Audio Transcript

We just started March, and that means we just started reading the glorious letter of Romans together — “the greatest letter that has ever been written in the history of the world by anybody, Christian or non-Christian.” That was your claim last time, Pastor John — high praise from a man who has read and studied this letter countless times over more than sixty years. Coming up this Thursday, we find ourselves reading Romans 5:10 together, and it has led a podcast listener named Bethany, an 18-year-old woman, to write in to ask this sharp question.

“Pastor John, hello, and thank you for this podcast,” she writes. “I was given the great joy and privilege of being born into a Christian home and raised by godly parents, and I went to church every Sunday. I gave a credible confession of faith very young and trusted in Christ for my salvation as long as I can remember. Add all this up, and I’m having a hard time understanding how I was God’s enemy. I know I was God’s enemy, according to Romans 5:10. I guess, what does it feel like to be God’s enemy? I’m trying to understand how he and I were opposed against one another. I know my salvation will be even more glorious if I can understand this better and feel it more deeply.”

Bethany is not alone. I’m in her situation. I have no memory of being God’s enemy. I mean, I’m 79 years old. I was saved when I was 6. I’ve been walking with Christ since then. The basic issue we face is this: Are we going to learn our true condition before Christ and outside Christ from our memory and our experience, or are we going to learn it from the word of God? Are we going to feel it because it’s in the word of God and the Spirit applies it to us? Or are we going to try to dredge up some memory that may not exist at all and try to feel that? I don’t think that’s going to work — and even if it did work, it would be inadequate.

Double Enmity

Bethany refers to Romans 5:10. That’s a good place to start. “If while we were enemies we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son, much more, now that we are reconciled, shall we be saved by his life.” So, she’s right to conclude that, before conversion — whatever age — before faith in Christ, we needed to be reconciled to God because we were his enemies.

That phrase “I am his enemy” is ambiguous. It might mean “I’m angry at him” or “He’s angry at me” (or both). I think Bethany is focusing mainly on how she could feel any enmity toward God. She’s never felt any enmity toward God. Neither have I, consciously. I’ve never consciously raised my fist in God’s face, saying, “You’re my enemy” or “I’m your enemy.” So, when she says she has no memory of that, as far as she knows, she means it. And she’s never felt that way toward God. And I think she’s aware that her enmity (that she’s thinking about) toward God is only half the issue of being the enemy of God. The other half is that God has enmity toward us.

Now, she’s not talking about that directly, but she does say, “I’m trying to understand how he and I were opposed against one another.” Ah, she’s onto it, right? That’s right. The reconciliation has to go both ways, both directions, in order for us to have peace with God. He’s angry at her and me and everybody because of our sin, and we don’t like him. That’s our part — we don’t like him. We consider him an intrusion upon our self-determination and our self-exaltation. That’s our enmity toward him. So it goes both ways.

“You can only know the root of your condition outside Christ by learning it from the Bible.”

See these in the Bible so people don’t have to take my word for it. Look at the amazing connection between Romans 5:8 and Romans 5:9. It’s amazing. Romans 5:9 says, “Since . . . we have now been justified by his blood, much more shall we be saved by him from the wrath of God.” Okay, so there’s enmity toward us: “saved . . . from the wrath of God.” Our biggest problem is that God is our enemy. He has enmity toward us. He has a legitimate, just, wrathful disposition toward us because we deserve his judgment as God-hostile sinners.

Now, here’s the preceding verse, Romans 5:8: “God shows his love for us . . .” Take a step back and say, “Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. I thought he was angry.” “God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” So, before the problem of our enmity toward God is overcome, while we were still his enemies, God does what must be done in order to remove his enmity toward us by sending Christ. This is what must be done. He sends his Son, Christ, who bears our punishment so that we might be forgiven and justified.

So, God unilaterally — quite apart from anything we do or say or think, or even our existence — on the cross, satisfies his own justice and wrath in the death of Christ so that there is no condemnation toward those who will believe in him.

Different by Degrees

But Bethany’s question is, What about my enmity toward God? I don’t remember ever feeling that. How should I think about it? How should I feel it?

Now, the first part of the answer is that Bethany is only different in degree from the person who was saved at age 35, having had illicit sex over and over, been in jail, done drugs and every other manner of evil you can think of. She’s only different in degree as to whether she or that person could feel enmity toward God.

And what I mean is that that person, looking back, knows a little bit of how bad sin is and what their condition was and would be outside Christ. But the memory of all those outward acts and even the impulses that caused them does not go to the root of the matter. You can only know the root of your condition outside Christ by learning it from the Bible. God must reveal to us the nature and the depth of our corruption and our sinfulness and our enmity to God. Experience can only take us so far, but not far enough.

Now, Bethany surely has been tempted to sin. I assume she’s a human being, right? She has been tempted to sin, and she can imagine some of what her corruption would be like if she gave in to it repeatedly. And that person who was saved at age 35 has a clear sense of what sin is like. But it’s only a matter of degree that separates them because neither of them — none of us — knows the depth of our condition if we don’t learn it from God in the Bible.

Seeing Ourselves in Scripture

Since I think Bethany and I have basically the same issue — namely, a Christian background in which we don’t have any memory of being enemies of God consciously — let me use myself as an example of how I gain and feel a true conception of my condition before I was a believer (say, at age 4 or 5 years old) and what I would be now (at age 79) without Christ in my life. Here’s what I do: I immerse myself in what God says I was, what God says I would be outside Christ. I make the touchstone of my identity outside Christ God’s word, not my memory.

For example, here’s what I preach to myself. Romans 3:9–11: “Both Jews and Greeks are under sin, as it is written: ‘None is righteous, no, not one; no one understands; no one seeks for God.’” That’s me: no understanding, no seeking, no desire, no righteousness, under the dominion of sin. That’s me. And I meditate on that.

What is that? What does it look like? What is sin? Romans 1:22–23: “Claiming to be wise, they became fools, and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images.” They exchanged God for images. Romans 1:28: “Since they did not [approve of having God in their knowledge], God gave them up to a debased mind to do what ought not to be done.” Sin is exchanging God for the treasures I prefer rather than God. I prefer to eat of the tree of the garden of Eden. I prefer my way toward money, my way toward power, my way toward fame, my way toward sex, and God is in the way. I don’t like it. I want him out of the way. I want to do what I want to do. That’s sin. I don’t want to be subordinate to any authority outside myself.

That’s what Paul means by enmity toward God. And all of us can feel it crouching at the door. Without the Holy Spirit in Christ, it would take over. That’s me apart from sovereign grace.

What about Romans 8:7? What it adds is that, without Christ, I’m a slave to my arrogance; I’m a slave to my self-determination, my self-exaltation. It says, “The mind [of] the flesh is hostile to God, for it does not submit to God’s law; indeed, it cannot.” And that word cannot is crucial. My condition, apart from sovereign grace, God’s work in my life, is not just that I don’t please God or even that I don’t want to please God, but that my not wanting to please God is so deep I cannot please God. That’s my condition.

Word over Experience

We can only learn that because God reveals it to us in the Bible, not from experience — whether you were saved at 6 or saved at 60. So, Bethany, we’re all in this together. Whoever we are as Christians, we are all seeking to know who God is, what grace is, who we were and would be without him, and what we are by grace. And we can only know these things rightly, deeply, not because of our memory or our experience, but because of God’s word.

There’s a lie we all want to believe — even against all available evidence. It trades on our God-given capacity for hope. It tempts even those with impeccable theology. It lures us in and then leaves us in the lurch. It goes like this: “Life will get easier if I just make it past this current challenge.”

We feel this way about life stages. “If I can just find a romantic partner . . . make it through grad school . . . marry and settle down . . . have children . . . survive the diaper stage . . . survive the terrible twos . . . survive the teen years . . . find a better job . . . retire . . . then, finally, all will be well.” We think this way about temptations. “If I can accumulate enough in my bank account, I won’t be anxious anymore.” “Once I own my own home, I won’t envy what others have.” “After I marry, pornography will no longer be an issue.”

You’ve probably seen medication commercials featuring ridiculously fit and happy older people with silver hair and perfect teeth playing tennis and laughing in a carefree fashion. That’s the lie. It’s not true. In many years of pastoral ministry, I’ve seen numerous people work hard and honor God through their childrearing years and careers only to retire and face increased challenges. Friends move away. Misunderstandings with grown children occur. Spouses die. Medications multiply. Often, retirement isn’t a quiet harbor but the open ocean.

Because the Bible is realistic, almost every page punctures the lie. In particular, the clear-eyed story of Nehemiah reminds us that God’s people face lifelong hardships and temptations. At the same time, Scripture is not a counsel of despair for those in Christ. Like Nehemiah, we can learn to let hard be hard yet also filled with hope. Consider how his story might supply fresh strength for your current season — not some unpromised future one.

