Audio Transcript

To be a Christian is a wonderful thing. The greatest thing, in fact. To find forgiveness in the cross of our Savior, to be united to Christ by his Spirit, to have the Father as our own Father, and to commune with him as his child — these are the greatest gifts a creature can receive. And so, we give thanks. And yet we also look forward to our resurrection, and to new bodies that will enjoy God forever without any sinful impediments to our giving God all the glory he is worthy to receive from us — and by it, experiencing the fullest possible joy we can experience in ourselves. Can’t wait!

But for now, we wait. For all the incredible gifts and blessings we now have in Christ, to be a Christian in this life doesn’t mean we are free from our disordered loves. We’re not. Every Christian feels an ongoing civil war on the inside, in our twisted loves and longings. We both love God and find in us the remains of a treasonous impulse against the God we love, in our attraction to sin. The Bible explains this civil war. Arguably, Romans 7:14–25 makes the point. Less arguably, Galatians 5:16–17 makes the point too.

So then, what do we Christians — redeemed by Christ’s blood, sealed by the Spirit, adopted by the Father — what do we do with the disordered loves that we find still at work inside of us? Pastor John explained at the end of a sermon on Romans 7, preached in 2001. Here he is, drawing out pastoral application.

“We should not be surprised when we meet in ourselves some really excessive and distorted bodily desires.”

In view of all that the Bible says to us about our condition, our fallen condition with this body of death, and our sinful condition with the body acting in treason to join forces with the power of sin to tempt us — in view of the fact that there’s a law of sin still active, and there’s a body of death — we should not be surprised or thrown off balance when we meet in ourselves, and our children and our spouses and our loved ones and our colleagues and our roommates and our neighbors, some really excessive and distorted bodily desires.

Let me give you some examples, and then say how I think we should respond.

Excessive and Distorted Desires

Remember, we are being redeemed in stages. Guilt is taken away right now. All your sins are forgiven right now. The Holy Spirit is dwelling in your life by faith, if you’re a believer, right now. No condemnation is hanging over you at all right now. And yet, we wait for the redemption of our bodies, and those bodies are bodies of death, and places where sin sets up a base of operations often, and tempts us with excessive and distorted bodily desires.

For example, we see excessive desires for leisure, tempting us to laziness and sloth. We see excessive desires for food, tempting us to gluttony and all of its damaging effects. We see excessive desires for drink, tempting us to alcoholism. We see excessive desires for sex, tempting us to lustfulness and fornication and adultery.

And on top of all of those excessive desires, this law of sin operating in our members produces distorted desires. That shouldn’t surprise us either. The whole world is bent out of shape under the fall. That’s much of the point of Romans 1–3. It’s much of the point of part of Romans 8.

For example, we see distorted desires for food. My father-in-law treated people, before he died, who had this incredible hankering for gray river clay in Georgia. They ate clay until it filled their bowels and they died. He would warn them not to take laxatives because it would kill them. Why would anybody want to eat clay?

Or the whole issue of binging — bags of cookies and so on. Those are distortions of a good thing called appetite, desire. Or we know about distorted desires of sex. The desire to have satisfaction with one of your own sex, whether homosexuality or lesbianism or bisexuality, is one of many kinds of fallen distortions. Another example would be the distortions of desire for pleasure, a kind of high, and people resort to marijuana or speed or cocaine or LSD.

Why? What are these distortions, these artificial ways of getting some kind of satisfaction and happiness? The world is just shot through our bodies. These bodies of death are shot through with excessive desires and distorted desires. There’s not a person in this room who doesn’t have one of those.

Who Will Deliver Me?

Now, what do we do? I’m calling you, pleading with you week after week for a biblical realism in Jesus Christ. In Christ, by faith, we are united to him. Before any of this is fixed, hear this now: by faith we become united to Jesus. Faith alone! We are united to him, and his purchased pardon becomes perfectly ours, and his perfect righteousness clothes this excessively desiring, distortedly desiring body first. This is the gospel.

“Will you make war all your life until your body is finally redeemed at the resurrection? That’s the issue.”

Now, what’s the issue then? The issue in your life, believer, is not, Do I have excessive desires? Do I have distorted desires? I say it with joy in my heart for those of you who struggle with homosexuality or with eating disorders or with drugs or with laziness — I say it with joy in my heart: The issue is not whether you have those excessive and distorted desires. The issue is, will you say, “Who will deliver me from this body of death?” and look away from yourself and your resources and say, “Thanks be to God, through Jesus Christ, who gives the victory”? And will you not make peace with the law of sin and find yourself at home in the body of death, but rather make war all your life until your body is finally redeemed at the resurrection? That’s the issue.

