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.

The plot was, in most respects, suicidal.

Jonathan, impatient with his father’s halting, snuck off to the Philistines’ camp, his trusted armor-bearer beside him. Near the border, Jonathan turned to his servant and defied common sense: “Come, let us go over to the garrison of these uncircumcised. It may be that the Lord will work for us, for nothing can hinder the Lord from saving by many or by few” (1 Samuel 14:6). While Saul sat back counting his soldiers, Jonathan counted to two and drew his sword.

I imagine myself as Jonathan’s servant:

What do you mean “go over”? Fight an entire army with just the two of us? And what do you mean “it may be that the Lord will work for us”? Shouldn’t we check first?

What his armor-bearer actually said was this: “Do all that is in your heart. Do as you wish. Behold, I am with you heart and soul” (1 Samuel 14:7). Here is a brother born for the day of adversity (Proverbs 17:17), a soldier ready when the war horn sounds, the kind of man you want beside you when everything is on the line.

This nameless servant of Jonathan would fight whomever Jonathan fought. They would claim victory together, or die together — whichever their Lord willed. He not only carried his master’s armor; he stood ready to strap it on himself.

And he did. The Philistines called them up to fight (confirming, in their minds, that God went with them, 1 Samuel 14:10), so Jonathan charged up first, his armor-bearer behind. After they killed twenty men, the Lord sent the thousands within the Philistine camp into confusion. Israel’s army, observing the commotion, drew near to see the Philistines striking each other down (1 Samuel 14:20). They then routed the bewildered army. “So the Lord saved Israel that day” (1 Samuel 14:23).

Men of Our Own Soul

Where are Jonathan and his armor-bearer today?

“Where are the men who have resolved, God helping them, to take a hill for Christ?”

Where are the men who have resolved, God helping them, to take a hill for Christ? Men who see the devil’s flag waving over their neighborhood and dare some glorious mission? Men who hear the taunts of that Philistine Planned Parenthood and pray, fast, and strategize to save lives? Men who, when confronted with the evil forces at work in their area, say, “Come, let go over to the garrison of these uncircumcised — it may be that the Lord will work for us”?

Where are the men who take seriously Jesus’s claim that “all authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me” (Matthew 28:18)? Men who do not pretend that their Captain is halting like Saul, but hear his call to manfully venture outside the camp (Hebrews 13:13)? Men who know they never step anywhere under the sun that is outside of their King’s jurisdiction? Men who, when they speak with politicians, implore sinners, or expose scoffers, secure good works in the name of Jesus, do so unashamed because their Master rules all?

And where are the men on mission together? The Jonathans to lead the way, and the faithful and formidable armor-bearers to charge behind? Where stand the men outmanned and outmaneuvered, yet pointing and saying, “We know nothing can hinder the Lord from saving by many or by few”? Where are the hills flapping with the gospel’s banner? Where is that sacred flame that unites two or more soldiers on active duty, standing firm in the armor of God?

I first ask myself these questions. My city and neighborhood do not lack needs, just bands of brothers to meet them.

Man and His Household

Is even our ideal Christian man today isolated from other men? His world orbits around his personal devotions and how he leads his own family toward Christ. Healthy fatherhood and healthy husbanding within healthy homes can appear to suffice.

But this faith scarcely resembles our forefathers who “conquered kingdoms, enforced justice, obtained promises, stopped the mouths of lions, quenched the power of fire, escaped the edge of the sword, were made strong out of weakness, became mighty in war, put foreign armies to flight” (Hebrews 11:33–34). “Let the Philistine flag fly in our city,” we seem to say. “Each man for his family and himself.”

And even when we do gather together, do we move beyond the talk of war? Surely, how good and pleasant is it when brothers dwell in unity, and meet to update about last week’s battles and pray for battles to come. But how often do we meet and talk of soldiering only to disband and fight alone? Why not take a hill together? Jonathan did not send his armor-bearer into the camp alone with plans to meet next week for an update.

And there may also be a lesson for us in the sin of King David — the man Jonathan would love as his own soul (1 Samuel 18:1). His mighty fall with Bathsheba occurred at home: “In the spring of the year, the time when kings go out to battle” (2 Samuel 11:1). David was slain by temptation at home (a fate we have shared) when he stayed back from mission with his men.

Lineage of Conquerors

How many of us today know the blessing George Whitefield once described?

It [is] an invaluable privilege to have a company of fellow soldiers continually about us, animating and exhorting each other to stand our ground, to keep our ranks, and manfully to follow the Captain of our Salvation, though it be through a sea of blood.

Men need something to live for, to fight for, to die for. Our faith lineage, we men in the West must not forget, includes not only those who conquered kingdoms and put armies to flight but also those who suffered without obvious “success”:

Some were tortured, refusing to accept release, so that they might rise again to a better life. Others suffered mocking and flogging, and even chains and imprisonment. They were stoned, they were sawn in two, they were killed with the sword. They went about in skins of sheep and goats, destitute, afflicted, mistreated — of whom the world was not worthy — wandering about in deserts and mountains, and in dens and caves of the earth. (Hebrews 11:35–38)

These heavenly men, bearing worth beyond this realm, suffered. We must count the cost. Regardless of victory or defeat, whether hills be claimed with our efforts or not, remember, we do not descend from “those who shrink back and are destroyed, but [from] those who have faith and preserve their souls” (Hebrews 10:39). Men of courage. Men of valor. Men of God.

Our Missing Mission

Some godly men today, perhaps many, need more mission. We need to look around us and pray. We need to fight on hills we cannot take alone. Is it safe to say that if we don’t need other men we might not be on mission? Paul often called his brothers “fellow laborers,” “fellow workers,” or “fellow soldiers” (Philippians 2:25; 1 Corinthians 16:16) — do we hold objectives together that prompt us to speak this way of one another?

Masculinity begins to atrophy when it terminates on itself and even on its family — as important as our households are. Men were made to cultivate, to build, to exercise dominion (Genesis 1:26, 28). The godly man’s gaze is on his family at home (who should be on mission as well), and also toward the horizon with a few men. He says with Joshua, “As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord” (Joshua 24:15), and he seeks with Joshua to march forth with brothers to take new territory for their God. And woe to him who is alone when he falls in battle (Ecclesiastes 4:10, 12).

“Men, we are made to conquer. Made to risk. Made to sweat and face resistance.”

So, go street preach, intercede outside abortion clinics, evangelize blocks surrounding your church, build a fence for old Mrs. Jones in Christ’s name, meet every week to pray for the nations, and raise money to support missionaries overseas. Ask your elders — a supreme model of brotherhood — how you can serve together in the church and beyond.

Men, we are made to conquer. Made to risk. Made to sweat, and face resistance. Made to hunt souls, build and mend fences, evangelize blocks, mobilize missions — and a million other worthy pursuits — in the name of King Jesus. So come, let us go out — it may be that the Lord will work for us.

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.

I was waiting in line with my sons for a roller coaster when the T-shirt caught my eye: Kindness is free — so sprinkle that stuff everywhere.

I’m sympathetic to the message at one level. To many, the world feels meaner in recent years, and perhaps especially so since the last election cycle, COVID-19, and civil unrest. Yes, genuine human kindness, in the most basic of senses, has often been sorely lacking. More kindness would indeed be nice, and perhaps shine in new ways in times when we’re coming to expect meanness and outrage everywhere.

