http://rss.desiringgod.org/link/10732/16610680/the-spirits-irresistible-call
Part 8 Episode 241
What do we mean when we say that the Spirit’s work in the new birth is irresistible? In this episode of Light + Truth, John Piper looks at John 3:1–10 to explore the beauty of this aspect of the Spirit’s sovereign work.
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Appointed and Disappointed: Four Lessons for Passing Leadership
As you grow older, you increasingly find yourself at milestones that feel a bit surreal. For instance, this July, John Piper and I will mark three full and wonderful decades of ministry partnership that, by God’s grace, resulted in the birth of the mission we call Desiring God.
Why does the milestone feel surreal? Well, for starters, it’s strange to think that John and I have now been working together for the majority of my life. It’s also strange to realize that I’m entering the fourth quarter of my vocational career (should the Lord sustain my life and abilities). And a strange dimension of seeing the end of my vocational ministry on the horizon has been preparing for and experiencing the natural, necessary series of ministry disappointments.
What I mean by disappointments is not what you probably think of as disappointments. What I mean are the times when the Lord “dis-appoints” us from roles and responsibilities to which he had once “appointed” us. For every appointment, there will be a corresponding disappointment; for every calling we embrace, there will eventually be a corresponding calling to release.
Preparing for our eventual disappointment is a crucial aspect of faithful Christian stewardship. But in my observations over the years, it’s also often a neglected aspect. We find plenty of resources aimed at helping Christian leaders enter their leadership seasons, but it’s surprising how comparatively few there are to help leaders exit those seasons — despite the fact that how we end often says more than how we begin (Ecclesiastes 7:8; 2 Timothy 4:10).
“For every calling we embrace, there will eventually be a corresponding calling to release.”
I don’t claim to be an expert in leadership disappointments, but I can share with you some core values I gleaned from Scripture that helped prepare me for the disappointments I’ve experienced. And to do that, I need to provide you with a little historical context.
Appointed and Disappointed
In 1993, when John Piper graciously extended me the offer to become his first full-time administrative assistant, he didn’t know he was hiring Desiring God’s first CEO — because Desiring God (DG) didn’t exist yet (we launched it together the next year). This was fortunate for me because I likely wouldn’t have gotten the CEO job. I didn’t have a degree in theology or business. I was an anthropology major with no experience leading an organization. God does like to choose unlikely people.
What I did have, when John and I decided to start this ministry, was his trust. He knew that we shared the same theological vision and passion for spreading it. And despite my deficiencies, God had equipped me with enough leadership ability, creativity, risk tolerance, and resourcefulness to be an effective catalyst — to get things up and going and recruit other gifted people to join us as the ministry rapidly grew.
I realized in those first years, however, that if God granted DG growth and longevity, I would need to hold my leadership role with open hands. God had appointed me to steward it for a season, but sooner or later seasons change. The ministry could outgrow my ability to lead it effectively, or God could choose to redeploy me somewhere else. At some point, God would disappoint me from my leadership role and appoint someone else to lead. So, all along I asked our board to watch me carefully and help me discern when a change needed to be made.
Though I served as the founding CEO for about twenty years, much of my tenure was comprised of a series of delegated disappointments, of handing off responsibilities and initiatives I started or conceived to others more gifted than I was. Eventually, this included handing the role of CEO to someone who could fill it more effectively than I could. Looking back, these disappointing decisions were among the most consequential I ever made as a leader. And the most consequential of those tended to sting, since they required me to assess and discuss my deficits honestly with colleagues and board members. This forced me, though, through repeated practice, to internalize and be guided by the following four core values.
1. Love Jesus’s increase supremely.
Over the years, John the Baptist became one of my biblical-leadership mentors, mainly because of the way he responded to his disciples who were concerned that the crowds were leaving him to follow Jesus.
You yourselves bear me witness, that I said, “I am not the Christ, but I have been sent before him.” The one who has the bride is the bridegroom. The friend of the bridegroom, who stands and hears him, rejoices greatly at the bridegroom’s voice. Therefore this joy of mine is now complete. He must increase, but I must decrease. (John 3:28–30)
I love this man. John was more in love with the God of his calling than his calling from God. What gave him joy was seeing the bride increasingly drawn to the bridegroom. And when his role in helping make that happen began to diminish, it didn’t diminish his joy. He quietly and happily began to step aside.
“John the Baptist taught me to love the increase of Jesus’s glory more than my role in that increase.”
John the Baptist taught me to love the increase of Jesus’s glory more than my role in that increase. And he taught me that the way a leader relinquishes his role for Jesus’s sake might just speak loudest of his love for Jesus.
2. View yourself as a steward.
The apostle Paul also became a leadership mentor for numerous reasons, but I’ll focus here on one. When it came to the ministry he received from the Lord Jesus, Paul viewed himself primarily as a servant of Christ and a steward of the gospel entrusted to him (1 Corinthians 4:1). And since “it is required of stewards that they be found faithful,” the way he carried out his ministry was shaped by his constant awareness that someday he would “give an account of himself to God” (1 Corinthians 4:2; Romans 14:12).
