Sometimes, as you watch the hand of God’s providence draw some picture in your life, the pencil suddenly turns, and what you thought would be a flower turns into a thorn. The unanswered prayer seemed finally heard, the hope deferred seemed at last fulfilled — but no. You reach for the daisy and get pricked, instead, by a thistle.

C.S. Lewis’s marriage to Joy Davidman strikes me in this regard. The couple married later in life, when Joy appeared to be dying of cancer. After a prayer for healing, however, Joy recovered unexpectedly and perhaps miraculously. The love they thought they were losing came back to them, a precious gift, it seemed, from the hand of a healing God.

But soon, the cancer returned with a fury, ending their brief marriage. In the rawness of his grief, Lewis wrote, “A noble hunger, long unsatisfied, met at last its proper food, and almost instantly the food was snatched away” (A Grief Observed, 17–18). Experiences like these can shake the soul. More than a few have lost faith over them. For many others, such moments become a doorway to a darker world, where God seems less good than we once thought. Perhaps, in our more desperate moments, we can even think him cruel.

Many who enter that world never find their way back. They walk under deepening shadows of disillusionment, far from the broad fields and bright sun of their former childlike faith. Some, however, do find their way back. We meet such a soul in Psalm 73.

Darkened Days

Much of Psalm 73 takes place in the dark world. Asaph, the psalmist, finds himself disillusioned with the spiritual life. He sees God-haters prancing over the earth — wealthy, comfortable, fat. No matter that they strut through Jerusalem like gods and defy the very heavens (Psalm 73:3–11). “Always at ease, they increase in riches” (Psalm 73:12).

Meanwhile, the godly Asaph suffers unseen and unrewarded. For his obedience, he gets affliction; for his devotion, rebuke (Psalm 73:14). Eventually, he looks round at his prayers, his songs, his years of faithfulness, and with a sweeping hand says, “All in vain” (Psalm 73:13). His hopes dead, he enters the shadow world.

When our own hopes are deferred (again), we can easily justify our bitterness and spiritual apathy. Without much effort, we can cast ourselves as innocent sufferers under the heavy hand of God’s providence, our frustration toward heaven understandable. Asaph, however, looking back at himself from the other side of the doorway, sees something different: “I was like a beast toward you” (Psalm 73:22).

For those who have returned from the dark world, Asaph’s words will not seem too blunt. I, for one, can still remember the soul gnawings and heart snarlings of my once-jaded soul. Our grief in painful providences can quickly turn jagged, and our laments become a growl, whether silent or spoken. Bitterness can make the soul turn beastly — and beastly it will remain until (to use some imagery from Lewis’s Voyage of the Dawn Treader) God undragons us.

Undragoned

By psalm’s end, Asaph has walked back to the bright world, where he once again sings like a hope-filled child:

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. (Psalm 73:25–26)

Asaph reemerges in a world where God is good once again, where heaven and earth have nothing greater to give than him. Let affliction slay him, let rebukes strike him, let every hope remain deferred — God will be the strength of his heart and his abundant portion. The beast has become a man.

The undragoning happened, in part, as Asaph “went into the sanctuary of God” and “discerned [the] end” of “those who are far from you” (Psalm 73:17, 27). But he also discerned something better: “Nevertheless, I am continually with you” (Psalm 73:23). Here is the answer to his animal-like agitation, an answer so simple we may miss its power to tame. Consider, then, how Asaph unfolds the answer in three images, and how they might meet us in our own beastliness.

‘You hold my right hand.’

The real danger of a world gone dark is not the pain we feel there, nor even the perplexing dissonance those feelings bring, but the sense of God’s absence. The first half of Psalm 73 is a world without God — at least without a God who is near and good. But by verse 15, Asaph’s more or less godless ruminations give way to “you,” the God who “[holds] my right hand” (Psalm 73:23). In walking back through the doorway of disillusionment, he has entered his Father’s house.

Can you remember the sense of desolation when, as a child, you lost sight of your father in a sea of people? And can you recall the warm relief — almost worth crying over — when his familiar hand found yours? Something similar happens when, in the quiet of your own bedroom, or car, or backyard, your swirling thoughts calm, your embittered soul breathes, and you find grace to slowly say to God, “Nevertheless, I am continually with you; you hold my right hand.”

Nothing has changed in your circumstances; your troubles may still pain and perplex you. But somehow, your stumbling feet find their footing. Your afflictions fall into a broader perspective. Your bitterness shakes off like so many scales. And under the hand of God, your heart becomes undragoned.

‘You guide me with your counsel.’

We are not left alone in this world, however perplexed we feel. Nor are we left directionless. We have not only a God, but a guide; not only a Presence, but a path. He grips our hand to assure us of his nearness, and also to lead us home through this bewildering wilderness. “You guide me with your counsel” (Psalm 73:24).

The “counsel” of God, his written Scriptures, do not tell us all we would like to know — not by far. We don’t know why a seemingly miraculous recovery should dissolve into death. We don’t know why a relationship on the brink of restoration should crumble. We don’t know why the heart of a loved one, so close to repentance, should suddenly harden. But reaching home does not depend on knowing the mysteries God has hidden but on receiving the counsel he has revealed.

And he does not guide us as one who has never walked the path himself. Gethsemane pressed and perplexed our Lord Jesus to the point of sweating blood and praying for an exit. No one was faced with a more bitter providence; no one had more reason to grow bitter and forsake God’s counsel. Yet no one’s life showed more brilliantly that following God’s counsel will never put us to shame. For the dark tomb is now empty.

We are children here, and the why of our Father’s will often eludes us. But his counsel does not. So while the beastly follow their own instincts, God’s children say, “I will follow your counsel as long as night lasts — and even if the dawn never breaks in this life.”

‘Afterward you will receive me to glory.’

The day is coming when the holding hand will become a beholding face, and the winding path a stable home. There is an afterward to the unanswered questions and open loops of this life. And in that afterward, “you will receive me to glory” (Psalm 73:24).

Knowing the afterward changed everything for Asaph. He no longer envied the prosperous wicked when he “discerned their end” (Psalm 73:17) — and he no longer pitied himself when he discerned his. Affliction may tarry for the night, but glory comes in the morning. So too with us. If we know that we are headed to the bright world, where no more questions gnaw and no more tears run down our cheeks (Revelation 21:4), then the sharpest edge of our suffering is blunted.

In the present, we often have need to say with Paul, “We are . . . perplexed” (2 Corinthians 4:8). But in the coming afterward, the spiritual dissonance of this age will resolve into a harmony beyond imagination, as the hand that held us and led us all life long receives us into the door of his home, beyond all doubt and danger.

End of Darkened Roads

At one point in Lewis’s grief, he asks whether he has been treating God as his goal or as his road. Has he walked along every good gift like a path leading to God, or has he tried to walk along God as a path leading to some other place? Lewis goes on to say, “He can’t be used as a road. If you are approaching him not as the goal but as a road, not as the end but as a means, you’re not really approaching him at all” (A Grief Observed, 68).

Often, our own undragoning happens when we, like Asaph, freshly embrace God as goal, not road — or perhaps better, as both goal and road. Our great need is not to unravel the apparent knots in God’s providence, as if mere answers could tame the beast within. What we need, now and forever, is a hand upon the mane, a whispered presence to calm us. For God himself is both way and end, path and home, presence here and portion forever.

Colorado’s Rocky Mountain Range is home to 58 peaks that reach 14,000 feet above sea level. “Fourteeners,” they’re called. Fifty-seven of those 58 peaks are accessible only by a long and sometimes grueling hike — Long’s Peak, for example, runs 14.5 miles round trip and rises 5,100 feet from trailhead to summit. One of these mountains, however, called Pikes Peak, has a parking lot at the top.

Having topped both Long’s and Pike’s — the one through a desperate, why-did-I-agree-to-this trek, and the other through a comfy car ride (with doughnuts at the top, if memory serves) — I will confirm what you can probably guess: there is a difference between walking to 14,000 feet and driving there.

The view may be the same, with those Rockies running like a river of mountains across the West. But the experience of the view is not. The 14.5 miles and 5,100 feet, it turns out, are not impediments to the beauty, but part of the beauty. You can’t separate the summit from the path, or the final footsteps from the 30,000 that precede them. The difficulty of the way increases the wonder.

A similar principle applies to the spiritual life, including Bible reading.

‘Restless Experientialists’

Many Bible readers can see ourselves in J.I. Packer’s description of “restless experientialists”:

[They value] strong feelings above deep thoughts. They have little taste for solid study, humble self-examination, disciplined meditation, and unspectacular hard work in their callings and their prayers. They conceive the Christian life as one of extraordinary exciting experiences rather than of resolute rational righteousness. (A Quest for Godliness, 30)

In Bible reading as well as mountaineering, many would like the experience of heart-skipping beauty without working their quadriceps to jelly. We often would prefer, say, to drive to the summit of Romans 8 without traversing the rocky fields of reasoning, and climbing the alpine slopes of argumentation, and patiently tracing the winding paths of logic in Romans 1–7. We want the thrill of spiritual feeling without the labor of spiritual thought.

