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Christ’s Prayer For God’s City
by James Montgomery Boice In the seventeenth chapter of John’s Gospel there is a won-derful prayer of Jesus Christ for his people, the church, that is a perfect note on which to end this study. The disciples, those who were present with Jesus at this time as well as those who would believe on Jesus through their witness (v. 20), were to be God's new humanity, the very thing that has been the subject of this book. Christ's prayer for them is an illuminating glimpse into what Jesus wanted the City of God to be.
What did he pray for?
It is significant to notice what he did not pray for. He did not pray that his disciples would become so numerous that they would dom-inate and then transform the world and its culture, though he rec-ognizes that they are to be a missionary church. In fact, Jesus makes a distinction between his own and the world, declaring emphatically that his prayer is not for the world at all: "I pray for them. I am not praying for the world, but for those you have given me" (v. 9). He did not pray for the conversion of the Roman emperor or, failing that conquest, that a different, Christian emperor might be brought to the pinnacle of world power. Earlier he had rejected the tempta-tion to worldly power himself (Mt 4:8-10). He did not pray that there might be Christian laws or that the theocratic political system of the Old Testament might be extended worldwide.Jesus was not thinking of numbers, political structures or laws at all instead he was thinking of two things: the glorification of God, the character and conduct of those by whom God would be glorified. It was a way of acknowledging that the city of man will always be man's city, hostile to God and thus filled with every vice wickedness, but that the people of God are to glorify God as a people apart, God's new society, whether or not they are "successful" in terms of numerical growth or influence. They are to glorify God by being God's people.
To God Be The Glory
The word that dominates Christ's prayer in John 17 more than any word is glory. In the opening section Jesus prays that he might be glorified by the Father just as he has glorified God by completing his work on earth, thus revealing the Father to those whom God had given him: "Father, the time has come. Glorify your Son, that your Son may glorify you.... I have brought you glory on earth by completing the work you gave me to do. And now, Father, glorify me in your presence with the glory I had with you before the world began" (vv.1, 4-5). In the next section Jesus claims that "glory has come to me through them" (v. 10), that is, by their having believed on him by their having begun to live for him. Toward the end he says he has "given them the glory that you gave me" (v. 22). Even closer to the end he adds, "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" (v. 24).This is a very important emphasis, because it means that the goal the church is not to be numerical success (or any other kind of “success") but glorifying God by whatever means God might choose it.
To glorify God means to make him known in all his glorious attributes. Jesus did this for the disciples as a goal of his earthly ministry and would do it even more completely by his death on the cross for sin. We see God's sovereignty at the cross in the way the death of Jesus was planned, promised and then achieved, without the slightest deviation from the Old Testament prophecies. We see God's justice in sin actually being punished. Without the cross God might have been able to forgive sin (theoretically), but He could not have done it and remained just at the same time. A just God must punish sin. We also see God's righteousness at the cross, for only Jesus, the utterly righteous one, could pay sin's penalty. We see God's wisdom in the planning and ordering of such a great salvation. We see God's love, for it is only at the cross that we can know beyond any question that God loves us even as he loves Jesus. "For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life" John 3:16).Carrying that theme over to ourselves, we ask how the people of God are to glorify him. We cannot die for sin, of course. Only Jesus could do that. But we can glorify God by allowing his character to be developed and seen in us, and by obeying him in every area of our lives. In Ephesians the apostle Paul writes of one aspect of God's character, his wisdom, being demonstrated by the church even before the angels. "His intent was that now, through the church, the manifold wisdom of God should be made known to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly realms, according to his eter-nal purpose which he accomplished in Christ Jesus our Lord" (Eph 3:10).
With this in mind we can now turn to the latter half of Christ's prayer and study the specific marks that Jesus asked the Father to develop in his people, marks that would glorify God.
The church is founded on the Lord Jesus Christ and is called into being by the Spirit of Christ. It must therefore be like Christ, pos-sessing at least some of his characteristics. What should those char-acteristics be? What should the church be like? One of the most comprehensive answers to that question is in the latter half of Christ's prayer, for in it he prayed that the church might be char-acterized by six things: joy (v. 13), holiness (w. 14-16), truth (v. 17), mission (v. 18), unity (w. 21-23) and love (v. 26). Jesus' life was marked by each of these qualities.
