The Real Lord's Prayer, Part 4
Tom Shrader closes his series on John 17 by examining Jesus' prayer for all future believers, focusing on three petitions: that they would be united, that they would experience the same love the Father has for the Son, and that they would one day behold Christ's glory in heaven. He clarifies that Christian unity is not organizational conformity but a shared fellowship rooted in the Holy Spirit and the gospel, expressed practically through diverse community life and small groups. Drawing on 2 Corinthians 4–5 and the reality of the resurrection, he calls believers to live with an eternal perspective that shapes how they love, suffer, and witness to the world around them.
“The greatest picture of God's love for you is the selfless, voluntary, atoning death of Christ on the cross.”
— Tom Shrader
Series: John: The Essence of Life (2007)
Recorded: 2007 at East Valley Bible Church
Duration: 59 min
Themes: unity, prayer, eternal life, glory, love, community, resurrection, suffering, new believer, struggling with suffering, feeling disconnected from church, young adult, longing for heaven, searching for community, dealing with loss, questioning faith
Scripture: John 17:1, John 17:5, John 17:6-19, John 17:14, John 17:20-26, John 13:34, John 3:16, Isaiah 6, Revelation 5, Acts 1:8, Acts 2:37-46, 1 Corinthians 12:12, 1 Corinthians 12:4-6, 2 Corinthians 4:7-16, 2 Corinthians 5:1-9, 2 Corinthians 13:14, Galatians 2:20, Philippians 2, Romans 5:8, 1 John 1:3, 1 John 4:10, Malachi 3:6, Genesis 3, Hebrews 11
Theological Themes: eschatology, eternal perspective, sanctification, unity of believers, intercessory prayer, pneumatology, holy spirit, resurrection hope
Full Transcript
Opening Prayer and Welcome
For life and death that we find in Him that paid the price for our sin. Thank you for Your Spirit that indwells us and brings us to a point where we can understand Your truth. God, as we this morning come together, we pray that You would enlighten us, open our eyes to see, our ears to hear, and You would use this time to take Your Word and imprint it on our heart. God, we pray that to You here this morning, in Jesus' name, Amen.
Well, good morning. Great to see you this morning. Grab the bulletin that you received when you came into the room today. Let's take a second and work our way through this.
Almost every week we begin the same way by welcoming those of you who are visiting us today. Thank you for being here. It's a privilege for us to be able to welcome you, and we have over the years struggled with the best way to communicate to you. We have resolved that the best way to do that is to have you initiate that communication, so we've provided you a guest registry card. We'd ask you to take a second, open that bulletin, grab that card, complete it, and when you are done with that, drop it in one of the boxes as you leave here today.
We have also provided a monthly class for those of you who are new or newer to the church. Connect One — notice in the bulletin the next class is set for August 5th, and we invite you to join us at 10:30. Details are there in the bulletin, and we look forward to seeing you.
Announcements and Ministry Updates
We have two groups now that are traveling to Morocco. They are there — continue to pray for them. You can be involved in their lives in a variety of ways. Many of you have been part of the team that is sending them and are getting communication from them. They've had a couple of problems, some physical things, maybe more cultural adjustment than anything, so continue to pray for them that God would open doors and hearts and minds.
They have found a way for you to be involved financially, and one of them is a t-shirt that they've produced. It's available over in the bookstore, and if you want to go over — some of you have not seen the commons, so swing over afterwards and you can grab something to eat or drink, or one of those t-shirts, or simply walk in and take a look around and enjoy that building, and more importantly, the way God is using it for ministry.
A couple of other things are in the bulletin worth highlighting. This Friday night is Dinner and a Movie — details are in the bulletin for that 20-something ministry. Also, this Wednesday night will be our fourth Hot Summer Night. We sat down around March and thought about something we could do for the summer, and we came up with an idea called Hot Summer Nights — five Wednesday nights hosted here on campus. We'll be in the commons this week.
We've had a great time and a great response, from Barry Asmus to last week's discussion on worship. For these last two nights we're going to feature different areas of the church community. This week, if you are from the Chandler or Mesa area, you are especially welcome — though if you're not from those areas, that is not to say don't come. We also have a real change of pace coming: college football is getting ready to start, there's a lot of expectation about ASU football, and we're going to have Jeff VanRaphorst here to talk a little ASU football and then talk some area ministry.
The last week of Hot Summer Nights will feature Tempe, Phoenix, Ahwatukee, Queen Creek, and Gilbert, so if you're in one of those areas, make a note of that. It's been a great time to learn what's going on in your area and meet people from your area. So many of you have committed to showing up all five times this summer, and I think God is really rewarding you in the midst of that.
