Audio Transcript

Happy Wednesday, and welcome to this sermon-clip day on the podcast. For a long time now, I have been drawn to a little two-part message Pastor John delivered in the spring of 2010. And from this pair of messages, I want to share some clips with you on the podcast today and in the weeks ahead.

Historically, the sermons are interesting. Pastor John was about to take an eight-month leave of absence, away from the pulpit, to work some things out in his own heart and in his family. We’ve talked about this leave, and the lessons he would eventually take away from it, particularly in three episodes: APJs 138, 220, and 1227. As you know from those episodes, it was a defining season for him. But first he had to prepare his church for this leave. And that makes the tone of these sermons interesting, too. These two 2010 sermons are parting words to his church. And because of that, they carry an urgency, as you’ll hear.

So how does a preacher say goodbye to his church for eight months? We get the answer in two messages. These messages go deep inside the plan of God for his people. They go down to the deepest foundation of our very joy. And in that context, here’s the first interesting clip I want to feature on APJ. It gets right at the heart of what drives John Piper and his ministry. How’s he wired? Why does he do ministry the way he does it? Without further introduction, here he is to explain on April 18, 2010, two weeks out from his ministry leave, speaking of his recent travels and what makes him tick. Here he is.

Almost always when I leave the church and go away to speak somewhere, I give messages that are the overflow of things I’ve done here. I don’t generally make new things up to say anywhere else. I just try to apply to others what I’ve been thinking about and applying to you over the years.

However, at the end of February I went to Seattle, and on the way to Seattle I was on the plane — we had about a four-hour flight — and prayed earnestly that God would give me a message for them. And there was in my mind churning this issue of how to say in a fresh way something I’ve said over and over again for who knows how many years, and I delivered that message three times. I was crafting it in my head and then trying it out on all those people for you. I wanted to get it right so that when I tried to bring clarity here, I wouldn’t be stumbling around like I did in a couple of those messages, I think.

Driving Question

So here’s the thing that needs clarification, evidently. And this goes out of some conversations I’ve had, and those of you who conversed with me will know who I’m talking about. I appreciate them. The question that I’ve asked audiences for ten years maybe is this: Do you feel more loved by God when he makes much of you, or when he, at great cost to his Son, frees you to enjoy making much of him forever?

I’ve just asked that everywhere I’ve gone, all over the country, for ten years or so. Do you feel more loved by God because he makes much of you, or that he, at great cost to his Son, frees you and empowers you to enjoy making much of him forever?

I liked that question a lot. I still do. And I’ll try to explain why. The aim of that question was never and is not now to deny that God makes much of us. He does, and we’ll get to that shortly. The aim has been to help people relocate the bottom, the deepest foundation, of their joy from self to God.

Two Kinds of Christians

So let me try to explain and help you understand something that makes me tick and why I speak the way I do about things like this. “Why do you go around the country saying such things, and shake people up like that, and cause some of them to misunderstand?” And here’s the bottom line — and even this I fear is going to be misunderstood, so I’m going to jump on a clarification of it as soon as I say it: I am more concerned — this has been true for thirty years — about nominal, hell-bound Christians who feel loved by God than I am about genuine, heaven-bound Christians who don’t feel loved by God.

Let me say it again. I don’t know why, but as I just do what I feel like doing in the word and in preaching, I feel more concerned for nominal, hell-bound, churchgoing Christians who feel loved by God than I do about genuine, authentic, born-again, heaven-bound Christians who don’t feel loved by God.

Now, lest any of you poor souls who don’t feel loved by God, and there are many of you, think that means, “He doesn’t care about us; he just said so” — I didn’t! I care really deeply about that issue. But if I have to rank who I want to jostle and bring, I want to rescue people who are totally deceived about whether God loves them or not, savingly.

But I really, really care about my family, you, and whether you live in a halfway Christian life, knowing he loves you and never feeling it, and really saved — really saved because there’s that seed deep down that you’d die for him in a minute, and you just wish you could marvel at it more. So, don’t hear me saying I don’t care about that or I don’t want to invest in it. This sermon is that investment, and I hope I can do more without letting the other one go. So what I’m doing in explaining what makes me tick is try to give a perspective on why I emphasize what I emphasize.

Why Do You Want Jesus?

There are millions of nominal Christians who are not born again, and who believe God loves them, and are on their way to hell. And the difference between them and a born-again believer is what’s at the bottom of what makes them happy. As you penetrate down, down, down, down, down, down to what makes them happy and you get to the bottom, it’s different for a born-again person and an unborn-again person.

“There are millions of nominal Christians who believe God loves them and are on their way to hell.”

Millions of nominal Christians have never experienced a fundamental change in the foundation of their happiness. They haven’t experienced it. They go to church for other reasons. Instead, they’ve absorbed the notion that becoming a Christian means turning to Jesus to get what you always wanted before you were born again. No change in what you want. No change in the bottom, the foundation of what thrills you — just get it from a new place. The baggage in the hotel room is the same; they just got a different bellhop. The meal stays the same; they just got a different butler. And they think they’re Christian, and they feel really loved because he’s producing. “My life is going better.”

They want a happy marriage, so they turn to him to get it. They want peace of conscience, so they turn to him to get it. They want freedom from guilt feelings, so they turn to him to get it. They want to escape from hell, so they turn to him to get it. And every unregenerate person on the planet wants those things. You don’t have to be born again to want out of hell. You don’t have to be born again to want a good marriage. You don’t have to be born again to want any of those things.

So what’s new? Got a different bellhop, different butler, a different servant to give me what I want. I’m concerned about those people. There’s some here. I would suspect, in this room, not as many as the other kind. I think God will hold me more accountable for trying to help those people wake up than for helping his precious children feel more of him, though this sermon is about that, and I’m just setting the stage for why I talk the way I talk. I haven’t even started yet.

Change in Our Deepest Delights

In other words, they would say, these people I’m so concerned about, “We have desires and we turn to Jesus to get them met, and he is so loving to meet them.” No change at the bottom, no change in your cravings, in what makes you most deeply happy. No change in the decisive foundation. You just shop at a new store.

That’s not the new birth. The new birth is not having all the same desires that you had as an unregenerate person and then getting them from a new source. That’s not the new birth. The new birth changes the bottom, changes the root, changes the foundation of what makes us happy. Self at the bottom is replaced by Jesus. Treasuring being made much of at the bottom is replaced by treasuring Jesus. Everything changes.

“What makes the born-again person glad is not that they have God’s gifts, but that they have God.”

We don’t perfectly express these changes. That’s why I can be so confident that so many non-delighters are saved. What makes the born-again person glad is not, at the bottom, that they have God’s gifts, but that they have God. There’s the key way to see it.

You listen for it in the way they talk, the way they pray, and the way they speak to each other and to God. Are they most excited about his gifts, or are they most excited about him? Do they long for the people they love to see him, admire him, glorify him, live in him, hallow his name? Or do they only ask for and seek food, and clothing, and job, and the things the world wants?

It’s not wrong to pray for those things. It’s just what the world prays for. It’s not wrong to want those things. It’s just what the world wants. There’s no evidence in being born again that you want what the world wants and get it from God. Christians who are truly on their way to heaven and don’t feel loved by God are in a different category than that.

Christ is the heart of Christianity. It is hardly surprising, then, that from the beginning of church history his own person has been the target of foes from without and heretics from within. Early on, some attacked the doctrine of his eternal deity, others the belief that he had a real physical body, and yet others that he had a real human mind.

This last attack is particularly fascinating because it was driven by a bishop, Apollinarius (310–390), who had previously distinguished himself as a defender of the deity of Christ. Most likely, he hesitated to acknowledge Jesus’s full humanity because he feared compromising the Lord’s deity. He took John 1:14, “The Word became flesh,” to mean only that the eternal Word took a human body: he did not take a rational human soul. The incarnation thus involved a union between the Son of God and only part of human nature. Jesus did not have a human mind.

Apollinarius’s doctrine eventually was condemned as heresy, but only after a keen debate. A key figure in this debate was Gregory, bishop of Nazianzen (in what is modern-day Turkey). Gregory (329–390) famously summed up his argument in the statement, “The unassumed is the unhealed” (Letter to Cledonius the Priest Against Apollinarius). His logic was simple: a rational soul is as essential to human nature as a human body; if Christ didn’t take such a soul, he didn’t take the whole of human nature; and if he didn’t take it, he didn’t redeem it. Without a human mind, Jesus would have saved only a part of man, and not the most important part.

Side by side with Gregory in this debate stood his friend, Gregory of Nyssa (about 335–395), who also bequeathed to us a memorable image. Starting from the premise that it was not the body only, but the whole man that was lost, he proclaimed that the Good Shepherd, who came to seek and to save the lost, “carries home on his shoulders the whole sheep, not its skin only” (Against Eunomius, 2.13). Thus did the Good Shepherd make the man of God complete, redeemed in both body and soul.

Tempted Yet Triumphant

We shouldn’t overlook how tempting it is for those who are sensitive about the deity of Christ to follow the path taken by Apollinarius and to shrink from giving the humanity of our Lord its due place. Indeed, we already see the temptation confronted in the epistle to the Hebrews, where some in the early church found it hard to believe that the Son of God could sympathize with us in our weaknesses (Hebrews 4:15). This is likely why the writer has to stress that Christ was “made like his brothers in every respect” (Hebrews 2:17).

“Jesus endured temptation to a degree that we shall never know because, unlike us, he never gave in.”

Before we go any further, however, we have to remind ourselves there is one exception to this: Christ was without sin. This fact is all the more remarkable when we recall that he not only shared our nature: he also shared our temptations (Hebrews 4:15). Indeed, he endured temptation to a degree that we shall never know because, unlike us, he never gave in. Though the devil pursued him relentlessly — through family, friend, and foe — Jesus would not yield, even when faced with the cursed death of the cross.

