Summary
Pastor Safrit walks through John 17:20-26, emphasizing Jesus' prayer for the unity of the church. He highlights that Jesus desires believers to be one, just as He and the Father are one, and that this unity is essential for the church's mission and witness to the world. The sermon calls for practical applications of love and truth to foster unity, urging congregants to reflect on their contributions to the church's harmony and to recognize the importance of being united in purpose and mission.
Housekeeping and Welcome
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They can be dismissed at this time, and we'll be in John chapter 17, verses 20 through 26.
This will be our last message in the Abide in Me passage. Thank you for singing with us. Our choir did a great job. If you ever want to join our choir or lead our choir, by all means, I will let you do that. Join and lead.
So feel free to come and help out any time.
What a blessing it was. Hudson came home last week. As you're making your way to scripture, he came home last week, and he said, Dad, I, or two weeks ago, he said, Dad, I got a girlfriend. I said, you got a girlfriend? I said, does Mom know about this for one?
He said, yeah. He said, do you want to know what her name is? I said, what's that? He said, Miss Pat. He said, shh, shh, don't tell Mr. Roy. He'll get mad.
And today, he sat beside his girlfriend, and it was the best I've ever seen him sit in church in my entire life. He closed his eyes while we prayed.
He looked up at me, and he smiled real big while we were praying as I was walking up here. So it's always good to see kids grow and mature and learn and sit in church. It's a blessing. Thank you, Miss Pat, for making him sit still.
Doesn't happen often, but we know who to send him to now. John chapter 17 is where we're going to be at. We'll stand and read God's word, and we'll jump into this message today, last one of this series.
The Bible says, Jesus is speaking here, and he says, I pray not only for these, he was talking about his disciples that we looked at last week, but also for those who believe in me through their word.
May they also all be in one as you, Father, are in me, and I am in you.
May they also be in us so that the world may believe that you sent me.
I have given them the glory you have given me so that they may be as one as we are one.
I am in them, and you are in me, so that they may be made completely one, that the world may know that you have sent me and have loved them as you have loved me. Verse 24, Father,
I want those you have given me to be with me where I am so they may see my glory, which you have given me because you loved me from before the foundation of the world.
Righteous Father, the world has not known you, however I have known you, and they have known that you sent me.
I made your name known to them and will continue to make it known so that the love that you have loved me with may be in them, and I may be in them. Lord, we love you.
We thank you for the reading of your word this morning. Help us to faithfully proclaim it this morning.
Help us to grow closer to you as we look at this prayer from Jesus, as he continues this out, as he prays for the church this morning. We love you. In your name we pray. Amen.
You may be seated. Just to give us a recap, over the last 11 weeks, we've been looking at this passage of John chapter 13 through 17, Jesus' final teaching to his disciples.
And he's telling them, this is how you can have life that is connected to the vine, that's going to remain in me, that's going to be abiding in that passage that we look at.
Jesus' Actions Before His Betrayal
And he starts off by washing their feet and having communion with them, and then he gives them teaching, and he answers questions from the disciples. And now at this point, he has made his way down to the garden. He's not yet at the garden.
This is a prayer that he prays with his disciples right before he goes into the garden to be betrayed. And it's what we call the high priestly prayer of Jesus to his disciples. And so he knows what's happening. He knows what's going before him. And yet he is praying for these things.
He prayed for himself and the glory that God would get last week.
We looked at the disciples that he prayed for and what they were going to go through. And then we get the curtain pulled back of him praying for the church this morning. He's praying for you and me in this first verse.
He says, but also for those who will believe in me through their word, through the word of the disciples, which is us.
And so as we begin to see this and look at this here in the moment, we begin to get our mind's eye into the image of what Jesus has for the church. What he desires for the church, you could say it like that.
And so I want to give an illustration, as I normally do, to give us sort of in the mindset of where we're at, of what the church should be like. So in April of 1970,
was anyone alive in April of 1970? Raise your hand. All right. We've got a lot of people in here that are alive then. If you believe that the government never lies to us and always tells us the truth, then we went to the moon.
And on Apollo 11, a couple of years later, Apollo 13 makes its mission.
It was going to be the third mission to the moon. And they were going to have this plan that they were going to step foot on the moon and they were going to collect more space rocks and all these things. And I believe this happened.
