From Matthew to Revelation, the New Testament is saturated with citations of the sacred Scriptures. The apostles and their associates appeal to the Old Testament to explain God’s plan of salvation for Israel and all nations through the suffering and resurrection of Jesus the Messiah, and to instruct God’s people about how to live in the present evil age. This article provides a primer on how the New Testament writers cite the Scriptures. To understand the disciples’ powerful and sometimes perplexing quotations of the Old Testament, we begin with their Teacher and Lord.

Roads from Old to New

After his resurrection, Christ teaches his disciples, “These are my words that I spoke to you while I was still with you, that everything written about me in the Law of Moses and the Prophets and the Psalms must be fulfilled” (Luke 24:44). This sweeping claim prompts us to ask some important questions: What are those things “written about” Christ, and in what sense are they “fulfilled”?

Let’s start with the word “fulfill,” which we might use for a store fulfilling an order or a person fulfilling a commitment. The Bible uses fulfillment language not only for prophetic predictions but also for patterns shaped by God’s promises that prepare us for later and greater people, institutions, and events. With this in mind, our Lord’s references to “everything written about me” and “all that the prophets have spoken” (Luke 24:25, 44) include not only explicit messianic prophecies (like Isaiah 53) but also patterns and prefigurements of the Messiah throughout the Old Testament.

The use of the Old Testament in the New has intrigued and challenged theologians for generations. For example, Martin Luther likened the Old Testament to “the swaddling cloths and the manger in which Christ lies” (Luther’s Works, 35:235). And C.H. Spurgeon explained that as every English village has a road leading to London, “so from every text in Scripture, there is a road to the metropolis of the Scriptures, that is Christ” (“Christ Precious to Believers”). While this brief article cannot travel all those paths leading to Christ, I aim to highlight three of the most significant thoroughfares from the Old Testament to the New: promises fulfilled, patterns perfected, and principles restated.

Promises Fulfilled

The New Testament frequently quotes the Old Testament to highlight the fulfillment of a specific promise or prediction. In these instances, Christ and his followers make clear that ancient prophecies have come to pass in their midst, which demonstrates that the sovereign Lord’s words are trustworthy and true. Consider several examples from the Gospel of Luke and the apostles’ preaching in Acts.

One of the most dramatic examples of promises fulfilled is Luke 4:16–21, where Jesus stands to read the prophecy of Isaiah 61:

The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim liberty to the captives and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.

He then sits down and states to the people of Nazareth, “Today this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” Jesus’s point is clear and extraordinary. Isaiah wrote about him. The Spirit rests on him, as Luke’s account of Jesus’s conception, baptism, and temptation have made clear (Luke 1:35; 3:22; 4:1, 14). He is anointed to proclaim good news and liberty to captives and outcasts.

Christ is similarly emphatic when he cites Scripture shortly before his arrest in Luke 22:37:

I tell you that this Scripture must be fulfilled in me: “And he was numbered with the transgressors.” For what is written about me has its fulfillment.

Jesus here quotes from the final verse of Isaiah’s famous prophecy of the suffering servant (Isaiah 53:12). Though he is truly “righteous” (Isaiah 53:11; Luke 23:47), Christ is “numbered with the transgressors” as he gets treated like a robber in his arrest (Luke 22:52), condemned as a lawbreaker (Luke 23:1–5), and crucified between two criminals (Luke 23:32). Jesus appeals to Isaiah to preview his passion and to explain the theological significance of his innocent suffering on behalf of others.

“The Bible uses fulfillment language not only for prophetic predictions but also for patterns shaped by God’s promises.”

Similarly, the witnesses in Acts repeatedly stress that God has accomplished just what he said he would do by sending Israel’s Savior and raising him from the grave. For example, Paul recounts how God raised up David as a king after his heart, and then he declares, “Of this man’s offspring God has brought to Israel a Savior, Jesus, as he promised” (Acts 13:23). Then, after recounting how Christ’s suffering and death fulfilled ancient prophecies, Paul exclaims, “We bring you the good news that what God promised to the fathers, this he has fulfilled to us their children by raising Jesus, as also it is written in the second Psalm, ‘You are my Son, today I have begotten you’” (Acts 13:32–33). Paul draws on this famous royal psalm as a compelling proof for Christ’s resurrection and exaltation, which signals the beginning of his unending reign as the promised son of David.

Patterns Perfected

The New Testament also appeals to a number of biblical patterns or types that Jesus Christ fulfills. He is, for example, the king in David’s line (Luke 1:32–33), the prophet like Moses (Acts 3:22), the great high priest (Hebrews 7:26–28), the better temple (John 2:21), and the last Passover lamb (1 Corinthians 5:7). Because the Scriptures are breathed out by the sovereign God, they reflect consistent patterns throughout redemptive history. Earlier people, events, and institutions in the biblical story correspond to and prophetically prefigure later and greater fulfillments — a correspondence Jim Hamilton refers to as “promise-shaped patterns.” The study of these historical and theological patterns in the Bible is called “typology,” reflecting the biblical term typos, which means “type” or “pattern.” Thus, Paul calls Adam “a type of the one who was to come” (Romans 5:14; see also 1 Corinthians 15:45–47).

Of many biblical examples of patterns that are perfected, let’s briefly consider two.

First, God created the heavens and the earth in the beginning, which anticipates a new heaven and a new earth where righteousness will dwell (Genesis 1:1; Isaiah 65:17; 2 Peter 3:13). Specific features of Revelation’s final vision of the new creation recall Genesis 1–2, such as the tree of life and the river flowing through it. Revelation 21–22 does not merely describe a return to Eden, however, but rather shows how the end of the story is vastly superior to the beginning as the redeemed people dwell in God’s glorious presence without any residual curse, sin, or threats.

Further, Jesus and the apostles appeal to the pattern of the rejected “stone” that is God’s chosen cornerstone of the new temple (for example, Luke 20:17; Acts 4:11; 1 Peter 2:6–8). This image comes from a cluster of Old Testament passages, particularly Psalm 118:22 — “The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone” — and Isaiah 28:16 — “Behold, I am the one who has laid as a foundation in Zion, a stone, a tested stone, a precious cornerstone, of a sure foundation: ‘Whoever believes will not be in haste.’” Jesus fulfills this biblical pattern as he is rejected by the Jewish leaders, who correspond to “the builders” in the psalm (see Acts 4:11), and when he overcomes death to demonstrate that he is God’s chosen Messiah and a sure foundation for his people.

Principles Restated

New Testament authors not only quote Scripture to show how Christ fulfills prophecies and biblical patterns; the Old Testament also provides principles, examples, and moral instruction for Christ’s followers. For example, Leviticus 19:18 — “You shall love your neighbor as yourself” — is cited nine times in the New Testament, more than any other passage. Likewise, Jesus and the apostles restate the Law’s prohibitions on murder and adultery and its commands to honor your father and mother.

The Scriptures offer “instruction” and “encouragement” for believers in various ways (Romans 15:4). New Testament writers appeal to examples of Israel’s unfaithfulness to warn the church about the consequences of sin and unbelief (1 Corinthians 10:6; Hebrews 3:7–19). The steadfastness of Job and the merciful character of God provide hope in times of suffering (James 5:10–11), while Elijah’s life inspires us to pray fervently (James 5:17–18). The righteous person in Psalm 112 who “has distributed freely” encourages Christians to abound in good works (2 Corinthians 9:8–9). Likewise, the Law’s instruction about the unmuzzled ox offers an analogy for God’s people to support those laboring in gospel ministry (1 Timothy 5:18; 1 Corinthians 9:9). And God’s perfect character continues to provide the standard for the holy conduct of believers (1 Peter 1:15–16).

This list is far from exhaustive, but it illustrates the broad applicability of biblical examples and principles for believers’ life together until Christ’s return.

Concealed and Revealed

The great church father Augustine once wrote, “The New is hidden in the Old and the Old is revealed in the New” (Writings on the Old Testament, 125). Indeed, the two testaments hang together in a way that reveals God’s grand plan of redemption and confirms the complete reliability of God’s word. Readers would be hard pressed to find a chapter of the New Testament that does not explicitly or implicitly reference the promises, patterns, and principles of the Old Testament. Phrases like “it is written” and “to fulfill the Scriptures” and “God said” remind us that the Old and New Testaments cohere and culminate in the coming of Christ in “the fullness of time” (Galatians 4:4).

Indeed, “all the promises of God find their Yes in” our Lord Jesus (2 Corinthians 1:20).

Audio Transcript

Welcome back to the podcast as we begin this June together. Pastor John, today in our Bible reading we arrive at Ephesians 2:1–10 — an incredibly important text, and one you have mentioned in your works over 1,400 times over the decades. It is a mega-text in your legacy, I would call it, one you could talk about for hours and hours on end. But it includes a curious little line that you rarely talk about, especially compared to the other glorious points Paul makes here. I’m talking about the singular title he gives to the devil — that the devil is “the prince of the power of the air” (Ephesians 2:2).

All sorts of interpretations have been suggested for this over the decades. Historically, back in the 1920s and 1930s, as gospel programming was first introduced to broadcast radio, one critique said that any attempt to preach over the airwaves was “doomed to fail” because such ministry “operates in the very realm in which Satan is supreme. Is he not ‘the prince of the power of the air’?” So, there’s like a cosmological dimension to his reign.

That argument is basically dead today, but questions remain. APJ listeners want to know what that means that Satan is the “power of the air”? One of our listeners, named Emon, wants to know “if this implies that Satan is omnipresent or all-seeing.” Other listeners want to know how Satan influences “the air” and how it is that his reign as “the prince of the power of the air” leads him to coerce disobedience from sinners, as Paul implies here in the broader context of Ephesians 2:1–3. What kind of power, Pastor John, is Paul ascribing to the devil in this verse?

Well, first, let me suggest a principle of interpretation that I think is really important, especially for a certain mindset that is constantly fascinated with marginal, uncertain things in the Bible instead of being thrilled with central, sure, glorious things in the Bible. The principle is this: don’t let speculations about what you don’t know control or dominate the things that are clear in the Bible that you do know. That’s the principle. We know many clear, true things about Satan and his work in the world that are stated plainly in the Bible, and it would not be wise to start speculating about what we are unsure of — namely, the meaning of air in “the prince of the power of the air” — in a way that would contradict or dominate those clear, true things.

“Don’t let speculations about what you don’t know control or dominate the things that are clear in the Bible.”

Scholars and commentators, including me, are not generally confident or certain about why Satan is called “the prince of the power of the air” in Ephesians 2:2. There are pointers — I won’t stop here; I have something to say; we’re not left in the dark about what this probably signifies — but it would be unwise to put too much emphasis on what I’m about to say, because even though it’s important (it’s in the Bible), it’s not nearly as important as other clear things, I think, even in these verses and elsewhere in the New Testament. So, that’s the first thing, a principle.

Clearing the Air

The second thing we need to do, just by way of preparation, is to clear away some confusion. To say that Satan is “the prince of the power of the air” does not mean we should stop living and breathing and speaking and looking through the air. Air is what exists between the page of the Bible and your eye. Air is what exists between the preacher’s mouth and your ear. To say that we shouldn’t broadcast the truth through airwaves would also mean you shouldn’t preach into the air or look at the Bible through the air. That’s nonsense.

There’s a battle to be fought with the prince of the air, but you don’t fight it by stopping hearing through the air or seeing through the air or moving through the air. Okay, let’s just get that out of the way. To claim that you shouldn’t do radio or Wi-Fi or something like that is to over-prove what you’re trying to do, because it’s going to cancel out all preaching and all Bible reading, which happen through the air.

And we can add this: the fact that Satan has some measure of authority in the air does not imply that he’s omnipresent or omniscient. We are not told in the Bible the extent of Satan’s knowledge or how a non-spatial reality like a spirit — which he’s called in this very verse, “the spirit” that is dominating “the sons of disobedience” — with no up, down, or sideways reality, positions himself in the world. But he’s not God. He does not share God’s omniscience and omnipresence, but we do know that he has many unclean spirits, demons, at his disposal, and they are deployed all over the world in the air. The air is where his flaming arrows fly, according to Ephesians 6:16.

Evaluting the Enemy

Here’s what Paul said; let’s get the text in front of us:

You were dead in the trespasses and sins in which you once walked, following the [age, sometimes translated “the course”] of this world, following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience. (Ephesians 2:1–2)

So, here are some pointers that collectively bring some clarity, I think, to this term “prince of the power of the air.”

1. Air Above Us

First, the air is simply what Paul and people in his time called the space above the earth, and they had no scientific awareness of how high the air went. As far as they knew, it just went on and on, so human life takes place in the lower part of this air where it meets the earth. That’s where we live. That’s point number one. It’s just a general statement about the sphere of our life.

2. Layers of Air

Second, in Matthew 6:26, Jesus says, “[Consider] the birds of the air.” Now, the reason that’s significant is because the word translated air is heaven. It’s translated heaven almost everywhere. The term heaven in the New Testament was very broad in its usage, referring to layers that are above the earth, sometimes called the sky. Nehemiah 9:6 refers to “heaven [and] the heaven of heavens,” where the stars are. And Psalm 148:4 refers to the “highest heavens.” In 2 Corinthians 12:2, Paul refers to “the third heaven.”

“We have the victory over this one with whom we are contending in the air.”

Since Jesus uses the word heaven interchangeably with air, where the birds fly, we can think of various layers of air or heaven. There are these heavens. In fact, the word heaven is regularly used in the plural, I think probably because it’s thought of in terms of these various layers. This is probably why Paul refers so often, like in chapter 6, to heavens where the battle with Satan happens, he says (Ephesians 6:12). So, that’s number two.

