“Gifted communicator” — it’s a popular way of saying “good public speaker.”

Of course, if we’re going to sit and listen for half an hour (or more!), we all appreciate that the speaker is “gifted” — with an engaging presence, interesting turns of phrase, animated face, pleasant voice, natural gestures, and appropriate demeanor. We want a speaker who hooks us with a captivating story, presents his material in a clear and orderly fashion, creates and relieves suspense, touches our emotions, and ends with a satisfying conclusion, leaving us inspired and renewed.

These elements, and more, make for good conference speaking. At conferences, some of the thrill can be the novelty, hearing a new voice and seeing a fresh face. But preaching in the local church is not conference speaking. Nor is it mere public speaking. Preaching in the context of local-church corporate worship is a unique kind of speech — what we might call “pastoral speech.” Compelling speaking alone cannot fulfill the call of Christ on his preachers. The point is not to satisfy attendees with a “gifted communicator” who they will bring their friends to see next week. Rather, preaching in the local church is, first and foremost, the calling of the duly appointed shepherds to feed Christ’s sheep.

This vision for preaching involves at least two critical and connected parts: the nature of preaching and the nature of pastoral ministry.

What Is Preaching?

Long before the telegraph, printed newspapers, and instant digital media spread information far and wide, town criers would herald news from village to village. The verb herald (Greek kērussō) is one of the main words for this kind of “preaching” in the New Testament (along with euangelizō). Preaching in that day was not whispering (Matthew 10:27; Luke 12:3), but a raised “outdoor voice” in the town square, for as many to hear as possible, so that news might spread as far and wide.

“Preaching in the local church is the calling of the duly appointed shepherds to feed Christ’s sheep.”

Such heralding is not normal communication but an authoritative, public declaration (requiring an appropriate volume and intensity). It is not a story or mere report, nor is it speculative. But it is an announcement with a very high degree of (if not full) certainty. It is not for mere entertainment, but commends a message, or person, for the trust and response of the hearers (1 Corinthians 1:23; 2 Corinthians 11:4).

“What we proclaim,” the apostle says in 2 Corinthians 4:5, “is not ourselves, but Jesus Christ as Lord, with ourselves as your servants for Jesus’ sake.” Faithful preaching expects something of its hearers: faith, repentance, obedience (1 Corinthians 15:11).

Sent, Not Self-Made

True heralds are not self-made or self-commissioned but sent (Mark 3:14; Luke 4:43; Acts 10:36; 1 Corinthians 1:17). As Kevin DeYoung observes related to Romans 10:15 (“how are they to preach unless they are sent?”),

Preachers don’t just decide themselves that they want to preach. They must be sent. Preaching implies a commissioned agent authorized to preach. Rightly understood, there is no preaching that does not come from an authority . . . .

In the New Testament, we see preaching is interwoven with teaching (Matthew 11:1; Luke 20:1; Acts 5:42; 15:35; Romans 2:21; 1 Timothy 5:17; 2 Timothy 4:2), but the two are not identical. Preaching implies a kind of commissioned, authoritative public speech that overlaps with, but is not the same, as teaching. As John Piper highlights in Expository Exultation,

kērussō [“to herald or preach”] was ordinarily used to refer to a public heralding on behalf of someone with significant authority on a matter of great importance. It was not a kind of communication that simply transferred information or explained obscurities. It was communication with a comportment that signified the importance of its content and the authority of its author. (61)

Taking Preaching to Church

However, our question is not only about the nature of preaching in general, but specifically preaching in the context of the weekly gathering of a particular local church.

Here Piper highlights the significance of 2 Timothy 4:2: “preach the word.” Whereas preaching (as “heralding” or “proclaiming good news”) refers “most often to the public proclamation of a message to the world, not just to a church gathered for worship” (53), the apostle Paul “took preaching to church.” Paul highlights the need of professing Christians for ongoing gospel preaching (Romans 1:16–17; 1 Corinthians 15:1–4), and specifically charges his protégé Timothy (and other Christians pastors with him) to “preach the word” to the gathered church.

In one of the most solemn commands in all the Bible, Paul writes, “I charge you in the presence of God and of Christ Jesus, who is to judge the living and the dead, and by his appearing and his kingdom: preach the word” (2 Timothy 4:1–2). While this may be the only place in the New Testament where preaching is explicitly commanded in the weekly gathering of the local church, the command is not ambiguous. The very kind of declarative, authoritative, outdoor speech that spread the gospel from one village to the next now “comes inside,” so to speak, into the weekly life of the church.

“There is something about the peculiar speech involved” in preaching, writes Piper, “that belongs in the preaching of pastors to their already-converted people” (60).

‘Feed My Sheep’

Since Christian congregants already profess faith, what, then, is the aim of the preacher who “comes inside” to the gathered assembly? While the town crier, or evangelist, announces a message for new faith to those who do not yet believe, the Christian preacher, in corporate worship, aims to fuel the fires of existing belief — happy to spark new faith at the same time.

To use Jesus’s image to Peter in John 21, the Christian preacher aims to feed Christ’s sheep. And this is not easy work, but a weight for broad shoulders. Done well, it is costly. Preaching to the gathered assembly is not a privilege to enjoy and to demonstrate one’s own quality, but a burden to gladly bear for the good of the church.

Preaching, then, is not just public communication — even “gifted communication” — but spiritual feeding. Sermons, in the context of worship, nourish souls with the food of God’s word in Christ. They are meals carefully prepared, and presented, for the church for its spiritual health and welfare.

Which leads us to ask, then, Who does this weekly feeding?

Who Preaches?

Remember, we’re talking about weekly corporate worship in the local church, not conferences or even Sunday school. We’re asking, in light of the nature of preaching in worship, Who preaches? The answer that fits with both the nature of preaching, and the nature of pastoral ministry, is that the pastor-elders preach.

The shepherds (pastors) feed Christ’s flock. They are the ones, as teachers (Ephesians 4:11; 1 Timothy 3:2), officially charged to feed the flock (again, 2 Timothy 4:2), which includes giving instruction in sound doctrine, as well as exposing those who contradict it (Titus 1:9). It is pastor-elders who “labor in preaching and teaching” (1 Timothy 5:17). And not merely men, but pastor-elders, who “teach [and] exercise authority” (1 Timothy 2:12) — not as distinct callings but as two significantly overlapping prongs of a single calling.

So, when it comes to the week-in, week-out feeding of the flock in corporate worship, we look to the shepherds — the men God has specifically equipped, and formally called, to lead and feed the church.

Not All Christians Preach

“Preaching,” then, is a particular calling of the pastor-elders, and not for all Christians. There is general word ministry for all Christians, and then the specific calling to preach.

Every believer should take up the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God (Ephesians 6:17). We all should have the word of Christ dwell in us richly, “teaching and admonishing one another in all wisdom” (Colossians 3:16). Whatever we do — not just in deed but in word — we “do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him” (Colossians 3:17). We all seek to “honor Christ the Lord as holy, always being prepared to make a defense to anyone who asks you for a reason for the hope that is in you” — and “do it with gentleness and respect” (1 Peter 3:15).

But not all are “preachers.” Not all “preach the word” in the gathered assembly. Christ expects and requires that kind of feeding to come from his undershepherds.

Central to Pastoral Call

To approach our question from another angle, we could ask, How will our pastor-elders shepherd the flock apart from preaching and teaching?

“Shepherds are feeders; they guide sheep to springs of living water through their teaching and preaching.”

Paul says to the elders of Ephesus in Acts 20:28, “Pay careful attention to yourselves and to all the flock, in which the Holy Spirit has made you overseers, to care for the church of God.” How will they care for the church? The verb here, literally, is to shepherd (poimainein). And shepherding in the church requires, among other labors, feeding the flock through teaching — as Jesus charged Peter to “feed my sheep” (John 21:15–17). Shepherds are feeders (Jude 12), as well as leaders and protectors; they guide sheep to green pastures (Psalm 23:2) and springs of living water (Revelation 7:17) through their teaching and preaching.

Preaching to the gathered assembly of the church is not only Christ’s gift to his church (for its ongoing feeding and faith), but also a vital tool in the hands of the church’s pastor-elders to complete the work to which Christ has called them. Which is why faithful undershepherds rarely pass the pulpit to guests, but rather endeavor, as a team, to steward the precious few opportunities they have to feed, shape, and encourage the flock entrusted to them.

