Jesus' Goodbye Prayer

[This was shared during worship with the people of Saint Matthew Lutheran Church in Logan, Ohio, yesterday morning.]

John 17:6-19
Imagine, for a moment, that you’re the parent of younger children (if you're the parent of younger children, no imagining necessary) and you’re about to go away on a long trip.

As a responsible parent, before going, there are at least three major things you would be sure to do.

First, you would arrange for someone to take care of your kids in your absence.

Second, you would review for your children any essential instructions, including remembering that you always love them.

And third, you would pray, asking that God would see that your children were looked after and that you would all be safely, happily reunited.

Jesus does all three of these things in chapters 13 through 17 of John’s gospel, a section of the New Testament scholars call Jesus’ Farewell Discourse. They’re words Jesus speaks at the Last Supper in the presence of the apostles on the night before His crucifixion.

After being crucified, of course, Jesus would rise from the dead and, forty days later, ascend to heaven. From that moment, Jesus knew that no one on earth would see Him face to face for a period of time known only to God the Father.

So, in John 13:36, Jesus says: “Where I am going, you cannot follow Me now, but you will follow Me afterward.” Like a responsible parent, Jesus is preparing His followers for His impending departure.

Later, in John 14:18, Jesus assures the disciples that, even with Him being physically absent, they wouldn’t be alone: “I will not leave you orphans; I will come to you.” Jesus will come back some day, the dead who have believed in Him will rise again, and Jesus will welcome His children into the new heaven and the new earth He has prepared for believers in Christ. But until that moment, He would not (and He does not) leave those who believe in Him by themselves. He sends the Holy Spirit to be with us!

Then in John, chapter 17, having arranged for the care of those who believe in Him and having instructed believers in how to live until He comes back, Jesus does what any responsible parent does before a time of separation from his or her children: He prays.

Turn to John, chapter 17, please. There, you’ll see that Jesus’ chapter-long prayer, called by some the high priestly prayer, has been divided by translators into three sections.

• In verses 1 through 5, Jesus prays for Himself, not selfishly, but to ask that, as He had glorified God the Father during His time on earth, the Father would now glorify Him through His suffering, death, and resurrection, all so people will believe in Him and have life. 
• In verses 20 through 26, Jesus prays for people who will come to believe in Him through the witness of those who first followed and believed in Him. (That includes you and me.)
• Our lesson is John 17:6-19. Here, Jesus prays for His first disciples. 

Let’s look at what Jesus prays. In verses 6 to 8, He says that He has “manifested” the Father’s Name. To manifest is to show or to make clear. John 1:18 says: “No one has seen God at any time. The only begotten Son, Who is in the bosom of the Father, He has declared Him.” The New Revised Standard Version translates that last phrase: “It is God the only Son, Who is close to the Father’s heart, Who has made Him [made God] known.” By taking on human flesh, Jesus has manifested God. When we look to Jesus, we see what God is like. In fact, we see God.

Of course, not everyone looks at Jesus and sees that He is God in the flesh. Some refuse to see God in Jesus. The fact is that only those who are willing to see Jesus in this way are granted the gift of faith. These are the people who become disciples.

Disciples --followers of Jesus--aren’t perfect people. Nor are they people who don’t sometimes have doubts. They’re people who come from an imperfect world and are themselves imperfect. But by God’s amazing grace, God gives forgiveness to those who repent for sin and grants brand new, everlasting lives to those who surrender control over their lives to Jesus. Disciples are forgiven sinners in whom, day in and day out, the Holy Spirit is constructing faith in Jesus as Lord, God, Savior, and King of their lives.

In verse 9, Jesus prays something curious. We know from John 3:16 and other passages that God the Father sent Jesus because God so loved the world, in spite of our sin, that He sent God the Son--Jesus--so that all who believe in may not perish, lost to God forever, but have everlasting life. God loves the world and the human beings who populate it!

Yet look at how Jesus prays in verse 9: “I pray for them [meaning the disciples] . I do not pray for the world but for those whom You have given Me, for they are Yours.”

You see, more important to Jesus than this world are the people God has given to Him, the people who entrust their lives to Him, the people who make up His Church.

