Thirty-five years ago, as I was pastoring a small church in Boston and seeing the temptations and struggles facing my people, I felt an urgent need to gather the church and openly address the topic of abortion. What is it? What in the Bible ought to inform our views? How should we respond? By God’s grace, the gathering proved exceedingly helpful.

Yet now, in this post-Roe era, addressing abortion in the context of the church seems more urgent than ever before. Indeed, I’m convinced pastoral leadership is one of the greatest needs in today’s pro-life movement. Let me explain why — and along the way, let me also commend a book that models such leadership remarkably well.

Back to the States

Instead of ending the battle decisively by affirming the equal rights of all people, born and unborn, the Dobbs decision turned the moral question of abortion back to the people for each state to decide. The Supreme Court could have — and in my view, should have — abolished abortion with the same logic and under the same amendment that abolished slavery.

The Fourteenth Amendment declares that no state shall “deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” If the unborn are human, then they are persons, with God-given rights that cannot be justly denied or passively accepted when denied. It falls to us to “defend the rights of the poor and needy” (Proverbs 31:9).

In our nation, however, the just powers of the government derive from the consent of the governed. The court most likely believed that by defining abortion as a moral question and turning it back to the states, they had gone as far as they could to maintain the “consent” of the governed.

Urgent Times

Of the seven states that have voted on the question already, all seven decided to expand abortion rights. Last fall, the citizens of Ohio voted overwhelmingly to amend the state constitution to secure abortion rights. In our form of government, that decision represents as permanent a loss for the cause of life as is possible.

Pro-life advocates like myself feel a sense of urgency — but abortion advocates do too. They have put unlimited abortion on the 2024 ballot in eleven more states. True, they have a few thousand pesky pro-life voices to contend with.

If there is one data point that highlights the urgent need for church leaders to address abortion, it is this: exit polls in Ohio showed that, among those who identified as believing that “life begins at conception,” 30 percent voted for the abortion-rights amendment. That kind of moral befuddlement exists when Christians are not clear on what they believe and how to live it out. Which brings me to the online book Abortion and the Church.

Exposing Works of Darkness

This book was written by a committee of pastors and elders of the Evangel Presbytery. I commend it to those looking to lead well on abortion for two main reasons.

First, the book’s explanation of medical issues (based on published research), along with the historical developments surrounding them, is exceptional. Second, the fact that the book was written not by pro-life activists like me, but by trusted and authorized pastors, makes it especially commendable as an example for Christian leaders. The result is a serious book about the assault on the sanctity of human life in our time, all communicated in the voice of local-church overseers. The book calls for repentance at times and forbearance at other times; it warns and summons, condemns and offers grace.

I admit that some parts of the book give me pause. But the confusion of some pastors on the great bioethical abominations of our times alarms me far more. “Take no part in the unfruitful works of darkness,” the apostle Paul says, “but instead expose them” (Ephesians 5:11). If you are looking for an example of what such exposing looks like, I recommend Abortion and the Church. These pastors expose the multifaceted war against the intrinsic, equal, exceptional, and eternal value of human life today, and strive to help the church to do bioethics — to weigh right and wrong (ethics) in matters of human life (bio). They call us to know the will of God and to take no part in the works of darkness, no matter how hidden.

Pastoral Bioethics

More broadly, this generation faces extraordinary choices regarding birth control, chemical and surgical abortion, and infertility treatments such as in vitro fertilization (IVF). We need accurate explanations as to the treatment processes and associated risks. Often, the ethical issues involved are not only avoided by the abortion and infertility industry; they are also hidden. Moreover, people willing to pay large sums to get rid of a baby or to obtain a baby usually do not ask many ethical questions. The result is a conspiracy of silence in the destruction of the unborn.

Consider a few of the many questions needing thoughtful pastoral answers. Is abortion really just one issue among many in our day, or is it a preeminent moral crisis? Do intrauterine devices (IUD) and hormonal contraception ever work to prevent an embryo (a human being in the first few days of life) from implanting safely in the womb? What in the Bible should inform my desire to avoid children?

Is IVF a God-pleasing response to the pain of my infertility, or is it morally wrong? What happens to all those human embryos that are created in the IVF process and left frozen in the fridge? If vaccines are produced from unborn babies’ body parts, do I share in the guilt by getting the vaccine? Should a church split over differences of opinion here? In these self-expressive times, when feelings often replace moral truth, and when so many in society say yes, when does God say no?

Pastors and other church leaders who address such questions serve their people well.

What Normal Christians Need

Fifty years of legal and accessible abortion have led to hundreds of books and thousands of articles on the injustice of abortion and on natural rights, pro-life apologetics, crisis intervention, law, and more. I have written four books myself. So, what could another book possibly say to add to our understanding of these matters? After reading Abortion and the Church, I realized that this is the wrong question.

What these pastors understand is that their people, those under their care as overseers, need to hear from them far more than from someone like me. It matters who says what! For most Christians, the most influential voices are still the known and trusted leaders appointed to oversee the body of Christ. If the average Christian were to speak, I suspect he would sound like this: “You are the leader I have chosen to submit my soul to week after week. I trust your judgment more than others’. What do you think? What are the deeds of darkness in these times that we ought to take no part in?”

Unsettling Assumptions

Right before I started seminary in 1978, I got married. Almost as if it were required for newlyweds, my wife and I decided she would start using “the pill.” A few weeks into married life and biblical studies, however, my wife started asking questions. “Why are we doing this? What does God think about contraception? And by the way, I feel different. What are the side effects of the pill?”

I was shocked. In my young Christian life, I earnestly desired to bring Christ into every part of my life. I was training myself to ask of every topic, “What in the Bible ought to shape my views and actions on the matter?” But when it came to contraception, we started using the pill without asking a single question. I was conformed to this world’s expectations for newlyweds without a contrarian consideration. My wife’s troubled conscience and health questions stirred me. What did I do? I turned to the pastors in my church, whom I trusted for advice. “What do you say? Can you help me think this through from God’s perspective?”

