Audio Transcript

Welcome back! On Monday we looked at whether or not life has morally neutral areas — those gray areas, areas in life where we make decisions that are not necessarily sinful or holy. And in that first episode of the week, APJ 1846, Pastor John defined sin for us. He defined sin with Romans 3:23, saying, “Sin is first the disposition of the human heart to prefer human glory — especially self-glory — over God’s glory.” We exchange God’s glory for something we prefer more. We sin by exchanging the glory of God with another glory. That’s verse 23. Then verse 24 gives the solution to this sin, that we must be “justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus” (Romans 3:24).

This pair of glorious verses, Romans 3:23–24 — one verse defining sin, the other defining God’s response to that sin — holds the key to how we become unshakable people in this world. Those verses are, according to Pastor John, “more important than ten thousand books written by man to help you solve your problems.” So much so, he says, “If you build your life on these two verses, make them the foundation of your life, you will be strong and stable in a hundred crises” of life. That’s the bold testimony of John Piper, who makes those very claims in today’s sermon clip, a clip from a 1999 sermon. Here’s Pastor John to explain.

Verse 23 describes the universal need of every human being. And verse 24 gives the all-sufficient remedy for that need. These two verses are more important than ten thousand books written by man about how to solve your problems and make your future better. These are the words of God through the apostle Paul, and they tell us about our true condition, and they tell us about what God has done to remedy that condition.

Gospel Gravity

If you will build your life on these two verses, if you’ll make them the foundation of your life, you will be strong and stable in a hundred crises. If you will put these verses and the truth of them at the center of your life, like the sun at the center of the planets of the solar system of your life, then this truth will hold the orbiting planets of all the concerns and aspects of your life in place.

But if you allow this truth of Romans 3:23–24 to begin to marginalize and slip out to the rim — say, where Neptune and Pluto are out there — you know what would happen. If the sun moved from the center to the periphery of the solar system, everything would be destroyed. Everything would be in chaos. Everything would be confusion and perplexity and weakness, which is why so many professing Christians coast and amble through life wondering why their lives are so strangely perplexed, so out of sync, and out of kilter, and out of order, and nothing seems to be working right.

It’s because the truth of this magnificent gospel, which I’m going to try to articulate, is not at the center anymore. It’s not the sun that’s holding everything in place. It doesn’t have the weight of gravity to pull all things. Something else is at the center. You should be asking yourself right now, “What’s that in my life? Something really grips me in my life, something I come back to again and again and again. I go there in the morning, and I go there at noon, and I go there at night, and it pulls on me. What is it?”

Lacking the Glory of God

Verse 23 says that the universal need in the world of every person has to do with sin. “For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Romans 3:23). No exceptions. There’s no distinction. “All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” We saw that from Romans 1:18–3:20.

And now he tells us a little something about this condition by saying, “If you’ve sinned, your present condition is that you are now falling short of the glory of God.” Literally, the word is “you are now lacking the glory of God.” What does that mean? “All have sinned and are lacking the glory of God.” Does that mean that we were supposed to be as glorious as God, and we fell short and didn’t arrive at that divine glory, and so we have fallen short? I don’t think that’s what it means.

You weren’t designed to be as glorious as God. The best way to put meat on the bones of this simple verse is to go back to Romans 1, look at the discussion of glory in the context of sin, and see what a lacking might mean in Romans. So if you notice in Romans 1:18, Paul said they are suppressing the truth in unrighteousness. Everybody in the world is a truth-suppressor until God gets ahold of us. We suppress the truth in our unrighteousness. And then look at verse 23: “[They] exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images” (Romans 1:23). In verse 28: “They disapproved of having God in their knowledge” — that’s a literal translation. “They disapproved of having God in their knowledge.”

So, the picture you get is that sin is a failure to embrace the glory of God and God himself as our highest treasure and make him the center and foundation and supreme value of our lives, and thus to exchange that glory for some other treasure in this world, and thus lack that glory as our treasure, and thus bring great dishonor upon God.

“Sin is mainly about God; it’s not mainly about hurting people.”

