THE OBEDIENCE OF JESUS

Hebrews 10:5-10; Luke 22:41-44; Hebrews 5:7-9

We were speaking yesterday, dear brethren and friends, about feeding on the Lord Jesus. I would now like to speak about Him in a way which would have you think of Him more, and love Him more. That is what feeding on the Lord Jesus means. As we think of Jesus, we feed on Him, and He becomes greater to us. There are many things we could say about the Lord Jesus because He is so great, but I only want to speak about one, and that is His obedience. The first scripture is about the Lord Jesus coming to this earth in obedience. The second scripture we have read is about the end of His life here; in that life, He was perfectly obedient to His Father. And then we read in the last scripture of His suffering and death. I trust that as we speak of the Lord Jesus from these scriptures, He will become more precious to our hearts, because His obedience when He was here was one of the things that made Him so precious to His God and Father.

This scripture in Hebrews 10 is a very wonderful one, because it gives us an insight into eternity, before the worlds were made. This scripture is a quotation from a psalm, but we know, because the Lord Jesus told us, that these Old Testament scriptures speak of Him. So in verse 7, it is the Lord Jesus speaking prophetically; “Lo, I come … to do, O God, thy will”. Of course, He was not called the Lord Jesus then; He took that name when He came into this world. But He was always a divine Person, and as a divine Person equal with God, He said ‘I will do Thy will’. This One who became known as the Lord Jesus came into the world, and immediately the good pleasure of God was proclaimed; the angels could say “good pleasure in men”, Luke 2:14. How pleased God the Father was with His beloved Son in every way. When Jesus was here, the sacrifices were still being offered in the temple by the Jews, but God was no longer pleased with these sacrifices, because His beloved Son, a blessed Man, had come into the world. Jesus came in love for His God, and in love for man, but He came in perfect obedience to His God and Father. The desire I have is that we might see in Him what the Father saw, and that we might share the Father’s appreciation of His beloved Son.

As a boy of twelve, Jesus was perfectly obedient to His Father. He said to His parents, “did ye not know that I ought to be occupied in my Father’s business”, Luke 2:49. For thirty years, He lived a life of perfect obedience about which we know almost nothing. When He was baptised at the Jordan, before He did any of the wonderful things that are recorded in the gospels, the Father said, “Thou art my beloved Son, in thee I have found my delight”, Luke 3:22. During every day of the Lord’s life until then, the Father had seen a perfectly obedient Man. So Jesus moved out in His public service, which we know about from the gospels, and everything that He did, He did perfectly well. There is a scripture in Mark 7:37 where the crowd said “He does all things well”. They said that about Jesus because they had seen what He did in healing sick persons, but the Father had seen much more of the perfection of Jesus than the crowd had seen. Jesus was guided by the Father’s will; He said prophetically that “He wakeneth morning by morning, he wakeneth mine ear to hear as the instructed”, Isa.50:4. The doing of the Father’s will was food for Him; He said that “My food is that I should do the will of him that has sent me”, John 4:34. Think of how pleasurable it was to the Father that the Lord Jesus was so happy to do His Father’s will that it was food for Him. Every day for thirty three and a half years, He was perfectly obedient. The devil tried his best to get Jesus to be disobedient. You will remember when the devil suggested that Jesus should make the stone into bread when He was hungry (Luke 4:3), but because of His perfection, He could not be disobedient to the word of God.

Where we read in Luke 22, there came the greatest test of the obedience of Jesus. Because of who He is, He could see in His mind what lay ahead of Him, and in the holiness of His soul He shrank from it. He asked the Father to remove the cup of suffering which He was about to drink, but then in perfect obedience, He said “but then, not my will, but thine be done”. His will was perfectly in line with the will of His God and Father, and He accepted this way of suffering love. Think of what that meant for Jesus, that in all the holiness of His manhood, He was going to die on the cross; yet He accepted it as the will of His God and Father. It says later in this scripture that His sweat became as great drops of blood. That is how much what lay before Him affected the Lord Jesus.

That is what we read of in Hebrews 5, which speaks of His strong crying and tears. The feelings of Jesus were involved in His obedience. It was an awful thing for Him to go into death, but He went to the cross in perfect obedience. Thank God He did, because we can say, He did it for us. If Jesus had not been obedient to death, then I would still be a sinner in my sins. He went in obedience into this place of suffering; it speaks here of “the things which he suffered”. We cannot understand them, because they were so deep, but I trust that speaking about Jesus in this way will make you understand more the obedience and love of our Saviour.

But now He is out of death. This perfect Man has been raised, and He is alive now. So it says in verse 9 that having been perfected, He “became to all them that obey him, author of eternal salvation”. I have presented to you the obedience of our Saviour. Although He is perfect and unique, He is also an example to us, for we are to obey Him. During our time together this weekend, we have been speaking about love’s commandment. We have to be obedient to the commandments of our God, to the commandments of Jesus, but it is not the kind of obedience to the law which said, If you do this, you will live, and if you do not do it, you will die. It is the obedience of persons who know Jesus as the One who was obedient Himself. So He would say to us tonight, I loved you so much that I was obedient even to death; will you be obedient to Me? That is why I say that to be obedient to this blessed Man is to answer to the commandment of love. Being subject to the will of the Lord Jesus is the way of happiness. Sometimes when we are younger, we think that to be happy is to do our own wills, but the way of happiness is submission to our Lord Jesus Christ. A life lived in obedience to the Lord Jesus is a happy life.

May we feed on this blessed Man and on His perfect obedience. We can pray to the Father to ask Him to show us more of what He finds so precious in His beloved Son, and we can pray to the Holy Spirit to ask Him to help us to make these things real in our affections for Christ. May this blessed One be more precious to us all, for His name’s sake.

Address at Anand, India

28 December 2013