A Joyful People
The first of these characteristics is joy. Many of us would not think of joy as an important characteristic, let alone put it first. We would point to love or holiness or something else. But Jesus prayed that his people might “have the full measure of my joy within them”(v. 13). That most of us do not think of joy as a primary characteristic of the church probably indicates how far we have moved from the spirit of the early church, which was a joyous assembly.We see their joy immediately when we begin to study the subject the New Testament. In the Greek language, the verb meaning "to rejoice" or "be joyful" is chairein; it is found seventy-two times. The noun meaning “joy," chara, occurs sixty times. Joy is not a technical concept, found only in highly theological passages. Rather it most often occurs simply as a greeting, meaning “Joy be with you!" To be sure, chairein is not always restricted to the speech of Christians. It is used, for example, in the letter to Felix about Paul by the Roman officer Claudius Lysias, where it means "Greetings" (Acts 23:26). But in Christian hands it obviously meant much more than it did with pagans and is used more frequently.
Notice, for example, that the angel who announced the birth of Jesus to the shepherds said, "Do not be afraid. I bring you good news of great joy that will be for all the people. Today in the town of David a Savior has been born to you; he is Christ the Lord" (Lk 2:10-11). The word here obviously meant more than "Greetings!" Later Jesus said, "I have told you this so that my joy may be in you and that your joy may be complete" (Jn 15:11). The things he had spoken were great promises.
Paul's writings contain many uses of the word. In Philippians, the apostle, wishing to give a final admonition to his friends, wrote, “Rejoice in the Lord always. I will say it again: Rejoice!" (Phil 4:4). As William Barclay says in his discussion of this term, "This last greeting, 'Joy be with you!' rings triumphantly through the pages of the New Testament.... There is no virtue in the Christian life which not made radiant with joy; there is no circumstance and no occa-sion which is not illuminated with joy. A joyless life is not a Christian life, for joy is one constant in the recipe for Christian living."
Is the church today joyful? Are Christians? We need not doubt that we are all far more joyful than we would be if we were not Christians, or that there are places where joy is particularly evident joy is often evident in new believers, for example. But in most churches, if one were to observe them impartially week after week, I wonder if joy would be visible. We think of joy as something that should charac-terize that day when we are gathered around the throne of grace to sing God's glory. But here? Here we often see sour looks, griping, long faces and other manifestations of an inner misery.
The story has often been told-I am sure it is a true one-of a church in Scotland in which someone had obviously been bored by the sermon and had begun doodling. He had started drawing pic-tures of the preacher and then had gone on to writing verses. When the service was over the janitor found this bit of doggerel:
To dwell above with saints in love, Aye, that will be glory! To dwell below with saints I know, Now that's a different story. That is the difference between what we profess to be and what we frequently are. We should be a joyful people, but we are often gloomy, discouraged and negative. You say, "But my circumstances are discouraging. How is God glorified by that?" It is precisely in the discouragements that you can praise God by being joyful.
Fanny Crosby, the hymn-writer, became blind when she was just five years old, and she lived to be ninety-five, ninety years of blind-ness. Yet she did not complain. Instead, she apparently came to terms with her problem at an early age and determined to glorify God by a cheerful attitude even in her blindness. We know this because when she was just eight years old she wrote:
Oh, what a happy soul am I Although I cannot see, I am resolved that in this world Contented I shall be. How many blessings I enjoy That other people don't! To weep and sigh, because I'm blind? I cannot, and I won't. It might mark the beginning of a revival in some places if the people God would learn to stop thinking about themselves and what they regard as their imagined miserable circumstances and instead learn to be joyful in God. Someone once said to Hannah Whitall Smith, author of The Christian's Secret of a Happy Life, "You Christians are like a man with a headache. He does not want to get rid of his head, but it hurts him to keep it. You cannot expect outsiders to seek very earnestly for anything so uncomfortable.
