The Real Lord's Prayer, Part 2

Tom Shrader walks through the second section of Jesus' High Priestly Prayer in John 17, focusing on the phrase 'those You have given Me' as a window into the doctrine of election and the security of the believer. He draws on John 10, Romans 3, and Ephesians 1 to show that salvation originates entirely with God, not human merit, and that no one can snatch believers out of the Father's hand. Jesus prays three specific things for His disciples and all believers: that they would be unified in common faith, protected from the real spiritual enemy, and sanctified — set apart and used by God for their intended purpose through the truth of His Word.

“Inevitably, as I understand this doctrine, my God gets bigger and bigger and bigger, and man gets smaller and smaller and smaller. And all of a sudden, my worship comes to a whole new level.”

— Tom Shrader

Series: John: The Essence of Life (2007)

Recorded: 2007 at East Valley Bible Church

Duration: 59 min

Themes: election, security, salvation, unity, protection, sanctification, prayer, truth, new believer, doubting salvation, struggling with fear, seeking spiritual protection, young adult, feeling unworthy, longtime believer, searching for purpose

Scripture: John 17:1-26, John 17:1, John 17:2, John 17:3, John 17:4, John 17:5, John 17:6, John 17:9, John 17:10, John 17:11, John 17:12, John 17:14, John 17:15, John 17:17, John 10:24, John 10:27, Isaiah 6, Philippians 2:5-8, Philippians 1:6, 2 Timothy 4:6-7, Romans 3:10-12, Romans 3:23, Romans 8:28, Romans 8:30, Romans 8:31, Romans 8:35-39, 1 Corinthians 1-2, 1 Corinthians 2:14, Ephesians 1:4, 1 John 4:10, 1 Peter 5:6-8

Theological Themes: doctrine of election, eternal security, soteriology, high priestly prayer, sanctification, becoming holy, unconditional election, perseverance of the saints

Full Transcript

Father, for the cross, we thank You for the wonderful, magnificent cross in which we find grace and love and mercy. God, thank You for salvation that is there and nowhere else. Thank You for Jesus. We thank You for His love, His grace. We pray that You use this time this morning to glorify You. We pray in Jesus' name, Amen.

Introduction to John 17

John chapter 17 concludes what we have grouped together as the Upper Room Discourse. In reality, John chapters 14, 15, and 16 represent Jesus in dialogue with His disciples. When we get to John chapter 17, Jesus stops. He is on the way to Gethsemane, on the way to Calvary, on the way to the tomb.

If you look at John chapter 18, you will see that we are right in the garden. There is the betrayal by Judas, the turning over to the Roman authorities, Peter's denial of Christ, Jesus before Pilate, the scourging and the crowning of thorns, and then the crucifixion and the burial. So this passage falls right in that time between Jesus' last intimate moments with His disciples and the beginning of His suffering.

In John chapter 17, verse 1, He acknowledges that. He lifts up His eyes and He says, "Father, the hour has come." He understands that this is the time. The time for His suffering is here.

Review of the Prayer's Three Parts

This prayer breaks easily into three parts. Jesus prays in verses 1 through 5 for Himself, and He prays in verses 6 through 19 specifically for the eleven who are still there. Remember, Judas is now gone. He is praying specifically for them and generally for us. Then in John chapter 17, verses 20 through 26, and this is an amazing thing to say, Jesus prays for you, for me, for us.

He has identified that His hour has come. He says, Father, I want to glorify You. Father, will You glorify Me even as You give Me authority over all flesh, that to all whom You have given Him, He may bring eternal life? He is saying, You have given Me these men, and they represent many, many more. They are the fruits of many that You will give to Me. And I give to them eternal life.

What Is Eternal Life?

What is eternal life? We talked about it at length last week, but just to remind you, verse 3: "This is eternal life, that they may know You, the one true God, and Jesus Christ whom You have sent." Jesus is saying this is eternal life, that you might know Him and know the Father. Contained in all of that idea is that I am aware of Him and aware of the Father, that I have information about Him and information about the Father, that I have experienced Christ and experienced the Father through the Holy Spirit. But it is much more than just information or awareness or knowledge or experience.

Let me read again this week from the pen of James Boyce, which we read last week. What is this knowledge? It is a personal encounter with God in which, because of His holiness, we become aware of our sin. So it is not just knowledge about Him. We understand who He is, and immediately we begin to see who we are. Because of this knowledge, we become aware of our sin, consequently aware of our personal need, and then by His grace, we turn to Christ who is our Savior. That is what he is talking about: eternal life. We understand who we are, we understand our need, and we understand the solution is Christ.

