4. Christ, Our Example
four
The title “the Lamb” . . . describes His character. He is the Lamb in that He is meek and lowly in heart, gentle and unresisting, and all the time surrendering His own will to the Father’s. Anyone but the Lamb would have resented and resisted the treatment men gave Him. But He, in obedience to the Father and out of love for us, did neither. . . . No standing up for His rights, no hitting back, no resentment, no complaining! . . . When the Father’s will and the malice of men pointed to dark Calvary, the Lamb meekly bowed His head in willingness for that too.1
This is our Lord. As portrayed by Roy Hession in the above quote, even Jesus’ title of “Lamb of God”2 symbolizes submission. His life on earth is a perfect example of submission to authority. As believers, it is not a set of laws we follow; rather, it’s the person the Lord Jesus Himself.
The human race fell through the first man Adam’s disobedience. Redemption came through the last Adam’s obedience.3To demonstrate this truth to the worlds, the Trinity chose to bring redemption through obedience.
Although Jesus is equal to the Father and the Holy Spirit in the holy Trinity, by His own choice, He “became flesh and dwelt among us.”4 Thus, He is our “forerunner,”5 the One who showed us the way we must live.
But Christ can only be an example for us if He had no advantages over us. If you believe Jesus was a super-angel walking around, you are mistaken. Though He was God, He “emptied Himself” of His divine privileges and became man.6 He was tempted in every way that we are and had all the emotions we have. Yet He was always victorious, but only by the same means that are also available to us.7
In the book of Revelation, Jesus confronts the church in Laodicea with their failure to overcome the temptations they were facing. Jesus told them, “To him who overcomes, I will give the right to sit with me on my throne, just as I overcame and sat down with my Father on his throne” (Revelation 3:21, NIV, emphasis mine). He is essentially saying, “I understand. You are not the only ones who have faced an onslaught of temptations. I remember encountering the exact struggles that are facing you— but I did not give in.” And He exhorts them, “Just as I overcame, you can overcome.”
That is what our Lord is telling us today: “Just as I overcame, you too can overcome.” He invites us to use His life as the model. Let us follow His example of submission to authority.
learn from Me
While the Old Covenant is all about rules, regulations and obedience to laws, the New Covenant is God’s invitation for us to be “partakers of the divine nature.”8 Through the life and death of Christ, we are restored to God’s eternal purpose for man—to manifest His nature.9 His death was the means for our redemption, but by His life as a man, He showed us how God intends for us to live. John says of Jesus, “In Him was life, and the life was the light of men” (John 1:4). His life—His character and His example—is the “light of men.”
This does not mean we just imitate Christ. Many people, such as Mahatma Gandhiji, imitated Christ.
It is not to be like those who join the army. They come in with long bushy hair and their own look. But soon, they end up in the barber’s chair, and their long curly hair is gone. Their fancy civilian clothes are replaced with an army uniform, and all the soldiers now look the same. As long as they are in the army, they will behave as they are told. They are just copying behaviors. On the inside, however, they may still be something else.
As followers of Christ, we cannot copy behavior, imitate and therefore become godly. Godliness, becoming like Christ, is not an objective list of rules. In fact, a purely intellectual knowledge of Christ will leave us proud and self-centered still. Rather, godliness is born out of a growing and alive relationship with our Lord. Hence, we read in John 15:4, “Abide in Me, and I in you.” In Ephesians, the phrase “in Him” is repeated again and again.10Our life only makes sense when we understand that our very identity and source of life come from Christ. We are not on the outside. We are on the inside. It is no longer our life, but Christ’s life manifesting itself in us and through us.
“Come to Me” and “learn from Me,” Jesus told His disciples. But there is a condition: “Take My yoke upon you.”11 You cannot learn of Him unless you take His yoke. What does His yoke represent? When I was growing up in my village, there were paddy fields everywhere. To plow these fields, farmers used a set of buffaloes with a yoke placed over their necks. The rear of the animals had several burn marks on them, like stripes. I remember as a youngster asking a man, “Why do all of these animals have burn marks?” He said, “It is the sign that they are broken and submissive.”
When Jesus said, “Take My yoke,” it means He had a yoke. He was broken and submissive. Now He invites us to come under that yoke of submission next to Him, choosing to give up what “I want,” even in good and right matters, for His will.
Once we are willing to do that, we begin to manifest the nature of Jesus. A.W. Tozer says it this way, “If we cooperate with Him in loving obedience, God will manifest Himself to us, and that manifestation will be the difference between a nominal Christian life and a life radiant with the light of His face.”12 In the measure by which we open our life to Christ and bend our necks to the yoke, dying daily to our self-centeredness, independence, pride and reasoning, and instead depend on God, in the same measure we will manifest His nature in our lives.