That’s what sin is and does. Sin is mainly about God; it’s not mainly about hurting people. Sin hurts people. It’ll hurt you in the end. But it’s not mainly about hurting people. It’s mainly about God and trading, bartering, throwing away his supreme value and glory in order that we might put something else at the center, and in the bank, and in the treasury of our lives that we love, and we lean on, and we find satisfaction in. And thus, he is belittled and despised, sometimes wittingly and sometimes unwittingly — the same effect in both cases.

Great Guilt

Now that’s a great guilt. The reason it’s a great guilt is because God created this universe, the whole universe, to display his glory so that we might see it, and value it, and love it, and enjoy it and reflect it in the world. That’s why the universe and you were created. It should not therefore be surprising to us that the world will go haywire when the world is in rebellion against the design of the world.

If God designed the world, according to Isaiah 43:7, to display his glory, and you are choosing to dispense with his glory to put something else at the center of your life and love it, and live for it, and think about it, and dwell on it, and value it, it’s not surprising that the design of God for a beautiful, holistic world would be destroyed in your life. There is dysfunction and chaos and misery all over the world because the whole world is in rebellion against valuing the glory of God above all things. That’s why the world and your life is in the condition that it’s in.

“There is dysfunction and chaos and misery all over the world because the whole world is in rebellion.”

Sin is contemplating God as the supreme value and rejecting him as the supreme value, and thus exchanging the glory of God for some kind of substitute image (think of what it is), and thus lacking the glory, and thus dishonoring the glory of God. And that is a great guilt. And that’s the universal condition of humankind in verse 23. It’s a massive problem now that we have.

Great Turn

And the problem is, since we’ve all done this, how can we get right with God when we have so belittled him? And that’s what verse 24 is about. This verse is so rich. A great turn has come in Romans 3:21: “But now the righteousness of God has been manifested apart from the law.” Some great event has happened.

“Now.” Do you hear that word now? “But now,” some great event has happened, and something new is happening in the world. No other religion knows of this great now, because it’s the now of the arrival of Jesus Christ and the redemption that is in him. So let’s read verse 24: “And [all] are justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus” (Romans 3:24).

Fathers, I have a confession: I get “the feels” around all things Christmas. Listening to nonstop holiday music (after Thanksgiving, of course), the sight of a tree on a car, exterior illumination that would make Clark Griswold proud, the smell of evergreen — I love it all. I don’t need Andy Williams to tell me, “it’s the most wonderful time of the year,” but I sure can’t wait until he does!

If you don’t relate to this confession, though, don’t worry. I’ve got another one: on multiple occasions, I’ve arrived at Christmas morning feeling that it snuck up on me. This moment of recognition usually happens in the middle of our Christmas Eve service, when I glance around and see my wife and our five kids joyfully singing praises to “Christ, the newborn King,” or listening intently to the story of Jesus’s birth. On a number of years, this joyful moment has been accompanied in my heart with a twinge of sadness. Another Christmas has almost passed, and yet again, it snuck up on me.

Stewards of Hearts

I’m aware that these two confessions may sound contradictory. On the one hand, as a man who’s a kid at heart, I eagerly anticipate and count down the arrival of the holiday season. On the other hand, as a father who’s a steward of hearts, I have a tendency to arrive at the end of the holiday season and feel like I wasn’t ready for it — and now it’s gone.

I’ve heard quite a few fathers say that their daughter’s wedding day snuck up on them. They don’t mean they didn’t see it coming or were surprised by its arrival. No, it snuck up because the many things they needed to do (host family, write toasts, pay invoices, and much more) distracted them from the one thing they were honored to be: “Daddy.” In short, the significance of what they were a part of was lost on them until it had passed. Even if they were present in the moment, they were not prepared to win the moment.

This illustration has helped put words to the sadness that I’ve felt at the end of too many holiday seasons (and I don’t think I’m alone). If we are not mindful on the front end, the many things we “need” to do this December will distract us from the one thing we need to be: children of our good and generous God. And if we fathers personally neglect the significance of the Advent season, it’s unlikely we will lead our families any differently.

Fathers, let’s do more this year than be physically present; let’s get spiritually prepared to lead our family to win the moments. If you’re inspired to join me but don’t know where to begin, I’d like to offer three practices that have consistently enabled our family to win the holiday season, moment by moment.

1. Create Devotional Moments

The first practice is to create devotional moments. By “devotional moments,” I’m talking specifically about creating time for the family to gather and hear God’s word together.

