Audio Transcript

Welcome back on this Friday. The last time we were together, on Wednesday, we looked at Psalm 77. Asaph, the author of the psalm, was deeply despondent — so despondent he couldn’t even sleep, he says in Psalm 77:4. There are physical dimensions to despondency. And we’re going to look at that today in this episode, and what to do when despondency hits. It’s another episode we recorded live in Nashville.

We got an email from an anonymous woman who asked this: “Pastor John, hello. In a previous episode of this podcast — back in 2018, in APJ 1157 — you mentioned at the very end of the episode, in a brief little mention, ‘the sin of despondency.’ I’ve never heard that before. Can you explain what that is? What is despondency? And why is it considered a sin against God?”

That’s a necessary question because it could easily be misunderstood. Look, I went back and listened to it to see, “What did I really say?” And what I said was, “I jog to” — I forget the verb I use — “preempt or avoid or lessen my bent toward the sin of despondency.” I jog to diminish my bent toward the sin of despondency.

Starting with the Body

Now, before I define despondency and what’s going on there, why I think it can be right to call it a sin, there’s an assumption in saying you can jog to avoid sin. That’s a pretty amazing statement, and I really want that to be felt here because I built the APJ around it.

Paul says in 1 Corinthians 7:5, “Don’t let a husband and a wife separate from each other” — that is, stop having sexual relations — “except perhaps by agreement for a limited time, that you may devote yourselves to prayer; but then come together again, so that Satan may not tempt you.” Which means that an appropriately frequent and satisfying sexual intimacy in marriage is a protection against lust and fornication and adultery. That’s what it says. So there is a physical phenomenon called having sex that can lessen the likelihood that you will sin.

“Physical steps in life are means to avoiding certain sins.”

Now, jogging and moroseness (or self-pity or dismal attitudes) in my life are similarly related. If I don’t get exercise, I am more vulnerable to discouragement, depression, feeling dismal, feeling excessively sad. Therefore, whatever goes on — there are names for it in the brain — I’m going to fight. And the same thing is true of sleep. If you are prone to be irritable if you get five hours of sleep, it is God’s will that you get eight, because it’s a sin to be irritable. Okay, made that point. Physical steps in life are means to avoiding certain sins.

‘Why Are You Cast Down?’

Now, why would you call despondency a sin? One reason is because — I’m going to come back and qualify it, so hang on — the psalmist fights against it. Psalm 42:5: “Why are you cast down, O my soul, and why are you in turmoil within me? Hope in God; for I shall again praise him, my salvation and my God.” You notice that psalmists got mad at themselves when they were despondent.

So, I say, if they’re getting mad at themselves because they’re despondent, then we shouldn’t be despondent. Now, you don’t have to call it sin right away, but you should not like it and should want to get it gone. Get rid of it. That’s one reason. Paul said in Romans 14:23, “Whatever does not proceed from faith is sin.” And I suspect that my giving way to despondency is not owing to how good my faith is. I have let the fight of faith lapse, and I’m just sliding right into despondency. That’s what I was getting at in that podcast.

Seasons of Trouble

Now, I think my thoughts about Jesus in Gethsemane here are going to be helpful to you, because you all do get despondent, right? There’s just nobody in this room who doesn’t move into discouragement seasons, or depressed seasons, or sad seasons. Everybody does. And you’re going to say, “Well, am I automatically sinning when that onslaught comes?”

No. And the reason I say no is because Jesus said in John 12:27, “Now is my soul troubled.” Remember that sentence, that Gethsemane night? “Now is my soul troubled.” Now, that’s the same word in Greek that he uses in John 14:1, where he says, “Let not your hearts be troubled. Believe in God; believe also in me.”

“Jesus never sinned — ever. And he was troubled on the night before he died.”

Jesus never sinned — ever. He didn’t sin in thought. He didn’t sin in emotion. He didn’t sin in deed. He never sinned. And he was troubled on the night before he died. So the question then becomes for me, like, “Oh, the Bible’s got a contradiction in it” — baloney. That’s so naive to draw conclusions like that when the author himself knows exactly what he’s doing, and Jesus knew what he was doing.

What you do is you go to Gethsemane, and you say, “What did you do, Jesus? What did you do when this feeling came to you, which you’re describing as troubled? I’ve been troubled. My cross comes at me. I see it coming, and I feel that.” What did he do?

Following Jesus in the Fight

Let me just point out what he did. This is coming from Mark 14:32 and the following:

He chose a few; he chose three — Peter, James, John — and he went off. He left the others and he went off.
He poured out his soul to them. “My soul is very sorrowful, even to death” (Mark 14:34). He said that to them.
He asked them to pray. “Watch and pray that you may not enter into temptation” (Mark 14:38). Pray for me. Pray for you.
He poured out his soul to his Father. It says he fell on the ground and prayed, “Abba, Father, all things are possible for you. Remove this cup from me” (Mark 14:36). He’s not sinning. And his heart is very troubled about what’s coming in the next few hours. Will he be able to make it? And he’s crying out, “Father, if it were possible, let this cup pass from me.” And then he rested in the sovereignty of God: “Not my will, but yours be done.” He surrendered to God.
And the last thing he did is not mentioned there, but it is in Hebrews 12:2: “For the joy that was set before him [he] endured the cross, despising the shame, is seated at the right hand of the throne of God.”

I do not know where the line is crossed, as you move into an emotional downer — where it becomes sin. But it does eventually, and it does where you quit fighting. You just surrender. You don’t do what Jesus did. You just say, “Well, that’s the way I’m wired,” or, “I’ve got that kind of personality,” or, “Nobody knows the trouble I’ve seen.” And so you just surrender. And I would say the evidence that your hardship is not a sin is because of the strategies you have undertaken to fight it.

We want to do what we did a few years ago and have a conversation with Pastor John Piper. Pastor John, thank you so much for being here again, for being at CROSS Conference.

My pleasure.

I want to pick up where we left off last time. You made a very interesting statement. You said that when you were twenty years old, you had maybe the three most important weeks of your life, lying in a hospital bed. Why might those be the three most important weeks of your life?

