We’re just two weeks from Christmas. Presents are still being purchased, wrapped, and shipped. Christmas cards still need to be signed and mailed. Loose ends on travel details are getting sorted. Family event-planning is getting finalized. Perhaps you’re multitasking right now and gift-wrapping while you listen. We all feel the holiday pressures, of course, Pastor John, as we gear up for one of the busiest holidays in the world — and one of the most expensive. The average American adult will drop about $1,000 just on gifts during this season, leading to a question of great relevance this month, like in this email from a podcast listener named James.

“Pastor John, hello, and thank you for the podcast. Often, I hear that we are to love God for who he is, not for what he does for us — to love the Giver more than the gifts. How can we know that we are doing this, especially during this Christmas season? When I examine my own heart, so much of what I know about God seems to be in relation to what he has done for me, like the sending of his Son in the incarnation. How do I interact with him on the basis of him, and not simply on the basis of the gifts he has given me?”

First, I think it is absolutely crucial in pursuing that interaction with God in that way to get really clear in our mind and in our heart that there is a huge and important difference between enjoying a person who gives gifts and enjoying the gifts instead of the person or more than the person. And I think we need to clarify this and get it fixed in our minds, both from experience and from Scripture. Let me give you an example of what I mean from experience.

Key 1: Loving the Giver of the Gift

What if you give an engagement ring? You’ve been in love for two years, maybe, and now you’re going to move this thing decisively forward. You give a ring. (I’m assuming you’re a man, but gals, you apply it in an appropriate way.) You give your fiancée a beautiful diamond ring, and she spends the rest of the night and then the following weeks bragging about this gift, taking it and showing it to everybody. She never calls you. She never looks at you. She never takes you by the hand and looks you in the eye. She’s just thrilled with this diamond, and your intent in giving her that was totally missed.

“The goal of all God does for us is to make it possible for us to be with him and him to be with us.”

How would you feel about that? You wanted her to look at it. Oh, yes, you wanted her to love it. You wanted her to be thankful for it. You wanted her to enjoy it. And then you wanted her to put it on her hand, take your hands across the table, look you in the eye, and say, “I would love to spend the rest of my life with you. You are ten thousand times more precious to me than this beautiful ring.” We understand from our own experience what it means when gifts are loved more than the giver. We get that. There’s no excuse for not getting that. We get it in our experience.

Then we get it from the Bible when it comes to God, because it’s all over the place:

1 Peter 3:18: “Christ also suffered once for sins, the righteous for the unrighteous, that he might bring us to God.” That’s why he died: to “bring us to God.”
Or Romans 5:11 — after saying that “we rejoice in hope of the glory of God” (Romans 5:2) and “we rejoice in [tribulation]” (Romans 5:3), then Paul adds this in Romans 5:11: “More than that, we also rejoice in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have now received reconciliation.”
Or Psalm 16:11: “You make known to me the path of life; in your presence there is fullness of joy; at your right hand are pleasures forevermore.”
Or Psalm 73:25–26: “Whom have I in heaven but you? And there is nothing on earth that I desire besides you. My flesh and my heart may fail, but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever.”
Or consider the story of the ten lepers healed by Jesus in Luke 17:11–37. Remember? All ten — no leprosy, awesome, healed, run away. One of them, a Samaritan, comes back praising God and falling down at Jesus’s feet. What’s the point? The point is that they missed it. They just missed it. This is about Jesus. This is about God. Leprosy deliverance was a means to that end.

So, we know from experience, we know from the Scriptures, that there’s a difference between enjoying a giver through his gifts and enjoying gifts instead of the giver. We know that. We get that. We know that the goal of all God does for us is designed to make it possible for us to be with him and him to be with us. He does everything for us to be with us as our all-satisfying treasure and Father and friend and Savior. Getting that clear is the key, I think, to experiencing God in and through all his gifts.

Key 2: Remembering the Gift of Jesus

Here’s one more key to help us experience God this way during the Christmas season. We should realize that every gift, every good thing that comes into our lives of any kind as a token of God’s everlasting kindness — all of it, all of it was bought by the sacrifice of Jesus, the blood of Jesus. Here’s the logic of Romans 8:32: “He who did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all, how will he not also with him graciously give us all things?” So, “all things” are coming to us as believers because he didn’t spare his Son. Here’s the effect this has: All giving and getting, especially at Christmastime, becomes a reminder of the death of Jesus.

Now, what effect does that have? What effect does God intend for his Son’s death to have on us when we think this way? On the one hand, Christ is the Father’s indescribable gift (Romans 8:32; 2 Corinthians 9:15). And Christ is his own gift. Over and over, the New Testament says Christ gave himself, Christ gave himself, Christ gave himself (Mark 10:45; Galatians 1:4; Galatians 2:20; Ephesians 5:2, 25; 1 Timothy 2:6; Titus 2:14).

Think of it! If God gives his Son, and the Son gives himself for you and to you, it doesn’t even make sense to say we love the gift more than the Giver. The gift is the Giver. The Giver is the gift. So, since every gift shared at Christmastime is possible only because of the death of Christ for us, and thus directs our attention to the death of Christ, therefore every gift takes us through the cross to the gift who is the Giver.

