“Sanctify them through Thy truth: Thy word is truth” (John 17:17).

The word “sanctify” means to set apart, and we will speak a little more about this word tomorrow. But it simply means that something is put separately from other things. For example, sometimes we have dirty dishes that have been used at the table, and clean dishes that have not been used. We keep the clean dishes separate from the dirty dishes, for we do not want the clean ones to get dirty.

The Word of God sanctifies us as Christians, for it tells us how to remain separate from this world, so that we do not become contaminated by it. We must live and move in this world, but we are not to be a part of it morally and spiritually. Again, we will speak more about this tomorrow.

However, it is a precious thing to realize that God’s Word is truth. It gives us the truth about every moral and spiritual subject, according to the mind of God. It is a wonderful thing to have this Word in our hands, in our own language, but it is also a serious thing. If we have the Word of God, it is given to all of us directly from God Himself, and we are responsible to pay attention to it. If it gives us the truth about every moral and spiritual subject, then we are responsible to live and walk in this truth. If we know the Lord Jesus as our Savior, we have a new life that wants to do this, but we also still have an old sinful nature that rebels against it. Sometimes, when we read the truth of God, our old sinful nature does not like it, and then we may try to reason our way around it, because we do not want to follow it.

But here in this verse, the Lord Jesus was praying for us, asking God the Father to set us apart through the truth, which is found in the Word of God. As we have remarked before in these meditations, walking in the truth and in fellowship with the Lord is a happy way to live.