Audio Transcript

Happy Fourth of July to those of you in the United States. This holiday is a big one here, of course, and one that reminds me of many episodes on this podcast, Pastor John, where you have delved into the church-state separation controversy, political activism, Christian patriotism, US flags in the sanctuary, things like that — all sorts of topics we’ve covered in this realm. I attempted to digest all those episodes into one summary you can find (hopefully it’s handy for you) in the APJ book on pages 47–56.

Citizenship in a country like America is a wonderful grace, a common grace. On a day like this one, I am reminded of the apostle Paul and his Roman citizenship, which afforded him certain privileges and protections, and we see those come up all over Acts (Acts 16:35–40; 22:22–29; 23:26–27; 25:13–27; etc.). Paul’s passport is always showing up in Acts because his nationhood was useful. It was a common grace he returned to and claimed. We too have a ton of privileges, Pastor John, and protections in being American citizens. We cannot take them for granted. And so, on a day like today, it is good to celebrate them. So, Pastor John, what are your thoughts today as you ponder this common grace of citizenship, and how we got it?

I have little doubt that the lavish blessings of common grace that we enjoy in America are rooted in the pervasive cultural transformation that came from centuries of Christian influences in Europe and America. I don’t doubt that. And just by way of thanksgiving on this special day (and we should be thankful), the kind of common grace I have in mind are things like this — and the list is short and could be many times longer.

America’s Uncommon Gifts

I have in mind a stable government, whose processes so far have freed us from anarchy and mob rule, which are so destructive. You can just look at certain countries in the world today and imagine how horrible it could be.

I have in mind the freedoms we still enjoy to gather for worship and for all kinds of discussions that may or may not support the present persons and policies in power, without fear of the gestapo breaking in.

I have in mind the moral and legal forces that still hold sway that make people trust contracts when they sign them (and banking and currency) without fear of pervasive bribery or graft undermining the entire working of business and industry and personal finance — as is the case in so many countries that can’t do anything because everything breaks; it doesn’t work because of graft and corruption.

I have in mind reliable infrastructures that we simply take for granted. Electricity for virtually every home and apartment, with heat and air conditioning and refrigeration, and countless appliances that work at the flip of a switch. Indoor plumbing — imagine! Indoor plumbing! (And in Minnesota, that’s really good.) And invisible sewers that keep our streets from stench. (They were working outside my house some time ago, and they did this amazing relining of the sewer pipes without even digging them up — just incredible technology.) Hot and cold running water at the twist of a handle, and you can even drink it. You can drink it. Food supplies that almost magically show up every day on the shelves of thousands of stores because of countless processes of production and delivery. Roads and highways and trains and trams and buses and cars and air travel that, by the way, is astonishingly safe and reliable. An Internet that puts the world of information and commerce at our fingertips for almost everyone.

And Tony, I deleted a whole bunch, just to make this shorter. On and on we could go, and all this is true. Yes, though there are criminals at every level of society, from street drug dealers to white-collar fraud, the fact remains, for now, owing to the common grace of God in this land, in America, for the most part, things work amazingly.

I have an immigrant friend that I meet with almost every week to practice his English and to study Scripture, and we talk about his country of origin, where virtually nothing works. There’s no reliable infrastructure or economic system. The poor are kept poor because there’s no stable way for them to work themselves out of poverty in a system that is shot through with bribery and corruption and instability. A tiny layer of people at the top are rich enough to have multiple mansions all over the world, and they simply steal the country’s resources, with no effort to provide structures that enable people to make a living. And we both know, he and I, we know that will never change as long as the human heart of selfishness and greed dominates the culture.

Maintaining Perspective and Priority

So, what do I conclude from lavish blessings in America, rooted in a history of morality-shaping Christianity, and from hopeless brokenness in societies rooted in selfishness and greed and corruption? And lest anybody think I’m naive, of course I’m aware that there is ample selfishness and greed at every level of American society. But that’s not why America works. To the degree that those forces gain ground, to that degree will things simply break down, collapse, stop working. That may be where we’re going. I don’t know. So, what do I conclude from all this?

Not a Tool for Nation Building

Let me say again what I don’t conclude. I don’t conclude that we should think of the Christian gospel as the pathway to nation building or nation preservation. I don’t conclude that the church should define its priorities of ministry as nation building or culture transformation. Why not, since that is often the effect that they have? Two reasons.

“We’re not promised, in this age, the survival of any nation or culture.”

First, in the New Testament, the gospel was given to save sinners from the wrath of God, not from the collapse of the Jewish state or the Roman Empire. Jesus Christ came into the world to solve the biggest problem that exists in the world for everybody on the planet — namely, we will all perish eternally under the wrath of God if we are not saved by Jesus Christ, who reconciled us to God by his death in our place.

This is the most important news we have. No other religion has it. Jesus Christ — crucified, risen, and trusted — is the only hope for every person on the planet to be saved from eternal suffering. That’s the primary reason Jesus came into the world, and the message of the New Testament focuses on it. That’s the great problem of humanity. That’s the great glory of Jesus Christ. If we think of the Christian gospel in another way, and we promote the Christian gospel as a political tool for preserving a nation or transforming a culture, we will move away from the heart of the best news in the world, and the power of the cross will be lost.