Long after this universe has been destroyed and Jesus establishes His new heaven, new earth, and the new Jerusalem, believers in Jesus--the Church--will still exist. (Revelation 21:1-4)

The Church, the fellowship of Jesus’ disciples, is eternal.

The Church isn’t buildings, gardens, classrooms, sanctuaries, pipe organs, albs and stoles, hymn books, or offering plates.

I love how Article VII of the Augsburg Confession, one of the basic confessional documents of the Lutheran movement, based on the Bible, describes the Church. It says that the “...one holy Christian church will be and remain forever. This is the assembly of all believers among whom the Gospel is preached in its purity and the holy sacraments are administered according to the gospel.”

None of this is to say that the Church on earth is perfect. Personally, I know that I drag my old sinful self, sometimes kicking and screaming, whenever I come into the presence of Christ or gather with the fellowship of believers in Christ! This side of our own resurrections, every saint is still a sinner: a forgiven sinner, a recovering sinner, a sinner who lives in daily repentance and renewal, but still a sinner, saved only by the grace God gives to all who believe in Jesus Christ.

Article VIII of the Augsburg Confession notes that even in the church there are “many false Christians, hypocrites, and even open sinners [who] remain among the godly...”

But that doesn’t make the Church any less essential for anyone to have a life with God.

Life with God only happens in the lives of those who hear, receive, and believe in the gospel--the good news about Jesus--and who receive the sacraments of Holy Baptism and Holy Communion.

And these things--gospel and sacrament--are only offered by the Church.

This is why Jesus goes on to pray in John 17:11: “Holy Father, keep through Your Name those whom You have given Me, that they may be one as We are.”

Let’s be clear about what Jesus is praying here.

Jesus is not praying that everybody will all just get along.

There’s nothing wrong with people getting along, of course, and one day, after Jesus has returned to the earth, the dead who believed in Him arise, and He establishes the new heaven and the new earth, the harmony God intended for this fallen world will come into being.

But Jesus is not praying for unity in His Church in these days before His return at the expense of the truth.

He’s praying that our oneness, our unity, as Christians will be rooted in the truth that can only be found in Him and in the Word of God inspired by the Holy Spirit and revealed in the pages of Scripture.

That’s why Jesus prays as He does in John 17:17 (look at the verse, please): “Sanctify [that is, set them apart from the rest of the world, make them holy]...by Your truth. Your word is truth.”

A group of people united by anything other than the truth of the gospel of Jesus Christ and the revealed Word of God is not a church.

When Martin Luther nailed the 95 Theses to the church door in Wittenberg, Germany and unintentionally began the Reformation, he didn’t mean to divide the Church. He did it in hopes of uniting the Church behind the truth as revealed in Jesus and in the Bible, the living Word of God.

Luther was condemned by bullies of Church and State who told him that the Bible and Christian faith were what they said they were, no matter what Christ and the Holy Spirit-inspired Scriptures themselves may have said to the contrary.

To the bullies, rituals, edicts, traditions, and “church unity” were more important than the truth God has revealed in Christ and reiterated in the Bible.

They wanted to force unity at all costs.

Martin Luther and the other leaders of the Reformation said, “No. We won’t play God for a chump. We won’t turn our backs on the truth.”

Folks, unless a church teaches and believes that Jesus is the way, the truth, and the life and that people can only come to life with God the Father through faith in Christ, it’s not really part of Christ’s church.

Unless a church believes that Jesus was born of a virgin and was physically raised from the dead, it’s not a church.

Unless a church believes that the Bible is God’s inspired Word and is useful for teaching, reprimand, correction, and for training in righteousness, it’s not really a church.

Unless a church draws its being, life, and joy from Christ alone, Word alone, faith alone, it’s not really a church.

The church is that fellowship of believers among whom the gospel of new life for all who believe in Jesus is rightly proclaimed and the sacraments are administered according to the gospel.

It’s the fellowship being taken care of by God’s Holy Spirit, in which we hear and heed the Word of God, and is bathed in prayers: the prayers of Jesus for us and the prayers we offer for one another and for our witness about Jesus in the world.

