http://rss.desiringgod.org/link/10732/16507126/two-ways-to-deal-with-jesus
Now after Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea in the days of Herod the king, behold, wise men from the east came to Jerusalem, saying, “Where is he who has been born king of the Jews? For we saw his star when it rose and have come to worship him.” When Herod the king heard this, he was troubled, and all Jerusalem with him; and assembling all the chief priests and scribes of the people, he inquired of them where the Christ was to be born. They told him, “In Bethlehem of Judea, for so it is written by the prophet: ‘And you, O Bethlehem, in the land of Judah, are by no means least among the rulers of Judah; for from you shall come a ruler who will shepherd my people Israel.’”
Then Herod summoned the wise men secretly and ascertained from them what time the star had appeared. And he sent them to Bethlehem, saying, “Go and search diligently for the child, and when you have found him, bring me word, that I too may come and worship him.” After listening to the king, they went on their way. And behold, the star that they had seen when it rose went before them until it came to rest over the place where the child was. When they saw the star, they rejoiced exceedingly with great joy. And going into the house, they saw the child with Mary his mother, and they fell down and worshiped him. Then, opening their treasures, they offered him gifts, gold and frankincense and myrrh. And being warned in a dream not to return to Herod, they departed to their own country by another way. (Matthew 2:1–12)
There are two ways to deal with Jesus Christ. I am thinking specifically of those of you here tonight who do not yet worship Jesus as the greatest treasure of your life.
Herod and the Wise Men
There are two ways to deal with Jesus: the way of Herod, and the way of the wise men. The way of Herod is to get rid of Jesus. It was pure hypocrisy when Herod said he wanted to go worship the child. He did not intend to worship him. He intended to get rid of him. And in a matter of days, he would kill every baby boy in Bethlehem under two years old to get rid of Jesus. He failed. Herod’s way always fails.
Of course, nowadays it’s too late to kill Jesus. He has risen from the dead and he is alive, this very night, reigning in heaven. He will come back someday as King of kings. But we can, with less violent and more sophisticated ways, try to get rid of him, evade him, follow the Herod way.
We usually get rid of him by recreating him in our minds in ways that strip him of his claim on our lives: he’s a mere legend, or a moral teacher like other gurus, or just another prophet, or a mere symbol of hope. When I was in graduate school in Germany in the 1970s, a very popular book was Jesus for Atheists. Lo and behold, Milan Machoveč discovered that Jesus is, after all, a perfect embodiment of twentieth-century Marxism.
For two thousand years, people have been trying to get rid of the real Jesus by reinventing him in their own ideological image. But the Herod way of dealing with Jesus has never worked and will never work. You cannot get rid of Jesus. And I plead with you tonight: Don’t live your life trying to evade Jesus.
“You cannot get rid of Jesus. And I plead with you: Don’t live your life trying to evade Jesus.”
Instead, deal with Jesus the way the wise men did. “Going into the house, they saw the child with Mary his mother, and they fell down and worshiped him” (Matthew 2:11). Falling down signifies submission, and worship signifies treasuring. Submission to Jesus as your supreme King. Worshiping Jesus as your supreme Treasure. This is a huge change for all of us. Nobody is born this way. Jesus calls it new birth (John 3:3–8).
News to Make the Angels Sing
When this change happens to us, by God’s grace, we become the beneficiaries of God’s Christmas purpose. A few chapters later, Jesus tells us why he came — why there’s a Christmas: “The Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many” (Matthew 20:28). That’s the best news in all the world, for two reasons.
First, every one of us in this room tonight is under the guilt and bondage of our sinfulness toward God. We deserve judgment, and we know it. It is a debt we can never pay. And Jesus, God in human flesh, says, “I have come to pay it. I give my life to pay this ransom.”
Second, when we experience this forgiveness and freedom through the death of Jesus, we discover that for the rest of our lives, and for the rest of eternity, Jesus works for us. Omnipotence works for us. “The Son of Man came not to be served but to serve” — meaning, through all our pleasures and all our pain, Jesus is working to bring us to everlasting happiness in the presence of the all-satisfying God.
This is the good news of great joy that made the angels sing. It’s yours tonight, if you renounce the way of Herod and embrace the way of the wise men: they fell down and worshiped.
The song that we are about to hear, “In the Bleak Midwinter,” will end on a note that will be a perfect moment in the pilgrimage of your life to do what the wise men did: to say to Jesus, “My heart is not my own. It’s yours. I worship you, my King, my Treasure.”
