John chapter 17. I'm going to specifically go
through the first five verses again, like we did last week,
and I'm going to approach them landing on verse five. So let's
read together the first five verses. When Jesus had spoken these words,
he lifted his eyes to heaven and said, Father, the hour has
come. Glorify your Son that the Son
may glorify you, that you have given, since you have given him
authority over all flesh, to give eternal life to all whom
you have given him. And this is eternal life, that
they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you
have sent. I glorified you on earth, having
accomplished the work that you gave me to do. And now, Father,
glorify me in your own presence with the glory that I had before
the world existed." I've entitled today's message, The Splendor
of God in Christ. I'm almost thinking Dr. Queller
is selecting songs based on the text that's coming up. They're
just so rich in Christology, so rich in the divine glory of
the Lord, and so rich in the promises of eternal life. And
I think it's because the songs we sing are to that end. And
speaking of that end, what is it that we come to do? Someone
asked this question a couple of days ago. What is the real
purpose of preaching? How is it that I should leave
a church service at the end of the Lord's day? I thought about
that for just a very quick moment. I'm going to answer it more in
detail tonight at Theology on Call, but specifically it is
to give praise and glory to God. It is to His glory that we assemble. It is to His praise that we assemble.
It is to the praise of His glorious grace that we assemble. That
is why the assembly can only be the saints. That's why there
is no place in all of the New Testament where there is a compulsory
gathering of mixed peoples in the context of believers and
unbelievers. The scripture makes no sense
to someone who has not been converted. The scripture has no application
to those who are not born of God. Yet for we who are indeed
found in Christ and He in us, we are His and therefore we understand
and we hear His voice, and we worship because of His truth.
Now, the argument's been made before that a good church service,
a good sermon, ought to convict people of sin. It should not. It should show us the mercy of
God concerning our sin, for we are believers who gather here.
And even though there may be unbelievers in our midst, it
is because they, in their own hearts and minds, affirm to believe
that if they are the elect of God, that through the teaching
to the church, to the elect, to the saints, God will then
cause them to see. So that's why we're here today.
And whether it be an Old Testament narrative, whether it be a psalm,
whether it be a prophetic word or a gospel account like this,
or some didactic teaching of Paul to the church who are in
sin or to the church who are doing well. whether it be some
doctrinal thing or theological principle that we see or a behavior
that needs to change, in it all, in its context, the point of
it all is that God is glorified in it and that the gospel of
free and sovereign grace is indeed expelled out of the mouths of
those who teach and expounded upon from the pages of the written
word into the hearts of His people who praise Him from the inner
depths of their soul. I have had a very difficult time
over the last month having the mind to study. I don't know what's
wrong, but I know what's right. And that is that the Lord and
His sovereignty through His word will never fail us. and where
I want to go and what I want to see at times, I think the
Lord reserves me in that fogginess so that I do not put my personality
and that I do not put my desire to teach you certain theological
things that aren't necessary in the context of the scripture
where we are and keeps you from bogging your brain down, which
prevents you from worshiping if your brain is bogged down,
which would prevent you from worshiping. Because when our
brain is bogged down in theological systems, we cannot worship Christ,
for we can only worship in spirit, in Jesus, the truth. No, I hate
to say it, beloved, as you hear those things, we are not taught
to worship in truth that we study, we are taught to worship in truth
that is who is Christ. And today, there are so many
things. I could go for a couple of more
sermons out of this first five verses and teach some things,
and I'm going to touch on some of them today, but I want to
do it in such a way, and this has been my prayer, that I can
teach you deep doctrine contextually. That I can show you the beauty
of the glory and the splendor of our King through the words
of our King. What greater way to see? than
to be shown by the very one who reveals it all. So that is my
heart for you today. That you could worship with pure
hearts and minds. That when we sing our closing
hymns, that they would come from a different standpoint of, oh,
I love that song, or I like those words, or that music sounds good.
It would be because this is the Christ who saved me. This is
my Messiah. This is my Redeemer and I know
Him and I know that He lives. Jesus had spoken these words
as we saw last week. He prays to the Father. He comes
to the end of His dialogue with His beloved eleven because the
deceiver, the Judas Iscariot, now that's a proper noun, that's
an adjective, it's all sorts of things as we saw months before,
but Judas has been sent out to do that which he was to do. And Jesus has spoken to his disciples
and then he culminates this and his entire ministry praying to
the Father. I want to remind you, beloved,
that this is the attitude that we must also have in our flesh.
