You’ve done it again. Your conscience begins to stain. Here it is: that sin you vowed — you prayed — never to repeat. You feel the desperate urge to flee from yourself. You wonder, Does God feel the same?

You’ve read of that rocky ground that produces new life yet in the end falls away and dies (Matthew 13:20–21). You tremble at Demas, who, “in love with this present world,” deserted Paul to his apparent undoing (2 Timothy 4:10). You fear, after all your fighting, to finally fall prey to the sin at the door like Cain (Genesis 4:7). As Esau, do you wonder if you’ve sold your birthright so decisively that no power of tears can bring it back (Hebrews 12:17)? Was this your final chance? Will God leave you alone with your red stew?

Perhaps you wonder more specifically, Will he finally take his Spirit from me? You’ve already pled in David’s voice, “Cast me not away from your presence; and take not your Holy Spirit from me!” (Psalm 51:11). You wonder if you will end up being more Saul than David, for “the Spirit of the Lord departed from Saul” (1 Samuel 16:14). What makes you any different from him? You know for certain that if the Lord’s Spirit leaves you, you will leave the Lord.

And so it gets your attention afresh when you happen upon Paul’s command to the church at Ephesus: “Do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God” (Ephesians 4:30). Do all sins grieve the Holy Spirit of God? And can you finally grieve him to provoke his leaving you for good?

How We Grieve the Spirit

How do we grieve the Spirit of God? Do all sins grieve his heart the same?

Does grieving the Spirit entail sins like “lying to him” and “testing him,” as with Ananias and Sapphira (Acts 5:3)? Does it mean “provoking him” with unbelief, like the wilderness generation (Hebrews 3:7–11)? To “resist him,” like Stephen’s hearers (Acts 7:51)? Is grieving the Spirit the same as quenching him (1 Thessalonians 5:19)?

Instead of first considering that grieving the Spirit means poking at him with our own personal, more isolated sins of thought and deed, it is worthwhile, especially in our day, to realize that the context of this command is primarily corporate. How we frustrate the Spirit’s work to unite his people is in view more than how we sin in the chambers of our mind or alone in our room (though we may rightly imagine these also grieve the Spirit).

Symphony of Unity

Consider the communal emphasis preceding the command.

The Spirit has now unveiled the “mystery of Christ” through the holy prophets and apostles to God’s people: “The Gentiles are fellow heirs, members of the same body, and partakers of the promise in Christ Jesus through the gospel” (Ephesians 3:6). Christ’s blood has brought the far-off Gentiles near, leaving in the place of two people (two enemies) one new man (Ephesians 2:15).

To protect God’s magnum opus of diverse harmony, the church herself has a part to play: “Maintain the unity of Spirit in the bond of peace” (Ephesians 4:3). The Spirit unites us in one body, with one call, one hope, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one Father (4:4–6). We must not aggravate that work by slander, bitterness, corrupting talk, anger, and lovelessness against one another (Ephesians 4:25–29). We grieve the Spirit, most immediately, when we publish nasty tweets against each other, willfully misunderstand and gratify anger, backbite and gossip, neither seek forgiveness nor extend it.

This oneness (or not) plays out before more watching eyes than those of an unbelieving world. The hidden plan of God went public “so that through the church the manifold wisdom of God might now be made known to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly places” (Ephesians 3:10). We are placed on stage in a cosmic theater, before the eyes of the demonic forces and spiritual realms. The play is titled “The Manifold Wisdom of God,” and it stars one actress: the church. The theme of the play is God’s glory in the unity of his people.

How ugly, then, a shame for us, to refuse the union that the Spirit creates, that the blood of Christ purchased, that the Father planned before the foundation of the world. To sit on stage as devils and rogues, sneering as the church bites and devours one another. This, suffice it to say, grieves the Spirit.

Will He Ever Leave Us?

Can the Spirit be so grieved as to leave us? When Satan addresses us as Ichabod, saying, “The glory has departed” (1 Samuel 4:21), is he right?

