All right, if you would return
to John 17. John chapter 17. Now this is
the third and last in a series of messages that have the title,
The Lord's Great Concerns. Many have called this prayer Our Lord's great high priestly
prayer. He stands there with his closest
friends at that time. The 11 remaining disciples after
Judas has been sent away. And he stands there as a priest
between them and God. And he prays. And He is very near the end of
His natural life. And at that time, people do not
concern themselves with trifles. Our Lord was looking ahead, knowing
that within a few hours, our sins would be laid on Him, that
He'd bear our sins in His body on the tree, He would be made,
as Paul said, He would be made a curse for us. He would redeem
us from the curse of the law. And of course, all this comes
down to Him being forsaken by His God and bearing in Himself
all that a holy and righteous God can do in response to sin
against Him. So we're pretty sure whatever
the Lord prayed for here was the things that were very important
to him. And he mentions three things.
Now, as I have described them, you may not even find these words
in his prayer. But I've summarized, actually
there's more than three requests, but they all gather around these
three things that he addresses. Number one, he prays for the
success of the work that he was about to do. And that request
is revealed when he says, Father, glorify me with the glory I had
with you before the world began. We know that our Lord was glorious
as the true and living God. And we know that rather than
clinging to the rights and privileges of being God, he made himself
of no reputation and took on the form of a servant. That's
what Philippians 2 tells us. And so now he prays, Lord, God,
glorify me with that glory that I left behind. And that glory
is tied up in the salvation of his people,
the success of the work that he was about to do. Secondly,
he prayed for the protection of his people, in particular,
their protection from the evil one. He did not say, Father,
don't let them suffer trial. He didn't say, make their life
easy. He said, protect them from the
evil one. The devil is God's agent in this
world to accomplish several things according to his will, and one
of them is to pester us. Not only by doing what he can,
and I don't know how the devil works, that's not revealed, He has the power
if the Lord is willing to allow him to exercise it. He can make
people sick. He can cause disaster. He can
do all these things. But those are not what he's aiming
for. When he sends such trials, the
purpose is to remove our faith from Christ. That's what he was doing with
Job. He said, you let me loose on him, and Job will curse you
to your face. The Lord said, okay, see what
you can do. Now the Lord did not protect
Job from the devil's ability to make him miserable. He protected
Job from falling. He protected Job from abandoning
his faith in God. He said, though he slay me, yet
will I trust him. Now Job would not have done that
on his own. God protected him, did not let the devil accomplish
his purpose. Instead, saw to it that God's
purpose in all of this was accomplished. And then thirdly, his prayer
is for the full salvation of all those whom the Father had
given him. And that's what we're going to
focus on this morning, the full salvation of all whom the Father
had given him. Now what a man hopes for, what
he looks for, you know everybody's got an innate
sense that this life is not all there is to our existence. Everybody
seems to understand without you telling them, it's appointed
unto man once to dine, after that the judgment. And that's
what gives rise to the religions of the world. They might not
have the right God. They might not understand properly
what the standard will be when judgment comes. But they do know
that there is someone to answer to. And what they hope is, what all
men hope is, that that judgment will go well. and they will experience
a blessed eternal condition. Now, when men describe what they
think that blessed eternal condition is like, they reveal to you what's
in their heart. You know, shortly after 9-11,
and believe it or not, here in a few weeks, that'll be 20 years
ago, But shortly after 9-11, a lot
of people began to investigate the Muslim religion. And it was
said that for at least some men in that religion, going to heaven
meant getting 72 virgins as a harem. And they were willing to strap
bombs to themselves and blow themselves up so they could get
to heaven and get their 72 virgins. Well, it's obvious what's on
their heart. That's how they define heaven. Now, I say that. I heard that. I don't even know if it's true.
I haven't spent any time trying to find out what Muslims believe.
It's kind of like once you learn that two and two equals four,
you don't go looking at other people's answers. Once you got
the truth, there's no use messing with what others believe. But
if that's true, if that's what they really thought, it shows
you where their heart and mind is. It's on the things of the
faith. But the hope of many Christians
is not much better than that. For many Christians, I would
even say most Christians, heaven is a place of riches. They misunderstand John's vision
at the end of Revelation, thinking it's a description of heaven.
