The Joy Set Before Him

Last week's blog didn't elicit any comments--I guess it wasn't very clear, eh? Sorry about that. I want to try a different angle on the same theme this week. But first, Wayne Jacobsen's latest Body Life is saying what I was trying to say, I think, only much more clearly. Check it out by clicking here.

Ok, so is it really possible to be so "God-blinded," God-intoxicated, that obedience flows from love rather than fear, duty or obligation? Absolutely! This is what Jesus modeled and it is the way He intends for us to live. It was Jesus' sense of the Father's constant love for Him and His responsive love for the Father that enabled Him to live the life that fully and perfectly obeyed the Father's will. This is wonderfully clear over and over again in John's Gospel (read it from that perspective: the love relationship between Jesus and His Father). And it was Jesus' ability to look into the Father's face that enabled Him to wrestle through the time of His suffering.

Perhaps the most tender illustration of this is in the Garden of Gethsemane where in Mark's Gospel we find the only written evidence of Jesus using the term "Abba" for His Father (Mark 14:36). There in the Garden, as He wrestles with things beyond our comprehension, His first word is "Abba" (Papa!), the word that His lips had first assigned to His Father when He was a child. And Luke's Gospel tells us that Abba answered Jesus' prayer, not by eliminating the cross but by sending angelic help (Luke 22:43).

While Jesus was on the cross, in spite of popular songs that suggest otherwise, His mind was on His Father (not you and me). We see this in the seven sayings from the cross: His first record words are, "Father, forgive them..." and His cry of terror "My God, My God, why have you forsaken me" was clearly birthed by His sense of the Father's withdrawal (not in reality but the sense of it), and His final words are, "Father, into your hands I commit my spirit."

I am convinced, dear ones, that only by gazing at His Father's loving face (momentarily obscured at one crucial point) was Jesus able to endure the incomprehensible pain that He endured. The joy of obeying the One He loved the most (the "joy set before Him" described in Hebrews 12:2--note that the context is gazing upon Jesus just as He did upon His Father), the sense of His Father's complete trustworthiness and the constant awareness of His Father's love and delight are the factors that enabled Jesus to say at the end, "It is finished."

The question is, do we think that some other, lesser motivation will work for us? If Jesus lived loved and therefore lived fully, dare we think that we can do something different?

'Tis the face that Stephen saw,
'Tis the heart that wept with Mary,
Can alone from idols draw: (Ora Rowan--see last week's post)

Gazing ever more intently,

Tom, one of Papa's little boys