34 - Was Jesus Ever Surprised?

Right up front, my answer to that question is a resounding no, I don't believe he ever was. And in this episode I'll share why I think this way. This is part 1 of 2 to learn where did Jesus find his lasting peace and how he was (and still is) the best source of joy. 

And here is the PDF with all the Bible verses on what Jesus said about hearing from his Father and plan in place he lived from. 

Email me at mike@menrestored.com if you'd like more information about my 90-day Exodus Freedom Journey pathway and cohort. It's built for men in ministry, just like you and also the Christ-follower still feeling enslaved by pornography. 

Together, let's reclaim your freedom! 

Transcript

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Hi everyone, I'm not sure if you're a man in ministry, but I want to invite you, if you are, and this is a problem for you, pornography. I want to invite you to this cohort that I have. It's safe and it's confidential, and you need that. You need a place to go to talk about this and to get some deep learning and brotherhood to fight together with other men. That's what I want to offer to you. Stay tuned at the end of the episode to find out how to be in touch with me so that you can learn more about this cohort. I don't want you to have to ever live in isolation like I was living for so many years as a young pastor. I want you to know that you don't have to be alone in this anymore. So I'll see you on the other side. Listen in and let's get into the episode. You are a man seeking freedom from pornography. You know what's at stake if you don't break free. Your marriage, your family, and your faith. Welcome to the Exodus Freedom Journey Podcast. Here you'll discover insights and tools to help you find lasting freedom. Starting in as little as 40 days, you are worth the fight. Your marriage is worth the fight. Your family is worth the fight. Together with God's mighty hand, let's reclaim your freedom. Welcome to session number and lesson number 34. So, about that title. Was Jesus ever really surprised? Well, as you're going to find out as I introduced this in the curriculum in the lesson today, nope, I don't think he ever was. I really don't. He might have been amazed at some points, as you might read as you read in the Gospels. I really don't think he was ever surprised. And there's a reason for that. There's a reason for that. The story of redemption includes, of course, the life of Jesus and how did he live his life? How can we live our lives? So this next uh this one and the next one are about that. Jesus' life, how he lived it, how we are to live our life and our story. All right, I'll see you on the other side. Hello and welcome to session four. The title that I have for this is something that's been on my heart for a very long time. And God helped me to see how to fit this into this whole curriculum. Was Jesus ever surprised? It's a great question that I've sat with for many years. I personally am convinced that Jesus was never surprised, and I have a reason for that. I've got a big reason for that. I believe Jesus was never surprised because he lived into a plan. He lived into his father's will for his life. Now, I want to start with painting the picture here of Jesus' life. So this session and the next session are a part one and part two. This session, session four, is going to be about looking at Jesus' life and some of the plans that God had for him, just making that case that Jesus' life had a pre-arranged, if you will, a predestined plan that he lived into. In the second session here, the next session is going to be about your plan. And I'm going to make that case that God has a plan, i.e., a story. He has a story for your life. He has a story for you to live into. So this session and next are going to be about a larger plan in where you fit in, where I fit in to that plan in our own smaller plan. Remember, there's a big one, then there's each individual's plan and story. You have your own story, I have my own story, and we're living out those stories, each of us on our own. Here in this curriculum, all of our stories have intermixed. All of our story, my story, and your story have connected. Somehow they have been brought together. I believe God brought our stories together, but that's not our focus of this session. This session, I want to focus in on Jesus. I want to focus in on why it's so important to look to Him as our example as we live our daily life, as we live our day-to-day mission, if you will, in the unfolding of God's story for us, his plan for us. I want to begin with the end of Jesus' life because it's so powerful when you consider one verse in light of, now consider this, Gethsemane. Consider Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane, and consider Jesus as he's on the ground, literally on all fours. And I believe he was prone on the ground. I believe there's a part of this moment where Jesus was, he was wringing his hands into the earth as if he's trying not to fall further into the earth and not be swallowed up, if you will. He's just clinging to that creation, that solid earth, as he's making the decision whether or not to save humanity. He was sorely tempted, I believe, very strongly, in this moment, he was tempted to say goodbye, to say, I don't want to do this, to say, I'm just gonna stop and go back to heaven. That's when you have Jesus saying, Father, take this cup from me, but not if it's not your will. If it's your will that I go through this, I am willing to do this. And to the point, if you read in Luke's account, to the point where his whole body was so pressed, the name and the word Gethsemane, by