The Lord’s Supper reveals that Jesus takes the worst we can do and makes it a sign of the best he does for us. Within hours of that meal in the upper room, Jesus’s body would indeed be given and his blood poured out. This dreadful tragedy accomplished our glorious salvation.

From the beginning, the early church recalled and reenacted these moments in gathered worship. Just two decades after Jesus’s death, Paul passed along what he had received as common understanding: “As often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes” (1 Corinthians 11:26). In Communion, we enter both the power and the proclamation of Jesus’s saving death. That participation should be thrilling.

Contentious Meal

Sometimes, however, we get all tangled up about the Lord’s Supper. We can so easily miss the point of this practice Jesus gave to his people. The joyful expression of our union with Christ and one another becomes heavy with contentious questions.

For example, we puzzle over what happens to the elements. Jesus said, “This is my body” (Matthew 26:26; 1 Corinthians 11:24). We wonder how literally he meant it. We also stress over who may participate. Some ministers in my tradition seem to take more time talking about who may not partake than actually inviting believers into the life-giving mystery of the meal.

Then there are all the logistical issues. We worry whether the bread must be unleavened as in the Passover. Some insist the wine must be fermented, while others are adamant that grape juice will do. Common cup, individual cups, or intinction (dipping the bread in the cup)? Come forward or pass out?

And unless we are from a long-established liturgical tradition, we discuss frequency. Quarterly, monthly, weekly? Practically speaking, Communion takes away time from singing and preaching, so it can feel like a nuisance. Others worry that if we celebrate the Supper too often, it will become rote.

This cascade of questions can suck the joy out of this precious sacrament Jesus gave us. But perhaps if we dig under these encrusting controversies, we might once again reach the living heart of Communion. It’s really not that far away. We just return to that momentous night. We consider how Jesus draws humanity at its worst into the triune God at his redemptive best.

His Best in Our Worst

Jesus gives them the bread with the words, “This is my body” (Matthew 26:26). Then he shares with them the third cup of the Passover: “This is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins” (Matthew 26:28). The ancient symbols of bread and wine received new, deeper meaning in these moments. Jesus dared to make the sacred Passover meal find its true fulfillment in himself. The Lamb of God pledged himself to a new covenant that would be sealed in his blood. At the meal, Jesus offered himself to them — just minutes before the arrest that would lead to his trial and torture and death.

Jesus warns them that this night will bring them the shame of failing him. But in the glow of the meal, the disciples feel brave. “Peter said to him, ‘Even if I must die with you, I will not deny you!’ And all the disciples said the same” (Matthew 26:35). Yet minutes later, when Jesus asks three of them to keep watch while he prays in his agony, he returns to find them sleeping. “So, could you not watch with me one hour?” (Matthew 26:40).

“The Lord’s Supper reveals that Jesus takes the worst we can do and makes it a sign of the best he does for us.”

Soon, Judas arrives with the soldiers. “Now the betrayer had given them a sign, saying, ‘The one I will kiss is the man; seize him’” (Matthew 26:48). Moments before, those same traitorous lips had tasted the bread given by Jesus’s own hand. With that same mouth, he marks Jesus for death.

Before the mob, the bravado of Christ’s closest friends fades to fear. “Then all the disciples left him and fled” (Matthew 26:56). Even Peter would proclaim with an oath, “I do not know the man” (Matthew 26:74).

Jesus pledged himself in covenant as he gave them bread and wine. But the disciples’ eager participation in the moment only highlighted their weakness to come. Bread and wine would forever remind them of how they failed their Lord that night. They were unable to stop his body being seized and his blood being let.

And yet. One cannot steal what is already freely given. One cannot gain victory over another who has already submitted. The soldiers may have seized Jesus, but he had already given his will to the Father. Pilate may have condemned him, but Jesus had already submitted to the triune plan to defeat death by death. The disciples were never really the cause of anything. These tokens of suffering, betrayal, failure, and death would become everlasting signs of sovereign love. This is the heart of Communion.

Wonderful Exchange

Near the beginning of his brilliant explanation of the Lord’s Supper, John Calvin connects this sacrament with the heart of God’s gift to us in Jesus. He likens what Jesus underwent to a marvelous trade in which we are surprised beneficiaries.

This is the wonderful exchange which, out of his measureless benevolence, he has made with us; that becoming Son of man with us, he has made us sons of God with him; that, by his descent to earth, he has prepared an ascent to heaven for us; that, by taking on our mortality, he has conferred his immortality upon us; that, accepting our weakness, he has strengthened us by his power; that receiving our poverty unto himself, he has transferred his wealth to us; that, taking the weight of our iniquity upon himself (which oppressed us), he has clothed us with his righteousness. (Institutes of the Christian Religion, 4.17.2)

Every Lord’s Supper, we come to the trading place. We come carrying our shame and guilt like Jacob Marley in A Christmas Carol, dragging the clanking chain of his sins. Yet at the Table, Jesus offers to break those chains. He wants to trade us. He’s ready to take our latest cowardly denial, drowsy inattention, outright betrayal, and embarrassing flight into self-protection. He remains the most extravagant trader. No four-year-old trading his leather baseball glove for a tattered comic book ever made a seemingly worse deal than Jesus. For out of the grace hoard of his complete atonement, Jesus swaps us.

Trade at the Table

Can you imagine Jesus at the Table? His eyes welcome you with love. They see all and yet beckon you to come closer. His smile opens an ocean of compassion. He speaks with startlingly ordinary words. “Drop that sack of shame right here. Take a hunk of my ever-renewing Bread of Life. Slide that bitter cup of stubborn unforgiveness my way. And pick up my cup. Gulp down the blood that cleanses not only all you’ve ever done but all that’s ever been done to you. Come on — trade me. This is for you, right now. Give me your worst. Receive my best. Take me — don’t wait. Let’s make a trade.”

It’s not only a matter of sins. We can bring all that weighs us down and offer it up. In Communion, Jesus nourishes us with himself, so we can receive any and all words he says into our personal situations. We bring our anxiety and listen to him saying, “My peace I give to you. . . . Let not your hearts be troubled, neither let them be afraid” (John 14:27). We bring our tumults and trials and receive his words, “In the world you will have tribulation. But take heart; I have overcome the world” (John 16:33).

We bring our sorrows from all the painful partings. He speaks, “I am the resurrection and the life. Whoever believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live” (John 11:25). We carry up our despair over the state of the world and place it into his hands. He gives us the bread and cup with a promise: “Behold, I am making all things new” (Revelation 21:5). We bring intractable situations to the one “who opens and no one will shut, who shuts and no one opens” (Revelation 3:7).

Heart of Communion

The heart of Communion is Jesus’s taking the worst, hardest, most baffling and defeating from us. He gives us his best — his way, truth, and life. For the bread reveals the Son of God who gave himself entirely and utterly for us. The cup offers the blood shed to take away every sin. The essence of the Lord’s Supper is Jesus offering in the present moment all that his incarnate life, death, resurrection, and ascension have accomplished.

Paul writes, “The cup of blessing that we bless, is it not a participation in the blood of Christ? The bread that we break, is it not a participation in the body of Christ?” (1 Corinthians 10:16). The mystery is the wondrous exchange whereby Jesus keeps on receiving us as his own and giving himself to us utterly and redemptively. This puts all the other questions, as important as they may be, in their proper place.

Then it came burning hot into my mind, whatever he said, and however he flattered, when he got me home to his house, he would sell me for a slave. (The Pilgrim’s Progress)

These words from Faithful still expose the sweet talk of the old self. We need the Holy Spirit to bring it hot to mind: whatever our lusts promise, however they compliment, when they get us home, they mean to throw us in a pit and sell us for a slave.

The apostle Peter rings the alarm: “Beloved, I urge you as sojourners and exiles to abstain from the passions of the flesh, which wage war against your soul” (1 Peter 2:11). For somebody to assault your body is treacherous enough, but here we find an assault on the soul — and that by our own mutinous passions. Peter pleads, Don’t embrace your soul’s murderer; don’t welcome your soul’s foe through the front gates. These are compelling entreaties for anyone who knows what a soul is. One assumes that discovering our flesh with soul-daggers up its sleeves would be enough to motivate any reasonable person to mandate pat downs at the gates. But then again, we are not always reasonable.

Weaponized Hope

The liquor of sin makes us drunk and stupid. Sin crouches at the door, and its desire is for us. How adamant its demands, how loud its knockings, how dear and costly and bloody the necessary resistance — “If your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away. For it is better that you lose one of your members than that your whole body go into hell” (Matthew 5:30).

With such a seductive tyrant, Peter sends another mighty reason to defend the gate, one easy to overlook: “Beloved, I urge you as sojourners and exiles to abstain from the passions of the flesh, which wage war against your soul.” He does not appeal to us as farmers or carpenters or even as soldiers; he implores the church to kill sin based on our identity as pilgrims and outcasts. Refuse the world’s lusts as a people of the Spirit, a people not of this world, a people not yet home. Heaven’s joys will slay earth’s sins.

Has your heavenly hope ever reached its blade down to earth and stabbed your strongest temptations? Peter wants you to wield your heavenly citizenship; he wants your heavenly home and future to fill the skies with swords that everywhere reach down and behead the lusts of the flesh. “Christian,” Peter urges, “this world is not safe for you — its passions deceive, its pleasures enslave, its glories will perish. Our feet are not yet in Zion. The world and all its desires are passing away, sinking like a cannon-torn ship into the abyss. If you allow them, the appetites of the old you will fasten you to the deck.”

“As we pass through the world, we seek to bless the world with a knowledge of how they, too, can be saved from the wrath to come.”

But Peter also reminds us that a paradise awaits the faithful: a place you half-expect is too good to be real, with a Person you only half-believe will sit you at his table and serve you after all you’ve done (Luke 12:37). But the grace of our Lord is not like man’s, and he has prepared a place, solely from his good pleasure, for us who receive the kingdom. And he sends his apostle with a message: “Beloved, as sojourners and exiles, ready any minute to be called away to feast at my table, make war against that which makes war against your future with me.”

Moses, an Illustration

Isn’t Moses a vibrant example for us? The author of Hebrews thought so. He offers him as a living testimony of a man whose understanding of himself as an exile, a son of Israel in a foreign palace, armed him against the best the world could offer his flesh. His self-understanding birthed his self-denial.