But as admirable as the instincts behind the message are, the initial claim is badly mistaken. No, real kindness — the kind we really long for and need — is not free. And perhaps it would help us all to come to terms with that up front. Real kindness is costly.

This Harsh World

Deep down, we know that we live in a mean world — too mean to keep the meanness constantly at the forefront of our minds. Yet at times — more frequent for some than others — the meanness, the evil afoot in this world, accosts us. Even as bright as some days appear, there is a “present darkness” (Ephesians 6:12), still under the sway of “the god of this world” (2 Corinthians 4:4). Pretender though he is, and numbered his days, his “domain of darkness” (Colossians 1:13) is real, and “the power of darkness” (Luke 22:53) treacherous.

And not only has the world out there gone mad, but far too often the sway of the world, and the indwelling sin in us all, brings that meanness in here, into the people who profess to be Christ’s. Tragically, the very people who are to make Jesus known by their love for each other (John 13:35) can be harsh, quarrelsome, impatient, shrill, nasty.

It’s only human to respond in kind. But Christ requires of his church what is more than human: respond in kindness.

Virtue in a Vacuum?

In part, internal conflict in the Ephesian church prompted Paul’s second letter to Timothy. At the letter’s heart, the aging apostle gives his protégé this arresting charge:

The Lord’s servant must not be quarrelsome but kind to everyone, able to teach, patiently enduring evil, correcting his opponents with gentleness. God may perhaps grant them repentance leading to a knowledge of the truth, and they may come to their senses and escape from the snare of the devil, after being captured by him to do his will. (2 Timothy 2:24–26)

Christians have long celebrated kindness as one of the heavenly virtues. Yet we live in a day that often makes very little of kindness. We assume it’s free. We celebrate “random acts of kindness.” We think of kindness without context. Of course, in our mean world, it is pleasant to be surprised by a stranger’s kindness, free and random as it may seem. Sure, sprinkle that stuff everywhere. But the Christian vision of kindness is far deeper, more significant, and contextualized.

“Kindness is not random or free, but a costly, counter-intuitive response to meanness, rather than responding in kind.”

Christian kindness is no common courtesy or virtue in a vacuum, but a surprising response to mistreatment and hurt. It is not random or free, but a costly, counterintuitive response to meanness, to outrage, rather than responding in kind. As Don Carson comments on 1 Corinthians 13:4, “Love is kind — not merely patient or long-suffering in the face of injury, but quick to pay back with kindness what it received in hurt” (Showing the Spirit, 79).

Companions of Kindness

One way to see that Christian kindness is not random is to observe the kind of company it keeps, especially in the letters of Paul — who would be “the apostle of kindness,” if there were one. No one sprinkles costly kindness like Paul.

Among other graces, kindness often appears hand in hand with patience and compassion. Patience appears side by side with kindness, and in the same order, in 2 Corinthians 6:6 and Galatians 5:22: “patience, kindness.” So also, Paul presses them together in Romans 2:4, in speaking of divine patience and kindness: “Do you presume on the riches of his kindness and forbearance and patience, not knowing that God’s kindness is meant to lead you to repentance?”

So too, as we’ve seen, Christian pastors — “the Lord’s servant” in the midst of conflict — “must not be quarrelsome but kind to everyone, . . . patiently enduring evil” (2 Timothy 2:24). Kind to everyone — isn’t that surprising? The opponents here are false teachers. They must not be coddled or encouraged. Rather, they must be exposed and corrected — and yet that is no license to treat them harshly or with meanness. Opponents can be patiently endured and gently corrected. In fact, it would not be kind to a false teacher, or the church, to let him continue in error. Exposing his error and gently correcting him is kindness.

As for compassion, Ephesians 4:32 memorably explains the command to “be kind to one another” with the word “tenderhearted” (or “compassionate,” Greek eusplanchnos). Kindness is an expression of a tender, compassionate heart. Colossians 3:12 puts all three together, with humility and meekness: “Put on then, as God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved, compassionate hearts, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience.”

Kindness, we might say, is a kind of secondary virtue. Compassion and patience, in various ways, make kindness possible. A compassionate heart leads to kindness, and external actions that give expression to that kindness. So also, patience makes internal kindness and its external acts possible. Patience gives emotional and practical space for kindness to ripen and move outward in physical acts. True kindness and its expressions (which are not random or free) complete and extend its companion virtues. The fruit of kindness needs the roots of patience and compassion, and they need kindness.

Costly Kind

Our young kids are still honest enough with themselves, and us, to admit to how costly kindness can be. When a sibling is mean, or someone on the playground, their natural response (and ours) is not to be kind, but to respond in kind. Which is why we consider kindness a Christian virtue — which doesn’t just happen spontaneously without practice and the enabling of the Holy Spirit. Kindness, Paul says, is the produce of the Spirit (Galatians 5:22–23; 2 Corinthians 6:6), not of the natural human heart.

Real kindness requires intervention from the outside, both from God’s Spirit and also his divine Son stepping into our mean world, showing us a different way, and doing it, climactically, to our eternal salvation and joy. As my wife and I have learned in almost fifteen years of marriage, kindness toward each other begins with God’s kindness toward us in Christ. Only then can we really find the resources to overcome evil with good, triumph over annoyance with patience, and rise above meanness with kindness.

In other words, the heart of how we become kinder — not with free, random, imitation kindness, but with thick, genuine, Christian kindness — is knowing and enjoying the kindness of God toward us, and doing so specifically by feeding on, and taking our cues from, the very words of God.

Behold His Kindness

Our world, in its rebellion and cosmic treason, is no meaner than in its meanness to God himself — God who is holy and just. And yet what shocking kindness he displays, even toward the unbelieving. Our heavenly Father “is kind to the ungrateful and the evil” (Luke 6:35). Even those who live the hardest, meanest of lives are surrounded by rays of God’s common kindness, as we might call it: beautiful days, human minds and bodies and words, friends and family, food and shelter, the everyday divine kindnesses we take for granted until they’re gone.

“Even those who live the hardest, meanest of lives are surrounded by rays of God’s common kindness.”

As Paul preached at Lystra, even “in past generations,” before Christ, when God “allowed all the nations to walk in their own ways,” he showed the unbelieving his common kindness, and “did not leave himself without witness, for he did good by giving you rains from heaven and fruitful seasons, satisfying your hearts with food and gladness” (Acts 14:16–17). Such kindness even in our day, gratuitous as it may seem to us, is not wasted. It is not random but has purpose: “meant to lead you to repentance” (Romans 2:4).

Yet in the fullness of time, “the goodness and loving kindness of God our Savior appeared” (Titus 3:4), bringing salvation — God’s special kindness — through faith in Christ. Such divine kindness not only brought eternal rescue for God’s long-chosen people, but it engrafts even strangers into God’s ancient tree of blessing through faith (Romans 11:22). Jesus is Kindness incarnate, whose yoke is not severe, but (literally) kind (Matthew 11:30). He is the Lord whom we, with new Spirit-given palates, taste as kind (1 Peter 2:3).

Kindness Coming

As Christ, by his Spirit, shows kindness to us, in his word and in our lives, he also forms us into instruments of his kindness to others. “God in Christ forgave you,” Paul says in Ephesians 4:32. Therefore, “Be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another.”

