Answering Jesus’ Prayer

Well, my name's René, another one of the pastors here at Twin Lakes Church. Super glad that you are joining us today, whether you're joining us online or joining us right here in person. Also very excited about Easter next weekend and very excited about a very special announcement that I have for you that'll have to wait for the end of the service though.

But for now, I wanna tell you about something very interesting that I found in Charles Duhigg's new book, Super Communicators. I like almost everything that this guy writes; it's just fantastic. But in this particular new book, he describes a fascinating true story. And it happened at Harvard University in 1937. Harvard got a grant to begin what turned out to be the longest and most famous study of its kind ever in human history. It was called the Harvard Study of Adult Development. And the point was to figure out, can success be predicted? Can you look at teenagers and young adults in their early 20s and look at certain key traits that would predict their future success or failure?

Among the two first subjects to be studied were two men known as Godfrey Camille and John Marston. And they were studies in opposites. One researcher wrote that Godfrey Camille was, quote, a disaster. He had a very bleak childhood, he was physically weak, he struggled to make friends, he was suicidal. And one researcher wrote, everyone predicted he would be a loser. I mean, that is rough when it's not just kids on your bus at school; it's Harvard scientists saying, yeah, scientifically, you're a loser.

On the other hand, John Marston was seen as absolutely exceptional. He was from a wealthy family, he graduated top of his class, he was successful in business. Quote, one of the more professionally successful members of the study already when he was in college, and they predicted this would take place the rest of his life. So they ended their study of these two guys in 1938, right? And they continued following up on them, but in 1954 funding ran out, and that would have been that.

Except in the early 1970s, some young researchers at Harvard found these old studies and thought, let's follow up, let's track down these people, let's see how they did. And of course, they expected to find that the researchers' predictions were accurate. After all, Harvard, that's not what they found. Just look at those two guys. Four decades later, Godfrey had become a different person, married, leader in his church, successful doctor, a national expert on allergies. Perhaps the biggest national expert on that. His own daughters called him, quote, an exemplary father.

They even did follow-up surveys every two years, and they said every single time they interviewed Godfrey, he seemed happier than the time they interviewed him before. He died in his 80s; his church was packed at his memorial service. Marsden, alienated from his family, had few friends because he kept cutting himself off from family and friends who annoyed him, who upset him politically or some other way, and his friendship grew smaller and smaller. He reported feeling angry, lonely, disappointed with life, said his life was loveless; one research said he seemed like a broken person.

And it wasn't just those two. Those two just incarnated a pattern they saw again and again. And it was this: what researchers had predicted would indicate success when people were in their teens and 20s, in fact, did not. So what did? Could you predict it in any way? Well, they studied the data, they searched every possible correlation, and they did find one thing that mattered more than anything else. One factor, the single most important variable in determining whether or not somebody would end up happy and healthy or miserable and sick.

Would you like to know what it is? Come back on Easter. Just kidding. What a build-up. That's super communication right there. Here it is. Loving relationships. One Harvard researcher put it bluntly: the most important influence by far on a flourishing life is love. And a brand new, very recent 2023 summary of all this continuing Harvard data. So they kept getting funding after they restarted the project in the 70s. And what they've done is they've tracked all the people that they started tracking in the 30s, and then they tracked their next generation and the subsequent generation in this study.

And one researcher summarized all the data so far over almost a century now. He said through all the years of studying these lives, one crucial factor stands out for the consistency and power of its ties to physical health, mental health, and longevity: good relationships. Well, guess what Jesus prays for in his final prayer for his followers. Let's talk about it. Grab your message notes. Stay strong and carry on is our series in what's known as the upper room discourse in the Bible.

So to set this up, the last week of Jesus's life, it starts when, well, he rides into Jerusalem on what's known now as Palm Sunday, because the people were waving palm branches. What was that all about? The palm branch was the national symbol of the Judean nationalists. This would have been like waving the rebel flag in the face of the Romans. They were clearly saying to Jesus, yeah, we see you as the Messiah, the political Messiah, the warrior Messiah; come on in and kick out the political oppressors, the Romans.

