A Faith That Knows
Rev. Res Spears
The High Priest’s Prayer • Sermon • Submitted • Presented
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The early church Father, Augustine, once said, “Faith is to believe what you do not see” and that “the reward of this faith is to see what you believe.”
Today, as we look at the second-to-last verse in the High Priestly Prayer of Jesus in chapter 17 of the Gospel of John, faith will be our topic.
You’ll recall that last week, I said Jesus closed this prayer on the night He was arrested by talking about three pillars of Christian belief: hope, faith, and love.
Last week, we talked about our great hope as followers of Jesus: that we’ll be WITH Him and see the fullness of His glory in bodies that have been raised from the dead, just as His was.
And we talked about how the basis for that hope is the eternal love of God for His Son.
And as I closed last week, I talked about how the only way to have this hope is to know Jesus as your Lord and Savior.
Well, actually, I probably said the only way to have this hope is through FAITH in the work that Jesus did in His life, death, and resurrection.
But what’s interesting is that, biblically speaking, these are the same statements. Knowledge and faith aren’t mutually exclusive of one another. The Bible doesn’t call us to a faith that’s blind.
No. In fact, what it calls us to is a faith that’s built upon the knowledge of God’s character.
How can we followers of Jesus trust that our sins have been forgiven? How can we be sure we’ve been adopted into the family of God? How can we trust the promise that believers will be bodily raised from the dead into the presence of Jesus?
We can have faith — a confident assurance — in these things because of what God has revealed to us about Himself in Scripture, in His Son, and in His very creation.
In the Old Testament, we see that He is a covenant-keeping God who never breaks His promises. We see that He has a special love for mankind, even in its sinful and fallen state. We see that He’s gracious and merciful and righteous and just.
In our own lives, we can see God’s goodness and mercy. When we look closely, we can see His hand working to guide and protect us and to draw us to Christ.
And because of all these things we know about God, we can have faith that Jesus — the image of the invisible God — will do what He said He will do.
We don’t place blind faith in a God we don’t know. Our faith is built on the solid foundation of what we DO know about God. And our faith GROWS as we come to know Him better through His Son, Jesus Christ.
Indeed, the knowledge of God is an important theme throughout this prayer. Jesus talks about having manifested God’s name. In His words and His actions, Jesus taught and displayed the character of God.
He imaged His Father so well, in fact, that He told the disciples, “If you have seen me, you have seen the Father.”
Not all had come to know God. And even the 11 disciples who remained in that upper room to hear Jesus’ prayer that night had at that time only an elementary understanding of God and of the work that He’d sent Jesus to do.
But they knew something very important that’s revealed in the verse we’ll study today. So, let’s take a look at verse 25 and see what that was.
25 “O righteous Father, although the world has not known You, yet I have known You; and these have known that You sent Me;
I said this is a verse about faith. But the word doesn’t even appear in this verse. So, let me share a story that will help you see why I consider this a verse about faith.
John Bisango, a pastor at a Houston church in the mid-20th century, wrote in his book, The Power of Positive Praying, about a time when his five-year-old daughter, Melodye Jan, asked him for a dollhouse.
“John promptly nodded and promised to build her one, then he went back to reading his book. Soon he glanced out the study window and saw her arms filled with dishes, toys, and dolls, making trip after trip until she had a great pile of playthings in the yard. He asked his wife what Melodye Jan was doing.
“‘Oh, you promised to build her a doll house, and she believes you. She’s just getting ready for it.’
“‘You would have thought I’d been hit by an atom bomb,’ John later said. ‘I threw aside that book, raced to the lumber yard for supplies, and quickly built that little girl a doll house. Now why did I respond? Because I wanted to? No. Because she deserved it? No. Her daddy had given his word, and she believed it and acted upon it. When I saw her faith, nothing could keep me from carrying out my word.’” [Robert J. Morgan, Nelson’s Complete Book of Stories, Illustrations, and Quotes, electronic ed. (Nashville: Thomas Nelson Publishers, 2000), 285–286, quoting Bisango.]
It seems like little Melodye Jan knew her father better than he even knew himself. Apparently, she knew him to be a man of his word.
So, when he told her he’d build her a dollhouse, she figured the work was all but done, and she proceeded to prepare for the time when that dollhouse was ready for her.
What she knew about her father was the basis for the confident assurance she had that he’d do what he’d said he would do.
In a similar way, as Jesus wraps up this prayer, He grounds the confidence He has that God will do what He’s asked Him to do in His own knowledge of God.
