City Life Starter

Written by Scott Fiddler

The Word

¹⁹ Therefore Jesus answered and was saying to them, “Truly, truly, I say to you, the Son can do nothing of Himself, unless it is something He sees the Father doing; for whatever ^[a]the Father does, these things the Son also does in the same way.

John 5:19 (NASB)

Commentary

So, here, some religious people are mad at Jesus because He healed a man on the Sabbath. Jesus’ response was in effect, “I only do what I see God doing, and God wanted to heal this man on the Sabbath. Your problem is with Him, not Me.” Jesus had told them something similar in verse 17 as well. See John 5:17 (“My Father is working until now, and I Myself am working.”).

Here is Jesus, fully man and fully God, a full-fledged member of the Godhead. He could do whatever He wanted; yet, He declares He only did what He saw the Father doing. He subordinated His will to that of the Father. Jesus wasn’t calling healing down on this man merely because Jesus wanted to see him healed, but because Jesus saw that is what the Father wanted. In other words, Jesus acted out of His obedience not His omnipotence.

I’m old enough to have lived through a number of Evangelical and Charismatic crazes, including the Prosperity Gospel, Name it and Claim it, and the Prayer of Jabez, all of which have a pernicious common denominator: they promise to make God subject to our will. If you just believe this enough, or say these words this way, then God will give you what you want. They reduce the God of creation to a genie in a bottle and prayer to mere incantation.

Jesus modeled for us a different way. He spent all night in prayer seeking the Father’s will, then chose His disciples. Luke 6:12-13. He looked for whom the Father wanted to heal, and healed those people (John 5:19), and when it came time to choosing between continuing His career as the most popular preacher in Israel or a humiliating death on a cross, He declared, “Not My will but Thy will be done.” Luke 22:42.

Application

The same John who recounts Jesus’ healing of the paralytic because that is what He saw the Father doing, wrote this: “This is the confidence which we have before Him, that, if we ask anything according to His will, He hears us. And if we know that He hears us in whatever we ask, we know that we have the requests which we have asked from Him.” I John 5:14-15 (emphasis added). 

It is imperative then, that we spend less time asking God for what we want and more time seeking what He wants because it is in carrying out His will that the power of God is manifested on the earth.

Prayer

Lord, remind me always to seek Your will and not mine. In Jesus’ name I pray. Amen.