Also, look for the postcard insert in your bulletin. Our Latino church, Ponte Vida, has decided that about half a dozen times this year they're going to meet on our campus at the six o'clock service. The next one is next Sunday, right here in this room. Many of you have Spanish-speaking men, women, teenagers, and children in your sphere of influence, and this is a wonderful opportunity to invite them. The other dates are September 9th, October 28th, and December 9th. We've provided these cards as a handout, and if you need more of them, you can swing by the office and they would love to provide you with even more.
Introduction to John 17
Let me invite you to open your Bibles to John chapter 17. Today we finish this seventeenth chapter. It is Jesus praying. Often in Scripture we will see that Jesus goes away and prays, but in John chapter 17 — maybe for really the only significant time, and certainly the most substantial in terms of volume — we find out what He prays.
In the first five verses, He prayed for Himself. He understood in verse 1 of John 17 that His hour had come, that it was time for His suffering and death. He prayed in verse 5 that He would be returned to His glory — that state that we saw as we looked at Isaiah chapter 6.
In verses 6 through 19, Jesus prays for the eleven who are gathered there specifically, and some of that applies to us as well. He prayed for their unity, He prayed for their protection, and He prayed that they would be sanctified. He understood that their unity was important — we'll talk more about that today. He understood that they were about to go into the world, and as verse 14 tells us, the world hated them because they are not of the world, even as He is not of the world.
This harkens back, for those who have been in the study, to chapter 15, verse 18, where Jesus says to the disciples, "If the world hates you, you know that it hated Me before it hated you." A slave is not greater than the master. They hated Me; they will hate you as well. So as you go into the world as a follower of Christ, the world is in opposition to you, and you are in opposition to the world system. You think differently than the world. Your motivation is different, what drives you is different, and ultimately you and the world are on a collision course. There may be a time where you can peacefully coexist, but ultimately what drives and motivates you is different than the world, and ultimately you will collide.
Sanctified in Truth
He also prays that they would be sanctified, verse 17. That word, to be sanctified, means to be used for your intended purpose. So when you sat in those pews or chairs today, you sanctified them — you fulfilled their intended purpose. How do we understand what our intended purpose is for our life? The answer is right there: "Sanctify them in truth, and Your word is truth." So we take those age-old questions — who am I, why am I here, where am I going, and all the variations of that — and we answer them not through speculation, not through wishful thinking, not our best guess. We understand them and answer them through the Word of God.
This is interesting: we come to Scripture frequently to find the answers to our questions, but as we study Scripture, we realize that Scripture itself raises questions. A series I would love to do would be the questions that God asks us. Going back to Genesis 3, God says to Adam, "Where are you, Adam?" We all understand that God was not saying He did not know — it was not as though He had lost Adam in a crowd. He asked that question for Adam's benefit. You were in the garden, you were at peace, you were naked and in harmony, everything was fine — and now you are hiding, the first instance of abnormal behavior in all of the human race. He asked the question so that Adam would stop and ask himself, "How did I get here?" While it is helpful to us that the Bible answers our questions, it is far more important that we understand who God is and answer the questions that He asks of us, and that cannot be done apart from His Word.
Jesus Prays for Us
So Jesus prayed for Himself, and He prayed for the eleven — and maybe for some of you for the first time, you are going to find out today that Jesus prayed for you, for me, for us. Look at verse 20: "I do not ask on behalf of these alone, but for those also who believe in Me through their word, that they may be one even as You, Father, are in Me, and I am in You, that they also may be in Us, so that the world may believe that You sent Me. The glory which You have given Me, I have given to them, that they may be one just as We are one — I in them, and You in Me — that they may be perfected in unity, so the world may know that You have sent Me and loved them even as You have loved Me. Father, I desire that they also, whom You have given to Me, be with Me where I am, so that they may see My glory which You have given to Me, for You loved Me before the foundation of the world."
Then, in verses 25 and 26, as a kind of summary: "O righteous Father, although the world has not known You, yet I have known You, and these have known that You sent Me; and I have made Your name known to them, and will make it known, so that the love with which You have loved Me may be in them, and I in them." This is very familiar language for those who have been with us as we have broken down this prayer that Jesus prays.
