We have a mission statement at Desiring God with several lines in it. The last line goes like this: “. . . grounded in, governed by, and saturated with the infallible Christian Scriptures.” That’s what we exist to be, and that’s what we encourage other ministries to be. So, one of the main reasons I’m here is that I believe Truth78 is one of those ministries — grounded in, governed by, and saturated with the infallible Christian Scriptures.

When the founders of this ministry, David and Sally Michael, were my colleagues in the ministry at Bethlehem Baptist Church (where we served for decades together), this was the glorious impact that they had on me and on the ministry to our children: everything was grounded in, governed by, and saturated with the infallible Christian Scriptures. They left a legacy not unlike that of John Bunyan.

Spurgeon loved the classic Pilgrim’s Progress by John Bunyan. He loved it because it was grounded in, governed by, and saturated with the infallible Christian Scriptures. He said,

[Bunyan read the Bible] till his very soul was saturated with Scripture; and, though his writings are charmingly full of poetry, yet he cannot give us his Pilgrim’s Progress — that sweetest of all prose poems — without continually making us feel and say, “Why, this man is a living Bible!” Prick him anywhere — his blood is Bibline. The very essence of the Bible flows from him. He cannot speak without quoting a text, for his very soul is full of the word of God. (Autobiography, 2:159)

God-Centered Discipleship for Children

When David wrote us at Desiring God, asking me to come, he said,

My hope is that John will do what he has always done to validate the significance of faithful, God-centered, Christ-exalting, Bible-saturated, doctrinally grounded, mission-advancing discipleship beginning with the youngest of children.

The key to that long list of hyphenated phrases (that I love) is to realize that the phrase Bible-saturated gives rise to all the others. So, I want to try to pick one of those — namely “God-centered” — and reflect with you about its meaning, its rootedness in the Bible, and how ministry to children sheds light on it. In other words, it’s not only true that being God-centered shapes children’s ministry (which it does), but also that doing ministry to children shapes the way we think about God-centeredness. It goes both ways. Being God-centered shapes the way we do children’s ministry, and doing children’s ministry thoughtfully shapes the way we think about God-centeredness.

Beyond Contextualization

For example, what doing ministry to children clarifies for us is the limits of what’s called contextualization. Contextualization ordinarily means that you bring a truth to a culture or a group and you try to find some idea or practice or language in the group that would help make this truth understandable. Then you put the truth in the terms of something understandable in the target culture, all the while trying not to lose the truth. We all do this, for example, if we go to Germany and we have to use German in order to get our idea across.

But when children are the “target culture,” so to speak, what they make plain is that, to make truth about God understandable, we must do more than connect our ideas with concepts they already have. Because what we discover in their little minds — their glorious, Godlike little minds — is that they don’t yet have sufficient concepts for grasping many biblical realities. So, contextualization proves to be an insufficient method of communication. It’s important but insufficient. What needs to be added is this: concept creation. It’s not the adaptation of biblical reality to already-existing concepts but the actual creation in the mind of new concepts, new structures of thought, new ways of viewing reality.

Children are not unique in this regard. They are just a very special case. The Bible teaches that all human beings, apart from the renewal of the mind that comes through being born again, do not have the categories of mind for seeing reality for what it really is. For example, 1 Corinthians 2:14 says,

The natural person [what we are apart from the transforming effects of the Holy Spirit] does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are folly to him, and he is not able to understand them because they are spiritually discerned.

So, every pastor, every Sunday school teacher, and every parent has to deal not only with levels of mental maturity but with levels of spiritual capacity. There are important biblical realities that simply will not fit into the human mind until new concepts, new structures of thought, new ways of viewing reality are created by the Holy Spirit through parents and Sunday school teachers and pastors. This is what I’m calling concept creation. The ministry to children simply makes this necessity crystal clear.

We must so teach, and so pray, as to create categories of thought that don’t yet exist, so that strange and wonderful biblical realities will make sense.

Strange and Wonderful Truth

Let me mention a few of those biblical realities that don’t fit the natural human mind.

1. God rules the world, including the sins of human beings — like Pilate’s expediency, and Herod’s mockery, and the mob’s “Crucify him,” and the soldiers’ brutality (Acts 4:27–28) — yet in such a way that God does not sin as he governs sin.

2. God governs all the steps of all people, both good and bad, at all times and in all places, yet such that everyone is accountable before him and will bear the just consequences of his wrath if they do not believe in Christ.

