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. Yet the Savior never defines His relationship with the Father in this way. Instead He says that His food, His life, is doing the Father's will.
Of course, if the matter were only doing one thing or another at the Father's direction, we would have the right to ask how this can sustain a person. We ourselves often understand doing God's will as something very much like that. We strictly observe all the norms and rules that, whether in reality or only in our imagination, have been prescribed to us by God, 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 doing as such, we would reach approximately the same result. For the will of God is not a command from above. A command is only its outermost side. Its shell. And inside, in the depth, is He Himself. His life. His presence. His strength. To do His will means not only to do what He commands, but also to share in this life, this presence, this strength.
But for that to become possible, God's will must not be perceived by us only as an instruction that has come from somewhere outside. It must become an inner imperative for us. Something that defines 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 defined by that inner divine presence which the Bible calls the breath of life.
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 defines the Savior's whole life, is the food of 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 it.