I gave my first sermon eight thousand miles from my home, through a translator, to a room full of pastors twenty or thirty years older than me in Vijayawada, India. The text, I’ll never forget, was 1 Thessalonians 1:4–6. I was the rookie, the intern, on a team of more veteran teachers — and I was sweaty nervous.

The message got off to a rocky start. I was going too long without a break for translation, and I was clearly using words the translator either didn’t know or couldn’t translate. After a few long minutes (which felt something like a benevolent wrestling match), the poor guy had to quit and ask an older, more experienced brother to step in. The tap out certainly didn’t help my young nerves. Fortunately, I had run out of sweat by that point.

The second translator and I slowly found a rhythm together. His confidence and patience gave me greater peace and courage, and, by God’s grace, I survived the message. And the brothers, I believe, were encouraged in their faith and ministries. (As yet another mercy, preaching a sermon back home in English suddenly felt far less intimidating.)

I’ll remember that day for many reasons, but as much as anything, I’ll remember their eyes. We had been told for months leading up to the trip about all the obstacles these men were facing where they served — intense opposition, even malice; little training or support; false teaching even among Christians; grave poverty. Then we got to witness, firsthand, just how hard it was for some. And yet their eyes told a different story.

Smile of Genuine Revival

Standing in that pulpit so far from home, I began to read the sermon text: “For we know, brothers loved by God, that he has chosen you.” How could the apostle Paul possibly know that these people had been chosen by God? He doesn’t leave us in the dark:

We know . . . that [God] has chosen you, because our gospel came to you not only in word, but also in power and in the Holy Spirit and with full conviction. (1 Thessalonians 1:4–5)

He feels confident in their election because he’s seeing the signs of true revival — of God coming with supernatural power by his Spirit, through his word, to inspire sincere conviction and heartfelt worship. But how could he see the Holy Spirit? How could he know that God himself was actually moving in this church?

Paul says more in the next verse: “You became imitators of us and of the Lord, for you received the word in much affliction, with the joy of the Holy Spirit” (1 Thessalonians 1:6). He sounds the same warm note in Romans 14:17: “The kingdom of God is not a matter of eating and drinking but of righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit.” What gave Paul such confidence that the God over heaven and earth, without beginning or end, who created all things and will judge the whole world, had reached down and actually chosen this little group to be his children, his ambassadors, his future kings and queens of glory? Their extraordinary joy, especially through hardship. This joy was like a sun rising over all the dark horizons around them, declaring that they now belonged — body, soul, mind, and delight — to Jesus.

This joy wasn’t just any joy, though. The apostle goes on to sketch something of a portrait of Spirit-filled joy for us — a joy that gladly submits, that stubbornly endures, that steadily spreads, and that eagerly waits.

1. This Joy Submits

First we learn that this miraculous joy is under authority. “You received the word in much affliction, with the joy of the Holy Spirit” (1 Thessalonians 1:6). This joy wasn’t a follow-your-heart joy, but a kneel-and-obey joy.

We actually get to watch the Thessalonian church receive the word in Acts 17:1–5. When Paul came to Thessalonica, he went with Silas into the synagogues and “reasoned with them from the Scriptures, explaining and proving that it was necessary for the Christ to suffer and to rise from the dead, and saying, ‘This Jesus, whom I proclaim to you, is the Christ’” (Acts 17:2–3). In other words, he preached the Bible. And how did the people respond? “Some of them were persuaded and joined Paul and Silas” (verse 4). They didn’t reject the word of God, or give lip service to it, but they received it. They were persuaded by Scripture in their minds and hearts, and so they submitted themselves to whatever they found there.

2. This Joy Endures

Their glad obedience to the word of God was all the more beautiful because they suffered for their faith. “You received the word in much affliction, with the joy of the Holy Spirit” (1 Thessalonians 1:6).

“The fullest joy in the universe is, for now, an incomplete joy — an anticipation of what will be.”

Again, we get to see how they suffered in Acts 17. As the word began to take hold, as they were persuaded by what Paul taught them about Jesus, “the Jews were jealous, and taking some wicked men of the rabble, they formed a mob, set the city in an uproar, and attacked the house of Jason, seeking to bring [Paul and Silas] out to the crowd” (Acts 17:5). The mob was so violent that the church rushed Paul and Silas out of town (verse 10). But many Christians stayed behind and withstood the mob.

And they didn’t merely stay and keep gathering, keep preaching, keep praying, keep making disciples, but they endured much affliction with joy.

3. This Joy Spreads

When God does this kind of work, when he brings spiritual revival and exalts his Son in the hearts of a people in such a dramatic and countercultural way, news of that work inevitably spreads. Again and again, this is how God presses his fame into the hard-to-reach, often hostile corners of the world: through forgiven people rejoicing through suffering.

You received the word in much affliction, with the joy of the Holy Spirit, so that you became an example to all the believers in Macedonia and in Achaia. For not only has the word of the Lord sounded forth from you in Macedonia and Achaia, but your faith in God has gone forth everywhere, so that we need not say anything. (1 Thessalonians 1:6–8)

Words didn’t travel easily in those days. Wherever they went, they went slowly and at some significant cost. But even then, the story of this church’s joy spread far and wide beyond their region.

This means, at one level, that widespread revival is all the more possible when our circumstances turn bleak, when opposition heats up and the costs climb, because of the testimonies that spring up from such battlefields. The book of Acts is a testimony to how the word runs through suffering (see Acts 5:41–42; 6:7), bearing the fruit of joy wherever it’s planted.

4. This Joy Waits

What specific report was sent out everywhere, though? “They themselves report . . . how you turned to God from idols to serve the living and true God, and to wait for his Son from heaven, whom he raised from the dead, Jesus who delivers us from the wrath to come” (1 Thessalonians 1:9–10). So, they’ve already found their treasure hidden in the field — they’ve found God their exceeding Joy, a joy strong enough to brave the mob — and yet they’re still waiting for their full reward. The fullest joy in the universe is, for now, an incomplete joy — an anticipation of what will be.

Waiting is all over this letter (see 1 Thessalonians 2:19; 3:13; 5:23). And what are they waiting for? Paul paints a picture of that coming day:

The Lord himself will descend from heaven with a cry of command, with the voice of an archangel, and with the sound of the trumpet of God. And the dead in Christ will rise first. Then we who are alive, who are left, will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air, and so we will always be with the Lord. (1 Thessalonians 4:16–17)

The happiest people on earth are those who have their eyes set beyond this earth to the one who will one day bring heaven down to earth.

Beaten, Bruised, and Happy

I have many memories from that trip to India. Taking a plane, train, and automobile (literally) to get to the city where we were serving. The unbelievably warm hospitality everywhere we went, with amazing dishes I’d never tried (and still love). Almost all of our team getting seriously ill at some point during the two weeks. What I remember most, though, was how happy those embattled pastors were. I remember the brightness and warmth in their eyes.

I met men who had been beaten for sharing Jesus, and still bore the cuts and bruises. They had experienced hostility from every direction — from Muslim zealots, from neighbors on their street, even from within their own homes. Jesus warned us, “I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother. . . . And a person’s enemies will be those of his own household” (Matthew 10:35–36) — and he wasn’t lying. I saw the scars.

Yet as these battered men told their harrowing stories, their eyes sang with joy. It really was the closest I’ve been to a 1 Thessalonians 1 church. They received the word in much affliction, with the joy of the Holy Spirit, relishing the chance to suffer for Jesus and eagerly waiting for his return.

Part 6 Episode 239 What does it mean to look at Jesus and live? In this episode of Light + Truth, John Piper opens John 3:1–15 to explore how Moses lifting up the serpent in the wilderness helps us understand how the death of Jesus changes us.

“I am a servant of the Secret Fire, wielder of the flame of Anor. You cannot pass.” Fans of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings first heard the wizard Gandalf utter these words in 1954, bravely standing against the balrog on the bridge of Khazad-Dûm. Gandalf’s declaration now rings out in the memories of millions of those who have never read the original text, thanks to Sir Ian McKellen’s portrayal in Peter Jackson’s films.

But there is more to this line than an epic oration. In the creation myth of Middle-earth, not divulged to eager readers until four years after Tolkien’s death, we learn that the Secret Fire, or Flame Imperishable, is a gift bestowed only by God — the very gift of Being. And all the way back before 1920, Tolkien had penned a short entry in a lexicon focusing on Elvish linguistics and phonology that is the key to understanding this fire. Tucked away on page 81, the entry reads, “Sā: Fire, especially in temples. etc. A mystic name identified with Holy Ghost.”

That pattern of discovery perfectly encapsulates most people’s experience with The Lord of the Rings. A rousing story draws us in, but it takes deeper delving to unearth the rich veins of Christian theology that spread like mithril through Tolkien’s constructed world.

Perhaps you’ve been put off from reading The Lord of the Rings because Elves and Dwarves seem frivolous. Perhaps you feel content to watch the film adaptations instead. Perhaps it was simply something you read as a child, without ever considering that it might contain hidden depths. Whatever your reason, I’d like to invite you into Middle-earth to see how Tolkien approached his storytelling with an attitude of praise. We see in The Lord of the Rings a stellar example of the way a worldview can affect every facet of life.

The Open Secret of Middle-earth

Tolkien was not a professional theologian. He was not even a professional novelist. He was perhaps the greatest living authority on the history of the English language, a full professor at Oxford who mumbled his way through lectures on obscure Anglo-Saxon grammar. But when the stories he told his children gained attention and were published as The Hobbit, Tolkien became an immediate sensation. He spent the remainder of his life letting the public into the secret world he had been building in his imagination since he was a soldier in the trenches of World War I.

The basic plot of his magnum opus is now so well-known as to barely need a summary. Frodo Baggins, a diminutive Hobbit of the Shire, finds himself in possession of the One Ring, a thoroughly evil artifact that shares the essence of the Dark Lord Sauron (who was long thought destroyed). But Sauron (the eponymous Lord of the Rings) is rising again, and he wants his most powerful weapon back. Frodo, along with a small Fellowship, must undertake a mission to travel into the very heart of Sauron’s impenetrable kingdom without being discovered, and destroy the Ring in the very fires in which it was forged.

“That is the purpose for which you are called hither,” Elrond explains to the Fellowship.

Called, I say, though I have not called you to me, strangers from distant lands. You have come and are here met, in this very nick of time, by chance as it may seem. Yet it is not so. Believe rather that it is so ordered that we, who sit here, and none others, must now find counsel for the peril of the world. (The Lord of the Rings, 242)

Not chance, but a hidden ordering, orchestrated the assembly of the Fellowship at Rivendell. This sort of subtle providence appears everywhere throughout the tale, and yet it remains hidden until and unless the reader asks the next (and necessary) question: “Ordered by whom?”

Divine Design

Once the question is posed, the answer seems inevitable. The very nature of the narrative drives it. Who keeps this seemingly impossible mission from devolving into chaos? Why does chance always seem to favor the side of the good? Gandalf, again, shows us more than is immediately obvious.

There was something else at work, beyond any design of the Ring-maker. I can put it no plainer than by saying that Bilbo was meant to find the Ring, and not by its maker. In which case you also were meant to have it. And that may be an encouraging thought. (56)

This is the divine design of Middle-earth.

The Lord of the Rings keeps its Christian metaphysic under the surface. Tolkien deliberately set the story in the mythical past of our own world, before the special revelation to Abraham or the incarnation of the God-man. Yet, aside from its strong portrayal of providence, it also models the life of common grace.

“We see in ‘The Lord of the Rings’ a stellar example of the way a worldview can affect every facet of life.”

Frodo refuses to kill Gollum (who deserves it) because he insists that Gollum still possesses an inherent dignity and the possibility of redemption. Aragorn’s kingship manifests not in his seizure of military power, but in his works of healing and righteousness. Sam Gamgee, the blue-collar gardener, not Boromir, the realpolitiker captain, is the highest model of heroism. In all these ways, Tolkien is seeding the ground for spiritual harvest, creating art that has its own integrity while organically illustrating truth.

The World as Art

A staunch Roman Catholic who recited his prayers loudly in Latin even after Vatican II allowed for Mass in English, Tolkien didn’t set out to write “Christian fiction,” whatever that term may mean. He has no Aslan-allegory waiting to pounce upon us. “I was primarily writing an exciting story in an atmosphere and background such as I find personally attractive. But in such a process inevitably one’s own taste, ideas, and beliefs get taken up,” he explains (The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, 267).

Tolkien’s art is, first and foremost, just that: art, made by a professing Christian. Not a hidden sermon, not an evangelistic allegory, not a work of imaginative apologetics — at least, not directly. But Tolkien had an incredibly robust doctrine of creation, which makes the category of “art” something much more than mere entertainment. For him, the whole world is a work of Art that the Creator has made real, giving it what Tolkien calls “secondary reality” (Letters, 279).

And if the world is art, then it all must mean something. God, the true Being, gives other beings their existence, and because God is their source, they point back to him. All creation is sacramental: God reveals his own Being through the gift of being and his own invisible nature through visible nature. This is what creation means. It’s designed to lead us to glorify its Creator.

Stories Can Elevate the Heart

If the world really is art, then not just the sacramental, imaginative, aesthetic experience of creation, but also our instinct for poetic vision, reveal the divine Poet. If creation is art, then all art mirrors creation in some way.