I'm not saying I don't. I believe it happened. But everything was going according to plan until one moment, two days in, the oxygen tank on the side of the plane, on the side of the spacecraft exploded. Three astronauts were suddenly stranded in outer space. I believe it says that they were about 200,000 miles away from Earth.
And they are now with limited oxygen, limited power, and no clear way to get home. The mission started as this, let's go to the moon. And all of a sudden, the mission changed from let's go to the moon to let's get these people home.
So you can imagine the shifting of thought. It was no longer let's try to land on the moon. It was how in the world are we going to bring these three men back home and make them home alive? This is the idea of everything that was going on. And back in Houston, something remarkable happened.
There's a documentary you can watch about this, Apollo 13. You can watch it. But engineers, flight directors, scientists, technicians, everyone came together with one goal in mind.
The goal was this, that they were going to be in unity in bringing these three astronauts back home. They all had different backgrounds. They all had different expertise.
They all had different roles. They all had different responsibilities. But in this moment, the guy that was the engineer was no longer engineering the plane. He was saying, how can I help this other guy figure out a way to bring these men back safely?
The story goes is that they worked around the clock. They improvised solutions that were using by the astronauts on board. They recalculated and calculated every single variable.
If you've looked at this, you know that at one point they had to figure out how to fit a square carbon dioxide filter into a round hole. Right? They had to do something that was square into something round. They used duct tape. They used plastic bags.
They used the flight manual that was on the plane to try to figure out how to do this and how to work all these things together.
And against all odds, if you were alive at that time, you were watching this against all odds, four days later, in this crisis of moment, those astronauts made it home safely. Now, I said all of that to ask you this question. Why did they make it home safely?
Because a group of men and women that were a whole lot smarter than I am sat in a room and did not care about who got the glory. They sat in a room and they said, how can we get these people home in this moment of crisis?
We're going to unify our minds together and become an essential part of getting these men 200,000 miles away back to earth safely to the best of our ability.
Now, I asked that whole story and I told that whole story for this reason. Jesus, on the night before the cross,
he's outside the garden. He's looking into the garden as he's about to go in and pray in the garden. He knows that Judas is going to come and betray him. He begins to decide what is going on and face something far greater than a space crisis.
He is facing the redemption of the world.
Crisis and Prayer in Difficult Times
And in that moment, when everything is crumbling around him, when he knows his best friend Judas, who he called to come and follow him, is going to betray him. The only thing he could do was this. Pray.
The only thing he could do was, Father, I don't have anything else I can do right now, but come and talk to you. His only resort that he had left was to be unified with him and the Father. And this is what he didn't pray for church. He didn't pray for comfort.
He didn't pray for escape. He prayed for unity of the church. He prayed that his disciples would be unified and that one day in the future for his church right now, that the church would be unified as well. Jesus knew something we often forget. That the church can be a divided thing. And when we are divided,
the mission becomes in danger. In Apollo 13, when this happened, if the engineer would have said, listen, I don't care what you guys are working on over there.
I'm just going to keep doing my little thing in my cubicle, and I'm not going to worry about what you guys are talking about because everything that I'm doing is working right. If that would have happened, I'm very sure that these three men would have never made it home.
But they sacrificed to themselves. They came together. They put their differences aside. If you've ever worked in a group of people, everyone has their own opinion, and yet they were united. If the church is united,
the world begins to take notice. The world begins to look and say, there's something going on over there that I'm not seeing anywhere else. And we have to ask ourselves, are we that united in Jesus the way that Jesus is praying for the church?
Or are we living in a way that's working against it and working against the unity of what God has designed the church to be? And so let's break this down.
I've got lots of points we're going to talk about. I'm going to quickly go through here. But there's a lot to unpack in this passage. But verses 20 through 23, Jesus prays for a church united.
He looks into the future of all eternity, and he begins to see and understand that there is going to be a massive group of believers in the future, you and me. And he says, they're going to have difference of personalities. They're going to have differences of preferences.
They're going to have differences in ideas and how things should work and the color of a carpet and the color of a wall and the color of the lights. And they're going to have so many different things that they're going to cause them to be divided.
And Jesus looks down from all of eternity and says, Father, can the church be united in the future? That's my only prayer.
My only prayer in this moment is that for these first three verses is that the church would come together and be united. And he sort of lays out some qualities of united, some qualities of what it would look like to be united.
The first one is this, the scope of the unity that we look at. He says here, all who will believe. This is bigger than just the 12 that we look at in Scripture.