Pastor, you may not feel all that influential. Your platform may be small. But you are a trusted authority to those under your care. Find solid texts. Prepare your thoughts prayerfully. Muster some courage. And rise up in these urgent times to teach on abortion and the church.

The Creator of the universe, who holds everything in being, from all the galaxies to every grain of sand, and who governs everything that happens, from the fall of nations to the fall of every bird that dies — this God has decreed that he will accomplish his enemy-reconciling, worshiper-creating purposes among all the peoples of the world through your mouth.

Listen to the words of the apostle Paul: “We are ambassadors for Christ, God making his appeal through us. We implore you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God” (2 Corinthians 5:20). Think of it: there’s God, with his appeal to the peoples of the world; there’s Christ, who provided the basis of the appeal by his death for sin and his triumph over death — and there’s you, with your mouth.

You take your Christ, your great Treasure, and his magnificent salvation, and you open your mouth, and wonder of wonders, God makes his appeal through you: “Be reconciled to God.” This is how we make disciples of all nations. This is how the Great Commission is completed. God makes his appeal through us: “On behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God.” When you say that, it is the voice of God.

Christians, the Voice of His Excellencies

Don’t shrink back from this, as if it were meant only for apostles. Do you remember what Peter said about who you are? You are Christians: “You [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). You are the voice of his excellencies. That’s not a missionary calling. That’s your Christian identity. It’s who you are — the mouthpiece of the excellencies of God.

So, my prayer for this message — indeed, for this day and this conference — has two layers.

Layer #1: I am praying that God would redirect the lives of hundreds of you from where you were heading when you came to this conference, or from the muddle your life was in, into a life totally devoted, vocationally, to opening your mouths among the least-reached peoples of the world — God making his appeal through you for the reconciling of his enemies and the creation of his worshipers.

Layer #2: I am praying that the rest of you would see this divine enterprise as so glorious that you would celebrate it and support it in every way possible.

What can I do in the rest of this message that God might use to make you an answer to one of those prayers? What I’m going to do is to try and show you from the Gospel of John how God will use your mouth to create worshipers of the true God among the nations. I think if you could see how God actually does it, you might feel called to join him in doing it.

Whom the Father Seeks, He Will Have

Let’s start with John 4:23. Jesus is talking to the Samaritan woman at the well of Jacob. She has just pointed out that Samaritans worship on Mount Gerizim while Jews, like Jesus, worship in Jerusalem (John 4:20). To this Jesus responds,

The hour is coming, and is now here, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for [or because] the Father is seeking such people to worship him. (John 4:23)

The reason there will be true worship on any mountain or in any valley or on any plain is because the Father is seeking worshipers. That’s why worship among the nations happens.

This is not a seeking as in an Easter egg hunt, as if God doesn’t know who they are or where they are. This is a seeking because they are his, and he means to have them and their wholehearted, happy worship for himself forever.

“The Father is seeking worshipers from all the nations because they are already his.”

As Jesus prayed to his Father in John 17:6, “I have manifested your name to the people whom you gave me out of the world. Yours they were, and you gave them to me, and they have kept your word.” The Father is seeking worshipers from all the nations because they are already his. “Yours they were!” Jesus declares. “And you gave them to me.” God chose them “before the foundation of the world” (Ephesians 1:4–6). They are his. He is seeking them. He will have them.

How does he do that? How do we move from “yours they were” from all eternity to countless worshipers from every people, language, tribe, and nation at the consummation of history with you, and your mouth, in the middle?

To answer that question from the Gospel of John, we need to know, What’s the relationship between worshiping and believing in this Gospel? Because Jesus just said in John 4:23 that the Father is seeking worshipers. Yet this whole Gospel is written, according to John 20:31, to create believers: “These are written so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name.”

What’s the relationship between believing and worshiping? Which should we seek? Is there a first and second? Are they the same? Do they overlap?

Belief as Soul-Satisfaction

Here’s my very condensed answer, which starts with a stunning fact: In this so-called “Gospel of Belief,” John never uses the noun belief or faith (Greek pistis) — never! — in all 21 chapters. But he uses the verb believe (pisteuō) 98 times. That can’t be an accident. What’s the point?

I think the point is this: John wants to emphasize that believing is an action, and one of the soul, not the body. The movements of the body are the effects of believing. What the soul does is believing. And what are the actions of believing in the soul? John answers at the very beginning of his Gospel in John 1:11–12: “[Jesus] came to his own, and his own people did not receive him. But to all who did receive him, who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God.” Believing is the soul’s receiving of Christ.

Receiving as what? A ticket out of hell that you put in your back pocket and never think of? A wonder-worker to keep my wife alive and my children safe (and a failure if he doesn’t)? No. John and Jesus have a different kind of receiving in mind. It’s the receiving of Christ as soul-satisfying bread from heaven and as thirst-quenching living water: “Jesus said to them, ‘I am the bread of life; whoever comes to me shall not hunger, and whoever believes in me shall never thirst’” (John 6:35).

Believing, in John’s Gospel, is the soul’s eating and drinking of all that God is for us in Christ with the discovery that this is the end of my quest. (Believing is more, but it is not less, than this.) My soul-hunger and my soul-thirst are satisfied in believing. Christ is my food, my drink, my treasure, my satisfaction. That is the essence of believing as John presents it.

Worship as Soul-Satisfaction

And what is worship — the essence of worship, not the bodily acts that express it, but its essence? Jesus forced that distinction on us when he said in Matthew 15:8–9, “This people honors me with their lips, but their heart is far from me; in vain do they worship me, teaching as doctrines the commandments of men.” Actions of the lips and the hands and any other part of the body are “vain,” empty, when the heart is not acting its worship.

“Where God is not satisfying, our worship is not glorifying God. It is vain, empty. It is not worship.”

But how does that happen? What is it in the heart that turns the actions of the voice and the hands into worship? Jesus answers with a spatial image. He says, “Their heart is far from me.” What does this spatial image of moving far away from God mean for true and false worship? If you are moving away from God, it means God is becoming less desirable. You feel that he has become boring, or disappointing, or cruel, or unreal, or negligible, marginal, forgotten.