We must pray. Not because our prayers twist
God or change God or get God to do something for us that He
would not otherwise do. But when we pray according to
the will of God, it is now the Spirit of God giving us the heart
and the mind to trust in the will of God. Because we know
who He is. We know what He's promised. We
know how He has decreed. And there are clear things, understanding
and knowing the will of God, that are certain in Scripture. And we are to pray to Him. So
that when we pray in faith, whatever happens that moment, whatever
happens the next day, whatever happens in that circumstance,
whatever happens a week from now, or a year from now, or ten
years from now, whether good, bad, or indifferent, or no matter
how hard it is for us to face, we know that it is in the will
of God, therefore it is a good and precious, awesome gift to
us. The damnable caricatures of Christ
and the Lord in our culture assume that all good things in our flesh
come from the good God of heaven, and they do come by His hand
and His will. But beloved, so do the calamities. And for His beloved children,
whom Christ has died and bought with His blood, we will suffer
more than the rest of the world. We will. So if we are looking
for the will of God in a way of feeling that release, like,
wow, life is just going so well, you will search like a fool,
looking for that one piece of sand that fell out of the airplane
over some sea, thinking that it's still yours to find. But if we seek that which is
immeasurably infinite and glorious, which is the face of Christ,
which is the knowledge of God, we will know Him more. There are six things that I want
you to see out of this verse five. Out of all these five verses,
and specifically I want you to see that when I say the splendor
of God in Christ, As we have seen in the very beginning, in
the beginning was God and was the Word and the Word was God
and the Word was with God. He was in the beginning with
God and all things are made through Him. Sometimes we have a hard time
relating to that. It is very poetic. It is also
very doctrinal. And I know if you went back 127
sermons, you probably would be, wow, we've come a long way from
that, but we're coming back to that, see? We're right there,
still today. And everything that we've heard
from John's Gospel, everything that we've seen Jesus do, and
heard the Gospel writer pen, or read him, maybe you have,
and everything that we have heard Jesus say, this is all from that
point of view. It is all to the end of, we have
seen God's glory. The fullness of all that God
is, we have seen it face to face. We have beheld it. We know Him. This is eternal life. And we've talked about glory
numerous times. Many of you have even spoken
to me that you've never understood glory until we looked at John's
Gospel. That to define God's glory is
to see Him in the trueness of His essence. is to know Him in
the fullness of His being, is to recognize Him without blemish,
without corruption, without veil, as Paul would say in 2 Corinthians
4. We see Him face to face, though
we are not necessarily with Him, as Peter would say. We love Him,
and we love Him with a joy that is often inexpressible. And John
then in his first epistle would say, we know him and we love
him because he first loved us and he loved us in Christ. And
that love that he has for his people is effective in Christ,
is seen in Christ, so that the glory of God is encompassed in
the perfection of his person. All three of them, persons. The
father, the son and the spirit, individual persons. But the glory
of God is seen because he is one and they are one. They are
one God. They're one being the God of
all things in three distinct persons, eternal. Personal. Yet united. So to see the glory
of God is to see him as he is. And it's not divided. We do not
need to take the glory of the Son and the glory of the Spirit
and the glory of the Father and put them all together to see
the glory of God. Jesus is the exact imprint of
His nature. So if we see the fullness of
the Son, we see the fullness of the Father. If we see the
fullness of the Father, we see the fullness of the Son. If we see the fullness
of the Spirit, because they are all God. So when we're seeing
the glory of God, we are seeing God Himself in full. And I will encourage you if your
mind goes, I just don't get it. Good, because you're not. It's
not for us to get, it's for us to see and stand in awe and wonder. It's for us to look and recognize
that there is nothing in this world that is possible to lay
alongside of this truth and say, OK, here's a metaphor and an
analogy or a picture or an illustration that will help me get it. There's
no such illustration. An illustration helps cement
a truth more in the heart and the mind of a human being learner.
