I'd like you to turn in your
Bibles with me to John chapter 17. After a marvellous message
like we had from Simon I almost feel like all I can do is spoil
things for you, but nevertheless the Lord has moved us down through
this remarkable prayer and I pray that, I really do pray that you
will just be enabled of the Lord to take a hold of this and that
He would actually make it just such a precious, precious Word
to you that you can go back to and you can hold on to and you
can find in it. One of the things I love about
the Word of God is that it's living and active and we never
get to the end of it. One of the things that's glorious
about John 17 is the wonderful completeness of this prayer. And as I've reminded you before,
he could have, and he did pray privately so often, and there
aren't very many times in the scriptures where he and his father
are openly communicating with us to us, but there, just before
he goes to the cross at Calvary, before he goes down to Gethsemane's
garden, we have recorded for us, perfectly recorded for us,
this remarkable prayer. I want to start in verse 17.
I just want to read down the next few verses and want us to
look at what is evidently declared in these verses for us. He says,
I have given them thy word, and the world hath hated them. Because they are not of the world,
even as I am not of the world. I pray not that thou should take
them out of the world, but that thou should keep them from the
evil. Or possibly an adequate translation
is not just the evil but the evil one as well, but both are
all so linked together that both are right. They are not of the
world, even as I am not of the world. And so here the Lord asks
and answers some wonderfully simple but extraordinarily important
questions for us, isn't it? Why are we here? All of us. Every single living human being
here is covered in this, isn't it? I pray that you should not
take them out of the world. Why are we here? We're here because
of the ordained purpose of God Almighty. He, the sovereign creator,
the sovereign ruler, the sovereign, the one who reigns over all events,
has left his people in this world for a particular purpose. What
is the world? People get caught up on John
3.16 and they want to believe that the world is all humanity
and God loves all humanity and He's proof of loving all humanity.
is that he sent his son to die for all humanity and he's desperately
wanting everyone to be saved, but he just can't quite manage
it because man is so, so powerful. That is the evil that he's praying
that these people should be kept from. That's part of the evil
that they should be kept from. Why do we need keeping? Well,
Simon showed us very wonderfully and very clearly in the story
of Gideon. We need to be kept. Quite simply
because we can't keep ourselves. God is not in the business of
exalting the flesh of man. Never. God is in the business
of exalting the glory of God Almighty and for us to know what
we are. So we need to be kept and we
need to be kept from the evil. We need to be kept from the evil.
We're not of the world. We don't belong. The world is
not our home. God's children are children who
have come from another place. They are the children of God,
and they are born into this world as the children of Adam, and
they are born into this world under the power and the dominion
of the evil one. And that's what he's praying
to us for. And isn't it remarkable what
a glorious description of how powerful our God is and how needy
we are. He doesn't say that you can keep
yourself for one tiny second. He's saying that you have to
be kept. We have to be kept by God the Father. We have to be
kept by God the Son. We have to be kept by God the
Spirit. We have to be kept. We can't keep ourselves. And
all of this is only ever going to be revealed into the hearts
of God's children when he shines the light of the gospel. We won't
know what the world is, we won't know why we're here, we won't
understand a single thing about God, about us, about the events
of this world, unless God shines a light. A couple of years ago
I made a terrible mistake. I saw something on television
and you can buy those vacuum cleaners with the lights on them.
Have you seen those vacuum cleaners with little green light that
sort of shines in front of the thing? I only ever used it once. Horrible things. So all of a
sudden, all of a sudden what I thought was a clean floor is
revealed to be a dirty. We live on a farm and we live
with a dog or two dogs at times. Dear oh dear, I didn't want to
see all of that rubbish. But what was exposed by the light? The rubbish that is there. What
happens when God shines the light of the gospel of who he is and
who we are into the hearts of someone? They see the rubbish. What happens as they grow, as
the light shines more and more clearly on their lives? The religious
world says to you, you get better and better and better and you
get less. They need my little light. We need the light of the
gospel to show us what we are. And we need the light of the
gospel to continually show us what we are. Because otherwise
we'll be as proud as those Israelites in the days of Gideon. They thought
that they could go off and do all these things under their
own strength and they forget about God. What a mercy that
he's left us here in a world in a world that hates us because
we reflect God to this world and we proclaim God to this world.
