“I have manifested Your name to the men whom You have given Me out of the world. They were Yours, You gave them to Me, and they have kept Your word.
Now they have known that all things which You have given Me are from You.
For I have given to them the words which You have given Me; and they have received them, and have known surely that I came forth from You; and they have believed that You sent Me.
“I pray for them. I do not pray for the world but for those whom You have given Me, for they are Yours.
And all Mine are Yours, and Yours are Mine, and I am glorified in them.
Now I am no longer in the world, but these are in the world, and I come to You. Holy Father, keep through Your name those whom You have given Me, that they may be one as We are.
While I was with them in the world, I kept them in Your name. Those whom You gave Me I have kept; and none of them is lost except the son of perdition, that the Scripture might be fulfilled.
But now I come to You, and these things I speak in the world, that they may have My joy fulfilled in themselves.
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.
I do not pray that You should take them out of the world, but that You should keep them from the evil one.
They are not of the world, just as I am not of the world.
Sanctify them by Your truth. Your word is truth.
As You sent Me into the world, I also have sent them into the world.
And for their sakes I sanctify Myself, that they also may be sanctified by the truth.
(John 17:6–19)
The great Scottish preacher, Robert Murray Mcheyne once said, “If I could hear Christ praying for me in the next room, I would not fear a million enemies. Yet distance makes no difference. He is praying for me.”
What do you think you would hear, if you heard Jesus praying for you? The theologian Louis Berhoff said, “Christ is praying for us, even when we are negligent in our prayer life; that He is presenting to the Father those spiritual needs which were not present to our minds and which we often neglect to include in our prayers; and that He prays for our protection against the dangers of which we are not even conscious, and against the enemies which threaten us, though we do not notice it. He is praying that our faith may not cease, and that we may come out victoriously in the end.”
In this great prayer that caps off the Upper Room Discourse, Jesus prays for Himself in the first 5 verses, for His disciples in the next fourteen, and for future disciples in the last seven.
God included Jesus’ prayer to both encourage us, and to teach us about our mission and its dangers. It is like hearing a parent tell you all that she has done to get you ready for a trip. It both encourages you and educates you. Sometimes we need to know a little more about the threats and dangers to our faith.
Especially in a fairly peaceful and relatively comfortable place, we can forget that we have a mission; that we are fundamentally different to the world; that we should expect hostility; that we are not left here to simply live a selfish life. If nothing in your life disrupts Satan’s kingdom, this prayer doesn’t make sense. This prayer only makes sense if we are Christ’s ambassadors, sent into the world. It only makes sense if there is a real danger of our faith coming under fire. Not always the dangers of direct persecution. Sometimes it is the more subtle dangers of spiritual complacency, apathy, lukewarmness, worldliness, compromise, of being ashamed of the Gospel. And what we thought was faith can turn into discouragement, fear, lack of joy, disunity with the church. It can even end up quitting, turning back, renouncing the faith.
Here we will hear Jesus praying for the apostles, and indirectly then, for all believers. We will hear what Jesus knows we need more than anything, and what Jesus wants for us. We’ll move around in this prayer to find the three pillars of this prayer for His disciples. Jesus will give the reasons for His prayer, the requests in His prayer, and the results of His prayer. And in so doing, we’ll find out what Jesus wants for us.
I. The Reasons for Jesus’ Prayer
In a series of statements, Jesus makes it plain why He is praying for the disciples. And it has to do with identity and location: who they are, and where they are.
“I have manifested Your name to the men whom You have given Me out of the world. They were Yours, You gave them to Me, and they have kept Your word. (John 17:6)
“I pray for them. I do not pray for the world but for those whom You have given Me, for they are Yours.
And all Mine are Yours, and Yours are Mine, and I am glorified in them. (John 17:9–10)
When Jesus says He does not pray for the world, He does not mean He never prays for them. After all, on the cross, He prayed for them, when He prayed, “Father, forgive them, they know not what they do”. But here His focus is His disciples.
