Audio Transcript

We seem to be hardwired to root our happiness in our circumstances. It comes naturally to us. We are happiest when things are going well; we are saddest when things are going badly. Our mood is determined by the up-and-down roller-coaster of life’s ever-changing circumstances. We do it at age 4. We do it at age 24. We do it at age 44. And we do it at age 14. Today I want you to meet Tessa. She is a 14-year-old listener to the podcast who writes us today. “Dear Pastor John, hello! Thank you so much for this podcast and for the ministry of Desiring God. All of it has been a huge blessing in my life. Recently, I have been feeling more and more that my happiness depends on the circumstances around me. Will you please offer me biblical guidance on how I can root my joy in Jesus instead?”

Well, I feel so thankful for this from a 14-year-old. When I think back on the things that I struggled with when I was 14, I don’t think I posed the question the way I should have. So let me just encourage you that your very way of asking this question is a sign of significant, growing spiritual life and maturity, for your age especially. So take heart: from where I sit, it looks to me like God is at work in your life, and that is always a wonderful miracle.

Lifelong Labor

Before I give you some suggestions from the Bible for how you can shift your circumstance-dependent happiness onto Jesus-dependent happiness, let me also say that this battle that you feel right now, you will be fighting sixty years from now if you’re still alive and Jesus hasn’t come back. Because that’s how old I am.

“God is much more committed to building godly joy into his children than we are committed to finding it.”

Actually, I’m one year older than that — 75, not 74. And I have to address this issue of where my joy is rooted every day — every morning in battle against the devil and the world and the flesh — rather than letting the old nature, which the Bible calls “the flesh,” lure me away from Jesus to earthly things as more valuable. Every stage in life — a 14-year-old stage and a 75-year-old stage — has its unique allurements away from Jesus-dependent happiness to world-dependent happiness. It does. So, you’re going to have to fight this all the way to the end, so it’s good to get a good start now and learn your battle strategy.

Four Ways to Root Your Joy in God

So, let me make four suggestions for how to root your joy in Jesus and not in circumstances.

1. Get to know God’s purpose for the troubles in your life.

God is much more committed to building godly joy, happiness, into his children than we are committed to finding it. And one of his ways of doing this is by seeing to it that we walk through enough trouble to make us give up on finding our joy in a trouble-free life. Get to know the passages in the Bible that teach this. For example, Romans 5:3–5:

We rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.

In other words, the joy of hope is intensified when our faith endures through trouble. Or in 2 Corinthians 1:8–9, Paul says,

We do not want you to be unaware, brothers, of the affliction we experienced in Asia. For we were so utterly burdened beyond our strength that we despaired of life itself. Indeed, we felt that we had received the sentence of death. But that was to make us rely not on ourselves but on God who raises the dead.

In other words, the joy of complete reliance upon Jesus is God’s purpose when he brings us to the very brink of death. So, suggestion number one: Get to know this biblical teaching for the rest of your life. It will serve you very well.

2. Form the habit of finding God everywhere.

It’s a little unusual. Think it through with me. I suggest that you take all the natural pleasures that God gives you, which are not sinful, and make the conscious effort to see and to savor, or taste, God himself in and behind those pleasures. In other words, the best way to keep a God-given pleasure from becoming your God is to push into the pleasure and through the pleasure to the Giver of the pleasure, who is trying to show you something about himself and how satisfying he is.

So for example, the Bible says that God’s word is sweeter than honey (Psalm 19:10). And the Bible says that Jesus is the light of the world (John 8:12). And the Bible says that he’s like living water (John 4:10–14). So when you taste anything that is really delicious, or when you pass out of a scary darkness into some beautiful light and brightness, or when you really, really, really are thirsty and you drink a glass of cold water, at every one of those points, say to yourself that Jesus is sweeter than honey, and he wants me to taste him in the gift of honey. Say to yourself that Jesus is brighter than this beautiful light, and he wants me to enjoy him in his brightness. And say to yourself that Jesus is more satisfying than this great thirst-quenching water, and he wants me to be satisfied in him like I feel right now with this water — only better.

In other words, form the habit of finding God everywhere that there is goodness in this world. This will keep you from treating the goodness as God, and it will keep you from scorning the goodness of God by rejecting the gifts. All God’s good gifts are meant not for idolatry; they are meant to give us a taste of the one who created them and to show us something of himself.

“Form the habit of finding God everywhere that there is goodness in this world.”

And I find it helpful to add this: since I’m a sinner and deserve nothing from God but judgment, therefore, every good thing that comes to me as a child of God was purchased for me by the blood of Jesus, without which I would only be condemned. I would base all that on Romans 8:32. Therefore, every good thing not only points me to the goodness of the Giver, but it points me to the infinite price that was paid by Jesus so that I could have the gift and the Giver. This helps me love him as I ought. I hope it does you too.

3. Make Bible reading personal.

Make your Bible reading every day very personal. Don’t just think about learning how to live from guidelines in the Bible, which are important, but every day, think about what you can know of Jesus, the Son of God, and God the Father, and God the Holy Spirit — what you can know about them as persons. In other words, read the Bible to get to know the person of God. Always think: I love a person. I love a person. God is admirable. God is strong. God is wise. God is kind. God is patient. God is just. God is merciful. And as you see these traits in God, love him because of them. Find the person himself to be your treasure. Make Bible reading personal.

4. Remember your coming death.

And finally, even though you’re only 14, keep death regularly in your mind — not all the time; just regularly return to the thought that you’re going to die. And the point of this is not to make you scared. It’s not to make you sad. It’s not to make you morose. Just the opposite. Everybody is going to die unless Jesus comes back first. It might happen when you’re 15, it might happen when you’re 95, but it is going to happen.

And when that time comes, everything but Jesus will lose its comforting power. All our possessions, all our accomplishments, all our personal looks and intellect, all our family and friends, all of them will fail as a foundation for hope and joy in our dying. But if you know Jesus personally, the day of your death will not be a day of just leaving things behind that you’re familiar with, but it will be a day of stepping into the presence of the one that we care about most.

So thank you for asking such a very good question at age 14. I’m really excited about what God is going to do in your life between now and when you’re 24.

“God gave us plurality because he’s a big fan of humility.” I was struck by how often Dave Harvey mentions humility in his new book The Plurality Principle on building and maintaining church leadership teams.

It’s not a new thought that a plurality — a team of pastor-elders, as opposed to just one — both requires and encourages humility. But what I did not expect is how often Harvey would sound the refrain for the pride-crucifying, humility-cultivating power of team leadership.

Harvey, like many of us, has seen and heard a lifetime’s worth of pastoral shipwrecks in recent years. Some of these leaders were formally peerless in their churches and ministries, but many others had fellow pastor-elders in name, and functionally little accountability, operating with special privileges and a long leash. In the end, too often one man was at the helm, when it could have been a team, and in time, the church, its witness, and the pastor himself came to suffer because it.

“When difficulties arise, do the elders suspect themselves first, not others, and serve others first, not themselves?”

“All Christian community tests our humility,” Harvey writes, “but being part of a leadership team is like sitting for the bar exam” (127). Then he observes, “Humility must be learned over time as individuals both suspect themselves first, not others, and serve others first, not themselves.” Suspect self first. Serve others first. That’s insightful, and a watershed of good leadership in the church: When difficulties arise, do the elders suspect themselves first, not others, and serve others first, not themselves? And what will determine which way the pastors will go?

“Humility is the oil that lubricates the engine of plurality,” writes Harvey. “If you want to know the foundational secret that lies beneath great teams, meetings marked by unity, personal elder care, and lovingly accountable relationships, it’s this: humility” (98).

How Plurality Humbles

Unlike the world’s vision of leadership as self-actualization and the accrual of privilege, a Christian vision of leadership has God, not self, at the center. Pastor-elders are not in it to build their own sense of confidence and self-worth. Rather, their calling is to make additional sacrifices, to bear extra burdens and costs, to point our fellow church members Godward in Christ.

