· Howard Young · blog · 3 min read
What Jesus Wanted Most: The Deepest Desires of Christ in John 17
John 17 gives us a rare window into the deepest desires of Christ — what Jesus prayed for His people the night before He died, and why it still matters.
The night before Jesus died, He didn’t pray for Himself first. He prayed for us.
John 17 is one of the most intimate passages in all of Scripture — a window into the deepest desires of Christ as He stood at the edge of the cross. It is the prayer Jesus offers in Gethsemane, recorded only in John’s Gospel, and church tradition holds that the author was an eyewitness present in those final hours.
Martin Luther called it a “warm and hearty prayer” — one where Jesus, in Luther’s words, “opens the depths of His heart.” Luther returned to John 17 again and again throughout the 1520s and 1530s, drawn by a single remarkable fact: that Christ, on the night before His suffering and death, focused not on Himself but entirely on His people.
Sanctified by Truth, Not by Striving
Of all the verses in John 17, Luther returned most often to verse 17: “Sanctify them in the truth; your word is truth.”
For Luther, this single sentence was a sword against centuries of religious confusion. The church of his day had built an elaborate system — pilgrimages, indulgences, rituals — all on the assumption that holiness was something a person climbed toward through effort and merit.
But John 17:17 says something entirely different. Sanctify them. The subject is God. The object is us. Holiness is not a ladder we ascend — it is something God does to us, in us, through His Word. Luther called the Word the tool of grace — the instrument by which God reaches into a human heart and does what no amount of human striving ever could.
Desires Rooted in Love
The deepest desire of Christ in John 17 wasn’t simply that His followers would be moral. It was that they would be His — set apart, held in the truth, made holy not by what they did but by what He had done for them.
That kind of love is patient. It outlasts our expectations and our timelines. And unlike the ordinary desires we carry through life — the ones that may or may not be fulfilled — Christ’s desires for His people are not left to chance. They are held in the hands of the Father Himself.
At Triumphant Cross Lutheran Church, we believe that same prayer is still being answered. Every time the Word is proclaimed, every time a child is baptized, every time the Gospel goes out — the deepest desires of Christ are being fulfilled, one heart at a time.