The second reason that we don’t prioritize the gospel as nation building and culture transformation is that in that very process of prioritization of the wrong thing, we would undermine the very force of the gospel to transform cultures and build nations.

In the New Testament, the process of becoming godly, righteous, humble, courageous, loving people who are radically different from fallen human nature and from corrupt cultures — that process is profoundly personal and is a deeply spiritual warfare against Satan and against indwelling sin. Where the gospel takes a detour away from the prioritization of justification by faith and sanctification by the deeply personal process of spiritual warfare, the Christian church will reflect culture, not change it.

Faithful and Forward-Looking

So, what do I conclude? What can I say positively? With all our might, let us take the Christian gospel to all the unreached peoples of the world, and let us present the gospel in the most compelling way we can to the people around us, and let us seek to be so radically changed by the gospel that our lives are full of good deeds, which bring glory to our Father in heaven by showing that our treasure is not on this earth. These good deeds may or may not preserve a nation and build a culture.

We’re not promised, in this age, the survival of any nation or culture. C.S. Lewis said, “Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations — these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat” (The Weight of Glory, 46). What we are promised is meaningful lives of love in this world and eternal joy in the next — and that Jesus Christ, when he comes (and he is coming, personally, on the clouds), will create a new nation, a new culture, a new world that lasts forever. And so we pray, “Keep us faithful, and come, Lord Jesus.”

Blessed is the man who remains steadfast under trial, for when he has stood the test he will receive the crown of life, which God has promised to those who love him.

Let no one say when he is tempted [or “tested,” as in verse 12], “I am being tempted by God,” for God cannot be tempted with evil, and he himself tempts no one. But each person is tempted when he is lured and enticed by his own desire. Then desire when it has conceived gives birth to sin, and sin when it is fully grown brings forth death.

Do not be deceived, my beloved brothers. Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change.

Of his own will he brought us forth by the word of truth, that we should be a kind of firstfruits of his creatures. (James 1:12–18)

When you hear the words of verse 12, “Blessed is the man who remains steadfast under trial [testing],” you are hearing an echo of what it was like to be a Jewish Christian in the churches to whom James was writing. Testing, testing, testing.

Some were poor and wore shabby clothes and lacked daily food (2:16). Some were humiliated when they came to church dressed like that and were told to “stand over there” (2:3). Some were dragged into court by the rich (2:6). There were fights and quarrels (4:1). People spoke evil against them (4:11). Some were defrauded of their wages (5:4). Some were condemned and murdered (5:6). Some were sick (5:15). And all of them were told to be patient in suffering (5:7, 10).

We usually think of the book of James as the book of doing. And it is at least that. “Be doers of the word, and not hearers only” (1:22). Put away anger (1:19). Be done with filthiness and wickedness (1:21). Visit orphans and widows (1:27). Don’t practice any partiality (2:1). Shun adultery and murder (2:11). Give to the needy (2:16). Tame your tongue, and use it for blessing, not cursing (3:8, 10). Forsake jealousy and selfish ambition (3:16). Be peaceable and gentle and open to reason, impartial, full of mercy and good fruits, bearing a harvest of righteousness (3:17–18). Learn how to pray like a wife who loves her husband (God), not like an adulterous wife who uses her husband’s generosity to hire lovers (4:3–4). Love your neighbor as you love yourself (2:8). Yes, it is the book of doing the word. Faith without doing is dead.

But what this text in chapter 1, and I think the whole book, presses on us is that all of James’s exhortations are written to people whose lives are characterized by suffering.

Painful Path to Joy

He begins with it in 1:2: “Count it all joy, my brothers, when you meet trials of various kinds.” He spends almost the whole first chapter on it. And he ends with it in 5:10: “As an example of suffering and patience, brothers, take the prophets who spoke in the name of the Lord.” And he soberly implies that it will be this way till Jesus comes: “Be patient, therefore, brothers, until the coming of the Lord” (5:7).

Therefore, if you are a faithful Christian, this is going be your life — a life full of faith-filled good deeds clothed with hardships and suffering, which James calls “tests.”

Count it all joy, my brothers, when you meet trials [or tests] of various kinds, for you know that the testing of your faith produces steadfastness. (1:2–3)

Blessed is the man who remains steadfast under trial [testing], for when he has stood the test [i.e., when he has been proven and found genuine] he will receive the crown of life. (1:12)

James calls them tests because they are from God. Neither nature nor Satan gives tests. They attack faith; they don’t test faith. They do not put you through fire to prove the gold of your faith is genuine. Satan aims to devour, not refine.

We know this is the way James thinks about suffering because in 4:13–15 he says,

Come now, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go into such and such a town and spend a year there and trade and make a profit.” . . . Instead you ought to say, “If the Lord wills, we will live and do this or that.”

