Thank you, Dr. Piper. A lot to think about, a lot to pray about. I feel like I have 35 things to process, but man, the concept of kept — amazing. I think about the early days of Acts 29, when so many of us that are older planted churches, and then in the early 2000s someone gave us the book Desiring God, and we read it. We didn’t really understand it the first time, so we read it again, and then we read it again. Then we listened to the Jonathan Edwards biography, and then we listened to that again. Then we listened to the Adoniram Judson biography and the Lloyd-Jones biography, and we’re shaped so much by the Reformed theology that we learned from guys like R.C. Sproul and John Piper.

Here we are now in 2024, and we asked you to speak on this topic because a lot has changed in our culture and our society since 1999, when Acts 29 started. I’d like to ask you this question: In your decades of ministry, 33 years of pastoral ministry, how have you seen the culture change? You just preached on what is completely unchanging. How have you seen the culture change, and do you sense an increased hostility toward the church in today’s culture from when you began in 1980, or do you feel more like there’s nothing new?

Well, that doesn’t depend on my perception. There are statistics that show clearly that the hostility is greater. I don’t usually read statistics, but you have to do what you’re asked to do. In the last ten years, the question has been, “Is it a good thing that more and more people are nonreligious?” That’s the question. Is it a good thing? The movement has gone from 25 percent of the people saying, “Yes, that’s a good thing” to 47 percent between 2010 and 2020.

Twenty-five percent said, “I wish more people were not religious,” and now 47 percent say, “It’s a really good thing that people are less religious because religion is bad for us. You guys are all bad for us.” Yes, that’s an easy question to answer just statistically.

But as far as other changes go, I’m old. I started pastoring before personal computers, before email, before smartphones, before the Internet, before social media. The world has changed. You all have computers in your pockets, and on those computers is every manner of evil, and Desiring God, and lots of other good things, so that’s huge. You preach to people who are looking at their phones because it just bumped and they’re getting a text message from Africa or a different time zone, and you’re looking at them and saying, “Would you pay attention to me? Would you turn them all off?” That’s a small, little issue.

The bigger issue is what’s happening to people as they soak themselves in an entertainment culture. I’m trying to think, What’s the main issue regarding social media? I don’t know the answer to that. I just say it’s huge that I think most people live from eye candy to eye candy and entertainment to entertainment so that the mind is not as reflective. To walk through the airport forty years ago, nobody was talking into the blue with an earbud in their head, and nobody was reading a phone. They had books in their hands or something else like that. It’s a different world. So, that’s a huge piece that’s changed.

Let me just mention one other thing, because it’s just so prominent: the battle lines of sexuality and the battle lines of abortion. Let me go back one step on why I would go there. When I was in high school, I knew there was such a thing as Democrats and Republicans, and I wasn’t a political animal at all in high school. What high schooler is? I just knew they were out there. Both kinds were in my church, and they basically had some different ideas about economics or whatever.

It didn’t enter my mind that you’re bad if you’re one and you’re good if you’re the other. It didn’t enter my mind. I didn’t think that way. Today, it’s very hard given the love affair with killing children, and the love affair with celebrating two men having sex and calling it marriage, and the love affair with taking eight-year-olds and surgically turning them into the opposite gender. (I hate that word. I try to avoid the word entirely because it’s so politically and culturally twisted. Sex is the right word.) Just take those three things. It’s very hard to meet somebody and find out “I’m totally pro-choice, I’m totally affirming of LGBTQ, I’m totally affirming of transgenderism,” and not feel like that’s wicked.

The word wicked wasn’t in my vocabulary for another human being. Theologically, I suppose you’d say it was. I wasn’t a Calvinist in those days, so maybe it wasn’t, but I just mean that makes relationships really hard. You could put on it names, Republican and Democrat, but that’s not really helpful because both those groups are really sinful, and your job as a pastor is complicated by that dynamic, but it should not be consumed by that dynamic. That’s just a big, big change regarding how one navigates relationships.

