So, we’re finishing off uh John chapter 17 uh this morning. This is that magnificent prayer that Jesus uttered just hours before he was to be arrested and executed the next day. And in the concluding section of the prayer that we’re looking at this morning, Jesus was looking far down the corridor of history. He knew that his church would start from nothing and then his influence would spread like yeast in dough all over the world. But before that seed was even sown, Jesus could envision the abundant harvest that was to come. So he prays with his with his eye on us this morning, saying to his father in heaven, “My prayer is not for them alone,” meaning the 11 men that were gathered around him in the room. I pray also for those who will believe in me through their message. And to hear Jesus praying for us, it’s immensely encouraging, motivating for us. you know, our our church namesake guy named John Knox was a 16th century uh church reformer based mainly in Scotland. And he was calling the church back to the word of God in opposition to the institutional church that had really drifted away from its roots in scripture. And in 1572 when John Knox was on his deathbed, he asked his wife if she would come and read uh to him this chapter, John 17, saying that this scripture was where he first cast his anchor. And if you and I are casting our anchor in the word of God, this chapter is not a bad place to start. So let’s look at what Jesus saw to be the most important things to pray for his church including our own knocks local expression of it as Jesus saw the church unspooling down through down through the ages. And it’s it’s not hard for us to see immediately what Jesus’ primary concern or request was for. He says I pray also for those who will believe in me through their message that all of them may be one. Father, just as you are in me and I am in you, may they be also in us so that the world may believe that you’ve sent me. I’ve given them the glory that you gave me that they may be one as we are one. I in them, you in me. May they be brought to complete unity to let the world know that you sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me. There’s just an overarching concern for the unity of believers there. And it shouldn’t be imagined though that Jesus was seeking just a a visible institutional kind of unity for his church. That’s not what we was what he was praying for because a few verses earlier in this prayer Jesus asked his followers to sanctify uh Jesus asked his father to sanctify his followers by the truth adding your word is truth. And in verse eight he affirmed that he had given the father’s words to the disciples. They had accepted those words and had obeyed them. And now Jesus prays for all those who will believe through the message of the disciples. So wrapped into that prayer for unity, Jesus is emphasizing a unity that’s based on words and a message. Meaning that the glue of Christian unity, it’s embedded in content. It’s embedded in what we believe. Unity is grounded in sound teaching. It’s wordbased. It’s not just some soft ecumenical idealism. Jesus is praying for people he says who he has taken uh who is are separated from the world who taken out of the world who’ve responded to a specific message left in the world to take that message to others. So there’s no squishy kind of universalism in Jesus’ prayer for unity. It’s not like everyone’s supposed to gather around and hold hands and sing John Lennon’s Imagine about no hell and no heaven and everyone living in peace. Not the kind of unity that Jesus is praying for. You know, I’ve been in ministerial groups where pastors and ministers and priests all get together once a month or so and we have coffee and we chat about a number of things. And in those groups, I found the people to generally be friendly, our conversations polite. None of us come with the agenda to jump on one another’s toes. But in a group like that where our Christian beliefs might be wildly diverse, we really can only talk about what we hold in common, the lowest common denominator of church work. Maybe what we served at our potluck the last Sunday or a renovation we’re doing on our building. If the conversation becomes doctrinal ever becomes truth-based, then it becomes pretty obvious how far apart we might be in our understanding of the word of God. Some in the group might barely believe in the Bible at all or they operate their churches with a very modern critical uh deconstruction reinvention of all that the Bible is saying. And so most of our conversations in a group like that remain safely benol. They’re not vibrant spiritual times where we would share scripture with one another and pray together at the end. We try to get along. We try to respect one another. We’re careful not to disturb the peace such as it is. But it can feel to everyone involved like a bit of a waste of time to kind of feain a fellowship that’s only really loosely based on truth on what we actually believe. I was in a group like that once and the one time I couldn’t be there. The tension of pretending that the group was of one faith and one understanding concerning the word of God, it became too much for the Pentecostal pastor who was involved. And he could be a bit of a fire breather. that he decided that day to tear a strip off the liberal-minded participants and just stomp out. And I don’t think what he did was very subtle or