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 language shall I borrow     to thank thee, dearest friend,for this, thy dying sorrow,     thy pity without end?Oh, make me thine forever,     and should I fainting be,Lord, let me never, never     outlive my love for thee. (“O Sacred Head, Now Wounded”)

I’d like to begin by giving two answers to the question of why this conference exists, or more personally, why I consider it a grace and privilege to be here.

First, when Bernard of Clairvaux, a thousand years ago, wrote the lines, “What language shall I borrow / to thank thee, dearest friend,” he was expressing the universal human experience that human language does not suffice as an adequate expression of the greatest realities in the world. What language shall I borrow / to thank thee, dearest friend, / for this, thy dying sorrow, / thy pity without end?

One answer to Bernard’s question that God has given in Scripture, and that the people of God have given for four thousand years, is this: I will borrow the language of singing. The Sing! Conference exists because the realities of the Christian faith are so glorious — so great, so beautiful, so valuable — they will never be adequately experienced or expressed by written or spoken language alone. They must be sung. Hence, a conference called Sing!

My second answer to the question of why this conference exists, or why I feel it as a grace to be part of it, can be seen if I tell you about an interaction between my wife and me. When we travel together, as we did yesterday to come here, I have said to my wife countless times in the last 52 years, “I’m glad you can go with me.” Or I have said something like: “It makes me happy that we can do this together.” Never once, not once, has she ever said, “You are so selfish. It makes you glad to have me along. It makes you happy that we can do this together.” The reason this conference exists is found in the answer to why she has never said that.

“God has given singing to his people as one of the most precious and powerful expressions of our gladness in his glory.”

Here’s why she has never said that: My pleasure in her is a measure of her treasure to me. The worth, the glory, that we see in others is measured by the gladness that we have in their presence. My pleasure in her presence is a tribute. It’s not selfishness; it’s celebration. And so it is with God. God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in him. Our pleasure in him is the measure of his Treasure to us. And the Treasure of God is so great that spoken language alone does not suffice as an adequate expression of his worth. Therefore, God has given singing to his people as one of the most precious and powerful expressions of our gladness in his glory. It is the gladness of Godward singing, especially through suffering in the cause of love, that makes God’s glory shine most brightly.

Five Ways Singing Serves the Great Commission

My task in the final minutes is to draw out some of the connections between this gladness of Godward singing and the great work of finishing the Great Commission — to gather in God’s elect from all the peoples of the world — to see all the ransomed of the Lord “come to Zion with singing” and “everlasting joy . . . upon their heads” (Isaiah 35:10).

To that end, I want to simply point you to five of those connections that I see in Scripture:

Singing sends the lovers of Christ to the nations.
Singing sustains the servants of Christ among the nations.
Singing sets free the captives in the nations.
Singing shows the all-satisfying glory of Christ to the nations.
And singing is a sign that the kings of the earth belong to Christ.

1. The gladness of Godward singing sends the lovers of Christ to the nations.

Sing to the Lord, bless his name;     tell of his salvation from day to day.Declare his glory among the nations,     his marvelous works among all the peoples!For great is the Lord, and greatly to be praised. (Psalm 96:2–4)

How many thousands of missionaries over the centuries have heard their calling from God in Psalm 96? Declare his glory among the nations! Declare his glory among the nations! And do it with a song in your heart and on your lips: Sing to the Lord, bless his name.

Every year for 33 years when I was a pastor, we had a missions conference. We closed it with me asking people to come to the front who, in their own fallible hearts, believed that God was calling them to cross some culture for the sake of the gospel long-term. They would come — twenty, fifty, two hundred. We would get their names to plug them into the nurture program. Then we would close the service every time with the hymn that the five Ecuador martyrs sang as they gave their lives to reach the Hourani in 1956.

We rest on thee, our Shield and our Defender!     Thine is the battle, thine shall be the praise;When passing through the gates of pearly splendor,     victors, we rest with thee, through endless days;when passing through the gates of pearly splendor,     victors, we rest with thee, through endless days. (“We Rest on Thee”)

My point is this: I would not be surprised if singing that song sealed the calling of many people as they wrestled with God’s will. Singing sends the lovers of Christ to the nations.

2. The gladness of Godward singing sustains the servants of Christ among the nations.

When that first Lord’s Supper was over, and Jesus was about to walk out into the dark of his final test, Mark and Matthew tell us that they sang together. “And when they had sung a hymn, they went out to the Mount of Olives” (Mark 14:26). And the next thing out of Jesus’s mouth is: “You will all fall away, for it is written, ‘I will strike the shepherd, and the sheep will be scattered’” (Mark 14:27). Here is the greatest missionary that ever was — from heaven to earth — about to be tested beyond imagination. And he strengthened his hand in God by singing with his friends.

