John 17:22-24 (A Prayer For Sharing His Glory)

Thank you for subscribing to the Shepherds Church podcast. This is our Lord's Day Sermon. We pray that as we declare the Word of God that you would be encouraged, strengthened in your faith, and that you would catch a greater vision of who Christ is.

May you be blessed in the hearing of God's Word and may the Lord be with you. Eleven years ago, I lived in a land of biscuits and gravy where there were just as many cars on center blocks as there were on the road.

I'm not kidding. And my town was voted the second most redneck city in North Carolina because we don't win at anything. I was brought up in a rural sort of southern town, and I loved it. But I wanted to get out of it very quickly because there was this fascination that I had with high culture.

Now, if you know me, I did not grow up to be high culture at all. But I loved thinking about like symphony orchestras and and things of that nature. I love listening to them even today. I love watching something that is truly excellent where you've got not one, but you've got this multitude of people working together and doing something that expands and swells and grows in the room.

And it captivates you. It really does, because all of those individual talents there could play their instruments and do solos and and you could have the focus on them. But when all of them are working together and when they're doing this in such a way as the music is swelling, I have experienced that it swells up in me.

And I think this is a good example of what glory is. It's a very limited example, but like an orchestra that is filled with a litany of instruments capable of their own individual sound. Together, they do something glorious.

Together, there's a weightiness and a significance to what they're doing, an awe and a majesty that is accompanying this performance where all of the individual pieces are working perfectly together in time.

And as you think about that, you think about how it holds you captive, it spell binds you, it presses upon you. And in a way, that is what glory is. Glory is awe, A-W-E, in the face of something majestic.

Glory is when your hands begin clapping before your brain has told them to do it. You know that you're in glory or in a glorious moment when your heart begins skipping a beat and you are in awe. Glory is awestruck wordlessness when you've been in the presence of something great.

And there's all kinds of examples we can look at. Humanly speaking, we always think about God, and that's right. That's good. But I need you to understand what glory is. Glory is not holiness. It's a different attribute.

Glory is that God is significant and weighty. And we've experienced significant and weighty things, so we can sort of compare in a very limited way. Think about the very first time that you held your child.

For Don, it was really recently. And you look at their little face and you remember in that moment, you're like, this is a weighty moment. This is a moment that's going to be burned into my memory, and I will never forget it.

I'll probably never forget the smell of the room I was in when I held that child. The day you get married and men, as you look across and you see that she's actually happy to be there with you. That moment is burned into your memory when you stand in front of the Grand Canyon and you look in and you say, I am small compared to this big thing.

And yet the God of the universe looks down and he loves me and he knows me. When you meet a prince or a king or in my situation, when I met the greatest college basketball coach of all time, Mike Krzyzewski of the Duke Blue Devils.

And I looked at him and I said. You're Mike Krzyzewski, and he said, Oh, my gosh, you're Kendall Langford. That's not what happened.

He didn't even notice me.

But I remember like so silly and so ridiculous. But as he walked past me, I was just like, I'm in the presence of something great. There's a man who's won more college basketball games than anyone else.

He's done more with his body than I'll do with mine. And there was a glory that humans can have in those sorts of ways. Now, I bring this up because our passage is going to talk about glory, and we need to understand what glory is.

Glory is a heaviness and a weight that presses down upon you and changes you. It lets you know that you are in the presence of greatness. And what is better, greater, stronger, more mighty than God? So today we're going to look at glory and we're going to look at it from a couple of different ways.

We're going to look at it from God being the source of eternal glory. We're going to look at it from Christ being the one who God shares his glory with in in his incarnation. We're going to look at how Christ in unity brings us in unity with him so that now we live in the glory of God.

And because of that, there's consequences to that. What are the consequences of living in the glory of God, that the church would be in unity and that the world would sing his praises? So we will look at those things together.

If you will turn with me to John 17, 22 through 24, as we inch closer towards the end of John 17. And as we study this beautiful, glorious prayer that Christ prayed, it's the only prayer we have recorded in the Bible that Jesus prayed.

He taught us to pray the Lord's prayer. This is a prayer he prayed. So let us read together. John 17, 22 through 24. The text says. The glory which you have given me, I have given to them that they may be one just as we are one.