First of all, the reason the Father should honour Jesus’ prayer for the disciples is that His disciples belong to God the Father. They were the Father’s even before the Son gave them eternal life. This is the high and lofty doctrine of God’s sovereignty in salvation. Believers are selections out of the world.
For whom He foreknew, He also predestined to be conformed to the image of His Son, that He might be the firstborn among many brethren. (Romans 8:29)
He gave them to the Son, and they still mutually own them. There is no difference between what belongs to the Father, and what belongs to the Son. This is a question of possession, of caring for what belongs to you.
But the flip side of that sovereignty coin is the human response: that the disciples heard the message Jesus spoke, and received it.
“I have manifested Your name to the men whom You have given Me out of the world. They were Yours, You gave them to Me, and they have kept Your word.
Now they have known that all things which You have given Me are from You.
For I have given to them the words which You have given Me; and they have received them, and have known surely that I came forth from You; and they have believed that You sent Me. (John 17:6–8)
Jesus is the only begotten Son who manifested, declared the Father that no one has seen at any time. He is the fullness of the Godhead bodily. He is the prism that splits the white light of God’s glory into a spectrum of colours that the human heart can now see and understand. Jesus says the disciples kept the Word, meaning, compared to the world around them, they accepted it, believed it, and have obeyed it.
Verse 7 and 8 tells us that they finally understood the complete equality and unity between Father and Son, that the Son speaks only what the Father gives Him, that the Son is sent from the Father. Look at the verbs in verse 8: they have received them, they have known, and they have believed. There is a great difference between believing Jesus lived, and believing Jesus was sent. When you believe Jesus was sent, you believe Jesus existed before being born; you believe God the Father sent Him, you believe He came for a particular purpose and mission.
God should consider this request favourably because He and His Son own these disciples, and because these disciples responded favourably to the message. They accepted it, and did not reject it.
Now that logically leads to another piece of this puzzle. Now, because of the Father giving them to the Son, and their receiving and believing the Son, these disciples have become alienated from the world. They have changed families, swapped sides. They are in the world, but no longer part of it.
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.
They are not of the world, just as I am not of the world. (John 17:14–16)
To make things seemingly worse, Jesus is physically leaving the world, but they are staying.
Now I am no longer in the world, but these are in the world, and I come to You. (John 17:11)
And Jesus is not going to sequester them and hide them in a special shelter. He is going to deliberately send them into this world that hates them.
As You sent Me into the world, I also have sent them into the world. (John 17:18)
So what do we have as we take these reasons together? People loved and owned by the Father and Son, who accepted and received the Son, who have left the world system of unbelief and are now rejected by the world, but yet must remain in the physical world surrounded by worldliness, and carry out a mission.
It’s as if within a pack of wolves, a few of them are suddenly and instantly turned into sheep. Becoming a red ant in the middle of a black ant colony, becoming a hen while running with the foxes presents danger to you, hostility, opposition, difficulty.
This is in fact the true position of a true Christian in the world. Jesus used those very words, “Behold, I send you out as sheep in the midst of wolves.” (Matthew 10:16)
As a believer, if you have received the message Jesus preached, then an inner change has taken place, a change of nature. According to Colossians 1:13: “He has delivered us from the power of darkness and conveyed us into the kingdom of the Son of His love.”
But that has happened without you leaving the physical world. You are here, but your citizenship has changed, your loyalties are different, your very reason for living is different. The current of the world now flows against what you want to do, and you are a fish swimming upstream, instead of with the current. If you had gone to heaven the moment you received Christ, there would be no dilemma here. But now there is real spiritual danger.
So this is the reason Jesus is praying for His disciples. So what then does Jesus pray?
II. The Requests in Jesus’ Prayer
Jesus only makes two requests in this prayer, which both aim at the same thing. Here’s the first in verse 11.
Now I am no longer in the world, but these are in the world, and I come to You. Holy Father, keep through Your name those whom You have given Me, that they may be one as We are.
While I was with them in the world, I kept them in Your name. Those whom You gave Me I have kept; and none of them is lost except the son of perdition, that the Scripture might be fulfilled. (John 17:11–12)
Jesus uses the unusual title, Holy Father, which some have seen as a blending of Old and New Testament, the holiness of the old, the gift of adoption in the new. Here is the request: Keep through your name.
