as in Philippians, that I may
know him. All right, if you'll turn back
to John chapter 17. John chapter 17. This is the prayer of our Lord. at the very end of what is commonly
called the Last Supper. He has celebrated the Passover
with his disciples, and yet one among that group was not really
his disciple, but was a devil. And so at the right time, the
Lord called him from the herd and sent him away with the words,
whatever you are doing, do quickly. And he went on and he taught
things to the remaining 11 that Judas never got to hear. Why? Well, Judas hadn't believed what
he said up to that point. Why would he believe anything
else? Also this Judas wasn't going
to live long enough to see any of that come to pass. So he sent Judas away and he
spoke to those who were his close, intimate friends in this world. And then he prayed this prayer
in their hearing before he dismissed that gathering. He would pray more that night. He would pray under more pressure
that night there in the Garden of Gethsemane. But here, just before he turns
to begin that awful suffering for sin, he prays this prayer. Last week, we began looking at
this chapter and we noted that given the timing of this prayer
and the group of people that he gathered around him, it is
safe to say that we find within this prayer the true great concerns
of the Lord Jesus Christ. He is with those whom he, even
if he were just a natural man, he'd feel no need to impress
them with a prayer made up of stringing together the kind of
phrases we think are appropriate for prayer. And he is at a point in his natural
life when one would no longer consider trifles. When the time comes, if you're
made aware of it, and know that it's close at hand, when the
time comes for you to die, I guarantee you, you will not be praying
for many of the things you probably pray for now. And I'm not saying
what you pray for now, is inappropriate. The scriptures say, make all
your requests known to God. We are children of the heavenly
Father, and we are free to ask of Him whatever we want. I suppose we should exercise
some restraint according to the grace and wisdom given to us
that we don't fill our prayers with merely fleshly requests,
but he taught us to pray, give us this day our daily bread,
and that's kind of a natural need. So it's okay to pray to
him for natural things, but when you're near the end of your natural
life, natural things don't matter anymore. And so here in this prayer of
our Lord Jesus, we see His heart opened up in a way we might not
have seen it before, not even in his preaching. He makes three major requests. Now, there are more requests
than that, but as I looked over this prayer, I saw that The other
requests were all, at least it looked to me, they were all made
as a means of fulfilling one of these three major requests. We looked at the first one last
week in which he prayed to his father for the success of the
work that he had been given to do. Today, we're going to look
at this section that we just read under the request he made
of his father to protect his people. And then next week, the
Lord willing, we will look at the request in the remaining
portion of this chapter, the request for the full salvation
of all his people. Now, our Lord's request in this
section is summarized in verse 15. My prayer is not that you take
them out of the world, but that you protect them from the evil
one. Now this request has a familiar
ring to it. In Matthew and in Luke, we find recorded what is commonly
called the Lord's Prayer. Our disciples, the Lord's disciples
asked our Lord, teach us to pray. Now that was a good request on
their part. I've prayed it myself. I listen to my prayers and I
think to myself, I need to be taught how to pray. That wasn't
any good. I didn't do that right. And you know, these disciples
of our Lord They had seen the Pharisees pray their big, public,
loud prayers that drew attention to themselves and gave people
the impression that they were particularly holy and pious people. They were probably quite aware
of the weakness of their own prayers. they had seen and heard our Lord
pray, and I'm sure they were thinking to themselves, I want
to be able to pray like that. And so they said, teach us to
pray. And so our Lord gave them that
prayer which probably everyone here could recite if they were
called on to do it. And within that prayer is this
line, deliver us from the evil one. Now, in the King James Version
and the way most people have memorized it, it just says deliver
us from evil. But the way it's written in the
Greek language, it really says deliver us from the evil. And in the Greek language, they often
Well, they'd leave out words that we might normally put in.
But as I've mentioned before, if everything you write down
you have to write down by hand, and every copy of it you have
to copy by hand, you learn to leave out words that aren't necessary.
And so sometimes they would just give the adjective and leave
the noun out. We do that sometimes as well.
