As the Son of Man ( the second Adam), Jesus said to His disciples who were encouraging Him to eat, “I have food to eat that you do not know about. My food is to do the will of Him who sent me and to accomplish His work.” John 4:32,34.
Jesus said in the 2nd half of John 5:30, “I do not seek My own will, but the will of Him who sent Me.” And in John 8:29, He said, “I always do the things that are pleasing to Him.” 4 different times in the Gospel of John, Jesus said that he did nothing on his own initiative. What I want you to see is how radically surrendered Jesus was to the will of the Father. At his greatest trial in the garden of Gethsemane, Jesus said to the Father, “not my will when Your will be done.” The testing was so severe that Jesus was sweating drops of blood, but even in that intense battle, He affirmed that He had no independent will apart from the Father’s will.
Jesus lived his life on earth in union with the Father through the Holy Spirit to show us, as the 2nd Adam, how we were created to live in union with God. The outworking of Jesus being in the Father and the Father being in Him was Jesus saying He only did those things He saw the Father doing and only said those things He heard the Father saying. That is an extraordinary description of what life in union with God looks like. Jesus said, “For the Father loves the Son, and shows Him all things that He Himself is doing.” John 5:20.
Jesus effortlessly knew what the Father was doing, and what the Father was saying, and in surrendered faith acted and, in so doing, allowed the Father to act through Him, and in obedience, Jesus spoke what He heard, thus allowing the Father to speak through Him.
As Christians, you and I are in union with Jesus, and He lives in us to live His life through us. We have said it many times; the Christian life is Jesus living His life and His story through our life and our daily life story. I think that many times when believers read what Jesus said about only doing those things he saw the Father doing and only saying those things he heard the Father saying, it sounds so mystical and impossible for us to ever experience that kind of relationship. The truth is, that is exactly the kind of union experience Jesus wants us to enjoy with Him. Here is the remarkable key to all, and I hate to use the word “key” because it sounds like a formula, and the Christian life is not a formula; it’s a relationship lived in union with the person Jesus, but the “key” to always knowing what Jesus is doing, and always hearing what Jesus is saying is simple radical surrender. A Life lived in union with Christ is an effortless joy to those who say yes to the fact that Jesus nailed your independent self and its independent will to the cross.
I discovered 44 years ago that only Jesus Christ can live a victorious Christian life and that he had come to live in me to do just that. After more than four decades, I’m still discovering how large this life is and how gloriously simple it is to daily experience knowing and seeing what He’s up to. If it was hard and complicated then it would not be grace. We are the ones who have made it so complicated; not. To the yielded, the River flows out of your innermost being, and you get to just flow with Him.