the way, means the olive press. Jesus was being pressed hard by evil, by the weight of sin, and at the same time, his father's presence was being taken away from him. That protective presence that was with him for all of eternity, by the way, but especially while he was here on earth, was starting to be taken away. He says to his disciples, literally, my soul is dying, and I'm seeing the separation from God start to happen. Separation means death. That's what the Bible talks about with the second death, by the way. But Jesus in Luke's account, he is so pressed that he sweat, as it were, and it says in the text, drops of blood. And I don't remember the name of the condition, but there's a condition where you sweat through the pores and the capillaries in your skin or under your skin, out to the skin, blood. That is under a lot of stress. That is now if you could just physiologically try this for just a minute or two. Tense up all the muscles in your body, every muscle from your toes to your chest, your legs, your butt, your chest, your arms, your shoulders, your back, tense them all up at once. I'm doing it right now. But imagine having that happen and you're trying to resist and you're giving all of your energy. That's what Jesus was going through. He was in that for minutes, I don't know, maybe even hours at a time over the overnight there, that Thursday night before his crucifixion. He was being pressed hard by evil, and the weight of sin was coming down upon him. I believe those two things were happening, along with the Father removing his presence from him for the first time in all of eternity. Now consider one verse in light of that moment. Again, I would highly recommend you just take all the gospel accounts, read them through slowly, that that part where Jesus is in the garden, and just meditate on it. In your imagination, see it, hear it, feel it, and just know that Jesus is making a decision in that moment to save humanity. But listen to this. Go to Hebrews 12, verse 2. Hebrews 12, verse 2, and I'll read it to you. Hebrews 12, 2 says, looking to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, is seated at the right hand of God. That text, of course, is written after the ascension, after Jesus was already glorified and ascended into heaven. But I wanted to key in on two words. The joy, the joy that was set before him. That's how he endured the cross. That's how he made it through that awful, dark, horrible moment when he thought his soul was dying. Well, he wasn't thinking that it was. It really was dying. His soul was dying because he was being separated from the Father. And he was having the weight of all the world's sin, from Adam all the way to the very last human being ever born on this planet, all the sinful nature of all humanity was pressed down upon Jesus in that moment. But it says in Hebrews 12, too, that he saw something. There was joy that he found. I want to ask the question: where did Jesus see this joy? How did Jesus see joy in this supremely dark, supremely anxious, supremely agonizing moment? Where was Jesus' joy? Let me answer that by reading another text. Now go to Revelation 19, Revelation 19, 6 and 7. Then I heard what sounded like a great multitude, like the roar of rushing waters, and peals of thunder, shouting, hallelujah! For the Lord God Almighty reigns, let us rejoice and be glad and give him glory. Listen to this: for the wedding of the Lamb has come, and his bride has made herself ready. To be sure, in Revelation, the Lamb is always Jesus. You probably knew that. But somehow the joy that Jesus was going to be with this multitude, this vast multitude that includes you, includes me, and countless billions of other people. That's why John the Revelator describes this sound that sounds like rushing waters and loud peals of thunder because you can't distinguish individual voices. It's just the collective billions of worshipers shouting hallelujah all at once. I can't even imagine what that would sound like. Hallelujah sounded out by billions of people all at once. Jesus saw the end result of his sacrifice. Jesus saw the supreme ending to the story where his sacrifice got those people there. That's why I believe Jesus had joy leading up to the cross. You don't catch it quite in the Gospels. There isn't a lot of joy for Jesus in those moments. But I believe there is a deep joy that surpasses all the agony that he lived in in those last moments, in those last hours of his life leading up to the crucifixion on Friday. But here's another thing that I believe gave Jesus perfect peace all his life. Jesus did say, Come to me and you will find rest. Jesus is the source of peace and rest. Why did Jesus and how did Jesus have that rest all his life? When the time came and Jesus said, Not as I will, but as you will, he had to have been practicing that for the majority of his life. What? Living into the will of God, knowing and living God's will for his life. Living out this plan and saying to his father, here is my day. What do you have for me? What is your plan for me? Where am I supposed to go? Who am I supposed to talk to? What direction do you want me to go? Living out God's will for his life brought Jesus complete peace and complete joy. He always lived for that. I believe he knew his purpose clearly. I will state this early here. I will state, I believe Jesus was not a strategist. I believe he knew maybe of one day in the future, one date perhaps, if you want to call it that. There were no dating system like what we have. But he had one Passover in mind when he knew that that Friday he was going to be crucified. He knew it. It was coming. I don't know if he knew it years