When it's not, it's a symbolic description of his church. But they said, oh, I can't wait
to walk on those pearly streets. Walk through the, I mean, golden
streets. Walk through the pearly gates on the golden streets and
get my big colonnaded mansion that Jesus went to prepare for
me. Is that heaven to you? Is that as high as your aspirations
go? To achieve the kind of financial
success and excess that you haven't been able to get while here on
earth? Well, if that's what you want,
if that's really what lies at the bottom of your greatest desires,
I seriously doubt that you know God, but you know, there's so
much flesh in the people of God, who knows what goes on in their
minds, but if that's what you think you're gonna get when you
get to heaven, that's what you're looking for, heaven's gonna be
a big disappointment to you. The Lord defined for us the fullness
of salvation. and the great blessedness that
awaits us with these words. He says in verse 24, Father,
I want those you have given me to be with me where I am and
to see my glory, the glory you have given me because you loved
me before the creation of the world. Now, if that's not what you want,
heaven's gonna be a big disappointment to you. To be with him and behold his
glory. You know, ever since the devil whispered his temptation
Eve, you shall be as God's. We have sought our own glory. And even we who believe still
carry that principle within our flesh, and we do everything we can to make people think we're something
special. whether it be some natural talent
we have. In religion, people try to glorify
themselves by excessive, this is gonna sound funny, but excessive
morality, if that's the right way to put it. They can't begin
to keep God's law, so they just make up a bunch of other rules,
and rules that you can see them keeping. And they do that. As the Lord said, they do what
they do to be seen of men, which in essence means I want to glorify
myself in the presence of men. I want them to think I'm somebody. It's in all of us. We were born
with it. But the Lord Jesus Christ, he
had a right to such desires. He had a right to seek his own
glory because he had a glory that was rightfully his, which
he had lovingly surrendered for a time to accomplish something,
and he wants it back. He didn't want to stay in that
condition forever. And I'll tell you this, when
we are glorified in His presence, because the Bible says when we
see Him as He is, that is in His glorified state, we'll be
like Him. And when we experience that glory,
I'll guarantee you, we will not be willing to give it up. Whatever
that glory consists of, and I'm not, I think it's such a glory
as we cannot even think of. We could maybe make some words
to kind of describe it, but once we've described it, we really
don't even know what it is we've described. What would it be like
to be glorious like the Son of God? What is it like to be what
God Created us to be. Sinless. Wise. Holy. Consumed with a passionate love
for the God of our creation and the God of our redemption. I don't know what that's like
to the full. Nobody here does. But our Lord
Jesus Christ knew what it meant, and he wanted his glory back,
and he wanted us to see it, to behold it. To the believer, heaven is being
with Christ and being made like Christ. Paul wrote, for I desire to depart
and be with Christ. You'll notice he did not say,
I desire to depart and go to heaven. He said, I desire to depart and
be with Christ. And you know what? I bet you
if the Lord had been right there, he'd have said, I desire to stay
right here and be with Christ. That's what he would have said. Where he was was not the issue. It was who He was with that was
the issue. It is written that our Lord was
to be named Jesus, for He would save His people from their sin. Well, what did our sin do to
us? It alienated us from God and got us kicked out of paradise. What does salvation from sin
do? It reconciles us to God, reunites us to Him, and restores
us to paradise. Now the opening chapters of Genesis
don't give us a lot of detail about what life was like in the
Garden of Eden, but in the account of the temptation in Genesis
3, It spoke of the voice of the Lord God walking in the cool
of the evening, walking in the garden. So the impression I get
from that is that every day, God, God the Word, God the Son,
appeared there in Eden, and He appeared in glory as the voice
or Word of God. And they were with Him. He was with them. They communed
with one another. They expressed their love for
one another. And then they sinned. And it
ruined all of that. Jesus Christ came. And His work
restores that for His people. In fact, it restores it to something
even better. You say, how could that be? I
remember my first year of Bible school, somebody made this statement,
and I still believe it, even though I don't believe a whole
lot of what they taught me in that year, but I still believe
this one. We gain far more in Christ than we ever lost in Adam.
Why? Well, if nothing else, it's this.
