This past summer, a giant deposit of phosphate rock was discovered in southwest Norway. Why does that matter? Well, this one area in Norway now “contains enough minerals to meet the global demand for batteries and solar panels for the next 100 years.” A mining company discovered the jackpot of “up to 70 billion tons of the non-renewable resource [phosphate], . . . a key component for building green technologies” that “currently faces significant supply issues.” Supply issues no more. And just two months later was announced the discovery of 40 billion tons of lithium found inside the McDermitt Caldera, a supervolcano on the Nevada-Oregon border here in the States. That discovery sparked headlines like this one: “Lithium discovery in US volcano could be biggest deposit ever found.”

These are jackpots for the future of solar and battery power. And they should feed our worship. But they typically don’t. Instead, we are conditioned to see headlines and go man-centered (“This is all corporate greed!”). Or we go Luddite (“This is all of the devil — I’m ignoring it!”). Or we go political (“Electric vehicles are a liberal fad!”). Or we go greedy (“How do I get stock in this!?”). Our minds don’t naturally move from mining discoveries to the Creator. And they will not, without a reshaping of the heart first.

And so now most of us find it easier to celebrate God’s glory in unseen, spiritual realities. By faith, we see his glory in the gospel and in our Intercessor, Christ, our ascended and enthroned Savior in heaven, interceding for us right now. Glorious! And we easily celebrate God’s glory in untouched creation, too. Mountains, oceans, beaches, the northern lights, and the Milky Way galaxy on a dark night. But when it comes to the elements buried deep inside the earth that we excavate and make into shiny new things, God’s glory diminishes. Deposits of phosphate rock and lithium are ho-hum. And by the time we take those materials and make batteries and solar panels out of them, for many believers, God is rendered irrelevant.

A Nation-Sized Gift

The Bible gives us new eyes to see the material world around us in places like Deuteronomy chapter 8. Deuteronomy 8:1–10 is where I want to go this morning. Here Moses shapes the hearts of God’s people, getting them ready to live fruitfully in the promised land. They are a people redeemed from a 430-year bondage in Egypt straight into a 40-year desert wandering. A hard life. But now God’s people are being readied to enter the promised land. A new land. A good land, furnished with everything they could possibly need, even for their future innovations. But their hearts are not yet ready.

So, we’re simply going to walk through the text, beginning in verse 1, where Moses says,

The whole commandment that I command you today you shall be careful to do, that you may live and multiply, and go in and possess the land that the Lord swore to give to your fathers. (8:1)

Lasting life for true obedience. That’s the deal. A verse that beautifully sets up the gospel and the obedience of Christ. But for now, if Israel upholds their end of the covenant, God promises that his covenant people will flourish in this new land. They will live and multiply. They will become a strong nation.

The small-cap Lord frames everything else we will study. The great “I am.” The great all-sufficient, self-sufficient “I am who I am.” This self-sufficient Lord promises to give his people the promised land, a promise repeated 23 times in Deuteronomy alone. This sworn land is fundamental to their national identity. This land is their national identity.

And while they will flourish if they obey, the land itself is pure gift. The Lord made the world from nothing. He laid the foundations of the world. Before any creature existed, God prepared this ground for his people. Pure gift. Not a payment for holiness. In chapter 9, this point will be made very clear. Israel is not earning this new land by its self-righteousness. It comes as a gift.

“See beyond man. Marvel at the Maker of our makers.”

This promised land belongs to the Lord. He designed it. He owns it. He’s giving it as a gift of love. Israel will take possession of it by faith and flourish in it by obedience. So Israel is warned. Don’t think that you’re morally superior to all the people who lived on the land previously to you. This land is a perpetual reminder of God’s abundant kindness to undeserving sinners, the lesson they should have learned in the desert.

Testing Hearts Through Stomachs

And you shall remember the whole way that the Lord your God has led you these forty years in the wilderness, that he might humble you, testing you to know what was in your heart, whether you would keep his commandments or not. (8:2)

For forty years, God has been humbling his people. Bringing them low. Testing them. Because when you are brought low, your true self comes out. Pressure squeezes out what is inside the heart. So, God sends adversity to prove the faith of his people. Like a furnace that burns away whatever is trivial and false and fake, God “tests hearts” (Proverbs 17:3). Testing proves our trust in God. Do we really trust God or not? This whole text is about the heart. So, God works in the hearts of his people, humbling them, even down to their daily food.

And he humbled you and let you hunger and fed you with manna, which you did not know, nor did your fathers know . . . (8:3a)

Food’s hard to find in the desert. Manna was a miracle food. It looked like coriander seed and appeared in the desert, on the ground, every morning for forty years. God’s people woke up, gathered it daily, ground it up, and boiled manna cakes — cakes that tasted oily. And a little like honey. Not bad actually.

So, where’d this daily manna come from? No one knew. It was a miracle food from God. “The grain of heaven” made into “the bread of the angels” and eaten “in abundance” (Psalm 78:24–25). A gracious, sustaining gift from God that was sweet and pleasant. A daily gift to prove a bigger point:

. . . that he might make you know that man does not live by bread alone, but man lives by every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord. (8:3b)

A glaring contrast. Our hungry mouths are needy. God’s mouth sustains all things. Farmers don’t keep us alive. Safeway or Costco or Walmart doesn’t keep us alive. We are kept alive by divine miracle. Manna was a miracle food to remind Israel, and to remind all of us, that life is a sovereign miracle. If you are breathing right now, it’s because God says, “Live!” And so we live! Groceries are just a means he uses. Manna is just a means. He cares about the means, but the means point to him.

The first cause of our life is not what goes into our mouths, but what comes out of his mouth. God says, “Live!” And by it, he upholds our lives “by the word of his power” (Hebrews 1:3). By miracle. One of many tangible miracles.

Providence and Preparation

Your clothing did not wear out on you and your foot did not swell these forty years. (8:4)

Forty years in the desert, wearing the same old clothes, same sandals. They never wore out. God involved himself down to the level of how fast their clothes wore out! Amazing providence on display down to the most mundane material provision of Israel’s life. Footwear. God’s generosity in the most basic provisions.

Know then in your heart that, as a man disciplines his son, the Lord your God disciplines you. (8:5)

God has brought discipline — training human behavior. For forty years in the desert, God was disciplining his people, resetting their behaviors, and preparing their hearts for a new home. Preparing them to trust and obey him in a materially prosperous land. Why?

So you shall keep the commandments of the Lord your God by walking in his ways and by fearing him. (8:6)

The basic point of verses 2–6 is this: arrogance is unfitting for people about to inherit the gift of God’s land. For forty years, God was humbling his people, testing their hearts, and training their gratitude for a good land. And all this prep builds up now to the promised land itself, and that’s where I want to focus. So, what’s so special about this land?

The Good Land

For the Lord your God is bringing you into a good land . . . (8:7a)

The Lord is bringing them. God’s people are being led by the hand toward a gift. Have you ever bought someone a gift so big you couldn’t wrap it up? What do you do? You blindfold them and lead them to the gift by the hand. That’s God here. He’s leading his people by the hand to the gift of his land. Again, his kindness frames this entire story.

Not just any land. “A good land.” That’s its name. We typically call it the promised land. You could literally call it “the good land.” It has everything they will need to flourish. The land is useful and productive. The land is abundant and beautiful. And that means, of course, for any desert people, water:

. . . a land of brooks of water, of fountains and springs, flowing out in the valleys and hills . . . (8:7b)

The good land is rich with water flowing deep under the ground. Water breaks out from deep springs into fountains and flowing rivers, and God made it this way. Long ago he cut deep fountains into his creation. Descriptions of flowing water recall God’s original work. Into the promised land, God pre-cut channels into the rock for fresh water to flow. Long ago, this land was readied for God’s thirsty people, before God’s people even existed. And where water flows, grains and fruit abound.

. . . a land of wheat and barley, of vines and fig trees and pomegranates . . . (8:8a)

Remember when the spies took their first peek into the promised land? The evidence they took back was grapes, pomegranates, and figs. What more do you need, right? A land of amazing and delicious fruits. Fruits to make jams and wines flow like rivers.

. . . a land of olive trees . . . (8:8b)

Not just olives — literally, “oil-rich” olives. The best olives. This land flows with olive oil. Oil for worship sacrifices. Oil to anoint. Oil for cooking and baking. Oil for skin care and hygiene. Oil for medicine to treat wounds. Oil to fuel lamps and give light. Olive oil was abundantly useful for all of life, and it was already there for God’s people.

. . . and honey . . . (8:8c)

A land of honey. The land flows with milk and honey. And you cannot have honey without bread.

. . . a land in which you will eat bread without scarcity, in which you will lack nothing . . . (8:9a)

That’s the punch line. It’s the chief characteristic of the promised land itself: here, all scarcity and all shortage is completely negated. There’s no lack here. Why? Because the land is loaded with everything you could materially imagine. God is comprehensively aware of the entire scope of our material lives and made a creation to meet it. And so the land abounds.

Loaded with Ore

And that means — and here’s where I want to camp — it is

a land whose stones are iron, and out of whose hills you can dig copper. (8:9b)

This land lacks nothing because its rocks and hills are loaded with bronze and iron. Mentioned together, bronze and iron symbolize power and military might. Power and might already in the land. Iron could be taken from stones. Iron meant wealth. It could be traded. And iron was immediately useful in all areas of life. Iron-made tools for soldiers, tools for stonecutters, tools for carpenters, tools for farmers. Iron was used for axles, reinforced wheels, and chariots.

Even more diversely useful was copper. Copper could be excavated from the hills. It would be the most common material used for jewelry. It would be polished into mirrors. Copper mixed with tin made bronze, a hard and durable metal. Farmers would use bronze for plowpoints, threshing sledges, axes, pruning shears, yokes, and sickles. Soldiers would use bronze for chains, chain mail, armor, helmets, shields, javelins, bows, and arrows, as well as to fortify city walls and gates. Stonemasons would use bronze tools to cut and shape rock. God’s worshipers would use copper and bronze musically to make symbols.

“If we hold our iPhone up and cannot see God’s generosity in it — that’s inexcusable.”

Most importantly, David would prepare for the temple by acquiring iron and “bronze in quantities beyond weighing” (1 Chronicles 22:3). Then his son Solomon would take that iron and “bronze beyond weighing” and build the temple (1 Chronicles 22:14–16) — one to dazzle the world with shiny copper things: pots, shovels, basins, furniture, altars, entire doors. Bronze hardware would be everywhere — all by God’s design.

God’s nation has been handed all the iron and bronze needed to build a temple that gleams in the sunshine to attract all the nations to God. It is within God’s redemptive history that iron and bronze and human inventiveness find their home.

Israel’s unweighable abundance of iron and copper and bronze is as much a gift from God as the manna flakes they ate daily in the desert. All these weapons, all these tools, all these decorations to beautify God’s house — all of it God coded into the promised land at creation — by design. One reason the good land lacked nothing is because it was designed with all of Israel’s future “tool and technologies” needs in mind. All of Israel’s future tool needs were met and pre-coded into the good land by God, from the beginning of time — a gracious gift of the Creator’s design given in order to shape Israel’s material future.

There are staggering realities here, linking God’s sovereign plan for a nation’s future to its available natural resources. So, who’s getting the praise for these shiny metal things in Israel’s technological future?

And you shall eat and be full, and you shall bless the Lord your God for the good land he has given you. (8:10)

There again is its name: “the good land.” A land without lack. So, praise the Creator of this good land. When you have all this prosperity, thank God for it! You have it by his design.

How Faith Receives Technology

The full implications of these few verses deserve a book. But here are four statements only people of faith can make.

1. Follow human inventions back to the Creator.

The One who laid the foundations of the world is the One who dug deep channels for water. And the One who channeled the water infused into his creation of iron and copper to inspire his people’s future inventions. So, where does material technology come from? The Lord. God’s sovereign plan for each nation unfolds according to the available resources he has given. It was he who determined, “Let’s put 70 billion tons of high-grade phosphate rock in Norway and another 40 billion tons of lithium in Nevada for them to use in 2024.” That’s one way the Creator sovereignly guides the future of nations.

If you think that’s only true for Israel and not Europe, I’ll add our friend Spurgeon into the chat. I can’t talk tech without a Spurgeon quote. He got it. And it would be unforgivable to speak here without a Spurgeon mention. Here he is landing a sermon illustration about coal. Spurgeon said this:

A man, looking at the coal mines of England, naturally considers that God made that coal with the intention of supplying the world’s inhabitants with fuel, and that he stored it, as it were, away in those dark cellars underground for this favored nation [England], that the wheels of its commerce might be set in motion.

God made coal — made it for man to discover and burn — then hid that coal until just the right moment to reveal his generosity to England and to fire her economic engine. That’s how Christians view the material world, through the lens of Deuteronomy 8.

Our inventions unfold according to the discoveries we continue to make into God’s creation, in God’s timing. And so, Israel was positioned to discover and invent and build, “being gratefully aware” that all the “material resources, imagination, planning, skills, energy” — all of it was given to them by God. God governs the unfolding story of nations by governing the story of human inventiveness by how he designed his creation. True for Israel, Norway, Nevada, England.

2. Marvel at God’s glory exposed in our mining discoveries.

We won’t go there, but Job 28:1–11 is all about mining. An amazing “hymn celebrating human technology,” specifically of man’s “technological ability” to excavate what’s in the earth. That text led theologian Abraham Kuyper to say this, long before the digital age:

Man was designed and intended for digging up what God has hidden in the earth and for glorifying the greatness of God through doing this. . . . God enclosed gold and silver, all precious metals and precious stones, in the heart of the earth, and if there had been no human beings to bring these treasures to the surface, and to let the luster of the gold shine and to bring out the brilliance of the diamond by cutting it, then God would never have received the honor and praise for these, his more delicate creations in the mineral kingdom. (Common Grace, 2:97)

Amazing. True of gold, silver, diamonds, the brass on the temple, coal, and high-grade phosphate and the resources that feed our economies. Miners continue to set free the otherwise unseen creative brilliance of our God.