3. Seated in Heaven

Third, the term “prince of the power.” Just take those two words. “Prince of the power,” “ruler of authority” — archonta tēs exousias — is exactly the same as those two terms four verses earlier in Ephesians 1:20–21, where it says God raised Christ “and seated him at his right hand in the heavenly places [the heavens], far above all rule and authority.” Now, that’s the phrase that describes the devil, “rule and authority” — “far above all rule and authority.” Far above the devil. Far above the prince of the power, the ruler of the authority, of the air.

So Satan, though he has a measure of rule and authority in the air or the heavens, is not God. He’s vastly under God. Christ is vastly superior to, over, has authority over him — so Satan’s rule in the power of the air, or in the lower air of the heavens, is not supreme. He is decisively defeated. Colossians 2:15 says, “[God] disarmed the rulers and authorities,” and that’s exactly the same phrase as “the prince of the power.” Ephesians 2:2: “The prince of the power of the air” is “the rulers of the authority of the air,” and that has been decisively disarmed at the cross.

So, he’s mortally wounded. A decisive battle has been fought, and we in Christ have a victory over him. And when it comes to Ephesians 6:12, where it says, “We do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities” — same phrase as back in Ephesians 2:2 — “in the heavenly places,” those heavenly places are evidently layers of heavens, the layers of the air above the earth but below the highest heaven, where Christ sits supreme, governing all things. And we have the victory over this one with whom we are contending in the air.

4. ‘God of This World’

Fourth, Paul calls Satan “the god of this world” in 2 Corinthians 4:4. I think “god of this world” and “ruler of the authority of the air” are virtually interchangeable terms, with the world being the sphere in which we live and the air being the sphere in which we live. They refer to the same thing.

Live with Boldness

So, here are four implications I draw from Paul’s calling Satan the prince of the power of the air:

Satan is a spirit who is invisible like air, not like flesh and blood, according to Ephesians 6:12.
There’s no place to go while we breathe air where the flaming arrows of Satan will not fly through the air at us (Ephesians 6:16).
Any place we go where there’s air, heaven, sky, space, we will need to wear the armor of God and do battle with the word of God and the shield of faith.
Christ is exalted as King to the highest heaven, above all rule and authority. The prince of the power of the air is not sovereign. He is on a leash.

John says, “The whole world lies in the power of the evil one” (1 John 5:19), but those who are born of God he cannot touch; he cannot destroy (1 John 5:18). We should believe that; we should take up the armor of God and live with that kind of boldness.

How can Scripture say that there was a time when Jesus wasn’t “perfect”? Twice we’re told that Jesus was made perfect (Hebrews 2:10; 5:9). Hebrews even goes on to connect perfection with cleansing from sin. Old Testament sacrifices couldn’t “make perfect,” cleanse, remove guilty feelings, or “take away sins” (Hebrews 10:1–4). Yikes! Did Jesus really start his life as an imperfect human needing to be cleansed from sin? That doesn’t fit with what the Bible says in other places, even in Hebrews, where we’re told that Jesus did not sin (4:15). How can Scripture say that Jesus had to be perfected, connect perfection with sin, and still affirm that Jesus was sinless?

The Bible answers these questions in a surprising way. The perfecting of Jesus isn’t some embarrassing reality to paper over. Instead, Hebrews insists that Jesus’s perfection was “fitting” — good, right, appropriate (2:10). We’re told, in fact, that had Jesus not been perfected, then God’s story wouldn’t be good news. To hear the Bible’s surprising answer to why the sinless Jesus had to be perfected, we have to start at the beginning of the Bible’s story — with Adam.

Adam’s Imperfection

We were created to live permanently in God’s presence. That is the goal of God’s story. It’s where God’s story will one day end and, therefore, where it’s been headed from the beginning (Revelation 21:3). God wants to be our God in the perfect and permanent place he’s prepared for us (Hebrews 8:10; 9:11; 11:16). To reach that end, to enter and remain in God’s presence, humans must be perfected. Humanity’s original glory and worldwide dominion had to become permanent glory and dominion. For that to happen, Adam, our representative, needed to trust and obey God.

He didn’t.

Instead, he disbelieved in God’s goodness and disobeyed God’s word. As a result, humanity lost its original splendor. We lost our original splendor, becoming diminished in glory and restricted in our dominion. Hebrews 2 tells this sad story. It’s why perfection in a post-Adam, post-fall-into-sin world now requires unwavering trust in God and forgiveness. Faith alone won’t perfect us any longer now that we have red on our ledgers. Something has to be done about our sin too.

Jesus’s Perfection

This is the world Jesus entered and the humanity Jesus assumed. Hebrews doesn’t tell us how Jesus was “made like [us] in every respect” (2:17) while still avoiding guilt by association with Adam. Other places in the Bible give us hints. (Compare Matthew 1:18–25 and Luke 1:26–38 with Romans 5:12–21.) Hebrews only tells us that Jesus was like us and that he lived his human life full of faith and free from sin, with the help of the Holy Spirit (Hebrews 2:13; 4:15; 9:14).

“Jesus did what Adam did not. And because he did, he reached humanity’s goal.”

Jesus, in other words, did what Adam did not. And because he did, he reached humanity’s goal. He was made perfect (5:9). Humanity’s original destiny — superiority to angels, glory, and dominion — is now his permanently (1:5–13; 2:9). Even his body is now “indestructible” (7:16), since perfection takes away even the possibility of mortality. It’s this new status, therefore, that makes Jesus fit to live right where God intended humans to live — in his presence forever (1:3; 11:16; 12:28).

But that’s only part of the story. After all, the Bible doesn’t just say it was fitting for Jesus to be perfected, but perfected “through suffering” (2:10). It’s a two-word phrase we cannot live without!

Our Perfection

When Jesus entered God’s presence, he went there ahead of us, not instead of us. He’s like Daniel Boone, a pioneering trailblazer who paved the way for others to follow him. That’s exactly how Hebrews describes Jesus (2:10; 12:2). It’s also why Hebrews won’t let us forget that Jesus wasn’t simply perfected but was perfected through suffering.

He ran his race. He succeeded where Adam had failed. He trusted and obeyed all the way to the cross. And he did all this for us. His final act of faith gives us a way to wash our sins clean and join him in God’s presence.

Hebrews tells the story like this: During Jesus’s final days, he prayed and prayed that God would rescue him from death and reward his sinless life with perfection. God — we’re told — heard Jesus’s request precisely because of his “reverent submission” (5:7 NIV). God listened to Jesus because Jesus listened to God all his life. Jesus ran his difficult race and, along the way, learned what it meant to trust and obey God through thick and thin. As a result, Jesus crossed the finish line and was made perfect and, at the very same time, became the “source” of our perfection (5:9). Jesus perfectly passed his test of faith, and his passed test perfects us!

Precious Perfection

Had Jesus not been perfected, then we could not be perfected. There wasn’t any other way to reach the end of God’s story. Hebrews wants us to see this so clearly that it tells us four precious goods we would lose had Jesus not been perfected.

1. PERFECT EXAMPLE

First, we would lose our perfect example. Had Jesus come as an already-perfected human, then he couldn’t be our example. His human experience would have been too different from our own to be useful. That’s why Jesus came not only as one not yet perfected but also as one lowered, diminished, and restricted. He came as a post-Adam, post-fall-into-sin human like us.

Yes, he was sinless and blameless. Had he not been, then his final act of obedience would have lacked the potency our sins required (Hebrews 9:14). But he was, nevertheless, weak and susceptible to suffering in a way pre-fall Adam — God’s “very good” humanity (Genesis 1:31) — was not (Hebrews 2:15, 18; 4:15; 5:7). Friends, it’s Jesus’s example, his likeness to us, that inspires our race of faith. That’s what it’s meant to do. Jesus is like the amazing runners of old (11:1–40), only so much better (12:1–2).

2. PERFECT PRIEST

Second, we would lose our perfect priest. Had Jesus not been perfected, had he not experienced our human condition, he could not be our priest (2:17–18; 5:1–10). After all, priests are selected from “among” others just like them (5:1). How else could they hope to “sympathize with our weaknesses” (4:15)?

It’s also Jesus’s sinless experience of our human condition that qualifies him for a unique priesthood. Only a human with an indestructible life could be appointed to the ultimate priesthood and, therefore, provide his peers with the perfection other priests could not (7:11, 16–17; 9:1–10; 10:1–4, 11–14). Because Jesus sinlessly suffered, because he faithfully trusted and obeyed to the point of death, he reached humanity’s goal. And his body was made permanently immortal, qualifying him for an eternal priesthood. The suffering, the becoming perfect, however, was essential. Jesus could not be the priest we need without it.

3. PERFECT COVENANT MEDIATOR

Third, we would lose our perfect covenant mediator. Had Jesus not been perfected, then he could not give us access to God’s best and final promises. It’s Jesus’s final act of faithful obedience that unleashes the promises God made in his new and final covenant (8:6, 8). There God promised to make a way for humans to live with him forever, to do for them what Adam had not. He promised to stitch perfect faith and obedience into their minds and hearts (8:10). But he couldn’t do this without first taking away their sin. Perfection in a post-Adam world requires faith, but it also requires forgiveness. In the new covenant, God provides both through Jesus’s faith-filled death (9:15–28).

4. PERFECT KING

Finally, we would lose our perfect king. Had Jesus not been perfected, then Jesus couldn’t be our king. As Hebrews tells us, it was Jesus’s life of faithful obedience that caused his enthronement. “You have loved righteousness and hated wickedness; therefore God, your God, has anointed you with the oil of gladness beyond your companions” (1:9).

Later, Hebrews specifically draws attention to Jesus’s final act of faithful obedience. “We see . . . Jesus, crowned with glory and honor because of the suffering of death” (2:9). It’s Jesus’s death — his final act of faithful trust in God — that led to his enthronement as our king. And it’s this king who triumphs over every one of our enemies (1:13; 10:13), including our ultimate enemy, the devil (2:14–15). Before Jesus was perfected, before Jesus died, we were slaves to the king of death. But now that Jesus has died, we serve a new and better Lord (13:20).

God’s Good Story

Far from being an embarrassing subplot in God’s grand story, Jesus’s perfection is the story’s fitting and surprising climax. It’s the reason we can call God’s story good. It’s the way — the only way — we can reach the story’s end. How precious indeed is Jesus’s perfection.

We wouldn’t want the story told any other way.

The longing has stirred deep within me, I suppose, ever since I’ve been old enough to long for it. It’s an intense, bittersweet longing for something unnamed I’ve always wanted but can’t quite put my finger on. And it doesn’t so much stir as stab, striking when I’m not expecting it — not even looking for it. Then all too quickly, it’s gone, leaving me wanting that pleasurably painful pang again. I say it’s bittersweet, but it’s the sweetest thing I’ve ever known.

Growing up, I don’t remember anyone I knew ever describing this experience of longing. Nor do I remember trying to describe it myself. Perhaps it’s because English doesn’t have a word for it. Or perhaps it’s because the experience is so subjective and what prompts it varies from person to person.

But I learned from C.S. Lewis that German speakers have a word for it: “Sehnsucht” (Surprised by Joy, 6), which means a wistful yearning for one’s homeland when living in a foreign country, or a painful pining when someone or something dear is absent. That gets very close to the feeling.

Sehnsucht Mentor

In fact, Lewis not only gave me vocabulary for this familiar soul-longing, but he also became my first and foremost teacher regarding its significance. Lights came on when, as a young man encountering Lewis’s essay, The Weight of Glory for the first time, I read about the “inconsolable secret” I carried inside (just as you do) — “this desire for our own far-off country” (29). And he explained why we find this Sehnsucht secret difficult and awkward to talk about:

We cannot tell it because it is a desire for something that has never actually appeared in our experience. We cannot hide it because our experience is constantly suggesting it, and we betray ourselves like lovers at the mention of a name. (30)

In my childhood and teen years, I had loved Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia and his Space Trilogy, no doubt because they were seasoned with Sehnsucht. But it was in reading many of his nonfiction works later that I really began to understand why I had this “unsatisfied desire which is itself more desirable than any other satisfaction” — an experience Lewis called “Joy” (Surprised by Joy, 19).

Beautiful Signposts

It’s telling that my experience of this Joy has always been stirred by beauty. Not everything I find beautiful stirs it. And a beautiful thing that stirs it once may not stir it again — certainly not every time. Nor can I predict what kind of beauty will rouse it. But a whole spectrum of beauties might: An old house long abandoned. Clouds in an N.C. Wyeth painting. Orion striding toward a crescent moon, noticed on a late-night dog walk. My granddaughter on the porch, entranced by Narnia, which she discovered through the magical wardrobe of an audiobook. A long-past moment in Lutsen, Minnesota, frozen on film, when my then-young children leaped from a boulder, laughing for joy.

Lewis frequently experienced the stab of Joy in works of literature. I frequently experience it in music. I’ve been stabbed when listening to Rich Mullins’s rough demo of “Hard to Get,” the melancholy cello in Rachel Portman’s “Much Loved,” Andrew Peterson’s “The Silence of God,” Eva Cassidy’s rendition of “Fields of Gold,” Ola Gjeilo’s “Winter,” and Bob and Jordan Kauflin’s “When We See Your Face,” to name just a few.

When I perceive beauty in such things, what am I longing for? The abandoned house? The clouds? The stars? The memory? The music? No. It’s something else, some beauty I’m glimpsing through them. Lewis explains it this way:

The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing. These things — the beauty, the memory of our own past — are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself, they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshippers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited. (Weight of Glory, 30–31)

Or we could say they are signposts directing us toward the place where all the beauty comes from.

Where the Signposts Point

When I was around age ten, I remember listening to my father’s record of Christopher Parkening performing Bach’s “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring” and feeling that bittersweet pang of Joy. As far as beauty-signposts go, few are more obvious — spelling it out in the title. You might think I’d have recognized where my longing led, especially since I came to faith about this time. But I didn’t — and wouldn’t for another decade.

