Audio Transcript

Jesus was sinless. “He committed no sin, neither was deceit found in his mouth,” says Peter (1 Peter 2:22). And he remains sinless today. “In him there is no sin,” says John (1 John 3:5). This glorious truth forms the basis of his substitutionary atoning work for sinners. But his sinlessness also forms the basis of why he is qualified to sympathize with us as sinners. And on that point comes a controversy. If Jesus is sinless, doesn’t that mean he never really tasted the power of temptation? How can a perfect man who never sinned — a man who never struggled to get free from a sin habit — how can he truly feel the power of temptation?

This line of thinking is wrong. It’s wrong because you’re not struggling with sin if you’re continually giving in to sin. In other words, the pressure of temptation is felt most strongly by those who most earnestly resist giving in to the sin. And if that point sounds familiar, it should. We covered that theme several times on the podcast already, particularly in episodes on lust like APJ episodes 291, 804, and 963. The pressure of temptation is felt most strongly by those who most earnestly resist giving in to the sin. Pastor John explains in this clip, from a 1996 sermon.

I apologize for about a minute of static in the middle of it. But the clip is too good, and the point too important, not to share here on the podcast. Here’s Pastor John, 25 years ago, preaching on Hebrews 4:15, a text that tells us our high priest can sympathize with our weakness, because he never sinned.

Now, look at verse 15. In spite of the fact that verse 14 presents a magnificent and lofty great high priest, verse 15 describes him in another way.

We do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet without sin.

Notice three things: (1) he was tempted like you are; (2) he never gave into temptation, never sinned; and (3) he is very sympathetic with us in our weaknesses.

Temptation’s Full Force

Fifty years ago, C.S. Lewis was pondering this text, and he heard an objection raised by a scoffer, and the objection went like this: “If Jesus never sinned, he can’t know what real temptation is like. He can’t sympathize, he can’t empathize with me because he’s never tasted the full force of temptation.” And this is what C.S. Lewis wrote in response:

A silly idea is current that good people do not know what temptation means. This is an obvious lie. Only those who try to resist temptation know how strong it is. . . . A man who gives in to temptation after five minutes simply does not know what it would have been like an hour later.

And I might add: or a lifetime later — like hanging in there with a tough marriage and resisting the temptation to bail out, or hanging in there against sexual temptation and resisting the temptation, not just five minutes or one hour, but year in and year out, decade in and decade out, until Jesus comes or calls. Talk about knowing the force and power of temptation — only those who do that know the full force. Lewis continues,

That is why bad people in one sense know very little about badness. They have lived a sheltered life by always giving in. . . . Christ, because He was the only man who never yielded to temptation, is also the only man who knows to the full what temptation means — the only complete realist. (Mere Christianity, 142)

“Jesus was ‘tempted as we are, yet without sin,’ and therefore he knows the full force of what it is to be tempted.”

Don’t you ever think that because you have lived a life of sin that you know more about temptation than the godly person who has walked that razor’s edge of the straight and narrow, gritting his teeth in the power of the Holy Spirit and saying, “No, no, no, no, no,” and fighting his way through every day with righteousness, and laying his head down, and feeling the force of evil upon him day after day after day, and triumphing over it in God. Don’t you ever think that you know more of evil than that person, or that you know more of evil than Jesus Christ. Jesus was “tempted as we are, yet without sin,” and therefore he knows the full force of what it is to be tempted.

In Every Way as We Are

Let me illustrate for you.

Jesus was tempted to lie to save his life. Would you not, surrounded by soldiers, spears, a cross in the corner, nails on the floor, hammers over there, having seen what it was like when they asked you, “Are you the Christ, the Son of the living God?” be tempted to lie?

He was tempted to steal to help his mother when his father died, I do not doubt. There were at least five kids in that family. Widows don’t make it easy. Joseph disappears off the scene early. Jesus was tempted to steal. Jesus was tempted to covet all those things, those nice things that Zacchaeus had. Even after he gave away half his goods, he was a rich man, and Jesus walked out owning nothing. Do you think he was not tempted to covet a home for himself, a place to lay his head down every night?

He was tempted to dishonor his parents when they were tough on him and told him what was right and wrong and set limits, perhaps more than the other boys in Nazareth. He was tempted to take revenge when he was wrongly accused. So often they said lies about him. And with one word, he could have made fools out of them.

He was tempted to lust when Mary knelt down, leaned over, and wiped his feet with her hair. He was tempted to murmur at God’s sovereignty when his friend and colleague and brother, John the Baptist, was beheaded at the whim of a dancing girl. “Where are you, God?” He was tempted to gloat over his accusers when they couldn’t answer his questions.

He knew the battle, folks, and he triumphed over that monster every day, all day, for thirty-three years. And when it crescendoed at the end, he never ever gave in.

Who Will Help the Helpless?

Now, let me close by pointing you to verse 16. The conclusion that we draw from all of this — that we have a great high priest, that he is the Son of God, that he has passed through the heavens with God, that he is sympathetic with us — the conclusion to draw is that we can draw near to God for grace.

Let me pose a problem, as we close, that has kept many people away from Jesus. And I want to make sure nobody falls for this, because there are so many people — I’ve talked to so many. I’ve heard of so many who get to the crisis point of whether to embrace Christ as their high priest, their Savior, their Lord, their King, their guide, their friend, and they push it away.

Here’s why many of them do: everybody in this room knows that you need help.

We need help with our bodies.
We need help with our minds.
We need help with our jobs.
We need help with our spouses.
We need help with our kids.
We need help with our finances.
We need help with our choices.

Everybody knows we need help. And there’s a second thing everybody in this room knows in your most honest moments: you don’t deserve help. John Piper doesn’t deserve any help from anybody. Why? I’m a sinner. I deserve one thing: judgment. I don’t deserve help. So here I am. I need help to live my life and cope with eternity, and I don’t deserve help.

Grace for the Least Deserving

Now, what are you going to do? This is the trap that keeps many people away from Christ. You’ve got maybe three or four options.

You can deny it all and say, “I’ll be a superman or superwoman and rise above my need for help.” And that might last a year, a decade, and then you’d break.
Or you could say, “I can’t deny it all, but I can drown it all,” and you throw your life into a pool of sensual pleasure.” That’s a possibility.
The third option is very common. It’s looking here: “I need help with my life. My life doesn’t work. I’m not in control. I especially can’t handle my sin and my eternity.” And over here: “I don’t deserve help. Nobody owes me anything, because I’m a sinner. I have wrecked things so many times, and my attitude stinks, and I don’t love God the way I should.” Paralysis and hopelessness. And when you present the gospel to a person like that, if they don’t have ears to hear, they just say, “There’s no way. There’s no hope for me.”
But now there’s a fourth option. And that’s what the Bible is about, that’s what the history of Israel is about, that’s what this text is about. And the option is this: There is a high priest who is the Son of God, who takes the blood of his own death into the presence of God. And he enables us to say, “Yes, I need help — and yes, I don’t deserve it. But no, I will not be paralyzed, because there’s a mediator, and Jesus came to give the undeserving help.”

“The throne of grace is God meeting the need of undeserving people.”

What do you call that? The throne of grace. The throne of grace is God meeting the need of undeserving people. You’ve got to hear that now. I want you to take that out of here in about one minute. Grace comes into your life when you are paralyzed with the sense that you need help and you don’t deserve help, and therefore, you feel hopeless, and you’re either going to superman it out or drown it out or be paralyzed with depression.

And grace comes in and says, “Yes, you’ve analyzed that rightly: you need help. Yes, you’ve analyzed that rightly: you don’t deserve a thing from God. But no, you don’t need to be a superman. No, you don’t need to drown it. And no, you don’t need to be paralyzed. The fourth option is this: “I paid for that sin, and while you don’t deserve any help, God will give you help if you come through a high priest.”

http://rss.desiringgod.org/link/10732/14875448/how-does-anger-give-place-to-the-devil

“The church” this. “The church” that.

One way professing Christians betray a small, thin, and weak vision of the risen Christ is by dumping on “the church.” They might speak flippantly of what “the church” doesn’t get. Or what “the church” does wrong. Or the problem with “the church” in our day. They claim to know better than “the church.” If only they could fix “the church.” Having become concerned about an oversight, error, or danger they see in some Christians or churches, they’ve become careless with their words about the church — and particularly so when we consider what Christ himself says about her.

As much as we may claim to esteem Jesus, and desire to speak highly of him, we reveal gaps in our devotion when we broad-brush his bride with negativity, evidence strange biases against her, and feed into popular opinion by suspecting, seeing, spinning, and spreading the worst.