3. Jesus Christ is one person with two natures, divine and human, such that he upheld the world by the word of his power while living in his mother’s womb.

4. The death of the one God-man, Jesus Christ, so displayed and glorified the righteousness of God that God is not unrighteous to declare righteous ungodly people who simply believe in Christ.

These kinds of mind-boggling, category-shattering truths demand our best thought and our most creative labors — especially when trying to communicate them to children (or at least to prepare children to someday be able to grasp them).

Biblical Defibrillator

Here is the way all this relates to my focus on God-centeredness. As I have tried to make a case for God-centered everything over the past fifty years, what I have found is that many Christians simply take that concept and fit it comfortably into their already-existing mental framework. They do not see how explosively contrary it is to things they hold dear but are in fact mistaken or out of proportion.

“Being God-centered shapes the way we do children’s ministry.”

I look at what the people do in worship, or preaching, or counseling, or teaching, or curriculum development for children, and I realize they don’t mean what I mean. They don’t mean what I mean by God-centeredness. It’s not having the same outcome. The phrase “God-centered” is fitting into a concept they already have, and it’s not the same as mine. I’m really not communicating.

So, I have felt that something more is needed here if communication is really going to happen. I really do need not just contextualization but concept creation. The reality I see is being adapted to another view of reality and being lost in the process, while the terminology remains the same.

What do you do to build into a person’s mind (adult or child) a reality that isn’t there? One strategy that I have used for many years is to state the reality I’m trying to communicate in such a shocking (and yet true) way that it requires either rejection or the biblical remaking of some part of the mind.

Let’s take our theme, God-centeredness, as an example. To awaken people to what I mean by God-centeredness, I have regularly used the phrase God’s God-centeredness. That phrase has a double effect. First, it’s strange: people have not used it. And second, it’s troubling: they don’t like it. Why is that? Because it implies that God does what he forbids us to do — namely, exalt himself and make himself central. It forces people to ask whether it might be right for God to do this but wrong for us to do it. And why might that be? And that is a very fruitful question. That might take us to glorious discoveries. Even our children will be troubled by the fact that God does things he tells us not to do.

So, what I’m trying to do is to create a concept, a view of reality called God’s God-centeredness, that does not yet exist in people’s minds (or in a child’s mind), so that when it takes root as fully biblical and beautiful, it makes all God-centeredness as radical as it really is.

Tour of Concept Creation

So, come with me, if you will, on a short biblical tour of how I have tried to do this kind of concept creation. This is what we have to do with our teachers in children’s ministry so that there is a trickle-down effect for the children as gifted teachers find age-appropriate ways of creating concepts in their minds.

There are about four stations on this tour.

Station 1: Awakening Through Provocation

I start with a provocative, shake-you-out-of-your-slumbers quiz to force people to face the issue of whether they will say God is God-centered or not. These questions could be adapted for different age groups, even for children.

Question 1: What is the chief end of God?
Answer 1: The chief end of God is to glorify God and to enjoy magnifying his glory forever.
Question 2: Who is the most God-centered person in the universe?
Answer 2: God.
Question 3: Who is uppermost in God’s affections?
Answer 3: God.
Question 4: Is God an idolater?
Answer 4: No, he has no other gods before him.
Question 5: What is God’s chief jealousy?
Answer 5: God’s chief jealousy is to be known, admired, trusted, obeyed, and enjoyed above all others.
Question 6: Is your enjoyment of the love of God mainly owing to the fact that he makes much of you, or is it mainly that he frees you to enjoy making much of him forever?

I press on these unusual questions because if we are God-centered simply because we believe God is man-centered, then our God-centeredness is in reality man-centeredness. But pressing the reality of God’s God-centeredness forces the issue of whether we treasure God because of his excellence or mainly because he endorses ours.

So, now people are agitated. The concept of God-centeredness isn’t fitting so neatly into their minds as they thought it would. They are troubled by the possibility that a way of thinking they’ve never dealt with might be true — namely, God’s God-centeredness.

Station 2: Validation Through Scripture

Now we flood the mind with Scripture about God’s God-centeredness. God’s eternal, radical, ultimate commitment to his own self-exaltation permeates the Bible. God’s aim to be exalted, glorified, admired, magnified, praised, reverenced, trusted, and enjoyed as a supreme treasure is seen to be the ultimate goal of all creation, all providence, and all saving acts. What I have found is that the following litany of God’s God-centeredness proves overwhelming to people, either winning them or losing them. Many professing Christians bury their heads in the sand of their own theological preferences and ignore the clear teaching of Scripture. But here’s what we find:

1. “He predestined us for adoption to himself as sons through Jesus Christ . . . to the praise of the glory of his grace” (Ephesians 1:5–6 my translation).

