Audio Transcript

What would it look like in your life to know that God loves you — I mean to know that he really loves you? Would that love be proven in a new job? Or maybe a better job? Would it be an open door that will allow you greater financial independence? Maybe it would be to find a spouse. Or maybe deliverance from chronic pain that depletes your energy. Or maybe it would look like being delivered from the consuming demands of a special needs child. What would prove God’s love to you? And what if the answer to that question was something altogether different than what we expected? What if, instead of any of these things, God showed his love to you by letting you die in sickness? Crazy, right? Totally counterintuitive. And yet this is exactly what we read about in John 11:1–44. Listen to this extraordinary story, because in it we find a life-changing lesson God wants all of us to grasp. Here’s Pastor John to explain, in one of his sermons from 2001.

This is John 11. I have used this text now in about five settings in the last couple of months because no other text has gripped me like this in driving home this central point.

Love and Glory

Now a certain man was ill, Lazarus of Bethany, the village of Mary and her sister Martha. It was Mary who anointed the Lord with ointment and wiped his feet with her hair, whose brother Lazarus was ill. (John 11:1–2)

This is clearly a picture of sweetness and love. Mary loved Jesus, and Jesus loved Mary. Mark that word love. It will show up several more times.

So the sisters sent to him, saying, “Lord, he whom you love is ill.” But when Jesus heard it he said, “This illness does not lead to death. It is for the glory of God, so that the Son of God may be glorified through it.” (John 11:3–4)

So now you have two profound realities on the table: love and glory — the love of Christ and the glory of Christ. My question is, How do they relate to each other? Verse 5:

Now Jesus loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus. So, when he heard that Lazarus was ill, he stayed two days longer in the place where he was.

“Until Christ becomes our treasure, we don’t know what it is to be loved by God.”

Notice three things: (1) Jesus chose to let Lazarus die. (2) He was motivated in this by his zeal for the glory of God to be manifest. (3) This motivation is love.

Do you see the word so, or therefore, at the beginning of verse 6? Do you see what it’s preceded by and followed by? It’s preceded by the fact that Jesus loved Martha; Jesus loved Mary; Jesus loved the dying man, Lazarus. Therefore, he did not go heal him but stayed two days longer where he was and saw to it that he died.

Why Do You Want to Be Loved by God?

Now, what on earth could possibly turn that into love? Verse 4: This is not going to end in death. This is all about the glory of God, “that the Son of God may be glorified through it.”

So here’s my definition of the love of God based on this text: God’s love is his doing whatever needs to be done, at whatever cost, so that we will see and be satisfied with the glory of God in Jesus Christ. Let me say it again: the love of God is his doing whatever needs to be done, at whatever cost to himself or to us, so that we will see and be satisfied by the love of God in Christ forever and ever.

Let me confirm this with John 17:24. Here’s Jesus praying for us, and he loves us in this prayer — oh how he loves us in this prayer. John 17:24: “Father, I desire that they also, whom you have given me, may be with me where I am, to see my glory.” If Jesus loves you and prays for you, do you know what he finally asks for you? That you may see him. The ultimate answer to the prayer of love is, “Show them my glory, Father. Show them my glory, and they will have arrived at ultimate satisfaction.”

Why do you want to be loved by God? Yes, not to perish. Yes, not to go to hell. Yes, not to have a guilty conscience anymore. Yes, to have the marriage put back together. But if that’s all you want, you don’t know him. You don’t know him. It’s for life. And what is life? It is to know him and his Son. It’s to fellowship with him. It’s to behold him. It’s to be satisfied with him. It’s to enjoy him. Until Christ becomes our treasure, we don’t know what it is to be loved by God.

Why are you thankful for the love of God today? I hope, before we’re done, God will have worked in your heart so that you see enough of God the Father and enough of God the Son, Jesus Christ, so that you will know and feel that it is not finally for the relief of your conscience, it is not finally for escape from hell, it is not finally for health in our bodies, or reconciliation among our family members; it is finally to bring you home to God, where you can see him and enjoy him forever and ever and ever.

Seeing and Savoring Forever

I want to know: Do you want this? Do you want this? Do you want to be loved by God for God? Do you want to be loved by God for God? Or do you only want to be loved by God because it feels good that he seems to make much of you? Have you taken the American definition of love — being made much of — and so twisted God to fit that definition that the only way you would feel loved by God is if he makes much of you, when, in fact, the love of God is working so as to change you so that you enjoy making much of him forever and ever and ever? And that’s the end of your quest. There isn’t anything beyond it.

“You will be satisfied when you forget yourself and are swallowed up in Jesus Christ, and he becomes your treasure.”

