All for the Glory of God
By Rev. Res Spears
The High Priest’s Prayer • Sermon • Submitted • Presented
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Does anyone here today have special plans for Valentine’s Day?
Yes, that’s this week. If you haven’t already picked up your Hallmark card, time’s running out!
I know some of you have plans to prepare extravagant dinners at home. Maybe some of you have made reservations for a special meal together at a nice restaurant.
I’ve had many reasons to thank God for Annette through the years, but one of the recurring themes of my thanksgiving is the fact that she’s generally uninterested in the kinds of things that a lot of women need their men to do to demonstrate their love.
She’s not really into jewelry or flowers, for instance. And she couldn’t care much less for Valentine’s Day. When I asked her what she wanted to do for it this year, she said, “Oh, I don’t know. Maybe just hang out and watch TV?”
Well, if you insist, honey.
Long, romantic dinners really just aren’t part of our love language to one another.
In fact, I was reminded of what I think was our last long, romantic dinner while I was going through some photos recently.
We were at Disneyworld, and we had reservations for the exclusive Victoria and Albert restaurant in the Grand Floridian hotel on the Disney property.
It was a wonderful evening. The service was impeccable — all white-gloved headwaiters and servers — and the food was delicious.
But what I remember the most about that evening is how beautiful Annette looked.
We’d both dressed to the nines for the occasion. Indeed, you know you’re in for a different sort of Disney vacation if you wind up packing a suit to wear while you’re there.
But the restaurant required coats and ties, and I wanted to make a good impression on my sweetheart, so I did what was necessary and wore a suit.
We would be eating with real silver and crystal, and we’d be waited on by people wearing dresses and tuxedos.
The last thing I wanted to do was to be the guy wearing an ill-fitting jacket that had been pulled from a closet by a maitre d who took one look at me and wondered whether I’d even be able to pay the bill.
So, we dressed up for the occasion.
We arrived at Victoria and Albert’s clothed in splendor, as it were. We arrived in full glory.
And I want you to keep in mind this idea of being clothed in splendor as we begin a series this week on John, chapter 17.
I know I’d mentioned that we might start a series on the Book of Jonah this week, but as I looked at the calendar again, I realized that it would make much more sense to postpone that series until after Easter.
So, for the next several weeks, as we approach the celebration of Jesus’ sacrificial death and supernatural resurrection, we’re going to look at the prayer He prayed at the end of the Last Supper on the night before His arrest and crucifixion.
Warren Wiersbe calls this prayer “the greatest prayer ever prayed on earth and the greatest payer recorded anywhere in Scripture.” John, chapter 17, he said, “is certainly the ‘holy of holies’ of the Gospel record, and we must approach this chapter in a spirit of humility and worship.” [Warren W. Wiersbe, The Bible Exposition Commentary, vol. 1 (Wheaton, IL: Victor Books, 1996), 367.]
This prayer is often called the “High Priestly Prayer,” because much of it is concerned with interceding with God on behalf of the apostles and the church.
And as we head into the weeks leading up to Easter, I think it’s useful for us to be considering what was on Jesus’ mind in those last hours before His arrest.
We’ll see during the next several weeks that Jesus prayed for Himself, He prayed for His disciples, and He prayed for His Church. But we’ll see that in all of that, His thoughts and His desires were primarily focused on God the Father.
We’re going to look at the first five verses of this chapter today, the part where Jesus prays for Himself. Let’s read them together.
1 Jesus spoke these things; and lifting up His eyes to heaven, He said, “Father, the hour has come; glorify Your Son, that the Son may glorify You, 2 even as You gave Him authority over all flesh, that to all whom You have given Him, He may give eternal life. 3 “This is eternal life, that they may know You, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom You have sent. 4 “I glorified You on the earth, having accomplished the work which You have given Me to do. 5 “Now, Father, glorify Me together with Yourself, with the glory which I had with You before the world was.
Now, the first thing I want you to notice about Jesus’ prayer in this chapter is that He prayed it at all.
It’s clear from the first words of the prayer, as well as from other passages in the Gospel of John, that Jesus knew where and how this visit to Jerusalem would end.
That He’d be arrested on sham charges, tried in a kangaroo court, found innocent by the Roman judge, and yet be killed anyway.
This had always been God’s plan for His Son. This was the only way that mankind could be redeemed from sin. And so, we see the Gospel writers describing Jesus as setting His face toward Jerusalem. He was heading resolutely toward the cross. His hour had come.
And we might expect such a situation to arouse a sense of resignation in Jesus. Maybe even a hint of fatalism.
But the arrival of God’s appointed hour instead finds Jesus engaged in prayer.