2. God created the natural world to display his glory: “The heavens declare the glory of God” (Psalm 19:1).

3. “You are my servant, Israel, in whom I will be glorified” (Isaiah 49:3).

4. “He saved them [at the Red Sea] for his name’s sake, that he might make known his mighty power” (Psalm 106:7–8).

5. “I acted [in the wilderness] for the sake of my name, that it should not be profaned in the sight of the nations” (Ezekiel 20:14).

6. After the people sinfully ask for a king, Samuel says, “Do not be afraid. . . . For the Lord will not forsake his people, for his great name’s sake” (1 Samuel 12:20–22).

7. “Thus says the Lord God: It is not for your sake, O house of Israel, that I am about to act [in bringing you back from the exile], but for the sake of my holy name. . . . And I will vindicate the holiness of my great name . . . And the nations will know that I am the Lord” (Ezekiel 36:22–23).

8. “[Christ] died for all, that those who live might no longer live for themselves but for him who for their sake died and was raised” (2 Corinthians 5:15).

9. “God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name, so that . . . every tongue [should] confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father” (Philippians 2:9–11).

10. “I am he who blots out your transgressions for my own sake” (Isaiah 43:25).

11. “Whoever serves, [let him serve] as one who serves by the strength that God supplies — in order that in everything God may be glorified” (1 Peter 4:11).

12. “Immediately an angel of the Lord struck [Herod] down, because he did not give God the glory” (Acts 12:23).

13. “. . . when he comes on that day to be glorified in his saints, and to be marveled at among all who have believed” (2 Thessalonians 1:10).

14. “Father, I desire that they also, whom you have given me, may be with me where I am, to see my glory” (John 17:24).

15. “The earth will be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the Lord as the waters cover the sea” (Habakkuk 2:14).

Now, this Bible bath of God’s God-centeredness (God’s relentless self-exaltation) often creates a crisis, because people do not yet have a category for how God can be so self-exalting and still be loving.

Station 3: Clarity Through Objections

God’s God-centeredness is not megalomania because, unlike our self-exaltation, God’s self-exaltation draws attention to what gives us the greatest and longest joy — namely, himself — while our self-exaltation lures people away from the one thing that can satisfy their souls: the infinite worth and beauty of God in Christ. When God exalts himself, he is loving us. He is showing and offering the one thing that can satisfy our souls forever — namely, God.

Listen to how Jesus prays for us in his last hours in John 17: “He lifted up his eyes to heaven, and said, ‘Father, the hour has come; glorify your Son that the Son may glorify you . . .’” (John 17:1).

“Don’t underestimate how the Holy Spirit can use God-centered teachers to build glorious concepts into children’s minds.”

He’s asking God to glorify God by glorifying the Son. Then in John 17:24, he prays for us and draws us into this glory: “Father, I desire that they also, whom you have given me, may be with me where I am, to see my glory.”

Lest we think we might see him in his glory and not be able to love him and enjoy him as fully as we ought, he adds this prayer in John 17:26: “[I pray, Father, that] the love with which you have loved me may be in them, and I in them.” In other words, “When they see my glory, grant them to love and enjoy it (me) with the very love and joy that you’ve had in me from all eternity.”

This is God’s radical and loving God-centeredness. And to receive it requires a profound, Holy Spirit–given concept creation, not just the adaptation of a biblical reality to a fallen, man-centered mind.

If a person has the greatest treasure in the world, and he wants to share it, most people would embrace that person as loving. But if a Person is the greatest treasure in the world, and he wants to share it, many people will reject him as an egomaniac. For that to change, the mind must be renewed. God is the one being in the universe for whom self-exaltation is the most loving act, since love offers what is supremely and eternally satisfying — namely, God.

Station 4: Awakening to Happiness

If God is merciful in shaping this new mental framework that we have seen in the Bible, people awaken to the fact that the pursuit of their happiness in God is, in fact, the fulfillment of God’s purpose to be magnified. God exalts himself as the all-satisfying treasure of the universe, and we magnify that greatness by, in fact, being supremely satisfied with him. God’s pursuit of his glory and our pursuit of joy turn out to be the same pursuit.

