Instead, I have called you friends, for everything that I learned from my Father I have made known to you.
What profound words! “Everything” that Jesus has learned from his Father he has made known to his disciples. John, the disciple writing the gospel we have been meditating on, listened to Jesus every day. What did Jesus tell him and the other disciples that encompasses everything the Father taught him? What was it he learned from his Father?
Let’s look back over Jesus life and see if we can figure it out.
The first thing that comes to mind is obedience. Jesus obeyed his Father when he fasted in the wilderness for 40 days and nights. He obeyed his mother when she asked him to do something about the lack of wine at the wedding in Cana. Jesus obeyed.
The second thing that comes to mind is the primacy of God’s Word. Jesus answers Satan with God’s Word and generally uses Scripture for every defense against the hostile Jewish leaders. We should ponder the wisdom of what God has placed in the Scriptures. Jesus knew the Scriptures by heart and lived them perfectly.
The third thing that comes to mind is love. Not “love” in the worldly sense of “I love water skiing” or being “in love” or “making love,” but love in the sense of sacrificial giving.
We could make it more complicated than this if we wanted to drill down into the fine details, but in the larger sense of things the lessons Jesus learned from his Father and conveyed to his disciples were simple: Obedience, Scripture, Love.
Let’s Discuss: If you were to add to this list of things Jesus learned from the Father, what would you add?
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Hmm… Good question. Perhaps the coming of the Holy Spirit to indwell people. Maybe truths about Him going to prepare a place and come back for His people. But most things I can think of are covered in what He taught and modeled in what we see in Scripture.
Rich,
You make a good point about Jesus preparing a place for His people. That was important new information. I would add one more category: Redemption. Jesus shared God’s plan for our future with Him through the new covenant in His blood. Then again, maybe this is more rightly a subset of the other three. For it was because of his Love for us, His obedience, and the fulfillment of Scripture, that redemption is possible.
Perhaps we could add humility to the list.