20 “I do not ask for these only, but also for those who will believe in me through their word, 21 that they may all be one, just as you, Father, are in me, and I in you, that they also may be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me. 22 The glory that you have given me I have given to them, that they may be one even as we are one, 23 I in them and you in me, that they may become perfectly one, so that the world may know that you sent me and loved them even as you loved me.
Any passage of Scripture first needs to be read in its context. In other words, the first questions we need to ask ourselves are, who was the author? Who was he writing to? What were the circumstances? Is this a prescriptive text which describes what God requires, or is it descriptive - is it merely telling us what happened? Understanding the context is always the first step when studying the word of God, as this helps us to avoid cutting and pasting passages to get the Bible to say what we want it to say. Some people are very good at doing that, unfortunately.
Equally important is the application of the Word of God. What does this mean to me, and what lessons are there which I can and should apply to my life? There are times when this is not easy to do, but that can’t be said of the verses we are looking at today in John 17.
Here Jesus prays specifically for all believers of all ages. In the first 5 verses Jesus prays for Himself as He prepares to go to the cross, while in verses 6 through 19 of His High Priestly Prayer He prays for His disciples, and now, as we near the end of His prayer, He prays for us, His Church.
“I do not ask for these only, but also for those who will believe in me through their word.”
It would be a mistake though, to think that this is the first time Jesus prays for His Church. Throughout His public ministry He alluded to and spoke about those who would come to faith in future generations. In John 10:14-15 He said, “I am the good shepherd. I know my own and my own know me, just as the Father knows me and I know the Father; and I lay down my life for the sheep.” Again, context is important. He was speaking to His Jewish followers here, but He continues in the next verse by including Gentile believers who would come to faith in Him. “I have other sheep that are not of this fold. I must bring them also, and they will listen to my voice. So there will be one flock, one shepherd.”
He was talking about His Church in verse 16, and we are part of that Church. In fact, as we read God’s covenant promise to Abraham back in Genesis 12:3, “in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed,” we can see that Jesus was fulfilling this promise.
Earlier in His prayer, Jesus asked the Father to make His Church holy and protect it from corruption in the world, and we certainly need all the help we can get when it comes to resisting the temptation to allow worldliness and the evils of the world to corrupt our faith in God. As we are part of the Church, the family of God, we learn that we are connected to a unique body of fellow believers through our common faith in Jesus Christ. Jesus also prayed that the Father would sanctify His Church in the truth of his Word, and now, in praying for His future Church, He is referring to those who will believe in Him through the apostles’ teaching.
One of the ways we are part of the worldwide body of believers which transcends both time and location, is by belonging to a local Church, a local congregation just like ours. As we well know, worship styles and the structure of different denominations do differ, but what rises above all of the non-salvific differences is a common belief in the whole of the Word of God, as given to us by the apostles of Jesus Christ. This is the only way we can be part of the redeemed, holy, and saved Church for which Jesus prayed, died and rose again.
This is the Church Jesus prayed for, and this is the true Church to which we belong, and we are to build and grow His Church by the teaching and preaching of the whole counsel of the Word of God.
The Church was established by Jesus sending the apostles to preach the Word, to share the Gospel and to teach true, Biblical doctrine. This is how the Church grew in the 1st century, and now, all these years later, people are still added to the Church in the same way. Peter wrote in 1 Peter 1:23, “You have been born again, not of perishable seed but of imperishable, through the living and abiding word of God.”
In John 17:9, Jesus made it clear that He was not praying for the world but for those whom the Father had given to Him, and now, in verse 20, He prays, “I do not ask for these only, but also for those who will believe in me through their word.” Their word - the testimony of the apostles. The implication here is clear. If you want to belong to God through Jesus Christ, you must believe the Word of God as taught by the apostles and passed down through the ages by the true Church of Jesus Christ.
We are not to reinvent the wheel, so to speak, by changing Christian doctrine or by watering down the truth of God to make it less offensive and less confrontational in order to make it more acceptable to the world. The words of Hebrews 4:12 are just as true today as they were nearly 2000 years ago. “The word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing to the division of soul and of spirit, of joints and of marrow, and discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart.”
The thoughts and intentions of the heart encompasses everything in our lives. The Christian faith is not just a part of our lives. We are not to have a faith life and a secular life. We don’t follow one set of rules on a Sunday, and another set of rules on the other six days of the week. The Word of God is our plumb line and our standard for our entire lives. Everything we do, say or think is governed by belief or unbelief in Jesus Christ as He is revealed to us in the Scriptures.
Jesus said in John 5:24, “Truly, truly, I say to you, whoever hears my word and believes Him who sent me has eternal life. He does not come into judgment, but has passed from death to life.” Whoever hears my word and believes Him who sent me. Remember, there are only two kinds of people in the world - the spiritually alive who believe the Word of God, and the spiritually dead, those who reject the truth of God.
Jesus prays in verse 21, “that they may all be one.” He prays for Christian unity.
If Christian unity is important to God, then it must be important for us too.