If I live to the end of this chapel, it is because the Lord willed it. If I die before the end of this chapel, it is because the Lord willed it — and thus it will be an all-wise test for my wife. And he goes further. If I “do this or that,” it is because the Lord willed it. If I totally blank out while preaching and can’t finish the message, that will be from the Lord, and it will be a test for my faith in the goodness and kindness of the Lord for me.

Or we could make the same point — that God governs our suffering — from James 5:10–11:

As an example of suffering and patience . . . you have heard of the steadfastness of Job, and you have seen the purpose of the Lord [telos kyriou], how the Lord is compassionate and merciful.

All Job’s sufferings were purposeful. And the purpose was God’s (see Job 42:11). And the goal was a compassionate and merciful testing.

So, when we read James 1:12, “Blessed is the man who remains steadfast under trial [testing],” James means for us to understand that the testing is from the Lord, not Satan and not nature. And I am going to argue now that all of verses 12–18 are intended by James (and by God!) to help us see our lives as blessed (with the deepest and longest happiness) because of this testing.

Blessing Through Testing

In other words, James says, I am about to exhort you five dozen times (there are 62 imperatives in the Greek of this letter) to be doers of the word (1:22). And I am fully aware that I am calling upon you to live this unselfish, other-person-oriented, loving, sacrificial way of life in the midst of many God-given miseries called tests. And since I am aware of that, I am devoting most of the first chapter to persuading you that these painful tests are designed by God to make you blessed (makarios) — that is, deeply and lastingly happy. I believe that is the main point of my text (James 1:12–18), and it is the main point of this message. Everything after 1:12a (“Blessed is the man who remains steadfast under [testing]”) is argument.

The text is built around four arguments that support this main point — namely, that God’s tests are designed to lead us to deep and lasting happiness (our blessedness), not designed to make us sin and lead us to death.

Argument 1

Blessed [deeply and lastingly happy] is the man who remains steadfast under trial [testing], for when he has stood the test [been proven like gold through fire] he will receive the crown of life, which God has promised to those who love him. (verse 12)

So, the reason that God-given tests of affliction make you more deeply and lastingly happy is that they provide the circumstances, the occasions, the means by which God fits us to wear the crown of life — to have eternal life. Painful tests and patient endurance and provenness lead to life. If we really believe this is how God is fitting us for eternal life — for eternal joy — would we not say, “I am blessed”? These are reasons for me to be deeply and lastingly happy.

But here’s a key question for your real-life experience of this: What’s being tested by hardship? James mentions only one thing. He doesn’t mention faith (which would be my first thought). He doesn’t mention hope. What he mentions is love — love for God.

Blessed is the man who remains steadfast under trial, for when he has stood the test he will receive the crown of life, which God has promised to those who love him. (1:12)

Who gets the crown of life? Those who love God. So, those who are tested and endure and are proven as real get the crown, and those who love him get the crown. Surely those two ways of describing how we get the crown of life are not alternatives! Surely James is saying, “When you walk through the fire of testing, will you come out on the other side more deeply loving God, or not? If you do, you get the crown.” What’s being tested and refined and proven is love. Love for God. Valuing God. Enjoying God. Treasuring God. Being satisfied in God.

So, what is that? Do you love God? What are you feeling or willing or doing when you are loving God? Your eternity hangs on this. Here’s a picture of it in James 4:2–4:

You desire and do not have, so you murder. You covet and cannot obtain, so you fight and quarrel. You do not have, because you do not ask [God]. You ask [God] and do not receive, because you ask wrongly, to spend it on your passions. You [adulteresses]! Do you not know that friendship with the world is enmity with God?

The word really is “adulteresses,” not “adulterous people.” Why? Because the picture is of God as our husband and we as his bride — the church. And James presents us praying — going to our generous husband (God) and asking him if we can have some money to go hire a prostitute because he does not satisfy anymore. That’s the picture: “You ask and do not receive, because you ask wrongly, to spend it on your passions. You adulteresses!”

To love God means you find God to be so satisfying as your husband, shepherd, Father, King, Savior, treasure that you will not turn him into a cuckold and use his gifts to go get your satisfaction from another. That’s adultery.

“Take heart, suffering Christian. All your hardships are God’s tests.”

And the fires of affliction are designed by God to test and refine and prove the reality of that. Do you love God more than the spouse you just lost? Do you love him more than the health you just lost? Do you love God more than the life the doctor just said you will lose in six months? Suffering tests and refines and proves our love for God — that God is our supreme treasure, the deepest desire of our souls. And those who love God like this, verse 12 says, receive the crown of life.

Therefore, argument 1 that God’s painful tests lead to deep and lasting happiness (blessedness) is that God’s tests are designed to refine and prove our love for God, which in turn is how we inherit the crown of life.

Argument 2

Let no one say when he is tempted, “I am being tempted by God,” for God cannot be tempted with evil, and he himself tempts no one. But each person is tempted when he is lured and enticed by his own desire. Then desire when it has conceived gives birth to sin, and sin when it is fully grown brings forth death. (verses 13–15)

The main point of verses 13–15 is this: Nobody should ever say, “Those God-given tests of verse 12 are really God-given temptations designed to entice and drag us into sin and death.” And the reason we should never say it is because it’s not true. And verses 13–15 are the explanation for why it’s not true. So, the way verses 13–15 argue for the main point (tests are to make us deeply and lastingly happy) is to prove that those tests are not designed to entice us into sin and death.

