by Steven Gledhill for FREEdom from MEdom Project
Jesus said, “You are truly my disciples if you keep obeying my teachings. And you will know the truth and the truth will set you free.” What is true about Jesus is that he obeyed his own words in the way he lived his life as a man on planet earth. Jesus is our model for recovery.
The key to the life of Jesus Christ as a man was that he recognized his own weaknesses in his human flesh and worked the ABCs of recovery (A=admit powerlessness without authority; B=believe God has full authority; C=commit life to God’s authority) necessary to remain sober from a lifestyle of addictive sin. While reading this chapter, be thinking to yourself, “If Jesus, the Son of God, the Savior of mankind, worked his recovery this way, why would I do it any differently than he did?” Keep in mind the following Scriptures:
Then Jesus answered and said, “Most assuredly, I say to you, the Son can of Himself do nothing, but what He sees the Father do; for whatever He does, the Son also does in like manner.” John 5:19 (NKJV)
“I can of Myself do nothing. As I hear, I judge; and My judgment is righteous, because I seek not to do My own will but the will of the Father who sent Me.” John 5:30 (NKJV)
Jesus presented himself as having no authority as a man after being rebuked by the Pharisees and temple scribes for healing a man on the Sabbath who had been paralyzed for nearly forty years. How dare Jesus order a man to get up and walk for the first time in decades? But because Jesus told the man to pick up his mat on the Sabbath, it was considered a transgression by the religious authority. It was perhaps the first run-in Jesus had with the religious establishment. Jesus made it a clear indisputable point that he was merely a man and did not have the divine authority to so radically transform the biology and physiology of another man. It was impossible for Jesus to heal a person on his own. Since it required divine authority and power for the man to be able to walk on the order of Jesus, where did the authority come from? The authority originated with God. Since God imparted divine authority unto Jesus it must have been the will of God to heal the paralytic man on the Sabbath.
Having sacrificed his own divine nature to fully experience our human nature, it was paramount that Jesus surrenders himself to doing the will of God. Remember that he said that he came not seeking his own will. Why not? Could it be that the human intentions of Jesus were flawed; compromised by his human intentions and desires of the flesh? Recognizing this, Jesus spent more time in prayer and communal fellowship with God than any person that lived before him and anyone since. Jesus did not act on his willful intentions in any way. He did not entertain his selfish desires in his mind or they would have conceived in him sin (James 1:14-15). Jesus absolutely understood that his will was by nature flawed, and in his humanity weak, and he was powerless against it. It was, therefore, imperative that he direct his intentions unto submission to the will of God.
A. Jesus admitted that his will was inferior in the flesh rendering him powerless.
B. Jesus believed that the will and authority of God the Father was superior to his own.
C. Jesus committed to turn his human will over to God in submission to his perfect will.
Jesus did not tell us as merely a command to obey the commandments to love God with all of our being, and to love our neighbor. Jesus knew that the only way he would survive the tug of temptation to satisfy his own selfish desires in the flesh; he must be obedient to the will of God, and to trust and depend on him. Jesus sympathizes with our condition that leads to complex difficulties, not only because we have a sin addiction but because we are under the law of sin. We learn obedience because of consequences we suffer under the impact of sin. According to Scripture, this was the experience of Christ as well.
For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who has been tempted in every way, just as we are—yet was without sin…He can have compassion on those who are unaware and going astray, since He himself was also subject to weakness…Jesus, in the days of His flesh, when He had offered up prayers and supplications, with vehement cries and tears to God who was able to save Him from death, and was heard because of His godly fear, though He was a Son, learned obedience by the things which He suffered. Hebrews 4:15 (NIV), 5:2, 7-8 (NKJV)
The Bible tells us that Jesus learned obedience by the things which he suffered. One aspect to learning obedience through suffering is having to suffer the consequences of, 1) your own mistakes and, 2) enduring the consequences as an inhabitant of a world dominated by sin, or in other words, subject to the “law” of sin.
In our human condition we will surely die. The body of Jesus was also obedient to the law of sin, just as yours and mine is. Jesus needed rest and food in order to survive. Had he not died by way of execution, he would have died of old age, or from disease or injury. The physical body of Jesus would have declined and decayed as ours does as we get older, even though he did not sin, because he was affected by, even under the authority of, if you will, the law—the mandate—of sin. As we as human beings obey the law of gravity as a constant inevitability, we learn to obey the constant inevitability of sin by what we suffer at its hand. Jesus learned this as well by the way he suffered as a human being. The Bible tells us that Jesus was subject to weakness, and that he learned obedience by the things which he suffered, which was the result, or consequence, of his weakness as a person of flesh. In other words, Jesus would, in his body and mind, be subject to the forces of natural laws just as we are.
This reality for Jesus required that he recognize and acknowledge his limitations as a human being both to himself and then to God. His forty days in the wilderness at the outset of his ministry was necessary for Jesus to learn by that experience that he would need to absolutely depend on God. Jesus didn’t eat for more than a month as he fasted and prayed. He was hungry, lonely and very tired. He experienced physical and emotional weakness to the extreme. Jesus grew so close to God in relationship during that time that Satan himself could not deter Jesus from his purpose to initiate recovery for you and for me. If this is what it took for Jesus in recovery to depend on God for everything, what does that say for us? At the very least, we need to be disciplined about working the ABC steps that Jesus Christ modeled for us. If these steps were the strategy for Jesus to succeed in his personal recovery from the human reality, why would we do it any different?
I cannot know what kind of sacrifice this was on the part of Christ. I’d be lying if I said I understand how Jesus “humbled himself and became nothing” in order to share in our human experience. Jesus was obedient in his humanity to remain committed to serving us in human form to the extent that he would die sacrificially on a cross as the payment for sin. He would then rise up from the dead as the precursor of our resurrection from the graveyard of our sin. Because the debt has been paid, the expectation for us is to live out our recovery the way Jesus did and pray that we can have the same attitude toward our recovery that Jesus had toward his (Philippians 2:5-8).
