The last of the apostles, Paul, noted in Galatians 2:9–10 how happy he was that the earlier apostles assigned him two tasks: missions and mercy ministry.

When [they] perceived the grace that was given to me, they gave the right hand of fellowship to Barnabas and me, that we should go to the Gentiles. . . . Only, they asked us to remember the poor, the very thing I was eager to do.

That’s a different reaction from what pastors often get when they ask congregants to remember the poor. A few are eager. Others ignore the call altogether. Many respond reluctantly, like all of us do at some point when growing up: Do I have to? I can understand the reluctance. Some people insist that they first have to remember their own families. They are struggling to make ends meet. Some are working two jobs. I sympathize with them.

I’m more critical of some others.

Less Compassionate Conservatism

For two years during the nineties, I went on more than a hundred flights per year to promote community-level projects to help the materially poor. As a “platinum medallion” Delta customer, I frequently had free upgrades to first class that left me sitting next to skilled and wealthy doctors, lawyers, and other professionals. I would ask what they thought about their tax bills. “Too high.” I would then ask, “What if you could lower your tax bill by committing ten percent of your work time to direct help for those living on the other side of the tracks?” Oh. They typically responded with words like these: “Hmm, paying up isn’t that bad after all.” Few were eager to remember the poor.

“In our middle-class and wealthy churches, we may talk about remembering the poor, but do we mean it?”

Remember, that was during the nineties, a blessed decade in American life. From 1991 (when the Soviet Union disintegrated) to September 11, 2001, we believed we had no enemies in the world that could trouble us. The economy was generally good. By the end of the decade, the federal government had a balanced budget. (We should repeat the words “balanced budget” three times while clicking our ruby slippers because now that seems like a fairy tale.)

If many people of means did not want to remember the poor then, how likely is enthusiasm now, when callous conservatism seems to have driven out compassionate conservatism?

That’s only one of our problems.

Do We Really Mean It?

A new book by David Bahnsen, Full-Time: Work and the Meaning of Life, notes that in the past two decades suicide and drug overdoses are both up thirty percent. One out of six American adults regularly takes antidepression medication, and (coincidentally?) one out of six prime working-age men (ages 25 to 54) is not in the workforce. And “volunteering is on the decline,” according to an NPR report just before Christmas.

Again, I’m not criticizing those who are working two jobs or are overwhelmed with family needs. Our lives have different seasons. Besides, all of us are spiritually poor. We all need help. But for anyone who has a couple of hours a week available to help the materially poor, including many widows and orphans, including women facing a crisis pregnancy and not knowing how they will survive, including others who are heavy laden — it’s worth remembering that Paul did not just talk about helping those poor: he was eager to help them.

In 1948, when Harry S. Truman was president, South Carolina senator Strom Thurmond vehemently attacked Truman’s call for ending racial discrimination by the federal government. A reporter noted that Thurmond had faithfully supported President Franklin Roosevelt, who had said pretty much what Truman was saying. The reporter asked Thurmond, “Why are you being so critical?” Thurmond replied, “Truman really means it.”

Today, in our middle-class and wealthy churches, we may talk about remembering the poor, but do we mean it?

Five Ways to Encourage Eagerness

Some people see preaching the gospel and helping the poor as competitors for time and treasure: choose one or the other. That’s not true. If we are truly grateful for the grace given us, we will eagerly tell others of that grace, not only in word but also in deed, not only with words but also with dollars, and not only with dollars but also with our time.

When gratitude for the gospel awakens eagerness, church leaders need to have practical programs for remembering and helping the poor. Here then are five practical steps that we can take to encourage eagerness.

1. Start really small.

First, when congregation members don’t know how to swim, start them in the shallow end of the pool. Do not proudly proclaim, “We will work with the long-term homeless.” No, many of those are the hardest to help, and the frustrations of trying will leave many people uneager to try again. Instead, start with children in grades one through four who are falling behind in reading. That puts them in danger of dropping out of high school and becoming ineligible for most jobs. Listening to little children read demands patience and the ability to say, “Good job.” They’re not threatening, and success there leaves helpers eager to move on to harder tasks.

2. Distinguish unable from unwilling.

Second, remember the poor by not treating them in a one-size-fits-all way. Two centuries ago, the mayor of Boston, Josiah Quincy, made a good tripartite distinction. Some among the poor are “able” (ready and willing to work, and thus needing a job, not alms). Some are “unable” (and thus worthy of alms). Some are able but “unwilling.” Church volunteers are likely to find pleasure in working with the able and the unable, and frustration with the unwilling. Quincy also recognized the need to know the poor individually and not make assumptions based on appearance. He gave the poor opportunities and let them show in which category they belonged.

3. Begin with talents, not needs.

Third, we can increase eagerness and avoid making premature distinctions by practicing ABCD, “asset-based community development,” an approach based on John McKnight’s teaching about starting with the talents of those seeking help rather than their needs, and building on what they can do rather than what they can’t do. Michael Mather, in Having Nothing, Possessing Everything, describes a church that put ABCD into practice: instead of passing out dollars, it helped a seamstress, a shoe repairer, a musician, and many others to monetize their skills.

4. Recover the goodness of work.

Fourth, Bahnsen’s Full-Time points out that American culture generally (including church culture) undervalues work. Many see work as a means to the end of not working. Many miss the way God created both physical and intellectual work before that tragic day in Eden: Adam was a gardener and a namer. After the fall, work is harder but still a means to discover our meaning and purpose, and to glorify God by cultivating the world he created. When some of the wealthy among us stop working as soon as they can, it’s hard to insist upon its importance for everyone. High schools and colleges earn their funding only when graduates wake up eager to work each weekday.

5. Learn from the experienced.

Fifth, we can learn not only from Bahnsen and Mather but from other books past and present. I learned a lot during the 1990s while writing on these issues. The deacons in my church read Steve Corbett and Brian Fikkert’s When Helping Hurts: How to Alleviate Poverty Without Hurting the Poor. Note the practical subtitles on three more twenty-first-century books: Robert Lupton’s Toxic Charity: How Churches and Charities Hurt Those They Help — And How to Reverse It, Lawrence Mead’s From Prophecy to Charity: How to Help the Poor, and Howard Husock’s The Poor Side of Town — and Why We Need It.

“The unjust, rich or poor, live by making demands. The just, poor or rich, live by faith.”

While writing a preface to the thirtieth-anniversary edition of The Tragedy of American Compassion, I read Gene Dattel’s good history book, Reckoning with Race — and saw that my reckoning was inadequate. Books by John McWhorter (including Losing the Race) and Thomas Sowell (including The Thomas Sowell Reader) can also help. Books from the right and left such as Jason Riley’s Please Stop Helping Us and Elizabeth Wilkerson’s Caste provoke thinking about the consequences of slavery, segregation, and hating our neighbors.

None of those five steps will work, of course, unless we desire God. The unjust, rich or poor, live by making demands. The just, poor or rich, live by faith.

Audio Transcript

Welcome to a new week on the podcast. This week in our Navigators Bible Reading Plan, we start our May readings. Month number five is upon us. And that means we begin the new month in the first four chapters of 1 Samuel, reading the story of a dad named Eli and his worthless sons. That’s the Bible’s language — 1 Samuel 2:12 says it: “Now the sons of Eli were worthless men.” That’s a brutal assessment right from the start of their story, one that continues in 1 Samuel 2:12–36 and then picks up in 1 Samuel 4:12–22.

With such a heavy story on the docket, we start this week talking about parenting — because clearly there’s a link between our parenting and our children, right? Failed child, failed parent. Well, such a link never tells the whole story of parenting, as we are going to hear today as we look at the parenting assurances that we read about in the book of Proverbs.

All this came up in an APJ from 2015 that I want to reshare with you today. The question was from a new mom named Brenda. She asks, “Pastor John, I have a 22-month-old daughter, and I’m already teaching her about Jesus and sharing my faith with her. However, recently I’ve heard about many adult children who grew up in a strong Christian home — some who even had parents who were leaders in the church — who eventually left the faith as adults. This has become my biggest fear for my own daughter. Can you explain Proverbs 22:6 and give me some practical ways I can help my daughter have a true, authentic relationship with Jesus — one that she will not abandon later on?”

Well, I wish I knew more about this question than I do, even after 43 years of parenting five children, but I want to base everything I say, as much as possible, on the Bible and not just on my personal limitations. So, I will try to say something. Let’s talk about Proverbs 22:6 first, and then we will get to what you can do to maximize the likelihood that your child will follow the Lord.

“Rest in the sovereignty of God over your children. We cannot bear the weight of their eternity.”

Proverbs 22:6 says, “Train up a child in the way he should go; even when he is old he will not depart from it.” And the problem we all feel is that the promise half of that verse — “he will not depart from it” — seems so absolute that every time a grown-up child of a Christian family departs from the way of wisdom, or the way of faith in Jesus, we must conclude that it is owing to a failure of the parents to obey the first half of the verse — namely, to train him properly. That is a pretty heavy burden to bear for most parents. But if that is what the text means, then we should be willing to bear it.

Before I say what I think that promise actually means, there are passages in the Bible where the disobedience of children as adults — departing from the faith and making a shipwreck of their lives — is traced back to the failures of fathers.

Parental Failures

For example, Adonijah, David’s son — David, the man after God’s own heart — “exalted himself, saying, ‘I will be king.’ And he prepared for himself chariots and horsemen, and fifty men to run before him. His father had never at any time displeased him by asking, ‘Why have you done thus and so?’” (1 Kings 1:5–6). Now, that is a very intentional criticism of David. His father had never taken the time to say, “Don’t do that,” because he didn’t want to displease Adonijah. And clearly, this biblical writer is chalking up the rebelliousness of Adonijah against his own dad to the failure of his father to rebuke him. So there it is. We do err, and our errors have terrible consequences.

Here is another example: the sons of Eli the priest. A prophet came to Eli and said, “Why then do you scorn my sacrifices and my offerings that I commanded for my dwelling, and honor your sons above me by fattening yourselves on the choicest parts of every offering of my people Israel?” (1 Samuel 2:29). Wow. When Eli heard his sons had been killed by God for their disobedience, he fell over backward, broke his neck, and died because he was old and fat (1 Samuel 4:18). And it says he got fat because he honored his sons above God, because his sons were pulling out the choicest parts of the sacrifices to eat, and their dad loved the food so much he wouldn’t criticize his kids.