Before I share what my wife and I have found helpful, let me make sure you are picturing our family correctly. Imagine a quiet and orderly group of serious, scholarly believers, gathered together to eagerly learn from the Scriptures. Got those people in mind? Now picture the opposite of that group. That’s our family. There are seven of us, and for some reason just saying the words “family devotion” produces an effect like drinking a Red Bull, where everyone “gets wings.” Even the dogs get in on the madness.

But while family devotions aren’t always easy and can go south quickly, we’ve discovered that a little planning and perspective can set us up for success. Years ago, we set it as our goal to create family devotional times that were fun, engaging, and memorable. We observed that many kids leave Christian homes feeling that the Scriptures are boring, irrelevant, and hard to understand. Not only do our three goals counter these, but they can create a learning environment that kids might even look forward to. As a father, I consider it a huge win anytime I can spark in my children an eagerness, or even an openness, for the living and active word of God (Hebrews 4:12).

“Fathers, do what it takes to carve out some planning time on the front end of the holidays (now!).”

During the holidays, we try to gather at least two times a week for family devotions. For us, family-devotion topics typically emerge as my wife and I share with each other what we are learning in our respective Advent devotionals. If we have any “secret sauce” to share, however, it’s what we do next. Julia and I then spend a few minutes brainstorming about three things: teaser, takeaway, and treasure hunt. (The more you do this, the better you get at it.)

The teaser starts our family devotions. We tee up our time with a fun question that gets everyone talking and points toward the message. The takeaway is the one big idea from Scripture that we want the family to walk away with. A concise takeaway focuses the devotion and gives the family language to rally around. Last, the treasure hunt is when things really get fun. Prior to the family devotion, we secure some sort of holiday treat (like a family game, a dessert to make, a holiday movie) and hide it somewhere in the house. Here’s the catch: the treat is hidden somewhere that is connected to something from the devotional. The one rule about the treasure hunt is that all the kids have to discuss and hunt together.

I hope you can envision how powerful it can be to create family devotional moments that are fun, engaging, and memorable.

2. Capitalize on Seasonal Moments

The second practice is to capitalize on seasonal moments. Unless you live on Mount Crumpit, others in your area have already put together holiday events that can provide your family with memorable moments. If setting aside time to pray and think creatively is the key to the first practice, this second one hinges on the willingness to do a little calendar coordination. In all likelihood, your area schools will have holiday programs, churches will host Christmas concerts, community theaters will produce shows, and the city at large will plan a slew of seasonal events. It’s all there, simply waiting to be leveraged by those who will take some time now to look ahead and make a few decisions.

For years, we had the same experience over and over: I would find the greatest holiday events for the family to enjoy — and we wouldn’t ever go. Before you think I live with a bunch of hermits, I should add that I would find these events the day of the show, and either the tickets would be sold out or someone in the family had other plans. Bah humbug!

My wife had been telling me about this thing called “planning” that adults sometimes do, and when I finally applied it to the holiday season it was a game changer. At the start of the Christmas season, we take some time to identify important moments for each family member (so we can all plan to attend), as well as a few special holiday events. (By the way, news of a special seasonal event makes a great treasure hunt discovery after an enjoyable family devotion!)

3. Copy Memorable Moments

Last, I would encourage you to copy memorable moments year after year. It doesn’t take long in life to realize that change is inevitable — and navigating through a world of constant change can lead to a feeling of instability, especially among children. As a father, I long for my children to know they have a God who is “the stability of your times” (Isaiah 33:6) and one who is “the same yesterday and today and forever” (Hebrews 13:8). As we teach these truths, we can also seek to create a home environment that models it. We have leaned on our family traditions as a way to provide a sense of constancy in an ever-changing world.

What are your family traditions that you copy year after year? Our holiday season is full of memorable and repeatable moments that provide an anchor for our family. We have traditions that are unique to us (“elf knock,” holiday game night after devotions, ham-and-steak holiday meal, stockings hid on Christmas morning, sibling gift exchange before Christmas) as well as some that I imagine many families do (family pajamas on Christmas Eve, birthday cake for Jesus, reading Luke 2 and praying together before opening gifts). To quote my good friend Cousin Eddie, a meaningful family tradition is “a gift that keeps on giving” year after year.

