Audio Transcript

Good people-pleasing versus bad people-pleasing: there’s a difference. So how do we know the difference? We need to figure it out. And we will today, thanks to yet another excellent email question from a listener, this time a listener named Nathaniel. “Pastor John, hello! I need your help on something. How do I quit seeking to please every person in my life and focus on pleasing God? I want to apply Galatians 1:10 to my life. Can you walk me through what this means? I’m unable to discover God’s plan for me because I’m constantly making decisions based on how it pleases or displeases everyone around me. Thank you!”

People-pleasing is a great problem for many people — I would say probably for most people, because nobody likes to be criticized. Nobody likes to be rejected. We want to be affirmed and admired and accepted. And therefore, everybody is vulnerable to this temptation. When we don’t get victory over this temptation of people-pleasing, it can become a very unhealthy, controlling neediness that keeps us in bondage rather than liberating us to do God’s will with joy.

Bad People-Pleasing

The first thing I think we need to do is to clarify what aspects of pleasing others are good, and what aspects of pleasing others are harmful. Nathaniel, who asked this question, has his eye on Galatians 1:10, where Paul says, “Am I now seeking the approval of man, or of God? Or am I trying to please man? If I were still trying to please man, I would not be a servant of Christ.”

Paul says the same kind of thing elsewhere. For example, in 1 Thessalonians 2:4, he says, “As we have been approved by God to be entrusted with the gospel, so we speak, not to please man, but to please God who tests our hearts.” And he tells slaves in Ephesians 6:5–6, “Obey your earthly masters . . . not by way of eye-service, as people-pleasers, but as servants of Christ, doing the will of God from the heart.” And people said of Jesus in Mark 12:14, “Teacher, we know that you are true and do not care about anyone’s opinion. For you are not swayed by appearances, but truly teach the way of God.”

“If you live to please other people, you will not live for the sake of the truth.”

So clearly, Paul and Jesus put a high premium on not being controlled by what other people think. Both of them say or imply that if you live to please other people, you will not live for the sake of the truth, which clearly means you won’t live for the sake of the will of God. The opinion of others will become your god and will lead you around as if you had a hook in your nose, and you will not be authentic, and you will not be obedient, and you will not be able to fulfill God’s purpose for you on the earth, which is to glorify him rather than to esteem the opinion of others so highly.

Good People-Pleasing

However, having said all that against people-pleasing, that’s not the whole story when it comes to pleasing others. Paul said in Romans 15:2, “Let each of us please his neighbor for his good, to build him up.” And in 1 Corinthians 10:32–33, he says, “Give no offense to Jews or to Greeks or to the church of God, just as I try to please everyone in everything I do, not seeking my own advantage, but that of many, that they may be saved.”

Now, here’s the reason those two sets of teachings about people-pleasing are not contradictory. The efforts to please people in both Romans 15 and 1 Corinthians 10 are not to curry the favor of others, nor are they to avoid criticism. This effort to please in those two texts is not self-exalting, and it’s not self-protecting. It is entirely in the service of doing good to others, not enhancing one’s own position or protecting oneself. In the one text, Paul says he pleases others to build them up, and in the other he says he pleases people in order that they may be saved.

This is not evidence of an insecure, unhealthy person who needs the approval of others. This is evidence of a very healthy, strong, loving person who lives for the good of others. Sometimes he’s able to commend the gospel by pleasing people; other times he must defend the gospel by displeasing people. And in both cases, his own identity remains constant. He’s not a chameleon, changing colors in order to fit in for the sake of his own enhancement or protection. He’s living for others, whether that calls for displeasing them or pleasing them.

Three Remedies for Fearing Man

So what needs to happen if we find ourselves in bondage to the opinion of others?

1. Get a big vision of God.

The first thing that needs to happen is that our God needs to become bigger in our lives, and in our minds, and in our hearts. God must increase, and people must decrease. Ed Welch wrote a whole book called When People Are Big and God Is Small. That’s a great title. That’s the basic problem. People and their opinion loom large in our minds and hearts, while God is a distant, scarcely discernible influence on what we feel and do. That has to change.

“God is infinitely greater, more glorious, more satisfying, more rewarding than all the people in the world put together.”

