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We're going to turn to the Gospel of John. Um, in chapter 17, we had moved through the Gospel of John over the last year, but we've gone back to comb over a couple pieces of the Gospel of John that deserved more attention. And one of those was Jesus' what's called his high priestly prayer. So he had just shared in the Last Supper with his followers. He's heading to the cross the next day. And at the end of that supper, he takes time to pray. And that's the entire chapter of John chapter 17. It's the longest recorded prayer of Jesus. It's meaningfully his second to last prayer before he goes to the cross. The last one was when he was in the garden saying, Father, if it be your will, let this cup pass. Like I don't want to have to do this, but I'm willing. But this prayer, he turned and he prayed first of all, he prayed for himself, knowing what he had been called to do. And here's God praying to God. The son praying to the Father, having stepped out of heaven as spirit and taken on flesh, literally in order to die. And I say that repeatedly because I want you to remember it and appreciate it and be equipped to share that with other people. We literally have Christmas to get the Good Friday. If there was no need for him to die, he wouldn't have stepped out of heaven and taken on flesh. Spirit cannot die. He chose to die because it required a perfect sacrifice to pay the penalty for our sins. And the only thing perfect in all of creation was God Himself. He chose to step out because he chose to love you and he chose to love me. It is not because you're lovable or I'm lovable. We are just not that lovable compared to a holy God. And I'm thankful that that's what he chose to do. And he took on flesh, he lived his life, and he went to the cross and he was crucified. It was a horrific physical death. In fact, as a heads up and a reminder, on the Thursday night before Good Friday, we're going to have Rob Rogan here. He's a physician's assistant, works with the Duchess Ortho. That wasn't meant to be an ad for them. But he has a passion for the Lord, and he has a passion to share about the physical aspects of what Jesus went through during the crucifixion. He's going to be giving a presentation here in our fellowship hall or this room on that Thursday night before Good Friday. I would encourage you to come, not for entertainment, but to be informed and to grow in your awareness and appreciation of what he went through for you and for me and to make that personal. Jesus literally is heading to the cross the next day, and he turns to God and he prays, acknowledging that the work that you've given me to done, I've completed it. I'm heading to the cross. I've lived a sinless life. I'm going to give that life for these people. Please, Father, restore me to the glory that I had when I was once with you before the creation of the world. He's heading back to glory. He's praying basically to carry it out, to finish the job, and then he's heading back to glory, grounding himself, asking for the Father's support, not just to be crucified, but to take on the penalty for every single sin I have ever committed, and that you have ever committed. And he paid that penalty in full. Nothing left to be paid, only to be able to receive that gift that he offers because of that. And then he turns and he prays for his followers that are there. And in verse 15, he prayed that he would be protected, they would be protected from Satan. In verse 16, he prays that just acknowledging that they are in and not of the world. I don't know if you ever heard the phrase IANO, I-A-N-O. It's in the acronym for in and not of. That's us. Those that are children of God. We are in the world, but we're no longer of it. We now belong to Him. That's the opportunity we have. But He sends us back into that world to minister to it, and we'll see that in a few minutes. In verse 17, He prays that we would be sanctified in the truth, in His Word, set apart, grounded and rooted in the very truth and Word of God. And in verse 18, he acknowledges that He has sent them out into the world. They're in it and out of it, but I'm sending them back into it. And so you don't miss it. He does the same thing for you and for me as well. We don't just get saved and we sit, sit on it, and hold it. We receive the life and forgiveness that He offers, and He says, I want you to go live that with me and for me, to go minister to the world. It's personal, but it's something to be saved, not held on to. And then in verse 20, he prays for you and me. It's kind of awesome. We have God praying to God. We have the Lord, Savior, Jesus, the Messiah, praying to the Father in heaven for you and for me, for the followers, the believers that are of yet to come, for the future believers. And I think that's just plain awesome. I wanted to ask you, just recognizing where Jesus is, heading to the cross tomorrow, it's show time. And you're going to pray to God the Father in perfect accordance with the Father's will, knowing that the Father is perfectly able and he will do what you're asking him to do, what would you pray for? You're given that one ability to pray to God, and he had obviously more than that, but if you had one