CHRIST AS MODEL IN DOING THE FATHER’S WILL

Hebrews 10:7-10,14; Colossians 1:9,10; Romans 12:1,2

I have been contemplating, dear brethren, the wonderful model we have in the Lord Jesus, particularly in the way He accomplished the Father’s will. He says elsewhere, “My food is that I should do the will of him that has sent me”, John 4:34.

The passage we have read says, “Lo, I come ... to do ... thy will”. Let us contemplate all that that involved for the Lord Jesus. There was not any question of a partial satisfying of God’s will, but in every movement of every day, fulfilling the will of God was Christ’s paramount and abiding desire. It must of course be as Man that He did that. He came down here specifically in view of carrying out God’s will. The end of it was the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all. It would surely affect our hearts and our spirits that the Lord Jesus was so set to do God’s will, not as a matter of command exactly, but in love, and that has a great effect. The way that He did the Father’s will has an effect on us, because it says, “by which will we have been sanctified through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all”.

Where I read in verse 14, the scripture says: “For by one offering he has perfected in perpetuity the sanctified”. This refers to what God has made us. It is not what we have striven for, what we might desire to be, but it is what God has made us, and what the Lord Jesus has brought us to by His supreme example of fulfilling the will of the Father. I do not know that I can say much about it. It is something that would affect our hearts and our affections, so that we should be here too for the will of the Father. May we know what that will is, and that we have been acted on by God through the work of the Lord Jesus. We have been justified through His blood and we have been sanctified through the giving of His body. It is a wonderful thing to contemplate what the Lord has done to each one of us.

In the epistle to Colossians, the apostle’s desire for the saints there is that they: “may be filled with the full knowledge of his will, in all wisdom and spiritual understanding, so as to walk worthily of the Lord unto all well-pleasing”. How we would each desire to be like that, to be filled with the full knowledge of His will and to walk worthily of the Lord. It should make us examine every facet of our lives, and to ask whether what we do, what we say, and what we are is walking worthily of the Lord and acceptable to Him. That would be so when we are walking according to God’s will as our Master did.

In Romans, the scripture speaks about what we are brought to: “that ye may prove what is the good and acceptable and perfect will of God”. It suggests that we are to be ready to accept certain things which are difficult, which naturally we would rebel against, happenings in our lives which are difficult; but we are to see them as indicating “the good and acceptable and perfect will of God”. We are not here to do our own wills, but we are here for Him. We are here to please the Lord, and I am sure that would be the desire of every one of us. There is so much that the Lord has done for us which we have no real input into, but then there is to be an answer in us to Him, in affection and in the desire to be here in accordance with His will.

I trust that these few thoughts might encourage us, for His name’s sake.

Word in meeting for ministry, Maidstone

20 February 2024

Keith May