Our Scripture reading is from the 17th chapter of the Gospel according to John, and we're going to read there verses 20 through 26. You'll be familiar, I'm sure, with this section of Scripture. It's often called the High Priestly Prayer of our Lord Jesus. I think probably because the flow of it seems to echo the responsibilities of the high priest on the Day of Atonement, who consecrated himself first of all to the Lord, and then consecrated his family and his fellow servants, and then finally consecrated all of ancient Israel to the Lord. And as you read down through John 17, you notice that the flow of our Lord's prayer is exactly the same. He prays in verses 1 through 5 about himself and his relationship to the Lord and the glory to which he looks forward. And then he prays from verse 6 through verse 19 for the apostles. And then finally, in the verses we are about to read, expands that to pray for the whole church. 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. 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 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 that you have sent me. I made known to them your name, and I will continue to make it known. But the love with which you have loved me may be in them, and I in them. Our Heavenly Father, we thank You for the privilege of overhearing the intercession of our beloved Lord Jesus Christ. We pray as we meditate together upon His Word, that as He speaks to us through it, we may become conscious that this same Jesus, as He was yesterday as He prayed this prayer overheard by the apostles, may be as real and present to us as He was to them. We thank You that although we do not see Him now, we rejoice already in His presence and taste an unspeakable joy that is full of glory. And we pray that this glory of which He speaks and for which He prays may also be the reality of our experience this evening. That as we sometimes sing, we may be conscious that heaven has come down through Your Word, by Your Spirit, and glory has filled our souls. So hear us. We come to you each with our needs and burdens, and minister to us, we ask, in our Savior's name. Amen. Well, let me thank you, first of all, for your very kind, I think it's been kind and warm welcome. Sometimes one is warned about Dutch congregations, But I have found you today the very antithesis of all that I have been warned against, and I rejoice not only in your welcome, but also in your smiling faces and in your reformed sense of humor, which is the best of all. And I am at last glad to see the people who have tolerated my friend Bob Godfrey for so many years, and through Him you have been a blessing to me. Years ago when I was a young Christian, I quite often used to see on church boards a rather threatening question in the King James Version. It was, what think ye of Christ? What think ye of Christ? And those words came back into my mind recently reversed. What thinks Christ of thee? And I suppose in evangelistic preaching in my youth those words, what think ye of Christ, was a very common text. And sometimes it could search the heart. And reversing the words and asking the question, what thinks Christ of thee, could also sound rather menacing. But what I want to emphasize this evening from these verses is that Jesus Christ does think about you. Jesus Christ does think about you. I wonder if your experience as a youngster was anything like mine. I was very conscious that my father and my mother loved me and cared for me and our little family. I left the family home at the age of 17 to travel to the ends of the earth, 143 miles to go to college. And it never, until I was middle-aged, it never crossed my mind that they would miss me. I never reflected for a moment that they might sit by the fireside and talk about me. I never imagined that I would come to them either in waking moments or in sleeping moments. I had this very real knowledge that they loved me, but it never crossed my mind that they would think about me, talk about me, miss me. And my own conviction has become that many of us as Christians tend to think about the Lord Jesus the way I thought about my parents. We know He loves us. We know He cares about us, but it never really crosses our minds or touches our hearts sufficiently that He cares for us more than our parents did. He thinks of us more deeply than our parents did. And most of all, as this passage underlines for us, he prayed for us, and in some sense still makes intercession for us in precisely the terms of these wonderful verses that we have read right here at the end of John chapter 17. As a name that you will infrequently hear quoted from this pulpit once said, Arminius of all people, these words are a transcript of our Lord's prayer for us in heaven, and he has been echoed by the best of reformed divines, let me say. And what a wonderful thing this is, that as our Lord Jesus prayed within hours of his crucifixion, he prays this longest recorded prayer in the New Testament, and he allows the apostles to eavesdrop on the intimacy of his intercession with his Father about himself as he unburdens himself about this longing that he has lived with through these three decades, that he might taste again and afresh the glory that He had with His Father. And then as He gathers them into the arms of His intercession and brings them and His purposes for them before the Father. But then for us, in a sense, the most wonderful section of all, that His praying reaches beyond those who are with him in the room, to those who are beyond the room, for whom, of course, he is about to go to the cross and lay down his precious life. This is a prayer we might say about me, about you. It has our names inscribed in it. And I want to try to reflect with you this evening on two very obvious and simple aspects of this prayer. The first is how Jesus thinks about us, and the second is what Jesus wants for us. So, how does Jesus think about us? Well, if we capture, if we grasp what he is