Good morning, Providence. We are going to be in John’s Gospel, John chapter 17, verses 20 through 23.

I’ve got a Bible there in the house. Hope you do. I want to encourage you to open it with me to John chapter 17, verses 20 through 23.

And this is what Jesus says there. He says,

I think famous last words are always really intriguing to us. Because I think famous last words, and you’ve probably heard that phrase many times before in your life, I think they tell us something about the person who said them. I think it gets to the core of what mattered most to a person. It’s very revealing about their character, their personality, what they cared about most in life. I think about Leonardo da Vinci, the famous painter. His last words were, I have offended God and mankind because my work did not reach the quality it should have. Harriet Tubman’s last words were,

Marie Antoinette, when she was about to be, I’m executed, the last queen of France, getting ready to be executed. She stepped on her executioner’s foot on accident and said, pardon me, I didn’t do it on purpose.

And Winston Churchill, very popular, very famous prime minister of England said, I’m bored with it all. So it’s interesting to hear someone’s last words because it gives one final look into who that person was and perhaps what mattered. And I think it’s a very similar thing in John’s gospel in chapter 17. This is Jesus’s famous last prayer.

So surely if this is Jesus’s famous last prayer, it’s usually referred to as his high priestly prayer. Surely it’s going to really, really matter what he chooses to talk about. It’s going to be important to him. And if it’s important to Jesus to pray it in this great, famous last prayer, should it not be important to us? I think absolutely it should. And the thing that Jesus chooses to pray about is you. What he chooses to pray about is me. He prays for his disciples, not just the ones present, but he prays for every follower of Jesus, that disciples would be for all time unified. He prays that Christ-centered community would be vibrant. It would be real. It wouldn’t fracture. It wouldn’t fall apart. So this is what Jesus is praying for. He’s praying for the unity of the church. Why is it so important to him?

And why does it need to be then so important to us as well?

Christ-centered community. So understand, earlier in this prayer, Jesus says, I’m praying for all of them. So not just my disciples, but every disciple who’s going to be a disciple of mine. And what he prays is, Father, I want you to take them out of the world. A lot of times we pray things that we want, not what God wants. And Jesus doesn’t pray, Lord, just hit the pause button on all this bad stuff. Take them out of the world. What he prays is, no, don’t take them out of the world. But Father, I want them to be kept. He’s praying that even after his departure, he can’t be there with us, with his disciples bodily. He still prays that we would be kept and we would abide and we would be faithful. And we would be as. As unified together as disciples, our purpose as disciples, Jesus prays just as unified as the Father and the Son are unified in one. That’s how unified the local church disciples should be. So I want us to see two characteristics, two markers of what this unity in Christ-centered community should look like. And the first one I want us to see here this morning is a shared glory. If we have Christ-centered community in our lives, in our church, what Jesus says that we will have is a shared glory. Verse 22, he says,

So I want us to understand that word glory. When we think about God’s glory, there are really two great aspects to it. And the first aspect, It’s the glory of God’s power. God’s power. God is a majestic God. He’s a highly exalted God. And the psalmist, if you read through the Psalms, you find so much rich language about God’s altogether just worthiness. He’s above us in power and his rule and his reign. He deserves praise. He deserves to be worshipped for this. He is the God who is in unapproachable light. No man could draw. Near to him. So God fills, you know, with his presence every square inch of heaven and earth. He’s supreme ruler whose ways are inscrutable. His judgments accurate. And no one knows the greatness, the sheer power, the might, the majesty of God than Jesus. Jesus himself being one with the father as the second person of the Trinity. Jesus understands that for all eternity. God being Father, Son, and Holy Spirit and there are three persons, they have perfectly in all power ruled and reign without one bit of opposition able to foil them. Jesus is profoundly aware of the power of God and how glorious God is in his power. So God is this then. He’s the one being in all the universe who can go on and on about how great and awesome God is. He’s the one being in all the universe who can go on and on about how great and awesome God is. And it never counts as pride. It never counts as arrogant because it’s so true. You know, that’s why it’s so off-putting when an athlete or a musician or an actor self-praise. Because their greatness, it’s incredibly subjective. One may think that an artist is so great and another person may think that same artist is terrible. One may think that they have uncontested skills. But always, so it goes, another champion comes along. So human greatness, as we think about it, it’s subjective. Human greatness is always fleeting. It goes when you die or you get too old to do that thing you were great at. Or, and this is always likely, the masses, their tastes change for someone and something else. So it’s very subjective. But God’s greatness is not subjective. It is objective. God is objective. God is perfectly great in His power, in His majesty, in His might. It doesn’t fade. It doesn’t go out of style. It doesn’t weaken. The psalmist says in Psalm 19, the heavens declare His glory. So His glory is just going on and on forever. And it’s never going to stop whether or not you and I see it.

