“God gave us plurality because he’s a big fan of humility.” I was struck by how often Dave Harvey mentions humility in his new book The Plurality Principle on building and maintaining church leadership teams.

It’s not a new thought that a plurality — a team of pastor-elders, as opposed to just one — both requires and encourages humility. But what I did not expect is how often Harvey would sound the refrain for the pride-crucifying, humility-cultivating power of team leadership.

Harvey, like many of us, has seen and heard a lifetime’s worth of pastoral shipwrecks in recent years. Some of these leaders were formally peerless in their churches and ministries, but many others had fellow pastor-elders in name, and functionally little accountability, operating with special privileges and a long leash. In the end, too often one man was at the helm, when it could have been a team, and in time, the church, its witness, and the pastor himself came to suffer because it.

“When difficulties arise, do the elders suspect themselves first, not others, and serve others first, not themselves?”

“All Christian community tests our humility,” Harvey writes, “but being part of a leadership team is like sitting for the bar exam” (127). Then he observes, “Humility must be learned over time as individuals both suspect themselves first, not others, and serve others first, not themselves.” Suspect self first. Serve others first. That’s insightful, and a watershed of good leadership in the church: When difficulties arise, do the elders suspect themselves first, not others, and serve others first, not themselves? And what will determine which way the pastors will go?

“Humility is the oil that lubricates the engine of plurality,” writes Harvey. “If you want to know the foundational secret that lies beneath great teams, meetings marked by unity, personal elder care, and lovingly accountable relationships, it’s this: humility” (98).

How Plurality Humbles

Unlike the world’s vision of leadership as self-actualization and the accrual of privilege, a Christian vision of leadership has God, not self, at the center. Pastor-elders are not in it to build their own sense of confidence and self-worth. Rather, their calling is to make additional sacrifices, to bear extra burdens and costs, to point our fellow church members Godward in Christ.

Our need for humility grows the more we are surrounded by other people, especially when yoked in a calling to lead together. While humility is first and foremost a creaturely virtue in relation to our Creator, many of the great texts on humility come in the context of community (Philippians 1:27–2:5; Ephesians 4:1–3; 1 Peter 5:5–7).

Consider four ways, among many others, that team leadership humbles us.

1. Teams expose selfish desires and unholy ambitions.

The apostles warn us of the dangers of “selfish ambition” (Greek eritheia). James writes, “Where jealousy and selfish ambition exist, there will be disorder and every vile practice” (James 3:16; also James 3:14). Paul lists selfish ambition as one of “the works of the flesh” alongside “sexual immorality, impurity, sensuality, idolatry, sorcery, enmity, strife, jealousy, fits of anger, . . . dissensions, divisions, envy, drunkenness, orgies, and things like these” (Galatians 5:19–21; also 2 Corinthians 12:20; Philippians 1:17; 2:3).

“Selfish ambition,” or “self-seeking” (Romans 2:8), is tragic in any human, and any Christian, and all the more in Christian leaders. And it is a special threat for lone rangers. Who will smell it out, and can challenge it, even in its subtle forms? Teammates. Men who are peers, of the same standing and similar perspective, and can tell when directions and decisions are self-seeking, rather than church-seeking.

There is often a fine line between putting self forward and the willingness to serve in visible, celebrated positions of leadership. Good pluralities (teams not just in name but in function) tend to expose such selfish desires and unholy ambitions and challenge them before they become deep-seated. As Harvey writes,

If you’re new to working with a team, you’ll soon see how often plurality uncovers and forces you to deal with the heroic dreams and fleshly desires you have for ministry. . . . To serve as part of a healthy elder plurality, a pastor must know his role, be willing to come under authority, learn humility, traffic in nuances that are neither black nor white, and be willing to think about his gifts and position through the lens of what serves the church rather than his personal agenda. Leading in community puts us under the spotlight. (29–30)

2. Teams encourage the right kind of disagreement.

Disagreements are inevitable in the church, and in every sphere of life. The question is not if they will come, but when and how. Healthy teams encourage the right kind of disagreements to happen early and often, in the context of trusting, regular relationships. Better to first hear the opposing perspective in private, from a brother and peer who manifestly loves you, than publicly, or from a tense call or letter, after a rash decision has been implemented.

It is humbling to hear a brother you admire and respect disagree with you. Then, it’s additionally humbling to realize you were short-sighted, or wrong, and to admit it. Leadership pluralities encourage healthy disagreement, in the right time and context.

3. Teams show us the joy of not doing it all.

It’s one thing to admit, as a leader, that you’re human and can’t do it all (in theory); it is another to go about your daily and weekly work as if you can indeed do it all. Teams play out that humbling truth before our eyes, moving it from theory to reality in our own heads and hearts.

For team leadership to thrive over time, writes Harvey, “Each man must believe that he needs the other men.” And seeing our need for each other, lived out before our own eyes, serves to dispel pretenses in us that we deserve the credit for ministry successes.

4. Teams try our patience, and produce better results.

Team leadership is typically not efficient, but it is effective — which is how God wants his church to be led.

“Team leadership is typically not efficient, but it is effective — which is how God wants his church to be led.”

