Pastor Zach Pummill • August 30, 2020

Sermon Overview

JOHN 17:1–5

As we enter into a season of prayer, we are going to learn to pray by praying what Jesus prayed. And the first thing we see him pray in this passage, is to be glorified. In his High Priestly Prayer, Jesus prayed and asked to be glorified in his crucifixion. What exactly is glory and how was the crucifixion actually glorifying of Jesus?

Sermon Transcript

Good morning. My name's Zach. I'm one of the pastors here. And if you're a guest with us today, we're really glad to have you. So let me be, hopefully not the first, but if I am, welcome to our church home, and we hope that you feel at home worshiping with our church family today. You find us as we begin a new sermon series. Well, the second week, because last week we started this new series that we've entitled, "Pray God Down." And we're using this series to guide us as we enter into a season of prayer here at Rockwall Pres.

So last week we started with 2 Chronicles 7 because it speaks to moments just like the ones in which we find ourselves now, moments of uncertainty, moments of unknown, moments of pandemic and plague. And in that passage, God gives an invitation to his people. It's an invitation to see the world through his sovereign hand, that nothing is outside of his plan and his purposes. But within that invitation is another one, to pray and seek his face. He says, "If my people pray and seek my face, then I will dwell with them. I will come down to them. My eyes and my heart will be with them.”

And so this sermon series is about accepting that invitation and laying hold of that very promise. It's an opportunity to stop and seek his face and pray that God would come down and move among us in new and fresh ways that we would be able to sing a new song here at RPC. And so of course, you know, when you start something off like that, there's a sense in which you say "Yes, that sounds awesome." Let's pray. What do we pray for? Like, how do you actually do that? What do we actually pray when you see God's face? There's a sense of mystery to it, isn't there?

And so Jesus is gonna show us what it looks like, and he's gonna show us the way. So for the remainder of this series, what we're gonna do is we're gonna look at John 17. Each week we're gonna look at a portion of John 17 one week and see what Jesus prayed. And then the following week, we're gonna look at a passage in the Book of Acts where it shows and reveals to us what it looks like when Jesus's prayers are answered and they come to life in the life of God's people. And so we're gonna alternate each week between John 17 and the Book of Acts to shape how we pray and seek the face of God this fall. So we're gonna learn to pray by praying what Jesus prayed.

And so why John 17 for this? Why not some other section about prayer? Why John 17 in particular?

Well, if you knew that tonight you'd be cut off and separated without contact from everyone that you ever loved. And that tomorrow by 3 PM, you'd be dead. What would you pray for tonight? What would be on your mind and on your lips? Would you pray at all? What would you pray for in such a moment? Death has a way of organizing our priorities. It gets us to the heart of the matter. And John 17 is that very situation, and it's that very prayer of Jesus the night before he dies as sovereignly orchestrated events are swirling around him and closing in on him.

And so with that in mind, we can see that Jesus actually embodies the very invitation of God in 2 Chronicles 7. In verse one, he says, "Father, the hour has come." And throughout the book of John, he keeps saying, "My hour's not yet here. "This is not yet my hour. "My hour has not come." But now in John 17, he says, "My hour has come. "My hour is upon me." It's the moments of all moments because it's the hour of his crucifixion. And so in the face of that hardship, in the face of that suffering, in the face of that agony and that plague of death, Jesus prays, and he seeks the face of God. He doesn't fall away. He doesn't fall asleep. He seeks the face of his Father in prayer as he engages the future that lies ahead of him, a future that God had sovereignly ordained and orchestrated for him.

And in his prayer, Jesus remembers that. We see in verses two through four, because Jesus remembers his very purpose. "To give eternal life to all whom you have given. And this is eternal life, that they know you, the only true God and your Son, Jesus Christ, whom you have sent. I glorified you on earth having accomplished the work that you gave me to do." So it's in this prayer that Jesus turns his face to the Father and remembers his sovereign purposes in him. God's sovereignty does not cause him to fall into fatalism and say, "Well, I guess whatever happens happens. We'll just see how this goes." Instead God's sovereignty is his very incentive for why he turns his face to the Father in prayer. Because he aligns his will with the will of God.