Oh, he criticized their fornication in the temple, but they kept their jobs, and they kept misusing the sacrifices. What this shows is that a dad can be very selective in his discipline and his criticism of his children, and clearly the prophet here wants to criticize Eli for honoring his sons above God by failing to reprimand them in the way they were handling the sacrifice.

“The only perfect Father who ever was had a son who went astray.”

So, the point there is simply not to blow off Proverbs 22:6, as though there were no correlation between the way you bring up your children and what becomes of them. I mean, I am a dad, for goodness’ sake. I know this is a huge weight to bear for all of us — when our kids don’t do things we think they should do or do things we think they shouldn’t do, to look back and say, “Could I have done better?” And the answer is almost always yes.

No Foolproof Process

But having said all of that, I doubt that the second half of Proverbs 22:6 — “even when he is old he will not depart from it” — I doubt that the writer of Proverbs intends for us to take that as an absolute promise with no exceptions. And I’ve got three reasons why I don’t think that means it is a foolproof process — that if you bring up your child in a godly way, he will never depart from the faith.

1. Bad sons follow good kings (and vice versa).

When you read the history of the kings of Israel, a good and faithful king is sometimes followed by a bad son. A bad king is sometimes followed by a good son. There doesn’t seem to be any effort on the part of the inspired writer to say that faithful fathers have faithful sons and unfaithful fathers have unfaithful sons. There doesn’t seem to be any effort to do that. The writer seems to be okay pointing out that this godly king is going to have an ungodly son (and vice versa).

2. The only perfect Father had a rebellious son.

The only perfect Father who ever was had a son who went astray. Israel is God’s son and was rebellious almost its entire existence, in spite of all God’s fatherly ways with his child. Here is an example: in Hosea 11:1–2, God says, “When Israel was a child, I loved him, and out of Egypt I called my son. The more they were called, the more they went away.” This is God, the perfect Father, pleading with his son. And what does he get for it? A lifetime — I mean, a history time, the whole history of Israel, the whole history of the Old Testament — shows that this son is rebellious.

3. A proverb is rarely an absolute statement.

I think this is the most important point contextually. Proverbs 22:6 is a proverb — and proverbs, by their very nature, are generalizations about the way life usually is rather than promises about the way it will have to be all the time. You could just read through Proverbs, and you will see this.

For example, in Proverbs 22:29 it says, “Do you see a man skillful in his work? He will stand before kings.” Well, really, are we going to force the writer to mean that every carpenter or every stonecutter in Israel who does his job well is going to get a chance to go to the palace and stand before the king? That is surely not the way we should take the proverb, and many others. The point of the proverb is to make the generalization that excellence in our work generally gets recognized by discerning people and leads to great benefits — something like that.

The clearest example of how proverbs work is, of course (everybody who has studied Proverbs knows this), Proverbs 26:4–5. Proverbs 26:4 says, “Answer not a fool according to his folly, lest you be like him yourself.” Verse 5, the next verse, says, “Answer a fool according to his folly, lest he be wise in his own eyes.”

Now, what that does is reveal the nature of proverbs. “Haste makes waste”; “a stitch in time saves nine.” Those are opposites, right? “Haste makes waste.” Is that a true proverb? Yes. “A stitch in time saves nine.” Is that a true proverb? Yes. Well, they command opposite things. Yes, which is why Proverbs 26:9 says this: “Like a thorn that goes up into the hand of a drunkard is a proverb in the mouth of fools.”

“Kids need to see how precious Jesus is to Mom and Dad.”

In other words, you can use proverbs to put thorns through people. You have to be wise to even know what to do with a proverb. You can’t just take proverbs and assume that they are self-explanatory. It takes wisdom to know how to wield a proverb. “A word fitly spoken is like apples of gold in a setting of silver” (Proverbs 25:11). Yet you have got to know the time and the place to use a proverb.

So, for those three reasons, I don’t think that Brenda should bear the horrific weight of thinking that if she could just do it exactly right, it guarantees that her 22-month-old daughter will be a solid believer when she is 22 years old. She cannot bear that burden.

Counsel for Godly Parenting

So, here is what I want to say to her — just a few things.

1. In general, bringing up children God’s way will lead them to eternal life. In general, I think that is true.

2. This would include putting our hope in God and praying earnestly for wisdom and for their salvation all the way to the grave. Don’t just pray until they get converted at age six. That is not very smart. Pray all the way to the grave for your children’s conversions and for the perseverance of their apparent conversions.

3. Saturate them with the word of God. “Faith comes from hearing, and hearing through the word of Christ” (Romans 10:17).

4. Be radically consistent and authentic in your own faith — not just in behavior, but in affections. Kids need to see how precious Jesus is to Mom and Dad, not just how he is obeyed, or how they get to church, or how they read devotions, or how they do duty. They need to see the joy and the satisfaction in Mom’s and Dad’s heart that Jesus is the greatest friend in the world.

5. Model the preciousness of the gospel. As we parents confess our own sins and depend on grace, our kids will see, “Oh, you don’t have to be perfect. Mom and Dad aren’t perfect. They love grace. They love the gospel because Jesus forgives their sins. And I know, then, that he can forgive my sins.”

6. Be part of a Bible-saturated, loving church. Kids need to be surrounded by other believers and not just Mom and Dad.

7. Require obedience. Do not be lazy. There are so many young parents today that just strike me as being so lazy. They are not willing to get up and do what needs to be done to bring this kid into line. So, we should follow through on our punishments and follow through especially on all of our promises of good things that we say we are going to do for them.

8. God saves children out of failed and unbelieving parenting. God is sovereign. We aren’t the ones, finally, who save our kids.

9. Rest in the sovereignty of God over your children. We cannot bear the weight of their eternity. That is God’s business. We must roll all of that onto him.

“Abandon all hope, you who enter here.” This warning stands etched for eternity over the gates of Dante’s hell. It is one of the most famous lines in literature, and rightly so. It marks the beginning of Dante’s descent, following the footsteps of Christ, into the heart of the earth — a sobering journey that puts both the fear and fitness of divine justice on full display.

Many are tempted to “abandon all hope” at just the prospect of reading Dante. Perhaps you were forced to slog through Inferno in high school or read a few excerpts about Beatrice in college. Yet few realize that Dante wrote his epic poem, including his descent into hell, precisely to offer hope to Christians in their pilgrimage through this life. He offers himself as a guide for all who would follow in his footsteps, a shepherd of the Christian imagination.

C.S. Lewis once observed, “Certain things, if not seen as lovely or detestable, are not being correctly seen at all” (A Preface to Paradise Lost, 67). In other words, you don’t really see reality if you don’t feel rightly about it. If you don’t see God as beautiful, you don’t actually see God. If you don’t see sin as utterly ugly, you don’t actually see sin. Like trying to see a rainbow in black-and-white, you don’t really see it without the color. And here Dante shines as such a valuable guide for us because he leveraged all of his poetic prowess to help his readers see and feel rightly about God and everything else in relation to him.

In short, Dante wrote for you. By shaping our imaginations, Dante aims to pull back the veil of appearances and show us what’s really real. Therefore, if we will journey with him, Dante proves himself wonderfully relevant to Christians today. To motivate you to embark on this pilgrimage, I want to examine one image Dante gives us in Inferno that helps us envision just how detestable our sin is.

Showing the Invisible

Before turning to Inferno, however, a word on the imagination and how Dante appeals to it. Dante holds that a disciplined imagination is essential for Christian maturity because it serves an indispensable role in tracing the Good, the True, and the Beautiful to their fountainhead in the triune God. He celebrates the fact that all things find their meaning and purpose in relation to God, who is

The ever-living One and Two and Three     that ever reigns as Three and Two and One     uncircumscribed and circumscribing all. (Paradise, 14.28–30)

Furthermore, Dante sees the incarnation of Jesus as the key to understanding everything. Just as the Word became flesh and revealed the invisible God, man can imitate the incarnation through the imagination. Our words form images that make invisible realities visible. Good stories help us really see.

“Dante offers himself as a guide for all who would follow in his footsteps, a shepherd of the Christian imagination.”

It should come as no surprise, then, that Dante has shaped and ordered the Christian imagination as much as any man besides Jesus. His labyrinthine fourteen-thousand-line poem, The Divine Comedy, is for the imagination a playground and a schoolhouse, a cathedral and an observatory, a courtroom and an art gallery. It is a story that springs up from the leaf mold of a mind saturated in Scripture and awed by “the love that moves the sun and other stars” (Paradise, 33.145). Thus, Dante can help guide us on the path of godliness and maturity.

Now, how does Dante employ the imagination to unmask the true nature of sin?

Sin Incarnate

In Inferno, Dante leads his readers into the depths of hell in order to illustrate what sin does to the soul. By presenting a host of sinners and their punishments, Dante paints soul-pictures to help us envision how sin leaves people bent and broken. In Dante’s vision, sinners embody the sins they cling to. To use the category we mentioned earlier, the sinner incarnates the sin. As Lewis puts it in The Great Divorce, the grumbler becomes a grumble. Fittingly, then, the punishments in hell are not tacked on after the fact. They are a picture of God giving sinners up to the intrinsic effects of their sin (Romans 1:24–32). Sin goes against the grain of God’s design, and Dante shows us what it looks like when you get splinters.

For instance, in canto 5 of Inferno, Dante presents those people who were dominated by lust in life as souls endlessly tossed to and fro by “a hellish cyclone that can never rest” (Inferno, 5.31). Like little birds in a blizzard, these souls are carried wherever the winds take them. This image perfectly depicts the sin of lust, which puts desire in the driver’s seat so that we are “led astray, slaves to various passions” (Titus 3:3). With this image, and a host of others, Dante helps us see the final destination of disordered loves.

The Soul-Picture of Ulysses

To look at a more involved example, Dante presents one of his most poignant and convicting soul-pictures in canto 26. In this eighth circle of hell, Dante meets the mythic character Ulysses, the mastermind of the Trojan horse and main character of Homer’s Odyssey. In Ulysses, Dante presents the embodiment of a sin that haunts the lips and keyboards of our own age — the misuse of words.