Sea of Hardships

Tasked with rebuilding the Jerusalem wall, Nehemiah finds himself surrounded by enemies. They simply will not quit in their efforts to stymie his work. Like Wile E. Coyote, the famous cartoon nemesis of the Roadrunner, the adversaries are unrelenting, undeterred, always trying new schemes. Their initial strategy for hindering Nehemiah is mockery and public shame (Nehemiah 2:19; 4:1–3). When that fails, they try deception, pestering Nehemiah for a private meeting, meaning to harm him (6:1–4). Then, in an open letter (so that the rumor will spread), they mention that he’s rebelling against Persian authority (6:5–7). They try to ruin his reputation (6:10–13) and send more letters to scare him (6:19).

I can imagine Nehemiah saying to himself, “If I just get this wall rebuilt, life will be easier.” But that’s the lie. Because once the wall is completed, the houses of Jerusalem must be rebuilt and the city repopulated (7:4). And, as it turns out, those who fill the city are sinful, which means Nehemiah must respond to continued and complicated crises (see Nehemiah 13). It never stops. God’s people face lifelong hardships and temptations.

John Newton understood this. In his hymn “Amazing Grace,” he proclaimed his confidence that God would be his shield and portion “as long as life endures.” You need a shield only when spears and arrows are flying your way, so Newton clearly believed they’d be in the air as long as he lived. Yes, many “dangers, toils, and snares” were already in the past. But Newton knew that the baseline expectation for God’s people is that more will come. Our only safe haven is heaven, and there’s no heaven on earth. (Not yet, at least.)

“God’s love will outlast every discouragement, fear, anxiety, setback, and temptation we face.”

Yet biblical realism needn’t lead to pessimism or passivity. Despite stiff opposition, Nehemiah and his followers keep on working and complete the wall (Nehemiah 6:15). Despite the continued disobedience of those who returned to Jerusalem, Nehemiah continues to make reforms and call the people back to God (Nehemiah 13). Nehemiah chooses to face real hardships and temptations with energetic hope rather than slack despair. And upon closer inspection, his story also shows us how: by looking up and looking back.

Looking Up

In the midst of unrelenting opposition, Nehemiah repeatedly looks up. He speaks to the God of heaven who is here with him: “But now, O God, strengthen my hands” (6:9). Here’s the first key to joyful perseverance amid pervasive difficulties: look up to God.

Nehemiah is famous for setting his sights heavenward in tight spots. He tells us that, in the intimidating presence of King Artaxerxes of Persia, “I prayed to the God of heaven” (2:4). As he recounts his enemies’ taunts, he bursts into prayer: “Hear, O our God, for we are despised!” (4:4). He’s a shining example of how to look up.

And, of course, our experience of God’s presence is greater than his. We know the Messiah’s name and the details of his story. We’ve seen God’s glory in Jesus’s face. His very Spirit lives inside us, encouraging and emboldening us. We enjoy his continual help. Through him, we possess constant, confident access to the Father. So, ultimately, we don’t need hardships and temptations to end because we have God with us in the midst of them.

Looking Back

Not only does Nehemiah gaze heavenward; he also looks backward. God’s past faithfulness is a second source of indominable hope. My church supports global partners who recently realized that sharing stories of God’s faithfulness on the mission field is noticeably decreasing their anxieties while there. This can be true for us too. As we meditate on God’s help in the past, our confidence in him grows in the present.

Surely, this is one of the reasons for the otherwise baffling inclusion of Nehemiah 7, a long genealogy of the first wave of exiles who had returned to Jerusalem a century before Nehemiah’s day (see also Ezra 2). Why include it here? Because it’s a tangible, specific reminder of God’s meticulous past provision. It fuels hope. Similarly, the people’s celebration of the Feast of Booths (Nehemiah 8) reminds them of what God has already done for them.

We too should look back. “I remember the days of old; I meditate on all that you have done; I ponder the work of your hands” (Psalm 143:5). Of course, we’re able to ponder thousands more years of God’s faithfulness than Nehemiah could. The reservoir of God’s grace has grown, and that grace now includes Jesus’s life and redeeming work. God’s past work fuels present confidence in the face of future challenges. We press forward by looking back.

Onward

God’s people endure hardships and temptations that will not end before heaven. New difficulties are surely just around the corner for you — only a text, call, or email away. But don’t despair — and don’t pin your hopes on the vain expectation that suffering will cease. There is no paradise here.

Instead, look back and look up. God’s love will outlast every discouragement, fear, anxiety, setback, and temptation we face. Nehemiah shows us how to endure grave challenges with glad hope.

My wife and I knew we were different when we got married, even though public school hadn’t helped us much on that front. Our 1990s and early 2000s society tried to take the edge off our sense of difference, but still we knew.

Clearly our bodies, as male and female, were different. And our instincts, while complementary, plainly differed. Of course, we had differing life experiences and families of origin, and so we exhibited the typical variances between any two humans. But the main differences, the ones that mattered most, and had the most potential, corresponded to one simple yet complex reality: I am a man, and she is a woman. We knew this.

However, looking back now, twenty years later, I’m not sure we yet knew how different we were — on the outside, yes, but even more on the inside, the things you can’t see at a glance. We were not yet deeply aware of the complementary differences God had sown deep into our masculine and feminine souls.

We Know Deep Down

Two decades of adult life have taught us much about God’s powerful dynamic in our human similarities and our male-female differences. As co-heirs in Christ, we stand, side by side, on equal footing before God and at the foot of the cross. Together, as man and wife, we are created, fallen, and redeemed. Oh, what glorious equalities we share as humans and Christians!

And we are clearly different — profoundly different — as male and female, as husband and wife, as head and helper. These differences are features, not bugs. They are not drawbacks to be covered over or collapsed into each other. There is the majesty of the sun and the splendor of the moon. One glory of day, another of night. We need both. Neither is better than the other; both are essential. And these differences — glorious complementary differences — go far beyond emotional intuition, native aggressiveness, how much sleep we need, and how long we can bear up under trying circumstances.

People know that men and women are different. All of us know. Sure, sinners suppress the truth (Romans 1:18–23). Doubtless, many have been deeply deceived, perhaps even choosing the deception one moment at a time for years on end. But we all know. Being male or female, like being made in God’s image, is basic enough, foundational enough, plain enough to the very nature of our world and our own human lives, that we know.

Still, as societal confusion and controversy continue to blur the sense of our God-given complementary differences as men and women, it can be helpful to point out, with the objectivity of Scripture, the traces of what’s been clear from the beginning.

God’s Creative Order

Genesis chapter 2 zooms in on day 6, that climactic day of the creation week, and we learn about how God made man, and find a two-stage sequence: God first forms the man from the ground, then distinctly, at a later time, he builds the woman from the man.

God chooses to create with a plain order. He calls our race “man.” He forms the man first and orients him toward the ground from which he came, to work the garden and keep it (2:15). And God gives him the ground rules:

“You may surely eat of every tree of the garden, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die.” (2:16–17)

At this point, then, God introduces man’s need for a “helper fit for him” (Genesis 2:18) — and God apparently takes his time. Not only does this create anticipation in the man for this helper; it also teaches a lesson. Then God forms the woman second, orienting her toward the man from which she came (2:22), to help him in God’s calling. The man names her Woman (2:23). They stand equal before God as human (Genesis 1:27–28). And God orders them in marriage as head and helper (2:20).

In 1 Timothy 2:13, the apostle Paul points to this ordered sequence in Genesis 2 as the first half of his reason for why mature Christian men are to be the pastor-elders and authoritatively teach the gathered church: “For Adam was formed first, then Eve.” God created these equals with an order. They are not the same but different — and these differences are God-designed complements.

Here an exhaustive list of the differences between the man and the woman (and men and women in general) is not necessary or relevant. God has his reasons for these differences — many of which are obvious, many that become plainer the longer we live, and many that remain subconscious for most in this life. But God’s design is intentional, and his order endures. And when we follow his order, we find that a lifetime of happy, even thrilling, discoveries await us. When you walk in light of the truth, lights go on everywhere. But that’s only part of the story.

Disorder in the Fall

Paul gives the second half of his answer (for why pastor-elders should be qualified men) in 1 Timothy 2:14: “And Adam was not deceived, but the woman was deceived and became a transgressor.” Now sin and Genesis 3 come into view.

Paul’s full explanation includes not just the order of creation, but also the (dis)order of the fall. God laid down an order; the serpent subverted it. The word deceive draws in the language of Genesis 3:13, where the woman says, “The serpent deceived me, and I ate.” Paul’s point is not that women are more gullible than men, or more prone to deception. The point is the order: The serpent did not deceive the man. He went to the woman. Satan intentionally undermined God’s order, and the fall was the direct result.

Yet even though the fall of man (and woman) brought God’s righteous curse upon the world, it did not overturn his order. After Adam too has eaten, God comes knocking and asks for the man (3:9), not for his wife, who handed him the fruit (3:6). God again operates according to his order, not according to the serpent’s scheme.

