Audio Transcript

Well, it’s never a bad time to soak in the glorious truths of Psalm 16. And that’s what we are going to do today in a clip from 2015. This clip comes from a memorable sermon titled “The Path to Full and Lasting Pleasure.” The clip begins where the sermon begins, with John Piper walking out on stage at a Shane & Shane conference. There Pastor John recited Psalm 16 from heart. This text and this sermon come in light of pretty deep sorrow for the Bethlehem community, making for a clip and a sermon that have impacted many of you. Without any further introduction, here’s Pastor John reciting Psalm 16.

Preserve me, O God, for in you I take refuge.I say to the Lord, “You are my Lord;     I have no good apart from you.”

As for the saints in the land, they are the excellent ones,     in whom is all my delight.

The sorrows of those who run after another god shall multiply;     their drink offerings of blood I will not pour out     or take their names on my lips.

The Lord is my chosen portion and my cup;     you hold my lot.The lines have fallen for me in pleasant places;     indeed, I have a beautiful inheritance.

I bless the Lord who gives me counsel;     in the night also my heart instructs me.I have set the Lord always before me;     because he is at my right hand, I shall not be shaken.

Therefore, my heart is glad, and my whole being rejoices;     my flesh also dwells secure.For you will not abandon my soul to Sheol,     or let your holy one see corruption.

You make known to me the path of life;     in your presence there is fullness of joy;     at your right hand are pleasures forevermore. (Psalm 16:1–11)

“God will bring you into everlasting pleasure if he is your sovereign Lord and supreme treasure.”

If you have a Bible, I want you to open it to Psalm 16, which I just recited. Let me set the table for you before I pray and ask God to come and do mighty things among us. The reason I anticipate that he’s going to do remarkable things is because of the way he has set up this evening.

Numbered Days

Two weeks ago, I was in the Boundary Waters in northern Minnesota, fishing with my son and six others. One of those others was a twenty-year colleague whom I love, who has been the worship leader at our church for twenty years. When we got back to the outfitters, he was to call home. The phone call was that his son had died at 22 without the slightest history of health troubles. He was in Northern Ireland doing a mission trip and simply fell over, and with his sister at his side, he met Jesus.

The funeral was last Friday, four days ago. Little did we know that Alex, before he had left for Northern Ireland, had told his small group what he wanted at his funeral. He didn’t think he was going to die, but he said, “Here are the songs, and here’s the text that I want — Psalm 16.” We sang all the songs that he chose, and Psalm 16 is the passage that I was asked to speak on months ago at this event.

And so last Friday, in front of about a thousand young people mainly, I was doing what I just did, praying Psalm 16 over those people. Now I’m here speaking to several thousand people, probably not too much older than Alex, on Psalm 16. And in my judgment, God set this up to burden me for you in a way that he wouldn’t or couldn’t in any other way. You have no idea whether you will live out this week. None. Alex had no troubled medical history whatsoever, and to this moment we do not know why he died.

So, Lord, I believe this is a divine appointment for many. Whether it be the case that some here will not live out the week or whether they will live sixty more years, it’s a divine appointment. And the weight I feel for this psalm to become a reality in their lives is very great.

And so I invite you, Holy Spirit, to come in the name of Jesus. I plead with you to come. Don’t leave me to my own resources. I look away from myself, and I ask that these friends would do the same. May they look away from themselves and all their performances, looking wholly to you to speak to them now, so that who David is and what he sees in this song, they would be and see and feel. I ask this in Jesus’s powerful name. Amen.

Undying Pleasure

Let me give you the main point, as I understand it, of all eleven verses in one sentence: God will bring you — body and soul, through life and death — into full and everlasting pleasure if God is your safest refuge, and your sovereign Lord, and your supreme treasure, and your trusted counselor. If he’s not, my prayer is that he would become these things for you as he speaks to you through this psalm.