This is what Christ died for. First Peter 3:18 says, “Christ . . . suffered once for sins, the righteous for the unrighteous, that he might bring us to God.” And what does he intend for us to find when we are brought to God as the greatest treasure in the universe? Psalm 16:11 says, “In your presence there is fullness of joy; at your right hand are pleasures forevermore.”

Children can get this. Don’t underestimate how the Holy Spirit can use God-centered teachers to build glorious concepts into their minds. You say to the first and second graders in your class,

Let me tell you a story about two brothers. One brother was sixteen years old and the other was just your age. He was seven. The younger brother liked his older brother a lot. He liked him so much that nothing made him happier than to spend time with his big brother. He would rather be with his big brother doing things together than anything else.

Now, the big brother knew this. He knew that he was the greatest treasure in his little brother’s life. He knew that he had great value in his little brother’s eyes. So, on his little brother’s birthday, he gave him a box about the size of a shoebox. In the box was a note that the older brother had written. His younger brother opened it and read,

Here’s a gift to make you glad,Nothing wrong, and nothing sad.The best I have, I’m sure you’ll see:A fishing trip, just you and me.

Then you ask the kids in your class, “Do you think the older brother was bragging when he said that the best gift he could give his little brother was to give him a whole day of fishing with his big brother?”

The need is very great for the next generation to be rescued as early as possible from the natural man-centeredness with which we are born.

What is Look at the Book?

You look at a Bible text on the screen. You listen to John Piper. You watch his pen “draw out” meaning. You see for yourself whether the meaning is really there. And (we pray!) all that God is for you in Christ explodes with faith, and joy, and love.

Audio Transcript

First Peter 1:5 holds a very special place in your life, Pastor John — a precious text about God’s keeping power over his children, of those “who by God’s power are being guarded through faith for a salvation ready to be revealed in the last time.” So precious. This is the promise that you wanted as a banner over the life of your mom, and so had a phrase from this text (in the King James Version) etched into her grave: “Kept by the power of God.” Ruth Piper was kept by the power of God in this life until her tragic passing in an automobile accident at the age of 56. You were 28 at the time of the accident, almost fifty years ago now. It will be fifty years ago in just a couple of months actually — on December 16. You told us about the life-altering phone call you got, back in APJs 1577 and 1936. No need to go back into that story here.

I mention 1 Peter 1:5 because the text also adorns our Bible reading from yesterday, as we start this new week. Melissa, a podcast listener, wants to know more about what the verse means. “Hello, Pastor John,” she writes. “What does Peter mean that we are guarded ‘by God’s power . . . through faith’? How exactly does God guard us by his power but through faith? Is he guarding us through our own faith? I don’t understand how this works. Is his guarding of me thereby ultimately dependent on me and my faith? This is a text that should give me great comfort and it doesn’t. Not yet.”

Here’s the passage, 1 Peter 1:4–5 — let’s get it in front of us so that we know what we’re talking about. We have “an inheritance that is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading, kept in heaven for you, who by God’s power are being guarded through faith for a salvation ready to be revealed in the last time.” One of the wonderful things about this promise is that there is a double guarding or a double keeping.

First, God is keeping or guarding an inheritance in heaven for us. Verse 4: we have “an inheritance that is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading, kept [or guarded] in heaven” by God for us. So, when we get there, the inheritance will be fabulous and not ruined or disappointing in any way. That’s the one keeping.

Here’s the other one. The other keeping is that God is guarding us for it. He not only keeps it — the inheritance — for us in heaven, but he keeps us for it. He guarantees that it will be there and that we will get there. That’s the double amazing thing in this verse — why it’s one of the favorites of many people, including me. “By God’s power [you] are being guarded [or kept] through faith for a salvation ready to be revealed in the last time.” In other words, you’re going to make it.

Who Sustains Our Faith?

Now, the key question for how we get strength from this — How do we actually apply it to our lives and draw down joy from this promise? — the key question is whether “kept by God through faith” means we sustain our own faith and then God responds by guarding or keeping us, or whether God sustains our faith and in that way he keeps us and guards us. In the first meaning, we are the decisive cause of our ongoing faith, and in the second meaning, God is the decisive cause of our ongoing faith. Which is it?

