For the full unabridged audio listen here: Believing is Seeing and Believing is Life - Unveiled Glory
The world has a pretty fixed idea of what glory looks like. Glory is wealth. Glory is crowns. Glory is military power and self-promotion. We glorify ourselves.
But when Jesus lifts his eyes to heaven in John 17, he pulls back the curtain on the true heart of God. He unveils a glory revealed not in a palace but on a cross — not in self-preservation but in self-giving love, not in worldly dominance but in a united, protected church that reflects the eternal love of the Father and the Son.
Glory, from the perspective of Jesus, is so different from how we think of glory in the world. So let me try to give you a snapshot of what it actually looks like.
There’s a scene at the end of The Return of the King — the third film in The Lord of the Rings — that gets it. Aragorn (who I prefer to call Strider, because Strider is a cooler name than Aragorn) has been crowned the true king. The crowds are gathered, everyone cheering and celebrating. And who comes walking up? The four hobbits — the most diminutive of the peoples of Middle-earth. These brave little hobbits were so fundamental in the defeat of ultimate evil.
They come walking up, and they go to kneel. And Aragorn says, “No, no, no — my friends. You kneel to nobody.” And the king drops to a knee and bows his head to them. And as he does, so does everybody else.
It’s a powerful, powerful moment. The least of these are glorified because of their sacrifice, because of their bravery, because they went all the way to the end. It is upside down — because the world does not typically give glory to hobbits. They’re just some people who like good drink, good ale, and a nice pipe. And yet here, in this moment, they receive glory from the King.
Upside down and beautiful.
That’s the picture John 17 gives us. In this prayer, Jesus unveils God’s glory: revealed through Christ’s exalted sacrifice, protected mission, and missional unity.
The Prayer (John 17)
Set the scene: night has fallen. Judas is gone. Jesus stands on the precipice of arrest, beating, and death — they haven’t yet headed to Gethsemane, but they’re about to. This is one of those moments in John where we get the inside scoop. In the darkest of places, Jesus turns to his Father in prayer:
Father, the hour has come. Glorify your Son, that your Son may glorify you. For you granted him authority over all people that he might give eternal life to all those you have given him. Now this is eternal life: that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent. I have brought you glory on earth by finishing the work you gave me to do. And now, Father, glorify me in your presence with the glory I had with you before the world began.
I have revealed you to those whom you gave me out of the world. They were yours; you gave them to me and they have obeyed your word. Now they know that everything you have given me comes from you. For I gave them the words you gave me and they accepted them. They knew with certainty that I came from you, and they believed that you sent me. I pray for them. I am not praying for the world, but for those you have given me, for they are yours. All I have is yours, and all you have is mine. And glory has come to me through them.
I will remain in the world no longer, but they are still in the world, and I am coming to you. Holy Father, protect them by the power of your name, the name you gave me, so that they may be one as we are one. While I was with them, I protected them and kept them safe by that name you gave me. None has been lost except the one doomed to destruction so that Scripture would be fulfilled.
I am coming to you now, but I say these things while I am still in the world, so that they may have the full measure of my joy within them. I have given them your word and the world has hated them, for they are not of the world any more than I am of the world. My prayer is not that you take them out of the world but that you protect them from the evil one. They are not of the world, even as I am not of it. Sanctify them by the truth; your word is truth. As you sent me into the world, I have sent them into the world. For them I sanctify myself, that they too may be truly sanctified.
My prayer is not for them alone. I pray also for those who will believe in me through their message, that all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you. May they also be in us so that the world may believe that you have sent me. I have given them the glory that you gave me, that they may be one as we are one — I in them and you in me — so that they may be brought to complete unity. Then the world will know that you sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me.
Father, I want those you have given me to be with me where I am, and to see my glory, the glory you have given me because you loved me before the creation of the world.
Righteous Father, though the world does not know you, I know you, and they know that you have sent me. I have made you known to them, and will continue to make you known in order that the love you have for me may be in them and that I myself may be in them.
Three movements run through this prayer. First, the glory of the sacrificial life (verses 1–5). Then the glory of protected mission (6–19). And finally the glory of missional unity (20–26).
