Even during his lifetime, many considered him “the First American.” The list of his accomplishments is astounding: first as an editor and publisher, then as a scientist and inventor, and finally as a philosopher and politician. A certified polymath, he founded not only the University of Pennsylvania but also Philadelphia’s first fire department.

Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790) was born two years after Jonathan Edwards but outlived him by more than three decades — and made the most of his extra time. He invented bifocals, the lightning rod, and the Franklin stove. He served as ambassador to France. Remembered as a “founding father” of the United States, he rallied disparate colonies to unity, and even served as the first postmaster general.

According to biographer Walter Isaacson, Franklin was “the most accomplished American of his age and the most influential in inventing the type of society America would become” (Benjamin Franklin, 492). Franklin’s labors were seemingly indefatigable.

Over a hundred years later, still remembered for his industry and achievements, Franklin appeared to German philosopher Max Weber (1864–1920) to be the paragon of what he called “the Protestant work ethic.”

Weber was badly mistaken.

Grilling Weber

Weber, who made famous the phrase “Protestant ethic” in his 1905 book, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, saw Franklin as “a near-perfect example of how Protestantism, drained of its doctrinal particularity, fostered modern capitalism” (Thomas Kidd, Benjamin Franklin, 3). Like Scottish economist Adam Smith (1723–1790), Franklin was raised in a Protestant, and Calvinist, home, where he learned his diligence, frugality, and industry. However, Franklin’s ethic, writes Kidd, came to be “detached from all direct connection to religious belief” as he “jettisoned Christian orthodoxy” (3–4).

At the outset of the twentieth century, Weber saw Franklin’s aversion to orthodoxy as an advantage for holding him up as his model. Weber wanted Protestant productivity without the drawbacks of Protestant doctrine. His errors, however, were twofold: first, he put a doctrinal label on an ethic emptied of doctrine; second, and even deeper, his understanding of “Protestant” was upside down. Weber’s doctrine-less “Protestant ethic” severed the fruit from the root, and also misunderstood the root to begin with.

In Weber’s eyes, Franklin’s “Protestant ethic” was an improvement on the ethic of his doctrinally particular forebears, who, he argued, sought to prove their election through prosperous work. As John Starke wrote in 2012, in response to the same error still appearing in The New York Times, “Weber’s book unfortunately multiplied myths about Protestantism, Calvinism, vocation, and capitalism. To this day, many believe Protestants work hard so as to build evidence for salvation.”

Whether Weber knew some self-proclaimed Protestants, Calvinists, or Puritans who accented this misconception, I would not doubt. But whether the Scriptures, and the Protestant movement and its spokesmen, teach this impulse, is not ambiguous. The lightning rod of the Reformation was justification by faith alone, and we will do far better than Weber, and any remaining heirs to his misconception, if we take our productivity cues from the electricity of this doctrine.

From Faith, for Work

Weber was onto something as an observer. Protestant theology changed not only the church; it changed the world. Full acceptance with God, by faith alone, unleashed industry. The rediscovery of Pauline justification produced hard work, and manifestly fruitful labor. But Weber failed to accurately explain why. He saw in Franklin a prodigiously productive man, and he hoped that perhaps the “Protestant ethic” could survive without its doctrine. But Weber overlooked how Franklin rode on the coattails of an upbringing steeped in that doctrine — and exactly how it produced such hard work.

The twin recoveries of the Protestant Reformation were the so-called formal principle of supreme authority (the Scriptures alone as final authority over all human authorities, including popes and councils) and the material principle of how humans get right with God (justification by faith alone, rather than human action, however righteous and good). Protestants emphatically do not believe that our labors secure God’s favor, nor that proving our election is the driving motivation for work. Rather, God, in his grace, declares the ungodly to be righteous before him through faith alone, on the basis of Christ’s perfect life, sacrificial death, and triumphant resurrection.

For Protestants, the first word, and the foundational word, about work is that the labor of our hands cannot get us right with God. Human effort and exertion, no matter how impressive compared to our peers’, cannot secure the acceptance and favor of the Almighty. God’s full and final acceptance — which we call justification — comes to us “by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus” (Romans 3:24), not through our working, or even our doing of God-commanded works (Romans 3:28). God’s choice of his people “depends not on human will or exertion, but on God, who has mercy” (Romans 9:16), and so, fittingly, his final and decisive approval and embrace of his people is through their believing in him, not their working for him (Romans 4:4–5; 2 Timothy 1:9; Titus 3:5).

“The Christian faith — grounded in justification by faith alone — is the world’s greatest rest from human labor.”

The Christian faith — rightly understood, grounded in justification by faith alone — is the world’s greatest rest from human labor. Jesus invites “all who labor and are heavy laden” to come to him for his gift of rest (Matthew 11:28). And then in this rest, God supplies remarkable, even supernatural, ambition, through his Holy Spirit, for pouring out what energies we have for the good of others.

To argue that hard work and justification by faith alone are not at odds, Protestants love to point out that most of the Bible’s teaching on both topics comes from the same voice: the apostle Paul.

Liberated for Love, and Labor

In coming to Christ in faith, we receive another gift, in addition to justification: “the promised Holy Spirit” (Ephesians 1:13). The Spirit not only produces in us the faith by which we are justified, but he gives us new life in Christ, new desires, new inclinations, new instincts, new loves. By the Spirit, our coming into justified rest does not make us idle or lazy. Rather, Paul says, the Spirit begins to make us “zealous for good works” (Titus 2:14), eager and ready to do good (2 Timothy 2:21; 3:16–17; Titus 3:1–2), devoting ourselves to acts that serve the good of others (Titus 3:8, 14), in the household of faith and beyond.

The Reformation recovery of such ultimate rest for the soul produced a different kind of people. Not a lazy and apathetic people. But the kind of people with new energy and freedom, new vision and hope, fresh initiatives, fresh freedom from self, and new desires to expend self for the good of others — all of which we might call love. If there is a work ethic that we might properly call Protestant, this is it.

Fill Your Work with Doctrine

Where Weber desired “Protestantism, drained of its doctrinal particularity,” William Wilberforce (1759–1833), a century before Weber (and far more proximate to Franklin), wanted exactly the opposite. In Wilberforce’s mind, it was precisely Protestant doctrine that fed the fires of its work ethic. Remove the fuel, and the engine will stop. As John Piper observes,

What made Wilberforce tick was a profound biblical allegiance to what he called the “peculiar doctrines” of Christianity. These, he said, give rise, in turn, to true affections . . . for spiritual things, which, in turn, break the power of pride and greed and fear, and then lead to transformed morals which, in turn, lead to the political welfare of the nation.

