How involved is Jesus in your daily life? What is he doing for you right this second? Think about your lungs. Are you making them do what they do? What about your heart? Are you forcing its beat? What about the synapses in your brain that are reading the letters on this page and forming them into words that you comprehend? What about the food you ate? Do you tell your stomach to break it down, absorb the energy and nutrients needed, and expel the rest? All of these things are occurring under the sovereign orchestration of Jesus, and apart from him you can’t do a single thing. It’s in him that you and I live, move and have our being (Acts 17:28). We need Jesus every nanosecond. And the good news is that Jesus never steps away from his role at the right hand of the Father as our mediator and advocate. But to only consider the physical or outward nature of our dependence on Jesus would be a crime against John 15:5, in which Jesus speaks of how we can’t bear fruit in the Christian life apart from him. He is the vine. We are the branches. We bear fruit because we are in him; he grows the fruit because he is the root. We can’t grow without Jesus. We can’t become like Jesus without Jesus. A husband can’t love his wife as Jesus loves the church without the help and power of Jesus. We can’t work under human authority in a God-glorifying way, as Jesus did, without his help and power. We need Jesus in order to live the Christian life. Living in complete dependence on him is the Christian life.
Let’s take this further, higher and deeper into the love of Jesus. We cannot be accepted before God without him. God invites us into the kingdom because Jesus bought us full access. Jesus paid our way; he is our backstage pass into the throne room of God. We are in with God, because Jesus bought and brought us. We roll with him. Apart from him we got nothin’. Apart from him––we can’t do anything.
It is in the vast love of Jesus, displayed on that forsaken tree, that we find the deepest truth and the fulfillment of our greatest need. As the old hymn “O the Deep, Deep Love of Jesus” (Samuel Trevor Francis, 1875) invites us to sing:
O the deep, deep love of Jesus, vast, unmeasured, boundless, free!
Rolling as a mighty ocean in its fullness over me! Underneath me, all around me, is the current of Thy love Leading onward, leading homeward to Thy glorious rest above!
O the deep, deep love of Jesus, spread His praise from shore to shore!
How He loveth, ever loveth, changeth never, nevermore!
How He watches o’er His loved ones, died to call them all His own;
How for them He intercedeth, watcheth o’er them from the throne!
O the deep, deep love of Jesus, love of every love the best!
’Tis an ocean full of blessing, ’tis a haven giving rest!
O the deep, deep love of Jesus, ’tis a heaven of heavens to me;
And it lifts me up to glory, for it lifts me up to Thee!
