Beholding the Glory of Christ – Timothy Keller [Sermon]

tonight's scripture reading is from the book of john chapter 17 verses 20 through 26 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 as 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 this is god's word so we've been going through this uh chapter 17 this final prayer of jesus just before he died and you may have heard me say this in past weeks john knox the uh the man who brought the protestant reformation to scotland uh in the 1500s when john knox was dying he had his wife read him john 17. and i uh i hope that tonight you'll see why you could do a lot worse and in some ways

if you if the content of these six verses five six seven verses if the content of these verses does not equip you to face any challenge in life and death itself then i'm really not sure what will uh in these verses which jesus is praying for literally for us see verse 20 he says i'm not just praying for them now he's talking about his disciples in the room with him he says father i'm not just praying for the people in the room i'm praying for all those who will believe in me through their message and

that's all of us anybody in this room that's a christian tonight so he's praying very specifically for us and what we're going to see here is we're going to learn here what we most need and how to get it and what the result will be but we most need how we can receive it and what the outcome the final result is going to be so first of all um what do i mean when i say what we most need well i'm not going to tell you right off what i mean by that but let's start

by looking at this great petition verse 23 the last half of 23 where jesus says to the father father i want that the world will know that you sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me i want the world to know this is his petition that you sent me and that you love them even as you love me now when he says i want the world to know that what he's actually praying is i want the world to know the gospel because if you look at that those two things he's praying

for you put him together it's the gospel how so well first of all he wants the world to know that he was sent he wasn't just born he was sent you see the difference of course jesus was born he's a human being you're human beings you were born he was born but he wasn't only born because he was an only human being he was sent meaning he existed before he was born he was the son of god now that makes all the difference in the world because if he was just born then he was just

one more human teacher telling us how to live our lives so that if we live a good life god will take us to heaven if he was only born then all he would be is one more human teacher telling us how to save ourselves but he was sent he's the son of god not just one more human teacher telling us how to set of ourselves he is the son of god come to save us to live the life we should have lived to die the death we should have died in our place so that when

we believe in him god accepts us not because of our work but because of his work so you see in that little word i want the world to know i was sent i'm just not another human teacher like all the other founders of all other religions but i'm the savior who has come to save them and that explains this astounding last part of the sentence which if i possibly could i would i'll show you why i would brand it in your heart he says because i was sent i want the world to know that you

sent me and have loved them even as you loved me even as see if he was a human teacher telling us how to live so that if we lived a good enough life god would would bless us and take us to heaven then in that case god would love us to the degree that we deserve so if you live a good life this good uh god would love you that much because that's how much you deserve if you only live this good a life god will love you that much if if you live this good

of life god would always love you to the degree that your life warranted uh to the degree you deserve that's not what it says here so the gospel is that because jesus christ has saved us the moment we believe god loves us not as we deserve but as jesus deserves see that i want them i want the world to know that you have loved them even as to the same degree that you love me so for a moment think about this well first of all of course that is the gospel the gospels were not saved

because of our work but because of jesus work so the bible has all these words for it the bible says uh we're clothed in jesus christ um it says that uh the the it says that jesus absolute perfect holiness and beauty and righteousness is imputed to us meaning it counts as if it's ours that's the only way to read this passage this th that sentence or put it like this think of the magnitude of the love of the father for the son you know only the father knows what jesus went through to save us only

the father knows how much he loved us how brave he was just how much he gave up only the father knows these things and therefore only the father knows the complete beauty and greatness of jesus christ and the father's love for the son it would be infinite it would be it would be it would be eternal it would be infallible and it would be unvarying right and it says that's exactly how he loves you the moment you believe he loves you exactly even as in quality and quantity as he loves his own son now i

over the over the years david martin lloyd jones has been a as some of you know a a preacher he's written a lot of uh he preached he was a british preacher in the middle of the 20th century he preached in the 1940s 50s 60s in london i've read a lot of his sermons over the years influenced me a great deal and he actually uh preached a whole series of sermons on john 17. so as i've been we've been preaching through john 17 and i've been preaching to john 17 this year i've been looking at

