Jesus’ Final Wishes

Today on Summit Life Pastor JD Greer talks about priorities in prayer. The church you see is God's plan A for working in the world. Therefore it is the main thing that Jesus prayed for on the last night of his life. When we pray for our world the main thing we ought to pray for is the spiritual vitality of believers in the world. Welcome to Friday here on Summit Life, the Bible teaching ministry of pastor, author, and theologian JD Greer.

As always, I'm your host Molly Vidovitch. Of course as Christians we all know that prayer is important and sometimes it feels like just another item to check off on our to-do list. Or maybe we want to pray more but we aren't sure what to say. Well today Pastor JD is reminding us of the ultimate purpose of prayer and why it matters. And trust me when we catch sight of this vision it'll give us a fresh excitement for prayer like never before.

Pastor JD originally preached this message shortly before the 2016 presidential election but the principles apply to us at any time. He titled today's message Jesus's Final Wishes. John chapter 17 if you have your bibles this is the last recorded prayer that Jesus prayed. He prayed it on the night right before he died.

Now I've personally never been with somebody in the last night of their life when they knew it was the last night of their life but I would imagine that that if you knew that somebody you were about to die whatever you prayed would have a great amount of clarity to it. Just ask yourself if you knew that you were going to die and you had chance for one prayer what would you pray? This is what Jesus prayed in the last prayer he made publicly before he died it's what he asked for you. And let me just say this as we get into it there are some things that Jesus prays in this prayer that belong uniquely to him.

He was the son of God. He was the second member of the trinity and so not everything he says in this prayer is going to apply to us but a pastor named Louie Giglio down in Atlanta points out that there are three major things that Jesus prays for in this prayer that ought to serve as a pattern for how we should pray. These are the things that Jesus prayed on the last night of his life which means that we ought to pray them on every night of our lives. I have lamented to some of you before how trite the average Christian's prayers usually sound. We fill up our prayers with cliches and platitudes and spend most of our time asking God for things that he's already promised to give us. I always hear oh God be with us and God says I promised you I would never leave you or forsake you. Hebrews 13 5 read your bible ask me for something else.

Nor we spend the whole time asking God for things that are okay but things that are really not supposed to be our main focus. Lord help me do well on this test. And then the Holy Spirit says well did you study? I give us traveling mercies. What the heck are those? I have a PhD in theology.

I don't have the foggiest idea. I think God's probably like put on your seat belt and drive the speed limit. Stop texting when you drive. There's your traveling mercy. I'm not saying that there's never a place to ask for any of those things but I hope you understand my point. What is supposed to be the core of our prayer? What's our prayer supposed to sound like? Well this passage can show you how you can pray like Jesus. How you can pray what Jesus prays. Our prayers ought to sound like is.

So here we go. The first thing that he prays for of the three. Number one in his final prayer Jesus prays for himself.

Look at verse one. Father the hour has come. Glorify your son that your son may glorify you. Now it might strike you as strange that Jesus opens up this prayer praying for himself but the key is an understanding why Jesus is asking God to glorify him.

You see this? Glorify me so that I can glorify you. We often have a wrong view of Christian humility. We think Christian humility means that you don't seek prosperity but clearly here Jesus asked God to bless him and glorify him and raise him up. Let me introduce you to a phrase that Pastor Louie uses. The phrase is me for you. God I'm asking you to bless me so that I can glorify you. I'm not saying me for me.

I'm saying me for you. Humility is not not seeking prosperity. Humility is using whatever prosperity that God sends you to direct people's attention back toward God. I pray all the time for God to raise up the summit church but not for the sake of the summit church. I ask that he raise up the summit church for his glory. You can ask that same thing about your own life.

You say well that sounds convenient. You and God both getting glory. How can you know that when you say that it's not really all about you?

That's a great question. Here are a couple of ways you can know when you're asking this of whether it's about you or it's about God. Way number one when God gets glory for himself by exalting somebody else besides you, you can tell by the jealousy in your heart whether you're more concerned about God's glory than your own. Now I've told you where God revealed this to me as pastor of this church many years ago. I was praying for God to raise this church up. Bless our ministries. I was like God would you do something in the triangle area that will transform the area? The kind of thing they'll write about in history books 100 years from now of the great gospel awakening in the triangle.

And it was one of those times where God the Holy Spirit spoke to me not audibly but in a voice that was every bit as clear as if it had been audible. The Holy Spirit said okay what if I say yes to this prayer and what if I just transform the triangle for the gospel? But what if I don't use your church? What if I don't use the summit church to do it? What if I use the church down the street and they're the one that gets famous and they're the ones everybody talks about and your church stays the same? Now y'all I knew I knew the right answer. Oh Lord you you must increase and I must decrease. I knew that was the right answer.

