If Jesus were here in the flesh, instead of me, he could step down off this platform, and walk among you, and put his hand on your shoulder, and look you in the eye, and say, “You, follow me, and I will make you a missionary. You, follow me, and I will make you a missionary. You, follow me, and I will make you a missionary.” He could be that specific.

This is what he did with the twelve apostles when he was here in the flesh. There were many faithful followers of Jesus in his lifetime who were not apostles. They were devoted lovers of Jesus. They were ready and willing to leave everything if he asked them to. But he didn’t ask everybody. Most of them stayed in their jobs. Like Zacchaeus, or the centurion. Most of the people that Jesus saved went on their way rejoicing, with their sins forgiven, ready to make much of Jesus in every sphere of their lives.

But the Twelve, he looked them in the eye and said, “You, follow me. You will be fishers of men in an unusual, focused, vocational way. You will be my global emissaries. That will be your life. You will be the first shock wave of my ambassadors to all the nations of the world.” If he were here physically, that’s what he could do at this conference.

Miracle of Making a Missionary

But he’s not here — not in the flesh. Oh, he’s here. Just not visibly. So how does he do it? How does he touch individual persons so that from that moment on they are devoted to lifelong missionary service? Because, be assured, he does still do this. He has been doing it for two thousand years. And he has been doing it the last two days. He will do it tonight. And he will do it in the days to come.

He will do it as you sing. He will do it on your way home. He will do it as you lie in the hospital after an accident. He will do it as you come to your senses after a mindless-drunken spree, or an almost lethal overdose. He will do it in the silent hours of the night. He will do it at the end of the R-rated, sex-saturated movie when you feel dirty and empty. He will do it after you speak cruelly to your best friend and then step outside into the warm sunlight and feel the breeze of God’s mercy on your undeserving face.

How does that happen? We do not know. It is a great mystery. A hundred people read the same Bible, love the same Savior with the same passion, have similar gifts, hear the same message, sing the same songs, and 75 are profoundly moved to live their lives more radically for the fame of Jesus where they are. But five people in that hundred will never be the same again. Something takes hold of them — some precious truth about God, some gripping reality about the lostness of people, some heaven-like joy of seeing dead people live forever, some sense of strategic usefulness in a global purpose, some vision of multi-colored, multi-ethnic bands of happy worshipers.

Something takes hold of you. And never lets you go. To the end of your life you say with Paul, “I do not account my life of any value nor as precious to myself, if only I may finish my course and the ministry that I received from the Lord Jesus, to testify to the gospel of the grace of God” (Acts 20:24). The inexplicable miracle happens. A missionary is created. For fifty years I have seen it happen over and over. A shoe salesman, a financial planner, a counselor, a building contractor, a student. And then, inexplicably, a missionary for 40 years.

Jesus is still doing this. And I mention it to heighten your expectancy and to focus and intensify your prayers. Jesus said to us, “Pray earnestly to the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into his harvest” (Matthew 9:38). He will not perform this miracle of the missionary calling on most of you. For most of us, there will be engagements of equipping, and supporting, and sending, and rejoicing every time we see this glorious thing happen — an ordinary person becoming a lifelong missionary. Amazing.

My prayer is that God will use this message for such a miracle.

Why and How of Mission

My assignment is 1 Corinthians 9. I’m going to read the entire chapter and then talk about (1) Paul’s motivation in his mission and (2) his method in his mission.

Am I not free? Am I not an apostle? Have I not seen Jesus our Lord? Are not you my workmanship in the Lord? If to others I am not an apostle, at least I am to you, for you are the seal of my apostleship in the Lord.

This is my defense to those who would examine me. Do we not have the right to eat and drink? Do we not have the right to take along a believing wife, as do the other apostles and the brothers of the Lord and Cephas? Or is it only Barnabas and I who have no right to refrain from working for a living? Who serves as a soldier at his own expense? Who plants a vineyard without eating any of its fruit? Or who tends a flock without getting some of the milk?

Do I say these things on human authority? Does not the Law say the same? For it is written in the Law of Moses, “You shall not muzzle an ox when it treads out the grain.” Is it for oxen that God is concerned? Does he not certainly speak for our sake? It was written for our sake, because the plowman should plow in hope and the thresher thresh in hope of sharing in the crop. If we have sown spiritual things among you, is it too much if we reap material things from you? If others share this rightful claim on you, do not we even more?

Nevertheless, we have not made use of this right, but we endure anything rather than put an obstacle in the way of the gospel of Christ. Do you not know that those who are employed in the temple service get their food from the temple, and those who serve at the altar share in the sacrificial offerings? In the same way, the Lord commanded that those who proclaim the gospel should get their living by the gospel.

But I have made no use of any of these rights, nor am I writing these things to secure any such provision. For I would rather die than have anyone deprive me of my ground for boasting. For if I preach the gospel, that gives me no ground for boasting. For necessity is laid upon me. Woe to me if I do not preach the gospel! For if I do this of my own will, I have a reward, but if not of my own will, I am still entrusted with a stewardship. What then is my reward? That in my preaching I may present the gospel free of charge, so as not to make full use of my right in the gospel.

For though I am free from all, I have made myself a servant to all, that I might win more of them. To the Jews I became as a Jew, in order to win Jews. To those under the law I became as one under the law (though not being myself under the law) that I might win those under the law. To those outside the law I became as one outside the law (not being outside the law of God but under the law of Christ) that I might win those outside the law. To the weak I became weak, that I might win the weak. I have become all things to all people, that by all means I might save some. I do it all for the sake of the gospel, that I may share with them in its blessings.

Do you not know that in a race all the runners run, but only one receives the prize? So run that you may obtain it. Every athlete exercises self-control in all things. They do it to receive a perishable wreath, but we an imperishable. So I do not run aimlessly; I do not box as one beating the air. But I discipline my body and keep it under control, lest after preaching to others I myself should be disqualified. (1 Corinthians 9:1–27)

What Motivates Mission?

Let’s start with the puzzling paragraph in verses 15–18. In verses 1–14, the point is this: I have a right to be paid for preaching the gospel. Verse 7: “Who serves as a soldier at his own expense?” But then in verse 15, he explains why he doesn’t demand his rights, and he reveals part of the motivation of his mission.

But I have made no use of any of these rights, nor am I writing these things to secure any such provision. For I would rather die than have anyone deprive me of my ground for boasting. For if I preach the gospel, that gives me no ground for boasting. For necessity is laid upon me. Woe to me if I do not preach the gospel! (1 Corinthians 9:15–16)

In other words, “On the Damascus road when I was converted, I met the King of the universe. He conscripted me like a soldier into the army. He bought me like a slave in his household. He gave me an assignment and told me how much I would suffer.” And woe to any soldier who goes AWOL with such a commander. And woe to any slave who tries to escape from such a master. Conscripted soldiers and slaves don’t boast about doing what they have to do.

Motivated by Reward

Therefore, Paul says, I will not settle for serving my commander and my owner in that way. I will have a boast. I will have a reward. What is it? Verses 17–18:

For if I do this [ministry] of my own will [willingly, gladly], I have a reward, but if not of my own will [if I act begrudgingly, slavishly], I am still entrusted with a stewardship. [Like it or not, I have to do it.] What then is my reward? That in my preaching I may present the gospel free of charge, so as not to make full use of my right in the gospel.

In other words, I could be motivated by the desire for money — I ought to be paid! Or I could be motivated by the desire to get my rights. And he says “No!” to both of those. I will not be motivated by the desire for money. I will not be motivated by the desire to throw my weight around and demand my rights. I will present the gospel free of charge. This is my boast. This is my reward.

“Paul’s motivation is to do his mission in a way that magnifies the all-satisfying worth of Christ.”

By the grace of God, I will be the kind of person who does not find his reward in the pleasures of money and does not find his reward in the pleasures of rights-demanding power. I will find my reward in presenting the gospel in such a way that it will be plain that the fruit of gospel ministry itself is my satisfaction. I will commend the gospel — I will magnify the worth of the gospel, the worth of Christ — by showing that the satisfaction it gives — that he gives — does not need to be supplemented by the pleasures of money or the pleasures of power.

So, Paul’s motivation is to do his mission in a way that magnifies the all-satisfying worth of Christ and his gospel, apart from the pleasures of money and the pleasures of power.

People Are the Reward

Now, let’s press into this motivation further, because Paul invites us in. What, more specifically, is the gain for Paul of this “reward” of presenting the gospel without charge (1 Corinthians 9:18)? In verses 19–23, he answers over and over, “I gain people. I gain fellow lovers of Christ. I gain my doubled joy, my glory, my crown of boasting” (cf. Philippians 4:1; 1 Thessalonians 2:19).

Paul has turned away from serving in order to gain money and from serving in order to gain power. Now, according to verse 19 (in the middle of the verse), he has become the servant of all in order to gain people.

Verse 19 (at the end): “that I might win more of them.”
Verse 20 (at the beginning): “in order to win Jews.”
Verse 20 (at the end): “that I might win those under the law.”
Verse 21 (at the end): “that I might win those outside the law.”
Verse 22 (at the beginning): “that I might win the weak.”

That word — “win” — is ambiguous in English. You can win a prize. Or you can win an argument. If you win a prize, you gain it. If you win an argument, you defeat someone. What kind of “win” does Paul have in mind? There is no doubt. He is speaking of gaining people as a prize, not defeating them as an opponent. This is crystal clear in the original language. Because the word translated “win” (kerdainō) means “gain.”

As in Matthew 16:26, “What will it profit a man if he gains the whole world and forfeits his soul?” Or Philippians 3:8, “For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things and count them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ.” That’s the word. His aim is to gain the Jews, and gain the Gentiles, and gain the weak.

He’s not trying to gain the pleasure of money. He’s not trying to gain the power of rights. The gospel has already assured him that he will gain the fullness of the enjoyment of Christ. And now, he wants to gain people.

He Enjoys Their Joy

What does it mean to gain people? Verse 23 gives the answer: “I do it all for the sake of the gospel, that I may share with them [all those gained people] in its blessings.” His aim is to gain more and more people so that he can “share with them in blessings of the gospel.” Notice carefully the wording. He does not say, “So that they can share with me in the blessings of the gospel.” I’m sure that’s true. He wants them to share with him in the blessings of the gospel. But that’s not what he says because the note he’s striking here is his reward, his gain, in this mission.

So what he says is (last part of verse 23) “that I may share with them in the blessings of the gospel.” I want to gain people — all kinds of people — so that I can be a sharer with them in the blessings of the gospel — that I might enjoy their enjoyment of Christ.

“Our gospel joy is authentic and satisfying only if we desire to taste this joy in the hearts of other people.”

