March 16

Doing the Father’s Will

My meat is to do the will of him that sent me. — John 4:34

Thus Jesus explained to His disciples how He had been nourished during their absence. He had been labouring in His Father’s work, and this labour had revived Him. There is for all of Christ’s people a wonderful secret of hidden blessedness in these words. There is a life higher than mere bodily existence. As our Lord elsewhere said, “Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God.” It is only the lower life that can be nourished by bread, and this may be well fed while the true life is famishing: the higher existence is sustained by communion with God, and this communion is maintained by doing God’s will.

Obedience secures the Divine presence and companionship. It was this communion with the Father that sustained Christ in all His sufferings. At one time He said, “He that sent me is with me: the Father hath not lift me alone; for I do always those things that please him.” The simple joy of doing the Father’s will was another element in the “meat” on which Christ here fed. There was also the joy of saving a lost soul. We do not begin to realize the joy that it gives Christ to see penitents coming home. It was this same “meat” that sustained Him in all the sorrows of the cross — “who for the joy set before him endured the cross, despising the shame.”

These are but a few of the many deep and rich suggestions of truth which lie in this one divine sentence. We should learn the lesson for ourselves, for it is true for us as it was for Jesus that doing the will of God nourishes our souls. Complete and loving submission to the Divine will in time of suffering lifts the spirit above its pain. Entire devotion to God’s work brings a Christian into such living communion with his Lord that he even rejoices in toil and sacrifice. To do God’s will brings us into living communion with Him, and that is life