thing in your head, on your heart that you wanted to pray for, what would it be? And I sat there and thought about it, and I engaged a couple people over the last week to ask that question. And to be honest, what most people will talk about is fix that shoulder of mine. Fix my knee. Make me run faster, jump higher, like I used to be able to do. That's a lie, I never could jump. Fix us physically, our aches and pains. Fix our broken relationships. Help me, God, be financially secure. Help me to live life and not worry about the future. Most of our prayers tend to be self-focused or for other people in our life because of what they're going through. It's not a bad thing at all. It's just not the best thing. Jesus paid for what was best, and what we're getting in this prayer is this incredible glimpse into the heart of God for glory and for people. That people would live with him and for him and that others would come to know him. He literally lived these 33 years on mission for that very purpose. And here he is praying for that. And it's a prayer that's not just lifted up out of nowhere, it is a prayer that's lifted up with incredible focus and incredible purpose. I want to pump the prayer up and have you look at it just for a minute. And now look at this. The words that will be highlighted for you. That or so that. It's infused in the prayer. The word in that in Greek is hina. It's the purpose clause. It's so that. And we it's the same word, it's interpreted that or so that all the way through this. Look at this. I do not ask for these only. That's the followers that he has there, but also for those who will believe in me through their word. That's us. That's those that are responding to the gospel through all these centuries. They're going to be one, that we would be one, 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. The glory that you have given me, I've given to them, that they may be one as we are one. I in them and you in me, that they may become perfectly one, so that the world may know that you sent me and love them even as you loved me. It's infused with purpose. He's not just playing for dead-end requests, he's praying and lifting up requests to his heavenly father with an incredible missional focus that is absolutely driven by his love for people. And I'm incredibly grateful for that. God is praying to God for you and for me with purpose. And I want you to be able to grasp that purpose as we move through it today. So the first thing is that he prayed for us is that we would be one. And we can look at that and say that he prayed for us to be one and go, that's great. What's that mean? Because if you miss the meaning of one, you miss the meaning of that request. He prayed for us that we would be one, that's one in essence, and one on mission. One in essence, we become children of God through a saving faith in Jesus Christ, through the work that He's done, through His death, burial, and resurrection. He did it all. And through what He did, through the cross, He eliminated all those barriers. No more Jew over here and Gentile over here. We now get to become one people, one children of the body of God. It's not about rich and poor, black and white, Republican or Democrat. It's about us being one. And we find our identity, we find our being in Christ. He has done the work. He has provided unity through his work on the cross. And your job and my job within his church, here locally and all through the world, we have the privilege and the opportunity of preserving that unity. We get to preserve it. But we are now one people, saved by grace, children of God. And we need to recognize that. We don't need to stop looking critically at one another or judgmentally at one another, but to love one another the way that He has chosen to love us and to preserve that unity. But we are also one on mission. And he's focusing on that as you moves through this prayer. And this is talking about unity, not uniformity, okay? You don't all need to look the same, act the same, think the same, do the same. That's deadly. God has created you just the way you are. You've got a personality. For those of you that have become a child of God, he's given you at least one spiritual gift. There's a whole smattering of possible spiritual gifts, like 20 of them, plus or minus, depending how you're counting as you move through Scripture. At that moment that you become a child of God, he gifts you with a certain ability to serve Him. And what He wants us to do as His people is to come together and be one unified body, living on mission as an entity, individually and collectively. We have about 400 people now that come to Cross Point on a regular basis. Between the 8:30 service, this 10:30 service, some every week, some once a month, but in that neck of the woods, about 400 people, men, women, and children that are coming to CrossPoint. And I say thank you, God. Not for the size of this church, but for each individual. Because you matter to God. But what he wants us to do is to bond together on mission as we live through life. Our mission here at Cross Point is to reach our community and impact the world for Christ. We are and we will be an externally focused church. I never want this church to turn inward. We're