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Should I Become a Preacher?
Audio Transcript
Welcome back to the Ask Pastor John podcast. This podcast launched nine years ago yesterday, on John Piper’s 67th birthday. Amazing. We are grateful to God for his sustaining grace over these nine years. Someone recently alerted me to the fact that I have now been the host of this podcast for exactly twenty percent of my life. Amazing. The years have flown by. Pastor John is no longer 67. He’s now 76, as of yesterday, and still at it. To celebrate his birthday, we look back on his life today through the lens of a question, one we get a lot: Should I become a preacher?
It’s a question we get from many men who are thinking about vocation, calling, and whether ministry is the path laid out for them. In making such a big decision, many factors must be weighed. Of course, that’s true also in Pastor John’s case. He shared the story of his path into the pulpit in a new series of preaching videos we released on YouTube. Those videos were filmed back when Pastor John was 71 years old. The videos are now online, and you can find them all on YouTube. You’ll find a playlist comprised of 31 videos. But today I want to feature the audio from one of the early episodes, lecture number 1, titled, “The Making of a Preacher.” It gets at this question: Should I become a preacher? Here’s Pastor John’s story.
The longer I live — and I’m age 71 right now — and think about ministry, the more I believe in the power, the preciousness, and the necessity of preaching in the life of the church.
Some of you are watching this, maybe age 40 or 50, as a businessman, wondering if you should become a preacher. Others of you might be 15 years old. Others are in school, in college or seminary. And what I thought might be helpful to do immediately in this series on preaching is to tell my story. You might call it “The Making of a Preacher,” because it’s a story of quite significant improbabilities.
You may feel that way about yourself. And so, let me give you the short version of the things in my background that stand out to me as difficult and obstacles to preaching, and yet, which turned out to be, I think, the very forge in which God fired and made a preacher.
Paralyzed with Fear
So let’s start at seventh grade. Right around seventh grade, I discovered the fact that I couldn’t speak in front of a group without freezing. Now, this is not your ordinary butterflies that everybody jokes about. This is not your funny knocking of the knees and, “Oh, you’ll get over it.” This was a paralysis. This was really deep. To this day, I do not understand what it was, where it came from, why it was there — in its entirety anyway, the full explanation. I think I know part of why God did it.
But there I am now, entering junior high and high school and terrified in a paralyzing kind of way of any kind of public speaking — like in front of six people at church or a class at school. So for example, ninth grade science class, we all had to read a one-paragraph — you’re talking one paragraph — description of our project. And she, the teacher, was just going down the row. We’d walk up to the front and read the paragraph so the class knew what you were working on. As it was coming down my row toward me, I looked down. I could see my heart beating through my shirt here.
When it got to the person just behind me, as he was going up to speak, I stood up and walked out of the class. I went to the bathroom and cried. I wasn’t going to do it. I couldn’t do it. And I told her afterward, “I couldn’t do it.”
“In all the sorrows, as well as the happiness, God was making a preacher.”
In tenth grade, Mr. Vermilion was my civics teacher. He announced on the first day of class that there would be an oral book report that everybody had to give. My heart absolutely sank. I felt my throat and my shoulders freezing up. So I walked up to him afterward, and I said, “Mr. Vermilion, I can’t do that.” And he said, “Well, Johnny, you can’t get better than a C in this class if you don’t do it.” And I said, “That’s fine. I’ll take a C.” I got a C because I wasn’t going to do it. I couldn’t do it.
I never ran for any class office — president of the class, vice president, secretary, anything like that — because I knew you had to give speeches. When I was in the tenth grade, my mother — now, this is before any Christian psychology at all. We’re talking 1961 or 1962. My mother took me to a psychologist because it was so painful and difficult, and it felt like it was just a pall over everything in my life. The psychologist had me look at these, today I think I’d call them Rorschach charts, and just say what I saw. After an hour of this, I could tell that this psychologist was suggesting my mother was the problem.
Well, you could believe this is not making me happy because there was one person in the universe, under God, who understood me, loved me, was patient with me, and helped me work through this, and it was my mother. There was no way I was going to blame her. So we never went back to that.
Plea for Help
So I come to the end of high school having skipped every possible way of speaking in front of a group and at church, and I headed off to college with the most dreadful fear and trembling, because I knew at Wheaton College there was a required speech class.