And so Jesus embodies the very invitation we saw last week. But what do we actually see him pray for in this moment? What's on his mind?

Well, the first thing we see is he prays for glory. Verse one, he says, "The Father," or, "Father, the hour has come. "Glorify your Son so that the Son may glorify you." Father glorify your Son. Glory is on Jesus's mind so much so in this prayer that he mentions the word ‘glory’ five times just in these first five verses alone. And he will continue to mention glory throughout John 17. Jesus very much has his glory on his mind.

And we do as well in this season. Glory is on our minds as we enter into the season of prayer, because one of the things that we are praying for is that God would reveal his glory among us. And maybe that's a new thought for you. And you're thinking something like, "Can we even ask for that? And is that allowed? Are we able to ask for such a thing?" We would say, absolutely, Jesus prayed for that. We see it in verse 10. He says that he is glorified in us. We want to take that seriously. We want to seek and welcome and ask and invite God to reveal his glory in Christ among us. But what does that request really even mean? What does it mean to ask God, to reveal his glory among us?

Well, to understand that, we need to understand what glory really means in the first place. Because are we just, you know, asking to have an experience? Are we just asking to have a vision or to have a feeling? What does it mean to ask God's glory to be revealed among us? But at the same time, what does glory mean in light of what we've been talking about? How does glory relate to a hunger and desire for more? How does glory relate to a hunger and a desire for more of God?

So I asked you this question this week on Realm. How would you define ‘glory’? And maybe then when you first read it, you thought about it. And maybe even now you might think of glory as being a bright, brilliant, shining light. We call that glorious. And yeah, there's a sense in which God does reveal. Absolutely God does reveal his glory in that manner. But that definition of glory really falls short because God also reveals his glory in thick darkness.

Glory from the Bible's understanding, the biblical definition of glory is really weight. Glory is weight. Glory is something that's weighty. It has a tremendous presence. It's something substantial. It's something that has a profoundly significant impact on everything around it. If it has no impact on anything, then it's not glorious, right? So his glory is something of profound presence in weight that has an impact on everything around it.

So, an image that we will continue to use is to think about the idea of a river that's flowing, a large, powerful river, uninhibited going along its course. Well, what would happen if we took a rock the size of this room, and we laid it right in the middle of that river. Well, the river would have to go around this rock. It's the presence and the weight of this rock that would now determine the shape of the river. Why? Well, because the glory of the rock is greater than the glory of the river. It's the glory of the rock that now determines the course and the shape of everything around it.

Think of the glory of the sun for a second. Think about its sheer presence and the weight of its significance for millions and millions of miles radiating out into a solar system, keeping everything in place. It's the sun's presence and weight that determines the course of the planets. That's glory.

How can we humanize the idea of glory for a second? Well, think about Tiger Woods. It amazes me whenever I hear golfers talk about what it was like to play against Tiger Woods when he was in his prime. Because whenever he entered a tournament, everybody knew they were playing for second place. He was virtually unstoppable. When Tiger entered into the tournament, it had a massive impact on the field, why? Because everybody knew that for you to beat him, you had to play the best round of golf in your life if you were gonna pull it off. And the psychological impact of knowing that had to be done, produced a tremendous weight on everybody in the field. He imposed a significant, profound weight on everything around him. That's glory.

Now those are helpful in understanding the concept of glory. But, what do the scriptures have to say about the glory of God? Because that's an altogether different category. What do the scriptures say happens when you come into contact with the glory of God?

Well to see that, we actually have to climb a mountain with Moses, we have to climb up Mount Sinai. We sometimes have become so familiar with these stories that we, they lose their weight, so to speak. Think about this story as though it were the first time. Let me paint a picture for you of this mountain that has to be climbed. Imagine a mountain that's covered in thick darkness, and it's covered in billowing smoke. At the same time, the mountain is completely on fire. It's surrounded by thunder and flashes of lightning, and out of that darkness that covers that mountain is this trumpet sound that gets louder, and louder, and louder to this deafening roar. That's Sinai, when the glory of God comes and rests on that mountain.