A human learner. Yet there is no illustration
that can cement the glory of God in the heart and mind of
a learner. Jesus Christ is the only one. So what do we want to see here? Verse 5, I want to specifically
deal with it. And now, Father, glorify me in
your own presence with the glory that I had with you before the
world existed. We saw last week that Jesus was
literally commanding the Father to glorify Him. This is not a
question of saying, will you? This is a commandment, you do
this now, Father. So that in itself, in the grammar,
shows that Jesus has authority as God. It also deals with something
that we've talked about some in our theological studies with
the subordination of Christ. And I'm not going to get into
this at all, but I just want to ask you this. If Christ can
command God, the father, then he is not sub equal to God, the
father. And if Christ in that same wording
there in these few sentences talks about the glory that he
had with the Father as we'll look at probably point five four
today. That means that he's co-equal
with the Father in all essence is God as we'll see as well. So therefore the subordination
of Jesus exists in the incarnation so that Christ by obvious teaching
has lowered himself in some way through the incarnation. He created
Mary and her womb and the body within her for himself. And this is not the first time.
You see it in John 1, 1 through 4. You see it there in the creation
of the world and all things. You see that in him is the light
of the life of men. And you see that the word became flesh and
dwelt among us. You see that we've seen the glory
of God in the face of Christ. You see that the God, the one
and only God who sits at the Father's side makes God known. And so on and so forth. But one thing you'll see here
is that Jesus' glory is equal to the Father's glory. Now, that's an obvious statement.
He says, and now glorify me in your own presence. In your own
presence. With the glory that I had with
you. So see what we see there? You
see what Jesus is saying there? He's showing us that the glory
of God the Father is indeed equal to His own glory. In your presence,
God, I want you to glorify me. Now, why is this a problem? We'll
get to that in a minute. Why would this be a problem to
some people? Because very few people believe that Jesus is
God. Very few people have been shown
the divine nature of Jesus, and I'm gonna show you at the end
of it all today, the reason we're here is to worship. If you can't
worship Christ, it's because you can't see him as God. And if you can't see him as God,
you do not have eternal life. Jesus says that to the Pharisees.
Unless you believe that I am, you will die in your sins. And
the Pharisees could believe that he was a prophetic answer, that
he was a good teacher, that he was a possible one come from
God, but they'd lost sight of the teaching because they'd not
been born of God, that he indeed was God. And he also was man,
see. Because the other side of that
is where you get Gnosticism and you get all sorts of different
heresies that are not new, that have been going around since
the days of Jesus. Well, He wasn't really man, He just appeared
to be man. Or He wasn't really this, He just had the form of
man. You know, they like to use the English words in a pretext
to mean nothing. It's become meaningless in that
sense. Jesus' glory is equal to the Father's glory. In the
presence of God the Father, I want the glory. in the presence with
you that I had before I came to earth, I want the glory. Now
where in scripture do we hear something else telling God that
they want to share in His glory? In the fall of Lucifer. And the
scripture says that in his heart, Lucifer said, and I'm going to
paraphrase to get the point, I should share in the glory of
God. I should stand up there next to him on stage and be seen. Look at
me. I reflect the nature of God. That's a big difference than
sharing the essence of God. And what did God do when in his
heart Lucifer thought, along with a third of the multitude
of heavenly hosts, agreed in their heart, Lucifer ought to
share in the glory of God. He cast them out of his presence.
Non-elect angels, eternal destruction. Isaiah, God says in Isaiah, I
think it's 46, 48, somewhere in there, that God does not share
His glory with anyone, any creature, at any time, eternally. In the garden, the serpent, who
wanted to share the glory of God, told the first couple, you
will be like God. And you have the knowledge of
God. And you have all the good things that God is withholding
from you. And they opened their eyes through rebellion. And they
knew evil because they knew death. For the weight of the sin is
death. If you eat of that tree, you will surely die. And so even in the human sphere,
humans have wanted to make themselves God. Let me give you a little
sidekick before I forget about it here. You know how people
make themselves God today? There are a lot of ways, but
you know how people make themselves like God and want to share in
His glory today? When they take some credit for their salvation.
