Remember that this is the inerrant, infallible, inspired Word of God, John chapter 17. These words spake Jesus and lifted up his eyes to heaven and said, Father, the hour has come. Glorify thy son that thy son also may glorify thee, as thou hast given him power over all flesh, that he should give eternal life to as many as thou hast given him. And this is life eternal. that they might know thee the only true God and Jesus Christ whom thou hast sent. I have glorified thee on the earth. I have finished the work which thou gavest me to do. And now, O Father, glorify thou me with thine own self, with the glory which I had with thee before the world was. I have manifested thy name unto the men which thou gavest me out of the world. Thine they were, and thou gavest them me, and they have kept thy word. Now they have known that all things whatsoever thou hast given me are of thee. For I have given unto them the words which thou gavest me, and they have received them, and have known surely that I came out from thee, and they have believed that thou didst send me. I pray for them. I pray not for the world, but for them which thou hast given me, for they are thine. And all mine are thine, and thine are mine. and I am glorified in them. And now I am no more in the world, but these are in the world, and I come to thee. Holy Father, keep through thine own name those whom thou hast given me, that they may be one as we are. While I was with them in the world, I kept them in thy name. Those that thou gavest me, I have kept. And none of them is lost but the son of perdition, that the scripture might be fulfilled. And now come I to thee. And these things I speak in the world, that they might have my joy fulfilled in themselves. I have given them thy word, and the world hath hated them, because they are not of the world, even as I am not of the world. I pray not that thou shouldest take them out of the world, but that thou shouldest keep them from the evil. They are not of the world, even as I am not of the world. Sanctify them through thy truth. Thy word is truth. As thou hast sent me into the world, even so have I also sent them into the world, and for their sakes I sanctify myself, that they also might be sanctified through the truth. Neither pray I for these alone, but for them also which shall believe on me through their word, that they all may be one as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee, that they also may be one in us, that the world may believe that thou hast sent me. and the glory which thou gavest me I have given them, that they may be one even as we are one, I in them, thou in me, that they may be made perfect in one, and that the world may know that thou hast sent me and hast loved them as thou hast loved me. Father, I will that they also whom thou hast given me be with me where I am, that they may behold my glory which thou hast given me. For thou lovest me before the foundation of the world, O righteous Father, the world hath not known thee, but I have known thee, and these have known that thou hast sent me. And I have declared unto them thy name, and will declare it, that the love wherewith thou hast loved me may be in them, and I in them. Let's pray. Father, we ask that you would continue to bless the reading, the hearing, and the preaching of your word for your glory and for our good. In Christ's name, we pray. Amen. Please be seated. Westminster Confession, or the shorter catechism, asks us how Christ executed the office of a priest. He has three offices, the prophet, the priest, and the king. And our answer gives us a little bit of an indicator as to why this prayer is often called the high priestly prayer. The divines give us this shorter catechism answer. Christ executed the office of a priest and is offering up of himself a sacrifice to satisfy divine justice and to reconcile us to God and in making continual intercession for us. So the priests in the Old Testament system would make sacrifices. They would intercede for the people we know. that the Old Testament system of sacrifices and offerings were a type that foreshadowed Christ coming and fulfilling those things completely. And so our divines, as they give us that shorter catechism answer, lay out in summary fashion, Christ offers himself as a sacrifice. We can kind of see and understand what that is, his work on the cross, Satisfies divine justice to reconcile us to God We hear that in the text We'll talk a little bit more about that and to make continual intercession for us and the author of Hebrews references that a Lot of times we think of the intercession that Christ makes for us Being in the present day like he's continually making intercession. It's an important context So as we speak, Christ is interceding with the Father on our behalf. But it's more fully orbed than that, if you stop and think about it, given what we see in John chapter 17. Matthew Henry's talked about this chapter, these passages, and he references the fact that Christ prayed for himself first, And he kind of has the idea of charity beginning at home. Many of us might understand it in