So you walk up to me at the end of the service in five minutes and say, with trembling, “I’d like you to pray for me because I’ve never told anybody, but I really struggle with homosexuality.” I’m not going to be surprised. Happens a lot. You say to me, “Nobody knows what I’m doing with food. Nobody knows.” I’m not going to be surprised; nothing surprises me anymore.

But I will call you to a massive hope that through faith, there is justification, and through faith, there is forgiveness. And then, by that same Christ, comes incrementally — sometimes in leaps and bounds, and sometimes through long, agonizing wrestling — a triumph that will be secured in the last day because of the blood of Jesus.

Say you have a friend whose approach to the Christian life seems somewhat extreme. Too strict. Overly disciplined.

You heard him say something the other day about beating his own body — figuratively (you think), but still. In fact, the way he talks often makes you squirm a little bit. Strain, agonize, struggle, labor, strive — these are common words for him. Maybe too common for someone saved by grace.

Then again, he does regularly celebrate God’s grace — more than you do, actually. He’s a joyful, worshiping man, not gloomy or obsessive in the typical sense. His seriousness is almost always tinged with something merry, and for all his drive he seems marked by unusual peace. He’s warm toward you, friendly.

But still, the man never seems to let up. He reads his Bible, and prays, and speaks of spiritual things with an earnestness that embarrasses you. He talks of fighting sin as if he had a sword strapped to his thigh. He denies himself many innocent pleasures (without expecting you to do so) because, he says, they “slow his pursuit of Christ.” You can’t help but feel a touch kittenish in his presence, your Christianity more purr than roar. So you wonder.

Is this legalism? Asceticism? An attempt to be superhuman?

And then, once again, you remember that this friend is the apostle Paul.

Pauline Paradox

Now, if the apostle himself had overheard our concern, he may have sympathized, at least a little. For Paul had known the dangers of discipline. Hebrew of Hebrews, law-keeping Pharisee, zealous persecutor, Paul ran harder and faster than most (Philippians 3:5–6; Galatians 1:14). Yet his disciplined feet only carried him farther and farther from Christ (1 Timothy 1:13). He was rigorous, precise, self-denying, and lost.

“When Paul lost his legalism, he did not lose his discipline. Not even a little bit.”

Yet, remarkably, when Paul lost his legalism, he did not lose his discipline. Not even a little bit. God transformed him, instead, into a stunning apostolic paradox: He preached justification by faith alone, and he pursued holiness with fear and trembling (Philippians 2:12–13). He worshiped God for his grace, and he “worked harder than any” (1 Corinthians 15:10). He boasted of Christ’s sufficiency, and he beat his body lest somehow he should fail to finish the race (1 Corinthians 9:27).

We struggle to live such paradoxes. The grace of God, for many of us, seems to produce a more casual Christianity, a faith without a sweat. But when Paul’s own discipline passed through the fires of grace, it emerged on the other side not consumed but refined — free from the dross of self-righteousness, aglow with the Spirit’s flame.

Redeeming Discipline

Mentions of discipline lace Paul’s letters. We could consider his toil in teaching (Colossians 1:29), his striving in prayer (Romans 15:30), his refusal to use his full apostolic rights (1 Corinthians 9:12), or that startling statement already mentioned: “I strike a blow to my body and make it my slave” (1 Corinthians 9:27 NIV). But we may hear the heartbeat of Paul’s discipline most clearly in Philippians 3:12–14 and its context:

Not that I have already obtained this or am already perfect, but I press on to make it my own, because Christ Jesus has made me his own. Brothers, I do not consider that I have made it my own. But one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus.

Paul the persecutor died on the Damascus road — and in his place arose a man who pressed and strained for Christ. A mighty discipline still drove him forward, but a discipline far different from the one he had known. A new power, new purpose, and new pleasure now gripped him.

New Power

Paul had known something of power in his pre-Christian life, but it was power “from a self-strength,” as John Owen puts it (Works, 6:7). The source of Paul’s unredeemed power was Paul; he relied on self, not the Spirit, for his strength. Not only did such power prove powerless against sins of the heart (Romans 7:7–8), but also, being an offspring of the flesh, it could never please God (Romans 8:8).