Individually, we can wonder, What of Saul or Samson, or those who “go on sinning” and so trample underfoot the Son of God, profane the blood of the covenant, and “outrage the Spirit of grace” (Hebrews 10:29)?

Corporately, we can wonder, What of the unbelieving Jews that Paul alludes to in giving us the command? “They rebelled and grieved his Holy Spirit; therefore he turned to be their enemy, and himself fought against them” (Isaiah 63:10). Will the Spirit who convicts and encourages us today become an enemy because of our sin?

Paul assures us, “And do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God, by whom you were sealed for the day of redemption” (Ephesians 4:30). This is Paul’s second mention of this glory. Consider the first:

In [Christ] you also, when you heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation, and believed in him, were sealed with the promised Holy Spirit, who is the guarantee of our inheritance until we acquire possession of it, to the praise of his glory. (Ephesians 1:13–14)

“After so many provocations, you would leave you — but God the Holy Spirit will not.”

If you have been indwelt, renewed, sealed by the Spirit, he will never leave you, nor us as a people. After so many provocations, you would leave you — but God the Holy Spirit will not. He is given as our down payment in a way Old Testament saints (and Israel at large) did not receive him. The Spirit came upon individuals, anointing them for kingship and other great feats, but he did not indwell them as promised in the new covenant (Ezekiel 36:27).

The apostate may outrage the Spirit and choose his darling sins over Jesus, but this proves he did not truly have the Spirit — for the Spirit seals us, marking us as God’s for the day of redemption, the day of Christ’s return.

Love-Sweetened Grief

So we grieve the Spirit of God by our sin, specifically our sins against the devil-shaming, God’s-wisdom-exalting unity of the gospel. But this is not a grief unto desertion. As God’s people, the Spirit is our guarantee until Jesus returns.

“As God’s people, the Spirit is our guarantee until Jesus returns.”

Perhaps one more question is in order: Does the Spirit dwell in us as we might dwell in a broken down, dirty motel? Is he only ever grieved by our sin?

Charles Spurgeon beautifully reminds us of the flower’s scent contained in the very word grief:

There is something very touching in this admonition, “Grieve not the Holy Spirit of God.” It does not say, “Do not make him angry.” A more delicate and tender term is used — “Grieve him not.” . . . For grief is a sweet combination of anger and of love. It is anger, but all the gall is taken from it. Love sweetens the anger, and turns the edge of it, not against the person, but against the offense.

Don’t miss the point: the Spirit is a Person. The Spirit himself loves us (Romans 15:30). He inspires the word grief here to communicate this grand love, even in view of our sin. A disapproval that is wrapped in undying care. May we not grieve the love of the third person of the Trinity, who has sealed us irreversibly for the day of our Savior’s arrival.

Who is God? What is he like, and how do we come to know him? What is salvation?

We may be tempted to consign these questions to the first weeks of evangelistic courses or the earliest years of discipleship, yet they were central to the ministry of Cyril of Alexandria (c. AD 376–444). As a bishop and theologian with far-reaching influence, he saw the gravity of these questions, as well as the pastoral fallout if Christians thoughtlessly rattled off pat answers.

Cyril’s heart was that believers would consciously and joyfully place Jesus Christ front and center in their understanding of God and their salvation. His tenacious Christ-centeredness shaped some of the most significant all-church councils and creeds that we have inherited today.

Seeds of Scandal

In the fifth century, perhaps the most famous church in the world was the Great Church of Constantinople. Enthroned there in the heart of the “New Rome,” its archbishop carried a leading political and theological voice. In 428, the job was given to a well-loved Syrian preacher named Nestorius.

Nestorius wanted to stop all references to Mary as theotokos, Greek for “Mother of God.” The title had long been popular and had tried to express something of the wonder of the incarnation: that a human mother should give birth to God the Son in human flesh. In Nestorius’s mind, however, the title was imprecise and dangerous. His concern was not that it encouraged undue veneration of Mary (that would develop later in church history), but that it implied something about God that he could not accept.

