He was 31 years old. Born in modern Algeria, from all accounts he had an ambitious streak that could border on ruthlessness. But it was matched by a probing intellect and a thirst for reality that had the potential to unbalance him or even lead to perpetual disappointment. The combination had taken him to great cities and led him to inquire into world religions and philosophies. But now, barely into his thirties, he was on the verge of despair so extreme that one day, despite his pleasant surroundings, he could scarcely sit still or stem the flow of tears. And then he heard two Latin words — Tolle lege — that changed everything.

At first, he thought the words must be part of a child’s game. But he knew no game that included the mantra “Take it and read it.” But by what John Calvin would later call “a secret instinct of the Spirit,” he reached out for the copy of the Scriptures that lay beside him. Opening it randomly — as people in antiquity did, hoping for divine direction — he read the words that brought him to faith in Christ.

You likely have guessed his identity. Perhaps you recognized him from the first sentence: Aurelius Augustinus — Augustine. But do you know where the Scriptures “randomly” fell open, and the words that changed everything? Romans 13:14: “But put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh, to gratify its desires.”

Augustine would ponder and seek to apply these words for the rest of his life. For all the profundity of his grasp of God’s grace, he could doubtless say of them what he wrote of the mystery of God’s sovereignty: “I see the depths, I cannot reach the bottom” (Works of Saint Augustine, 3.2.108).

Gospel Grammar

Underlining the significance of Paul’s words from the vivid context of Augustine’s conversion hopefully serves to secure them in our minds and hearts — “like nails firmly fixed . . . given by one Shepherd” (Ecclesiastes 12:11). In fact, the words are so pointed that repeating them a couple of times may fix them permanently in your memory banks. And they need to be well secured there because they enshrine key biblical principles for living to the glory of God.

Paul’s words contain two imperatives. What is particularly striking about them is that they not only tell us what to do, but the first imperative contains within itself the indicative that makes possible the effecting of the second imperative. Their importance can be measured by the fact that the effect of Romans 13:14 on the history of the church through Augustine is rivaled only by the effect of Romans 1:16–17 on the church through Martin Luther.

“The biblical gospel has a grammar all its own.”

The biblical gospel has a grammar all its own. Just as failing to properly use the grammar of a language mars our ability to speak it, so an inadequate grasp of the grammar of the gospel mars what the older translations fittingly called the “conversation” of our lives. It results in lives that reflect Christ in a stilted manner.

So how are the substructures of gospel grammar illustrated in Romans 13:14?

The Balance

First, the emphasis on the positive (“put on”) is matched and balanced by an emphasis on the negative (“make no provision”). This is characteristic of Paul. Think of Galatians 5:24: “Those who belong to Christ [positive] have crucified the flesh [negative].” Or consider Ephesians 4:21–24: you were taught

as the truth is in Jesus . . . to put off your old self, which belongs to your former manner of life and is corrupt through deceitful desires [negative], and to be renewed in the spirit of your minds, and to put on the new self, created after the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness [positive].

Perhaps the clearest and fullest example is in Colossians 3:1–12. Those who have died and been raised with Christ, those whose lives are hidden with him and who will appear with him in glory, are to “put to death whatever is earthly [negative]” and to “put on then, as God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved, compassionate hearts, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience [positive].”

The grammar lesson? There is no growth in holiness unless both the negative and the positive elements are present.

More Than Mortification

None of us is by nature “normal” or “balanced.” We sinners are inherently lopsided. Each of us has a natural bias either to the negative or the positive. If we have not discovered that, we probably have not yet come to know ourselves adequately. Thus, some of us tend to think of sanctification largely, if not entirely, as a battle against sin. John Owen’s eighty pages on The Mortification of Sin is the book for us! (In the circles in which I moved as a teenager, not to have read Owen on mortification was tantamount to apostasy! And after all, the addresses that lay behind it were probably first preached to teenagers — students at Oxford University.)

The mortification of sin is indeed vital. Owen was right: if we are not killing sin, it will be killing us. His memorable one-liner comes as a shock to much modern Christianity: “Let not that man think he makes any progress in holiness who walks not over the bellies of his lusts” (Works of John Owen, 6:14).

