Audio Transcript

We end the week with episode 1800. It’s an incredible benchmark for us, and it’s only possible because of you. So thank you for a decade of support and for your encouragements, email questions, and 250 million episode plays — and for hundreds of thousands of subscribes over the years. This podcast happens because you invest time with us — precious time that we don’t take for granted. That’s why we don’t have ads or sponsors, and it’s one of the reasons we don’t dillydally around with windy introductions. So, moving on to the episode.

Today’s question is a great one, Pastor John. Scripture gives us a constellation of ways to think of the Christian life. And a listener to the podcast named Jason wants to know how they relate. Here’s what he asks: “Pastor John, hello! Can you help me figure something out? Is the key to personal sanctification more about ‘looking to Jesus,’ as Hebrews 12:2 says? Or is it more about being united ‘to him who has been raised from the dead,’ as Romans 7:4 puts it? Or is it mostly about ‘beholding’ Christ’s glory, as 2 Corinthians 3:18 puts it? Or is it more about just obeying and doing the ‘work of faith,’ as 2 Thessalonians 1:11 says?

“I know the answer is likely going to be, ‘Yes, it’s all of those!’ But I am trying to connect them all in a way that is practical to teach and live. I find myself jumping from one to the other as though they are multiple things. Surely there are logical connections that make them all one and the same.” Pastor John, how would you put this puzzle together for Jason?

Wow, I just love this kind of a great question — not only this kind of question, but just this way of thinking. Taking different parts of Scripture — they use very different language — and asking, “Are there deep, common, unified, coherent realities here?” That is so helpful to do.

So let’s see if I can weave these four strands together into some kind of cord that the Lord might use to bring us along in our pursuit of sanctification. That’s what they’re designed for, and I think the Lord is very pleased when we try to put the different parts of his word together in order to see the common realities behind them, even when different words are used to describe those realities.

One Great Work of God

The realities in these four passages of Scripture would include these (I just made a list of them as I read these passages):

God
word of God
Christ
death of Christ
glory of Christ
law of God
faith in Christ
faith in his word
hope
joy
Christian freedom
the Holy Spirit
human resolve

All of those are realities, and they are all at work in these passages, and they are not doing contradictory things.

“There is one great work of God weaving all these realities together in the process of making us holy.”

There is one great work of God weaving all these realities together in the process of making us holy, making us sanctified, more Christlike. Different texts focus on different ones of these realities, but none of them leads us in a direction that would in any way contradict the other passages. We’ve misunderstood the text if one text is sending us off in a direction that flies in the face of the other passages. So, let me take them one at a time and just see if I can draw out some of the common connections.

Looking to Jesus

Since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight, and sin which clings so closely, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is seated at the right hand of the throne of God. (Hebrews 12:1–2)

So in this text, “looking to Jesus” is given as the means by which we run our race with endurance. That race, of course, includes becoming holy, staying on the narrow racetrack to the end. And when we look to Jesus, we see three things that affect our running.

First, he’s called “the founder and perfecter of our faith,” which means he has done the decisive work in dying and rising and sitting down at the right hand of God. Because of Christ, our faith is well-founded and well-finished. It’s as good as done. In other words, because of Christ, we’re going to make it to the finish line. He founded our faith. He’ll finish our faith.

“Because of Christ, we’re going to make it to the finish line. He founded our faith. He’ll finish our faith.”

Second, we look to Christ as inspiring our endurance because of his endurance — enduring the cross. He ran his race successfully through suffering. This emboldens us to run our race through suffering.

And third, when we look to Jesus, he shows us how he ran his race. He says he ran it “for the joy that was set before him.” Therefore, the key to our endurance is to stand on that finished work of Christ and be confident that all-satisfying joy is just over the horizon. He’s going to finish it. He’s going to bring us great joy. That’s how we keep going, because that’s how he kept going.

So this confidence in the joy that is set before us is called, in Hebrews, faith. In the chapter just before, faith is the substance of things hoped for, the joy hoped for. Faith is the foretaste, the substance (Hebrews 11:1). Right now you can taste it — the foretaste of the joy of the promise of God, over and over. In Hebrews 11, the saints obey by faith — that is, this faith, this confident hope of a joyful future, is the key to their obedience, just like it was the key to Jesus’s obedience. So that’s the picture, and that’s the reality of how we are sanctified, in Hebrews 12.