The word keep means to guard, to preserve, to keep intact. Jesus wants believers to be in the world, but not be destroyed.
He doesn’t mean protection from all danger, pain or trouble. Indeed, in Matthew 10, he told his disciples:
“But beware of men, for they will deliver you up to councils and scourge you in their synagogues.” (Matthew 10:17)
Just a few minutes earlier, he told them in chapter 15:20:
“Remember the word that I said to you, ‘A servant is not greater than his master.’ If they persecuted Me, they will also persecute you. If they kept My word, they will keep yours also.” (John 15:20)
And we remember Paul saying in Romans 8: “Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword?
As it is written: “For Your sake we are killed all day long; We are accounted as sheep for the slaughter.” (Romans 8:35–36)
So Jesus does not mean deliverance from trials and difficulties, pain, or even death. In fact, he clarifies what He means by keep in verse 15.
I do not pray that You should take them out of the world, but that You should keep them from the evil one. (John 17:15)
The word for take in verse 15 is airo, which means to remove from a place altogether. It means to protect by removal. Jesus says, I don’t pray for that. I pray rather that you guard them, protect them from the evil one. (As an aside, this has implications for how we understand the pre or post tribulation rapture, because Revelation 3:10 says:
“Because you have kept My command to persevere, I also will keep you from the hour of trial which shall come upon the whole world, to test those who dwell on the earth.” (Revelation 3:10)
Do not let Satan have his way with them. Do not let that roaring lion tear their faith to pieces. Do not let that serpent bite them with the poison of apostasy, or spiritual defection, or life-corrupting sin.
Do not isolate them from the world, insulate them within the world! Insulate so that they can infiltrate the world. Do not remove them, armour-plate them. Jesus says what that armour-plating, what that insulation is to be. He says, “keep through your name”. God’s name is His person, His character, His nature. To be kept through His name means God keeps us in the place of loyalty to His name. We are kept inside a place of trust and devotion and faith in Him. This is spiritual protection, spiritual preservation. It is God working in us to sustain our faith. It is God preserving our perseverance. It is God maintaining our walk in Him.
The most dangerous thing that can happen to you is not persecution, opposition, trials. Even bodily pain and death comes and is over. The worst thing that can happen to you is for you to be an almost Christian, and to have the Evil One steal from you even the proto-faith you think you have. The worst thing that can happen is for you to think you are in Christ, and not do your part to fight for your faith, and then to have Satan deceive, bewilder, and redirect you.
The ultimate downfall for a professing Christian is losing your faith. Jesus wants disciples protected from what would corrupt or destroy their faith. This is a prayer for spiritual protection, for spiritual preservation, for spiritual perseverance.
You see, it is true that true faith saves us, and the truly saved cannot be lost, but in the drama and combat of everyday life, the line between false and true faith is not always visible to us. The difference between the second, third, and fourth soil in Jesus’ parable of the Sower is invisible until much later. And it is exactly here that Satan gets stuck in, finding those who may be taking steps towards God, but are not yet His. Finding those who mentally are open to truth, but whose hearts have not yet surrendered to Christ. Here Satan wishes to turn the person into a Pharisee, or an apostate, or a cynic, or a skeptic, or a religious moralist, or a self-righteous legalist.
And the best illustration of that is the very person Jesus mentions in verse 12: Judas.
While I was with them in the world, I kept them in Your name. Those whom You gave Me I have kept; and none of them is lost except the son of perdition, that the Scripture might be fulfilled.
Judas is called the son of perdition, a title that is also given to the future antichrist, because he will also masquerade as one close to the things of God, but then betray them. Jesus says Judas is lost. But He also says everyone whom the Father gave to the Son, He kept them. The implication is that Judas doesn’t seem to be one that the Father gave to the Son. Because otherwise, we are left with the troubling idea that Jesus failed to keep one of the ones the Father gave. Judas was not one of those the Father gave, otherwise, Jesus did not faithfully steward the Father’s gifts.
