Prayer Life series #21

Prayer Life series #21

Jesus’s entire life was patterned by His daily adjustments to the Father’s will Jesus said it this way in John 8:29: “I always do those things that please the Father.” Obedience was an absolute for Jesus and it has to be for us too. Every time Jesus entered the Father’s presence, His understanding was opened to what the Father was doing. Having learned the Father’s agenda through prayer, and after preparing Himself through prayer for each assignment God gave Him, Jesus’s example was to immediately follow the Father’s will by fully adjusting His life to the Father’s purposes. This pattern was the heart of Jesus’s decisions in every aspect of His behavior. Jesus always knew what to do and say because the Father had instructed Him through their intimate relationship of prayer.

            In the days of His flesh, the same godly fear and reverent submission that we saw in Jesus’s attitude in prayer was also characterized in every part of the way He lived His life. There was a lot of times Jesus could have gone against the Father’s will and provided comfort for Himself or even avoided pain. He acknowledged this fact then the soldiers came to arrest Him in Gethsemane. He asked them: “Do you think that I cannot pray to My Father, and He will provide Me with more than 12 legions of angels?” Then He made it clear that He would not do that because He was committed to God’s revealed will. Matt. 26:53-54 “How then could the Scriptures be fulfilled, that it must happen this way?”

            The necessity of obedience and accountability was a driving force in Jesus’s life. At many points in His ministry, Jesus could have avoided the trials that were ahead. But because of the deep sense of accountability that marked His life and His prayers, He did not turn away. Once He heard the Father in prayer, He lived out His entire life with a determined purpose to obey everything God set before Him.

            This sense of accountability only intensified the closer He got to the cross. He knew His death was the Father’s will, and He was set on obeying the Father will. On the night before His death, He said to the Father: “I have finished the work which You have given Me to do” (John 17:4). Nd on the cross itself He said in a loud cry to the Father: “It is finished” (John 19:30).