By faith Moses, when he was grown up, refused to be called the son of Pharaoh’s daughter, choosing rather to be mistreated with the people of God than to enjoy the fleeting pleasures of sin. He considered the reproach of Christ greater wealth than the treasures of Egypt, for he was looking to the reward. (Hebrews 11:24–26)

Moses did not merely prefer to be known as an Israelite, a race of slaves; he refused to be named among Egypt’s household. He would be an exilic son of the true God and not a son of Pharaoh’s daughter. He was a sojourner in Egypt and thus considered the sufferings of his Messiah greater wealth than the dainties of the damned. Manful Moses said in his heart, “Away with this stick you call a ‘scepter,’ away with this name you call ‘noble,’ away with these pleasures you label ‘safe,’ these sins you call ‘joy,’ these idols you call ‘gods,’ and draw near you beatings, you banishment, you scorn and you shame, for I look beyond these griefs to the reward in Immanuel’s land.”

He knew, as Jeremiah Burroughs writes,

There is a great difference between the prosperity of the wicked, and that which the godly have. God carries his people when he exalts them, as the Eagle her young upon her wings, he exalts them to safety (Job 5:11). . . . But when God exalts the wicked, he lifts them up as the eagle lifts up her prey in her talons, he lifts them up to destroy them. (Moses, His Choice, 101)

By faith, he foresaw his people headed toward the promised land and Pharaoh’s crown sunk at the bottom of the sea, motionless. His choosing a home not with the women, the money, the power, the gods of Egypt was eminently practical. In leaving, he left to “a better country, that is, a heavenly one. Therefore God is not ashamed to be called [his] God, for he has prepared for [him] a city” (Hebrews 11:16). So, as a sojourner and exile, he abstained from the passions of the flesh and even valued the reproach of the Messiah as better wealth because “he was looking to the reward.”

Exiled to Glory

Christian, you don’t belong in this world — how often do you consider that? Do you openly acknowledge it, and make plain through speech, that you seek a homeland (Hebrews 11:13–14)? And does the hope of home, the glory of home, the God who is your home, equip you to abstain from the passions of the flesh that wage war against your soul?

Peter writes his letter “to those who are elect exiles . . .” (1 Peter 1:1). But this tells us more than that we are not citizens of this world anymore — he does not leave our name tags blank. We are elect exiles, chosen exiles, estranged from the world and forgotten, but at home and remembered by our God, who chose us out of the world by his grace. And as elect exiles, God has chosen us out of the world to serve as a spiritual blessing while in this world:

You are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for his own possession, that you may proclaim the excellencies of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light. Once you were not a people, but now you are God’s people; once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy. (1 Peter 2:9–10)

As we pass through the world, we seek to bless others with a knowledge of how they too can be saved from the wrath to come. We travel along, resisting the world’s temptations and the flesh’s enticements to them, living out our exile in the knowledge it soon will end. Peter summarizes:

Therefore, preparing your minds for action, and being sober-minded, set your hope fully on the grace that will be brought to you at the revelation of Jesus Christ. As obedient children, do not be conformed to the passions of your former ignorance, but as he who called you is holy, you also be holy in all your conduct, since it is written, “You shall be holy, for I am holy.” And if you call on him as Father who judges impartially according to each one’s deeds, conduct yourselves with fear throughout the time of your exile, knowing that you were ransomed from the futile ways inherited from your forefathers, not with perishable things such as silver or gold, but with the precious blood of Christ, like that of a lamb without blemish or spot. (1 Peter 1:13–19)

Isn’t that beautiful? Don’t you want to live like this? Shunning shameful and former passions, thriving as obedient children to our holy heavenly Father, fulfilling our earthly exile with that power purchased by the blood of Christ? Such a life requires a mind set fully on the grace to be brought to us at the revelation of Jesus Christ. Or, like Moses, a mind looking to the reward.

So, by faith, and as sojourners and exiles, we refuse “to be called the son of Pharaoh’s daughter, choosing rather to be mistreated with the people of God than to enjoy the fleeting pleasures of sin,” for we look to a future with Christ. We are exiles, but exiles soon to be welcomed to that homeland of eternal life and glory and fellowship with God himself in the new Jerusalem.

Audio Transcript

Welcome back to the Ask Pastor John podcast. Here we talk every so often about wartime living. And we talk about minimalism, too. But those are not the same thing. The Christian life is not simply about decluttering our closets and living a simpler life. No. We aim at wartime simplicity, which is a more specific goal, a material simplicity in this world that’s on mission, not simply happy with being more organized. You can see how Pastor John has distinguished the two — wartime simplicity and minimalism — in the APJ book on pages 98–101.

Today we look at a new angle to the topic in an email from a woman who listens to the podcast from China. Here’s the email from our friend: “Dear Pastor John, hello to you from Hong Kong, and thank you for this podcast. My question is that my unbelieving husband has the habit of hoarding. He keeps boxes, newspapers from years back, packaging — all the things that average people may regard as garbage once their expected usage is over — all that accumulates in our home. I tried to throw away some things, but it caused disharmony in our relationship. I feel like I live in a rubbish dump. How do I deal with the problem biblically?”

Well, let me admit right away, I am not an expert in either understanding hoarding or counseling hoarders. So, you might say, “Well, why are you even trying to answer this question?” And I’m trying to answer it because it’s so hard. I feel like, as a pastor, I can’t ignore things that I just have not given a lot of thought to. But frankly, I have seen enough of this in the last forty years that I’ve thought about it some. So, don’t take this as a final word — just take it as “Maybe there’s something here that would help me.” And if there’s not, you haven’t wasted too much time.

So, let me at least try to share the kinds of things that I have thought over the years, and then call them together here to show what you can do if you have a friend or a relative or married someone who lives in the chaos of hoarding. And the reason I say chaos is that we almost never speak of a person as a hoarder who saves everything but keeps it in perfect order on shelves, in the attic, in closets. We don’t call that person a hoarder. The house is neat; it’s orderly. Life is functional.

The hoarder is a person who has gotten out of proportion to his ability to manage what he’s saving, and disorder and encroachment is making life almost unlivable. I view hoarding as on a continuum with degrees of messiness, and we are all messy a little bit — some a lot, some a little bit. I think there’s a continuum here.

Why Some Live in the Chaos

So, what are the factors that move people along this continuum to full-blown, almost incapacitating, depressing hoarding?

1. They might not have the inclination to organize.

The first thing I would say is that many people grow up in homes where they do not see or hear anyone modeling or expressing the value of orderliness, or neatness, or cleanliness, or beauty. They may enter adult life with no built-in instinct toward keeping a room or a home orderly or neat or beautiful. It’s just not their natural impulse. It wasn’t built into them either genetically or the way their parents raised them.

2. They might not have the necessary attention.

This lack of any natural impulse toward orderliness may go hand in hand with a kind of attention deficit. As much as we may overdiagnose our children with attention deficit disorder, attention deficit — whether you call it a disorder or not — is a real thing. If you were to ask somebody why they don’t put this or that away — they just leave it there — one honest answer they might give to you is, “It doesn’t register. I don’t even see it.”

Now, those folks leave a trail of things that belong in a drawer, or on a shelf, or in a cabinet, or in a closet, but they don’t put them there for the two reasons we’ve seen. One, partly because there’s no natural impulse toward orderliness, and partly because it just doesn’t grab their attention. They don’t see it. It is as if they are blind to it.

3. They might procrastinate.

There is the complicating factor of procrastination. A person opens a package, takes out the content, and leaves the packaging on the chair or on the counter. “I’ll deal with that later. I fully intend to.” They don’t. So, now you have three factors at work: the absence of a bent toward orderliness, a deficit of attention as though things just don’t even get noticed — they don’t register — and you have procrastination that intends to do the right thing and put something away, and never gets back to it. Now, the effect of those three factors is a room or a house of increasing disorder or messiness or chaos.

4. They might not think to make a plan.

The fourth complicating factor has to do with why it’s so hard to tackle this mess and clean it up once it’s accumulated; namely, many people’s minds simply do not function in a way that makes planning for cleaning and ordering natural. It doesn’t come naturally to formulate a goal. “Okay, this is going to be cleaned up in three weeks.” Conceive of steps to get to that goal. “Okay, I’m going to have my friend and I — we’re going to work on it about one hour a day every morning.” Plan for those times. “Okay, we’ll do it on Tuesdays and Thursdays.”

That way of thinking seems so natural to some people — it does to me — and it’s quite unnatural to others. They just don’t think that way. If you talk to them about that kind of planning, they might say something like, “I just do things. I don’t live my life that way. I don’t even think that way. It’s a strain on my mind to even hear you talk about it that way.” In other words, they’re not walking through their lives formulating goals, identifying steps to reach those goals, planning how to take those steps. They just don’t approach life that way.

“God in Christ is ultimately the source of our well-being — not orderliness and not messiness.”

Therefore, what seems like a simple cleanup project to some, to them seems absolutely daunting, which means now that if all those factors come together — absence of any natural bent toward orderliness, a deficit of attention, a bent toward procrastination, the absence of any natural inclination to form a plan in handling the growing chaos — the effect is discouragement, hopelessness, paralysis, isolation (nobody is going to come to their house) and sometimes depression.

5. They might be inclined to collect things.

Which brings us now to the final complicating factor of this tendency toward hoarding. On top of an ever-increasing chaos of things that never get put away, you have this added impulse to collect things and rarely throw them away. I don’t think hoarding is a separate and distinct tendency from all those other things that I’ve just mentioned. I think they’re all interwoven in greater or lesser degrees.

What Feeds the Impulse to Hoard

As I’ve tried to understand this impulse of hoarding that gets added into the mix, it seems to me there are two general ways to describe what’s feeding this impulse.

1. We can find our identity in our possessions.

One is a deep, distorted association in a person’s mind between having and being. Now, that may sound a little philosophical, but it’s not. Everybody can understand this. Let me try to explain. To have stuff is to be okay. “I’m okay. I’ve got my stuff I have, and so I am okay.”

The reason I say it’s distorted is because all of us experience some measure of good feeling that comes from just having, right? This is not weird. We all do this. We collect coins or baseball cards or butterflies or antiques or books. There’s a satisfying sense of well-being that comes from just having a thing, having a collection. What is that? Well, there it is. It’s universal. Most people experience having as part of their well-being.

But with the hoarder, this has been distorted so that the person’s sense of significance and well-being is preserved not by an isolated healthy collection, but by a life dominated by collection. It feels good. It feels significant to have more stuff, even if it’s old newspapers or tools or wrapping paper or buttons or scrap metal. I’ve seen people collect and fill their houses with the most bizarre things.

2. We can find it too painful to discard our possessions.

The other thing that feeds the hoarding impulse is the anxiety caused by getting rid of stuff. Now, this is just the flip side of the good feeling that one has by gathering stuff, but experientially it’s a different feeling. And so, there are two impulses, not just one. Once you have comforted yourself with some acquisition — “I’ve got a lot of stuff that feels good. I feel secure. I feel content. It does good for me” — and you surround yourself with this stuff, then that sense of peace is jeopardized (there’s an anxiety that comes) if you contemplate getting rid of any one piece of the stuff.

