The Joy Of The Finished Task
By Woodrow Kroll
John 17:1-15
In our study today we'll take a look at the task that Jesus Christ brought to completion and we'll understand the joy of this work that was finished even before the cross of Calvary. Yet, as one mission was accomplished, another one was given by Jesus to His disciples and those who call themselves by His name even today. That's the task you and I have before us, and it's important that we understand the Lord's instructions and warnings if we're to see it finished. You'll find all this in John chapter 17.
Now, we have been thinking about the word know, K-N-O-W, in the Gospel of John. And on our long journey now, we've seen that that word occurs again and again and again. We began in John chapter 1, looking at those people who did not know Jesus, did not even know He was in their midst. And then in John chapter 3, Nicodemus came to Jesus and he knew something about Jesus. He knew He was a Rabbi, but he didn't know He was the Savior. And then, in John chapter 4, there was that great story of the woman at the well who called Jesus "Sir" and then she called Him "Prophet" and then she called Him "Messiah, the Son of God." She got to know Him personally.
And we've been thinking about knowing Jesus, where He came from, and the outrageous claims that He made, and who He is, and what we need to know about Him, how intimate we need to become with our Savior. Now, I've saved the best till last. John chapter 17 has, I think, the key K-N-O-W, the key know expression in the Gospel of John. There are others, we just didn't have time to get to them during this series. John chapter 17, let me begin at the first verse with you:
"Jesus spoke these words, lifted up His eyes to heaven, and said: 'Father, the hour has come. Glorify Your Son, that Your Son also may glorify You, as You have given Him authority.'" Now, notice all the themes we've dealt with, here's one, authority. "'As You have given Him authority over all flesh, that He should give eternal life,'" there's another theme, "'to as many as You have given Him. And this is eternal life, that they may know You,'" K-N-O-W. "'That they may know You,'" that's eternal life, "'the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom You have sent. I have glorified You on the earth. I have finished the work which You have given Me to do. And now, O Father, glorify Me together with Yourself, with the glory which I had with You before the world was.'"
Now, let's stop there and think about those first five verses. What Jesus is doing here is, He is praying to His Father. This is before Calvary's event, just the night before. He's on His way to the Garden of Gethsemane and He's praying, communing with His Father as He goes. And this is the Lord's prayer; this is Jesus' prayer to the Father. And, isn't it interesting that He is praying for you and me?
And in the process of praying, He says down there at verse 4, "I have glorified You on the earth. I have finished the work which You have given Me to do." Now, if you're like I am, you say, "Now, wait a minute, Jesus, this is the night before Calvary. What do you mean, you have finished the work that God gave You to do? The work isn't done yet; tomorrow is the work."
And maybe you've noticed that elsewhere in Scripture, often the Lord God talks in tenses that don't make sense to us. Let me give you an example. The night before the great battle of Jericho, Joshua is out surveying the whole of the country. The Captain of the Lord's Host comes to him, the Lord Jesus Himself. And the Lord Jesus says to Joshua, "See! I have given the king of Jericho into your hand, and his people" (Joshua 6:2). And this is the night before the battle.
And I suppose if I were Joshua, I would say, "Lord, let me help you with English grammar here. You know, the night before the battle you don't say, 'I have given the king into your hand.' You say, 'I will give the king into your hand.'" To which the Lord of Glory says, "Shut up and listen to Me! When I tell you I have done it, it's a done deal. And if I tell you I will do it, it's still a done deal."
Because Jesus, God, the Holy Spirit, [are] above time, they're not bound by time. So, when Jesus says, "I will do it," in His mind it's like it's already done. When He says (John 14:3), "I will come again, and receive you unto Myself; that where I am, there you may be also," my friends, it's future for us but it's not future for Him. It's a "done deal" in His mind. And while this is the night before Calvary, it's already a "done deal." He says, "I have the joy of a finished task."
Now, I don't know about you, I think finished is one of the greatest words in the English language. I am not process-oriented. You may have assumed that already. I am not process-oriented; I am goal-oriented. I want it done. My favorite verse in all the Bible is Ecclesiastes 7:8. It says, "Better is the end of a thing than the beginning thereof." I want it done.
To me, the three most important words in the English language are "no more work." Or, "it's all done." Or, "that does it." Or, "it is finished." Or, "we're all done." Or, "it's all over." You know, the words "pack it in," "hang it up," three words. Oh, I love all those words. "Let's go home." "That's all, folks." Now, those are my kind of words. The whole idea that it's done, you know.