Our self-will, our way, our wish, what we want is the enemy of submission and brokenness. Make no mistake: When we say no to self and yes to God, we will suffer in the flesh. The Bible says Jesus learned obedience through suffering.13 Throughout His lifetime, from the day He was born to the last minutes before He died, He suffered in the flesh, saying no to what He wanted and yes to the Father’s will.
When an authority asks us to do something that seems unjust, it is easy for us to become defensive and angry and, if we are not careful, say things we will regret, whether to them or others. What did Christ do? He said, “I accept the suffering. This is from Your hand, Father. I am happy to suffer for You.” When His earthly parents, the creation of His hands, were scolding Him or behaving in ungodly ways themselves, God was living in their house and looking at them, watching and suffering on the inside—but without bitterness, anger or condemnation. He didn’t correct them or abuse them; He just suffered.
In His flesh, He died daily. And He left His example that we may understand this principle. But unless we embrace it, we may imitate godliness, but we will never actually become godly.
For I Am Gentle
Sin is a manifestation of the independent spirit of pride and self. In Christ there was no sin. There was never a moment in His life of worry, fear, strife, bitterness, unforgiveness or pride. After Jesus told His disciples “Learn from Me,” He continued, “for I am gentle and lowly in heart” (Matthew 11:29). There was no trace of self-promotion, disobedience or rebellion in Him.
He then closed His sentence with, “and you will find rest for your souls.”14 When we die to pride and self, there is rest from worry, fear, unforgiveness and all the manifestations of our flesh. We come to a place of peace saying, “Lord, whatever You want.” Madame Guyon said, “[When you are so sustained by God] a new kind of peace will come to you. It is the kind of peace that a dead man would feel in the middle of a great storm at sea.
Deep below it is tranquil. The outward senses may suffer pain, but the deepest parts of the spirit dwell in undisturbed rest.”15
Just before He went to the cross, Jesus said to His disciples, “My peace I give to you” (John 14:27). Think about it: In the final hours before His death by crucifixion, when the sins of all humanity would be set upon His shoulders, He was able to essentially say, “My peace, the peace that is mine right now, I give to you.” These words transcend human understanding.
The key to Christ’s life on earth—all that happened in Him, through Him, by Him and for Him—was due to His submission to His Father. This also meant submitting to the delegated authorities over Him while He lived on earth.
Those who follow Jesus will also have this same mark of submission on their lives.
One Step at a Time
Consider this: Christ started His public ministry at the age of 30. Why did He have to wait until then? On top of that, why was there another three-and-a-half years before the cross? Couldn’t He have started His ministry when He was 18?
When I was a boy, my mother took me to kindergarten. There were about 30 lads like me who sat in a circle with our guru (teacher), who taught the alphabet to us in our native language. Each year I passed on to the next grade and eventually on to high school and college.
A primary-school student learns subtraction and multiplication, but the college student deals with calculus. In the lower grades, a child draws pictures or writes papers on simple subjects. But at a university, the scholar reads a 2,000-page book and writes a 10-page paper. It’s a whole different world.
So why did Christ have to wait 33 years before He went to the cross? For Christ the man to choose absolute surrender to the point of death on the cross, He needed time to grow in obedience. The Bible actually says that Jesus learned obedience.16
When His parents made mistakes and Jesus suffered, instead of sinning against them, He grew in obedience. Like this, He learned obedience through the years until He came to the place at which He was ready to lay down His life.
So it is in our own lives. God does not start us out with calculus and a 10-page paper. We can trust that the opportunities He gives to us to learn obedience—whether to Him directly or to a delegated authority—are at our current level of growth.
As we submit in our hearts, step by step the Lord will bring us to a place where we hold nothing back from Him. Paul encourages us, saying, “He humbled Himself by becoming obedient to the point of death” (Philippians 2:8, NASB, emphasis mine).
His journey
“For we do not have a High Priest who cannot sympathize with our weaknesses, but was in all points tempted as we are, yet without sin” (Hebrews 4:15). As a human being, Jesus faced the same temptations we do, even in this difficult area of submission to authority. He too must have been tempted at times to disobey authority and not show them honor. Yet He was without sin.
Jesus was 12 when His parents found Him learning in the temple with the teachers.17 He was about His Father’s business. When confronted by His parents, He could have chosen to rebel and say it was more important for Him to stay in the temple. But He chose instead to submit to His heavenly Father’s will by submitting to His earthly parents: “Then He went down with them and came to Nazareth, and was subject to them” (Luke 2:51).