And what Wilberforce meant by “peculiar doctrines” was, in essence, Protestantism: “human depravity, divine judgment, the substitutionary work of Christ on the cross, justification by faith alone, regeneration by the Holy Spirit, and the practical necessity of fruit in a life devoted to good deeds.” As in every generation, we are in great need of the peculiar and particular Protestant doctrines today.

“The most courageous and self-sacrificial people are those who know themselves to be right with God through Christ.”

In the power of the Holy Spirit, such doctrines will not make us passive. Rather, they will unleash energy and industry, new desires and dreams for how to practically love neighbor, and even enemy. The most courageous and self-sacrificial people in the world are those who know themselves to be right with God through Christ.

From Joy, for Joy

Such full-orbed, detailed, time-tested, biblically grounded, Protestant doctrinal particularity will fill our work and callings with meaning and power. And not just “at work,” but in the home and in the church and in society. For Christians, the concept of work and labor extends far beyond a “day job” and what others pay us to do.

Through faith, Christ is ours, and heaven. Eternity is secure. Even now, we have the Spirit. We are free to love and serve others without using them, and free to learn the lesson that a hard day’s work makes for a happier soul than a day of laziness and distraction.

So, we work, from joy, and for joy — with far deeper roots than Franklin, and for the glory of God.

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.

The gospel is not a way to get people to heaven; it is a way to get people to God. (God Is the Gospel)

People often describe pivotal moments in their lives as “the day when God turned my world upside down.” Some experience, some conversation, some trial radically reshaped how they viewed themselves, their lives, their relationships, and the world around them. Well, in my sophomore year of college, God turned heaven upside down for me.

I grew up in a Christian home with loving Christian parents, and had been a Christian myself for a number of years at that point in college. I read the Bible and prayed most days. I was part of a faithful Bible-preaching church and was surrounded by mature and intentional Christian friends. I was even doing ministry among high school students, sharing the gospel and discipling them in the faith. And then, in a moment — in a sentence — God suddenly flooded the gospel with new meaning, new colors, new intensity and joy.

To draw me deeper into the gospel, though, God had to first confront me, but it was the sweetest kind of confrontation, the most satisfying kind of rebuke. The sentence tackled me where I sat and has never let me go.

Christ did not die to forgive sinners who go on treasuring anything above seeing and savoring God. And people who would be happy in heaven if Christ were not there, will not be there. The gospel is not a way to get people to heaven; it is a way to get people to God. (God Is the Gospel, 47)

Question for Our Generation

The gospel is the way to get people to God. The gospel is the way to get me to God. It was the kind of rare epiphany that is both devasting and thrilling. Devastating, because you realize just how much you’ve had wrong until now. Thrilling, because you have stumbled into a land you’d never seen before, an ocean you’d never sailed before, a favorite meal you’d never tasted before.

God is not just the only way to heaven; he is what makes heaven worth wanting. He is the great meal. He is the wild and wondrous ocean. He is the treasure hidden in the field and the pearl of great price (Matthew 13:44–46). John Piper presses home the surpassing gift of God himself with a haunting question:

The critical question for our generation — and for every generation — is this: If you could have heaven, with no sickness, and with all the friends you ever had on earth, and all the food you ever liked, and all the leisure activities you ever enjoyed, and all the natural beauties you ever saw, all the physical pleasures you ever tasted, and no human conflict or any natural disasters, could you be satisfied with heaven, if Christ were not there? (God Is the Gospel, 15)

“God is not just the only way to heaven; he is what makes heaven worth wanting.”

Could you?

Could I? That was the question that turned heaven on its head for me. Could I be content in a heaven without Christ? And if not, if Christ really was what made heaven an eternity worth wanting, why wasn’t I doing more to know and enjoy him now on earth?

Who Is Heaven?

“The gospel is not a way to get people to heaven; it is a way to get people to God.” But what does God say? Does he talk about himself, the gospel, and heaven that way?

The apostle Paul knew that God was the greatest gift of the gospel. “Whatever gain I had, I counted as loss for the sake of Christ. Indeed, I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things and count them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ and be found in him” (Philippians 3:7–9). The real treasure, the one that surpasses all others, is to know him, to gain him, to have him.

Why did Christ die on the cross? The apostle Peter says, “Christ also suffered once for sins, the righteous for the unrighteous, that he might bring us to God” (1 Peter 3:18). He suffered, bled, and died not just so that we might be forgiven and relieved of hell, but so that we might have God. The worst consequence of sin is not the fire, but the separation (2 Thessalonians 1:9). Hell will be agonizing and miserable for many reasons, but none more than being deprived of God himself. The damned will still experience the presence of God (Revelation 14:10), but it will be in horrifying wrath, rather than in grace and joy. They will never have God.

“The real treasure, the one that surpasses all others, is to know him, to gain him, to have him.”

The redeemed, however, sing, “I will go to the altar of God, to God my exceeding joy” (Psalm 43:4). “You make known to me the path of life; in your presence there is fullness of joy; at your right hand are pleasures forevermore” (Psalm 16:11) — not only joys and pleasures beside him or around him, but above all, joy in him. He is the joy. He is the pleasure. His presence is paradise — and it would be so even if everything else we loved and wanted was taken away.

And, in Christ, we experience that presence in part even now. Yes, our remaining sin and the consequences of sin interfere with that experience, but when God is our joy, we taste real joy now. We savor pleasures in everyday life now, pleasures that will last forever. And so we pray prayers like Psalm 42: “As a deer pants for flowing streams, so pants my soul for you, O God” — not for deliverance, or forgiveness, or healing, or provision, or relief, or reconciliation, but for you — “My soul thirsts for God, for the living God” (Psalm 42:1–2). Not for the good and perfect gifts God gives, but for the far better gift that God is.

Heaven of the New Heavens

As we wait and long for heaven, many of us have clung to promises like Revelation 21:4: “He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away.” No more tears, no more death, no more mourning or crying or pain. We can hardly imagine the sweetness of these absences — a whole world without shadows.

Heaven, however, will not be defined by absences; paradise will be defined by an all-satisfying presence. When God becomes heaven for us, verse 3 rises and eclipses even the precious promises of verse 4:

Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. . . . And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God.”

