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.

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

Welcome to October. This month we’re celebrating the Reformation together — Martin Luther’s great stand against the pope and against Rome’s spiritual abuses and theological errors. Luther did not stand alone, of course. Other men stood for this same cause, before and after him — people like John Wycliffe, William Tyndale, Thomas Cranmer, John Knox, and John Calvin. And many other lesser-known names paid the ultimate price in the Reformation — men and women, even teenagers, who stood against Rome, and who bled and were burned and drowned for it. These stories of sacrifice are our focus in the month ahead, in a 31-day tour you can complete in just 5–7 minutes each day. It’s called Here We Stand. If you haven’t yet, subscribe to the email journey today, online at desiringGod.org/stand. Or just go to desiringGod.org and click on the link on the top of the website. I hope you’ll join us in remembering the price paid for the spiritual blessings and religious liberties we enjoy today.

Speaking of church history, again, the birthday of Jonathan Edwards falls on Saturday, October 5. Pastor John, on Monday we talked about Christian zeal — an old-fashioned word, but an important one. You called zeal an “essential virtue” to Christian obedience. To make the case, you quoted Paul’s biblical exhortations, like in Romans 12:11: “Do not be slothful in zeal, be fervent in spirit, serve the Lord.” And in Titus 2:14: “[Christ] gave himself for us . . . to purify for himself a people . . . who are zealous for good works.” Then you brought up Jonathan Edwards and his seventy resolutions that he made as a young man, especially the one you can recite from memory after almost fifty years since you first read them — namely, number 6: “Resolved, to live with all my might, while I do live.”

But here’s today’s question. Both you and Edwards are Christian Hedonists. And he is a major source of your own understanding of Christian Hedonism. A point that was not made clear last time, as you were talking about zeal: Does Edwards see a connection between zeal and delight in God? Do you? Do you see a connection between zeal to live with all our might for the glory of God and the Christian Hedonist’s passion to maximize his joy in God?

Yes, and the best way I think to see it is to follow a certain sequence of thought in Edwards’s mind and my mind that moves from (1) zeal for the glory of God to (2) zeal for good deeds to (3) the inner motivation of those deeds in love for God or delight in God or treasuring God (different ways to say the same thing) to (4) the Christian Hedonist principle that we should seek to maximize — zealously seek to maximize in every way we can — our joy in God now and forever.

Christian Hedonist Zeal

Let’s try to follow that sequence of thought. And we’re going to bump into another amazing resolution of Edwards that really brings clarity to his Christian Hedonism.

1. Zeal for God’s Glory

Remember, in Romans 12:11, Paul said, “Never flag in zeal, serve the Lord.” So, clearly, Christian zeal is directed toward serving the Lord. And since the Lord is not needy — he doesn’t need any servants to make up for any lack in himself — what that means is that we should avail ourselves of his power to do his bidding to make him look great. I think that’s what “serve the Lord” means.

“We must pursue joy with zeal, with passion, with all our might.”

The apostle Paul said, “Whether you eat or drink, or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God” (1 Corinthians 10:31). Everything in our lives should be calculated to make God look more glorious than people think he is. Edwards defines Christian zeal as “a fervent disposition or affection of mind in pursuing the glory of God.” That’s step one.

2. Zeal for Good Deeds

This zeal for God’s glory implies being zealous for good deeds — good deeds to people — because this is one crucial way God is glorified. Titus 2:14 says that Christ died to create a people “who are zealous for good [deeds].” Jesus said 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.” So, that’s step two. Zeal for God’s glory implies zeal for good deeds since that’s how Jesus said we will glorify the Father. Or as Edwards says, Christian zeal is a “fervency of spirit that good may be done for God’s and Christ’s sake.”

3. Zeal from New Hearts

Step three is to realize that good deeds toward man and outward acts of worship toward God are of no spiritual value without a new heart that loves God, values God, delights in God, treasures God above all else. Jesus said, “This people honors me with their lips, but their heart is far from me; in vain [emptiness] do they worship me” (Matthew 15:8–9). Outward acts of worship without inward affections of love are worthless. Jesus speaks of moral acts of good deeds in the same way: “You blind Pharisee! First clean the inside of the cup and the plate, that the outside also may be clean” (Matthew 23:26). They did all kinds of good deeds, the Pharisees did, but were hypocrites, because those deeds were not coming from the right kind of heart. They just wanted to be seen by men.