necessarily helpful in changing anyone’s minds or their doctrinal positions. But I understand the frustration. It comes out of what Jesus prayed for that Christian unity needs to be truth-based. It needs to be wordbased or else we don’t really have any kind of glue holding us together. Christian unity, it can’t be merely cosmetic. It can’t also fit just under the umbrella of one single visible hierarchical institution or organization. Author Gavin Ortland writing about what it means to be Protestant notes that the uh major Christian traditions outside of Protestantism and this would be Roman Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy, Oriental Orthodoxy, and the Assyrian Church of the East. Each one of those claims to be the one single true church. And each of them to the exclusion of all others see themselves as the original church that Jesus founded. And they may differ a little bit on whether or not they would consider us at Knox to be real Christians. Whether any of us would be saved at all, whether our sacraments, our observation of baptism or the Lord’s Supper has any validity to it at all. But each of them would insist that because we’re not under their institutional umbrella, we’ve fallen short. We’ve certainly missed God’s best when it comes belonging to the one it comes to belonging to the one true church. And all of the main nonprotestant traditions see the real church restricted to their institution subject to their hierarchy. But that’s also an artificial type of unity. You know, you read the book of Acts and it’s it’s raw and it’s ragged. It’s like the wild west. And uh the gospel is spreading rapidly among very diverse cultures. And the unity is fluid. It’s organic. It’s spiritual. And the apostles and the missionaries sharing the gospel, they don’t make any attempt to build intricate hierarchies or formal institutions. That’s not the kind of church unity that Jesus is calling us to. Now maybe before we talk about the true unity that Jesus is looking at, we should take a moment and just consider the kinds of doctrines that are of such importance that we really couldn’t have fellowship if we disagreed on them. Several times in the New Testament read, we read of people in the church whose teachings are false. And Paul tells Timothy in 1 Timothy 1, just command them to stop because they’ve wandered away from sincere faith. Paul says they want to be teachers but they don’t know what they’re talking about or what they so confidently affirm. So to pay attention to what Paul is saying here we need some criteria some way of recognizing what are minor innocuous differences among churches or traditions and what differences are so significant that we really can’t retain fellowship any longer. Gavin Ortland is a he’s a good Christian speaker and a writer. He’s always doing what he can to build bridges uh with those outside our Protestant tradition. He has a book called Finding the Right Hills to Die On. And he suggests four ranks of doctrines that help us evaluate whether or not we continue in fellowship with those we disagree with. First rank are those doctrines that are absolutely essential to the gospel itself. Second ranked doctrines, he says, are urgent for the health and practice of the church and differences in those areas often do result in separations among churches and denominations and ministries. Third kinds of doctrines, they’re relatively or they’re important to Christian theology, but not enough to justify separation or division among Christians. And fourth are doctrines that are relatively unimportant. uh they don’t get in the way of our gospel witness or our corporate fellowship with other believers. Orland suggests that in looking at any specific issue, we need to do some triage. We need to assess how serious our disagreement really is. Is what we’re arguing about essential? Is it urgent? Is it important? Is it relatively unimportant? And it’s no secret if you look around at some of the more established mainline churches in Canada, US, the UK, particularly over the last 15 years or so, separation, denominational splits have occurred primarily over issues dealing with same-sex marriage, same-sex relationships. And the more conservative historical evangelical wings of those denominations, those who are most like us in the evangelical free church, they consider those historical doctrines to be concerning marriage and sexuality to be not essential to the gospel but urgent for the health and practice of the church. And so after usually after years and decades of trying to call their denominations to retain a historical understanding about marriage and sexuality, often with tears in their eyes, they decide they just need to leave. And there’s no gloating or rejoicing in any of that. The world, I think, always looks in confusion when Christian churches, traditions that might have been together for hundreds of years, come apart at the seams. There are certainly some doctrinal hills that we need to die on to remain faithful to Christ. But it takes wisdom and discernment for us to realize what those are. We need to separate ourselves over gospel issues, over urgent issues, serious issues. We can’t afford to separate over matters that are minor and non-essential without shrinking our potential Christian fellowship down to near nothing. You know, my district superintendent, guy named Bob McKenzie once was a good guy and he told me the