Easter 6 Service

St. John 16:23-30

[Jesus said,] In that day you will ask nothing of me. Truly, truly, I say to you, whatever you ask of the Father in my name, he will give it to
you. Until now you have asked nothing in my name. Ask, and you will receive, that your joy may be full.

“I have said these things to you in figures of speech. The hour is coming when I will no longer speak to you in figures of speech but will tell you plainly about the Father. In that day you will ask in my name, and I do not say to you that I will ask the Father on your behalf; for the Father himself loves you, because you have loved me and have believed that I came from God. I came from the Father and have come into the world, and now I am leaving the world and going to the Father.” His disciples said, “Ah, now you are speaking plainly and not using figurative speech! Now we know that you know all things and do not need anyone to question you; this is why we believe that you came from God.”

We’re still in the Sixteenth chapter of St. John’s Gospel (third straight week on this conversation between Jesus and His disciples).

First, we looked at the part in which He talked about the “little while” that they would weep, and lament, and sorrow in His absence (all other believers too, until He returns in glory). He was telling them that, like a mother’s rejoicing at the birth of her child following the pain, believers will rejoice endlessly when that day has come. Then, last week, we looked at His promise of sending the Spirit of truth, the one Who clarifies for them these three things: (1) sin’s significance, (2) where sinners truly find their righteousness (in Christ), and (3) the “innocent” verdict believers in Christ receive in the judgment.

In today’s section of that chapter, Jesus talks about one of the specific things His followers will be doing in this world while they await His return; He talks about prayer. They will pray for their comfort. They will pray as an expression of faith. They will pray in His Name.

For Their Comfort

You might notice the word Rogate on the cover of the bulletin. It means, pray! We might not think of it this way so much, but one of the fathers of the synod ours comes from—the Norwegian synod—talked in a sermon about us being commanded in the Second Commandment to pray. We usually think we break that commandment—You shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain—by doing something we’re not supposed to do; using God’s name in a way that dishonors Him. From U.V. Koren’s perspective, though, we break it also by not doing a certain thing we’re supposed to be doing with God’s name, that is: praying.

Jesus certainly is presenting prayer in this text as something believers do. It’s a given to Him that they’ll have things to say to the heavenly Father in prayer.

In Jesus’ conversation with His disciples in our text, He makes clear to them that, He won’t be in their presence anymore in the same way. They won’t be able to come to Him with their needs and concerns like they did in the boat when the waves were tossing them about and they thought they were going to perish, or like in the wilderness, when a hungry crowd was looking to them to provide food. Instead, they will go to the Father in prayer. They will flee for refuge to His infinite mercy, seeking and imploring His grace, as we say in one version of the Confession of Sins. They will be doing it by praying. Though not with Jesus like they’ve known, they will still have audience with God in this way. They can take comfort in having been invited by Him to address to Him their concerns.

That same U.V. Koren we mentioned earlier—in that same sermon, talks about believers having a longing to pray to God. “You never ask people for things you don’t want to have”—he says. We pray because we have needs.

You certainly recognize all sorts of needs that you have. If you’re a parent, you need wisdom in dealing with your children. You need understanding. You need patience. You need forgiveness for the times you think, and say, and do the wrong things. You need peace of mind because so many things worry you about their lives. You want them to be protected from all kinds of harm and danger. You want them to prosper mentally, physically, emotionally. You want them to be people of faith, who fear the true God. And you feel in so many moments in this, helpless, clumsy, incompetent. Jesus tells His disciples in our text (and He tells you) that the Father waits to hear your concerns—this One for Whom nothing is too large, nothing impossible.

As An Expression of Faith

“You never ask people for things you don’t want to have.”—Koren follows it with this: “You don’t ask people from whom you don’t expect anything.” Prayer is an expression of our faith. We pray because we believe, not only that we have needs that even with our best efforts still go unmet, but also that in God our needs are met. There wouldn’t be any point in praying otherwise. We pray because we believe Jesus when He says the Father hears our prayers. We believe Him when He says that we will receive from Him to our joy.