The answer to that question decides how we will answer this question: How can I be sure I will wake up a believer tomorrow morning? In one case, the answer would be, “God will see to it that I believe tomorrow morning. He will sustain my faith. He’s promised to sustain it, keep it, guard it. He’ll keep me believing.” In the other case, the answer would be, “I can only hope that my independent, self-determining will is not overcome tonight by my flesh or the devil or the world since the decisive, sustaining power must come from me.”

Five Reasons for Confidence

I see at least five reasons for thinking that Peter intended to strengthen and encourage us by teaching that God sustains our faith, and that’s how he guards us for final “salvation ready to be revealed in the last time.”

1. The other view doesn’t make sense.

I don’t think the other interpretation — that we are the decisive sustainers of our own faith — makes any sense in this verse. I think it’s got a built-in contradiction. Suppose you — we humans — provide the decisive cause of sustaining your faith day by day. That’s what you provide. My question is, What’s left for God to do to guard you for your heavenly inheritance, your final salvation? You might answer, “In response to my faith, he defeats the destructive effects of Satan and the destructive effects of suffering and the pleasures of this world. That’s what he does in response to my self-sustained faith.”

But think about it. There’s only one way that Satan and suffering and worldly pleasures can prevent you from attaining heaven — namely, by destroying your faith, which you’ve already accomplished. So, God does not need to provide that. You’ve provided that. Satan’s accusations don’t keep you out of heaven. The pain of suffering doesn’t keep you out of heaven. The allurements of the world don’t keep you out of heaven. The only way Satan, suffering, worldly pleasures can keep you out of heaven is by causing you to turn away from Christ and stop believing in him as your supreme treasure. And that’s what you yourself have already by sustaining your own faith.

If you say God prevents the satanic destruction of your faith after or as a result of your faith, which you yourself have triumphantly and decisively sustained, that’s a contradiction. God doesn’t guard you from doing what you’ve already done. That’s a contradiction. What you are really saying is that you yourself protected yourself from the faith-destroying effects of Satan, suffering, worldly pleasure. That is, you have guarded yourself for the inheritance through faith, and God is simply not needed to get you there by guarding or sustaining your faith.

“God not only keeps our inheritance for us in heaven, but he also keeps us for it.”

So, I conclude that being guarded through faith by God’s power means God’s power sustains our faith, and that’s why Satan and suffering and pleasure do not succeed in destroying our faith. God’s power sustains our faith. He keeps us for the final salvation by keeping our faith. That’s argument number one. The other view doesn’t make sense. It has a built-in contradiction.

2. We believe ‘through him.’

In this same chapter, 1 Peter 1:20–21 says, “[Christ] was foreknown before the foundation of the world but was made manifest in the last times for the sake of you who through him are believers in God.” Now, I think “through him [you] are believers in God” means he is the cause and the sustaining power of your faith.

3. Faith comes by new birth.

Verse 3 says, “According to his great mercy, he has caused us to be born again to a living hope” (1 Peter 1:3). Now, we know that “faith is the assurance of things hoped for” (Hebrews 11:1). Faith is inseparable from hope. Hope is faith in the future tense, you might say. So, the way we became Christians was owing to no merit in ourselves. We didn’t do anything. We were dead. We had to be born again. God in “his great mercy . . . caused us to be born again.” That has caused us to have spiritual life, and that life manifests itself in hope and faith. That’s the way it remains all our lives, I’m arguing. Our faith was brought into being by mercy — undeserved mercy, totally lopsided, Godward mercy — and it is sustained by mercy.

4. God promises to keep us.

This interpretation fits with the promise of the new covenant in which Christians now live. This is who we are. We are blood-bought new-covenant people. And here’s how Jeremiah describes the new covenant, which is the experience of believers today. In Jeremiah 32:40, the Lord says, “I will put the fear of me in their hearts, that they may not turn from me.” That’s the promise of God-sustained faith. That’s the heart of the new covenant — the heart of it. God puts his fear — puts faith — in us, so that we don’t make shipwreck of our faith. That’s the promise and difference between the new and old covenant.

5. Jesus intercedes for us.

Finally, in Luke 22:31 there is a beautiful picture of how this faith-sustaining work of God happens — it happened then and happens now because of Christ’s intercession for us in heaven. Jesus says to Peter the night before his crucifixion, “Simon, behold, Satan demanded to have you, that he might sift you like wheat.” What does that mean? It means he’s going to squish you through the strainer and sift out all your faith. He’ll leave you there, and your faith will be stuck in the wires. That’s what he’s trying to do tonight. “But I have prayed for you that your faith may not fail” (Luke 22:32).

