Dear Christ Follower,
Holy Week is upon us.
Did you know that a little less than 2,000 years ago, around this time of year, Jesus was praying for you?
Before His crucifixion, before His trial, before He spent the night in the Garden, pleading in prayer and sweating great drops of blood from the weight of what He knew must take place…
He took time to pray for you.
In John 17:20, after praying for His disciples with Him for The Last Supper, Jesus turns His thoughts towards future followers, “I do not ask for these only, but also for those who will believe in me through their word,”. Jesus prayed for the people of His church who were yet to exist.
And what does His prayer for His future people consist of?
He asks for unity between believers. Unity that isn’t only theological or spiritual in nature, but something visible to a watching world. In verse 21, Jesus continues, “…that they may be one, just as you, Father, are in me, and I in you, that they also may be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me.”
Jesus prays that His followers operate as a united front, a single people called His Church.
In His prayer we learn that Jesus gives to each believer something wondrously special: The gift of glory given to Him from the Father, He gives to us. “The glory that you have given me I have given to them…”, Jesus declares in verse 22.
All humans bear the image of God, but as believers in Jesus, we bear His glory.
2 Corinthians 3:18 speaks of this, “And we all with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another.” As we fix our eyes on Jesus, the work of sanctification (the Holy Spirit shaping us to resemble Christ) takes place. It’s a process that doesn’t finish this side of eternity.
We’re given this gifting of glory Jesus says, so that we will find ourselves in Him. From verse 23, “I in them and you in me, that they may become perfectly one.” In an earlier message to His disciples, Jesus teaches that He is the Vine, the Father is the Vinedresser (pruning, cultivating) and believers are the branches. He says in John 15: 5, “…Whoever abides in me and I in him, he it is that bears much fruit, for apart from me you can do nothing.“
We weren’t meant operate independently. We’re called to togetherness with God’s people, to identity in Jesus as we’re conformed to His glorious likeness, and to dependence on Jesus’ power enabling us to do what the Father has called us to.
Finally, we learn that the purpose in all of this is so “that the world may know that you sent me and loved them even as you loved me.” This is profound. The Father’s love for us is so great as to be compared to His love for His Son.
Jesus, knowing the awful bitterness of the Cup He would soon be drinking, looks to “the joy that was set before Him” (Hebrews 12:2), and concludes His prayer with this request:
“Father, I desire that they also, whom you have given me, may be with me where I am, to see my glory that you have given me because you loved me before the foundation of the world.” John 17: 24
What a strange and glorious and wonderful realization.
Jesus desired for us to be with Him, and so He went to the Cross and made a way.
