Pastor Marq Toombs • September 13, 2020

Sermon Overview

JOHN 17:10–11

Jesus prayed and asked that the Father would make us one. What is the oneness that Jesus prayed for among his people? Why is our unity something that was on his mind in prayer the night before he died on the cross? Unity is central to who we are as Christians in the family of God.

Sermon Transcript

It's good to be with you all. Thank you for the time that you allowed me to be away for a couple of weeks and to get some rest and refreshment. I wonder if I appear differently to you. If you look at me from the side, do I look rested and refreshed, or maybe this side, whatever angle. It's good to be back. And it's good to come back with a fresh heart and fresh spirit to continue serving with you and working with you here at RPC. We're in a very exciting time in the life of our congregation, as we have entered into a season of prayer, and we are crying out to God that He will show us His glory, that He will manifest Himself among us, that He will allow us to seek His face and to see Him. And we're also praying that He will use us on mission to reach people in our community who are the most hurting and the most suffering, and use us to bring the grace and glory of God to bear on their lives.

And so it's an exciting time for us here at RPC. Today, we go back to the Gospel of John in John 17. We are invited to come into the upper room with Jesus and His disciples once again, where we get to enter into a conversation between Jesus the Son and God the Father. And we're not simply eavesdropping on this conversation, we are entering into the conversation because it involves us. Jesus prayed for Himself, but He also prayed for us. He had us in mind when He spent that time in prayer with His Father.

A few years ago, I was preaching through the Gospel of John in my former congregation. And for those of you who were with me in those days, you might remember that as we went through the Gospel of John, we got to 17. And I said, man, there's so much in this prayer so much in this chapter, we can't do it all in one sermon. So in a few months, we're gonna come back together and we're gonna do a whole series just on John 17. Little did I know and little did those people know who were with me, that it would take us 46 months to come back to do that series.

But here we are at RPC in the middle of a series on John 17. And I wanted to mention that detail to you just to show you that I am a man of my word. It might take me a while to get around to it, but I'm gonna do it. You don't have to remind me 97 times. Now, what is Jesus doing in this prayer? He is praying not only for Himself, but also for His followers, for His friends. And He's concerned about them. He asked God the Father to keep His friends and followers safe in His Holy name. He's written His name on them. They bear the name of God. And since they belong to God, Jesus is saying, Hey, take care of these people for my sake. But he has a specific reason attached to this prayer request. And their specific reason He gives, is so that they may be one as the Son and the Father are one.

Now, I want you to let that soak in a little bit, let that soak in as much as you can. It's often that when we hear this kind of prayer in John 17, that our minds go immediately to the horizontal relationships that we have among Christians. Our minds immediately go to, how do we pursue unity? What can we do to make things right? How can we become one the way Jesus prayed? And we end up taking Jesus' Prayer to God the Father, and turning it into a kind of command that Jesus gave us, as if He were sending us on mission to generate or manufacture some kind of oneness. Now there is time and place for that. And we'll talk about that a little bit here in a minute. But the thing I want you to see and walk away with today is that Jesus actually prayed for a different kind of oneness.

That's simply the oneness that is experienced between believers, but the kind of oneness that believers experience with God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Notice how Jesus made this request to God. He said He pray that they may be one, even as we are one. If you drop down to verse 21, "That they may all be one just as you Father are in me and I in you, that they also may be in us." And 22, "The glory that you have given me, I have given to them that they may be one, even as we are one. I in them and you in me, that they may become perfectly one." So again, we might hear that and think, well, Jesus is praying for horizontal unity between all believers. I think that's implicit in what Jesus is praying, but what's explicit in what Jesus is praying is the kind of vertical union union that He expects the Father to establish among us.