These temptations were real and protracted, sometimes cunning, sometimes violent, but from them all Christ emerges with his integrity inviolate. But the very fact that he was tempted is fatal to the idea that he had no human mind. A mere body cannot be tempted. The divine Logos cannot be tempted. Omniscience cannot be tempted. We are tempted by what we know, by what we shrink from, by what we fear, and by what we love. So it was with Jesus, as we see from his experience in Gethsemane. He knew something (but not all) of what the cup involved, he shrank from it, and he wished, as man, there could be some other way. But in the end, he prayed, “Not my will, but yours, be done” (Luke 22:42). This was not mere submission. It was the keynote of his life.

Real Human Mind

When we turn to Jesus in the Gospel accounts, we are immediately aware that here is someone who not only lived in a human body but one who also had a real human mind. This is made plain at the beginning, when Luke tells us that Jesus grew not only in physical stature but in wisdom (Luke 2:52). God doesn’t grow in wisdom. He is eternally all-knowing, but the child Jesus was not.

His physical development was accompanied by a normal human intellectual development. His mother would have taught him what every human mother teaches her child, but she would have shared with him, too, what she had been told by the angel who had been sent to announce his birth. He learned from the Scriptures, which he clearly read for himself and which he cherished as a font of wisdom all his life. He learned by attending the synagogue, and by questioning the rabbis at the temple (Luke 2:46). He learned from his father, Joseph, to whom he was apprenticed. And he learned by observing the world around him and the ways of his own people.

Yet this human mind, acute and probing as it was, was also aware that it didn’t know everything, and couldn’t answer every question that might be put to him. The prime example of this is his confession of ignorance about the time of his own second coming (Mark 13:32). He was never ignorant of anything he ought to have known, or of anything his people needed to know. From that point of view, the Father had delivered to the Son everything that would be helpful to the “babes” (Matthew 11:25 KJV). But on such a detail as the date of the end, all that Jesus could say was that the Father had set it by his own authority (Acts 1:7).

The fact that Jesus had a real human mind and confessed himself ignorant on certain matters doesn’t mean, however, that his knowledge was never more than ordinary. He clearly had supernatural knowledge, as appears, for example, in his conversation with the woman of Samaria. He has never seen or heard of her before, yet he knows all that she ever did (John 4:29). Yet supernatural knowledge is not omniscience. It was a normal adjunct of the prophetic office, as we can see clearly in the ministries of men like Elijah and Elisha.

Deep Affections

If we see in Jesus a man possessed of a real human mind, we also see in him a deeply affectionate human being. Above all, of course, this affection is directed toward his heavenly Father, whom he now loves according to his two natures, human and divine. But alongside this affection, the Gospels highlight Jesus’s love for his fellow humans.

Perhaps the most fascinating instance of this is Jesus’s love for the rich young man who approached him to ask what he had to do to inherit eternal life (Mark 10:17–23). The man went away sad, we are told, because he was unwilling to part with his possessions. We have no reason to believe that he ever chose eternal life, but we have very good reason to believe that Jesus loved him (Mark 10:21). Jesus was drawn to him, it seems, as one human to another.

It is clear, too, that Jesus loved company, and in this respect he was a marked contrast to his cousin, John the Baptist. John was a solitary who preferred life in the desert to life in the city and was happy to live on his diet of locusts and wild honey. Jesus never found fault with John’s lifestyle, nor did John with his, but they were men of different temperaments (Matthew 11:18–19). Jesus readily accepted invitations to enjoy the hospitality of others, even when they came from tax collectors and sinners.

But he also had his own circle of intimate friends. Its nucleus was the original band of twelve disciples, whom he called apostles “so that they might be with him” (Mark 3:14), but within this band there was another even more intimate circle consisting of Peter, James, and John; and even within the inner three there seems to have been one who was special: John, “the other disciple, the one whom Jesus loved” (John 20:2). This also bears the mark of humanity. Some were close to him, others were even closer, and one was closest of all. But they were all his friends (John 15:14). He loved them as the Father loved him (John 15:9), and his love for them was to be the paradigm for the way they were to love one another (John 13:14, 34).

There was another group, too, to which Jesus was especially close: the Bethany household of Martha, Mary, and Lazarus. Jesus, we are told explicitly, loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus; and in the sisters’ message to Jesus informing him of Lazarus’s illness, they refer to their brother as “he whom you love” (John 11:3).

There was clearly a close bond here: a bond that embraced the sisters as well as their brother, and a love so deep that when Jesus saw Mary stricken with grief, he was profoundly moved in his spirit, and wept (John 11:33–35), even though he knew that Lazarus’s illness would ultimately lead not to his death, but to the glory of God. The sight of human heartbreak convulsed his soul.

Human Emotions

Then we see, too, that Jesus experienced ordinary human emotions.

He was moved to anger, for example, by the hardness of the human heart, by the hypocrisy of the religious, and by the desecration of his Father’s house. More typically, however, the emotion we see in Jesus is compassion. He feels pity for the crowds, living aimlessly like sheep without a shepherd (Matthew 9:36), and it is pity that moves him to raise the widow’s son (Luke 7:13) and to heal the leper who approaches him imploring, “If you will, you can make me clean” (Mark 1:40).

In fact, as B.B. Warfield points out in his splendid essay “The Emotional Life of Our Lord,” compassion is the emotion most frequently attributed to Jesus in the Gospels, and it was no shallow feeling. The Greek verb used to express the Lord’s pity (splanchnizomai) is closely related to the word for the inward parts (“bowels,” in the older English versions) and underlines the fact that Jesus’s compassion was visceral. He was deeply upset, stirred to his depths, by the misery he saw around him, whether in the state of society in general or in the plight of individuals, and his distress was frequently accompanied by clear physical symptoms such as, for example, his weeping at Lazarus’s tomb and his tears over the doomed city of Jerusalem (Luke 19:41). Jesus felt, and felt deeply.

Nor is compassion something that Jesus, now that he has risen, has left behind as not fit to be taken back to heaven. After all, compassion is an emotion clearly ascribed to God himself (Psalm 103:13). Indeed, it is a key attribute in the name revealed to Moses when he hid in the cleft of the rock and the glory of God passed him by (Exodus 34:6). Pity is a part of the glory, and it is perfectly consistent, then, with the exaltation of Christ that he still sympathizes with his people in their weakness (Hebrews 4:15). He knows how they feel, he feels with them, and he feels for them, because he has stood where they stand.

Yet the fact that he can follow our experiences doesn’t mean that we can always follow his, because he has plumbed emotional depths that none of his brothers or sisters has ever known. The supreme example of this is Gethsemane. The cross had long occupied Jesus’s mind, but in Gethsemane, “Today is the day,” and the full horror of the cup he has to drink is well-nigh overwhelming. He cannot hide his anguish. “My soul,” he declares (speaking of his human soul), “is very sorrowful, even to death” (Mark 14:34); and he prays, not once but thrice. He wanted the cup removed. Could there not, he asked, be some other way?

These, as John Calvin put it, are the feelings of a condemned and ruined man (Institutes, 2.16.11), and when what he dreaded in Gethsemane became a reality on Calvary, they found expression in the dreadful cry, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Matthew 27:46). What did they mean? That is between himself and the Father. Only they know what our salvation cost them each. But let’s never forget that while we have all, at one time or another, cried from the depths (Psalm 130:1), we have never cried from such depths as these: the depths of the curse of the law (Galatians 3:13).

Does the Whole Sheep Matter?

Back, then, to the two Gregorys. Why was it important that the shepherd should carry the whole sheep — or, more prosaically, that the Redeemer of the human race should take to himself the whole of human nature, and not just a human body?

“The sins of the human soul need to be atoned for as well as the sins of the body.”

First, because the sins of the human soul need to be atoned for as well as the sins of the body. This becomes clear the moment we look at such a passage as Galatians 5:19–21, where Paul lists the sins of the “flesh.” It is doubtful that any of these is exclusively a sin of the body, but some — such as enmity, jealousy, envy, and fits of anger — are clearly sins of the mind; and the bearer of the sins of the world had to bear these sins of the mind as surely as he bore the sins of the body.

Second, the human mind had to consent to the sacrifice offered on Calvary. It was not merely a physical act, but a voluntary act; otherwise it would have had no moral value. The power of the cross lies not in the degree or quantity of the pain it involved, but in the fact that Christ offered himself in love. In the very act of delivering himself up, Christ loved the Lord his God with all his heart, soul, strength, and mind. Like Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac, the cross was an act of worship (Genesis 22:5).

Third, the soul, no less than the body, had to bear the cost of redemption. This is the great truth highlighted by the Puritan theologians: “The suffering of his soul was the soul of sufferings” (Christ’s Famous Titles, 124). And just how real these soul-sufferings were, we have already seen. The cry “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” came from the depths of Immanuel’s soul.

Fourth, the soul, no less than the body, needs a full salvation. It needs renewal and cleansing as well as forgiveness. But just as the resurrection of the body presupposes our union with Christ, so does the transformation of the soul. We are sanctified in him, our souls united to his soul, and drawing on one and the same Spirit.

Full Propitiation

It would be a mistake, however, to assume that the two Gregorys provide a complete understanding of the atonement. There was a tendency among the great Greek theologians to see the union of the two natures in the person of Christ as itself the defining atoning act.

But the incarnation, magnificent as it was, was not an end in itself, as the writer to the Hebrews makes clear when he tells us that Christ took flesh and blood “that through death he might destroy the one who has the power of death, that is, the devil” (Hebrews 2:14). Or, as he puts it a moment later, the reason that Christ became like his brothers and sisters in every respect was that he might make propitiation for his people’s sins. The propitiatory act was not his incarnation, but his death. He is a propitiation by his blood (Romans 3:35).

