John 17:1–5
We have been looking together in some detail at the first five verses in this chapter because we have suggested that in them we have a wonderful display of the scheme of salvation. I also suggested that it was good for us to be looking at this, because it is undoubtedly the most important thing that anybody can ever grasp in this life and world. The one message which the gospel of Jesus Christ has to give to the world outside the church is the message concerning the way of salvation. But we must never forget that it is also always the central message which is needed by the church herself, because we have considered together the fact that, even having believed the gospel, we often find ourselves spending our Christian life in what may be called ‘shallows and miseries’. We often seem to be living a life which is full of problems and perplexities, without much happiness and joy, a life, as it were, of struggling, of barely succeeding and barely avoiding defeat. The main explanation of that, when it is true, is that in one way or another we have ceased to look at and to realize the truth about this great plan of salvation as it is unfolded in the Bible.
There can be no doubt at all but that one of the besetting temptations and sins of the average Christian is the tendency to be looking in a wrong way at oneself. Now it is true that the Bible is full of exhortations to us to examine ourselves and to prove ourselves, yes, but there is all the difference in the world between doing that in the right way, and becoming introspective. You are introspective when you spend the whole of your time looking at yourself, looking inward, and being concerned only and supremely about yourself. The antidote to that, I suggest, is that we look again at the plan of salvation as it is unfolded in the Bible. And here, in this chapter, in the brief compass of these first five verses, we find it clearly summarized. There are many additional reasons why we should always be doing this. One all important one for us to remember here is that it is only as we remind ourselves of this plan, both in its various parts and as a whole, that we shall not only be able to counteract certain doubts that may arise in our own minds, but, still more important, we shall also be able to answer those who attack our position and attack the Christian faith from the outside.
Now it is no final answer to one of the most subtle attacks upon the Christian faith today simply to say that we have experienced certain things, or that we are in a certain position now. Many people take up that argument and they often imagine that it is a cogent one. They turn to the world and say, ‘You can say what you like about the Bible, you can criticize the Christian faith as much as you like, but you cannot make any difference to me because I am happy. The gospel has done this and that for me and as a result I am quite immune to all your criticisms.’ I know what such friends mean when they say something like that, but it seems to me that it is not only putting the Christian position at the very lowest, but there is also a sense in which it does not begin to meet the attack made upon the faith. For the fact is, of course, that if we are going to base our position solely upon what we feel, and what we are at this moment, then we have nothing to say to the attack thus made upon the Christian faith, especially by psychology.
There are many today who would explain all our faith in terms of psychology. They claim it as a very clever and subtle form of self-persuasion, just a way of shifting your difficulties on to another plane. ‘It is good psychology,’ they say, ‘and anything that makes a man happier is a good thing, in and of itself; Christians may use all these great terms, but actually it is nothing but a bit of psychology. As you know, there are many false teachings, such as Christian Science, which are quite unjustifiable, but which can make people very happy.’
So, then, if we base our position entirely upon experience, we will convince nobody. The answer to the good psychology argument is that we are dealing with certain historical events and facts which we must never allow ourselves to forget. Indeed, I am prepared to go as far as to say that whatever I may feel at this moment, though I may feel that I am in a state of darkness and blackness, and am utterly discouraged, my position is still safe and I am secure because of these things that have been done in history outside of me and before I was ever born. Thank God I do not base my position on how I feel. Feelings are treacherous, they come and go, and what little control we have upon them! We have all had the following experience, have we not? We wake up one morning and find ourselves full of peace and joy and happiness, and all seems to go well. We have a marvellous day, we read our Bibles, we have freedom in prayer, and all is well, so we look forward to the next day being still more wonderful. But, strangely enough, we find that when we wake up the next morning we are lifeless and dull. If you are going to base your whole position upon experience and feelings, you are going to be a very unhappy person and your Christian life is going to be very unstable. But the answer is, I repeat, this marvellous plan of salvation. I must, of course, know that I am related to it—that is essential—but what I am arguing for is that if you want to enjoy these blessings and if you want to live this Christian life truly, you do so by looking at these things, by resting upon them and by saying, if you like, in the words of a hymn:
My hope is built on nothing less
Than Jesus’ Blood and Righteousness,
I dare not trust my sweetest frame,
But wholly lean on Jesus’ Name.
On Christ the solid rock I stand,
All other ground is sinking sand.