Churches Need Shepherding

Preaching is not just public speaking. Many fine public speakers — stimulating as they may be in a conference setting — are not local-church pastors tasked with preaching as a function of their calling. Our churches need more than gifted communication; they need shepherding.

Rediscovering such a vision for preaching in the local church helps both pastors and their churches. We need to be regularly reminded to take our cues from the Scriptures, rather than the world — and all the more when it comes to those sacred moments each Sunday when the undershepherds strive to feed Christ’s sheep.

My fourth miscarriage flattened me. I couldn’t believe it. I’d buried an infant son a few years earlier and was unprepared for yet another loss. I’d finally started to feel like myself again after Paul’s death, but the miscarriage left me bewildered and unsure of what I could trust.

Months before, my husband and I had planned to go on a retreat to the Cove in Asheville, North Carolina, but I miscarried two days before the conference. Needless to say, I didn’t want to go. Add to that, the retreat was on the book of Job — and I felt too much like Job already. But I went anyway, and as John Piper began teaching on the first two chapters, my outlook radically changed. During those few days immersed in Job, God reoriented my life.

At the end of the weekend, I saw how much of my faith had been Scotch-taped to God’s blessings. I had valued God not for who he was but for what he’d given me. As God took away the things I treasured, I had pulled away from him, wondering why he would let the losses happen to me. But as I studied the book of Job, I saw that God was still worthy of my worship, even in my losses.

Will Job Curse God in Suffering?

The book begins by telling us about Job, a wealthy and righteous man who feared God and turned away from evil. When Satan enters God’s throne room, the Lord points out Job’s virtue. The devil responds,

Does Job fear God for no reason? Have you not put a hedge around him and his house and all that he has on every side? You have blessed the work of his hands and his possessions have increased in the land. But stretch out your hand and touch all that he has, and he will curse you to your face. (Job 1:9–11)

Satan proclaims that Job loves God not for who God is, but because of what God has given him. The Lord is confident in Job’s faithfulness, so he permits Satan to touch whatever Job has, so long as he does not harm Job himself.

And so disaster comes, in a flood. Messengers are suddenly standing in line to tell Job about one calamity after another. Everything Job has is destroyed. His property. His servants. His livestock. Even his children. In one fateful day, everything is gone. Job goes from one of the wealthiest men in the East to one of the poorest.

Amazingly, however, Job responds not with anger or turning away, but with humility and worship as he blesses the Lord (Job 1:21). Job’s magnificent response decimates Satan’s initial premise, but the devil refuses to concede defeat, this time maintaining Job’s allegiance was tied to his physical well-being. So, God gives Satan permission to afflict Job’s body, so long as he spares his life. Soon, Job’s body is covered with disgusting sores, but he still refuses to speak evil against God (Job 2:9–10).

God Is the Reward

These initial chapters of Job have taught me many important truths, truths that continue to shape my life. First, when we worship and trust God in trial, we declare that God is more valuable than anything he gives us.

“When we worship and trust God in trial, we declare that God is more valuable than anything he gives us.”

God, not our earthly blessings, is the ultimate object of our delight. Job continued to trust God after everything he had was destroyed, declaring, “The Lord gave and the Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord” (Job 1:21). While this response speaks highly of Job, it speaks far more highly of God. God is as worthy of our praise in times of loss, pain, and scarcity as he is in times of fruitfulness and abundance.

This first truth undid me. I saw how linear my functional theology was — if I worshiped God and obeyed him, I expected him to give me what I wanted. And if I remained faithful through one big trial, he wouldn’t keep letting me suffer. In my mind, the reward for following Jesus was a prosperous, fruit-filled, blessing-laden, trouble-free life. But as I saw in Job, God himself is the reward. When we turn away from God in suffering, questioning his love and care, we are agreeing with Satan — that God’s value is tied to the material blessings he gives us. And that is an immeasurable assault on God’s worth.

The Heavens Are Watching

Second, Job taught me that my response to suffering matters. The book takes us into the throne room of God, where we see that the angels and demons, the unseen world, are watching what is happening on earth. They see our responses. When we respond to trials and loss with worship and praise, we are demonstrating God’s value to the heavenly realms.

God intends that “through the church the manifold wisdom of God might be made known to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly places” (Ephesians 3:10). The rulers and authorities in the heavenly places learn about God and his wisdom, in part, by watching us. Though we may feel that we are suffering in obscurity, we are never alone. Our struggles are being seen by countless heavenly beings, so the stakes are higher than we think, and our calling is greater than we can imagine.

Through our faithfulness in trials, we show the unseen world that God himself is more precious than anything he gives or takes away.

Good Purposes in Suffering

Though we may not know why we are suffering, we do know there is always a reason. Everything in our life ultimately comes through the hands of God. Satan cannot touch us without God’s permission. And we know that, in Christ, the God who knows all our sorrows and holds all our tears in a bottle is always for us (Psalm 56:8; Romans 8:31). Though God never told Job why he was suffering, Job knew he must have had a reason. He knew God could be trusted.

We know that Job’s suffering came in part because God trusted him. God knew that Job’s faith would come forth like gold (Job 23:10), albeit refined by fire (1 Peter 1:7), and that God would be glorified through it. So our suffering may be entrusted to us by God to display his glory.

Suffering is a great revealer of what we value and what we cling to. God’s value is not in the gifts that he gave Job, though they were many. God’s value lies in who he is — and often it is in the taking away of gifts that we see him most clearly. Job knew God before his calamity, but in suffering he saw God in a new and more profound way. And that changed him.

How Will You Receive Suffering?

After hearing the message of Job that weekend, I was convinced I needed to trust God with what I could not see. I needed to put the glory of God above my glory. I needed to praise God through loss and pain, highlighting his worth and declaring that he is more precious than anything he might give me.

“God is as worthy of our praise in times of loss, pain, and scarcity as he is in times of fruitfulness and abundance.”

The truths I learned about God through Job have carried me through single parenting, an unwanted separation and divorce, and my current declining health, which could end in quadriplegia. Without these truths, I would have turned inward, giving in to doubt and despair. With them, I can turn to the Lord with gratitude for his unending love and presence, even when the worst happens to me.

How will you respond to suffering? Will you see it as a sign that God has abandoned you? Will you curse God and walk away, convinced that he doesn’t exist or doesn’t care? Or will you bless God even in great pain, and trust that he has a purpose, maybe ten thousand purposes, for your pain, even if you cannot see any of them?

Such trust will deepen your love for God and bind you to him with cords that nothing and no one can sever.

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.

ABSTRACT: Due to his shameful death at the hands of Aaron Burr, Alexander Hamilton is not typically remembered for his religion. But Hamilton appeared to exercise a genuine faith during his lifetime, including in the final hours following the duel. While a number of America’s founding fathers questioned or rejected the fundamental beliefs of Christianity, Hamilton, the grandson of a French Huguenot, remained within the bounds of historic Protestantism and was no stranger to the Bible or the church. Without these broad theological convictions, his immigration to America and his own political achievements likely would not have been possible. Despite his seemingly authentic faith, however, Hamilton was a man between two churches, shaped by both but finding fellowship in neither.

For our ongoing series of feature articles for pastors and Christian leaders, we asked Obbie Tyler Todd (PhD, New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary), pastor of Third Baptist Church in Marion, Illinois, to explore the faith of Alexander Hamilton.

When Aaron Burr shot Alexander Hamilton through the liver in Weehawken, New Jersey, on the morning of July 11, 1804, Hamilton clung to life for another 31 hours after the duel. Although his illustrious career and ignominious death have not typically been remembered for their piety and devotion, Hamilton’s beliefs about God, Christ, sin, and salvation came to the fore in these last excruciating moments.

Hamilton was no stranger to the Bible or the church. As a child on the Caribbean island of Nevis, where he was born across the street from St. Paul’s Anglican Church, he attended a small Hebrew school and learned to recite the Decalogue in its original language. At Elizabethtown Academy in New Jersey, he wrote commentaries on the books of Genesis and Revelation. At King’s College in New York, he attended chapel and began “the habit of praying upon his knees both night and morning.”1 In fact, Hamilton owed his passage to America largely to the Presbyterian church through the patronage of Rev. Hugh Knox, who inspired the teenager to record his thoughts about God and who likely sponsored the subscription fund that sent him to America to be educated.