Our need for humility grows the more we are surrounded by other people, especially when yoked in a calling to lead together. While humility is first and foremost a creaturely virtue in relation to our Creator, many of the great texts on humility come in the context of community (Philippians 1:27–2:5; Ephesians 4:1–3; 1 Peter 5:5–7).

Consider four ways, among many others, that team leadership humbles us.

1. Teams expose selfish desires and unholy ambitions.

The apostles warn us of the dangers of “selfish ambition” (Greek eritheia). James writes, “Where jealousy and selfish ambition exist, there will be disorder and every vile practice” (James 3:16; also James 3:14). Paul lists selfish ambition as one of “the works of the flesh” alongside “sexual immorality, impurity, sensuality, idolatry, sorcery, enmity, strife, jealousy, fits of anger, . . . dissensions, divisions, envy, drunkenness, orgies, and things like these” (Galatians 5:19–21; also 2 Corinthians 12:20; Philippians 1:17; 2:3).

“Selfish ambition,” or “self-seeking” (Romans 2:8), is tragic in any human, and any Christian, and all the more in Christian leaders. And it is a special threat for lone rangers. Who will smell it out, and can challenge it, even in its subtle forms? Teammates. Men who are peers, of the same standing and similar perspective, and can tell when directions and decisions are self-seeking, rather than church-seeking.

There is often a fine line between putting self forward and the willingness to serve in visible, celebrated positions of leadership. Good pluralities (teams not just in name but in function) tend to expose such selfish desires and unholy ambitions and challenge them before they become deep-seated. As Harvey writes,

If you’re new to working with a team, you’ll soon see how often plurality uncovers and forces you to deal with the heroic dreams and fleshly desires you have for ministry. . . . To serve as part of a healthy elder plurality, a pastor must know his role, be willing to come under authority, learn humility, traffic in nuances that are neither black nor white, and be willing to think about his gifts and position through the lens of what serves the church rather than his personal agenda. Leading in community puts us under the spotlight. (29–30)

2. Teams encourage the right kind of disagreement.

Disagreements are inevitable in the church, and in every sphere of life. The question is not if they will come, but when and how. Healthy teams encourage the right kind of disagreements to happen early and often, in the context of trusting, regular relationships. Better to first hear the opposing perspective in private, from a brother and peer who manifestly loves you, than publicly, or from a tense call or letter, after a rash decision has been implemented.

It is humbling to hear a brother you admire and respect disagree with you. Then, it’s additionally humbling to realize you were short-sighted, or wrong, and to admit it. Leadership pluralities encourage healthy disagreement, in the right time and context.

3. Teams show us the joy of not doing it all.

It’s one thing to admit, as a leader, that you’re human and can’t do it all (in theory); it is another to go about your daily and weekly work as if you can indeed do it all. Teams play out that humbling truth before our eyes, moving it from theory to reality in our own heads and hearts.

For team leadership to thrive over time, writes Harvey, “Each man must believe that he needs the other men.” And seeing our need for each other, lived out before our own eyes, serves to dispel pretenses in us that we deserve the credit for ministry successes.

4. Teams try our patience, and produce better results.

Team leadership is typically not efficient, but it is effective — which is how God wants his church to be led.

“Team leadership is typically not efficient, but it is effective — which is how God wants his church to be led.”

When the “senior pastor” is essentially the church’s CEO, decisions and next actions can happen very fast. Teamwork, on the other hand, takes time. We need to synch schedules, have conversations, provide rationale, answer objections, write drafts, add appropriate nuances. Team leadership is typically not efficient.

But apparently, God isn’t all that interested in efficiency in local-church leadership. Which is worth pondering carefully in our day, when other organizations in society emphasize efficiency, not without good reasons. Yet not so with the church. The clear, unified testimony in the New Testament to plurality of leadership in the local church signals that Christ is more interested in effectiveness than efficiency in his body. Again, Harvey writes,

God loves unity, so he calls us to a team — a place where we must humbly persevere with one another to function effectively. God loves making us holy, so he unites us to men who will make us grow. God loves patience, so he imposes a way of governing that requires humble listening and a trust that he is working in the lives of others. God loves humility, so he gave us plurality. (99)

Harder, and Better

Teamwork in ministry is a precious gift. Surely, thousands of solo pastors around the world long for fellow elders and do not yet have them. May God be pleased to answer their prayers and steady their hands. There is grace too for a lonely calling.

Those of us who do enjoy the priceless gift of teammates, it can be all too easy to take them for granted. Team leadership is not always easy. Often it doesn’t feel efficient. Fellow leaders can feel inconvenient. At times, it may seem like leading alone would be better.

But leading together challenges and chastens our pride. It costs us personal comforts and convenience, but the gains for the church, and for our own long-term joy, far surpass the discomforts.

Our cause is never more in danger than when a human, no longer desiring, but still intending, to do our Enemy’s will, looks round upon a universe from which every trace of Him seems to have vanished, and asks why he has been forsaken, and still obeys.

This brief sentence at the end of the eighth Screwtape letter may not be as life-changing as other sentences have been for me, but it has certainly been faith-sustaining. I realized this recently when I noticed just how frequently I return to it. I quote it twice in my book on Narnia. Whenever I give a talk on C.S. Lewis, I find myself quoting it (even when I haven’t planned to). In counseling sessions with students or members of our church, the words frequently roll off my tongue. Most importantly, I know how often I preach it to myself in the midst of dry times.

Law of Undulation

The sentence appears in a letter from Screwtape to Wormwood about “the law of Undulation.”

Undulation is a fancy word for “wave-like rhythm.” The law of Undulation refers to a permanent feature of human life in our mortal condition. Screwtape derisively refers to humans as amphibians, creatures with one foot in the spiritual world (like angels) and one foot in the material world (like animals). As spirits we belong to the eternal world, but as animals we inhabit time.

“In all areas of our life, periods of emotional richness are regularly followed by periods of dryness and dullness.”

While our spirits can be directed to an eternal object, our bodies, passions, and imaginations are in continual flux. The result is undulation — “the repeated return to a level from which they repeatedly fall back, a series of troughs and peaks.” In all areas of our life, periods of emotional richness and bodily vitality are regularly followed by periods of dryness, dullness, numbness, and poverty.

Peaks and Valleys

Screwtape explains why God has subjected human beings to the law of Undulation. Fundamentally, God aims to fill the universe with little replicas of himself. He intends for the lives of his image-bearers to be a creaturely participation in his own life as our wills are freely conformed to his will. God wants us to be united to him and yet distinct from him.

Troughs, especially spiritual troughs, serve this larger purpose. At times in the Christian life, God makes his presence manifest and felt. He makes himself sensibly present to us, with an emotional sweetness that empowers us to more easily triumph over temptation. Obedience flows from us like rivers from a living spring. Prayer is like breathing — the most natural and normal overflow of God’s felt presence in our lives. These are the peaks of the Christian life.

But then come the valleys, the troughs. God withdraws himself, not in actual fact, but from our conscious experience, from our felt reality. In doing so, he removes the emotional support and spiritual incentives that made obedience seem so natural and effortless. In these times, God is calling us to carry out our duties without the emotional richness and relish that his felt presence provides (though not apart from his sustaining grace). In doing so, we grow into creatures whose wills are more fully conformed to his own.

Desiring Versus Intending

This brings us to the faith-sustaining sentence, “Our cause is never more in danger than when a human, no longer desiring, but still intending, to do our Enemy’s will, looks round upon a universe from which every trace of Him seems to have vanished, and asks why he has been forsaken, and still obeys” (Screwtape Letters, 42). We can break it into parts in order to understand it better.