So, if we want our zeal for the glory of God to be real, and we want our zeal for good deeds to be morally significant in God’s sight, we must be changed on the inside, so that we value and treasure God above all things. Or to say it another way, we must delight in God, be glad in God, find God to be our superior satisfaction so that our outward acts of worship are authentic and our good deeds toward people serve to glorify the value of God and not ourselves. Psalm 16:11: “In your presence there is fullness of joy; at your right hand are pleasures forevermore.” Tasting that right now — tasting that in the heart — is the heart of worship.

And at the horizontal level of good deeds, Jesus said, “It is more blessed” — more glad, more happy, more satisfying — “to give than to receive” (Acts 20:35). We should find more gladness in good deeds than in having security and comfort and riches. That’s true now, in measure, and he says it’s true lavishly in the future. “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 great” — that’s an understatement! — “great is your reward in heaven” (Matthew 5:11–12). Which leads to step four.

4. Zeal to Maximize Joy in God

If this is true, if worship is authentic because our hearts are treasuring and delighting in and being satisfied with God above all things, and if good deeds are morally significant because of the present experience of gladness and blessedness and because of a future hope or reward in God, then we simply cannot be indifferent to the pursuit of joy in God himself and the joy that comes from the overflow of that Godward joy into the lives of other people through good deeds. We can’t be indifferent to that joy. We must pursue it with zeal, with passion, with all our might — which is what makes us Christian Hedonists.

Edwards on Zeal and Joy

Now, that was a long argument to get to the point that, yes, there’s a connection between zeal for God’s glory and being a Christian Hedonist. Here’s the amazing way Edwards connected zeal with the pursuit of this joy in God. This just boggled my mind when I first read it. Number 22: “Resolved, to endeavor to obtain for myself as much happiness, in the other world” — that is, in God, in heaven, or in the age to come, not in earthly ease — “as I possibly can, with all the power, might, vigor, vehemence, yea violence, I am capable of, or can bring myself to exert, in any way that can be thought of.” That’s just off the charts. Zealous for joy. Zealous for happiness with God in heaven forever. That’s like saying, “Resolved, to live with all my might while I do live.”

There’s the connection between Christian Hedonism and zeal in his own resolution language. “To live with all my might while I do live” — namely, in the pursuit of maximum joy in God, with him, forever, by whatever means on earth I can. Of course, that means by doing as many good deeds as I can, even if it costs me my violent death. That’s the point of referring to violence. It’s not violence against others he’s talking about, but the kind of violence that cuts off your hand or tears out your own eye if it would diminish your doing of good and your avoidance of sin and your experience of joy in God through loving other people.

So, my conclusion, Tony, is yes, there is a powerful connection in Edwards’s mind — there certainly is in my mind — between zeal to live with all our might for the glory of God and the Christian Hedonist passion to maximize our joy in God. They come together as our joy in God extends itself to make God look great through deeds of love. We pursue our joy in the joy of others in God because zeal for his glory and for their good impels us in the Christian Hedonist pursuit of maximum joy in God forever.

I love Reformed theology (the doctrines of grace, the five points of Calvinism) the way I love a cherished picture of my wife. If I said, “I love that picture,” would you say to me, “But that’s not your wife. That’s a picture. You shouldn’t love a picture. You should love your wife”? If you said that to me, I would say, “I know it’s only a picture. I don’t love the picture instead of her; I love the picture because of her. I know the difference. She is precious in herself. The picture is not. It is precious only because she is.” The picture is precious because it reveals her. It does the best a picture can do.

That’s the way Reformed theology is precious. God is valuable in himself. Theology is not valuable in itself. It is valuable as a picture, a portrait, a window, a telescope. So, I love Reformed theology because I love God. I love Reformed soteriology because I love the sovereign Savior. Reformed theology makes me happy because God makes me happy. I find in Reformed theology a vast Lake Superior in which to paddle around and make thrilling discoveries because Reformed theology is a lake-sized picture of an ocean without bottom and without shores. And that ocean is God.

