http://rss.desiringgod.org/link/10732/15183895/does-the-new-testament-legitimize-slavery

Audio Transcript

We start a new week looking at the distracted heart. What do we do when our hearts are too distracted to focus on Christ? Two listeners asked it, Pastor John. First is Tess. Tess writes, “Hello, Pastor John! Thank you for such an amazing and unique platform to minister to people’s hearts through this podcast. When it comes to setting my mind on the things of Christ, like it says in Colossians 3:2, I know how to preach truth to myself and remind myself of God’s promises in Scripture. However, when I think about my ex-boyfriend dating one of my dear friends that have both walked away from the Lord recently, my mind is so fixed on that one thing, I cannot focus on the word. How can I train my distracted mind away from this world and its worries and stresses, and instead set my full gaze on Christ himself? I’d love some insight on this.”

And then Michelle from Canada writes in: “Pastor John, you have no idea how helpful this podcast has been for me. Thank you for responding to every question with thoughtfulness and love. Sometimes I have trouble falling asleep, and what’s helped me the most is daydreaming about things that will probably never happen to me. I imagine my dream home with lavish furniture, traveling to remote places, being a CEO of a company, and so on. Although it helps me fall asleep, I’m left feeling guilty that thinking about the Lord and what he’s doing in my real life doesn’t bring me the same peace. I’m now finding that these imaginary scenarios consume me during my day-to-day routine outside of sleep — during my commute to work, getting ready in the morning, cooking, and more. Given that the Bible tells us to ‘Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth,’ in Colossians 3:2, is it a sin to daydream in these ways?”

These two questions both raise a question about Colossians 3:2 — namely, “Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on the earth” — but they point to almost opposite ways of struggling with this verse.

Losses and Dreams

Tess is struggling with the controlling thought about something she has lost (a boyfriend and more), and Michelle is struggling not with something she has lost, but something she dreams of having (a dream home, traveling, being a CEO). The very fact that setting our minds on things that are above can be hindered by both regrets and by dreams is very instructive for us. It’s instructive because it reminds us that the heart of our problem is not what we had and lost or what we never had but desired to have. The problem is deeper.

It’s similar to the instruction we get when we realize that being wealthy and being poor might both be characterized by being greedy and covetous. The person who has a lot may trust and love his possessions, and the person who has little may crave earthly things with as much passion as a rich person loves them. So the essence of the problem is not in the wealth or the poverty. The essence of the problem is in the heart and what it desires and where it rests. That’s what I would say we learn from Tess and Michelle. The essence of the problem is not that something has been lost or something has not yet been gained. The essence of the problem is deeper.

Our Breathtaking Identity

In both cases, setting the mind on things that are above is hindered by a recurring pattern of thought — in one case, a pattern of thought about what she had lost, and in the other case, a pattern of thought about what she doesn’t yet have and dreams of having. And I think if we read Colossians 3:1–4, the Lord will show us what may be the common, deeper root of the problem here. So let’s read it.

If then you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. Set your mind on things that are above, not on things that are on earth. For you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God. When Christ who is your life appears, then you also will appear with him in glory.

Now, these words are simply breathtaking. They are breathtaking in what they show us about the reality of who Tess and Michelle are and who Jesus Christ is.

Who We Are

So, consider five things that Tess and Michelle need to know about themselves:

They have died (verse 3). Because of their union with Christ by faith, their old, unbelieving, rebellious, perishing self died when Christ died.
They have been raised with Christ from the dead (verse 1). They are a new creation in Christ. This is not something to be achieved, but something that has happened to them. God has done this.
The essence of their new life in Christ is hidden with Christ in God (verse 3). They are as real and as secure as Christ is in heaven.
Their life is not only hidden with Christ in God, but Christ himself is their life (verse 4). Their life is as indestructible as Christ because he is their life.
At the coming of Christ in glory, Tess and Michelle will appear with him as the everlasting, glorious beings that they really are, even though very few people can see that in them now.

Those are five staggering realities that Tess and Michelle need to know about themselves.

Who Christ Is

And here are the four realities about Christ in those verses:

Christ is alive forevermore (verse 1).
Christ is right now seated at the right hand of God (verse 1). He is a coruler of all things in the universe.
Christ is now the life of his people (verse 3). All our new, everlasting existence flows from him and consists in our union with him.
Christ is going to appear on the clouds with great glory to establish his kingdom (verse 4), and with him, all his people will shine like the sun with his kingly glory.

Set Your Minds

Now, embedded in those nine truths is this: “Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on the earth” (verse 2). That’s embedded in those glories. And what I’m suggesting is that the deeper issue that Tess and Michelle are dealing with, and all of us deal with, is that they may be trying to obey this exhortation — to set their minds on things that are above — without getting a clear, deep, satisfying grasp of these nine glorious realities about themselves and about Christ.

“It’s hard to set your mind on something if that something is not clear and great in your mind and heart.”

In other words, it’s hard to set your mind on something over against your losses and your dreams if that something that you’re trying to set your mind on is not clear and great and beautiful and desirable in your mind and your heart.

Reservoir of Glory

Now, I realize someone is going to say to me, “But how does that help them, since they’re saying that thoughts about loss and thoughts about dreams are precisely what is keeping them from setting their minds on the greatness and the beauty and the desirableness of these realities? So you haven’t said anything helpful, Piper.”

Now, my response is that it’s not quite like that. Let me explain. When I lie awake at night, knowing that I need sleep, and it’s not coming, and I’m tempted to set my mind on something earthly that I want or that I regret, what helps me turn my mind toward things that are above is that I have devoted significant time and energy on a few passages of Scripture to penetrate through to the clarity of the greatness and the beauty and the desirableness of the reality that is there.

“Devote certain times to create a reservoir of beauty and glory and greatness with a few passages of Scripture.”

In other words, I don’t expect all of that work to happen on my pillow. The times when I need to direct my thought away from anxieties and earthly cravings is not the time for doing the serious business of understanding texts and penetrating through them to great and beautiful reality that can conquer my wandering thoughts.

So, my suggestion for Tess, Michelle, and all of us is that we devote certain times to create a reservoir of beauty and glory and greatness and desirableness with a few passages of Scripture, so that when in the course of the day or night we try to set our minds on things that are above, we don’t have to fill that reservoir at that moment. It’s already there. We can ask God, “Father, as I recite this verse, or as I recite this passage now, cause me to see — to really see — and savor and stand in awe of the greatness and the beauty and the desirableness of things that are above.”

Death is our mortal enemy — an enemy that Jesus defanged (Hebrews 2:14–15), and one day will utterly destroy (Revelation 21:4). He revealed his omnipotent power over death by raising people from the dead (Mark 5:41–42; Luke 7:11–17; John 11:33–34). Through his own resurrection, he revealed that all authority in heaven and earth is his (Matthew 28:16). D-Day over death for all who believe has arrived (2 Timothy 1:10), and V-Day’s future has been secured (1 Corinthians 15:25–26).

How then should we pray for God to heal our dying loved ones? On the one hand, until Jesus returns, death is an inescapable reality for everyone (Hebrews 9:27). So praying for healing isn’t always God’s will. In the case of a dying great-grandmother, for example, we may be more in line with God’s will not by praying for healing, but by praying for her to finish well (Philippians 1:23), trusting that because her Savior has conquered death for her, she will never see it, not even for a second (John 8:51).

On the other hand, because Jesus robbed death of its life-stealing power by bearing the full wrath of God for our sins (2 Corinthians 5:21), we sometimes should pray that he would snatch our loved ones from the grasp of death. We can pray for miracles, asking him to spare us the sorrow upon sorrow that comes from seemingly untimely deaths (Philippians 2:27), even as we trust him for his answer, whatever it might be.

‘She Can’t Breathe’

In a recent article, I shared how God humbled me and taught me to trust him through my daughter’s battle with cancer when she was 8 years old. Despite our prayers for God to spare her life, she drifted closer and closer to death’s door. The new “promising” experimental treatment we authorized further robbed us of hope when it gave her a life-threatening side effect called VOD of the liver.

The worst part was how she was laboring to breathe. That’s the final line to cross before death, isn’t it — no longer being able to breathe the breath of life (Genesis 2:7; 3:19)? Our doctor told us that if she continued to struggle, they would have to put her on a ventilator. They would sedate her and strap her down before intubation so that she could not pull out the ventilator. Taking that step could mean that my wife and I would never speak with our daughter again.

Then it happened. It was two o’clock in the morning when the pediatrics ICU doctor woke me up. “We have to put your daughter on a ventilator right now. She can’t breathe, and her carbon-dioxide level is past the emergency benchmark.” Everyone had been dreading this moment, but here it was. Desperate, I called my wife so she could rush to the hospital, perhaps in time to speak one last time with her baby, but she didn’t pick up the phone. My daughter was dying, and the person she loved more than anyone on earth wouldn’t be there to hold her and say goodbye. I was broken.

Waiting and Praying

Then, like the voice of an angel, the nurse whispered to me, “Dad, if you are not comfortable, they can’t make you do this.” And so, when our doctor returned with the ventilator, I told her I wanted to wait and pray. The doctor’s countenance morphed. Her voice steeled. She said that if they didn’t intubate my daughter right then, she could go into cardiac arrest. The doctor warned me repeatedly, but each time I firmly told her I wanted to pray and wait. I’m no doctor, and as a rule, I hear and receive doctors’ recommendations. But in this moment, I couldn’t shake the sense that God wanted me to pray and wait.

“God calls us to pray, believing that there is nothing too difficult for him.”

Eventually, everyone left the room, and I dropped to my knees. “God, you said if we ask you for a fish, you won’t give us a serpent. If we ask you for bread, you won’t give us a stone. God, I am asking you to give me my daughter’s life.” I prayed through the night. Each hour I prayed, my daughter’s carbon-dioxide levels dramatically improved, and her breathing grew stronger. In the morning, her doctor came into the room and removed the order for the ventilator, and the following week, he let her come home for a weeklong visit before her second round of chemotherapy.

