Growing in the Garden (Week 5) – Gethsemane (Matthew 26:36-54)

Gardening can be hard work. It takes a lot of time, effort, and energy to see fruit from the garden. It also takes alertness or awareness of what is going on. Deer, rabbits, insects, all of them would like to steal your produce. You have to keep watch in the garden.

This week in our summer series, “Growing in the Garden,” we come to a garden known not for beauty but for agony. The Garden of Gethsemane is where Jesus endured extreme mental, emotional, and spiritual anguish and is where He was arrested and carried off to be crucified. As we’re going to learn this week, Jesus asked some of His disciples to keep watch and pray with Him in the garden, but they didn’t and were caught off guard for what came next.

The Garden of Gethsemane is one we enter reverently, but enter it we must as Pastor Clay shows us from Matthew’s account, some important lessons for us to learn and to apply to our lives today.