And Jesus comes to this night before Calvary; and basically, he says to us, "That's all, folks. I've done it. I have glorified the Father here on this earth." Now, everything Jesus did, He did designed to glorify the Father. Matthew 9:8, Jesus healed the palsied man and the end result of that was, everybody "glorified God"--not Jesus, they glorified the Father. And again in Luke 23:47, even the centurion at the cross, when he saw when he saw the way Jesus died, this centurion said, "Certainly this was a righteous Man!" And the Bible says, and "he glorified God."
See, everything Jesus did in His life, He did in a calculated way to glorify God. And you know what? That's exactly what you and I need to do. We need to arrange our lives in such a way that when we come to the end and we say "that's all, folks" we can look back and say, "I have finished my course, I have kept the faith, I have glorified the Father." Oh, it's the joy of a finished task.
Now, Jesus' work is done here--even the work of redemption. Verse 4, "I have finished the work which You have given Me to do." John 19:30, on the cross Jesus said, "It is finished!" And now, at the end of His work here on earth, Jesus awaits being re-glorified. He says in verse 5, "And now, O Father, glorify Me together with Yourself, with the glory which I had with You before the world was."
See, when Jesus was in heaven before creation, He, the Father, and the Holy Spirit shared their glory. But there was a day when in the great counsel of God, it was decided that Jesus would set aside that glory, set aside all the trappings of heaven (Philippians, chapter 2). He would set all that aside and empty Himself, and He would come down and assume the form of a man, take on Himself the form of a servant, become obedient--imagine that, the Sovereign, obedient--obedient even unto death. Imagine that, the One who gives life, obedient unto death, even the death of the cross.
And once He finished that work, that's why Philippians 2:9-11 is so important. "Wherefore God has also highly exalted Him and given Him the name which is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, of things in heaven, and things in earth, and things under the earth, and that every tongue should confess that Jesus is Lord," now listen, "to the glory of God the Father." Everything in Jesus' life brought glory to the Father.
And it's my prayer today, my friends, that everything I do can bring glory to the Father. I'm not always successful at that. And I know you aren't either. But there is a certain joy that comes to the end of life, knowing that you finish well. Jesus comes to the last night of His life here on earth, and He said, "I have finished this task. I have glorified the Father. I am ready, Father, to return to You and to come back to the glory that I set aside that I had with You before the world was." The great joy of a finished task.
Well, Jesus' task is finished in this passage. Now, here's the catch. When Jesus' task finished, your task and mine just began. So, also in this passage, not only do we see Jesus and the joy of His finished task, but we see us and the dangers of our present task. Look down at verse 14. You want to see some danger, look at this. John 17:14, He says:
"I have given them Your word; and the world has hated them because they are not of the world, just as I am not of the world. I do not pray that You should take them out of the world, but that You should keep them from the evil one. They are not of the world, just as I am not of the world. Sanctify them by Your truth. Your word is truth."
Now for you and me, looking at this passage, thinking about the K-N-O-W's of John chapter 17, the knows in this passage, we know that Jesus' task is finished. He has the great joy now of returning to the Father. But we also know that He is warning us of the dangers of the task we have yet to come. And, friends, I don't hear many people talking about these dangers any more. And it may be because they aren't the dangers that we face today.
Notice what the dangers are. Verse 14, very clearly in God's Word. "I have given them Your word; and the world has hated them because they are not of the world." I think one of the primary dangers we face in the task of evangelism, is the hatred of the world. People do not like to find out they are sinners.
And you know what we did in the last couple of decades in the twentieth century? We decided if they didn't like finding out they were a sinner, we'd say they were spiritually challenged. We'd say they weren't living up to their potential. We'd somehow soften what we had to say to them so they wouldn't hate us so much.
And here the Lord Jesus is clearly saying, "Look, they are going to be--when they do My work--they will be hated by the world. And this is not the only place the Bible tells us this, friends. Paul tells us, "we preach Christ crucified, unto the Jews a stumbling block, unto the Greeks foolishness" (1 Corinthians 1:23). See, if the Gospel of Jesus Christ is to be a stumbling block, and we remove all the tenets of the Gospel that will cause people to trip, we have removed the Gospel from the Gospel.
And in these waning years of the twentieth century, one of the things I have watched is how easy it has become to embrace the Gospel and never confront their sin. And Jesus says, "You need to be careful of the dangers of the task I'm leaving with you, because the world is going to hate you. If you do this right, don't expect the world to love you for it." Paul said it. Jesus said it again, John 15:18, He said, "If the world hates you, you know that it hated Me before it hated you." See, if you want to be like Jesus, you've got to expect some hatred from the world. And the less we are like Jesus, friends, listen--the less we are like Jesus, the more we are going to be liked by the world.