Edward Mote
That, then, is what we are doing by looking together at the plan and scheme as it is here unfolded. So far we have seen something like this. We have seen that the great object and intent of the plan of salvation is the glory of God, and if we do not see that first and foremost, then there is something wrong with our whole conception of salvation. If we look at salvation only in terms of ourselves or of something that happens to us, and do not see in it primarily the glory of the almighty God, then our view of salvation is grossly inadequate, indeed, it may even be a false one. It is the glory and the wonder of the triune God which our Lord emphasized and he is our supreme authority.
Now we have been looking at the plan in its different parts. We have seen that it originates with the Father. He planned and purposed it, and set it into operation in the eternal Council. Then we have seen how the work was divided, the Son was sent, a commission was given to him, and he accomplished the work to the glory of God the Father. And he himself, as we were considering in our last study, was glorified in the resurrection and the ascension, but the final manifestation of the glory of the Son was that which was given on the Day of Pentecost when the Holy Spirit was sent down upon the infant church gathered together at Jerusalem. That is the final proof of the fact that Jesus of Nazareth is the only begotten Son of God. The Scripture talks about the ‘promise of the Father’: the Father had promised the Children of Israel in the old dispensation that he would send his Spirit. He keeps on saying that he is going to make a new covenant with them, that the day is coming when he will take out their stony heart, give them a heart of flesh, and pour out his Spirit upon them. That is the thing to which they were looking forward, and, in a sense, the work of the Messiah, the Deliverer, the Saviour, was to send this promise of the Father. And that is the very thing that happened on the Day of Pentecost when the Lord Jesus Christ sent the Holy Spirit.
Now the Scripture uses two terms. In one place it tells us that the Lord Jesus Christ sent the Holy Spirit, and in another place it tells us that God the Father sent the Spirit after listening to the prayer of his Son, but it is the same thing, since the Spirit proceeds from the Father and from the Son. What I particularly want to emphasize at this point, however, is that this teaching is included even in these five verses that we are looking at in John 17: ‘These words spake Jesus . . .’ and then he began to pray. ‘These words’ refers to the words that are recorded in chapters 14, 15 and 16 of this particular gospel, which are all to do with this promise of the coming of the Holy Spirit. Our Lord began to speak about this in chapter 14. He found that the disciples were crestfallen because he had said that he was going to leave them, so he told them, ‘I will pray the Father, and he shall give you another Comforter, that he may abide with you for ever; even the Spirit of truth; whom the world cannot receive, because it seeth him not, neither knoweth him: but ye know him; for he dwelleth with you, and shall be in you’ (Jn 14:16–17). And he proceeded to teach them about the coming of the Holy Spirit.
So here, you see, in John 17:1, the coming of the Holy Spirit is introduced as a part of this great and vital plan of salvation, and it is, of course, one of the most wonderful aspects of all. There, in the Council in eternity, as we have already seen, God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit spoke together and planned the salvation of man; the Father reiterated the great scheme, and the Son accepted the decision that he should be the one to carry out the plan; and then it was equally decided that the Holy Spirit should complete what the Son had done for mankind. This is what is sometimes called the ‘economy of the Trinity’, the division of the work between the three Persons, and it is something that appears very clearly right through the Scriptures. It appears, for example, in the very beginning, in Genesis, where we are shown how the creation itself was the work of the Trinity—’In the beginning God . . .’ Then we are told that ‘the Spirit moved . . .’; everything was made through the Word, but in a sense the agency was still the Spirit.
However, what I am anxious to look at now is the way in which this verse brings out the point. The Father sends the Son, and the great business of the Son is to glorify the Father. He says, ‘I have glorified thee on the earth; I have finished the work which thou gavest me to do.’ For there is a sense in which the Lord Jesus Christ never glorified himself. That is why he laid aside his glory, and why he was not born in a king’s palace but in a stable. That, too, is why he took upon himself the form of a servant; it was all to glorify the Father. All his life as a man was in a sense lived just in this way, in order that all the glory and power might be of God the Father.
But here we are told another wonderful thing. After he went back to heaven, he sent upon the church the Holy Spirit, and the business and the work of the Holy Spirit is to glorify the Son. Now this is a marvellous statement. We do not see the Holy Spirit, he is invisible, and, in a sense, that is because his work is to glorify the Son. Indeed, we read about the Holy Spirit in John 16:14 the same thing that we read elsewhere about the Son. Our Lord says that the Holy Spirit does not speak of himself, but, ‘He shall glorify me: for he shall receive of mine, and shall shew it unto you.’ We are told precisely the same thing about the Son in relation to the Father. Therefore, the great controlling thought we must hold in our minds is that the chief work of the Holy Spirit is to glorify the Lord Jesus Christ.
