Jno. 17:21 ... "That they all may be one; even as You, Father, are in Me, and I in You, that they also may be in Us; that the world may believe that You did send Me."
The seventeenth chapter of John contains what may truly be called The Lord's Prayer. The setting was an "upper room" somewhere in Jerusalem on the same night during which Jesus was betrayed, arrested, and put through the mockery of a "trial." Within less than twenty-four hours of the time that He uttered this prayer, Jesus had been crucified and entombed in the crypt of Joseph of Arimathea. We can believe, therefore, that with His mission to earth finished, the thoughts expressed in this prayer were especially important to Jesus. Those who read it carefully will be impressed with the idea that its contents were indeed of critical meaning to our Lord as He concluded the work God had given Him to do, (v.4).
The essence of Jesus' prayer concerned the completeness of His mission, the preparedness of the apostles to continue His work, and the unity of all who put their faith in His gospel. He emphasized this unity as an extension of the perfect unity that prevails in the Holy Trinity: "even as You, Father, are in Me, and I in You, that they also may be in Us." Absolute harmony prevails among the three Personalities of God in will, in purpose, and in action. It is God's will that the same harmony prevail among those who compose His spiritual family on earth. The gospel is filled with teaching that stresses the necessity of this unity. The length of this essay could be multiplied several times in the effort to survey all those passages. There can be no denial that God demands unity among Christians and accounts it as a great sin when they divide into factions.
Let us notice, however, another dimension to this unity. At the end of v.21 Jesus declares that the unity of His disciples will be a powerful force to induce the world to "believe that You did send Me." In other words, the ability to bring the masses of the world's people in each generation to accept that Jesus is not just "a great human teacher" but the Son of God descended from heaven is contingent upon the cohesion of His followers. If there is any inducement to cause Christians to squelch their prejudices, personal desires, and vain ambitions in order to achieve and preserve this unity, it should surely be this great objective in our Lord's prayer.
As one looks over the vast sea of people on earth, only a minority can be found who believe that Jesus is the divine Son of God, that His gospel is the rule for human conduct, and that His kingdom (the church) is the one institution in the world that will continue into eternity. After setting aside the hundred millions of people who are irreligious, the remainder are distributed among the echelons of Moslems, Hindus, Buddhists, Taoists, and myriad animists. Why has not Christianity, with its "power of God unto salvation," (Rom. 1:16), been able in two thousand years to convert the vast majority of mankind so that the other religions are just odd, rare anomalies in the world? Some would answer that it is because the claim that the gospel is "the power of God unto salvation" is nothing more than sanctimonious propaganda. If this is the answer, then Jesus is a liar. But the miracles He performed before countless witnesses testify that He is true and not a liar, (Jno. 5:36). The true answer, therefore, is the one He points at in the initial text above: those who profess discipleship to Him have divided and subdivided ad absurdum. When people in general look at what goes by the name "Christianity," what they see is a complicated swirl of contradictory doctrines, institutions, and styles of religious expression that compete with insane jealousy. It is little wonder that the world has not been converted to Christ!