Lewis’s road to discovery was longer. In Surprised by Joy, he describes how he spent the first half of his life engrossed in the pursuit of Joy, experiencing repeated disappointment when it vanished from every beautiful object he thought contained it. What surprised Lewis was his slow realization that it wasn’t Joy he desired; rather, “Joy was the desiring.” And “a desire is turned not to itself but to its object” (269, italics mine). All along, Joy had been saying to him, “Look! Look! What do I remind you of?” (268).

Having searched high and low, Lewis realized that his desire was one “which no experience in this world can satisfy,” in fact was “never meant to satisfy . . . but only to arouse . . . to suggest the real thing” (Mere Christianity, 136–37). The greatest surprise of Lewis’s life was when he followed the direction of his otherworldly desire and discovered that it led to the Satisfaction he hadn’t believed existed. All those years he had mistaken the signposts as the sources of his treasured Joy, when all along they had been telling him that Jesus was the ultimate Joy of Man’s Desiring.

The Ultimate Destination

I call Lewis my “Sehnsucht Mentor” because through his writings I gained a vocabulary for my “inconsolable longing,” priceless conceptual clarity for what before had been a hazy intuition, and a richer understanding of the heartbeat of the Christian life, which I learned from John Piper to call Christian Hedonism.

And when I read the last novel Lewis published in his lifetime, Till We Have Faces, his reworking of the Greek myth of Psyche and Eros into a story of Sehnsucht, he gave me one of the most beautiful statements I’ve ever read, uttered by the character Psyche:

The sweetest thing in all my life has been the longing — to reach the Mountain, to find the place where all the beauty came from. (86)

I feel the bittersweet pang of homesickness almost every time I read it, “a desire for [my] far-off country,” “a country [I] have never yet visited” but recognize as home (Weight of Glory, 29, 31).

Home. That is our inconsolable secret, isn’t it? We long to be in the place where — or more accurately, with the Person from whom — all the beauty, all the glory, comes from (John 17:3, 24). We’re longing for home, for the Mountain. And all the signposts that prompt our piercing, bittersweet desire tell us that’s where we truly belong.

I call it bittersweet, but it’s the sweetest thing I’ve ever known.

Did you know that Charles Haddon Spurgeon (1834–1892) was not only a preacher but a poet? In her husband’s Autobiography, Susie Spurgeon wrote, “If there had been sufficient space available, an interesting chapter might have been compiled concerning ‘Mr. Spurgeon as a Poet and Hymn-writer’” (Autobiography, 4:313). If you are at all familiar with his sermons, you’ll know something about Spurgeon’s love for poetry. He once wrote, “No matter on what topic I am preaching, I can even now, in the middle of any sermon, quote some verse of a hymn in harmony with the subject” (Autobiography, 1:43–44).

From Watts to Wesley and Luther to Cowper, Spurgeon used hymns to form much of his theological vocabulary. But beyond hymns, he also enjoyed other forms of poetry. He read through Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, “that sweetest of all prose poems,” at least a hundred times (Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit, 45:495). Often, after a long Sunday, he found refreshment by having his wife read to him the poetry of George Herbert, “till the peace of Heaven flows into our souls, and the tired servant of the King of kings loses his sense of fatigue, and rejoices after his toil” (Autobiography, 2:185–86).

But did you know that Spurgeon not only loved poetry but was a poet himself? To be sure, his primary calling was that of pastor and preacher, not poet or hymn-writer. But occasionally, we see his poetic gifts on display. When compiling his church’s hymnbook, Spurgeon didn’t mind composing a few hymns himself, especially when he couldn’t find one suitable for his church. From time to time, he published his poems in The Sword and the Trowel. But for the most part, poetry was not a part of his public ministry. Rather, like his prayer life, it was a part of his private devotional spirituality.

Lost Lyrics

Among the other treasures of the Spurgeon Library, we have a plain, time-worn notebook. There is no title page, but the spine reads,

PoemsSpurgeon

Inside are 186 handwritten devotional poems that were composed by the preacher throughout his forty-year ministry. What kind of poems are they? They are, first and foremost, prayers and meditations, reflecting Spurgeon’s theological convictions about God, creation, revelation, salvation, the Christian life, eternity, and much more.

“These poems provide a window into the private and poetic prayer life of the Prince of Preachers.”

These poems are also biographical, many of them drawn from events in Spurgeon’s life. Whether it be theological controversies, the dedication of the Metropolitan Tabernacle, the exhaustion of pastoral ministry, or many other chapters from his fruitful life, these experiences elicited poetry from Spurgeon. In other words, unique among all that he wrote, these poems provide a window into the private and poetic prayer life of the Prince of Preachers.

What can we learn from these poems?

Dependence and Prayer

When you read that Spurgeon preached as many as thirteen sermons a week, largely extemporaneous in delivery and yet full of theological truth and insight, it would be easy to assume that the task came very easily for him. A few hours of preparation on Saturday night, and — voilà! — the sermons are ready. But that’s not what we see in this volume. In poem after poem, we encounter a desperate plea for God to illumine his mind and heart to see Christ. In the poem “Christ Our All,” Spurgeon writes,

Shew us thyself, shew, dearest Lord,The beauties of thy grace;And let us in thy blessed word,Behold thy shining face.Reveal still more of all thy will,The wonders of thy law,And let us while with love we fill,Behold thee and adore. (Christ Our All, 77)

It is true that Spurgeon was an incredibly gifted and experienced preacher (at the age of nineteen, he had preached over seven hundred sermons!). But beyond rhetorical and homiletical skills, Spurgeon knew that his ministry and his own spiritual life depended on God’s grace to reveal Christ’s shining face in his blessed word. He did not take this sight of Christ for granted, but every time he opened God’s word, he prayed for illumination.

Perhaps one of the most painful reminders of Spurgeon’s dependence on God came through his frequent struggle with illness. Especially as he grew older, Spurgeon groaned under the crushing pain of gout and many other ailments that could knock him out for months at a time. In the poem “Sickness,” Spurgeon laments,

Why! Wasting sickness, art thou come?Disease, why venture nighTo take more victims to their home,In fever graves to lie?Wherefore art thou dispatch’d amongThe creatures here below,To track us in the busy throngOr lay the needy low? (199)

This poem is striking because there is no resolution, no earthly answer to these questions of Why? Yet as Spurgeon suffered alongside other sufferers, he could pray that if these trials must come,

May I be ready any dayTo meet thee without fear. (199)

But he did not face these trials alone. Spurgeon’s response to suffering was not simply why but who. Amid all our trials, we have a God who reigns over our suffering and who is with us amid our suffering. In “He is Faithful,” Spurgeon writes,

Thou Faithful One, whose promise stands,Secure when storms and tempests rage,E’en storms obey thy wise commandsAnd for our welfare must engage. (92)

And it was on this Faithful One that he depended.

Meditation and Confession

A mark of Spurgeon’s preaching was his meditation on God’s word. Like the Puritans before him, Spurgeon turned the diamond of Scripture again and again to reflect the brilliance of its many facets. But his meditation on Scripture wasn’t only a public performance. It was the fruit of his private meditation on Scripture. We see glimpses of that practice in these poems.

For example, in the poem “Obedience,” Spurgeon marvels at the way the angelic host tremble before God and fly to obey his word. And yet, their fear and readiness stand in stark contrast to human rebellion (could this poem be a meditation on Isaiah 6?).

They all in strict obedience bowAt their Creator’s nod;In awful reverence lie lowAnd listen to his word.Then with the light’ning’s speed, they flyTo execute his word;Perform the summons from on high,His utmost word fulfill.Then why should man of puny raceBe disobedient here,And set themselves before his faceRefusing him to fear? (39)

“No matter how fruitful and famous he was, Spurgeon never forgot that he deserved nothing from God.”

On that theme of disobedience, many of the poems are meditations on human sinfulness, including his own personal sin. One of the qualities I appreciate most about Spurgeon is that his life was free of moral scandal. On the whole, he was a loving husband and father and a faithful preacher and pastor. And yet, when we look at these poems, we see that in the quietness of his heart, Spurgeon was deeply aware of his sin: his pride, impatience, fear of man, doubts, and much more.

A rebel, far from thee I stray.Without excuse I roam.Nothing can now thy justice stay,Or keep me from my doom.I sin, yet know, t’will end in death,And feel that death is nigh.Before thee I will hold my breath,Will but for mercy cry. (70)

No matter how fruitful and famous he was, Spurgeon never forgot that he deserved nothing from God. But even as he reflected deeply on his own sinfulness, he knew where to turn to find grace.

But yet to Calvary I turn,And there behold thy Son.I see on him thine anger burnFor sins which I have done. (70)

Spurgeon preached the gospel not only to hundreds of thousands but also to himself. Before he was a pastor or a preacher, he was a sinner in need of a Savior. This was the starting point of his life, and it made all the difference in his ministry.

Trust and Hope

In the spring of 1861, the magnificent Metropolitan Tabernacle was opened and dedicated for gospel ministry. And yet, Spurgeon knew that his ministry was not about a building but a people. And so, at the dedication of the Tabernacle, Spurgeon prays,

O Lord, another house is rear’dWhere thou delight’st to dwell.Let thy dear name be here revered;Here, let thy praises swell.In adoration, Lord, we bowFor what thine arm has wrought.Thy strength here to thy people show,Nor let us know a drought.Let plenteous showers of grace divineForever here descend;May in this house thy glory shine,And every one attend. (111)

As someone raised in the countryside, Spurgeon could have never imagined being given a ministry with such a worldwide influence. But he had the joy of seeing God take an unlikely preacher and use him to display his surprising power. Throughout these poems, then, are joyful prayers for God to continue doing a mighty work in our day.

Strong Arm, outstretch; the victory take.Who can before thee stand?From every place new captives makeBy thine almighty hand. (125)

But amid his fruitful ministry, and all the toils and hardships that came with it, Spurgeon never lost sight of the end of the story. He typically concludes his poems with the hope of heaven. He knew that he was a pilgrim. This world was not his home. The day would soon come when he would rest from his labors. These poems, then, were his prayers and reflections on his way to the Celestial City.

There was no challenge too great and no trial too painful that heaven would not resolve. Even when his health was failing and so many were turning away from the gospel, Spurgeon knew that Christ would build his church. And so, like a soldier longing for his home, he found comfort and strength in his meditations on heaven.

We’ll walk the streets of heav’n with joy,In praising, all our pow’rs employ,In raising great hosannas to his name,In speaking praises to the heav’nly Lamb.We’ll tell the wonders of his grace to usWho died to save us from the curse,And the arch’d vault of heav’n shall ringWhile countless myriads praise their King.There’s no more sorrows, no more pains.We’ll sing in sweet melodious strainsAnd bid our harps resound the laysThat will not end in endless days. (146)

Poems for Heavenly Pilgrims

In all these qualities, Spurgeon is a helpful model for us. Whether we are new to the Christian life or seasoned in ministry, we want to cultivate this kind of dependence, humility, and hope. As pilgrims on a dangerous journey, we cannot make it alone. But these poems remind us that we are not alone. Christ our Captain is with us every step of the way. He is faithful, and he will bring us home.

My Jesus I am bound to theeWith chains that cannot break.Thou’st promis’d I shall saved be,And I thy word will take. (26)

Audio Transcript

Welcome back to the podcast. As you page through the new APJ book, you’ll see some of the ways we’ve talked about election and predestination over the years. The fallout of this doctrine of God’s sovereignty over who is saved in the end leads to many, many questions about whether this is fair or unfair and whether election excuses the non-elect from their unbelief. You’ll see those themes compiled on pages 355–64.

We’re right back into this theme today in an email question from a listener named John. “Hello, Pastor John! I have often heard nonbelievers blaming God for not electing them and giving them a new heart to have faith. How can I persuade them that it is not God’s fault but their own unbelief? My friend’s son professed to be a Christian and even evangelized people and led people to God. But later, while in college, he realized he was not a true believer and left the faith. He now blames God for not electing him. How would you counsel this young man?”

Well, let me clarify immediately that I do agree with the premise that there is such a thing as unconditional election by God — namely, that everyone whom God decisively saves, whom he brings out of darkness to light, brings out of the bondage of sin and unbelief, he does not decide to do that on the spur of the moment, as though there were no plan. Rather, he saves in accordance with his infinite wisdom and plan, which he has had in mind forever. Ephesians 1:4 says, “[God] chose us in [Christ] before the foundation of the world.” So, when he saved me, he saved me according to an electing plan.

Physically Free, Morally Bound

So, the question being asked is this: Why are people whom God does not save according to his purpose and plan nevertheless accountable? That is, they are not able to relieve themselves of the responsibility to believe and trust God because God has not planned to save them.

“God has his wise and holy reasons for why he does not overcome the rebellion of everyone.”

Now, I think a helpful place to begin in talking about the accountability of people to embrace and treasure the truth of God that they have access to is to distinguish two kinds of inability, because the kind of objection we’re dealing with here is that someone is saying, “I am required to believe, but I don’t have the ability to believe. And not having the ability to believe means I’m not responsible to believe.” These two kinds of inability that I’m talking about are moral inability and physical inability.

Physical inability is when you’re required to do something, but you do not have the physical ability to do it. For example, you’re chained to a pillar in a burning house, and you’re commanded to realize there’s a fire and to get out, but the chains physically keep you from moving. So, in that case, we would say that you are not accountable for remaining in the house. You may have wanted with every will in you to move and get out, but you were physically unable.

