Behold, I Come Quickly! Series

To set the stage, gradually in Christ’s Prayer in this section of John’s Gospel, he has been moving out to the ends of the earth. First, he prayed for himself as he was imminently facing the Cross.

Second, he prayed for His disciples, and for the Father’s protection over them. Now His prayers takes a sweep into the future, and he prays for those who in distant lands and far-off ages will also enter the Christian faith.

People like the first gentile believers who we saw in our lesson from Acts, and people like us, who have received the word 2 millennia later!

At that moment, His followers were few, and the Cross was facing him, but His confidence was unshaken, and He was praying for those who would come to believe in His name. This passage should be especially precious to us, for it is Jesus' prayer for us specifically who, unlike the disciples, never met Him.

What was his prayer for us? It was that all its members would be one as he and his Father are one.

Many times, as I have heard this passage preached, the sermon seems to become an apologetic to why Christians are at disunity with each other.

Preachers will expound why this division, or that schism over church government is acceptable, as they try to justify their positions. In these sermons, which usually cause me no end of frustration as I listen to them, the sermon on Christ’s Prayer of Unity becomes a sermon to list excuses as to where, when and why we don’t have to be at unity.

I am not saying that differences of theology don’t matter. But in the name of truth, which is important, we many times show complete neglect of the love we are commanded to show one another as a body, and the call which has been put into our mouths.

Last week, Christ told his disciples, “By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have Purity of Doctrine. No. If you have the Rite Liturgy. No.

If you have love for one another.”

This week, very similarly, Christ prays for unity in our church so that our witness to the world will be effective. So that the world will see the transforming power of Christ and his Gospel reflected in our lives. So that we may, with one voice, cry out to the world, Come to the Lord, come drink from the living waters. Come to the Great Marriage Feast.

When the world sees our unity in the Spirit, especially when personally we may disagree about all kinds of things, our unity testifies that Christ is in us, and as Christ states here, it shows that the WORDS and the mission of Christ are true. Our unity shows the truth of Christ’s words that the Father has sent Him.

We are very different people one from another in the church. A striking feature of the early church was the bond of unity which existed between the various local churches which differed in language and culture. This unity was based on a common faithfulness to the teaching of the apostles, and it was the distinguishing mark in a pagan world of being a disciple of Christ.

Our first lesson brings us to Paul on his second missionary journey through Turkey and into Greece.