What Adam had could be lost. And we know that because he lost
it. What Christ gives cannot be lost. You hear that? Cannot be lost. What a wonderful thing we have
to look for. The first thing to note here
is that this is what our Lord wants. Here He is, I mean, He's praying
serious now. I'm not saying He didn't before,
but our Lord was a human being like you and me, and He was affected
emotionally by the things that went on around Him and what lay
before Him. And as he's about to undertake
the most serious part of the work that he was sent to do,
here's what he wants to pray for. Father, I would that those
you gave me would be with me where I am that they may behold
my glory. Now, we should be astonished that
the Lord wants anything to do with us at all. But here we have it in black
and white, or red and white if you've got a red letter edition. That our presence with him is
one of his chief desires. That we would want to be with
him is perfectly understandable. That he would want us to be with
him is amazing. We might go out among the poor
and the uncultured, the filthy and diseased, those who for whatever
reason we count them to be our inferiors. We may go among them
for a little while so that we can do something for them and
gain some praise for ourselves that we deigned to lower ourselves
to be among them and try to make their condition better. But it's not likely we're going
to go out there among them. and invite them to come home
with us. Now understand, I'm not making
little of what people do out of honest human compassion, like
to help the homeless and this kind of thing. I'm glad that
that's being done. But how many of them do you see
go out to among the homeless and say to them, I've been watching
you driven by here, as you parked underneath this overpass, living
in a cardboard box. And I went home, I built an addition
on my house. And I furnished it. It's got
every good thing. Got a good bed. Good clothes
in the closet. There's good food three times
a day. Now come on, let's go home. Have you ever heard of anybody
doing that? That's what our Lord did. He
came here among us and He said to us, no, we thought
we were something else. You know, the homeless among
themselves have their hierarchy. I may be homeless, but I wasn't
like that homeless drug addict over there. I may be homeless, but it wasn't
my fault that I'm homeless. That guy over there, he's just
a bum. They've got their hierarchy. They've got their glory. They've
got their stuff. And you and I would consider
most of what they had to be useless junk. But don't you dare touch
it. Don't you try to take it away.
Don't even try to replace it with something better. And that's
how we are spiritually speaking. We live in this world. We come
into this world and we think we've got something. And we brag
about it. We say, well, yeah, I've sinned,
but I've never done that like that guy over there. I'm better
than that. And we collect all our religious
baubles. We gather together some worn
out, tattered, clothes of righteousness and put them on and then go like
this and think we're something else and yet there's holes in
the clothes and they're dirty and they stink. And we think
we're something. And Jesus Christ comes to us
in our filth, which we think is cleanliness, in our sinfulness,
which we think is righteousness, In our poverty, which we have
mistaken for riches. And he says, I've prepared a
place for you in my father's house. And it has everything in it that
a human being could ever want. And more than he could even imagine. I prepared it for you. I did not build a great big apartment
building and just put a sign on the front that says y'all
come. I have built many of these places in my father's house and
every one of them has a name on it and there's one with your
name on it. Now come on, let's go home. What a savior. You think on that
a minute. If you want to love the Savior,
if you want to experience that love, all you need do is see
what love He showed to us, that it's such great expense to Himself. He drew us to Him, not as those
who were desirable, not as those who had something to give Him
back, He came to us in all of our wretchedness, and he said,
You're mine. I built a place for you. You're
coming with me. And we said, No. I like it here. Here in this
little camp of homeless people, I'm top dog. I don't have me a Wal-Mart buggy. I got one from One of the nicer
stores in town. And my rags don't have as many
holes in them as the other people. No, I'm staying right here. And
you could just see the Lord say, Father, you heard my prayer long
ago. And this is one you gave to me.
And I said, I want him to be with me where I am. All right,
and the Father sends the Spirit, changes the heart of us spiritually
homeless people. And all at once we see the glory
of Him as much as we're able to see it in this present situation.
And we see the glory of what He has prepared for us, and we
throw off these wretched rags of our own righteousness. We
suddenly count everything we've had up to that point to be nothing
but trash, to be hauled out, to be gotten rid of, not to be
mourned over. And we follow Him. When you consider the agonizing
work that He did to save us, that it was for the express purpose
of preparing a place for us, so that He could come again and
receive us unto Himself. Now, the former religion I was
raised in would say, well, he did all of that, you know. So
each one of us would have an opportunity to come to him if
we want, you know. So he just went back to heaven
and he's sitting there and he's kind of pleading, you know, and
he sends out preachers to plead and invite and everything else.