So, by prayer and study of God’s word, we should focus on the majesty and glory of God in all his attributes and all his ways. We need to preach to ourselves that there really is no comparison between knowing God and knowing people, between pleasing God and pleasing people, between treasuring God and treasuring people. God is infinitely greater, more glorious, more satisfying, more rewarding than all the people in the world put together. So, that’s our first task: pray and study the greatness of God into our hearts and minds.

2. Find a firm identity in Christ.

The second thing that needs to happen — and it happens by means of the first — is that when God becomes big, our identity in relation to God becomes secure, firm, glorious. If the Creator of the universe is your Father, and you are an heir of everything he owns, how could the opinion of, say, a million people — a million mere humans — control your sense of destiny, your sense of who you are?

Listen to Paul’s logic in 1 Corinthians 3:21: “Let no one boast in men.” Now, remember what was happening. Some were saying, “I’m of Christ,” “I’m of Apollos,” “I’m of Peter,” “I’m of Paul,” meaning, “I’m getting my strokes and my identity from lining up with the really famous guy, this really good guy.” These are needy people. “So let no one boast in men,” Paul says, “for [here’s the argument] all things are yours, whether Paul or Apollos or Cephas or the world or life or death or the present or the future — all are yours, and you are Christ’s, and Christ is God’s” (1 Corinthians 3:21–23).

What an argument. The fact that Christians own everything (“all are yours”) as the children of God, and that it’s only a matter of time until we come into our inheritance, shows how utterly foolish it is to boast about famous people that we know, or whose favor we have obtained. It’s ridiculous. It’s a sign that we don’t really believe who we are as the children of God.

3. Look to your reward.

And third, which is simply an implication of the first two, we need to be deeply persuaded that our reward is great in heaven, very great, precisely because we incur the displeasure of other people in our faithfulness to Jesus. Listen to Jesus in Matthew 5:11–12: “Blessed are you when others revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice . . .” You can’t do that if you’re a people-pleaser. “Rejoice and be glad.” Why? “For your reward is great in heaven.” So instead of being depressed or controlled by the rejection and the disapproval of others, Jesus says, “If you’re walking in obedience to me, that very rejection will result in a great reward.”

We need to believe that. We need to believe that our reward in heaven is great. I get so sick of people talking about “pie in the sky by and by,” having no relevance for this life. Good grief — what could be more relevant in Jesus’s argument here? If you have the resources to rejoice in the face of being scorned, persecuted, reviled, rejected, you have resources to love your enemy like crazy. We need to believe that our reward is great in heaven, a lot better than pie.

Free to Please God

So those are my three steps toward being set free from the bondage of people-pleasing. May God make your identity as his child, who will inherit everything, firm. May he make your identity as his child stable, firm, deep, unshakable. And may you realize how great your reward is while walking in obedience to Jesus, precisely because you incur the displeasure of others, not because you avoid it.

ABSTRACT: As a young pastor, Jonathan Edwards yearned for revival — and in time, God was pleased to bring revival, first in 1734, and then into the 1740s as the Great Awakening spread through the Western world. Edwards watched hundreds of formerly apathetic neighbors become earnest seekers of God; he saw evening revelries become gatherings for singing and prayer. Along the way, however, he also observed many spurious signs of spiritual life. His ministry yields insight into both the spiritual means of revival and the genuine marks of revival, and it also gives hope that God might be pleased to bring similar revival today.

For our ongoing series of feature articles for pastors, leaders, and teachers, we asked Douglas Sweeney, professor of divinity at Beeson Divinity School, to draw lessons on revival from the ministry of Jonathan Edwards.

The young Jonathan Edwards (1703–1758) longed for nothing more than revival. He viewed special works of the Spirit as special tokens of God’s blessing, and he hoped beyond hope that he would receive some himself. He had moved to Northampton while in his early twenties to assist his aging grandfather, Rev. Solomon Stoddard, at the only church in town. Stoddard had led the congregation in occasional seasons of grace, but soon after he passed away, leaving Edwards by himself as the town’s only pastor, the church’s spiritual life began to go downhill. The young people, especially, started sowing wild oats, partying especially after corporate worship services. They seemed deaf to their Lord. Edwards wondered what would become of his ministry.