Well, you know, it turns out that political oppressors don't like it when this kind of stuff happens. So Jesus strides into town for the next several days. He declares with more and more clarity that this oppressive religion system is going to go; the temple is going to go, and the sacrificial system is going to go. You won't need high priests anymore. You won't need the Holy of Holies anymore because he himself will be the final sacrifice for mankind.

And it turns out that religiously oppressive systems and leaders don't like it when people say things like that about them either. And so what happens is for the first time, the religious oppressors and the political oppressors, who until then had been on opposite sides of the coin, band together to conspire against Jesus to kill him. This is the way the gospels tell us this amazing story. Now, Jesus knows this is going to happen. In fact, he insists it's part of God's plan. But he knows it's going to, of course, freak out the disciples.

And so he gathers his closest followers together in an upper room in Jerusalem to give them sort of his final pep talk. And we've been going through these chapters in the Gospel of John, chapters 13 through 17 in Lent, those weeks, the 40 days leading up to Easter. And today we wrap it up with a look at the final seven verses in this amazing upper room discourse. And this is Jesus Christ's final prayer for the disciples, but not just the disciples in that room.

Listen to the way he starts this final section. It's almost as if he's looking out of that painting right at you. He says, "I do not ask for those only, but also for those who will believe in me through their word." Those who will believe in me, hey, that's us. That's every Christian ever. That's every Christian in this room. That's you. That's me. Jesus prayed something for you. Jesus, in his last few hours before the crucifixion, he said, "Father, this is what they need most. This is what I want for them most. More than anything else, Father, I have just one request." What was it?

What do we need most from Jesus' perspective? Simple, loving community. Just like that Harvard study showed, a unified community of love is what he prays for us. Look at verse 21. "I pray that they all may be one." Now he sets the bar pretty high. "Just as you, Father, are in me and I in you, that they also may be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me." He says, "The glory that you have given to me, I've given to them that they may be one, even as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they may become perfectly one that the world may know." That's how important this is.

That the world may know that you sent me and loved them even as you have loved me. Now, you think something here is pretty important to Jesus? I mean, he mentions this four times in two brief sentences. One, one, one, one, one. Jesus wants us to be unified. And he's not picking up a new theme. He's just ending the upper room discourse with the same exact thing he started the upper room discourse with in John 13. "I'm giving you a new commandment." He says to his followers, "Love each other. Just as I have loved you, you should love each other. Your love for one another will prove to the world that you are my disciple."

So this exact theme is then echoed with his last couple of sentences. Loving, unified community. We need it as we saw in that Harvard study. Jesus wants it. And I would argue the world wants it. We belong for it. 67% of Americans right now say they are sick and tired of the division in our society. What if, what if Christians could serve as an example of how divisions could be overcome? That's the prayer of Jesus. Because people are going to look at... His society was very divided too, just like ours.

He's praying that what happens in the community of my followers is so outrageous that a divided, polarized, angry world is going to look at what's happening among Christians and go, "What? They love each other so much." Something supernatural is going on there because they are not all the same. And you might say, "Well, you know Jesus was dreaming. That'll never happen." You know the prayer of Jesus did get answered. Look at the very earliest description of the early believers in the book of the Bible called Acts, chapter 2.

All the believers were together. And they had everything in common. Selling their possessions and goods, they shared with anyone who was in need. With one accord, they continued to meet daily in the temple courts to break bread from house to house, sharing their meals with gladness, with sincerity of heart. And guess what happens? They praised God. They enjoyed the favor of all the people. And indeed, people were attracted to this. The Lord added to their number daily those who were being saved.