When the “senior pastor” is essentially the church’s CEO, decisions and next actions can happen very fast. Teamwork, on the other hand, takes time. We need to synch schedules, have conversations, provide rationale, answer objections, write drafts, add appropriate nuances. Team leadership is typically not efficient.

But apparently, God isn’t all that interested in efficiency in local-church leadership. Which is worth pondering carefully in our day, when other organizations in society emphasize efficiency, not without good reasons. Yet not so with the church. The clear, unified testimony in the New Testament to plurality of leadership in the local church signals that Christ is more interested in effectiveness than efficiency in his body. Again, Harvey writes,

God loves unity, so he calls us to a team — a place where we must humbly persevere with one another to function effectively. God loves making us holy, so he unites us to men who will make us grow. God loves patience, so he imposes a way of governing that requires humble listening and a trust that he is working in the lives of others. God loves humility, so he gave us plurality. (99)

Harder, and Better

Teamwork in ministry is a precious gift. Surely, thousands of solo pastors around the world long for fellow elders and do not yet have them. May God be pleased to answer their prayers and steady their hands. There is grace too for a lonely calling.

Those of us who do enjoy the priceless gift of teammates, it can be all too easy to take them for granted. Team leadership is not always easy. Often it doesn’t feel efficient. Fellow leaders can feel inconvenient. At times, it may seem like leading alone would be better.

But leading together challenges and chastens our pride. It costs us personal comforts and convenience, but the gains for the church, and for our own long-term joy, far surpass the discomforts.

Christ did not exalt himself. Both culturally and theologically, these can be surprising words to encounter in Hebrews 5:5. So also with Jesus’s own confession in John 8:50: “I do not seek my own glory.”

Culturally, we live at a time in which self-exaltation, self-promotion, and self-advocacy are increasingly cast in terms of virtue rather than vice. We expect self-exaltation, and even commend it. Assert yourself. Speak up for yourself. Put yourself forward. Yet one of Jesus’s most repeated teachings, increasingly at odds with our age, confronts our modern lifting up of self: “Everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, and he who humbles himself will be exalted” (Luke 14:11; also Matthew 23:12; Luke 18:14).

Theologically, we have our questions as well. Many of us have come to learn, rightly, from the Scriptures, that God is the one being in all the universe for whom self-exaltation is the highest of virtues. But what does this mean for the man Christ Jesus as we see and hear him in the Gospels? He is both fully God and fully man. Did he seek his own glory — as is good and right and loving for God? If so, what do we make of the plain words in Hebrews and John that he did not?

Who Glorifies Whom?

In Scripture, to glorify, or exalt, or lift up, is sacred action and language. God made us to image him, to reflect and reveal him in the world, that he might be glorified and exalted. Before addressing the question of what it meant for Christ, as man, though God, to not seek his own glory, it may help to rehearse Scripture’s plain and repeated teaching about the pursuit of glory and exaltation.

God exalts God.

That God righteously (and lovingly) exalts himself is not Scripture’s most frequent teaching about the act of exalting, but it is plain and repeated — and theologically foundational.

It is no flaw, but indeed the highest of virtues, that God says, through the psalmist, “Be still, and know that I am God. I will be exalted among the nations, I will be exalted in the earth!” (Psalm 46:10). So too it is no flaw, but indeed virtue, for the psalmist to say to God, as rationale for his praise, “You have exalted above all things your name and your word” (Psalm 138:2). In his name and through his word, God has revealed himself, abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness toward his people.

“God exalts God, and his people exalt him, and he exalts them, but his people do not exalt themselves.”

God’s self-exaltation comes not at the expense of his people’s joy, but in the service of their joy. As Isaiah says, “He exalts himself to show mercy to you” (Isaiah 30:18). When God moves to glorify himself — “Now I will lift myself up; now I will be exalted” (Isaiah 33:10) — rightly do his enemies cower, while his people rejoice. So too, in the Gospels, when Jesus prays, “Father, glorify your name,” a righteous and loving voice comes from heaven in response: “I have glorified it, and I will glorify it again” (John 12:28).

God’s people exalt God.

Then, without surprise, and with the greatest scriptural frequency, God’s people exalt him. This is the very heart and essence of our creation in his image: to glorify him, make him known, exalt him in the world. When humans exalt, or when humans glorify, God is to be the object of the sacred action.

Rescued from Egypt and the Red Sea, Moses and the people sing in celebration, “This is my God, and I will praise him, my father’s God, and I will exalt him” (Exodus 15:2). We come to the bottom of our nature and calling as humans when we say with the prophet, “O Lord, you are my God; I will exalt you” (Isaiah 25:1), and repeat with the psalmist, “Oh, magnify the Lord with me, and let us exalt his name together!” (Psalm 34:3).

Jesus himself captured this profound calling in Matthew 5:16: “Let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father who is in heaven.” The impression on Peter and the disciples was indelible. Among dozens of other instances of exalting or glorifying God in the New Testament, Peter echoed this basic human calling, now made Christian: “Keep your conduct among the Gentiles honorable, so that . . . they may see your good deeds and glorify God” (1 Peter 2:12; also 4:11, 16).