A Separated People
A second characteristic of the church is holiness, the characteristic God most mentioned in the Bible. Holiness should therefore characterize God's church. We are taught this in many places besides John 17. For example, Peter said that we are to be a "holy" people 1 Pet 2:9). The author of Hebrews wrote that we are to "make every effort" to be holy since "without holiness no one will see the Lord" Heb 12:14). Jesus spoke of this when he prayed that God would keep his people from the evil one. "My prayer is not that you take them out of the world but that you protect them from the evil one. They are not of the world, even as I am not of it. Sanctify them by truth; your word is truth" (Jn 17:15-17).What Is Holiness?
Some people have identified holiness with a culturally determined behavioral pattern and so have identified as holy those who do not gamble or smoke or drink or play cards or go to movies or do any a large number of such things. This is a misconception. It may be that holiness in a particular Christian may result in abstinence from one or more of these things, but the essence of holiness is not found here. Consequently, to insist on such things for those in the church is not to promote holiness but rather to encourage legalism and hypocrisy. In some extreme forms it may even promote a false Christianity according to which men and women feel that they are justified before God on the basis of some supposedly ethical behav-ior.The apostle Paul found that to be true of the Israel of his day, as Jesus had also found it before him. So Paul distinguished between that kind of holiness (the term he used is righteousness) and true holiness, which comes from God and is always God-oriented. He said of Israel, "Since they did not know the righteousness that comes from God and sought to establish their own, they did not submit to God's righteousness" (Rom 10:3).
Israel had imagined that holiness was something that could be measured or graded. In other words, as we look around we see some whom we consider low on the scale of human goodness: criminals, perverts, habitual liars and other base characters. On a scale of one to one hundred, we might give them a score in the low teens, for although they are not very good by our standards they are neverthe-less not entirely without any redeeming qualities. A little higher up are the average people of society. They score between thirty and sixty. Then there are the very good people. They may score in the seventies. Beyond that, if you push the score up to one hundred (or higher if that is possible), you get to God. His holiness is perfect holiness. According to that way of looking at holiness, God's holiness is only a perfection of the holiness that lies to a greater or lesser degree in all of us. We are to please him (some would say "earn heaven") by trying harder.
That is what Israel had done, and it is what nearly everyone naturally does. But it does not reflect the biblical idea of holiness. According to the Bible, holiness actually deals (on God's level) with transcendence and (on our level) with a fundamental response to God that we would call commitment or dedication.
The biblical idea of holiness is made somewhat clearer when we consider words that are related to it, namely, saint and sanctify. Christ used the second one in John 17. A saint is not a person who has achieved a certain level of goodness, although that is what most people think, but rather one who has been "set apart" for God. Therefore, in the Bible the word is not restricted to a special class of Christians, still less a class that is established by the official action of an ecclesiastical body. Rather it is used of all Christians (Rom 1:7; 1 Cor 1:2; 2 Cor 1:1; Eph 1:1; Phil 1:1; and so on). The saints are the "called-out ones" who make up God's church.
The same idea is present when the Bible refers to the sanctifica-tion of objects (as in Exodus 40). Moses was instructed to sanctify the altar and laver in the midst of the tabernacle. That is, he was to "make saints" of them. The chapter does not refer to any intrinsic change in the nature of the stones-they are not made righteous. It merely indicates that they were to be set apart for a special use by God.
In John 17 Jesus prayed, "For them [the disciples] I sanctify my-self, that they too may be truly sanctified" (v. 19). The verse does not mean that Jesus made himself more righteous, for he already was righteous. Instead it means that he separated himself for a special task, the task of providing salvation for people by his death.
But if holiness has to do with separation or consecration and if believers are already holy by virtue of their being set apart for Christ by God, why did Christ pray for our sanctification? Why pray for what we already have? The answer is that although we have been set apart for God, we often fail to live up to that calling. To paraphrase Wil-iam Wordsworth, it is "trailing clouds of old commitments, sins and loyalties that we come."