Even through the curse itself, God’s order persists. His curse directed toward the man relates to the ground and his labor. It will take his sweat and overcoming many barriers to be fruitful. Meanwhile, the curse directed toward the woman relates to childbearing and childrearing, to the domestic sphere and the labor of multiplying the race to fulfill God’s mandate. Greater still, the curse will include the sinful desire in woman to control the man, and that he will, in turn, be sinfully domineering toward her (this is the meaning of “desire” and “rule over” in Genesis 3:16; compare with Genesis 4:7). Sin always seeks to destroy God’s order.

Order Restored and Glorified

Remarkably, when we rush forward to the coming redemption — to God himself coming to rescue his people in Christ — his created order is not abandoned in the church age but endures. Not only is the original order restored through Christ’s redemptive work in the church, but now it is glorified, exalted to a new register through life in Christ by his indwelling Spirit.

As man and wife stood before God as equals in Eden, so we stand together, side by side, at Calvary and in the congregation of the church. Among those who have “put on Christ” through faith, “there is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:28). Men and women stand together before Christ, as co-heirs of the grace of life (1 Peter 3:7) — glorious equals. Neither man nor woman has any inside track with Jesus.

Yet that does not mean that our God-designed differences go away in Christ. Rather, they are rescued, restored, and glorified. “The husband is the head of the wife,” as he always has been, yet now, he finds his model in Christ: “. . . even as Christ is the head of the church, his body, and is himself its Savior” (Ephesians 5:23). Whereas sin may lead a husband to lord his authority over his wife, husbands in Christ love their wives and are not harsh with them (Colossians 3:19). As household head, a man owes his wife a special kind of care. Wives, in Christ, take the part of the church: “Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit in everything to their husbands” (Ephesians 5:24; Colossians 3:18).

This brings us back to Paul’s authoritative commentary on Genesis 2–3 for the church age. A team of mature Christian men serve the whole congregation as its pastor-teachers, according to God’s order in creation, now restored in Christ. And the glorious dance of our equality as humans and our differences as men and women, now rescued in Christ, not only gives order to our households and God’s household but also gives life and energy, beauty and power, to all of life, wherever we go and grow as those who image Christ in his world.

As my wife and I, and countless others, have discovered, our differences as man and woman are not less than they appear; they are even deeper. And that’s good. The more we are the same, the less rich an arrangement marriage is. But the more complementary we are, the more marriage becomes a strong and beautiful dance for making much of our God and his Son.

What’s the Difference?

This month at Desiring God, we are celebrating afresh the beauty and power of God’s design for men and women. We believe that sexual complementarity influences every realm of our lives — and we’re happy about how God chose to do it. Thin, narrow, and minimalist are not the adjectives for our complementarity at Desiring God. We love the God-designed differences in men and women, from the beginning, found in our households, celebrated in our churches, and displayed as a diamond next to the dull monotony of the world. We are thick, broad, and maximalist. We don’t stomach God’s design. We delight in it and hope you will too.

To that end, we’ve developed a new series of articles under the banner “What’s the Difference?” In this series, we’ll move through a sequence from our households, to our churches, to society, as we seek to celebrate God’s good design by pointing out what’s the difference — or more precisely, what are some of the countless differences we discern in our world and in ourselves and in Scripture.

One winter morning, I got a last-minute phone call that our school carpool fell through. Someone was sick, and so I was asked to drive instead. A few scrambling minutes later, I was driving north, then backtracking south, before finally heading west on the road to school with a minivan full of kids. An already long commute became twenty minutes longer. Internally, my heart was stuck on how very inconvenient this was. I was annoyed by the detour God had providentially planned for that morning.

Those extra minutes on the road gave me extra time to look into my heart. Why was I valuing convenience above serving my neighbor? If I was honest with myself, wasn’t my annoyance evidence that I had become unwilling to go out of my way for others? Was I even thinking about convenience and inconvenience in biblically sound ways?

God seems to prioritize something other than convenience as his plan of salvation unfolds. He was in no hurry to bring the promised offspring, Isaac, to Abraham and Sarah. He provided manna in the wilderness just one day at a time. Resting every seventh day was an inconvenient boundary for God’s people, considering how often they failed to keep the Sabbath. A suffering Messiah, an infant born of a virgin, and an already–not yet kingdom are neither comfortable nor convenient methods for redemption by human standards.

Might it be that delayed fulfillment, desert detours, and daily bread are effective teachers precisely because they are inconvenient? Maybe the high value our world places on convenience — from smartphones and GPS to grocery delivery and overnight shipping — makes us wrongheadedly expect God to change us in some easy way, apart from uncomfortable circumstances. In times when convenience is so valued, expected, and even demanded, it might be worth asking how God matures us specifically through inconvenience.

Consider four benefits that regularly come to us through inconvenience.

1. Welcome the fruit of the Spirit.

Inconvenience is an opportunity to cultivate the fruit of the Spirit. Uncomfortable, inconvenient circumstances are often the very means the Holy Spirit chooses to cultivate his fruit in us, perhaps patience most acutely. Like many others before me, I thought of myself as a patient person until God gave me children. The baby that wouldn’t fall asleep, the toddler who needed so many reminders, the teenager who kept losing his newest coat — these have revealed to me just how impatient I truly am. But how can I grow in patience unless my patience is tried?

“In his wise providence, God ordains convenience and inconvenience alike.”

Just as God tried his people in the furnace of affliction (Isaiah 48:10), so God tries me in the furnace of inconvenience. If I am honest with myself, even the most petty inconveniences can cause impatience, grumbling, and self-centeredness to flare up in my heart and my speech. How necessary joy, patience, peace, gentleness, and self-control are in such moments, however insignificant they seem — and what an opportunity such moments offer for growing in these precious qualities!

2. Heed the call of Christlike love.

Inconvenience caused by others’ needs gives us an opportunity to practice costly love. In Matthew 5, Jesus gives our heart a reality check. Easy love, he says, is neither remarkable nor a mark of God’s kingdom. “If you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax collectors do the same?” (Matthew 5:46). Instead, he presses us to do something much more difficult and costly, something that he does — love sacrificially, looking to a greater reward than convenience (Matthew 5:44–45; John 15:12–13).

Sacrificial love is not convenient. It assumes a loss, a sacrifice of some kind, whether large or small. It could be the sacrifice of time or a good night’s sleep. It could be the sacrifice of comfort in order to have a difficult conversation or helping to bear the burden when someone is going through a difficult trial. It could be the sacrifice of a kidney donation to a relative or postponing needed chemotherapy for the sake of a child growing in the womb. Whatever the sacrifice, it won’t be convenient. But the heavenly joy that comes from giving of ourselves for others is far greater than the temporary benefits of convenience.

In Philippians 2, Paul reminds us that sacrificial love begins with humility, ends in glory, and is always a reflection of Jesus:

Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility count others more significant than yourselves. Let each of you look not only to his own interests, but also to the interests of others. Have this mind in yourselves which is yours in Christ Jesus. . . . He humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death. . . . Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name . . . to the glory of God the Father. (Philippians 2:3–11)

If we are determined to keep our lives convenient, then our lives will display little of the glorious love of Jesus. Inconvenience is often an opportunity, however small, to look out for the interests of others and be rewarded by our Father in heaven.

3. Embrace your creaturely limits.

When I drive from Minneapolis to St. Paul, I’m limited to roads with bridges across the river. The Mississippi is an unavoidable reality, at times an inconvenience, but it is the kind of inconvenience that reminds me that God made this world and I am only a creature in it, hemmed in by God-ordained limits. Just as a river moves within the borders of its banks, I too live within the mortal limits that God has given me. I can rage and rebel against those limits, and my life will grow increasingly chaotic and destructive, like the Mississippi in flood season. Or I can embrace the limits God has given me and thank him for hedging in my days and my ways.

Sickness regularly reminds us of our humble creatureliness. Food poisoning, pneumonia, a high fever and aches — these have the ability to cancel whatever fine plans or high demands we had for the day. We’re often tempted to feel anxious about how this sickness will slow us down, and we lose sight of the opportunity to stop and surrender our mortality to God. Home or car repairs are often inconvenient, expensive, and frustrating, but they are yet another reminder that created things don’t last forever. Moth and rust will destroy, but our treasure in heaven is imperishable (Matthew 6:19–20). When we lay our heads on the pillow each night, we’re reminded that we cannot work nonstop, even if we want to. We lie down and rise again in the morning because our heavenly Father continues to sustain us (Psalm 4:8).

4. Remember that God is in control.

Inconvenience reminds us that God is in control. In his wise providence, God ordains convenience and inconvenience alike. Not only our sleep but also “rain and drought, fruitful and lean years, food and drink, health and sickness, poverty and prosperity — all things, in fact, come to us not by chance but by his Fatherly hand” (Heidelberg Catechism, Lord’s Day 10). The closed road, the canceled appointment, the snowstorm that prohibits travel, the school lunch that was left on the counter — all these inconveniences announce to us, like a neon sign, that God is in control and we are not.

When we find ourselves rolling our eyes in the grip of the most recent inconvenience, it may be time to take a deep breath and praise God that although “the heart of man plans his way,” the Lord “establishes his steps” (Proverbs 16:9). Every inconvenience provides a concrete circumstance in which we can live out a glad submission to our heavenly Father.