Ultimately, it is the kindness of God that melts an unforgiving spirit, softens a hard heart, and transforms unkind actions. In Christ, we become the kind of people who see others, and have compassion for them, and exercise patience toward them, and show kindness to them, knowing not only that we ourselves have been shown kindness but that “in the coming ages [God himself will] show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus” (Ephesians 2:7). We have only begun to taste the kindness of our God.

Audio Transcript

We live in the age of tolerance, a season when the payment due for sin is forborne. The sin debt is not being called in — not yet. This is a season, Paul says, to demonstrate “the riches” of God’s kindness in his forbearance and patience with sinners. This is a season of kindness, a kindness on purpose, “meant to lead you to repentance,” as Paul says in Romans 2:4. This day of tolerance will end. And when it does, the King of kings, our Savior Jesus Christ, will not be the King who rode into Jerusalem on the humble donkey of Matthew 21. Our King will return on the white warhorse of Revelation 19. And this King — the once lowly, soon-to-return-in-majesty King — is the King we need.

Today’s sermon clip is about such a King, in comparison to all other world rulers, even compared to our presidents. At the time of this sermon, George W. Bush was president, having just completed the first of his eight-year run in the Oval Office. Here’s Pastor John, preaching on Matthew 21, in the spring of 2002, about six months after 9/11.

We have a president, right? President Bush. We don’t have a king. So, some of this is a little bit foreign to us, but there are kings in the world. And when I think “King of kings,” I think King over presidents, vice presidents, premiers, and kings. He’s the King over all the presidents.

Universal King

Now, when I think about the president — what can George Bush do for me? Well, he’s (I think) doing a pretty good job with security and protection. That’s what he ought to be doing. He’s the commander in chief. He’s got to wield the sword, according to Romans 13, appropriately to protect a people. And it seems like it’s going well. I hope he’s levelheaded and reasonable and thinks through all the options in front of him carefully.

“I don’t just want a king over politics and king over military might; I want a King over molecules and atoms.”

But do you know what? The best he could do for me is keep me safe — and sick. I will still get sick and die in a safe America, right? He can’t make me see. He can’t make me walk when I’m lame. I don’t want that kind of king. I want a real King. I want a King of nature. I don’t just want a king over politics and king over military might; I want a King over molecules and atoms. That’s the kind of King I want.

Keith, I’m looking at you — my blind brother over here. He knows. Someday, Keith, someday — maybe in this life but for sure, for sure — King Jesus is going to touch your eyes, brother, then you’ll look on him. He’ll be the first one you see. That’s the kind of King he is. He’s a global, universal King — King of the universe, King over eyes, King over legs. No president, no king on earth is that kind of king.

Praise on Palm Sunday

We’ve got the children here, in Matthew 21:9, 15. Jesus declares his kingship by the way he responds to what the children and the crowds are doing — the way he responds. This is a response issue. He doesn’t take the initiative here, except that he set it all in motion. The priests and the scribes are really bent out of shape about this event. They are not happy with what’s going on here. And the children — well, that’s just too much.

Verse 9: This is the crowds. “Hosanna [salvation] to the Son of David!” That’s the hoped-for King. “Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord!”
Verse 15: “Hosanna to the Son of David.”
Verse 16: The priests ask, “Do you hear what these [children] are saying?”

Now, the implication there is, “You better quickly diffuse this enthusiasm about you; otherwise, you’re going to be guilty of blasphemy. So what do you say now?” They could be asking the same question about the cloaks the crowds threw down in the road in verse 8:

Didn’t you see them throwing cloaks in front of you? Do you know what that means according to 2 Kings 9:13? That means they’re treating you as the king. You’re going to get the Romans after us. And besides, you’re not the true King. This is a big hoax. This is blasphemy. Do you realize what everybody’s hollering? And these little children — come on, settle this down.

That’s what they’re saying to him.

Now, how does Jesus respond to this? The way he responds to this is absolutely stunning. You couldn’t have poured more oil on this fire than he pours. This is the last straw. He answers it with one word and then a Bible quote. “Do you hear what they’re saying?” “Yes.” Pause. And then do you know what he quotes? He quotes Psalm 8: “Out of the mouth of infants and nursing babies you have prepared praise” (Matthew 21:16). That psalm opens with, “O Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth!” (Psalm 8:1). That’s God. That’s God talking about God. They’re not dumb. The last straw is this: “I’ll quote some more Scripture for you, and I will take God’s word applied to children, about the praise of children to God, and apply it to me.” And he’s dead. He’s dead for you.

There’s Still Time

So I’m finished, except to try to wrap it up. There is coming a day when he will come again as King — not on a donkey but on a white warhorse. And his hands will not be empty and outstretched. And the blood on his hands will not be his own blood. The garment dipped in blood will be the blood dragging through the blood of his enemies.

“Now is the day of salvation. Don’t risk meeting King Jesus on the white horse, having rejected him on the donkey.”

The second coming is the end of the day of salvation. The second coming is the end of the day of patience. The second coming is the end of the day of tolerance. And now is the acceptable time. Now is the day of salvation. Don’t risk meeting King Jesus on the white horse, having rejected him on the donkey.

And the way to switch sides is like this. So if you find yourself right now on the wrong side of the war, then what’s king in your life is money or food or success or looks or family or job or health or fame. What rules you right now more than Jesus? What governs your affections and your choices day by day, hour by hour, more than Jesus governs them? That’s your king.

And so the way you come over is that you hear him saying,

I’m your king. I’m on a donkey. I’m on my way to die for you. I will shed my blood that your sins might be forgiven and your treason might be forgotten. I hold out amnesty for you. Anyone who comes, I will receive and forgive and declare you righteous with my own righteousness that I’m working out here on this very Palm Sunday, and I will fold you into my redeemed people. And you will live forever with ever-increasing joy.

It’s just faith. By faith you forsake. By faith you receive him.

http://rss.desiringgod.org/link/10732/14861753/christian-be-passionately-speaking-truth

ABSTRACT: Ever since credobaptists began promoting their views in the emerging Reformation, the terms “Baptist” and “Reformed” have lived in tension. On the one hand, Particular Baptists embraced Calvinist soteriology and championed the five solas; on the other hand, Baptists differed from the Reformers in baptismal practice, ecclesiology, and the relationship between church and state. Despite these differences, however, these canonical, covenantal, congregational, Calvinistic Baptists belong to the broad Reformed family of faith — and at their best, they have not only drawn from that tradition but made singular contributions to it.

For our ongoing series of feature articles for pastors, leaders, and teachers, we asked Timothy George, distinguished professor of divinity at Beeson Divinity School, to explore the nature of Reformed Baptist identity.

In October 1654, Henry Dunster, the first president of Harvard College, was forced to resign. His offense was neither sexual immorality nor fiscal impropriety. Rather, he had withheld from baptism his fourth child, a baby boy named Jonathan — and when his daughter Elizabeth came along, he refused to have her baptized as well. Dunster was a learned and pious leader of Puritan New England, and he possibly could have gotten away with his baptismal irregularities — if he had been willing to keep his mouth shut. But when he openly proclaimed that baptism was not for infants but only for penitent believers, he crossed a line that the authorities of Massachusetts Bay Colony could not ignore. Already, Obadiah Holmes, a Baptist preacher from Rhode Island, had been publicly beaten with thirty lashes on the streets of Boston for his religious views.