A few of you who really know your Bible well might hear that one-sentence summary and say to me, “Are you going to take into account what the apostle Peter makes of this Psalm in Acts 2, in the New Testament? Peter says that verses 9–11 are a prophecy of the resurrection of Jesus, and you didn’t mention that in your main point. Why not? Because that’s the one thing he picked out of the psalm to mention.”

My answer has two parts. Number one, yes, I am going to deal with what Peter makes of this Psalm in Acts 2. Number two, the reason I don’t say that the resurrection of Jesus is part of the main point of this psalm is because I don’t think it is. Rather, the resurrection of Jesus is a massive and unshakable argument in support of the psalm’s main point.

“Again and again in the Bible, glorious realities are made to serve practical, personal main points in texts.”

If that sounds strange to you, that something as massive and unshakable and great and glorious as the resurrection of the Son of God from the dead should be an argument under a main point, supporting it, know this: one of the great and amazing and wonderful things about the Bible is that again and again and again, glorious things — massive, unshakable, beautiful, awesome realities — are made to serve practical, personal main points in texts. That’s amazing, and that’s true all over the Bible.

So yes, we will get to Peter’s application of verses 9–11 to the resurrection, and we will discover it is not the main point of Psalm 16. The main point of this text is that God will bring you — body and soul, through life and death — into full and everlasting pleasure if he is your treasure and refuge and sovereign and counselor. That’s the main point.

Audio Transcript

Welcome back to the podcast. We end the week talking about a marriage struggle. We have talked about many of the struggles and tensions marriages face over the years. Here’s another one of those topics, one we have not directly addressed yet. It comes to us from a young wife, who writes in anonymously to say this: “Pastor John, hello, and thank you for this podcast! I have a question about your point that men owe women a special kind of care. You’ve made this point several times on the podcast.

“In particular, Paul commands husbands to ‘not be harsh’ with their wives. He says this in Colossians 3:19. You say, ‘This admonition to men is owing to a peculiarly male temptation to be rough — even cruel — and to a peculiarly female vulnerability to that violence, on the one hand, and to a natural female gladness, on the other hand, to be honored with caring protection and strong tenderness.’ My question is this. My husband is not violent to me, praise God. But he is harsh. He’s just not a gentle man. How should I approach this topic with him?”

Well, if I’m talking to the husband — I need to just say this to get it out of the way and make sure it doesn’t go unsaid — I would have lots to say biblically, spiritually, relationally, about how he needs to deal with his own sins and personality quirks or weaknesses. But that’s not the question she’s asked. She asked us, How can I most helpfully approach him on this topic? So that’s what I’m going to talk about, perhaps with five suggestions. So, here they go.

Pray for Both

First, I would encourage our friend to pray both for her husband and for herself in this matter of his harshness. Jesus said that we should ask God that his will would be done on earth — and that would include in our marriages — as it’s done in heaven (Matthew 6:10). And that includes that his will be done the way the angels would do it. Husbands would love their wives, and wives would love their husbands, the way angels obey God — namely, joyfully and fully and without begrudging.

“It’s completely fitting that she would intercede with her Father in heaven that her husband would be softened.”

So, it’s completely fitting that she would intercede with her Father in heaven that her husband would be softened and moved toward greater Christlikeness in his demeanor toward her. And I say that she should pray for herself as well, because even though he bears his own peculiar burden of responsibility before God for his own change, we know from Scripture and experience that God uses the behavior of husbands and wives to bring about change in each other. He uses the people around us to affect the way we do things and feel about things. So, what God does in her will have an effect on what he does in him. So, she prays for herself as well.

Win Him with Gentleness

Second, in 1 Peter 3:1–2, Peter says to wives that they should try to bring about godly change in their husbands by means of their “respectful and pure conduct.” In other words, Peter underlines what we know from experience, that a person may be helped in his deliverance from his own sinning by the godly way that others behave around him, especially people close to him that he loves, like his wife.