I do believe that is in every heart in this room. And we are all fallen, and we are all sinners. I know that every person in this room has a distorted desire for God, and it’s on the way to being purified. And it’s being tricked. You’re being tricked, many of you, into thinking that the satisfying thing in life is to be made much of: “If I could just get some people to clap for me, to like me, to approve of me, to give me a raise, or to give me an advancement. If I could just get someone to pay attention to me, I would be satisfied.” You wouldn’t. I promise you, in the name of Jesus Christ Almighty, you wouldn’t.

You will be satisfied when you forget yourself and are swallowed up in Jesus Christ, and he becomes your treasure, and he becomes your delight, and he becomes what you cherish and what you value, and you spend the rest of your eternity growing in your capacity to see and savor, to know and to delight in him forever and ever — and it will get better and better and better.

Audio Transcript

Today’s topic is a sensitive one. We get a lot of questions from a lot of listeners on a very wide range of life situations, obviously. And many of these questions come to us from pretty broken places. And I think that’s true today. We address an email from a woman, a female by birth — born with two X chromosomes. She’s written in anonymously to ask this: “Pastor John, hi. I find myself at a stage in my life when I am seriously considering removing my female body parts — namely, my breasts and my uterus — because I no longer want to be a woman. Women are perceived as weak vessels whose only purpose is to have children. Even Scripture supports that ideology,” she writes. “As a modern ‘woman,’ I have no desire to have children or get married but to have a successful career to help support less fortunate people and animals live better lives. My question is this: Would doing this to my body be sinful?”

Yes, it will be sinful, and it will probably be dreadfully destructive to you as a person. I want to give you six reasons for that response to what you’ve said. So I hope you’ll be willing to listen to me, because this is not going to be easy for you to hear. I hope you have the courage to listen.

1. Purpose of Women

No, neither the Bible nor the church has ever said or hinted that woman’s only purpose is to have children, nor is this the view of the vast majority of human beings in the world. The very fact that you would say this shows how conflicted you are, because you know that’s not true. You know it’s not true. You know that in the Gospels, women followed Jesus and served him in many ways (see Luke 8:1–3). You know that Paul refers to numerous women who labored side by side with him in the gospel. You know that love between a man and a woman in marriage is vastly deeper and richer than only baby-making. You know that in history, the prayers and the service of women have turned the tide for good in communities again and again. You know that today, women work in hundreds of vocations, and most of them do it gladly as women, not in spite of being women.

“Neither the Bible nor the church has ever said or hinted that woman’s only purpose is to have children.”

You know these things, and yet you still say women are perceived as having only the purpose of childbearing. I wonder why that is. Why do you say that? What it sounds like is that you’re not thinking clearly. You’re not speaking and thinking clearly. You’re speaking and thinking carelessly, and that is not a good place from which to make a massive decision like the one you are contemplating. It would be folly.

2. Weaker by Wisdom

Yes, woman is the weaker vessel, as Peter says (1 Peter 3:7) and as everybody knows. That’s why there’s a women’s NBA, women’s college volleyball, women’s gymnastics, women’s track and field, women’s soccer, women’s Tour de France. God made men stronger, and there are reasons for this, and he really is wise. He really is very good in making such decisions. If you don’t trust him with the way he made the world, then that’s one of the main reasons that what you are about to do is sin. You’re not acting in faith, but anger and resentment at the way God made you. You are, evidently, not trusting God’s wisdom but denying it. That’s not a safe place from which to make this massive decision.

But there’s a sad thing as well besides this point. When you’re done mutilating yourself, you’re still going to be part of the weaker sex. You can make your chest flat — that won’t make you strong. You can put testosterone into your body and grow more hair and make your voice lower, but you’ll still be a woman. You’ll be weaker than 90 percent of the men your age. In fact, you will be weaker than you were before, not stronger, because pretense is weakness. Living a life trying to be what you are not is a life of weakness.

3. God’s Better Desires

You say, “As a modern woman, I have no desire to have children or get married.” I have two questions for you. First, is your desire your god? It sounds like it. Are you humbly asking the true and living God, “God, what are your desires? What is your will for me?” Or does that matter to you? Is your desire final? If it is, that’s another evidence of sin behind your thinking.

Second, what if your desire changes in five or ten years? Oh, how I wish I knew your name so I could say with all earnestness, “Seriously, Chelsea, seriously, think about this.” Surely you have lived long enough to know that what you desire today may not be what you desire tomorrow. You know this. In one moment, you can destroy a whole life of possibilities that you may desperately desire someday. If you blow me off here and think you can predict your desires ten years from now, you are delusional. You know it. Wake up. Be realistic. You do not know what your desires will be in ten years. Don’t cut off those possibilities.