I in them and you in me, that they may be perfected in unity. So that the world may know that you sent me and loved them, even as you have loved me. Father, I desire that they also whom you have given to me would be with me where I am so that they may see my glory, which you have given me.

For you loved me before the foundation of the world. Let us pray. Lord Jesus. This is a prayer ultimately for your glory. You prayed this prayer, acknowledging the great glory of God. You prayed it, acknowledging how in your incarnation God shared his glory with you and Lord, you prayed that how in your death, burial and resurrection, you shared that glory with us.

Lord, let us see the consequences of that glory today. That because you shared glory with us, it will do something to us. Lord, help us to see that. As we read in the text earlier, Lord, let the nations be glad that the church has been given the glory of Christ.

And Lord, let the nations come. And let them see the glory of Christ through the witness of this church. Through other faithful churches across this land. Until there is nothing but faithful churches across this land.

Jesus name. Amen. Now, before we get started, I do want to go deeper into what glory is. I want to define it. I want to define our terms. Glory is felt when a complex. This is my definition, so it's overly complicated.

And we will break it down after that. Glory is felt when a complex of magnificent external qualities intersect with you in space and time and they press upon you and they overcome you with a sense of awe and with an understanding that you are in the presence of greatness.

Glory is that star crossed glance that you have where your heart is set on edge, where the intensity of the motion is infectious, where the weightiness of the situation presses upon your chest. And this this moment, this feeling, this sense of great awe has been known ever since the ancient world.

And in some ways, the ancient world knew this better than we do today because we have such shallow times that we live in. In some ways, the ancients understood glory better than us. Now, in Hebrew, there's two words for glory.

The first one is kavod. Kavod is a word that means heavy, and that is what it means. There's a physical connotation of the word where it just means something that weighs more than you can lift. So if you're a Hebrew and you had something in your house that was too kavod, you might invite your neighbor over and say, Come help me.

This is heavier than me. This is bigger than me. This is more significant than I can lift. I can't move it. Come help me. That's kavod. And yet that word would take on a figurative meaning as well,.

Not just physical.

It would take on a figurative meaning and that there was that there could be something outside of you, not a refrigerator and not a couch that you can't lift by yourself, but something else that could be so significant that you could not move it.

So big, so important, so majestic that you actually begin to pale in comparison to it. Now, the Hebrews understood that people, human beings could have glory. They could have a sort of significance or a weightiness to them.

If you've ever met kings or princes, or if you've ever met rulers or dictators or potentates, or if you ever met Mike Krzyzewski, you would know that there are people who have weightiness that sets them apart from us.

But there's also glory on the battlefield. The ancients talked about this as well, where a soldier would do something above and beyond and they would do something that put the lives of their men in safety as opposed to danger.

You look at you think about Hacksaw Ridge, great movie. That's a movie that sort of celebrates a glorious act. And we celebrate this in today's culture. We do. We just don't call it glory. We give soldiers medals of honor or bronze stars or purple hearts because they serve valiantly in battle.

We give sports people who run around in tights and make money in that sort of thing, which is really weird if you think about it, men, that we celebrate and cheer for men in spandex. And yet we give them shiny trophies and say, you're the most valuable.

You got the glory on the field. You left it all out there. And there's something different about you. Again, we understand it and we celebrate it because human beings are created to celebrate glory. And if you compare that to God.

Who is utterly set apart from us, his deeds are infinitely better than any of us, his renowned echoes, not through a few good years of life in the prime of your physicality, but through every era, every time for all eternity.

And then you think to yourself, how much more should we be heaping our praises onto God for who he is? Throughout the Hebrew Bible, glory, this word kavod was expressed through theophany, theophany just means God revealing himself in physical ways.

For instance, you compare the Super Bowl today where men are going to show up and there's going to be this energy and this excitement that pales in comparison to when God shows up in the Old Testament, mountains, quakes, earthshakes, volcanoes happen on Mount Sinai.

And the people are like, oh, no, Lord, let us stay at a distance from you. When God shows up, he shakes things and he moves things because he is glorious. This shows up, this word kavod shows up in the cloud that led them by day and the fire that led them by night.