Few people have helped me go deeper or farther in that ocean than Jonathan Edwards. He wrote,

The enjoyment of [God] is the only happiness with which our souls can be satisfied. To go to heaven, fully to enjoy God, is infinitely better than the most pleasant accommodations here. Fathers and mothers, husbands, wives, or children, or the company of earthly friends, are but shadows; but God is the substance. These are but scattered beams, but God is the sun. These are but streams. But God is the ocean. (Works of Jonathan Edwards, 2:244).

The truths of Reformed theology are shadows; God is the substance, the reality. The beauties of Reformed theology are beams; God is the sun. The depths of Reformed theology are the streams; God is the ocean. The delights of Reformed theology are sweet, but in God’s presence is fullness of joy, and at his right hand are pleasures forevermore (Psalm 16:11). Reformed theology is beautiful because God is beautiful.

Reformed Theology and the Centrality of God

The portrait of God in Reformed theology is beautiful first because it relentlessly foregrounds the greatness of God, the supremacy of God, the centrality of God, or — the word most often used in Scripture — the glory of God. Geerhardus Vos, a Dutch-American theologian who died in 1949, captured the central theme of Reformed theology when he wrote,

Reformed theology took hold of the Scriptures in their deepest root idea. . . . The root idea which served as the key to unlock the rich treasuries of the Scriptures was the preeminence of God’s glory in the consideration of all that has been created. . . . [Reformed theology] begins with God. God does not exist because of man, but man because of God. This is what is written at the entrance of the temple of Reformed theology. (Redemptive History and Biblical Interpretation, 241–42)

When we tried to formulate a mission statement for our church in 1995, which is still on the wall in our sanctuary today, we said, “We exist to spread a passion for the supremacy of God in all things for the joy of all peoples through Jesus Christ.” That was our effort to give expression to what Reformed theology saw in the Bible — namely, that God is first. God is supreme. God is central.

Or to put it more accurately, God is not just the first reality, the supreme reality, or the central reality; he is Reality. He is the only reality that absolutely is. When God identified himself and gave himself a name in Exodus 3:14, he said, “I am who I am.” He simply and absolutely is. He never came into being. When there was no universe, and no space or time, there was God.

“Reformed theology is beautiful because God is beautiful.”

This is an electrifying truth! God simply is. Explosive. Wild. Untamable. It changes absolutely everything to know this. To foreground this and make it the bedrock, the capstone, and the all-pervasive reality of your theology will shape all thought, all feeling, and all of life and ministry.

Jonathan Edwards captured the supremacy and centrality of God like this:

All that is ever spoken of in the Scripture as an ultimate end of God’s works is included in that one phrase, the glory of God. . . . The refulgence shines upon and into the creature, and is reflected back to the luminary. The beams of glory come from God, are something of God, and are refunded back again to their original. So that the whole is of God, and in God, and to God; and God is the beginning, and the middle, and end [in this affair]. (God’s Passion for His Glory, 242, 247)

That’s a beautiful rendering of the truth and sentiment of the apostle Paul in Romans 11:33–36:

Oh, the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments and how inscrutable his ways! “For who has known the mind of the Lord, or who has been his counselor?” “Or who has given a gift to him that he might be repaid?” For from him and through him and to him are all things. To him be glory forever. Amen.

Antidote for Pragmatism

I remember ten years into my pastorate reading this terrible indictment of Christian pastors from Albert Einstein, and resolving, God helping me, never to be guilty of this. Charles Misner wrote,

I do see the design of the universe as essentially a religious question. That is, one should have some kind of respect and awe for the whole business. . . . It’s very magnificent and shouldn’t be taken for granted. In fact, I believe that is why Einstein had so little use for organized religion, although he strikes me as a basically very religious man. He must have looked at what the preachers said about God and felt that they were blaspheming. He had seen much more majesty than they had ever imagined, and they were just not talking about the real thing.

Reformed theology is beautiful because it is a great antidote to a kind of pragmatic, managerial, therapeutic dumbing down of the glory of God and the central reality of the universe and the Bible and life and ministry.