When Dante meets Ulysses, he recounts the story of his downfall. After a decade of fighting the Homeric wars, Ulysses finally returns home to his wife, son, and father. Yet he shamelessly admits that none of these bonds of love

Could drive from me the burning to go forth     to gain experience of the world, and learn     of every human vice, and human worth. (Inferno, 26.97–99)

Like the lustful, Ulysses is blown about by his passions. Like our first parents, he harbors a sinful obsession to obtain the knowledge of good and evil. Burning with this ambition, Ulysses uses his eloquence to inflame his war-weary friends with a desire to sail to the ends of the earth and storm the gates of Eden. However, before they can ever set foot on that hallowed shore, a whirlwind “to please Another’s will” sinks their ship, killing the whole crew. God quelled Job’s curiosity from the whirlwind, and Dante envisions the same for Ulysses’s folly.

In this image of Ulysses, Dante shows the destructive power of the tongue. Ulysses is a master rhetorician, and his words are poison. With just nine lines of speech, Ulysses convinces those he calls brothers to join him in his sin. He boasts,

I made my comrades’ appetites so keen     to take the journey, by this little speech,     I hardly could have held them after that. (26.121–123)

With carefully wrought words, Ulysses enflames the desire of others, enticing them into sin that ends in death (James 1:14–15).

The Fiery Tongue

The story itself is a parable of warning, but it is the punishment that finally unmasks the sin. Ulysses’s penalty involves being eternally encased in a tongue of flame, a flame kindled by the blaze of his own tongue. Here Ulysses embodies the sin of misusing words. And the punishment fits the crime for at least three reasons.

First, it is a kind of anti-Pentecost. At Pentecost, the Spirit rested on men like tongues of fire, freeing the tongues of men to set the world ablaze with truth. Yet Ulysses is imprisoned by his tongue, locked in his own lies. Second, as James tells us, the tongue is a fire, a restless inferno of unrighteousness (James 3:1–12). The fiery tongue kindles the world. Third, in life, Ulysses’s tongue devoured the lives of his friends. Now the very flame that consumed others eternally consumes the soul that wielded it. He entrapped with words, and now he is entrapped. The arsonist burns on his own pyre.

This image rightly haunts the imagination. It is truly terrible because the sin it reveals is detestable to God! Even as I write these words, I behold Ulysses as a blazing beacon of warning. My tongue, just like yours, is powerful. I can use it to help others enjoy God and see Christ. Or I can twist it to my own ends, subtly kindling my own ego and reputation. I can use it to bring life or, like Ulysses, to bring death.

Dante himself felt this danger. Staring at Ulysses veiled in flame, Dante determined to “hold my genius under tighter rein / Lest without virtue’s guidance it run loose” (Inferno, 26.21–22). Dante, gifted with great linguistic ability, knew he could lead others to ruin if God did not tame his tongue.

“Our words form images that make invisible realities visible. Good stories help us really see.”

And the warning of Ulysses is not limited to professional wordsmiths. With the help of the Internet and social media, the reach and speed of our words today make the danger all the greater. Ulysses’s “little speech” is no longer than an average text message or social media post, and they can be just as deadly. Like sparks in a forest, a few lines of misused words can set society ablaze. Therefore, we would do well to heed Dante’s image of Ulysses.

Imagining Reality

More broadly, we would do well to heed all of Dante’s images. I have given just one snapshot of how Dante — a man saturated in Scripture and enchanted by myth — can guide us on the Christian pilgrimage by shaping our imaginations. He can help us love much when we realize we have been forgiven much (Luke 7:47). He can guide us up toward holiness by revealing the ugliness of sin. He can help us bask in the light of God.

In short, Dante — and others like him who wield the imagination faithfully — can pull back the veil and show us a glimpse of the way the world really is.

What is the difference between those welcomed into heaven and those thrown into hell? Can we imagine a more relevant or urgent question? While depicting the final judgment in parable form, Jesus gives us a surprising answer: their thoughts.

“What comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us,” wrote A.W. Tozer (Knowledge of the Holy, 1). Jesus shows this true for the evil servant in the parable of the talents (Matthew 25:14–30). In the parable, Jesus gives us a glimpse into one difference between those welcomed into heaven and those thrown into judgment: their beliefs about God’s goodness. We get beneath actions into the psychology of the lost man, a window showing what squirmed beneath his disobedient life.

As we consider him, be asking yourself questions such as: What comes to mind when I think about God? Who do I assume he is? What does he love? What does he hate? What kind of Person governs the world? Is he good? Is he happy, blessed, disposed to give freely, or not? Beliefs about his goodness can lead to a useful life with heaven to follow or a worthless life with hell close behind.

At Journey’s End

The master finally returns from his long journey to meet with his three servants “and [settle] accounts with them” (Matthew 25:19). Before he left, he had entrusted them with his property, each according to his ability. He gave the ablest man five talents; the next, two talents; and to the last, he gave one. Jesus focuses the parable on their report of their stewardship in his absence. Had they been watchful for his return and about their master’s business (verse 13)?

“Beliefs about God’s goodness can lead to a useful life with heaven to follow or a worthless life with hell close behind.”

The first two report, rejoicing with their lord that, by their trading, they had each doubled what their master left them. Eyes then turn to the third servant. “He also who had received the one talent came forward” (verse 24).

Had he set off to the happy work like the first two servants? No. He buried the treasure in the backyard. But why? For the same reason as many today: he did not know the goodness of his master.

The God He Thought He Knew

Note the first words out of the servant’s mouth: “Master, I knew you to be a hard man.” What a different assessment from the first two, and what a strange conclusion given the facts we know. Do many masters entrust such valuable property to their servants’ keeping? Pharaoh withholds straw to make bricks, but this master hands over precious jewels from the vault. A talent is not a single coin; it is a treasure chest of precious wealth, twenty years of wages. The master hands him up to one million dollars in today’s wages — and simply leaves. Who is the servant to steward such wealth?

To account for this unbelievable opportunity, the servant twists the interpretation to excuse his thanklessness. “Master, I knew you to be a hard man, reaping where you did not sow, and gathering where you scattered no seed” (Matthew 25:24). He thought he knew an exacting master, a groping master, a severe man about the bottom line.

His lord — seemingly generous beyond any master earth has ever seen — was really grasping, not giving; extracting, not investing; extorting, not enriching. We even hear an accusation of laziness against the master — he was one who didn’t get his own hands dirty. Don’t we sometimes project our own sins upon God, as this “slothful” servant did (verse 26)?

So, he saw his master as a giant fly, rubbing his greedy hands in anticipation of profit. Faceless were the slaves who built his house. Should this servant stoop to be ridden as a donkey? Was he an ox to tread grain? This master’s yoke was not easy, nor his burden light.

Finally, his wickedness curls up in the fetal position. “I was afraid, and I went and hid your talent in the ground” (verse 25). Thus, he knew a God to be feared, but not obeyed. This man knew his master’s will and thought to lazily hide from the failure of trying in the failure of disobedience. He committed his talent to nature’s vault. Better for his master to lose benefit than go bankrupt. “Here, you have what is yours” (verse 25).

The God He Did Not Know

That was the God he thought he knew: a hard and severe master whose generosity was pretense for profit, a master who fed his cattle well. He did not know the master that animated the service of the other two servants.

1. He did not know the master eager to commend.

The passage stresses that the two faithful servants left “at once” to do their master’s work (verses 16–17). I imagine them going forward with excitement. Really, me? I get to serve my Lord in this way? And that same excitement brought them to show their master the fruit of faith-filled trading, as children with a Father: “Here are your five talents, master, and five more!”

And how does the master respond? With that fatherly twinkle of satisfaction in his eyes, he will not let them do one thing more without warming them with his pleasure: “Well done, my good and faithful servants!” (verses 21, 23).

2. He did not know the God who gives for keeps.

In the end, how false and foolish this servant’s meditations of the miserly God. Wonder with me: the master didn’t give the talents for his own profit, but for theirs. He gave for keeps. This Lord designed for loyal stewards to keep their talents and the increase.

The worthless servant learned this lesson the hard way: “Take the talent from him and give it to him who has the ten talents” (Matthew 25:28). He doesn’t say, “Give to the servant who made me five talents.” The talents now belong to the servant, as confirmed in the next line: “For to everyone who has will more be given, and he will have an abundance” (verse 29). From before the journey, this master gave intending to make them rich. His joy — “Well done, good and faithful servant!” — was not in what he gained, but in what they gained. Is this your hard and stingy God?

3. He did not know the master who gives in order to give more.

“You have been faithful over a little,” he tells the good servants. “I will set you over much” (Matthew 25:21, 23). Do not let that humble word little pass by unnoticed. The five-talent servant gained another lifetime of value by his trading. Jesus calls this stewardship little compared to the much on its way.

Have you placed your life and all that you own upon the altar before God? Have you left family or fortune for the gospel? Have you despised your life in this world, looking to that country to come? Little your trading, great your promotion. Remain constant, as Joseph governing in prison: soon, you shall stand second-in-command in the new heavens and new earth; he will set you over much. Our greatest labor for Christ in this world is but the small beginnings to our real labor for Christ in the next.

4. He did not know the God of spacious joy.

What did the wicked servant think as he overheard the master’s final remark to the truehearted? “Enter into the joy of your Master” (verses 21, 23). The evil servant did not know that this Master’s joy was a country of happiness. He thought him a hard man, an unhappy man, but he is the happiest of all men. “Leave your joys behind and enter mine!” Or, “These things I have spoken to you, that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be full” (John 15:11). Here is a God to labor under. Here is a God to trust. Here is a God who can happify his servants forever.

He Hides a Smiling Face

If he only believed in the blessedness of this master’s heart, that the master really meant to reward and welcome him into his own joy upon his return, how things might have changed. The problem was not his master; the problem was his heart. The problem was not his abilities; the problem was his sloth. The master’s assessment proved him an evil, lazy, unreasonable servant (Matthew 25:26–27). In the end, he is cast into outer darkness. Sinners who spin lies get caught in webs.

So, my reader, what do you think of God? Does he give us serpents when we ask for bread? Is he watching with an eagle’s eye to strike you when you stumble? Is he stingy, heartless, selfish? Does he tax at high rates and offer mere rations to strengthen for tomorrow’s slavery? How does your life answer?