Lewis here makes a distinction between “desiring to do God’s will” and “intending to do God’s will.” This distinction is produced by the law of Undulation. Doing the will of God feels hard in the valley. It’s heavy and burdensome because the emotional sweetness of God’s presence is not felt.

In these times, we feel divided from ourselves. At one level, there is no desire. This is the level of the passions, those almost instinctive and intuitive reactions to reality that are closely tied to our bodies. At that level, we feel no desire to do God’s will because God is sensibly absent. His presence is not felt, and so our passions (i.e., desires) are not stirred up. But at another level — the level of reason and will — there is intention. This level is higher (or perhaps deeper) than the level of passions. Here there is a deep and fundamental commitment, even a deep and fundamental and enduring desire to do God’s will.

In such moments, we are like Christ in Gethsemane, saying, “Not my will, but yours be done.” “Not my will,” that is, “I don’t want to do this; I don’t desire to drink this cup.” Nevertheless, at a deeper level, “Your will be done.” That is, “I still intend to do your will, and this intention reflects a deeper and more enduring desire in my heart.”

Gap Between Want and Ought

Lewis expresses this division elsewhere in a discussion on prayer in Letters to Malcolm. Prayer, he notes, can feel irksome. “An excuse to omit it is never unwelcome” (113). And this is deeply unsettling to us, since we were made to glorify God and enjoy him forever. “What can be done for — or what should be done with — a rose tree that dislikes producing roses? Surely it ought to want to?”

If we were perfected, Lewis says, prayer would not be a duty, but a delight. So would all of the other activities we classify as duties. In fact, the category of duty is created precisely by this gap between our spontaneous desires and our real obligations. In other words, the distance between what we desire to do and what we ought to do is what creates the whole category of moral effort.

Lewis, however, insists that duty exists to be transcended. Angels don’t know (from the inside) the meaning and force of the word “ought” (115). Someday, God willing, we too will live beyond duty. Prayers and love to God and neighbor will flow out of us “as spontaneously as song from a lark or fragrance from a flower” (114). Until then, however, we live in the realm of duty, in which our desires and our obligations are frequently divided.

Lewis knows how to encourage us here: “I have a notion that what seem our worst prayers may really be, in God’s eyes, our best. Those, I mean, which are least supported by devotional feeling and contend with the greatest disinclination. For these, perhaps, being nearly all will, come from a deeper level than feeling” (116) — though, we should add, not from a deeper level than God’s grace.

God-Forsaken?

Returning to Screwtape, what frequently smothers our desires is that we “look round upon a universe from which every trace of Him seems to have vanished.” The “seems to” is crucial. Every trace of him hasn’t actually vanished. All of reality continually testifies to its Maker. The heavens perpetually declare the glory (Psalm 19:1).

But in the trough, our perception is diminished. Our felt reality is often out of accord with reality. And thus God “seems to” have vanished. This seeming is potent. We mustn’t underestimate the power of appearances, of seemings. But neither must we make our periodic (and even enduring) seemings the dictators of our actions. Lewis shows us a better way.

Acknowledging Our Valleys

What should the Christian in the trough do? Begin with honesty. Acknowledge the trough. Name the valley. If God seems absent, say so. Out loud.

More importantly, say so to God. The patient in Screwtape “asks why he has been forsaken.” He directs his observation upward, to the God who seems to have forsaken him. In doing so, he follows in a great biblical lineage.

How long, O Lord? Will you forget me forever? How long will you hide your face from me? (Psalm 13:1)

Why do you hide yourself in times of trouble? (Psalm 10:1)

O Lord, why do you cast my soul away? Why do you hide your face from me? (Psalm 88:14)

In the face of (seeming) divine absence, faithful saints cry out to God and plead, “Why?” and “How long?” and “Arise, O Lord!” They echo Jesus on the cross, who himself echoed the psalmist: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Matthew 27:46; Psalm 22:1) This is what faith looks like in the trough.

“In the face of God’s apparent abandonment, the faithful Christian still obeys.”

The cry of desperation and confusion is faith in the face of felt divine absence. That’s why Lewis contends that prayers offered in the state of dryness please him in a special way. Unsupported by rich communications of the divine presence, lacking the emotional sweetness of the peaks, these prayers come from the deep places of the soul, the heart of hearts, which contains our deepest and most persistent longings and commitments.

And Still Obeys

The sentence crescendos with these final three words: “and still obeys.” In the absence of passionate desire, in the face of God’s apparent abandonment, the faithful Christian still obeys. God’s felt absence is never an excuse for sin. The poverty of our feelings, the dryness and the dullness — these can never be used to justify disobedience.

And make no mistake: that is the demonic stratagem in the troughs — to prey upon our experience of divine absence in order to lead us to abandon him altogether. Which is why the satanic cause is never more in danger than when every sensible support has been knocked out and we cling to Jesus anyway. If we, apart from eager desire to do God’s will, and with God’s felt absence pressing upon us, still cling to Jesus and seek to walk in the light, what else can the devil do?

Even more than that, such faithful obedience, over time and through the valley of shadows, is frequently the pathway to renewed experiences of God’s presence. As Lewis’s hero George MacDonald put it, “Obedience is the opener of eyes.” Faithfulness in the Master’s absence leads to the delight of returning to the Master’s presence. “Well done, good and faithful servant. Enter into the joy of your master” (see Matthew 25:21).

God never makes a mistake.

I vividly remember those words, a chapter title in Evelyn Christenson’s book What Happens When Women Pray.

Honestly, when I first read them, I was cynical. They sounded trite and naive. I arrogantly assumed that the author hadn’t struggled much in her life, or else she wouldn’t have made such a bold claim. In my mind, God was good and all-powerful, but to say that he never made mistakes had sweeping implications that seemed inconsistent with the massive evil and suffering in the world. Christenson’s statement so annoyed me I was tempted to stop reading.

As I read her book, I had just been through the fallout of a marital crisis while also pregnant with our oldest daughter. I was grateful we had put our marriage back together, but to say that God didn’t make a mistake seemed far-fetched. My life had been difficult on many fronts already. I had lived in and out of the hospital after contracting polio as an infant. I had been bullied throughout grade school. I had recently suffered three miscarriages.

I had a hard time imagining that God hadn’t made a mistake somewhere in my trials.

All My Suffering?

While I struggled to believe he had never made a mistake, I did believe that God had been in at least some of my early suffering.

“God had not made a mistake in making my son, in giving him to us for a time, and in taking him back to himself.”

When I came to Christ, even at sixteen, I was already beginning to see God’s purpose in my disability. I had happened upon John 9, where Jesus tells his disciples that the blind man’s condition was not because of any sin, but so that his life could glorify God. When I read that, I knew that God was speaking directly to me. He reassured me that my suffering had a purpose, which changed how I viewed my life and my struggles.

Still, even though I had seen God use my physical challenges for good, I doubted that principle applied to all my suffering.

What God Says About Sovereignty

Despite my skepticism, since I was leading the discussion on Christenson’s book at church, I had to keep reading it. I pored over the Bible before our meeting, asking God for wisdom and guidance, and was drawn to passages on God’s sovereignty and purpose. I grabbed a concordance and made a list of Scriptures that stuck out to me, like these:

Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? And not one of them will fall to the ground apart from your Father. But even the hairs on your head are numbered. (Matthew 10:29–30)

I know that you can do all things, and that no purpose of yours can be thwarted. (Job 42:2)

Many are the plans in the mind of a man, but it is the purpose of the Lord that will stand. (Proverbs 19:21)

My counsel shall stand, and I will accomplish all my purpose. . . . I have spoken and I will bring it to pass; I have purposed, and I will do it. (Isaiah 46:10–11)

I kept rereading these verses even though they made no sense to me.

Truth I Could Not Shake

As the discussion began, everyone had an opinion on the same line that had arrested me: “God never makes a mistake.” Some people decidedly disagreed. It angered them. “Of course, hard things happen in the world,” they insisted, “but we shouldn’t attribute them to God.” Others shared their painful experiences and struggles with loss.