Seize the Season

The prophet Isaiah provides much-needed wisdom for what it’s going to take to see these ideas become a reality: “He who is noble plans noble things, and on noble things he stands” (Isaiah 32:8). Fathers, do what it takes to carve out some planning time on the front end of the holidays (now!). Get a plan for creating devotional moments, coordinate how you will capitalize on seasonal moments, and identify the memorable moments to copy year after year.

For those who apply these three simple practices, I am confident that you will look at your family on Christmas Eve with a whole lot of gladness and very little sadness. For this holiday season came, and you were ready for it.

Encouraging young couples to cultivate trust is a bit like exhorting a teenage boy to develop healthy eating habits: it’s rarely front of mind. However, like health, trust takes time, intentionality, and effort to develop and guard. So whether you’re engaged, or early in your marriage (or years in, for that matter), how are you and your spouse deepening and strengthening your trust in marriage?

Traditional marriage vows include the phrase “forsaking all others” as a promise of exclusivity “for as long as we both shall live.” In his book A Severe Mercy, Sheldon Vanauken includes an image that offers both a sober warning and a powerful insight into marriage, one my wife and I have benefitted from personally.

As unbelievers, Sheldon and his wife, Davy, so cherished their relationship that they did not want anyone or anything to come between their love for one another. They therefore committed to maintaining a “Shining Barrier” around their marriage to preserve the exclusivity of their love. They vowed to never have children, lest rambunctious little ones invade their shining barrier. Lest death break that barrier, they even promised to one day sail out to sea to sink their sailboat so they could die together. In retrospect, the converted Sheldon judiciously titles the section on their young, distorted commitment to one another’s vows “Pagan Love.” As Christians, we recognize in their marriage a sober warning: a relationship so devoted to itself excludes and replaces God.

Nevertheless, Sheldon and Davy’s commitment to radical exclusivity in their marriage highlights a powerful insight: marriages thrive on trust. Sheldon and Davy prized their “in-loveness” and feared broken trust would destroy it. They therefore sought to cultivate and encourage trust. My wife and I seek to do so too, while wary not to resort to Sheldon and Davy’s extreme exclusivity. We do so by pursuing one another in three distinct but overlapping modes: face-to-face intimacy, back-to-back partnership, and side-by-side friendship.

Face-to-Face Intimacy

Face-to-face trust grows when spouses seek to know and be known by one another. Such intimacy may happen on weekly date nights, or during prayer before bed, or on morning walks, or with playfulness around each other throughout the day. And, yes, in sexual foreplay and consummation too. We’re naive, though, to reduce intimacy to sex. For, as lovers come to know, sex is merely part of a much greater beauty. “To be in love, as to see beauty, is a kind of adoring that turns the lover away from self,” Sheldon observes (A Severe Mercy, 43). Thus, face-to-face intimacy is a beholding of the beloved — a looking up from self and away from the world to truly see another.

“Face-to-face trust grows when spouses seek to know and be known by one another.”

Beholding our beloved will look different in different seasons of marriage. In every season, though, intimacy is an opening up of yourself to your spouse emotionally, physically, and spiritually. This requires vulnerability from both of you. In fact, trust and vulnerability run parallel in intimacy. Thoughtfully and consistently sharing your joys and burdens, fears and successes, and then seeking to hear the same from your spouse, engenders the kind of trust out of which healthy marriages are made.

For many couples early in their relationship, emotional and physical intimacy may come easily. A gentle touch. A whispered word. A quick glance. Eros makes us eager to give ourselves heart, soul, mind, and body to our beloved. And in most marriages, you will quickly rack up more face time with your spouse than with anyone else. But it takes work to develop deeper and lasting intimacy.

In his song “World Traveler,” Andrew Peterson describes how his small-town younger self dreamed of traveling the world to discover “the great beyond.” He had “hardly seen a thing,” though, when he “gave a golden ring / To the one who gave her heart to me.” And he became a different kind of world traveler as “she opened the gate and took my hand / And led me into the mystic land / Where her galaxies swirl.” For deep and lasting trust to take root, we must travel each other’s souls with a kind of patient, unhurried attention that is willing to wonder and delight.

