Righteous Father, although the world has not known You, I know You, and they know that You sent Me.Righteous Father, the world hasn’t known you, but I knew you; and these knew that you sent me.O righteous Father, the world hath not known thee: but I have known thee, and these have known that thou hast sent me.O righteous Father, the world knew thee not, but I knew thee; and these knew that thou didst send me;
3 sermons cite this verse
what he has done in their life now reproduced in the lives of others and what i want you to notice is in those verses we read over and over again, you see, well, you see a couple different phrases repeated, but there's one word I want us to focus on, and it's the word world. When you look at this chapter as a whole, nearly 20 times Jesus mentions the world, almost 20 times. And even in the last part here, he mentions it over and over and over again. Look in verse 13, and you might circle or put a box or a triangle or something around these words because we've been circling a lot of different words, so you might want to do it in a way that differentiates it from the others. But I want you to circle or make some kind of note every time you see the world mentioned. Look in verse 13. It says, I am coming to you now, but I say these things while I'm still in the what? …
… Greatness, greatness of the human soul. Greatness, O righteous Father, the world hath not known thee, but I have known thee. Joy, joy, joy, tears of joy. I have separated myself from him. My God, why hast thou forsaken me? That I be not separated from thee eternally. This is life eternal. That they might know thee, the only true God, and him whom thou hast sent. This is life eternal. that they might know thee, the only true God and him whom thou hast sent. Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ. I've separated myself from him. I fled him. I renounced him. I crucified him. May I never again be separated from him. He maintains himself in me only in the ways taught in the gospel. Oh, renunciation, total and sweet. What happened to him? He got access. Big shock. Not the sound of one hand clapping. Not something he couldn't talk about. Not some mystical thing. Not some anti-doctrinal thing. Not getting beyond truth. Not the God of the philosophers. …
IT is remarkable how throughout the whole of John's Epistle he continually uses the word, "know." It has quite refreshed me to carefully read through the Epistle and to observe how, as the clock strikes the same note again and again, John seems to have kept to this monotone—"We know, we know, we know." In this age, when it is fashionable not to know anything, when the professedly learned would hold us in a state of perpetual doubt and our great poet tells us that there is more faith in honest doubt than in half the creeds—and everybody seems to be bewitched with what is called "modern thought"—it is quite cheering to one's ears and delicious to one's heart to hear the bell strike out again and again, "We know, we know, we know"! After all, there is something certain somewhere, some grip for our anchor, some foundation to build our eternal hopes upon—something that can be trusted, something besides cloud and will-o'-the wisps! "We know, we know, we know." Take your pencils and read through this first Epistle of John and underline the word, "know," and you will feel the force of our remark. Look at the second Chapter—"Hereby we do know that we know Him." "He that says I know Him." "Hereby know we that we are in Him." In the 13th verse we read, "Because you have known Him." "I write unto you, little children, because you have known the Father. I have written unto you, fathers, because you have known Him that is from the beginning." "We have an unction from the Holy One and you know all things." "I have not written unto you because you know not the Truth, but because you, knowi t, and that no lie is of the Truth." And so in the third Chapter, verse after verse. "The world knows us not, because it knew Him not." "We know that when He shall appear, we shall be like He, for we shall see Him as He is." The fifth verse "You know that He was manifested to take away our sin." And so it is—on, on, on, all through the Chapter—"we know," "you know," and "they know." …