John Piper is founder and teacher of desiringGod.org and chancellor of Bethlehem College & Seminary. For 33 years, he served as pastor of Bethlehem Baptist Church, Minneapolis, Minnesota. He is author of more than 50 books, including Desiring God: Meditations of a Christian Hedonist and most recently Providence.

Audio Transcript

Good Monday morning, everyone. We open this new week on the podcast addressing one of the many questions we have not addressed directly — embryo adoption. There are several versions of the question. I’ll put them all on the table, Pastor John.

A listener named Sveta writes in. “Hello, Pastor John. I have a follow-up question to APJ 1165. What do you think about so-called ‘snowflake adoptions,’ in which a frozen embryo, left over from another family’s IVF process, is implanted into a woman to give this child a chance at life?” Laura, a listener, wants to know if there’s “a moral difference between adopting the orphaned-born versus adopting the orphaned-unborn?” Likewise, Audrey asks if embryo adoption should be considered something that Christians value “as much as after-birth adoptions?”

In fact, several listeners have asked, in essence, Are frozen embryos as much orphans to concern the church as living, breathing orphans? And this is a very real question for one couple: “Hello, Pastor John. My name is Carien, from Australia. I recently read some articles about considering embryo adoption to help those babies live their God-given life with a loving family. My husband and I are considering this option. We lost our only child in 2019 and we feel ready to love a child again. But my husband is subfertile and the normal adoption process in Australia is long and expensive. But my question is, How could I be sure that adopting an embryo is what God intended for us? We want a child. But does embryo adoption allow us to ‘play God’ and choose parenthood? Maybe God made my husband subfertile for a reason. I guess I just want to make sure that this is God’s will and not our will here.

“Also, another concerning fact about embryo adoption is that the clinic transfers all the donor’s embryos to the recipient. What if the donor has three frozen embryos and we can only afford to grow one baby? Then it does not help the other two frozen babies left, as one will have to decide to keep them frozen or destroy them. Maybe we are overthinking this process, but we want to do what is right in God’s eyes.”

There are so many angles from which we could come at this question. I hope the angle that I take will prove helpful in the end, even though it’s somewhat indirect concerning the question of God’s will for this couple’s life. I assume what they are asking is not that I tell them whether to adopt a frozen child, but whether there is anything in God’s word, God’s revealed will, that would make such an adoption sinful.

Upstream and Downstream

Now, the angle I want to take is to make the observation that when we have a tragic situation, we who are Christians should feel a desire to take action to mitigate the tragedy in two ways. One way is that we should be thinking about how to get at the causes of the tragedy upstream, so to speak, from the actual tragedy, and do what we can to hinder the tragedy from becoming worse by dealing with those causes.

The other way we should be thinking is how to mitigate the tragedy, not just by looking upstream to its causes, but by looking at the tragedy as it is right now and downstream to its effects. We should be moved to take action so as to make the present situation and the future situation less destructive and heartbreaking than it is.

Tragedy of Frozen Children

Now, I think the existence of 750,000 frozen children in America, and 120,000 in Australia, is a tragedy. God’s revealed will in his word for the conception and pregnancy and birth and rearing of children is not that it be done in such a way that results in hundreds of thousands of eventually abandoned children. This means that, upstream from the tragedy mingled into whatever sorrowful situations may motivate in vitro fertilization — which results in so many extra conceived children outside the womb — there are sinful desires and practices. They’re mingled in.

“I think the existence of 750,000 frozen children in America, and 120,000 in Australia, is a tragedy.”

Nobody forced this tragedy on anyone. It’s not like the result of a hurricane or a pandemic that leaves orphans. These hundreds of thousands of orphans are not owing to the death of their parents. Choices are being made that result in this heartbreaking reality of hundreds of thousands of unwanted children. Some Christians should devote energy to looking upstream and trying to reverse the causes of this tragedy.

For example, Germany has a law that says only three embryos can be created in one in vitro fertilization cycle, and they must all be transferred into the mother’s womb. This, in effect, prevents the tragic situation of thousands of frozen children accumulating and eventually being unwanted. Some Christians should be looking upstream to work for those kinds of preventions.

I think Jennifer Lahl, the president of the Center for Bioethics and Culture Network, is a person like that. She relentlessly tries to draw our attention to the moral problems that multiply when we take the processes of conception and pregnancy into our own hands outside the womb. For all the joy that may come for some couples, we need to be aware of the legal tangles and the personal tragedies that also result.

Adopting with Eyes Wide Open

So, I think one of the first things that Carien and her husband need to come to terms with is that they are dealing with a tragic situation with some innocent and some sinful causes. It’s not a neutral situation. If they move forward with adoption of one of these frozen children — and frankly, I hope they do — I think it will spare them future pangs of conscience if they do it with eyes wide open.

Someone will accuse them of participating in a system that is shot through with processes and procedures and priorities that are unwise and sometimes sinful. Others will point out that children created in this way will face many difficult and troubling realities as they come to know and understand their conception stories. I think Carien and her husband need to be ready, just for their own conscience, to respond to such concerns with wisdom in patients.

That’s why I introduced the second way of approaching a tragedy like this — not just looking upstream for ways to prevent it, but looking at it for what it is and asking how we might mitigate, at least in a small way, the tragedy right in front of us. And one strategy of taking that approach is the strategy of adoption.

I know two couples who have embraced this way of life, and I admire them for it. They are not naive, and they are moved both by their principled opposition to the destruction of these frozen children and by their loving longing to have some of these children in their own family.

Risk Is Right

I wrote a little book one time called Risk is Right. I didn’t mean that anybody should jump off a cliff thinking an angel would catch them, but I did mean that for the sake of love, and for the glory of God, and for the peace of conscience, it is right to look all of the possible future heartache and pain in the face that may come with such an adoption, and then to act like Esther did.

For the sake of saving her Jewish kinsmen, she approached the king, which was illegal, and the only way she would survive this disobedience was if he graciously lifted his scepter. She asked her family and her friends to fast and pray for her, which is what we should do when we adopt children, and then she said, “If I perish, I perish” (Esther 4:16). That’s the kind of risk I think glorifies God.

“We embrace the ambiguities of this fallen, tragic world, and we do our best to act in love.”

She wasn’t trying to make a name for herself. She wasn’t trying to be a hero. She was trying to save people who were going to perish if she couldn’t change the king’s mind. And so it is with thousands of these frozen children. They’re going to be disposed of sooner or later if they’re not adopted.

It is a wonderful thing to be a Christian and to know that Christ died for our sins so that even if we are not completely sure about all our motives and all our tactical efforts to be loving, and even if we’re not sure that we have all the wisdom we need, we can be sure of this: the record of our debts is nailed to the cross. With that assurance, we embrace the ambiguities of this fallen, tragic world, and we do our best to act in love.

I do not doubt that God will guide Carien and her husband in the path of love and meet every need that they have for the next fifty years, according to his riches in glory, and according to his promise.

I say to the Lord, “You are my Lord; I have no good apart from you.” (Psalm 16:2)

In Psalm 16, David is taking refuge in God. Taking refuge includes David’s prayer for God to keep him. In other words, the prayer “preserve me” (Psalm 16:1) is itself a taking refuge in God. But David doesn’t simply ask God to keep him. He also speaks and declares truth to God. He exults in Yahweh his refuge (Psalm 16:2).

The last phrase of verse 2 is packed with deep theological truth and precious fuel for worship. So, what does David mean when he says, “I have no good apart from you”?

God is the source of all goodness.

Every good that is good comes from the God who is Good. God is the maker and sustainer of all created goods. Thus, in Genesis 1, he creates and then appraises his work: “God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good” (Genesis 1:31).

“Every good that is good comes from the God who is Good.”

Anselm of Canterbury (1033–1109), the brilliant medieval theologian, saw in this truth compelling evidence for God’s existence. He noted that everyone agrees there is a great variety of goods in the world. There are physical goods, intellectual goods, relational goods. This is a basic fact of reality. From this fact, Anselm asks, “What makes all of the good things good?” And he concludes that the good things are not independently good. They are not good by themselves. Rather, there must be some ultimate good that makes all the other things good.

In other words, Anselm reasoned there must be a supreme good that is the source of all other goodness. In doing so, he was following in the footsteps of David in Psalm 16. David confesses that there is a Supreme Good that makes all other goods good. And Yahweh is this Supreme Good. Or, as David prays elsewhere, God is my “exceeding joy” — literally, “the joy of joys” (Psalm 43:4). David knows his refuge is the foundational joy on which all other joys are built.

God’s goodness is unique.

All created goods are finite, temporal, and changing. But God is infinite, eternal, and unchanging. The apostle James celebrates this fact: “Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change” (James 1:17).

Created goods cast shadows. As good as they are, they are not infinite goods. They are limited, and they fade. But God has no shadow, and he does not change. His goodness is without boundary or limit. His is an absolute and essential goodness.

God is goodness itself.

God’s perfections aren’t just qualities that he happens to have. They are essential to him. They are our human descriptions of his being, his essence, his nature, his very God-ness. This is what it means for God to be holy. His attributes are utterly perfect and wholly distinct from the derivative, dependent attributes of his creatures.

We call a man righteous because he meets the standard of righteousness. We call a man wise because he conforms to the pattern of wisdom. But God is the standard. He is the pattern. He is not merely righteous; he is righteousness itself. He is not merely wise; he is wisdom itself. He is not merely strong; he is strength itself. And he is not merely good; he is goodness itself. Or again, the Lord is not merely righteous, wise, strong, and good. He is the Righteous, the Wise, the Strong, and the Good.

This is what it means for God to be God, for God to be Yahweh, I Am Who I Am. This is why Jesus can say, “No one is good except God alone” (Mark 10:18). He is the fountain of all goodness, the source and origin of all pleasure and joy. He is infinite, eternal, unchanging, inexhaustible, self-sufficient and all-sufficient, without limit or diminishment.

