The Best Exchange

August 11

Jesus was totally focused on His Father’s will. He stated emphatically that it was His Father’s will, not His own, that He had come to perform (see John 4:34). This sentiment was repeated perfectly by the Nineteenth Century English Pentecostal Pastor, Smith Wigglesworth who allowed himself, “…no mind in the matter.” Wigglesworth, like Christ, wanted only the Father’s will in every situation.

If we study the lives of those who are devoted to the will of the One who is “high and lifted up and whose train fills the temple” (Isaiah 6:1), we will discover they have a singleness of purpose—that being the salvation of souls. Jesus expressed that purpose clearly by His words and by His sacrifice on the cross.

Certainly, to have laid down His life, to have suffered the penalty of death and hell so man would never be required to endure that punishment, is the profoundest of evidence that Jesus loves men—in spite of their sin—and came to cleanse them from it stain of guilt and shame. He washed them clean from sin and made them “white as snow” (See Isaiah 1:18).

In John 6:40, Jesus’ words in the matter are recorded by the beloved apostle: “My Father’s will is that everyone who looks to the Son and believes in Him shall have eternal life, and I will raise him up at that last day.” When man’s proclivity to sin is exchanged for the Lord’s matchless standard of righteousness, the world’s best transaction has taken place: freedom for bondage; beauty for ashes; life for death.