Boyce continues: this knowledge occurs where the Holy Spirit is at work beforehand to make it possible. It always changes us, issuing in a heart response to God and true devotion. This is involved even in Christ's brief statement, for He stresses that the knowledge of which He is speaking is knowledge of the one true God. There is not just knowledge about God, but there is this intimacy with Him, this awareness of Him that immediately turns me inward. I begin to evaluate my life, I realize that I come up short, and I realize the only solution is Christ and His death.

Accomplishing the Work Given to Us

Verse 4, He prays: "I glorified You on earth, having accomplished the work which You gave Me to do." As we said last week, we could spend a great deal of time on that. It indeed becomes our call for our life, to glorify the Father by doing the work He has given us to do.

People regularly ask what my favorite book of the Bible is, and the answer often has some connection to what I am studying at the time. There are giant, solid answers that people love — the Book of Romans, the Gospel of John. The Book of Psalms is of great comfort and encouragement. But one of the books I find myself going back to again and again, and it is something of a practical answer, is 2 Timothy.

I love 2 Timothy. I love the Apostle Paul understanding that he is about to die, writing to a man he loves deeply, and telling him what you need in life. I find great encouragement and great direction there. I especially love the end of the book where Paul says the time of my departure has come, I am being poured out like a drink offering, and then: "I fought the good fight. I finished the race. I kept the faith." Do you not want to be able to write that at the end of your life?

Just as Jesus prays, "I have accomplished the work You gave Me to do," in a sense that is what Paul is writing: I fought the good fight, I finished the race, I kept the faith. What 2 Timothy reminds me of over and over again is that Paul did not simply wake up at the end of his life and pen those words. There was a conscious, deliberate commitment in his life that said, I am about something. God left me here for a reason. "This one thing I do, forgetting what lies behind, I press forward toward the upward call of Christ Jesus," the call He put on my life. So we could take John chapter 17 verse 4 and apply it, apply it, apply it — but you get the sense of it.

The Pre-Incarnate Glory of the Son

Verse 5, and this is where we left off last week: "Now, Father, glorify Me together with Yourself, with the glory which I had with You before the world was." He is saying, Now I long to be back in that pre-incarnate state, that pre-incarnate state of glory. "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God." That is what John wrote.

In Isaiah chapter 6, when Isaiah looks up and sees the Lord in the temple, the temple is filled with smoke. He sees the seraphim with six wings — two to cover their face, two to cover their feet, and two to fly — singing, "Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God of hosts." They are singing to Christ who is there. He is saying, Now I long to be returned to that glory.

Paul speaks of it this way in Philippians chapter 2, verse 5: "Have the attitude in you which was also in Christ Jesus, who although He existed in the form of God, did not regard equality with God a thing to be grasped, but He emptied Himself." Paul is talking about this pre-incarnate Christ — that Christ we have just been considering.

Jesus Prays for Those Given to Him

He was seen pictured in Isaiah 6. He was on the throne, in control, exercising all of His authority and prerogatives of God, but He emptied Himself — not of His deity, but of the rights and privilege and glory. He emptied Himself and took the form of a bondservant, being made in the likeness of man, being found in the appearance of man. He humbled Himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. And Jesus, as He reflects on this, says, "Now, Father, glorify Me together with Yourself with the glory which I had with You before the world was."

So Jesus prays first for Himself, and that is His prayer in verses 1 through 5. Now He prays specifically for the eleven, but generally for us as well. Verse 6: "I have manifested Your name to the men whom You gave Me out of the world. They were Yours, and You gave them to Me, and they have kept Your Word. Now they have come to know that everything given Me is from You. For the Word which You gave Me, I have given to them, and they received them, and truly understood that I came forth from You, and they believe that You sent Me."

He says in verse 6, "I have manifested Your name." The phrase "Your name" represents all that You are. "I have represented You. When they saw Me, they saw You. I have demonstrated Your attributes — Your love, Your care, Your mercy, Your passion, Your likes, Your dislikes. Your attributes have been displayed. I have made those manifest."

Now notice who He has manifested those to. Do you see it? To the men whom You gave Me.

Marking the Phrase "You Gave Me"

I want to pull you into my world a little bit here. The phrase appears there in verse 6: "the men whom You gave Me." Get your pen out, or a marker in your Bible, and somehow delineate that phrase. I have been using circles, so now I am using rectangles, but I am in a new chapter, so I am comfortable with that.