“We show how little we think of Christ by speaking endless negativity about his bride.”

Whatever the motivations (which are varied and complex), we demonstrate how subtly, and perhaps deeply, we have been shaped by, and conformed to, the course of this world, when we talk about “the church” in ways grossly out of step with our Lord. And we show how little we think of Christ, by speaking endless negativity about his bride.

Wife of the Lamb

Make no mistake, the church is his bride. How startling that Christ himself would risk such an image?

Not only did John the Baptist speak of him as such (John 3:29), but Jesus cast himself as “the bridegroom” who is taken away (Matthew 9:15; Mark 2:19–20; Luke 5:34–35), and whose return is delayed (Matthew 25:1–10). In one of Scripture’s final climactic statements, Revelation 22:17 says, “The Spirit and the Bride say, ‘Come’” — meaning the church. In Revelation 21:9, the angel says, “Come, I will show you the Bride, the wife of the Lamb.”

The church is Jesus’s bride, “the wife of the Lamb.” And when we admire a man, respect him, appreciate him, and reverence him, we are careful what we say about his wife — and all the more so in public. We check our suspicions. We are vigilant to not let personal disappointments fester into a global cynicism toward her. We go out of our way not to regard her, speak of her, or criticize her in his presence in any way that would puzzle or dishonor her husband. We show little esteem for a groom when we insult his bride.

So, those who genuinely admire and worship Christ will not only reverence his person but also his perspective. They will want to know, and remember, What does Jesus think of his church? What does Christ feel toward her? How does he talk about her?

He Chose Her

First, the great Groom’s choice of his Bride is remarkable. Not only is she “a chosen race” (1 Peter 2:9), but he chose her in her ungodliness, not because of any native beauty in her. The Father chose the church for his Son before the foundation of the world (Ephesians 1:4), writing the names of his people in “the book of life of the Lamb who was slain” (Revelation 13:8).

Not only did Christ and his Father choose the church for her salvation, but also to be an instrument of divine revelation in the world. And not just an instrument, but the central vessel in making God known in his world in this age. The vision of the church is astoundingly, almost uncomfortably, high in Ephesians 3.

When Paul there offers praise to God the Father, he says, “To him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus.” We expect “in Christ Jesus” as the focal point through which God’s glory is displayed — but here she is, his wife, side by side with Christ himself, the bridegroom: “to him be glory in the church.” This echoes the centrality of the church in making God known just a few verses prior: the manifold wisdom of God is being “made known to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly places” — and now he mentions only one instrument — “through the church” (Ephesians 3:10).

Disappointed as we may be with an unfaithful leader, or hurt as we may feel by particular people or ministries in a local community, we would do well to remember such a vision of the church — Christ’s own vision of his church. The church, worldwide and throughout the ages, is not mainly bringing reproach upon Christ. Rather, the church, alongside Christ, is bringing glory to the Father and making his wisdom known to all the powers, earthly and heavenly.

He Cherishes Her

Second, the church is not just a body. She is his body (Ephesians 5:22; Colossians 1:18, 24). “You are the body of Christ,” Paul says to the church (1 Corinthians 12:27).

In the best body reference of all, God not only has “put all things under [Christ’s] feet” as sovereign of the universe on the very throne of heaven, but also God “gave [Christ] as head over all things to the church, which is his body, the fullness of him who fills all in all” (Ephesians 1:22–23). Christ’s vision and concern for his body boggles, stretches, and defies human explanation. Which might, at least, correct our uncareful speech.

Jesus loves the church as his own body. He emphatically does not hate his own flesh, but he nourishes and cherishes it (Ephesians 5:29). Jesus cherishes his church. He adores her, cares for her, gladly devotes his attention to her. He has pledged his loyalty to her, to be one flesh with her, to hold fast to her, to not give up on her, to never leave or forsake her. “Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her (Ephesians 5:25).

He Cleanses Her

Jesus’s awareness of his church’s flaws and failures is far more extensive than any human’s. He knows every detail of ongoing evil. He knows the sins we try to hide. Jesus’s high view of his church is not owing in the least to his turning a blind eye to, or any codding or soft-peddling of, sin. He died to cleanse his church of her sin. He does not take her sin lightly. He is his church’s “Savior” (Ephesians 5:23). No one takes sin in the church more seriously than Jesus. He knows the depths of her sin. Yet he still loves her.

“No one takes sin in the church more seriously than Jesus.”

He not only chose her (despite her sin) and cherishes her (despite her sin), but he also is cleansing her from her sin. He died to both secure his bride and to sanctify her, to make her holy (Ephesians 5:26). And he rose, and lives, to cleanse her “by the washing of water with the word” (Ephesians 5:26). Do our words echo his? Do we join him in washing her, cleansing her, sanctifying her, building her up with our words? Or do we oppose him, insult her, sully her, tear her down by the spirit we harbor and the words we speak in the world and post on the web?

The day is coming when Jesus will “present the church to himself in splendor, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, that she might be holy and without blemish” (Ephesians 5:27) — when all will see “the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband” (Revelation 21:2). Christ is preparing his church for the wedding, purging sin, adorning his bride for that day when she will be presented to him, and every eye will see her, at last, in unparalleled majesty.

Hard Words of Love

Here we might ask about Jesus’s own hard words for his bride. Isn’t it the Bridegroom himself who says these devastating words in Revelation 3:15–16? “I know your works: you are neither cold nor hot. Would that you were either cold or hot! So, because you are lukewarm, and neither hot nor cold, I will spit you out of my mouth.” Love for the Bride of Christ does not mean silence about the sins of particular churches and specific saints. But it does mean that we take care how we speak about those failures.

Part of cleansing the church means correcting her, but correcting her does not mean despising her, or painting her sins in broad strokes. When Christ confronts the churches in Revelation 2–3, he addresses specific churches with their own failures. And in correcting them, he also woos them back to himself. Notice even in Revelation 3:

Those whom I love, I reprove and discipline, so be zealous and repent. Behold, I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in to him and eat with him, and he with me. (Revelation 3:19–20).

Jesus doesn’t sit back in his armchair issuing criticisms about the church, however much indwelling sin remains, for now, in his people. He “gave himself for us to redeem us from all lawlessness and to purify for himself a people for his own possession” (Titus 2:14). He is redeeming his church from her sin, purifying her as a people for himself. There is no place for hopelessness about the future of the church. Jesus will build his church (Matthew 16:18), and he will cleanse her.

He Covenants with Her

Finally, Jesus makes lifelong — eternity long — promises to his bride. He covenants with her.

He will provide for and protect her. The gates of hell will not prevail against her (Matthew 16:18). “The righteous” — his church — “will shine like the sun in the kingdom of their Father” (Matthew 13:43). Stunningly, Jesus will “dress himself for service and have [his people] recline at table, and he will come and serve them” (Luke 12:37). And not only will he come to them; he will bring them to himself, to sit with him on his very throne: “The one who conquers, I will grant him to sit with me on my throne, as I also conquered and sat down with my Father on his throne” (Revelation 3:21).

For now, tears remain. We face death, battle remaining sin, endure mourning and crying, persevere in pain. Yet he promises, to his church, to “wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore” (Revelation 21:4). And this when we hear a loud voice from the throne saying,

Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God. (Revelation 21:3).

And so we, his church, will receive the fulfillment of Scripture’s great, long-running promise: He will be our God, and we will be his people. He has pledged himself to us. We will have him. We will know him. We will enjoy him. We will dwell with him, forever.

His church is the people he has chosen to be among for eternity.

Would You Insult His Bride?

Jesus chose his wife before the foundation of the world. He cherishes her with energy and attentiveness. He cleanses her and prepares to present her pure and beautiful to himself. And he covenants to be hers, and with her, for all eternity. The Lord of heaven loves his bride. Does that not make you love her all the more? Does that not make you want to keep from carelessly speaking ill of her?

We do not whitewash the flaws of particular church leaders, or particular tendencies in sinful hearts. We do not cover for evil. Nor do we broad-brush the church, pretending to see and know flaws that are beyond our vantage nationwide, not to mention worldwide, and across the ages. And we don’t pretend the church is yet fully cleansed. Christ is still working on her.

When tempted to dump on “the church,” we who claim Christ will do well to remember his perspective, and his heart, and to speak with the grace and truth of our Savior toward his bride.