By the time Burr’s bullet settled in his vertebra and left him withering away in a second-floor Manhattan bedroom, however, Hamilton’s relationship to the church was much less promising. Alexander Hamilton, the West Indian immigrant who became the principal architect of the new American government, was still without a church home. As a result, coupled with the egregious circumstances of his death, he was twice denied communion in his final moments.

Deathbed Confessions

Shortly after crossing the Hudson River wounded and being transported to the home of his friend William Bayard, Hamilton called for Rev. Benjamin Moore, the rector of Trinity Church, the Episcopal bishop of New York, and the president of Columbia College. In 1788, the Hamiltons had their three eldest children baptized simultaneously at Trinity Church. Since 1790, when the church was rebuilt after the great fire of 1776, they had rented pew 92. Therefore, to ask Moore to perform last rites was not totally unexpected. On one hand, Hamilton appeared to ascribe some efficacy to the sacraments and wished to be buried at Trinity Church. On the other hand, Hamilton was only nominally Episcopalian.

“Hamilton’s beliefs about God, Christ, sin, and salvation came to the fore in these last excruciating moments.”

No amount of legal work he supplied for the church or religious fervor on the part of his wife, Eliza (who was unaware of the duel), could atone for the fact that Hamilton had never actually been baptized an Episcopalian. Hamilton had neither attended Trinity Church regularly nor had he taken communion. Therefore, despite a dying plea from one of the nation’s founding fathers, Hamilton was to Bishop Moore a lawless duelist without access to the Lord’s Table. Moore’s refusal to administer the Lord’s Supper to a non-Episcopalian would only foreshadow the high church theology of the next bishop of New York, John Henry Hobart, whose Apology for Apostolic Order and Its Advocates (1807) was aimed at the second clergyman who visited Hamilton that day: Rev. John Mitchell Mason.

Although Mason was less exclusivist than the Episcopalians, he likewise was bound by his own theological convictions in the Associate Reformed Presbyterian Church. When Hamilton pleaded with his dear friend to administer communion to him, Mason replied that, even though it gave him “unutterable pain” to decline such a request, “it is a principle in our churches never to administer the Lord’s Supper privately to any person under any circumstances.” After Mason explained that the Supper was only a sign of the mercy of Christ that is “accessible to him by faith,” Hamilton responded softly, “I am aware of that. It was only as a sign that I wanted it.”

Alexander Hamilton held to a basic understanding of the gospel, to be sure. Nevertheless, in the face of Hamilton’s shameful and imminent demise, Mason proceeded to quote from a barrage of scriptural texts, including Romans 3:23, Acts 4:12, Hebrews 7:25, Ephesians 1:7, 1 Timothy 1:15, and Isaiah 43:25 and 1:18. When the preacher reminded him “that in the sight of God all men are on a level, as all have sinned, and come short of his glory,” and must take refuge in the righteousness of Christ, Hamilton answered, “I perceive it to be so. I am a sinner: I look to his mercy.” Upon Mason’s insistence that the grace of God was rich, Hamilton interrupted, “Yes, it is rich grace.” Indeed, few presentations of the gospel could have been clearer than the one delivered to Alexander Hamilton on his deathbed. Still, perhaps the most compelling testimony from Rev. Mason is his account of Hamilton’s reaction to Ephesians 1:7. After hearing of the “forgiveness of sins according to the riches of his grace,” Hamilton finally let go of Mason’s hand, clasped his own hands together, looked up to heaven, and cried, “I have a tender reliance on the mercy of the Almighty, through the merits of the Lord Jesus Christ.”2

Hamilton the Christian?

Were these the words of a true believer? At first glance, Hamilton’s confessions appear as if they were uttered in genuine faith. In his final hours, the Major General claimed that the promises of Scripture were his “support.” Years earlier, in a renowned legal case, Hamilton had referred to the Jews in the Old Testament as the “witnesses of [God’s] miracles” who were “charged with the spirit of prophecy.”3 Even though Hamilton was influenced by deism during his lifetime, he was never suspicious of biblical revelation to the degree of Franklin, Jefferson, or Madison.4 Hamilton once confessed that he could prove the truth of the Christian religion “as clearly as any proposition ever submitted to the mind of man.”5 His abolitionism and his capacity for lasting friendship set him apart from many of the other founders. His view of human nature, demonstrated best in the Federalist Papers, often bordered on the Puritanical.

However, like Washington (who actually joined the Episcopalian Church), Hamilton was reticent to discuss his Christian faith. Ironically, the man who, to rescue his financial integrity, printed an entire account of his own affair in the first major sex scandal in American history had seemingly less to say about his relationship with Jesus Christ. Episcopal Bishop William White refused to publicly drink a toast to Hamilton due to his indiscretions with Maria Reynolds, and evangelicals today have also been reluctant to honor an adulterer.6 Although he had once opposed dueling “on the principles of religion” and seemed not to intend to actually kill Burr, a duelist he was nonetheless.7

“Hamilton was a paradoxical figure whose sins were just as public as his successes.”

As many scholars have noted, Hamilton was a paradoxical figure whose sins were just as public as his successes. By examining the complexity of Hamilton’s faith, Christians today are confronted with the conflict that inevitably arises when the authority of the local church is subordinated to personal ambition and when the teenage fire of Christian zeal is slowly cooled by professional aspirations and the desires of the world. In such a relatively brief life, one encounters the danger of building earthly kingdoms without seeking first the kingdom of God, the grace and encouragement of a believing spouse, and the fleeting nature of even the most astonishing career. In order to better understand Hamilton’s theology, his aversion to church membership, and his own Christian practice, the best place to begin is on the small Caribbean island from which he came.

Grandson of a French Huguenot

As a boy, Alexander Hamilton was raised in a religious, albeit savage and precarious, world. His mother’s store in St. Croix was next to St. John’s Anglican Church on Company’s Lane. The Hebrew school in which he was instructed left him with a lifelong affection for the Jewish people. In fact, Protestantism was the very reason that Hamilton’s family had arrived in the West Indies. In a letter to William Jackson in 1800, in which he fumed over criticisms of his ignoble birth, Hamilton wrote, “My Grandfather by the mothers side of the name of Faucette was a French Huguenot who emigrated to the West Indies in consequence of the Edict of Nantz and settled in the Island of Nevis and there acquired a pretty fortune. I have been assured by persons who knew him that he was a man of letters and much of a gentleman.”8

Huguenots were Protestants in France in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries who held to the teachings of John Calvin, a French-born theologian in Geneva. While the Edict of Nantz in 1598 granted religious toleration to Protestants for the sake of civil unity, the French Reformed Church would endure severe persecution when the Edict was revoked in 1685 by Louis XIV.9 The result was a Huguenot diaspora throughout the western world, including the West Indies. John Faucette had arrived at the shores of Nevis as a French immigrant seeking religious freedom from the tyranny of the Catholic Church. Not surprisingly, his grandson would carry an aversion to popery all of his life.

Indeed, Hamilton may very well have thought of his grandfather when he denounced the Quebec Act of 1774, a measure that extended the border of Quebec to the Ohio River and guaranteed full religious liberty to French-Canadian Catholics. In A Full Vindication of the Measures of the Congress, Hamilton opined, “The affair of Canada, if possible, is still worse. The English laws have been superseded by the French laws. The Romish faith is made the established religion of the land, and his Majesty is placed at the head of it. The free exercise of the protestant faith depends upon the pleasure of the Governor and Council.” He then asked, “Does not your blood run cold, to think an English parliament should pass an act for the establishment of arbitrary power and popery in such an extensive country?”10

Shown by his friendship with Marquis de Lafayette and his proficiency in the French language, Hamilton never lost touch with his French heritage. But an abiding hostility toward Catholicism and French “infidelity” always remained. In a letter to Edward Carrington in 1792, Hamilton warned that Thomas Jefferson had “drank deeply of the French philosophy, in Religion, in Science, in politics.”11 Although the rationality of deism appealed greatly to Hamilton, he never strayed from a Protestant outlook of world events. He was, after all, also the grandson of a Scottish laird on his father’s side.