I’ve learned to laugh at myself for my rising impatience when traffic slows to a halt. How can I feel so busy and then be annoyed when God literally slows me down and gives me a minute to rest? The traffic jam, the power outage, the long grocery line, the empty printer cartridge, the lost library book, the misplaced keys — in every inconvenience, we can pray, as Jesus taught us, “Your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven” (Matthew 6:10).

Though there is far more to our lives than inconvenience, God wills that we experience it nearly every day and that we respond with faith and grace. May there be enough inconvenience in our lives that when we get a last-minute call to help a friend in need, our first response is not impatience but delight in the God-ordained detour, giving us extra miles on the road to love God with all our heart and love our neighbor as ourselves.

Audio Transcript

The book of Romans answers some of the most important questions we have about life, particularly our own lives. What was my spiritual condition before my conversion? What did God do in Jesus Christ to save me from that condition? How is that work different from what God has done inside of me? How did God overcome my stubborn resistance and give me the gift of faith? And now, how should I live in light of this precious salvation God has given me and is working out inside of me? How does it affect my relationships, my work, and my life at home, in the church, and in the world? What confident hope can I have for the future?

Paul’s letter to the Romans is such a precious gift from God, answering all these questions for us. Pastor John, as we approach March and prepare to dive into Romans in our Bible reading and read it throughout the month, help us out here. You’ve been reading and studying and cherishing this letter for over sixty years now. What advice would you give us to help us draw out the most glories from this great letter?

Let me see if I can raise the expectations of us all as we move into Romans again this year. I will claim, without any fear of contradiction, that Paul’s letter to the Romans is the greatest letter that has ever been written in the history of the world by anybody — Christian or non-Christian.

Why Romans Is So Great

Here’s what I mean by greatest. Three things.

1. It is the fullest divinely inspired summary of the greatest realities in the universe.

2. Among those inspired writings, it is not only the fullest summary of the greatest realities. It penetrates more deeply into those realities than any other book does, like the condition of humanity outside Christ, the meaning of justification by faith, the miracle of the Christian life lived after the law in the Spirit, the condition of the natural world under the fall, the future destiny of the people of Israel, the mystery of why God would prepare vessels of wrath for destruction — things like that. It’s just unparalleled in its penetrating power.

3. What I mean by greatest is that no other letter has had a greater impact on the history of the church and the world than this one. Augustine traced his conversion to Romans 13:13. Martin Luther entered the paradise of imputed righteousness and freedom through the portal of Romans 1:17. And John Wesley’s heart was freed from the strivings of the Oxford Club into the joy of faith by hearing the Moravians read Luther’s Preface to Romans. And millions upon millions of others have walked into peace with God along what we call “the Romans road.”

Romans 3:23: “All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.”
Romans 6:23: “The wages of sin is death.”
Romans 5:6: “While we were still weak . . . Christ died for the ungodly.”
Romans 10:9: “If you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.”

Goodness, how many millions of people have heard those four glorious and painful and wonderful truths and been saved by God? It’s the greatest letter that has ever been written, and we should enter the front door of Romans this year with a sense of wonder and reverence and thankfulness and expectation and joy.

It’s not just the Mount Everest of Scripture, which it is. It is a whole range of mountain peaks of soaring revelation. If there’s any Scripture to which we should apply Psalm 119:18, this is it: “[O Lord,] open my eyes, that I may behold wondrous things out of your [instruction].” (That’s a good translation of torah, sometimes translated “law.”) So, with this sense of expectation and wonder and reverence and thankfulness for the greatest of all books, is there a peculiar angle from which we should come at this book as we read it this year?

How to Approach Romans

Well, I’m very hesitant to limit anybody’s approach to this book. It is, without exaggeration, an ocean. It’s an ocean of insight into reality, and the ocean has no bottom, and the ocean has no shores, which means that this book will never be exhausted by finite human beings in what it has to show us about God and his ways and about his world and his people. But if anybody listening to us would like a suggestion, here’s mine.

“Romans is the greatest letter ever written in the history of the world by anybody — Christian or non-Christian.”

I would dare to say that no believer fully understands who he is and what God did to make us believers — who we are and what we will become. I would venture to say that most Christians have an incomplete — and many even a defective — grasp of what happened to make them a Christian and the miraculous thing it is to be a Christian. Therefore, my suggestion is that many of us read Romans, ransack Romans, this year — for three to four weeks or however long we’re in it — to find the answer to five questions.

1. What was my condition before Christ saved me?

First, what was my condition before conversion to Christ? Which is a form of the same question, What would be my condition now if God had not powerfully moved in my life to save me? We must let God answer this question from Romans, not from our experience.

Some of us were saved when we were six years old, and we don’t have any memory at all of what our condition was before we were saved. And some of us think we know how bad we were because of the bad things we did before we were saved, but we don’t realize how bad we were because, deep down, the analysis of our condition and our corruption is so much more profound than any experience could teach us. We must be taught by God what our condition was (and would be today if we weren’t saved), or we won’t be singing “Amazing Grace” the way we should.

2. What did God do to save me from that condition?

Here’s the second question we should try to answer: What did God do in Jesus Christ in history to save me from that condition? Now, let’s not confuse that question with what God did in me — in me. Martin Luther’s whole world was turned upside down when he realized that his salvation was accomplished outside of him. He called it extra nos. I remember the first time in seminary I heard that phrase, and it landed on me similarly, with power — extra nos, outside of us.

Centuries ago, on a hill outside Jerusalem, it was done. The salvation was achieved. The decisive, divine work was done before Luther existed, you existed, I existed. What did God do outside of us to save us in eternity, in history? Romans is really good on that. Let’s answer that question, because we need to know what he did for us outside of us thousands of years ago, before we ever existed, not just what he does in us.

3. What did God do in me to save me?

Third question: What, then, did God do in us to save us? What does he do to us by his Spirit and his sovereign grace? How was my resistance to him overcome? How did that happen? How did my faith come into being? What was that like? If the mind of the flesh is hostile to God and cannot submit to God’s law (Romans 8:7), how did I get saved? The glory of God’s grace that we find in the Bible is so powerful and decisive that we stop attributing things to ourselves that the Bible attributes to God.

4. How then should I live?

The fourth question I hope we can answer this year is this: How then shall I live in this world if I was saved like that? How shall I live in this church? How shall I live with my enemies? How shall I live in relation to the government, in relation to unreached peoples of the world? By what power can I live the Christian life? How am I to gain that power? How am I to defeat sin? How do I live the Christian life?

5. What does God have in store for me?

Last question, number five: What is my future? What’s my future in this life? What kind of care does God take of me in this life as I walk in the Spirit? What is my future forever? Those are my five questions.

Now, I don’t want to limit anybody’s insights as you read Romans. God has things for you to see besides these five questions, I am sure. So, one way to do both — to let God say whatever he wants to say besides these, and to do this ransacking for these five answers — is to get a notebook or a few sheets of paper and put these five questions on five different pages. And then, as you read — I think that the sections we’re going to read are fairly short — just stay alert to these five questions. And every time you see something that relates to one of them, jot it down on that particular page while he shows you all kinds of other things as well.

Let God speak to you any way he pleases. And don’t fret that you can’t see it all. Depending on how old you are, you can read it maybe another hundred times — and there will always be more to see.

The landscape of college ministry has shifted dramatically over the past 25 years. But here in 2025, I’m still consistently receiving the same question that I asked as a student: “Why am I not feeling it?”

Why am I not more excited about Jesus? Why doesn’t the gospel taste sweeter to me? Why are my emotions not responding to the best news in the world? I have a wealth of Christian resources, but I’m still desperately grasping for joy. Why does it stay tantalizingly out of reach?

Two Common Diagnoses

Before we go further, it must be said that the majority of those who experience this kind of unwelcome numbness are not fully numb. They are selectively excited. They still find themselves giddy about gaming, wild about the weekend, or captivated by a crush. It’s the spiritual pursuit, or perhaps the very nature of God, that douses the flame.

Years ago, I was leading a weekly Bible study of sophomore men. At the beginning of each meeting, one of these sophomores was playful, energetic, even squirrely. But almost without fail, his eyes would begin to droop when we would open the Bible — as if some form of yet-undiagnosed, Scripture-induced narcolepsy had seized him. (My children are often afflicted with the same strange condition.)

While this was an embarrassingly overt case, parallel stories of selective excitement remain common, and there are generally only two diagnoses.

Spiritually Dead

On the one hand, the person has yet to develop a taste for God at all. Scripture clearly states that God turns on the lights of Christward affection in our hearts (2 Corinthians 4:6), but before that wonderful awakening, we are prone to be bored by anything that doesn’t directly or indirectly exalt ourselves. So the Bible, which humbles us on every page, is somewhere between repulsive and boring, and talk of God evokes a response akin to Edmund’s at the first mention of Aslan’s name.

If you are reading this and deeply concerned that you are of that number, I am less concerned than you are — precisely because you’re unsettled. It is far more likely that you fall into a second category.

