Ron Dunn Podcast - The Time Has Come

Episode Date: May 17, 2016

Pastor Ron Dunn preaches a message from John 17:1-5. This message is focused on Jesus' prayers to the Father.

You are listening to the Ron Dunn Podcast. Ron Dunn is a well-known author and was one of the most in-demand preachers during the latter part of the 20th century. He led Bible studies all over the United States, Europe, and South Africa. For more information and resources from Ron Dunn, please visit rondunn.com. And it's good to be back in Sherwood Baptist Church, Albany, Georgia. Good to be back with Michael. Always enjoy being with he and Terry.

They are, I guess, our dearest friends. And good to be back with all of you and the staff. And look forward to the week. I tell you what, there's no other church that I'd leave Cape Cod to go to than this one. As much as I look forward to this, Kay and I have just spent two weeks on Cape Cod. I mean, right there on Cape Cod Bay. And we have some friends up there that have a condominium. And right there on

Cape Cod Bay and the bay is about a hundred feet down you just walk down there and everything and it's all glass thing there you can sit out on the deck and you can sun and read and sleep and if you you know eat a little bit and then if you really get energetic you you can get up and walk around the beach and everything. Oh, I'm telling you, I kept thinking, what would Michael believe? What story could I come up with? I tried my best. You know, as a little boy, I used to ride bicycle all the time.

But that was when they had, you know, sensible, common sensical bicycles with good comfortable seats. And you sat down, you know, like in a chair. And, you know, you had good wide handlebars. Nowadays, they've got these bicycles, you know, that are made in hell. And, you know, they're real high and they have these little old seats in it, you know, hard as a rock. And the handlebars way up here. And the only way you can ride like that. And so they had, and so Kay rode it. I mean, she did all right. I said, well, I can ride that.

And I got on it and headed straight for a fence. And it had some kind of flower box out there, and I just ran into that and fell off a bike. But it was a sticky bush. And I've got, I won't show them but I've got about 75 little stickers embedded in my skin I'm trusting my body will reject them sooner or later but the chain caught my leg and I've got two huge gouges right here in my leg and kind of healing slow and everything and so I kept thinking boy that's going to get infected and doctors Maladies right here in my leg and kind of healing slow and everything.

And so I kept thinking, boy, that's going to get infected. The doctor is going to tell me I can't move. Yeah, that'd be nice. Beat up on a little bit, kick it against something, you know, try to re-injure it. It's sore, but it's healing. You know, slowly, but it's healing. So I, of course, if I had called from Podunk, Oklahoma and said I can't come, he would have believed me. But the minute I said, well, where are you?

Well, I'm in Cape Cod. I know Michael, he wouldn't have believed me for a minute. No, sir. Well, look forward to this week. This is always a good time for me and Kay, and we appreciate you and love you so much. I want you to open your Bibles to the Gospel of John, chapter 17. The Gospel of John chapter 17 the Gospel of John chapter 17 I want to read just the first five verses John chapter 17, verses 1 through 5.

After Jesus had spoken these words, he looked up to heaven and said, Father, the hour has come. Glorify your Son, so that the Son may glorify you, since you have given him authority over all flesh, to give eternal life to all whom you have given him. This is eternal life, that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom

you have sent. I glorified you on earth by finishing the work that you gave me to do. So now, Father, glorify me in your own presence with the glory that I had in your presence before the world existed. Now, when you and I talk about time, use the word time, we speak of it in basically two senses. We speak of it in the sense of chronological time, time as it passes,

time in motion. If I had a blackboard, I could just draw a straight linear line and call that time, chronological time. Here is the beginning of creation, and here is the end of human history as we know it. And this is time, the timeline. But there is another word that is often translated time in the Bible, and it's the word, not chronos,

but it's the word kairos, and it speaks of a characteristic time, not just the passing of time, but a moment in time in which something extraordinary happens that has consequences on the chronological time to follow. For instance, on this linear line, I might put here a little bubble and put down the That was a pregnant time during our history and was a time that actually influenced the rest of linear time. You might put down other things, the World War I or put down World War II, put down the Great Depression. Over here, maybe the assassination of Kennedy, and so forth and so forth. And those would be little bubbles on that linear line of time.

