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25 Anyone who loves their life will lose it, while anyone who hates their life in this world will keep it for eternal life. 26 Whoever serves me must follow me; and where I am, my servant also will be. My Father will honor the one who serves me. 27 “Now my soul is troubled, and what shall I say? ‘Father, save me from this hour’? No, it was for this very reason I came to this hour. 28 Father, glorify your name!” ~ John 12:25-28
The theme of John's Gospel is Christ's fullness and mankind's emptiness. In our text today, the Lord Jesus is underlining the reason for mankind's emptiness: we rejected God's definition of life and we tried to define our lives for ourselves.
The Lord Jesus reminds us in v.25 that infatuation with the way we think life should be leads to our destruction. The gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ begins with dying, it begins with His cross. God's culture confronts the philosophy of this world where self is placed squarely at the center. The Lord Jesus advises that if we follow this philosophy, we will lose. The life we so desire will slip through our fingers no matter what we do.
In v.25, we read, "Anyone who loves their life will lose it, while anyone who hates their life in this world will keep it for eternal life." This means we must recognize that living for self will never supply what we really want out of life. Only as we surrender to the Lordship of Christ can that happen. That is why the gospel includes His cross, and why His cross has become the symbol of Christian faith.
The cross is the symbol of death. It stands for the end of the our will. When we came to Christ we did not bring our life up to a higher plane. The grain of wheat must fall into the ground and die. That is the beginning of the gospel.
In v.26, we read, "Whoever serves me must follow me; and where I am, my servant also will be. My Father will honor the one who serves me." Surrendering our claim on our lives, and bowing our knee to the Lordship of the Lord Jesus is a form of dying. The result, as promised in v.26, is that we will truly begin to live.
In v.27 the Lord Jesus reveals that He struggled with this idea of going to the cross. His struggle was not caused by His lack. His struggle was linked to the impending separation from the Father. He had never known such separation. We are motivated in the reverse order of that which the Lord Jesus was. Our insecurities are linked to our lack which creates the potential for greed and covetousness. This is not so for the Lord Jesus for He has no insecurities caused by any type of lack. His apprehension was caused by having to become sin while hanging on the cross. He who had never committed one sin embraced all sin so that God would punish that sin in His body as He hung on that tree.
The latter part of v.27 and v.28 reveals that the Lord Jesus concluded His cross was His calling in order to rescue mankind from our emptiness. His cross was a necessary evil, otherwise, you and I would be damned for eternity. Imagine that, we would be guaranteed an eternity in hell. The Lord Jesus was emptied in the worse possible way so that we would be able to know the fullness of God's forgiveness and presence in our lives.