Tolkien ties this vision of a universe teeming with unique, wonder-full creatures to his theory of sub-creation. We make because we are made in the image of a Maker, and we extend and enrich God’s creation through our own derivative creative efforts. Tolkien’s “exciting story,” in which a Christian mind imitates its Creator, doesn’t have to be a gospel allegory. It glorifies God by being itself, just as trees glorify God by being trees and the rocks cry out before Christ. All art imitates creation to a greater or lesser degree. God’s character is more translucent in some works than others (more evident, for instance, in The Brothers Karamazov than Iron Man 2).

The Lord of the Rings is not just popcorn fare. It is deeply theological, meditating on themes of death, fall, mercy, and idolatry. Its atmosphere strikes even non-Christians as redolent of a certain sanctity, of a high, clear nobility that elevates the heart. Here, Tolkien’s fantasy environment allows for such elements to be magnified beyond their ordinary scale and contemplated more directly. He invented this genre for a profound reason.

Joy as Poignant as Grief

In his magisterial essay “On Fairy-Stories,” Tolkien articulates the threefold theological movement of fantasy. First, it helps us to escape from the claustrophobic realm of materialism and all our quotidian burdens. Escaping into a new perspective then helps us to recover our view of the truth. Our eyes have been clouded by sin and possessiveness, and packaging the old familiar goods in unfamiliar forms helps us to see them afresh. But the key characteristic of all good fantasy is consolation, the joy of the happy ending.

Tolkien terms this specific sort of joy eucatastrophe, “a sudden and miraculous grace: never to be counted on to recur.” While acknowledging that we live in the midst of much sorrow, failure, and pain, eucatastrophe instead “denies (in the face of much evidence, if you will) universal final defeat and in so far is evangelium, giving a fleeting glimpse of Joy, Joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief” (Tolkien On Fairy-Stories, 75).

Fantasy echoes the story of redemption. Lost in our sin and with no hope of escape, we are alienated from God the Creator, but in an astonishing grace he himself becomes one of us in order to do what only he can. And when things seem darkest — when we reject, violate, and murder God himself — that is the exact moment at which God’s greatest triumph occurs. It leads our hearts to exult in immeasurable joy. The fairy tale has come true. “Legend and History have met and fused” (Fairy-Stories, 78).

As such, Tolkien believes that fantasy can train our hearts for truth. He writes of the gospel as a form of fairy tale:

This story has entered History and the primary world; the desire and aspiration of sub-creation has been raised to the fulfillment of Creation. The Birth of Christ is the eucatastrophe of Man’s history. The Resurrection is the eucatastrophe of the story of the Incarnation. This story begins and ends in joy. It has pre-eminently the “inner consistency of reality.” There is no tale ever told that men would rather find was true, and none which so many sceptical men have accepted as true on its own merits. (Fairy-Stories, 78)

A Classic for Christians?

If all good art reflects the divine artist, and all good fantasy foreshadows the gospel, what might we gain from reading a work like The Lord of the Rings, crafted by a Christian who self-consciously leaned into this state of affairs, seeking to make excellent art that goes with the grain of creation?

The Lord of the Rings offers a picture of a good and beautiful cosmos. It refuses to glamorize evil. It pictures heroes who are actually heroic in the biblical sense, not just glory-driven killing machines. Tolkien doesn’t need to make his fantasy Christian; instead, he can simply recognize and cultivate a narrative process that God has already designed to lead us to himself.

The Evangelium has not abrogated legends; it has hallowed them, especially the “happy ending.” The Christian has still to work, with mind as well as body, to suffer, hope, and die; but he may now perceive that all his bents and faculties have a purpose, which can be redeemed. (Fairy-Stories, 78–79)

Tolkien’s great text models for us what it might mean to redeem this aspect of God’s good creation, to participate in the work of making all things new. In this way, he too is a servant of the Secret Fire.

Audio Transcript

One of the great anxieties that parents face is the fear of what our own sins could do to corrupt our kids. It can be a paralyzing anxiety, one that has come up on the podcast in many different forms.

It’s the fear of those who believe in God’s judgment on generational sins, sins of the past being visited on future generations. More commonly, it’s the fear of young men and women born out of wedlock, or born into dysfunctional homes, who wonder if their past dooms their future family to a similar broken fate. It’s the fear of Christian parents of prodigals who are left wondering what they did to mess up their children so badly. It’s the fear of young men and women awakened to the potency of sin in their own hearts, and afraid to even have children because of what their own sins could do to corrupt those future kids. In each of these scenarios, we find the same haunting question lurking behind it all: Did my sin — or will my sin — ruin my child? In our new APJ book, you can see these scenarios on pages 192–93.

And the same question echoes in this heartbreaking email from a broken dad. He writes in anonymously. “Pastor John, my wife and I have four sons, ranging from twenty to eight. We recently found out our twenty- and fifteen-year-olds both claim to suffer from so-called ‘gender dysphoria.’ The twenty-year-old is walking with the Lord and knows it’s wrong, fighting his temptations, and trying to dwell in God for strength, and attends a solid, Bible-believing church. But he’s in college two hours away, and we are still worried for him.

“Our fifteen-year-old is not a believer. He’s in a public school, and we are now looking to move him to private Christian school and will continue to help support him. But he has been cold and not receptive. We have talked to our pastors and asked for prayer, but we feel so broken and so alone and so helpless in this season. What do we do to fight against the despair we face every day as failed parents? How did we fail them? Please help us, Pastor John. We are so torn and heartbroken.”

As I have thought and prayed more than usual about this question and this situation — which, of course, is multiplied ten thousandfold for Christian parents across the world — there are ten suggestions that I have for parents to consider (and I just say consider) when a child moves away from obedience to Jesus. It might be completely away; it might be partially away — whatever form it takes.

Here they are.

1. Grieve with hope.

Grieve deeply but not despairingly. Grieve while holding fast to the sovereign goodness and wisdom of God. Be like Job, who fell on the ground, tore his robe, shaved his head, no doubt wept his eyes out at the loss of his children, and said, “The Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord” (Job 1:21). So, grieve deeply but not despairingly.

2. Look to the God of the impossible.

Do not assume while your child lives that he will not return to the path of obedience. “What is impossible with man” — and it surely seems impossible at times — “is possible with God” (Luke 18:27). Look to the God of the impossible.

3. Do not assume you’re decisively at fault.

Do not assume that your imperfections as a parent were decisive in causing this disobedience in your child. Don’t assume that. Read Ezekiel 18:1–32. I’ll sum it up:

Behold, all souls are mine; the soul of the father as well as the soul of the son is mine: the soul who sins shall die. If a righteous father begets a son who is violent, a shedder of blood, though the father himself has done none of these things, that son shall surely die. His blood shall be upon himself. The son shall not suffer for the iniquity of the father, nor the father for the iniquity of the son.

The father shall not suffer, the mother shall not suffer, for the iniquity of the son. In other words, we cannot draw a straight line from our own parenting to our children’s sin or righteousness. The refrain running through the Bible is that failing parents can have good children, and good parents can have failing children. So, repent of all remembered sin, but don’t assume that was the decisive cause of your child’s disobedience.

4. Love your children on God’s terms.

Resolve to love your children on God’s terms, not the world’s terms. That is, love them with a readiness to sacrifice your life while standing for what God calls right and what God calls true, not what the world calls right and true. The effort to be loving by forsaking God’s way of truth and righteousness — which many are trying to do today — is to fail in love. “You will know the truth, and the truth will set you free,” Jesus said in John 8:32. God’s truth is the path to love.

5. Speak truth to your child.

Whether in person or in letters or emails, speak truth to your child. Tell them what you believe, why you believe it, and why you believe it’s the path of love. Do not withdraw into self-pity or anger. Lean in with truth; speak to them. Once this is done, then wait. Don’t nag — don’t harass — but be sure you have spoken to them the fullness of the truth you believe is the path of love.

6. Communicate your love.

Communicate your love — the love that is willing and ready to go anywhere, do anything, at any cost to your life for the sake of the life of your children. Now, they may think that the truth you embrace cannot be loving because it does not affirm them in their sin, but they know in their heart when you are ready to give your life for them and that you are not selfish. They know. Your commitment to the Bible has made you ready to die for the good of others, especially your children. Communicate that readiness to them.

7. Pray without ceasing.

Pray without ceasing in the confidence that God is sovereign and merciful, slow to anger, abounding in steadfast love. And gather some friends — whether in person or in other ways — and join in prayer for each other’s children. Trust God as you pray that he will give good things to those who ask him, because that’s what it says in Matthew 7:11: “If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is in heaven give good things to those who ask him!” Expect him to give good things as you pray.

8. Discern how often to address the issue.

Measure — with prayerful, Bible-saturated wisdom — how often to address the issue with your child. I said a moment ago, “Don’t nag — don’t harass.” Some will be utterly closed to any communication. That’s tragic, but it’s real. So, rarely intrude where you have been forbidden. (Rarely — I didn’t say never.) Others will be more open. God will give you discernment. That’s what I trust. God will give you discernment — “wisdom from above,” as James calls it in James 3:17.

Sometimes you will just send a note of affection. “I love you.” That’s the text: “I love you.” Sometimes notes mentioning something precious about the Lord Jesus that you just read in your devotions. Maybe, “As a father pities his children, so the Lord pities those who fear Him” (Psalm 103:13 NKJV). You just say that. Sometimes the note will simply say, “Just thinking about you today.” That’s all.

9. Make the central gospel plain.

Periodically, make the simple, central gospel plain to the distant prodigal — the child who’s moving away. Make the central gospel plain. In other words, from time to time — God will make it plain how often (Once a year? Once every six months?) — remind them there’s always a way out, a way home to God and to you, because there may come a point when they want out.

They want out of their disobedience, but Satan is blinding them to any hope that it could happen, telling them there’s no way out; there’s no way back. And they may need help remembering what they once knew so well and has become cloudy. “If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness” (1 John 1:9).

10. Press on with indomitable joy.

Press on with your ordinary life with brokenhearted but indomitable joy, and deny Satan the triumph of paralyzing you in your path of righteousness because of your child’s path of unrighteousness. Satan would love to take out two people with one bullet. Deny him that.

Yes, your child needs to see that you are not blithely indifferent to his disobedience. But just as important, he needs to see that Jesus is your supreme treasure and that the solar system of your life does not revolve around your child. He is not the sun in your solar system. Christ is. He doesn’t need you falling apart, retreating in self-pity, pouting. That’s not helpful. He needs you weak and triumphant in Christ.

Tidal Wave of Grace

Now, there are so many other things besides these ten things to say. When I finished them, I just kept thinking of others. We have to stop. But these are the thoughts that come to me just now as I was praying and preparing for this. So, let’s pray for each other, and may the Lord bring the day when there is a tidal wave of grace that sweeps thousands of precious prodigals into the arms of their parents and of the Lord Jesus.

I can’t remember the preacher, but I remember the line: “Abraham would have traded places with us in a heartbeat.” It caught my attention because I so often read my Bible and wish I could have the experiences that Abraham had. Or Moses. Or Joshua. Definitely David.

But the preacher was right. In fact, he wasn’t saying anything different from what Jesus says to his disciples: “Blessed are your eyes, for they see, and your ears, for they hear. For truly, I say to you, many prophets and righteous people longed to see what you see, and did not see it, and to hear what you hear, and did not hear it” (Matthew 13:16–17). Now, in other words, really is better than then: better than Abraham’s experiences at Haran (Genesis 12:1–5), Moses’s at Sinai (Exodus 19), Joshua’s at Jericho (Joshua 6), or David’s in the Valley of Elah (1 Samuel 17). Now — the present chapter in God’s story — is better, and it’s better for all kinds of reasons.

Here I want to draw our attention to one often-overlooked reason. It’s found at the end of Hebrews, and it’s full of implications for how we read our Bibles — and whom we baptize.

Running with a Limp

Right at the end of the “Hall of Faith” in Hebrews 11, the pastor concludes his list of Old Testament heroes by telling us this: “All these, though commended through their faith, did not receive what was promised, since God had provided something better for us, that apart from us they should not be made perfect” (verses 39–40). We find the same idea in two other places in the chapter (verses 1–2, 13): the Old Testament faithful lived and died without receiving what God had promised them.

The promise in view is variously described as a “land” (verse 9), a “city” built by “God” (verse 10; see also verse 16), a “homeland” (verse 14), and a “better” and, indeed, “heavenly” country (verse 16). In other places, Hebrews calls this same place “the world to come” (2:5; 1:6), “a Sabbath rest” (4:9), “the inner place behind the curtain” (6:19; 9:11–12, 24), “the promised eternal inheritance” (9:15), “a better possession” (10:34), “Mount Zion, the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem” (12:22 NET), “a kingdom that cannot be shaken” (12:28), and a “city that is to come” (13:14).

It’s a place the Old Testament faithful never reached. They didn’t reach it because God had planned “something better for us.” Or, to say it another way, God had decided “that apart from us they should not be made perfect” or fit to enter God’s presence. That’s what perfection means in Hebrews. It’s a fitness made possible by Jesus’s sacrifice (10:14), and it includes new and immediate effects upon the believer’s conscience (9:9, 14; 10:2, 22) and, one day, on his body too (see 11:35). It also gives believers new spiritual access to God now (4:16; also 4:3; 12:22–23), and bodily access to the heavenly city when Jesus returns (12:22; 13:14). It’s an extraordinary gift and one, Hebrews insists, that Old Testament believers, from Abel to Zechariah (Hebrews 11:4, 37), ran their race without.

