Jesus’ Prayer for Glorification – and Our Prayer for It

God the Father blessed the Son as the Mediator of the elect with a predestined glory that included his promised reward for faithful accomplishment of his work. The glory promised to him included being the Head of the church, Savior of the world, and visible image of God crowned with glory and honor.

God gave this glory to Christ, then, at the very moment that God predestined him to it, even though it was obscured to men in his state of humiliation. Because the Son was a preexistent person, this was not only possible but also suitable to God’s grand design and purposes. The Son knew before the foundation of the world the glory that would be his as Mediator. He voluntarily entered into this world of sin and misery, knowing that he alone would redeem the world from its present state of bondage and decay. Rightly, then, he asked for his glory as the One who would fulfill the preordained purposes of God.

We can and must pray for those things that have been given to us from before the creation of the world. God has blessed us in eternity with all spiritual blessings in Christ, including a conformity to his image (Rom.8:29). We can pray, ‘Father, glorify us, by making us like your Son in this life by faith and in the life to come by sight.’ We possessed this glory when we were chosen in Christ (Eph.1:4-5), but the fulfillment of this glory, which is ours, since we are raised with him already (Col.3:1), is still to come. Until then, we must pray for this reality to take place.

Taken from chapter 11 (“Jesus Prayed for the Glory He Had Before the World Existed”) of Mark Jones’ new book, The Prayers of Jesus – with the subtitle Listening to and Learning from Our Savior (Crossway, 2019), pp.99-105.

The significance of this prayer of Jesus recorded in John 17:4-5 is that God answered this petition of our Lord when he exalted His Son, in His resurrection but also in His ascension, the reality and blessedness of which we just marked as the church of Christ (this past Thursday, May 30).

That prayer of our Lord in the upper room hours before his death was this: “I have glorified thee on the earth: I have finished the work which thou gavest me to do. And now, O Father, glorify thou me with thine own self with the glory which I had with thee before the world was.”