Appointed To Bear Fruit: A 90 Day JourneySample

Jesus Knows The Father

Every day the media is seemingly filled with reports of bad news. If you only paid attention to the media, you would think that nothing good ever happens anywhere in the world. Bad news sells. People like to hear it and are fascinated by it. Jesus doesn’t end His prayer by trying to pique the interest of His disciples. His prayer wasn’t for them. Jesus was praying to the Father. The content of this prayer centered around the gospel message. Jesus knows the Father is righteous and that the world is lost in sin, and that it is only the Father who can make a way for the world to come back to Him. This is the kind of prayer that God wants from us. The more we understand the glory of God as expressed through salvation, the more we will pray, “Your kingdom come, your will be done.” We know that the gospel is the only hope for the world, so we need to continually ask God to glorify His name by revealing the truth about Christ to the world. 

Sadly, the world doesn’t know Christ. Their minds have been too dulled by sin and their eyes have been blinded to the truth about Jesus. Paul described the world’s spiritual condition: “In their case the god of this world has blinded the minds of the unbelievers, to keep them from seeing the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God” (II Cor. 4:4). They are lost in their sin and captives in Satan’s kingdom of darkness. Even if they knew of their miserable condition, they have no ability in and of themselves to be set free from Satan.

In spite of the desperate condition of the world, there is good news: Jesus knows the Father. Jesus is the highest and most perfect expression of who the Father is. He knows how much the Father loves even the lost and rebellious. What is the Good News? It is that there is hope for even the worst of sinners. God has taken the initiative to completely resolve the matter of our sin before Him. Each day as our debt of sin grows, Jesus knows exactly the payment that the Father requires. Our good works cannot pay this debt. There is no guessing. So, when Jesus proclaimed from the Cross, “It is finished,” He could guarantee that the Father’s plan for our salvation was completed. He paid it all. All. “And you, who were dead in your trespasses and the uncircumcision of your flesh, God made alive together with him, having forgiven us all our trespasses, by canceling the record of debt that stood against us with its legal demands. This he set aside, nailing it to the cross” (Col. 2:13-14). Our debt is paid. We can once again worship God.

Although the world doesn’t know the Father, there is a way for the world to know Him again: believing in the Son. This is the definition of a disciple—one who knows the Son. This means that we believe that we are sinners and that Jesus is the divine Son who came to pay our debt of sin. Because of what Jesus did on the Cross, our debt of sin is paid in full. This payment was a great exchange. Jesus took our sins upon Himself and put His righteousness on us. Now when the Father looks at us, He doesn’t see our sin; He sees Jesus’ perfect righteousness. 

The one and only way to solve the problem of sin is Jesus Christ. If we don’t know Him, we don’t have eternal life. Disciples, who know the Father, will proclaim the Good News. Jesus’ righteousness is enough to cover all the sins committed throughout history. Therefore, we need to work diligently to get the news out to others so that they, too, might believe that the Father sent the Son. 

Application:  How has knowing Jesus changed your life?