The Prayer Before the Book

Hours before the cross, Jesus prayed. He prayed for Himself. Then He prayed for the eleven men in the room with Him. And then He widened the prayer to take in everyone who would ever believe through their word — which means He prayed, that night, for the reader of this page. Before you were born, He had you in view. And the burden of that final petition, asked four times in three verses, is one word.

"I am not praying only on their behalf, but also on behalf of those who believe in Me through their testimony, that they will all be one, just as You, Father, are in Me and I am in You. I pray that they will be in Us, so that the world will believe that You sent Me. The glory You gave to Me I have given to them, that they may be one just as We are one — I in them and You in Me — that they may be completely one, so that the world will know that You sent Me, and You have loved them just as You have loved Me." — John 17:20–23 (NET)

One. That is what He asked for on the night He was handed over. And He attached the reason twice, so it could not be missed: so that the world will believe. So that the world will know. The oneness of those who know Him is the way the world is meant to see that the Father sent the Son. He did not leave His church a strategy for being believed. He left it a prayer, and the prayer asks us to be one.

In the same prayer, a few sentences earlier, He said what eternal life is:

"Now this is eternal life — that they know You, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom You sent." — John 17:3 (NET)

The knowing and the oneness live in the same prayer, prayed in the same hour, by the same Lord. They are not two subjects. Where the knowing is real, the oneness grows out of it the way fruit grows out of a branch. Where the church is at war with itself, something has gone missing that no correct doctrine can supply.

This book is written inside that prayer. It examines twenty traditions and the pride that fuses them to Scripture, and the examination is careful and it does not flinch. But receive the prayer first, before you read a word of the examination, because everything in this book is grief measured against it — the grief of watching the family He prayed for tear at itself over genealogies and timelines and translations, in public, while the world watches and concludes there is nothing here worth having.

The examination is not the point. The prayer is. If this book leaves you better armed and no more loving, it has failed, and so have you and I together. If it leaves you holding your tradition with open hands and your brother with both arms, it has done the only thing it was written to do.