God’s Commitment to His Glory

One of the ways that Reformed theology portrays the glory of God and the centrality of God is by drawing attention not just to the God-centeredness of the Bible, but to the God-centeredness of God. God’s commitment to his own self-exaltation — his God-centeredness — permeates the Bible from cover to cover. And Reformed theology holds the great honor, the great beauty, of reveling in God’s God-centeredness. Listen to this litany of God’s God-centeredness — God’s zeal to see his own glory, his own name, exalted:

“He predestined us for adoption . . . to the praise of the glory of his grace” (Ephesians 1:5–6 my translation). God planned his praise.
“The heavens declare the glory of God” (Psalms 19:1). He designed it that way.
“You are my servant, Israel, in whom I will be glorified” (Isaiah 49:3). That’s why he chose them.
“He saved them [at the Red Sea] for his name’s sake, that he might make known his mighty power” (Psalm 106:8).
“I acted for the sake of my name, that it should not be profaned in the sight of the nations” (Ezekiel 20:14).
“Thus says the Lord God: It is not for your sake, O house of Israel, that I am about to act, 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).
“For my name’s sake I defer my anger; for the sake of my praise I restrain it for you. . . . For my own sake, for my own sake, I do it, for how should my name be profaned? My glory I will not give to another” (Isaiah 48:9–11).
“I am he who blots out your transgressions for my own sake” (Isaiah 43:25).
“[Jesus comes] on that day to be glorified in his saints, and to be marveled at among all who have believed” (2 Thessalonians 1:10).
Jesus prays, “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). He’s saying, “I died for this — that my people would see my glory. I will be central and supreme among my people.”

I know that a lot of people, thousands of people, do not at first regard God’s God-centeredness as beautiful and, therefore, they don’t regard Reformed theology as beautiful. As far as they’re concerned, what I just described is megalomania. Before C.S. Lewis was a Christian, he said he read texts like these and they sounded to him “like a vain woman wanting compliments” (Reflections on the Psalms, 109). When Oprah Winfrey was 27, she heard a sermon on God’s jealousy for his name and said, “Something about that didn’t feel right in my spirit because I believe that God is love, and that God is in all things,” and she walked away from biblical Christianity. Brad Pitt grew up in a Southern Baptist church but turned away because he said,

I didn’t understand this idea of a God who says, “You have to acknowledge me. You have to say that I’m the best, and then I’ll give you eternal happiness. If you won’t, then you don’t get it!” It seemed to be about ego. I can’t see God operating from ego, so it made no sense to me.

So, it’s pretty clear that many people do not find God’s God-centeredness — God’s self-exaltation — beautiful and, therefore, turn away from him and from Reformed theology. It’s like George MacDonald (one of C.S. Lewis’s heroes), who said (to my utter dismay so many decades ago), “From all copies of Jonathan Edwards’s portrait of God, however faded by time . . . I turn with loathing” (Creation in Christ, 81). That was like a gut punch to me as a young man, as I was falling in love with the God of Jonathan Edwards and this portrait of him called Reformed theology. I have spent the lion’s share of my thinking in the last fifty years trying to show that baked into the biblical portrait of God’s God-centeredness is a beautiful answer to the accusation of megalomania.

Answering the Objection

The answer goes like this: God’s commitment to making himself supreme and glorious and central 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. It doesn’t work that way with us. That’s why we don’t like human beings who exalt themselves. Our self-exaltation draws people away from the one thing that can satisfy their souls: the infinite worth and beauty of God in Christ.

If I say, “Look at me,” I’m your enemy. If God says, “Look at me,” he’s your friend. If you obey me when I say, “Come, drink at the fountain of my resourcefulness,” you will die. If you obey God when he says, “Come, drink at the fountain of my infinite resourcefulness,” you will live. When God exalts himself, he is loving us. He is showing and offering the one thing that can satisfy our souls forever — namely, God. If Psalm 16:11 is true (“In your presence there is fullness of joy; at your right hand are pleasures forevermore”), what should he do to love you?

He should stand on every mountain and in every church, and say, “I am that great. I am that great. I will satisfy.” In our very experience of supreme satisfaction in him, his ultimate purpose is fulfilled — namely, the magnifying of his own all-sufficient, all-satisfying glory, because God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in him. This is the answer to the accusation of God’s megalomania: when he offers us himself at the cost of his Son’s life, he is both magnifying his own worth and satisfying our souls forever. There is a name for this, and it is not megalomania. It is love.