It might be the one piece that you’re going to need to complete your well-being, and a huge anxiety is created by thinking, “I don’t think I can give that away because if I give that away, then I might give all this away. And if I give all this away, I have no idea how we’ll feel good anymore about my life.”

How to Help a Hoarder

So, what do you do if you must deal with a friend or a roommate or a relative or a close relative, like a spouse? Here are five suggestions (very briefly).

1. Don’t get angry.

Get beyond anger. The Bible says that the anger of man does not work the righteousness of God (James 1:20). It is so easy to get frustrated and angry. And you will discover that’s not going to help. That’s not working righteousness for anybody. We have to find a way to subdue the anger that rises so that we can talk and relate in a way that doesn’t come from anger.

2. Try to talk about it.

With as much patience and kindness as you can, see how far your friend or relatives will let you draw them into a conversation about what you perceive as a problem. They may not. They may. They might admit it’s a total problem. They might not see any problem at all. Don’t go first to the problems that it creates. “The chaos is killing you.” “It’s going to make a fire hazard.” “It’s unhealthy.” Don’t go there first.

First, go to the kinds of things that may help you understand them. How did it get to be this way? What’s driving them? And they might be helped by your suggesting some of those five things that I mentioned earlier. See if they recognize themselves in any of those traits.

3. Consider how you can compromise.

See if they are willing to think in terms of a both-and, a kind of compromise with you, where both of you can accomplish some of what you desire. I knew one family, for example, that basically solved the problem (more or less) by making one room in the house total chaos. And nobody gave a thought to it; nobody attempted to fix it. If you’re going to store something, throw it in there. And if you opened that, you’d say, “What is this?”

I remember doing that — and it was far away from Minneapolis, so I won’t identify anybody. But I thought, “This seems like a normal house, and that one room is absolute, bizarre chaos. What is that?” It’s a compromise is what it is. They found a way to live together. And I thought, “Okay, that’s what it has to be.” So, that’s number three. See if you can get a both-and — a compromise of some kind. That may not be it, but something like that.

4. Suggest seeing a counselor.

If the problem seems severe enough to be hindering friendships and hindering health, putting life at risk, you might ask the person to see a counselor with you and get more help than I can give. And I don’t mean that there are any magic bullets. I just mean sometimes a third person listening carefully can help both of you talk more clearly, more fairly to each other, and so move you forward toward a solution.

5. Seek your ultimate fulfillment in God.

Finally, God in Christ is ultimately the source of our well-being — not orderliness and not messiness. So, seek together to find your deepest sense of identity and well-being and happiness in him.

Therefore, having this ministry by the mercy of God, we do not lose heart. But we have renounced disgraceful, underhanded ways. We refuse to practice cunning or to tamper with God’s word, but by the open statement of the truth we would commend ourselves to everyone’s conscience in the sight of God. And even if our gospel is veiled, it is veiled to those who are perishing. In their case the god of this world has blinded the minds of the unbelievers, to keep them from seeing the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God. For what we proclaim is not ourselves, but Jesus Christ as Lord, with ourselves as your servants for Jesus’ sake. For God, who said, “Let light shine out of darkness,” has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.

But we have this treasure in jars of clay, to show that the surpassing power belongs to God and not to us. We are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not driven to despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed; always carrying in the body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be manifested in our bodies. For we who live are always being given over to death for Jesus’ sake, so that the life of Jesus also may be manifested in our mortal flesh. So death is at work in us, but life in you.

Since we have the same spirit of faith according to what has been written, “I believed, and so I spoke,” we also believe, and so we also speak, knowing that he who raised the Lord Jesus will raise us also with Jesus and bring us with you into his presence. For it is all for your sake, so that as grace extends to more and more people it may increase thanksgiving, to the glory of God.

So we do not lose heart. Though our outer self is wasting away, our inner self is being renewed day by day. For this light momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison, as we look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen. For the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal. (2 Corinthians 4:1–18)

Let’s walk step-by-step through the chapter and see if we can follow the train of Paul’s thought as the argument unfolds. Then we will step back and focus on the main point and the primary supporting arguments. And I promise you that the main point is going to be personally and culturally very relevant for your life and ministry, and the seven supporting arguments are going to be very powerful to help you not to lose heart.

Verses 1–2: ‘Do not lose heart, but refuse to tamper.’

Verse 1: “Therefore, having this ministry by the mercy of God, we do not lose heart.” We are going to see this again in verse 16: “So we do not lose heart.” What is it that, at this point, might make Paul lose heart? In 2 Corinthians 2:15, he had said that his ministry is the aroma of Christ, and to some it is an aroma from death to death. He preaches, and the effect is that the deadness of some is simply confirmed with death. Sometimes the gospel meets with deadness and becomes a sentence of death.

And then, in chapter 3, even though he celebrates the superior glory of the new covenant ministry, in which the Spirit lifts the veil so people can see the glory of God — nevertheless, he says in 3:14–15, “For to this day, when they read the old covenant, that same veil remains unlifted, because only through Christ is it taken away. Yes, to this day whenever Moses is read a veil lies over their hearts.” An aroma of death and an unlifted veil before the preaching of Paul. It can be discouraging. One can easily lose heart. We’ve all tasted it.

But as soon as Paul says that he does not lose heart, he immediately shows us that this is not merely a statement about his emotions, but about his trustworthiness, as a minister of the word. Follow the logic: “We do not lose heart. [Verse 2:] But we have renounced disgraceful, underhanded ways. We refuse to practice cunning or to tamper with God’s word.” What’s the implication of saying it that way — not lose heart but refuse to tamper?

The implication is that a very tempting way to deal with discouragement when your preaching is not producing as much life and is not lifting as many veils as you would like, is to tamper with the message to make it more palatable to the unbelieving mind. Let’s read it all (verses 1–2):

We do not lose heart. But we have renounced disgraceful, underhanded ways. We refuse to practice cunning or to tamper with God’s word, but by the open statement of the truth we would commend ourselves to everyone’s conscience in the sight of God.

Our message, our gospel, is an “open statement of the truth.” There’s no cunning. There’s no tampering. There’s nothing underhanded. We’re not slippery. There’s no double-speak. There’s no clever attempt to hide difficult doctrines or tough moral positions. What we believe is open and clear. Everybody can see it for what it is. Our discouragement with results has not driven us to become wishy-washy with God’s truth or turned us into man-pleasers.

Verses 3–6: ‘Only God can save, and he saves through means.’

So, verses 3–4 give the real explanation for why not everybody believes when Paul preaches.

And even if our gospel is veiled, it is veiled to those who are perishing. In their case the god of this world has blinded the minds of the unbelievers, to keep them from seeing the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God.

What’s the point? The point is that the unbelief of those who remain veiled when Paul preaches is not owing to lack of openness and clarity in Paul’s message. He is not responsible for their unbelief. There has been no cunning. No tampering. No subtlety. No half-truths. No concealing of what is utterly important. The ultimately decisive factor if the gospel remains veiled (for the rest of their lives) — having no saving effect — is that God has given them up to their own hardness and to the blinding effects of Satan (verse 4). They are among the perishing (1 Corinthians 1:18; 2 Corinthians 2:15–16).

Then, verse 5 adds this argument:

For what we proclaim is not ourselves, but Jesus Christ as Lord, with ourselves as your servants for Jesus’ sake.

In other words, the failure of people to see the glory of Christ in our preaching (verse 4) is not because we don’t preach Christ. It’s not because we’re inserting ourselves in some confusing or obscuring way into the gospel. “What we proclaim is not ourselves, but Jesus Christ as Lord.” Our message is Jesus Christ and his lordship. Yes, we ourselves, in our bodily existence, are very much a part of this proclamation. But the way we figure in is that we are your servants (douloi), your slaves. Our verbal message and our bodily ministry are not the reason the veil is still over the gospel.

Then Paul completes the argument like this in verse 6:

For God, who said, “Let light shine out of darkness,” has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.

In other words, the reason we preach Christ, and embody the servant-like, suffering ministry of Christ, is that when God sovereignly shines with his saving light into the veiled and dead human heart, what he enables people to see in the gospel we preach and the Christ we embody is the glory of God in “the face of Jesus Christ.” Paul and his message are the face of Jesus. He ministers in the double way of verse 5 — proclaiming and serving — because when God lifts the veil, that’s what people see.

So, the point of verses 1–6 is that Paul does not let possible discouragement (verse 1) lead him to tamper with the gospel (verse 2) or to pull back from being a Christlike servant. Rather, he takes his encouragement from the fact that, ultimately, it is God who decides who is being saved and who is perishing (verse 3), and from the fact that, when God sovereignly creates light in a blind heart (verse 6), he does it by means of Paul’s Christ-exalting preaching and his self-sacrificing ministry (verse 5). The fact that Paul has this ministry as a gift of mercy to him (as verse 1 says) is added reason for why he does not lose heart.

Verses 7–12: ‘I, Paul, preach Christ with my afflictions.’

Now, verses 7–12 focus on the sacrificial, suffering, servant-like aspect of Paul’s ministry (from verse 5b). Remember how he said in verse 5 that his ministry has these two dimensions: “[1] For what we proclaim is not ourselves, but Jesus Christ as Lord, [2] with ourselves as your servants for Jesus’ sake.” First dimension: Paul proclaims Jesus Christ with the authority of heaven. But — second dimension — he also gets down low like a slave, underneath, and serves his people, forgoing rights, forgoing privileges, forgoing remuneration, forgoing sleep and safety and esteem.

“Don’t lose heart in your ministry, and don’t protect yourself from losing heart by tampering with God’s word.”

That second dimension of Paul’s ministry is what verses 7–12 are about. So, he’s carrying forward the argument that he is anything but cunning and manipulative and underhanded and disgraceful. Not only does he not tamper with the word. He doesn’t tamper with the example of Jesus’s sacrificial love. He lives it. He commends his message to our conscience, and he commends his life to our conscience. He speaks a crucified Christ and he lives a crucified Christ. He tells the sacrifice of Christ and he embodies the sacrifice of Christ.

Verses 7–12 show how he does that, and why. Verse 7:

But we have this treasure in jars of clay, to show that the surpassing power belongs to God and not to us.

I take the “treasure” to be the miracle of verse 6 — that God has shone in Paul’s life to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ. But the main point is that Paul is a clay pot. I don’t think we need to speculate about what that means. It’s spelled out in verses 8–9. This is the form of his slavery (from verse 5).

We are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not driven to despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed.

To be a clay pot is to be vulnerable to affliction, perplexity, persecution, and being knocked down. This is what Paul meant in verse 5 when he called himself their “servant.” He’s saying, in essence, “I will endure anything for you.”

And then in verses 10–11 he connects that servant-like suffering to how he reveals Christ:

. . . always carrying in the body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be manifested in our bodies. For we who live are always being given over to death for Jesus’ sake, so that the life of Jesus also may be manifested in our mortal flesh.

