Jesus Volunteered

What Did Jesus Do?

And behold, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus.
Luke 1.31

Jesus didn’t conceive and bear himself, He was conceived in Mary’s womb, and she bore Him, which means that “conceive” and “bear” are passive verbs with respect to the Lord, they were actions that happened to Him, rather than actions He performed. But, unlike any of us, Jesus had a part in His own conceiving and being born, for, at the very least, He consented to it, He volunteered for it.

With every right to simply grasp tightly onto His divinity and remain safely in Heaven at His Father’s side, Jesus submitted to the will of the Father, and humbled himself so much as to take on human flesh and become one of us. Other religions have stories about gods who masquerade as humans at one time or another, but no other faith has a Savior who willingly became one with us by becoming one of us in order that we might be saved.

And, again, while being conceived and born happened to Jesus, they happened to Him because He delighted to do His Father’s will. All of us can say that our birth was God’s will, but who of us can claim that we had anything to say about our birth? Jesus did, and He did so because He understood what was at stake, the salvation of lost sinners whom the Father loved. No but human could ultimately make sufficient sacrifice to pay the penalty for our sins, but no human that could ever be poured out could be completely and pure. It was absolutely necessary that Adam have a “pureblooded” descendant, if you will, to wipe away the stain of Adam’s Fall. But no son or daughter of Adam would ever be born free of sin’s taint. Yet it was the earnest desire of the Father that atonement should be made, men’s sins forgiven, and the relationship between God and man restored.

I can imagine the scene in heaven: The Father surveys all the heavenly host and asks, “Who will go for us?” Silence. “Who will go for us, and redeem Man from his sins?” And, close at the Father’s right hand, the Son speaks, “Here I am Father, send me. I will make myself nothing (See Philippians 1.7) and go. I know how much you love Man, and therefore I too, love them so much that I would live as one of them, and die for them.” Can you imagine yourself safe and secure in Heaven and volunteering for that mission, not just to live as man, but to die and descend to Hell itself, for the sake of liberating all those whom the Father loves whom keeps in to sin and ? No one in Heaven had ever known fatigue, hunger, pain, suffering, ; and there was Jesus, volunteering to experience all that, and much more, much worse.

Have you ever been in a situation where a volunteer was needed to do a job that no one would choose to do, that everyone would hope someone else would do, and you stepped forward? Have you ever willingly agreed to tackle a problem that promised lots of sacrifice with no reasonable chance of success? Have you ever stepped completely out of the security of everything you had ever known to volunteer to go somewhere completely foreign to you in order to totally share in the lives of people who had no hope? That’s what Jesus did.

S.D.G.

Jim
www.jimwilkenministries.org
Marion, NC
PS 37.4