And that may have been the right answer but it wasn't the real answer. I was not okay with God bringing glory to himself if it didn't involve me in our church. And that just showed me that all this time I've been saying thy kingdom come what I really meant is my kingdom come. So yes you can see by the jealousy in your heart when God chooses to exalt somebody else whether you're in this for you or for him. Here's here's a second way you can know it's about God's glory is what you do when he sends suffering to you like he did Jesus. You see sometimes God brings glory to himself by how joyously a believer suffers. By how confident you remain in pain.

How happy you remain in poverty. It is true yes that God gets glory when sick Christians miraculously get well. But it's also true that he gets glory when sick Christians die well. Also when you and I are able to say even in the midst of great pain I got a treasure that's greater than health.

I got a treasure that's sweeter than earthly benefits. When you and I are able to say in the midst of confusion and disappointment I trust God even in the midst of this confusion for his loving purposes in my life. And people say why? Why would you why would you say that?

Because your life is clearly falling apart. And you say because he proved it at the cross. That brings glory to God. In his final prayer Jesus prays first for himself but his prayer was me for you. Glorify me so that I can glorify you and when you send the cross I'm going to glorify you through that also. You know listen most of us pray as if the point of prayer was to get God on our side. Oh God bless me.

Oh God do this. Hey newsflash he already is on your side. That's what the gospel tells you. You are his child. He is for you. He is promised a price for you. The question is no longer whether he is for you.

That's been settled. The question is whether you are for him. Here's number two in his final prayer. Jesus prays for his disciples. Verse six. I've revealed to you to those whom you gave me out of the world. They were yours.

