John 17:3 (NASB95)
3 “This is eternal life, that they may know You, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom You have sent.
It is impossible that any simply human heart would begin to comprehend what passed between God the Father and God the Son with the words, “Father, the hour has come”.
The Eternal addressing the Eternal. He for whom time holds no meaning except for that which He assigned to men, who says of Himself “Even from eternity I am He”(Isa 43:13), is now speaking in terms of hours. And not many hours, for He even said, ‘the hour has come’.
Not a 60 minute time period, but that time, that day that God had determined would be the center of history and the hinge of eternity.
Jesus was about to accomplish His sufferings and enter into His glory with the Father, and so fixed was His determination to complete His Father’s will that He spoke of it as though already done (as we see in verse 4); for indeed, in accordance with His own sinless obedience, it was done for it was done already in His divine heart.
In the same way He once accredited Abraham with the sacrifice of his own son, Isaac, because although He stopped that godly man’s hand yet the deed had been done by faith in his heart, He now speaks of His own sufferings as an accomplished work because there is no power or influence in the heavens or on the earth that can stop it. It is done in His eternal heart therefore cannot but be done in history.
This isn’t some great poetic work that we see here in John 17, meant to wrench the heart strings and stir the emotions of the listener.
It’s not the self-indulgent swan-song of a martyr about to be carried away against his will and hoping someone, somewhere will remember his cause and his passion.
It is the pouring out from a heart that is one and indistinguishable from the heart to whom He is speaking, sharing something that only the eternal Father and Son could share because it has been the plan of the Godhead from before time and therefore no one, no created being whether man or angel or devil could begin to fathom the meaning of “Father, the hour has come”.
There was a time when He prayed all night for the Father’s guidance in who He should choose for His Apostles.
There were many hours, both day and night, that He spent alone with His Father for strength and wisdom and power and refreshing; and for all the things we ought to seek in prayer and so often fail to do.
Now, there was nothing left to pray for except those things most pressing on His heart.
Remember, I told you, the deed was as good as done, so much so that He was speaking of it in past tense. So He was free now to pray for the things most important to Him here, because soon He would be at the Father’s right hand and there would no longer be a need for prayer except to intercede for the saints.
So it should not come as a surprise to any Bible studying, Holy Spirit filled believer that according to this great High Priestly prayer of Jesus, the divine priorities would be the Glory of the Father, the giving of eternal life, and the preservation of those the Father has given Him.
Now listen again carefully:
The Glory of the Father, the giving of eternal life, the preservation of the saints.
Now I’m not trying to contrive some half-baked outline for you in this. I know it sounds like a typical three point sermon in the making and I suppose a pointed and meaningful sermon could be gotten from it.
I just want to save you some reading time since we won’t be going over the entire chapter, by saying these three points seem to be the primary focus of Jesus in His prayer. First, God’s glory, as was His mission and purpose throughout His earthly ministry and even in going to the cross, and the giving of eternal life, which was His purpose toward man in coming (Lk 19:10), and then the preservation of those the Father had given Him.
I’ll come back to this in the end but rather than following that outline out of the chapter as a whole I want to narrow our focus to this one verse today, verse three, and draw out from it a challenge for us, the church, and some encouragement for that challenge.
THIS IS ETERNAL LIFE
“This is eternal life…”
Jesus talked of eternal life and the promise of eternal life (Jn 5:24, 6:47) a great deal in the gospels, as do the writers of the New Testament.
One thing this tells us as we step back to examine just the general thought of eternal life is that men believe in it.
Whatever the modern day proponents of atheism and the ‘you only go around once in life, so live it up’ philosophy might say, Ecclesiastes 3:11 tells us that God has placed eternity in the hearts of men.
Men attempt to suppress the truth within them so they might continue in their unrighteousness but the truth they want to quash even in their own consciences is that there is life after this life, and whether for the good or bad, whether with God or separated from Him, it is eternal.
I can’t say I blame those without Christ for coming up with some way-out, fanciful idea of what the term ‘eternal life’ means, or denying it altogether.
If you are only confronted with believing in Christ and spending eternal life in bliss, or denying Christ and spending it in eternal torment, then your choice is clear. Surrender to Christ, or pretend there is no eternal life so you can at least put forth some effort to enjoy or pretend you’re enjoying the here and now and try not to think about the later.
Your other options, if you reject Christ as an option, would be to tell yourself (or believe the claims of others) that eternal life, if you pay the right price and live just so, will be filled with virgins at your disposal and all the other things that in this passing world appear to have some value for comfort or entertainment or power or prestige or wealth.
Isn’t it interesting to note that when the human mind will not accept the truth revealed in scriptures concerning the spiritual realm, all it can come up with is some extended and usually perverted version of what it can already experience with the physical senses?