We look at the 12 disciples, and I'm sure if we gave time, you could name all 12 of them, and you could give their names and the pros and cons and strengths of each and every one of them. But in this moment, when Jesus is praying for the future,
he understands the 12 won't be there. And he understands there's going to be a new group of 12, and there's going to be a new group of churches, and there's going to be a new group of people that come together and join together for the sake of the gospel.
And he says, I want to pray for them, and I want to include every generation that is all throughout history that's going to happen into the future as our kids and grandkids begin to lead the church. He said, I'm praying for them as well.
And he says, as I'm looking through this, I'm going to pray for the future believers.
Now, this is what rocked me this week as I was beginning to study this. He's praying specifically for you and for me. He's literally in the moment of the garden, and he's saying, one day, 2,000 years from now, there's going to be a young,
probably little arrogant, cocky guy that's leading the church in Ronda, North Carolina, that's going to be the pastor of that church. I'm praying for that pastor.
I'm praying for the church that he's going to lead. I'm praying for the church that I got saved in as a five-year-old boy in Salisbury, North Carolina. He was looking ahead, and he was praying for that church.
He was praying for the children that are going to go to youth camp this summer.
He was praying for the young people who are going to go to teen camp this summer. He was praying for the teenagers and young people and adults that are going to come to Bible school this summer, all throughout our state, all throughout our country.
He is looking ahead of time, and he is saying, I am praying for them because they are foundational to the ministry and the mission of what I have.
And you did not take him by surprise when you walked through those doors. And I want us to understand that Jesus is praying for us. And unity as a church is not optional, but it is the foundation of what we have in the mission of Christ. The church must be unified.
It's like this. Kim was telling me that Natalie is running track, and I think Charlotte runs track as well. They've got one more track meet this Thursday.
I haven't been to any of their track meets, so I'm going to try to make it to it. I've got to check my son's schedule and everything else that's going on. But the one thing that I love about track and relays is there's this baton handing off.
And this baton handing off has to be in sync. If you watch the Olympics, you understand that one person's running and one person's reaching out, and there's this transferring of the baton that the next person has to go forward with it.
And if those people have not practiced and been in sync, and they drop the baton, or the baton never gets handed off, all of a sudden the entire event is now put on hold. The entire event is now in shambles. That team is now losing because they were not together in the mission.
The mission of the church is the same way. The mission of the church is this global baton race of us running our race and us looking to the future and saying, this is the person that I'm going to train, disciple, and allow to lead the church, and I'm going to hand them that baton.
But before I hand them the baton, I've got to teach them, and I've got to train them, and I've got to show them these things so that they know how to do the ministry, so that when I hand
the baton off, nothing is let go. This is why it's so important for the church to be in unity and allowing us to grow forward, because when the church doesn't do this, the mission begins to slow down.
The mission begins to have a pitfall, and the mission begins to have a crack, and all of a sudden people go fall through those cracks, and we're like, why did that happen? Why are these things out there?
Because the church was not in unity and growing and building up the other people to take upon these next steps.
As you personally ask yourself this question, are you contributing to the unity of the church,
or are you contributing to the tearing down of the church? We all have a job. We all have a role, right? I love the camaraderie of prayer and ideas, but there are often times where we can get to the point where it's no longer a prayer request, it is a gossip session.
And I find myself in this way too, but we all of a sudden can begin tearing down things instead of building things up.
And we must be in the idea of this unifying movement to where we come together and we say, God, I want to contribute to the unity. I want to bring the people of the church together for your glory and for your honor. Number two, he gives us the source of the unity.
This ties back into verse 17 that we looked at last week. Sanctify them in truth. Your truth is what brings unity.
Unity is not built on feelings. We don't get together in the same room and say, let's all feel and have this great kumbaya moment, and let's feel really good together and have this unifying feeling. Unity is not built on compromise. Unity is built on truth.
Let me give you an illustration here as I break this down.
If you have a coach that comes in and he understands that the truth of winning the ball game and doing it to the best of their ability is all that he has,
and he comes together, he will begin to bring this idea of, I'm going to drive the truth home and I'm going to be harsh.
But if you have a coach that comes in that doesn't really care about the truth and only cares about the conviction of the players, he's going to sort of be hallowed in his idea, and the two must come
together where there is truth and there is unity and there is a belief in what we're doing. What we call this in the church is doctrine. What we believe and why we believe it. How we are living out this doctrine.