But sin is never truly mortified by mortification alone. To borrow from our Lord’s parable, if we only empty the house (mortify sin) without filling it (putting on graces), the devils will simply return in greater force (Matthew 12:43–45). We need to furnish our lives with the fruit of the Spirit. Repentance involves conversion; conversion means a reversal. So, we need to put on as well as put off.

Making no provision for the flesh (mortifying sin) by the power of the Spirit is not an end in itself. It is not the Spirit’s ultimate goal; in fact, on its own, it is not sanctification. It is a vital means to a greater end — and that end is that we may live in unclouded fellowship with our holy Lord.

Holiness Is Christlikeness

So, Paul always balances his emphases. We need to put on as well as put off. The works of the flesh need to be superseded by the fruit of the Spirit. This is the point of Thomas Chalmers’s famous sermon on 1 John 2:15, “The Expulsive Power of a New Affection.”

“Sanctification is not merely the process of overcoming our sin; it is, ultimately, becoming like the Lord Jesus.”

Sanctification is not merely the process of overcoming our sin; it is, ultimately, becoming like the Lord Jesus. For this is the goal of the Father who has “predestined us to be conformed to the image of his Son” (Romans 8:29). He will be content with nothing less. This is also the passion of the Holy Spirit, by whom we “are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another” (2 Corinthians 3:18). For it is this — Christlikeness — that constitutes the “holiness without which no one will see the Lord” (Hebrews 12:14). A staggering thought, but a wonderful motivation: nothing in us that is un-Christlike will be able to last in the presence of God!

Therefore, any less goal than pursuing the knowledge of Christ and growing into his likeness is not worth living for. Only that in you that reflects him will last forever. But it will last forever.

The Order

In addition to balance in Paul’s words — negative and positive — there is also order in his gospel grammar. It is not always the order of his words, but it is always the order of his logic. For gospel logic, and therefore gospel grammar, never changes. It has a fixed order. And as it happens, Augustine’s text is particularly helpful here because the order of the literary grammar is identical with the logic of the gospel’s grammar. Not only are putting on and putting off balanced, but putting on the Lord Jesus Christ is primary and foundational. It is always the first principle in Paul’s theological grammar when he writes about our sanctification.

But why? The answer is embossed on the pages of Scripture. Our fundamental need is not for “mortification” or even for “sanctification.” It is for the Lord Jesus Christ himself. Mortification and sanctification are but the pathway to “Christification”! And as Abraham Kuyper shrewdly put it, there are no other resources in heaven or on earth for the Holy Spirit to employ to make us Christlike outside of Christ himself. Only in him are there resources appropriate and adequate to transform sinful humans into Christlike ones. Sanctification is not deification, but it is transformation into the likeness of the holy humanity of our Lord Jesus, and glorification is the end of the process. For then “we shall be like him, because we shall see him as he is” (1 John 3:2).

Only when we are “in Christ,” only when we have “put on Christ” — “who became to us . . . sanctification” (1 Corinthians 1:30) — and have taken him as ours, receiving him as our clothing, wrapping ourselves in him, does becoming like him begin. Otherwise, we are merely seeking to remake ourselves according to the pattern of moral ideals (even if they are those of the Ten Commandments or the Sermon on the Mount). We are missing the point. For our chief need is to “be found in Christ” and to “know him and the power of his resurrection, and . . . share his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, that by any means possible [we] may attain the resurrection from the dead” (Philippians 3:9–10).

So, all we need is found in Christ. Everything you need is found in Christ. Mortification, sanctification, and glorification all begin and end in Christ alone. When he fills our horizon, all the other elements in sanctification make grammatical sense: mortification and vivification are balanced in our “conversation”; sanctification develops like a well-crafted sentence. Yes, there will be punctuation marks, and perhaps even unfinished sentences (Paul knew all about that). But if we look elsewhere, our lives will not speak clearly of our Savior and Lord.

Give Me Christ

This was what Augustine saw — the very man who once prayed, “Give me continence, but not yet.” He had things the wrong way around. He needed first to say, “Give me Christ.”

This has perhaps never been better expressed than by the Reformer who wrote (albeit not completely accurately!) that Augustine was “totally ours” — namely, John Calvin. His words make a fitting closing meditation for us:

When we see salvation whole — and every single part — is found in Christ, we must beware lest we derive the smallest drop from somewhere else.