The Bible makes clear that eternal life is unending existence either in the presence of God through faith in the shed blood and resurrection of Christ, or unending existence separated from God and cast into outer darkness where there is wailing and gnashing of teeth; where the worm does not die and the fire is not quenched.
Reject and despair or believe and rejoice. That is the choice and it is the only one.
Now just for the moment let’s take our focus off those who reject truth and think about those who receive and believe truth. That would be us, Christians.
When we think of eternal life the first definition that would generally come to our mind is ‘life that doesn’t end’. It’s eternal. It goes on forever. That’s eternal life.
Jesus said that if we believe we have eternal life, meaning we’ll never die.
The more mature believer as he studies the Scriptures and delves deeper into spiritual truth might be inclined to say, ‘Ah, but it is more than quantity of life; it is quality of life’. Yes, that would be accurate, wouldn’t you agree?
A life that, since it is in God’s presence, must be not only perfectly blissful but perfectly purposeful. Purpose driven, even.
We don’t usually get much beyond that though.
I think C. S. Lewis took it a little closer to the truth when he wrote this:
“I think all Christians would agree with me if I said that though Christianity seems at first to be all about morality, all about duties and rules and guilt and virtue, yet it leads you on, out of all that, into something beyond. One has a glimpse of a country where they do not talk of those things, except perhaps as a joke. Every one there is filled full with what we should call goodness as a mirror is filled with light. But they do not call it goodness. They do not call it anything. They are not thinking of it. They are too busy looking at the source from which it comes.” Mere Christianity, Christian Behavior ch 12, 1943, Collier Books
I think he’s got something there, Christians. I think when we’re all gathered there in that far country there won’t be all this dizzying preoccupation with being a good Christian and who’s first and who’s last or which white robe should I wear to the Throne room today.
Jesus said, “This is eternal life” Until now He has talked of who would inherit eternal life but He has never defined it. Now He says, “This is eternal life” and it is, “…that-they-may-know-Thee…”
THAT THEY MAY KNOW THEE
What is it, to know God?
Well, first of all it is more, much more, than knowing about God.
James 2:19 says that the demons believe in God and shudder, and the crux of his meaning there is ‘big deal if you just believe in Him’.
I want to tell you a story about my neighbor but I want you to know that I do not intend to be mean-spirited in the telling; it’s only to emphasize a point. I have a good relationship with this neighbor; he’s a good guy.
One Fall day as I returned from my walk to the mailbox I was flagged down by my Roman Catholic neighbor who had been busily and conscientiously raking leaves for the better part of a week.
“Pastor”, he called to get my attention.
“Yes sir”, I said, looking his way with anticipation.
“I figure you’re in a good position to do me a big favor”, he said as he strolled toward me, rake in hand.
“What would that be”, I asked with a smile, thinking that since he knows me so little but calls me ‘Pastor’ it’s probably going to be a prayer request.
“Could you ask the man upstairs”, he said, jabbing at the sky with the handle of his rake, “to turn off the fan just for a little while until I can get some leaves up?”
Well, it grates on me to hear God referred to as ‘the man upstairs’, but I froze the smile in place because I know my neighbor meant no disrespect.
Still smiling I said, “Well He has to make the leaves available to you somehow; otherwise, how could you rake them?”
He stopped and stared for a moment while it sunk in, then he realized I was teasing him and he laughed. And I should interject right here that if he had requested any legitimate prayer I would have prayed and his misaddress of God wouldn’t have stopped me. Anyway he then countered with, “But if He’d only turn off the fan for a little while I could at least get caught up”.
As I turned to walk up my driveway I shot back, “You might have a neighbor who needs the wind for something. What then would be the proper prayer to pray?”
His laughter rose again, this time sounding a little less jocular.
I went inside and put the mail down and walked over to the kitchen sink to get a drink of water. From my vantage point I could see my neighbor back at his raking.
Now I am going to assure you at this point that I am well aware that I get more upset at glib references to God than some people. So when I seem ruffled at someone calling God ‘the man upstairs’, some if not many of you think, ‘oh, lighten up, no harm is meant from it’.
But you have to understand, it’s a preacher ‘thing’. We just hear things a little differently. For example, hearing someone say, “Boy, I really wanted to give that guy what for”, probably sounds very different in the ears of an electrician than the rest of us. (Think about it)
So you have to forgive me when I tell you that I was actually standing there at the sink drinking my water and wondering if I should have said, “Neighbor, God is not ‘the man upstairs’; He is God, and He is everywhere”.
With a smile, of course.
And you don’t have to forgive me for this part, but I have to just be honest and tell you that right about then, when a gust of wind came up that bent the trees over and blew leaves in a whirlwind all over the street, yards and driveways up and down the block, I almost choked on my water laughing out loud.
Later I took him a loaf of fresh banana bread and as I handed it to him I asked if he noticed that big wind swirling around him just after I went inside. He chuckled and said that he did, but did I notice that right after that the wind stopped completely.