The Call to Unity
There is a call here that you cannot miss. There is a call for unity — verse 21, "that they may be one, even as You the Father and I are one"; verse 23, "I in them, You in Me, that they may be made perfect in unity." Jesus begins by saying He is not just praying for the eleven who are present; He is praying for those who will believe as a result of their word, as a result of their faithfulness. In Acts chapter 1, verse 8, as Jesus is leaving, He says, "The power of the Holy Spirit will come upon you, so you may see this word preached in Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, even to the remotest parts of the earth." He has in mind, as He prays, those of you who are followers of Christ. Those of you who just took communion and are genuinely His — He prays for us. And His prayer is that we would be united.
Now that word can easily be misunderstood. He is not praying that all who are followers of Christ would be part of a united organization or denomination. I do not think He is in any way saying there is one singular denomination and these are My people. For those of us who study and try to understand how a church should be organized and how it should function, we recognize that there are very few details prescribed and massive freedom granted. He is not talking about organizational unity, and He is not talking about uniformity.
James Boyce addresses a great mistake evangelicals make when we talk about uniformity. He writes, "The evangelical church for its part seems to strive for identical pattern for looks and behavior among its members." This is not what Jesus is looking for in this prayer. On the contrary, Boyce writes, "There should be the greatest diversity among Christians — diversity of personality, diversity of interest, diversity of lifestyle, even methods of Christian work and evangelism. This should make the church interesting, not dull." Uniformity is dull.
Unity in the Church
In our Connect One gatherings, I speak with people who are new to the church — those who have been around maybe two or three weeks, a month, or a couple of months, and have begun to think, "Maybe this is going to be home for me." In the midst of those conversations, I make a point of saying something very important: we don't consider relationship in a church to be something casual.
Some of you, even now, are church hopping. You're here today trying to figure out whether you want to be here, and let me tell you, the faster you can get out of that mode, the better off you are. One of the downsides of church hopping is that you become very critical. You start to critically analyze everything. Now, there is a fair part of that — discernment matters, and understanding your own uniqueness alongside ours is a legitimate thing.
So when I'm with people who are saying "maybe I'll stay, maybe not," I warn them to be honest with themselves as they evaluate our church. If something here bothers you every week — it's not a big thing, but it just bothers you — take that seriously. Let's say you come in every Sunday and think, "I just wish the music were different. I wish we had a choir, and I wish the choir had robes." That is absolutely a fair thing to say.
You might also say, "I like a lot of the other stuff — what they do with my kids, what they do with the students — but the music drives me a little nuts every week." Here is what I try to say, and this is really important: it's okay to go somewhere else. My suspicion, though, is that at some level you're going to have to live with some things that don't fit for you perfectly. I doubt you'll find a church where everything is exactly right — I don't even like everything we do.
Preferences vs. Mandates
This reminds me of when Susan and I had been married about a week. We were in the car, stopped at a stop sign, and I cracked my knuckles. She said, "Oh, don't do that." I said, "What do you mean?" She said, "I don't like that." I told her, "We dated this whole time and I cracked my knuckles — you never once said anything about it." This is why premarital counseling is a waste of time, by the way. And I said, "I've got some other habits I'm going to spring on you over the next couple of months that are really going to bother you. If that bothers you, I've got a whole bunch more that are going to drift out over our relationship." It's not fair to say, after the fact, "I don't like what you're doing, and this is what you need to change." Just say what you prefer.
If you made a list of everything we do as a church, and you used a blue highlighter for absolute biblical mandates and a yellow highlighter for preferences, you would find that the majority of what we do is preferential. Even the blue things — the biblical mandates — are fulfilled in a way that is, at some level, preferential. So when Jesus prays for unity, He is not praying that we would all be monolithic in what we say, how we say it, or how we look. We are all different. We have different personalities and different likes, and there is nothing wrong with that.
I have friends who attend churches that are fine churches. Every once in a while I'll visit, and there will be an organ and a full choir, and in the first verse I think, "This is incredible." But then after that first verse I'm thinking, "This is dragging on." There is nothing wrong with that style, or with them, or with me — we're just different. If you want a pastor in a coat and tie, that's fine. Whatever form works for you is fine. The important thing is that we are united not in form, but in heart, around the Spirit of God and the gospel truth.
The Spirit Behind Unity
First Corinthians chapter 12, Paul writes this: "There are a variety of gifts, but the same Spirit. A variety of ministries, the same Lord. A variety of effects, but the same God who works all things and all people." So God speaks to us about unity, and as He uses images in His Word to help us understand it, one of those images is family.
That's an interesting picture, isn't it? I think about our own family. We have two daughters — same mom, same dad — and they are very different girls. When they were young, people would even say, "Are they twins?" Once you get to know them, though, they are just very, very different. A great example was their weddings. When Haley was getting married, she simply did not care about the details. There was only one thing Haley wanted: she didn't want to wear shoes. She didn't ask about anything else, and literally, when people came up to her and said, "Haley, what kind of flowers are you going to have at your wedding?" she would say, "Are you coming to the wedding? Then we'll find out together."