“God has carved only one path to the human heart, and it runs through the mind.”

To be sure, a Christian is nothing without sincere spiritual affections. But God has carved only one path to the human heart, and it runs through the mind.

Bright Minds, Burning Hearts

Passage after passage in the Bible shows this relationship between thought and affections. In fact, the Bible’s very existence suggests it, because here we have a book that unashamedly addresses the brain en route to the heart. But consider just one passage for now.

On the Emmaus Road, when Jesus finally reveals himself to Cleopas and the other disciple, the two men say, “Did not our hearts burn within us?” (Luke 24:32). Every Christian has felt something of the burning heart — the blaze of glory, the flame of joy. And every Christian, on some level, wants more.

Notice, however, how the disciples finish the sentence: “Did not our hearts burn within us as he opened to us the Scriptures?” And by opened, they mean this: “[Jesus] interpreted to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning himself” (Luke 24:27). Jesus took the men on an Old Testament tour, interpreting its Christ-centered meaning. In other words, he led an in-depth Bible study with them. Then, and only then, did fire kindle within. Before their hearts burned with love, their minds brightened with truth.

Packer draws the conclusion,

Man was made to know God with his mind, to desire it, once he has come to know it, with his affections, and to cleave to it, once he has felt its attraction, with his will. . . . God accordingly moves us, not by direct action on the affections or will, but by addressing our mind with his word, and so bringing to bear on us the force of truth. (A Quest for Godliness, 195, emphasis added)

“Our affections catch true fire only when our souls are full of truth’s kindling. And the Spirit lights the flame.”

Deep Christian feeling is supernatural, to be sure, but it is not the product of spontaneous spiritual combustion. Rather, our affections catch true fire only when our souls are full of truth’s kindling. And the Spirit lights the flame.

How to Summit Scripture

How then shall we read the Bible? To return to our mountain image, we read the Bible well by hiking rather than driving — by prayerfully thinking our way to affections rather than bypassing the brain. Or, to get more specific, we don’t pass over the hard places, we slow down enough to see, and we resist the comforts of sentimental reading.

Don’t pass over the hard places.

On the Emmaus road, what Scriptures did Jesus open to Cleopas and his friend? Luke writes, “Beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he interpreted to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning himself” (Luke 24:27). He took them to Genesis and Isaiah, Leviticus and Kings, Deuteronomy and Psalms, showing how his whole story reveals his whole glory.

We may imagine a book like Leviticus can do little for our hearts; the sand around Sinai seems to offer little spiritual refreshment. And if we come to the Bible looking mainly for a quick emotional kick, we likely will drive right past Leviticus in search of better views. But what if good Bible reading looks less like finding familiar comfort and more like hiking, sometimes through rough terrain, toward a summit whose beauty will thrill us more because of where we’ve walked?

Christian joy becomes more whole the more we read the Bible whole: whole chapters, whole books, whole testaments. Over time, even a book like Leviticus — filled with Christward types and gospel whispers — will lay so many logs on the hearth, ready to be lit by the Spirit.

Slow down enough to see.

As you travel through whole books and testaments, consider also reading slow, at least slow enough to notice details that can’t be enjoyed by car: daffodils along the path, birds’ nests in the branches, unexpected prospects through the trees.

A few weeks ago, I stumbled upon an unexpected sight while walking through familiar territory. “Love your enemies,” Jesus said, “so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven. For he makes his sun rise on the evil and the good” (Matthew 5:44–45). Suddenly, that simple word his freshly welcomed me into a God-filled world. The sun is God’s sun, and he raises it, lovingly, like a father turning on the lights in a child’s bedroom. A pronoun changed my day.

God means for pronouns to change us — and conjunctions and prepositions and definite articles. Not that we need to know the names of these parts of speech: a rose without a name still smells just as sweet. We can’t enjoy them, however, without noticing them, and noticing calls for an unhurried pace.

Resist the comforts of sentimental reading.

Martyn Lloyd-Jones, in a sermon on Hebrews 12:5–11, shares some strong words for those who read Scripture only in what he calls “a sentimental manner”:

There are many people who read the Scriptures in a purely sentimental manner. They are in trouble and they do not know what to do. They say, “I will read a psalm. It is so soothing — ‘The Lord is my Shepherd; I shall not want.’” They make it a kind of incantation and take the Psalms as another person takes a drug.

The problem with such sentimental Bible reading is that it goes against the grain of Scripture’s own approach to our problems. “The word of God does not merely give us general comfort; what it gives us always is an argument,” Lloyd-Jones writes. And therefore, “We must follow the logic of it, and bring intelligence to the Scriptures. . . . Let them reason it out with you” (Spiritual Depression, 253).

Often, the logic of a passage — its fors and therefores, its ifs and buts — is the trail leading to the summit of glory. “There is therefore now no condemnation” (Romans 8:1); “He who began a good work in you will bring it to completion” (Philippians 1:6); “Let us then with confidence draw near to the throne of grace” (Hebrews 4:16) — all of these are scriptural summits. We can enjoy some of their glory if we drive quickly to the top. But oh, how much better the view if we patiently walk the path.

Patience is, indeed, the virtue many of us may need most in our Bible reading. For the deepest joy, the kind “inexpressible and filled with glory” (1 Peter 1:8), comes only to those who prayerfully and thoughtfully plod the path. They read the Bible to know what God says and how he says it — in order that they might then feel that knowledge become worship by the power of the indwelling Spirit.

Resist, then, the urge the drive through your devotions. Glory awaits those who walk.

Here’s a thought to make the soul stagger: if you are in Christ, then the God of highest heaven has made your heart his home. The Holy Spirit has moved in, so to speak, filling your soul’s halls and rooms with himself. And he will never, ever move out.

“If anyone loves me,” Jesus told his disciples, “he will keep my word, and my Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our home with him” (John 14:23). In Christ, not only do we have a home in heaven (John 14:2), but heaven has made a home in us now. Already, we feel some of the warmth of our Father’s fireplace, and hear some of his music dancing down the halls, and smell some of the food from his table, because the very Spirit of that home is here.

And what a Spirit he is. Richard Sibbes (1577–1635), one of the great Puritan theologians of the Spirit, writes that when the Spirit takes us “for a house for himself,” he

doth also become unto us a counselor in all our doubts, a comforter in all our distresses, a solicitor to all duty, a guide in the whole course of life, until we dwell with him forever in heaven, unto which his dwelling here in us doth tend. (The Works of Richard Sibbes, 5:414)

Before the Spirit brings us to heaven, he brings something of heaven to us. How foolish, then, to ignore or refuse this glorious guest — and how happy to host him well.

Entertaining the Spirit

Sibbes, in his seventeenth-century way, liked to talk of “entertaining” the Spirit, by which he simply referred to our showing him hospitality (as in the language of Hebrews 13:2, “Some have entertained angels unawares”). If the Holy Spirit dwells in us (Romans 8:9–11), then our great duty and joy is to entertain him, to welcome him, to lovingly host him until he brings us to heaven.

And how? Consider four pieces of counsel from Sibbes, a master in Spiritual hospitality.

1. Hear his voice.

The Spirit, like the best of guests, comes to speak with us. And though he may at times impart a prophetic word (1 Corinthians 12:8, 10), he speaks most clearly, and with final authority, in the pages of Scripture. These are the words he once breathed out (2 Timothy 3:16; 2 Peter 1:21), and for those with ears to hear, they are “living and active” (Hebrews 4:12), the Spirit’s breath still warm upon them.

“Read the Bible” is, I suppose, old counsel for most of us. But Sibbes alerts us to two common ways we read Scripture with ears muffled to the Spirit: by hearing selectively, and by hearing superficially.

“If the Spirit‘s words never wound us (and then heal us), we are not hearing his voice.”

First, he writes, “It is a dangerous grieving of the Spirit, when, instead of drawing ourselves to the Spirit, we will labour to draw the Spirit to us” (Works, 5:420). He has in mind the person who reads Scripture to hear not what the Spirit actually says — however uncomfortable it may be — but what he wants the Spirit to say. How easily I forget that the “living and active” word is also “sharper than any two-edged sword” (Hebrews 4:12) — and the Spirit wields the weapon. If his words never wound us (and then heal us), we are not hearing his voice.

Second, Sibbes speaks directly into our hurried age:

Another way whereby we commonly grieve the Spirit of God is, when the mind is troubled with a multitude of business . . . for multitude of business begets multitudes of passions and distractions; that when God’s Spirit dictates the best things that tend to our comfort and peace, we have no time to hear. (422)

The Spirit’s voice can be drowned by the noise of a distracted life (Mark 4:19). We may hear his word in a quick, cursory way, as a husband hears his wife while rushing out the door. But “we have no time” to listen, unhurried and undistracted, so that the Spirit’s voice sinks down deep.

Hearing the Spirit — really hearing him — takes humility, time, and quiet, just as hearing a spouse or a friend does. We would do well, then, first thing in the morning, and perhaps at key moments throughout the day, to dismiss all other company from the soul and invite the Spirit to speak.