Someone said (rather matter-of-factly), “But we know Romans 8:28 says, ‘All things work together for good, for those who love the Lord and are called according to his purpose,’ which means that God is in control of everything and will use it all for our good.” Her cool words felt more like a platitude or cliché than the truth as they hung in the air. Her detached insistence on this doctrine, apparently without sympathy or understanding, tempted me to defend the other perspective.

Yet somehow, I couldn’t do that. Somehow, after reading the Bible carefully, I couldn’t dismiss the idea that God never makes a mistake. Somehow, deep inside me, I knew that the author’s words aligned with Scripture. Somehow, I believed this was life-changing truth. And so, I proclaimed my convictions to the group, even while I did not yet fully understand them.

Why Did My Son Die?

A few weeks later, I was asked to put my words to the test. At a routine 20-week ultrasound, we learned that our unborn baby, Paul, had a life-threatening heart problem that would require surgery. I told myself and others that God never makes a mistake. I repeated those words until they became part of my vocabulary. In an inexplicable way, God’s peace came while I declared those words, words that enveloped me throughout the pregnancy.

Paul had a successful surgery at birth and was thriving. But almost two months later, he died unexpectedly because of a doctor’s inattention. Though we were numb, my husband and I spoke at Paul’s funeral, reiterating that God never makes a mistake. We’d been helping each other find hope in the Lord through those words.

At the time, I meant those words sincerely, but weeks after Paul’s funeral, those same words once again seemed hollow and trite. Why did Paul die? Why did God permit this? This was because of a doctor’s negligence — hadn’t God made a mistake this time?

Theology — all of it — seemed empty and wooden to me. None of it made sense. The words would ricochet inside my mind and land nowhere. I didn’t know what to think or how to pray. So I didn’t. And I drifted from God.

Months later, God graciously drew me back to himself. While sobbing in my car, I encountered the radical love of God and I saw the rock-solid truth in the words I had pushed away. They were words I could build my life on. Words that could carry me through the darkest days. God had not made a mistake in making Paul, in giving him to us for a time, and in taking him back to himself. All of Paul’s life was filled with divine purpose.

God’s Plan A

After Paul’s death, I read Joni Eareckson Tada’s book When God Weeps, which further helped me see the importance of believing in God’s sovereignty. Joni says,

Either God rules, or Satan sets the world’s agenda and God is limited to reacting. In which case, the Almighty would become Satan’s clean-up boy, sweeping up after the devil has trampled through and done his worst, finding a way to wring good out of the situation somehow. But it wasn’t his best plan for you, wasn’t plan A, wasn’t exactly what he had in mind. In other words, although God would manage to patch things up, your suffering itself would be meaningless. (84)

“My suffering had meaning. All of it. I was living God’s plan A.”

Like Christenson’s chapter title, Joni’s words hit me hard. My suffering had meaning. All of it. I was living God’s plan A. Embracing and understanding her words changed my perspective on life, giving me strength to press on through the darkest trials, looking for God’s hand, grateful that my pain had a divine purpose.

Even in My Nightmares

God never makes a mistake. The phrase has shaped and reshaped my life and has anchored me through many storms. I clung to it when I was diagnosed with post-polio syndrome. And I kept repeating it after my first husband left us.

I needed the assurance that God was with me in my trials. The assurance that even when my nightmares came true, God had not made a mistake. He would use even my most dreaded outcomes for my good and his glory. Christenson says,

This is the place you reach when after years and years of trials and difficulties, you see that all has been working out for your good, and that God’s will is perfect. You see that he has made no mistakes. He knew all of the “what if’s” in your life. When you finally recognize this, even during the trials, it’s possible to have joy, deep down joy. (89–90)

I didn’t have a category for that kind of faith or perspective when I first read those words years ago. But now, over twenty years later, I am grateful for them. Grateful that the same God who walked with Evelyn Christenson through the various trials in her life, and taught her how to pray, has walked with me and taught me as well.

Most of all, I’m grateful to know that Jesus, who died that we might live, who loves us with an everlasting love, and who cares about every minute detail of our lives, will never make a mistake.

http://rss.desiringgod.org/link/10732/14759968/does-christ-put-pastors-in-specific-churches

Audio Transcript

Are rich Christians commanded to downgrade their living standards? It’s a question from Kevin, a listener to the podcast in South Dakota. “Pastor John, thank you for this podcast and for your ministry. And thank you for preaching against the prosperity gospel and for your personal model of contentment and generosity. All of this is prophetically needed in our age. But I also have a remaining question on wealth, specifically about 1 Timothy 6:17–19. I am a middle-class American, not fabulously wealthy according to the cultural standards of my day. But in the global perspective, and historically, I am wealthy. Whenever I hear you teach on Paul’s text, I hear you imply that the Christian wealthy are called to intentionally downgrade their lifestyles. They should live in smaller homes than they could manageably afford and enjoy the simpler pleasures of life. There’s a wonderful warning here about trusting in wealth that we should all be aware of.

“However, Paul does not seem to say in this text that the wealthy should downgrade their personal lifestyles. I read Paul and presume that a wealthy Christian today could live in an eight-thousand-square-foot, two-million-dollar mansion, drive a new BMW, and still also have their hope set on God, the giver of all these gifts, as they magnify Christ in their honest business dealings. But in that situation of abundance, Paul would tell them: Don’t be proud. Die to self-sufficiency. Enjoy it all as a gift, and never set your hope on riches. Instead, ‘be rich in good works’ and ‘be generous and ready to share’ (verse 18). I can see him discouraging the rich from seeking greater wealth accumulation or ‘barn-building,’ as Jesus called it. But Paul also does not seem to be too concerned with calling the wealthy to purposefully downgrade their own living conditions either. Am I missing something here?”

Cultural Conditioning

Well, let’s start by saying something controversial: Not only does Paul not seem too concerned with calling the wealthy to purposefully downgrade their own living conditions, but neither does he seem too concerned with calling slaveowners to account for holding slaves. So there you go. That ought to get everybody feeling defensive.

No, I’m not equating wealth-holding with slaveholding. The point of that comparison is this: If Paul chose to explode slaveholding not with direct indictment but with theological dynamite like 1 Corinthians 7:23 — “you were bought with a price; do not become bondservants [slaves] of men” — could it be that he might take the same theological, explosive approach to weaning people away from luxury?

Now before I illustrate what I mean by that, let me clarify something that I’m very aware of: I am aware that any warnings or admonitions that I might give to someone who lives a life ten times more lavish than my own, someone could give to me whose life is one-tenth as lavish as my own. And I am aware, as an American, that this latter group, globally, who live lives that are less than one-tenth as lavish as mine, are 99 percent of the world.

Now, here’s the implication of that awareness: Either I am a first-class hypocrite, which is possible, or I am a culturally conditioned voice trying to let the word of God call Western affluence to account, including my own, in the light of Scripture, without specifying precisely what degree of affluence is destructive to spiritual life and witness.

What’s Left?

So then, how does the New Testament address the issue of luxury and opulence and lavishness and riches? Kevin, of course, is right that Paul does not speak to the wealthy in his churches with condemnation — or to the slaveholder either, by the way. The text Kevin refers to is this:

As for the rich in this present age, charge them not to be haughty, nor to set their hopes on the uncertainty of riches, but on God, who richly provides us with everything to enjoy. They are to do good, to be rich in good works, to be generous and ready to share, thus storing up treasure for themselves as a good foundation for the future, so that they may take hold of that which is truly life. (1 Timothy 6:17–19)

So here’s the question: When these wealthy Christians have reckoned with the uncertainty of riches, set their hope in God, have done good, have been rich in good works, have been generous, have been ready to share, have taken hold of life that doesn’t consist in possessions, what do you think is left for them to live on?