Look at verse 2, John 17 verse 2. Here is the phrase: "You gave Him authority over all flesh, to all whom You have given Him." Mark that phrase in verse 2 — "all You have given Him." In verse 6, use exactly the same marking. "The men whom You gave Me," and again in verse 6, "You gave them to Me." The whole objective is to allow you to begin to see it the way I try to use it, so that when I open this passage, I will see consistent markings and know immediately it is the same idea. I find frequently when I get into a position like that, I just remember these things even without notes — all of a sudden I notice there are six or seven of these boxes, "You gave them to Me," and it all comes back.

The phrase appears again in verse 9: "those whom You have given Me." Verse 11: "You have given Me." Verse 12: "I was keeping them in Your name, which You have given Me." So there are six occurrences of this phrase. In verse 14, He says, "I have given them Your Word," and we will come back and really unpack that next week. So hopefully when you look at this passage, you will see six of these rectangles marking "You have given Me."

The Doctrine Behind the Phrase

Now, what is the point? Jesus is praying specifically for these eleven men who have been given to Him. But it is fair — and we will build this case from the balance of Scripture — to say that these eleven men and that phrase represent every person who has ever been given to the Son. There is a sense in which it is a phrase that, when we begin to unpack it, can for some be problematic.

When I finish here, I go over to room 100 for a Connect One class, where I will answer all the questions and spend an hour on this. I will be a little brief today, because Susan and I are going to take the last flight out to go see my mom. My dad died a year ago tomorrow, so we are going over to be with her. We decided to go at the last minute and I have a middle seat in the last row — but it is close to the bathroom. I was trying to find the one good thing.

In essentially every Connect One class, someone will make this statement: "When I told my friends I was going to East Valley Bible Church, they said, 'Watch out — that is the place where all they do is talk about Calvinism.'" I understand that is the reputation. I absolutely disagree with it. That is not something we talk about all the time. We do talk about it when it is in the passage, and I would encourage anybody who is teaching the Bible to talk about it when it is in the passage.

When I started marking these rectangles — "the ones You gave Me, the ones You gave Me, the ones You gave Me" — I thought, here we go. But then I thought, God left it there for a reason. We have to talk about this, because it is an unbelievable reality that, when we look at it from a human perspective, makes no sense — this unbelievable reality that God saves sinners. So let us unpack that just a bit. Turn in your Bible back to John's Gospel, chapter 10.

God's Sheep and the Assurance of Salvation

For some, may this be a reminder of God's majesty, power, and love. For others, perhaps for the very first time, may it be an opportunity to begin to understand the depth with which God loved you.

Jesus has been teaching and talking about Himself as the Good Shepherd. In John chapter 10, verse 24, the Jewish leaders gather around Him and say, "How long will you keep us in suspense?" In other words, don't play games with us anymore — tell us the truth. If you are the Christ, if you are the Messiah, tell us plainly.

Maybe you have had people in your life saying something similar: don't beat around the bush, just tell me — is Jesus the only way? And when you begin to tell them, you get a response like this. Jesus said, "I told you, but you do not believe the works which I do in the Father's name. But because you do not believe, because you are not My sheep" — in other words, you are not the ones that have been given to Me.

Look at verse 27: "My sheep hear My voice." How do I know that I am one of those God has given to the Son? How do I know that I am one of those whom God, before the foundations of the earth, determined He was going to save? Not because I am special. Not because there is anything intrinsically more valuable in me. For His own good pleasure, how do I know that I am a Christian preordained before the foundations of the earth? Here is how you know: "My sheep hear My voice."

Do you hear and understand the Word of God? One of the very first things that happens when somebody is saved is that all of a sudden they say, "The Bible makes sense." Not all of it — but it never made sense before, and now they read it and get it, now they read it and understand it. Why? Because they are now a sheep of His. They hear His voice, and now there is relationship.

The Security of the Believer

Notice what follows: "I know them." This is not merely knowing about them — He knows everything about everyone. He is speaking relationally here. "I know them, and they follow Me." How do I know I am one of His sheep? I obey Him. "If you love Me, you will keep My commandments." There will be a change in your life.

Look at what comes next: "And I give eternal life to them." This raises one of the most common questions Christians have: if I am a Christian, is there any way I can lose my salvation? Four or five weeks ago, I was talking to a man who does not believe in what we call the perseverance of the saints, the preservation of the saints, or the security of the believer. The question is simply this: if I have been saved, am I always saved? Can I lose my salvation?