Reformed theology is beautiful because it foregrounds the centrality of the glory of God and, therefore, provides the deepest and longest satisfaction to the human soul. But neither C.S. Lewis, nor Brad Pitt, nor Oprah Winfrey, nor that precious prodigal for whom you would lay down your life will ever see this beauty, unless God, by omnipotent sovereign grace, rescues them from the blindness of our spiritual depravity and death, which is the second thing that makes Reformed theology beautiful. The first was that Reformed theology foregrounds the centrality of God. The second is that Reformed theology exalts the sovereignty of God’s grace in saving sinners.

Reformed Theology and Sovereign Grace

Reformed theology takes seriously, with blood-earnest seriousness, the beauty-destroying, hopeless condition of human beings under the wrath of God and on our way to eternal punishment — if God himself doesn’t intervene. “For we have already charged,” Paul said, “that all . . . are under sin, as it is written: ‘None is righteous, no, not one’” (Romans 3:9–10).

The Bible describes us as spiritually dead and unresponsive to God (Ephesians 2:1), hardened in our hearts against spiritual reality (Ephesians 4:18), utterly unable to change ourselves: “The mind of the flesh is hostile to God, for it does not submit to God’s law; indeed, it cannot. Those who are in the flesh cannot please God” (Romans 8:7–8 my translation). We are, therefore, according to Romans 6:17, “slaves of sin.” And all of this is a depravity that makes us blind to the glory of Christ — the beauty of Christ (2 Corinthians 4:4). To the natural human heart, Christ appears as foolish, or legendary, or mythological, or just boring and irrelevant. Without a miracle, a work of omnipotent grace, we are all hopeless in our alienation from God. No theology takes this miserable condition more seriously than Reformed theology, which is why no other theology can portray salvation by sovereign grace more beautifully.

God’s Will, Not Man’s

Reformed theology not only takes this hopeless condition seriously. It also takes sovereign grace seriously. Oh, the beauty of sovereign grace — the beauty-restoring power of sovereign grace! This means that our rescue from the deadness, blindness, and ugliness of depravity into the life and beauty of salvation is found in God’s sovereign will, not man’s free will. Reformed theology does not believe in the existence of human free will — not if you define it as the power of ultimate self-determination. Left to our so-called “free will,” we die, because by nature we love and choose sin. The freedom to be the master of our own fate means death. If there is any hope for us in our rebellion against God, the hope will be in God’s sovereign, total rescue. Reformed theology does not believe that God contributes a helpful 99 percent and we contribute the decisive 1 percent to our conversion.

When we all get to heaven and lay our crowns before the feet of Jesus, no one is going to say, “Thank you, Jesus, for the 99 percent that you contributed to my conversion, but there is one crown I’m not going to lay down at your feet — namely, the decisive 1 percent that I, by my free, self-determining will, provided; that crown belongs to my final, decisive spiritual discernment.” No one is going to talk like that. Because that’s not the way it happened — not for one person in this room.

Purchased, Called, Kept

Reformed theology bows to the beautiful, humbling, precious reality that the blood of Christ — the blood of the new covenant (Luke 22:20) — purchased a new heart for his bride: “I will give them one heart, and a new spirit I will put within them. I will remove the heart of stone from their flesh” (Ezekiel 11:19). Do you have the new heart that believes in Christ? That’s how it happened. Your new heart was bought with the blood of the covenant (1 Corinthians 6:20).

Then, on the basis of that bloody purchase in history, God actually did it in your life. He took away the blindness, and caused you to see the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ (2 Corinthians 4:4–6). He caused you to see the spiritual beauty of Christ crucified as compelling. Christ became your supreme treasure (Matthew 13:44). You experienced the gift of faith (Ephesians 2:5–10). And then he gave you the Holy Spirit as a down payment, a guarantee, a seal (2 Corinthians 1:22; Ephesians 1:14). And he speaks these words over every one of his blood-bought, believing children: “I will put the fear of me in their hearts, that they may not turn from me. I will rejoice in doing them good . . . with all my heart and all my soul” (Jeremiah 32:40–41).

Are there any more beautiful words for a 78-year-old sinner to hear (or an 18-year-old sinner) than this: “You are mine. I will keep you. You will not make shipwreck of your faith. No one can snatch you out of my hand. I bought you, I called you, I own you, and I will keep you”? Is there anything more firm, more beautiful than that?