Audio Transcript

How do we shepherd small children through the pains of life? The question comes to us from a mom in Baltimore named Taylor. She writes, “Hello, Pastor John! My husband and I have been deeply encouraged and greatly challenged by this podcast and through all the Desiring God resources. Thank you! I just started your new book, Providence, and it is stirring my heart with great affection toward our God. Thank you for helping to align my emotions through your writing with the reality that is ours. This past fall, my husband was in a serious car accident. He walked away from it with just a concussion, but our car was totaled. When we shared this with our 3-year-old, in an age-appropriate way, he was greatly affected by this, even angered. We tried to explain how God had allowed this and protected Daddy through his providence, but he had two responses: asking when God will ‘make Daddy dead,’ and showing anger toward God and wanting to ‘beat him up.’ How would you explain suffering in light of God’s providence to a toddler, and help him to love God more for it?”

There are two principles that need to be taken into account when choosing what to say about God to a particular audience or child. One principle is whether they are open and mature enough to understand the truth. The other principle is whether we have spoken the truth clearly and boldly enough so that a real judgment can be formed about it.

Is Our Audience Ready?

Two passages of Scripture relate to that first principle. Jesus said, “Do not give dogs what is holy, and do not throw your pearls before pigs, lest they trample them underfoot and turn to attack you” (Matthew 7:6). I’m not saying you should think of your 3-year-old as a dog or a pig — although his responses were the kind of responses Jesus had in mind when he gave that principle: “I’m gonna beat God up.”

Rather, the point is that there are audiences or children that are so spring-loaded to reject the truth that Jesus warns us not to bring reproach on the truth by having it trampled under their feet. Your 3-year-old may show himself to have such an attitude toward God’s providence that you should measure your teaching by what he can hear. You don’t substitute falsehood for truth; you simply decide how much and when you can share.

Now the other passage is 1 Corinthians 3:1–3:

I, brothers, could not address you as spiritual people, but as people of the flesh, as infants in Christ. I fed you with milk, not solid food, for you were not ready for it. And even now you are not yet ready, for you are still of the flesh. For while there is jealousy and strife among you, are you not of the flesh and behaving only in a human way?

Here the problem is not with swinishness but immaturity: “I . . . could not address you as spiritual people, but . . . as infants.” That’s the first principle: Is the audience or the person, the child, open enough, mature enough to receive the particular truth you’re talking about?

Have We Spoken Clearly?

Here’s the second principle — namely, whether we have spoken the doctrine clearly and boldly enough, so that the people have a real sense of its truth and worth and beauty. Paul says in 2 Corinthians 4:2,

We have renounced disgraceful, underhanded ways. We refuse to practice cunning or to tamper with God’s word, but by the open statement of the truth we would commend ourselves to everyone’s conscience in the sight of God.

An “open statement of the truth” — that’s what’s needed for a clear grasp of the doctrine, and a sense that it is good and wise and just and beautiful. You can see how this is almost the exact opposite of the first principle. In that case, we might say too much, and in the second case, we might say too little, or hedge the truth a bit.

Now what I have in mind in this second case, this second principle, is perhaps being so cautious, or so hesitating, or so qualifying in our talk about God’s sovereignty, that a child may pick up, in the way things are explained, or the tone of voice, that Mom and Dad are not exactly excited or joyful about God’s providence.

The child may hear, in the explanation, a kind of permission not to like this doctrine. A lot of people talk that way about God. They are so ready to excuse anger at God that they talk about his sovereignty as though it actually invites anger. I think anger at God is always wrong — always. If you feel it, of course, you should say it. But to feel anger at God is sinful. So I don’t think our tone of voice or the way we talk about God’s providence should sound like it invites disapproval.

I don’t know which of these two principles — say less, say more — should govern these parents right at this moment with this child. But I’m very surprised that a 3-year-old feels free to talk about beating God up. It surely sounds like God has been presented to him in a way that God is too small, too humanlike. But I’m not there, and I can’t say with any certainty.

Four Ways to Teach Providence

What about the last part of the question: How would you explain God’s providence to a toddler and help him to love God more for his providence? Here are four suggestions.

1. Illustrate God’s merciful providence.

First, tell him stories that illustrate how bad things are often God’s wise and merciful way of doing good to us. For example, I know several stories where a serious injury happened to a person, and it was the way the doctors found the cancer in the lacerated leg, which then enabled the doctors to start therapy that saved the person’s life. Then you can teach the child: “That’s always true. That’s always true when bad things happen to God’s children. He always does good through them, even if we can’t see it.”

“Bad things are often God’s wise and merciful way of doing good to us.”

Another example is this: When you go to the doctor, he pokes at you; or when you go to the dentist, he drills on you; or a doctor cuts you to have surgery to save your life. He hurts you to save you. The doctor’s always doing that for our good. So you tell those stories to children to build in the truth so that they can grasp that bad things, hurtful things, painful things are not unloving things from God. They can get that very early.

2. Explain that suffering is normal.

Second suggestion: weave into your teaching, again and again, the passages that say suffering is necessary for Christians and designed by God. Teach a child that suffering is normal, not exceptional, for Christians.

Matthew 5:12; 24:9
John 15:20
Romans 5:3
James 1:2, 12
1 Peter 1:6; 4:12

And on and on and on. Saturate your kids with this doctrine.

3. Remove any sense of entitlement from God.

Third, and related to that second suggestion: teach your child that we are sinners and that we don’t deserve anything good from God. The surprising thing in a world of rebels like us is not pain; the surprising thing is pleasure. God is super, overly abundantly good to his creation, giving us better than we deserve every day — all the time, better than we deserve.

“The surprising thing in a world of rebels like us is not pain; the surprising thing is pleasure.”

In fact, everybody gets better than they deserve once you understand the nature of sin. God is never unjust in the suffering of this world — never. We don’t deserve better than we get, ever; we always deserve worse than we get. Every good thing is grace, grace, grace. Teach a child grace as undeserved favor. Strip a child of all sense of entitlement before God.

4. Look always to the cross.

Finally, point the child over and over again to the cross of Christ — where the worst suffering happened in the world — and explain how the death of his Son was planned by God (Acts 4:27; Isaiah 53:4–10). This is where the child will see how bad his own sin is, because when he asks, “Mommy, Daddy, why would God do that to his own Son?” the answer is that Mommy’s and Daddy’s sin, and your sin, is that bad, and takes that much suffering and love from God.

I think if those four suggestions are followed, children will be more able to submit to God’s providence and feel thankful for everything that God turns for good.

I recently had the incomparable joy of visiting the Grand Canyon. Though visit isn’t quite the right word, I suppose. You don’t just visit the Grand Canyon — you marvel at it, stand in awe of it, catch your breath before it, and find yourself transfixed and transformed by it. You come away “canyoned” by the juxtaposed emotions of feeling smaller and bigger at the same time. As a Christian, I reveled in knowing that the Creator of such beauty also happens to be the Savior of my soul.

I believe gospel-shaped humility can have similar effects. It makes us feel smaller and bigger at the same time. But only if we have a proper understanding of humility, carefully defined, delineated, displayed, and distinguished — that is, only if we move past some common confusions about humility.

Humility Confused

I’ve heard some Christians say things like, “I’m nothing. I’m just a worm.” Or, “I didn’t do a thing. I’m just an empty vessel.” I don’t think such statements reflect a healthy view of humility. The New Testament calls us saints and God’s children and goes out of its way to declare just how loved, redeemed, and blessed we are. Our new identity cannot square with “I’m nothing.”

It’s easy to get confused about humility. Consider how C.S. Lewis put these directions into the mouth of Screwtape, the senior demon in charge of training a new tempter:

Your patient has become humble; have you drawn his attention to the fact? . . . Catch him at the moment when he is really poor in spirit and smuggle into his mind the gratifying reflection, “By jove! I’m being humble,” and almost immediately pride — pride at his own humility — will appear. If he awakes to the danger and tries to smother this new form of pride, make him proud of his attempt — and so on, through as many stages as you please. But don’t try this too long, for fear you awake his sense of humor and proportion, in which case he will merely laugh at you and go to bed. (The Screwtape Letters, 69)

Humility Defined

Merriam-Webster defines humility as “freedom from pride or arrogance.” But that leaves us needing another definition — one for pride. And we need the Bible’s authority, not the dictionary’s, to help us most.

“Humility is not thinking of yourself more highly than you ought but with sober judgment, according to what God says in his word.”

I suggest this definition adapted from Romans 12:3: humility is not thinking of yourself more highly than you ought but with sober judgment, according to what God says in his word. Thus, growing in humility is a lifelong venture as you increase in knowledge of God’s word and in appreciation for God’s work through Christ.

Humility Delineated

Clear thinking about humility is on display in Andrew Murray’s classic short book Humility: The Beauty of Holiness. He starts with this insight: “There are three great motives that urge us to humility. It becomes me as a creature, as a sinner, as a saint” (10).