I got an email from a missionary friend several months ago who serves among an unreached people in a very difficult place, and he gave a link to a recording of a song his teenage daughter had written and sung about the sufficiency of Christ in her life. One can only imagine how many missionaries have persevered for a lifetime through the power of Godward singing. Many of us sing to the Lord in the solitude of our rooms. So only heaven will reveal the immeasurable strength God has given to sustain us through song.

3. The gladness of Godward singing sets free the captives in the nations.

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that an earthquake shook open the prison doors while Paul and Silas were singing.

About midnight Paul and Silas were praying and singing hymns to God, and the prisoners were listening to them, and suddenly there was a great earthquake, so that the foundations of the prison were shaken. And immediately all the doors were opened, and everyone’s bonds were unfastened. (Acts 16:25–26)

Whether Luke intended for us to make the connection between Paul’s singing and setting the prisoner free, that is what happened, and what happens today.

In my early days as a pastor, I got a call at about ten o’clock in the evening. Some college students told me that a young woman was demon-possessed, and was threatening them with a knife, but they weren’t going to let her out of the room until I came. So I called my colleague, Tom Steller, and we went.

I had no experience of such a thing. But it was quite real. They all said that’s not her voice and that’s not her face. What I knew was that Jesus is more powerful than demons, and that the word of God is our sword for such warfare. So I read and prayed, and read and prayed, as she knocked the Bible out of my hand several times, and kept threatening with this little penknife that she had.

Then someone started to sing: “Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia,” and we all joined in and added spontaneous words to that simple melody. She fell to the floor and shook with great spasms calling out for Satan not to leave her. Then she went limp. When she came to, she had a different countenance and a different voice and read to us the eighth chapter of Romans.

Demons are real. Prisons are real. And God has appointed his truth, sometimes in singing, to free the captives among the nations.

4. The gladness of Godward singing shows the all-satisfying glory of Christ to the nations.

What does it mean that the missionaries of Christ sing and call the nations to join them in singing? It means that the fundamental divine requirement from all the peoples of the world is that they be glad in God through Jesus Christ.

Let the nations be glad and sing for joy, . . .Let the peoples praise you, O God;     let all the peoples praise you! (Psalm 67:4–5)

Make a joyful noise to the Lord, all the earth;     break forth into joyous song and sing praises!Sing praises to the Lord with the lyre,     with the lyre and the sound of melody!With trumpets and the sound of the horn     make a joyful noise before the King, the Lord! (Psalm 98:4–6)

“The Great Commission is a global command to be glad in God. Missions is a summons to the nations to sing of the all-satisfying glory of Christ.”

The Great Commission is a global command to be glad in God. Missions is a summons to the nations to sing of the all-satisfying glory of Christ — not because singing is the right thing to do but because singing is inevitable when you have tasted the forgiveness of sins, the rescue from hell, the imputation of righteousness, the adoption into God’s family, the hope of being with the God of all glory and shining together like the sun in the kingdom of our Father (Matthew 13:43).

“Let the nations be glad and sing for joy” is not a burdensome requirement. It’s an invitation to a feast (Matthew 22:4, 9), where every burden will be lifted, and every inner restraint will be removed, and the least likely singer will sing like the nightingale or the trumpet of God.

5. The gladness of Godward singing is a sign that the kings of the earth belong to Christ.

All the kings of the earth shall give you thanks, O Lord,     for they have heard the words of your mouth. (Psalm 138:4)

They lift up their voices, they sing for joy;     over the majesty of the Lord they shout from the west. . . .From the ends of the earth we hear songs of praise,     of glory to the Righteous One. (Isaiah 24:14, 16)

This is the sign of the triumph of Christ among the nations and their kings: a song of joy to the majesty of the Lord and songs of praise to the Righteous One. The singer gets the joy. The Savior gets the praise. That’s how God’s saving purpose advances.

This is the way God designed the world to be: God gets the glory among the nations. The nations get the gladness in God.

There is one unified goal for the universe: the glory of God in the gladness of the nations in God — gladness that is of such a nature that it cries out, What language shall I borrow? and answers, I will borrow the language of singing — and summon the nations to join me.

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.

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.

