_Jesus closes His life with inimitable calmness, confidence and sublimity. “I have glorified Thee; I have finished the work which Thou gavest me to do.” The annals of earth have nothing comparable to it in real serenity and sublimity. May we come to our end thus, in supreme loyalty to Christ._ —EDWARD BOUNDS. We come now to consider our Lord’s Sacerdotal Prayer, as found recorded in the seventeenth chapter of John’s Gospel. Obedience to the Father and abiding in the Father, these belong to the Son, and these belong to us, as partners with Christ in His Divine work of intercession. How tenderly and with what pathos and how absorbingly He prays for His disciples! “I pray for them; I pray not for the world.” What a pattern of prayerfulness for God’s people! For God’s people are God’s cause, God’s Church and God’s Kingdom. Pray for God’s people, for their unity, their sanctification, and their glorification. How the subject of their unity pressed upon Him! These walls of separation, these alienations, these riven circles of God’s family, and these warring tribes of ecclesiastics—how He is torn and bleeds and suffers afresh at the sight of these divisions! Unity—that is the great burden of that remarkable Sacerdotal Prayer. “That they may be one, even as we are one.” The spiritual oneness of God’s people—that is the heritage of God’s glory to them, transmitted by Christ to His Church. First of all, in this prayer, Jesus prays for Himself, not now the suppliant as in Gethsemane, not weakness, but strength now. There is not now the pressure of darkness and of hell, but passing for the time over the fearful interim, He asks that He may be glorified, and that His exalted glory may secure glory to His Father. His sublime loyalty and fidelity to God are declared, that fidelity to God which is of the very essence of interceding prayer. Our devoted lives pray. Our unswerving loyalty to God are eloquent pleas to Him, and give access and confidence in our advocacy. This prayer is gemmed, but its walls are adamant. What profound and granite truths! What fathomless mysteries! What deep and rich experiences do such statements as these involve: “And this is life eternal, that they might know thee, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom thou hast sent. “And all mine are thine, and thine are mine, and I am glorified in them. “And I have declared unto them thy name, and will declare it, that the love wherewith thou hast loved me may be in them, and I in them. “And now, O Father, glorify thou me with thine own self with the glory which I had with thee before the world was.”