3. Enjoy the Creator in your inventions.

We so easily miss the main point of why mining exists. Kuyper just said it. Many previous nations have failed here. We will too if we’re not careful. We must also heed God’s warning in Deuteronomy 8:17–18. So, what’s the safe way to go here? Should we, God’s people, just diss on material things? Hate on technology? Scoff at EVs? Ignore the Norway discovery as vain worldliness? Let’s find out.

Beware lest you say in your heart . . . (Deuteronomy 8:17a)

Here it is again. What our industries do with all that high-grade phosphate rock in Norway or lithium in Nevada is one thing. What our heart does with all that phosphate rock and lithium is the concern of God. The heart of his people is the far bigger issue. Do you see God’s generosity or not? What does your heart do with all this culture-making and city-building and human tech-making? The temptation is to say,

“My power and the might of my hand have gotten me this wealth.” (8:17b)

To say that is to utterly fail! Israel, when you’ve settled into this land, you’ll stand back and enjoy the skyline of your cities. You’ll look at all the houses you have made. The new shoes and new clothes you wear. All the copper and brass and iron tools you invented to make you strong, prosperous, and wealthy. Your temple will shine in the sun. You will see oil and wine flowing from your industry. You will see farmers hauling carts of grain. You will see bakeries full of bread. Your markets will be full of food. You will make banks and financial systems and succeed in international trade. And if you fail to see God’s generosity in it all, you are an idolater.

The only explanation for why anything in the world works — why tech works, why our cars work, our computers, our phones, our batteries, why we generate wealth — is owing to the power and generosity of God. So instead,

You shall remember the Lord your God, for it is he who gives you power to get wealth. (8:18a)

God claims the glory for every penny of Israel’s wealth. He claims credit for the ultimate, final product of Israel’s industry. All the economic momentum of Israel is all because of God. He claims credit not merely for the iron and copper — or the phosphorus and lithium — but for the power to excavate these materials, and then he claims credit for wealth generated by turning those raw materials into solar panels and batteries. Why? Because all industrial wealth is traced back to its first cause: God’s generosity in creation. The God who gives out manna day by day in the desert is the same God who plants mineral deposits to spur Israel’s creativity and to spur us forward in our batteries and solar panels. Same God. Same generosity. Do you see it? Do you see him?

Every nation is held accountable here, as verses 19 and 20 suggest. Everything we make spotlights God’s abounding generosity. So, build houses. Burn coal. Make batteries and solar panels. Build economic systems. Engage in international trade. Grow trees for lumber to build homes. Harness the lightning and electrify your cities. Replicate the sun in nuclear fusion. Listen as the Creator helps you max out your farm yields. Make new things out of metal. Make new cars. Make EVs if you want. Make more comfortable clothing materials. Make new gadgets. And when you do all of it, people of God, enjoy God in it.

“The first cause of our life is not what goes into our mouths, but what comes out of God’s mouth.”

God never assumes his people will do this well! Deuteronomy 8 assumes that God’s own people will grow blind to his generosity in the shiny metal things they hold in hand. If we hold our iPhone up and cannot see God’s generosity in it — that’s inexcusable. This world will condition us — us Christians — to see mining headlines and to think man-centered thoughts. We’re wired to do everything but move from mining discoveries to the iPhone to the Creator’s generosity. Deuteronomy 8 corrects us.

4. Employ your inventions to reach the nations.

We often make the mistake of thinking technology is outside of redemptive history and inconsequential to the church. Silicon Valley is just humans doing human things. It’s Babel. It’s rebellion. Ignore it. And then we open our Bibles to find the story of human innovation woven right into redemptive history, as God claims credit for everything we make out of metal — our gadgets, cities, temples, homes, economies. Technology is there, not as some intruder into God’s redemptive plan, but as a servant within God’s redemptive plan. We have tech because we have a mission.

There’s a world of lost sinners to reach, so the temple needs brass and the missionary’s bush plane needs gas. And God is the first cause of both the brass and the gasoline. The best of our inventions is missionally useful. Israel’s iron and brass was meant to attract the nations.

In the story of the church, we could talk about the history of metallurgy and the iron nails used in the cross, or the invention of the Greek language to codify a far-reaching tongue, or the brilliance of Roman roads, wooden ships, the codex Bible, printing presses, steam trains, steamships, fossil fuels, combustion engines, off-road trucks, bush planes. Everything needed to pull off a Spurgeon sermon and then a Billy Graham revival meeting, or to show the Jesus Film in a dark village, or to broadcast the gospel on AM/FM airwaves, or for digital media to enter closed and remote countries through smartphones. Tech exists because the church exists. Tech exists because the Great Commission exists.

Here’s the bottom line: In 70 billion tons of phosphate in Norway or 40 billion tons of lithium in Nevada, never grow blind to God’s glory and generosity on display. Marvel at the Maker. Don’t watch a SpaceX rocket fire through the sky and marvel at man. Don’t watch a SpaceX rocket launch and diss on man. See beyond man. Marvel at the Maker of our makers. And marvel in your heart at the foresight of a Maker whose creation would produce rockets and cars and gasoline and batteries and solar panels and iPhones, and thousands of innovations we’re using right now and take for granted every day. God claims it all.

“Well, this is the end, Sam Gamgee,” said Frodo to his dear companion. The Ring was melting in the fires of Mount Doom. Mordor was collapsing in ruin around them. For all they knew, the whole world was disintegrating. Lava rushed down the slopes. The quest was, beyond hope, achieved. The hobbits had done what they came to do, but they did not count on getting home. Frodo had given every drop of strength and will. He sat down and waited to die. This seemed to be the world’s, and his, last hour.

In those apparently final moments, Frodo’s only comfort was the sweetness of companionship. “I am glad you are here with me,” he said. “Here at the end of all things, Sam.” These words pierce me every time. I can see Sam gently holding Frodo’s wounded hand. “Yes, I am with you, Master . . . and you’re here with me. And the journey’s finished” (The Lord of the Rings, 950).

The great burden lifted, we can feel the relief. We may even tear up over the tenderness, our hearts breaking over Frodo’s resignation. He celebrates this utter triumph for Middle-earth only in terms of having his Sam with him in the brief moments before the end.

Brushes with the End

We may well experience events that make us feel the end of all things has arrived. Once, I was young and foolish enough to keep driving on the interstate in a snowstorm. Suddenly, my car flew off the road. Airborne off a hill, time slowed down. The very heart of me spoke, “I love Jesus. I love my family.” Surprisingly, I felt companioned in those milliseconds. This was the end, and weirdly I felt peace along with the adrenalin. Then the car landed in the snow, miraculously undamaged. Completely fine, I just drove back onto the highway like nothing had happened. Yet I would never be the same. I knew I could die anytime. I knew I was never alone.

That was not the last time I braced for death. In Louisiana, we know hurricanes. A few years before Hurricane Ida in 2021, we’d lived through major damage and repairs from uprooted trees crashing on our house. So this time, as Ida roared toward us, we waited for the worst. The power had already gone out. We moved to the family room, lest the neighbor’s fifty-foot tree should crush us in the night. We settled into our sleeping bags with the dogs, turned off the transistor radio, and tried to sleep. The end of all things — that is, life as we know it — might well be coming. It was good not to be alone.

“Jesus himself is the end, the purpose, the goal, the completion of everything.”

Or take last winter. My wife put tiredness aside and drove through the night when word came that her ailing father had suffered a stroke. She made it in time to spend a day with him at hospice. Her prayerful, loving presence brought peace to her family. But more, she felt the sweet companionship with her father, even though he was not awake. “It’s good to be here with you, Dad, here at the end of all the things we’ve known together in this world. Nothing will be the same, but these moments are ours.”

Life as we know it always stands on the brink of endings, both small and momentous. The curtain closes on the final performance, and the troupe will never be so close again. Graduation means now you can never quite go home. The divorce decree arrives, stamped and notarized; the book closes on all that life you once shared. The family business shutters after generations. It was on your watch. The song ends, the plates are cleared, and each day — the best and the worst — fades to night.

The world rotates and revolves relentlessly so that change, endings, always draw nigh. We look around and see who remains when nothing will be as it has been. Maybe a friend, a son, a daughter, a spouse. “It’s good to be with you, dear one, here at the end of all things.”

The World Is Passing Away

These personal tastes of the end remind us that the whole world, even the cosmos, will not remain in present form. Indeed, the conclusion of this age has already been set in motion. Peter writes, “The end of all things is at hand” (1 Peter 4:7). The completion of everything has drawn near. With the incarnation of the Son of God and his journey through death, resurrection, and ascension, this world has entered the last days. Of course, “with the Lord one day is as a thousand years” (2 Peter 3:8). The world may endure for centuries more, but the last day, as we know it, is now inevitable. Jesus will return.

This awareness changes how we view the world. We may be despairing of the future. The earthly powers bluster and threaten, posturing that they know the score and call the shots. The world insists that now is all. We’re prodded to accept that the way things are is the way things always will be. We can rush into our days filled with the dull but persistent anxiety that comes from hopelessness. We try not to think about the end. But when we gather around the word in worship with other believers, we see more clearly. The new age of the reign of Christ has begun. The old world in all its rebellion is fading away (1 John 2:17). The true purpose of every created thing will be made clear very soon.

Jesus declares, “I am the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end” (Revelation 22:13). Jesus himself is the end, the purpose, the goal, the completion of everything. Apart from him, we find only the emptiness and abyss of being outside his purpose. Joined to him, we will find that everything gets resolved.

What Matters in the End

This higher view of where the world is going gives us hope. But it also presses on us the urgency of accountability. Every moment may be our last. So, Jesus told the parable of the complacent man who believed he had secured enough goods for a comfortable future. The man told himself, “Relax, eat, drink, be merry.” But then God said, “Fool! This night your soul is required of you” (Luke 12:19–20). Our personal endings can come at any hour. And then an accounting of our lives must be given.

That’s why Peter expands on the implications of his statement, “the end of all things is at hand.” He writes, “Therefore be self-controlled and sober-minded for the sake of your prayers. Above all, keep loving one another earnestly, since love covers a multitude of sins” (1 Peter 4:7–8). This life counts. This life could end in an instant. So, live with the end, the goal, the purpose in mind. Live for what lasts.

“This life counts. This life could end in an instant. So, live with the end, the goal, the purpose in mind.”

In his great love chapter, Paul concludes, “Now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love” (1 Corinthians 13:13). Only what partakes of faithful trust in Christ and lovingkindness toward others will survive through the end into the new creation. Jesus both evokes fear and inspires hope when he says, “As you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me” (Matthew 25:40). Because we know what the end of all things will be, we also know what matters. Every present moment is charged with the future end of all things. And our personal ending could arrive any second.

So, we live with the end in mind.

With Us to the End

We cannot stop the ever-arriving endings in the world, or even in our personal lives. Endings come because change continues. But when we trust that the world’s true end is the day of Christ Jesus, we live in hope. We live for his mission. And he promises that we are companioned. “Go . . . and make disciples of all nations. . . . And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age” (Matthew 28:19–20).

We are not alone. We face these endings, even the endings of life as we know it, with one who has endured the end of all things, the plunge into the utter darkness of God-forsakenness on the cross, so that we do not face any ending, any nightfall, alone. And usually, in his mercy, he sends us a fellow believer, a Sam, to keep us company along the way.

So, Scottish pastor Alistair Maclean prayed, “Thou hast destined us for change, us and all things Thy hands have made. Yet we fear not. Nay, rather, we are jubilant. Hast Thou not loved us before the world began? What can change bring us but some better thing?” (Hebridean Altars, 89).

Given enough time, men and women of principle stand out. After waves of social pressure and the mounting cares of this life, such people are left standing, long after others around them have compromised and toppled.

I’m referring to Christians who don’t play favorites and aren’t partisans of this age. They don’t bend the truth or sweep respectable sins under the rug. Rather, they call Jesus “Lord,” and standing with two feet on his soil, they call “spade” and “evil” to all sides of error and unbelief. Such men and women refuse to cut moral corners, or presume that strategic wrongs can make others right. They shun small compromises and may not stand out at first. But give it time, and their truth and good will be conspicuous (1 Timothy 5:25).

When justice is at stake, such people are not partial to the rich, or the poor. They don’t pick a favorite group, or preferred person, and twist truth and righteousness to fit their darling. Bearing the name of their God, and the Messiah he sent, they judge with impartiality and decide with equity.

And in the spiritual conflict in which we’re engaged, they “stand against the [plural] schemes of the devil” (Ephesians 6:11) that come from every side. They remember that our warfare is spiritual, not “against flesh and blood” (Ephesians 6:12) — and that this war cannot be fought with the weapons of the world.

If such men and women seem to be in short supply in some circles, we might ask, Where do such people come from?

God’s Armor and Ours

“God shows no partiality” is a striking refrain across Scripture, and particularly in the New Testament (Acts 10:34; Romans 2:11; Galatians 2:6; Ephesians 6:9; Colossians 3:25). The implication for God’s people is plain and explicit: do nothing from partiality (1 Timothy 5:21). This is James’s memorable teaching about rich and poor who come to worship: “show no partiality” (James 2:1). “If you show partiality, you are committing sin and are convicted by the law as transgressors” (James 2:9).