After five years of anxiety, hard work, and prayer, signs of spring began to appear. Early in 1734, a revival started to stir the nearby village of Pascommuck, roughly three miles from town. Then in April of that year, Northampton’s youth were faced with the unexpected deaths of two of their friends — the first “a young man in the bloom of his youth,” who was “violently seized with a pleurisy and . . . died in about two days”; the other “a young married woman, who had been considerably exercised in mind about the salvation of her soul before she was ill, and was in great distress in the beginning of her illness; but seemed to have satisfying evidences of God’s saving mercy to her before her death; so that she died very full of comfort, in a most earnest and moving manner warning and counseling others.” As Edwards noted of her passing, “This seemed much to contribute to the solemnizing of the spirits of many young persons: and there began evidently to appear more of a religious concern on people’s minds.”1

“The young Jonathan Edwards longed for nothing more than revival.”

Leaning into this concern, Edwards spoke to the youth that fall, recommending that they turn their Thursday evening revelry into a time of “social religion,” meeting in homes throughout the town for Christian fellowship and prayer. No sooner had they done so than the town was forced again to deal with a strange, surprising death — this time of a senior citizen. “Many were much moved and affected” by this tragedy.2 The adults in town followed the lead of their own children, meeting on Sunday nights for fellowship, prayer, and hymn-singing. Soon these spiritual practices led to transformation. Revival roared through town, spreading up and down the Connecticut River Valley.

God’s Surprising Work

Edwards, of course, was biased, but his testimony regarding this revival’s holy fruit suggests a massive outpouring of the Spirit in Northampton. “This work of God . . . soon made a glorious alteration in the town; so that in the spring and summer following [1735] . . . the town seemed to be full of the presence of God: it never was so full of love, nor so full of joy; and yet so full of distress, as it was then.”3

In addition to the changes wrought in individual souls, this revival changed the nature of corporate worship in Northampton. “Our public assemblies were then beautiful,” as Edwards later recalled. “The congregation was alive in God’s service, everyone earnestly intent on the public worship . . . ; the assembly in general were, from time to time, in tears while the Word was preached; some weeping with sorrow and distress, others with joy and love, others with pity and concern for the souls of their neighbors.”4

It amazes one to consider that Edwards was barely 31 years old when he led this great revival. His wife Sarah was 24. Even contemporaries stood in awe of what was taking place. Edwards scribbled a breathless report to a senior colleague living in Boston, who in turn spread the word along his own social network. Soon the news reverberated all the way to England. A detailed account was in demand across the sea, and Edwards stepped up to supply it in the form of his first book, A Faithful Narrative of the Surprizing Work of God in the Conversion of Many Hundred Souls in Northampton, and the Neighbouring Towns and Villages (1737). Within three years, this book was printed both in Edinburgh and Boston, and translated and republished in both German and Dutch editions. It inspired other ministers to work toward revival. It compelled George Whitefield to resume his work in the colonies, encouraged John Wesley to practice outdoor preaching in England, and exerted a powerful force on the spread of the Great Awakening, which would crest during the early 1740s.

Edwards gave the credit to the work of his sovereign God. But he knew that God is wont to work through prayer and gospel preaching. In 1747, Edwards published a lengthy treatise on the need to pray for revival. He preached for many years about the importance of praying persistently. Late in 1734, he also began, prayerfully, to preach a gospel series on the sinner’s justification and conversion by faith alone — a series used by God to effect the work of redemption in Northampton.

He commenced this series in November of that year, attributing his church’s own revival to its contents. It began with a talk on “Justification by Faith Alone,” based on Romans 4:5: “To him that worketh not, but believeth on him that justifieth the ungodly, his faith is counted for righteousness.” He took from the text this doctrine: “We are justified only by faith in Christ, and not by any manner of virtue or goodness of our own.” And he expounded this doctrine with passion, making it clear that justification comes as a gift of God’s free grace, not for anything we do, but because of what God effects when he unites us to his Son, by the power of the Spirit, making us part of his holy church, the mystical bride of Jesus Christ. Our faith is that by which we cling to Christ in spiritual union. God brings it to life in us; we merely exercise it “actively.” And as we cling to Christ and trust in his merit for salvation, God sees that we are one with him and reckons his merit as our own. “What is real in the union between Christ and his people, is the foundation of what is legal,” Edwards postulated famously.5

Marks of the Spirit

Like the Puritans before him, Edwards placed a high premium on the Christian’s union with Christ as the basis of salvation. We are saved, he taught, not merely by assenting to the gospel; even “the devils . . . believe, and tremble” (James 2:19). We are saved, as well, because the Holy Spirit inhabits our bodies, reorients our souls by uniting them to Christ, makes us sharers in the Lord’s righteousness, and bears fruit in our lives.