First, we should be humbled by the fact that we did not create ourselves or have any say in the specifics of our birth. How is it that you weren’t born in the 1300s in an obscure, poverty-stricken, disease-ridden village? Can you provide breath at any given moment? Which talents came from your blueprint, and not God’s? Consider Paul’s insightful question, “What do you have that you did not receive?” (1 Corinthians 4:7).

Second, humility befits our fallenness. We’re sinners, rebels, transgressors, and worshipers of false gods. Reflect on Paul’s recounting of our before-salvation résumé: “We ourselves were once foolish, disobedient, led astray, slaves to various passions and pleasures, passing our days in malice and envy, hated by others and hating one another” (Titus 3:3).

Third, we are saved by grace, “not because of works done by us in righteousness” (Titus 3:5) “so that no one may boast” (Ephesians 2:9).

Humility Displayed

Humility’s central text is Philippians 2:1–11, where Jesus is lifted up as the perfect example of humility. It’s easy to zoom in on verse 5, “Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus,” and think, “I should be humble like Jesus was humble.” He is indeed our supreme example.

But we can follow his example only because he was also our supreme sacrifice. Don’t race past the first phrase of this chapter: “If you have any encouragement from being united with Christ . . . .” It is your union with Christ that transforms you into a new creature who can “consider others better than yourself,” and “look not only to your own interests, but also to the interests of others” (Philippians 2:1–4 NIV).

Humility Distinguished

Humility, as the Bible puts forth, must be distinguished from vague ideas apart from the specifics of the gospel. Humility is not feeling bad about oneself. Humility is not comparing ourselves to others. And humility isn’t merely the absence of boasting. (What goes on inside our heads can be disgustingly self-exalting even while we keep our mouths shut.)

“Humility shaped by the gospel shows us just how bad we are and, at the same time, just how great God’s salvation is.”

Humility shaped by the gospel shows us just how bad we are and, at the same time, just how great God’s salvation is. It chastens while it emboldens. It puts us in our place, which, amazingly, is a place of both contrition and confidence. It is a proper and complete understanding of who we are — created, fallen, redeemed, and blessed. We live out our lives in humble boldness, knowing we deserve wrath instead of grace, judgment instead of justification, separation from God instead of the indwelling of his Spirit.

Humility Pursued

Note what immediately follows Philippians 2:1–11. Verse 12 begins with “therefore” and goes on to tell us to “work out [our] salvation with fear and trembling.” We do have a part to play in pursuing humility. Consider some practical suggestions.

Bodily Prayerfulness

The position of our bodies can make a difference in our prayer lives. Kneeling while interceding, raising our arms while praising, and opening our palms while giving thanks can intensify the blessings received through prayer. And it can help us grow in humility before God. It’s hard (although not impossible!) to feel self-empowered while kneeling.

Rigorous Confession

I’ll let C.S. Lewis present this case for me. He writes in The Weight of Glory,

I find that when I think I am asking God to forgive me I am often in reality (unless I watch myself very carefully) asking him to do something quite different. I am asking him not to forgive me but to excuse me. But there is all the difference in the world between forgiving and excusing.

Forgiveness says, “Yes, you have done this thing, but I accept your apology; I will never hold it against you and everything between us two will be exactly as it was before.” But excusing says, “I see that you couldn’t help it or didn’t mean it; you weren’t really to blame.” If one was not really to blame then there is nothing to forgive. In that sense forgiveness and excusing are almost opposites. (178–79)

Humility makes a regular practice of asking God, and others, to forgive us instead of excuse us.

Regular Periods of Fasting

Simply put, fasting makes us feel physically weak. That’s a good state for trusting entirely in God’s provision for everything. Fasting can take all sorts of forms and varieties. All of them can help in growth toward humility.

Outward-Facing Intercession

Jesus told us to include “our daily bread” (the most basic unit of physical sustenance) as well as “your kingdom come” (the most expansive scope of church growth) in our prayers. Prayer guides like Operation World (both the book and the app), which inform us how to pray for gospel advance in every country, help us see our individual needs on a larger canvas and forge humility.

Others-Centered Conversation

Many so-called dialogues are really simultaneous monologues. A gospel-humbled conversationalist can allow the interchange to be unbalanced — in the direction of the other person. Asking questions to draw more out of the other person can display Philippians 2 humility in tangible, practical ways.

Bowing Low, Standing Tall

Some might say standing before the Grand Canyon should have made me feel like “nothing.” But that wasn’t my experience. To be sure, I had no doubt that the nearly two thousand square miles of a mile-deep chasm dwarfed my 5-foot, 9-inch frame. If I did not know the Creator of both the physical universe and my physical body, I would have felt like dust.

But standing before an even greater wonder — the cross, where we are “united with Christ . . . in the comfort from his love . . . with the fellowship of the Holy Spirit . . . with tenderness and compassion” (Philippians 2:1 NIV) — forges a gospel-humility that bows us low and stands us tall.

The most morally beautiful, winsomely attractive command Jesus ever uttered also happens to be the most difficult to obey:

You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets. (Matthew 22:37–40)

It’s a breathtaking statement. All that God requires of us, everything Scripture contains regarding “life and godliness” (2 Peter 1:3), summed up in two simple commands.

“In their simplicity, these two commands encompass everything. Obeying them, however, is anything but simple.”

In that simplicity, these two commands encompass everything. Obeying them, however, is anything but simple. And there’s the rub. Because these commands are so sweeping, they can feel overwhelming — in fact, impossible. As a result, we can assume that we’re not required to take them all that seriously. This is a serious mistake.

Is Love Even Possible?

We might wrongly assume that while obeying these commands was once humanly possible in Eden, and will once again be humanly possible in our glorified state, they are humanly impossible now in our fallen state. And so they’re really more like lofty ideals, ones we don’t need to think hard about. We might even assume their purpose is to merely reveal our inability to fulfill them and our need for Christ (Romans 7:22–25), and that as part of Christ’s righteousness imputed to us, Jesus obeyed these commands perfectly on our behalf (Romans 8:3–4). Therefore, Jesus doesn’t really expect us to obey them now.

While it’s true that Jesus purchased our justification through his perfect obedience, what Paul wrote in Romans 13:9 and Galatians 5:14, and what James wrote in James 2:8, make it clear that the apostles believed Jesus expects us to seriously seek to love God with our whole being and love our neighbor as ourselves — now, in this age, even today.

Who Models Discipleship for You?

The community around us either confirms or confronts our faulty assumptions about love. We often allow our peers to inordinately determine for us what discipleship looks like. If many Christians around us assent to but don’t rigorously apply these two great commands, their example can influence us to implicitly assume Jesus wants us to affirm his commands’ ideal rightness, but doesn’t really expect us to work hard in consistently living them out.

But as Paul’s rebuke of Peter in Galatians 2 illustrates, peer influence can lead us into serious disobedience. The whole New Testament witness bears out that it’s precisely the radical way we live out Jesus’s love commands, all of which are essentially expositions of these Great Commandments, that demonstrate we are his disciples (John 13:35).

“The most morally beautiful, winsomely attractive command Jesus ever uttered also happens to be the most difficult to obey.”

No, we must not allow these facts — that these commands are difficult to obey, that we aren’t ultimately justified by our obedience, or that others around us fail to obey them — to form our assumption that Jesus doesn’t expect us to seriously obey them. Because he does. In fact, he expects us to structure our lives around obeying them.

How in the World?

This brings us back to how overwhelming these commandments can feel. If we take them seriously, they force us to ask, How in the world am I supposed to obey them? That’s exactly the right question to ask ourselves.

Have you ever spent serious time meditating on these commands to love?

I don’t mean merely listening to sermons, lectures, and podcasts about them, or reading numerous books and articles about them, and forming the right theological answers. For Christian teachers who produce such resources (I’m preaching to myself as I write this), I don’t mean merely putting in the arduous work of historical-grammatical and hermeneutical research and developing effective homiletical or literary communication skills in order to accurately understand and teach this text within your systematic theological framework. Don’t misunderstand me: these are important. But they don’t necessarily result in rigorous real-life obedience.

I mean, have you ever spent hours seriously pondering and working out specifically what it means for you to intentionally pursue loving God with your whole being in the tiny part of the world where God has placed you, and loving your neighbor as yourself among the eternally significant souls whom God has placed there too — especially needy ones, perhaps even an “enemy” (Matthew 5:44), maybe one you come upon along the road, so to speak (Luke 10:25–37)? Jesus doesn’t mean for us to be paralyzed by these all-encompassing commandments; he means for them to form our fundamental approach to life. He means for each of us to seriously ask how in the world we are to obey them and put in the rigorous effort of prayerfully discerning what obedience might specifically mean for us.

