I want to show you that Jesus, while being God, was in total submission to God the Father.

He claimed to be God, and there can be no mistake about it. In John 10:30 He claimed that He and the Father were one. The religious leaders plotted against him because He claimed to be God. He said that if you have seen Him, you have seen the Father. Yet this one who is God, who claims divinity,2 who says in John 17 that He was with the Father before the world ever began,3 also says that He does only what the Father wants Him to do.4 He is submissive to God His Father. His being is perfectly equal, but His role is submissive.

This prayer of Jesus in John 17 shows total submission. Even the opening of His prayer shows this:

After Jesus said this, he looked toward heaven and prayed, “‘Father, the time has come. Glorify your Son, that your Son may glorify you’” (John 17:1, NIV).

The phrase “the time has come” is meant to say that His appointed time to die for the sins of His people has come. Jesus is living a life that His Father ordained for Him. He is headed for the cross to die for sinners. Yet, there has never been anyone more free because our Lord is controlled by a love that He said existed before the world began. He is free from every other passion and interest because of His one holy passion. And one holy passion makes you free.

Shall you think that you, a mortal, a creature created by this God, can maintain independence by being alienated from this God? Can you, believer, actually think for one moment that you, who are said to be a gift of love from Father to Son, can actually be independent from God? Going your own way? But many imagine such a thing.

The classic tale of resisting God for his own supposed independence is that of the great church father Augustine. In his Confessions Augustine recounts how he did not want to yield his life to God, thinking that do so would be to give up his own rights. But the prayers of his mother, Monica, and the words of a child drove him to the Scriptures where he saw the insanity of unbelief. Augustine wrote these words:

You called, you cried, you shattered my deafness.

You sparkled, you blazed, you drove away my blindness.

You shed your fragrance, and I drew in my breath and I pant for you.4

That is the language of a lover and a heart set free.

I resisted God in my own life. Perhaps like someone listening, I thought that to live apart from God meant freedom. But it was insanity. I was deaf to the sound of His sweet words of life. I was blind to the sight of His hand moving in my life and in the world. I had no sense of the presence of God. But to give your life away to the Lord is to be acquitted of the judgment against your sins and to be set at liberty. And more. it is not only to know Him but to experience His power in your life. It is, in a word, to live.