"‘This is my Son whom I love’"

Welcome back to the One Thing Podcast! I would like to share with you today from the book of Matthew chapter 17. I'm taking from the story of the first 12 verses, but focusing on verse 5. We're very familiar, many of us, with the story that's taking place- it's called the 'Transfiguration of Jesus'. We know that only a few of the disciples were with Jesus at this time, one including Peter. Now in verse 5, Peter was beginning to speak with Jesus and it says in verse 5 that “While he was still speaking, a bright cloud covered them, and a voice from the cloud said, ‘This is my Son, whom I love; with him I am well pleased. Listen to him!’” This is God speaking with a loud voice saying about the Lord Jesus Christ - ‘This is my Son whom I love’.

"Come to Him! Obey His following! Let Him be the one that leads your life!"

See, it is the Lord Jesus that the Father loves so deeply and so dearly and He is pleased with his Son and He gives us this command; He says ‘Listen to Him! Listen to my Son!’ In other words, ‘Come to Him! Obey His following! Let Him be the one that leads your life! Let Him be the one that connects you to me, for He is the only one that can truly please the Father!’

"Free to please the Father because it is the Lord Jesus who lives within us!"

You see, according to the Word of the Lord - by nature humankind is sinful, by nature we do not please the Father. We are faithless and wicked and evil to the core of our hearts. But praise God today that those who look to the Lord Jesus, who believe in Him and walk according to His ways and walk according to His Spirit, Jesus comes and He lives and dwells on the inside. And because He is pleasing to the Father, we too are able to please Him by the power of the Lord Jesus Christ! You see, as long as we struggle under the law or another way to say it, live according to our own effort, trying to please God, sin will always have a dominion over us and hold us back. But when we step into the Lord Jesus Christ we are free! Not free to do as we please, but simply free to please the Father because it is the Lord Jesus who lives within us!

Pleasing to God

As Paul said, ‘For me to live is Christ and to die is gain’. To live in Christ, to live is Christ, He is everything! He is our hope of pleasing the Father. He is the only one that can please God. So may we look to Him today. May we not look to our own effort. May we not be trying to function as Christians by just trying to keep the law within ourselves or trying to please God by our own way. Jesus is the way! The Lord Jesus is the only way! May we look to Him then faith. May we look to Jesus and His promise that He himself would come and dwell within us. Not only forgiving us of our sins, but truly imparting His very nature, the divine nature of Jesus. Causing us to rise up and to live in the glory and the goodness of our God. He said, “This is my Son, whom I love; with him I am well pleased. Listen to him!”

May we beckon to the voice of the Lord Jesus Christ that calls us into faith, into Himself. And may we, together be one with the Son, pleasing the Father, living in the power of the Holy Spirit.