“This teaching about the Spirit’s role in salvation might have been the defining feature of Edwards’s ministry.”

This teaching about the Spirit’s role in salvation might have been the defining feature of Edwards’s ministry. He lived in a setting where everyone had to go to church and almost everyone affirmed the basic truths of the Christian faith. He worked as a tax-supported servant of his colony’s state church, an institution that he knew was full of merely cultural Protestantism. He loved his people dearly and believed that he would have to give an account someday for his ministry. So he labored tirelessly to help his hearers understand that there is a wide, eternal difference between authentic faith in Christ and perfunctory religion, or nominal Christianity. That difference, furthermore, has to do with the Holy Spirit and his work of regeneration, of quickening the soul, giving it spiritual life in Christ.

After struggling with his predecessors’ doctrines of conversion, Edwards came to see that God does not convert us all in exactly the same way, that the substance of conversion matters much more than the form. He also saw that true conversion was primarily supernatural. It is not something sinners effect by taking the right steps. They can (and should) certainly prepare for conversion, availing themselves of God’s means of grace and praying for mercy. But they cannot make it happen by their practice of religion. God effects conversion. And the main thing he does when he converts penitent sinners is give them a new heart, reorienting their “affections.” He fills them with his Spirit. He engenders in the soul a deep longing to walk with him, to know him better, and to honor him in everything. So when Edwards counseled sinners, he asked about their hearts. He wanted to find out what they loved, how they wished to spend their time, what they aspired to in life. Moreover, his burden during the rest of his revivalistic ministry was to help others discern the Spirit’s presence in their lives — to “try the spirits” (1 John 4:1), distinguishing God’s Spirit from counterfeits.

Edwards’s strategy was to point people away from what we might call externals of religion, red herrings of the faith, qualities he labeled “negative signs” — they neither confirm nor disprove the Spirit’s presence and activity — and toward what he referred to as the “positive signs” of grace, qualities the Bible says result from true revival and conversion. The negative signs included strong emotions, loss of control (either physically or spiritually), and irregular worship practices. Such qualities had often attended God’s regenerating work, but they could also be the products of religious “hypocrites” (a term Edwards used quite frequently), or even of the devil.

Edwards’s positive signs, by contrast, included esteem for Jesus, opposition to the devil, greater regard to the Scriptures, and a spirit of love to God and man, qualities that guarantee that God is active in one’s life. They cannot be fabricated. They are supernatural gifts. And the “chief” of all these gifts, the sign most clearly taught in Scripture as an indicator of grace, was the sign of “Christian practice,” or biblical holiness. This was no red herring. It was the sum of true religion and, in Edwards’s estimation, it had characterized Northampton for a period of several months — like never before in local history — from December of 1734 through summer of 1735.

Whitefield Visits Northampton

Unfortunately, however, this revival of the Spirit and its signs of grace would fade — nearly as fast as they had appeared — during the dog days of summer. Despite (or rather because of) these positive signs of saving grace, the devil was haunting the town by spring, trying to thwart the work of God by spreading melancholy, doubt, and even suicidal urges. The revival came to a halt that summer.

The good news is that Edwards continued grow in grace through the late 1730s and taught his people to do the same, preaching some of the best sermons in the history of the church. This faithfulness contributed to even larger revivals, which culminated regionally in the early 1740s and were tied to the preaching of Edwards’s friend George Whitefield, thought by some to be the greatest preacher in history.

Only 26 years old at the height of this work of God, Whitefield spoke to larger crowds than anyone else in colonial history — at times to tens of thousands — long before the invention of microphones and amplifiers. A poor man from England with distinctly crossed eyes, he was blessed by God with a booming voice, a flair for the dramatic, and a remarkable gift of extemporaneous speech. He preached a basic gospel message from all over the biblical canon. He told stories with charisma. The most compelling stories he told as he progressed from place to place had to do with the spread of revival through the Anglo-American world. He personified the Awakening and its international scope.