In 1966, between my sophomore and junior year, Evan Welch, the chaplain, came up to me during summer school when I was taking chemistry to catch up with a pre-med plan. I was all excited that maybe God was making clear my life plan to be a medical doctor, and I was going to catch up with my science prerequisites and take chemistry. And he said, “Would you pray in chapel tomorrow?”
I found myself saying, “How long does it have to be?” Now, there’s about five hundred people who come to summer-school chapel, as I recall. And he said, “Thirty seconds or a minute.” I do not know how or why it happened, but I said, “Yes.”
Then I remember walking out on front campus alone and dealing with God. I haven’t made many vows in my life, but I made one. And I said this: “Father, if you would just get me through this, just get me through it, so that I don’t freeze and my voice doesn’t stop, I will never turn down a speaking opportunity for you again out of fear.” That was a really scary vow. He did get me through. I think I’ve kept the vow. And something broke.
Drawn to Preaching
Let me give you one more piece at college. That fall, I got mono and spent three weeks in the infirmary. During those three weeks, I was listening to Harold John Ockenga preach in the chapel, a couple hundred yards away, and everything in me wanted to handle the Bible like that.
After three weeks, I knew I couldn’t catch up in organic chemistry, and God basically said, in his way, “I don’t want you to do medical anyway. You should go to seminary and know my word.” That’s what I did. I married Noël, went off to seminary, spent three years loving studying the Bible, and knew that my call was to the word. I didn’t know what I’d do with it. I didn’t know if I could ever preach.
“I was absolutely amazed that I was standing in front of several hundred seminary students and faculty preaching.”
I won the Clarence Roddy Preaching Award my senior year. You can listen to this 18-minute sermon at the Desiring God website. I listened to part of it. Can’t believe it. What was I, 28 years old? No, no, 25 years old, I suppose, when I gave it. I used Big Bad John, which was a song popular in those days, to illustrate Ephesians 1:6. I was just amazed. I was absolutely amazed that I was standing in front of several hundred seminary students and faculty preaching this senior sermon.
Drawn to the Church
I went off to graduate school because I didn’t know what else to do. I didn’t feel any particular call to any avenue of ministry. And six years into teaching, which I loved, something rumbled inside me I could not resist. I was being pushed by a kind of disillusionment with the romance of academia, and I was being pulled by every sermon I heard because I said, if it was a good sermon, “Oh, I’d love to do that.” And if it was a bad sermon, I’d say, “We’ve got to do better than that.”
And on October 14, 1979, late at night writing in my journal, I could resist this desire no longer. I said to Noël in the morning, “What would you think if I resigned my teaching and looked for a church?” And she said, “I could see that coming.” And that’s what I did for the next 33 years — I preached.
Trust God and Take Steps
So as I look back over that story that brings me to today, it’s not the kind of story I would’ve planned. I wouldn’t want to live my teenage years over again at all. They were not very happy years — at least not at one level. And as I look back, all I can say is that in all the sorrows, as well as the happiness, God was making a preacher — not at all the way you would expect him to make a preacher. So, for you, the implication is that you have no idea — you have no idea what he’s doing in your life. And so, trust him, and then walk through the open doors where you feel called.
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Grace Will Order All Your Pain: Retirement Message for Dana Olson
Yesterday in The New York Times, there was an article about a picture taken by the James Webb Space Telescope, which launched two and a half years ago and currently orbits around the sun about a million miles from Earth. The picture is of a vast stretch of galaxies, and right near the bottom is a perfectly framed question mark formed by a pair of giant dust clouds.
Now, this was quite an energizing providence to me for today’s message. Not because I’m going to talk about astronomy, but because the last paragraph of the article filled me with a sense of sadness, urgency, and wonder that I get to talk to you about the Creator of this universe and his purposes for this church and Dana Olson’s family.
The author of the article, Dennis Overbye, closes like this:
We’ve barely begun to know anything — that’s why we build telescopes. Once the Webb has completed its rounds of investigations two decades from now, we might know a bit more about how this bowl of stars works. But we still won’t know why we are here. That question mark, our profound cosmic ignorance, is one of the great gifts of science.
So, the great gift of science is to underline the “profound . . . ignorance” that we do not know why we exist.
If that were the gift of science (and I don’t believe it is), it would be not a gift, but a curse. To wake up every morning and have to say, “I have no idea why I exist” — that is not a gift. It is a curse. And millions of people are taught to live under this curse.