What’s better than a world without sin, sorrow, and death? A world with God. Yes, he will wipe away our tears. Yes, he will heal our wounds and cure our diseases. Yes, he will finally do away with that awful enemy, death. But those blessings, while infinitely great, will be as puddles next to the ocean of having him and being his. A God capable of drying every tear under every eye will be our God. A God capable of curing every cancer will give himself to us — even us. A God capable of emptying graves and overthrowing death will live with us, and for us, forever.

Don’t let all that God can do for you blind you to all that he can be for you. Don’t spend so much time splashing in puddles that you never get to see the ocean. Don’t settle for any offer of heaven that doesn’t have him at the center.

Nine-year-olds tell it straight. A boy in my morning class once asked me, “Miss, why do you look like you just woke up?” Another day he walked in sighing and clutching his chest. “I’m just so glad you aren’t wearing a wig again today!” The wig? My new bangs, hidden behind a headband.

Unlike adults, most kids don’t have a category for off-limit topics regarding appearance. While most adults would cry conversational foul play, bad haircuts, weight gain, and receding hairlines are all fair game for fourth graders. Why do kids feel free to describe beauty in both its presence and its absence?

At least in part, kids talk about appearance because, in their eyes, it’s just that. When students tell me how I look, that’s exactly what they’re doing — telling me how I look. They make no claims about who I am. If my ponytail looks “super weird today,” they say so — because my hairstyle does not undermine my identity as their beloved teacher.

Too often, however, we invest physical beauty with far more significance. We treat beauty as a means to self-worth: how we look is who we are. But if we would only gaze upon God’s word with the eyes of a child, we might unlatch beauty from its worldly contortions and fasten it instead to the God who is Beauty himself.

Beauty by the World

Left to our own devices, we define beauty a lot like the Evil Queen. We stand enraptured before the mirror, waiting for it to tell us how our appearance measures up to others across the land. In sin-twisted kingdoms, to be beautiful is to be attractive to as many human eyes as possible.

“We age, and lose it. Generations pass, and alter it. Staying beautiful is flat-out exhausting (and expensive).”

But beneath those eyes lie hearts whose visual appetite is insatiable. They flit from post to post, screen to screen, trend to trend — idol to idol — waiting to be satisfied. Nothing will do. That’s why an attractive-and-therefore-beautiful appearance, both as a personal possession and cultural definition, expires. We age, and lose it. Generations pass, and alter it. Staying beautiful is flat-out exhausting (and expensive).

While describing my teenage years to a group of girls, I mentioned how “thin and lanky” I was. They looked at me in horror. Cutting me off, one student exclaimed, “Miss, you are not thin! You’re perfect.” The other girls agreed. “Yeah, miss! Don’t say that. You are not thin. You’re beautiful.” Their words struck me silent. The teenage me had lived in a world where beauty required thinness; in their world, beauty required not thinness. I heard in their words not a compliment, but a truth claim: worldly beauty is fickle.

God warned us. Thousands of years ago, he said, “Beauty is vain” (Proverbs 31:30) — or according to some translations, “fleeting” (NIV). The adjective’s literal meaning packs the greatest punch, as the Hebrew word heḇel denotes “breath.” From the perspective of an eternal God, beauty vanishes with the rise and fall of a chest. If we put our hope in beauty, it will betray us — and quickly.

Does that mean God wants Christian women to toss out the mascara and throw in the washcloth? No makeup, no dyed hair, no new clothes, no gym membership — nothing? Shall we consign ourselves to a life of bedhead, wigs, and super weird ponytails? These aren’t bad questions, but they are the wrong ones. Instead we should ask, How does God’s definition of beauty change our pursuit of beauty?

Beauty from God

In God’s economy, beauty does not fret over itself, or talk about itself, or make purchases for itself, or dawdle over pictures of itself. For God-defined beauty cannot be seen in a mirror. Rather, it pulses: “Man looks on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart” (1 Samuel 16:7). Beauty flows from a heart that beats with moral goodness — love for, delight in, and submission to God (Acts 13:22).

Unlike our pursuit of physical beauty, we cannot fret, talk, purchase, or edit our way to heart-level beauty. The Beauty — with a capital B — for which we ought to exert the most energy, the Beauty on which we ought to spend the most time and resources, is one we cannot powder onto our faces. It is a Person we must pursue.

This Person is Jesus, the only man whose heart sought God perfectly for a lifetime. In him we find, and from him we receive, true Beauty. And it is not the beauty of appearance:

He had no form or majesty that we should look at him,     and no beauty that we should desire him.He was despised and rejected by men,     a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief;and as one from whom men hide their faces     he was despised, and we esteemed him not. (Isaiah 53:2–3)

Rather, it is the Beauty that loves and sacrifices itself for others, in which God delights:

He was pierced for our transgressions;     he was crushed for our iniquities;upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace,     and with his wounds we are healed. (Isaiah 53:5)

This is the Beauty that does not perish upon makeup removal or spoil from one trend to the next. It is the Beauty that endures with laughter the aging process and the innocent comments of children (Proverbs 31:25). For regardless of appearance, its identity is secure: “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased” (Matthew 3:17).

Beauty as Possession and Pursuit

Dear women: If we call the beloved Son “Savior” and “Lord” (Romans 10:9), we possess this Beauty forevermore. For in God’s sight we have been clothed for all time with Christ’s sacrificial love (Galatians 2:20). There is no need to fuss over becoming and staying beautiful on this earth. Christ is eternal Beauty Himself — and our lives are hidden in him (Colossians 3:3).

We still labor for beauty — but not now for the beauty of appearance. If we possess Beauty in Christ, we will pursue the Beauty of Christ. We will strive, as those who are free from the world’s fickle fashions, to emulate an everlasting Beauty — to live as if God’s glory is real, precious, and worth pursuing, now and always.

Becoming more like-hearted to God’s beloved Son will never go out of vogue. We can exhaust ourselves in the pursuit of Christ’s Beauty, sure that “we all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another” (2 Corinthians 3:18). When the day ends, we will not crawl into bed with less money and more products. We will drift off radiating God’s Beauty in Christ, satisfied.

Beauty as a Means

As Beauty becomes ours ever more in Christ, beauty — with a lowercase b — will take its rightful place as a God-given, God-exalting gift. God cares about visual beauty because, well, he makes and sustains its every expression. He made us in his image, to image him. For our part, we humbly, happily use what he has made to exalt him who made it (Colossians 1:16).