Nevertheless, despite his rich family heritage, there was also a darker side to the religious world he inhabited. As the illegitimate son of a bankrupt merchant, Hamilton was likely barred from being instructed at an Anglican school.12 In addition to the many losses and rejections that he and his brother James suffered at a young age, this would certainly have influenced his religious consciousness. Alexander Hamilton was, in some sense, disinherited by his own family and by the church. As Ron Chernow observes, “As a divorced woman with two children conceived out of wedlock, Rachel was likely denied a burial at nearby St. John’s Anglican Church. This may help to explain a mystifying ambivalence that Hamilton always felt about regular church attendance, despite a pronounced religious bent.”13

Hamilton’s affiliation with the church thus became not unlike his own American citizenship, being at once insider and outsider. The hierarchical West Indian system that bred in him a hatred of slavery and an indomitable ambition may also have fostered a rather conflicted view of the church. Hamilton, the architect of the U.S. Constitution and the nation’s first banking system, was a believer in institutions. Yet as demonstrated in his last moments, he also had difficulty submitting himself to that very authority.

Under a Sovereign God

Hamilton’s life changed when he met Rev. Hugh Knox. Ordained by Princeton president Aaron Burr, the son-in-law of Jonathan Edwards and the father of the man who killed Hamilton, Knox believed that illegitimate children should be baptized. His combination of evangelical Calvinism and intellectualism attracted young Hamilton to the things of God. Soon after the Presbyterian minister arrived in St. Croix in 1771, Hamilton began regularly attending his revival services and reading from his extensive library (Knox graduated from Yale in 1751). According to one historian, “At seventeen Alexander Hamilton may have undergone a powerful religious conversion. At least that is the impression he gave that spring, as the Great Awakening swooped down on St. Croix.”14

Although Hamilton probably read sermons and devotional tracts from his mother’s book collection as a child, this was the first time he thought freely and deeply about the Bible, consuming bound sermons from his mentor’s library. Knox even inspired his young protégé to compose his own religious epistle! After a hurricane demolished St. Croix in 1772, Knox delivered a sermon to his congregation to lift their minds and hearts heavenward. Eventually published in a pamphlet, the sermon seemed to have a profound effect upon Hamilton, who wrote a graphic letter to his father describing the ferocity of the storm and drawing from Knox’s themes. After showing the letter to Knox, the minister persuaded him to publish it in the Royal Danish American Gazette. The letter illustrates that, even as a teenager, Hamilton believed in a Creator who intervened powerfully and personally in his creation. He wrote,

See thy wretched helpless state, and learn to know thyself. Learn to know thy best support. Despise thyself, and adore thy God. How sweet, how unutterably sweet were now, the voice of an approving conscience; Then couldst thou say, hence ye idle alarms, why do I shrink? What have I to fear? A pleasing calm suspense! A short repose from calamity to end in eternal bliss? Let the Earth rend. Let the planets forsake their course. Let the Sun be extinguished and the Heavens burst asunder. Yet what have I to dread? My staff can never be broken — in Omnipotence I trusted. . . . He who gave the winds to blow, and the lightnings to rage — even him have I always loved and served. His precepts have I observed. His commandments have I obeyed — and his perfections have I adored.15

After recounting the horror of the hurricane to his father, Hamilton added, “But see, the Lord relents. He hears our prayer.” The themes of judgment, mercy, and human dependence in the letter reflected Hamilton’s belief in an all-controlling God who ordered the cosmos and who ultimately could be trusted in an unstable and cruel island world. Remarkably, Hamilton’s letter about God’s providence became his ticket to America when a number of benefactors read the piece and began a fund to send the young man north to be educated.

Before leaving, Hamilton almost certainly penned an unsigned hymn that his future wife, Eliza, would cherish for decades after his death as an example of his Christian piety. Published in the Gazette on October 17, 1772, as an imitation of Alexander Pope’s “The Dying Christian to His Soul,” it reads,

Hark! hark! a voice from yonder sky,Methinks I hear my Saviour cry,Come gentle spirit come away,Come to thy Lord without delay;For thee the gates of bliss unbar’dThy constant virtue to reward

I come oh Lord! I mount, I fly,On rapid wings I cleave the sky;Stretch out thine arm and aid my flight;For oh! I long to gain that height,Where all celestial beings singEternal praises to their King.

O Lamb of God! thrice gracious LordNow, now I feel how true thy word;Translated to this happy place,This blessed vision of thy face;My soul shall all thy steps attendIn songs of triumph without end.16

While Alexander Hamilton did not frequently express his thoughts about Jesus Christ, he was, at times during his youth, capable of eloquent meditations on the Son of God. After arriving in America, he continued his religious instruction and even developed spiritual disciplines. But the Revolution and his own personal ambition made it difficult for him to settle upon one denomination.

Between Two Churches

By the time Hamilton disembarked in Boston in 1772, the political frenzy in the colonies had already begun to erupt in the churches. At Elizabethtown Academy, Hamilton studied under Presbyterian teachers who would later serve under his command, including headmaster Francis Barber. Hamilton listened to three-hour sermons on Sundays next to men possessed by the spirit of liberty. As a training ground for Princeton (the College of New Jersey), Elizabethtown introduced Hamilton to Presbyterian orthodoxy and patriotism. In some ways, he was being catechized in the Westminster Confession and in republicanism. After all, Princeton’s president John Witherspoon was the only clergyman to sign the Declaration of Independence and the first clergyman at the Continental Congress.

On one hand, its combination of evangelical Calvinism and Whig principles made Princeton the logical choice for a college education. Hamilton was accepted at 18 years old after passing Witherspoon’s examination. On the other hand, Hamilton’s insatiable drive to achieve was greater than his desire to ground himself in the Presbyterian faith. As a result, when Witherspoon denied his bold request to complete his schooling in three years instead of four, Hamilton looked to New York — to the Church of England.

As he would later prove in his writings, Hamilton’s departure from Princeton was not a sign of any Tory sympathies (although he often feared the rising mob mentality in the colonies). However, upon his passing an examination into Princeton by one of the most anti-Episcopal figures in America, that Hamilton then chose to attend King’s College in New York City, a bastion of Anglicanism and loyalism in the colonies, is perhaps the clearest sign that Hamilton’s affiliation to the church was only as strong as his professional aspirations.

“Hamilton was a man between two churches.”

Still a teenager, Hamilton was no more loyal to the Church of England than the Church of England had been to his family as a child. The only difference was that Hamilton, the illegitimate son from Nevis, was now in seeming control of his political destiny and itching to receive his education from the fastest bidder. While this apparently did not hinder his personal Christian devotion, it certainly did not strengthen his ties to the local church. Indeed, Hamilton was a man between two churches. A Presbyterian from Princeton had helped thrust him to America, and yet another inadvertently forced him to Manhattan to study under Anglican Myles Cooper, one of the most outspoken loyalists in the colonies.

Nevertheless, Hamilton’s ecclesiastical turnabout did not hinder his efforts to develop his own spiritual disciplines. At King’s College, his roommate Robert Troup recalled,

Whilst at college, [he] was attentive to public worship and in the habit of praying upon his knees both night and morning. I have lived in the same room with him for sometime and I have often been powerfully affected by the fervor and eloquence of his prayers. [He] had [already] read most of the polemical writers on religious subjects and he was a zealous believer in the fundamental doctrines of Christianity.17

Although Troup may have been guilty of a bit of hero worship, Hamilton did attend chapel services routinely and exhibited an interest in theological study. As to his reading of polemical works, these may have led Hamilton to lean in the direction of deism as the war began, as the Anglican church was defined by a vehement anti-Calvinism and extreme rationalism in the late colonial and early national periods.18 Although, for example, Hamilton mocked Anglican leaders like Samuel Seabury for their loyalty to Parliament, he did not repudiate Anglican theology to the same degree.

