Praying For All Believers
Published by Stanley Pouw in 2022 · 20 February 2022
This is the only place where we have the intercessory work of our Lord Jesus Christ before the Father laid out for us verbatim. We know our Lord ever-lives to make intercession for us, and this is the intercession that He makes. This goes on all the time since His ascension until the end of the age. And this is then the Lord Jesus Himself praying for us, before His loving Father.
It all begins on Thursday night, during Passion Week, when there is the celebration of the Passover. The Passover was a feast that God instituted back in Exodus 13 and 14 to commemorate His miraculous deliverance of Israel. After 400 years of slavery in Egypt He delivered them, and that was 1,500 years ago. That event was the most monumental deliverance that God had ever done for His people.
But there was an even more monumental deliverance, the deliverance from God to His people through the death of His Son, a deliverance that was not physical, but spiritual. So that resulted in the last official Passover to be held. The Lord transformed that feast into the Lord’s Table, the Communion, which goes back to the cross, which is God’s greatest act of deliverance for sinners.
Our Lord gathered that evening with His twelve disciples. Satan entered Judas, who was the son of perdition and never a son of God; and he left to go carry out the betrayal which is about to happen. In John 12, our Lord Jesus’ soul was deeply troubled. He was fully aware that this Friday was coming, where He would die as God’s chosen sacrifice for the sins of all His people.
And the horror for Him is not what men will do to Him, but what God will do to Him, to lay on Him the iniquity of us all, and then punish Him for all the sins of all the people who will ever believe through human history. In John 13 He is still caught up in how much He loves His own. The boundless love of those unworthy eleven is expressed throughout that evening and on Friday morning.
Jesus gives them promises of divine love: a promise of heaven that He’s going to prepare a place for them in the Father’s house; the promise of power to do greater works than He did, not greater in kind, but greater in extent; they will cover the globe eventually. The promise that anything they need He will supply from heaven and the promise that the Holy Spirit is going to come and be in them.
He also granted them peace, His peace. He promised them forgiveness of sin, but He also promised them fruitfulness, that they would bear much fruit. He also warned them about persecution, hatred, and even death. But in the end, He promised them that He would overcome the hostile world, and He promised them a joy that no one could ever take away to a group of men who were weak and struggling.
They were promises of love, but they were promises of grace as well. In John 15, our Lord said, “When the Helper comes, whom I will send to you from the Father, He will testify about Me, and you will testify also.” You are the first generations of gospel preachers. You will testify. The Spirit of God will inspire you, along with your associates, to write the New Testament.
That very night that Jesus was arrested, they would be seen as weak. In fact, before the arrest of Jesus in the garden, our Lord took them in for a time of prayer to pray with Him, and their weakness was on full display because they fell asleep in the sleep of fear; and then when the arrest came, they scattered. Something dramatic has to happen. Well, the difference comes in two things.
One, the Holy Spirit will come upon them, Acts 1:8, “And when the Spirit comes upon you, you shall be witnesses.” The Spirit will empower them for witness. Not only will the Holy Spirit come to empower them for witness, but Christ Himself will pray for them. Yes, the coming of the Holy Spirit plays a role, but two, so does the intercessory ministry of our Lord Jesus Christ.
Now in John 17 we’ve seen in the opening five verses that Jesus prays that He would be glorified. And when He is glorified, He will pray continually to make intercession to bring all His children to glory. And we’ve learned that He prays for not only for those disciples, but verse 20 says, “for all who will believe in the future.” So He’s praying for all believers through all of human history.
Now all of this is His praying for us while we’re in the world. So as a result of His prayers and the power of the Holy Spirit, the disciples will be transformed. They will overcome their weaknesses in a divinely granted usefulness that has no parallel. They will be eleven men who turned the world upside-down, and they will be the foundation for the spiritual temple of believers.
Now let’s look at verse 20, “I do not pray for these alone, but also for those who will believe in Me through their word.” So Jesus is praying to the Father not only for the eleven, but for all people who will believe through their word. He says that “those who believe in the future in Me will believe through their word,” the word of the apostles. The New Testament, in a real sense, is their word.
Many believed through their word, even when their word was not written down, it was only preached. That’s what the book of Acts gives to us. While they were preaching through the book of Acts, the apostle Paul and the other apostles are writing the epistles. So people believed, in that first generation, through their preaching; and in all subsequent generations, through their writing.
Jude 17 says, “You, beloved, ought to remember the words that were spoken beforehand by the apostles of our Lord Jesus Christ.” If you want to set a right course for truth against false doctrine, which is Jude’s subject, you better remember the words spoken by the apostles. Not only spoken, but inscribed in the New Testament. So the prayers of Christ, gave them a clear understanding of the gospel.
And while they preached, they were inspired by the Holy Spirit to write the books of the New Testament so that when they disappeared from the earth and the age of the apostles was over, the theology that God had given to them would be in Scripture for every generation in every country and every language through human history. People need to understand what’s in the New Testament.
So the preached word is based upon divine revelation, and the written word is the means of salvation. People are not saved apart from the message. “Anyone can call on the Lord,” Romans 10 says “but how are they going to call on one they don’t know?” How are they going to know if they don’t have a teacher? How are they going to have a teacher unless somebody is sent?