God has no need of my goodness.

Because God is the source of all goodness, my goodness does not benefit God in any way. He is above all need and all improvement. As Paul says, “God . . . does not live in temples made by man, nor is he served by human hands, as though he needed anything, since he himself gives to all mankind life and breath and everything” (Acts 17:24–25).

“The Lord is all-sufficient, and it is because he is all-sufficient that he can be sufficient for me.”

David in this psalm revels in the fact that he has nothing to offer God but his poverty, his weakness, his need. He has no gift to give to God that he might be repaid. The Lord is all-sufficient, and it is because he is all-sufficient that he can be sufficient for me. It is because he has no needs that he can meet mine. It is because he is the Supreme Good that I can take refuge in him.

Drops and the Ocean

Finally, don’t miss the fact that these weighty theological truths are deeply personal for David. David doesn’t merely confess that Yahweh is the Lord; he says, “You are my Lord.” What wonders are embedded in that little possessive pronoun. The infinite and eternal fountain of goodness somehow, some way belongs to me. In his infinite all-sufficiency, he condescends and allows me to call him “mine.” My Lord, my Master, my King.

And this means that God is not merely the ultimate and supreme Good. He is my Good. And for him to be my highest good is for him to be my greatest pleasure. My ultimate well-being and happiness are found in him and him alone. Jonathan Edwards (1703–1758) expressed this glorious truth as well as anyone else in his sermon “The True Christian’s Life a Journey Towards Heaven”:

God is the highest good of the reasonable creature. The enjoyment of him is our proper happiness, and is the only happiness with which our souls can be satisfied. To go to heaven, fully to enjoy God, is infinitely better than the most pleasant accommodations here: better than fathers and mothers, husbands, wives, or children, or the company of any or all earthly friends. These are but shadows; but God is the substance. These are but scattered beams; but God is the sun. These are but streams; but God is the fountain. These are but drops; but God is the ocean. (The Works of Jonathan Edwards, 17:437–38)

Let’s begin with some comments about the theme of this conference: “Serious Joy: Gladness and Gravity in a Groaning World.” This is a conference about joy — the kind of joy that can be experienced simultaneously with a weighty sense of reverence and respect, and simultaneously with a painful groaning under the sinfulness and futility of this world. We call it serious joy. In fact, we define what we do at Bethlehem College and Seminary as “an education in serious joy.”

We call it serious joy not only because it coexists in the same heart, at the same time, with the gravity of reverence and the groaning of sin, but also because it is not peripheral but central — serious in the sense of centrally important. It is not the negligible caboose at the end of the train, but belongs to the very fuel that runs the engine. And when I say centrally important, I mean central to God’s very being — central to God’s ultimate purpose in creating the world — and therefore also central to God-glorifying Christian living.

Central to God Himself

Serious joy is central to God’s very being. God has always existed. He never came into being. He is never becoming. He said, “I am who I am” (Exodus 3:14). He is absolute reality. All other reality comes from him, and its meaning is derived through him. His eternal, absolute existence has always has been Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. . . . And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father” (John 1:1, 14). So the Word is the Son. And therefore, the Son has always existed as God, coeternal with the Father, eternally begotten, not made.

And when the Son came into the world, the Father openly declared how he relates to the Son. The Father said, “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased” (Matthew 3:17). The Father is very pleased with his Son. He takes pleasure in him. He delights in him. “Behold . . . my chosen, in whom my soul delights” (Isaiah 42:1).

“Joy is serious because it is central to the very being of God.”

This delight did not come into being at the incarnation. God’s joy in the Son did not originate — ever. It never had a beginning, as if there were a time when the Son of God was not his Father’s delight. Therefore, joy belongs to the being of God, eternally in the fellowship of the Trinity. I don’t have the philosophical horsepower to make fine distinctions between nature and essence and simple and complex in the divine being. All I mean is this: If God the Father has not always delighted in God the Son — if God has not always been a joyful God — then there is no Christian God. Joy in the fellowship of the Trinity is part of what it means to be God. Therefore, we say, joy is serious because it is central to the very being of God.

Central to God’s Purpose in Creation

Serious joy is central not only to the being of God, but also to the ultimate purpose of God in creating the world. Here is one of the many climactic glimpses of the final world where God is taking his church and his new creation,

And the ransomed of the Lord shall return and come to Zion with singing; everlasting joy shall be upon their heads; they shall obtain gladness and joy, and sorrow and sighing shall flee away. (Isaiah 35:10)

. . . . For you shall go out in joy and be led forth in peace; the mountains and the hills before you shall break forth into singing, and all the trees of the field shall clap their hands. Instead of the thorn shall come up the cypress; instead of the brier shall come up the myrtle; and it shall make a name for the Lord, an everlasting sign that shall not be cut off. (Isaiah 55:12–13)

This is where everything is heading. This is the ultimate purpose of God in creation — a Christ-ransomed people with everlasting joy on their heads, sorrow and sighing gone, all creation transformed and applauding the work of God. Joy is the ultimate goal of God in creation.

This is serious. So serious we need to be careful. That last verse (Isaiah 55:13) shows us the care that we need to take: “And it shall make a name for the Lord, an everlasting sign.” What does “it” refer to? “It shall make a name for the Lord.” “It shall be an everlasting sign.”

It refers to what went just before: everlasting joy will be on the heads of the ransomed, mountains singing, trees clapping their hands. This is the name of the Lord. This is the everlasting sign of his purpose and his nature. His name, his chosen reputation, his glory is, “I make my ransomed people glad forever in my grace. My glory is their great gladness in me.”

And from this derives the foundation stone of what we call Christian Hedonism — namely, God is most glorified in his Christ-ransomed people when his Christ-ransomed people are most satisfied in him. If you remove satisfaction in God from the hearts of God’s people, they cannot magnify his worth the way they ought to.

Essential to God’s name — essential to the final manifestation of God’s glory — is the crown of everlasting joy resting on the heads of the redeemed, followed by the singing mountains and the clapping trees. If you remove the crown of joy from the heads of God’s people, God’s purpose to glorify himself in the new creation aborts. It will only shine the way it ought to shine — the way it is destined to shine — when its greatness and beauty and worth are reflected in the God-centered gladness of the redeemed.

Central to Christian Living

It follows, therefore, that the joy we are talking about is serious, not only because it is central to God’s very being, and not only because it is central to his ultimate purpose in creation, but also because it is central to God-glorifying Christian living now.

One of the most comprehensive descriptions of the Christian life is 1 Corinthians 10:31, “So, whether you eat or drink, or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God.” If it is true, then, as we have seen, that God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in him, then eating and drinking and everything we do in the Christian life should flow from a heart that has found its ultimate satisfaction in God.

“Everything we do in the Christian life should flow from a heart that has found its ultimate satisfaction in God.”

This is why the commands and promises of Scripture concerning joy in God are so relentless: “Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, rejoice” (Philippians 4:4). “Delight yourself in the Lord” (Psalm 37:4). “Be glad in the Lord and rejoice” (Psalm 32:11). “Satisfy us in the morning with your steadfast love” (Psalm 90:14). “In your presence there is fullness of joy; at your right hand are pleasures forevermore” (Psalm 16:11). “Whoever comes to me shall not hunger, and whoever believes in me shall never thirst” (John 6:35).

A Christian is a person who, by the sovereign grace of God, has found this treasure hidden in the field, and with life-controlling joy has sold everything he has to buy that field (Matthew 13:44). Meaning, “Any one of you who does not renounce all that he has cannot be my disciple” (Luke 14:33). “Whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me” (Matthew 10:37). Jesus has become the supreme treasure of our life. Our quest for the greatest and the longest satisfaction of our souls is over.

And this affects everything we do. It humbles us, breaks us, satisfies us, frees us, overflows from us. It is a restless joy that grows by including others in it. This expansive restlessness is called love. “In a severe test of affliction, their abundance of joy and their extreme poverty have overflowed in a wealth of generosity on their part” (2 Corinthians 8:2). Love is the restless overflow of joy in God that meets the needs of others.

This is what we mean by “serious joy” — central to God’s being, central to God’s purpose, and central to the God-glorifying Christian life of love.

What Is ‘Joy’?

Still one more clarification of our conference theme before we turn to Nehemiah. Namely, the biblical reality referred to with the word “joy.” Here’s my definition of what I mean by the word “joy” in this message and in this conference: Joy is a good feeling in the soul produced by the Holy Spirit as he makes us see and savor the glory of Christ in the word and the world.

It is rooted in Christ and all that God is for us in him. It is the miraculous work of the Holy Spirit. Its organ, so to speak, is the soul, not the body, not the reason, though the body and the reason are affected by it. And it is a feeling — a good feeling. I admit that trying to find adequate words for heart-realities is difficult. I invite your help. If you don’t like the word feeling for such a serious and central reality, you might try the word sense or emotion or affection or sentiment or taste or passion or liking or mood. And if you don’t think the word good (in “good feeling”) is adequate, then you might try pleasant or congenial or delightful or agreeable or comforting or satisfying or amiable or sweet or happy or likable or glad or positive.

All language is, in the end, inadequate to carry the fullness of experienced reality. That’s why poetry exists — music, hugs, kisses, tears, tones of voice, sacrifice. We long to receive from others and to communicate from ourselves what the soul feels. The way the Bible goes about communicating through the inadequacy of language is by piling up diverse expressions that refer to the same inner reality.

Listen to this array of feeling language for how Christians relate to God:

Joy in the Lord (Isaiah 29:19).
Delight in the fear of the Lord (Isaiah 11:3).
Pleasures in the presence of the Lord. (Psalm 16:11).
Gladness in the Lord (Psalm 32:11).
Exultation in the Lord (Psalm 61:10).
Desire for the Lord (Isaiah 26:8).
Tasting the goodness of the Lord (1 Peter 2:3).
Longing for the word of the Lord (Psalm 119:20).
Happiness in keeping the instruction of the Lord (Proverbs 29:18)
Contentment in the Lord (Philippians 4:11)
Treasuring the words of the Lord (Job 23:12)
Being satisfied in the love of the Lord (Psalm 90:14).

