For the second time in a few verses the Lord speaks of His imminent departure from this world and anticipates returning to His Father. Our Saviour’s readiness, and we may say happiness, to leave the world is moderated by the needs of His friends whom He will leave behind. In this precious intercessory prayer the Lord Jesus seeks additional ‘hands on’ involvement from the Father for the disciples’ help and protection. By these requests He informs the disciples, and His church, of the Father’s active and ongoing care in the lives of His people.

It is perhaps worth mentioning, though a moment’s thought would reveal it, that the atoning death of the Lord Jesus Christ not only saved sinners from death and hell but gained for them everlasting life and glory. The redemptive sacrifice of the Lord Jesus brought eternal security as well as God’s full and free salvation to all His chosen people. Christ’s death accomplished in time what God’s will purposed from eternity. Our Saviour did not save us on the cross only to relinquish us under the complexities of life and lose us in the end. 

Many reasons render this prayer of the Lord Jesus precious to His people. Foremost among them is the frequency with which our Saviour differentiates between His Church and the ungodly in the world. Let there be no confusion in the minds of God’s people. The Lord God distinguishes absolutely between those who are His own by everlasting love and those who are not; those set apart in the covenant of grace and those who are not; those redeemed by the blood of Christ and those who are not.  

Everything our Lord Jesus Christ did as a man He did according to the will of God and for the glory of God. Throughout His ministry our Saviour constantly ascribed glory to God for all things; the miracles He performed, the doctrines He preached and for the mission of salvation and reconciliation upon which He was embarked. The Saviour was always obedient to His Father’s will and from a child was aware to be about His Father’s business. 

The glory of God is the final and sufficient explanation for everything. God in His glory is the beginning and end of all things. When God created the world, ‘the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy’ to the praise of His glory. When the Lord Jesus came into the world, the angels sang ‘glory to God in the highest’. When the redeemed of the Lord enter heaven they shall sing, ‘Alleluia; Salvation, and glory, and honour, and power, unto the Lord our God’. ‘For of him, and through him, and to him, are all things: to whom be glory for ever. Amen.’

In John chapter 17 we embark upon one of the most remarkable and profound passages in the whole of Scripture. Every believer reading this chapter must surely feel they are standing on holy ground for the majesty of the subjects involved and the blessedness of those things requested from God by our Lord Jesus Christ. As we enter into this chapter let us do so with excitement and humility, and let us note this fact; there never was a request made by the Son of God that was not abundantly granted by His loving Father.