But I say to you who hear, love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you. (Luke 6:27–28)

Over two decades ago, on an unusually hot July evening in Syracuse, New York, I stood on Pastor Ken Smith’s porch and knocked on the door. I had been doing this for months, dining with my enemies.

I was a lesbian feminist activist English professor at Syracuse University. I thought I was doing research on this odd tribe of people called Christians, people who stood in the way of full civil rights for gay people like me. Ken was the pastor of the Syracuse Reformed Presbyterian Church. On that July night, Ken opened the door and warmly embraced me and welcomed me inside. Dining with my enemies was a fascinating experience. It made me feel like a bona fide liberal.

I knew I was on enemy territory. But I didn’t believe that I was the enemy. How could I be? I was on the side of social justice, reparations for the disempowered, racial reconciliation, and equitable inclusion for all.

Identifying the Enemy

For years — and before I became a believer and Ken became my pastor — I enjoyed the company of the Smiths’ table fellowship. I sat under Ken’s family devotions and joined in the Psalm singing. And then, at this July dinner, I realized it. I wasn’t the victim dining with my persecutors. I wasn’t at the enemy’s table. I was the enemy.

I thought I was on the right side of history. It was my undoing to finally realize that it was Jesus I was persecuting the whole time. Not some historical figure named Jesus. But King Jesus. The Jesus who was this world’s sovereign King and would become my Lord. My Jesus. My Prophet, Priest, King, Friend, Brother, and Savior. That Jesus.

I don’t like thinking about the fact that I was the enemy who hated, the enemy who cursed, and the enemy who abused. But it’s true. And instead of hating me back, Ken Smith assembled such a wide team of prayer warriors that I likely won’t meet all of the believers who prayed for my salvation until heaven.

From Cursing to Cursed

As soon as the Lord claimed me for himself, I had the opportunity to model what had been given to me: to love, do good, bless, and pray for those who curse me. It’s a lot harder than it sounds.

Everyone from the lesbian partner I broke up with, to the graduate students in Queer Theory whose Ph.D. dissertations I could no longer supervise, to the LGBTQ+ undergraduate student groups I could no longer support felt the stunning betrayal. I had changed my allegiance. Were their secrets still safe with me? I was disappointing almost everyone I loved because I believed in Jesus — the real Jesus who reveals himself in the Bible. My treachery to my lesbian community was only bearable through my union with Christ.

In such circumstances, union with Christ is the source of a Christian’s love that overcomes hatred: spiritual, unbreakable, irreplaceable, and eternal. It springs from the power of Christ’s resurrection, in which every believer abides. Conflict with others is never pleasant. It is disarming, disillusioning, and depressing. Union with Christ is our active comfort.

Cursing Continues

More recently (about a year ago), I found myself under attack again, and this time on three different fronts.

A national LGBTQ+ rights group grew angry with me as the 2020 PRIDE Parade was canceled for the first time in fifty years. Christians from a discernment ministry believed that I was too charitable in my evangelism in the LGBTQ community. Self-described gay Christians believed that I was too harsh in my rejection of “gay Christianity.” It was tempting to handle this in the flesh — to wish that all of these people could be locked in the same room and wrestle it out.

But that is not what God calls us to do when we’re under attack. God calls us to love our enemies. This season was spiritually rich with Psalm singing and reflection, repentance, and prayer. As the negative attacks intensified, the words of the great Puritan John Owen started to make sense. Owen considers union with Christ “the cause of all other graces a believer receives” (A Puritan Theology, 485). This is because union with Christ depends first on Christ knowing you.

Known by Christ

The issue for the suffering Christian isn’t first if you know Christ. Rather, the first issue is: does Christ know you? Union with Christ is first about Christ knowing you. Suffering for Christ is a great privilege. It is the privilege of John 10:27: “My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me.” Because Jesus knows the believer, we hear him, we follow him, and we suffer with him.

“God’s comfort is power. It’s not meant merely to make us feel better. It’s meant to make us more like Jesus.”

Do you want to know why the church lacks unity? Because we try to build our unity on issues — on where we stand on pressing matters of the day. But unity does not and will never derive from shared loyalty to issues. Christian unity flows from our union with Christ because he alone equips us to die to ourselves.

The comfort we find in Christ is not a passive repose in our favorite recliner. Even in the English language, comfort is an old word hearkening from the Middle Ages and referring to needed moral and physical strengthening. Comfort is active. God gives us comfort because we are too weak to go on, and his comfort enlivens us. God’s comfort is power. It’s not meant merely to make us feel better. It’s meant to make us more like Jesus.