And as your heart moves away, God ceases to be your desire, your treasure, your food, your drink. You don’t say or feel anymore, “Taste and see that the Lord is good!” (Psalm 34:8). He does not taste good. He is not satisfying. And where God is not satisfying, our worship is not glorifying God. It is vain, empty. It is not worship.

In the end, then, when we have penetrated into the essence of believing and the essence of worshiping, we find the same thing: a human soul drinking and eating all that God is for us in Christ, and discovering that he is our deepest satisfaction and our greatest treasure. This is the essence of believing, and this is the essence of worshiping.

Therefore, what the Father is seeking (in John 4:23) and what John is writing for (in John 20:31) are essentially the same: the ingathering of people from all the nations of the earth who come alive to find their fullest satisfaction in all that God is for them in Jesus.

Because He Must

We return to a previous question: How does he do that? How do we move from “yours they were, Father,” from all eternity, to countless worshipers from all the peoples at the end of the age, with you and your mouth in the middle? The answer is found in the most important missionary text in the Gospel of John — namely, John 10:16.

I have other sheep that are not of this fold. I must bring them also, and they will listen to my voice. So there will be one flock, one shepherd.

This is the thunderclap of warning against every whiff of ethnocentrism or nationalism that exults in any earthly citizenship above our citizenship in heaven (Philippians 3:20).

Just when we think that we have settled in comfortably with “my people,” “my church,” “my denomination,” “my ethnicity,” “my nation,” Jesus lifts his voice: “I have other sheep that are not of your fold. Not your church fold. Not your denominational fold. Not your ethnic or national fold. Not even in your Christian fold — yet. They are scattered among all the peoples of the world. I have other sheep, and they will listen to my voice.” They will. They will listen, and they will come — if you go, if you let his voice be heard in your voice.

Is that going to happen? Will the voice of Christ be heard among the nations in the voice of his people? Yes, it will. We know it will because of one word in John 10:16, the word must: “I have other sheep that are not of this fold. I must bring them also.” That is the must of a divine purpose, like, “Nicodemus, you must be born again” (see John 3:7), or “the Son of Man must be lifted up” (see John 3:14).

And here is the link back to the Samaritan woman at the well and the Father’s pursuit of worshipers. When John 4:4 says, “He had to pass through Samaria,” the Greek word for had to is the same Greek word for must in John 10:16: “I must bring the sheep that are not of this fold.”

Geographically, he did not have to go through Samaria. Most Jews didn’t. John 4:9 says, “Jews have no dealings with Samaritans.” So, what kind of had to was it? What kind of must — he must go through Samaria? This is the cross-cultural missionary commitment of Christ in John 10:16: “I have other sheep that are not of this Jewish fold. I must — have to! — bring them. They will hear my voice. They will be reconciled. I laid down my life for them. They will believe. They will worship.”

Therefore We Must

But they must hear his voice, first in Jesus’s voice and then in our voice. God does not speak the gospel from heaven in the voice of thunder. He speaks it on earth in the voice of Christians. “God [is] making his appeal through us. . . . Be reconciled to God” (2 Corinthians 5:20). Believe God. Worship God. Be satisfied fully in God.

Do you remember what Jesus said to this five-times married woman living with lover number six? He said, “Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks of the water that I will give him will never be thirsty again. The water that I will give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life” (John 4:13–14).

God is calling some of you to do what Jesus did: go through Samaria. They did not want him there. Jews were about as welcome in Samaria as Americans in Pakistan. But he went. He had to — because she was there. Chosen. A sheep not of this fold. Utterly oblivious that God was seeking, and would have, her worship. She would hear the voice, and come and drink and live.

“The salvation of one soul is worth your life.”

Someday, some of you will sit by a well in a very inhospitable country. And you will say to the one God points out, “Ma’am (or sir), I have water that, if you drink it, you will never be thirsty again.” And the sheep will hear the Shepherd’s voice in your voice, and say, “I would like to hear about that water.”

The salvation of one soul is worth your life.

Souls Await

Peter Cameron Scott was born in Scotland in 1867. He founded the African Inland Mission (AIM). He had tried to serve in Africa but had to come home with malaria. The second attempt was especially joyful because he was joined by his brother John.

The joy evaporated as John fell victim to the fever. Peter buried his brother all by himself and at the grave rededicated himself to preach the gospel. But again Peter’s health broke, and he had to return to England, utterly discouraged.

But in London, something wonderful happened. While recovering, he visited Westminster Abbey to see David Livingstone’s grave, hoping to find some encouragement. He knelt down and read the inscription:

“OTHER SHEEP I HAVE, WHICH ARE NOT OF THIS FOLD:THEM ALSO I MUST BRING.”

It was enough. Peter Cameron Scott did return to Africa. He founded AIM, which after 128 years has touched the lives of millions.

The Shepherd will have his believing sheep. The Father will have his worshipers. They will hear his voice in our voice. And they will come. There is a woman at a well. Waiting.

“The truth about a man lies first and foremost in what he hides.” So wrote the French novelist, art critic, and statesman André Malraux in 1967, in a weighty diagnosis of the human predicament (Anti-Memoirs, 5). Malraux was on to something. We may broadcast what we want to be known for, but we hide what we are.

We might think first of the dark side of this insight. We may keep the skeletons safely in the closet, our secret sins and hidden idolatries, thinking to ourselves, “If others knew who I really am, they’d despise me.” We well know that we are what we hide.

But there’s a positive side to the insight as well, and our Lord may be said to commend it. Jesus encourages us to hide, in a manner, what’s closest to our hearts: “Beware of practicing your righteousness before other people in order to be seen by them” (Matthew 6:1). We face a common and strong temptation to do what we do to receive the praise and admiration of people. The appearance of righteousness can easily become more important to us than righteousness itself. But true righteousness, we might say, isn’t merely something we show, but also and especially something we hide. Thus arises Jesus’s exhortation to practice righteousness — almsgiving, prayer, and fasting — “in secret” (Matthew 6:2–18).