“Carrying in the body the death of Jesus” is being afflicted, perplexed, persecuted, and struck down for Jesus’s sake. Paul is embodying, for the world to see, what Jesus was like in suffering and dying for them. So he says, “The life of Jesus is being manifested in our bodies, our mortal flesh.” This is why, in verse 6, when God shines into veiled, blind hearts, what they see is the face of Jesus Christ. And they see it in the verbal preaching and the bodily sacrifices of Paul.

The effect of Paul’s clay-pot, servant-like weaknesses in being afflicted and crushed and perplexed and struck down, is threefold. (1) The life of Christ is manifested (verses 10–11). (2) This leads to new life in believers. Verse 12: “So death is at work us, but life in you.” And (3) since God is the one who creates that new life through Paul’s clay-pot-weakness, God gets the glory. Verse 7: “We have this treasure in jars of clay, to show that the surpassing power belongs to God and not to us.”

Verses 13–14: ‘I’m not the first to suffer and stay true.’

And then surprisingly, in verses 13–14, Paul steps back and aligns himself with the psalmist who wrote Psalm 116. It is as though he wants to say, “I’m not the first person who has embraced suffering and stayed true to the message God wants me to speak without tampering with it.” And by aligning himself with the psalmist in Psalm 116, he argues that, just as the psalmist looked to God for life beyond the suffering, “so do I.”

2 Corinthians 4:13–14:

Since we have the same spirit of faith according to what has been written [Psalm 116:10 LXX], “I believed, and so I spoke,” we also believe, and so we also speak, knowing that he who raised the Lord Jesus will raise us also with Jesus and bring us with you into his presence.

Here’s Psalm 116:3–10:

The snares of death encompassed me; the pangs of Sheol laid hold on me; I suffered distress and anguish. Then I called on the name of the Lord: . . . You have delivered my soul from death, my eyes from tears, my feet from stumbling; I will walk before the Lord in the land of the living. I believed [that!], and therefore I spoke [LXX of verse 10].

Paul knew that often in the Old Testament, those who suffered gained strength by believing in fellowship with God after death. “I will walk before the Lord in the land of the living.” And so Paul says, “In the same way, I press on in my painful, often disheartening ministry, because [2 Corinthians 4:14] I know that he who raised the Lord Jesus will raise us also with Jesus, and bring us with you into his presence.”

Verse 15: ‘When people get grace, God gets glory.’

Then, in verse 15, Paul adds two more arguments for why he continues to speak and continues to suffer without tampering with the word or tampering with the example of Jesus. He says (verse 15), “For it is all for your sake so that, as grace extends to more and more people it may increase thanksgiving to the glory of God.”

In other words, his ministry of truth and love, word and deed, speaking and suffering, is in fact leading people by grace out of death into life and God-glorifying thankfulness. And since God’s surpassing power (verses 6–7) is what makes it happen, he gets the glory. So, the two added arguments of verse 15 are (1) people are getting grace and (2) God is getting thanks — glory. People get grace; God gets glory.

Verses 16–18: ‘So do not lose heart. Rather, look ahead.’

Therefore, in verse 16, as the final paragraph begins, Paul returns to his first point (from verse 1): “So we do not lose heart.” And he says this knowing full well that his kind of ministry is costing him his life. “Though our outer self is wasting away . . .” I know that’s true for all of us, but if you minister like Paul — he goes faster. If you say, “This ministry is killing me,” that’s not a reason to leave the ministry.

He finishes the chapter by explaining why this wasting away does not cause him to lose heart. First, it’s because he experiences an inner renewal every day. Verse 16b: “our inner self is being renewed day by day.” How does that happen? It happens because he is totally convinced that (verse 17) “this light momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison.”

For Paul to call his countless lifelong afflictions “light and momentary” is astonishing. But it shows how heavenly-minded he was. He always thought of this life in comparison to the next. “I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us” (Romans 8:18). Compared to eternity, these afflictions are momentary. Compared to the weight of glory that’s coming, these afflictions are light.

Then he ends by telling us his secret to experiencing daily renewal, namely, verse 18:

We look not to the things that are seen, but to the things that are unseen. For the things that are seen or transient, but the things that are unseen or eternal.

Where was his gaze? What was he looking at? What was unseen?

This chapter (chapter 4) began with the word therefore. Verse 1: “Therefore . . . we do not lose heart.” Which links back to these words in the preceding chapter and verse (3:18): “We all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another.”

So, when Paul says at the end of chapter 4 that his inner self is being renewed, day by day, by looking at the eternal and the unseen, I think he has in mind (at least) this: “We look to the glory of the Lord, and the effect is that we are being transformed, renewed, strengthened, enabled to go on in the ministry day by day and not to lose heart.

Paul’s Double Main Point

Now, let’s step back and make the main point of this chapter as clear as we can and summarize its supporting arguments. And let’s do all of this now in application to our own souls and our own ministries.

Twice Paul says, “We do not lose heart” (verses 1, 16). I think everything in this chapter is designed by Paul to support that statement. Some of the greatest realities in the world are harnessed to pull that statement into reality. I think if Paul were looking down from heaven right now on this conference, he would say, “As you leave, brothers, preach to yourself, ‘I will not lose heart in my ministry.’”

But I also think that if Paul were looking down from heaven, he would tap me on the shoulder and say, “Be sure to draw attention to the connection between verses 1 and 2.” It’s really a double main point. The double main point is this: “Don’t lose heart in your ministry, and don’t protect yourself from losing heart by tampering with God’s word.”

In other words, be a man of total truthfulness. Put the open Book in front of you, and say with an open and clean conscience, “Thus saith the Lord.” Have an open life of humble service in front of the people and say, “Thus is Christ,” fallible as you are.

Seven Heart-Strengthening Realities

Paul has a particular way to keep us (and himself) from losing heart — namely, with seven arguments, seven realities.

1. Unbelief need not be your fault.

When your gospel remains veiled to people that you know and love, it need not be owing to your tampering with the truth. And if they remain hard and resistant to the gospel till they die, it will not be laid to your account. It will be said under God’s judgment, “It was veiled to those who were perishing” (verse 3).

2. Your afflictions manifest Christ’s life.

When you are afflicted in every way, and perplexed, and persecuted, and struck down, and thus carry in your body the death of Jesus, never forget this is how the life of Jesus is manifested to your people (verses 10–12).

3. People will be saved through your ministry.

In spite of the sorrows of those who don’t believe, many will see the life of Jesus in your message and in your life; they will receive grace; they will live; and they will give thanks. Your ministry will not be wasted (verse 12).

4. Clay pots were made by God for God.

Since you must take the role of a clay pot in your weakness and your afflictions, never forget that there is a design in it “that the surpassing power might belong to God and not to us” (verse 7). Become so God-centered and God-satisfied that his glory through your affliction really is sufficient to keep you from losing heart.

5. The resurrection can and will sustain you.

Never let anybody persuade you that being heavenly-minded makes you no earthly good. Paul’s heavenly-mindedness was precisely what sustained him through the Christlike sacrifices he had to make for his ministry. He believed and spoke and suffered “knowing that he who raised the Lord Jesus will raise us also with Jesus and bring us with you into his presence” (verse 14). Seriously, brothers, if the hope of the resurrection is not a regular, conscious, sustaining power in your sacrifices, how will you survive?

6. The glory to come is incomparable (and accessible now).

God has for each of you a daily renewal for the inner man (verse 16). It comes from the hope of the weight of glory that makes present afflictions light and momentary by comparison. And we taste it every day, do we not, by getting alone with God and beholding the weight of glory, the glory of the Lord (3:18).

7. You are not alone.

Finally, brothers, you’re not alone. The psalmist (verse 13), the prophets, the apostles, all the thousands of saints who have lived and served faithfully, and the Lord Jesus Christ himself have gone before you. They believed, and so they spoke. And so they lived. And so they died. And today they bear the weight of glory, and their final word to you is, “Do not lose heart, and do not tamper with the word of God or the example of Jesus.”

ABSTRACT: Throughout church history, some theologians have followed Aristotle’s description of woman as a “deformed” or “malformed” man. The Reformers, however, celebrated woman as “a most excellent work” of God, equally capable of virtue and worthy of love, respect, and justice. Together with their doctrine of male headship, the Reformers’ defense of woman offers a position close to what many call “complementarity” today.

For our ongoing series of feature articles for pastors and Christian leaders, we asked Steven Wedgeworth (MDiv, Reformed Theological Seminary), pastor of Christ Church in South Bend, Indiana, to investigate the Reformers’ defense of woman.

As a whole, the tradition of the Christian church stands opposed to the modern commitment to sexual egalitarianism, especially when it comes to ministerial ordination and headship within marriage. This testimony, however, is frequently rejected on the grounds that the Christian church throughout history was misogynistic. Indeed, various statements that seem harsh or unfair toward the female sex are not hard to find. Perhaps the most notorious of these is Aristotle’s assertion that women are “misbegotten” or improperly formed, an assertion reaffirmed by Thomas Aquinas in several places.

While we should be willing to acknowledge gross errors and blind biases in church history, we also find a contrary testimony on this point. The normative Protestant tradition rejected the “traditional” definition of woman as malformed. More than this, in the history of Reformed theology, we also find the assertion that women are capable of true virtue and even political rule. Indeed, the Reformers and their heirs freely acknowledged that individual women often excel particular men in character and intellect, even their own husbands. They also condemned domestic abuse in the strongest of terms.

This fuller view of history is important because it shows the way in which a Christian tradition can maintain the scriptural doctrine of male headship while rejecting a philosophical notion of female deficiency. What emerges is a position similar to what we now refer to as complementarity. The theologians of the Reformation maintained that both men and women fully bear the image of God, are equally capable of virtue and spiritual graces, and yet are differently ordered in God’s good design. Due to the creation order, men and women have certain specific vocational directions and also make unique and essential contributions to both marriage and society. Instead of defining woman as a necessary evil, the Reformers defend woman as a most excellent work.