“All giving and getting, especially at Christmastime, becomes a reminder of the death of Jesus.”

Here’s the other way of seeing it. In Romans 5:8, Paul says, “God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” So, behind every gift that we get or give at Christmastime is the death of Christ. And that means that every gift is the overflow of the gift of God’s love, because that’s what he shows when Christ dies. When you think of God’s love, it is inseparable from himself. When John Piper talks about enjoying God, I don’t mean, “Oh, but you can’t enjoy his love.” In a sense, his love is not a gift. It is what he is. When real love binds two persons together, they don’t say, “Hey, where’s the gift?” They say, “You are the gift. You are the gift. You are my love. Your love is yourself given to me.”

So, it seems to me that Romans 8:32 is the key to Christmas God-centeredness in giving and getting gifts. Every good in our life as Christians is owing to the death of Jesus, according to the logic of Romans 8:32, and that death is the gift of God himself for our everlasting joy and the gift of God’s love, which is also the giving of himself to us.

There is no wrong time for world evangelization. And there is no wrong time for theological clarification. If you wait for the optimal time to become a missionary or to send a missionary, you won’t be one or send one. If you wait for the optimal time to get theological clarity about what the Bible really teaches, you won’t get it. There is no optimal time because sin, Satan, sickness, and sabotage have made certain that there is no optimal time to know or spread the truth. If knowing and spreading happen in your life, it will be because you looked sin, Satan, sickness, and sabotage in the face and said, “I’m going through you. In the name of Jesus, in the power of his Spirit, in the joy of the gospel, and for the glory of God, I’m going through you. And you will not stop me.”

I would like to motivate you — I pray that God will use me to motivate many of you — to give your life to world evangelization and theological clarification in the most inhospitable, unsuitable, uncongenial, forbidding times. If you wait for the ideal moment — personally, relationally, economically, globally — you won’t know what you ought to know, and you won’t go where you ought to go. There is only one kind of time for knowing and going, and it is always, at some level, inhospitable, unsuitable, uncongenial, forbidding.

So, the lesson that I want to draw out of the life of William Tyndale is that he carried out his theological clarification and his Bible translation in what most of us would consider impossible circumstances — the kind of circumstances that would surely justify putting theological study and Bible translation on hold while you just keep your nose above water. You just stay alive on the run.

Tyndale the Theologian

Tyndale’s incredibly productive twelve years (from the age of 30 to 42) working on theological clarification and Bible translation were spent in exile on the European continent. I’m including theological clarification because most people don’t know that Tyndale was a theologian — a theological Reformer — alongside his Bible translation. I have a three-volume set of Tyndale’s theological works, totaling over 1,200 pages. David Daniell wrote,

It is possible . . . to write about Tyndale as polemicist, as propagandist, as political reformer, as moralist, as theologian, as historian, as enemy of the institutions of the church: yet he first presents himself as a working translator of the Scriptures. It cannot be right to see him as being anything else more important than that. He translated two-thirds of the Bible so well that his translations endured until today, a labor so great that that list of secondary definitions must surely dwindle by comparison. (William Tyndale, 121)

Secondary, yes, but oh my — how significant those writings were in his own day. If Tyndale had never translated a page of the Bible, he would have been hunted down and killed by the Roman Catholic Church because of his writings in support of Luther’s teaching. Anthony Kenny wrote,

When he renounced the doctrine of transubstantiation, friars, noblemen, and bishops all turned against him, and the University which had sheltered him offered him a home no longer. (The Bible in English, 72–73)

Henry VIII was angry with Tyndale mainly for believing and promoting the theological clarification of Martin Luther’s Reformation teachings. In particular, he was angry because of Tyndale’s book Answer to Sir Thomas More, who had who helped Henry VIII write his repudiation of Luther called Defense of the Seven Sacraments. Thomas More was thoroughly Roman Catholic and radically anti-Reformation, anti-Luther, and anti-Tyndale. So, Tyndale had come under excoriating criticism by Thomas More. In fact, Daniell said Thomas Moore had a “near-rabid hatred” for Tyndale and published three long responses to him totaling nearly three-quarters of a million words. This was not mainly about Bible translation. This was about truth clarification. And remember, these are political leaders who at the snap of their fingers could kill Tyndale with impunity — if they could find him.

“There is no wrong time for world evangelization.”

This was all theological clarification — almost all of it written while he was in exile on the Continent, moving from place to place to avoid arrest. He had left England probably in April 1524 when he was 30 and never returned home till he was martyred at age 42 in 1536, just north of Brussels, after twelve years in exile and in hiding. The charge that sealed his execution was not Bible translation, though that might have sufficed, but heresy, not agreeing with the holy Roman Emperor — in a nutshell, following the teachings of Martin Luther.