Fellowship of Suffering

The Heidelberg Catechism declares that our “only comfort in life and death” will not be found in any of the values to which I had decades ago committed my life: social justice, reparations for the disempowered, racial reconciliation, and equitable inclusion for all. No. My only comfort in life and death, says the majestic Heidelberg, is

that I, with body and soul, both in life and death, am not my own, but belong unto my faithful Savior Jesus Christ; who with his precious blood has fully satisfied for all my sins, and delivered me from all the power of the devil; and so preserves me that without the will of my heavenly Father, not a hair can fall from my head; yea, that all things must be subservient to my salvation, wherefore by his Holy Spirit he also assures me of eternal life, and makes me heartily willing and ready, henceforth, to live unto him. (emphasis added)

What’s the big difference between a believer and an unbeliever? The believer does not belong to himself.

What does the experience of hatred, abuse, slander, and unjust discrimination mean to a believer? It means that, under God’s providence, these painful circumstances are “subservient to my salvation.” The hatred that a believer receives is subservient, which means that it is instrumental; it is a means to an end. And what is that end? To join in the “fellowship of his suffering” (Philippians 3:10 KJV). To grow in sanctification. To become more like Jesus.

Persecution Has a Master

Luke’s words are directed only to believers, to “you who hear.” Someone with a new heart, receptive ears, and bright eyes. We live in a noisy world — podcasts, television, social media, and so on — but Jesus is telling us to hear him.

“Persecution is subservient — it is a means to an end. And that end is your sanctification.”

What an amazing privilege it is to be someone chosen, elected, saved, justified, sanctified, and daily guided by the King of kings and Lord of lords. If nothing else is good in your life except that Jesus has unstopped your ears, you are already more blessed than any persecution or persecutor that comes your way. Persecution is subservient — it is a means to an end. And that end is your sanctification.

In God’s providence, as believers, we will have many opportunities to love, do good, bless, and pray for those who hate us. And as God enlarges our hearts by his Spirit, comforting us through union with Christ and assuring us of his sovereignty, we will not fail to do so.

Audio Transcript

On Wednesday we were in Holland. Today we are in Brazil. We are blessed with many friends in Brazil, and today’s email comes from one of them, a man named Cauã. Cauã lives in Rio de Janeiro. “Hello, Pastor John! I have been debating the following question in my head for a while. Does God command our praise because it glorifies him, or does he command our praise because he wants us to be happy? Does he command our worship for himself, or for our good? Or for both? Can you help me understand, please?”

Well, I will do my best, because this is what I’ve been trying to do for more or less fifty years. I think the answer to this question is just about the best news in all the world. At least in my own experience, to see the relationship between God’s command for praise and my experience of happiness was one of the most important discoveries that I ever made in my life. So I hope I can bring some clarity to it.

Glory at the Center

I don’t think there was any biblical text that my parents spoke to me or wrote to me after I left home more frequently than 1 Corinthians 10:31: “So, whether you eat or drink, or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God.” That command, that duty, was imprinted on my soul from as early as I can remember, and I am so thankful that it was. It was a wonderful thing. Whether you’re young, whether you’re old, to have a short, pithy summary of the purpose of human existence — what a gift! To know why you exist, to know why you are on this planet, indeed, to know why there is anything at all in existence — what a gift! What a privilege!

“God is committed to glorifying God.”

And it became obvious over time that this wasn’t simply my duty — to glorify God in everything I do — but this was God’s design for his own action. All of it. He does everything — he does everything he does — to the glory of God.

He predestines to the glory of God (Ephesians 1:5–6).
He creates to the glory of God (Isaiah 43:6–7; Psalm 19:1).
He guides history to the glory of God (Romans 11:33–36).
He sends Jesus to live and die for the glory of God (John 12:27–28; Philippians 2:9–11).
He sanctifies his church to the glory of God (Philippians 1:9–11).
Jesus is coming back to be marveled at and glorified among his people (2 Thessalonians 1:10).

Everywhere in the Bible, God is glorifying God. He does what he does to make God himself look as beautiful and glorious and great and wise and just and good and loving and gracious as he really is. So the duty that I grew up with expanded into a full-blown view of the universe. I think that’s really there in 1 Corinthians 10:31, because text after text pointed to the ultimate purpose of all things; namely, God is committed to glorifying God.