saying here about us in his prayer, we are able to say on the basis of what he says in verse 20, that as a Christian, I am someone who believes in Jesus through the apostles' word. That's the first way he describes us, the first way he thinks about us. As a Christian, you are someone who believes in Jesus through the Apostles' Word. Now, most of you don't look old enough to have heard the Apostles' preaching. So, it's clearly that is not what he is speaking about. What he is speaking about is not the Apostles' preaching, but the Apostles' Word that is now embodied for us, given to us in the pages of Scripture. And this I think the apostles would immediately have grasped because part of the teaching He's been given to them in the upper room in the last few chapters has made very clear to them that part of their calling is to give to the future church the pages of the New Testament. He says several very striking things in these verses. He says, when the Spirit comes to you, my brethren, you who are my apostles, whom I'm going to send out, when the Spirit comes, He will remind you of everything I have said. When the Spirit comes, Jesus has taught them, He will lead you into all the truth. When the Spirit comes, He will show you the things that are to come. And what will happen in your ministry is that the Spirit will bear witness to Me, and you also will bear witness to Me. And if you think about it, there could not be a clearer or simpler description of the pages of the New Testament, could there? This is a place in Scripture where it's very explicit that Jesus envisages that the Word of the Gospel is going to go to the world not just through the living voice of the apostles, but through the written Word of the apostles. The things that He has said that we find in the Gospels, the leading into all truth that we find in the epistles, the revelation of the things that are still to come that we find in various parts of the New Testament, and this joint witness of the Spirit of Christ and the apostles of Christ in the inspiration of Scripture. The Word that the Spirit breathes out and breathes out through the God-given words of the apostles. And this is the burden of Jesus' prayer. This is the way Jesus thinks about all of His people. These are the ones who are going to come to faith in me through the Word of the Apostles. It's an amazing thing to think about, isn't it? To think in terms of the message this morning, of the way in which God works through individuals to touch individuals whom they may never know. I think in these terms of the way in which this book, the pages of this New Testament, eventually reached my life and embraced me into this prayer of the Lord Jesus. To think that for a millennium and a half in my own country, hardly a single individual would have owned a copy of the New Testament. to think of the way it was smuggled into Scotland by merchants in the days of the Reformation, to think of the times in which it was banned, to think of the ways in which it was printed, to think of the times in which it seemed to be demeaned and its influence diminished, and to think of the ways in which, as I mentioned this morning, as a young boy whose parents didn't go to church until after he was converted, somebody encouraged me when I was a nine-year-old boy to start reading the Bible. And that what Jesus says in these verses about that Bible, about this New Testament, that I could hear and read and begin to understand the words of the Lord Jesus that would, over a period of time, draw me to Himself. I've never forgotten reading in John's gospel as a 14-year-old boy the words of Jesus that seem to leap out of the page at me, because for five years I had been reading the Scriptures, and in them I thought there was eternal life, but had not come to him to find eternal life. And then hearing the words of John 8 verse 12, I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will not walk in darkness, but have the light of life and being drawn to him. Over all these years, over all these centuries, in the marvelous preservation of the pages of the New Testament. Learning the words of Jesus, being led into all the truth that is in the Scriptures. Having some sense, not only of past history, but of where history is going and the things that are to come. And sensing and reading this Word and hearing it preached. that yes, this was the witness of the apostles, but this was also the powerful witness of the Holy Spirit, and that it was through Him that I was hearing the voice of Jesus Christ calling me to Him in different ways you're experienced too. And so that right from the very beginning, This is part of what the large heart of our Lord Jesus has envisaged for us, that we would be those who would believe in Him through the Apostle's Word. And through that Word, we would be drawn to Him. By His Spirit, we would be united to Him. And in this Word, we would find life and health and peace and direction and comfort and yes, a taste of glory. So, when Jesus thinks about you, He thinks about you as someone who has come to trust in Him through the Word of the Apostles. But there's another way in which Jesus tells us here He thinks about us. And in a sense, this is even more intimate. If I'm a Christian believer who's come to believe in Jesus through the Apostle's Word, then I am also, as he puts it in verse 24, I'm also someone his heavenly Father has given to him. And you'll know as you read through John's gospel, that expression begins to appear about the middle of John's gospel. All those the Father has given to me, says Jesus, will come to me. But then there seems to be an acceleration in Jesus' thinking and in His feeling about His people. And particularly here in chapter 17, He uses it again and again. Those you have given me in verse 2, and again in verse 6, and again in verse 9, and again in verse 11, again in verse 12, again in verse 24. It conveys to us a sense that as Jesus gets nearer to the climax