Luke 23:26-46
Sermon preached at Barclay Church, Edinburgh by Rev D. Graham Leitch
25 May 2003

FATHER INTO THY HANDS I COMMEND MY SPIRIT

Since Easter we’ve been reflecting on Jesus’ prayers from the Cross. Today we reach his very final word. Of course in one sense it isn’t his final word - the voice of Jesus Christ, risen and living, is never silent. And still He speaks! He spoke to Mary in the garden when he gently whispered her name! He spoke to Saul on the Damascus Road ‘Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?” And so he speaks still to individuals and invites each, by name, to himself!

JESUS STILL SPEAKS!
He still speaks to individuals. And He still speaks to His Church! He spoke to the churches of Asia Minor through his revelations to John in the Book of Revelation (Ch.2-3) - penned by him as messages to the churches from Jesus himself, to the Christian congregations in Ephesus and Smyrna, Pergamum and Thyatira, Sardis, Philadelphia and Laodicea.

And just as Jesus spoke to each of these congregations about their specific situation - so he knows and longs to speak HIS word of encouragement and assurance into this church’s situation at the present time!!

Yet the words we turn to this morning - “Father, into your hands I commend/commit my spirit” - were Jesus final earthly word - the last thing he uttered before His death. Notice now, though it’s a theme to which we’ll return, that Jesus breathes his last and departs this earth with a prayer on his lips.

“Prayer is the Christian’s vital breath,
The Christian’s native air,
His watchword at the gates of death;
He enters heaven with prayer.”
James Montgomery 1771-1854

He knew where He was going - and He knew who awaited Him there!!

PRAYERS WITH CHARACTER!
In our service this morning we’re going to allow Jesus’ final prayer from the cross to speak to us. Each of the prayers we have considered has its own character.

Jesus’ first prayer from the cross is a prayer of mercy - “Father forgive them, for they know not what they do.” He prayed for the forgiveness of those who abused, mistreated and were killing Him.

Jesus’ second prayer from the cross is a prayer of anguish - “My God! My God! Why have you forsaken me?!!” He was “wounded for our transgressions and bruised for our iniquities” - and suffering the penalty we deserved, in the mysterious darkness which fell over the scene, the Prince of Life was separated from life’s source - cut off from God!

Jesus’ third prayer from the cross is a prayer of triumph. “It is finished!!” he has rendered to God a life of perfect obedience. He has borne the price of sin and paid for our forgiveness. He has won both the battle and the prize....He has opened the door - the way back to God - which it is ours to enter:

“The price is paid! Come let us enter in
To all that Jesus died to make our own.
For every sin, more than enough He gave,
And bought our freedom from each guilty stain.
The price is paid, Alleluia,
Amazing grace,so strong and sure;
And so with all my heart,
My life in every part,
I live to thank You for the price You paid.”

And now we come to His fourth and final prayer and it’s a prayer of surrender or faith. It is the trustful surrender of HIMSELF to God.... having given Himself for us, He gives Himself to God, his work complete.

“Father, into your hands” he says “I commit my spirit.”

The first thing to notice here is that Jesus’s last prayer at Calvary echoes his first. As he had prayed.
“Father forgive....” so now He prays “Father, into your hands....” We can learn from this that God is always and ever the Father of the Christian believer.

THE UNIVERSAL AND PECULIAR FATHERHOOD OF GOD
To be sure, He is the Father of all in a general sense. Acts 17:25-26

“he himself gives all men life and breath and everything else. From one man He made every nation of men.....”

The Bible does teach the universal Fatherhood of God. When the prophet Malachi asks the rhetorical question Have we not all one Father”?”the answer his question invites is YES! God IS the Father of the Muslim and the Jew and the atheist - not just the Christian. We all come from the same divine source and owe our existence, whether we recognise it or not, to the same personal God.

The Bible does teach the universal Fatherhood of God. But it also teaches what I shall call the peculiar Fatherhood of God. What I mean is this - that the Bible teaches that God is, in a special sense and in an especially wonderful way, the Father of those who believe in Jesus Christ.

To accept Jesus Christ and possess His Spirit (or be possessed by the Spirit!) is to enter into that most intimate and joyous of relationships - a real and living, satisfying and personal relationship with the Father who, having created us, has called us back to Himself.

God is especially the Father those whom He has brought to new birth as His children; those whom He has chosen, called and adopted to be His children. The Bible uses both pictures. So while God is one sense the Father of all, He is, in another and especial way, the Father of those to whom He has given the family prayer; “Our Father, which art in heaven.....”