Our daughter, who had been at death’s door only a few days before, was home with no detectable cancer to be found in her body. God and God alone did that.

Amazing Providence

My daughter was cancer-free, but she was far from being out of danger. Because the first round of chemotherapy had almost killed her, her bone-marrow specialist wanted her to skip the final two rounds and go straight to receiving a bone-marrow transplant. Our oncologist disagreed and told us he believed bone-marrow transplants work best when even the imperceptible levels of cancer are reduced by the final rounds of chemotherapy.

Because they couldn’t agree, they left the decision with us, giving us the weekend to decide whether to continue with two more rounds of chemo or go straight to a transplant. So my wife and I went away for a night to pray and seek wisdom from a multitude of counselors. We called friends with medical backgrounds, although we hadn’t spoken to some of them in over twenty years. And how God providentially answered our prayers seemed even more amazing than how he miraculously strengthened my daughter’s breathing.

Oncology Expert

We called Judy, who used to attend a UCLA Bible study with me. I had heard that she worked as an oncology nurse at a children’s hospital in Los Angeles. She told me that the doctor who trained our oncologist was actually at her hospital. Then she said, “You won’t believe this, but the doctor who wrote the national experimental protocol that your daughter is on just walked past me, and I’ll check with her!” Both doctors agreed that under our circumstances, we could go straight to the bone-marrow transplant and skip the final two rounds of chemotherapy.

Bone-Marrow Expert

Then my wife, who years ago had spent a year in medical school, called a former classmate, Larry, who suggested that we reach out to the UCLA bone-marrow transplant department. When we pulled up their webpage, my wife recognized a high-school classmate, LaVette, and I recognized one of the doctors, Ted Moore, with whom I had attended a UCLA Bible study. We called the number listed, and my wife’s high-school friend picked up. She said she had never answered that phone but had just so happened to be walking past it when it rang. Dr. Moore was in a meeting, but she would have him call us back as soon as he was free. Within the hour, I answered the phone to “Hey, Bobby. It’s Ted.” The unassuming UCLA student I knew from sixteen years ago had become Dr. Theodore Moore, a renowned expert in bone-marrow transplants. With complete confidence, he counseled us to go straight to the transplant.

VOD Expert

Finally, we called Dr. John Vierling, a liver specialist. My wife and I had met him years ago when her cousin asked my wife to sing at the funeral for Dr. Vierling’s son. Our concern was whether having a history of VOD would make the risk of undergoing a bone-marrow transplant too great for our daughter, because a major risk from these transplants is contracting VOD. As God would have it, Dr. Vierling was an expert on VOD, and he counseled us that we could safely proceed with the transplant.

Through the unveiling of his amazing providence, God had answered our prayer. We authorized our daughter to undergo a bone-marrow transplant at City of Hope eighteen years ago. Eighteen years later, she is a walking cancer-free miracle of God.

He Holds Every Breath

I know my daughter’s story is just one among many stories that end so differently. We journeyed through our trial with four other families — three children my daughter’s age and one adult, all of whom had similar types of cancer. We prayed for each of them, but none of them survived. God does not answer every prayer for healing. So, how might he have us pray when our loved ones need a miracle?

“Our primary prayer is always that God would prepare the hearts of our dying loved ones to see Jesus.”

First, armed with the trust that God sovereignly ordains our prayers as a means to accomplish his ends, we freely pray for miracles, as Elijah did (James 5:17–18). Honestly, before God healed my daughter, I would pray for God to heal others, but I didn’t necessarily expect to see a miracle. For that, I repent. God calls us to pray, believing that there is nothing too difficult for him, including healing our loved ones on their deathbeds.

At the same time, however, we pray with the kind of faith that does not rest on God saying yes to our prayers (2 Corinthians 12:8–9). By his grace, we can accept his answer when it’s no, as David did (2 Samuel 12:16–23), and we can submit to his will and worship him when we can’t understand his answer, as Job did (Job 1:21; 42:1–3).

Christians also embrace the reality that, until Jesus returns, everyone we love will die, and our lives are but a vapor in light of eternity, whether we die at age 10 or 100. So our primary prayer is always that God would prepare the hearts of our dying loved ones to see Jesus, and that he would grant our unbelieving loved ones repentance and faith toward Jesus. Our first prayer for our daughter was for her soul’s salvation.

A wise friend reminded me, when we were enduring our trial, that God holds the pen that is writing our story. Everything God writes is good: in the end, we will see his story as good, and in the present, we believe it to be for our good. So yes, pray for a miracle, and trust that God holds your loved one’s next and last breaths.

The following is a lightly edited transcript.

We, though many, are one body in Christ, and individually members one of another. Having gifts that differ according to the grace given to us, let us use them: if prophecy, in proportion to our faith; if service, in our serving; the one who teaches, in his teaching; the one who exhorts, in his exhortation; the one who contributes, in generosity; the one who leads, with zeal; the one who does acts of mercy, with cheerfulness. (Romans 12:5–8)

I want to add to that list, “the one who reads with . . .” What would you put there? The reason I feel okay suggesting that Paul could continue that way is because those last several gifts are not gifts that are unique to any Christian. Every Christian is supposed to be merciful:

Be merciful, as your Father is merciful. (Luke 6:36)

That’s spoken to all Christians, and here in this passage it says, “those of you who show mercy as your gift, do it with cheerfulness.” Or what about giving? It says to do that with generosity. Every one of you men should be a giver, financially and in other ways. That’s not a unique gift. So if Paul can take contributing and say, “do that with generosity,” and to the one who shows mercy, “do that with cheerfulness,” then he can say something to the one who reads as well, because everybody’s supposed to be a reader, if you’ve been given the opportunity to learn how to read in this world. There are cultures that haven’t had that opportunity yet.

What would you fill in the blank with? The reason this feels so relevant to me, and the reason I’m starting this way, is because if there are merciful people (which all Christians are supposed to be), and Paul feels legitimate in calling out mercy as something you might be especially gifted at, that means that ordinary Christian duties and acts can be expressed in peculiarly, individually anointed ways, just like reading. So I paused and I thought about that for myself, thinking, “What about me?”

I’m going to tell you my story, because if you know me at all, you know me as a preacher and a writer. Maybe you know me as a family guy, for those of you who know me personally enough to be on the staff with me and so on for 33 years here. But you don’t know how I got to all those places and what limitations and giftings prescribed those paths. You’re all led by limits that you have — things you’re not good at — and a few things that you are more or less good at, and that’s why you do what you do.

So for me to fill in the blank, I would put it this way: In your mercy, be cheerful; in your contributing, be generous; and in your reading, be what? What’s your blank? You could fill in that phrase with “in your reading, be speedy,” or you could say, “in your reading, be really good at comprehension, memorization, and remembering,” or it could be “ in your reading, be especially adept at relating what you read to other Scriptures,” or, “in your reading, be especially adept at explaining to other people,” or, “in your reading, be especially adept at applying it to your friends.” The list could go on and on.

You may be more or less good at some aspects of reading and not so good at other aspects of reading. How would that affect your life? How would that affect your vocation or your fathering?

My Struggle to Speak

I grew up in a Christian home, and my dad was an evangelist. My mom and dad are both in heaven, I believe, right now. And I’ve always described my childhood as the happiest home I could have ever imagined. My mom and dad would sing. They’d sing in the front seat of the car while my sister and I sat in the back seat on the way to Daytona Beach, Florida, to do some deep sea fishing. Those are great memories of my life. And they would sing things like “Heavenly Sunlight.” That’s an old spiritual song from the 1950s.

I had a great home, but somewhere around the seventh grade something happened, and I discovered I could not speak in front of a group. It wasn’t funny. It wasn’t like when a person has butterflies, or their knees knock, or their hands tremble. I shut down. It was absolutely humiliating from seventh grade until I was about twenty. It was horrible. I would not want to live my teenage years over again. I do not look back on my teenage years as happy years. I had acne, and that was probably owing to how anxious I was.

I didn’t accept any office proposals in school, even though academically I did okay in high school. If they nominated me for vice president or president I would say, “No way; you have to give speeches. I can’t give any speeches.” I couldn’t do a report in a biology class for 30 seconds in order to say what I was supposed to be doing with my science project. I couldn’t do any of it. I took a C in Civics because I was supposed to give an oral book report. I said to Mr. Vermilion, “I can’t give an oral book report.” And he said, “Well, if you don’t give an oral book report, you’re going to get a C.” I said, “That’s fine, I’ll get a C. I just cannot do it.”

My Struggle to Read

Accompanying that, and maybe related to it, was the fact that I couldn’t read fast, and therefore I disliked any kind of test that involved reading. There were these horrible tests you had to take for standardized stuff to get into college, where you would read a paragraph and then they would ask you ten questions about it. I couldn’t remember what was there, and if I were to go back and reread it to find out what the answer was, it would keep me from finishing on time. Inside I would just be churning with anxiety about tests like that because I couldn’t read. To this day, I cannot read faster than I can talk.

Since then I’ve talked to some specialists and I’ve taken all kinds of courses. I’ve had examinations done. Andy Naselli’s wife told me the other day, “I think, Pastor John, you have dyslexia.” I said, “Well, I don’t transpose things too often. When I write down phone numbers, I do sometimes switch things around.” She said, “Oh no, that’s not the only mark of dyslexia. All kinds of things that are going on with your brain.”

That’s like one of my sons, so I passed some of this on to one of them. I can remember my son was ready to drop out of high school a week before he graduated from Roosevelt High, and I said, “Why?” He said, “I can’t do what she wants me to do.” And the teacher said, “If you don’t do this, you’re going to fail this class.” What she wanted him to do was listen to her in class and write down the main points and hand that in at the end of the class. That’s all he had to do to pass the class. But he said, “I can’t do that. I could tell her verbatim what she said when she’s done, but I cannot write and listen at the same time.” Those are the peculiar things that you can pass on to your kids.