But Judas is an example of one who is close to the things of God, but not inside them, close to the truth, but has not embraced it, close to faith, but not possessing it. And such a one is like those tragic people who get out of their cars in the game park. Outside the car, the lion will maul you. Outside of being kept in the name, Satan entered Judas, and turned him into a full apostate and betrayer. The Scripture predicted it, it was going to happen, but yet Judas made his own choice, acted freely, and became, by his own hand, the son of perdition.
So Jesus says, keep them believing and trusting. I kept them believing and trusting while I was with them. Now, sustain their faith. Keep them from stumbling as Jude 1:25 puts it. Finish the work you have begun in them, as Philippians 1:6 puts it. Keep them by the power of God through faith for salvation as 1 Peter 1:5 puts it. Keep them in Your hand and let no one snatch them out as John 10:28 puts it.
But if faith is like walking, then the implication is while God is going to give us the energy, we must keep walking. He will sustain our belief, but we must keep believing. This is why Paul says we must “continue in the faith, grounded and steadfast, and are not moved away from the hope of the gospel which you heard” (Colossians 1:23). It’s why he tells us to “Fight the good fight of faith, lay hold on eternal life” (1 Timothy 6:12).
Eternal security is guaranteed by God’s gift and Christ’s prayer. But guaranteed does not mean automatic. It is guaranteed to those who truly have faith. The discovery of who has true faith is exactly what life reveals, and exactly what Satan attacks. So your part is to persevere, to seek to grow your faith, knowing that Jesus is praying that the faith of His true disciples will endure.
One of the ways that happens is through Jesus’ second request, which complements this first.
Sanctify them by Your truth. Your word is truth.
And for their sakes I sanctify Myself, that they also may be sanctified by the truth. (John 17:17, 19)
Set them apart for your own use, by using the truth. The Word. Let the Word of God keep cleansing them, separating them from the world, causing them to live in the domain of your name, living in loyal faith to you.
So then faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the word of God. (Romans 10:17)
It is as believers are indwelt by the Word, that learning turns to loving, which turns to living. You internalise the Word, it shapes your affections, which then shapes your actions. Jesus says, Father, use the Word of God to keep setting them apart from the world, less like the world, more like Me. Transform them into the image of your Son that they may truly be in Your name, preserved and safe and located within saving faith.
To sum up: Jesus says: keep their faith. Insulate them with truth. Protect them from the evil one who savages false faith and fake faith and man-made faith. Sanctify and keep them believing.
Now, what will happen if the Father answers Jesus’ prayer? What will happen if believers are kept and sanctified while in the world?
III. Results of Jesus’ Prayer
Holy Father, keep through Your name those whom You have given Me, that they may be one as We are.
The first result of persevering, preserved believers will be this spiritual unity. It is a oneness that mirrors the Trinity. Jesus as the Father, Son, and Spirit are three persons, yet they are one Being. So believers are Jew and Gentile, male and female, wealthy and poor, old and young, but in all this diversity, we have unity. Our unity is our oneness in Christ, where we sense that having Jesus in common, makes our differences insignificant. As Paul put it:
”There is one body and one Spirit, just as you were called in one hope of your calling; (Ephesians 4:4)
… where there is neither Greek nor Jew, circumcised nor uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave nor free, but Christ is all and in all. (Colossians 3:11)
When we persevere in loyal faith to His name, we experience the spiritual, supernatural, organic unity and union in Christ. This is not primarily an outward, organisational unity. People are always asking, “Why are there so many churches? Why can’t we just all come together and have one kind of Christianity?” Organisational unity is impossible as long as the world is fallen. There will always be false teachers, false believers, immature believers, differences of opinion, deeply rooted historical and traditional differences. The Bible is a big and complex book, and there will always be enough interpretive differences to warrant different expressions, different conviction.
No, Jesus is not praying for some big ecumenical movement, some big morphing of all Christian churches into a shapeless mass who no longer have any convictions or distinctive beliefs. He is praying that believers, particularly Jews and future Gentile members of the church, will sense our complete spiritual equality in Christ, and enjoy the union and unity. That particularly our local churches would be expressions of our spiritual union in Christ.