From Luke 2:24 we can deduce that Joseph and Mary were not well-off. They sacrificed two pigeons or turtledoves, which was the Lord’s instructions to those who could not afford a lamb.18 According to Mark 6:3, Jesus had at least four brothers and two sisters at home. That means there were at least nine members of the family.
Living in cramped quarters and not always having enough money, there was plenty of room for irritation. John 7:5 says that His brothers did not believe in Him. You can imagine the sibling rivalry when there was an older brother whose place in the family was held in question.
Yet in this complex family situation, with all the misunderstandings, missed judgments and scoldings that must have happened, Jesus continued to submit to the authority that was over Him. It would have been easy for Him to just walk away from it all. But He didn’t.
While Christ was on earth, at any time He could have returned to heaven and resumed the throne and His rule as part of the Godhead. He never ceased being God. He only laid aside His powers. It was a choice He made to submit Himself to the Father and live in total obedience. In John’s Gospel, He says, “I lay down My life that I may take it again. No one takes it from Me, but I lay it down of Myself. I have power to lay it down, and I have power to take it again” (John 10:17-18).
Jesus could have said, “I’m stopping this whole thing and going back to heaven. I can’t continue to live under these people and their decisions.” We sometimes respond that way to delegated authority, but Christ didn’t. Instead, for 30 years He lived in subjection to the human authority of His imperfect parents.
Luke 2:52 reads, “And Jesus increased in wisdom and stature, and in favor with God and men.” I have no doubt that His increase in wisdom and favor with God and men had everything to do with His choice to submit to their delegated authority.
Joseph was a carpenter and so was Jesus.19 According to custom, Jesus would have learned this trade from His father. As He never sinned, Jesus must have faithfully submitted to Joseph’s instructions about being a good carpenter and taking care of the family business.
Throughout the Gospel of John, we read of Jesus making statements like, “I do nothing of Myself,”20 “I say whatever the Father tells me to say”21 and “I do exactly as the Father commanded Me.”22
We all know Jesus is the One who called His disciples. But toward the end of His life on earth, He says to the Father, “I pray for them . . . for those whom You have given Me” (John 17:9). How do we explain that? Nowhere in the Gospels do we find the Father calling these men to Christ.
Let’s look at what happened the night before Christ called those men. He spent all night in prayer seeking the Father, and by morning, He knew exactly whom He must choose.23 Jesus did not pick the disciples Himself but did exactly what the Father told Him.
Minute by minute He did what His Father instructed Him to do. Obviously there were many times when this meant that Jesus the man had to say no to what He thought and yes to the Father. But He chose to obey His Father and suffered in the flesh.
One of those many times is found in John 11. Christ did not have very many friends.24But there was one family we hear of numerous times—Lazarus, Martha and Mary.25 He loved them very much.26 In the midst of all the busyness of His schedule, He was able to find rest at their home in Bethany.
Then one day, Lazarus’s sisters sent word to Jesus: “Lord, the one you love is sick” (John 11:3, NIV). Notice the message wasn’t, “Lord, please come! Lazarus is sick and is dying!” It’s nothing like that, just this one statement: “The one you love is sick.” The Gospels are filled with people pleading, but it’s not that way here.
Why was that? It was common knowledge that Christ deeply loved Lazarus and his sisters. They fully expected that the moment Christ heard Lazarus was sick, He would drop everything and rush to see him. In Bethany they waited for Jesus for days, and He didn’t come. So they sat beside the bed and watched Lazarus die. He was buried, days went by, and still Jesus didn’t come.
When they said to Jesus, “The one you love is sick,” our Lord did not go but stayed in the same place for two days. You see, each moment He lived under obedience and submission. He must have said, “Father, Lazarus needs Me; what should I do? Am I to go and heal him?” But the Father said, “Son, don’t go. Wait.”
As a man, Jesus obviously would have wanted badly to go to Lazarus. He was moved to weeping and groaning when confronted with Lazarus’s death. Yet when He heard the Father’s response, He must have answered saying, “I accept the suffering, Father. If that is what You say, I will wait.”
Christ’s life was always marked by absolute obedience and submission to His Father. But please don’t misunderstand—Christ was not a weak person by any means. He was a leader in every sense of the word. People were amazed at the authority with which He spoke.27 He commanded demons to flee, rebuked the wind and sea, and even called Lazarus to rise to life from his tomb.28
His authority came out of His submission to His Father. He said, “For I have not spoken on My own authority; but the Father who sent Me gave Me a command, what I should say and what I should speak” (John 12:49). Let me remind you again: We cannot say we submit to God and at the same time, on the inside, live a life of insubordination and rebellion toward the authority God has placed over us. Watchman Nee says, “Submission to God is not possible if we are not in submission to those He has placed over us.”29 Our submission to God is a reflection of our submission to our delegated authority. In the same way, our submission to our delegated authority is a reflection of our submission to God.