That is the most blasphemous thing that a human being could
ever do, is to say, I chose to be saved. I accepted Jesus into
my life and He saved me. Oh, it's just words. No, it's
not just words. It's the condition of a heart
that has not been born. Jesus' glory is equal to the
Father's glory. And because of that, the second thing we need
to see here today is that Jesus' glory This might sound redundant. Is
as God, just as the Father's glory is as God. So they're not
sharing the same glory in their persons. Let me give you this.
God's glory is God's glory. Jesus is God. The Father is God.
The Spirit of God. They all have glory as God. And then individually, they are
also glorious. In their persons. But there's not this big bowl
of glory, and then Jesus shares a third, and this spirit shares
a third, and the Father shares a third, and you may think, well,
who cares? That's sort of silly. No, this is what people believe. This is where many cults come. Oneness. Cults. Jesus is... God is one person, they say. Not one being three distinct
persons, but one person, and Jesus is the person, and then
the Father is the person, and the Spirit is the person, and
then there's modalism, and there's also... I don't want to bog you
down. See what I mean? I don't want to bog you down with all that. It
doesn't matter. I'm just telling you that there is much error
in the context of the triune God. This text blows that garbage
out of the water. And this text shows that those
who believe such things are lost. This is not an error of interpretation. It's not an error of academics. There is no such thing. And for
those of you who have been with us the last two Wednesdays or listened
to those sermons on Galatians, Paul does not say, these guys
are a little confused, let's fix it. He says they're cut off
from Christ. Friends, there either is one
true gospel or there are many gospels that we hope we get right.
If the gospel we preach and believe as a people is not the only gospel,
then by implication the gospel that contradicts it could be
the true gospel. And if what we believe is the
only gospel, then the gospels that contradict it cannot be
the true gospel. And God does not convert people
unto false gospels, which is no gospel. It is not good news
to believe a falsehood. So, as Jesus is God and has glory,
the Father is also God and has glory. He says, I, with you,
I am to be glorified. With you, in your presence. I
am to be glorified. Jesus has already said, I will
glorify you. Glorify your Son that the Son
may glorify you. Now, that's last week. The Son
may reveal you. The Son may show you. The Son
may glorify you. And Christ the Son has done that. He will glorify the Father. And He is to be glorified with
the Father. What is this showing? Have you ever stopped to just
think about these simple words with such deep meaning? You don't
have to dig, you don't have to sit there and go, I don't get
it, I don't understand. You just have to read it. And
just slow down. Just slow down and ask yourself,
what is it that's being said here? What's being said here
is that Jesus the Son and the Father are the same being and
they're being revealed in the same fullness. But they're also
being revealed as eternal and separate persons with the same
glory. And our minds should be blown.
Well, what does that ultimately bring us to? That Jesus is divine. That's the way you'll end up.
What does that mean? It means Jesus is God. Father is God, Jesus is
God, the Spirit is God. We see all of the teaching of
the Trinity here in John 16, 17. And other places, but I mean, it's
right here. Jesus is divine. I mean, I could give you Many,
many scriptures in the New Testament where Jesus calls himself God.
Jesus makes himself equal with God. The I am statements alone. Now some people would argue,
and for those of you who listen to our Theology Answers podcast,
Eddie and I have had numerous, I think there's nine, podcasts
that we deal with the divine nature of Jesus. And we talk
about how some people have said, and people have sold me, I've
had Muslim people come up to me in public, see me with a Bible,
and say, where in that Bible do you see Jesus ever say anything?
And the first time they get you, because you show them a, no,
that's somebody quoting Jesus. Okay, you got me. You got me. But then they'll ask the question,
when and where did Jesus ever say, I am God? And you know what? He never says that. Why? Because a lot of people say that.
Matter of fact, the Old Testament calls the judges gods. The Old
Testament calls Israel gods. Jews gods. So the word God, in
a sense like that, just means someone in high authority, someone
who is high. The word God means the highest. So for Jesus to say, I'm a God,
well, you're a Jew? Of course you are. Look at us. But there's only one being in
the entire historical record that has ever called himself
the I Am. The I Am. And throughout all
of history of Israel, Every one of the Jews throughout all of
history have known God through his self-revelatory name. I am the great I am. I am that I am. Who should I say sent me, said
Moses. Tell them I am sent. So when Jesus says, I am, concerning
himself, every time in the New Testament narrative, what do
the Jews do? They grab stones to kill him
because he said he was equal as God. Jesus' glory is a divine glory
because Jesus is divine. Isaiah 6, somewhere that we go
a lot, I did it more in the first 10 or first 12 chapters of John,
I always alluded to it, then I talked about getting to it,
and when I got to it, Jesus, the Word of God, alludes back.