“In the new covenant, God enables every member to keep covenant. He enables every member to persevere in faithfulness.”

The author couldn’t make his point more forcefully. When his friends asked whether it was possible to run the Christian race, they needed only to remember the “great cloud” of the Old Testament faithful, who lived and died full of faith (Hebrews 12:1 NET). These heroes were tempted in every way, just like we are, yet without giving up. Like us, they too ran their race through many dangers, toils, and snares. But, on top of all this, they also ran with a limp. They ran their race without the gift of perfection (11:39–40). Surely (and this is Hebrews’s point) if they could run and finish full of faith, so can we!

Three Lessons from Perfection

This brand-new gift of perfection makes our place in God’s story better and, at the same time, teaches us fresh lessons about how we should read and understand God’s written word, including the relationship between the covenants, the nature of Christian apostasy, and the proper subjects of Christian baptism.

1. Relationship Between the Covenants

According to Hebrews, Jesus’s perfection-bringing death inaugurated a new covenant (9:15–17, when properly translated). Hebrews calls this covenant “better” when comparing it with the old covenant that Moses inaugurated at Sinai (8:6; 9:18–22) and under which most of the faithful in Hebrews 11 lived (11:23–38).

It’s better because it’s “not like” the old covenant that God made with Israel and that Israel didn’t keep (8:8–9). Unlike the new covenant, the old covenant couldn’t guarantee its members’ faithfulness. It couldn’t keep itself from being broken or its members safe from its curses (3:11, 17–18). It had no power to ensure that its members would, like the heroes of Hebrews 11, live and die full of faith. It was good but, owing to these deficiencies, not good enough.

The new covenant’s new provisions, therefore, supply precisely what the old covenant lacked. God now puts his “laws into” his people’s “minds” and writes “them on their hearts” (8:10). In short, he enables his people’s obedience. In fact, he does this for each and every covenant member: “all” the members of God’s new covenant “know” God, from “least” to “greatest” (verse 11). The days of a believing remnant inside a hardened majority are forever ended. In this new covenant, God enables every member to keep covenant. He enables every member to persevere in faithfulness.

All of this, however, can be gifted to sinful people only because our thrice-holy God, in unfathomable love, finally and fully forgives his people’s sins through Jesus’s perfecting sacrifice (8:12; 10:14, 18).

Hebrews 11:39–40, therefore, teaches us that Jesus’s perfecting death inaugurated a covenant that is better than the old covenant precisely because it includes benefits never before experienced. None, in fact, could be experienced in earlier eras of God’s story, neither through God’s earlier covenants nor proleptically through the new, because “God had planned something better for us” (11:40 NIV).

To say it again, the Old Testament faithful were not perfected. The new covenant was not inaugurated, nor its better promises experienced, until Jesus died. This means that the new covenant is not simply a further revelation of the one covenant of grace, but a substantively new covenant, new in its revelatory content and in its soteriological provisions (1:1–3).

2. Nature of Christian Apostasy

The new covenant’s superiority implies that apostasy in the new-covenant era is substantively different from apostasy under the old covenant. While an old-covenant member might fail to “continue in” the covenant (and, sadly, many did; Hebrews 8:9), a new-covenant member cannot. It’s this very distinction — the unbreakable-ness of the covenant — that makes the new covenant better. Thus, the warnings against apostasy in Hebrews, which some in the author’s audience did not heed (10:25), refer to new-covenant experiences available to members and nonmembers alike (see 6:4–6 and 10:29). After all, the covenant is either better or breakable. There is not a third option.

3. Proper Subjects of Christian Baptism

Considering the inviolability of the new covenant and the connection Hebrews draws between faith, perfection, and covenant membership (3:6, 14; 10:14, 18, 22–23), Hebrews gives us no encouragement to treat non-professing individuals (those who do not profess faith in Christ) as covenant members. Rather, the (sad) reality of apostasy suggests that the visible new-covenant community will be phenomenologically mixed until Jesus returns, with real and false professors, while the superiority of the new covenant suggests the true covenant community will remain ontologically (and gloriously) unmixed.

To admit non-professing people into the visible (professing) community confuses these two realities. It fails to recognize the crucial difference between a professing member who claims to “know the Lord” and a non-professing member who doesn’t — and who therefore requires something that new-covenant membership itself specifically provides (8:11).

Our Place in God’s Story

What more shall I say? Time would fail me to tell of what Hebrews 11:39–40 teaches us about Levitical sacrifices or circumcision or regeneration or the intermediate state. Time and space fail already to give anything more than a cursory look at the three implications I’ve sketched above.

Still, what we’ve seen gives us more than enough reason to agree with Jesus (and the nameless preacher) about the goodness of our place in God’s story. We have even more reason to persevere in our race of faith as we await Jesus’s return, a perfected body, and life with God and in his city forever and ever.

The road to the pastorate is filled with men who had hoped to arrive a long time ago. Many years have passed since they first felt the seed of a desire to shepherd Christ’s church. But for any number of reasons — life circumstances, personal immaturity, the need for training — no church has called them as shepherd. Not yet.

I think of one friend whose aspiration has quietly burned for over a decade. I think of another man, barely out of his teens, who recently started pursuing the pastorate and likely has years ahead of him. I think of my former self, traveling that road through my entire twenties. Such men may feel ambitions as big as Paul’s — but then remember, with a sigh, that they are not even a Timothy yet.

What can a man do on that road, especially when he can’t see the end of it? Well, quite a lot. Bobby Jamieson offers a couple of dozen ideas in his helpful book The Path to Being a Pastor. My colleague Marshall Segal boils those down to seven worthy ambitions. But lately my mind has been focused on a passage from Paul to Timothy. Timothy was already a pastor at the time of Paul’s writing, but he was a young pastor, not far removed from the road of aspiring men. And Paul’s counsel applies wonderfully to those preparing to join him.

“Do we enjoy Jesus before we preach him, and preach him because we enjoy him?”

We might capture the heart of Paul’s burden in 1 Timothy 4:6–16 with the words of verse 15: “Practice these things, immerse yourself in them, so that all may see your progress.” Let them see your progress, Timothy. Don’t grow discouraged. Don’t remain stuck. Instead, by God’s grace, gain ground. Hone your character. Develop your competency. Become more godly, more fruitful, more zealous, more skilled. Make progress — the kind of progress that others can see.

To that end, consider a two-part plan: Train privately. Practice publicly.

Train Privately

Most of Paul’s commands in 1 Timothy 4:6–16 focus on Timothy’s public ministry. “Command and teach” (verse 11); “set the believers an example” (verse 12); “devote yourself to the public reading of Scripture, to exhortation, to teaching” (verse 13); and so on. At the same time, Paul knew just how easily public ministry could outpace private piety. He knew how tempting it could be to “keep a close watch on . . . the teaching” without keeping a close watch “on yourself” (verse 16).

It is frightfully possible to preach in public what you disobey in private. It is sadly common for men, even pastors-in-training, to lose delight in God’s word, and neglect the prayer closet. So, behind, before, and alongside Timothy’s public ministry, Paul says, “Train yourself for godliness” (verse 7). Explain publicly what you have experienced privately. Let all your teaching be plucked from the orchard of your soul. Remember that all God-pleasing progress in public flows from God-centered progress in private.

Enjoy His Words

“Train yourself for godliness”: the command takes us into an athletic spirituality, a pursuit of Christ that doesn’t mind the uphill climb, that relishes some sweat, that is willing to beat disobedient feelings into submission. Give yourself, Timothy, to the long, gradual, difficult, joyful process of becoming more like Jesus — or what some Puritans called “the great business of godliness” (The Genius of Puritanism, 12).

Such training may take many forms, but Paul leaves no doubt about the central content of Timothy’s regimen: he would progress in godliness by “being trained in the words of the faith” (1 Timothy 4:6). Reject “deceitful spirits and teachings of demons” (verse 1); sidestep “irreverent, silly myths” (verse 7). Instead, give yourself to God’s word.

If there is a secret to public progress, surely it lies in private soul-dealings with the God who speaks. I for one have felt chastened lately by Andrew Bonar’s description of the young Robert Murray M’Cheyne, who would often ride outside town “to enjoy an hour’s perfect solitude; for he felt meditation and prayer to be the very sinews of his work” (Memoir and Remains of Robert Murray M’Cheyne, 56). Meditation and prayer are the sinews of ministry. Without them, we may have the muscle of charisma and the bones of orthodoxy, but the body hangs loose and weak; we stagger rather than run.

In one way or another, the depth of our private dealings with God will become evident in public. Our faces will shine like Moses’s — or they won’t. Our spontaneous speech and conduct will “set . . . an example” (verse 12) — or it won’t. We will hand others the ripe fruit of our own meditations — or we will deal in plastic apples and pears.

As aspiring leaders, we know God’s word forms the soul and substance of our public ministry. But over time, has our private life come to betray that conviction? Do we still read God’s word with anything like athletic obsession? Do we enjoy Jesus before we preach him, and preach him because we enjoy him? Do we treat meditation and prayer as the indispensable sinews of ministry?

Examine Your Soul

As Timothy devotes himself to “the words of the faith,” Paul calls him to turn his attention inward as well. “Keep a close watch on yourself,” he writes (1 Timothy 4:16). Timothy was an overseer of souls, but the first soul he needed to oversee was his own.

“The gifts of God are not only given, but cultivated; not only bestowed, but honed.”

Paul had spoken such words to pastors before. “Pay careful attention to yourselves,” he told the elders in Ephesus (Acts 20:28). And he had good reason to warn: “From among your own selves will arise men speaking twisted things” (Acts 20:30). Pastor or not, if a man does not keep a close watch on himself, he will lose himself. He will not only fail to progress; he will regress, sometimes beyond hope. And Timothy was no exception.

So, Paul says, keep a close watch. Regularly tour the city of your heart to see if any enemies have breached the gate and now threaten the throne. Stand sentinel in your soul; know the weak spots on the walls, and study the enemies you are likely to face. Pray and then patiently review in God’s presence your speech, conduct, love, faith, purity (1 Timothy 4:12). As you read God’s word, ask him to search you and save you, to reveal you and rescue you (Psalm 139:23–24). “Lord, discipline me, correct me, expose me, confront me — and whatever it takes, keep me from destroying myself.”

True, we do not make much progress in godliness by looking inward. But we may notice the enemies that keep us from progress — enemies that, unmortified, would ruin all our progress up till now.

Practice Publicly

If private progress relates mostly to our character, public progress relates mostly to our competence. And in our passage, Paul cares about Timothy’s competence a lot. When he writes, “Practice these things, immerse yourself in them, so that all may see your progress” (1 Timothy 4:15), “these things” refers mainly to “the public reading of Scripture, to exhortation, to teaching” (verse 13). Timothy was already “able to teach” (1 Timothy 3:2), but Paul wanted him to become more able, to increasingly look like “a worker who has no need to be ashamed, rightly handling the word of truth” (2 Timothy 2:15).

Paul recognized in Timothy a pastoral gift (1 Timothy 4:14). But Timothy’s gift was not a static endowment: he could “neglect the gift” he had, or he could “practice” and improve it (verses 14–15). For the gifts of God are not only given, but cultivated; not only bestowed, but honed. And here men like us find hope. However gifted we may feel (or not), we are not at the mercy of our present attainments. We can handle God’s word with more care. We can apply it with more power. We can develop a greater readiness “in season and out of season” (2 Timothy 4:2). That is, as long as we practice.

Embrace Unspectacular Opportunities

Few men receive a ready-made gift of teaching, a gift with no assembly required. God’s kingdom has its occasional Spurgeons, of course, who preached better as a teenager than I ever will as an adult. But most of us become proficient only through repeated practice over years, and then most of us progress further only through more practice still. And if we’re going to practice as much as we ought — as much as Paul’s “immerse yourself” suggests (1 Timothy 4:15) — then we likely will need to embrace opportunities that seem pretty unspectacular.

We might, for example, lead a group of guys in middle-school ministry. We might pour more thought into family devotions. We might find a lonely, suffering saint, listen to his heart woes, and practice the complex art of pastoral counseling. We might gather a few men committed to exhorting and encouraging each other. We might spend time with the sermon passage before we hear it preached, developing our own ideas and applications, drafting our own outline. We might snatch up every realistic opportunity to open the Bible and say something about it.

Perhaps we feel tempted to despise these small, unspectacular opportunities. But small, unspectacular opportunities form, for most of us, the indispensable path toward progress. There is no progress without practice — and practice sometimes feels utterly ordinary.

Fail Well

Those who practice enough, of course, eventually discover an uncomfortable truth: with practice comes not only progress, but failure. Open your mouth often enough, and you’ll say something foolish. Exhort others enough, and you’ll damage a bruised reed. Counsel enough, and you’ll speak too soon or too late. Preach enough, and you’ll leave the pulpit disheartened.

In the aftermath of such moments, we may feel like practicing a little less; rather than immersing ourselves in ministry or devoting ourselves to teaching (1 Timothy 4:13, 15), we may feel like retreating to a safer place. We may want to dig a hole and bury our talents in the dirt of our failures.