“Precisely because the hour has come for the Son to be glorified, he prays that the glorification might take place. This is God’s appointed hour; let God’s will be done—indeed, Jesus prays that his Father will accomplish the purpose of this appointed hour. As so often in Scripture, emphasis on God’s sovereignty functions as an incentive to prayer, not a disincentive.” [D. A. Carson, The Gospel according to John, The Pillar New Testament Commentary (Leicester, England; Grand Rapids, MI: Inter-Varsity Press; W.B. Eerdmans, 1991), 553–554.]
And this is a great prayer lesson for us as we try to work through the matter of God’s sovereignty in situations over which we have no control. Precisely BECAUSE God is sovereign, we should respond to such situations with prayer.
And Jesus gives us the perfect example of HOW to pray in such situations. Pray for God’s glory.
Glory is an important theme throughout this prayer, and especially so in these first five verses.
So, let’s talk for a minute about what it means to glorify something or someone.
The Greek word here is doxazo, and it’s the word we get Doxology from. The Doxology is a hymn of praise, and glorifying God includes praising Him. But “praise” doesn’t get quite to the depth of what it means to glorify God.
Doxazo means to cause the dignity and worth of some person or thing to become manifest and acknowledged. The Greek word carries with it the sense of clothing something in great splendor, of adorning it with beautiful and luxurious things.
So, when Annette and I showed up for our dinner reservations at Victoria and Albert’s, we were, in a sense, glorified. We were clothed in great splendor.
And here in verse 1, we see Jesus asking His Father to glorify Him now that His hour has come. Indeed, what Jesus asks in verse 5 is that God would give Him the glory He had before the world was created.
Sometimes I think we don’t spend enough time thinking about what Jesus set aside in order to come and live among us in human flesh.
Father, Son, and Holy Spirit had existed together for all eternity in perfect harmony, perfect community, and perfect fellowship in heaven, where they were worshiped as God by all the heavenly host.
But in order to come and live among us as a human, Jesus had to set aside the glory of heaven. He had to set aside the privileges and power He had as God so that He could live as a man.
In his letter to the Philippians, the Apostle Paul describes what happened this way as he calls his friends in Philippi to mimic the attitude of Jesus.
5 Have this attitude in yourselves which was also in Christ Jesus, 6 who, although He existed in the form of God, did not regard equality with God a thing to be grasped, 7 but emptied Himself, taking the form of a bond-servant, and being made in the likeness of men.
As the second Person of our Trinitarian God, Jesus had every right to hold onto the glory He had in heaven. But, as Paul says here, He emptied Himself of the supernatural glory that was His by virtue of His status as God so that He could take upon Himself the flesh of mankind.
And now, with His work on earth nearly complete, Jesus asks His Father to restore all the glory that He had set aside.
But the thing to remember about this prayer is that Jesus didn’t pray it silently. He prayed it in the hearing of his disciples. He prayed aloud so they’d HEAR Him and be ENCOURAGED by Him.
And it’s encouraging, indeed, to hear Jesus in such an intimate conversation with His Father. To hear Him coming before God with a gentle reminder that He’d done just what He’d been sent to do. To hear Him longing for the fullness of fellowship that had been one of the marks of the relationship between Father and Son for all eternity past.
It’s encouraging to me to know that Jesus could think of being clothed in splendor even as He knew He would be murdered the very next day.
It’s encouraging to know that Jesus wasn’t just looking TOWARD the cross; He was looking PAST the cross to the empty tomb and to the glorified body in which He would ascend back into heaven.
But it’s also useful for us to recognize that, throughout this prayer, the glory Jesus seeks is only a means to an end. He’s not looking for glory so He can be all puffed up and proud. He’s not looking for glory for the sake of glory.
Jesus is asking to be glorified so that HE can glorify His Father.
That, of course, is what Jesus did throughout His life on earth. In His perfect obedience and His unshakable faith, Jesus revealed to us what the Father is like.
In both His sinless life and His sacrificial death, Jesus caused the dignity and worth of God to become manifest to the world.
As He put it to Philip, “Whoever has seen me has seen the Father.”
In other words, Jesus came as the perfect manifestation of God. And as we praise Jesus for who He is, we are also praising the Father for who HE is.
Jesus glorified God by doing the work that God had given Him to do, right up to dying on the cross so that all who follow Him in faith can be saved from the penalty for our sins.
As one commentator puts it, “There is only one way to glorify God, and that is to obey God.” [Tom Constable, Tom Constable’s Expository Notes on the Bible (Galaxie Software, 2003), Jn 17:4, quoting Barclay.]