New Way of the Spirit

Now here’s Romans 7:4, 6:

You also have died to the law through the body of Christ, so that you may belong to another, to him who has been raised from the dead, in order that we may bear fruit for God. . . . We are released from the law, having died to that which held us captive, so that we serve in the new way of the Spirit, and not in the old way of the written code.

Now, the new reality that Paul introduces here that wasn’t in Hebrews 12 is the fact that when Christ died, we died. Specifically, we died to the law. We were released from law-keeping as the way of getting right with God, as the way of ongoing fellowship with God.

That’s new, right? Nothing was said about the law in Hebrews 12:1–2. So Paul is coming at sanctification with a different problem in view: not the need for endurance through suffering — that’s the issue in Hebrews; that’s not the issue here — but the need for liberation from law-keeping. That’s the issue here. How do we relate to God? How do we become holy without law-keeping as the foundation for our lives (because that we died to)?

And the other new reality that Paul introduces in Romans 7:4 is the Holy Spirit. He says that we “have died to the law . . . so that we serve in the new way of the Spirit and not in the old way of the written code” (Romans 7:6) And that wasn’t in Hebrews.

And I would say that this new way of the Spirit is precisely the way of Hebrews 12, describing the Christian life — namely, the life of faith in the promises of God to fulfill us, to fill us with hope for future joy. That’s the new way of the Spirit in Romans 7. That’s the alternative to law-keeping as a way of walking with God. So, they are complementary texts, coming at sanctification from two very different angles.

Beholding the Glory of Christ

Third, Jason introduces, or he brings up, 2 Corinthians 3:18. In this text, Paul combines the reality of the Holy Spirit (mentioned in Romans 7) and the reality of looking to Jesus (mentioned in Hebrews 12). And he adds the realities of glory and freedom, neither of which had been mentioned explicitly in those other two texts, but are mentioned here. So he says,

Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. And we all, with unveiled face, beholding glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another. For this comes from the Lord who is the Spirit. (2 Corinthians 3:17–18)

What this text adds to the “new way of the Spirit,” described in Hebrews 12 and Romans 7, is that looking to Jesus in Hebrews 12 means not only seeing him as enduring the cross, but seeing him as glorious in all that he’s done.

The focus is on how beautiful and glorious and magnificent he is — and finding that glory so riveting, so satisfying, that it has the effect of transforming us. We tend to take on the traits of those we most admire. This is freedom, because it happens by the Spirit as a natural process.

This is what Paul called “bearing fruit for God” in Romans 7. Faith and hope and joy are not mentioned in 2 Corinthians 3, but I would say that they are implied in the phrase “beholding the glory of the Lord.” I think that transforming “beholding” is the sight of faith. That’s the way faith sees Christ. Faith beholds the beauty of Christ. Faith finds joy in him when it looks at him and all that God promises to be for us in him. And by beholding him that way, faith transforms. And that’s sanctification.

Work of Faith

One more. Jason refers us to 2 Thessalonians 1:11, where Paul says, “May [God] fulfill every resolve for good and every work of faith by his power.” So in the process of sanctification, we do make resolves. Yes, we do. We intend things. We will things. We exercise our will. But Paul says that all of these volitional actions are works of faith by God’s power. In other words, we are back in the realm of God’s empowering Spirit. We work by trusting God’s promise that he is at work in us.

So, Jason, good question. I think if you bore into the actual reality of these four descriptions of sanctification, you will find they are deeply unified and mutually illuminating. It’s a thrilling thing to meditate on the realities of Scripture until we see how beautifully they cohere.

All the shine of a thousand spotlights,All the stars we steal from the night sky,Will never be enough,Never be enough.Towers of gold are still too little;These hands could hold the world but it’llNever be enough,Never be enough.

—Loren Allred, The Greatest Showman

The world is too small to fill your heart. The best things that time can give you will leave unfathomed depths in your soul. It is a beautiful truth that you were made for eternity.

This is the perspective of “the Preacher” in Ecclesiastes, who spoke these famous words: “He has made everything beautiful in its time. Also, he has put eternity into man’s heart, yet so that he cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end” (Ecclesiastes 3:11).