If we seek salvation, the very name of Jesus teaches us that he possesses it.

If other Spirit-given gifts are sought — in his anointing they are found.

If strength — in his reign; purity — in his conception; tenderness — expressed in his nativity, when he was made like us in all respects, that he might learn to feel our pain.

Redemption when we seek it, is in his passion found; acquittal — in his condemnation lies; and freedom from the curse — in his cross is known.

If satisfaction for our sins we seek — we’ll find it in his sacrifice; and cleansing in his blood.

If reconciliation now we need, for this he entered Hades; if mortification of our flesh — then in his tomb it’s laid; and newness of our life — his resurrection brings; and immortality as well comes also with that gift.

And if we also long to find heaven’s kingdom our inheritance, his entry there secures it now with our protection, safety too, and blessings that abound — all flowing from his kingly reign.

The sum of all for those who seek such treasure-trove of blessings, these blessings of all kinds, from nowhere else can now be drawn than him; they’re found in Christ alone. (Institutes 2.16.19)

So, let us “put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh, to gratify its desires.”

Audio Transcript

Welcome back on this Thursday. Well, if you were to sit down with John Piper’s collected works, his thirteen-volume collected works, published back in 2017, and if you read the entire thing, beginning to end, you’d come across the word satisfy or satisfied nearly 1,500 times. Satisfy, satisfied — those loaded terms are all over those works, and they’re all over your ministry, Pastor John. But we rarely, if ever, read a definition of what you mean by the term, leading to Ralph’s question today.

“Pastor John, hello to you! I thank God for your ministry in my life. I have read many of your books and listened to many of your messages, especially those on Christian Hedonism. That idea revolutionized my relationship with the Lord. You have spoken about being satisfied in God thousands and thousands of times in your life. But I cannot find any reference in your works to where you have defined that term. To you, what does it mean to be satisfied?”

This is good for me to be pressed to ponder a term that I ordinarily use, because I consider it self-explanatory. Sometimes those are the very terms that would be most fruitful to at least try to put into words, or to relate to real-life experiences, so that we don’t just speak with empty phrases. So, thank you for the question.

Satisfaction in Scripture

I think the first thing to say is that it doesn’t really matter very much what John Piper means by satisfaction, but it matters a lot — I mean, it’s hard to exaggerate how much it matters — what God means by it when his inspired spokesmen in the Bible use the word. For example:

Psalm 90:14: “Satisfy us in the morning with your steadfast love, that we may rejoice and be glad all our days.”
Psalm 63:5: “My soul will be satisfied [in the Lord] as with fat and rich food.”
Psalm 65:4: “We shall be satisfied with the goodness of your house, the holiness of your temple!”
Psalm 103:5: “[The Lord] satisfies you with good so that your youth is renewed like the eagle’s.”
Psalm 107:9: “He satisfies the longing soul.”
Matthew 5:6: “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied.”
Philippians 4:11–12: “I have learned in whatever situation I am to be [satisfied or] content.” I know how to abound, and I know how to be in need.
Hebrews 13:5: “Keep your life free from love of money, and be [satisfied] content with what you have, for he has said, ‘I will never leave you nor forsake you.’”

So, it’s not so much what I think satisfaction is that matters, but rather, What do texts like these mean? What did God intend when he called us in all those passages — and others — to be satisfied? What kind of experience are we talking about?

Let me try to get at what satisfaction in God, or satisfaction in all that God is for us, refers to.

Evil and Its Opposite

First, notice that the experience of satisfaction corresponds to desire and longing and yearning in the human heart. There would be no such thing as satisfaction if there were no such thing as desire. God created human beings as desire factories. Everybody has desires, longings, yearnings, wantings. God made us that way. Our problem as sinners is not that our desires are too strong, but that they are directed toward the wrong things.

That’s the essence of sin. That’s the essence of evil. Jeremiah 2:13: “My people have committed two evils.” What is that? Number one: “They have forsaken me, the fountain of living waters.” Number two: “[They have] hewed out cisterns for themselves, broken cisterns that can hold no water.”