In other words, I have asked your Father in heaven to sustain your faith. That’s what I do. “And when you have turned again” — not if you have turned again — when you have turned again. He knows it’s going to happen. He asks God for it. When you’ve repented, then “strengthen your brothers.” So, that’s a picture of how Christ intercedes for us today. He’s interceding for us, and that’s what he’s doing — he’s asking our Father to sustain our faith just like he did for Peter.

So, for those five reasons at least — there are more — I think we can rejoice. Indeed, I think we should leap for joy that not only is God keeping a treasure for us in heaven secure; he is also keeping us secure for heaven. “By [his] power . . . through faith” — this is through sustaining our faith.

Audio Transcript

Welcome back to the podcast on this Monday. Today in our Bible reading, we read Jeremiah 23–25 together. It included a beautiful new-covenant text that one listener wants you to explain more. The listener is Matthew. He wrote, “Pastor John, hello to you. I find myself often in debates with friends and family over Calvinism and Arminianism. They’re all Arminian. I try to represent the other side with clarity and charity.

“One of the arguments that I come back to repeatedly is about free will and what I see in Jeremiah 24:7: ‘I will give them a heart to know that I am the Lord, and they shall be my people and I will be their God, for they shall return to me with their whole heart.’ What I see in this text is that, of course, we all have free will, the ability for our hearts to do and believe what we most desire. So, what we need are new desires that want the right things. God must act to give us new desires or we are hopeless. This is sovereign grace in the miracle of regeneration. How much of your discussions over free will centers on this fact, that we all have free will, and we all need a new heart, a new will?”

First, let me commend Matthew for defining what he means by free will. That’s really unusual. I appreciate it very much, because in most discussions people use the phrase as though it were clear, when in fact most people have very different views of what free will means. He has defined it, so I can answer his question with more precision.

Defining ‘Free Will’

He says that free will is “the ability for our hearts to do and believe what we most desire.” That’s a pretty shrewd and careful definition. Freedom of the will, he says, is the freedom “to do and believe what we most desire.” And I think that if we are going to affirm the existence of free will among fallen people like us, that’s the definition we need to use, because it answers the question of how people can be free whom the Bible says are dead in trespasses (Ephesians 2:5), slaves of sin (Romans 6:20), under the dominion of sin (Romans 3:9), blind to spiritual reality (2 Corinthians 4:4), hardened against God (Ephesians 4:18), and unable to submit to God (Romans 8:7).

“God knows how to govern all things, including the human will, in such a way that we are truly responsible.”

So, given Matthew’s definition of freedom, such dead, enslaved, dominated, blind, hard, impotent people have freedom of the will, because it means that they are free to do and believe what they most desire — namely, sin. That’s what they’re free to do. And I would agree that if we’re going to maintain that the will is free, that is the definition we should use. So, to speak of free will then is to speak of a will that is free to do and believe what it most desires — but is not free to desire God above all else.

What Arminians Want

What I have found, therefore, is that most people who reject Calvinistic or Reformed understandings of human depravity and sovereign grace — which is required to bring a dead, hard, blind person to saving faith — is that this definition of free will is not acceptable to them. It’s not acceptable because it still leaves a person unable to provide the decisive thing that leads to conversion — namely, the strongest desire to trust Christ. It leaves a person in the bondage of their strongest desires, which are against God.

Saying that a person is free to do what he most desires, but he’s not free to create desires for God, does not give the Arminian what he wants. And what’s that? A fair definition of what the Arminian requires is free will defined as the power of decisive self-determination. In other words, what the Arminian requires is that, at the precise point of conversion, where saving faith comes into being, it is man and not God that at that point provides the decisive and effective influence. That’s what the Arminian must have to make his views work. Whatever influences God may give prior to that point — call them “prevenient grace,” which is what the Arminian wants to call all the illuminating, freeing grace of God — the Arminian insists that the final, decisive creation of the strongest effective desire for Christ must be self-determined, human-determined, not God-determined.

So, Matthew asks me, “How much of your discussions over free will centers on the fact that we all have free will, and we all need a new heart and a new will?” My answer now is that I don’t usually start with Matthew’s definition of free will. It may be helpful in some discussions to define free will that way, but I find that it is most illuminating, most convicting, most clarifying to start with the definition of free will that Arminians really do need in order for their views to make sense — namely, the definition that free will is the power of decisive self-determination (or I sometimes use the phrase “ultimate self-determination”). With this definition, then, it appears that Arminians believe in such free will and Calvinists do not believe in such free will. I certainly do not believe there is such a thing as human free will defined as decisive self-determination.