“The Christian who wraps his soul in the objective truth of Scripture shapes his subjective heart for the wiles of war.”

But all this truth and righteousness, precious as it is, remains downstream when we come to “the whole armor of God” — and what Paul lists first. Before we start reaching for God’s armor, we should know whose it is, and who wore it first.

Now, some of Scripture’s most magnificent passages can be lost on us through over-familiarity. Such chapters as Isaiah 53 and 1 Corinthians 13 are deservedly famous — and in that due emphasis and celebration, many of us need to move past our dulling acquaintance with them and see them with fresh eyes, and amazement.

The “armor of God” in Ephesians 6 is one of these stunning flourishes. This is Paul at his best, with dazzling Christian creativity, if we might call it that. In one powerfully rhetorical swath, he both pulls together Old Testament references to armor and presses them into Christian use (perhaps even against a Roman backdrop). This is instructive of the range of usages the apostles can make of the Hebrew Scriptures, not only as simple promise-fulfillment, but also illusions and types and patterns and artistic syntheses crafted to serve the holy designs of the authors and needs of their readers. Here the apostle is both poet and pastor.

Iain Duguid makes a compelling case that

each of the pieces of armor has a rich background in the Old Testament, where they describe God’s armor — the armor that God himself dons to rescue his people. The Old Testament, not the Roman legionary, provided Paul with his inspiration — and if we miss this background, we may misinterpret and misapply the various pieces of the armor.

So, we begin with the first — “the belt of truth,” which strictly speaking isn’t armor, defensive or offensive, but pre-armor or under-armor. Let’s see it first in its original context, and what it shows us of our Divine Warrior, and then how we, very practically, might “wear the belt” today as Christians in a world of half-truths.

Messiah Wrapped in Righteousness

Isaiah 11 tells of the coming “shoot from the stump of Jesse,” David’s father. The mention of Jesse recalls the humble origins of Israel’s greatest king. The wide trunk that is God’s first-covenant people may be felled by an invading army, but God will see to it that a stump will remain — and in time a new shoot of life will spring from David’s line.

The prophet anticipates that this coming Messiah, with the Spirit of God resting on him, will delight in the fear of God — and so will be no partisan king. He will not be deceived by appearances and personal preferences, “but with righteousness he shall judge the poor, and decide with equity for the meek of the earth” (Isaiah 11:3–4). Strikingly, he will not then take up the physical sword to enforce his will but exact justice with the word of his power: “he shall strike the earth with the rod of his mouth, and with the breath of his lips he shall kill the wicked” (Isaiah 11:4).

Seven centuries later, when the apostle writes so memorably to Christians about putting on “the whole armor,” he draws first on Isaiah 11:5:

Righteousness shall be the belt of his waist,and faithfulness (truth) the belt of his loins.

Gracious and merciful as will be this Messiah to rescue his people, he will not act unjustly. He will not take bribes or underwrite half-truths. He will not treat wrong as right, or sweep injustice under the rug. Delighting to reverence his divine Father and cosmic justice, he will be a king who delights in right, does right, and is known for it. Even his opponents will have to admit, “Teacher, we know that you speak and teach rightly, and show no partiality, but truly teach the way of God” (Luke 20:21).

So here, looking to the righteous actions of Jesus, Paul notes our first step in dressing for spiritual battle.

Prepare Your Soul with Truth

Before reaching for breastplate, shoes, shield, helmet, or sword, first comes the under-armor. There’s technically no “belt” here in Ephesians 6:14. This first step of preparation is literally, “having girded up your loins in truth” (perizōsamenoi tēn osphun humōn en alētheia). We might say wrap your waist in truth.

In the ancient world, “girding up your loins” meant wrapping your waist with the excess fabric of a long robe as “preparation for vigorous activity” (O’Brien, Ephesians, 473). Drawing up the dangling garment, and securing it at the waist, enabled running, free movement, and unhindered combat. With this foundational fashion in place, warriors then could secure their armor and go into battle.

For spiritual war, the Christian first is to wrap his loins in truth. Now, as “the belt,” this is not yet truth on the offensive (that’s the sword of the Spirit), but this is God’s truth applied to oneself, to the inner man, the soul, the “inward being” or “secret heart” (Psalm 51:6). The Christian who wraps his soul in the objective truth of Scripture shapes his subjective heart for the wiles of war. He takes the divine word deep into his human center, for transformation and joy. He not only searches the Scriptures, but lets the Scriptures search him. He ingests God’s truth both to feed and to condition his soul, subjectively using the objective truth to shape his pliable affections.

Slowly, one day at a time, over months and years, this wrapping makes him a vastly different person, far better equipped to both identify truth and embody it.

Wrap Yourself in His Word

Wrapping ourselves in truth applies to more than personal Bible intake, but not less. Those best prepared for spiritual war are those who not only dip into the word briefly but saturate their lives with it. They wrap their souls in God’s truth through various habits and patterns, personally and corporately — through reading and rereading and study and meditation and memorization and discussion. They click on content that strengthens their bearings and their delight in truth, rather than error.

We all wrap our souls in something. Is it truth or error? And as we practice choosing truth daily, reading truth, clicking truth, meditating on truth, talking truth, then we become ready to discern truth from error, counterfeits, and half-truths.

“Those best prepared for spiritual war are those who not only dip into the word briefly but saturate their lives with it.”

And having wrapped our souls in truth, we become the kind of people who bring truth with us wherever we go. We not only speak truth but embody it, and even more, speak the truth of the gospel into places and hearts of unbelief. We are truth-tellers in our jobs, on our taxes, when we fill out insurance claims, when we serve as jurors, when we find a financial error in our favor, and when we hear someone speak a half-truth about someone else. Like Jesus, we will become agents of truth wherever we go: when we walk into a room, or stand up at a school-board meeting, or sit in a conference room, or engage in conversation.

Wrapped in truth, we’ll be the kind of people who say, in every crisis, Let truth hold sway. Let the unvarnished truth be discovered and known. Truth will not undermine the cause of our God and Christ, who is the Truth. Rather, the cause of truth — openhanded, not angling, full exposure, light into darkness — is an effect downstream of our knowing and enjoying the word of truth, the gospel, about the one who is Truth himself.

And so we call out spades and evil, and call on Jesus as Lord. We refuse to cut moral corners, cater to lies, or presume that some wrongs can make others right. First, we wrap ourselves daily in God’s truth. Then, we reach for the armor, and over time we grow increasingly bright and shine like the sun in the kingdom of our Father, and in this age besides.

Audio Transcript

Boosted by a fresh dose of resurrection hope coming out of Easter Sunday, we are talking about death on the podcast this week. We are free to speak openly about dying in hopeful ways the world cannot speak of, free to say that what is sown into the soil “does not come to life unless it dies” (1 Corinthians 15:36).

In that hope, we started the week with the story of V. Raymond Edman, a preacher who died in the pulpit, an event from Pastor John’s very formative years at Wheaton College and one he almost never talks about. But he did on Monday. And today we read about death in the Navigators Bible Reading Plan. It comes in the context of Paul talking about division and jealousy in the church, in 1 Corinthians 3:1–23. And there Paul gives us this amazing motivation for not getting jealous in this life. And that motive is the gift of death. He says, “Death is ours.” And that has led to many emails over the years asking what in the world Paul means that death is a gift to us, specifically there in 1 Corinthians 3:22. How, Pastor John, would you explain the divine gift of death here in this context?

Well, I love this text, 1 Corinthians 3:21–23. Tony, it’s very hard for me to talk about this without raising my voice with exuberance, and I will try to restrain myself. But hundreds of realities are thrilling in the Bible. This one is off-the-charts, unspeakably amazing. Let me read it for our friends so they know what we’re talking about.

Let no one boast in men. For all things are yours, whether Paul or Apollos or Cephas or the world or life or death or the present or the future — all are yours, and you are Christ’s, and Christ is God’s. (1 Corinthians 3:21–23)

End of Boasting

So, Paul is trying to get the Corinthians to stop boasting in human beings. That’s the agenda. Back in 1 Corinthians 1:11–12, they were saying, “I belong to Paul,” “I belong to Apollos,” “I belong to Cephas.” In other words, they were exalting themselves over others by borrowing significance from their favorite teacher or orator or intellectual, claiming to be superior to others because they were in the Paul group or the Apollos group or the Cephas group.

And basically, Paul says (in 1 Corinthians 3:21–22), “You’re insane. You’re crazy for thinking like that.” Why are you crazy? And he gives them the reason. “Let no one boast in men,” and here comes the reason: “[because] all things are yours, whether Paul or Apollos or Cephas or the world or life or death or the present or the future.” Everything is yours.

So, Paul exposes the craziness of the Corinthian boasting by turning their words upside down. They were saying, “I belong to Paul,” “I belong to Apollos,” “I belong to Cephas.” And Paul says,

No, they belong to you, you idiots. All things are yours. Paul is yours. Apollos is yours. Cephas belongs to you. And by the way, so does the world and life and death. All things are yours, you crazy Corinthians. Come on, wake up to who you are. You belong to Christ. You are fellow heirs with Christ, and he is the heir of God, and God owns everything. Get it? Come on.

So stop acting like idiots, Corinthians. Stop trying to prop up your significance in this world by boasting in your favorite teacher. You own everything. The poorest Christian among you, the poorest Christian on this planet, is richer than the richest unbeliever.

Death Is Your Servant

Specifically, then, what does it mean that death is yours, along with everything else? “You own death. It’s your possession. It doesn’t possess you; you possess it.” What does that mean? Now, I’ll give you my understanding of that statement, and then I’ll take you to several passages of Scripture that support this understanding.

“The poorest Christian on this planet is richer than the richest unbeliever.”

When Paul says, “Death [is] yours,” he means, “Death is your servant — not your master, your servant.” It does for you what you need to have done. If I say, “The food in my refrigerator is my food; it’s mine,” I mean, “I can eat it without stealing, and it serves me; it strengthens me to do what I need to do.” If I say, “This car is my car,” I mean, “It serves me; I use it. It doesn’t use me; I use it. It gets me where I want to go.”

So, I’m saying that Paul means, “Paul is your servant” (in fact, he says that earlier in 1 Corinthians 3:5). “Paul is your servant. Apollos is your servant. Cephas is your servant. The world is your servant. Life and death are your servants. You don’t serve them; they serve you. You don’t exist for their benefit; they exist for your benefit. In the end, they will do for you exactly what you need to have done. Death will do for you what you need done.”

All Things Serve God’s Children

Now, here are some biblical pointers to that understanding. Psalm 119:90–91 says,

Your faithfulness [O God] endures to all generations;     you have established the earth, and it stands fast.By your appointment they stand this day,     for all things are your servants.

Everything in the universe serves the purposes of God — everything. There are (as R.C. Sproul used to say) no maverick molecules. Every bird that falls, every hair that turns white, is of God. Everything serves the purposes of God. We are God’s children, and it would make no sense if God said, “Well, all things serve me, but when it comes to my children, I just have no idea how to make all things serve them.” That is crazy. It’s not only crazy; it’s blasphemous. If all things serve our omnipotent, all-wise, all-caring Father, then all things serve us.

More Than Conquerors

Which brings me, then, to Romans 8:28. “We know that for those who love God all things [including death] work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose.” In other words, all things, including death, serve the children of God, serve their good, do for us what we need to have done.

Then Paul lists all the things that might “separate us from the love of Christ” (Romans 8:35), and included in that list is “danger” and “sword,” which means danger and death. We used swords to chop off people’s heads in those days. And we know that because, in the next verse (Romans 8:36), it says, “We are being killed all the day long.” Christians are dying for their faith every day, even today. Somewhere in the world, some Christian’s life is being threatened for his faith. And Paul says, “Death is yours. It serves you.”

How does he say that right here in Romans 8:37? This is the really amazing part. He doesn’t just say, “Death cannot separate us from the love of Christ.” He says that. It’s not all he says. He says, “No [no!], in all these things” — not in spite of them, but in all these things, including death, danger, sword, peril, famine, nakedness — “we are more than conquerors.” You could translate it “super-conquerors.”

“Life and death are your servants. You don’t serve them; they serve you.”

So, if death takes your life (which he says it does in Romans 8:36), how are you, in that moment when death has taken your life, more than a conqueror? How does it serve you? You’re not just a conqueror — it doesn’t just lie there conquered at your feet. It is “more than a conqueror.” It gets up; death gets up. After you’ve slain death, it gets up and serves you. Death does what you need doing and takes you where you need going.

Two Powers Dethroned

So, if we really believed — O God, help us. Every time I work on this text, I just shake my head and think, How in the world can this text go out of my head? How can I not live in the light of this text? And it happens. It’s just a horrible thing how it happens to us Christians. This text just goes out of our head.

If we really believe this text (what the Bible says about us in 1 Corinthians 3:21–23) — namely, that all things are ours, including the finest intellects on the planet and the best orators and the richest people and life and death and the world and the present and the future — if we really believed that these things are our servants, two powers would be dethroned in our lives. First, we would no longer desperately try to find our significance in this world by being superior to others or by lining up with people who are superior. We would see that as insane. And second, we would stop fearing death. “O death, where is your victory? O death, where is your sting?” (1 Corinthians 15:55). It’s gone. It’s not only gone — it comes back around and becomes our servant.

ABSTRACT: The “Five Points of Magnetism” articulated by the twentieth-century missionary theologian J.H. Bavinck serve as a grid for understanding human cultures in every age. Formed in the image of God, humans necessarily ask the same basic questions about who they are and how they fulfill their place in the world. The gospel of Christ answers those questions and fulfills every longing. Learning to recognize these questions can help pastors serve their people in preaching and counseling, as well as empower them to offer a compelling witness to the world.