his sermons because they're great and when he gets to this verse he he he says then the world will know that you sent me and therefore that you have loved them even as you love me he stands back and this is what he writes this is a pretty remarkable point and i he says it in a kind of it's almost understated after all he was british but listen what he said he says in this christian life there are many problems and difficulties but more and more it seems to me that most of our problems indeed

if not all of them arise from the simple fact that we fail to realize understand and appreciate what is the real truth about us as christian people we read these things in the scripture without meditating on them so we don't realize that these are not abstract truths but these are truths about us if we did that our entire lives would be revolutionized in other words you see that verse that's true of you do you realize it's true of you is it a reality do you really grasp it do you realize that this is you this

is true of you he loves you like this no you don't you'd be way happier no you don't you'd be able to take criticism no you don't and this is why lloyd jones is saying i've actually this is it's intrigue he says more and more it seems to me that most of our problems indeed if not all of them arise from the simple fact that we look at these things in the bible and we get them you know they're just abstractions we feel to realize these are true of us do you realize who you are

in jesus christ do you realize what you have no you'd be so different i'd be so different we'd be so different let me show you let me give you an example how life-changing this should be in our situation we live in the middle of new york and new york is at the heart of modern western secular culture some years ago a man a canadian philosopher charles taylor wrote a magisterial book called the sources of the self i just i don't recommend it at all it's it's a it is really a tremendous book it's a nice

big thick book it's a philosopher written to philosophers and so it's not an easy book to get through but it is a magisterial account of how modern western society's understanding of self and identity is so different than every other culture and every other century you see even today in non-western cultures and in older you know in previous centuries how did you find your identity how do you how did you find out who you were your parents told you and your people told you and they said this is who you are this is who you should

try to be and if you aspire to that and if you if you uh fulfilled that then everyone said you're a good person and you had house you had self-esteem okay in other words every other culture your your family and your people said here's who you are and then when you lived up to that then they affirmed you and you felt you know you you you had a self-esteem and self-worth as a person but charles taylor says we are the first culture in which no no we say you decide who you want to be you

determine who you want to be you don't let anybody else tell you but once you go deep in your heart and you figure out who you are and then you come out now charles taylor says now we so desperately need affirmation from everybody i mean we've come up with this identity all by ourselves and now suddenly we go out into the world and we demand recognition we need recognition we demand constant affirmation he says we have the most fragile identities in the history of the world because we need everybody pretty much to affirm them we

can't take it if people dislike us or disagree with us or don't affirm us we can't take it we're the most fragile identities in the world now somebody who's been writing about this recently is a guy named freddie deboer he actually i think he's on the staff of brooklyn college he lives in brooklyn and he's a good writer and he writes a column and he he writes a blog and recently he wrote a great uh article about this very thing about the fragility of modern identity that charles taylor writes about and he wrote this in

an article called you can't fake it so the article starts like this the article starts i have been increasingly preoccupied by a basic question recently why is everybody such a wreck why is everybody such a wreck and now listen he goes through a list he says first we have been pardon me he says we have this vast intellectual architecture telling us that physical attractiveness hierarchies are cruel and gendered and unfair and this is correct but we still care so much about being hot and we judge each other about it and all of our papers and

humanity seminars are entirely inadequate to ending that condition secondly we have a political critique of all the ways in which notions of human worth are dictated by traditional inequalities of race and sex and class we have a sec we have a whole set of political concept concepts of self-care that are designed to fight that negative of those negative effects we have a self-help culture that constantly tells us you are wonderful you are a brilliant unique light who and you can alone shine the way in a dark world we have a very woke he said we

have a work woke world of marketing all the marketing is always affirming you affirming you he says he has a gym nearby where he lives in brooklyn and the jim's ad says join the body acceptance movement he points out if you actually did join the body acceptance movement there'd be no reason to join a gym [Music] but he says see everything everything is there to help you feel good about yourself and then he says we've also got um he says finally we have uh social media we've got incredible social media tools to craft a perfect