What makes the connection between verse 12 (God is testing us) and verses 13–15 (God is not tempting us) difficult for the translators is that those two English words, testing and tempting, are the same word in Greek. So, all of us here at Bethlehem College & Seminary who are learning Greek have to decide where James stops talking about testing and starts talking about tempting (if he does), and what that connection means.

Here’s what I propose, and I’m not unique in this. In verse 13, I would translate it, “Let no one say when he is tested, ‘I am being tempted by God.’” And that’s how the two units relate to each other: I am being tested by God. Verse 12 says so. But I am not being tempted by God. And that’s what verses 13 and 15 explain and defend.

To make the argument work, everything hangs on the meaning of tempt. What does James mean by tempt in this text? Not, what do you mean by it? Or what do I mean by it? James has a very precise and limited definition for tempt in verses 13–15.

Verse 13b: “God cannot be tempted [apeirastos] with evil, and he himself tempts no one.” God can be tested (as he was sinfully tested over and over in the Old Testament, as Psalm 78:41 says). And God does test us. That’s the point of verse 12. So, James is drawing a firm line between testing and tempting in this text. God does test, but he does not tempt.

What’s the difference? Verse 14 gives James’s definition of tempt and temptation. “But each person is tempted when he is lured [literally dragged] and enticed by his own desire.” So, James is drawing a line through the progress of desire. On one side of that line, desire is moving toward an object without sin. When Jesus had fasted forty days in the wilderness, Matthew says he was hungry (Matthew 4:2). Hunger is a desire for food. After forty days, it would be a strong one. And as Jesus’s desire moves toward the object of bread, his desire approaches a line. And it doesn’t cross the line. On Jesus’s side of the line, his desire is holy and without sin.

And James is saying that the line is crossed when desire turns into being dragged and enticed by a sinful pleasure. For Jesus, that would have been doing what the devil wanted him to do. “Use your amazing power and satisfy your desire by abandoning the path of suffering and sacrifice” (see Matthew 4:3). None of Jesus’s desires ever crossed the line where they became sinful enticement.

This understanding of temptation (namely, being dragged away with sinful enticement) helps explain verse 13b, where James says, “God cannot be tempted with evil, and he himself tempts no one.” God is never dragged by or enticed by sinful allurements. He is never the victim of his own passions. This is the meaning of the doctrine of God’s impassibility — not that he has no emotions, but rather that they are never governed from outside his own sovereign will and self-sufficient fullness. God (and Jesus!) cannot be tempted in James’s sense because he is perfectly happy and self-sufficient. Nothing from outside him can create a controlling craving in him. He never says, “I’ve got to have that!” because he has everything in himself.

So, James infers from this that God doesn’t tempt anyone. James says in verse 14 that when anyone’s desire crosses the line from good desires to being sinfully enticed and dragged toward sinful acts, all that’s needed to explain this is our own desires.

God does not need to intrude into the dynamic of movement from good desire to sinful enticement. He doesn’t need to add anything from outside for our desires to cross from holy desires to sinful enticement. Our own desires make it happen. And we are responsible for those desires.

If we put this together with the absolute sovereignty of God over all things in James 4:15, what we conclude is this: God governs all things in such a way that he doesn’t need to reach in and drag us across the line from holy to unholy desires. Our desires in this fallen state are perfectly sufficient to bring about our entanglement in what James calls temptation.

And he completes his explanation in verse 15 by saying,

Then desire when it has conceived gives birth to sin, and sin when it is fully grown brings forth death.

So, we have the picture of conception in the womb, birth out of the womb, and a completed lifespan ending in death. The conception happens in verse 14 with the coming into being of sinful enticement — that’s the unborn baby. So, verse 15 describes desire that, having conceived (namely, back in verse 14 with the awakening of sinful enticement), now gives birth to this active child of sin. And that sinning child grows up, fills up his life with sins, and as a result dies — perishes.

And James’s point in all of verses 13–15 is this: When God tests you with suffering (verse 12), he is not tempting you. He’s not intruding himself into your desires with a design to bring about sin and death. He is aiming to deepen and refine your love and bring you to the crown of life, and so make you deeply and lastingly happy — blessed.

Argument 3

Do not be deceived, my beloved brothers. Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change. (verses 16–17)

Do not be deceived about what? I don’t see any reason to think he has changed his focus from what he’s been saying. So, I take this to be the same warning he gave in verse 13: “Let no one say when he is [tested], ‘I am being tempted by God.’” Don’t say that. It’s not true. It’s a deception. So, don’t be deceived into thinking God is the kind of God who is using tests as a way to get you to have sinful desires and then sin your way into death. That was the deception of verse 13.