If all these things aren't true of a group of people who call themselves church, they are not part of Christ’s Church. They may be a social club. Or a service club. Or a keep-up-the-building club. But they’re not part of the Church. Salvation isn’t happening among them. Its life isn’t being built on the truth of Christ.

If the church as you experience it is anything less than what Christ intends for you to have, why not join in praying to God today:

I want to build my life on the truth of Christ. I want to be part of a fellowship that scares the devil and shares life in Christ with a world that is dying in its sin by the second. I want to see Jesus’ prayer for His Church answered in my own life, along with the lives of all who are part of Saint Matthew. Grant this, O Lord! Amen 

If that prayer expresses the desire of your heart today, I invite you to keep offering prayers like that every day you live and to allow the Holy Spirit to make you part of God the Father’s answer to Jesus’ John 17 prayer! Amen

What Jesus Reveals About God

[This was shared during worship with the people of Saint Matthew Lutheran Church in Logan, Ohio, this morning.]

John 17:6-19
As a pastor, I’m often with people in times of crisis or difficulty. As much as I hate to see people enduring such circumstances, the way I've seen many people do so has often been nothing short of inspiring.

That’s because it’s in times of crisis that those who see life with the eyes of faith can most clearly see God at work in their lives—helping them, encouraging them, strengthening them.

Often when I visit with folks going through hard experiences, I can remind them, “There are a lot of people praying for you.” And usually, they will tell me, “I know that. I can sense their prayers. There is no way I could have gotten this far without people praying for me.”

Our Gospel lesson for today indicates that it isn’t just other people who pray for us. One of the many things that makes the Church unique is that it’s the only gathering of people for whom Jesus has prayed. Think about that: Jesus Christ, God the Son, has prayed for us to God the Father. As believers in Jesus, you and I are beneficiaries of Jesus’ prayers. That includes all believers in Jesus, whether we feel that we are worthy of His love for us or not.

Some of you have heard me tell of my visit one day with an elderly woman in a nursing home. She was almost eighty, had a strong mind and while somewhat frail, still functioned well. When she knew that I was coming and would be offering Holy Communion, she got into her Sunday best and awaited my arrival.

But after I had shared a passage from the Bible and spent a little time visiting with her, she refused to take Holy Communion. I asked her why. She told me that she was unworthy of receiving Jesus’ body and blood. There was something that she had done when she was seventeen years old which, she said, made her too horrible a sinner to be in fellowship with Christ.

After she’d confessed her sin to me, I tried to explain that if she truly repented—in other words, if she truly wanted to walk away from her sins—she could be sure that she could walk into the welcoming, forgiving arms of Christ. Though we talked for a long time, she remained convinced that God could never forgive her.

But she was wrong. And if this morning, you think that God can’t forgive you, I want to tell you that you are wrong.

In today’s Gospel lesson, Jesus prays on behalf of all believers. At one point, He says to the Father, “I have made Your Name known to those whom You gave Me from the world.”

The late, great Lutheran Bible commentator R.C.H. Lenski, who taught at Capital before I was born, writes that in this part of His prayer, Jesus is saying that, in His very Person—in Who He is and what He does—Jesus has revealed the heart of God. It echoes what John writes near the start of his Gospel:

No one has ever seen God. It is God the only Son, Who is close to the Father’s heart, who has made Him known.

Martin Luther said that if we truly want to understand Who God is and what God is like, we should look at Jesus on the cross.

We could spend a lifetime talking about the things Jesus reveals about the heart of God to us. But I want to focus on just three of them this morning.

First of all: Jesus reveals that God, not Nationwide, is on our side. In His famous encounter with Nicodemus, Jesus said that He had come into the world not to condemn the world, but so that the world could be saved from sin and death by Him. This will come as a disappointment to some judgmental people.

A man was bitter about the wife who had left him for another man. He cornered me one night, I'm not kidding, at a pool party. He wanted me to tell him that his ex-wife and her new husband were both headed for hell.

“I can’t say that,” I told him.

“But they sinned,” he said.

“You’ve never sinned?” I asked him.