idealized version vision of ourselves curated to the millimeter that we can present to the world exactly the kind of self that we want to present so we've got all these tools then he says and none of this is working none of it works and this is what he sees around brooklyn by the way he says i see people who are the most outwardly secure and confident they never betray a hint of doubt or guilt or remorse they project cool at all times they are popular they're getting plaudits and positive affirmation all the time they are

academically and professionally successful they have money and respect and yet the flow of life reveals that inside they hate themselves they all hate themselves none of that stuff matters none of it gets at the core self-hatred within and i'm beginning to wonder is this the human condition see and charles taylor he would say yeah and but modern culture aggravates it and here's what the bible would say yes but that what he calls self-hatred why is it with all this stuff we're doing all these ways of making ourselves feel good about ourselves we're just screaming affirmation

and recognition and why everybody deep down why it's not working at all the bible would say that sense that we're not okay is a universal sense that we all know deep down inside that we're sinners so this thing that he's describing is like a rock on everybody's heart it's a rock on your heart and you know what the social media and you know what the self the self-help and the therapy and the self-esteem you know what all these things are there are water pistols trying to deal with that rock but this in jesus christ the

father loves you even as he loves jesus even as that is not a water pistol that will blast that rock off of your heart that will explode the rock off your heart if you believed it do you believe it do you realize it that's what the lloyd jones says all of your problems come from you don't really believe it it's not really there and it's not a reality to you so this is the thing you most need you need to believe the gospel not just believe the gospel but believe the gospel okay secondly how does

how do we receive this this incredible this incredible love how do we start to receive it so it actually changes our lives now at first this passage doesn't seem to be giving us any help so look at verse 24 he says 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 love me before the creation of the world now we'll get back to this but jesus is saying when we die if you're a christian or at the end

of time if you're a christian you actually go where jesus is and you see the glory of the love we've talked about this before from all eternity the father the son the holy spirit have been perfectly loving one another and glorifying each other and jesus says at the end of time we are going to be incorporated into that love and glory it's astounding but you say well that doesn't help us now yeah it does yes it's true it's talking about an incredible experience and we will only know that experience fully in the future but will

we know it only in the future that's the question we will know it fully only in the future but will we know it only in the future and no it's not true because like for example even 22 look at 22 it actually gives you a hint jesus says i've already given them the glory you gave me what's that mean and uh what does paul mean when he says in second corinthians 3 and 4 this is what paul writes he says we who contemplate the lord's glory are being transformed into his image with ever increasing glory

for god who said let light shine out of the darkness has made his light to shine in our hearts to give us the light of the knowledge of the glory of god the face of jesus christ so here it says that when we see him and by the way first john chapter 3 verse 1 john says when we see him we'll be like him because we will see him as he is so when we see jesus christ we'll become like him you know why because you'll want him there was an article in the new york

times just this weekend somewhere where he said advertisers have gotten pretty smart they realize they don't want to just tell you about a product they want to show you the product there's something about the human nature that if we see something we want it we tend to want what we see it looks so delicious that looks so comfortable whatever so when we see it we tend to want it but we're told in first john 3 1 that when we see jesus christ we will become like him because we will see him as he is when

with our eyes the eyes of our body we actually see the glory and beauty of jesus christ we'll want that same glory and beauty will want him so much that it'll utterly transform us on the spot we'll become perfect we'll become glorious everything wrong with us will go wait but paul says and this is what's important that you don't have to wait completely for that experience that there's a way he says we we who are contemplating the lord's glory well what does that mean it means you can see his glory through faith you can see

his glory through the eyes of faith with the power of the spirit there's a sense in which you can see him no not like it's going to be at the end it's not the vision of christ at the end of time but to some degree you see him now and that changes you now and that's what paul's saying what does that mean john owen who was a 17th century british pastor and writer he was also the head of christ church oxford christ church college oxford if those of you who know oxford he was a great

