Jesus' Prayer Request
Christ Loves the Church and Gave Himself for Her
We saw earlier, in Ephesians chapter 5, that Jesus loved the church and gave Himself for her. This means that when He gave His life on Calvary, He was seeking for more than to save sinners from a terrible Hell. Though that element was there, He was giving Himself in order to obtain a bride. Yes, there was first a reconciliation of enemies unto Himself, but that was just the beginning (Rom. 5:10). We can see the process moving beyond that as Jesus explains His heart to His Father, telling Him that He had reconciled us, and then He wanted to marry us. Jesus loves the church, and by His death, He would bring her forth (Eph. 5:25-32). And so, we begin to see that Christ’s death was more than the reconciliation of the sins of the world that John 3:16 declares. It also included what Paul described in Romans chapter 5 as “much more,” which speaks of a church that is one with the Lord.
Look at Ephesians 5:25: “Husbands, love your wives, even as Christ also loved the church, and gave Himself for it.” That is not instructing a husband to try to get along with his wife. If Christ does not invade the earth, then all our relationships will function by temporal methods. There is no perfect man or woman, only the perfect love of God that gave Himself for us that we might be made one in Christ. As we come to understand HOW Christ loved the Church, husbands will love their wives by relating to them as one with themselves in love. No wonder there is so much divorce; people vow before the minister to become one, but remain two. Without union, the only hope they have is for reconciliation whenever division arises, because they will have to work through their issues as two separate individuals. They never learned to relate to one another in oneness.
While human marriages fail, the love that Christ has for His Church is eternal, and so His heart will never change. We can rest assured on this fact. The day that the Lord starts hating His own flesh and hating Himself is the day we will be allowed to worry. Only then should we start wondering about becoming unreconciled. If we truly knew the heart of Jesus for His bride, we would never again doubt our acceptance into Him as one. There must come a time when we begin to forget our old ways of understanding so that we might come away to His view and heart. We must seek to hear our Bridegroom’s heart and viewpoint in the Song of Solomon. We must ask the Holy Spirit to open the true spirit of John chapter 17 to us. As we do, we will see the precious heart of Jesus pray to His Father for something about which He cared very deeply.
The Waters of Oneness
To come to this viewpoint concerning the heart of the Lord toward us is not easy to do. It is hard to believe that Jesus cares about something so much and wanted it so badly. It can be difficult to understand His love that died for his future bride when she was not perfect, and she certainly was not perfect when He obtained her. This is where we must understand that there is still the necessity for the washing of the water by the Word so that He may present her to Himself without spot or blemish, as described in Ephesians chapter 5. These waters are not making dirty people clean. These waters are not making her acceptable and reconciling her ever closer to Jesus her Husband. He uses these waters to wash her because she is now accepted and one with the Lord Himself. In effect, as He washes her, He is washing His own Body. He is caring for what is now of His own flesh and bones (cf. Eph. 5:26-30).
Many work to maintain reconciliation with the Lord because they think that we have to keep the relationship in good standing. This will continue until we understand the reality behind His washing. In other words, until we comprehend that we have been made One with Christ and are now being treated as His own body, we will comprehend all washing and chastisement as proof that we are not yet acceptable enough, and therefore receive these things on the basis of reconciliation.
The means for bringing someone into rest concerning their relationship in Christ is not preaching against legalism or assuring them that the work of reconciliation is great enough to keep us from fretting over our problems. The end of all strife is to enter into oneness with Christ. We are joined to Jesus and will never be “dis-joined”(Mark 10:8-9; Eph. 5:30). The answer is union and being found in Christ as one with Him. The phrase “in Him” means that in His mind we are now one with Jesus. It has been settled in His mind and therefore needs to be settled in ours as well. That can only be accomplished as our Husband washes away all our old concepts of how to relate to Him and replaces them with the pure water of the Word concerning marriage, union, and oneness. Jesus washes the mud of the earth out of our eyes so that we now see that we are in Him, and not just with Him. We take the view of how God sees us in Christ instead of our former view of how well we are doing in the earth.
Let me give you a rather simplified example of how our viewpoint greatly affects our behavior in our relationships. Some women are continually working on themselves so that, when they look in the mirror, they will feel beautiful in their own eyes. A woman may feel all right about herself because she personally feels like she looks attractive in certain clothing. At another time, she may have on some of the most expensive clothes in the world, but because she does not feel like she looks good in them, she will not want to wear them. Clearly her perception of herself is coming from her own opinion and view. She needs to quit looking into an earth mirror to determine what she looks like and start looking into the mirror of the Word of God (II Cor. 3:18).