Here is maybe one other thing. Carl Trueman has done us a good service with his books — the big one and the little one — and now he has a new one of identifying underneath the modern world a kind of autonomy that decides our own nature, and therefore “I can be a woman if I choose to be a woman.” That deeper autonomy, I think, has never changed.

Pastor John, that leads into a second question. So many of us, when we planted Acts 29 churches, were looking. We valued conservative Reformed theology, but we also valued cultural engagement, and we wanted to reach our cities. We wanted to stick to the truths of Scripture, and we wanted to engage with lost people and reach lost people. How can church planters and pastors culturally engage our cities on this hand while also living as people set apart on this hand?

I do have to admit that I emphasize the second one more than the first one because that’s where I think we’re weak. I think most of our people do not live for the age to come, and they’re out of step with the New Testament in that regard. That’s cheating to just go there.

“Do you know what the answer is to persecution and criticism, which drive men out of the ministry? Joy.”

I was at a lecture on Thursday on “Augustine Against the Neo-Stoics,” and I don’t know if you’re aware of this, but Stoicism is making a comeback. There are half a dozen books that are very popular, and it’s recapturing Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus, and Seneca. It fascinated me because when he was done, I said, “That’s the answer I’m going to give in Dallas. That’s what I’m going to say. Thank you.” Because what he showed was that Augustine was totally culturally engaged. He wrote City of God. If you read City of God (which is good — nice and thick), it’s just one engagement after the other philosophically with the Roman times.

The Stoics said that happiness is found through virtue, not circumstances. If a bad thing happened to you, you could just say, “I didn’t feel that. I’m a stone. I didn’t feel that.” Virtue is about rising above circumstances and maintaining your equanimity. That was the stance of the Stoics. That’s being offered today in our culture, which is so fragile and so uncertain, and these new Stoics are saying, “You can do that. You can just rise above it all. You don’t feel any of that. You’re just your own person.” And yet, the Stoics argued for suicide, and they described what would bring you to the point where it was noble and virtuous to end it with equilibrium.

Augustine saw right through that contradiction. He said, “You can’t have it both ways. You can’t say that happiness is from rising above circumstances and turn around and say, ‘Circumstances can get so bad that you can end it.’ You can’t.” What he did was to go into the mindset of Stoicism and undermine it by just thinking it through as self-contradictory.

What I said to Zach, who gave this lecture, was “Zach, happiness was the common denominator there, and Augustine just took it for granted. They’re seeking happiness, and he’s saying, ‘You can’t have it your way. It can only be had by hope in an everlasting life.’” It’s about rejoicing in hope (Romans 5:2). And I said, “Do you think that’s the way Augustine tackled all the issues, making happiness and its quest the apologetic means by which he hooked the culture?” And he said, “I think it’s probably not the only way.” I said, “But it’s almost the only way, right?”

I haven’t read a lot of Augustine, but I read enough to know sovereign joy is his thing. Augustine is the greatest philosopher-theologian in the history of the church outside the apostle Paul, lots of people would say. Maybe Jonathan Edwards would come in second. If that’s true, we should not be ashamed, both from the history of theology and the Bible, to say the way to engage with culture is to tap into the universal pursuit of happiness. The message I just gave is my way of showing how deep that is. That’s not superficial. That’s not light. That’s weighty because God is supreme. You’re not.

That sounds to people like, “Oh, you’re going to make the pursuit of happiness the goal of life. That’s just selfish. That’s small. That’s man-centered.” Then you use the Bible, the God-centeredness of God, and Christian Hedonism to say, “No, no, no, no, you’re not getting it.” You take them up. This is just Piper’s bent. You hear Piper’s bent.

If I’m going to talk to any unbeliever in any country in the world through any language, I know one thing about that person: They don’t want to be sad. They don’t want to be discouraged. They don’t want to suffer. They want to be happy. They want to be glad. They want to have soul satisfaction to sleep well at night and feel good about the happiness they enjoy during the day without any guilt feelings at all. And only Christianity has the answer to that. For that to be true, you have to make much of the world to come.

