Praying Like Jesus Prayed

I have a serious question for you this morning. Do I look tired to you?

I have to tell you that lately I’m about as tired as I ever have been, and I cannot imagine that my face doesn’t show it.

I need to unload a bit, and I hope you’ll indulge me. There’s a point to the over-sharing that I’m about to do.

Last Friday, I finished a very hard semester at Dallas Seminary, and on Monday, I started a new one.

For the most part, I have been able to juggle the interim pastorate here at Liberty Spring Christian Church, along with my seminary studies and a part-time job.

But in February, we were all thrown for a loop. The coronavirus forced us to come up with new ways of holding church services, new ways of bringing the church together in community, and new ways of reaching out to the world around us, and the learning curve for doing those new things has been steep and exhausting.

In the midst of all of that, my family has been in the process of buying a new house and preparing to move into it.

We are downsizing to a condo just a few minutes from our current home, and I want to assure you that I am still committed to the work the Lord has given me to do with this flock.

But the added stress of the home-buying process and the impending move has worn us all down, and to be honest, I haven’t handled it all that well.

And now, as we consider how and when we might move these services back inside the church building, what I see ahead of us is a lot more work, and the truth is that I wonder whether we will simply go back to the way things were or whether we will take some of the lessons we have learned about worship and service and make something new of this church.

And as I worry about those things, I must tell you that I’m simply exhausted. And in my exhaustion, I find myself feeling that I am being sifted like wheat, that Satan has sought permission to use my own frailty and weakness to destroy me, as he tried to do with Simon Peter.

Luke records that Jesus warned Peter of Satan’s demand to sift the disciples like wheat during the Last Supper.

I’d like you to turn to Luke, Chapter 22 and read this short passage with me. We’ll pick up in verse 31.

The disciples had just been arguing about which one of them should be considered the greatest in the Kingdom of Heaven. And Jesus had lightly scolded them, telling them that they are not to be like the kings of the Gentiles, who lorded their authority over others.

And then came His warning, not just to Peter, but to all the disciples at this Last Supper. We’ll pick up in verse 31.

Luke 22:31–34 NASB95

“Simon, Simon, behold, Satan has demanded permission to sift you like wheat; but I have prayed for you, that your faith may not fail; and you, when once you have turned again, strengthen your brothers.” But he said to Him, “Lord, with You I am ready to go both to prison and to death!” And He said, “I say to you, Peter, the rooster will not crow today until you have denied three times that you know Me.”

Peter said he was willing to go with Jesus to prison and even to death. In his arrogance, he couldn’t imagine himself failing his Lord.

Peter thought he had it all together. He was confident and proud. Sometimes I am those things, too. And those are two of the devil’s favorite weapons to use against us.

And he would use those weapons against Peter especially, since he was the leader of the disciples.

But as I was reading this passage this week, thinking how much like Peter I can be in my pride and my confidence, thinking how much I feel Satan sifting me these past couple of months, thinking how many times I have failed in my faithfulness to the Lord, something struck me.

Do you see it there in verse 32?

“But I have prayed for you.”

Jesus had prayed for Peter and for the other disciples. In fact, He had prayed for us, as well, in what is known as His High Priestly Prayer, which you will find in the 17th chapter of the Gospel of John.

Turn there now, if you would.

This very night when Jesus warned of Satan’s intentions for the disciples, they had all been gathered in an upper room of a house in Jerusalem to celebrate Passover, the last one Jesus would celebrate before his death on a cross the very next day.

He had washed their feet, He had told Judas Iscariot that He knew Judas would betray Him, He had instituted the sacrament of communion, and He had warned the 11 disciples who remained after Judas had left that He would be betrayed and crucified and that they would all fall away from Him in His last hours.

Jesus Christ was God’s unique and eternal Son, who had been sent to show man the character of His Father and to demonstrate how man had been created to live.