The Church That Is Not Holy
The opposite of a holy church is a secular church, one that is marked by the world's wisdom, theology, agenda and methods. I discussed this in detail earlier, in chapter seven. The true wisdom of the church is the wisdom of the Bible. Christian people stand before the Word of God and confess their ignorance of God's truth. They even confess their inability to understand what is written in the Bible except by the grace of God through the ministry of the Holy Spirit. But today many consider themselves too wise for that old reliance on the Bible and they substitute another authority entirely. What is it? It is the world's wisdom, of course. But in the church it takes ~ special form, which is the authority of the majority. In other words it is the wisdom of the 51 percent vote.The secular church is also marked by the world's theology. It says that people are basically good, that no one is really lost, that belief in the Lord Jesus Christ is not necessary for salvation, and that all religions are really saying the same thing and are equally valid. In a climate like this the old theological terms are redefined. Sin no longer means rebellion against God's law. Salvation no longer means deliverance from sin, the world and the devil. Faith no longer means a turning from self to place one's entire trust in Jesus Christ as Savior Instead, sin means imperfections, and salvation is something to be achieved by ourselves through hard work, social reform or positive thinking.
The secular church also adopts the world's agenda. It wants to deal with whatever the world is concerned about: racism, ecology, inter-national brotherhood, secular liberation or whatever. It no longer is primarily concerned with evangelism or with living holy lives.
Finally, secularism in the church is seen in the world's methods. The methods given to the church by God are prayer and the power of the gospel, through which the Holy Spirit is able to turn people from their wicked ways, bring them to Christ and heal their land. But today in large sectors of the church these methods are laughed at, and the choice weapons of the hour become money, political power and entertainment.
But the church is called to be holy, separated unto God in order to imbibe his wisdom, learn his theology, pursue his agenda and utilize his methods. How can it do this? Only by a regular, disci-plined, practical study of the Bible. Without this the church will always be secular. It will be like the church of the last days described by Paul in 2 Timothy. "People will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boastful, proud, abusive, disobedient to their parents, un-grateful, unholy, without love, unforgiving, slanderous, without self--control, brutal, not lovers of the good, treacherous, rash, conceited, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God-having a form of godliness but denying its power" (3:2-5). That is the secular church -"having a form of godliness but denying its power." But the true church is not to be like this. It is to be separated unto God and empowered and directed by him until Jesus comes again.
A Truth-rooted People
That brings us directly to the third mark of the church: truth. For it is by the truth of God, embodied in the Scriptures, that Christian people are to be filled with joy (the first characteristic Jesus prayed for) and live holy lives (the second characteristic). Jesus made the connection explicit in both cases. He said, "I have told you this so that my joy may be in you and that your joy may be complete" (Jn 15:11). That is, joy was to come from knowing his teachings recorded for us now in the Bible. He prayed, "I say these things while I am still in the world, so that they may have the full measure of my joy within them" (Jn 17:13). And in reference to holiness he said, "Sanctify them by the truth; your word is truth" (v. 17). Again the path is by the Bible.A striking thing, which we realize more and more as we grow in the Christian life, is that nearly all that God does in the world today he does by the Holy Spirit through the instrumentality of his written revelation. So far as truth goes, the world lives by an illusion. What it thinks of as truth is a falsehood. Since we live in the world, though we are not to be of it, the world's views will always be a problem for us unless we have a sure way of countering and actually overturning its influence. Ray Stedman was thinking of this problem when he wrote,
The world lives by what it thinks is truth, by values and standards which are worthless, but which the world esteems highly. Jesus said, "What is exalted among men is an abomination in the sight of God" (Luke 16:15).... How can we live in that kind of world ~ -touch it and hear it, having it pouring into ours ears and exposed to our eyes day and night, and not be conformed to its image and squeezed into its mold? The answer is, we must know the truth. We must know the world and life the way God sees it, the way it really is. We must know it so clearly and strongly that even while we're listening to these alluring lies we can brand them as lies and know that they are wrong.
Stedman was saying that Christians should be great realists, because their realism is that of the truth of God. That by its very nature should lead to deep joy and greater sanctification-and lead to a more steadfast conviction as to what is our real authority in life!
