The Person of Christ
Our study of the Person of Christ is based on the conviction that He was fully and genuinely human, having experienced a real incarnation. The concern in these studies is to consider some of the distinctive perfections of Christ’s personality. This week Theology 101 ponders how He was devout and disciplined.
By devout, we mean Christ was fully obedient and devoted to the will of the Father who sent Him. To be devout is to be “sold out” completely to God’s will, seeking always His good pleasure. We might summarize the devout quality of Christ’s life in such statements as these that follow.
God’s will be done
Christ was deeply devoted to truth and obligations that derive from the love of truth, both believing the truth and embodying it in a way that allowed Him to assert, “I am … the Truth” (John 14:6). Christ made communing with the Father through prayer a prominent and consistent part of His devotion, on occasion spending a night in prayer, as well as on occasion arising a great while before dawn in order to pray in private (Mark 1:35).
Christ was wholehearted and sincere in the pursuit of the Father’s good pleasure and His perfect will, desiring for Himself what He taught His followers to desire by asking in prayer that God’s will be done on earth as it is in heaven.
Obedient to Scripture
Christ was obedient to the demands and commands of the Father’s revealed will expressed in His written Word, frequently citing or alluding to God’s revealed Word in the Old Testament Scriptures. Such was His familiarity with those Scriptures that He could take a scroll and immediately open it to the place from which He wanted to read (Luke 4:17–19).
By disciplined, we mean Christ practiced certain attitudes and actions with intentionality. He did not live randomly, but purposefully. For example, Christ participated in the regular practices of worship in local synagogues as well as at the temple, especially on annual Holy Days. The phrase “as His custom was” offers insight into His devotion to synagogue attendance, such as happened when He returned to Nazareth. According to Luke 4:16, “He came to Nazareth where He had been brought up. And as His custom was, He went into the synagogue on the Sabbath Day.”
Intentional solitude
Christ’s devotion to the Father and to holy things also showed up in other spiritual disciplines that characterized His life. As noted already, He made the discipline of prayer prominent during His earthly sojourn. Not only so, but living and serving amid the multitudes, Christ sought special times for the discipline of solitude.
Luke 9:10 witnesses to His awareness of the need for special seasons of withdrawal when He took the apostles “and went aside privately into a deserted place.” The record of His life in the four Gospels suggests One who lived intentionally.
In reading the Gospels, we do not get the impression that Christ was ever caught simply killing time or using major seasons for doing nothing. He was excellent at redeeming the time.
Such indications of His devoutness and devotion furnish us a backdrop against which to look at ourselves as we ponder the depth and consistency of our devoutness and devotion.
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