And yet He would be arrested that very night in the Garden of Gethsemane. He would be tried before Jewish and Roman authorities and found to be innocent, but He would be nailed to a cross anyway.

And there on that cross, the sinless Son of God would take the punishment for the sins of mankind so that those who follow Him in faith could be saved from the punishment that we all deserve for our rebellion against God.

Then, on the third day, He would be raised from the dead. In raising His Son, God demonstrated that He had accepted Jesus’ sacrifice as full and complete payment of the debt that we owe.

And in his resurrection, Jesus demonstrated that He has the power to give eternal life to those who trust in His promise that He came to give life abundantly.

He now sits at the right hand of His Father in heaven, awaiting the day when God sends Him back to complete His work, bringing those who have put their faith in Him back to Heaven and, ultimately, judging those who have chosen to ignore Him and revile Him.

One day, after that judgment, He will make all things new. He will put things the way they were always intended to be.

There will be no more crying or pain. There will be no more viruses or death. There will be no more hatred or strife.

He will reign as King of Kings and Lord of Lords, and we who follow Him will be with Him and with His Father and with the Holy Spirit forever, growing in our understanding of God and our love for Him forever.

But at the time of this Last Supper, none of this had yet happened. And Jesus knew that His disciples were about to face great sorrow as they heard of His death.

He knew they would be shaken in their faith, and He knew that Satan would be sifting them like wheat — picking them apart, piece by piece.

And so, He prayed for them as they sat in this upper room.

I find great comfort in this. I hope you will, too.

Let’s read this prayer together, and then we’ll talk a bit about what it shows us in our continuing study of prayers for the churches.

READ JOHN 17

Now, there are many, many sermons that could come out of this wonderful prayer, the most wonderful prayer in Scripture.

But in the context of our study of prayers for the churches, I want to focus on what Jesus asked for Himself, what He asked for the disciples in that room with Him and what He asked for us.

As we understand what He asked, I think we can see what WE should be asking from God, as well.

First, what did Jesus ask for Himself?

In verse 1, we hear Him say, “Father, the hour has come; glorify Your Son.” And then again in verse 5: “Father, glorify Me together with Yourself, with the glory which I had with You before the world was.”

To glorify something is to make known its splendor and magnificence.

So when Jesus asks that God glorify Him, He “was asking that His mission to the world would be made known through the Cross.” (Earl D. Radmacher, Ronald Barclay Allen, and H. Wayne House, Nelson’s New Illustrated Bible Commentary (Nashville: T. Nelson Publishers, 1999), 1351.)

Jesus had been sent to earth for a purpose — to reconcile mankind to the God who had created man in His own image, to provide a way that things could be made right between a righteous and holy God and we who had rebelled against Him in our sins.

And in the death, burial, resurrection and ascension of Jesus Christ, God’s glory would be etched into history.

At the cross, Jesus revealed His Father’s love and His justice, and at the cross, He revealed God’s grace in the forgiveness of sins.

It’s important to note here that Jesus didn’t seek glory for His own sake, but rather to bring glory to God the Father. He is the one to whom all honor and glory and praise are ultimately due, even from the Son.

Jesus knew that the cross was inevitable. But He didn’t see the inevitability of the cross and say, “Well, there’s no need to pray about it.” Instead, he said, “The cross is inevitable, so let me pray that the Father be glorified in it.”

Brothers and sisters, your pain and suffering are inevitable. If you are seeking to cling to Jesus Christ, your SIFTING is inevitable.

Pray that God be glorified in it. Pray that He would be glorified in it all.

Pray that as people see you suffer through your sickness and even as they see you fail in your faithfulness, that they will also see the amazing grace that God lavishes upon those He has adopted as sons and daughters.

Pray that they will see the Christ into whose image you are being conformed, even in the midst of your sorrows and failures.

Jesus prayed for Himself to be glorified so that God could be glorified.

So what did He ask for the remaining disciples, the 11 who were left in that room with Him, wondering what He had meant when He had said they would be sifted like wheat?

