GOD’S WORD FOR AUGUST 1 ~ ~ Luke 12:32 ~ ~ “Fear not, little flock, for it is your Father’s pleasure to give you the kingdom.”
Continued excerpts from John Piper’s, “the Pleasures of God”
(In relation to the continued, and ever increasing, unbelief in the world. Perhaps you yourself aren’t sure if you are a true believer. Here are some thoughts from J.P.)
Jesus will not sit by and let us disbelieve without a fight. He takes up the weapon of the Word and speaks it with power for all who struggle to believe.
“Fear not, little flock, for it is your Father’s pleasure to give you the kingdom” (Luke 12:32)
His aim is to defeat the fear that some people have, that God is not the kind of God who really wants to be good to us….that he is not really generous and helpful, kind and tender, but is basically irked with us…ill-disposed and angry.
Sometimes, even if we believe in our heads that God is good to us, we may feel in our hearts that his goodness is somehow forced or constrained, perhaps like a judge who has been maneuvered by a clever attorney into a corner on some technicality of court proceeding, so he has to dismiss the charges against the prisoner whom he really would rather send to jail.
But Jesus is at pains to help us NOT feel that way about God. He is striving in this verse to describe for us the indescribable worth and excellency of God’s soul by showing the unbridled pleasure he takes in giving us the kingdom. “Fear not, little flock, for it is your Father’s PLEASURE to give you the kingdom.”
This verse is a sentence about the nature of God. It’s about the kind of heart God has. It’s a verse about what makes God glad…not merely about what he WILL do or what he HAS to do, but what he DELIGHTS to do, what he LOVES to do and takes PLEASURE in doing. Every word counts:
“Fear not little flock, for it is your Father’s pleasure to give you the kingdom”
Take the word, “pleasure.” You could say, “it pleased God” or “God chose it gladly”
(John goes on to talk about Philippians chapter 1, where Paul talks about a group of people who preached the gospel to get back at Paul, not because they loved the Lord, nor because they took pleasure in it. On the other hand, the followers of Paul were preaching out of love, and they chose to do it because of that love. They took pleasure in it.
The words in the original language used in this description of events reflect these two mindsets. The word used by Jesus in this verse in John’s gospel, is the one used to refer to Paul’s followers who greatly LOVED to preach the Word, showing that God LOVES giving us the kingdom)
That is what Jesus means when he says, “It is God’s PLEASURE to give you the kingdom.” In other words, God is not acting in this generous way in order to cloak and hide some malicious motive. The word “pleasure” utterly rules that out.
The Lord’s meaning is inescapable: God is acting in freedom. He is not under constraint to do what he doesn’t really want to do. At this very point, when he gives his flock the kingdom, he is acting out his deepest delight. This is what the word means: God’s joy, his desire, his want, wish, hope, pleasure, gladness and delight is to give the kingdom to his flock. It is the measure of the greatness of his heart.