For our ongoing series of feature articles for pastors and Christian leaders, we asked Dan Strange (PhD, University of Bristol), director of Crosslands Forum and the vice president of The Southgate Fellowship, to recover the “Five Magnetic Points” of missionary theologian J.H. Bavinck as a foundation for the church to engage with culture in a compelling manner.

If you knew me, you would know that I have not been gifted with the body of a climber. However, a few years ago I became somewhat obsessed with the Oscar-winning documentary Free Solo, which captures Alex Honnold’s breathtaking ascent of El Capitan in Yosemite National Park: 2,900 feet (884 meters) in 3 hours and 56 minutes without any ropes or safety aids. In parts of the climb, the rock face appears so vertical and smooth that it seems impossible for Honnold to get a grip (could he really be Spiderman?). On closer inspection, though, we discover indentations, nubs, and abrasions, however small, that Honnold uses creatively, not to mention with great effort and patience, to get traction and continue his journey to the top.

Engaging late-modern culture, and indeed any culture, in terms of our pastoring, preaching, and persuasion can seem as if we’re trying to climb a sheet of glass. We may not like to admit it, but we often struggle to get traction, to understand and connect with people where they really are — their hopes, dreams, and fears. It can feel as if we’re losing our grip and slipping down. How do we get traction given such pervasive uninterest and even antagonism?

As evangelical Christians, however, getting traction is not our only concern, and this is where my Free Solo illustration breaks down. Alex Honnold is not to be our example. There’s a tragic montage in Free Solo that shows how many of Alex’s friends in the free-solo climbing community have fallen to their deaths. Free soloing is absolute madness. Yes, we want to get traction, but we also know we need to be tethered. Our ministry, in all its facets, if it is to be truly life-giving, must be tethered to Christ and his word. This is where we find not only safety and security, but also sight. Far from being restricting, such tethering gives us confidence, freedom, and imagination to get traction in whatever cultural context the Lord has placed us because we learn from God’s word that there is always a point of contact to confront and call our culture to come to Christ.

Seeing Culture Through Scripture

What I’ve said so far is nothing original. The swirl and interplay between our confession and our context — and to which I would add our character — are perennial issues in theology and missiology that can discombobulate and paralyze. Which theory of “contextualization” can we understand, let alone utilize? How do we have the time and energy to keep up with the constant shape-shifting of cultural trends and artifacts? Do all pastors today need PhDs in the sociology of religion and an intricate theory of secularization?

To aid our progress, I have found the Dutch Reformed missiologist J.H. Bavinck (1895–1974), the nephew of Herman Bavinck, to be an expert guide in helping us gain traction while remaining securely tethered: exegeting culture through the exegesis of Scripture.1 In this essay, I outline Bavinck’s theological anthropology in his understanding of humanity’s religious consciousness, unpacked in what he calls the “magnetic points,” which are subversively fulfilled in Jesus Christ. I then apply this to our pastoring, preaching, and persuasion.

The ‘Perilous Exchange’

To unpack what it means for humanity to be religiously conscious, Bavinck focuses his attention on Romans 1:18–32. In the cosmic game of hide-and-seek, Bavinck says, God is not the one hiding. He has made himself known in everything he has created, with the climax of creation being his image bearers. This revealing is dynamic, personal, and relational. More than most commentators on this seminal passage, Bavinck unpacks the revelation of God’s “invisible qualities” (Romans 1:20 NIV). God’s “eternal power” notes our creaturely dependence on our Creator.2 His “divine nature” recognizes our personal accountability to a Someone — the Someone — rather than a “something” or an “It.”3 Dependence and accountability are hardwired into human beings (something to which we’ll shortly return).

What do we do with this personal knowledge? In the game played out since Eden, we are the ones who try to hide. We suppress the truth and try to drown it, and with that choice comes a “perilous exchange”4 where we idolatrously substitute all kinds of created things for the uncreated God in the foolish attempt to extricate “eternal power” and “divine nature” from them.

This suppression and substitution of revealed truth can be hard to understand, but Bavinck offers a memorable illustration in the metaphor of a dream, or better still, a nightmare. In a nightmare, the phenomena we experience in reality during the day are ripped out of their original contexts and become grotesque — twisted and distorted new ideas and fantasies. This whole process makes up what Bavinck calls humanity’s universal “religious consciousness.” We are God’s image bearers built for worship, and yet we have rebelled against our Creator. We know God and so are without excuse, but we are also ignorant of him. We are running to him and away from him at the same time. This is the dignity and depravity of our humanity.

This messy mix is what I believe Paul is getting at in Acts 17 when he calls the Athenians “very religious” and points to their unknown god. He’s not commending their idolatry (he’s been deeply distressed, notes their ignorance, and will call them to repentance), but he starts where they are, recognizing their need for worship as a point of contact (or better, attack).

Five Magnetic Points

Bavinck’s experience on the mission field in Indonesia and then back in a theological seminary in the Netherlands led him to unpack this religious consciousness. Yes, different religions and worldviews are vastly different, and yet, he writes,

There seems to be a kind of framework within which human religions need to operate. There appear to be definite points of contact around which all kinds of ideas crystallize. There seem to be quite vague feelings — one might better call them direction signals that have been actively brooding everywhere. . . . Perhaps this can be expressed thus: there seem to be definite magnetic points that time and again irresistibly compel human religious thought. Human beings cannot escape their power but must provide an answer to those basic questions posed to them.5

These “magnetic points,” fashioned from our distortions of God’s “eternal power” and “divine nature” (which stress our creaturely accountability), can manifest themselves in a multitude of mutations, but “since they are rooted in our existence, they are stronger than ourselves, and somehow we must come to grips with them.”6 Even if these points are never consciously articulated, human beings still answer them by “their entire conduct” and “attitude to life”: their “whole way of living already implies an answer, and is an answer.”7 These are the itches that we have to scratch, even if they just lead to more irritation.

Bavinck notes that there are five of these magnetic points, each offering a perspective on the one religious consciousness. The following is my own summary of them.8

1. Totality: Is there a way to connect?

All humans have an innate sense of totality and connection that shapes our identity. On the one hand, we often feel so small and insignificant, just specks in the vast universe with no value or worth, and treated as such. Any yet, when we connect with something or someone(s) bigger, we find significance through belonging and enjoy communal awareness. Therefore, we crave connection, often feel abandoned after we’ve experienced it, and crave for it again and again.

2. Norm: Is there a way to live?

We have a vague sense there are rules to be obeyed. People recognize and accept moral standards and codes that come from outside them and to which they must adhere. This knowledge brings with it a sense of responsibility to live up to those norms. Even groups that seek to be countercultural have their own set of rules of nonconformity.

3. Deliverance: Is there a way out?

We know something is wrong with the world. There is finitude, brokenness, and wrongdoing, and the problems of suffering and death consistently confront us. We mourn for some kind of paradise lost and long for deliverance from these evils, craving redemption. And yet, we can’t agree on what our ultimate problem is, let alone whether there is a solution that would deliver us.

4. Destiny: Is there a way we control?

Although we know ourselves to be active players in the world, we have a nagging feeling that we are also passive participants in somebody else’s world. We both lead and undergo our lives. Sometimes we feel confident that we are masters of our destiny with agency and power to determine reality. Other times we feel restricted and trapped with no agency, like pawns in a cosmic game of chess or puppets on a string. We’re victims. We oscillate between these two moods, and cannot settle and find cognitive or existential rest.

5. Higher Power: Is there a way beyond?

This is the meta-magnetic point on which all the others converge. Humans perceive that behind all reality, beyond the veil, stands a great reality. The deeper we look to find connection, discover the norm, search for deliverance, and relate to our destiny, the more we come to the question of a higher power. But what is it? Who is it?

These, then, are the magnetic points that make up our religious consciousness, all formed from the anthropological clay of Romans 1 and the broader theological anthropology of Scripture. In Bavinck’s life and ministry, the phenomena before him (with which he used this framework) were what we might call recognized religious traditions and worldviews. And such analysis in cross-cultural settings is as relevant then as it is now.

However, I believe this anthropological framework, these five magnetic points, are just as relevant in our late-modern, post-Christian Western context. These magnetic points can be the lens through which we start to read our culture. They can help us connect with those around us who are scratching their “very religious” itches.9 They can be the magnetic poles we use to orient wandering souls to True North.

One Magnetic Person

Using this framework enables us to connect and confront our culture with the Lord Jesus Christ. In him, all the magnetic points are yes and amen. He is where the traction lies. The gospel of Christ confronts and subverts idolatrous religious consciousness and its historical manifestations, but it also provides its fulfillment. As we observe in 1 Corinthians 1, Christ crucified confronts all idolatrous cultural stories (1 Corinthians 1:20–25). It’s foolish and scandalous to Jews (who look for power) and to Greeks (who look for wisdom). And yet, to those who are being saved, Jesus is the power and is the wisdom that completes these stories (and the myriad of other stories we tell).

The gospel of Jesus Christ is the subversive fulfillment of the magnetic points. He is the magnetic Person that we present to people. In the cosmic game of hide-and-seek, where God is not hiding but we, Jesus, the light of the world, pierces the darkness. He is the greatest seeker who comes to seek and save the lost. (I can only present the barest pencil outline here. I will leave it to you to color in these points with the boldest and richest gospel colors.)

First, Jesus is the subversive fulfillment of totality (the way to connect). The beautiful doctrine of the image of God affirms both our insignificance (we are not God) and our significance (we are images of God). We are Adam — ones “from the earth” — and so our need for connection is natural. And yet, we are disconnected: from ourselves, each other, the creation, and (most of all) the Creator, against whom we have rebelled. Being connected to this world means being connected to a world that is under judgment and is perishing.

Jesus, the Second Adam, offers a new kingdom into which we enter by repentance and faith. Entering this kingdom requires death and sacrifice but not a loss of self in terms of individuality and responsibility. Rather, it brings rebirth and resurrection, communion with God in our union with Christ and community in the body of Christ, the church.10

Second, Jesus is the subversive fulfillment of the norm (the way to live). Jesus offers himself as both the standard and the Savior. In following Jesus, people come to see that God’s unchanging holy law is for our flourishing. Yet, he offers compassion to the outcast and marginalized, and he hates religious hypocrisy.

Third, Jesus is the subversive fulfillment of deliverance (the way out). The war between ourselves, within ourselves, and with our environment has a root cause: our enmity with God. We face his righteous wrath and an eternity in hell. Deliverance can be found only through one Mediator, the God-man Jesus Christ — and through him alone. In him there is not only escape but restoration and eternal blessing.

Fourth, Jesus is the subversive fulfillment of destiny (the way of control). Our world is not governed by blind fate or malevolent forces but by a sovereign God who is Lord over all creation, both natural and supernatural. This sovereignty does not take away human freedom but is its precondition. Christian destiny is liberating and joyful.

Finally, Jesus is the subversive fulfillment of the higher power (the way beyond). We do not worship a non-Absolute deity or an impersonal force, but a Someone, maximally Absolute and maximally Personal, who is both transcendent and immanent, Judge and Savior. We worship One who has reached down to us in grace, the Word made flesh.

Many Magnetic People

Now that we have considered the five magnetic points and the one magnetic person, Jesus Christ, how might we utilize this framework in our ministry and mission?

Pastor Toward the Magnetic Person

First, in our pastoring. Our evangelism and apologetics flow from our discipleship. In 1883, Charles Spurgeon preached a sermon on John 12:32 titled “The Marvelous Magnet.” He said,

All the magnetism comes from the first place from which it started, and when it ceases at the fountainhead there is an end of it altogether. Indeed, Jesus Christ is the great attractive magnet, and all must begin and end with Him. . . . Thus from one to another the mystic influence proceeds, but the whole of the force abides in Jesus. More and more the kingdom grows, “ever mighty to prevail,” but all the growing and the prevailing come out of Him. So it is that Jesus works — first by Himself, and then by all who are in Him. May the Lord make us all magnets for Himself.11

A teacher wrote to me recently about this quotation and gave me a physics lesson. Some materials can become magnetic when placed in a magnetic field, as they are made up of lots of regions called “domains,” which are essentially “mini-magnets.” When not in the magnetic field, they align randomly and cancel each other out so that there is no overall magnetic field. But in the presence of an external magnetic field, these domains align so that, instead of canceling each other out, their strengths combine to make the material magnetic.

Our hearts are like the unmagnetized material: we are fragmented. Our inner desires, commitments, loves, emotions, and beliefs are attracted by all sorts of created things. We have divided hearts (Psalm 86:11). What we need is to be close to Christ. As we behold his glory (2 Corinthians 3:18), spending time in his magnetic field, all our fragmented “mini-magnets” become attracted to him and start to align. He makes us magnetic.

We are either being formed by Christ or being deformed by something or someone else. If we are not being drawn to Christ, we are being drawn away by something else. The magnetic points serve as a helpful diagnostic tool as we pastor ourselves and those in our care. Where are our hearts seeking connections, norms, deliverances, destinies, and higher powers that are not in Christ?

The question then becomes, How are we to stay properly magnetized? The extraordinarily ordinary answer is, of course, by loving Jesus and loving his body, the church, through which the Holy Spirit re-magnetizes us each week, and sends us out on mission and into our God-given vocations. May the Lord make us all magnets for himself!