For them, He asked for faithfulness.

This is a major theme from the Gospel of John — faithful loyalty to Jesus Christ, all the way to death.

Look down at verse 6. Jesus said He had manifested God’s name to them. He had demonstrated the character of God to them.

He had revealed the very nature of God to them, and they had not understood everything He had told them, but they had believed what He had said and had followed Him.

Now, He asked God in verse 11 to “keep them in Your name,” to keep them loyal to Him.

Jesus would be leaving them and returning to His Father after His resurrection, and He knew that they would be tempted to leave the faith.

He had called them to abide in Him, but He knew that would be hard for them, so He had promised to send the Holy Spirit to help them remain faithful, to comfort them, and to remind them of what Jesus had told them. And here, He asked God to keep them.

Notice that the power of their keeping isn’t in the disciples’ own strength. It’s not in the pride and confidence of Peter. Rather it is God’s keeping power that gives Jesus confidence.

They belonged to God, and God had given them to Jesus — He mentions this five times throughout this prayer — and so Jesus knew that God would protect them from falling away.

When we try to follow Jesus in our own strength, we will fail. When we try to do ministry in our own strength, we will fail. It is only by the power of God through the Holy Spirit that we can have victory in Jesus.

And as we are kept faithful, we experience unity in the church.

Unity is one of the major themes of this prayer, and, indeed, of the whole Upper Room Discourse.

Jesus prayed that the disciples would have the same unity that has ever existed among the three Persons of the Trinity — “that they may be one even as We are” in verse 11.

“They would be one with one another as well as one with the Son and the Father if they remained loyal to Jesus’ revelations.” (Tom Constable, Tom Constable’s Expository Notes on the Bible (Galaxie Software, 2003), Jn 17:11.)

In other words, if they followed Jesus’ teachings, they would have unity.

Where there is disunity in the church, you can be sure that some other doctrine has taken precedence over the Word of God.

We are called to be people of the Word, not people of the world.

That means that every decision we make as a church should be grounded in the commandments given to us by the Word Himself, Jesus Christ, who said “Love God. And love your neighbor as yourself.”

So as we pray for the church, we should pray for the power and the will to be faithful and keep those commandments.

Now, this kind of faithfulness is a hard thing. As we see in verse 15, we have not been taken out of the world, so we are always at risk of being enticed by the things of the world — by politics and fear and worry and temptation.

So how can we overcome these things and remain faithful?

Look at verse 17.

“Sanctify them i the truth; Your word is truth.”

To be sanctified is to be set aside for service. Down in verse 19, Jesus says that He has sanctified Himself. He had set Himself aside for service to the disciples and, in a different sense, for service to mankind at the cross.

He was devoted completely to doing God’s will.

So, as Jesus had sanctified Himself, He asked that the disciples — and believers of all times and places — be sanctified, that they be set aside for service to God by serving others.

The means of our sanctification is God’s Word, both the truth of Scripture and the Truth of the living Word of God, Jesus Christ.

If you have been saved, then you have been saved for a purpose, for service to God in Christ Jesus.

And you cannot be set apart for that service if you are not in God’s Word.

“The words of God that Jesus revealed and that stand recorded in the Bible are the key to believers’ practical sanctification.” (Tom Constable, Tom Constable’s Expository Notes on the Bible (Galaxie Software, 2003), Jn 17:17.)

Warren Wiersbe put it this way: “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 of truth and live God’s truth day by day. It takes all three for a balanced experience of sanctification.”

As Jesus prayed for His disciples’ sanctification, He also prayed for ours, and we see that in verse 20:

“I do not ask on behalf of these alone, but for those also who believe in Me through their word.”

But we see that Jesus also prayed for two other things for us: for our unity and for our glorification.

Look at verse 21 and marvel for a moment with me that we are called into a relationship that mirrors the eternal self-giving relationship among Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

Jesus prayed that we “may ALL be one,” even as the Father was in Him and He was in the Father, that we might be in them and they in us.