But we — we who have been born again “through the living and abiding word of God” (1 Peter 1:23) — we know why we exist. We exist to know and enjoy and reflect the glory of our Creator and Redeemer, especially the glory of his sovereign, sustaining grace.
What Is Sovereign, Sustaining Grace?
What is God’s sovereign, sustaining grace? Where does God make plain that this is our portion? That’s my focus in this message. Let me give you a rhyming definition to illustrate what I mean from experience, and then I’ll show its meaning from the word.
Not grace to bar what is not bliss, Nor flight from all distress, but this:The grace that orders our trouble and pain, And then, in the darkness, is there to sustain.
I stress this because to celebrate a grace that bars what is not bliss, and gives flight from all distress, and does not order our pain — that grace would be biblically false and experientially unrealistic.
Our experiences and the Bible teach us that grace does not prevent pain, but orders, and arranges, and measures out our pain, and then in the darkness is there to sustain. Grace will one day banish all pain. But not yet.
Scarred by Grace
For example, years ago Bob Ricker was the president of the Baptist General Conference. He spoke at his daughter’s wedding. He pointed to some small scars on her neck and called them memorials of God’s grace — his sovereign, sustaining grace.
She had been in a car accident. Her injury prevented her from breathing right there at the scene of the accident. In the car behind her was a doctor who happened to have an air tube in his pocket. By the time he got to her, she was already turning blue. He forced the tube into her throat and saved her life. At her wedding a few years later, Bob told her: those scars you have to live with — they are memorials of sustaining grace.
Now, Bob Ricker is not naive. He knows that if God can ordain that in the car behind there be a doctor, and that this doctor have a breathing apparatus in his pocket, and that he have the presence of mind to use it savingly, then this God is fully able to prevent the accident in the first place. This is the God of whom Paul said in Ephesians 1:11, “[He] works all things according to the counsel of his will.” Bob even stressed, “‘All things’ means all things” — including, I assume, the paths of cars and airplanes and arrows and bullets and chromosomes and cancer cells. That was the inspiration for my little rhyming definition of sovereign, sustaining grace.
Not grace to bar what is not bliss, Nor flight from all distress, but this:The grace that orders our trouble and pain, And then, in the darkness, is there to sustain.
The God Above the Farmer
Here’s another story of grace, which I confirmed with Noël in the car yesterday driving over from Minneapolis. Noël, Abraham, Barnabas, and Talitha were traveling to Georgia, and the car broke down on a lonely stretch about an hour south of Indianapolis. The radiator was shot.
“Grace does not prevent pain, but orders, and arranges, and measures out our pain.”
A farmer in his mid-sixties pulled over and offered help. Noël said that she supposed they needed a motel and hoped that Monday morning there would be a garage open to work on the car. The farmer said, “Would you like to stay with me and my wife?” Noël hesitated. He said, “The Lord said that when we serve others, it’s like serving him.” He called his wife to get the okay and added, “You could go to church with us in the morning, if you can take a Baptist church.”
So, they stayed with the farmer — who was also an aviation mechanic that diagnosed the problem, drove to town Monday morning, bought a new radiator, came back, put it in at no expense, and sent the family on their way. In the meantime, Barnabas had pulled his fishing rod out of the car and caught a nineteen-inch catfish — the icing on the cake. Spectacular, sovereign, sustaining grace.
The God who can cause a farmer to stop to help Noël, and who sees to it that he is a Christian (even a Baptist!), and that he and his wife have room for the family to stay, and that he is a mechanic, and that he finds a radiator first thing Monday morning, and that he is willing to take the time, and that he has a pond with catfish — this God is perfectly able to keep a radiator from bursting open in the middle of Indiana. But in this fallen world of futility, that is not usually the way sustaining grace works. It does not always spare us frustrations and disappointments and losses.
Not grace to bar what is not bliss, Nor flight from all distress, but this:The grace that orders our trouble and pain, And then, in the darkness, is there to sustain.
Responding Like Paul
A young man in our church who was dealing with a physical condition that did not get better in spite of prayer said to me, “It would be easier if Jesus hadn’t healed, but instead had given grace to endure the absence of healing.” One of the things I said to him was this: “That’s exactly what Jesus did do — and for that very reason — in 2 Corinthians 12:9–10.”