of His ministry and His death on the cross, in the depth of His humanity, we might say. His deepest feelings for His people come to this amazing expression. This is how He delights to think about you if you are a Christian believer, that you are someone His own Heavenly Father has given to Him. I said to my son, this is a loved one of mine. I give him, I give her to you to love, to care for, to die for, to rise for, to ascend for, to intercede for, to transform, to save, and to bring me back your own children whom I am giving to you. And this is so fascinating because you would think that what the Father Almighty would give to His Son would be the most precious, precious realities in all creation. And yet this book tells us that we are poor and sinful, we are rebels, we are the worms of the earth, we are nothing. And it is these that the Father is giving to His Son in His love. I don't know about you, but the things that I value and keep are actually not things of much value. But they are of value to me not because of what they are in themselves, but because of the identity of the person who gave them to me. The few things I keep that my mother or father gave to me, my brother gave to me. I actually possess something that a member of the royal family gave to me. In itself, it is worth absolutely nothing. But I keep it because of who gave it to me. And this is the atmosphere in which Jesus is speaking here. Why are you precious to Jesus? Not because of your inherent value, but because if you're a Christian, you're someone His heavenly my Father has given to him. This one is precious to me, and I give him to you. This one is precious to me, and I give her to you. I think actually it was this that must have begun to dawn upon the Apostle John as he reflected on the ministry of Jesus to him and his significance to Jesus. And the reason why, as we get to the end of the gospel, he begins to describe himself as the disciple Jesus loved. Now, I think those words are often understood as though John were saying, I was Jesus' favorite. And it seems to me incredible that that would be what he was saying. That he would stand among the other disciples and say, if you were in Dr. Godfrey's Sunday school class today, you would catch the spirit of this among the disciples. Who is going to be the greatest? Well, it's me, because I am the disciple Jesus loved. No, no, he's not saying that. What he's saying is, as he gets nearer to the sacred heart of Jesus, as he describes the ministry of Jesus, that he is a disciple who discovered he was the disciple Jesus loved. He's not seeing anything different from what the Apostle Paul says in Galatians 2.20, is he? But the Son of God loved me, gave Himself for me. It's the dawning of a new realization in his relationship to Jesus Christ, a dawning of a new level of wonder that that is who He is. But why is it that that is who He is? Why is it He knows that He is the disciple Jesus loved? Because He knows that if the Heavenly Father put His hand upon the fisherman John and said to Jesus, my son John is yours, then he would most assuredly be the disciple Jesus loved. And to think that all of us who are believers can say that. Why would that be so practically significant to us, so wonderfully life-changing to us? Because some of us by intuition and constitution. We may have bumped into somebody already this evening and had this thought, well, there is someone that Jesus loves, and it's very clear He must love them more than me. But you see what this is teaching us? The reason Jesus loves us is not because we have made more advanced than someone else in the congregation. The reason Jesus loves us is because we are his Father's love gift to him. Doesn't that put a completely different spin on the question, what thinks Christ of ye? Because many of us by instinct are likely to respond, he doesn't think very much of me. I am at very best Mrs. Average Christian. And most of us have been taught, haven't we? We've been taught sufficiently about our sinfulness that we've sometimes taken that out of the context of the biblical teaching, and we've drawn only one conclusion, that because we are not worthy of His love, we are not loved. Although we have known, some of us almost from infancy, that it's not because of our worthiness that He would love us. And yet we cannot break through to this consciousness of how precious we are to Him. And so there is introduced into this language of Jesus this truth about His relationship with the Father and His Father's relationship with Him that transforms our sense of our relationship to Jesus, that I am someone that Jesus loves because I am someone His Father has given to Him. You think it's the sweetest way to fall asleep at night with your head on the pillow, perhaps in your loneliness or in your fears, anxieties about the future, your sense maybe even of shame about the past, to be able to lay your head on the pillow tonight, and your last waking thought to be, I am someone the Heavenly Father has given to His beloved Son, and the reason Jesus is caring for me, loves me so deeply, is because I am His Father's love gift to Him. And I think it's this, the answer to this question, how does the Lord Jesus think about me, that helps us then to answer the second question. What then does the Lord Jesus want for me? And it's so interesting, isn't it, in the Gospels that at this point we come to the last thing that Jesus says He wants. He uses the same language actually later on in the synoptic Gospels, in the first three Gospels that don't record this prayer, to tell us there is something He doesn't want. But He is willing to do, although He does not desire it, He is willing to do, because this is what His Father wants. This is the fulfillment of their joint will in eternity. And so, He goes to drink the cup in the Garden of Gethsemane. And the wonderful thing is, it's because He drinks that cup, because He says in the Garden of Gethsemane, not what I will, but