God exalts his people.

Sometimes those who have rehearsed the first two truths most can struggle with the third: God exalts his people. Not only are his chosen people predestined to Christlikeness, called, and justified, but they also are glorified (Romans 8:29–30). The Scriptures make stunning promises — almost too good to be true — about how God will glorify his people: being pleased with us, making us heirs with Christ of everything (Romans 8:16–17), serving us at table (Luke 12:37), appointing us to judge angels (1 Corinthians 6:3), ascribing value to us and rejoicing over us (Zephaniah 3:17), and (perhaps most shocking of all) granting us to sit with Christ on his throne (Revelation 3:21).

In the Old Testament, God moved to glorify or exalt the leader of his people. First, Moses; then, Joshua: “The Lord exalted Joshua in the sight of all Israel, and they stood in awe of him just as they had stood in awe of Moses, all the days of his life” (Joshua 4:14; also 3:7). Then markedly so with David, as king, as he knew full well (2 Samuel 5:12; 22:49; 1 Chronicles 25:5). But not just prophets, leaders, and kings. To all his chosen people, he said, “Wait for the Lord and keep his way, and he will exalt you to inherit the land” (Psalm 37:34).

God’s exalting of his people is likewise explicit in one of Jesus’s most repeated statements, as we’ve seen: “Whoever exalts himself will be humbled, and whoever humbles himself will be exalted” (Matthew 23:12; also Luke 14:11; 18:14). And it’s applied particularly to Christians in James 4:10 and 1 Peter 5:6: humble yourselves before God, and he will exalt you.

God’s people do not exalt themselves.

At this point, however, the symmetry breaks down. Scripture here is gloriously asymmetrical, we might say: God exalts God, and his people exalt him, and he exalts them, but his people do not exalt themselves. Just as in the sacred language of exaltation, God is to be the object of human glorifying, so God, not man, is to be the actor when his people are glorified.

“Biblically, the path of human self-exaltation is a trail of tears and tragedy.”

Biblically, the path of human self-exaltation is a trail of tears and tragedy. Pharaoh, who oppresses God’s people as almost the serpent incarnate, is first to be tagged: “You are still exalting yourself against my people and will not let them go” (Exodus 9:17). Centuries later, the ancient head reared when David’s son Adonijah “exalted himself, saying, ‘I will be king’” (1 Kings 1:5), and rebelled not only against his own father, but against God.

Psalm 66:7 identifies “the rebellious” as those who “exalt themselves.” Proverbs 30:32 identifies “exalting yourself” with folly. Self-exaltation may feel attractive, and safe, in the moment, but God’s humbling hand will come in time.

The vision of Daniel 11 shows that the rebellion and folly of human self-exaltation is no small flaw or misstep. It is the spirit of antichrist. “The king shall do as he wills. He shall exalt himself and magnify himself above every god, and shall speak astonishing things against the God of gods” (Daniel 11:36). Paul too sees self-exaltation as the calling card of “the man of lawlessness” to come: “[The day of the Lord] will not come unless the rebellion comes first, and the man of lawlessness is revealed, the son of destruction, who opposes and exalts himself against every so-called god or object of worship” (2 Thessalonians 2:3–4).

Human self-exaltation is the spirit of antichrist. Meanwhile, human self-humbling, according to Paul, is the spirit of Christ: “Being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross” (Philippians 2:8). Which brings us back to the question, Did Jesus glorify himself or not?

Did Jesus Exalt Himself?

The question about Christ’s self-exaltation is more challenging than what we’ve seen so far. Scripture is plain that divine self-exaltation and human God-exaltation are righteous, as is divine man-exaltation, while human self-exaltation is folly, rebellion, and even the very spirit of antichrist. Yet with Christ, we come to the unique and spectacular man who is also God, and the one person of the Godhead who is also man.

The Gospel of John in particular captures the marvelous complexities of the relationship between the man Christ Jesus, who is God, and his Father in heaven.

First, Jesus glorified God. As man, he gave his human life, from beginning to end, to the human calling, common to us all, to exalt God with our lives and words. “I glorified you on earth,” Jesus says to the Father on the night before he died (John 17:4).

Second, God glorified Jesus. The clear refrain as to who acted to glorify Jesus is God, both Father and Spirit. As Jesus says, “It is my Father who glorifies me” (John 8:54; also 13:32), and of the Spirit, “He will glorify me” (John 16:14). So too the book of Acts says it was “the God of our fathers” who “glorified his servant Jesus” (Acts 3:13). “God exalted him at his right hand” (Acts 5:31).

Third, God was glorified in Jesus. The glory of God and the glory of Christ are not competing but complementary glories (John 11:4). When Jesus is glorified, “God is glorified in him” (John 13:31). And Jesus tells his disciples to pray “in my name . . . that the Father may be glorified in the Son” (John 14:13).