So unity, it's desired. It's necessary. This kind of love is the key predictor to our success and our happiness and our thriving. We all want it. The problem is in our culture right now, there are some serious challenges to unity. What would you say if you had to come up with three challenges to unity in this cultural moment? What are some of the things that might come to your mind? Yeah, politics would be a big one right now. Exactly. I've never seen this like this before in my life, where literally people look at each other and they say, "You know what? If you vote differently than I do, then I can't be your friend anymore." I've heard that many times.

I mean, people have told me that. Families torn apart by this. And this is a bipartisan phenomenon. This is happening on the left and on the right. Politics has become more important to people than religion. In fact, in many ways, it's the new religion with its own fundamentalists and cults. And then secondly, technology, or precisely the way most of us use our technology. Follow me here. It's changing how we respond to anything we don't like. Many people have written about this. Your brain is being rewired against unity every single day.

How? Well, as we thumb through, you know, the socials and YouTube videos and blogs and we watch our streaming services at home and read the news online, what happens? Well, most of us, of course, tend to leave a post, stop watching a video as soon as we're not interested or disagree. And the more we do that, the more we are fed by the algorithms exactly what we prefer. And so we're actually being trained to leave when we see something that we even mildly disagree with.

Right? Therefore, we are losing the ability to live alongside people who aren't exactly what we prefer. Because we are no longer practicing coexisting even with other ideas, let alone other people. But Jesus is praying that we will commit to be in a group of people even when they think a little bit differently than us on some issues that are important to us even when they might offend us. Because I mean, you look at his little group of 11 disciples, they were always offending each other and they didn't agree politically and on many other things.

So you could put it this way, resist the swipe. Read articles from different points of view than your own. That's actually kind of fun, sharpens you. You know, be with people that you don't align with on every single point down the line. So challenges to unity: politics, technology, and then what you might call call-out culture. What I mean by this is in our culture, there's a spirit of intolerance on every side. Again, this is bipartisan, left and right. If you do not align with my entire platform, all of my views, a hundred percent, well, then you're evil.

Remember John Marsden in that study, how he started cutting off people that annoyed him? It's like we're all becoming John Marsden. That second guy who ended up so unhappy. You know what this attitude reminds me of? This is going to give you a scary insight into the way my brain works. But do you remember those old spy movies where like from the 60s where the passenger seat of the spy car has an ejector seat and the bad guy gets in and what does the spy do? It's like we live in an ejector seat culture, but the buttons on this eject, eject, eject, eject, eject.

My cousin Dieter has a great line. He says eventually what happens in lives in churches that operate like this is there's one guy that's left in the church and looks at the other guy and says, "Well, it's just you and me now, and I'm not so sure about you." You know, this is what it all comes down to. It's like the whole world is operating according to the rules of a cult. Now, of course, doctrine matters. In fact, the early Christians fought for unity through doctrine. You know, things like the Apostles Creed, these are the earliest statements of faith that we have outside of the Bible.

What they were trying to do is answer the question, what do we all have in common? And what they were saying was if we agree to agree on the essentials, then we can agree to disagree on the so many secondary and tertiary issues. But here's the real challenge. We can say we believe in unity. Everybody does theoretically, but do we do unity individually? You and me reaching across to people that we are not like and seeking true unity in Christ. How does that happen? We say we want it, but how do we get it? Well, Jesus tells us how there's only one way. By knowing God's love. By knowing God's love for us.

Look at what Jesus says. He says, "So that the world may know," we'll get back to this, "that the world may know you sent me," but look at the second phrase, "and loved them even as you have loved me." Now, let's just settle down for a minute and let your mind just focus on that line and get expanded by this sentence for just a minute. The Father, according to Jesus, the Heavenly Father loves you. You might go, "Yeah, I already knew that, I already knew that." The same exact way he loves Jesus.

The Heavenly Father loves you with the same amount he loves Jesus, with the same intensity he loves Jesus, as unconditionally as he loves Jesus. I mean, wow! If you want to get deep theologically, the triune God, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, have existed forever in an eternal relationship of love. Full strength, full intensity, all eternity, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit together, and that is how he now loves you. God the Father loves you invariably, eternally, intensely, as much as he loves the other members of the Trinity. Simply because you believe and receive.