You gave them to me and they've obeyed your word. Holy father protect them by the power of your name. The bulk of Jesus's prayer he spends right here. He is thinking specifically about the 12 disciples of his minus Judas. You can see in verse 12 that he excludes Judas because he knows that Judas is about to betray him. The best correspondence to this group that Jesus prays for I think is probably your your small group or let's say those four to six people in your life that you pray intimately and daily for. Here's what he prays for these guys. Verse 11. Holy father protect them by the power of your name. Verse 13, 15. My prayer is not that you take them out of the world. My prayer is that you protect them from the evil one in the world. He prays not that we would be taken out of the world but that they would be kept by the power of God in the world. I point this out because there is a warped version of Christianity that seeks to remove itself from the world because it believes that isolation is only the only way to avoid corruption. In high school I went to a private Christian school whose sole goal seemed to be to keep us as isolated from the world as isolated from the world as humanly possible. So we weren't supposed to go see movies at the theater because you might while you're there actually you know see an R-rated movie and even if you hadn't gone to see an R-rated movie maybe you were there to see fireproof or something related gee others might not know that you were there to see that and they would think you were there to see an R-rated movie and then they would be influenced to see an R-rated movie and you would be responsible. We weren't allowed to dance because dancing would make you want to you know so we weren't allowed to listen to rock music because rock music had a beat in it and make you want to even Christian rock music you shouldn't listen to that because that might make you want to dance the point the way the high school I was going to their goal was a good one the goal was to keep us from being corrupted by the world but it's not Jesus's vision of how you stay uncorrupted true discipleship is not isolation from the world true discipleship is living like Jesus within the world because what happens when you remove yourself from the world you lose your evangelistic witness which is the very reason that God leaves you in the world do you know people outside the church are you actively engaged in their lives could you pull out your phone right now and and pull up the numbers of three people who are not believers and text any of them and say let's go get coffee after this and it wouldn't be weird can you speak the language of culture because a holiness that is disconnected from the world is no holiness at all which leads to verse 17 sanctify them sanctify means make them holy set them apart sanctify them how by removing them no sanctify them by the truth your word is truth Jesus wanted us in the world but he didn't want us to be shaped by the world so how do we develop a holy heart and holy life within the world short answer really simple answer by knowing God's word because the greatest way to avoid a lie is to know the truth your success in the world spiritually and the success of your kids is not going to be based on how well you isolate them from the lies it's going to be based on how much they know the truth my kids love sports my kids love extracurricular stuff but we as a family have made a decision that we just will not do things that negatively impact their opportunity to learn God's word here's why it is unlikely that my kids will ever play a professional sport or dance for a living it is a hundred percent likely that they're going to go to heaven or hell right and so i'm going to make sure that they're prepared for that i'm also 100 sure that God has a plan for their lives so we are going to seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness which means making sure they know scripture and let extracurricular be added in on the margins all right now notice specifically he's concerned about two things in regard to the truth the first thing is that they recognize that these words have divine origin see verse seven now they know that everything you've given me comes from you i want you according to the prayer of Jesus i want you to have the confidence that this book that we learn from every week is from God this is not practical life lessons from uncle JD and this concept is always under attack in the culture and sadly even in the church his second concern was that they internalized these words verse eight for i gave them the words that you gave me and they accepted them i can teach these things to you you see and Jesus could teach them but you're the only one that can actually take them into your heart it's why we're always pushing you here to do what we call a quiet time quiet time just means a time every day where i open up God's word i read it and i begin to see the lit through the lens of the gospel the things that are going on in my life and i apply the promises of scripture to my problems why because i need to internalize God's word and so do you it's why we also push you to be a part of a small group because we realize that there are certain dimensions of God's word that you can learn better when you're seated in circles talking about God's word than when you're seated in rows just listening to God's word so you need to internalize it here's number three in Jesus's final prayer he prays for his church look at verse 20 my prayer is not for them alone i pray for those who will believe in me through their message and by the way that that was me and you he was praying for right there as well as people all over the world who have yet to hear i pray that all of them may be one father just as you're in me and i'm in you that may they also be in us so that the world may believe that you have sent me a couple of observations here first notice that Jesus does not pray for the world not one time in john 17 does Jesus pray for the lost world what he prays for listen are believers in the world in fact he says quite plainly verse 9 i'm not praying for the world is that because Jesus didn't care about the world hardly it's because he knew that the hope for the world the hope for any community is found in the believers in that community and what that means is that if you really want to pray for some group you want to pray for a nation a city a group of people you want to pray for a school campus the best strategy is to pray for God to raise up and strengthen the believers within that group what Jesus tells them is the hope for people in your community is for believers to be healthy and vibrant so that they can testify to the salvation that's in Jesus the church you see is God's plan a for working in the world therefore it is the main thing that Jesus prayed for on the last night of his life when we pray for our world the main thing we ought to pray for is the spiritual vitality of believers in the world now second observation the one dominant thing from this section that Jesus prays for is that we would internalize God's love see verse 26 i pray that the love with which you have loved me may be in them and i in them so he's praying look at this he was praying first that we would love Jesus the way that God loves Jesus the love that you've loved me may also be in them and that we would also love others like Jesus loves us and that i would be in them also because when we do that he says listen to this people will will know that he's real see verse 23 i am them and you and me that they may become perfectly one because then then the world will know that you sent me how does the world know that God is real is it by how well i preach is it the cogent and watertight arguments that i make for the existence of God is that how they know he's real is it by how loudly you worship oh that's got to be it how loudly you worship they can just see that God is real by how loud do you worship how about miraculous answers to prayer is that how they know he's real by how we all vote if we all vote the same way then they'll know that he's real no he says very clearly as by how you love each other in the church here's how i see it you remember the the show um the invisible man remember this the one superhero they haven't brought back yet marvel hadn't pulled back out as the invisible man and i'm kind of excited when they do because that was my favorite one um as a kid i love superheroes i love to dress up like superheroes truth be told i still do but it creeps the neighbors out when i go running around the neighborhood dressed like spider-man um but uh so the one um superhero whose costume i could never really quite master was the invisible man fair enough i mean the best i could do is to sneak in my sister's room and mess all her stuff up and say the invisible man did it um but i never could master this costume so if you remember the show the way if you were near the invisible man the only way to to make invisible was to do what you had