Fourth, then, comes the surprisingly human truth about Christ: Jesus did not glorify himself. This is what we saw in Hebrews 5:5 related to his calling as our great high priest: “Christ did not exalt [literally, glorify] himself to be made a high priest.” And this is what we heard from Jesus’s own mouth in John 8:50: “I do not seek my own glory; there is One who seeks it, and he is the judge.” He explains more in John 8:54: “If I glorify myself, my glory is nothing. It is my Father who glorifies me.”

Fifth, and finally, comes the surprisingly divine prayer of Jesus to his Father on the night before he died: Jesus asked to be glorified, to the glory of the Father.

Father, the hour has come; glorify your Son that the Son may glorify you. . . . Father, glorify me in your own presence with the glory that I had with you before the world existed. (John 17:1, 5)

This is perhaps the place, on the eve of the cross, where Jesus’s pursuit of the Father’s glory seems most distinct from ours. Yet even here, in asking for glory, he is strikingly human. Here, in human words, with his fully human mouth and soul, he asks of his Father, rather than grasping or self-exalting, and he waits in faith. And his pursuit is Godward. He does not posture to “receive glory from people” (John 5:41; also Matthew 6:2) but seeks “the glory that comes from the only God” (John 5:44). And he aligns his Father’s coming exaltation of him with his human exaltation of his Father: “. . . that the Son may glorify you.”

God Highly Exalted Him

What, then, do we learn from Christ, both theologically and ethically, in our milieu increasingly at home with human self-exaltation and confused by self-humbling?

“Christ, as man, did not exalt himself. How clear, then, is our calling and path as humans and Christians?”

First, oh what wonders await us in the unique and spectacular person who is Jesus Christ — the one man who is God, and the one divine person who became man. As Paul writes, with awe, “In him the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily” (Colossians 2:9). Which means we will need to beware of pigeonholing or of simplistic questions about Jesus. Who glorified Christ? Answer: God did — Father, Spirit, and Son. Christ, with regard to his humanity, did not (and does not) glorify himself; he is not guilty of human self-exaltation. And Christ, as God, the eternal second person of the Trinity, did (and does) indeed, without doubt, hesitation, or apology — and with the infinite energy and power of the Godhead — glorify himself. Christ, as man, did not exalt himself, even as he did as God.

As for ethics, and our lives as humans in these last days, we see afresh the folly, and rebellion, and even anti-Christian spirit of human self-exaltation. Even Christ, as man, did not exalt himself. How clear, then, is our calling and path as humans and Christians?

We were made, and we have been redeemed, for self-humbling, in service of God-exaltation. And there is great joy in this Christ-modeled pattern — perhaps we could even say “increasingly great joy” in a day when self-humbling might seem increasingly rare.

For Christians, as it was for Christ himself in human flesh, our being glorified, exalted, lifted up by God is not the problem, but our self-glorifying, our self-exalting, is the problem. God made us to be recipients of glory and honor from him, on his terms, not self-glorifiers and self-exalters on ours. And for those who humble themselves before him, he will indeed, without fail — in his “proper time,” not ours (1 Peter 5:6) — exalt them, even as he did for his own Son Christ (Philippians 2:9).

September 11, 2001, was the day before my twenty-first birthday. I was leaving my first collegiate Classical Greek class when I heard someone say a plane had crashed into the World Trade Center. He didn’t sound shocked; just intrigued. I assumed it must have been a small plane, surely an accident, perhaps even no fatalities. I walked back to the dorms, enjoying a few more minutes of peace.

That peace ended on my hall. Doors were open, televisions on. Shock and horror were plain. Now another plane — passenger jets? — had hit the other tower. This was coordinated terrorism, and the nation seemed under attack. We waited to learn whether more planes had been highjacked, whether more assaults would come.

As we come to the twentieth anniversary of 9/11, I suspect many readers have those first horrific moments emblazoned in their memory — where you were, how you heard, what you did for the next several hours. Most, like me, were tucked safely away from America’s largest cities. I can only imagine the experience of those hours, and days, in New York and DC.

Doubtless we remember the day far more than the ensuing weeks, but much was changing in those days. News was changing. Air travel was changing. New and deeper fears were stirring. And many of the changes are still felt and seen today, two decades later. As others pay tribute, and tell of those who died, of how it profoundly affected a nation, and the world, and the ripple effects that followed, my particular interest is theological. What mark did 9/11 leave on our faith?

God Without Christ

In those days, many Christians, churches, and ministries asked fresh questions with deeper interest — about the sovereignty of God, and the problem of evil, and the reality of Islam, the world’s second largest religion. But at the ministry of Desiring God specifically, the enduring theological legacy of 9/11 has been a deeper and more deliberate Christ-centeredness.

“The enduring theological legacy of 9/11 for us has been a deeper and more deliberate Christ-centeredness.”

A year and a half after the attacks, I was in my final month of college when I read a copy of Don’t Waste Your Life, which released that year. I can still picture the top of page 38, the words now emblazoned in my mind like images from 9/11.