So we're gonna talk about both of these things as we make our way through the sermon today. If we're not careful, we might listen to Jesus' prayer and think, well, this request just sort of fell out of the sky, came out of nowhere. Like lightning on a clear blue day, we might be tempted to think that no one else in the history of the world had ever prayed that God would make His people one with Himself. And that would be a fair assessment, unless you've read all of the Bible and paid close attention to little details that pop up from time to time. Jesus is praying this way because He's echoing promises that God had made to His people. As far back as the beginning of creation. Go with me if you will, on a quick journey reminding you of a few things that we know from the story of the Bible. In the beginning, when God created man, male and female in the image and likeness of God, He placed them in paradise. He gave them mission and purpose. He gave them a reason to be. He also established boundaries of their existence and told them some do's and don'ts. And one of the things He told them not to do was, not to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

But then a villain entered into that story. A villain who had caused division and discord in heaven and fell to the earth, and then he ended up, causing division and discord on the earth among the people of God. The result of the devil's work, the serpent's work in that story is that man and woman fell into sin, and no sooner did they fall into sin. And then we see in the story that everything begins to fall apart. Everything begins to unravel. We see that they are separated from one another. They're separated within themselves as guilt and shame wreck them. We see that they are separated from God and separated from the world around them. And so from the very beginning of the biblical story, we see that when sin and death entered the world, it wrecked shop and it just caused division and discord all across the map. And that division and discord continued, wherever human beings went, they carried it with them in their hearts. And you can see family divided against family. We see nation divided against nation. We see tribe divided against tribe.

And through the story of God's people, there's this tension, this conflict, and this division that keeps coming up again and again. And one of the more famous stories of this, is an example of a man named Korah, who decided that he could do the job of leading Israel, just as well as Moses, if not better. And so he rallied a bunch of people around him and he formed a Korah team to go against the Moses team. What he didn't expect is that Moses was not competing with him, he was the one competing with Moses. But he generated this rivalry. And when, on the day, when they're supposed to be a great showdown to figure out which team God is going to side with, everyone was surprised when God called creation itself to rise up against Korah, and his rebellious followers, and the earth opened up and swallowed those people, and destroyed them.

We learn in the Book of Proverbs that God hates a lot of different things. There are six things he hates even seven. And one of those things that God hates is a man that sows discord among his brothers. And to illustrate His hatred for that, you see the destruction of Korah. Nevertheless, people continue dividing. And so in the story of God's people, there's conflict and controversy so much so that at one point, the entire nation goes to civil war and divides against itself. We live in a time that is reflective of that. As we look around and we see the conflict and controversy in our own day, we can resonate with that. We can say yes, been there and done that. Politics, religion and sports have become the volatile topics of our day. And it seems that those three things are the things around which people are dividing more and more and going against each other, not only outside in the culture, but we even feel the impact of this within the church. Politics, religion, and sports. Those are things that can have incredible unifying power, but they can also have incredible divisive power. And so we wanna be careful.

For our purposes today, I want us to think about the divisions, the conflict and controversies that come up in the area of religion. Because that's where we are, a church relating to other churches, living side by side with many Christians throughout all the ages. But locally here around us. Think about the trouble that we experience. It's similar to the trouble that the people of God experienced in the Old Testament. And the God wasn't tolerant in the sense that He just let it go and turn a blind eye and didn't care what happened. He intervened from time to time to make sure His people understood that He was going to put an end to those divisions. From the very beginning, God promised to send a savior that would crush the one who caused the division, who caused the discord in the first place. And you see God working this out through the story of His people, even promises through one of the prophets that He will take divided things, two sticks. He uses an example of two sticks that are divided. And He says He will bring them together, reunite them in Himself. And there will be one shepherd, one king, one people, one flock.