“If we don’t watch ourselves, we will end up only watching ourselves.”

As with any morally neutral hobby, we seek to use earthly beauty to illumine heavenly realities. As we dab at our faces in the morning hours, we can wonder at the way God paints the sky (Psalm 19:1). We can adopt new styles with hearts enthralled by the God who has provided us with an imperishable garment — the righteousness of Christ (Isaiah 61:10). We can enjoy beauty without self-obsession when we seek to enjoy its Fount.

I’m not saying we have to pair Scripture and meditation to all our beautifying. Many activities whirl past us unexamined. But we all can agree that beauty — like many other endeavors, such as athletics or a career — has great capacity to be self-centered. If we don’t watch ourselves, we will end up only watching ourselves.

As my students discover lip gloss and T-shirt dresses, I pray they learn to use beauty as a means to enjoy and exalt God rather than self. I hope they know the beauty with which God already has created them and the Beauty to which he beckons them. Even so, they cannot learn what Christian women neither understand for themselves nor model for others. Let’s see beauty for what it is, as we lay hold of Beauty for who he is.

Audio Transcript

After one quarter of a century at Bethlehem Baptist Church, Pastor John looked back and reflected on one of the most troubling trends he followed in Christianity. It was the trend of self-esteem and self-love, big in the 1970s and 80s. Self-esteem was said to be the key to Christian love: love yourself more, and then you will be able to love others more effectively. But such a model was a distortion. Actually, what the Bible demands from Christians is far more radical than self-esteem. It’s more radical because the Bible does not call us to love ourselves more, but to love others with the same earnestness and zeal that we already love ourselves with. This more radical calling to love is such a high and demanding calling, Pastor John will come right out and call this revelation utterly “devastating” — devastating because it really renders Christianity to be “an impossible religion.” Here’s Pastor John, explaining in one of his 2005 sermons.

How is the debt of love we owe to others related to self-love? Romans 13:9 is a quotation of Leviticus 19:18. It’s quoted by Jesus; it’s quoted by James; it’s quoted by Paul. This is the royal law of love: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” My question is, What does “as you love yourself” mean — “as yourself”?

I’ve been here 25 years now. We just celebrated that on Wednesday night. I can remember in the six years before I got here being over at Bethel, and I would say among the dominant concerns of my life from 1974 to 1989 was this issue. What does “as yourself” mean? I point out that little historical fact just because either I’ve got my head in the sand, or things have changed a little bit. I don’t hear as much now as I did, thirty and twenty years ago, the psychological scheme that was built on this verse that was so wrong. But I’m going to tell you what it is just in case my head is in the sand, and just in case it’s got a hook in you. I’m going to try to get the hook out right now.

Gospel of Self-Esteem

For many years, Christians would write articles and books in which they said that this command meant that the reason people don’t love others is because they haven’t learned to love themselves enough, and therefore the task of counseling and the task of education and parenting and preaching is to help people love themselves more so that they would have resources to love other people. And in that little scheme, self-love always meant self-esteem.

So the universal gospel that fixes all problems of children and marriages and business conflict is lack of self-esteem, and therefore the task of all counselors, all preachers, all parents, all educators is to get more self-esteem into these little kids’ lives and into these employees’ lives, and then things will go better because as they love themselves, they will spill over on love to other people. That was the scheme, and it colossally missed the point in several ways.

First, this biblical commandment assumes that all of us love ourselves and don’t need to be taught at all to love ourselves. It is an assumption. Every person in this room without exception has a massive love affair with yourself. You don’t need to be taught at all.

And it has, secondly, nothing to do with self-esteem. Your love for yourself is very simply your desire to be happy and to do whatever it takes to make your life the way you want it. He’s not talking as if first you must learn to esteem yourself, and then out of that rich appreciation for your qualities, you now are free to love other people — which presumably, then, would mean to help them appreciate how wonderful they are.

Everybody Wants to Be Happy

That’s just not the way Paul was thinking. The words are not a command to love yourself; they are an assumption: love your neighbor as you already love yourself — no questions asked about it.

Here’s an example in Ephesians 5. Paul is talking about husbands and wives in Ephesians 5. He’s taking the command to love your neighbor and applying it to husbands and wives. So how does a husband love a wife in these terms? It goes like this: “Husbands should love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself.” Then he adds this amazingly crucial statement in verse 29: “For no one ever hated his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it, just as Christ does the church” (Ephesians 5:28–29). Nobody ever hated himself, but nourishes and cherishes himself. Everybody, without exception, loves himself — whatever his self-esteem is, high or low.

Everybody wants food to eat and will do almost anything to get it if we get hungry enough.
Everybody wants to drink and not die of thirst, and we will do almost anything to serve ourselves with drink if we get thirsty enough.
Everybody wants to avoid injury and death, and we will do whatever it takes not to walk in front of a train or a truck or drink poison or get ourselves killed in some other way.

We love life and our health big time. And if somebody raises the objection, “Well, what about masochists and suicide victims? Are they exceptions? I mean, they don’t treat themselves well, do they?” The answer is that masochists and suicide victims are not exceptions to this rule.

A masochist is a person who, for very sad and sick reasons, finds pleasure in hurting himself or pleasure in the tending of the doctors. I’ve talked to people who cut themselves. I asked one young woman that we were working with, “Why do you cut yourself?” She had big lacerations on her stomach. She said, “It’s the only time anybody ever touches me.” She wanted to be touched. She loved herself massively. “Touch me. Touch me, doctors.”

The same is true for suicide. The only reason people commit suicide is because life has gotten so painful, they can’t stand it anymore and they want to escape. They just want out of the pain, which is self-love. “I don’t want the pain anymore.”

“Everyone has self-love. Jesus does not command it; he assumes it.”

Everybody likes to be praised, and apart from grace, we all subtly say things and do things to be liked, to be praised. It takes a massive work of divine grace to free you from that idol. We love the praise of men. Everyone has self-love. Jesus does not command it; he assumes it.

Seek Others’ Good

Now, lots of people think it would be very radical if Jesus said, “So stop loving yourself like that, and start doing the duty of love to other people. Stop having those strong cravings for your own happiness and your own welfare. Stop that, kill that, crucify that, die to that, and start doing something that doesn’t flow from desires for your happiness and just do dutiful, loving things.” Some people would say that’s really radical, and it would be, I suppose.