Call to Secret Prayer

Jesus’s words and warnings about almsgiving, prayer, and fasting clearly overlap. We are to take care lest our motivation for them is the ephemeral reward of others’ esteem (Matthew 6:2, 5, 16). But prayer seems to be central among these three, and not only because it’s sandwiched in the middle. For one thing, Jesus spends twice as much time addressing prayer as he does almsgiving and fasting combined. For another, when it comes to prayer in the middle, Jesus warns against a second problematic motivation in addition to seeking others’ admiration.

“When you pray, do not heap up empty phrases as the Gentiles do, for they think that they will be heard for their many words” (verse 7). At root, it seems, “the Gentiles” pray to acquire things of want and felt need, thinking prayer to be simply a means to that end. But additionally, they presume that the divine needs goading to deliver the goods. So, they heap up many words — perhaps thinking that God needs to be informed of our grocery list of needs, or that long-winded eloquence may impress him to act, or that abundant articulation of “truth” is required to pass a threshold.

Jesus blocks off all such wrong ways at the trailhead: “Your Father knows what you need before you ask him” (verse 8). Apparently, we don’t need to pray long to inform God. Neither are long prayers needed to butter God up for generosity and care that he isn’t already inclined toward. For the Father’s knowledge of our need signals his intention to provide for us his children, whom he loves more than he loves larks and lilies (Matthew 6:25–34), and to whom he would never dream of giving rocks or serpents in response to prayer (Matthew 7:7–11).

Secret prayer doesn’t secure the loving orientation of the Father toward us. In Jesus’s outlook, the Father’s loving attention and wise intention to meet our truest needs precede our praying and invite it. We don’t need to enter the prayer closet anxiously angling after our good.

Centrality of Secret Prayer

If prayer isn’t best thought of as merely an effort to get what we desire or need, and if it’s to be done in secret where no one else is looking, then what motivates it? Is it not simple love for and desire to commune with the Father who sees in secret?

We are what we hide because what we do in hiddenness — in secret, in the closet, when no one else is looking — is what we love. And we are what we love.

Therefore, Tim Keller rightly calls secret prayer “the infallible test of spiritual integrity” (Prayer, 23). This is not to deny that “secret” almsgiving and fasting are also tests of spiritual integrity. But simple love for God is not so easily discernible as the motivation for them. For example, philanthropy might impel secret almsgiving (which, of course, is nothing to sneeze at). And a desire for mere self-optimization might impel secret fasting (I’m going on a “technology fast” to kick a bad habit!).

In secret prayer, our love is most clearly manifested. It is the crucial and indispensable test of the wholeness, rather than double-mindedness and dividedness, of our souls before God.

Complications in Secret Prayer

Of course, secret praying might not always feel like it flows from much warmth of love for God. This lack of feeling, however, need not discourage us from the practice. Indeed, it provides us with a key supplication as we enter our prayer closets: confession of “internal, innate blindness, unbelief, doubts, [and] faintheartedness” (as the 1563 Palatinate Church Order puts it) and earnest petition that “the joy of . . . salvation” and “a willing spirit” might be restored (Psalm 51:12).

In the Christian life, we often go to private prayer not from a wellspring of warmth, but for one — yearning, seeking, and supplicating for “more love to thee, O Christ, more love to thee!” The psalmist acknowledges to God, “When I was pricked in heart, I was brutish and ignorant; I was like a beast toward you” (Psalm 73:21–22); but, though his flesh and even his heart may fail, he will continue to turn to God, who remains “the strength of my heart and my portion forever” (verse 26). It is a wise plan.

Having honestly admitted our lack, as is often necessary, what then might our prayers alone with God consist of? Knowing what to do and say in secret prayer, beyond confession and contrition and appeal for spiritual renewal, is a frequent complication. In this regard, let me offer a couple words of advice.

SCRIPTURE

On the one hand, pray with your Bible open. As a sword is for enfolding in the hand, so the sword of the Spirit is especially for folded hands. The word of God helps, stimulates, and shapes our prayers, and this in numerous ways. As a basic starting point, it gives us words to pray. I think here especially of praying the Psalms. These prayers are a gift of the Spirit to help give us voice when entering our prayer closet. The Psalter can function like a divinely inspired form of speech therapy, training the underdeveloped muscles of our mouths and hearts in shapes and sounds and speech-acts they may not be used to making — particularly prayers of adoration and praise of the splendor of God’s glory (also, for example, prayers of lament, and intercession for widows and orphans).

A key assumption here is that we must be taught to pray. Healthy prayer is not merely automatic and instinctual. Well do the disciples ask Jesus to teach them to pray (Luke 11:1). And wisely, with great compassion, does the Lord so teach them. But how he teaches them is telling. He doesn’t simply talk about praying and its nature, logic, and motivations. Jesus gives his disciples a specific form, actual words to pray, which we call the Lord’s Prayer (Luke 11:2–4; Matthew 6:9–13). The Son of God’s prayer pedagogy is the same as that of his Father, whose Spirit inspired the Psalms: he gives words to pray to help his people get started.

SILENCE

On the other hand, silence in secret prayer isn’t to be avoided. “To draw near to listen is better than to offer the sacrifice of fools,” the Preacher asserts. Indeed, “Be not rash with your mouth, nor let your heart be hasty to utter a word before God, for God is in heaven and you are on earth. Therefore let your words be few” (Ecclesiastes 5:1–2). The prayer closet is first a place of listening in silence before we find the proper words to speak — silent meditation on the word, silent vulnerability before God.

To be sure, silences are awkward, which may be as much a reason as any for the “Gentile” propensity to prattle. Or maybe, at root, the “Gentiles” feel they need many words to secure the caring attention of the divine because they presume that, under normal conditions, they do not already have it. Without confidence in one’s standing before God, the solitary silence can be downright terrifying. For there I am alone with my God and Lord and Judge. And how can the real me, which I try so hard to hide, feel anything but shame and terror before One who sees in secret? Such fearful uncertainty is one of the greatest complications in secret prayer.