What does this imply about the nature of joy in gospel blessings — blessings like the forgiveness of sins, the declaration of righteousness in the court of heaven, the removal of all condemnation, reconciliation with God, adoption into his family, fellowship with Christ, the hope of eternal life? What does it imply about the nature of our joy in such blessings?

It implies this: our gospel joy is authentic and satisfying only if we desire to taste this joy in the hearts of other people. I want to gain people. I want to gain people — all kinds of people — in order that I might share in their experience of gospel joy. Do you?

‘That I Might Save Some’

Did you notice where I stopped in my listing of those five kinds of people he wanted to gain — what I left out? I stopped in the middle of verse 22. Pick it up there with me: “I have become all things to all people, that by all means I might save some.” He switches from “win some” (or “gain some”) to “save some.” Paul said in Romans 5:9, “Since we are now justified by Christ’s blood, much more shall we be saved from the wrath of God.” And in 1 Thessalonians 1:10 he says, “Jesus delivers us [saves us] from the wrath to come.” Being saved, in Paul’s language, is first and foundationally being rescued from the wrath of God. By Christ’s taking our condemnation, God rescued us from God.

Then, Paul says in 1 Corinthians 9:23, “I want to share with them in gospel blessings” — that gospel blessing. I want to be there when they walk out of the courtroom of condemnation and do handsprings down the sidewalk, and they leap for joy and shout, “I’m not going to be executed. I’m not going to be condemned. I’m not going to be punished.” I want to be there when it lands on them that they are not only saved from hell, but are adopted as God’s very own children and will inherit the world. I want to gain people for this: I want to share in their experience of this joy.

That’s Paul’s motivation for his mission, which is interwoven with his motivation. Not the pleasures of money. Not the power of rights. But the pleasures of blood-bought joy, especially as he tastes it welling up in the hearts of other people gained from every tribe and language and nation.

What Was His Method?

We turn now to Paul’s method in his mission. We could sum it up with that last half of verse 22: “I have become all things to all people, that by all means I might save some” (1 Corinthians 9:22). Or, as he says it in verse 19, “I have made myself a servant to all, that I might win more of them.” Then, he begins to flesh it out in verse 20: “To the Jews I became a Jew, in order to win Jews.” Verse 21, “To those outside the law [Gentiles] I became as one outside the law.” And so on.

We could talk for hours about how this is worked out in practice — becoming all things to all people that we might save some. But given the constraints on this message, I’m going to cut through to what I think is the single most important reality behind Paul’s missionary method in 1 Corinthians 9.

Radically New Identity

The clue is in verse 20: “To the Jews I became a Jew, in order to win Jews.” I think Don Carson is exactly right to point out that Paul was a Jew. He did not have to become a Jew in order to win Jews. Or did he? What does this imply that Paul, who calls himself a Hebrew of Hebrews in Philippians 3:5, says that he becomes a Hebrew, becomes a Jew, to gain Jews?

What it implies is this: when a person becomes a Christian, that person’s deepest and truest identity is no longer the identity of his family, or tribe, or ethnicity, or race, or political party, or nation. Why? Because of what happens by faith when you are united with Christ at conversion.

Listen to what has happened to you if you are a Christian:

You have been born again (1 Peter 1:3).
You are a new creation (2 Corinthians 5:17).
You have died and been raised with Christ, and your life is hidden with Christ in God (Colossians 3:3–4).
You are seated with him in the heavenly places (Ephesians 2:6).
God has transferred you to the kingdom of his beloved Son (Colossians 1:13).
You are members of the household of God (Ephesians 2:19).
Your citizenship is in heaven (Philippians 3:21).

In other words, the Jewish man, Paul, was so profoundly and pervasively redefined — given a new identity — by union with Christ Jesus, that Jewishness was not his truest, deepest identity anymore and, therefore, in order to win Jews, he had to become a Jew. When you become a Christian, your family roots, your tribal connections, your ethnicity and race, your nation of origin — all of them become secondary, at most. And the real you is something supernaturally new, different. A new creation. A new family identity in Christ. A new citizenship in his kingdom. Every other identity and allegiance is relativized.

Adapting to a New Culture

The implications of this for method in missions are profound. When you become a missionary, and cross a culture, and learn a language, you do not go as an emissary of your nation of origin, you go as an emissary of the kingdom of Christ. Your aim is not to create cultural enclaves replicating your earthly home. Your aim is to establish outposts of the kingdom of heaven.

Yes, this is complicated by the fact that Paul really was ethnically a Jew. And you — every one of you — is embedded in a cultural and ethnic identity. But as a Christian you are both embedded in human culture and transcending human culture. The gospel came to you in culturally familiar dress and began reidentifying you as an alien and a sojourner in your own culture. Christians are always embedded in human culture and always at odds with human culture — even our own.

“When we cross a culture in missions, we find ourselves adapting to culture and challenging culture.”

So, when we cross a culture in missions, we find ourselves adapting to culture and challenging culture. Always. Everywhere. We are never at home in any fallen human culture, because our citizenship is in heaven. Yet we are always at home, because our Father owns the world. We will inherit all of it. As missionaries we leave as aliens; we arrive as aliens. Yet we leave what belongs to our Father. We go to what belongs to our Father. You found ways to be Christian in your home culture as an alien, and you will find ways to be Christian in your new culture as an alien.

God will guide you by the Spirit of your true heavenly homeland, and by the law of Christ, so that your cultural adaptations do not involve sin and do not distort truth.

Miracle of a Missionary Calling

And so I end: if you find your deepest identity in Christ, and your decisive citizenship in his kingdom, and if you know yourself to be an alien and a sojourner wherever you live, and if you pursue your joy not in the pleasures of money or the power of rights, but in tasting gospel blessings in the joy of others as you gain them as eternal friends in Christ, then you will be useful to your own people and a very likely candidate for the inexplicable miracle of the missionary calling.

When we, as a society, stopped reading and started watching, we began thinking and talking less — at least with the same substance or effectiveness. That was the bright red flag Neil Postman began waving in the sixties, captured for future generations in his classic work, Amusing Ourselves to Death. The book was published in 1985, the year before I was born.

With the introduction of the television, Postman observed, entertainment did not merely become a bigger and bigger part of our lives — it became our lives. And everything else in our lives — news, politics, education, even religion — was increasingly forced to perform on its stage. Suddenly, everything had to be entertaining. Newspapers gave way to “the nightly news”; classroom lessons made their way to Sesame Street; worship services transformed into televised concerts with TED talks.

“The television slowly taught us that nothing was worth our time unless it was entertaining.”

The television slowly taught us that nothing was worth our time unless it was entertaining. And anything entertaining, almost by definition, requires less of us — less thinking, less study, less work. Entertainment, after all, isn’t meant to be taken seriously. But when everything is entertainment, doesn’t that mean little, if anything, can be taken seriously?

For those who take the glory of God seriously, and our joy in him seriously, that becomes a very serious question.

What Will Ruin Society?

Postman warned about this devolution long before others noticed what was happening. He writes,

[George] Orwell warns that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression. But in [Aldous] Huxley’s vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity, and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think. What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. . . . In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us. This book is about the possibility that Huxley, not Orwell, was right. (Amusing Ourselves to Death, xix)

When he wrote those words, television had only been around for thirty years (invented much earlier, but not common in households until the fifties). The internet would not become publicly available until the 90s. Social media didn’t come along for another fifteen years (and really didn’t become widespread until the iPhone in 2007, several years after Postman died).

If Postman was right about the early years of television, how much more today — a day when we no longer have to schedule time to sit and watch our favorite shows, but carry our entertainment with us literally everywhere we go? If entertainment could control our lives from a small box in the living room, how much more so when it’s nearly surgically attached to us on our phones?

Postman, I believe, was more correct than even he realized — and the implications are not just social or cultural, but spiritual.

Irrelevance Binds Us

What makes television such a terror to the collective mind of a culture? Postman begins by arguing that the “medium is the metaphor.” Meaning, any given medium — whether text, television, or social media — doesn’t only distribute content, but unavoidably shapes the content. How we consume, he argues, is as important as what we consume. Mediums determine how we take in information. For instance, over time typography (despite its own limitations) generally taught us to follow arguments, test conclusions, and expose contradiction. Television, by contrast, consistently does away with arguments, strips away context, and darts from one image to the next.

Television, however, not only teaches us a new way to process information, but it also floods us with information and from far beyond our everyday lives. The telegraph, of course, had begun doing this with words long before the television, but notice what was happening then, even with the telegraph:

In the information world created by telegraphy, everything became everyone’s business. For the first time, we were sent information which answered no question we had asked, and which, in any case, did not permit the right of reply. We may say then that the contribution of the telegraph to public discourse was to dignify irrelevance and amplify impotence. (68–69)

For the most part, the kind of information that would interest people in both Los Angeles and Minneapolis, would need to be nonessential to life in either place (irrelevance), and all the more so with news from around the globe. Stories had to transcend ordinary life in a real place (part of the appeal for people looking to escape the malaise of ordinary life).

And, for the most part, the information had to be the kind of information neither could do anything about (impotence). Postman asks a pointed question of all our media consumption: “How often does it occur that information provided you on morning radio or television, or in the morning newspaper, causes you to alter your plans for the day, or to take some action you would not otherwise have taken, or provides insight into some problem you are required to solve?” (68).

Television only made the irrelevance that much more accessible and that much more appealing (actual images and videos of celebrities doing everyday activities as opposed to the short descriptions the telegraph could produce). And how much more is this the case through social media? We know more and more about our favorite athletes, actors, and musicians and yet often less and less about our neighbors and the places where we might actually make a difference.

Worth a Thousand Images

But isn’t a picture worth a thousand words? In 1921, the marketer Fred Bernard famously said so, promoting the use of images for advertising on the side of streetcars. He was probably right as far as streetcars go. If you want to make a memorable impression on someone in a couple seconds, by all means use a picture — but is this effective communication or just effective marketing? Maybe it’s more accurate to say a picture is worth a thousand more sales, or clicks, or likes. Even then, though, can a picture really convey what a consumer needs to know about a new phone, or clothing line, or dish soap? For serious shoppers, haven’t we learned that one coherent sentence of honest description might be worth a thousand pictures?

Postman saw that as images overtake words as the dominant form of communication in a society, communication invariably suffers. “I will try to demonstrate that as typography move to the periphery of our culture and television takes to place at the center, the seriousness, clarity and, above all, value of public discourse dangerously declines” (29). We descend into “a vast triviality,” he says. We get sillier.

