Welcome to Day 30 of our 40 Day challenge! John 14:1-20

(Catch up with us, with our reading list March, reading list for April,  and Day 1, Day 2, Day 3, Day 4, Day 5, Day 6, Day 7, Day 8, Day 9, Day 10, Day 11, Day 12, Day 13, Day 14, Day 15, Day 16, Day 17, Day 18, Day 19, Day 20, Day 21, Day 22, Day 23, Day 24,
Day 25, Day 26, Day 27, Day 28, Day 29)

Today we are reading John 14:1-20

John 14:1-20

Jesus Comforts His Disciples

14 “Do not let your hearts be troubled. You believe in God; believe also in me. ² My Father’s house has many rooms; if that were not so, would I have told you that I am going there to prepare a place for you? ³ And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come back and take you to be with me that you also may be where I am. ⁴ You know the way to the place where I am going.”

Jesus the Way to the Father

⁵ Thomas said to him, “Lord, we don’t know where you are going, so how can we know the way?”

⁶ Jesus answered, “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. ⁷ If you really know me, you will know^[b] my Father as well. From now on, you do know him and have seen him.”

⁸ Philip said, “Lord, show us the Father and that will be enough for us.”

⁹ Jesus answered: “Don’t you know me, Philip, even after I have been among you such a long time? Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father. How can you say, ‘Show us the Father’?¹⁰ Don’t you believe that I am in the Father, and that the Father is in me? The words I say to you I do not speak on my own authority. Rather, it is the Father, living in me, who is doing his work.¹¹ Believe me when I say that I am in the Father and the Father is in me; or at least believe on the evidence of the works themselves. ¹² Very truly I tell you, whoever believes in me will do the works I have been doing, and they will do even greater things than these, because I am going to the Father. ¹³ And I will do whatever you ask in my name, so that the Father may be glorified in the Son. ¹⁴ You may ask me for anything in my name, and I will do it.

Jesus Promises the Holy Spirit

¹⁵ “If you love me, keep my commands. ¹⁶ And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another advocate to help you and be with you forever—¹⁷ the Spirit of truth. The world cannot accept him,because it neither sees him nor knows him. But you know him, for he lives with you and will be^[c] in you.¹⁸ I will not leave you as orphans; I will come to you. ¹⁹ Before long, the world will not see me anymore, but you will see me. Because I live, you also will live. ²⁰ On that day you will realize that I am in my Father, and you are in me, and I am in you.

Any effort to do what God would do or what He wants us to do must first be from a firm foundation of knowing Him. We must first know what kind of God He is before we can discern what He wants us to do.

As we learn who He is through experience, we ask what would Jesus do, not from a place of striving or performance, but from a place of holy belovedness. Knowing Him allows us to operate not from striving and working hard, but from this wellspring of life within us that provides all we need for every situation each day. And this takes our whole lives! It’s a full paradigm shift from the way the world works to the easy yoke of Jesus. His yoke is easy, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy for us to set down the yoke of the world consistently.

I need to constantly reorient my perspective to God’s. And the first step in this is knowing what kind of God He is to discern His perspective.

I struggled in our building outreaches when Jack went Home to Jesus. I became the default organizer and struggled to get my bearings. Jack knew and loved construction and building. He could read plans and visualize the process. He loved being right in the middle with the guys planning things out. And so the guys would call and ask me questions about the details of a project that Jack would have understood instantly. Maybe the lot was harder to level than we expected. Maybe we needed to build a retaining wall or hire a digger, etc.

And I found myself stopping them and saying, oriéntame: orient me to where we are at the project, pretend I’m standing right there, which direction am I facing, which part of the lot are we on, etc. Orient me on the property to know what we are talking about. I need first to know where we are to know what we do next.

This feels like those maps at large malls with the star and the you are here on it. The guys would show me where I was relative to what they were explaining. They would first orient me to what they were talking about, before asking me to make a decision about it. Soon all I had to do was say, oriéntame, and they would stop and help me get my bearings on the project.

This became a really useful habit for me in other areas as well. Taking time to ask God to oriéntame, for His perspective of what was going on in all areas became vital.

In this era of digital overwhelm, we are presented with more information than we can possibly handle in several lifetimes. We can be exposed to more suffering in one day than our hearts could bear in a lifetime. We don’t lack information at this point. We lack perspective. We desperately need God’s perspective on our lives and the things we face. We need Him to orient us to what we’re looking at. Where are we on this map of life, and where does He want us to go?

Without His perspective, we misread the part of the “project” of life we’re dealing with. When we face setbacks, are they guideposts from the Lord, or interference from the enemy? Are we discouraged because we thought it was harvest time, but we are actually in a season of sowing? Is it a winter period when we are to lie fallow and rest, but we’re pushing through, trying hard to till the soil? We need God’s perspective. We can’t do it without Him.

We need two critical things before we can discern His perspective. We have to know what kind of God He is and then, we have to know who we are in Him. History is filled with people who tragically missed the mark by not knowing what kind of God we serve. And Jesus tells us plainly, if we really know Jesus, we know the Father as well. If we want to know what our Father is like, we look at the life of Jesus. This is the first things first in our walk with Him.

Options for further  journaling or discussion throughout the challenge:

• Choose a part of the passage to write out by hand. Writing by hand helps us slow down and focus on what the Lord might highlight for us in the passage. Our brains can focus and remember better by writing than just reading alone.
• Journal about what the passage brings to mind. Does the passage tell us anything about God? Does it tell us anything about our response to Him?
• Does your heart respond in gratitude to any part of the passage? Write or pray your gratitude to the Lord.

We’ll see you next time, for Day 31 and John 16:16-33

♥ Samantha