One article I consulted mentions 27 different Hebrew words for joy or joyful expression in worship. So, our focus is not mainly on a word. It’s on a reality — a central reality. And for now, “serious joy” is our best effort to point to that reality.

‘The Joy of the Lord’

As we turn to Nehemiah 8:10 the seriousness of joy is underlined in a way that I did not expect. Let’s get the context before us. The people of Israel have returned from captivity. Ezra the priest and Nehemiah the governor have seen the temple rebuilt and the walls repaired. As Nehemiah 8 begins, it is the first day of the seventh month (v. 2b), which according to Leviticus 23:24 is appointed for the feast of trumpets.

According to verse 1, the people ask Ezra the priest to read to them from the book of Moses. Nehemiah 8:3 says, “He read from [the book] facing the square before the Water Gate from early morning until midday.” According to Nehemiah 8:6, the response was that “the people answered, “Amen, Amen,” lifting up their hands. And they bowed their heads and worshiped the Lord with their faces to the ground.” Nehemiah 8:8 says that the Levites joined Ezra, and “They read from the book, from the Law of God, clearly, and they gave the sense, so that the people understood the reading.” But perhaps not entirely, as we will see.

Now, as I read verses 9–12 watch for three things: the weeping of the people, the holiness of the day, and the joy of the Lord.

And Nehemiah, who was the governor, and Ezra the priest and scribe, and the Levites who taught the people said to all the people, “This day is holy to the Lord your God; do not mourn or weep.” For all the people wept as they heard the words of the Law. Then he said to them, “Go your way. Eat the fat and drink sweet wine and send portions to anyone who has nothing ready, for this day is holy to our Lord. And do not be grieved, for the joy of the Lord is your [stronghold]. So the Levites calmed all the people, saying, “Be quiet, for this day is holy; do not be grieved.” And all the people went their way to eat and drink and to send portions and to make great rejoicing, because they had understood the words that were declared to them. (Nehemiah 8:9–12)

Weeping — But Not Only Weeping

Three times Nehemiah and Ezra and the Levites said, “This day is holy to the Lord” (Nehemiah 8:9). Then, “This day is holy to our Lord” (Nehemiah 8:10). Again, “This day is holy” (Nehemiah 8:11). And each time they say that, they make it the reason why the people should stop weeping:

Verse 9, This day is holy; “do not mourn or weep.”
Verse 10, This day is holy; “do not be grieved.”
Verse 11, “This day is holy; “do not be grieved.”

They had understood something correctly back in verse 8, but evidently not everything. They were weeping in response to this understanding. But in verse 12 they stopped weeping and rejoiced “because they understood what was declared to them.”

Notice that the kind of weeping they experienced is called “grieving” two times. This is not a weeping for joy. This is a weeping for failure. They were grieved over having disobeyed God for so long. That is a proper response to the holiness of God. But it is not, if the weeping lingers too long. A holy response to the holiness of the merciful God of Israel is not simply weeping. So, three times they tell the people, “Stop this!”

Moving to Joy in God

What do they propose as an alternative to this weeping and grieving? We read it three times, “Go your way. Eat the fat and drink sweet wine and send portions to anyone who has nothing ready” (Nehemiah 8:10). Or again, in Nehemiah 8:12, “And all the people went their way to eat and drink and to send portions and to make great rejoicing, because they had understood the words that were declared to them.” Now their understanding is better, it seems.

The third way of describing the alternative to grieving is in Nehemiah 8:10, “Do not be grieved, for the joy of the Lord is your stronghold.” So, I don’t think the joy of the Lord is the joy that the Lord had, but the joy that the Lord gives — the joy that he is for his people. Notice the three parallel thoughts:

Don’t weep, go rejoice with feasting and with generosity for the poor (Nehemiah 8:9–10)
Don’t be grieved, and they went and rejoiced with feasting and generosity for the poor (Nehemiah 8:11–12).
Don’t be grieved; the joy of the Lord is your stronghold (Nehemiah 8:10).

The natural interpretation of “joy of the Lord” here is the rejoicing that replaces the grieving, just like the other two parallel statements.

I would love to preach a message on the Lord’s joy over his people! Oh, my goodness what glorious truth! Zephaniah 3:17, “The Lord will rejoice over you with gladness.” Isaiah 62:5, “As the bridegroom rejoices over the bride, so shall your God rejoice over you.” Jeremiah 32:41, “I will rejoice in doing them good . . . with all my heart and all my soul.” Deuteronomy 30:9, “The Lord will take delight in prospering you.” Psalm 147:11, “The Lord takes pleasure in those who fear him.”

That would be a great focus for a message on serious joy. But not from Nehemiah 8:10. Maybe next year. It’s not good to preach true sermons from wrong texts.

Strength or Stronghold?

That was no surprise. I always assumed that the “joy of the Lord” in Nehemiah 8:10 was probably our joy in God, not his joy in us. But what was a surprise was the word behind the translation “strength.” Virtually all modern English translations translate Nehemiah 8:10, “The joy of the Lord is your strength.” But virtually every commentary I consulted treats the word as “stronghold” or “fortress” or “refuge” or “protection” — not strength.

The Hebrew word is ma’ōz. It is used 37 times in the Hebrew Old Testament. It’s translated in the ESV 14 times as stronghold, 7 times as refuge, 7 times as fortress, 3 times as protection. And only one time is it translated “strength” — namely, here in Nehemiah 8:10. I am totally baffled as to why that is. (The LXX omits “joy of the Lord” and translates, “because he is your strength [ischus].”)

Does the context perhaps constrain that translation as strength? No. Just the opposite. The people are weeping with grief. Grief over what? It all comes out in Nehemiah 9. The long confession of generations’ unfaithfulness to Yahweh who is perfectly holy and righteous. Here’s Nehemiah 9:33, “Yet you [O Lord] have been righteous in all that has come upon us [in our captivity], for you have dealt faithfully and we have acted wickedly.”

This was their grief. Their guilt. Their fear. And the answer of Nehemiah 8:10 is this: There’s a refuge! There’s a stronghold. There’s a fortress. There’s a protection against what grieves you — your sin and God’s holy judgment. And what is that protection, that stronghold? It is your joy in the Lord. So, replace your grieving with that joy. Come into the refuge from sin and guilt and holy wrath. Leave your grieving and come into joy. Come into the stronghold, the refuge. “For the joy of the Lord is your stronghold.” Joy in God your Savior is your refuge.

This is what the people, at first (in Nehemiah 8:8), did not understand, and then, at least partially did understand. It says in Nehemiah 8:12, “The people went their way to eat and drink and to send portions and to make great rejoicing, because they had understood the words that were declared to them.” The light was dawning that you can’t honor Yahweh as holy if you only grieve in his presence. Grief is good. Fear is good. Penitence is good. Tears are good. But not if that’s all you feel. God’s holiness is the purity and perfection not only of his justice but also of his mercy and grace. And cowering people do not magnify the glory of grace.

“The fear of God, without joy in God, is no refuge from the wrath of God.”

The fear of God, without joy in God, is no refuge from the wrath of God. Nehemiah had made this plain in the first chapter of this book. He was praying about approaching the king. And as he prayed he said (in Nehemiah 1:11), “O Lord, let your ear be attentive to the prayer of your servant, and to the prayer of your servants who delight to fear your name, and grant him mercy in the sight of [the king].” In other words, the mercy of God is found in the stronghold of reverential delight. The joy of the Lord is your stronghold, your refuge.

Shepherd Your People into the Stronghold

Picture it this way, on this side of the cross of Christ. The righteous judgment of God looms over the world (John 3:36). We can picture a refuge from that judgment in two ways: objectively, what God has built, and subjectively, how we enjoy the safety of it. God has built a refuge, a stronghold of safety; namely, forgiveness, love, acceptance, personal friendship, and pleasures at his right hand forever. All of it purchased by Christ once-for-all. That’s the refuge prepared by God. He built it. Objective. Purchased. Secure. Complete. Everlasting.

That refuge is of infinite value. And God offers it freely, without payment. Not to joyless grieving. Not to joyless weeping. Not to joyless fearing. But to glad receiving. God gives his blood-bought refuge to those who see Christ as their treasure, and find him to be more precious than anything. In this way, the stronghold of mercy that God built becomes ours. Or as Nehemiah 8:10 says, “The joy of the Lord is your stronghold.” The stronghold built by God, and full of God, becomes our stronghold when we find him to be the treasure hidden in the field and take him as the treasure of our lives — when we are wakened to see and savor God as our joy. The joy of the Lord is your stronghold.

Pastors, we have a glorious calling. This is what we offer our people every week, and in every meeting. As Paul says in 2 Corinthians 1:24, “We are workers with you for your joy.” Or as he says in Philippians 1:25, “I will remain with you for the joy of your faith.” This is a magnificent calling — to take the word of God, and preach and teach and lead and live by it, so that our people come to see all that God is for them in Christ as their greatest joy — a place of perfect refuge both in life and in death. Give yourself to this: the glory of God in the gladness of your people in God. This is their stronghold.

Today marks seven years of marriage for me and my wife, Faye. Since our wedding day, I’ve learned that year seven has become something of a milestone for marriages (largely, it seems, thanks to a 1955 film, The Seven Year Itch).

The “seven-year itch” refers to the time when one or both spouses grow tired of the marriage and begin to long for something new. While studies have never proven seven as the precise number, various studies have shown that divorce statistics do rise and peak somewhere between five and ten years. I’m not sure, however, that we really needed sophisticated studies to tell us what most marriages know by experience: marriage is harder than we expect. And if we’re looking for reasons to leave, we’ll have plenty to choose from.