As he attempts to summarize his warning to the ever-entertained, he says, “Our Ministry of Culture is Huxleyan, not Orwellian. It does everything possible to encourage us to watch continuously. But what we watch is a medium which presented information in a form that renders it simplistic, nonsubstantive, nonhistorical, and noncontextual; That is to say, information packaged as entertainment. In America, we are never denied the opportunity to amuse ourselves” (141).

In the Beginning Was the Word

According to Neil Postman, America (and much of the modern world) has laid our collective minds on the altar of entertainment. But why should followers of Christ care about television (or websites or social media)? Should we spend much time worrying about how much we watch and how little we read?

Yes, because the fullest Christian life is firmly anchored in words and sentences and paragraphs. When God revealed himself to his chosen people, of all the infinite ways he could have done so, he chose to unveil himself with words. “Long ago, at many times and in many ways, God spoke to our fathers by the prophets, but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son” (Hebrews 1:1–2). God didn’t build a gallery or start a YouTube channel, he wrote a Book (2 Timothy 3:16). “In the beginning was the Word. . . . And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth” (John 1:1, 14). From the beginning, God has put the Word, his Son, at the center of reality, and, in doing so, he has given words unusual power and importance in anticipating, explaining, and celebrating him.

Yes, the heavens are declaring the glory of God (Psalm 19:1). Yes, his eternal power and divine nature have been seen, from the beginning, in the things that have been made (Romans 1:20). But “faith comes from hearing, and hearing through the word of Christ” (Romans 10:17). For now, faith looks “not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen. For the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal” (2 Corinthians 4:18). And we look to the unseen through words. We may see God in mountains and oceans and galaxies, but we only know him savingly through sentences. He wrote the story that way.

Serious Joy in Silly Days

If the way we’re using entertainment erodes our ability to reflect, reason, and savor truth, it erodes our ability to know and enjoy Jesus. “Blessed is the man . . . [whose] delight is in the law of the Lord, and on his law he meditates day and night” (Psalm 1:1–2). If we lose the ability to think, we lose the ability to meditate. And if we lose the ability to meditate, we lose our path to meaningful happiness. The life of the mind, and heart, is a pivotal battleground in the pursuit of real and abundant life.

“The life of the mind is a pivotal battleground in the pursuit of real and abundant life.”

The medium is not the enemy — television and YouTube and Instagram are not the enemy. But if Postman was right, the medium can be wielded by our world, our flesh, and our enemy when we soak up entertainment and ignore the consequences. What, if any, of your entertainment habits need to be curbed or redirected for the sake of your soul? What are ways you are seeking to cultivate the spiritual gift of your mind — slower Bible study or memorization, reading substantive books, meaningful conversation with friends, more time in unhurried reflection and meditation?

As we learn to guard and nurture our minds as our God-given pathways to God, the kinds of mindless entertainment that are undoing millions today will be far less appealing and far less dangerous. And we will find pleasures deeper, and far more enduring, than what we see on our screens.

When pain jerks me awake at night, I first glance up. If the digital display on the ceiling says only the second watch of the night, I push through the pain and try to breathe my way back to sleep. But if the clock says 4:00 a.m., I smile. Jesus has awakened me to enjoy communion with him, even though it’ll be hours before I sit up in my wheelchair.

Do I need more sleep? Of course. Will my pain subside? Unlikely. But at four in the morning, there is a more necessary thing, and it makes me happy to think that long before dawn, I am among the early ones who are blessing Jesus. Filling my chest with Jesus. Rehearsing his Scriptures, murmuring his names, and whisper-singing hymns that cascade one into another, all filled with adoration.

It’s hard to do that when you’re wearing an external ventilator. And so I wordlessly plead that he unearth my sin, fill all my cavernous, empty places, and show me more of his splendor. He always responds with tenderness. He sees me lying in bed paralyzed and propped with pillows, encumbered by a lymphatic sleeve, wheezing air-tubes, a urine bag, and hospital railings that “hold it all together.”

One of my helpers knows all about these nighttime rendezvous with Jesus, and so one night after she tucked me in, she stood over my paralyzed frame with an open Bible. “This is you,” she said, and then read Psalm 119:147–148: “I rise before dawn and cry for help; I hope in your words. My eyes are awake before the watches of the night, that I may meditate on your promise.”

That pretty much describes it. In the morning when a different helper draws the drapes, unhooks my ventilator, drops the guard rails, removes the lymph-sleeve, and pulls out my many pillows, she’ll usually ask, “Sleep well?”

“Not the best, but I am so happy.”

Blessings that Bruise

Real happiness is hard to come by. Many Christians default to the lesser, more accessible joys of our culture. But the more we saturate ourselves with earthy pleasures, the more pickled our minds become, sitting and soaking in worldly wants to the point that we hardly know what our souls need. We then seize upon the loan approval, job promotion, the home-team victory, or rain clouds parting over our picnic as glorious blessings sent from on high. Yet if Jesus were counting our blessings, would these make his top ten?

I am the most blessed quadriplegic in the world. It has nothing to do with my job, a nice house, my relatively good health, or a car pulling out of a handicap space just as I pull up to the restaurant. It does not hinge on books I’ve written, how far I’ve traveled, or having known Billy Graham on a first-name basis.

Jesus goes much deeper than the physical-type blessings so reminiscent of the Old Testament. Back then, God blessed his people with bounteous harvests, annihilated enemies, opened wombs, abundant rains, and quivers full of children. Jesus takes a different approach. He locates blessings closer to pain and discomfort.

How Suffering Invites Blessing

In his most famous sermon, Jesus lists empty-handed spiritual poverty, hearts heavy with sorrow, a lowly forgiving spirit, eschewing sin, and struggling for unity in the church. Jesus tops off his list with, “And what happiness will be yours when people blame you and ill-treat you and say all kinds of slanderous things against you for my sake! Be glad then, yes, be tremendously glad — for your reward in Heaven is magnificent” (Matthew 5:11–12, J.B. Phillips).

How does one accept these hard-edged things as blessings? First Peter 3:14 suggests that “even if you should suffer for righteousness’ sake, you will be blessed.” It is affliction that sends us into the inner recesses of Christ’s heart and shuts the door. There, “a new nearness to God and communion with him is a far more conscious reality. . . . New arguments suggest themselves; new desires spring up; new wants disclose themselves. Our own emptiness and God’s manifold fullness are brought before us so vividly that the longings of our inmost souls are kindled, and our heart crieth out for God” (Horatius Bonar, Night of Weeping, 74).

“A godly response to suffering places you under a deluge of divine blessings.”

These new desires and wants give birth to a strong desire to obey him (James 1:2; 2 Corinthians 5:9). David the psalmist knew this. He said, “Before you made me suffer, I used to wander off. But now I hold onto your word” (Psalm 119:67). A godly response to suffering places you under a deluge of divine blessings.

‘If You Love Me’

Jesus summed it up, saying, “If you love me, you will keep my commandments” (John 14:15). Here, Jesus is not likening himself to a stern husband who walks through the front door, notices that dinner is not on the table, and mutters to his wife, “If you love me, you will have my meal ready when I come home!” Biblical obedience is not a duty to do the right thing because that’s what good Christians should do.

John 14:15 is like a promise. Like Jesus saying, “If you love me, if you make me the center of your thoughts, delighting in me and doing your most ordinary tasks with an eye to my glory, then wild horses will not be able to stop you from obeying me.” Obedience that is motivated by unbridled love for your Lord has a powerful sanctifying effect. What euphoria when your delight in Christ meshes perfectly with your delight in his law! (Psalm 1:1–3) You are then able to cry out, “My soul is consumed with longing for your rules at all times” (Psalm 119:20).

So David could say, “It is good for me that I was afflicted, that I might learn your statutes” (Psalm 119:71). Think of affliction as a sheepdog that snaps at your heels, always driving you through the gate of obedience and into the safety of the Shepherd’s arms. Affliction and sanctification then go hand in hand as you are constrained on all sides and pushed hard “toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus” (Philippians 3:14).

This Blessing Has Fallen to Me

All the New Testament-type blessings that Jesus preached about now lose their hard edge. No longer off-putting, Matthew 5:11–12 feels smooth to your soul. You can rejoice with the psalmist who effused, “This blessing has fallen to me, that I have kept your precepts” (Psalm 119:56). We are blessed — supremely happy — not when we have everything going for us, but when all of us is going for God.

“We are blessed, not when we have everything going for us, but when all of us is going for God.”

Does it get any better? Yes. Jesus describes an extraordinary blessing between obedience and the prize of himself in John 14:21: “Whoever has my commandments and keeps them, he it is who loves me . . . and I will love him and manifest myself to him.” This is the sweetness of obedience. When you sanctify yourself, he opens layer upon layer of his heart, inexorably wooing you with his loveliness — and his holiness (Hebrews 12:10):

This is the blessing which above all others [God] desires for us . . . when we come to be perfectly at one with him, then the struggle ceases. How blessed when his desire to deliver us from sin, and ours to be delivered from it, meet together . . . then divine fullness flows into the soul without a check, and, notwithstanding the bitterness of the outward process by which [it is secured], joy unspeakable and full of glory possesses the consecrated soul. (Night of Weeping, 68–69)

Beholding Holiness Himself

In the hours before dawn when I lie awake, I fill my chest with such thoughts. I marvel at Jesus’s loveliness, picturing him carving out canyons, puckering up mountains, ladling out streams, rivers, and seas. He breathes suns and stars into orbit; nebula and galaxies, all spinning in motion, all so that we might behold his glory. Even more glorious, “he upholds the universe by the word of his power” (Hebrews 1:3). Mountains, seas, and stars would — poof! — disappear, every molecule would vanish, if he stopped willing the universe to be.

This barely scratches the surface. Our Creator God then wills himself to be nailed to a cross. He gazes up into the eyes of a soldier about to drive in iron spikes. But as the soldier reaches for the mallet, his fingers must be able to grasp it. His heart must keep pumping. His life must be sustained nanosecond by nanosecond, for no man has such power on his own. Who supplies breath to this Roman’s lungs? Who holds his molecules together? Only the Son can, through whom “all things hold together” (Colossians 1:17).

Jesus wills the spikes be driven through his flesh. He gives the executioners strength enough to lift the cross, heavy with his impaled body. God then goes on humiliating display — in his underwear. He can scarcely breathe. Yet he looks down upon these poorly-paid legionnaires jeering at him and utters, “Father, forgive them.” Jesus graciously and unbegrudgingly grants them all — every wretched one — continued existence.

