John 17:25-26

O righteous Father, the world hath not known Thee

The “amen” to the sublimest of all prayers

I. GOD AND THE WORLD.

1. God.

(1) His relationship--“Father.” No relationship is more intelligible, attractive, morally assimilating. It means causation, affection, resemblance. Christ’s God was not a cold King upon the throne, but a loving Father whose heart yearns for His prodigal children.

(2) His character--“righteous.”

(a) His existence is the foundation of all right.

(b) His will is the standard of all right.

(c) His works and Word the revelation of all right.

(3) His character is not opposed to His relationship. Righteousness is love resisting all that will injure the moral universe: love uprooting weeds out of the paradise of virtue.

2. The world--unregenerate humanity. This ignorance is

(1) Most universal.

(a) The barbarian world hath not known Thee. It is sunk in idolatry, superstition, and sensuality.

(b) The civilized world. When this was said, Egypt, Greece and Rome had done their best; but even in Athens God was “unknown.”

(c) The conventionally Christian world. Its science denies; its literature, politics and commerce ignore; its creeds and Churches misrepresent God.

(2) Most inexcusable. Men may have just excuses for not being scholars, &c., but no excuse for this. Nature is made to reveal God and the soul. The blindness of the man who shuts his eyes to the sun is not more inexcusable than this.

(3) Most ruinous. The man ignorant of God is in moral midnight--the blackness of darkness.

II. CHRIST AND HIS SCHOOL,

1. Christ, “I have known Thee.” From any lips but His how presumptuous would this sound! Who among the world’s geniuses or sages could say it?

(1) No one had the opportunity of knowing God that Christ had. He was in the “bosom of the Father.” He knew the motive that prompted the creative act, and the plan on which the whole was organized.

(2) None the capacity. What is the greatest intellect to His.

(3) None the heart--the true organ of knowledge. Christ and His Father are one in heart, spirit and purpose.

2. Christ’s School “they have known”

(1) By the mighty works which Christ wrought.

(2) By the sublime doctrines He propounded.

(3) By the matchless purity of His character.

III. THE PREACHER AND HIS MISSION (John 17:26). What Christ did is the genuine work of every true preacher. What was it?

1. A persistent declaration of the Divine character. To declare self, or theories and speculations about God is what some do: but to declare His “Name,” His moral character, the essence of which is love, is Christ’s work.

2. A persistent declaration of the Divine character in order to transfuse Divine love into human souls. (D. Thomas, D. D.)

God’s Fatherhood

Our Lord first addresses God as “Father,” then as “Holy Father,” and lastly as “Righteous Father.” Note that holiness and righteousness flow from the Fatherhood of God. Note also that the manifestation of the Divine fatherhood is consummated in the manifestation of the Divine righteousness. (W. H. Van Doren, D. D.)

The righteous Father known and loved

The text speaks of

I. A KNOWLEDGE OF INFINITE VALUE AND ITS TEACHER.

1. What is that knowledge?

(1) “Thy name.” God has made man, and naturally man ought to know his Maker: the subject should know the name of his king; but men say, “we desire not the knowledge of thy ways.” Yet it is evident that a man can never be in a proper state till he knows his God. He cannot be happy, holy, or safe. Christ therefore, in coming to save us, makes it a part of His office to reveal the Father to us.

(2) A testing name is given to God, “O righteous Father.” If you know Him aright you know what is comprehended under those two words, so remarkable in combination. How can the Judge and the Father be found in one? There is but one answer, and that is found in the sacrifice of Jesus, which has joined the two in one.

(3) This knowledge is

(a) Peculiar--“The world hath not known Thee.” The heathen world knew nothing of a righteous Father. Their gods were generally monsters of iniquity. The Christian world does not know God as a “righteous Father.” Sceptics labelled as “thinkers” reject the evangelical idea of God, and the atonement which that idea involves. It knows an effeminate, indiscriminate fatherhood, but not “the righteous Father.” It will not bow before the majesty of His justice.

(2) Distinctive, for it reveals the condition of the mind which receives it. When we see in a man an unconditional submission to the justice of God, and yet a trustful hopefulness in His boundless love, we may be sure that he is a renewed man.

(3) Consolatory. For a man to know that God is his Father is delightful beyond measure, to feel that God forgives him as the father forgave the prodigal; but when we further learn that all this is done without the violation of justice, then are we full of wondering love.

(4) Causes its possessor to enjoy much fellowship with Jesus. “I have known Thee.” This grand character of God as “righteous Father” was so dear to our Lord, that He died to maintain it. Herein we have fellowship with Christ, for we know the “righteous Father” too in Christ, and love and bless Him, and wonder at Him every day more and more.

2. This knowledge comes to us by a Teacher. Christ declared the “righteous Father”

(1) In His life, for in His life He incarnated truth and grace.

(2) In His death, however, most gloriously illustrated this beyond everything else.

(3) By the work of His Holy Spirit.

II. THE OBJECT OF THE KNOWLEDGE IS THE INFUSION OF A LOVE UNRIVALLED IN VALUE.

1. This discovery of love is inward, “may be in them,” i.e., that they may know it, be persuaded of it, believe it and enjoy it; that they, through knowing the righteous name, may come to perceive the love of God towards them. When the Divine Father gives up His best Beloved for guilty man we may well say, “Behold how He loved Him!”

2. This love was of a most extraordinary kind. He loves you as He loves His best Beloved. It must be altogether boundless and unspeakable. Now, if you fully know the righteous fatherhood of God, as Christ would have you know it, you will learn that God loved you as He loved His Son. If He had not loved you as He loved the Son, He would have spared His Son.

3. It was a love of complacency and delight. Remember those words at Christ’s baptism and at two other occasions. Always draw a distinction between the love of benevolence with which God loves all His creatures and the love of complacency, which is reserved for His own. The Eternal Father views us in Christ, and in Him He takes delight in us as a father does in his children.

4. God the Father loves His Son infinitely. How could He do less? Without beginning has He loved Him, and without an end will He love Him, and also without change, without limit, and without degree: in the same way doth He love His people, whose hope is fixed in Him as the “righteous Father.”

5. This love wherever it reigns in the heart creates a return love to God.

6. This love comes through an indweller, “and I in them.”

(1) Through His Spirit.

(2) By faith.

(3) In a real, vital sense.

(4) Producing likeness to Christ. (C. H. Spurgeon.)