And Jesus Prayed

Olive Tree, Gethsemane, Israel

There are at least 38 times that Jesus prays in the Gospels.We were studying Luke 6:12-19 which starts: “One of those days Jesus went out to a mountainside to pray, and spent the night praying to God.”We noted that immediately after praying He named the twelve apostles and people who had come from the coastal region to hear him were healed of their diseases.It seems that Jesus always goes off on his own before he has a big decision to make, or he uses his power to heal others.In a recent Lenten Discipleship Group meeting we had an interesting discussion about Jesus’ solitary prayers to His Father. Since Jesus and God are the same, why would Jesus need to pray? Wouldn’t He already know what His Father wanted him to do, or couldn’t He see the future and know that people would be healed?We discussed that because Jesus came to us as human, He was exhibiting more human characteristics and demonstrating to us how we shoul