We’re in a great passage of scripture. A couple of weeks ago, we began John chapter 17, uh, chapter this entirely devoted to Jesus, uh, praying, uh, for the disciples that were with him in that upper room. There’s that upper room discourse which covers chapters 13-1 17 in the Gospel of John. Very powerful final evening teaching of Jesus for his followers only just gave it only hours before he was to be arrested and executed. the following day. So, this is a quite a public prayer and that Jesus prayed it aloud, but a very personal and private prayer as well since the ones that Jesus was praying for were right there in the room with him and they were listening to the words that Jesus was praying for them. So, as we read this chapter, Jesus also makes it very clear and we’ll see that next week that he’s praying for us as well. He’s praying for his original disciples and all those who would come after them and would follow him. So, one thing that immediately jumps out as we read the section we’re looking at this morning is the great heart that Jesus has for our protection and our preservation. This is what he prays for his followers. Holy Father, protect them by the power of your name. When I was with them, I protected them and kept them safe. My prayer is not that you take them out of the world, but that you protect them from the evil one. And I I have quite a clear memory from a couple of decades ago when I drove my 18-year-old daughter Jessica from our little small town of Clearwater, BC to the booming metropolis of Cam Loops, BC. And and she was going to be living on her own for the first time, leaving our home, leaving our town, and she’d rented a room with friends and striking out on her own to look for a job, begin making her own way through life. Bought her a little foam mattress for her to sleep on. She had a lamp. She had some hangers. Uh she had her guitar. She had a few bagels to chew on. And really not much other than that. And it came time to leave her. It was a great struggle for me. I didn’t realize it was going to be, but it was hard for me to say goodbye and begin my drive home cuz what if she wasn’t safe? What if she was out at night and and got in some trouble? Or what if she met the wrong guy? Because I’d had the responsibility and the joy of protecting her for 18 years. But now she was she wasn’t going to be in the bedroom just below our own anymore. And what I had to genuinely wrestle with that day was whether or not I could depend on God and trust him with the lives of my children. And if you’re a parent whose children have left home, you know what that feels like. So that evening in the upper room, Jesus was processing and he was praying for what it meant for him to go away and leave his beloved men behind. These 11 guys that shown a lot of growth over the last three years since Jesus had called them and he had spent such concentrated time with them. I think Jesus was proud of them what they had absorbed over those years. So he’s praying to his father. I’ve revealed you to those whom you gave me out of the world. They were yours. You gave them to me and they have obeyed your word. I gave them the words you gave me and they accepted them. and they knew with certainty that I came from you and they believed that you sent me. Now, it’s a great testimony to the stability and the strength of the disciples. You might wonder if you read that if Jesus is maybe going a little far in his estimation of them because we start scanning what we know of the gospels and we think of all those occasions where the disciples were frail and fragile and ignorant and sluggish to obey and to understand what Jesus was teaching them. You think of the time when Jesus had to rebuke Peter because Jesus was speaking very clearly to his disciples about his upcoming arrest and his execution and his resurrection 3 days later. Says in the Gospel of Mark that Peter decided to pull Jesus aside and rebuked him for talking that way for being so negative for spoiling the morale of the troops. And and Jesus had to say to Peter, “Get behind me, Satan.” knowing full well that Peter was being used at that moment by the enemy to insinuate that Jesus’ mission of sacrifices himself was unnecessary. It didn’t need to happen. And that very night that Jesus prayed this prayer for his disciples, he also knew that they would all desert him. He said, “Strike the shepherd and the sheep will be scattered.” And he knew that one key guy would deny even knowing him. But despite all those shortcomings and failures, Jesus prayed that prayer of confidence over his followers. you gave them to me. Uh they have obeyed your word. I’ve preserved them, protected them, kept them safe. Except Jesus says in verse 12, Judas, the uh the one who was doomed to destruction so the scriptures could be fulfilled. So Jesus expressed such confidence in his disciples, but he’s also going to pray some very specific things for them about their for their protection, their preservation, about the fact that