God’s grace ordained that Paul have a thorn in the flesh for the sake of his humility, and then he does not remove it in answer to prayer. Instead, God says, “My [sovereign, sustaining] grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.”
To which Paul responds, “Therefore I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may rest upon me. For the sake of Christ, then, I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities. For when I am weak, then I am strong.”
Not grace to bar what is not bliss, Nor flight from all distress, but this:The grace that orders our trouble and pain, And then, in the darkness, is there to sustain.
Grace Abounds Even in Babylon
Our text in Jeremiah 32 is about this kind of sovereign, sustaining grace and holds the key to why Faith Baptist Fellowship exists after 44 years, and to why Dana and Christa and the girls served so faithfully.
Jerusalem and God’s chosen people are in darkness and distress, and it is God himself who has ordered it so. Look at verse 36: “Now therefore thus says the Lord, the God of Israel, concerning this city of which you say, ‘It is given into the hand of the king of Babylon by sword, by famine, and by pestilence.’” That’s what those outside of Israel are saying, and it is true. Grace has not spared them this calamity. Nor will the grace of God spare you your appointed calamity. He will spare you many sorrows, but not all.
But what they say about God’s chosen ones is not the last word. God has the last word. And it is a word of sovereign, sustaining grace. Verse 37: “Behold, I will gather them from all the countries to which I drove them in my anger and my wrath and in great indignation. I will bring them back to this place, and I will make them dwell in safety.”
So, God declares that he has ordered the trouble and pain: I have driven them to these foreign lands. And he declares that he himself will deliver them and bring them back to himself and to their land. In other words, sovereign grace will eventually triumph over the calamity.
What Makes Us Saints So Sure?
How can we be sure of this triumph of grace in our lives, our churches, our souls? It is one question to ask, Why has Faith Baptist Fellowship endured for 44 years? But an even more urgent question is, How can we be sure that grace will triumph for this church and in our own lives in the future? How can you be sure that grace will sustain you to the end in the faith and holiness that brings you safe to heaven?
That’s what the rest of this text is about. The answer is sustaining grace for God’s chosen people is sovereign grace. That is, sustaining grace is omnipotent grace. It is grace that overcomes all obstacles and preserves the faith and holiness that bring us home to heaven. This is our only sure confidence for the future. You and I, in ourselves, are utterly fickle and unreliable. If we were left to our own powers to persevere, we would make shipwreck of our faith. It is sure. This is why the saints have prayed and sung for centuries,
Oh, to grace how great a debtorDaily I’m constrained to be!Let thy goodness, like a fetter,Bind my wandering heart to thee.Prone to wander, Lord, I feel it,Prone to leave the God I love;Here’s my heart; Oh, take and seal it;Seal it for thy courts above.
Is that the way saints should pray? Is that the way to pray for your future and for Dana’s future and for this church’s future? Is that a biblical way to pray?
Make your goodness like a fetter — a chain — that binds my wandering heart to you. Seal my heart with an unbreakable bond for the courts of heaven. In other words, keep me! Preserve me! Defeat every rising rebellion! Overcome every niggling doubt! Deliver from every destructive temptation! Nullify every fatal allurement! Expose every demonic deception! Tear down every arrogant argument! Shape me! Incline me! Hold me! Master me! Do whatever you must do to keep me trusting you and fearing you till Jesus comes or calls.
May we — should we — pray and sing like that?
Four Promises of Sovereign, Sustaining Grace
The answer from this text is yes. That kind of singing and praying is rooted in the new-covenant promise of sovereign, sustaining grace. Let’s read it. Keep in mind that this is one of several Old Testament promises of the new covenant that Jesus said he sealed with his own blood for all who are in him. It is not just for Jews, but for those who are true Jews by virtue of union with Jesus, the seed of Abraham (Galatians 3:7, 16). Jeremiah 32:38–41 says,
They shall be my people, and I will be their God. I will give them one heart and one way, that they may fear me forever, for their own good and the good of their children after them. I will make with them an everlasting covenant, that I will not turn away from doing good to them. And I will put the fear of me in their hearts, that they may not turn from me. I will rejoice in doing them good, and I will plant them in this land in faithfulness, with all my heart and all my soul.
Notice four promises of sovereign, sustaining grace.
1. God will be our God.
God promises to be our God. Verse 38: “They shall be my people, and I will be their God.” All the promises to his people are summed up in this: “I will be your God.” That is, “I will use all that I am as God — all my wisdom, all my power, and all my love — to see to it that you remain my people. All that I am as God, I exert for your good.”