I would guess that among the kind of conduct that God might use in the case of a harsh husband to bring about change would be what God said in Proverbs 15:1 (for the wife, for example): “A soft answer turns away wrath” — or maybe “turns away harshness.” Or Proverbs 25:15: “A soft tongue will break a bone” — the bone of harshness. In other words, I would encourage her not to return evil for evil or harshness for harshness, which will probably only spiral into a worse situation, but rather to try to win him toward gentleness with gentleness.

Share the Burden Wisely

Third, there will probably come a point where she desires and needs the support of others in this effort to love her harsh husband. She will need them to pray for her and encourage her and counsel her. But I would earnestly caution her against bad-mouthing her husband behind his back with other people. This will almost certainly backfire in a more hopeless situation.

“There will probably come a point where she desires and needs the support of others in this effort.”

So then, the question is, “Well, what can she do?” Well, let me illustrate maybe what might happen. During some of our darkest days of marriage, Nöel and I both knew we came to a point where we needed to have others to counsel us. We weren’t sure yet whether it needed to be a professional counselor, a Christian counselor (which it did eventually), but we wanted some friends to encourage us and pray for us, where we could unburden ourselves and be heard with sympathy — and yet not naively, as though everything is her fault or his fault. We wanted others to pray for us.

So, we knew we did not want to talk about our problems just randomly to everybody that came along. That would’ve been harmful. So we asked each other, and we just agreed with each other on a handful of very trusted friends. And we gave each other the trusted permission to say anything that seemed helpful to say, and to ask that other couple not to share anything.

In fact, it was interesting. One of the counselors that we did choose to go to insisted that we bring with us to every counseling session — well, not to every one, but to most of them — another couple with us. Isn’t that amazing? What a strategy! I thought, That’s really good. It’s a huge commitment of time for the other couple to invest, but it means somebody else always knows what you’re dealing with, and you can’t get away with too much when that’s happening. That requires an enormous amount of trust, but that was our way forward. And it kept us from speaking about our problems with just random people. We trusted each other with those we had agreed upon. So, that’s a possible way forward, perhaps.

Distinguish Sin from Personality

Fourth, I would encourage this wife to recognize that very likely, part of what she is experiencing in her husband’s harshness is owing to sin, and part of it is probably owing to — what should we call it? — the inherited genetic tendencies embedded in his own basic personality or in his upbringing.

Now, I’m not excusing any sin by saying this, but I am being realistic and acknowledging how complicated human beings are. I know people whose personality is such that you wish they would smile more. You wish that they would oil the relational wheels with a few more kind words or forthcoming encouragements or affirmations. But instead, there’s almost continual bluntness, terseness, unemotional communication.

And I have learned over the decades that in certain cases this is simply not sinful. This is a deeply ingrained personality trait with no ill will. There’s no ill will behind it. You know this over time. And it will only make matters worse if the people around these folks continually impute sin to them, where in fact that’s not mainly what’s going on.

Approach Him with Hope

Finally, last point. When it comes to actually approaching the husband, here are a few thoughts about how to go about that.

Create a context of encouragement.

It is perfectly biblical — as you can see from the way Paul approaches the problems, say, in 1 Corinthians — to find explicit things that you can say by way of thankfulness and encouragement and affirmation (call them evidences of God’s grace that you see in his life), so that criticisms, when they come, are embedded in a rich context of love and verbal affirmation.

Model humility and vulnerability.

In the overall context of your relationship, then, also ask him from time to time, perhaps, if there is there anything in your own behavior or your own attitudes that are bothersome to him or frustrating to him or maddening to him or annoying to him, and ask him to point out any ways that he would like you to make changes.

I’m saying this in the larger, bigger context — no artificial way of saying, “Okay, here are three affirmations I’m going to make and three vulnerabilities I’m going to express, and now here comes my criticism.” It’s just a bigger, healthy relationship that you try to build so that when you broach a problem, it’s not part of an ugly pattern.