terms of putting on our own mask in the event of turbulence so that we can help someone else put their own mask on. And certainly, as we see this prayer, this is actually the Lord's prayer. You know, as Christ gave us what we know is the Lord's prayer, that wasn't a prayer that he necessarily prayed. He didn't need to be forgiven of sin. He gave us the model that we should use as a template, so to speak, for how we ought to approach the Lord. But as far as the Lord's Prayer, this is it. John 17 is how he prays. And as we go through that, we see a consistent application with the exception of forgiveness of sin that he lays out for us in the Lord's Prayer. As we look at the text, Jesus is offering these prayers Not just for his apostles and that's the thing that I want to want to focus on more more this morning Turn with me to John chapter 17 verse 20 verses 20 and 21 in particular Jesus has prayed for himself that he would be able to glorify his heavenly father He's prayed for his apostles and how he's kept them, and this consistent refrain that you hear as you read this chapter is one of unity with the Father, that Christ is united with the Father, and in fact always has been. So the Arian heresy that we see play out in church history in the modern sense, where people claim that there was once a time where Christ wasn't, that's thrown out if we read John 17 Jesus says I've always been with you glorified Glorify me with the glory that I always had Jesus always knew he was God. So this modern skeptics that say well Jesus didn't know he was God some Church council pronounced him God, but he didn't know That's thrown out as well. If we read the text But look at verses 20 and 21 After he prays for himself after he prays for the Apostles, which makes sense. He knows what's about to happen. He And he knows what's about to happen with those men. They're going to be scattered. It's going to be a hot mess in their lives because they're expecting one thing of Christ. He knows what his father has in store for him. But let's pay attention to what he actually says in verses 20 and 21. Neither pray I for these alone, these referring to the apostles for whom he just prayed. But for them also which shall believe on me through their word, that they all may be one, as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee, that they also may be one in us, that the world may believe that thou hast sent me." You know who he's referring to here is us. We are the people who believe through the apostles teaching this apostolic this biblically minded apostolic succession not a faulty apostolic the the legitimate teachings of The apostles as God spread the church and grew the church. It's us Jesus prayed for himself that he would glorify his father in heaven That he would receive the glory that he always had he prayed for his apostles Because again The world hated them Because they hated Christ So he's praying for his apostles. Look what he says in verse 14 I've given them thy word And the world hath hated them Because they're not of the world, even as I am not of the world. This is another refrain that we'll see. That clear demarcation between those who are in the world and those who are in Christ. It's the only two types of people that there are. Those who are in Christ and those who are in the world. It's not a pleasant thing to have to say, but if we read the text honestly, Jesus is telling us that. So He knows, He's praying for His apostles, but verse 20 should give us the ultimate comfort. "'Neither pray I for these alone, but for them also which shall believe on Me through their word.'" It's us. We may have never belonged to anything else in our entire lives, but through the apostolic teaching of God's Word, We belong to something, and we belong to someone far greater than anything that we could possibly imagine. And Christ saw fit to pray for us. I'm not going to play fast and loose with the text, but if we want to think about it, we could almost substitute our own names into this. Neither pray I for these alone, but for Phil and our name, which shall believe on me through their word. In our minds, certainly, we can make that connection. because God has preserved His Word. He's kept it pure in all ages. Westminster, Chapter 1, Section 8. That means all the attempts to corrupt it, all the attempts to explain it away, all the attempts by certain people who've crept in unawares, who saw fit to distort God's Word, to deny the deity of Christ, all of those things all through church history that were going on even as the canon wasn't formally and officially closed yet, Paul references and alludes to people coming through and distorting God's Word. All of those things, none of them will matter at all. They all fall away because it's God's Word. And Jesus says as much, that we are sanctified by it. We are sanctified by God's Word And I cannot seem to find it in my text. 17, verse 17, sanctify them through thy truth. Thy word is truth. We are sanctified the same way the apostles were sanctified. We are prayed for the same way the apostles are prayed for. We matter