Ministry on the Run

I don’t mean to downplay the achievement or the danger that Bible translation played in Tyndale’s life. It is almost incomprehensible to us how viciously opposed the Roman Catholic Church was to the translation of the Scriptures into English. In response to John Wycliffe’s work to put the Bible in English from the Latin, the Roman Catholic parliament passed the law de Haeretico Comburendo — “on the burning of heretics” — to make heresy punishable by burning people alive at the stake. The Bible translators were in view.

Then in 1408, the Constitutions of Oxford stated,

We therefore decree and ordain, that no man, hereafter, by his own authority translate any text of the Scripture into English or any other tongue . . . and that no man can read any such book . . . in part or in whole. (God’s Bestseller, xxii)

John Bale (1495–1563) “as a boy of 11 watched the burning of a young man in Norwich for possessing the Lord’s prayer in English. . . . John Foxe records . . . seven Lollards burned at Coventry in 1519 for teaching their children the Lord’s Prayer in English” (The Obedience of a Christian Man, 202).

Tyndale hoped to escape this condemnation by getting official authorization for his translation in 1524. But he found just the opposite and had to escape from London to the Continent for the rest of his life. He gives us some glimpse of those twelve years as a fugitive in Germany and the Netherlands (in one of the very few personal descriptions we have) in 1531. He refers to

. . . my pains . . . my poverty . . . my exile out of mine natural country, and bitter absence from my friends . . . my hunger, my thirst, my cold, the great danger wherewith I am everywhere encompassed, and finally . . . innumerable other hard and sharp fightings which I endure. (William Tyndale, 213)

All these sufferings came to a climax on May 21, 1535, in the midst of Tyndale’s great Old Testament translation labors, when he was betrayed in Antwerp by his supposed friend Henry Philips. He was taken to Vilvorde Castle six miles north of Brussels, where he stayed for eighteen months until his death.

No Hiatus from Holy Work

You might think that, imprisoned and waiting for your possible death, you would take a break from theological clarification and Bible translation and hope for a more optimal time, or think you’ve done enough. That didn’t happen. I think this letter is one of the most moving things I have ever read and captures what I mean by doing theological clarification and Bible translation in the most inhospitable circumstances. He wrote this to an unnamed officer of the castle. Here is a condensed version of Mozley’s translation of the Latin:

I beg your lordship, and that of the Lord Jesus, that if I am to remain here through the winter, you will request the commissary to have the kindness to send me, from the goods of mine which he has, a warmer cap; for I suffer greatly from cold in the head, and am afflicted by a perpetual catarrh, which is much increased in this cell; a warmer coat also, for this which I have is very thin; a piece of cloth too to patch my leggings. My overcoat is worn out; my shirts are also worn out. He has a woolen shirt, if he will be good enough to send it. I have also with him leggings of thicker cloth to put on above; he has also warmer night-caps. And I ask to be allowed to have a lamp in the evening; it is indeed wearisome sitting alone in the dark. But most of all I beg and beseech your clemency to be urgent with the commissary, that he will kindly permit me to have the Hebrew Bible, Hebrew grammar, and Hebrew dictionary, that I may pass the time in that study. In return may you obtain what you most desire, so only that it be for the salvation of your soul. But if any other decision has been taken concerning me, to be carried out before winter, I will be patient, abiding the will of God, to the glory of the grace of my Lord Jesus Christ: whose spirit (I pray) may ever direct your heart. Amen. W. Tindalus. (William Tyndale, 379)

So, the lesson I am taking away from Tyndale’s life is that his accomplishments in theological clarification and Bible translation are astonishing not only because of their faithfulness and excellence, but because they were achieved without waiting for the optimal moment. There wasn’t an optimal moment in his life.

Hindrances to World Evangelization

Let’s turn from Tyndale to the Bible and our own circumstances as we hear the call of world missions. Let Tyndale’s experience put fiber in your faith and stir you up not to wait for the optimal season of your life to be as engaged as God calls you to be in the task of theological clarification and Bible translation — or whatever dimension of world missions God calls you to.

Let me call your attention to some global crises that might make you think this is not an optimal time for doing world evangelization or Bible translation or even focused effort at theological clarification.

In the conflict between Russia and Ukraine, the killed and wounded are approaching one million people. Israel is now fighting wars on two fronts, with Hamas and Hezbollah, with Iran about to intervene. China, for the first time in decades, several weeks ago launched an intercontinental ballistic missile. Boko Haram in Burkina Faso recently killed 26 Christians as they worshiped — and a hundred others. Over half of Sudan’s 46 million people suffer from acute hunger because of civil war. Civil wars rage in Ethiopia, Yemen, Syria, Afghanistan, Central African Republic, Haiti, and at least ten other nations. One hundred million people in the world have been forcibly displaced from their homes, including forty million refugees, 40 percent of which are under eighteen. On the home front, in the United States since 2017 there have been half a million opioid-related deaths. And the moral degeneracy embraced by our highest leaders and aspiring leaders is appalling.