But there’s another kind of inability, which we call moral inability. You’re not physically limited or restrained, but your moral preferences — what you experience as good and bad, pleasing and displeasing, desirable and undesirable — are so strong in one direction that you may be unable to act contrary to those preferences. So, this time, you may be in the burning house, and you are not physically restrained at all, but you love what you’re doing in this house at this moment. You love it so much, you prefer it so much, you desire it so much, you find it so pleasing that you will not even believe every credible testimony that the house is on fire and you must get out, and you die.

So, you are physically free, but you are morally bound. You are in bondage to act according to those overpowering desires and die.

God’s Sovereign Grace

Now, I think the Bible teaches that if you are not free in the physical sense, you are not responsible to act according to the truth. You are physically unable to see or do (Romans 1:18–23, if we had time to talk about it — I’ll let you look it up). But if you are not free in the moral sense because your desires are so corrupt and so contrary to truth, you are nevertheless responsible to act according to the truth (Romans 2:4–5). Responsibility to forsake sin and trust Christ is not nullified because of our sinful desires, because they’re so strong that we are morally unable to turn away from sin.

In election, God freely chose, graciously chose, to set people free from this bondage of moral inability — to set people free from loving evil so much that they are morally unable to choose the good. None of us would be saved if God had not done this for us. The final and decisive answer to why I or you believed in Jesus and were set free from our bondage to the love of self and sin is the sovereign grace of God. As the apostle Paul said, God made us alive when we were dead (Ephesians 2:5). God granted us to believe (Philippians 1:29). God overcame our hardness against him (Ephesians 4:18). God gave us the ability to see the glory of Christ and the true and desirable Christ hanging on the cross (2 Corinthians 4:6).

“You cannot use non-election as an excuse for loving the dark more than the light.”

He does this for millions of people, and it is owing to nothing in us. It is free. God has his wise and holy reasons for why he does not overcome the rebellion of everyone. The fact that God does — in his mercy and the freedom of his grace — overcome the sinful corruption and rebellion and resistance of many does not mean he’s obliged to do it for anybody. Nobody deserves it, and nobody has a right to complain if he does not do it for them.

Final Verdict

So, let’s imagine a person coming to me as a pastor and saying to me, “Pastor, I believe that God has not loved me and has not set me free from my sin and my unbelief because I am not elect. And therefore, I believe God is to be blamed. He’s guilty of evil.” I would say to him, “How do you know that you are not among the elect?”

Now, perhaps he would say, “Because he hasn’t taken away my rebellion,” to which I would say, “But that does not prove you’re not elect, because he might take away that rebellion in the next hour or the next day or year. So really, how do you know that you are not elect?”

“Well,” he might say, “maybe I don’t know for sure I’m not elect, but if I’m not elect, then I’m not responsible to believe,” to which I would say, “Why don’t you believe and receive Jesus right now? You can’t say it’s because you’re not elect — you don’t know that. And you can’t know that ever, till the day you die. You can never say with any authority, ‘I’m not elect.’ You don’t know. But you can know that you are elect because only the elect receive Jesus. So, tell me right now, why don’t you believe and so prove that you are elect?”

Now, I don’t know what he’s going to say at this point. He might be honest and say, “Because I don’t find him very attractive. I don’t find Jesus compelling.” Or “I don’t find his way of life that he requires of me to be desirable.” Or “I don’t like Christians.” Or “I don’t think the Bible is true.”

I will say, “That’s right. That’s right. And if those are your last words, they will be your condemnation at the last day — not the fact that you are not elect. That fact will not enter into your judgment at all. You were presented with Christ — the most valuable, beautiful person in the universe — and you did not find him to be true or desirable. That will be the case against you at the last day. You cannot use non-election as an excuse for loving the dark more than the light. You will be self-condemned.”

Randy Newman, our longtime friend, wrote this article just weeks ago to be published May 30 at Desiring God. Last week Randy died unexpectedly of heart complications. We publish this article with the blessing of his wife and family, and in gratitude to God for Randy’s faithful ministry and contagious joy in Jesus.

I was raised in an environment of skepticism, during a time of questioning, amid a culture that preferred sarcastic mocking over serious thinking. We liked simplistic slogans more than complex considerations. We loved to point out religious hypocrisy but rarely turned the light of inquiry on our own assumptions.

On top of all this, I was raised in a Jewish family who firmly believed that “Jews don’t believe in Jesus.” So, to say the least, I had many doubts about the Christian faith my friends encouraged me to consider. After all, it was hard to give much credence to a religion that supposedly dominated Germany as it incinerated six million of my fellow Jews. A “Christian nation” thought they had found “the final solution” to the world’s problems: get rid of people like me.

So, I sympathize with doubters who may feel drawn to Christianity but find plenty of objections to keep them at arm’s distance. If you’re drawn to the message of Jesus but can’t seem to get past your doubts, perhaps it would be helpful if I share how I worked through some of my doubts.

Out of Absurdism

As I’ve said, many factors pointed me away from accepting the Christian faith. In addition to those already mentioned, I immersed myself in absurd literature and comedy for several years as I began my university studies. I mixed together an intellectual cocktail of Samuel Beckett, Kurt Vonnegut, and Woody Allen — with large quantities of alcohol added in. It made for a lot of laughs, even more smirks, and a great deal of what felt like fun. But there were hangovers as well — and not just from the alcohol. After the intoxication of laughter wears off, absurdism leaves the mind and heart with existential emptiness.

Immersed in meaninglessness, I continued to seek something transcendent in the world of music. I attended concerts, practiced, performed, and listened desperately, hoping to find a portal to the supernatural or divine. But every piece, every concert, every experience left me disappointed.

I was experiencing the kind of chronic disappointment C.S. Lewis describes in his book Mere Christianity, in the chapter titled “Hope.” Although I had not read anything by Lewis at that point, my life bore out the truth of what he said. Since even my best experiences proved unsatisfying, I could essentially respond in one of three ways:

I could embrace godless hedonism and keep trying to chase momentary intoxicating pleasures.
I could embrace cynicism and reject any hope that life might have some ultimate meaning.
I could embrace the possibility, as Lewis so eloquently puts it, that “if I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world” (Mere Christianity, 136–37).

Since the third response is the only one that gave me hope, it propelled me to read a copy of the New Testament that friends had given me years before. In it, I found Jesus to be compelling, brilliant, challenging, and transformative. Though my objections and doubts did not simply disappear, the power of Jesus’s message and life began to overshadow the doubts. He tipped — and continues to tip — the scales for me.

“Where will your current beliefs lead in the future, especially at the end of your earthly life?”

I also immersed myself in pursuing answers to my questions, insisting on finding the best arguments available. Although some of that reading seemed dry compared to the splendor of Matthew’s Gospel, it was necessary. I needed to sufficiently address my doubts about the reliability of the Bible, the historicity of the resurrection, the validity of New Testament interpretation of Old Testament prophecy, and several other crucial issues. But eventually, I found the arguments in favor of Christianity more compelling than the arguments against it.

Five Clusters of Questions

As I pursued answers to my questions about Christianity, I also found myself asking questions of my own skepticism. Instead of only questioning faith, I started to doubt my doubts. In the process, the foundations of my own unbelief began to feel more brittle.

If you find yourself in a similar place, intrigued by Jesus but kept back by questions, I would encourage you to doubt your doubts and explore faith in Christ with an open mind. Here are five clusters of questions that may help.

CLUSTER 1: WHAT IS SOLID?

Where do you fit on the spectrum between “I know all about Christianity” and “I hardly know anything at all”? What do you already accept about the Christian faith — and why? What has convinced you of its plausibility?

CLUSTER 2: WHAT IS ADRIFT?

Which parts of the Christian message are you doubting? What has prompted these doubts? Might there be factors other than sound reason that have triggered this current round of doubt? Those factors could include disappointment with God due to unanswered prayer, some disaster or suffering that felt like the last straw, the hypocrisy of Christians you know, or reports of Christians behaving non-Christianly.

CLUSTER 3: WHAT NEEDS ATTENTION?

Just how strong are the arguments in favor of your doubts? Have you talked about these arguments with someone you trust to give you honest feedback, or have you immersed yourself in an echo chamber of skepticism? Have you sought out the best arguments in favor of the Christian perspective — not merely the shallow, silly so-called “defenses” of Christianity?

CLUSTER 4: WHAT ARE THE ALTERNATIVES?

Have you given greater credence to your own ability to reason than to numerous arguments in support of belief? Have you considered that you might be guilty of chronological snobbery — the belief that new arguments are superior to older, more “traditional” perspectives simply because they’re newer? What convictions form the backbone of your present way of thinking? And where will your current beliefs lead in the future, especially at the end of your earthly life? Does your skepticism produce hope, purpose, meaning, and strength?

CLUSTER 5: WHAT COMES NEXT?

If you were to believe (or return to belief), what would that look like for you? How might it change your life? What questions do you need to address? With whom can you process your doubts?

Overcoming Unbelief

Doubts still surface occasionally for me — especially upon hearing news of some terrible natural disaster or exposure of Christian hypocrisy. But the best biblical, serious, and thoughtful Christian responses to even the most painful challenges continue to outweigh my objections. I shudder to think of what my life would be like now if I had not abandoned absurdism, immorality, and overindulgences. I continue to marvel that God intervened with his hope, love, and grace.

I hope you’ll confront your doubts with the best that Christianity has to offer. Are you willing to echo the man who once said to Jesus, “I do believe; help me overcome my unbelief” (Mark 9:24 NIV)?

Here’s our overview for this section, and this is the way I like to talk about it. It’s about hearing God’s voice, having his ear, and belonging to his body, the church. And here, I want to emphasize enjoying the gift. This is a gift that we often do not enjoy like we can. So I hope to remind myself and remind all of us here this evening, what a gift we have in prayer. And perhaps we would enjoy this gift a little bit more, incrementally more because of our focus here this evening.

To take a little half step back and do a little bigger review, and then come into prayer, we’re going to talk about Jesus’s habits first. I love talking about this. I don’t see a lot of people talking about this. I find this really exciting and life-giving. So we’ll talk about Jesus’s habits.

Then, we’ll talk in some more nitty-gritty and practicals about our habits of prayer. We’re going to break those up into prayer in secret (personal prayer), prayer constant (prayer that’s on the go and doesn’t cease), and then prayer together in company. And then finally, we’ll talk about fasting. Several years ago, to talk about fasting people would turn their heads. There was not a lot of interest in fasting. And then all of a sudden in recent years, there’s a lot of talk about fasting, intermittent fasting. We’re going to talk about Christian fasting, fasting for a spiritual purpose. So there’s our overview here for tonight’s session.

As a review, let me go to this J.C. Ryle quote again. I just love it. I wanted to come back to it to make sure that everyone hears it. I’m sure there’s somebody here who hasn’t been to the other sessions, so here’s a chance to hear it. Ryle says:

The means of grace are such as Bible reading, private prayer, and regularly worshiping God in church, wherein one hears the word taught and participates in the Lord’s Supper. I lay it down as a simple matter of fact that no one who is careless about such things must ever expect to make much progress in sanctification. I can find no record of any eminent saint who ever neglected them (the means of grace, including prayer). They are appointed channels through which the Holy Spirit conveys fresh supplies of grace to the soul, and strengthens the work which he has begun in the inward man . . . Our God is a God who works by means, and he will never bless the soul of that man who pretends to be so high and spiritual that he can get on without them.

So may we not pretend to be so high and spiritual as to get on without these glorious means. That is our focus tonight.

The Habits of Jesus

So first, let’s take a look at Jesus’s habits. Here’s a disclaimer: The Gospels are not intended just to teach us Jesus’s spiritual practices so we can imitate them. At the very heart of the Gospels is something Jesus does for us that we cannot imitate precisely. We cannot die for others, and definitely for the sins of the world. However, even in his death on the cross and resurrection at the very climax of the Gospels, there is something to imitate, just as he has washed our feet and died for us, so we are to love and serve each other in a cruciform pattern. There’s so much in the Gospels we can pick up from the life of Jesus, the God-man, and I think his spiritual habits are worth observing. Granted though, they are not the main point of the Gospels; that would be the gospel, Jesus.

But we have far more about Jesus’s personal spiritual rhythms than we do about anyone else in Scripture. Part of the reason for this is that we have four Gospels, and the Gospels are given in half of their space at least to tracking his life, especially his ministry, until he came to that final week. We have a lot about his movements and his patterns, but we don’t have that about Paul or Isaiah or Moses or even David. Many of these figures in the Bible that we have a lot of text about, we don’t get anything like some of these spiritual movements and rhythms like we have in the Gospels with Jesus. Let me show you.

Return and Retreat

First, let me give you the big picture about his rhythms of return and retreat, then we’ll talk about how he handled the word, then we’ll talk about prayer, and that moves us into the prayer topic for tonight. The word piece is a little bit of review, but it’s important because there’s this relationship between God speaking in his word and our response in prayer that we step on that foot again.

Here are some of Jesus’s rhythms of retreat and return. See how he draws back from the crowd and communes with his Father, and then that fills him and feeds him and strengthens him to then move back to the needs of others, back to the crowd to bless others. Mark 1:35 comes after a very busy day in Capernaum. They’re healing all sorts of people and they’re beating down the door outside Peter’s house.

And rising very early in the morning, while it was still dark, he departed and went out to a desolate place, and there he prayed.

That’s going to be key language. We’ll see this “desolate place” again and again. That could be translated as “wilderness place.” He’s getting out of the town. He’s getting alone. He’s getting some solitary space to meet with his Father. So he gets out to a desolate place, and there he prays. This is really an amazing moment. The whole town, Peter’s hometown, is all excited about this guy that Peter has been following. So Peter has to be thrilled, thinking, “My whole town is wanting to hear from this Jesus that I’ve given my life to follow.” And Peter wakes up the next morning and is like, “Uh oh, where’s Jesus? He’s gone.” Peter must’ve been in a panic. They’re looking for him. Where is Jesus? They find that he’s gone out to pray, and when they get there to him, they’re like, “Jesus, where have you been?” He says, “I came out to pray. I need to move on to the next town” (Mark 1:38).