I feel deeply sorry for this man, because I believe he labors under the false teaching that he can lose his salvation. There is no joy in his life at all. The slightest possible sin becomes a potential source of separation from God. This man loves the Lord — there is no question in my mind that he knows Christ — but he is petrified that he could lose his salvation.

I tried to say to him: let's understand the terms. Do you have eternal life? Yes. Then how can you lose eternal life? The very definition of eternal life is that it goes on forever. It is impossible to lose eternal life by the definition of the word itself. Common sense and logic alone will take you a long way on this point.

But Jesus emphasized it even further: "I will give him eternal life. They will never perish." When will they perish? Never. "No one will snatch them out of My hand. My Father, who has given them to Me, is greater than all, and no one is able to snatch them out of My hand." It is a beautiful picture of the security of salvation for the believer.

The Condition of Man Before God

Let us go a little deeper and see man as God sees him. In Romans 3, Paul tells us that "all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God." But before that, Paul issues a blanket indictment against every person who has ever lived: "There is none righteous, not even one." He is speaking about no one who can please God on his own. "There is none who understands. There is none who seeks for God. All have turned aside." That is a military picture of a soldier marching in the wrong direction. "Together they have become useless. There is none who does good, not even one."

That is a dramatic and disastrous picture of man. No one does good — not one. No one understands. All are useless. Even so, in the back of my mind I think: alright, I may not get it now, but surely there could come a day when I can do good. Paul says no — there is a further obstacle. First Corinthians 2:14 tells us that "the natural man does not accept the things of the Spirit of God. He does not welcome them. He does not count them as true, for they are foolishness to him, and he cannot understand them." Why? "They are spiritually appraised."

The Doctrine of Salvation and Its Practical Power

Natural man and spiritual things are never, ever going to connect. That is what Paul is saying. They can fly past each other endlessly and never meet. But God has decided to save some. So the Father, before the foundations of the earth — Ephesians chapter 1, verse 4 — chose us in Him. He has taken those and given them to the Son, and the Son will redeem them.

At the appointed time, Jesus would die. That is what we were told before He was born. The angel appeared to Joseph and said, "Mary will bear a son and you shall call Him Jesus, for He will save His people from their sin." John writes this in John 4:10: "In this is love, not that we loved God, but that He loved us and sent His Son to be a propitiation for our sin." Propitiation means to satisfy — in this case, to satisfy God's wrath. Christ died on the cross and satisfied the Father's wrath toward those people, those who were given to Him.

Then at the appointed time, the Holy Spirit comes and washes us clean, regenerates us, renews us. Scripture also tells us the Spirit seals us — it puts a claim on us that guarantees the work of salvation is complete. So Paul can write, not "I wish" or "I hope," but in Philippians chapter 1, verse 6: "I am confident of this very thing that He who began a good work in me will continue it until the day of Christ Jesus." All who have been given by the Father to the Son will be saved.

Paul puts it plainly: all who have been predestined will be called, all who have been called will be justified, all who have been justified will be glorified. This is not abstract theology without consequence. It has a huge practical application to our lives.

The Unbreakable Chain of God's Purpose

Right after declaring that God causes all things to work together for good to those who love Him and are called according to His purpose, Paul starts asking questions. "What shall we say of these things? If God is for us, who can be against us?" The answer is obviously no one. "Who shall separate us from the love of Christ?" No one. "In all things we overwhelmingly conquer through Him who loved us, for I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor any other created thing is able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus." This has huge practical ramifications.

When we sat together last Wednesday night and talked with Susan, she had no idea what we were going to discuss. We walked through her life — how she and her husband met, just a number of different things. Then we got to the cancer. She had just had chemo about an hour and a half before, so she was dealing with that on top of everything else, and what came out of her was this raw, honest response. She said it is fearful. She said she does not necessarily want to die, even though they have told her she is not curable. She went through all of those things. But in the midst of that, there was a certain sense of peace — a peace that came from the reality of knowing the doctrine.

That is why this matters. As we truly understand this doctrine, our God gets bigger and bigger, and man gets smaller and smaller. Worship comes to a whole new level. Reverence for Him deepens, and life is built on a solid foundation. False teaching finds no footing in the heart, and pride and arrogance begin to break down, replaced by security and encouragement.