Yet precisely in such moments, we need to hear Paul’s word to Timothy in verse 14: “Do not neglect the gift you have.” Yes, your effort ended in embarrassment, but do not neglect the gift you have. Yes, taking another public risk feels daunting, but do not neglect the gift you have. Yes, to fail again like that would feel shameful, but do not neglect the gift you have. In some cases, of course, repeated failure may suggest that we don’t actually have the gift we thought we did. In so many cases, however, the failure was just part of the practice.

So, hold your failures in open hands, and learn all you can from them. Remember “the words of the faith” that have been your private strength, your secret delight. Take courage that if “Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners” (1 Timothy 1:15), he can certainly restore and use failures. And then get back in the pulpit, back before the small group, back on the streets, back wherever your ministry lies, and use the gift that God has given you.

And in time, all will see your progress.

John Erickson: Brothers, thank you again for joining us. We prayed that the Lord would meet us in these sessions, not just in the Q&A, but in these two previous sessions, and I’m so thankful for God’s grace in how he answered prayer. We want to spend this next session thinking about the joyful courage that the Spirit gives. These are days that require courage. Brothers, you know that courage is required in the days ahead, but I don’t think any of us quite comprehend how much courage will be needed for the days ahead.

And when days are difficult, the most natural thing is to conserve, to just stop spreading. I’m just struck by the reality that in the book of Acts, on the heels of persecution, there are men filled with the Holy Spirit, filled with joy, and that joy bubbles up into courage that leads them to spread. God is at work every place they go, and everywhere they go there’s suffering. So, brothers, we’re inviting you into this Spirit-wrought work of joy that produces courage that will run right into the teeth of suffering. That’s what we’re asking God to help us with in these minutes.

This little, very weak group of churches, 36 beautiful churches, traces its roots back to the beginning of days when I had the privilege of being on staff at Bethlehem and the Lord was bringing quite a few people to Bethlehem. Pastor John preached a message with the title Treasuring Christ Together. Pastor John, can you just tell us that name, that phrase, where did that come from? What were you thinking about in those days as you were thinking about treasuring Christ together?

John Piper: Paul said, “We have this treasure in earthen vessels in order that the surpassing power might belong to God and not to us” (see 2 Corinthians 4:7). That’s the text, I suppose, where I would go to warrant that. Jesus said, “Whoever loves mother or father more than me is not worthy of me, and whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me” (see Matthew 10:37). And that love there is not the kind of agape, service love. That’s not the way we love Jesus. He doesn’t need our service. It’s affection love. That’s family love.

That’s what I have for my children, right? I’m supposed to love Jesus more than Abraham and Benjamin and Karsten and Barnabas and Talitha and Noël. That’s massive, and it is not stressed, in my judgment, often enough at the heart of coming to Christ. So, I wrote a book which was controversial and isn’t selling very well called What Is Saving Faith? in which I argued treasuring Christ is part of saving faith. This title is not, in my judgment, icing on the cake or peripheral.

It’s a way of helping people know what it means to be a disciple of Jesus. When we summon you to Jesus, we summon you to trust a Savior that you treasure, and follow a Lord that you treasure, and have a friend that you treasure, and embrace a reward that you treasure. And if you leave the treasuring part out of any of those, it’s defective. That’s the softest thing I can say, defective. I won’t say unreal. I don’t want to overstate the case. I’ll just say it’s defective. And we don’t want to invite people to a defective faith.

There are a lot of nominal Christians in the world. A lot of people are going to be shocked on the last day. Jesus will say, “I never knew you; depart from me,” because they didn’t love him (Matthew 7:23). They just inherited their faith from somebody. They have various reasons for going to church that are not Jesus being their treasure. It’s pretty basic in my judgment. I’m glad it’s right at the front of our name.

Erickson: Amen. As a family of churches, that is the beating heart at the center: that Christ is the diamond, and treasuring him is not cliche, not a throwaway, as you just stated. This is the essence. We’re also united by a big view of God. You wrote an Elder Affirmation of Faith for Bethlehem that is now subscribed to by every elder of every one of our churches. It’s not a short affirmation of faith. It’s about 59 pages, depending on how it’s written up, with 299 footnotes loaded with Scripture. Your aim there was just Scripture, Scripture, Scripture, because this is the document that unites us as churches. Go back and give us a little history of how that document came about.

Piper: I’m glad you gave me that ahead of time. That’s why I have notes. I’m no good at remembering history, but this is really interesting. So, I’m going to take a few minutes to answer this. If it sounds like I’m losing you, I’ll stop — and you can stop me anytime. When you say I wrote it, that’s dangerous, right? One man wrote this thing. What’s that?

Back in the mid-1990s, there were red-hot issues, among them was open theism. I belonged to the Baptist General Conference. The Baptist General Conference, to my amazement, would not affirm the absolute foreknowledge of God as part of their beliefs — that God foreknows perfectly everything that shall come to pass. I was stunned. It so jolted me, and I was shouted down almost at the annual meeting in 1995. I began to think about creeds and affirmations and beliefs that are so precious. Without a good one, conferences can really go awry. I’ll just say at the outset, to have a good affirmation faith doesn’t guarantee the church will be faithful. Many churches embrace the Westminster Confession and they’re not faithful churches because it’s just in name. That was part of the background.

I noticed in the Bible that Paul referred to a “form of teaching to which you were committed” (see Romans 6:17). He referred to a “deposit” (2 Timothy 1:14) that everybody was to pass on. He referred to “the traditions” (2 Thessalonians 2:15), which you have received. He referred to “the whole counsel of God” (Acts 20:27). These phrases connoted a body of teaching. Paul could wash his hands of people and walk away from them after two years and say, “I’ve delivered it to you. It’s not my fault if you’re lost” (see Acts 20:26–27), because he delivered “the whole counsel of God.” Amazing. I thought that was a biblical warrant for putting things down as a summary of our precious faith. I love historic confessions, like Westminster, Belgium, Heidelberg, 1689, Philadelphia, and Baptist Faith & Message. These kinds of summaries are precious.

However, the one we ascribed to as a church was the Baptist General Conference Affirmation of Faith, and it had no clear affirmation of any of the doctrines of grace, which in my life had become of paramount significance as a faithful, glorious description of how I got saved. I was dead in my trespasses, chosen before the foundation of the world, bought by the blood of Jesus, kept forever and ever, and drawn irresistibly to him. I mean, I owe everything to these five points. So, I thought we’d need an affirmation that gets that.

The immediate occasion for the writing of it was TBI (The Bethlehem Institute), the precursor for Bethlehem College and Seminary. They said, “We need an affirmation of faith more robust than the one the church has.” And they sent me away to write a draft. I did that in April of 1999. And I wanted to weave into it the doctrines of grace. I thought it should be thoroughly Christian Hedonist. If you go through and mark every reference to joy, you’ll find about 15 of them. So, Christian Hedonism is marking it.

I wrote it. I brought it back. After 10 years, we created elders at Bethlehem. We didn’t have any when I came. There was a new constitution in the year 1990. The question was, “What are these elders going to believe?” I remember meeting with John MacArthur and saying, “How do you handle what you require at Grace Church?” And he said, “You’ll notice the title for our elder book, which is quite thick, is What We Teach.” I thought, oh, that’s helpful, because I can’t demand a front-end believer, a baby believer, who’s just been brought to Christ to embrace this document. They don’t know anything. They hardly know their right hand from their left. So, that’s not what you do.

But what do the elders teach? What are you going to hear when you come to this church? That’s what you lift up in an affirmation of faith. The elders believe it. That’s what we teach. That’s what we operate from. And so I thought, okay, let’s do this.

I wrote the first draft and I brought it back and I sent it to Sam Crabtree and Tom Steller first. Then I sent a draft to the TBI board (The Bethlehem Institute). I sent a draft to the TBI students. I sent a draft to Desiring God theological support staff and to the pastoral staff. And here are the outside readers that read it: Timothy George, J.I. Packer, Richard Muller, Mark Noll, Millard Erickson, Wayne Grudem, Bruce Ware, Tom Schreiner, Ardel Caneday, David Wells, R.C. Sproul, John Sailhamer, Scott Hafemann, C.J. Mahaney, Tom Rockstead, and Michael Horton.

I did not trust myself in this. This was going to be a historic thing. I wanted trusted teachers like this to read this and tell me if I’m saying anything quirky. I don’t want to be quirky. I don’t want people to just read it and say, “Oh, that was the 1990s.” So, when you hear Piper wrote it, I did write the first draft. It went through four renditions with all these inputs, and finally it was voted on as a TBI requirement for the faculty first. We taught it in the church consistently from 2000–2003. And on December 10, 2003, it was a miracle night in my judgment. The church voted that all our elders would henceforth embrace this.

I mean, for a Baptist Church to have the congregation say, “We want to be governed henceforth by a council of elders who believe this document,” was remarkable. And so, that’s how it came to be an elder affirmation of faith at Bethlehem. Since then, as you know, it’s been the affirmation of faith for Bethlehem College and Seminary, Desiring God, and the Treasuring Christ Together network. The Cross Conference, the missions conference, has used it as the basis of their conference, although we’ve changed the baptism paragraph, so Kevin DeYoung, a really good friend, and other good Presbyterian brothers could sign it. That’s the history of how it came to be.

You can pray about this. One of the faculty at school right now says, “John, this is a historic piece, and we need a new name, so that in the coming days when churches here and there, TCT and other schools and missions, embrace it, they won’t say ‘the Bethlehem Elder Affirmation of Faith.’ They’ll say something else.”

I don’t know whether that’s a good idea. I think it may be. So, if you have input on that, you can send it to him maybe and he can pass it along. You can follow up if you want, but that’s my summary of how it came to be. God was good. I see Chuck standing back there, who is a worship leader at Bethlehem. We’ve been reading it on and off for quite a while. And frankly, Chuck, I think it reads pretty good for Sunday morning. It has a flow to it.

When we read the section on sin for Kenny’s sermon two weeks ago and you followed it with “Come, Ye Sinners,” I was just about to lose it. Because it was so perfect to move from that dreadful statement on sin and to follow it with, “Come, ye sinners, poor, needy. If you wait, you’ll never come at all.” That’s good.

Erickson: Jordan and Nathan, I wonder if you would read two sections from near the end of this statement, sections 15.2 and 15.3. I think they really highlight your heart, Pastor John, in this document. It wasn’t trying to put the cookies on the bottom shelf. It wasn’t trying to reduce this down to a note card. There’s a rationale here for why that is. So, Jordan, if you would read 15.2, and Nathan, if you could read 15.3. Then Pastor John, if you just comment on this after they read it.

Jordan Thomas: Yes, gladly. Section 15.2 says:

“Our aim is not to discover how little can be believed, but rather to embrace and teach — the whole counsel of God. Our aim is to encourage a hearty adherence to the Bible, the fullness of its truth, and the glory of its Author. We believe Biblical doctrine stabilizes saints in the winds of confusion and strengthens the church in her mission to meet the great systems of false religion and secularism. We believe that the supreme virtue of love is nourished by the strong meat of God-centered doctrine. And we believe that a passion for the supremacy of God in all things for the joy of all peoples through Jesus Christ is sustained in an atmosphere of deep and joyful knowledge of God and his wonderful works.”

Nathan Knight: Section 15.3 says:

“We believe that the cause of unity in the church is best served, not by finding the lowest common denominator of doctrine, around which all can gather, but by elevating the value of truth, stating the doctrinal parameters of church or school or mission or ministry, seeking the unity that comes from the truth, and then demonstrating to the world how Christians can love each other across boundaries rather than by removing boundaries. In this way, the importance of truth is served by the existence of doctrinal borders, and unity is served by the way we love others across those borders.”

Piper: Let me start with that last one. I had that in my notes to say about the beginning. I’ve always struggled with the importance of and the way we pursue Christian unity. I mean, there are Christians probably in every denomination under the sun because people’s hearts are regularly better than their heads when it comes to what they’ve been taught badly. God has worked in their lives. They’re saved and they’ve just been taught so badly about what happened to them.

So, how am I supposed to love my brothers and sisters everywhere and maintain the truth of Scripture? Francis Schaeffer wrote an article near the end of his life on that issue and he said what I said. I borrowed that entirely from him. We serve truth and we serve unity not by tearing down fences. Because if you tear down fences, you say truth doesn’t really matter. You basically say, “There are no borders around what I believe. It can flow over into error.” In that way, you really don’t know where error begins and truth stops.

And then he said, “But you don’t have to throw hate bombs over the fence.” I thought that was so helpful. At least for me personally, it was so helpful. I’m going to build a fence around this 12-page document. It’s a fence. It’s a pretty significant fence. But I don’t have to devote my life to demonizing the folks on the other side of the fence. I can look for ways to try to help them understand — ways to be cobelligerent. I march with Roman Catholics every January 22 at the Capitol on pro-life. There are all kinds of things that create bridges.

So, that ending there was a Schaeffer-motivated way of speaking. If somebody says, “Don’t you know that doctrine divides, TCT pastors?” I would like to say, “Actually hate divides worse than doctrine divides. Doctrine honors God. And when we build a fence to stay inside here, we believe it’s what the Bible teaches. And if you disagree with that, I don’t want to hate you. I’m going to serve you. I’m going to die for you.” So, that would be the way I would respond to somebody who says doctrine divides. It does, but it doesn’t have to divide in a mean-spirited, hateful way.