And we would say that these are critical times, are crucial times, times that are characterized by something special, keros times. For instance, we use that. We use this expression. We talk about the times in which we live. We're not talking about from 1900 to 2000. We're talking about the characteristic of the times in which we live. People say, what do the times come to?

We're talking about the character of these times. We say we're living in critical times or we're living in momentous times. This is a great time to be alive. We're not talking about chronological time there. We're talking about time in a moment, time characterized by opportunity, characterized by some event or attitude or philosophy that is going to affect linear time. And in the life of Jesus, when this linear time, chronological time, becomes a kairos time, a critical time, the result is an hour. An hour. Not just, I'm sorry to say 24 minutes, not just 60 minutes, but an hour. For instance, the basis of this prayer

that we're going to study this week is this. Verse 1, after Jesus had spoken these words, he looked up to heaven and said, Father, the hour has come. In other words, there is now, times are right. The Bible says in the fullness of time Jesus came, that means when everything was just right in the linear time, in the chronological time, there came a period of time and when everything was just as God wanted it, and that's when he set forth his Son into this world. And now there has come an hour, an hour that is a critical hour, and it is the hour upon which this prayer is based.

He says the hour has come. Now I think it is helpful for us to realize the significance that this hour, praise the hour has come, had in the life of Jesus. For instance, in John chapter 2 and verse 4 you remember Jesus is at the wedding feast in Cana and his mother has something to say to him about the fact that they're out of wine and Jesus said to her woman what concern is that to you and me my hour has not yet come. And then in chapter 7 and verse 30, he says a similar thing. Then they tried to arrest him, but no one laid hands on him because his hour had not come. Chapter 8, verse 20, he spoke these

words while he was teaching in the treasury of the temple, but no one arrested him because his hour had not come. In other words, there was an hour, there was a fixed time preordained in the mind of God, in the counsel of eternity. And until that hour came, nobody could hurt Jesus. Nobody could touch him. nobody could hurt Jesus. Nobody could touch him. Nobody could arrest him. Nobody could stone him because his hour had not yet come.

He was invincible because his hour had not yet come. You can shoot at me all you want, but the bullets will deflect off me like Superman because my hour has not come. And then in chapter 12, you have a significant change. In verse 20, you remember, we have the Greeks who came seeking Jesus. And in verse 23, verse 22, Philip went and told Andrew. Then Andrew and Philip went and told Jesus. And Jesus answered them, the hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified. And then in verse 27, he says, now my soul is troubled, and what shall I say? Father, save me from this hour. No, it is for this reason that I have come to this hour. Now, notice you could divide the Gospel of John into two sections, before the hour had come and after the hour had come. Before the hour had come, nobody could touch him, nobody could

lay a hand on him. But suddenly he says, my hour is come. Now, when did he say that? When did that change? It was when the Gentiles came seeking Jesus. And when the Gentiles came seeking Jesus, Jesus said, now my hour is come. Why? To show that not just the Jews were going to be a part of the redemption that Jesus purchased on the cross, but also the Gentiles, the whole world. And so when the Gentiles finally came and said,

Sirs, we would see Jesus, he said, Now my hour has come. And then in chapter 3, chapter 13, you remember he's going to wash the feet of the disciples. He says in verse 1, Now before the feast of the Passover, Jesus knew that his hour had come to depart from this world and go to his Father. And so the basis of this prayer we're going to be looking at this week is this. His hour has come. It's time for Jesus to go to the cross well that's what the hour

meant it was time for Jesus to enter into his passion and to go through all the shame and struggle that that entailed which finally meant that he would suffer and die on a Roman cross my hour has come when I must go to the Father. And so he prayed this prayer. This is the holy of holies as far as I'm concerned in the scripture. There's some exotic flowers that when a human hand touches them, they wilt. And I tell you, I feel this way about John 17. I have never dealt with a passage of Scripture in which I felt so inadequate. And even after I've dealt with it, I feel like I've left out more than I've grasped. It is a holy moment. Jesus has just finished giving His last-minute instructions, what

we call the upper room discourse, to the disciples. And now He prays. But notice something about this prayer. He prays aloud. It's the longest written prayer in the Bible. He prays aloud so that his disciples can hear him, and so that John, under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, can record that prayer. Now, why did Jesus pray that aloud? So that his disciples could hear it. So that John could reward it, accord it, record it. Having a senior moment here. And so that you and I could read it. Well, it's because this is a teaching prayer.