I have one more story. Raise your hand if you’ve ever heard of Joni Eareckson Tada. She’s one of my heroes, and her new book, The Practice of the Presence of Jesus, just came out last fall and has an introduction in it that calls her a five-point Calvinist. It’s all there. I am teaching on that at my church. I read them this introduction, and then I said, “I’m going to write to her and say, ‘Why’d you do that? That really tips your hand. That makes a lot of enemies. We’re trying to just keep that underneath.’”

I wrote to her, and she wrote me back the day before yesterday. We know each other. I knew what she’s going to say. She said, “Why would I want to keep secret what keeps me alive? Why would I want to keep secret what sustains me every day of my life?” So, the sovereignty of God in the life of a sufferer is another thing that makes it universally culturally relevant.

At Desiring God, we have a mission statement, and the mission statement says, “Given the truth that God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in him, we exist to help people glorify God by helping them be satisfied in God above all things, especially in their suffering.” We didn’t always add that little thing at the end. When I wrote Desiring God, do you know the first criticism I got? People said, “This is just naive, typical American self-help. That’s what this book is. It’s just another book about how to be happy.” And they couldn’t have missed it more. I realized, “Okay, I have to make this clear.” So, the next edition had a chapter on suffering: “Suffering: The Sacrifice of Christian Hedonism.” That’s not in the first edition.

Suffering is universal. Everybody suffers. Even the rich people in the suburbs living in their mansions, having total insurance, are miserable. One hundred thousand of them overdosed with opioids last year. That’s not poor people. That’s middle-class people, desperately needing something more than what this world gives them, and they’re dying in droves. If you tap into suffering, and you have a theology big enough to carry you through suffering, that’s another cultural engagement that really does carry the day, I think.

Thank you. Now, you told us earlier tonight that you’d spoken at twenty Passion conferences. How do you hope your legacy of ministry lives on — or do you?

Yeah, I think about that. Should you live and influence the moment? The Bible says they minister to their generation, and I think that is your primary responsibility. I don’t think you are responsible for influencing people fifty years from now — or let’s just say one hundred years from now because some of you will live fifty years. A lot of you will live fifty years. I won’t.

Number one, don’t worry too much about living to make an impact one hundred years from now. That’s not your responsibility. It isn’t. I don’t see anything about it. You are responsible for those people sitting in front of you on Sunday and loving them well, and if God wants to do something with that after you’re gone, he can. If you think about it, then what would you want it to be? I would want it to be this: “He loved God, and he helped people love God. Through that, he helped people love their neighbor, which is the great commandment.” This is not rocket science. There is one great commandment, and there’s a second one that’s like it. Did he love God? Did he help people love God? Did he love his neighbor? That’s huge for me.

I would like to be known as somebody who was faithful to his wife all the way to the end. I sit beside this woman 55 years now every night, and we just look at each other and say, “So, who’s going to take care of the other one?” In other words, when we take the dining room table out and put a hospice bed in there, which one of us is it going to be? The answer is, “Whoever it is, I’m taking care of you. I’m going to be there. I’m not going to any conferences when you’re there.” I’ve watched men and women do that in our church, and I just stand in awe. I stand in awe of a man or a woman who gives up almost everything to be there for the dying spouse. That’s another big one.

We have a lot of potential church planters in here, and we have church planters that are just starting to plant churches, and we have church planters that are planting churches in countries across the world. We were just in Latin America this week with planters from nine countries. What do you think are some of the challenges you’re seeing church planters face today?

I knew that one was coming too. The more I thought about it, the more they are changeless. They are changeless. I thought of ignorance. I thought of death (that is, the people are dead). They’re ignorant. They’re dead. I thought of opposition or persecution. And I thought of discouragement. Now, let me just say a word about each. How much time do we have?

Plenty of time.

Okay, I won’t take long, but I think those are universal. I think they’re in every generation, and I think they’re the deadliest opponents we have. What was the first one? Tell me my first one.