And so there's this moment where Moses comes to Israel before he goes up and he says, "While I'm gone, "nobody touch the mountain or else you're gonna die." And everybody says, "That's not gonna be a problem. "We don't want anything to do with it." They said, "You go talk to God, and we're gonna stay here." It says that they stood far off. And there's this verse, it's really one of my favorite verses. It says, "The people stood far off "while Moses drew near to the thick darkness where God was."

So Moses goes up the mountain. And on top of that mountain in the darkness, he has a conversation with God. And they kind of dance around each other for a little bit, getting closer and closer to the heart of the matter. God tells Moses, "Moses, I want you to take the people and I want you to depart from this mountain to the place that I'm going to show you." And Moses says, "Well, God, do you know who you've asked me to lead? These are really stubborn people. You need to show me your ways. You need to show me how to lead them.” And God says, “Moses, you have my presence with you. I will be with you when you go." And Moses says, "How do I know that you will be with me when I go because if your presence doesn't go with us, and if your presence is not with me, then don't send us away from here. If your presence doesn't go with us, then we have nowhere to go." And God tells Moses, "Moses, I know you by name. You will have my presence with you."

And then Moses gets to what he really wants. He says, "Please show me your glory.” Please show me your glory. It's a request, please show me your glory. And that's a bold request. I mean think about it. Think about that request for a second, Moses asking to see the glory of God. Moses asking to see the glory of God after everything that he saw God do in the Exodus, and after everything he saw God do in Egypt, and after everything he saw in the Red Sea, not to mention the fact he's on a darkness-covered, thunderstorm-filled mountain that's on fire, he asked to show, or he asked God to show him his glory. And he didn't even do anything in the entire Exodus.

God just tells him to go to Pharaoh. And he's like, "What do you want me to do?" He said, "Well throw your staff down." So Moses throws his staff down and God just takes care of the rest. He just stands there and watches God completely drop the weight of his glory on the biggest empire in the world, and he crushes the big rock in that river. He just crushes it, and all he uses is insects and frogs. And then at the Red Sea, that's what Moses tells Israel to do. He says, "There's nothing you can do. Just sit here and watch and be silent, and watch what the Lord your God will do."

And after all of that, Moses makes his request, which is the request, "Please show me your glory." After all that he'd seen, he doesn't back away like the rest of the people. After all that he had seen it created a desire within him for more. He wanted more and he asked for it. He says, "I've seen your power. Now, let me see you. Show me your glory. Show me the full weight of your being and your existence."

But notice how God responds to him. Moses says, "Show me your glory." But God doesn't say, "I will make all my glory pass before you." Instead, God says, "I will make all my goodness pass before you." I will make all my goodness pass before you. And what he's saying to Moses is, “Moses, what you are really asking, what you really desire, what you really want to see is my goodness. That's what you're really looking for in your request is to see the full weight of my goodness. That's what that desire in you is all about. The problem is, is that you can't. No one can see my face and live. No one can see my face and live. Instead, I will place you in the cleft of the rock and cover you with my hand. And when I pass by, you will see my back, but my face shall not be seen. That's as close as you can get Moses.”

And here we learn something about what it looks like to move towards this glory. That any attempt at moving towards the glory of God requires that you see yourself for what you really are, which is incapable, utterly, completely incapable of having it. You cannot move towards it and not grasp it without it costing you your very life. Incapable of beholding it.

Which really brings us to a point of profound disappointment and tension in the biblical story. Because what you're seeing play out in this request, and this answer from God, is you're seeing the reality of the curse of the Fall of man. And I would argue till I'm blue in the face, that this is the curse of the Fall of man. Because all Moses is asking to do is to see the very thing for which he was created, to behold the fullness of God's presence, to sit and savor in the full weight and reality of his goodness and his being. We see that in the creation story.

God did not create gardeners in Adam and Eve. He created his children. A God that had perfect fellowship didn't need any other community and had perfect love. But for some reason, he decides to create humanity. Why? So that he could give himself, he could give the fullness of his being. They experienced a measure of satisfaction and joy that we would not experience in 10,000 lifetimes with all of that combined together. That's a joy and satisfaction and a goodness that vocabulary falls apart. That's goodness that's otherwise cut off to us.

