Jesus and the will of God!

Reflecting on John 7:14-24

“My teaching is not my own. It comes from the one who sent me.” (John 7:16)

If you want to know God’s will, look at Jesus.
If you want to know what the Law of Moses was about, look at Jesus.
Though the religious people had Moses’s Law, they did not understand it.
They were focused on following the letter, not the spirit of the Law.
Jesus was doing God’s will, yet they did not recognize it.

When we look at Jesus, we see compassion, gracious love, mercy, forgiveness.
This is the glory and goodness of God revealed to Moses (Exodus 34:6-7).
As Jesus followers today, we look to Jesus to show us God’s teaching, God’s will.
The Law then, and the Bible today, point us to Jesus, to focus on Him.
His teaching reveals God’s will in the fullest, clearest way.

If we want to do the will of God, Jesus’s way of gracious love will show the way.
Jesus says that though they have the Law, they are not doing God’s will.
I sense this is a concern for institutional christianity today.
What is said and done may be ‘in the Bible’, but does not look like Jesus.
And if it does not look like Jesus’s teaching, it is not God’s will.

PRAYER
Lord Jesus, I can find many things 'in the bible', but that does not make them right. Help me move beyond the words in the Book to the will of the Father, as seen most clearly in You. Help me to follow Jesus, not the bible.