2. God will change our hearts.
God promises to change our hearts and cause us to love and fear him. Verses 39–40: “I will give them one heart and one way, that they may fear me forever. . . . I will put the fear of me in their hearts.” In other words, God will not simply stand by to see if we, by our own powers, will fear him. He will sovereignly, supremely, mercifully give us the heart that we need to have, and give us the faith and the fear of God that will lead us home to heaven. This is sovereign, sustaining grace. (See also Deuteronomy 30:6 and Ezekiel 11:19–20; 36:27.)
3. God will not let us turn away.
God promises that he will not turn away from us and that we will not turn away from him. Verse 40: “I will make with them an everlasting covenant, that I will not turn away from doing good to them. And I will put the fear of me in their hearts, that they may not turn from me.” In other words, his heart-work is so powerful that he guarantees we will not turn from him. This is what’s new about the new covenant: God promises to fulfill by his power the conditions that we have to meet. We must fear him and love him and trust him. And he says, “I will see to that. I will ‘put the fear of me in their hearts’ — not to see what they will do with it, but in such a way that ‘they may not turn from me.’” This is sovereign, sustaining grace.
4. God will do this with infinite intensity.
Finally, God promises to do this with the greatest intensity imaginable. He expresses this in two ways, once at the beginning and once at the end of verse 41: “I will rejoice in doing them good, and I will plant them in this land in faithfulness, with all my heart and all my soul.” First, he says that he will exert this sovereign, sustaining grace with joy: “I will rejoice in doing them good.” Then he says (at the end of verse 41) that he will exert this sovereign, sustaining grace “with all [his] heart and all [his] soul.”
How Great Is God’s Desire to Do You Good?
He rejoices to sustain you, and he rejoices with all his heart and with all his soul. Now, I ask you, not with any sermonic exaggeration, or with any rhetorical flourish, or with any sense of overstatement at all — I ask you, I challenge you, can you conceive of an intensity of desire that is greater than a desire empowered by “all [God’s] heart and all [God’s] soul”?
Suppose you took all the desire for food and sex and money and fame and power and meaning and friends and security in the hearts and souls of all the human beings on the earth — say, about eight billion people — and you put all that desire, multiplied by all those eight billion hearts and souls, into a container. How would it compare to the desire of God to do you good implied in the words “with all [his] heart and all [his] soul”? It would compare like a thimble to the Pacific Ocean, because the heart and soul of God are infinite, and the hearts and souls of man are finite. There is no intensity greater than the intensity of “all [God’s] heart and all [God’s] soul.”
“Grace will one day banish all pain. But not yet.”
And that is the intensity of the joy he has in sustaining you with sovereign grace: “I will rejoice in doing them good . . . with all my heart and all my soul.” Some of you may be tasting the sweetness of such sovereign, sustaining grace for the first time this morning. That is the work of the Holy Spirit in your life, and I urge you to yield to it and be mastered by sovereign, sustaining grace.
Others of you have lived in this sweet assurance for decades. It has sovereignly sustained you in the worst and best of times. Pain has not pushed you into bitterness; pleasure has not lured you into idolatry; God has kept you. He has held you fast — with all his heart and all his soul.
He has done it for your church, and he has done it for Dana and Christa and Anna and Mary and Betsy, and he will — with all his heart and all his soul. This is sovereign, sustaining grace. To know it, rejoice in it, and reflect it is why you exist.
Not grace to bar what is not bliss, Nor flight from all distress, but this:The grace that orders our trouble and pain, And then, in the darkness, is there to sustain.However long the sorrows last, This mighty grace will hold you fast.
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The Serious Sin of Prayerlessness: Four Reasons to Bow Before God
Prayer lies at the heart of our relationship with God. Prayer preaches that God is God and we are weak and needy creatures. And yet how many Christians persist in the sin of prayerlessness? We desire to pray, yet prayerlessness lies close at hand. We delight in prayerfulness, in our inner being, but we see in our members prayerlessness waging war against that inner desire, leaving us living like little gods pursuing godliness without depending on the power of God. Although Jesus tells us “always to pray and not lose heart” (Luke 18:1), we get discouraged regularly (perhaps because of our lack of prayer).