The man allowed as how he had sinned. But he seemed to feel that the sins his ex-wife and her husband were worse than his. “Besides,” he said, “they’re still together. So, they’re just committing adultery every day.”

I countered by saying that I had known couples who had begun their lives together in just that way. They regretted what they had done. But they were committed to not repeating their sin. They had turned to Christ and received forgiveness and the power to go on living with God in their lives. They had, in fact, become exemplary Christians and even taken steps to be reconciled with their former spouses.

My pool party friend was disappointed because Christ shows us that God is willing to forgive repentant sinners.

I tell you what: I’m not disappointed by that! I’m grateful for it because I’m a sinner in desperate need of the forgiveness I receive through Jesus Christ. I’m grateful that, even when we’re not worthy, God is for us and wants what is best for us.

Second: Jesus reveals that God understands who we are and how difficult our lives can sometimes be. Once, you remember, Jesus came into the little town of Bethany, where three of his friends—the siblings Mary, Martha, and Lazarus—lived. Lazarus, he was told, had died. Jesus’ response? He wept. He wept for those who mourned without hope for the resurrection. He wept too for the dying his friend had experienced.

The New Testament book of Hebrews says that Jesus has experienced everything that you and I go through in our lives. The cross where He died confirms that. Yet, Jesus promises to be with us always. The Bible also tells us that nothing can separate us from the love God offers us through Jesus. Can God forgive you and me? Of course He can; Jesus, God in the flesh, demonstrates that God understands who we are and how difficult our lives can be.

Third: Jesus reveals that God has compassion for us. Jesus was often surrounded by people hungry for His love and His touch. Once, the Bible says, He looked on the crowds and felt compassion for them because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd. Life can sometimes leave all of us feeling that way: harassed and helpless.

As some of you know, early in my ministry, a man came to me to talk. He’d been sent by a counselor at Lutheran Social Services in northwestern Ohio. “Mark,” he told me, “this guy is at the end of his rope. He’s made a lot of mistakes in his life. Our sessions have gone pretty well. But I’ve realized that there’s a spiritual dimension to his problems.”

When the man arrived, he looked haggard, disheveled. After awhile, we came to the nub of things. “I can’t believe that God will help me," he said. "I’ve screwed up too many times.” We talked for a long while. Eventually, as some of you who know me well will understand, I turned this man’s attention to Romans 8, where Paul writes, “If God is for us, who can be against us?”

I’m not exaggerating when I say that as we read those words together, that man’s face lit up. “Would you write that down for me?” he asked. I wrote the passage on a 3-by-5 card and handed it to him. I urged him to look at the card periodically each day. I don’t know what happened in that man’s life from that point. But I do know that it came as really good news to him to know that God has compassion on us and that while we may walk away from God, the God we know through Jesus Christ will never walk away from us.

Early in my ministry, a woman approached me with a big concern. It was about my preaching; she didn’t like it one bit. In fact, she hated it.

Why, she asked, was I always talking about how wonderful God is? Shouldn’t I be bawling people out more for their sin?

Sin is serious business. God hates sin. But God hates sin because of what each one—whether it involves taking God’s Name in vain, murder, adultery, thievery, putting the motives and actions of others in a bad light--does to us.

Sin separates us from God.

It brings death.

It destroys our relationships with others.

It distorts our humanity.

God is the loving Father Who wants to welcome us home today and forever. Every time we’re tempted to see God as a cold, distant deity, we need to remember that when God came to earth in the Person of Jesus Christ, He was loving, compassionate, and involved.

We may condemn ourselves by not repenting for sin and not believing in Jesus Christ, but far from condemning us, on the night He was arrested, Jesus prayed for us. I preach about a wonderful God because in Jesus Christ that’s exactly what we see, the wonderful God of all creation!

There are many mysteries in life—suffering that doesn’t go away, prayers that seem unheard, temptations that dog us, relationships that go sour in spite of our fervent prayers, and others. But Jesus demonstrates beyond all doubt that each of us matters to God.

Jesus’ resurrection says that in the end, God will act lovingly and decisively on behalf of those who believe in Jesus. The Savior Who prays for us will never walk away from us. We can count on that!