2. Heed his motions.

Intimately related to the Spirit’s voice are what Sibbes calls the Spirit’s “motions.” By “motions,” he refers not to what some today call “impressions” (often a sense that we should take some unusual course of action), but what many of us might call “conviction.” Motions are spiritual promptings to apply a specific part of Scripture — read, heard, or remembered — to a specific part of life.

Say, for example, that you hear a sermon or teaching on fasting, and (as happened to me recently) you sense your negligence in this spiritual discipline and feel the need to change. You may in that moment be feeling one of the Spirit’s motions, “sent to make way for God in our hearts” (Works, 5:426).

Now, the question is, What will you do? We likely can resonate with Sibbes when he says, “How many holy motions are kindled in hearing the word, and receiving the sacraments, etc., which die as soon as they are kindled for want of resolution!” (428). Sermon over, we leave the gathering, get caught in the current of the day, and forget what we felt (James 1:22–24). The Spirit has invited us to enjoy more of his presence and power, and by our actions we have silently said no.

How then do we heed the Spirit’s motions? Through what Paul calls a “resolve for good” (2 Thessalonians 1:11). Sibbes writes, “When the Spirit suggests good motions, turn them presently into holy resolutions. Is this my duty, and that which tends to my comfort? Certainly I will do it. Let not those motions die in us” (428). Sermon over, we leave the gathering and perhaps tell a trusted friend what we’ve felt, discerning if the motion was truly spiritual. If so, we might then make a plan for how we will “work out” the Spirit’s motions “with fear and trembling” (Philippians 2:12), laboring to open every door to him.

3. Hate his enemies.

Opening every door to him requires closing every door to sin. As Sibbes writes, “Who will think himself well entertained into an house, when there shall be entertainment given to his greatest enemy with him, and shall see more regard had, and better countenance shewed, to his enemy than to him?” (Works, 5:419). Holiness is far more than keeping some abstract law or code of conduct. Holiness begins with good hospitality.

“How many of our excuses for sin would wither and die if we remembered the holy guest in our souls?”

How many of our excuses for sin would wither and die if we remembered the holy guest in our souls? Where can we go from this Spirit? Or where can we flee from his presence? If we ascend to angry heights, he is there. If we make our bed in hidden fantasies, he is there. If we take the wings of the morning and sin where no human eye sees, even there he with us; even there his heart grieves (Ephesians 4:30).

Hear Sibbes’s spiritually sane counsel: “Take heed of little sins, which we count lesser sins perhaps than God doth” (429). Yes, take heed of little sins, for every sin, if given entertainment, will seek to destroy the Spirit’s work. Take heed of gossip and borderline shows. Take heed of greed and second glances. Take heed of bitterness and snap judgments. Take heed as you would of a thief at your door.

The counsel will not sound too strict to those who have enjoyed the Spirit’s fellowship. When he is Master of the house, and all enemies are outside, then the music plays, the feast arrives, the fires blaze; then the soul rests happy at home. And so, we will not hesitate to say, “Come and help me kill your foes” (Romans 8:13).

4. Have his grace.

Of course, anyone who has entertained the Spirit knows what it feels like to grieve the Spirit — to stifle his voice, kill his motions, welcome his enemies (Ephesians 4:30). And yet, even in the aftermath of those miserable moments, we need not wait to entertain him again — or worse, try to work our way back to a welcome. No, we can entertain him right here, right now, by agreeing to have his grace.

To entertain the Spirit is, in essence, to welcome the Spirit in his various offices. And his most precious office is to glorify Jesus (John 16:14). We are never more hospitable, therefore, than when we let him lift our eyes to Christ.

“Let not our despairing hearts cross the Spirit in his comforts,” Sibbes writes (Works, 5:428). To refuse the Spirit’s comfort, even after we have confessed our sin, may feel humble. But those who persistently refuse the Spirit’s comfort persistently refuse the Spirit himself, as much as a host who leaves his guest outside.

Let your broken heart take courage. The Spirit comes to us with grace. He comes with comfort. He comes to give us Jesus Christ.

Heaven’s Happiness on Earth

“It is the happiest condition in the world,” Sibbes writes, “when the soul is the temple of the Holy Spirit; when the heart is as the ‘holy of holies,’ where there be prayers and praises offered to God. . . . While the Spirit and his motions are entertained by us we shall be happy in life, happy in death, happy to eternity” (Works, 5:432).

The deepest, most durable happiness, a hint of heaven’s own joy, can be felt here below. It is the gift of the Holy Spirit to those who entertain him. So, hear his voice, heed his motions, hate his enemies, have his grace — and welcome the indwelling Spirit of joy.

Have you ever found yourself in a night so black that you nearly stopped hoping for morning?

Some guilt feels so deep that you wonder if you should just lie down and die. Some mental or spiritual midnights feel so thick, and the sky so starless, that a step in any direction seems useless. Sometimes, you not only walk through the valley of the shadow of death, but you collapse partway through, and don’t rise.

Maybe you’ve been there, as I have. Maybe you are there right now. If so, Holy Week offers a fellow failure, an anguished friend, a brother in the darkness. If anyone has tasted the bitter salt of midnight weeping, he has. And if anyone can testify to the miracle of dawn and the drying of tears, he can.

What was happening in those dreadful hours on Holy Saturday, as Peter, sobbing and beating his breast, remembered his three denials, remembered Jesus’s final look (Luke 22:61), remembered how it all ended, and yet somehow did not go hang himself like Judas? A scene from Maundy Thursday gives us the answer: the prayer of Jesus was holding him.

Against the accumulated powers of sin, Satan, and despair, a praying Christ was Peter’s only hope. And ours.

Satan Roars

Simon, Simon, behold, Satan demanded to have you, that he might sift you like wheat. (Luke 22:31)

Earlier in Luke’s Gospel, we read the foreboding words, “When the devil had ended every temptation, he departed from [Jesus] until an opportune time” (Luke 4:13). As night falls on Thursday, the time has come, and the devil knows it (Luke 22:53). And so, Satan, after devouring one of the twelve (Luke 22:3), roars for the other eleven.

For three years, Jesus had stood between Peter and the dragon’s mouth, keeping him, guarding him (John 17:12). But now he was leaving, and Peter, like Job before him, would discover how much his strength rested on the hidden shield of his Lord. For the first time, he would walk the valley without the familiar comfort of his shepherd.

Satan demands to sift the disciples: to throw them on the sieve and shake, shake, shake until Simon Peter was only Simon again — clay and not rock (Luke 6:14), a fisher of fish and not of men (Luke 5:10). Here is the real terror behind our darkest nights. We feel like we’re unraveling, as if our testimony is being told in reverse. We fear we’re falling back into a Christless past.

We would, if Jesus left us alone in Satan’s sieve. Thank God he doesn’t.

Jesus Prays

But I have prayed for you that your faith may not fail. (Luke 22:32)

What words could overcome the horror of “Satan demanded to have you”? These: “But I have prayed for you.” I have prayed for you, Peter. I, Jesus, the storm-stilling, sickness-healing, demon-destroying Son of God. I, Jesus, the Father’s beloved, his Chosen One, whom heaven hears with pleasure (Luke 3:22; 9:35). I, Jesus, have prayed for you.

Peter will still be put in the sieve. But Jesus asks that, in all the shaking, Peter’s faith will not fall dead to the ground. He asks for an ember to burn under the ashes of Peter’s failure — a secret comfort in his weeping, a buried warmth beneath his anguish, a hidden hope that would compel him come Sunday to sprint to the tomb rather than follow Judas (Luke 24:10–12).

“Your night, no matter how black, is no sure sign that your faith has finally failed and fled you.”

In all likelihood, Peter could neither see nor feel the ember. He may have felt inconsolable, sure that this darkness would never see the dawn. Maybe you feel similarly. Know this: Jesus has seen embers of faith in his saints where they saw only ash. Your night, no matter how black, is no sure sign that your faith has finally failed and fled you.

Jesus still held Peter, even from the tomb. So he holds all his people, even when a stone seems to have rolled over the heavens. And we can feel him holding us when we, like Peter, stubbornly refuse Judas’s despair, and labor to believe even on the bleakest Saturday.

In the coming hours, the sun’s light would fail (Luke 23:45). But in answer to Jesus’s prayer, Peter’s faith would not.

Peter Turns

And when you have turned again, strengthen your brothers. (Luke 22:32)

When Jesus looks at Peter, he sees the three denials hiding in his heart (Luke 22:34). But he also sees something deeper than his denials, a threefold “I love you” that will survive till Sunday, sustained by his own prayers (John 21:15–17). He sees a man who will plant his feet in the same footsteps of his denials, this time walking in the opposite direction.

And even now, Jesus wants Peter to see himself beyond the coming misery. And so, he doesn’t say, “if you have turned again,” but when. Peter’s perseverance does not rest on the slender thread of his own power, but on the unbreakable beam of Christ’s own prayers. And so it is for all Christ’s disciples. Our deliverance — whether from our own sin or from a darkness not our fault — may seem uncertain on our side; we wonder if our faith will fail along the way. But on Jesus’s side, our deliverance is as certain his own intercession (Romans 8:34; Hebrews 7:25). If we are truly in Christ, our turning is a when, not an if.