In other words, it's a gift you just receive. The Father loves you every bit as much in quantity and quality as he loves Jesus Christ. In other words, you are beloved. Say the word "beloved" out loud with me. Beloved, I love that word. Say it again. Beloved, do you know you're beloved? Here's the way this creates an atmosphere for unity. Now hang with me here because we are going deep. You ready for this? Charles Taylor is a Canadian philosopher who wrote a classic book called The Sources of the Self, the Making of the Modern Identity.

And here's his theory. In our Western culture, self-worth and identity formation operate differently than any other culture ever. He says in most non-Western cultures and traditional cultures today, how does anybody decide who they are, what their worth is? Well, your parents and your people. They have a role for you to play and if you fulfill it, they affirm you and you have self-worth. Not saying that's the best way, but that's the way it's been for most of human history.

Modern Western culture, like every Disney movie tells you, we decide what we want to be. We determine it. But here's the sticking point. Once we determine it, who affirms us? So one of the big points that he states again and again in his book, Charles Taylor says that's why in our culture, we are desperate for recognition. We are dependent on constant attention, constant affirmation. Charles Taylor says we actually have the most fragile identities in the history of the world because we constantly need everybody to tell us how good we are. And we can't take it when people disagree with us at all. And consequently, we're setting ourselves up for unhappiness.

And this isn't just something pastors notice. So Freddie DeBore is a writer and a blogger. He works in Brooklyn. He calls himself a Marxist. He's not a Christian. So this fascinates me precisely because it comes from somebody outside my own worldview. Watch this. He says, I've been increasingly preoccupied by a basic question. Why is everybody such a wreck? Why do people who have every reason to feel emotionally and socially secure still feel so deeply insecure? I mean, after all, we have the endless progression of positivity-mongering Instagram memes expressed in a kind of lunatic self-worship.

We have this vast intellectual architecture telling us that physical attractiveness hierarchies are cruel and gendered and unfair. And the cultural perceptions of what's attractive reflect traditional bigotries. But we still care about being hot. He says, a gym I passed by had a sign that said, "Join the Body Acceptance Movement," neglecting the fact that if we all accepted our bodies, there would be no such thing as a gym. We got a self-help culture that constantly counsels that everybody is a ray of brilliant and unique light that alone can shine the way through a dark world. And none of it works.

What makes people so insecure? Why is the condition so common? I wonder, is this the human condition? Well, the Bible would say, yes, it is. When in our sin we are separated from the source of true eternal love. And what we need is to receive love that is not based on our opinion, that's not based on somebody else's opinion, but declared over us by God. And Jesus says, that is what we have. Now, why would he pray that we sense this right after he prays for our unity? What do the two have to do with each other?

Well, if you're secure about the fact that you are beloved, say beloved again, beloved of God, you, loved by God as much as God loves Jesus, right? And that every single other person you ever meet is also beloved of God. Then first of all, you're not going to be insecure if somebody disagrees with you. And secondly, you're going to love across barriers even if people don't love you back. And that's why Jesus goes on; he doubles down on this. He says, father, I desire that they also whom you have given me may be with me where I am to see my glory that you've given me because you love me before the foundation of the world.

And that's how he loves these followers. He goes on, oh, righteous father, even though the world doesn't know you, I know you. And these know that you've sent me. I've made known to them your name. That means that the truth of God about God and I will continue to make it known. Why? Why do we want to study the Bible? Why do we want to continue to learn about God? Not just to become smarter people. Here's why, says Jesus, that the love with which you have loved me may be in them and I in them. We study God's word so we can know him and soak in his love.

You know, one of the things I love about our women's recovery group, that's started, was begun by Natalie Bradley, our women's ministry director, is its name. Guess what its name is? Beloved. That's right. And Natalie chose that name because she says that these women need to know more than anything else that they are God's beloved. Watch Natalie talk about it.

