04: Generational Witness

John chapter 17 verses 20 through 26.

John 17:20–26

I do not ask for these only, but also for those who will believe in me through their word, that they may all be one, just as you, Father, are in me, and I in you, that they also may be in us, so that the word world may believe that you have sent me.

The glory that you have given me, I have given to them, that they may be one even as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they may become perfectly one, so that the world may know that you sent me and loved them even as you loved me.

Father, I desire that they also 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.

O righteous Father, even though the world does not know you, I know you, and these know you that you have sent me.

I made known to them your name, and I will continue to make it known, that the love with which you have loved me may be in them, and I in them.

This is the word of the Lord.

Please be seated.

Okay, would you pray with me?

Holy Father, I pray that we would hear your prayer for us.

Lord, would your word be applied to our hearts by your Holy Spirit?

And would you use it to sharpen us and refine us that we might look more and more like Jesus?

Father, I pray that you would open our hearts to the particulars that you have for each of us individually, and that you would show us what you have for us as a church in your word.

Father, uh, we praise you.

We praise you for your word, and um we lift this up in Jesus' name.

Amen.

So we are in the last week of our series, which we've titled A Prayer Before the Journey.

Uh, this is Jesus praying.

Uh it's recorded as the high priestly prayer in John chapter 17.

John 17 · chapter mention

This is just before he is arrested.

This is what he prays in the presence of his disciples.

And with our church on the eve of our journey, we thought it would be appropriate to uh hear Jesus' prayer, that he prayed before he went on his journey to the cross.

I've said it each week, but that's only four weeks, so I'll say it again.

Uh a journey to Berkeley from Cap Hill is very different from the road to Calvary.

But uh remembering, it's so important for us to remember that the reason that we go on mission together as a church is because Jesus went on mission to rescue us.

It is it is his mission that all of what we would do is grounded in.

Uh another reason that we wanted to hear this is because as the holidays, as we're in the midst of them, uh life just gets crazy, and I think tensions uh get high and our fuses get short, and as uh we become sort of surrounded by this time of celebration, it can be uh uh difficult to find the same comfort that we otherwise would, uh perhaps in the Word or in community.

And I think one of the greatest sources of comfort that we have is hearing a friend pray for us.

To sit and have someone uh put their hand on your shoulder and just to hear them pray for you has been an incredible source of encouragement in my life.

And I think that uh uh it's so important for us to hear Jesus pray for us.

For us to hear the words of our Lord pray for us can be such a comfort for our hearts.

So we want to listen closely as we move through this prayer.

Throughout the prayer, Jesus has prayed in uh at the first part of the prayer, we saw that he prayed for his own glory.

And then we saw Jesus pray for his disciples.

And this week that sort of circle expands to include us, to include the people who would know Jesus because of the witness of the disciples.

And so we're going to see that today.

So as we've as we've said that we're going to hear Jesus pray particularly for us, this week that becomes the most true.

Because this is where we see Jesus describe those of us who know of him because of the witness of the apostles.

Now, it's common to hear that and you kind of hear these uh kind of rebukes against Christianity as the organized religion that it is today, which is that, you know, if Jesus uh Jesus never would have intended for Christianity to happen.

We can't imagine that Jesus would have intended for this like religion to take place.

That couldn't have been what he wanted.

He wanted peace to move through the world or something like that.

We hear these sort of caricatures of Jesus.

Uh but it in the prayer, the section of the prayer that we're going to look at today, I think it will become apparent that Jesus really intended to create a church.

Jesus intended to create a body of people that was unified in him and that continued on generationally beyond him.

This is not just some fluke of history that the church happened.

This was Jesus' intention all along.

So we're going to look through, we're going to see that today, this clear intent of Jesus.

We're going to see the witness, uh, the way that the church bears witness.

We're going to see the witness of generations, the witness of the church's unity, and we're going to see the witness of Christ.

So the witness of generations, witness of unity, and the witness of Christ.

So let's go ahead and jump into the generational witness of the church.

This is John 17, 20 through 21.

It says, I do not ask for these only, but also for those who will believe in me through their word, that they may all 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.

So the prayer up until this point has been directed pretty exclusively at the disciples.