Well, there are at least two specific reasons why. It was 1966, and it was right after summer school. I had just met and fallen madly in love with Noël Henry, and I had just heard from the Lord in April — I thought, unmistakably — that I should be a pre-med student and head for medical school. So, I took chemistry in summer school and signed up for organic chemistry in the fall and found myself flat on my back with mononucleosis as the semester began. I watched my organic chemistry possibilities falling away as I lay there.

Harold John Ockenga, a pastor from Boston, was speaking at the Spiritual Emphasis week in the chapel about two hundred yards to my right as I lay in bed. I was listening on the college radio station and everything in me said, “I would love to be able to handle the Bible like that.” It was so compelling after three days that I knew it didn’t matter whether I could catch up on organic chemistry — I was going to drop that course anyway — and I was heading for theological education. That was totally life-shaping, right? I missed it in April. So, if you think you know God’s will for your life, you probably don’t. All my subjective senses of God’s leading were wrong, I hope. My whole life would be misdirected if that were not the case.

Noël had a doctor for a dad and thought she was falling in love with a pre-med student, which she was. And she came in one day to the hospital room and I said to her, “These chapel messages have just undone me, and I’m not going to pursue medical school. I’m going to go to seminary, and I want to learn how to handle the Bible like that. What do you think about that?” And she said what she always has said for 57 years now: “I fell in love with you, not your vocation.” And it’s been that way ever since. She’s been an absolutely glorious, God-sent support for my life and ministry.

“You don’t plan your life; God plans your life.”

Those two things I think warranted that statement. Under submitting to Jesus, who you marry and what you do with your whole life are, I think, about the two biggest decisions you could make. And if it takes God to put you in the hospital to make those things clear, then don’t begrudge a little seminary of suffering.

I think it’s just good for you guys who are 18, 19, and 20, that this could be the week or the year in which God radically changes and alters your life forever. And you should believe he’s able and willing to do that. On the line of that, you’ve said before that you didn’t plan your life and that nobody plans their life. Why is that encouraging? Why is that important for us to know?

Well, it’s important to know because it’s true. James 4:13–16 says,

Come now, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go into such and such a town and spend a year there and trade and make a profit” — yet you do not know what tomorrow will bring. What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes. Instead you ought to say, “If the Lord wills, we will live and do this or that.” As it is, you boast in your arrogance. All such boasting is evil.

You are arrogant in saying, “I’m going back to my hotel tonight,” unless there is this deep sense of, “If the Lord wills, I’ll go back to my hotel tonight. And if he doesn’t, then I may die between now and then.” Those two words are all-encompassing. You ought to say, “If the Lord wills, we will live,” which means every heartbeat right now is a gift. You don’t deserve it. And he could stop it just like that and he will have done you no wrong.

Second, when he says, “We will live and do this or that,” you should think that the posture you’re in right now is dictated by the Lord. If you have your legs crossed, that’s because God willed it ten million years ago. If you don’t believe that, then you ought to be at this conference because that’s what we stand for — the all-pervasive sovereignty of God and his total governance of the world. So, it’s true that God plans our lives and we don’t, ultimately.

Now secondly, it just fits with experience. How many of you chose the family in which you were born? How many of you chose to be male or female? That’s a controversial question, but you’ll hear more about that and that’s a serious issue today. But you know what I mean. You didn’t choose. You didn’t choose your ethnicity. You didn’t choose the town you were born in, the socioeconomic status you were born into, or the nation you were born into. You didn’t choose anything to get started in this world. And almost all of it dictates what you’ve become. That’s a piece.

Now, just take my own life and let’s just start in college. Why did I go to the seminary I went to? Well, there were palm trees in the catalog. That’s a crummy reason to go to a seminary. I met Dan Fuller at Fuller Seminary and everything changed. That was the most important event of my life after those two big events. I sat in eight classes with this man who gave me the big-God theology I have today. He gave me Christian Hedonism and assiduous attentiveness to the word of God. What would’ve happened to me if I had not gone? And I went for all the wrong reasons. I didn’t plan this. It was a gift to me.

Then I came to the end of seminary. I had been in seminary for three years and didn’t know what to do. I was 25. And the teacher said, “Well, if you don’t know what to do, just go ahead and get the last degree and then you can do anything.” I said, “Okay. Where should I go to graduate school?” I got turned down at the one place I applied in America. I applied to Basel and Munich and Durham, and the only place where Noël could get a job and support us for a year and a half till she got pregnant was Munich. So, we went to Munich. I didn’t choose Munich. God chose Munich. Then I was done with three years of graduate school. I had a wife, a kid, and I had to put bread on the table.

Nobody in America knew I existed. I had been out of the country for three years. I would do anything for Jesus, but I just wanted to use my Bible. Along came a graduate student who said, “Well, I think they need a one-year sabbatical replacement at Bethel College in St. Paul.” I had never heard of Bethel College. I thought, “Where’s St. Paul?” I mean, I’m really provincial. I don’t know anything. I had never been to Minnesota in my life, but I had to have a job. They took me for one year, and it turned into six. I was born in South Carolina and I’ve been in Minnesota for fifty years. Do you think I chose that? That’s crazy. Why would anybody live in Minnesota, right?

So, I went to Minnesota and that one year turned into six years. I loved all of it, and God just moved in so mighty and said, “I want you to preach, not just teach. I want you to herald these truths from Romans 9, not just analyze the God of Romans 9. So, move toward a pastorate.” I went to the denominational headquarters and I said, “I’m going to leave teaching and I’m going to look for a church. What would you suggest?” And they said, “We know the church. Go to Bethlehem.” I said, “Where’s Bethlehem?” They said, “It’s in downtown Minneapolis. They’re just building nearby.”