here and we're committed to care for you and to love you and to equip you and to minister to you. We want you to grow into the people that God's called you to be. We are all in for that. But we also want you to live missionally. Because the day this church turns inward and starts focusing on our survival and our wants and our needs, we light a fuse. And this church will begin to die, and this church will begin to wither. God will break his heart. We're here to live on mission with him and for him. And you individually and we collectively will grow farther and faster into the people he's created us to be as we live on mission, with him and for him, in his strength and for his glory. We, as a people, 400 people, and there may be 200 people here today between the services, we come to the table with an awful lot of gifts and abilities. We have strengths, we have experiences, we have skills, we have spiritual gifting, and as we bring those things together, we bring a lot to bear in caring for one another, strengthening this church and impacting the community around us. We get to do that together. We as a church also partner with other churches. We're not here as a siloed church. We partner with about 30 churches from Lake George all the way down to Monticello, like-minded, both in doctrine, what we believe, and in our practice, and we partner together. We give cooperatively into a common fund to help start new churches and strengthen churches. We come alongside one another when there's needs, whether it's replacing a pastor, filling in the pulpit, so to speak, on a Sunday. If churches need help being revitalized, we're there for one another so that we're not out there by ourselves. We partner with about 500 churches in New York State to do the same thing, to start and strengthen churches and to help people know Jesus Christ. And then we partner with the North American Mission Board and the International Mission Board to do that work around this country, this continent, and around the world. We do more together. He wants us to live on mission. I want to recognize a bunch of things all at one time. I and we could do a lot better job of that. We all draw lines in who we play with. We do. And it's probably a phrase I shouldn't use, but that's what I call it. We get to play with other churches. We get to cooperate with them on mission and ministry. And we all draw lines. We try to draw those lines on the major things. So basically, this is the word of God. Our job is to discover it, to apply it, to share it with other people. We don't get to make it up, we get to discover it. If they believe that's the word of God and they believe in the gospel, that you are saved by God's grace through faith in Jesus Christ, not of your own works or anything else, but 100% Jesus, we want to come alongside those churches and be supportive the best we can. So we have some that are very like-minded that we absolutely partner with. I'm grateful for the other churches that are out there that believe that's the word of God and believe in the gospel, but they may have some subtle differences. I'm thankful they're out there, but we don't do a whole lot to partner with them in a lot of different things. At some level, that needs to change, and I own that. So even after being convicted about this over the last week or so, we've reached out to several other churches to ask what we could do to help. Churches that are struggling. Churches that are withering, quite frankly, where they've declined from their glory days and now they're hanging on for dear life, and they're down to anywhere from, quite frankly, six people to in one case 25 people, but churches that are struggling. We take no joy in that. We want to see them thrive. So we've offered to help with facilities, we've offered to help with anything we can do to help revitalize them. We want to be an encouragement to them, we want to partner with them in ways that we can that make sense. But I want to get some of those barriers down, and we will still be drawing lines. There's just churches for some different reasons that we probably won't be doing a whole lot with, but we're looking for opportunities to engage. I'm going to be away, but Adam and Tim are going to participate with a group of pastors heading down to Morningstar Church in early May, where they've invited pastors from this area to come in. And they want to be a part of it. We want to partner with them. We want to build relationships with them. We want to be one body. And this is going to be awkward, and it's going to be really awkward because this is live streamed, it's going to be recorded. But I want to acknowledge something that I've been asked about several times in the past year and numbers of times over the many years is do we participate in the Council of Churches here in Kingston? And the answer is absolutely no, we don't. And we won't. Love the people, but enough of those churches that are a part of that are not churches in terms of the people of God. I don't want to be a part of it. I don't want our participation in any way convey that we're all one, that we're all part of the same team, that we're all part of God's family, because they teach a different gospel. It's a broad enough theology