John 17:11-19, Acts 7:54-60
11 I will remain in the world no longer, but they are still in the world, and I am coming to you. Holy Father, protect them by the power of[b] your name, the name you gave me, so that they may be one as we are one. 12 While I was with them, I protected them and kept them safe by[c] that name you gave me. None has been lost except the one doomed to destruction so that Scripture would be fulfilled.
13 “I am coming to you now, but I say these things while I am still in the world, so that they may have the full measure of my joy within them. 14 I have given them your word and the world has hated them, for they are not of the world any more than I am of the world. 15 My prayer is not that you take them out of the world but that you protect them from the evil one. 16 They are not of the world, even as I am not of it. 17 Sanctify them by[d] the truth; your word is truth. 18 As you sent me into the world, I have sent them into the world. 19 For them I sanctify myself, that they too may be truly sanctified.
Listening guide
What risks did you take? ________________________________________
“I protected them and kept them safe”. (verse 12)
Quick, if you could take one great risk, what would it be? ______________________
“Holy Father, protect them by the power of your name, the name you gave me, so that they may be one as we are one. While I was with them, I protected them and kept them safe by that name you gave me.” (verses 11-12)
“Sanctify them by the truth; your word is truth.” (verses 17)
You can have _______________ _____________.
Go take a risk
Discussion questions
Sermon
During the pandemic, plenty of people have said things like, “that doesn’t make me feel comfortable.” “is that safe?” “What can we do to make this safer?” Or even just the plain statement, “I don’t feel safe.”
Suddenly safety was on everybody’s mind.
I know people aren’t saying, I feel like I might fall down and hurt myself. Or I feel like I might get a scratch, get a booboo, get an owie. No, we’re talking something much deeper. We’re saying, my very existence doesn’t feel protected anymore. I don’t know if I can handle being alive.
I thought about this as I considered the request to be a pastor in Milwaukee. I didn’t just think, what would be a good opportunity for me, like career development. I didn’t just think, where does the kingdom need to get served. I thought, where does my family have safety and security? Where am I going to make a stable income so I can provide for their needs? Where are they going to be physically safe? Where is an emotionally and psychologically safe environment for them to develop?
I know that thousands of people think about this all the time. We make decisions all the time about where we’ll live, about who we’ll invite over into our houses, and about what activities we do based on the physical and emotional safety we feel.
Then I look at the story of the 1st Christians (and today is one of those lessons) and I realize they took all sorts of risks. For example, in Acts 4, Peter and John were arrested and put in jail. After they stood trial and were released, they were told to stop preaching. Acts 5, we find they are still meeting in the temple. They are told again to not preach and are flogged. But Stephen keeps preaching and he gets arrested. Then he is put to death. At that point, they leave the city of Jerusalem but they keep preaching wherever they go.
Or do you remember the line that says all the believers held everything in common and someone would sell everything when someone had a need? I wonder how many of us would risk our finances for someone else.
Put it this way: Do you remember all the risky things you did in high school and college and your younger years?
I remember driving way too fast. That was probably a bad choice.
I tried to pursue, date this gorgeous, popular girl in college. Yeah, that I didn’t have a shot at.
We drove to Lincoln NE and back in 24 for a friend’s father’s funeral.
I spent college spring breaks, when everyone else was in Florida, knocking on doors at churches around the country to share the gospel with people.
At 16 I took a job working in all kinds of cities in the Midwest, living in hotels, and doing steel work in college dorms
I moved my barely one year old daughter and wife to no man’s land China.
What risks did you take? ________________________________________
Did we take those risks just because we were “young and we didn’t know better”? I think there was more to it than that.
Promise/Discover
We knew, even if we couldn’t talk about it, what Jesus said today, “I protected them and kept them safe”. (verse 12)
Friends there is a safety out there that is so great, it will let you take the greatest risks you ever imagined.
Quick, if you could take one great risk, what would it be? ______________________ If you were willing to take a great risk, what would do? Would you quit your job so you could pursue your dream career? Would you stand up to your coworkers? Would you move to a new country? Would you sacrifice for a friend or spouse? What risk do you want to take? ___________________________________
There is a safety out there for you and I that is so great. That’s what we want to discover today. We want to see two things: the world is so much more fragile than we realize it is, we can be much more safe than we thought we could be
Development
The Bible shows that we live in a fragile, dangerous world.
We already heard today Jesus said, “Holy Father, protect them by the power of your name, the name you gave me, so that they may be one as we are one. While I was with them, I protected them and kept them safe by that name you gave me.” (verses 11-12) If he wants to protect us, it’s because we need protection.
I think I really need to wrestle with this, because it is so easy to imagine I can keep myself safe. Something that’s made me think about it lately. I've been reading this book from Nassim Taleb about randomness and chance. He has this illustration. It goes something like this. Imagine you have $10,000 you want to invest. There are 10,000 traders standing ready to invest for you. You give each one $1. Do you know how many will have made money in 5 years? The odds are basically 50/50 for each trader each year. If they lose their money, they’re out of the game. That means that after 5 years there will only be 269 traders.
If you want to check the math all out, you can read his book. His exercise doesn’t quite match real life because no one starts at zero and we all get more than one chance to succeed. Still, I was so surprised. If I have money to invest and so I pick a trader, the odds are incredibly small that I’ll pick right. (basically 1 out of 50 people will make money)
Or take work. Do you know the median time a person works for one employer in America? Just over 4 years. That’s the median tenure with an employer. You think your job is stable? You have longevity? You think you’ll have a job in a decade? Try again.