If we think high of him, he is higher. If we think well of him, he is better. If we think base of him, he shall not always correct us. Unjust beliefs that lead to unjust lives provoke his justice. “With the merciful you show yourself merciful; with the blameless man you show yourself blameless; with the purified you show yourself pure; and with the crooked you make yourself seem tortuous” (Psalm 18:25–26).

Some of you do not serve him because you do not know him. Others have let hard and bitter circumstances deceive you into thinking he is hard and embittering. Business is not going as planned. You just received news that you lost the baby, again. Life should have been so different by now.

And the perfectly aimed question comes: Is this your good Master? O saints, Satan is asking God about some of you just now — “Does this ‘faithful servant’ really keep his integrity? Does he fear God for no reason? Touch his health, touch her fertility, touch his money, and they will curse you to your face.”

“Our greatest labor for Christ in this world is but the small beginnings to our real labor for Christ in the next.”

O saints, the Master is so good — above our deserts or imaginings — and he proved it for all time. How? By handing us his property, taking the long, faraway journey to Golgotha, and dying on the cross to pay our debts that we might keep his blessings. The Master not only gives his property to us — he offers himself for us. On the cross, Jesus lifted God’s goodness high above any of our earthly circumstances. “God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us” (Romans 5:8).

So,

Ye fearful saints, fresh courage take;The clouds ye so much dreadAre big with mercy and shall breakIn blessings on your head.

Judge not the Lord by feeble sense,But trust him for his grace;Behind a frowning providenceHe hides a smiling face. (William Cowper, “God Moves in a Mysterious Way”)

Every year as summer approaches, the world hastens to embrace its warmth. Restaurant patios shake out their snowy dust, kids trickle back into parks, sunscreen appears in the checkout aisle, teenage lifeguards ready the pools, vacation ads become relentless — and the clothing departments transform overnight.

Oversized sweaters vanish; swimsuits now welcome shoppers. Spaghetti-strap dresses stand in place of trench coats, and short shorts overtake long pants. A flock of oddly named tops — crop tops, tank tops, halter tops, tube tops — sidelines the long-sleeve section. Weatherproof boots no longer necessary, strappy shoes (of questionable durability) line the shelves.

The first glimpses of summer often appear on in-store mannequins and online models. For Christian women, that glimpse often causes not only anticipation, but anxiety, as that nagging and perennial question emerges: How might we dress modestly?

Asking Questions Carefully

So, how might we dress modestly? Of course, true modesty springs from the heart’s disposition, not the closet’s contents, and extends well beyond the clothes we keep. As one author states, “The external signs of what we call ‘modest behavior’ — not bragging, not showing off your body too much — are ultimately signifiers of modesty, not modesty itself” (Shalit, A Return to Modesty, xxv).

At the same time, when the summer months roll around, a choice in clothing still stands between us and the sun. So, to answer the question, I often find myself asking another: Would it be wrong if I wore this? I imagine many women can relate. In the pursuit of modesty, we tend to censure our clothing for sin — which can be an immature approach. Though the Bible commands modest dress (1 Timothy 2:9–10), it doesn’t include a list of modesty dos and don’ts. Were we to hold up an outfit and ask Matthew or Peter to tell us yay or nay, godly or sinful, we may get little response. “Thou shalt not wear . . .” is, well, nowhere.

As a result of Scripture’s supposed silence, we can begin to define “modest” as “not too immodest” — not too much like the world. That’s when the tricky questions really start firing: Are these shorts too short? Is this shirt too revealing? Are these pants too tight? And so we sift through summer clothing racks, hunting for items that won’t look too much like the way the world dresses in warm weather.

As such, we place modesty’s meaning (and expression) at the mercy of the masses, whose sense of “too far” only seem to inch further away. The tendency is not unique to our age. As early as the second century, church father Tertullian addressed the issue, in a work suitably called On Modesty:

The modesty of which we are now beginning to treat is by this time grown so obsolete, that it is not the abjuration [the rejection] but the moderation [the restraint] of the appetites which modesty is believed to be; and he is held to be chaste enough who has not been too chaste. But let the world’s modesty see to itself. (2)

So long as society sets our standard of dress, “modesty” simply means being less immodest than others. But “let the world’s modesty see to itself,” advises Tertullian. How might we? Is there a way to leave the house knowing not just that we tried our best to avoid worldliness, but that we actively aspired to godliness? Don’t we long for more than looking good without feeling too bad?

Perhaps the apostle Paul can assist us. Though the Bible is quiet on wardrobe particulars, it is loud on wisdom principles. One in particular from 1 Corinthians may help us to wade into the summer with truth and grace, rather than imprudence or stress.

‘Is It Helpful?’

Throughout 1 Corinthians, Paul tackles a similarly sensitive topic for first-century Christians: food. What can they eat, and what can’t they eat? The Corinthian believers want to know. (Sounds familiar!)

“In what ways does the desire to wear what we want when we want rule over us?”

Though Paul responds to this tension multiple times, we’ll focus on what he says in chapters 6 and 10. In both places, he begins by quoting a maxim the Corinthians themselves held: “All things are lawful” (1 Corinthians 6:12; 10:23). In other words: No food is unclean. Because in the new covenant, “it is not what goes into the mouth that defiles a person, but what comes out of the mouth; this defiles a person” (Matthew 15:11). So, what can they eat? In theory, anything.

Even so, that’s not the end of his response. Upon declaring all foods clean, he adds, “. . . but not all things are helpful.” Eating this or that food isn’t inherently sinful — but that doesn’t make it helpful. “Not wrong” doesn’t spell “automatically good.” Could the same be said of our clothing?

God’s word outlaws no outfits, but that doesn’t mean every outfit “helps” — benefits, profits, serves, encourages — ourselves and others. So, while the questions “Is it wrong?” and “Is it too [blank]?” tend to flounder around, maybe we can begin to anchor our dress in another direction: Is it helpful? Following Paul’s lead, let’s consider the helpfulness of our clothing choices in two areas.

1. Is it helpful for my soul?

Paul first mentions lawful-yet-unhelpful matters in 1 Corinthians 6. There, he equates helpfulness with what is personally profitable: “‘All things are lawful for me,’ but not all things are helpful. ‘All things are lawful for me,’ but I will not be dominated by anything” (verse 12). In other words, we “help” our faith along only so far as we flee anything that seeks to dominate us — govern us, control us, dictate us — apart from God. What our hangers hold is no exception.

Do we fidget over how to appear expensive, or fit, or even perfectly unkempt? How much hold does an approving or affectionate glance have on our heart? In what ways does the desire to wear what we want when we want rule over us? If someone we respect and admire were to question our swimsuit choices, would we mutter to ourselves about “legalism,” or would we walk away from the conversation open to the notion? “Inward examination,” writes Kristyn Getty,

should not make us fearful. It is necessary as we seek to fix our eyes on Christ. We don’t keep the course of steadfast faith accidentally. It’s a costly path that requires diligence, repentance, and the Holy Spirit’s sanctifying work. (ESV Women’s Devotional Bible, 1551)

If we value Christ above everything, then we will gladly consider whether any one thing (even our favorite dress) is competing for our affection. And when we do, we’ll grow in godliness and increase in joy. Happy is the woman who has no reason to pass judgment on herself for the clothes she buys, for she knows that her purchases proceed from faith, not fashion (Romans 14:22–23).

2. Is it helpful for my neighbor?

But dressing “helpfully” reaches beyond what bolsters our own faith. In 1 Corinthians 10, Paul expands the meaning to include what is loving toward others: “‘All things are lawful,’ but not all things are helpful. ‘All things are lawful,’ but not all things build up. Let no one seek his own good, but the good of his neighbor” (verses 23–24).

When it comes to our clothes, we have the same freedom as Paul’s first-century readers. Neither dietary laws nor dress codes bind new-covenant Christians, no matter the era. But also like the early church, we have the same responsibility to use that freedom helpfully. “Do not use your freedom as an opportunity for the flesh, but through love serve one another” (Galatians 5:13). A proper response to our freedom in Christ, explains John Piper, is not simply to assert our freedoms.

No, that’s not the way a Christian talks. We ask, “Will it be helpful? Will it be profitable? Will other people benefit from my enjoyment of this?” . . . That’s the principle of love.

With great freedom comes great love toward God and neighbor.

But how does that love dress on Monday mornings and Saturday nights, in church and at the pool? We must answer for ourselves. What is helpful for me (as a Coloradan wife and mother of little ones, with long-standing battles against pride and envy) may differ from you. Only let both of us answer the question “How might we dress modestly?” in a way that lovingly, sincerely seeks others’ good (1 Timothy 1:5).

For pews and grocery stores alike brim with people God loves, people for whom Christ died (John 3:16; 1 Corinthians 8:11). Given the astounding lengths to which the Godhead went to save them, might we be willing to adjust the length of our shorts?

“The principle of helpfulness enables us to be serious about our clothes without being legalistic about our clothes.”

Perhaps we have a friend sensitive to her size. More than likely we have sisters in Christ, whether teenage girls or peers, looking to us as models for modest apparel. Remember likewise our brothers, who may battle against lust. Though never responsible for others’ sin, we should seek not to provoke it unnecessarily (1 Corinthians 8:13). Maybe a new acquaintance, an unbeliever, learns that we’re Christian, and because we dress so differently, this person wonders aloud about the God we say we serve — not just with our lips, but with how we look too.

From Heart to Head to Toe

If we’ll let it, the principle of helpfulness enables us to be serious about our clothes without being legalistic about our clothes. Humbly we stand before the mirror, asking God to reveal to each of us, as women with different temptations and contexts, how to dress helpfully.

The more we prize God’s gaze above the world’s, the more we will take every outfit captive to obey him (2 Corinthians 10:5). The desire to honor him with our hearts can’t help but reach from head to toe.

Together, may we become so enthralled with pleasing and proclaiming God that we care more about “good works” than fitting into current fashion (1 Timothy 2:9–10). Sometimes, perhaps even often, the two can coexist. But when they cannot, may we happily decline to dress like the times for modesty’s sake — which is to say: for God’s glory, our joy, and others’ good. Seen this way, “How might we dress modestly?” sounds a lot less like a nagging question, and a lot more like an invitation.