4. Serving Others for Christ’s Glory

If you want to serve the less fortunate, do you want to do it for Christ’s sake? Do you want to do it for his glory? If not, it’s idolatry. If you do, then why wouldn’t you consult with him for how you can glorify him through your body the way he made you? I mean, if his glory matters to you in serving the poor, wouldn’t it matter in how to be a woman?

5. Serving Others as a Woman

If you really love people and care about the disadvantaged, God cares about that as much as you do. He loves that, which is why millions of competent, caring, persevering, Christ-exalting women are leading the vanguard in many such ministries of compassion and justice. Why in the world would you think that you will be a better lover of needy people as a fake man than as a real woman? You know that’s inconsistent.

“Your re-creation of you will not be a better lover of the poor than God’s creation of you.”

If you really want to give your life for the sake of others who are less advantaged, praise God. That’s what he wants for you. He wants it more than you do, and he made you perfectly suited for his calling on you to do it. Breasts and uterus and hormones and monthly cycle and brain structures — all of it is gloriously suited for what he’s calling you to do. He’s not stupid. He doesn’t make mistakes. Your re-creation of you will not be a better lover of the poor than God’s creation of you.

6. Woman All the Way Down

God made us male and female, and we are male and female all the way down. The glory of womanhood is not something as superficial as breasts and uterus. It is marked in every cell of your body, every dimension of your soul, every part of your brain. You can’t even begin to undo the pervasive mystery of your womanhood. Your womanhood is like yeast in the dough, like the color in the paint of your life, like the aroma in the flower that you are, like the melody in the song. Dear friend, whose name I wish I knew, you are a female wonder of God’s handiwork, and no amount of chipping away at it will make it cease to be a God-designed masterpiece.

So, I conclude, yes, it will be a sin, a tragedy, and almost certainly tragically regretted if you have yourself mutilated to try to be what you are not and what God did not make you to be. And I plead with you, don’t do that. Surrender to him, and his will, and his wisdom, and his love, and his Son Jesus, and you will find an amazing life of purpose as he created you to be.

Christmas still enchants the West.

For all its public professions of secular faith, and for all secularism’s aggressive incursions into the collective psyche, we still make a big deal of Christmas. It is a wonder.

Granted, our age tries its best to empty Christmas of its Christ, and spends the rest of the year confessing trust in other messiahs, but beyond the obvious practical and commercial pressures, we continue to be haunted by the magic of Christmas. Try as they might to recast Christmas as anything other than Christian, mysterious longings deep in the human soul keep even the religiously secular from jettisoning what is still the most distinctive and stubborn day of the year.

Try as we might to suppress them, we all have messianic longings. We were made for Christmas.

Our Messianic Hopes

West and East, North and South, modern and pre-modern, we humans long for true leadership, for the true benevolent sovereign, for a king who will, in himself, embody and be all we need — a single, tangible, personal solution for all that ails us. That is, God made us for himself, and not only for himself but for himself become man.

“Beyond the obvious practical and commercial pressures, we continue to be haunted by the magic of Christmas.”

Before the Father of Jesus made the world through him, he first appointed his divine Son to be heir of all things (Hebrews 1:2). He made the world to await the coming of its King — his eternal Word made flesh — and he made human souls to long and look for such a singular, personal Hope.

For sure, our hearts not only manufacture messianic desires, but also idols — and chief among them, particularly in our age, is the idol of self. Not only do our factory settings include righteous messianic hopes, but sin has rewired us to angle tirelessly for self-rule. Our messianic longings, then, struggle against the grain and vestiges of our sin. But our hopes remain. The history of our race tells of one, young, Christ-figure after another, who in his youth embodies the enigmatic hopes and dreams of a nation, only to have his flaws and limits, without fail, grow conspicuous over time.

Lineage of Shattered Crowns

For centuries, God’s first-covenant people focused these universal longings on a promised coming “seed of the woman,” “offspring of Abraham,” “prophet like Moses,” and then, in full flower, a “Messiah,” great David’s greater offspring, a supremely Anointed one. This king would reign as God’s “son” over his nation, God’s “arm” to rule his people for their good, and rule over their enemies to protect his own.

To have only another David seemed satisfactory to some. Yet the prophets knew better. David himself had not fulfilled their messianic hopes and dreams. Nor had his son Solomon. One king after another ascended to the throne in his youth buoyed by the nation’s messianic hopes. And one after another disappointed those dreams — some, like Ahab and Manasseh, egregiously so.

But the answer to a king as wicked as Manasseh was not a return to the period of the judges, when the nation had no king and everyone did what was right in his own eyes (Judges 17:6; 18:1; 19:1; 21:25). Rather, the answer was a true king, a righteous king, strong and brave enough to defeat their foes, and gentle and good to shepherd his people — the king for whom we long at Christmas.