Jesus also submitted to the government of Rome, and He encouraged others to do so. His enemies tried to trap Him in His words, asking, “Is it lawful to pay taxes to Caesar, or not?” (Mark 12:14). This was a controversial issue of that day. God’s chosen people were governed by a foreign power. There were Jewish rebels in Jesus’ day who encouraged the people not to pay taxes lest they come under man’s rule instead of God’s. Jews begrudged paying taxes to the Romans, and some even considered it treason.
Jesus answered their question, “Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s” (Mark 12:17). He told them that despite being under another nation, they were to submit to the government over them.
Jesus submitted to Pilate during His trial and at His sentencing. Jesus knew the decisions made by Pilate were ultimately directed by God. He told him, “You could have no power at all against Me unless it had been given you from above” (John 19:11).
When He was arrested the night before, He was able to say, “Shall I not drink the cup which My Father has given Me?” (John 18:11). He knew it was not from the Pharisees, the Roman soldiers, the Jewish people or Judas. He could say, “No, it’s from My Father, and I submit to Him.”
Even earlier that night, in the Garden of Gethsemane, Jesus had prayed, “Father, if it is possible, may this cup [the cross] be taken from me. Yet not as I will, but as you will” (Matthew 26:39, NIV). At a glance, it would seem that Jesus appeared frightened by what was about to happen, including the horrible death He must suffer on the cross, and so was looking for a last-minute way of escape, wishing salvation could somehow be achieved by another means.
But what did He actually mean? Watchman Nee explains:
It is the highest prayer in which our Lord expresses His obedience to God’s authority. Our Lord obeys God’s authority first, more than sacrificing Himself on the cross.
He prays earnestly that He may know what is the will of God. He does not say, “I want to be crucified, I must drink the cup.” He merely insists on obeying. He says in effect, “If it be possible for me not to go to the cross,” but even here He has not His own will. Immediately He continues with, “but Thy will be done.”30
The cross and sacrifice were not Christ’s focus, but rather the will of God. Death on the cross was not an absolute to Christ; the Father’s will was the absolute.
More than a thousand years earlier, King Saul had told the prophet Samuel, “But the people took . . . the best of the things which should have been utterly destroyed, to sacrifice to the Lord your God” (1 Samuel 15:21). Saul must have thought to himself, I want to sacrifice to God who gave me this victory. This is wonderful.
But Samuel told him, “Has the Lord as great delight in burnt offerings and sacrifices, as in obeying the voice of the Lord? Behold, to obey is better than sacrifice, and to heed than the fat of rams” (1 Samuel 15:22). Saul had been handpicked and anointed by God, but because of his disobedience, God rejected him, regardless of the sacrifice he was prepared to make.
Even in the last minutes of His time on earth, Christ’s sacrifice on the cross was secondary to His greater concern—submitting to the will of God.
As Followers of Christ
I pray that God will open our eyes to understand His ways. I write these words not as someone who has learned these lessons, but as a person who has a long way to go. I am concerned for us as the Body of Christ. I know many who follow the Lord and work hard, sacrifice much and go to the ends of the world. But the question remains for all of us: Is it out of pride and self-assertion?
Or is it done out of obedience to God in the brokenness and submission of Christ?
Hopefully none of us from the perspective of eternity will look back with regret to see much done “for God” because we were smart, had the ability, had the money and the title—but in the end we were actually disobedient to God’s purposes. We did not listen to the authority God placed over us; we did not listen to God. We did many things “for Him” but without the brokenness and submission of Christ.
My hope is that someday we will have a community of Christ raised up that understands what it means to walk in submission like our Lord did, living in submission to God and His authorities.
Roy Hession continues his words about Jesus, the Lamb of God:
It was as the Lamb that Isaiah saw Him, when he prophesied, “He is brought as a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before her shearers is dumb, so he openeth not his mouth.” The scourging, the scoffing, the spitting, the hair plucked off from His cheeks, the weary last march up the Hill, the nailing and the lifting up, the piercing of His side and the flowing of His blood—none of these things would ever have been, had He not been the Lamb.31
The Moravian Church that sought the Lord so fervently in the 18th century displays these words on their emblem: Our Lamb has conquered. Let us follow Him. May that be our commitment.
How painful it is for us, O Lord, to be confronted with our nature of rebellion. Thank You so much for the example You set for us, for showing us the way. Help us to hunger after You. May we too learn the godliness that comes through submission. Thank You for Your grace. We know it is sufficient. Amen.