I was familiar with John Piper’s own story in chapters 1 and 2 of becoming a “Christian Hedonist” and discovering the life-transforming truth that God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in him. Now what I found on page 38 was new — at least new clarity, new precision, new explicitness. I had not heard Piper zero in so particularly before, at least in this way, with a seriousness about Christ-centeredness. Writing a little over a year after 9/11, he said,

Since September 11, 2001, I have seen more clearly than ever how essential it is to exult explicitly in the excellence of Christ crucified for sinners and risen from the dead. Christ must be explicit in all our God-talk. It will not do, in this day of pluralism, to talk about the glory of God in vague ways. God without Christ is no God. And a no-God cannot save or satisfy the soul. Following a no-God — whatever his name or whatever his religion — will be a wasted life. God-in-Christ is the only true God and the only path to joy. Everything I have said so far must now be related to Christ.

As Christians living in America at the beginning of the twenty-first century, we often took “God” for granted as the Christian God — the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. Even in cities like Minneapolis, and all the more in rural areas, God was assumed to be the God of the Judeo-Christian tradition.

But 9/11 struck us right between the eyes — with terror inflicted by professing monotheists. To many of us, Islam had seemed so distant. Now, all of a sudden, it felt so close, and threatening. And theologically, the question that churches and ministries and Christian publications wrestled with in those days was, Is the God of Islam the Father of Jesus?

Bracing clarity awaited us. The New Testament was not birthed in the presumptions of increasingly post-Christian times. Rather, the early church was at the margins. The first-century world was flagrantly pluralistic. Now, in the harsh wake of the attacks, we began to see explicit, even shocking, Christ-centeredness from the Gospels to Revelation — and its profound relevance to the pluralism of our days.

The One Who Rejects Me

Jesus himself made it stark: “The one who rejects me rejects him who sent me” (Luke 10:16). “Whoever does not honor the Son does not honor the Father who sent him” (John 5:23). To reject Jesus on his own terms, as Islam does, is to reject the one, true God. “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me” (John 14:6).

“To reject Jesus on his own terms, as Islam does, is to reject the one, true God.”

Again and again, the events of Acts turn not on mere monotheism, or the name of Yahweh, but on the name of Jesus. We also were awakened, Desiring God included, to the striking Christ-centeredness we often overlooked in the Epistles. Amazingly, not only did “God the Father” now appear alongside “our Lord Jesus Christ” (more than fifteen times), but he was defined as “the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ” (Romans 15:6; 2 Corinthians 1:3; 11:31; Ephesians 1:3, 17; Colossians 1:3; 1 Peter 1:3).

Paul’s letter to the Colossians is particularly explicit about Christ, and his supremacy, in its God-talk. In perhaps the most stunningly Christ-centered six consecutive verses in all the Bible, Paul celebrates Jesus as “the image of the invisible God,” and the one in whom, and through whom, and for whom, all things were made and exist — “in him all things hold together” (Colossians 1:15–17). And not just this exhaustively in creation, but also in redemption — all salvation is in him, and through him, and for him (Colossians 1:18–20).

Later, Paul goes as far as to say, sweepingly, “Christ is all, and in all” (Colossians 3:11), and the apostle takes the all-encompassing charge of “do all to the glory of God” (1 Corinthians 10:31) and makes it explicitly Christ-centered: “whatever you do, in word or deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him” (Colossians 3:17).

Litmus Test for All

It was not just Colossians that we turned to afresh in those post-9/11 days. It was the magisterial opening verses of Hebrews (1:1–4) and the Gospel of John (1:1–18), as well as John’s final apocalyptic vision at the end — with Christ, the Lamb, lighting the celestial city in the glory of God as its singular lamp (Revelation 21:23).

The implications were freshly clear for us: “No one who denies the Son has the Father. Whoever confesses the Son has the Father also” (1 John 2:23). “Everyone who . . . does not abide in the teaching of Christ, does not have God” (2 John 9). So, as Piper went on to say,

Jesus is the litmus test of reality for all persons and all religions. . . . People and religions who reject Christ reject God. Do other religions know the true God? Here is the test: Do they reject Jesus as the only Savior for sinners who was crucified and raised by God from the dead? If they do, they do not know God in a saving way. . . . There is no point in romanticizing other religions that reject the deity and saving work of Christ. They do not know God. And those who follow them tragically waste their lives.

If we would see and savor the glory of God, we must see and savor Christ. For Christ is “the image of the invisible God” (Colossians 1:15). To put it another way, if we would embrace the glory of God, we must embrace the gospel of Christ. The reason for this is not only because we are sinners and need a Savior to die for us, but also because this Savior is himself the fullest and most beautiful manifestation of the glory of God. He purchases our undeserved and everlasting pleasure, and he becomes for us our all-deserving, everlasting Treasure. (38–39)

‘Through Jesus Christ’

In the months that followed 9/11, we realized at Desiring God, and at Bethlehem Baptist Church, that our beloved mission statement needed at least three more precious and clarifying words:

We exist to spread a passion for the supremacy of God in all things, for the joy of all peoples, through Jesus Christ.

To be sure, Christ is not just the means. We not only do all we do as Christians through him but also, as Colossians 1:15–20 makes plain, in him and for him. He is not just the way, but also the life. He is not just the means, but knowing and enjoying him is also the great end. As Piper had said, It will not do, in this day of pluralism, to talk about God in vague ways. Everything must now relate to Christ.