what you will. It's because He's going to do that. But here in John 17, 24, He has the authority to tell His Father what He does want. And what He does want is moving beyond words. He says, I want, Father, that those You have given Me should be with Me where I am, so that they may behold the glory that You have given to Me from before the creation of the world. But there's something else here. Because Jesus prays here about what He wants here and now, as well as what He wants there and then. So, before we rush on to what He wants for the there and then, what does He want for the here and now. Well, what He wants for the here and now is that believers should be united together in Him as He is united with the Father. And you'll notice that there is a very striking reference in these verses to the Lord Jesus giving His glory to others. And I think if we're well uninstructed publicly, our immediate reaction is to ask the question, how can we put these two things together that God gives His glory to no other? And yet Jesus is speaking here about the way in which the glory of the Father that has been given to Him, He has passed on to His disciples. And I think if you give careful attention to the words that Jesus uses, you probably come to the conclusion that he means glory in a very special sense. In this context, the glory of the Lord is the special manifestation of His love. The glory of the Lord given to the Lord Jesus during His ministry is the special manifestation of the love that the Father has for His Son. The glory the Lord Jesus bestows upon the apostles is the special manifestation in their lives of His love for them. The glory into which He wants us to enter is the special manifestation of the love the Father has for the Son and the Son's love for the Father into which He brings us in grace and salvation so that we taste that glory. And it's within that context that Jesus is praying. He's praying, Father, may there be such a sense of this love glory or this glorious love abiding on My people, abiding on these believers in the future, that the result will be that the unity of their fellowship that is created by this supernatural sense of love for them will compel the world to believe that the only explanation for this phenomenon is that the Father sent His Son to be the Savior of the world. And so, you see, this is the key to Jesus' evangelistic strategy. I'm sure you've noticed in the New Testament that the New Testament is not an evangelism manual. There are plenty of evangelism manuals. They'll give you good counsel and helpful advice about how you witness to others. The New Testament is not one of those evangelism manuals. Why? Why is it that in contemporary evangelism, there's been this tendency to tell Christian believers, we need to go out into the world and to prompt unbelievers by the questions we ask them. Whereas what seems to be assumed in the New Testament is not that Christians will go and ask non-Christian questions, but that non-Christians will be asking Christians questions. That's why Peter says you should always be ready to give a reason to anybody who asks you. about the hope that is in you. Why should there be this difference? Well, I think here is part of the explanation. When you read through the pages of the Acts of the Apostles, what do you discover? You discover there was this cloud of the glory, love of the Lord upon the church of Jesus Christ that filled them with awe and wonder and produced, as the Acts of the Apostles tells us a very strange paradox that people who were not believers felt they couldn't dare join these Christians. And in the very next breath, Luke tells us in the Acts of the Apostles, they were pouring into the Christian church. And you see, that's a paradox that often the church has failed to understand, isn't it? The more like the world we become, the more likely the world is to join us. And the state of the churches in the Western world gives the lie to that false thinking. But when there is this overwhelming, as it were, glory cloud of the love of the Father and the Son, baptizing a fellowship of God's people so that they are bound together in the unity of that love. Then, of course, men and women, boys and girls, when they encounter that. They may even hate what they think we believe, but by this they will be convinced that this is not natural, but supernatural. This is the fruit of the Father sending the Son to be the Savior of the world. I was teaching in seminary in Dallas when the Mel Gibson movie The Passion of the Christ came out, and some well-meaning but short-sighted pastor of a mega, mega, mega church in Dallas was recorded as saying to the Dallas newspaper reporter, this is the greatest evangelistic tool that we have ever had since the days of Jesus Christ. And I remember instinctively thinking I thought you were the pastor of a church. That's what Jesus is praying about. That's the glory. That's why when you come to the Lord's Supper and taste the reality of the Lord Jesus and His love for you, as you share the bread and the wine, as we preach the gospel to one another, as we proclaim Christ to one another, if the Spirit uses these means of grace, then isn't your instinct, yes, I know there are all kinds of things that can destroy that instinct, But isn't your instinct, however reserved we are, I mean our genes were once freezing in the Northlands, however reserved you are, don't you want to go to every other believer in the church and just give them a hug and say you are loved for Jesus' sake, and for Jesus' sake I love you too? You don't find that anywhere else in the world. And this is what Jesus is praying about. This is what He asks the Father to produce in the here and now among us. And when that happens in a church family, then people come in and they say, I didn't think it was like this. I didn't know church was like this. I didn't realize worship was like this. But as we've seen, that's only the beginning. that's only