When I reflect upon someone whose presence steadied my life, my Pop comes first to mind. He proved to be the most loyal man in my life. He didn’t always agree with my choices, but he always stood by me. He defended me publicly and corrected me privately. I never had to wonder whether he was for me or against me. The Lord used my father to build my sense of security, my grasp of truth, my understanding of love, and my awareness of purpose.
When the crushing diagnosis of stage 4 kidney cancer came, I begged him to fight. During the next 11 months, I preached and led my church with that weight pressing into the back of my mind. The day was quickly approaching when he would be gone. I remember feeling the desperate longing for him to remain those final two days. His presence had served as a kind of shelter for my entire life. When someone has helped forge your very sense of purpose, losing them leaves more than an empty chair at family gatherings. It leaves a void that no other human relationship can fill. Though I was anchored in Christ, his passing still devastated me, because the foundation of our security rests upon the irreplaceable presence of those we love.
Perhaps you’ve felt that same disorientation when someone central to your life was suddenly gone. The phone calls that will never come. The counsel you’ll never receive. The presence that steadied you through every crisis, now absent when you need it most.
But here’s what I discovered in my grief, and what I suspect you’ve discovered in yours: even when human foundations crumble, the Lord presence never leaves. Even when the people we’ve depended upon are taken from us, there is Someone who cannot be removed. Recall the seasons when your world was collapsing and the Lord held you steady. Remember the nights you were certain you wouldn’t survive until morning, yet dawn broke with fresh mercies. Consider the guilt that haunted you until He forgave it completely. Think of the times you stood exposed, and He covered your shame, the moments you felt utterly lost until He gave you reason to live again.
Without His sustaining grace, your life would not have held together for a single day. Every breath you’ve drawn, every thread of stability you’ve known. Every relationship that has endured, every provision that has met your need. All of these mercies have flowed from His sovereign hand. This is the foundation of spiritual security: it rests upon the covenant faithfulness of our unchanging God.
Imagine having all of this stability being suddenly removed. Scripture is no longer there to guide you through confusion. The Holy Spirit’s presence is no longer there to steady you in the storm. No comfort to sustain you through grief. The foundation upon which you’ve stood for years suddenly gone from beneath your feet, leaving you to free-fall into uncertainty.
This is precisely where we find the disciples in the Upper Room. For three years they had walked with Jesus. They had abandoned everything to follow Him. They had built their entire future on His promises. Their hopes, their identity, their purpose. All of it was wrapped up in His person and His presence. And now He announces that He is leaving them.
They couldn’t envision life without Him. Not just because they loved Him, but because He was their very life. He was their security, their certainty, their anchor in every storm. Without Him, they faced the terrifying prospect of spiritual orphanhood.
But Jesus knew their hearts would be shattered by His departure. He had already spoken peace to them in verse 27, His own divine peace. Not the fragile peace this world offers. And now, in the verses that follow, He reveals something their grief-clouded eyes could not yet see. His departure was not defeat but triumph. Not abandonment but the fulfillment of His mission. He calls them to rejoice in His return to the Father, to believe when the dark hours came. To stand firm when the ruler of this world pressed in. To see His obedience as the ultimate display of love. Let’s read:
John 14:28 NASB “You heard that I said to you, ‘I go away, and I will come to you.’ If you loved Me, you would have rejoiced because I go to the Father, for the Father is greater than I.
Their sorrow at His departure was proof they hadn’t yet grasped the glory of His return to the Father. If they had, they would have seen that what looked like loss was actually the crowning moment of God’s saving plan , and that
Loving Christ means rejoicing in God’s redemptive plan.
Jesus begins with a gentle but pointed rebuke. “If you loved Me, you would have rejoiced” indicates that something that should have already occurred but has not. The Lord is not speculating about their love; He is exposing the inadequacy of it. Their grief revealed the truth: they’re thinking more about their circumstances than about His coming glory.
The Lord isn’t expecting them to have a fully formed, Spirit-empowered joy in that moment. He’s exposing the gap between their present love and what true love will look like. Once the Spirit has illumined their minds and anchored their affections in God’s plan, they will see it. To truly love Him is to prioritize His glory over our comfort. But He knows they can’t fully do this yet which is why He is sending the Helper (14:26–27). The Spirit will enable what their fleshly fear can’t.
We all have blessings from Christ that steady us. His peace in hardship, His forgiveness when we’ve failed, and His guidance when we’ve been lost. Those are not small gifts; they are meant to be received with gratitude. But if we stop at the gift and never let it lift our eyes to the Giver’s glory, we’ve missed something essential. The disciples loved Jesus sincerely. But their love still needed to be deepened by the Spirit. Only then could they rejoice in His exaltation, even when His plan ran against their desires. In the same way, whatever comfort Christ has given you, let it draw you into deeper delight in Him. Not merely in what He provides.