During his second trip to the colonies, Whitefield sent a letter to Edwards asking permission to visit his church. Edwards replied warmly. He knew of Whitefield’s record as a winsome gospel preacher, and he longed for help renewing the work of revival in Northampton. By the spring of 1740, Edwards’s parish started to show the signs of another work of God, especially among the youth. Then when Whitefield finally arrived — on Friday, October 17, eleven months after he had written to Edwards — these sparks were fanned into flame.

Whitefield stayed for three days. He spoke twice on the day he arrived, once in church and once at the manse; once the following afternoon (after another sermon in Hadley, nearly five miles away); and twice more “upon the sabbath.” Edwards reported to a friend that his “congregation was extraordinarily melted by every sermon; almost the whole assembly being in tears for a great part of sermon time.” Edwards “wept” as well, “during the whole time” of the Sunday morning service, according to Whitefield. God’s Spirit was at work, as nearly everyone could tell. While in town for only three days, Whitefield played a crucial role in drawing Edwards’s flock back into the Great Awakening.6

Whitefield was impetuous, at times spiritually arrogant. He had earned a reputation for judging other pastors rashly, claiming that many — maybe most — were unconverted. So as Edwards traveled with him to his next few preaching stations, he advised the young star that it could be dangerous to rely too much on spiritual impulses without help from the word of God. He also said that, while he affirmed Whitefield’s emphasis on the need for clergy themselves to be converted, he believed it inappropriate to judge precipitately which of their colleagues were regenerate — and which were not. Edwards listened to Whitefield preach to several thousand in the fields, thanked him heartily for his labors, and returned home hopeful for the future. Right away, he preached a series on the parable of the sower (Matthew 13), exhorting his people not to be starstruck by Whitefield’s obvious eloquence, but to live as the kind of soil in which the word bears fruit.

Within the next couple of months, Northampton bore abundant fruit. “There was a great alteration in the town,” Edwards testified, particularly among the local children. “By the middle of December a very considerable work of God appeared among those that were very young, and the revival of religion continued to increase; so that in the spring, an engagedness of spirit about things of religion was become very general amongst young people and children, and religious subjects almost wholly took up their conversation.” Even Edwards’s own daughters had come under the work of the Spirit. Many other children, as well, had been affected by the gospel. Edwards later described this time as “the most wonderful work among children that ever was in Northampton.” It rekindled his flame for revival and conversion in New England.7

Pastor as Watchman

During the following spring and summer, Edwards himself was called upon to serve as a traveling gospel preacher. Inspired by Whitefield’s example, he did more of this than ever during 1741. He is best known for a sermon he preached in Enfield, near the border with Connecticut. He had preached this sermon before to his own congregation. As he preached it on the road, however, amazing things happened. Edwards’s text was very brief: “Their foot shall slide in due time” (Deuteronomy 32:35). His doctrine somewhat longer and more memorable today: “There is nothing that keeps wicked men, at any one moment, out of hell, but the mere pleasure of God.” He applied this doctrine at length, in words that have gone down in history:

The wrath of God is like great waters that are dammed for the present; they increase more and more, and rise higher and higher, till an outlet is given, and the longer the stream is stopped, the more rapid and mighty is its course, when once it is let loose. ’Tis true, that judgment against your evil works has not been executed hitherto; the floods of God’s vengeance have been withheld; but your guilt in the meantime is constantly increasing. . . . Thus are all you that never passed under a great change of heart, by the mighty power of the Spirit of God upon your souls; all that were never born again, and made new creatures. . . . You are thus in the hands of an angry God; ’tis nothing but his mere pleasure that keeps you from being this moment swallowed up in everlasting destruction.