Preach with the Magnetic Points

Second, in our preparation for preaching. To connect every aspect of their sermons to the lives of the people in their churches, the Puritans used preaching grids that helped map out particular sermon applications. The magnetic points can function in a similar fashion, acting as a bridge to connect our preaching to the lives and concerns of our listeners. Because they are a way of understanding the Bible’s own anthropology, using them as an application grid is not an artificial imposition on the text. Because they are part of who we are, we can’t avoid touching on these themes.

Preachers don’t have to explain the magnetic points in their sermons. Like the scaffold in a building project, such a grid is temporary and won’t be on display in the final product. But the magnetic points do provide a useful grid as we aim to present Christ in our preaching as the fulfillment of our deepest longings.

Persuade with Magnetic Spaces

Third, in our persuasion. As I’ve already noted, the magnetic points provide a helpful framework for connecting with the non-Christians God has placed in our lives in a natural but intentional way.12 Sometimes this occurs in more direct and immediate evangelistic engagement. However, given our increasingly post-Christian culture — which is frantic, fractured, and polarized — civil dialogue and conversation is becoming more difficult. How do we even create opportunities to speak of Christ where people will genuinely listen and engage? Increasingly, some relationships call for a longer “run up.”

Among many steps churches could take, we could consider creating “magnetic spaces,” places where people can pause in the journey of life, gaining some relief from the storm. Like the ancient hospiciums, which before the nineteenth century were not places for the dying but rest houses for travelers, such spaces could provide relief from the storms of life and opportunities to reflect on the many issues people face. A magnetic space could be a book or film club, a regular meeting of parents or businessmen, a sports ministry, a mental-health discussion group, or more.

It should be noted that such magnetic spaces would not be guilty of what can be called bait-and-switch tactics. While each magnetic space is built by a local church, every space would be happily self-contained with an integrity of purpose in serving the community (for example, to produce better leaders, parents, or mental health) and in fostering and promoting civility. We would love all citizens in our hostile and fractious culture to be learning a convicted civility that combines a civil outlook with a passionate intensity, and where there is improved self-understanding, awareness, and listening. We might call this pre-pre-evangelism.

However, we need to note that helping people think through issues of life through the magnetic points serves the gospel by helping people uncover their own ultimate heart commitments. As Isaiah says in his great satire of idolatry, the problem with the idolater is that “no one stops to think” (Isaiah 44:18–19 NIV). Magnetic spaces would be places to get people to stop and think about their commitments and the objects of their worship. By God’s Spirit, they may begin to see the futility of lives not built on Christ, the only one who can give us connection, norm, deliverance, and destiny.

In other words, conversational difference creates the space and the platform for conversional difference. We might call this pre-evangelism. At this point, the churches that built the spaces are open and welcoming for those who want to hear more about Christ being the subversive fulfillment of their idolatrous longings.

Traction and Tethering

Tackling pastoring, preaching, and persuasion in our late-modern culture can seem as daunting, dizzying, and arduous as one of Alex Honnold’s vertiginous climbs. However, the magnetic points can provide both the traction and the tethering we need to make it to the top. Yes, such climbing requires creativity, imagination, and stamina, but we aren’t climbing solo. We have God’s Spirit with us, and we trust what God’s word says about the religious nature of all human beings, our security as Christian disciples, and the magnetism of the Lord Jesus Christ. What an exciting adventure to be part of.

What assassin better cloaks himself than Satan? He is a rumor whispered, a rustling of the bush, a cutthroat who leaves no witnesses. Everywhere he devastates, yet, seldom perceived, he attacks by submarine. Out of sight, out of mind, he burrows to the roots; we only see the forest dying.

In the West, a shy assassin, he conceals himself within a joke — a horned Halloweener dressed in red, brandishing a plastic pitchfork. He chuckles along with freethinking societies, nodding that his existence is but a ploy to maintain religious power or a fairy tale to parent naughty children. As Master of the air, this Pied Piper plays his music, his hiss, full of sweetness and song, suggesting softly of fruit able to make one wise.

Scripture unearths and names him. Slanderer. Accuser. Adversary. Tempter. Deceiver. Evil One. Prince of Demons. Great Dragon. His arrows, venomed, sink to the heart. His chariot wheels, when meant to be heard, quake the brave. His crimson fingers colored a third of heaven’s host. Great was their war; great is their war. Their skirmish toppled heaven; the serpent spoke on earth.

If the lights turned on, if we could see with physical eyes the god of this world and his troops arrayed about us, fetal would be man’s position. Staring at the beautiful face, hearing the capturing voice, would we be tempted to worship? Would most kneel, trembling, or try to crown him king? Though he remains absent from news channels, dire is our station; extreme, our contest; savage, our enemy.

“Stand upright, men of God; grip the hilt firmly. Your God is with you.”

Yet forward, Christ calls us; to a bloody victory we march. Onward, to a clash forbidding cliché. Advancing, for as Bunyan reminds us, we have no armor for our backs. But what can stir our blood and steel our mettle before such a terror? As great generals of the earth ride up and down the battlefront to rouse great deeds, men of God reached for words.

A Summons

Overhear Paul’s call to battle as he writes Christ’s troops in Ephesus. To begin, he does not undersell their foe. They cannot meet the like on earth.

We do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places. (Ephesians 6:12)

Not against flesh and blood, but against spiritual forces, bodiless battalions. Not against a race of slaves or inferior beings, but against rulers and authorities and cosmic powers. Not against fortresses of stone, but against towers in the heavenlies. We are not outmanned but outspecied. Do trees array for battle against the forest fire? Do sheep march on a pack of wolves? Does wheat charge the sifter? Does flesh dare ascend the hill to demonic spirits? If words hold heat to waken courage, what words can help us keep rank against such terror?

To War

As if he can see the uncertainty in our eyes, the apostle cries, “Be strong in the Lord and in the strength of his might” (Ephesians 6:10). Mount no steed of your own strength. Paul rides to the front lines as the Levites did the Israelite armies of old: “Let not your heart faint. Do not fear or panic or be in dread of them, for the Lord your God is he who goes with you to fight for you against your enemies, to give you the victory” (Deuteronomy 20:3–4). Stand! Stand! Stand! in the Lord (Ephesians 6:11, 13–14).

Stand upright, men of God; grip the hilt firmly. Your God is with you. Let not unbelief unhorse you now. As the fiends drum and hell hollers, one is with you higher than they, who greets their joint armies with a laugh. Stand firm. Withstand in this evil day. Take not one step back.

He goes forth with his people and clads us in his own armor. David required no great armor of the king, but we need the armor of the greater King David. “Put on the whole armor of God, that you may be able to stand against the schemes of the devil” (Ephesians 6:11). Charge not forth in the chain mail of pride. You face battering rams beyond your defenses, strategies beyond your devising, weapons beyond your shielding. “Therefore take up the whole armor of God, that you may be able to withstand in the evil day, and having done all, to stand firm” (Ephesians 6:13).

Spare not one piece: “Put on the whole armor of God.” Fasten on the belt of truth. Clasp the breastplate of righteousness. Shod your feet with the gospel of peace and its readiness. Forget the shield of faith to your own peril. Step not within bow range without your helmet. Go nowhere without his word, God’s two-edged sword. Pray for yourself; pray for each other. Watch over yourself; watch over others. Have each other’s back, left, and right. To war we ride.

To Christ

We dress not only in God’s armor, but go forth with God’s own Son, our own brother in the flesh. “I am not afraid of an army of lions led by a sheep,” Alexander the Great once remarked. “I am afraid of an army of sheep led by a lion.”

Oh, the enemy has much to fear. Though we be regarded as sheep and are killed all the day long, what lion stands among us, before us, beside us. Weep no more, you troubled saint; the Lion of Judah has conquered. Though the giant barks loudly, we have one Man of War among us who does not need all five smooth stones. Though we still must fight if we would reign, he returns with the head of our foe.

“War has never seen the like before: conquest through crucifixion, dominion through death.”

What Brother is better born for the day of adversity than he who was born to bear our adversity? Having refused Saul’s armor, the greater David did not refuse Saul’s flesh. Born in the form of a slave, the eternal Son did not unsheathe weapons of divinity to win the war. See him stand fast, as man, for men. Tempted in the wilderness as man. Mocked, bleeding, dying as man. He wore the peasant’s weakness over his robes of eternity that he might win our salvation through the gory affair.

And how he conquered. He took on flesh to have it torn, a body to have it broken, blood to have it spilled upon the altar — for us. War has never seen the like before: conquest through crucifixion, dominion through death. Men twisted thorns, but crowned him; he hung under the name of “King.” Alexander’s Lion is also the Lamb, slaughtered, risen, reigning.

Will we not say, “Let us also go, that we may die with him” (John 11:16)? What safer place exists than on mission with Jesus? Demons fall distraught before him: “What have you to do with us, O Son of God? Have you come here to torment us before the time?” (Matthew 8:29). He holds the keys to Death and Hades. A sword protrudes from his mouth — one little word shall fell the ancient foe, as Luther put. An iron scepter is in his hands. On his blood-dipped robe he has a name written: King of kings and Lord of lords. His eyes flame with fire. On his head rest many crowns. The armies of heaven follow behind on white horses (Revelation 1:12–16; 19:11–16).

He is our brother, our Savior, our friend. No safer place in all the world than beside him in his conflict. “Let us go to him outside the camp and bear the reproach he endured. For here we have no lasting city, but we seek the city that is to come” (Hebrews 13:13–14).

To Glory

Do not fail to look to the time beyond. Feed your warring spirit thoughts of coming peace. The end has been proclaimed from the beginning. Soon and very soon it shall be asked, Where now are his foes? Where now the boasts of men? Where now those mighty authorities and cosmic powers? Sunk to the bottom of the sea like a stone.

Mighty ones of the earth, show yourselves! Nations gathered against his Anointed, come forth! Shattered they soon shall lie, dashed to pieces like a potter’s vessel. Soon it will be asked, Where now is your taunt, you who refused to kiss the Son? Soon it will be commanded, “As for these enemies of mine, who did not want me to reign over them, bring them here and slaughter them before me” (Luke 19:27).

So come, my brothers and sisters, heirs of the kingdom, sons of Abraham by faith, mighty men of heaven, precious daughters of the King — while as yet despised of earth and beleaguered. Come, citizens of the unseen world, rulers of the age to come, judges of angels. Rise up, you men of the cross, sisters of the crown, soldiers of Christ endowed with his very Spirit. Come and speak. Come and die. Come and serve. Come and overcome. Come and stand firm. Crawl not after the same grass that entertains the cattle of the earth. Rise up! Partake of the heavenly bread, the heavenly conflict, the heavenly reward.

Do not mind you are outnumbered: “He who is in you is greater than he who is in the world” (1 John 4:4). Pay no heed to man, in whose nostrils is breath, for of what account is he? Do you suffer? Think it not strange or worth mentioning compared to the glory that is to be revealed. Grumble not about those scars — very soon, they shall shine in heaven as your crest of glory. “We few, we happy few, we band of brothers” march on. Make good your fealty of faith. For glory. For honor. For immortality. For the King, with the King, in the King’s power. Onward against the foe, brothers and sisters: to war, to Christ, to glory.

A persistent critique of Reformation theology is that a high view of God’s sovereignty reduces evangelistic zeal. While the criticism is often misguided, the danger is not historically unprecedented. Church history bears witness to unbiblical understandings of God’s sovereignty and human responsibility. In the eighteenth century, one such view choked the life out of many Reformed Baptist and Congregational churches in England.

One courageous book, however, not only reversed the decline, but it also provided the foundation for the most consequential Protestant missions movement in history. And it has an important word for the church today.

Doctrinal Distortion

As heirs of the Reformed tradition, English Baptists and Congregationalists affirmed God’s sovereign power in salvation — that, in accordance with his great love, God irresistibly draws those whom he unconditionally chooses into persevering faith. Apart from any human initiative, God works an unmerited, merciful, transformative act of regeneration that brings about faith. The Reformers underscored what the Scriptures taught: salvation is all of God, “for by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast” (Ephesians 2:8–9).

By the late eighteenth century, however, some Calvinistic ministers, in their zeal to protect this doctrine, had disfigured it.

“Fuller never forgot the fear and hopelessness he felt in the pew when Jesus was right there to be offered.”

Since unbelievers are incapable of turning to Christ without divine action, they reasoned, it would be unbiblical to urge them through preaching to do so. Preaching the gospel to a mixed audience of believers and nonbelievers would effectively give assurance of God’s promises to both the elect and the non-elect. Those who did so would also be claiming divine authority and usurping the role of the Spirit of Christ. Therefore, they argued, pastors must only declare the work of Christ as simple fact in preaching — to call men to repentance and faith was theologically erroneous and pastorally dangerous.

This hardened position, known as High Calvinism, almost ensured that nonbelievers were never invited to put their faith in Jesus. Under this gospel-less preaching, pastors made no urgent appeal to trust in Christ. High Calvinist churches withered. Personal evangelism ceased. Sinners were left with conviction of sin but no clear remedy.

Any Poor Sinner

Andrew Fuller (1754–1815) was one of those hopeless sinners. Fuller grew up on a farm in the rugged marshlands northeast of Cambridge and attended a small Baptist congregation in Soham. As the evangelical awakening transformed churches across the English countryside, Fuller’s church and its High Calvinist pastor John Eve seemed immune to its effect. Pastor Eve, Fuller wrote, “had little or nothing to say to the unconverted.” While George Whitefield and John Wesley were pleading with sinners to repent and trust in Jesus, Eve made no gospel call. “I never considered myself as any way concerned in what I heard from the pulpit,” Fuller later wrote.1 Aware of his own sinful condition, teenaged Fuller was caught in anguished speculation, desperately looking for a sign of his election rather than looking away from himself to Christ.