With regard to what was read here, I just so totally agree with that. Anecdotally, if I go back to 1995 and remember who stood up at the annual meetings and looked at me like I was the worst person in the Baptist General Conference for thinking that we should fire Greg Boyd, who’s a pastor right here in the cities — he was teaching at Bethel, and he didn’t believe God knows what you’re going to do this afternoon and he still doesn’t. If he were sitting right here, he’d say, “I agree with that.” He doesn’t believe that God knows future acts of free wills. I think that’s heresy, and I was hated for that.

Those people have gone so far left to this day, you can just taste it. They were so anti-doctrine, but the doctrine is a ballast in your boat. The doctrines of grace in particular are such a protection. I mean, there are a lot of bad people who believe the doctrines of grace. Yes, there are, because you can just be a horrible person because your heart is so bad and you’re using doctrine to sell something. But in the best of cases, the doctrines of grace can be a sweet, deep, weighty ballast in your boat so it doesn’t get tipped over by winds that blow along. I like what I wrote there. I don’t remember how much of it was edited.

Erickson: That’s so helpful. I want to hear these brothers’ responses to this, but I just asked Michael if he would read one more section, just one more bit of flavor from this.

Michael Reeves: This is section 3.2:

“We believe that God upholds and governs all things — from galaxies to subatomic particles, from the forces of nature to the movements of nations, and from the public plans of politicians to the secret acts of solitary persons — all in accord with his eternal, all-wise purposes to glorify himself, yet in such a way that he never sins, nor ever condemns a person unjustly; but that his ordaining and governing all things is compatible with the moral accountability of all persons created in his image.”

Piper: I love to hear you read that. Shakespeare, bow down.

Erickson: They’re all going to weigh in, but I just want to focus on that particular paragraph, especially as it’s germane to what you were just describing historically.

Piper: Here’s a little pastoral discovery. If you say to new people, “I don’t believe in free will,” they won’t have any idea what you’re saying first of all, and they’ll think you’re crazy and dead wrong. And they might have good reasons for saying that. To try to help people grasp the sovereignty of God by going the soteriological route of irresistible grace to start with isn’t necessarily the most effective because what I have found is that people who are genuinely born of God are ready to bow down and submit to that paragraph about his sovereignty over nations, his sovereignty over their kids, and his sovereignty over their diseases.

For example, my mother-in-law, who’s with Jesus now, lived to be 101 years old. She died last year. She would never have called herself a Calvinist. She was a little bit nervous that this guy was going to marry her daughter. We’ve been married for 55 years now, and she was okay with me after a while. Right after we got married, maybe three years into our marriage, Noël’s 16-year-old brother was killed immediately in a car crash. To watch Pam Henry deal with the death of her son was glorious. She totally submitted to God. There was not a whiff of criticism of God. There was not a whiff of doubt in his goodness.

Now, to me that’s very close to the heart of Calvinism. Don’t ever get angry with God. Don’t ever criticize God. Don’t ever question God. Don’t ever doubt God. God reigns and God is good in the death of your 16-year-old son. And yet she couldn’t shake what she’d been taught about free will.

So, the point is, over time, if you preach the sovereignty of God and his goodness in the mess this world is in and your personal life and the sufferings you’ve been through, and people begin to embrace that, most of them, I think, will eventually make their way to the full-blown discovery of God’s sovereignty in their own salvation.

Here’s just one other example. Very few people want to proudly answer the question: Why did you believe in Jesus and your sister didn’t? I asked that to a girl named Sharon walking across the bridge after she had gotten in my face after a message. She was angry as could be at predestination. And I said, “Let’s just walk home together,” because she lived in my neighborhood. I said, “Tell me about your conversion,” and she told me about being saved at age nine because she was really tall, and everybody was criticizing her because she was tall. The Spirit of God spoke to her, she said, and assured her, “You’re mine and I love you, and it doesn’t matter what they say.”

I said to her, “So, why did he do that for you?” And she, of course, is not going to say, “Because I’m better than my sister. I’m smarter than my sister. I have more wisdom than my sister.” She just said, “Grace. He just loved me.” I said, “That’s all I’m teaching. It’s sovereign grace that penetrates through your 12-year-old soul and lays hold on you effectively and draws you to himself so that he gets all the glory.”

Erickson: Amen. Michael, share with us from a perspective outside of this little bubble what Pastor John has been talking about about doctrine and how God uses it. As you’re hearing these things, what are some of your thoughts about what Pastor John shared?

Reeves: I love this title, Treasuring Christ Together, and it’s a banner that needs to be held high and waved today because it’s far too forgotten, it’s far too breezed over with thoughts that we can have Christian healthiness without treasuring Christ, maybe with good programs and with hard work and with certain actions, but without that treasuring Christ. Treasuring Christ is an essential mark of the heart that has been renewed, and that truth needs to be trumpeted.

What I see as I read these affirmations is page after page of truths that renewed hearts should warm to. They won’t always, but they should warm to these. And with such good news that is so pastorally helpful, these are truths that are useful for us. Congregationally and communally, they hold the people of God together because it is the word of God that creates the church. It is the gospel truth of God that has brought us new life. So, to be reciting these truths together, we’re holding onto those truths that bind us in the unity of the Spirit. They are pastorally helpful too, individually.

So, just to hear how these truths are being used pastorally and discussed before a sermon or after a sermon or whenever those instances were, strikes me as a really healthy use of such a document. It doesn’t just sit around merely as a fence, but actually becomes a banner and becomes a pastoral support, so that people can be constantly called back to the gospel that gives health.

Erickson: Nathan, you pastor in DC. You’ve recently written a book with 9Marks. You’re right in the splash pool of Mark Dever and our friends at 9Marks, and we appreciate their emphasis on healthy churches. How have you seen this wedding of a healthy church and this big view of God in this affirmation of faith?

Knight: Well, first, I just want to affirm obviously everything that’s been said. When we talk about Jesus, we need to know what Jesus we’re talking about. That’s critical. I think secondly, it’s important to note that, of course, doctrine divides. Christ died for doctrine. He was divisive from the doctrine of the Pharisees and the like.

I think 9Marks has been enormously pivotal in my life, and I love the ways in which they’re highlighting how the Bible teaches doctrine about ecclesiological conviction, which I find few people to have. The more that I read the Bible, the more these things start to pop up. I’ve been preaching through 1 Thessalonians and there’s a little line from 1 Thessalonians 5:15 that says, “Repay no one evil for evil, but always do good to each other and to everyone.” Well, who is he talking about when he says “each other”? It’s the local church. We just skip right past that. So, I think 9Marks has helped us see how the Bible is teaching us a meaningful, definable community, but that is only helpful insofar as it adorns a particular Christ.

I think that’s the thing that I would want to say. We need to have healthy churches that are not centered on the church as such, but healthy churches as we’ve been using this image that is like how the prongs of the diamond are not plastic prongs. They’re platinum. They’re strong. They’re healthy. That’s the ecclesiology that’s really healthy, but they exist for one purpose — not as an end unto themselves, but it’s to hold up the diamond of Christ. And I have found that marriage to be wonderfully beautiful.

Erickson: Jordan, you pastor in one of the hardest areas in Memphis. You went down there to plant 18 years ago. You’ve raised your beautiful family on that hard street, Mill Avenue, and I know you love this affirmation of faith. You’ve taught through it. You’ve taught your teenage kids this. What are some of the ways God has used this at Grace Church in Memphis?

Thomas: I think Pastor John said that you guys are deliberating on whether or not a change of the title is useful or something. Well, you also mentioned that the Treasuring Christ Together churches, DG, and others use this affirmation. So, I don’t know if we should have asked permission, but we just changed the title. It’s called the “Grace Church Elder Affirmation of Faith.”

Piper: That’s what everybody has done, and historically, that’s just going to be a problem because nobody will know you all believe the same thing.

Thomas: Oh, I got you.

Piper: You’re totally free to do that. DG has done it, Bethlehem College & Seminary has done it, and Bethlehem has done it. The North Church will probably do it. That’s just a problem when you think 50 years from now.

Thomas: Right, we’re all united.

Piper: Exactly. This school and that denomination will have renamed it. It’s not Westminster, or another document people know already. So, that’s the problem we have to solve if it should be solved.

Thomas: Got it. It’s been abundantly useful. We did two demographic researches before Grace Church began 18 years ago. I spent a year at Bethlehem doing a church planting residency program. That finished in May of 2006. Then we moved back to Memphis and started some Bible studies in the fall after some basic street, door-to-door, good old-fashioned evangelism. This is our elder affirmation of faith. I taught a 35-part systematic theology class to our church on the Elder Affirmation of Faith.

I did every article from a biblical, historical, and practical perspective. I just tried to show in the historical context that a lot of Christians have believed this stuff for a long time. Practically, I answered how the justifying act of God (one of the articles) applies to our life together as Christ-treasuring people. It’s been super helpful. I discipled my kids through it. I’m teaching a co-op class on Monday afternoon for my two sons and any of their friends that were interested. We meet at our church office for an hour and a half every Monday. I taught them the Elder Affirmation of Faith. We’re just trying to lay it into the souls of our church, including young people.

Erickson: Michael, you referenced the phrase “treasuring Christ.” In the latest article that you wrote for Desiring God some months ago, you referenced this, but I just wanted to read you a quote back that I thought was so helpful and ask you just to tease out this idea. You said:

If people are to cherish and treasure Christ, they cannot merely be told that he is good, true, and beautiful. They must be shown so that they taste and see. Yet showing is a much more challenging proposition for the preacher: such a sermon cannot be aimlessly trotted out; nor can it come from a preacher who is not himself enjoying and adoring Christ. For those reasons, we preachers all too easily settle for telling.

Reeves: In 2 Corinthians 3:18, Paul talks about how we are transformed as we all with unveiled faces, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed from glory to glory. The transformation happens through beholding. And therefore, in preaching, we should seek to set forth Christ so that people behold. It’s more than simply being able to rationally comprehend the three truths you’ve just said. It’s that through the text that’s being proclaimed, they are able to behold the reality of Christ that’s being proclaimed, which means that for the preacher, I need to work much harder to show Christ as I preach him, which means that I’m doing work to think, “What does this mean about Christ? How do these truths intersect to tell me something more so that I can see Christ more clearly?”

It is that sight that will transform. I think that we settle for telling for two reasons really. One is it’s easy for me when I’m spiritually cold to just throw out three truths that I’m not actually enjoying at the time. But if I’m seeking to show Christ, and show Christ in his truth, his goodness, and his beauty, that means that it’s very, very hard for me to show the beauty and goodness of Christ if I’m not appreciating the goodness of Christ.

Therefore, for me to seek to have my people behold the glory of Christ in my preaching actually puts a weight on me as a preacher that I need to be cherishing Christ myself, and therefore holding him out as one who should be cherished. If I’m holding out Christ, who self-evidently I’m not enjoying, I’m therefore effectively holding out a Christ who forever is doctrinally correct but who seems to be unenjoyable.

Knight: Pastor John, you preached a sermon on John Newton years ago, and we have people listen to it. You chided us in a way by saying, “You preach the doctrine of justification like this: ‘It is the imputation of Christ upon us . . .’ and you list the facts. But John Newton says it like this . . .” And you read this beautiful image of Newton that does exactly what Michael just shared with us.

Piper: I am so glad Michael has made it explicit that Christian Hedonism — and that’s the root of Treasuring Christ Together — makes your job spiritually much more difficult. Because you’re just not permitted to go into the pulpit regularly without a passion for Jesus. And to put treasuring or serious joy right at the front of your goal will make that a mandate. So, Friday or Saturday or whenever it is, as the preparation comes and you’re at your desk or you’re standing in your preparation moments, as important as getting your doctrine right is getting your heart full.

That’s the warfare, the fight for joy, and it’s much harder than getting the doctrine right. The devil gets the doctrine right, and therefore we have enormous enemies and sinful tendencies of our heart that are turning us into those raw, doctrinal statements where people can tell, “He’s not communing with the Lord and the doctrine of which he preaches.” That’s an Owen phrase. John Owen said that you have to commune with the Lord and the doctrine with which you contend. And I said, “Oh, I love that phrase.” What a warfare.

I wonder how many of our Twitter warriors are communing with the sweetness of God in the doctrine for which they contend. You called for courage. I just want to say that’s absolutely right, but what we’re after in TCT is a peculiar kind of courage. It’s easy to do courage swagger. That’s just not what we’re about. Deeply delighting people don’t swagger. They’re just so overwhelmed with thankfulness. They’re so overwhelmed that they’re saved.

The swagger is pulled out of the courage. The courage remains. The backbone is steel. It doesn’t get pushed over by any wind, but it doesn’t have the raw, critical, ugly, mean-spirited, swaggering feel to it. That’s the peculiar challenge. That’s a parenthesis in the joy piece. But all that is just to say that what Michael just said is so right, because your job as you enter the pulpit is to get it right doctrinally and to get the passion spiritually, and then find words and illustrations that move people’s hearts.