So goes the famous sermon, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” a truly frightening piece of work, but one that is also full of love and passionate literary artistry.8

Edwards preached dozens of hellfire sermons during his ministry, many of which survive. Like the Puritans before him, he did so in the manner of the “watchman” of Ezekiel, whom God held responsible to sound a trumpet clearly when his people were threatened with danger. This was serious business. Edwards believed, as he proclaimed at one of his colleagues’ ordinations, that “ministers of the gospel have the precious and immortal souls of men committed to their care and trust by the Lord Jesus Christ.” He believed that he would give an account on judgment day for his ministry. So he preached from time to time on the dangers of damnation. “If there be really a hell,” he wrote in 1741,

of such dreadful, and never-ending torments, . . . that multitudes are in great danger of, and that the bigger part of men in Christian countries do actually from generation to generation fall into, for want of a sense of the terribleness of it, and their danger of it, and so for want of taking due care to avoid it; then why is it not proper for those that have the care of souls, to take great pains to make men sensible of it? Why should not they be told as much of the truth as can be? If I am in danger of going to hell, I should be glad to know as much as possibly I can of the dreadfulness of it: if I am very prone to neglect due care to avoid it, he does me the best kindness, that does most to represent to me the truth of the case, that sets forth my misery and danger in the liveliest manner.9

Such preaching saw success at the apex of the Awakening. Thousands were converted — in America alone — during 1741. The Great Awakening was divisive, but it also crystallized the crucial importance of conversion and of living with eschatological urgency.

Ten Lessons from Edwards’s Ministry

What might we learn from Edwards and his work on revival? Let me conclude by offering ten brief lessons.

First, Edwards and his colleagues show what God has often done — and still wants to do today — by means of urgent, vivid, preaching framed by the doctrines of grace. How many preachers can you name who share Edwards’s ability to render Bible doctrine urgent and Edwards’s commitment to write sermons that leave a beautiful, intellectually compelling, and enduring impression on their hearers?

Second, Edwards and his colleagues demonstrate the great promise of preaching to people’s hearts. As Edwards wrote in Some Thoughts Concerning the Present Revival (1743), “I should think myself in the way of my duty to raise the affections of my hearers as high as possibly I can, provided that they are affected with nothing but truth, and with affections that are not disagreeable to the nature of what they are affected with. . . . Our people don’t so much need to have their heads stored, as to have their hearts touched; and they stand in the greatest need of that sort of preaching that has the greatest tendency to do this.”10

Third, Great Awakening Christians showed that testimonies matter. I cannot do justice to this topic in this essay. Suffice it to say that what they often called “religious intelligence,” or news of the work of God and the spread of the gospel both at home and abroad, played a central role in spreading the revival. This news was shared orally in evangelistic services. It was also published in Christian magazines and newspapers, used by God to expand people’s horizons and make them feel part of the global cause of Christ.

Fourth, Edwards and his peers showed that prayer matters even more. Edwards preached for many years about the importance of praying persistently. He published a major treatise on the need to pray for revival, An Humble Attempt to Promote Explicit Agreement and Visible Union of God’s People in Extraordinary Prayer for the Revival of Religion and Advancement of Christ’s Kingdom on Earth. And he exhorted all who listened to participate in transatlantic concerts of prayer for revival.

Fifth, Edwards and pastors like him demonstrated the importance of preaching what the apostle Paul called the whole counsel of God — even the parts about hell and the consequences of sin. God used such preaching to draw thousands to himself. Do we have the wisdom, faith, courage, and spiritual sensitivity to preach this way today, to the honor and glory of God?

Sixth, Edwards and his peers modeled pastoral wisdom in the midst of signs and wonders and spiritual intensity. They often failed to discern rightly. But they tried their best to open their Bibles and interpret the signs of the Spirit all around them, teaching the distinguishing marks of a work of the Spirit of God.

“Edwards and his peers demonstrated that word and Spirit always go hand in hand.”

Seventh, Edwards and his peers demonstrated that word and Spirit always go hand in hand. Against those who taught the word without spiritual vitality, they called for real conversion and walking with the Spirit. Against those who made claims to immediate revelation, or to spiritual impulses not grounded in the Scriptures, they called for theological accountability.

Eighth, Edwards and his peers modeled evangelical ecumenism. They avoided spiritual rashness and judgmental attitudes toward serious Christians, at least when at their best. Some did prove divisive from time to time. But again, when at their best, they showed that Anglicans, Congregationalists, Presbyterians, Baptists, and others can work together for the gospel — giving rise to modern evangelicalism.

Ninth, Edwards and his colleagues did not let anyone despise them for their youth, as Paul said to Timothy (1 Timothy 4:12). Edwards was in his thirties at the height of the Great Awakening. Whitefield was in his twenties. God used them remarkably in spite of themselves.