In a sense, the final glorification of the Lord Jesus Christ was the coming of the Holy Spirit. We are told in John’s gospel that the Holy Spirit was not yet come because Jesus was not yet glorified. We see this in the great promise our Lord made one day in the Temple when he said, ‘If any man thirst, let him come unto me, and drink. He that believeth on me, as the scripture hath said, out of his belly shall flow rivers of living water’ (Jn 7:37–38). And John expounds that: ‘This spake he of the Spirit, which they that believe on him should receive: for the Holy Ghost was not yet given; because that Jesus was not yet glorified.’ So the Holy Spirit could not be given until Christ had finished the work the Father had given him to do, until he had died and risen again, until he had ascended and taken his seat at the right hand of God. God then said, in effect, ‘I give you the promise, you send it upon the people.’
Now this is something that can be worked out in many different ways. I want to do it here in a more or less objective manner, but the subjective part is important in this way: If you claim that you have received the Holy Spirit in his fullness, then the best test of that is whether or not you are glorifying the Lord Jesus Christ. There is a danger that again we put such emphasis upon the Spirit himself that we do so at the expense of the Son. There are some people who are always talking about phenomena in the Christian life. They like talking about the gifts of the Spirit and boasting that they possess one or other of them: ‘Do you speak in tongues? Have you got the gift of healing?’ Their talk always seems to be about these things. Well, thank God, the Holy Spirit does give these gifts, but let us never forget that his main function is to glorify the Son, so that if our life is not always pointing to the Lord Jesus Christ and glorifying him, we had better be careful. There are other spirits, and these other spirits are very powerful, and can give wonderful gifts. Satan can counterfeit most of the gifts of the Holy Spirit. For example, there are spirits who can heal. There are strong phenomena in this world in which we live, and the test of the gifts of the Spirit is this: do they testify to the fact that Jesus is God in the flesh? Do they glorify the Son of God? As that is the supreme work of the Holy Spirit, so every spirit must be tested by that particular test.
How, then, does the Holy Spirit glorify Christ? It seems to me that the best way to look at this is to divide it into three main headings. First of all, he reveals the Lord Jesus Christ and his person. Paul in his letter to the Corinthians talks about the Lord of glory. Paul writes: ‘But we speak the wisdom of God in a mystery . . . which none of the princes of this world knew: for had they known it, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory’ (1 Cor 2:7–8). But we, he says, have received the Spirit, and ‘the Spirit searcheth all things, even the deep things of God’. Do you see what that means? When the Lord Jesus Christ was here as man, the Pharisees and the doctors of the law did not recognize him—it was they who incited the people to cry out, ‘Away with him, crucify him.’ The Greeks did not know him either, nor did the great philosophers, they all rejected him. They said it was nonsense and impossible that a carpenter like that should be the Son of God. And the reason why they did not know him was they had not received the Holy Spirit. Paul says in 1 Corinthians 12:3, ‘No man can say that Jesus is the Lord, but by the Holy Ghost.’
Have you not often been perplexed by the fact that many able men in this modern world of ours do not believe in the deity of Jesus Christ? They say that he was only a man. They praise him, and say he is the greatest man, or teacher the world has ever known, but they do not see in him the Son of God. We should never be unhappy about that. To recognize the Lord Jesus Christ is not a matter of intellect, because the greatest brain can never come to see it and believe it. It is a spiritual truth and something which is spiritually discerned. The Bible tells us that it was not surprising that these people did not believe on the Lord Jesus Christ as the Son of God. It was because they were blind, because their understanding had not been enlightened by the Holy Spirit and, in a sense, their unbelief proves the truth of the gospel. Thank God that it is not a matter of intellect, because if the recognition of the person of the Lord Jesus Christ were a matter of intellect and ability, then the way of salvation would not be a fair one. People with brains would have a great advantage over everybody else, and those who were ignorant and had not much intellectual power, would not be able to understand and grasp the truth. Consequently, they would not be saved and it would be a salvation for certain special intellectual people only.
But thank God it is not that at all! In this matter of the recognition of the Lord Jesus Christ we are all exactly on a level, we are all in the same position. The greatest brain is never big enough to understand and to grasp it, but the Holy Spirit can enable the most ignorant and the most unintelligent to understand. A person without any educational advantages can accept the great salvation because it is the work of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit alone can reveal the person of Christ, but he can do it and he can do it to anybody and to everybody.