Audio Transcript

Every once in a while, we talk about writing on the podcast. Several emails over the years have asked if you would coach aspiring writers, Pastor John. Obviously, many Christian writers gravitate to you as a master of the craft. That’s why, over the years, APJ episodes have covered the calling to write, how to write poems and write biographies, even down into the details of grammar and punctuation, on the no-nos of ghostwriting, and then (most popular of all) on productivity — how it is that you create so many books and sermons and articles and APJ episodes and all that, with advice for how all Christian creators can maximize their own output. All those topics have been well covered in the past, as you can see in my summary in the new APJ book on pages 411–16.

But we’ve never gotten down into the weeds of how to write a sentence. “Sentences change lives” — you’ve said that before on the podcast. But from your perspective, what makes a great, edifying sentence? How do you write and rewrite sentences like this? And what would be your five (or so) pieces of advice for crafting edifying prose, beyond all that we’ve already covered on the podcast — something relevant for book authors and for Christians who just want to send an edifying text message? What would you say?

I start with the conviction that our words, whether spoken or written, really matter. “Death and life are in the power of the tongue” (Proverbs 18:21). That’s powerful. “The mouth of the righteous is a fountain of life” (Proverbs 10:11). How many times have I prayed, “O God, for my children, for my wife, for my church, for my books, for my podcast, make my mouth a fountain of life.” Or as James says, the tongue is a fire that can set a whole forest ablaze with destructive power (James 3:5–6). So, I start there. This is serious. I take all my speech seriously and all my writing seriously.

And I thank God that he has spoken. He has used human language to communicate himself and to communicate how to communicate. So, when I ask, “What’s a good sentence?” I mean, “What does God have to say about a sentence?” and “Is it good in view of his word?”

Here are my eight marks of a good sentence.

1. True

A good sentence is true. It communicates what accords with reality; that is, it helps people know what is and what ought to be. This is because God himself “never lies” (Titus 1:2). He’s a “God of truth” (Isaiah 65:16). He has given us “the Spirit of truth” (John 16:13). Christians are people of truth. We speak and write true sentences.

2. Clear

A good sentence is clear. It does not indulge in deception or vagueness. It does not settle for undefined ambiguities that encourage people — like so many public figures encourage people — to believe contrary things while they affirm your sentence. One person reads and says, “Oh, it means this,” and the other says, “It means this,” and both of them have a good foothold because you’ve set it up that way. That’s not a Christian way to write.

Clarity stands in the service of truth. It seeks to help people get the clearest idea of what you believe and are trying to communicate. Paul says in 2 Corinthians 4:2, “We refuse to practice cunning or to tamper with God’s word, but by the open statement of the truth we would commend ourselves to everyone’s conscience in the sight of God.” That is a beautiful goal for every Christian writer and speaker.

And just a little qualification here: there is a place for intentional ambiguity at times. For example, if a four-year-old asks about some sexual scene in the Bible, a wise parent finds an appropriate circumlocution appropriate to the age, not for the sake of deception but for the sake of helpfulness.

“A true sentence says what accords with the facts, and an authentic sentence says what accords with your heart.”

And there are certain kinds of poetic effort and moments in communication, if you’re writing poems or just want to be poetic in your speech, where truth can actually be served by coming at a reality in a slanted way rather than a direct way, which is not intended to create confusion but to illuminate reality. A whole other thing we could talk about is the appropriate place of slant or planned double entendres or ambiguities. We want to help people toward right thinking and right feeling. And it might be that that kind of speech now and then will do that.

3. Authentic

A good sentence is authentic. The difference between a true sentence and an authentic sentence is that a true sentence says what accords with the facts, and an authentic sentence says what accords with your heart. (And of course, one sentence can do both, should do both.) We are inauthentic to give the impression with our sentences that we are something we aren’t. It’s dishonest; it’s insincere. And the Bible says that Christians are people of sincerity (2 Corinthians 2:17).

4. Thoughtful

A good sentence should be thoughtful. The opposite of thoughtful, as I’m using it, is glib, superficial, frivolous, trifling. Many people treat their language as nothing but clever, lighthearted banter. It fills up sound space. The Bible refers to such people as “empty talkers” (Titus 1:10).

And I don’t mean there’s no place for humor when I say thoughtful. Life is often humorous, inevitably humorous. You cannot walk through days and not see something that is laughable, both positively and negatively. And those situations can be served well with well-placed, thoughtful sentences that might cause a person to buckle over with belly laughter.

But what I’m pleading for is that the bread and butter of our communication have substance in it. That is, people benefit from hearing what we say; there’s some measure of thinking behind our sentences. That’s the goal.

5. Creative

A good sentence is creative. I don’t mean that everybody becomes a poet. I mean that we aspire over a lifetime to grow in our ability to select words and arrange words in fresh and striking ways that have the greatest impact for good on others. When Jesus referred to himself as a thief in the night (Matthew 24:43–44) — are you kidding me? Who would dare? Who would dare to do such a thing? That was risky, striking, creative, utterly memorable. Mark Twain said, “The difference between the almost right word and the right word is . . . the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.” That’s a good sentence, right? It not only is a good sentence; it captures the power of the right word at the right time.

“Abstractions and generalizations tend to be boring. Concrete language tends to be arresting.”

Part of being creative is using cadences that sound pleasing. And now I’m shifting gears from choosing the word to choosing the rhythm and the cadence. I once told an audience at our conference here that the title of our conference was “With Calvin in the Theater of God.” It was not “With John Calvin in the Theater of God” because the word “John” ruins the iambic-pentameter cadence. “With Calvin in the Theater of God.” You can’t stick “John” in there. It wrecks the sound.

And a lot of people think, Why in the world . . . ? No, no, no. Pastors, talkers, you should give thought to whether your sentences have cadences, rhythms that are pleasing to the ear. So, there are ten syllables, five beats in that sentence or that title, and it just wrecks it to put “John” in there. It doesn’t work. When you get a feel for cadences and what sounds pleasing, you don’t even have to think about it anymore. Over time, if you school yourself in trying to be thoughtful in your rhythms and cadences so that they sound pleasing, then it will become natural.

Part of being creative, again, is concreteness. Generalizations and abstractions are boring. They’re not as effective as particularities and specifics and concreteness. For example, say “peach”; say “Georgia peach” rather than “fruit.” Say “dog” rather than “animal,” “Dusty” rather than “dog.” Say “rain” rather than “weather.” Say “Neptune” rather than “planet.” Say “basketball” rather than “sports.” Say “bacon” rather than “breakfast.” Say “brown, woolen, pullover sweater” rather than “clothing.” Say “rusty socket wrench on the oily bench” rather than “tool over there in the corner.” Say “John and David” rather than “friends.”

Abstractions and generalizations tend to be boring. Concrete language tends to be arresting. When Paul says in Colossians 4:6, “Let your speech always be gracious, seasoned with salt,” I take him to mean — at least partly — that our speech should not be bland and tasteless.

6. Well-Timed

A good sentence is well-timed. Proverbs 25:20: “Whoever sings songs to a heavy heart is like one who takes off a garment on a cold day, and like vinegar on soda.” That’s another good sentence. It’s just full of concrete language. Take off a coat on a cold day. Put vinegar on soda, and it goes sizzle, sizzle, sizzle — makes a little smoke. And even more specifically, Proverbs 15:23 says, “To make an apt answer is a joy to a man, and a word in season, how good it is!” So, timing really matters.

7. Clean

A good sentence is clean. The apostle Paul said, “Let there be no filthiness nor foolish talk nor crude joking, which are out of place [for the Christian], but instead let there be thanksgiving” (Ephesians 5:4). Thankful hearts don’t speak or write dirty sentences. Our sentences do not have to be sinful in order to take sin seriously. There are powerful and creative ways to speak of the corruption and wickedness of the world without participating in it.

8. Loving to People, Glorifying to God

Finally, number eight — and I would add that this casts a net over all seven of the others — the aim of the good sentence is to love people and glorify God. “Whether you eat or drink, or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God” (1 Corinthians 10:31). And I think that would mean, “Whether you eat or drink or write sentences, do all to the glory of God.” And in addition to that, Paul says, “Let all that you do be done in love” (1 Corinthians 16:14). We want people to be helped. We want to help people toward their eternal happiness, and we want to make God look great. That’s what good sentences are for.

That’s good. It seems like your poetry training also trained your ear for cadence in prose. Is that true?

I think it is, yes. And I think it’s good that everybody just has a little bit of exposure to that kind of language where the author, a poet, has given serious thought to the cadences. And a lot of modern poetry doesn’t work at that.

“The aim of the good sentence is to love people and glorify God.”

So, you’ve got to go back a few centuries to see how it’s done, because those guys from three hundred years ago, they didn’t do that because it was boring. Alexander Pope wrote the way he wrote in iambic tetrameter and these couplets — page after page, like hundreds of lines — because it was being eaten up. People read it. People don’t read poetry today, but they did in those days.

A lost art that helps us with prose.

I think so.

Why would anyone exert the time and energy required to read Jonathan Edwards’s Concerning the End for Which God Created the World? This may be the most difficult and challenging text you will ever read. But after the Bible, it may be the most important piece of literature ever written. It really promises to change everything for you.

Jonathan Edwards (1703–1758) was a pastor, theologian, and philosopher in Colonial America. In 1755, he completed his dissertation after 35 years of development, which was then published posthumously in 1765. Looking back over the more than forty years since I first read it, I can say that this short book has profoundly and permanently affected me for good. As a result of reading End of Creation, I changed careers, earned a PhD, and took up teaching Edwards as a profession. You might wonder why this book upended my life (in the best sense possible). Because the God who Edwards showed me is breathtaking.

So, I believe the wisdom of Proverbs 2 applies to Edwards. When you read End of Creation, study it, “making your ear attentive to wisdom and inclining your heart to understanding [because] if you seek it like silver and search for it as for hidden treasures, then you will understand the fear of the Lord and find the knowledge of God” (Proverbs 2:2–5). With a pencil in your hand and prayers in your heart, pay close attention to what Edwards says. The work is worth it when you see the God he saw. Finally, bear in mind that no one has ever fully comprehended End of Creation his first time through.