That's what he says, isn't it? I've given them, verse 14, I've
given them thy word. Now this is not just the written
word here, isn't it? This is the living word that
he's given to his people, and when that living word is revealed
in his people, all of a sudden there is an enmity that rises
up in the hearts of people, and it's a spiritual enmity, and
it's not understood by rational thinking, it's not understood
by intelligent Exercise is only ever revealed as God reveals
himself to people. Listen to what God says about
this world that you live in. He says, in time past you walked. This is Ephesians chapter 2 verse
2. You walked. That's what your
walk was. That was your daily activity,
your daily journey through this world. You walked according to
the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of
the air, the spirit, this is this evil one, isn't it? The
spirit that now worketh in the children of disobedience. Is that your worldview? People try and figure out what's
happening in this world, and why there is so much evil in
this world, and why things aren't as they ought to be, and why
things, rather than getting better, are getting worse and worse.
1 John 5, at the end of 1 John 5, He has two remarkably short sentences
that are so poignant. He says in verse 19 at the end
of his epistle, We know that we are of God. There is a people
in this world who know that they are of God. They know that their
origin is of God. They know that their faith came
from God. They know that their revelation
of who God is. They know that their revelation
of who they are is from God. And the whole world lieth in
wickedness. world you see? That's God's view
of this world isn't it? This world lies in the hands
of Satan. Why are people being so silly?
Why are people being so evil? Why? When you try and work out,
common sense would say we go in this direction and what the
world is doing is going in that direction. They lie in the hands
of the evil one. What does the evil one do? He's
a liar and a murderer. He'll lie to you about yourself
as he did in the garden. You'll be like God. You'll have
free will. You'll be able to choose. You
are the master of your destiny. I love what he goes on to say
if you have your Bibles open in 1 John 5. And we know these
are the things that children of God know because they've been
taught, because there's light come. We know that the Son of
God has come and has given us an understanding that we may
know Him that is true. We know Him that is true and
we are in Him that is true. That's what we know. That's what
God's children know. They know that the world lies
in the arms of Satan. And that they know that they
were there. And we're in Him that is true, even in His Son,
Jesus Christ. This is the true God and eternal
life. And then I love how he finishes,
isn't that wonderful? Little children, keep yourselves from
idols. An idol is anything that you
concoct in your imagination about who God is, about who you are,
about how God saves sinners, about who the Lord Jesus Christ
is, about what happened on the cross at Calvary. It's an idol. It doesn't have
to be a silly statue that decorates so much of this world. I lived
in India for years and the more statues I saw, the worse and
worse. You felt so uncomfortable seeing them everywhere you looked.
You couldn't go shopping without buying them. You couldn't drive
a car without seeing them dangling from the backs of the trucks
and cars in front of you. You couldn't be in a taxi without
them dangling all over the place. Everywhere they were, and the
worst of all were the Catholic idols which just permeated our
part of of India, and every time, every single one of those, was
a pathetic Jesus. Every one was a pathetic Jesus.