We saw how Jesus really narrows the prayer towards the disciples who have been with him for these past couple of years and who are with him now while he's praying.

But here we become brought into this story.

He says, I do not ask for these only, that's the disciples, but also for those who will believe in me through their word.

So what we see is that each generation of Christians becomes responsible for the continuation of this message of Christ.

You know, in order for any of us to have been saved, we had to have been brought into this by other people who bore witness to who Jesus was.

And so you can think that the progression of Christianity, it can seem like, oh my gosh, this is just teetering on a generational edge.

It's been 2,000 years.

When we look back, we are completely connected to that lineage of people sharing Christ down the generational line.

That's how we know who he is today.

This is not uh, this is the true development of our faith for the generational line to continue.

So we see that we have this link to the immediate prior generation before us, where it's because of their faithfulness that we can come to know who Jesus is.

And we can say the same thing, we hope for the generation after us, that it's in large part our faithfulness and sharing it with them, that God uses as the medium for continuing his message through these generations.

But if you look at the text, you'll notice that Jesus doesn't actually discuss multiple generational cycles.

What Jesus ties us to is those who will believe in him through the word, particularly of the disciples, through the word of the apostles.

So here we've got these sort of two generations at play.

We've got the original eyewitnesses, the apostles, and they are the ones who hold the authoritative word of God.

It's through the apostles that we have the New Testament written.

It's through these who are sent messengers of Jesus that they are able to bear the word that holds authority for who Jesus is.

That's why we have scripture that has real authority.

And then it's the generations that have preceded us that have maintained this connection to the scriptures.

And in maintaining that connection to Scripture, they maintain this unity with Jesus and who he really is.

And so there are these two elements at play in the way that Christianity continues.

One is the authority of the original eyewitnesses, which we receive in Scripture.

And the other is the continuing understanding and connection with that scripture as it marches forward through time.

And so we have this sort of dialogue.

There's this interesting dynamic with Christianity where it's intentionally grounded in the factual eyewitness history of what Jesus did, and it's always progressing, it's always developing as the story moves on into new contexts and cross all of the normal boundaries that would keep humanity apart.

Christianity just spreads through as we maintain this connection to the Word.

Leslie Nubigan has this great description of this groundedness and connectedness, or excuse me, and progressiveness of Christianity.

He says this says, it would be a remarkable example of cultural chauvinism if we suppose that our faith about what really happened, shaped as it is by our own cultural perspectives, must necessarily displace that of the immediate witnesses.

The conversation between the present and the past must go on and will go on until the end of the world.

And the perception of the first witnesses must have the premier role in the conversation.

So let's start off with that first sentence.

She's saying it would be a remarkable example of cultural chauvinism if we assumed that you know who really knows who the real Jesus is?

It's probably us.

Because we stand at this developmental end of history.

And you know what we've transcended as a culture?

We've transcended the gendered barriers that Jesus lived in.

We've transcended the cultural barriers that Jesus lived in.

We've transcended the supernatural understanding of reality that Jesus lived in.

And so because we as a culture have the firmest grip on reality, we're able to look back at the eyewitness accounts of what Jesus did, and we're able to say, this is some great teaching, but the miracle stuff, look, we know that isn't true.

Because miracles don't happen.

People back then, when they didn't have the scientific understanding that we had, they couldn't have possibly understood, you know, the ways that Jesus was manipulating molecular, molecular whatever, you know, insert whatever word salad you would like to.

And uh so what that does is it takes us out of the equation and puts us at the end of this developmental history, puts all of the pressure for the growth of Christianity on the generational progress and development, and by doing so removes the importance of the foundational witnesses of that first generation that we need to be constantly adhering to, of the groundedness of Christianity.

And that's what he's saying.

This would be a remarkable act of chauvinism, but then he says to remove the immediate witnesses of Christianity.

If we were to walk up to John and say, like, hey, we know you wrote this resurrection stuff, uh, but we know that resurrection doesn't happen.

John would say, Yeah, look, I knew that too.

But then I saw the resurrected Jesus.

See how that immediate eyewitness must hold the authority in the conversation.

So, next in the second part of uh Leslie Nubigan's sentence, he says the conversation between the present and the past must go on and will go on until the end of the world.