The Body of Christ and the Challenge of Unity
We have no choice who God saves and brings into this family. We admit sometimes, "He wasted grace on that one." You have no choice. The body of Christ is filled with diversity — very different people. It is a source of never-ending amusement and bewilderment to me who comes to church here, and what is important to one person and what is not important to another.
The challenge is, just as in our human family, how do we take these diverse people and knit them together? The unity is not around organization or conformity. The unity is around the Holy Spirit. The unity is around our fellowship with the Father.
Vertical Fellowship as the Foundation
I was invited years ago to speak at a church, and they gave me the topic of fellowship, meaning fellowship with one another. In part of my study, I went through all that I could find of the documents that Charles Spurgeon had generated on the topic of fellowship. I did not find one that spoke of horizontal fellowship. It was all vertical fellowship — that is, our fellowship with God.
For good reason. First John 1:3, John writes: "We have seen and heard, we proclaim to you so that you too may have fellowship with us. Indeed, our fellowship is with the Father and with His Son, Jesus Christ." Second Corinthians 13:14, Paul writes: "The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you."
So the principle for us, as Jesus prays for our unity, is not organizational unity, not conformity, not all being the same. It is the unity we find in our vertical fellowship with Father, Son, and Holy Spirit that now manifests itself in our horizontal fellowship with one another.
The Challenge of Community in a Larger Church
This idea of being part of the body of Christ presents a particular challenge for a larger church — by that I mean 300 or more. If you are in a church of 250 or whatever, there is no way you know everybody and what is going on. The immediate challenge is to live this idea of community somehow within the body of Christ. For most of us — not all of us — the major expression of that is going to be within and around and through the local church.
The value of the small group is that it can be a community of related persons. In it, the benefit of personal relatedness cannot be missed, nor its challenge evaded. In other words, if we are all going to be family here — 20 of us in a group — it is going to get difficult, because there will be hard things, and we will have to come alongside and help. There will probably be times when someone has to come alongside and say, "What you are doing is not right here. You are out of whack." This is not in and of itself desirable, but we do it because God put us in that structure together.
John Stott writes: "I do not think it is an exaggeration to say therefore that small groups — Christian family or fellowship groups — are indispensable for our growth into spiritual maturity." I think he is exactly right. For us to grow spiritually, we have to be engaged in these one-anothers. That is our challenge.
Putting Community Into Practice
James Boyce wrote about Tenth Presbyterian Church in Philadelphia thirty years ago, speaking about small groups and geographic breakdowns. That is what we have tried to do here. We are going to take East Valley Bible Church and make some arbitrary divisions, periodically putting people together by age — so right now you have third graders together over there...
Community, Gifts, and the Body
We have junior highs together, high schoolers together, and stage-of-life ministries. We have a ministry for those who are 55 and older, because though not all of them face the same challenges, many do. We also have a newly married ministry, and I think that is a wonderful thing.
Love is, in a sense, blind — but love should only be blind after you say "I do." Up to that point you should be very critical of the other person. After that, the criticism is over. But now you are in this marriage for five or six months and you are thinking, it is just the way he squeezes the toothpaste, or whatever she does not do, and it is a big issue but not big enough to bring up, so you stuff it in. You stuff it in, and twenty years later you are ready to kill them in their sleep over that stupid little thing. One of the great things about a newly married ministry is that people discover they are not alone — does he do that? I thought he was the only one in the world who did it!
710 meets in this chapel on Tuesday night at 7:10, and there are two, three, four, five hundred men and women who are out of high school but not yet out of their twenties. It is a wonderful time for people in that shared stage of life to come together. Each of these groupings reflects the reality that different seasons of life bring different needs and different common ground.
When I get back from vacation on September 9th, and for the following three weeks — four weeks total — we are going to talk about area ministry. We have been working two years on area ministry, and we are now ready to roll it out. It is a way, not the way, not the only way, but a way for you to live in community. It is thought through, it has great strengths, and I am sure it has a couple of weaknesses that you will be more than willing to point out once we launch it. But it is a great way for new people to be plugged in and for hurting people to be ministered to, broken down primarily by geography.
The Body: Interconnected and Interdependent
God says in His Word that we are like a family — we call each other brothers and sisters. Another picture He uses is that of the body. First Corinthians chapter 12, verse 12 says, "Even as the body is one, yet it has many members. For all the members of the body, though there are many, are one body, so as also in Christ. For by one Spirit we're all baptized into one body. For the body is not one member, but many."