And he has by no means left us without help. He has given us the gift of the Holy Spirit to guide us (John 16:13), the gift of the New Testament to provide plenty of examples of breaking down these sweeping commands into specific applications, and the gift of one another in the church to assist us in pursuing this “more excellent way” of life (1 Corinthians 12:31).

Count the Cost

It isn’t until we have pondered what these commandments truly demand of us that we can determine if we’re truly willing to pay what it costs. Jesus says as much:

Which of you, desiring to build a tower, does not first sit down and count the cost, whether he has enough to complete it? (Luke 14:28)

Jesus said this after declaring what his commandments cost his disciples: they must renounce everything. It’s a high cost.

But the cost itself is an expression of love. Our renunciation isn’t primarily about how much asceticism we’re willing to endure for Jesus’s sake; it’s about where our treasure is and how much we love it (Matthew 6:21). Which is why Paul wrote, “If I give away all I have, and if I deliver up my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing” (1 Corinthians 13:3). Jesus’s call, to paraphrase Jim Elliott, is for us to give up what we cannot keep, to gain what we cannot lose.

If You Love Me

Jesus’s commands to love — these most morally beautiful, winsome imperatives — are the most difficult, most costly words to obey.

That’s why at the end of his Sermon on the Mount, after giving specific examples of what a life of love looks like, Jesus says, “The way is hard that leads to life” (Matthew 7:14). And it’s why one of the last things Jesus said to his disciples before his crucifixion was John 15:12–13:

This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends.

When we read that statement, especially in the light of something he said just minutes before — “If you love me, you will keep my commandments” (John 14:15) — we can hear both the echo of Jesus’s two great commandments and his expectation that we take them with the utmost, life-shaping seriousness.

For those of us aspiring to pursue “radical discipleship,” it really doesn’t get more radical than Christlike love.

We live in an age that has become painfully cynical about leadership — some of it for good reason. Much of it is simply the mood of our times. And the underlying mood has only seemed to thicken and become all the more manifest in recent years, and perhaps especially in the last eighteen months.

Stories of use and abuse abound, and the letdowns make for big headlines. In the Information Age, we have more and quicker access than ever before to tales of bad leaders. In our own lives, we all have felt the sting of being let down by some leader in whom we had placed our trust. The pain and confusion are real. The wounds can be deep. We learn to guard ourselves from future disappointment. Cynicism can feel like a worthy shield.

But high-profile failures can mask the true source of our discontent with being led: we love self and come to pine for self-rule. Couple that with our generation’s distorted sense of what leadership is. When leadership has become a symbol of status, achievement, and privilege — as it has in many eyes — we desire to “be the leader” ourselves, not to bless others but to bless ourselves, get our way. And understandably, we become reluctant to grant anyone else that authority over us.

Led by God — Through Others

Into such confusion, the Christian faith speaks a different message. You need leadership. It is for your good. You were designed to be led. First and foremost by God himself — through the God-man, Jesus, who now wields all authority in heaven and on earth at the Father’s right hand. God made us to be led, every one of us. He designed our minds and hearts and bodies not to thrive in autonomy but to flourish under the wisdom and provision and care of worthy leaders — and most of all, under Christ himself. But there is more.

The risen Christ has appointed human leaders, in submission to him, in local congregations. Precious as the priesthood of all believers is — a remarkable truth that was radically counter-cultural from the first century until the Reformation — today we have need to articulate afresh the nature, and goodness, of leadership in the local church. We have an important kind of gracious inequality within our equality in Christ.

One of the ways Christ governs his church, and blesses her, is by giving her the gift of leaders under him: “He gave the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the shepherds and teachers, to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ” (Ephesians 4:11–12). The mention of “shepherds and teachers” is of special significance because it is intensely personal to you as a Christian. It includes the pastors of your particular local church (and note that pastors is plural). You’ve never met one of Jesus’s apostles (even as their writings remain precious to us beyond words!), but chances are you know a pastor. Faithful pastors are a gift from Christ to guide and keep his church today.

Are they flawed? Of course. Sinful? Regrettably. Have some pastors made terrible mistakes, sinned grievously, fleeced their flocks, and harmed the very ones they were commissioned to protect? Sadly, yes, some have. But such failures were not the fulfilling of the vision of what true Christian leadership is. Such failures fell short of God’s vision, or departed from it altogether. In fact, such failures show — by contrast — what real leadership in the church should be.

That’s our focus this morning: what Christ calls leaders in his church to be — especially the “lead office” or “teaching office” in the church, that of “pastor” or “elder” or “overseer,” three terms in the New Testament for the same lead office. My prayer is that these minutes will be useful to congregants and leaders alike in considering Christ’s call and what vision he himself has cast for leadership in the local church.

Teamwork: Good Men with Good Friends

I mentioned that pastors is plural. One of the most important truths to rehearse about pastoral ministry is that Christ means for it to be teamwork. As in 1 Peter 5, so in every context in which local-church pastor-elders are mentioned in the New Testament, the title is plural. Christ alone reigns as Lord of the church. He is head (Ephesians 1:22; 5:23; Colossians 1:18), and he alone. The glory of singular leadership is his. And he means for his undershepherds to labor, and thrive, not alone but as a team.

The kind of pastors we long for in this age are good men with good friends — friends who love them enough to challenge their instincts, tell them when they’re mistaken, hold them to the fire of accountability, and make life both harder and better, both more uncomfortable and more fruitful.

Shepherds Old and New

Let’s start with the main verb in 1 Peter 5:1–5, which is Peter’s charge to the elders: “shepherd the flock of God.” Shepherd, as a verb, is a rich image. Consider all that shepherds do: they feed, water, tend, herd, protect, guide, lead to pasture, govern, care for, nurture. To shepherd is an image of what we might call “benign rule” (the opposite of “domineering”), in which the good of the shepherd is bound up with the good of the sheep.

Preparing the Way

The concept of shepherding also has a rich Old Testament background, not just in the Patriarchs, and Israel in Egypt and in the wilderness, but also in King David, the shepherd boy who became the nation’s greatest king, the anointed one, who anticipated the great Anointed One to come. So, with David, shepherding takes on messianic meaning. David, of course, had his own grave failures in shepherding the nation, but after David the trend of the nation’s kings became worse and worse.

Five centuries later, the prophet Ezekiel condemned the nation’s leaders for “feeding themselves” rather than feeding the sheep:

Ah, shepherds of Israel who have been feeding yourselves! Should not shepherds feed the sheep? You eat the fat, you clothe yourselves with the wool, you slaughter the fat ones, but you do not feed the sheep. The weak you have not strengthened, the sick you have not healed, the injured you have not bound up, the strayed you have not brought back, the lost you have not sought, and with force and harshness you have ruled them. (Ezekiel 34:2–4)

The leaders of Israel should have fed the people, not fed on them. They should have strengthened the people, and healed them, bound them, brought them back, and sought them, but instead they have ruled them “with force and harshness” — not benign rule but malignant rule. The people long for a shepherd, a king, who will rule them with gentle strength, with persuasion and kindness, with patience and grace, even as he protects them from their enemies. And God says, in response, again and again, “I will rescue my flock,” but also, “I will set up over them one shepherd, my servant David, and he shall feed them: he shall feed them and be their shepherd” (Ezekiel 34:22–23). Note the prominence of feeding in shepherding.

Good Shepherd and His Help

Micah prophesied that from Bethlehem, the city of David, will “come a ruler who will shepherd my people Israel” (Micah 5:2; Mark 2:6). During his life, Jesus himself says he is the good shepherd (John 10:11), who, rather than taking from his sheep, comes to give them life, and even give his own life for them.

Then, amazingly, at the end of the Gospel of John, when Jesus asked Peter three times — this same Peter — if he loved him, Peter said yes, and then Jesus said, “Feed my lambs,” “Tend my sheep,” and “Feed my sheep” (John 21:15, 16, 17). Here “feeding” and “pastoring” are synonymous. Jesus is the good shepherd, but he is leaving, and he will now pastor his sheep through Peter and other undershepherds — not just apostles, but local church elders, overseers, pastors, as Paul says in Acts 20:28 to the elders in Ephesus: “Pay careful attention to yourselves and to all the flock, in which the Holy Spirit has made you overseers, to care for the church of God, which he obtained with his own blood.” The elders are also overseers, and they are to “care for” — or literally, “pastor the church of God” (elders = overseers = pastors).