that much to the eternal son of God that he sought to pray for us, not individually by name, but because of who he is, the God-man, he knew that we, in 21st century Virginia, in the United States of America, needed to be prayed for as a result of what? The war going on between Christ's people and the world's people. We mattered so much to Christ. A lot of times we focus on that you matter so much to God that he sent that he sent Jesus to pay the penalty for your sin. And it's right and proper that we wrap our minds around that. Because so much of our worldly teaching is, do it for yourself. You can fix yourself. You can convert yourself. You can become as gods. You have the divine spark in your own life and you can be as God. That's the world's teaching. So when we focus on, hey, as we share the gospel with people, when we say, hey, there's nothing that we can do. All of us have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. There's no one righteous. No, not one. But God demonstrates his love for us in this. While we were still sinners, while we were still waving our fingers and shaking our fist in God's face, he sent Christ to do the work that we couldn't do, to live the life we were supposed to live, fully and completely obeying God's law. not succumbing to temptation. And he died the death that we deserve. The penal substitutionary atonement is a real thing. And he defeated death, he ascended into heaven, he sits at the right hand of God, and like I said earlier, the author of Hebrews tells us he's making continual intercession. We fixate on that because that's the crux of the gospel teaching, but we as God's people need to remember that his high priestly office included just before he is about to go through the worst thing imaginable, the sinless, spotless Lamb of God being treated like a dirty, corrupt criminal. Just before he does that, in the last portion of the High Priestly Prayer, he prays for us. Because he knew what we were going to face. Now, we might be able to discern the times. We see references back in the Old Testament of folks that discern the times. They could kind of see how things might shake out because they knew history and maybe they understood current events. And we think that we can know what's going to happen. But we don't know what's going to happen like Christ knew and knows what's going to happen. And so when we see him say, I pray for them also which shall believe on me through their word." He knows the war, because He's in the war, because He's the reason the war is going on. All the way back from Genesis, it's always been a war against the seed of the woman. Satan knew that if he could crush that seed, that the Messiah wouldn't come. And so it's always been a war. And yet Christ completely and utterly destroys his enemies. That's one of the kingly duties that Christ does. He subdues his and our enemies. But in his priestly office, he intercedes for his people, all of his people. It would be reasonable to say, OK, well, it makes sense. Jesus is praying for himself. He's about to go through trials and afflictions, the likes of which we can't fathom. He certainly wants to glorify his Father in heaven, consistent with everything else he said in the gospel ministry. And it makes perfect sense, we think in our pragmatic minds, that he's going to pray for his apostles. They're expecting things, and it's going to be a shake-up for them, and the world is going to make war on them. But he's so concerned with his people that he does something that at least from a pragmatic perspective doesn't make a whole lot of sense But it does make sense when you realize who Christ is That he's the God man That he knows all things He says I'm not only going to I'm not only focused on my apostles I'm focused on every single person that will hear their teaching teaching that I gave them teaching that I gave them that was from God the Father, I know how hard it's going to be on them. So let's personalize this a little bit. In the hot mess that is our culture, it is so easy to get cynical or scared or hostile and deal with people acrimoniously. Because we're just tired of the war. We're tired of fighting. We know certain things are wrong and certain things are right. And our culture seems literally hell-bent on calling evil good and good evil, to use the prophet Isaiah's words. And we feel like we're all alone. It's just us and maybe the people in our small circle of friends. But then we open God's Word. We stumble upon John 17, verse 20, and we say, whoa, whoa, wait a second. All that's going on in Jesus' life, and He saw fit to pray for people who would listen to the apostles' teachings. Well, what were the apostles' teachings? Jesus is God. He's the Son of God. He came to save sinners. He was fully God, fully man. He was the only one that could satisfy divine justice. He was human, but he was also fully human, because he had to redeem fully human people. The apostolic teaching, the apostolic witness that was preserved in God's Word and then kept pure through godly people, godly men, godly women, the church councils that