He was a pathetic baby in his mother's arms. He was a pathetic
crucified one in his mother's arms. And he was a pathetic pleading
idol, just an idol. Okay, so let's
go back and have a look at our verse, and I'll just try and
be brief. on account of the heat. But why are we still here? We're
still here. We're still here in this body
of sin. We're still here amongst the
people that hate us. We're still here amongst people
that don't have the foggiest notion of who we are and who
God is. We're here in this world of sin
and death. We're here in this world under
the dominion of Satan. We're here in the midst of this
world that tells lies about God. And we're here. We're here because
God has prayed that we'll be here. So many people want to
say, I'd like to get out of here. I'm fearful that the reason for
most people wanting to get out of here is not that they don't
want to be with the Lord necessarily. I'm sure the Lord's people do,
but often they just want to be free from their trials. But we're
here because these trials are ordained by God. Our work, walk
and our journey in this world is ordained by God. He prays And we are kept here by His power
and we are kept here for His purpose. If we delight in all
the other promises of God, that's another one we ought to be delighting
in, isn't it? We are kept here by the power of God and He's
left us here. He's left His people here because
He's determined that we would be here. He's determined that
we would be here for His glory. That's what all of this prayer
is about. It's about the glory of God Almighty who has power
over all flesh and leaves his people here in the midst of all
flesh so that he can display the glory of his power. There
was a missionary who was confronted by a Hindu. Many years ago, a
Hindu Brahmin priest confronted him and said, God ought to repent
for not having sent the Gospel to India much earlier than he
did. Well, he did. He sent the Gospel to India in
Daniel's day, and he sent the Gospel to them. They knew about
the Gospel when they stepped off the ark. They knew about
the Gospel when they left the Tower of Babel. They weren't
ignorant. They're not ignorant, nor are
they innocent. according to God. But the missionary
replied, which I thought always struck me as an interesting reply
to this accusation against God. He said that if a great and powerful
king wanted to show his greatness over his enemies, would it not
be in his interest to allow his enemy to grow strong and mighty
before he destroyed him with the evident grace and power that
he alone can reveal and do good to his people. Simon's just told
us about that in the picture of Gideon, isn't it? He let the
Midianites grow to this enormous army of hundreds of thousands
of people and so many camels, and God destroyed them with what?
The gospel. He destroys them with the gospel.
He doesn't need to go and fight wars. He doesn't need us to go
and fight wars on his behalf. He destroys them with the gospel.
We're here because he prays for us to be here. That's a good
enough reason, isn't it? I'm here because he prays for me
to be here. I'm only here because he's kept us here and he's keeping
us and preserving us so that no harm will ever befall the
righteous in this world. We'll have all sorts of physical
harms, and we'll have all sorts of emotional harms, and we'll
have lots and lots of trials, but there's no spiritual harm
ever, ever comes to the child of God. Everything is designed
for their good. I don't like the trials. I don't like being hated. I want
to try as hard as I possibly can not to be hated. And I have
found the hatred persistent and I have found the hatred irrational
and I have found the hatred to be exactly what God says. It's
a hatred that is directed at God's people because they reflect
the truth of who God is in themselves in a spiritual way and then that
truth is reflected in the gospel they proclaim and the gospel
they believe and the gospel they congregate under. It's a great
congregation, not because we're great. The great congregation
that is Psalm 40 and other places talk about is a great congregation
because the congregating one is there in the midst of them.
And the angels encamp around us and we don't see any of it. And he walks amongst his people
and he ministers to his people. In the midst of their trials
he ministers to his people in ways that he could never do when
there weren't trials. He gets more glory. So we're
here to be his witnesses. We're here to be his ambassadors.
We're here to love his people, to care for his people, to preach
the gospel to his people. We're here because God has a
people in this world. Yes, the people in this world,
we don't know where they are, we don't know what they look
like, we don't know what their lives are like, and every judgment
that we make of them outside of looking to the Lord Jesus
Christ is a judgment that's wrong. And every time we look down our
nose at anyone else, we're just displaying the fact that we again
need to be kept from evil. Any time we look down our nose
at any other living human being and think that we're better than
them because of something that we have done, we're just reflecting
what the evil ones said to us. And they go, you'll be gods,
you'll know good and evil, you'll be able to make judgments about
people. That's why God saves the worst of sinners, the most
unlikely sinners, in all of that world. The thief on the cross,
the Saul of Tal, you go through the list of the ones saved, and
you look at their lives, you think that person's beyond the
pale, that person's bigger. No, they're not. We're in this
world because God has his people here, and we're in this world
and we've got every reason to be hopeful. They need to have
life from above. They need to be transferred from
the kingdom of darkness into the kingdom of the light of his
dear son. And he can do it. And he's only
promised to do it one way. And that's through the preaching
of the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ and him crucified. It
never happens under any other gospel. He has his people in
this world. He has his ordained means that
through the treasure that's in an earthen vessel, he'll get
all the glory. The earthen vessel gets no glory
whatsoever and doesn't want any at all. And the earthen vessel
is cracked and broken and extraordinarily fragile, but it's the treasure
that counts. And God put the treasure in there.