Finally, in the book of Revelation, we have two images of Jesus as shepherd. The Lamb, as shepherd, “will guide them to springs of living water” (Revelation 7:17), and in three texts, he will rule “with a rod of iron” (Revelation 2:27; 12:5; 19:15), which doesn’t mean he is forceful or harsh with his people, but that he protects them from their enemies with his iron rod. The shepherd’s rod is for protecting his flock: “your rod and your staff, they comfort me” (Psalm 23:4).

So there’s just a taste of the richness in this shepherding image and action as a verb: centrally, feeding and watering (“green pastures” and “still waters,” Psalm 23:2), but also protecting. Shepherding means caring for the sheep, and leading with gentleness and kindness, with persuasion and patience, but wielding a rod of protection toward various threats to the flock.

Three Ways to Exercise Oversight

Back to 1 Peter 5, the verb that then augments “shepherd” is “exercising oversight.” It’s the verb form of the noun “overseer” used in Acts 20:28, as well as four other New Testament texts (Philippians 1:1; 1 Timothy 3:2; Titus 1:7; 1 Peter 2:25). “Oversee” in this context doesn’t mean only to watch and observe, but also to “see to it” that important observations about the flock, and any threats to it, also become tangible initiatives and actions in the church. In other words, as one of my fellow pastors, Joe Rigney, recently wrote about oversight, “Having seen clearly what they need to see about their flock, the pastors [need to] have the courage and compassion to act together with wisdom to do what is best for the sheep, especially through their teaching.”

Now, at the heart of this passage, Peter gives us three “not-buts” — not this but that. Verses 2–3: “Shepherd the flock of God that is among you, exercising oversight, [1] not under compulsion, but willingly, as God would have you; [2] not for shameful gain, but eagerly; [3] not domineering over those in your charge, but being examples to the flock.” Let’s take them in reverse order.

1. Not domineering but exemplifying.

We saw God’s condemnation for the leaders of Israel who ruled “with force and harshness.” Peter says “not domineering” — which is the same language we see elsewhere translated “not lording it over.” It’s built on a strong verb that can refer in other contexts to Jesus’s lordship (Romans 14:9; 1 Timothy 6:15); or the kind of lordship sin once had, and should no longer have, over us (Romans 6:9, 14; 7:1); the kind of lordship Christian leaders should not have over those in their charge (Luke 22:25).

First and Foremost Sheep

This prohibition against domineering applies even for an apostle, as Paul says to the Corinthians: “Not that we lord it over your faith, but we work with you for your joy, for you stand firm in your faith” (2 Corinthians 1:24). The intensified form of the verb here in 1 Peter 5 is the same one Jesus uses in Mark 10:42:

Those who are considered rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their great ones exercise authority over them. But it shall not be so among you.

Christian leaders, as workers for the joy of their people, should not be controlling and domineering and lording over them. Rather, they are examples to the flock. Twice Peter says they are “among” the flock: “I exhort the elders among you . . . : shepherd the flock of God that is among you” (1 Peter 5:1–2). Not above, or off to the side, or far away — not remote — but among.

“Good pastors are secure in soul and not blown left and right by the need to impress or to prove themselves.”

Good pastors are first and foremost sheep. They know it and embrace it. Pastors do not comprise a fundamentally different category of Christian. They need not be world-class in their intellect, oratory, or executive skills. They are average, normal, healthy Christians, serving as examples for the flock, while among the flock, as they lead and feed the flock through teaching God’s word, accompanied with wise collective governance. The hearts of good pastors swell to Jesus’s charge in Luke 10:20: “Do not rejoice in this, that the spirits are subject to you, but rejoice that your names are written in heaven.” Their first and most fundamental joy is not what God does through them as pastors but what Christ has done (and does) for them as Christians.

Good pastors, therefore, are secure in soul and not blown left and right by the need to impress or to prove themselves. They are happy to be seen as normal Christians — not a cut above the congregation, but reliable models of mature, healthy, normal Christianity.

Humbled and Happy

Another way to say it is that such pastors are humble, or humbled. After all, Peter charges “all of you” — elders and congregants — “Clothe yourselves, all of you, with humility toward one another” (1 Peter 5:5). Healthy churches are eager to clothe themselves in humility toward their pastors who have led the way in dressing with humility for the church.

Such pastors, humble in practice, not just theory, are present in the life of the church and accessible. They invite, welcome, and receive input from the flock. They don’t presume to shepherd God’s flock in all the world through the Internet, but focus on the flock “that is among you” (verse 2) — those particular names and faces assigned to their charge — and they delight to be among those people, not removed or distant.

2. Not for shameful gain but eagerly.

Shameful gain would be some other benefit than the gain of the flock — whether money as the driving motivation, or power, or respect, or comfort, or the chance to perform, enjoying being on the platform. In terms of “eagerness,” the epistle to the Hebrews gives this important glimpse into the dynamic of Christian leadership as workers for the joy of the flock:

Obey your leaders and submit to them, for they are keeping watch over your souls, as those who will have to give an account. Let them do this with joy and not with groaning, for that would be of no advantage to you. (Hebrews 13:17)

“Christ gives leaders to his people for their joy. Pastors are glad workers for the gladness of their people in God.”

Here is a beautiful, marriage-like vision of the complementary relationship between the church and its leaders. The leaders, for their part, labor (they work hard; it is costly work) for the advantage — the profit, the gain — of the church. And the church, for its part, wants its leaders to work not only hard but happily, without groaning, because the pastors’ joy in leading will lead to the church’s own benefit. The people want their leaders to labor with joy because they know their leaders are working for theirs.

Christ gives leaders to his people for their joy. Which turns the world’s paradigm and suspicions about leadership upside down. As Paul says in 2 Corinthians 1:24, “Not that we lord it over your faith, but we work with you for your joy.” Pastors are glad workers for the gladness of their people in God.

For Your Advantage

How eager, then, would the people have been to submit to such a leader? The prospect of submitting to a leader drastically changes when you know he isn’t pursuing his own private advantage but genuinely seeking yours: what is best for you, what will give you the deepest and most enduring joy — when he finds his joy in yours, rather than apart from or instead of yours.

The word “submission” has negative connotations today in many circles. But how might the charge to “submit” in verse 5, to “be subject to the elders,” change when we see it in the context of this vision of shepherding and oversight and pastoring that Peter lays out? There’s no charge to submit in verse 5 until verses 2–4 establish a context of “workers for your joy” who are willing, eager, and exemplary: they feed the flock, not themselves; they attend to the flock’s needs, not their own; they gain as the flock gains, not as the flock loses.

It’s amazing to consider what actions and initiatives and care are presupposed in the New Testament, from husbands and fathers and governors and pastors, before the command is given to submit:

husbands, love and be kind (not harsh) (Colossians 3:18);
fathers, do not provoke your children to anger (Ephesians 6:3);
civil governors are God’s servants for your good, avenging wrongdoing (Romans 13:1; 1 Peter 2:13);
pastors feed through public teaching (1 Corinthians 14:34) and pay careful attention (Acts 20:28) and keep watch over the flock (1 Timothy 4:16).

Pastors give of themselves, their time, their energy, their attention, to work for the joy of the flock. Therefore, church, submit to your leaders. In Hebrews 13:17, negatively, God will hold the pastors accountable, and positively, it will be to your advantage, to your benefit, to your joy, if you let them labor with joy, for your joy, and not with groaning.

Unfading Joy

For those who are skeptical of leaders in general, what if you knew that “those who are . . . over you in the Lord” (1 Thessalonians 5:12) were not in it to stroke their ego, or secure selfish privilege, or indulge desires to control others, but actively were laying aside their personal rights and private comforts to take inconvenient initiative, and expend their limited energy, to work for your joy?

For those who are formal leaders in the church, or in the home, or in the marketplace, what if those under your care were convinced — deeply convinced — that your place of relative authority (under Christ) was not for self-aggrandizement or self-promotion, but a sobering call to self-sacrifice, and that you were genuinely working for their joy? That your joy in leadership was not a selfish pursuit, not for shameful gain, but a holy satisfaction you were finding in the joy of those whom you lead?

When leaders in the church show themselves to be workers for your joy, they walk in the steps of the great shepherd — the great worker for joy — the one who bore the greatest cost for others’ good, and not to the exclusion of his own joy. He found his joy in the joy of his Beloved. “For the joy that was set before him [he] endured the cross” (Hebrews 12:2).

As workers for the church’s joy, pastors emphatically pursue gain — not shameful gain but shameless gain — their joy in the good of the church to the glory of Christ. Joy now, and joy in the coming shame*less* reward: “When the chief Shepherd appears, you will receive the unfading crown of glory” (1 Peter 5:4).