One of the films that was famous, I think it was when I was in
about the eighth grade, The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. Well,
strictly it's the good guy, the bad guy, and the ugly guy. But
you don't need the word guy, or person, or whatever. You say
the good, the bad, and the ugly, everybody knows what you're talking
about. And I believe, as most modern translators do, that that's
how we are to take it when our Lord taught us to pray, deliver
us from the evil one. Not a principle of evil, the
person of evil. Deliver us from that one whose desires are always evil. Our Lord said to the Pharisees,
you're father of the devil? He was a murderer from the beginning. He's a liar from the beginning. We take this request of our Lord,
as our translation has put it, protect them from the evil one. In the Lord's hours, He prayed
for us the very same thing He taught us to pray for ourselves. Now we can take some things from this request
that we might not, well I'm sure we know them already, but we
don't keep them in mind. First of all, if he says protect
them from the evil one, that means there's an evil one from
whom we need protection. In our modern age, And as our
nation becomes increasingly secular, increasingly unbelieving, even
in what we would consider that natural condition of faith, I
realize not everybody who says, I believe, does. Not everybody
who says, I'm a Christian, is. But until, I don't know, when exactly would
be the right time. I would say that it began in
earnest with my generation, the baby boomers. The numbers or the percentage
of people in the United States who claimed to believe God and
believe the Bible started going down. And there's barely a majority
now in the United States who say they believe the Bible, and
even among them, the way they believe it doesn't mean much,
because they see fit to change its meaning to suit them. But this evil one is in the world,
And he draws people to lies. He hates the truth. And he is
bent on destroying anyone who believes and promotes the truth. Now, a lot of people think they
know, they understand how the devil became the devil and all
that, actually the scriptures never really do tell us where
the devil, the evil one, came from. I mean, we know whatever
he is, he was made by God, because there's nothing in this creation
that wasn't made by God. We know that the evil one is
not another being like God, just evil instead of good. No. If he were another one like God,
there would be an eternal conflict between God, good God and evil
God, and neither one would ever win because they both have the
same power and all that. No, this was something created.
And seeing that God looked on his creation and saw that everything
was good, we must assume that at one time the devil was good.
You say, well, how did he get bad? I don't know. And I don't
know that it's particular Particularly important that we understand
that people get all caught up that how did evil get in to the
universe? I Don't know but I know that
it did Brother Spurgeon said people that Get all tied up in
the origin of evil, how did evil get in? He said there They're
paying attention to the wrong subject. He said, if you find
a lion in your house, the first question is not how did it get
in, but how can I get him out? Now, once he's out, maybe we
can safely sit on the couch and consider how he got in. First
thing to do is get him out. But there is this evil one. It's
not superstition to believe that there are spiritual forces in
this universe. We can't see them. But they're there. And there is one who seems to
be, to a great degree, the leader of all of them. And he absolutely
despises the Lord Jesus Christ. And because he hates the Son
of God, he hates the rest of the sons of God who have been
made sons by Jesus Christ. And despite the fact that he
should know better, he believes that he can trouble persecute,
tempt some of the people of God to the point that they abandon
Christ. Now, we realize that if a person
is ever brought to faith in the Lord Jesus Christ, it's only
because God gave them faith. I mean, the faith that real believers
exercise is not something they had. It was simply pointed in
the wrong direction and God taught them to point their faith somewhere
else. No, the kind of faith that saves is something that arises
from the new birth. Something that arises from the
living spirit that God creates within everyone he saves. And we know that because that
faith is God-given, God-generated, you can't destroy that. You know, people say, well, do
you think somebody can lose their faith? Oh, I'm sure of it. And I hope they do. But there's
one faith you can't lose. And that is the faith that is
the gift of God. Which though it's given to you
as a gift, it's not your faith in the sense that it arose from
you. And I'm glad of that. Because
we can know of a certainty since it was not generated by us, it's
not kept up by us. And we can know that if we have
that faith, which is the gift of God, should all hell oppose
us, we will not stop believing, because
God will not let that happen. But here's the thing. The only
way that we know that our faith is that faith, which is the gift