Why else do we make vows? “Wedding vows,” Tim Keller reminds us, “are not a declaration of present love but a mutually binding promise of future love” (Meaning of Marriage, 79). “I take you, from this day forward, for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, till death do us part.” Being yours might cost me more than I ever thought I could give — more than I can now imagine — but I promise to never leave you. Vows tie the future fragility and difficulty of marriage into the very beauty of the ceremony.

In his introduction to Herman Bavinck’s The Christian Family, James Eglinton writes,

In this fallen world, there are no promises that marriage, for all its capacity to be beautiful and enriching, will be a lifelong series of increasing physical delights. In reality, a healthy marriage will probably lean more on the Sermon on the Mount than on the Song of Solomon. (xiii)

After seven years (and seventeen dreams), marriage has been far harder than either of us expected — and far sweeter. We still love and lean on the Song of Solomon — healthy marriages, however challenging, are captivating romances worthy of such poetry. But we also have learned, perhaps all the more, to climb the mountain and sit longer at the feet of Jesus.

Seven Words for Seven Years

Marriage is not the focus of the Sermon on the Mount — it’s only addressed explicitly in 2 of the 107 verses — but the three chapters do provide some profound counsel for marriages, young and old. After seven years with Faye, Jesus’s commands, warnings, and promises fall with fresh weight and relevance for the gospel drama we’ve been given to live out together. The following seven words, in particular, have stuck with me as we take our first steps into year eight.

1. Take care where you build your home.

Everyone then who hears these words of mine and does them will be like a wise man who built his house on the rock. (Matthew 7:24)

We’ll begin where Jesus ends. After teaching on anger, lust, anxiety, integrity, vengeance, forgiveness, giving, fasting, praying, and more, he closes with a vivid picture of two kinds of homes: one built upon sand and the other on rock. Lives (and marriages) built on sand will fall. Lives (and marriages) built on rock will stand: for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health — in other words, whatever may come. “The rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house, but it did not fall, because it had been founded on the rock” (Matthew 7:25).

What does it mean to build a marriage on the rock? It means to build our marriages on obedience to Jesus. “Everyone then who hears these words of mine and does them will be like a wise man who built his house on the rock.” It means actively putting Jesus and his words at the center of our rhythms, our romance, and even our conflict. Are we still looking for creative ways to draw him further into our marriages — reading together, praying together, singing together, thanking him together, enjoying him together? Every marriage learns quickly that it takes special, Spirit-filled intentionality to keep from drifting off of the rock.

Regarding conflict, what if, when tension arises in our marriage, the decisive factor was more often what Jesus wants most? To be sure, we won’t always know precisely what Jesus wants, but a commitment to trust and obey him above all else, and in every situation, would resolve many tensions in many marriages, wouldn’t it?

When the forecast darkens, and the clouds crawl in, and the winds begin to howl, and the showers start to fall, we feel whether our love is built on solid ground (or not). Are we more committed to obeying Jesus than getting our own way? Do his words or our feelings consistently win the day? Are we ready to take the hard, costly steps he calls us to take — again? Is our house built on rock — or on sand?

2. Guard your fidelity with vigilance.

Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God. (Matthew 5:8)

Perhaps the clearest word for marriage in the Sermon on the Mount comes in Matthew 5:27–32. “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall not commit adultery.’ But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lustful intent has already committed adultery with her in his heart” (Matthew 5:27–28). In other words, don’t just avoid the forbidden woman’s bed; avoid even imagining yourself in her bed. Go to whatever lengths necessary to guard the garden of your purity and intimacy.

If your right eye causes you to sin, tear it out and throw it away. For it is better that you lose one of your members than that your whole body be thrown into hell. (Matthew 5:29)

Does that kind of Spirit-filled zeal and vigilance surround our marriage bed? Do we ever talk about how we’re each battling sexual temptation? Are there men and women in our lives who know how to hold us each accountable? The deepest marital happiness comes to those who fight together for purity, because we get to see more of God together: “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.”

This faithful pursuit of purity also comes with a commitment to never leave — not in year five, or seven, or fifty-seven. “I say to you that everyone who divorces his wife, except on the ground of sexual immorality, makes her commit adultery” (Matthew 5:32). To be sure, marriages wrecked by infidelity will require special care and counsel and grace, but his word remains clear: “What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate” (Matthew 19:6). He says that precisely because of how much easier separation will feel at times.

3. Correct each other with humility.

Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth. (Matthew 5:5)

Marriage, we all know, is sanctifying — perhaps more sanctifying than any other human relationship (although parents may sometimes wonder). Marriage sanctifies us for at least two great reasons: (1) a husband and wife see more of each other’s sin than anyone else could, and (2) the covenant ties us uncomfortably close for a lifetime, sins and all. We see the worst in each other and yet have nowhere to go.

How my wife responds to my sins has a disproportionate effect on how I see myself and my sin (and vice versa). As spouses, we sit at a critical, sensitive, and sometimes painful window into each other’s souls. The question is how we will handle that burden and privilege. Jesus tells us how:

Why do you see the speck that is in your brother’s eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own eye? Or how can you say to your brother, “Let me take the speck out of your eye,” when there is the log in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your brother’s eye. (Matthew 7:3–5)

How different might our marriages be if we simply and consistently implemented these three verses? The longer we stare at any given speck — months, years, even decades — the harder it can become to see our own logs. In the vulnerability of marriage, it is all the more important to confront and correct each other with humility — with a patient awareness of our own failures and sins and a resilient hopefulness for change and growth.

4. Don’t murder each other.

Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God. (Matthew 5:9)

We may assume that sexual immorality has ended more marriages than any other threat — and it surely has crushed and devoured many. I wonder, however, if unchecked anger has ended more.

You have heard that it was said to those of old, “You shall not murder; and whoever murders will be liable to judgment.” But I say to you that everyone who is angry with his brother will be liable to judgment. (Matthew 5:21–22)

“By all means, guard your marriage bed from adultery and pornography, but also guard it from your own anger.”

Jesus makes no room for unrighteous anger; he elevates it alongside murder. And yet how often have we made room for it in our homes? How often have we felt justified while our hurt feelings burned hot within us? And how often have we responded to unrighteous anger with more unrighteous anger? By all means, guard your marriage bed from adultery and pornography, but also guard it from your own anger.

Guard against anger, and when a fire breaks out, don’t leave it unaddressed. Jesus continues,

So if you are offering your gift at the altar and there remember that your brother has something against you, leave your gift there before the altar and go. First be reconciled to your brother, and then come and offer your gift. (Matthew 5:23–24)

Different marriages will have different rhythms for reconciliation; the important point is to have one. Do offenses consistently get addressed in your relationship — or not? Do you lovingly correct each other? Are you quick to admit when you’re wrong or to confess when you have failed? Do you still gladly forgive each other? Couples who avoid hard conversations forfeit some of the sweetest moments in marriage.

5. Delight to forgive each other.

Blessed are the merciful, for they shall receive mercy. (Matthew 5:7)

Because every marriage is a union between sinners, forgiveness will be our constant guest. Children may come and go, jobs may come and go, houses may come and go, but the need for forgiveness will remain. So will forgiveness be a welcome and celebrated guest in your home — or an unwelcome and resented one?

Jesus warns us, including husbands and wives, “If you forgive others their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you, but if you do not forgive others their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses” (Matthew 6:14–15). Does any relationship test our willingness to forgive — and to persevere in forgiveness — like marriage? Jesus says an unwillingness to forgive is spiritually lethal. Mercy, on the other hand, breeds security and joy: “Blessed are the merciful, for they shall receive mercy.”

Forgiveness is costly, and in some ways, all the more so in marriage. Marriage reveals more of us than we want to show, and it opens us to more pain than most relationships. And we inevitably must forgive the same sins again and again and again (seventy times seven feels about right). It’s good to remember that this love, as much as any on earth, is meant to look like the cross (Ephesians 5:25) — so we shouldn’t be surprised that it sometimes feels like a cross. In fact, that feeling may be proof we’re doing something right.

6. Cover your marriage with prayer.

Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. (Matthew 7:7)

Prayer is as powerful and important outside of marriage as it is in marriage. But if we are married, nothing will shape our marriages more. Of the dreams we had going into our first seven years of marriage, this is the one we feel most desperate to cultivate in our next seven. I long for the words, “Let’s stop and pray about that,” to become as common as any in our home.

How many marriages (my own included) suffer unnecessarily because we refuse to take advantage of the all-powerful ear of heaven? Is our marriage really too hard for him? “Everyone who asks receives, and the one who seeks finds, and to the one who knocks it will be opened” (Matthew 7:7–8).

Has marriage begun to feel unsustainable? Have you lost hope that things will get better? Have you quietly stopped praying for your husband or wife? Then take Jesus at his word: keep asking, keep seeking, keep knocking. Your Father won’t give you a stone. He won’t give you a scorpion. “If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is in heaven give good things to those who ask him!” (Matthew 7:11).

7. Seek God before each other.

Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied. (Matthew 5:6)

Many spouses who leave a marriage wouldn’t have trouble staying for another day or two, but they can’t imagine staying for thirty or forty more years. This is precisely the kind of thinking Jesus confronts in his teaching on anxiety:

Do not be anxious, saying, “What shall we eat?” or “What shall we drink?” or “What shall we wear?” [or “How shall we stayed married?”] For the Gentiles seek after all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them all. . . . Therefore do not be anxious about tomorrow, for tomorrow will be anxious for itself. Sufficient for the day is its own trouble. (Matthew 6:31–32, 34)

“Fix your eyes on God today, and leave the next ten, or twenty, or fifty years to him.”