The Glory of the Sacrificial Life
“The hour has come.” We’ve been walking through John together these past weeks, so we know this is a turning point. Every other time Jesus says “the hour,” it’s “my hour has not yet come.” Here in the upper room, the hour has come. His time. His moment. This is why he came — so he could glorify the Father.
How is Jesus glorified? Through the crucifixion. Through self-sacrifice — the giving of himself.
I know that offends modern ears. You’ll hear people say the cross is “cosmic child abuse” — how could you believe in a God who would kill his own Son? But here’s the thing: it’s not God killing his own Son. It’s God giving himself. This is where the Trinity comes to play. John has been teaching us from chapter 1 that Jesus was pre-existent — Jesus is indeed God. So here we have God the Son saying, “It’s time for you to glorify me so that I can glorify you.” And the way he does that is by giving himself for the world, on the cross.
We’re offended by that because glory to us is not dying a sinner’s death. Glory to us is not hanging on a cross naked, spit on and beaten and mocked. That, to us, is the very opposite of glory. And Jesus says: no. Nothing else is going on. This is what true glory looks like — giving yourself for someone else.
And this glory opens something up. Verse 3: “Now this is eternal life: that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent.”
We Westerners get caught up in the timeline — “eternal life, wow, that’s a long time.” It is. But don’t miss what Jesus is coupling here: eternal life with knowing God. “This is eternal life, that they know you.” This is less about a chronological timeline and more about a depth of knowledge — a quality of relationship. God is eternal, so to truly know God is to experience eternal life.
Which means we’re already tasting and living in eternal life right here, right now. It’s not something we’re waiting for, something we get someday in the future. As we know God through Christ, this is indeed eternal life. We’ve already begun the journey. Will it get better? Yes — there’s coming a day when he’ll wipe away every tear, no more mourning, no more weeping. But the journey has already begun, because Christ has revealed the glory of God through self-sacrifice on the cross.
The Glory of Protected Mission
Now Jesus prays for the guys in the upper room — that crew around him, probably the wider group we’d later see at the beginning of Acts. Think about where they were: night has fallen. They’re in the darkness, minutes or hours from watching Jesus arrested, mocked, beaten, crucified. They’re about to lose their rabbi. The fear must have been palpable — you probably could have cut it with a knife.
So Jesus intentionally prays for them. And the core of his prayer is that the Father would protect them. “I haven’t lost any that you’ve given me” — John always makes sure we remember about Judas — “They’re all here. They’re all safe. Now I have to go. So Father, you need to protect them.”
Could you imagine what it would be like to hear Jesus praying to the Father to watch over you, to protect you, to care for you? These guys are true believers — they really do believe Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, worthy of worship. And here he is, praying that they would be protected.
Now maybe if you’re like me, you think: Jesus, appreciate the prayers for protection, but wouldn’t it be great if you just took me with you? Scoop me up to the Father’s house where there are many rooms? Why do I need to stay here? Wouldn’t it be easier for the Father to protect me if I were already there?
That would be the easy way. We don’t get the easy way in following Jesus. Because he says, “As you sent me into the world, I have sent them into the world.”
We are a people on mission. From the very beginning, Jesus’s people were never meant to sit around and hide out and just read books. He’s sending them as the Father sent him. His people have a mission and a purpose — not to hide out in holy huddles, not to cower inside church doors, not to create private little groups of just Christians. We are to be a people on mission out in the world.
“My prayer is not that you take them out of the world but that you protect them from the evil one.” We are to be in the world but not of the world. And we need the Father’s protection as we move about, because until the second coming, we’re going out into a world of darkness, pain, suffering, evil. We need the protection of the Father through the Spirit. Jesus prayed for it — so we can trust it. We can go out into a dark world with boldness, without fear, to live sacrificial lives and love well.
And that will cost us. Love without sacrifice is not love. That’s hard for us to understand, but it’s reality.
He also prays we’d be sanctified — set apart — by the truth: “Your word is truth.” Sanctification is a purification process: us being changed, made more like Christ, and he says it’s done by the Word.