Ignorance.

Ignorance, thank you very much. (This is called being 78 years old.) In Ephesus, is it not amazing that in Acts 19, when he’s driven out of the synagogue, he rents the hall of Tyrannus, and he teaches every day? Now, several manuscripts say from 11:00 in the morning till 4:00 in the afternoon, or whatever. He teaches every day for two and a half years. All of Asia heard the word of God in one place (Acts 19:10). That’s the antidote to ignorance: teach, teach, teach, teach, teach.

Your people don’t know God. They don’t know God, and those poor Ephesians were saying, “Who is this crazy guy?” They could say, “Well, just go down into the hall of Tyrannus. He teaches every day down there.” Isn’t that amazing? I just think, “God, I want to do that. I want to do that.” That’s my little ignorance piece.

Next, consider opposition. Do you know what the answer is to persecution and criticism, which drive men out of the ministry? Joy.

Blessed are you when others revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for so they persecuted the prophets who were before you. (Matthew 5:11–12)

That’s a miracle. The best antidote to being criticized and reviled and persecuted is that you have a great reward in heaven, and it is so great and so sure that you can smile and be happy. The world needs happy people in the face of suffering. That’s opposition.

“I stand in awe of a man or a woman who gives up almost everything to be there for the dying spouse.”

Regarding death, in 1 Corinthians 1:23–24, Paul says, “We preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God.” The reason the Jews demand signs and the Gentiles call it foolishness is because they’re dead. They can’t see anything glorious in Christ crucified. They think, “That’s just idiotic, a piece of meat hanging on a stick. You call that God and Savior? That’s foolishness. We need a sign. You come down from the cross, and then we’ll believe” — which was a pure lie.

Paul preaches that crazy gospel. Some people believe, and they believe because of the sovereign call of God, who says, “Lazarus, come forth.” That’s great. That’s the way you preach. So, the antidote to deadness is to preach Christ crucified, call down the power of the Holy Spirit, and watch the dead be raised.

What was the last one? Discouragement. Well, this was a big deal because I preached it a few weeks ago at Kevin DeYoung’s Coram Deo pastors conference, and they wanted me to do an exposition of 2 Corinthians 4. Oh my goodness. Throw me into the briar patch. (That’s an allusion nobody in here understands.) He says twice in that chapter, “We do not lose heart” (2 Corinthians 4:1, 16). Losing heart is a big enemy for church planting or for enduring in ministry. “I just lose heart. It’s just too hard, too discouraging.”

He has several arguments. I gave eight arguments for why they shouldn’t be discouraged, but the one that’s so clear in 2 Corinthians 4:16 is this: “So we do not lose heart. Though our outer self is wasting away, our inner self is being renewed day by day.” So, this 78-year-old nature is wasting away, but our inner nature is being renewed day by day. Then he says,

We look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen. For the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal. (2 Corinthians 4:18)

There it is again, the remedy to losing heart and the wasting away. I said to them, and I’ll say to you, “If you say this ministry is killing me,” my response is, “That’s no reason to quit.” It killed Paul. Paul said, “I carry about in my body the death of Jesus” (see 2 Corinthians 4:10). This ministry is killing me. That’s what your people watch. They’re watching how you die. Does this man die with joy? Does he have his eyes set on things that are eternal, or does he want to write more books? Does he want to get his name on more placards? Does he want to get more followers? Is he all about money and about fame, or is dying in the ministry for us?

That’s what the whole of 2 Corinthians is about. That’s all it is. We are being comforted in our sufferings with the comfort with which we want to comfort you. We want to comfort you with the comfort with which we are being comforted by God (2 Corinthians 1:4). Pastor, your suffering, your discouragement, your dying in the ministry, is remedied by “we look not to the things that are seen, but to the things that are unseen.” They are eternal.

Thank you, Pastor John. You’ve served us for 25 years of our history and some of us for even longer. We’d like to close tonight with praying for Pastor John, so can I ask you to just extend a hand toward him? We’ll thank God for his presence in our lives and pray for him.