But then, Paul says, “Christ Jesus . . . made me his own” (Philippians 3:12). And with Christ’s presence came Christ’s power — power from above and beyond him, and yet power now dwelling within him. And so, Paul saw former sins, once unconquerable, fall dead at his feet (Romans 8:13). He “pressed” and “strained” with a new kind of strength (Philippians 3:13–14). And he worked as one who knew “it is God who works in you, both to will and to work for his good pleasure” (Philippians 2:13).

With Paul, disciplined Christians do not run on the strength of self-resolve; they know and fear the manufactured power of the flesh. But they also take seriously those four familiar, radical words: “God works in you.” God works in you — and therefore you are not bound to the narrow limits of your self-strength. God works in you — and therefore laziness is not a celebration of his grace but a tacit denial of his presence. God works in you — and therefore every resistance is an opportunity to prove his power.

New Purpose

The power behind Paul’s discipline, then, was decidedly different after Damascus. And so too was the purpose or aim of his discipline. Once, Paul ran to attain “a righteousness of my own that comes from the law” (Philippians 3:9). But then, blinded by the risen Christ, he realized there was only one righteousness worth having, and it was one that discipline could never win: “the righteousness from God that depends on faith” (Philippians 3:9). So, in a moment, Paul stopped running for righteousness.

But he did not stop running. For though he already wore the robe of Christ’s righteousness, another robe still awaited: the robe of resurrection. “The resurrection from the dead” was the “it” he pressed on to make his own, the “prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus” (Philippians 3:11–12, 14). By discipline, Paul reached to share his Lord’s undying life.

Paul knew, of course, that discipline could not earn his resurrection — nor was he ultimately uncertain about reaching that land beyond death. He could already feel the hand of Christ upon him; he could already say, “Christ Jesus has made me his own” (Philippians 3:12). And yet, Paul also knew that God-empowered discipline — pressing on, straining forward — was Christ’s way of bringing his people to glory. In a world where many professing Christians give up after making a good start, discipline keeps the righteous running till resurrection.

By discipline, we throw off every hindrance that slows our pace toward heaven. We shake off every hand that wraps around our ankles. We set our gaze ahead, where Christ himself awaits us. And with holy resolve we say, “By the power of God within me, I won’t allow sin to keep me from him.”

New Pleasure

Perhaps Paul once saw discipline as many of us have: as a purse-lipped virtue, a grim necessity, a healthy fruit with sour taste. Discipline is an alarm at 5:00am; it is wind sprints and diets and long hours over dull books. Yes, Paul may have seen discipline as such. But then he saw the face of Jesus, and discipline became filled with new pleasure.

What spark lit the fire of Paul’s resolve? What gunshot sent him racing toward resurrection? This spark, this shot:

I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things and count them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ and be found in him. (Philippians 3:8–9)

“The surpassing worth of Christ has captured our hearts, calling forth our own surpassing work.”

Christian discipline may press and strain. It may rise early to read and pray; it may fast and go willingly without; it may say many a painful no. But not from any barren sense of oughtness. Rather, the surpassing worth of Christ has captured our hearts, calling forth our own surpassing work.

Not that we always feel the same sense of Christ’s worth. Sometimes, discipline is the song of living longing; other times, it is the prayer of longing lost. But whether discipline moves mainly from desire or for desire, its sights remain set on him whose presence is our pleasure. Out, then, with any thoughts of stern and frowning resolve. The only discipline worth the name runs under the banner of delight.

From ‘Done’ to ‘Do’

So, say you have a friend whose approach to the Christian life seems somewhat extreme. Too strict. Overly disciplined. So you wonder. Doesn’t the gospel cry “Done!” rather than “Do!”?

Indeed it does (John 19:30). But as you watch your friend more closely, you realize that on the other side of the gospel’s “done,” there is another kind of “do”: not the doing that strives for God’s favor or adds anything to Christ’s cross, but the doing that rises from fresh power, resurrection purpose, and a new and deep pleasure in God.

So, by grace, you start running harder. You pray and press on; you trust and strain forward. And you begin to discover that God’s grace is a bigger wonder than you once thought. Not only does grace grant our forgiveness and win our worship, but it works — hard. And to top off the paradox, it keeps us happy while we work.

Audio Transcript

Today we look at one of John Piper’s favorite Bible texts on the Christian life. The text that I’m thinking of is 2 Thessalonians 1:11–12. Pastor John doesn’t talk about this text a lot, but when he does, you immediately sense its significance. He has mentioned it here on the podcast a few times. A while back, speaking of 2 Thessalonians 1:11–12, he said, “I encourage everybody to meditate on every single phrase in those two verses.” That was in APJ 1473.