One of the examples that has really hit me lately is to think about what some scientists call the fine tuning of the universe. Cosmological constant (which controls the expansion speed of the universe) refers to the balance of the attractive force of gravity with a hypothesized repulsive force of space observable only at very large size scales. It must be very close to zero, that is, these two forces must be nearly perfectly balanced. To get the right balance, the cosmological constant must be fine-tuned to something like 1 part in 10to the 120th. If it were just slightly more positive, the universe would fly apart; slightly negative, and the universe would collapse.
Some people are very convinced the fine tuning of the universe speaks to the existence of God. How else could there be such precision? But even if it doesn’t, the world is incredibly fragile. If the forgive of gravity was just a little bit stronger, everything would disappear.
This is something God has said for a very long time.
Peter “For, "All people are like grass, and all their glory is like the flowers of the field; the grass withers and the flowers fall,”
Jesus said, “you fool. This very night your life will demanded from you.” (Luke 12:20)
James “What is your life? You are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes.” (4:14)
There is a reason Jesus says, “I protect them.” It’s because the world is so much more fragile than we think about.
Now what do we do about this? How do we respond to this?
Jesus said, “Sanctify them by the truth; your word is truth.” (verses 17) What does sanctified mean? Sanctified means “set apart”. It means set aside.
What is Jesus doing? He is keeping us safe. He is setting us apart from whatever it is that hurts or damages us. That’s what he is doing. He is keeping us safe. That’s what happens when you set something aside. You put it in safe keeping.
At first it sounds like...Let’s say you have some money you want to keep safe. Let’s say you’re trying to save for a new car. What do you do? You set aside the money.
You put in the bank. If you’re old school, you put in your mattress. If you’re cool, you put it in Dogecoin. You set it aside.
And that’s great, until you want to buy your spouse a birthday present. Then you need to buy your kid a new bike. Then you’re paying for school. And on and on. Pretty soon, that money you set aside, it’s not set aside at all.
This is what so many of us do when we want to keep ourselves safe. We set ourselves aside. Now sometimes that might be a good thing to happen. It might be a good thing to do. If you and your kids are being abused, you should pull back. Cut off that dangerous relationship.
The things is, this impulse, isolate, separate. It’s pervasive. We build houses that isolate ourselves from one another. Have you noticed how garages are put on the front of peoples houses? We destroy the common meeting grounds of society. (basically speaking of protectionism). Tell me, where do you go to meet new people? That’s not me saying this. Someone like Robert Putnam writing in Bowling Alone said this long ago.
We’re trying to do what Jesus says. We want to set stuff aside for safe keeping. We want to keep ourselves safe.
Jesus teaches that we really get set apart not when we get taken away from everything, but when something really great comes into us. The way to be safe in it, is to not try to run away from it. It’s to actually put something else into you to become part of a different world.
What Jesus says to put into is the Word. You notice he doesn’t say, sanctify them by the truth. My family is truth. The Bible speaks really well of the family. I think it speaks of us more highly than anyone else in the world. But family won’t make you safe.
He doesn’t say sanctify them by the truth, your house is truth. The Bible loves homes and your home is a great place. But your home won’t keep you safe. The best Christian homes are wrecked by the ravages of sin.
Jesus says, I'm going to put something into you that will take you to a different world. My Word. Here is an illustration.
My wife and I generally get along well. We like each other. We enjoy our time together. We do have our challenges. Sometimes the kids get us going. We debate work. We get to the point where like a lot of people we find ourselves in a very heated discussion. We go at each other.
One way we’ve tried to solve that problem, you can probably guess, is we take a break. We separate ourselves. Then we try to set apart time for that conversation later.
We’re in the middle of a conversation and we stop. We say, we’ll come back to this later.
I’m really skeptical of that idea now. You can guess why. We almost never have that conversation. If we do, do you know when we end up having it? Usually the next day with another heated conversation.
Do you know what does work? We’ve gotten much better by including a mentor, a counselor, a pastor, or a good friend in the conversation. We’ve literally said, hey, we want you to be a referee. Make us fight fair. Your words will change our conversation. Put your words into the middle of us.
When we do that, we almost always fight fair. Just those words make us safe.
Now imagine what would happen if you would put the words of the one who came from another world into your world? Can you imagine how great that could be?
He set himself apart from sin and from death and from the devil himself. None of those things can touch him. He sits at the right hand of his Father. He does not belong to this world.
Can you imagine what might happen if his words would come and set you apart?
Do you know how unstoppable, how absolutely unbreakable you could be? We heard this great story today of a man named Stephen. He was arrested. He was falsely accused. He was eventually put to death. He was stoned by his own people. The last thing he said as he died was, “Lord Jesus, receive my spirit.”
There is one thing that can make you and I absolutely bulletproof in this fragile world. And that is to realize that the one who was crushed to death by this fragile, crazy world sits at the right hand of God. The whole world collapsed on him. He was not safe from it. That same man reigns in heaven for you.
Bottom line: You can have certain safety.
Action
I’m going to do something a little dangerous today. It’s a good thing we have insurance and my pastoral counsel is covered by insurance.
I was talking to my dad this week about our family history. My great great great grandpa moved to this country when he was 63. He had 6, maybe 7 year old son. I don’t know what brought them. I do know that in the end he came.
And you’ve got me as a pastor, we’re in this together, because 140 years ago one senior man took a huge risk. I can say senior because in those days, if you made it past 40, you almost certainly weren’t going to hit 70. That man took a risk.
What risk did you write down before? If you could take one risk what would it be?
I want you to get out there this week and take a risk. Your safety is certain.