SERIES: WHAT JESUS SAID ABOUT WHY HE CAME
“I CAME TO DO THE FATHER’S WILL”
JOHN 6:37-40
INTRODUCTION
Today we finish our Christmas series. It’s not been the typical Christmas series where we look at the traditional scenes about Jesus’ birth – Mary and Joseph, the shepherds, the angels, the wise men. It’s a series called “What Jesus Said About Why He Came.” During the Christmas season, we celebrate “God with us” – when God came to earth as a man. That God-man’s name is Jesus and during His time here on earth, He made several declarations concerning why He came. During this series we’ve been looking at those statements and how they affect our lives. Today’s statement: “I Came to Do the Father’s Will.”
A man was bitten by a dog and went to see his doctor. The doctor checks the wound, takes some samples, disinfects the wound, and sends the man back out to the waiting room to wait for the results of the rabies test.
The doctor comes out to the waiting room some time later to speak to another patient and notices that the man bitten by the dog is furiously writing on a piece of paper. The doctor walks over to him and says, “I doubt that your problem is all that serious. In any case, there’s no need to make out a will.” The man says, “I’m not making out a will. I’m making a list of people I want to bite.”
What is a “will”? A will, in this sense, is our choices or determinations concerning what happens to our material possessions when we die. Jesus claimed that He came to earth to do the will of His Father. Jesus meant that He was here to follow the Father’s choice or determinations. He didn’t seek to please himself but to please the Father. Jesus’ obedience to the Father’s will has provided us not only with an example to follow but also with blessings beyond measure. Let’s look together the implications of Jesus’ statement and how it empowers us to live according to the Father’s will.
Jn. 6:37-40 – “All that the Father gives me will come to me, and whoever comes to me I will never drive
away. For I have come down from heaven not to do my will but to do the will of him who sent me. And this is
the will of him who sent me, that I shall lose none of all that he has given me, but raise them up at the last day. For my Father’s will is that everyone who looks to the Son and believes in him shall have eternal life, and I will
raise him up at the last day.”
PLAN
In the broader scope of this passage, Jesus is speaking to a group of people who sought Him out after He had fed them with a miracle using only five small loaves of barley bread and two small fish. Those who camped out following that meal woke up the next morning and discovered that Jesus and His disciples had gone to the other side of the Sea of Galilee. They went to look for Him because they wanted breakfast. They wanted more bread.
Jesus tells them about the Bread of Life – referring to Himself. This bread would be a bread which would feed spiritual hunger. In Matthew 5:6, Jesus said, “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be filled.”
The people became confused because their vision was on earthly, material things. Jesus clarifies His teaching. First, Jesus reminds them that this teaching is not new or contrary to what they had already been taught. Then Jesus tells them that He is actively involved in doing what the Father wanted Him to do. Jesus basically said, “I exist not to bring glory to myself but to Him who sent me.”
Earlier in the Gospel of John, Chapter 4, Jesus meets a Samaritan woman at a well and convinces her that He is the one who can change her life. While she’s gone back into the town to bring others to meet the “Promised One”, the disciples return from going after food. As they pass the food around, they encourage Jesus to eat. Jesus tells that that He has food to eat that they don’t understand. The disciples get a little upset because they think someone else has brought Him food. But Jesus says in Jn. 4:34 – “My food is to do the will of Him who sent me and to finish His work.”
Jesus claimed throughout His earthly ministry that His authority, His basis for what He did and said came from Heaven and not from earth. In Jn. 5:30, Jesus says, “…I seek not to please myself but Him who sent me.” Then in vs. 43, He says, “I have come in my Father’s name.” Jesus came with God’s plan. He came to do the Father’s choices, determinations, and decisions.
Augustine said, “O Lord, grant that I may do thy will as if it were my will; so that thou mayest do my will as if it were Thy will.” Are we concerned about doing what God wants or are we seeking our own will? Are we fighting for things to happen the way we want them to happen? Are we more concerned that things go our way than the Father’s way? Remember that Jesus taught us to pray, “Your kingdom come, Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.”
PURPOSE
Note that Jesus says that He was “sent” by the Father. It wasn’t an accident or a coincidence that Jesus came. God had a pre-determined purpose in sending His Son. Gal. 4:4-5 – “But when the time had fully come,
God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under law, to redeem those under law, that we might receive the full rights of sons.” Eph. 1:4-5 tells us, “For he chose us in him before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless in his sight. In love he predestined us to be adopted as his sons through Jesus Christ, in accordance with his pleasure and will.”
Jesus tells us that His Father’s purpose and His own purpose are one and the same. Jesus basically says, “Not only am I here with the Father’s permission – His blessing and authority, I’m here to accomplish what he wants done.” J. Hudson Taylor said, “I used to ask God to help me. Then I asked if I might help Him. I ended up asking Him to do His work through me.” That’s why Jesus came – so the work of the Father could be done through Him.
If we want to know God’s will for our lives, we need to recognize not only God’s choices and determinations for our lives but His purpose in choosing those things for us. God does not do things randomly and recklessly. He has a purpose behind everything that He does.
Even when we have trouble seeing God’s purpose, know that that purpose is there and that God is using all things to work toward that purpose. His purposes are for our ultimate good. Rom. 8:28 – “And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose.”
PASSION
Being ready and willing to do the will of the Father involves understanding God’s permission and authority, and His purpose and plan. But it also involves understanding God’s passion. Passion can be defined as “a burning desire.”