And yet, often our praying amounts more to something we are getting around to doing rather than something we have very faithfully done. We have been “pray-ers” in theory, but not so very often in practice. And it’s important for us to consider what that says about us as believers. Is God the One Who helps us in our need; or must our help come from elsewhere (maybe from ourselves)? The world says you must believe in yourself, you must dig down deep and come up with whatever it is that can solve your problems. God isn’t in the equation for the world.

It isn’t the same for us, is it? That’s not what we believe. That’s certainly not what Jesus is saying in our text. We ask of the Father in our need. If prayer is an expression of faith, then it has to be said—doesn’t it?—that to not pray is to act like an unbeliever. It’s to have had the One Who can truly help inviting us to come to Him for that help, and to have said, “I don’t need it; I don’t want it.”

In His Name

You might have noticed that in our text, Jesus says, in My name a number of times. People wonder sometimes, Why do we do that; why do we say, “In Jesus’ name” at the end of our prayers? It comes from this text.

The answer has to do with what Jesus is preparing in our text to do for His disciples (and for us). In a sense, He has already been doing it: He has been living perfectly in their place in this world—sinless. His work will be complete a short time after our text, when He is betrayed into the hands of sinners, unjustly convicted and sentenced to death, crucified, and entombed. Then, He will have positioned Himself (according to eternal plan) to represent us before the Father. He has made us able to invoke His name before the Father, Who then sees us as never having sinned—Him having been made guilty and punished for all of ours.

We don’t belong before the Father otherwise. Other than in Jesus’ name we have no business there. I wouldn’t want to find out what happens were I to stand before the perfect God in my own name. That name is corrupted. It is soiled. It is wholly unfit to stand before Him. There would be no mercy applied to my name, only just punishment for sins.

But I go before Him in Jesus’ Name. We talked about sins we have as parents (children have a whole list of their own). We talked about the sin that we have of neglecting prayer—ignoring so much of the time God’s invitation to address Him as the One who hears and Who helps. Jesus had no such sins, see. He was a perfect child of His parents, and of His heavenly Father—continually going before Him in prayer in every sort of circumstance. We not only see glimpses of it in Scripture, but knowing Him, we know that how ever many times He did it, it was the perfect amount. He did for us what we couldn’t do for ourselves.

So, when we look back upon the pitifulness of our prayer lives, and upon all of the other ways in which we have fallen short before God, and have earned His wrath and punishment, we don’t despair because our names are attached through Baptism, through faith to a Name that stands before God righteous and having salvation. It’s the Name that has made us righteous through an exchange; He took our sins upon Himself so that we could have His righteousness. We ask the Father in His name, and we receive. We receive to the extent that our joy is full. We anticipate the inheritance of God’s kingdom. The Father loves us for Christ’s sake. He loves you. He forgives you your sins. He forgives you in Jesus’ Name. God be praised. Amen.

Other Lessons from this week:

Jeremiah 29:11-14

For I know the plans I have for you, declares the Lord, plans for welfare and not for evil, to give you a future and a hope. Then you will call upon me and come and pray to me, and I will hear you. You will seek me and find me, when you seek me with all your heart. I will be found by you, declares the Lord, and I will restore your fortunes and gather you from all the nations and all the places where I have driven you, declares the Lord, and I will bring you back to the place from which I sent you into exile.

James 1:22-27

Be doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving yourselves. For if anyone is a hearer of the word and not a doer, he is like a man who looks intently at his natural face in a mirror. For he looks at himself and goes away and at once forgets what he was like. But the one who looks into the perfect law, the law of liberty, and perseveres, being no hearer who forgets but a doer who acts, he will be blessed in his doing.
If anyone thinks he is religious and does not bridle his tongue but deceives his heart, this person's religion is worthless. Religion that is pure and undefiled before God the Father is this: to visit orphans and widows in their affliction, and to keep oneself unstained from the world.