In my own struggles to pray, I have found it helpful to think more clearly about why prayerlessness is such a serious sin — and how God puts our prayerlessness to death. My mind goes back to a story in 1 Samuel 12, where Israel rejects God’s rule, and rules out crying to God for themselves, asking Samuel to pray for them (1 Samuel 12:19).
First, Samuel encourages God’s people not to fear, even though they have done “all this evil” (1 Samuel 12:20). “The Lord will not forsake his people, for his great name’s sake, because it has pleased the Lord to make you a people for himself” (1 Samuel 12:22). Despite their grievous sin, God will not forsake them, and Samuel resolves to pray for them.
Second, Samuel pledges: “Moreover, as for me, far be it from me that I should sin against the Lord by ceasing to pray for you, and I will instruct you in the good and the right way” (1 Samuel 12:23). I find Samuel’s words fascinating because, at this point in redemptive history, God has not yet commanded prayer. He has not enshrined into the law, “You must devote yourself to prayer.” Yet Samuel sees prayerlessness as a sin: “Far be it from me that I should sin by ceasing to pray for you.” Why? Consider four compelling reasons for Samuel’s conviction.
God’s Story
According to Samuel, Israel’s history has been a story of God crowning Israel’s cries with deliverance. God saved Israel when they cried to him in slavery, gave them the land (1 Samuel 12:8), and has been their help till date (1 Samuel 7:12). In suffering for sins, Israel has cried to God often, and God has saved them (1 Samuel 12:8, 10–11).
Samuel does not see prayerlessness as sin because the law commands prayer, but because God’s relationship with his redeemed people compels prayer. How can he not depend on God for Israel’s future when Israel’s past has been a story of humiliation and humble dependence on God? God has been her help in ages past, and only God will help her now.
Like Israel, our salvation begins with a cry of faith to God for deliverance. Israel cried out to God in their slavery to Egypt, and we cried out to God in our slavery to sin. We are God’s people today because he heard our cry. If our story has been one of crying to God for help and experiencing his deliverance, what future do we have but one of crying to God for help? Prayerlessness is sin because it ignores God’s story and God’s design for his people. It is God’s design that we depend on him and cry out to him so that he can save us again and again and again. God’s story is one of crowning our cries with salvation, and the future will not be different. God will crown your prayerful cries with salvation. Only be sure to cry.
God’s Promises
Because God has promised, “I will not leave you or forsake you” (Joshua 1:5), Samuel trusts that “the Lord will not forsake his people” (1 Samuel 12:22). This promise motivates Samuel to pray. Indeed, without God’s promises, we would have no basis for prayer. The promises of God powered David’s prayer. David found courage to pray because God promised to work (2 Samuel 7:27). So did Daniel (Daniel 9:1–4), and the early church (Acts 4:23–30), to list a few.
What is prayer, then? Prayer is asking God to do what he has committed himself to do. Prayer is not a human attempt to overcome God’s reluctance to work for the good of his people. Rather, biblical prayers are powered by God’s commitment and promise to work. God’s promises for his people motivate prayer. Prayer voices our confidence in God who has promised to do us good.
So, what is prayerlessness? It is a failure to trust God and his promises. Samuel knew that such prayerlessness would be a gross sin. How can you not trust the promises of the God who has been so faithful, and voice that trust in prayers?
God’s Glory
Samuel knows that God could only preserve Israel after they reject his kingship “for his great name’s sake” (1 Samuel 12:22). So, he seeks God’s glory by praying that God would not forsake Israel. God’s commitment to glorify himself makes prayerlessness sinful. God says he will not abandon his people “for his great name’s sake” (1 Samuel 12:22). Samuel intercedes for Israel because God is passionate about his glory, and so is Samuel.
When we pray, we align our passions, desires, and will with God’s. If God has committed himself to save his people for his glory, then it becomes sinful for his servants to not seek his glory in the salvation of his people through prayer. Prayerlessness, then, is a failure to seek God’s glory. Prayerlessness betrays not only our lack of love for God’s people, but also our lack of love for the God who spreads his fame through the salvation and preservation of his humble and crying people.
God’s Gospel
Unlike Samuel, we have received commandments from God to pray (Romans 12:12; Colossians 4:2; 1 Thessalonians 5:17; James 5:13). When we fail to pray, we are breaking God’s command. But, according to the New Testament, we find the power to keep God’s commandments in the gospel. So, prayerlessness shows that we are not grasping the gospel.
