Sermon Tone Analysis

Follow Me

If you have a Bible, and I hope you do.

Let me invite you to open to the book of John.

Let's start off this morning with a little Bible quiz.

One question … probably pretty simple … hopefully.

I want to know when and where Jesus said these words?

When and where was He when He said, “It is finished?”

Anybody know?

He was on the cross!

Okay.

That’s our first answer.

That is one of the places where Jesus said those words.

Look at John 19:30.

One of the times where Jesus says, “It is finished.”

This is where we often immediately think … well, when Jesus said He is finished, He was done, He finished all that He was supposed to do; it was John 19:30.

Does anybody know the other time when Jesus said that He was finished?

Turn back two chapters to John 17:4.

Jesus uses the same word there.

You kind of miss it because it is translated in some of our translations differently but it says in verse four, “I have brought you glory”—this is Jesus praying to the Father.

“I have brought you glory on earth by completing”—or finishing—“the work you gave me to do” (John 17:4).

Same word in the original language of the New Testament that we see in John 19:30 is now used here in John 17:4.

The Work of Jesus...

Now here is what I want us to do today.

I want us to think, if Jesus said it is finished on the cross but He also said I have finished the work you have given me to do in John 17 before He went to the cross.

This doesn’t say that the cross wasn’t important, that was obviously a very important part of His work but there was also another work that He was doing here.

That He could say even before He went to the cross, “I’ve finished the work you have given me to do.”

The strategy of Jesus on earth revolved around two main aspects...

John 19:30 - A message of redemption

that was the picture on the cross that Jesus was giving His life to redeem men and women, which basically was to restore us to God.

That was part of His work and obviously the central part of His work giving His life on the cross but in John 17, before He even went to the cross, He says, past tense, “I’ve finished the work you have given me to do.” What’s He talking about there?

John 17:4 - A method of reproduction

What you’ve got here is two aspects to Jesus work.

Yes, He went to the cross and died on the cross to restore us to the Father.

At the same time, he’s showing us a picture here of how His work also involved how that message is going to be reproduced throughout the entire world.

I think that is the picture we have in John 17.

He says this at the beginning of this prayer, “I have finished the work you have given me to do.”

Then, he begins to describe that work.

Over the next 22 verses we’ve got a picture of Jesus summarizing His work on earth.

In John 17, Jesus never mentions the miracles he performed or the multitudes to whom he preached, but over 40 times he mentions the men whom God had given him out of the world!

So here’s what I want you to do.

You’ve got John 17 open.

If you are okay with marking in your Bible, here’s what I want you to do.

We’re going to read through this prayer and every time you see the word disciples or even us, as disciples of Christ two thousand years later mentioned, then I want you to put a box around each word in this chapter that describes His disciples or us.

You might circle it, put a square, underline it or whatever it might be but every time you see the disciples mentioned put a mark there in your Bible.

Let’s read this together now.

Now keep in mind; we are coming into a conversation between God the Son and God the Father right before He goes to the cross and He prays this prayer out loud for a reason.

His disciples are there in the upper room and they are listening.

Here’s what He says, verse 1:

Now some of you are thinking, "Alright, we've got a long way to go to get 40 plus times."

Well, get your pen ready.

This is where disciples of Christ come in after that, including us...

Do you get the point?

Over and over and over again, Jesus says at the beginning, “I’ve finished the work you have given me to do.”

And then, 40 plus times, He references this small group of men that He had poured His life into.

Could it be that His work, yes, exemplified in the cross was preceded by His work of pouring His life into a few men, i.e. making disciples?

They were His life that He had poured into so that He comes to the end of His ministry, He says, everything is staked on these guys.

Jesus’ strategy depended on a few disciples’ faithfulness to advance the message of redemption by following His method of reproduction.

His whole work, His whole life in ministry hinged on the faithfulness of these few guys.

As a result, I think John 17 gives us a pretty incredible picture of the heart of Jesus, the master disciple maker.

It gives us a picture in to: What kind of work did Jesus do on earth?

How did He do it?

How did He pray for the people around Him? What it’s going to do over the next four weeks, this week and the next three weeks, it’s going to begin to unpack what it means to make disciples.

We are going to learn directly from the heart of Jesus, Himself.

And here's the urgent need...

If we do not reproduce ourselves in disciple-making, then we will do a meager job of advancing the message of redemption.

If we do not reproduce ourselves in disciple making, then the message of redemption on the cross in John 19:30 will not be advanced in the way Jesus desires for it to be advanced.

You know it’s funny that in a day where we have more faculties and more resources to advance the gospel to the ends of the earth than ever before, in this day and age with all that we have, do you realize that there are more unreached people, more people today on the earth who have never heard Jesus than there were before we invented the horseless carriage.

That brings us to the urgent question...

Will we be faithful to obey His plan?

Will we be faithful to obey His plan?

Don’t miss this!

Because if this mission is dependent on us using technology and resources wisely, if it depends on us using all the things we have at our disposal, then that means that those who don’t have all those resources, can’t accomplish the mission without them.

So what I want us to do, over the next four weeks, is to dive into four components of what it means to make disciples.

If you were not here last week, the goal is that through this series that you would be able to ask anybody at the Church at Brook Hills, “How do you make disciples?”

And we would be able to say, “This is how you make disciples.”

I want to show you four practical components and not just be able to say we know how to do it but we are doing it.

I want you to see a foundation in this prayer and then I want to dive into the first component.

The Foundation of Disciple-Making...

So let’s start with the foundation for disciple making.

It’s in these first five verses and I want to read back over them one more time.

Instead of circling all the “they’s” and “them’s,” I want you to look for one word that is mentioned a couple of different times that really becomes the focus, the driving force, behind this prayer.

Listen to John 17:1–5.

Did you see one word mentioned five different times?

“Glorify your son, that you Son may glorify you; the glory I had with you before the world began.”

The driving force in this prayer is the glory of God.

We see it in two different ways.

God is glorified in the completion of the Incarnation.

This has been the driving passion at the heart of Jesus.

Over and over again in the book of John, I think seventeen different times, we see this emphasis on glorifying the Father through Christ.

It is Jesus’ driving passion.

In John 12:28 he’s praying, “Father what shall I say, ‘Save me from this hour’ ” as He prepares for the cross and He says in verse 28, “No, this is why I came.

Father, glorify your name.

Clothe yourself with splendor through my life.”

God is glorified in the continuation of the Incarnation.

But that is not where it stops.

If it stops there, with Jesus going back and the incarnation being completed, and that happened two thousand years ago, how does that affect us today and how did that affect these disciples then?

What we see is that God is glorified by not just in the completion of the incarnation but God is glorified in the continuation of the incarnation.

Christ is making Himself known through us.

We are His hands.

We are His feet.