In John 17, we read a prayer that Jesus spoke in the presence of his disciples the night before he was crucified. This prayer reveals God’s love and acceptance for Jesus, his disciples, and ultimately to all future believers.
The Father and Son identify this as their moment to glorify each other. They love one another and desire to make much of one another for all the world to see. Contrary to the common experience of human glorification of one another, the mutual honouring of the Father and Son isn’t self-centred. Those who come to God through Jesus Christ are called to participate in this love. And the result is the glorification of the Father, the Son, and all who believe in Jesus.
The prayer expresses Jesus’s total dedication to God’s will, showing complete alignment with the Father’s purposes.
Glory in this prayer is relational acceptance.
When the Father accepts the Son’s obedience and the Son accepts the Father’s will, they reveal themselves to one another and to those who witness their relationship.
When believers receive Jesus’s words and recognize him as sent from God, they participate in the Father’s acceptance of the Son and through that acceptance, they enter into the very glory-relationship that characterizes the Trinity.
To be accepted into this relationship is to be drawn into the divine glory itself.
Jesus Prays for Himself
He prays for Glory.
What does that mean?
It sounds odd.
To grasp what Jesus is really asking for, and why he might have arranged for this request to be heard and remembered by John, let’s dig into the meaning of glory. I’ll do this by drawing from a sermon by C.S. Lewis called “The Weight of Glory.”
Glory is understood most simply as fame. But, in this prayer, it is not fame given by people. It is fame with God. It is having God the Father as a fan. It is approval or “appreciation” by God.
Perhaps you are familiar with Matthew 25:21 “Well done, good and faithful servant! You have been faithful with a few things; I will put you in charge of many things. Come and share your master’s happiness!”
To possess glory is to matter, to carry weight in God’s eyes.
Confusion about the nature of pride and humility can get in the way of seeing how glory in this sense is actually humility and not pride.
To stand in front of our creator and receive his approval and to receive glory, is to be in the humblest position.
Lewis says that part of the bitterness which mixes with the sweetness of the promise of glory is due to the fact that it so seldom seems to be a message intended for us, but rather something we have overheard.
The door on which we have been knocking all our lives will open at last. Those who love God will not only know Him, but will be known by Him. So, requesting glory isn’t selfish. It is relational.
And the relational nature of glory is deeply connected to the description of eternal life that we see in verse 3. I spoke about this last week.
Eternal life is knowing God. And not just knowing about him. It is an intimate relationship with God through Jesus, a relationship that will grow throughout our lives and extend into eternity. This was demonstrated to us by Jesus in how he knew the Father, listened to the Father, obeyed the Father, and glorified the Father.
Jesus states that he already brought the Father glory on earth by finishing the work the Father gave him to do. His earthly ministry has already made God’s power and character visible. And in the final act of obedience, the glory of Jesus will be seen in the humiliation of the cross. This seems counterintuitive: the cross appears as defeat, yet it becomes the supreme revelation of God’s character.
This is the pattern we are given for eternal life and glory. It is not the glory offered by the world. That glory fades because it is mortal. It is temporary. It depends on a constant striving and climbing. Pushing others down to get to the top.
And so, Jesus prays for his disciples because he knows the difficulty of resisting temptation better than any human that has ever lived. And he knows that the only way to stay faithful to the glory of the Father is to be devoted to prayer.
Jesus Prays for His Disciples
Protect them by the power of your name.
What does protection mean?
Jesus’ prayer for protection operates on two distinct levels, addressing both internal cohesion and external spiritual danger.
First, Jesus asks the Father to protect his disciples “by the power of your name” so that they may be unified as he and the Father are one. His primary concern is that the disciples remain united, desiring for them the same intimacy and oneness shared between him and the Father. This unity is not an organizational unity dependant on a shared vision or mission statement. It’s a spiritual reality rooted in alignment with God’s character and purpose.
This protection and sanctification reveal God’s active, ongoing acceptance. It’s not conditional upon performance but rooted in the Father’s love for the Son and the Son’s love for those given to him.
Jesus prays for unity because it strengthens believers internally and demonstrates God’s reality to the watching world. This unity prepares all of Jesus’s followers to endure the unbelieving world after Jesus’s departure and protects them against this unbelieving world. Without cohesion among believers, they become vulnerable to external pressures and internal fracturing.
Second, Jesus prays not that the Father remove the disciples from the world, but that he protect them from the evil one. This protection addresses a genuine spiritual threat. Jesus recognizes the power of evil, having lost one disciple to Satan, and understands that representing God in this world constitutes genuine spiritual battle. The evil one often operates through the world’s hatred, and the disciples will need protection against such malice.
Jesus doesn’t ask that his followers escape the world through death or withdrawal, nor does he pray they be spared all suffering from the world’s opposition. Rather, he prays they be protected from the evil one even while facing that opposition. Jesus also prays that the disciples be sanctified by the truth, with God’s word serving as truth—spiritual equipment that sustains them in hostile territory.
The protection Jesus seeks is spiritual rather than circumstantial: preservation of unity, defence of the mind and spirit against demonic attack, and consecration through God’s revealed word.
The connection between unity and glory is intimate and transformative. Jesus has extended this glory, this honour, to his believers for the purpose that they will be one, just as the Father and the Son are one (17:22).
