14 I have given them your word, and the world has hated them because they are not of the world, just as I am not of the world. 15 I do not ask that you take them out of the world, but that you keep them from the evil one. 16 They are not of the world, just as I am not of the world. 17 Sanctify them in the truth; your word is truth.
In the first 5 verses of John 17, Jesus prays for Himself as He prepares to go to the cross, after which the focus of His prayer turns to His disciples and every believer who will come to Him in faith. This is essentially a prayer for the Church. In verse 11 He prayed for unity in the Church. “Holy Father, keep them in your name, which you have given me, that they may be one, even as we are one,” and as we closed with verse 13 last week, Jesus prayed that His joy would be fulfilled in us. As Christians we have a joy and an inner peace the world cannot offer, and as the family of God within His Church, we find joy and fulfillment as we serve Christ and one another.
Now, as we move on, Jesus prays that we would be kept safe from the world so that we would be sanctified in the truth. What Jesus is praying for in the verses we’re looking at today, is holiness in His Church.
Throughout the Bible, and in the Old Testament in particular, we see God saying to His people, “Be holy, because I am holy.” Peter refers to this when he writes in 1 Peter 1:15-16, “As He who called you is holy, you also be holy in all your conduct, since it is written, ‘You shall be holy, for I am holy.’”
So as Jesus prays for holiness in the Church, what are the things that keep us from holiness? If we are going to be called to a life of holiness, both as individual believers and corporately as the Church, we need to be aware of the things which threaten us, the first of which is the hatred of the world for God’s people. Jesus prays in verse 14, “I have given them your word, and the world has hated them because they are not of the world, just as I am not of the world.”
This is something Jesus had spoken about to His disciples before. In John 15:18-19 He said, “If the world hates you, know that it has hated me before it hated you. If you were of the world, the world would love you as its own; but because you are not of the world, but I chose you out of the world, therefore the world hates you.”
Jesus had told His disciples they would be hated by the world, and now He brings this issue to the Father in prayer, so it must be important for us to know. The disciples, and every Christian since then are no longer like the world. From the moment we receive God’s Word in faith and are born again to new and eternal life, everything changes.
We might not completely live up to the standards of God’s holiness, but as we grow in grace and in the knowledge of God, we are perceived as a threat and a reproach to the world. If we go all the way back to the fall in the Garden of Eden, we can see what the holiness of God does to those who are unholy. “The Lord God called to the man and said to him, ‘Where are you?’ And he said, ‘I heard the sound of you in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked, and I hid myself.’” (Genesis 3:9-10)
The prophet Isaiah was convicted of his sinfulness when he was given a vision of the throne room of God. “In the year that King Uzziah died I saw the Lord sitting upon a throne, high and lifted up; and the train of His robe filled the temple. Above Him stood the seraphim. Each had six wings: with two he covered his face, and with two he covered his feet, and with two he flew. And one called to another and said: ‘Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts; the whole earth is full of His glory!’ And the foundations of the thresholds shook at the voice of Him who called, and the house was filled with smoke. And I said: ‘Woe is me! For I am lost; for I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips; for my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts!’” (Isaiah 6:1-5)
God’s holiness exposes our sin, and it shames us, while those who are saved by the grace and mercy of God are hated by those who hate God. Mark wrote of John the Baptist, “Herod feared John, knowing that he was a righteous and holy man.” (Mark 6:20)
Just as the world hated Jesus, they hate His followers too, so we should not be surprised when we are personally criticised, shouted down and even hated for the cause of Christ, because He told us this would happen, but we can take courage in knowing that Jesus has prayed and does pray for us.
A second threat we face from the world is moral and spiritual corruption. In verse 15 Jesus prays that the Father would “keep them from the evil one.” We must remember that Jesus is praying for His own here - those who have been called out of the world for Himself. He is praying that God would protect the Church from the corruption of Satan. When a Church becomes confused and starts embracing worldly principles and practices, it loses its focus on the truth of God.
Is a Church’s growth measured in the level of spiritual maturity and spiritual growth of its people, or is it measured in numbers and by the size of the Church’s bank account? We are materialistic by our nature, and it is dangerous when we allow materialism to be the focus of our ministries. The obvious example is the explosion we have seen worldwide in recent decades of the so-called prosperity gospel, where these false teachers dceive people into thinking that God’s greatest desire is for us to be healthy and wealthy, but there are equally dangerous, yet more subtle threats to the purity and holiness of the Church.