As the war progressed and nation-building ensued, due to his political genius and military skill, Hamilton’s writings naturally adopted a much more civil and diplomatic turn. Hamilton’s references to the divine became vaguer and less Christian. The language of a “divinely authoritative Religion,” “the will of heaven,” and “an over-ruling Providence” far outweighed any allusions to Scripture or any kind of theological discourse, indicating that Hamilton may have slowly traded the Christ-centered, born-again religion of his youth for the lawful, reasonable deism of the age (or something we might call Christian rationalism).19

Still, there is no evidence to support the idea that Hamilton rejected the deity of Christ or that he questioned God’s miraculous intervention in the world. To simply label Hamilton a “deist” or a “rationalist” does not adequately describe his own theology during this stage of his life. To begin, more so than Jefferson, Hamilton believed that the French Revolution was opposed to “friends of religion.”20 Like Washington, he believed that we “flatter ourselves that morality can be separated from religion.”21 In other words, natural law is grounded in the eternal, revealed law of God. In the early years of the republic, Hamilton proposed a “day of humiliation and prayer” for the nation.22 In his doctrine of divine providence, Hamilton still remained the same young man who had prayed for the hurricane to cease on the island of St. Croix. Faith was about more than knowledge or reason. As Secretary of the Treasury, he noted to George Washington “the conflict between Reason & Passion,” a tension that many of his deist or Unitarian colleagues might not have admitted so easily.23 Although the Federalist Papers never mention God explicitly, Hamilton sounded like a New Light evangelical in his opening essay: “In politics, as in religion, it is equally absurd to aim at making proselytes by fire and sword. Heresies in either can rarely be cured by persecution.”24 Political liberty and religious liberty were inseparable in Hamilton’s mind, and he affirmed a real boundary between orthodoxy and “heresies.”

As he slowly passed from the earth, Hamilton once again found himself between the Episcopalians and Presbyterians, begging each for the bread and the cup from the Lord’s Table. But Hamilton’s end was much like his life, confessing the faith once delivered to the saints while finding no real home in the communion of believers.

Eliza’s Influence

As scholars have noted, perhaps the most compelling evidence to the authenticity of Hamilton’s faith is his marriage to Eliza, a devoted follower of Jesus Christ. An active member in the Dutch Reformed Church, Eliza worshiped her Lord and sought to obey his commands with such heartfelt sincerity that Washington’s staff was somewhat surprised when Hamilton chose to marry her.25 After all, Hamilton had written to a friend in 1779 about his ideal wife: “As to religion a moderate stock will satisfy me. She must believe in god and hate a saint.”26 In Eliza he found no moderate believer, and their wedding in 1780 was in traditional Dutch Reformed custom.

If Alexander Hamilton was an unbeliever, he was indeed “made holy because of his wife,” as her influence upon his soul became evident in his waning moments (1 Corinthians 7:14). Upon rushing into the second-floor room and discovering that her husband was dying (not suffering from “spasms,” as originally she had been told), the frantic Eliza was consoled not by Hamilton the soldier or Hamilton the founding father or Hamilton the financial genius, but by someone who appeared to know the weight of sin and the hope of Christ: “Remember, my Eliza, you are a Christian.”27

Audio Transcript

How do we respond when God feels distant from us? Several versions of that question have come in recently from listeners on the topic of “spiritual desertion.” I can boil them down to three categories.

First, spiritual desertion is an experience of God hiding his face from the believer. But in the great text on contentment, and how to live free from the love of money, we are given a glorious promise — one we have repeated several times on APJ. We should cultivate material contentment in this life because God has promised us, “I will never leave you nor forsake you” (Hebrews 13:5). So how does desertion relate to this promise that we will never be forsaken?

Second, does the Bible tell us why God deserts believers? Should we read into the experience of desertion something we have failed to do, or need to do? And what has his absence felt like to you?

And then third, in the famous desertion psalm, Psalm 22, we read that God does not hear the psalmist’s prayers and refuses to deliver him from his distress. Hence the felt desertion. And yet the psalmist still delights in God in verse 8. So what does it look like to delight in God in felt desertion?

So, Pastor John, there is a mix of questions for you under this label of “spiritual desertion.”

Well, just a word of caution to start: the term spiritual desertion doesn’t occur in the Bible, nor does the word desertion itself — at least not in the ESV. So, we have to be careful that when non-biblical words or terms are used to describe biblical realities, we don’t force any connotations of those non-biblical words onto the biblical reality.

I think what’s being asked in all of these concerns is not only about the objective circumstances that can be so painful in the lives of Christians — that it looks objectively like God is just no longer working for us. But probably more what’s being asked is about the subjective inner sense when we don’t feel the presence of God, and we don’t see the glory of God, and we don’t sense the sweetness of his fellowship. Whether he’s near or far, the question I think is mainly about how, subjectively, he feels far. It’s true that a Christian can have the experience of desertion in both of these senses. In the objective, it just looks like he’s gone. He doesn’t do anything for me anymore. And in the subjective, whether he’s near or far, I don’t feel, I don’t taste, I don’t sense. I think that’s the main concern.

Grace in Every Thorn

So, I won’t linger long over the first sense because that’s not the focus of these questions, I don’t think. And I’ve spoken about it so often. I’ll only say that Paul deals with the objective afflictions of Christians in Romans 8:35–38, and amazingly he does so by quoting the Psalms. He quotes Psalm 44:20–22, which says,

If we had forgotten the name of our God     or spread out our hands to a foreign god,would not God discover this?     For he knows the secrets of the heart.Yet for your sake we are killed all the day long;     we are regarded as sheep to be slaughtered.

And Paul explains that God’s face is hidden only in the sense that outward physical blessings are being withheld. But he protests strongly that in every loss and affliction for the Christian, we are “more than conquerors” (Romans 8:37). So Paul’s answer to the outward objective appearance of desertion is that God is present: he’s here, and he’s working through our troubles. And in that very teaching, Paul paradoxically shows that if we really understood what God was doing, we would know it was to help us see him more clearly — not less.

There’s this beautiful poem called “The Thorn” by Martha Nicholson, who died in 1953, that ends like this: “I learned He never gives a thorn without this added grace, / He takes the thorn to pin aside the veil which hides his face.”

“The thorns of life, which we think are God’s desertion, are in fact designed to pin back the veil of worldliness that hides God’s loving face.”

So, Paul’s answer to this first kind of objective desertion is that we need to learn the biblical truth that the thorns of life, which we think are God’s desertion, are in fact designed to pin back the veil of worldliness that hides God’s loving face. That’s a huge change in your mindset, but it’s crucial in order to understand how to respond to what appears to be objective absence of God but isn’t.

Fight to See and Savor

But the main thing, I think, being asked in these questions is about the inner sense of the Christian when we don’t feel the presence of God, and we don’t see or savor the glory of God, and we don’t sense the sweetness of his fellowship. So, let me give several texts from the New Testament that provide biblical categories that are Christian — Christian categories for this experience of more or less of this darkness, as if the Lord were absent, because you don’t see or savor his beauty or feel his fellowship.

1. First Corinthians 13:12: “Now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known.” In other words, some measure of hiddenness is what we have to live with now, no matter how we live, until Jesus comes.

2. Ephesians 5:19: “Be filled with the Holy Spirit” — meaning that there are different measures of experience of the Holy Spirit’s fullness. And what does the Holy Spirit do but reveal the beauties of Christ and thus stir us up to joy and boldness? So, there’s more or less clarity of spiritual seeing and savoring depending on what degree of fullness we are enjoying.

3. In Ephesians 4:30, Paul says, “Do not grieve the Holy Spirit.” And in 1 Thessalonians 5:19, he says, “Do not quench the Spirit.” So, there are sinful attitudes and behaviors that do indeed grieve and quench the Spirit and thus draw a veil between us and the beauty of Christ, which the Spirit gives.

4. Paul prays in Ephesians 1:18 that “the eyes of your hearts” would be “enlightened,” so that you may know your calling, your inheritance, and the power of Christ in you. In other words, the eyes of our hearts see with greater or lesser clarity the glories of Christ.

5. And finally, in 2 Corinthians 4:6, Paul says that God “has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ.” That’s the glory we long to see with steady, unveiled brightness.

But all of these texts imply that the Christian life is variable. It is a fight to the end. Just before he dies, Paul says, “I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith” (2 Timothy 4:7). And it’s mainly a fight to see and savor the beauty of Christ right to the end.