All to His Praise

And I remember seeing (this was in, I think, 1976 or so) for the first time those three verses in Ephesians 1:6, 12, 14 — all three of them saying, “unto the praise of his glory,” “unto the praise of his glory,” “unto the praise of his glory,” as if Paul were to say, “Hey, did you get it the third time, if not the second, if not the first time?” God does everything — and he saves especially — unto the praise of his glory.

So there’s absolutely no question how to answer the first part of Cauã’s question. Does God command our praise because it glorifies him? Yes. You are chosen, destined, adopted, redeemed unto the praise of the glory of God’s grace (Ephesians 1:6). God plans for our praise, creates for our praise, rules the world for our praise, saves us through the death of Jesus for his praise. And that praise is, specifically, praise ultimately for the glory of God’s grace.

“You are chosen, destined, adopted, redeemed unto the praise of the glory of God’s grace.”

Now that vision of God’s God-centeredness in creation and redemption, salvation, all of history, — that God-centeredness of God himself — left me for a long time perplexed about the place of my happiness in this overarching divine purpose. My perplexity was compounded when I heard preachers — for example, during a call to missions — say things like, “Seek God’s will, not your own. Seek to please God, not yourself.” And I knew there were texts in the Bible that said things like that. But it left me wondering, “Well, will it always be the case that when I’m acting in obedience, I’m acting against my will and against my pleasure?” That seemed hopeless to me — as if you were to grow in your obedience and be condemned to unhappiness the rest of your days, or even for eternity.

Completion of Joy

Then came the great discovery. It came from several sides, but the most shocking and compelling statement of the discovery was in C.S. Lewis’s book Reflections on the Psalms. He not only nailed my confusion, my perplexity, but in doing so, he gave the answer to it. So I want you to hear what I heard. So I’m going to read the whole section, a couple of paragraphs. And remember that what he’s dealing with here is that parts of the Bible, especially the Psalms, sounded to him, when God commanded his own praise, like an old woman seeking compliments, and that really bothered him. So here’s what he wrote. And this was life-changing for me.

The most obvious fact about praise — whether of God or anything — strangely escaped me. I thought of it in terms of compliment, approval, or the giving of honor. I had never noticed that all enjoyment spontaneously overflows into praise unless (sometimes even if) shyness or the fear of boring others is deliberately brought in to check it. . . .

The world rings with praise — lovers praising their mistresses, readers their favourite poet, walkers praising the countryside, players praising their favourite game — praise of weather, wines, dishes, actors, motors, horses, colleges, countries, historical personages, children, flowers, mountains, rare stamps, rare beetles, even sometimes politicians or scholars. . . .

I think he’s laughing.

I had not noticed either that just as men spontaneously praise whatever they value, so they spontaneously urge us to join them in praising it: “Isn’t she lovely? Wasn’t it glorious? Don’t you think that magnificent?” The Psalmists in telling everyone to praise God are doing what all men do when they speak of what they care about. My whole, more general, difficulty about the praise of God depended on my absurdly denying to us, as regards the supremely Valuable, what we delight to do, what indeed we can’t help doing, about everything else we value.

Here’s the nub of the matter:

I think we delight to praise what we enjoy because the praise not merely expresses but completes the enjoyment; it is its appointed consummation. It is not out of compliment that lovers keep on telling one another how beautiful they are; the delight is incomplete till it is expressed. (109–11, emphasis added)

Glory and Gladness Bound

Do you see where that led me? Every time God commanded me to praise him for his glory, he was commanding me to bring my pleasure in him to its fullest delight. That’s what he was commanding. My pleasure in God is not complete unless it overflows in praise. And my praise of
God is not glorifying to God unless it is the overflow of pleasure in God. God is not an egomaniac when he commands me to praise him. He’s acting in love, because my praising him is the apex of my pleasure in him. What a discovery!

So, the answer to the question is this: We should not, we dare not, choose between praising God as an expression of the glory of God and praising God as an overflow of our pleasure in God. We dare not choose between those or separate those. And after fifty years of pondering this, I don’t know any better way to say it than God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in him. If we try to choose between glorifying God and being glad in God, we will fail at both. The great discovery is that God has bound them together in his children forever.

Is it strangely possible that love is both pervasive and yet endangered in our day? The label is certainly plastered, like bright yellow tape, across anything and everything around us. Or, perhaps more accurately, society has made love a big-beige wall, drained of the definition or vibrancy it once had, so that anyone can decorate it however he or she likes. “Love” has come to mean whatever anyone says it means — and to suggest otherwise is, of course, “unloving.”