of God, is that we don't quit believing. Now we say we have faith and
you know if our trust is in Christ we can be certain that faith
is the gift of God. But if we said that we trust
Christ and we thought that we trust Christ and in the end it
proved out we were or proved that really we weren't that we
had been deceived in our own hearts you know the hearts deceitful
above all things and desperately wicked. If we found out, we wouldn't
be the first ones to find that out. Judas thought he believed
Jesus. Turns out he didn't. And the devil is not convinced
that the work of grace which creates faith is a work that
cannot be overthrown. So what does he do? He comes
after believers. He comes after them to destroy
their faith. He brings what Peter calls trials
of your faith. He says we're not ignorant of
his devices, of his means of doing this. He says, be sober,
be vigilant, for your enemy, the devil, goes about like a
roaring lion, seeking whom he may devour. Thank God he has
never devoured one of God's people. But keep your eyes open. Keep
your eyes open. Because that's one of the ways
he protects us, is by giving us wisdom. But protect them from
the evil one. Now, for whom did Christ make
this request? Well, it's important for us to
note this point, for we can be certain that Christ
will receive whatever he prays for. Now, earlier I said we are
free to make our request known to God. That does not mean we're
going to get everything we request. We often make requests from fleshly
desires. We shouldn't, but we do. We make requests which seem to
be to us, it seems to us that they are good spiritual requests,
But due to the fact that our wisdom is not perfect, we don't
really understand always what would even be good for us in
a spiritual sense. God always answers our prayers
according to his purpose, wisdom, and love. And he will not grant
our requests when we ask for what is bad for us. My mother
used to teach us when we were children and in the Bible club
classes she gave, she would say, God always answers prayer. His
prayer, his answer is always yes or no or later. But people say, well, yes, God
always answers prayer. Yes, he does. And sometimes the
answer is no, I'm not going to give you that. But such an answer has never
been given to the Lord Jesus Christ. He has never made a bold and
open request that the Father did not give him. The Father will give to Jesus
Christ whatever he asks for, For Christ's will and the Father's
will is the same. And Christ's wisdom keeps him
from asking for what is contrary to our good. So the things he
prays for here, they will happen. They are happening, they have
happened. God's people are protected, guarded,
kept from the evil one. But who is it that he has prayed
for? Well, he doesn't pray for everyone. If you look here, verse nine,
I pray for them. I am not praying for the world. Now in our day when the idea of God's universal intention
for good for everybody in the world, I mean that's just, even
though it's never taught in the scriptures, it's almost universally
accepted by anyone who claims to be a believer in the Lord
Jesus Christ. In fact, they will begin their
preaching of the gospel with such statements as, God loves
you. And you can read all the way
through the scriptures, you will never find the apostles ever
address a group of people other than those who have already professed
faith. But when they're out there evangelizing,
as we normally use that word, he never said to anyone, God
loves you. Why? Because he had no authority to
say that. God loves his people, but we
don't know who they are. The Lord here says, I don't pray
for the world. Why wouldn't he pray for the whole world? They
say God loves everybody in the world. Christ died for everybody
in the world. And the Spirit of God's trying
to get everybody in the world to believe. Well, then why wouldn't
Christ pray for everybody in the world? He didn't pray for everyone in
the world. because the Father did not love everyone in the
world. He had not sent the Lord Jesus for everyone in the world. The Lord Jesus was not going
to give himself for everybody in the world, nor was the Holy
Spirit going to try to call to faith everyone in the world.
Every bit of God's blessings. And I don't say this to be harsh. I don't say this to give us a
cause for pride. No, it's the other way around.
This truth ought to make us realize how blessed we are. Because we're
no different by nature than the rest of the world. And He passed
by what certainly appears to us to be most of the world. Just passed them by. and gave us grace. He chose us,
redeemed us, called us, and keeps us. Why? You'll have to ask him
that one. I don't know why. He just did.
He did because it was his will to do so. He chose us not because
he looked down through history and said, well, he's going to
be a fine fella, or he's going to be a believer, so I'll choose
him. No. He just chose us because that's
what He wanted to do. We are recipients of that which
we did not earn in the least. We are recipients of that which
we never qualified ourselves for. We were by nature children
of wrath even as others, and God could have left us that way.