Now, I'm not suggesting you become obnoxious. I'm not suggesting you go out and do something that will cause reproach to the Gospel of Christ. I'm just telling you what the Bible says. And I didn't make this up, friends, I just read it out of the Gospel of John and out of 1 Corinthians. Let me read another one to you, out of 1 John 3:13, John again is saying, "Marvel not, my brethren, if the world hates you." Now, that's three places in God's Word, four if you count this passage in John 17, that we have the warning that it is likely that people are going to hate you because you present the Gospel to them.
Galatians 6:17, Paul says, "I bear in my body the stigma [the marks] of the Lord Jesus." The Greek word for marks there is the word stigma. And when the Gospel does not carry a stigma with it, when it becomes so acceptable to the world around us that you can't distinguish it between other messages in the world, it is no longer the Gospel.
And this world has removed, the church of these centuries has removed, the stigma from the Gospel. We have become so sensitive to the needs of people, so much concerned that we'll drive them away, that we won't fill our large auditoriums, that I think we have forgotten that the Gospel always carries a stigma with it. And when that stigma is removed, the Gospel is removed.
One finds ourselves today being tempted to ask the question that Paul asked the Galatians, chapter 5 verse 11, when he asked, "is the offence of the cross ceased." Now, ask yourself that question.
On the message on Sunday morning, or Sunday night, or Saturday night, is there any offence at all to that message anymore? See, the concern Jesus has is that while He has finished His task and He's going back to glory, He's leaving us here to be hated by the world because we are not of the world. Now there is a great concern about being hated by the world. But notice, also, there's a greater danger than that in verse 14.
"I have given them Your word; and the world has hated them because they are not of the world, just as I am not of the world." I think a greater danger than being hated by the world, the latter part of that 14th verse, is being attracted to the world, being like the world, becoming like the world in such a way that the world can't distinguish the believer from the unbeliever.
And you can do that any day of the week today. I mean, you can go to some churches and not even know the Gospel is there. I won't tell you what country it is, but I was doing an interview with a Christian radio station, largest station in this whole nation, and it was a Christian station. And I asked the station manager what percentage of your program is truly Christian, because they were thinking about pre-evangelism, about not being too difficult on people so they wouldn't drive them away from the Gospel. And I said, "What percentage of your programming is actually Christian?"
And he said, "14 percent." Christian station, 14 percent was Christian. And then he said with some degree of glee, "Most Christians don't even know we're a Christian station." Now what on earth good is that? Sure, you haven't driven anybody away from the Gospel and you've gathered a large audience, but you haven't given them the Gospel either--these people are going to die in their sins and go to a Christless eternity because we weren't willing to stand up and tell them the Gospel.
Now that's what He says here. Be careful because the world will hate you. Secondly, be careful, you may be so attracted to the world you'll want to become just like the world. You want to do the things the world does, you want to look like the world, think like the world, smell like the world. And Romans, chapter 12, tells us just the opposite, friends, just the opposite. Jesus' concern for you and me is that we are hated by the world, but we're not attracted to it.
And then, verse 15, here's His third concern. His task is finished, but there's danger ahead for you and me. Verse 15, He says, "I do not pray that You should take them out of the world, but that You should keep them from the evil one." See, Jesus does not want you to withdraw from the world. If you do, the only witness this world has is gone. Jesus said, "As long as I am in the world, I am the light of the world" (John 9:5). But when He left, He said, "Now, my friends, you--you are the light of the world." And if you and I withdraw from the world, there's no light for this world.
So He doesn't take us out of the world, He just prays that we will not be overwhelmed by the evil one. He prays that we will be kept from evil. That's exactly the same prayer as in what we call the Lord's Prayer in Matthew, chapter 6, isn't it? "Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil [the evil one]" (Matthew 6:13).
Now, Linda and I have four children, three daughters and one son. They and their children are the delight of our lives. And I have to tell you, I have not prayed every day that God would make of my son a great pastor and a great preacher. He is a pastor. I have not prayed of my daughters that God would make of them great teachers of the Word, great mothers to their children, great wives to their husbands. They are that.
But this is what I prayed for my kids every day, "Lord, keep them from the evil one. Don't let Satan get his grip on them." Because if the world, the flesh, and the Devil, swallows up and gets a hard grip on our families, their use to the Lord God is finished. My prayer for my children is "Keep them from the evil one."
And you know what? That's what Jesus is praying for me! Jesus is greatly concerned, not that I am hated by the world. He doesn't care about that at all. He's concerned that I'll be so attracted to the world that the world won't hate me. He's concerned that I'll be gobbled up by the evil one, that I'll fall prey to the sins of the evil one and in the process of doing that, that I will no longer be of any value to Him in service to this world.
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