Try not to globalize.

When you try to describe to him what you mean by his harshness, try not to globalize. This is something I had to learn about myself in dealing with my wife. Try not to globalize. That is, try not to say, “You always do this. You’re always saying it that way. You always do it that way.” I can tell you, human beings do not like the word always. If you want to push somebody away, make it sound like this criticism is global; it’s all-consuming. “That’s all you are as a human being.” Because what that says to the other person is this: “There’s no hope for you.” They will feel paralyzed and helpless.

So instead, you give one or two concrete examples that you wish they did another way — a different tone of voice or a different way of answering. And that gives them some sense, “Okay, I get that. I can see how you would hear that. I’ll try not to do that anymore.” And incrementally, then, who knows how God might be pleased to work.

Keep pursuing change.

And then, finally, I would say that if he indicates a sense of openness to talk about this, then you can explain your feelings more fully, you can ask for what you long for and maybe explain why it would be so happy for the relationship if he would be less harsh in these several ways. And if you both feel stuck after a while, it is perfectly biblical and right to seek help from close friends, or even, if it comes to that, from a wise Christian counselor.

Audio Transcript

Well, some Christians are dramatically saved out of a life of scandalous sin and have an amazing testimony of deliverance to share. Many other Christians, particularly those saved at a young age, don’t really have a dramatic conversion story. And that leads to a challenge for at least one young Christian, a young woman named Rachael. She writes in, “Hello Pastor John, and thank you for taking my question! I’ve been a Christian all my life, as long as I can recall. I’m not perfect. I have a ton of issues and God is still working in me. But I’ve never indulged in alcohol, never done any drugs, never engaged in premarital sex. I guard my heart to the best of my ability and pray often when I’m struggling with temptations. I’ll be the first to tell you that I need God’s grace just as much as, if not more so than, anybody else.

“But sometimes, I get a case of FOMO, the fear of missing out. Sometimes I feel like the older brother in the prodigal-son parable. Like when I see people at church who turned away from sinful hedonism and became Christians, I’m happy for them and rejoice with them. But at the same time I feel like, ‘Wow, no one cares that I’ve always said no to drugs and sex and wickedness my whole life, but boy they all care when all the people doing that stuff turn away from it.’ And I know that’s not what I should be thinking. I shouldn’t be bitter or resentful. But sometimes those feelings manifest. I’m not proud of these thoughts and I often pray to God that these feelings would flee so I can just bask in his presence, but it’s hard. Any advice you have would help. Thank you!”

I appreciate Rachael’s honesty, and I appreciate her self-recrimination at the temptation to feel resentment that her lifelong faithfulness to Christ feels unacknowledged and less valued than recent converts from lives of flagrant sin. And one of the reasons that I appreciate this is that it shows me that Rachael is not in the category of the Pharisee in Luke 18:9–14:

Two men went up into the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. The Pharisee, standing by himself, prayed thus: “God, I thank you that I am not like other men, extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week; I give tithes of all that I get.” But the tax collector, standing far off, would not even lift up his eyes to heaven, but beat his breast, saying, “God, be merciful to me, a sinner!” I tell you, this man went down to his house justified, rather than the other.

Now, Rachael is aware of that danger, and she’s not proud when that temptation rises. That’s a good sign.

Sons and Slaves

She mentions the older brother in the parable of the prodigal son. Now that is a dangerous comparison because she doesn’t want to be in the category of the older brother. The older brother was very angry that the father was so lavish in his celebration of the return of the younger son who had wasted the father’s inheritance.

But the problem with the older brother, more deeply, was that he related to his father like a slave instead of a son. He reminded his father “how hard I’ve served you all these years.” You could just hear, “. . . like a slave,” but the father shook his head as if in bafflement and said, “Son, you are always with me, and all that is mine is yours” (Luke 15:31).

