Exaudi Midweek Sermon 2022

 

Romans 8:29-39; John 17:20-26

 

The end of Jesus‘ great High Priestly Prayer should assure our hearts that God loves us. 

 

He prays not only for His apostles, who will be mocked and ridiculed and taste a piece of the cross that He goes to suffer, but for all of us who believe in Jesus through His apostles’ word.  He prayed for you before you were born.  He had you in mind.  He cares about you as much as He cared about Peter and John. 

 

It is the through the apostles’ word that we are one.  We are united by the Holy Spirit by the pure teaching of the apostolic word, which is Jesus’ word.  Jesus spoke the word which His Father gave Him to speak.  The word expresses and teaches unity of the Father and the Son.  This is their eternal love and kindness for each other, which the Father sent His Son to show the world through His apostles’ word. 

 

Jesus demonstrated the unity of the Godhead through His life and teaching, through His suffering, death, and resurrection.  We are one as the Father and the Son are one when we know this love that has united them from eternity.  We are one with each other and with God when we believe that God is reconciled to us through the Son He gave to die for us. 

 

People think unity is when we set aside our differences. That may be so on earth.  But Jesus sets forth the biggest difference between us and God not by showing that He is a mighty God and we are puny creatures.  Jesus shows the biggest difference between us and God in that God is holy and righteous and we with the world are sinners and unholy.  But Jesus bridges even this gap and mends this tear, and brings His creatures to their Creator first by becoming a creature, as His Father sent Him to do, and second by becoming sin for us when He knew no sin, as His Father sent Him to do. 

 

What joined a sinless Creator to a sinful creature?  A sinless creature made to be sin for us.  The love of God.  The love that joins the Father and the Son from eternity is manifested to you by the Holy Spirit in the glory of the new testament, the Gospel, the message about what Jesus did for the whole world, when God loved the whole world and sent Him.

 

  It is this message of the Comforter, this love, this Gospel, to which every word of Holy Scripture points us.  Jesus fulfilled every jot and tittle of God’s Word.  He did what God told you to do and sent Him to do.  And it is when you see what divides you from God removed that you are one with Him.  It is when you repent of your sins that divide you from God that the Holy Spirit reveals to you the Savior who joins you to God.  It is when the light of the Law shines in your heart and you see who you really are without God, that God shows Himself made man for you, and joining you to Himself, taking not only a body and a mind like yours, but all of the sins that make you run away from God.

 

But listen to His prayer.  He wants to be in you and you to be in Him, just as the Father is in Him and He is in the Father.  What does this mean?  It means that you are in a love that does not die when Christ dies, but shines all the brighter.  It means that when your sins overwhelm you, it does not mean that this love is overwhelmed, because Christ died for you and rose for you and conquered sin for you, because the Father sent Him to reveal the glory of God.

 

You can tell the glory of something by how deeply into the darkness it shines. I have had flashlights that only pierce a few feet in front of me, and I have had flashlights that beam fifty feet and the glory, the light shows everything clearly.  The glory that the Father gave to Jesus is that He shines the light of His love into the darkest depths of sin and death and the love is not only not extinguished, but shines so brightly it overcomes all the darkness. 

 

It reveals the love that was before the foundation of the world, the love with which God foreknew and predestined you to be conformed to the image of His Son, to be conformed to the love that the Father and the Son shared. 

 

And this love is righteous.  It teaches us the grace of God for sinners which teaches us not to give up hope as we fight against sin that is not love.  It teaches us where Jesus is.  He is not with the proud who deny their sin, but with the poor who confess it, just as God was in the thick of sin, and He in whom no darkness dwells at all, overcame the darkness with a love that rescues us from sin and promises us help when it threatens us, tempts us, fills us with regret, or tries to rob us of our hope to feel the unity that we now have by faith in God’s Word. 

 

The world has not known the Father.  The natural man does not receive the things of the Spirit of God. The fleshly mind is enmity with God.  But Jesus has known the Father, and through no man has ever seen God at any time, the Son of God, who is in the bosom of the Father, He has made Him known to us.  He has declared to us the name of God, and it is the name that did not give up on us when the world would have tossed us away for the sake of a bowl of soup.  And Jesus says, “I will declare it.”  That means that He is still declaring it now, through the lips of a sinful man, in the preaching and the sacraments, in the New Testament His apostles wrote.

 

The love with which the Father loved His Son Jesus is the love that sent Him to suffer and die for you.  Jesus considers it love for Him that the Father sent Him to suffer for you.  I do not understand this.  I bow in awe at the majesty of it.  And this love enters our hearts through faith in this word, and we know that Jesus is in us when we believe the word that gives us Jesus’ love.

 

So believe it.  Listen to Jesus pray, and He will kindle in your heart the fire of His love with His Holy Spirit.  He will turn your heart from worrying about yourself and all the sad things this world has no power to overcome, to Him and all the sad sin that He truly has overcome.  And He will change your and your heart to love as He has loved you.  Just as He has given you that love, He will continue this love and mercy in your life, so that you learn, however weak you are, to love as you have been loved.  He predestined you to be conformed to His Son.  He loves you by letting you suffer for others, and when you know this, blessed are you, because Christ dwells in you and you in Christ. 

 

And this you must believe and cling to it against your feelings and your thoughts and your fears and the world’s threats and allurements, that Jesus has overcome the world and sin and death and devil because the Father loved Him enough to send Him to suffer for you.  Embrace that mystery and you will be in Christ and He in you, and you will be one with the apostles and all Christians, and with God, and what can separate you from such love?  What in all creation has the power to overcome the love that the Creator has shown as a creature to His creatures?  Therefore live by this love, and should you become discouraged because you don’t see it in your life, then remember that it does not come from you, but from Christ, who prays for you who have believed in Him through the apostles’ word. Return to the word, and the love will return to you.  Alleluia!  Christ is risen!  Amen.