Comfort for Secret Prayer

Crucially, our Lord speaks of the Father who sees in secret. The emphasis is unmistakable and insistent: in Matthew 6:1–18, Jesus speaks of God only as Father, and that in a tenfold manner (verses 1, 4, 6 [2x], 8, 9, 14, 15, 18 [2x]). Jesus wants us to know that the God who sees us in secret is one who looks upon us with the relational orientation of a Father.

But can we know for sure that God is not only Lord and Judge, but Father? We can know it because the one who speaks of God in this way, the one who invites us with him (in him) to pray to “our Father” (Matthew 6:9; see also John 16:23, 26–27; 20:17), is himself, by eternal begetting, the Son of God who has ever known the joy of calling upon his Father. Jesus has come to reveal the Father’s identity to us. And Jesus has come to reveal the Father’s love for us.

According to the loving plan of God the Father, the Son was sent into the world to accomplish — through his life, death, resurrection, and ascension — a great exodus work of deliverance (Galatians 1:3–4). By faith in Christ, we are delivered from our sin and adopted as beloved children of God. Indeed, God’s own Spirit of adoption is poured out into our hearts. And what does this Spirit do? He leads us in the privilege and wonder of filial prayer: “Abba! Father!” (Galatians 4:4–6). Because of the gospel of Jesus Christ, as a traditional invitation to the Lord’s Prayer has it, we are bold to pray, “Our Father . . .”

In Christ, we need not be unsure of God’s posture toward us. We need not strategize about how — by our persuasion and prolixity — we might secure God’s attention and get into his good graces. We need not let uncertainty and fear block the way to the prayer closet. Rather, we can turn and turn again to the gospel, and know the love of the Father for us made flesh, and find welling up in return love for him. Which is as good a reason as any to find a secret, undistracted, hidden place to speak forth our thanks in love to the Father.

A late middle-aged father is standing next to his boat and a pile of partly mended fishing nets, watching his two sons. He has always assumed that his sons would someday take over his fishing business and help provide for him and his wife when they grew too old to work. But now he watches them do something he never expected: they walk down the shoreline with a young rabbi who has called them to leave their fishing vocation — and their father — in order to follow him.

Suddenly, his envisioned future for him and his sons has become a swirl of uncertainty. What is he feeling? What are his sons feeling?

You may recognize this scene. It comes from Matthew 4:21–22:

Going on from there [Jesus] saw two other brothers, James the son of Zebedee and John his brother, in the boat with Zebedee their father, mending their nets, and he called them. Immediately they left the boat and their father and followed him.

When I read this story as a younger man, I didn’t give much thought to Zebedee. I tended to put myself in the place of James and John, following Jesus into a future of fishing for men. The uncertainty of it all felt adventurous and exciting. But now, as a late middle-aged father of adult children, I can’t help but put myself in Zebedee’s place.

Recently, I was discussing with my twentysomething son and daughter-in-law the possible call they’re discerning to follow Jesus to another country for the sake of the gospel. I do feel excited for them, but it’s significantly different when the cost is not leaving to follow Jesus, but being left as my son follows Jesus. I find myself wanting to talk to Zebedee about his experience and get his counsel.

Unless You Hate Your Father

Zebedee’s experience casts these words of Jesus in a whole different light:

If anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple. Whoever does not bear his own cross and come after me cannot be my disciple. (Luke 14:26–27)

As a younger man, I mainly heard these words pertaining to my father and mother and siblings and friends. Now, I hear them significantly pertaining to me as a father. In order to follow Jesus faithfully, my children must “hate” me for his sake.

Of course, when Jesus says “hate” here, he’s not talking about the kind of affectional hatred we usually mean when we use that word. He’s talking about treasuring, as he does in this text:

No one can serve two masters, for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and money. (Matthew 6:24)

Jesus doesn’t mean here that we should feel revulsive animosity toward money. He’s saying we can’t treasure God and treasure money, because “where your treasure is, there your heart will be also” (Matthew 6:21). The hatred Jesus is talking about looks like this:

The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field, which a man found and covered up. Then in his joy he goes and sells all that he has and buys that field. (Matthew 13:44)

The man in this parable doesn’t feel revulsive animosity toward “all that he has.” He just values the treasure he’s found more than all that he has. So, he “hates” his former possessions by selling them. He knows what’s most valuable and important.

To be a Christian father or mother means not only that we must treasure Jesus more than we treasure our earthly loved ones; it means we must joyfully accept being the object of our Christian child’s “hatred” in this sense. We are part of the “all” that our child is willing to “sell” for the joy of discovering the treasure that is Jesus.

Willing to Be ‘Hated’

As you probably know, we at Desiring God want you (and everyone) to be a Christian Hedonist. We believe the Bible clearly teaches that God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in him. But there’s another side to Christian Hedonism. As we pursue our highest joy in God, we also help others pursue their highest joy in God. Which naturally means we want them to treasure God far above the way they treasure us.

The rubber meets the road most when it comes to fathers and mothers and other dear loved ones. There’s a real felt cost when we actively make difficult, even painful choices to treasure Jesus and his call on our lives more than those precious relationships.

But there’s also a real felt cost when we are on the passive side of such an equation — when we are the father or mother or loved one whom a Christian must “hate” (in the treasuring sense) in order to follow Jesus’s call on their lives. It’s a different experience to count ourselves among the earthly treasures someone must “sell” in order to pursue the joy of the supreme Treasure. It’s a different experience to be sacrificed than it is to sacrifice.

But it’s not any less Christian Hedonistic — not when we truly treasure our children’s pursuit of the greatest Treasure. As Jesus’s disciples, we too must “hate” lesser treasures we truly love (like our children’s nearness) in order to have him. Our willingness to be sacrificed is what this paradoxical hatred looks like from the passive side of the call, when we are not the ones leaving, but the ones who are left. At such a moment, we must keep in mind the whole nature of Jesus’s call:

If anyone comes to me and does not hate . . . even his own life, he cannot be my disciple. Whoever does not bear his own cross and come after me cannot be my disciple. (Luke 14:26–27)

Fellowship of the Left Behind

Releasing our children to follow Jesus’s kingdom call is part of how we, as parents, hate our own lives and bear our own cross for Jesus’s sake. And part of what makes his call paradoxical is that this “hating” is not affectional hatred at all. In fact, it’s what love looks like. For as my friend John Piper says,

Love is the overflow of joy in God that meets the needs of others. The overflow is experienced consciously as the pursuit of our joy in the joy of another. (Desiring God, 141)

So, in being left by our children as they pursue their highest joy in the greatest Treasure, we pursue the same prize by hating our own lives in this earthly age. It’s one way we join Jesus on the Calvary road of self-sacrifice for the joy set before us (Hebrews 12:2).