Whether or not you and I agree with it. And often we don’t. That’s it. That’s the great loss for us due to the fall of man. We have stopped seeing our lives as revolving around the one who deserves all glory. And we have begun seeing life and people and stuff as revolving around us. So we have robbed God of His glory, so we think, in our attempt to find ultimate meaning in anything other than God. And what we find most… And what we find most meaningful, never mistake it, what we devote ourselves to is the thing we ultimately worship and glorify and see as most important and great in our lives. So this is one critical aspect of God’s glory that’s lost on us. And that Jesus alone is able to, plural, plural, restore to us. To all of us. Jesus alone shows us that God is the only thing… Worth living for. Jesus shows us that God deserves and demands our praise. Jesus alone heals us from the delusion that we or anyone else is worthy of glory that only God does. Jesus knocks over our silly little idols. He ruins our small, stupid little kingdoms. Jesus shows us that the greatest way to live is under the reign of God. Of God and His kingdom that goes on forever. And in giving all glory and praise to God and recognizing His power and His might. In living for that glory do we find great satisfaction and pleasure as we never could otherwise. So Jesus unites His disciples. This is a thing that we as a church should be able to do uniquely. It is together we are united in a passionate pursuit for the glory of God. And seeing His power, His majesty, His reign over all creation, over all people, over all time. That should be a passion of yours if you’re a disciple of Jesus. And it’s something you should share with the church. But there’s a second aspect to the glory of God I want us to see. And that’s the glory of God’s holiness. So we cannot conceive of God’s glory and not reckon with His utter purity and sinlessness. That’s the critical second aspect of it. Just as man stopped worshiping the God of glory’s power, he stopped being like God in the glory of His holiness. Or we could say the image of God, which was perfectly put on us, is marred and mangled and lost. The holiness of God’s righteousness, the holiness of God’s character that was on us in the garden, has been marred and ruined by God. And so now that righteous holiness, the glory of God and how pure and holy He is to the natural man without the Spirit, it is as a noxious and odious fume. The standard of what is a good life, that may vary greatly from person to person, society to society, but what we will never achieve as individual people or as societies, is the level of good found in the image of God. God alone is good in His holiness, in His righteousness, in His purity, in His sinlessness. And here’s the thing to grab. God demands everyone, especially His church, be as holy as He is holy. Think back to Moses on the mountain. And what does Moses ask for? He says, Lord, I want to see Your glory. But God says, no. He says back to him, no, you can’t really see Me. Why? Because if Moses saw God in the glory of His holiness, it would kill him. In the same way, if anyone touched the Ark of the Covenant where God’s presence uniquely rested, it would kill him. And that happened in the Old Testament. The very law that God gave the people, it was a testament to and God for holy living. Because God demanded His people be holy. And that’s not just an Old Testament thing. The apostle Peter reemphasizes that in his first epistle in chapter 1 verse 14. He says, As obedient children, do not be conformed to the passions of your former ignorance. But as He who called you is holy, so also be holy in all your conduct. Since it is written, and this is a throwback to the Old Testament for Peter, You be holy for I am holy. Holy. God is a holy God. And He’s so holy. But just as the people in the Old Testament could not, we cannot live up to that holy standard of a God who is gloriously holy. But the blood of Jesus does the thing that only the blood of Jesus can do.