Jesus had some things he wanted to say to us, and so he prayed out loud. So this morning, I want us to talk about what Jesus taught us about himself, what this prayer teaches us about Jesus himself. And there are three simple things that I'd like to say to you. Boy, you all are going to have to listen fast, aren't you? Number one, this prayer teaches us of Christ's preexistence with the Father.

Of Christ's preexistence with the Father. Notice in verse 5. So now, Father, glorify me in your own presence with the glory that I had in your presence before the world existed. The glory that I had in your presence before the world existed. In other words, Jesus Christ existed before the world. John opens his gospel with these words. In the beginning was the Word. In the beginning was the world. John opens his gospel with these words,

In the beginning was the Word. In the beginning was the Word, Jesus, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The Word was with God. The with there is a preposition that means face to face that indicates Jesus Christ was co-equal with His Father. Co-equal, co-eternal,

co-existent. And this was important in John's day as it is in our day because there were those in John's day particularly who said that, well, Jesus became God at his baptism when the dove descended upon him. And then when he died on the cross or was on the cross before he died, he said, my God, why has thou forsaken me? Then divinity left him before he was just a plain old man. And after that, he was just a plain person. And that's heresy. He was God before he was ever born at Bethlehem. And it was God who finally gave up the ghost on the cross and died. How that fits into what I know about God, I cannot imagine. But John is careful to point out that Jesus Christ was God and preexistent with God, that he is eternal God. Now that's important for us today

because, you know, you listen to politicians and movie stars and a lot of people and they'll all, you know, they'll talk about God. But they choke on the name Jesus. Have you ever noticed that? You listen to them. They'll talk about God. They won't talk about Jesus. You see, because Jesus defines who God is and they don't want to acknowledge that Jesus is God. They like to keep Jesus into a second category over here. He's a good man, the greatest teacher that ever lived, the most moral man that ever lived, but they won't refer to him as God.

I want to tell you something, folks. When you deal with Jesus, you're not dealing with a man that had his beginning at Bethlehem. You're dealing with God himself. Now, there's something interesting here that I want you to notice. He says in verse 5, So now, Father, glorify me in your own presence

with the glory that I had in your presence before the world existed. Now, he's saying, Father, glorify me with the glory that I had when I was in your presence before the world existed. Now, let me ask you a question. While on earth has Jesus been glorified? The answer is yes. Jesus been glorified?

The answer is yes. The Father glorified him. John says we beheld his glory while he was here on earth. But now in this prayer he's asking for a different kind of glory. He says, Father, glorify me with the glory that you and I had before the world existed. In other words, there was a pre-incarnate glory and then there was an incarnate glory. Now, glory, there are two meanings to the word glory,

two ways in which it's used. One way in which it's used, and this refers to the earthly glory of Jesus, it meant to unveil or to reveal or to honor. And when Jesus came to this earth, what did he do? He revealed the Father. And the Father glorified him by honoring him, by exalting him. And so Jesus had that glory. But now he's saying, Father, I want now that other glory that I shared with you before the world began. Now the Hebrews used glory in a second way.