Against the ‘Deformed Man’

If you read Reformation commentaries on the book of Genesis or other treatments of the constitution of men and women, you will notice a peculiar line of argument that repeatedly shows up. When dealing with the creation of the woman, Protestant theologians go out of their way to show how the Scriptures refute the “pagan” and “vulgar” conception of the female sex. For instance, Martin Luther (1483–1546) writes,

This tale fits Aristotle’s designation of woman as a “maimed man”; others declare that she is a monster. But let them themselves be monsters and sons of monsters — these men who make malicious statements and ridicule a creature of God in which God Himself took delight as in a most excellent work, moreover, one which we see created by a special counsel of God. These pagan ideas show that reason cannot establish anything sure about God and the works of God but only thinks up reasons against reasons and teaches nothing in a perfect and sound manner.1

In his typically colorful prose, Luther is interacting with a longstanding conversation in classical biology and anthropology. Aristotle, as noted, had claimed that the woman was a “maimed” or deformed man. What he meant by this description strikes us as bizarre, as it has to do with the way he understood the mechanics of human reproduction and embryonic development. In short, Aristotle believed that all human life begins in one state of existence but possesses potential to develop into a more perfect state of existence. Those humans who activate this potency and move into the fully developed stage Aristotle classified as males, while those who remain in the initial stage were females. Various translations and restatements of Aristotle render his description of the woman as maimed, deformed, malformed, mutilated, or misbegotten.2

While contemporary readers will quickly reject Aristotle’s argument as based on an entirely false understanding of human physiology, Christian theologians in earlier times often gave Aristotle the benefit of the doubt. Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274) is perhaps the chief example. Though he qualifies and relativizes the Aristotelian view to a point, Aquinas still considers it to be basically correct.3

The Reformers had no time for this discussion. Martin Luther finds Aristotle’s claim offensive and impious, an affront to the very majesty of God. In his treatise The Estate of Marriage, he attacks the ancient statement that woman is a “necessary evil”: “These are the words of blind heathen, who are ignorant of the fact that man and woman are God’s creation. They blaspheme his work, as if man and woman just came into being spontaneously!”4 John Calvin (1509–1564) also rejects the description of the female sex as a “necessary evil,” arguing, “The vulgar proverb, indeed, is, that she is a necessary evil; but the voice of God is rather to be heard, which declares that woman is given as a companion and an associate to the man, to assist him to live well.”5

While the later Reformed scholastics were frequently more friendly toward the Thomistic and Aristotelian heritage, they too stood firm on the question of the origin and constitution of woman. Andrew Willet (1562–1621) attacks “the Philosopher” (i.e., Aristotle) as “heathenish” and “profane” for asserting that women cannot possess virtue in the full and “proper” sense.6 Writing in 1676, Gisbertus Voetius (1589–1676) says the notion that woman is an “error of nature” or an “imperfect male” is a “monstrous opinion that is refuted by Scripture and reason.”7 The overwhelming majority of Protestant theologians in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries directly rejected the ancient position that the woman was deficient or malformed.

Upholding Hierarchy

While Reformation theologians rejected the notion that women were lesser creatures than men, they did not hesitate to use the language of hierarchy. In the relationship of marriage, the husband was said to be “superior” to the wife. To modern ears, this language may seem to parallel the position just rejected. But closer attention to the particulars reveals something different.

For example, John Davenant (1572–1641) writes, “The wife acknowledges in her mind, that her husband is and ought to be her head and governor, and that she is the inferior on the mere ground that she is a wife, although in birth, riches, virtue, and prudence, she excel her husband.”8 Notice that Davenant says that a wife might indeed “excel her husband” in birth, riches, virtue, and prudence. That is to say, she may be of nobler birth than her husband, she may come from greater riches than her husband, and she may be more virtuous and more prudent than her husband. (Davenant surely had met many such women in his career as a professor, priest, and bishop.)

The “inferiority” of the wife does not necessarily render her lesser in any of those areas. Instead, her inferiority is simply with regard to the marital relationship itself (“the mere ground that she is a wife”). The relationship of wife is like a rank or office, akin to that within an army or administration. Just a few sentences earlier, Davenant had compared this sort of hierarchy to that of magistrates or soldiers. The superiority and inferiority in view have to do with an order of authority in the specific organization, not with a difference of value, capability, or essence.

Another testimony to this perspective is Robert Leighton (1611–1684), a Reformed Scottish bishop writing in the late seventeenth century. He writes,

It is possible, that the wife may sometimes have the advantage of knowledge, either natural wit and judgment, or a great measure of understanding of spiritual things; but this still holds, that the husband is bound to improve the measure both of natural and of spiritual gifts, that he hath, or can attain to, and to apply them usefully to the ordering of his conjugal carriage, and that he understand himself obliged somewhat the more, in the very notion of a husband, both to seek after and to use that prudence which is peculiarly required for his due deportment. And a Christian wife, who is more largely endowed, yet will show all due respect to the measure of wisdom, though it be less, which is bestowed upon her husband.9

“Instead of defining woman as a necessary evil, the Reformers defend woman as a most excellent work.”

Again, we see that the wife is not presumed to be inferior to the husband in “natural wit and judgment,” nor even in the “understanding of spiritual things.” But the calling of authoritative leader nonetheless belongs to the husband because he is the husband. The authority is located within the “office” of husband; the duty to submit belongs to the wife because she is the wife.

Such a perspective is not substantially different from what we now call complementarity. The husband’s duty to lead and the wife’s duty to submit are based not upon an innate hierarchy of ability, capacity, or skill but rather upon the divine arrangement of husband and wife grounded in the creation order.

For the Regiment of Women

The magisterial Reformers were, on the whole, not revolutionary in their political thought. They did not promote a doctrine of liberation nor even the sort of social equality that we commonly understand today. Indeed, they frequently had to repel charges of promoting “radicalism” or political upheaval. Even arguments for political resistance were grounded in longstanding debates from classical antiquity, not any new breakthroughs in biblical exegesis.

Concerning women’s roles in public, the Reformers tended to assert traditional views. Women, for them, would generally hold a domestic position. But the controversy over England’s Queen Elizabeth gave occasion to reflect on the possibility of women holding the highest political offices. John Knox’s (c. 1514–1572) negative views on this topic are more well-known, but what several other Reformed thinkers had to say might be surprising.

John Calvin is usually considered to be a friendly associate (if not an ally) of Knox. Knox certainly wanted to maintain this impression, and it is likely that Calvin did indeed lend his support from time to time. Still, Calvin recognized the inconvenience that Knox could bring. In a 1559 letter to Sir William Cecil, the chief adviser of Queen Elizabeth, Calvin writes,

Two years ago, John Knox in a private conversation, asked my opinion respecting female government. I frankly answered that because it was a deviation from the primitive and established order of nature, it ought to be held as a judgment on man for his dereliction of his rights just like slavery.

Calvin is clearly not a progressive thinker on this question. “Nevertheless,” Calvin goes on, he also told Knox that

certain women had sometimes been so gifted that the singular blessing of God was conspicuous in them, and made it manifest that they had been raised up by the providence of God, either because he willed by such examples to condemn the inactivity of men, or thus show more distinctly his own glory. I here instanced Huldah and Deborah. I added to the same effect that God promised by the mouth of Isaiah that queens should be the nursing mothers of the church, which clearly distinguished such persons from private women.10

This section of the letter is not exactly inspirational prose. Calvin does not muster any kind of “trumpet blast” of his own, and he was wholly unsuccessful in his attempt to move into the queen’s good favor. Still, his admission is important. For him, while female magistrates are a “deviation from the order of nature,” they are not so unnatural as to be illegitimate in their rule. Indeed, in God’s providence, certain women rulers had been successful. In fact, Calvin argues that Isaiah had prophesied that women would be godly rulers (Isaiah 49:23), implying that Elizabeth is one of their number.

Voetius also offers a moderate perspective on female government, writing that “in the case of extreme necessity,” and upon the discovery of a woman possessing the necessary prudence, bravery, and spirit, “I think that such should be employed for a time.”11 Willet is even more supportive, writing in defense of “the regiment of women”:

The spirit of God can plant grace and virtue in the hearts of women, as well as of men: nay often the Lord chooses the weak things of this world to confound the mighty things, 1. Cor. 1.27. And the examples of so many virtuous and good women in the Scriptures, of Sara, Rebecca, Anna, the Shunamite, and the rest in the old: of Marie, Anna, Martha, Lydia, Dorcas, and many other in the New Testament, do evidently confute that prophane paradox of the Philosopher.

He adds a personal reflection regarding England’s own experience:

This country and nation of ours, as is hath found the government of a woman the worst, in the late Marian persecutions, when more good men and women, Saints of God, were put to death, than in any three Kings reign beside: so have we seen it in the next change, the best of all other Princes reigns that went before: famous Queene Elizabeth’s government, as for flourishing peace, honourable fame and name, enriching of the Land, subduing of foreign enemies, enacting of good laws, may be compared with the reign of any former Kings. So for the advancing of true religion, increasing of learning, propagating the Gospel, none of her predecessors came near her: That as the refining of coin, being reduced from base money to pure silver and gold, was her honour in the Civil State: so the purging of religion, according to the purity of the word of God, in the Church shall bee her everlasting fame in the world, and is her eternal reward with God.12

A final example is Johannes Althusius (1563–1638), one of the most important political thinkers of the post-Reformation era and a key forerunner to modern politics as we know it. In his 1614 work Politica, Althusius endorses the rule of women in provincial government, citing Deborah from the book of Judges, Nitocris of Babylon, Zenobia of Palmyra, Amalasuintha of the Goths, and “Elizabeth of the Britons.” He writes, “In this matter, the female sex does not stand in the way.”13 Althusius is especially noteworthy for his stature in political theory and in the fact that he does not use the typical qualification of extreme necessity, but merely “when the function is appropriate.”

The Grave Sin of Domestic Abuse

Another important area where the Reformation combatted misogynistic behavior was in its condemnation of domestic abuse. The second Anglican Book of Homilies has a homily titled “Of the State of Matrimony,” which contains an extended discussion of spousal abuse. It says that for a man to beat his wife is “the greatest shame that can be, not so much to her that is beaten, as to him that does the deed.” It even refers to classical “pagan” law to argue that domestic abuse can be a ground for ending a marriage:

This thing may be well understood by the laws which the Panims have made, which does discharge her any longer to dwell with such an husband, as unworthy to have any further company with her that does smite her. For it is an extreme point, thus so vilely to entreat her like a slave, that is fellow to thee of thy life, and so joined unto thee before time in the necessary matters of thy living. And therefore a man may well liken such a man (if he may be called a man, rather then a wild beast) to a killer of his father or his mother.14

Davenant echoes this same argument in his commentary on Colossians, where he writes,

It is the height of this bitter tyranny to act cruelly towards the wife by stripes or blows, which we do not read that any one among the heathen did unless he was drunk or mad. Hence the civil law permits the wife to avail herself of a divorce if she can prove that her husband has beaten her: and it gives as a reason that blows are foreign to a state of freedom. For no superiority whatever gives the power of coercing the inferior by blows.

He adds:

For although parents often chastise their children from love; yet both the experience and conscience of everyone will testify that no one proceeds to beat his wife except from anger, bitterness or hatred; all which are unlawful things and diametrically opposite to the matrimonial state.