Because, as we’ve seen during the Upper Room Discourse, one of the great consolations and comforts after being rejected by the world is the reception you have in God’s family. Professing Christians who neglect the church end up becoming reclusive, sometimes even hostile, even paranoid, because they get rejected by the world, but then do not experience acceptance in God’s family. After a week of dealing with the world’s hostile ways, its twisted priorities, its cutthroat ethics, its immoral sexuality, its depraved entertainment, to then come and enjoy spiritual unity at church with people very different from you in other ways – it’s deeply comforting, strengthening. It is, as Hebrews 10 puts it, when we do not forsake the assembling of ourselves together we encourage one another all the more. Jesus says, let them come back to HQ, come back to the family table, come back to the refuge of the body of Christ, to strengthen them to remain insulated while in the world.
First result – spiritual unity with other believers.
Here is the second result of Jesus’ prayer.
But now I come to You, and these things I speak in the world, that they may have My joy fulfilled in themselves. (John 17:13)
Joy fulfilled. This means joy brought to the full. This is not even our joy, it is His joy, the joy of Jesus that now comes into us and completely fill us to overflowing. Jesus spoke of this in 15:11.
“These things I have spoken to you, that My joy may remain in you, and that your joy may be full.” (John 15:11)
Spurgeon said, “What an unselfish Saviour! His heart is ready to break with his impending sufferings, and yet he prays for us, that we may be filled with his joy. I suppose that it is true that the Man of sorrows was the happiest man who ever lived. ‘For the joy that was set before him, he endured the cross, despising the shame;’ and, notwithstanding his boundless and bottomless grief, yet there was within him such communion with God, and love to men, and the certainty of his ultimate triumph, that kept him still joyous above the seas of tribulation. He prays that that same joy may be fulfilled in us; may God graciously grant it to all of us who believe in Jesus!”
Someone once said, “The opposite of joy is not sorrow. It is unbelief.” If you have this persevering faith, that keeps you in the name of God, then you will have this joy. Joy in the past forgiven, joy in the present having purpose, joy in the future being guaranteed.
When you think about it, the world is chasing wealth, comfort and security, because it thinks that there will be a pot of golden joy at the end of that rainbow. But I don’t need to give you any illustrations of why that isn’t true, because every one of us has plenty of illustrations of that. People we know who have the life, and are miserable. People who got it all: the looks, the partner, the money, the holidays, the house and car and gadgets, the kids, and do they have joy? Exhibit A: Hollywood celebrities – who have it all, and are on marriage number 5, hooked on drugs, living in the deepest depression. What would you rather have: the untroubled, comfortable, secure, materialistic life, with no joy; or a life with trial, trouble, difficulty, danger, neediness and fullness of joy? The world promises the stuff, but not the joy. Jesus promises the joy, with or without the stuff. And when you have the joy, you have life and life in abundance.
When the Father answers the prayer of Jesus, the true disciples are kept secure and sanctified in the faith, and in their persevering faith, they experience the sweetness of unity with each other, and maximum joy in their Christian lives. The family of God plus the fullness of joy can weather anything Satan and the world throws at us.
Does the prayer of Jesus fit you? Are you a called-out, believing Christian who is no longer of the world, and sees yourself as a representative of Jesus the King? Are you getting close enough to the front-line that it makes sense to pray for protection from the evil one, preservation of your faith, consecration to service? The way you will know is that the results of this faith are an overflowing joy, and a deep sense of loving unity with the Body of Christ.
Maybe not, and you need to still practice verse 6 in your life: receive the message about Jesus being sent by the Father, believe it and receive Him into your life as your Lord and Life and Saviour.
Maybe you need to make a break with the world and turn to Him with all your heart. Because far more dangerous than what Satan can do to you, is what rebellion against God will do to you for an eternity. The most precious thing in the world is that lifeline called faith. Take it, if you have not already. Keep it and fight for it if you have. And know that Jesus is praying for you to keep it.