Father, Glorify Your Name!

Is your soul weary or troubled?  Are you in the midst of or approaching a difficult journey and don’t know how to go on?  Does your heart want to cry “Save me from this trial!”?  Well, I have encouraging news for you, you are not alone!  Our Savior, Jesus Christ the perfect Son of God, also faced heartache and unrest on the journey to the cross.  In John chapter twelve, we get a glimpse of His inner turmoil and how He managed to continue on the road placed before Him.  So let’s study and learn from our Lord’s perfect example.

As Christians, we will encounter trials, suffering, and even persecution as we follow in the footsteps of Christ.  And if you haven’t experienced it already, don’t worry, you will!  Therefore, we need to be prepared so that when we face adversity, we will stay strong and press on in our faith.  Our Savior walked through the most affliction on His journey to the cross.  Not only was He betrayed, beaten, and hung with nails on the wooden cross, but He, fully God, knew all that would take place before it happened, was separated from His Father, and bore the filthiness and sin of the entire world.  It is no wonder that He sweat blood while praying in the Garden of Gethsemane or that His soul was troubled before He even entered Jerusalem!  But despite all this, what did Jesus say to His disciples? “Father, glorify your name.”


Human nature wants out of any situation that causes discomfort or pain. However, as our Savior was preparing to face the cruelest death invented by man, He put aside His own will and said, “Not my will, but Thy will be done.”  The greatest task set before Jesus was also the most difficult.  It was more difficult than leaving the perfection of heaven and coming to earth as a mortal man, more challenging than making a blind man see or a dead man breathe again.  Jesus’ greatest and most difficult task was to pay the penalty for sin which included death, separation from the Father, and untold suffering.  This is why His soul was troubled in John 12, and why He might be tempted to say, “Father, save me from this hour.”  But He didn’t.  He knew that though He had done many great and marvelous things, had touched thousands of lives, and gathered a following, the hour had come to do what He was sent to accomplish:  bring reconciliation between man and God.

So in light of this, I ask you….when (not if!) you encounter trials and affliction, how will YOU respond?  Will  YOU give in to the flesh’s desire to find escape or will you seek to glorify God and continue walking the path set before you?

We are God’s children whom He loves and went to great lengths to redeem and ransom.  So do you think that He will allow something spiritually deadly into your life?  No!  We can choose to forsake the One who’s done so much for us, but He will not abandon us!  Even in the difficult times when God seems so far away, He is there and has a plan and purpose for all that He allows; everything gets filtered through His loving fingers.  Therefore, when we face adversity we have two choices:  

1. Do all we can to get out or
2. Trust God that He knows what He’s doing and has a purpose in mind.  
   

​Let us follow Christ’s example and choose the latter, trusting God while faithfully walking the road laid before us and seeking to glorify Him in all that we say and do!  And let us join our Savior in declaring, “Father, glorify your name!”