Jesus, by spilling His blood, has purified us and cleaned us so that we are free from the stains of our unholiness. Free from a life that dishonors God. We are made holy. And we are made clean in and through Jesus. That we may look up again at God. And that we may again be in His presence. Jesus has purified us. Jesus has put His Holy Spirit within us to empower us for, and to desire holiness. And that not individually. That’s not, you might get caught up in that if you’re a disciple of Jesus. No, not at all. If you’re really a blood-bought disciple, you’ve placed faith in Christ, then that means without question, you have a passion for, with the local church, with the people of God, to be holy. It should be a big deal to you. The older, more archaic word for it is piety. You want to live a pious life. And it’s not about, look at me, I’m holier than thou. It’s about striving to be all that Christ is. Because you’ve been changed into a new image. And not just you. But again, why is Jesus praying what He’s praying in the high priestly prayer? Because He realizes God, His grace, has changed us. He’s turned our lives around from sin. He’s knocked down our idols so that we would be the people that God desires us to be and holiness and purity. We are a holy community. And Jesus is the center of that community. And our lives are formed around Him together. Together. So that’s Jesus’ prayer for you and I. That we would have a shared glory and living lives of holiness and purity before the holy, pure, powerful God who will call all people into account for whether or not they are a holy people. Jesus is asking that you and me, His disciples, that we would be overwhelmed with the greatness of God’s glory. That it would produce in us an intensity for obedience and full submission to God. That we would live in reverence before God knowing that judgment is coming. So we can’t just say, God is glorious. What we have to do is obey Jesus. And what does Jesus say in John chapter 15 verse 8? He says, The Father is glorified when you and I bear fruit. And what do we bear in our lives? We bear the marks of Jesus. Which is the glory of holiness lost in the garden but put back on us through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. And you know it’s amazing when you think about it, how much people give in life to many different pursuits.

Perhaps you know people like this. Perhaps this is you. But people who love exercise. I mean, there’s some people who, without question, they’re up at 5 a.m. They’re at the gym. They pay their membership fees happily to that gym. And they work out maybe a couple hours a day. And they’re obsessive about what they eat. And that’s not wrong. But it’s a lesser glory. And I want you to think about the great suffering and lengths people go to for things that aren’t nearly as glorious as God is. Whether it be exercise and personal health or money. Think about all the men in the world, past or present or future, who will sacrifice their marriages. Who will sacrifice what it means to be a parent. Who will give up their family life. Lose their own minds. Just to get money. They believe money is the answer. And they’re looking for more money. And they think working and working hard is the greatest achievement in life. Or fame. How many people have done terrible, crazy things just to get famous. Just to be seen. Just to be known. And if the world is doing these kinds of things and going to such great lengths for a lesser glory, friends, should you and I not constantly be saying, Lord, am I being a living sacrifice and giving myself away, not for a lesser glory that’s going to pass, but for your greater, greatest glory that’s going to go on forever? I think that should be a question for us always. Are we tuned to Jesus’ heart in our unity for the glory of God? And so think about how do we do that then just by way of application. So the first aspect of God’s glory, if I’m going to worship God in His glory for His power, I think what I need to do first of all is have the right mindset. And I think it’s easy to just go through life and it’s another day and I’m driving. But what I need to do really is obey the Scripture and see the creative power of God in all of creation. You know, it’s one thing just to drive down the road and see trees. It’s another thing to drive down the road and see trees. And what I mean is when you begin to just to notice in nature and you notice in clouds and you notice in storms and you notice in just the changing weather, God is a powerful God who alone created this. And you know, even when you’re not seeing crazy things happen like pandemics or amazing things happen like the birth of a new child or just the changing of events in the world and everything that happens good and bad, my mindset is God hasn’t just created all this stuff. God is the one who is sovereign over it and it’s happening the way that He wants it to happen. And when I live like that, friends, I’m in a place of fear and reverence. I’m in a place of just a complete and total, just healthy all that. Man, God is powerful and that great and powerful God deserves my worship. And secondly then, He deserves my obedience. So I’m glorifying God and just that mindset, Lord, You are glorious and I’m not going to take You lightly as if You’re someone else because You’re not someone else. But You’re a powerful God who is holy. So I need to be, we need to be, and this is a together thing, this is us, I need to constantly be living my life holy.

