I have been thinking about what Jesus did the night before he chose his twelve apostles. Luke tells us that he went out to a mountain and prayed all night (Luke 6:12). All night. Not a quick devotional before bed. Not thirty minutes of journaling. He climbed a mountain after an exhausting stretch of ministry, and he talked to his Father until the sun came up.

What makes this even more striking is what comes immediately before and immediately after that prayer. Before it, the Pharisees were seething because Jesus healed a man on the Sabbath. After it, Jesus chooses Judas. The man who would betray him. The all-night prayer sits right between religious fury and an appointment with treachery, and Luke wants us to see all three together.

I think there is something here for us, and it has less to do with Sabbath rules than we might expect.

When Religion Becomes the Problem

Luke 6 opens with two Sabbath conflicts. In the first, the disciples are walking through a grain field, plucking heads of grain, rubbing them in their hands, and eating. Deuteronomy 23:25 permits this. It is not theft. But the Pharisees saw the rubbing and crushing of grain as work, which made it a Sabbath violation. Plucking is close to reaping. Rubbing is close to threshing. Close enough, in their eyes, to condemn.

Jesus responded with a question that cut deeper than any legal argument: “Have you not read what David did?” (Luke 6:3). Of course they had read. These were the Pharisees. They had memorized more Scripture than most of us will ever read. But Jesus was not asking whether they had read the words. He was asking whether the words had ever read them. They had studied Scripture in order to master it. They had never allowed Scripture to master them.

There is a world of difference between those two postures toward the Bible. One comes to the text looking for ammunition, for proof that your position is right and theirs is wrong. The other comes to the text open-handed, expecting to be confronted and changed. The Pharisees had done the first so thoroughly that they could quote the Law while completely missing its heart. That is how a few hungry men eating grain on the wrong day of the week becomes a scandal worthy of public condemnation.

Jesus also made a claim here that we should not gloss over. He called himself “Lord of the Sabbath” (Luke 6:5). The Sabbath does not rule Jesus. He rules it. He made it, and he gets to say what honors it and what does not. When Jesus speaks about the Sabbath, he is not offering an opinion from inside the system. He is speaking as the one who designed the system in the first place.

The second conflict escalates things further. In the synagogue one following Sabbath, a man with a withered hand stood in the crowd, and the Pharisees sat off to the side like prosecutors waiting for their case to be called. They were not there to worship. They were there to catch Jesus in the act of healing, because according to rabbinic tradition, you could only heal on the Sabbath if the illness threatened imminent death. A withered hand did not qualify. Never mind that the category was invented by men, not commanded by God.

Jesus called the man forward and asked a question that no one dared answer: “Is it lawful on the Sabbath to do good or to do harm, to save life or to destroy it?” (Luke 6:9). Then he looked the Pharisees in the eye, one by one, and told the man to stretch out his hand. The hand was restored instantly. And the Pharisees, who had just watched a miracle, responded with fury (Luke 6:11). They were so consumed with protecting their framework for God that they could not recognize God standing right in front of them.

Dale Ralph Davis captures the irony well when he notes that Jesus’ question may have been loaded, given that his critics were potentially plotting to harm him that very day. They were policing the Sabbath while violating its very heart.

A Trap We Know Better Than We Think

It would be easy to read these stories and think, “I would never do that.” But I am not so sure the distance between us and the Pharisees is as wide as we like to imagine.

Most of us do not struggle with Sabbath strictness. If we did, we would tie ourselves in knots trying to figure out whether Sunday is the Sabbath and what counts as rest. Our version of the same problem looks different. We attach enormous importance to matters that Scripture never elevated to that level, and over time, those matters start functioning like doctrine.

In some Christian circles, the issue is schooling: homeschool, Christian school, or public school, and whichever one you choose says something about how serious you are about your faith. In other circles, it is dating versus courting, or whether the church should celebrate Christmas. Everyone has their list, and everyone’s list feels obviously biblical to them.

In my experience, the version of this trap that hits closest to home for most churchgoing believers is not about rules at all. It is about activity. It is the tyranny of Christian busyness, the unspoken expectation that a truly devoted follower of Christ is someone who shows up to everything, volunteers for everything, and never says no. Bible study, small group, committee meetings, service projects, Sunday morning, Sunday evening, Wednesday night. After a while, the pace stops feeling like devotion and starts feeling like obligation, and the joy that once fueled the work quietly drains away.

I want to be careful here, because all ministry involves sacrifice. Serving Christ costs something. But the sacrifice is supposed to be sustainable because it flows from and through a living relationship with Jesus, not from a compulsion to be seen as faithful. When we build our identity on being needed, being dependable, being the one who always shows up, we have traded the freedom of the gospel for a new kind of legalism. It is possible to be incredibly busy for Jesus and completely disconnected from him at the same time.

