Preparation For Separation Series

Every once in a while, in world history a powerful personality comes along whose influence and presence in life so impacts life during his time on earth that the people who are associated with him actually wonder how they will get on in life without him—whose departure from life leaves such a huge hole that, at lest in some quarters and among some people, it is hard to imagine how their lives will go on without them.

For instance, imagine the nation of Israel, as it pondered its direction and future after Moses. What a loss his departure must have been for them. They had prayed for 400 years for a man who would deliver them from oppressive Egyptian slavery, and it seemed like nothing happened. And all of a sudden, the deliverer that they had prayed for showed up, and God showed up with Him and they were delivered by incredibly great miracles, and they had a spiritual leader par excellence who had an “in” with God, and then He was gone as they faced another great challenge, conquering the Promised Land. How would they go on without him?

And perhaps in our own nation’s history, we might think of Abraham Lincoln, and Life after Lincoln. He had guided the nation through a horrendous Civil War, seemed to have a great sense of righteousness and a wisdom not often heard—his words from the Gettysburg Address are still hallowed in our nation’s history, and now it was time to heal and reconcile, but someone wouldn’t let that happen, and that assassin’s bullet removed this incredible man from the scene just as the nation seemed to need him the most. How could we possibly get on without Lincoln?

And perhaps there’s someone within your family, your extended or immediate family that you personally feel that same way about, a patriarch, or maybe a matriarch, who is so incredibly important to your own direction and security in life. What would life be like after they were gone?

And so you can perhaps imagine how the 11 disciples were feeling as the last moments with Jesus Christ wound down. They were facing the prospect of life after Christ. They had lived with the greatest and most influential personality of all time, man of unparalleled wisdom, knowledge and power, love and character, then any other person in all of history, and now, in a moment of time, with one violent thrust of his enemies, He would be gone. And what in the world would they do without Him. How would they continue to follow Him without His personal, physical, visible or even verbal presence?

Or perhaps a better question at this point was this: Would they continue to follow Him in any respect after His departure.

And so that’s also a question for us, though we are not accustomed to the physical and visible presence of Christ this morning. Whatever would encourage and enable these disciples to continue following Christ after his departure would likely also be of help to us as we seek to follow Christ. How can we not only survive and thrive in following Jesus when we don’t have His visible specter to guide us?

Well, in John 16, Jesus speaks of three specific expectations we must have if we would follow Him fully, as He desires these immediate 11 disciples of His to do. The first had to do with persecution, the second with supernatural help in the matter of witnessing, and the third with guidance, how we might find further guidance and revelation apart from His physical presence.

Now as we’ve been in John 15, Jesus spoke of three relationships we must necessarily have in the course of following Him. The first was, of course, our personal relationship with Him. And his command was to Abide—to abide and obey. To abide as a branch does in the vine to bear fruit. The second was the relationship we would have with each other—and His command was to love, to love one another even unto death, even as He was an example of that for us. And the third relationship would be the with the world—the world of unbelievers. And the command with respect to that was to testify—to witness. We, in order to fully follow Jesus, must witness to the world, must testify to the world of the truth and reality and eternal significance of Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior, just as He did.

But in the course of encouraging us to testify to the world, Jesus made it also clear that there would be a reaction, and the reaction would not generally be positive. In fact, he did not hesitate to characterize that reaction with the very strong verb hate. The world would hate us, just as it hated Jesus, and without a good cause. It would hate us because our deeds were good and its deeds were evil, and so he prepared us for something we might not otherwise expect.