I got in the car, went down there and looked around, and that’s where they called me. I was at the church for 33 years. I mean, you don’t plan your life, just get over it. You don’t plan your life. Here’s what the Lord wants from you, and we’ve heard it already several times. He wants your flat-out, 24/7 devotion to him and his calling of holiness in your life. The will of God for your life is holiness (1 Thessalonians 4:3). He will guide you if your life is absolutely devoted. Just say, “I’ll go anywhere; I’ll do anything” — you ought to be able to say that every day — “I will go anywhere and do anything. Just lead me. I’m flat-out, totally devoted to Jesus.” You don’t plan your life; God plans your life.

Amen. So with that, you weren’t aimless in your life. You had some ambition. I assume it wasn’t your ambition to be famous, to make Calvinism cool, to speak at conferences, or to write all these books, right? Did you have ambition? Is ambition okay, though we trust that God plans our lives? Is it okay for us to have desires and ambitions and pursue different things?

Ambition is okay because Paul said, “My ambition is to preach the gospel where Christ has not been named” (see Romans 15:20). You talk about ambition, this man was totally devoted to getting the gospel to places where it wasn’t yet known. Holy ambition is of the Lord and not nearly enough of you have it. One of the reasons we have this conference is to awaken holy ambition. An unholy ambition is to make a lot of money and be famous and live in the suburbs and live the American dream. A holy ambition is to be willing to lay your life down for Jesus, whatever he calls you to do.

I would probably be naive to say that at every single point in my life there was no successful temptation to want to be noticed for the wrong reasons. But as far as my conscious aim was concerned, money didn’t mean anything to me and being famous didn’t mean anything. But I’ll tell you, when it comes to how God saves us — the sovereignty of God in the salvation of sinners, called Calvinism — I have ambitions. I want all of you to be Calvinists. I want all of you to believe in the total depravity of the soul, in the unconditional election of God, in the definite atonement of the Lord, in the irresistibility of his grace, and in the perseverance of the saints.

This is just glorious gospel truth called Calvinism. That’s why we exist. The leader of Reaching and Teaching was up here, and he said, “We’re Reformed and baptistic and we’re complementarian.” Well, this is not a baptistic conference, though a lot of you are baptists. In that part we’re going to tolerate a lot of differences.

We’d be happy for you all to be baptists. I mean, you’re welcome. The water is nice.

But as far as being Reformed and complementarian, that’s what we are, and we’re not going to sweep it under the rug. So, the answer is yes, I have ambitions. I have ambitions to this day. I sit there in my chair with Noël in our living room, thinking, “Good night, my life is easy. Whatever happened to the pressures I used to live under?”

So, I got out my little booklet that I carry around, this little field notebook. I have a field book and I got it out and I wrote down my goals for 2024, just the things that are expected of me working for Desiring God full-time. At the end I thought, “Okay, I didn’t put down anything for the three hours free I have every night and the 8 to 12 hours I have free every Saturday. And I just won’t put anything on the calendar for Sunday.” Three times five is fifteen, and fifteen plus ten for Saturday is twenty-five hours.

Everything in me says, “What can I do with that? What can I do with that? Just watch stuff? Watch stuff on TV?” We don’t even have a TV. We haven’t had a TV for fifty years in our marriage. Of course, we have computers, which is the same thing now. I get that. But I don’t want to do that. I have ambitions. I want my life to count for those 25 hours. I don’t want to just veg every night and spend Saturday putzing around in the yard and in the garage — and I believe in keeping a nice yard for the neighborhood.

So yes, I do have ambitions, and I suspect the forms and kinds of ambition I have have produced books and conferences and things like that. But fame is very relative. I’m a big fish in a little, teeny pond. We just crossed 8 billion people in the world, right? What percentage of those people know who John Piper is? Maybe it’s 0.001 percent. I’ve never done the math, but that’s it more or less. Don’t get a big head if you’re popular among twelve people, or twelve thousand, or a million. It’s no big deal.

That’s helpful. You said before, if you go back to when you were 22, you would join a Bible-believing, Bible-preaching, Bible-structured, Bible-obedient church. That’s a lot of Bible. Why do Christians need the local church? We have God’s Spirit. We have God’s word. We have Look at the Book and Desiring God. Why do we need the local church? Why should they commit their life to the local church?

They should do that because God says, “Don’t forsake the assembling of yourselves together” (see Hebrews 10:25). The whole assumption of everything Paul wrote was that Christ has a body on the earth, and that all people are members of the body. And it’s just crazy to think you can be a member of a body while living in the woods and not relating to the other members of the body. That’s just crazy. You just don’t believe the Bible if you try to live a life isolated from the body manifest in its local expressions.

Here’s the payoff. I think I can mention two or three things. Number one, God has saved my marriage more than once through corporate worship. I don’t doubt it. Noël and I have been married 55 years. They have been embattled years sometimes, not knowing why we hurt each other with our words, not knowing why we can’t communicate the way we’d like. There have been seasons of Christian counseling, and life has not always been easy at home. I’ll get my back up about something that Noël said.

But I’m a pastor, right? I go to church to preach, and things are crummy at home. That’s a nice word for it. I’m on the front pew and Chuck is leading us in songs like these. And the mercy of God lifted up in song and his patience and his kindness have broken over me like a wave that has often said, “You’re an idiot, Piper, for prioritizing your little pain over her, or over the gospel, or over the church. Get real. Wake up. Get the world sorted out here.”

In other words, corporate worship has sorted out my life. It has made things look real. It has made big things look big and little things little, and it has rescued me from pouting and self-pity. If you’re totally engaged in corporate worship, surrounded by people who are engaged, it will save your marriage, it will save your job, it will save your calling, and it will save your sanity.

Number two, my guess is that most of you here are asking the question, “How can I know what to do with the rest of my life?” I mean, practically, it is nice to say, “You should just try to be holy.” But you might think, “Come on Piper, we have to do something. I have to make some money and I have to have a place to live. If I’m going to get married, I have to be able to support or be a part of a support team. How do I do that?” And my answer is that you’ll find out what your gifts are and what your calling is not by going off by yourself and pleading with God to reveal it to you, but by embedding yourself in a local church and using whatever gifts you can to serve other people. That’s absolutely the way it happened with me.