Oscar Huerta served in Uzbekistan for nine years, and he made the Elder Affirmation of Faith a catechism in Uzbek and used it on the mission field. Right now, I’m meeting every Saturday morning at 7:30 a.m. with an African immigrant who lives in our apartment in the basement, and it’s mainly to teach him English because his English is okay, but he’s hard to understand. I want to refine his English. We’re reading the Elder Affirmation of Faith. He’s loving it. He’s just loving it. I said, “We’re going to meet from 7:30 a.m. to 8:15 a.m.” We get to 8:15 a.m. and he says, “Let’s just do a little more.” This document has potential for more different uses than you probably think.

Erickson: I remember coming to Bethlehem as a very young man and being surprised by a number of things. I was surprised at our first staff retreat when we went out to play volleyball. I was tall, and I didn’t want to hurt anybody who was older than me. And I was surprised, Pastor John, that right away you said, “Spike the ball, Erickson!” I thought, “Oh, okay, you’re competitive.”

Piper: God didn’t make you tall for nothing.

Erickson: That’s right. But one of the things that surprised me just because I was young and foolish was how much you talked about suffering. I remember in several of the biographies in the life of Martin Luther and some of these men, just thinking, “Is Pastor John overemphasizing this? Is this too much?” And then as I went along in ministry, I realized this is just such a huge part of our work.

I think for any of the folks here who are pastors, who are shepherds, or for women who are shepherding women, walking with people through suffering, at times deep, deep suffering, is something very few of us feel like we’ve been prepared for, even understanding what our Father is going to call us to suffer with. As I was thinking of that, I was thinking about how you used to speak about America being Disneyland, and you would say, “This isn’t normal.” I thought, “I have to go back and remember what Pastor John said.” I was thinking about this because they intersect.

So, I just wanted to read you a quote because the call for courage in light of suffering, as you said, is a peculiar kind of courage. But you said:

Will you join the Son in displaying the supreme satisfaction of the glory of grace in joining him on the Calvary road of suffering? Because there’s no other way the world is going to see the supreme glory of Christ today, except that we break free from the Disneyland of America and begin to live lifestyles of missionary sacrifice that look to the world like our treasure is in heaven and not on the earth. It is the only way.

Pastor John, can you just help us think about preparing ourselves for suffering, preparing our people for suffering, and walking with them through our own and their suffering?

Piper: Jesus says:

Blessed are you when others revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for so they persecuted the prophets who were before you. (Matthew 5:11–12)

I didn’t make it up that joy is attached to suffering pervasively in the New Testament.

Not only that, but we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance . . . and hope does not put us to shame. (Romans 5:3, 5)

Count it all joy, my brothers, when you meet trials of various kinds. (James 1:2)

It comes over and over. I didn’t make this connection up, in this fallen world where the creation is groaning as in childbirth and the horrors are all around us. This is just a horrible world in which we live, in spite of all the beauty. There’s beauty everywhere, and there’s horror everywhere.

If we’re going to try to build a church movement on the basis of some glib, superficial, praise-God-anyhow kind of happiness, that’s just a dead-end street for real people. You can do that for a while on Sunday morning for healthy people. But if you want broken people in your church and you want to deal with your own sufferings, there has to be a “sorrowful, yet always rejoicing” (2 Corinthians 6:10). That’s the text I go back to again and again. And then to that textual foundation, I would add my experience as I became a pastor at Bethlehem.

I came to Bethlehem saying to the Lord — having just written the book on Romans 9 called The Justification of God, which is about God’s absolute sovereignty — “I want to go to a church and see if this message works.” That’s what I said. I spent nine months there, and then I quit at Bethel and said, “I don’t want to be a teacher anymore. I want to go to herald the God of Romans 9 to see if it works for children, and to see if it works for divorced people and old people and young people.” And it did.

How many young moms have come to me over the years and said, “If you hadn’t taught me about the sovereignty of God in suffering, I would have gone insane when that child was born”? That has been a refrain for years about the sovereignty of God being painfully sweet in people’s real suffering. I think Christian Hedonism is what enables you men in treasuring Christ. It enables you to preach that with tenderness and sweetness. It’s easy to hit people over the head with the sovereignty of God, and that does no good whatsoever.

But if you bear witness to the sufferings of your own life and how God stood strong, it won’t be that way. We’ve all been watching people, maybe online. I’ve heard that the 15-year-old daughter of a pastor was in a coma but now she’s out. To watch him walk through this, like one of your colleagues over there near Virginia, is just glorious. It’s glorious to see someone not lose faith in God, not curse God, but trust God through the worst of times. So yes, I think the New Testament warrants the emphasis on suffering, and experience warrants it.

I’ll say one more thing. I was 22 years old when I got married. I got married three months into the discovery of the doctrines of grace. And the text we chose for our wedding was Habakkuk 3:17–18, which says:

Though the fig tree should not blossom,     nor fruit be on the vines,the produce of the olive fail     and the fields yield no food,the flock be cut off from the fold     and there be no herd in the stalls,yet I will rejoice in the Lord;     I will take joy in the God of my salvation.

It’s a picture of starvation. That was our wedding text. How weird is that? I was 22. I didn’t know anything about life really, and God put it in my heart to put over the banner of our marriage, “Noël, if we starve to death, we rejoice in Jesus.” That’s a glorious beginning. I think that’s why we’re still married, because there have been some pretty lean times, though we laugh now.

Erickson: Jordan, piggyback on that and talk about something the Lord has taught you about pastoring while you’re walking through your own pain.

Thomas: I’ll just be a prisoner to the moment. Right after my little message, a brother came up with commendable things and encouraging things to say and also tethering it to some hard things in pastoral ministry. I said to him what my little cliche, go-to, broken-record summary of being a pastor is. My summary is that it’s God’s invitation to more sorrow. That’s what I think being a pastor is. That’s a narrow slice of the pie to look at. But the reason I say that is because it’s just being a Christian publicly. We have some assignments, like “preach the word” and all those things.

So, there are some particular assignments, but we also get invited into so much pain and so much suffering. There are multiple pastoral care cases going on at our church right now that have our elders in the fetal position. They’re just hard. There have been many of those. May I say with a broken heart, but also gospel hope, we’ve had numbers of excommunication cases. They’re all just devastating. They’re terrible.
With all the behind-the-scenes labor that goes into that, I honestly do not know how Christians (and I would say especially pastors) aren’t just in a constant free fall if they don’t have the rock of God’s sovereignty in suffering.

Speaking of pastor retreats with volleyball spikes and things, I went on one of those and we played kickball. I almost demolished this man playing left field. I was the shortstop. It was a pop fly. We were both running full speed.

But it was at that retreat where a side conversation about some Edwardsian thoughts of heaven and suffering and hell came up, and Pastor John said the statement that you’ve probably all heard him say: “If you can’t handle the statement, ‘It is not sin for God to ordain that sin be,’ then you can’t handle the cross.” The cross is just right at the center of everything about everything about everything that we believe. It’s the worst suffering that’s ever happened to the only innocent man, and God absolutely ordained it.

That’s the foundation of our faith. So, we have to have a theology of suffering. It’s the bloody, gory, nasty, nauseating, make-you-throw-up, grotesque cross that for the joy set before him Jesus endured. We are sorrowful, always rejoicing. My wife and I took a sister who has an excommunication case with her husband to dinner last week. She said, “The sovereignty of God has been sweet to me.” And she elaborated on God’s kindness and God’s nearness in Psalm 44, Psalm 45, and Psalm 46. In Psalm 44, the people are faithful, but where’s God? He hid his face. In Psalm 45, I told you about it today. It’s the marriage of the divine king. And in Psalm 46, our God is a very present help in trouble.

Erickson: Amen. Michael, what we’ve learned over centuries is that the only way Christians persevere through this kind of suffering, the only way they would joyfully take up their cross and follow Christ, or spread, or plant a church, or go to the nations is a big view of God.

You have brought us back to the glories of our triune God again and again. You used the word that I’m shocked after you use it that it’s not used much more. It’s the word fullness. You use that a lot, and it’s such a helpful thing. I just want to read you something you wrote and then see if you can talk about why it’s so important and also why it’s so rarely used. You said:

God is so overflowingly, super-abundantly full of life in himself that he delighted to spread his goodness.

That’s just a little quote from a longer section, but it’s this idea of the fullness of God and how he does so much for us. Why does it seem so rare and why is it so important?

Reeves: I think to talk about the fullness of God is rare because when you have a God who is so super-abundantly full, such a God makes us unnecessary. When you have a great view of God, you are humbled by that view.

So, I’m not surprised that sinful hearts instinctively react against such a full view of God. Human religions and heretical beliefs are always and consistently seeking to belittle God. It’s always the characteristic. But with this God, only a God who is so full as to be overflowing, only is such a God truly glorious, and only such a God can truly be enjoyed. Given that this God’s glory is a radiant, outgoing fountain, therefore, we are not contributing, but receiving. And therefore, it speaks of a God of grace and of grace even in our dark times.

I think you talked, Jordan, about the experience of pastoring while clinging onto the sovereignty of God. It is the character of the one who wields that sovereignty that is also great comfort when it doesn’t make sense what you’re going through. The forces of nature, the movements of the nations, the public plans of politicians, the secret acts of solitary persons, all things, this God upholds and governs. He upholds and governs as he’s revealed himself to be, without a spot of imperfection, with kindness, with pity, with righteousness, and with justice.

Holding onto that enables there to be that extraordinary, supranatural sweetness even at the times where it’s hard to hold on. Enduring suffering in communion with such a God and bearing up under suffering is critical then for being able to minister to others who are themselves suffering. It is actually a rare thing, I think, for a pastor to pastor real people without himself having experienced suffering. And that even means to struggle and to wrestle and wonder why and not understand, and yet hold on to God and even appreciate through the tears that sweetness of knowing who this God is.

Erickson: Nathan, I want to close with one of the great grounds for our joy. I want to ask you and then I want to ask Pastor John and Michael to comment on this as well. The Bible calls us to the hope of heaven again and again. You wrote an article for Desiring God that five percent of all the verses in the New Testament call us to the hope of heaven. Talk about the importance of pointing our people to the hope of heaven, if you would.

Nathan Knight: On my last sabbatical, I read the New Testament every day, and I would just circle a verse every time an author was counseling the hope of heaven — not talking about heaven, but counseling the hope of heaven. I’d circle a verse and I’d write it out in my journal. I came back to the end, not including the book of Revelation, and it was something like 5 percent of New Testament verses, which tells us something, right?

That this was a constant, frequent turn of the apostles to counsel us through our sufferings, through our difficulties, through our joys, whatever the case may be. I have found even again, just 15 years into pastoring and preaching, that as I’m working consecutively through books of the Bible that it’s frequently coming up.

We had a family in our church who was 35 weeks pregnant. They went to their regular checkup and there was no heartbeat. They had to deliver the baby dead. Tears were everywhere. And one of the things that we’re able to say amidst the sovereignty of God is a day will come when you will not weep anymore. You can be confident of that. You can be sure of that. Unlike every other worldview that says, “Let’s hope it works out,” the Christian worldview is centered on the truthfulness of what is coming in front of us. We know it’s done.

My mind is littered with 1 Thessalonians 5:24. I’ll preach it in a couple of weeks. It says, “He will surely do it.” And so, we have so much confidence. The apostles are clearly appealing to it time and again, this hope that we have out in front of us. Therefore, it gives us so much help in the midst of pastoral ministry, in the midst of suffering, in the midst of preaching, and in the midst of evangelism to call them to a sure and certain hope that’s out in front of us that Christ has purchased.

Erickson: As we end, Pastor John and Michael, we’re invited to set our hope fully on the grace to be brought to us at the revelation of Jesus Christ (1 Peter 1:13). You wrote Come, Lord Jesus not mainly to chart out eschatology, but mainly to call our hearts to be so eager and love the appearing of Christ. It’s so helpful. But could you paint a picture for us in this room, Pastor John, of what awaits us, whether it’s Revelation 7, whether it’s 1 Peter 5:4, or whether it’s John 17:24? Can you just paint a picture in brief of what awaits God’s people?

Piper: Noël and I tried to read through the New Testament together last year just for our devotions in the evening. We’re in Revelation and we were at 16 last night. At the end I said, “That’s about the most horrible chapter in the Bible.” There are frogs and devastation, and the point was that heaven is going to praise God because his judgments are just. Babylon was remembered and they will drink the cup of his wrath to the bottom.

So, I start here just because I think unless we are shaken by the majesty of Christ coming with wrath, we probably won’t feel the excitement of his coming to serve us and save us. He’s going to save us from the wrath to come. He will deliver us from the wrath to come (1 Thessalonians 1:10). I think that’s one of the big problems in our day for painting a picture of the beauties of Christ. We’re painting on a white canvas instead of a black one. So, I would say there’s the dark canvas, and the colors of his coming are radiant with oranges and yellows and gold and red.

It is probably best to focus on the person himself.

We are God’s children now, and what we will be has not yet appeared; but we know that when he appears we shall be like him, because we shall see him as he is. And everyone who thus hopes in him purifies himself as he is pure. (1 John 3:2–3)

We’re going to see him as he is. Revelation says he’ll have hair like snow, a big belt around his chest, legs like bronze, and a face shining like the sun in the kingdom of God so that you won’t be able to look at him. You’ll tend to fall down dead, and he’ll reach out his hands and say, “You don’t need to fall down dead. Get up, and I’ll give you special eyes to see me.” I think it’s about seeing him.