Davenant explains that the husband does not have the authority to use physical violence against his wife because the marriage is not a master-slave relationship but instead “a certain amicable fellowship in life.” The wife is “subject to her husband and directed by him; but as a companion, not as a slave; by advice, not by stripes.”15

In the same vein, Jeremy Taylor (1613–1667) says, “A husband’s power over his wife is paternal and friendly, not magisterial and despotick.” He explains that the husband must lead by love through counsel, instruction, and nurture. “The power a man hath is founded in the understanding, not in the will or force; it is not a power of coercion, but a power of advice.”16 To be an effective leader, the husband must actually lead. He must assume responsibility and carry out the duties of a loving and friendly family leader. On this point, Taylor gives a sort of proverb: “It is a sign of impotency and weakness to force the camels to kneel for their load because thou has not spirit and strength enough to climb.”

Against physical violence in the marriage, Taylor cites Marcus Aurelius, Basil the Great, and John Chrysostom. The husband, he asserts, should never strike his wife. “The Marital Love is infinitely removed from all possibility of such rudeness.”17

Perfectly Complementary

These observations do not establish any sort of proto-feminism or egalitarianism within the Reformation tradition. Rather, a fundamental human equality was said to coexist within a stipulated hierarchy — the husband’s loving governance over his wife, which established the basic paradigm for relationships of authority and submission. Still, the Reformers were well aware of areas of historic abuse and error in the tradition. Based upon Scripture and reason, they maintained the woman’s full integrity as a good creature of God, capable of virtue and even public rule. They argued that the woman’s strength could shine in and through her relative temporal weakness, all to the manifest power, wisdom, and glory of God.

What is commonly referred to as complementarity is sometimes opposed to the older “patriarchal” tradition. At times, this is done by complementarians themselves; at other times, their opponents insist on the discontinuity so as to deny the authority of the historic Christian witness. But the difference is not a fundamental or essential one. While certain terminology has changed and particular categories have become more or less familiar, the basic structure remains. While God has ordered men and women differently, in such a way as to complement and perfect one another according to his calling, both men and women are equally human, originally good according to God’s design, and worthy of love, respect, and justice.

What is Look at the Book?

You look at a Bible text on the screen. You listen to John Piper. You watch his pen “draw out” meaning. You see for yourself whether the meaning is really there. And (we pray!) all that God is for you in Christ explodes with faith, and joy, and love.

Were you to frequent the streets of Shanghai in the mid-1850s, you may have encountered a curious sight: a young British man sporting a pigtail, wearing the clothing of a poor local schoolteacher and speaking in Mandarin to whoever would give him a hearing. The man’s name was Hudson Taylor (1832–1905), the future founder of China Inland Mission (now known as OMF International).

Upon his arrival in March 1854, Taylor soon discovered that the Chinese did not convert to Christianity as easily as his zealous heart desired. He noted that, for many Chinese, the obstacle to faith lay not in the message of the cross itself but in its Western packaging. In his bid to fulfill God’s calling on his life, Taylor committed to lay no stumbling block before potential Chinese converts except Jesus Christ, the crucified and risen Messiah.

In today’s Shanghai (and in other major world cities), questions of “what shall we eat” or “what shall we wear” no longer exert quite the same pressure on those aiming to evangelize their neighbors. Walking down the same streets Taylor did, you are just as likely to find people wearing Western clothing and eating at McDonald’s as those reflecting a more traditional life. Even still, the questions Taylor dealt with remain essential as Christians throughout the world consider how to effectively engage their neighbors and proclaim the message that Jesus is Lord.

At Home and at Odds

What Taylor sought to accomplish by changing his clothes and hairstyle is known today by the term contextualization. While the message of the gospel never changes, communicating that message across cultural differences requires wise and patient discernment. Failure to recognize differences in culture might affect how the gospel is heard — in fact, as Taylor discovered, such failure might even add unnecessary stumbling blocks to belief (see The Willowbank Report, 5.D).

All of us belong to multiple layers of culture. We have national cultures (embodied, for example, in holidays and shared folklore), family cultures (such as how your family celebrates Christmas), corporate cultures, city or neighborhood cultures, and more. When Christ calls us to himself, he does not demand that we be shorn of all cultural backgrounds. Rather, he makes us his own — cultural baggage included! As the late missiologist Andrew Walls argued,

The fact . . . that “if any man is in Christ he is a new creation” does not mean that he starts or continues his life in a vacuum, or that his mind is a blank table. It has been formed by his own culture and history, and . . . his Christian mind will continue to be influenced by what it was before. (The Missionary Movement in Christian History, 9)

Thus, while in Christ we are a new creation (2 Corinthians 5:17), we continue to feel at home (to a certain degree) in the cultural conditions within which Christ called us — a dynamic Walls referred to as the gospel’s “indigenizing principle.”

At the same time, we now are decidedly not at home. While Christ calls us within our cultural conditions, he works by the Spirit to transform us so that we begin more and more to reflect him. As we grow in Christlikeness, we discover more and more ways that we are at odds with the layers of culture that have formed us. Walls again:

Along with the indigenizing principle which makes his faith a place to feel at home, the Christian inherits the pilgrim principle, which whispers to him that he has no abiding city and warns him that to be faithful to Christ will put him out of step with his society; for that society never existed . . . which could absorb the word of Christ painlessly into its system. (Missionary Movement, 9–10)

While remaining citizens and participants in the present world, Christians are joyfully aware that our permanent and most precious citizenship is with the fellowship of the saints in the city of God.

Crossing Cultures with Apostles

This tension between being both at home and at odds with our own cultural background puts Christians in a unique position. While we gladly participate in many of the customs that surround us, we also see that some aspects of our cultures are dreadfully opposed to Christ. Having been made part of God’s people, we live in the present as “sojourners and exiles” (1 Peter 2:11), sent on mission across the visible and invisible boundaries of culture to proclaim God’s excellencies (1 Peter 2:9).

But this calling raises the question of how to navigate those boundaries — whether as missionaries living far from our home culture or as Christian pilgrims within our home culture. Should we change our hairstyle and adopt new fashions to reach the lost around us? Maybe. But I doubt Hudson Taylor would say that everyone should follow his example to the letter. He would likely tell us he was merely obeying a principle outlined by another missionary from the even more distant past.

Paul and Idol Meat

Paul the missionary was a culture-crossing pro. The world he grew up in — not unlike ours today — was a mixed bag of clashing cultures. A Jew growing up in the region of first-century Palestine would encounter multiple languages, soldiers and merchants from faraway lands, foreign concepts and worldviews, and much more that did not fit easily with Jewish heritage. In his missionary labors, Paul worked hard to ensure that his own cultural background did not get in the way of the Christ he proclaimed.

“Paul worked hard to ensure that his own cultural background did not get in the way of the Christ he proclaimed.”

Responding to the Corinthians’ question about eating meat offered to idols, Paul explained the principle of Christian freedom he had followed when he ministered the gospel to them. Reminding them that “there is one God, the Father, from whom are all things and for whom we exist, and one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things and through whom we exist” (1 Corinthians 8:6), and therefore that all things are under his rule, Paul argues that food itself “will not commend us to God” (1 Corinthians 8:8). We can eat whatever is placed before us to God’s glory (1 Corinthians 10:31). In fact, we have a right to make our own decisions in such matters.

However, some with weak consciences could be led astray if they saw a fellow Christian eating meat that had been offered to an idol. So, Paul tells the Corinthians that pressing forward with their own rights in such a situation is a “sin against Christ” (1 Corinthians 8:12).

Paul goes on to list more of his rights in the next verses. Doesn’t he have the right to eat and drink what he wants? To get married and bring a spouse along on his journeys? To receive payment for gospel labors? But Paul does not cling to these rights. Instead, he gladly gives them up to better pursue the calling God gave him: presenting the gospel “free of charge” (1 Corinthians 9:18). His goal is to win more to Christ. So, he gladly gives up personal rights and lets go of cultural preferences “that by all means I might save some” (1 Corinthians 9:22).

At the end of chapter 10, he turns the principle into a clear command: “Give no offense to Jews or to Greeks or to the church of God, just as I try to please everyone in everything I do, not seeking my own advantage, but that of many, that they may be saved” (1 Corinthians 10:32–33).

Freedom for What?

Christians have been freed from the constraints of culture. We have not become acultural, transcending our God-given nature as enculturated beings. Instead, God has transplanted us into a new cultural heritage, that of his people. We’ve been given new freedom as his children. Significantly, however, he calls us to use this freedom for the sake of others, not for our own private benefit. Closing out the section on meat offered to idols, Paul gives one final command: “Be imitators of me, as I am of Christ” (1 Corinthians 11:1). The willingness to flex on personal preferences and cultural predispositions in order to save and serve others is nothing less than following in the very footsteps of the Son of God.

Walking in this path of freedom, however, is difficult. Like a favorite pair of shoes, our own ways of thinking and doing are, well, comfortable. They feel natural. We don’t have to work at them. And as soon as we begin to lay down personal preferences, the strength of our own cultural patterns begins exerting itself. Why do they do it that way? No, I am not going to start wearing those clothes. By no means, Lord, for I have never eaten anything that is common or unclean.

Not only is it easier to walk in well-trodden paths; we are also prone to confuse them with the narrow way. This tendency lay at the heart of the question that led to the first church council. After Paul and Barnabas reported to the church at Antioch about how God had “opened a door of faith to the Gentiles,” opposition arose from Judea, for some who came from there were teaching the brothers, “Unless you are circumcised according to the custom of Moses, you cannot be saved” (Acts 14:27–15:1). The Chinese to whom Hudson Taylor ministered in the nineteenth century were hearing a similar message (more or less explicitly) from some Protestant missionaries: “Unless you adopt the forms and dress of Western Christians, you cannot be saved.”

Thankfully, the early church understood how deeply this idea threatened the gospel. They refused to require more than Jesus himself does for salvation. We believe in salvation “through the grace of the Lord Jesus” alone for all (Acts 15:11) — Jew, Greek, Scottish, Chinese, English, Brazilian. And so we aim to follow the principle that guided the apostle Paul’s ministry. Though called within particular cultural circumstances, we are pilgrims on this earth journeying toward the heavenly city, refusing to place stumbling blocks that in any way would hinder others from also receiving the free grace of the Christ.

Now, when our cultural background makes us stick out like a sore thumb, the preferences we need to lay down may be obvious. But what about when we blend in with the people around us? Many Christians will spend all their lives in the culture they were born into, making it difficult to recognize what might present stumbling blocks to the gospel. So we have to ask hard questions — and invite others to do the same — that probe our natural predispositions. Why do I do it that way? I’ve always done discipleship this way, and it feels so natural to me, but am I forcing my culture on others? Do my instincts about how to do family and church life more reflect Scripture or my own preferences?