they were going going to be living in their culture a bit like fish out of water and about setting them apart for the great mission that he was sending them on. But he had every confidence that they they would succeed. You know, over over the years, I’ve had the privilege of baptizing good number of people. Last Sunday was an exceptional time of rejoicing in God’s work. And the four who came up and they were bold and they gave a clear testimony of how God had met them at various points in their lives and and the work that God had done in them and and they were baptized and it was inspiring and it really was God-honoring. And I I can think of a lot of people that I baptized who have gone on to walk with God and bear good consistent Christian fruit in their lives. But sadly, I I think of many many others. You know, I see their faces of those who seem to have fallen away, who appear to want nothing to do with Jesus anymore. Either Jesus has been banished to the sidelines of their lives, barely perceptible, or they’ve declared outright that they just don’t believe in him anymore. Prayers for protection and preservation, they’re never going to be out of place. They’re never going to be non-essential. We ought to pray that for those four who were baptized last Sunday. And and we ought to pray that for one another that they’ll persevere and be guarded from all that’s going to come against them in life. An enemy that seeks to persuade them that it’s all a hoax. It’s not real. They don’t need to believe in or rely on Jesus to live a good life. All of those thoughts and more. They come against them. They come against us. They’re used against us. So, we should make at least part of our regular prayer lives prayer for the protection over one another and protection over the church. In our passage, Jesus goes on to explain why his prayer, why we need protection, why our Christian lives are going to feel like we’re like we’re walking uphill much of the time, and why despite the difficulties, Jesus is confident that he’ll send us on a mission that’ll be a roaring success. So, let’s f look first at the reasons Jesus states as to why our lives are going to feel the friction of going against the grain of our culture, of our city, of our friends, of the people around us. why it’s always going to seem or often going to seem like hard work and why Christianity always must be countercultural. Over and over again in that upper room, in fact, you look at it, it’s incredible. 51 times in just chapters 13-1 17, Jesus refers to the world. There’s a rising emphasis on the topic because the last two chapters have more references to the world than the previous three. So the world a very prominent theme in this upper room discourse and Jesus doesn’t always use the term in exactly the same way. Occasionally it’s more an innocuous reference to the planet as in Jesus says I’m leaving the world but on most of the occasions many of the occasions Jesus says that his followers are going to collide with the world and the world will hate them. His followers will weep while the world rejoices. The world he says will be a place of suffering and tribulation. At the same time Jesus says the world is the mission field that I am keeping you here for and sending you to. So the main two senses of the term are first that God loves the world. The world create uh contains his created humanity people made in his image. So in John 3:16 for God so loved the world that he sent his son. Jesus affirmed in John 12 I’ve come into the world as a light. I’ve not come to judge the world but to save it. And the other sense of the world as Jesus uses it, it’s like a code for all the peoples and plans and organizations and philosophies and values that belong to a society that is not pointed toward God. The world, as Jesus expresses it there, is an anti-God institution. And that world he says is under the influence of the one Jesus refers to as the foul prince of this world Satan and all his minions of darkness. So the term the world can refer to just humanity that God loves and comes to save Jesus comes for and also to the fallen system under the influence of Satan fully opposed to the world. So the world then it’s like the stage that you and I are on this morning. There’s this great cosmic conflict being played out. And when Jesus, the main protagonist has exited that stage, his followers, you and I, are left on to carry on that mission. So Jesus prays specifically for those on stage who have given their allegiance to him. Verse 9, he says, “I’m not praying for the world, but for those you have given me, for they are yours.” He continues in verses 14- 16, “I’ve given them your word. The world has hated them, for they’re not of the world any more than I am of the world. My prayer is not that you take them out of the world, but that you protect them from the evil one. They’re not of the world, even as I am not of it. Now, Christians, we often summarize what Jesus is saying here, and it’s a fair representation to