Blazing Center of the Glory

For Christians desiring God — and the ministry called Desiring God — this has been a great legacy of 9/11.

We don’t say that lightly. We don’t say that without acknowledging the pain, and profound terror, experienced by many in those hours, or the casualties and their friends and family. As Christians, however, neither do we minimize the preciousness of fresh explicitness, and awareness, and appreciation, and worship of Jesus Christ crucified and risen for sinners like us. Perhaps you were among the number newly awakened to the treasure of Christ in the darkness of 9/11. Or maybe here twenty years later, at its remembrance, God would be pleased to stir you to the explicit glories of his Son that set the Christian faith apart from Islam, secularism, and every other confession on earth.

With that, perhaps Piper should have the last word:

Ever since the incarnate, redeeming work of Jesus, God is gladly glorified by sinners only through the glorification of the risen God-man, Jesus Christ. His bloody death is the blazing center of the glory of God. There is no way to the glory of the Father but through the Son. All the promises of joy in God’s presence, and pleasures at his right hand, come to us only through faith in Jesus Christ. (38)

Not only do books change lives, but paragraphs do. And not only paragraphs, but even single sentences. “Paragraphs find their way to us through books,” John Piper writes, “and they often gain their peculiar power because of the context they have in the book. But the point remains: One sentence or paragraph may lodge itself so powerfully in our mind that its effect is enormous when all else is forgotten.”

In fact, we might even take it a step further, to particular phrases. That’s my story. It’s been a loaded phrase, but a single phrase nonetheless, penned by Jonathan Edwards and printed in a book by Piper, that has proved life-changing: “admirable conjunction of diverse excellencies.”

Lionlike Lamb

As a sophomore in college (and with the help of some older students), I was becoming wise to the bigness and sovereignty of God, but I was still naïve about how it all related to Jesus. Help came when Piper published Seeing and Savoring Jesus Christ.

At first, I read it too fast, and benefited little. But when I came back to it, and read each chapter devotionally (thirteen chapters plus the intro, so a reading a day for two weeks), it awakened in me a new love for and focus on Jesus.

The most transformative section of the book was chapter 3. The chapter begins like this, landing on the phrase from Edwards that lodged itself so powerfully in my mind:

A lion is admirable for its ferocious strength and imperial appearance. A lamb is admirable for its meekness and servant-like provision of wool for our clothing. But even more admirable is a lionlike lamb and a lamblike lion. What makes Christ glorious, as Jonathan Edwards observed over 250 years ago, is “an admirable conjunction of diverse excellencies.” (29)

No One Like Him

The life-changing phrase first appears in a sermon, “The Excellency of Christ,” preached under the banner of Revelation 5:5–6. Edwards says,

There is an admirable conjunction of diverse excellencies in Jesus Christ. The lion and the lamb, though very diverse kinds of creatures, yet have each their peculiar excellencies. The lion excels in strength, and in the majesty of his appearance and voice: the lamb excels in meekness and patience, besides the excellent nature of the creature as good for food, and yielding that which is fit for our clothing and being suitable to be offered in sacrifice to God. But we see that Christ is in the text compared to both, because the diverse excellencies of both wonderfully meet in him.

I was captured by the thought, and reality, that Jesus brings together in one person what no other men or angels — or even the Father or the Spirit — unite in one person. Lionlike strength and lamblike gentleness.

“Unless we know Jesus specifically, and in greater detail over time, we will come to know him wrongly.”

What I began to see for myself in those days is that Jesus isn’t just the means for humans to get right with the Father. Christ, the God-man, is also the great end. He is the fullest and deepest revelation of God to mankind. To see him is to see the Father. And the Father means for us to see, and savor, his Son as the great treasure of surpassing value, as the pearl of greatest price.

Fresh and Holy Discontent

What Edwards’s well-crafted phrase, and Piper’s short book, did for me was to woo me into a lifelong hunt for details about Jesus. The line awakened a fresh and holy discontent for the popular vagueness about Christ’s person.

Years ago, I heard from a veteran at a Christian publisher that books on Jesus don’t typically sell well today. People want to read and learn about trending topics and life application. They think they already know about Jesus. Tragically, they are content with little knowledge (and often vague knowledge) about the most fascinating, mindboggling, profound subject in all the universe: God become man.

Edwards was not that way. He didn’t mention Jesus on his way to some other more popular topic; he focused on Jesus. He lingered on Jesus — in the case of this particular sermon, for 15,000 words (roughly two hours).

Seven Diversities in One Son

In the first part of the sermon, Edwards addresses the diversity of Christ’s excellencies: his infinite highness as God and his infinite condescension as man, alongside his infinite justice and infinite grace. Then, in part 2, he speaks to the conjunction of those excellencies, specifically the virtues in Christ which “seem incompatible otherwise in one person.” This is the heart of it — seven “admirable conjunctions” Edwards highlights in Christ:

Infinite glory, and lowest humility;
Infinite majesty, and transcendent meekness;
Deepest reverence toward God, and equality with God;
Infinite worthiness of good, and the greatest patience under sufferings of evil;
An exceeding spirit of obedience, with supreme dominion over heaven and earth;
Absolute sovereignty, and perfect resignation;
Self-sufficiency, and an entire trust and reliance on God.