And in the matchless mercy of Jesus, we will find, as Peter did, that he welcomes us back as not a slave but a son, reassured and recommissioned. “When you have turned again, strengthen your brothers.” The one who was too weak to stand with Jesus will now strengthen others, his failure having fitted him for a wiser, humbler, more Christward ministry, resting on a power not his own.

Peter now knows the weakness of Peter, the strength of Satan, and the overpowering redemption of Jesus. And the restored Peters among us, who know the same firsthand, are often best suited to strengthen others.

He Prays for You

What might Jesus have prayed for Peter on that darkest of nights? We get a clue in John’s Gospel.

I do not ask that you take them out of the world, but that you keep them from the evil one. (John 17:15)

“Don’t come undone, and don’t despair, if the sky above you looks black as Peter’s. Instead, hope.”

Jesus did not ask that Peter be removed from the world, where the devil prowls. Peter felt “the power of darkness” on Maundy Thursday (Luke 22:53), and the darkness nearly broke him. But Jesus did ask that Peter be kept from the devil’s devouring jaws. And the Father answered: Peter did not become a Judas.

We may find, too, that Jesus’s intercession does not keep us from nights whose darkness nearly swallows us. Don’t come undone, and don’t despair, if the sky above you looks black as Peter’s. Instead, hope. Pray. Huddle together with the other disciples, and wait for Sunday morning.

In time, something will stir on the horizon of this midnight: a light beyond hope, a magic deeper than the misery of sin or the mercilessness of Satan. Jesus prays for you.

If you follow the greatest men of God back to their beginnings, you will often find yourself in a hidden closet or lonely pew, where a mother kneels to pray. Look behind Augustine, and you will find Monica. Look behind Spurgeon, and you will find Eliza. Look behind Hudson Taylor, and you will find Amelia. And look at each of these mothers, and you will find earnest prayer.

Those who know their Bibles should hardly be surprised. Like the star the wise men saw, the stories of God’s redemptive movements often lead us to a home where a woman, hidden from the great ones of the earth, caresses a heel that will one day crush a serpent. In the prayers of a mother, awakenings are born and peoples won, idols are toppled and devils undone, dry bones are raised and prodigals rescued.

Again and again, before God laid his hand on a man, he laid it on his mother.

Mother of the Kingdom

“The dawn of the great new movements of God repeatedly occurs in women’s spaces,” Alastair Roberts writes. The word repeatedly is right. Over and again, redemptive history turns on a flawed but faithful mother bearing a son: Sarah and Isaac, Rebekah and Jacob, Rachel and Joseph, Ruth and Obed, Elizabeth and John, Eunice and Timothy — and, of course, Mary and Jesus.

Among all these stories, however, one in particular illustrates the power of a praying mother. The books of 1 and 2 Samuel tell the story of how God turned Israel into a kingdom — how he sought “a man after his own heart” (1 Samuel 13:14) to sit on the throne and begin a royal line that one day would run to Jesus (2 Samuel 7:13–14). But where does this story of a king and a kingdom begin? With one infertile woman, pleading for a son.

[Elkanah] had two wives. The name of the one was Hannah, and the name of the other, Peninnah. And Peninnah had children, but Hannah had no children. (1 Samuel 1:2)

“If you follow the greatest men of God back to their beginnings, you will often find a mother kneeling to pray.”

A barren woman and a fruitful rival: we’ve been here before (Genesis 16:1–6; 30:1–8). The stage is set for God to make a name for himself through a miraculous birth. And prayer will be his appointed means.

Hannah’s Prayer

Like Hagar before her, Peninnah can’t help pointing the finger at Hannah’s empty womb: “[Hannah’s] rival used to provoke her grievously to irritate her, because the Lord had closed her womb. So it went on year by year” (1 Samuel 1:6–7). But unlike Sarah before her, Hannah turns to God instead of turning against Peninnah.

Listen to the simple prayer of a suffering woman, longing for an open womb:

O Lord of hosts, if you will indeed look on the affliction of your servant and remember me and not forget your servant, but will give to your servant a son, then I will give him to the Lord all the days of his life, and no razor shall touch his head. (1 Samuel 1:11)

We know the rest of the story. The Lord would hear Hannah and give her a son. And her son, Samuel, would establish Israel’s kingdom (1 Samuel 16:10–13), inaugurate the nation’s prophetic line (Acts 3:24; 13:20), and gain a standing beside Moses as a mediator of God’s people (Jeremiah 15:1). Through prayer, Hannah’s once-barren womb bore a son to rescue Israel.

What might mothers learn from Hannah’s prayer today?

1. Anguish can be a good teacher.

Years of infertility, joined with Peninnah’s mockery, had finally broken the dam of Hannah’s sorrow. The pain of hope deferred flooded her heart, and the flood could not be hidden. “Hannah wept and would not eat. . . . She was deeply distressed” (1 Samuel 1:7, 10).

Yet, as so often happens, Hannah’s tears became a trail that led her to her knees. “After they had eaten and drunk in Shiloh, Hannah rose . . . and prayed to the Lord and wept bitterly” (1 Samuel 1:9–10). We don’t know what Hannah’s prayer life was like before this moment. But here, at least, anguish became her best teacher.

In a world as broken as ours, anguish hems a mother in, behind and before. Some, like Hannah, feel the peculiar agony of wished-for motherhood. Others, the pain of pregnancy and childbirth itself. And still others, the sorrow of a child who has not yet been born again. What Augustine once said of his mother holds true for many:

She wept and wailed, and these cries of pain revealed what there was left of Eve in her, as in anguish she sought the son whom in anguish she had brought to birth. (Confessions, 5.8.15)

“Anguish often leads a mother to a prayer God longs to answer.”

Anguish, we know, may tempt a mother toward bitterness, as it did both Sarah and Rachel for a time (Genesis 16:5–6; 30:1). But here, Hannah reveals a surprising truth: anguish often leads a mother to a prayer God longs to answer.

2. God delights in open hands.

Two words in Hannah’s prayer rise to the surface through repetition: Lord (twice) and its counterpart, servant (three times). In her anguish, she does not forget that God is her Lord, high and wise above her, nor that she is his servant, bound to do his will. The famous words of Mary over a millennium later — “Behold, I am the servant of the Lord” (Luke 1:38) — are an echo of Hannah’s.

Hannah’s open hands also appear in her remarkable vow: “If you will . . . give to your servant a son, then I will give him to the Lord all the days of his life, and no razor shall touch his head” (1 Samuel 1:11). Her promise not to cut her son’s hair refers to the Nazirite vow, by which a person’s life was devoted entirely to God (Numbers 6:1–5). Hannah says, in others words, “Give me a son, and I will give him back to you — heart and soul, body and mind, all the days of his life.” In response, God gives her a son to return to God.

We should hesitate, of course, before drawing a straight line between a mother’s heart and how God answers her prayers. Some mothers pray with Hannah-like surrender, and still their wombs stay empty, or their children keep walking to the far country. Hannah’s story does teach us, however, that God loves to put gifts in open hands. He delights when a mother, welling up with maternal affection, wells up still more with desire for Christ and his kingdom.

In Hannah’s case, her openhanded motherhood allowed Samuel to spend his days at the temple, where, the narrator tells us, “he worshiped the Lord” (1 Samuel 1:28). May God be pleased to do the same for many mothers’ sons.

3. A mother’s prayers can shake the world.

The anguished prayer of 1 Samuel 1:11 is not the only prayer we hear from Hannah. When she brings her freshly weaned son to the temple, she prays again, this time soaring with praise (1 Samuel 2:1–10). And as we listen, we quickly realize that the story of Hannah and Samuel reaches far beyond the four walls of a happy home.

Consider just her final words, which offer a fitting ending to a massive prayer:

The adversaries of the Lord shall be broken to pieces;     against them he will thunder in heaven.The Lord will judge the ends of the earth;     he will give strength to his king     and exalt the power of his anointed. (1 Samuel 2:10)

Hannah, carried along by the Spirit, finds herself caught up in something far greater than her own domestic hopes: under God, her son would deliver Israel from its oppressors and establish a kingdom that one day would cover the earth. Hannah had simply prayed for a son — but in return, God answered far bigger than she asked.

And so he still does. Eliza Spurgeon and Amelia Taylor prayed for saved sons, scarcely imagining that God would give a preacher to the masses and a missionary to the nations. And though not every son is a Samuel, or a Spurgeon, or a Taylor, who knows what lovers of orphans, or pastors of churches, or seekers of justice, or fathers of lost ones God is right now raising up through a faithful mother on her knees? With a God like ours, we can dare to dream — and pray.

Mother for Every Mother

The weeping, anxious Hannah of 1 Samuel 1 is not a woman out of a mother’s reach. She was not a well-known woman. She was not a put-together woman. So far as we know, she was not a particularly strong woman. But she was a praying woman. And through her prayers, God showed his great power.