say that we are meant to be in the world, but not of the world. That’s that’s a good understanding of what Jesus is praying. And the implication of Jesus’ prayer is that being a Christian is not just holding a different set of beliefs or having a different set of ethics uh ethical behaviors. It probably includes those things, but it’s bigger than beliefs or ethics alone. Being a Christian means nothing less than living in an alternate culture that looks quite different than the host culture that we find ourselves placed in. And the alternate culture that we’re in is not meant to seal ourselves off from the host culture, but to attract people from the host culture into our alternate culture. See, one of the bedrock principles of our current modern western host culture is that we belong to ourselves. We answer only to ourselves so long as we don’t harm other people. And our main task is to find and develop our real selves and remain true to our real selves. And in more traditional non-western cultures, it’s not your individual self that matters as much as your family and your tradition. You don’t belong to yourself, but you’re a member of your family, your clan, the group that you belong to. But then this alternate culture of Christianity comes along and says, “No, both modern secular and traditional cultures, they’re missing the point here. You don’t belong to yourself. You don’t belong wholly to your family. But do you know who you really belong to?” The Apostle Paul declares it in 1 Corinthians 6:19. He says, “You’re not your own. You were bought with a price.” So for a Christian, we don’t embrace embrace the ever crumbling idea of self ownership. But nor do we just just glom on to our clan or our family. The context in which Paul is discussing in first Corinthians the fact that we are not our own, but were bought with a price. It’s a discussion of sexual immorality. He says, “Flee from sexual immorality. Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit? You’re not your own. You were bought with a price. Therefore, honor God with your body.” Christianity has always been countercultural, but maybe never more so as an outlier in its strange views concerning sexuality. You know, from the very beginning, 2,000 years ago, Christianity was this tiny, powerless Middle Eastern minority of, very much an afterthought within the supreme host culture of the Roman Empire. And it’s not that Rome was a place where anything could go sexually. It wasn’t just chaos. They had a code and they had a system. They had some sexual honor. Very different though than what was being introduced by Christianity. Luis Perry writes, “What historian K Kyle Harper has described as the first sexual revolution emerged in a slave society in which Roman men enjoyed unrestricted sexual access to the bodies of their social inferiors, including women, including children, and murdered infants were understood as an acceptable consequence of the need for frequent male sexual release. The violation of slaves and other lowborn people was simply, as Harper puts it, beyond the field a vision for ancient thinkers. So all legal systems, she goes on, including the Roman one, have some concept of rape as a forbidden sexual violation. But rape is normally a category that can be committed against only some categories of women. Typically only those whose male kin are inclined to object to the offense and could punish the perpetrator. Says the poor and the friendless, they have no such recourse. They’re basically defined as unrapable. So the moral innovation of Christianity was to reconceptualize rape as a moral wrong to the woman herself regardless of her birth. Paul’s prohibition of he uses the Greek word porna illicit sexual activity including prostitution. It upended an ethical system in which male access to the female body was unquestioned and unquestionable. Whereas the Romans regarded male chastity as profoundly unhealthy, Christians prized it and insisted on it. Early converts were disproportionately female because of the Christian valorization of weakness. It offered obvious benefits to the weaker sex who could for the first time demand sexual continents of men. She says feminism is not opposed to Christianity, it is its descendant. And she goes how on to talk about how in our modern world with the thought that now we’re finally being liberated and liber liberalized sexually with the mantra, you know, love who you love. It’s it’s not needed. not even particularly healthy to think of sex as only appropriate within a heterosexual marriage with the formation of families in view. Sex can be much freer, more recreational than that. There’s a bigger playing field. There’s a wider range of partners for you to express yourself with sexually than than that of shriveled Christianity. And that modern mantra may sound very liberal and liberal and liberating, but Perry says it really represents a society that is repaganizing itself. Paganism never went away. Even in the Western world, the era of