Well, he hopes somebody will come, you know, because he's
built a lot of rooms. There's a lot of places for them. Hope
we can get them filled up. Got one of the empty rooms in
heaven, you know. He came here because before the
foundation of the world, his father gave him a people. And
he said, son, these people are going to be lost to me. And I'm
going to send you to go get them and bring them back. Now, not all of them belong to
the father. Not all people who have ever
lived belong to the father. Therefore, not all of them have
been given to the sun. But those that were given to
the sun, here's his prayer for them. I want them to be with me where
I am. So that they can behold my glory. In an order for that to happen,
when I Lord prayed this prayer, I want you to think of this when
he prayed this prayer. He knew what it was going to
take to make that happen. If He was going to have them
be with Him and behold His glory, that means that He was going
to have to degrade Himself even farther than He already had.
He was going to have to accept upon Himself all our guilt. He was going to have to take
our place as the condemned. He was going to have to own our
sins as His sins and present Himself before the Father clothed
in our unrighteousness and bear in Himself the wrath
of an Almighty God. And all that so that those that have been
given to Him could be with Him. as though our Lord counted us
being with him something to pay a lot for. You can have the other saviors
in this world. You can have those who merely
offer a home in heaven. You can have those who did a
little bit, but not everything necessary for their salvation,
you can have them give me this Savior who was willing to spend
Himself utterly for what He considered the privilege of me being with
Him. He's got my heart. And then seeing that our Lord
desired this and asked His Father for it, we can be certain it's
going to happen. He already said that He's not
lost any of those that the Father had given Him. And we know that
in the process of His life, death, and resurrection, He did not
lose any that the Father had entrusted to His care. But now
He calls upon His Father to ensure that not one who was given to
Him in the everlasting covenant of grace and for whom He would
offer Himself as a substitute, not one of them would be left
behind, but that every one of them would at some appointed
time be with Him and see Him in the full blaze of His glory.
and not die. Moses said, show me your glory.
And the Lord said, no, no man can see my face and live. Oh,
someday we will, brother. Someday we will. We'll see his
face and live. We'll behold his glory and not
be consumed with it. All of us who have been born
again by the Spirit of God, we pray like this one way or another. We do. If you've been born of
God, you do want to be with Christ and you want to behold His glory.
If you don't want to be with Christ, if you don't want to
behold His glory, it's because you're still dead in trespasses
and sins. That's just the way it is. And so we pray for it, but is
it not wonderful to consider this? That our Lord Jesus prayed
for it. I prayed for a lot of things
I didn't get. In fact, it seems like most of what I pray for
I don't get. And I give thanks for God that he doesn't give
it to me. because that means my prayer wasn't a good idea.
Wasn't a sinful prayer, just wasn't, not necessarily a sinful
prayer, sinful request. It's just that in the foolishness
of human wisdom, we ask for the wrong things. And our Lord, who
is infinitely wise, answers our foolish prayers by giving us
what is good for us instead of what we just wanted. So if I was the only one praying
for me, or if all the saints on earth who have ever been or
ever shall be prayed this in my behalf, Father, I would that
Joe would be with Christ and behold His glory. It would not
mean one millionth of what it means to me that our Lord said,
Father, I want Him to be with me and behold my glory. Because I know that the Lord
Jesus lacks no favor with the Father. I know that the Lord
Jesus lacks no wisdom in his requests. And I know that the
Lord Jesus lacks no power to bring it about. And seeing that this is the fullness
of salvation, the greatest of all the blessings that's been
given to us in the gospel, seeing that it's the very purpose for
which man was created, to be with God, behold His glory, to
share in His glory, it is most certain that those who were given
to Christ will be made to desire the very thing which Christ prayed
for. Now there are plenty of descriptions
or expressions of this desire to be found in scriptures. We
already mentioned what Paul said. I desire to depart and be with
Christ. He said, I'm really kind of caught
in the middle here. I don't know what to decide.
Not as though his decision was going to make it happen, but
he said, should I stay here, and that would be good for you,
and I could do more fruitful labor, or should I depart and
be with Christ, which is a whole lot better than being here. Therefore, that's one reason
we don't take action on that. We leave that to God to figure
out What's the amount of time we ought to be here and when
should we depart to be with Christ? That's his business, not ours.