Do you feel like you’ve exhausted everything you could possibly give, sacrifice, and endure in marriage? Does being married tomorrow feel impossible? Don’t worry about tomorrow. Fix your eyes on God today — on his righteousness, his kingdom, his promises, his resources — and leave the next ten, or twenty, or fifty years to him.

This doesn’t mean good marriages ignore the future. Husbands, in particular, bear a responsibility to look ahead and anticipate opportunities, needs, and dangers, like any good shepherd would. Good marriages require regular forethought and planning. How else could preserve and nurture meaningful, fruitful oneness? Faithful marriages do not ignore the future, but they’re also not anxious about the future. They know they don’t need a lifetime of marital strength and love today; they just need enough for another Sunday, and then another Monday, and then another Tuesday.

God doesn’t call us to predict or bear our future troubles. He calls us to bear today’s troubles in the grace and strength that he provides for today. Look at the birds of the air. Look at the lilies of the field. He will keep your marriage, and strengthen your marriage, and even beautify your marriage — as you each focus most on seeking him. “Seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness,” Jesus says, “and all these things will be added to you” (Matthew 6:33).

Do you want the real key to a healthy and happy marriage? The real key, whether at year seven or year seventy, is to pursue something before and above marriage — to pursue someone before and above your spouse. Blessed are the husbands and wives who hunger and thirst most for righteousness, for they shall be faithful, hopeful, and satisfied.

http://rss.desiringgod.org/link/10732/15208352/how-are-we-empowered-with-gods-power

Agrippa said to Paul, “In a short time would you persuade me to be a Christian?” (Acts 26:28)

“You know,” Festus had said to the king, just one day prior, “I have this prisoner who the Jews are simply desperate to kill. Strange case, in my opinion. They came with the raucous of the gods, only to tell me the most idle of tales.”

“What tales?” asked King Agrippa.

“Apparently they want this man dead because he claims that some prophet died, a man named Jesus, and yet is now alive. Impossible to investigate such delusions. I am not sure what to say to Caesar.”

“May I examine the prisoner?”

“Of course, my King. We will make a spectacle of it tomorrow.”

The next day, as Agrippa sat enthroned in royal pomp and splendor with the mighty attending, he found Paul much smaller than expected. The royal hush washed over the assembly as the king motioned for Paul to give his defense.

“I consider myself fortunate,” began the prisoner, “that it is before you, King Agrippa, I am going to make my defense today against all the accusations of the Jews, especially because you are familiar with all the customs and controversies of the Jews. Therefore I beg you to listen to me patiently” (Acts 26:2–3).

Agrippa was ready to do just that.

He listened as Paul recalled growing up a Pharisee, hunting Christians, and meeting Jesus in a heavenly vision on the Damascus road. “Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?” Jesus was alive, Paul insisted. Furthermore, he said that Moses and the prophets spoke of this very thing and even foretold such things as salvation extending to the Gentiles (Acts 26:4–23).

“Paul, you are out of your mind,” Festus interrupted with a yell, “your great learning is driving you out of your mind” (Acts 26:24). To this Paul responds with something equally as shocking to the king’s sensibilities. And how Paul replies next, how he turns matters to the king directly, offers a balancing word to one of our evangelistic emphases today.

King in the Dock

“I am not out of my mind, most excellent Festus,” Paul responds, “but I am speaking true and rational words.” And as if pointing to the throne, he continues, “For the king knows about these things, and to him I speak boldly. For I am persuaded that none of these things has escaped his notice, for this has not been done in a corner. King Agrippa, do you believe the prophets? I know that you believe” (Acts 26:25–27).

Paul, on trial before the king, puts the king on trial before Christ.

Paul’s appeal is no vague word or bashful plea. He speaks plainly, courteously, boldly, and directly. He does not shoot over Agrippa’s head but lets the arrow fly at his heart. Before the watching eyes of everyone who is anyone in the region, Paul looks him in the eye, and says for all to hear, “King Agrippa, do you believe the prophets? I know you do.”

The arrow finds its mark. The king staggers. In wonder he asks, “In a short time would you persuade me to be a Christian?” (Acts 26:28).

Whether Long or Short

I find great correction in this scene, summarized by Paul’s final response,

Whether short or long, I would to God that not only you but also all who hear me this day might become such as I am — except for these chains. (Acts 26:29)

Organic, relational, “long” evangelism has its place. This form of evangelism tends to be especially useful with people woven into our lives. With those we will see again, we want them to witness our lives and open up to us that we might bring Christ to their specific hopes, sins, and sorrows. One brick at a time, one conversation at a time, because we have more time, so we think. “Whether short or long” he declared to Agrippa, “I wish that you would be a Christian.” He makes space for long.

But how many of us today have jettisoned the first half — the short-term, first-conversation evangelism that arrested the king? He did not expect that Paul would press the relevance of this news to his conscience and call for a response in their first conversation. “In such a short time,” he asked, “would you persuade me to be a Christian?” In such a short time, Paul would.

Not only did Paul have the spine to evangelize the king in front of all notable somebodies, but he turned to them, seeking to win everyone within the range of his voice to Christ. “I would that all of you be a Christian, just as I am,” he said turning to the spectators, “except, of course, for these chains.” He only had one shot. And so, with little regard to his own welfare, he broke down the fourth wall and addressed every man, woman, and child openly: “I would that all of you believed and were saved!”

Lies Short-Circuiting Evangelism

Do we do the same? Does it feel taboo to share the gospel at the bus stop, restaurant, basketball game, on the airplane? “Drive-by” evangelism, some have called it. Unnatural, ineffective, abrupt, and most likely offensive. That sort of thing is impolite and undemocratic, and if it must be done, surely it should be left to those especially gifted as evangelists, right?

When I am tempted to think this way, such resistance belies several wrong beliefs that are especially compelling in our day.

‘Jesus can’t save in one conversation.’

When I forget that the gospel is the power of God for salvation (Romans 1:16), I remain silent. Offering a word of true hope to a stranger can’t do anything but make me look foolish, so why bother?

But Paul remembered the power of the gospel.

“God, through his gospel, can and does save — sometimes over years of relationship and often in random, short conversations.”

One vibrating with divine life, quaking with expectation, muscular enough to capture and liberate even the chief of sinners. He was willing to persuade them, with a “loud voice” at his trial, and expected King Agrippa, the military tribunes, and “the prominent men of the city” to cast off their crowns and bow their knees before the King of glory (Acts 25:23). If Jehovah’s Witnesses, with their door-to-door evangelism, believe they have a message that can save in a moment — why not the actual witnesses of Jehovah?

‘Salvation is my work, not God’s.’

New birth is not fundamentally the offspring of a good relationship between a Christian and non-Christian. Our coffee conversations or basketball games or neighborly help has no power to raise anyone from the dead. Salvation is now and forever a sovereign act of our Almighty God. When Nicodemus hears Jesus explain this, he is perplexed and astounded (John 3:4). “You must be born again.”

No, Nicodemus, your positive assessment of me and my miracles is not enough — you must be born again.
Yes, your self-striving will not avail you of the kingdom. Correct, you can no more choose to be born again spiritually than you chose to be born physically.
You have as much control of the Spirit as you do the wind. And if you had read the Scriptures correctly, none of this should surprise you.

That night Jesus baffled Nicodemus, but it can encourage us in our evangelism. No matter how vulnerable, risky, awkward it feels, God, through his gospel, can and does save — sometimes over years of relationship and often in random, short conversations. Nicodemus’s life, for one, shows what one uncomfortable conversation can do (John 7:50–51; 19:38–40).

‘A personal relationship makes evangelism easier.’

In my experience, the less short-term mindset I have at the beginning, the harder long-term evangelism tends to be. If I refuse to tell someone from the get-go that I am a Christian, the harder it becomes to tell him later. It always feels odd to introduce something so massive about myself later on. It seems to betray that Jesus isn’t really that important to me.

“I know we have known each other for a while now, but did I ever mention what matters most to me? I believe a murdered Jewish carpenter — who was also God in the flesh and the fulfillment of God’s plan for the world — is now alive, enthroned in heaven, and will come back soon to judge the world in righteousness?”

“Gospel truth doesn’t only travel through well-established relationships, nor does it travel at all when not shared.”

Typically, the more upfront we are in the beginning (if possible, in the very first conversation), the easier it becomes to return to Jesus later on. And again, it is our privilege to share the hope that we have, and not our responsibility to convert the person by our conversational prowess. The saving work is God’s alone.

God, Give Me One

None of this is an assault on “relational” or “friendship” evangelism. The apostle himself, after all, would win King Agrippa in a short time or long. My point is that long-term evangelism must not be our only method, nor is it a reasonable excuse to neglect single-conversation evangelism. Despite the merits of the statements like, “Truth travels best through relationship,” I want to remind you, as I remind myself, that gospel truth doesn’t only travel through well-established relationships, nor does it travel at all when not shared.

I know of an elderly saint in my church who recently told me, “I have prayed every day for God to send me one person that day to tell about Jesus, and in fifty years he has not failed me once.” Paul modeled such bold, firm, polite, short and long evangelism. Let’s pray such prayers and not fail when it comes time to speak.

How did Jesus walk on water? How did he feed five thousand with five loaves and two fish? How did he raise Lazarus from the dead?

Unless we have been carefully taught, many Christians would be quick to say simply, Because he is God! And he truly is. But is that how the New Testament answers these questions? If we follow the emphasis of the Gospels, we might say that what Jesus’s miracles show is that he is God, but how he, as man, performs these wonders, is not quite as simple as we may assume.

In particular, what are we to say about the many texts that testify to the Holy Spirit’s presence in the human life of Christ? Did Christ, in his humanity, actually need the Holy Spirit if he performed such signs simply by virtue of his divinity?

When we recognize the surprisingly recurrent theme of the divine Spirit’s relationship to the divine Son in his humanity, we might understand Jesus (and the Gospels) better, and freshly marvel at what grace Christ offers us in the gift of his Spirit.