I focus on those big, global, nonoptimal circumstances for two reasons. One is to draw attention to the fact that if every one of those crises were to go away tonight, the real-life, close-to-home reasons for not throwing yourself into world missions would be just as great. You are one heartbeat away from death every moment, and you have no control over God’s decision about how long you live (James 4:15). The pain in your chest might be a heart attack in the making. The ache in your hip might be bone cancer. The phone ringing might be the death of your children or parents — or worse, their divorce. The note you’re about to open might be that your twenty-year-old daughter has decided she is not a Christian and finds better community with her LGBTQ friends. Or you look in the mirror and say, “You are not fit to even consider Christian service.” Most of the hindrances to devoting ourselves to the nudgings of God’s Spirit in world missions do not come from world events; they come from the nonoptimal circumstances of our personal lives.

Hostility in the End Times

But the other reason I focused my list on global crises is that they describe the world in which the Great Commission is going to be finished. God is not going to make an era toward the end of history when the nations will be hospitable to the reception of the gospel. Most of the unreached peoples in our day live in cultures that are hostile to the gospel. They are not waiting with open arms. But that is the world in which the mission will be finished. Jesus said,

You will be hated by all nations for my name’s sake. And then many will fall away and betray one another and hate one another. And many false prophets will arise and lead many astray. And because lawlessness will be increased, the love of many will grow cold. But the one who endures to the end will be saved. And this gospel of the kingdom will be proclaimed throughout the whole world as a testimony to all nations, and then the end will come. (Matthew 24:9–14)

Let this nonoptimal description of the world in which the gospel will reach the nations — leading up to the second coming of Christ — land on you with its proper force. Count them:

1. God’s emissaries will be hated by all nations.

2. Many Christians will fall away. They will deconvert, and we will call them nones — those who declare no religion.

3. Christians will betray one another and hate one another — and the strategy of Satan here is to cause other believers to say, “The faith is failing. It must not be real. If the Christians are betraying each other at home, what do I have to say to the world?” You need to know how the Bible describes the end if you are going to escape that temptation.

4. Many false prophets will arise and lead many astray — books, articles, podcasts, TikTok reels, and movies, giving voice to many false prophets. They will be causing people to think, “We’re not winning. We’re not winning.” Win what? The Christianization of the world? That’s not in the Bible — till Jesus comes! He will do it. And if you want to know how, read 2 Thessalonians 1.

5. Lawlessness is multiplied. The troops from Kenya in Haiti right now are outnumbered four hundred to fifteen thousand gang members. It is not hard to imagine urban centers in America being little Haitis. If you live there, will you stay true to your calling to the nations? Or will you say, “This is not an optimal time”?

6. The love of many will grow cold. You travel from church to church hoping to find warmth and zeal for world missions, but what you find is that love for the nations — indeed, for the Lord — has grown cold.

And when Jesus had spoken those six inhospitable circumstances for the completion of the Great Commission, the next words out of his mouth were, “And this gospel of the kingdom [this good news of the kingdom] will be proclaimed throughout the whole world as a testimony to all nations, and then the end will come” (Matthew 24:14).

He did not say that the gospel of the kingdom might be proclaimed throughout the whole world. He did not say there might be a testimony to all the nations. He did not say that this proclamation and testimony might usher in the end and the coming of Jesus. Matthew 24:14 is not the Great Commission. That comes four chapters later. This is the great promise, the great certainty, the great absolute.

“If you wait for the optimal time to get theological clarity about what the Bible really teaches, you won’t get it.”

The Great Commission is a test of our obedience (most explicitly). This is a test of our faith. Do we believe him? Do we believe that in spite of being hated by all nations, in spite of many Christians deconverting and falling away, in spite of Christians betraying one another and false prophets persuading millions, in spite of lawlessness being multiplied in cities and nations, and in spite of the spreading of Christian coldness, there will be churches and Christians and missionary senders and goers who are white-hot for Jesus, and who are torching the glacier that is spreading over the world, and who will finish the mission?

Sustained by the Gospel Proclaimed

They will be sustained by the very good news that they carry. That’s why William Tyndale was both a truth clarifier and a Bible translator. It was the reality of biblical truth — the gospel of the kingdom — that sustained him. You might think that, living in exile, driven from place to place, in danger of betrayal, working in nonoptimal circumstances, he would develop an austere demeanor and a burdensome view of the gospel. Here’s how he defined the gospel:

Evangelion (that we call the gospel) is a Greek word and signifieth good, merry, glad, and joyful tidings, that maketh a man’s heart glad and maketh him sing, dance, and leap for joy. (Selected Writings, 33)

That’s Tyndale writing in 1530 in exile at the age of 36. Tyndale was driven to put the Bible into the vernacular of every language because of the gospel. And yes, not just English, but every language. He wrote in the preface to his New Testament,

Christ wishes his mysteries to be published as widely as possible. . . . I wish that they might be read and known, not merely by the Scotch and the Irish, but even by the Turks and the Saracens. (William Tyndale, 67)

Without the Bible, there would be no pure, enduring gospel. And without the gospel, there is no escape from universal bondage of the will.