But that was his desire. The psalmist said this, this
one thing I ask, this one thing. Didn't mean he never asked for
anything else. But if all of his requests had to be distilled
into one request, it's this. This one thing I ask, that I
may dwell in the house of the Lord forever and gaze upon His
beauty, His glory. Oh, don't you want that? I know we get covered up with
the baubles, bangles, and beads of this world. They attract our
attention. I know that we've got to put
some attention to it. We're required to work. There's
nothing wrong with a desire for nice things. Boy, we can get
consumed by them, can't we? You know, a believer, sometimes
he's kind of like an onion. You got to peel off a lot of
layers before you get down to where his heart is and find out
where his deepest desires are. And here's the deepest desire
for a child of God, to be with Christ, to be like Christ, to
behold his glory, to be perfect in Christ. I think if I was able to see
the Lord's glory and survive it, And as John said, when we
see him as he is, we'll be like him, okay? So to be made in the
same image as him. I think if God did that for me,
I really wouldn't be too interested in a mansion, a colonnaded mansion
like people think of. I think that the street of gold
wouldn't appeal to me. I mean, I'm not saying there's
anything wrong with it, just who'd care? A few months ago, my son Nathan
came across a hymn that he liked. We've used it as a hymn of the
day. Actually, that's why. Well, we were talking about that
hymn, and that's why it ended up being our hymn of the day
that week. But he wrote a tune to go with it and sent it to
me. And I looked at it, at the tune,
and it inspired different thoughts than that other hymn did. And
so I wrote some different words to go with that tune. and see
if these words don't find a home in your heart. My
heart's great longing in these days of my sojourn on earth is
soon to see my Savior's face and praise his matchless worth. His loving eyes with mercy filled,
my soul now longs to see They looked on me and looking still,
no fault in me perceive. By such a gracious Lord to be
forever loved and blessed, I cannot help but press the day when I
shall see his face. He's coming back, his promise
says, to claim his cherished bride. For her, he has prepared
a place in heaven by his side. That day shall open wide the
skies, the king in glory come. Graves shall be opened, the dead
shall rise, and he shall take us home. If I live till you come at last,
or someday lie in tomb, this one thing most of all I ask that
I may dwell with you. Is there anything else you want
more than that? But you know we don't have to
wait for death or the return of the Lord to get some taste
of this. Our Lord is with us at all times. He never leaves us or forsakes
us. But He has made a special promise
concerning the assembly of His people. Where two or three are
gathered together in my name, there I am. You hear that? There I am. There He is in a
way He's not in other places, under other conditions. There
I am in the midst of them. He didn't say where somebody listens to sermons, I'm there. He said wherever my
people meet, I'm there. I'm there. And is it not true that in the
assembly, such as we gathered here this morning, that what we came here to do
was to, as much as possible, behold His glory? That should be our main desire
when we come here. I want to see more of His glory
than I've seen before. I want Him to appear to me as
a more glorious God and Savior than I've known Him up to this
point. So here we have a promise of Christ being with us when
we meet in His name. And we have this opportunity
to behold His glory in a way that we're probably not able
to do. when we're not gathered like this. So doesn't it seem reasonable
that if we really long for the day to see Him face to face,
behold His glory, that if that's really what burned in our deepest
heart, that we would get to that as close as possible until that
day. You know, I think that we miss
the true significance of the gathering of God's people. You
know, we were all raised that it was an obligation you perform.
You know, it's Sunday, I gotta go to church today. Really? Gotta go to church? Kinda like, it's five, I guess
I gotta go eat some food. And one said, you can call me
anything, but don't call me late for supper. Here this morning, right now
it's just a little bit after 1130, central time, 1616 18th
Street, Rock Valley, Iowa. Christ is here. He is here in
a way he wasn't here yesterday or the day before. We've met
in His name. He's here. You say, well, I don't
see Him. No, you don't. But He's here. Faith is to take
as fact that which cannot be seen. So He's here. He is revealing
His glory here at this moment in a way that He doesn't under
other situations. Why would we want to miss that?