What is God’s “burning desire”? In Jn. 6:40. Jesus says, “For my Father’s will is that everyone who looks to the Son and believes in Him shall have eternal life, and I will raise him up at the last day.” God’s plan, purpose and passion was salvation.
God could not bear the fact that sin separated us from Him. He had determined before the foundations of the universe were laid that He would provide a way for us to come back to Him. God could not stand that there was a wedge between Himself and those He loved. His burning desire was to do something about it. John 3:16-17 – “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him.”
Jesus identified Himself with this same passion. Mt. 20:28 – “…the Son of Man did not come to be served,
but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.” Lk. 19:10 – “For the Son of Man came to seek and to save what was lost.”
Listen to some very important things that Jesus tells us in this passage from John 6. First, God draws us to His son – “All that the Father gives me will come to me.” The history of God’s interactions with people – the Bible – shows us that God is a God who actively seeks relationship. He came searching for Adam and Eve in the Garden. He came searching for Moses in the wilderness. He came looking for you and I in His Son Jesus Christ when He sent Him to this earth.
Second, Jesus says that He will not reject any who come to Him. He says, “whoever comes to me I will never drive away.” This world is rough. We face rejection every day. Yet Jesus tells us, “I will never reject you. If you’ll seek me out, I’ll accept you.” His invitation in Mt. 11:28-30 remains the same today as it was 2,000 years ago: “Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke
upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.”
A school teacher lost her life’s savings in a business scheme that had been elaborately explained to her by a very talented con man. When her investment disappeared and her dream was shattered, she went to the Better Business Bureau.
The official to whom she complained at the Better Business Bureau asked her quite bluntly: “Why didn’t you come to us first?” Didn’t you know about the Better Business Bureau?” The teacher replied, “Oh yes, I’ve always know about you. But I didn’t come because I was afraid you’d tell me no to do it.” Jesus says to us: “If you’ll come to Me, I’ll never reject you. If you’ll look to Me and trust Me, you will never be disappointed.”
CONCLUSION
When we understand God’s plan, God’s purpose, and God’s passion, it’s not so difficult to seek to follow His will. Yet, many choose not to follow. God gives each of us a choice – the choice to either line up with His choices and determination or to reject His choices and determinations. Jesus said in Mt. 7:21 – “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only he who does the will of my Father who is in heaven.”
God sent His Son. He had a plan and a purpose. Jesus complied with the Father’s will. Salvation is now available to all. That’s the message of Christmas. Jesus came and did the Father’s will. His will is that no one will perish but will have everlasting life.
Paul Harvey shares the same story every Christmas. Listen to the transcript of this story directly from the files of “The Rest of the Story.” Let it speak to your heart and then decide how you will respond to the will of the Father for your life.
“You know, the Christmas story, the God born a man in a manger and all that escapes some folks mostly, I think, because they seek complex answers to their questions and this one is so utterly simple. So for the cynics and the skeptics and the unconvinced, I submit a modern parable.
“Now the man to whom I’m going to introduce you was not a Scrooge -- he was a kind, decent, mostly good man -- generous to his family, upright in his dealings with other men but he just didn’t believe all that incarnation stuff which the churches proclaim at Christmastime. It just didn’t make sense and he was too honest to pretend otherwise. He just couldn’t swallow the Jesus story about God coming to earth as a man.
“‘I’m truly sorry to distress you,’ he told his wife, ‘but I’m not going with you to church this Christmas eve.’ He said he’d feel like a hypocrite, that he’d much rather just stay at home but that he would wait up for them and so he stayed and they went to the Christmas eve services.
“Shortly after the family drove away in the car, snow began to fall. He went to the window to watch the flurries getting heavier and heavier and then went back to his fireside chair and began to read his newspaper. Minutes later he was startled by a thudding sound...then another...and then another...sort of a thump or a thud. At first he thought someone must be throwing snowballs against his living room window but when he went to the front door to investigate, he found a flock of birds huddled miserably in the snow. They’d been caught in the storm and in a desperate search for shelter had tried to fly through his large front window.
“Well, he couldn’t let the poor creatures lie there and freeze. So he remembered the barn where the children stabled their pony. That would provide a warm shelter if he could direct the birds to it. Quickly he put on a coat, overshoes, tramped through the deepening snow to the barn. He opened the doors wide and turned on a light.....but the birds did not come in.
“He figured food would entice them in, so he hurried back to the house, fetched bread crumbs, sprinkled them on the snow making a trail to the yellow-lighted, wide-open doorway of the stable, but to his dismay, the birds ignored the bread crumbs and continued to flap around helplessly in the snow.
“He tried catching them...he tried shooing them into the barn by walking around them waving his arms
...instead they scattered in every direction except into the warm lighted barn and then he realized that they were afraid of him.
“To them, he reasoned, I am a strange and terrifying creature -- if only I could think of some way to let them know that they can trust me -- that I’m not trying to hurt them but to help them -- but how? Because any move he made tended to frighten and confuse them. They just would not follow -- they would not be led or shooed because they feared him.
“If only I could be a bird, he thought to himself, and mingle with them and speak their language. Then I could tell them not to be afraid. Then I could show them the way to the safe, warm.....
....to the safe warm barn, but....
...I would have to be one of them so they could see and hear....
...and understand.
“At that moment the church bells began to ring. The sound reached his ears above the sounds of the wind and he stood there listening to the bells, Adeste Fideles... listening to the bells pealing the glad tidings of Christmas. And he sank to his knees in the snow.”
