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The Praying Jesus

Apr 13 2025

By: Geoffrey Thomas Scripture: Mark 14:32-42

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The sermon explores the profound significance of Christ’s prayer in Gethsemane, emphasizing his humanity and dependence on God amidst immense suffering. It highlights prayer not as a demonstration of power, but as an acknowledgment of impotence grasping for divine omnipotence, illustrating that even the Son of God needed to seek strength and guidance from the Father. The message underscores the importance of recognizing personal frailty and approaching God with humility, drawing parallels between Christ’s experience and the need for ongoing reliance on divine grace, while also emphasizing the comfort found in God’s unwavering love and the transformative power of surrendering to His will, regardless of the pain involved.

Geoffrey Thomas (@geoffreythomas) Rev. Dr. Geoffrey Thomas was the minister of Alfred Place Baptist Church in Aberystwyth, Wales, from 1965 for the next fifty years. Born in 1938 in Merthyr Tydfil, Glamorgan, he became a Christian as a teenager in his home church, the Tabernacle Baptist Church in Hengoed, in 1954. After grammar school, he read Biblical Studies, Greek and Philosophy at Cardiff University (BA, 1963). He found fellowship in the Inter-varsity Fellowship group, and was influenced by the ministry of Dr Martyn Lloyd-Jones, and reading books such as J. I. Packer’s Fundamentalism and the Word of God, Whitefield’s Journals, Lloyd-Jones’ Studies in the Sermon on the Mount, and J. C. Ryle’s Holiness. At that time he also began to take The Banner of Truth magazine, which he has served for some years as Associate Editor. He preached for the first time in 1959 and ‘thenceforward Sunday after Sunday’. In 1961 he travelled to the United States to study for three years at Westminster Theological Seminary, Philadelphia, under men such as Edward J. Young, Ned Stonehouse, John Murray, Cornelius Van Til, Meredith Kline, Norman Shepherd, Jay Adams and Edmund Clowney. Returning to Wales after graduation (M.Div, 1964), he married Iola, ‘the girl back home’. Assured during the last months of his course at seminary of the call to preach, he began his first and only pastorate at Alfred Place the following year. Geoff’s wife Iola after 53 years of marriage died in October 2016, passing, as Geoff wrote, ‘from the state of grace to the state of glory’. Two of Geoff’s daughters are married, one to a deacon and one to an elder. A third daughter is a pastor’s wife, mother of five sons. Geoff has eight grandsons and one granddaughter and, so far, five great grandchildren. His grandson, Rhodri Brady, followed him to the pastorate in Aberystwyth in 2016. He remarried in 2018, Barbara Homrighausen, an old family friend and a former member of Westminster Chapel under Dr. Lloyd-Jones, and also later of the London Free Church of Scotland congregation, and now the International Presbyterian Church. Geoff’s latter years have been largely spent in writing books, He is a member of Amyand Park Chapel where he occasionally preaches. He travels extensively to speak in different churches.