Spiritually Distracted

In this case, the person isn’t “feeling it” because he has been nibbling on lesser joys, like a child who has no appetite for a steak dinner because there are a dozen candy wrappers in his pocket. I confess that I often live here, surprised by my lack of hunger for the living God but slow to consider how I have given myself to the seemingly innocent distractions of little phone games or ESPN throughout the day (or throughout the season). As C.S. Lewis puts it, “Having allowed oneself to drift, unresisting, unpraying, accepting every half-conscious solicitation from our desires,” we are then shocked at our lack of spiritual fervor (The Great Divorce, 38). We make a mockery of David’s singular aim of God-gazing in Psalm 27:4, betraying our true practice in this ungodly paraphrase:

Twenty-six things have I asked of the Lord, and those will I seek after . . . gazing upon his beauty is peripherally one of them.

So, if your affections for God aren’t accurately reflecting the goodness of who he is, first take an honest inventory of your prayer life, your thought life, your diet, and (perhaps especially) your screen time. Perhaps you will find that you are an average hyper-stimulated citizen of the twenty-first century, giving in to secular liturgies with every free moment.

When the Dryness Remains

But when that inventory is taken, the competing liturgies are stripped away (or at least taken captive to the obedience of Christ), and that spiritual dryness remains, what then? What of the seasons when I put my head under the normal waterfall of grace, and I still feel thirsty? Or worse, when my thirst is as weak as the trickle that falls from the expected fountainhead? What if, like Heman the Ezrahite in Psalm 88, “Every day I call upon you, O Lord; I spread out my hands to you,” but “I suffer your terrors; I am helpless” (Psalm 88:9, 15)?

Many have experienced deserts vaster and drier than my own, but I can offer a few helps from my mixture of faithfulness and failure in this area.

1. Trace sunbeams back to the Sun.

I once met with a Christian counselor after getting fed up with my hyperactive mind, my questions about God, and the ensuing distance from him I felt. That counselor gave me some simple advice I have carried ever since: use creation to taste the goodness of the Lord. He told me to take moments to be more tactile and less cerebral, touching a leaf to remember God’s brightness and liveliness, feeling a breeze to remember his gentleness. Gamers today advise one another to “touch grass,” and if we are using said grass-touching to trace sunbeams back to the Sun, it’s not bad advice (James 1:17).

2. Let art wake you up.

God is not boring. In his presence is fullness of joy (Psalm 16:11). But my own drabness dirties my lens for seeing him, so I often employ the aid of musicians and filmmakers to turn my experiential prose into poetry. God has gifted some with the ability to feel deeply and, even better, to depict their emotions vividly. Borrow from them. My tear ducts regularly run dry until God opens them through the haunting, heavenly sounds of Sigur Rós or the depiction of fatherly pursuit in Finding Nemo.

3. Engage the poor and marginalized.

I assume that most of the world, for most of history, has struggled less with longing for God than we do in the prosperous and peaceful West. I currently live in a town called Mount Pleasant, and the back half of the name fits (not so much the front: our highest point above sea level is seven feet). So, in a Monday-morning pastors’ meeting, our senior pastor asked, “How do we keep longing for heaven here?” He was heeding the warning of Hosea 13:5–6:

It was I who knew you in the wilderness,     in the land of drought;but when they had grazed, they became full,     they were filled, and their heart was lifted up;     therefore they forgot me.

Yes, we have the universal wake-up calls of sin, aging, disease, and death to keep our longings aimed at eternity, but the contrast between Mount Pleasant and heaven doesn’t always seem so stark. Seeking to build heaven on earth is a recipe for numbness. When we tie our life to those of the poor, the fatherless, the widow, or the refugee, we not only heed the heart of God but also remember more regularly the brokenness of our current age.

4. Gaze at Jesus, not your affections.

I spent too many years checking my spiritual blood pressure and becoming immediately discouraged by the gap between the wonders of God and the gospel on the one hand and my puny affections on the other. It became a tooth-gritting (and losing) battle that was eventually resolved (and continues to be) by acknowledging the full sufficiency of my Substitute.

“Unsatiated hunger for God is the fitting experience of the believer before glory.”

I remember driving around the University of Minnesota in my white Nissan Quest minivan in a yelling match with the Lord as my questions and self-doubts tied me in knots. By God’s grace, it finally came to me: Jesus’s affections for his Father were perfectly aligned with the magnitude of divine beauty. The strength of his faith was one hundred percent. Why had I been assuming that my sinful actions required a crucifixion, but my affections and faith were on my shoulders? I asked Jesus to take the lump sum of my weakness, including my paltry hunger for him, and to cover it with his blood. Though less dramatic, my experience was not dissimilar to Martin Luther’s: “The gates of paradise were opened to me.”

My gaze shifted. And the strangest thing happened: when my subjective affections ceased to be the basis of my confidence, they began to grow. Jesus’s gracious sufficiency to cover and carry me made him seem as wonderful as he actually is.

5. Wait.

I have often swallowed the microwave mantra of our instant-gratification society. I don’t go to Wendy’s if the drive-through is too long. I feel the impulse to reach for my phone if two people are in front of me at the grocery store. This disease makes me feel as though a day or week or month of spiritual dryness is abnormal, even unjust. Waiting, though a prominent theme across the pages of Scripture, does not have popular appeal. Yet Jeremiah commends it:

The Lord is good to those who wait for him,     to the soul who seeks him.It is good that one should wait quietly     for the salvation of the Lord.It is good for a man that he bear     the yoke in his youth.Let him sit alone in silence     when it is laid on him;let him put his mouth in the dust —     there may yet be hope. (Lamentations 3:25–29)

It is good to wait? Why? There may be some speculation here, but I think our taste for the unseen God is best cultivated when we are conscious of the dry and desert land that is this fallen world without God’s visible, tangible presence. The entire life of a believer can rightly be described as a fast, beset with hunger pangs until Jesus’s return (Matthew 9:15). Unsatiated hunger for God is the fitting experience of the believer before glory. Feeling that this is not the way it’s supposed to be is the way it’s supposed to be — for now.

But now is so very brief in the grand scheme. To quote Gandalf, soon “the grey rain-curtain of this world rolls back, and all turns to silver glass, and then you see it . . . white shores, and beyond, a far green country under a swift sunrise” (The Lord of the Rings, 1030). In that instant, we will see and so become like Jesus (1 John 3:2), and all our nagging numbness and depressing doubts will be put to death. Take heart, feeble-faithed believer; he will carry you there.

Solitude is threatening because these voices of various kinds come in and threaten us, like Satan with accusations. And one of the ways to push out those voices is to fill your mind and heart with another voice. And that’s what this session is about.

I honestly didn’t want to talk about COVID-19 anymore. I’m sure you don’t either. But I’m going to do it anyway. And it’s because I think the virus is a good picture of what I want to show you in this session about loving God through daily Bible reading. COVID-19 has a couple trademark symptoms. You know them by now: a cough, shortness of breath, extreme tiredness, and loss of smell and taste. I had COVID-19 (it wasn’t a serious case), and that might have been the most disorienting thing about the virus for me. I’d get hungry, and I’d go to eat something that I’d eaten hundreds, maybe thousands, of times: pasta, pizza, chicken, Chipotle. And it wouldn’t taste right.

In fact, it wouldn’t taste like much at all. It’s the exact same food, the exact same flavors, and yet something changed in me. I did a little bit of research over the last few weeks (and I mean a little — just very little). At least one serious study says that the reason we lose our sense of smell and taste is because the virus disrupts our olfactory cells. It’s the cells that relate to our sense of smell, and 80 percent of our taste comes from what we smell. The virus can’t infect these cells, but when it gets close to them, the brain sends all of these extra immune cells that clog up the olfactory system, in some cases for weeks, or months, or years. People lose their sense of smell or taste. It can happen for years.

Lies That Block Our Spiritual Senses

I suspect something similar happens, at least in seasons, when we resolve to read the Bible. If you’re like me, there are times when you open the Bible, a meal that you’ve enjoyed hundreds, maybe thousands, of times, and yet something doesn’t taste right. Maybe it doesn’t taste like much at all. It’s a symptom, and I believe this happens because our spiritual olfactory senses are under attack. They’ve been disrupted and distracted by a virus, by subtle lies that Satan feeds us about this book. And so, with these few minutes together, I want to expose and confront just four lies that undermine Bible reading.

These aren’t the only four lies, by any means. There are dozens, if not hundreds. But I’ve experienced these four personally, and I suspect that they’re pandemic. I just want you to hear someone say out loud that they’re not true. And I’ve chosen these four in part because I see them all, or at least the shadow of them, in Psalm 19:7–11. If you have a Bible, you can turn there and I’ll or reference verses throughout.