The Lord’s path was leading Him back to the Father: “for the Father is greater than I.” Jesus is not saying He is less than God. The eternal Son is not inferior to the Father in His divine nature, John 1:1 declares Him to be God, and John 10:30 records His claim, “I and the Father are one.” Here, Jesus is speaking about the role He willingly took on when He came to earth. In becoming man, He humbled Himself to carry out the Father’s mission. As He said earlier, the one who sends is greater than the one who is sent (John 13:16). The Father gave the mission; the Son carried it out in perfect obedience. It’s not about being less than God, it’s about the Son choosing to glorify the Father by completing the work He was sent to do. And if they could see that clearly, they would understand why His return to the Father was not loss, but victory. Christ’s return to the Father meant the restoration of the glory He had laid aside.
John 17:5 NASB “Now, Father, glorify Me together with Yourself, with the glory which I had with You before the world was.
His departure was not abandonment of the disciples but the reclaiming of His rightful position at the Father’s right hand.
As our love for Christ matures so does our love for God’s redemptive plan, even when it runs counter to our preferences. The disciples wanted Jesus to stay because His presence served their needs. But their love for Christ must grow to celebrate His return to undiminished glory, even at the cost of their own comfort.
Every believer eventually faces this test. Will we love Jesus enough to rejoice when His will takes us into loss, knowing it fulfills His glory? Will we celebrate His purposes when He trims fat from budgets? Will we find our joy in His exaltation rather than in our consolation?
This is not stoic resignation. This is not gritting our teeth and enduring God’s will with grudging acceptance. This is the joy that flows from loving Someone so deeply that His glory matters more than our comfort. His purposes more than our plans. His reputation more than our convenience.
Do you love Jesus this way? When His will cuts across your comfort, do you mourn your loss or celebrate His gain? When God’s plan dismantles your expectations, do you see only what you’re losing? Or do you rejoice in what He’s accomplishing?
The disciples would learn, in time, to see their Master’s departure through His eyes. And when they did, their grief would turn to gladness, their fear to faith, their sorrow to singing. They would discover that…
Believing Christ means trusting the certainty of His word.
In just a few hours, the Roman soldiers would arrive and the religious leaders would drag Him away. The cross would loom before them and death would seem to swallow their hopes. The disciples need something more substantial than emotion to sustain their faith. They need the unshakeable certainty of His word. So, Jesus continues…
John 14:29 NASB “Now I have told you before it happens, so that when it happens, you may believe.
The Lord is preparing them while He is still present with them before panic overtakes them. This is a consistent pattern in Scripture: God often gives His people advance warning, so that His word becomes the anchor of their faith when the tempest hits. Earlier in this same Gospel, Jesus told His disciples things in advance so that “when it comes to pass, you may believe” (13:19). His aim is not to eliminate their coming sorrow but to give them something stronger than emotion to sustain them, a clear word from the Lord Himself. A ship’s captain does not drop anchor in the middle of the storm, he secures it before the winds begin to howl.
The purpose of this forewarning is “so that when it happens, you may believe.” This belief is not mere agreement but confident trust in His word, even when everything you see seems to contradict it. When they see Him arrested, they will remember He predicted it. When they watch Him suffer, they will recall He foretold it. As they witness His death, they will know He chose it deliberately. And when He rises from the grave, they will finally understand: even death could not derail the plan He had announced in advance.
Jesus’ words of forewarning are not wasted, even when His disciples stumble. Think of Peter. Jesus told him plainly,
John 13:38 NASB Jesus answered, “Will you lay down your life for Me? Truly, truly, I say to you, a rooster will not crow until you deny Me three times.
And when the rooster sounded, the trauma of that moment seared the Lord’s words into Peter’s soul. It broke him, yes, but it also kept him. That memory became part of the very path to his restoration. Years later, when facing prison and death, Peter would not deny his Master again. Christ’s foreknowledge does not excuse our sin, but it does mean our failures never catch Him off guard. His word both exposes our weakness and secures our faith, so that even our collapse becomes a testimony of His keeping power.
The Lord does not typically remove our trials, but He does provide the interpretive framework that transforms how we understand them. His word becomes the lens through which we view our circumstances. Rather than allowing our circumstances to become the lens through which we question His word.
When the storm hits, will you remember the words He gave you before the clouds rolled in? The test of our faith is not whether we can quote Scripture when life is comfortable. The real test is whether we can cling to His promises when everything we see contradicts everything we believe.