I went off to seminary not knowing at all what I should do with this precious book that I love, the Bible. After one semester I realized, “I have to be involved in the church.” So, I embedded myself and Noël in Lake Avenue Church in Pasadena, California. I said to John McClure, “John, I need to do something.” He said, “Can you teach seventh grade boys?” I said, “I don’t know. I’ll try.” He put me in the seventh grade boys group, and I did it. And the next year he said, “How about ninth grade boys?” I said, “Sure.” Because they split them up, boys and girls. And then I taught ninth grade boys. I devoted about four hours every Saturday to get ready for this class. I wanted to give them my very best on Sunday morning.

At the end of that year, there was one more year to go. The Galilean young adult Sunday school class came to me and said, “Would you teach us?” The upshot of this was knowing, “I’m a teacher. These seventh grade boys loved it. These ninth grade boys loved it. This young marriage class loved it. I’m a teacher. That’s who I am.” So, I went to get trained to be a teacher. I taught for six years, and then God said, “Actually, I have another chapter. I want you to proclaim. You’ve explained long enough, okay? I want you to proclaim. I want you to herald like a town crier that says, ‘Hear ye, hear ye, hear ye.’” That’s the second thing. You will find out who you are in relation to other people.

I’ve been trying to help folks to find their way recently. They think they want to do something, and I ask, “Has anybody encouraged you in that and said that you’re especially fruitful in that?” They said, “No.” I said, “Well, that’s probably not it.” That’s really a big deal.

“Corporate worship has sorted out my life. It has made big things look big and little things little.”

Then the third thing is that you’re probably going to find your spouse at church, or in some church-related thing. We have a strange culture, right? You have to go searching to find a spouse. Praise God for cultures where they just set it up. It would be a lot simpler. But that’s not going to change. It’s not going to happen. We live in a very individualistic culture. So, you’re going to have to sort this out, which is not easy, but it sure helps if you have Christian community.

Most people see the church as an event on the calendar, but in the New Testament we see it as a people to center our life around. You’re not meant to live this Christian life alone. You’re meant to be involved in a local church, center your life around those people, and let God minister to you through those people. You’re going to go through difficulty and trial in this life. And with that, I kind of want to talk about affliction in the Christian life.

In Luke 22:31, Jesus says to Peter, “Satan has asked to sift you like wheat.” Now, most of us would assume that Jesus would say, “But I told him he couldn’t have you.” But that’s not what Jesus says. Jesus says, “I’ve prayed that your faith would not fail” (see Luke 22:32). What does it mean to be sifted by Satan? Have you yourself been sifted? And why does God allow his people to be sifted?

Well, I think I could give one clear answer from 2 Corinthians, but let me just stay with Peter for a minute. Jesus told Peter, “You’re going to deny me three times.” This is a done deal. Jesus doesn’t make mistakes. He says, “You’re going to fail.” And then he tells Peter,

Behold, Satan demanded to have you, that he might sift you like wheat, but I have prayed for you that your faith may not fail. And when [not if] you have turned again, strengthen your brothers. (Luke 22:31–32)

I’m assuming that little interchange there is part of the answer to why. Jesus is saying, “I want you to be stronger than you are. You’re not as strong as you think you are. You are not strong. Do you think you’re going to last tonight? Do you think you’re going to die with me? You’re not. You’re going to wimp out and deny me three times, but I have prayed.”

Now, I think what Jesus means when he says he prayed “that your faith not fail,” is not that Peter wouldn’t fail in that moment. I think his faith failed. He did not trust God for the strength or the courage to be honest and true, and say, “That’s my Lord. I’ll die with him.” He didn’t have the faith for that. He failed. But he didn’t fail utterly. He went out and he wept bitterly and he turned and he became a valiant spokesman. So, I think the answer to why God lets Satan sift us is for that reason.

To be sifted means you have this sieve and you put the grain in it and push it through and the grain comes through without anything else in it. He wants to sift your faith out of your life and just rub you over these harsh things so that what comes through is you minus faith. That’s the sifting of the devil. Whether it’s pleasure or whether it’s pain, he’s going to sift your faith out of your life. That’s his goal. And Jesus is praying for you. If you’re a believer, Jesus is praying for you that it would not happen utterly.

So, how did he fix it? We all know what Jesus did when they were out in the boat and they were not catching anything. Jesus said, “Throw the net on the other side” (see John 21:6). They caught a lot of fish. John said, “It’s the Lord” (see John 21:7). Peter put his clothes on and jumped into the water and swam ashore. And Jesus said something to Peter. I want some of you right now to hear Jesus say this to you because you have blown it. You have totally blown it the way Peter did. You have denied the Lord in whatever ways. I want you to hear Jesus say this:

Jesus said to Simon Peter, “Simon, son of John, do you love me more than these?” He said to him, “Yes, Lord; you know that I love you.” He said to him, “Feed my lambs.” He said to him a second time, “Simon, son of John, do you love me?” He said to him, “Yes, Lord; you know that I love you.” He said to him, “Tend my sheep.” He said to him the third time, “Simon, son of John, do you love me?” Peter was grieved because he said to him the third time, “Do you love me?” and he said to him, “Lord, you know everything; you know that I love you.” Jesus said to him, “Feed my sheep.” (John 21:15–17)

Why three times? It was to rebuild this man who blew it three times, right? He said, “I deny you. I deny you. I deny you.” And now he says, “I love you. I love you. I love you.” That’s what I hope is happening at this conference. I hope you hear the Lord Jesus say, “Do you love me?” And you hear him say, “Feed my lambs.” It might be in a Sunday school class, or it might be in Afghanistan or India or North Korea or Cuba or Vietnam.

Amen. We’ve talked about sovereignty and suffering, and we don’t plan our life. God is the one who plans our life, which means he plans our suffering. For me when I was in my teens and twenties, I felt invincible. My life was up and to the right. Why wouldn’t I get to do what I want to do? I didn’t sense my own frailty. When I got into my thirties, it’s almost like God removed this veil and I realized how broken this thing actually is and how vulnerable I actually am, and I realized how thin the line between life and death actually is. It can cause you to despair when you see that.