story of a ship that was passing a deserted island and captain looked out through his scope and greatly surprised to see a man standing on the beach wa desperately waving to gain attention. And the captain and a few crew members took the small boat to the island. When they arrived, the man just fell at their feet and he’s so grateful to finally be rescued. Having been shipwrecked, he’d spent many, many years alone on the island, giving up real hope of rescue. And before departing for the for the big ship, the stranded man gave the captain a tour of what he had accomplished over those years. He’d built a little rudimentary house for himself and a garden and a root seller for storing fruit and vegetables. And not far from the house, the captain saw this solid, well- constructed building, had a cross on the top, and asked what that was. And the man said proudly, “Well, I’m a Christian. That’s my church. It’s where I go to worship every Sunday. Looking a little further down the beach, the captain spied another sizable structure that seemed to have fallen into disrepair and asked the man, “Well, what’s that for?” And the man grimaced and pursed his lips and muttered, “Oh, that that’s the church I used to go to.” You know, we’ll have no fellowship or unity at all with anyone if we constantly argue over non-essential, non-urgent articles of faith. We have a responsibility in the Holy Spirit to discern what’s loadbearing and what’s only cosmetic. So Jesus prays for our unity insisting that it be word-based, truth-based, message-based if it’s going to be genuine and lasting. All right. So if the unity Jesus calls us to is not to be merely ecumenical or institutional in nature, let’s consider what true Christian unity looks like and how to maintain it. One thing to notice in our passage and this is powerful is the quality of the unity that Jesus is praying for us that the quality of the unity that Christians would have would be no less than the unity of the trinity. No less than the unity that Jesus enjoys with his heavenly father. Just step back from that for a moment. This is astounding. Jesus prays, “I pray also for those who will believe in me through their message that all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you, that they may be one as we are one.” Well, you can’t slide a piece of paper between the unity of the Father and his son Jesus Christ. They’re completely united. Jesus said once, “If you see me, you see the Father. I and the Father are one. I can only do what I see the father doing. How many ways can Jesus say that there’s never been even the smallest margin of disagreement within the trinity. The father, the son, the holy spirit completely one, eternally exist in peace and unity. And Jesus prays that his future followers including you and I would experience that s same kind of ironclad unity. Not a unity that we have to work to create. Our task is just to maintain what’s already there. In Ephesians 4:3, we’re instructed to be eager to maintain the unity of the spirit in the bond of peace. There’s a world of difference between manufacturing and maintaining something. Someone else goes to all the work of manufacturing things like our cars and our computers and then we just maintain them with regular oil changes or security updates. Maintenance is so much easier than manufacturing. And if the Holy Spirit has already put the pieces together, he’s done all the assembly and the soldering to bring about the successful unity of God’s people, God’s family, then maintaining that unity really shouldn’t be that much trouble. But of course, it is because we’re sinful. We’re selfish people. So, we’re all as slippery as a tank of eels when it comes to maintaining unity. History of the church is littered with broken relationships, with severed fellowships. Quite a few years ago, one of the churches in the district I was part of was going through a very difficult time. Members had been bickering and accusing one another for quite a while. The church was on the verge of coming apart at the seams. I was on the district board at the time. We decided as a group to travel up and visit that church, try to help them pull things back together. So, we drove up and we met with representatives over the course of a few days. and it led up to a congregational meeting that the church had planned to basically heir their grievances. And they didn’t trust any of their own leaders to run that meeting. So, as district chairman, I, an outsider, was given the the horrible job of running that meeting, and it was awful. I used Robert’s rules of order. I I was able to keep things basically under control, but invisibly, spiritually, it was chaotic. Their dispute, it was not doctrinal. It wasn’t a disagreement over truth. There were personal issues involved. Just a lack of trust, a a suggestion, a hint of moral failure. A motion was made to dismiss the entire church leadership, the pastor and the elders. That was what they were discussing that night. And their agenda, they spent the first hour reading 33 pages of charges and allegations against the leadership. Second hour was given to largely reading letters of support for church leadership. In the third hour was an open forum where the accused could defend themselves if they wanted. And the most heart-wrenching contribution that night was when a couple of fairly new, fairly young Christians stood up. And they weren’t