Two Aims of the Essay

What makes this work so difficult? Edwards penned End of Creation with three goals in mind. Edwards’s first goal was to know God experientially because he saw that kind of knowledge described and promised in the Bible. As a pastor, this concern drove him to understand, explain, promote, guide, and defend a view of authentic Christian experience as a work of God. He connects that experience to God’s ultimate end in creation, and shows how God is ultimately motivated by his own “supreme self-regard.”

What does Edwards mean by “supreme self-regard”? God loves God with all his heart and soul and mind and strength. Far from making God supremely selfish, this self-regard flows from God’s intra-Trinitarian love. The Father loves the Son, and the Son loves the Father, through the Holy Spirit. The triune God of the Bible is eternally and fully satisfied, possessing in himself alone all existence, beauty, power, knowledge, truth, goodness, and happiness (not a lighthearted cheerfulness, but a deep fulfillment and complete well-being).

“The triune God of the Bible is eternally and fully satisfied.”

Grasping this truth makes a big difference in understanding Edwards’s first goal of showing that genuine Christian experience is a gracious and free work of God. God delights in his own fullness and shares that fullness with his people. That reality affects how we understand faith and fuels our motivation to seek to know God.

Edwards’s second goal was to undermine the influence of a destructive and contrary view of religious experience by refuting the views of God’s end and motivation it presupposed and promoted. Edwards demonstrates that God’s ultimate end in creation cannot be something God lacks, nor can it be more valuable to God than God’s initial state without creation. To state the issue succinctly: if God creates for an ultimate end, which by definition implies that the person acting does not now possess what he seeks, how can God be absolutely self-sufficient (needing nothing)? Edwards tackled this problem head-on, claiming in his finished work,

[I]t has been particularly shewn already, that God’s making himself his end, in the manner that has been spoken of, argues no dependence; but is consistent with absolute independence and self-sufficience. (God’s Passion for His Glory, 180)

If you can keep these goals in mind, the exercise required to grasp Edwards’s tight reasoning becomes significantly easier.

Why Not Begin with Scripture?

Edwards’s dissertation comprises an introduction and two chapters. In chapter 1, Edwards considers “what Reason teaches” using deductive arguments that build on the assumptions and concepts developed in the Introduction. To readers today, this may seem like a strange way to begin a book. However, the expression “what Reason teaches” signifies a mindset and a way of discovering truth and settling disputes that had swept through Europe and America by mid-eighteenth century.

Beginning around 1594 and ending in 1734, a process occurred that altered the entire background against which Christian theologians, pastors, and philosophers debated about what to believe and how to live. The struggle during this process was over what would serve as the final arbiter or authority in matters of faith. Would it be tradition and authority, personal inspiration, Scripture, or reason?

“The heart of God’s purpose in creation lies in the heart of God himself as Trinity.”

It’s safe to say that by the mid-eighteenth century, reason had become the dictator of truth. It’s crucial to appreciate how thorough and widespread this reliance of reason was in the mid-eighteenth century. Reason was the battleground where the wars were being waged, and so, to achieve his goals, Edwards adopted two parallel — and complementary — ways of arguing: (1) from what reason teaches and (2) from what Scripture teaches.

Edwards continues in chapter 2 with an exposition of relevant Scripture because he believed that God’s word is “the surest guide” on these matters. And while both methods converge on the same answers regarding the end for which God created the world, the method of Scripture followed in chapter 2 yields more truth — truth inaccessible to reason alone. Thus, while he begins his argument in the rationalist discourse of the age, Edwards culminates his argument with Scripture, demonstrating his unwavering commitment to the rule of faith. Edwards believed what he wrote about reason’s “dictates,” but he insists that what reason dictates on the matter is at best incomplete.

Why Would God Create Anything?

A fair interpretation of Edwards, therefore, requires us to trace the steps in his argument according to reason and understand the harmony between God’s self-sufficiency and his acting for ends. However, since we can’t trace the full argument here, I’ll just whet your appetite with where Edwards ends. We might summarize his argument like this:

God’s “original ultimate end” in creating and sustaining the world is God’s Holy Spirit indwelling the redeemed, thereby enabling and empowering their experience of God’s own knowledge, love, and joy, so that their words, deeds, and emotions redound to the praise of his glory.

In short, Edwards argues that God created to share his Trinitarian fullness with creatures.

Edwards insists, “That which God had primarily in view in creating” — namely, God’s ultimate end — “must be constantly kept in view, and have a governing influence in all God’s works, or with respect to everything he does towards his creatures” (God’s Passion, 134). If, as Edwards claims, God’s end in creation determines all of his works toward his creatures, then this dissertation is among his most important works (if not the most important). In End of Creation, we not only have the proverbial “Big Picture”; we have the biggest picture. It applies to everything.

The heart of God’s purpose in creation lies in the heart of God himself as Trinity. As the apostle John reveals, the Father loves the Son and the Son loves the Father (John 17:23–26). This love that characterizes the Trinity is what God “communicates” to the redeemed in sending them the promised Holy Spirit. Edwards delights in the fact that God’s inclination to create and sustain the world derives from the pleasure God takes in his “internal glory” — that is, God’s self-knowledge, holiness, and happiness — eternally increasing in “a society of created beings” (149). Thus, “God in seeking his glory, therein seeks the good of his creatures,” and “God in seeking their glory and happiness, seeks himself” (176).

Rewards of Climbing the Mountain

Over decades of teaching, I have had the privilege of walking through End of Creation with hundreds of students. We worked our way line by line through this most difficult work of philosophical and biblical theology.

After that arduous journey, some students have reported that now they grasp just how safe they are in Christ. “He is faithful, not for anything I do, but because of God’s faithfulness to himself.” Some have found a liberating sense of personal value. “I see now that I am a product of God’s creational, providential, and redeeming action. My identity is a reflection of the attributes of God that are involved in God’s works. I really honor him and accentuate his role by taking refuge in him to be for us as he promises to be in his names.”

Others have gained a new appreciation for nature, seeing that all of it reflects who God is, like a divine performance. As works of performance art, each instance of God’s works of creation, providence, and redemption is valuable and valued by God solely in virtue of the value of God’s attributes that are jointly responsible for their coming to be. They often report how this heightened awareness has brought them to reframe all of life’s ambitions and questions in terms of God’s purposes for them. Not every student is affected in these ways. Some students are provoked (even shocked) into fully grasping the present-tense reality that God is acting. Some love the fact; others, as we would expect, reject the idea altogether.

Yet, even with the occasional outliers, I’ve seen the positive effects over and over again. Through studying Edwards by the illuminating grace of the Holy Spirit, most thoughtful readers come to a new and deeper sense of God’s greatness and gladly join the eternal choir singing, “Worthy is the Lamb” (Revelation 5:12).

The Way of Allurement

Finally, reading Edwards is an exercise in opposites. On the one hand, every time I read End of Creation, I feel a new anticipation for fresh vistas onto the greatness and love of God. On the other hand, his writing style and rational arguments can feel like wading through wet concrete. At times, his language begins to sound as if he is saying the same thing over and over again. To follow each step in the path of his thought is relentlessly demanding. And yet, like no other book (besides the Bible), all the hard work is worth it when the God whom Edwards loved gives you a glimpse of the God whom Edwards saw.

Elsewhere Edwards charges us, “Endeavor to promote spiritual appetites by laying yourself in the way of allurement. We are to avoid being in the way of temptation with respect to our carnal appetites. But we ought to take all opportunities to lay ourselves in the way of enticement with respect to our gracious inclinations” (Sermon on Canticles 5:1).

Working your way carefully through Concerning the End for Which God Created the World is certainly one way of laying ourselves in the way of allurement.

One of the most impactful theological conversations I remember being a part of happened when I was in my early twenties as a Bible-college student in Southern California. Some friends and I had stayed up way too late talking, and at one point our conversation turned toward the topic of heaven. I can’t remember what precise words we said, but I can recall the feeling. As we pondered the glories of the eschaton together, we whipped ourselves up into a flurry of joy, wonder, and longing.

Happier Visions of Heaven

At the time, I recall being captivated by the profound earthiness of the new creation. Like many, while growing up I had somehow absorbed the idea that the final promise of the afterlife was to depart from the real, physical world — the world of food and games and laughter and adventure — to ascend to an ethereal, floaty cloud-place, populated by chubby cherubs with harps. (And yes, I secretly dreaded going to heaven because of how boring such a place promised to be.)

By the time of that late-night conversation, I had thankfully been disabused of that conception. The promise of the afterlife, I had come to learn, was not the obliteration of all things God had previously declared good, but rather their restoration. Their transfiguration. Their glorification. It was not that the material would be swallowed up by the immaterial — as if we were ridding our souls of our flesh and bones — but rather that the mortal would be swallowed by immortal life (2 Corinthians 5:4).

“What makes heaven heaven is not merely that we will experience Earth 2.0, but rather that we will see God.”

I had come to see that everything good in this life would see its heightened and imperishable fulfillment in the next. The promise of the eschaton is not the intermediate state, but rather the resurrection — and not just our resurrection as humans, but the resurrection of the cosmos (Romans 8:18–25; Revelation 21:1–22:5). So, my friends and I let our imaginations loose as we wondered about how the sensations of the physical world we so enjoy now might be magnified and enriched in the age to come. And our blur of excited words was worship.

What I have since come to discover, however, is that even these aspects of the new creation are not final. Those heavenly joys my friends and I fantasized about were, like their present earthly corollaries, the joyous means to the greatest end: the vision of God himself. Theologians call this the beatific vision (or the blessed or happy vision). What makes heaven heaven, in other words, is not merely that we will experience Earth 2.0, but rather that we will see God. Now, if it seems like I am backtracking what I just affirmed and am once again trading an earthy vision of the eschaton for an ethereal one, let me assure you I am not.

Beckoned Through Beauty

The childhood conception of heaven I gladly shed in my early twenties was one of reality diminished. But the beatific vision promises something infinitely more enriched than anything we experience here. It is the ultimate end of our every joyous encounter with goodness, truth, and beauty.