Evangelicals must be men and women of "the Book." In theory we are. We say we are. We acknowledge that this is our standard. But much of the time, in practice, evangelicals operate exactly the way those in other churches do, or even worse.
We have to recover the biblical standard. This means that we cannot say, as I have heard evangelicals say on important issues, "Well, that particular matter just does not bother me." That response is not good enough. We have to get to what the Word of God says and perhaps become bothered. We have to study the Bible, do our homework and then ask: On the basis of this Word, what does God want for the church in this age?We are going to have to do that sooner or later anyway, or else we are going to have to go the world's way entirely. History does not allow us to stand long in an ambiguous position. In Nazi Germany, the church went in one of two ways. Either it capitulated to the Nazi point of view, as most of the established church did, or it became increasingly a church of the Bible. Those who lived by the Book eventually established a communion of their own. They signed doc-uments identifying themselves as the "confessing church." Why did they do this? They did it because, when the whole drift of the culture is contrary to biblical standards, it is impossible to appeal to any external norms. You cannot argue, "This is backed up by what they are teaching in the area of psychology or science or social relations," because it is not. The things that are being written in all those areas are contrary to biblical truth. So the church must increasingly fall back on divine revelation.
Has God spoken to his people in this Book? Does he speak? If he does, then we must be clear and say, "Let God be true and every man a liar.”A Missionary People
Up to this point Christ's prayer has been dealing with things that concern the church itself or that concern individual Christians
personally: joy, holiness and truth. But while those characteristics are important and undoubtedly attainable to some degree in this life it does not take much thinking to figure out that all three would be more quickly attained if we could only be transported to
heaven.We have joy here. But what is it compared to the abundant joy that we will have when we eventually see the source of our joy face to face? The Bible acknowledges this when it speaks of the blessedness of the redeemed saints, from whose eyes all tears shall have been wiped away (Rev 7:17; 21:4). In this life we undoubtedly know some sanctification. But someday we shall be made completely like Jesus (1 Jn 3:2). In this life we are able to assimilate some aspects of God's truth, but it is only a poor assimilation of what we will one day know fully. Paul wrote, "Now we see but a poor reflection then we shall face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known" (I Cor 13:12). If that is true, why should we not go to heaven immediately?
The answer is in a fourth mark of the church. The church is not to look inward and find joy, Christ-ward and find sanctification, to the Bible and find truth. It is also to look outward to the world find there the object of its mission. What kind of a mission should this be? Jesus' prayer highlights two important matters.
We are to Be in the World
first thing that these verses tell us is where our mission is to be conducted. The word mission comes from the Latin verb meaning "to " or "dispatch." A mission is a sending forth. But when we ask, to who or where are we sent as Christian missionaries? The answer is "into the world." Jesus said, "As you sent me into the world, I have sent them into the world" (Jn 17:18).That answer is probably the explanation of why the evangelical church in America is not the missionary church it claims to be. It is not that the evangelical church does not support missions. It does. The problem does not lie there. Rather it lies at the point of the evangelicals' personal withdrawal from the culture. Many seem afraid of the culture. They try to keep as far from the world as possible, lest they be contaminated by it. Some have developed their own subculture. It is possible, for example, to be born of Christian parents, grow up in a Christian family, have Christian friends, go to Christian schools and colleges, read Christian books, attend a Chris-tian country club (known as a church), watch Christian movies, get Christian employment, be attended by a Christian doctor, and finally die and be buried by a Christian undertaker in hallowed ground.
What does it mean to be in the world as a Christian? It does not mean to be like the world; the marks of the church are to make the church different. It does not mean that we are to abandon Christian fellowship or Christian convictions. It means that we are to mingle with and get to know non-Christians, to make friends with them and enter into their lives in such a way that we begin to infect them with the gospel, rather than their infecting us with their outlook.
