"Jesus answered, "My teaching is not my own. It comes from the one who sent me. Anyone who chooses to do the will of God will find out whether my teaching comes from God or whether I speak on my own. Whoever speaks on their own does so to gain personal glory, but he who seeks the glory of the one who sent him is a man of truth; there is nothing false about him. Has not Moses given you the law? Yet not one of you keeps the law. Why are you trying to kill me?" (John 7:16-19)
Through most of the discussion, I remained puzzled about Jesus' transition from the Father's teaching to Moses and the law. But in both cases, we are dealing with the question of 'keeping.' Jesus receives teaching from the Father. He keeps it. The Jews receive the law from Moses. They don't keep it. Keeping a teaching or a law isn't storing something away in an attic. My wife and I recently threw away a number of things from our attic that we realized we weren't going to use. Two years from now, we'd be asking ourselves yet again, "Why are we keeping this?" Keeping the law would have more to do with what Psalm 119 is talking about:
"How can a young person stay on the path of purity? By living according to your word. I seek you with all my heart; do not let me stray from your commands. I have hidden your word in my heart that I might not sin against you. Praise be to you, Lord; teach me your decrees. With my lips I recount all the laws that come from your mouth. I rejoice in following your statutes as one rejoices in great riches. I meditate on your precepts and consider your ways. I delight in your decrees; I will not neglect your word." (Psalm 119:9-16)
Think of the verbs: words are lived, hidden, recounted, rejoiced in, meditated upon, and delighted in. This is how Jesus treats his Father's words. Failure to do so is failure to keep.
If you are flooded in words, take some time and let most of them go and dwell with the words of the Bible alone. The words of the Bible are the words of life. These are the creative words from Genesis with which God speaks everything into being. If you can't slow down or put aside other words to tend to those of the Bible, I leave you with the words of someone from this same Bible study: "I have experienced the power of the Lord, and it has almost always involved me going out of my comfort zone." I circled the words 'comfort zone'. We all have them. Areas of thought, feeling, and life that we hesitate to exit. As we prayed, quite a few of us said things like this, "God, make me more confident to be uncomfortable." I hope it is your prayer too. Wanting to keep God's words is the first step to actually keeping them. And we can ask God to do this for us.
The best news of all is that those in Christ have his Spirit so that we love to do the Father's will in the same way that Jesus does. The common thread is the life lived by the Holy Spirit. The old life which refused to obey God has been put to death, and the new life in the Spirit loves God's words. In this new life, we live the words, hide them in our hearts, recount them, rejoice in them, meditate upon them, and delight in them. This is what Jesus does. This is what we do.
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