A Warm and Hearty Prayer: Christ's Deepest Desires in John 17

In the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.

Today is a special day in my home — and in the homes of millions of Norwegians around the world.

May 17th. Norwegian Independence Day.

The day in 1905 when Norway was granted her independence from Sweden.

For those of us with Norwegian blood, this is a day we remember with the same pride and weight that we Americans remember the Fourth of July.

And it was a day my mother wanted to be remembered in our family in a very particular way.

You see, after my mother’s 2nd great-grandchild was born, she confessed something to me. She told me that for years — years — she had carried a deep, quiet desire: that someone in our family would be born on May 17th.

It began, as all quests do, with hope. My brother arrived on May 5th. Close. My sister on May 22nd — closer. Another sister — well, she came in November, which in my mother’s mind was practically a different continent. Then there was me. I arrived breech on the 21st. After that, she said: no more.

She must have passed the mission on to my siblings, because the campaign continued into the next generation — her first granddaughter born on the 23rd. Still close. Still not quite.

It seemed the longing would never quite find its fulfillment. But desires like that — the deep, love-rooted kind — have a way of outlasting our expectations. And I’ll come back to that at the end of this morning’s sermon.

What strikes me, even before we get there, is not whether she succeeded — it’s that she wanted it so deeply in the first place. That a date, a day, a moment of history could become the object of such tender, persistent desire.

We know something about desire like that this morning. Because in John 17, we are given something extraordinary — a window into the deepest desires of Jesus Christ Himself.

It is truly an unique gem only found in John and not the other Gospels.

Church tradition suggests that the author of John was an eyewitness who remained close to Jesus and recorded this before exhaustion set in that night in Gethsemane.

This is the prayer Jesus prays the night before He dies. Not a composed, formal prayer for public consumption.

Martin Luther held John 17 in exceptionally high regard.

He preached and wrote on it extensively through the 1520s and 1530s, returning to it again and again as the ultimate expression of Christ’s heart and mission.

He called it a “warm and hearty prayer” — one where Jesus, in Luther’s words, “opens the depths of His heart.”

Luther was moved by the fact that Christ, standing at the very edge of His own suffering and death, focused entirely — not on Himself — but on His people. On us.

As Luther wrote:

It is truly a fervent and sincere prayer in which he opens and pours out His soul to us and His heavenly Father… it is nevertheless impossible to fathom its profound significance, its wealth and its compass.

My mother wanted a family member born on May 17th. It was a desire rooted in love — in a longing to see something precious woven into the history of the people she loved most.

Christ’s desires in John 17 run deeper still. And this morning, we are going to look into them together.

Sanctification Through the Word

Of all the verses in John 17, Luther returned most often to verse 17: “Sanctify them in the truth; your word is truth.”

This single sentence was, for Luther, a sword against centuries of confusion about how a person becomes holy.

The church of his day had constructed an elaborate system — pilgrimages, indulgences, rituals, penances — all built on the assumption that holiness was something a person climbed toward through their own effort and merit.

Luther said: no.

Read the verse again. 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. It is a gift before it is ever an achievement.

He 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.

You cannot sanctify yourself any more than you can lift yourself off the ground by pulling on your own collar. But God can. And He has chosen to do it through one means: the truth of His Word.

This is why Luther was so fierce about keeping that Word pure. When Jesus prays in verse 11 — “Keep them in your name” — Luther heard in that phrase a prayer for the preservation of the Gospel itself.

To be kept in His name meant to have the Gospel held uncorrupted in the heart.

A pure heart, in Luther’s understanding, was not a sinless heart — it was a heart that had not traded the truth of grace for the counterfeit of self-righteousness.

The deepest desire of Christ in this prayer was not 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 and continued to do through His living Word.

And so we return to where we began. My mother’s deepest desire — that someone in our family would enter the world on May 17th, on Norwegian Independence Day — seemed, for a long time, like a wish that would simply go unfulfilled.

Generation after generation, close but never quite.

But desires rooted in love are remarkably patient.

My mother’s wish finally came true — in the form of my grand nephew, Sean, who was born on this very day.

She lived to see every desire of her heart satisfied.

Some of us never do. But the deepest ones — the ones born out of love for the people we hold most dear — those have a way of finding their moment.

That is exactly what John 17 shows us about Jesus. The night before He died, He poured out the desires of His heart — for His disciples, for those who would come after them, for you and for me.

And unlike my mother’s wish, which took years and generations, Christ’s desires are not left to chance or timing. They are held in the hands of the Father Himself. They will be fulfilled.

Oh — and by the way. Happy birthday, Sean. Amen.

Theological Citations:

1. John 17:1-11: The primary sermon text — Jesus’s high-priestly prayer the night before His death, the foundation of the entire message.

2. John 17:17: “Sanctify them in the truth; your word is truth.” — The sermon’s theological pivot, establishing that sanctification is God’s act through the Word, not human achievement.

3. John 17:11: “Keep them in your name.” — Luther heard in this verse a prayer for the preservation of the Gospel itself; a pure heart is one that has not exchanged grace for self-righteousness.

4. Romans 3:21-24: “But now apart from the law the righteousness of God has been made known… righteousness is given through faith in Jesus Christ to all who believe.” — Paul’s parallel declaration that justification comes from outside us, not from within.

5. Ephesians 2:8-9: “For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith — and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God — not by works, so that no one can boast.” — The Sola Gratia foundation underlying the sermon’s rejection of earned holiness.

6. Psalm 119:105: “Your word is a lamp for my feet, a light on my path.” — Old Testament resonance with John 17:17; the Word as the instrument by which God guides and sanctifies.

7. The Augsburg Confession, Article IV — On Justification: “Our churches also teach that men cannot be justified before God by their own strength, merits, or works but are freely justified for Christ’s sake through faith.” — The confessional backbone of the sermon’s argument against works-righteousness.

8. Luther’s Works, Volume 69 — Sermons on the Gospel of John, Chapters 17–20: Luther’s extensive commentary on John 17, the source of his description of it as a “warm and hearty prayer” in which Christ “opens and pours out His soul.”