underneath that that they have Muslims and all sorts of different people. We love the people, but that's not who we are. We need to be able to stand on the word of God and the grace of God and be clear about that and recognize there's differences and still love them. But we don't have to participate with them by affirming them or cooperating with them. So I just wanted to get that out of the way. I do want to recognize though, and I'm going to come back at this, you matter. So we matter as a church, you matter as an individual in the way we live this out. All those different skills and gifts that you've you've brought to the table, God wants you to be engaged. How many of you are watching March Madness coming up? NCAA, it's basketball time. What happened to Cross Point? My goodness. We've aged out or something's happened to us. I love this time of year. But when you watch the basketball team out there, they put teams together based upon skills and abilities. Congratulations, by the way, on section nine championship. Yes, sorry about that. I have to have a little shout out there. We have gifted athletes. Their character matters, the practice matters. They practice, they contribute, they get engaged. You've got point guards, you've got shooting guards, you've got power forwards, you've got weak side forwards, you've got centers, you've got people that fill different roles. You've got people that have a gift at rebounding. You've got people that are gifted at shooting. You've got people that can handle and distribute the ball. But they play as a team. And they practice individually and as a team. And here's the danger. If those players showed up on the court, my job is to shoot, and all I did was shoot, that's not much of a team, is it? Everybody else is going to be standing around waiting for you to do what you do. Or all I do is rebound. I can box out, I can rebound, I can track, or I pass, I defend. That's not a team. Every one of those players does everything. And they practice everything. And they practice in a coordinated way, and they put a lot of time and they put a lot of sweat and they put a lot of effort into it, and they give the best they've got when they get out there on that court. That should be us as a team. And I say that with love, but I also want to recognize that we have a we're a target rich for opportunities for you to serve here at Cross Point. We have people, and I have incredible thankfulness for all the different people that serve over the course of the week that come in and clean this building, that stay after this service today, after our fellowship time, and they help clean the building up. And people that come in through the week cleaning the building so that it's clean and a nice place for people to come in and be ministered to and to worship and to serve. We have people that make coffee and help with snack. We have an incredible team of people that help with our nursery and our kids' class. Committed. Week after week after week. They come and they serve. And I do joke about it a lot, but America runs on Duncan. Ministry runs on commitment. Dreaded commitment. Because I need my time. It's a sacrifice. But people make sacrifices to make commitments to minister to other people. We have worship team members, we have people that handle the buildings and grounds, we have people that help out in all sorts of different ways. But the danger will be if any one of them ever looks up and says, This is what I do, I've got the kitchen, I've got the nursery, that would be a hazard. I do worship, and that's all you do, I've failed. So you may have a particular focus in a gift that you bring to bear, and I'm grateful for that. But what we all want to be doing is engaged in all these different aspects. It doesn't mean you all have to do everything, but don't ever develop the mentality that I've checked the box, I did my job for the week, and that's it. You want to be living 24 by seven for Christ. The ministry of this church, the vast majority of it happens outside these walls in a way that we never see. It's you living it out. So we come together once a week to worship God and to be equipped to go back out there into that world. That's where we get to live this out, and we get to team up, to partner up, to do those things together. And I hope that you're incredibly blessed increasingly as you do that. Jesus went on in this prayer to pray that the world would believe, and that they would believe that the Father sent Jesus specifically. And he sent them for a purpose not to encourage us, not just to teach us. He came here to save us, to rescue us from death to life. In Luke 19 10, it says, He came to seek and to save the lost. That's his mission statement. And what the Bible teaches us, we are all lost apart from coming to a saving faith in Christ. He gave his life so that we could come to that new life in him and to be with him forever. And he wants us to receive that life and then go share that life with other people. That's why we're here. And please, I'm going to lose my job one of these days. I don't care about Cross Point. I do not care about Cross Point Fellowship. I care about you. I care about the people of this church. The organization, the legal entity of Cross