But it’s not as radical as what Jesus says and Paul says and James says and Leviticus says. They say, “Love your neighbor that way: like you massively love yourself. Make your desire to be alive, make your desire for happiness the measure of your desire for other people’s happiness.” You talk about radical, you talk about life-changing, heart-exploding, impossible demands. Love your neighbor as you love yourself.

If you are energetic in pursuing your own happiness, be energetic in pursuing the happiness of your neighbor.
If you are creative in pursuing your own happiness, be creative in pursuing the happiness of your neighbor.
If you are persevering and enduring in pursuing your own happiness, be persevering and enduring in pursuing the happiness of your neighbor.

“Make the degree of your own self-seeking, which is very high, the measure of your seeking their good.”

Paul is not mainly saying to seek for your neighbor the same things that you want; he’s saying, “Seek their good in the same way you seek your own good. Make the degree of your own self-seeking, which is very high, the measure of your seeking their good.”

Radical, Impossible Command

This is devastating. You’re sitting at home. You’re just enjoying an evening. It feels good — watching television, watching a video, eating a good meal, talking. And you hear Jesus say, “Love your neighbor as you want this evening.” That’s just devastating. Measure your pursuit of the happiness of others by the pursuit of your own.

How do you pursue your well-being? Pursue their well-being that way.
Are you hungry? Find a hungry neighbor and feed him.
Are you thirsty? Give your thirsty neighbor a drink.
Are you lonely? Find someone who’s lonely and befriend them.
Are you frightened? Find someone to comfort.
You want to make a good grade on the next exam. So do others. Help them.

That is radical. It’s far more radical than saying, “Stop desiring and start doing duty.” It’s far more radical because it says, “Now, all these massive desires that I have for my happiness are not sent away; they are transposed into another kind of music. The same energy, the same longings, the same desires are now desires for you and your salvation and your happiness and your good, your stomach being full and your mind being educated and your life having significance. All the things I want, I now, with that same energy, want for you.”

Christianity is an impossible religion. This is a standard that is overwhelming, and it just makes me long to have a miracle done to me.

It is more pious and more accurate to signify God from the Son and call Him Father, than to name Him from His works only and call Him Unoriginate.

As a child, I used to have an almost physical reaction to the word God. To me, it was a sharp-edged word that cut through all others. When it was spoken, I felt both searched and unsettled. Now, I knew enough to understand why the uttering of that word should make me feel searched. God, I realized, was high and holy; I was not.

But why was I unsettled? That question would pester me for years. It wasn’t merely that God transcended me. It wasn’t only his dazzling perfection. I had only the dimmest appreciation of those realities. What I couldn’t quite express at the time was that God in his glory was not then beautiful to me. His holiness troubled me, not just because it exposed me, but because I did not clearly see him as good.

And so, I found myself interested in heaven, interested in salvation, even interested in Jesus, but not attracted to God. I longed to escape hell and go to heaven, but God’s presence was not the inducement. Quite the opposite: I would have been far more comfortable with a Godless paradise. At the same time, I loved the idea of justification by faith alone, but couldn’t quite believe it — for, quite simply, God did not strike me as being that kind.

Rescued from the Unsmiling God

I have always been an avid bibliophile, and as a teenager I began to be drawn especially to the writings of the Reformers and Puritans. And one soon stood out to me: Richard Sibbes.

The way Sibbes described the tenderness, benevolence, and sheer loveliness of Jesus was utterly enthralling. And I knew he was right. Yet it didn’t compute. How could the Son of God be so beautiful when God was not? It could only be, I dimly reasoned, that the kindness of the Son was but window dressing. Jesus was the lovely facade behind which lurked a more saturnine being: an unsmiling God, thinner on compassion and kindness.

Perhaps it was unsurprising then that I soon found myself surrounded by books about the Arians, that fourth-century group who held that the Son was a different being from the Father. Then I met Athanasius. Where the other writers struck me as dull, he had a twinkle in his eye and a mind that saw with a clarity none of the others had. It was as if he lived in some sunny upland, free of the fog that clouds more mundane intellects. One sentence of his tugged at me:

It is more pious and more accurate to signify God from the Son and call Him Father, than to name Him from His works only and call Him Unoriginate. (Against the Arians, 1.34)

It doesn’t immediately pop out from the page. For me, it started out more like a pebble in a shoe. It niggled. But the more it niggled, the more I came to see it as the jewel in the crown of Athanasius’s thought, and the most mind-bending sentence ever written outside Scripture.

God Who Is Father

Athanasius’s point was that the right way to think about God is to start with Jesus Christ, the Son of God. “He is the radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of his nature” (Hebrews 1:3). He is the Word and revelation of God. Our thinking about God cannot start with some abstract definition of our own devising. It cannot start even by thinking of God first and foremost as Creator (naming him “from His works only”). For if God’s essential identity is to be the Creator, then he needs a creation in order to be who he is.

“Athanasius showed this struggling, God-wary sinner that there is no God in heaven who is unlike Jesus.”

We cannot come to a true knowledge of who God is in himself simply by looking at him as Creator. We must listen to how he has revealed himself — and he has revealed himself in his Son. Through the Son, we see behind creation into the eternal and essential identity of God. Through the Son we see a God we never could have imagined: a God who is a Father.

If we try to know God “from His works only,” we will not sense that Fatherliness of God. God’s kindness seen in Christ will seem like something extraneous and not truly characteristic of him. If our thoughts about God are based on something other than the Son, we will have to assume that God has none of the loveliness we see in Christ. When we think of his glory, we will imagine it as something rather like our own. We will not dare dream of the sort of glory revealed in “the hour” of his glorification on the cross (John 12:23, 27–28). And so we will harbor a quiet reserve about the “real” God behind that glorious self-revelation.

No God Unlike Jesus

Athanasius showed this struggling, God-wary sinner that there is no God in heaven who is unlike Jesus. In the Son of God, we see all the perfections of God blazing forth, and we see them — the love, the power, the wisdom, the justice, and the majesty of God — all defined so differently from our sinful expectations.

“God himself, made known through Christ, became the true object of my adoration.”

In the Son of God, we do not see a haughty God, reluctant to be kind. We see one who comes in saving grace while we were still sinners. In him we see a glory so different from our needy and selfish applause-seeking. We see a God of superabundant self-giving. We see a God unspotted in every way: a fountain of overflowing goodness. In him — and in him alone — we see a God who is beautiful, who wins our hearts.