Holiness. It should be a favorite word for you. We should want to be holy. How do I live a holy life?

I think we constantly have to be coming back to the word and saying, okay, who is Jesus and what does He look like? And there’s our blueprint for what it means to be the people of God together. We are resisting the works of the flesh, the fruits of the flesh. We are together dying to ourselves. We are together having a renewed heart and mind to bear the fruits of the Spirit. We are guarding our hearts and minds from it being filled with filth, from it being filled with immorality. We are not responding in our flesh when we want to in anger. We are responding in the Spirit to glorify God. So I’m laying myself down daily. Jesus said, you want to follow me? What do you have to do? You’ve got to pick up your cross. He doesn’t say weekly. He doesn’t say when it’s convenient. Jesus says, if you want to follow me, which I think is just synonymous with saying if you want to live for the glory of God, you’ve got to die to yourself and you’ve got to pick up your cross and follow me daily. And friends, that’s a thing for you and I to do together. It’s a shared thing to live for the glory of God and bear fruit in holiness for His name’s sake. So a shared glory. I want us to see the second aspect

to what healthy Christ-centered community is and that second characteristic here is a shared love. So a shared glory.

Secondly, a shared love. In verse 23, Jesus says, I in them and you in me, that they may become perfectly one so that the world may know that you sent me and love them even as you loved me. So Jesus is asking the Father for His disciples, and that’s us, what He has always known and what He’s always had, and that is the love of the Father.

Jesus has always existed. If we believe that Jesus is God, we don’t believe He was created. And Jesus in eternal existence with the Father and the Spirit has known a relationship of perfect love with the Father. Jesus has had a familial bond, a love that transcends space and time. It’s a kind of harmony. I think it’s a kind of care and affection that you and I can hardly dream of. Why? Simply put, because as sinners, we’re bad at being one. We’re bad at unity. We don’t know what it is to give or receive perfect love. Not because God made us this way. He didn’t. But as a consequence of being apart from God, we lack the capacity for receiving and giving true love. What do we excel at? Well, we excel at selfishness. We excel at one-upmanship. We’re kings and queens at holding grudges, at taking advantage of others, of doing what’s most beneficial for me and mine. We look out for number one. So we walked away from true and pure love a long time ago, and so we lack the capacity for it. And really it’s interesting if you consider just how soon after the fall of man in the garden, does the flood come in. So in chapter three, we’ve got the fall of man, and it’s just in chapter six that the world gets so evil. The world becomes so bad and such a wicked place that God says, I’m going to wipe this whole place out with the flood. He says, I regret that I made man. So, so many things God did not intend to come to pass, have and hate for our fellow man is one of those great things. In the same reason that God sent Jonah to Nineveh, Nineveh with God removed. What do you have there? Well, in chapter three of Jonah, we find that there are violent people. Part of them being godless is their violence, their hate.