3. Not under compulsion but willingly.

Churches want happy pastors. Not dutiful clergy. Not groaning ministers. The kind of pastors we all want are the ones who want to do the work, and labor with joy for our joy. We want pastors who serve “not under compulsion, but willingly, as God would have you” (1 Peter 5:2).

God himself wants pastors who labor from the heart. He wants them to aspire to the work (1 Timothy 3:1), and do it with joy (Hebrews 13:17). Not dutifully, or under obligation, but willingly, eagerly, happily. And not just “as God would have you” but “as God himself does” — literally “according to God” (Greek: kata theon).

“God wants pastors to labor with joy because he is this way. He acts from fullness of joy.”

It says something about our God that he would have it this way. He is the infinitely happy “blessed God” (1 Timothy 1:11) who acts from joy. He wants pastors to labor with joy because he works this way. He acts from fullness of joy. He is a God most glorified not by raw duty, but by eagerness and enjoyment, and he himself cares for his people willingly, eagerly, happily.

Churches know this deep down: that happy pastors, not groaning elders, make for happy churches, and a glorified Savior. Pastors who enjoy the work, and work with joy, are a benefit and an advantage, to their people (Hebrews 13:17).

Chief We All Want

Such are the pastors we all want. Of course, no man, and no team of men, will embody these dreams perfectly, but men of God learn to press through their temptations to paralysis and resignation because of their imperfections. They happily lean on Christ as the perfect and great shepherd of the sheep, gladly roll their burdens onto his broad shoulders (1 Peter 5:7), remember that his Spirit lives and works in them, and then learn to take the next courageous, humble step — ready to repent and retry if it was the wrong one.

As pastors learn to live up to these realistic dreams — albeit not perfectly, but making real progress by the Spirit — some aspects of our broken leadership culture will find healing. At least our churches, if not our world, will learn to lay down suspicions and enjoy God’s gift of good pastor-teachers.

http://rss.desiringgod.org/link/10732/14870022/does-be-angry-mean-make-sure-youre-angry

John Owen (1616–1683) agreed with the ancient idea that happiness is a good and worthy goal, although what he had in mind is far different from what we tend to assume about happiness. We often link happiness to entertainment or comedy, and thus to distraction from the frustrations of everyday life. The ancients, in contrast, equated happiness with virtue and being as fully human as possible. Aristotle, for example, encouraged his readers to instill good habits in their children, to give them a depth of character that would equip them for life and for contributing to the polis (their society). Owen, working within his distinctly Christian tradition, naturally envisioned happiness against a much more God-oriented background.

Like Aristotle, Owen derived his understanding of happiness from his view of the world and our place in it, but, of course, his starting point was very different from Aristotle’s. Owen knew that God himself is the source and goal of our happiness. As Owen puts it, “It was from eternity that [God] laid in his own bosom a design for our happiness” (Works of John Owen, 2:33), which is nothing less than communion with God. Communion, for Owen, constituted true, deep, and life-giving happiness.

The triune God of life and love made us to enjoy fellowship with him, to love our neighbors, and to live in harmony with the earth. Communion, as interpersonal activity, is our mode of engaging God and the world as we were designed to do. We will need to understand this construct of happiness if we are going to rightly understand why Owen, in perhaps his most recognized book, would emphasize an exercise that sounds so negative — mortification! Sin is that which disorders, disrupts, and destroys our communion, so learning to deal with this threat is a necessary component of happiness.

Mortification and Communion

Owen’s little book On the Mortification of Sin grew out of a series of sermons he preached while serving as Dean of Christ Church and Vice-Chancellor of Oxford. His preface mentions that he was also working on his volume Communion with God, but because that was unfinished, he hoped this smaller contribution would satisfy readers in the meantime. I point this out because readers too often detach Owen’s writing on “putting sin to death” from the larger theme of communion with God, and that produces all kinds of problems, like reading the book as an exercise in moralism — not at all Owen’s intention!

The theme of mortification animated Owen’s pastoral heart because killing sin is a necessary tool in our pursuit of communion with God. Owen’s approach does not imply any sort of legalism or negative self-concept, although some have read him that way. On the contrary, he knew that, while God’s love for us, his people, is never contingent upon our faithfulness, our experience of communion with God can be helped or hindered by how we deal with our sins.

Ignoring or downplaying our sins tends to harden our hearts and deaden our awareness of God’s presence, activity, and comforts. We must, therefore, constantly remind ourselves that mortification matters, not to keep an abstract law, but to pursue our very life in God and with our neighbors.

Start with the Spirit

“To mortify” means “to put to death,” which is what we must do with sin. Even here, however, a careful reading of Owen shows that he begins not with a principle of death, but of life — what John Calvin and others called “vivification,” making alive. Although this particular book of Owen’s concentrates on the problem of sin, it constantly presupposes and points back to the presence and power of the Holy Spirit, who makes us alive. Only through the Spirit can “the deeds of the body” be mortified (Romans 8:13; Works, 6:5).

Consider the difference between Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography and John Owen’s volume Mortification. Franklin wanted to cultivate virtue, show self-control, and live in an upright manner. He even created a list of virtues and decided to take one at a time: his plan was to concentrate on one virtue, master it, and then acquire the next. In this simplistic vision, he expected to end up truly virtuous, having conquered the weaknesses in his character. It’s no surprise that Franklin found this plan far more difficult than he originally anticipated.

Like Franklin, Owen was concerned with cultivating virtues and self-control, but the Puritan’s vision is fundamentally different: instead of merely relying on willpower, Owen looks to the presence and power of God’s Spirit. Owen doesn’t disregard human agency — as we will see, he takes our actions fully seriously — but he knows we need God’s activity in giving us eyes to see, ears to hear, wills to stir, and energy to move forward. Owen rejects false dichotomies between divine and human agency: by definition, communion is mutual, with God working and us responding. This experience of communion differs from his view of union (which God alone establishes and which doesn’t waver), but that is a discussion for a different time.

How the Spirit Works

How does the Spirit work in us? Positively, he fills our hearts with life, light, and love. Only by God’s power can Christians kill sin and grow in obedience. Without these gifts, our efforts quickly devolve into self-righteousness or legalism or mere failure. Negatively, the Spirit attacks our sin, like a fire that burns the roots of a tree and kills it utterly.

The Spirit convicts us of sin, not because he hates us, but because he loves us: he wants to free us from sin’s destructive entanglements that would enslave or suffocate us and destroy our communion with God, our neighbors, and the earth. In this way, the Spirit of creation is also active in this work of re-creation. Further, the Spirit constantly points us away from our own sin and back to Christ, thus fostering communion with our crucified and risen Lord (Works, 6:19).

When the only book people read by John Owen is his little volume on Mortification, they can easily miss this larger background. But he wrote far more on the glory of Christ and on the person and work of the Spirit than he did on sin. If we forget this, we will miss Owen’s deeper themes, which provide the basis for us to fight sin with all our strength and passion. He was not interested in promoting obsessive levels of meticulous self-criticism, but a burgeoning communion with God.

Renewed, Deeper Humanity

Owen’s teaching about the work of the Spirit and of Christ does not undermine our agency, but rather establishes it. In Owen’s words, the Spirit “works in us and with us, not against us or without us” (Works, 6:20; emphasis original). Our actions have consequences, not because they make God love us more or less, but because they either promote or hinder the liveliness of our communion with the living Lord.

Nor does being spiritual mean we stop being human — on the contrary, as Owen shows, the Spirit renews and deepens our humanity by redirecting us to its source, God himself (see his Discourses on the Holy Spirit). Thus the Spirit works in and through our wills, our affections, our minds, and even our bodies. When we respond to and participate in what God’s Spirit is doing with us, we mortify sin and deepen the quality of our humanity. Divine sovereignty and human agency are not at odds.

Our era avidly pursues shortcuts, efficiency, and instantaneous growth. That, however, is not how most of the world works. Growth happens slowly, and the formation of human character takes effort, patience, and perspective. Those who read Owen on mortification often feel exhausted by it because, this side of glory, the threat and attack of sin never stops. Thus we must never stop. He famously provides believers with an either-or admonition: “Be killing sin or it will be killing you” (Works, 6:9). There is no other option. Left alone, sin will grow like mold, and the damage quickly becomes very difficult to repair. You are no longer cleaning surfaces, but having to rip out walls — far more painful than if you had noticed and dealt with it earlier.

Or, to use an analogy from Owen, sin is like weeds growing in a garden — unattended, they will take over and choke out the beautiful flowers and fruits. A good gardener always pulls out the weeds even while cultivating the good fruit. The Spirit plants and produces fruit in our hearts, and he also gives us the power to pull out the invasive weeds attacking the garden of our hearts and lives. We are invited to participate in this work of the Spirit.