Hey, I am Natalie and I'm here to share with you a little bit about the impact of what is happening in the ministries in our portables on campus right now. Many women walk in to the rooms hopeless. They'll walk in filled with anxiety or gripped with addiction or a struggle that feels so heavy that they just don't know what to do next. And by the end of the meeting to see just a little smile or a spark of hope come from these women as they leave knowing that they don't have to go this journey alone.

Some of my favorite things is to walk into Sunday big service and to see a row of beloved ladies who walked into that portable and started. God just started doing restoration of their hearts and their lives and transformation. And now they're serving in ministries and they're sitting in the front row at church on Sunday with their arms up high praising the Lord. And that right there is what Jesus can do. It's a place of hope and encouragement at this particular time. My alcoholism is arrested, but I still struggle. I struggle with the challenges of everyday life and the women in the group I can identify with and the group is a solution-oriented environment with Jesus guiding us and the Holy Spirit evident.

René told me about a year ago about this idea of a center for the community. And I got chills because there's such a need for a space for women and men to come and find hope and find restoration and to have a building that's dedicated to our community. The impact that can make is so significant. We can be a place of hope that women and men can leave that center with hope instead of hopelessness. Isn't that awesome? Let's thank Natalie and everybody involved in the beloved ministry.

Now she was talking about the Hope Center, more on that later, but do you see what happens when you know you're beloved? What happens then? Well, people are drawn to Jesus. Remember what Jesus said, "So that the world may know that you sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me." That the world may believe. This is how high the stakes are. It's a matter of the world coming to know Jesus of what I want more than anything else is that people would place their faith in Jesus Christ.

And Jesus says, "This is my strategy when they see you unified and loving community because that's what they thirst for." You know, one day the outgoing director of Second Harvest Food Bank, Willie Elliott McCray, told me, "René, you know what I see at Twin Lakes Church?" Now Twin Lakes has for nine years given more to the food bank during the food drive than any other organization in Santa Cruz County. So I assumed that he would say something like, "I see people who really care about the hungry," but that's not what he said.

You know what he said? "I see a church full of people who know they are loved." That is the best thing that a pastor could ever hear. When you know you are beloved, then you radiate love and you live in that loving community. People are drawn to Jesus. You know, we've been asking you to help at Easter. Kyle mentioned that. You know the biggest way you can help at Easter? Honestly? Love. Like when you're at Easter services, and I'm asking you to do this, every single person that you see think, "God loves you, and I love you. Welcome." Think that.

Now I would say unless you know them well, don't necessarily go up and tell them that. That would be, "I love you. I love you. I love you too. I love you." In fact, don't do that. Let me just say don't do that. But think it. Because it changes your smile, right? Remember the people that we started with, Godfrey, Camille, and John Marsden? Godfrey, at age 35, had a life-changing event. He was hospitalized for 14 months in a veteran's hospital with tuberculosis. And during that time, he had what he described as a spiritual rebirth.

He said, "I felt someone with a capital S cared about me, and nothing has been so tough since that year." In another interview, he went into more detail. He described how he had a personal encounter with Jesus in the hospital. In fact, he described it as a visitation, his words. And that was the turning point for his life because he knew he was loved. And so from that moment on, he lived a life of loving community. I don't know how you felt about yourself when you walked in, but I want you to know that someone with a capital S cares about you. And when you know that, then you can stay strong and carry on through anything.

Let's pray together. Heavenly Father, I just want to pray the prayer of Jesus Christ, that we continue to see your love revealed in Jesus as we study your word, as we worship, as we fellowship, so that we know deeply we are loved and we radiate that love to others and we live in unity so that the world will know Jesus. We also pray for the services next weekend, help them be services full of love and joy. And Lord, I also want to lift up anybody who was affected by the attack on the concert in Moscow. I pray that you would be in healing and comfort to the victims and their families, bring them closer to you. And we pray for all those suffering throughout the world. We lift all this up to you, thanking you for your love for us. In Jesus' name, Amen.