Finally, the early evangelicals demonstrated the crucial importance of “social religion”: Christian fellowship, Bible study, testimony, prayer, and spiritual singing in small-group contexts. Indeed, they put these practices on the church-historical map. Millions have come to know Jesus as a result.

May God help us all make good use of their example, facilitating revival and renewal in our time.11

Imagine that the angel Gabriel has been recording your prayers for the last year. Every request for yourself or others has found its way into his heavenly ledger. What might such a record reveal?

How many petitions would fall under the heading of physical health? How long would be the column tracking requests about your relationships? How many tallies would you find next to “Work” or “School” or “Church”? How many vague prayers for “blessing” might you find?

I’ve been asking myself such questions lately, in part because of a striking observation from Tim Keller’s book Prayer. If you study the prayers of the apostle Paul recorded throughout his letters, Keller says, you may notice something striking: among the many requests Paul makes on behalf of the churches, he never once asks God to heal their bodies, fill their wombs, prosper their vocations, or lift their persecutions. In fact, Keller writes, “Paul’s prayers for his friends contain no appeals for changes in their circumstances” (20).

I fear that if I set my own prayer record next to Paul’s, some of my first prayers may appear last, and my last prayers first.

Heart-Deep Prayers

Now, we should beware of stating the case too strongly. Even though Paul’s prayers for others contain no appeals for circumstantial changes, the apostle clearly had a category for such prayers.

He invites the Philippians to “let [their] requests be made known to God,” without limiting the requests to a certain kind (Philippians 4:6). He calls Timothy to pray “for kings and all who are in high positions” (1 Timothy 2:1–2). When asking for prayer himself, Paul sometimes mentions personal safety and success in travel (Romans 15:31–32; 2 Thessalonians 3:1–2). He also pleaded three times for God to take his thorn (2 Corinthians 12:8).

Yet such requests form the background, not the foreground, of Paul’s recorded prayers; they are q’s and z’s in the alphabet of his intercessions, present but not frequent. Instead, Paul displays a relentless focus on the inward life, the Christian soul, the hidden realm of the heart — or, to use a phrase from Ephesians 3:16, the “inner being.”

So, for example, Paul prays that the Romans might “abound in hope” and know the presence of “the God of peace” (Romans 15:13, 33). He wants the Ephesians to have “the Spirit of wisdom and of revelation in the knowledge of him”; he wants Christ to “dwell in [their] hearts through faith” (Ephesians 1:17; 3:17). Paul yearns for the Philippians to abound in discerning love (Philippians 1:9) and for the Colossians to give thanks like heaven-bound saints (Colossians 3:12). He asks that the Thessalonians might be holy through and through (1 Thessalonians 5:23).

Even when Paul prays for outward matters like public obedience or visible unity, these always flow from somewhere deeper, somewhere inner. Paul’s prayers cut to the heart.

Why He Prayed What He Prayed

God gave us Paul’s prayers, in part, so that by rehearsing them our own requests might grow in biblical balance and substance. Like the Psalms, Paul’s prayers train our tongues in the language of heaven. They give us words before the throne of grace.

At the same time, growing in Pauline prayer means more than simply repeating his requests. As D.A. Carson notes, Paul’s prayers spring from a robust “biblical vision,” a vision that “embraces who God is, what he has done, who we are, where we are going, what we must value and cherish” (Praying with Paul, 43). If we abstract Paul’s prayers from the biblical vision that inspired them, they may feel unnatural (like a second language we can’t quite learn). But once we catch his vision, we find ourselves slowly becoming fluent in Paul’s heart-deep prayers.

What, then, was Paul’s vision? Among the several areas we could explore, consider how Paul’s prayers were shaped by past grace and future glory.

Prayer Furthers Faith and Love

The first part of Paul’s vision comes from the past. “He remembers the grace we have received in the past, and thinks through the direction of our lives,” Carson writes (42). In other words, Paul considers the “good work” God has already begun in the lives of his people, and in prayer, he aims to partner with God in “[bringing] it to completion” (Philippians 1:6). He sees the seeds of grace, and prays them into flowers.