Battle for His Presence

One of the questions that you read asks me personally what the absence of God has felt like to me. And I would answer like this: God has given me the grace not to think in terms of God’s absence, but only of my dullness, my disobedience. In other words, I believe that Jesus Christ, as my Savior, is always near,

because he is omnipresent — “he upholds the universe by the word of his power” (Hebrews 1:3);
because he promised, “I am with you always, to the end of the age” (Matthew 28:20); and
because he has put his Spirit within me as the down payment of my final redemption, and the Spirit does not come and go (Ephesians 1:14).

“God has given me the grace not to think in terms of God’s absence, but only of my dullness, my disobedience.”

Therefore, my experience is not of God’s absence but of my absence, my dullness, my faithlessness, my disobedience. I don’t fight to get God’s objective presence. It’s there. I fight to get his manifest presence, experienced presence. That’s my experience of his reality, which really means that the key changes have to happen in me — not in him. His location is not the issue. My faith, my sanctification, is the issue, and that’s the battle of my life every day.

He Will Hold You Fast

So finally, the last question is, What does it look like to delight in God in felt desertion? It’s a huge question, so let me just point to a passage for you to think about. Hebrews 12:2 says, “[Look] to Jesus, . . . who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross.” So, Jesus experienced a profound sense of desertion on the cross as he cried out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Matthew 27:46). And this text in Hebrews says he was able to endure that by the joy that was set before him.

Now I think that means that the faith of Jesus in his Father was able to hold on, was able to taste — by memory or by hope — some incremental measure of the anticipated joy with God. I think that’s what it looks like for us as well. For God’s elect, for his adopted children, God will hold us fast, as the song says. And the way he holds us is by preserving that mustard seed of remembered or anticipated joy at the Father’s right hand.

http://rss.desiringgod.org/link/10732/14796825/all-christians-speak-truth-to-grow-the-body

A scarcity of encouragement can become a crisis for any soul. Can you remember a time you really needed encouragement but didn’t receive it?

Encouragement often runs dry in our churches because we fail to prioritize and practice it, but some of us fail to encourage one another because we don’t really know what encouragement is. We assume encouragement is merely some word of comfort or affirmation — something to make us feel better about ourselves — when what our souls really need to hear is something that deepens our hope and confidence in God.

To encourage is to give courage — not simply to console or compliment someone (and certainly not to flatter, but to strengthen a heart for risk or adversity. Every Christian needs a steady stream of courage to endure suffering, to reject temptation, to sacrifice in love, to embrace discipline, to persevere in ministry, to trust and obey God.

And we will not survive long on the light and superficial inspiration that sells by the millions. We do not need hearts more filled with self; we need hearts regularly inflamed with God. We need soul-anchoring, heart-stirring, love-unleashing encouragement.

Church in Need of Encouragement

The church in Thessalonica seemed to suffer from a deficit of encouragement. Why else would the apostle Paul urge them, again and again, to encourage one another?

Encourage one another with these words. (1 Thessalonians 4:18)

Encourage one another and build one another up. (1 Thessalonians 5:11)

We urge you, brothers, admonish the idle, encourage the fainthearted, help the weak, be patient with them all. (1 Thessalonians 5:14)

“We do not need hearts more filled with self; we need hearts regularly inflamed with God.”

Why such a serious and repeated charge? Because the apostle had seen firsthand the troubles the Thessalonian church faced. The believers in Thessalonica were not, like so many in more affluent and comfortable places today, merely low on self-esteem. These were embattled men and women who were hated and threatened for their faith in Jesus.

When Paul and Silas preached the gospel there, many believed and joined the church (Acts 17:4), but a jealous mob rose to oppose them (Acts 17:5). Even when Paul and Silas left the persecution in Thessalonica behind and went on to Berea, the mob was so outraged that they followed them there, “agitating and stirring up the crowds” (Acts 17:13). And while Paul and Silas could leave town, the Thessalonian believers stayed and made their homes in the fire. They “received the word in much affliction,” 1 Thessalonians 1:6 says, and they would now have to hold fast in much affliction. Therefore, they needed real, meaningful, compelling encouragement.

Encouragement of a Father

As Paul exhorted the Thessalonians to encourage one another, he also gave them (and us) a godly example of encouragement to follow.

You know how, like a father with his children, we exhorted each one of you and encouraged you and charged you to walk in a manner worthy of God, who calls you into his own kingdom and glory. (1 Thessalonians 2:11–12)

Notice how he sets this kind of encouragement next to a complementary kind of love a few verses earlier: “We were gentle among you, like a nursing mother taking care of her own children” (1 Thessalonians 2:7). We were gentle among you like a mother, and we encouraged and charged you like a father. That picture gives encouragement a masculine strength, weight, and urgency that we don’t always associate with encouragement. Paul was both gentle like a mother and tough like a father, both understanding and pleading, both compassionate and assertive.

And how did he encourage them in this case? Not by saying, “Everything’s going to be alright,” but rather by charging them, “Walk in a manner worthy of God.” Encouragement sought to compel them out of spiritual sluggishness and complacency into a glad and disciplined faithfulness. How much of the encouragement we give and receive today sounds like that?

Facets of Encouragement

As we look more closely at the specific commands to encourage one another in 1 Thessalonians, we see more of the depth and complexity of real encouragement. Encouragement is not a simple reality or practice; it comes in various shapes and colors and tones, in each case aiming to stimulate the courage needed to walk in a manner worthy of God. Notice three major threads of encouragement in this letter alone.

Comfort the Sorrowful

Some in the Thessalonian church were despairing over those who had died. Paul writes in 1 Thessalonians 4:13, “We do not want you to be uninformed about those who are asleep, that you may not grieve as others do who have no hope.” These younger believers grieved as the world did, as if the grave were the end, as if the dead would never live again. They feared, it seems, that those who died before Christ returned would never see him. This made their grief even more unbearable.

How does Paul encourage them? “Since we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so, through Jesus, God will bring with him those who have fallen asleep” (1 Thessalonians 4:14). In fact, “The dead in Christ will rise first,” he tells them. “Then we who are alive, who are left, will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air, and so we will always be with the Lord” (1 Thessalonians 4:16–17). In Christ, those who have died will not remain dead. They will live, and be more alive than they ever were before, because they will finally live in the presence of the glorified Christ.

Then, in the next verse, “Therefore encourage one another with these words” (1 Thessalonians 4:18). Some are carrying a weight of sorrow or grief they cannot bear; therefore, encourage them. Strengthen their battered souls to endure heartache with hope. Remind them that all who have believed in the Lord Jesus will soon always be with him.

Awaken the Idle

Others in the Thessalonian church made the return of Christ an excuse for idleness in the meantime. If Christ is coming any time, why, they thought, would we keep working so hard? In a second letter to the church, the apostle says, “We hear that some among you walk in idleness, not busy at work, but busybodies” (2 Thessalonians 3:11). A spiritual sleepiness had fallen on some, producing negligence and laziness.

How does Paul encourage them?

Let us not sleep, as others do, but let us keep awake and be sober . . . having put on the breastplate of faith and love, and for a helmet the hope of salvation. For God has not destined us for wrath, but to obtain salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ, who died for us so that whether we are awake or asleep we might live with him. (1 Thessalonians 5:6–10)

While encouragement comes to console and strengthen those who are grieving, it strives to light a fire under sleepy souls. Strap on your breastplate. Put on your helmet. Arm yourselves for battle. Take action. Those who sleep through this war are destined for wrath. Those who will inherit the kingdom of God, however, stay awake, alert, and diligent.

Then, in the next verse, “Therefore encourage one another and build one another up, just as you are doing” (1 Thessalonians 5:11). Awaken and compel the idle. Receive the work God has given you to do, and do it with all your heart, as unto the Lord and not men (Colossians 3:23–24). Remind one another of all that’s at stake and of how serious the spiritual armies are that are lined up against us (Ephesians 6:12). “Take up the whole armor of God,” as Paul says in Ephesians 6:13, “that you may be able to withstand in the evil day, and having done all, to stand firm.”

Fortify the Fainthearted

Other believers in Thessalonica were not sleepy in idleness, but had grown weary under the weight of life in a fallen world.

“We urge you, brothers, admonish the idle, encourage the fainthearted, help the weak, be patient with them all” (1 Thessalonians 5:14). The word fainthearted appears only once in the New Testament, but it does appear several times in the Greek translation of the Old Testament. For instance, Proverbs 18:14, “A man’s spirit will endure sickness, but a crushed spirit who can bear?” Do you know someone who seems crushed in spirit? Has your heart felt weighed down by life?