Bound to Sovereign Grace

At this point in my conversations, what proves to be most clarifying is two things.

First is the abundance of biblical texts that describe the bondage of the will and the necessity of sovereign grace to bring a person out of spiritual deadness into life and faith. For example, in Ephesians 2:5–6, Paul does not say that when we were spiritually dead God gave us a kind of halfway regeneration where we now, in that new halfway state of life, provide ourselves the decisive, self-determining act of faith — the act of producing the strongest desire for Jesus that pushes us over the line to believe. What Paul says is that while we were dead, God not only made us alive but also raised us up with Christ and seated “us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus.” In other words, God’s action is decisive — all the way from death through spiritual resurrection to our firm, saved position in the presence of God in Christ. There are many texts that teach the same thing concerning sovereign grace. That’s the first thing.

“Without God’s sovereign grace, we would be utterly hopeless in the bondage of our spiritually dead hearts.”

The other thing that I find clarifying and helpful in conversations with folks is to point out that free will, understood as the power of ultimate or decisive self-determination, is not taught anywhere in the Bible. Not a single verse, not a single text teaches that there is such a thing as the power of ultimate human self-determination. So, where does that idea come from that we must have ultimate self-determination? It comes from a philosophical presupposition that people bring to the Bible. The philosophical presupposition is that if we don’t have ultimate self-determination, we cannot be held accountable for our own beliefs and actions before God. Well, the Bible simply does not affirm that presupposition.

The Bible teaches that God has ways we do not understand and that he knows how to govern all things, including the human will, in such a way that we are truly responsible, truly accountable — and he, at the same time, is truly sovereign. And oh, we should be thankful for this sovereign grace, because without it, we would be utterly hopeless in the bondage of our spiritually dead hearts.

So, if you find yourself — and I’m speaking to those of you who are listening right now — if you find yourself unable to love God, unable to trust Christ, don’t despair. Jesus said, “With man this is impossible, but with God all things are possible” (Matthew 19:26). Resolve to seek him, come to him. Look to his suffering for the worst of sinners, and ask God for the grace to see and savor Christ.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Plenty of time.

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

Ignorance.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Audio Transcript

We talked about Christian Hedonism last week. And we’re back to it today. We are pleasure-seekers. We are in pursuit of our own highest happiness. Or as you said it last time, Pastor John, “We zealously seek to maximize, in every way we can, our joy in God now and forever.” And such a zealous commitment to our own joy raises an objection for many people. Does that mean Christian Hedonists deny self-denial? In an email from Erin, a young woman who listens to the podcast, comes this question: “Hello, Pastor John! How does self-denial fit with Christian Hedonism, the endless pursuit of our greatest happiness?”

Well, my mind just explodes with things to say. But before I say half a dozen crazy wonderful things about the eternal benefits of self-denial, I have to nail down something with absolute clarity. If we don’t get this, everything I say about self-denial will not be biblical. When I speak of the pursuit of our greatest and longest happiness, I am speaking of God himself being that happiness, not primarily his gifts. His gifts are wonderful, but they’re not primary. Psalm 16:11 is essential here: “In your presence there is fullness of joy; at your right hand are pleasures forevermore.”

God’s Gifts Lead Us to God

The difference between Christian Hedonism and the prosperity gospel is that the prosperity gospel downplays suffering and foregrounds material blessing. Christian Hedonism says, “God makes no promises of earthly material prosperity to his children.” None. On the contrary, he promises them again and again that the path that leads to heaven is the path of sacrifice and often suffering. The goal of Christian Hedonism is to attain final, full, eternal happiness in God, not prosperity on earth.

As wonderful as his gifts are — and they are infinitely wonderful — they are all designed to remove barriers or build bridges to God himself as our supreme enjoyment. First Peter 3:18 says, “Christ . . . suffered once for sins, the righteous for the unrighteous, that he might bring us to God” — and he does not expect us to be disappointed when we get there.

Propitiation removes the wrath of God so that we can enjoy him as our friend.
Regeneration takes away the deadness of our hearts so that we can be alive to delight in God.
God’s effectual calling is a calling into the fellowship and the delights of his beloved Son.
Justification puts us in the right standing with God so that we don’t have to be afraid anymore of condemnation in the presence of our all-satisfying Judge.
Forgiveness of sins removes the barrier of guilt between us and our enjoyment of the infinitely holy Maker.
Eternal life is defined as knowing God and his Son in the most intimate fellowship (John 17:3).