He is saying the body is a picture of something that is absolutely interconnected and interdependent. We may look at the body and elevate certain parts — the brain, the heart, the eye — and think, I do not want to be a toe. But God says you need all of them. If every member of the body were an eye, we as a church would see very well, but mobility would be a challenge.
God says that just as there is diversity in the body, there is diversity of gifts and diversity of personalities in the church, and all of these need to come together to round one another out. I can almost predict how certain conversations will go. Someone will come to me and say they are concerned that all we do is teach, teach, teach — God's Word, God's Word, God's Word — and that we need to take care of hurting people. I will say, you are right, what is your spiritual gift? And inevitably they will say mercy. Then the next person in will say that all we do is hug one another and that we need truth, truth, truth. You are right, what is your spiritual gift? Teaching.
We tend to see everything through the lens of our own gift. Some of you have not yet learned the importance of the first forty-five minutes of our service — to you it is just a warm-up act, something to get out of the way before the teaching. Others are saying, why is there any teaching at all? The reality is that God says this is the picture: the whole body coming together. Those of you with the gift of mercy begin to soften my heart, and someone with the gift of teaching might come alongside and say, it is wonderful that you want to love everybody, but how about a little discernment as well? That is the picture He gives us.
Unity as Witness to the World
In verse 23, Jesus says, "I in them and You in Me, that they may be perfect" — or perfected — "in unity." He gives two reasons: so the world may know that You have sent Me, and that You love them even as You have loved Me. Jesus is making two distinct points here. This unity is not just about fellowship and the one-anothers of Christian community — it is also about what the world observes when it looks at us.
John chapter 13, verse 34: "A new commandment I give you, that you love one another even as I have loved you, that you will love one another. By this all men will know that you are My disciples if you love one another." He repeats the same idea. Unity is not just about fellowship — it is about evangelism.
The world that observes you is watching. Once you identify yourself as a Christian, once you invite someone to a Bible study, once someone asks what you did over the weekend and you say you went to church, they are all watching you from that point on. They are judging you, and you can say that is not fair — but they are judging you all the same.
The Witness of a Different Life
People hold you to a standard almost certainly higher than the one you have for yourself. In some sense, this is totally unfair, but Larry used to say: remember and understand that you may be the only Bible that some people ever see. That is the idea at work here. People are looking at you, they see Christ, and it may be unfair as they reject Him to hold you to that standard, but they do.
I used to work with a fellow who, when God saved me, got on my case pretty hard. He had a problem with his kid and called me at home one day and said he would like to talk. I said I would be more than willing to meet with him, and I did. At the end of our conversation I said, "Why don't you call the guys that you smoked dope with, go to the club with?" He said, "I watch you with your kids, and there's something different about that." In his own way, he was saying, "Tell me about Jesus."
That is what happened to me in my life as well. When my life hit an all-time low, I went to one of my friends at work, and he said, "Jesus." I said, "Hey, you got anything other than that? A pill, dust, something?" It does not mean, by the way, that everyone will respond. Our objective is simply to be obedient and to proclaim the truth. If they respond, God worked in their life; if they do not, that is God's decision and God's job, not yours or mine.
The Cost of Looking Just Like the World
Jesus prayed that there would be unity, so that people look at you and take notice. This is why it is so catastrophic when a couple who say they are followers of Christ divorce. What that says to the whole world is, "We cannot keep a marriage together any better than you." All of a sudden it says, "We are just like you."
Consider the workplace. You are sitting in a room with ten people, and everyone is driven by the deal and by money and by success. If you are driven by exactly the same things, what that says is that you are just like the world. Is there anything wrong with money? No. Anything wrong with success? No. But it has to exist within a godly perspective and context.
If somebody followed me around Monday through Friday, would there be anything in my life that might make them stop and think, "There is something different about these people"? Or would they simply see the same thing they see everywhere else?
The Compelling Community of Acts 2
In Acts chapter 2, verse 37, Peter preaches an incredible sermon. The people ask, "What should we do?" He says, "Repent, be baptized," and three thousand were saved. Then what happened? "They continually devoted themselves to the apostles' teaching, to fellowship, to the breaking of bread, and to prayer, and everyone kept a sense of awe, and many wonders and signs were taking place through the apostles, and all those who had believed were together and had all things in common."
