Sermon Quotes: "The Cup"

“Since it would not be possible for any believer, however experienced, to know for himself all our Lord endured in mental suffering and hellish malice, it is clearly far beyond the preachers capacity to set it forth to you. Jesus himself must give you access to the wonders of Gethsemane; as for me, I can but invite you to enter the Garden.” Charles Spurgeon

“Nothing in all the Bible compares to Jesus agony and anguish in Gethsemane. Why, we may ask, is Jesus so assailed by the prospect of his death? Surely we all know individuals who face the prospect of their deaths with greater composure and courage than does Jesus. Why does Jesus, who has foreseen his death and marched resolutely to Jerusalem to meet it, now quail before it? The answer must be that Jesus is aware of facing something more than simply his own death. Not his own mortality, but the specter of identifying with sinners so fully as to become the object of God’s wrath against sin-it is this that overwhelms Jesus soul ‘to the point of death.’” James Edwards

“The dreadful sorrow and anxiety, then, out of which the prayer for the passing of the cup springs, is not an expression of fear before a dark destiny, nor a shrinking from the prospect of physical suffering and death. It is rather the horror of the one who lives wholly for the Father at the prospect of alienation from God which is entailed in the judgment upon sin which Jesus assumes. Jesus came to be with the Father for an interlude before his betrayal, but found hell rather than heaven opened before him, and he staggered.” William Lane

“He took the cup in both His hands and he drank damnation dry.” Charles Spurgeon

“If I understand Gethsemane at all, it means that Jesus loves me even more than I can imagine. It is not just that he died for me, but that he died this horrible, damnable, God-forsaken death that no one would ever want to die. He died this death because there was no other way for sinners to be saved, no easier road to redemption, no alternative to the cross. Jesus thus volunteered to do what the Father willed, choosing to do the one thing that would bring the most suffering to his body and soul. ‘The wonder of the love of Christ for his people’ writes Donald Macleod, ‘is not that for their sake he faced death without fear, but that for their sake he faced it, terrified. Terrified by what he knew, and terrified by what he did not know, he took damnation lovingly.’ This must always be the main lesson we learn whenever we go to the Garden of Gethsemane. We will never have to suffer what our Savior suffered in Gethsemane, or at Calvary, for the very reason that everything he suffered there was in our place, on our behalf.” Phil Ryken