It changed everything for me. It meant that instead of trying to wrestle other rewards from God and treasuring “heaven” and “eternal life” as things in themselves, I came to treasure him. God himself, made known through Christ, became the true object of my adoration. And with that, Athanasius’s sunny disposition made sense, for like him, I found in Christ a God I could truly and wonderfully enjoy.

http://rss.desiringgod.org/link/10732/14778698/will-we-find-unity-before-christ-comes

What if this world was full of dragons? The question opens important windows into reality, even for those who care nothing for dragons.

I first asked the question while watching The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings again (after who knows many times). As my mind wandered to more exciting worlds than my own, Would I be happier, I asked myself, if God wrote orcs and hobbits and rings of power and dwarves and dragons into the pages of history? Would an earth filled with fantastic creatures — with talking trees, singing elves, grumbling dwarves, and firedrakes flying overhead — finally satisfy? I often answered, yes.

In this new world, normal life wouldn’t exist. I wouldn’t spend as much time on my phone. Life, I thought in honest moments, would be more thrilling, more heroic, more throbbing with that elusive something I had taught myself not to expect anymore. There — if there was ever possible — I would find what I had been searching for.

As I wondered about better worlds than God had made, and a more fulfilling life than God had given, the temptation of dissatisfied wishfulness came upon me. And this wishfulness comes to us all, for every human heart is prone to create its own make-believe worlds. On one planet, the perfect wife is found. On another, the doctor confirmed you were pregnant. And still another, the voice which has rested silently for years again calls your name. Each one beckoning like that ancient planet where man first ate in hopes of becoming like God.

We all have fantasies tempting us away from life as God has authored it, to some other life we think would satisfy. In those worlds, our restless longing for more (we imagine) would go quiet for good.

In a World Full of Dragons

In considering worlds where dragons roam, we come to observe a shared fiction: somewhere else seems to be the place of true happiness.

“We all have fantasies tempting us away from life as God has authored it.”

What perpetuates this lie for so many? Our imagined realities so rarely come true. We spend a lifetime pursuing a shadow of which we never see the face. If we actually found that perfect spouse, if our doctor had confirmed our pregnancy, if we had heard that lost loved one calling out affectionately to us, we might be happier, but not decisively happy. Even if our dreams came true, we would still ask, “Is there more?”

C.S. Lewis marks this after his own temptation to wishfulness. Apparently, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (author of Sherlock Holmes) claimed to have photographed a fairy. Considering that fairies had invaded earth, he says,

Once grant your fairy, your enchanted forest, your satyr, faun, wood-nymph, and well of immortality real, and amidst all the scientific, social, and practical interest which the discovery would awake, the Sweet Desire would have disappeared, would have shifted its ground, like the cuckoo’s voice or the rainbow’s end, and be now calling us from beyond a further hill. (Preface to Pilgrim’s Regress, 236)

Sweet Desire hides just beyond the horizon. When the hoped-for is found, the sweet (and haunting) desire would not satisfy, but shift. It would find another hill to call from. Eventually, we would set out again for another hill, in another world, somewhere else.

Test man’s heart with new and wondrous pleasures, make the imagined real, and he will need more. God has written a message above all the real (and imagined) wells of this life, “Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again” (John 4:13).

Men Who’ve Seen Elves

This is confirmed by the few who have lived to secure what they chased after. They have the supermodel spouse, the acclaim and celebrity, the money and career, and yet they come to say with Tom Brady, “There has got to be more than this.”

Or, they say the same with the Prince of Pleasures, King Solomon, who after sampling each golden challis as we sample foods at Costco, found them all wanting.

Solomon tested his heart with the rare pleasures most spend their lives pursuing (Ecclesiastes 2:1). He tested his heart with abundant laughter (verse 2), wine and folly (verse 3), amazing careers (4), the beauty of nature (verses 5–7), servants to meet every need (verse 7). Anything he desired, he possessed (verse 10). He filled treasure rooms of silver and gold, hired singers to follow him with song, and filled his palace with beautiful women and sexual satisfaction (verse 8). As the resplendent king, he “kept [his] heart from no pleasure” (verse 10).

Solomon traveled to the rainbow’s end, tried earth’s choicest goods, but nothing satisfied his heart. He leaves us with a whole book summarized in three haunting words describing every well under the sun: “All is vanity” (Ecclesiastes 1:2). He remarks that all was but a striving after the wind, nothing to be gained but vanity and vexation. Everything, that is, but a life lived for God (Ecclesiastes 12:13–14).

What we love and long for apart from God will leave us unsatisfied in the end. God has fashioned the human heart this way: “He who loves money will not be satisfied with money, nor he who loves wealth with his income” (Ecclesiastes 5:10). What we love will fail us as our hope. “Also, he has put eternity into man’s heart, yet so that he cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end” (Ecclesiastes 3:11).

No Other Streams

We began with a question: What if this world was filled with dragons? Or, in other words, would our alternate realities — a world of fairies, elves, and granted wishes — bring us to that cool stream of ultimate satisfaction?

They would not. Even in a world of dragons, the human heart would grow cold and yawn and wonder, Is this all?

“Man will never find enduring happiness apart from his Lord.”

Christianity alone explains why our best imaginings after satisfaction inevitably fail: Man is too high a creature for even his greatest imaginings. He is made for communion with something greater than giant talking trees; made for greater dominion than taming dragons. He is made for God (Colossians 1:16), and remade and forgiven through Christ to enjoy relationship with God. Redeemed man is destined to rule with Christ into eternity (Revelation 5:10). Man will never find enduring happiness apart from his Lord. Branches exist to be united to vines; Jesus is the true Vine (John 15:1). All branches detached from him wither, die, and burn (John 15:6).

Or, to finish with Lewis in the realm of imagination, consider yourself before the Lion beside his eternal stream of life and satisfaction, as he warns you about every other stream:

“Are you not thirsty?” said the Lion.

“I am dying of thirst,” said Jill.

“Then drink,” said the Lion.

“May I — could I — would you mind going away while I do?” said Jill.

The Lion answered this only by a look and a very low growl. And as Jill gazed at its motionless bulk, she realized that she might as well have asked the whole mountain to move aside for her convenience. The delicious rippling noise of the stream was driving her nearly frantic.

“Will you promise not to — do anything to me, if I do come?” said Jill.