Henry Dunster not only lost his job, he was forced into exile because of his challenge to the baptismal practice of the Puritan established church. Though he himself was never rebaptized, his story connects to the saga of Baptist beginnings in New England and raises several important questions for Baptist identity today.

What’s in a Name?

Matthew C. Bingham, a Baptist scholar from America who teaches now in England, has written an important book: Orthodox Radicals: Baptist Identity in the English Revolution.1 He argues against the wholesale and generic use of Baptist for those seventeenth-century Puritan Christians who gathered churches and began to practice believer’s baptism. It is not as though a group of congregationally minded, hot Protestants gathered in a coffeehouse in London in 1640 and said, “Brothers, let’s start a new denomination and call ourselves Baptists!” The word Baptist was not a term of self-designation you might stamp on your stationary or paint on a church sign outside the house of worship, partly because, as Dunster’s case shows, to challenge the baptismal practice of the established church in London, no less than in Boston, was to invite reprisals. Baptist was a kind of nickname, a byword, used first by Quakers and others as a sneer or term of abuse. Bingham’s preferred moniker is “baptistic congregationalists,” a more precise but no less anachronistic term. In this way, Baptists is like the word christianoi, which the New Testament uses three times to refer to the followers of Jesus — a derogatory name that stuck because it fit (Acts 11:26; 26:28; 1 Peter 4:16).

“‘Baptist’ was a kind of nickname, a byword, used first by Quakers and others as a sneer or term of abuse.”

The first Baptists were not overly concerned about which word other people used to describe them. But they could get huffy about what they did not want to be called. Thus, the 1644 edition of the London Baptist Confession was put forth in the name of seven congregations “which are commonly, but unjustly, called Anabaptists.” For more than a century, Anabaptism had connoted mayhem and violent revolution associated with the polygamous kingdom of Münster in 1534. “We are not like that!” the Baptists wanted to say clearly. When such Christians of the seventeenth century did refer to themselves in a positive manner, it was as “sister churches in London of the baptized persuasion,” or “the baptized people and churches in Lincolnshire,” or simply “the company of Christ’s friends.”

The framers of the 1644 Confession also rebuffed another charge leveled against them — namely, that of “holding free will, falling away from grace, denying original sin.”2 Such views could be found within the “Arminianized” Church of England led by Archbishop William Laud, as well as among some baptistic Christians who had broken with the strong Augustinian consensus of mainline Protestantism. This latter group would later become known as “General” Baptists, from their belief that Christ had provided a general redemption for all, as opposed to the “Particular” Baptists, who held that “Christ Jesus by his death did bring forth salvation and reconciliation only for the elect,” God’s chosen people.3 In their early years, Generals and Particulars had little to do with one another, and each group declined during the 1700s: Generals largely lapsed into unitarianism, while many Particulars were drawn toward a kind of hyper-Calvinism that squelched the free offer of the gospel for all. Both groups, by God’s grace, were touched by the fires of evangelical awakening in the later eighteenth century and played a role in the rise of the modern missionary movement.

John Bunyan, the “immortal dreamer,” was a Particular Baptist with a Luther-like passion for the gospel. He knew that labels can be libels, and he gave us wise words for a post-denominational world like ours no less than for his own pre-denominational one:

And since you would know by what name I would be distinguished from others; I tell you, I would be, and hope I am, a CHRISTIAN; and choose, if God should count me worthy, to be called a Christian, a believer, or other such name which is approved by the Holy Ghost. Acts 11:26. And for those factious titles of Anabaptist, Independents, Presbyterians, or the like, I conclude that they came from neither Jerusalem, nor Antioch, but rather from hell and Babylon; for they naturally tend to divisions: “you may know them by their fruits.”4

Which Tradition? Whose Reformed?

To call the baptized Christians who first embraced the 1644 and 1689 London Confessions “Reformed Baptists” is to lapse into anachronese again, for it was not a term they used for themselves. “Reformed Baptist” as a term came into vogue only in the latter half of the twentieth century, apparently originating among some of the followers of D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones. But more broadly, the term does serve a useful purpose to underscore the continuity between the Baptist movement that emerged in the seventeenth century and the earlier renewal of the church spawned by Luther, Zwingli, Calvin, Cranmer, and the Puritans. For example, the great Baptist pastor-theologian Andrew Fuller was happy to acknowledge that his own ministry stood in the tradition of “Luther, Calvin, Latimer, Knox . . . and numerous others of our Reformation champions.”5 Fuller and other Baptists like him were grateful for the Reformers, even though they did not look to any of them as a standard of faith. As Samuel Hieron put it in a verse that many other dissenters and non-conformists would have applauded heartily,

We do not hang on Calvin’s sleeveNor yet on Zwingli’s we believe:And Puritans we do defyIf right the name you do apply.6

“The Particular Baptist movement took shape as both a continuation and a pruning of the Reformation.”

When we keep this in mind, we can better see how the Particular Baptist movement took shape as a continuation and deepening as well as a pruning of the Reformation of the sixteenth century. This is how those who embraced the 1644 and 1689 confessions saw themselves and how, in retrospect, we should see them too. Four words describe these Baptists who subscribed to the defining confessions of the seventeenth century: canonical, covenantal, congregational, Calvinistic.

Canonical

In the preface to the 1689 London Confession, these Baptists were concerned to show how closely linked they were with other orthodox believers “in all the fundamental articles of the Christian religion.” They had no itch, they said,

to clog religion with new words, but do readily acquiesce in that form of sound words which hath been, in consent with the Holy Scriptures, used by others before us; hereby declaring, before God, angels, and men, our hearty agreement with them in that wholesome Protestant doctrine which, with so clear evidence of Scriptures, they have asserted.7

In other words, Baptists were good Protestants before they were good Baptists — and further, they were good Baptists because they were good Protestants. They affirmed the formal principle of the Reformation and denied church tradition as a second source of authority equal to the canonical Scriptures, the written word of God. The presuppositions of these Baptists echoed the teaching of William Ames, who, in his Marrow of Theology (the first theology textbook used at Harvard College), declared, “All things necessary to salvation are contained in the Scripture and also those things necessary for the institution and edification of the church. Therefore, Scripture is not a partial but a perfect rule of faith and morals.”8

But search the Scriptures as they might, the Baptists could find infant baptism in neither the Old nor New Testament — not in the analogy from circumcision, nor in Jesus’s blessing of the children, nor in household baptisms, nor in the famous prooftext of 1 Corinthians 7:14. In the church of the apostles, baptism had been an adult rite of initiation signifying a committed participation in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Baptism for believers only was simply the liturgical enactment of justification by faith alone.

“Search the Scriptures as they might, the Baptists could find infant baptism in neither the Old nor New Testament.”

And how this act was to be done was vitally important. This is why, beginning in the 1640s, immersion, dipping, or plunging the whole body under water was considered the proper, biblical mode of baptism. The question was not about the amount of water. Rather, the very act itself proclaimed its threefold meaning: the washing of the believer’s sin in the blood of Jesus, his or her interest in Jesus’s own death and resurrection, and the promised resurrection at the return of Christ. In the era before indoor baptistries, immersion was often performed outdoors in the open air, in rivers, lakes, ponds, and sometimes the sea itself — and often under the cover of darkness to prevent discovery and arrest. This led to salacious gossip and rumors of sexual scandal based on reports of women baptized naked in the river and of “young maids . . . baptized about one or two o’clock in the morning.”9 As the early Christians were falsely accused of turning love feasts into orgies and were called cannibals because they ate the “body and blood of Christ,” so too Baptists in this time had to fend off outrageous charges.