So, here in verse 16 is the same warning: “Do not be deceived, my beloved brothers.” Yes, he sends many painful tests your way. But in doing that, he is not evil. He is not whimsical and unpredictable, with dark intentions. No. He is the source of every good gift. Every test that comes down on you comes from the Father of lights. Yes, all the lights of heaven — the sun and moon and stars — change continually. Brighter, less bright. Full moon, no moon. Bright sun, clouded sun. And shadows run with constant change all over the ground.

But it is not so with the Father of lights. He is the source of all light. And the source of light is always bright, always unchanging — inexhaustible in goodness and perfection. So, don’t be deceived. Your suffering is not sinister. Your testing is not temptation.

Argument 4

Of his own will he brought us forth by the word of truth, that we should be a kind of firstfruits of his creatures. (verse 18)

The most striking link with the preceding is the word “bring forth,” or “cause to be born.” He caused us to be born by the gospel, the word of truth. The only other place in the New Testament where this word “cause to be born” (apokyeō) occurs is in verse 15: “Sin when it is fully grown brings forth death” — “causes death” to be born.

It is utterly striking. Who talks about giving birth to death? Birth leads to life. But that is exactly what James is contrasting. Temptation — the crossing of the line by our desires into sinful enticement — gives birth to sin, which gives birth to death. But God is not like that. He does not tempt, and he does not send tests to give birth to death. He gives birth to life. And that life is the life of the new creation, which has begun with every new creature in Christ. The “firstfruits of his creatures.”

The Heart Behind Every Test

So, the main point of the text and the message is this: God’s tests are designed to lead us to deep and lasting happiness (our blessedness), not designed to tempt us into sin and lead us to death.

Argument 1 (verse 12): All God’s tests are designed to deepen our love for him, which leads to the crown of life.
Argument 2 (verses 13–15): It is totally wrong to say, “When he tests us, he is tempting us.” He can’t be tempted and tempts nobody with sinful enticements that lead to death.
Argument 3 (verses 16–17): To think otherwise is deception, because God is the source of all good and all light, not the source of sinful enticements that lead to death.
Argument 4 (verse 18): Yes, God causes birth, but it is not the birth of death by sin. It is the birth of life and new creation.

Therefore, take heart, suffering Christian. All your hardships are God’s tests. They do not come from a fickle heart, or a dark heart, or a tempting heart. They come from the Father of lights, the life-giver, the all-sufficient, untemptable one, whose whole design for you is your unshakable love for him and his crowning you with life — with blessedness, with the deepest and longest happiness.

Audio Transcript

Welcome back to the podcast. We’re on the topic of joy again — namely, is our joy commanded by God as an act of obedience? Or is our joy in God made authentic by being spontaneous? It’s a common question posed to Christian Hedonists and a great question asked by Emily today. “Dear Pastor John and Tony, thank you so much for this podcast! I have a question that comes from listening to two of your more recent episodes. In them you stated that joy is not a choice but a sovereign gift. To quote you, Pastor John: ‘Joy is a God-given, spontaneous experience of the beauty, worth, and greatness of God.’ Then in the next episode, you discussed that we are commanded to rejoice by Jesus, Peter, and Paul, implying we have some control over our rejoicing.” Those are from APJ 1983 and APJ 1984. “Pastor John, can you explain how this works, spontaneous joy and commanded joy?”

This is such an important issue because not only does it relate to joy, but it relates to all the behaviors and all the decisions and all the emotions of the Christian life. The paradox between an emotion being given by God and being commanded by God runs through the whole Bible.

And the reason it does — the reason it runs through the whole Bible — is because it’s at the heart of living a life that glorifies God by depending on God in doing what he commands us to do. When God commands us to do things, or believe things, or decide things, or feel things, he’s treating us as genuinely responsible moral persons in his image, unlike all the animals. He’s honoring us as the kind of beings in his image who can perceive things, and think about things, and evaluate things, and then feel and act in accord with how we think and evaluate.

But while he created us to be morally responsible persons, he did not create us to be independent from him and his enabling power. Because if we use our own native powers to analyze the world, think it through, make decisions, experience emotions, perform actions without relying on him, we’re going to get the glory, not him. He didn’t make the world for us to gain independent glory. That’s not why he created the world. He created the world for us to live in such a way that he gets the glory and we get the help. We get the joy; he gets the glory.

We Get Help, He Gets Glory

So, here’s the principle with a couple of texts. For example, 1 Peter 4:11: “Whoever speaks, [let him speak] as one who speaks oracles of God; whoever serves, [let him serve] as one who serves [now, this is key] by the strength that God supplies.” So, as we serve in obedience to what he commands, we rely upon strength that’s not our own. And then, why? He gives us the why: “. . . in order that in everything God may be glorified through Jesus Christ. To him belong glory and dominion forever and ever.” That’s an absolutely fundamental principle of living the Christian life. We get the help; he gets the glory. We obey commands by relying utterly on his gift.

“We get the help; God gets the glory. We obey commands by relying utterly on his gift.”