God’s righteousness would be the basis for God’s answering Jesus’ prayer. “By calling God His righteous Father, Jesus was affirming His belief that God would do what was right in granting the petitions that He was presenting.” [Tom Constable, Tom Constable’s Expository Notes on the Bible (Galaxie Software, 2003), Jn 17:25.]
Because of His Father’s righteousness, Jesus knew God would grant His request to be glorified in the events that would follow over the next hours and days.
Because of God’s righteousness, Jesus knew His Father would grant the request of bringing believers to heaven where they would behold the fullness of His glory.
But the righteousness of God is also the basis for how God deals with those who reject Him by rejecting Jesus.
“The world has not known you,” Jesus prays. Most of those who had come into contact with Him had rejected Jesus’ message of salvation by grace through faith.
As Peter puts it in Acts, chapter 4, where he’s preaching to the religious and political leaders who’d demanded Jesus’ crucifixion:
11 “He is the stone which was rejected by you, the builders, but which became the chief corner stone. 12 “And there is salvation in no one else; for there is no other name under heaven that has been given among men by which we must be saved.”
God gave us ONE way to be saved from the penalty we all owe for our sins, for our rebellion against Him. He gave us Jesus, whose sinless life shows us the character of God.
He gave us Jesus, whose sacrificial death for us and in our place paid the penalty for the sins of all who turn to Him in faith. He gave us Jesus, who took upon Himself at the cross our sins so that we who follow Him can be forgiven.
He gave us Jesus, whose supernatural resurrection demonstrates that God has the power to keep His promise to raise believers from the dead, just as Jesus was raised.
He gave us Jesus, who now sits at the right hand of God, waiting for His Father’s signal to return and gather to Himself all those who have believed in Him.
He gave us Jesus, the king who gave up His glory so that we could become PARTAKERS of that glory through faith in Him.
But for those who’ve rejected this message of salvation by grace through faith, their sins — their evil and rebellious works here on earth — are still their own. They have NOT been forgiven, and they will bear their own punishment.
Perhaps nowhere in Scripture is this put more clearly than in the 20th chapter of the Book of Revelation, in the passage about judgment at the Great White Throne in heaven.
11 Then I saw a great white throne and Him who sat upon it, from whose presence earth and heaven fled away, and no place was found for them. 12 And I saw the dead, the great and the small, standing before the throne, and books were opened; and another book was opened, which is the book of life; and the dead were judged from the things which were written in the books, according to their deeds. 13 And the sea gave up the dead which were in it, and death and Hades gave up the dead which were in them; and they were judged, every one of them according to their deeds. 14 Then death and Hades were thrown into the lake of fire. This is the second death, the lake of fire. 15 And if anyone’s name was not found written in the book of life, he was thrown into the lake of fire.
Folks, you need to know that, because of God’s righteousness, heaven is real. But hell is real too, and that’s ALSO because of God’s righteousness.
The perfect righteousness and perfect justice of a holy God demand that sin be punished. At the cross, God took upon Himself that punishment in the person of Jesus. This was His greatest gift to mankind.
But those who’ve rejected that gift by rejecting Jesus will face the punishment they deserve for their sins.
That’s what’s going on in this passage, when the Apostle John describes the books being opened and people being judged according to their deeds.
We know this passage isn’t about believers for two reasons. First, we who’ve followed Jesus in faith have our names written in the Book of Life.
And second, the passage refers to the dead as the ones being judged. But God’s promise back in John 3:16 is that all who believe in Jesus will receive eternal LIFE.
The dead here are those who are still spiritually dead, those who haven’t received the life-giving presence of the Holy Spirit in themselves through faith in Jesus.
And because of God’s righteousness, they will receive the punishment they are due: eternal separation from God in a place of continual torment.
Having known God eternally and in perfect intimacy, Jesus had revealed — and continues to reveal — His perfect righteousness to the disciples and to the world.
And through His revelation, they had come to know something important: that God had sent Him.
Now, I did a little research on this phrase — “that You sent Me” — at the end of verse 25. It’s a significant theme in this prayer and in the Gospel of John.
A version of this phrase appears six times in this prayer alone and 17 times in John’s Gospel. That should suggest to us that there’s something important about it.
The first time this phrase appears in John’s Gospel is in Jesus’ conversation with the Pharisee Nicodemus. You’ll recognize the verses.
16 “For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish, but have eternal life. 17 “For God did not send the Son into the world to judge the world, but that the world might be saved through Him. 18 “He who believes in Him is not judged; he who does not believe has been judged already, because he has not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God.
Do you see it there? Jesus was sent here by His Father FOR A PURPOSE. In His incarnation, He came to offer salvation. He’ll come in judgment one day — the conquering King, riding a white horse.