Point, it'll be gone someday. And I hope that when it's gone, there's going to be a whole lot of other churches out there that we've helped give birth to and supported along the way. I hope there'll be a whole lot more people that are out there that know Jesus Christ. Local churches have some kind of a shelf life to them, we, because we're people. There's no church that's been in continual existence for the last 2,000 years. But I want us to live it well. I want us to live it well so that there's people on the backside of what we're doing. We are here for people, we are here for the kingdom of God. And Jesus wants the world to believe. And for them to believe, you and I have to be able to share with them, to share who he is and what he's done. So we're here to equip you in doing that. We have a class at 9:30 that's been meeting. We have 150 or 170 people now that are memorizing those scriptures that are involved in sharing the gospel, bit by bit, life by life, one step at a time. We want to equip you and support you and strengthen you in sharing that so that the world can believe. He goes on then to say that the world may know, may know that the Father sent him and that the Father loves us. And I looked at that and I thought, man, Jesus, sorry about that, but you just prayed that the world would believe, and now you're praying that the world would know. This is meaningful, your last prayer. Why the dual focus? And I had to chew on that, and I don't know this for sure. The world does need to believe. But there's a step beyond that in many cases where we can know for certain for certain. We can know because he's given us his word. We can know, we don't have to make it up. We can discover what's true. You and I don't get to determine what's true, we get to discover what's true, and we find that between the pages of this book. He wants us to know with certainty who he is and what he's done, so we can choose to believe and choose to trust in him as we live it out. He went on to share then, as he moves through this prayer, that we would be, excuse me, that the Father, that we would know that the Father loves us even as he loves Jesus. And I thought, I, golly, I dwelled on that for a couple days. I do my sermonizing in bed, actually, when I'm horizontal, Nancy will tell you that. Chewing on different aspects of it that I know I want to get deeper. That we would know that he loves us. Okay? Even as he loves Jesus. Think about that. God the Father loves you. Just as he loves Jesus. You want to be encouraged? You want to feel that love and know that love? I mean, praise God that he's cared enough to share that with us. That inspires me, that comforts me, that strengthens me. I am loved by God. Just the way I am. Just the way you are. You are loved by God, and he wants you to know that and live your life based upon that and in response to it. And then finally, as he was wrapping this up, he went on to pray that you and I would someday see his glory, glory that he's already given to us, that will be fully revealed when we're with him in heaven someday. You have the glory of God. You have the person of God in you if you've become a child of God. The Spirit of God is within you. You're lacking nothing to live the life that he's called you to live. He's given you everything you need for life and godliness. And I thank him for that. And we are not lacking anything. We all have it individually, we have it collectively. And then he goes on to say in verse 26 that he's made the Father's name known and that he will continue to. And as I looked at that, I thought, wow, I can continue to grow in my knowledge and experience of God, intellectually and experientially. And he's going to help me get that through his word and through his spirit. What he's doing is he's praying that you will be equipped and live missionally to share him with other people as you move through life. So I want to back up, and I just want to lift up and elevate a little bit. And I want to ask and talk about why being one matters, because that was the focus of this prayer, that his followers would be one, united in essence and on mission. It matters because disunity is destructive, isn't it? I mean, we've seen churches that get ripped apart. They get ripped apart because they don't like the color of the chairs, they don't like the type of coffee that gets served, they don't like the teaching or the preaching or whatever it might be, and we rip churches apart. We don't handle things purposely, we shoot pastors, we shoot individuals, and we make a mess of it. And oh, isn't that a beautiful witness to the world around us? It's horrible the damage that gets done. Not just to the organization of the church, but to the people that comprise that church, it rips at the fabric of who we're called to be. And it incredibly damages the witness to the world around us. The consequences of disunity are enormous. The other consequence of not being fully engaged is a lack of effectiveness. I don't know if you ever heard of the Pareto principle, but it's basically where 80% of the is done by 20%. 80% of the inventory in a business will be found in 20% of the products. 