in advance, or perhaps months in advance, or perhaps two or three Passovers in advance. I don't know exactly. Interesting, however, that we've been talking a lot about the Passover through this whole curriculum in the Exodus, right? And we're talking about Jesus' exodus from the earth, but also ultimately his exodus from the earth and his ascension. His exodus initially was from the earth in earthly life into the grave. But I believe probably the biggest source of Jesus' joy, peace, and his purpose in life was following God's plan for his life. That unfolding of the Father's plan, his plan, he and the Father's plan that they made before in eternity, as it was revealed to him one day at a time. I believed that with all my heart. So I'm going to show it to you from the Bible. Again, I'm going to throw a few Bible verses at you here. Look them all up. I'm going to include with this presentation the PDF of all the slides that I'm working from. I put together a slide deck years ago that includes what I'm talking to you today about. And I want to include it for you as a PDF so you can see all of these verses if you'd like to look them all up. There's a bunch of them. I'm not going to go through all of them. I'll touch on a few of them. But I want to talk to you just to prove to you from the Bible, from Jesus' words himself, that he had a life that he lived into God's plan for him. So let's go see some of those verses. Look at John 14 7. Now, if you know the context, John 14 is that last week. So this is the end of Jesus' life. So in John 14, 7, and I especially like the way it's worded in the message Bible, it says it like this I, Jesus, glorified you, my Father, on earth by completing down to the last detail what you assigned me to do. I like that. I like the way it's worded. What you assigned me to do. That's the first one. Here's another one. The context is when Jesus met with the women at the well, and the disciples were headed off to go buy food. And Jesus gives them this cryptic statement, and he says it in John 4, verse 34. Jesus said to them, the disciples, My food is to do the will of him who sent me and to accomplish his work. So this isn't later in Jesus' life, it's early in Jesus' ministry, later in his life, early in his ministry. One more, and then I'm going to ask a key question. Now, this is again back towards the end of Jesus' ministry here. So this is John 12. So many of these are from John, but they're really good. John 12, and this is verses 49 and 50. I know that his commandment is eternal life. Therefore, the things I speak, listen to this, I speak just as the Father told me. So here's my question. If Jesus speaks what his father told him, and if he knows that he has a work to do and a plan to live out, how did he know that? How? I believe Jesus learned that plan from the Father. Not just as he learned the Bible, the Hebrew Bible, in fact, as any Hebrew male back then would have done, he probably memorized large chunks of it. So he knew the scriptures. He also knew that the scriptures were pointing to him. If you read in Luke 24 with Jesus on the walk to Emmaus with those two men, Luke says in that passage that Jesus pointed them to the law and to the prophets, in other words, the Hebrew Bible of Jesus' ministry. He had this long walk, this great Bible study with these two guys. And I love the way those two guys express it. Weren't our hearts burning within us as he was telling us about what was going on with the Messiah? And so their hopes were dashed, but Jesus was trying to rekindle their hope and to change their perspective. Anyway, I believe Jesus knew that because he studied the word, number one, and because he spent a lot of time, at least the first part of each day, or perhaps even overnight, with his father. He spent time getting to know the father, and the father spoke to him. He listened to the father speak to him in this one-on-one relationship that he had with his father. That's how I believe he knew what the father was telling him. Perhaps it wasn't every single day, because maybe he had a command over a number of days. Go this direction, and you will meet this person along the way. This person you'll be healing along the way. Or Jesus just knew that there was somebody coming into his path on a certain day at a certain time. I think about like the story of Zacchaeus. He had never met Zacchaeus before. He knew that Zacchaeus was going to be there. He knew that Zacchaeus was hanging out in that tree. The Bible doesn't say clearly that Jesus didn't know. Maybe somebody told him. I'd like to believe that Zacchaeus was known by Jesus before he ever met him. Just like he told one of the first disciples, Nathaniel, before you met me, I saw you under that tree. He saw Zacchaeus up in a tree, he saw Nathaniel under a tree. I believe Jesus knew these things because the father told him about these. The father revealed to him that you're going to meet a certain person by name or whatever. Jesus got to know these people before they got to know him because the father revealed to him. I believe that's how Jesus lived. That's what gave him such perfect peace. He trusted his father, and he trusted his father implicitly. He knew that his father was going to be taking care of him. He knew that his father was going to be speaking to him. And he knew that he was living out his story, his mission, his purpose in this life. Let me give you one example out of the Gospels in the book of Acts. This is the Apostle Peter speaking to a crowd. Now listen to these verses. Look in Acts chapter 2, verse 23. Acts chapter 2, verse 23. This Jesus delivered up according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God, you