The Calvary road is not an easy road. Jesus told us that “the way is hard that leads to life” (Matthew 7:14). And one of the hard moments on this road is when we’re called to join Zebedee in the fellowship of the left behind, the lesser treasures who release loved ones to pursue their highest joy in the greatest Treasure.

But as it turns out, being left behind isn’t merely, or even mainly, passive — not when we turn this painful experience into an active pursuit of our own highest joy in our greatest Treasure.

If you had to choose five adjectives to describe God, would holy appear on the list? I trust so. Righteous probably would too. No doubt merciful or loving would be a shoo-in. But what about this divine descriptor: happy? Would that make your list?

It may sound somewhat strange, but God is happy. Happier than the happiest person you’ve ever known. Even before there was time, he was happy — infinitely happy within a triangle of love. From all eternity, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit (one God in three persons) delighted to share the joy of divinity with one another.

So, why did the triune God create the universe? Did he need something to complete him? No. Creation was an overflow of joy — not a filling up, but a spilling out. In extravagant generosity, the persons of the Trinity decided to share their boundless gladness with the work of their hands. You were made to be happy in a happy God.

And all of this has everything to do with your prayer life.

When Keller Discovered Prayer

Few people have taught me more about prayer than Tim Keller. He himself taught eloquently on the subject for decades before (at least in his estimation) he truly learned to pray. In a wide-ranging interview not long before his death, Keller was asked, “Looking back, is there anything you wish you had done differently in ministry?”

“Absolutely,” Keller replied. “I should have prayed more.”

In many ways, Keller’s Prayer: Experiencing Awe and Intimacy with God records experientially what he had long affirmed theologically. What happened is worth quoting at length:

In the second half of my adult life, I discovered prayer. I had to.

In the fall of 1999, I taught a Bible study course on the Psalms. It became clear to me that I was barely scratching the surface of what the Bible commanded and promised regarding prayer. Then came the dark weeks in New York after 9/11, when our whole city sank into a kind of corporate clinical depression, even as it rallied. For my family the shadow was intensified as my wife, Kathy, struggled with the effects of Crohn’s disease. Finally, I was diagnosed with thyroid cancer.

At one point during all this, my wife urged me to do something with her we had never been able to muster the self-discipline to do regularly. She asked me to pray with her every night. Every night. She used an illustration that crystallized her feelings very well. As we remember it, she said something like this:

“Imagine you were diagnosed with such a lethal condition that the doctor told you that you would die within hours unless you took a particular medicine — a pill every night before going to sleep. Imagine that you were told that you could never miss it or you would die. Would you forget? Would you not get around to it some nights? No — it would be so crucial that you wouldn’t forget; you would never miss. Well, if we don’t pray together to God, we’re not going to make it because of all we are facing. I’m certainly not. We have to pray; we can’t let it just slip our minds.”

For both of us the penny dropped; we realized the seriousness of the issue, and we admitted that anything that was truly a nonnegotiable necessity was something we could do. (9–10)

Tim and Kathy maintained this unbroken streak night after night for more than twenty years — all the way through until the end of his life. But it wasn’t just a nightly discipline that changed him. He also began reading and studying, searching for help:

Kathy’s jolting challenge, along with my own growing conviction that I just didn’t get prayer, led me into a search. I wanted a far better personal prayer life. I began to read widely and experiment in prayer. As I looked around, I quickly came to see that I was not alone. (10)

Spoiler alert: his quest ultimately led to deeper engagement with, and fresh appreciation for, his own theological heritage. From Augustine in the fifth century all the way to Martyn Lloyd-Jones in the twentieth, Keller realized anew he didn’t have to choose between robust theology and vibrant experience. His own tradition featured both. “I was not being called to leave behind my theology and launch out to look for ‘something more,’ for experience. Rather, I was meant to ask the Holy Spirit to help me experience my theology” (16–17).

Keller has enriched my own experience of God by helping me to meditate on his Word, marvel at my adoption, adore him for his character, and step into divine joy.

1. Meditate Your Way to Delight

Can you relate to the disconnect between theology and experience? I sure can. God is the most glorious and satisfying person in the universe — I know this, I preach this, I write articles about this — and yet, before the splendor of his majesty, my heart can feel like a block of ice. The reason is often quite simple: I haven’t slowed down enough to really warm my heart — to thaw it — before the fire of God’s Word. I merely glance over a passage and get on with my day.

That doesn’t work. We must slow down and linger over the words of life. Biblical meditation is the music of prayer and involves a kind of two-step dance: first, Keller says, we think a truth out, and then we think it in until its ideas become “big” and “sweet,” moving and affecting — until the reality of God is sensed upon the heart (162).

This doesn’t mean we are chasing an experience; it means we are pursuing a living God. Above all, prayer isn’t merely “a way to get things from God but a way to get more of God himself” (21). This is staggering. Despite our distracted, fidgety, wandering defiance, he beckons us in and — wonder of wonders — offers us himself. And this is precisely what we need, since hearts wired for intimacy were made to be swept up into the life of the Trinity (e.g., John 17:21; 2 Peter 1:4; 1 John 1:3). As Keller explains, “We can see why a triune God would call us to converse with him, to know and relate to him. It is because he wants to share the joy he has. Prayer is our way of entering into the happiness of God himself” (68).

2. Remember Why He Listens

Another key to unlocking joy in prayer is to marvel at the doctrine of adoption — the glorious truth that God not only acquits believers in heaven’s courtroom but also welcomes us, as it were, into the living room.