The woman I just described is much like the Church, in that her comprehension of who she is and how she looks is based on her own understanding of herself. The answer is that she needs to enter into the marriage! When she does that, she can gain a perspective of herself as seen in His heart that will not be tainted by her past earth existence. Can we comprehend the real meaning of this? Men and women, boys and girls, we all need to quit looking into the “mirror” of the Scriptures to see ourselves, and start looking there to see Jesus, the one with whom we are joined and made one. As we search the Scriptures, our motivation should not be to look there in order to see ourselves with the intent of cleaning ourselves up.
Washing at the Laver
In the Tabernacle, there was an object called the laver. It was a big brass bowl filled with water that stood behind the altar, and the high priest used it to wash off the spots and blemishes before he entered into the presence of God. The laver represented the Word of God. Likewise, we may think that we are going to walk up to the laver of the Word of God and dip into it and wash off our own spots. But now we are in the New Covenant. Now our Husband does the washing. In the Old Covenant, the blemished man would have to be cleaned up BEFORE he entered the presence of God. Now, it is the presence of our Husband and His washing that cleans us.
In Old Testament times, a priest would not dare to enter the Holy of Holies in a blemished state unless they had some assurance like Esther, that the King would not kill her but let her enter. If a New Testament believer has only a reconciled mindset, he cannot understand or discover what it means to truly be washed by the water of God’s Word. He will always fear entering into God’s presence, being mindful of two things: his own blemishes and how those blemishes can cause a break and disunion to occur between himself and God. Fear is his major motivation. Only those who have seen the love of the King for themselves, as Esther had, will risk all, counting on the fact that His love will not allow separation and death ever again.
When we go to the Word of God, our motivation will either be to see Jesus and our oneness with Him, or it will be to discover what is wrong with ourselves as we set about to find answers that will clean us up. To the reconciled mindset, the mirror will only reflect its own image, and the water will only be used for self-improvement. Jesus’ bride who is one with Him, however, will allow those waters to bring her into her true identity as one with all that He is. Her heart is towards His face and not focused on her own reflection; therefore, she sees Him. This washing brings forth a cherishing and a nourishing that can only be possible when done through the basis of oneness, for Christ loves His bride and treats her as Himself.
The Church and the Bride
There are some defining factors between the Church and the Bride that can help us illustrate these two different relationships. The word “church” means “called out,” which exemplifies a mindset of leaving something. The Israelites left Egypt and the oppression of their taskmasters. There was a great deliverance from the house of bondage as they made their exodus from the land of bondage. This part of Israel’s journey was all about leaving something.
In like manner, the Church is that group which has been “called out” from the world, the flesh, and the devil. We have obviously been reconciled to God, and in that sense we must have left something behind. But the relationship of becoming a Bride speaks more of the concept of entering into something than it does of leaving something. It speaks of entering into oneness, while “leaving” something behind can still leave us separate from the One who caused the leaving in the first place.
In Acts 7:38 we read, “This is he, that was in the church in the wilderness with the angel who spoke to him on the Mount Sinai, and with our fathers: who received the living oracles to give unto us.” Because the Church did not come into existence until around 1,500 years after the events referenced in this verse, it is hard to comprehend what this verse is trying to say to us, since the church as we understand it was not in the wilderness. But this verse is telling us the exact spirit of what we are trying to communicate — that those in the wilderness were the called-out ones, or reconciled ones.
Those believers who are in the wilderness live as called-out ones, for they are leaving something. They are reconciled to God in order to get away from past failures and sins with the punishment that accompanies them. Israel was just as much the called-out ones in the wilderness as we are today when we relate to God based on a reconciled mindset. Israel thought the plan was to save them out of something, so they balked when it came time to enter into something else, i.e. the Promised Land. The Church has done the same thing! But when we start entering into the Promised Land, the relationship changes, for it is when you begin to relate differently that you actually begin to enter into the Land. We cannot enter into the Land until the time that we begin to comprehend and relate to the Lord on the basis of oneness. We do not first enter the Land and then find that our relationship changes. But at whatever junction we begin in the new relationship of oneness, whether it is two days, fifty weeks, or forty years, that is when we can enter into what the Lord had in His heart toward us all along.