“The New Testament relentlessly pushes us toward simplicity and economy for the sake of the gospel.”

Well, right: it doesn’t say — which is why I have never precisely specified what degree of luxury is destructive to spiritual life and witness. On the other hand, as I read the New Testament, I think it is my job, as a biblical voice trying to be faithful to what’s there, to disturb the wealthy — including John Piper, especially him — by drawing attention to the ways that the New Testament relentlessly pushes us toward simplicity and economy for the sake of gospel advance and away from luxury and affluence and finery.

So, let me push in the other direction from Kevin when he says this: “I . . . presume that a wealthy Christian today could live in an eight-thousand-square-foot, two-million-dollar mansion, drive a new BMW, and still also have their hope set on God, the giver of all these gifts, as they magnify Christ in their honest business dealings.” Now, my response to this is to push in the opposite direction, knowing that there are far more powerful ways to magnify Christ than through honest business dealings, as good as that is, and knowing that there are many other passages of Scripture that ought to get under the skin of those of us who want to surround ourselves with vastly more than we need.

Four Reasons Wealth Is Dangerous

So, here’s one way to show what I mean. Jesus said in Luke 18:24, “How difficult it is for those who have wealth to enter the kingdom of heaven!” He did not say, “How hard it will be for those who love riches to get into the kingdom of heaven.” In other words, it’s a warning about the danger of being rich, not just of wanting to be rich.

Now, why would that be? Why would Jesus say that? Why does wealth make it hard to get into heaven? Why is being wealthy dangerous? Let me mention four biblical pointers to why that would be.

1. Wealth tends to choke faith.

Jesus warns in the parable of the soils in Luke 8:14 that people are “choked by the cares and riches and pleasures of life.” These are not neutral; they have a tendency to choke the vitality of radical Christian living. So, the word to the rich like me should never be merely, “Oh, you’re okay if you’re honest.” Actually, you’re not necessarily okay. You’re in danger.

2. Wealth hinders us from radical obedience.

Jesus said in Luke 14:33, “Any one of you who does not renounce all that he has cannot be my disciple.” Now of course, from all the other texts, we know this doesn’t mean that Christians don’t own anything. It means they are radically free from the control of possessions and always ready to do the most life-threatening acts of obedience. But the more accustomed we become to the lap of luxury, the more difficult this is and the less it looks to outsiders as if we are in fact that free from things, and that ought to matter to us. It ought to matter to us what inferences people might be drawing.

3. Wealth confuses our true treasure.

In Philippians 1:20, Paul said that his goal in life was that Christ would be magnified in his body, “whether by life or by death.” In other words, he wanted to live and die in a way that would appear to the world that Christ was magnificent to him — more satisfying than possessions or life.

And to that end, he said in Philippians 3:8, “I count everything as loss [rubbish] because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord.” In other words, we don’t magnify Christ just by being honest in our business dealings. We magnify Christ by living in such a way that communicates to the world that Christ is more valuable to us than houses and cars and lands and life itself.

4. Wealth distorts pure motives.

Which brings us finally to the fourth pointer to why it’s hard for the rich to enter heaven — namely, whether the motives for pursuing symbols of wealth (whether we think of them that way or not, they are) are pure. It is difficult to keep them pure — very difficult.

So, back to the two-million-dollar mansion, or there is a house here in Lake Minnetonka that went on sale yesterday in my area for fifteen million dollars. Why would a Christian — whose treasure is in heaven, and whose life is devoted to doing as much good as he can, and whose desire is to show the world that Christ is more precious than things — why would a Christian want to look like riches are his treasure? What would be the motive for buying such a mansion and surrounding yourself with more and more and more than you need?

“Why would a Christian want to look like riches are his treasure?”

And maybe I should end with just one more question for the mansion owner: Who are you going to leave it to when you die? If you have experienced the miracle of treasuring Christ above all things and of living for the good of others, do you think that handing off all this wealth to others will help them experience that miracle? Do you think it will do your children good to make them wealthy or to put a palace in the hands of some ministry?

My position is this: without specifying what measure of wealth is destructive to the soul or to our witness, the New Testament relentlessly pushes us toward simplicity and economy for the sake of the gospel and away from luxury and affluence.

She knew that typically the man would make the first move. She knew that what she was doing would appear at least suspicious, perhaps scandalous. She knew what other people might say. She knew just how much she might lose (after all she had already lost). And yet there Ruth lay, in the dark — vulnerable, hopeful, trusting, courageous — waiting quietly at the feet of a man who might wake up at any moment.

Even in a more egalitarian age, the strange and brave step Ruth took that night can make many of us uncomfortable:

When Boaz had eaten and drunk, and his heart was merry, he went to lie down at the end of the heap of grain. Then she came softly and uncovered his feet and lay down. (Ruth 3:7)

Such was Ruth’s way of asking Boaz to take her as his wife. But why did she ask like that? Wasn’t there another way? Couldn’t her mother-in-law have put out some feelers with Boaz’s servants?

Maybe. But God, in his wisdom, decided to join this man and this woman in this unusual way. And when we stop to look closer, the strangeness of the scene actually enhances the beauty of their love. This potentially embarrassing moment highlights what makes Boaz a worthy husband — and what makes Ruth a worthy wife.

Worthy Woman

As scandalous as it may seem for Ruth to lie down next to Boaz while he was sleeping, it seems that, in God’s eyes, she acted honorably and in purity. For all the beautiful glimpses we get of Ruth in these four chapters, she is called a “worthy woman” just once, and it’s right here, at this most vulnerable moment. Boaz, recognizing her in the dark and receiving her humble and submissive initiative, says to her,

Now, my daughter, do not fear. I will do for you all that you ask, for all my fellow townsmen know that you are a worthy woman. (Ruth 3:11)

“A truly worthy woman is as worthy in secret as she is when others are watching.”

Worthy when her husband died, worthy when her mother-in-law was left alone, worthy in a foreign land, worthy while working long days in the fields, worthy even here, in the darkness, on the threshing-room floor, waiting at the feet of the man she desired. A truly worthy woman is as worthy in secret as she is when others are watching — and Ruth was just such a woman.

So, what sets Ruth apart as a worthy wife-to-be — yes, in the eyes of Boaz, but all the more in the eyes of God?

Loyal Woman

The story of Ruth’s worthiness begins with her surprising loyalty.

Her mother-in-law, Naomi, had lost her husband as well as her two sons, including Ruth’s husband. Naomi saw how bleak their future had become and tried to convince her two daughters-in-law to go back to their families. In response, “Orpah kissed her mother-in-law, but Ruth clung to her” (Ruth 1:14). When Ruth had great reasons to leave and save herself, she stayed and cared for her mother-in-law instead. Listen to the intensity of her loyalty:

Do not urge me to leave you or to return from following you. For where you go I will go, and where you lodge I will lodge. Your people shall be my people, and your God my God. Where you die I will die, and there will I be buried. May the Lord do so to me and more also if anything but death parts me from you. (Ruth 1:16–17)

Ruth could have walked away, but faith and love had bound her to Naomi. Staying meant suffering. Staying meant sacrifice and risk. Staying could have even meant death — especially in a period when the judges in Israel, though charged to care for the widow, “did what was right in [their] own eyes” (Judges 17:6). But nothing would make Ruth leave now.

As news spread, her future husband was especially drawn to this loyalty in her: “All that you have done for your mother-in-law since the death of your husband has been fully told to me, and how you left your father and mother and your native land and came to a people that you did not know before” (Ruth 2:11).

Fearless Woman

Ruth could not have been loyal in these circumstances without also being courageous. You hear and feel her fearlessness in the vows she makes to Naomi:

Where you die I will die, and there will I be buried. May the Lord do so to me and more also if anything but death parts me from you. (Ruth 1:17)

She was not naive about what they might suffer. Remember, she had already buried her husband and her brother-in-law (and likely had never even met her father-in-law). Death had become an intimate part of their family. She left with no guarantee that a widowed life in Israel would be any better than the trials they had known. And yet, when love met fear — real, serious, life-threatening fear — her love prevailed.