That those four letters are overused and abused, however, does not alter what love is. We could, for instance, start calling our mailbox a “tree,” and even convince our neighbors to do the same, but it wouldn’t erase the living realities of roots, and bark, and branches, and leaves that grow green, then yellow, then red, then fall. So what might we be losing by blurring the lines of what we call love?

Who Can Love?

Love, we know, not only has a definition but an identity, a personality, a name:

Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God, and whoever loves has been born of God and knows God. Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love. (1 John 4:7–8)

Only those who know God, the true God, can love, because this God, and only this God, is love. Drawing on texts like these, John Piper helpfully defines love as “the overflow and expansion of joy in God, which gladly meets the needs of others” (The Dangerous Duty of Delight, 44). If that’s true, that means millions — billions — of people think themselves loving while having never truly experienced or extended true love.

“Millions of people think themselves loving while having never truly experienced or extended true love.”

Closer to home, many of us, even in the church, consider ourselves loving without having wrestled with what it really means to love. We mistake not-loves for love, and therefore often fail to pursue the real thing.

What Love Is Not

In 1 Corinthians 13, the apostle Paul wrote, perhaps, the most familiar and cherished lines on love ever written. And while weddings today might lead us to believe the chapter was written for bright-eyed grooms and their brides dressed in white, he was actually writing to an ordinary, conflict-afflicted church struggling to love one another (1 Corinthians 1:10–11).

While we could focus on what he says love is and does, Paul also teaches us that pursuing love requires carefully discerning what love is not. For instance, “Love does not envy or boast” (1 Corinthians 13:4). It is not arrogant or rude, irritable or resentful. It does not insist on its own way. In fact, he begins the chapter not with startling examples of love, but by distinguishing love from four common not-loves. Notice how we can practice each without practicing love.

If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. 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 13:1–3)

Serving Is Not Love

The first of the four warnings is to the spiritually gifted. Our giftings, even our spiritual giftings, are no sure evidence of love. Don Carson writes, “The various spiritual gifts, as important as they are and as highly as Paul values them, can all be duplicated by pagans. This quality of love cannot be” (Showing the Spirit, 84).

What kinds of gifting did Paul have in mind? He gives examples in the previous chapter: the gifts of wisdom, knowledge, healing, miracles, prophecy, spiritual discernment, and speaking in tongues. The apostle encouraged, even charged them to practice these giftings. Evidently, though, some were given profound spiritual insight and an unusual ability to articulate those insights, but still lacked love. They probably assumed they were loving the church when they really loved being gifted and needed and seen.

And still today, some of us pursue gifting, and insist on using our abilities (whether in our churches, our communities, or our careers), but we do so without love. We’re more concerned with being needed, being productive, being successful than we are with loving others. We likely see this best when what others need from us diverges from the ways we want to be serving.

Knowing Is Not Love

Others in the Corinthian church pursued knowledge, and assumed their knowing made them loving. But even if we had all knowledge and understood all mysteries, Paul says, we can still lack love. In fact, the more we know, the more susceptible we may be to temptation, because “knowledge puffs up” (1 Corinthians 8:1). If Satan can’t keep us from the truth, he’d be happy to see us fill our minds with knowledge if it means enflaming our sense of pride and emptying our hearts of love.

So how do we distinguish between proud knowledge and good knowledge? Paul says, “‘Knowledge’ puffs up, but love builds up. If anyone imagines that he knows something, he does not yet know as he ought to know” (1 Corinthians 8:1–2). Pride betrays a knowledge running low on love. As godly knowledge grows, though, so does its sense of humility. Gold in a leaky boat will sink the boat, but gold in a well-built boat adds weight that strengthens and stabilizes the boat, even through heavy storms.

Those who know more, with love, have an increasing sense of just how much they do not know — and of how little they deserve to know anything they do know. And they use whatever knowledge they have not to stoke their personal sense of worth or image, but to build others up in their walks with God. They wield their knowledge to comfort, to encourage, to teach, to heal, to correct, to restore, to love.

Giving Is Not Love

“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). On the surface, it’s hard to conceive of a scenario like this. Could a man really give away all he had, even his very life, without love?

The apostle says yes. How could that be? Because people make radical sacrifices for all kinds of reasons, and usually not because of “an overflow of joy in God that gladly meets the needs of others.” In fact, many of the reasons have nothing to do with God at all. And as we’ve already seen, if an act has nothing to do with God, it has nothing to do with real love.

