Just Like Jesus

I’ve been helped in recent times in my appreciation of what it means to live “in Christ” by Jesus’ relationship with his Father. For many years I didn’t realize that he himself models what it means to live “in” another person, but my recent study of John’s Gospel has convinced me that his life with his Father was exactly that – a constant experience of living his life “in” another person.


Jesus spoke of his relationship with his Father in those terms on more than one occasion. Once when he was answering unbelieving Jews in Jerusalem he said to them that if they couldn’t believe what he was saying about himself and his relationship with the Father, then they ought to believe his works (his miracles). If they only comprehended what was really happening when he was performing these – the mighty works of healing the sick, casting our demons, stilling stormy lakes, raising the dead – they would realise that he wasn’t acting alone. Instead they would see that his Father - the God whom they acknowledged as their God - was always with him and working in him. You will know and understand, he says to them, "that the Father is in me, and I am in the Father” (John 10:38).

Speaking to his disciples just before he died he said something similar. They had reached the point of believing that he was the Son of God and that he had come from God. Yet they still longed to see and know the Father. “Lord, show us the Father,” his disciple Philip asked him, “and that will be enough for us” (John 14:8). Frustrated by their slowness to learn – to “connect the dots” in their thinking as it were – he said to them, “Don’t you believe that I am in the Father and the Father is in me? The words I say to you are not just my own. Rather, it is the Father living in me, who is doing his work” (John 14:10).

Then in his great prayer to his Father before being arrested (the High Priestly Prayer of Jesus), Jesus asked that his followers all be kept one, “just as you are in me and I am in you” (John 17:21). He was obviously wanting them to be kept one in mind, heart, spirit and mission - people so closely connected with each other that they could be said to be "one." That's what his relationship with the Father was like; a bond so close that it could be described in terms of a mutual indwelling of two persons.

What makes all of this so relevant is that Jesus uses the same terminology exactly to describe the kind of relationship he would have with his disciples after his death and resurrection. As he comforts them on the eve of his betrayal and death, he promises that after he leaves them he will send another “Counsellor” (the Holy Spirit). In that connection he says “On that day you will realize that I am in my Father, and you are in me, and I am in you” (John 14:20). The very connection he has with the Father (and the Father has with him), would be replicated between himself and his followers. He would be "in" them, and they "in" him.

I find this fantastic, hardly believable. More than that, I find it the best place to start this exploration of what it means to "live in Christ." True, he was different to us in the sense of being himself the divine Son of his Father, sharing the essential nature of his Father. Yet, as we shall see next time, the "indwelling" of the Father that he has in mind here is not an indwelling of shared nature, but an indwelling of persons. That's what makes it a pattern for us.