A young pastor in Guatemala went from seminary to a remote area known as Cabrican. Cabrican was unpopular; it was located at an altitude of about nine thousand feet and was nearly always damp and cold. The church he went to was small, having only twenty-eight members, including two elders and two deacons. These believers met together on most nights of the week, but they were not a growing congregation. There was no outreach. In one of his first messages to them the young pastor, whose name was Bernardo Calderon, said, "I know God cannot be satisfied with what we are doing." Then he challenged them to this program.
First, they abandoned the many dull meetings at the church, re-taining only the Bible-school hour on Sunday. In their place home meetings were established. On Monday night they would meet in a home in one area of Cabrican, and everyone would attend. As they made their way to that home they were to invite everyone they en-countered, even passersby on the streets. Since the Christians came from different areas of the city and took different paths to get there, this meant that quite a bit of the city was covered. On Tuesday the church met somewhere else. This time different paths were used as the twenty-eight members converged, and different villagers were invited. So it was on Wednesday and Thursday and the other days of the week, as the church literally left its four small walls to go out into the world with the gospel. The result? Within four years the church had eight hundred members. The next year a branch church was started, and soon there were six churches in that area of Gua-temala, two of which had nearly one thousand members. They even created an agricultural cooperative in which church members bought land for their own poor and then bought and sold the pro-duce their own people supplied. The entire area was revitalized.
Like Jesus in the World
The second thing that these verses talk about is the character of the ones who are to conduct this mission, which means the character of Christian people. We are to be as Christ in the world. Jesus compared the disciples to himself, both in having been sent into the world by he Father and in being sanctified or set apart to that work. He said, 'As you sent me into the world, I have sent them into the world. For them I sanctify myself, that they too may be truly sanctified" (vv. 18-1-9). We are to be in our mission as Jesus was in his mission. We are be like the one we are presenting.In what ways? In all ways, of course. But since we are studying John 17, the answer here must be in terms of the marks of the church for which the Lord is praying: joy, holiness, truth, mission, unity and love. Jesus is to be our pattern in each case.
A Unified People
A fifth mark of the church is unity, and it is noteworthy that it was this that Jesus prayed for at greatest length. He said,
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 one as we are one: I in them and you in me. May they be brought to complete unity to let the world know that you sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me. (vv. 20-23)What kind of unity should this be?
One thing that the church does not need to be is a great organ-izational unity. Whatever advantages or disadvantages may be found in massive organizational unity, that in itself obviously does not produce the results for which Christ prayed. Nor does it solve the church's other problems. It has been tried and found wanting.In the early days of the church there was much growth but little organizational unity. Later, as the church came into governmental favor under Constantine and his successors, the visible church in-creasingly centralized until during the Middle Ages there was liter-ally one united ecclesiastical body covering all of Europe. Wherever one went-north, south, east or west-there was one united, inter-lacing church with the pope at its head. But was this a great age? Was there deep unity of faith? Was the church spiritually strong? Was morality high? Did men and women find themselves increasingly drawn to that faith and come to confess Jesus Christ as their own Savior and Lord? On the contrary, the world believed the opposite. Charles Haddon Spurgeon wrote, "The world was persuaded that God had nothing to do with that great crushing, tyrannous, super-stitious, ignorant thing which called itself Christianity; and thinking men became infidels, and it was the hardest possible thing to find a genuine intelligent believer north, south, east or west."
Certainly there is something to be said for some form of outward, visible unity in some situations. But it is equally certain that this type of unity is not what we most need, nor is it that for which the Lord prayed.
Another type of unity that we do not need is conformity-that is, an approach to the church that would make everyone alike. Here we probably come closest to the error of the evangelical church. If the liberal church for the most part strives for organizational unity- through the various councils of churches and denominational mergers -the evangelical church seems to strive for an identical pattern of appearance and behavior for its members. Jesus was not looking for that either. On the contrary, there should be diversity among Christians, diversity of personality, interests, lifestyle and even methods of Christian work and evangelism. Uniformity is dull. Variety is exciting. We see it in the variety of nature and the actions of God.