Furthermore, the Holy Spirit not only reveals the person, he also reveals the work. The preaching of Christ, says Paul, is a stumbling block to the Jews, and foolishness to the Greeks (1 Cor 1:23). These so-called wise men frequently stumble at the cross especially. You see, the preaching of the first disciples was not only that Jesus of Nazareth is the Son of God, but that he came into the world in order to deal with the problem of sin. They taught that the meaning of his death upon the cross was not merely that he was arrested by the Romans at the instigation of the Pharisees, and put to death by crucifixion. No, they taught also that God had made him to be sin for us—it was a great transaction between the Father and the Son. To the philosophers, this was nonsense. They did not understand because they did not receive the Holy Spirit. ‘But we,’ says Paul again to the Corinthians, ‘have received, not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit which is of God; that we might know the things that are freely given to us of God’ (1 Cor 2:12).
I want to ask a simple and plain question here: have you understood this matter of the atonement? Are you clear about the work of Christ? Do you see and know that the Lord Jesus Christ has taken your sins upon himself and has died for them on the tree: Is that real to you? Does that make sense to you, or are you stumbling at it? If you are in difficulty, it is because you have not been enlightened by the Holy Spirit, and, believe me, the only way you can come to know, is not to try to understand it intellectually, but to ask God to enlighten you by the Spirit and to enable you to see and understand and receive this truth as he unfolds and displays the work of Christ. If you read the sermon, delivered by Peter on the Day of Pentecost you will find him doing that very thing.
Then the Holy Spirit not only reveals the person and work of Christ, he also reveals the teaching of Christ. Our Lord said to these disciples before he left them, ‘I have yet many things to say unto you, but ye cannot bear them now. Howbeit when he, the Spirit of truth, is come, he will guide you into all truth’ (Jn 16:12–13). He will remind you of the things I have said and which you cannot grasp now and he will make them plain to you.
So if you are in trouble about the understanding of this gospel, ask God to give you his Spirit in all his fullness, and you will begin to understand. The fatal thing in these matters is to bring your natural intellect to bear upon them: ‘The natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God . . . neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned’(1 Cor 2:14).
Read 1 Corinthians 2 again, and understand that these things are in a different realm, they belong to a different order, and the only way to understand the teaching of the New Testament about Christ’s personal work and his teaching is to have the eyes of your understanding enlightened by the Holy Spirit. Therefore, if you are in trouble, do not waste your time trying to read books of philosophy about these matters, do not try to grasp them with the natural intellect, for it is impossible. We are dealing with miracles. We are in the realm of the supernatural and the spiritual, and the only hope for us is that the Holy Spirit will come with that unction, with his eye salve, to anoint our eyes so that they will be opened to the blessed truth.
But the Holy Spirit not only reveals Christ, he also applies his word, which is to convict us of sin. I have sometimes met people who have said to me, ‘I do not understand this teaching about sin, I do not feel I am a sinner.’ Well, if you do not feel you are a sinner, it is simply because you do not know yourself, and you do not know yourself because the Holy Spirit has not convicted you. Some of the best people who have ever trodden this earth have been those who have been most conscious of their sinfulness. I cannot imagine a worse state for anybody to be in than for him or her to say they do not feel they are sinners. The Holy Spirit convicts and convinces of sin, and if he has not done it for you, as you value your own soul, ask him to do it. Christ came to die for sinners, not for the righteous, and the first work of the Spirit is to convict of sin, of righteousness and of judgement. We come to Christ for salvation after the Spirit has convinced us of sin, because the Lord Jesus Christ is the answer to our need.
The Holy Spirit then gives us assurance of our acceptance and of our forgiveness. He is a seal given to us to show that we belong to God. He testifies with our spirits that we are the children of God. No Christian has a right to be uncertain about his or her salvation; the Holy Spirit has been given in order that we might be certain for, ‘The Spirit itself beareth witness with our spirit, that we are the children of God’ (Rom 8:16). If any Christian who is reading this is uncertain, or is lacking in assurance and in happiness, let me urge this upon you—ask for the gift of the Spirit in his fullness, ask for this blessed assurance, tell God you long for it, do not give yourself rest or peace, and, in a sense, do not give God rest or peace until you have it. You are meant to have it, therefore pray that the Spirit will lead you to it and, if you are genuine and sincere, you will have it. You may have been praying for months, or even years, but go on, I say, keep his commandments, live the life he has marked out for you, but above all ask that the Spirit may give this witness within you. He was sent to do that and thus he links us to Christ. It is beyond understanding; it is the mystical union between the believer and Christ. As our Lord said in John 15, we are bound to Christ as the branches to the vine; his life is in us and it is a part of this blessed work of the Spirit. Then he goes on to work in us, sanctifying and perfecting us—’Work out your own salvation,’ says Paul in Philippians 2, ‘with fear and trembling. For it is God which worketh in you both to will and to do of his good pleasure.’ He even helps us in our prayers: ‘We know not what we should pray for as we ought: but the Spirit itself maketh intercession for us with groanings which cannot be uttered’ (Rom 8:26). He then goes on to produce the fruit of the Spirit in us: ‘love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance’ (Gal 5:22–23).
