NOTES for Joh 4:34
By saying that doing the Father's will becomes His food, Jesus thereby reveals the meaning of what should properly be called spiritual life. For us today spiritual life is reduced to certain states, experiences, and in general to what is usually called experience. Meanwhile the Savior never defines His relationship with the Father this way. Instead He says that His food, His life, is doing the Father's will.
Of course, if the issue were merely to do this or that at the Father's instruction, we would have the right to ask how this can sustain a person. We ourselves often understand the doing of God's will precisely in this way. We unfailingly observe all the norms and rules that are prescribed to us by God, whether in fact or only in our imagination, and we are often surprised that we do not become stronger from it but, on the contrary, only lose strength from such a life.
But even if we always and exclusively did exactly what God wants from us, limiting ourselves only to the doing as such, we would come to approximately the same result. For God's will is not a prescription from above. A prescription is only its outermost side. Its shell. And within, in the depth, is He Himself. His life. His presence. His power. To do His will means not only to do what He commands, but also to participate in this life, this presence, this power.
But for this to become possible, God's will must not be perceived by us merely as an instruction that has come from somewhere outside. It must become an inner imperative for us. Something that determines our life from within and directs our actions. And it can become an inner imperative for us only when our life begins to be wholly and completely determined by that inward divine presence which the Bible calls the breath of life.
And Jesus can give us even more: He promises those who follow Him and share His life the same source of life that is in His own heart. This source, which completely determines the whole life of the Savior, is the food about which He speaks to the disciples. And the Father's will becomes for Him what flows from this source. He carries this will in His heart. And He is ready to share all this with each of us, with those who are ready to receive.