Sadly, our own reasons for giving, serving, and sacrificing, even in the church, sometimes have little to do with God. We want to appear generous. We want more power or influence. We like the feeling of having others indebted to us. We want to be rid of a guilty conscience. We want to fit in with some crowd or cause. “If men do great things and suffer great things merely out of self-love,” Jonathan Edwards warns, “that is but to offer that to themselves which is due to God, and so make an idol of themselves” (Charity and Its Fruits, 87).

Whenever the roots of our motivation stray away from our joy in God, our love will starve and wither. We will give, even give much, and gain nothing of eternal fruit or significance. Sweat, bleed, and even die as we might, our deeds can never cover a lack of love.

Believing Is Not Love

Perhaps most surprising of all, some even make the pursuit of faith a detour around love. “If I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing” (1 Corinthians 13:2). These people might say, “Of course I’m loving, look at what I believe.” To which, Paul might say, “I will know what you really believe by how you love.”

And he’s not alone. “What good is it, my brothers, if someone says he has faith but does not have works? Can that faith save him? . . . Faith by itself, if it does not have works, is dead” (James 2:14–17). Our acts of love could never save us, but neither can a faith that does not work through love (Galatians 5:6). We can have faith enough to hurl mountains into the sea, and yet still not be willing to climb the hills of love God has put in front of us.

“Genuine faith is not as concerned with moving mountains as it is with knowing and enjoying God.”

Believing and even expecting great things from God does not prove we belong to God; people in every religion, and even some pagans, hope for great things from God. But none of them — none of them — can love like anyone who truly knows Jesus. Genuine faith is not as concerned with moving mountains as it is with knowing and enjoying God, and the more it learns and enjoys of him, the more its love overflows into the needs of others.

Notice that Paul says four times, “If I have not love,” not, “If you. . . .” Even as he rebuked the heated and divided church, he modeled the kind of humility he longed to see in them. He knew how much even an apostle’s heart could be prone to resist and avoid the high costs of love. So are we similarly aware? Have we allowed our love for one another to grow cold behind the veils of our knowing, our serving, our giving, our believing?

No Greater Privilege

For all the ways “love” is used today, any real experience of love is a treasure beyond counting. Those who truly love prove not only that they know God, but that they are known and loved by God. If we see any genuine love in ourselves, we see God in us. Edwards captures something of the miracle in this love:

The saving grace of God in the heart, working a holy and divine temper of soul in the gift of faith and love must doubtless be the greatest blessing that ever men receive in this world; greater than any of the gifts of natural men, greater than the greatest natural abilities, greater than any acquired endowments of mind, greater than any attainments in learning, greater than any outward worth or honor, and a greater privilege than to be kings and emperors. (Charity and its Fruits, 74)

The love that God empowers is the greatest privilege on earth. When we love one another, God is pressing the wonders of his own heart into the cracks and corners of his kingdom — into our families and friendships, into our churches, into our neighborhoods. Without love, no matter how much we know, give, or do, we are and gain nothing. But if we walk in love, we gain more of God and we become more like God — and we hold out real love to a world whose God is love.

As discussion about women in the church lingers online and in the minds of congregants, I wonder if some sisters today feel that their churches debate their proper callings more than they delight in them as one of God’s best gifts. The conversations about what women can and cannot do in the context of the church are poignant in this particular moment. Can they preach, teach, or lead a co-ed Bible study? These conversations matter because the Scriptures speak to them. Yet the church’s public discourse about women, when healthy, is marked most of all by celebrations of women as faithful saints.

Women across continents and denominations report their local-church participation often leaves them feeling overlooked and undervalued. What a sad reality that our mothers and daughters often feel that Christ’s very own bride holds them at arm’s length, even if unintentionally.

We are right to aim for theological precision in all matters, including the callings of men and women in the church. But we would also do well to ask, Does the way we talk about women reflect the way the Scriptures celebrate them?

Introducing Eve

Recall man’s first words in Scripture. After God created the world and everything in it, the narrative sings with the rhythm, “And God saw that it was good” (Genesis 1:10, 12, 18, 21, 25, 31). But then suddenly, God declares, “It is not good that the man should be alone” (Genesis 2:18). And so, God makes the woman — the helper fit for the man. And as a father would usher the bride to her expectant husband, so God “brought [the woman] to the man” (Genesis 2:22).

“Remarkably, the first words a woman heard from a man announced the joy he took in her being.”