Covenantal

No term was more often used in the writings of seventeenth-century Reformed theology than the word covenant — not church, not grace, certainly not baptism. Congregationalists and Presbyterians alike defended infant baptism on the basis of covenant theology. Drawing on the construals of Zwingli and Calvin, their paedobaptist heirs in the seventeenth century found in Scripture one covenant in two administrations: what circumcision was to Abraham and his descendants in the Old Testament, infant baptism has become for Christians in the New.

Baptists agreed with the basic point that God had provided one, and only one, way of salvation throughout history — by grace through faith in the Messiah. But as Paul explained in Galatians, Abraham had a twofold seed — one according to the flesh, and one based on faith. The new covenant promised in Jeremiah 31 was fulfilled at the coming of Christ and the pouring out of the Spirit. As Samuel Renihan has said in his fine study From Shadow to Substance: The Federal Theology of the English Particular Baptists (1642–1704), “The covenant of grace did not run in bloodlines.”10 Nonetheless, the rite of circumcision does have a continuing positive meaning in the New Testament — not as the analogue to infant baptism, but rather as a type of regeneration and the new birth. So, Paul could say that in Christ we have received a “circumcision made without hands.” What counts now is a new creation (Colossians 2:11–12; Galatians 6:15).

Congregational

It was a Baptist pastor William Kiffen who coined the term “the congregational way”11 to describe the design of God for his people to live as “a walled sheepfold and watered garden,” a “company of visible saints, called and separated from the world to the visible profession of faith of the gospel.”12 Henry Dunster’s reflection on this ecclesiology led him not only to withhold his own children from infant baptism but to disown national and provincial churches altogether — he called them “nullities.” Dunster’s decoupling of citizenship and church membership was not far from Roger Williams’s church-state separation, and a precondition for full religious liberty. It is not surprising that, as one observer noted, Dunster’s preaching became bold “against the spirit of persecution.”13

Baptists inherited from their English Separatist forebears a bipolar ecclesiology based on the Augustinian distinction between the invisible church of the elect — all of God’s redeemed people through the ages — and the visible church, a covenantal company of gathered saints separated from the world and knit together into a “living temple” by the work of the Spirit (Ephesians 2:22; 1 Peter 2:4–5). It was also incumbent on such a body to separate back to the world (through congregational discipline) those members whose lives betrayed this profession. Baptists, with other congregationalists, were obsessed with what G.F. Nuttall has called “the passionate desire to recover the inner life of New Testament Christianity.”14

The Christological basis of the Christian life was developed by Calvin, Bucer, and other Reformers and was applied to the church in a distinctive way by early Baptists and other congregationalists. The threefold office of Christ as Prophet, Priest, and King not only secures the salvation of the chosen elect, it also enables the worship and corporate sanctification of the gathered community. Prayer and preaching are sustained by Christ’s priestly and prophetic offices, while his royal office undergirds the governance and disciplinary life of the church.

Calvinistic

Are Baptists Calvinists? This is what the French might call une question mal posée, because, as we have seen, the short answer is this: some are and others are not. Further, if a Calvinist is a person who follows strictly the teaching of the sixteenth-century Reformer of Geneva, then in three important ways Baptists, Generals and Particulars alike, are not and never have been such. Calvin was a paedobaptist; Baptists are credobaptists. In matters of church governance, Calvin was a Presbyterian; Baptists are congregationalists. Calvin believed that the civil magistrate had a religious duty to enforce both tables of the law, punishing heresy and rooting it out by capital punishment, if necessary; Baptists are advocates of religious freedom for all.

But Calvinism is not a monolithic historical entity irrevocably tied to one person. Nor can it be equated with a discrete denomination or an overarching confession with no soft edges. Historian John Balserak has reminded us that “as a living body of doctrines, Calvinism exhibits a great deal of development, diversity, and ambiguity.”15 The same, of course, could be said about Baptists, even if we count only those who claim the name for themselves, much less all the others who hold a baptistic view of the church. Perhaps it is better to listen to Alec Ryrie, who has described Calvinism, and the Reformed tradition more broadly, as “an ecumenical movement for Protestant unity.”16 At the heart of such an ecclesial and spiritual impulse is a heartfelt embrace of the unfettered grace of God set forth in the early church by St. Augustine and expressed with clarity in the five heads of doctrine promulgated at the Synod of Dort (1618–1619) — all of which are embedded in the 1644 and 1689 London Baptist Confessions.

Baptists today, with many pulls and tears and their diverse rivulets and tributaries, belong to this historic Reformed family of faith. When Baptists have forgotten this and obscured their rootedness in the Protestant Reformation, they have lost sight both of their “near agreement with many other Christians”17 as well as the theological basis of their own Baptist distinctives. They have become sectarian, distracted, and doctrinally unserious. But at their best, Baptists have not only drawn from the rich spiritual and theological traditions of the Reformation, they have made singular contributions to it. William Carey did so when he opened up a new era of missionary work by sailing to India. Charles Haddon Spurgeon did so from his pulpit (and in the slums) in Victorian London. George Liele and David George, both former slaves, did so when they proclaimed the great doctrines of grace from Georgia and Nova Scotia to Jamaica and Sierra Leone.

Anne Steele (1717–1778), the daughter of a Particular Baptist lay pastor, was a poet and hymnwriter whose work has blessed the entire church. Her poem “Entreating the Presence of Christ in His Churches” is based on the Old Testament text Haggai 2:7 and closes with a prayer that reflects her strong faith and confidence in the boundless power and grace of God:

Dear Saviour, let thy glory shine,     And fill thy dwellings here,Till life, and love, and joy divine     A heav’n on earth appear.

Then shall our hearts enraptur’d say,     Come, great Redeemer, come,And bring the bright, the glorious day,     That calls thy children home.18

Audio Transcript

Good Monday morning everyone, and welcome back to the podcast. Pastor John, we have over fifty questions piling up and waiting patiently for us in the inbox, all on cigarette smoking, vaping, and nicotine addiction — topics not addressed on APJ to this point. Our questions include things like, Is cigarette smoking a sin? Is smoking a “deliberate” sin, a willful sin, like what we read about in Hebrews 10:26? Is it sinful for someone to smoke indoors, thereby endangering the health of non-smokers inside a home? And of course, we have several emails from parents watching their teens get addicted to nicotine by vapes. Should they be concerned? There’s a lot to cover. In our first venture into these intertwined themes, what thoughts come to your mind?

The United States Food and Drug Administration has been requiring health warnings on cigarette packages since 1969. As of May 2021, there are eleven approved warnings. Here are six of them. (I just got them off the FDA website.)

Smoking causes head and neck cancer.
Tobacco smoke causes fatal lung disease in non-smokers.
Smoking causes cataracts, which can lead to blindness.
Smoking causes bladder cancer.
Smoking causes type 2 diabetes.
Smoking during pregnancy stunts fetal growth.

It’s not a debate anymore whether nicotine is a harmful drug and whether smoking causes numerous diseases. That includes nicotine in cigarettes, cigars, e-cigarettes (vaping), and chewing tobacco. Nicotine is harmful — whatever form you choose to put it in your mouth or in your lungs.