And the perception of the first witnesses must have the premier role in the conversation.

So you see, he he embraces this conversation that must continue.

Because the way that we relate the true story of Jesus' life, death, and resurrection to our present moment is very different from the way that a first century Jew would relate the true story of Jesus' life, death, and resurrection to their present moment, or a 15th century monk, or a farmer in New Delhi, or whatever it may be.

We need to see that the conversation has to happen because we can only read scripture as us in our present time, where we see it critique and affirm aspects of our culture, but it's only able to critique and affirm those aspects in a truthful way when we allow the eyewitnesses themselves to hold the authority.

I love the way that Nubigan talks about this because what we're talking about is the depth of scriptural authority, and yet he addresses it in just this really obvious, really practical way, which is like, why would the scripture have this ultimate authority for the body of Christ?

Well, it's at least because these are the eyewitness accounts.

In any engagement with any historical event, what holds the priority, it's the eyewitnesses.

So the way that this is being laid out, the the uh understanding that Jesus is laying out, you can see he's designing the way that the church should relate to the authority of Scripture.

He's setting the apostles up to be the eyewitnesses, and therefore for Scripture to be the authority of the church.

You can see it in Jesus' language.

So the last part of that verse that we're in, he he says that we would be united.

That means us, united to Jesus with the apostles.

In the same way that the apostles are united, we join in that unity as one.

And that unity becomes a witness to the fact that Jesus was really sent by God.

So our unity is grounded in the testimony of the apostles.

For us to be united as a church, what is it that we're looking at?

We're looking at the testimony of the apostles.

Now, I think it's so common for churches to find their unity in the pursuit of unity, to make unity the highest value for the church.

And so, how do you tell a good church from a bad church?

Well, a good church is the one that's the most unified and able to bring people into the most unity, and a bad church is the one that's the most disunified.

And look, that may be true, but it's secondarily true.

Because what makes us unified isn't the pursuit of unity.

What makes us unified in a real way is the pursuit of the scriptures.

It's the pursuit of the real authority of the story of Jesus.

That's what makes us one together in that type of oneness, which is not a oneness for oneness's sake.

That type of oneness tells the whole world that Jesus was really sent by God.

So we see that this unity is uh an implication of our uh our correspondence to scripture.

If we aim at unity, we'll miss the testimony, we'll miss the testimony.

Uh but if we aim at adherence to scripture, if we if we aim at Jesus, then we'll get that unity as well.

All right.

Um is it is it possible to turn me down a little bit?

Thanks.

We just got a new mic, and I feel like I want to yell, but then I feel like I'm talking very loudly.

Okay.

Uh so we'll continue on, and we're gonna explore more deeply what is the witness of our unity.

This is John 17, 22 to 23.

It says, The glory that you have given me, I have given to them, that they may be one even as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they may become perfectly one, so that the world may know that you sent me and loved them even as you loved me.

These this scripture is just un unreal.

Uh in in the beginning of the prayer, Jesus prayed for his own glory.

And then here at the end of his prayer, he's praying that the glory that the Father has given to him, this is the glory of God, right?

Jesus is saying, I am giving that glory to think who he's talking about here.

He's not talking about the apostles, you know, some special group in the beginning.

He's talking about those who know Jesus through the apostles' testimony.

He's talking about us.

He's talking about people who just heard one day because uh a friend came and you know shared the gospel with them or something, or just pestered them enough so that they came to church.

When I the the guy who really taught me the gospel was a guy named David Billingsley.

And the reason that we had conversations was because my freshman year at CU Boulder, he was handing out lollipops and uh doing surveys.

Like here, I'll if you do the survey, I'll give you a lollipop.

Now that was a scam.

But I didn't know that because I was a freshman, and freshmen don't know anything.

And so I walked past and I was like, oh, a free lollipop.

That must be what college is like.

And I take it and I take the survey, and it's like, if you were to die now, are you going to heaven when you die?

Like, if you take any evangelism class now, they'd be like, don't ask a stupid question like that.

Somebody's just gonna leave.

But uh they asked, he asked me a stupid question like that, and I was like, interesting, let's talk more.

And that that guy, through relationships I developed with that guy, he he really showed me the gospel.