In beholding our spouse, we’re seeking to give and receive the true reward of face-to-face intimacy: being both genuinely known and truly loved. We will ultimately find this only in communion with God, and yet he ordains marriage as one picture that points to such a future heavenly reward (Ephesians 5:25–33). Such face-to-face trust, though, is fragile and requires a different kind of posture to guard and protect it.

Back-to-Back Partnership

When couples, knowing each other’s strengths and weaknesses, seek to guard and protect each other, they develop a kind of back-to-back trust. We all have blind spots, besetting sins, and frailties that our spouse comes to know through the consistent face time of everyday life. And spouses can use those sight lines and their own unique strengths to protect each other. Sin crouches at the door (Genesis 4:7), Satan roars like a lion (1 Peter 5:8), and both seek to devour your marriage. Like two heroes with circling enemies, couples turn back-to-back, trusting the other to call out threats, shout encouragements, and celebrate even the small victories together.

“Sin crouches at the door, Satan roars like a lion, and both seek to devour your marriage.”

Couples, of course, can partner back-to-back without an obvious enemy like sin or Satan. External pressures from difficult circumstances, a challenging boss, high expectations from extended family or friends can all create a setting where a couple needs to practice back-to-back partnership. The in-laws come into town, and their casual, make-it-up-as-we-go style disorients the wife’s thoughtful, well-planned itineraries. Her gift for planning is unwittingly ignored by the husband’s parents, and after day one with them she feels exposed and frustrated. She’s tempted to unload her frustration on him, and he’s tempted to shrug off her concerns as being oversensitive. Both spouses are tempted to start shooting at each other in the very moment they most need to care for the other, building mutual trust by standing back-to-back. In recognizing the urge to attack him, she can instead generously acknowledge the qualities worth praising in her in-laws — while he can initiate a frank conversation with his parents about following the plan for day two.

As we recognize and protect against threats to each other, we reap the fruit of stability and endurance. Back-to-back trust strengthens marriages to bear the heavy burdens we carry together in a fallen world. Yet the intimacy from face-to-face and the strength from back-to-back can both be undermined if we neglect another posture for cultivating trust.

Side-by-Side Friendship

Couples who seek to behold and pursue something together cultivate side-by-side trust. This side-by-side posture is marriage as friendship.

Friendships form around a mutual beholding of a shared delight. When you discover another who shares your interest in something dear to you, you declare, “You too?! I thought I was the only one!” (C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves, 248). Your friendship may include many mutual pursuits or only just a few, but any side-by-side time fosters the kind of trust that comes from holding something in common beyond your relationship itself.

Many couples’ relationships initially form around something they pursued together. Perhaps you two met because of a love for music, or a shared academic interest, or a business venture. Often, however, the demands and trials of life act over time like a centrifugal force, pushing those once-shared pursuits to the periphery. I’m suggesting that, as much as you can, pursue interests held in common, whether old or new, in the regular rhythms of your life together.

Perhaps you host the annual fall festival in your backyard, or serve on the worship team together, or play Terraforming Mars with those other board-game fanatics. Whatever the common pursuit, invest in it together. And if you object that you do not share the same interests, then find one of your spouse’s interests that you can learn too. Sheldon loved literature; Davy excelled in music. Out of love for the other, they “became at home in both worlds” (A Severe Mercy, 38).

Finding Intimacy on the Way to God

Investing in side-by-side trust is essential because a “creeping separateness,” Sheldon and Davy rightly warn, is frequently a “killer of love” (37). And as they later discovered in their conversion, the greatest resistance to that centrifugal force is no mere common pursuit but the greatest pursuit: beholding God together. So even if shared hobbies and interests feel sparse, seek always to go in a Godward direction together. For Christian marriages are built not around mere eros or philia, but around a shared receiving and giving of agape love for God and one another. Therefore, together as a couple we must prize worshiping God at home and with God’s people.

The beautiful thing about these three postures for cultivating trust is their mutually reinforcing nature. You can’t grow in intimacy if you are not working to protect each other from temptation and sin, disappointment and burnout — or just simply protecting your own time together. The reverse is true as well. You can’t grow in your ability to help each other see your blind spots if you do not grow in face-to-face fellowship. And both face-to-face and back-to-back trust flourish in the consistency of a side-by-side friendship set on God.