So anyway, the point of all that was that I came to college as a very slow reader with a poor memory — the very two things that are necessary to be academically successful, at least in my mind. And I was also not able to speak.

Let the One Who Reads

I fell in love with reading in the 11th grade, but it didn’t change the speed of my reading. I just wanted to read fiction, so I became a literature major in college, which is crazy.

I avoided every single class on novels and took every class on poetry. Do you know why? Novels are long, and they wanted me to read six novels in a class, but I couldn’t read one novel in a class, let alone six. Whereas with poetry you take a poem that’s very short and analyze it and write a paper about it. I could do that. That’s why today I’m a preacher and not an academician. I tried teaching at Bethel for six years. I was a competent teacher, but as I looked around at my colleagues and what’s expected of an academician — namely to read everything, remember everything, and write books about everything — I said, “I’ll never be able to do that.”

Do you know what preachers do? In season and out of season they remember Bible verses. On Sunday they have a paragraph, and they understand it, love it, and tell people what they see in it. I thought, “I could do that!” And I did it for 33 years, and people thought I was good at it. I became a pastor in large measure because I can’t read fast, and I can’t remember much of what I read, but oh, can I analyze a paragraph. If you give me enough time, I can analyze a lot of them and write books like that. I mean, when you write a book it looks to people like, “Whoa, to write a book like that you must read everything!” No, the reason I write books like that is because I don’t read everything.

So as I finish my phrase here — “let the one who reads . . .” — I do not say, “let the one who reads be a speed reader, or, “let the one who reads be one who remembers everything he reads.” I don’t and I can’t. But I will say, “let the one who reads read slowly and deeply, and with tears, and with longing to live it and speak it as he sees it. Then I talk.

“Let the one who reads read slowly and deeply, and with tears, and with longing to live it and speak it as he sees it.”

And I would just say to you brothers, as you finish that sentence, you fill it in for yourself. God made you the way you are. If you have a great memory, memorize books of the Bible. I work like crazy to memorize Scripture. I wake up every morning and before I get out of bed, I recite a chapter in Philippians until I’ve got the whole book, and I also quote a chapter in 1 Peter until I get the whole book. I know those two books by heart. I could recite both those books by heart right now. Do you know what that cost me over the last eight years? It was constant work. Those things would go out of my mind within a week if I wasn’t doing a chapter a day on Philippians and 1 Peter. So the fact that I have a lousy memory is no excuse for not memorizing Scripture.

The Place of the Bible in Daily Life

Here’s what I want to do the rest of the time. Given my limitations that I can’t read fast and can’t remember much of what I read without an enormous amount of labor to memorize, how do I read my Bible daily? How does the Bible function for me in my life daily? That’s what I want to talk about for the rest of our minutes together. I have it boiled down to something like the following categories: Reading and my life, reading and God, reading and the devil, reading and witness, reading and crisis, and reading and family. I have a little story to go with each of those regarding how reading relates to those things in my life.

Reading and My Life

The gist of it is this: I read my Bible every morning and pray for about an hour. I’ve done this as long as I can remember, and I say, brothers, it is my life. So I’m going to start with my life. When I say reading and life, this is what I mean. Here’s 1 Peter 1:23:

Since you have been born again, not of perishable seed but of imperishable, through the living and abiding word of God; for “All flesh is like grass and all its glory like the flower of grass. The grass withers, and the flower falls, but the word of the Lord remains forever.” And this word is the good news that was preached to you.

Understand that. The statement “you have been born again” means you have been made alive from spiritual death by the living and abiding word of God. If any of you men are alive in Christ, you owe it to the word of God. That was 1 Peter, now here’s what James does with a similar thought. First he says:

Of his own will he brought us forth by the word of truth. . . . (James 1:18)

That means you were born again, brought to spiritual life, and made a believer by the word of truth. Then he continues:

Therefore put away all filthiness and rampant wickedness and receive with meekness the implanted word, which is able to save your souls. (James 1:21)

What a strange phrase. He says, “receive the implanted word.” It’s already implanted in you. That’s what happened when you were born again; God planted his seed in you. His word has taken root in you. That’s why you’re a Christian. But now James says, “Receive it. That will be your life. Your life is given and your life is sustained by the power of the word at the beginning and the receiving of the word.” That’s been every morning for me for about 60 years, because I started when I was about 15. I have a Bible that my parents gave me when I was 15. I look at it and how it’s marked up in red. I have memories of lying in my single bed with the trolley cars on the wallpaper on the wall above me, reading my Bible late at night, desperate because I couldn’t speak.

That was a great gift to me by the way, that God shut me down socially and cut me off from all fast tracks, all party tracks, and all cool-guy tracks. I was just shut down into my little world of going hard after God when I was 15. So I’ve been reading my Bible every day since I was 15, and it has been my life.

That’s my first point — the Bible and life, or reading and life. It doesn’t matter whether you feel like it, though you want to feel like it. The idea is to enjoy it with all your heart, but you’re like farmers. Farmers cultivate the field because the crops won’t come. It doesn’t matter whether they’re weeping. You go forth weeping, sowing your seed, and you will come forth rejoicing. So weep on, reader; that’s not the criterion of whether you should read or not. Life comes through this word.

If you want to know how I do it, by the way, I use a Bible plan that’s called the Discipleship Journal Bible Reading Plan. It’s a plan where you read the whole Bible in a year with four chapters a day, roughly, and you’re in four different places of the Bible at the same time. You get five days off without reading at the end of every month. That’s the genius of the program because everybody gets behind and the reason people give up on reading the Bible in a year is because they’re behind by February and they feel like there’s no point to continuing. It helps if you start drifting. The devil is an expert at using drifters to do nothing. So what a wonderful thing this is. I’ve been using it for 30 years. It’s just gold. I can never find anything better.

Reading and God

Reading is not an end in itself; we want to know God and we want to trust Christ. We want to be filled and led by the Holy Spirit. The word is the key to all of those. So let me just say a word about God the Father, God the Son, and God the Spirit, and how reading relates. I just cannot overstate to you, men, what a precious thing it is to know with a few clear sentences, why you are alive and what you’re doing every morning and every night. In other words, why do you exist and why do you read your Bible?

God the Father

With regard to God the Father, it is for his glory:

So, whether you eat or drink, or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God. (1 Corinthians 10:31)

Now, wouldn’t that include reading your Bible? So I know the goal of my reading the Bible. I know it beyond a shadow of doubt. God is to be made to look glorious in my life because I read the Bible. That’s clear as daylight to me as I look at the whole range of Scripture. So every text I read, I know I’m reading it to the glory of God. I want God to look great because I’m reading this book. I want to know him as great, see him as great, savor him as great, and show him as great. That’s number one. I read the Bible for the glory of God the Father.

God the Son

What about the God the Son? I think of Romans 8:32, which is probably the most important verse in my theology:

He who did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all, how will he not also with him graciously give us all things?

The logic is that if God didn’t spare Christ, but handed him over to torture and shame for sinners like me, would he then withhold any omnipotent effort to give me everything I need for his purposes? No, the logic would break down if he did. Christ would have died in vain if he did. Therefore, every good thing that you get from the Bible is blood bought. And that’s how Jesus relates to every text you read. Second Corinthians 1:20 says:

All the promises of God find their Yes in him.

So if you have him, if you are in him, if his blood is covering your sins, every page of this book is yours. The whole promise, the whole inheritance, and everything good that you could possibly get out of this book that’s really there is yours because of Jesus and God not sparing his own Son. If he didn’t spare his own Son, will he not with him freely give you all things that are in this book for your good and for your eternal welfare? Yes, he will. So the goal of all of all things is the glory of God, and the foundation of all things is the blood of Jesus, the Son of God.

God the Spirit

Third, let’s speak about the Holy Spirit. We have texts like, “be led by the Spirit” (Galatians 5:18), or, “bear the fruit of the Spirit” (Galatians 5:22–23), or, “walk by the Spirit” (Galatians 5:16), or, “put to death the deeds of the body by the Spirit” (Romans 8:13). Everything we do is to be done in the power of the Holy Spirit, by relying on him. That’s true for the Bible.

The book you’ve got in your hand there, Reading the Bible Supernaturally, is my lifetime of effort to describe what’s that like — what is it like to read the Bible in reliance upon the Holy Spirit. There are 300 pages about that. And by the way, don’t feel intimidated, thinking, “Oh my goodness, he gave me this book. Now I have to read it.” You do not have to read it.

Here’s my suggestion. Most of you probably do not read 300-page books, but you read short things. A book like this doesn’t have to be read straight through. You can just flip through the table contents, and if you see a chapter that sticks out, just go there. It might help. So regarding God the Father, read to his glory. Regarding God the Son, every benefit that is promised in the Bible is yours on the basis of his blood. Regarding the Holy Spirit, he’s the one who illumines. He’s the one who opens the eyes of the heart. He’s the one who gives a spirit of wisdom and of revelation. Read in reliance upon his help.

Reading and the Devil

The devil is real brothers. I think the devil is on a leash, and God holds the leash. The devil may be the immediate cause of all kinds of horrors in the world, but God holding the leash could have jerked it at any time. Therefore, behind everything is God with his infinitely wise purposes.

When I think of the devil today, I think of the way we treat each other on the internet. I think of the kind of tensions that are seething in the church right now between maskers and non-maskers and between Trumpers and non-Trumpers. The kind of stuff that we’re feeling in our hearts towards each other is demonic. It really is demonic. And therefore, I hate the devil and I want the devil to be defeated. I want you men to be good warriors against the devil. I want to read a verse to you and then tell you a story. This is 1 John 2:14. It says:

I write to you, fathers, because you know him who is from the beginning. I write to you, young men, because you are strong, and the word of God abides in you, and you have overcome the evil one.