So see, it just doesn’t take the human heart that long to run the full course of its corruption. It’s not to say people are all bad, all the time, or as ruthless as they can be against other people all the time. But in light of God’s perfect love, we fail to show that kind of love. We don’t know what it is to experience that kind of love. Knowing the perfect love of God,

it is the height of your existence. It would be the height of mine to experience the love of God. But friends, those heights are unattainable for you and I. You and I cannot climb that high. Because of our sin nature, we cannot do it. But Jesus’ prayer for unity in the perfect love of God, see, he’s praying this because he knows what he’s getting ready to do. What Jesus is going to do after he prays this prayer is make a way for that great love to come down. What Jesus is going to do on the cross is going to be the greatest display of love imaginable. In 1 John 4, verse 7, John says it this way in his first letter, Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God. And whoever loves has been born of God and knows God. Anyone who does not love does not know God because God is love. In this, the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only Son into the world so that we might live through him. In this is love, not that we have loved, but that God has loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation or the satisfaction for our sins.

So Jesus has come and he hasn’t just prayed something that’s not possible. He’s prayed for something that God desires, the Father desires. But Jesus is also uniquely going to make a way for it to be possible. And what Jesus does is he displays God’s love on the cross. Jesus displays how much we are loved in that he loved us when we didn’t deserve that love.

God saved us when we didn’t deserve to be saved. When we, by faith, receive the work of Jesus on the cross, we are made anew children of God. We are embraced as adopted sons and daughters of God. And we are loved and experiencing God’s love. The Bible’s very plain. We then gain a capacity to show it. So the love of God, the sacrificial love of God, is something that we together should be enjoying, as we dwell on, savor the perfect,

unspeakable love of God on the cross of Christ, how we ourselves have been loved and have been saved. But that very same love, it should be our constant go-to to say, if Jesus loved me like that, how should I be loving other people in the very same spirit? So I really believe this is true. And I say this with all sincerity. I really believe that the local church should be a very unique and special place. I really believe that. I believe that not because of any of the members inside of it, as if they were special on their own, but because each member has been loved by God. That’s why I believe the local church should be a special place. Because if every member in the local church has been loved by God, it means that you and I have a special way in the power of the Spirit to show love, to show affection, to have a kind of genuine community that’s so real. It’s so much more real. It’s such a tighter bond than any kind of friendship that the world could possibly know. That’s what it should look like. That’s what it should look like. And Jesus even says, and it’s a very famous verse, but it doesn’t mean it’s any less powerful. Jesus says, How will the world know that you’re mine? He says, By the way you love one another. So Jesus is really riding big on the local church being a unique community of love so that the gospel is preached, so that people come to know Him and the glory of God. I mean, it’s such a theme for John and his gospel because I think it’s such a theme for God and His character. So if that stuff’s true and it very much so is, I really believe it should be heartbreaking to you. It should be heartbreaking to me when you hear about the church

across town that stood for over a century but now they’ve dismembered into factions over petty differences. I think that it should pain us to think about that the American church so much today people just hop around looking for the best experience for themselves. Churches are, seems to be more and more so increasingly organized around the tastes, the preferences of the consumers that frequent them and much less like a family to endure all trial and hardship with. I think it’s one of the greatest wins for the enemy that the church has lost the identity of family. I think that we have traded out the identity of spiritual family for spiritual experience.

But the greatest experience you and I could ever have is bearing with a spiritual family. Is going on and going long to the end with a Christ-centered community. Yes, it’s going to be difficult along the way. It’s going to stretch you. It’s going to stretch me. But when we bear with one another in the love of God friends, it’s going to grow us up into the image of Christ and God uses you and God uses me in each other’s lives to bring us to completion.

I’m grateful for

godly friends and I think this passage makes me think about

the blessing and gift of godly friends and you know with the pandemic going on, it’s like when you see somebody out in public you know or you’re able to talk to a friend it’s like, hey this is such a crazy experience to be able to see somebody face to face and have a conversation because we’re just not used to doing it over the last couple months but I had the opportunity

