Please turn with me, if you will, in your Bible to the Gospel of John, chapter 17, and we'll be exploring verses 1 through 26 this morning. I have to tell you that in an attempt to preach all of John, chapter 17, in one sermon, I am way over my head. Because there are many people, and I don't know if I'm one of them, but I sympathize with them, who believe that John 17 might very well be the most profound chapter in all of scripture. This is the Lord's prayer, not the Lord's prayer that's we have been taught to pray by the Lord, but this is the Lord's prayer on the eve of his crucifixion, on the night before he is going to go to the cross, and he is laying out his soul before the Lord. We get to know a person. What is at the level of their heart? What are their deepest passions are? What appetites are for? On the basis of what it is that they pray for, and what it is that they pray about, and we see that here in this very passage. There's so much in here. As I was preparing for this sermon, I discovered that one minister who I highly regard preached 48 sermons on this one passage. That's 11 months of Sundays, and you're going to get it in 30 minutes if you're lucky. So with all of that in view, let's take a moment now to read this passage. John chapter 17, beginning in verse 1. When Jesus had spoken these words, he lifted up his eyes to heaven and said, Father, the hour has come, glorify your Son, that the Son may glorify you, since you have given him authority over all flesh, to give eternal life to all whom you have given him. And this is eternal life, that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have since. I glorified you on earth having accomplished the work that you gave me to do, and now, Father, glorify me in your own presence with the glory that I had with you before the world existed. I have manifested your name to the people whom you gave me out of the world. Yours they were, and you gave them to me, and they have kept your word. Now they know that everything that you have given me is from you. For I have given them the words that you gave me, and they have received them, and have come to know in truth that I came from you, and they have believed that you sent me. I am praying for them. I am not praying for the world, but for those whom you have given me, for they are yours. All mine are yours, and yours are mine, and I am glorified in them, and I am no longer in the world, but they are in the world, and I am coming to you. Holy Father, keep them in your name, which you have given me, that they may be one even as we are one. Well, I was with them. I kept them in your name, which you have given me. I have guarded them, and not one of them has been lost, except the Son of Destruction, that the Scripture might be fulfilled. But now I am coming to you, and these things I speak in the world, that they may have my joy fulfilled in themselves. I have given them your word, and the world has hated them, because they are not of the world, just as I am not of the world. I do not ask that you take them out of the world, but that you keep them from the evil one. They are not of the world, just as I am not of the world. Sanctify them in the truth. Your word is truth. As you sent me into the world, so I have sent them into the world, and for their sake, I consecrate myself that they may also be sanctified in truth. I do not ask for these only, but also for those who will believe in me through their word, that they may all be one, just as you, Father, are in me, and I in you, that they also may be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me. The glory that you have given me, I have given to them, that they may be one, even as we are one. I and them, and you and me, that they may become perfectly one, so that the world may know that you sent me, and love them, even as you loved me. Father, I desire they also, whom you have given me, maybe with me, where I am, to see my glory, that you have given me because you loved me before the foundation of the world. O righteous Father, even though the world does not know you, I know you, and these know that you have sent me. I have made known to them your name, and I will continue to make it known, that the love with which you have loved me, may be in them, and I in them. Amen. This is God's Word to us this morning. Well, it was just a little under a year ago that Rebecca and I came down here to Baloxy to meet with the Pastoral Search Committee here at this church to interview for the pastoral position. It's odd interviewing for a pastoral position. It's like going on a date. You're putting your best foot forward. They're putting their best foot forward, and that's how it is. But we came here, and I had the opportunity to preach, had the opportunity to meet many of you, and after the service, and after we had lunch, we went up to Jackson to stay with some friends of ours. Rebecca and I talked about the trip, the whole way back up there, and we talked a lot about the church, but one of the things that came to mind that we discussed over and over was the fact that despite all of the things that churches go through, no matter what church it is, this church seemed to have a genuine sense of love and a genuine sense of unity with one another. The people here really deeply cared for one another, and that seemed to be an obvious thing to us as we left the church that morning. It's not a perfect church, but obviously there seemed to be some sense of love and sense of unity there. And now that we've been here for a year, we have not found ourselves to