“There’s a connection between the word of God abiding in you and you overcoming the evil one.”

There’s a connection between the word of God abiding in you and you overcoming the evil one. Jesus was perfect, and when he was tempted by the devil, what did he do? He quoted the Bible, of all things. He’s the one who wrote the Bible; he didn’t need to quote the Bible. All he needed to do was say what he said later — “Get out of here. Go to the pigs. Go to hell. You’re done. I’m God, and you don’t own anything. You don’t rule anything. I’m Jesus, the Son of God.” Instead of that, he quoted Scripture and dispensed the devil in that way. You can do that too, and that’s what they were doing in 1 John 2:14.

The Sword of the Spirit

My first year here in Minneapolis was 1980, and I was living over at 1604 Elliot with Tom Stellar. He was my associate for 33 years. Tom just switched from being a pastor at Bethlehem to be a missionary. That’s a glorious way to live. I love it. Tom and I were living together, and he was the associate here for students and I was a brand new pastor in 1980. We got a call from some college students at Bethel at about 10:00 p.m. at night, saying, “There’s a woman in this apartment that’s demon-possessed, and we want you to come and cast a demon out.” That’s in the Bible; it’s just not in my experience.

What would you guys do if somebody called you up and said, “There’s a demon-possessed woman in the apartment here. We’re not letting her out. You come. We’ll keep her here”? I called Tom, because you’re supposed to go out two by two. We got in the car and headed for that apartment and were praying, “God we’ve never ever been asked to do anything like this in our life. This is a frontline missionary story. This is not normal for pastors in Minneapolis.” We got there and went in, and then there was this girl named Midge, which I came to find out later, and she looked like a maniac. She had a pen knife, one of these little things that have a short blade, and she was going around pointing it at people, but she didn’t stick anybody. I kept my winter coat on thinking, “Okay, it won’t go all the way in if I keep my coat on.”

Now, what would you do in that situation? You quote the Bible. You start telling Bible stories. You recite Romans eight. You call up anything God gives you. You need Christ and you need the Holy Spirit at that moment, and you say, “God, help me. I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what to say. I know what I’m saying right now that the word of God gave Jesus power over the devil. So may you grant us your word now to speak in a prophetic way that would deliver her, because they say she’s even possessed. I don’t know. Maybe that’s the way she always is. She just looks horrible. She sounds horrible.” So that’s what we did.

She collapsed on the floor and the students, there were about six of them, men and women, began to sing over her choruses of hallelujah, and then — I would call this prophetic — they put words besides hallelujah too, like, “Jesus is powerful.” I forget what words they used, but just words that came to mind about Jesus, they sang over her. We sang over her. She went absolutely berserk, screamed at the top of her lungs for Satan not to leave her, and then, bang, just went as unconscious as she could be as far as I could tell. And I thought, “Oh my goodness, she’s dead or something.” I didn’t know what was going on. We stopped and waited, and she came around and, brothers, her face was totally different. When she opened her mouth, it was a different voice. And I said, “Midge…” and I handed her my Bible, which she had knocked out of my hand two or three times before, and I said, “I want you to read Romans 8 to us.” And she did.

She was in church the next Sunday on the second row, which scared me to death. I thought she was going to stand up and do something horrible in church. I remember visiting her in the hospital because she broke her leg playing soccer, and she told me horrible stories while I was visiting in the hospital about Satanic worship she was involved in when she lived in Arizona. Brothers, I don’t know what your challenge might be. Sometimes the devil is subtle and sometimes the devil is blatant. Right now you’re all dealing with the subtleties of Satan. That’s what he specializes in within the Western world. He thinks all of us scientific people don’t believe he exists, so he’ll keep that cover and not show his hand too much with exorcism or demonic possession like he does in so many other places.

But it’s here, and witchcraft is here, and all kinds of demonic involvement are here in the Twin Cities, and you guys are going to hit it. It will be there either in subtle ways or in manifest ways. I just tell you, the word of God is powerful. It is powerful. You do not have to be an expert at this, but you do need to be in the word. You do not want to walk out without your sword any morning.

Reading and Witness

On November 5th, Noël had a car wreck. I loved our yellow Toyota; everybody loves our yellow Toyota. People would say, “There comes the pastor in his yellow Toyota,” and she totaled it. Now, it wasn’t her fault at all. The other guy ran the red light, and she’s fine. State Farm gave us $6,000 for that Toyota. We had to have another car because we only have one car. We’ve always only had one car because we live so close. I even walked over this morning.

David Livingston said to me, “Go to Oleg down in Farmington. He rebuilds wrecked cars. Jason Meyer is driving one of his cars, Chuck Steddom is driving one of his cars, and I’m driving one of his cars. So go get a car from Oleg.” So I called Oleg and said, “Hey, Pastor John here.” He thought I was joking and said, “Yeah right, blah, blah, blah.” Then he said, “You mean the Pastor John?” And I said, “Yes, yes, Oleg. Come on. I need a car. I really drive cars. I don’t fly.”

So we drove down there, and what does Oleg do? He was a half an hour late. I said, “We’ll meet you at 12:30 p.m.,” and he was a half an hour late. When he showed up, he said, “I had to go get Andy because Andy called me this morning right after you called and said he wanted to talk about Jesus. He doesn’t know Jesus, and I’ve tried to witness to him. I told him there’s a Jesus guy coming to buy a car, so I’m going to come get you and you’re going to talk to him.” So I was there to buy a car, and he introduced me to Andy Standal — I’m saying the name so you can pray for him — and he took us up to the lunchroom nook in his shop and sat us down and walked away and said, “Tell him about Jesus, Pastor John.” Would you be ready for that? Would you be ready?

You will be if you read your Bible every morning and come away from your Bible with one sentence that you love. Now, that’s getting at my point about the fact that I don’t remember much. There is no way I can remember the four chapters that I read in the morning. I read them and sometimes a half an hour later, I can’t remember even where I was reading. I have to work to make sure something lodges in my mind, so I take a sentence and I chew on it, savor it, love it, and I trust it. Sometimes I write it on a piece of paper and stick it in my pocket if I think I’m not going to be able to remember it, and I eat it all day long. I eat that one sentence all day long, because I can remember a sentence. I can’t remember a chapter, let alone four.

So what did I do with Andy? I just took the lozenge out of my mouth, and the lozenge that morning was John 6:35, as I recall, and it says:

Jesus said to them, “I am the bread of life; whoever comes to me shall not hunger, and whoever believes in me shall never thirst.

I talked to Andy for 20 minutes about what it means to be hungry for Jesus and to drink the water of Jesus. God brought words to my mind. He just brought words. Andy was spellbound. I mean, he just sat there. He’s just a mechanic and he helps Oleg, so he probably doesn’t have a college education and is just a real ordinary, normal guy. Here I am with a PhD, and that doesn’t mean anything there. Only one thing does me any good there: Will the Holy Spirit show up, reach in my brain and pull out a verse or two, and help me to say, “This is beautiful, Andy. This is my life, Andy. This is free and you can have this living water.”

He didn’t make any decision there. In fact, I didn’t push for any decision. I hardly ever do that because I want them to know it comes down to them and God in reality, not me putting artificial words in their mouths. And I said, “Now, do you have a Bible?” And he said, “Oh, I’ve got an old King James.” I said, “Okay, you need a newer Bible. I’ll send you one.” So I sent him one. I paid 34 bucks on Amazon and mailed him an ESV Study Bible. He’s probably never seen one of those in his life. It’s huge, and he probably just felt totally intimidated by it. I also sent him a copy of Don’t Waste Your Life and a copy of my Seeing and Savoring Jesus Christ. Those are my two go-to books for unbelievers that I would give to people. So pray for Andy Standal.

My point here is that today, before this day is over right now, God’s going to give you something like that. He’s going to put right in your path, something wonderful. My first reaction to Oleg was, “I came to buy a car. What are you doing? You can talk to this guy about Jesus. Why are you treating me like some kind of priest?” And that after that self-defensive, fearful attitude got crucified, I was thrilled to be able to do that. It was a gift. I came to the end of the day saying, “Jesus, what a gift you gave me to be able to talk to that guy.”

Reading and Crisis

I just have one quick story for this. Does anybody here remember the name Roland Erickson? You’re all too young. Roland was the main man at Bethlehem when I came in 1980. He was just a statesman of a Christian, and loved Jesus with all of his heart.

In my first year here I was as green as you could be. I had never done a funeral. I had never visited the hospital. I was so unbelievably green at age 34. I had just done academia for all those years, and I got a phone call that Roland’s wife had a heart attack. She was at North Memorial Hospital, and I was thinking, “Oh boy, I’m going to get there before the ambulance does. I’m going to be a good pastor.” So I jumped in my car and headed to North Memorial. And when I got out there, she was in surgery and the family, probably a dozen of them, was in the waiting room. I walked in and Roland gave me a big hug, and do you know what he said? He said, “Give us a word, pastor. Give us a word.”

I couldn’t think of anything. This was before I had formed some of my crisp habits of getting a sentence every morning from the four chapters I read. I used to think just reading it was good enough to let it have its general impact. I think I said something to him like, “Let me pray for you,” and I prayed something and he was very gracious. I went home as a humiliated, defeated young pastor, not knowing what I needed to do. So I got down on my knees and said to the Lord, “That will never happen again. I’m sorry.” And then I memorized Psalm 46, which says:

God is our refuge and strength,      a very present help in trouble.Therefore we will not fear though the earth gives way,     though the mountains be moved into the heart of the sea,though its waters roar and foam,     though the mountains tremble at its swelling.