Christendom, Christian influence on culture. It’s compared to clearing a forest, that dark, wild, vigorous, menacing, magical forest of paganism. And for its early centuries, when Christians had no power at all in terms of numbers, Christians just quietly, gently pruned and cultivated and cleared spaces within the host culture it sat in. And people on the outside looking in were deeply attracted to that garden with that upper view of heaven. So Christianity flourished greatly increased in numbers. Sexual monogamy protected within marriage along with the equal value of men and women with no regard for high or low social status. That was extremely attractive to pagans who were being burnt out and exploited by their own sexual ethics and practices. So later when Christianity became widespread and influential became part of what is called Christendum, it experienced great power and influence. At times it burned and hacked at that forest to clear greater portions of ground. But in the modern west with Christianity now on the decline, the forest of paganism doesn’t need to be reinvented. It’s always been there. It’s just closing in and it’s threatening to rew which for centuries had been cleared and cultivated. As Perry notes, with no one left to tend the garden, the forest is reclaiming its ground. So the counterculture of Christianity, it confronts, it conflicts with our host culture in terms of personal identity, in terms of sexuality. Also think of things like money. In modern western secular culture, my money is my own. I earned it. I can spend it as I wish. I can be generous to others if I want to be, but I don’t have to be. Or in a traditional culture, my money really kind of resp uh belongs to my family. Maybe I’ll come to Canada and try to get a good job and send money home to my family. And it’s a resource that we we hold communally. And there’s nothing wrong with that. But countercultural Christianity says that our open-handedness, our generosity with our resources, it mirrors what’s been given to us uh in Christ. 1 Corinthians 8, wanting to help the Corinthians just follow through in a commitment that they had made to support their brothers and sisters in need. Paul writes, “For you know that the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ that though he was rich, yet for your sakes he became poor so that you through his poverty might become rich.” That’s a great model that directs us not to think of our money just as our own or just as the property of our family. Rather, our riches come to us from Christ. And as we share them with others, we emulate, we enter into the grace that Jesus has given us. So when Jesus prayed his prayer in the upper room and he extended that prayer to us, he knew that our Christian culture was going to look very different from the host culture, from the world. And sometimes, maybe regularly, depending on where we live in the world, that host culture will really see us as a threat. It will attempt to discredit us and mock us and hate us, even destroy us. I mean, it’s happened throughout history. But Jesus prays, rather than magically transporting us off the world stage, we’ll be protected. He wants to keep us here, will be protected, and the evil one won’t be allowed to have his way with us. That’s a beautiful thing as Jesus taught that Christians could walk boldly and visibly within their culture as a counterculture. We retain our saltiness and we refuse to hide our light under a basket. And it has a tendency to both confuse and attract those from within our host culture. Tim Keller said he was once talking with a a fellow who was a Christian speaker. He spoke on campuses and he would speak to skeptics and then he would talk one-on-one. Afterwards he would uh yeah he would spend as much time as he wanted with various individuals and he gave a talk. He took some questions and answers and afterwards he was talking to a young man who was like the head of the skeptics student association on campus. an atheist, an agnostic, thoroughly skeptic. And the skeptic said to him, “You know what? I’m having trouble understanding you or even explaining you.” And the speaker replied, “Well, tell me why.” And the skeptic answered, “Well, I think you must be undergoing some kind of metamorphosis right now.” Well, why is that? Well, you have these conservative beliefs, conservative moral values, but you have liberal attitudes. You know, you’re very kind to people. You’re understanding. You’re very tolerant. You listen to people. Now, here’s what I want to know. Are you a conservative that’s kind of going liberal, or are you a liberal that’s kind of going conservative? Because I think I’ve caught you in the middle, like when the larva’s coming out of the cocoon becoming a pupa or something like that, and I’m trying to figure out where you’re going. And the speaker said, “No, you don’t understand. I’m a Christian.” And you see, a Christian believes that you’re saved by grace. And what that means is I’m a sinner. I’m corrupt. I