we see, Those don't have any power or authority in and of themselves. They are God. Those are an example of God working through people to preserve His Word. Athanasius Contramundum. Athanasius writing in opposition to Arius. Arius who said that there was a time where God wasn't, where Jesus wasn't, that He didn't exist. Arius didn't know his Bible. Jesus saw fit to pray for all of us. because that's how thorough His high priestly office is. He's not just making continual intercession in heaven right now. Way back when, just before He goes through the trials and afflictions that we desperately needed Him to go through, He saw fit to link us in His high priestly prayer. And for what purpose? Verse 21, that they all may be one. The biblical peace and purity, the biblical unity that comes through consistent application of the sanctifying power of God's Word as taught through the faithful apostolic teaching. That they all may be one as thou, Father, art in me and I in thee, that they also may be one in us. That we are united not only to one another, we are not only leaning on one another in periods of affliction and trials. But we are united to God the Father and God the Son. And many of us might not have been united to many things in our lives. Maybe we have worldly experiences that have isolated us. But we look at what Christ has done for us in this text. It's befuddling if it wasn't for the fact that He was God, that He even survived as long as He survived when you read the Gospels. The only way He survives is because He is the God-Man, and it's His plan to do these things. You look at how many times He was attacked and accosted, and the false trial and the false accusations would have broken a normal man. Christ is no normal man. And He does all of these things Not just to save, not just to save us from our sins. That would be great if it was just that, but it's not just that. It's to unite us to him and to our heavenly father. He does that through his spirit. So in this Trinitarian formula that we talk about, God, the father sends God, the son, God, the son does the work of redemption. God the Father and God the Son send God the Spirit. And what does this do? It has the power to unite not only us in this room, not only us in the world who've named the name of Christ as Lord, but to unite us to God the Father and to God the Son. We are united to something far more powerful than any sort of unity that the world could produce. And Jesus saw fit to pray for us. before our ancestors were even conceived. We mattered so much to him. So when we go through these struggles, when whatever happens in the world is going to happen, it doesn't matter. I mean, it does matter. It affects us. We are living in the world, even though we are not of the world. Christ alludes to this all through that not the least of which is at the bottom here That the world may believe that thou has sent me to the world when Christ unifies his people together the world will see That Christ was sent by God the Father Because we know in Scripture every knee is going to bow every tongue will confess that Jesus is Lord So Jesus is alluding to that whether we want to see it that way or not The world will know he says But what we see in the high priestly prayer is unity. Biblical unity. There's always that false unity that comes from the world's perspective. God the Father sending God the Son. God the Son praying that God the Father's name would be glorified. That Christ himself would be glorified with the glory that he already had before he came down from heaven. And that not only the apostles, but from all of the apostolic witness and all of the Christians that ever were, who are, and ever will be, would be united all together. There's only one person that does that, and that's God himself. Man can't unite for, I mean, anything. Even if people agree 100% of the time, there's always going to be something that messes it up. Because it comes from man. It comes from that flawed, natural, hard heart. But the unity that Christ talks about in the high priestly prayer is a unity that also speaks to God's glory. And Jesus makes that clear distinction. My people aren't of this world. We are different in Christ. We don't belong here. Now let's not take that to the extreme and say if you're converted the next step is to self-murder or something like that. We don't want to We don't want to give the skeptics folly like that. We are called to be in the world because we have kingdom work to do. But our kingdom work isn't in a vacuum. Our kingdom work is when we are unified by the apostolic teaching that has at its core God revealing to us what his word is. There are no private Christians. We have a personal relationship with Christ. We need that desperately. But we are saved into the body of Christ. The papists would say that you can't have God as father without the church as mother. They mean something completely different than what we've seen through church history where there's no salvation outside of the church. We don't mean that in an authoritarian way. We don't mean that as though the church