Now, we can come up with a thousand explanations of why this is not teaching communal living, and I understand that — it is not. But it is saying there is something that goes on within the body. "They began selling their property and possessions, and they were sharing them with all as one might have need, and day by day, continually, with one mind, they were in the temple breaking bread from house to house. They were taking their meals together with gladness and sincerity of heart. They were praising God, and as a result, were having favor with people."
This was compelling to the people around them. That is God's call on our lives — that people would see us and see something distinct and unique and different. This idea of living together, of meeting one another's needs, of hanging together, of crying together and laughing together and suffering together and rejoicing together — I have to tell you, even as I say this, that is not instinctively me.
But here is what I know. This is not about saying, "I will get into this community because I need to get something out of it." It is about unity — you bring your gifts and your uniqueness to it. Why did I go to church? Maybe you are a blessing to the people around you, and as you bless them, you are blessed in the process.
The Love That Defies Human Limits
Then there is something in verse 23 that blows your mind. Here is what Jesus prays for you to the Father: "Love them even as you have loved me." That phrase — "even as you have loved me" — means "just as" or "to the same degree." In other words, not some hyped-up, juiced-up, non-steroid human sort of love. It is God's love.
My love is conditional, incomplete, shows favoritism, and is selfish. That is how I tend to love. God's love is limitless, endless, perfect, and selfless. That is what we see in both the Old and the New Testament, and Malachi 3:6 tells us, "I am the Lord and I do not change." Those promises are for today. Human love always has conditions on it.
I watch Sarah and Haley with their kids, and there is no way you can be a good parent and be selfish. You cannot do it. As selfish as you are, that selfishness will hinder or limit your ability to parent, because parenting by its very nature is one of the most selfless acts I know.
The Cost of Selfless Love
Now what he means when he says that is, "Grandpa, can you call Grandma, because I have a poopy diaper." He doesn't fully understand all that it means, but I watch that, and I'm thinking, here's Haley going through this again. I watch Sarah with it, and it gets a little less as they get a little bit older, but especially those first four, five, six months, it's just selfless living. No sleep, change diapers, feed, cry.
Even as they grow, parenting becomes still even more difficult, but it requires me to be so selfless and not selfish. I was talking to a guy this week who's a teacher, and he said, you can just tell when the kids walk in the door in first grade, the ones who have parents who spend time with them and the ones who don't. You can just tell.
The selfish thing to do is to give them everything. The selfish thing to do is to not discipline them. Why? Because disciplining is a hassle. I've got to lay this rule down and reinforce it.
A Scene at the Biltmore
I'm walking through the Biltmore this week. I meet my son-in-law there every Thursday at ten, and I was early. So I go down to Borders, and I'm walking through, and on my way out I decided to walk through the middle of the courtyard.
I come around, and there's a mom sitting on a bench with a kid. "Nathan, come back here. Nathan, get back here." This kid is absolutely out of control, and everything in me wanted to intervene. She is sitting there reading a book, and here's the title of the book: *The ADD Child.*
That's a lot of work, isn't it, to actually discipline a child? If you just give him a pill, it's easier. And summer is a hassle when kids are around. What do families do? Every one of these kids gets sent to about fifteen camps — ballet camp, basketball camp, football camp, spelling camp, any sort of camp — because as long as they go, I don't have to parent and I'm still free to do my thing.
Well, your thing was having these kids, and if you're going to have them, you have to raise them. But that's very hard to do in a selfish way. We aren't even to marriage yet. There is no way to make a marriage work if I'm selfish. I can't be a good employer if I'm selfish. I can't be a good employee if I'm selfish.
God's Love Leaves No Room for Complaining
That's the way I want to talk about love. God's love is limitless. Boyce writes this, and it was like a stake in my heart when I read it: "If we believe that God loves us with the same perfection of love He has shown Jesus, then we will not be gripers because plans don't turn out the way we'd like them to. We will not be despondent because of some undesirable circumstance. On the contrary, we will be encouraged, knowing that indeed all things work together for good to those who love God and are called according to His purpose."
Before I read that, I had made a note, and I wrote this down: my default is to complain. When there's a pause in the conversation and there's nothing else to say, I'll complain. I'll give you a great illustration.
Sunday is just physically an excruciating day for me. When I get up on Monday morning — and I usually can't sleep in, I'm usually a little juiced from Sunday — I'll get up around five-thirty or six, and I can hardly walk. My feet hurt so much, my knees hurt, my hip hurts, my back hurts.
I came out last Monday, and Susan was sitting on the couch. She said, "How are you doing?" I said, "My feet hurt so much, my knees are killing me, my hip hurts, my lower back hurts." And then I almost asked how she was feeling, but I realized I had seen her the night before give herself a shot. The result of those shots is, if you can imagine the worst flu you've ever had minus the upset stomach, that's what she has every Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday.