Jesus Prays for Those Given to Him

We see this same reality in Paul's writing, and we see it in Jesus' prayer. Let us go back to John chapter 17. Jesus is not operating under any assumption that everything is going to be smooth and easy. But He is saying that in the midst of difficulty, we must understand: you have been given to Me by the Father, I know My sheep, they follow Me, I give them eternal life, and no one is going to snatch them out of God's hands. It does not get any more practical than that.

So He says in verse 9: "I ask on their behalf — not on the behalf of the world, but on those You have given Me." Jesus is narrowing the scope of His prayer. He is not praying for everyone out in the world. He is praying specifically for those the Father has given Him.

Does God love everyone? There are people who want to argue about that. God does have a love for everyone — He tells us to love our enemies, and we can assume He loves them as well. But He has a special love for His people. You might say you want to work with the two-year-olds because you just love kids — and that is a love for all children. But there is something deeper still when it comes to your own.

A Special Love That Brings Glory to God

God has a special love for His people, and this is so important to understand: that is not a source of pride or arrogance on your part, because He doesn't love you because there's anything in you that's exceptional. He loves you in spite of you, not because of you. Paul makes it clear in 1 Corinthians 1 and 2 that God uses not the biggest and the best and the brightest and the smartest and the richest, but He tends to use people that the world calls a loser — people like you and me. God looks and says, "Now I'm going to do something."

In fact, here's what Jesus prays. Look at verse 10: "All these are mine, all these things that are mine are yours, and yours are mine, and I've been glorified in them." How is He glorified? When you take people like us, and we are delivered, and we trust Him, and we live for Him, and our life is transformed — He gets the glory, not you and me. That's how He's glorified.

Jesus Prays for Unity

"I am no longer in the world, yet they themselves are in the world, and I come to You, Holy Father, keep them in Your name, the name which You have given Me, that they may be one, even as we are one." Jesus now prays for three specific things, and here is the first one: He prays for unity — unity among these men, and I think we could argue unity within the body as a whole. Jesus is pleased when we are united.

I don't believe He's necessarily trying to wipe out all denominational lines. I was listening to someone the other day who said he wanted to wipe out all denominational lines and all doctrinal differences, but I don't think that's what Jesus is looking for here when He speaks of unity. I think when He talks about unity, He's talking about people who have a sense of commonality — a shared faith, a shared purpose. For me, that means being able to say we are thrilled to partner with Food for the Hungry because they share our basic faith and our purpose.

The other night I was with Susan, and someone asked what the two of us do for fun. She looked at me, I looked at her, and I said, "Why don't you handle that one?" She said we don't do anything for fun, and that was essentially her answer. Now, please don't email me about this — this is just my opinion — but I don't think having a lot of things in common is the basis for a great marriage, just because you can play golf together or you love to cook or travel. What Susan and I have in common is our love for Christ and our shared commitment to glorify Him in what we do. That's the kind of unity Jesus is speaking about: a shared faith, a shared power, a shared love.

Jesus Prays for Protection

Jesus also prays for the disciples' protection. He says, "While I was with them, I was keeping them in Your name, which You have given Me, and I guarded them, and not one of them perished but the son of perdition" — speaking of Judas — "so that the Scripture could be fulfilled."

Let me pause there, because there is a very practical point. Jesus was with these men for three years. Jesus told them He was going to be betrayed, and you would think that all eleven of them would have had their eyes fixed squarely on Judas. This is potentially very frightening — they had lived with this man for three years and had seen him under all sorts of scrutiny and difficult situations. They were so deceived by him that they trusted him with the little money they had in their treasury.

Here is the application: you can play church, hang around, learn the lingo, and never be saved.

The Danger of Playing Church

This has very real application, especially for children. Both of my girls, at about age five and independent of any pressure from us, responded to the gospel. We never tried to push our kids to ask Jesus into their heart. We certainly made sure they were in an environment where they heard it, and at a very young age both of them responded. But I never for a second assumed that they were necessarily believers simply because of that.

They went to Christian grade school and Christian high school, and I can guarantee you that was a target-rich environment for evangelism — only a fraction of those kids were truly saved. One of the questions I always had about my girls was whether it was really real, and the honest answer is that as long as they're at home and doing what we say, you can't always know.

Why do ninety percent of kids who grow up in church stop attending by the end of college? Every time we hear that statistic, we say we need to do a better job in high school. But that's not the core problem. The problem is that many of those kids are simply doing what mom and dad tell them to do — they don't own the faith. There are certainly worldview attacks and other pressures we can and should address, but the deeper reality is this: when you're young, you can play the game of doing what your parents tell you to do. Whether that faith is truly your own is another matter entirely.