I know that's redundant, but it alludes to Isaiah 6. I've
closed their eyes, I've closed their mind, I've prevented them
from seeing, so that, what? They would not believe. They
would not understand. I will not heal them. But in
Isaiah 6, it says that the glory of God was revealed to Isaiah.
And that's where you get that famous phrase that we like to
sing in the contemporary 90s or the 2000s, the glory of God
filled the temple. His robe filled the temple. I
don't know about you, but those word pictures don't do a whole
lot for me because when I think about a road filling the temple,
I think about a bunch of laundry needs to be put up. Pick your socks up off the ground.
And I'm joking. But I don't have a direct relationship
with temple worship. But I understand it. I understand
it in the fullness. We try to in our day, in my short
life, I've heard many people talk about how God has filled
this place. What they're talking about is
the emotion of their feelings, not the feeling of God. As Moses saw the word of God
on the stones of Mount Sinai, he asks God what? Can I see you? Can I see your
face? And the way of putting that is,
can I see your glory? Can I gaze upon the fullness of you? And
God says to him, no one can see me and live. But I will let you
look at my back as I pass by. And as Moses gazed upon whatever
it is God showed him that day, his skin glowed. So some people would say, well,
God must be a radioactive isotope. Must be a power plant up there
on Mount Sinai. That's why it was all boiling over. It was
meltdown. So he comes off the mountain
and they beg him, cover your face. We don't want to see your
glow stick face. We don't want to see your glow
in the dark face because it reminds us that you've been in the presence
of God. And we don't want the presence of God here. Isaiah saw it. He saw the fullness of God's
glory. The essence that God shares with
no one, with nothing, that He created all things for the sake
of beholding His glory. To see Him in the fullness. And
Jesus says that Isaiah spoke of Him. In John 12, Paul writes to the Hebrews in
his letter to the Hebrews, Christ, he is the radiance of the glory
of God and the exact imprint of his nature. And he upholds
the universe by the word of his power. And after making purifications
for sins, he sat down at the right hand of majesty on high.
Now see, some things I need to clarify that we all know, especially
we who have gone through the book of Colossians and are reading
it, and we'll get back to that in a couple of weeks. Keep reading
it. But many people look at He's
the exact imprint, or He sat down at the side of God. So therefore
he has a secondary role, he has a secondary place of authority.
But that's not what it means. Oh, he's the firstborn of all
creation. Friends, this is not about biology. It's not about the hierarchy
of monarchy. Bullarchy. It's about his preeminence. His divinity. It's about His
glory. It's about Him being God the
Creator. To be the firstborn has nothing
to do with lineage and a family tree. It has everything to do
with preeminence. Because in this first century
Palestinian culture, if you were the firstborn son, what was due
to you? Everything! What did the secondborn
son get? Nothing! A pat on the back, a
kick in the butt. See ya! Firstborn, everything
belongs to Him. He represents the Father in a
perfect way. This is the imagery of Jesus
being the firstborn. It's not about His place as though
God had a wife and bore a child and this half-man, half-God child. This is Greek mythology. That's why I'm being the one
to whom all is due. That's what it means. Isaiah spoke of Jesus. Hebrews
says that He's the exact imprint of His nature. In John 12, this
is where Jesus says these things. When Jesus had said these things,
he departed and hid himself from them. Though he had done many
signs before them, they still did not believe in him, so that
the word spoken by the prophet Isaiah might be fulfilled, Lord,
who has believed what he has heard from us, and to whom has
the arm of the Lord been revealed? Therefore they could not believe.
