If you’ve ever seen the movie The Help, you would remember Aibileen. Aibileen is a black maid/nanny for a white family. Her daily job is to care for a little white girl. The girl’s mother doesn’t know how to care for her. She clearly has little interest in doing so personally. She’s also disappointed in the little girl’s looks. She’s constantly saying discouraging and hurtful things to the little girl.
As someone who sees everything that happens behind closed doors, Aibileen does what she can to love and encourage the little girl. Every day, Aibileen repeats to the little girl what she knows is true and what she hopes the little girl will come to believe about herself: “You is kind. You is smart. You is important.”
What Aibileen and Jesus Have in Common
These words of Aibileen remind me of Jesus’ prayer for his disciples in John chapter 17. He is asking God for what he hopes and what he knows they can become. This prayer is prayed out loud, right after Jesus finishes teaching his disciples in chapter 16 so they can be encouraged by it. While only God can answer prayer, the disciples can be strengthened by what Jesus hopes for them and what he believes they can be with God’s help.
Jesus doesn’t just pray for the disciples who are sitting right in front of him either. He extends his prayer in verse 20 to include all those who will come to believe because of the work of the disciples. That includes us today.
Jesus prays for three main things for his disciples and for us.
Protection
Even though Jesus has said in the previous verse that all who follow him will experience trouble, he still asks God for his followers to be protected. It’s not that Jesus is asking that nothing bad will happen to the disciples. He’s asking that nothing will happen that will cause them to be lost, to turn away from God.
Jesus knows that the world and the prince of this world (Satan, the great enemy of God) will do everything possible to try to get people to stop following Jesus. Until we die or Jesus comes back, we are in enemy territory in the world. There are many things that can draw us away from God. Jesus asks that God would protect them from the forces that would try to drive them from God.
Our Part
Jesus prays and hopes today that you will be protected from those forces that would try to separate you from God. You can do your part to make sure that doesn’t happen. Continue connecting with God in whatever way you can. Dig into the Bible. Listen to God in silent prayer. Pray for your mental health and that of your family. Take prayerful walks in nature. Express gratitude to God for the good you see, and maybe only hope for. Whatever strengthens your relationship with God, do that as much as you can. Don’t seek to isolate yourself from the world or keep yourself in a Christian bubble. You are still in the world, you can’t escape from that. But do try to make sure you keep your connection to God strong and your eyes on where your loyalty truly lies.
Sanctification
That’s a big, churchy word that we don’t often use. The word sanctification means “to be made holy”. You can also think of it as a purification process. Jesus prays that God would make his disciples more like Jesus. His wish is that they would be purified over time, becoming the people God intended them to be at the beginning of creation before sin came into the world. This is a lifelong process. Slowly but surely, God uses the circumstances in our life, the Holy Spirit, and Scripture to remove sin and impurity from our lives and make us more like Jesus.
God is the one who ultimately makes us holy. There’s nothing we can do on our own that will make us more like Jesus. However, there are practices and circumstances that God uses to help us in this process. We can willingly enter this process with God and be a part of the work he is doing in our lives.
Our Part
A big part of this is just being self-aware, of recognizing areas in our lives that need God’s healing and cleansing power. If we ask, God will show us areas we need to work on and will provide us with the tools we need to work on them. We also need to be humbly open to God’s work and have patience with God’s process.
God may use things we don’t expect (or don’t want) to make us who we should be. There are some practices of the church that can make us more aware of God’s work in our life. Things like prayer, reading the Bible, meditating on God and Scripture, self-examination, and serving can all help us along the road of sanctification.
Unity
Several times in this prayer, Jesus asks that God would make his disciples one, like the unity Jesus shares with the Father. Jesus wants us to be united in mutual love. He doesn’t want things like differing opinions, backgrounds, socioeconomic status, education level, life journeys, ethnicity, age, or gender to separate us. Jesus says that this unity will be a witness to the world and will bring glory to God. People will be so amazed at how different people can come together that it will draw them to Jesus.
We should recognize that this prayer is ultimately only answerable by God. There’s no diversity campaign or program that can bring about unity like Jesus is talking about. It’s only through the work of the Spirit that such differences can be overcome.
Our Part
However, we have a part to play. In order to experience this unity, we have to make sure we’re putting ourselves in places where we can meet people who are different from us. If all of the people we interact with are basically the same as us, we’re never going to experience the kind of unity Jesus is talking about. We have to be willing to enter into the lives of people who look, believe, speak, and live very differently from us.
That doesn’t mean that we have to be friends with people just because we’re trying to expand our horizons. No one wants to be a token friend. It does mean that we should start by putting ourselves in places where we can listen and understand how other people think. That might mean reading books, watching movies, listening to music or looking at art that is made by people from a different culture or background. It means listening to podcasts or shows made by people who disagree with us.
As Jesus speaks these words over us and offers this prayer to God, may we be encouraged and inspired to watch for how these prayers are answered.
Photo by Mads Schmidt Rasmussen on Unsplash