And you can't really understand the biblical story until you realize at the very beginning through Adam and Eve, and through their face-to-face relationship with God, that that's what you were made for. You were made with an insatiable, infinite desire for God. You were made to grasp the infinite, the full deity of the Godhead, and to recognize that desire within you only he can satisfy. But in the Fall we lost it. We lost access to that goodness. We were kicked out of the presence of God and we lost his face. And so here in my opinion is the real curse, is that God never took away our desire for him. God never took away that desire within us for him. It's just that we were sent out into a world in which we would never find him. In fact, we wouldn't even know what we were looking for.

We wouldn't even know the thing that we desired, but yet we have that infinite hunger within us, and so we'd look for that satisfaction in the face of our children, the embrace of every lover, at the bottom of every bottle. To see this situation and to see the Fall of man is to understand the world and to understand that every line of every song, every poem, every painting is very simple. It's out of the broken heart of man is this desperation to fill the emptiness of the human soul.

And here Moses comes so close. He asked to see more. He asked to see his glory. But God says that the very thing that he wants to see, the very thing for which he was created to behold, that goodness, would kill him. "No one can see my face and live."

Now think about it for a second. If the story ended there, what hope do we have? Eat, drink, and be merry my friends, because this is as good as it gets. So make the best of it. You know, if life didn't turn out how you wanted it to turn out, so sorry. There's nothing more coming for you. If you have everything that you ever wanted, enjoy it while it lasts. Because death is the rock in the river of this world, and it's gonna rob you of all of it. It's the reality of the Fall, and the reality that all of our attempts at finding what we desire will fall short. Because moving close to this glory reveals who, and what we are, is that we are incapable of experiencing the very goodness that is at the very core of our being. Because the immovable rock of sin is within us all.

But, the story doesn't end there, does it? It really just creates another question because the story goes on. And the question is this: “Then how can we experience your goodness and live?” How can we have all of your goodness and live? Well we find that answer in John 17.

Here in Jesus's prayer, as he draws near to the darkness on another mountain. He says, "Father, the hour has come. Glorify your Son." Jesus comes to the hour of his cross and he asked to be glorified, but he doesn't mean after the cross glorify me. After the cross is over, after I suffer and die, glorify me then. No, he says, "Now the hour has come. Glorify your Son. Glorify your Son in this hour. Glorify your Son in the cross. Glorify your Son in the shame, and humiliation, and agony, and death of the crucifixion."

So what is Jesus really asking for when he says that? He's asking something very simple. "Father, drop the full weight of your judgment and wrath and rage against sin upon me. Drop the full weight of your punishment and justice upon me. The hour has come. Drop that rock upon me and crush me." But Jesus also says, "So that the Son may glorify you.” Glorify the Son so that the Son may glorify you. So that he, the Son, may reveal the full weight of the Father's love, and compassion, and goodness, and mercy, and grace, and forgiveness, and desires for sinners. Why? Verse three, "So that they may know you. So that they may know the full weight of your goodness and desire for them and live."

It's the cross that reveals the glory of God to us. And it's the cross that reveals the full weight of God's hatred of the sin that separates you from him. And it's the cross that reveals the full weight of his love and his commitment and desire to have you for himself, Christian. Because it's the power of the cross that crushes the rock of death. And now everyone and everything in the entire cosmos now flow around this cross. And it's the means by which God will judge the world, and the means by which he will bring his glory to cover the earth as the waters cover the sea. Jesus prayed for his glory, and so will we. In this season, we are going to pray to ask God to reveal his glory among us.

But again, what does that really mean? Well, it means that we are asking for the power of the cross to be at work among us. We are asking for the power of the cross to drop its weight upon every heart, upon every home, upon our church, upon our community, so that what? So that we would know him and that we would reveal the glory of God in Christ. And when that happens, two things occur.

One, is that it's gonna crush the rock in your river. To come into contact with this glory means that we realize who we, and what we are. It will expose the sin that separates you from him. That separates you from experiencing his goodness because the Bible actually defines sin in terms of glory. For all have sinned and fallen, what? Short of the glory of God. Which means that all it's saying is that we search for more in anywhere and everywhere we can find it. We search for the glory in jobs, in spouses, children, sex, status, affirmation, friendships. We search for glory to give meaning and significance to life. And when we find it in that we are saying, "This is the glory around which my life will flow. This is the weight around which everything in my life will be bent and shaped.”