“The problem with the older brother, more deeply, was that he related to his father like a slave instead of a son.”

In other words, the problem with the older brother is not merely that he doesn’t love his younger brother the way he should, but that he doesn’t see or feel the glory of what he has in his relationship to his father, and the inheritance from the father. So, Rachael does not want to be like this older brother.

Who Are the Ninety-Nine?

Now, let’s go one step further with this parable, because it gets insightful for her situation. The parable of the prodigal son is the third of three parables that illustrate joy when a lost sinner is rescued by Jesus for the kingdom of heaven. In the first parable, there’s the man who leaves ninety-nine sheep behind, and he goes out, and he finds one lost sheep. And it says, “There will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous persons who need no repentance” (Luke 15:7).

And then there’s the woman in the next parable who has ten coins. She loses one, and she desperately sweeps all of her house, finds the coin, gathers her friends, and rejoices. And Jesus says, “Just so, I tell you, there is joy before the angels of God over one sinner who repents” (Luke 15:10).

Now that might sound like the situation Rachael is frustrated about. The church throws a party for one amazing convert out of a life of flagrant sinning — why? Well, doesn’t Jesus say in Luke 15 that one sinner who repents is more to be celebrated than ninety-nine faithful Rachaels? No, that is not what it says. These three parables are not about a church with ninety-nine godly, faithful, lifelong Christians who know they need grace, and who live by the mercy of God. That’s not what these parables are about.

These parables are about a dinner party where Jesus is eating with tax collectors and sinners, surrounded by Pharisees who are ticked off that Jesus is offering his forgiving fellowship to sinners. The elder brother represents the Pharisees, not the faithful, humble, believing church member. And when Jesus refers to ninety-nine persons who need no repentance, he’s speaking ironically, because there is no such thing as a person who needs no repentance, especially the Pharisees.

Where We See Our Sin

But here’s what I would say, both to Rachael and to Rachael’s church leaders. It is a serious mistake to give the impression that Christians come to understand the depth of depravity from which we’ve been saved, and the glories of grace by which we’ve been saved, by focusing on the remembered experience of conversion and the sins that went before.

That’s a profound mistake to think that we can know the depth of our depravity by recalling our pre-conversion sins, or that we can know the glories of grace by recalling that night when we were set free from drug addiction and sexual bondage. That is utterly naive for pastors to think that way or people to think that way.

“Nobody can know the depths of their depravity and the glories of God’s grace by focusing on remembered experience.”

Nobody, nobody can know the depths of their depravity and the glories of God’s grace by focusing on remembered experience. I don’t care how horrible the lifestyle was or how dramatic the conversion was, all such estimations of depravity and grace will be superficial without the biblical revelation of what depravity really is in relation to God, and what grace really is in the heart of God. That reality can only be learned from what God has said in his word, not from any analysis of our sinful lives or our conversions. Listen to Paul:

You were dead in the trespasses and sins in which you once walked, following the [age] of this world, following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience — among whom we all once lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the body and the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, like the rest of mankind. (Ephesians 2:1–3)

They are darkened in their understanding, alienated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them, due to their hardness of heart. . . . But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ — by grace you have been saved. (Ephesians 4:18; 2:4–5)

If we don’t penetrate into this kind of God-given description of our condition before and after grace, we will never know the depth of our depravity or the glory of God’s grace.

Glory of Grace

Which means for Rachael and her church, by all means, let there be celebrations of every conversion of every hardened sinner. Amen. And let there be celebrations of every 8-year-old child who genuinely repents and embraces Jesus as Savior and Lord and Treasure. And let every Christian marvel every day that he or she has peace with God, and that we swim in an ocean of grace, and that we owe nothing to ourselves and everything to God.

And let the elders teach the people, so that year by year the people tremble more and more at the horrors of what they were saved from at 8 or 18 or 58. And so, year by year, they leap with greater joy at the increasingly amazing grasp of grace by which they live.