Why would we count it an interruption? in our lives to take the time,
get up in the morning, put ourselves together, gather up the kids
if we still got them at home or whatever, get in the car,
drive however far it is, and sit down and be with Christ and behold His glory as much
as we can do here. I know that things come up that
prevent us, but I also know our flesh, and
it will find any excuse it can and talk us into thinking it's
a good enough one. There are some whose health prevents
them from coming. There are some whose age prevents
them from coming. There are those who live so far
away, just can't be done. And they can't move anywhere
where there's an assembly of God's people. I'm glad that for people like
that, there are other ways that they can gather. For many years, you know, live
streaming was available. Other churches that we closely
associate with were doing that. But I thought, no, not going
to do that. Because if I do, some people
are going to start substituting that for showing up. But then
I got a request from what one of our, what I call, I call them
remote members. We have some of those. We have
people that are members of our church that we never see. Because
they live hundreds of miles away. No, they can't get up Sunday
morning and drive here. And believe it or not, they can't
find anywhere within driving distance where people worship
God. They've got a lot of religion,
don't have any gospel. One of them asked me, did you
ever consider live streaming? Well, right then I considered
it and said, okay, we're going to start doing it. And that's why
we started doing it. And I was surprised and I found
it gratifying that it really didn't have any impact on the
attendance here until COVID came. I realized COVID kept a lot of
people away. It's probably the wise thing
to do. But you get used to that, don't you? Let me ask you a question. Did
you ever put out the effort together with the people of God.
And after it was over, say, that wasn't worth it. Has that ever happened? I wish
I hadn't done that. No. You may have had all kinds of
resistance. You got up, and I'll tell you,
for you that are younger, This is going to happen eventually.
You get up and it's not so easy to move around as it once was. It's tough getting out. And there's
all that business of cleaning up, you know. Don't come to my
house during the week without giving me a call first. You might
see something that you'll never get out of your mind. And I take a shower if I haven't
had one recently. Put on new clothes and comb my
hair and I've even got some hairspray back in there so it doesn't fly
around if I remember to use it. I give you the best thing to
look at that I can do. Takes some effort. But I've never come here and
thought I wish I hadn't wasted the time. I could have got just
as much out of staying home and watching it on the internet.
They say, why is that? I don't know. I mean, I've got
my theories about it, but that's all they are. All I know is,
our Lord said, where two or three of my people meet, I'm there.
I'm there. The apostle wrote, do not forsake
the assembling of yourselves. Now, for those who can't, I believe
the Lord will certainly bless them with special provisions
of grace and maybe a sense of His presence. Those who can't,
yet they get on their computer and they get as close to showing
up here as they can. Well, the Lord is not going to
withhold His blessing from them because they weren't here. He
didn't make a way for them to be here. But for those who can be here,
who know His promise of His presence among the assembled saints, and
they could come, but for one reason or another don't, do you think the Lord is just
going to continue to bless them the same way He blesses the assembly
according to His promise? Well, my friends, If you haven't come back and
you're watching this morning, and I don't, you know me, I'm
not one of these rebuking kind of guys. I don't want to make
you feel bad. I don't want to make you feel guilty. I'm not
speaking a law here. Here's what I'm saying, come
home. Come here when we gather. If there's any way for you to
get here, get here. Because Christ will be here.
And you don't want to miss that. His glory is going to be revealed
here. You don't want to miss that. You'll be among people like-minded. with you. Isn't it kind of tough
out there? I mean, we spend the whole week
with people that don't agree with us about all kinds of things, but
mostly about this gospel. Don't you like to get together
with people that you agree, you rejoice in the same things? That's
why, and I certainly can't take time to lay it all out, but this
glory that he has, which shall also be given to us." It's connected
with us being united of one mind and one heart. Oh, people, here
we are. A mess full of troubles, but
we meet like this, and the King of heaven shows up. And we meet like this, and for
all our natural disagreements and our fleshly irritations,
we are among those who have hearts that beat like ours. And we gain
benefit through them, and they gain benefit through us. Do you
really want to miss that? Father, I would that those that
you have given me would be with me where I am, that they may
behold my glory. Do you want that? Well, if that's
what you really want, eventually you'll get it to the full. Until
then, do all you can to get what provision of that you can in
this world. Well, the name of the Lord be
blessed.