Yes. There is one more brushstroke to add to this canvas of beautiful, sovereign salvation from the ugliness of total deadness and blindness and depravity. And that brushstroke makes the firmness of sovereign grace as deep as it can possibly be. I will read it to you from 2 Timothy 1:9: “[God] saved us and called us to a holy calling, not because of our works but because of his own purpose and grace, which he gave us in Christ Jesus before the ages began.” You will never love him, worship him, obey him, or enjoy him the way you ought until your heart leaps up with this reality: God gave me saving, sovereign grace in Christ Jesus before the creation of the universe. He chose me. He predestined me to believe, to be his child — “to the praise of the glory of his grace” (Ephesians 1:6 KJV) — before the foundation of the world.

Depraved, chosen, purchased, called, and kept (T.U.L.I.P.). We are saved by sovereign grace, infinitely beautiful sovereign grace. Reformed theology is beautiful because the God of sovereign grace is beautiful. Oh, that this sovereign God would look with such favor on the Acts 29 movement that nothing could move you from holding and heralding this beautiful and beautifying Reformed theology.

Audio Transcript

How do we overcome half-hearted spiritual laziness? That’s the question today and Thursday. And speaking of zeal for God, I should first mention again that this October we’re celebrating the Reformation — Martin Luther’s great stand against the pope and against Rome’s spiritual abuses and theological errors. But Luther didn’t stand alone. Other men stood for this same cause, before and after him — people like John Wycliffe, William Tyndale, Thomas Cranmer, John Knox, and John Calvin. And many other lesser-known names paid the ultimate price in the Reformation — men and women, even teenagers, who stood against Rome, and who bled and were burned and drowned for it.

These stories of sacrifice are our focus in the month ahead, in a 31-day tour you can complete in just 5–7 minutes each day. It’s called Here We Stand. You can subscribe to the email journey today by going to desiringGod.org/stand. Or just go to desiringGod.org and click on the link on the top of the website. I hope you’ll join us in remembering the price paid for the spiritual blessings and religious liberties we enjoy today.

Speaking of church history, this Saturday marks Jonathan Edwards’s birthday — his 321st, to be exact. Not a monumental year, but certainly a monumental man in your life and theology, Pastor John. Edwards was a pastor and theologian in New England during the First Great Awakening. His God-entranced theology and preaching became a powerful influence in your life over fifty years ago. And evidently that is still the case because just this last spring you delivered a commencement address at Bethlehem College and Seminary and again quoted Edwards as a key example of what you were trying to get across to those students in a message all about zeal. Revisit that message for us, and tell us what Edwards teaches us about overcoming spiritual laziness.

J.I. Packer wrote a blurb in 1986 for the cover of the first edition of the book Desiring God, and it said this: “Jonathan Edwards, whose ghost walks through most of Piper’s pages, would be delighted with his disciple.” Well, I really liked that endorsement very much — but it’s an open question to me whether Jonathan Edwards would be delighted with me as his disciple. But what’s not an open question is that he walks like a ghost through all my pages. That’s true, and in fact, the origin of that message that I gave at Bethlehem College and Seminary was not first from Edwards.

When You Really Want to Obey

I’ll get to Edwards in just a minute, but here’s where it came from. That message on zeal came from some morning meditation — maybe fifteen minutes of meditation — on Romans 12:6–8, where Paul says, “Having gifts that differ according to the grace given to us, let us use them,” and then you list gifts, and the last three go like this: “the one who contributes, in generosity; the one who leads, with zeal; the one who does acts of mercy, with cheerfulness.”

“Seek to magnify the worth and the greatness and the beauty of the Lord in all that you do.”

I read that and I turned to my wife, who was sitting with me in the living room there, and I said, “Noël, what’s the common denominator between contributing generously, leading zealously, and showing mercy cheerfully? What’s the basic point in saying, ‘Do what you do generously, do what you do zealously, and do what you do cheerfully’?” She said, “Well, you really want to do it. You’re not being forced. You’re not half-hearted. You’re all in.” I thought, “Yeah, that’s it. That’s it.”