There is a river whose streams make glad the city of God,     the holy habitation of the Most High.God is in the midst of her; she shall not be moved;     God will help her when morning dawns.The nations rage, the kingdoms totter;     he utters his voice, the earth melts.The Lord of hosts is with us;     the God of Jacob is our fortress.

Come, behold the works of the Lord,     how he has brought desolations on the earth.He makes wars cease to the end of the earth;     he breaks the bow and shatters the spear;     he burns the chariots with fire.“Be still, and know that I am God.     I will be exalted among the nations,     I will be exalted in the earth!”The Lord of hosts is with us;     the God of Jacob is our fortress.

I just memorized it cold. That was in 1982, and I’ve never stopped using it. It’s always there. I will never be caught flat footed again like that in your cause, Lord Jesus, if somebody looks at me and says, “Give us a word,” in the midst of crisis. Psalm 46 is coming out if nothing’s there from the front burner in the morning. But let me tell you what this morning was, because you might want to know, “Do you still do that?” Absolutely I do. This morning was a little crowded just because I’m fitting in a three-mile run before this, I’m eating breakfast, I’m having devotions, and I’m trying to get ready to talk to you guys. So I read Daniel 1–2. That’s all I had time for this morning. Do you know what I’m taking away, sucking on as a lozenge all day long?

And God gave Daniel favor and compassion in the sight of the chief of the eunuchs . . . (Daniel 1:9)

Do you have any meetings today? Are you going to meet one of your kids today? Are you going to talk to your wife today? Are you going to talk to a friend today, a colleague, and you wonder if you will find favor? Will they look upon this conversation with some sympathy? God gives favor. God gives compassion to his people when they need it. They might kill you or they might look upon you with favor. Who controls that? It’s God. The king’s heart is like a river in the hand of the Lord; he turns it wherever he wills (Proverbs 21:1). So I’m taking this away from Daniel 1:9 this morning: God gives favor and God gives compassion. He controls the heart of the people I talk to. That’s gold right there in Daniel 1:9. So that’s what I’ve got in my head all day long today, and we’ll see what the Lord brings me later this afternoon.

Reading and Family

This is the last one and we’ll be done. This is Deuteronomy 6:6, which I’m sure is really familiar:

And these words that I command you today shall be on your heart.

“Fathers, immerse your families in the word. Just immerse them in the word.”

That’s why I take a sentence and try to press it in on my heart, asking, “What does this mean, Lord? Why is this sweet? Why would this be precious today? How could I commend this to anyone today?” If I talk to my neighbor, Steve, about my life today, while I’m raking leaves in the backyard and Steve says, “How are you doing?” and I say, “Steve, I read this morning an amazing thing in the prophet Daniel,” wouldn’t that be cool? And then I could talk to him about the goodness of God and giving people favor when they need it and see where it goes. Canned evangelism has never worked for me. I think you ought to always have a simple gospel message in your head — something like God, sin, Christ, and faith. That’s a great outline for all gospel messages — God, sin, Christ, faith — but way better is for you to just tell people what’s precious to you today. What’s precious to you today about Jesus. Deuteronomy 6:6–9 continues on to say:

And these words that I command you today shall be on your heart. You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise. You shall bind them as a sign on your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes. You shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates.

Now the point of that would be this: Fathers, immerse your families in the word. Just immerse them in the word. While you’re driving the car, be connected to the word; while you’re doing playtime in the evening, be connected to the word; while you’re dealing with a crisis in the kids’ lives, be connected to the word; at supper time, be connected to the word; while you watch a movie, be connected to the word. Just immerse your life in the word, and that’s only possible if you are reading the word.

Amen. Come, Lord Jesus! (Revelation 22:20)

The last prayer in the Bible is also one of its shortest — and yet it’s layered with heartache and anticipation, with distress and hope, with agony and joy. Can you imagine the apostle John, the disciple whom Jesus loved (John 13:23), savoring those three words — “Come, Lord Jesus!” — while he was abandoned among criminals on the island of Patmos? Does the promise that Christ will come again ever feel sweeter than when life on earth feels harsh and unyielding?

It’s almost as if John tries to draw the risen Jesus out of heaven, praying with all his might. The barren, rocky ground beneath his knees was more than a prison; it was a model of the curse, twenty square miles overrun with the consequences of sin. Suffering does this. It opens our eyes wider to all that sin has ruined, just how much pain and havoc it has wrought in the world. And, in a strange way, suffering often awakens us to the promise of his coming.

Weakness and illness make us long all the more for new bodies. Prolonged relational conflict makes us long all the more for peace. Wars and hurricanes and earthquakes make us long all the more for safety. Our remaining sin makes us long all the more for sinlessness. “Come, Lord Jesus!” is the cry of someone who really expects a better world to come — and soon. Suffering only intensifies that longing and anticipation.

Many Prayers in One

The prayer “Come, Lord Jesus!” is really many prayers in one. What will happen when Christ finally returns? The opening verses of Revelation 21 tell us just how many of our prayers will be answered on that day.

Come, Lord Jesus, and dry our tears. Followers of Jesus are not spared sorrow in this life. In fact, following him often means more tears. Jesus himself warned us it would be so: “In the world you will have tribulation” (John 16:33). But one day, “He will wipe away every tear from their eyes” (Revelation 21:4). In that world, we will not have tribulation, or sorrow, or distress, or persecution, or danger. When he returns, we’ll never have another reason to cry.

Come, Lord Jesus, and put an end to our pain. Some long for the end of heartache; others feel the consequences of sin in their bodies. Pain has followed them like a shadow. Revelation 21:4 continues, “. . . neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore.” Can you imagine someone who has battled chronic pain for decades waking up one morning and feeling no more pain? It will be like a man who has never seen anything clearly finally putting on his first pair of glasses — except the sufferer will feel that sensation in every muscle and nerve. The absence of pain will free his senses to enjoy the world like never before.

Come, Lord Jesus, and put death to death. Jesus came to dethrone death. Hebrews 2:14–15 says, “Since therefore the children share in flesh and blood, he himself likewise partook of the same things, that through death he might destroy the one who has the power of death, that is, the devil, and deliver all those who through fear of death were subject to lifelong slavery.” Every one reading this article was once enslaved to the fear of death. But death lost its sting when the Son of God died. And one day, death itself will die. When the Author of life comes, “death shall be no more” (Revelation 21:4).

Come, Lord Jesus, and rid us of sin. This burden may be more subtle in these verses, but it would not have been subtle in John’s imagination. He writes in verse 3, “Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man.” And he knew that God cannot dwell with sin. For God to come and dwell with us, he will have to first eradicate the sin that remains in us — and that’s exactly what he promises to do. The sin that hides in every shadow and behind every corner will be suddenly extinct. He will throw every cause of sin into his fiery furnace (Matthew 13:41). “When he appears we shall be like him, because we shall see him as he is” (1 John 3:2).

“In the world to come, we will have nothing to fear, nothing to mourn, nothing to endure, nothing to confess.”

Come, Lord Jesus, and make it all new. In other words, anything not included in the prayers above will be made right too. “Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth” (Revelation 21:1). Nothing here will go untouched. Whatever aspect of life on earth afflicts you most, it will be different. Whatever fears have plagued you, whatever trials have surprised you, whatever clouds have followed you, they all will be transformed — in the twinkling of an eye — and stripped of their threats. In the world to come, we will have nothing to fear, nothing to mourn, nothing to endure, nothing to confess. Can you imagine?

More than a prayer for relief, or safety, or healing, or even sinlessness, though, “Come, Lord Jesus!” is a prayer for him.

His Presence Is Paradise

The burning heart of John’s three-word plea is not for what Jesus does, but for who he is. This is clear throughout the book of Revelation. The world to come is a world to want because Jesus lives there. John’s prayer, after all — “Come, Lord Jesus!” — is a response to Jesus promising three times in the previous verses, “Behold, I am coming soon. . . . Behold, I am coming soon. . . . Surely I am coming soon” (Revelation 22:7, 12, 20).

“The world to come is a world to want because Jesus lives there.”

While the apostle wasted away in prison, he could see the Bridegroom on the horizon (Revelation 1:12–16). His hair white, like snow. His eyes filled with fire. His feet, like burnished bronze. His face, like the sun shining in full strength. The man he had walked with, talked with, laughed with, and surely cried with, now fully glorified and ready to receive and rescue his bride, the church. The Treasure was no longer hidden in a field, but riding on the clouds.

Even the vision of the new heavens and new earth in Revelation 21 makes God himself the greatest prize of the world to come: “Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God” (Revelation 21:3). Yes, we want a world without grief, without pain, without fear, without death. But better to have a world like ours with God, than to have any other world without him. His presence defines paradise.

Randy Alcorn writes,

Nothing is more often misdiagnosed than our homesickness for Heaven. We think that what we want is sex, drugs, alcohol, a new job, a raise, a doctorate, a spouse, a large-screen television, a new car, a cabin in the woods, a condo in Hawaii. What we really want is the person we were made for, Jesus, and the place we were made for, Heaven. Nothing less can satisfy us. . . . We may imagine we want a thousand different things, but God is the one we really long for. His presence brings satisfaction; his absence brings thirst and longing. Our longing for Heaven is a longing for God. (Heaven, 166, 171)

A Second Coming

While the apostle’s brief prayer may be the most memorable invitation in Revelation 22, it is not the only one. The Bible doesn’t end only with a desperate plea for Christ to return, but also with a warm invitation to the weary, the suffering, the spiritually thirsty.

The Spirit and the Bride say, “Come.” And let the one who hears say, “Come.” And let the one who is thirsty come; let the one who desires take the water of life without price. (Revelation 22:17)

As John anticipates Christ’s returning, gathering his people and wiping out all his enemies, his last thoughts are not of judgment, but of mercy. He ends not with smoke rising out of torment, but with a free and overflowing fountain held out to all who would come. His words ring with an old and glorious invitation, Isaiah 55:1–2:

Come, everyone who thirsts, come to the waters; and he who has no money, come, buy and eat! Come, buy wine and milk without money and without price. Why do you spend your money for that which is not bread, and your labor for that which does not satisfy? Listen diligently to me, and eat what is good, and delight yourselves in rich food.