These are the things which are the work of the Spirit and they can be summarized like this: he is sent to make the Lord Jesus Christ real to us. So do not waste your time in trying to picture the Lord Jesus Christ. Do not go and look at portraits of him which are wholly imaginary. There is a sense, I believe, in which nobody should ever try to paint him—it is wrong. I do not like these paintings of Christ, they are the efforts of the natural mind. No, if you want a photograph of the Lord Jesus Christ, the Holy Spirit will give it to you in the inner man. Christ said himself, in John 14: ‘He that hath my commandments, and keepeth them, he it is that loveth me: and he that loveth me shall be loved of my Father, and I will love him, and will manifest myself to him.’ That is the work of the Spirit, to make Christ living, to make us certain he is there, so that when we speak to him, and he to us, the Spirit makes him real, he is formed in us. Indeed, the Spirit takes the place of the Lord Jesus Christ with us. Christ has said, ‘I will not leave you comfortless.’ I am going away and you are beginning to be unhappy, but I will not leave you orphans. I will send another Comforter, the Holy Spirit. He will be with you, and he will always be with you so that you will always know what you should do. He will work in you, and you will know that you are walking with him. The Christian life is fellowship with the Father and the Son Jesus Christ, through the Holy Spirit.
And, finally, what he does is to enable us, to give us his wonderful power in order that we may witness to the Lord Jesus Christ. Have you ever thought of that? Have you ever thought about how the Christian church came into being, or how she has persisted throughout the centuries?
Have you ever thought of how that handful of ignorant men, fishermen and ordinary people, were able to turn that ancient world upside down? Have you ever wondered how it happened? There is only one answer, and that is that the power of the Holy Spirit came upon them on the Day of Pentecost. They were not able to reason or argue, it was not their eloquence or persuasive power. No, it was the mighty power of the Holy Spirit upon them!
And Paul writes the same thing about himself. He tells the Corinthians that when he preached the gospel to them at Corinth he deliberately eschewed the methods and manners of the Greek philosophers, ‘For,’ he says, ‘I determined not to know anything among you, save Jesus Christ, and him crucified . . . and my speech and my preaching was not with enticing words of man’s wisdom’—he would have nothing to do with these intellectual things—’but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power,’ so that the glory might be to God and not to man (1 Cor 2:2,4).
The Holy Spirit gives this power, and, thank God, he not only gave it to the first apostles, he has also given it to quite unknown people, throughout the centuries. He has enabled some simple people just to speak the right word at the right moment. John Bunyan tells us in his autobiography, Grace Abounding, that one of the greatest blessings and helps he ever had was one afternoon listening to three ignorant women who were doing some knitting together in the sunshine, outside a house, and talking about the Lord Jesus Christ. He got more from them than from anybody else. And you find that that is what happens. God gives this power to the simplest, humblest Christian to testify to the Lord Jesus Christ, of what he has done and the difference he has made to human life. That is how the Holy Spirit glorifies the Son. When he works in us, what he does is to make us glorify the Lord Jesus Christ. The man in whom the Spirit dwells does not talk about himself; whether he is a preacher or whatever he may be, you do not come away talking about him.
You and I have the inestimable privilege of being men and women who in this life and in our daily work and vocation can be glorifying the Lord Jesus Christ. Oh, God grant that we all may be filled with this Spirit, the Holy Spirit, of God, that we may ‘know him, and the power of his resurrection, and the fellowship of his sufferings, being made conformable unto his death’; that we may know what he has done for us; that we may know we are the children of God and joint heirs with Christ; that we may have glimpses of the glory that awaits us and that we may find our lives transformed and filled with his power, so that we may say with Paul, ‘I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me.’