The desire that earthly beauty awakens, for example, is not intended to terminate in the object that awakened the desire. This is why every delight that comes with the experience of beauty is accompanied by a stab of longing for more. When I am struck by the beauty and magnitude of the Grand Canyon at sunset, the longing that such a sight elicits is not satisfied by the visual encounter itself. The greater the enjoyment, the greater the longing. All this is by design: the earthly beauty that arouses our desire beckons us through and beyond to something greater. Earthly beauty constantly calls us not to itself, but through itself to its final source: the God of all Beauty.

This truth is often missed as the context for C.S. Lewis’s memorable line: “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). In saying this, Lewis does not merely affirm that every human has a longing for God that can only finally be satisfied in the age to come. He is saying at least that much, but the immediate context shows that he goes a step further to say that all our longings in this life serve to arouse a deeper longing for enjoyment of God. He writes,

If none of my earthly pleasures satisfy it, that does not prove that the universe is a fraud. Probably earthly pleasures were never meant to satisfy it, but only to arouse it, to suggest the real thing. If that is so, I must take care, on the one hand, never to despise, or be unthankful for, these earthly blessings, and on the other, never to mistake them for something else of which they are only a kind of copy, or echo, or mirage. (137)

The beatific vision — or the happy vision — is beatific because it is the vision of the all-blessed God. The one who is infinitely happy in himself begraces us with a participation in his own blessedness. Since the triune God is the plentitude of life and light and love — he ever burns in the white-hot fire of infinite pleasure as Father, Son, and Spirit — the blessing of eternal life is our coming to experience by grace what God is by nature: blessed. And this infinite blessedness is signaled to and previewed through all our earthly joys. God is, through all of them, beckoning us to come “further up and further in.”

Our Unnamed Ache

You are beginning to see now, I trust, that even while the doctrine of “the beatific vision” may sound exotic and alien to your ears, you have already been primed to receive it. It is true that the doctrine has fallen into obscurity in evangelical circles (though it enjoyed near-universal centrality for the majority of Christian history). Even still, the desire for the beatific vision is awakened by all manner of well-known evangelical convictions.

“Earthly beauty constantly calls us not to itself, but through itself to its final source: the God of all Beauty.”

The desire to experience the beatific vision is the deepest longing of the Christian Hedonist, who has been taught by John Piper that “God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in him.” It is the longing provoked by every immersed reader of the Narnia books who yearns — along with the Pevensies and their comrades in The Last Battle — to go “further up and further in” to Aslan’s country. It is the longing Jonathan Edwards awakens when he opines about heaven as “a world of love.” It is the deep longing of those who have come to pray with Augustine, “Thou hast made us for Thyself, and our hearts are restless until they find their rest in Thee” (Confessions, 1.1.5).

We all have been aching for the beatific vision, whether we had language to articulate this desire as such or not.

Where Every Desire Leads

The promise of the beatific vision is that none of our desires aroused in this life is ultimately for naught. None of them is wasted! Even our sinful desires are perversions of God’s good creation. He made us with certain faculties in our souls for longing, and this soulish thirst — even where it has been desecrated by the muddy cisterns of sin (Jeremiah 2:12–13) — is never intended to be utterly extinguished; it is designed to be satiated by God himself. This is why we can never be finally satisfied by anything in this life.

The soul’s cravings are infinitely insatiable because their object is itself infinite. God will never cease to be infinite, and we will never cease to be finite. Therefore, our enjoyment of God will, in the beatific vision, expand perpetually. We will never grow tired of delighting in God, any more than we will grow tired of delighting in anything, for earthly delights are summed up, purified, and perfected in our delight of God.

Every creaturely desire finds its final satiation in this happy vision of God. All the joys we experience in this life, which are ever tinged with the sting of disappointment, are designed to awaken a hunger that will be ultimately satisfied in God. But this state of rest in the happy vision of God — this state of eschatological Sabbath repose — will not be static thanks to God’s infinity and our finitude.

Let me explain. Sometimes we are tempted to lament our finitude, as if our creaturely limitations were themselves a deficiency. But God made us finite on purpose, and in the beatific vision, our finitude becomes a means of joy. Because God is infinitely delightful, and because our delight of him is finite, we can be assured that the beatific vision is a state of perpetual expansion. As we behold God, our joy in him full, our capacity for sight and joy will expand, and our satisfaction of beholding and enjoying him will also expand. We will never grow tired or become disappointed or bored. Our longing will increase in perfect proportion to our satisfaction, so that every “happiest” moment will be topped by the next “happier” one forever.

All roads of desire lead here, to the blessed hope of seeing God. When we become truly convinced of this fact, we pray sincerely with David, “One thing have I asked of the Lord, that will I seek after: that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life, to gaze upon the beauty of the Lord and to inquire in his temple” (Psalm 27:4). There are, of course, many questions left unanswered about the beatific vision. But worshipful longing rushes in where intellectual certainty fears to tread. Amen, may it be.

Audio Transcript

Yesterday, in our Navigators Bible Reading Plan, we read Psalm 90 together. Or maybe you’re catching up with the reading still. That’s fine. No problem there. When you get to it, you’ll see why Psalm 90 is the special, much-beloved psalm that you, Pastor John, have referenced in thirty different episodes of this podcast already to answer all sorts of listener questions. Psalm 90 is rich. Sometimes you’ll focus your attention on verses 12 or 17. As you approach eighty years old, verse 10 looms more and more on your mind.

But no verse in Psalm 90 gets more mentions from you than verse 14. And that’s just it. It only gets mentions from you — brief mentions — usually simply listed in the texts you string together in a prayer you call I.O.U.S. (an acrostic), a one-minute prayer that you pray before you read the Bible in the morning. You’ve told us about that prayer in several episodes, which you can see in that new APJ book, if you have that. On pages 16 and 17, I put those episodes together on that I.O.U.S. acrostic.

So, you often mention but rarely dwell on Psalm 90:14: “Satisfy us in the morning with your steadfast love, that we may rejoice and be glad all our days.” For Christian Hedonists dedicated to the daily discipline of seeking our joy in God, this text is so huge. So, draw out ten minutes of insights from what you see in this text alone about our daily desire for God.

“Satisfy us in the morning with your steadfast love, that we may rejoice and be glad all our days” (Psalm 90:14). There are few things, Tony, that I love to do more than to take a Bible verse like this, a word from God — and I want to underline that: this is a word from God — and then squeeze it like a sponge that has been dipped in the river of God’s delights, and see how many cups I can fill. That’s what I love to do. That’s my life.

Sometimes, a sponge is so big and so squishy with glorious truth that you have to squeeze one end and hold that and then squeeze another end and hold that. So, I’m going to squeeze this verse four times.

“Satisfy us.” I’m going to squeeze that.
“In the morning.” I’m going to squeeze that.
“With your steadfast love.”
“That we may rejoice and be glad all our days.”

So, that’s the plan.

‘Satisfy Us’

“Satisfy us.” Squeeze that end. This is a God-inspired prayer to God. That’s what the Psalms are. This means that it is God’s will for his children, for us, to experience satisfaction. It is God’s will that Christians live with hearts that are deeply content and satisfied. He does not will that our hearts be continually restless or fearful or joyless.

“It is God’s will that Christians live with hearts that are deeply content and satisfied.”

God’s will for us is that we be able to say with the apostle Paul, with complete authenticity, “I have learned in whatever situation I am to be content” (Philippians 4:11) — that is, to be satisfied, to enjoy peace, contentment, confidence, gladness, joy. And notice that he’s not equating satisfaction with pleasant circumstances. They may be pleasant, and they may be devastating. God’s will is that we be satisfied. The rest of this psalm is pretty devastating.

And don’t miss that this is a prayer, which means it’s a battle. If it came naturally, we would not need to cry out for satisfaction. This is a gift from God. It’s not something we can make happen with food or caffeine or drugs or sex or wealth or health or friendships or family.

‘In the Morning’

So, the question, then, is, Well, what kind of satisfaction is it? What’s the actual source of the satisfaction? And before I tackle that — because he does answer that — he says one other thing first. So, number two, squeeze the sponge again: “in the morning.” “Satisfy us in the morning.” Why does he say that — “in the morning”? Because the morning is when we face the day.

According to this psalm, our days are filled with toil and trouble (Psalm 90:10). We’re like grass that is renewed in the morning and then in the evening fades away (Psalm 90:5–6). We are about to walk into a new day and experience the consequences of sin in this world, the limits of our own finiteness, the opposition of evil people, the futility of the fallen world system. That’s what the day is going to bring as we get out of bed and go to our kneeling bench and cry out to God.

So, what do we cry out for in the morning, facing that kind of day? We cry out in the face of sin and finiteness and opposition and futility. We cry out for satisfaction. We don’t expect all the circumstances to change; it’s just the fallen world we live in. We won’t be of any good to anybody — as George Müller taught us — if we all share in the moaning and the groaning of this sinful and broken world. What good is it to add to the world more of our own moaning and groaning?

God’s will is that we’d be satisfied in the face of all the trouble every new day will bring, which now brings us to the third squeezing of the sponge.

‘With Your Steadfast Love’

Where does the satisfaction come from amidst all this trouble? And the answer given is this: “with your steadfast love.” “Satisfy us in the morning with your steadfast love.”

So, when you get up in the morning, and you see before you a day of trouble and problems — problems upon problems that you cannot solve — and you feel weak and sick, and the things you thought were going to bring you some happiness have all crumbled, where do you look for satisfaction?

And Moses’s (this is a psalm of Moses, by the way) answer was, “I look to the love of God for me.” Isn’t that amazing? “God loves me,” Moses says. “God chose me before the foundation of the world,” we Christians say, “to be his treasured possession. God gave me existence. God sent his Son and paid for the failures that I’ve committed and offenses against him. God opened my eyes to see the worth and greatness and beauty of Christ. God promises to be my treasure. God promises to make everything, including all my troubles and problems, work together for my eternal joy. God loves me.”

That’s the source of his satisfaction: his steadfast love. And we pray for the ability to taste it. That’s what he’s asking. “Satisfy me in that. Help me enjoy that. Help me be satisfied in that every morning,” because his mercies are new every morning.

‘That We May Rejoice’

And now comes the fourth part of the sponge to squeeze — namely, “that we may rejoice and be glad all our days.” “Satisfy us in the morning with your steadfast love, that we may rejoice and be glad all our days.”