It must have been very difficult for Peter, but he had a mission and he moved out. He was filled up by his Father and he was ready to move on to the next town to spread the word. Next is Matthew 9:36–38. Now you see his approach to the crowds. It’s not that Jesus disdains people, humans, crowds.

When he saw the crowds, he had compassion for them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd. Then he said to his disciples, “The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few; therefore pray earnestly to the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into his harvest.”

He’s going to be that, paradigmatically, in being sent out from heaven to die for us. And he prays for the disciples to be sent out and for others to be sent out that there be labor. There is this movement where he goes away to commune and then comes back to the crowds. Luke 5:15–16 says:

But now even more the report about him went abroad, and great crowds gathered to hear him and to be healed of their infirmities. But he would withdraw to desolate places and pray.

This pattern emerges. The crowd swells. They want to know more about him and he doesn’t hate them. He ministers to them, he blesses them, and he finds his time to withdraw and to pray.

The Son of God’s Daily Bread

Now quickly, consider the place of Scripture in Jesus’s life, because I don’t want to give the impression that he’s just a man who prayed and that prayer was not a kind of rhythm or response or relationship with the word from his Father. So here’s the place of Scripture in the life of Christ.

First, consider the wilderness where he faced temptations. Satan says, “If you are the Son of God, command the stone to become loaves of bread” (Matthew 4:3). And Jesus answers, “It is written, ‘Man shall not live by bread alone, but every word that comes from the mouth of God’” (Matthew 4:4). So Satan comes back to try to match him. He says, “All right, I hear that. Let me learn from it.” He’s clever. He’s going to try to match it. He says, “If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down, for it is written . . .” (Matthew 4:6). In other words, “If you want to quote the Writings, I’ll quote the Writings.” He says, “It is written, ‘He will command his angels concerning you and on their hands they will bear you up, lest you strike your foot against the stone’” (Matthew 4:6). Jesus is going to fight fire with fire. He says to him, “Again, it is written, ‘You shall not put the Lord your God to the test’” (Matthew 4:7).

Then Satan says, “All these I will give you if you will fall down and worship me” (Matthew 4:9). Then Jesus says, “Be gone, Satan, for it is written, ‘You shall worship the Lord your God and him only shall you serve’” (Matthew 4:10). So even the Son of God among us, God himself among us, bases his “Be gone, Satan,” not merely on his own authority with respect to his humanity, but he bases it on the revelation of God’s word. He says, “Be gone, Satan, for it is written.”

Continual Appeals to Scripture

Here’s Jesus in his hometown when he comes back from the wilderness. He comes to Nazareth where he was brought up. And it says “as was his custom” (Luke 4:16). This is habit language. He’s making a custom here to gather with the body. That belongs to last night, the habit of gathering. It says:

He came to Nazareth, where he had been brought up. And as was his custom, he went to the synagogue on the Sabbath day, and he stood up to read. And the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was given to him. He unrolled the scroll and found the place where it was written . . . (Luke 4:16–17).

He’s handling Scripture, reading it aloud. Then he reads, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me” (Luke 4:17–19), and he reads the quote. Then it says:

And he rolled up the scroll and gave it back to the attendant and sat down. And the eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on him. And he began to say to them, “Today this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing” (Luke 4:20–21).

He begins his ministry in coming back from the wilderness, coming to his hometown (Nazareth), by quoting Scripture. This is the fulfillment of Scripture. This is how he identifies his cousin, John the Baptist. He says:

This is he of whom it is written, “Behold, I send my messenger before your face, who will prepare your way before you” (Matthew 11:10).

And when Jesus clears the temple, he uses Scripture:

Jesus entered the temple and drove out all who sold and bought in the temple, and he overturned the tables of the money-changers and the seats of those who sold pigeons. He said to them, “It is written, ‘My house shall be called a house of prayer,’ but you make it a den of robbers” (Matthew 21:12–13).

The Word Applied, the Word Fulfilled

This is also how he rebukes the proud. Mark 7:5–9 says:

And the Pharisees and the scribes asked him, “Why do your disciples not walk according to the tradition of the elders, but eat with defiled hands?” And he said to them, “Well did Isaiah prophesy of you hypocrites, as it is written, ‘This people honors me with their lips, but their heart is far from me; in vain do they worship me, teaching as doctrines the commandments of men.’ You leave the commandment of God and hold to the tradition of men.” And he said to them, “You have a fine way of rejecting the commandment of God in order to establish your tradition!”

He’s a man who is soaked in Scripture, in what is written. Again and again, he’s referring to Isaiah and to what is written. He’s quoting Scripture. He’s referring to the commandments of God and holding those up against the traditions of men. He is saying, “That tradition is not in the word, that’s not in Scripture. But this is in Scripture.”

In Luke 20:16–18, it says:

When they heard [the parable of the wicked tenant], they said, “Surely not!” But he looked directly at them and said, “What then is this that is written: ‘The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone’? Everyone who falls on that stone will be broken to pieces, and when it falls on anyone, it will crush him.”

Here are some other examples:

On the way to Calvary in John’s Gospel, as he turns the corner and heads with intentionality to Jerusalem, it is pronounced, “It is written in the Prophets. . .” (John 6:45).
In John 8, he says, “In your Law it is written . . .” (John 8:17)
In John 10, he says, “Is it not written in your law?” (John 10:34).
In John 12, it says, “Just as it is written . . .” (John 12:14),
In John 15, he says, “The word that is written in their Law must be fulfilled” (John 15:25).
He says, “The Son of Man goes as it is written of him” (Matthew 26:24).
In Luke 18, he says, “We are going up to Jerusalem and everything that is written about the Son of man by the prophets will be accomplished” (Luke 18:31).

Living by What Is Written

So here’s my summary about the function of the written word, Scripture, in the life of Jesus. Jesus didn’t have his own print Bible to page through in private. You get this, right? They didn’t have the printing press until 500 years ago. To produce books was a great cost. People didn’t have personal copies of books. So it’s almost certain Jesus just doesn’t have a personal copy of Scripture. He heard it read at the synagogue, he heard it in his mother’s singing. He could rehearse what he himself had memorized. Even though he didn’t have his own print Bible to page through, let there be no confusion about the central place of God’s written word in his life. God himself in human flesh lived by what was written.

I came across this quote from Sinclair Ferguson recently. This comes from his book, The Holy Spirit, and he’s talking about the role of the Holy Spirit in the earthly life of Jesus. And he makes this comment relative to Scripture:

Jesus’s intimate acquaintance with Scripture did not come [magically from heaven] during the period of his public ministry. It was grounded, no doubt on his early education, but nourished by long years of personal meditation.

“God himself in human flesh lived by what was written.”

This is what it means for God himself to be among us as a human. Hebrews 5:8 talks about him learning obedience through what he suffered. Luke 2:52 talks about him growing in wisdom and knowledge, and this is the wisdom and knowledge he grew in. It was God’s written word in Scripture, which then formed a life of prayer.

The Place of Prayer in the Life of Christ

The place of prayer then. So given that picture of how Scripture functions in the life of Jesus, what’s the place of prayer in the life of Christ? This is really rich. Let’s start with Jesus and his prayer alone. I’ll put the cards on the table. I want you to hear the application here. Hear echoing and imitation as we talk about his prayer alone, his prayer with others, and what he’s teaching his disciples about prayer. This is all very relevant and applicable to us.

Jesus and Private Prayer

We already saw Mark 1:35. This is Matthew 14:23, which says:

And after he had dismissed the crowds, he went up on the mountain by himself to pray. When evening came, he was there alone . . .

Even though he has these 12 and they were with him essentially all the time. Here it’s said in particular that he went up alone. This time, not even Peter, James, or John are coming with him. He goes alone to commune with his Father in prayer. Mark 6:46–47 says:

And after he had taken leave of them, he went up on the mountain to pray. And when evening came, the boat was out on the sea, and he was alone on the land.

And you know there’s a great miracle coming. John 6:15 says:

Jesus withdrew again to the mountain by himself.

I’m suspecting he goes there to pray. And as one who is quoting regularly what is written, when he prays to his Father, he prays in light of what he knows to have been revealed in Scripture. Luke 6:12 says:

In these days he went out to the mountain to pray, and all night he continued in prayer to God.

Now this context here is him choosing the disciples. Jesus didn’t have one night a week where he always missed sleep for prayer. I’m aware of two occasions. It happened at the beginning of his ministry when he was choosing his disciples, and at the end of his ministry the night before he died when the disciples were all ready to sleep and he was praying in the garden of Gethsemane. I don’t know that Jesus had any sleep that night before he died. So Jesus did have a regular pattern of sleep, and yet he was ready to miss sleep if he needed to for communion with his Father. It wasn’t all the time, but it was on some particularly pressing occasions. That was Jesus praying alone.

Jesus and Public Prayer

Now, how about praying with his men, or as his disciples hear him praying? And this occurs regularly in his ministry. Luke 6:21 says:

When Jesus also had been baptized and was praying . . .

This is when he was being baptized. This is being observed by his disciples. They’re hearing that he’s praying. Or consider Matthew 6:5–13 when he taught them how to pray. This is the Lord’s prayer. In Matthew 6, it’s part of the teaching during the Sermon on the Mount, but in Luke 11:1–4 the disciples came to him after hearing his prayers, and they wanted to learn. They asked him to teach them. We’ll get to that.

Matthew 19:13 says that children are brought to him that he may lay his hands on them and pray. So the word is going out and people think, “Hey, this is Jesus!” He was the one who would lay his hands on your children and bless your children and pray for your children. He’s a man of prayer. He’s a man who loves children. He’s a man who will pray for them. So they brought children to him because he was known this way. Mark 9:29 says:

And he said to them, “This kind [demon oppression] cannot be driven out by anything but prayer.”

Luke 9:18 says:

Now it happened that as he was praying alone, the disciples were with him.

That’s how much he was with his men, how much he invested in these guys. Even at times when he was praying alone, the disciples were with him. So how does that work? Is it that he kind of goes off to the side and has a prayer time? Or is he so used to these guys that it feels like being alone compared to the crowd and others?

Lord, Teach Us to Pray

This is a time when his men are observing him or hearing him pray. The disciples were with him, and because they see the kind of man of prayer he is and these rhythms of prayer he has, they ask him, “Lord, teach us to pray” (Luke 11:1). He’s praying in a certain place. And when he finished — somehow they knew he finished, either he raised his head or they heard him praying and he stopped — they said to him, “Lord, teach us to pray.” They’ve heard him pray. It’s winsome, it’s contagious. They want to pray like this man. And they ask him for his instruction. Luke 9:28 says:

Now about eight days after these sayings he took with him Peter and John and James and went up on the mountain to pray.

The night before he died, he said to Peter, “I have prayed for you that your faith may not fail” (Luke 22:32). The God-man prays for his disciples that their faith will not fail. John 17 may be the deepest chapter in all the Bible, and it’s Jesus praying. It says:

He lifted up his eyes to heaven and said, “Father, the hour has come . . .” (John 17:1).

All of John 17 is Jesus’s prayer. Lastly, Matthew 26 is in the garden of Gethsemane. It says:

Then Jesus went with them to a place called Gethsemane, and he said to his disciples, “Sit here, while I go over there and pray” (Matthew 26:36) . . . And going a little farther he fell on his face and prayed, saying, “My Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me; nevertheless, not as I will, but as you will” (Matthew 26:39) . . . Watch and pray that you may not enter into temptation. The spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak (Matthew 26:41).

And again, for the second time, he went away and prayed. He was leaving them again. And he went away and prayed for a third time. This is how he waits for the events to begin to transpire when he’s taken into custody. These are the last few moments when he could run. This is the moment to feel the weight, to suffer beforehand with the weight of what it will be like to be at the cross, to ponder what he’s doing. This doesn’t catch him off guard. There would be less virtue and power in the cross if it caught him off guard. The cross doesn’t catch him off guard. He knows exactly what’s happening and he wrestles with it. He owns it. He solidifies his will for the joy set before him and he does that through prayer.

Jesus and Fasting

Jesus also talks about fasting and there are two key texts on fasting, both are in Matthew’s Gospel, which will accompany prayer as we’ll talk about. He says:

And when you fast, do not look gloomy like the hypocrites, for they disfigure their faces that their fasting may be seen by others. Truly, I say to you, they have received their reward. But when you fast, anoint your head and wash your face, that your fasting may not be seen by others but by your Father who is in secret. And your Father who sees in secret will reward you (Matthew 6:16–18).

This pairs with his talk about praying in secret, as we’ll see in just a minute. And he says “when you fast.” This is not an if to his disciples. He expects there to be occurrences of fasting. Matthew 9:15 says:

Can the wedding guests mourn as long as the bridegroom is with them? The days will come when the bridegroom is taken away from them, and then they will fast.

So Jesus says we will fast. When they fast, he assumes we’ll fast and he says we will. The bridegroom, Jesus, will be taken away and then they will fast.

Instructions on Seclusion

So far we have seen Jesus’s pattern of retreat and return, how Jesus shaped his life with the word, how Jesus prayed alone with his disciples, how Jesus taught his disciples to pray, and then Jesus also teaches his disciples the same kind of pattern of withdrawing at appropriate times for communion and rest and then going back to the crowds to minister. Jesus withdrew with his disciples, bringing them with him. He’s teaching them this pattern. Luke 9:10 says:

On their return the apostles told him all that they had done. And he took them and withdrew apart to a town called Bethsaida.

Mark 6:31–32 is more direct. He says:

And he said to them, “Come away by yourselves to a desolate place and rest a while.” For many were coming and going, and they had no leisure even to eat. And they went away in the boat to a desolate place by themselves.