The God who crushed the serpent’s head by the woman’s offspring has more victories to win. Jesus dealt the deathblow, the blow no other son could give. But more of the devil’s kingdom needs crushing. And if we look behind the men who lift their heels, we will often find a mother like Hannah: anguished yet openhanded, praying for her boy.

In his book The Whole Christ, Sinclair Ferguson notes that many Scottish pulpits once bore the words of John 12:21 on the inside, so that only the preacher could see them. Whenever a pastor stood in such a pulpit, he would find himself confronted with the same words some Greek visitors once spoke to the apostle Philip:

Sir, we wish to see Jesus.

We wish to see Jesus. Deep in their souls, all God’s people wish the same from their pastors. “Sir, would you tell me of Jesus? Would you show me again my King in his beauty? Would you warm my heart with another glimpse of his glory? Would you uncloud the heavens and give me a sight of him?”

And deep in their souls, God’s faithful pastors wish to say yes. Their hearts beat with the famous words of John the Baptist, that prophet of the lifted voice and pointed finger: “He must increase, but I must decrease” (John 3:30). At their best, pastors are matchmakers between the bride of Christ and her glorious Groom.

Yes, at their best. But of course, pastors are not always at their best. Sometimes, a small inner voice suggests, “He must increase, and I must too.”

Alone in the Jordan

Even as a young pastor — with months, not years, of official ministry behind me — I feel this split ambition. At times, the words “he must increase, but I must decrease” burn like holy fire in my bones. And at other times, they just burn.

Maybe, my flesh sometimes proposes, I can show others Jesus while also showing something of myself. Maybe I can win others’ hearts to Christ while also winning their hearts to me. Maybe some of the glory I preach can fall upon my shoulders. But then I take a closer look at the context of John’s words, and I find the rebuke, and the help, I need.

Perhaps you remember the situation. God had given surprising fruit to the ministry of the Baptist, that desert-dwelling, locust-eating prophet. His sermons about the Christ had drawn thousands to his river pulpit in the Jordan. Some Jews wondered if John himself might be the Christ (John 1:19–28).

And then, at the height of the awakening, the crowds leave as quickly as they came, for the Lord, whose way John had been preparing, suddenly appears on the way (John 1:29–31; 3:22). John finds himself knee-deep in the increasingly obscure Jordan of his ministry, the banks once so full of people now nearly bare. His disciples draw the humbling conclusion: “Rabbi, he who was with you across the Jordan, to whom you bore witness — look, he is baptizing, and all are going to him” (John 3:26).

All are going to him. Moments like these reveal a man’s heart. Has he preached Christ for Christ’s sake, or for the sake of a bustling ministry? Has he counted baptisms for Christ’s kingdom, or for his own? Has he rejoiced to hear others praise Jesus, or praise John?

In words that likewise deserve a place on every pulpit, John leaves no doubt: “He must increase, but I must decrease” (John 3:30).

Heart of the Baptist

To be sure, John spoke these famous words at a unique moment in redemptive history. The age of the Christ had come; therefore, the age of old-covenant prophecy had ended. And when the sun rises, all candles can be blown out (to paraphrase Karl Barth). For John, then, “I must decrease” meant “my ministry of preparing the way must end.”

Yet God requires the same “decrease,” on a spiritual level, from all who have been charged to proclaim “not ourselves but Jesus Christ as Lord” (2 Corinthians 4:5). And in the verses preceding John’s declaration, he opens up his humble, Christ-loving heart to show us where words like his come from.

‘All I Have Is from Above’

A person cannot receive even one thing unless it is given him from heaven. (John 3:27)

John’s first response sounds a note of spiritual realism. The crowds, the baptisms, the confessions of sin, the repentance, the surprising spiritual fruit — all of these were, in John’s eyes, not earned, but “given.” From the start, John knew his ministry was a received ministry, a bestowed ministry, a given ministry. And so, wherever he looked, he could see no good thing that did not bear the label “Gift.”

No pastor today is a prophet like John, but our ministries — small or large — bear the same gracious character; they are all “given . . . from heaven” (see Acts 20:28). All our successes are little Isaacs, children beyond the power of flesh and blood, pointing to the God who “calls into existence the things that do not exist” (Romans 4:17) through the ministries of frail men. And so, Christ must increase.

‘I Am Not the Christ’

You yourselves bear me witness, that I said, “I am not the Christ, but I have been sent before him.” (John 3:28)

During the height of his ministry, John found need to clarify rumors circling on the banks of the Jordan. “He confessed, and did not deny, but confessed, ‘I am not the Christ’” (John 1:20). And now again, he makes the same confession to his disciples, whose words effectively urged him to act like he, not Jesus, was Israel’s Christ.

“In a strange irony, we who preach Christ sometimes can act like we ourselves are the Christ.”

In a strange irony, we who preach Christ sometimes can act like we ourselves are the Christ. Sometimes we consider ourselves indispensable to the mission. Sometimes we hunger for others’ praise as if we ourselves could satisfy a soul. Sometimes we rise early and go late to rest, not from holy zeal, but from a sense that, unless we build the house, the others labor in vain (Psalm 127:1–2).

We may do well, silly as it sounds, to regularly repeat the Baptist’s words to the rumors circling within: “I am not the Christ.” And therefore, I must decrease.

‘The Bridegroom Is My Joy’

The one who has the bride is the bridegroom. The friend of the bridegroom, who stands and hears him, rejoices greatly at the bridegroom’s voice. Therefore this joy of mine is now complete. (John 3:29)

There is more than one kind of must. There is the must of duty: “I must decrease, because Christ deserves prominence.” But there is also the must of delight: “I must decrease, because joy in Christ compels me.” And here we reach the inner chamber of John’s heart, the secret spring of his humility: joy — and not just any joy, but the joy of the bridegroom’s friend.

“Here we reach the inner chamber of John’s heart, the secret spring of his humility: joy.”

The bridegroom’s friend, John tells us, enjoys a peculiar kind of joy: not the joy of attention, but the joy of attention giving. He would rather “stand and hear” the bridegroom’s voice than have ten thousand stand and hear his own. He would rather live unseen in the Jordan, and watch all Galilee, Judea, and Jerusalem stream to Jesus, than draw the crowds to himself. He would rather see the bride’s eyes from the side, as she stares into her Groom’s, than to see them head-on.

“He has obtained the height of his wishes,” John Calvin writes. “He has nothing further to desire, for he sees Christ reigning and people listening to him as he deserves” (Calvin’s New Testament Commentaries, 4:81). To be seen as Christ’s minister, to be heard preaching Christ — these are partial joys, and often tinged with self. But to see others loving Christ, and to hear them worship him — these are full joys, complete joys, the first bells of the coming wedding.

He Must Increase

We would be wrong, of course, to deny that faithful pastors deserve the love and respect of their people. “Esteem them very highly in love because of their work,” Paul tells the Thessalonians (1 Thessalonians 5:13). But a pastor’s “work” is the same as John’s: not the work of winning others to ourselves, but the work of winning them to Jesus. In other words, pastors deserve their people’s esteem only as they help their people esteem Jesus more.

We cannot offer others joy in ourselves. We cannot offer them peace. We cannot offer them forgiveness or hope or rest of heart. But we can offer them Christ. We can preach from the aisle, as it were, leaving the altar clear for the presence of their bridegroom.

And to that deep request in every Christian’s soul — “Sir, we wish to see Jesus” — we can respond, “With all my heart.”

Soon after becoming a Christian, I started wondering if I really was a Christian. The first doubt struck unexpectedly, like lightning from a cloudless sky. Am I real? I seemed to love Jesus. I seemed to trust him. I seemed to bear the marks of a changed life. But, the thought crept in, so too did Judas.

Though the long night of wrestling slowly passed, I emerged from it like Jacob, limping into the daylight. Assurance has been, perhaps, the main question, the chief struggle of my Christian life over the years, sending me searching for what Paul and the author of Hebrews call “full assurance” (Colossians 2:2; Hebrews 10:22).

The topic of assurance is complex, to put it mildly. Genuine Christians doubt their salvation for many different reasons, and God nourishes assurance through several different means. So the needed word for one doubter often differs from the needed word for another. Nevertheless, for those who find themselves floundering, as I did, perhaps unsure what’s even happening to them, a basic guide to assurance may prove useful.

Possibility of Assurance

By assurance, I simply mean, to borrow a definition from D.A. Carson, “a Christian believer’s confidence that he or she is in right standing with God, and that this will issue in ultimate salvation.” Assured Christians can say, with Spirit-wrought conviction, not only “Christ died for sinners” but “Christ died for me.” Though sin may assault them, and Satan may accuse them, they know themselves forgiven, beloved, and bound for heaven. And the first word to offer about such assurance is simply this: it’s possible.