All the gifts of God are designed to enable us to enjoy God. That’s the aim of creation; that’s the aim of redemption: the magnifying of the worth and beauty and greatness of God through the satisfying of the human soul with the friendship and the glory of God. So, that’s fundamental. That’s the beginning of any talk about self-denial.

Why We Deny Ourselves

What then is biblical self-denial and its biblical role in the Christian life? Biblical self-denial is the sacrifice of any earthly pleasures for the sake of gaining greater pleasure in God, both in this life and especially in the next.

1. For example, Philippians 3:8: “I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things and count them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ.” So, the aim of loss, the aim of self-denial is gain, gain, gain — and not the gain of worldly pleasures, but the gain of more Christ, more of Christ.

2. Matthew 13:44: “The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field, which a man found and covered up. Then in his joy he goes and sells all that he has and buys that field.” So, selling, losing, forfeiting, denying all that we have is for the purpose of gaining the greatest treasure in the universe: King Jesus. So, “Sell your possessions, and give to the needy.” Why? “Provide yourselves with . . . treasure in the heavens” — namely, the enjoyments of Christ (Luke 12:33).

3. Mark 8:34–35: “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For” — here’s the reason you should — “whoever loses his life for my sake and the gospel’s will save it.” Save it — that’s your goal. Save it. Save it for what? For Christ, for the enjoyments of Christ.

4. Here’s the way Jesus clarifies that saying in John 12:25: “Whoever loves his life loses it, and whoever hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life.” You hate your life in this world and you gain it forever. And what is that eternal life that you gain by losing your life? John 17:3 says, “This is eternal life, that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent.” We lose our lives to gain our lives — namely, knowing God forever.

5. Hebrews 12:2: “[Look] to Jesus . . . who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross.” The greatest act of self-denial that has ever been performed in the history of the world was performed and sustained by joy — “for the joy that was set before him [he] endured the cross.” He gave himself to the worst suffering to gain for himself the worship of millions.

“Biblical self-denial is the sacrifice of any earthly pleasures for the sake of gaining greater pleasure in God.”

6. Luke 6:35 — and this text combines the shocking no reward, full reward: “Love your enemies, and do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return, and your reward will be great.” I love the way Jesus shocks us again and again with the way he puts words together. So, let the satisfaction of your reward from God in heaven be so deep that you don’t need any rewards here. Oh, what a countercultural, counterintuitive life that would be, right? We don’t need any rewards here. We can deny ourselves whatever love requires that we deny because he has promised us such a reward. That’s exactly the way Jesus argues in Luke 6:35.

7. Luke 14:13–14: “When you give a feast, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind, and you will be blessed, because they cannot repay you.” There it is again. “For” — here’s the reason — “you will be repaid at the resurrection of the just.” In other words, be so confident and so satisfied with the joy of what is coming to you at the resurrection in your fellowship with Jesus forever that you can make sacrifices. You can make whatever self-denial payments or sacrifices are needed to serve the poor and invite people over who cannot pay you back.

The Blasphemy of Ultimate Self-Denial

Now, those are seven passages, and I think I could add a dozen more to those texts. If someone should say to me, “Now, Piper, you don’t really believe in self-denial. You don’t, because all of your illustrations of self-denial are really aimed at satisfying the self,” my response would be, “Oh, I believe in biblical self-denial. I believe in self-denial on earth. I believe in martyrdom. I believe in sacrifice. I believe in love. But I do not believe in ultimate self-denial, because ultimate self-denial is blasphemy.”

Let me illustrate. Suppose I stand at the pearly gates and God holds out his hands to me and says, “Here I am, John — your lifelong desire, your great reward. I am your God, and in my presence is fullness of joy, and there are pleasures at my right hand. Enter, John, my son. Enter into the joy of your master.” If my response to that welcome would be, “Thank you anyway. I did not come here for delights. I did not come here for satisfaction. I did not come here for the rewards of your presence and your beauty and your worth and your greatness. I intend to deny myself all those pleasures forever.” That, Tony — that, listeners — is blasphemy. The only way to glorify God at that moment is to say, “Yes, Lord. This is what I have longed for all my life” — and then enter.