As just one taste of the feast, consider what Edwards says about Jesus’s humility:

Humility is not properly predicable of God the Father, and the Holy Ghost, that exist only in the divine nature; because it is a proper excellency only of a created nature; for it consists radically in a sense of a comparative lowness and littleness before God, or the great distance between God and the subject of this virtue; but it would be a contradiction to suppose any such thing in God.

Yet in becoming man, Christ, without losing his highness or deity (as if that were possible), gained humanity and the ability to humble himself (Philippians 2:8). Jesus, the God-man, is “above all” as God, “yet lowest of all in humility.” Edwards continues,

There never was so great an instance of this virtue among either men or angels, as Jesus. None ever was so sensible of the distance between God and him, or had a heart so lowly before God, as the man Christ Jesus.

Precise, Extensive Glories

God the Father means for his people to treasure his Son, Jesus, not as a general concept, but through his particular, Scripture-revealed contours. God made us to know his Son in his precise and meticulous and extensive glories, not in mere generalities and nondescript statements. He made us to go further up and further in to the glories of Christ in all their detail and brilliance for all eternity.

If our knowledge of Jesus consists in mere generalities and nondescript statements, then we will be prone to embrace a misguided vision of Jesus. Unless we know him specifically, and in greater detail over time, we will come to know him wrongly. And we will not love the true Jesus deeply and fervently.

Which leads to one final truth about Jesus’s “admirable conjunction of diverse excellencies.” Jesus is not just the right answer to the problem of sin, but in his diverse excellencies, he satisfies the complex longings of the human soul.

He Satisfies the Complex Soul

Paul prays in Ephesians 3:16–19 that God’s people would “know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.”

“Jesus is not just the right answer to the problem of sin, but he satisfies the complex longings of the human soul.”

All the fullness of God is found in this man Jesus. Full humanity and the fullness of deity. We marvel at his bigness and might and omni-relevance, and we melt at his grace and mercy and meekness, and all that comes together in one spectacular person — all the fullness of God in this God-man — whom we will one day see face to face, where we will more fully know and enjoy him without obstruction for all eternity.

So, I finish, then, with one more quote from Seeing and Savoring, and the prayer that God might do for you what he did for me twenty years ago:

This glorious conjunction [of diverse excellencies in Christ] shines all the brighter because it corresponds perfectly with our personal weariness and our longing for greatness. . . . The lamblike gentleness and humility of this Lion woos us in our weariness. And we love him for it. . . . But this quality of meekness alone would not be glorious. The gentleness and humility of the lamblike Lion becomes brilliant alongside the limitless and everlasting authority of the lionlike Lamb. Only this fits our longing for greatness. . . .

We mere mortals are not simple either. We are pitiful, yet we have mighty passions. We are weak, yet we dream of doing wonders. We are transient, but eternity is written on our hearts. The glory of Christ shines all the brighter because the conjunction of his diverse excellencies corresponds perfectly to our complexity. (31–32)

Permission to slow down — perhaps that’s what you’re aching for again. Maybe you tasted it for a few weeks, or even months, when the pandemic hit, as event after event was cancelled. But now, with vaccinations in arms, and the collective rush to return to life as “normal” (as much as that’s possible), you’re feeling the need again for life to move slower than the modern world seems to allow.

You’re not alone, and the phenomenon may be understandable, at least in good measure.

Age of Accelerations

According to New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, we are living in “the age of accelerations.” Our world has become increasingly fast-paced through the exponential development of technology and accompanying factors. Now “the pace of technology and scientific change,” he writes, “outstrips the speed with which human beings and societies can usually adapt” (Thank You for Being Late, 39). Friedman claims that “we are living through one of the greatest inflection points in history” (3) — perhaps unequaled in the last 500 years.

We have come to “a fundamental turning point in history” (4), and perhaps you’ve felt the effects, as I have. To-do lists seem to grow faster than we have time for. We hurry in the morning. Hurry on the road. Hurry at work. Hurry between meetings, and in meetings, and over meals. Hurry to get dinner ready. Hurry to eat. Hurry to get the kids cleaned up, and out the door, and get back home, and get to bed. Then, hurry to do more on evenings and weekends than we realistically have time for. Then hurry to bed ourselves. Get too little sleep. And start it all over the next day.

Even more important than what constant hurry is doing to our work lives, family lives, relationships, and emotional health, is what it’s doing to our souls. The late Dallas Willard (1935–2013) sounded the alarm toward the end of his life: “Hurry is the great enemy of spiritual life in our day.”

Find Your Balance First

The challenge of living in an increasingly fast-paced society, and finding measured ways to slow our lives down to a realistic human speed, will be addressed on many fronts. Whole books, like John Mark Comer’s Ruthless Elimination of Hurry, offer various ideas and strategies. But here I’d like to focus on just one, but one that may be as important, if not more so, than any other:

Begin the day at the pace of God’s word.