[No] creature can loose the bonds, save the blood of Christ only. . . . When the gospel is preached, [it] openeth our hearts and giveth us grace to believe, and putteth the spirit of Christ in us: and we know him as our Father most merciful, and consent to the law and love it. (Selected Writings, 37, 40)

William Tyndale was sustained in a life of theological clarification and Bible translation through unremitting, nonoptimal, inhospitable, forbidding circumstances, because he was thrilled by the power of the gospel to set people free from condemnation and make them glad in God. He lived on it and would say with the apostle, “In all our affliction, I am overflowing with joy” (2 Corinthians 7:4).

So, I close where I began. If you wait for the optimal time to become a missionary, you won’t be one. If you wait for the optimal time to get theological clarity about what the Bible really teaches, you won’t get it. There is no optimal time for either. Circumstances will almost always say, “Not now.” And faith will say, “I’m going through you. In the name of Jesus, in the power of his Spirit, in the joy of the gospel, and for the glory of God, I’m going through you. And you will not stop me.”

Audio Transcript

If you’ve listened to the Ask Pastor John podcast for more than a few weeks, you know that we regularly explore life’s deepest sadnesses and most painful losses. This is a fitting place to hear Pastor John address hard situations, and those hard situations include couples who are unable to bear children of their own. On infertility, we have looked at amazing Bible texts with amazing promises, like Isaiah 56:4–5. That comes to mind. And you can see how important Isaiah 56:4–5 is pastorally, in the APJ book, on page 193. There, you’ll see that this same incredible promise can be applied to two sadnesses: infertility and lifelong singleness. It’s one of those essential texts you want in hand, when the time is right, in ministering to others — Isaiah 56:4–5.

Lifelong singleness is the topic again today in an email from a woman, a listener, who writes in anonymously. “Hello, Pastor John. I am 43 and a faithful Christian — have been all my life — but I have never been married. I’ve been visiting many congregations in my community and have yet to find a suitable mate. I am haunted by the story of Jephthah and his daughter at the end of Judges 11:34–40. I know the point of that story is to teach us not to make rash vows, especially to God. But when I see how his daughter wanted to spend the last two months of her life mourning that she will never be a wife or a mother, it terrifies me. It shows me that if I don’t get married, I am missing out.

“That fear is compounded when I consider Jesus’s words from Matthew 22:30. I know some teachers, including you, who use this verse to give hope for single people. But I don’t see what is hopeful about it. I resonate with Jephthah’s daughter. If people are ‘neither [married] nor are given in marriage’ in the resurrection, that means if one doesn’t get married in this life, they will never know the joys of marriage! They won’t know what it’s like to touch or be touched by someone of the opposite gender. They won’t know what it’s like to hold their own child in their arms. These blessings that such a single person may have wished for their entire lives will be unrealized for all eternity!

“Even if whatever God has in store for us is better, won’t they still wonder what they missed — what it seems everyone, Christian and non-Christian alike, seemed to enjoy? My question is, if I die unmarried, yet remained faithful to Christ and have kept myself pure, will I have the same grief in my heart that Jephthah’s daughter dealt with in those last two months of her life for everything that I will never experience as well?”

Before I saw this question yesterday and had time to think about it, I was sitting in my chair over my Bible, pondering how pervasive and inevitable deep disappointments are that will never be turned around in this life.

World of Sorrows

I thought of people who are blind, perhaps from birth. They will never see the sun or moon or the beauties of a flower or the face of a friend. All will be dark until death. That will be their life on earth. I thought of people who are deaf and live in total silence all their lives — no music, no voices from a family or friend, no sweet robin’s song, no blasting thunder. I thought of people who are paralyzed because they were born that way or had an accident and perhaps can’t feel anything below their neck — paraplegics, maybe, who can’t run or walk or play pickleball, all the way to the end of their life. It never changes — all of life paralyzed. That was what they were dealt.

I thought of people who grow up in very poor, desperate conditions where they never learned to read — no Shakespeare, no Milton, no Herbert, no novels, no poems, not even a note or a letter from a friend — confined to a small world of limited experience. No reading. I thought of people who are miserable in marriages. All their hopes for what marriage was supposed to be have crashed. The romance has gone. There’s no mutual affection shown anymore — both partners in frustration and disappointment that the other doesn’t meet their emotional needs. The children are broken. All the dreams seem dashed all the way to the end. “For better or worse” — and it turned out to be worse.

I thought of refugees and people whose entire lives are decimated by war. I see the pictures today, people who as a class are hated, driven from one place to the next with scarcely any peace, any security, any comforts at all. And then there are the countless diseases, sicknesses, disabilities that people live with and die with and never experience healing or freedom from debilitating suffering.

“As we find our richest contentment in God, this life of singleness or marriage need not be wasted but full of joy.”

Now, I mention these realities in this world not to minimize this woman’s sorrows at not being married or having children. Her longings are good and right. Human beings were designed by God to be married, to be hugged in a one-flesh union, to have sexual relations that bring forth exquisite pleasures and then the cutest little persons. We were made to be cherished and respected in a lifelong union of man and woman in marriage that is deeply right, deeply human, deeply good, deeply gracious of God, and not to have it can be profoundly disappointing and painful, and I feel no need to minimize that.

