Living in the ‘nevertheless’

Did you ever think that Jesus might have utilized the Twelve Steps of AA? It’s true. In the Garden of Gethsemane, the night Jesus was betrayed and arrested, He was well into Step Eleven. It’s just that the rest of His group was asleep, so He had to go it alone. But everything He was experiencing that night in the garden is expressed in the eleventh step which reads: “Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out.”

Jesus was definitely seeking, through prayer and meditation, to improve His conscious contact with God. Of course there was not a whole lot of improvement necessary, since He and His Father were one, and it had always been His joy to do His Father’s will, but this was the first real bump in that road. Suddenly, Jesus didn’t want to do the will of His Father, even though He was well aware of what it was. We don’t know for sure how long He had known His purpose for being here was to die on a cross for our sins, but it must have been for some time, since He knew so much even at age 12. This was not about the knowledge of God’s will; it was about the power to carry it out.

For one moment in time, He was in conflict. His will was fighting with His Father’s will. Until it came down to that famous “nevertheless.” “Nevertheless … not my will but yours be done.” From there, Jesus was going to be walking in God’s power to carry out that will. Like us, He could not do it on His own. 2 Corinthians 5:19 says that God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself. That would mean that God was empowering Jesus all along the way. God was willing Jesus to die. It was God’s love that made Him do it. Jesus was, at all times, God-driven.

I need the same thing. I need the power of God today to carry out His will. There are things about the will of God for me today that I do not want to do. If I could have this pass by me, I would. Nevertheless (there’s that “nevertheless” again) … not my will but His be done. I think we live in the “nevertheless” a good deal of the time. We need to pray continually for the power to carry out God’s will. We need to be God-driven.