"20 “I do not ask for these only, but also for those who will believe in me through their word, 21 that they may all be one, just as you, Father, are in me, and I in you, that they also may be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me. 22 The glory that you have given me I have given to them, that they may be one even as we are one, 23 I in them and you in me, that they may become perfectly one, so that the world may know that you sent me and loved them even as you loved me. 24 Father, I desire that they also, whom you have given me, may be with me where I am, to see my glory that you have given me because you loved me before the foundation of the world. 25 O righteous Father, even though the world does not know you, I know you, and these know that you have sent me. 26 I made known to them your name, and I will continue to make it known, that the love with which you have loved me may be in them, and I in them.”"
John 17:20-26
We come now to the final section of our Lord's intercessory prayer, in which He goes beyond His disciples to the larger horizons of the Church of God down the ages of history. It is a very moving thought to realise that our Lord's prayer reaches out to, and spans, all Christendom, and that in that solemn and hallowed hour He was praying for a Church as yet unborn, yet fully formed in the mind and purpose of the Father before all worlds. The prayer for unity in 21 is one that is much and often in the minds of Church leaders in our time and much - too much, indeed, in the wrong way is made of it. Unity is of course a greatly to be desired thing, because disunity between believers is a problem and a scandal. But there is no kind of warrant in our Lord's words here or anywhere else for pressing for organisational or denominational union willy-nilly, at any cost, because unity can never be at the expense of truth. Truth is the only adequate basis of unity. Our Lord is speaking here of unity among believers of the same thoughts, aspirations, attitudes and desires, and it is simply wresting the Scriptures to suppose that His words here could be legitimately applied to unity between those who believe the fundamental doctrines of the faith and those who deny them. One recalls a statement made by the late Professor Renwick of the Free Church of Scotland warning people of the danger of making too facile an interpretation of the sequence in 21 - 'unity... that the world might believe'. He pointed out that in the Middle Ages the Church was one; there was no disunity then; there was one, great, monolithic Church. But did the world believe? Of course it did not believe; it lived in gross darkness - and for this reason: the unity of the one, great, monolithic Church was not a unity that was built on truth. It is through truth, not unity, that the world believes. Apart from truth, unity is not only irrelevant; it is deadly dangerous.