When Jesus comes, we will eat and drink and enjoy without end. Hunger and thirst will become distant memories. If sorrows have robbed you of sleep, if pain has made even normal days hard, if death has taken ones you love, if life has sometimes seemed stacked against you, if you can’t shake a restless ache for more, then come and eat with him. This world may be the only world you’ve known, but a better world is coming — and there’s still room at the table.

In 1969, as Apollo 11 orbited the moon, the voice of Neil Armstrong sounded back to earth with some of the most familiar words in the Bible: “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.” As Genesis 1:1 stands, it is a simple yet profound statement of fact. Yet it is also more than that. It is factual, yes, but it is also liturgical. Genesis 1:1 is the first call to worship. In the opening line of Scripture, God calls us to worship him for who he is and what he has done in creation.

Theology Behind the Liturgy

Genesis 1:1 is liturgical because it is first theological. By good and necessary consequence, we may reasonably deduce twelve attributes of God from this one verse.

1. God Is One

In the beginning, there was God and only God. This is one of the Bible’s great claims: there is one God, and besides him there is no other (Isaiah 45:5). Connected to this truth is God’s oneness, otherwise known as his simplicity. Because God is Creator, not created, he is a simple being, not a composite being. God is one; he has no parts. Indeed, in the Old Testament, the oneness of God is at the heart of Israel’s worship: “Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one” (Deuteronomy 6:4).

2. God Is Spirit

Before the creation of the heavens and the earth, there was nothing but God. Space, time, matter, and energy were all created by him, which means that he himself does not consist in space, time, matter, or energy. As Creator, God is distinct in his essence from the world he has created. In the New Testament, Jesus states explicitly what is said here implicitly: “God is spirit” (John 4:24).

3. God Is Eternal

For God to be present in the beginning, he had to exist before the beginning of time, which means that God is outside of time. His existence is eternal. He was there in the beginning because he had no beginning, and he will be there in the end because he also has no end. God was and is and is to come — he is eternal. “Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever you had formed the earth and the world, from everlasting to everlasting you are God” (Psalm 90:2).

4. God Is Infinite

The phrase “the heavens and the earth” is a merism: two polar opposites that also include everything in between. In other words, “In the beginning, God made everything.” By everything, however, we should think not simply of the physical universe. The heavens and the earth include the invisible as well as the visible, realms unseen and seen. Given their created nature, these realms are finite, but for God to create finite realms, he himself must be infinite. The Bible conveys this truth by affirming his immensity or omnipresence (Isaiah 6:3; Jeremiah 23:23–24), but also by stating how unfathomable his majesty is: “Great is the Lord, and greatly to be praised, and his greatness is unsearchable” (Psalm 145:3).

5. God Is Unchangeable

Before God created everything, he simply was. This means that there was nothing external to God that could change him — his being was the same throughout eternity past. And after he created everything, since the universe was (and is) dependent upon him, it could not (and cannot) change him. God has remained the same in eternity past, and he will remain the same in eternity future. The God who was and is and is to come is the same God. In short, he is unchangeable. “Every good and 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).

6. God Is Self-Existent

God existed before the world, and therefore he was not dependent upon what he created. In his essence, God is independent; he relies on no one and nothing for his existence. Theologians call this God’s aseity, from the Latin a se, meaning that God is “from himself.” That is, God derives his existence from himself and not from anything else. God is pure being; indeed, his name is Being. When Moses asks God for his name, he answers, “I am who I am” (Exodus 3:13–14).

7. God Is Life

For God to create life in heaven and on earth — angels, vegetation, fish, birds, reptiles, animals, and mankind — he had to have life in himself. God had to be the living God to create living beings. The Bible affirms that God is life itself (1 John 5:20), has life in himself (John 5:26), is the fountain of life (Psalm 36:9), and is the one in whom we live and move and have our being (Acts 17:28). Indeed, God says of himself, “As I live forever . . .” (Deuteronomy 32:40).

8. God Is Immortal

Since God lived by himself in an undisturbed life before creation, there was nothing that could take his life. And since what he created is dependent upon him for life, there is still nothing that can take his life. God has life in himself, which means that nothing in heaven or on earth can take it from him. God cannot die. He is immortal. As Paul says to Timothy, “[God] alone has immortality” (1 Timothy 6:16).

9. God Is Creator

The verb create is a rather unique verb in the Old Testament. It occurs about forty times and only ever has God as its subject. In the Bible, only God creates, which is just another way of saying that only God is the Creator. “All the gods of the peoples are worthless idols, but the Lord made the heavens” (Psalm 96:5).

10. God Is Omnipotent

If, in the beginning, God the Creator made everything from nothing, then he must be all-powerful. He must be omnipotent — able to execute his will as he pleases. As Paul affirms to the Ephesian church, God “is able to do far more abundantly than all that we ask or think.” Therefore, “to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, forever and ever” (Ephesians 3:20–21).

11. God Is Omniscient

If, in the beginning, God the Creator made everything from nothing, then he must be all-wise. He must be omniscient — able to execute his will without instruction or input from anyone. As Jeremiah the prophet says, God is the one “who made the earth by his power, who established the world by his wisdom, and by his understanding stretched out the heavens” (Jeremiah 10:12).

12. God Is Sovereign

If God is the all-powerful, all-wise Creator of everything, then after he made the heavens and the earth, he must have remained in control of them. The heavens and the earth cannot escape the sovereignty of God because they were created by God and remain dependent on God. Thus, whatever unfolds in the history of the heavens and the earth must remain under God’s sovereign control. “I know that you can do all things, and that no purpose of yours can be thwarted” (Job 42:2).

Spirit and Word

We can sum up these twelve great truths about God from Genesis 1:1 in a single sentence:

God is one spirit, eternal, infinite, unchangeable, self-existent, living, and immortal in his being, the omnipotent, omniscient Creator and Sovereign of all things in heaven and on earth, of all things visible and invisible.

“God has remained the same in eternity past, and he will remain the same in eternity future.”

This is the God we meet in the first verse of the Bible. And as such, we are called to worship him. Worship is what the living creatures in heaven are doing right now as they sing, “Worthy are you, our Lord and God, to receive glory and honor and power, for you created all things, and by your will they existed and were created” (Revelation 4:11). If that is the response of the creatures in heaven as they contemplate who God is and what he has done in creation, then what ought to be our response as his creatures on earth?

However, Christian worship is more than just an unqualified worship of God as the Creator of all. The verses that follow Genesis 1:1 can help us here. After the initial act of creation, the Spirit of God is said to be present (Genesis 1:2), hovering over the waters. And then God speaks by his word to form and fill his creation (Genesis 1:3–2:3). So we might accurately summarize God’s work in creation like this: In the beginning, God created everything from nothing by the agents of his word and Spirit.

The apostle John expands on this truth as he commences his Gospel, stating that it was indeed Christ, the eternal Word, who was present in the beginning with God, working as his agent in creation (John 1:1–5). And the apostle Paul writes of Christ in similar terms:

He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation. For by him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities — all things were created through him and for him. And he is before all things, and in him all things hold together. (Colossians 1:15–17)

“In the beginning, there was God and only God.”

Thus, what we have in Genesis 1:1–3 is a call to worship God for who he is and what he has done in creation — through Christ and for Christ.

Glory Be

Our worship of God, of course, involves so much more. But the first few verses of the Bible provide us with the beginning and foundation of Christian worship. So, the next time you hear the opening words of Genesis, hear them as God’s call to come and worship him through his Son and Spirit. It’s what the heavenly creatures have been doing since the beginning of creation:

Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit.As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end. Amen.

http://rss.desiringgod.org/link/10732/15177550/can-slaves-of-christ-have-another-master

Audio Transcript

We’re in our tenth year on the podcast, coming up on 1,800 episodes in the archive. And over the course of that decade, we’ve covered a lot of different topics. And that includes the topic of birth control, or, better, conception control. It’s arisen three times on the podcast, in three episodes 230, 552, and 1347. The most recent being three years ago. But today we have a follow-up question, built off something you said on the podcast seven years ago, Pastor John. Here it is, from an anonymous wife and mother.

“Hello Pastor John, and thank you for taking my question. Here’s the context. My husband and I have two wonderful boys. I believe our family is complete. He does, too. We have each independently decided that two children is enough. I’ve asked my husband to consider a vasectomy. He’s interested, and feels that he is done having children himself, so the potential for children in a re-marriage, if death were to end our present marriage, seems to not necessarily factor in here, a very important argument you made in a previous episode. But ultimately my husband is undecided because he’s not sure if God permits such an action. In your view of the Bible, is it okay for a monogamous husband and father of two, who is done having children with me, or any future wife, to get a vasectomy?”

The older I get, the more skeptical I become of the freedom I think I have from being formed by my own culture. Let me put it in another way. The older I get, the more suspicious I become that I am more a child of my historical and cultural circumstances than I once thought I was.

Now, one of the reasons I say this is to help people like this couple not take offense when I wave a yellow flag (not a red flag, but a yellow flag, a big yellow flag) warning us all that when it comes to children and sex and family and personal freedom and comforts, we are almost certainly deeply infected by a contemporary culture that for decades, through television, movies, videos, advertising, books, articles, and podcasts, has shaped our mindset about marriage and children and sex and freedom of the unencumbered self.

None of us comes to the Bible with a blank slate in these matters. We are profoundly shaped by the cultural air we breathe. And that culture (and it’s been this way for a long time) does not rejoice at the blessing of children. It does not gladly embrace the enormous cost and effort of raising children in the nurture and admonition of the Lord. It does not see marriage as forming a beautiful, meaningful, lifelong, faith-building, character-forming matrix for growing the next generation.