And many people, as all throughout history have, and commentators have pointed out that Jesus does not pray for the organizational unity of the church.
Spiritual Unity and Shared Truth
He doesn't say, I'm going to pray for this group of people and this group of people to come together and work and do this. What he simply plays for is this, the spiritual unity to be rooted in a shared truth of the gospel.
We can go out and we can have a hot dog fundraiser or a trunk or treat, or we can go out and we can do these things. And as long as the spiritual understanding of the gospel is rooted in everything we do, and we're rooted in that,
then the believer can go out and they can share these things, and we can be together in truth because we have the source of all this truth in our lives as the gospel. Brody likes to row on canoes.
I don't like canoes. They hurt my back. I'm not a small guy, so canoes are not my best.
But every once in a while, there was one time at camp and we're out there and we're rowing, and Brody was rowing in one way and I was rowing the other way, and it was not long. I think it was actually Hudson in this moment.
Hudson's rowing this side, and I began to row on this side, and we started doing circles. You ever seen this? Where the canoe is no longer rowing in the right direction.
It's doing circles because I would tell Hudson, row on the right side, and he would row on the left side, and I was rowing on the left side, and he wasn't understanding it. He's four or five years old.
And all of a sudden, this is what it looks like in the church. When we are not in the same idea, in the same sink, we begin to run in circles.
We begin to do things over and over again, and God is telling us, I need you to rally around truth, and that's going to be the thing that gives you the strength to do the mission. So we see the source of unity.
We see the scope of unity. Let's quickly move forward here. The shape of unity.
Verses 21 and 22, he says here, as you, Father, are in me, I will be in them. This is not a surface level of unity. This is an idea that grows so much deeper than just,
hey, we're Christians. We look right. We act right. We talk right. We're doing the right things. What he is saying is this is a Trinitarian style of unity. This is the Father, Son, and the Spirit coming together in a deep, relational, inseparable unity that comes together as believers come together.
This is like this.
My best friend, John, I talked to him last night, and he was sharing some things, and he didn't agree on everything I was saying, and I didn't agree on everything he was saying last night.
Theologically, he was saying a couple of things, and we're not going to go into the idea of all that, but this morning, he texts me, and he says, hey, I'm praying for you this morning. I'm praying that lives will be changed by your preaching this morning.
It was the idea of, yeah, we may not agree on everything yesterday, but we're so unified in this idea that the Father is so much more greater than our own personal preferences that we can pray for each other in the way that God's going to be glorified. Unity that is personal,
unity that is powerful, and unity that is an idea of shaping our lives like the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit are shaped together.
They are in unity with one another that as they think they do, and as they go through life, they are so close to one another that Jesus is saying, the model that I want you to live your life by in unity
is the way that me and the Father and the Holy Spirit live. How is that?
That you're in me and that I am you, and we begin to live our life so close that when bitterness comes in, it gets immediately pushed out. When division comes in, it gets immediately thrown out the door because we can't have division because we're so unified in what we're doing.
And when shallow relationships come in, it's like, you know what, I've got to be deeper in this relationship with someone. I want you to imagine a marriage that has been married for 30 or 40 years. Me and my wife celebrate 15 years this month, and she put up with me that long.
We're praying that she'll continue to put up with me for many, many years to come.
But a marriage that has been strong for decades and decades, if there's depth to it, there's truth, there's honesty, there's trust in that marriage, and you begin to say to that person, hey, these are some things I'm struggling with.
And because it has been together for so long, they understand, and they know what is going on in that life, and they know how to encourage and sometimes discourage. But they're there, and they are living this life in marriage because it has been together and shared with one another.
And Jesus is telling us that this is the type of unity that he's talking about. A marriage that has been brought together is just like the marriage of the church with the Christ. As we come together and we multiply across our community and across our world.
Love as the Glue of Unity
The strength of unity. Why is there unity, and how does it bring strength? Through the love of Jesus. Verse 23, it says, Through your love, they are complete. Complete. Love is the glue that brings all this unity together.
I can't come in and say, Hey, let's be unified and not give a reason for us to be unified.
That's why last year at about this time I preached on the biblical view of love and what that means and how that works in our life. Because the love is the true foundation of what it means. Love is like this.