to throw dust on him throw dust on him pour paint on top of him and then you could see the outline of the invisible man well the local church love in the local church is supposed to be like the paint that makes the invisible christ visible and that love shows itself in primarily two ways in this chapter it shows first of all in how we serve people on the outside the love that jesus has for us just spills out like a waterfall like it gushes into us and then threw us into the streets several years ago our our church got very convicted about the fact that we just weren't loving our community and so we just said all right how is it that we can bless the broken places in our community in the first place the holy spirit led us to was a string of underprivileged schools in one particular school we got really involved in it and we renovated the classrooms and we adopted teachers there and said hey whatever your supplies you need let us be the first line of defense dozens of our people scores of our people uh uh tutored kids there um in fact we had a refugee family in the school that had lost their house to a fire and we had an engaged couple that said hey we got a wedding shower instead of giving all the stuff to us for our house why don't we redirect this to this refugee family well at a breakfast that we put on for the teachers before the school year the next year one of the teachers stood up and she says she says you know i'm not a christian i'm not a christian but i've always known that you christians believed you were supposed to love your neighbor i just never knew what it looked like until now what happened is you made the invisible jesus visible through the way that you love those on the outside that can't necessarily pay you back because that looks like jesus love the world loves people who can love them back jesus loved people who couldn't pay him back and that's how you make the invisible jesus visible it's when we take in foster children and love prisoners and serve refugees and befriend political enemies that's when we make the invisible jesus visible here's the second way his love inside of us shows itself through a unity in jesus stronger than anything that could divide us watch this verse 23 i am them and you and me that they may become perfectly one so that the world may know that you sent me when we lose our unity in the church it is because something has become more important to us than jesus i pointed this out to you before when when the gospels list out the names of jesus's 12 disciples it includes a couple of little interesting and seemingly irrelevant details with them one of them is described as simon the zealot now zealot was a political platform back then they believed that rome had coming in and stolen all their property and so they wanted to kick rome out that was a political movement in um israel in the first century so shortly after him you have matthew the tax collector matthew his political position was the best thing is to work with rome you could not get more opposite politically than these two guys one of them's like a tea party and one of them's like a bernie sanders supporter and yet they're here in the same group of disciples you know they had to have some incendiary discussions around the campfire right and i just kind of get bemused thinking about jesus listening to them go back and forth on what's the best strategy yet somehow they found in jesus something that unified them that was greater than the things politically that divided them um it's just they what was in jesus was greater than the disunity in politics all right listen some of you by the tone of what you put on your facebook wall demonstrate that you care more about politics than you do about jesus i know christians i know christians good pure-hearted christians who cannot fathom how a believer could ever vote for trump because of the terrible and repulsive character he displays and the endless amounts of just idiotic things that he says and there's some aspects of clinton's platform that they like so they're going to vote for her there are others who say yeah but how could you vote for clinton in light of her position on abortion and who we know she'll appoint to the supreme court and the disastrous implications that that's going to have for religious liberty maybe the best way to stop her is just to hold my nose and vote for trump and then there are others who cannot fathom how a true christian would vote for either one so they're going to vote third party and others are like i'm just going to write down in my ballot lord jesus please come back soon right which maybe that's the best option my point is to tell you that when we do discuss them we do so with the spirit of love and unity that declares that what we have in jesus is greater than any opinions we have about secondary or tertiary matters which is as high as politics can ever get that we give space and show grace because of what we have together in christ and even our tone in how we talk communicates that some of church as best i can as best i can i refuse to let secondary opinion let any opinion on a secondary issue separate me from those who love jesus or to let something like that inhibit my ability to talk about the gospel this unity in the church happens not because we care about politics too much it happens because we care about jesus and his church too little some of you understand if we live this way you know when you're talking with somebody and you find out they're kind of politically aligned with you you know that sense of like relax that you kind of suddenly feel you could have just met them you're like okay we're on the same page um we ought to fill that times a hundred with jesus in a way that just outweighed anything that we disagreed with in a secondary matter some of church if we live this way and loving unity with the spirit of jesus our evangelism efforts will get a whole lot more effective do you see what jesus said if they do this if they do this then the world is going to know that you sent me write this down love on display in the church is the church's most powerful apologetic apologetic means how we defend our faith love on display in the church is the church's most powerful defense of its faith that's not me trying to be cute that's john 13 35 where jesus says it in the in the in his explanation before this prayer he tells them he says by this will all men know that you are my disciples by how loudly you praise about how you pray it's about how you preach no they're going to know that you're my disciples by how you love each other how you love and forgive and for bear with and serve each other and how you refuse to be divided from each other some that if we did this we would not have to invite people to come to our church they would be beating down the doors to come and see what is going on who is this powerful invisible superhero that fills and empowers your church and then we would say we're talking about jesus and we tell them about him it's always interesting to me in church surveys that we do the number one answer when people get asked why do you come back to a church after having visited it's not the music that's always number three it's not the preaching that's number two it's whether or not they felt loved you may have noticed that this message was preached shortly before the 2016 presidential election but pastor jd greer's points about unity in the church are definitely still relevant today we live in turbulent times and some churches are tempted to turn to a political party for security but jesus didn't promise to build his church on a president or a platform he promised to build it on the gospel you're listening to summit life we've spent the past couple of months surveying the entire bible from genesis to revelation so we've partnered with crossway publishers to create a custom summit life bible that includes some detailed study tips and a full year reading plan the translation is the english standard version of the bible or esv the main goal of providing a bible with a reading plan is to grow in your daily interaction with god and his word if you learn 10 books of the bible better than you knew them before after working through the plan that's a huge win and we'll send you this custom blue leather bible as an expression of thanks when you donate today to support this ministry summit life is funded by listeners like you so your gift truly makes a difference ask for the custom summit life bible when you give by calling 866-335-5220 that's 866-335-5220 or give online at jdgreer.com by the way if you haven't checked out pastor jd's newest podcast called ask me anything you'll want to do that today pastor jd gives quick honest answers to tricky questions and you can find it online at jdgreer.com or through your favorite podcasting app i'm molly vinovich inviting you to join us next week when we turn our attention to the crucifixion and how it changed human history forever have a great weekend and join us again monday here on summit life with jd greer