Exposed and Healed

Dietrich Bonhoeffer once made a distinction between the “psychologist” and the “Christian.” While I would never want this quote to be taken as grounds for belittling the field of psychology (we all owe a great debt to scholars in this discipline), Bonhoeffer’s comment illustrates why we need Owen’s book on mortification. He writes,

The greatest psychological insight, ability, and experience cannot comprehend this one thing: what sin is. [Secular] psychological wisdom knows what need and weakness and failure are, but it does not know the ungodliness of the human being. . . . In the presence of a psychologist I am only sick; in the presence of another Christian I can be a sinner. (Life Together, 94–95)

Owen is a trained Christian physician of the soul. When we sit on the couch in his presence, he will tell us the truth about our condition. If you are like me, you may find you are more manipulative than you realized, more arrogant than you wanted to admit, more greedy and self-absorbed than you would ever want anyone to know. But Owen exposes these sins in us, not that we might wallow in our guilt, but to show us forgiveness, to show us our liberation in Christ to a happier way of life — a life of freedom before God as we confess our sins, resist them in the power of the Spirit, and rest secure in the Father’s love.

Owen’s exposition of mortification, read carefully, will not ultimately make you sad, but profoundly and durably happy. It gives us tools for honest, energized, and relationally oriented Christian living. It fosters communion. So I recommend this book to you, dear reader, in the hope that you will learn from this Puritan master — not because the process will be easy, but because it can be healing in all the best ways.

Impatience is a dark and prevalent sin that we love to explain away. We were worn out. We were busy. We were distracted. The kids were being difficult. We were carrying too much at work. Our spouse was short or cold or harsh again. We didn’t sleep well last night. What excuses do you reach for when your patience runs low?

I usually reach for tired. If only I got enough sleep and enough quiet time to myself, I often think (or even say), then I wouldn’t be so impatient. I’m a patient person who gets impatient when I’m tired. Can you hear yourself arguing that way? No, the truth is that I’m an impatient person whose impatience often crawls out of hiding when I’m exhausted. Weariness never makes any of us sin; weariness, and other pressures like it, only bring our sin to the surface (Matthew 15:11).

So where does impatience come from? At bottom, impatience grows out of our unwillingness to trust and submit to God’s timing for our lives.

What We Cannot Control

Impatience is a child of our pride and unbelief. It rises out of our frustration that we do not control what happens and when in our lives. We see this dynamic in the wilderness, among the people God has just delivered from slavery and oppression:

From Mount Hor they set out by the way to the Red Sea, to go around the land of Edom. And the people became impatient on the way. And the people spoke against God. (Numbers 21:4–5)

“Impatience grows out of our unwillingness to trust and submit to God’s timing for our lives.”

Even after God had carried them out of Egypt, and walked them through the Red Sea, and wiped out their enemies behind them, and fed them with food that fell from heaven, they still grew impatient. Why? Because the life God had promised them, the kind of life they really wanted, didn’t come fast enough. The path he had chosen for them was longer and harder and more painful than they expected. They grew angry over how much they could not control. So much so, in fact, that they even began to long for the cruelty of Pharaoh — at least then, they got to choose what they ate (Exodus 16:3).

Our impatience has much in common with theirs. We don’t get to decide how much traffic there will be. We don’t get to decide whether our kids will cooperate at any given moment. We don’t get to decide when we’ll get sick, or when an appliance will fail, or how often interruptions will come. So many decisions are made for us, every single day, without our consent or even input. And God’s plans for us are famous for upending our plans for ourselves.

So when we are confronted with our lack of control, when life inevitably interrupts what we had planned, when we are forced to wait, how do we typically respond? Impatience tries to wrestle God for control, while patience gladly kneels, with hands spread wide, ready to receive all that God has planned and given. Impatience grumbles, while patience rejoices, even while it experiences real pains of delay.

So where does patience come from? If impatience is a child of our pride and unbelief, patience springs from humility, faith, and joy.

Humility Subverts Impatience

Humility subverts impatience by gladly admitting how little we can see in any given moment, however difficult or inconvenient the moment may be. As John Piper says, “God is always doing ten thousand things in your life, and you may be aware of three of them.” When we grow impatient, we overestimate our own ability to judge our circumstances, and we underestimate the good God can do through unwanted inconveniences and unexpected delays. The humble receive the same inconveniences and delays as callings, not distractions — as God revealing his will and timing to them.

The humble are patient toward God, and they are patient toward others. “Walk in a manner worthy of the calling to which you have been called,” Ephesians 4:1–2 says, “with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love.” Humility fosters the kind of patience that love requires. Every truly loving relationship is an exhibition in patiently bearing with one another, because our sin both makes us difficult to love and keeps us from loving well.

“Clothe yourselves, all of you, with humility toward one another, for ‘God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble’” (1 Peter 5:5). Do you want to grow in patience and experience a fuller, richer stream of grace from God? Wrap yourself in humility.

Faith Subverts Impatience

If humility subverts impatience by admitting how little we can see in the midst of our trials, faith subverts impatience by holding firm to God’s promises, even when life calls them into question.

Be patient, therefore, brothers, until the coming of the Lord. See how the farmer waits for the precious fruit of the earth, being patient about it, until it receives the early and the late rains. You also, be patient. Establish your hearts, for the coming of the Lord is at hand. (James 5:7–8)

Farming well requires waiting well, and so does living well. Faith trusts that God is both sovereign and good, that all of his promises are true in Christ, that suffering produces endurance, that Jesus really will return and make all things new, and so we can afford to wait, to bear, to be patient. The patient continue to sow, even when the ground seems hard and the harvest uncertain, because they know they will eventually reap (Galatians 6:9).

And where does James go in the next verse? “Do not grumble against one another” (James 5:9). This kind of faith subverts our impatience with one another. The farmer believes the seeds will sprout and bear fruit, so he endures the dry weeks or months with patience. The Christian believes he will soon experience fullness of joy and pleasures forevermore — and not alone, but with everyone who has ever believed — so he endures offenses from other believers. He doesn’t grumble like others would. The promise of what’s to come makes him more durable in love, more gracious in his judgments, more patient in conflict.

Joy Subverts Impatience

This faith, however, is not merely a trusting in verses, but an overflowing joy in experienced wonders. The apostle Paul prays that the church would be “strengthened with all power, according to his glorious might, for all endurance and patience with joy” (Colossians 1:11). The patient are not secret grumblers; they’re not simply bottling up irritation and bitterness and hiding it from others. Their patience flows out of the wells of their joy in God. They’re too happy in him to be undone by interruption or inconvenience.

Where do we see this kind of resilient joy? Paul writes in 2 Corinthians 8:1–2, “We want you to know, brothers, about the grace of God that has been given among the churches of Macedonia, for in a severe test of affliction, their abundance of joy and their extreme poverty have overflowed in a wealth of generosity on their part.” They did not grumble like Israel in the wilderness. They did not resent what they could not control. No, when their lives were upended and they were thrown into the fire, their joy not only held, but overflowed in generosity.

“The patient are too happy in God to be undone by interruption or inconvenience.”

The patient can wait and embrace inconvenience because whatever happens today or tomorrow or next Tuesday, their Treasure is unthreatened in heaven and therefore their joy is secure. Their happiness is not tied to their plans, so when their plans are disrupted, their happiness holds and continues pouring over in love.

Joyfully Accepting Disruption

The same miraculous patience appears in Hebrews 10:32–34:

You endured a hard struggle with sufferings, sometimes being publicly exposed to reproach and affliction, and sometimes being partners with those so treated. For you had compassion on those in prison, and you joyfully accepted the plundering of your property, since you knew that you yourselves had a better possession and an abiding one.

They joyfully accepted the plundering of their property. They were not just willing to have their possessions vandalized and stolen because they followed Jesus, but they were glad to suffer for his sake. If we were in the same circumstances, would others be able to say the same of us? Would we so joyfully accept the plundering of our possessions, our homes, our budgets? Do we now joyfully accept the upheaval of our schedules, the derailing of our dreams, the setbacks in our work, the monotony and difficulty of our parenting, the trouble of our lives?

We will if we, like them, know that we have a better possession and an abiding one — if we know that we have God forever, and in him more than enough to endure whatever we’re called to endure for now. Patience flows from a humble embrace of what we do not know and cannot control. It flows from our deep and abiding trust that God will follow through on his promises, however unlikely that may seem at the moment. And it flows from hearts that are profoundly happy to have him as our exceeding joy.