can’t trust my own heart. That’s why I believe in absolute truth. That’s what makes me look conservative. But because I’m a sinner saved by grace, not saved by my own good works, it’s inherently humbling. So I can’t be condescending to anybody. I can’t be superior to anybody. I have to listen to people. I can never feel like I’m better than anyone else. And so I actually do believe in these conservative convictions, but it gives me a kind of humble attitude toward people. And the skeptic looked at him and said, “I’m sorry, that’s just impossible. There’s no such thing.” But there is in the counterculture of Christianity. It’s expressed Jesus wants us to live. It is confounding. It’s attractive to those who are outside our host culture who are taking the time to maybe give us a good look. And the reason that Christianity is the leading religion in the world numerically, unlike other religions, we didn’t do it through conquest or through power or through the sword. It’s because our faith in Jesus brought us into a counterculture that continues to both confuse and mystify and attract those from within the host culture. So Jesus prays for his immediate followers for us that we won’t be taken off this stage of the world. We’ll be protected from the evil one. And though we might be inevitably hated by those who are most opposed to God, will also be used to attract and draw people in. But to do that, something else has to happen to you and me. We need to be sanctified. That’s also part of Jesus’ prayer for his original hearers and for us. He prays, “Sanctify them by the truth. Your word is truth. For them I sanctify myself that they too may be truly sanctified.” And what do you think of when you hear that term sanctified? What does it mean? Does it mean to be made holy? Holiness is certainly part of it, but sanctification is broader than being made holy. And one big clue to that is in our passage where Jesus says, “For them,” meaning his disciples, “I sanctify myself.” Of course, Jesus had always been eternally holy, eternally without sin or blemish. He didn’t progressively become more holy. So, sanctification must mean something more than being progressively made holy. A much better I think in biblical definition is that sanctification means to be set aside for a holy or a sacred purpose. That makes sense of Jesus already completely holy saying that he sanctified himself for the benefit of his disciples. And it makes sense of so many of the Old Testament references where something like Mount Si is set aside for a holy purpose. I mean a mountain’s just a mountain. It’s just a hunk of rock. But when God sets it apart for a holy purpose and calls it sanctified, it’s something altogether different. Same thing said about Aaron and his sons and their priestly garments or the various furnishings of the tabernacle. There’s nothing intrinsically holy about a chair. But when it’s constructed and set aside for sacred purposes, then this sanctified quality is bestowed on it. Lord said to Jeremiah, “Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you. Before you were born, I set you apart. So when Jesus prays that we be sanctified by the truth, by the word, he’s asking his father to set us apart by his truth so that we can go out into the world and accomplish his sacred purposes. And a few minutes we’re going to celebrate communion together. And we could, if we wanted to, we could pour out the communion wine or the juice from something as common as a peanut butter jar. And that might sound blasphemous or inappropriate, but if someone has taken the time to scrub out every vessage of peanut butter and thoroughly wash it, maybe put it through the dishwasher a couple times, then that jar could be sanctified, could be set apart for Knox communion services, the vessel that we would use every month. And the encouragement in that is that none of us here are these naturally exquisite crystal decanters, you know, some great craftsman or or glass blower designed so that we’d be beautiful and all inspiring. At Knox Church, we’re all probably more like old peanut butter jars and some of some of you are smoother and some of you are crunchier. that uh despite our commonness, despite the fact that we’re naturally pretty unremarkable people, Jesus has prayed that God would set us aside and use us for his sacred tasks. He’d sanctify us. So, there’s some electricity in that thought for us, isn’t there? And the last couple of weeks, we’ve been watching the Olympics. Uh people who for years have known and devoted themselves to their purpose. You know, someone some athletic body or or someone recognized them and set them apart. They were sanctified. They were set apart for Olympic competition. Knowing that these athletes made every aspect of their life subservient to their purpose, their diet, their sleep regimen, their training. And it didn’t mean they didn’t do anything else for the last four years. I mean, they still had meals with friends and they still watched severance