You can have a vehicle that can go 180 miles an hour and is running to the best of its ability. All the spark plugs are perfect. The motor's running great, but without the fuel in the gas tank, the car's not going to go anywhere.
Love is the fuel that we put into the gas tank of the church that says, We're going to go out and we're going to reach the world and we're going to go out and we're going to preach the
gospel. How does that be fueled? Through the love of the Christ. Through the love of God that he has given us. And we begin to walk through this love in our life. A love that covers our sins when we have done wrong.
A love that connects us with the Savior of Jesus who gives us this power and a love that can convict us when we've done wrong.
I know when I've done wrong or when I do things that I shouldn't have do with our family and our kids, Allie will come to me and she'll say, Hey, you were a little abrasive with your words towards your daughter or towards your son. Why does she do that?
Because she knows, and I know that she loves me and I know that she cares about me and she's telling me this because she loves me. She's not telling me this because she hates me.
She's telling me this to help me be a better father.
Things that I don't see that she can come in and say, Hey, this is how I would say things or this is how I would do things.
And she begins to help me model my fatherhood and my parenthood because Jesus is telling us we must love one another as it connects us back to the truth that we also have.
We can say the truth to someone that may be a little tough to say because they know we love them.
So the strength of this unity is through the love of Christ, the significance of the unity. Verses 21 and 23 talk about this, so that the world may believe.
This is the real reason why we are unified is because the significant as we begin to walk through this together, we begin to see that unity is evangelistic.
Unity's Impact on Community Perception
Unity is what we can go out and we can share the gospel with someone and we can say, Yeah, I go to that church down the road and they go, That church is pretty unified.
That church is pretty, got it together. They understand what the mission is and they are doing things the right way and they are doing things the way God would have them to do that and people see that and it brings the gospel into a better proper view.
You see, when the church is divided, we lose our mission and it damages our witness.
When we are divided on an issue and all of a sudden there's rifts and I've been there, I talked about it this week with a friend of mine. I was at a church, the church I grew up in, the church I was saved in, there was a really hard rift that came in.
Church was running three, four hundred people. It was a church that was growing and all of a sudden, sin happened in the church,
division happened in the church, the community found out about it because the community finds out these things and all of a sudden, the witness of the church was ruined.
As a teenager, a couple years later, after all that happened, I would go out and I would invite people to church.
We had a little bus route and I was inviting people and I'd knock on their door and I'd say, hey, you want to come to church or whatever and they would say, what church is it? And I would tell them and they'd go, oh, that church.
And immediately, the witness of the church was destroyed because they knew, the community knew that something bad had happened there. Unity validates the message that God has given us.
Division begins to distort the mission that God has called us to do.
What does our unity look like to the watching world or what does our lack of unity look like to the watching world? How are we unified in the mission that God has given us? This is what Christ is praying for in these first three verses.
He's praying for the church to be united in a way that it makes such a big difference that everyone is taking notice. But not only does he pray for a church united, look at what he does in the last part of this chapter. He prays for a reunited church.
In verses 24 through 26, he begins to shift his tone of prayer to not current focus, but future focused. And a one day reunited church that is eternal and glory and hopeful in Christ. He begins to look at this favorite topic of ours, right?
We love eschatology. We love end times. If I got up and I said, next week we're going to preach on Revelation for the next year, I probably would have more people here in the next year because everyone wants to know about Revelation and everyone wants to know about the end times. And I understand that.
I love the book of Revelation. I love the end time. And Jesus in this same mindset here begins to pray for a church that will one day be reunited.
And this is a hope for us that even as we go through death, even as we go through difficulties, as even this week with Randy passing away and with Rodney passing away, we can understand and know that one
day we're going to be reunited with them and also in the glory of God Almighty who saved our soul from hell, who brought us into this wonderful reunion that he is going to lay out for us.
Desire of Christ for Unity
And so what is going on here? Very quickly, I'm going to lay out these five points and I'll be done. The first is this, the desire of Christ. What does Jesus pray for in a reunited church? He says this, I want them to be with me.
I want you to understand how deeply personal this statement is.
I want this group of people, the church, that's one day going to believe in me, I want them to come and have fellowship with me and see me in all of my glory.
He is praying specifically for you and specifically for me that not only does he want us to be saved, but he wants us to have this relationship that God has determined for us.
As we're looking at in our Sunday school class and we're looking at the fall of man and Genesis,
right, God created Adam and Eve to fellowship with him and walk with him every single day of their life.