Whose Pace? Whose Voice?

In our “age of accelerations,” our lives are awash in words. Words on screens. Words in our ear buds. Words written in articles and ebooks. Words spoken on podcasts and radio. And the in-the-flesh words of family, roommates, neighbors, and coworkers. The question isn’t, Are there voices in your head? But rather whose voices are they — and which ones carry the day in shaping the desires and direction of our souls and lives?

“The Bible is God’s breathed-out Book, to be breathed in by us as we catch our breath for the day.”

When we begin the day with God’s voice in the Scriptures, we’re welcoming his Truth, his concepts, his mind and will and heart, to direct and shape our lives. We’re making an effort to see the world through God’s words, rather than God through the world’s. Apart from receiving God’s words in sufficient quantity, and with due priority, we will inevitably follow “the course of this world” (Ephesians 2:2) and “be conformed to this world” (Romans 12:2). In time, the world’s patterns and voice and pace will rule us.

So, one significant way to hold back the tides of the world’s pace is to start the day with the voice of God.

Move at the Pace of God’s Word

Coming first to God is critical, but so is the pace at which we move once we’ve come. Rushing in and out of our readings, at the speed of modern life, will do our souls far less good than learning to let the cadence of God’s words set our pace.

But how might we do that? How might we let God himself set the pace? Consider (1) the design of ancient books, and especially the Bible, (2) how we are to read them, and (3) what effect our reading can have on us.

Design of Ancient Texts

Unlike so many of our books today, and internet content, ancient texts were not written quickly, nor written to be read quickly. They were designed to be read slowly, enjoyed, reread, and meditated on. After all, they had to be copied by hand. So published words were precious. They were not meant to be read once, but over and over again. And the Christian Scriptures, of all texts, ancient and modern, reward rereading, and slow reading.

Moreover, these are God’s own words. Written through his inspired prophets and apostles, the biblical text is fundamentally different than any other mere human text and deserves from us a distinct approach — which means, at least, reading without rushing. The Bible is God’s breathed-out Book (2 Timothy 3:16), to be breathed in by us as we catch our breath for the day.

When we “slow down” and meditate, memorize, and study Scripture at an unhurried, even leisurely pace, we are not engaging with it in a foreign, unexpected way. God means for his word to be read slowly, meditated on, not speed-read.

Call to Comprehend — and Experience

Also, we will need to slow down, from our normal pace of reading the news and contemporary texts, so we might comprehend what the ancient writer, speaking for God, has to say. The Scriptures were written centuries, even millennia, before us — in places and times different than our own. And not only that, but the Bible is divine in its content. No biblical prophecy, Peter writes, “was ever produced by the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit” (2 Peter 1:21).

Not only is the Bible itself designed to be engaged differently — more slowly and repeatedly — than our published words today, but also we, as humans and moderns, need a more careful, deliberate pace to be able to understand what the words mean — and to experience the truth. Bible reading, and particularly meditation, is to be emotionally responsive.

For this reason, speed-reading and Bible-reading are a mismatch. When we have questions (as we often do) about the meaning of a word or phrase or sentence in context, we don’t just keep going to finish the reading, check the box, and move on. Rather, we need margin to pause and ponder. We need to give ourselves time and space to ask the questions that keep us from understanding, and then seek answers.

Be Fed, Not Just Informed

Finally, another aspect of not just comprehending the text of Scripture, but also experiencing it, might be captured under the banner of Seek to be fed, not just informed.

In Meditation and Communion with God, Jack Davis waves the flag for “a more reflective and leisurely engagement with Scripture” in our day (20). According to Davis, the nature of modern life, and the “information overload” we have through television, smartphones, and endless new media “makes a slow, unhurried, and reflective reading of Scripture more vital than ever” (22).

Leisurely does not mean passive. Quality reading can be leisurely, and enjoyable, while at the same time being careful and active. In fact, the two belong together. An unhurried pace gives space for careful observation and rumination, while active reading demands a certain slowness.

Over time, as we come to know ourselves, we learn what kind of pace and approach is most conducive to feeding our souls, not just informing our minds — what pace helps us catch our emotional breath and find our spiritual balance for the day to come — how to gather a day’s portion of food for our souls. The mind often seems to work faster than the heart. A faster pace might stimulate the mind, while a slower pace gives room to satisfy the soul.

Push Back Against the Tide

Ask yourself, How hurried are my devotions? Do you prioritize a daily season (early morning proves best for most) for unhurried Bible meditation and prayer? And have you learned to move at the pace of the text, or do you feel the pressure to do your devotions at the pace of modern life?

“Ask yourself, How hurried are my devotions?”

In our world of speed and acceleration, what good will it do the Christian soul, and our love for others, as we learn to push back against the tides of this world, and its patterns of hurry, with a life-giving daybreak routine of catching our breath by breathing in the breath of God, and breathing out to him in prayer?

This may be one of the most countercultural things you can do: go to bed without a screen, get up early, grab a paper Bible, put your phone aside, and let the voice of God in the Scriptures fill your mind and heart at his pace, not the world’s.

God has given you permission to slow down.