be disappointed in that. And if you're here visiting with us this morning, or you've just recently been attending here, we hope that you found that to be the case, a place where you're going to be accepted as you are, a place where you're going to be loved, and treasured, and valued, and accepted here. But, as I said, we are not a perfect church. There is no such thing as a perfect church. If you are visiting here today and you're looking for a perfect church, you're going to have to go somewhere else. And good luck in finding it because there is no such thing as a perfect church. This is not a museum of self-righteous people here. This is a hospital for six centers. This is a hospital for people who are in recovery, who are recovering Pharisees, who have all sorts of issues in our lives, and we are not altogether. That's why we're here. That's why we need grace. That's why we need the gospel. And because we're not perfect, there's always going to be something going on in our individual lives, and in our relationships, and in the life of a church, that seems to strike some degree at what Jesus specifically prayed here. That he prayed that we would be one, even just as he and the Father, our life together, how we live with one another. In relationship, in this particular local church, speaks volumes to this community. If speaks out what we believe, do we actually live what we believe? Do we believe that when Jesus prayed that we would be one, just as he and the Father one, that's something that we're actually striving towards, that we desire to the degree that the Father desired that. That Jesus desired that. We're communicating something to the world. When you look in verse 21 here, part of the reason why Jesus prayed that the church would be unified is so that the world may believe in Him. And when disunity is part of the culture of this church or any other church, we're communicating that there is no difference between the gospel and any other message that the world has to communicate to us. There's no difference between Christianity and any other philosophy or lifestyle or world view that the world has involved. Very rarely in the history of the church has the church expressed a whole lot of unity. I remember on September 11, 2001, coming home from work and I did probably what many of you did that day. I was glued to the television set. I was watching the news, trying to discover what went on. Just awestruck by that awful day. But I remember one beautiful thing that I saw. And that was the members of Congress standing on the steps of the Capitol building in Washington D.C. and spontaneously breaking out into song as they sang God Bless America. It was a beautiful sign of unity between Republicans and Democrats. People who ideologically are all over the map, worlds apart, can't agree on what time the sun's going to come up in the morning. They get together and they're singing God Bless America. A beautiful symbol of unity. And in my cynicism and also in my realism, I thought to myself, I don't think that's going to last very long. It didn't, did it. The unity didn't last very long. And unfortunately, the church so often looks just as disunited as the least popular Congress in history of the United States of America. It's too our shame. And that's been the case throughout it in the church throughout her history. There has never been a golden age. If you just look at first Corinthians, you can't even get to the first generation of churches. You discover that there were wild divisions in that church. I would have hated to have been the pastor of the church in Corinth. You get to the early church, all throughout the early church, there are divisions. There's this huge budding of heads that happens in the year 1054 where you end up getting what's called the great schism. That's why we have the Roman Catholic Church, the Western Church, and the Eastern Orthodox Church. That's where that split happened. Just two weeks ago, we celebrated Reformation Sunday, the 493rd anniversary of when Martin Luther nailed his thesis to the door of the church in Wittenburg that sparked the Protestant Reformation. And out of that, the church split again. The churches that were Protestant who protested the heresies and the egregious practices of the Roman Catholic Church. And Rome warned us. They warned us that if we split off from the Roman Catholic Church, we would divide into all sorts of factions. And you know what? They were 100% right. The estimates are that there are somewhere in the neighborhood of 20 to 30,000 denominations out there. Even within Presbyterianism in America, you have the Presbyterian Church in America. That's what First Presbyterian Church is affiliated with. You have the Presbyterian Church USA. You have the Eden Gelical Presbyterian Church. You have the Orthodox Presbyterian Church. You have the Associate Reform Presbyterian Church and you have the Reform Presbyterian Church in North America. Not to mention a whole host of others. And that's just in America, the divisions that we have. When we can agree on 99.9% of things, I have a friend, an unbeleding friend who knows the gospel, understands it backwards and forwards, probably better than most Christians do. He knows the Bible very well. One of the reasons why he will not bow to the need of Jesus Christ is because he sees this in the church. He sees all of these denominations, all of these factions in the church. And even when you get to the local church level, he's seen that in the local church. And it's a stench in his nose, something that I