“Not my will, but Thine” (Luke xxii. 42).
He who once suffered in Gethsemane will be our strength and our victory,
too. We may fear, we may also sink, but let us not be dismayed, and we
shall yet praise Him, and look back from a finished course, and say, “Not
one word hath failed of all that the Lord hath spoken.”
But in order to do this, we must, like Him, meet the conflict, not with a
defiant, but with a submissive spirit. He had to say, “Not My will, but
Thine be done”; but in saying it, He gained the very thing He surrendered.
So the submission of Gethsemane is not a blind and dead submission of a
heart that abandons all its hope; but it is the free submission that bows
the head, in order to get double strength through the faith and prayer.
We let go, in order that we may take a firmer hold. We give up, in order
that we may more fully receive. We lay our Isaac on Mount Moriah, and we
ask him back, no longer our Isaac, but God’s Isaac, and infinitely more
secure, because given back in the resurrection life.