Your faith may feel small, and your hold on Christ shaky. Even still, it is possible for you to feel down deep that he will never cast you out (John 6:37). It is possible for you to cry “Abba!” with the implicit trust of God’s children (Romans 8:15–16). It is possible for you to “rejoice with joy that is inexpressible and filled with glory” (1 Peter 1:8). It is possible for you to have “confidence for the day of judgment” (1 John 4:17) — indeed, to “know that you have eternal life” (1 John 5:13).

God’s desire for his people’s assurance, even for the most fragile of them, burns brightly through the Scriptures. He has knit assurance into his very name, whether old covenant (Exodus 34:6–7) or new (Matthew 1:21). He has spoken assurance in promise upon promise from a mouth that “never lies” (Titus 1:2). And as he once wrote assurance with a rainbow (Genesis 9:13–17), and flashed assurance through the stars (Genesis 15:5–6), so now he has sealed assurance with the greatest sign of all: the body and blood of his dear Son. Week by week, we eat the bread and drink the cup of his steadfast love in Christ (Matthew 26:26–29).

If God’s new covenant is sure (and it is), if his promises are true (and they are), and if his character cannot change (and it can’t), then full assurance is possible for everyone in Christ, no matter how strong our present fears.

Enemies of Assurance

If, then, Scripture testifies so powerfully to the possibility of assurance, why does anyone ever lack assurance — and why do some seem to struggle with it ongoingly? Because Christian assurance is not only possible, but opposed. Of the enemies that assail us, three are chief: Satan, sin, and our broken psychology.

Satan

We might expect “the accuser of our brothers, . . . who accuses them day and night before our God” to war against the Christian’s peace (Revelation 12:10). And so he does.

In his classic on assurance, Religious Affections, Jonathan Edwards reminds readers that the devil assaulted even the assurance of Jesus (172). “If you are the Son of God, command these stones. . . . If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down” (Matthew 4:3, 6). The Father had just said, “This is my beloved Son” (Matthew 3:17), but the devil loves to trade his own if for God’s is.

“The devil knows that well-assured Christians threaten the domain of darkness more than any other.”

Many a true Christian has, in turn, heard that dreadful if: “If you are a Christian, why do you sin so much? Why is your faith so small? Why is your heart so cold?” And though Satan’s charges cannot condemn those whom God has justified (Romans 8:33), they certainly can ruin our comfort.

The devil knows that well-assured Christians threaten the domain of darkness more than any other. And so, he protects his property with one of his most-used weapons: doubt.

Sin

Alongside Satan, Scripture presents sin as one of the foremost enemies of assurance. Now, of course, assurance in this life always coexists with sin. “If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us” (1 John 1:8). Nevertheless, habitual sin, unrepentant sin, or particularly grievous sin darkens our assurance as surely as drawn curtains darken a room — and it should.

“By this we know that we have come to know him,” the apostle John writes, “if we keep his commandments” (1 John 2:5). And therefore, when a pattern of commandment-keeping gives way to commandment-breaking, and a pattern of repentance to stubbornness, and a pattern of confession to secrecy, we cannot “know that we have come to know him” with the same confidence as before. We may be secure in Jesus’s grasp, as Peter was even when he denied his Lord, but our sense of that security is rightly weak until we “have turned again” (Luke 22:31–32), and again have heard his pardoning voice (John 21:15–19).

Psychology

Finally, our own psychology plays an influential, but often overlooked, role in assurance. (By psychology, I refer generally to matters of temperament, patterns of thought, and self-reflection.) Assurance is not only a spiritual phenomenon, but a psychological one: its strength depends on a rightly calibrated conscience, mature self-awareness, and the ability to distinguish gold from fool’s gold in the mines of the soul. John warns us that the time may come when “our heart condemns us” unfairly (1 John 3:19) — and the hearts of some, due to a more broken psychology, condemn more often.

Sinclair Ferguson writes,

An individual may have strong faith, much grace, and rich evidence of fruitful service yet lack full assurance because of natural temperament. We are, after all, physico-psychical unities. A melancholic disposition de facto creates obstacles to the enjoyment of assurance — partly because it creates obstacles to the enjoyment of everything. (The Whole Christ, 219)

Or to paraphrase the Puritan Thomas Brooks (1608–1680), if the eyes of the soul wear dark-tinted glasses, then even the sun may seem black.

Means of Assurance

Such are the enemies to a settled, joyful Christian assurance. But great as they are, “he who is in you is greater” (1 John 4:4). God will not allow Satan, sin, and fallen psychology to thwart the possibility of assurance. And so, he offers, through the ministry of his Spirit, means by which we can overcome their assault and “draw near [to God] with a true heart in full assurance of faith” (Hebrews 10:22). And in his providence, his three great means counter our three great enemies: promises defeat Satan’s accusations, Christlikeness overcomes sin’s darkness, and the Spirit’s witness silences our broken psychology.

Promises

To counter the accusations of the devil, God gives “his precious and very great promises” (2 Peter 1:4), and especially those promises that pledge his patience, kindness, and favor toward us in Christ.

J.I. Packer (1926–2020), in one of his books, notes the inconspicuous but crucial for connecting Romans 5:5 and 5:6. In the former verse, Paul offers a picture of warm-hearted assurance: “Hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.” We might assume such a heart-pouring happens unaccountably, perhaps even mystically. Not so. In the next verse, Paul’s little for draws us to the Spirit’s fountain: “For while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly” (Romans 5:6). In other words, God’s love enters the hearts of those whose minds are fixed on Calvary.

“Assurance is, first and chiefly, the fruit of beholding Christ and the promises he holds out to us.”

Paul takes the same road later in Romans 8, where he sets the “charge against God’s elect” next to the death, resurrection, ascension, and intercession of Christ (Romans 8:33–34) — implying that, in the court of the soul, the devil’s accusations die only when we rest our case on the person, work, and promises of our everlasting Advocate.

Assurance is, first and chiefly, the fruit of beholding Christ and the promises he holds out to us with nail-pierced hands. So, as Brooks says, “Let thy eye and heart, first, most, and last, be fixed upon Christ, then will assurance bed and board with thee” (The Quest for Full Assurance, 127).

Christlikeness

Then, without taking our eye and heart from Christ, the Spirit also nurtures our obedience. As he unveils the glory of Christ, he transforms us “into the same image from degree of glory to another” (2 Corinthians 3:18). He makes us a little garden of grace, where the fruits of Christlikeness take root and grow (Galatians 5:22–23). He also puts a helmet on our head and a sword in our hands to do battle with the un-Christlike “deeds of the body” (Romans 8:13).

As we walk by his power — looking to Christ, becoming like Christ, and confessing our failures along the way — the Spirit assures us that, indeed, “the old has passed away; behold, the new has come” (2 Corinthians 5:17). Christlikeness may grow slowly; it usually does. We also may struggle in different seasons to discern genuine spiritual fruit amid the thorns of our indwelling sin. But the same Spirit who grows his grace inside us can train us also to recognize it. As Thomas Goodwin (1600–1680) writes, the Spirit “writes first all graces in us, and then teaches us to read his handwriting” (Quest for Full Assurance, 137).

Embracing obedience as a means of assurance does not require obsessive introspection — in fact, obsessive introspection usually does more to stifle grace than grow it. In general, grace grows best when no one’s watching, including you. And so, like Paul, we forget what lies behind and strain forward to what lies ahead, keeping our eyes on the Gracious one all the while (Philippians 3:13–14). And then, occasionally, an inward look at our hearts and an outward glance at our lives (perhaps with a pastor or trusted brother or sister) can show us what the Spirit has done.

Witness of the Spirit

The third enemy to Christian assurance, our own broken psychology, likewise finds its match in the ministry of the Spirit, and particularly in what Paul calls the Spirit’s “witness”:

You did not receive the spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received the Spirit of adoption as sons, by whom we cry, “Abba! Father!” The Spirit himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God. (Romans 8:15–16)

Much debate surrounds Paul’s words about the Spirit’s witness. But this much we can say with confidence: Assurance does not ultimately depend on your background, personality, conscience, or common temptations. Rather, assurance depends on the gracious witness of the Spirit, who not only shows us Christ, and not only makes us holy, but who also silences all objections and testifies, “Here is a child of God.” And so, as J.C. Ryle writes, assurance “is a positive gift of the Holy Ghost, bestowed without reference to men’s bodily frames or constitutions” (Holiness, 128).

The Holy Spirit “knows our frame” (Psalm 103:14) — the human frame in general, and our frame in particular. And whatever our psychological makeup, he knows how to communicate his own witness in ways we can hear. He may do so in one dramatic moment, as we read a specific promise or hear the gospel preached. Or he may do so gradually, even almost insensibly, through daily meditation and obedience pursued over years. But no matter how strong the walls, the Spirit can break into the city of our doubts and, where insecurity reigned before, enthrone assurance in its place. So why not ask him?

Preciousness of Assurance

The pursuit of assurance may last long. We may find, moreover, that doubt can return after a long season of confidence, for assurance once enjoyed does not mean assurance always enjoyed. Our peace can rise and fall, requiring a fresh pursuit of assurance through the means God has provided. But however long we have to travel this road, and however often, remember: the preciousness of assurance outweighs all the world.

