In Luke 2:4949And he said unto them, How is it that ye sought me? wist ye not that I must be about my Father's business? (Luke 2:49) the Lord puts the question to His earthly parents, “Wist ye not that I must be about My Father’s business?” Which of us would have said these words when we were twelve years old? His ways had been such that He would appeal to them as though they ought to have known from the tenor of His life what he was occupied with. Philippians 3 shows how Paul, a man of like passions with us, may tread the same path, seeing and estimating the beauty of Christ. The effect was, first, that he counted all else dung for the excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus his Lord, and, second, having the death of the Lord as his substitute and the resurrection of Christ as his righteousness, he found that everything was against him. His position was like that of Christ Himself, and he could say, “Father.” As a child of the Father, his thought becomes, I want to be like Christ in the fellowship of His sufferings. He had no bag with holes, like Judas, into which he could put the things of earth. They were but dung, and the whole world to him was a place savoring of the murder of Christ, and it produced in him a sort of nauseous disgust of the things in it.
Association With Christ
The power of Nazariteship comes from the knowledge of association with Christ. Being crucified with Him and raised up together with Him, I would like to walk as He did in this world, to have the life He had when raised from the dead manifested in my ways. How few have this as their aim and object! How few seek to live out Christ! What will produce it? If you and I could say, “Wist ye not that I must be about My Father’s business?” we should soon find ourselves in the fellowship of His sufferings. If I am a son, the Father has His business still to be done down here. Does it enter into our souls, sitting around the table, when we commemorate the death of our Lord, that our Father has business to be done? By His Spirit we can find out what part of that business He puts on us, and let us do that, letting self and the world completely go. The extent to which the simple faith of that truth would bring our hearts into treading the same path as Christ trod and give power to be occupied with the Father’s business is greater than we know. Christ has brought me, put me in the right place — I in one, you in another, where there is suffering or no suffering, but as He likes, and where there is His Father’s business to be done. Standing in the resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ, conscious that His Father is our Father, His God our God, and that we have the Spirit of that blessed One at the right hand of God, the purpose of our hearts must be to mind the Father’s business. Have you purpose of heart? The compass needle quivers restlessly till it has turned to the north; there is purpose there. “Whose service is perfect freedom” should be our word. What am I doing? Minding the Father’s business, for one thing. What is my confidence as to what lies before me? What would it be if I sought only the Father’s will, if I had confidence in His wisdom and desired nothing but His will? How could I fear if I had no business but the Father’s will?
G. V. Wigram from Ministry of G. V. Wigram,
Vol. 1, pp. 234235