But the Bible is willing to talk about a new heavens and a new earth and the righteousness that will be there and the peace that will be there and the people that will be there. A man said to me yesterday, “I read Solid Joys every morning. I want to talk to you every time I do it, but we’ll get to do that.” We really will resonate with each other and revel in each other’s beauty in the kingdom, but mainly it’ll be about Jesus with all our sins forgiven.

I’ll just say one other thing that’s controversial. People ask me, “Will there be regret in heaven?” And my answer is that we’re going to sing the song of the Lamb forever, the Lamb slain. That will not be a meaningless event. We will know what that’s about. It’s about our sins being forgiven. You can’t sing the song of the Lamb without in some sense remembering, “I shouldn’t be here.”

So, there will be a special kind of regret that has all the badness taken out of it, a peculiar regret. Will all our tears be wiped away? Yes, except maybe for tears of joy. I mean, wouldn’t you want to be able to weep with tears of joy as you see him or as you periodically are enabled to know the wonder of having been saved from sin without feeling any of the pain of regret? It would be a kind of peculiar regret that I can’t put into words adequately, but I don’t know how we can make much of Christ crucified forever and ever without having some kind of non-painful, very happy regret.

Erickson: So many of these texts are intermingled with the sinfulness of sin. There are myriads of myriads from every nation in Revelation 7:9–14, and they are coming out of the great tribulation. You wrote in chapter nine here in Come, Lord Jesus that Christ is coming “in flaming fire with vengeance and relief.” It’s this full-orbed picture of who Christ is. Michael, tell us about John 17:24 as just the final thing we say, where Jesus requests, “Father, let them be with me to see the glory that you gave me before the foundation of the world.” What is he asking for? What awaits us?

Reeves: Well, that ties right back to 1 John 3:2, which says, “When he appears we shall be like him, because we shall see him as he is.” Right now we behold him by faith and are transformed into his image from glory to glory, but when we actually clap eyes on him, we will have our treasure. We will have the object of our longing, and sometimes maybe we haven’t even realized it was our longing. We will have the object of our longing. And in that moment of transformation I will be so changed, that all my sinfulness and weakness and depravity will be gone. I will have my treasure and I will be without that which disgusts me in myself, in my fallenness.

That is the hope of the final transformation and achievement of satisfaction that we are inching towards now, which lightens our sufferings. I think we’ve twice mentioned the word “courage” this afternoon, and here’s the sight that gives courage. We need to know courage is not true, biblical courage when it’s merely the temperamental wiring of some who are thick-skinned. That is not courage. C.S. Lewis put it like this: “Courage is every virtue at the testing point.” It’s love when you can’t love anymore. It’s patience when you’re absolutely fed up. Therefore, courage is part of the fruit of the Spirit. It’s love, joy, peace, and patience at the testing point.

Therefore, true courage is to be found not within some individual’s temperamental makeup; it is to be found by all believers in that sight of Christ, which will be fulfilled completely when he returns. And on that day, while we’ve been growing in courage as we’ve been looking to him by faith, we grow both more lion-like (more courageous) and simultaneously more lamb-like because we’re more like him. Therefore, our courage is never bullish or bully-ish. It’s tender and firm like Christ, inching towards that day when we shall be entirely like him. We’ll be lion-like and lamb-like all around and by enjoying him.

Audio Transcript

In January of 2013, we launched a little podcast into the world. We called it Ask Pastor John. We slapped a jingle on the front end and hit publish on a temporary podcast meant to last us fifteen months or so to fill a short need we had here at Desiring God. And Pastor John, here we are, two thousand episodes later.

I can’t even remember those days.

I know. It seems like a distant memory. And I think I used to call you up on your phone. You used a landline phone for those early years. Do you remember that?

Yep. Down in Tennessee.

Two thousand episodes later, we’re now into our twelfth year. And today we look back. We look back at what God has done in the past years of APJ. And we look forward, with prayers for the future and prayers for what God might do in a new APJ book. That book releases today. More on that in a moment. As we start off, Pastor John, tell us how this podcast fits within your ministry legacy. How do you think of it now, twelve years in?

Bible-Saturated Legacy

My parents built into me from the time I could read — that’s about six years old, when we moved into the house I’m thinking about — a passion for legacy. And I didn’t know that at the time. I didn’t know what legacy was, but that’s what it was, because hanging on the wall in our kitchen — and it hangs behind me right now where I’m standing in my study — was this motto: “Only one life, ’twill soon be passed. Only what’s done for Christ will last.” That’s legacy talk.

So I believe, Tony, that you and I have produced Ask Pastor John for Christ. “Only what’s done for Christ will last.” And we didn’t do it for ourselves. We did it for Christ. We’re doing it for Christ. Your book will be, I believe, part of the fulfillment of the second half of the motto: “What’s done for Christ will last.”

“Almost every episode is a careful expression of about an hour and a half of study and thought and prayer.”

You know well, Tony, that I have my favorite hyphenated phrases: God-centered, Christ-exalting, Bible-saturated. And I think that’s what Ask Pastor John is; that’s the legacy: God-centered, Christ-exalting, Bible-saturated counsel for people who are in need. And I would underline Bible-saturated, because many podcasts are enjoyable conversations that people have online. That’s not what we’ve done for ten years. Almost every episode is a careful expression — well-prepared and a lot of thought gone into it — of about an hour and a half of study and thought and prayer, saturated with the Bible.

So I think, Tony, our legacy will be this: “They were God-centered; they were Christ-exalting; they were Bible guys — with a strange twist called Christian Hedonism because they believed that God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in him.” I think that’s the way I would express the legacy.

Distilling the Archive

Amen. May it be! That has certainly been our prayer from the very start of this podcast. And if you want the full backstory of where it came from and how it’s tied to the unique ways that Pastor John is gifted to answer questions, I tell that backstory in the introduction to my brand new book, just mentioned. It’s titled Ask Pastor John: 750 Bible Answers to Life’s Most Important Questions. That new book launches today. It’s the point of this special episode to announce the new book, Ask Pastor John: 750 Bible Answers to Life’s Most Important Questions.

People hearing about it for the first time ask me, “What is it, Tony? Why did you write a book about a podcast, especially when the whole archive is transcribed; it’s online; it’s just a Google search away for anyone who wants it?”

Really the genesis of this new book came years ago when friends of ours, ministry partners (donors), would email me, asking about some pressing question that has come up in their life, their family, their church — asking me for one APJ episode that could answer a dilemma. And I think the archive is intimidating for a lot of people. I think we’re up to about 250 hours of content now. And that grows by the week. That’s a lot of content to sift through.

So, what I would do is I would take the question from the donor, dive into the archive, and always find multiple episodes on a topic, and respond with an email that was basically a digest of all those episodes that I found — or even just parts of an episode that I found — that I thought could help answer a given challenge from different angles, explaining why each episode I found was uniquely valuable in answering the question.

And over time, those little digests just seemed to prove useful. As they did, I collected them into one document on my computer, and at some point I realized I could do this with the broader archive. So, I set aside two years of my book-research-and-writing time. I identified our most popular episodes from our first decade. That was the easy part. This type of podcast really offers us a feedback loop like no other — the audience asks the questions, and then the audience responds to the episodes we record. It’s very easy to see what topics most resonate with our audience.

So, I isolated our 28 most popular topics, and basically just created 28 huge digests of 750 episodes, in one comprehensive guide, to help find the episodes that you need when you need them. It was a huge project. There were times early on when I wondered if this was a good idea or not.

Book for Every Home

But now it’s done. And I have high hopes that this book will prove useful. Sinclair Ferguson, in his kind endorsement, likened it to Richard Baxter’s classic, massive book, A Christian Directory. It’s an amazing comparison for those of you in the Reformed world who know what that huge book is like. And then Dr. Ferguson called the APJ book “one of those rare contemporary books that can be described as ‘should be in every Christian home.’” My jaw dropped when I read that. I mean, that is an amazing endorsement of the book, but even of your deep labors in this podcast too, Pastor John, each episode being that careful expression of about an hour and a half of your study and thought and prayer, saturated with the Bible. That’s a huge investment. A ringing endorsement of your labors.

And then Kevin DeYoung, another friend of ours, said, “I can’t imagine any Christian who wouldn’t be helped by and fascinated by the hundreds of topics covered in this amazing resource.” Again, that highlights the value of having a printed guide you can easily thumb through and browse. It’s a unique way, I think, to appreciate such a long-running podcast like APJ.

So, if these kind words are accurate — and I have high hopes that this book is going to serve listeners to help them benefit from the archive in the years ahead — I can’t wait to see what the Lord does with this. Pastor John, as you consider what this new book will offer the podcast in the near future and in the distant future, what would you add to this conversation?

Trembling and Rejoicing

When people say nice things about our teaching, we could easily overlook what makes us tremble in this project — namely, James 3:1: “Not many of you should become teachers . . . for you know that we who teach will be judged [that means judged by God] with greater strictness.” Wow. But you and I involved in this constant teaching ministry take heart from God’s word to Isaiah: “This is the one to whom I will look [declares the Lord]: he who is humble and contrite in spirit and trembles at my word” (Isaiah 66:2). So, we believe God will look to us — he will smile upon us because of Jesus and because we don’t play fast and loose with his word. We tremble at the very privilege of knowing his word and speaking his word.

Teaching is what we do. It’s our calling. It’s a dangerous work. It’s a trembling work. But oh, what a happy work! It’s a happy work because we get to spend untold hours immersed in God’s word for the sake of God’s people. And Jesus said, “These things I have spoken to you . . . that your joy may be full” (John 15:11). And then he told us to go share what we’ve heard and added, “It is more blessed [more happy] to give than to receive” (Acts 20:35). So, it’s been a happy work.

Tony, you can bear your own witness to the joys of facing, amazingly, two thousand episodes of APJ, and selecting and distilling them into a usable manual of Christian counsel. But I want to bear witness to the joy of watching that happen. It really has been astonishing to watch. For ten years, I have watched you evaluate questions by the thousands, record answers, edit recordings, record or host a podcast, and schedule the episodes.

Now, that’s one source of joy (and it’s big and solid), just watching those competencies that God has given you put into action for his glory. But the skill that our readers are going to see in this book — this synthesizing skill — is of another order. Weaving hundreds of thousand-word answers into topical, coherent, readable chapters has inspired — still inspires — my happy admiration and thankfulness to God.

So thank you, Tony, for the investment of ten years of your life on the podcast and two years of your life on the book. It has been a precious partnership. Clearly you and I both believe in the value of the written word and the spoken word. You’ve reminded me of that over and over again — about the peculiar nature of this audible conversation that we have. We’ve seen lives captivated for Christ through both writing and speaking. We pray for that to continue to happen through both.

You and I both love to write. We are writers. We get our thoughts out on paper with joy. It is in our God-designed bones. But neither you nor I will surrender the living voice, because the living voice carries the affections of the heart more effectively than the written word. And we believe that new Christ-exalting affections of the heart are the goal of this ministry, the goal of books, the goal of speaking, the goal of Desiring God. I believe it’s the goal of the Bible — new Christ-exalting affections.

So, Ask Pastor John — the book and the podcast — aim to impart new affections. That’s what we want to happen. We aim at a miracle. We hope that you, our listeners, will hear and read our hearts. There is a happy melody there in our hearts — a God-centered, Christ-exalting, Bible-saturated, happy melody — and we hope that you hear it, and that it becomes the melody of your life.

Two Prayers for Listeners and Readers

Well put! Thank you, Pastor John. I appreciate that. We want the living voice captured in this podcast to bless people around the world for years and decades to come. To that end we have two prayers with this book.

First, we pray this book helps you who are listening to us right now. We want you to better navigate our over two hundred hours of audio, to find episodes you need when you need them, and the episodes your friends need when they need them. I think we can help you better serve others if we can help you find your way around the archive better. That’s prayer one.

“The book and the podcast aim to impart new affections. That’s what we want to happen. We aim at a miracle.”

Prayer two is for future listeners to this podcast, those who are not listening right now. They can’t hear me right now; they’re not listening to me; they haven’t even started listening. Imagine an audience of people who have never listened to APJ that will come online and listen to our content in future years and decades. Millions of people right now — that’s not an overstatement — don’t know that this podcast exists: people in our churches, people in our neighborhoods, people at work, people wrestling with suffering, people asking the most important questions in life. And I want them to see quickly the ground we’ve covered in the first ten years of the podcast so that they can benefit from the archive immediately.

So, those are our two prayers. And I put them in the introduction to my new book when I wrote this: “As we build this podcast into a single content library, our first decade lays the groundwork for everything else to come. For current listeners, the book rehearses key highlights from the past. For future listeners, the book is an on-ramp to summarize the ground we’ve already covered. The book will immediately serve thousands of current listeners who found their way from the podcast to the book.” That’s you if you’re listening, hearing about the book for the first time; you’re moving from the podcast to the book.

“But perhaps, if the Lord is gracious, the current will reverse in due time, and thousands of readers will find their way from this new book to the podcast. That’s our prayer. As you gift this book to not-yet-listeners, you’re helping us fulfill this dream in answer to that prayer. Think of this book as a podcast promo made of paper and ink that you can physically hand to others” (xxviii).

