Today, I am reading and commenting on  John 17-18.

When John recounts Jesus final prayer at the Last Supper he brings us back to the transitive principle which played a large part in his accounts of Jesus’ teaching.  At its most basic, that transitive principle was that Jesus was in the Father and the Father was in Jesus, therefore anyone who knew Jesus knew the father.  Jesus further extended that by saying that He was in anyone who believed in Him and followed His teaching, and they were in Him.  In this prayer, Jesus takes this yet further by saying that those who believed in His words as communicated by His disciples entered into this transitive relationship.  So, just as Jesus’ disciples were able to be in Him and have Him in them, we also can be in Him and have Him in us.  Of course, if Jesus is in us that should impact the way in which we feel about the sins which we are constantly tempted to commit.   Hopefully we can come to see that the pleasure we might receive from the sins which tempt us is not worth the joy they will cost us.

Also in His prayer Jesus warns us that the world will hate us for believing in Him because we are no longer part of the world.  The world will try to reclaim us and cause us to recant of testifying to the truth.  We see a form of this hostility in Pilate’s response to Jesus’ statement that He came to testify to the truth.  Pilate asked “What is truth?” indicating that he did not believe there was such a thing as truth.   Our society today also rejects the idea that there is such a thing as truth and hates anyone who claims that there is.

I use the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.