For again, Isaiah said, He has blinded their eyes and hardened
their hearts, lest they see with their eyes and understand with
their heart, and turn, and I would heal them. Verse 41 of John 12,
listen, Isaiah said these things because he saw the glory of the
Son, and I'm putting that in there for emphasis, it said His
glory, Jesus is the person in context there. They saw the glory
of the Son and spoke of Him. Jesus is written about here.
We also see Jesus in John 5 saying, Moses wrote of me. But for the fear of the Pharisees,
listen to this, they did not confess it. So what's happened
here in John 12, 42? Many of the authorities believed
in him, but for fear of the Pharisees, they did not confess it, so they
would not be put out of the synagogue. For they loved the glory that
comes from man more than the glory that comes from God. What
in the world is happening there? They weren't converted. They
knew that what was being said about Jesus was true, but they
could not see Him. They could not believe in Him.
Because it was not granted to them to believe. So they love
the glory that comes from man. What is the glory that comes
from man? All of our religious efforts. All of our obedience. All of
our service. All of our stuff we do in the
name of faith and religion and God. It's why there's such an
easy scoff and mockery of the Christian faith in our culture,
because it's ridiculous. It's absolutely ridiculous when
you see the liturgy of most people who confess to see the glory
of Christ, yet they will spend all week preparing to put on
their own pompous glory. And that's just one example of
many that flows through my mind. How do you got all these examples?
Because I've been in ministry a long time. Jesus' glory is a divine glory. And all the prophets and all
the history of the Old Testament points straight to Him. We talked
about that last week. It all points to Him. It also proves to us that Jesus'
glory is eternal. Because if he's God, God is eternal,
then his glory is eternal. But it's not just an implication
of this teaching. It's a direct teaching. Look. Now, Father, glorify me in your
own presence with the glory that I had with you before the world
began. In the very beginning of John,
in the beginning. You see that phrase there in
the beginning? It's a phrase that means before
time. Before there was anything. Before
time existed. Time is a created construction. It's an intangible measurement. that's seen and witnessed and
experienced through aging, through schedules, through tax bills
and electric cycles and everything else. In the new kingdom, there will
be no time. You won't see things in the same
way, but here Christ is before time. The Word in the beginning
was God with God and created all things that were created
in the beginning. In the beginning, the Word already
was existing. And everything that has been
created, that's ever been created, He created. That excludes Him. Now some cults would say, well,
see, God the Father created God the Son, then God the Son created
everything else. Well, then God the Son is a creation, and He
could not be excluded. Not just in John 1, but in Colossians
and Hebrews and everywhere else. And oh, boy, the first two chapters
of Hebrews, God the Father actually calls God the Son God, and commands
the angels to worship Him. God doesn't share His glory. Jesus is eternal. That means
that the plan of redemption is eternal. You know, the whole
idea of eternal. You know, I've got friends who
are physicists who spend a lot of time contemplating and theorizing
about this, and they'll tell you, we are theoretical in everything
we say and think and measure. There is no substantial weight
to anything we're doing. We just have to keep talking
until we hit something real. That's what it is. And I think
that's why certain aspects of physics is so appealing to me.