And he comes into the garden and he asks the most depressing question ever, Adam, Eve, where are you at?
And Adam and Eve hid behind a bush and hid in the trees because they were ashamed to even answer that Jesus was calling their name, that God was calling their name. And it gets back to the point of Jesus, God is standing there saying, hey James, where are you at?
I want to have a relationship with you. I know you're saved.
I know you trusted in me, but I want you to live every day with me.
I want you to walk with me and talk with me and pray with me and commune to me and read your word and be so in tune with Jesus that he says, I desire this permanent, ongoing attention with just you and the Father. Father. And this is what Jesus is praying for.
He's saying, this is not just I'm going to prepare a place for you, but I am preparing a people for that place that is one day going to be in glory, that we're going to be able to experience God in his perfectness that man has never seen since the garden.
The Bible says that Enoch walked with God and God looked at him and saw favor on him and said that he was one of the most holy men that ever lived, that God just took him on in their glory.
Would that be our testimony? That we would be so close to the Lord that the next step that we take is just straight into heaven. And it's like I'm already experiencing it here on earth. I'm already experiencing walking with Jesus.
I might as well go ahead and go on into glory because that's all I can experience.
This is what it looks like as we begin to walk through our relationship with Jesus. It's like this.
It's like the Father who has sent his kid off to college or off to military or whatever it may be and the Father knows the Son's coming home.
We have these things called Life 360 and you can track people's phones and my dad recently started doing this and so he knows where I'm at at all times and so he's like James, why are you over there? James, why are you doing this? I'm like, dad, I'm 37 years old.
I've got my own kids. What are you doing watching where I'm at? And all of a sudden
he knows we're coming over and my mom is the world's worst. I went to lunch the other day with someone in Salisbury. She goes, James, why are you in Salisbury?
Why didn't you come see me? Why are you tracking me? What are you doing? But if I'm going to my mom's house, I'll use my mom because it's Mother's Day coming up. If I'm going to my mom's house and my mom says, hey, I know you're going to be there at noon for lunchtime. She's watching the phone
and as I get closer all of a sudden she's standing at the door and she's waiting. She's like, okay, James should be here. Why is he not here? He was supposed to be here three minutes ago. All of a sudden I get a text message from mom. Where are you at?
Traffic happens, mom. Kids were behaving, misbehaving. Had to get out, whoop one of them. Like things happen in life. But she is so anticipating. She's so waiting. She has a desire for me to be there that she's standing at the door and when I get there all of a sudden
son and daughter-in-law and all the kids are there and it's a wonderful reunion. This is Jesus.
He's standing on the footsteps of heaven. Father, I want to go get my kids. Can I go now, Father? No, wait a little bit longer. I'm just ready.
I have this desire to go and get my kids. I have this desire to go get my bride. I gave my life for them. I want to go get them. He has this desire for us to be with him
and yet we're sitting down here on earth and we're like, yeah, one day I'll be there, Lord, but I want to live my own life down. He's like, no, no, no.
I want you to serve me. I want you to love me. I want you to give to what I've got for you. I want you to live a life that is so consumed with Christ that all you do in your thinking is,
can I tell someone about Jesus? How can I influence their life now about what God has done for them? Number two, the destination of the church and I've got to hurry. The destination of the church is verse 24, to see my glory.
I want you to understand Jesus in this moment doesn't pray and say, one day the church is going to see the streets of gold.
I can't wait for them to see that street of gold that I prepared for them. I can't wait for them to see the mansion that I have prepared for them. I can't wait for them to see the pearl gate that I've got prepared for them in this house.
No, Jesus prays and he distinctly says, I can't wait for them to see my glory.
The glory that you gave me from the foundation of the world. I can't wait for the church to be as John writes in John 3, 2, that the church would look more like Christ.
You ready? We will be like him because we will see him as he is. The glory of God revealed and the glory of God reflected as we begin to look at Christ face to face. The street of gold, the gates of pearl,
the marriage of the lamb is all going to be faded into existence because we're going to see Jesus face to face and we're going to see him and what he did for us and we're going to see the
nail-scarred hands and we're going to see the side that was pierced for us and his blood that was poured out for us and this is the destination that he has for him that we would behold him and that we would become him
as we get closer and closer to him. When I was 14 years old and going through driver's ed, I didn't understand this at the time.