The glory of God was their guide through the wilderness as they were heading towards Mount Sinai. Exodus 16, 10. It came about as Aaron spoke to the whole congregation of the sons of Israel that they looked toward the wilderness and behold, the glory of the Lord appeared in the cloud.

Now you have to put yourself back in their in their shoes, right? This wasn't just a little fog that had descended down. And now they're like, oh, yeah, that must be God. Now, this is the group that saw God kill Pharaoh's firstborn son.

This is a group that saw him rain frogs down from the sky so that the whole land is filled with frogs and gnats and the river turned to blood. This is a God who just destroyed the most powerful military on earth who had just parted the Red Sea so that they could go safely across on dry land.

And now they're standing there and this God is leading them personally. And there had to have been some level of fear to say if he could do that to them. We don't even have weapons. And yet. Look at how kind he's been to us and that he's rescued us.

That fear led them to praise. This is the same God who filled the tabernacle with his holy weighty presence. This is the same God who filled the temple when Solomon constructed it. Fire fell down from heaven and consumed the offerings.

And this is the same God today who is owed our praise. Kavod means that God is weighty, significant, and his glory should crush us because he's so heavy. And yet, because Christ took the crushing, now you and I get the blessing.

So that's what glory is. That's kavod. The second word is shekinah. You may have heard this word shekinah, but you actually may be surprised that shekinah glory doesn't show up at all in the Old Testament.

I was shocked by that this week, that the word shekinah is not in the Hebrew Bible. It's a word that the rabbis invented, and they invented it in about the fourth century BC. And they were looking at how God has all through history come down and dwelt with his people.

And they used a term called shekan. And that word means to dwell with. They used that term to make a theological term that said God has come down and dwelt among us. And they use this to describe that even though we are living in this time where God is not speaking, there's no more prophets, there's no more books of the Bible being written.

That's 400 BC to the New Testament, this period that we call the great period of silence. They use this term to encourage themselves that God has come down, that God is dwelling with his people, that he is shekanah, he is heaven sent, earth dwelling with us, his people.

Now, compared to us, which we have a certain amount of presence that we can share with other people, it is small, God's presence is immense. And that's what the Jewish rabbis were celebrating, a pure, unadulterated, powerful presence.

That's what the word shekanah is getting after. Now, in this, there actually was a great problem that ended up coming in because human beings are sinful and we will take anything good and we will turn it for idolatry.

This was something very strange that happened with this word, something that I did not know about this week, and it made sense of the human condition. The Jews, around 300 BC, so 100 years after they started using this word, started deriving implications for this word that were unbiblical.

They said, what a blessing it is that God would come down and dwell with us. And in the 400s, they were praising God for that, amen. But by the 300s, they were saying, it must be that God came down and dwelt with us because we're so special, because we're so this, and because we're so that.

It was around that time that the Pharisees became a thing. And they started off a good movement, but over time, they became puffed up with pride, looking down their nose at other people. So what happened was they created a word to celebrate God and they used it to celebrate themselves.

They celebrated how they were such a unique people that God would dwell with them. Oh, how wonderful. Oh, how blessed the Lord is that he can hang out with you. And in that, they became arrogant. And in that, they began to look down their nose at other people.

And by the time of the New Testament, the world that Jesus was born into, the Jews of that era hated the Gentiles, but they hated the Samaritans even more. They called them dogs. They used this significant, weighty concept called glory to look down their nose at other people and become hateful and become harmful.

And to say that this faith belongs to us, it doesn't belong to you. Glory all through the Bible is supposed to motivate us to go tell the nations. We're supposed to say, look at this God that we know.

Don't you want them to know and them to know in this country and that country? And it's supposed to motivate us to go out into the world and tell people God is glorious. You can know him. You can love him.

You can worship him. But instead, they turned inward on themselves and they said, no, no, no. This is our thing. You go find your own thing and to hell with you. That's what they said. That is the world in which Jesus was born into.

And that is the context for which Jesus prays this prayer, and it will actually open up, I believe. What Jesus is actually saying, because Jesus says in this prayer that God has shared his glory with him.

Can you imagine what a provocative statement that that would have been in his time period? The Jews would have said, no, no, no. God has shared his glory with us. We are God's people. Jesus says, no. He shared his glory with me.

And me alone.