1. The Bible is irrelevant.

The first lie is that the Bible is irrelevant to your real life. Now, right off the bat, we probably wouldn’t say this out loud to anyone. We know that the Bible is theoretically relevant to our situation in some way. But when it comes time to sit down and read it, doubt can begin to creep in, can’t it? The distance between the Bible and me can feel wide — between a book like Ruth and our relationships, between Deuteronomy and the deadlines that we have at school or work, between 1 Peter and the problems that we’re bringing into this new year. Will reading this really old book really make any difference in my job or classes or friendships or future marriage? To which God says in Psalm 19:7, “The testimony of the Lord is sure, making wise the simple.”

This book makes people wise — genuinely, supernaturally wise. And it’s not just any people, but simple people. People like me. This book can make you wise. It really can. And it makes these simple people wise in every age, from ancient Israel to modern Louisville, Minneapolis, or Los Angeles. And it makes us wise in all kinds of circumstances: school semesters, dating relationships, first jobs, and world missions. God didn’t shoot this book out into the future and hope that it would land a couple thousand years later and be relevant to you. That’s not what happened with this book.

“The Bible is a reviving book, a restoring book. It’s a balm to weary and hurting hearts.”

No, still today, the book that’s in your hands is breathed out by God and is profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness (your righteousness), so that the man or woman of God may be complete, equipped for every good work (2 Timothy 3:16–17). This book gives wisdom for every difficult situation and decision you will face. And the testimony of this word is sure.

2. The Bible won’t make sense.

Now, of course, just about anyone can understand some verses, like John 3:16, Romans 8:28, and Psalm 23. I don’t hear anyone saying that they can’t understand any of the Bible, but a lot of us struggle to understand a lot of the Bible. And when we commit to reading the whole Bible over and over year after year, we’re going to walk through strange and difficult passages: Ezekiel, Hebrews, Revelation, and so on. After a while, the exercise can start to feel kind of futile. We may think, “Am I ever going to understand more of this?” To which God says, “The commandment of the Lord is pure, enlightening the eyes” (Psalm 19:8).

Remember, even the apostle Peter had a hard time understanding some passages in the Bible, and he wrote whole books in the Bible. In 2 Peter 3:16, he says that there are some things in Paul’s letters that are hard to understand. To which Paul says, in 2 Timothy 2:7, “Think over what I say, for the Lord will give you understanding in everything.” The Lord will enlighten your eyes in everything. That’s what he says. It’s not immediate, of course, but he’ll give you real light now, and then, if you keep looking and looking and looking, that light will grow over months and years and decades.

So, rejoice in what you can see now. It’s a miracle. If you see any beauty, any truth, any worth in this book, it’s a miracle that God has given you. Rejoice in that, and then expect to see more and more and more because this book enlightens our eyes. It doesn’t just give us something to look at, but it actually alters our vision so that it improves the longer that we live in it.

3. The Bible won’t address my pain.

When we look back on these seasons when we’ve struggled to read the Bible, a lot of us can probably point to some heartache or pain where the struggle started, where the Bible lost its taste. That’s not always the case. In fact, for some of us, that’s the very point when the Bible started tasting sweeter. But suffering can become a barrier to hearing God in Scripture. I wonder if you’ve experienced that. It’s a difficult relationship, a chronic pain, or an illness. Some looming uncertainty about your future can become this barrier to hearing God in his words.

You might think, “Will the chapters for today really say anything that will help me through this?” To which God says, “The law of the Lord is perfect, reviving the soul” (Psalm 19:7). This is a reviving book, a restoring book. It’s a balm to weary and hurting hearts. David describes the same reviving power in Psalm 23:1–3, when he says,

The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want. He makes me lie down in green pastures. He leads me beside still waters. He restores my soul.

This God comes and finds us in our valleys — afflicted, confused, broken — and he leads us into safe pastures and peaceful waters. And his rod for leading us, his rod of peace and comfort and direction, is this book.

Notice that he doesn’t just treat our wounds or our particular suffering, but he revives the soul. He goes deeper than our wounds. He offers a deeper, more meaningful rest and healing than all the things that we might turn to in our suffering.

4. The Bible won’t make me happy.

Some of us don’t even think about the Bible in categories of happiness. Wisdom, yes. Correction, yes. Promises of future happiness in heaven, yes. But meaningful happiness today? Really? Friendship makes us happy. Great food can make us happy. Recognition and praise for our work can make us happy. Sports can make us happy, if the right team wins. Marriage might make us happy. But the Bible? Really? To which God says, at the beginning of Psalm 19:8, “The precepts of the Lord are right, rejoicing the heart.”

God wrote the Bible not merely to give you wisdom in your relationships, or to make you articulate in your theology, or even just to comfort you in your suffering. No, he also wrote the Bible to make you really, really happy. Jesus says of his words in John 15:11, “These things I have spoken to you, that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be full.”

Jesus spoke at the Last Supper, and then in all of Scripture, that his joy might be in you, and that your joy may be full. God gave us a Bible so that we might be as happy as God, infinitely happy through this book — knowing him and loving him through this book. And of all the things that David says about Scripture in these verses here in Psalm 19, this is the piece that he can’t help but say a little bit more about. Consider Psalm 19:9–10:

The rules of the Lord are true,     and righteous altogether.More to be desired are they than gold,     even much fine gold;sweeter also than honey     and drippings of the honeycomb.

This is what the Bible is. It’s more desirable than gold. It just is, no matter how you feel about it in the moment. It is more to be desired than gold. It is sweeter than honey, even when our spiritual taste buds can’t taste it. The Bible is a happy-making book. And so, when Bible reading gets hard, or life gets busy, or you don’t taste what you used to taste in these pages, remember: This book revives the soul. This book gives supernatural wisdom for all of life. This book can be understood. And in understanding it, you’ll begin to understand everything else. And this book is the deepest, richest well for joy.

Is your Christian life too private, too indoorsy?

“You are the light of the world,” our Lord declares. “A city set on a hill cannot be hidden” (Matthew 5:14). Some of us, it seems, mean to test that claim.

We can yell about Jesus as loudly as we want in our homes and church buildings — but we must keep it behind those walls. Public life is off-limits. The good of society requires it, you see. How can a multicultural, multireligious community flourish with the Christians insisting that all other gods are false and that Jesus is the only way to heaven? What about the atheists? Muslims? Jews? Our lofty ideals tell us to leave all the high places intact.

Though the heavens cannot contain him, though earth is his footstool, do we — his grasshoppers leaping upon his lawn — try to cage the living God in church buildings and around dinner tables? They say he is too wild and transgressive to be unleashed into the community. They are not wrong. He came to bring division: light from dark, the truth from the lie, his sons from Satan’s. Our God holds up his Son; his Son holds out his ring for all other gods and men to kiss. Refuse, and his wrath is quickly kindled. Blessing is only for those who take refuge in him.

Man does not like a God who lays claim on everyone and everything. And we, his ambassadors, too quickly grow tired of discipling them to observe all that he commanded. We comply with society’s red tape above our Savior’s red letters. Sheep, too happily sheepish. The Sunday gathering soon becomes the one (and virtually only) place for overt Christianity. Christ must be left out of malls, sports, restaurants, workplaces, and anywhere else he is unwanted. We quickly feel we have done enough to huddle once a week in that fenced green pasture. We are well-fed, happy enough, and sleepy.

Will Stones Cry Out?

Charles Spurgeon, a man who went to the people in open-air preaching and evangelism, states my main burden well:

We ought actually to go into the streets and lanes and highways. . . . Sportsmen must not stop at home and wait for the birds to come and be shot at, neither must fishermen throw their nets inside their boats and hope to take many fish. Traders go to the markets, they follow their customers and go out after business if it will not come to them; and so must we. (Lectures to My Students, 224)

How do you bring the gospel to where the people are? Christ teaches us to be fishers of men, but do we drop our nets in the boat instead of the sea?

How much of Christianity is lived among ourselves, for ourselves? The gathering of God’s people is the most notable event a calendar can contain. Heaven and earth meet when the saints gather to hear from their Lord. Yet, as much as the church is an end, we also harness together to bring others in. We are refreshed, equipped, and emboldened to go out on mission and return, in coming weeks, with more souls.

Does it bother you when additions to your church body grow stagnant? Are you concerned that so many in this world are perishing without hearing of Christ? If the gathering continues, kids’ programs run smoothly, and some spiritual benefit is exchanged from Sunday to Sunday, is all well with your soul?

Will that building that saw nearly all of our light testify against us on the last day? Will the walls testify that we knew that great name by which men must be saved, knew that souls outside were perishing, knew that a vast eternity stretches before every soul and that most run to ruin, and yet, like the rich man with Lazarus, kept feasting inside?

How about the windows? How much of that beautiful stained glass is stained with our neglect of the people on the other side? How many of these painted lookouts are but kaleidoscopes through which we peer at people who have never heard the gospel from our lips?

“Let us bring Christ to the people that we might bring the people to Christ.”

Or how about the pews? Surely they will protest their innocence. They were meant to be a training ground, a place of equipping. They meant to send their bearers along on their mission. Instead, these pews, looking down upon so many dress shoes, high heels, and boots in our congregations, saw so few beautiful feet going out to publish the good news of happiness and salvation among the people (Isaiah 52:7).