Pondering this familial bond, and the intimacy it secures, has unparalleled power to nurture joy in drowsy hearts. The seventeenth-century minister Thomas Goodwin once recounted seeing a man and his young son walking along. Suddenly the father stopped, lifted up his boy, and said, “I love you.” The boy hugged his dad and said, “I love you too.” Then the father put him down and they kept walking. Now, here’s the question: was the child more legally a son in his father’s arms than when he was on the street? Of course not. But through the embrace, he vibrantly experienced his sonship.

This is what prayer offers us. The most ordinary believer in the world has access to “the most intimate and unbreakable relationship” with the Lord of the world. Just imagine, Keller says, what it takes to visit the president of the United States. Only those who merit his time and attention are granted entry. You must have credentials, accomplishments, and perhaps a power base of your own — unless, of course, you’re one of his children. That detail changes everything. Likewise, in prayer, we lean experientially — not just theologically — into the Father’s loving embrace (70).

Or as Keller put it in a sermon, in one of the most lovely images I’ve ever contemplated: The only person who dares wake up a king at 3:00 a.m. for a glass of water is a child. We have that kind of access.

3. Begin Your Prayers with Adoration

The pages of Scripture brim with summons to boldly approach our Father and lay our requests at his feet (e.g., Matthew 7:7–8; Philippians 4:6; Hebrews 4:16; James 4:2). Danger arises, though, when adoration becomes a mere afterthought — which reveals more about our self-absorbed hearts than we may care to acknowledge. Reflecting on the parable of the prodigal sons (Luke 15:11–32), Keller warns against an “elder-brother spirit” that robs our ability to enjoy the assurance of fatherly love. How might we detect if we’re succumbing to this danger?

Perhaps the clearest symptom of this lack of assurance is a dry prayer life. Though elder brothers may be diligent in prayer, there is no wonder, awe, intimacy, or delight in their conversations with God. . . . Elder brothers may be disciplined in observing regular times of prayer, but their prayers are almost wholly taken up with a recitation of needs and petitions, not spontaneous, joyful praise. (The Prodigal God, 72–73)

Though unsettling to admit, difficult things in life move us to petition far more readily than happy things move us to praise. One of the most practical “next steps” for your prayer life, then, is simply this: spend some unhurried time reveling in who God is. If you begin there — contemplating his character, gazing at his glory, praising him for his promises — then your heart will be ready to bring requests to his throne.

4. Pray to Get God Himself

God never promises to give believers all good things on our terms. What he promises, rather, is to work all things — even the bad — for our ultimate good (Romans 8:28). And when we don’t receive a good thing we want, we can rest in the knowledge that we already have the best thing. We have him. As Keller puts it, in God we have the headwaters of all we truly desire — even if a tributary of our joy goes dry.

And yet, God wants us to ask things of him. To protect us from pride and self-sufficiency, he rarely gives us what we want apart from prayer. But through prayer, our Father withholds nothing good from his children (Matthew 7:11). God delights to give himself in his gifts. Keller concludes:

Prayer is how God gives us so many of the unimaginable things he has for us. Indeed, prayer makes it safe for God to give us many of the things we most desire. It is the way we know God, the way we finally treat God as God. Prayer is simply the key to everything we need to do and be in life. (18)

The ability to converse with the King of the universe isn’t just an honor — it’s the glorious union of two disparate truths: awe before an infinite being and intimacy with a personal friend. Because we’re made to know a triune God — a merry, generous, hospitable community of persons — prayer is the furthest thing from a sterile concept or boring duty. It’s an invitation into unimaginable joy.

Audio Transcript

We’re back, and we’re back into an online controversy — a “brew-haha,” as it was called. Pastor John, on September 30 you tweeted about coffee. You posted Hebrews 12:28, which says, “Let us offer to God acceptable worship, with reverence and awe.” And in light of this reverent, awe-filled vision for our worship, you posed this open question: “Can we reassess whether Sunday coffee-sipping in the sanctuary fits?”

As I mentioned last time, the tweet was loved and hated and spread all over the Internet to the point that, after a couple weeks, it had 1,000 retweets, 1,500 comments, 3,000 likes, 2.7 million views, and feature articles online from Fox News here in the States and the Daily Mail in the UK. None of which you saw, which we talked about last time, on Monday.

Now, there’s a lot behind that tweet, a whole worldview really. So, we are building out the context behind it, and you are talking about how to build and shape a church with this “reverential vibe” in everything that happens on Sunday morning. Last time, you signaled that you wanted to get into the nitty-gritty of helping church leaders move their church away from casual worship toward something better and more fitting to what Hebrews, and all of the Bible, calls for. So, get practical, and pick up the discussion for us at this point.

I argued last time that sipping coffee in the holiest hour of congregational worship does not fit with the reverence and awe that Hebrews 12:28 calls for. “Let us offer to God acceptable worship, with reverence and awe,” Hebrews says.

But I argued that sipping coffee is not the heart of the matter. The heart of the matter is that people and leaders don’t have a heart that resonates with what I mean by “reverence and awe” and the holiness, the sacredness of that hour of congregational worship on Sunday morning (usually). Those realities are not prominent in their mind and heart, those reverent realities. They know those words: reverence, awe. They know the words, but the words don’t have compelling existential content, with the kind of serious joy that makes people eager for reverence and awe. They’re just words.

And I argued that you don’t solve that problem by creating external rules. You solve it by awakening internal, heartfelt reverence. So, things that are unfitting don’t get outlawed; they just fall away. I think that’s the way I tried to do it. I don’t think I ever laid down rules for 33 years of preaching.

What I’d like to do here now is to point a way, a possible way forward for pastors to lead the church gradually — say, over five to ten years. You’ve got to be patient to move from the atmosphere of a casual, chipper, coffee-sipping, entertainment-oriented gathering to a more seriously joyful, reverent, deeply satisfying encounter with God. So, maybe in this episode, Tony, we could talk just for a few minutes about the kind of preaching that would lead in that direction.

