The Tears Of Gethsemane

Life is full of ups and downs. All believers, at some point or another, will stand at a crossroads whether in our ministries, while weathering a major storm, or while contemplating why our faithfulness to God seems to cause humiliation, betrayal, or gossip. One day we will all have our garden of Gethsemane—the call God has on our lives that will require pain, trials, and sorrow in order for his glory to become evident, and strengthen us to walk in our destinies and build God’s kingdom. In a powerful and unique spiritual guidebook, Deborah Faulks utilizes the story of Jesus’s temptations at the Garden of Gethsemane to educate believers on how to be prepared for the advances of the devil as well as on how to leave the garden successfully and ultimately fulfill God’s destiny and purpose. Faulks includes Christian characteristics that qualify a believer, twelve keys of wisdom, comparisons between the Garden of Eden and the Garden of Gethsemane, ways to prevent getting stuck, why Jesus is the model of prayer, and a detailed explanation of the heart of Jesus in prayer. The Tears of Gethsemane reveals hidden biblical truths while educating the believer standing at the crossroads of a God-ordained ministry to fulfill their spiritual destiny and purpose.

Life is an exciting journey filled with moments of delirious laughter, family, and accomplishments. Along the way, the unexpected jolt of a critical illness can stop us dead in our tracks. Such an experience happened in the life of Earl Spivey Jr. After years as pastor serving churches in Indiana, North Carolina, and South Carolina, a new ministry had begun, helping single mothers overcome tremendous obstacles to become loving, godly mothers who could engage successfully in society. His journey included caring for parents suffering with dementia, a major move, and adoption of two children. Then the journey took a catastrophic turn. A routine visit to the doctor for a sore throat led to the diagnosis of acute myeloid leukemia. Life as he knew it stopped, and a new journey began. Earl J. journeyed through devastating rounds of chemotherapy and brushes with death. The first night in the hospital set the stage for his journey as he wrestled with God in his Garden of Gethsemane. Tears led to a release of his will to that of his Heavenly Father. Earl J. details the stories of many of the people who walked with him along his journey through leukemia. His own personal struggles and the miracles he experienced are shared without restraint. Life has changed, but his faith and praise for each new day has deepened. His story brings encouragement to those who need hope as they or a loved one struggles with a devastating diagnosis and to those who need a reminder that God is a God of love and grace. Join this pastor's journey through the Tears of Gethsemane and his life after AML.

Anxiety, suffering and death are not simply the “ills” of our society, nor are they uniquely the product of a sick and sinful humanity. We must all some day confront them, and we continually face their implications long before we do. In that sense, the Garden of Gethsemane is not merely a garden “outside the walls” of Jerusalem but also the essential horizon for all of us, whether we are believers or not. Emmanuel Falque explores, with no small measure of doubt, Heidegger’s famous statement that by virtue of Christianity’s claims of salvation and the afterlife, its believers cannot authentically experience anxiety in the face of death. In this theological development of the Passion, already widely debated upon its publication in French, Falque places a radical emphasis on the physicality and corporeality of Christ’s suffering and death, marking the continuities between Christ’s Passion and our own orientation to the mortality of our bodies. Beginning with an elaborate reading of the divine and human bodies whose suffering is masterfully depicted in the Isenheim Altarpiece, and written in the wake of the death of a close friend, Falques’s study is both theologically rigorous and marked by deeply human concerns. Falque is at unusual pains to elaborate the question of death in terms not merely of faith, but of a “credible Christianity” that remains meaningful to non-Christians, holding, with Maurice Blondel, that “the important thing is not to address believers but to say something which counts in the eyes of unbelievers.” His account is therefore as much a work of philosophy as of theology—and of philosophy explicated not through abstractions but through familiar and ordinary experience. Theology’s task, for Falque, is to understand that human problems of the meaning of existence apply even to Christ, at least insofar as he lives in and shares our finitude. In Falque’s remarkable account, Christ takes upon himself the burden of suffering finitude, so that he can undertake a passage through it, or a transformation of it. This book, a key text from one the most remarkable of a younger generation of philosophers and theologians, will be widely read and debated by all who hold that theology and philosophy has the most to offer when it eschews easy answers and takes seriously our most anguishing human experiences.

In the light of Jesus’s ministry as a whole, his agonized prayer (Gethsemane) is troublesome. He failed to meet the standards of dying “like a man.” How did the first centuries of Christians come to terms with this embarrassing story?

“And as it is appointed unto men once to die, but after this the judgment:” (Hebrews 9:27) Death; An unfortunate reality that awaits all men. Jesus’ sacrifice solved the eternal death problem; the physical appointment with death – caused by Adam, nonetheless, still remains sacrosanct. More intimidating also, is the mystery behind the timing, when this menace decides to pay his visit; as the hour of death, is unknown to most men. Some, however, who by reason of their misdeeds, have been placed on death row. These ones, are certain of when their ‘ends’ would be. Perhaps, the luxury of not knowing the scheduled time for death, affords many the ease and comfort to embrace this life, without care and worry. To those on death row, this is not the case. The sheer horror of knowing one’s ‘death date’, petrifies. It also transfixes and stupefies – mildly put. The Gethsemane episode of the Christ, could best be explained by the death row experience. Because of His omniscient nature, the Son of God knew what was soon to happen. He fully understood the cruelty and savagery, that He was about to face. Knowing His death date, was bad enough. Worse, were the coming betrayals, isolation and immense torture. His foreknowledge of these events, only offered Him more misery. Grief, pain and unbearable agony. In some thirty-three years the Christ had spent on Earth, He was never this vulnerable. The Son of God, was really at His wits end! That day – and in that place, the whole plan for redemption could have been aborted. An action, that would have doomed our fates forever. But what sustained the Son of God on His quest? What kept Him resolute, even as His odyssey hung by a thread? Let’s take a walk through that garden, at Gethsemane. Listen to the echoes… ‘even as we appreciate our Lord’s perseverance, patience and love, in His venture to save our souls. Lest we forget!