Day 26 (Monday): John 17:20-24
Today’s Passage
Read the passage – John 17:20-24
Jesus prayed that we would be in the Father and Son so that the world would know that Jesus was sent by the Father. This points to how important it is for us to be in close relationship with Christ. Jesus also prayed for complete oneness with him again so that the world would know about him and his love. Such unity does not mean sameness so we can be diverse in the way we approach things. It must grieve God to see the constant divisions in the overall church in our city. It is not just disagreements on theology, it is the lack of sense that we are one in Jesus. We need to have a unity of purpose in glorifying Jesus and living lives that reflect the love of God.
Questions to Consider
- What do you think you should do about this prayer?
Prayer
- Lord, open the hearts of attendees to encounter Your grace and truth.
- Pray that churches in our area would be one and that we all would be working towards the glory of Christ and not our personal kingdoms.
- Ask for forgiveness for when we have judged and criticised other believers and created division. Pray asking God to bless some churches that you know of by name.
Go Deeper
David Gooding, In the School of Christ: Lessons on Holiness in John 13–17, Myrtlefield Expositions (Coleraine, Northern Ireland: Myrtlefield House, 2013), 248–250.
In asking his Father that all those who believe in him should be one, our Lord had a further objective in view. It was that ‘the world may believe that you have sent me’ (John 17:21). Now it has become quite clear that the oneness our Lord was talking about was the oneness produced by the fact that every believer is in him and in the Father. He was not thinking about the great—and small—organizational structures that have arisen within Christendom in the course of the centuries. Christendom certainly has produced from time to time and in different parts of the world some vast monolithic organizations as well as myriad other smaller ones. But the organizational unities are not what demonstrates that Jesus Christ was sent by God.
What our Lord intended, what would impress the world, was this: as people came in contact with and observed individual true believers, whether rich or poor, educated or uneducated, they would find that they all had one striking and pre-eminent thing in common: Jesus Christ was real to them! They would not talk of Jesus as a merely historical figure, nor as a remote figure in some distant heaven. They would speak of him as someone they knew, as a baby knows its parents. They would describe themselves as being ‘in Christ’ and ‘in God the Father’. Whatever denominational label they might carry (or none at all) they would not tell the world that they had to join the church to be saved, nor try to convince the world that their church was the only true church. They would preach Christ, and Christ alone, for salvation.
The stumbling-block of denominational labels. It is the regrettable fact that denominational labels have often obscured this unity that exists between all true believers. For some reason or other, Christians have shown a perverse (and biblically forbidden) tendency to advertise themselves publicly under a whole array of different labels. It is a scandal and a dishonour to Christ of which all Christians should everywhere and speedily repent.
But in spite of that scandal, the unity of all true believers, brought about by the fact that all true believers are in Christ and in the Father (in spite of their denominational labels), remains. It is indestructible. And it points the world to Christ as the present living Lord sent by God for mankind’s salvation.