The transformed mind from Romans 12:2 not only discerns “what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect” — it really wants to do the will of God. It’s all in, 100 percent, with the will of God. It’s not a half-hearted doing of the will of God. If God’s will for you is to contribute, do it generously. If God’s will for you is to lead, lead zealously. If God’s will for you is to do mercy, show mercy, do it cheerfully, not begrudgingly.

So, what Paul is getting at is that the renewed mind, the mind of Christ in Christians, this transformed mind is not only able to recognize what is the will of God but also is inclined how to do it — how to go about the will of God. God’s will is not simply that we do the right thing but that we do it with all our heart, all our soul, and all our might. That’s the point of those verses. That’s what got me thinking about zeal.

It’s not surprising, then, that the very next verse, Romans 12:9, says, “Let [your] love be genuine. Abhor what is evil.” In other words, really love and really hate. Don’t let your love be half-hearted and unreal, and don’t let your recognition of evil simply be a mild disapproval. Abhorrent — it’s a very strong word. This is the only place it’s used in the New Testament. It’s the way zeal responds to evil — abhorrence. Then to make it crystal clear what he’s so concerned about, one verse later, in Romans 12:11, he says, “Do not be slothful in zeal” — same word as in Romans 12:8 — “be fervent in spirit, serve the Lord.” So, the great object of the lives of believers is the Lord: “serve the Lord.” Seek to magnify the worth and the greatness and the beauty of the Lord in all that you do.

But what burns in Paul’s heart, as far as I can see, is that we serve the Lord in a certain way — namely, that we not be lethargic or slothful or lazy or half-hearted or sluggish or lukewarm in the way we serve the Lord, or the way we do everything, for that matter. So, that phrase “be fervent in spirit” literally means “boil” — “boil in the spirit.” In fact, the word “fervent” is the Latin word for “boil,” and Paul is saying, “You don’t get a pass if your personality is phlegmatic.” That’s an old word. If you were born passive, as a couch-potato-type person, you don’t get a pass. This is not a comment on your personality. This is a command for all Christians. Whatever your personality, make it work for you. When you know the will of God and you resolve to do it, which is what Christians do, be all in. Do it all the way. Do it with all your might and all your soul. Do it with zeal, ardor, fervency, eagerness. Pray that your spirit would boil with zeal for the will of God and the glory of God.

The Zeal of Jonathan Edwards

Now, here we come: Edwards. I was about fifteen minutes into my meditation on Romans 12, making notes in my little journal that I keep beside my chair, and I realized there was a ghost walking through my mind. He’s really there. Yes, it’s the apostle Paul. Yes, it’s the Holy Spirit. There’s another ghost, and his name is Jonathan Edwards — and he wrote seventy resolutions when he was nineteen. I read those resolutions decades ago, and only one of them could I quote verbatim to this day — only one, because it’s short, but it’s also very important.

Resolution #6: “Resolved, to live with all my might, while I do live.” Let me say it again: “Resolved, to live with all my might, while I do live.” Every time I read that sentence, my heart rises up with zeal and says, “Yes, yes. O God, don’t let me waste my life with lukewarm, half-hearted efforts to do anything.” “Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with [all] your might” (Ecclesiastes 9:10). I think that resolution is just a paraphrase of Ecclesiastes 9:10. Or Colossians 3:23: “Whatever you do, work heartily” — from the soul — “as for the Lord and not for men.”

“God’s will is not simply that we do the right thing but that we do it with all our heart, all our soul, and all our might.”

Lest we think that this resolution to “live with all my might while I do live” was simply an overstated nineteen-year-old expression of youthful energy, seventeen years later, as a pastor in North Hampton, Edwards preached a sermon entitled “Zeal an Essential Virtue of a Christian.” I just reread it a few days ago just to stoke my engine on this. The text was Titus 2:14: “[Christ] gave himself for us . . . to purify for himself a people who are zealous for good works.” He didn’t die simply to make us able to do good works. He died to make us passionate about doing good works. That’s what it says: not half-hearted.

So, in conclusion, the booster rocket that sends zeal for good works — in fact, zeal for everything we do — into orbit, this booster rocket is: Christ died for this. He died for this. Christ gave himself on the cross to create a people with zeal — zeal for good works, zeal for the glory of the Lord. This is what pleases the Lord. He died for it. So, I pray that all of us will join Jonathan Edwards and say, “Resolved, to live with all my might, while I do live.”