Consequently, Paul’s example profoundly shaped how I came to view myself and my role. I am a servant-steward tasked with laboring for the joy of others (2 Corinthians 1:24), and I must labor in such ways as to avoid giving unnecessary offense to my Christian brothers and sisters as well as to unbelievers (1 Corinthians 10:32).
3. Watch for and support your successor.
Leaders often keep their eyes peeled for possible successors — and often for the wrong reasons: to eliminate the competition. Which is what Saul tried to do when he saw David’s star begin to rise in Israel (1 Samuel 18:9–11).
But Saul’s son, Jonathan, the heir apparent to Saul’s throne, saw something very different in David: a kindred God-entranced soul (1 Samuel 18:1). Eventually, Jonathan discerned that God had chosen David, and not himself, to be the next king. And the way he responded is why he became another mentor for me:
Jonathan, Saul’s son, rose and went to David at Horesh, and strengthened his hand in God. And he said to him, “Do not fear, for the hand of Saul my father shall not find you. You shall be king over Israel, and I shall be next to you. Saul my father also knows this.” And the two of them made a covenant before the Lord. (1 Samuel 23:16–18)
Jonathan’s humility and faith is stunning, and so rare in this world. He didn’t merely step aside for David, but he loved, comforted, defended, and encouraged him in God’s calling on his life.
If, out of “bitter jealousy [or] selfish ambition,” we feel threatened by a potential successor, it’s crucial that we recognize this Saul-like response as “earthly, unspiritual, demonic” (James 3:14–15) and repent of it. Because it poses a clear and present danger to whatever mission we serve.
I learned from Jonathan that, when circumstances allow it, a Christian leader can and should befriend his successor and do everything within his power to help him launch well into his season of leadership.
4. Love them to the end.
Jesus is, of course, the perfect model of leadership, but we never see him disappointed from his role because he is the Lord himself. However, this description of the way Jesus loved his disciples made a huge impact on me as a leader: “He loved them to the end” (John 13:1). Whatever circumstance resulted in the end of my leadership season, I wanted the same to be said of me. A faithful Christian leader loves those he leads to the end.
In 2010, I knew that DG had outgrown my abilities to lead it effectively. And to put simply what wasn’t simple in experience, the Lord made it clear that my colleague, Scott Anderson, was the leader he was raising up for the next season. So, we worked with our board to create a transition process that culminated in Scott being installed as our CEO in 2015. And I officially took a role as a member of DG’s teaching team.
Due to Scott’s leadership, as well as the remarkable team he has assembled, the ministry is more fruitful, more focused on our mission, more efficient, and healthier than it’s ever been. And my profile within the ministry is as small as it’s ever been. The next generation has taken over, and they are doing everything better than I ever could.
Humble Joy of Heaven
How do I, as the founding leader, feel about all this? Honestly, it’s hard to imagine being happier. This is what I had prayed for in the early days. I think it’s a taste of the humble joy of heaven, where every saint overflows with joy as they see Jesus increase and remember how God so graciously gave them each a small, temporary role in that increase.
I wish I could say I embodied these values perfectly through my disappointments. I didn’t. But they nonetheless shaped and guided me. And I believe the Lord honored my imperfect striving and blessed my friendships with the men who were appointed to take over after me.
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Christ Loved Himself in Loving the Church: Ephesians 5:25–31, Part 1
John Piper is founder and teacher of desiringGod.org and chancellor of Bethlehem College & Seminary. For 33 years, he served as pastor of Bethlehem Baptist Church, Minneapolis, Minnesota. He is author of more than 50 books, including Desiring God: Meditations of a Christian Hedonist and most recently Providence.
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Do Answered Prayers Depend on My Holiness?
Audio Transcript
The Bible is very clear on a point we address today. And it’s this one: for our prayers to be answered, we must be obedient to God. That’s right — for our prayers to be answered, we must obey. The point is blunt and pervasive, and you can find it all over the Bible, in texts like Isaiah 1:15–18; John 15:7; 1 John 3:21–23; 1 Peter 3:7, 12; 4:7; James 5:16; and on and on. Okay then, so how holy must I become in order for my prayers to get answered? If you’re paying attention to your Bible, this is a legitimate question, and one Pastor John took up in a sermon over forty years ago. Here he is to explain and to add two more texts into the mix that I didn’t mention.
God said to Solomon, “If my people who are called by my name humble themselves, and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven and will forgive their sin and heal their land” (2 Chronicles 7:14). And the psalmist confirmed it in his own experience: “I cried to him with my mouth, and high praise was on my tongue. If I had cherished iniquity in my heart, the Lord would not have listened. But truly God has listened; he has attended to the voice of my prayer” (Psalm 66:17–19). Therefore, I find it taught in the New Testament and the Old Testament that if a child has bad attitudes or misbehaves, God will not give him everything he asks for. In order to have our prayers answered, we must be obedient children.