As to natural origin, he is the Father of all; but as to spiritual relation, He is the Father only of those who possessing the Spirit cry “Abba! Father..”

To know God as a Christian is to know Him as Father, not merely in the first but also in the second sense.

THE GOD AND FATHER OF OUR LORD JESUS CHRIST
Of course, in a third and unique way He was - and is eternally - the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! Christ as the first-born and eternal Son of God is uniquely related to God. God is Christ’s Father in a higher sense than He is ours. Yet (and this is the amazing, stupendous, wonderful thing!) when God calls and adopts us; when faith is born and we trust in Jesus, we are welcomed to a share in Jesus’ relationship with the Father! God treats us not as second rate children but as His very own!!

All that Christ is to the Father, as perfectly loved and precious - the apple of His eye - WE are!! The Christian is invited to a share in Jesus’ relationship with the Father. That’s amazing! But it’s what we’re made for and what we’re called to!!

“Father” Jesus prays “into your hands I commend my spirit.”

THE ALL EMBRACING FATHERHOOD OF GOD
As Jesus’ suffering on the cross began with Father:“Father forgive...” so it ended with “Father..” too. We can learn from this that from the beginning to the end, through the depths of anguish and heights of triumph alike - in the brightness of noonday sun and in the midnight darkness alike; when the wind’s in our favour and when the wind’s against us - in all the ups and downs - on the highest mountain peaks and in the deepest of earth’s valleys - God remains always and equally our Loving Father.

And this, even though we may not always sense the fact - and even when all sense of His presence and love is lost - yes, even AS we cry “My God! My God! why have you forsaken me!” God IS still our Father - even then!!

Just as the whole of Jesus’ suffering at Calvary, when he hung there for our sake’s, was encompassed within the loving Fatherhood of God - so the whole of life for the Christian is encompassed within that Fatherhood.

INTO YOUR HANDS I COMMIT...
“Father...” Jesus final prayer begins, “Father, into thy hands I commend....” - or, in most modern translations

“into your hands I commit...”

Before we look at the particular lessons of this in our own living and dying, I want to consider what it has to say to us in a more general sense. INTO YOUR HANDS I COMMIT is a statement of resignation and trust. We can hold things in, keep them to ourselves and, usually worry about them. Or we can release them - say “into your hands I commit” - and hand them over to God!!

There are situations we CAN do something about! And when and wherever we can we should do whatever we can. When we pray - “into your hands I commit” - we are sometimes meant not just to bring the problem to God but to be part of the solution! When someone needs a lift to hospital and we’re free at the time and our car’s parked in the driveway, piously praying “Lord into YOUR hand I commit...” is likely to be met by God’s “No! Into YOUR hands I commit!” God, after all, doesn’t have a driving licence or a car - BUT YOU DO!

There are situations we CAN do something about! But often we look at a situation and just feel so helpless - when you’ve done whatever you can, the one thing left that you can do, and it is the best thing to do and the Christian thing to do is say”

“into your hands I commit....”

Into your hands I commit the victims of terrorism in Saudi Arabia, earthquake in Algeria, war in Iraq, famine in Southern Africa....

Into your hands I commit the oppressed, exploited, those without God without Christ and without hope...

Into your hands I commit my dying friend and her four children, my drug addicted nephew, my homosexual son....

A conscious, faith based and intentional releasing or handing over of the things we can’t do anything about to God is both therapeutic and liberating. Where our hands are weak and helpless His hands are strong....

“Father, into your hands I commit my spirit.”

Let me apply this more particularly to our lives before I apply it, in the sense in which Jesus used it, to our deaths:

INTO YOUR HANDS....MY DAILY LIFE
INTO YOUR HANDS ought to be the Christian’s prayer at the beginning and the end of each day. We are called to live by faith and what is living by faith but placing each day into the hands of God at its beginning and its end.

At the beginning of each day the Christian should pray“Father into your hands I commit the day ahead...” Each day should be placed in God’s hands and then lived consciously depending on his guidance, protection and strength.

“Every morning when you get up, take yourself and put yourself into God’s custody. Lock yourself up, as it were, in the casket of divine protection....”
C H Spurgeon

Have you an exam to face - then say “into YOUR hands I commit”: have you an awkward situation to deal with, a conversation that will take courage or tact, a task or duty you fear - then say “into your hands I commit.” Are you facing an operation or an illness for which there is no cure - then say “Into your hands I commit..”

