Today, I am reading and commenting on  John 17-18.

A few weeks back I heard a sermon where the preacher said that our prayers should primarily be for our fellow believers.  I am really oversimplifying what he said here because he did not say that we should not pray for unbelievers (his point was not that we should pray for unbelievers less than we do, but that we should pray for believers much more than we do).  He based saying that on the fact that most of the prayers mentioned in the Bible are for believers (a large percentage of the prayers mentioned in the Bible are in Paul’s letters).  I fully agreed with everything that preacher said in that sermon, except his emphasis on focusing our prayers on believers (I didn’t exactly disagree, I just wasn’t sure that he was correct).  Which brings me to today’s passage.  In His final prayer before His arrest Jesus prays for His disciples, both those who followed Him during His ministry and those who followed Him based on the testimony of those who followed Him.

Jesus identifies those for whom He is praying by saying that they accepted the words from the Father which Jesus had given to them.  He prays that the Father protect them, but not by taking them out of the world, or even protecting them from the world.  Rather Jesus prays that God the Father will protect us (yes, those of us today who call upon His name are among those for whom He was praying) from the evil one.  We have been sent into the world by Jesus, but we are not to be of the world.  Jesus prayed that all believers would be brought to complete unity.  That unity should lead us to live our lives so that the world would know that He was sent by God.  I struggle with this because there are those who use Jesus’ call for unity among believers to interfere with rooting out of false teaching.

I use the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.