polished and they weren’t articulate. One had just been released from jail on a pretty serious charge. They just spoke from their hearts and they said, “What are we doing? How can we do this? How can we tear one another apart and split up this church? To them as new Christians, it was just incoherent that people in the church they loved and respected and leaders they followed who were helping them grow would be devouring one another that night. But their words were to no avail and the minds of the people in the congregation were made up and the vote to retain the pastor received 42 votes votes for 42 votes against. Pastor and all the elders resigned that night. number of others publicly withdrew their membership and the church it just split apart. People were weeping in the foyer as they realized they’d no longer be worshiping together alongside people they had loved and worshiped with for many years. So in stunned silence, people began leaving the building. And this church had once been an average about 400 members and it was quickly reduced to about 60. And I think people in the outside world despite maybe not believing in any Christian doctrine, they might understand that there are some doctrinal matters, some beliefs in the church that if disputed are serious enough to merit separation. But how are they to understand a non-doctrinal situation where people who all say they love and follow Jesus just can’t get along with one another? You know, the minute we say of a fellow Christian, “Oh, I’m not going to forgive that person.” We’re denying our faith. We’re becoming a walking advertisement for atheism, Jesus prayed, “May they be brought to complete unity to let the world know that you sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me.” So as as Christians, we know we make truth claims that are quite absurd maybe in the minds of those outside the church that Jesus, God himself, came from outer space and landed on earth and and he died on the cross and it was a cosmic transaction that could take away our guilt and take away our sin. And he didn’t stay dead. He rose from the grave on the third day. And now when we place our our faith and trust in him alone, we receive the gift of eternal life. Those those claims might sound crazy to those outside the church, but if they can look in within these walls and see a community that displays an astounding supernatural degree of love and forgiveness for one another, that makes our truth claims much more plausible. May they be brought to complete unity to let the world know that you sent me and have loved them even as you’ve loved me. So the engine of our faith, the engine of any church runs on forgiveness. The gospel says that the moment we believe, God starts loving us not as we deserve, but as Jesus deserves. You notice the second part of that sentence I just read. It says, “May they be brought to complete unity to let the world know that you sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me.” See what Jesus is saying there? He’s saying that the moment we become a Christian, the second we believe, God the father loves us as much as he loves his son Jesus Christ. Gospel says the moment we place our faith, our trust in what Jesus has done for us on the cross, God starts loving us not as we deserve but as Jesus deserves. no distinction between the Father’s love for Jesus and his love for all of his adopted children, for all those who have repented of their sins and turned to him in faith, knowing and believing that, how then could we ever withhold forgiveness from one another? How could we not just enjoy unity and fellowship and joy with every other Christian? Jesus said, “If you don’t forgive your brother from the heart, my father will not forgive you.” And he taught us to pray, forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors. Jesus’ point in this great high priestly prayer in John 17 is that the unity of Christians really potent evangelistic tool. It shows the world something unique and wonderful that’s going on inside these walls. Equally potent reminder of just how much we’re loved by our heavenly father every bit as much as he loves his eternal son, Jesus Christ. So amazing things can happen to us. Amazing things come over us as we embrace Jesus and then are united in love to those in our church and our family, this community. David Martin Lloyd Jones, he was a 20th century preacher. He was best known for 30 years that he spent ministering at Westminster Chapel in London. He didn’t start out as a preacher. He didn’t even start out as a Christian. His career was medicine. He was trained at St. Bartholomew’s Hospital in London. He was rising to prominence. He eventually served as an assistant to the Lord hoarder who was the physician to the royal family. By every social measure in the early 20th century in Britain, Martin Lloyd Jones was on the ascent position, prestige, access to the highest levels of society and had always lived a fairly moral life. he had attended churches where he said the preaching was always based on the assumption that we were all Christians that we wouldn’t have been there in that congregation if we weren’t Christians. And he said for many years I I thought I was a Christian when in fact I was not. It was only later that I came to see I’d never been a Christian. I became one. What I needed, he said, was preaching that would convict me of my sin and would make