In this way, Ruth was a daughter of Sarah, that worthy wife before her, who hoped in God and clothed herself with the beauty of obedience. For, despite how fragile and daunting her life had become, Ruth “[did] good and [did] not fear anything that [was] frightening” (1 Peter 3:5–6) — because Sarah’s great God had become her God (Ruth 1:16). Women like Ruth are not easily deterred, because they have experienced a wise and sovereign love bigger than all they might fear.

Unwavering Woman

Ruth was not just fearless but determined, and her mother-in-law knew so. “When Naomi saw that she was determined to go with her, she said no more” (Ruth 1:18). Her love was a fierce, durable, stubborn love.

It’s not that Ruth wouldn’t hear and consider counsel (Ruth 2:22–23; 3:3–5), but she also wouldn’t retreat or give up easily. She kept loving when lesser women would have walked away. She kept working when lesser women would have quit. For instance, when she came to Boaz’s field, his servant reported, “She said, ‘Please let me glean and gather among the sheaves after the reapers.’ So she came, and she has continued from early morning until now, except for a short rest” (Ruth 2:7). Even the servants were surprised by this woman’s effort and endurance in the field.

Ruth did what she could (even straining her capacity at times) to care for those God had given to her, even when the risks were great, even when her strength ran low, even when others would have understood if she stopped, because Ruth was a worthy woman.

Godward Woman

Lastly, Ruth was a worthy woman because she was a Godward woman.

Though Ruth had been a foreigner, a Moabite by blood, she was now also a God-fearer by heart. “Your people shall be my people,” she said to Naomi, “and your God my God” (Ruth 1:16). She sounds like the apostle Peter when Jesus asked if the disciples wanted to leave with the others: “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life” (John 6:68). Ruth’s loyalty to Naomi, and her fearlessness in leaving home, and her tireless determination, surely all blossomed from the garden of her newfound faith in God.

Faith tied Ruth to Naomi, and it also drew Boaz to Ruth. On the day he met her, he said,

All that you have done for your mother-in-law since the death of your husband has been fully told to me. . . . The Lord repay you for what you have done, and a full reward be given you by the Lord, the God of Israel, under whose wings you have come to take refuge! (Ruth 2:11–12)

“Do not be mistaken: worthy women are not proudly independent women.”

Yes, he admired how she cared for her mother-in-law, but he also saw how she had hidden herself in God, taking refuge under his wide and strong wings. She was not only a faithful woman, but a faith-filled woman. Do not be mistaken: worthy women are not proudly independent women. They know themselves to be needy, dependent, and vulnerable, and entrust themselves to the grace of God. They serve and sacrifice and risk with their eyes lifted above this earth to where their true hope lives.

When Boaz awoke and saw his future wife lying at his feet, he did not see the simple, fleeting beauty of a younger woman (though she was much younger); he saw the deeper, more complex, more durable beauty of a truly worthy wife.

Should She Move First?

What about single women today wondering if they should take a step toward their own Boaz? Should the man always act first, as the counsel so often goes? Was Ruth wrong to make the move and let her interest be known? Could she still be a model for women today who want to honor the man’s calling to take initiative? For my part, I believe Ruth is one wonderful example for single women today, and not just despite the unusual step she took, but even in it. I suspect some potential godly relationships may be prevented by an excessive fear that any initiative by women would undermine a man’s call to lead.

I do believe that God calls the man to bear a special burden of responsibility and take the greater initiative toward the woman. I believe the man should generally be the one risking rejection, protecting the woman by consistently putting himself forward in ways that require courage, great and small. I also believe that, should the couple marry, the man will uniquely bear the responsibility to lead, protect, provide, and shepherd her and their family — and I believe the tracks for that kind of healthy leadership are laid from (and even before) the first date. A godly woman should want a boyfriend, and eventually a husband, who consistently initiates and leads in their relationship.

Ruth, however, was in an unusual situation. Perhaps you are too. Boaz, being a worthy man (and a considerably older man, Ruth 3:10), might never have considered approaching Ruth. He also knew that he was not the next “redeemer” in line (Ruth 3:12), and so he may have not wanted to dishonor the other man by making the first move toward Ruth. Perhaps Ruth and Boaz never would have married if Ruth had not been willing to communicate her interest.

And as strange, even suggestive, as the scene may seem to us today, it very well may have been the most honorable way for Ruth to communicate that interest in her day. Even her bold step was discrete, and left the ultimate initiative in his hands, not hers. She found a way to communicate interest that upheld and encouraged his honor and leadership as a man.

So, yes, God calls men to take the initiative in Christian dating, but that doesn’t mean a godly woman never takes any steps of faith to communicate interest, especially in the context of a Christian community that can help her express that interest while shielding her from some of the pain of rejection. If there is a particular godly man you would like to pursue you, ask God if there are creative, humble, open-handed ways you might invite his initiative.

And as you do, it may not hurt, following that worthy example of Ruth, to ask an older woman in your life for counsel and help.

Christ did not exalt himself. Both culturally and theologically, these can be surprising words to encounter in Hebrews 5:5. So also with Jesus’s own confession in John 8:50: “I do not seek my own glory.”

Culturally, we live at a time in which self-exaltation, self-promotion, and self-advocacy are increasingly cast in terms of virtue rather than vice. We expect self-exaltation, and even commend it. Assert yourself. Speak up for yourself. Put yourself forward. Yet one of Jesus’s most repeated teachings, increasingly at odds with our age, confronts our modern lifting up of self: “Everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, and he who humbles himself will be exalted” (Luke 14:11; also Matthew 23:12; Luke 18:14).

Theologically, we have our questions as well. Many of us have come to learn, rightly, from the Scriptures, that God is the one being in all the universe for whom self-exaltation is the highest of virtues. But what does this mean for the man Christ Jesus as we see and hear him in the Gospels? He is both fully God and fully man. Did he seek his own glory — as is good and right and loving for God? If so, what do we make of the plain words in Hebrews and John that he did not?

Who Glorifies Whom?

In Scripture, to glorify, or exalt, or lift up, is sacred action and language. God made us to image him, to reflect and reveal him in the world, that he might be glorified and exalted. Before addressing the question of what it meant for Christ, as man, though God, to not seek his own glory, it may help to rehearse Scripture’s plain and repeated teaching about the pursuit of glory and exaltation.

God exalts God.

That God righteously (and lovingly) exalts himself is not Scripture’s most frequent teaching about the act of exalting, but it is plain and repeated — and theologically foundational.

It is no flaw, but indeed the highest of virtues, that God says, through the psalmist, “Be still, and know that I am God. I will be exalted among the nations, I will be exalted in the earth!” (Psalm 46:10). So too it is no flaw, but indeed virtue, for the psalmist to say to God, as rationale for his praise, “You have exalted above all things your name and your word” (Psalm 138:2). In his name and through his word, God has revealed himself, abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness toward his people.

“God exalts God, and his people exalt him, and he exalts them, but his people do not exalt themselves.”

God’s self-exaltation comes not at the expense of his people’s joy, but in the service of their joy. As Isaiah says, “He exalts himself to show mercy to you” (Isaiah 30:18). When God moves to glorify himself — “Now I will lift myself up; now I will be exalted” (Isaiah 33:10) — rightly do his enemies cower, while his people rejoice. So too, in the Gospels, when Jesus prays, “Father, glorify your name,” a righteous and loving voice comes from heaven in response: “I have glorified it, and I will glorify it again” (John 12:28).

God’s people exalt God.