And yet to move close to this God, does he not say, "I am the God that will not share his glory with another"? And so to move towards him and seek his glory and his goodness requires that the obstacles that stand in the way be removed. For him to move to us is really nothing less than the work of the cross. To ask that God would reveal his glory among us and that the cross would be at work is that it reveals the reality of sin and its presence in our lives in new ways, perhaps that we've known, perhaps that we haven't known. And yet it's the power of the cross that crushes its bondage, that crushes those chains. It crushes that rock of trauma and abuse. It crushes that rock of addiction and broken relationships, and despair, and hopelessness, and grudge. And it invites us into something more.

Because all of those rocks are so immovable to us. And to invite the power of the cross, is to invite that power that crushes those things that are so immovable so that we might have freedom.

And secondly, it means that your life begins to flow around a new rock. It's not simply about crushing sin. It's about turning from that sin unto God and having a new weight in which we seek, a new weight of goodness in our lives around which our lives flow. Because when the power of the cross is at work in you and in us, we awaken to a deeper sense of God's presence with us. We awaken to a deeper commitment to his purposes, which means we awaken to new joys, new desires, new passions, new hopes, that really we've never felt before because our hearts become inclined to his heart, and our will falls in line with his will.

It awakens a greater sense of intimacy and closeness with him. Because inviting the power of the cross to be at work within us is inviting the very purpose of the cross, the very thing for which Jesus prayed, that you may know him, that you may see his goodness and live. It's in this series in John 17 that we see this intimacy between the Father and the Son. And that's the very intimacy into which we are invited. Do you see that invitation this morning to know him?

In this prayer, do you see the desire and commitment of the Godhead to you and for you? Do you see a Father that wouldn't spare his own Son? Do you see a Son that wouldn't spare his own life so that you might have more, so that you might know the fullness of his goodness and live? Not just so that you'd see his back, but so that you'd see his face. Do you see it? Do you hear it?

And maybe not, maybe you don't, and maybe if you were honest, you would just simply say, "That sounds great. I'm just not there right now. I feel sluggish in my spiritual life. I struggle to pray. I feel numb. I struggle to hope for anything. It's easier just to think that this is just the way life is and that all of those promises are for somebody else. And I will just resign myself to a life of hoping maybe to make the best of it, hoping to get by. And it's hard to ask for more."

And if that's you, that is okay, because that is why we do ask for more. That's why we ask for his glory to be revealed among us. That's we ask for the power of the cross to come down and to crush those things you cannot see, to crush those things that would weigh down your heart from desiring more of him so that you might awaken to more of who he is.

Because you're gonna find that these sermons are really not about giving simple points of application. It's about accepting the invitation – the invitation to ask, to knock, to seek, to pray and seek his face, to seek the face of a God that spared nothing so that you might know the full weight of his goodness. Because that invitation is not to draw back or to look away. It's to draw near.

My daughter is one year old, and I was holding her a couple of weeks ago as I was finishing getting ready to come up here to the church one morning. And as I'm holding her, my wife walks by. And so I took that as an opportunity to stop my wife, and I planted a big kiss on her. I'm talking a big kiss, a mommy-daddy kiss. Okay? Like the kinda kiss that makes your kids barf a little bit. That one. So I kissed her. And then I looked at Ava. And she was just looking at me like, "What are you doing to her?" And she kinda turns at Melissa, and she's like, "Are you okay with what he's doing to you?" She was just taken aback.

She just had this blank stare. And so I took that as an opportunity to kiss Melissa again. So I did, bigger this time. And then I looked at Ava. She looked at me. She looked at Melissa. She grabs my face, and she leans in, and she waits for me to close the distance and kiss her. And then she leans over to Melissa and she grabs her head, leans into her face and just waits from Melissa to kiss her.

What are we doing when we pray?

We're leaning in and we're waiting for him to lean towards us.

And so we will pray in this season, and we will wait.