And the text pops up on the podcast annually, in early January, whenever we talk about New Year’s resolutions. That’s because Pastor John calls it “the most important” text in the Bible on resolutions. That’s a claim he made in APJ 1415. And back in APJ 246, he called it “a theology of resolutions in two verses.” But this same text has year-round value because it offers us “eight steps of sanctification” (APJ 367) — eight indispensables for Christian living, as we see in today’s episode, in a great little sermon clip from 2012. Here’s Pastor John to explain 2 Thessalonians 1:11–12.

Let’s read these two verses again. “To this end” — and what he means by that in the preceding verses is “so that you will be able to marvel at the Lord when he comes.”

To this end we always pray for you, that our God may make you worthy of his calling and may fulfill every resolve for good [or good resolve] and every work of faith by his power, so that the name of our Lord Jesus may be glorified in you, and you in him, according to the grace of our God and the Lord Jesus Christ.

So, notice eight crucial things in those two verses.

1. Calling of God

There is a calling of God on and in every believer. Verse 11: “. . . that our God may make you worthy of his calling” — that is, the glorious destiny that he has for you, a destiny to be a part of his kingdom, and to be a part of and shaped by, glorified by, his glory. The easiest place to see that that’s what it means is 1 Thessalonians 2:12, which goes like this: “[We] charged you to walk in a manner worthy of God, who calls you into his own kingdom and glory.”

“Your calling is to be in the kingdom of God. Your calling is to share the glory of God.”

So, the calling of every Christian is that we will be destined — we are destined — and we’ll be there in God’s kingdom, and in his glory, perfectly someday. So your calling is to be in the kingdom of God. Your calling is to share the glory of God, as will be increasingly clear as we get to that part of these two verses. That’s number one, the calling of God.

2. Made Worthy of His Calling

There is a being made worthy of the calling. Verse 11: “. . . that our God may make you worthy of his calling.” So, that’s what God is doing if you’re a Christian. He’s making you worthy of his calling. Being made worthy of something doesn’t mean being made deserving of it — it means being made suitable for it, or being made fitting or appropriate for it.

If you know that the queen of England has decided to come and stay in one of the bedrooms of your house, your thought will be, first (probably), “I don’t deserve it, and the room certainly doesn’t deserve it,” which would be true. But what you mean by, “I must make the room worthy of the queen” is that she’s got the worth and the room needs some work. “I want to make the room suitable. I want to make the room fitting.” She’s already decided to come. It’s not about deserving her coming.

The Lord has put his favor on his people and said, “You’re going to be in my kingdom. You’re going to be my children. You’re going to be there glorifying me.” And then he goes about the business of suiting us out, fitting us for that destiny called being made worthy of our calling. That’s number two.

3. Good Resolves Fulfilled

There is a fulfillment, therefore — in the exercise of that being made worthy of the calling, there’s a fulfillment of our good resolves. Verse 11: “. . . that our God may make you worthy of his calling and may fulfill every good resolve,” or “every resolve for good.” So, the Christian life is a resolving life. It’s a planning life. It’s a purposing life. It’s an intending life.

God has given every one of you wills. And he intends for you to use your will to make plans and purposes and designs and intentions and resolves, to do something right and beautiful and good every hour of your day. That’s why we have brains and wills, volition.

4. Power of God in Us

And the question is, how do those resolves become real — turn into deeds, get fulfilled? And that’s number four: by the power of God. Verse 11: “. . . that our God may make you worthy of his calling and may fulfill every resolve for good and every work of faith by his power.” So our resolves become works by his power, and he intends to get the glory for the fulfillment of our resolves. And that’s why he makes himself the giver of the power. The giver gets the glory.

If you did your resolves in your own strength, you would get the glory, and you should. And if you depend on him to fulfill your resolves with his power, he gets the glory, and he should. And that’s the way he set it up.

And so, how do our resolves become acts? How does the resolve to do a right thing and not do a wrong thing become effective? God’s power, that’s how. So, the Christian life is a life of supernatural power coming in, moving out, and giving us the ability to fulfill our resolves.

5. Works of Faith

How do we tap into this power? How do we avail ourselves of the power? How do we depend upon the power? By faith. Verse 11: “. . . that our God may make you worthy of his calling and may fulfill every good resolve” — every resolve for good — “and every work of faith.” When God fulfills, by his power, a good resolve, it becomes a work of faith. That’s the way I’m taking the connection between fulfilling a resolve for good and a work of faith: the power of God enabling needs to happen.