In a nutshell, I think the Preacher is saying this: The longing we each possess for a coherence to our own story — and, indeed, the story of the world — has been graciously gifted to us by God. And part of the grace is the surprise that this longing takes the form of a pained looking, a perplexed pondering, as we try to — and then realize we cannot — join up all the dots of our own and the world’s stories. We long for more than we have, we long for what is transient to last, and we long for people and relationships that are temporal to abide forever.

This God-given desire for an uninterrupted, big-picture understanding of everything rubs against the piecemeal, fragmented nature of our grasp on reality. We have a sense that we were made for a grander and more perfect story than the one being played out in our brutal experience of the world.

Time Meets Eternity

This interpretation of Ecclesiastes 3:11 emerges when we attend to the verse’s parts, reading them in the context of the chapter in which they are embedded. Observe how the poetic phrase about eternity in the middle is bracketed on either side by references to time: the beauty of things in their right time and the language of beginning and end.

The juxtaposition of time and eternity is more than a difference; it is a tension, as seen in the words “yet so that he cannot.” There is something about the interplay of temporal affairs and eternity that creates a jagged edge in human experience.

This tension is borne out when we consider the whole chapter. Ecclesiastes 3 is famous for the lyrical tilt of its poetry: “For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven: a time to be born, and a time to die” (verses 1–2). There is “a time to weep, and a time to laugh” (verse 4). There is “a time to love, and a time to hate” (verse 8).

We’re meant to realize that there is no predictability to the arrival of these events, and often, their presence takes us by surprise. We live with life’s ugliness and pain as much as its beauty and delight, and we are not in charge of when, where, and to what extent each enters our lives.

These seasons are also nearly all relational. They involve the people whom we love and lose, those whom we wrong and forgive, our companions and our enemies. The ebb and flow of our lives is largely taken up with piloting the different seasons of these relationships and the effects they have on us.

The point about time is this: we cannot control it. We cannot control events, and we cannot control relationships. The rest of Ecclesiastes 3 makes clear that we also cannot control ultimate outcomes: “Moreover, I saw under the sun that in the place of justice, even there was wickedness, and in the place of righteousness, even there was wickedness” (verse 16).

This is why we “cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end” (verse 11). We simply do not know the end from the beginning of anything. We are bit-part players on the sprawling epic of world history, stumbling over our own lines, never mind understanding how this scene on Tuesday morning coheres with a chapter three years ago or the episode that will take place twelve years from now.

The absence of that big picture — particularly if there is injustice and wickedness to be endured or suffering to be stewarded in the meantime — can be one of the most bewildering features of our pilgrimage.

Every Heart a Stable

But now observe the rose among the thorns, the middle of verse 11: “[God] has put eternity into man’s heart.” The idea that God has placed something more than this world (eternity) inside an object in this world (man’s heart) is amazing and powerfully poetic. In The Last Battle, C.S. Lewis has Tirian, the last king of Narnia, and his party enter a stable, which is the threshold of death itself. On entering, they discover that all is not as it seems.

“It seems, then,” said Tirian, smiling to himself, “that the Stable seen from within and the Stable seen from without are two different places.”

“Yes,” said the Lord Digory. “Its inside is bigger than its outside.”

“Yes,” said Queen Lucy. “In our world too, a Stable once had something inside it that was bigger than our whole world.” (744)

That something finite could hold something infinite — this is in keeping with who God is and what he gives. From the fullness of his own immensity, he sought to bestow vastness on small creatures. He intended an experience of infinite bliss to be savored by finite beings. Eternal life for humankind, in the unending Sabbath-rest of the Creator God, was possible from the very beginning of creation.

Our first parents squandered it in an attempted coup, their vandalism of shalom (Genesis 3:22). Yet its loss does not mean its impossibility; rather, it means that we, in our fallen human nature, experience the echoes of who and what we were made to be. This capacity for eternity and its infinite depths keeps sounding in our hearts, in both major and minor keys.

Minor-Key Echoes

In minor key, consider the horror of death. Eternity echoes in our grief. Why is it that we find the idea of the total and absolute nonbeing of our loved ones intolerable, such sorrow unbearable? Christian and non-Christian alike have a sense of, and a yearning for, the person’s existence to continue in some form, in some way, however vague and uncertain. This longing for uninterrupted and durable relationships, for reunion, for wholeness, for completeness and perfection — ultimately, for a share in the life of God — is what it feels like for God to set eternity in our hearts.

