Dear friend,
I want to tell you about a prayer that most Christians have never read carefully.
Not the Lord's Prayer. You know that one. You learned it as a child. You have said it so many times the words have gone smooth from use.
I am talking about a different prayer. A longer one. A more personal one. The one Jesus prayed the night before He was crucified when He knew exactly what was coming and chose to spend His final free hours talking to His Father.
You will find it in John chapter 17. The whole chapter. Twenty six verses.
I have been with the Church for fifty years. I have read this prayer hundreds of times. And I want to walk you through it tonight because I believe there is something in it that most people who have read it have missed.
Something that was about you specifically.
Before I show you what I mean let me place something in your hands.
I wrote a guide called They Tried To Stop Him: What The Bible Says About Donald Trump. I want to tell you why it connects to what I am about to show you. Because the prayer Jesus prayed that night was about people who would be hated by the world for what they believed. People who would be opposed from every direction. People who needed to be protected by something stronger than themselves. That description has not expired. You can find the guide by clicking on the image below:
Alternatively, you may find it here: https://fatherthomasletters.com/products/they-tried-to-stop-him-what-the-bible-says-about-donald-trump
Now let me show you what Jesus prayed.
The first thing He prayed for was Himself.
John chapter 17 verse 1. Father the hour has come. Glorify your Son that your Son may glorify you.
I want you to notice something about this. The night before the most painful thing that has ever happened to any human being Jesus did not pray for it to be cancelled. He did not ask His Father to find another way. He prayed to be glorified through it.
Not removed from it. Glorified through it.
That is a remarkable thing to pray. It means He understood that what was coming was not the end of something. It was the mechanism through which something greater would be accomplished. The cross was not the defeat. The cross was the instrument.
I think about that prayer often when I look at the people who have been opposed and attacked and seemingly defeated in the course of doing something they believe God called them to do. The prayer of Jesus on that night was not God spare me from this. It was God use this.
There is a kind of faith that only becomes visible under that kind of pressure. And that is exactly what the next part of the prayer is about.
The second thing He prayed for was His disciples.
John chapter 17 verse 11. Holy Father protect them by the power of your name so that they may be one as we are one.
Protect them.
Jesus knew what was coming for the men He was leaving behind. He knew the arrests and the trials and the beatings and the executions that most of them would face. He knew the world would not welcome what they carried. He knew they were walking into something that would require more than they currently had.
And so He prayed for their protection.
Not their comfort. Not their ease. Not that the hard things would not happen. Their protection. The specific assurance that the power of God's name would be around them even when everything else was against them.
And then He prayed something that stops me every time I read it.
Verse 14. I have given them your word and the world has hated them. For they are not of the world any more than I am of the world.
The world has hated them.
Jesus did not pray that the world would stop hating them. He acknowledged that it would happen. He prayed for their protection inside the hatred. He was not promising them a comfortable life. He was promising them a protected one. There is a difference.
The third thing He prayed for was you.
John chapter 17 verse 20.
My prayer is not for them alone. I pray also for those who will believe in me through their message.
Those who will believe through their message.
That is you. The people reading this letter tonight. The ones who came to faith not because they walked with Jesus in Galilee but because someone told them the story and they believed it. Two thousand years removed from that upper room. Reading a letter from an old man on a Friday night.
Jesus prayed for you specifically on the night before He died.
Not generally. Specifically. He looked ahead across two thousand years and prayed for the people who would believe through the message of His disciples. He included you in the prayer He prayed when He knew He had hours left before the cross.
Let that land for a moment.
What He asked for on your behalf.
John chapter 17 verse 21. That all of them may be one Father just as you are in me and I am in you. May they also be in us so that the world may believe that you have sent me.
Unity. Not uniformity. Unity. The specific kind of being-together that reflects the relationship between the Father and the Son. The kind that makes the world stop and ask what is holding these people together.
And then verse 24.
Father I want those you have given me to be with me where I am and to see my glory.
