“ so that the world may know that You sent Me and loved them even as You loved Me” (John 17:23).
My Beloved Brothers and Sisters in Christ Jesus our Lord,
You will likely recognize the words above as coming from the lips of Jesus as He prayed most fervently in the Garden of Gethsemane on the night of his arrest and trial. The prayer itself, infinitely rich with truth, could very well be the subject of one’s study for a lifetime. Who could ever fully mine the depths of what our Lord expressed to His Father at such an hour?
But this one line in our Lord’s impassioned words of supplication is most staggering in its own right. Here the Savior is lifting up His disciples and, by extension (and the Lord’s own testimony, v. 20), each of us as well. And His prayerful concern is that we who have believed in Him for our eternal salvation would “ know” something essential, a foundational truth, a life-transforming reality. And that is, that we are “ loved” by the Father “ as” the Father has “ loved” the Son!
Now, just pause momentarily and reflect upon that!
Consider how frequently and often flippantly we (and even those outside of Christ) speak of God’s love. ‘God loves me, and God loves you, and God loves everybody.’ Virtually everyone who admits their belief in God will sound these words with confidence and some degree of conviction. In this case, God’s love is referenced in the abstract. It is not connected to anything that might illustrate, measure, or define it. He loves us, and that’s it. Simple enough!
But here in His prayer Jesus blows away such a shallow and rather innocuous view of God’s love. Our Savior and Lord will not permit His disciples (in any age or place) to be content with how the world speaks so abstractly and frivolously of the divine love. Rather, our Lord provides a measurement, or a comparison, for us so that we might have a proper and full view of the inexpressible greatness of this love.
The Father does indeed love each of us who belong to His Son. But there’s more!
According to the Savior Himself, the Father loves us as much as He does His only-begotten Son! God the Father loves you, me, and every believer redeemed by Christ’s blood, as if we were His Son!
In the light of this truly astounding thought, our task is to contemplate how, as well as how much, the Father loves His Son.
Thankfully, we are not left without help on this question. In John 3:35 Jesus declared, “ The Father loves the Son and has given all things into his hand.”
The Father’s infinite love for His Son is so vast that He has granted to Him the ownership of literally everything! And not only that, but with the Son’s possession of all that exists, He has also been freely granted sovereign control over every fraction of it! By means of the Father’s eternal love for His Only-begotten Son, Jesus is the rightful Owner and Master of all creation!
So this is how we are to contemplate and measure the Father’s great love for us!
Because we belong to His Son, we too share in His ownership and sovereignty over all things! We are, as Paul writes, “ heirs of God and fellow heirs with Christ” (Romans 8:17). And since the Father loves the Son and has granted Him all the fullness of creation itself, the Father will also “ graciously give us all things” (Romans 8:32) that we might need now in this life, and literally everything in eternity to come!
So let me ask you this question as our new week begins on this good Monday: If you really believed this to be true, that the Father loves you in the same way and to the same degree that He loves His Son, what difference would it make now?
How would such a truth impact your day, and the remainder of the week? If, as Jesus Himself prayed, you did come to “ know” the Father’s love in this way, what would be different about you? How would it impact your relationships with others? How would it challenge your anxieties and fears? How would it affect the degree of peace and contentment that you have right now? How would it modify the way you look out at this world in its rebellion against God and spiritual lifelessness? And would it make a difference in how you act, what you set your affections upon, what you think about and treasure in your mind?
And biggest of all, what would be different about your worship of and devotion to such a loving and gracious Father?
Now we know why the Apostle Paul also verbalized this very same concern for all believers that Jesus expressed in the Garden that night long ago:
“ And I pray that you, firmly fixed in love yourselves, may be able to grasp (with all Christians) how wide and deep and long and high is the love of Christ—and to know for yourselves that love so far beyond our comprehension” (Ephesians 3:18-19, Phillips Translation).
If we truly “ know” this love, we can never be the same. And no Monday will ever be ‘just another manic Monday’!
Be encouraged! Be in the know! Listen to Jesus pray! You are loved!
With all my love and prayers,
Mike