The Holiness of God the Son, Jesus Christ, part 4

In John 16:7, we hear Jesus tell His disciple, “I am telling you the truth: It is for your benefit that I go away, because if I don’t go away, the Counselor will not come to you. If I go, I will send Him to you” CSB. On the day of Pentecost Jesus fulfilled that promise to send the Holy Spirit (next week we will look at the Holiness of the Holy Spirit. Because of the Holy Spirit we have God’s very presence with us and in us always.)
 

Another advantage of Jesus’ ascension to heaven is the fact that He is interceding on our behalf in the presence of God the Father. Remember, Jesus is our Advocate. In Hebrews 7:25 we find that He is “able also to save completely those who come to God through Him, since He always lives to intercede for them” CSB.
 

From His exalted position in the throne room of heaven, Jesus pleads for us as our Advocate. When our will is surrendered to God and when we have received His Holy Spirit by faith, we no longer have to live in fear of falling into sin! Yes, it is still possible, but we can have a deep confidence in the faithfulness of our great Advocate who represents us before the Father: He represents us before the throne!

We have wonderful resources! We have powerful help in our time of need! In the Book of Jude, verse 24, we find that "He is able to protect you from stumbling and to make you stand in the presence of His glory, without blemish and with great joy” CSB.
 

Not long ago, I was reading from a little devotional book titled, “This Day with the Master.” Let me share with you the devotional, dated April 27^th that I read.

“One day as I was reading through the book of Ephesians, I found myself laughing aloud when I came across Ephesians 5:1 where it says, “Be imitators of God as dearly loved children, and walk in love” CSB. How can someone like me imitate God?

Many of His attributes immediately came into my mind. First of all, He is the Omnipotent One. A few in history have tried to be all-powerful, but they have ended up as fools. Second, He is the Omniscient One. He knows all things. But when I am in the process of finding an answer to a question, I discover that I have ten more questions, and so my experience is one of exploding ignorance, not knowledge. The more I know, the more I have to learn. Third, He is the Omnipresent One. But I am confined to one moment in time and one point in space.  How can I imitate Him?
 

I looked again at the passage, going on to Ephesians 5:2: “And walk in love, as Christ loved us and gave Himself for us, a sacrificial and fragrant offering to God” CSB. My laughter faded when I realized that God wants us to imitate His lifestyle, not His attributes. What Paul was telling the church to imitate was the life of love that issues in self-sacrifice modeled in the Lord Jesus.
 

Suddenly I found myself confronted not with divine attributes in abstraction, but with the very Cross of Christ. Then I realized that Paul was asking us to imitate the God we see on Calvary, the God who cares more for someone else than He does for Himself. Paul says that the self-sacrificing love pleased the very nostrils of God.
 

But how can I get out of my self–interest, which seems to contaminate everything I do and touch? Paul gives us the key: it lies not in us but in the very love that sent Christ to Calvary. Paul believed that God can put His own love in us, if we want it and seek it.
 

If we let His Spirit fill us, we will find that His love comes with His presence. Then we can live as He lived because He will be living through us.” (Dennis Kinlaw) 

Continued tomorrow