What follows are the first recorded sentences from human lips in Scripture. Upon seeing the woman, Adam explodes with delight: “This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called woman, because she was taken out of man” (Genesis 2:23). Remarkably, the first words a woman heard from a man announced the joy he took in her being.

At that moment, the woman hadn’t yet done anything except exist by the power of God. Yet her very existence leads Adam to rejoice. Without any further instruction, he understands that the woman is an extraordinary gift to him. He had known life in God’s world apart from her, and, once with her, he immediately loves her and knows how essential she is to God’s mandate that humans should take dominion and multiply (Genesis 1:28).

Without Eve, Adam cannot fulfill God’s calling. Without the woman, the story stops. In the very good beginning, God puts his wisdom on magnificent display in her creation. And as the story of the world progresses, God puts front and center the essential part women will play in his redemptive plan.

Book of Heroines

The Scriptures brim with narratives that underscore the essential and exalted place women hold in God’s economy. From Rebekah, whose Abraham-like faith compelled her to leave her home for a place and people she did not know (Genesis 24), to Ruth the Moabite widow, whose conversion to Yahweh led her to become part of the Messianic line, the Bible’s story cannot be told apart from the lives of faithful women.

In the ancient world, women were far more vulnerable than today, in part because they did not enjoy the same legal rights as men. Yet in that very context, Scripture celebrates women by repeatedly placing them in the stream of God’s redemptive plan, where their fidelity to God often throws into relief the disobedience of fallen men. We know many of their names: Sarah, Deborah, Hannah, Abigail, Esther, Elizabeth, and Priscilla. Four women even appear in Christ’s genealogy, including Rahab, Ruth, Bathsheba, and Mary (Matthew 1:5–16).

“The Bible’s story cannot be told apart from the lives of faithful women.”

Yet there are many others whose names are known only to God: women who received back their dead by resurrection (Hebrews 11:35); the widow of Zarepath, whose son was raised (1 Kings 17:17–24); the industrious godly woman extolled in Proverbs 31; the widow who offered everything (Mark 12:41–44); the sinful woman whose lavish care for Jesus in washing his feet with tears exposed the hypocrisy of the religious elite (Luke 7:36–50); and the Canaanite woman whose faith was answered with her daughter’s healing (Matthew 15:21–28).

Great Commission Women

Unbridled faith in God marks all of these accounts, and continues to encourage believers today. You can’t read your Bible without discerning the honored role God assigns women at every point in his story. Just as God gave Adam a mandate to multiply on the earth, so God gave the church a mission to multiply disciples. And so, just as Adam marveled at God’s creation of the woman, so the Bible teaches us to glorify God for the incredible gift of women who are in Christ.

Our sisters have been wonderfully indispensable to the church’s work of bearing witness to Christ and making disciples. God used Priscilla to sharpen and instruct the preacher Apollos in the way of God (Acts 18:24–26). Apart from the fervent prayers and godly life of Monica, the church may not enjoy the treasures of her son, Augustine.

Who can know how much eternal fruit the sacrificial labors of Lottie Moon and Gladys Aylward bore through their long ministries in China? Or through Amy Carmichael’s lifelong ministry in India?

Of course, we don’t just praise the Christian sisters whom we know by name. There are countless names we have not yet heard whom we will honor in the age to come. They are steadfast mothers and wives who pray down heaven while giving themselves to their family from dawn to dusk and even through the darkest nights. They are single women who joyfully content themselves in God while the world constantly tempts them to believe their faith is folly. My own experience living overseas testifies to the truth that far more young unmarried women cross oceans and borders for the sake of the gospel than men.

Honoring the Women Among Us

In the church, as in the garden, it is not good for man to be alone (Genesis 2:18). In a day in which popular culture has muddled the lines between men and women, Christian men today have an opportunity to give fresh evidence for how much we admire women and value womanhood. Created in God’s wisdom and by his power, the church’s mothers and daughters are not second-class citizens in the church.

God presented the first woman to the first man as a gift, and he continues giving women as blessings to his church today. And just as the woman knew the man’s joy in her immediately, so too it would be fitting for Christian women to regularly hear how much of an asset they are to the church, both locally and globally. Adam could not multiply and take dominion without the woman (Genesis 1:28). And without Christian women, we the church will not be able to fulfill our mission to bear witness and make disciples (Matthew 28:18–20). The whole of the Scriptures and church history bear witness to this fact.

Every day, women advance the mission of the church by demonstrating the matchless worth of Christ. We cannot afford to overlook these sisters in Christ — neither the God of history nor God-in-the-flesh overlooks them.