A Cry Of Submission Series

JESUS DIED THE WAY HE LIVED...

1. Accompanied by His Father’s presence

Three of the seven cries from the cross are prayers, and when we examine those prayers we find that they reveal something important about Jesus’ relationship with His Father:

• Jesus’ first cry from the cross, his cry of forgiveness, is directed to His Father: “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.”

• Then, when all the sins of the world are laid upon Him and Jesus cries out in anguish, He no longer refers to God as His Father. Instead, he cries out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Because He bears the sin of the world, His fellowship with the Father has been broken and He ceases to enjoy the presence of His Father for a period of time.

• But in His last cry, Jesus once again addresses God as “Father”. As Denny pointed out last week, the very moment that Jesus cried out, “It is finished,” victory was achieved and therefore Jesus once again could experience the presence of His Father

Jesus died accompanied by the presence of His Father because He also lived in that presence. One of the things that characterized the life of Jesus while He was here on this earth is the importance of His relationship with His Father.

• When He was twelve years old, He told His parents that he must be about His Father’s business.

• Before he began His ministry, he spent 40 days in the wilderness in the presence of His Father.

• In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus uses the word “Father” 15 times.

• We constantly read of Jesus going off to a solitary place to be in the presence of His Father and pray.

• On the night before His crucifixion, Jesus goes into the Garden with His disciples, where he prays in the presence of His Father, first on behalf of His disciples and then for His own strength.

It was because He lived His life in the presence of God that Jesus was able to say things like:

"All things have been committed to me by my Father. No one knows who the Son is except the Father, and no one knows who the Father is except the Son and those to whom the Son chooses to reveal him."

Luke 10:22 (NIV)

Because it was His habit to live in the presence of His Father, when it came to die, Jesus could die confidently because He knew He was about to be ushered back into the presence of His Heavenly Father.

I know that when I die, whenever and however that may occur, the one thing I want to make sure if is that I die in the Father’s presence. But in order to do that, I must learn to live in the Father’s presence right here and now.

One of the great things about the death and resurrection of Jesus is that He made it possible for me to live my life accompanied by the presence of the Father. Right before this last cry of Jesus, Luke tells us that the curtain in the temple was torn in two. Matthew and Mark give us even more detail. They record that the curtain was torn from top to bottom. Prior to the death and resurrection of Jesus, the only person who could enter the Holy of Holies, which was symbolic of the presence of God, was the High Priest, and even he could only enter once a year on the Day of Atonement. But when Jesus died on the cross, God tore the curtain that separated the Holy of Holies from top to bottom to symbolize that everyone could now have direct access to the Father all the time.