That would have been a slap right in their face because of the pride that they had and because of all of that. So he is challenging their assumptions and he's going to lay out a foundation for what glory is, that if you are not in him, you do not experience it.

You do not have it and you will be lost forever. That foundation begins in verse 22, where he talks about who God is. Verse 22 says, the glory which you have given me. This means that the father is the source of glory.

That means that when Jesus said that the father shared the glory with me, he did not say that God borrowed glory from Mr. So-and-so and then gave it to me. No, God doesn't have borrowed glory. All majesty, all, all righteousness, all holiness and all glory belong to God.

And his deeds reveal that he is the only one who has all glory. So when Jesus says that you gave me glory, he's saying that you are the source of glory, that if you want to understand what glory is, you have to go to God, which, again, the Jews at the time had turned inward and they were going to themselves.

The second thing Jesus says is that he is the one who manifests the glory of God to us. God is the source of all glory and God has shared his glory, not with the Jews of the first century, not with a particular people at a particular space in time, when Jesus came in his incarnation, God shared his glory with Christ.

He says the glory which you have given me. Now, we have to be careful here and we have to do some good theology because Jesus in eternity has all glory. Jesus in the Godhead, Father, Son and Holy Spirit all have perfect glory such that they cannot have it improved upon.

God's glory cannot be improved by any external force. Jesus is second person of the Trinity. His glory cannot be improved. He has infinite glory and such so the Holy Spirit. So what Jesus is referencing here is his incarnation.

He's saying, as I came down and took on human flesh. God has shared his glory with me. And that's a fascinating statement, as we've already alluded to. Did you know at this time that the Israelites believed that they were the firstborn son of God and they had good reason.

The book of Exodus said, out of Egypt, I called my son. So the whole nation of Israel believed that they were the firstborn son of God and they received the glory of the Father. And Jesus is saying, no, it was given to me.

This would have inflamed their emotions in a similar way if we were to see another country who called their flag old glory. We would be like, that doesn't belong to you. Or if the country of Nigeria started a basketball league called the NBA.

We would say, that's not yours, that's ours. The Nigerian Basketball Association. The Jews thought about glory in two ways. They thought that it belonged to God alone and that he shared it exclusively with them.

Jesus said, not any more. Not any more. Do you have to travel hundreds of miles, even thousands of miles to come see the glory of God and the temple of God so that you are held at a distance because it's so weighty, it's so significant, it's so heavy that it will crush you?

No more.

Because when God is going to do in me, is he is going to make the glory of God accessible to you and he's going to do it not by crushing you, but by crushing me. No more is the glory of God limited. To this first century group of people called the Jews, no longer is it confined in the third level of a back and the back room of the temple.

No longer. You will know the glory of God through the face of Jesus Christ. And John does this all over his gospel to tell us what he's doing. John chapter one. The word became flesh and dwelt among us and we saw his glory.

The glory is of the only begotten of the father, full of grace and truth. This word, this word dwelt among us is a very fascinating word that we talked about three years ago when we were in John one. The word of God dwelt among us.

That word means tabernacled. That's not the normal word for dwelt. That means that Jesus left heaven and he set up a temple on earth and that temple was him. He is the temple of God. So the only way you can experience glory is by knowing him.

Second, Peter tells it tells it this way. For we did not follow cleverly defies fables when we made known to you the power and the coming of the Lord Jesus Christ. But we were eyewitnesses of his majesty, majesty.

For when he received honor and glory from God, the father, such an utterance as this was made to him by the majestic glory. This is my beloved son and who I am well pleased. All honor, all authority, all glory is now been given to Christ.

The book of Hebrews. And he is the radiance of God's glory, the exact representation of his nature. And he upholds all things by the word of his power. When you look into the face of Christ, you are seeing the glory of God.

Which brings us back to John 17, the glory which you have given me. He says, I have given them.

That is astounding.

The glory that God has poured out on Jesus Christ, he has given to his church. It's so unbelievable that we can barely wrap our head around it. I want you to see how this happens. This doesn't happen by governmental fiat, as many laws come into being through different countries.

It doesn't happen by the stroke of a pen. It happens by the striking of hammer and nails. It happens by Jesus, the Lord of glory, dying an inglorious death on our behalf. Look at what Paul says in Colossians 1. 25 through 27, he said, I was made a minister according to the stewardship from God bestowed on me for your benefit so that I might fully carry out the preaching of the word.