I understand it now more, less now because I've got a car that drives itself but as we were going through driver's ed, the driver's ed teacher, he looked at us, it was my football trainer, Dr.
Schof and he looked at me and he said, as you're driving, where your eyes are at is where you're going to go.
You're going to be distracted as you're driving. If you see something over here in the side of a ditch and you begin to look at that ditch and as you go by, you're going to look back up and the car is magically going to be going into that ditch.
If you see something on this side of the road and you begin to look at it and you begin to pay attention to it, the car is going to drift over into what your eyes were at because you inevitably are going to go where your eyes are pointed to.
I didn't understand that as a kid. Now I understand it more as an adult as I'm driving and things distract me,
a little ADD up here, but as things distract me, I begin to go through life and I begin to see my eyes begin to get wayward off of Jesus. And he said, we've got to get our eyes fixed back on him so that we are going in the right direction.
He says, what we behold is what we will become.
As we look to Christ, the one who has saved us, the one who has gave his life for us, we begin to be determined to figure out what he is and how he is in our life. Number three, the distinction of the church.
The distinction of the church. The world did not know you. There is a clear contrast and a clear line of division.
There is a community that is chosen for Jesus and the church is different. As I said last week,
too often the church blends in with the world and the world doesn't even know there's a difference between us and them. Jesus is praying here for the church and he says, the church should be different.
We are marked and we have a life that is bought by Christ and we should live a life that is completely different from the world and when we do that, the world's not going to like us.
The world's not going to get along with us but you are going to be bought with the price of Jesus and there is this distinction between us and the world.
Number four, the disclosure of the church. I did alliterate all these so that my wife would be happy. The disclosure of the church. Look at verse 26.
I made your name known. He begins to take this into the revelation of Jesus to the relationship that we have with him and he says that Jesus begins to reveal how closely intimate we're going to be when we begin to know who Jesus
is, when we know who the Father is and the Bible says that to know this name, to know the name of Jesus, it's a biblical term to know the character and the nature of God.
He says you're going to know Jesus, you're going to know God so much that you're going to know his character, you're going to know his nature and I'm going to reveal these things to you
so that you can be a church that is more on fire for God because when we truly understand who he is and what he's done for us,
we'll be like the old preacher said, we'll be willing to charge hell with a squirt gun
because we're going to be so on fire for God, we're going to be so on fire for what he's done for us that we can't help attack the things that are coming against the church. And he says, I want to tell you these things that you will know God more supremely.
And the final thing here, number five, the divine indwelling of the church.
Look at what it says here in verse 26, love in them and I in them.
This is where it begins to bring it all down as Jesus is finishing up his prayer. He says this, I am going to be in them through the Holy Spirit.
I'm going to indwell the church and indwell the believers and my love that I have for them is going to be in them so that they can love other people supernaturally so that when they love someone who hates
them, they're going to say, that's not right. They hate you. You're supposed to hate them back, but you're loving your enemy. That person just punched you in the face as Jesus said and you turned the other cheek. I don't understand that. Why did you do that? Normal people would have punched them back,
but Christ's love is inside of us and we begin to respond differently.
We respond contrary to the way the world would expect us to respond because Christ is inside of us and the unity of the church is all built on the love of Christ inside of the church so that when
the church comes out and the church begins to love those that are unlovable, the church begins to love those that have been abused and hurt and victimized,
the church can now begin to work and do things for the sake of Christ and Christ says that you will have the same love that I had for the one at the very beginning of this study.
The very beginning when Jesus walked into that room and took the basin and took the cloth and walked over to Judas' feet
and said, this is the man that's going to betray me. He didn't say this out loud, but this is the man that's going to betray me and he gets down on his hands and his feet. He takes off his sandals and he begins to wash the feet
of the man that just paid for him to be betrayed and be sent to the cross.
He said, this is the love, this is the indwelling love that I'm going to have in you so that you can do something so much more for the world than the world has to offer.
Church, I don't know about you, but this is one of the most staggering things for me is if I were to be able to look into the future and see someone was going to betray me
and then go and bless them more and go and honor them more and go and give them more favor and go and do more things for them and even call them to be one of my disciples in our church. That's what Jesus did.
He said, hey, I want you to come follow me for three years. I want you to be a part of my first church that I'm going to establish. If I knew that, I would be like, yeah, I don't want that guy here. He's going to betray me. He's going to hurt me.