“Our culture has virtually stripped the pleasures of sex from the place God appointed for them.”

It doesn’t put any value on the pain that inevitably comes with deep covenant commitments to spouses and children, but instead justifies every possible means of minimizing our own personal frustration and pleasure and maximizing personal freedom, whether through postponing marriage, or not having children, or avoiding any kind of commitment, or divorcing in order to get out of an uncomfortable marriage, or neglect of children, sticking them in some kind of institution while we go about our careers.

Our culture has virtually stripped the pleasures of sex from the place God appointed for them, namely woven into the covenant commitments of lifelong marriage. These and dozens of other ways, we are all infected by the spirit of our times. All of that to say, I speak with the kind of trembling that I may be more a child of my times than I wish. I try to be under the Scriptures. I want to be shaped by the Scripture. I want to be counter-cultural in a biblical way. I want to be radical for Jesus, but I know how inevitable it is that I speak from a particular cultural time, place, not to mention my own sinfulness and intellectual limits.

Are Marriage and Children Normative?

So, with that confession, let me just rehearse briefly what I have said more extensively elsewhere. I believe marriage is normative for Christians, normative. It’s normative to be married because Genesis 2:18 says it’s not good for man to be alone.

And because we are so wonderfully designed, I think physically and psychologically, by God to form covenant commitments, consummated in sexual union with the glorious wonder of making and raising babies. Nevertheless, though I believe that’s normative, I can see in the life of Jesus and in the life of the apostle Paul and their teachings, that marriage is not an absolute requirement of Christians, but that for kingdom purposes, for God-centered, Christ-exalting, mission-advancing, church-building, soul-saving, sanctifying purposes, one might choose a life of singleness.

“Children are a great blessing. They are one of the purposes and miracles of sexual union.”

By analogy, I believe having children in marriage is normative. Children are a great blessing. They are one of the purposes and miracles of sexual union. To turn away from procreation in marriage for the sake of some worldly gain rather than being motivated by God-centered, Christ-exalting, kingdom advancement is a sin.

Nevertheless, on the analogy of marriage, just as for kingdom reasons singleness may be chosen, it is possible for Christ’s sake and for holy purposes that limiting the number of children would be chosen also. The principle in both cases, getting married and having children is one of self-denying, Christ-exalting, mission-advancing motivation — what’s your motivation? — rather than simply following the course of the age in order to maximize worldly freedoms and worldly comforts.

Now that puts a huge burden on all of us to honestly know our own hearts, doesn’t it? Search me oh God and know my thoughts and see if there be any wicked way in me governing these choices. This must be our cry because we are also prone to come up with a theology and an ethics that justify our desires. So, I think you can see in these observations that I don’t regard all birth control, or better conception control, as sinful.

Using abortifacients that kill a conceived child would be sin. But choosing not to conceive may not be a sin, which means that the methods and the timing of such choices will become a matter of biblically and medically-informed wisdom.

Three Questions About the Question

So what would my advice be that might contribute to the wisdom of this couple besides what I’ve tried to say?

Let me pick one sentence from what she wrote. She says, “I’ve asked my husband to consider a vasectomy. He’s interested and feels that he is done having children. So the potential for children in a remarriage, if death were to end our present marriage seems not necessarily to factor in here.” Three questions about that sentence. First, the word feels, he feels that he is done having children.

Feelings are notoriously temporary. And even if she had said, “He thinks that he is done,” I would say the same thing. We just don’t know in such circumstances what may happen in our lives that would make an irreversible sterilization tragic.

Second question. The word “seems.” She says the potential for children in a remarriage if death were to end our present marriage “seems not to necessarily factor in here.” Seems is a pretty weak word. Death is a real possibility in a marriage, and in that case, remarriage would be both likely and I think good. How does he know what his heart would say in that new marriage? How does he know? “It seems that it may not be a factor.” Well, that’s pretty flimsy.

Third, nothing is said about the wife in that possible new marriage. Seems like he would be only taking into account his own preferences about whether he would want children in that new marriage. What about hers? And be careful about assuming that you’re too old to become a parent. Noel and I adopted when I was 50. What if a 50-year-old man marries a 35-year-old single woman who has always dreamed of giving birth to her own child?

Plead with God for Guidance

So my fallible contribution to your effort to act biblically — and I admire you for it — and to act wisely is to simply say one, search your hearts so that your decision to have no more children is a Christ-honoring decision, a mission-advancing decision.

Second, be very slow to implement that decision with a kind of sterilization that would cut off godly future possibilities which you cannot presently see.

And maybe just one other word of counsel. Sit down together and open your Bible and read the first 12 verses of Psalm 25. I say that because I don’t know any other passage of Scripture that is better for putting into word words our cry for guidance and wisdom from God.

A few months back, considering the heightened level of contention among some American Christians in recent years, I stumbled upon this golden nugget of pastoral wisdom from Richard Sibbes, the English Puritan pastor from four hundred years ago:

It were a good strife amongst Christians, one to labor to give no offense, and the other to labor to take none. The best men are severe to themselves, tender over others. (The Bruised Reed, 47)

Sibbes was exhorting his Christian brothers and sisters during a terribly contentious historical moment, when professing Christians in England were saying and doing appalling things to one another. And it seems to me that we would be wise to heed Sibbes’s counsel, and do our part to contribute to the collective public reputation Jesus desires for us: “By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another” (John 13:35).

We all know from Scripture, however, that there are times when faithful love requires us to speak hard, even sharp, wounding words (Proverbs 27:6). And we all know that those on the receiving end of our hard, wounding words may, and often do, find them offensive. So, if we embrace Sibbes’s biblical principle that, when possible, we all, for the sake of love, should labor to give and take no offense, what principle should guide us for the (hopefully) rare exceptions when we must, for the sake of love, risk offending someone with our words?

“There are times when faithful love requires us to speak hard, even sharp, wounding words to someone.”

Well, not surprisingly, Sibbes has something very helpful to say about this as well. But first, I need to provide the biblical context from which Sibbes draws his principle.

Jesus on the Offensive

It was during the last week of Jesus’s earthly life, just days before his crucifixion. There had been numerous tense verbal exchanges between Jesus and the religious leaders, as the scribes, Pharisees, and Sadducees all tried to get Jesus to incriminate himself with his words — and all failed. So, they gave up that strategy (Matthew 22:46).

And then Jesus laid into them, delivering seven prophetic, scathing “woes” to the scribes and Pharisees, requiring 36 of 39 verses in Matthew 23 to record. Here are a few choice excerpts:

Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you shut the kingdom of heaven in people’s faces. For you neither enter yourselves nor allow those who would enter to go in. (Matthew 23:13)

Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you travel across sea and land to make a single proselyte, and when he becomes a proselyte, you make him twice as much a child of hell as yourselves. (Matthew 23:15)

You blind guides, straining out a gnat and swallowing a camel! (Matthew 23:24)

You are like whitewashed tombs, which outwardly appear beautiful, but within are full of dead people’s bones and all uncleanness. (Matthew 23:27)

You serpents, you brood of vipers, how are you to escape being sentenced to hell? (Matthew 23:33)

This is Jesus at his most offensive — at least we would have thought so, had we been scribes or Pharisees back then.

But this raises an important question: Just because most of the scribes and Pharisees would have taken offense at Jesus’s words, does that mean he was truly being offensive? The distinction may seem small, but answering the question illuminates when our own love requires hard words — and what our aim in those hard words should be.

To answer, we need to briefly look at how the New Testament defines an offense. (Then I promise I’ll share that other gold nugget from Sibbes.)

No Offense?

Let’s start by tackling one of the most straightforward statements on offense in the New Testament: “Give no offense to Jews or to Greeks or to the church of God” (1 Corinthians 10:32). Just on the face of this phrase, it looks like Jesus broke a Spirit-inspired command. But these few words don’t tell the whole story. We need to examine their context to understand what Paul specifically means when he says to “give no offense.”

He makes this statement after spending three chapters instructing the Corinthians to “take care” that they not exercise their Christian freedoms (like eating meat that had been sacrificed to idols) in a way that “somehow become[s] a stumbling block to the weak,” thereby destroying another’s faith (1 Corinthians 8:9). And then, as examples of forgoing personal freedoms for the sake of love, Paul describes three ways he and Barnabas had set aside their apostolic “rights”:

They were careful not to offend others by what they ate or drank (1 Corinthians 9:4).
They refrained from getting married so as to maintain undivided devotion to the Lord (1 Corinthians 7:35; 9:5).
They made no demands on the Corinthian church to provide them financial and material ministry support, even though they had brought the gospel to the Corinthians at great cost to themselves (1 Corinthians 9:6–12).

And why did they deny themselves in these ways? Because, Paul says, “We endure anything rather than put an obstacle in the way of the gospel of Christ” (1 Corinthians 9:12).

And right there we see what Paul means by an offense to Jews, Gentiles, and Christians: anything that is an obstacle to faith in Jesus. At one place, he even says, “If food makes my brother stumble, I will never eat meat, lest I make my brother stumble” (1 Corinthians 8:13). The Greek word Paul uses here for stumble (skandalizō) is the same word Jesus uses when he warns us not to cause “little ones who believe in [him] to sin,” and to cut off our hand or foot or tear out our eye if it causes us to sin (Matthew 18:6–9).

These texts (and many more) capture what the New Testament considers a true offense: saying or doing anything that would prevent others from coming to faith in Christ or persevering in their faith.