They talked about the Shekinah glory of God, which always referred to the brilliance and radiant light that emanated from God. You remember when Moses went up on the mountain and got the law, and he saw God face to face, or, and he came back and his face was so, so radiant that the people couldn't look upon it, and so he had to put a veil on his face so that he could communicate with people. See, he had been in the presence of Shekinah glory,

and a human being, normal human being, can't look into that bright light. Now, this is the kind of glory that Jesus is seeking. He said, Father, before I came to this earth, I dwelt in you, dealt with you in brilliant light, radiant light. And I laid that aside, and I came in a glory that was veiled by human flesh

so people could look upon me. But now, Father, I'm coming back to you. I want to once again live in that radiant glory, you see. There is revealing glory that Jesus did while he was here on earth. Then there's that radiant glory that belongs to Jesus in his existence with the Father. And can you imagine how anxious Jesus was to get back to that? I'll tell you what, having, since before eternity, having existed in that radiant light and the brilliance and the worship of the angels in

that Shekinah glory, and then to lay it aside and to be treated as a human, even as a subhuman, and to be rejected and lied upon and then beaten and crucified. And all this time he was doing it to reveal God, to glorify God. Can't you imagine the eagerness of Jesus to be once again restored to that radiant light, that radiant glory?

So this verse tells us, this passage tells us, this prayer teaches us of Christ's preexistence with his Father. But it also teaches us something else. It teaches us of his authority given to him by the Father. Notice in the second verse he says, since you have given him authority over all flesh. Since you've given him authority over all flesh. This prayer teaches us that Jesus Christ

not only preexisted with the Father, but that when he came to earth, he had authority, authority, power over all flesh. Amazing thing. That little boy in the temple at the age of 12 had authority over all flesh. Jesus walking with his disciples down dusty roads while people mocked him had authority over all flesh. When he died upon the cross, when he was beaten with the cat of nine tails, when the crown of thorns were pressed upon him, he had authority over those men doing that. You wonder why in the world he let them do it. He had authority over them.

I remember the first time I was about eight or nine years old, I saw Cecil B. DeMille's black and white silent version of King of Kings. Now, did anybody see that? I want to know something. At the 930 service, not a single person was willing to admit they'd seen that. Is there anybody here that ever saw that movie? Do you mean to tell me that nobody here, some of you are older than I am, and you never

Oh, oh, back in the back, back in the back. Yes, you saw that, didn't you? Yeah, I saw it too. I don't know why. They must have brought it back because you know because they had sound movies when I saw it. But anyway, anyway, anyway.

Anyway, so I'm sitting in the balcony of the Temple Theater in Fort Smith, Arkansas, and I go to church, and Sunday school had been brought up in the church, and I know how the story's going to end, right? I mean, I know, you know, everybody knows. But I get caught up in that drama. And when they send him to Herod, and Herod says, work a miracle. Prove who you are.

Perform a miracle. I found myself sitting on the edge of the seat saying, do it, Jesus, do it, Jesus, and you'll get out of this mess. I mean, to me, the best thing he could have done was to have escaped and not have to have gone to the cross. And I said, zap old Herod with a miracle there, boy, and then you'll be set free. But he didn't do it.

He didn't even answer him a word. And he went to the cross. Of course, at that time, I didn't understand that was the best thing to do. That was what he was sent to do. But you see, I kept saying, Jesus, you've got authority over all men. Why don't you zap over your head?

Well, I want you to notice something. Look again at that second verse he says since you have given him authority over all men for what for what to give eternal life to all whom you have given me I kept saying

Jesus give Herod a miracle and Jesus kept saying, that's not what I came to give to men. I came to give to men eternal life. And if I escape this, I'll not be able to do it. You see, folks, what amazes me is the greatest thing that God can give us is eternal life.

That's the greatest thing that God can give us is eternal life. That's the greatest thing that God can give us. We say, oh, I pray God that I'll win the lottery. Or I'll pray God that the publisher's, you know, clearinghouse will show up at my door after the Super Bowl. Or I pray God that God will deliver me from this illness. Friends, I want to tell you something. The greatest thing God can do for you is to give you eternal life. And his authority was not to do things his own way. His authority

was not that he might mystify men by miracles. His authority was to give eternal life all those who believe on it and he still is the only one who has authority to give eternal life nobody else can give you eternal life church can't priest can't nobody can give you eternal life except jesus christ which brings us to our last point i'm just going to mention it because I'll be talking more about it as we go along in our studies, but this prayer teaches us of Christ's submission to his Father, of Christ's submission to his Father.