Yet his crucifixion was a mere warm-up to the greater horror. At some point during that dreadful day, Jesus began to feel a foreign sensation. An unearthly foul odor began to waft in his heart. He felt dirty. Human wickedness crawled upon his spotless being — the living excrement from our souls. The apple of his Father’s eye was turning brown with the rot of our sin (see Steve Estes, When God Weeps, 53–54).

This is what Jesus was talking about in John 14:21. This is the Ancient of Days manifesting himself to us. And wonder of wonders, the Father now calls us the apple of his eye (Psalm 17:8).

Who Will Have Your Heart?

If you long for divine fullness to flow into your soul without a check, embrace your afflictions, get actively engaged in your own sanctification, and let your delight in Christ mesh with your delight in his law. For God has given you the sun, stars, and the universe; he has given you flowers, friendship, goodness, and salvation. He’s given you everything — can you not give him your heart? If God does not have our heart, who or what shall have it?

I trust that at four in the morning, Christ has yours.

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

At some point, many Christians experience unsettling doubts regarding their professed beliefs. Some Christians experience this more than others.

The areas of our individual doubt struggles are as diverse and complex as our Christian faith claims. Some battle doubts about the genuineness of their conversion (“Have I truly been born again?”). Some battle doubts about the character of God (“Is God truly good?”). Some battle doubts about the validity of their theological framework (“Does Calvinism truly represent the biblical revelation of God’s nature, purposes, and actions?”). Some battle doubts about the authenticity of their spiritual experiences (“Was my remarkably fast health recovery after receiving prayer truly a divine healing?”). Some battle doubts about the veracity of the Christian faith itself (“Does God truly exist?” or “Does another religion or belief system more truly reveal the nature of ultimate reality?”). Some battle a hodgepodge of these and still other kinds of doubts.

For most Christians, the intensity of their doubts falls into the mildly to moderately troubling range. In relation to faith-health, these battles with doubt are like battling a bad cold or flu — they require care, but they are not faith-threatening. However, a minority of Christians (though I’d say a substantial minority) endure one or more seasons of doubt so intense we’ve given them a special term: faith crises.

When Doubts Become Crises

To call these experiences crises is not hyperbole. When a confluence of factors moves us to question whether our fundamental understanding of reality is indeed true, it can feel like our world is on the verge of collapse. In relation to faith-health, this kind of doubt is more like a heart attack or stroke.

“I know the oppressive spiritual darkness, the agonizing fear, the confusion, disorientation, the sense of isolation.”

I say this from experience. Like everyone, I occasionally battle some doubts that are like a cold or the flu. But more than once in my forty-year sojourn as a Christian, I’ve also endured doubts more like a heart attack. I know the oppressive spiritual darkness, the agonizing fear, the disorienting confusion, the sense of isolation.

Since I am part of the substantial minority of Christians who have (or will) experience this, I thought it might be helpful if I briefly describe the emotional and psychological state a person often is in when such a crisis hits. My goal is to increase awareness in Christians — especially those who have not experienced a faith crisis themselves — of the destabilized state someone enduring a faith crisis can be in. Such awareness can help us extend the most needed kinds of initial “crisis care” when ministering grace to beloved brothers and sisters who are reeling.

Stage 1: The Build-Up

A person’s faith crisis often appears to happen suddenly. Someone you know (perhaps you) seems to have a strong, sturdy faith. Then, all of sudden, it looks like their faith is falling apart. And you wonder, “What happened?”

Although that’s the way it often appears, rarely do such crises come out of nowhere. Almost always, destabilizing elements have been building up under the surface, even if the person wasn’t fully aware.

All of us experience and observe realities that don’t seem to make sense within our Christian worldview or our theological framework. Often, we’re able to mentally file these under Scriptural categories such as:

Proverbs 3:5: Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and do not lean on your own understanding.

Or Isaiah 55:8–9: My thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, declares the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.

But some people, over time, gradually accumulate sufficient, seemingly incoherent experiences and observations that their faith becomes destabilized, often more than they realize. Each experience or observation on its own likely causes them only mild to moderate confusion or unsettledness — it looks and feels much like the doubt common to all believers, which may be why they don’t more urgently address them prior to the crisis moment. But if enough faith-destabilizing elements build up, such people, even if they don’t consciously realize it, become vulnerable to a faith crisis, only needing the right (or wrong) catalyst to set it off.

Stage 2: The Catalyst

Sometimes a catalyst moment is a significant life event, like a betrayal or a tragedy. But often, it is an apparently and surprisingly insignificant event, like an offhanded comment someone makes in an ordinary conversation.

Whatever the catalyst event, when it occurs it ignites a kind of chain reaction. It’s as if the various destabilizing elements that have built up now psychologically fuse together into a sudden awareness that the person’s belief system — Christianity as ultimate reality — might not be true, but might instead be, like other belief systems, a human construct. This awareness produces a kind of internal explosion: a faith crisis (which nowadays some might refer to as a deconstruction).

What’s important to keep in mind when ministering to someone experiencing this, especially in the early stages of the crisis, is that the catalyst event, whether extraordinary or mundane, is frequently not what’s only, or even mainly, fueling the person’s crisis. Often, well-meaning friends coming alongside a person in faith crisis can focus too much on the catalyst and give too little attention to the doubts and experiences that built up over months or years.

The catalyst is more like a lit match dropped on an accumulated pile of tinder, or like the last Jenga block pulled that suddenly brings the weakened structure down. And when it happens, the person usually finds himself suddenly caught in a raging spiritual tempest.

Stage 3: The Storm

For those who haven’t experienced a faith crisis, it’s hard to capture in words what it feels like. As I have tried, I have found a storm to be a helpful metaphor.

The human brain is a remarkably, even incomprehensibly, powerful and complex creation. The speed at which it can process, especially in a state of alarm, is incredible. And people in the initial stages of a faith crisis are typically in a state of alarm. The brain is processing in overdrive — and not only processing the Christian claims in question, but the possible implications of those bedrock claims proving untrue. And they’re trying to resolve those overwhelming questions in a storm of anguishing emotions.

If those who have taken their faith seriously suddenly and unexpectedly experience the kind of internal faith explosion I described above, resulting in intense doubts regarding their fundamental beliefs, these are the sorts of implications crashing in on them:

That God — the Person they have most profoundly trusted, most deeply loved, most passionately worshiped, the one they believed they have experienced and been led by, the one they’ve oriented their whole life around and taught others about — might not be real.
And if God’s not real, much of what they’ve found meaningful in life would either be a delusion or built on a delusion.
And if they’ve been deluded, what is real? What does everything mean? They wonder, “Who am I?”
And if they were to lose their faith, they’d grieve and confuse believing family members and friends they love deeply, and lose a priceless dimension of relational connection they have shared with those loved ones.
And they would lose the church community that has been integral to their lives.
And if they’re in vocational ministry — because pastors, missionaries, and vocational Christian workers of all kinds are not immune from faith crises — then they’d lose both the missional purpose that oriented their lives as well as gainful employment. And what would they do, or even want to do, next?
And most frightening of all, if they were to lose their faith only to discover too late that their doubts had deceived them, they would be condemned to hell, and may cause others to stumble and end up there too.

Hopefully you can see why this experience is so often psychologically disorienting and emotionally distressing.

What I want to stress here is that when we are ministering to those who have recently entered a faith crisis, it’s important to get as clear a sense as possible of their state of mind before attempting to seriously engage the faith questions they’re wrestling with. Because for some, their inner turmoil, their internal storm, is overwhelming. I like to say that when a faith crisis hits, it’s like trying to think and discern clearly in a hurricane. It’s wise to assume strugglers’ anxiety and fear levels are running high, that they’re depressed, and they’re in need of rest, since this experience often robs them of sleep at night.

At this moment, what a person in faith crisis often needs most is not immediate answers, but shelter.

Providing Shelter in the Storm

Shelter is what anyone caught in raging storm seeks. A shelter doesn’t end a storm, but it does provide a storm-tossed struggler a measure of needed respite, safety, and peace.

Jude instructs us to “have mercy on those who doubt” (Jude 22). Providing merciful shelter for a Christian in the tumultuous throes of a faith crisis is one way to show mercy, and one of the most important initial ways we can extend “crisis care” to him.

“Faith crises are complex, and God’s mercy is many-faceted.”

But what does it mean to provide spiritual shelter for someone in this kind of spiritual storm? Like most parts in the Christian life, there’s no simple formula. People’s faith-crisis experiences are unique. Their doubts are unique, their contexts are unique, their histories are unique, their temperaments are unique, their spiritual-maturity levels are unique, and so on. Therefore, the kind of merciful shelter each person needs will be unique. Faith crises are complex, and God’s mercy is many-faceted.

But we know what people experience when they find a storm shelter: their fear reduces, they breathe easier, and they’re able to rest. In a spiritual shelter, a person can be open and honest about their doubts and fears, release pent-up emotions, and God willing, gain some much-needed, Spirit-granted perspective and guidance.

Providing this kind of merciful shelter for someone requires discernment. And discernment requires a listening ear. Which means, while God hasn’t given us a one-size-fits-all formula for how to do this, he has given us a governing principle we can apply: “Let every person [who wishes to have mercy on those who doubt] be quick to hear [and] slow to speak” (James 1:19). This is crucial because we won’t know what (or if) to speak unless we have first carefully and prayerfully heard.

So, as we seek to care for those in a faith crisis, we’re wise to remember that (1) the crisis is often the sudden explosion of doubts that have accumulated over time, (2) the crisis is often ignited by a catalyst event that may itself not be fueling their doubts, and (3) their most pressing initial need may not be our immediately addressing their doubts, but experiencing through us the sheltering mercy of Jesus, who extends this invitation to all strugglers: “Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest” (Matthew 11:28).

Audio Transcript

Happy Friday, everyone. We’re back to talk about education. Specifically, how do we pursue education in this world without getting taken captive by the thinking of this world? It’s a question we get often from students navigating higher learning and wanting to do so with discernment, both in non-Christian and in Christian schools. James, one listener, asks it this way: “Hello, Pastor John! I’m a Christian studying philosophy at a secular university. What steps can I take to do as Colossians 2:8 says and avoid being taken ‘captive by philosophy and empty deceit, according to human tradition, according to the elemental spirits of the world, and not according to Christ’?”

And the question comes from Michael, as well: “Hello, Pastor John! I am about to begin my senior year as a philosophy major, and I am currently working on an Honors Thesis on Christian Compatibilism. As I have felt God lead me to study philosophy, and take great delight in what I study, I also recognize that Colossians 2:8 challenges the study of this discipline as a whole. While I esteem the word of God above all else, I also believe that the study of philosophy can be used for the church. The question that I would like to ask is, In your view, what is the role of Christian philosophy, and where should one take care in the pursuit of this discipline? Is it okay to explore possibilities, and things that Scripture does not directly deal with, as long as one does not speak with authority on these issues?” Pastor John, what would you say?