Another way to say it is that the Christian life is meant to be a life of “[walking] by the Spirit” (Galatians 5:16) or being “led by the Spirit” (Galatians 5:18). We fight against sin, Paul says, by putting to death the deeds of the body “by the Spirit” (Romans 8:13). All those phrases — “by the Spirit,” “by the Spirit,” “by the Spirit.” We do the action but, Father, you give the strength. We do it in reliance upon your power: “by the Spirit.”

So, the whole Christian life, not just the emotion of joy, is built on this paradox of moral responsibility to do what God tells us to do, and yet to do it in the strength that he supplies. So, it’s really a gift. It’s really a gift from him, even though our willpower is involved.

Command and Gift

Probably the most famous words outside the Bible to capture this paradox were spoken by St. Augustine. He prayed like this in Confessions book 10. “Give what you command, O Lord, and command what you will.”

Now, here are some of the concrete biblical illustrations of what he meant. Let’s just take belief in Jesus. Command: “Believe in the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved” (Acts 16:31). It’s a command. Gift: “It has been [given] to you that for the sake of Christ you should . . . believe in him” (Philippians 1:29).

Or take repentance. Command: “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand” (Matthew 3:2). Gift: “The Lord’s servant must not be quarrelsome but kind to everyone. . . . God may perhaps grant them repentance leading to a knowledge of the truth” (2 Timothy 2:24–25). It’s a command; it’s a gift.

Here’s another one — love. Love is a command: “A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another: just as I have loved you” (John 13:34). But it’s a gift: “the fruit of the Spirit is love” (Galatians 5:22).

So, Emily was exactly right to quote me as saying, on the one hand, “Joy is a God-given, spontaneous experience of the beauty, worth, and greatness of God” — that’s true; it’s a gift — but then saying, on the other hand, that we are commanded to rejoice by James and Peter and Jesus and Paul, implying that we have some control over our rejoicing (that is, control over the pursuit of it and obedience to that command).

For example, we’re commanded (returning now to the issue of joy), “Rejoice insofar as you share Christ’s sufferings” (1 Peter 4:13) — a command. “Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, rejoice” (Philippians 4:4) — a command. “Delight yourself in the Lord” (Psalm 37:4) — command. But on the other hand, joy is a gift: “The fruit of the Spirit is . . . joy” (Galatians 5:22). Or Romans 15:13: “May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing.”

Look and Pray

So, what do we do to live in this paradox of joy being a gift and a command? To make it as simple as I can, here’s what we do. We look — that’s the key word — at the reasons God has given us to rejoice; we look at them in the Bible. And second, we pray. Look and pray. Look and pray. Look and pray. We pray that God would open our eyes to see and feel the value of those reasons the way God intended them to be felt.

For example, Paul says, “We rejoice in hope of the glory of God” (Romans 5:2). So, we look at it, we look at the hope, we ponder it, we think about it, and then we pray, “O God, open my eyes to see the worth of the glory of your hope.” Or Jesus said, “Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven” (Matthew 5:12). So, we read about that, and we look, we ponder, we think, we meditate on the reward in heaven. And then we pray, “O God, open my eyes to the worth of the reward, so I feel what I ought to feel when I’m gazing at this amazing reward. Make me happy the way Jesus commanded me to be happy, because of how beautiful this reward is.” Or the psalmist says in Psalm 119:162, “I rejoice at your word like one who finds great spoil.” So, we read the word — we read it, we meditate on it, and we pray and pray and pray, “God, open our eyes, that we may behold wonderful things in your word” (see Psalm 119:18).

Now, if this is new to any of our listeners, this kind of paradox between living with commands and gifts like this, and you’d like to probe more deeply, I really simplified things by saying the key is looking and the key is praying. If you want to read a whole book about it, I wrote a whole book. It’s called When I Don’t Desire God, and you can read it for free at desiringGod.org. So, as paradoxical as it sounds, this is a glorious way to live. “Give what you command, and command what you will.”

Audio Transcript

We love to focus our attention here on the podcast on international missions. I know this is a high priority for you, Pastor John, which is evidenced in where you speak and invest your life. Everyone here at Desiring God has high respect for frontier missionaries laboring in the remotest parts of the world. So, how do global missions and the local church work together? That’s the question today. “Hello, Pastor John. My name is Jack, a seventeen-year-old high school student in the U.S. with a passion for world missions. My question is this: Given the recent decrease in long-term career missionaries, and recent increases in church support for short-term missions, who should the local church be partnering with today to promote biblical missions? In other words, what do you think is the best blueprint for biblical world missions in a local church today?”

I really want to speak to this question because I think God is doing something very unusual in our day with respect to frontier missions. And by frontier missions, I mean missionary efforts that attempt to get to places in peoples or language groups that don’t have any ordinary access to the gospel and don’t have any Christian churches that could build up such a movement of gospel spreading. Everywhere they look — everywhere the people in those groups look — they see unbelievers like themselves. And most likely, they’ll be born, they’ll live, they’ll die without ever knowing a Christian or hearing what God has done in Jesus to save sinners from destruction.

“God is doing something very unusual in our day with respect to frontier missions.”

