How Was Jesus Able to Make Himself Pray So Hard, Since He Already Did not Have the Sin Nature, Not Being Born of Sex?
1) Direct Answer
Jesus prayed so intensely because, though He had no sin nature—being conceived by the Holy Ghost and not by sex—He truly took our human nature with a human will, and He chose perfect obedience through prayer. As God manifested in flesh, He stood in our place, faced the cup of judgment, and, as a Man, He submitted His human will to the Father’s will. Prayer was not for cleansing from sin; it was the channel of surrender and strength to finish the work.
2) Scriptural Explanation
- He had no inherited sin: “That holy thing… shall be called the Son of God” (Luke 1:35). His blood was not Adam’s line.
- Yet He took our nature: “In the likeness of sinful flesh” (Romans 8:3); He partook of “flesh and blood” to be our High Priest (Hebrews 2:14–18).
- He was tempted, but without sin: “In all points tempted like as we are, yet without sin” (Hebrews 4:15).
- He prayed with agony: In Gethsemane He prayed, “Not my will, but thine, be done,” and “being in an agony he prayed more earnestly… his sweat was as it were great drops of blood” (Luke 22:41–44). An angel strengthened Him.
- He offered strong cries: “Who in the days of his flesh… offered up prayers and supplications with strong crying and tears… and learned he obedience by the things which he suffered” (Hebrews 5:7–9).
- He bore our sin: “He hath made him to be sin for us” (a sin offering) “who knew no sin” (2 Corinthians 5:21).
- He lived in perfect dependence: “I can of mine own self do nothing… I seek not mine own will, but the will of the Father” (John 5:30). “The Father that dwelleth in me, he doeth the works” (John 14:10).
3) Simple Clarifying Logic
- No sin nature does not mean no human will or no human feeling. He hungered, wept, grew weary, and faced death’s horror as a real Man—yet without sin.
- The fiercest battle was not personal guilt—He had none—but taking our guilt and tasting death for every man. That is why the prayer was so deep.
- Prayer was the way the Man Christ Jesus kept the human will perfectly yielded to the indwelling God: “Not my will, but thine.” That is not two Gods; it is one God revealing Himself—Father above, and the same God veiled in the Son—showing us perfect obedience in flesh.
- If the sinless One prayed with strong crying, then prayer is not merely for the guilty; it is the lifeline of surrender and strength for every son and daughter. “The spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak” (Matthew 26:41).
Short reinforcing statement
You see, He had no sin by birth, yet He took our battle into His own body. He prayed hard because He chose, as a real Man, to put the human will under the Father’s will and to drink the cup for us. God was in Christ, and through prayer the Man yielded completely to finish our redemption.
Ask a Follow-up Question
What did the Laodicean Church Age (our age) Angel (- messenger) Say about this?
Ranked passages from the local William Branham sermon and Church Age Book database. Relevance is relative, not a statement of doctrinal certainty.
Have not I sent thee?
62-0124 §135
Now, if Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever, now, He's got to act the same as He did. He's got to be the way in every principle---only a corporal body, 'cause his corporal body is still a sacrifice on the throne of God. And He sits there, and his bloody garments is the propitiation for our sins. He, Himself, is acting as a high priest to make intercessions upon what we confess that He has done, see. That's not by feeling; it's by faith, see. You can just beat, and cry, and everything else. It'll...
From the beginning it wasn't so
59-1125 §54
How many know that Jesus Himself, as a Son, did not do one miracle? Jesus said so. "The Son can do nothing in himself." John 19:5. The Son, Jesus, the Son of God. "The Son can do nothing in himself but what he sees," not hears, but "sees the Father doing, that doeth the Son likewise." How many knows the Scripture, reads that? Sure. Then He saw by vision what the Father was doing, then He did just what the Father had told Him to do by a vision. See that? Now, watch. The Father told Him one day, "Lazarus' going to di...
Jesus arose
56-0405 §10
Now my prayer is that that same person, will open to us the Scriptures, tonight. It's a very timely Scripture reading, because we're again in the resurrection in the Easter season. And I think that one of the greatest scriptures that's more neglected than any scripture I know of being preached on is: the ascension of the Lord Jesus, what He did after His resurrection. Now, He did not sit down on the tomb after His resurrection, because His work wasn't completed, it wasn't finished. And the ones at the grave that mo...
God identifying Himself by His characteristics
64-0320 §25
But Jesus corrected his own mother, and his mother was in the wrong, 'cause she'd already said that that was a child conceived in her by the Holy Ghost. And here she turns her testimony around and said that Joseph was her father, was the father of Jesus. Now if Joseph ... if He was the son of Joseph, if He'd been about his father's business, He'd been down at the carpenter shop. But He was about his Father's business up there in the temple, rebuking those organizations. He was about his Father's business, just a tw...
Perfection
56-0610 §21
He saw you, and He knowed that you wanted to be saved. So He said, "The only thing I can do is to go down Myself and have a Son born ... or, a body of flesh and be made like them." The antidote is for God Himself to become sin, that He might pay the price, because it would take the highest thing there is to lift men from the lost condition. And look. He's above every Angel, every Archangel. The Highest there was come down here on earth, and lived among men and went to the lowest city in the earth: Jericho.