He says in one of these verses, verse 4, I have glorified you on earth by finishing the work that you gave me to do. I finished the work you gave me to do. I didn't come to do my own will. I came in submission to you. Here is this man who preexisted with the Father, this person to whom all authority over all flesh was given to him,

and yet he subjected all of that to the will of his Father, to the will of his Father. He said, I have finished the work that you gave me to do, but there's one more work to do, and that's to go to the cross. Now, we're going to talk more about this later so I'm getting, and I'll repeat it but I just want to say it in closing.

In John chapter 12 we read a moment ago Jesus said, what shall I say? Shall I say, Father save me from this hour? No, I can't do that. Shall I say, Father, save me from this hour? No, I can't do that. All I can do is say, Lord, glorify your name. And Jesus said, I have glorified it, and I will glorify it. Now, what's he talking about?

The cross. In that opening statement, as we'll see tonight, Jesus says, Father, glorify thy Son. Now, what does that mean to you? Father says, I'm going to glorify you. The time for my glorification has come, Jesus said. He's not talking about this radiant glory. He's talking about right now on earth, the time for my glorification has come. What's he talking about?

He's talking about his death on the cross. your wings flapping, or the voices of heaven sounding like the hundred thousand rivers. Glory is to be found in a manger. It is to be found in a carpenter shop. It is to be found on a cross. Do you realize that Jesus' glorification was his death on a cross?

You see, we think of glory in other terms don't we but to Jesus to be glorified was to be crucified so you might want to consider before you ever pray again Father glorify me because you may just be asking Father, glorify me. Because you may just be asking him to crucify you. This prayer teaches us what real glory is.

Would you bow your heads with me now for a moment as we pray together? We're going to have a word of prayer. And then we're going to stand together and the choir is going to lead us in a hymn of invitation. Pastors are going to be here at the front to meet you as you come. You need counseling. We have counselors that will help you and talk with you and pray with you.

Maybe someone here this morning that does not have the gift of eternal life. You say, where does this life come from? It comes from Jesus. It comes from Jesus. Only He can bestow it. It is only as I come to Jesus Christ, acknowledging my sins and turning from them, and receiving Him as being

sent from God as the Savior of my sins. And I receive Him that I'm born to eternal life. And I want to ask you this morning if you have ever had that moment happen in your life. I'm not asking you if you're moral. I'm not asking you if you're religious. I'm not asking you if you go to church. I was talking to the pastor yesterday, and I said one of the things that I'm afraid may happen in all of this talk nowadays about morality

is that we'll substitute morality for God. That we'll all talk about being moral and having character. But that will be what we worship rather than God. I've heard a lot of people saying we ought to get back to the moral standards, but I haven't heard anybody yet say we need to get back to God. You may be a moral person. You may be a religious person.

That's all I'm asking you. I'm asking you, have you ever experienced the birth of new life? Has Jesus ever come into your life and given you forgiveness of sins and new life? If not, when we stand to sing in a moment,

God speaks to you, puts the desire in your heart, and all we're asking you to do, slip out from where you'll be standing, make your way here to the front, and there'll be somebody here to meet you. Maybe the Lord is speaking to somebody about the church membership. You believe this is where God would have you to serve him,

from this outpost, from this fellowship. And if that's God's will, you ought to come. There may be other decisions that you need to make, and the Holy Spirit will tell you what they are. Whatever they are, I hope you'll just be obedient to him and come. So, Father, we

thank you for Jesus Christ. And thank you for who he is. And we remind ourselves that he is the object of our worship, and that only he can bestow eternal life upon us. So I pray that you'd have your way with every one of us during these following moments, and may the Lord be honored by what we do.

We pray in Jesus' name. Amen. Would you stand with me, please? Ron Dunn's podcast is available only for personal edification, not to be duplicated, uploaded to the web, or resold without prior written consent. It is managed and operated by Sherwood Baptist Church. For more Ron Dunn materials, sermon outlines, devotions, and scanned pages from his study Bible, please visit rondunn.com.