And what does Jesus pray for? Two things: because we are those who believe in Him through the apostles’ word. First, verse 21: “That they would be one in this world.” Second: “That they would be one in the next world.” He’s praying for their unity, unity in this world and unity in heaven. The first one, “unity in this world” is in verses 21 - 23. The second one, “unity in heaven” is in verses 24 - 26.
It is something internal, not external. He can’t be praying about the unity of everyone who will ever believe, because everyone who ever believes doesn’t live at the same time. The kind of unity He’s praying for in verse 21 is “even as You, Father, are in Me and I in You, that they also may be in Us.” It is an internal unity. What He is praying for is the future salvation of the elect not yet born.
He is praying that we would possess eternal life, the life of God. This life of God means they have one will, one motive, one mission, one truth, one holiness, one purpose, because they possess one life. Everything between the Father and the Son is a perfect unity of life. The true God has to be a trinity. If God is not a trinity, then you have an eternal being absent the attribute of love.
Christianity is about a God who is three-in-one, who is marked by relationships of love. And a shared life between the Father, the Son, and the Spirit expresses itself in that relationship. God is defined in relationship, and we are made in His image for relationships with others and with Him. It is that when you come to Christ, you are forgiven. But you have been transformed; you are not who you were.
John understood this. 1 John 1:3 says, “What we have seen and heard, we proclaim to you also, so that you too may have fellowship with us, and, indeed, our fellowship is with the Father and with His Son Jesus Christ.” To be saved is to come into a union of life with the Trinity. You are drawn up into the Trinity, pulled up out of Satan’s kingdom, out of death, out of darkness into the Trinity.
We don’t become God, but we share His life. We aren’t eternally the possessors of that life, but He creates that life in us, and that’s why Bible says we are new creations and old things pass away. God became joined to man in the person of Jesus Christ so that men could be joined to God in the person of Jesus Christ. He became one of us that we might become one with Him.
So as believers, we know God, not at a distance, but near. We know God, not vaguely, but distinctly without confusion. We know God, not doubtfully but confidently. And how do we know God so well? Because He lives in us and we live in Him. He has given us understanding of the revelation of Himself in Holy Scripture being in the Father and in the Son and they being in us.
The people that we are, the glory that we have, the life that we possess is not yet manifested. But being one with the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit is infinitely more joyous and blessed than all the comforts and riches of the world. Why? Because in heaven there will be no sun, no moon; no creatures to entertain us; no sunrise, no sunset, no starry nights, and no earthly pleasures.
Another practical thing by this reality of being one with God in God and God in us, sin must be uglier. Sin can’t be committed by God, but it is committed all the time by people who are in God. The apostle Paul says, “Do you know that your bodies are members of Christ? Shall I take away the members of Christ and make them members of a prostitute? Your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit who is in you.
Now, our Lord has a reason for our unity in this life. He says it in verse 21 at the end, “so that the world may believe that You sent Me.” If we live the kind of lives that we ought to live consistent with what God has done for us and in us, the world is going to see a massive transformation. If the world is going to see this internal unity, there’s going to be an attraction to the gospel.
Jesus prays further in verse 22, “that they may be one, just as WE are one.” Again, it’s unity that’s on His mind: spiritual unity, the unity that comes from possessing the life of God given to us to make us one. But He even enriches it, “The glory which You have given Me I have given to them.” Now, what glory is this? When He became a man, He was given glory by the Father.
2 Corinthians 4:4 says, “It was the glory of God shining in Jesus Christ. And the Son turned right around and gave the glory to us so that we, according to 2 Corinthians 3:18, as we gaze at His glory begin to reflect it, and the Spirit moves us from one level of glory to the next. The glory was veiled and only seen for a glimpse at the transfiguration during His earthly life.
It is veiled in us, but it is there. We are new creations; we possess the characteristics of God in some measure and some degree. This is remarkable because Scripture says twice in Isaiah 42 and 48, quoting God, “My glory will I not give to another. My glory will I not give to another.” But He gave it to His Son who deserved it, and His Son gave it to us who didn’t deserve it, because we are in Him.
And even when we are in heaven and are radiating His glory and are as all glorious as we can possibly be, we will not receive that glory, but we’ll turn and give it all to Him who deserves all the glory. He is the glory, we’re only reflectors. But our Lord is praying a prayer that expands our understanding of salvation. We have the glory of God that are communicable to us in us; and we will reflect that glory.
And then in verse 23, He repeats the request for unity again: “I in them and You in Me, that they may be perfected in unity, so that the world may know that You sent Me.” Our unity is to be manifest unity, the life of God revealed on earth through believers so that the world will know that Jesus came from heaven. Verse 23, “Father, I want the world to know that You love them, even as You have loved Me.”
Salvation is all about divine love. Behind all this work of salvation, behind this prayer for unity, behind the prayer for glory is love. All these promises from John 13 to 16 are because of love. So how does the Father love the Son? He loves the Son infinitely and eternally. He says, “He’s My beloved Son in whom I’m well pleased.” But He loves us the same because we are in His Son.
Well, isn’t the Father offended by our sins? He is. But here’s the good news; His anger is over. Love has replaced His anger. His anger was brief; His love is forever. Hebrews 12:6, “Those whom the Lord loves He disciplines and scourges.” It’s not out of anger anymore, it’s out of love. We can never be out of His love. He loves us in such a way that He couldn’t love us more. Let us pray.