There's a brand of Christianity running around loose that is about 10% Christian and 90% superstition.

If any profess Christian ever tells you that God always says yes to your prayers from such turn away.

Lots of turn away.

Lots of us have wrestled in prayer before God. I'm sure many of you know what it means to pray in anguish,

praying for five hours at a time. You know, like Jacob wrestling with

the angel, refusing to let go, God pleading with him. We know what that's like, to pray with

passion.

If anybody in this room ever prayed with such intensity

that your sweat became blood.

The scripture tells us that when Jesus was in

gessema, he sweat blood.

blood.

Now we can look at that as perhaps an example of poetic license of the author,

an example of hyperbole, to communicate with that kind of imagery that Jesus was very, very

intense, super intense in his prayer life.

I don't think so.

I think he really swept blood because no human being in history ever faced the ordeal that was before him.

Socrates had to drink a cup.

A cup of hemlock was a humane way to execute a criminal.

He drinks the heml lock in a short period of time and numbness begins to come over his body

feelings disappear and he passes away.

But that's not the cup that was waiting for Jesus.

...