God is in the business of taking away our sad divisions and bringing about unity and union. In the Proverbs, I'm sorry. In the prophets, we see that phrase that they may become one, that they may be one. And this is the very passage of scripture that Jesus is echoing in His prayer. It's as if He is saying to the Father, Father, remember what we have planned to do. Remember what we have promised to do. Remember what we have the power to do in ourselves. Let's keep our promise. Let's do what we've said we're always going to do. Let's bring our people back together again. Let's gather them from among the nations and bring them together. Let's make sure that we establish unity among our people again. And not just unity in the horizontal sense. He says in the prophet, "That they shall be my people and I will be their God." Jesus is echoing this promise in His prayer, reminding the Father that this is what His heart's desire is. Now, when Jesus came into the world, He came into the world as the one who would fulfill the promise of God to crush that divisive, fallen angel, the serpent. And He would be the one to undo all of his destructive and divisive works and to establish a new thing, to reunite all things, all peoples in Himself. And Jesus is in fact, doing that very thing. In this prayer in John 17, we see Jesus opened the prayer by calling upon the Father to glorify the Son. And in this prayer, Jesus floods the prayer with this language of glory so much so that glory becomes the gravitational center around which the whole prayer centers, around which the whole prayer functions.

And so everything Jesus is praying for about glory, even when He's praying about unity between God and His people and His people with each other. This is about the glory of God in Jesus Christ. How will Jesus glorify Himself before the Father, by bringing all of these disparate and broken and fragmented threads and bringing them back together in Himself. Jesus entered into the fray of our sad divisions. He entered into the fray of our conflict and controversies in order to gather His people together. And how did He do it? He did it by laying down His life on their behalf. He did it by falling on the flaming sword of judgment on their behalf. He did it by laying down His life at the cross to bring them back to Himself.

Now I've given you a little bit of a biblical theological overview of the story of scripture up to this point, and maybe it felt a little dense. Maybe it was a little bit heavy, even at 11-ish in the morning, but now I wanna shift gears a little bit and talk about how this relates to us in a personal way, in a personal level. I wanna confess to you at the outset that as much as I've reflected on this prayer, as much as I've taught and preached on it over the years, I really struggle with this prayer. And I struggle specifically with this request that Jesus made. I don't wanna contradict Jesus. I'm not resistant to what He prayed. I'm not against what He was asking for. I'm simply looking at my own life and experience and wondering how is that working it's way out in my life. That's where the struggle is. Jesus made this marvelous request before God the Father, and yet, as we look around, we might consider the story.

We just heard of God's people and say, wow, the more things change, the more they remain the same. We are Protestants, we came from a tradition where there was upheaval, where there was conflict, where there was division. And whatever we might think about the necessity of it all, and whether it was legitimate or valid. The fact of the matter is we're downstream from that. And we're living in this time of conflict and controversy. And it's hard to get your mind around, how is it possible that Jesus could pray for the oneness of His people with God, the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The oneness of His people with each other. And yet we look around and we see so much division, so much diversity, so many differences. Is something wrong? Did the Father not hear Jesus' prayer correctly? Did He decide not to answer it? Did we mess something up along the way? These are the kinds of questions we wrestle with. So throughout the history of the church, you see various leaders, various theologians and pastors wrestling with this kind of thing.

And the time of the Protestant Reformation, Luther and Zwingli met together to try to hammer out a way forward to come together to be one. And they couldn't do it. There were mixed results. Luther was angry and he told Zwingli, you are of a different spirit. And that put an end to their talks for unity. Calvin and Cranmer tried to find a way to unify around prayer. Time and circumstance prevented them from following through with those vision, that grand vision. But their heart's desire was for that. And more recent days, we see J.I. Packer, who worked tirelessly in his lifetime to find a way if there was a way forward to bring Catholics and Evangelicals back together again. And speaking of Catholics, Pope John Paul, the second in an encyclical, based on the Jesus' prayer in John 17, expressed his own desire for ecumenical discussions. And to see if there was a way forward to bring Christians from different traditions together again, somehow and some way. Now only mentioned that, not to say that one was right or the other was wrong, or to take sides in any way, but simply to illustrate that some of the keenest minds and some of the more sensitive hearts of Christian leaders throughout history have agonized over this prayer, is there a way forward? Is there a way that we can become one again? It's a very difficult matter and you see no matter what the efforts are, there are always mixed results. And there will always be mixed results so long as you and I and others are involved in this process. We're a broken and frail people. We have our limitations, our preferences get in the way. We let our ego rise up. And we miss some of the beauty and truth of Jesus' prayer.