thinker and writer and as he was dying in the 1680s he wrote his last book called meditations and discourses on the glory of christ and that's a wonderful book and in it he decide he said over all of his lifetime he'd come to realize you never changed just by elbow grease you never change this by trying harder just by exercising your will he says you don't become honest by trying he says you don't become uh forgiving and generous and and brave just by trying because when you do that you say well i need to be

those things because i have to i have to in order to get to heaven i have to in order to feel good about myself i have to in order to get the the uh the approval of other people i have to he says whenever you do something because you have to it's always a superficial change it never lasts but he says what really changes me he says what makes me forgiving is not the bible says you must forgive it's seeing jesus christ the beauty of jesus christ dying on the cross to forgive me and when

i say oh lord did you really do that for me you forgave me that changes me because i don't just i'm not then becoming forgiving because i have to i'm becoming forgiving to because i want to and it's not just the sight of jesus doing it you know as an example but as a savior doing it for me do you want to be courageous don't just do because i i don't want to be a coward that won't change you an awful lot of people have been courageous only because they're more scared of looking like a

coward than they are scared of the enemy but when you see jesus christ facing hell for you and setting his face like a flint and not flinching and doing it for you and say savior did you do that for me that will make you courageous what john owen said and it's all based on he says in john johno and then this great book he says in john 17 24 jesus says the ultimate goal of salvation the ultimate goal of human life is to see his glory because when you see his glory you'll want it you'll

be you'll you will be absolutely transformed by your love for him but owen says that actually can happen to some degree now it's not a sight with your it's not a a vision with your body it's a it's a sight of your your faith it's a faith site it's seeing you by faith aren't you it's happening now everybody right now it's happening to me i think it's happening to you in other words we're describing jesus we're talking about him we're we're we're imagining him dying for us we're imagining him being courageous for us are you

feeling moved by that in any way that's what will change you not just trying to be courageous not just trying to be forgiving seeing him you know here's the reason why when you just put pressure on the will you don't change the real thing that needs to be changed for you to be really changed and that is your loves have to be changed the loves of your heart so when like for example somebody once said to me my doctor told me that i'm working too hard i tend to be a workaholic i overwork my doctor

said your body can't take it you got to stop i've been trying to slow down i've been trying to slow down but i can't slow down well here's why because if the thing you love most in life is money and success and power then that's what controls you and you're going to stay a workaholic until you love something more than that money and success or somebody has said to me in the past i just can't get over the rejection i can't get over the betrayal and the shame that comes from it and the anger that

comes from it well okay but uh if your reputation is more important to you than anything else if you love your reputation and you love human approval and you lost human approval and you lost reputation in that incident no you'll never get over the anger and the shame of it but if you love something more see thomas chalmers uh great scottish uh presbyterian minister wrote a sermon years ago called the expulsive power of a new affection and this is what he says in he says this is the secret to change he says he says there

is not one personal transformation in which the heart is left without an ultimate object of beauty and joy the heart's desire for a particular object may be conquered but its desire to have some object is unconquerable the only way to dispossess the heart of an old affection is by the expulsive power of a new one he says look i may stop loving this too much because i love this more than that but the heart's got to love something it says there is not one personal transformation in which the heart is left without an ultimate object

of beauty and joy your heart has to have that and you know how you change only when something that you love too much and wherefore was ruining your life you start to love jesus more when you love jesus more than money you'll be get you'll get more generous when you love jesus more than power you'll become more of a servant when you love jesus more than your reputation because you know you've got the ultimate good name in jesus christ you'll be able to forgive people who have wronged you it's only as you see him by

the power of the spirit there's a great place in in ephesians 3 where paul writes this he says i pray this ephesians 3 i pray that he may strengthen you with power through his spirit in your inner being that you may have the power to grasp how wide and how long and high and deep is the love of christ and to be filled with all the fullness of god when he says you need spiritual power in your being to grasp how much jesus loves you you say but i already know that jesus loves you no

you don't you need with the power of the spirit as we pray as you read the bible as you're in worship services you're in fellowship groups whatever you need to be getting these faith sites you the more you contemplate the glory of jesus the more you see it the more you'll change you can see it now you can have it now some years ago well i'll tell you this when i was a young man i started at one point i wasn't hadn't been a christian very long and i got into let me just put it