That God should be born, naked and crying, depending on a mother to feed and wash him, was unthinkable. God, eternally unchanging and untouchable, simply could not be straightforwardly identified with the wriggling baby in the manger. No, Mary must be called “Mother of Christ,” not “Mother of God.” There had to be a clear distinction between the two. Nestorius devoted a sermon series to the subject, and his troubled colleagues began to ask, If Mary is not the “Mother of God,” then just who is her son?

Nearly seven hundred miles to the south in Egypt, Cyril, the archbishop of Alexandria, was alerted to the emerging scandal. Having spent years writing biblical commentaries and theological works on the Trinity, he knew he had to step in and challenge Nestorius. Like the apostle Paul centuries before, Cyril saw that when the identity of Jesus Christ is distorted, so is our understanding of God and what it means to know him — with devastating consequences. “Another Jesus” goes hand in hand with “another gospel” (2 Corinthians 11:4).

Another Jesus

Nestorius believed in Jesus as the eternal Son and Word of God. He believed, along with the Council of Nicaea of AD 325, in the humanity and divinity of Christ. Yet the distortion of Jesus he presented threatened to undo the orthodox faith he claimed to hold.

“‘Another Jesus’ goes hand in hand with ‘another gospel.’”

Nestorius’s deepest problem was that he had his definition of God prepared long before he came to look at the person of Jesus Christ. The carpenter from Nazareth, in the manger and on the cross, could not fit with his understanding of God. Following his mentor, Theodore of Mopsuestia (c. 350–428), Nestorius taught that Mary’s son was a separate man from God the Son: a man assumed (taken up) and brought into fellowship with God. Jesus and the Word enjoyed a relationship of unique cooperation, with the Word graciously sharing the honor of his sonship with Jesus. Because of his obedience, Jesus came to earn his resurrection into a new life free from death and decay (Nestorius, Bazaar of Heracleides, 1.3).

For Nestorius, although the people of first-century Israel saw an individual human being with divine power, they were actually looking at a kind of partnership of two sons, presented in one man. A glass wall ran down the middle of Jesus Christ, shielding the eternal Word from the human experiences and troubles of the man until he was perfected. While Nestorius was happy to worship and adore the man Jesus, he did so only beside “the one who bears him” (Sermon 9.262).

Cyril could see that Nestorius’s Jesus was only a man like the rest of us, elevated to a special relationship with God. The one who suffered and died on the cross was not technically God the Son himself coming to us in the flesh. Instead, God wore gloves, as it were, to deal with sinful humanity. He promoted a man to divine dignity, setting before us a supercharged example of holiness to imitate. Nestorius’s Jesus is the perfect Savior for those who would win salvation for themselves.

The Real Jesus

In AD 431, at the Council of Ephesus, Cyril (along with most of the other bishops) opposed Nestorius’s teaching. They saw that it contradicted not only the biblical Jesus but also the biblical gospel. Leaning heavily on Cyril’s writings, the fathers of the church affirmed that while there are two natures in Christ, there is only one person.

In other words, God the Son was the person in action during the incarnation, whether he was walking on water by the Spirit or tired after a journey in his flesh. He maintained his unchanged, eternal divine nature, but had added to himself a truly human nature — along with all of its capacity to fall asleep in a boat, battle temptation, or suffer crucifixion.

“The Son of Mary was none other than God the Son himself, made known and living in human nature as well as divine.”

God the Son personally took all that we are to himself, choosing this way of being “for us and for our salvation,” as the old Nicene Creed had it. In answer to the question of the pastors of Constantinople, the leaders gathered at Ephesus were clear: the son of Mary was none other than God the Son himself, made known and living as man as well as divine.

Cyril’s Influence

In time, this picture of Christ came to be known as the “hypostatic union”: a true union of divine and human in the one person (Greek hypostasis) of God the Word. It was not an agreement between two parties with separate agendas, nor a cooperation of equals.

In fact, there was a critical asymmetry to this union, for the humanity of Jesus comprised no separate person, as Nestorius had taught, but was “personated” by the Son. Humanity had been added to a preexisting divine person. There was no Jesus to know other than the second Person of the Trinity, now made flesh. This meant that all of Jesus’s actions and words were truly the actions and words of God the Son.