Now I've been talking for a moment here, emphasizing the horizontal unity and the burden that we've, we might feel as we pursue that and look for that in our own life. But I wanna shift gears for a minute and say, as frustrated as you and I might be, as we try to sort through the tangled web and the difficulty of noticing that there are so many different kinds of churches out here. I wanna put your heart at ease a little bit and remind you that what Jesus was praying for, was a little different than what we think He was praying for. Read the prayers again, read those requests again. And what was Jesus praying? He was praying that God would make us one with the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. That's the primary burden of Jesus' prayer. Is that God would bring us together in Himself.

Now it's important for us to understand that we need to pursue unity with other Christians. We need to chase after that. We need to do our part to fight for that. We need to do our part to get outside of ourselves and reach beyond the borders and the boundaries of our own, of our own traditions, of our own denomination. To recognize that God has many people in the world besides us. We need to do all of that. Don't get me wrong. The apostles teach us to do those very things. But I wanna suggest to you that if we do that without the prior knowledge, that Jesus prayed that we would be one with God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, we're going to be on a fool's errand. It does us no good to unite with other people apart from the union and communion that is promised to us in God the Father. In other words, we're not simply on a mission to find the lowest common denominator and see how we can get along without getting at each other every five seconds. No, we're on a mission to recognize that God the Father has been answering Jesus' prayer with the work of the Holy Spirit from the moment Jesus prayed it. And He has been drawing His people together to Himself and uniting them to Himself.

And what the burden is for us is to recognize that gracious work of God in the world. To recognize in each other, the work of grace and uniting each one of us to God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. And then looking beyond this congregation to other places and seeing that God is doing that work in other places as well. It's not to minimize our differences. It's not to turn a blind eye to some very serious differences among us, but it's simply to recognize that under the surface, beyond what we tend to see, God is doing a marvelous work. This allows us to see the work of grace among us. Now, I wanna commend this congregation for the spirit of unity among other Christians that you demonstrate on a daily and weekly basis.

I think about the work that this congregation has been doing with King of Kings Ministries in India. Think about the work that we do through CRI. Think about the way that mothers in this church gather weekend and week out with believers, from different traditions, just to pray. Pray for each other. Pray for families, pray for communities. Think of the mothers, or think of the women in this church who participate in community Bible studies and reach across different lines, just so they can grow together in the grace and knowledge of Jesus. Think about the fact that we have established friendships with pastors in our community, where we can do some work together and support each other in ministry.

Zach and I have become friends with Father Michael at St. Benedict's Anglican Church. And we share office space from time to time. We get together and hammer things out. We argue about doctrinal differences. We pray for each other and support each other in ministry. I'm mindful of a friend of mine in Mesquite, Elder Greg Wren at the Saints Chapel. And thank God for the encouragement. He's been to me in a different tradition, but we have so much in common and we can co-labor together. Your pastors have participated in prayer gatherings here in the center, over in the square and Downtown Rockwall with pastors from other traditions. Praying together, crying out to the Lord on behalf of this city, on behalf of this community.

Now I mentioned all of that to say that these kinds of efforts allow us to reach beyond our Presbyterian and Reformed comfort zones as you will. And we do this in response to Jesus' prayer for the glory of God and the good of others. All of these things, and more are signs that Jesus' Prayer is being answered by God the Father in the life of this congregation. And so I thank God for that and praise God for this work of grace. God loves unity. God loves harmony and Shalom. But God hates discord, strife and chaos. So as the apostles teach us undoubtedly reflecting on Jesus' sermon, Jesus' prayer. We should maintain the spirit of unity and the bond of peace. We should strive for peace with each other and dwell in unity and resist anyone who stirs up division among God's people.