In John 11, it says:

Jesus therefore no longer walked openly among the Jews, but went from there to the region near the wilderness, to a town called Ephraim, and there he stayed with the disciples.

Matthew 6:11 says:

When you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret. And your Father who sees in secret will reward you.

Here’s my summary. In receiving his Father’s voice in Scripture, in praying alone and with company, and at times when faced with particularly pressing concerns, adding the tool of fasting, Jesus sought communion with his Father. His habits were not demonstrations of sheer will and discipline. His acts of receiving the word and responding in prayer were not ends in themselves. In these blessed means, he pursued the end of knowing and enjoying his Father, communing with his Father in prayer.

The God Who Speaks and Listens

We’ve been talking implicitly all along, but now let’s talk explicitly about our habits of prayer. There are three foundational truths here before a few concrete specifics and suggestions. First, our God is not only communicative but listens. The speaking God is also the God who listens. “God Who Listens” is a good song by Chris Tomlin. Now, he doesn’t only listen, he first speaks. Sometimes we can get this thing back and forth in our modern day. It’s spoken of in therapeutic, psychological terms. People say, “I just need somebody to listen to me. If God will just listen. If people just listen to me. I need listening.” Yes, and you need teaching and divine revelation along with listening.

There are two things that are happening. He speaks and he listens. Our God is a God who listens and he listens in light of his speech. Prayer is a conversation we didn’t start. God speaks first. We respond in light of his word. We talked yesterday about dialing up. Who’s going to dial up? Well, actually we’re not going to dial up. God has dialed up. So let’s pray to him together in light of his revelation. And the great purpose of prayer is that God would be our joy. We pray for things and we pray for help. We pray for assistance and we pray for blessing. At the end of the day, we pray to God himself. We want more of him. He is the greatest gift he gives. His Son is the greatest gift he gives. And so we pray to know him, enjoy him, and have him even as we want to have and see him through blessings he may give.

We’ll talk in just a minute about how we would work things into our prayer life other than just asking. This is C.S. Lewis on prayer, and it’s about the asking part of prayer, which is where the word “pray” comes from. We think of asking things from God and we should be careful not to only ask stuff from him as if he’s a big gift dispenser in the sky. Lewis says:

Prayer, in the sense of asking for things, is a small part of it; confession and penitence are its threshold, adoration its sanctuary, the presence and vision and enjoyment of God its bread and wine.

Our Habits of Prayer

Let me break these out with various texts and concepts as our prayer in secret (private prayer), as in the Ryle quote. Then, we will talk about the language in the New Testament that you’re probably familiar with, “praying without ceasing.” What is that? And then, we’ll focus on praying with company with a few suggestions on how to pray together with company in ways that might be most effective in the life of the church.

Praying in Secret

Here’s prayer in secret again, as we saw:

And when you pray, you must not be like the hypocrites. For they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and at the street corners, that they may be seen by others. Truly, I say to you, they have received their reward. But when you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret. And your Father who sees in secret will reward you (Matthew 6:5–6).

This does not mean never ever pray in public. That’s part of what we do as a church. It would be a blessed thing to pray for someone. It’s very good for others to hear your prayers all the time in our families. People should be hearing our prayers all the time. But don’t let prayer become something that is only heard by others so that there’s never this prayer in secret. And don’t let it just be prayer on the go, but have a particular time set aside where nobody else is listening and you’re not just begging for help on the way as you go through life, but you have time set aside to commune with God, as we saw in this pattern in Jesus’s life.

It’s great to find a space where you can pray out loud. This has been something that’s fresh recently in my life that the kids have gotten old enough now. They’re in school five days a week. I have some work from home days now because on the other side of COVID there are some fresh patterns, and we have a blended office, so some days you’re home. There are times I’m just at home by myself and I can kneel in our living room and I can just pray out loud. For me, it helps me to pray it out loud so I don’t kind of trail off. Sometimes when I’m just in my head praying, I kind of trail off. I don’t finish sentences and thoughts, or my prayers can begin to wander into thoughts because they were thoughts to begin with. I find it very helpful to be able to pray out loud and in secret. We need to find space for that.

My suggestion here, as I mentioned yesterday, is this pattern of beginning with the Bible, moving to meditation, and then polishing with prayer. The thought there being, we want to hear from God first and reading is moving at the typical pace of a written text. So begin by reading his word. And then meditation is about pausing, pondering, and seeking to feel the weight and significance of a particular part of that text on the soul. And then, instead of doing a hard pivot to praying what you want to pray for the day, let what God has been speaking through his word and you’ve been meditating on be the theme, the inspiration, and the catalyst for your prayers.

You could say, “God, I’ve seen your Son is glorious in this text. I pray that you would help me to continue seeing that, help my wife to see it, help my kids to see it, help my coworkers to see it, and help the nations see it.” I typically move in a pattern from self to wife to kids and family, then coworkers in church and the Twin Cities, and then to the nations. I kind of move out in concentric circles. But you find your way and what makes sense to you as you think about circles of prayer. I love to have that prayer time come out of being freshly inspired by time in the word.

Adoration, Confession, Thanksgiving, Supplication

Then there is the ACTS acronym. This is not proprietary or special. You’ve probably heard of this. I think it’s very helpful. I think we tend to forget without reminders like this about the other aspects of prayer other than petition. Lewis is talking about petition being a small part of prayer. So here’s what ACTS refers to: adoration, confession, thanksgiving, and supplication. Supplication is there. It’s part of prayer, it’s important.

Come into a prayer time and begin by adoring God. There is something so right, so precious, so enjoyable about adoring God. It’s fitting and he’s worthy of it, for us to pause and adore him and then move from that adoration as we rehearse his glory, his attributes, and his worth to a sense of self and the need for the confession of our sins, and how we are not living up to the standard, and how we have we have sinned against him. Then we move to thanking him. Thank him that he’s drawn near in Christ. Thank him for the many blessings in our lives. And then we ask, if you want to go through this pattern of ACTS.

I get asked this question a lot, but I think the general pattern in Scripture and in the New Testament in particular for Christian prayer is to the Father through the Son — that is, in Jesus’s name — and by the Spirit. So prayer is Trinitarian, but it’s not necessarily symmetrical.

We don’t pray to the Spirit through the Father by the Son. You pray to the Father through the Son by the Spirit. And all three persons of the Godhead are God in their own right. So it is fitting and wonderful to pray to particular members of the Trinity. You don’t have to only address the Father, you can pray Jesus prayers where you pray to him. You can pray to the Spirit. And in particular that can be fitting where there’s certain times where we know of the roles that the persons of the Godhead take in the economy of salvation. So if we’re praying for a particular thing, you may want to pray to that particular person. However, the general pattern is to the Father through the Son, the one person of the Trinity who became human and died for us, and doing that by the power of the Spirit who dwells in us. Don’t be shackled into thinking you need to pray the same number of prayers and spend the same number of minutes praying to each person in the Trinity.

Prayer and Fasting

And then, prayer is to be accompanied on occasion with fasting. We’ll say more about this in a few minutes, but let me just say there are normal daily prayers and there are times in our lives where we feel a particular desperation. Fasting is a tool for the desperate. You cannot fast all the time, you’d die. You can pray every day. Prayer goes with the breath. You have to keep breathing and keep praying. You can go without food for a little bit, not all the time.

So fasting is a special measure. When you have a particular burden, some particular desperation, and you want to say, “Oh Father, I’m so desperate here,” more than just the typical prayer — which is wonderful and blessed and prayed in confidence because of Jesus — then you can add a particular demonstration of desperation in fasting. We’ll say more about fasting here in just a moment.

Praying Without Ceasing

I have four texts that talk about praying without ceasing or being constant or continual in prayer:

Rejoice always, pray without ceasing (1 Thessalonians 5:16–17).
Be constant in prayer (Romans 12:12).
Continue steadfastly in prayer (Colossians 4:2).
Praying at all times in the Spirit . . . (Ephesians 6:18).

I don’t think this means you stay on your knees all day and you never stop praying. I think it means don’t give up praying. Don’t have trials come into your life where you forget to pray or become so discouraged that you don’t pray. Continuing it, persevere in prayer. And as you go throughout the day, as you live, develop patterns of prayer or anchor points of prayer.

Maybe you think about your car as being a reminder on your commute in the morning, getting in the car in the morning. This is a reminder to pray as you start out on the commute. Or there could be other ways. We do this with meals as we sit down. We take that as an occasion to pray. That’s a good thing. That’s a good habit. There could be other habits of prayer like that so that we would have this sense of ongoing prayer, constant prayer in our life, which doesn’t mean that we don’t ever do our work or don’t ever give any focus somewhere else. Be freed from that burden.

There can be a spirit of dependence, yes, as you go throughout the day, and your attention is limited. You can only really focus on a thing at a time. And God means for you to do your work and your calling and your parenting and interact with your spouse and do what you’re called to do. And we can develop these rhythms that are such that it would be as if we never stop praying. We pray without ceasing. We’re constant in prayer because it marks our life like it did for Jesus.

Praying with Company

Before we finish with fasting let’s focus here on praying with company. I call praying with company the high point of prayer, which is in no way to minimize private prayer or prayer on the go. But again, as we talked about with fellowship, when God’s people come together, there is a power. God loves to brood by his Spirit on the gathering of his people. And when we sync up our schedules and our lives and our habits to pray together, it is significant. There is multiplying blessings to us and through the gathering in praying together.

Jesus does this, and we see it in the life of the early church where they gather to pray. My recommendation is to make it regular with spouse, with family, and with people in a small group or Bible study. There can be prayer gatherings in the rhythms of the church. An idea with a time that’s set aside as a prayer time is to begin with a brief word of Scripture. It might just be a single verse that someone reads. If there’s a prayer leader for the gathering, they could just say, “Let me read this paragraph and let’s pray together.” That could be one way to get into prayer time to remember that we’re not the one dialing up, we’re praying in response to God’s word. Some word of Scripture can be the catalyst for our group gathering in prayer.

I also recommend limiting your share time. I try to do this in our community group. We will gather in our time to pray and people will start sharing. Are there any prayer requests? People start sharing and the clock is ticking and they are sharing so well, and we are just bearing down on the time when they’ve got to go because they have to have kids in bed for school the next day. One strategy, if you’re leading a prayer time, is to start with a little Scripture and then say, “Does anybody have a really pressing request you need to talk to us about, or can we just talk to the Lord in prayer about these things?” And you know what, in all our prayers, God already knows it.

So if you want to give some extra information in your prayer to him so that other people understand what you’re praying for, God is really fine with that. I’m pretty sure about that. So for us to get into prayer time and go ahead and go directly Godward and be able to share as we pray can be a good thing in our praying with company.

Utilize Short Prayers

At times, I love to remind folks you don’t have to pray long. Jesus commends short prayers. When he gave us the model prayer, it’s only 50 words. Feel free to hop around. You can pray for something in a focused way and none of us here are going to think you’re unspiritual if you pray too short. In fact, we may think you’re unspiritual if you pray too long, depending on the setting.

Pray without show and with others in mind. This is the last tension in corporate prayer. We don’t want to pray for show and yet when it’s corporate prayer, you’re praying for other people. So there’s no need to pretend it’s just you and God. It’s not. It’s corporate prayer. The very nature of corporate prayer is that we’re doing this together, so it’s appropriate to both seek to be authentic and real before him, and at the same time, you know others are listening and you’re leading them together with you Godward in prayer.

Inducements to Communal Prayer

I’ll just end with some incentives here about the benefits of praying with company. Why not just make all your prayer, private prayer? In praying with company, I think there are answers to prayer that we get in praying with each other that we may not get otherwise if we didn’t do so in company. I think there’s growth in our prayers. When we hear others pray, we grow in the way that we pray. It’s a wonderful thing to pray in private.

We have to pray in private, but I think there’s more growth that happens as we hear others, as we hear their perspective, as we hear how they’re wording it, the angles of approach to God, what they say to God, their concepts. We get to know those persons well too in the fellowship of the church as we hear their heart in prayer. That draws out something in that person you may not hear otherwise when they come before God’s face in prayer. We get to know them better. And then, most of all, you get to know Jesus better.

I think there are aspects of our Savior that God means for us to know through hearing those in the prayers of others in the corporate gatherings. As we know others, we get to see aspects of Jesus, his grace, how he’s drawn near to them, how he’s blessed them, how he’s shown them grace upon grace.

And then lastly, the great purpose of prayer in secret, prayer on the go, and prayer with company is that God in Christ would be our reward.

Questions and Answers

Are there any questions here on prayer before I finish up with some brief thoughts about fasting? Any burning questions on prayer? If it’s not burning, you don’t have to make one up.

Do you have a favorite resource on prayer?

Yes, my favorite is Tim Keller’s book on prayer. I think it’s Tim Keller’s best book. It’s at a different level from his other stuff. It is so well done. It’s so steeped in John Owen and the Puritans. I love Keller’s book. Years ago, I loved Paul Miller’s book called A Praying Life. It was so good. There’s an old Spurgeon book called The Power of Prayer in a Believer’s Life. It’s really good. I know that people recommend E.M. Bounds. Actually I haven’t heard people talk about E.M. Bounds recently, but go look up E.M. Bounds for a lot of resources on prayer.

The Place of Fasting

The last point is on fasting. At no place in all his 13 letters, does the apostle Paul command Christians to fast. Neither does Peter in his letters, nor John, nor any other book in the New Testament. There are no commands to fast. And yet, for 2,000 years Christians have fasted. One expression among others of healthy, vibrant Christians and churches has been the practice of fasting. However much it may seem to be a lost art today, fasting has endured for two millennia as a means of Christ’s ongoing grace for his church. So why then, if Christians are not commanded to fast, do we still fast?