Because I see the infinite probabilities And I want to hit something,
and the only thing I can ever hit is the eternal word. So it
pushes me back here, keeps me from floating off into outer
space. Before the world existed, Jesus
had the same glory as the Father. He shared in all ways every attribute
and prerogative as God. And He became flesh and dwelt
among us. He dropped Himself out of glory. And the Father was with Him. Nothing stands with God. And
God stands with no one. Wait a minute, that don't sound
right. We stand with America? We stand with our children? That's
a figure of speech. Taking a stand and standing with
someone is a figure of speech in our understanding. To stand
with God is to be God. My ways are higher than your
ways and my thoughts are higher than your thoughts. There is
only one God. There is no other. I do all that
I wish. No one will stop me. I determined
the beginning from the end, the first and the last. I am. Nobody else gets to stand in
that position. No one else gets to stand in that glory. No one
else gets to reveal themselves in that way. Now a lot have tried,
a lot have put forth great effort to influence little sheep like
us to believe that they are that way, and they fail. That's why it's a trap. God, the Son Eternal, then, changed
something concerning Himself. What did He change? He became
a man. He never, though, stopped becoming
God. Because for something to be eternal,
that means it is God. And for something to be God,
that means it cannot at any time, He cannot at any time, It cannot
at any time, however pronoun you want to put there, decide
something. God cannot just choose something
in the midst of things. He is eternal. So all that He
is and all that He's decreed and all that He knows is at all
times, always and forever His to execute. Some people would
argue, well, creation was a decisive act of God in time. It was not. It was an eternal decree of God
to come forth at the moment He decided and at that moment, moment,
actually became a real thing. Because before there was moment,
there was only eternity. See how crazily we shove God
into a humanistic box? Yet Jesus, who is that eternal
God, came into the world that He created in order to save His
people from their sins, and He accomplished the work that God
has sent Him to do. So Jesus' glory is eternal. He changed His state by taking
on humanity, but He did not cease being God. He laid down His glory,
and now here is going to be seen again as He truly is, and as
He truly was before. the world began, before He came
into the world. Now, let me now tie all this
together. I know a lot of you might be
confused. This that we have just learned from verse 5 is a very
meaty package of what Jesus means in verse 3, eternal life. It's all there. To know the one
true God is to know Jesus the Son. To know the one true God
is to know that the Father sent Him. To know the one true God
is to know that He is the fullness of the glory of God. To know
the one true God is to know He took on flesh but did not devoid
himself of divine nature, but he took on flesh and he saved
his people through his ministry. He obeyed and he died and he
rose again from the dead and he is glorified now and ascended
into the place of glory as God forevermore. This is eternal
life. All of it. And those who are
the recipients of His work have a guarantee of their salvation,
that through the proclamation of this Good News, they are given
and granted the knowledge, listen to this, of God in the face of
Jesus Christ. And the knowledge of God is a
knowledge of His finished redemptive work, which says to them in the
Good News, you are redeemed. That's saving faith. Faith isn't
to exercise something to get life. Faith is an exercise, I
mean, it's a gift of God telling you you have it. Big difference,
isn't it? Because of who Christ is. See
why this is not for lost people. It is not for non-elect people.
They'll never get it. But we preach it to everybody.
We teach it to all, that nugget of gospel. And that's what Paul
means in 1 Corinthians 15. That Christ was born according
to the scriptures, that he died according to the scriptures,
that he was buried according to the scriptures, that he was raised alive according
to the scriptures. That's what Peter means when he says, you
do well to pay attention. to the Old Testament writing to
the prophets. Not just to our testimony, but our testimony
corroborates what the prophets have been saying concerning God's
Son. So Jesus' glory is life-giving.
To see Jesus is eternal life. To know Him is eternal life. This is eternal life. And now the ultimate question
that I get from a lot of people when I talk about the gospel
is they'll say to me, then how in the world is anybody ever
going to be saved? Well, isn't that the easiest
answer? Isn't that the easiest answer in the entire Christian
realm? By grace, my friend. By mercy,
my friend. Only by mercy. Only by God giving
it to you. Helping you to see. Causing you
to believe. By mercy, God put Christ on the
cross. By grace, God gives you the gift
of faith. People change their minds concerning
their righteousness before God because God, the Holy Spirit,
grants them this new life. And then no longer do they look
at their works, and no longer do they work at their morality,
no longer do they look at their decisions, or their Christianity,
but they look at Christ. They've been given a changed
mind to believe the witness of God the Father concerning His
Son about the redemption of His people alone. It's okay to preach
election, beloved, because it is the gospel. It's not a theological
principle started 502 years ago. It's the doctrine of grace. It's the doctrine of God. It's
the teaching of Christ in Genesis 1. Let there be light, and there
was light, and the light was good. It's the doctrine of grace. It's the doctrine of teaching
the mercy of God for His people that when they rebelled against
Him after just hours of seeing the fullness of God face to face
with sinlessness. What it must be like to see Jesus,
the Son of God, with sinlessness. And yet, that's
what Adam knew. And he still gobbled that fruit
up. He still died before God. And in the doctrine of grace,
God killed an animal to point to what he would do when the
sun would come through the seed of a woman and crush the head
of the serpent. This is not new. It's not like,
oh, all the Old Testament, they tried and then God had to fix
it. But this is the point of it all. The metanarrative of
the Bible is free and sovereign grace. That's become cliche. It's become identified with Calvinism
or reformed tradition or Baptist or whatever, but it's not the
point. Those labels are worthless outside
of the doctrine of Scripture. Jesus' glorious life given, if
you can't see Him, you can't claim to be alive. And it's seeable by grace alone.