How does God himself encourage the fainthearted? He does so twice through the prophet Isaiah, first in Isaiah 57:15. Notice the unusual kindness and compassion of God:

Thus says the One who is high and lifted up, who inhabits eternity, whose name is Holy: “I dwell in the high and holy place, and also with him who is of a contrite and lowly spirit, to revive the spirit of the lowly, and to revive the heart of the contrite.”

“Who can fathom a God so mighty and yet so tender, so above and yet so near, so holy and yet so compassionate?”

Though God is high and lifted up, dwelling in the high, holy, and eternal heavens, he draws near to the fainthearted, to revive and strengthen us. Who can fathom a God so mighty and yet so tender, so above and yet so near, so holy and yet so compassionate?

Notice, however, how God encourages the fainthearted in Isaiah 35:4 with urgency and earnestness: “Say to those who have an anxious heart” — same word for fainthearted — “Be strong; fear not! Behold, your God will come with vengeance, with the recompense of God. He will come and save you.” Anything you have suffered, God will repay. However bleak life may become, he will surely deliver the redeemed and repay any evil committed against you.

Do you know someone suffering from sorrow or grief, someone leaking hope in the storms of loss? Do you know others who have grown idle or complacent, making excuses to avoid what God has called them to do? Do you know some who are suffocating under the burdens they bear, living just barely above water? If so, how might you strengthen their souls in Christ? How might God use you to stir their confidence in him?

Audio Transcript

How do we parent through family crisis? In today’s scenario, a husband and wife are at odds. Son is pitted against father. Daughter is pitted against her mother. Even the daughter-in-law sides with the daughter against mom. And all the compounded animosity toward the mother weighs heavy on the father, until it all appears that a man’s worst enemies are inside his own home. So when a family breaks apart like this, what is a man to do?

This scenario is what makes the seventh chapter of Micah so bleak. It’s the worst of times. The culture is fracturing apart due to sin. No one can trust anyone. Closer to home, families are falling into crisis. It is a time, warns Micah, to “put no trust in a neighbor; have no confidence in a friend; guard the doors of your mouth from her who lies in your arms [from a wife, that is]; for the son treats the father with contempt, the daughter rises up against her mother, the daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law; a man’s enemies are the men of his own house” (Micah 7:5–6).

Considering the pain of such chaos in society and in the home, Micah models two things in verse 9. He honestly reckons with himself, and he lays hold of his hope in God. “I will bear the indignation of the Lord because I have sinned against him, until he pleads my cause and executes judgment for me. He will bring me out to the light; I shall look upon his vindication” (Micah 7:9).

Here’s Pastor John, in a 2010 sermon, explaining this text’s relevance for the broken family today.

What makes verse 9 at the beginning so stunning — “I will bear the indignation of the Lord because I have sinned” — is because he says it in the vortex of being sinned against. You know that this is one of the hardest things in the world, don’t you — being sinned against by friends, family, coworkers? It is impossible without the Holy Spirit.

Own Your Offenses

So Micah knows he’s being sinned against. He knows some of the accusations against him are wrong. He is going to be vindicated in something, and he knows that God is for him and not against him. God will bring him out into the light, out of darkness. He will vindicate him. So Micah is bold in his confidence in his assertion — amazingly bold. Nevertheless, what he draws attention to, to explain the Lord’s indignation, is his own sin: “I will bear the indignation of the Lord because I have sinned against him.”

“The posture of parenting with hope in the worst of times is the posture of brokenhearted boldness.”

I’m arguing that the posture for parenting with hope in the worst of times is a brokenhearted boldness, and I’m asking first, Why is Micah brokenhearted? And the center of the answer, the core of the answer, is not their sin against him, but his sin against God. That’s the core of his answer. And that’s the core of parenting. If it doesn’t happen, nothing else is going to go right — nothing. Wives and husbands, here is where it begins, or here it starts over. The posture of parenting with hope in the worst of times is the posture of brokenhearted boldness. And the brokenheartedness is first, centrally, because of his own sin.

That is a great battle that we face, and we can only find it by God’s grace. I pray for you. God grant that all of us would be given the miracle, by the Holy Spirit, of the kind of humility that, in the midst of being sinned against, we own our sin against God. That’s a healing miracle, the kind of thing that could give hope where you thought there was none.

When you stand before God on the judgment day to give an account, guess what? He will not give you one minute to itemize the sins against you — not one. For several reasons:

He has a book; he doesn’t need your help.
You’d get it wrong; your memory is not good enough.
You’d use it for self-justification.

You don’t get one minute at the last day to talk about anybody else’s sin — none. It’s just your own.

Brokenhearted Boldness

So how do you parent in the worst of times with hope? How do you parent with hope when the family is divided two to three? You look to the Lord, you cry to the Lord (Micah 7:7), and then you cry to him with two deep, Spirit-wrought, word-informed convictions. Are you getting there? Only God can get you there. Preaching helps, but only God can get you there.

I’m trying to build into your life right now, as parents or parents to-be or single people, two deep convictions, governing convictions, emotionally effective convictions — two of them: brokenhearted boldness.

First conviction: my sin is my biggest problem. My sin is our marriage problem. My sin is my parenting problem. My sin is my work problem. My sin is the church’s problem. And I don’t deserve anything from God. We are not and never will be perfect parents. We have sinned. Call it anything you want to soften it.

We’re not foolish. We’re not naive. We know we’ve been sinned against. Wives have sinned against us. Children sin against us. Pastors sin against us. We know that. That’s just not the core of our issue. God will not call me to account for anybody’s sin against me — none. He will call me to account for one thing: How have I responded? Have I been a sinner? And I have. Only the Holy Spirit can make us feel this guilt as we should deep down. So that’s the first conviction I’m praying to God would work in our hearts.

Second conviction: there is no God like our God. I want you to be so deeply convinced that he pardons iniquity. He passes over transgression. He relents from anger. He delights in steadfast love. I want you to be just as deeply convinced of that as that you are a sinner.

Great Sinner, Glad Savior

Do you see how these work together? This is so important. You need to get the next sixty seconds. I have a deep, deep sense of conviction from my own sin in the midst of being sinned against. I’m emotionally governed here by my own failures, and I’m being humbled by that. That’s a miracle. And over here is a massive, strong, unshakable conviction: this God that rules the world pardons iniquity.

Do you see how they work together? The first one causes me to be more amazed at the pardon, but unless I’m confident in the pardon, I’m going to lie to myself. I’m going to short-circuit this conviction. I will not let it go to the bottom — I can’t because it’s devastating. It’s just too devastating, unless I got this fixed. Do you get how they work together? It won’t work. You can’t have a God that you’re super excited about because of his pardon if you don’t consider your own sinfulness. And you can’t go here unless you’ve got a God who’s super excited in his pardon.

And you might say that won’t work, but I’m saying it’s a miracle. It’s a miracle. I can’t explain the Christian life. I can’t explain the new birth. I can’t explain conviction of sin. I can’t explain how God shows up and does two things that depend on each other at the same time. But he does. Most of you have tasted it. You have. You need to go deeper. But almost all of you in this room, I would guess, have tasted what I’m talking about.

So those two deep convictions, brokenhearted boldness, are what I mean by parenting with hope in the worst of times. Usually, we don’t even know: “Was it mainly me, or mainly them? I can’t even figure this out.” We don’t even know. In that vortex, we own what we know: “I’m a sinner, and he’s a great Savior.”

Shaped by the Cross

So how do you close? You close by saying, “Okay, we’re Christians, and we know now that from this side of the cross, if I look at where God bought my pardon, both of these are intensified.” Aren’t they intensified, not lessened? You don’t really know how grievous your sin is until you watch Jesus die for it. You don’t. You can’t. You just can’t know how bad it is. You can’t feel how bad it is. The whole point of how gory the cross is is how gory my sin is. That’s the whole point. You just can’t know.

“You don’t really know how grievous your sin is until you watch Jesus die for it. You don’t. You can’t.”

