For many years in my Christian walk, I didn't get it either. I thought "I" had to do what God had commanded. I thought that was what made me a "good Christian". I had made it about me!!! When Jesus answered them when they questioned Him about healing the lame man on the Sabbath, they didn't get it. They would NEVER break the Sabbath. That would be not doing what God had commanded.
Now, I knew that Jesus was my example, but I always used to say, "But He was GOD!!" I am not and I can't obey the way He did. Well, all of this is to say that He did show us how to obey. Jn 5:19....."The Son can do nothing of Himself, but what He sees the Father do; for whatever He does, the Son also does in like manner." There it is. It isn't that Jesus wasn't capable of doing anything on His own. He is God. So obviously, He could have done anything on His own. BUT He chose to cooperate fully with the Father, doing, going, working only as the Father worked through Him. Later, Jesus states it in vs 43..."I have come in My Father's name....."!
Jn 5:17 tells them the reason He healed on the Sabbath and told the man to take his pallet and walk was because the Father was working through the Son, Who was in complete surrender to His Father. It was the Father's will that the lame man be healed on the Sabbath. IT is His authority that Jesus obeyed, even when it didn't look right to anyone else. In other words, He and His Father were in total cooperation. This is what it means to do something "in the name of God". The LORD Jesus is driving home the point to us that when we do something in God's name, we are fully cooperative with God. Whatever we do will look like, act like, smell like, be like Him because He is the One in control of our lives.
And that can only happen when we are in a covenant relationship with Jesus. Then as Jesus was to the Father, submissive to Him, in full cooperation with Him and His initiative, so are we to Jesus. Jn 5:30 Jesus tells us that He allowed the Father to initiate and He cooperated 100% with the Father. And then as the Father was to Jesus, so Jesus is to us. He does His work through us as we are fully cooperative with Him. Mt 11:28-29 comes to mind as describing this kind of relationship with Jesus. IT is a rest when I let God initiate and I cooperate. He is leading the "yoke" and I am cooperating with Him. "My sheep hear MY voice and they follow ME."
I think that for far too many years, I was following a lot of other voices that were telling me what I was supposed to be doing for God "as a good Christian should"! I was abiding.....in my works-oriented flesh! And not in the True Vine!! It had man's glory tagged all over it and not His glory.
Here is a great quote from Wayne Barber: "Jesus said, 'I have come in the name of My Father'. Now the thing that grabs me about Jesus, equal to the Father. He never was anything less than God.....lived as if He was never anything more than man....but submissive to the will of His Father. He had chosen to live this way! Why? It's so you and I could understand what it is like to live the Christian life. You see, the Father continues to initiate. But now He communicates to us what that will is and through the power of the Spirit, He enables us to do whatever God tells us to do."
I think the thing that amazes me the most is that so many believers in the LORD Jesus Christ as the Son of God, the Christ, God in flesh, Who came that we might have everlasting life in Him think that they can do something to either keep this salvation going or lose it!!! It is so obviously ALL of His grace and none of me!! Praise His name!! Eph 2:8-10. Go "in the name of the LORD"!
