Power for obedience
“This is My beloved Son. Hear Him!” (Luke 9:35).
Usually, Monday mornings are the start of the new working week. Our minds can be full of all kinds of things we have to do. I remember staying with a brother who had been a missionary in the West Indies. He said to me, “I don’t like my children to tumble into the day.” I have often thought of his words and the times I have tumbled into the day. Mondays can be the day when the demands and responsibilities of life engulf us, and activity sweeps us through another week.
As we remembered the Lord yesterday, I found myself reflecting on the three special moments in the Bible when the Father speaks of His delight in His Son. The first is at the baptism of the Lord Jesus in Luke 3:22, as His public ministry in divine love and holy energy was about to begin. As Jesus came out of the River Jordan, the Father expressed His delight in His Son’s obedience in love to do the work the Father had given Him to do. He not only delighted in it at that moment but also in the thirty years that led up to it, and all the Son would accomplish from that moment to the glory of God the Father.
The second occasion was on the Mount of Transfiguration when Peter, James and John saw the glory of Jesus and also saw Moses and Elijah speaking with Him. These two men represent the Law and the Prophets which foretold the sufferings and glory of the Saviour. Luke tells us they spoke with the Lord of His suffering and death that Jesus was about to accomplish at Jerusalem. Moses never entered the Promised Land. Instead, God personally showed it to him from Mount Nebo (Deuteronomy 34:1). But there was Moses on the Mount of Transfiguration. Grace takes us where the law never could. Elijah, who like Enoch did not die, was there as well. Moses and Elijah remind us of the dead in Christ and also the saints who are alive when the Lord comes again. He will take us into His glorious presence (1 Thessalonians 4). The Father closes the scene with the words, “This is My beloved Son. Hear Him!”, and afterwards they only saw Jesus. Here the Father is teaching us that communion with Christ is the power for our obedience.
In John 12, after Philip and Andrew tell Jesus about the Greeks who wanted to see Him, the Lord says in verse 24, “Unless a grain of wheat falls into the ground and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it produces much grain.” The verse is about the cross, and the subsequent joy that lay before the Lord. The Greeks who wanted to see the Lord were in a nation which had rejected the same Lord. They were a token of that vast company the lonely death of our Saviour would bring into being; the “much grain”. But then the Lord measures that loneliness, “Now My soul is troubled, and what shall I say? ‘Father, save Me from this hour’? But for this purpose I came to this hour. Father, glorify Your name.” The Father’s responds “I have both glorified it and will glorify it again” (verses 27-28).
These brief holy glimpses allow us to see the pleasure the Father has in the obedience of His beloved Son. That obedience expressed His love for the Father and His love for us. It is only enjoyed as we, like Peter, James and John, are taken up into His presence day by day. There we learn to listen to the Lord and find our life, not engulfed by busyness, but embraced by the calmness of His presence and enriched by the spiritual fruitfulness it produces (John 15).