80% of the work in an organization gets done by 20% of the people. In a church, that number is closer to 90% and 10%. It's a few people that are living committed and sacrificially that do the bulk of the work. It's just part of where we are. You as a church generally do a much better job of that than most. I just want you to recognize without any guilt or condemnation the opportunity that you have to become more fully engaged. And you know me well enough, but I'll say it again for those that don't. I never, ever, ever want to get anything out of you. Not your money, not your time, nothing. That is never our goal. It is never our heart. We want you to give and we want you to serve because it's honoring to God and it's good for you. And you will bless other people in the process. And we are unapologetic about that because in that case everybody wins. So when we lift up service opportunities to you, when we reach out with texts or emails to say, hey, could you help with this? Always be at peace to say no. You're tied up, I'm busy. There's never judgment, condemnation, there's never disappointment even. I trust that you know best what's going on in your life. But I want you to be able to sacrifice with wisdom. I want you to give up your private time. I want you to be able to give up your pleasures and your desires. I want you to make smart sacrifices in a way that honors God and brings blessing to other people because it's also really, really good for you. It helps reorient life. Division and disunity are destructive and a lack of full engagement, we we lose opportunity. We do. You're an incredibly strong church, but we can be a whole lot stronger as more and more of us get more and more engaged. But unity brings glory to God, helps bring people to Jesus. There is a joy and a purpose that, man, it lights people up. When you're a part of what's going on, when you're contributing to what God is doing in and through this church, whether it's a block party outreach to people down at Stony Run or helping somebody move or two people going and just helping to share, share Jesus with somebody, it puts gas in your tank. It blesses you, it brings glory to God. It's a God thing. And you get to make that choice. So I want to bring you face to face with it, and I want you to do that in a way that you understand, and it's one of the things I say, my goodness, every month, you make a difference. You individually make a difference. You matter. And you matter in the way that is most significant in anything in the world. It's not mattering in some local not-for-profit, and I'm not demeaning anything like that. It's not mattering to your school or to your workplace. I'm talking about mattering eternally. You matter to God, and you matter in a way that can bring eternal blessing to people by helping them step from death to life and to live that life with him and for him. You matter. And I say this a lot because I mean it to my core. Every one of you, each and every one of you, is in a better position than anybody in the world to lead certain people closer to Jesus. You. And the people in your life. You make a difference. So I want to encourage you this morning, with no pressure, but a whole lot of love and a whole lot of encouragement to get in the game. You are target rich for ways that you can contribute by inviting people, by caring for them, by listening to them, by introducing them to other people, by bringing them here if you'd like to, or by pointing them to another church if there's a place that's closer and healthier for them. You matter. And I want you to walk out that door today committed, committed to engaging in a way that honors God, brings blessing to people, and brings blessing to you. So for the application, it's super simple today. Choose to be engaged. And with every step that you take, every little action that you take of serving and connecting, being a part of what's going on, recognize it's an incredible opportunity to honor God, to bring glory to Him. It's an incredible opportunity for you to be blessed, and it is an incredible opportunity for you to have a blessing to the people in your life, to this church and to this community. You've done a great job of that. We can do more, and I hope that you're going to be richly blessed as we do. So if you would join me in prayer, I'm going to ask for God to speak into each one of our minds and our hearts. And my prayer is going to be that we'll each respond in a way that honors him. So let's do that together. So, Father, thank you for your word. Thank you for praying for us, Jesus. And Father, thank you for allowing me and each person here to be a part of your answer to Jesus' prayer. God, that's profound. God, help us to live it out in a way that honors you. Help us to live it out, God, in a way that is a blessing to others. And Lord, please help us to grasp the blessings and the growth that are involved through our obedience. And Lord, I pray that we would increasingly do it, Lord, not by compulsion or duty, but driven by love, God. The love for you, the love from you, and love for people. And I thank you, God, for the privilege and the opportunity of doing that. And as we turn back to you now, God, in worship, God, I pray that we would do it with an incredible sense of gratefulness and awe. And I ask that in Jesus' name. Amen.