This lasted for years. “I was not then aware that any poor sinner had a warrant to believe in Christ for the salvation of his soul,” Fuller later reflected, “but supposed that there must be some kind of qualification to entitle him [to be saved]. Yet, I was aware that I had no qualifications.”2 The breakthrough finally came when Fuller recognized that salvation was to be found in trusting in Christ, not in a subjective perception of his own fitness.

I must — I will — yes, I will trust my soul, my sinful soul in his hands. . . . I was determined to cast myself upon Christ . . . and as the eye of my mind was more and more fixed upon him, my guilt and fears were gradually and insensibly removed.3

Fuller later reflected that, though he had finally found peace in Christ, “I reckon I should have found it sooner” had not the High Calvinist’s bar blocked the way. He never forgot the fear and hopelessness he felt in the pew when Jesus was right there to be offered. And as Fuller grew in his understanding of the Scriptures, he saw the deadly flaws of High Calvinism with even greater clarity.

The Gospel Worthy

Fuller became pastor of the church in Soham in 1775 and three years later began openly calling his hearers to faith in Christ. Many in the Soham congregation were unhappy, but Fuller pressed on — even turning down an opportunity to pastor a larger congregation in another community. The opposition in Soham, however, was not fruitless. Fuller mined the Scriptures and, stirred by conversation with new friends in the local pastoral association, began writing an extended response to the High Calvinist scheme.

In 1781, he was called as pastor of the Baptist congregation in Kettering. The personal confession of faith he presented to his new congregation reflects the thinking that would soon upend High Calvinism:

I believe it is the duty of every minister of Christ plainly and faithfully to preach the gospel to all who will hear it; and, as I believe the inability of men to spiritual things to be wholly of the moral and, therefore, of the criminal kind (and that it is their duty to love the Lord Jesus Christ, and trust in him for salvation, though they do not); I, therefore, believe free and solemn addresses, invitations, calls, and warnings to them to be not only consistent but directly adapted as means in the hand of the Spirit of God to bring them to Christ. I consider it as a part of my duty which I could not omit without being guilty of the blood of souls.4

With the encouragement of friends, in 1785 Fuller published the argument behind his conclusions. The Gospel Worthy of All Acceptation, or the Duty of Sinners to Believe in Jesus Christ hammers home a central point: because God’s nature and purposes have been revealed ultimately in Jesus Christ, every human being is obligated to respond in repentance and faith.5

Six Reasons to Plead

Fuller’s argument rests on six propositions. First, unconverted sinners are clearly and repeatedly invited, exhorted, and commanded to trust in Christ for salvation. This is the teaching of both the New Testament (John 5:23; 6:39; 12:36) and the Old (Psalm 2:11–12; Isaiah 55:1–7). “Faith in Jesus Christ,” Fuller writes, “is constantly held up as the duty of all to whom the gospel is preached.”6

Second, every human being is obligated to receive what God reveals. “It is allowed by all except the grossest Antinomians [High Calvinists],” Fuller argues, “that every man is obliged to love God with all his heart, soul, mind, and strength — and this notwithstanding the depravity of his nature.” This is the witness of God’s self-revelation in creation, in the law, and “in the highest and most glorious display of himself” in the incarnation.7

Third, the gospel, though a message of pure grace, requires the obedient response of faith. Fuller illustrates this proposition by observing that the goodness of God “virtually [effectively] requires a return of gratitude. It deserves it and the law of God formally requires it on his behalf. Thus, it is with the gospel, which is the greatest overflew of Divine goodness that was ever witnessed.”8

Fourth, lack of faith is an odious sin that the Scriptures ascribe to human depravity. In light of God’s self-revelation, sinners’ willful ignorance, pride, dishonesty, or aversion of heart are evidences of unbelief, not excuses for it. The Spirit of Christ has been sent into the world for the very purpose of convicting the world of unbelief, which would be unnecessary “if faith were not a duty” (John 16:8–9).9

“‘The Gospel Worthy’ unleashed a tsunami of evangelical Calvinism.”

Fifth, God has threatened and inflicted the most awful punishments on sinners for their not believing on the Lord Jesus Christ. “It is here taken for granted that nothing but sin can be the cause of God’s inflicting punishment,” Fuller writes, “and nothing can be sin which is not a breach of duty.”10 Unbelief is, itself, a sin “which greatly aggravates our guilt and which, if persisted in, gives the finishing stroke to our destruction.”11

Sixth, the Bible requires certain spiritual exercises of all mankind, which are represented as their duty. If persons are required to love, fear, and glorify God, then repentance and faith are also required. Even though these exercises are brought about by the Spirit of Christ, the obligation remains. Man’s obedience to the truth and God’s gift of faith by grace are the same thing seen from different perspectives.12

If these propositions are valid, Fuller concludes, “love to Christ is the duty of everyone to whom the gospel is preached.”13 The work of Christian ministry, then, is to “hold up the free grace of God through Jesus Christ as the only way of a sinner’s salvation.” “If this not be the leading theme of our ministrations,” Fuller warns, “we had better be anything than preachers. ‘Woe unto us if we preach not the gospel!’”14

Duty to Make It Known

The repercussions of his argument are incalculable. From a historical perspective, Fuller so dismantled High Calvinism that no serious case for it has since arisen. Even more importantly, The Gospel Worthy unleashed a tsunami of evangelical Calvinism. If it is the duty of sinners to repent and believe in Christ, as the Scriptures teach, then it is also the urgent duty of Christians to present the claims of Christ to their neighbors and the nations. Pastors reengaged their calling as evangelists. New organizations were launched to multiply itinerant preaching.15 Ordinary Christians, grasping the implications of the gospel more fully, lifted their eyes to the horizon and saw fields white for harvest.

For William Carey (1761–1834), Fuller’s argument was foundational. “If it be the duty of all men where the gospel comes to believe unto salvation,” Carey told a friend after reading Fuller’s book, “then it is the duty of those who are entrusted with the gospel to make it known among all nations for the obedience of faith.”16 Several years later, in his famous Enquiry, Carey wrote that deficient understandings of the gospel were the reason “multitudes sit at ease and give themselves no concern about the far greater part of their fellow sinners who, to this day, are lost in ignorance and idolatry.”17 Since Christians are those “whose truest interest lies in the exaltation of the Messiah’s kingdom,” Carey concluded, “let every one, then, in his station consider himself as bound to act with all his might and in every possible way for God.”18

Such were not mere words. Four months after publishing them, Carey, Fuller, their friend John Ryland (1753–1826), and several others joined to form the Baptist Missionary Society. Carey became their first missionary, departing for India in 1793. Ryland supported London Congregationalists in starting the London Missionary Society (1795) and the Anglicans in launching the Church Missionary Society (1799). Reaching the shores of America, this wave of evangelical Calvinism then spawned the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (1810) and the General Missionary Convention of the Baptist Denomination (1814), the precursor to the International Mission Board of the Southern Baptist Convention, the largest missionary-sending organization in the world.

Jesus Is Worthy

Fuller’s The Gospel Worthy also holds a word for us. A high view of God’s sovereignty does not diminish evangelism and missions. Rather, it produces the opposite effect. Because the gospel is worthy of all acceptation, because all who hear it are duty bound to respond in faith, and because the Spirit ultimately brings about obedience to the truth, we can have the confidence and the courage to proclaim the gospel to our neighbors and among the nations. Jesus is worthy of all worship. His glory, our joy, and the good of all peoples “call loudly for every possible exertion to introduce the gospel among them.”19

Audio Transcript

Chapel is designed to be a meeting on your part with the King of kings and the Lord of lords himself. Over the years, there has been the same, basic objective: that chapel is to be a time of worship. Not a lecture, not an entertainment, but a time of meeting the King.

Those were some of the closing words from a man’s final minutes on earth. The preacher is V. Raymond Edman. He’s 67 years old. It’s a Friday-morning chapel at Wheaton College, on September 22, 1967, five and a half decades ago. His sermon is titled “In the Presence of the King.” Edman preached for about eleven minutes, paused, collapsed, and died — and entered into the presence of the King of kings. A stunning event.

In chapel that morning, along with about two thousand other Wheaton students, was 21-year-old John Piper. And Pastor John, you rarely ever mention this event: once late in an article you wrote in 1995, but nowhere in a book or sermon, and never here on APJ. So, take us back to Wheaton in 1967. Who was V. Raymond Edman? What do you remember about that fateful Friday morning? What impact did the chapel have on your ministry? And as you listen to the audio recording over 55 years later, what strikes you now?

The room we were meeting in when “Prexy” (as those who knew him well called him), V. Raymond Edman, died was called Edman Chapel, named after Dr. Edman in 1960 when it was built. So, the building in which he died bore his name already. It’s a large, concert-like venue, beautifully white and blue, with huge chandeliers. It holds about 2,400 people, with a main floor where the students sat during chapel and then a balcony behind.

Chapel was required of all students in those days, so the main floor was almost always mostly full. I was sitting near the back on the main floor on the right-hand side as you face the platform (I think my row was about three or four from the back). We sat in alphabetical order. So, nobody chose whom they sat with.

Discipline of Stillness

So, what do I make, then, as I listen to these last minutes of Dr. Edman’s life (which I did in getting ready for this)? What an amazing experience to listen. Frankly, if you listen to the whole thing, I think you can hear Dr. Edman — in his voice and in the content of his message — that he was displeased with the casual way students were treating chapel.

His entire narrative of his meeting with Haile Selassie, the Ethiopian king, with its elaborate protocol of bowing and silence as one approached the earthly king, was designed by Dr. Edman to encourage students to come to chapel and meet the King of kings in that spirit. That’s the whole point of his message. “Stop talking as you enter the foyer,” he pleaded with them. He pleaded that, when they walk into chapel, they wouldn’t talk with each other, but cultivate what he called the discipline of “be still, and know that I am God” (Psalm 46:10).

He had written a book of devotions called The Disciplines of Life. I had the book. I can’t find it right now, but I remember reading it while I was still at Wheaton. His burden in the book — and in the chapel message and elsewhere — was paradoxical, like the Christian life. He knew on the one hand that the deeper life — “the exchanged life,” as he called it (he was very influenced by Hudson Taylor, by the way, in that regard). He knew that the deeper, exchanged life — Christ for mine, mine for Christ — was a profoundly free and Spirit-inspired life.

“Speak in a way that you would be okay with if a recording of your last minutes were played over and over again.”

Yet on the other hand, this life was marked by rigorous disciplines that flowed from the Spirit. And he saw those disciplines being eroded in the 1960s in the church and in the students at Wheaton. And that book and this chapel message were his way of earnestly calling students to discipline themselves to be still and know that God is God. And so, he lamented the roar of student conversation in chapel. He even asked — with, I think, only partial humor — “Is it louder than the lions at Brookfield Zoo?” I didn’t hear any laughter when he said that.

Final Moments

So, we were all sitting there when, suddenly, he stopped for no apparent reason. There were a few seconds of silence. He turned to his left and just collapsed. It was not a gentle collapse, as I recall. He hit the floor like a log, and the sound was frightening. He didn’t crumple. You thought it was quiet before? Good night. Now it was breath-holding quiet as two thousand students trembled inside. “Oh no. What has just happened?”

Dr. Armerding, the new president, who was sitting right behind him in the main chair behind the pulpit, immediately knelt down over Dr. Edman. Then he stood as medical people were coming to the platform, and he said with beautiful, perfect equanimity and the dignity he was known for, “Let us pray.” And he prayed briefly for Dr. Edman and dismissed us in silence.

So, I went to my classical Greek class with Gerald Hawthorne in Blanchard Hall, and after we prayed, we tried to go on with our lessons. But soon the chapel bell tolled a long series of solemn bells. And we assumed that meant the chancellor had died. And he dismissed class, and that’s basically where my memories stopped.

Verge of Eternity

As I listened to those last minutes of the chapel message, about eleven minutes before he collapsed, several things struck me.

As I listened yesterday, I was trembling inside. I had this awareness, “This man is going to meet Jesus in eleven minutes.” It was as though I were there, and I knew something he didn’t know. “You’re going to die in eleven minutes. 10, 9, 8, 7 . . . You’re going to meet the King of the universe face to face in eleven minutes. You will not finish this message, Dr. Edman. You will not finish anything that is not finished now. Your life will be over in eleven minutes.”

I actually looked over to my computer screen at the numbers ticking off the seconds. And they felt like heartbeats to me. And then he stopped. Now, I’m ten years older than Dr. Edman was when he died. This was a good rehearsal for me. That’s what this is for. This is a rehearsal.

I think the final minutes of Dr. Edman’s life and message have been a bit romanticized. It’s more realistic to say that in those last minutes, not only did he speak of entering the presence of the King — that’s what’s been remembered, and rightly so — but he was also dealing with student misbehavior, just real down-to-earth, inglorious, practical, disappointing behavior. And he talked about speakers who come to chapel and are bad speakers. “They tilt like windmills,” he said, and say things unhelpful. That’s not glorious.

Ordinary Deaths

This is the way it struck me: that’s the way most of us are going to die. We won’t be on some mountaintop of sinless spiritual fervor. We won’t. We’ll be dealing with some mundane, frustrating, ordinary issue like students making a ruckus coming into chapel, speakers that are embarrassing to listen to — trying to say something helpful about this frustrating reality. And here’s the beautiful thing: in the midst of dealing with ordinary, mundane, frustrating disappointments, Christ will shine through. And he did.