Who tastes more of heaven on earth than those who walk, freely and happily, through that holy city of assurance, marveling at the heights of Romans 8:31–39? To know with Spirit-given confidence, and not just a frail wish, that the Almighty God is for us, that he gave up his Son to save us, that the blood of Jesus covers us and his intercession upholds us, that neither devils nor conscience can condemn us, and that his love will never leave us — to know all this is to walk, right now, on streets of gold.

Assurance, Ryle writes, enables a man to “always feel that he has something solid beneath his feet and something firm under his hands — a sure friend by the way, and a sure home at the end” (Holiness, 139). Yes, a sure friend, Jesus, and a sure home, heaven: such is the precious gift of assurance — a gift, let it be remembered, that God delights to give.

Ten years ago, on Martin Luther King Jr. Day 2012, could you have predicted where we would be on Martin Luther King Jr. Day 2022? Some surely foresaw a number of our present sorrows. But who could have foreseen Trayvon Martin, and Michael Brown, and Charlottesville, and Confederate-monument debates, and Trump, and national-anthem kneeling, and George Floyd, and the outrage of 2020 — to name just a few of many tragedies and controversies? And who could have imagined that the events of these ten years would so severely tear the fabric of our Reformed world?

Even by 2017, John Piper could mourn the “improbable constellation of [racial] sorrows” unknown in 2012. The last five years have only added to the improbable constellation, splintering a once-unified Reformed evangelicalism into groups that often struggle not only to partner with one another but even to understand each other.

And that struggle to even understand touches on one of the many dysfunctions beneath our divisions: in our thinking and talking about race in recent years, many of us have failed to engage the issues and one another Christianly. Many conversations, especially online, have savored less of Solomonic wisdom and more of political savvy (no matter how apolitical we may feel otherwise). Too easily, many of us have adopted and advocated for positions not because we have thought through them carefully, prayerfully, with open Bibles and in thoughtful dialogue with Christians who think differently, but simply because these positions are not what the other side holds (whoever the other side may be).

The dysfunction would be easier to brush aside if it characterized only the most extreme among us, the most militantly “woke” and most virulently “anti-woke.” But too often, such a dynamic has characterized my own thought and talk. Even those who generally strive for patience and fair-mindedness are falling into these ditches. With a topic as fraught as race in the American church, almost everyone has an “other side,” a group whose thoughts and sentiments feel not only troublesome but threatening — and therefore a group we struggle to hear, much less learn from.

Healing such dysfunctional engagement would not heal all our divisions, not by a long shot. But it may soften our various prejudices, nurture deeper understanding, and (on the micro scale if not the macro) lead us toward a less fragile unity. Or, if nothing else, we may simply become better at talking when the temperature rises over other tense issues.

Talking in the Boxing Ring

In many ways, the deck of the last decade was stacked against Christian habits of thought and talk. Even as we faced the constellation of sorrows, information overload accelerated, social media colonized public discourse, and our society’s typical partisanship seemed to swallow steroids. Often, the context of our conversations has felt less like a living room and more like a boxing ring. And it’s hard to engage as Christians when the rules of the game are punch or be punched.

Many of us have learned to think and talk on the surface of things. Once, a phrase like systemic racism offered an invitation to ask, “What do you mean by that?” and then consider whether the description fits biblical and experiential reality. But our communicative climate rarely encourages such engagement. Now, systemic racism has become a badge for a particular team — one that, depending on your side, either cannot be questioned or cannot be considered. The phrase (and more like it) no longer spurs thought, but replaces thought. Meanwhile, we fall deeper into our own silos, less able to hear truths that might counterbalance our perspectives. We learn to parrot whatever voices are loudest or most immediately persuasive, and parroting, by nature, inevitably leads to partisanship and polarization.

The danger for many Christians is not that we will disown manifest biblical concerns, but that we will so underemphasize some biblical concerns (that is, the other side’s) that they become functionally denied in our theology and practice. Where we now stand, some of us don’t want to talk anymore about God’s care for the oppressed (Exodus 22:21–24; Psalm 103:6); others no longer want to discuss the necessity of due process (Deuteronomy 19:15; Matthew 18:16). Some are nervous about acknowledging the prejudice that power can bring (Deuteronomy 16:18–20); others are wary of admitting the fallibility of wounded feelings (Proverbs 18:17). Some are slower to condemn American slavery and Jim Crow (1 Timothy 1:10; James 2:1–7); others are slower to denounce the unjustly disproportionate black-abortion rate (Psalm 139:13–16).

In each case, however, the balance and emphasis of Scripture is no longer setting our theological and ethical agenda. The other side is.

Four Postures for Christian Conversation

On one level, we cannot help but think and talk from our subjective perspectives. But by God’s grace, we can avoid thinking and talking more like political people than Christian people. We can unlearn the reflexes and rhetoric of the city of man. And to that end, we can pursue four Christian postures for thinking and talking about race (or any contentious subject), adapted from the framework creation-fall-redemption-restoration.

Embodied

To be human is to be wonderfully and inescapably embodied, a creature among creatures in God’s physical world. Most of our communication technologies, however, treat us as an avatar among avatars in man’s ethereal world. And much of the time, an avatar thinks and talks differently from a creature.

Martin Luther King, looking upon Southern segregation, once observed, “Men often hate each other because they fear each other; they fear each other because they do not know each other; they do not know each other because they cannot communicate; they cannot communicate because they are separated” (Free at Last?, 68).

Today, of course, we actually can communicate in real time while separated. But to King, our technological talk would hardly look like the kind of communication he had in mind — the kind that erases ignorance, eases fears, and melts hatred. To him, our social media platforms may seem more like anti-communication technologies.

When we take our complex racial conversations onto social media, we take them into an environment that forces three-dimensional topics into a two-dimensional mold, that rewards slander and belligerence, and that (contrary to James’s counsel) teaches us to be slow to hear, quick to speak, and quick to anger (James 1:19). Image-bearers become little more than “mouthpieces of positions we want to eradicate,” as Alan Jacobs puts it (How to Think, 98). And eradicate we try.

I know proximity is a buzzword in some circles. Even still, nothing has mitigated my own tendency toward unthinking aversion of “the other side” more than looking some of the other side in the face. Something changes when your ideological opponents are no longer two-dimensional representatives of a barbarous idea, but instead living, feeling, speaking beings — and perhaps even friends.

Fallen

The doctrine of the fall has not experienced the same neglect that the doctrine of creation has in recent years. Few doctrines have been so universally emphasized, even among non-Christians, than the fall of humanity. But too often, the emphasis has landed on the fall of other humans, of those humans over there.

“A pattern of hurling blame usually reveals more of our own fallenness than of the people we accuse.”

Ironically, a pattern of hurling blame usually reveals more of our own fallenness than of the people we accuse. Few instincts are less Christian and more devilish than turning the blade of God’s word against everyone’s sins but our own (Zechariah 3:1; Revelation 12:10). The doctrine of the fall, rightly grasped, does not put a spotlight in our hand so we can expose the sins of others; it reveals the spotlight in God’s hand, exposing us all (Hebrews 4:13).

Of course, to say “all have sinned” (Romans 3:23) is not to say all have sinned in the same way or to the same degree. And so, in conversations about race, we need not assume the same kind or same level of guilt on all sides. Some of us have more reason than others to suspect ourselves.

But all of us have some reason to suspect ourselves. Given all that God has said about sin, it would be astonishing indeed if anyone in these conversations had nothing to learn and, from time to time, no fault to confess. God’s regenerating work does not make fallen people flawless people. Therefore, we exercise not false humility but biblical realism when we enter most conversations assuming we don’t see everything clearly and that this other human, ideological opponent or not, has some truth to shine on us.

Redeemed

If the fall means we should expect to find our ignorance and sin exposed in conversations about race, redemption means we can. Those who wear the robe of righteousness can bear to see the stains beneath (Isaiah 61:10). Those who hear God’s pardoning voice can handle his reproofs (Hebrews 12:5–6). Those forgiven of much can go ahead and weep their repentance in public (Luke 7:36–50). If the fall compels us to suspect ourselves, redemption frees us to reveal ourselves: we are unafraid to be seen as the sinners we are.

“Every Christian conversation about race happens beside the spilled blood, torn flesh, and cursed cross of Jesus.”

We can easily feel like conversations about race happen beside the cliff edge of condemnation, with an admission of fault casting us over. But no: every Christian conversation about race happens beside the spilled blood, torn flesh, and cursed cross of Jesus (Ephesians 2:13–16). And all our guilt casts us onto him who preached peace to Jew and Gentile, privileged and oppressed, and whose gospel speaks a stronger word than all our racial sins (Ephesians 2:17–18).

Many of us would do well to briefly pause during tense interactions and remind ourselves of Psalm 130:4: “With you there is forgiveness.” With God there is forgiveness, even when there is none with man. A new humility may come from embracing such a promise. And humility has a way of opening doors for understanding that self-righteousness never can.