is equal with God the Father, and therefore elevated over God the Father in practice. That's not what we mean. What we see in Christ, what we see in Christ's prayer, is a unity and being saved into a group of people, into the Church. And the Church matters to God. The Church matters to Christ. We are His bride, collectively. We are not isolated. You cannot be saved outside of the church, because once you repent and believe the gospel, you are brought into the number. You are added. You are, in effect, John chapter 17, verse 20. You are those who've been saved as an extension of the teachings of the apostles, that were the teachings of Christ, that were the teachings of God. You can't get away from being united as a Christian. United to the church now there are visible Extensions of that there are visible ways that we unite ourselves to the church We all understand that but what we're talking about here is the invisible bride of Christ all of the people for whom Christ died all of the people who are saved as an extension of the apostolic teaching I cannot stress that enough we are not saved because of We as individuals picked up a Bible, and we as individuals prayed a prayer. There's no part of our salvation that's individual. That's what I don't think I fully grasped prior to my conversion. There's no way I could have grasped it. Because the things that we're reading in Scripture are spiritual, and my heart was carnal, was worldly. I thought it was something I did to be saved. I didn't do anything. except for all of the sin that made it necessary for Christ to come, as Jonathan Edwards is quoted as having said. But the bottom line is God did the work. He's the one that softened my heart. He's the one that opened my eyes to see that the Bible wasn't an albatross hanging around the necks of people to shackle them, but it was actually filled with the words of life that took those shackles off. that set me free where I was once a prisoner and I didn't even realize it. And that's the story of everyone that's converted. My story is no different than any other conversion story because we're all saved into the family of God. Now just like our worldly families, we've got different stories to be sure, but when it comes down to how we entered into the family of God, the doctrine of adoption is what the theologians would call it. We are adopted into God's family because of the work of God Himself, and the work of God's Son Himself, and the work of God's Spirit Himself. We're not individual people at all, and yet we are. It's a strange way of looking at it if you stop and think about it. But Christ is talking about the unity that we have in the Father. Let's look at verse 23. He says in verse 22, in the glory which thou gavest me, I've given them, that they may be one even as we are one. So we receive a taste, certainly a foretaste in this world, of God's glory, the same glory Christ gets through Christ. He goes on, Father, I will that they also whom thou hast given me be with me where I am. that they may behold my glory which thou hast given me, for thou lovest me before the foundation of the world." So not only are we prayed for, not only are we saved, not only are we given a foretaste of glory, but Christ desires to be with us forever. And for many of us who've struggled with acceptance or have been maybe rejected by people, the idea of the second person of the Trinity talking to the first person of the Trinity on our behalf and desiring that we would be with Him, it's more than many of us could bear. We don't think logically about what these words mean sometimes. They're great words and we read through them and we appreciate them. But when we stop and think about what they actually mean, that we matter so much to our God, that we have so much value in Christ, that Christ is talking not only now but then about how much he desires to be united to us and how much he desires us to be united to his Father in heaven. Would that we all keep that in mind as the world spits us out, as we lose jobs, as we don't get second or third interviews, as maybe we have a hard time finding a place to live, or maybe we're castigated in social media circles. None of those things matter. What matters is God the Father and God the Son and God the Spirit desperately want and will, in fact, have us in their presence forever. Praise God. Let's pray. seems like an understatement. Lord, I pray that we would fully understand, as times get tough, you are far tougher. There is no plan of man that can thwart your will. And I pray, Lord, that you would remind us that your word is truth, and that not only that we are sanctified by it in our initial conversion, but we are sanctified by it in our progressive sanctification as we are made more like Christ and less like Adam. Help us to run to your word, to be reminded of how much you love us. Certainly your spirit will remind us in our minds, but help us see it in print. Help us see and fully understand how thoroughly Christ loved us. when he did his work on earth. Let us never forget that we are yours. In Jesus' name we pray. Amen.