God has placed it there as an invitation to humility. As John Jarick puts it, “The human being . . . wants to pass beyond his fragmentary knowledge and discern the fuller meaning of the whole pattern — but the Creator will not let the creature be his equal” (quoted in Tremper Longman, Ecclesiastes, 121). Instead of trying to rise above our station and know what only God can know (the beginning and the end), Ecclesiastes 3:11 reminds us that God is not bound by the changing times in the ways that we are.

The times happen to us, but God happens to the times. He sees and knows what we cannot; he is the one in charge of the ultimate coherence of all things. It is part of the Preacher’s invitation, as Derek Kidner comments, “to see perpetual change not as something unsettling but as an unfolding pattern, scintillating and God-given. The trouble for us is not that life refuses to keep still, but that we see only a fraction of its movement and of its subtle, intricate design” (Message of Ecclesiastes, 38–39).

No one would open The Lord of the Rings to a random page two-thirds of the way through and conclude, after a few minutes of reading, that it had no point, that it was incoherent. Why do we feel so confident interpreting our own times in this way, when in fact the story is still being written by the divine Author?

We are actors, not the Playwright. We are not his equal.

Major-Key Servants

The eternity in our hearts breaks through in other ways. There is a major key as well. The world we recognize so well in Ecclesiastes 3:16 is followed by a depiction of the world we long for so passionately: “I said in my heart, God will judge the righteous and the wicked, for there is a time for every matter and for every work” (verse 17).

Judgment is a divine promise. All the events of human history that have slipped through the hourglass of time into the past might be lost to us, but they are never lost to God. One day he will pull the past into his present to bring it to account. Every sorrow, every injustice, every unanswered grievance will have its day in court.

Even more, such longing for the beauty of coherence, or for the rightness of justice exactly meted out for wickedness, is a pointer to the eternal perfection of life with God. Lewis expresses this powerfully:

If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world. If none of my earthly pleasures satisfy it, that does not prove that the universe is a fraud. Probably earthly pleasures were never meant to satisfy it, but only to arouse it, to suggest the real thing. (Mere Christianity, 136–37)

Perhaps his most beautiful expression of this idea comes from “The Weight of Glory,” where he manages the rare feat of analyzing an emotion (nostalgia) in a way that makes the emotion more beautiful after the analysis than it was before. He describes nostalgia as the bittersweet, special emotion of longing, observing that only the emotionally immature believe that what they are longing for is actually what they are longing for.

The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; for it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing. These things — the beauty, the memory of our own past — are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself, they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshippers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a far country we have not yet visited. (30–31)

Is it not true that we often treat the best and most beautiful things we have as ends in themselves? In fact, they are messengers, servants of eternity in time-bound form, sent to us from God with an invitation to see through them to the One who gave them and who made us for him. They are images, shadows, and dreams. They are too small to satisfy us. They are passing. We were made for eternity.

Audio Transcript

We live in the age of tolerance, a season when the payment due for sin is forborne. The sin debt is not being called in — not yet. This is a season, Paul says, to demonstrate “the riches” of God’s kindness in his forbearance and patience with sinners. This is a season of kindness, a kindness on purpose, “meant to lead you to repentance,” as Paul says in Romans 2:4. This day of tolerance will end. And when it does, the King of kings, our Savior Jesus Christ, will not be the King who rode into Jerusalem on the humble donkey of Matthew 21. Our King will return on the white warhorse of Revelation 19. And this King — the once lowly, soon-to-return-in-majesty King — is the King we need.

Today’s sermon clip is about such a King, in comparison to all other world rulers, even compared to our presidents. At the time of this sermon, George W. Bush was president, having just completed the first of his eight-year run in the Oval Office. Here’s Pastor John, preaching on Matthew 21, in the spring of 2002, about six months after 9/11.

We have a president, right? President Bush. We don’t have a king. So, some of this is a little bit foreign to us, but there are kings in the world. And when I think “King of kings,” I think King over presidents, vice presidents, premiers, and kings. He’s the King over all the presidents.