So, how do we remain sober about our own vulnerability in the world without being paralyzed by fear, without being paralyzed that the sifting is coming, and I just want to flee from it? How can we not be paralyzed but trust God in the midst of these trials?

Let me go back and close the arc to James 4 and say something about the ballast in your boat. Do you know what ballast is for? Your life is a boat, the world is a sea, and the waves are suffering of any kind — adversity, frustration, or things that are going to upset your boat and drown you. Ballast is weight in the bottom of the boat that makes it harder for the waves to tip you over, because the weight at the bottom of the boat keeps you stable. I think the heart of the ballast is the sovereignty of God — that God is absolutely sovereign. He says,

I am God, and there is no other;     I am God, and there is none like me,declaring the end from the beginning     and from ancient times things not yet done,saying, “My counsel shall stand,     and I will accomplish all my purpose.” (Isaiah 46:9–10)

Or consider Job at the end of his life. After all his sufferings, he said,

I had heard of you by the hearing of the ear,     but now my eye sees you;therefore I despise myself,     and repent in dust and ashes. (Job 42:5–6)

And he says,

I know that you can do all things,     and that no purpose of yours can be thwarted. (Job 42:2)

So, if you, in this conference, confirm, “I really believe in the absolute, all-pervasive, sovereign God,” you will not be fragile. You live among millions of your peers who have been coddled. Books have been written about your generation regarding how you are emotionally fragile, meaning when somebody gets in your face and says something critical, you pout or you blame or you sue or you cuss or you just say, “I will not be treated that way.” And you can’t read your Bible, which says,

Blessed are you when others revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for so they persecuted the prophets who were before you. (Matthew 5:11–12)

I mean, come on. Do any of you rejoice when you are reviled? We need miracles to happen in this room. We want you to go home able to be so strong, so deep, so knowing who you are in Christ, that anybody can revile you and it won’t paralyze you. It won’t blow you over. That’s the only way that the nations are going to be reached. So, the sovereignty of God is the ballast in your boat.

And I’ll just add one other thing. The sovereignty of God will do nobody any good unless God is for you. Scripture says,

For those whom he foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, in order that he might be the firstborn among many brothers. And those whom he predestined he also called, and those whom he called he also justified, and those whom he justified he also glorified. What then shall we say to these things? If God is for us, who can be against us? He who did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all, how will he not also with him graciously give us all things? (Romans 8:29–32)

You have to be confident of that. God is going to give you all things. In fact, you have them already. Let me go back to fame for a moment. In the first four chapters of 1 Corinthians, Paul is mainly dealing with pride — pride in intellect and pride in oratory. People were boasting about their favorite teachers for vicarious praise. They said, “I’m of Paul,” or, “I’m of Apollos,” or, “I’m of Cephas.” And do you know what Paul’s final word against that kind of pride is? He said:

Let no one boast in men. For all things are yours, whether Paul or Apollos or Cephas or the world or life or death or the present or the future — all are yours, and you are Christ’s, and Christ is God’s. (1 Corinthians 3:21–23)

So, alongside the sovereignty of God, you say, “I own the world.” John Newton just nailed it and helped me so much years ago, when I heard him tell the story of a man who was headed for a city to inherit a million dollars. He was in an old-fashioned carriage. And one mile outside the city, the carriage broke down and he got out and he had to walk. He had to walk a whole mile to inherit a million dollars. And all the way into the city, he was complaining. He said, “My carriage is broken. My carriage is broken.” That’s the way you and I live. We complain and complain. And Paul would say, “You own everything. It’s just a vapor’s breath, and then you come into your inheritance, a fellow heir with Christ forever.”

So, those two things go together, in answer to your question about how not to be paralyzed in a world that’s going to hell in a handbasket — namely, a sovereign God is the ballast in your boat, and he’s totally for you, and he’s proven it by the death of his Son, Jesus.

I cling to the psalmist’s statement in those moments. “God is good and he does good” (see Psalm 119:68). What a comfort in times of suffering and trial. We’re going to ask two more questions. You clearly love Noël. You’re just deeply in love with her, which is awesome.

I wrote a poem for her last week. I write a poem for my wife on every anniversary and on every birthday.

John, my wife is right over here and she’s hearing you say this, and I might have to write some poems. But you called your wife a radical, risk-taking, go-anywhere-for-Jesus woman. She sounds amazing.

She is amazing.

But Paul says in 1 Corinthians 7:8 that if you can be single, be single. So, knowing what you know now, why wouldn’t you go back to 22 and just be single the rest of your life?

We have Genesis 2:18 and 1 Corinthians 7. Duke it out in your life. Genesis 2:18 says, “It is not good for man to be alone.” He made a helper fit and suitable for Adam. The normal creation pattern is marriage. That’s normal. It’s good. It’s beautiful. It’s the way you fulfill the mandate to fill the earth and a lot of other things. The main thing is representing Christ and the church in marriage. When Paul talks in Ephesians 5 about men being the head and the woman being the body in the marriage, and he says, “This refers to Christ and the church” (see Ephesians 5:32), after quoting from Genesis 2:24.

What we know is that God did not look around the world for an analogy for what Jesus and the church would be like and say, “Oh, marriage would work. Let’s use marriage as an analogy.” It’s just the other way around. He knew from eternity he was going to marry his Son to the church, and he created marriage to show it.

So, this is massive. Marriage is massive, and the way people treat it today is just flat-out blasphemous. Where in the world is anybody your age who believes in keeping promises anymore? I hope you do. We said, “For better or for worse, for richer or for poorer, in sickness and in health, till death do us part.” Do you mean that? I don’t know if you’ll even say that, but if you don’t say it and you don’t mean it, you probably won’t last, because the whole culture says it doesn’t matter. They don’t think marriage counts for anything. So, marriage is big. That’s all to justify my marriage, I suppose. You said, “Why wouldn’t you remain single?”