At the cross of Christ, God makes a people for himself at the cost of his only Son’s life. At the cross, God displays his commitment to never forsake his people. At the cross, God works to save and preserve a people for his name’s sake. In the cross, we find God’s Yes to all his covenant promises (2 Corinthians 1:20). His covenant love, his faithfulness, and his commitment to save for his own glory revealed at the cross make prayer possible and render prayerlessness sinful.
Putting Prayerlessness to Death
Knowing that something is a sin does not give us the power to kill it. We need gospel power. The cure for our prayerless hearts is not more commands to pray but the healing balm of the gospel. The cross exposes our sinful pride, our lack of dependence on God. At the cross, we know that we could never pray enough to earn God’s favor. At the cross, we know that we could never merit God’s mercy. At the cross, we know that no good work is good enough for our good God. We are humbled at the cross, and that humility is the fuel for prayer.
Humbled by the God who saved us when we could not possibly save ourselves, we prayerfully depend on him. And the God who saved us from condemnation is the same God we need to save us from sin’s power day after day. The cross that saved us is the same cross we need to cling to day after day. Understanding the gospel destroys the pride of prayerlessness.
Jesus died for our prayerlessness, and he also sets the example for how to pray. Jesus prayed without ceasing on earth, and he continues to intercede for us in heaven (Hebrews 7:25). Far be it from Jesus, the new and better Samuel, to sin against his Father by failing to intercede for the church, the new-covenant people of God. As Charles Wesley sang,
Five bleeding wounds he bears,Received on Calvary;They pour effectual prayers;They strongly plead for me:“Forgive him, O, forgive,” they cry,“Forgive him, O, forgive,” they cry,“Nor let that ransomed sinner die!”
The scars from the cross plead for us right now before the throne of God. When we pray, we join the crucified, risen, and ascended Lord in his passion to see God keep the people he made at the cross for his name’s sake. There are few privileges on earth so great as being able to pray with our Savior. In the power of the gospel, we follow Jesus’s example.
When Prayerfulness Goes Wrong
As we labor to join Jesus in prayer, however, we should beware of a type of prayerfulness that is still sin against God. After Jesus uses the parable of the persistent widow to teach us to pray without losing heart (Luke 18:1), he tells another parable about a tax collector and a Pharisee who both go up to the temple to pray.
The tax collector prays and confesses his neediness, simply pleading, “God, be merciful to me, a sinner!” (Luke 18:13). At the same time, a prayerful “saint” — who has done far more good works than the tax collector — stands confidently before God and recounts his qualifications for acceptance: “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” (Luke 18:11–12). This Pharisee is not prayerless like other sinners. He is so prayerful, in fact, he intensifies his prayers with fasting. But his prayers are corrupt for two reasons.
First, in his mind, his prayers are the grounds for God’s acceptance of him. He lists all that he has done for God, but he asks nothing of God. He prays as though God needs his good works but he does not need God’s gracious work at the cross.
Second, his prayers also become the grounds for competition with others. He compares his faithful and intensified prayers with others and sees that others fall far short. His prayerfulness becomes his own condemnation because it is the ground for condemning others. He leaves his place of prayer feeling good, but not because he enjoyed God, received mercy from God, or rested in God’s work of salvation. Rather, he feels good because he prayed longer, more regularly, and more passionately than others. The perceived prayerlessness of others boosts his pride before God, but God rejects him and his intense prayers (Luke 18:14).
God designed prayer not for self-justification or competition, but for humiliation. Genuine prayer kills our pride and promotes his praise. Pray regularly, earnestly, and faithfully, but never put your confidence in your prayerfulness or compete with others through them.
Far Be It from Us
Far be it from us that we should sin against God by prayerlessness, and far be it from us that we should sin against God by trusting in our prayerfulness. The cross makes humble, dependent prayer possible and necessary, and the cross is our only merit before God.
Let the cross of Christ kill your prayerlessness and prideful prayerfulness. Let the cross kindle prayer that trusts in Christ’s sufficiency and pleads for God’s mercy. When you struggle to pray, do not look to yourself. Do not expect guilt or better planning or stronger resolve to ultimately transform the way you pray. Look to Jesus. The gospel is the cure for our prayerlessness. The gospel purges our guilt of prayerlessness, proves our need for God’s grace, grounds our hope for answered prayers, powers our resolves to pray, promotes our dependence on God in prayer, and protects us from boasting in our prayers.