It seems to me that God is awakening his people today in a fresh way to this unfinished mission Jesus gave us. It seems to me that, alongside historic mission agencies that have been doing great work for a long time — decades — God is raising up new conferences, new mission organizations, new online ministries, churches with the kind of biblical theology and ecclesiology and cultural strategies that are freshly empowering for advancing Christ’s global mission at the present time.

When I say biblical theology, I have in mind Reformed theology that puts a high premium on the sovereign grace of God in saving sinners who would never turn from their traditional religion to Christ apart from God’s work of unconditional, omnipotent regeneration. They must be born again. It’s a sovereign act of God. God is gloriously sufficient in his grace to save the hardest of sinners in another religion.

And when I say ecclesiology, I mean putting a high premium on planting healthy biblical churches among peoples of the world that can carry on the mission for decades, if needed, before Christ comes.

Five Assumptions for Missions

I’m going to mention a few of these newer works that I alluded to because I think that that’s what Jack is asking for. Where should we look for partnerships? But first, let me name some assumptions that I have in seeking to answer the question about long-term career missionaries compared to short-term missionaries. Five assumptions.

First, all human beings, apart from the saving grace of God in Christ, are under the just wrath of God and are perishing and will spend eternity in hell if they are not reached with the saving message of the gospel. That’s assumption one. It’s a massive assumption that gets minimized in so many kinds of churches and theologies that don’t like to talk about that truth.

Second, there is no other way for people to be rescued from the wrath of God than by the provision that he himself has made in sending his Son to bear the punishment of sinners and absorb the wrath of God and cover the guilt of the lost and free us for forgiveness and justification by faith alone in Jesus. There’s no other way for people to be saved than Jesus.

Third, therefore, they must hear the good news, and we must take it to them so that they can hear. We have news. I love this word news. It’s not first an ideology. It’s news — spectacular, breathtaking, glorious news about what God has done in his Son Jesus Christ in history to rescue sinners from all the peoples of the world. The task of missions is to take this news to all the unreached of the world — all the unreached peoples and languages of the world — whatever the cost. That’s number three.

Fourth, it is essential to the missionary task that biblical, worshiping, obedient, soul-winning, healthy churches be planted so that the ongoing Christian life can be lived out over the decades the way it’s described in the New Testament. And so, the work of evangelizing the local people group can be carried on even when the missionaries are not there anymore. Churches, that’s number four.

Fifth, translating the Bible into indigenous languages is crucial. If such churches — the ones that I just described — are going to flourish spiritually in the long run, we all know how precious and utterly crucial it is for growing in Christ that we immerse ourselves day by day in the Bible. That’s why the Bible is needed in the people’s heart language, wherever the mission goes.

Our Primary Task

Now, so much more could be said besides those five assumptions. But because of those alone, I would say short-term missions has a secondary place of value in recruiting, motivating, and supporting what is primary. But what is primary — the primary effort of the local church, the primary investment of our resources for missions, the primary challenge of the pulpit, the primary strategy for finishing the mission of Jesus — is to raise up, send, support, nurture, and hold the rope for career missionaries.

If churches are to be planted and the Bible is to be translated and an ongoing movement of evangelism is to be sustained, short-term missionaries are probably not the main means by which that’s going to happen.

Four Commendable Partners

So, Jack asks, “Who should we be partnering with?” Now, you’ve already heard where I’m coming from theologically, so that governs what I’m going to suggest here. And please understand that there are dozens of movements and agencies and ministries that are faithful and that can help you and your church become a launching pad for the kind of missionaries I’m talking about. But I would mention, I think, four particular agencies or groups that you should pay attention to.

“The task of missions is to take this news to all the unreached of the world, whatever the cost.”

First, Reaching & Teaching International Ministries is a sending agency that shares these convictions.

Second, Radius International. It’s not a sending agency but a remarkable training organization preparing the kind of missionaries I’m talking about.

Third, Radical, the ministry of David Platt, which waves the banner for the unreached of the world, and teaches and inspires and trains for the sake of sustainable, radical commitment to planting the church globally.

Fourth, two conferences: The Missionary Conference this fall in Jacksonville, on October 16–18, 2024. And the CROSS Conference, a missionary conference for 18- to 25-year-olds in Louisville, on January 2–4, 2025. I’m going to be at both of those conferences. And I would love to see you, Jack, and lots of others of you who are listening at those conferences.

God is up to something amazing in our day. It’s thrilling to be a part of it.

Audio Transcript

Happy Monday, and welcome back to the podcast with us. We appreciate that you listen along each week. On this Monday, Pastor John, I want to look at Psalm 111. There we find a great promise for life: “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom” (Psalm 111:10). I suspect this is a line that a lot of us know well — we know by heart, likely. A lot of listeners have memorized this verse over the years. Many of us have underlined or highlighted it in our Bibles, tweeted it or shared it online at some point. I’ve seen it on coffee mugs and wall hangings. “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.”

But there’s a Christian Hedonist spin to this text I hadn’t noticed until I saw something you said about it a few years back. You quoted the text and then you said, “As so often in Scripture, what happens in the heart governs what happens in the mind.” So here, fear in the heart leads to wisdom in the mind. We so often approach things the other way around: from our head into our heart, getting things from our head into our heart. Explain how this works in the other direction — how our hearts govern what happens in our minds.

