TITLE
John 17:1-26 – The Prayer of Prayers
EXPLANATION
I am going to go out on a limb and call this chapter
the greatest prayer in the Bible. This
is not to take anything away from other great prayers in Scripture. However, this is God the Son intimately and
privately pouring out His heart to God the Father. This is a snapshot, a window, into the inner
circle of the Trinitarian counsels of God.
Jesus’s high priestly prayer is an immense skyscraper of theology that
towers above the biblical landscape like a behemoth.
Jesus, having finished His instructions to the twelve,
then lifted His eyes to Heaven and began to pray. His prayer was in four successive stages: the
glory of God, the witness of God, the protection of God, and the unity of God.
He began by unpacking the mutual glory between Father
and Son that had been accomplished in the Son’s ministry. Jesus asked that His Father now glorify Him,
in order that He could in turn glorify the Father. The Son would accomplish this by granting eternal
life to all whom the Father had chosen and given to the Son. The eternal life granted was nothing more and
nothing less than a genuine experiential knowledge of God and His Christ. This was the manner in which Jesus glorified
His Father; by accomplishing this work.
As such, Christ now asked the Father to glorify Him in return, in the
same way He had been glorified prior to His incarnation and even prior to
Creation. This is an incredibly
beautiful portrait of love. In the
relationship between Father and Son there is a beauty of mutual symbiotic
dedication to each other that is almost completely foreign in human
relationships.
Next, Jesus discussed the work of bearing witness to
God that He had performed. He had
accurately represented the Father to the ones who had been chosen for eternal
life. It was through words, the very
words of God, that such knowledge had been imparted and would continue to be
delivered. This totally accurate work of
revealing the Father that the Son accomplished had its expected result. That is, the ones to whom this revelation had
been given, in this case the disciples, after having come to the knowledge of
the truth, had been made mutual possessions of both the Father and Son. This is the effect that a true witness of
Christ has, when applied to someone who has been elected to salvation. They become one with God.
Having passed into this state, Jesus was well aware,
and had previously warned His disciples that this would cause worldly trouble
for them. As such, He next prayed to His
Father for protection. Jesus had already
fulfilled His responsibility of keeping all whom the Father had given Him. Not one of them had fallen away, except for Judas,
who had never been permanently chosen in the first place. Jesus wanted this protection to continue,
both during His torment and death as well as beyond. So, He petitioned His Father to seal the
believers in the impenetrable protective shell of the power of God. Significantly, what was on Jesus’s mind here
was not a removal of His disciples from the threat of danger and
persecution. He was not asking His
Father to take all trouble away from His own.
Rather, He wanted His own to be sustained through the midst of their
struggles. This was absolutely
necessary, because the disciples were going to be expected to take up the
mantle of witness for God that Jesus would have to lay down when He ascended
back to the Father. If believers were
lifted out of the world, then they could not be sent into the world by Christ
to bear witness to the truth.
To this point we might be forgiven if we thought that
all of these blessings and requests did not have much to do with us. It is pretty clear that Jesus has His
personally selected apostles in mind with His prayer to this point. But now, magnificently and wonderfully for
us, Jesus applies His prayer to all future generations of believers who would
be spiritually born from the fruit of the apostles’ ministry. The Lord’s steadfast desire was for all
believers to be perfectly united in harmony and oneness with each other and
with Him. The relationship of believers
with God should be such that the world literally could see the character of God
in the life of the one walking with Him.
Furthermore, if each Christian was exuding this lifelong witness, then
when they came into contact with each other, the expectation would be for
automatic and immediate harmony to exist between fellow image bearers of God
and His Christ.
APPLICATION
I think we could truly spend a lifetime unpacking the
truths present in John 17, and the ways and means by which they apply to
us. In short form, however, I think this
prayer should serve as a blueprint for our lives. Consider the following.
We are in the business of walking in Christ’s
footsteps. He was focused upon
glorifying His Father. Therefore, we
should do likewise. The exaltation of
God should be the foremost agenda on our minds and it should consume all of our
resources.
By engaging in this greatest of all lifetime
achievements, we automatically bear witness to God, just as Christ did. The only way available to us to bring glory
to God is to proclaim His character to the world through our own
character. As such, when we glorify God
we are literally revealing who He is to anyone and everyone watching.
Now then, as Jesus has already so eloquently pointed
out, this is going to cause us trouble.
We can expect adversity, mockery, revulsion, imprisonment, torture, or
even death. How could someone possibly
face such difficulty if they were not confident of their protected status? This is not a protection of flesh. It does not imply that we will have lives of
ease and comfort. What it does mean is
that we will never fall away from God because we are safe and protected in His
loving embrace.
This entire process requires being one with God. There is no way we can live to the glory of
God unless He is at work within us. That
is really one of the major points of the gospel of John, I think. No man can come to Christ unless He is placed
in Christ by God. It would be impossible
for us to resist persecution and persevere through the worst of it unless we
were indwelt by the very Spirit of God Himself.
Left to our own devices, we are frail and flippant. We will not endure without God. Thus, in a very real sense, both the means
and the end result of living like this is a oneness with the Father, through
the person of the Son, according to the witness of the Spirit.
No comments:
Post a Comment