Well, thanks for the question. I was a literature major in college, but I did have a philosophy minor. So, I had enough of a taste to be able to resonate positively — because of my experience at a Christian school — with what they’re saying.

The word philosophy occurs one time in the Bible — namely, in Colossians 2:8, where it says, “See to it that no one takes you captive by philosophy and empty deceit, according to human tradition, according to the elemental [principles] of the world, and not according to Christ.” So, let’s think about this verse for just a moment, and then we’ll step back and think about the larger task of philosophy.

Lovers of Wisdom

The word philosophy, both in English and in Greek, literally means “love [philos] of wisdom [sophia].” It means thinking about the great issues of life: What is ultimate reality? How can you know it? What’s right and wrong? What’s the good life? In and of itself, therefore, one would, I think, be inclined to say, Who could find fault with that — loving wisdom? Well, of course we should love wisdom and pursue it with all our might.

In fact, this book of Colossians is filled with positive references to wisdom:

Paul prays “that you may be filled with the knowledge of his will in all spiritual wisdom” (Colossians 1:9).
Paul says that he teaches “everyone with all wisdom” (Colossians 1:28).
“In Christ are hidden all the treasures of wisdom” (Colossians 2:3).
Paul tells us to “let the word of Christ dwell in you richly, teaching and admonishing one another in all wisdom” (Colossians 3:16).
“Walk in wisdom toward outsiders” (Colossians 4:5).

“Treasure Christ’s fullness as the ground and goal and access to all true wisdom.”

My goodness. It seems to me that in view of all that — just in Colossians, I mean, not to mention all the other places in the Bible — it would be a sin not to love wisdom, not to be a philosopher in that sense: a wisdom lover. So, if you just take the word philosophy, “love of wisdom,” by itself it would surely be a good thing.

Taken Captive

But Colossians 2:8 says it’s not a good thing. Why not? Paul says four things about philosophy in Colossians 2:8, and let’s look at them to see what the problem is here.

Empty Deceit

First, he says it is “empty deceit.” Deceit means that it pretends to offer a fullness but is in fact empty. It pretends to be full of what would make the good life and bring us lasting satisfaction and finally get us to eternal happiness — and none of it is real. It proves to be totally empty and leaves us miserable in the end. That’s the first thing he says about this so-called “philosophy” that he’s worried about in Colossae: “empty deceit.”

Human Tradition

Second, it is “according to human tradition”. In other words, it has no true warrant from God. It’s coming out of human heads rather than from God’s mind. It’s mere human thinking, not dependent on God’s thinking. Of course — and this is the really interesting part about philosophy — aspects of human thinking can parallel or overlap with God’s revelation of his own thinking in Scripture and in the world.

But what Paul means is that this teaching doesn’t carry in it any built-in submission to God’s thinking. Therefore, it is fundamentally flawed — not because it may not have some overlap with truth, but because, at its root, it doesn’t care about conforming to God’s truth. And therefore, even in those places where it may parallel some divine truth, it has the aroma of error because it doesn’t love that truth as coming from God and conforming to God and glorifying God. That’s the second thing he says: “human tradition.”

Human Precepts

Third, Paul says this so-called philosophy is “according to the elemental principles of the world.” Now, later in the chapter, Paul explains what he means by “elemental principles.” He says in Colossians 2:20–23,

If with Christ you died to the elemental spirits of the world, why, as if you were still alive in the world, do you submit to regulations [these are, I think, the names of the elemental principles] — “Do not handle, Do not taste, Do not touch” . . . according to human precepts and teachings? These have indeed an appearance of wisdom in promoting self-made religion and asceticism and severity to the body, but they are of no value in stopping the indulgence of the flesh.

“This ascetic rule-keeping, this philosophy, was feeding the sin of pride rather than subduing the power of sin.”

Virtually every philosophy points to a way to live that it considers wise or profitable — the path to greatest meaning, greatest satisfaction. And in the case of this philosophy threatening the church in Colossae, the way to live in this philosophy was summed up in certain ascetic elements and rules — “elemental principles,” they call them — so that through severity to the body one might find a pathway to illumination and to the good life and the approval of angels. And it was backfiring because this ascetic rule-keeping, this philosophy, was feeding the sin of pride rather than subduing the power of sin.

Not According to Christ

And the fourth thing he says about this philosophy is that it is “not according to Christ,” which is the fundamental issue for him. He says in Colossians 2:19, “not holding fast to the Head, from whom” everything is coming.

Redeeming Philosophy

So, let’s step back now and ask, How can the study of philosophy — the history of the love of wisdom as humans have tried to see it — how can this study be made truly profitable rather than a snare like it was at Colossae? And I think the central answer in the book of Colossians is this: If you want to measure all philosophy rightly, and thus profit from what God has revealed — by special revelation in his word and general revelation from the writings of the influential thinkers in history — then

know Jesus Christ as he is pervasively and profoundly revealed in Scripture,
treasure his fullness as the ground and goal and access to all true wisdom, and
live in a way that shows in your life how this wisdom defeats pride and sin and exalts Christ.

I say it that way, with those three criteria of good philosophy — knowing Christ as supreme, treasuring Christ as supreme, showing Christ as supreme in your life — because of these texts in Colossians:

“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” (Colossians 1:15–16). In other words, he is the ground and the goal of everything, all true philosophy.
Be “rooted and built up in him and established in the faith” (Colossians 2:7). All true life flows from him as root and foundation.
Do your thinking “according to Christ” (Colossians 2:8). Let all thought, all affection, all action accord with Christ and all that can be known about Christ.
“[Hold] fast to [Christ as] the Head” — that is, hold fast to him as the all-supplying one (Colossians 2:19). His redemption makes all knowledge and all the enjoyment of all that is good possible for forgiven sinners.
“In [him] are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge” (Colossians 2:3).

All the Treasures of Wisdom

Whatever is valuable in any truth found anywhere is the way it points to Christ. Let me say that again, because that’s a little complex. Whatever is valuable in any truth found anywhere, whatever that value is, is this: it’s the way that truth points to Christ and helps us know him and treasure him and show him. That’s the truth. That’s what’s found in him.

There are very few scholars in the world who are willing and able to pursue wisdom — that is, do philosophy — in this Christ-saturated, Christ-treasuring, Christ-showing, Christ-exalting way. But if you can, if God gives you the grace to do that, do it.

Ignatius of Loyola (1491–1556) believed the cannonball that broke his leg was essential to his spiritual awakening. For Martin Luther, it was the threat of lightning. What unites them is that they are part of a common Christian tradition that teaches an uncomfortable lesson: suffering sanctifies.

The stories can be found throughout Scripture and in every church on almost any day. We might wish that faith grew especially during prosperity, but the voice of faith says, “Jesus, help!” And those words come most naturally when we are weak and unable to manage on our own. Growth can be judged, in part, by the number of words we speak to our Lord, and we tend to speak more words when we are at the end of ourselves.

Suffering sanctifies. God tests us in order to refine us. This is true, and knowing this might help us face the inconveniences and challenges of everyday life. But this knowledge feels less satisfying in the face of the death of a child, betrayal by a loved one, or victimization that leaves you undone. Then the nexus between trouble and God’s sanctifying goodness can gradually give way to a relationship in which you and God seem to live in the same house, but you rarely acknowledge him.

We expect some types of sanctifying suffering, but not those sufferings that border on the unspeakable. When these come, the idea that they sanctify us may feel unhelpful. Though we might say to a friend who had a flat tire, “How is God growing you through that?” we know that we should never ask such a question to someone when “the waters have come up to my neck” (Psalm 69:1). The basic principle is true — God sanctifies us through suffering — but there are more elegant and personal ways to talk about it.

Sanctification Is Closeness

A more helpful approach first refreshes our understanding of sanctification.

Let’s begin with a common definition: sanctification is growth in obedience. The problem is when this definition drifts from its intensely personal moorings. As it does, suffering becomes God’s plan to make us better people — stronger, seasoned soldiers who don’t retreat after a mere flesh wound. All of this, of course, sounds suspiciously like a father who is preparing his children to move out and become independent, which is the exact opposite of what God desires for us. Left in this form, the principle that “suffering sanctifies” will erode faith.

Sanctification, of course, is much more intimate. “Christ also suffered once for sins, the righteous for the unrighteous, that he might bring us to God” (1 Peter 3:18). Jesus died to draw us near to God, and our obedience serves that closeness. From this perspective, sin and any form of uncleanness distance us from God. Holiness, or sanctification, brings us closer.

Progressive Nearness

Think of the Old Testament tabernacle. The unclean, which included the foreign nations and those contaminated by the sins of others, were farthest from the place of God’s presence in the Most Holy Place. The clean were closer. They camped around God’s house and could freely come near to worship and offer sacrifices. The priests, however — the ones made holy — were closer still. They were invited daily, in turn, into the Holy Place, and, once a year, on the Day of Atonement, the high priest dared to enter the Most Holy Place. The high priest offers a picture of humanity as God intended — purified and close to him.

For us, we have been sanctified once for all by the obedience of Jesus Christ (Hebrews 10:10) and our faith in him. We now are holy ones. From that place, in the Most Holy Place, God invites us closer still, and our obedience and love for him are means by which we draw nearer. In his book on Leviticus, Michael Morales helpfully suggests progressive nearness as an alternative to progressive sanctification (Who Shall Ascend the Mountain of the Lord?, 18).

This heavenly pattern of nearness through obedience overflows into the very fabric of marriage: a married couple has been brought near in their declarations of commitment to each other, and then, for the rest of their lives, they draw nearer still through their growth in covenant love.

Sovereignty Has Mysteries

With sanctification understood more personally, we turn to our understanding of God’s sovereignty. “Suffering sanctifies” suggests that God purposely brings suffering into our lives. He ordains every detail. This is true, but some ways of talking about God’s sovereignty can be misleading and miss the emphasis of Scripture.

“God’s sovereignty invites us to trust in our Father who will make everything right, even in creation itself.”

God’s sovereignty is not an invitation to make perfect sense of how his power and love coexist with every detail of our suffering. Instead, his sovereignty reminds us to approach him as children who trust their Father and his love. A child understands love, and God’s love is, indeed, a fathomless expanse that he welcomes us to explore. He gives help and wisdom as we consider, “He who did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all, how will he not also with him graciously give us all things?” (Romans 8:32).