In 1 Corinthians 7, Paul says, “I wish you were all like me. Those who are married have to give a lot of attention to the concerns of their wives or husbands, and those who are single can be utterly devoted to the Lord.” I’ve thought a lot about that, and it’s totally true. I must take into consideration another human being with every decision I make. That’s very limiting, and it’s intended to be. In that limitation, I represent a Christlike husband, which is a beautiful thing if I do it right. And she represents an obedient church, if she does it right, and it portrays to the world a beautiful thing. So, it’s a beautiful thing that’s happening. It’s not like singleness is set against something that’s not beautiful and not significant.

However, there are often times I just want to throw myself into something and I think, “I better check with Noël,” and she’s not at that level there. So, I think the answer is that as you try to discern, Paul says, “Each has his own gift” (1 Corinthians 7:7). You ask, “Do I, in the Lord Jesus, have the gift of singleness and celibacy?”

Celibacy, by the way — being a virgin until you die — is a glorious thing. And we know that because Jesus was one. And right now you can tune in to the New York Times or any other major news thing, and there are these big conversations among cutting-edge 20-somethings about virginity. That’s been going on for a long time. That is the call on your life if you’re not married. And if somebody says, “Man, you can’t even be human if you haven’t had sex. Come on.” I’ve had guys say that to me. They say, “Are you kidding me? You can’t even be fully human if you don’t express that part of your reality.” And I say, “Jesus never did. And I’ll take Jesus’s kind of humanity over your kind of humanity any day.” So, you do not have to have sex to be fully human.

“My highest and longest happiness and God’s glory are never at odds — ever.”

The gift of singleness you will discover by the providence of God. If you are not led into a marital relationship, he expects you to be chaste and single and serve him joyfully. Maybe the last thing to say on this is this: Don’t come to God and say, “If you don’t give me a husband or if you don’t give me a wife, I’m going to be miserable.” God doesn’t want to hear that, because it’s not true if he’s your treasure.

Go to him and say, “Lord, as I know myself, there’s so much in me that would love to give myself away to a man or a woman who’s godly and holy, and link arms together to serve you in missions, or whatever the calling is. I would love to do it, but God, you are supreme. You are the treasure of my life. I will take whatever you’ve given me, and I will rejoice and be a happy, productive single person or a happy, productive married person.”

Amen. Here’s one last question. Lord willing, on January 11, you’ll be 78 years old. Praise God for your life. We pray that he gives you many more years of faithfulness to him and encouragement to others to know him and love him. But if this were your last CROSS Conference, what would you want this group of people to know?

Everything I’ve just said, but if this is really the end, I’ll end on one of the most important discoveries I made in the fall of 1968, and that is that God is most glorified in you when you are most satisfied in him. I call that Christian Hedonism, and it’s important because, at your age, one of my biggest battles was trying to figure out how my irresistible desire for happiness fit into God’s passion for his glory.

My parents taught me, “Johnny, whatever you do, whether you eat or drink, do all to the glory of God.” I knew that. But I had this sneaking suspicion that to want to be happy — not to mention to pursue happiness — was defective. It cramped my worship, it cramped my obedience, and it cramped my relationships, because I thought when Jesus said, “Whoever would come after me, let him deny himself,” meant, “deny himself happiness” (see Matthew 16:24). If he meant that, then Psalm 37:4 is a command to sin. It says,

Delight yourself in the Lord,     and he will give you the desires of your heart.

And he also says,

In your presence there is fullness of joy;at your right hand are pleasures forevermore. (Psalm 16:11)

Here was the solution, and that’s why I say it was a great discovery. If in fact that’s true — God is most glorified in you when you are most satisfied in him — then those two are never in competition. My highest and longest happiness and God’s glory are never at odds — ever.

Which means I can say to ten thousand students that you should leave this place utterly, totally devoted to the pursuit of your happiness as long as it’s the biggest happiness and the longest happiness. Don’t settle for eighty years. Who cares about eighty years of happiness if you go to hell? Don’t settle for 90 percent happiness. Insist on 100 percent, forever. The Bible is really clear where that’s found. It’s found in God, and it’s found in the overflow of the enjoyment of God onto other people, especially the nations who don’t know anything about this joy.

Thank you, brother. I always enjoy talking with you. Thank you for the time and for the conversation.

Today I want to try to help us experience prayer as the vocalization of abiding in Christ. When I speak of prayer vocalizing the experience of abiding in Christ, I have in mind three ways prayer vocalizes abiding.

First, there is the vocalization of our need and our desire to be attached to Christ, like a branch to a vine. I have in mind that first cry when God saved us by putting a taste for his life-giving, love-giving, joy-giving sap on the tongue of our souls so that we cried out, “Yes, Lord, yes. I want this! Make me yours. Fasten me to yourself, branch to vine, forever.”

And I also have in mind the recurring cry, when we feel like our branch is withering, that says, “Hold on to me. Keep me in the vine. Don’t let me go. Be my life. If there’s a disease in me, disenchanting me with the all-satisfying sap of yourself, then heal me, prune me, and cause your life to surge in me again.”

That’s the first way that prayer vocalizes abiding in Christ: it is both the first cry to become attached to the vine and the recurring cry to remain attached to the vine.

Second, there is the daily vocalization of our thankful, happy, desperate dependence — moment by moment — on his ever-flowing sap of life. This isn’t the desperate cry of, “Keep me!” This is the happy, thankful, expression of confident trust.

When I dropped my wife Noël off at the airport yesterday at seven o’clock in the morning, as she was on her way to her mother’s one-hundredth birthday, I pulled up by the Delta drop-off, took her hand, and prayed, “Father, Noël and I are so thankful to be your adopted children, with every amazing thing that this implies. We receive right now the promise that we can cast all our anxieties on you, because you care for us (1 Peter 5:7). We rest, we revel, in your care. We love being branches in the vine. Meet every need as Noël travels and as I go home to prepare tomorrow’s message. In Jesus’s name. Amen.”

