Our Great Hope
Rev. Res Spears
The High Priest’s Prayer • Sermon • Submitted • Presented
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John Maxwell, the Christian financial guru, tells a story in his book, Your Attitude, about a small town in Maine “that was proposed for the site of a great hydro-electric plant. A dam would be built across the river and the town submerged.
“When the project was announced, the people were given many months to arrange their affairs and relocate.
During those months, a curious thing happened. All improvements ceased. No painting was done. No repairs were made on the buildings, roads, or sidewalks.
“Day by day the whole town got shabbier and shabbier. A long time before the waters came, the town looked uncared for and abandoned, even though the people had not yet moved away.
“One citizen explained: ‘Where there is no faith in the future, there is no power in the present.’ That town was cursed with hopelessness because it had no future.” [Robert J. Morgan, Nelson’s Complete Book of Stories, Illustrations, and Quotes, electronic ed. (Nashville: Thomas Nelson Publishers, 2000), 448–449, quoting Maxwell.]
Well, maybe we can understand why folks in that town might’ve just given up. Why on earth would you spend the time and money to paint your house, knowing that it was going to be demolished soon? Why would you invest in landscaping, knowing that everything would soon be covered in water?
I would suggest that the people of this town in Maine were acting exactly as one would expect. They were responding to the news of the town’s imminent demise in an entirely natural way.
Indeed, if anyone there DID perform major renovations, upgrades, or maintenance after the dam project was announced, I suspect the rest of the folks there must have looked at them like they were a little bit crazy. What a waste of time and resources, they must have thought.
As I thought about the story of this town in Maine this week, it occurred to me that most of the world lives very much like the people of that town after they learned about the plans for the dam.
For much of the world — especially the post-Christian world of the West — there’s an assumption that each person’s physical death is like the commencement of that dam project.
For them, death is as final and absolute as the rising of those waters that would be trapped behind the dam, finally submerging that little town.
And in the face of such finality, they consider the kinds of things Jesus prayed for on the night of His unjust arrest to be a bit silly, something of a folly, even.
Sacrificial love for one another. Sanctification. Unity. Joy. The glory of God.
At best, nonbelievers consider these concepts to be quaint. At worst, they think of them as evidence of the foolishness of the Christian faith.
And that’s because the lost world lacks the hope — the confident assurance — that we were made for more than the 80 or 90 years of our current physical existence.
In fact, the hope that believers have in Christ Jesus is so unusual in the world that the Apostle Peter said we always need to be ready to explain it.
15 but sanctify Christ as Lord in your hearts, always being ready to make a defense to everyone who asks you to give an account for the hope that is in you, yet with gentleness and reverence;
The Apostle Paul considered hope to be one of the three pillars of the Christian faith and of the unity of the Church.
Concluding the famous “Love Chapter” in his first letter to the Corinthian church, Paul wrote:
13 But now faith, hope, love, abide these three; but the greatest of these is love.
Today, we’ll continue our study of Jesus’ High Priestly Prayer in John, chapter 17. And we’re going to see that our Savior encouraged His disciples with the confident assurance that the future of all believers is in the hands of the God who has loved Jesus from before the foundation of the world and who loves us even as He has loved His own Son.
Indeed, we’ll see Jesus talking about faith, hope, AND love in the last three verses of His prayer, although He puts hope first.
Today, we’ll talk about the hope Jesus prays about in verse 24. Next week, we’ll talk about the faith He portrays in verse 25. And on the week after Easter, we’ll talk about love, as He concludes His prayer in verse 26.
So, let’s read verse 24 of chapter 17 together, and then we’ll talk about who has this hope, the substance of this hope, the purpose of what’s hoped for, and the basis for it.
24 “Father, I desire that they also, whom You have given Me, 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.
Now, the first thing we need to do is to recognize that this verse is connected to everything that comes before it and especially to the portion of this prayer that’s on behalf of the disciples and all who’d come to faith through their witness.
So, as Jesus knew He would soon be leaving His disciples — and as He prayed for the unity among believers that would be a witness for Him, even as those same believers faced persecution — He wanted to encourage them by reminding them of the great hope in which they lived.
And so, He prays for the ones the Father has given Him. In other words, He’s praying for the disciples and for all who would turn to Him in faith through their witness.
At the cross on the following day, Jesus would give Himself as a sacrifice for the sins of all mankind. His death was sufficient to pay the penalty for ALL sin. But only those who repent and turn to Him in faith are saved. THEY are the recipients of this hope He’s praying about.