this way without going into details i started getting into calvinistic christianity and i loved it because like many many white people i don't like emotion and what's if you don't like emotion boy calvinism is great because it's so rational and it's so you know truth and doctrine oh okay and i started reading calvinistic authors and one of them was a man named charles spurgeon who had been a uh a british preacher in the in the late 1800s in the in the uh the 19th century and i not forget by the way i i read a

sermon by him that just really had a huge impact on me in fact i went back and found it before getting coming to i went back to find it to make sure my memory was right i didn't want to tell you this story without uh making sure my memory is right uh at the very end of one of the last years of his life 1891 on december 27 1891 he preached a sermon just on three words out of the prodigal son text you know the prodigal son story in luke 15. you know the place where

the prodigal son comes back to the father and the father runs after him and kisses him so spurgeon just he just preached on three words in in luke 15 and kissed him the whole sermon was on and kissed him and here's what he said he says well what is a kiss a kiss is not just love it's love made manifest its love expressed its love felt so the father doesn't just love the son the father kisses the son and then he said there is absolutely no way you're going to make it in life unless sometimes

the holy spirit sheds the love of god abroad in your heart sometimes the love of god has to be manifest in your life this this thing has to jump off the page he loves you even as he as he loves his son that's got to jump off the page it's got to flood your heart you've got to say oh my word sometimes it's got to happen in other words sometimes the love of god you've got to feel it and it's got to be made manifest and then he added these words which amazed me he said

some of us know at times this is spurgeon speaking personally some of us know at times what it is to be almost too happy to live the love of god has been so overpoweringly it's been experienced by us so the love of god has so overpoweringly been experienced by us on some occasions that we've almost had to ask for the stay of the delight because we could not endure it any longer so spurgeon says sometimes in prayer sometimes in reading he is so overwhelmed by the love of god it's it's so overpowering that he's been

afraid that he couldn't endure and he had asked god to stay his hand stop the joy and i read that and i said what the and i said if this is available to a calvinist it's got to be available to any christian who believes in jesus christ and it's available to you but do you know anything of it you're not going to be able to make your life without it but here's the good news and the good news is regardless of how good or bad we are at contemplating the glory of christ while we're on

this earth eventually jesus says father this is what i want for my children my my believers my brothers and sisters i want them to be where i am and see my glory and then at the very end so that the love you have for me may be in them and i myself may be in that's an amazing statement but here's what we're talking about uh jonathan edwards in his great sermon um heaven is a world of love lists five reasons why even though we need loving relationships here in this world loving relationships makes us miserable

by the way if you don't have love you are really miserable really miserable but if you do have loving relationships you're fairly miserable and those are the only two ways to be human beings in this world and there's five reasons why loving relationships make us miserable number one we all want to be loved this is all from edwards we all want to be loved for our own sake right isn't it awful when you find you thought somebody liked you but then they were just using you to get to somebody else that's awful you feel objectified

you feel dehumanized but here's the here's the problem all of us kind of love one another because it benefits us we tend to not love people just for their own sake we tend to love people for our sake we don't love people for their own sake and therefore all of us are yearning for a kind of love that nobody really can give to one another secondly he says another reason why love makes us miserable here is because we can't express our love you um you know that if you love somebody you want to tell them

and you want to articulate it it's so frustrating if you can't but for all sorts of various reasons edward says we cannot express our love well uh he says we're clogged uh some of us just don't like to talk about it some of us get scared about it some of us just won't do it some of us love people who we desperately wish they would tell us that they love us but they never do and so because it says love is only really really great if we're expressing to each other but we're not we're clogged

there's impediments so he says number one we all want to be left for own sake and we nobody can really do that secondly we all want to express our love completely and nobody can really do that number three we want to love mutually there's there's nothing worse than loving somebody who doesn't love you the same right to love somebody so much and they don't love you at the same level it's not awful you love them far more than they love you that's terrible but you know what's second worse when you love someone less than they