What of the roads leading to and away from the gathering? They had heard rumors about “The Great Commission,” though they saw evidence of only “A Nice Suggestion.” They would have been stones crying out, most willing preachers for their Lord, if only given such a chance. They pointed out into a wide world in need of Christ. But alas, so few returned week by week with a testimony of conquest.

Go

Horatius Bonar says the part we’d rather leave unsaid:

Eye has not seen, nor ear heard, nor has it entered the heart of man, what a soul in hell must suffer forever. Lord, give us bowels of mercies! We too ought to pray, “Give us thy tears to weep; for, Lord, our hearts are hard toward our fellows. We can see thousands perish around us, and our sleep never be disturbed; no vision of their awful doom ever scaring us, no cry from their lost souls ever turning our peace into bitterness.” (Words to Winners of Souls, 12)

Brothers and sisters, souls are dying, hell is gaping, an awful doom awaits the perishing. We have been entrusted with the gospel of Jesus Christ. Go and tell it on the mountains, over the hills, and everywhere. Go and do street evangelism, or hand out gospel tracts, or knock on doors, or preach in the open air, or move overseas as a missionary, or engage in mercy ministries, abortion witnessing, or letter-writing. Be simple or get creative, but go — across an ocean, across a taboo, across a street. Go — to unbelieving family members, to classmates, teammates, neighbors. Go — to the least of these, to the forgotten in prisons or nursing homes, to the poor, orphans, and widows. Go.

What has our Lord left us here for? “You are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for his own possession, that you may proclaim the excellencies of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light” (1 Peter 2:9). If you know the excellencies of Christ — who he is, what he has done, and what he has done for you — go and proclaim them.

“Well, they don’t want to hear about his excellencies.” So be it. Jesus does not remind us of his supreme authority for nothing: “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations” (Matthew 28:18–19). Because of his supreme authority over heaven and earth, there is never a place where the gospel has no place. Where the King says, “Go!” you may go — you must go — no matter what man threatens. When they strictly command us to no longer speak in the name of Jesus, disciples of the cross reply, “Whether it is right in the sight of God to listen to you rather than to God, you must judge, for we cannot but speak of what we have seen and heard” (Acts 4:19–20).

Let us bring Christ to the people that we might bring the people to Christ.

Audio Transcript

Welcome back to a new week. On this Monday, we return to the topic of AI. We touched on it recently in APJ 1985, “John Piper on ChatGPT.” And there, Pastor John, you explained that Christian Hedonism offers us a unique angle on AI, emphasizing that God is glorified when humans not only understand him but also rejoice in him from the heart — something AI, lacking spiritual affections and a supernatural heart, cannot replicate. AI is fundamentally disconnected from God’s intended purpose for intelligence. Since then, you followed up with more thoughts in your Sing! Conference message, explaining why we never hear about “Artificial Emotion.”

I suppose there’s still a lot to address here. As you build out your thoughts on AI, we revisit the topic with two new angles raised by podcast listeners: a pastor and a college-ministry leader. The first email, from an anonymous pastor, asks this: “Pastor John, do you think it’s okay to use AI platforms — like Gemini or ChatGPT — to help draft a sermon, youth lesson, or Bible study, as long as I review, adjust, and ensure it aligns with God’s word?” The second email comes from a college-ministry leader: “Hello, Pastor John! Thank you for this podcast and the ways it has blessed so many. My question is, Can I use AI to write my newsletter to ministry supporters? I provide real updates and true facts, but I find writing particularly frustrating. While AI would help me write newsletters more quickly and frequently, I worry it could feel misleading to my supporters. What are the potential dangers of pastors using AI for ministry tasks like sermon preparation and newsletter writing?”

Let’s start with a definition. I got this straight off Google. It’s another artificial intelligence defining artificial intelligence. “Artificial intelligence is a technology that enables computers and machines to simulate human learning, comprehension, problem-solving, decision-making, creativity, and autonomy.”

What AI Will Always Lack

What you just referred to, Tony, in the question is my message at Sing! where I drew attention to the fact that missing from that definition, that list of things that it simulates, is emotion. Feelings are not listed there. Why? I made a big deal out of that. Because the ultimate purpose of the universe is that God be glorified, and he is glorified not merely by being rightly thought about, logically comprehended, but by rightly being enjoyed, admired, appreciated, valued. And God is most glorified when we are most satisfied in him, which means no artificial intelligence will ever be able to worship.

Worship is not simply right thinking, which computers can do. Worship is right feeling about God. That’s really crucial, unless we begin to think that artificial intelligence can take the place of human beings in accomplishing the divine purpose in the universe. It can’t. The affections of the human heart are fundamentally of another nature than the logical thinking process of the human mind. We are not bothered — I’m not bothered anyway — that a computer can simulate human logical reasoning, but we consider it ludicrous when a machine attempts to rejoice or delight or be glad or stand in awe or be amazed or feel grief or fear. We know that these are the making of the human soul so uniquely that they will not be replaced by machines. The very phrase “artificial emotion” is an oxymoron.

So, that was the point of the message at Sing! And I think that distinction between artificial intelligence and artificial emotion frees us from an overly fearful reaction to what AI can do and can’t do.

What’s New About AI

What we have, essentially, in the form of artificial intelligence — called ChatGPT or others, but I’m focusing on ChatGPT since that’s the one I’m most familiar with and have worked with most — what we have here is a powerful online assistant designed by its own definition. If you type into ChatGPT, “What are you?” it will tell you, “[I am an assistant] to understand and generate human-like text based on the input it receives. Users can ask questions, seek information, or engage in conversation, and ChatGPT responds with relevant and coherent text.” That’s crucial.

Now, that’s new. Google doesn’t write essays or poems. ChatGPT does. So, you can get a lot of information from Google — ask it all kinds of questions, and get the answers you want. It won’t write a poem for you, and ChatGPT will. Which means that ChatGPT has at least these two distinct functions: information and composition. You can ask ChatGPT to give you the symptoms of Parkinson’s disease, for example. You can say, “Write me a one-hundred-word paragraph describing the symptoms,” and it would just write a beautiful one-hundred-word paragraph describing the symptoms of Parkinson’s disease and give you a list.

In that sense, ChatGPT is simply a very sophisticated addition to other sources we regularly use to help us know what we need to know and understand what we need to understand: dictionaries, encyclopedias, articles, books, Google searches, and so on. We’ve been doing this for a thousand years — getting help from other people to help us know what we need to know, understand what we need to understand. That’s just relatively old school if you use ChatGPT that way.

“Use ChatGPT for information and inspiration. But don’t use it for composition unless you’re going to give credit.”

What’s new is that you can ask ChatGPT to write a two-thousand-word sermon on the parable of the prodigal son in Luke 15. In fact, you can type in, “Please write me a two-thousand-word sermon on the prodigal son from Luke 15 in the style and language of theologian John Piper or John Calvin or R.C. Sproul.” And you will get an astonishingly well-written sermon in the style and language of the theologian that you ask about. Or you can ask GPT to write your monthly newsletter. Just give him a few facts and tell him to write it in X-number of words, and he’ll do it as well as you can do it, probably.

AI Doing APJ

Now, here’s something for you to think about. When I saw what, Tony, you wanted me to talk about here with AI, I went to ChatGPT, and here’s what I typed in: “Please write an eight-hundred-word answer, in the theology and style of theologian John Piper, to the question, What are the dangers of a pastor using AI?” That was what I asked. It took him five seconds, and he produced an 857-word essay that was so good that if I were reading it right now, I don’t think you, Tony, or your listeners would know that I’m reading from ChatGPT. It was amazing.

There was an introduction, and then there was point 1 (the danger of disconnection from the divine and a quote from 1 Corinthians 2), point 2 (the risk of impersonal ministry and a quote from John 10) — they’re quoting Scripture because John Piper does that sort of thing, right? — point 3 (the challenge of theological integrity and a quote from Hebrews 4), point 4 (the peril of ethical compromise), point 5 (the threat of idolatry in efficiency and a quote from Psalm 127), and a conclusion called “A Call for Discernment.” I mean, it is excellent, unbelievable.

And if I had read that to you as my own, it would have been wicked. This is what I want the folks to hear. Wicked — I’m using a strong word because I feel strongly about this. This goes to the heart of God and the meaning of Christianity and the integrity of the church and her ministers. Neither God nor his people speak in a way so as to bring about in the minds of other people thoughts that are not true about us or what we say, or feelings in them that are not appropriate about us. That is, we do not deceive. We are people of truth and transparency and honesty through and through, or we are nothing.

Appalling Shortcut

So, my answer: No, don’t have ChatGPT write your newsletter. Don’t do it, unless you’re going to put in clear letters at the top, “This newsletter was created by ChatGPT.” That’s honest, and your supporters won’t like it. Even the secular world, without any of our Christian commitments — namely, The Chicago Manual of Style. You know what that is? It tells you how to do footnotes and everything. The Chicago Manual of Style already has guidelines for how to cite ChatGPT sources. When you’re quoting from something that was created by ChatGPT, The Chicago Manual of Style tells you how to give it credit. And if the world does that, oh my goodness, how much more should we be concerned to be honest through and through?