can understand. I can understand that. It's not necessarily putting our best foot forward. I should say that denominations are not always bad. Sometimes they actually help to foster unity. We can be in our respective denominations and not have to fight over some of these nitty gritty details. At the end of the day, we wouldn't even have them if our sin were not rising to the surface all the time. This unity is part and parcel of what happens. But what is true of the church throughout the world has also been true of churches on the local level. It's true even of this church to some extent. Yet of all of the things, of all of the things that Jesus could have prayed for on that night before he was to go to the cross. He prays for his people and he prays that we would be one unified together, reconciled just as he and the Father are one. You're getting the sense here that this is a tremendous issue for him. He wants the church to look like this. He wants the church to display unity not only amongst one another and not only to the Lord but to the world. It's part of our mission, to the world, that we actually express some form of unity. That's what he prays for for us. But the reality is that it doesn't just happen. Unity doesn't just happen. When two people get married just because they have the right structure in place that they put rings on each other's fingers and they've signed a marriage license and they've done the whole thing and they've had the party and they've thrown the rice and they've gotten married. They live in the same house together. That does not mean that they're unified. Just because the structure is there and just because we have the structure doesn't mean that we're unified. We have to fight for it and marriage, if you want to have unity in your marriage, you have to fight for it and in the local church, if you want to have unity in the local church, you have to fight for it as well. So how do we do that friends? That's the question that we have to come to grips with when we read this passage that Jesus has prayed this yet. What we see is not always the fact that there is unity. How do we fight for that in the local church? We do it by remembering that despite all of the differences that we have, legitimate differences, despite all of the differences that we have, when you look to the person next to you, someone who professes to believe that gospel, that person has been saved by the same grace, by the same Jesus Christ, who gave up his same life for you and for them. Despite all the differences, he had to tone for your sin, he had to tone for their sin, and to tie that binds us together is Jesus Christ. His promises to us in the gospel, it is the gospel that binds us together with my friends. A lot of people think that the gospel is the stuff you need to believe to get you saved, to get you to walk down the aisle, it's grace that saves you and then the rest of the Christian life is about doing a bunch of good stuff and about staying away from a bunch of bad stuff. It's obeying the rules divorced from the gospel. That's not Christianity. That's Islam. That's Judaism. That's what everybody believes. They have everybody believes you have to find some way to justify yourself. It's not Christianity. Christianity is having the gospel infused through every thread of your life and changing your morality, changing your worldview and changing the way in which we fight for unity with one another. The gospel is the only ground, not one of several grounds, the only ground that we have in order to be unified with one another. Period. And Jesus wants us to see that here. In Christ, in that gospel, there is neither Jew nor Greek. There is neither slave nor free. There is neither male nor female. All are one in Christ because of what he has done for us as individuals and for us as a body. So the things that we stand united upon are not our political ideologies. It's not where we went to school. It's not our vocations. It's not our work. It's not our economic status. It's not our race. It's not how old or young we are. It's none of those things as important and as good as many of those things are. Those are not the things that unite us in the local church. That we are coming here to find unity upon the place where we find unity is upon the person and the work of Jesus Christ for us in the gospel. It's upon his life and upon his death and upon his resurrection that unites us together. That is where we find our unity here. And that actually means that sometimes there are times when we need to divide. There are times when we need to divide. Matthew 10, Jesus says that he came not to bring peace but a sword and actually the pit members of a particular household against one another. The basis upon which we would divide and the only basis upon which we would divide is the basis of the gospel. When the gospel itself is being compromised, a lot of people ask me, why did your denomination split off from a perfectly good denomination in 1973 to start its own? The reality is that men in the PCA could not even get ordained in the old church. They would be asked, do you believe that Jesus Christ as the son of God, the only Savior of sinners, the only hope in life and death, and if they affirmed yes, they couldn't get ordained. Do you believe that the Bible is the word of God, the only rule of faith in practice? If they said yes, they couldn't get ordained. And that's been true in many cases throughout the course of history. Martin Luther, John Calvin, the PCA, many other places have been, it wasn't they that split