And it is for them — indeed, for all of us who have followed Jesus in faith — that He prays.
But even in this, it’s apparent that His priorities are not the same as the world’s priorities.
The world might expect Jesus to pray that His followers would be kept safe and healthy, that they’d receive a warm reception wherever they took the message of the gospel, or even that they’d be better loved than He was.
In fact, He’s already prayed that we would be kept from Satan’s evils. He’s prayed that we’d be set apart for service to God in holiness. He’s prayed that we’d experience the fullness of joy in serving Him. And He’s prayed that there would be unity of purpose, will, and affections among believers, who constitute the one Body of Christ, His Church.
And the purpose of those requests to God was that we might have great success in drawing the world to Jesus.
But here, we might expect Him to turn His requests toward the sort of logistical matters that tend to occupy most of our minds. Instead, He encourages us to look beyond this life and into eternity.
He was leaving His followers IN the world, though we are not OF the world. But He reminds us here that the substance of our hope is to be where HE is.
He’d made a promise to the disciples earlier that evening. It’s in John, chapter 14. Let’s look at it together.
1 “Do not let your heart be troubled; believe in God, believe also in Me. 2 “In My Father’s house are many dwelling places; if it were not so, I would have told you; for I go to prepare a place for you. 3 “If I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and receive you to Myself, that where I am, there you may be also.
Jesus is preparing a place for all who’ve turned to Him in repentant faith, so we can be WITH Him forever.
THIS is the great hope of the Christian faith: that every sinner who repents and places his or her faith in Jesus is forgiven and welcomed into the kingdom of God as an adopted son or daughter. That we will spend eternity in the glorious presence of our Savior and King.
And by praying as He does in verse 24, Jesus reminds us that our focus and our attention and our affections should be turned toward eternity.
When our greatest affections are for the time we will spend in the physical presence of our Savior, everything changes.
As we anticipate Jesus saying to us, “Well done, good and faithful servant,” we’ll find it easier to love our enemies and pray for those who persecute us.
As we anticipate the rewards we’ll will receive for our obedience, we can stand up under the harshest and most unfair criticisms, allowing the LORD to fight our battles instead of responding in kind.
The more tightly we cling to the hope of eternity with Jesus, the more loosely we will cling to the things of this world.
The more tightly we cling to the REAL hope of eternal life, the less chance we’ll have at being derailed by all the things that happen to us here and now.
Next to Jesus, the Apostle Paul may be our best example of clinging to hope in the face of great troubles.
In 2 Corinthians, chapter 11, he describes his life as an apostle, and it’s frankly terrifying.
‘He was whipped by the Jewish leaders five times. Beaten with rods three times. Stoned once. Shipwrecked THREE TIMES! He spent a day and a night in the sea. And those are just the obvious crises. He goes on in verse 26.
26 I have been on frequent journeys, in dangers from rivers, dangers from robbers, dangers from my countrymen, dangers from the Gentiles, dangers in the city, dangers in the wilderness, dangers on the sea, dangers among false brethren; 27 I have been in labor and hardship, through many sleepless nights, in hunger and thirst, often without food, in cold and exposure.
Life wasn’t easy for the apostles, and we shouldn’t expect it to be easy for us, either. But they were able to bear it all and to begin spreading the gospel to the world, because they were focused not on the trials they faced but on the hope of eternity in the presence of Jesus.
Their hope gave them something to focus on besides their troubles. And the same thing can be true of you if you’re a Christ-follower. Listen to what the writer of the Book of Hebrews says about this:
1 Therefore, since we have so great a cloud of witnesses surrounding us, let us also lay aside every encumbrance and the sin which so easily entangles us, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, 2 fixing our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of faith, who for the joy set before Him endured the cross, despising the shame, and has sat down at the right hand of the throne of God. 3 For consider Him who has endured such hostility by sinners against Himself, so that you will not grow weary and lose heart.
“Fix your eyes on Jesus.” Focus on the hope — the confident assurance — of eternity in His presence.
But also, don’t miss this: If you’ve turned to Jesus in faith, eternal life has already begun for you. And you can find Jesus present — even here and now — wherever there is suffering, wherever there are people in need, wherever people are hurting.
So, meet Him there. BRING Him there, since He dwells within every believer. Introduce Him to those who suffer, and prepare to see His glory when some who were lost are saved through your witness.
That’s the purpose of what we hope for: that we’ll see the fullness of Jesus’ glory.