There’s Jesus’s example as we’ve already seen. He fasted in the wilderness. He said, not if you fast, but when. And Jesus promised, “then they will fast” (Matthew 9:15). So the words of Christ have an effect on the church, though it’s not a direct command to fast because they will, and he says “when you fast.” The early Christians fasted. They fulfilled what Jesus said would happen. Acts 13:1–3 says:

Now there were in the church at Antioch prophets and teachers, Barnabas, Simeon who was called Niger, Lucius of Cyrene, Manaen a lifelong friend of Herod the tetrarch, and Saul. While they were worshiping the Lord and fasting, the Holy Spirit said, “Set apart for me Barnabas and Saul for the work to which I have called them.” Then after fasting and praying they laid their hands on them and sent them off.

It’s a pattern in the early church. Acts 14:23 says:

And when they had appointed elders for them in every church, with prayer and fasting (notice the pairing) they committed them to the Lord in whom they had believed.

Inward Fasting

Overall, the New Testament may have little to say about fasting, but what it does say is important. And what it doesn’t say, I think it’s leaning heavily on the Old Testament. The Hebrew Scriptures do not speak the final word on fasting, but they’re vital in preparing us to hear the final word from Christ. I have a summary for you of three groups of passages on fasting in the Old Testament. I count about 25 references to fasting, situations of fasting, or narratives about fasting. Let me summarize them for you in three groups.

First, there is inward fasting. There’s an inward focus in fasting to express repentance. God’s people fast to express a heart of repentance before him. They realize their sin, typically not small indiscretions or lapses in judgment, but deep and prolonged rebellion, and they come seeking his forgiveness. This happens in 1 Samuel 7:3, which says:

And Samuel said to all the house of Israel, “If you are returning to the Lord with all your heart, then put away the foreign gods and the Ashtaroth from among you and direct your heart to the Lord and serve him only, and he will deliver you out of the hand of the Philistines.” So the people of Israel put away the Baals and the Ashtaroth, and they served the Lord only. Then Samuel said, “Gather all Israel at Mizpah, and I will pray to the Lord for you.” So they gathered at Mizpah and drew water and poured it out before the Lord and fasted on that day and said there, “We have sinned against the Lord” (1 Samuel 7:3–7).

I’m not going to go through all these texts, but this is the first scenario: to express repentance. And you can see fasts expressing repentance in 1 Kings 21, Nehemiah 9, Daniel 9, Jonah 3, Joel 1–2. Old Testament saints often expressed an inward heart of repentance to God, not only in words, but with the exclamation point of fasting. It’s kind of a declaration of particular repentance. Such fasting did not earn God’s forgiveness but demonstrated the genuineness of their contrition. It’s like they’ve reached for some extra help to express the intensity of their repentance.

Outward Fasting

Then there is outward fasting. Then there’s an outward kind of fasting, in order to grieve hard providences. You can see this on several occasions. Fasting can give voice to mourning, grieving, or lamenting difficult providences. This is the end of 1 Samuel when the first anointed king, Saul, dies:

And they took their bones and buried them under the tamarisk tree in Jabesh and fasted seven days (1 Samuel 31:13).

They were mourning for the death of their king. 2 Samuel 1 is the next chapter here:

Then David took hold of his clothes and tore them, and so did all the men who were with him. And they mourned and wept and fasted until evening for Saul and for Jonathan his son and for the people of the Lord and for the house of Israel, because they had fallen by the sword (2 Samuel 1:11–12).

“Fasting expresses to God our pointed need for God.”

Hard providences call for fasting. Esther fasts when the king’s decree goes out. In Psalm 35:13, David talks about wearing sackcloth and afflicting himself with fasting in his grieving. Psalm 69:10 says, “He humbled his soul with fasting.” Fasting gave voice to the pain and sorrow of sudden and severe outward circumstances and represented a heart of faith toward God in the midst of great tragedies.

Forward Fasting

So there is inward fasting (repentance), outward fasting (hard providences), and then the last one here is fasting forward, to seek God’s favor like traveling mercies, or something like that. But it’s with a particularly acute sense. Fasting can have a kind of forward orientation in seeking God’s guidance or future favor. This is like Acts 13:2, when they’re worshiping the Lord and fasting and the Spirit says to set them apart, and they pray and fast to send them out and send them forward.

Ezra is an example of this. He proclaims the fast:

Then I proclaimed a fast there, at the river Ahava, that we might humble ourselves before our God, to seek from him a safe journey for ourselves, our children, and all our goods . . . So we fasted and implored our God for this, and he listened to our entreaty (Ezra 8:21–23).

It’s similar for Nehemiah. Fasting often served as an intensifier alongside forward prayers for God’s guidance, traveling mercies, and special favors. So let me bring it all to a close here with the thread that comes together in fasting.

A Prayer Amplifier

This is not all the Old Testament has to say about fasting. For instance, there are correctives to fasting in Isaiah 58 and Jeremiah 14 and Zechariah 7–8. But the three general categories hold. Fasting expresses inward repentance, grieves outward tragedies, or seeks God’s forward favor. And a common thread holds all true fasting together. Fasting, like prayer, is always Godward. Faithful fasting, whatever the conditions of its origin, is rooted in human lack and need for God. We need his help, his favor, his guidance. We need his rescue and comfort from trouble. We need his forgiveness and grace because we have sinned.

We need God. He, not human circumstances or activity, is the common denominator of fasting. Fasting expresses to God our pointed need for God. We have daily needs and we have unusual needs. We pray for daily bread, and in times of special need, we reach for the prayer amplifier called fasting.

Christian fasting is also unique. I don’t want to give the wrong impression by going back to the Old Testament for background that we’re going back to the Old Testament for our fasting. Christians have one final and essential piece to add: the depth and clarity and surety we now have in Christ. As we express to God our special needs for him, whether in repentance or in grief or for his favor, we do so with granite under our feet. When our painful sense of lack tempts us to focus on what we do not have, fasting reminds us now of what we do. Already, God has come for us in Christ. Already, Christ has died and risen. Already, we are his by faith. Already, we have his Spirit in us, through us and for us. Already, our future is secure. Already, we have a home.

In fasting, we confess we are not home yet and remember that we are not homeless. In fasting, we cry out for our groom and remember that we have his covenant promises. In fasting, we confess our lack and remember that the one with every resource has pledged his help in his perfect timing. John Piper says:

Christian fasting is unique among all the fasting of the world. It is unique in that it expresses more than longing for Christ or hunger for Christ’s presence. It is a hunger that is rooted in — based on — an already present, experienced reality of Christ in history and in our hearts.

In Christ, fasting is not just a Godward expression of our need. It is not just an admission that we’re not full; fasting is a statement in the very midst of our need that we’re not empty. In both prayer and fasting, God himself in Christ is our reward.

Questions and Answers

Are there any questions about prayer or fasting as we wrap up?

I get the sense from what you’re saying here that fasting is more withdrawn and alone and purposeful. Yet often, I’ve heard from church, if you fast, you’re just going to quit eating and go about your business. I see that as two different perspectives, am I right or wrong?

Well, as you were asking the question, it made me think. What I don’t talk about here is our fasting together. Fasting can be done as a fellowship aspect. We know Jesus’s words about fixing yourself up when you fast and not making it obvious that you’re fasting so that you have your righteousness exercised before others. But there can be communal fast. That’s very biblical as well. A church can call a fast for a particular need, like finishing the building program, or getting another pastor or elder, or meeting the financial gap, or whatever it may be. A church can call a fast together. Elders often do this. We’ve done this as pastors together with our church, feeling some particular needs and saying, “Brothers, we’re going to fast together.” A corporate fast is not something you keep secret from each other. You’re doing it together.

On the question you have about whether it’s withdrawn or you go about your business, I maybe have two things to say to that. On the one hand, I think what I’m advocating here is mostly that you go about your normal life. However, it’s also good to think about what you’re going to do at the time you’re not eating. We spend a lot of time eating. It happens three times a day for many of us and the time adds up. So in wanting your fast to be spiritual and not just going hungry, it is really important.

A lot of times the fasting that is talked about nowadays is trending and it’s a hot topic on Google or whatever, like intermittent fasting. That’s about weight management and it’s about health. It’s not spiritually-intended fasting. So you might do some form of Christian intermittent fasting if there’s Christian purpose in it, if there’s a particular prayer, if there’s desperation to God. But if it’s just weight management, like a diet or exercise, then that’s not really the essence of what we’re talking about here with Christian fasting.

Christian fasting has a Christian purpose. One way you might express that is setting aside some time when you’re not eating to have some reflection over God’s word, to spend that time in prayer. In fasting, being accompaniment to prayer, it would sure be a shame to fast and not pray. And when we’re not eating, hunger should be a reminder for us to pray, to take the ache in the stomach and turn that into a spoken ache Godward. That’s the kind of fittingness between prayer and fasting. We’re cultivating or giving space to a physical ache that corresponds to the kind of ache in the soul, the desperation for God’s help, God’s deliverance, and God himself in the circumstance.

I get how we don’t want to do this for like bodily improvement, but what about those people that maybe have a job that is very physically exerting and it’s very difficult to go without food? Or what about the person who has anemia or other health issues that really wants to fast in light of all of the things you talked about but isn’t able to? Are there times where you have to really look at bodily circumstances? Do you have anything to say to that?

That’s a great question. I should have accounted for that in my slides. There’s a great quote by Martin Lloyd Jones where he talks about how the impulse for fasting can be applied to many other good things. There may be particular health conditions. I’m not a doctor, I don’t know them. There may be particular health conditions that you need to be aware of and you can’t go without food for whatever reason. God knows that. He’s aware of that and you can go without other good things. So some people talk about fasting from social media or fasting from television or fasting from some other good gift, some entertainment or some blessing you normally would have and it’s going to be part of your life, but you’re going without it for spiritual purpose in seeking God’s particular help, or in desperation, or even in putting some good pattern into your life.

Maybe someone says, “I don’t want to be leaning so heavily on my phone all the time, so I’m going to set aside time for a phone fast.” So there are other manifestations of the principle of fasting from something good for the sake of something better, to turn the lack of a good thing into a Godward ache. So it would not have to be going without food. But the reason in Christianity that fasting is going without food and that the principle doesn’t start as picking your good thing and going without your good thing is that food is such a basic part of this life. It’s such an obvious good thing. “Give us this day our daily bread” (Matthew 6:11). It’s such a regular part of our lives and we feel that ache in the stomach when we go without food for a while. So there may be medical conditions where you simply cannot.

Also, it might be worth asking ourselves if the abundance of food that we have has made it so that we have conditioned our system in a way to always get food. There’s potential resilience that humans may have — that I think humans do have in normal circumstances — if we trained ourselves to go a little bit longer without food. So there could be some who feel like, “Oh man, three hours into my fast, I can’t do it any longer.” I would say, “Well, that’s great you did three hours. What if you tried four hours next time and five hours the next time? What if you tried to build up resilience?” Some of us may need to build up metabolic resilience or something like that.

But in Scripture it only talks about fasting from food?

Correct, so far as I am aware.

Can you draw out the difference between the Pharisee praying on the corner and public prayer in our gallery, because both are public. What is the difference between those?

The potential danger is that it could be similar. Our hope is that it’s not. I think the picture there of the Pharisee praying on the corner is that Jesus saying they are praying to be seen by others. That’s the motivation. That’s what is leading to it. That’s the heart and that’s bringing about the prayer on the corner in public. This is a good reminder for all of us who not only pray in gatherings of the church and pray from the front here, but in our prayer times as a family, if it’s with a spouse, if it’s in a community group or a class, that we check our hearts on that.

Are we just praying to be heard by others? Even if it’s a really small circle and it’s not on a public street where there are dozens or hundreds, I really want to impress these few people right here. That’s a good thing to check in our hearts. I know our motivations are rarely digital, that it’s either this or not that, but Jesus’s teaching and his reminder is good for us there. It’s a particularly thorny issue to do public prayer in the sense that our hearts might drift into wanting to impress people. So check that, pray against that, and then focus on God. Pray in the context of other people for their good and blessing and trust that the blood of the Lamb covers a lot of our indiscretions and mistakes and tainted hearts.

Several weeks ago, I bore witness to a miracle. It was the kind of miracle I had often prayed for — and the kind I had come not to expect. And then, in an ordinary moment of an ordinary day, it happened.

A man I have long known and loved, a man I have poured into and prayed for, a man I have sometimes despaired of and sinned against, changed. He really changed. The Spirit of God moved upon the waters of his soul, shining light into an old and stubborn darkness, and I bore witness to a startling, miraculous act of obedience. It was a moment worthy of angels’ admiration.

As I reflect on the miracle now, and the years leading up to it, I find myself wishing I could take back many impatient responses along the way: cynical thoughts, reproofs spoken in fleshly frustration, unbelieving prayers on his behalf, unrighteous inner anger. But even more, I find myself marveling at the patience of God unashamed to call this man — and me — his own.

So often, I labor for others’ growth on a timeline dramatically shorter than God’s. Whereas I tend to track others’ progress in terms of days and weeks, “the living God,” says David Powlison, “seems content to work . . . on a scale of years and decades, throughout a whole lifetime” (Making All Things New, 61). And oh, how I want to be like him — zealously yearning for change, faithfully praying for change, and then patiently waiting for change.

For miracles are wondrous things. But many miracles take time and remarkable patience.

Disciples of Perfect Patience

The apostle Paul knew something of such patience. His own testimony bore the marks of God’s long-suffering love, his “perfect patience” (1 Timothy 1:16). And Paul remembered that patience. He couldn’t forget it.