That is the mystery which has been hidden from the past ages and generations, but has now been manifested to his saints, to whom God willed to make known the riches of his glory, which is Christ in you.

Jesus is saying in John 17 that the only way that you're going to know glory is if the glory of God crushes me. The only way you're going to know it safely, the only way, we talked about this in Sunday school, that in the rock, Moses was hidden and was covered and was sheltered from the glory of God so they didn't destroy him.

And now Jesus, the true and better Moses, has been crushed so that you and I can see and experience the glory of God. Christ came to manifest the glory of God to the people of God by the death of God so that we could be the inheritors of the glory of God so that the nations would be glad.

Why is this so important? Because if God has shared something so powerful and so beautiful as his glory, it will have consequences in our life. When you look at Mount Sinai that was being ripped apart by the glory of God, when you look at the water that stood on end so that the Israelites could pass through, when you look at all of the magnificent, marvelous deeds that God has done, you have to remember his glory is so weighty and so powerful that it must have consequences.

It always has consequences. Consequences aren't always bad things because he's given you his glory. There's a consequence that happens there and there's two of them. There's consequences that will happen to you in heaven and there's consequences that will happen to you on earth.

Let's look at them individually. The earthly consequences that God, through Jesus, by his death on the cross, by crushing Jesus, is going to give you glory, how's that going to affect your life on earth?

This is what it says. The glory which you have given me, I have given to them so that they may be one just as we are one. I in them and you in me so they may be perfected in unity. Brothers and sisters, I can't emphasize this enough.

One of the aspects that God's glory has been poured out on you is that you are in unity as the church. There has been much division in Jesus' bride for far too long. One of the consequential aspects that his glory really has been poured out on you is that you would be in unity in your church, that you would participate in unity, that you would work for unity, that that thing that you want to say that you know is going to bring division, you strike it from your conscience and you keep your mouth closed because you are a person who belongs to the living Christ.

And that's just one example. Are we a people who work for unity? Because if we're not, there is no evidence that his glory has been poured out on you. That's what it's saying. It says in Proverbs that he hates the one who causes division, but the one he loves and he pours out his glory upon, they are in unity.

And it's an example of the power of God. Do you know why unity is an example of the power of God? Because sin is so corrupting and corrosive that you and I, left to our own devices, would rip each other apart.

We would kill each other. We would hate each other. We would do what people do in families where they divide from each other. They live multiple feet down the street from each other and they divide over things.

Our sin nature is so egregious that it produces hate, constant, continual hate. And yet the glory of God is so powerful that it reverses it. And it's one of the great signs that you really are in Christ, that you're a person who's not perfect, but you're a person who pursues unity.

You're not a person who's arrived at your destination, but you're a person who's aimed in a particular direction. And this is why I think that this word here is so important, that we will be perfected in unity.

He doesn't say that when I give them my glory, they will be perfect in unity. Praise God he didn't say that because none of us would have any hope. He says that because I've shared my glory with them, they will be perfected, which is a future tense verb, which is a verb that implies a process.

It's a verb that implies a long-term plan of perfecting and shaping and cultivating that hasn't been finished yet. You look at the church. The church, I think, is more in unity now in some ways than it was a hundred years ago.

You think about all of the things that have happened in the history of the church, the great schism, the division that happened between the Protestants and the Catholics, or the Roman Catholics, excuse me, we're all part of the Catholic church, the universal church.

You look at the Reformation, you look at the Puritans and the English kings and queens who killed them and who murdered them for preaching the gospel. And you look at now how the division that we see is involved in denominations and church splits.

At least the church is in unity enough to where we're not killing each other anymore. So in some ways, we're being perfected in unity. By the end, when Jesus returns, that perfection in unity will be sweeter and better than it is today.

I think about it like a silly example I could give you. Imagine there's a billionaire who goes to a very remote part of the country, or part of the world, maybe you'd call it the bush, off the grid, and he finds and falls in love with this woman who is tribal and who has never been a part of civilization.

And he says, I have to marry this woman. And he marries her and he brings her back. And let's say to England, because they're classy. And then he gets there and she feels completely out of place. And she's like, oh, my goodness.