Are You Playing the Game?

Whether you are a young kid, a junior high kid, a high school kid, a college kid, or an adult — whether you are 15, 55, or 105 — you need to ask yourself: are you a little Judas? Just playing the game, going through the motions. You may be the most compliant of children because you do not want to give your mom and dad any hassle, and you know it is going to be thrilling to them if you are a follower of Christ. So you pretend to be something you are not.

Am I saying there are no childhood conversions? I hope you did not hear that. I just talked about two of them. But we need to be really careful. I can be in church and play the game. I am continually seeing — not just kids, but adults — where I am thinking, you have been around here for 15 or 20 years, and that is what you are going to go do?

Protected from the Evil One

Jesus said, "You have given them to Me, I have protected them, I have guarded them." Verse 15: "I do not ask You to take them out of the world, but to keep them from the evil one." He is not asking the Father to remove them from the world. That is our instinct — that is our flinch — and we will talk about that next time, this idea of removing ourselves from the world. But here He is saying: protect them from the evil one.

Let us take the time to go to the book of 1 Peter. Go left from the book of Revelation — it is the fastest way to find it. Peter writes in 1 Peter 5, verse 6: "Therefore, humble yourselves under the mighty hand of God, that He may exalt you at the proper time, casting all your anxieties on Him because He cares for you." Peter has just been talking about humility, self-control, submission, and trust. He has just said in verse 5: "Likewise, younger men, likewise be subject to your elders."

Why do you need to be in this position of humility and self-control? Verse 8 gives the answer: "Be of sober spirit, be on the alert." That is a command, an imperative — watch out, stand guard, be alert, keep watch. And then, if you write in your Bible, circle the next word, because Peter personalizes it. He does not say "the adversary" or "my adversary." He says your adversary. "Your adversary, the devil, prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour." There is a real enemy. Jesus prays, "Protect them," because there is an enemy — the devil.

Three Faces of the Enemy

The devil is presented to us essentially in three ways in Scripture: a subtle serpent, an angel of light, and a roaring lion. The roaring lion is seeking someone to devour, to tear apart. Satan's desire — and his demons' and this world system's desire — is to destroy you. If you are not a follower of Christ, their aim is to do anything within their power to stop you from responding to the gospel. For those of us who are Christians, their desire is to do whatever it takes — and it comes in many varied forms — to render your Christian life, in their terminology, at worst neutral and at best destroyed.

That is why the Screwtape Letters is so ingenious — there are so many ways to destroy. We can spot the roaring lion, but there is also the angel of light. I was listening to the radio last night, and there was a man from a major denomination — really bright, really smart — and he was going back and ripping apart Genesis, ripping apart the Bible. His whole point was: listen, those are all helpful little stories, but that is not really how God communicates. That is an angel of light. There are many pulpits right now being filled by angels of light.

Then there is the subtle serpent. We think Satan is really going to attack us in some really clear, obvious way, but it can come through religion, through faith, through Bible study. Study, study, study, study — know it inside and out — but never apply it anywhere. It can be all sorts of things. We will pull this together again next time.

Sanctified in the Truth

The third thing Jesus prays for in John 17, alongside unity and protection, is sanctification. Verse 17: "Sanctify them in the truth. Your word is truth." The word sanctify means to put something to use for its intended purpose. Here is a stool — now I have sanctified the stool, meaning it is being used for its intended purpose. Jesus is saying, "God, use these people. Sanctify them. Use them for their intended purpose."

What is our intended purpose? The way we come to know our intended purpose, as verse 17 tells us, is through His word — the truth. We study that word to know what God has for us, what God intends for us. So Christ prays in John 17 — first for Himself, then specifically for these eleven, and generally for us as well — and He prays three things. Father, keep them unified around a common purpose and a common faith. Father, protect them from an enemy. I love the reality of that. He does not pretend it is not dangerous out there, because it is. And then, Father, sanctify them — use them for the purpose You intended.

Closing Prayer

Father, thank You for this day and place and time. Thank You for this Word. As we leave this place, we pray that You would unify us and protect us and sanctify us. We are here today as followers of Yours. God, I pray that we would hold this Word up as a mirror and examine our lives. May we also understand the comfort and the encouragement of knowing that we were given by You to the Son, and from the Son back to You — that we are Yours, and nothing can break that relationship. God, thank You for the comfort that Your Son Jesus prays for us.