And second, no, don’t have ChatGPT write the first draft of your sermon, which you then check, adjust, and customize. Frankly, I’m appalled at the thought — appalled. I know that resources and websites have existed forever to help pastors cut corners: create your outlines, provide illustrations, tell you how to do research, and so on. There’s nothing new about this, and it’s been appalling to me all the way along, for this reason: one of the qualifications for being an elder-pastor-preacher in the Bible is the gift or the ability to teach, didaktikos (1 Timothy 3:2). That means you must have the ability, the gift, to read a passage of Scripture, understand the reality it deals with, feel the emotions it is meant to elicit, be able to explain it to others clearly, illustrate and apply it for their edification. That’s a gift you must have. It’s your number-one job. If you don’t have it, you should not be a pastor.

Let’s use ChatGPT and other sources that are coming along for information, even for inspiration, just like you use commentaries and articles and books and songs and poetry. But don’t use it for composition unless you’re going to give credit for it. So, if you’re going to have ChatGPT write your first draft and you’re going to tweak it, then you better say to your people, “ChatGPT, artificial intelligence, has composed the word of God for you this morning.”

We have a love-hate relationship with the human body. We see it in society. We feel it in ourselves.

Many, to be sure, are infatuated with their own bodies. It must not only feel but look as good as possible. Whatever exercise it takes. Whatever dieting. Whatever sleep. And eventually, whatever surgery. Love for the body can swiftly become self-worship. And much of the world’s vibes, and many of its tribes, stand ready to help us craft our own flesh into the idol of hearts.

On the other hand, countless souls despise their bodies. They look in the mirror and see a lost cause. Some, of course, even feel themselves to be a different sex than they are. The body haunts them and holds them back. In extreme cases, a surgeon may be called to the rescue. But for most, online platforms, with their avatars and carefully sculped profiles, can serve as treatment. Still, the end is idolatry. Now the craftsman carves his idol with a keyboard or a scalpel.

But Christians are called out of this twin darkness into his marvelous light. We are men and women reckoned holy in Christ and in the process of becoming holy in both body and soul, through the quiet, omnipotent, indwelling help of the Holy Spirit.

As people in the midst of our own sanctification, we are not immune to the world’s errors and temptations. We struggle. We wrestle with soul-weakening, joy-undermining versions of the world’s love-hate relationship with the body. And the battle is not new in our generation. Christians throughout history have had similar struggles.

Body Versus Soul

Historically, the most well-known tendency among Christians has been to undervalue the earthly body because of a priority placed on the soul. This tendency is understandable because it begins with a good instinct. Christianity does claim such stunning glories for the human soul that we should not be shocked if a good number of Christians, from various theological traditions, struggle with neglecting the body. After all, the apostle Paul acknowledges that “bodily training is of some value,” yet “godliness is of value in every way” (1 Timothy 4:8).

Mere bodily training related to eating, sleeping, and exercising does hold some promise for the present life, but godliness — that is, Christlikeness in soul and body, holistic maturity through the power of the Spirit — holds promise both for the vapor’s breath of this life and also for the life to come. If you’re doing the math at home, you see that godliness far outshines mere bodily training.

Still, understandable as its origins may be, the neglect or minimizing of the human body is far from Christian. We were created, soul and body, in the image of God — fearfully and wonderfully made, even with our indwelling sin and under the curse of all creation. And remarkably, God’s own Spirit has been given and dwells in those in Christ, and the New Testament holds out stunning hope that Christ’s disciples will honor him not by escaping their human bodies but precisely by enjoying him — and thus glorifying him — in their bodies.

Body Serves Soul

As much as our world oscillates between errors, and many Christians with it, there has long been another path: the one laid out so clearly by the apostle Paul (who wrote often about the human body in his letters). Francis of Assisi observed this road least-traveled, and C.S. Lewis paid him memorable tribute in the last century. Lewis recalls that Francis called the body “Brother Ass,” which Lewis defends:

Ass is exquisitely right because no one in his senses can either revere or hate a donkey. It is a useful, sturdy, lazy, obstinate, patient, lovable and infuriating beast; deserving now a stick and now a carrot; both pathetically and absurdly beautiful. So the body. (Four Loves, 93)

For Christians, the magnificent beasts that are our bodies are worthy of love but not worship; they are infuriating but not to be hated. We may have affection for them like a brother and find them stubborn as a donkey. “Pathetically and absurdly beautiful” indeed.

“Love for the body can swiftly become self-worship.”

However, the adjective that strikes me most in Lewis’s florid list is useful. Oh, the usefulness of these lovable, infuriating beasts. The human body is useful in giving us the priceless powers of seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, touching, lifting, pulling, and moving. If you have an able body, you are rich beyond compare. What wealth would a blind man trade for working eyes, or the deaf for hearing? Yet, apart from Christian faith, these bodily abilities facilitate a steady journey to hell. Even for believers, they can become avenues for wandering.

How, then, might our physical bodies be useful in the cause of the Christian life and the pursuit of spiritual joy in God?

‘Marked Effect’

When I Don’t Desire God might be John Piper’s “most practical book” (in his own words). In it, he writes plainly about everyday dynamics for the pursuit of joy in God, including the central place and use of God’s word and our prayers in the fight for joy (as well as the covenant fellowship of the local church).

What many readers may not expect, however, is the focus of his penultimate chapter: “How to Wield the World in the Fight for Joy.” Here Piper wrestles with the relationship between physical causes and spiritual effects and, in particular, “how to use the world of physical sensation for spiritual purposes” (182).

By world, Piper means the sights and sounds of nature, human art and music, poetry and literature, and even the commonplace in our everyday lives. And one vital aspect of this “wielding the world” is the use of our own bodies:

the proper or improper use of our bodies can have a huge effect on the way we experience spiritual reality. . . . Proper eating and exercising and sleeping has a marked effect on the mind and its ability to process natural beauty and biblical truth. (78)

What are these “marked effects,” and how can we wield them in the fight for Christian joy? To answer, we might follow Paul’s own treatment of the dinner table and the marriage bed, and take our cues from there for sleep and exercise as well.

Food and Marriage

Paul’s mention of “bodily training” in 1 Timothy 4:8 does not come out of the blue. In the previous paragraph, he warns Timothy about false teachers who (under demonic influence) forbid marriage and certain foods. They are ascetics who disavow the pleasures of good food and marital intercourse. Paul counters with creation and consecration (1 Timothy 4:1–5).

Creation: God created food and marriage, and he means for those who believe and know the truth (Christians) to receive them with thanksgiving. As Creator, he gives all. As creatures, we receive and enjoy the goodness of his gifts and should give him thanks that he may be honored.

Consecration: God means for us to enjoy his gifts (1) according to what he himself says about food and sex (“by the word of God”) and (2) through our speaking back to him (“and prayer”) in light of his word. This prayer would include words of gratitude to him as well as requesting that he would sanctify our use of his gifts — that he would make the enjoyment of them holy, occasions of serving both physical and spiritual needs. We consecrate our meals and our marriage to him so that he might use these common kindnesses beyond what good they bring to nonbelievers.

From here, Christians might cultivate habits of Scripture intake and prayer that would not only refine their understanding of food and marriage but also use these physical aspects of bodily life for the advance, and not detriment, of the soul.

Sleep and Exercise

Now, expand that to include sleep and exercise. Piper encourages Christians to use the physical world in such a way that our spiritual joy is “more intense and more constant” (183).

That’s amazing! I wonder if you’ve ever thought of it like that. We pursue joy in God not only with an open Bible, on our knees, and gathered in corporate worship. We also can honor God in our bodies by making use of them in our pursuit of joy in him.

Take exercise. Piper notes that “consistent exercise has refining effects on our mental and emotional stability” (203). And I speak from years of experience that while physical exercise does not, on its own, produce spiritual joy, it can indeed serve it. And a cascade of good effects follow (not just physical but spiritual) when sedentary humans get their bodies moving regularly and do some modest upkeep.

Or how about sleep? Here I have far more to learn, and I acknowledge there are some nights, and even rare seasons of life, when God calls us to sleep less. For instance, when parents have young children, particularly newborns, the call of love might leave us often without adequate sleep, even for some months. But few other seasons justify ignoring our creatureliness and the humbling fact that God made us to sleep. Faithful stewardship of our bodies requires rest, and proper sleep is indeed useful in the pursuit of spiritual joy. Says Piper,

For me, adequate sleep is not just a matter of staying healthy. It’s a matter of staying in the ministry — I’m tempted to say it’s a matter of persevering as a Christian. I know it is irrational that my future should look so bleak when I get only four or five hours of sleep several nights in a row. But rational or irrational, that is a fact. And I must live within the limits of facts. (205)

God made us for his goodness in meals and marriage, for the strain (and joy) of exercise and the recovery of sleep, that we might “make our bodies and minds as proficient as possible in their role as physical partners in perceiving the glory of God” (199). Your body matters in the fight for joy.