“I make no promise,” said the Lion. Jill was so thirsty now that, without noticing it, she had come a step nearer.

“Do you eat girls?” she said.

“I have swallowed up girls and boys, women and men, kings and emperors, cities and realms,” said the Lion. It didn’t say this as if it were boasting, nor as if it were sorry, nor as if it were angry. It just said it.

“I daren’t come and drink,” said Jill.

“Then you will die of thirst,” said the Lion.

“Oh dear!” said Jill, coming another step nearer. “I suppose I must go and look for another stream then.”

“There is no other stream,” said the Lion. (The Silver Chair, 22–23)

Audio Transcript

From the first year of this podcast, we decided to address mature topics and awkward questions. No apologies. If you’re comfortable asking it, we will address it. Needless to say, today’s question is a mature one for married couples. The question arrives from men and from women. Here are three representative emails I’ve picked out.

First, from an anonymous wife: “Pastor John, I have a question. It’s embarrassing. But here it is. My husband likes to use role-playing in the bedroom, and various levels of bondage and dominance. He wants me to say things like ‘I am your slave.’ He wants me to wear certain collars around my neck. To the far extreme, he likes to fantasize that he is raping me. But he’s a very nice person outside of the bedroom. He only asks if he can play out the fantasy in bed. What should I do?”

Second, another anonymous wife writes in: “Dear Pastor John, thank you for the podcast. I have been married for twenty years. Before we got married, my husband told me he had struggled with porn. After we were married, he asked me to try some of the things he saw in the porn he had watched. I consented. Our premarital counselor told us that anything was okay in the marriage bed with mutual consent, and I wanted to please my husband. But this has had a detrimental effect on our marriage. I am now to the point where I don’t want any physical intimacy, and he doesn’t feel loved. Was it okay for us to do those things since we agreed at the time? I think dominance in the bedroom is completely anti-biblical. My husband continues to think it’s fine with mutual consent.”

Third, and finally, the question also arrives from a husband: “Pastor John, my wife recently told me she was unfaithful to me and hasn’t had an emotional connection to me in sex or in general since we got married three years ago. She wants to engage in domineering sexual acts that I see as sinful. She thinks I’m too boring in bed. She now wishes to leave me so I can find a new wife, and so she can engage in sexual experiences with other men. How do I respond?” Pastor John, how would you respond?

Here are five perspectives on sexuality that I hope will help couples get their bearings if they are willing to seriously seek God’s will for their sexual lives. And I do promise that God’s will for your sexual lives is the most satisfying way of life.

Fantasized Sin

First, fantasizing sin is sin. Playing out a situation or behavior in your mind because of its pleasure that is sinful — a sinful situation or a sinful behavior if you did it outwardly — is sin in your mind. And if this is true for fantasies, then it is all the more true that playacting sin is sin. Pretending to do something that, if you did it when not pretending, is sin — that pretending is sin. I say this because of Matthew 5:27–29.

You have heard that it was said, “You shall not commit adultery.” But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lustful intent has already committed adultery with her in his heart. If your right eye causes you to sin, tear it out and throw it away. For it is better that you lose one of your members than that your whole body be thrown into hell.

“To the degree that you pursue some act as more pleasurable because it is illicit, you are in a fool’s bondage.”

In other words, Jesus’s standard of holiness is not merely a standard of bodily deeds, but also of mental delights. If you pursue a pleasure in your mind that is unlawful for your body, you are sinning. What is sin? Think of it. Sin is the heart’s preference for anything above God and his ways. Sin is not primarily the movement of the muscles or the body. It is primarily and fundamentally the movement of the soul, the movement in pursuit of pleasure in a way that God has forbidden. It’s the failure to pursue pleasure in God himself above all else.

So, it was an overstatement or a misstatement (I’m not sure which the counselor would admit to) when the premarital counselor said that anything you mutually agree on in the marriage bed is permitted.

If you mutually agree to playact a rape, it is sin.
If you mutually agree to pretend you are having sex in Times Square with a thousand people watching, it is sin.
If you mutually agree to pretend that you are two strangers who happened upon each other in the woods and have sex, you are sinning.

Fantasized sin is sin, no matter how many people agree on it. Playacted sin is sin.

Self-Serving Sex

Second, demanding or coercing unnatural and bizarre sexual acts when they displease the partner is sin.

Romans 12:10 says, “Outdo one another in showing honor.”
Philippians 2:3 says, “Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility count others [like your wife] more significant than yourselves.”
1 Corinthians 6:19–20 says, “You are not your own, for you were bought with a price. So glorify God in your body.”

All of that leads to the conclusion that in the marriage bed, the other person’s desires and delights and disapprovals and displeasures are as important as our own — indeed, more so. To press for your own private bodily satisfaction at the cost of the spouse’s displeasure is

a failure to honor,
a failure to count the other more significant,
a failure to glorify God with your body, and
a failure to show you are not your own but bought with a price, belonging to Jesus.

If you need ever more kinky sex — ever more bizarre, unconventional sexual acts at the expense of your spouse’s enjoyment — you are elevating your appetite above his or her delights. That’s not the way of Christ.

Folly of the Forbidden

Third, if you pursue a sexual act or an imagined sexual situation because it is more stimulating, scintillating, pleasurable because it is forbidden, then you are living out the way of the fool, and you are embodying the principle of bondage. Proverbs 9:16–17 says, “To him who lacks sense [folly] says, ‘Stolen water is sweet.’” If you pursue forbidden water because its prohibition makes it sweeter, you’re a fool.

Paul got at the principal like this. He said in Romans 7:7–8,

If it had not been for the law, I would not have known sin. For I would not have known what it is to covet if the law had not said, “You shall not covet.” But sin, seizing an opportunity through the commandment [through the prohibition], produced in me all kinds of covetousness.

“Fantasized sin is sin, no matter how many people agree on it.”

In other words, when you see a child have no interest in a toy until it is forbidden, you are watching bondage to a sinful nature.

So, in the marriage bed, to the degree that you pursue some act as more pleasurable because it is illicit, you are in a fool’s bondage to a sinful impulse.

Disordered Desires

Fourth, if sexual desire has become so prominent in the way you pursue satisfaction in life that you must push the limits of sexual conventions in order to be a joyful and contented person, your God and your purpose for living have become too small. Bodily appetites become gods when God diminishes. Sexual urges become too big when we lose big purposes for our lives.