The first step in pursuing Christian unity, though, is to define it Biblically. Critics of the Christian faith often point to the vast number of Christian denominations to accuse us of a lack of unity, but we do need to be careful here, because the usual assumption is that by praying for unity in the Church, people tend to think that Jesus was insisting on an outward, physical, organisational unity.
But if you look at the early Church in the book of Acts, the Christian Church grew at an enormous rate without a structural hierarchy. The hierarchy of the Roman Catholic religion is based on a false interpretation of Matthew 16:18, where Jesus says, “I tell you, you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my Church.” Contrary to what Rome teaches, Jesus did not appoint Peter as the first pope, instead, the rock He was talking about was Peter’s confession of faith in verse 16: “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.”
The apostle Paul had no hesitation in rebuking Peter when he fell into error, as he wrote in Galatians 2:11-14. “When Cephas (Peter) came to Antioch, I opposed him to his face, because he stood condemned. For before certain men came from James, he was eating with the Gentiles; but when they came he drew back and separated himself, fearing the circumcision party. And the rest of the Jews acted hypocritically along with him, so that even Barnabas was led astray by their hypocrisy. But when I saw that their conduct was not in step with the truth of the Gospel, I said to Cephas before them all, ‘If you, though a Jew, live like a Gentile and not like a Jew, how can you force the Gentiles to live like Jews?’”
So much for the infallibility of the pope…
When Jesus established His Church to go into the world, and when He prayed for His Church, He did so by giving joint authority to His apostles and their teachings, and we are still very much a part of the apostolic Church today.
When we look at the early history of the Church as recorded in the New Testament, especially in light of Jesus’ prayer for unity in the Church, there are at least three major points we can learn about what it means to be a unified Church.
Firstly, Christian unity is, an organic, mystical unity. The unity that Jesus prays for is based on the unity within the Godhead, the Holy Trinity. Christians are to be one, as Jesus prayed in verse 21. “Just as you, Father, are in me, and I in you, that they also may be in us.” Just as we are unable to fully understand the doctrine of the Trinity, we can’t really understand true unity in the Church.
We have Christian brothers and sisters on the other side of the world who don’t understand our language, and we don’t understand theirs, yet they are our brothers and sisters. If you think that’s complicated, some of our brothers and sisters in Christ died hundreds of years ago, and others will only be born hundreds of years from now, yet we are united in Christ.
There will be no need for name badges and formal introductions in heaven, because we will all know one another perfectly, and that mystical union begins in the physical, bodily Church of Jesus Christ in this world.
The two main New Testament metaphors for the Church are a body and a family. Paul wrote in 1 Corinthians 12:12, “Just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ.” He was teaching about the mutual dependency we have of each other in the Church. We need one another, just as a physical body relies on its feet, hands, eyes, and ears. Paul puts it very simply when he wrote in verses 15 through 21, “The body does not consist of one member but of many. If the foot should say, ‘Because I am not a hand, I do not belong to the body,’ that would not make it any less a part of the body. And if the ear should say, ‘Because I am not an eye, I do not belong to the body,’ that would not make it any less a part of the body. If the whole body were an eye, where would be the sense of hearing? If the whole body were an ear, where would be the sense of smell? But as it is, God arranged the members in the body, each one of them, as he chose. If all were a single member, where would the body be? As it is, there are many parts, yet one body. The eye cannot say to the hand, ‘I have no need of you,’ nor again the head to the feet, ‘I have no need of you.’”
Paul goes on to stress in verses 26 and 27 that just like our physical bodies, the whole Church is affected by the experiences of any part of the body. “If one member suffers, all suffer together; if one member is honoured, all rejoice together. Now you are the body of Christ and individually members of it.”
We sing the words often: “I will weep when you are weeping, when you laugh I’ll laugh with you; I will share your joy and sorrow till we’ve seen this journey through.” Christian unity means we share an organic oneness in our service of each other and in our ministry to one another.
The other New Testament metaphor for the Church is a family. You join a physical family by being born into it, or by being legally adopted into it. We join the Church family when we are born again by faith in Jesus Christ and God adopts us as His own as we see in Ephesians 1:4-5. “In love He predestined us for adoption to Himself as sons through Jesus Christ, according to the purpose of His will.”
So the first point in understanding Christian unity from a Biblical perspective is that this unity is an organic, mystical unity.
Secondly, our unity is a spiritual unity. In Ephesians 4, Paul prays for unity in the Church and he begins by writing, “I therefore, a prisoner for the Lord, urge you to walk in a manner worthy of the calling to which you have been called, with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love, eager to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.” (Ephesians 4:1-3)
This kind of unity cannot be legislated by any human organisation. The structures we have in the Church are a good thing, and they have their place in the Church, especially when it comes to exercising Biblical Church discipline.
Many of you will remember Calvin Cook, a past moderator of the Presbyterian Church of South Africa. I was talking to him a number of years ago about all the rules and regulations we have in the Manual of Faith and Order in our denomination, and I’ll never forget what he said. “Behind every clause, there is a scoundrel!”
And he was right. We can’t legislate true Christian unity. We can legislate how to deal with disunity, but true unity and oneness in the Church is spiritual. It comes through the unifying presence of God’s Holy Spirit.