The very last things, the very last words out of Dr. Edman’s mouth, were an exhortation not to return evil for evil, or (to say it positively) to treat disappointing chapel speakers better than they deserve — that is, courteously. Here’s what he said in his last words, words of counsel about how to treat unhelpful speakers. He said, “Our part as Christians is to be courteous. Any indication of disinterest or displeasure on our part would be an unnecessary discourtesy to him, and so I would ask you to desist.” And he fell over. So, the last word, the very last word, was, “Treat them better than they deserve.” Just like Stephen, right?

That’s the way the Christian life is going to be at the very end. I think it’s going to be a mixture of mundane, frustrating, disappointing reality and shafts of light — shafts of light from the word of Christ breaking in, and yes, the glory of the King just over the horizon, a moment away.

Live with the End in View

As I listened and counted down, I thought, “These could be my last eleven minutes right now.” Even as we talk, right? I could drop over here at my desk. I’m standing. I could fall to my left, fall to my right. So, Piper — here’s the admonition that’s landing on me — speak in a way that you would be okay with if a recording of your last minutes were played over and over again on earth and in heaven.

My prayer after listening to this message again after 55 years is that when I die, I would be found like Dr. Edman, commending the love of Christ — and that while I live, I would be found like Dr. Armerding, beautifully discerning what love calls for in every unexpected moment.

Our tired, sinful world has never seen a surprise so momentous as the one that spread from the tomb on Easter Sunday. “The dead stayed dead in the first century with the same monotonous regularity as they do [today],” Donald Macleod writes (The Person of Christ, 111). No one, in any age, has been accustomed to resurrection.

To the disciples, it mattered little that their Lord had already given away the ending (Mark 8:31; 9:31; 10:34). The resurrection of Jesus Christ — heart beating, lungs pumping, brain firing, legs walking — could be nothing less than a surprise. The greatest surprise our world has ever seen.

Pay attention to the resurrection narratives, however, and you may find yourself surprised at how Jesus surprises his people. He does not run from the tomb shouting, “I’m risen!” (as we may have expected). In three separate stories, in fact — with Mary, with Peter, and with the two disciples on the Emmaus road — he does not reveal himself immediately. He waits. He lingers. He hides, even. And then, in profoundly personal ways, he surprises.

Some of us woke up this Easter in desperate need of this same Jesus to offer a similar surprise. We declare today that he is risen, that he is risen indeed. But for one reason or another, we may find ourselves stuck in the shadows of Saturday. Perhaps some sorrow runs deep. Or some old guilt gnaws. Or some confusion has invaded the soul. Perhaps our Lord, though risen, seems hidden.

Sit for a moment in these three stories, and consider how the Lord of the empty tomb still loves to surprise his people. As on the first Easter, he still delights to trade our sorrow for joy, our guilt for forgiveness, our confusion for clarity.

Sorrow Surprised by Joy

Maybe, this Sunday, some long sadness seems unmoved by the empty tomb. Maybe the Easter sun seems to have stopped just below the horizon of some darkened part of life — some love lost, some long and aching wait. Maybe you remember Jesus’s words, “Your sorrow will turn into joy” (John 16:20), but you still feel the sorrow, still look for the joy.

Stand at the tomb with Mary Magdalene. Others have come and gone, but she waits, weeping (John 20:11). She has seen the stone rolled away, the absent grave, and the angelic entourage of her risen Lord — and now, Jesus himself stands near her. But though she sees him, she doesn’t see him. “She did not know that it was Jesus” (John 20:14). She mourns before the Lord of holy joy, not knowing how soon her sorrow will flee. And for a few moments more, Jesus waits.

He draws her out with a question: “Woman, why are you weeping? Whom are you seeking?” (John 20:15). She offers her reply, supposing she speaks to a gardener. And then, in a moment, with a word, the mask comes off. Shadows break, sun rises, sorrow makes its sudden happy turn. How? “Jesus said to her, ‘Mary’” (John 20:16). One word, one name, and this Gardener blooms flowers from her fallen tears. “Rabboni!” she cries — and cries no more (John 20:16).

Unlike Mary, you know your Lord is risen. Even still, for now, you may feel bent and broken. Seeing Jesus, but not seeing him. Knowing he lives, but not knowing where he is. Maybe even hearing his voice, but supposing you hear another’s. Dear saint, the risen Christ does not stand idly by while his loved ones grieve. He may linger for the moment, but he lingers near enough to see your tears and hear your cries — near enough to speak your name and surprise your sorrow with joy.

Keep waiting, and he will speak — sooner or later, here or in heaven. And until then, he is not far. Even if hidden, he is risen, and the deepest sorrow waits to hear his word.

Guilt Surprised by Forgiveness

Or maybe, for you, sorrow is only a note in a different, darker song. You have sinned — and not in a small way. The words of your mouth have shocked you; the work of your hands has undone you. You feel as if you had carried the soldiers’ nails. And now it seems that not even Easter can heal you.

Sit in the boat with Peter. He knows his Lord is risen — and indeed, he has even heard hope from Jesus himself. “Peace be with you,” the Master had told his disciples (John 20:19). But that “you” was plural. Peter needed something more, something personal, to wash away Good Friday’s stains.

“Jesus still delights to trade our sorrow for joy, our guilt for forgiveness, our confusion for clarity.”

And so Jesus stands on the shore — risen, hidden, and again with a question: “Children, do you have any fish?” (John 21:5). These are words to awaken memory (Luke 5:1–4), “yet the disciples did not know that it was Jesus” (John 21:4). No, not yet. He will allow Peter to feel the night’s empty nets a few moments longer, and then the surprise will come. And so he reveals himself, this time not with a name but with fish — many fish, actually (John 21:6). Then, after feeding his men, he leads Peter in personal repentance and, as if all is forgotten, calls him afresh: “Follow me” (John 21:19).

That Jesus should turn our sorrow into joy is one of Easter’s greatest wonders. But perhaps greater still is that he should turn our guilt into innocence — that he should address our most sinful, shameful moments so personally, that he should wash our souls as humbly and tenderly as he washed his disciples’ feet. Yet so he does.

The process can take some time, however. We may not feel his forgiveness immediately, and he does not always mean us to. He sometimes hides for some moments or some days. Yet as he does, he prepares the scene for a surprise so good we too may feel like leaping into the sea (John 21:7). Our Lord is here, bringing grace and mercy; we must go to him.

Confusion Surprised by Clarity

Or maybe you find neither sorrow nor sin afflicting you this Easter, but rather another kind of thorn, a pain that can pierce deep enough to drive you mad: confusion. Life doesn’t make sense. Logic fails. God’s ways seem not just mysterious but labyrinth-like. Who can untangle these knots or find a way through this maze?

Walk with the two disciples toward Emmaus. “We had hoped that he was the one to redeem Israel,” you hear them say (Luke 24:21). Yes, had hoped. No more. Three nails and a spear stole the breath from that dream. Now all that’s left is confusion, a body and blood and a burial of all that seemed good and right and true. If not Jesus, then who? Then how? We had thought he was the one.

But then “the one” himself “drew near and went with them” (Luke 24:15). Again he asks a question: “What is this conversation that you are holding?” (Luke 24:17). And again he conceals himself: “Their eyes were kept from recognizing him” (Luke 24:16). So they walk; so they talk; so they spill their confusion all along the road from Jerusalem to Emmaus. Yes, they have heard his body was gone, have heard even a report of his rising (Luke 24:23–24). But still, they just can’t make sense of it all.

But oh, how Jesus can. So, with a swift and tender rebuke, a lesson in the Scriptures, and a face revealed over broken bread, he picks up their shattered thoughts and arranges them in a vision of startling, stunning clarity. Then “he vanished” (Luke 24:31), taking all their confusion with him. “Did not our hearts burn within us?” they ask each other (Luke 24:32). Christ had risen, and the clarity they could not imagine had walked with them, talked with them, and loved them into the light.

Our hearts today may brim with questions, some that seem unanswerable. But the resurrected Jesus knows no unanswerable questions. He can solve every riddle in every corner of every human heart — even if, for the moment, he walks beside us incognito.

Our Final Surprise

We live today in an in-between land. Jesus is risen, but we don’t yet see him. Jesus lives, but we haven’t yet touched the mark of the nails in his hands. If we are his, however, then one day we will. And these stories give us reason to expect on that day a final, climactic surprise.

If hearing Jesus’s word by faith can lift the heaviest heart, what sorrow can withstand his audible voice and the new name he will give to us (Revelation 2:17)? If even now we taste the relief of sins forgiven and condemnation gone, what will happen when he puts a white robe around our shoulders and renders sin impossible? And if we have moments here of bright clarity, then what will come when the mists lift altogether, when Truth himself stands before us, and when all deception disappears like a bad dream?

Then we will see what a risen Christ can do. His dealings with Mary, with Peter, with the Emmaus disciples — these are but the fringes of his power, the outskirts of his ways. So keep waiting, dear Christian. At the right time, he will speak your name. He will appear on the shoreline of your long-repeated prayers. He will walk with you on the road of confusion and loss until you reach a better table, and in the breaking of the bread you will see his face.

There you sit at the elder meeting. Some disagreement again surfaces.

Maybe you disagree about a potential elder candidate. He’s a good friend of one brother. But to you, he doesn’t seem sober-minded. You don’t think he’ll add to the team, but detract. He seems more like a liability than a blessing.

Perhaps you disagree about a troubled marriage. One pastor thinks the wife is mature and has been long-suffering with the husband, who is largely to blame; another pastor thinks the wife has come to imbibe an unbelieving perspective and is angling to be free from her marriage vows.

Perhaps it’s a doctrinal or exegetical disagreement. Let’s say female deacons. You’re on a counsel of eight. The other seven brothers have expressed openness to female deacons, and you’re the one that doesn’t see it in 1 Timothy 3. You think gunaikas there is deacon wives, not women deacons.

Or you disagree about priorities. How often should we inform the church about the latest pro-abortion legislative disaster in our state? How often do we call our people to prayer and some kind of action?

Or maybe it just seems to be the same brother all the time. Clearly the algorithms have the two of you on different feeds. Whatever the causes, you’ve been pulled into different ecosystems of digital influence. You wonder how much of this has been conditioned through these devices.

Our focus in this session is on seeking unity among pastor-elders. That is, unity in the lead or teaching office of the church, variously called pastor, elder, and overseer in the New Testament — three names for one office, the lead office (with deacon being the name of the assisting office). Our task in this session is handling disagreements among pastor-elders.

First, I’d like to make some preliminary assumptions explicit, and then give some practical counsel and reasons for hope.

Preliminary Assumptions

Now, a preliminary word about these “preliminary assumptions.” These actually may be the most important part. Many of the most important factors related to disagreements among pastors begin long before the specific disagreements emerge. I will try to speak to working for unity amidst disagreement, but I suspect the best working for unity happens before disagreement.

1. Church leadership is teamwork.

Even in rural settings, where the idea of a team of pastors may seem unrealistic, we still have the New Testament’s stubborn ideal of plurality. Twice Peter addresses the plural elders in 1 Peter 5:1–5; local church elders are plural in Acts (Acts 14:23; 20:17); so too in the Pastoral Epistles (1 Timothy 4:14; 5:17; Titus 1:5), and in James 5:14. In fact, every instance of local-church leadership in the New Testament implies plurality.

If I could give you a four-part summary of the New Testament vision for church leadership, it would have team at the heart of it: “local teams of sober-minded teachers.” Four parts: locality, acuity, didacity, and plurality.

“Our churches not only need good men as pastors; they need good men who are good friends.”

But not only plurality. The hope is not just that pastor-elder teams would be plural, but that pastor-elders would like each other, enjoy each other — that they would be friends, not rivals. Maybe “team of rivals” worked in Lincoln’s cabinet. But none of us is Lincoln, and besides, the local church is not the Lincoln administration. My experience has been that friendship, love, genuine affection among elders is not icing on the cake for good eldering. This is part of the cake. Our churches not only need good men as pastors; they need good men who are good friends.

Oh, “how good and pleasant it is when brothers dwell in unity!” (Psalm 133:1). That is, not just put up with each other, but actually enjoy each other, and look forward to being together, rather than dread it. Whether the pastor-elders enjoy their fellowship will soon affect the church. And it will profoundly affect how we work for unity in the midst of the disagreements that will inevitably come.

If fact, related to working for unity, my counsel would be to always be working for unity through friendship, through investing in team dynamics, long before disagreements arise. Work for unity ahead of time, and seek to have such settled, stable unity, that when disagreements do arise, your unity isn’t soon called into question. Then you can give your focus to actually working through the issue, rather than working for unity prematurely.

And get this: when the relationships are strong and enjoyable among elders, you’re not so nervous about conflict and avoiding certain issues. Rather, you’re free to mine for conflict — to ask about it and talk about it long before it becomes an elephant in the room. You read a frustrated look on a brother’s face and ask him to say more, rather than barreling forward to get your preference in the moment. Your relationship is stable enough to try to surface potential disagreements early, rather than avoiding them and letting them fester.

So, church leadership is teamwork — and best done by friends, not rivals.

2. Good teams guard the gate.

That is, they are careful whom they add to the team. They don’t rush the process. They aren’t “hasty in the laying on of hands” (1 Timothy 5:22). So, we ask all sorts of questions up front. Ask about theology and theological hobbyhorses. Work carefully through the elder qualifications (take them seriously!). And ask each other, Do we think this man fits with the shared instincts of our team? Will he be a good teammate? Does he seem to have our chemistry? Or, how will he affect our team’s chemistry?