In response, he lived and ministered with a profound patience of his own. What else could have kept Paul loving churches that sometimes broke his apostolic heart — churches like Corinth or Galatia? Though slandered (2 Corinthians 10:1–2), though underappreciated (Galatians 4:15–16), though repeatedly faced with startling folly and sin (1 Corinthians 3:1–4), Paul remained patient, a disciple of God’s perfect patience. He yearned, he prayed, he labored, he pleaded, but he also waited “with utmost patience” (2 Corinthians 12:12). He let miracles take their God-appointed time.

And so he instructed others. “Reprove, rebuke, and exhort,” O Timothy — yet do so “with complete patience” (2 Timothy 4:2). “Admonish the idle, encourage the fainthearted, help the weak,” dear Thessalonians — yet “be patient with them all” (1 Thessalonians 5:14). Patience, for Paul, was not merely one way of responding among many: it was a robe to clothe all responses.

“Miracles are wondrous things. But many miracles take time and remarkable patience.”

Where might such “complete patience” come from? Where might we find the strength to be patient not just with the outwardly hopeful, or with those whose struggles we understand, but “with them all”? Patience like Paul’s comes in part (as we’ve seen) from the backward glance, from the story of God’s patience with us. But Paul also gives us more. For so often, as he responds to sin and folly with patience, his eyes are looking ahead.

Imagine Them Then

Consider the Christian who causes you the most grief: a brother or sister in your small group, a parent or sibling, your own believing child. What do you see when you look at this person, especially in his worst moments? A stubborn young man, perhaps, who can’t seem to take counsel seriously. Or maybe a flaky woman whose “yes” is actually “we’ll see” and often “no.” A headache or a heartache. An inconvenience or an interruption. A waste of time.

Those assessments are understandable, at least to a man like me. But what did Paul see? He saw, no doubt, a troubled soul, just as we do. But whereas we often see only what is, Paul had an astounding ability to see what could be — and in Christ, what will be. We see a house unfinished; Paul saw an unfinished house. He saw stumbling saints in light of who they one day would become:

I am sure of this, that he who began a good work in you will bring it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ. (Philippians 1:6)

The picture frame I place around people is often no more than a cramped little square: I imprison them in the present moment, neglecting to see where they came from or where they’re going. But what a broad frame the apostle used! Broad enough to see the darkness and death from which others came (“he who began a good work in you . . .”) — and broad enough to see the light and life to which they are headed (“. . . will bring it to completion”).

Paul could still see the present moment, of course. And his patience did not prevent him from rebuking and reproving, nor from earnestly warning when needed. But when he looked upon someone in Christ — repenting, believing, yet often stumbling — today was not as important to him as “the day of Jesus Christ,” when this unimpressive saint would shine like the sun in the kingdom of God (Matthew 13:43).

And so, he could look upon today’s stumbling and see tomorrow’s standing. He could trace a line between today’s discouraging failure and tomorrow’s final victory. He could imagine the angry turned calm, the lustful made pure, the grumbling quietly content, and the bitter full of forgiveness — not because people themselves are so full of promise, but because our faithful God finishes whatever he begins.

Name Them Now

Ah, yes, I find myself thinking. Paul wrote those words to the Philippians, a maturing church. Would he say the same to the struggling? Indeed he would; indeed he did. He begins his letter to the Corinthians in much the same way (1 Corinthians 1:8–9). And as he does, he reveals another dimension of godly patience: the patient not only imagine other Christians then; they also draw that future reality down into the present moment and name these Christians now. They see, in Christ, that the sun of another’s life is rising, not setting, and then they define this person by the coming day, not the lingering night.

And so Paul, though discouraged and disappointed by the Corinthians’ slow progress, begins his letter with their true name: “To the church of God that is in Corinth, to those sanctified in Christ Jesus, called to be saints” (1 Corinthians 1:2). O Corinthians, you might act sometimes like sinners and fools, but that’s not who you are. In Christ, your name is saint.

We find this patient naming elsewhere as well, perhaps especially in Peter’s life. When he saw himself as merely “a sinful man,” worthy to be forsaken by Jesus, our patient Lord named him a fisher of men (Luke 5:8–10). Later, when Peter surely felt like little more than a lost and desperate sheep, our patient Lord named him a shepherd (John 21:15–17).

Every failed Peter needs someone to believe that failure need not define him. Every stumbling Corinthian needs someone to see his sin and still call him saint. Every discouraged Christian needs someone to lift his eyes to the coming day, when all the soul’s shadows will flee before the face of our patient and purifying Christ.

Of course, we don’t want to give anyone a name that God himself doesn’t give. But if Jesus could see a shepherd in Peter, and if Paul could see saints in the Corinthians, then surely we can name others more hopefully than we sometimes do. And what a difference such a name might make. When we feel utterly lost in some forest of failure, a faithful name can be like a path that suddenly appears and a light to guide our way. I don’t need to stay here, such a name suggests. In Jesus, I can be more than I am right now.

Room for Good to Grow

Several times in Paul’s letters, the grace of patience holds hands with another Spirit-given virtue: kindness. “Love is patient and kind,” he tells the Corinthians (1 Corinthians 13:4). He writes also of “the riches of [God’s] kindness and forbearance and patience” (Romans 2:4). In the garden of the Holy Spirit, the two grow side by side: “patience, kindness” (Galatians 5:22).

“Every failed Peter needs someone to believe that failure need not define him.”

Such a pairing suggests that the truly patient do not merely hold their tongue or restrain their burning frustration behind a forced smile. No, their patience is the product of a deeper passion, godly and pure: a love of kindness, the very kindness that leads to repentance (Romans 2:4). As God has been patiently kind with us — as God is, right now, patiently kind with us — so we love to be patiently kind with others.

Imagine, then, patience like the walls of a garden, protecting the fragile shoots of grace in another’s soul. Whereas impatience lets wind destroy and animals trample and chew, patience gives room for good things to grow. It gives room for kindness to shine like the sun and fall like rain, for the work that God began to grow toward completion.

You and I, dear Christian, are a garden within God’s walls. Whatever grace we have is a miracle wrought by his patience and nourished by his kindness. And the same miracles still happen today. We may see more of them if we pray, and imagine, and name, and wait, and robe our every word with some of the patience we have received from him.

Audio Transcript

Happy Memorial Day today for those of you here in the States. Last time, we looked at the sanctifying power of Christ on the cross. That was episode 2048. In our Bible reading together, we’ve been reading Mark 15 recently, about the death of Christ. It’s been a theme for us. And today we return to the cross by doing something different, Pastor John. I want you to respond to a viral video clip going around from a pretty well-known actor named Shia LaBeouf. He’s 37. He was converted to Roman Catholicism in recent years. He starred in the 2022 film Padre Pio, a movie named after a Catholic priest, mystic, and so-called venerated saint. Not long ago, in an interview, the actor was discussing the connection between Christ’s suffering and joy, and it generated some emails for you, all asking for your response.

Before we get to what he said, let me footnote a few caveats. It should be first said that the New Testament never speaks of individuals as saints. That’s a Catholic myth. Saints is a corporate title for all Christians. And I’m unsure if this actor understands the gospel, that Christ paid for the guilt of our sin by satisfying the wrath of God. He tends to speak of the cross as more of a moral model — Christ died mainly as an example for us. And he’s obviously very comfortable with images of Christ — crucifixes and paintings. Those are several factors I want to acknowledge at the front end of this episode and set aside for now. I don’t want to get into any of those.

As Shia spoke, my mind went to Hebrews 12:2 — a text you’ve brought up in 25 episodes on the podcast over the years, Pastor John, so I can see why listeners want you to weigh in and respond to what was said. I’ll read what he said and then ask you, on behalf of those listeners who emailed, What does this actor get right and what does he get wrong about the joy of Christ on the cross? Here’s what he said.

When I look at Christ on the cross, I think, hmm, is that a joyful man as he bleeds out and dies on a cross for humanity? Is that man joyful? And I think the answer is yes, that even in his suffering — that’s what Christ represents for me: meaningful suffering. The story of Christ is that God became man for our betterment. So, that means that he is the ultimate example, the supreme priest, the ultimate redeemer. If I look at Christ on the cross, I think, That’s very instructive. You don’t see a lot of smiley-face Christs on the cross. You don’t see Christ on the cross dying and laughing with aplomb — in joy, in ultimate joy. But I think they should make some Christs on the cross in ultimate serenity and ultimate joy. They always make this sad face. And that seems stupid. It seems like it’s not deep enough, like the artists who manufacture those crucifixes — it’s almost like they’re not seeing the full story. And the full story, I believe, is that Christ is in maximum joy in that moment. He is fully in his purpose. If you can tap into how you can use your suffering to help other people, that is maximum joy.

What strikes you?

What strikes me first is that I’m not sure what he means by joy and what he means by suffering even. It’s hard to respond with a clear yes or no to what he’s saying when he seems to switch categories on me. I’ll try to point out what I mean by this ambiguity by suggesting several positive responses. So, I’ll try to be positive before I’m negative.

Christ’s Purposeful Suffering

For example, he uses the phrase “meaningful suffering,” and I can’t escape the impression that he might mean that this phrase “meaningful suffering” is synonymous with “joyful suffering.” He says, “Is that man on the cross joyful? And I think the answer is yes, that even in his suffering — that’s what Christ represents for me: meaningful suffering.” So, he switches. He switches from joyful to meaningful, which is what throws me.

“What sustained Jesus was a confidently expected future experience of joy.”

Well, Christ’s suffering certainly was meaningful, right? Everybody would agree with that. Oh my goodness! His suffering carried more meaning in it than all the suffering of all the human beings in the world combined, because it carried in it the salvation of millions of people that nobody else’s suffering could do. So, that’s absolutely right: the suffering of Christ was not meaningless; it was infinitely meaningful. And if that’s what he means by joyful, it’s hard to disagree.

I see at least two other things that are positive. He says that Christ, at that moment of suffering, “is fully in his purpose.” That’s almost the same as saying that the suffering was meaningful — that is, it was fully purposeful. He was not being frustrated at that moment in his designs. He was accomplishing exactly what he came to do. Indeed, it is a satisfying thing to accomplish what you were designed to do. We all would agree with that. I’m doing what I was made to do. I’m doing what I came to do.

Then he applies that to us, and he says, “If you can tap into how you can use your suffering to help other people, that is maximum joy.” Well, the true part of that is that Jesus did say, “It is more blessed to give than to receive” (Acts 20:35). Living to make others glad in God is certainly a glad way of living, even through suffering.

When Is Maximum Joy?

But the question I have at this point is whether the moment of suffering is the moment of maximum joy. That’s my question. One biblical obstacle to thinking that way is Hebrews 12:2, which says, “Jesus . . . for the joy that was set before him endured the cross.” Notice that it does not locate the pinnacle of Jesus’s joy at the point of the cross, but on the other side of the cross. At the cross, the joy “was set before him.”

To be sure, Hebrews 11:1 teaches that, by faith, the substance of things hoped for — the substance of that future joy — can be tasted now. Yes, it can and is, even in our suffering. But that does not change the fact that the text says that what sustained Jesus was a confidently expected future experience of joy, whatever partial measure of it he might have tasted on the cross.

Another biblical factor that we have to, I think, take into account is that there are different kinds of experiences of joy and different degrees of joy, and not just because of sin. I don’t think joy goes up and down only because sin enters in. For example, in Luke 15:7 we are told that there is more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine who don’t need repentance. So, there’s very great joy in heaven, and there’s great joy in heaven — more joy and less more. And it’s not because there’s sin in heaven. There is no sin in heaven; that’s not what causes the difference.

So, it’s fair to say, isn’t it, that the sinless Christ may have tasted a kind of joy and a degree of joy as he suffered on the cross, but that there was a much fuller joy of a different kind even yet to be experienced beyond the cross.

It seems to me that Shia LaBeouf may be saying too much when he writes that some crucifixes should depict “ultimate serenity and ultimate joy.” I think any ordinary use of the word serenity would simply not fit the hours of Jesus’s horrific suffering. I just don’t think serenity is what you would see, nor should you explain it with that word. I think that would diminish the reality of his agony. I think to use the word ultimate to describe his joy is probably a failure to take into account that there will be more joy on the other side of death and resurrection and ascension.

Maintaining Mystery

Another biblical problem I have is that I think there’s probably a greater mystery at the moment of propitiation on the cross than he realizes. When Jesus says, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” that is the cry of the damned (Matthew 27:46). He is at that moment experiencing the outpouring of the wrath of God upon the sin of all his people. And I say it is a mystery because I don’t think we can give a sufficient account for how he can experience that damnation and joy simultaneously — at least, I don’t feel competent to rise to that level of sufficient explanation of what happened in that moment in the heart and mind of our Lord Jesus.

I’m not saying it’s impossible; I’m saying we need to tread very carefully here so as to give full measure to Christ’s mental and spiritual agony under the Father’s displeasure, even as we try to give proper measure to the fact that in himself Jesus had a clear conscience, and he was doing the absolutely right thing. It was meaningful; it was purposeful; it was the loving thing to do.

Maybe I should say one more thing before we stop our reflections. The mystery of Christ’s experience — indeed, the Father’s experience as Christ died on the cross — is expressed, I think, in Ephesians 5:2 in another way. Paul says, “Christ loved us and gave himself up for us, a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God.” A fragrant offering? Fragrant? Sweet smelling? Pleasing smelling? I take that to mean that God the Father was able, in some mysterious way, to pour out wrath on his beloved Son and know at the same time with approval that this sacrifice was beautiful, fragrant, pleasing, righteous, glorious — achieving everything that the two of them had designed and intended.

So, in summary, what I’m pleading for is a careful expression of the reality of Jesus’s suffering, the reality of being damned and forsaken, the reality of knowing that more joy lay ahead — all of that to temper any effort to describe the Lord’s experience on the cross as “ultimate joy.”