God could have been just in never letting us hear His name or hear
about His Son, let us go through life utterly ignorant, utterly
dead in trespasses and sins, die and go to hell. And there
wouldn't have been a word that anybody could raise against him
for doing that. People think God's got to give
everybody a chance to be saved. Why? He's not under obligation
to give anybody a chance. We all come into this world as
rebels against him. So the fact that you and I sit
here this morning, And when the Savior speaks, we
hear his voice. When we hear himself declare
himself to be Lord of all, we like the sound of that. We agree
when we hear that we are sinners without the ability to remedy
our problem. We agree with it. When he says,
come unto me, all you who are weary, and burdened, and I will
give you rest, we come. When he says, look unto me, all
ye ends of the earth, we look. Why is that? Sovereign grace,
that's why. How blessed we are to be among
those for whom the Lord Jesus prayed. He didn't pray for the
whole world. He prayed for those the Father gave him. He says, again, verse nine, I
pray for them, I'm not praying for the world, but for those
you have given me, for they are yours. Now, this isn't the first time
the Lord Jesus has talked like this. He said, all that the Father
gives to me will come to me. And he that comes to me, I will
in no wise cast out. But he identified those for whom
he came and who would in time come to him. He identifies them
as those who were the possession of the father and the father
gave them to the son. He says, I don't pray for the
whole world. I pray for those you gave me because they were
yours. They are yours. He prayed for
those who heard his word and believed it. It says in verse six, the last
half of it, they were yours, you gave them to me, and they
have obeyed your word. And on a couple other occasions
during this prayer, he refers to them that the truth had been
revealed to them, the word had been given to them, and they
believed it. Now, this word that's translated
obey in our translation, it's translated kept in the King James,
and actually, it's the same word where it says, he prayed, protect
them from the evil one. So how is it that we protect
the word? The Word's been given to us and
we protect it. Well, it means, you know, protect
one way to look at it. It's not really like the Word
needs protection. The Word is powerful. The Word
protects us. But it does carry the sense of
guard and to keep intact. And so it's speaking of not only
those who at any given time claimed to believe Jesus Christ, because
there were many who claimed to believe Christ, but you know,
the more he preached, the more they drifted away. In John chapter six, he preached
what we might call a hard message, and people said, that's a hard
saying. And it says after this, many of his disciples no longer
followed him. And he turned to the 12 and he
said, will you also go away? And they said, where shall we
go? You have the words of eternal
life. What were they doing? They were
guarding that word that was in their heart. And though their
flesh might rise up against it, Though the agents of the evil
one might scowl at them and threaten them, they would not give up
that word. They hung on to it. And every
one of God's people do that. Every one of them. He prayed
for those who were hated by the world. You know, it's only been very
rare that anyone who preached the gospel of Christ was ever
held in honor by the people of the world. Very rare. And in our country,
as we see preachers and musicians becoming very popular, followed by millions. You have
to ask yourself, where's the hatred? He said, the world hated
him. Why? Because I gave them your
word. If you have the word of the Father
within you, the world hates you. Now, that doesn't mean they're
gonna act on that hate. They may not even realize the
hatred they have because maybe they don't even understand what
you believe. But if God gives them enough leash and they know
what you believe, they'll come after you just like the world
came after Christ and came after the disciples and came after
the other followers of the Lord Jesus Christ. We believers in
the United States, we have it so easy, really. So easy. There's some of our brethren
in India who they're just peaceably gathering. And those followers
of the Hindu religion have gone in there and dragged like their
pastors out and beat them to death in the middle of the street.
Now, the only reason you and I aren't experiencing that is
God in grace holds back, holds back those forces of evil from
being able to control the people. But the day may come, the day
may come. He prays that they be protected, be guarded from the evil one. We're not promised that we will
be spared any of the difficulties that unbelievers experience in
this world. He does not pray that we will
not be confronted with the onslaughts of the evil one. He doesn't pray
that we will not face the temptations of this world. He
said, I'm not praying that you take them out of the world. You know, sometimes I imagine
you think and have thought to yourself, you know, when the
Lord said, why did he just get me out of here? Why did he leave
me to struggle? Why did he leave me with these
fleshly desires? Why did he leave me with a tendency to see the world
and to love it and to want to lay hold of it? Why did he leave
me like that? Well, one reason is the Lord didn't pray any different. He didn't say take them out of
the world. Some religious people think the best way to serve God
is, you know, since the world is so tempting, well, let's go
build us a building over here and we'll cloister ourselves
away from the world. They are the world. And they
take the world with them when they get into their little buildings
with each one having a room and, you know, and make themselves
suffer and all that thinking by that, somehow or another,