Therefore, Christians have an edge on guilt. We’re better at it, hopefully. We should be the guiltiest people on the planet. We should be more devastated than anybody. We’ve seen the glory of the cross. And the confidence level in our hearts that he passes over this horror should rise with every scream from his mouth on the cross. So on this side of the cross, what changes is this: Now we see the price that was paid. It intensifies how wretched I am, and it intensifies how utterly committed our covenant God is to pay for it and draw us into his family in spite of it. It’s just incredible.

And for Micah, Jesus was just a prophecy. Do you remember it? I’ll read it to you.

But you, O Bethlehem Ephrathah,     who are too little to be among the clans of Judah,from you shall come forth for me     one who is to be ruler in Israel,whose coming forth is from of old,     from ancient days. . . .And he shall stand and shepherd his flock in the strength of the Lord,     in the majesty of the name of the Lord his God. (Micah 5:2, 4)

That shepherd laid down his life for the sheep, and now we see in that the greatest clarity of our sin and God’s commitment to rescue us from it. Christ took our judgment.

We live in a perilous age. What Christian parents haven’t worried about the world they are sending their children into?

Depravity is widely praised and promoted. Moral order has been turned on its head. Many good customs and institutions, once taken for granted in our society, have crumbled into dust. We have to fight many times harder than our parents and grandparents to defend even the most basic of moral truths. Our increasingly secular society, however, should lead us not to despair, but to greater vigilance in how we raise our children.

Ephesians 6:4 gives us a command to shape all our attempts to form our children into those who love the Lord and desire to serve him all their days. Although I normally use the ESV, I think the King James Version is better here: “Fathers, provoke not your children to wrath: but bring them up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord.” Consider how this brief charge shapes Christian parenting in an unchristian world.

Every Father’s Calling

First, note that the command is given to fathers. In Ephesians 6:4, Paul deliberately shifts from using the word parents (in Ephesians 6:1), or speaking of fathers and mothers together (in Ephesians 6:2). Fathers are the divinely appointed leaders of the household (1 Corinthians 11:3; Ephesians 5:23; 1 Thessalonians 2:11–12; Hebrews 12:7–11) — which is not to downplay the vital role of mothers in the household, but simply to note that fathers are given the chief responsibility for the nurture and admonition of their children. And so, Paul calls fathers to rise to the challenge for the sake of their children’s spiritual well-being, even as mothers play their own indispensable role, both as a complement to the father, and as a support.

“Fathers are given the chief responsibility for the nurture and admonition of their children.”

Second, remember the first half of the verse. Fathers are commanded to bring their children up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord rather than provoking them to wrath (sinful anger). There is a way of disciplining our children, in other words, that will actually lead to more rebellion and alienation. Such discipline is hard and unloving, driven by sinful anger and resentment: anger because our commands are not heeded; resentment because of the resulting unpleasantness; all of it driven by love for self rather than love for our children.

In contrast, godly discipline is driven by love for our children (Hebrews 12:7–11), by the recognition that the pathway of uncorrected error and rebellion is the pathway to death and hell (Proverbs 5:1–6). The world may tell us that we will alienate and embitter our children if we firmly and consistently discipline them, but we live by faith in God’s promise that “folly is bound up in the heart of a child, but the rod of discipline drives it far from him” (Proverbs 22:15; see also Proverbs 3:11–12; 13:24; 19:18; 23:13). Paul, therefore, calls us to raise our children in the “nurture and admonition” of the Lord.

Nurture and Admonition

Nurture is a word sometimes used positively, sometimes negatively in the New Testament. It has the positive sense of instruction and training in Paul’s words about the purpose of preaching in 2 Timothy 3:16, and the negative sense of chastisement or corrective discipline in Hebrews 12:5–11.

Admonition, on the other hand, has the sense of warning in both of its instances in the New Testament: in 1 Corinthians 10:11, the Old Testament’s “instruction” functions as a warning to the Corinthian church not to follow the example of Israel’s wilderness rebellion; in Titus 3:10, Paul commands the church’s leaders to “have nothing more to do” with the man “who stirs up division” after “warning him” twice. These uses make it more likely that nurture in Ephesians 6:4 should be taken positively: it is the positive counterpart to the admonitory warning.

To nurture, then, is to teach and show our children positively what the Lord requires of them: repentance, faith, and a humble life of obedient service. To admonish is to warn them of the spiritual peril that will necessarily result if they turn away from the Lord in unbelief and disobedience. In his book Parenting by God’s Promises, Joel Beeke captures both the overlapping and distinct qualities of these two words:

“Nurture” (paideia) is the general training of all parts of the child: instructing his mind, shaping his character, bending his will, awakening his conscience, enriching his soul, and building his body. “Admonition” (nouthesia) has to do with conduct: encouraging children to do what is right, rewarding good conduct, confronting them when they do what is wrong, and punishing their misconduct in an appropriate way. (80)

Our Twofold Responsibility

Both sides of the equation are indispensable. Our children must be taught to embrace Christ by faith, to love what is good and true, and they must also be shown the positive and negative consequences of unbelief and disobedience (see the similar positive-negative dynamic in Paul’s comment on preaching in 2 Timothy 3:16).

The twofold call is much like the old adage about the training of inspectors of counterfeit dollar bills: they spend as much time studying real bills as they do counterfeit ones so that they will be able to tell the difference. In much the same way, our children cannot pursue faithfulness merely by being told what they have done wrong. They must also positively be shown the pathway of faith and obedience.

Nurturing our children also includes showing how pleased we are when they do well, and praising and encouraging them in their obedience, as our heavenly Father does with us: “The Lord your God is in your midst, a mighty one who will save; he will rejoice over you with gladness; he will quiet you by his love; he will exult over you with loud singing” (Zephaniah 3:17; see also Matthew 25:23; 1 Corinthians 7:32; 2 Corinthians 5:9; Colossians 3:20; 1 Thessalonians 2:4; 4:1; 1 John 3:22).

Ephesians 6:4 in Practice

What might obeying Ephesians 6:4 look like in practice? We can begin by reading the Scriptures with our children and encouraging them to do the same.

“Nurturing and admonishing our children for their eternal spiritual well-being is hard, slow work.”

We can also teach them what the Scriptures mean. Many parents will feel daunted by this calling, but there are many helps to be found. Chief among these are the great catechisms of historic Protestantism. Why reinvent the wheel when we have such wonderful teaching aids already at our fingertips? Family worship is also vital, which need not be complex or overlong. In addition, calling our children to faithfulness requires modeling faithfulness ourselves. What greater hindrance to a love for Christ could there be than for our children to hear it from our lips, but not see it in our lives?

Perhaps an example will be useful. Consider a command to an 8-year-old son to take out the trash, which he ignores. Nurture requires that we explain to him what he should have done, but also how he should have done it: the obedience God requires is immediate, complete, and without complaint. We explain to him that a truly obedient heart responds with respectful acknowledgment (“yes, sir,” or “yes, daddy,” for example), begins to obey immediately, and obeys without complaining.

Along the way, we exercise care not to “provoke our children” to anger (Colossians 3:21) with undue harshness and condemnation, or with unreasonable expectations that do not fit our children’s capacities, even as we train them toward complete obedience. To that end, as the New Testament commentator Andrew Lincoln puts it, we also treat all of our children with fairness, we do not seek to humiliate them, and we do not arbitrarily command them to do something just to show that we have power over them (Ephesians, 406). At the same time, however, we insist upon obedience, just as the Lord does with us.

Hard, Slow, Wonderful Work

All parents fall short of what God requires of us, and there is abundant grace in Christ for the forgiveness of our failures. And yet, grace does not teach us to lessen what God requires of us in any way, even though this is our natural tendency, a way of trying to cope with our parenting failures. God’s grace is sufficient to forgive us, and then strengthen us to strive after obedience to what he requires, not to find our hope by lowering the standard and congratulating ourselves in how we have met it.

Nurturing and admonishing our children for their eternal spiritual well-being is hard, slow work. As a vital aspect of our own holiness, it is an endurance race set before us (Hebrews 12:1). Our children’s spiritual growth will not occur overnight, but don’t be discouraged: we look for spiritual fruit, the fruit God promises, to develop over time as we patiently and prayerfully nurture and admonish our children to take hold of Christ and to follow him wherever he leads (John 10:27).

http://rss.desiringgod.org/link/10732/14791491/how-not-to-be-childlike