Then, without surprise, and with the greatest scriptural frequency, God’s people exalt him. This is the very heart and essence of our creation in his image: to glorify him, make him known, exalt him in the world. When humans exalt, or when humans glorify, God is to be the object of the sacred action.

Rescued from Egypt and the Red Sea, Moses and the people sing in celebration, “This is my God, and I will praise him, my father’s God, and I will exalt him” (Exodus 15:2). We come to the bottom of our nature and calling as humans when we say with the prophet, “O Lord, you are my God; I will exalt you” (Isaiah 25:1), and repeat with the psalmist, “Oh, magnify the Lord with me, and let us exalt his name together!” (Psalm 34:3).

Jesus himself captured this profound calling in Matthew 5:16: “Let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father who is in heaven.” The impression on Peter and the disciples was indelible. Among dozens of other instances of exalting or glorifying God in the New Testament, Peter echoed this basic human calling, now made Christian: “Keep your conduct among the Gentiles honorable, so that . . . they may see your good deeds and glorify God” (1 Peter 2:12; also 4:11, 16).

God exalts his people.

Sometimes those who have rehearsed the first two truths most can struggle with the third: God exalts his people. Not only are his chosen people predestined to Christlikeness, called, and justified, but they also are glorified (Romans 8:29–30). The Scriptures make stunning promises — almost too good to be true — about how God will glorify his people: being pleased with us, making us heirs with Christ of everything (Romans 8:16–17), serving us at table (Luke 12:37), appointing us to judge angels (1 Corinthians 6:3), ascribing value to us and rejoicing over us (Zephaniah 3:17), and (perhaps most shocking of all) granting us to sit with Christ on his throne (Revelation 3:21).

In the Old Testament, God moved to glorify or exalt the leader of his people. First, Moses; then, Joshua: “The Lord exalted Joshua in the sight of all Israel, and they stood in awe of him just as they had stood in awe of Moses, all the days of his life” (Joshua 4:14; also 3:7). Then markedly so with David, as king, as he knew full well (2 Samuel 5:12; 22:49; 1 Chronicles 25:5). But not just prophets, leaders, and kings. To all his chosen people, he said, “Wait for the Lord and keep his way, and he will exalt you to inherit the land” (Psalm 37:34).

God’s exalting of his people is likewise explicit in one of Jesus’s most repeated statements, as we’ve seen: “Whoever exalts himself will be humbled, and whoever humbles himself will be exalted” (Matthew 23:12; also Luke 14:11; 18:14). And it’s applied particularly to Christians in James 4:10 and 1 Peter 5:6: humble yourselves before God, and he will exalt you.

God’s people do not exalt themselves.

At this point, however, the symmetry breaks down. Scripture here is gloriously asymmetrical, we might say: God exalts God, and his people exalt him, and he exalts them, but his people do not exalt themselves. Just as in the sacred language of exaltation, God is to be the object of human glorifying, so God, not man, is to be the actor when his people are glorified.

“Biblically, the path of human self-exaltation is a trail of tears and tragedy.”

Biblically, the path of human self-exaltation is a trail of tears and tragedy. Pharaoh, who oppresses God’s people as almost the serpent incarnate, is first to be tagged: “You are still exalting yourself against my people and will not let them go” (Exodus 9:17). Centuries later, the ancient head reared when David’s son Adonijah “exalted himself, saying, ‘I will be king’” (1 Kings 1:5), and rebelled not only against his own father, but against God.

Psalm 66:7 identifies “the rebellious” as those who “exalt themselves.” Proverbs 30:32 identifies “exalting yourself” with folly. Self-exaltation may feel attractive, and safe, in the moment, but God’s humbling hand will come in time.

The vision of Daniel 11 shows that the rebellion and folly of human self-exaltation is no small flaw or misstep. It is the spirit of antichrist. “The king shall do as he wills. He shall exalt himself and magnify himself above every god, and shall speak astonishing things against the God of gods” (Daniel 11:36). Paul too sees self-exaltation as the calling card of “the man of lawlessness” to come: “[The day of the Lord] will not come unless the rebellion comes first, and the man of lawlessness is revealed, the son of destruction, who opposes and exalts himself against every so-called god or object of worship” (2 Thessalonians 2:3–4).

Human self-exaltation is the spirit of antichrist. Meanwhile, human self-humbling, according to Paul, is the spirit of Christ: “Being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross” (Philippians 2:8). Which brings us back to the question, Did Jesus glorify himself or not?

Did Jesus Exalt Himself?

The question about Christ’s self-exaltation is more challenging than what we’ve seen so far. Scripture is plain that divine self-exaltation and human God-exaltation are righteous, as is divine man-exaltation, while human self-exaltation is folly, rebellion, and even the very spirit of antichrist. Yet with Christ, we come to the unique and spectacular man who is also God, and the one person of the Godhead who is also man.

The Gospel of John in particular captures the marvelous complexities of the relationship between the man Christ Jesus, who is God, and his Father in heaven.

First, Jesus glorified God. As man, he gave his human life, from beginning to end, to the human calling, common to us all, to exalt God with our lives and words. “I glorified you on earth,” Jesus says to the Father on the night before he died (John 17:4).

Second, God glorified Jesus. The clear refrain as to who acted to glorify Jesus is God, both Father and Spirit. As Jesus says, “It is my Father who glorifies me” (John 8:54; also 13:32), and of the Spirit, “He will glorify me” (John 16:14). So too the book of Acts says it was “the God of our fathers” who “glorified his servant Jesus” (Acts 3:13). “God exalted him at his right hand” (Acts 5:31).

Third, God was glorified in Jesus. The glory of God and the glory of Christ are not competing but complementary glories (John 11:4). When Jesus is glorified, “God is glorified in him” (John 13:31). And Jesus tells his disciples to pray “in my name . . . that the Father may be glorified in the Son” (John 14:13).

Fourth, then, comes the surprisingly human truth about Christ: Jesus did not glorify himself. This is what we saw in Hebrews 5:5 related to his calling as our great high priest: “Christ did not exalt [literally, glorify] himself to be made a high priest.” And this is what we heard from Jesus’s own mouth in John 8:50: “I do not seek my own glory; there is One who seeks it, and he is the judge.” He explains more in John 8:54: “If I glorify myself, my glory is nothing. It is my Father who glorifies me.”

Fifth, and finally, comes the surprisingly divine prayer of Jesus to his Father on the night before he died: Jesus asked to be glorified, to the glory of the Father.

Father, the hour has come; glorify your Son that the Son may glorify you. . . . Father, glorify me in your own presence with the glory that I had with you before the world existed. (John 17:1, 5)

This is perhaps the place, on the eve of the cross, where Jesus’s pursuit of the Father’s glory seems most distinct from ours. Yet even here, in asking for glory, he is strikingly human. Here, in human words, with his fully human mouth and soul, he asks of his Father, rather than grasping or self-exalting, and he waits in faith. And his pursuit is Godward. He does not posture to “receive glory from people” (John 5:41; also Matthew 6:2) but seeks “the glory that comes from the only God” (John 5:44). And he aligns his Father’s coming exaltation of him with his human exaltation of his Father: “. . . that the Son may glorify you.”

God Highly Exalted Him

What, then, do we learn from Christ, both theologically and ethically, in our milieu increasingly at home with human self-exaltation and confused by self-humbling?

“Christ, as man, did not exalt himself. How clear, then, is our calling and path as humans and Christians?”

First, oh what wonders await us in the unique and spectacular person who is Jesus Christ — the one man who is God, and the one divine person who became man. As Paul writes, with awe, “In him the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily” (Colossians 2:9). Which means we will need to beware of pigeonholing or of simplistic questions about Jesus. Who glorified Christ? Answer: God did — Father, Spirit, and Son. Christ, with regard to his humanity, did not (and does not) glorify himself; he is not guilty of human self-exaltation. And Christ, as God, the eternal second person of the Trinity, did (and does) indeed, without doubt, hesitation, or apology — and with the infinite energy and power of the Godhead — glorify himself. Christ, as man, did not exalt himself, even as he did as God.