When the power of God meets you in your good resolve, it meets you by making that resolve become a work called now a “work of faith,” which shows how you tapped into that. Got it? It’s a work of faith — you could call it a work of power, it’s true. He’s just bringing you into the picture now. He’s already said God’s power fulfills your resolves and turns them into fulfillment — that is works, deeds, acts. And then he adds, “And those acts are acts of faith,” which tells me exactly what my role is in availing myself of divine power to fulfill the resolves I have in life — namely, I must trust him. I must trust his promise to give me power tonight, to fulfill a resolve I have when I go home.

That’s what I have to do: believe him; trust him. That’s the plug into the power. The outlet and the electricity is his power. And the plug is my faith. I trust you — click — power. That’s what faith does: it gets in, and power flows through it. And God has designed it that way because, when you’re a little child leaning on God for power to fulfill your resolves, he’s going to get the glory, which is where we’re going in just a moment — in fact, not a moment, a second.

6. Jesus’s Glory in Us

In this text, the name of Jesus is going to be glorified. Now we’re at verse 12. When God fulfills our resolves through our faith and turns them into works of faith, Jesus gets glory. So, verse 12: “. . . so that the name of our Lord Jesus may be glorified in you.” So, when God’s power comes through your plug of faith and turns your resolves to do the right and to avoid the wrong into an act of faith, Jesus gets glory.

“All God’s power now, because of the cross and our connection with Jesus, is pouring on us for our good.”

Which must mean, since he hasn’t been mentioned yet in these two verses, that Paul is assuming that the power that he calls “God’s power” is power purchased and provided by Jesus, which is exactly what I argued for last week. When Christ dies, what he purchases for us is that God would now no longer be against us. His power is no longer devoted to our destruction, no longer devoted to our condemnation. All his power now, because of the cross and our connection with Jesus, is pouring on us for our good, not our destruction.

So anybody who knows the gospel — and I hope that last Sunday’s message hasn’t ceased to be real for you — would know that it’s so fitting that Paul would say here that Jesus’s name would be glorified. When God, by his power, comes into the life of imperfect people like me, who don’t deserve any help at all from him, and he takes my little puny, half-baked, vain resolves to do right, and he makes them happen to some measure of good, Jesus gets glory. That’s right. God gets glory too, but Jesus is named as the one who gets the glory. He purchased that awesome sanctifying event that enables us to fulfill our resolves.

7. Our Glory in Him

And we are glorified in him. So, he’s glorified in this process, and now it says we are too. So let’s read that again. Verse 12: “. . . so that the name of our Lord Jesus may be glorified in you, and you in him.” So, as he purchases and provides the power by covering all of our sin and providing all of our right standing with God, we are being conformed into Christ’s likeness, because our resolves for good are being fulfilled by faith in that.

And the effect is that we too are becoming glorious with his glory. “We all . . . beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to the next” (2 Corinthians 3:18). And oh for the day when that will be complete, in the moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet, when we shall be changed — saved to sin no more. Hasten that day.

8. All of Grace

All of this is according to the grace of our God and the Lord Jesus. End of verse 12: “. . . so that the name of our Lord Jesus may be glorified in you, and you in him, according to the grace of our God and the Lord Jesus Christ.” It is all of grace — the grace of our Father and the grace of our Lord Jesus. The power that comes to us moment by moment to fulfill our resolves for good is the power of grace, the extension of grace.

Grace to Glory

So those are the eight crucial, indispensable, wonderful elements in verses 11 and 12. Let me try to sum them up. How do they work? Let me put them together in the order that they work instead of just the order that they come.

Paul ends with the beginning, right? At the bottom of the Christian life is grace, and everything moves up from that foundation. If there were anything we could do down here beneath this to get under it and make it happen, it wouldn’t be grace. That’s the meaning of grace. So grace is free, and it comes to us in our total undeserving, and it starts to do good things for us. And so, it’s all of grace. Grace is at the bottom of the Christian life.

And now, up from that grace, God’s power flows. And that power flows through your faith. If we were doing other texts, I could show you that the power, in fact, awakens that faith and then moves through it, awakens those resolves and then fulfills them. But all it says here now, which is all we’re going to talk about, is when you have a resolve to do right, and do good — to honor God, to love people, to kill sin — that resolve, if it gets fulfilled, gets fulfilled by the power of God.

And the way you tap into that power is by faith. And when you do, then Jesus is made to look glorious in your life, and you participate in the glorification of Jesus by becoming increasingly beautiful yourself — somewhat in this life, unspeakably in the life to come.