Eugene Peterson put it this way. He said, "If Jesus' prayer has its way with us, we will no longer define other Christians as competitors or rivals. The longer we stay in Jesus' praying presence. The more we will understand that our impulses towards schism and sectarianism, our rivalries and denunciations will have no place in the room while Jesus is praying for us to be one." And he's right about that. Francis Schaeffer said that the final apologetic for the Christian faith, the defense that we would offer to the world is love and unity. And that's based on his observation of what Jesus said in John 13 and John 17. It is this practical, observable, unity and love that we demonstrate that tells the world something about who we are, but it also tells the world something about who Jesus is. It tells the truth that He is the Son of God.

Now again, I know we've been emphasizing in this part of the sermon, the horizontal unity, the burden we feel with that, but shift gears with me now and think about something here, that's so important. And I had met going into this, that I've really struggled to find the words, to find the language, to convey what I really want you to hear in this part of the prayer. Jesus prayed that the Father would do something for us that we cannot do for ourselves. Jesus prayed that the Father would make us one with each other, that He would make us one with the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit together. Jesus prayed that the Father would grant us this sort of mystical and spiritual union face-to-face fellowship with God that there would be no barrier, no obstacle, no distance between us. That we would be slammed together in union with them. In other words, Jesus is praying here, something that goes beyond what we would ever ask or imagine. That He is asking God the Father to do something that we in and of ourselves would not have the audacity to ask. And that is that He is asking the Father to make us a part of their eternal family. To make us a part of the inner circle of the Holy Trinity. To bring us into this inner personal relationship with the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.

And as the Father does that and answers that prayer and brings us into this transcendent reality. What do we find happening among us? We find that we are now growing together in union with one another. We're not simply pursuing unity apart from our relationship to God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, but our unity with each other, is established as we grow in union with the Triune God. Words escape me, language fails me to bring out the truth and the beauty of this prayer. The thing I want you to see here is that Jesus is praying that all of God's people will be brought together in complete union. The question we ask is this, is the Father answering that prayer. And we have to be careful how we answer that question. Don't we? Because we say, well, Jesus made this request, but the Father could have said no. And there's a part of us as we look around and we see the things that we see that we might say, well, it doesn't seem that the Father has answered Jesus' prayer. It doesn't look like it at least to the naked eye, but has the Father ever denied Jesus His heart's desire? Has He ever turned down His son and not giving Him what He requested. Now, even in this, the Father is answering Jesus' prayer to do what Jesus asked. To keep His promise, to bring His people together, to bring them back into reunion and communion with God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

And so I encourage you not to simply look by sight and judged by what you see, but walk by faith and look beneath the surface. See if you can look to the heart of things and recognize that whether it's among us or with other Christians outside of our congregation, beyond our denomination. Note that God is doing His work to answer Jesus' prayer, to bring His people together. We live in the already not yet tension of this prayer being answered. We live in the already, not yet tension of this prayer being answered. As one of your own cultural prophets has put it. We're one, but we're not the same. We hurt each other and we'll do it again. We're one, that's the already, we're not the same, that's the not yet. We hurt each other, we do it again. That's more of the not yet. And sometimes some of us feel that more than others. But we've got to push past that and search for healing that comes to us through the gospel of grace. Those who believe in Christ on the basis of the apostles word are the friends and the followers that Jesus had in mind when He prayed in the upper room the night before He was crucified. "Father make all of them one in us."

What a beautiful prayer, and what an encouraging thought to know that on the night before Jesus was betrayed and crucified and put to death, He had you on His mind. He was praying for you. Praying for your relationship with God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, asking God to bring you into that divine council, into the Holy of Holies of their eternal relationship. There's no application to this sermon other than to say, rest and rejoice in the promises of the Lord Jesus Christ, and know that God the Father is answering all of Jesus' requests.

All the things he prayed for you and for me and for us. In the name of the Father, the Son, and Holy Spirit, let us pray.