And thirdly, Christian unity is unity in the truth. We know that the Spirit indwells born again believers, those who believe the Word of God. We also know that the Word of God was inspired through the apostles by the Holy Spirit Himself. This is what Jesus was talking about when He said to His disciples in John 16:13. “When the Spirit of truth comes, He will guide you into all the truth,” and now, in 17:20 He prays “for those who will believe in me through their word.”
If there is going to be unity in the Church, it must be based on truth. Unfortunately, we often see the exact opposite in our attempts to get along with one another. Christian unity is pursued by setting aside matters of truth. The argument is that the reason so many branches of the Church cannot get along and agree with each other, is because too much emphasis is placed on doctrine, and because we’ll never really agree on doctrine, the only way to have unity is to ignore our doctrinal differences.
This is an extremely dangerous path to head down. At the turn of the millennium in 2000, the then Archbishop of Canterbury George Carey and Pope John Paul the second made a big show of Christian unity by joining hands and signing a document in which they both pledged to strive for unity between the Reformed Church and Roman Catholics.
The problem is that the only way you can do that, is by setting aside Christian doctrine. Carey said, “Polemics lead to hatred and division.” In other words, he was saying that we should seek unity without truth, but that’s not Christian unity.
Truth matters. Doctrine matters. The Protestant Reformation 500 years ago was driven by faithful men who upheld Biblical doctrine. Jesus said that when the Spirit came, He would lead His Church into truth. It is the truth of God which sanctifies the Church, and in John 17, Jesus prayed only for those who believe the truth.
This means that it is impossible for Christians to have unity that is not built on the truth as revealed in the Word of God. Unity without truth is not Christian unity.
Martyn Lloyd-Jones wrote, “There are many people in this world who call themselves Christians, yet who, alas, regard the Lord Jesus Christ as nothing but a man. Well, all I can say to this is that I have no fellowship with such people. I have no unity with them for they take from the very foundation and basis of my faith, and my whole position and standing. What do these people believe about the work of the Lord Jesus Christ? What is their view of His death? Is it a substitutionary death? Is it the Son of God dying because that is the only way whereby my sins may be forgiven, and therefore the essential preliminary to my becoming a child of God, and a partaker of the divine nature? If it is essential, and the other man says it is not, how can it be possible for there to be unity between us?”
There are three principles that must be applied as we strive for true Christian unity.
Firstly, Christian unity means we believe what the Bible says. Secondly, we are not to add to the Bible or take away anything from it.
And thirdly, Christian unity means we should be able to tell the difference between the essential and non-negotiable doctrines and those which are not essential to Christian unity.
The obvious question is, does the Bible specify which doctrines are essential? The answer is yes. The essential, non-negotiable doctrines of the Christian faith are, the Deity of Jesus Christ, Jesus as the world’s only Saviour, His death as a substitutionary atonement, His bodily resurrection from the dead, and justification through faith alone in Jesus Christ alone. Any organisation or cult which denies any of these core doctrines is not a part of the Christian Church which Jesus prayed for in John 17.
Other doctrines, as important as they may be, are non-salvific, and so are not essential to Christian unity. Examples are the different understandings of how and when baptism is to be ministered in the Church, the different views on the end times and the structures and governance of the different denominations in the Church.
Lloyd-Jones said, “There are certain great doctrines about which there never has been unity in the Christian Church and I take it there never will be, but I would not separate from any brother or sister on matters like these.”
The American theologian Francis Schaeffer said, “The real chasm must be between true Bible-believing Christians and others. The chasm is not between Lutherans and everybody else, or Baptists and everybody else, or Presbyterians and everybody else. The real chasm is between those who have bowed to the living God and His Son Jesus Christ, and thus also to the verbal, propositional communication of God’s Word, the Scriptures, and those who have not.”
The point is that we must guard against allowing the less important traditions in the Church from threatening the spiritual unity we have with those who belong to the various denominations and congregations in the true Church of Jesus Christ.
Christian unity is important, for the simple reason that this is what Jesus prayed for. Verse 23: “I in them and you in me, that they may become perfectly one, so that the world may know that you sent me and loved them even as you loved me.” We are loved by the Father just as the Father loves the Son. Just think about that for a second. As much as God the Father loves God the Son, so He loves us - His Church.
Bearing that awesome truth in mind, how can we not strive for unity within our own congregation and with other Churches who faithfully stand on the truth of God? As we work together in the Christian Church, we should always remember that it is Jesus’ work and Jesus’ prayer that brings about Christian our unity.
Warren Wiersbe writes, “There is every reason why believers should love one another and live in unity. We trust the same Saviour and share the same glory. We will one day enjoy the same heaven! We belong to the same Father and seek to do the same work, witnessing to a lost world that Jesus Christ alone saves from sin. We believe the same truth, even though we may have different views of minor doctrinal matters; and we follow the same example that Jesus set for His people, to live a holy life. Yes, believers do have their differences; but we have much more in common, and this should encourage us to love one another and promote true spiritual unity.”