And I realized my default was to complain. If I loved like Christ loved, the moment she said, "How are you doing?" I would have said, "You know what, it's Monday, it's my day off, and I'm with you. How are you doing? I hope you're all right." Maybe tomorrow I'll do that. Christ loves perfectly. God loves the Son perfectly, and Jesus prays, "Father, I want You to love them like that."
The Evidence of God's Love
What is the evidence that God loves us like that? John 3:16: "For God so loved the world that He sent His only begotten Son, and whoever believes in Him shall not perish, but have eternal life." Galatians 2:20: "I have been crucified with Christ. I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life that I live in this body I live by faith in the Son who loved me and gave Himself for me." 1 John 4:10: "This is love, not that we love God, but that He loved us and sent His Son as an atoning sacrifice for us." Romans 5:8: "God demonstrated His love for us in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us."
Almost always when Scripture talks about God's love for us, it connects it with Jesus' death. That is the evidence.
Christ's Desire for Us to Share His Glory
Of all the evidence that God loves you — that God has blessed you, and you have seen that, and you are the recipient of it — the greatest picture of God's love for you is the selfless, voluntary, atoning death of Christ on the cross.
Look at verse 24. "Father, I desire that they also whom you've given me will be with me where I am, so that they may see my glory." Where is it that He is? Is He praying for that very moment? Is He saying, "I wish they were in the garden"? No, that is impossible. He has already given us the answer. It is in verse five of this same chapter: "Father, glorify me together with yourself with the glory with which I was with you before the foundations of the earth." It is the picture we see in Isaiah chapter six and Revelation chapter five. It is Christ on the throne — Christ restored to His position of glory. As Philippians chapter two tells us, He emptied Himself not of His deity but of His glory. He prays, "Father, that they would see me." He is talking about heaven, about union, about being with Him forever.
God's Love and the Crucifixion
I have been noticing lately, as I read, that when God talks about His love for us or Christ's love for us, it is so often connected with His crucifixion. When God talks about the crucifixion and His death, He rarely separates it from the resurrection. And when God seems to want to offer us encouragement, He talks about death — the fact that there is no condemnation for those of us who are in Christ Jesus — and the certainty of salvation.
Turn to 2 Corinthians. This whole thing flows together. Look at chapter four first, verse seven: "We have this treasure" — what is that? The gospel — "in these earthen vessels, so that the surpassing greatness of the power will be of God, not of ourselves." Here is Paul talking about life. God never glosses over this. He says, "We are afflicted in every way but not crushed, perplexed but not despairing, persecuted but not forsaken, struck down but not destroyed."
Verse 16: "Though we do not lose heart, though the outer man is decaying, the inner man is being renewed day by day, for momentary light affliction is producing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison." What is the key? We do not look at the things that are seen; we look at the things that are unseen. The things that are seen are temporal; the things that are unseen are eternal.
The Eternal Dwelling That Awaits Us
Chapter five continues: "We know that if this earthly tent — this body, which is our house — is torn down, we know that if we die, we have a building from God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens. For indeed, in this house, this body, we groan, longing to be clothed with our dwelling from heaven." Then Paul unpacks this further. Verse seven: "We walk by faith, not by sight." "We are of good courage, I say, and prefer rather to be absent from the body and to be home with the Lord." "Therefore, we also have as our ambition, whether we are home in this body or absent, to be pleasing to God." And to please God, the author of Hebrews tells us, it is impossible to please Him without faith.
When God wants to instill in us this wonderful picture of His love for us, He talks about Christ's death for us. And when He wants to put courage into us to live life — as we are pressed and our lives are filled with things, many of which we have never chosen, as life begins to come at us — He says, let us get our eyes off of this earthly tent and onto this dwelling in heaven.
Happy Deaths: A Picture of Faith at the End of Life
I came across a book on vacation a couple of years ago. The title captured me: it is called *Mrs. Hunter's Happy Death*, and it is written by a pastor. I would really recommend this book to you. The author is a Methodist, and he has some seriously flawed Arminian theology in there — and saying that is itself a criticism — but having said all of that, it is a wonderful book that is really worth reading.
He is talking about people in his church who were dying. He tells of one lady who died singing her favorite hymn and reciting the Lord's Prayer. Her son said it was the most beautiful moment of his life, watching his mother die. Another lady from the church was absolutely preoccupied in the last weeks of her life with helping her husband learn to cook, knowing this was essential, and with feeding those who came to visit her — literally offering them cookies and tea as she was dying. The last thing her family remembers is her smile.