Bringing Christ Across Cultures

Dear Christian, consider the great calling that you have received. You are a minister of reconciliation, given the glorious task of proclaiming to others the free gift of God’s amazing grace in the person and work of Jesus Christ, the eternal Son of the Father. Your future is bright: eternity in the new Jerusalem, whose light is the very glory of the triune God. With such a wondrous new identity and such hope for the life to come, you can follow the example of missionaries like Paul and Hudson Taylor, joyfully giving up preferences to become all things to all people, eager in every interaction to not let anything stand in the way of the gospel.

So, whether you eat or drink, cut your hair or change your clothes, adopt a simpler lifestyle or use different terminology, decrease the size of your personal bubble or let go of expectations of time, aim in everything to glorify God and point others to the wonder of his gospel.

The young mom is alone with her infant, covered in sweat, urine, and drool. Life feels unremarkable and repetitive. Another load of laundry waits impatiently. The dishwasher begs to be unloaded. Another diaper cries to be changed. The early years of parenting can feel like emptying a bathtub with a teaspoon: it takes far too long and goes much too slow.

The caretaker of an aging parent is weary and spent. Did she eat yet? Did he take his medicine? Can we afford transitional care? Who will fill the gap if we want to get away? There are no cheering crowds on this arduous road. The labor of love is slow plodding, but still physically and mentally exhausting.

The midlife man labors on with no end in sight. He doesn’t love his job, but it pays the bills and puts food on the table. His aches and pains grow, along with his waistline, a little more each year. He toils away to support those he loves, but he wonders if this is it. Why does life feel so insignificant?

The twentysomething graduates with a crisp degree in hand. Yet employers are unimpressed, and jobs are elusive and underpaid. She punches the clock at a local coffee shop, waiting for HR departments to return her calls. Post-graduation, she didn’t anticipate making hazelnut oat-milk lattes all day. What’s next?

Is God working amid the mundane moments of life?

Seasons of routine, monotony, and uncertainty can cause us to question. Is this what I’m called to? Should I be doing something else or continuing down this familiar path? Sometimes, God uses our restlessness to awaken us. We should be doing something different. God is moving us on and using this uncertainty to get us to where we need to be. But in other cases, wisdom dictates that we stay and plod away. Yet we might still wonder, Is God working?

We know the right answer is yes, but what if we can’t see or feel God’s presence? Where can we find some assurance that God is working amid the mundane moments of our lives?

Patience in Plodding

First, the Bible reminds us to be patient in our plodding. Jesus teaches his disciples that the Christian life is like farming. The seeds of God’s word, when planted in good soil, “bear fruit with patience” (Luke 8:15). It takes years to reach maturity. Roots need time to grow deep. Trunks need time to thicken. Branches need time to strengthen enough to sustain the weight of fruit.

“Christ is at work not only in the high points of life — when we scale the Alps — but also in the valleys and plains.”

Almost anything worthwhile takes time. Thousands of expressions of love and loyalty cultivate a beautiful marriage. Raising children into God-fearing men and women takes blood, sweat, and tears over many years. Building a godly congregation calls for decades of faithful plodding and preaching. Transforming a community, city, or nation doesn’t happen overnight. God generally does not rush his work of sanctification. He slowly but surely works to conform us to the image of his Son.

Lord of the Lowlands

Second, the apostle Paul’s letters reveal God at work in ordinary people doing unremarkable things to accomplish his divine purposes.

At the end of Colossians, Paul mentions Tychicus and Onesimus, couriers who likely delivered the letters to the saints at Colossae and Ephesus as well as to Philemon (Colossians 4:7–9; Ephesians 6:21). They are beloved brothers and faithful ministers, postal carriers doing gospel ministry. Because they faithfully carried out their task, these letters continue to ring out today.

Christ’s kingdom advances through the labors of apostles, yes, but also through ordinary, faithful saints. Some are singled out in Paul’s letters, but most remain unnamed. They are the nobodies of church history, yet their labors will echo through eternity. Christ is at work not only in the high points of life — when we scale the Alps — but also in the valleys and plains. He is Lord when we traverse the lowlands and even when we are mired in the pit. He is at work in the crevices of life.

Tychicus could have gotten cold and used one of the parchments as firewood. He and Onesimus could have abandoned the mission when a more lucrative opportunity presented itself. Yet they faithfully carried out their mission. God works through the small obedience of letter couriers and co-laborers to build his church.

Never a Dull Moment

Third, every stage, role, or season of life is an opportunity to glorify God. Earlier in Colossians, Paul addresses wives, husbands, children, fathers, bondservants, and masters (Colossians 3:18–4:1). He doesn’t assume that what we do at home, in marriage, at work, or out in the fields is unimportant. Wives are to submit to their husbands “as is fitting in the Lord” (Colossians 3:18). Children are to obey their parents, “for this pleases the Lord” (Colossians 3:20). Bondservants are to obey in everything, “fearing the Lord” (Colossians 3:22). Such faithful obedience honors God.

The banner over this section is Colossians 3:17: “Whatever you do, in word or deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus.” We can honor Jesus Monday through Friday and on the weekend. We can do it when the tasks are mundane or monotonous. In one sense, there is never a dull moment. At any moment and in every task, we can act as unto the Lord! We can labor not to get money, respect, or the approval of others, but to please God.

C.S. Lewis famously writes that there are “no mere mortals.” Everyone has an everlasting soul. Similarly, there are no mundane moments. Our jobs, family time, house projects, and yard work is not inconsequential. We can eat, drink, and do all for the glory of God (1 Corinthians 10:31). Christ is at work in the common things.

Christ in the Commonplace

God is always working — do we see it? He’s actively working in the crevices and commonness of life. Monotony is not contrary to faithful gospel labor. Rather, faithfulness is cultivated in the furnace of routine, where we learn discipline, develop steadfastness, cultivate patience, and foster eyes to see Christ at work.

While faithful plodding gets no fanfare, our labors in Christ will not be in vain. We honor Christ as we go about the millions of little moments in our lives: holding a baby, cooking a meal, leading our home, providing through work.

So, if life feels boring, the days feel long, the tasks feel mundane, and the plodding feels like it’s gone on long enough, take heart. God is transforming you — moment by moment, day by day, year by year — into the image of his Son. He is strengthening your faith muscles so that you might be “steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, knowing that in the Lord your labor is not in vain” (1 Corinthians 15:58).

Audio Transcript

Today’s Labor Day for us in the States. We’re taking a break from our work. But we can still use the day to learn new skills, specifically to become better Bible readers. Of course, we have dozens of episodes covering a host of very practical tips on overcoming the challenges of studying the Bible for ourselves. And I took all those episodes on Bible reading, Bible study, Bible memorization, even the struggle with Bible neglect — all those many episodes I put together in one big digest to show you all the ground we covered, in the APJ book in that first section, on pages 1–46. It’s the section I’ve heard the most compliments about, too.

And this episode will add to it. So, what do you do when a Bible verse doesn’t make sense on first read? The question is from Chris, and it’s specific: “Pastor John, hello and thank you for this podcast. You have said in the past that you didn’t understand Matthew 6:22–23 for a long time. But then you spent more time looking at the context before, in the treasuring focus in Matthew 6:19–21, and more time after the text, in the money focus in Matthew 6:24 — those contexts helped make sense of everything in between. Also, what you learned in Matthew 20:13–15 you brought into your discovery, too.

“Can you explain how you came to understand Jesus’s teaching on the healthy and sick eye using both the close context, before and after it, and the broader context together? These seem like Bible interpretation principles we all need to master when the text in front of us doesn’t make immediate sense. Thank you!”

Well, that’s true. Matthew 6:22–23 just seemed to dangle without connections to what went before, what went after. I couldn’t see it. I mean, it was my problem, not God’s problem, not Jesus’s problem. It’s my problem. I just couldn’t see it. Then one day, as I was reading in Matthew 20 — that’s 14 chapters later — and the ESV footnote clarified a phrase I saw, I said, “Oh, that’s going to help. That’s going to help make sense back in chapter 6.”

Lamp of the Body

So, here are the verses:

The eye is the lamp of the body. So, if your eye is healthy, your whole body will be full of light, but if your eye is bad, your whole body will be full of darkness. If then the light in you is darkness, how great is the darkness! (Matthew 6:22–23)

Now, if we just take those two verses by themselves, I think I can make sense out of them. If you close your eyes, everything is dark. But if you open your eyes, there’s light, and it fills you with light. You can walk. You can not run into walls, you can not fall off a cliff.

And so, the eye is like a lamp. I get that. I like that, that it’s a lamp. And when it’s lit and burning, you can see where to go. If your eyes are shut or if your eyes are sick, if you have cataracts or something, then you can’t see where you ought to go. So, if the body is going to not kill itself by running into the wrong thing, it needs a healthy eye. “The eye is the lamp of the body.” I get that. That’s a good image.

But what puzzled me was that it just seemed to come out of nowhere. Why are you saying that here, especially in the sequence of these sayings?

Considering the Context

Before those two verses comes the familiar saying about not laying up treasures on earth:

Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy and where thieves break in and steal, but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust destroys and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also. (Matthew 6:19–21)

“Pray for eyes that look upon the things of this world as ways of serving God and loving people.”

So, before the saying about the good eye and the bad eye comes a saying about money — laying up treasures in heaven and on earth. Don’t hoard money here as though your life and your security were in money. Use money here in ways that piles up treasure in heaven. Use it in acts of love. Then, with no explicit connecting word, Jesus simply says, “The eye is the lamp of the body” (Matthew 6:22). And I just found that puzzling. Why do you follow up “lay up treasures in heaven” with “the eye is the lamp of the body”?

And then, after these puzzling verses — 22 and 23 — comes the saying, “No one can serve two masters, for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and money” (Matthew 6:24). So, the sayings before and after the words about the good and bad eye deal with treasure or money. That seems significant to me.

So, the one in the middle seems like it should have something to do with that. But as far as I could see, the good and the bad eye don’t have any clear connection to money. So, the saying seemed to just dangle there, and I didn’t get it for a long time. And Chris, in his question, is right to notice a principle of interpretation that’s driving me here, and you can hear it’s been coming out all the way along.

I really don’t like it when I can’t see an author’s intention in how his words are connected to each other. Seeing connections in a paragraph, in a chapter, is really important. I don’t think I’ve got a good handle on what the author is communicating if I can’t see how his connections are working. So, why does Jesus link these two sayings about money with a saying about a good eye and a bad eye?

The Key That Unlocked the Meaning

Then I stumble upon the key in Matthew 20:15. Jesus had just told the parable of the workers of the vineyard, and some of them, you remember, had agreed to work from 6:00 in the morning till 6:00pm for one denarius, a day’s wage — a fair wage, a good wage. Others were hired at 9:00am. Others were hired at noon. And finally, he hired some at 5:00pm. All he had to do was work an hour.