What's the end game? Remember I asked that question
as we got started this morning. What's the end of it all? What's the
point of it all? To the praise of His glorious grace. Why? It all has to do with worship,
doesn't it? I don't have time to give you
all the details and probably have forgotten more than I've
ever remembered. But the word worship in itself comes from
the idea of something being praised because of its worth. And no matter how much something
is worth, the person who has it in their hands has to recognize
its worth. I used to give illustrations
on college campuses like this. If you give the Hope Diamond,
is that thing still around? I mean, you know, it used to
be always in the conversation. Hope Diamond, Hope Diamond. Now
we've got stocks that are worth more than Hope Diamonds, right?
Intangible things. You give a Hope Diamond to an
infant, it sucks on it, it plays with the box. throws it down, plays with the
box. Give a Hope Diamond to a man who's lost everything, it's priceless.
Give a $100 bill to a child, it'll flush it down the toilet.
Oh, I thought it was toilet paper. Give a $100 bill to a homeless
man, he appreciates it. Sees the value of it, you see,
and that's terrible. There's no illustration that
gives you that. But in order for you to worship something,
you have to see the worth of something. The reason people
don't worship the free and sovereign grace of God is because they
can't see Him. They can't see His worth. But that's the reason
that we're saved under the praise of His glorious grace, that we
see His worthiness and we are able to worship Him from the
fullness of His revelation to us, that He has saved us for
Himself. Not for our sake, but for His
sake. Yet we are the beneficiaries of His glorious grace. We get
it all. Jesus starts to talk about that
in verse 6, doesn't He? We get it all. We get everything that
Christ is and has promised to us is ours. And there's no one
who can take it away from us. There's no one who can keep us
from it. And so we worship. worthy of all praise and all
glory and all honor. And now, here, and now, look
at that, and now, Father, glorify me in your presence with the
glory that I had before the world existed. Now, when you hear that
sentence, you should hear it with new ears. Glorify your Son now. Because in the glory of the Son,
The people that you gave me out of the world that are yours are
mine. And I will keep them. See the point? It's not like
seeing something beautiful that you can't possess, that you can't
claim, and going, wow, I enjoyed that experience. We're not going
to enjoy the experience of the presence of Christ. We are in
Him. And I can't explain that to you,
yet. People have tried, people have
taken to the Lord's table, well maybe we'll experience Christ.
We'll experience Christ. You can't experience Christ without
the Holy Spirit. You can't experience Christ without the Word of God.
You can't experience Christ without the grace of God. And so when
we look at the work of Jesus, we remember what he's done and
we recall it to our mind and we grow in it and we worship
him from it. And in doing that, every thing
that we do as an assembly, as a family, when we get together
is for the sake of giving praise to him. And I'll tell you this,
beloved, true worship is often silent and somber. Because there's not a whole lot
that I need to say to God from my flesh. Not much at all. Yet I could
imagine sitting in His presence and not moving. Such as my studies lately. What
am I supposed to see here? Nothing but what's there. Nothing
but what's there. Let me see it. So my prayer for
you, beloved, today is that you would see it. And that you would
worship. And you would strive to this,
this week, by the mercy of God, to be in your word, to read John
17. Read John 17 every day this week.
It's a good, good, powerful teaching. And that through it all, that
you would see the love of God for you. See, God does love you,
beloved. That's why you're called beloved.
He has brought you into Him, and this is why we exist as His
sheep. To see Him, to know Him, to love
Him, and to grow together in that, and to be together in that,
and to help each other in that, because life is here. When time
is over, life starts back, doesn't it? This is a pause for me. It's
like, yes, vacation. Every week I get vacation, two
days a week. Wednesday night, Sunday mornings,
I get vacation. It's a vacation from the world,
vacation from the flesh, vacation from people who I don't want
to be around to be with people that I do want to be around.
And it's glorious because Christ, we are his. Let's pray. We thank you, Father, for your
word and for the power.