That’s evil. Evil is to turn away from being satisfied with God as your fountain. All our desires are designed by God to be Godward desires, to move toward the fountain of living water. Even when we desire earthly things like food or friendship or praise or beauty, all these things are tastes of God’s goodness and pointers to God as the final satisfaction.

God-Shaped Joy

So, the first thing I would say about the meaning of satisfaction in God is that it refers to the experience of having our desire — longing, yearning, wanting — filled. And filled means not too little and not too much. Satisfaction in God is the experience where God is enjoyed as the perfect fullness that corresponds to the God-shaped desires of our hearts.

Eternal Joy

Second, sometimes I use the phrase all-satisfying, like “the all-satisfying God.” And by this I mean that there are no desires that, in the end, God will not purify and satisfy with himself. Even sinful desires have some vestige of legitimacy. God will rescue that fragment of legitimacy and cleanse it of all that is destructive and fill it up in the age to come. When this sinful age is over and the kingdom has fully and manifestly come, there will be no unmet longings, no unfulfilled desires, no dissatisfaction.

Embattled Joy

Third, there are many mysteries about what our experience will be like when we are totally perfected in the age to come. But for now, I want to stress that to say, “Jesus is all-satisfying,” does not mean that when he becomes our satisfaction, our desiring ceases. That would be a mistake to say that our desiring ceases.

Jesus says in John 6:35, “I am the bread of life; whoever comes to me shall not hunger, and whoever believes in me shall never thirst.” Now, I don’t think he means that when we are born again and receive him by faith, we never desire him again. I don’t think he means that. I think he means that finding Jesus to be the bread and the water that our souls have always longed for means our quest is over. We no longer look for a better drink or a better food. We have found our all-satisfying treasure.

But in this sinful age — and I’m including myself now, as a sinner, as remaining corruption within me needs mortifying — in this sinful age, where the heart of faith is always embattled, our experience of the satisfaction of Christ will always be imperfect, fragmentary, ever-changing, renewable, greater and lesser.

“Our problem as sinners is not that our desires are too strong, but that they are directed toward the wrong things.”

Christ remains who he is, right? He doesn’t change. He remains who he is: all-satisfying. And our new birth with new spiritual taste buds that know he is the all-satisfying one remains attached to him. We don’t lose him and then find him, and lose him and then find him. He holds on to us. We do not run away after some new fountain or new bread. But for now, our experience is up and down. It won’t be like that in the age to come. But how will desire and satisfaction be related in the age to come? Frankly, I can’t answer that fully.

Dissatisfied Joy

Fourth and finally (and this is really important), the reality of love for other people, and especially compassion for those who suffer, demands that our satisfaction in this age of pain and sorrow be a dissatisfied satisfaction. Almost forty years ago, when I wrote the chapter on love in the book Desiring God, I said this: “The weeping of compassion is the weeping of joy” — or you could say, “the weeping of satisfaction” — “impeded [hindered] in the extension of itself to another” (125).

Now, that sounds paradoxical, “weeping satisfaction” — an odd phrase. But what it means is that when God grants me to know him as satisfying to my soul’s deepest needs, and then I look on a suffering person, my God-given satisfaction at that moment has in it the impulse to expand and include the other person in it. I want them in it. I want them to share it. Satisfaction in God is not indifferent to those who don’t share it. If we could, we would fold them into our satisfaction in God. But if we are hindered from that, it is our very joy, our very satisfaction, impeded in the extension of itself, that grieves. It is a peculiarly Christian form of dissatisfied satisfaction.

Four Facets of Satisfaction

Ralph, that’s my effort to clarify what I mean by “satisfaction in God.”

It is a filling up of God-given, God-shaped desires.
It will, in the end, leave no desire unfilled for God’s children forever.
For now, the satisfaction in God is embattled and variable, and desires must be rekindled.
For now, even the best experience of satisfaction in God is a dissatisfied satisfaction, when we are surrounded by the pain of those who don’t yet have it and the sorrows of this fallen world.

The Wisdom Literature (Job, Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Song of Solomon) is not simply insightful in its content, but delightful in its craft. As dwarves with rare jewels, these authors didn’t just discover golden nuggets of wisdom; they shaped them, forged them, hunched over their obsession, inspected them, held them up to the light, cut them, and framed them into sentences poetic and memorable.