When I say that the heart governs the mind, I don’t mean that when our minds are renewed by the Holy Spirit, they can’t exert good influence upon our heart. I don’t mean to exclude that. They do. Renewed thinking helps renewed feeling. That’s true. All through the Bible, right knowing has the purpose of producing right feeling as well as right acting. We know God in order to love God.

Ten times in 1 Corinthians, Paul says, “Do you not know?” (1 Corinthians 3:16; 5:6; 6:2, 3, 9, 15, 16, 19; 9:13, 24) — with the implication, “If you knew rightly, then you’d think differently, feel differently, act differently about what you’re about to do.” And in 1 Thessalonians 4:5, Paul says to not give yourself over to “the passion of lust like the Gentiles who do not know God,” implying that a right knowledge of God would have a subduing effect upon the passions of our heart. So, I’m not denying that God has given us renewed, Bible-formed reason as one way of shaping the emotions of our heart.

Power of the Heart

Where do I get the idea that it works the other way around as well — namely, that a heart whose desires go after evil will be blinded from seeing the truth about God in his ways and works, and a heart that desires to go after God and what is good will see the truth more easily? In other words, the condition of the heart and its desires have a huge effect on whether or not we will be able to see God and his ways and his works for what they really are.

Let me just give some Bible passages that point to this power of our hearts — our desires over our mind’s thoughts.

Darkened Love

In John 3:19, Jesus says, “This is the judgment: the light has come into the world, and people loved the darkness rather than the light.” They don’t come to the light. They reject the truth. They don’t embrace the truth with their minds. And the reason Jesus gives is not that they don’t have sufficient light or sufficient evidence or knowledge. The reason he gives is this: they love the darkness. Why don’t they see the light? Because they love the dark. It’s a love issue, right? It’s a heart issue. This is what I mean when I say the heart governs the mind. What the heart loves can blind the mind to the light, the truth.

Hardened Heart

Here’s the way Paul gets at the same thing. He describes the Gentiles who reject the gospel like this: “They are darkened in their understanding, alienated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them, due to their hardness of heart” (Ephesians 4:18). He moves toward the bottom of our problem, passing through four layers. Where does it end? What’s at the bottom of our problem, our darkness?

He says darkened, alienated, ignorant, hard. The bottom of our problem is not ignorance. There’s something beneath ignorance that brings about culpable ignorance and holds us in the dark prison of ignorance — namely, hardness of heart. That’s not primarily an intellectual problem; that’s a desire problem. Hardness of heart is stiff-necked resistance to God because we love our independence from God. We hate the idea of being under absolute authority. We love our autonomy, our self-sufficiency, our self-direction, our self-exaltation. We bristle with hardness, stiffness against any suggestion of absolute dependence on another, especially God.

Paul says that the effect of this hardness of heart is ignorance and alienation and darkness. But the root issue is not intellectual. It’s a love issue. It’s a desire issue.

Bent Will

Or consider this amazing word from Jesus in John 7:17: “If anyone’s will is to do God’s will, he will know whether the teaching is from God or whether I am speaking on my own authority.” This is one of the clearest statements in the Bible that right-willing precedes and enables right-knowing.

“Since proud hardness of heart is the root problem, God-given humility is the remedy.”

I remember hearing that for the first time in a chapel message at Wheaton College. I think it was 1966. I remember thinking, “That’s amazing.” I remember walking out thinking, “That’s amazing that my willing has to be changed in order for me to know the truth.” It’s not just the other way around. My whole mindset was that it’s the other way around. Knowing will change my will. “I’ve got to know. I’ve got to know.” Well, actually, no. Right-willing will enable right-knowing.

It was two years later, Tony — it was two years until my first year in seminary, where all the pieces fell together, and I realized we have to be born again. We have to have a new will, a new heart. Something has to happen to us to change us from the inside so that we can know things the way we ought to know them, which means God is sovereignly in control over rescuing me from my sinful heart, my bent will. I cannot will myself out of willing the wrong thing. It’s not going to work. My will is bent by nature. It’s called original sin. I love the wrong things, and I need God to intervene to change my will so that I can know God rightly.

Gift of Humility

So, the lesson is: apart from God’s Spirit, all of us have sinful hearts that are prone to take our minds captive and make them produce arguments that justify the sinful behaviors that we love. That’s the kind of control I’m talking about. We are all prone to self-justification — all of us. I really, really want to do something that’s sinful, so my desires exert a powerful influence on my mind to create arguments that show me it’s not sinful; it’s okay. That’s the way it works. That’s the way it’s working all through our culture today.

And since proud hardness of heart is the root problem, God-given humility is the remedy. Psalm 25:9 says, “He leads the humble in what is right, and teaches the humble his way.” So, we ask God to break our hardness and replace our pride with humility, and in that way make it possible for us to see God — to see his ways and his works for what they really are. When God changes our hearts, then our hearts serve the mind rather than blinding the mind.