Submission Enabling

Have you considered what it was like for the LORD to live in the limits of a human body, for Jesus to be dependent upon the Father’s will and timing, to rely upon the Holy Spirit’s empowering to live the Incarnate life? Infinite God limiting Himself to human form, trusting the LORD to guide Him through no matter how circumstances felt.

Look with me at the ‘how’ He did it as a model of how we can live fulfilled in the LORD. Let us unfold it backwards from what He said last to make sense out of His lesson.

“Holy Father, keep them in your Name, which you have given me, that they may be one, even as we are one.” ¹

Essential to living a life in the desire of the LORD is being in Him, identified with Him, wholly in agreement with Him. Jesus lived in agreement with the LORD and in His parable of the Vine in John 15² and His prayer for us in John 17³ emphasize us as the branches remaining in Him as the Vine just as He remained in the Father even though separated by His human existence and the necessity of continuance.

Not long after the Parable of the Vine and the Intercessory Prayer, Jesus was at the moment He anticipated in the Garden of Gethsemane when He prayed while waiting for the climax to begin. It was not as if He didn’t know it was coming for all of the Godhead had agreed it was necessary for Him to both live and die if mankind was to have the possibility of being redeemed. Knowing did not lessen the agony of that process—being betrayed by one He loved, seeing His disciples deny Him, being taunted and yet restraining Himself from lashing out at His accusers, then willingly allowing Himself to be murdered for the sake of those who did not comprehend. So He honestly prays to the Father,

And he said, “Abba, Father, all things are possible for you. Remove this cup from me. Yet not what I will, but what you will.” ⁴

His physical desire is to have the cup⁵ removed but ‘submission and trust’ is ‘not what I will, but what you will’ as expressed to God the Father. They would have preferred another way of redemption but only through sinless shed blood was redemption possible so Will was to Love to the end. Both sacrificed ‘want to’ for what was necessitated by our sin and creating a perfect Way of redemption.

Staying the course, finishing the race, being faithful will cost disciples as it cost Jesus yet along a different path:

Jesus answered him, “If anyone loves me, he will keep my word, and my Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our home with him. Whoever does not love me does not keep my words. And the word that you hear is not mine but the Father’s who sent me.⁶

‘Keeping His words’ will have its own cost for us as we must submit to the LORD’s will and lay down our lives in exchange for the life He has for us.

By this we know love, that he laid down his life for us, and we ought to lay down our lives for the brothers. But if anyone has the world’s goods and sees his brother in need, yet closes his heart against him, how does God’s love abide in him? Little children, let us not love in word or talk but in deed and in truth.⁷
And calling the crowd to him with his disciples, he said to them, “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake and the gospel’s will save it. For what does it profit a man to gain the whole world and forfeit his soul? For what can a man give in return for his soul? ⁸

Think about the exchange involved in the repentance and commitment to life in the will of God but think about it in the light of Jesus’s question,

“For what does it profit a man to gain the whole world and forfeit his soul?” ⁹