We are wise to enter their mines and learn their skill, not just to discover beauty but to adorn it beautifully. Briefly, then, I want to travel into the mountain of these sages’ eloquence, exploring the deeps of their craftsmanship. Notice what was spoken of one such sage:

Besides being wise, the Preacher also taught the people knowledge, weighing and studying and arranging many proverbs with great care. The Preacher sought to find words of delight, and uprightly he wrote words of truth. (Ecclesiastes 12:9–10)

Handcrafted writing, beautiful writing that adorns God’s wisdom, weighs and studies, arranges with great care, and seeks out words of delight and writes words of truth uprightly.

Weigh the World, Study Scripture

Besides being wise, the Preacher also taught the people knowledge, weighing and studying.

First, to write well, this master-jeweler prepared well. Superior gifting did not alibi sloth. That the Preacher possessed superlative wisdom (Ecclesiastes 1:16) did not shorten his preparation. He pored over the wise sayings of others; he wrote wise sayings of his own. And we, with lesser wisdom and ability, also measure and ponder, read and study, roast the truth over in our minds, never tire to hunt each morning for fresh discoveries in the forests of God’s Book.

Particularly, we do not just study how to write, but what we write about. We must have knowledge to teach. Here, some of us step along a cliff’s edge, tempted to preoccupy oneself with how we say over what is said. Many have lost their footing. Pride drags much of man’s toil over the edge to shatter upon the rocks. I grimace when I discover myself painting, like the worst of modern art, indistinct displays of my own artistry, instead of the landscape or the glories beyond.

No, the writing life gropes for metaphor and imagery and beauty because it has heard creation singing God’s praises and has seen his beauty in the face of Jesus Christ. In other words, we love God’s diamonds more than our metal rings and sentences that hold them. In all things, his Son must have preeminence (Colossians 1:18). The wise never lose sight of a God greater than our pens can ever tell. “What we proclaim is not ourselves, but Jesus Christ as Lord, with ourselves as [the reader’s] servants for Jesus’s sake” (2 Corinthians 4:5). So, first, we weigh and study and place all in the light of God and his truth.

Arranging the Flowers

The Preacher did not merely weigh and study, however; he “taught the people knowledge, . . . arranging many proverbs with great care.” He made straight, he put in order, he composed. He forged proverbs, wisdom compressed into Hebrew poetry, what Robert Alter calls “the best words in the best order” (The Art of Biblical Poetry). He engraved the truth to be remembered, considering both style and structure. He knew that to add order was to add beauty and force. He knew a proverb or poem could be less or more than its parts.

Whether compiling proverbs of others or composing his own, he saw that truly beautiful writing has pleasing cohesion. One note out of place disrupts the recital — and is detected even by those who have never heard the music before. How? Because beauty has its anatomy, its symmetry, its mathematics, its order. Assonance, alliteration, metaphor, contrast, and more — the science of lovely prose.

Our God is a God of order and beauty, and he will not have his children fight. Beautiful writing is not a collection of notes struck on a whim, but a symphony; not a handful of casually picked flowers, but a pleasing bouquet. Marvel has their Avengers; Christian eloquence her Arrangers — of words and phrases and paragraphs and chapters. Such writers position their thoughts, others’ thoughts, and (most importantly) God’s thoughts into the vase with “great care.”

“The wise never lose sight of a God greater than our pens can ever tell.”

Again, the man to whom God gave “wisdom and understanding beyond measure, and breadth of mind like the sand on the seashore” (1 Kings 4:29), had to work at writing (and rewriting) — but also in arranging (and rearranging). Solomon did not publish first drafts. We almost hear his exhaustion (and see his smile) as he finally puts down the quill: “A word fitly spoken is like apples of gold in a setting of silver” (Proverbs 25:11).

Words of Joy and Truth

You’ve experienced it, right? Halfway through the second paragraph, the writing tastes stale, unappetizing. You travel on, if you travel on, against the wind. It has words of truth, perhaps, but not delight. But then you turn to another writer whose beliefs all but nauseate, but whose prose allures. As in Athens, his verbal idols are well crafted. Here, we find words of delight, but not much truth.

The Preacher sought something different. He “sought to find words of delight, and uprightly he wrote words of truth.” He loved beauty and he loved truth, and he took great measures to wed the two.

