The passage I read
was John 17:1-21
You can find that passage here:
The verse that most
stood out to me:
1 After Jesus said this, he looked toward heaven and prayed:
“Father, the hour has come. Glorify your Son, that your Son may glorify you.
As I reflect:
Selfless
glorification. Jesus didn’t pray for
glory for His own benefit, but for the Lord’s glory.
When we ask for
things from God we often take scriptures out of context and believe that simply
because we asked, it will be given to us.
But God isn’t a genie in a bottle.
He isn’t someone you can just come to for your wishes to be
granted. When we patiently and
reverently make our requests known before God, and when we persistently
continue to do so, we need to be sure that our requests are for His will and
for His glorification and not our own.
If you read the word and align your life to it, spending day and night
meditating on the wisdom found in the Good Book and getting to know Our God,
then you begin to understand and even at times expect His will. With this understanding we can all better
pray for His will and glorification instead of our own. These are the type of prayers referred to by
“ask and you shall receive”.
Verse 6 through 8
very much remind me of my family. Jesus
is of course referring to those in the world who have chosen to follow Jesus,
but He doesn’t speak of them as His own followers but rather as followers of
God. He communicates an understanding of
stewardship of people. For me, this is
my family. I fully thank God for them
and I pray for them, but I also often acknowledge in prayer that they are not
my own and that I give them fully to God.
These are difficult prayers for me sometimes, not because I don’t trust
God with my family, but just because I know what I am praying and it may very
well mean that one day He answers those prayers and ends up taking one of my
sons from me. He may take one of them
during a mission trip to the middle east or perhaps one will be martyred in a
south American jungle? I don’t
know. What I do know is that they are
not mine to keep, but to raise and to lead to God that they may do His will
(regardless of whether that leads them away from where I’d rather they be or
not).
In verse 9 through
12 Jesus goes on to pray for protection of the disciples. I have often come to a point of
semi-confusion in prayer when this topic arises. As for my family, as well as for adult
disciples of Christ that I fellowship with, there are times when I will pray
for God’s will to be done through them so that He be glorified, but I then also
pray for their safety. The reason this
is somewhat confusing at times is because God’s will does not always include
the physical safety of His follower.
There are times when there may be hardship or pain in a believer’s life
that are more useful as a witness than when everything is “hunky dory”. I have a friend who witnesses in a way that I
think we all ought to. He will often go
out to bars where people are drinking and will eventually need a ride home and
he will share Christ with them. There
are many that would tell him to be careful.
I do not. I tell him to be bold
and go with Christ. And when I tell him
that, I know that he may not return to his home. That may very well be the last night he is
allowed the opportunity to witness, but I tell him to be bold anyway that the
Lord would use him for the Lord’s will and not his own. I then pray for his safety, but I pray less
for his safety than for God’s will to be done (even if that includes my friend
not being safe). It’s a hard prayer to
pray for a friend, and even harder to pray over the life of your child, knowing
that what you pray for could one day be that which takes your child’s
life.
When Jesus continues
to pray for their protection, He isn’t praying that they never die. He is instead praying that they be used for
as long as is possible before they come home.
He also prays that they not fall into temptation saying, “protect them
from the evil one.” I pray no less for
my family, friends, and as verse 20 and 21 indicate, also for all who believe
and follow Christ. I pray also for
sanctification not only over myself but over others as well that they may be
set apart to be used by God.
Jesus’ prayer was
selfless all the way through as he prayed for the glory of God through His
sanctified followers being protected while doing His will. He prays for our unification as followers
that we also may glorify the Lord as He has glorified the Lord. We ought to pray in the same manner with the
same heart seeking God’s will and glorification and not our own.
My response to the
Lord: not written today.
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