Do this and you will find - I promise you that you will find - that it makes a difference!

And at the end of each day the Christian should pray “Father into your hands I commit the day which has passed...” Its achievements with thanksgiving and its failures and sin with repentance. And then as you lie down commit even your rest to Him.

INTO YOUR HANDS - THE CHRISTIAN’S DYING
All I have said is true and I trust also helpful. But of course of course Jesus’“Father into your hands I commit my spirit...” was his dying prayer so that it is not mainly concerning the manner of our living that this prayer speaks its wisdom but to the manner of our dying....

Hanging on the Cross, His life’s work ended and breathing his last, Christ with the eye of faith casts a look heavenward and prays:

“Father, into your hands I commend my spirit...”

Death and dying is not a subject that is commonly discussed, Our mortality isn't something most folk like to dwell on! Yet there is one single and sufficient reason why all of us should think of death and it is this - that all of us are mortal and all of us will die!

For Christians life is not a stairway to nowhere and death is not the threshold of oblivion. It is the entrance to a future which is unimaginably bright - it is not LEAVING home, it is GOING home! For those who trust in Christ as the Saviour and confess and obey Him as the Lord death is no longer death but its opposite - LIFE!! Here are some thought provoking words about death for the Christian from the wisdom of the ages:

THE CERTAINTY OF DEATH
“Death is not a spectator sport”
Samuel Waldron
“One out of one dies”
George Bernard Shaw
“We are not here to stay. We are here to go.”
Anonymous
THE CONQUEST OF DEATH
“Jesus has forced open a door that had been locked since the death of the first man. He has met, fought and beaten the King of Death. Everything is different because he has done so.”
C S Lewis.

“Christ has been raise to life! And he makes us certain that others will also be raised to life...we will be raised to life because of Christ.”
1 Cor 15:20-21 CEV

“Death does not put our relationship with God into the past tense.”
Anonymous

DEATH AND HEAVEN
“Death to a saint is nothing but the taking of a sweet flower out of this wilderness and the planting of it in the garden of paradise.”
Thomas Brooks

“Death is but a passage out of a prison into a palace”
John Bunyan
“Death for the Christian is not a miserable cul-de-sac, but a glorious open road
into the presence of God”
Doug Barnett

“Forever with the Lord!”
Amen, so let it be;
Life from the dead is in that word,
‘Tis immortality.
Here in the body pent,
Absent from him I roam,
Yet nightly pitch my moving tent
A day’s march nearer home.

So when my latest breath
Shall rend the veil in twain,
By death, I shall escape from death
And life eternal gain.....!!
James Montgomery.

When Jesus prayed “Father, into your hands I commit my spirit” he was doing what every Christian must do one day - His life's work over, he was placing Himself in the hands of His Father and our Father, His God and our God!:

“Father, into your hands I commit my spirit”

THE DIVINE CATCHER
In one of his books, “Our greatest Gift”, the well known Christian psychiatrist and author speaks about what he calls “befriending our own death”:

He tells how he once spent several weeks travelling with Circus Trapeze artists called “The Flying Rodleighs” One day the leader of the troupe said to him:“As a flyer, I must have complete trust in my catcher. You and the public might think that I am the great star of the trapeze, but the real star is Joe my catcher. He has to be there for me with split second precision and grab me out of the air as I come to him in the long jump.”

“How does it work?” Nouwen asked.

Rodleigh replied, “The secret is that the flyer does nothing and the catcher does everything! When I fly to Joe I simply have to stretch out my arms and hands waiting for him to catch me and pull me safely over the apron behind the catch bar.”

“You do nothing!” an astonished Nouwen asked.

“Nothing!” repeated Rodleigh. “The worst thing a flyer can do is to try and catch the catcher. If I grabbed Joe’s wrists I might break them or he might break mine and that would be the end for both of us! A flyer has to trust with outstretched arms that his catcher will be there for him.

Recalling Jesus words “Father into your hands I commit my spirit” Nouwen remarks:

“Dying is trusting the Catcher! Caring for the dying is saying “Don’t be afraid! You are a child of God. He will be there when you make your long jump. Don’t try to grab Him. He will grab you...just stretch out your arms and hands and trust, trust, trust in Jesus!”

Remember Rodleigh’s advice. Trust in Jesus. And with your last breath, whenever that may come, you will be say with the confidence of faith and expectation of reward”

“Father, into your hands I commit my spirit.”

AMEN