Father, we thank you for the celebration of Reformed theology that we’ve heard tonight, the celebration of who you are, the celebration of the fact that we are kept, and nothing can pull us away from you. We thank you for using the gifting that you gave Pastor John to impact so many of us, but our ultimate goal is that we would make much of you. So, I pray tonight that as we’ve heard what we’ve read, as we’ve heard what we’ve preached, as we have heard what we believe, that we would walk away from here and make much of you.

I pray that you would be magnified like we began singing tonight. Christ be magnified. We do pray that you would continue to bless Pastor John and his ministry as, hopefully, he has many years left to serve us, and to minister us, and to teach us how to make much of you. So, we thank you for his ministry, and we pray over him tonight in Jesus’s name. Amen.

Some spiritual darkness feels so woven into the fabric of our souls, so enmeshed in our personality and wiring, so deeply rooted and subtle, that escaping it can feel like trying to run from our own shadow. An ingrained and abiding lack of assurance, a distorted relationship with body image or food, the twisting temptations of unwanted desire — such darkness has a way of hounding at the heels.

Perhaps you feel, as I have, like “a man in a shipwreck who sees land and envies the happiness of all those who are there but thinks it is impossible for him to reach the shore,” as Henry Scougal once described the experience (The Life of God in the Soul of Man, 108). You see clearly enough what a life free from your darkness would look like, but every attempt to reach that happy shore has left you wave-tossed and battered upon the rocks. So you look wistfully from the deeps, still desiring deliverance, but no longer trying so hard. You settle into a life of treading water.

Some years ago, as this fatalistic spirit began to settle on me, I struck upon a piece of counsel that offered a mighty and needed shake. John Owen (1616–1683), addressing spiritual doubters in particular, writes,

Be not . . . heartless or slothful: up and be doing; attend with diligence to the word of grace; be fervent in prayer, assiduous in the use of all ordinances of the church; in one or other of them, at one time or other, thou wilt meet with Him whom thy soul loveth, and God through Him will speak peace unto thee. (Works of John Owen, 6:614)

“Up and be doing.” Certainly this is not the only counsel the spiritually stuck need to hear (nor is it the only counsel Owen offers). But in my own entrenched struggles, I have found great help from this gentle but firm hand on the shoulder, this kind but resolute look in the eye, this warm but weighty voice telling me I am no prisoner to my past or present and bidding me not to grow weary in seeking God.

‘Up and Be Doing’

Perhaps you read counsel like the above and sigh. “Read the Bible more? Pray more? Go to church more? I’ve already tried all that.” A similar sigh has passed through my own lips more than once. I’ve already asked, sought, and knocked, I’ve thought to myself, but it just hasn’t worked. Eventually, however, my mind drifts back to Scripture’s own examples of long and earnest seeking, and the words “I’ve already tried that” fall limply to the ground.

We could consider the Old Testament refrain to seek the Lord “with all your heart and all your soul” (Deuteronomy 4:29), or the prophets’ resolve, come what may, to “wait for the God of my salvation” (Micah 7:7), or the psalmists’ example of crying out “day and night before you,” even from the deepest, longest darkness (Psalm 88:1). But perhaps the Gospels offer the most powerful call to rise, lift up our heads, and seek God with fresh diligence.

“Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you,” Jesus tells his disciples. Fewer words hold more promise for those seeking a deliverance as yet ungiven. Fewer too hold more challenge. For when Jesus illustrates the kind of asking, seeking, and knocking he has in mind, he offers the parable of the impudent friend, that noisy midnight knocker who wouldn’t leave without his loaves (Luke 11:5–9). Of the various charges that might be brought against my own prayer life, I fear impudence is rarely one of them.

Meanwhile, the Gospels give us living portraits of the same point: women who break through crowds to touch the hem of his garment (Mark 5:27–28), fathers half-beaten by unbelief who nevertheless carry their sons to Christ (Mark 9:24), mothers who persist in their petitions, undaunted by refusals, until they receive their request (Mark 7:24–30). Such desperate souls asked and sought and knocked — and asked and sought and knocked again — until the gift was given, the treasure found, the handle turned.

