John 17:23, “I in them, and You in Me; that they may be made perfect in one, and that the world may know that You have sent Me, and have loved them as You have loved Me.”

In the final prayer Jesus prays before He went to the cross, He prayed the above for those who would believe in Him. He prays that the world will know God the Father sent Him by our oneness with God the Father. I have often wondered how that would be possible until I began observing how Jesus lived and what He did when He was on the earth.

John 5:19, “Then Jesus answered and said to them, “Most assuredly, I say to you, the Son can do nothing of Himself, but what He sees the Father do; for whatever He does, the Son also does in like manner.”

In the above scripture Jesus says that He only did what He saw God the Father do. For Jesus to do what He saw God the Father do, that means He was in constant communion with God the Father. The question on mind has always been how did the relationship with Jesus and the Father look like? I was meditating on it and, Holy Spirit led me to Matthew 26 where Jesus was in the Garden of Gethsemane. In that prayer you see Jesus struggling with impending doom. The amazing thing was despite all that He chose to submit His to the Father’s will. His motivation for doing that was the love that He had for the Father.

The last phrase of John 17:23 states, “…. have loved them as You have loved Me.” The love that Jesus and the Father had for each other is what made their relationship so strong even to the point of death.

For us to commune with the Father we must know that God loves us as much as He loved Jesus. In 1 John 4:19, Holy Spirit through John says that we love God today because He first loved us. Receiving that truth is the most important thing in the world. We must go away from trying to do things to earn God’s favor and/or love; and begin to believe that we are loved. Let that truth be the motivation we have.