they're gonna be able to protect themselves from the evil one. No, God leaves us here, we glorify
him even in our struggle. He doesn't protect us, as it
were, from the principle of evil, but he does guard us from that
one. So that that one is not able
to touch us in any way other than what he permits, and he
will never allow that one to touch us. any more than He gives
us grace to endure. I thought it was interesting
when I, the word here for evil is not the normal word or the
generic word for evil. It comes from a word that means
toil, trouble, and pain. So the evil one is the one who
causes toil, trouble, and pain. And my eye caught that first
word, toil, work. The devil's a legalist. And here's
how he'll come to you. He might tempt you with some
sinful desire and get you to fall to it. But it wasn't, his
original temptation wasn't simply for the purpose of making you
sin. Because let's face it, we can sin without his help. We
don't need the devil to sin. The reason he desires for us
to sin is that he can turn right around and say, ah. As a psalmist
would put it, ah-ha, ah-ha, look at you, you've been caught. You
say you're a child of God, look what you did. Would a child of
God do a thing like that? No doubt God's mad at you now
for what you did. I mean, yesterday you were doing
okay, but look at you now. How many times have you fallen
to this sin? Don't you think that somebody that's been saved,
as long as you claim to have been saved, would have overcome
that sin by now? Here's what, let me tell you
what to do. And he lays a burden of toil. He says, you do this. and you'll be back in God's good
graces. Who was it that opposed our Lord
Jesus most in the days of his flesh? It was the Pharisees,
those legalists, those who tied burdens to people and wouldn't
lift a finger to help them. And what did he call them? You
are of your father the devil. And you know what God does? I
mean, you may fall to all kinds of sin. You may struggle with
horrible doubts. But when the devil whispers in
your ear, you clean up your act and everything will be okay again. Oh, you might listen a minute,
but then the Lord will intervene. No. Yeah, you ought to clean
up your act. but not so that things will be
good again, because they're already still good. I'm already reconciled to you,
says God. Don't listen to that liar. Don't fall for his deception,
that you have sinned in such a way that the favor I once had
towards you has been pulled away, never. My favor, my love, my
grace, it's eternal. It was upon you before the world
began. It was upon you before you drew a breath. It was on
you the whole time you were living in darkness and sin and unbelief.
It was there with you when you first believed. It's been there
with you all along. And now that you are faced down
in the despair of your own weakness and failure in sin, don't you
believe that liar. My grace is still with you. He protects us from falling to
the accusations of the evil one who is called the accuser of
the brethren. We might wish that God would
take away our tendency to sin. We might wonder why He doesn't. But while we wonder about that
and scratch our heads, let's keep this in mind. He will never
allow the devil to take your sin and turn it to cause you to once
again bind yourself in a yoke of bondage. In fact, much as
the devil hates it, it is generally in the face of our most grievous
sins. that we are most likely to seek
His face and His grace again. We don't take our failures to
be evidence that we are not the people of God. We take them as
evidence of how much we need Him and His grace. How does he protect us? Verse
17. Sanctify them by the truth. Your word is truth. Once again,
we see by the method that he uses to protect, he shows us what the real danger
is, that we would ever abandon the truth, that we'd ever turn
from pure grace and mercy Or as Paul calls it, fall from grace. How do you fall from grace? By
turning to legalism. And so the Lord prays to the
Father, Father of these people, you've chosen them. Shortly I
will go and die as their substitute. And here's how to protect them.
You give them the truth in their hearts. And by that, you set
them apart. That's what the word sanctify
means. And he sets us apart from the world by encircling us with
his truth. His truth. Do you know why it's
so important that we hear the truth over and over and over
again? Because that's what's protecting
us from the evil one. That's what keeps us from falling
to his lies. The truth. The scriptures say buy the truth
and do not sell it. Not for anything. Hear it. Hear it as often as you can.
Meditate on it. Make it to be what you insist
that you have even at the cost of everything else. For without
the truth, people perish. Thank God He's given us His truth. And if we've been given His truth,
we will continue to seek it. And it will protect us. And though,
in kind of a literal sense, all hell breaks loose against us,
It will never convince us to depart the truth, because God
uses that very truth to protect us. Boy, what a God we have. What a Savior we have. So wise,
so kind, so gracious, so powerful. We're saved. all of our weaknesses,
which we know pretty well, don't we? They won't cause us to fall. Because he who is of limitless
power, who is the truth in person, stands as our guard. And the
evil one, no matter how clever, no matter how powerful he is,
he'll never be able to get us from behind the protection of
the Lord. Blessed be his name. Heavenly
Father, thank you for this word. Thank you, Lord Jesus, that you
prayed like this. We're so foolish, we forget to
pray for protection, but you didn't. And we know that the
Father heard your prayer, and that's why we're here now. If
he hadn't heard your prayer, Lord, if he hadn't answered yes,
we'd have drifted off by now. We'd have believed the lie. which you've protected us with
the truth. Continue to do so, our Lord. In the name of Jesus
we pray, amen.