“For whoever does the will of My Father in heaven is My brother and sister and mother” (Matt. 12:50).
Union with Jesus gives the power to do the will of the Father. We begin with “willing to do His will,” and do it as far as we know and can. When this is really done with the whole heart, we come and claim the promise of being admitted consciously into the love and society of the Elder Brother.
In true relation with Him, studying His example, drinking in His Spirit, receiving His strength, we get larger insight and greater love of God’s will, and begin to long to live in it wholly even as Jesus did... In ever closer union with Him, the Elder Brother imparts to us, in ever deeper measure, the secret of His own blessed life in the will of God.
And what is that secret? It is found in the words our Lord so frequently uses — “the will of My Father, which is in heaven.” Christ was only able to do and suffer as He did, because it was all to Him each moment the will of a loving Father. The will of the Father was nothing but the experience of the love of the Father: therefore He delighted, therefore He was able, to do it.
Many Christians never learn to understand the difference between the Law of God and the Will of God. The law is given by a Ruler, and when embodied in a statute book may be kept or broken, with very little thought of personal relationship to the Lawgiver. For this reason the Law has no power to secure obedience.
Christ speaks of the Will as the Will of the Father — the expression of a personal, living communication, in which the Father’s voice and presence is ever known, and the Will never for a moment separated from Him whose it is. It was the ever-present Love of God showing His will, and the ever-blessed enjoyment of that Love, that enabled Christ to be obedient even unto death.
It is this alone can enable us to do the Father’s will. The grace once for all to yield ourselves to do only that will; the faith to believe that in the fellowship and by the power of Christ such a life is possible; the joyful devotion to Him to walk as led by His hand, and like Him to do the Father’s will; these all come as a believer seeks to know the life of a brother of the First Begotten Son.
It is indeed a change in the life of a believer, when he fully grasps and experiences the difference between the Law of God and the Will of the Father. He sees how the only power to do the will is the unceasing experience of the Father’s presence, His loving voice, His guiding eye, His inspiring love.
He sees how that was the life Jesus lived, how nothing less is the life Christ lives in us. He learns to understand how doing the Father’s will is the one blessing into which faith is to lead us, the one secret of abiding union with Christ Jesus.
~ Andrew Murray ~ Thy Will Be Done
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