and Stranger Things and they went shopping for clothes and they celebrated family birthdays and anniversaries. They did other things than train for the Olympics. But if you spoke to them and observed their lives, you’d see that everything they did remain subservient to their one overarching goal of competing in the Olympics. And when you and I see what God has set us aside to do and what Jesus has prayed for us, it doesn’t mean that we don’t do other things in our lives that are non-religious things. But that electricity of sanctification starts humming through the wires of our souls and redirects our goals. Jesus prayed for all who would follow him that would be protected that would be in the world but not of the world that would be countercultural would be sanctified would be set apart for sacred purposes and finally that we’d be sent he says sanctify them by your truth your word is truth as you sent me into the world I have sent them into the world and what was Jesus sent in the world to do you know he repeatedly tells us throughout the gospels he says for the son of man came to save and to seek what was lost. For the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve and to give his life as a ransom for many. He says, “For this reason I was born. For this reason, I came into the world to testify to the truth.” He says, “I’ve come into the world as a light so that no one who believes in me should stay in darkness.” Says, “I’ve come that they may have life and have life to the full.” He said, “Just as Moses lifted up the snake in the desert, so the Son of Man must be lifted up so that everyone who believes in him may have eternal life.” When Jesus says, “I came to die in their place for their sins.” Left the glorious, ever glorious culture of heaven to subversively infiltrate the corrupt culture of earth. And he was protected from all those people who sought to kill him prematurely several occasions. He’s able to get away from people who wanted to kill him on the spot. He was certainly sanctified, set apart for the great purpose of saving us. And he was sent and he willingly came for you and for me. And just as he has done, Jesus now sends us out to broadcast the good news. What he has done for all the lost people in the world in our city who are still sitting in darkness, Jesus says. And being sent obviously means we have contact. We mix it up with people. We don’t isolate or insolate ourselves from others. That the monastic life, I know there’s lots of people who who have cherished that and they’ve lived the monastic life. I struggle to make much sense of that in terms of the mission that Jesus has sent us on. Of course, there are some spaces in our culture that we really can’t occupy without compromising our sanctification. But as much as we’re able, as much as we’re able to seek to go where Jesus has sent us, trusting he’ll protect us and preserve us as we go. Author Paul Kingsorth writes how in ancient China uh the state of China distinguished between two different kinds of barbarian outsiders. The raw, the shang, and the cooked, the shoe. And there’s a 12th century document that details the relationship of the Lee people to the Chinese state. The cooked Lee are those who have submitted to state authority. They live among the general population. The raw lee are those who are out living in mountain caves far away from the control and authority of the state. But the state officials actually found they couldn’t trust either group because the cookedly although they were living among them were still very sympathetic with what the rawly were doing outside outside the the walls of the city and applied to what Jesus is sending us to do. We’re to be cooked Christians. We’re not raw Christians. And even though our allegiance and our citizenship, our true culture is that of heaven, Jesus doesn’t at this time choose to take us out of this culture, but to keep us involved in it for the sake of the lost. That’s a big job. It’s a big responsibility for us. It’s not without its dangers. But how encouraging is it for us to know that Jesus has prayed this prayer of power over us? Protection, it’s ours. Sanctification is ours. It’s like that myithil armor that Frodo put on was given on given for the Lord of the Rings so that we can be sent and we can go out into our host culture with confidence that the truth of Jesus is going to keep attracting people from that host culture into our own. So lots to pray about from this message that Jesus prayed for his disciples that night. Here are a few things that we’ll take next couple moments to pray about. Pray that uh that God would protect you and others in this church, particularly those who were baptized last week from the evil one. Pray for the wisdom and the grace to function in the world without becoming un undifferiated from the world. And thank Jesus for the mission he has sent you on to persuade and attract others to him. This is your time of personal prayer and then I’ll continue with prayer in a moment.