United

Through redemption, Jesus has united us — to himself, first and foremost, but also to all others in him, no matter how differently they understand race in America. And so, whatever team or tribe we affiliate with for practical purposes, let it never be forgotten that our true team and tribe reaches far as redemption is found.

What might happen if we began to identify more deeply with the whole church of Jesus Christ than with our particular pew? We might renounce the old Corinthian folly of finishing the sentence “I follow . . .” with any name other than Jesus (1 Corinthians 3:4). We might recover the true sense of the word prophetic and gain courage to reprove our own friends. We might find new freedom in pursuit of truth, knowing that a genuine win for “the other side” is a win for us all. We might live up to our identity as sons of a peacemaking Father (Matthew 5:9).

Joining the Needlessly Divided

The road of racial harmony still stretches far ahead of us — in our friendships and churches, in our denominations and broader networks. And if the last ten years have taught us anything, they have taught us that no one can really know where we’ll be a decade from now. But oh that John Wesley’s praise for John Newton might rest upon many in that day:

You appear to be designed by Divine Providence for an healer of breaches, a reconciler of honest but prejudiced men, and an uniter (happy work!) of the children of God that are needlessly divided from each other.

Such healers of breaches will not arise from the knee-jerk opposition that has become so common. They will carry the hope that “the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace” (Ephesians 4:3) forms a stronger tie than the unity of political party, cultural similarity, or any ideological kinship. They will arise from the ground of Christian thought and Christian talk — embodied, fallen, redeemed, united.

When we give someone our full attention — our patient, focused, self-forgetful gaze — we look a little like God. The glory of God consists partly in the fact that he, unlike the gods of wood and stone, pays attention to his people (1 Kings 18:29; 2 Chronicles 7:15; Psalm 34:15). No distraction averts his gaze; no interruption snaps his focus. The true God is a perfectly attentive God — and when we offer our full attention to others, we look a little like him.

At the same time, of course, our attention is amazingly unlike God’s. God can give his full focus ten trillion places at once; we must choose one among the trillions. God’s sight can range through all space and time; our two little forward-facing eyes frame our sight here and now. God can walk through the million-acre orchard of life and see every piece of fruit; we must stop before this tree, this branch, this apple.

Which means human attention is one of the most precious gifts we have to give. By it, we offer another creature the dignity of our loving regard. We humble ourselves to know and be known. We invite someone or something to stamp us, even for just a moment, with their unique, surprising existence.

And perhaps never more so than in an age like ours, when human attention is an endangered species.

Lessons for Stewarding Attention

Over half a century ago, the great Martyn Lloyd-Jones groaned,

The world and the organizations of life around and about us make things almost impossible; the most difficult thing in life is to order your own life and to manage it. . . . There are so many things that distract us. . . . Every one of us is fighting for his life at the present time, fighting to possess and master and live our own life. (Spiritual Depression, 209)

There are so many things that distract us. Lloyd-Jones had distractions like the morning newspaper in mind. What would he say of a society where most live with a newspaper-television-camera-telephone-radio-mailbox strapped to our hand? We are all fighting for our lives — and whether we realize it or not, fighting for our attention, fighting to possess and master and give our attention, rather than having it taken from us.

And fight is the right word, for the stakes are high. We cannot follow Jesus without giving him our attention (Mark 4:24; Hebrews 2:1). We cannot become like Jesus without attentively beholding him (2 Corinthians 3:18; Hebrews 12:1–3). And we cannot love like Jesus without offering others our unhurried, undistracted, calm, attentive regard.

How then can we steward our limited, precious, endangered attention? In short, by living as humans made in the image of God, rather than as gods made in the image of the Internet.

Simplify your inputs.

If you’re like most people in the digital age, you take in far too much information every day — at least, far too much information to process, much less store as long-term knowledge. You wake up every morning subtly tempted to attend to the world as God does. And as always, those who reach for deity forfeit their humanity: by trying to give our attention everywhere, we weaken our ability to give it meaningfully anywhere.

“By trying to give our attention everywhere, we weaken our ability to give it meaningfully anywhere.”

We could look for support from neuroscience, which assures us that an abundance of information, especially the kind shot at us from the Internet’s hundred firehoses, impoverishes memory and addicts us to distraction. In his landmark 2010 book The Shallows, for example, Nicholas Carr writes, “The influx of competing messages that we receive whenever we go online not only overloads our working memory; it makes it much harder for our frontal lobes to concentrate our attention on any one thing” (194).

But neuroscience only confirms the anthropology we find in Scripture. Humans are far more tree-like than computer-like: information becomes knowledge and wisdom only as fast as water becomes fruit on the branch. Water cannot travel into roots and up trunks and through limbs in a moment; it takes time, and often requires the painfully slow process of meditation (Psalm 1:3). An abundance of information processed rapidly makes for distracted, superficial souls; a limited amount of information processed slowly makes for knowledge and that increasingly rare quality so lauded in Scripture: wisdom.

Consider, then, simplifying your inputs. Read less, but read better. Learn less, but learn better. Listen to less, but listen better. You cannot eat all the apples in life’s information orchard; you would be foolish to try. So make peace with your gloriously limited humanity, and learn to choose and savor just a few.

Prioritize near over far.

For most of history, humans had no choice but to give their attention to those people and things that lay near at hand. Adam and Eve not only did not know what was happening outside Eden; they could not know. There was no Ancient Near East Times back then. So, what could they do but spend their waking hours devoted to what they could see?

Today, we are just as limited as our first parents, with just as many hours in the day and just as much capacity for focus, but with billions more objects vying for our attention. We no longer need concern ourselves with people who can talk back or with the sensory world. We can spend all our time on the digital side of the globe.

Such availability, however, has not fundamentally changed our responsibility. Though we can know nowadays about matters far beyond the garden called home, God still holds us responsible, first and foremost, for how well we love, care for, and attend to those people and callings within arm’s reach.

What was once an inevitable fact of creaturely life now needs stating: proximity heightens responsibility. The Ephesians were to care for the whole church’s households, but especially for their own (1 Timothy 5:8). The Galatians were to do good to all, but especially to fellow believers (Galatians 6:10). Israel fell under judgment, not for neglecting Edom’s poor, but the poor within their own gates (Amos 8:4–6).

“What was once an inevitable fact of creaturely life now needs stating: proximity heightens responsibility.”

And if you are a normal, busy person, your nearest circles likely need all the attention you can give. Few of us can attend well to spouse and children, church members and neighbors, while also attending well to digital controversies, international news, and high-school friends’ Instagram posts. Something must give, and we need not feel guilty for prioritizing the near over the far.

Don’t just see, but notice.

The muscle of attention strengthens or atrophies, in part, during everyday, ordinary moments. What do you do when you arrive somewhere five minutes early, or when you wait in line at the grocery store? Like so many, I find myself reaching for my shiny pocket rectangle, that beloved window into distant realms. But this window is also a shutter, closing my eyes to the realm right in front of me.

Creation has grown dim to many. We see without seeing and hear without hearing. The world’s ecstasies have become a background hum; the color spectrum has turned to shades of gray. We have grown unrighteously unlike the God of Psalm 104, that Wonderer who never grows weary of gushing springs and valley beasts, branched birds and growing grass, schools of fish and the hidden deeps (Psalm 104:10–11, 12, 14, 25–26).

We have also become unlike the attentive Jesus, that Psalm-104 God made flesh. He had a way of noticing what others only saw, didn’t he? The disciples saw some birds and flowers; he noticed God’s fatherly hand (Luke 6:22–31). The crowds saw seeds and yeast; he noticed the coming kingdom (Matthew 13:31–33). The multitudes saw a blind beggar; Jesus noticed Bartimaeus himself, in all his desperate need (Mark 10:46–52).

In Jane Austen’s Emma, as the heroine finds herself waiting at a storefront with only a dull street outside, the narrator tells us, “A mind lively and at ease, can do with seeing nothing, and can see nothing that does not answer” (174). Yes, a mind lively and at ease — a mind attentive — need not reach compulsively for the pocket. It can do with seeing what seems like nothing, because in that “nothing” is the handiwork of God, ready to answer our gaze. Do you notice?

Live in the attention of God.

Scripture’s charge to “pay attention” almost always includes God or his words as the object. So, he calls his people to pay attention to “all that I have said to you” (Exodus 23:13), “my words” (Jeremiah 6:19), “the prophetic word” (2 Peter 1:19), or simply, “me” (Isaiah 51:4). Yet when we give him our attention, we find that he has already given us his (Psalm 34:15).

Perhaps many need a Hagar moment, a moment of waking up to the presence of El-Roi, the God who sees us (Genesis 16:13) — and in Christ, the God who sees us graciously, ever and always. We do not find, when we look to him, a God who gives us half his attention, or half of himself, but all: his full gaze, under his full grace, now and for endless ages.

Nothing so shapes our attention like living — daily, adoringly — in the loving attention of God. Turn your eyes upon him at first rising, and see his eyes turned to you. Speak to him in the day’s lulls, and find his ear open. Return to him before shutting your attention off for the night, and then lie down knowing his will not.