That doesn’t feel good. Remember John 15 — the pruning of the branches? The pruned branch produces more fruit: more love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control. But pruning is cutting. Pruning hurts.
So when we bump into hard stuff out in this dark world, remember two things. One, we’re going to be protected — the Father is caring for us; Jesus prayed for it, so it’s real. Two, we’re going to be sanctified — pruned — and that’s going to hurt. It’s a both/and, an already-but-not-yet tension we live in as we go on mission.
The easiest way to avoid all of it is to simply not live on mission — to live a self-centered life. You might live comfortably that way. Plenty of people do. But we’re called to mission, sent into the world to live sacrificial lives. So if we’re serious about following Jesus, we don’t get to hide out on our couches watching bad TV. We go out putting on display what love looks like.
The Glory of Missional Unity
And we do it through missional unity — Jesus’s final prayer request. Now he’s praying not for the disciples in the room but “for those who will believe in me through their message.” That’s us, gang. Jesus is praying for us here — a remarkable thing.
There are very few places in Scripture where you can know with absolute certainty, “This is directed at me.” Read Paul or Peter or John, and you’re reading secondhand mail — written to someone else at a different time and place. But here, on the night of his betrayal and death, Jesus looks into the future and prays for those who would believe through the disciples’ message. That is us.
And what is his prayer? That we would be one — brought to complete unity. That is his prayer for the church through the ages, because living in unity puts on display, for a watching world, love. “They will know you by your love for one another.” Complete unity is how we display that at the corporate level.
So look around at this here world and ask: how’s the unity thing working out?
Not so well. This should challenge us to our core. It should make us ridiculously uncomfortable — that the global church is most known for its factionalism and disunity. I can’t think of any major denomination in the United States that didn’t have contentious, disunifying debate at its annual meeting this past year — to the point where churches left and denominations split again.
We live in a world so utterly given to a wrong view of glory that we practice disunity. It’s all tied together: when you start chasing the world’s notion of power and glory, your values get shifted. It becomes about you — about being right, being the best. My position is right, yours is wrong. My pet issue becomes essential to the faith, and I’m willing to separate from you because, by God, the church carpeting ought to be blue and you think it should be red — or heaven forbid, you believe in vinyl plank. Gray millennial vinyl plank! And then you go to some churches and they’ve got it hanging on the walls. It’s not even on the floors. It’s crazy. No wonder we split.
We get so caught up chasing power and glory for ourselves that we split churches over flooring. What happens when there’s a global pandemic and you have to decide whether to meet or not meet? Can a church stay together over that? Nope. Not that that would ever happen. Oh wait — it did.
Jesus looked down the ages with a clear understanding of who people are. We struggle with self-centeredness, selfishness, an unwillingness to practice any kind of self-sacrifice. He knew our individualism — our desire to protect ourselves, our comfort — would create disunity. And yet he said the way the world would know we are his followers is by our love for one another. So he prayed: make them one.
Friends, we need to do some soul searching here. Do we really believe that displaying Christ to a watching world is ultimately done through our unity? That’s a tough question. But this is Jesus’s prayer for us — that we’d pursue unity, carried out in mission. We’re a sent people, just like those early disciples were sent. That’s tough.
So here’s my challenge: tomorrow morning, when real life hits, where will your heart hesitate?
Will you doubt God’s glory and sacrificial love — go out into the world thinking, no, that’s not really how glory works?
Will you doubt that God’s hand is keeping you safe when the proverbial poop is flying?
Or will you doubt that the oneness of the church is powerful enough to change the world? That maybe instead of being one more voice of disunity, we try to practice some unity — find the common ground, be a blessed peacemaker standing between two parties trying to bring them together? Do we believe the unity of the church is enough to change the world? Or do we think we need a whole bunch of apologetics, a big billboard, more money, more power, a different politician?
Wherever you hesitate — that’s the very place Jesus is praying for you. We read it. Hesitating on God’s sacrificial love? Jesus is praying for you. Don’t really believe God will keep you safe? His prayer meets you there. Think the unity of the church is overblown? Jesus will meet you there too. Because we have his prayer. We know what he prayed for.