The most shameful abuse will not separate us from God, which is certainly counterintuitive when we feel like an outcast who is among the unclean. When we see him face-to-face, we will rest in (and even rejoice in) his righteous judgement against oppressors, and we will be thoroughly cleansed from the wicked acts done against us. In other words, God’s sovereignty invites us to trust in our Father who will make everything right, even in creation itself.

How Suffering Draws Us

So, how does suffering sanctify? How does God sanctify us in the midst of suffering?

In this way: with boundless compassion, God rushes to us. He comes close and enters into our burdens. He hears the cries of his people, which means that he will take action (Psalm 10:14). This is all true. Satan would have you think otherwise, but this is true.

“I am the suffering servant. Talk to me.” The Spirit invites you to see and hear Jesus, the suffering servant. The misery of a mysterious servant in Isaiah 52–53 foretells his story. The last week of Jesus’s life in John 10–21 reveals him most fully. In Jesus, you find a kindred spirit who knows your experience through his own. He understands you without you explaining the details. As you watch him, you will notice how the list of abuses against him gathered momentum every day. Perhaps you will be stunned by his universal rejection and shame.

“In Jesus, you find a kindred spirit who knows your experience through his own.”

Next, there is an unexpected turn. “He was pierced for our transgressions” (Isaiah 53:5), which is to say, for your transgressions. What does your sin have to do with your suffering? When Jesus took your sin, he assured you that nothing can separate you from the love of God, and he breached the wall of pain in which Satan, death, shame, sin, and misery dwelt. To this stronghold, Jesus announced their demise.

Then Jesus makes all this even more personal. He brings you closer. He invites you to speak to him. “Pour out your heart” (Psalm 62:8), he says. Prayer, of course, can be much more difficult than it sounds, so he gives you words to replace those unspeakable silences. When you read the Psalms, you can almost overhear Jesus ask you, “Is this how you feel?” His request that you speak to him is a sincere request, and he patiently waits for your words.

In response, you break your silence. Perhaps your words jar you, not because of their honesty but simply because your recent words to him have been so few.

“But how could evil have been given such liberty in my life? Why did you hide your face from me? How could you have allowed . . .” With these words, he has drawn you closer. They are expressions of your faith in God. You are being sanctified. You have listened to him. Unbelief turns away or simply rages; faith responds to God, presses in, and inquires, with words shaped by Scripture. Jesus himself has asked these very questions to his Father.

After more words back-and-forth, God invites you to grow as his child. “I am your God and Father. You can trust me.” He has given you evidence that he is trustworthy. He certainly will not forget you or the acts done against you (Isaiah 49:16). Do you believe? This is the truth.

He says, “Come closer, as my child, and trust me.” You respond, “Yes, I believe; help my unbelief. I trust you, but please give me more faith.”

This is one way suffering sanctifies: it brings us closer to God.

http://rss.desiringgod.org/link/10732/15102416/how-did-the-divine-husband-love-his-wife

ABSTRACT: Many who know John Calvin as a brilliant Reformed theologian do not yet know him as a model of pastoral collegiality and accountability. Under his leadership, ministry in sixteenth-century Geneva often happened in plurality and community. In particular, four regular meetings fostered Calvin’s vision of collegial ministry: the weekly Company of Pastors, Congrégation, and Consistory, and the quarterly Ordinary Censure. Through these institutions, the city’s pastors prayed together, studied together, encouraged and exhorted one another, and labored for the advance of the gospel together. Their model of ministry offers an enduring case study for pastoral practice, especially in a day when many pastors feel discouraged, isolated, and perhaps on the verge of burnout.

For our ongoing series of feature articles for pastors, leaders, and teachers, we asked Scott Manetsch, Chair of the Church History and the History of Christian Thought Department at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, to describe John Calvin’s model of pastoral collegiality in sixteenth-century Geneva.

In a New York Times article from August 2010, Paul Vitello describes the serious difficulties faced by many Christian ministers in the United States today.

Members of the clergy now suffer from obesity, hypertension and depression at rates higher than most Americans. In the last decade, their use of antidepressants has risen, while their life expectancy has fallen. Many would change jobs if they could. Public health experts . . . caution that there is no simple explanation of why so many members of a profession once associated with rosy-cheeked longevity have become so unhealthy and unhappy.1

During the past decade, researchers have probed various factors contributing to the poor mental and physical health of America’s professional clergy.2 Some factors commonly identified include poor pastor-church alignment, lack of resilience, lack of self-awareness, unresolved conflicts, heavy workloads, unreasonable expectations, financial pressure, and loneliness or isolation. Though no single aspect is usually decisive, the cumulative effect of these tensions and troubles frequently produces high levels of stress that force pastors to question their vocation, or cause them to leave the ministry altogether. Pastoral work often becomes “death by a thousand paper cuts.”3

“A historical awareness of the pastoral office can provide a broader perspective and a refreshing draught of wisdom.”

Thankfully, a variety of helpful resources are now available to support and encourage pastors who are burned out, bummed out, or burdened with congregational ministry.4 One important resource for pastoral health and flourishing that is frequently overlooked in contemporary discussions, however, is the history of the pastoral office — the practices, convictions, and institutions that Christians in the past have adopted to nourish and strengthen gospel ministers. As we shall see, a historical awareness of the pastoral office can provide a broader perspective and a refreshing draught of wisdom as modern-day Christian ministers live out their vocations in ways that are pleasing to God and sustainable for a lifetime of faithful and fruitful ministry. This present essay offers a case study of the model of ministry created by John Calvin in Geneva from 1536–1564. As we’ll see, Calvin recognized the unique challenges faced by faithful gospel ministers and created practices and institutions to promote pastoral collegiality, accountability, and spiritual vitality.5

Proclamation of the Word

When John Calvin (1509–1564) first arrived in Geneva in the summer of 1536, the city republic had been Protestant for barely two months and faced an uncertain future. As Calvin later recalled, “When I first arrived in this church there was almost nothing. They were preaching and that is all. They were good at seeking out idols and burning them, but there was no Reformation. Everything was in turmoil.”6 Over the next 28 years (with a three-year hiatus from 1538–1541), Calvin emerged as the chief human architect responsible for building a new religious order in Geneva that prioritized the preaching of God’s word, the fourfold ministry (pastor, elder, deacon, professor), church discipline, and intensive pastoral care and visitation. Calvin’s vision for a church reformed in doctrine and practice was articulated in Geneva’s Ecclesiastical Ordinances (1541), in the city’s catechism and liturgy (1542), and in Calvin’s expansive biblical commentaries and sermons. For the Genevan Reformer, the faithful exposition and proclamation of God’s word was one of the marks of a true church, standing at the center of gospel ministry. As he once noted, the word is the “means of our salvation, it is all our life, it is all our riches, it is the seed whereby we are begotten as God’s children; it is the nourishment of our souls.”7

One of the first steps Calvin took upon arriving in Geneva was to restructure parish boundaries in order to give priority to the preaching of the word of God. He and his colleague Guillaume Farel consolidated nearly a dozen Catholic churches and chapels into three parish churches within the city’s walls — St. Pierre, la Madeleine, and St. Gervais — and recruited six or seven Reformed ministers to serve these three urban congregations. Calvin also consolidated Geneva’s countryside parishes and appointed around a dozen pastors to serve these rural churches.

The proclamation of God’s word stood at the center of religious life in Calvin’s Geneva. In the city, preaching services included weekday sermons at 8:00 a.m., early morning sermons at 4:00 a.m. for domestic servants, Sunday sermons at 8:00 a.m. and 3:00 p.m., and a catechetical sermon on Sundays at noon for children. By 1561, there were 33 sermons preached within Geneva’s city walls each week. Calvin and his pastoral colleagues shared the preaching load and rotated between the city’s pulpits. “The preacher was not the proprietor of a pulpit or the captain of his congregation: it was Christ who presided over his Church through the Word.”8 Even so, a disproportionate responsibility for preaching fell on Calvin and his more gifted colleagues such as Theodore Beza and Michel Cop, who regularly preached more than 150 sermons per year.

Calvin and Geneva’s ministers prioritized God’s word in other ways as well. The Genevan liturgy, written by Calvin in 1542, was filled with scriptural allusions and rich biblical language. The singing of the Huguenot Psalter was a standard feature of both public and private worship in Geneva. Children were required to attend catechism classes where they learned the Apostles’ Creed, the Ten Commandments, and the Lord’s Prayer — a basic primer for Christian faith, conduct, and worship. In 1555, the ministers, along with the church’s elders, also began conducting annual household visitations to ensure that all of Geneva’s residents had a knowledge of basic biblical doctrine as articulated in the catechism and were living in accordance with God’s word. Finally, during the sixteenth century, Geneva became a center for Protestant publishing, with the city’s presses printing no fewer than eighty editions of the French Bible as well as translations of the Scripture into English, Italian, Spanish, and Latin. For Calvin and Geneva’s ministers, reading, hearing, and obeying God’s word was essential for the life of the church and the spiritual health of God’s people.

Pastoral Collegiality and Accountability

In addition to prioritizing the proclamation of God’s word, Calvin also created pastoral institutions in Geneva to encourage the collegiality, accountability, and spiritual health of the Protestant ministers who served the city’s churches. These institutions included the Company of Pastors, the Congrégation, the Ordinary Censure, and the Consistory — four pastoral bodies that profoundly shaped religious culture in Geneva and preserved Calvin’s theological legacy for generations to come.

Company of Pastors

In the mid-1540s, Calvin began to convene the ministers of the city and countryside every Friday morning to discuss the business of the church. This institution, known as the Company of Pastors, became a fixture of religious life in Geneva thereafter. The Company, whose membership consisted of around fifteen to eighteen pastors and several professors, was responsible to monitor public worship in the city, recruit and examine new pastors, supervise theological education at the Academy, oversee the work of the deacons and public benevolence, and offer godly advice to the city magistrates. Owing to the theological stature of Calvin and several of his colleagues, the Company of Pastors soon developed a vast correspondence with Reformed churches throughout Europe, becoming a kind of hub of international Calvinism. As such, the Company served as an advisory board to foreign churches on doctrinal and practical issues, solicited financial and political support for embattled Protestants, and supplied student-pastors to foreign churches. Moreover, the Company of Pastors began in 1555 a top-secret program where it recruited and trained Reformed ministers and sent them as missionary pastors to Catholic France.

“What collegial relationships might God be calling us to cultivate for our spiritual and emotional health?”