Universal King

Now, when I think about the president — what can George Bush do for me? Well, he’s (I think) doing a pretty good job with security and protection. That’s what he ought to be doing. He’s the commander in chief. He’s got to wield the sword, according to Romans 13, appropriately to protect a people. And it seems like it’s going well. I hope he’s levelheaded and reasonable and thinks through all the options in front of him carefully.

“I don’t just want a king over politics and king over military might; I want a King over molecules and atoms.”

But do you know what? The best he could do for me is keep me safe — and sick. I will still get sick and die in a safe America, right? He can’t make me see. He can’t make me walk when I’m lame. I don’t want that kind of king. I want a real King. I want a King of nature. I don’t just want a king over politics and king over military might; I want a King over molecules and atoms. That’s the kind of King I want.

Keith, I’m looking at you — my blind brother over here. He knows. Someday, Keith, someday — maybe in this life but for sure, for sure — King Jesus is going to touch your eyes, brother, then you’ll look on him. He’ll be the first one you see. That’s the kind of King he is. He’s a global, universal King — King of the universe, King over eyes, King over legs. No president, no king on earth is that kind of king.

Praise on Palm Sunday

We’ve got the children here, in Matthew 21:9, 15. Jesus declares his kingship by the way he responds to what the children and the crowds are doing — the way he responds. This is a response issue. He doesn’t take the initiative here, except that he set it all in motion. The priests and the scribes are really bent out of shape about this event. They are not happy with what’s going on here. And the children — well, that’s just too much.

Verse 9: This is the crowds. “Hosanna [salvation] to the Son of David!” That’s the hoped-for King. “Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord!”
Verse 15: “Hosanna to the Son of David.”
Verse 16: The priests ask, “Do you hear what these [children] are saying?”

Now, the implication there is, “You better quickly diffuse this enthusiasm about you; otherwise, you’re going to be guilty of blasphemy. So what do you say now?” They could be asking the same question about the cloaks the crowds threw down in the road in verse 8:

Didn’t you see them throwing cloaks in front of you? Do you know what that means according to 2 Kings 9:13? That means they’re treating you as the king. You’re going to get the Romans after us. And besides, you’re not the true King. This is a big hoax. This is blasphemy. Do you realize what everybody’s hollering? And these little children — come on, settle this down.

That’s what they’re saying to him.

Now, how does Jesus respond to this? The way he responds to this is absolutely stunning. You couldn’t have poured more oil on this fire than he pours. This is the last straw. He answers it with one word and then a Bible quote. “Do you hear what they’re saying?” “Yes.” Pause. And then do you know what he quotes? He quotes Psalm 8: “Out of the mouth of infants and nursing babies you have prepared praise” (Matthew 21:16). That psalm opens with, “O Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth!” (Psalm 8:1). That’s God. That’s God talking about God. They’re not dumb. The last straw is this: “I’ll quote some more Scripture for you, and I will take God’s word applied to children, about the praise of children to God, and apply it to me.” And he’s dead. He’s dead for you.

There’s Still Time

So I’m finished, except to try to wrap it up. There is coming a day when he will come again as King — not on a donkey but on a white warhorse. And his hands will not be empty and outstretched. And the blood on his hands will not be his own blood. The garment dipped in blood will be the blood dragging through the blood of his enemies.

“Now is the day of salvation. Don’t risk meeting King Jesus on the white horse, having rejected him on the donkey.”

The second coming is the end of the day of salvation. The second coming is the end of the day of patience. The second coming is the end of the day of tolerance. And now is the acceptable time. Now is the day of salvation. Don’t risk meeting King Jesus on the white horse, having rejected him on the donkey.

And the way to switch sides is like this. So if you find yourself right now on the wrong side of the war, then what’s king in your life is money or food or success or looks or family or job or health or fame. What rules you right now more than Jesus? What governs your affections and your choices day by day, hour by hour, more than Jesus governs them? That’s your king.

And so the way you come over is that you hear him saying,

I’m your king. I’m on a donkey. I’m on my way to die for you. I will shed my blood that your sins might be forgiven and your treason might be forgotten. I hold out amnesty for you. Anyone who comes, I will receive and forgive and declare you righteous with my own righteousness that I’m working out here on this very Palm Sunday, and I will fold you into my redeemed people. And you will live forever with ever-increasing joy.

It’s just faith. By faith you forsake. By faith you receive him.