love you that's that that's not quite as bad but it's pretty awful don't you have people who just think you're their best friend and they come to you and they want and you don't look you really don't like them and and they kind of know that you really don't like them it's awful because there's something in every human love that wants reciprocity every love always wants to be answered and in this life we're almost all unaligned our love relationships we always we you know we find that we love too much people who don't love us

as much and vice versa so one reason love makes us uh uh you know unhappy is we're not loving each other for own sake we're not expressing love we're not loving mutually fourth when you love somebody and this is one of the worst things about love is you need for them to be happy isn't that right so if you love somebody and they're not happy then you can't be happy their unhappiness is a is a it's a darkens your happiness because of the love now a lot of people actually pull back because of that but

then they're even more unhappy if you pull back and you don't have love relationships you're even more unhappy and if you throw yourself into love relationships you're constantly unhappy because the people that you love aren't happy and their unhappiness actually in a sense just basically sucks the happiness out of your life you know what has been said is you've heard me say this before some of you especially parents is once you start having children for the rest of your life you're only as happy as your unhappiest child because your hearts are tied to your children

and you cannot be happier than they are and by the way um that's not just true for parents you see you see why why love is such a problem okay and then lastly we want to be loved for own sake but nobody does that we want to express love but really nobody ever does that we we we want love that's it that is a character mutuality seldom does that happen we want love in which the persons we love are all happy that can't possibly happen and lastly we don't ever want to say goodbye if you

love somebody you never want to lose them you know if you if you live a long time you're gonna you're gonna see virtually everybody you love die so if you die young that's a tragedy if you die old it's really a tragedy and here's what edwards means we're like beached whales a beach whale is dying why because the the whale is not meant for the environment it's in it needs to get back in the water and when you see all the ways in which we desperately need love but this world cannot give us the love

we need it can't give us love without partying love mutuality in mutuality it just can't do it in other words love keeps us miserable and the lack of love makes us even more miserable why we're beached whales where what are we really built for we're built for the love of heaven we're built for love in which everyone loves one another for their own sake which in which everybody is expressed in their love uh perfectly in which there's complete mutuality and also we need a place where when we love the people around us they're all infinitely

happy and in heaven of course everybody we love is gonna be infinitely happy which means it's gonna magnify our happiness and we need to be in a place where we never say goodbye to anybody and in heaven we won't say goodbye to anybody now where is that it's right here i want them father to be where we are i want to be in them i want them to be in us i want there's a fountain of love at the heart of the universe it's called the trinity it's called the fathers and the holy spirit they've

been loving each other and glorifying each other for all eternity all eternity and when you die if you're christian or at the end of time if you're a christian you'll be plunged into that [Music] and all will be well if you do not believe in god at all if you don't believe there's an afterlife death is going to take away everything meaningful to you it's going to take away all your love relationships if on the other hand you say oh i believe it in afterlife i believe in god and i believe if i've lived a

pretty good life and i believe that probably when i die i'll probably go to heaven well you should be scared of death too it's the ultimate college board test in other words if you if you don't understand the gospel then you should be scared of death why because you'll how do you know if you've lived a good enough life that'll be a pretty scary moment but believe the gospel and fear no darkness fear no darkness then you can taunt death the way paul did oh death where is thy sting oh grave where is thy victory

why because paul can look at death and can say all you can do is plunge me into an ocean of love all you can do is get me off the beach and finally into the water and you can say to death and it will show up and it's it's a one day closer to everybody in this room than it was yesterday it's on its way and you'll be able to say what george w what george herbert said at the end of that great poem you can look at death and say spare not do thy worst

i will just be better than before thou so much worse that thou shalt be no more let's pray our father we ask that you'd help us to uh realize this truth that you love us even as you love your son jesus christ let us live in the joy of that give us the the changes of life that should come from knowing that help us to glorify help us to contemplate jesus glory until we become like him we ask it in his name amen thank you for listening today gospel life's ministry is supported by generous partners

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