When Risk Is Wrong

The Bible is very clear that taking deadly risks is a noble and beautiful thing when you do it by entrusting your soul to Jesus and for the purpose of rescuing other people, especially people in eternal danger.

But the Bible has no praise for those who risk their lives or their health for private pleasure. The Bible calls this a deceitful desire (Ephesians 4:22). It’s a desire that promises one thing and then delivers another. It’s not rooted in or governed by a desire to show that Jesus is supremely desirable to us. The Bible says in 1 Corinthians 6:19–20,

Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, whom you have from God? You are not your own, for you were bought with a price. So glorify God in your body.

“The Bible has no praise for those who risk their lives or their health for private pleasure.”

So smokers need to ask, Is my decision to damage my body, and probably others’, by smoking governed by a desire to make God look glorious with my body, or does it merely make me look self-indulgent? So yes, parents should be concerned, and yes, it is wrong to use a deadly drug to calm your nerves.

From the First Smoke to the Last

But let’s do this. Let’s name seven steps from the first cigarette to the grave and see whether they fall short of biblical righteousness. This might be something parents would walk through with their 13-year-old.

1. Many people, especially younger people, take the first step into smoking because it’s “cool.” When I say cool, I intend three elements in coolness:

Coolness includes a feeling of liberating independence from authority. That authority might be a fuddy-duddy, fundamentalist, blowhard podcaster like me, or it might be parents, or it might be traditions that you’ve grown tired of.
Coolness includes the feeling that you now have an image of attractiveness, for whatever reason.
Coolness generally includes a sense of belonging to a group that you admire.

So step one into smoking is often motivated by a strong impulse to be cool in these three senses.

2. The desire to be a part of a cool group provides the necessary psychological power to deny, at the outset, that you are damaging yourself or others. Coolness empowers denial.

3. After the initial nausea or coughing or dizziness — if you get through that phase — there is the nicotine buzz, which feels, in the context of denial, like a justifiable reward. It feels good.

4. Now comes the pull of the buzz. As it becomes stronger, the desire passes from a chosen pleasure to the craving of a perceived need. This is sometimes called addiction. But I am usually hesitant to use that word because it creates the impression of helplessness, when we all know that if someone puts a blowtorch in front of your face, you will be able to put down the cigarette.

5. As one grows accustomed to the habit, there can easily grow a sense of indifference as to how it negatively affects others, whether at home or in public.

6. After enough time passes, then comes the negative health effect (or effects): lung disease, heart disease, kidney disease, high blood pressure, eye problems. The body eventually signals, with the help of physical pain, the foolishness that we refuse to see in rational or moral argument.

7. Death may come earlier than it would have otherwise, or perhaps more painfully.

Bad Habits and the Bible

Now it doesn’t take a Bible scholar to see that each of these steps involves an inclination or inclinations and actions that are contrary to the Spirit of Christ.

When the desire to be cool overcomes the call to wisdom and humility and freedom and self-control, coolness has become an idol; it has become more precious than the way of Christ. This is the main root that parents should address as soon as their children can talk: What will be their treasure and their guide — Christ or the crowd?

“What will be our children’s treasure and their guide — Christ or the crowd?”

The second step — the one that denies the harmfulness of nicotine — is simply self-deception. The Bible calls us over and over again not to be deceived: “You will know the truth, and the truth will set you free” (John 8:32).

The third step elevates the physical buzz above moral claims of wisdom and holiness. When Peter said, “I urge you as sojourners and exiles to abstain from the passions of the flesh, which wage war against your soul” (1 Peter 2:11), he meant that there are soul pleasures and soul commitments that should govern the desires of the body and keep us back from self-harm.

In the fourth step, we’re falling into the bondage of a drug. Paul said, “‘All things are lawful for me,’ but I will not be [enslaved] by anything” (1 Corinthians 6:12).

In step six, as with most bad habits, they’re not just a problem for us, but they begin to be a problem for others. Our indifference to that is simply a lack of love: “Let each of you look not only to his own interests, but also to the interests of others” (Philippians 2:4).

Finally, death is appointed for everyone, yes. Hastening it by means of self-pleasure, hastening it by means of selfish pleasure, is not submission to providence but the failure to value a precious gift.

Built into Your Kids

I would say to parents: from the earliest years, with prayer and a thoughtful use of the Bible, build into your children

a freedom from the herd mentality of needing to be cool;
a love of the truth;
a passion for self-control and self-denial for the greater joys of righteousness;
a deep commitment never to be enslaved by anything in this world;
a strong concern for the interests of others, not just our own;
a proper stewardship of the gift of health and life; and
a fearlessness in the face of death, but a refusal to risk it for the sake of personal pleasure.

A graduate student sits at a booth with friends, his second drink near empty. “Can I refill you?” the waiter asks.

A mother sees the chocolate as she reaches for her youngest’s sippy cup. She tries not to eat sugar in the afternoons, but she’s tired and stressed, and the children aren’t looking.

A father comes back to the kitchen after putting the kids down. Dinner is done, but the leftover pizza is still sitting out. The day has drained him, and another few pieces seem harmless.

Compared to the battles many fight — against addiction, against pornography, against anger, against pride — scenarios such as these may seem too trivial for discussion. Don’t we have bigger sins to worry about than the gluttony of secret snacks and third helpings?

And yet, food is a bigger battleground than many recognize. Do you remember Moses’s terse description of the world’s first sin?

She took of its fruit and ate, and she also gave some to her husband who was with her, and he ate. (Genesis 3:6)

Murder did not bar Adam and Eve from paradise — nor did adultery, theft, lying, or blasphemy. Eating did. Our first parents ate their way out of Eden. And in our own way, so do we.

Garden of Eating

Food problems, whether large (buffet binging) or small (hidden, uncontrolled snacking), go back to the beginning. Our own moments before the refrigerator or the cupboard can, in some small measure, reenact that moment by the tree. And apart from well-timed grace from God, we often respond in one of two ungodly ways.

“Our first parents ate their way out of Eden. And in our own way, so do we.”

Some, like Adam and Eve, choose to indulge. They sense, on some level, that to eat is to quiet the voice of conscience and weaken the walls of self-control (Proverbs 25:28). They would recognize, if they stopped to ponder and pray, that this “eating is not from faith” (Romans 14:23). But they neither stop, nor ponder, nor pray. Instead, they tip their glass for another drink, snatch and swallow the chocolate, grab a few more slices. Wisdom’s protest avails little against the suggestion of “just one more.”

“Since Eden,” Derek Kidner writes, “man has wanted the last ounce out of life, as though beyond God’s ‘enough’ lay ecstasy, not nausea” (Proverbs, 152). And so, the indulgent drink and grab and sip and snack, forgetting that their grasping leads them, not deeper into Eden’s heart, but farther outside Eden’s walls, where, nauseous and bloated, they bow to the god called “belly” (Philippians 3:19; see also Romans 16:18).

Meanwhile, others choose to deny. Their motto is not “Eat, drink, be merry” (Luke 12:19), but “Do not handle, do not taste, do not touch” (Colossians 2:21). They frantically count calories, buy scales, and build their lives on the first floor of the food pyramid. Though they may not impose their diets on others, at least for themselves they “require abstinence from foods that God created to be received with thanksgiving” (1 Timothy 4:3) — as if one should see Eden’s lawful fruit and say, “I’m good with grass.”