Their messianic hopes, and ours, include at least three distinct longings.

We Long for One to Rescue Us

In David’s day, the nation yearned for a deliver from the Philistines. Three centuries later, Isaiah’s generation longed for rescue from Assyria; two centuries more, and Jeremiah’s ached for release from Babylon. In Jesus’s day, the Jews longed for release from the heavy Roman hand, even as their forefathers had groaned for freedom from Egypt. Yet under it all was a far greater dominion and slavery — to sin. East of Eden, the original messianic longing in Genesis 3:15 was not yet eclipsed by human pretenses of some other solution: God promised, and so his people anticipated, an offspring of the woman who, even in the bruising of his heel, would crush the head of the serpent.

The messianic longing of Christmas in particular clears away the political distractions and hopes for salvation from an enemy far more destructive than Egypt, Babylon, or Rome: “you shall call his name Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins” (Matthew 1:21). Our world trains its messianic longings on politicians, athletes, and billionaires, but we need rescue from more than boredom, or from the other side of the aisle. Christmas reveals a rescue far deeper, the rescue from our sin that puts us under the righteous, omnipotent wrath of God. At Christmas, Messiah came to deliver us (Galatians 3:13; Romans 3:25; 1 John 4:10).

We Long for One to Respect

We want rescue; indeed we do. But something in us is not content just to receive deliverance and go on our merry way. We also want Someone to admire. We want a supreme role model. We long both for an exemplary human to learn from and imitate, but also for one far above us, worthy of worship. We long for a person in leadership we might treasure, not just put up with. We want someone who not only gets the job done and benefits us by his actions, but also one who, in himself, in his character, we might enjoy and admire.

We want a king we can be proud of, in the holiest of senses. A king who is worthy of our fealty. One who does not make us blush but evokes our praise — and gives us, and C.S. Lewis observes, the added delight of praising the one whom we enjoy, “because the praise not merely expresses but completes the enjoyment” (Reflection on the Psalms, 95).

At Christmas, we receive the one Messiah whose achievements and character are without fault. One who will never embarrass us. One who is both the ultimate man and God himself, worthy of our worship and humble imitation. One we can respect today, and not regret it tomorrow, or ever.

We Long for One to Rule Us

One final aspect in our messianic longings may be unnerving to many dreamers today: we long to be ruled. To pine for a messiah — for a singular, personal fix to all that ails us — is not only to hope for rescue, and for someone to genuinely respect, but also to be ruled. After all, what were you expecting a king to do?

At Christmas, we celebrate the coming of the King — the one appointed heir of all things, even before God created the world through him. And we remember that this “newborn king,” to whom we sing glory, not only had messianic hopes trained on him from birth, but that as he grew, and became a man, and gave himself as a ransom for many, and rose again in triumph, as he lived out the days God appointed for him, he did not let down our messianic expectations.

In fact, he is the only king in the history of the world to fully meet those expectations and exceed them. Finally, after centuries of the great hope deferred, Christ came to be the great desire fulfilled (Proverbs 13:12). The newborn king grew up to become the supreme King who rescues his people, and is worthy of their respect, and now rules over all the nations — with his people being those, from all nations, who receive his rule with rejoicing.

Do You Refuse His Rule?

A question, then, we might ask ourselves this Christmas is, Do I really welcome his reign? Or, do I refuse his rule? Has another year of the world’s influence engrained in me deeper patterns of yearning for self-rule?

“To refuse to be ruled is to refuse the Messiah.”

To refuse to be ruled is to refuse the Messiah. He did not come to fit into our pockets. He came to win, protect, and own a people who are very happy — even thrilled — to be in his pocket. That is, to be his. Not just have him as our Savior and Treasure but to be his as glad subjects of the great King and Lord who we know as “gentle and good” (1 Peter 2:18).

Oh, to Be His!

Those whom he rescues are “the many” who swell with respect for him and gladly submit to his rule. They are those who say, “Oh, to be his portion, to be his people — and not only his people, but together be his bride!”

We long not only to be subject to the one true gentle and good king as those among his many, but also somehow to be closer. To know him better than from a distance, and even to be known, and loved, by him. We ache not only to be among the king’s subjects but to be among his bride.

Suppress it as we might, we long to be ruled by the good and gentle Sovereign, and put our painfully short lives to good use in the world by rallying to his mission and kingdom expansion.

Christmas still enchants us. And as Christians, we say, Christ has come. Already now our Messiah has appeared, and we have him, and most importantly, he has us. And so too he will come again.