We see His glory on earth when sinners are transformed into saints through faith in Him. We see it when the church forsakes the divisiveness and strife that characterizes the world and embraces the unity that characterizes our trinitarian God.
But there’s also a sense in which we can never behold the fullness of Christ’s glory this side of heaven.
This is the glory Jesus prayed for back in verse 5 of this chapter, where He said,
5 “Now, Father, glorify Me together with Yourself, with the glory which I had with You before the world was.
Jesus set aside the glory — the privileges and powers — He’d had for all eternity to come and live among us as a man. But that glory was returned to Him when He ascended back to heaven after His resurrection.
And it is THIS glory that will captivate us for untold eons, first in heaven and then on the recreated earth.
Many Christians tend to think of life in the resurrection as a time of reunion with family and friends, a long period of rest, or maybe a big party with lots of bacon.
But what Jesus says here — and what’s clear from the entirety of Scripture — is that our time in eternity will be consumed in worship, the only appropriate response to the fullness of God’s glory.
As with so much about salvation, we tend to make heaven all about US. But I think that what we’ll find is that it’s all about JESUS.
Here and now, we’re instructed in Hebrews to fix our eyes upon Jesus. But in eternity, I think we won’t be able to take our eyes OFF of Jesus and His glory.
His glory will be EVERYWHERE. Surrounding us. Indwelling us. Drawing us together, finally, in perfect unity and love.
And love is the basis of this hope. That’s what we see at the end of this verse.
“For you loved me from before the foundation of the world,” Jesus prays to His Father.
It’s BECAUSE of God’s great love for His Son that He gave Jesus the disciples. It’s BECAUSE of God’s great love for His Son that He gives Jesus new disciples, even today.
It’s BECAUSE of God’s great love for His Son that Jesus could know His glory would be restored. And it’s BECAUSE of God’s great love for His Son that Jesus could make the promise He made back in John, chapter 14.
God’s eternal love of His Son is the very BASIS of Jesus’ promise that we who’ve followed Him in faith will be with Him one day.
What the Father has given the Son, no one can take away, not even death.
Listen, folks. If the bodily resurrection of believers into the presence of Jesus is a false hope, then we really ARE foolish. Paul says as much in 1 Corinthians, chapter 15.
19 If we have hoped in Christ in this life only, we are of all men most to be pitied.
If the hope of bodily resurrection from the dead is a false one, then Jesus’ death on the cross was futile. We’d still face the penalty for our sins — death and eternal separation from the God who made us for fellowship with Him.
But Jesus’ story didn’t end at the cross. At the empty tomb on the third day, God demonstrated, first, that He’d accepted Jesus’ sacrifice as full payment for our sin-debt.
And He also demonstrated He has the power to keep Jesus’ promise in John, chapter 11, where He says to Martha, sister of Lazarus:
25 Jesus said to her, “I am the resurrection and the life; he who believes in Me will live even if he dies, 26 and everyone who lives and believes in Me will never die. Do you believe this?”
Folks, the world puts its faith and its hope in all manner of things that are unworthy. Finances. Political structures. Government. Family and friends. Careers.
And some of those things might help you keep on keeping on as you slog through this hard world. But none of them are eternal. And if you’re a follower of Jesus, your focus should be on the eternal, not the temporal.
Because of God’s great love for His Son, we who follow Jesus can know that one day, we will be with Him where He is and that we will be enraptured by His glory.
THIS is the great hope of the Christian faith. And it’s a hope that can sustain you through whatever trials you face here on earth if you’ll only make it your focus.
But this hope is only yours if you’ve repented of your sins and turned to Jesus in faith that only His life, death, burial, resurrection, and ascension back to heaven provide the means for you to be reconciled to God.
Recently, a pastor I know wrote about hope on Facebook, and he was challenged by one of his friends to describe where people who “aren’t religious” can find hope.
I was disappointed to read his response to that question. He suggested family and friends and careers and many of the other things that are powerless to give REAL hope and said maybe the guy could find it there.
Friends, let me tell you that these 80 or so years you’ll spend here on earth are a drop in the bucket, compared to the eternity for which you were made.
You’ll spend that eternity either WITH Jesus or APART from Him. And the Bible tells us the eternal separation from Jesus that non-believers will experience will be grievous and terrifying.
What good is your hope if it doesn’t give you hope to avoid such a horrific and terrible existence?
Jesus wants you to see His glory. Jesus wants you to BE with Him. And He’s calling you today to make a decision to follow Him in faith.
Don’t ignore that still, small voice calling you to Jesus today. True hope awaits.