Calvin constructed the Company of Pastors out of the primary conviction of the equality of the ministry: all Christian ministers possessed equal authority under the word of God to proclaim the gospel, administer the sacraments, and govern the church. Though Calvin, as the moderator of the Company, possessed special moral authority among his colleagues, he rejected any notion of spiritual hierarchy within the pastoral office — all of Geneva’s ministers were considered equal gospel partners. As such, the Company provided a regular space where Geneva’s ministers could meet with one another, discuss theology, learn from one another, and support one another in their common vocation. This kind of support was especially important for Geneva’s countryside pastors, who often faced special challenges and dangers. One such pastor, Jean Gervais, experienced the scourge of warfare, roaming vigilantes, and aggressive Catholic missionaries during eighteen years of ministry in his small parish of Bossy-Neydens. On one occasion, he was even kidnapped and held for ransom. In the midst of these persistent dangers, the Company supported Gervais and his family by providing regular prayer support, encouragement, and advice; the ministers also petitioned the city magistrates for better wages and physical protection for their beleaguered colleague.9

Congrégation

A second institution that Calvin created in Geneva to promote pastoral collegiality and accountability was the Congrégation — a weekly assembly modeled after Huldrych Zwingli’s Prophetzei in Zurich, where the city’s pastors, theological students, and interested laypeople met for intense study of Scripture. Each week, different pastors were appointed to lead the discussion as the Congrégation worked systematically through books of the Bible. After an opening prayer, the designated pastor read the chosen passage aloud in French, and then offered a careful explanation of the passage drawn from his knowledge of the original Greek or Hebrew texts. After this exposition, the rest of Geneva’s pastors added their insights and corrections, contributing to an extended discussion of the exegetical and theological issues relevant to the biblical pericope being studied. In this way, then, the Congrégation functioned as a preacher’s clinic, a training ground for young preachers, and a tutorial where laypeople learned basic principles of biblical interpretation. The Congrégation was also a place where Calvin and his colleagues tested out their exegesis as they prepared sermons or wrote biblical commentaries.

From Calvin’s perspective, the collegial study of the Scripture was of vital importance in preserving the doctrinal purity of the church, forging unity among the ministers, and spurring ministers on to continued growth as faithful interpreters of the word of God. Scripture needed to be studied and interpreted in community. Calvin articulated this conviction in a letter to a colleague in Bern: “The fewer discussions of doctrine we have together, the greater the danger of pernicious opinions,” he noted. Indeed, “solitude leads to great abuse.”10 The Congrégation helped Geneva’s ministers mature as interpreters of God’s word and remain submissive to its teaching.

Ordinary Censure

The Ordinary Censure was a third institution that Calvin established in Geneva to promote pastoral collegiality and accountability. Four times a year — on the Friday before Geneva’s quarterly communion service — the ministers from city and countryside met behind closed doors to address personal grievances against one another, exhort one another to godliness, and offer fraternal corrections. The goal of this censure was to preserve the spiritual purity of the pastoral office, correct public and private sins, and achieve reconciliation among members of the pastoral company. At the conclusion of these meetings, the ministers shared together a meal of hot soup as a visual display of their spiritual unity in Christ.

Although the proceedings of the Ordinary Censure were strictly confidential, anecdotal evidence indicates that these meetings could be tense and contentious. During the sixteenth century, ministers were censured for a variety of sins and moral failures such as arrogance, slander, negligence in personal study, conflict with pastoral colleagues, inflammatory preaching, and teaching questionable doctrine. In one notable case, a minister was censured by his colleagues for attacking and beating a member of his congregation who came late to the worship service. Even more explosive was the case of Jean Ferron, who appeared before the Ordinary Censure in 1549 under suspicion of having groped a servant girl in his household and spoken salacious words to her. Ferron admitted to having done so “in order to test if she was a good girl.”11 The ministers sternly reprimanded Ferron and ordered that he be transferred to a different parish. Outraged, Ferron launched a blistering attack against Calvin and his fellow ministers. In response, Geneva’s pastors met again behind closed doors, exonerated Calvin, and suspended Ferron permanently from the ministry.

As these examples suggest, Calvin believed that pastors needed not only collegial support and encouragement, but also formal structures that held them accountable to God’s word, promoted godliness, and addressed areas of weakness and recurring sin.

Consistory

This commitment to hold ministers accountable within the church was also seen in the Consistory, the most famous church institution that Calvin established in Geneva. Beginning in 1542, the city’s pastors and twelve lay elders met every Thursday at noon to address cases of misbehavior and wrong belief among Geneva’s residents. During the decades that followed, this disciplinary court addressed hundreds of moral infractions each year, ranging from adultery to public drunkenness, from gambling to blasphemy, from business fraud to spousal abuse. Frequently, the Consistory served as an informal “counseling service,” where the pastors and elders addressed the grievances of embattled family members or neighbors in hopes of encouraging repentance and reconciliation.

Church discipline in Calvin’s Geneva took a number of forms, ranging from pastoral advice, personal admonition, public rebuke, temporary suspension from the Lord’s Supper, or (in rare cases) exclusion from the church. For Calvin, church discipline was a form of spiritual medicine, mandated by Scripture, to bring about the repentance of sinners, preserve the purity of Christ’s church, and protect Christians from the bad examples of the ungodly. As such, church discipline was indispensable for the health of any Christian community. “All who desire to remove discipline or to hinder its restoration . . . are surely contributing to the ultimate dissolution of the church,” Calvin stated.12 To be sure, the Consistory’s discipline could be intrusive, heavy-handed, and paternalistic; but at its best, it was an expression of pastoral care that God used to bring about repentance, reconciliation, and spiritual growth.

It is noteworthy that the ministers who staffed the Consistory sometimes also became objects of its discipline. During the sixteenth century, more than a dozen ministers were called to the Consistory’s chambers for various moral infractions, including fornication, greed, rebellion against the magistrates, usury, refusing to preach, and domestic quarrels. Some of these ministers were reprimanded; others were suspended from the Table; still others were deposed from their offices. In one memorable case, the Consistory confronted the rural minister Jean de Serres for abandoning his pastoral charge without notice due to family concerns and in hopes of securing a more lucrative church post in France. The Consistory sternly reprimanded Serres, temporarily suspended him from the Lord’s Supper, and recommended his demission from the ministry. The pastors and elders reminded Serres that the pastoral vocation was an “exceedingly sacred and honorable charge”; indeed, “his ministry should be one hundred times more precious to him than all of these things.”13

Contemporary Lessons and Suggestions

As we have seen, Calvin believed that ministers of the gospel needed collegial relationships of support and accountability if they were to flourish in their ministries. Modern studies regularly confirm this conclusion: “The isolation and loneliness of ministry often turns hardships into damaging experiences rather than ones of growth.” Indeed, “intimate relationships are necessary for spiritual growth.”14 In Geneva, Calvin addressed these concerns by creating four institutions, the Company of Pastors, the Congrégation, the Ordinary Censure, and the Consistory, which sought to facilitate pastoral relationships that were transparent, supportive, developmental, and collaborative. It would not be wise, of course, to import uncritically Calvin’s model of ministry into contemporary church life. (Ministry practices that are older are not necessarily better.) But even so, Calvin’s construction of the pastoral office in Geneva offers a valuable case study that can alert us to dangers, guide us in biblical wisdom, and spur our imaginations as we pursue the spiritual health of the church and her ministry leaders. Three points of application seem germane in this regard.

First, God can use institutions to preserve Christian truth and promote pastoral well-being. Evangelical Christians are frequently suspicious of building institutions for fear that they will become moribund and depart from their original gospel mission. Such concerns are not entirely without basis. Yet, at the same time, James K.A. Smith is correct in warning us against a cynical anti-institutionalism, for “institutions are ways to love our neighbors.” They are “durable, concrete structures that — when functioning well — cultivate all of creation’s potential toward what God desires: shalom, peace, goodness, justice, flourishing, delight.”15 As we have seen, Calvin recognized the importance of creating institutions to preserve his theological legacy and promote the well-being of the pastors who served Geneva’s church. What institutions might we create — or replicate — to contribute to the flourishing of Christian ministers?

Second, pastors who thrive in ministry have healthy relationships with other Christian leaders that are centered in the word of God. Calvin built into the DNA of the Genevan church weekly meetings where the city pastors met face to face, studied Scripture together, engaged in theological discussions, prayed for one another, and encouraged one another to persevere in their Christian vocations. They even occasionally shared meals together. For pastors today, collegial relationships of trust and support might be fostered among leaders of a multi-staff church, in a community ministerium, through denominational networks, or by regular gatherings of old seminary friends. Over the past decade, groups of pastors around the United States have even expressed this vision by forming their own versions of the Company of Pastors. These groups are most successful when they are attentive to God’s word, devoted to prayer, and committed to mutual sharing that is authentic and held in confidence. If we are presently isolated and lonely in Christian ministry, this question bears serious reflection: What collegial relationships might God be calling us to cultivate for our spiritual and emotional health?

“Calvin recognized that collegiality and accountability were two sides of the same coin.”

Finally, pastors who thrive in ministry are accountable to others and open to advice and constructive criticism. Calvin recognized that collegiality and accountability were two sides of the same coin. Consequently, even as Geneva’s ministers were welcomed into a pastoral company that provided emotional and spiritual support, they were also held accountable by colleagues for their doctrine, their preaching, and their personal behavior. The Congrégation provided a venue where ministers could get honest feedback on their skills as interpreters and expositors of the word of God — with an eye toward personal growth and improvement. Likewise, the Ordinary Censure allowed ministers to address with their colleagues those habits, sins, and conflicts that undermined personal holiness and disrupted the unity of the church. In Geneva, no minister was a lone ranger, above correction. These questions bear asking, therefore: Who is asking us the hard questions that we need to hear? Do we have colleagues who regularly speak God’s truth to us? If not, how might we welcome such people into life and ministry?

For Calvin, the call to be a Christian pastor was a high and holy calling — but it was also a most challenging vocation, not to be lived in isolation. Ministers of the gospel flourished as they experienced communion with Christ through his word, were empowered by the Holy Spirit, and enjoyed the precious gift of godly colleagues in ministry.

Audio Transcript

Welcome back to the podcast. Normally on Wednesdays, we feature a sermon clip from John Piper’s preaching archive. Not today. Today we have a full message — a short one, a recent one, one Pastor John preached at a gathering of our friends at Crossway. The gathering met at the most recent Evangelical Theological Society in Fort Worth, Texas. That was the occasion for a celebration of the life and work of Lane and Ebeth Dennis — on the occasion of Lane and Ebeth stepping down from their positions at Crossway, which they started back in 1978. If you own an ESV Bible or a book published by Crossway, you have Lane and Ebeth Dennis to thank for that. But they are now in transition. In the transition, Josh Dennis, their son, will take over for his dad, Lane, and will now lead Crossway as its CEO and president. Lane will continue to serve as the chairman of the board and as executive consultant. Ebeth will continue as an associate consultant. They’re not retiring.