Living with Realistic Hope

I mention these things because we really do need to have a biblical, realistic assessment of the possibilities of this fallen age, which is ruined by sin. And by ruined, I mean virtually everything that was designed by God for human pleasure is corrupted and, in greater or lesser ways, wrecked. Here’s Paul’s most penetrating description of our world. He said,

The creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of him who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to corruption and obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God. For we know that the whole creation has been groaning together in the pains of childbirth until now. And not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies.

That’s Romans 8:20–23 — subjected to futility, bondage to corruption, groaning as Spirit-filled Christians, waiting for our bodies to be redeemed from their present wasting away and dying condition. What an amazing, painful, realistic, worldly-hope-dashing assessment of the world. History is a conveyor belt of diseased, broken, frustrated, disappointed, dying, gloriously human persons and bodies. We in the West have so many suffering-ameliorating amenities that we can scarcely begin to imagine how hopeless this life feels to billions of people who don’t have a fraction of our comforts.

Looking to Our Reward

This is why the New Testament — unlike the Old Testament, including the experience of Jephthah’s daughter — is so relentlessly focused on the hope of eternal life: spectacular hope, incredible inheritance, lavish happiness being swallowed up by life at the resurrection, where the Lamb will bring us to springs of living water, and “[God] will wipe away every tear from [our] eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away” (Revelation 21:4). Over and over again, the New Testament presents the Christian life as shot through with sorrow and pain and disappointment and affliction and rejection and persecution — all of it sustained with gladness by rejoicing in the “hope of the glory of God” (Romans 5:1–2).

Apart from Jesus, nobody in the New Testament suffered nearly as much as Paul did, and yet he embraced it, even his singleness, as part of his calling, even though he had a right to have more pleasures than he got. Listen to what he says:

Do we not have the right to eat and drink? Do we not have the right to take along a believing wife, as do the other apostles and the brothers of the Lord and Cephas? Or is it only Barnabas and I who have no right to refrain from working for a living? . . . But I have made no use of any of these rights. (1 Corinthians 9:4–6, 15)

The flag flying over Paul’s life of self-denial and sorrow was 2 Corinthians 6:10: “Sorrowful, yet always rejoicing.”

Sorrow Will Flee

I’m not asking our 43-year-old single friend not to be sorrowful. I’m not. If our arm is cut off, we are sorrowful. If we are not granted a legitimate lifelong desire to be one flesh with a person of the opposite sex, we are sorrowful. But we do not feel singled out. We do not feel picked on. We do not feel mistreated by God. And we do not feel hopeless, as if in the resurrection we will walk the barren hills with Jephthah’s daughter and bewail our virginity. No, we will not wail on any hill in the age to come. These are hand-clapping, dancing hills and will satisfy our deepest lungs.

Whatever we have sacrificed in this world “is [working] for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison [because] 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 4:17–18). And in the meantime, as we go deeper and deeper with God, finding our richest contentment in him, this life of singleness or marriage need not be wasted or meaningless but full of meaningful fruitfulness and joy as we pour ourselves out for the present and eternal good of others.

My charge to you, Brian Tabb, as the third president of Bethlehem College and Seminary, may be spoken in a rhyming couplet with iambic tetrameter. It goes like this:

Hold fast the word, unchanged and true;Let insight, joy, and song be new.

Hold Fast the Word

Hold fast the word, unchanged and true. Be like those who received the word in good soil: “Hold it fast in an honest and good heart, and bear fruit with patience” (Luke 8:15).

Hold fast the word, unchanged and true. Be a firm and steadfast lover of the gospel: “I would remind you, brothers, of the gospel I preached to you, which you received, in which you stand, and by which you are being saved, if you hold fast to the word” (1 Corinthians 15:1–2).

Hold fast the word, unchanged and true. Be a guardian of the apostolic traditions: “Stand firm and hold fast to the traditions that you were taught by us, either by our spoken word or by our letter” (2 Thessalonians 2:15).

Hold fast the word, unchanged and true. Be dogged in holding our confession: “Since we have a great high priest who has passed through the heavens, Jesus, the Son of God, let us hold fast our confession” (Hebrews 4:14).

Hold fast the word, unchanged and true. And be obedient to the risen Jesus when he says in Revelation 2:25, “Only hold fast what you have until I come.”

Hold fast the word, unchanged and true. You are our leader, our pacesetter, our example, our ethos builder, our inspiration, and our truth protector. Hold fast to the inerrant word, for “the words of the Lord are pure words, like silver refined in a furnace on the ground, purified seven times” (Psalm 12:6). And Scripture cannot be broken (John 10:35). “More to be desired are they than gold, even much fine gold; sweeter also than honey and drippings of the honeycomb” (Psalm 19:10). Hold fast to the inerrant word.

Hold fast to Reformed soteriology — that is, the unchanged truth that our great salvation is a decisive work of God, start to finish. He chose, he predestined, he died, he rose, he bore our sin, he took condemnation, he calls, he causes new birth, he gives saving faith, he forgives, he adopts, he guards and sustains and keeps, he sanctifies, he perfects and brings us to God where there is fullness of joy and pleasures forevermore. And whatever contributions we make in the obedience of faith, it is not we but the grace of God working in us what is pleasing in his sight, so that our salvation — from eternity to eternity, from start to finish — redounds to the glory of his sovereign grace. Hold fast to the infinitely precious Reformed, biblical soteriology.