Just as it was right to call Mary theotokos, so it was right to say that God the Son played in the streets of Nazareth as a child, that God the Son had compassion on lost and helpless sinners (Mark 6:34), that God the Son shed his blood on the cross for our redemption (Acts 20:28). For it was no other person, no other human, but only the eternal Word in his humanity. After all, he was Immanuel, God with us.

These biblical convictions were honed and clarified by another all-church council held in Chalcedon in AD 451. Responding to another stream of false teaching, the church again turned to Cyril’s Christology (though he had now been dead some seven years). The gathered bishops affirmed that the one person of Jesus Christ was to be acknowledged in two “unconfused, unchangeable, indivisible, inseparable” natures. They confessed that the divine and the human in no way undermined or undid one another, yet that he was nevertheless just one person: “one and the same Son” who was with the Father before all things and who was born of Mary for us and our salvation. Chalcedon rang deeply with the echo of Cyril’s theology.

God Was Pleased

Nestorius’s precooked doctrine of God meant that he struggled to get divinity and humanity in the same person. There was an unbridgeable gulf between the divine and human, and his theology left believers the task of crossing it on their own, following at a distance in the footsteps of a superman from Nazareth.

Cyril, however, began with Jesus and allowed the Son of God to reveal the nature of God (John 1:18). And the God revealed in Jesus, he saw, was pleased to draw near to sinful humanity in person (Colossians 1:19¬–20). He came in uncompromised deity, but with mind-bending condescension, to cross the divide himself. The Son stepped in, clothed in our humanity, laying down his life, and taking hold of us when we could not save ourselves. In Jesus, God truly demonstrates his love for undeserving sinners, up close and personal.

Audio Transcript

Well, yesterday we started this five hundredth week on the podcast looking at Christian love and how that love differs from the love of the world. And I want to carry that discussion over to today because there’s another key factor that distinguishes our love. And it’s about the fear of money: specifically, the fear of not having enough money. Money fears kill our love. And money fears kill our worship. These are key points made by John Piper in a 1997 sermon on Luke 12. Here’s Pastor John to make those connections.

So Luke 12:32–34, of the dozens of texts I could have chosen, is all about worshiping God with your money. There are four points I want to make. Many more could be made: I think I counted about ten sermons I’d like to preach on these three verses. But I’ll preach one and make four points.

“When you magnify God through not being afraid about money, you worship.”

In verse 32 in particular, the first point is that God commands us not to be afraid about money, not to have fear about money. When it comes to money things, we’re not supposed to be anxious. Don’t worry. “Do not be afraid, little flock, for your Father has chosen gladly to give you the kingdom” (Luke 12:32 NASB 1995). That little verse is sandwiched before and after with money. Verses 22 and following are all about money: things, clothing, house, and whether you’re anxious about them. And then it’s followed by selling possessions and giving alms and laying up treasures in heaven instead of on the earth. So the first point of this little verse — this beautiful, magnificent promise verse — is don’t be anxious. Don’t be afraid.

Five Ways to Magnify God

But now there’s a deeper point in this verse. And the deeper point is that when you’re not afraid concerning money, you magnify five things about God, and that’s worship. When you’re not afraid or anxious or fearful about money, you magnify five things about God (in this one verse). And when you magnify God through not being afraid about money, you worship. Here are the five things. These are precious things that we want to magnify about God.

1. Magnify him as shepherd.

When we’re not afraid about money, we magnify God as our shepherd. “Fear not, little flock” (Luke 12:32). The word flock means we’ve got a shepherd, and we are sheep. And therefore, Psalm 23 kicks in: “The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want” (Psalm 23:1). That word is the old Elizabethan word for lack: “I shall not lack. I shall not be in want.” That is, if I have a shepherd like this, who loves to give me the kingdom, I will not lack for what I need. Therefore, if I believe that and thus exclude fear, I will magnify his shepherd-love.

