Prayer
Briefly prepare your heart in silence, and ask the Holy Spirit to awaken your sense of anticipation that God is about to speak to you through His Word. Then, before you read, I invite you to pray this prayer based on Psalm 63:2-4.
Lord, I long to see You
and to gaze upon Your power and glory,
for Your unfailing love is better than life itself.
I will love You as long as I live.
Amen.
Reading
We return yet again to the interaction between Jesus and a group of Jewish listeners who had come to believe in Him. As the week (and John 8) has unfolded, we’ve seen how Jesus presses in to the fact that simply believing His message is insufficient. Believing enough to entrust ourselves to Him and live in obedience to His Lordship is what discipleship is truly about.
In verse 29, this group insisted that Abraham was their father. They were relying on ancestry as a basis for belonging to God. But Jesus confronted them with the truth that ancestry means nothing. The only true “children of Abraham” are those who “do what Abraham did”. What did he mean? Well, he was talking about having faith.
Faith is what set Abraham apart to God. When He spoke about “doing what Abraham did”, Jesus was referring to the fact that Abraham trusted God enough to follow when God called, and to leave everything else behind in pursuit of obedience to God. (See Genesis 12:1-4, Romans 4:11-16, Galatians 3:7 and Hebrews 11:8-10)
By contrast to Abraham, though, many Jews of Jesus’ day had begun to look for ways to get rid of Jesus rather than surrender to Him by faith. So Jesus confronted them with this anomaly. Their response was, ‘The only Father we have is God himself.’ (v.41)
Then Jesus said to them, ‘If God were your Father, you would love me, for I have come here from God. I have not come on my own; God sent me.’ (v.42)
And that is the heart of our “command” for today: Love Jesus! Don’t just surrender to His Lordship out of a desire to be free from the power of other people or the power of sin (as we’ve seen over the last few days). Most importantly, surrender to Him out of absolute love for and devotion to God the Father and His Son, Jesus Christ.
In our response to Jesus, we are invited to truly love the Father by loving the Son Whom he has sent to us.
Contemplation
Please take time to ponder what Jesus has commanded us. Turn this declaration over and over in your mind. Keep it in mind throughout the day and live in step with Your King, Jesus.
As a disciple of Jesus Christ:
- I will choose to love Jesus above all else!
Holy Spirit, awaken in me an ever-deepening love for Jesus. Amen.
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