That thought thrills me. I can’t wait to hand out copies of this book to introduce new listeners to the podcast, to share with others this happy melody — this God-centered, Christ-exalting, Bible-saturated, happy melody of what this podcast is. What a joy! What an honor to be able to do that.

Okay, so where can you get copies? To launch this new, big, red Ask Pastor John book, we are again partnering with our friends at Westminster Books. Support a wonderful Christian bookstore, and get discounted copies of Ask Pastor John: 750 Bible Answers to Life’s Most Important Questions right now at wtsbooks.com.

I have been honored to be your podcast host for over a decade from behind a microphone. And now to be your podcast host in a new book format is a new joy for me. Whether by microphone or by book, I am your host, Tony Reinke. See you next time.

A couple of years ago, a friend and I were enjoying the view from a downtown hotel’s rooftop bar when we realized there was a function going on around us. Wanting to get some free food, we stuck around and started to mingle. But after just a couple of minutes, someone stood up to address the gathering, and we quickly discovered this was an event for a particular activist group — one whose cause both of us felt profoundly uncomfortable with, and so we discreetly slipped away.

Many people might feel similar as they read certain passages of Scripture. In Psalm 98, for example, we find ourselves in the middle of a celebration: there is a lot of music and energy (verses 4–6); all creation seems to be joining in (verses 7–8). But the cause of all the festivity quickly becomes apparent: “[God] comes to judge the earth” (verse 9). Which is where the discomfort might start. Perhaps we want to slip out.

The surprise is not just that the Bible speaks about God one day judging the world, but that his doing so is something to celebrate. Paul connects coming judgment to the gospel he preaches: “. . . on that day when, according to my gospel, God judges the secrets of men by Christ Jesus” (Romans 2:16). God’s judgment is part of the good news.

The Bible gives us at least five reasons why.

1. God’s judgment is needed.

Many today assume that people, deep down, are fundamentally good, and that bad things only really happen because of poverty, lack of education, poor upbringing, lack of privilege, and the like. What we need is progress, not judgment. Judgment is outdated. We’re sophisticated enough to know what’s right and wrong.

Miroslav Volf, professor of theology at Yale Divinity School, grew up in Croatia and lived through the bloodshed in that part of the world in the 1990s. In his book Exclusion and Embrace, he argues that one reason so many Westerners do not believe in judgment is that their lives are often too sheltered, too suburban, too quiet (300). For those who have lived through genocide, the idea of judgment can bring deep comfort. The fact is, many things in this world are not just unfortunate, but truly evil. We are naive to think otherwise. And too much wickedness is never adequately dealt with.

The truth of God’s judgment shows us that every wrong will be righted. No evil will ultimately prevail. No one will escape justice.

2. God’s judgment is fair.

Many people who don’t believe in God’s judgment do believe in judgment itself, and that it is down to us to implement it. Our social media feeds cry out with comments decrying injustice; often, the commenter also seems certain of exactly what needs to be done. Bloodshed erupts in the Middle East, and people who moments ago hadn’t even heard of the places in turmoil have no apparent doubt about who’s to blame and how to fix it.

The Bible does speak of a form of judgment that takes place in this life. Paul shows us that the state carries the sword of justice as an instrument of God’s wrath and an expression of his judgment (Romans 13:1–4). But such justice is incomplete and proximate at best. Even those of us fortunate enough to live in countries with healthy systems of justice know they are imperfect. Which is why Paul also speaks about “the day of [God’s] wrath,” when full justice will be done (Romans 2:5). If we don’t believe in that future judgment to come, our only hope for justice tends to be political justice in this life. Without God, such measures are all we have left.

“God sees the whole situation; we don’t. He is perfectly just; we’re not. He is not vindictive; we are.”

But we should be very hesitant to think we know how to fix the problems of the world. Paul’s language around the future judgment through Jesus shows us why: he will judge “the secrets of men” (Romans 2:16). Without that capacity, we will never have full justice. We can hide things from one another, even from our nearest and dearest, but we can hide nothing from Jesus. He sees the secrets of our hearts. He knows all our motivations, all our circumstances. His judgment — and only his judgment — will be fair.

3. God’s judgment shows we matter.

It is common to think that if God loves us, he won’t judge us; and if he judges us, he doesn’t love us. But the opposite of love is not judgment, but indifference.

When I was at university, a friend and I began to suspect a particular professor didn’t actually read our papers. They were often ungraded, with only vague comments and no evidence of the pages having been physically turned. So, we conducted an experiment. We each wrote an entirely random, outrageous sentence in the middle of our papers to see if he would spot it and comment on it. He never did. It was quite a blow.

There were some papers I’d worked especially hard on — papers on topics I deeply cared about, and where I wanted to make sure my understanding was clear. And yet he’d never actually bothered to read them. Which told me I didn’t matter to him — or at least this part of my education didn’t matter to him. Not grading and assessing someone’s work is a sign you don’t care about them.

So, God’s judging us is a sign that we really do matter to him. He is not indifferent to us. He cares how we live and what we do. His judgment is a backhanded compliment: our lives really are consequential.

4. God’s judgment makes us less violent.

If God is judgmental, we might think that gives us a personal license to be so as well. But Scripture shows us the exact opposite is the case: because God will bring final, perfect judgment at the end of time, I can trust him and not seek to enact my own form of justice now. If there is no judgment to come, then all I have left is whatever I can come up with in this life. Wrongs will have to be avenged here and now.

Paul writes, “Beloved, never avenge yourselves, but leave it to the wrath of God, for it is written, ‘Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord’” (Romans 12:19). Paul wouldn’t need to write this if the tendency toward vengeance was not so prevalent in the human heart. His words are emphatic: “never avenge yourselves.” This is not a recommendation or a rule of thumb that applies most of the time. It is a categorical command. However grievous the wrong, we are never to seek personal vengeance.

Paul shows us why. Significantly, he addresses his readers here as “beloved,” a term he does not typically use in this letter. He is reminding us of the undeserved love we have received from God. We haven’t received what we truly deserve from him; we were his enemies, but he has lavished his love upon us. So, as recipients of such undeserved love, how can we refuse it to anyone else?

But it is not just the love God has shown us, but also his judgment to come, that restrains us from vengeance in the present. We are to “leave it to the wrath of God.” He is the one who repays. He punishes sin and brings judgment. He sees the whole situation; we don’t. He is perfectly just; we’re not. He is not vindictive; we are. We can trust him to repay — and he will. And because he will, I can hold back my own desire for vengeance.

5. Jesus delivers us from judgment.

Perhaps the biggest way the good news of the gospel connects to the judgment of God is this: in Christ, we have no need to fear it. As Paul writes to the believers in Thessalonica,

You turned to God from idols to serve the living and true God, and to wait for his Son from heaven, whom he raised from the dead, Jesus who delivers us from the wrath to come. (1 Thessalonians 1:9–10)

God will indeed judge the world. History will not lack a moral resolution. Perfect justice will come. But those in Christ do not need to fear it. The wrath our own sins deserve has already fallen on Jesus. We have been justified through faith in him. So, along with all creation in Psalm 98, we will be able to celebrate when that judgment finally comes.

Audio Transcript

Welcome back to the podcast on this Monday. We’re going to start the week with a doozy of a question: Do we love God only by obeying him, or do we also love him verbally by using affectional language about him and to him? A hugely important question today that gets at the very heart of what we call Christian Hedonism.

The question is from an anonymous listener. “Pastor John, hello to you! My pastor recently admitted that he does not love God, or Christ, emotionally. He said he loves God, or loves Christ, by keeping his commandments. Obedience is love, he claims, returning often to 2 John 6 — ‘This is love, that we walk according to his commandments.’ And to 1 John 5:3 — ‘For this is the love of God, that we keep his commandments.’ I’ve known many other Christians in my life who seem to have no place for emotional or affectional language for God. They like to relate to him merely in similar categories of obedience. Is this healthy? How important is it to cultivate affectional language for God as God? And what would you say to those who are uneasy with such language for their relationship with God and only ever use this obedience language?”

Okay, I hear three questions.

1. Is it healthy to relate to God only in categories of obedience but not affections? Answer: no, it’s not healthy. It’s confusing at best, deadly at worst. I’ll come back to that.

2. How important is it to cultivate affectional language for God? Answer: it’s very important. However, language is not the ultimate issue. The reality of our hearts’ affections for God is the ultimate issue. The language of affections is important only because the heart reality is important.

3. What would you say to those who are uneasy with affectional language for their relationship with God and only use this obedience language? I would say, “Get over your uneasiness with affectional language, because the Bible is full of it — full of it — toward man and God.” You’re uneasy with the Bible. That’s your problem. And I would say if your heart is really emotionally dead toward God, repent and cry out for life.

Confused or Dead?

Now, we need to be careful here with our words, because it may be that this pastor is not denying that he has real and strong affections for God; he’s just denying that he should call them love, maybe. Love for God, he’s saying, is something else — namely, love is obedience. Now, if that’s what he’s saying, then he may be a good Christian and just biblically confused. In other words, his heart may be right, but he’s naming things in unbiblical ways, and probably he’s confusing his people in the process. It sounds like it from this question.

“God commands that we feel affections for God.”

On the other hand — this is more scary — it may be that he really doesn’t have any affections for God, and in that case he needs to be born again. If there is not even a mustard seed of delight in God, thankfulness to God, hope in God, satisfaction in God, desire for God — if none of those emotions is in his heart for God and Christ, he’s not a Christian. So, let me try to address both of those kinds of people at the same time.

The first kind is the Christian who is confused about the affections that he genuinely has for God and simply doesn’t know whether to call them love or not. And second is the person who thinks he’s a Christian when he has no emotions in his heart for God and Christ at all; he’s just dead emotionally toward God.

Affections in the Christian Life

Now, here’s the main thing to say about the confusion of claiming to love God with obedience but not with heart affections: that’s like affirming fruit but denying apples. I’ve said this so many times. Affirming obedience and denying affections is like affirming fruit and denying apples, because obedience means doing what God commands, and God commands affections. It’s confusing, it’s contradictory, to say, “I obey God, but I don’t have any of the affections that God commands me to have.” That’s just really confusing and contradictory.

1. God commands affections.

For example, Psalm 37:4 says, “Delight yourself in the Lord.” Now, that’s a command. So, a pastor who says he’s obedient to God’s commands would be obedient to the command to delight himself in the Lord. Now, he might not call it love — though I think he should, but he might not. (And I’ll show in a minute why I think he should.) That’s not a deadly problem. To get your language confused is not a deadly problem. Not to have any delight in the Lord is a deadly problem.

But for now, whether he calls delight in the Lord love or not, he is commanded to have delight. And it is simply confusing and contradictory to say he obeys God but does not relate to God with his emotions, because those emotions are commanded. And if he doesn’t have them, he’s disobedient to the command. We can add to Psalm 37:4 the command in Psalm 32:11: “Be glad in the Lord.” And Philippians 3:1: “Rejoice in the Lord.” And many others.

2. The godly model affections.

Not only are affections for God commanded, but that way of feeling in the heart is held out to us as an example — not just a command, but an example — of how godly people relate to God. For example, in Psalm 43:4: “I will go to the altar of God, to God my exceeding joy.” Or Psalm 84:2: “My soul longs, yes, faints for the courts of the Lord; my heart and flesh sing for joy to the living God.” Or Psalm 63: “O God, you are my God; earnestly I seek you; my soul thirsts for you. . . . Your steadfast love is better than life. . . . My soul will be satisfied as with fat and rich food . . . when I remember you upon my bed” (Psalm 63:1, 3, 5–6).

3. We are to pray for affections.

And not only are affections for God commanded and given as examples of how godly people relate to God, but we are taught to pray for those affections. This is what we ought to do if we don’t have them. Psalm 90:14: “Satisfy us in the morning with your steadfast love.” This is a cry to God to give us the affections for him that we ought to have and may not at the moment have.

And on top of all that, Jesus warns against outward obedience where the heart feels nothing. Matthew 15:8–9: “This people honors me with their lips,” — so, lips are moving; that’s outward obedience — “but their heart,” he says, “is far from me; in vain do they worship me.” “In vain”: that’s a big, terrible, horrible statement. Without heart, our outward obedience is nothing.

So, I conclude that it is confusing and contradictory to say that you obey God’s commands, but that you don’t pursue the very affections for God that he has commanded.

Love Worthy of Christ

Now, one last thing. Why should we use the word love for these affections for God? Now, I’m not saying that love for God is only affections. The Bible talks about love in a very broad way. But I am saying that love for God is not less than affections for God. Now, why would I say that? And I’ll give just one reason: because of Matthew 10:37. Jesus said this: “Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me, and whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me.”

Now, in that sentence, love for Jesus cannot mean obedience to Jesus’s commands, because he’s comparing love for Jesus with love for our children. “Whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me.” Love for our children does not mean obedience to our children. So, the point is, we must love Jesus with the kind of love we have for our most precious family members — only more so — and that is an affectional love.

So, I hope the pastor who said, “I love God by keeping his commandments, not with my affections,” will realize that God commands that we feel affections for God. And I hope that this is just a confusion of language and not a case of real deadness of heart.