That's a random way to learn this stuff.

And yet, because of that, because of that silly thing, that interaction on a college campus, because of that, I can read here and know these absurd things, like the same glory that the Father had in eternity past that he gave to Christ is my glory.

That's absurd.

And yet that's what we see here.

That's how we come in contact with that type of glory, just because, not because of anything special in David, but because he brought me back to the original eyewitness testimony that was in the scripture.

And because of that, the glory that is the Father's that was given to Jesus Christ will give to me, will give to you.

It's uh unreal.

It's uh it's unthinkable, it's it's almost too much to wrap our minds around.

You see, in this glory, the it's described as this becomes our unity, that that we may become perfectly one, Jesus in uh in us, in the Father, in Jesus.

It's like this Russian nesting doll image.

There's a lot of prepositions, the prayer gets a little hard to follow.

But what you get this sense of, it's almost uh you're just getting wrapped in the glory of God.

That's what it means.

This is language of intimacy and closeness.

Don't try and make this too cerebral of a project.

Our glory is Christ's glory becomes our glory.

So, how can that be?

How can that be?

The reason is because we are united into Christ.

This is the heart of Of the gospel, that we would become one with Christ in union with Christ.

Now, this is a difficult concept for us to grasp because we're a very individualistic type of culture.

But that sort of generational progress that we see in Scripture, that's something that Scripture treats as very real.

That is, we are not just atomized people that happen to spring on the scene as individuals, but that we come out of a real lineage, and that real lineage matters.

And the ultimate lineage that we all come out of, that we all share, is the lineage from Adam and Eve.

And that means that we've inherited their sin.

That's what it means to be in Adam.

We are in his sin.

We have inherited that guilty position and we've lived up to our inheritance as we each have sinned and fallen short of this glory of God.

And so what is our hope?

Our hope is that someone would come and give us a new lineage.

Someone would come and give us a new inheritance, but they'd have to be perfect and glorious in a way that God is perfect and glorious, but then somehow they'd also have to be really human.

Really human, like we're really human.

That's our only hope for salvation.

And that's what we see in Christ: that he comes, unites himself to us, and that means he bears the punishment for our sin, and we receive his glory.

So that we might hear the Father say one day, this is my beloved Son with whom I am well pleased.

Those words become true of us just because of Jesus.

Because he united himself to us.

That means that, as it says here, so that the world may know that you sent me and loved them even as you loved me.

This means that the same way that the Father loved Jesus in Christ, that becomes our love.

And that creates this unity that shows the world that the Father loved us.

You can see this take place sort of out here in the real world, normal ways.

In John 13, 34 and 35, he says to his disciples, A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another.

Just as I have loved you, you also are to love one another.

By this all people will know that you are my disciples if you have love for one another.

That means the unity itself is the way that the unity spreads.

Does that make sense?

The way that we love one another becomes the witness that brings more people into that love.

It means evangelism, it's a team sport.

So look, I want you to be good at apologetics.

But if you're wondering why can I not close this deal, it's probably because you're going it alone.

You know, you can write one person off.

But it's hard to write off a room full of people.

And look, looking around this room right now, like just gonna be honest, I don't see that many weird people.

And I know that you've all, many, maybe perhaps, have been in Christian communities where it's like, oh man, this would be too weird.

Look, it wouldn't be that weird.

Invite your non-Christian friends to be with you, in the midst of you.

And I think you'll find that there is a real difference in what you have.

And it will show, like, look, this is a promise.

You want an evangelistic method, if you're curious, love one another.

And then people will know.

They'll see that you know what?

You're a disciple of Jesus.

I can tell, I can see it.

So when we're thinking like, how can we go into Berkeley?

How can we make a big impact there?

When we move there as a church, well, one of the key things that we're going to need to focus on are love for one another.

Love is hard.

Love for one another, the way that Jesus loved us.

You know the way that Jesus loved us?

Mel Gibson made this great movie.

You know, that's the way that Jesus loved us.

It's hard.

The world's never seen anything like that.

Uh it's it's an undeniable witness.

Okay, so quick recap.

Unity is found in the word.

That unity must manifest in love for one another.

When that unity manifests in love for one another, it becomes a witness to the world.