Paul says in 2 Corinthians 3:18, “Beholding the glory” — now, that’s an infinitely beautiful thing he’s just mentioned. “Beholding the glory of the Lord, [we] are being changed into [his] image from one degree of glory to another.” In other words, we need a big, beautiful, glorious, transcendent, majestic vision of God and his purpose for our lives if sex is to stay in its pleasurable, small place.

Love Where It Matters

Finally, I would say to men especially, if you hope to have a thrilling, joyful, mutually satisfying sexual relationship with your wife for the next fifty years, you absolutely will not have it by demanding or expecting ever more bizarre exploits. Rather, you will have it by devoting 99 percent of your effort to loving your wife well outside the bedroom, so that she finds you somebody she really desires.

I don’t promise paradise. There’s too much brokenness in the world. But I do promise you, you will not find fifty years of mutual pleasure on the path of playacted perversion.

“The child of God has two great marks about him . . .” So writes J.C. Ryle in his classic book Holiness. How would you finish the sentence?

Faith and repentance? Love and hope? Praise and thanksgiving? Humility and joy? I’m not sure what I would have said before reading Ryle, but I know I would not have finished the sentence as he does:

The child of God has two great marks about him. . . . He may be known by his inward warfare, as well as by his inward peace. (72)

Warfare and peace. Combat and rest. The clash of armies and the calm of treaties. The Christian may have more marks about him than these two, but never less. He is a child in the Father’s home, and he is a soldier in the Savior’s war.

That sentence would play no small role in saving me from despair.

Parachuting into War

When I entered the Christian life, I had no idea I was walking into war. I felt, at first, like a man parachuting over the glories of salvation — finally awake to Christ, finally safe from sin, finally headed for heaven. But soon I landed in a country I didn’t recognize, amid a fight I wasn’t ready for.

The conflict, of course, was within me. I had never felt such inner division: my soul, which for a few months had felt like a land of peace, became a field of war — trenches dug, battle lines drawn. I found myself assailed by doubts I hadn’t faced before: How do you know the Bible is true? How do you know God is even real? The more I killed sin, the more I seemed to discover hidden pockets of sin — subtle, camouflaged sins crawling through forests of tangled flesh: self-flattering fantasies, knee-jerk judgments against others, unruly and sometimes wicked thoughts, fickle affections for God. I still enjoyed a measure of peace in Jesus, but it felt now like peace under siege.

“The same gospel that brings peace with God brings war with sin.”

Something must be wrong, I thought. Surely a Christian wouldn’t face darkness this black, division this deep. Surely, then, I’m not a Christian. For a season, I no longer called God Father, fearful of presuming that such an embattled one as I might belong to him.

Christianity Fights

Then came Ryle. In a chapter simply and aptly titled “The Fight,” he proved to me, with arresting intensity, that “true Christianity is a fight” (66), and every saint a soldier. “Where there is grace, there will be conflict,” he wrote with his manly matter-of-factness. “There is no holiness without a warfare. Saved souls will always be found to have fought a fight” (70).

A battery of biblical texts followed — texts I had known on some level, yet clearly hadn’t known on another.

“Fight the good fight of the faith” (1 Timothy 6:12).
“Put to death the deeds of the body” (Romans 8:13; see also Colossians 3:5).
“Put on the whole armor of God” (Ephesians 6:11).
“Abstain from the passions of your flesh, which wage war against your soul” (1 Peter 2:11).
“Watch and pray” (Matthew 26:41).
“Share in suffering as a good soldier of Christ Jesus” (2 Timothy 2:3).
“Wage the good warfare” (1 Timothy 1:18).

The same gospel that brings peace with God brings war with sin. For to say, “Jesus is Lord” is also to say, “And sin is not” — and to follow Jesus is to walk in high-handed rebellion against the devil. So, the same Spirit who wraps us with heavenly comfort also clads us with the armor of God.

Ryle’s chapter filled me with strange comfort. For months, I had felt like a civilian who had somehow walked into battle; now I felt like a soldier deployed. My war was a normal war — and more than that, a good one.

Normal War

If “the desires of the flesh are against the Spirit, and the desires of the Spirit are against the flesh” (Galatians 5:17), then what could be more normal than for Christians to feel divided, split, torn asunder in our inner being — or as Ryle says, to feel that we have “two principles within us, contending for the mastery” (72)? As long as we carry both Spirit and flesh, war will be normal.

We should not be surprised, then, when we find within us a dreadfully strong pull not to pray when we know we need to pray. Or an aching longing to satisfy some craving — for food, sleep, drink, sex, entertainment — that we know we should refuse. Or a heavy lethargy when the Spirit bids us to share the gospel or serve our family. Or a fickle forgetfulness that dulls the morning’s zeal by early afternoon. Or a driving compulsion to lean on our own understanding rather than the revealed word of God.

“The presence of inner division and opposition does not mean we’ve lost; it means the war has begun.”

We should not be surprised in such moments, any more than an army should be surprised by enemy fire. Rather, we should take courage. “We are evidently no friends of Satan,” Ryle writes. “Like the kings of this world, he wars not against his own subjects” (72). The presence of inner division and opposition does not mean we’ve lost; it means the war has begun.

Good War

The Christian fight is not just any war, but the best war the world has ever known. “Let us settle it in our minds that the Christian fight is a good fight — really good, truly good, emphatically good,” says Ryle (80). Yes, the war is fierce. The battle sometimes beats and bloodies us. At our lowest, we can feel tempted to despair. Even still, oh how good is the Christian fight.

Good, because God assures us that he will tread down our foes (Micah 7:19). Good, because he has promised to strengthen us in the thickest parts of the battle (Isaiah 41:10). Good, because all who fall can find forgiveness (1 John 1:9). Good, because we slay only sins and devils, not men (Romans 8:13). Good, because this war restores rather than ruins our humanity (Colossians 3:5, 9–10).

And most of all, good, because we fight under, with, and for Christ. He is our great Captain and our fellow Soldier, who won us to himself by dying for us, and who vows now never to leave our side (Matthew 28:20). “Would anyone live the life of the Christian soldier?” Ryle asks. “Let him abide in Christ, get closer to Christ, tighten his hold on Christ every day that he lives” (76).

Today, then, we march forth under the banner “Christ is better,” unsurprised and undaunted by battle, swords drawn against everything within us unlike him. And we look to the day when “the two great marks” of the Christian become one, and war gives way to Jesus’s endless peace.