The disciples in that Upper Room could not yet see it. Their Master’s death would become their deliverance. His apparent defeat would secure their victory. He had told them beforehand. He had given them the interpretive framework and anchored their faith to the certainty of His word.
Is your mind saturated with His promises so that when the unexpected trial arrives? Do you instinctively reach for His word rather than your worry? When the diagnosis comes, when the relationship crumbles, when the future you planned evaporates, will you trust that His word stands firm even when your world falls apart? For only then will you discover that…
Following Christ means standing firm in His undefeatable victory.
Jesus had prepared their hearts for His departure and anchored their faith in His word. But there was another reality looming that demanded their attention, the approaching conflict with the prince of darkness himself. Our Lord continues…
John 14:30 NASB “I will not speak much more with you, for the ruler of the world is coming, and he has nothing in Me.”
Following Christ means standing firm in His undefeatable victory. Jesus acknowledges the spiritual reality behind the physical events about to unfold. Yes, Roman soldiers would soon march into Gethsemane. Religious leaders would orchestrate His arrest. But behind all these human actors stood the true orchestrator, Satan himself.
Jesus calls him “the ruler of this world.” That doesn’t mean God crowned Satan king. His power is not legitimate but stolen. Scripture tells us that when God made the world, He entrusted humanity with the task of ruling it under His authority. But when Adam chose to believe the serpent’s lie rather than God’s truth, that trust was broken. The one who should have ruled became enslaved, and the deceiver became the new boss.
How can one man’s decision thousands of years ago give Satan any kind of authority over the world today? When a father abandons his family, he doesn’t just hurt himself. His choice creates a wound that often gets passed down through generations. The Bible tells us that Adam wasn’t just any man, he was humanity’s representative. From that moment, Satan has ruled, not by any rightful claim, but by chaining us to our sin, guilt, and the fear of death. This is why John says,
1 John 5:19 NASB We know that we are of God, and that the whole world lies in the power of the evil one.
His dominion is maintained not by justice but by deception, not by love but by accusation, not by truth but by lies. He deceives by blinding us to the goodness of God and making sin look harmless or even desirable. He accuses by rehearsing our guilt until we believe forgiveness is impossible. And he enslaves through fear, fear of death, fear of exposure, fear that we will never escape our shame. This is how the “ruler of this world” holds humanity captive apart from Christ.
Through the coming betrayal, arrest, and crucifixion, the enemy would unleash his full fury against the Son of God. This was the climactic battle between light and darkness, between the kingdom of God and the kingdom of Satan. The ruler of this world was marshaling all his forces for one final, desperate assault against the Christ.
When Jesus says “and he has nothing in Me” He is announcing the foundation of His certain victory. Satan may approach with all his accusations, all his temptations, all his condemnations, but he will find no foothold in the Son of God. No sin to exploit. No guilt to leverage. No weakness to attack. Satan has no rightful possession in Christ, no mortgage on His soul, no lien against His character. The enemy may search with all his malicious cunning, but he will discover what the Father declared:
Matthew 3:17 NASB and behold, a voice out of the heavens said, “This is My beloved Son, in whom I am well-pleased.”
This is absolute moral victory before the battle even begins. Satan’s entire strategy depends upon finding some sin to accuse, some failure to exploit, some weakness to manipulate. But in Christ, Satan encounters perfect righteousness, flawless obedience, unblemished holiness. The Christian’s safety before God is not in living a flawless life, but in Christ’s perfect righteousness. When we stand before God to give account, our safety will not rest on our record but on Christ’s perfect righteousness. He the only sinless human being who could say to Satan himself, “You have nothing in Me.”
When the enemy comes with his accusations against you, don’t argue with him, but acknowledge the truth. Then remind yourself that Christ’s perfect life of obedience covers you completely. And the very accusations that could have crushed you will instead make you love Christ all the more.
This is the wonder of “justification by faith alone.” God does not declare us in good standing with Him because of anything we’ve done. He declares us righteous because Christ is righteous, and by faith we share in His standing before the Father. Therefore, we can rest in His victory over our sin and Satan’s accusations.
It is exhausting relating to God through our efforts. Many of us lie awake at night tormented by our failures, convinced that our sins have somehow surprised God. We fight in our own resolve, only to collapse in defeat when our willpower fails. But Christ calls us to a different way, resting in His accomplished victory rather than striving for our own. When Satan whispers his accusations in your ear, when guilt threatens to overwhelm your soul, when you feel defeated by your moral failures, remember this. Your enemy has nothing in Christ, and if you are a Christian you are in Christ. The battle has already been won. The victory has already been secured. Stop fighting battles that Christ has already won. Stop carrying guilt that Christ has already borne. Stand firm in His undefeatable victory. Rest in the righteousness of the sinless One. Let His triumph be your confidence, His victory your peace, His righteousness your only hope. The sinless obedience that secured our salvation is now the pattern set before us, so…
Imitating Christ means obeying the Father out of love.