He quested for sweet sayings. He climbed mountains, entered forests, dove as a merman into the sea, searching for words of delight. Not smiling, quirky words such as “platypus” or “whizzle,” but sayings that gratified, “‘words that would give pleasure [to the listener]’ — presumably because they were well phrased and elegant.” He hunted them with a fierce love. “Elegant expression, deep and satisfying meaning — these were the goals of [the Preacher’s] work as a thinker, a teacher, writer and collector of wisdom” (A Handbook on Ecclesiastes, 436).

Lovely Christian writing does not apologize for its poetry. For those suppressing creativity in unloveliness, be free to search for words of joy. We know secularism only pretends to hate beauty; dark angels still dress as angels of light. To fight only with aesthetics leaves the bow without arrows; to fight only with naked truth is to toss your arrows at the heart. But let the archer place the golden arrow into the bow of bronze, let earnest prayer draw it back, and who knows how mightily the Spirit of the living God will let it fly?

Pens of Pure Hearts

The writing of Solomon has a further detail easily overlooked: “Uprightly he wrote words of truth.” Straight words did not emerge from a crooked heart: “That which was written was upright and sincere, according to the real sentiments of the penman, even words of truth, the exact representation of the thing as it is” (Matthew Henry, Commentary on the Whole Bible).

The painter, not just the canvas, is in view for the Christian writer. He speaks the truth truthfully, sincerely, as he knows it before God. Out of the overflow of the heart, the pen writes. He says with Job, “My words declare the uprightness of my heart, and what my lips know they speak sincerely” (Job 33:3). And with Augustine, “What I live by, I impart” (quoted in James Stewart, Heralds of God, 10). We err if we finely craft content but not our lives. Christian writing is done from a higher art.

Holiness adds to the force and wholesomeness of our writing, just as bad lives spoil otherwise good content: “Like a lame man’s legs, which hang useless, is a proverb in the mouth of fools” (Proverbs 26:7). We don’t fit this paragraph after that because it fits together — while obeying neither. Here lies the grand departure from all sub-Christian writers.

This means we obsess over reality. “I talk of love — a scholar’s parrot may talk Greek,” Lewis once wrote in a poem (As the Ruin Falls). As far as it goes with us, we refuse to write of God’s truth, of the wonders of the world, of deplorable and enduring things as a parrot overhearing its owner speak what it doesn’t understand. We do not arrange and weigh and judge and search for words of joy and truth from a heart that loves none of it.

The words of joy and truth the Preacher found first pleased his own soul. He loved what he wrote for more reasons than that he wrote it. He searched the tropics because he valued beauty — not to cage and sell what he found. He didn’t love ingredients just to cook meals he never tasted; he really loved the food. He delighted in the spiritual taste of words because words were doors into reality.

Dispatches from the Shepherd

The words of the wise are like goads, and like nails firmly fixed are the collected sayings; they are given by one Shepherd. (Ecclesiastes 12:11)

What we’ve seen is that beautiful writing for Christ considers the object of its writing more than the writing itself, yet spares little expense to arrange words of joy and truth in the most pleasing and effective ways possible. Beautiful writing for Christ also passes from the pen of a pure heart. And now finally, striking Christian writing descends from the Great Shepherd.

We might imagine this Shepherd picking us up in his arms and laying us down in green pastures — and so we have warrant, given Psalm 23, perhaps the most beloved beautiful writing in the Bible. But here, the Preacher instructs us that wise sayings are not down pillows for the soul, but rather nails and prods spurring us onward. And here is one of the most important lessons for Christian writers today: the beauty of the writing must not blunt truth’s blade.

Otherwise, beautiful writing can devolve into flattery and man-pleasing when it never cuts to the heart. Too many skilled writers try to give the God-breathed word a breath mint. It doesn’t need one. Against purple prose that only soothes, what imagery did the lover of joyful words find to describe the carefully arranged sayings? “Goads” and “nails firmly fixed.” They stand behind readers as cattle drivers and prod us forward with sharp pokes. They animate us. They bestir us. They protect us from veering from the path of holy living.

Christian writing, eloquent and comely, crafted and arranged, will not always be comforting or encouraging. The message is not ours, but that of the One Shepherd.