Pastor John, you’re normally not with us on Wednesdays, but here you are. You’re making an exception for this couple. We’re about to play your message in a moment. But introduce us to this couple. A lot of listeners don’t know them. Who are they? What do they mean to you? Why are they so precious and important to us at Desiring God? And tell us, what did you hope to accomplish in this brief message we’re about to hear?

Thanks, Tony. I love the thought of talking about Lane and Ebeth Dennis. Just a little more background before I point to my friendship. In 1938, the parents of Lane Dennis started a small tract-publishing ministry, and within five years they were distributing five million tracts a year. And that Good News Publishing, as it’s still called, grew into a nonprofit ministry spreading Christian literature around the world. And in 1978, as you said, Crossway Books became the book publishing arm of this nonprofit ministry. So Crossway is one of the unusual major book publishing companies that is a nonprofit today. Lane and Ebeth Dennis have led that ministry for decades until the recent handoff to their son, Josh.

Crossway has published, I think, 1,500 titles and is today really quite an influential Christian publisher of biblically faithful books. And I can’t really distinguish between my personal friendship with Lane and Ebeth and my relationship with Crossway Books as the primary publisher of the things that I’ve written. So, let me give you three examples of that intersection between my life and their life and Crossway Books.

Intersecting Ministries

In 1987, I got a phone call from Lane Dennis. It was my first acquaintance. I didn’t know who he was, and he wanted to explore with me the idea of a major book on the nature of manhood and womanhood and the biblical teaching concerning the roles of men and women. And the outcome of that phone call was the publishing of Recovering Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, affectionately known as “the big blue book” that Wayne Grudem and I edited and Crossway published in 1991. That was the beginning of a 35-year friendship and publishing partnership.

Then, in the late nineties, both Wayne Grudem and I felt the need for a new Bible translation that would lean in a little more in the direction of formal equivalence than only dynamic equivalence, and that would be in the tradition of the King James, American Standard Version, Revised Standard Version. Wayne and I both spent decades reading and memorizing the Revised Standard Version in spite of its flaws, and it went out of print. And so we couldn’t give it to anybody. We couldn’t ask people to use it in church because they couldn’t get ahold of it.

And we thought, “What a great idea if Crossway could get the rights from the National Council of Churches and produce an improved version of the Revised Standard Version while keeping it in the same linguistic tradition.” We urged Lane Dennis to make that fateful phone call to the National Council of Churches, and to everyone’s amazement, it happened: the ESV was published in 2001, and today the ESV is one of the most widely used English versions of the Bible in the world.

The third thing I would mention that has knit us together is that since those days of partnership in Recovering Biblical Manhood and Womanhood and the Bible translation, almost all of my books have been published through Crossway. I made that decision to publish with Crossway knowing that Crossway is not the biggest Christian publisher in America — it doesn’t have the most dollars. More important than that, it seemed to me — I feel this way today — was a theological and philosophical oneness of mind between author and publisher, which I am very happy to say in this case meant a rich friendship and oneness of mind between Lane and Ebeth Dennis and me. I think that in this message that you’re about to hear, you will hear some of my affection for them, and I hope it comes through loud and clear.

It does. And with that, here is Pastor John’s message, simply titled “God’s Providence in the Ministry of Crossway Books and in the Life of Lane and Ebeth Dennis.” Have a listen.

God’s Providence at Crossway

Lane and Ebeth Dennis are two of the most gracious people that I know. And I say that not because of reputation, though that is true and easy to verify, but because of over 35 years of knowing each other and them showing me personally unremitting kindness, even through circumstances that could have been relationally destructive and were not, because Lane and Ebeth love like they have been loved by their Savior.

So, I count it an enormous privilege to speak for a few minutes at this juncture in your professional and personal lives. I’m going to spend the next few minutes exulting with you, all of you, in the preciousness and the greatness and the beauty of God’s providence as it relates to you and Crossway. I define providence as God’s purposeful sovereignty. It is the all-embracing, all-pervasive, all-wise governance by God of all things for the demonstration of his glory in the Christ-exalting gladness of his people in God.

“Our hope rests finally on the freedom and wisdom and mercy of God’s providence.”

As each of us here lifts our hands in thankfulness to God for his merciful providence that you were not in your house when it burned down, we know that the very providence that rescued your life could have prevented the fire. Which means that our peace, our joy, our hope does not rest on being rescued from the disaster, the loss, the sorrow. Our hope rests finally on the freedom and wisdom and mercy of God’s providence to govern all fires, all calamities, all rescues, all non-rescues, so that all things work finally to magnify the fullness of the glory of God and all that he is for us in Jesus.

So, let us exult together in seven manifestations of God’s providence in the history of Crossway Books and your lives in particular.

1. Providence and Deity

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

So the most fundamental thing that God is making clear in the mouth of Isaiah in Isaiah 46 is that his sovereignty in accomplishing his purposes is what it means to be God. “I am God; my counsel will stand.” “I am God; I accomplish my purposes.” Only God depends on no one but God, no one but himself, informing his purposes and accomplishing them. That’s the ultimate foundation of Good News Publishers, Crossway Books. And what makes this morning so happy is that you know that and you are glad to have it so.

2. Providence and Purpose

The God of all-embracing providence has not left us in the dark at all about his ultimate purpose in redemption and creation. It’s not hidden. It runs like a golden thread from Genesis to Revelation. “Bring my sons from afar and my daughters from the end of the earth, everyone who is called by my name, whom I created for my glory” (Isaiah 43:6–7). It’s not unclear why you’re in existence. It’s just gloriously clear. We were “predestined according to the purpose of him who works all things according to the counsel of his will, so that we who were the first to hope in Christ might be to the praise of his glory” (Ephesians 1:11–12). That’s why we be. We exist for the praise of his glory — the meaning of the universe.

Now, praise is not a sad affair, especially when the last vestige of evil is wiped from the new earth. Therefore, the final goal of all providence is the glorification of God in the gladness of the blood-bought people of God in God. And when we search, as I did online, all the documents available for Good News Publishers and Crossway Books back to 1938, the refrain is as clear there as it is in the Bible that you exist for the glory of God. It’s clear in every mission statement that has been written that I could find. “Glad news for the lost” (from your parents), “and glory to God, through Jesus Christ” (from you).

3. Providence and Gospel

Truly in this city there were gathered together against your holy servant Jesus, whom you anointed, both Herod and Pontius Pilate, along with the Gentiles and the peoples of Israel, to do whatever your hand and your plan had predestined to take place. (Acts 4:27–28)

So, at the moment in history when the greatest evil was perpetrated against the greatest good, the all-governing hand of God was most lovingly active and sovereign. Herod scoffed. Pilate prevaricated. The mobs cried, “Crucify!” The soldiers drove the nails. And in it all, God was doing his plan and his purpose to save sinners. If God’s providence did not extend to the greatest evil ever done, there would be no good news, and there’d be no Good News Publishers, and there would be no Crossway Books. For 83 years, Good News Publishers and Crossway Books has flooded the world with the good news that it was God who bruised his son to save millions of sinners.

4. Providence and Conversion

When Jesus said to the departing rich young ruler, “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of God,” his disciples were dismayed and said, “Well, who then can be saved?” — to which Jesus answered, “With man this is impossible, but with God all things are possible” (Matthew 19:24–26).

Good News Publishers has cast upon the waters of this world billions of gospel tracts, and more recently, millions of gospel-laden books. And surely, it is no exaggeration to say that thousands upon thousands of persons have miraculously passed from death to life reading that good news — every one of them a miracle. Because with man, it is impossible, but not with God.

5. Providence and Loss

Every godly life, every fruitful ministry, advances through loss. “Through many tribulations we must enter the kingdom” (Acts 14:22). And through many tribulations we must advance in godliness and fruitfulness. When the final word of loss came to Job that his ten children were dead, “Job arose and tore his robe and shaved his head and fell on the ground and worshiped. And he said, ‘Naked I came from my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return. The Lord gave, the Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord’” (Job 1:20–21).

So, whether by flood or fire or relational heartache or physical challenges, Crossway and you, Lane and Ebeth, have known loss on your way to godliness and fruitfulness. And we today join you in saying, “Blessed be the name of the Lord.”

6. Providence and Humility

God intended and designed his meticulous providence in order to shut the mouth of all self-reliant pride and to awaken in us God-dependent humility.

Come now, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go into such and such a town and spend a year there and trade and make a profit” — yet you do not know what tomorrow will bring. What is your life? For you are a mist. . . . Instead you ought to say, “If the Lord wills, we will live and do this or that.” (James 4:13–15)

As it is, you are arrogant in saying, “I will get on the plane this afternoon and go to Minneapolis,” if you do not also say, “If the meticulous providence of God orders it so.”

“Meticulous providence is designed to remove boasting from human beings and to instill humility.”

If God wills, we will do this or that. That’s why I use the term “all-embracing, all-pervasive” providence. But the existential reality is this: that meticulous providence is designed to remove boasting from human beings and to instill humility. And I just want to bear public witness, happy witness, with all of you that God has wrought this in you, Lane and Ebeth. He has wrought this in you. We need examples today of your kind of strong backbone and conviction mingled with humble contrition and dependence. We need it very badly.

7. Providence and Perseverance

You and I, and all of us I am sure, hope to say with the apostle Paul, “I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith” (2 Timothy 4:7). And to those of us who love you and love this ministry, we say that we will pray that, indeed, both of you will say that cheerfully and confidently in the hour of your death. And we have good hope that you will — and it isn’t in you or me. It’s in the keeping providence of God. The Lord says,

I will make with them an everlasting covenant, that I will not turn away from doing good to them. And I will put the fear of me in their hearts, that they may not turn from me. I will rejoice in doing them good, and I will plant them in this land in faithfulness, with all my heart and all my soul. (Jeremiah 32:40–41)

That’s your only hope to say in the hour of your death, “I have finished the race.” This is our only hope. If you have another hope, you’re building on sand. “He who calls you is faithful; he will surely do it” (1 Thessalonians 5:24).

Greatly Loved

So, I say it on God’s behalf, and I say it to Lane and Ebeth on all of our behalf: you are greatly loved. And I join with you and the rest of us here in ascribing your keeping to the all-embracing, all-pervasive, all-wise, merciful providence that God has shown to us.

Now to him who is able to keep you from stumbling and to present you blameless before the presence of his glory with great joy, to the only God, our Savior, through Jesus Christ our Lord, be glory, majesty, dominion, and authority, before all time and now and forever. Amen. (Jude 24–25)