Jesus and the Spirit

First, let’s rehearse the string of biblical texts that lead us to what is often called a “Spirit Christology” — which is simply a term for recognizing the critical part played by the person and work of the Spirit in the person and work of Christ.

Sinclair Ferguson observes three distinct “stages” in the life of Christ, through which we might acknowledge the Spirit’s relationship to the Son (The Holy Spirit, 38–56). Those stages are as follows, with key texts.

1. Conception, Birth, and Growth

As we know from some of our favorite Advent readings, the Holy Spirit is present and pronounced in the angelic announcements to both Mary and Joseph. How will it be, asks Mary, that I, a virgin, will conceive and bear a son? “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you” (Luke 1:35). So too in Matthew’s account about Joseph, the Spirit both frames the report and is explicit in the angelic announcement (Matthew 1:18, 20).

Yet the Spirit is not only present, and explicit, at the conception and birth of Christ, but also specifically prophesied by Isaiah, seven centuries prior, as “resting upon” the coming Anointed One: “The Spirit of the Lord shall rest upon him, the Spirit of wisdom and understanding, the Spirit of counsel and might, the Spirit of knowledge and the fear of the Lord” (Isaiah 11:2).

“God’s word notes again and again the power of the Spirit as Christ’s inseparable companion.”

Now in Jesus of Nazareth, the long-promised shoot from the stump of Jesse has come (Isaiah 11:1), and “the Spirit of wisdom and understanding” upon him is seen even as early as age 12 as Jesus listens in the temple to the teachers and asks them questions. “All who heard him were amazed at his understanding and his answers. And when his parents saw him, they were astonished” (Luke 2:47–48).

Even in childhood, as Jesus “increased in wisdom and in stature and in favor with God and man” (Luke 2:52), he was not on his own but had the Spirit as his “inseparable companion,” as the great Cappadocian theologian Basil of Caesarea (c. 330–379) captured it so memorably.

2. Baptism, Temptations, and Ministry

Isaiah’s prophesied anointing with the Spirit comes to the fore again at the outset of Jesus’s public ministry, beginning with his baptism. The forerunner, John the Baptist, tells of a coming Spirit-baptism that John’s water-baptism anticipated (Luke 3:16). But first, before baptizing others in the Spirit, Jesus himself will be the preeminent Man of the Spirit. When Jesus “had been baptized and was praying, the heavens were opened, and the Holy Spirit descended on him in bodily form, like a dove; and a voice came from heaven, ‘You are my beloved Son; with you I am well pleased’” (Luke 3:21–22; also Matthew 3:16).

Here at the outset of his public ministry, the Spirit descends on him with new fullness for his unique calling, and the voice from heaven first connects the Anointed of Psalm 2 with the Suffering Servant of Isaiah 42. The Servant — and Son — not only enjoys God’s full favor, but he is also the one of whom it is said, “I have put my Spirit upon him” (Isaiah 42:1).

Freshly endowed with (“full of”) the Spirit, Jesus then goes to the wilderness. Not only is he “led by the Spirit” (Luke 4:1; Matthew 4:1) into the wilderness, but as Mark reports, “The Spirit immediately drove him out into the wilderness” (Mark 1:12), not as a retreat but as an advance in war, to encounter the enemy and beginning taking back territory.

Once Christ has returned, victorious in his wilderness test — in the power of the Spirit (Luke 4:14) — he comes to Galilee and to his hometown of Nazareth. In the synagogue, they hand him in the scroll of Isaiah, and what does he read, as the first public act after his baptism? He begins with Isaiah 61:1: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me . . .” (Luke 4:18).

Jesus’s ministry then unfolds in the subsequent pages as by the Spirit he proclaims good news to the poor, liberty to the captives, recovery of sight to the blind, freedom to the oppressed, and the year of the Lord’s favor (Luke 4:18–19; Isaiah 61:1–2). Jesus will testify that it is “by the Spirit of God that I cast out demons” (Matthew 12:28). By the Spirit, he teaches with unusual authority. Fully man, he is fully dependent on his Father — having come not to do his own will but the will of him who sent him (John 6:38). And as Peter one day will summarize his life, in telling his story to Gentiles, “God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Spirit and with power” (Acts 10:38).

In the words of John 3:34, and Isaac Ambrose (1604–1664), Jesus “received the Spirit out of measure; there was in him as much as possibly could be in a creature, and more than in all other creatures whatsoever” (Looking unto Jesus, 280).

3. Death, Resurrection, and Ascension

Significant as the testimony is about the Spirit’s work in Jesus’s childhood and ministry, we might expect that when he comes to die, and rise, and ascend, we would hear about the Spirit here too. Indeed we do. According to Hebrews 9:14, Jesus offered himself for sins at the cross “through the eternal Spirit.” As he set his face like flint toward Jerusalem, mounted the donkey on Palm Sunday, confronted scribes and Pharisees, and prayed with “loud cries and tears” in Gethsemane (Hebrews 5:7), Jesus was anointed, sustained, and strengthened by the Spirit to the end. And beyond.

In his resurrection, Jesus was “vindicated by the Spirit” (1 Timothy 3:16). As Paul writes in Romans 1:4, Jesus “was declared to be the Son of God in power according to the Spirit of holiness by his resurrection from the dead.” And promising a coming of, and baptizing with, the Holy Spirit (Acts 1:5, 8), Jesus ascended to heaven (Acts 1:9), to be glorified at God’s right hand, where he then would pour out the Spirit on those who believe (John 7:37–39; Acts 2:2–4, 17, 33). Amazingly, then, Peter would preach, “Repent and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins, and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit” (Acts 2:38). Now, to receive Christ is to receive the Spirit, and vice versa.

In fact, the Holy Spirit has become such an “inseparable companion” for Christ that we find a striking identification of Jesus and the Spirit in the letters of Paul (1 Corinthians 15:45; 2 Corinthians 3:17–18). Not only is the Holy Spirit now “the Spirit of Jesus” (Philippians 1:19; also Acts 16:7), but the glorified Christ and the poured-out Spirit can be spoken of interchangeably, as in Romans 8:9–11: Christians “have the Spirit of Christ,” and in the Spirit, “Christ is in you.”

Jesus Did Not Cheat

Now back to our original question: How did Jesus walk on water, multiply loaves, and raise the dead? The New Testament witness to the Spirit as Christ’s “inseparable companion” and source of divine power is too pronounced to ignore. Jesus, the God-man, apparently needed the Spirit. The terms of the incarnation, in honoring the fullness of humanity, were that the second person of the Trinity did not immediately provide divine power and help to the human Christ. Rather, he did so mediately through the Spirit. It was the great Puritan theologian John Owen (1616–1683) who perhaps first ventured the formulation that now has stood for almost four centuries: “The only singular immediate act of the person of the Son on the human nature was the assumption of it into subsistence with himself” (The Works of John Owen, 3:160).

“Jesus, the God-man, apparently needed the Spirit.”

In other words, the eternal Son’s only direct act on his human nature was uniting that humanity to himself in the incarnation. “Every other act upon Christ’s human nature,” writes Mark Jones, “was from the Holy Spirit. Christ performed miracles through the power of the Holy Spirit, not immediately by his own divine power” (The Prayers of Jesus, 23). As Jones comments elsewhere, “Christ’s obedience in our place had to be real obedience. He did not cheat by relying on his own divine nature while he acted as the second Adam” (Puritan Theology, 343). The Holy Spirit has accompanied, supplied, and carried the Son in his human nature from conception to childhood to ministry, to the cross and resurrection, and now in his glory, fully endowed as the Man of the Spirit at God’s right hand.

Spirit of Christ in Us

Why make a point of what some might perceive as a technicality? Why note, as Kyle Claunch does, this “marked contrast” between the New Testament emphasis and “the tendency of post-biblical authors, who appeal to the deity of Jesus as the explanation for the extraordinary features of his life and ministry”?

For one, a Spirit Christology demonstrates the genuine humanness of Christ, which is vital not only for our imitation of his life, but even more for his perfect human life to count savingly and uniquely in the place of us sinners. Also, observing the critical place of the Holy Spirit with respect to the humanity of Christ helps us understand the Bible. From Isaiah, to the Gospels and Acts, and the Epistles, God’s word notes again and again, as we’ve seen, the power of the Spirit as Christ’s inseparable companion. If we want to know and understand God’s word, we will not want to read a phrase like “by the Spirit” as white noise but with meaning.

Finally, a Spirit Christology shows us, in a secondary sense, what is possible in us by the same Spirit who dwells in us — not mainly in terms of being the Spirit’s channel for displays of extraordinary power (though we might grow to be expectant of more than we have), but most significantly in terms of holiness and spiritual joy. Jesus was and is unique. The power of the Spirit in his human life pointed to his uniqueness as God. Still, the same Spirit who empowered Jesus’s earthly life, and sacrificial death, and triumphant resurrection, has been given to us today as “the Spirit of Jesus” (Acts 16:7). He not only works on us, and through us, but dwells in us (Romans 8:9, 11; 2 Timothy 1:14). He has been given to us (Luke 11:13; John 7:38–39; Acts 5:32; 15:8; 1 Thessalonians 4:8). We have received him (John 20:22; Acts 2:38; 8:15, 17, 19; 10:47; 19:2; Romans 5:5; 8:15; 1 Corinthians 2:12; 2 Corinthians 5:5; 1 John 3:24), to glorify the Son (John 16:14).

The very power of God himself, in his Spirit, has come to make himself at home in some real degree, and to increasing effect, in us. We are his temple, both individually and collectively (1 Corinthians 3:16; 6:19), and a day is coming when we, like Christ, will reign in glory, fully endowed with the Spirit, to enjoy life, and God in Christ, beyond what we’ve even imagined so far.