But if the unity for which Jesus prayed is not an organizational unity or a unity achieved by conformity, what kind of unity is it? It is a unity analogous to the unity that exists in the Godhead. Jesus spoke of it like this: "That all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you.... I in them and you in me" (vv. 21,23). The church is to have a spiritual unity involving the basic orientation, desires and will of those participating. This is not to say at all true believers actually enter into this unity as they should. Otherwise, why would Christ have prayed for it? Like the other arks of the church, unity is something given to the church but also something for which the community of true believers should fervent-ly strive.
We are helped at this point by several powerful images of the church used in the New Testament.
A Family
Christians belong to the family of God and are thus rightly brothers and sisters of one another. The unique characteristic of this image that it speaks of relationships between and the commitments of one individual to another. These relationships are based on what God has done when he rescued us from spiritual death and made living members of the new humanity, the City of God. We are made members of this spiritual family through God's choice and not our own. One important consequence of this is that we have no choice as to who will be our spiritual brothers or sisters. The rela-tionships simply exist, and we must be brotherly to other believers, whether we want to be or not.A second consequence is that we must be committed to each other in tangible ways. I came across a speculation along these lines by a Christian writer. He said that he had asked himself what he would have done if he had gotten into financial difficulty a few years ear-lier, before he discovered what Christian community is all about and had actually gotten into a true Christian brotherhood. If he had a medical bill of several thousand dollars to pay and no extra money in the bank, to whom would he have turned? As he reflected on this he realized that he could never have turned to the Christians he knew at that time. They would have told him to go to a bank where he could get a loan, or perhaps have directed him to the welfare office. He realized that the only person he could have turned to was his blood brother.
This means that in some cases at least the human family is doing what the spiritual family ought to be doing but often is not. If we are serious about our unity, here is a place where we can demonstrate it tangibly. It is even an area in which the world, saddled as it is by its own selfishness, may take notice.
A Fellowship
A second important image used to suggest the unity of the church is a fellowship, which the New Testament normally indicates by the Greek word koinonia. We have to pay attention to the Greek word because the English term is not very helpful in conveying what this means. With us a fellowship usually means only a loose collection of friends or, even worse, just a good time. The Greek word has as its base the stronger idea of sharing something or having something in common. Thus, the common Greek of the New Testament period is called Koine Greek. People who held property together or shared in a business were called koinonoi, meaning "partners." Spiritually koinonia refers to those who share a common experience of the gospel. Thus the New Testament speaks often of our fellowship with the Father (I Jn 1:3), with the Son (I Cor 1:9) and with the Holy Spirit (2 Cor 13:14).But fellowship is not only defined by what we share in together. It also involves what we share out together. It points to a community in which Christians actually share their thoughts and lives with each other.
How is this to be done practically? Different congregations will do this in different ways depending on local situations and needs. Some churches are small and therefore will have an easier time establish-ing ways for sharing. Church suppers and work projects will help. Larger churches will have to break their members down into smaller groups.
At Tenth Presbyterian Church in Philadelphia, which I have served as pastor for nearly thirty years, we do this in various ways - through age-level classes and community service projects, for in-stance. The chief means is small parish Bible study and prayer groups. The number of these groups varies, but it has usually been between eighty and a hundred. The important thing about these groups is that they are scattered over the large geographical area of greater Philadelphia so that nearly anyone associated with the church can find a group fairly near at hand. These groups are the least structured of anything we do, but they are also the most exciting and profitable of all the church activities.
My experience in this area conforms to that of John R W. Stott, ho experimented with similar groups in his London parish. He wrote, "The value of the small group is that it can become a com-munity of related persons; and in it the benefit of personal relatedn-ess cannot be missed, nor its challenge evaded.... I do not think is an exaggeration to say, therefore, that small groups, Christian family or fellowship groups, are indisputable for our growth into spiritual maturity."