God knows when the light of that treasure will shine, and God
knows to whom it will shine. We're here to bear the image
of God and to bear the testimony of God in this world. We're here to display the ascension
gifts of the Lord Jesus Christ. You can read about it in Ephesians
chapter 4, but he's ascended on high, but I love what it says
in Psalm 68, which is what Ephesians 4 is drawn for. He says the chariots of God are
20,000, even thousands of angels. The Lord is among them as in
Sinai in the holy place. Thou, Lord Jesus Christ, you
have ascended on high. Thou hast led captivity captive. We were captive to Satan, he's
led us captive to himself. Thou hast received gifts for
men. He earned all the gifts and he's
able to distribute all the gifts for men. Yay, and listen to this,
don't you love this? Yay for the rebellious also,
that includes me. That includes every sinner, doesn't
it? Not every sinner, but it includes sinners, doesn't it?
The rebellious. If you rebelled against God Almighty,
I'd have, and I do, and I'm ashamed of it. But he's got gifts for
the rebellious. That's grace, isn't it? He's
not got gifts for the ones that think themselves worthy. That,
and this is the whole purpose of it, this is why he's left
his people here, that the Lord God might dwell among them. He's going to display the glory
of his victory on the cross in the gathering of his people together
and the display of his glory. And he uses the weakest, most
frail vessels so that he gets all the glory. And we get all
the comfort because we're just sinners. I can come to you as
a frail, fallen, rebellious sinner and tell you there is a great
God. There is a great salvation. Also, we're here because he wants
to display, and he does, no he doesn't have any wants, I'm sorry,
that's a silly thing to say. God has no wants, I'm fulfilled.
But we're here to display his keeping of us. He's kept us here,
he's kept us as a witness to him for this last 20 odd years. And we've been frail and fragile
and assaulted in all sorts of ways, continually. It's almost as if the little
periods of perfect peace have been so few you can hardly remember
any of them. We're here for His glory. And
He displays His keeping power. What keeps you believing the
gospel when countless multitudes who have heard the same gospel
have walked away? What keeps you? Because I, I
hope you don't ever say that. What keeps you? God keeps you. God the Father keeps you. keeps you. What a wonderful display of his
wisdom and his power and his truth that he keeps them. Simon loves quoting Micah chapter
7. Rejoice not against me, O my
enemy, when I fall, I shall arise. When I sit in darkness, when
I sit in darkness, When the darkness is so great that I don't feel
as if I can move, I'm sitting there, and darkness is all, the
Lord shall be a light unto me. He keeps him. When men are cast
down, then thou shalt say, Job 3, 22, 29, there is a lifting
up. You've been cast down, I've been
cast down so many times. I've had more emotional trial
in the last 15 or 20 years than I have in all of the rest of
my life put together. And it's agonizing. But there's
a lifting up. And God gets glory, doesn't he?
Because he can only display the power of his keeping And the Lord has us here in this
world that hates us amongst all of these enemies, amongst Satan
and all of the macinations of Satan, because he comes close
to his people in trials. He's much, much closer to the
downcast and the downtrodden. He makes himself evidently close
to them. When you have nowhere else to
go, when you have no resources of your own whatsoever, And you're
cast on a bed of languishing, and everything around seems dark,
and everything within seems dark. And that's when the Lord shines,
and that light that shines, it might only be a little light
at the time, but it's the most amazing light, because it's the
light that permeates the darkness. Lights come into the world the
darkness doesn't have a clue about, and can't understand it. But the light overcomes the darkness. We're here because God has ordained
that we be here for his glory and for the good of his people. He gets glory for himself in
the church, Ephesians chapter 2. That's where he gets glory
for himself. Look at this. The world looks at this and they
say, where on earth is the glory in all of that? Where is the
glory? Look at that little mob. Maybe if the Lord opened our
eyes, just occasionally, we like Elisha servants would look out
on the hills around us and look beyond our enemies and above
our enemies and see that there are chariots of fire and everything
is in the hands of a God who is infinitely bigger and infinitely
more sovereign and infinitely more wonderful than we can possibly
imagine and infinitely This world is all of this world
that is outside of the children of God. God gathers his people
out of this world. This world lies in the arms of
this evil one. If you're of the world, the world
would love its own. But I've chosen you out of the
world, and the world won't have the foggiest notion of who you
are. They won't have the foggiest notion of who God is. All of
their notions of God and His salvation and who they are are
figments of man's imagination. Man is a prisoner. He's a captive,
isn't he? He's a captive to his own inabilities. He's a captive to his nature.
and he's captive in such a way that the bars of who he is confine
him and control him and the windows are shut and all within his darkness
and he thinks it's light. He can't break free of who he
is. It's a prison cell that our fall
in Adam put us into. We keep talking about the ruined
by the fall. We have to talk about the ruined
by the fall because we're all there according to God in Romans
5, chapter 12. You were there in the garden.