Jesus had revealed the inadequacy of their love, anchored their faith in His word, and declared His victory over Satan. But now He discloses the deepest motivation for everything He was about to endure. The cross was not merely substitution for sinners, it was the supreme demonstration of Son-to-Father love…
John 14:31 NASB “But so that the world may know that I love the Father, I do exactly as the Father commanded Me. Get up, let us go from here.”
With these words, Jesus unveils the cosmic purpose behind His approaching passion. Yes, He would die to redeem sinners. Yes, He would bear our guilt and shame. But there was something even deeper driving Him to Calvary, His love for the Father.
The cross becomes the ultimate love letter written in blood. It declares to a watching universe the depths of Christ’s devotion to His Father. Every stripe on His back, every thorn pressed into His brow, every nail driven through His hands would proclaim: “This is how much the Son loves the Father.” The agony of Gethsemane, the betrayal of Judas, the denial of Peter, the mockery of the crowds, all of it served this glorious purpose: that the world might know the love between the Father and the Son.
Notice the phrase “I do exactly as the Father commanded Me.” It suggests precise, meticulous obedience, not grudging compliance but joyful precision. Christ did not obey the Father’s will partially, selectively, or reluctantly. He obeyed exactly, completely, gladly. His obedience was not the submission of a slave but the devotion of a beloved Son.
This transforms how we understand the cross. We rightly celebrate Christ’s substitutionary atonement. He died in our place, His righteousness is credited to our account, and His wrath-bearing sacrifice reconciles us to God. But we must not miss this: the cross was also the supreme demonstration of divine love between the Father and the Son. Before it was our salvation, it was their glory.
“Get up, let us go from here.” These final words reveal Christ’s unwavering resolve to move toward the appointed hour without hesitation. There would be no delay, no second thoughts, no retreat. The time for teaching had ended; the hour for obedience had arrived.
Jesus did not remain in the safety of the Upper Room. He did not linger in comfortable fellowship with His disciples. He rose from the table, walked through the doors, and headed straight toward Gethsemane, toward betrayal, toward suffering, toward death. His love for the Father compelled Him forward into the darkness.
This was not fatalistic resignation but love-driven determination. Christ moved toward the cross not because He had to, but because He wanted to. His Father’s will had become His deepest desire, His Father’s glory His consuming passion, His Father’s pleasure His supreme joy.
Here lies a doctrinal truth that should revolutionize how we understand our Christian witness: love-driven obedience glorifies God before a watching world. The world is not impressed by our theological knowledge, our spiritual emotions, or our religious activities. But they cannot ignore the testimony of a life that obeys God out of love, even when it costs everything.
The early Christians did not conquer the Roman Empire through superior arguments or political power. They conquered through love-driven obedience that was willing to die rather than deny their Lord. Their martyrdom declared to a watching world: “This is how much we love our God.” Their submission to suffering proclaimed: “Our allegiance belongs to a King worth dying for.”
When believers today live lives of costly obedience, they echo Christ’s declaration: “So that the world may know that I love the Father.” When they choose integrity over advancement. When they forgive enemies who have wounded them deeply. When they sacrificially serve others without recognition. When they remain faithful in marriage despite temptation.
The truest proof of your love for God is not emotion or confession but submission to His will, even when it costs you. God’s will often cuts against our preferences, His commands challenge our comfort, and His calling demands our sacrifice. Do you love God enough to forgive the person who betrayed you? Do you love Him enough to remain pure when temptation whispers that no one will know? Do you love Him enough to be generous with your resources when your bank account argues otherwise? Do you love Him enough to speak truth when lies would be easier? Do you love Him enough to serve others when self-advancement beckons?
The world sees how we respond when God’s will conflict with our desires. They observe whether our obedience flows from love or mere duty. They notice if we follow Christ when the path is easy. And they notice if we follow Him when it runs through the valley of the shadow of death.
Christ did not merely speak of obedience; He walked into the night and gave Himself up to the Father’s will. Now He calls us to follow Him. Not with half-hearted affection or delayed obedience, but with the glad surrender of love. The question is not whether you have sung the songs or spoken the words, but whether you will rise and walk in His steps. Will you forgive, will you trust, will you serve, because you love Him? This is the life He purchased for you, and this is the life His Spirit empowers in you. If the Lord is pressing this on your heart today, I’ll be here on the front pew. Come. Let us seek Him together in prayer.