“Hold fast the word, unchanged and true; let insight, joy, and song be new.”

Hold fast to the fullest glorification of God through the joy of God’s people in God. Hold fast to Christian Hedonism — by whatever name. Hold fast to the serious joy that God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in him — or as Paul expressed it: “I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, in order that the power of Christ may rest upon me” (2 Corinthians 12:9). Hold fast to the truth that gladness in Christ in weakness magnifies the glory of Christ.

Hold fast to the beauty of biblical manhood and womanhood as God created them and orders them in complementary relationships. Hold fast to marriage as a lifelong covenant union between a man and a woman, with the man taking his cues from Christ as the head of his wife, and the woman taking her cues from the faithful, submissive, loved body of Christ, the church. Hold fast to the burden that men must bear as those responsible for the pastoral leadership of the church. Hold fast to the truth that God has spoken in Scripture and in nature that men are men all the way down and women are women all the way down, and this is a godly, glad, and glorious thing.

Hold fast to them all, Brian Tabb — all the precious realities of our Affirmation of Faith.

Hold fast the word, unchanged and true.

Let Song Be New

And in all your steady, solid, stable, unflinching, unchanging holding fast to what is true, let insight, joy, and song be new.

Oh sing to the Lord a new song; sing to the Lord, all the earth! Sing to the Lord, bless his name; tell of his salvation from day to day. Declare his glory among the nations, his marvelous works among all the peoples! For great is the Lord, and greatly [freshly, newly!] to be praised. (Psalm 96:1–4)

When the psalmist said, “Sing to the Lord a new song,” he did not mean, “Write a new Bible, find some new doctrine, bow to a new Lord, bless a new name, tell of a different salvation, praise a novel glory, or be amazed at a greatness that never existed before.” That’s not what he meant.

He meant, “Hold fast the word, unchanged and true, but by all means, let insight, joy, and song be new.”

You have a great faculty in the school. And they have amazingly gifted eyes to seek and find treasures in the Bible — “the word, unchanged and true.” The word of God — and the world of God — is like an ocean of insight without bottom and without shore. Inspire these teachers. Challenge them, equip them, and pay them to see what is really there — insights they may never have seen before — so that they may train the students to do the same. “Every scribe [and these are worthy scribes] who has been trained for the kingdom of heaven is like a master of a house, who brings out of his treasure [his bottomless ocean] what is new and what is old” (Matthew 13:52). Old truth, new insight.

Let insight, joy, and song be new. Let joy be new. “Weeping may tarry for the night, but joy comes with the morning” (Psalm 30:5). Yes, there is a serious joy that endures through the night of weeping: “Sorrowful, yet always rejoicing” (2 Corinthians 6:10). But dawn is not darkness. Dancing is not weeping. Birth is not death. And the joy of the bridegroom coming out of his chamber at sunrise is not the same joy as the joy of the old man thankful for sixty years of marriage, standing by his wife’s grave. They’re all different. Every joy is different. The mercies are new every morning; the joys are new every morning — and every night.

Brian, know this, savor this, live this, and pray this until education in serious joy in this school is new every morning.

Let insight, joy, and song be new. If our president, our faculty, and our students are finding new insights in the ocean of God’s unchanging truth, and if we are tasting new joys every morning, we will sing new songs. And we will sing old songs like we’ve never sung them before.

So, I wrote a new song for you, Brian, which I would like our congregation to sing over you. (It’s to the tune of “All People That on Earth Do Dwell.”)

God’s Truth stands like his holy Name,     No origin, nor e’er became,Eternal, absolute, the same,     Forever one in sum and aim.

Yet oh how new and fresh the taste!     Linger with him and make no haste.Through every line the sweet is traced;     May we forever so be graced.

Come every scholar, poet too;     Keep ancient truth and bliss in view.Hold fast the word, unchanged and true;     Let insight, joy, and song be new.

Amen.

Audio Transcript

I’ll be the first to admit that it’s a little niche for us to speak to writers. Most subscribers to this podcast are not writers. I know that. But because of Pastor John’s prolific writing ministry, we get a lot of great questions from writers — and really from all types of Christian creatives. Writing is near and dear to us both, Pastor John — so much so that if you have the APJ book, you’ve likely seen that little section I pulled together “On Writing, Grammar, and Poetry” on pages 411–416. We don’t revisit these themes often, but we do today with this question from an aspiring author, an anonymous girl.

“Hello, Pastor John! I’m seventeen. I just recently discovered this podcast and quickly became a huge fan. I have already listened to all your episodes on hobbies and entertainment, but I would like to ask something of a little more specific nature. I absolutely love literature and writing, but I like to write things that have twists and turns and that are sometimes a little creepy. Is it okay for Christians to write — or read or watch — things like thrillers and murder mysteries, which have some violent or scary elements in them, as long as those elements are not sadistic, sexual, or gratuitous? Or does this violate passages like Philippians 4:8? Sometimes I feel like dark elements serve an important purpose in fiction, because they open the door for great moral and biblical solutions, but I am not sure. I would love your opinion on this matter. Thank you.”

