a great lesson

Heinrich Hofmann~Christ-in-the-Garden-of-Gethsemane

Matthew 26:36–46; Mark 14:32–42; and Luke 22:39–46

In the Garden, Jesus asked His disciples to pray, entreating the Father to keep them from entering temptations. Since temptations are on every hand every day, this is an important thing to pray. Although He asked them to watch, stay awake, and pray, they fell asleep. Literally and figuratively this is a lesson for all Christians. We must waken our souls to feel the spirit and not allow sin to make us complacent.


"Awake, my soul! No longer droop in sin. Rejoice, O my heart, and give place no more for the enemy of my soul." 2 Nephi 4:28

"Why art thou cast down, O my soul? and why art thou disquieted within me? hope thou in God: for I shall yet praise him, who is the health of my countenance, and my God." Psalm 42:11

Because He was committed to the will of the Father, Jesus submitted to the great suffering in the Garden of Gethsemane. At this time, He not only felt the pains of every man, woman, and child, He also taught us a great lesson. Sometimes submitting to the will of the Father is not all parties and games. Sometimes it involves great sacrifice, even unto death. However, submitting thus brings a special joy of its own. God, the Father, will send angels and the Holy Ghost to strengthen and comfort those that follow Him in times of distress.

“Christ’s agony in the garden is unfathomable by the finite mind, both as to intensity and cause. … He struggled and groaned under a burden such as no other being who has lived on earth might even conceive as possible. It was not physical pain, nor mental anguish alone, that caused him to suffer such torture as to produce an extrusion of blood from every pore; but a spiritual agony of soul such as only God was capable of experiencing. … In that hour of anguish Christ met and overcame all the horrors that Satan, ‘the prince of this world,’ could inflict. … In some manner, actual and terribly real though to man incomprehensible, the Savior took upon Himself the burden of the sins of mankind from Adam to the end of the world” (James E. Talmage, Jesus the Christ, 3rd ed. [1916], 613).

“As part of His infinite atonement, Jesus knows ‘according to the flesh’ all that through which we pass. (Alma 7:11–12). He has borne the sins, griefs, sorrows, and … pains of every man, woman, and child (see 2 Nephi 9:21)” (Neal A Maxwell, Ensign, May 1987, 72).