As for ethics, and our lives as humans in these last days, we see afresh the folly, and rebellion, and even anti-Christian spirit of human self-exaltation. Even Christ, as man, did not exalt himself. How clear, then, is our calling and path as humans and Christians?

We were made, and we have been redeemed, for self-humbling, in service of God-exaltation. And there is great joy in this Christ-modeled pattern — perhaps we could even say “increasingly great joy” in a day when self-humbling might seem increasingly rare.

For Christians, as it was for Christ himself in human flesh, our being glorified, exalted, lifted up by God is not the problem, but our self-glorifying, our self-exalting, is the problem. God made us to be recipients of glory and honor from him, on his terms, not self-glorifiers and self-exalters on ours. And for those who humble themselves before him, he will indeed, without fail — in his “proper time,” not ours (1 Peter 5:6) — exalt them, even as he did for his own Son Christ (Philippians 2:9).

http://rss.desiringgod.org/link/10732/14753688/apostles-prophets-evangelists-and-teachers

Audio Transcript

We all want our prayers to work. So what prayers are guaranteed to work? In discovering which prayers are effective, we can start with Jesus’s astonishing promise to all of us in John 15:7. Here’s his pledge to his followers: “If you abide in me, and my words abide in you, ask whatever you wish, and it will be done for you.” Ask whatever you wish! What an astonishing, open-ended promise to boost our prayer lives. But it’s given parameters by what makes for an effective prayer life. Did you catch that? “If my word abides in you.” John Piper preached a sermon on this text back in the early weeks of 1993, in a sermon fitly titled “Ask Whatever You Wish.” It led to this great clip where he explained the key to an effective prayer life. Here’s Pastor John, from about thirty years ago.

Prayer is for granting us the joy of seeing God’s will executed through us as it becomes our will. The only joy in life that lasts is when our desires are drawn from his desires, and those desires are the ones that have the promise made to them: “Ask . . . and it will be done for you.” Here is the way John put it: “Whatever we ask we receive from him, because we keep his commandments and do what pleases him” (1 John 3:22).

Prayer Is for Spiritual Desires

Prayer is not for gratifying natural desires. Prayer is given as a gift for the joy and the satisfaction of those people whose heart is so in tune with God that they keep his commandments and do what is pleasing to him. If you have no interest in obeying God, in bringing the whole of your life — your attitude from morning to night — into conformity to his values, and in getting your desires from his desires, prayer is not your business. James put it like this: “You ask and do not receive, because you ask wrongly, to spend it on your passions” (James 4:3). And then he calls them adulteresses in the next verse (James 4:4). Do you know why? He’s picturing the church as the wife, God as the husband, and prayer as asking the husband for money to pay the paramour down the hall with whom she sleeps. That’s a pretty ugly view of prayer, isn’t it?

Prayer is to bring our lives into conformity with the desires of our husband, God, not to ask him for the wherewithal to consort with the world. Prayer is not for the satisfying and gratifying of natural desires — until those natural desires come into the service of the hallowing of God’s name, the seeking of God’s kingdom, and the doing of God’s will.

“The major challenge in prayer is becoming the kind of people who are not dominated by natural desires.”

The words of Jesus abiding in us prepare us for fruit-bearing prayer. The words of Jesus abiding in us prepare us for fruit-bearing. If prayer is not for the gratifying of our natural desires, but for fruit-bearing for God, then the major challenge before us at the beginning of 1993 in prayer is becoming the kind of people who are not dominated by natural desires. That is the major challenge in prayer: becoming the kind of people who are not dominated by natural desires, but who are dominated by spiritual desires.

This is what Paul calls ceasing to be a natural person and becoming a spiritual person, or growing beyond being carnal people to being spiritual people. Of course, we want to eat. Of course, we’d like to succeed. Of course, we want clothes on our back, and a roof over our head, and education for our children. But if those things are not subordinate in our lives to the big issues that make us tick, then we’re not going to pray with success. We’re not. Prayer is going to be so worldly, so earthly, so unspiritual, God will wonder what it has to do with him. “If you abide in me, and my words abide in you,” you will become that kind of person: “Ask whatever you wish, and it will be done for you” (John 15:7).

Six Ways Jesus’s Words Prepare Us to Pray

Let me give you some examples of how the word of Jesus abiding within makes you that kind of person, in order that you might pray.

1. The word humbles us.

First John 1:10: “If we say we have not sinned, we make him a liar, and his word is not in us” — meaning, if his word were in us, we’d know ourselves aright. The key to a humble, proper assessment of who we are before God comes one way: by the word of God dwelling within. And without that proper self-assessment, we will not be in tune with God and know how to pray according to his will.

2. The word exalts Jesus.

John 17:8: Jesus says, “They have received [my words] and have come to know in truth that I came from you.” In other words, the word received and abiding is the key to unlock not only a true knowledge of ourselves in humility, but an exalted knowledge of God and his Son, Jesus, coming from him. We cannot pray aright until we know Jesus as he is. We can’t pray aright until we have an exalted view of the meaning of the coming of the Son into the world.

3. The word defeats Satan.

First John 2:14 says, “I write to you, young men, because the word of God abides in you, and you have overcome the evil one.” Unless the word of God is abiding in us, Satan will dominate, he will control, and he will deceive and bring us into odds with God rather than being in tune with God. In order to pray in tune with God, Satan must be defeated, and he was defeated in the young men in Ephesus and the other churches by the abiding of the word of God.

4. The word bears love.

John 14:24: “Whoever does not love me does not keep my words” — which means that the words of Jesus define the path of love. We cannot pray fruit-bearing prayers until we know the path on which the fruit is born, and the fruit is always born in the path of love and not outside that path. If you want to know the path of love along which prayers are answered — namely, the path of love — you must have the word of God abiding within you. You can’t know what love is any other way than by the word of God. John says, “By this we know that we love the children of God, when we love God and obey his commandments” (1 John 5:2).

“The key to a humble, proper assessment of who we are before God comes one way: by the word of God dwelling within.”

You may think you’re loving God by not checking into the Bible at all. How many articles, how many books do I read today where the concepts of mercy, compassion, and love are used as criteria with no defense that that’s the way God sees things at all? There’s no defense that this is God’s view of love, God’s view of mercy, God’s view of compassion. You just take the word right out of context, and since it’s a politically correct word, it works. It doesn’t really matter whether it comes from God. If you want to know the path of love, you must have the word of God abiding in you, because many things look loving that are not loving.

5. The word assures.

John 8:47: “Whoever is of God hears the words of God. The reason why you do not hear them is that you are not of God.” What that means is that if you hear God, receive the words of God and have his word abiding in you, it is evidence that you are of God — that is, chosen of God, born of God, elect. In other words, the whole issue of assurance is riding on this word. When you go to pray, one of the great hindrances to prayer and faith and hope in prayer is, Am I of God? Am I born of God? Am I in the family? How do I know I’m in the family? This text says you know you’re in the family if you hear the word of God, if you receive the word of God, if the word of God comes home and finds a place in you. The word receives affirmation and a yes and an amen.

6. The word sanctifies.

John 15:3: “Already you are clean because of the word that I have spoken to you.” And John 17:17: “Sanctify them in the truth; your word is truth.” So, we have cleanness and we have sanctification coming to us through the word.

Praying in Tune

There are a lot of other examples of how the word abiding in us fits us to pray, but here are six:

a humble view of ourselves
an exalted view of the Savior
triumph over the devil
knowledge of the path of love
assurance of our election
the power of holiness

Those six and many more come to us by having the word of God abide with us, abide in us, and therefore fit us for being the kind of people who will pray in tune with God and hear the promise: “Ask whatever you wish, and it will be done for you.”