And what is the good work God has begun? What grace does he intend to grow? Again and again, Paul thanks God for two signs of grace among the saved: faith and love. “Because I have heard of your faith in the Lord Jesus and your love toward all the saints, I do not cease to give thanks for you” (Ephesians 1:15–16). To Paul, faith in Jesus and love for God’s people were more precious than all the world’s silver and gold. Our body may be broken, our dreams undone, our relationships fraught — but if we have faith and love, God has lavished us with grace (Ephesians 1:7–8).

Paul’s prayers run like rivers from this fountain of past grace, flowing with faith and love. If God has begun the good work of faith, then Paul will pray (in a dozen creative ways) for faith to grow, for God to give “the Spirit of wisdom and of revelation in the knowledge of him” (Ephesians 1:17). And if God has begun the good work of love, then Paul will ask (again with wonderful creativity) for love to “abound more and more” (Philippians 1:9).

Paul’s prayers remind us of an easily forgotten truth: in this age, the character of our inner being is far more important than the circumstances of our outer being. As Paul writes elsewhere,

We do not lose heart. Though our outer self is wasting away, our inner self is being renewed day by day. (2 Corinthians 4:16)

One day, God will raise and glorify our “outer self” and banish every bad circumstance. But in the meantime, his good work happens mostly in the “inner self.” He aims to deepen our faith, love, and every other grace until we see him face to face. So, while Paul sometimes prays for the outer self’s welfare, he fastens his attention on the inner self’s renewal.

When Earthly Requests End

If Paul’s prayers keep one eye on the past, they keep another eye on the future — and not just the future vaguely, but one future moment in particular. Repeatedly, Paul returns to one future day, when God’s good work will finally come to an end: “the day of Jesus Christ” (Philippians 1:6).

Five times in Paul’s recorded prayers, he explicitly mentions the day of Christ’s return (Philippians 1:10; 1 Thessalonians 3:13; 5:23; 2 Thessalonians 1:9–12; 2 Timothy 1:18). He prayed, it seems, in the shadow of the second coming, with the returning Christ standing at the door of his prayer closet. And the power of that future promise governed what he asked of God.

When Jesus appears, the mists will rise, the fog will clear, and the true priorities of this age will stand forth in startling clarity. Our circumstances in this life, which are by no means insignificant, will bow before matters far weightier still. Healthy or sick, did we glorify God with our bodies? Arms empty or full, did we abound in thanksgiving to him? At peace or in conflict, did we display the patience of Christ? In success or failure, were we “filled with the fruit of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ, to the glory and praise of God” (Philippians 1:11)?

What if we prayed, for ourselves and our friends, under a sky ready to split before the glory of Christ? We might ask more often, and with greater fervor, that God would establish our hearts “blameless in holiness before our God and Father, at the coming of our Lord Jesus with all his saints” (1 Thessalonians 3:13). We might pray less for circumstances to change, and more for a heart that loves Christ in all circumstances.

Our Hearts His Home

When we kneel with Paul between past and future, grace and glory, Christ’s cross and Christ’s second coming, we find ourselves saying new words, praying fresh prayers. At the bottom of our prayers, we ask for faith and love, inward strength and heart-level holiness. Or, Paul writes in Ephesians, we plead for Christ to make our hearts his home.

According to the riches of his glory [may he] grant you to be strengthened with power through his Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith. (Ephesians 3:16–17)

Paul asks that Christ would take up his residence within, filling every hallway and room with his brilliance. He asks that we would have what Keller calls a “powerful sense of God’s reality” — a sense that transcends our present situation and even survives the grave.

“Without this powerful sense of God’s reality,” Keller writes, “good circumstances can lead to overconfidence and spiritual indifference. Who needs God, our hearts would conclude, when matters seem to be so in hand?” (Prayer, 21). But when Christ makes his home in our hearts, then we can make our home in every circumstance: in “plenty and hunger,” in “abundance and need” (Philippians 4:12).

So then, pray for healing, but pray also (and most) for holiness. Pray for relational peace, but pray also (and first) for relational patience. Pray for dreams still distant and hopes still deferred, but pray also (and chiefly) for Jesus to walk with you even among the ruins of the life you wish you had. Then, whether outward circumstances flourish or wither, all will be well within. For Christ will still dwell within.