That’s the second way that prayer vocalizes abiding in Christ: expressing thankful, happy, desperate, confident dependence — moment by moment — on Christ’s life-giving, love-giving, joy-giving sap.

Third, there is the vocalization of our longing that Christ’s life and love and joy would flow through us into living fruit — the longing that this fruit would course with the same life and love and joy that we have by abiding in Christ.

“God saved us by putting a taste for his life-giving, love-giving, joy-giving sap on the tongue of our souls.”

So when I got home from the airport, I got down on my knees in my study and said, “Father, would you help me now prepare a message for chapel tomorrow that would bear much fruit? Would you grant that all the life and love and joy of Christ that I have known throughout these decades of abiding would become life and love and joy in the lives of those who listen?”

Six Ways We Abide in Christ

My aim is to help us experience prayer as the vocalization of abiding in Christ, as (1) the cry to abide in the vine, (2) the day-by-day expression of joyful, confident dependence on the vine, and (3) the longing that we would bear fruit because of our attachment to the vine.

To do that, it seems we should spend a good bit of our time pushing into the reality of what abiding in Christ is. I am going to point to six ways we abide in Christ.

1. Receiving Life from Christ

Let’s start with the picture in John 15:5: “I am the vine; you are the branches. Whoever abides in me and I in him, he it is that bears much fruit, for apart from me you can do nothing.” The picture is of the disciple of Jesus as a branch and Jesus as the vine.

So, the least we can say is that abiding in Christ is the experience of getting our life from Christ. The sap of life flows into the branch if the branch is abiding, remaining in the vine. If there is no attachment to the vine, then there is no life in the branch.

2. Remaining in His Love

A second way to describe the experience of abiding is to say that we remain in the love of Christ. John 15:9: “As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you. Abide in my love.” So the life-giving attachment to the vine can be described as a love-giving attachment to the vine. The vine loves the branches. Love is flowing to the branches. The life that flows to the branches is the life of love.

So now the command “Abide in me” (John 15:4) and the implicit command “Abide in my life, which flows to you” become a little more concrete: “Abide in my love” (John 15:9). Essentially God is saying, “Keep on receiving and welcoming and enjoying and trusting and treasuring my love.” That is the experience of abiding in the vine.

3. Abiding in His Word

We can describe the experience of abiding yet another way. Abiding in Christ means abiding in his word, and his words abiding in us. John 15:7: “If you abide in me, and my words abide in you . . .” The phrase “my words abide in you” stands in the place where Jesus himself stood in John 15:4: “Abide in me, and I in you.” We see that “I, Jesus, abiding in you” becomes “my words abiding in you.”

“The experience of abiding in Christ is not only abiding in his life and love, but also in his word.”

And it is not just his words abiding in us, but us abiding in his words — just like we abide in him. According to John 8:31, “If you abide in my word, you are truly my disciples.” So the experience of abiding in Christ is not only abiding in his life, and abiding in his love, but also abiding in his word. John says it again in 1 John 2:24: “Let what you heard from the beginning abide in you. If what you heard from the beginning abides in you, then you too will abide in the Son and in the Father.”

I take this to mean that the life and the love that flow from the vine into the branches are communicated to us and experienced by us through the word of Christ. The life of Jesus and the love of Jesus accomplish nothing in our lives apart from the word of Jesus.

There are no incognito Christians. Wordless experiences — that is, experiences without any conscious connection with Christ — are worthless experiences. Christ gets no glory from human experiences that we do not know to be from Christ.

We know experiences to be from Christ because of the word of Christ. For he says, “The words that I have spoken to you are spirit and life” (John 6:63). And so we respond, “You have the words of eternal life” (John 6:68). Therefore, we abide in Christ — we abide in his life and in his love — by receiving and welcoming and understanding and believing the reality mediated by the words of Christ.

4. Drinking from Christ

A fourth way to describe abiding in Christ is to see the connection between the branch drinking the life-giving sap of the vine and the soul-drinking Christ as the water of life or the soul-feeding on him as the bread of heaven. John 6:35: “Jesus said to them, ‘I am the bread of life; whoever comes to me shall not hunger, and whoever believes in me shall never thirst.’” Coming to Christ so as not to hunger anymore and believing in Christ so as not to thirst anymore is the experience of abiding in Christ. Abiding is believing, understood as eating and drinking Christ.

“Prayer expresses thankful, happy, desperate, confident dependence on Christ’s life-giving, love-giving sap.”

Here it is again in John 7:37–38: “Jesus cried out, ‘If anyone thirsts, let him come to me and drink. Whoever believes in me, as the Scripture has said, ‘Out of his heart will flow rivers of living water.’” Notice that thirsting for Christ, coming to Christ, and drinking of Christ are replaced with believing in Christ. So the experience of believing in Christ is thirsting for Christ and coming to Christ and drinking from Christ — that is, abiding in Christ like a branch abiding in the vine and drinking the all-satisfying life and love that are in it.

Therefore, we can describe the experience of abiding in Christ as believing on Christ, provided we give the term believing its full-blooded meaning from the Gospel of John — namely, believing is thirsting, coming, drinking, and saying: “This is the end of my quest. Here is life and love and joy.”

5. Savoring the Son’s Joy

That word joy leads to a fifth way of describing the experience of abiding in Christ. In John 15:11, after drawing out the implications of the vine and the branches, Jesus adds this: “These things I have spoken to you, that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be full.”

Be sure to understand this in connection with the picture of the vine and the branches. He does not simply say that because we are abiding in the vine, our joy will be full. What he says is that because we are abiding in the vine, his joy will be in us, and therefore our joy will be full. In other words, what the branch receives from the vine is the very joy of the vine: “My joy [will] be in you” (John 15:11).

Let me give you a taste of what this experience is from Galatians 4:6. Paul says, “Because you are sons, God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, ‘Abba! Father!’” Push into the reality of this. Think of it in terms of the vine and the branch. We are redeemed and made the legal sons of God by the death of Christ. And then he says that because we are his sons legally, God sends the Spirit of the Son — the Spirit of the vine or the sap — into our branch-hearts, shouting (krazō), “Abba! Father!” And how does the Son of God feel about his Father? He loves him: “I love the Father” (John 14:31).