Compared to such as these, how much of my own seeking has happened from half a heart, from a split soul, with one foot stepping toward God and one dragging lazily behind?

Draw Near to God

To be sure, Jesus does sometimes surprise his struggling people and, quite apart from our diligent seeking, grant the deliverance we need. Our Christian lives began when he raised us, Lazarus-like, from the tomb — and sometimes, our Christian lives progress when he blesses us unsought, or sought only feebly.

But we have no warrant for presuming he will do so. The spiritual world, like the physical world, has its causes and effects, its means and ends, its principle that “whatever one sows, that will he also reap” (Galatians 6:7). Neither creation nor Scripture gives us a category for a sanctified sluggard, whose spiritual crop grows without diligent plowing and planting, weeding and watering. Our Spirit-dependent efforts cannot earn God’s blessing — only Christ can — but very often they are the divinely appointed means of experiencing his blessing.

Knowing that God uses our diligence as a means of deliverance, we might ask questions like these when darkness persists:

Am I actively killing every known sin, including those that seem unrelated to my main struggle, and by comparison small (Romans 8:13)?
Have my prayers for deliverance looked anything like that holy impudence that knocks and knocks again (Luke 11:8)?
Do I meditate upon God’s word day and night (Psalm 1:2) — and in particular, am I intimately acquainted with passages that address my struggle?
On Sundays, do I listen to sermons and take the Lord’s Supper expectantly, looking to my Lord “as the eyes of servants look to the hand of their master” (Psalm 123:2)?
Have I kept pursuing Christian community, surrounding myself with Spirit-filled people rather than shrinking away into the shadows (Hebrews 10:24–25)?
Have I sought specific counsel from wise and trusted saints, inviting them to take a flashlight into the cellar of my soul?

Questions like these make me mindful of God’s mercy, which so often has met my half-hearted seeking with wholehearted kindness. He is a blessed and blessing God, always “ready to forgive” and give more than we ask (Nehemiah 9:17; Ephesians 3:20). Yet as I think about my own persistent struggles, these questions also remind me just how much territory remains to be explored in the promise of James 4:8: “Draw near to God, and he will draw near to you.”

Seeking from the Depths

We should beware, at this point, of reducing the deepest struggles to a mere matter of trying harder. Nor would I wish to imply that all who have sought some deliverance unsuccessfully have simply not sought earnestly enough. Sometimes, the shore remains out of reach not because we haven’t swum hard enough, but because the sea is long. Jesus promises that those who seek will find; he does not promise they will find immediately. So, in reality, our seeking may last much longer, and our progress may advance much slower, than we hoped.

“Sometimes, the shore remains out of reach not because we haven’t swum hard enough, but because the sea is long.”

Spiritually speaking, we may feel somewhat like the woman with the twelve-year flow of blood, stuck in a place of undesired darkness despite our best efforts. Why did God let her sickness linger for twelve years instead of ten — or two? We don’t know. We do know, however, that in the fields of God’s kingdom, no seed of diligence, buried and watered with patient perseverance, remains fruitless forever (Galatians 6:9). God has never told his people, “Seek me in vain” (Isaiah 45:19). Nor does he show us the happy shore to merely tantalize us in the water. He shows it because it really can be ours — maybe not immediately or all at once, but really.

So, in the midst of long seeking, don’t lose heart. Your God sees you. His ways may soar high above your understanding, but they are never unwise or unkind (Isaiah 55:8–9). And if you go on seeking him, if every time you fall you rise up again and be doing, the sun will sooner drop from the sky than you be put to shame (Isaiah 49:23).

Our Hand on His Hem

Diligent seeking also holds its dangers, of course. And chief among them may be this: as we pray, and read, and gather with God’s people, and hear counsel, we may rely more on these means than on the One who made them. We may hang our hopes for deliverance not upon Christ, but upon all our efforts to seek him, like travelers too focused on the road to see their home.