off, their denomination, their people left them. And so sometimes those split happen and to stand firm on the gospel means that occasionally and hopefully very, very rarely there's going to be division. But I don't think that most of our divisions happen because of that in the church. Most of the divisions that happen in the church happen over petty things, over issues of personal preference rather than the very gospel being at stake. Let me give you just a little example of what I mean here. Everybody, you don't have to be a Christian, you can be a person who goes to church once every three or four years, but everybody has an opinion on music and worship style in the church. Everybody does. There are people who feel like the organ in the hymnal descended from heaven with the chicana glory behind it. And that is the God ordained instrument and the God ordained tool upon which we should sing and perform our music in the church. It just is. I mean, it was good enough for the apostles. It must be good enough for us, right? And so we believe that some people honestly believe that hymns written in northern Europe by white, northern Europeans of the 17th and 18th century are the only type of music that is ever appropriate in the local church. That's one extreme. Then there's another extreme. Very American. Newer is better. Whatever is newest, whatever is loudest, whatever is bigger is better. It's this mentality that's right around the time John finished writing the book of the revelation, the Holy Spirit went on vacation and he returned from vacation shortly after the Lewinsky scandal. And so everything from there on out is okay, but prior to that it's just too old school for us. It's not understandable. It doesn't resonate with us and this particular day and age. And so we enathomatize people on both sides or we just can't seem to worship together. So churches have sought to respond to this and one of the ways in which they have responded to it is also in very American style which is to create two completely separate worship services where you have one for the traditional people who like that style and one for the contemporary people who like that style. The market forces demand it. You have to placate the market forces. It's just good economics. It's something that we will never do here. We will never do it here at first Presbyterian Church. And the reason why is because we will not let our musical preferences divide us. It will not happen here. We need to be able to sacrifice some of our own preferences for the good of our brothers and sisters in Christ and the local church. We can't stand or die upon things like that. And it speaks to the gospel when we're able to do that with one another. When we're able to say that I'm going to give up some of my preferences, some of my own personal comfort because I have a savior who gave up his personal comfort in order to reconcile me to himself. If he can do that for us, we can get over our petty little differences that divide us from one another. Look y'all, I'm the one that decides what music we're going to sing here on Sunday morning. I have to be honest with you. I don't even like all of it. And I'm the one that picks it out. But I have to come to this liturgy, come to this service and think about who we are as a church, where we are as people, and not just do whatever my own personal preferences are. You have to give some of yourself in order to be unified. Too many of our complex center realm preferences. And it's not right for that to be the case. We give up our preferences in order to be reconciled to one another. But here's the reality as well. Not all of our conflicts are merely about preferences. Some of our conflicts are over issues of real or perceived injustice that one party has done to another. Usually, it's more muddy than that. It's mutual injustice that has been done to one another. Mutual wronging. It is almost never true that when there is a big conflict that only one person in that conflict is entirely at fault. We have to own our responsibility in that. And so what we do when we've been hurt is we have a tendency to draw circles of exclusion around our lives. We've been hurt. We've been in relationships that are unsafe. We've had times where we feel utterly hopeless. And so what we do is we seek to keep people out. We seek to exclude. We twist inward on ourselves. We hold grudges. We say things behind people's backs that we would never say to their face. That's what gossip is. Let me take a little sidebar. Gossip will destroy a church. When that becomes part and parcel of the life of the church, we can put the for sale sign-up. Churches can survive adulteries. They can survive various forms of immorality. But when gossip becomes part of the church, her days are numbered. The days of that particular local church are numbered when that's the case. The gospel changes that. The gospel frees us from having to speak behind people's backs things that we would never say to their face and to hold grudges like that. So how does the gospel do it? How does the gospel change that when I've been legitimately hurt or I've been the one doing the hurting? There's a lot of ways, but I'm just going to give you two things we get ready to wrap up here. First of all, when I've been hurt, when I've been offended, when someone has done something wrong to me, I need to take the initiative to forgive that person because I have been forgiven much. Christ has fully forgiven me and he doesn't hold a grudge against me. He doesn't hold what I have done as leverage