Now, there are two possible misunderstandings of this, which I want to ward off. Both of them would result in a great diminishing of our joy of faith, and a belittling of God’s mercy.
Obedient, Not Perfect
First of all, it would be a mistake to go away from here and say, “The Bible teaches that one must be sinlessly perfect in order to have our prayers answered.” There is a big difference between an obedient child and a perfect child.
You know the Lord’s Prayer? At the heart of the Lord’s Prayer is this petition that Jesus taught us to pray: “And forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors” (Matthew 6:12). Now, I assume that since immediately prior to that was the petition, “Give us this day our daily bread” (Matthew 6:11), that Jesus means for this prayer to be prayed each day, which means that he expects us to need to pray, “Forgive us our sins” each day. I don’t think Jesus had any illusion that his disciples would in life outgrow the need to pray for forgiveness for sins. That’s a great reassurance to me, who sins daily in my own attitude.
Here’s the inference that I draw from that: Since he taught us to pray, “Forgive us our sins,” it would be a contradiction to say that in order to have our prayers answered, we must be without sin. That’s plain, I think, and therefore, it does not follow from Jesus’s teachings that we must be perfect, without sin, in order to have our prayers answered.
“The righteous person, whose prayer avails much, is not the sinless person, but the repentant person.”
No, the righteous person, whose prayer avails much — as James says it does in James 5:16 — is not the sinless person, but the repentant person. He’s not the person who falls into sin, but the person who stays there and is content with his sin. The person whose prayers are not answered is not the person who fights against temptation and now and then loses the battle, but the person who is quite content with his spiritual mediocrity and makes no effort to improve or to overcome his lethargy and carnality. Therefore, never say, “I must be perfect in order to have my prayers answered.” That’s the first misunderstanding I want to avoid.
No Merit Involved
The second misunderstanding that might arise from the fact that we must be obedient children in order to have our prayers answered would be that this obedience merits or deserves the answer to prayer. That one would follow very naturally, some might think. If you’ve got to obey in order to get your prayer answered, then what he’s teaching is that you’ve got to merit or deserve answers to prayer. But that would go against everything I said at the beginning, to the effect that the death of Jesus purchased for us the answers to our prayers that we might receive them through mercy freely.
Now, the way I picture this — namely, the importance of obedience in relationship to God’s mercy — is something like this. None of us is a child of God by nature. On the contrary, Paul says we are all children of wrath by nature (Ephesians 2:3), which means that we have freely, by mercy, through grace, been adopted into the family of God. We have our standing as children not owing to anything meritorious in ourselves, but only owing to the grace of God.
Therefore, all good behavior in this family must spring from this dependence upon mercy. All true obedience to Christ, the only obedience that pleases him, is the obedience that springs out of our confidence in the power and the wisdom and the love of God.
The only reason to disobey God is that we don’t trust his advice, isn’t it? The only reason my sons disobey me is because, on the spur of the moment, or planned out, they don’t think what I’ve said is best for them. “Don’t play there.” “Well, it looks like it’s more fun to play there. Therefore, I will play there.” Tacitly, Daddy’s wrong. That’s why we disobey. We do not trust God.
Therefore, since all disobedience flows from not trusting the Father’s counsel, it follows that all genuine obedience flows from trusting God. There’s a huge difference between trusting God for mercy and meriting answers to prayer. Merit looks at itself and thinks about its own value that it can offer to God. Mercy looks away from the self to God and thinks about how much value there is in his mercy to me in my lack of merit.
“God answers the prayers of the obedient because he delights so much in their faith, out which their obedience springs.”
So God answers the prayers of the obedient because he delights so much in their faith, out of which all of their obedience springs. He sees faith, wherever he finds it, as a token or a sign or an outworking of what he values above all. But faith is not meritorious because it looks away to mercy rather than looking at its own value. So never say, when you get an answer to prayer, “I have merited (or deserved) this answer to prayer.”
Asking as God’s Children
If we avoid these two errors — perfectionism on the one hand and legalism on the other hand — then the teaching stands. According to John 9:31, “We know that God does not listen to sinners, but if anyone is a worshiper of God and does his will, God listens to him.”
It seems to me that the application of this teaching is plain; it hardly needs any emphasis. But I’ll state it in a sentence: When Jesus commands us to ask, to seek, to knock, he is not merely commanding that we pray, but that we live like children of a merciful Father ought to live. “Let my words abide within you. Cherish no iniquity in your heart. Love your fellow believers. Do good to all. Forsake oppression. Confess your sins.” If we walk in the light as he is in the light, we will have confident communion with him, and see great answers to prayer.