me see my need and bring me to repentance and tell me something about regeneration, but I never heard that. Now, eventually he was exposed to the true gospel and he came face to face with the reality of his own sin. And he described that realization. It was it was just it was absolutely life-changing for him. He says, “I’m a Christian solely and entirely because of the grace of God, not because of anything I’ve thought or said or done. He brought me to know that I was dead, dead in my trespasses and sins, a slave to the world and the flesh and the devil. That in me dwelt no good thing. I was under the wrath of God and heading for eternal punishment. He brought me to see that the real cause of all my troubles and ills and that of all men was an evil and fallen nature which hated God and loved sin. My trouble was not only that I did things that were wrong but that I myself was wrong at the very center of my being means he says the only way forward is through repentance to turn from our sin to God in faith without repentance there’s no salvation accompanying repentance is saving faith trust in Christ as our Lord and Savior we understand that his shed blood is the only means by which we can find forgiveness we come to an understanding that Christ died to save us from the penalty of sin the power of sin and ultimately the presence of sin. Now following his conversion, Lloyd Jones wrestled with whether or not to remain in his highly successful medical career or go into the ministry and he was working through this process. He was looking at the case notes of his mentor’s medical practice and he saw many patients that were being healed only return only to return to lives of sin and fall ill again and eventually die and he thought am I really doing the best that I can do with my life and that struggle between his promising medical career his call to ministry lasted a couple of years and the decisive moment came he said when he attended an opera with friends they were leaving the theater where this beautiful opera music had been performed and and they encountered uh a simple Salvation Army band playing hymns on the street. Lloyd Jones recalled, “There’s a theme in Vagner’s opera Tanhouser, the two pulls, the pull of the world, the chorus of the pilgrims, contrast between the two.” He says, “I’ve very often thought of it. When I heard this Salvation Army band and the hymns, I said, “Well, these are my people. These are the people I belong to. I’m going to belong to them. So he left his medical practice behind and he didn’t try to accept a comfortable position in London. He began his ministry in a small economically depressed town in Wales. Ministering among workingclass families, steel workers, and laborers and fishermen. And his early pastoral ministry, as he got to know the people, he discovered something that deeply impressed him. He found that these ordinary believers had a serious seriousness about God, a depth of spiritual experience, a grasp of scripture that surprised him. These were not socially prominent people. Many of them had very little formal education, but they possessed what he later called experimental religion, lived heartfelt Christianity. What struck him was not merely that he could preach to them. It was that he had absolutely genuine fellowship with them. The gospel had created this unity that cut across across class lines. This is in a society that was very rigid and deeply ingrained concerning class. And he went on not just to become a good preacher but a great preacher. And his goal in preaching as he described it was to present logic on fire. Logic on fire. I like that. He discovered that this classless raceless Christian unity where men and women and educated and una uneducated and the elite and the poor they discovered they were all equal in the sight of God. So just in closing very briefly look at the final words that Jesus prayed before going out in that night to be arrested. He prayed, “Father, I want those you have given me to be with me where I am to see my glory. The glory you have given me because you loved me before the creation of the world. Righteous Father, though the world does not know you, I know you and they know that you have sent me. I have made you known to them. I will continue to make you known in order that the love you have for me may be in them and that I myself may be in them. Look at the last phrase Jesus utters before he goes out in the night. That I might be in them. His last and greatest desire is to love his followers, to indwell them, to fill them with the glory and the joy that he has known so that our knowledge and experience of God would be really overwhelming in our lives. So may we see this great prayer of Jesus just answered and fulfilled in our lives, in our church, in our congregation, and the many, many congregations throughout this city that honor Jesus Christ. Here are some things that we could pray about. Pray, just take a moment and and pray for faithfulness and discernment as you handle the truth of God’s word. Know what is serious and what is innocuous in terms of what we believe. Pray that as far as it depends on you, you would seek to maintain the unity with fellow Christians that the Holy Spirit has created. Thank Jesus for the glory he’s shown you and his deep desire to reside in you. Just take a few moments of your own personal prayer time and then I’m going to continue on in prayer.