You were there in the garden in your father Adam. And you
said to God Almighty in all of the glory of that garden, you
said to God Almighty, get out of my life. And you said to Satan,
I will have your words that doubt and challenge the character of
God And I'll have the rewards of
Satan. I'll have the rewards of free will. I'll have the rewards
of a works religion. We were there. We were responsible. We had no one else to blame.
And man, ever since, has been an idolater. And the first idolatry
that he conducted, wasn't it, was he ran away as far from God
as he could, and he ran in the darkness of what was in him,
he ran to the darkest place in the garden, and he started being
as busy as he possibly could, stitching together a robe of
his own righteousness out of the fig leaves of the garden.
And who got him? Who got him out of the darkness?
The Lord Jesus Christ came and said, you come here. You're going
to be exposed for what you are, but you come here, and I'll preach
the gospel to you. And I'll show you the gospel
in the lamb sacrificed. are ruined by the fall. That's
the truth of it. Idolatry is the experience of
it. Satan is the source of it. Blindness
is the effect of it. And self-righteousness is the
fruit of it. And that's the work of the evil
one. And the evil one must be defeated
by one much stronger than him. And I love that picture, isn't
it? The evil one keeps his goods in his palace, and he keeps them
at peace, and he's got them being religious, and he's got them
being moral, and he's got them being everything else in this
world, enjoying all the baubles of the world. And the Lord Jesus
Christ comes and he changes the strong man. He says, you're mine,
you're coming out. That's what he does. That's the
preaching of the gospel. He declares himself to be an
absolute sovereign. He came into this world and Satan
tried to defeat him as a baby and he conquered triumphantly.
He was led of the Spirit into the wilderness and he defeated
Satan triumphantly. He went to the cross of Calvary
when Satan and all of his minions of this world were lined up against
him and he defeated them and he triumphed over them in the
cross. And he rose victoriously for a triumph and now he's left
his people here that we can proclaim a triumph. for God, who's triumphed
over all of our enemies, wherever they have been, he's triumphed
over them. And he says to his people, you
come to me. And he says to his people, you
are my sheep, and my sheep are going to hear my voice. They'll
hear it personally, they'll hear it individually, they'll hear
it powerfully. And they'll just come. They'll come and bow and
love and adore. And then they'll keep coming
and they'll keep needing to be kept. And they'll be kept being
made weak and weak and weak and weak. And if you are a child
of God, What a glorious Saviour we can
proclaim. Salvation is in His hands, all
of it, every last little tiny bit of it. Let's pray. Our Heavenly Father, we do thank
You for the keeping of Your people, the keeping of Your people in
the truth of who You are. We praise you, Heavenly Father,
for the revelation that you make of yourself to your people in
the proclamation of the Gospel. When new life comes, new light
comes, and the darkness is dispelled. May you open our eyes, Heavenly
Father, open the eyes of all who are here, that they might
see themselves and see this world. But most of all, see all of that
in light. of who the Lord Jesus Christ
is. We praise you heavenly father
that he rules triumphantly and sovereignly. Use us as your ambassadors
and as your servants for your glory. You've left us here for
a time our father. May we redeem the time and may
you get all the glory for what you do in the hearts of your
people. May we drink precious blood, and eat a broken body,
and may we find it, Heavenly Father, a picture of Christ in
us, washing us clean, robing us in His righteousness, reigning
triumphant and supreme over all our enemies, those without, those
within. We thank you, our Father, for
a great and wondrous salvation in your dear and precious Son.
You alone can make him precious to us, our Father, and we pray
that that would be your mercy upon us here again today. We
pray in Jesus' name. Amen.