There are many isms other than materialism which threaten the Church. When we begin questioning the authority and infallibility of God’s Word, we end up drifting away from the absolute truth of the Bible, and we allow relativism to cloud our vision of the truth. Your truth becomes your truth, and my truth becomes my truth, and so we compromise on fundamental spiritual truths. People no longer want to be students of the Word. The study and teaching of Christian doctrine becomes unfashionable, and the pulpit becomes a place to deliver uplifting motivational pep-talks, rather than a place to exposit and teach the Word of God.
In extreme cases like Hillsong “Church” their “worship services” are no different to modern rock concerts, complete with fancy lighting, blaring music, smoke machines and scantily clad dancers on stage. This is the kind of sensualism that Charles Spurgeon warned against some 150 years ago when he said the time is coming in the Church when the shepherds will no longer be feeding the sheep. Rather, the clowns will be entertaining the goats.
More recently the evils of secular humanism have found their way into the Church. Secular humanism calls into question Biblical teachings on creation, gender and sexuality, so much so that even confessing Christians are calling the Church to reconsider what many call the Church’s outdated and archaic views on homosexuality and Christian marriage. You hear it all the time: It’s about time the Church dragged itself into the 21st century, but when we resist and refuse to compromise Biblical truth, the Church is hated for it.
This is why Jesus prays that the Church - His Church - would be kept and protected by God from the ways of the world and of Satan. His prayer is that the Church would be holy. Peter encourages and exhorts the Church in 1 Peter 2:1-5 and 9-12, “Put away all malice and all deceit and hypocrisy and envy and all slander. Like newborn infants, long for the pure spiritual milk, that by it you may grow up into salvation - if indeed you have tasted that the Lord is good. As you come to Him, a living stone rejected by men but in the sight of God chosen and precious, you yourselves like living stones are being built up as a spiritual house, to be a holy priesthood, to offer spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ. You are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for His own possession, that you may proclaim the excellencies of Him who called you out of darkness into His marvellous light. Once you were not a people, but now you are God’s people; once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy. Beloved, I urge you as sojourners and exiles to abstain from the passions of the flesh, which wage war against your soul. Keep your conduct among the Gentiles honourable, so that when they speak against you as evildoers, they may see your good deeds and glorify God on the day of visitation.”
We need to be aware that the world is watching us, as we are called to be faithful witnesses of the grace and mercy of God. As we are faithful to our calling when we live up to the Biblical standards we proclaim, the world will see that we are different.
Martyn Lloyd-Jones wrote, “When the Church is absolutely different from the world, she invariably attracts it. It is then that the world is made to listen to her message, though it may hate it at first. It should not be our ambition to be as much like everybody else as we can, though we happen to be Christian. Our ambition should be to be like Christ, the more like Him the better, and the more like Him we become, the more we shall be unlike everybody who is not a Christian.”
When Christians reject worldly wisdom and worldly methods and embrace the truth of God instead, the world will see the difference that God can and does make, as God is glorified in and through His Church.
At the heart of Jesus’ prayer for the Church is verse 17. “Sanctify them in the truth; your word is truth.” Again, the Church is to be holy, which is what Jesus prays for as He asks the Father to sanctify her. Sanctification refers to the process by which God increasingly makes us holy, as we learn to turn from sin and embrace the standards God prescribes for us in His Word, the Bible.
We are to be students of the Word, embracing its principles and living by them, and not the standards of the world. We will be accused of being outdated, archaic and even hateful when we proclaim God’s truth, but what else can we do? We are God’s people, and it is He who has shown us how to live. We are not called to modify God’s truth or water it down to make it more attractive and less offensive to the world, as so many are doing these days.
The whole seeker-sensitive movement which began in the early 1980’s did just that, which resulted in a generation of professing Christians who have little or no understanding of Biblical Christian theology, because all they’ve heard Sunday after Sunday is that God is just crazy about them and He has a wonderful plan for their lives.
The Bible teaches that we are sinners in desperate need of a Saviour, and unless we repent and turn to Jesus Christ to be saved, we will spend all of eternity in a very real place called hell. This is the message the world needs to hear. The 20th century American revivalist preacher Vance Havner once said, “It is not our business to make the message acceptable, but to make it available. We are not to see that they like it, but that they get it.”
In verse 14 Jesus prayed, “I have given them your word,” and in verse 17, “Your word is truth.” The apostles received the Word personally from Jesus, and we receive it today as it has been passed down through the ages in the written Word of God.
John MacArthur wrote in his commentary, “The idea of sanctification is the setting apart of something for a particular use. Accordingly, believers are set apart for God and His purposes alone so that the believer does only what God wants and hates all that God hates. Sanctification is accomplished by means of the truth, which is the revelation that the Son gave regarding all that the Father commanded Him to communicate and is now contained in the Scriptures left by the apostles.”