Indeed, as He says in verse 18, the judgment has already taken place. All that remains is the public pronouncement of that judgment at the Great White Throne.
But everything from Jesus’ birth until this very moment today is all about His grace.
In His grace, God SENT His Son. In HIS grace, Jesus died for us and in our place. In His grace, God has accepted Jesus’ sacrifice as full payment for the sin-debt that His followers owe.
In His grace, our promise-keeping God has provided a way for us to be forgiven — to reconcile sinners to Himself. Which is a good thing, because we could never reconcile ourselves to God.
Even before the crucifixion, Zaccheus, the wee little tax collector who climbed a tree to get a better look at Jesus, seems to have understood what a marvelous gift it was that Jesus had been sent.
In Luke’s account of this meeting, while the religious leaders were grumbling that Jesus was spending time with sinners, Zaccheus repents for his sins.
8 Zaccheus stopped and said to the Lord, “Behold, Lord, half of my possessions I will give to the poor, and if I have defrauded anyone of anything, I will give back four times as much.” 9 And Jesus said to him, “Today salvation has come to this house, because he, too, is a son of Abraham. 10 “For the Son of Man has come to seek and to save that which was lost.”
From the moment when Adam and Eve ate the forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden, mankind had been lost.
We were made for fellowship with God, and that’s what Adam and Eve had experienced in the Garden, a place of perfect peace and bountiful blessings in the very presence of God.
But when they sinned by disobeying God’s ONE commandment, they were exiled from His presence. And in our own sins, we confirm that we’re all children of Adam.
But God loves us, and He never stopped wanting fellowship with us. And so, in the fullness of time, He sent Jesus to seek and to save that which was lost.
And one of the wonderful things about this faith that we’re called to is its simplicity. We don’t have to understand a bunch of seminary-level theological concepts to be saved.
Saving, repentant faith requires only that we confess we’re sinners unable to save ourselves and believe that God sent His unique and eternal Son, Jesus, to bring salvation to all who turn to Him in faith.
It’s a faith that’s based on the knowledge of who JESUS is. And it’s a faith that’s based on the knowledge of who GOD is.
God SENT Jesus for a PURPOSE. God sent Jesus so that you could be saved. There is no other way to BE saved. HE is THE Way, THE Truth, and THE Life.
So, let me ask you: What are you waiting for?
Now, today is Lord’s Supper Sunday. This observance is important to the fellowship of the church. It brings us together in a unique way and reminds us that we belong to one another in Christ Jesus.
It reminds us of the love He has for us and the love we’re called to have for one another.
Jesus commanded us to observe the Lord’s Supper as an act of obedience to Him, as a way of proclaiming that we who follow Him in faith belong to Him, and as a way of reminding us what He did for us.
The Lord’s Supper reminds us that our hope for salvation rests entirely on the sacrifice He made on our behalf at the cross. It reminds us that our life is in Him.
And the fact that we share bread from one loaf reminds us that we are, together, the one body of Christ. It reminds us that we’re called to unity of faith, unity of purpose, and unity of love.
It reminds us that, just as He gave up the glory He had in heaven, we who’ve followed Him in faith are called to give up any claims we might think we have to our own lives as we follow Him.
Finally, it reminds us that, as we’ve been given the testimony of the Holy Spirit within us, we are to share OUR testimony of salvation by grace through faith.
If you’re a baptized believer who is walking in obedience to Christ, I would like to invite you to join us today as we celebrate the Lord’s Supper.
Now, this sacred meal dates all the way back to when Jesus shared it with His disciples at the Last Supper on the night before He was crucified.
The conditions during the Last Supper were different than the conditions we have here today, but the significance was the same as it is today.
Jesus told His disciples that the bread represented His body, which would be broken for our transgressions.
Let us pray.
26 While they were eating, Jesus took some bread, and after a blessing, He broke it and gave it to the disciples, and said, “Take, eat; this is My body.”
As Jesus suffered and died on that cross, his blood poured out with His life. This was always God’s plan to reconcile mankind to Himself.
“In [Jesus] we have redemption through His blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses, according to the riches of His grace which He lavished on us.”
Let us pray.
27 And when He had taken a cup and given thanks, He gave it to them, saying, “Drink from it, all of you; 28 for this is My blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for forgiveness of sins.
Take and drink.
“Now, as often as we eat this bread and drink the cup, we proclaim the Lord’s death until He comes.”
Maranatha! Lord, come!
Here at Liberty Spring, we have a tradition following our commemoration of the Lord’s Supper.
Please gather around in a circle, and let us sing together “Blest Be the Tie that Binds.”