The Father glorifies the Son, and the Son glorifies the Father, and the Spirit reveals them both in their glory.

That is also the kind of relationship we are to have among one another.

That is what the church is supposed to look like — every believer setting aside his own rights for the glory of others, every believer, as the Apostle Paul put it, “doing nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility counting others more significant than yourselves.”

What would happen if the church looked like that?

Look at what Jesus says in verse 21.

He prays for this unity so that “the world may believe that You sent Me.”

Pray that the church would have such a powerful witness to the world by its humility. There is not much humility in the world today, not even in the midst of a crisis that shows us just how weak we all are.

Everyone wants glory; nobody wants to be humble. We MUST be different as the body of the Christ who humbled Himself to the cross.

The irony is that as we humble ourselves in this way on earth, we share in the glory of Jesus.

Verse 22: “The glory which You have given Me I have given to them.”

“Jesus probably was speaking of His bringing the full knowledge of God to [us]. The revelation of God results in glory for God. When believers understand and believe the revelation of God that Jesus brought, [we] become partakers of that glory.” (Tom Constable, Tom Constable’s Expository Notes on the Bible (Galaxie Software, 2003), Jn 17:22.)

Not only do we become partakers of that glory, we also become partakers of the eternal love with which God has loved His Son.

What an incredible promise this is for we who have followed Jesus Christ in faith.

And what an incredible comfort it is to know that as Jesus prayed for Simon Peter, He prayed for all of us who might be sifted as wheat by the devil.

We can have confidence, not in ourselves, but in the God to whom we belong and who therefore has a special interest in our welfare.

We can have hope because, like Peter, even when we fail, Jesus loves us, and He continues to pray for us by His Father’s side.

We can have joy in the unity we have with the Triune God by His grace through our faith in His Son.

And we can glorify Him in every circumstance and even in every failure, as we turn back to Him in repentance and in the recognition that we are kept wholly by His amazing grace.

Let us pray.

Now, if you have experienced God’s grace through faith in Jesus Christ, I invite you to open your communion boxes as we prepare to proclaim the work of Jesus Christ on that cross at Calvary.

If you are a Christian watching at home, feel free to join us with bread and juice or water — the early church used both as part of its communion observance.

I have missed sharing communion with you these past months. This observance is an integral part of the unity of the church, and I hated the thought of our not being able to partake in it.

I want to thank Amy Ford, who prepared these kits for us under restaurant conditions. And I want to thank our deacons for helping to distribute these boxes in a contact-free manner.

The conditions during the Last Supper were different, but the significance was the same as it is today.

Jesus told His disciples that the bread represented His body, which would be broken for our transgressions.

Let us pray.

Please go ahead and break your loaves and distribute the bread to your participating family members.

Matthew 26:26 NASB95

While they were eating, Jesus took some bread, and after a blessing, He broke it and gave it to the disciples, and said, “Take, eat; this is My body.”

As Jesus suffered and died on that cross, his blood poured out with His life. This was always God’s plan to reconcile mankind to Himself.

“In [Jesus} we have redemption through His blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses, according to the riches of His grace which He lavished on us.”

Let us pray.

Please share the cups from your boxes with your participating family members.

Matthew 26:27–28 NASB95

And when He had taken a cup and given thanks, He gave it to them, saying, “Drink from it, all of you; for this is My blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for forgiveness of sins.

Now, as often as we eat this bread and drink the cup, we proclaim the Lord’s death until He comes.

Maranatha! Lord, come!

Here at Liberty Spring, we have a tradition following our commemoration of the Lord’s Supper.

Normally, we all gather in a circle around the sanctuary and sing Blest Be The Tie That Binds, and we do it without accompaniment. This is kind of a reminder of the unity that we have in Christ, by the Holy Spirit.

I’m not going to ask that you circle the wagons, but please join me as we sing the first verse of this song.