If our God-given appetites are a stallion, some let the horse run unbridled, while others prefer to shut him up in a stable. Still others, of course, alternate (sometimes wildly) between the two. In Christ, however, God teaches us to ride.

Appetite Redeemed

Paul’s familiar command to “be imitators of me, as I am of Christ” (1 Corinthians 11:1) comes, surprisingly enough, in the context of food (see 1 Corinthians 8–10, especially 8:7–13 and 10:14–33). And the Gospels tell us why: in Jesus, we find appetite redeemed.

“The Son of Man came eating and drinking,” Jesus says of himself (Matthew 11:19) — and he wasn’t exaggerating. Have you ever noticed just how often the Gospels mention food? Jesus’s first miracle multiplied wine (John 2:1–11); two of his most famous multiplied bread (Matthew 14:13–21; 15:32–39). He regularly dined as a guest at others’ homes, whether with tax collectors or Pharisees (Mark 2:13–17; Luke 14:1). He told parables about seeds and leaven, feasts and fattened calves (Matthew 13:1–9, 33; Luke 14:7–11; 15:11–32). When he met his disciples after his resurrection, he asked, “Have you anything here to eat?” (Luke 24:41) — another time, he took the initiative and cooked them breakfast himself (John 21:12). No wonder he thought it good for us to remember him over a meal (Matthew 26:26–29).

And yet, for all of his freedom with food, he was no glutton or drunkard. Jesus could feast, but he could also fast — even for forty days and forty nights when necessary (Matthew 4:2). At meals, you never get the sense that he was preoccupied with his plate; rather, God and neighbor were his constant concern (Mark 2:13–17; Luke 7:36–50). And so, when the tempter found him in his weakness, and suggested he make bread to break his fast, our second Adam gave a resolute no (Matthew 4:3–4).

Here is a man who knows how to ride a stallion. While some indulged, and others denied, our Lord Jesus directed his appetite.

Meeting Eden’s Maker

If we are going to imitate Jesus in his eating, we will need more than the right food rules. Adam and Eve did not fall, you’ll remember, for lack of a diet.

No, we imitate Jesus’s eating only as we enjoy the kind of communion he had with the Father. This touches the root of the failure at the tree, doesn’t it? Before Eve reached for the fruit, she let the serpent cast a shadow over her Father’s face. She let him convince her that the God of paradise, as Sinclair Ferguson writes, “was possessed of a narrow and restrictive spirit bordering on the malign” (The Whole Christ, 80). The god of the serpent’s beguiling was a misanthrope deity, one who kept his best fruit on forbidden trees. And so, Eve reached.

But through Jesus Christ, we meet God again: the real Maker of Eden, and the only one who can break and tame our appetites. Here is the God who made all the earth’s food; who planted trees on a hundred hills and said, “Eat!” (Genesis 2:16); who feeds his people from “the abundance of [his] house,” and gives “them drink of the river of [his] delights” (Psalm 36:8); who does not withhold anything good from his own (Psalm 84:11); and who, in the fullness of time, withheld not even the greatest of all goods: his beloved Son (Romans 8:32).

“We eat, drink, and abstain to the glory of God only when we, like Jesus, taste God himself as our choicest food.”

Unlike Adam and Eve, Jesus ate (and abstained) in the presence of this unfathomably good God. And so, when he ate, he gave thanks to the Giver (Matthew 14:19; 1 Corinthians 11:24). When he ran up against his Father’s “You shall not eat,” he did not silence conscience or discard self-control, but feasted on something better than bread alone (Matthew 4:4). “My food,” he told his disciples, “is to do the will of him who sent me and to accomplish his work” (John 4:34). He knew there was a time to eat and a time to abstain, and that both times were governed by the goodness of God.

We eat, drink, and abstain to the glory of God only when we, like Jesus, taste God himself as our choicest food (1 Corinthians 10:31; Psalm 34:8).

Direct Your Appetite

Admittedly, the line between just enough and too much is a blurry one, and even the most mature can fail to notice that border until they’ve eaten beyond it. Even still, between the overflowing plate of indulgence and the empty plate of denial is a third plate, one we increasingly discern and choose as the Spirit refines our heart’s palate. Here, we neither indulge nor deny our appetites, but like our Lord Jesus, we direct them.

So then, there you are, ready to grab another portion, take another drink, down another handful, though your best spiritual wisdom dictates otherwise. You are ready, in other words, to reach past God’s “enough” once again. What restores your sanity in that moment? Not repeating the rules with greater fervor, but following the rules back to the mouth of an infinitely good God. When you sense that you have reached God’s “enough” — perhaps through briefly stopping, pondering, praying — you have reached the wall keeping you from leaving the Eden of communion with Christ, that Food better than all food (John 4:34).

And so, you walk away, perhaps humming a hymn to the God who is good:

Thou art giving and forgiving,Ever blessing, ever blest,Wellspring of the joy of living,Ocean depth of happy rest!

This is the Maker of Eden, the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. And if the real God is this good, then we need not grasp for what he has not given.

What is Christian boldness? For some, the phrase conjures images of bravado, machismo, and swagger. For others, the phrase signifies a vague sense of courage and conviction in the face of opposition.

The fourth chapter of Acts provides an unusually clear picture of Christian boldness. The noun for boldness (parrēsia) appears three times in this one chapter (and only twice more in the rest of Acts) and here sets the context for Luke’s use of the verb speak boldly (parrēsiazomai) seven times in the coming chapters. He apparently intends for us to see the events of this chapter as a particularly poignant example of Christian boldness. By examining them, we can see not only what Christian boldness is, but where it comes from, and how we can cultivate it for ourselves.

Astonished at Common Men

The word first appears in Acts 4:13: “Now when they saw the boldness of Peter and John, and perceived that they were uneducated, common men, they were astonished.” What had the Jewish leaders seen that so shocked them?

Recall that Peter and John had been arrested following a miraculous healing at the temple (Acts 3:1–4:4). Peter had healed a man lame from birth, amazing the crowds. He followed the healing with an evangelistic sermon to the gathered crowd. The sermon is interrupted by the Jewish leaders, who, annoyed by the apostolic teaching, arrest the apostles and throw them in prison overnight.

The next day, Peter and John are brought before the entire council, including the high priest and his family. The rulers demand to know how Peter and John were able to do this miracle. And then Peter responds with the words that surprise the Sanhedrin and show us the meaning of boldness.

Three Elements of Christian Boldness

First, their boldness shines in a hostile context. The gathering of the entire council seems to be an attempt to intimidate these uneducated, common fishermen. Here are the elite, the educated, the men who have power. It is they who ask, “What do you have to say for yourselves?”

No doubt other uneducated men had stood before them and shivered, looked pale, and found their tongues tied in the presence of these religious leaders. But not Peter and John. Their answer to the accusatory question is as clear as a bell. “Let it be known to all of you . . . ,” Peter says (Acts 4:10). One imagines him lifting up his head and his voice so that he can be clearly heard by those in the back. This fisherman is unmoved in the presence of these leaders.

Second, their boldness manifests in their clear testimony about Jesus. It is by his name that the man was healed. It is by his name (and his name alone) that any man can be saved. This Jesus, whom God raised from the dead, is the cornerstone, and there is salvation in no one else (Acts 4:10–12). Thus, clarity about Jesus, and his power to heal and save, is at the heart of Christian boldness.