He's going to do things I don't like and yet Jesus says, I want him to come in and I'm going to give him a favored position inside the church. I'm going to give him all the money and you're going to deal with all the money. You're going to take care of it.
This is the love that Jesus gives us and he says, this is the indwelling love of Jesus that should be into church is that we're going to love those that are around us and the love that we have is going to overflow into them. As Terry comes,
I want us to ask ourselves a couple of things. Jesus is now praying right before the church, right before the cross, right before he goes to Calvary.
He's about to go into the garden. The Bible says that he prays and he prays sweat drops of tears. I'm sorry, sweat drops of blood that he begins to pray. This excruciating prayer I've laid in this garden twice now.
I've been able to walk around in this garden where Jesus would have walked in and prayed. I began to get to one point where I look up and you can see the tower where Pilate's house was at where Jesus was going to go to be tried for the sins of the world.
The weight of what that was like was overwhelming. And Jesus in this moment of going to the cross, the most painful execution that was going to happen, the weight of that was not on his mind. The weight of unity of the church was on his mind. Oftentimes we think of this unity as an afterthought.
Well, Jesus was going through life and he was like, oh yeah, by the way, I want the church to be unified. No.
He's praying with his disciples. He's about to go to the cross and he spends six verses, probably longer, but this is just what was recorded, praying for the church and his disciples to be unified. This is the primary thought. This is the priority
of the thought of Christ right before he goes to the cross is that the church would be unified. That the church would come together and that one day there would be this reunion, but before that reunion happens, the church has to reach the people that are around it.
And the only way we do that is through the priority of being unified. This morning, if you're here and you don't know Christ,
it's hard to be unified with someone you don't know. Before I knew my wife, before me and her got married, we knew some things about her, but once we got married, I really knew some things about her. Like you understand what happens when you go through marriage
and Christ says, in order for you to be unified with me, you have to know me first. You have to know that I came into this world to die for you, to redeem the church so that you can walk with me in unity.
And the question we have to ask ourselves is once we know Christ, and maybe today would be the day you come to know him, but today we have to ask ourselves, as believers,
are we unified with other believers for the sake of the gospel? Are we saying, I'm going to put my own preferences aside? I'm going to put my own priorities aside?
I'm going to be like those men in Apollo 13 who put away all of the things that I was doing in order for the church to come together and rescue those people that need to hear the gospel. Are we grounded in the truth of the gospel?
Is everything we do driven by the sake of the gospel and driven by what Christ has done for us? And then ultimately,
the third question is, am I living with eternity in view? The decisions I make today,
the decisions I make tomorrow, the decisions I make 10 years from now will affect the eternal view of the reality of heaven. And as I interact with someone at work, as I interact with someone at the grocery store,
do I see heaven and do I say, I want them to be there with me and so I'm going to tell them about Jesus in order for them to come to heaven with me one day. And I want them to experience this joy that I have in Jesus.
And am I living with the idea of there is an eternal heaven and there is an eternal hell and I'm living with that view in light. The closer we get to Christ, the closer we get to one another.
The closer our men's group and our women's group and our small groups get with Christ, the more unified we are together because He is the thing that brings us together. together. And one day we'll experience
that in full. Right now it's in part. We have a partial unity here in the church. But one day we'll be standing in front of Jesus in all of glory and we'll see what He did for us and we'll experience what He did for us in the fullest understanding of that.
Closing Prayer and Reflection
And our unity will be in full. I so long for it to be here on earth so that God would look down and He would say, Pleasant Grove, that's a unified church.
That's a church that is wanting to be reunited with me one day and everything they do, every outreach they do, every mission they do, every person they talk to is doing that for the sake of reaching someone else for Jesus.
And we can begin to experience that unity and experience that goodness of God here on earth. Let us pray.
Father, we love you. We thank you for what you've done for us. Thank you for who you are.
We thank you for your last prayer that we get to look at here. We don't know every prayer that you prayed, but in this moment you revealed the high priestly prayer that you prayed for yourself, you prayed for your disciples, but ultimately
you took a couple of verses and you prayed for me. Lord, I'm so grateful and thankful this morning that you did that.
I'm thankful this morning that you prayed for each and every person in this room and I'm thankful that you have prayed for their life, for their salvation so that they would come to know you and ultimately that they would live their life for you in glory.
That they would live it here on earth and then one day be in glory with you. We thank you for what you've done in your name we pray. Amen.
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