"The Father loves the Son, and has given all things into his hand." - John 3:35

I was thinking, when I read this, that I am one of great talent when it comes to justifying certain things in my life; particularly how I spend my time and where I place my affections. But once again, the Word proved to be a "discerner of the thoughts and the intents" of my heart. At first glance, I assigned this verse a big "duh" and almost moved on; however, I remembered that the Word does not exist that I might gain merely ideas and notions about God. It exists that the Spirit might use it to cut me to the heart and expose reality, and through conviction, mold me into someone who looks a bit more like Jesus. It was about that time that it hit me: this verse exposes the heart of the Father...the very thing that Christians are supposed to be hungering and thirsting for. (And I was gonna just move on!) Perhaps even more stunning, was that it reveals the meditation of God's heart: Jesus. If God were to reveal his innermost thoughts to us, we would find Jesus there; constantly on his mind in an obsessively loving way. Now, I don't mean to be abstract, because most of the time when people discuss abstract ideas it is only to sound smart, or present some mind-numbing thought that never really helps us live out the Christian life any better than we were before we heard the idea. I believe this to be extremely applicational in at least two ways:

1) If Christians claim to be seeking to have the heart of God, then we should want to have the same obsession as the Father: Jesus. "The Father loves the Son." The Son is always the focus of the Father and the ultimate end to which the Father does all things. Jesus is the center of the universe. We must stop looking past Jesus to get a glimpse of the Father, because "in him the fulness of the diety was pleased to dwell." If we want to know God, we must focus on Jesus who said, "I and the Father are one." In all things, we must seek to know Jesus more.

2) There is a very applicational issue of trust in this verse, because we see the Father has "given all things into his hand." So we see that God loves and trusts Jesus with his whole heart, giving all the universe into his hand. The perfect judgment of character by the Father is shown in his giving all things into the hand of Perfection. And if we translate that into our lives, it means that when we do not trust Jesus with all things, we express two incredible blasphemies: We question the Father's judgment of character, and we doubt the dependability of Jesus. This is our sin when we hesitate to trust Jesus. It's no small thing to call into question the acts of the Creator and his Son.

All that said...we need to love Jesus....more. So much more that our time and our affections are placed where we can continually enjoy Jesus.