Then we become a part of that generational story.

Finally, Jesus prays and he describes how uh he describes these desires of his witness.

In John 17, 24, he says, 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.

That one just needs to settle in a bit.

Um, maybe about a month ago, one of the questions that we asked and just meditated on is, what do you think, if God were to show up in the room right now, what do you think he would say to you?

And not like the right answer of what he would say to you.

Like if you've been in church a while, he would show up and he would say, like, I love you for my glory, you know.

But if uh uh what do you think in your heart when he walks in the room, how does your heart feel?

What do you think he says?

To me, he says things like, not quite.

All almost, but not quite there yet.

You didn't really measure up.

That's what he says.

That's what he says in in my heart.

You know, that's what I functionally think.

And so we live, I think, with kind of constant voices of and what we do is we we start to speak for God in our heads.

And what we need to do is we need to hear what did He say.

So listen with that frame of reference.

Father, this is what Jesus says.

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.

How many of you think that God desires to be with you?

You know, uh what's what's in the way of you?

I just read it.

It's really in there.

It really says that.

And already, I bet some of your heads are going, look, I don't need that soft Christianity stuff.

I don't need that like seeker type of Christianity.

Like Jesus flipped over tables, all right?

Already in your heads.

What's Jesus' desire?

That they might be with me, that they might behold my glory.

This is the greatest hope of the human heart.

That we might be with Jesus.

With him.

Not to get his stuff, not so that he blesses our life in some particular way, with him.

To behold Jesus.

That is the greatest hope of the human heart.

This becomes the dividing line of humanity.

John 17, 25-26, Jesus continues his prayer and he says, O righteous Father, even though the world does not know you, I know you, and these know that you have sent me.

I made known to them your name, and I will continue to make it known, that the love with which you have loved me may be in them, and I in them.

Here's the template of the world.

He just gave it to us in these couple of sentences.

The world doesn't know the father.

Jesus knows the father.

And Jesus has shown us the father.

You can feel the tension build.

That means that some people are gonna go out into the world that really know who Jesus is.

They really know the story of God.

You know, when when their hearts come up and say, you know, the main thing God thinks about you is disappointment about what you turned out to be.

And they're gonna have the Holy Spirit in their heads that come through the authority of the scripture written by the first eyewitnesses, they're gonna say, no, no, no.

I was there when the Son of God was praying right before me, and I heard him say that his desire was to be with us, was for us to be with him in his glory.

And then just a couple paragraphs later, they didn't live in paragraphs, but just a couple moments later when he was done praying, he he went and was arrested, and then he died, and he just went through it with that death and was resurrected, and later came back and explained to us that that was the atonement for our sins, that his death atoned for our sins so that we could be with him.

And now the world is structured like this: there is light and there is darkness, and to see the light is to be in Jesus.

And to not see Jesus is to be in the darkness.

To be dead is to not be in Christ.

That is the dividing line of the world now.

Whatever other moral grid you think you're working in, however else you parse out good and evil, this is where it finally falls.

In Christ.

And so that's why the witness of our unity, the witness of our love for one another becomes so important for the world.

That they might know that the Father sent Jesus, that they might know that the Father could love us in Christ in the same way that he loved Jesus.

Because that's the dividing line of the world.

So when we go, when we go into Berkeley, with this prayer before the journey, this has got to be echoing in your hearts, echoing in our souls.

That we know the love of the Father.

We know his real desires.

We know that when he seeks his glory, he's also seeking the salvation of those that he came to save.

And there's people out there.

So let's let our love for one another bear witness that others might know him.

So with that, let's pray.

And we'll take communion together, and then we'll sing one song, and then we'll all break up into groups, and uh we'll pray, and uh we'll we'll pray together for the journey that we're about to go on, and then we'll sing a little more and uh um get ready for Monday.

Holy Father, we praise you for the way that you've expressed your glory in Christ.

Lord, we thank you that you shared the desires uh that you had to save us.

And Lord, I pray that what you have said would become what's most true in our hearts.

God, not the not the voices that we have, which we just tend to so easily believe and easily entertain, but your word, that our reconnection back to what happened in your word would be the foundation of our hearts.

Father, I lift this up in Jesus' name.

Amen.