And she asks him, can I go and get my hair fixed and get the tangles out of it? And can I do this? And eventually, she starts through a process of becoming who that culture is. She goes through a process of beautification.

She gets the unibrow fixed. If she has a unibrow, she buys dresses. She maybe tries makeup. And over the process of time, she becomes a perfect picture of the culture to which she's been called. In a similar way, you and I are that uncivilized maiden.

We lived in the country of sin where it was wild, uncivilized, and hated God. And he brought us into his community, his people. He brought us among his people. And over the process of time in your life and over the course of lifetimes and generations, he is sanctifying his bride, beautifying his bride, making her lovely.

And he will spare no expense in doing that. He even gave his own life so that that would be accomplished. I want you to remember that perfection, being perfected, it takes time. In the course of your life, are you the kind of person who celebrates unity now more than you did 10 years ago?

Are you the kind of person that tries to build bridges instead of tear them down? Are you the kind of person that shows more of the evidence of Christ in you than you did when you first believed? And you can say, yeah, but it's slow growth.

It's not a lot. Okay? That's okay. Again, it's not the destination. It's the direction. It's the Holy Spirit working on you, shaping you, beautifying you, changing you. That's true in your life, and that's true in the life of the church.

The church is being made beautiful. Revelation says that one day the church will be made ready. And like a bride for her husband, the Lord will receive her. She is not ready yet. I don't think that this is just my opinion.

This is not from the scripture. So I'm doing what Paul says sometimes. This is my opinion. This is not from the text, and yet it is from the text now as we read it, but not mine. I think that before Jesus returns, there will be no such thing as denominations.

I think before Jesus returns, the Roman Catholic Church will repent, the Eastern Orthodox Church will repent, and we'll all be one church. We'll all be one church. I think we will repent of the areas we've fallen short to, and we will all be one church, and He will return to receive a bride, not a harem of different denominations.

Because He promises here that He will perfect His church. He will perfect His church in unity, and I believe that. There's also heavenly consequences to the glory of God. The church will not only grow in unity.

Actually, there's one more earthly consequence, that the nations will come. The church will not only grow in unity, but the world will see Christ through her unity. It's an astounding statement to say that as the church grows in unity, the world will see it.

It doesn't say that the world will see it when faith healers raise people from the dead. It doesn't say that the world will see it when jumbotrons get put into worship services. It says that as the church learns how to love one another like Christ loves the church, then the world will stand in awe.

And again, we said this last week, this is because in our sin, we don't love each other. You can buy a big screen TV, you can fake a miracle, but you cannot fake true love in Christ. It is an apologetic to the nations that God is real.

Shepherds Church, our unity with one another is an apologetic to Chelmsford, that God really loves Jesus. That's what He says. That's the earthly consequences. The heavenly consequences of the glory of Christ begin in verse 24.

It says, Father, I desire that they also, whom you have given me, would be with me where I am, so that they may see my glory, which you have given me, for you have loved me before the foundation of the world.

I love this passage so much. It's one of my favorite passages in the Gospel of John. I say that a lot, but it is. Because we have a life of pain that we have to live. We have a life of frustration that we have to live.

We have a life of futility that we need to live. We've not been rescued and zapped out of here with a Wonkavator. We are going to live in this life where it's going to be hard, where it's going to be tough, where we're going to have to forgive people who make us mad, who say mean things about us.

We're going to have to fight for unity, and that fight for unity is going to demonstrate to the world the reality of Jesus Christ. But one day, you and I are going to leave this place, and we're going to look at the God of glory Himself, right in the face of Jesus Christ, and we will be with Him where He is.

Think about that.

One life that you and I have, 40, 50, 60 years, 70, 80 years for some of the children, you have left, and then you will be in the face of Christ. The Old Testament blessing that His face would shine upon you will be true for you.

It'll be true for you in spirit when you die, and one day it will be true for you in body when He raises your body and gives you a new body, in a new heaven, in a new earth, when you wrap your arms around Jesus, and He's not too busy to stand with you for a while and tell you that He loves you.

Can you imagine to look in the Lord of glory's face and see glory as a person? That's what's coming, because Christ took your crushing. You will have eternal blessing. The second thing is we will see Him as He is.