This is not merely a reward or decoration—glory becomes the means through which unity operates. Christian unity is facilitated by glory, first given to Christ and then in turn to the disciples. Glory in this context is not an absolute attribute of God but a relative possession that can be reassigned to believers.
The ultimate purpose of this unified, glory-bearing community is missional. Jesus’s reason for this particular petition is his desire for future believers in the unbelieving world to show to this world that Jesus is indeed God’s emissary (17:21f). The unbelieving world does not believe that the Father has sent the Son, so Jesus prays that his believers’ show of unity will lead to belief in Jesus’s unity with the Father and hence his identity as one who is sent from the world above. When believers manifest the same relational harmony that characterizes the Father-Son relationship, they become a living argument for Christ’s authenticity. One of the things that most impresses the world is the way Christians love each other and live together in harmony. It is this witness that our Lord wants in the world “that the world may believe that Thou hast sent Me” (John 17:21). The lost world cannot see God, but they can see Christians; and what they see in us is what they will believe about God. If they see love and unity, they will believe that God is love.
Full measure of my joy within them.
What is this joy, how is it given?
Joy appears as a central theme in Jesus’s teachings—he desires his followers to experience it.1 The nature of this joy is distinctive: it flows from a specific source and sustains believers through opposition.
The foundation of immeasurable joy is maintaining intimate contact with Jesus, who is the source of all joy.1 This isn’t abstract or sentimental; rather, after Jesus’s Passion, the disciples would recall his words and experience the full measure of his joy because they knew from those words that he had conquered the evil one and brought eternal life to them.2 Joy emerges from grasping Christ’s victory and the eternal life it secures.
The method by which disciples access this joy involves both remembrance and present reality. Jesus spoke of his own joy and his desire that his followers possess it, saying “These things I have spoken to you, that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be full” (John 15:11), and again in his high priestly prayer: “Now I am coming to thee; and these things I speak in the world, that they may have my joy fulfilled in themselves” (17:13).3 The words Jesus speaks—his teachings about his identity, mission, and victory—become the vehicle through which his joy transfers to believers.
Conflict will characterize the lives of those who simultaneously inhabit the world and remain faithful to God’s Word, yet Jesus asks not merely for spiritual protection but for a new disposition: joy in the midst of suffering.4 This joy isn’t dependent on external circumstances but on the internal certainty of Christ’s triumph and the believer’s participation in his victory. When believers maintain intimate contact with Jesus, they experience God’s special care and protection and witness the victory God brings even when defeat appears certain.
Sanctify them…
Sanctification literally means setting something apart for a sacred purpose.1 In Christian theology, the term encompasses two interconnected realities: believers are set apart as sacred through Christ’s holiness, having been made holy before God through faith in Christ2, and they undergo gradual purification from sin and progressive spiritual growth toward Christlikeness.1
The concept operates on both positional and progressive levels. Christian theology sometimes distinguishes between justification—having saving faith—and sanctification, which refers to the process of gradual purification from sin and progressive spiritual growth marking the believer’s life.2 Sanctification involves the operation of grace that enables a person to be freed from sin and to become like God in heart, will, and thought.
Practically, sanctification involves deliverance from sin’s power through faithful observance of faith, earnest struggle against temptation, and the practice of Christian piety.3 This doctrine draws on New Testament passages emphasizing a movement toward holy and righteous living that characterizes following Christ in faith.2 Rather than a single moment of transformation, sanctification describes the ongoing trajectory of the Christian life—a reorientation away from sin and toward conformity with Christ’s character. Though the term is used broadly of the whole Christian experience, most theologians prefer a restricted sense to distinguish it from related concepts like regeneration, justification, and glorification.
Jesus Prays for all who will Believe (us)
Jesus prayed first for himself, then for his disciples, and finally for all future believers and the content shifts in each section of the prayer.
Jesus’s work in the world is near completion, and he is praying exclusively for his immediate followers who will be left behind as he departs, like a shepherd about to lay down his life for his sheep. The prayer for the original disciples emphasizes their immediate vulnerability. His service, providing leadership and unity, will end with his departure, his disciples remain in the world, an environment of unbelief and cynicism but of abject hostility. Consequently, Jesus prays for their sustenance and strength in the world, their assignment is dangerous, and so he prays for their equipment and protection, having given them his word, which will become essential equipment in their testimony and survival.
The prayer for future believers, by contrast, emphasizes witness and expansion. Jesus’ prayer for his followers in the preceding verses is concerned only with those already established as his disciples on that last night, though many of the elements apply equally to later believers, and indeed some ingredients are repeated in the verses now before us, which record Jesus’ prayer for those who would later become his disciples. The extension to those who will believe through the witness of the original disciples assumes their witness will prove effective, and what Jesus prays for these believers-to-be is that all of them may be one—a petition that repeats what Jesus has prayed for his original disciples.
However, the fact that Jesus looks to the future and perceives this expanding circle of witnesses dominates the later verses, even when he prays for their unity, he looks beyond their unity to the still unconverted world which stands in need of the witness generated by that unity, developing the theme of witness to the world through the sanctification of believers3. The first disciples need protection for survival; future believers need unity for missional credibility.
Jesus gives the disciples the glory he received from the Father so they may be one as he and the Father are one, revealing to the world that the Father sent him and has loved them even as he loved Jesus.
Resources used in this sermon and throughout the Gospel of John sermon series can be found at https://williamknelsen.com/gospel-of-john-series-bibliography/
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