Saturday morning to spend a few hours with Chase and you all know Chase who served so faithfully as an elder at our church and it was refreshing to be with Chase because we didn’t just talk about the news and we didn’t talk about that. We weren’t together more than 20 minutes and we started

sharing our burdens and hey this is where I’m struggling and this is where I’m failing and man this is what I’ve been wrestling with and I need prayer here and hey this is where I want to grow and it was just so encouraging to just have a taste of what I haven’t really been having for such a long time in quarantine and that is the experience of shared love

and brother in Christ friend you are

in such a very dangerous way suffocating yourself dehydrating yourself when you live outside of Christ centered community you need it it is part of God’s design to bring you home completed in the image of Christ that you and I would together live in light of the cross of Jesus and see that radical sacrificial love as the way to love one another and if your question is how the answer for this one is so easy because the Bible makes it so easy and I love to reference them because it’s I think the fact that there are so many of them means God is like trying to make it so clear what it looks like to love one another there’s 59 of them I won’t read all of them but the Bible tells us to be at peace with one another it tells us to be devoted to one another and brotherly love

it says to live in harmony it says not to pass judgment it says to accept one another as Christ has accepted us it says to teach one another it says to greet one another with a holy kiss we may not do that but it just means be hospitable and really love to be together it says to wait for one another when you come together as a church just wait for everybody consider everyone equal the Bible tells us to serve one another it says not to bite and devour and gossip about one another

it says not to eat and not to provoke one another it teaches us to carry one another’s burdens it teaches us to be patient with one another it teaches us to be kind and compassionate it says to be forgiving it says to sing psalms and spiritual hymns to one another to encourage one another in the faith it says to submit to one another out of reverence for Christ it says not to lie to one another it says to admonish one another it says to encourage to build up to spur on

God has made so plain in his word about what it looks like for you and I to love one another well and when we do that when we love one another with the love of Christ we become a city on a hill we become the salt the taste, the flavor the savor of heaven to people who don’t know the precious simple, timeless truth that God and Christ Jesus died for sinners to save us and to call us his adopted sons and daughters this is such an amazing privilege and I hope it’s not just oh Christianity that’s what I know, that’s what I grew up in I hope it is just your lifeblood and you want to know the love of God to know it to love God but know it to love the local church so that question becomes when you and I come back together and when things hopefully soon and quick get back to normal are we going to love one another well are we going to go out of our way to serve one another are we going to go out of our way to bear one another’s burdens to be praying for one another when we need it, correct one another call one another out on sin to teach one another all these things are such wonderful gifts we’ve been given in the spirit to work out in each other’s lives so that we can be preserved

so that the gospel can be preached

so just at the end here why did Jesus why did Jesus pray for unity for us why did he pray for Christ centered community that we would be just unified and together and one as the Father and Son are because when we are a unified Christ centered community Jesus said quite plainly the world will know God

that’s Jesus’ greatest name for coming to earth dying on a cross ascending into heaven and sending his Holy Spirit is so that you and I as sinners would know God that we would know how glorious and wonderful he is how holy he is but also how kind he is to forgive us and to make us new and to take that great wonderful relationship we have with God that peace we have that familial bond we have and let the world see it as it plays out and manifest in our relationships in our lives that’s the great end of our unity in the local church it’s so that the world would know God I hope you and I have a passion for knowing God and making God know one of my heroes Dawson Trotman he was just a great disciple maker lived in the early 20th century and that was just his slogan just to know him and make him know

just a simple beauty in that that God’s not calling us to jump through some crazy hoops and he’s not calling us to do crazy equations we can’t figure out he’s calling us just to enjoy him

and help the world enjoy him by repenting and placing faith in Jesus just to know that love to make that love known share in that glory and preach how great and wonderful that glory is to the world and the spirit so let’s pray together that God excites us for that God makes us hopeful for that that because Jesus prayed that and it was according to the will of the Father it means that you and I are going to be quite successful in seeing that played out in our lives together at Providence Fellowship as we follow Jesus we are one and united in the spirit that God’s glory God’s love of experience and so that it would be made known to the ends of the world that all the nations would know and worship and love God so that is our great pursuit together by his grace I love you and I will see you next week