Jesus Prays Part Seven

Anything that is true about Jesus is true about God.

Anything that would be ridiculous to believe about Jesus would be ridiculous to believe about God.

NOW: Anything that would be expected of Jesus in the World should be expected of us.

In order to reveal the Father to the World, Jesus demonstrated His love for the Father in the way He loved us.

How did Jesus display His Deity? With fantastic displays of the awesomeness of His power over nature? With cosmic demonstrations of His control of the universe? With supernatural displays of His judgement of sinners?

Jesus did some of those things, but the main way that Jesus demonstrated His love for the Father was in loving us!

God knows us fully.

This is at the same time a concerning and comforting thought.

God wants us to know Him.

The challenge of knowing God is our finite minds and His infinite realities.

To know Him is to know His Love.

To illustrate the enormous complexity that God is by nature, He chose to use a basic but incredibly complex attribute…love.

No one truly understands what and how love works, we just know that it does.

Biological?

Psychological?

Sociological?

What we understand of it is because of what we experience of it.

1 John 4:8 NASB95

The one who does not love does not know God, for God is love.

Romans 5:8 NASB95

But God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.

John 3:16 NASB95

“For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish, but have eternal life.

Faith is our key, Forgiveness is our possession, Grace is our reality, Hope is our mindset, Praise is on our tongues, Prayer is our lifeline, The Word is our guide, Love is our fuel.

In Order to Reveal the Father to the World, We Must Demonstrate Our Love for God and One Another as Jesus Did

This World has a Warped Idea about Love

Love is about pleasure

Love is about the benefits

Love is about ourselves

This is in sharp contrast to what the Word says about Love

John 15:13 NASB95

“Greater love has no one than this, that one lay down his life for his friends.

1 John 4:7–11 NASB95

Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God; and everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. The one who does not love does not know God, for God is love. By this the love of God was manifested in us, that God has sent His only begotten Son into the world so that we might live through Him. In this is love, not that we loved God, but that He loved us and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins. Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another.

We must never let the World out-love us!

John D. Relationship of Believers to the Father (17:20–26)

“The situation, then, is perilous; the world antagonistic and unbelieving; the future dark for Master and men: all this is accepted without resentment, without fear. Jesus goes forward; his men, soon to be scattered and shaken, will also in time go forward, imbued with the Spirit, united in loyalty, sure of God’s love in Christ, with a gleam of glory in their hearts, and aware of the unfailing presence of the living Christ among them. In them, and upon us, the Lord’s own prayer is being constantly fulfilled”

1 John 3:18 NASB95

Little children, let us not love with word or with tongue, but in deed and truth.

John 13:35 NASB95

“By this all men will know that you are My disciples, if you have love for one another.”

CONCLUSION

John III. Conclusion: The Orphan Lamb

We are in the world, but not of the world, so that we may be a witness to the world. And because we are Christ’s, we are God’s. Our security rests on the possession of the new nature in the Son and not on anything we do for ourselves.

I am reminded of the touching story of an orphan lamb that a shepherd attempted to keep alive by putting it with a ewe whose own lamb had died. But the ewe rejected the foreigner and would not feed the offspring of another. In desperation, the shepherd skinned the dead lamb and laced its fleece over the starving orphan. Immediately upon recognizing the infant as her own, the ewe exercised the role of mother, giving new life to the orphan. Because of what the dead lamb had been to the mother, the stranger who deserved nothing was adopted and made a member of the family with all appropriate privileges.