I could see I wasn’t going to win any arguments that day so I went home.
Point is, when Jesus said that eternal life is knowing God, he didn’t mean being aware there’s a God out there, and He didn’t even mean being religious and knowing all the proper Biblical theology either.
I’m not an expert in the Biblical languages and I’m not going to try and wow you with some great insight as though it is from myself. Vine’s Dictionary of New Testament words says that the precise form of the Greek used here in John 17 that we translate ‘know’ is intimate. Let me quote Vine’s:
“…such knowledge is obtained, not by mere intellectual activity, but by operation of the Holy Spirit consequent upon acceptance of Christ…The verb is also used to convey the thought of connection or union as between man and woman”.
Friend, Jesus said that life eternal is in knowing God and He meant it in a way that can only be accomplished through the spiritual birth that comes from above through faith in the shed blood of Christ.
And I want you to hear and contemplate this truth today as though your life depends on it, because it does, that God the Father sent His only Son into the world to offer Himself a sacrifice for sin so that you might turn from your sin and be given eternal life from above and so that you might be brought into significant, personal, living, relational knowledge of Him. And whether you think you will come to Him on your own terms in some other way, or you think that you’ll come to Him by being good enough, or because you hid in the darkness of your room some night and made some kind of deal with Him or however else you may justify your own unbiblical mental assent of who or what God is and how He will be approached, the truth is that you cannot know Him apart from the life that only Jesus has to give.
He wants to give it, once He does it is yours for eternity, but you won’t find it anywhere else, from anyone else, under any other terms.
The philosophies of the world add up to ‘many gods, many ways’, or ‘one god, many ways’, but the truth is simply this, ‘one God, one Way’ and that Way has a capital ‘W’ because Jesus is the Way, the Truth and the Life and no one comes to the Father except by Him.
Come to Him today, if you haven’t. He has eternal life to give, and the definition of that life when all is said and done is ‘knowing God’.
Now I want to make just a point or two from the rest of this verse and then wind up by getting to the title of this sermon; “The Business of the Church”.
Jesus said “This is eternal life, that they may know You, the only true God…”
I’ve already touched on it so I’ll be brief but I just don’t want anyone to go out confused.
There is only one true God. The God of the Bible, the God Jesus refers to when He speaks of the Father, the God the Christian refers to when He says “Father, Son and Holy Spirit”.
Knowing the one true God is not a matter of intellectual assent to what you read in the Bible. You may read about God in the Bible and what is there is true. But you will never really know Him until the Holy Spirit reveals Him to you.
By that I mean to say that as a Christian you must be on your guard every day of your life against the propensity of your own fallen nature to twist and pervert in your own thinking the truth about who God is.
If you’re a true Christian then there isn’t much danger of your suddenly turning to some false god of this world who has a name and maybe a face by means of widespread idol worship.
The thing you have to guard against is in departing in your thinking and in your worship from Biblical revelation. The way to avoid that is to stay in the Word and stay in a prayer relationship with your Lord so that His Spirit can continue on a day to day basis, leading you into all truth. Eternal life is in knowing the Father and continuing to worship the one true God as revealed to you in Christ, through His Word and by His Spirit.
AND JESUS CHRIST
The other point I want to address is how He continues the sentence. “This is eternal life, that they may know You, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom You have sent”.
Do you notice that Jesus always put the Father first?
Although we know that God is One in Three Persons and we don’t make a distinction in reference to preeminence in the Godhead, yet Jesus in His incarnation made Himself dependant on the Father and submitted Himself to the will and plan of the Father in salvation.
Jesus told Philip, “I and the Father are one”, but we also note that He said things like “…I do not seek My own will but the will of Him who sent Me”
(John 5:30)
It was part of His humility. It was part of His sufferings, to temporarily lay aside the independent exercise of His own divine attributes and become a man and be tempted in all things such as we are yet without sin, and go as a Man to Calvary’s death for us and according to the Father’s will.
But as we look at this verse today we note that although He once more puts the Father first, still, the declaration is, “This is eternal life, that they may know You, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom You have sent”.
If He had said that eternal life was knowing God and stopped there, then any member of any worldly religion could point to our own scriptures and say “There you have it! We believe in God, you believe in God, so we’ve all got it made! We’re all going to have eternal life with God, no matter what our creeds and our practices are, because we only need to know God to have eternal life!”
But Jesus included Himself in His definition of eternal life, and friend, what sets you aside as a Christian from the world and every philosophy or religion of the world is Jesus Christ. If you don’t know Him you don’t know God and you do not have the eternal life that He is defining here. You do not have the eternal life that He has to give unless your personal, intimate knowledge is of the God of the Bible and His Son, Jesus Christ.
Ok, I have to finish. Let’s talk about the business of the church.