Finally, their boldness is displayed in their clarity about sin. This man, “Jesus Christ of Nazareth, whom you crucified . . . this Jesus is the stone that was rejected by you” (Acts 4:10–11). You rulers, you who purport to be the builders of Israel, rejected him, the cornerstone who has become for you a stone of stumbling and rock of offense. Here is a turning of the tables. Peter and John are the ones on trial; they have been arrested. And yet here they accuse and condemn the powerful men who not a few months earlier had killed Jesus himself.

“Christian boldness is courage and clarity about Jesus and sin in the face of powerful opposition.”

So then, what is Christian boldness? It is courage and clarity about Jesus and sin in the face of powerful opposition. It is plain and open speech with no obfuscation or muttering. It is unhindered testimony to the truth, whether about Christ and his salvation, or about what he came to save us from.

Obey God Rather than Men

This understanding of boldness is confirmed if we consider the next chapter, when Peter and John are again arrested and hauled before these same leaders for their refusal to stop speaking in the name of Jesus.

The high priest questioned them, saying, “We strictly charged you not to teach in this name, yet here you have filled Jerusalem with your teaching, and you intend to bring this man’s blood upon us” (Acts 5:28). But Peter and the apostles answered, “We must obey God rather than men. The God of our fathers raised Jesus, whom you killed by hanging him on a tree. God exalted him at his right hand as Leader and Savior, to give repentance to Israel and forgiveness of sins. And we are witnesses to these things, and so is the Holy Spirit, whom God has given to those who obey him” (Acts 5:29–32).

‘God Raised Him’

“You have filled Jerusalem with your teaching.” What teaching? The teaching about the resurrection of Jesus. The apostles are preaching the lordship of the risen Jesus. “God exalted him at his right hand as Leader and Savior, to give repentance to Israel and forgiveness of sins” (Acts 5:31). That’s what every sermon in Acts is about. God raised Jesus. God exalted Jesus. Jesus is Savior. Jesus is Lord. Jesus forgives sins. There is no other name by which we can be saved. This is the message the apostles preach in defiance of the Sanhedrin’s threats. They are determined to fill Jerusalem with the good news about who Jesus is and what God has done through him.

‘You Killed Him’

But not only teaching about Jesus. They also preach clearly and courageously about sin, and in particular the sin of betraying, rejecting, denying, and murdering Jesus. “You intend to bring this man’s blood upon us,” the high priest says (Acts 5:28). You’re trying to blame us for killing him. “That’s exactly right,” responds Peter. “You killed him by hanging him on a tree” (Acts 5:30).

It’s remarkable how often the apostles strike this note, in Jerusalem no less, only a few months removed from the crucifixion itself. The unjust death of Jesus is fresh, and yet the apostles make it a repeated and central note in their preaching, both to the crowds and to the Jewish leaders.

This Jesus, delivered up according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God, you crucified and killed by the hands of lawless men. (Acts 2:23)

God has made him both Lord and Christ, this Jesus whom you crucified. (Acts 2:36)

The God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, the God of our fathers, glorified his servant Jesus, whom you delivered over and denied in the presence of Pilate, when he had decided to release him. But you denied the Holy and Righteous One, and asked for a murderer to be granted to you, and you killed the Author of life, whom God raised from the dead. To this we are witnesses. (Acts 3:13–15)

By the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, whom you crucified, whom God raised from the dead. . . . This Jesus is the stone that was rejected by you, the builders. (Acts 4:10–11)

And this clarity and courage about the particular sin of killing Jesus is one part of the larger apostolic clarity about all sin and the need to repent.

Repent and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins, and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. . . . Save yourselves from this crooked generation. (Acts 2:38, 40)

Repent therefore, and turn back, that your sins may be blotted out. (Acts 3:19)

God, having raised up his servant, sent him to you first, to bless you by turning every one of you from your wickedness. (Acts 3:26)

“Every one of you [turn] from your wickedness.” Not your neighbor’s wickedness. Not the wickedness of those people over there. Your wickedness. This is Christian boldness — clearly and courageously testifying to the resurrection of Jesus and the need to repent, both in general and in the specific ways that we have rebelled against God.

Dare to Be Specific

This leads us to a key lesson for us about Christian boldness. If we are to be bold, we must bring the reality of Jesus to bear on the reality of human sinfulness. And not just generic sinfulness. While calls for repentance from generic sins have their place, true Christian boldness gets specific about sin and particular about context.

“If we are to be bold, we must bring the reality of Jesus to bear on the reality of human sinfulness.”

There is a perennial temptation for Christian preachers to gather a crowd and preach about all the sins “out there.” But faithfulness and boldness demand that we address the sins actually present in whatever room we find ourselves. And if we ever wonder which sins we ought to boldly address, we can simply ask which sins we’re tempted to ignore and minimize. Which sins do we tread lightly around? Where are we tempted to whisper? That context requires Christian boldness.

And Peter and John maintain this boldness in the face of threats and opposition, as they go from being a mere nuisance (Acts 4:2), to the objects of jealousy (Acts 5:17), to the objects of rage and violence (Acts 5:33; 7:54). The opposition escalates, and the boldness abides.

How Can We Grow in Courage?

Where then does this boldness come from? Fundamentally, it comes from the Holy Spirit. Peter, “filled with the Holy Spirit” answers the Sanhedrin’s question (Acts 4:8). In the face of threats, the early Christians “were all filled with the Holy Spirit and continued to speak the word of God with boldness” (Acts 4:31). Steven, “full of the Holy Spirit,” indicts the Jewish leaders who have arrested and falsely accused him (Acts 7:55).

But not only the Holy Spirit. The Jewish leaders, in recognizing the apostolic boldness, recognized that Peter and John “had been with Jesus” (Acts 4:13). And while this no doubt refers to their engagement in Christ’s earthly ministry, it contains a word for us today.

We too, if we wish to be bold, must be filled with the Spirit and abide with Jesus. And the book of Acts shows us not merely the ultimate source of Christian boldness, but also the means for growing in it. After Peter and John are released and warned to no longer speak in the name of Jesus, what do they do?

1. Gather

“They went to their friends and reported what the chief priest and elders had said to them. And . . . they lifted their voices together” (Acts 4:23–24). Christian boldness is not an individualistic affair. It comes from gathering with God’s people to seek his face together.

2. Pray

“Sovereign Lord, who made the heaven and the earth and the sea and everything in them . . . look upon their threats and grant to your servants to continue to speak the word with all boldness” (Acts 4:24, 29). Boldness comes to those who ask the Almighty Maker of heaven and earth for it. The Spirit fills them with Christian boldness because they petition the throne of grace to bestow it generously.

3. Ask God to make good on his promises

In their prayers, they repeat back to God what God has said. They quote Psalm 2 and celebrate God’s royal victory in Jesus. Christian boldness is a boldness built on the word of God.

4. Look for God’s Hand and Plan

Not only do they read the Bible and pray the Bible; they read their own story in light of the Scriptures, looking for God’s hand and plan in their lives. They see God’s hand and plan behind the Jewish and Roman opposition to Christ, and they see God’s hand and plan behind the continued opposition to Christ and his people. Jesus’s story is our story, and it is in the midst of that story that we gather and pray God’s word so that we, like the apostles, can speak God’s word with boldness.