crucified and killed by the hands of lawless men. So Peter is very clear that he knew that Jesus knew about this definite plan. Peter was one of the first disciples as well. He knew that as he got to know Christ, that Christ was living out this plan. For all the times you see it in the Gospels that Jesus said, I'm living out what my father tells me. I am almost sure that you've got many examples that aren't recorded where Jesus is just saying, I do this because I spend time with my father, just like you can. That's the whole point of me telling you all this, by the way. Jesus' whole purpose and peace and mission for his life came out of his day-to-day relationship with his father. Once he was 12 years old and he knew that he was to be about his father's business, he started to get to know what that business was. So after 12 years old, he spent even more time studying scripture. He spent even more time asking those hard questions of his mom and dad at that time, Joseph, not his real dad, as you know, of course. But he started asking more questions. But then he would start asking questions to his heavenly dad. And he would ask him, Show me more about this. How do you think that Jesus knew when to start his ministry when he did? Because the Father revealed it to him in his time. In John 2, you've got this moment where Mary wants him to perform a miracle of some kind. She wasn't sure how it was going to play out. And Jesus says, It's not my time yet. Jesus knew where things were going. He knew the direction of his life. And he knew that when the time came, that was going to be when he was going to reveal himself and start his public ministry. I believe some of Jesus' deepest peace and purest joy came from living into his Father's will, knowing that the Father was smiling upon him because he was the perfectly obedient Israelite Jew. He was living out that life in the covenant that the Jewish nation couldn't live out. And so Jesus was living it out fully, and it was his perfect joy to submit to the Father's will and the plan and the mission for his life. I believe fully, with all my heart, very strongly, that Jesus loved to live out Psalm 40, verse 8. I delight to do your will, O my God. That's a wonderful verse to live by, isn't it? Jesus lived that perfectly. Not my will, but your will be done. He lived that out his whole life, so that in that moment of supreme testing and agonizing separation from the Father, carrying the weight of human sin on his body, on his shoulders, in his heart, in his mind, he could say, Not my will be done, but your will be done. Be done because he trusted that the Father's will was best. Now, Jesus, he is our example. Jesus is the place where we must turn to to know that God does have a plan for us. He's got a plan for you. And he has a plan that your journey needs to go on. Your plan in his story for you includes you finding this curriculum. My curriculum is inconsequential to your larger story, though. I hope that my curriculum and what you're learning from this curriculum will move you into a better version of your story and an even more significant version of your story. And that's where we're going to go to with part two here, looking into your journey. I'm calling the next session your hero journey. And I'll see you next session. God bless. Well, I hope that helped you get some perspective on our lives, right? We always, always look to Jesus as our source of help. Holy Spirit's in there, but He Holy Spirit's pointing to Jesus. Jesus is pointing to the Holy Spirit, and everybody's pointing to the Father, of course. We have the Trinity working for us. How can we lose? So, but this insight into Jesus living his day-to-day life in dependence on God, finding his true joy, his true peace. Now that's the nature of addiction, isn't it? Is trying to find a source of help and peace. And a definition I've heard of addiction, maybe I've alluded to this in the past, maybe you've heard me. It's something that almost works. And it doesn't always work, right? It almost works and never fully works. That's why we keep going back to it. But going back to the source of help and peace and joy, that is God, that is for us Jesus, then that will work. Then we will find peace. And so that's what I'm pointing you to here. Go to Jesus and let's live into the story that he has for us. So this first part was about learning that Jesus has that. I hope it made a good case for that. And remember, do uh check into the uh I've got, I think it's something like um 18 verses that have references to Jesus saying, uh, not about me, it's about what the father's telling me. So and check them out. And it's about this plan, this larger plan that's been happening in the story of redemption. So check it out and uh check out if you want to be involved in this, go to my website, menrestored.com. And but also you're welcome to email me, Mike at MenRestored.com. That's probably the easiest way. And let's get you connected. I want to spend some time with you, and I want you to spend some time with other men to help you get through this, especially if you're a man in ministry and you can't talk to somebody else about this. Like I couldn't back in the day either. So I'm somebody who's been through this, I'm somebody who's found victor on the other side of this, and I believe I'm someone who can help you along with other men. So let's do this together, shoulder to shoulder. I'll see you in the next episode, and I'm looking forward to sharing more about what this is like for you and your story. Thank you for listening to the Exodus Freedom Journey podcast. Together with God's mighty hand, let's reclaim your freedom.