Here again, a mind immersed in the Gospels may be our best guide. For in all our seeking, we are doing spiritually what so many Gospel characters did physically: getting as close to Jesus as we can, certain that he is our only hope.

“All our best efforts are only the hand on the hem of Christ’s garment, and all the blessing belongs to him.”

Our prayers may rise like Bartimaeus’s cry, but they are not the voice that bids us see. Our Bible reading may kneel us like the leper before Jesus, but it is not the touch that heals us. Our Sunday worship may stretch out an arm like the sick and anguished woman’s, but it is not the power flowing. All our best efforts are only the hand on the hem of Christ’s garment, and all the blessing belongs to him.

But oh, what blessing awaits those who do cry out and keep crying, kneel and keep kneeling, reach and keep reaching. In all our hardest wrestlings, we are not bound to the narrow fences of our own personality, our own power, our own past: we are bound to Christ himself. And in him, the long and desperate darkness can finally begin to lift, and the shipwrecked saint can finally draw near to shore, carried on the waves of his strength.

Audio Transcript

I really love today’s question: “Hello, Pastor John. My name is Alex and I live in Alabama. I was just thinking today about all the things that run out. Money runs out, food runs out, sex runs out, cars run out, time runs out, and people run out of time and die. But God never runs out. Can you elaborate on that subject? It seems like a reminder to not rely on things, but on the eternal God.”

I am so eager for this question. I’m so thankful that Alex simply threw open the door for me to talk about the inexhaustibility of God. Here are a couple of reasons why I’m so excited to talk about this.

Inexhaustible Fountain

One is that my introduction to Reformed theology fifty years ago was not mainly through secondary theological sources, but through texts of the Bible that elevated the self-sufficiency, the inexhaustibility, of God as high as it possibly could be elevated. In other words, what struck me is that the very Godness of God is that he is absolutely free, absolutely self-sufficient. He has no needs from outside himself, but is completely and eternally sufficient in himself, and not just sufficient but a Vesuvius of joy in the fellowship of the Trinity, so that he has absolutely no need of me whatsoever, but is so full that he is prone to overflow with a river of pleasures toward those who will have him as their supreme treasure. That picture of God years ago from the Bible was ravishing to me.

The second reason this is such a golden invitation to me is that just the day before yesterday, I received an email from a friend who has gone through years of very, very hard times. And he wanted to thank me, even though I was part of the hard times, for something from a message years ago. I’ll just quote what he sent me: “Grace is the overflow of God’s self-sufficiency. So, you can’t have grace if you don’t have an utterly, infinitely, gloriously self-satisfied, all-sufficient, overflowing God who does not need you at all.” That’s the picture of God that he was sustained by. That’s the meaning of grace that held him and kept him from making shipwreck of his faith. Grace is the overflow of the self-sufficiency of a God who doesn’t need him.

“God is on the lookout for anyone who is humble enough and weak enough to let him be strong for them.”

That’s what grace is: it’s the overflow from an inexhaustible fountain, which means that the only way we can relate to God so that he’s pleased and so that it glorifies him is not by hauling buckets of human labor up the mountain and pouring our supply into the pure, inexhaustible mountain spring of God, but rather by falling on our face exhausted, and putting our faith and our face in the water, and coming up and saying, “Ah, that’s so good. Thank you, God, for the overflow that you are for me.”

Giver of All

Now I’ve eaten up half my time telling you why I’m so excited to talk about this question. So, let’s consider, in the time that remains, just a few passages of Scripture that celebrate the fullness of God to the point where he doesn’t need us at all, and where it would be an offense to him if we tried to become his benefactors. For example, Acts 17:25: “[God is not] served by human hands, as though he needed anything, since he himself gives to all mankind life and breath and everything.”

And that’s not just true of God the Father; it’s true of Christ as he comes into the world. Mark 10:45: “The Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.” We don’t serve him — he serves us, or we die.