A Body
The third important image used to stress the unity of the church is the body. This image points to several important matters. For one thing, it speaks of the nature of the church's union. One part of the body simply cannot survive if it is separated from the whole. Again, it speaks of independence. It even speaks of a kind of subordination involving a diversity of function; for the hand is not the foot, nor the foot the eye, and over all is the head, which is Christ. Paul notes this in I Corinthians 12: "The body is a unit, though it is made up of many parts; and though all its parts are many, they form one body. So it is with Christ. For we were all baptized by one Spirit into one body- whether Jews or Greeks, slave or free -and we were all given the one Spirit to drink. Now the body is not made up of one part but many" (vv. 12-14).A Loving People
At last we come to love, the greatest mark of all. Love is the mark that gives meaning to the others and without which the church cannot be what God intends it to be. Having written about love and having placed it in the context of faith, hope and love, Paul con-cluded, "But the greatest of these is love" (I Cor 13:13).With the same thought in mind, the Lord Jesus Christ, having spoken of joy, holiness, truth, mission and unity as essential marks of the church in his prayer in John 17, concluded with an emphasis on love. He said that he had declared the name of God to the disciples in order that "the love you have for me may be in them and that I myself may be in them" (v. 26). In this final petition Jesus is touching on the "new commandment" of John 13:34-35 once again. "A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this all men will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another."
We understand the preeminence of love if we see it in reference to the other marks of the church. What happens when you take love away from them? Suppose you subtract love from joy. What do you have? You have hedonism, an exuberance in life and its pleasures, but without the sanctifying joy found in relationship to the Lord Jesus Christ.
Subtract love from holiness. What do you find then? You find self- righteousness, the kind of sinful self-contentment that characterized the Pharisees of Christ's day. By the standards of the day the Pharis-ees lived very holy lives, but they did not love others and thus were quite ready to kill Jesus when he challenged their standards.
Take love from truth and you have a bitter orthodoxy. The teachin-g may be right, but it does not win anyone to Christ or to godliness. Take love from mission and you have imperialism. It is colonialis-m in ecclesiastical garb.
Take love from unity and you soon have tyranny. Tyranny devel-ops in a hierarchical church where there is no compassion for peo-ple or desire to involve them in the decision-making process, only determination to force everyone into the same denomination or to get them to back the "program."
Now express love and what do you find? All the other marks of the church follow. What does love for God the Father lead to? Joy. We rejoice in God and in what he has done for us. What does love for the Lord Jesus Christ lead to? Holiness. We know that we will see him one day and will be like him. "Everyone who has this hope in him purifies himself, just as he is pure" (I Jn 3:3). What does love for the Word of God lead to? Truth. If we love the Word, we will study and therefore inevitably grow into a fuller appreciation of God's truth. What does love for the world lead to? Mission. We have a message to take to the world. Where does love for our Christian brothers and sisters lead? To unity. By love we discern that we are bound together in the bundle of life that God has created within the Christian community.
Like all divine things love is made known by revelation only. No Greek, no Roman, no Egyptian, no Babylonian in Christ's day or in any of the centuries before ever thought of God's nature as being characterized by love or as love being an important virtue for bind-ing a people together, as it does the church. Read all the ancient documents, and you simply do not find this element. At best, the gods were thought to be impartial. Or if one chose to think optimistic-ally, a god could sometimes be said to be favorable to those who did something for him. That is, there was a tit-for-tat arrangement: "You serve me, and I will take care of you." So far as people were concerned, well, there was erotic love and a certain kind of affection within the family. But there was nothing like the great, steady, be-nevolent and unmerited love of God in the Bible. It was just not there.
But it is in the Bible. In the pages of the Old Testament we are told that God set his love on Israel even though nothing in the people merited it. That was a faithful, covenant love. Then, with the birth of Jesus, love actually entered history as a person. He loved and he continues to love as no other. The best and fullest revelation of love was at the cross. "For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life" (Jn 3:16).
There has never been, there never will be, a greater demonstration of the love of God. If you will not have the cross, if you will not see God speaking in love in Jesus Christ, you will never find a loving God anywhere. The God of the Bible is going to be a silent God for you. The universe is going to be an empty universe. History is going to be meaningless. Only at the cross do we find God in his true nature and learn how these other things have meaning. Only there do we learn to love as God loves, which is the last and most important petition in Christ's prayer.
Reprinted with permission from Chapter 13 of "Two Cities, Two Loves" by James Montgomery Boice. Published by InterVarsity Press, 1996.