Painful Application of a ‘Sweet Balm’

Now we can return to our question: Just because most of the scribes and Pharisees would have taken offense at Jesus’s words, does that mean he was truly being offensive — in the New Testament sense? Finally, it’s time to share that gold nugget from Richard Sibbes I promised:

We see that our Saviour multiplies woe upon woe when he has to deal with hard hearted hypocrites (Matthew 23:13), for hypocrites need stronger conviction than gross sinners, because their will is bad, and therefore usually their conversion is violent. A hard knot must have an answerable wedge, else, in a cruel pity, we betray their souls. A sharp reproof sometimes is a precious pearl and a sweet balm. (The Bruised Reed, 49)

I love Sibbes’s take on Jesus’s scathing rebuke of the scribes and Pharisees. He didn’t lose his temper with them and unleash his pent-up frustration with offensive language. He was taking the sharp wedge of a hard rebuke to the hard knots of their hearts.

If, like me, you’re an inexperienced woodsman, you may wonder what a wedge has to do with a knot. Sibbes was quoting an old proverb everyone probably knew back when felling trees was a normal part of life and a sharp wedge was needed to break through a hard timber knot.

“Jesus took the sharp wedge of his words to the knot of their unbelief. He applied a ‘sweet balm’ with painful reproof.”

The wedge wasn’t the real offense; the knots were the real offense. The scribes and Pharisees were putting obstacles in the way of the gospel (1 Corinthians 9:12), obstacles that were preventing both them and others from entering the kingdom of God (Matthew 23:13). It would have been a “cruel pity” for him to say nothing — or to say something soft. So Jesus took the sharp wedge of his words to the knot of their unbelief. Or to use another image from Sibbes, he applied a “sweet balm” with painful reproof. And we can see the heart behind this reproof in the tears of Jesus’s lament that appear in the last three verses of the chapter (Matthew 23:37–39).

Hard Kindness of Christian Love

If we embrace Sibbes’s biblical principle that, when possible, we all, for the sake of love, should labor to give and take no offense, what principle can we distill from Sibbes’s counsel above that can guide us when we encounter the (hopefully) rare exceptions when we must, for the sake of love, risk offending someone with some hard words?

Give no offense to anyone (1 Corinthians 10:32), unless it would be a greater kindness (1 Corinthians 13:4) to bring a hard word and an act of cruelty to withhold it.

This is why Nathan risked offending King David (2 Samuel 12); it’s why Paul risked offending Peter (Galatians 2:11–14); it’s why Jesus risked offending the scribes and Pharisees; and it’s why we are sometimes called to risk offending someone with a painful rebuke. In these cases, if our motive is love and our goal is to remove a stumbling block from someone’s path of faith, our hard words are not truly offensive. They are acts of love, the “faithful . . . wounds of a friend” (Proverbs 27:6). If our hearers find them to be “a rock of offense” (1 Peter 2:8), it may be due to the hard knots of unbelief in their hearts, rather than the sharp wedge of our words.

If you were told you had five years to live, would you live more in those five years than in the decades you might have had left?

By “live” I cannot mean “lifespan,” or the question isn’t worth asking. I mean to live wide awake, live purposefully, live undistracted by empty pleasures. Could you imagine the quality of those five years becoming preferable? Could five years more alive to God, his world, and the faces around us outshine decades of business and bluster with little fullness?

Oh, to sail under the stars awake to life, feeling the breeze upon your face and hearing the music of waves crashing. How different from the dreary drift from one meal to the next, one episode to the next, one year to the next.

Do you feel the preciousness of time? Are you truly living? A hand hold with a spouse or a wait in line at the store can take on new significance when we consider it occurs within this shooting star we call “life.”

Good I Could Have Done

I perplex myself, then, to consider how many golden moments I let pass, wasted. Hours upon hours, gone without notice, lost without grief. So many silver coins squandered; exchanged for pebbles and bubbles.

While not leaving the good news behind — namely that this neglect will not have the last word, but his grace will — the healthy sting is still felt. And if we let it: still instructive. When I awake to the value of time, the sheer possibility held in any given span, I sigh at how many moments have fallen irretrievably between the cracks — and this sends me to God for more mercy and help to better steward the time I have left.

This is especially true when I consider time lost while at work — how much good that might have outlasted me has been forfeit by my laziness and inattention?

What hid this realization from me for so long is that I never thought of myself as slothful. I get things done. At times, I’ve worked very hard. No one would have looked at me and said I sleep too much, or that I neglected my studies, or that I put off difficult things indefinitely. But looking back, I have realized in my work life that I have lived too often as a sophisticated sloth. Here are a few characteristics.

1. Slow to Begin

The traditional sluggard does not begin tasks at all. We hear his voice crying out from his bed, “There is a lion outside! I shall be killed in the streets!” (Proverbs 22:13; 26:13). He would go to the work like the rest of us, he assures us, but for those killer cats.

He says they prevent him from traveling to work,

There is a lion stalking the square.Travel to work? — I couldn’t dare.I shall stay in and feast— Oh that irksome beast —This confinement is too much to bare!

He says they prevent him from going to church,

There is a lion purring the pews.Upon good men’s bones it chews.Surely none could find faultIn avoiding assault;I’ll wait till next week to hear the good news!

And while I do not make such foolish excuses, as a sophisticated sloth, I start my tasks, eventually. The lions roaring in the street do not indefinitely detain, but they do delay me. When I gaze ahead and see duties sloping uphill, I decide I need some stretching before the activity — maybe some social media, or checking email, or a quick snack. How many hours have I wasted “getting in the mood” to start something difficult?

2. Quick to Break

We are told the traditional sluggard “buries his hand in the dish and will not even bring it back to his mouth” (Proverbs 19:24). This image is his profile picture.

The sluggard started his task. His hand, as a crane maneuvering a construction site, lifts, steers sideways, and drops on the full bowl. Upon impact, some Cheese Puffs jump overboard. As we continue to watch him, anticipating the triumphant return, we wait, and we wait — and we wait. Gravity assisted him on the way down, but has now betrayed him. The way up proves too much for him.

He is again made to seem ridiculous. As activity swirls about him, he sits immobilized, his hand in a dish. His eyes are open, but in such a way as to be shut. His fingers plop into the dish and remain, reluctant to return at the half-hearted bidding of their master. He is alive, but not alive. A man, but not a man. John Foster gives him a sobering epitaph, “Here lies a person who has lost nothing by being buried; for he is just as good a man underground as he was above” (An Essay on the Improvement of Time, 189).

“The sloth is alive, but not alive. A man, but not a man.”

By God’s grace, I am not such a creature. My hand does return, just not right away. I have been quick to indulge breaks as a reward for doing what was only my duty to begin with. That’s good enough for now, I think, don’t want to overdo it. A harder working man could have completed the same task without interruptions in a fraction of the time. A harder working man might have accomplished another life’s work by simply redeeming the intervals.

3. Open to Interruptions

I have contributed my attention to the notable businesses that profit on the distracted. Every text message and Youtube video seems so much more interesting when I am in the middle of my labor. The path of each workday has offered me multiple rest stops.

The traditional sloth also knows the power of a minor detour from the path.

A little sleep, a little slumber,     a little folding of the hands to rest,and poverty will come upon you like a robber,     and want like an armed man. (Proverbs 24:33–34)

The thief of time today is a tiny man. He specializes in little. Just a little sleep, a little slumber — just a little surfing the Internet, a little text-message conversation, a little checking of Facebook or ESPN.

He sells distractions during the workday, and though he will take large checks if he must, he prefers coins and small bills — ten minutes, fifteen minutes, twenty minutes — you know, harmless folding-of-the-hands kind of costs.

I, as the sophisticated sloth, have started and stopped, started and stopped, as a teenager learning to drive a stick shift for the first time. And while the classic sloth may not wake until he is robbed of everything, I return home every day just missing a few dollars here and there. The total sum I cannot estimate.

4. Puts Off Harder Work

This is one the cleverest tricks of the sophisticated sloth: He works — to avoid doing harder work. He is the kid who sees dad coming and rushes to take out the trash so his brother is left to shovel instead. He chooses to work when he must — to spare himself more difficult work later.

The end result looks like the typical sloth:

I passed by the field of a sluggard,     by the vineyard of a man lacking sense,and behold, it was all overgrown with thorns;     the ground was covered with nettles,     and its stone wall was broken down. (Proverbs 24:30–31)

But the text doesn’t tell us about the sophisticated sloth inside his house, pointing to his mostly clean dishes, washed clothes, and bed with a comforter folded over bundled sheets. Too often, I have done the easier work indoors and left the harder work unattempted.

Missing Servant

Time is far too precious to let it so subtly slip away. Those pressed up against the grave more rightly estimate its value; blessed are we if we can waken before we near closer to that slumber. Jesus seeks to help us awake to the stewardship of our lives in the parable of the talents.

To the hardworking servant who trusts his Master, believes him, loves him, and knows the privilege of his service and thus invests and turns his five talents into five more, his master says to him,

Well done, good and faithful servant. You have been faithful over a little; I will set you over much. Enter into the joy of your master. (Matthew 25:21)

The slothful servant, afraid of his Master and otherwise suspicious of his motives, buries his talent in the ground. He doesn’t lose it; but doesn’t improve it either. To this man, the Master says,

You wicked and slothful servant! . . . You ought to have invested my money with the bankers, and at my coming I should have received what was my own with interest. . . . [C]ast the worthless servant into the outer darkness. (Matthew 25:26–27, 30)

“Time is precious. Now is the time to live and work and love.”

I, however, have been describing the man who did not make the parable. He is the servant to whom the Master gives five talents, and yet brings back just two more instead of the full five. He could have brought more — but he wasted so much time on lesser things.

Whether we have five years left or fifty, life is a most terrible thing to waste. To other such servants, consider with me what glory lies ahead for the faithful Christian servant. “Well done, my good and faithful servant” — the eternal commendation. “I will set you over much” — the everlasting stewardship. “Enter into the joy of your Master” — the undying bliss of life with our God.

Might this not help us toward faithful living in total reliance upon our Savior?