Romans 11:34–36: “Who has known the mind of the Lord, or who has been his counselor?” Nobody — you can’t give God counsel. “Or who has given a gift to him that he might be repaid?” Nobody — you can’t loan God anything to put him in your debt. Why? “For from him and through him and to him are all things. To him be glory forever. Amen.”

Owner of the Earth

Or Psalm 50:10–15 — Spurgeon calls this “Robinson Crusoe’s text” because, if you read that novel, you realize Crusoe used these verses to get himself through.

Every beast of the forest is mine,     the cattle on a thousand hills. . . .If I were hungry, I would not tell you,     for the world and its fullness are mine.Do I eat the flesh of bulls     or drink the blood of goats?Offer to God a sacrifice of thanksgiving,     and perform your vows to the Most High,and call upon me in the day of trouble;     I will deliver you, and you shall glorify me. (Psalm 50:10, 12–15)

That’s amazing. So, how do we glorify a God who has absolutely no needs and has all resources in himself? Answer: By not being his benefactors, but his supplicants. By calling on him for help. Then we get deliverance; he gets the glory. Or as the psalm says, “I will deliver you, and you shall glorify me.” “You get the deliverance; I get the glory.”

“The very Godness of God is that he is absolutely free, absolutely self-sufficient.”

This is what stunned me years ago: the bigger God gets, the more self-sufficient he becomes, and the less he needs me, then the more resourceful he can be for me, and the more riches of glory he has to pour out freely on me, and the more glorious he looks when we find our joy in him. What a God! That’s exactly the way God wants us to experience his absolute fullness and self-sufficiency. He wants us to experience it as the source of inexhaustible grace.

Helper of the Weary

Listen to the way Isaiah 40:28 makes the connection:

The Lord is the everlasting God,     the Creator of the ends of the earth.He does not faint or grow weary;     his understanding is unsearchable.

What’s the consequence of all that self-sufficiency?

He gives power to the faint,     and to him who has no might he increases strength. . . .     They shall mount up with wings like eagles;they shall run and not be weary;     they shall walk and not faint. (Isaiah 40:29, 31)

So, the inexhaustible hand of God is good news for the exhausted.

Sustainer of the Humble

I remember in those early days when I was first being amazed by this kind of self-sufficient, inexhaustible, overflowing God, two of my passages were 2 Chronicles 16:9 and Isaiah 64:4.

The eyes of the Lord run to and fro throughout the whole earth, to give strong support to those whose heart is blameless toward him. (2 Chronicles 16:9)

In other words, he’s on the lookout — he is actually on the lookout — for anyone who is humble enough and weak enough to let him be strong for them.

From of old no one has heard     or perceived by the ear,no eye has seen a God besides you,     who acts for those who wait for him. (Isaiah 64:4)

In other words, God’s uniqueness — nobody’s seen a God like this — is that in his overflowing fullness, he delights to work for us, rather than have us work for him. The giver gets the glory.

No Help Wanted

So, not surprisingly, this kind of absolutely self-sufficient, inexhaustible, overflowing God is where the gospel comes from, the gospel of our salvation. For those who have absolutely no way to save themselves, he says,

Come, everyone who thirsts,     come to the waters;and he who has no money,     come, buy and eat!Come, buy wine and milk     without money and without price. (Isaiah 55:1)

It’s like the machine shop that I jogged by for years until it closed recently. It had a permanent “Help Wanted” sign nailed to the wall on the side of the building. Every time I’d go by, almost, there was a big, permanent “Help Wanted” sign. But some days there was a big red diagonal line through the sign with a big No in the middle of it: “No Help Wanted.” And I used to leap for joy while I was jogging, saying, “That’s my God! That’s my gospel! No help wanted. No help needed. No help demanded. ‘I exist to be inexhaustible and to help those who will trust me. That’s my glory.’ That’s the glory of the gospel.”

So amen, Alex. Everything else runs out, like you said. But God never runs out. He will be giving and giving and giving to all eternity as we receive and receive and receive like little children with joy.