“God’s will is that we’d be satisfied in the face of all the trouble every new day will bring.”

So, with the words rejoice and be glad, he underlines the emotional richness of the word satisfaction. God is telling us to ask him to make us satisfied, to make us happy, to make us glad, to make us rejoice no matter what. And the amazing thing is that he says “all our days” — not just sunny days, happy days, but all our days. The reason it’s amazing is because, in the first thirteen verses of this psalm, our days are being swept away like a flood. We are returning to the dust. We are fading and withering like grass. We pass away like a sigh. All our days are full of toil and trouble. Those are words from this very psalm.

And yet now Moses prays, “God, do your amazing, internal, miracle work of satisfying us with your love, so that in all those days — all those terrible days, including the very last one — short or long, whether the days last a long time or whether they get blown away overnight, we might rejoice and be glad.”

Psalm 90:14 is a glorious word of God to his children in the midst of their troubles in this real world. And I pray that you and I, Tony, and all of our listeners would take hold of it and wring out of it every cup of blessing that we need.

On February 23, 1856, Charles H. Spurgeon found a spare moment to write to a friend about the remarkable revival that was happening under his preaching. He had been in London for less than two years, and in that short time, his popularity had grown such that no building could hold the thousands coming to hear him. England had not seen the likes of Spurgeon since the days of Wesley and Whitefield. “Everywhere, at all hours, places are crammed to the doors. The devil is wide awake, but so, too, is the Master.”

With this growing popularity, the invitations to preach were pouring in. Just that week, Spurgeon had already preached eleven times. His letter concluded with a list of the fourteen preaching engagements he had the following week, preaching two to three times a day (Autobiography, 2:101–2). He would maintain this preaching pace for the first fifteen years of his ministry, and even as poor health began to limit his activity, Spurgeon still regularly preached four times a week in his own church, and usually two or three more times in other venues.

How did he do it? Amid pastoring a growing church, preparing sermons for publication, mentoring pastoral students, caring for his family, and more, how did he find time to prepare so many sermons? For Spurgeon, an important key was learning to deliver his sermons extemporaneously.

What Is Extemporaneous Preaching?

Spurgeon once delivered a lecture to his students on extemporaneous speaking, summarizing his approach on sermon delivery (“The Faculty of Impromptu Speech” in Lectures to My Students). He divided extemporaneous speaking into two categories: “speech impromptu” and extemporaneous sermon delivery.

‘Speech Impromptu’

The first is what he called “speech impromptu,” that is, preaching “without special preparation, without notes or immediate forethought” (227). His general rule was that no ministry should be made up primarily of this kind of preaching. Quakers or Plymouth Brethren preachers had the distinctive practice of not preparing and simply waiting for the Spirit to provide them a sermon. But Spurgeon believed such sermons tended to be repetitive and often void of solid teaching. “Churches are not to be held together except by an instructive ministry; a mere filling up of time with oratory will not suffice” (227).

“The ability to speak clearly and compellingly without preparation can be a tremendous gift to the church.”

At the same time, many unforeseen opportunities to speak arise in ministry: A church member speaks divisively at a meeting, and you, as the pastor, need to respond. A public meeting goes off course with unhelpful comments, and you are burdened to “counteract the mischief, and lead the assembly into a more profitable line of thought” (234). At a funeral, you are unexpectedly invited to say a few words. In all these events, the ability to speak clearly and compellingly without preparation can be a tremendous gift to the church.

Extemporaneous Sermon Delivery

The second kind of speaking is extemporaneous sermon delivery, where “the words are extemporal, as I think they always should be, but the thoughts are the result of research and study” (230). This was Spurgeon’s preferred preaching method. Spurgeon’s prodigious study habits are evident in his library, much of which resides today at the Spurgeon Library in Kansas City, Missouri. These six thousand volumes (half of his original library) contain works of theology, biblical studies, preaching, church history, poetry, fiction, classics, and much more. They give ample evidence of his wide and thoughtful study. Of course, his most important study was in the Bible, and his many Bibles reveal not only discipline but also prayerful meditation.

Beyond his reading, Spurgeon was always on the lookout for illustrations, anecdotes, helpful sayings, and anything else that could be used in a sermon. From his observations on the train to the latest headline in the newspaper to a bird on his windowsill, everything around him provided fresh insight into the truths of God’s word, and he attentively stored them for future use.

Of course, Spurgeon also dedicated time to prepare sermons. Throughout the week, he was constantly jotting down potential sermon outlines (he called them “skeletons”) out of the overflow of his Bible study and meditation. He spent the most time on his Sunday-morning sermons, devoting his Saturday evenings to preparation. A few hours on Sunday afternoons were spent preparing his Sunday-evening sermons, which tended to complement the morning sermon. For Monday and Thursday-night meetings, Spurgeon usually preached a more devotional sermon based on the things he found himself meditating on that week.

Fruit of Vast Labor

Both forms of extemporaneous speaking require a significant amount of hard work and training. Spurgeon warned students who saw this ability as an excuse for laziness:

Did we hear a single heart whisper, “I wish I had it, for then I should have no need to study so arduously”? Ah! Then you must not have it, you are unworthy of the boon, and unfit to be trusted with it. If you seek this gift as a pillow for an idle head, you will be much mistaken; for the possession of this noble power will involve you in a vast amount of labor in order to increase and even to retain it. (233)

“Step into the pulpit with less reliance on your notes and more prayerful dependence on the Spirit.”

Far from enabling laziness, cultivating this skill will take more work than simply writing a manuscript. So why go through that work? Spurgeon believed extemporaneous delivery enables preachers to connect with their hearers far more than a read or memorized sermon ever could. Preaching extemporaneously enables the preacher to engage the hearer not only with his mouth but with his eyes and heart. This is why people in many other professions work at this skill. From politicians to freestyle rappers, they can develop an impressive ability to speak extemporaneously with eloquence and power.

So, why not the Christian preacher?

Growing in Extemporaneous Speaking

To be sure, extemporaneous speaking, and especially impromptu speaking, is a skill that not every preacher will be able to develop. But Spurgeon encouraged all his students to try. As an exercise, he would sometimes assign his students a topic for a speech on the spot. On one occasion, he called a student to speak on Zacchaeus. The student stood up and said, “Zacchaeus was little of stature; so am I. Zacchaeus was up a tree; so am I. Zacchaeus came down; so will I.” He sat back down to the applause of all his classmates and teacher (A Pictorial Biography of C.H. Spurgeon, 88). This student showed some potential!

What advice would Spurgeon have for developing this ability?

1. Study and prepare.

“You will not be able to extemporize good thinking unless you have been in the habit of thinking and feeding your mind with abundant and nourishing food” (236). Unless you have fed your mind with abundant study and have worked hard to meditate on what you have read, you will have little worthwhile to say. In one sense, extemporaneous preaching requires more work, not less, than written manuscript sermons, because rather than preparing a manuscript, the preacher must prepare himself.

For Spurgeon, one evidence of his study is that his sermons always had an outline, often with points and subpoints. Rather than just rambling through a text, he always organized his thoughts and prepared his sermon in a cohesive and clear structure.

2. Speak out of your own spiritual experience.

“Accustom yourselves to heavenly meditations, search the Scriptures, delight yourselves in the law of the Lord, and you need not fear to speak of things which you have tasted and handled of the good word of God” (236). Don’t feel the need to speak beyond what you have personally come to know. But insofar as the Spirit has revealed wonderful things in his word to you, speak out of your own experience and meditation. Share what has encouraged you and how you have applied these truths in your own life.

3. Select familiar topics.

This was Spurgeon’s practice, especially when it came to his Monday-night devotionals. “When standing up on such occasions, one’s mind makes a review, and inquires, ‘What subject has already taken up my thought during the day? What have I met with in my reading during the past week? What is most laid upon my heart at this hour? What is suggested by the hymns or the prayers?’” (238). Rather than working from a blank slate, speak on topics that have already occupied your thoughts or are suggested by your context.

4. Learn how language works.

Extemporaneous speakers don’t have the benefit of editing their sermons. So you must master the language from the beginning. “Like a workman he becomes familiar with his tools, and handles them as every day companions” (241). Spurgeon found it especially helpful to translate Latin classics, forcing him to understand how the English language works and how to use it effectively. Whatever you do, seek to master grammar, composition, and all those skills from your grade-school language class.

5. Practice in private.

Rather than waiting until you’re unexpectedly called upon, begin practicing in private, even if it means preaching to your chairs and bookshelves. Better yet, gather other aspiring preachers and practice with one another. Spurgeon would often speak out loud in his private study. “I find it very helpful to be able, in private devotion, to pray with my voice; reading aloud is more beneficial to me than the silent process; and when I am mentally working out a sermon, it is a relief to me to speak to myself as the thoughts flow forth” (242).

6. Cultivate dependence on the Spirit.

Public speaking can be terrifying, and even more so without a manuscript. How does the preacher not give way to fear and anxiety? Only by depending on God. “Everything depends upon your being cool and unflurried. Forebodings of failure, and fear of man, will ruin you. Go on, trusting in God, and all will be well” (243). This doesn’t mean we can count on the Spirit’s help if we’ve been lazy. But if we have studied, prepared, and prayed, then we can trust the Spirit to be with us as we seek to serve God’s people.

From Page to People

The aim here is not merely to develop a skill. Our task as preachers is more than simply to become skilled rhetoricians. Rather, the aim is to equip ourselves to best edify the church. So, whether you preach from a simple outline, a full manuscript, or somewhere in between, all of us can improve our delivery and our ability to connect better with our hearers. This is where Spurgeon’s challenge applies. Step into the pulpit with less reliance on your notes and more prayerful dependence on the Spirit. Work on speaking less from your manuscript and more from your heart. And keep your eyes less on the page and more on your people.

The best way to grow is by doing. Your first attempts may seem feeble, but who knows? God can use even your imperfect efforts to accomplish his powerful work. So, keep working at it. Look for opportunities to speak of Christ. Find other preachers to help you. And as Spurgeon told his students, “You must continually practice extemporizing, and if to gain suitable opportunities you should frequently speak the word in cottages, in the school-rooms of our hamlets, or to two or three by the wayside, your profiting shall be known unto all men” (247).