Let me put on my lit-major hat for a few minutes. I don’t usually do this, but I have good memories — a lit major who has spent 55 years almost entirely immersed in the word of God, the Bible, which is a form (from one vantage point) of literature. But from another vantage point, I have found that almost everyone who tries to treat the Bible as literature winds up minimizing the Bible as the authoritative, infallible revelation of the Creator of the universe. The fact that it is both literature and revelation parallels the mystery of the incarnation, doesn’t it? Jesus Christ is both man (which corresponds to literature) and God (which corresponds to revelation). He could not be our Savior if he were not both.

Just so you know, I have not lost the bug. I continue to read and enjoy fiction, and I have written, I suppose, hundreds and hundreds of poems over those 55 years since I was a lit major. I still delight in a picturesque simile like Proverbs 11:22: “Like a gold ring in a pig’s snout is a beautiful woman without discretion.” That’s great. That’s just great. Jesus painted impossibly provocative pictures: “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of God” (Matthew 19:24). That’s good. That’s really good. I still love the cadences of Psalm 1:1: “Blessed is the man who walks not in the counsel of the wicked, nor stands in the way of sinners, nor sits in the seat of scoffers.” That’s good.

But the glorious divine logic and reality of Romans 8:32 exceeds the pleasures of these things a thousandfold: “He who did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all, how will he not also with him graciously give us all things?” The glory of that reality cannot seriously be compared to the pleasures of literary style. Both are good; one is glorious.

We Know Darkness

So, here’s the question I have lived with for decades that relates to this young aspiring writer of dark literature. Here’s the question: Why is it that almost all writers of fiction and perhaps even nonfiction find it easier to write seriously and compellingly about the dark than about the light? Why is it that most writers can produce something credible, authentic, moving, compelling about pain and fear but cannot write with the same compelling credibility and seriousness about joy?

You can see this, for example, symptomatically in television ads. If the writers want to portray some deeper emotion — say, of a family in sorrow — they can generally write something and show something that actually has the feel of authenticity about it. But when they turn to show happiness, the default is silliness. It’s just incredible — a big, wide, toothy grin everywhere, and people falling all over the couch and guffawing, and grown people acting like clowns. You get the impression that these writers are out of their element. They don’t know what to do with happiness. They’re stuck at about age ten.

“To be a good writer about the light requires a long and deep walk with God in the midst of human suffering.”

Now, my tentative explanation for this — why it’s easier to portray with authenticity the human experience of fear and sorrow than it is to portray the human experience of happiness with the same authenticity and depth — is that, for most people, the human experience of serious fear is far more common than the human experience of serious joy. Most people have categories for the stark terror of being charged by a grizzly bear or the panic of being surrounded by a mob or the sinking feeling in the stomach of a window being broken in the middle of the night or the heart-crushing grief at losing a loved one. We know these things. We’ve tasted these things deeply.

But we don’t have similar experiences or categories of serious, humble, invincible joy in the face of pain and death. Serious fear and sorrow is common. Serious joy is not. It seems to me that very often, that kind of joy is replaced with the closest many writers can get to it — namely, a kind of stoic swagger in the face of danger. Which shows that the hero or heroine is coolly above it all, which is the very opposite of the humble, serious, invincible joy I’m talking about, which is so rare and, therefore, so difficult to write about.

Writing with Serious Joy

Now, my guess at an explanation for why writing authentically about the dark is easier than writing authentically about the light is this: To be a good writer about the dark requires some literary gift mingled with the experience of darkness and fear and brokenness and sorrow that’s common in this world. But to be a good writer about the light requires more than ordinary human experience of the dark or light. It requires a long and deep walk with God in the midst of human suffering.

The kind of serious joy I’m talking about is especially at home in the heart of a Christian, a Bible-saturated Christian. Those outside the Christian worldview have tasted this because of common grace, but it is the peculiar purview of biblical revelation to understand from the inside out what serious joy in the face of suffering is really like — unless, of course, Christians have been forced into the mold of just being like the world, which happens by the thousands.

So, my short answer to our young writer is this: Of course one can write with biblical faithfulness about the dark because the dark is real. In fact, the only people who know how real and how terrible it is are people who know their Bible. Without biblical categories, the efforts of the world to portray the dark fall far short of reality, no matter how terrible they make it look. But to write faithfully about the dark requires a deep awareness that “God is light, and in him is no darkness at all” (1 John 1:5). It requires a deep awareness that God is sovereign over the darkness. Creepy is interesting but not necessarily insightful. Darkness will be defeated in the end.

But if you are going to write about the dark in a seriously joyful way that avoids naivete and melodrama, it may take decades of walking through deep waters with Christ. Don’t give up. You may prove to be one of those very rare writers who knows enough about God, knows enough about suffering, has lived enough life and sorrow and serious joy that you could actually write with authenticity about the light even better than about the dark.