I want them to be with me where I am.
Not I hope they make it. Not I would like it if they could. I want. The specific desire of Jesus on the night before His death was that you would be where He is. That you would see what He sees. That the distance between where you are right now and where He is would one day be closed completely and permanently.
He prayed that for you. On that night. Knowing what the next eighteen hours would cost Him.
I have been sitting with this prayer all week.
Not because of anything dramatic. Because of the specific quality of it. The intimacy of it. The way Jesus moved from Himself to His disciples to the people who would come after them without stopping. As if the circle of His concern on that final night just kept expanding until it had included everyone who would ever believe.
Including the people reading this letter on a Friday night two thousand years later.
Including you.
I find that extraordinary. I have found it extraordinary every time I have read it for fifty years. The night before the cross Jesus was thinking about you.
I want to tell you why this matters for right now.
Because the prayer Jesus prayed that night was specifically for people who would be hated by the world. Who would not belong to it in the way the world demands. Who would carry something that the world would consistently oppose and try to silence and try to make them ashamed of.
Verse 14. The world has hated them for they are not of the world.
That prayer is for the people reading this letter. The ones who feel like strangers in a country that used to feel like home. The ones whose faith has made them targets. The ones who believe things that the world has decided are dangerous and embarrassing and worthy of mockery.
Jesus saw you coming two thousand years before you arrived. And He prayed for your protection on the night before everything it cost Him became real.
That protection is not a feeling. It is a promise made by someone who paid an extraordinary price to keep it.
I want to leave you with one more verse before I close.
John chapter 17 verse 15.
My prayer is not that you take them out of the world but that you protect them from the evil one.
Not out of the world. In it. Protected inside it.
Jesus did not pray that the hard things would not happen to you. He prayed that the evil one would not have the final word over you inside the hard things. That the attacks and the opposition and the hatred and the mockery would not be able to reach the thing in you that He died to protect.
That prayer is still active. Jesus does not pray prayers that expire.
You are being prayed for tonight by the same person who prayed for you two thousand years ago on the night before the cross. The same protection He asked for then is the same protection that is over you now.
Hold onto that this weekend friend. Let it be louder than the noise.
I want to leave something else with you before the weekend begins.
The people Jesus prayed for on that night were people who would be hated and opposed and tried to be silenced. And the man at the centre of what is happening in America right now has experienced exactly that. Courts. Bullets. Betrayals. The world arrayed against him in the specific way that Jesus described the world arraying itself against the people God had chosen for something.
I wrote about that pattern in They Tried To Stop Him: What The Bible Says About Donald Trump. The same prayer Jesus prayed that night — protect them from the evil one, keep them in your name — is the prayer I believe is relevant to what you are watching right now. Read it this weekend if you have not: https://fatherthomasletters.com/products/they-tried-to-stop-him-what-the-bible-says-about-donald-trump
I think it will connect what Jesus prayed in John 17 to what you have been watching on the news in a way that changes how you see both.
God bless you, friend. You were prayed for on the night before the cross.
Let that be enough for tonight.
With you in prayer always,
Father Thomas
This weekend I want you to do two things:
One. Read John chapter 17 in full this weekend. All twenty six verses. Read it slowly. When you get to verse 20 stop. Read it twice. Let Jesus's specific inclusion of you in that prayer on that night land the way it was designed to land.
Two. Read They Tried To Stop Him this weekend: https://fatherthomasletters.com/products/they-tried-to-stop-him-what-the-bible-says-about-donald-trump
The prayer Jesus prayed for people who would be hated by the world is the context for everything that guide describes. Read them together and see if the picture becomes clearer than it has ever been.
P.S. If you want to go deeper on anything I have written, everything is available at fatherthomasletters.com/products — including The Signs Are Here, which maps today's headlines directly against the specific passages that described them, and the Father Thomas Prayer Card Collection, which many of you have told me you return to every morning. Take a look when you have a moment.