against me. Jesus forgave me and it cost him something. Jesus forgave me and it cost him his very own life. And so if it costs me something to be reconciled to my brother or sister, who has even wronged me, then friends, welcome to Christianity. Welcome to what it's all about. Welcome to the Christian life because forgiveness is costly. Grace is always expensive. When I've been hurt, it allows me to take the initiative to seek forgiveness. But secondly, when I'm the one that has done wrong, when I have been the one doing the wrong thing, the gospel frees me to own it, not hide it, not push it aside, not sweep it under the rug, not minimize it, but to own it for what it actually is, and to move toward that person and to seek to make it right. See, in the gospel, Jesus doesn't just ignore the sin. He doesn't just pass by it and turn a blind eye to it. He deals with it. There's justice that is done. There is a tonement that is paid, a penalty that is paid, not for his sin, but for ours. There's justice there. And because that is the case, the gospel allows me to take responsibility for what I've done wrong and take the initiative to make it right with the person that I've heard. And friends, that's why you need to personalize the gospel. That's why you need to move this from becoming an academic construct, a set of a list of things that you affirm, and it needs to become rooted at the level of your soul. Because until that happens, this type of thing that I just talked about is not going to be part and parcel of your life, because that's not how you're naturally wired. It's only the gospel that can drive you to that. Friends, when that becomes characteristic of our lives, of my life and of your life, our church will start to even more reflect what Jesus prayed for here, that we would be one just as He and the Father are one. Have you ever stopped to think about that? But the Father is always fighting to glorify His Son, and the Son's whole purpose in life was to glorify His Father, and the Holy Spirit is about shining the floodlight on Jesus Christ and shining the light on the Father. Their whole purpose in life is to glorify each other. They're giving over themselves in order to make the other member of the Trinity look glorious and look beautiful. It's a circle, a friendship. But guess what about that circle of friendship? It's not a closed circle. It's open. It shows that it's open in the incarnation of Jesus Christ, taking on flesh, dwelling amongst us, living the life that we fail to live, dying the death that we deserve to die, rising again, atoning for our sins, sending to the right hand of the Father, making intercession for us, establishing a room in the Father's house for us so that we could be with them in glory and experience what that friendship and what that unity is like with His people in glory and what the angels that surround His throne. That's what it's all about. That's what He's come to do and we have to fight for that. Christians are to fight for that kind of unity that Jesus Christ the Son prayed would be the case. What if we consciously decided that we were going to be a congregation that looked like that? What if we made this decision together that that was going to be part of the fabric of first Presbyterian church in Biloxi, where we started pouring out our lives for one another, where we stopped complaining about each other and we started to pray for one another, where we saw people who we don't really know, we don't understand that well, who are different from us in many ways, and we went up to them and said, hey, we're having lunch after church, why don't you join us? What if that became part of the fabric of this church? My friends, if that does become even more of what this church is all about, you're going to show up here one Sunday and you're not going to be able to find a place to sit. It's going to communicate something to this community that is almost unheard of that a church, a bunch of screw-ups, would dwell together in unity that looks something like what Jesus prayed for. That's what I long to see. That's what I long to see in me and in you and in this church. People will come here and they will see the unity and they will say, surely God is in this place. That's what we long for. So let's pray for that and work towards that and trust and hope and fight for the kind of unity that Jesus prayed that we would have. Let's do that now as we come before him in prayer. Father, we read this passage with such conviction because we know that so often each one of us as individuals has not been part of the solution but has been part of the problem. We've detached ourselves from worship, from relationship. We've closed ourselves off. We have spoken behind people's backs. We have said things to people's face that we would never say behind their back and vice versa. We have parted ways over issues of preference, issues that in the whole grand scheme of thing mean nothing. O Lord, how we pray that you would change us and we cannot be changed unless you come and break through the hardness of our hearts and you lead us to treasure the gospel of all things and your glory above all things and that we would desire to fight for unity in this church. Would you do that here at this little church in this little corner of the world, the first present galaxy make it happen for your glory and for our good and for the salvation of those who have yet to come to know you. We pray this all in the name of him who came such a distance for us, our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.