THE BUSINESS OF THE CHURCH
Here is the definition of the word ‘business’, and this is why I take this approach:
Purposeful activity. An immediate task or objective. Mission.
Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary- 10th edition
Some of you old timers may remember singing the Gloria Patri. It’s in the 1991 edition of the Baptist hymnal and not in the 1975 edition, but since a lot of folks came to the Baptist church from other mainline denominations I have to think some of you will remember singing it.
The ’91 Baptist hymnal says it’s an anonymous 4th century praise song. It goes like this:
“Glory be to the Father,
And to the Son, and to the Holy Ghost;
As it was in the beginning,
Is now and ever shall be,
World without end.
Amen, amen.
Gloria Patri. It means Glory to the Father.
It may be the simplest statement of the fundamental purpose of the church ever sung or spoken in corporate worship.
The primary business of the church is God. Therefore if you have the eternal life that Jesus has defined in verse 3 and are therefore a member of the body of Christ, then your primary business is God…glorifying God.
It just makes sense if we’ve ever studied the scriptures at all, that the primary goal and purpose of man in creation was to bring glory to God.
I wonder how many of us here prepared to come to church today with the primary purpose in mind being to bring glory to God.
I remember when I was in my preadolescent years spending Sunday mornings watching Rocky and Bullwinkle while everyone else got ready for church. One day something was said about my apparent reluctance to get ready and I boldly burst out with the revelation that I’d rather stay home and watch Bullwinkle.
Since my dad was the pastor you can imagine the silence in the room and the blank stares.
Finally they caught their breath and gathered their wits about them and the guilt trip rained down. “If people think the pastor’s own son doesn’t want to go to church, how can your father hope to convince them that they should be there?”
Well, the answer trying to scratch its way from my brain to my tongue was “Maybe they’d rather watch Bullwinkle too”. For once I kept my mouth shut and that’s why I’m here today.
But I didn’t know then that my chief end was to glorify God and to enjoy Him forever.
It is only by the regeneration and subsequential enlightening power of the Holy Spirit that anyone can know God or be aware that His is the glory or have a desire to bring Him glory or be used to bring Him glory and enjoy His presence in the life.
That goes for the individual and it goes for the church. The primary business of the church is to glorify God.
How many times is that focus the main focus of any projects plans or purposes addressed in the administrative or ministerial functions of our local bodies?
The second point of business of the church I see, as mentioned before, is the giving of eternal life.
Why is that the church’s business? Because it’s Jesus’ business. Read the first three verses of the chapter again (esp vs 2).
The third point is the preservation of the saints. Look at how much of this prayer of Jesus is devoted to praying for His disciples and those who would come to the Father through their word.
Jesus was going to His death in a matter of hours, and in less time than that He was going to be bound and passed from court to court, being beaten and spit upon and worse. He had no more time. He was pouring His heart out!
If you just read the first 3 or 4 verses of chapter 18 you’ll see that. They went right from here to the garden where He prayed until the mob came to arrest Him.
The most important thing on His heart as He faced the terror that was to come, was glorifying the Father, giving eternal life, praying for His church.
I wonder how differently our churches would operate and I wonder how much more effective the body of Christ would be in furthering the Kingdom in our day, if every local body hung a plaque in some conspicuous place that simply said this in big bold letters:
1. GLORIFY GOD
2. GIVE ETERNAL LIFE
3. PRESERVE THE SAINTS
and then held every suggestion for plan, project or purpose up against that sign, and if it didn’t meet all three requirements, jettisoned the idea.
Christians, Jesus’ final prayer from earth straight to the Father’s throne, the one that began with “Father, the hour has come”, was that He the Father be glorified, that men might know God and Jesus Christ, and that the Father would keep the saints safe in the palm of His hand.
The business of the church, is God. His glory, the spreading of His salvation, the unity and mutual support of the brethren.
Whether you meet in a big church structure, or in a house, or in a park or around a folding table at the county jail, or in a corner at Starbuck’s, wherever the saints are gathered, there is the church.
Do the business of the church. That begins in your own life, Christians. If you live entirely focused on self and the world all week you cannot expect to come in and be fit for the Holy Spirit to do anything helpful through you on Sunday. Being a Christian isn’t belonging to a church, it is a new life; old things passed away, all things new. If you understand that your reason for existence is to bring glory to God and you seek to have Him use you for that six days a week, you’re going to bring that into the assembly and God will use your united church mightily.
A.W. Tozer wrote: “She (the church) is purest when most engaged with God and she is astray just so far as she follows other interests, no matter how ‘religious’ or humanitarian they may be.” Tozer on the Almighty God
Throw out all the shallow, world-centered and flesh-focused garbage that keeps the church on the ground and do the business of the church, beginning in your own life and bringing it into the assembly.
Glory to God, eternal life for men, unity among the saints.
And God bless you as you do.