But that brings up a complication. In this part of His prayer, Jesus is asking God to glorify HIM in the hour that has come. He’s asking God to glorify Him through the crucifixion itself. And He suggests that in glorifying Jesus at the cross, God Himself will be glorified.
From a human standpoint, it’s hard for us to think of the cross as anything short of the horror of man’s arrogance.
As Warren Wiersbe puts it, “From the human point of view, Calvary was a revolting display of man’s sin; but from the divine point of view, the cross revealed and magnified the grace and glory of God.” [Warren W. Wiersbe, The Bible Exposition Commentary, vol. 1 (Wheaton, IL: Victor Books, 1996), 368.]
It’s easy to think of Jesus as a victim on the cross. It’s easy to see Him hanging there naked, with His blood pouring out of wounds on His feet, hands, head and back and wonder what could be LESS glorious than this picture we have in our minds right now.
It seems almost unimaginable that He was clothed in splendor during those awful hours.
But when we understand that the cross represents God’s greatest display of grace toward fallen mankind — when we recognize the great love for us demonstrated in this plan for our salvation — then the cross becomes glorious, indeed.
Jesus had glorified God in His life. He would glorify God in His death. And He would glorify God in His resurrection.
In His obedient sacrifice, He made the cross a thing of beauty, a thing of splendor. He took this instrument of suffering and death and transformed it into a tree of life.
And He did it all for the glory of God.
One of the themes of this passage is the mutual glorification of Father and Son. God points us to His Son, Jesus, and Jesus points us back to God.
That’s part of the reason we see this little parenthetical statement in verses 2 and 3.
Jesus says in verse 2 that God has given Him the authority to impart eternal life to those whom the Father has chosen.
And then, in verse 3, we get the New Testament definition of eternal life: to know God.
“Eternal life turns on nothing more and nothing less than knowledge of the true God. Eternal life is not so much everlasting life as personal knowledge of the Everlasting One.” [D. A. Carson, The Gospel according to John, The Pillar New Testament Commentary (Leicester, England; Grand Rapids, MI: Inter-Varsity Press; W.B. Eerdmans, 1991), 556.]
Speaking through the Old Testament prophet, Hosea, God said, “My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge.”
The people of Israel had strayed far from God and couldn’t be described as knowing Him. They knew ABOUT Him, but they didn’t have the experiential and personal relationship with Him for which we were all created.
But the prophet Habakkuk looked forward to a time when “the earth will be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the Lord, as the waters cover the sea.”
We were made for fellowship with God. But our sins have created a gulf between us and God that we cannot bridge.
So, Jesus came and lived a sinless life as a man. Then, He gave Himself to be sacrificed on a cross at Calvary, where He took upon Himself your sins and mine, along with the just punishment for them, so that all who repent and follow Him in faith can be saved and have eternal life.
So we can have the fellowship with God for which we were created. In other words, we who have followed Jesus in faith have been saved FOR GOD.
God has given us to Jesus, but Jesus’ chief aim for us is that we know the Father intimately and personally. And as He suggested to Philip, we can know the Father if we know the Son.
To know God is to be transformed by Him as we place our trust and faith in Him, as we fellowship with Him and pursue relationship with Him.
Indeed, this transformation is God’s will for us. It’s His purpose for us. As Paul puts it in Romans, chapter 8, we who’ve followed Jesus in faith are “predestined to become conformed to the image of” Jesus.
The Holy Spirit makes us more and more like Jesus so that we might experience the fullness of fellowship with God.
How does this glorify God? How does it cause His dignity and worth to be manifest or acknowledged?
Because nothing demonstrates God’s grace more clearly than a sinner who’s been redeemed and is being recreated in the image of God’s sinless Son, who died for that very sinner.
As we prepare to celebrate the resurrection of Jesus, I hope all of you will plan to take some time and meditate on the significance of the cross in the history of mankind.
I hope you’ll take some time to think about the glory that Jesus gave up to live among us as a man.
I hope you’ll think about what a terrible thing it is that your sins and mine broke the relationship for which we were created.
I hope you’ll think about the horror of Christ’s torture and recognize that the only reason it was necessary was because of our sins.
But I hope you won’t stop there in your meditation. I hope you’ll also recognize how the cross shouts God’s glory, because it also shouts His grace.
In the coming weeks, as we dig further into Jesus’ High Priestly Prayer, I hope you’ll be encouraged that, even as He knew what was about to happen, His thoughts were on God and on us.
He was thinking about how His death, burial, and resurrection would provide the way for us to be reconciled to God.
And I hope that you will glorify God by allowing yourselves to be transformed by this meditation. That you’ll be obedient in the transformation, just as Jesus was obedient in the crucifixion.
HE is glorious, indeed.