The Time Has Come To Glorify The Son

May 12, 2002 John 17:1-11

After Jesus said this, he looked toward heaven and prayed:

“Father, the time has come. Glorify your Son, that your Son may glorify you. 2 For you granted him authority over all people that he might give eternal life to all those you have given him. 3 Now this is eternal life: that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent. 4 I have brought you glory on earth by completing the work you gave me to do. 5 And now, Father, glorify me in your presence with the glory I had with you before the world began.

6 “I have revealed you to those whom you gave me out of the world. They were yours; you gave them to me and they have obeyed your word. 7 Now they know that everything you have given me comes from you. 8 For I gave them the words you gave me and they accepted them. They knew with certainty that I came from you, and they believed that you sent me. 9 I pray for them. I am not praying for the world, but for those you have given me, for they are yours. 10 All I have is yours, and all you have is mine. And glory has come to me through them. 11 I will remain in the world no longer, but they are still in the world, and I am coming to you.

How did you wake up this morning? Did your children wake up and say, “today we get to go to church!” Or did you say in a sorrowful and drawn out way, “come on, it’s time to go to church!” I’ll never forget a young lady with her mom, who had come to visit our church service about three months ago. They sat in the back row through the worship. It wasn’t an especially long service - normal length - 45 minutes to an hour. But as it came to dismiss from worship and the ushers were letting people out - she couldn’t wait to get out of here. Long before the ushers got to the back row, she hurried up, genuflected, and took off. I thought to myself, “was our worship service that bad?” Even though she was only here for an hour tops, she acted like we had kept her here for hours, padlocked to the pew, and finally set free. What’s my point? Time is relevant to what we’re doing. If we think we’re having fun, it goes fast. But if we’re in a place that we’re bored at, it goes extremely slow. We stare at our watches and count the minutes, waiting for every tick of the clock to hurry up and be over with.

In today’s text, Jesus said, “the time has come.” Time for what? For Jesus to be glorified. Was he in a hurry to get out of here? How did he know it was time? What determined it? That’s what we’ll find out today as we look at how Jesus said -

The Time Has Come to Glorify the Son

I. Because he completed his work

In America, we measure time with clocks. We are driven with a watch around our wrists. We have to be to work by a certain time, and then wait for the clock to hit five or six and then decide, “it’s time to go home.” And yet, as I’ve mentioned, we also measure time by the fun or lack of it thereof. In other cultures, like Mexico for instance, they usually aren’t slaves of “time.” They go when they feel it’s time to go. That’s just the way their world works. We don’t get it. But they don’t get our culture either.

What about God? How does he measure time? How does he make a determination that “it’s time to”. . . do something. When we look at the Scriptures - we see that our God is not driven by the position of the sun or the stars. God promised Abraham in Genesis 15 that his descendants would re-inherit the promised land when the sin of the Amorites reached its full measure. Once the Amorites sins came to a certain level, then God would act. In the same way with the coming of the Savior, God said, “when the time had fully come, God sent His Son.” What God meant by this, was that all of the conditions had to be just right. The Israelite nation and kingdom had to be cut down to a stump, which it was. (Isaiah 11:1) A foreigner had to be king of the Jews, which there was. (Genesis 49:10) After these conditions were met, then God decided to act. This shouldn’t surprise us, for our God has existed before time as we know it - before there was a sun, moon, and stars. It’s impossible for us to really comprehend this. But as we read the Scriptures, it seems that God is task oriented, not time oriented. He’s willing to be as patient as He needs to be until a task or goal is completed - a thousand years or a day.