Jesus’ Final Wishes

Today on Summit Life, Pastor J.D. 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 Summit Life, the Bible teaching ministry of pastor, author, and apologist, J.D. Greer.

As always, I'm your host, Molly Vidovitch. Of course, as Christians, we all know that prayer is important, and yet sometimes it feels like just another item to check off our to-do list. Or maybe we want to pray more, but we aren't sure what to say.

Or maybe we pray a lot and nothing seems to ever change. Well, today, Pastor J.D. 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 J.D. originally preached this message shortly before the 2016 presidential election, but the principles apply to us at any time.

Pastor J.D. 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. If you knew that you were going to die and you had a 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? Give us traveling mercies.

What the heck are those? Put on your seatbelt 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 his.

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. 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 the right answer. Oh, Lord, 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 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 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 that. Hey, newsflash. He already is on your side. That's what the gospel tells you. You are his child. He is for you. He has promised to prosper 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 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' 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 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 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 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 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 to G, 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 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 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 7, 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 internalize these words. Verse 8, 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 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. You're listening to Summit Life with Pastor JD Greer. I want to take a quick moment to recognize and appreciate a truly a special group, our gospel partners. This team gives so generously and faithfully to Summit Life each and every month.

It's not an exaggeration to say that they are the financial fuel behind everything we do, including broadcasting this program every weekday on your radio station. We call them gospel partners because that's exactly what they do. They are actually partnering with us to help make the gospel known around the globe. This month we are sending Pastor JD's signature book called Gospel to all those who become monthly gospel partners for the first time. We will also send our monthly featured resource as well, a five-week digital prayer guide, to help us all process our deepest emotions. This ministry couldn't exist without these gospel partners and it's always a privilege to say thank you with our specially curated featured resource each month. To give a one-time gift or to join with us as a monthly gospel partner, call us right away.

The number is 866-335-5220 or you can visit us online at jdgreer.com. Now let's get back to today's teaching. Once again, here's Pastor JD.

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 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. 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.

He was praying first that we would love Jesus the way that God loves Jesus, the love that you love 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 know that he's real. 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 you worship. How about miraculous answers to prayer? Is that how they know he's real?

No, he says very clearly it's by how you love each other in the church. You remember the show The Invisible Man? 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. So the one 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. 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 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. 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 through us into the streets. Several years ago, 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. Scores of our people, tutored kids there. In fact, it was a refugee family in the school that had lost their house to a fire. And we had an engaged couple that said, hey, we've 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, 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 to 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 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 come in and stolen all their property and so they wanted to kick Rome out. That was a political movement in 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. 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, 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 a 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. So I'm a 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.

So 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 and you're like, okay, we're on the same page. 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. So I'm a 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 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? By how you pray? Is it by 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 forbear with and serve each other and how you refuse to be divided from each other. So 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. 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 platform. He promised to build it on the gospel.

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