It is okay to pause and ask yourself an honest question: Am I serving Jesus in freedom, or have I created a new set of chains? The Pharisees weaponized the Sabbath until it crushed the very people it was supposed to bless. We can do the same thing with Christian activity until the life of faith feels less like a relationship and more like a job performance review. Jesus did not die on a cross so that we could spend the rest of our lives exhausted, anxious, and earning approval through religious output. He died so that we could be free.

The Mountain and the All–Night Prayer

After the synagogue confrontation, Jesus did something that should stop us in our tracks. He did not strategize. He did not call a meeting. He walked out alone, climbed a mountain, and prayed until morning.

Luke 6:12 reads, “In these days he went out to the mountain to pray, and all night he continued in prayer to God.”

Luke mentions Jesus praying more than any other Gospel writer, and it is worth asking why. I think Luke wanted his readers to understand that prayer was not an accessory to Jesus’ ministry. It was the engine. When the Pharisees’ anger was building, Jesus prayed. When the weight of the crowds pressed heavier, Jesus prayed. When he was about to make the most consequential leadership decision in the history of the church, he sought his Father’s face through the night.

The disciples were asleep. The town was quiet. And Jesus was still talking to his Father, hour after hour. Not because there was a formula to complete, but because he needed his Father. If Jesus, who is God in the flesh, did not dare shortcut the discipline of seeking the Father in prayer, I have to ask myself what makes me think I can get by without it. “It takes too much time.” “It doesn’t feel like it does anything.” I have thought both of those things, and I suspect you have too. But Jesus’ example quietly dismantles every excuse.

Choosing Judas on Purpose

When morning came, Jesus called his disciples together and chose twelve of them as apostles. The list is a fascinating collection of ordinary, unimpressive, and in some cases infamous men. No scholars. No priests. No politicians. These were people of the land with calloused hands. One of them, Matthew, had been a tax collector, which made him a social outcast among his own people. Jesus chose imperfect men because perfect men do not exist, and the gospel has never depended on the impressiveness of its messengers.

But then there is Judas Iscariot.

Luke 6:16 describes him as the one “who became a traitor.” Notice the verb. He became a traitor. He was not one yet. When Jesus chose him that morning, Judas was a disciple like the others. He would travel with Jesus, eat with him, hear his teaching, watch his miracles. And eventually, he would sell him for thirty pieces of silver.

This is the most sobering detail in the passage: proximity to Christ does not guarantee faithfulness to Christ. Judas had more access to Jesus than almost anyone who has ever lived, and it was not enough to keep him from betrayal. Worse, because he was close, his betrayal did more damage than any outsider’s opposition ever could.

That should unsettle us. We live in a world that equates spiritual maturity with spiritual activity: how many Bible studies you attend, how many years you have been a Christian, how much theology you can articulate. But Judas walked with Jesus for three years. He heard the Sermon on the Mount. He watched Lazarus walk out of a tomb. He ate bread that Jesus multiplied from a boy’s lunch. Access and experience were never the problem. Something else was happening in Judas’ heart that all the proximity in the world could not fix.

And this is where the all-night prayer becomes even more unsettling. Jesus prayed. He prayed earnestly and perfectly. And he still chose Judas. If we hold a strictly pragmatic view of prayer, the kind that says “I pray so that God will help me avoid mistakes,” then this passage creates a problem. Jesus did not make a mistake. He chose Judas knowing what Judas would become. The prayer did not prevent the betrayal. It preceded it.

Trusting God in the Fog

I think we often come to prayer expecting clarity. We want God to lift the fog, show us the right path, and confirm that everything will work out. And sometimes he does. But sometimes he does not. Sometimes prayer intensifies the haziness rather than resolving it. You pray and the answer still is not clear. You seek God faithfully and the situation still looks impossible. You do everything right and the outcome still feels wrong.

This is where Jesus’ example becomes our anchor. The same Jesus who prayed all night and then chose the man who would betray him is the same Jesus who turned that betrayal into the salvation of the world. What looked like a catastrophic failure on Friday became the greatest act of redemption in history by Sunday morning. God’s providence is not random. It is not careless. It is costly, and it is aimed at your good, even when you cannot see it, even when the fog refuses to lift.

So pray. Not because prayer is a vending machine that dispenses clear answers, but because the God you are praying to is sovereign over every unclear answer, every confusing circumstance, and every betrayal that threatens to undo you. He is working. He has always been working. And he is not finished yet.

Pray to that God. And trust that God, even in the dark.