That is, he takes infinite pleasure in the Father. He enjoys the Father. And he flows into our hearts, our branch, bringing that, being that, exulting in that. He does this, to use the words of John 15:11, “that my joy may be in you.” He flows into us, “That my joy in my Father made be your joy in your Father.”

So the experience of abiding in Christ is the experience of enjoying God by the Spirit of the Son of God enjoying his Father in us. If you find welling up within you the cry — spoken or unspoken, but real — that says, “Father! I need you. Thank you for redeeming me. Thank you for adopting me. Oh, how precious you are to me! I love you!” then guess what? You are experiencing the Spirit of the Son of God loving his Father in you. You are experiencing John 15:11, the joy of Christ himself becoming your joy, and your joy becoming full. You are experiencing what it means to abide in Christ.

6. Feasting on Calvary

Consider one last way to describe the experience of abiding in Christ. In John 6:56 Jesus says, “Whoever feeds on my flesh and drinks my blood abides in me, and I in him.” The crucified flesh and the shed blood of Jesus are the wellspring of all the life and love and joy and words that we receive from the vine. To eat and drink at the cross is to get everything from the sacrifice of Christ.

In summary, I would arrange the first five ways of describing the experience of abiding in Christ like this:

First is the experience of the soul’s thirst and hunger drinking from Christ with satisfaction.
Second, as the branch drinks from the vine, it receives the life of the vine. No attachment to the vine, no life in the branch.
Third, as we drink from the life of the vine, we find it to be the life of love — Christ’s invincible love for us. And we rest in it and feed on it.
Fourth, as we drink from the life and love of the vine, we experience the joy of Jesus as our joy —the Spirit of the Son singing out his joyful love for the Father in our hearts.
Fifth, we find all of this mediated to us through the words of Christ so that his words become our life.

And finally, we discover that every benefit of abiding in the vine was secured for us by the crucified flesh and shed blood of Christ. And that sacrifice becomes for us the all-supplying bread and drink of heaven.

How Prayer Speaks

Now let’s revisit where we started, with prayer as the vocalization of this experience of abiding in Christ. There are (1) the prayers that vocalize the desire to abide in Christ, (2) the prayers that vocalize the daily reality of abiding in Christ, and (3) the prayers that vocalize the desire for fruit through abiding in Christ.

With Desperate Desire

First, there are prayers that vocalize the desire to abide in Christ. When Jesus asked the Samaritan woman at the well for a drink, she couldn’t believe that he, a Jew, would ask her. Then he says, “If you knew the gift of God, and who it is that is saying to you, ‘Give me a drink,’ you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water” (John 4:10).

“You would have asked him” — this is where it all starts. There’s a sliver, a glimpse, of the life-giving vine right there in front of you, a glimmer of hope, and then comes an invitation: “Ask me. Just ask me.”

And many of us have responded: “Let me drink the living water. Attach me, Jesus, to yourself. Make me a living branch. Forever.” But if you haven’t tasted, haven’t asked to be grafted into the vine — this would be a good time. Vocalize to God your need and your desire to abide in Christ.

With Happy Trust

Then there are the prayers that vocalize the daily reality of abiding in Christ. These tell Christ — and tell the Father — that you trust him. Tell them that their love for you is your life and your joy. Tell Christ, in the presence of your spouse or children or friends, that his words are words of life to you.

Tell Christ that abiding in his love makes you glad. Say to him, on behalf of your family or your small group, and in their presence, “Jesus, your sacrifice, your words, your life, your love, your joy is everything to me. I taste them. They are my food and my drink. They satisfy my soul.” Tell him.

Do what the saints have done for millennia. Speak to the Lord of your trust. And tell him of the pleasures of abiding in Christ.

O God, you are my God; earnestly I seek you;         my soul thirsts for you;my flesh faints for you,         as in a dry and weary land where there is no water.So I have looked upon you in the sanctuary,         beholding your power and glory.Because your steadfast love is better than life,         my lips will praise you.So I will bless you as long as I live;         in your name I will lift up my hands. (Psalm 63:1–4)

They feast on the abundance of your house,         and you give them drink from the river of your delights.For with you is the fountain of life;         in your light do we see light. (Psalm 36:8–9)

With Fruitful Zeal

Finally, there are the prayers that vocalize the desire for fruit through abiding in Christ. This is the goal of life and love and joy flowing from the vine — a kind of life and a kind of love and a kind of joy that has in it a happy pressure to expand, to increase, by becoming the life and love and joy in others. That’s what it is to bear fruit.

Jesus says in John 4:14, “The water that I will give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life.” Yes, and more than a spring: “Whoever believes in me [abides in me, drinks from me] . . . ‘Out of his heart will flow rivers of living water” (John 7:38). Or, as Jesus says in John 15:5, “Whoever abides in me and I in him, he it is that bears much fruit.”

This is the sap of the vine, the living water, the very life and love and joy of the Son of God, coursing through your branch-life and then miraculously increasing — your joy increasing — in the life and love and joy of another.

And Jesus says, “Don’t be passive about this. Make this the great passion of your prayer.” He says in John 15:7–8, “If you abide in me, and my words abide in you, ask whatever you wish [for every kind of God-glorifying fruit], and it will be done for you. By this my Father is glorified, that you bear much fruit.” Jesus is saying, “Ask me! Ask me for God-glorifying fruit!”

When Christ’s words abide in you, when his truth, life, love, and joy abide in you, you will be given a spiritual taste for God’s fruitful will, and you will pray with Spirit-given passion, “O God, make my life fruitful. Let me not wither in the hot blasts of worldliness. Do whatever painful pruning you must do. Grant me so to drink that I become a spring — yes, a river! — and a fruitful branch. Oh, let me never be content until my joy in you bears fruit in the joy of others in you. By this, Father, are you glorified — that I bear much fruit. Do it. Amen.”