And when the day was done at 6:00, he paid all the workers the same thing, a denarius each. In other words, the master was lavishly generous to those who worked only one hour, and he paid a fair, agreed-upon wage to those who worked twelve hours. But those who worked all day, it says, “grumbled at the master of the house” (Matthew 20:11). They were angry that those who had worked so little were paid so much. They didn’t like the master’s generosity. They did not like grace.

Then the master used a phrase about the bad eye, which is just like the one in Matthew 6:23. He said, “Am I not allowed to do what I choose with what belongs to me? Or do you begrudge my generosity?” That’s Matthew 20:15. Now, that last phrase, “Do you begrudge my generosity?” is not a literal translation; it is a very loose paraphrase. And fortunately, the ESV gives the footnote and gives you the literal translation, which is, “Or is your eye bad because I am good?”

Oh my goodness, that made bells go off, right? Oh, the bad eye back in chapter 6. The bad eye here parallels the bad eye in Matthew 6:23, the verse I was puzzled about. So, what does the bad eye refer to in Matthew 20:15? It refers to an eye that doesn’t like generosity. It doesn’t like grace. It’s greedy. It’s a greedy eye. It’s a kind of eye that would treasure up things on earth. It’s the kind of eye that would serve money over God.

Pray for Good Eyes

So, if we interpret the bad eye in Matthew 6:23 the same way as in 20:15, the connection starts to make sense. The flow of thought would go like this. Matthew 6:19: “Don’t lay up treasures on earth. Lay up treasures in heaven. Show that your heart is fixed on the value that God has for you.” Now comes Matthew 6:22–23: “Make sure your eye is good and not bad. That is, make sure your eye is not greedy for earthly gain. Make sure that you see with this eye. See heavenly treasure as more precious than earthly, material treasure.”

When your eye sees things this way, you’re full of light. You know how to walk without falling off the cliff of greed. And if you don’t see things this way, you will, as Matthew 6:24 says, serve money instead of serving God. You will seek money, not God, as your treasure.

So, the bottom line lesson for us is this: pray for good eyes, healthy eyes — namely, the eyes that don’t disapprove of generosity or disapprove of grace. Pray for eyes that don’t look upon the things of this world with greediness, but look upon them as ways of serving God and loving people. Pray for eyes that see God as your supreme treasure.

“For one look at yourself, take ten looks at Christ!”

This memorable line from Robert Murray M‘Cheyne (1813–1843) has drawn many Christians out of the cellar of morbid introspection. Some of us once lived in that cellar — bent down double, curved concave, scrutinizing, analyzing, paralyzing. For every one look at Christ, we took ten at self.

But then the Spirit began to unbend us, convex us. He sent a friend, gave us a passage, or perhaps used M‘Cheyne’s famous line to lift us up and out to Christ. Self-scrutiny gradually gave way to Christ-scrutiny. We dared to believe that taking ten looks at him was better and safer than taking ten looks within. So, we looked and looked and looked — ten times and more.

I have no desire to discourage such “looking to Jesus” (Hebrews 12:2). At the same time, however, I do wonder if M‘Cheyne’s quote has sometimes been taken in ways he didn’t quite intend. We might read his counsel and think he gave little or no place to introspection — that he countered every inward turn with “Christ! Look to Christ!” And so we might strive for the same attitude.

But for all of M‘Cheyne’s remarkable Christ-centeredness, the man was not afraid to examine himself, and often with surprising rigor. In fact, M‘Cheyne believed that the right kind of introspection could actually serve his sight of Christ. He knew that one good look at self has the potential to make our ten looks at Christ all the sweeter, stronger, and more wonderfully specific.

Godly introspection is a road, not a room, that ever takes us to the same glorious place: Jesus. And as we learn from M‘Cheyne, some of the best sights of Christ come at the end of that road.

One Look Within

“I am persuaded that I ought to confess my sins more,” M‘Cheyne wrote near the end of his life. “I think I ought at certain times of the day — my best times — say, after breakfast and after tea — to confess solemnly the sins of the previous hours, and to seek their complete remission.” He goes on, “I ought to take all methods for seeing the vileness of my sins” (Memoir and Remains of Robert Murray M‘Cheyne, 150).

Those who have felt trapped in the prison of introspection may tremble at such words; we may hear in them the clink of former chains. We might also wonder, Is this really the same man who told us to take ten looks at Christ — the same man who said, “Do not take up your time so much with studying your own heart as with studying Christ’s heart” (279)? Yes, the same man. He treated the command to “keep a close watch on yourself” with utter seriousness (1 Timothy 4:16).

We might imagine that such precise self-examination would leave M‘Cheyne feeling like a constant spiritual failure. But remarkably, it didn’t. Those who read his biography find a man often exuberant with joy, regularly relaxing in God’s love. “Oh, how sweet to work all day for God, and then to lie down under his smiles!” he wrote in his journal (56). His looks at self did not steal his sense of God’s steadfast favor.

How? Well, for one, M‘Cheyne was aware not only of indwelling sin but of indwelling grace; when he looked within, he could notice the ways his life pleased God. But even more significantly, he grasped that seeing self (even the worst parts of himself) was not an end but a means of seeing Christ more clearly, of beholding his glories more intimately and particularly. And so he surrounded his self-examination and confessions of sin with celebrations of Jesus.

Ten Sweeter, Stronger Looks

We need not follow M‘Cheyne’s precise regimen of self-examination in order to learn from his Christ-focused pattern. Scripture doesn’t tell us how often we should confess our sins or how rigorously we should examine ourselves. We will need to find our own way under the guidance of the Spirit and in community with God’s people.

But however often or deeply we consider ourselves, how might our one look at self serve our ten looks at Christ?

1. Make introspection a road, not a room.

For some Christians, introspection leads to paralyzed inaction. Our look within becomes a locked sight, a fixed gaze — a room rather than a road. M‘Cheyne, for all of his inward intensity, speaks of self-examination in dramatically different terms. Yes, he sought to see “the vileness of [his] sins,” and to that end he examined himself carefully (150). But once he saw himself clearly, he did not linger long. He flew to Jesus.

At one point, M‘Cheyne uses the image of the prodigal son among the pigs. He knew how tempting it could feel to sit in his guilt, letting his inward look extend, not daring “to go straight from the swine-trough to the best robe.” But this suggestion, he said, is a lie “direct from hell.” “I am sure that there is neither peace nor safety from deeper sin, but in going directly to the Lord Jesus Christ. This is God’s way of peace and holiness” (151). And so he resolved to let no guilt “hinder me from fleeing to Christ” (152). Rather, he let his guilt drive him to God.

“Godly introspection is a road, not a room, that ever takes us to the same glorious place: Jesus.”

By definition, self-examination and confession require a careful inward look; they call us to know and feel the sicknesses of our soul. But they equally call us not to remain there. In confession, we are like the woman with the flow of blood — knowing our disease, yes, but allowing that knowledge to send our feet striding and hands reaching for the Healer (Mark 5:27–29). As M‘Cheyne’s friend Horatius Bonar wrote, “Complaints against self, which do not lead the complainer directly to the cross, are most dangerous” (Think Again, 107).

Done well, inward looking leads us to the Lord outside ourselves, the Christ worth beholding with tenfold attention. But what exactly do we behold about Christ at the end of this road? How does our inward look draw out glories we wouldn’t have seen otherwise — or would have seen less clearly? M‘Cheyne describes this sight of Christ in terms of both cleansing and clothing, or washing and wearing.

2. Wash from the infinite fountain.

Consider first the cleansing. When we bring our sins to Jesus, we approach an infinite fountain overflowing with the worth of Christ’s suffering. “In Christ’s bloodshedding,” M‘Cheyne writes, “there is an infinite over-payment for all my sins. Although Christ did not suffer more than infinite justice demanded, yet he could not have suffered at all without laying down an infinite ransom” (151).

M‘Cheyne names some of the sins he felt tempted to consider “too great, too aggravated, too presumptuous” for full, free, immediate forgiveness: “as when done on my knees, or in preaching, or by a dying bed, or during dangerous illness” (152). Does God readily forgive such evils upon sincere confession? Can we bring not just small sins but Goliath-sins to him? He does, and we can.

Hate your sins, renounce your sins, and resolve to forsake your sins. But do not fear to look your sins full in the face. Do not hesitate to call them what they are. The larger they seem, the larger Christ seems when he forgives them. The worse they appear, the worthier he appears when he covers them. “If we confess our sins” — whatever sins — “[God] is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness” (1 John 1:9).

We can bring no sin Christ cannot cleanse. And however often we draw from these waters, they remain ever full. So, come wash in the infinite fountain.

3. Wear his many-colored robe.

After the cleansing comes the clothing. “I must not only wash me in Christ’s blood,” M‘Cheyne writes, “but clothe me in Christ’s obedience” (152). And here we get to the heart of how our inward-looking shapes our sight of Christ. M‘Cheyne goes on,

For every sin of omission in myself, I may find a divinely perfect obedience ready for me in Christ. For every sin of commission in self, I may find not only a stripe or a wound in Christ, but also a perfect rendering of the opposite obedience in my place, so that the law is magnified, its curse more than carried, its demand more than answered. (152)

The “robe of righteousness” Christ gives is not generic (Isaiah 61:10). Like Joseph’s many-colored coat, Christ’s robe has every shade of splendor for our every shade of sin. Whatever our misery, he has an excellency to outmatch it. Every guilt finds an opposite glory in him.

For example, lately I have found myself feeling indignant at interruptions and demands upon my time. But then one morning in Mark 6, as an unrelenting crowd disrupted Jesus’s desired rest, I read this: “When he went ashore he saw a great crowd, and he had compassion on them” (Mark 6:34). Where I am affronted and offended, Christ bleeds mercy. I saw my selfishness in that moment, yes, but I also saw a robe woven with Christ’s own compassion — a robe to wear by faith and to increasingly embody by grace.

And so with every single sin. For our barbed words he has his own bridled tongue, and for our apathy his mighty zeal, and for our bitterness his tender grace, and for our impatience his slow-to-anger love. So, while sin can show us parts of ourselves we feel dismayed to see, sin can also show us parts of Christ we feel thrilled to behold. For our darkness cannot help but show his light — his many-splendored, perfect light, shining from every facet of his spotless human life.

His Unsearchable Riches

To be clear, M‘Cheyne’s ten looks at Christ did not all spring from his self-examination. He spent many hours in simple self-forgetful study, marveling at “the unsearchable riches of Christ” (Ephesians 3:8). But he also knew how to make introspection a means of seeing those riches more clearly.

By all means, then, take ten looks at Christ for every one look at self. Focus not so much on studying your heart as on studying Christ’s heart. But also do take that one look at yourself — and let it inform and shape those ten looks. And let what you see of your own heart show you the worth and beauty of his.