Another lady was so excited to see the way God was using her death. Her sons, who had not talked to each other for years, began talking with one another. One of her grandsons began to pray with her. She believed God was using her dying to accomplish miraculous things. As she was dying, the author quotes her clapping her hands in glee as she shared with him her plans for her funeral.
The author then begins to look around and observes that this is not everyone's experience. He sees pagans who, at their death, become angry and guilt-ridden. So he began to search, and he came across — while in a seminary library — this phrase: "happy deaths." Happy dying was a ritualized way of dying practiced widely for many generations. He arbitrarily picks a year, 1801, and finds a magazine from London. He picks up an issue of a magazine called *The Arminian* and finds an article written by an author who identifies himself only with the initial J. Wood. The author is writing a story about a twenty-nine-year-old
Dying Well and the Secret of Contentment
There was a lady who died of an unidentified illness — her name was Mrs. Hunter. An author writes about the incredible nature of her death: the joy of it, the happiness of it, the excitement of it. He asks, what is the secret to people who die contented and fulfilled? What makes it possible for them to attain such spiritual heights as they approach their physical demise? What enables them to make death a completion of life rather than a tragic end, and what can they teach us about life and death and love and loss and grief and spiritual growth? That has been my same experience as I have been around people who are dying.
Pearl Buck, just several months before she died, wrote this: "There are times in sleepless nights when I ponder upon this planet to which we cling. I meditate upon how utterly lost we are in space. We bear the total isolation as we must, for however we may hope there is a God, we do not hear His voice, we do not see Him, and while faith is a valid emotion, it is not confirmed except through hope." As uncertain as Pearl Buck is about God is how certain I am of God. God has spoken, hasn't He?
Are these people that this author observes on their deathbed simply engaged in wishful thinking? No — there is an objective truth. The objective truth is the resurrected Christ. Christ rose from the dead, and because Christ rose, we too will rise. If we believe in Him, we have eternal life, and it is so important for us to understand that so that we can live here and now.
Groaning for What Is Beyond
Paul writes in 2 Corinthians 5:2, "For indeed in this house we groan." Susan and I are getting ready to go on vacation, and vacation can be a difficult time because we do not have much in common, so we are going to spend a great deal of time together. A couple of years ago on vacation she was reading a book called *The Mayflower*, and almost every night she would give me a book report on what she had read, and it proved to be truly incredible. So I decided this year we would read the same book and then talk about it. I selected a book called *Things Unseen: Living in Light of Forever* by Mark Buchanan.
Let me give you a flavor of it, in light of what we just read in 2 Corinthians 5. The author opens by saying he is dying — and then he adds, not soon, he does not think, meaning we all are. He writes: "This book is about heaven, and yet it is not. It is about our longing for heaven, our instinct for it. It is about eternity in our hearts. It is about the groaning inside of us that is both an acknowledgment of and a protest against death, at the same time a cry for something else — for that which is beyond the grave, stronger and larger than it, more enduring. It is about our yearning for the unseen. It is about wanting heaven. We groan waiting for it."
He continues: "Words cannot express these groans — that is why we groan. Groaning is creation's song, the blues of the cosmos, and we are humming to it, its melody, and taking up its chorus. So this book is not about heaven. It is about heavenly mindedness. It is about the hope of heaven that inspires and sustains passion and purpose in this life and on this earth. It is about learning the biblical lexicon and discipline for bringing heaven near, for fixing our minds and our hearts on the things above. We are heaven bent." By that he means a number of things: that our hearts have an inward tilt upward, that the grain of our soul leans heavenward, and that in Christ we have a sure destination which is powered by something larger than ourselves and carries us toward heaven.
Eternal Life Gives Life Its Perspective
Every time I begin to sit down and teach about something concerning life, it seems God always places it in the context of the certainty of eternal life. Why? Because once we understand that, life now has perspective. When He says walk by faith, He is saying live by faith, and here is the picture of it: when we are absent from this body, we are present with the Lord. Whether we are here or there, it does not matter — what matters is to please God, and it is impossible to please Him without faith.
Let me give you this definition of faith: faith is our obedient response to the promises and commands of God. Faith is living obediently based on what God promises us and what God commands us.
Closing Prayer
Father, take our minds and focus them on You, on Your Son, on Your Son glorified, and in the reality that one day we will be with You forever. Let that affect the way we live so that we do not think and act like the world, but act like Your people. Do that in our lives. I pray in Christ's name, amen.