2. Magnify him as Father.

If I do not fear concerning money, I show that I treasure God as my Father. “Do not be afraid, little flock, for your Father has chosen gladly to give you the kingdom” (Luke 12:32 NASB 1995). So not only are we sheep who have a shepherd; we are children who have a Father. He’s multiplying images for us here to get rid of fear. Don’t be afraid — you are sheep who have a shepherd. Don’t be afraid — you are children who have a Father.

“Don’t be afraid — you are sheep who have a shepherd. Don’t be afraid — you are children who have a Father.”

Now, what does that imply? Well, verse 30, two verses earlier, makes plain what it implies. “All these things [eat, drink, wear, money] the nations of the world eagerly seek; but your Father knows that you need these things.” Now, he didn’t say that to mock us. He said that because, knowing that we need these things, he’ll work to provide what we need in order to magnify his Fatherhood. But now be careful. Do not come to God with an agenda defining for him what you need. Come to God and learn from him what you need. The word need today in America is so inflated that it scarcely has any meaning in a universal context anymore.

So, if we are fearless about money, we magnify him as shepherd, we magnify him as Father, and that is worship.

3. Magnify him as King.

If we’re not afraid concerning money, we show that we treasure God as our King. “Do not be afraid, little flock, for your Father has chosen gladly to give you the kingdom” (Luke 12:32 NASB 1995). Who has right and authority to give us the kingdom? No peon disposes of the kingdom. The king disposes of the kingdom. And therefore, not only is he a shepherd loving us as sheep and our Father loving us as children; he is King ruling over us, providing for us, exerting sovereignty and power on our behalf as subjects against our enemies, including the lack of things we need. If we trust him as King and shepherd and Father, and thus overcome our fear of not having enough money, then we magnify him, and he is worshiped.

4. Magnify him as generous.

If we are fearless with regard to our money, we magnify him as free and generous. “Do not be afraid, little flock, for your Father has chosen gladly to give you the kingdom” (Luke 12:32 NASB 1995). Not sell you the kingdom, not rent you the kingdom, not lease you the kingdom for payments — mortgage payments, rent payments, lease payments. He will give you the kingdom. He loves to give you the kingdom, which means he’s generous. And therefore, we let his shepherd-like, fatherly, kingly generosity work on our fear, our anxieties.

Now I’m talking a battle here. We’re not talking about something that happened yesterday and doesn’t happen tomorrow. We’re talking a weekly thing, a paycheck-by-paycheck thing, or unemployment check by unemployment check. We’re talking about a battle. The way we battle is by preaching to ourselves what I’m preaching right now. That’s the way I do it. It’s not automatic for John Piper to be fearless about money, though I get paid plenty. It isn’t automatic for me. It isn’t automatic for you.

We are battling fear and anxiety every day, not to mention greed. And we do it by saying, “He’s shepherd to me. He’s Father to me. He’s King to me.” And he’s not — as shepherd, Father, and King — folding his arms, standing off in the corner, saying, “Maybe you’ll get the kingdom. I’ll watch your performances.” That’s not the way he does it. Give, give, give, free, free, free is what the Lord does.

5. Magnify him as happy.

And when we overcome our fear and live free of fear, we magnify our God as happy in his giving. “Do not be afraid, little flock, for your Father has chosen gladly to give you the kingdom” (Luke 12:32 NASB 1995). Or another version says, “it is [his] good pleasure to give you the kingdom” (NKJV) — or another version, “it pleases him” (NIV). He is pleased to give you the kingdom. He wants to do this. He is not selfish. Simony is not his virtue (or vice). He is a generous God.

Trust Your Providing God

So the first point of this message is to trust him as shepherd. Trust him as Father. Trust him as King. Trust his generosity. And trust the fact that it’s lavish because he loves to do it. Preach these things to yourself, and attack fear and anxiety in your life with these truths — so that when you overcome fear about money, God gets the glory as these five glorious things shine out of your life.

And if anyone asks you, “I know that you’re in financial straits, and yet at work you seem to be caring about others and happy. How is that?” Then you say, “Can I share five things with you about my God?” And he is worshiped.