the here and now. What He wants for us in the there and then in verse 24 is that we might be with Him to see Him where He is in the glory of His Father. Now, as I draw to a conclusion this evening, let me say two things. The first is we have very little appreciation, I think, of how important this glory is to the Lord Jesus. As I say, in the humanity of Jesus, there is no doubt that these hours are hours in which we find His deepest desires intensified and coming out in His wonderful intercession for us, but in His intimate conversation with His Father. His glory and the glory of His Father, and our taste of that glory seems to be everything to Him. It will lie on the other side of His shame, and it runs through this passage. But the other thing I want to say to you is this, that there are many reasons why He wants you to see Him in His glory. And if you'll hold your breath for the next three minutes, I'll give you seven of them. Number one is this. He wants you to see Him in His glory because you have seen Him in the depth of His humiliation. You've seen that in the Scriptures, and you've probably seen that in the world. He wants you to see Him in His glory because He wants you to see Him as He really and truly is. With all the scales lifted from your eyes, He wants you to see who He has always been, always been to you that you have never been able to grasp, that then you will see Him as He is. And you'll be able to see Him as He is because you'll be made like Him. And therefore, you'll have this new capacity of grace, cleansed of sin, to take in who He really is. And the third reason He wants you to see Him in His glory is because He wants you to see how very much His Father loves Him, that He would restore Him to this glory. He also wants you to see how much you are loved by the Father. He is a Father after all. He's like a Father who wants to give his little boy the greatest treat he could imagine that little boy would ever experience. He's a Father who is saying to us, my child, my son, my daughter, I want to give you a treat, and a treat that will last forever. And because you love Him already with a real joyful love, I want you to see the fruition of that. I want you to taste the ecstasy of His presence, the awe of seeing Him in His glory. And reason number five is this. The Lord Jesus wants you to know just how much you mean to Him. If I can put it this way, He doesn't want that glory unless you can see it too because you mean so much to Him, because you're united to Him. You're His. And reason number six, He wants you to see Him in His glory. So, but almost with one voice, what we'll say is to one another, it was worth it all, wasn't it? The difficulties, the challenges, the disappointments, the pains, the losses, the struggles, the way in which perhaps people tried to embarrass you because you were a Christian. That sense of weakness and frailty. All of those things. It really was all worth it. And reason number seven is maybe the best of all. He wants you to be with Him, to see Him in His glory. Because He wants you. He wants you. Just as we in our human love do not want others because of what they can give us. Do not even want others because of the special gifts or positions that they hold. We want them because we love them, and we just want them and to be with them. And He is the same. Isn't it wonderful that within an hour, maybe two hours of this prayer, our Lord Jesus would be prostrated in the Garden of Gethsemane? And in that moment, He would be faced with the drinking of this cup that His holy humanity could never want. Drinking a cup that would mean inner desolation and a sense of isolation and abandonment by His heavenly Father. There was nothing in His holy humanity that could ever possibly desire that. And yet, because He prayed, Father, not what I desire, but what You will, I will drink the last dregs of this cup. And knowing that he was committed to that shame, he was able to come to his Father and say, Father, I desire that those you have given me may be with me where I am to behold my glory in the assurance that this was a prayer His Father would never, could never, and will never refuse. You know, very often when I've come to the end of a sermon and sensed the sheer wonder of what I'm trying to articulate and had no words to close the sermon. I do not know how many times I have said to the congregations I've served, is it not the most glorious thing in the world to be a Christian? But there's something else here tonight. It will be the most glorious thing in the world to come to be a Christian. So may God impress the truth of these words upon our hearts and raise our affections in love and devotion to our Lord Jesus Christ and through Him to our Heavenly Father, who has given us, if we are believers, to His Son, to be loved, to be redeemed, and eventually to be brought home, so that with all the ransomed host of God, we will be saved to sin no more, and able to see Him in His glory. Is that not the most marvelous thing in all the world? What a privileged people we are. May the Lord help us to take it in. Let's pray together. Our Heavenly Father, we thank You for the sheer generosity of the gospel. Forgive us that so often we have been like the man in the parable who said, I knew You were a hard man, a difficult taskmaster. Baptize, we pray, our vision of You with this overwhelming sense of Your love for our Lord Jesus and His love for us. Grant, O God, that we may taste something of the inner testimony of the Holy Spirit, reassuring us that we are the children of God, no matter what may become us. And so draw us into the marvels of your love for us in Jesus Christ, that we may taste now and again, and indeed frequently, what it is to feel that we ourselves are lost in wonder and love and praise. And may even in our poor lives there become evident not only expressions of your love, but a sense of your grace and glory. And this we pray together for our Lord Jesus' sake. Amen.