With Not For!

I have been trying to work through some difficult issues over the past few weeks and as I have reached out to the Lord, the Holy Spirit keeps taking me back to Jesus in the garden. He has shown me a great deal about Jesus and how He walked out that devastating moment in His life, but it wasn’t until this morning that I realized something altogether different about “watching.”

We are all familiar with Jesus admonition of Peter…

Matt 26:40 Then He came to the disciples and found them sleeping, and said to Peter, “What! Could you not watch with Me one hour?

One word in that statement stood out to me and it opened up a revelation of how I have too often watched “for” the Lord in my life. How I, like Peter, have so often watched for Jesus to come along beside “me” in my troubles. And that has usually kept me from seeing the situation through His eyes.

There were the disciples sleeping, overcome in their uncertainty of what was about to happen. They were watching from their perspective and not from Jesus’ perspective, and in the process they failed to understand the agony that He was going through. They placed all their focus on “themselves” and not on what Jesus had asked of them… not to Watch For Me but to Watch With Me!

When I am focused on watching for Jesus to show up “for” me I am certain to totally miss out on the reason I am faced with my current circumstances. It’s so easy to watch and pray… Jesus, be here for me and help/deliver me! In the process of focusing on the situation from my perspective I miss hearing from Him telling me what He is orchestrating in my life that is designed to draw me ever closer to Him. And that perspective has caused me a lot of worry, fear and anxiety in this life. And therein lies the challenge.

My prayer life needs to be realigned to reflect the higher priority of learning to pray “with” Jesus instead of praying “for” Jesus.

The disciples, if you will, at least had the excuse of not having the Holy Spirit in their lives to awaken their spirit. We, on the other hand, have Him sitting on the throne of our life and are without any excuse for failing to seek His wisdom in “every” circumstance we find ourselves. He is the One who will teach us to Watch With Jesus because He is the One who empowers us…

Acts 1:8(a) But ye shall receive power, after that the Holy Ghost is come upon you…

But then it’s a matter of choice, isn’t it? Do I choose to watch “with” or “for?” Is “Jesus” my focus or is it “me?” The answers I get to my prayers are a direct result of my choice, and in reflecting back I can easily see that far to often it’s been “For.”