Prayer and Purpose

Jesus endured the greatest testing any human will ever endure when He spent 40 days in the wilderness without food or drink, and He was tried and tempted (Mt 4:1-11; Mk 1:12-13; Lk 4:1-13. While Jesus walked on this earth He was fully God, yet also fully man. By allowing Himself to become man He was able to truly be tempted by Satan's lies. He was alone during this time, alone in the sense that there was no other human with Him. However, this does not require that we should do spiritual battle alone. Indeed, Jesus shortly before being arrested asks His disciples to pray for Him in Gethsemane, a time when He knew His time to die was drawing near and the temptation to not die must have been brutal (Mt 26:36-45; Mk 14:32-41; Lk 22:39-46).  Paul instructs us to keep watch over ourselves to avoid temptation and to "[b]ear one another's burdens" (Gal 6:2). Bearing one another up helps us, as Paul says, to not begin to think to highly of ourselves, and just like a yoke,...