Remember, this is not “team of rivals.” There are plenty of issues in life and ministry to disagree about, in big and small degrees. Inevitably, some differing instincts reside in your team. They are there, and they will come. After a while together, you’ll be able to plot on a line who’s the most knee-jerk conservative, who’s most compassionate, who’s most hopeful about the world and culture. Those differences of instinct that make a team healthy and effective will emerge soon enough. But don’t try to staff for difference. Difference will be there and arise. Staff for chemistry. Try to build a team of friends who like each other and have significant shared instincts and genuinely want to spend time together, and so come to enjoy the often burdensome work of teaching and caring well for the church together.

At the gate, be clear about what you have in writing. What, if anything, beyond Scripture does your elder team commit to? Do the leaders subscribe to any confession beyond the membership covenant? Is there a pastors’ covenant? Any agreed-upon documents on ministry philosophy? I’d encourage you to have some things in writing (though not too much). Know what it is, and use it.

3. Unity does not require unanimity.

I’ve heard of elder boards who insist on unanimity in their decisions. I don’t think that’s necessary (or good). We need to be wise and patient regarding particular situations. If it’s a huge initiative in the church — say, a capital campaign — you might want to press for unanimity, or very close to it, not mere consensus. And in major decisions like that, don’t rush the process. And for lead pastors, I say don’t bring a fully formulated proposal to the team. Take the initiative. Point in a direction. Give time to think it over carefully. Ask all the brothers to speak in and develop ownership in the process. Give space for that. Mine for hesitations and conflict. Seek to refine the proposal. On major initiatives, do your best to rally the whole team together.

But on other items, it’s simply not worth all the work to get to unanimity, and not necessary. One or two guys have a different opinion, but you have a clear consensus in the team. The decision needs to be made tonight, and so you move forward.

So, that’s one disclaimer on the idea of working for unity. Most things do not need unanimity.

Another disclaimer on working for unity is that true Christian unity is not something we first produce, and definitely not in a moment, but a grace we receive and then maintain and protect, even as we grow and deepen it. Consider Ephesians 4:1–3:

Walk in a manner worthy of the calling to which you have been called, with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love, eager to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.

In Christ, we don’t produce our unity. The Spirit gives it. Once we are in Christ, we have in common with others who are in Christ the most important realities in the universe. Unity, then, is what we seek to maintain.

Yet also there is a sense in which it is attained. Ephesians 4:12–13: Pastors “equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ, until we all attain to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to mature manhood.” The Spirit gives it; we maintain it, even as we pastors lead the church in attaining the unity of full maturity.

“We are prone to move too fast or not at all. Moving forward with patience is most difficult, and most rewarding.”

In Philippians, Paul is writing to a church with some newly emerging unity issues. He wants them to “[be] of the same mind, [have] the same love, [be] in full accord and of one mind” (Philippians 2:2). He hopes to hear of them that they “are standing firm in one spirit, with one mind striving side by side for the faith of the gospel” (Philippians 1:27). How, then, might that happen? How might they practically seek to maintain their unity in Christ and together attain the unity of maturity? Philippians 2:3–4 (this text might be the single most important one on pursuing unity):

Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility count others more significant than yourselves. Let each of you look not only to his own interests, but also to the interests of others.

(First Peter 3:8 mentions a similar cluster of virtues with “unity of mind”: “All of you, have unity of mind, sympathy, brotherly love, a tender heart, and a humble mind.”)

4. Different kinds of disagreement lead to different courses of action.

First, some disagreements on small or silly matters are overlooked by wise, peaceable, magnanimous men.

In 2 Timothy 2, before Paul gives Timothy some of the most pointed words in Scripture on how to deal with conflict, first he says in 2 Timothy 2:23, “Have nothing to do with foolish, ignorant controversies; you know that they breed quarrels.” And 1 Timothy 6:4–5 warns us about

an unhealthy craving for controversy and for quarrels about words, which produce envy, dissension, slander, evil suspicions, and constant friction among people who are depraved in mind and deprived of the truth.

Brothers, “not quarrelsome” is an elder qualification (1 Timothy 3:3).

It’s long been a live issue, but in recent years, online life has thrown gas on the fire. Brothers, you don’t always have to have an opinion. And you don’t have to express your opinion. (This is a particular temptation for word guys like us; words come so easy for some of us pastors.) Don’t let foolish, distant, impractical quarrels divide your pastoral team and ruin your trust with your own people.

Second, some disagreements are on clearly defined matters, like doctrine.

In Acts 20:29–30, Paul warns the Ephesian elders that wolves will rise up from within their own team:

I know that after my departure fierce wolves will come in among you, not sparing the flock; and from among your own selves will arise men speaking twisted things, to draw away the disciples after them.

God made the souls of men in particular to rise to the unpleasant and essential work of protecting the flock from wolves, with its emotional and physical costs. (As an aside, the threat of false teaching, and the necessity of pastors protecting the sheep from wolves, may show plainest of all God’s building of men for the pastorate. God made men to be conditioned for this calling.) And of course, the worst of this is when such errors, doctrinally or ethically, arise “from among your own selves,” from within the team.

Brian Tabb recently wrote in Themelios under the title “On Disagreements in Ministry.” I’d recommend it. He says there,

Christian workers are sometimes morally obligated to separate when matters of essential biblical doctrine and practice are at stake. Some separations and divisions between professing believers are necessary to distinguish true faith and morality from counterfeit Christianity. For example, Paul exhorts, “Do not be unequally yoked with unbelievers” (2 Cor 6:14), and he explains that “there must . . . be factions among you in order that those who are genuine among you may be recognized” (1 Cor 11:19). Likewise, John asserts, “They went out from us, but they were not of us” (1 John 2:19), and he warns against partnering with or receiving any teacher who “does not abide in the teaching of Christ . . . for whoever greets him takes part in his wicked works” (2 John 9–11). It takes biblical wisdom, humility, and courage to practice “theological triage” and discern between those hills that are worth dying on, on the one hand, and matters where fellow believers may agree to disagree, on the other.

And even when you find yourself in such a conflict, remember the rest of Paul’s counsel in 2 Timothy 2:24–25:

The Lord’s servant must not be quarrelsome but kind to everyone, able to teach, patiently enduring evil, correcting his opponents with gentleness.

Third, some of the most difficult are gray-area disagreements.

These are issues that matter but are not easily settled by texts of Scripture or shared statements of faith. One classic example is Paul and Barnabas disagreeing about John Mark and separating over their difference in assessment. This is Acts 15:36–41:

After some days Paul said to Barnabas, “Let us return and visit the brothers in every city where we proclaimed the word of the Lord, and see how they are.” [So they’re agreed!] Now Barnabas wanted to take with them John called Mark. But Paul thought best not to take with them one who had withdrawn from them in Pamphylia and had not gone with them to the work. And there arose a sharp disagreement, so that they separated from each other. Barnabas took Mark with him and sailed away to Cyprus, but Paul chose Silas and departed, having been commended by the brothers to the grace of the Lord. And he went through Syria and Cilicia, strengthening the churches.

In another Themelios essay, Don Carson refers to “differences in vision and priorities. . . . Is it a case of a Barnabas and a Paul unable to reach an amicable agreement on a pastoral issue where both sides feel strongly and can marshal compelling arguments?”

Again, pastor-elders are to be men who are not quarrelsome, but peaceable. And peacemaking is very different from conflict-aversion. To be a peacemaker, one must be willing to engage in and endure conflict, and do so with Christian speech and conduct, but not as an end — rather, aiming for the restoration of peace on the far side.

Which leads us to the practical counsel (after all those preliminary assumptions!).

Practical Counsel

What more might we say about the Paul-and-Barnabas type of disagreement? I’m not here dealing with disagreements on clearly defined matters, or disagreements on trivia, or foolish quarrels insighted by the Internet, but real-life gray-area disagreements between brothers on the same pastor-elder team — and that from my limited perspective (fifteen years as an elder).

When the situation arises, when disagreement emerges that feels significant enough that it draws your attention as a disagreement, here are six counsels (among many others, I’m sure).

1. Rehearse what you share in common.

Hopefully you’ve been working for unity ahead of time: fostering relationships with each other; cultivating affection for each other; keeping short accounts; mining for conflict, rather than letting it fester underground until it erupts through the surface. Remember what you share in common as redeemed sinners, indwelt by the Spirit, caring for the good of this church. Consider how much doctrine and philosophy of ministry you share. And pause to cherish it afresh.

2. Query the disagreement in three dimensions.

In abiding disagreements, query (1) your own soul, (2) God’s word, and (3) the counsel of others.

When trying to discern between controversies to avoid and conflicts to engage with courage, you might query your own soul like this:

Is this about me — my ego, my preference, my threatened illusion of control — or is this relevant to Jesus, his gospel, his church? Am I remembering that my greatest potential enemy here is not others, and not even Satan, but my own indwelling sin?
What is the tenor of my ministry? Is it one fight after another? Are there seasons of peace? Am I engaging in conflict as an end in itself, or is preserving and securing Christian peace clearly the goal?
Am I going with or against my flesh, which inclines me to fight when I shouldn’t, and to back down when I should kindly, patiently, gently fight? As the “servant” of the Lord, not self, am I avoiding petty causes that an unholy part of me wants to pursue, while taking on the difficult, painful, and righteous causes that an unholy part of me wants to flee?
Am I simply angry at my opponents, desiring to show them up or expose them, or am I sad for them — better yet, compassionate for them — genuinely praying that God would free them from deception and grant them repentance? Am I more inclined to anger against them or tears for them?

Also, you might want to revisit the elder qualifications afresh related to how you are engaging the disagreement. Which of the essential pastoral virtues are live challenges or come into fresh light in the conflict? Ask, Which single attribute do I need the most help with in this brewing conflict?

3. Carefully ask others for perspective and counsel.

I say “carefully” meaning (1) not to violate confidentiality and (2) not to rally support. You are asking for counsel for you — what you might do, how you might grow and change — not simply for a verdict from a buddy that you’re in the right. You could ask others in the room, fellow elders. Or carefully ask for outside perspective — again with the goal of receiving counsel for how you can be a means of grace, how you might wisely humble yourself and faithfully navigate the situation.

4. Look for objective cues and clarity to go on.

Good decisions are not ex nihilo but “sub-creation” with various givens. You need some objective grist to work with. Perhaps the confusion and disagreement stems from awareness, or lack thereof, of objective givens related to the situation. Rehearse what you know for sure and is not speculation. One way to move toward agreement is to get more of simply a clear given on the table.

5 Give it more time (without negligence).

Related to looking for objectives, you may be stuck because you need more data, another given, another data point, to lead and guide — which might mean you are not yet to a wise point to make the decision. Resist the pressure to make decisions prematurely. Giving it more time means patience, not neglect. This is like untying knots on our kid’s ice skates or untangling a necklace: we are prone to move too fast or not at all. Moving forward with patience is most difficult, and most rewarding.

Also, related to time, if you do begin to discern you’re at an impasse, be careful not to part too quickly. But also don’t stay stuck in an impasse when both sides are really entrenched. From here, there likely is one party that, given the situation, and in hopes of the health of the church, should stand down. Humbly assess if you’re the one who should stand down.

6. Ask afresh how Scripture speaks to the issue.

You might be able to get to this right away, but with a gray-area or jagged-line disagreement, you may simply come across surprising insights as you continue reading, meditating on, and sitting under God’s word. So, the deliberate passage of time may shed new light on the issue, which is why I’ve put revisiting Scripture here at the end, rather than first in the list.

As time passes, you have the opportunity to keep meditating on Scripture every day. It’s amazing what clarity you might get on an issue and what discoveries of biblical wisdom you might gain over the course of a year, say, if it remains with you while you read the whole Bible through. You might start seeing connections you had not previously seen as new issues are raised and become personal through the presenting disagreement. There can be wisdom in letting disagreements pass through a few seasons of the year (especially through winter and seasonally affected places like Minnesota). And other than 1 Timothy 3, Titus 1, and 2 Timothy 2:23–26, another particular passage to meditate on for disagreement is James 3:13–18:

Who is wise and understanding among you? By his good conduct let him show his works in the meekness of wisdom. But if you have bitter jealousy and selfish ambition in your hearts, do not boast and be false to the truth. This is not the wisdom that comes down from above, but is earthly, unspiritual, demonic. For where jealousy and selfish ambition exist, there will be disorder and every vile practice. But the wisdom from above is first pure, then peaceable, gentle, open to reason, full of mercy and good fruits, impartial and sincere. And a harvest of righteousness is sown in peace by those who make peace.

Every Conflict an Opportunity

Many disagreements will lessen, if not resolve, as you proceed patiently, query the Scriptures, query the situation, audit your own soul, and solicit perspective (and exhortation) from wise counselors. But some disagreements prove intractable. As you discuss and keep revisiting the issue, you seem to be getting further and further apart, not coming together. Some disagreements you may be able to live with. For others, it may be a matter of time before some parting will happen, like Paul and Barnabas.

“Disagreement is a chance for deeper harmony, greater friendship, wiser elder actions, and healthier churches.”

And when that happens, my counsel would be walk humbly and carefully as to who leaves and who stays. If the elder board is split ten to one, and deeply entrenched, it’s the one who needs to leave. Navigating a righteous departure demands great wisdom and perhaps even more energy in working for unity.

Let’s close with this hope: in Scripture, conflict is an amazing opportunity for God’s grace. Disagreement is a chance for deeper harmony in the end, greater friendship, wiser elder actions, and healthier churches.

We don’t know any more about Paul and John Mark from Acts. But we do see in Paul’s letters that they ministered together later on. And even this, from the last chapter of Paul’s last letter:

Get Mark and bring him with you, for he is very useful to me for ministry. (2 Timothy 4:11)

May God give us such hope, and such reunions, even in this life — and even more, even better, together in the one to come.