If we want to avoid being corrupted by the world and its ungodly practices, we must be people of the Word. We must be rooted in the Bible and its teachings. We are to submit to the authority of the Bible because it is God’s holy, inspired, and inerrant Word. As Paul wrote in 2 Timothy 3:16-17, “All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work.”
He also wrote in 1 Corinthians 2:12-16, “We have received not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit who is from God, that we might understand the things freely given us by God. And we impart this in words not taught by human wisdom but taught by the Spirit, interpreting spiritual truths to those who are spiritual. The natural person does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are folly to him, and he is not able to understand them because they are spiritually discerned. The spiritual person judges all things, but is himself to be judged by no one. For who has understood the mind of the Lord so as to instruct Him? But we have the mind of Christ.”
And how do we have or know the mind of Christ? By knowing the Word of God as revealed in Scripture.
The problem comes when we let down our guard and allow the world to dictate to us which parts of the Bible are no longer applicable in our alleged enlightened and progressive society.
Some 3000 years ago David wrote in Psalm 19:7-8, “The law of the Lord is perfect, reviving the soul; the testimony of the Lord is sure, making wise the simple; the precepts of the Lord are right, rejoicing the heart; the commandment of the Lord is pure, enlightening the eyes.” Those words are as valid and as true today as they were 3000 years ago.
Our goal as individual believers and as the Church is to be holy, because God is holy, and He teaches us how this happens through His Word, as He sanctifies us in the truth.
Warren Wiersbe put it so well when he wrote, “God’s truth has been given to us in three ‘editions’: His Word is truth (John 17:17); His Son is the truth (John 14:6); and His Spirit is the truth (1 John 5:6). We need all three if we are to experience true sanctification, a sanctification that touches every part of our inner person. With the mind, we learn God’s truth through the Word. With the heart, we love God’s truth, His Son. With the will, we yield to the Spirit and live God’s truth day by day. It takes all three for a balanced experience of sanctification. It is not enough merely to study the Bible and learn a great deal of doctrinal truth. We must also love Jesus Christ more as we learn all that He is and all He has done for us. Learning and loving should lead to living, allowing the Spirit of God to enable us to obey His Word. This is how we glorify Him in this present evil world.”
God’s Word creates holiness within His people, which is exactly what Jesus prays for in John 17:17. “Sanctify them in the truth; your word is truth,” so the path to holiness is found by studying and applying the Bible and its teachings in our lives.
God said through the prophet Isaiah, “As the rain and the snow come down from heaven and do not return there but water the earth, making it bring forth and sprout, giving seed to the sower and bread to the eater, so shall my Word be that goes out from my mouth; it shall not return to me empty, but it shall accomplish that which I purpose, and shall succeed in the thing for which I sent it.” (Isaiah 55:10-11)
God’s Word sanctifies us as we are transformed by the power of the Holy Spirit. It is not us who need to cultivate and grow holiness within us. God does this in us through His Spirit as we yield to the authority of God in our lives, and we do this as we submit to the authority of His Word.
We grow in holiness, becoming more like Jesus and gain increased power to turn from sin to righteousness as we commit ourselves to regular and serious study of God’s Word.
Jesus prayed in verse 15, “I do not ask that you take them out of the world, but that you keep them from the evil one.” God will answer that prayer, but we need to choose to be devoted to studying and obeying the Word of God. This is how we will be protected from the evil one.
Donald Grey Barnhouse wrote: “It is the Word of God that can establish the Christian and give him strength to overcome the old forces and to live the new. It can never be done in any other way. You cannot find one Christian on this earth who has developed into strength of wisdom and witness in the Lord who has attained it by any other means than study and meditation in the Word of God.”
This is what Jesus prayed for in John 17, that we would be sanctified in the truth.
Now we might ask, what is the truth? The world will tell us that the truth is whatever you want it to be. That’s the insanity we see all around us as we’re told it doesn’t matter what you believe, just so long as you’re sincere. What an empty, meaningless way to live your life.
Pilate asked Jesus, “what is truth,” and the world continues to stumble around in the darkness trying to answer that question, but Jesus clearly answers it in John 17:17. “Your Word is truth.”
The Life Application Study Bible notes on John 17:17 say, “A follower of Christ becomes sanctified (set apart for sacred use, cleansed and made holy) through believing and obeying the Word of God. He or she has already accepted forgiveness through Christ’s sacrificial death. But daily application of God’s Word has a purifying effect on our minds and hearts. Scripture points out sin, motivates us to confess, renews our relationship with Christ, and guides us back to the right path.”
Through His Word, God will sanctify us in the truth as He works in us by His Spirit to make us holy, so that we will be able to shine the light of Jesus Christ in this ever-darkening world.