Developing a Godward Mindset

But before I say that, the pastor’s mindset overall should be that it’s fitting for one hour a week, or an hour and a half, that the people of God meet him with a kind of radical Godward focus that has weightiness to it and seriousness to it, and that this weightiness and seriousness of God-centeredness become the most satisfying experience in our people’s lives. That’s the mindset we’ve got to have: “I want to do this in a way so that they love this, they want this, they come for this. This is not tolerated — it’s desired.” That’s the mindset.

We will never out-entertain the world. I just need to settle that. We’ll never out-entertain the world, nor should we try, because we have something infinitely better, something our souls were made for.

And most of our people don’t know this. They don’t know what’s better than the fun they have in watching videos and other kinds of entertainment. They just don’t know. They’ve never tasted the real thing. Something profoundly stabilizing, strengthening, refining, and satisfying at the depths of our being is what people long for, and they don’t know what they’re longing for until they’re shown it over time.

So, here are five appeals to pastors with regard to preaching.

1. Build Bible-people.

Rivet the people’s attention on the Bible, the very words of the Bible. Deal in great realities, and show them those realities from the text. Build trust in the Bible. Build trust in yourself as a Bible man, so that people say, “We can trust him because he’s a Bible man.”

Some people will leave the church because of this orientation; it’s too frightening and threatening to submit to the Bible like this. Others are hungry for this, and they’re going to come. Over time, seek to bring into being a people whose mindset is self-consciously and happily under the Bible’s authority. Seek to create a people who measure everything by the Bible. Every thought, every emotion, every word, every action, put through the sieve of Bible teaching — and what the Bible really teaches about everything.

The way you handle the Bible and the glories you see in it will bring about this kind of congregation. They’re not their own. They belong to Christ, and his word is their life and their law. That’s what needs to come into being through your Bible-saturated preaching.

2. Make God the dominant reality.

Make the glory of God and all that he is for us in Jesus the main reality people sense over the years, as they hear you preach week in and week out: “God is the main reality here. God is big. God is weighty. God is precious. God is satisfying. God is near. Don’t mess with God. God loves us.” I mean, it’s just a massive, weighty vision of God. Make the greatness and beauty and worth of God the dominant reality.

Be amazed, pastor, be amazed at God continually — that God simply is, that he just is, without beginning. This blows the mind of every four-year-old, right? “Who made God, Daddy?” the child asks. “Nobody made God,” responds the father. “Woah.” Eyes get big. “He just always was there.” God is absolute reality. All else, from galaxies to subatomic particles, is secondary. Everything we see is secondary.

God is the primary reality. Help your people to see this and feel this, that God relates to everything in their lives, all the time, as the main thing. He is the main thing in their lives. He’s the supreme treasure, the main value, the brightest hope, the one they are all willing to live for and die for.

3. Tremble at God’s wrath.

Make sure that the ugliness of the disease of sin in us and in the world and the fury of the wrath of God against that disease are felt by your people. God’s grace, precious grace, will never be amazing — not the way it should be — if our people do not tremble at the majesty of God’s transcendent purity and holy wrath against sin. If they do not feel the fitness of the outpouring of the cup, of the fury of his wrath against sin, they will never be amazed that they’re saved.

This is one of the main contributors to the happiness of serious reverence. It’s paradoxical, I know, that you would have a high, holy, trembling view of God’s wrath be the main contributor to the happiness of the seriousness of reverence. But it is so.

The 1,500-degree fire of the building from which we have just been snatched by the firemen can still be seen. We see it. We feel it. We see the smoke. We hear the crackle. And the trembling of our unspeakably happy thankfulness is anything but casual.

4. Exalt Christ and his work.

Exalt Christ in his majesty and lowliness, in his suffering and resurrection, and in the unimaginable riches of what he purchased for us. Romans 8:32, “He who did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all, how will he not also with him graciously give us all things?” Every single good that God’s elect receive, from now to eternity, is owing to the blood of Jesus Christ. Knowing that I don’t deserve this and what it cost him makes me tremble in my ecstasy.

5. Wonder over the new birth.

Finally, teach your people the miracle of their own conversion. Nobody knows from experience the glory of the miracle of new birth. We only know the wonder of the new birth from Scripture.

“Even when we were dead in our trespasses, [God] made us alive together with Christ . . . and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus” (Ephesians 2:5–6) — nobody knows this. Nobody knows this stupendous reality from experience. We know it because God tells us it is so.

We have to teach our people that they are supernatural beings. Most people come into the sanctuary feeling very natural, right? We have to help them feel another way: “You’re a miracle. You’re a walking resurrection from the dead. You’re not merely natural anymore. This is not a moment of gathering natural people. Our faith, which is our life, is a miracle. God created it. It is trust. Our saving faith is trust in a supremely treasured Savior and Lord.”

May I venture to say that preaching like this will, over time, create in your people an eagerness to encounter God in his word in a way that will make coffee-sipping seem out of place?

In sub-Saharan West Africa, the dry season slowly tightens its deathlike grip until that first thunderstorm. It begins as a speck on the horizon. The breeze stills; the furnace-like heat threatens to consume all in its oven. Dark clouds pile upon each other in the distance, as if in a mad race to block out the sun.

Then comes the wind: at first a whisper, but before long a mighty force that lifts months of dust and sand, whirling them into miniature tornadoes. In our early years, my siblings and I would run out and try to fight the strength of these winds. Taking our stand on the old garden mounds of last season’s planting, we would test our young legs against the power of the storm (always an exercise in futility).

Then the sky turns black. The rolling clouds have conquered the sun, declaring victory with lightning flashes and mighty cracks of thunder, a barrage of heavenly artillery. At last, finally, comes the rain — a marching wall of gray obscuring everything it passes, driven by the relentless wind. We fled for home as it approached and then flooded our street, turning the hard-packed earth into a sudden river.

I’ve always been awed by the power of storms. Their sheer might delights and overwhelms me. They produce in me a certain diminishing effect, reminding me that though God gave humans dominion over the earth, I am still made from dust. It’s fitting to flee.

But God designed thunderstorms to teach us about more than our smallness. In their unleashed fury, they are emblems of the wrath of God poured out in judgment. The short book of Nahum, tucked in the middle of the Minor Prophets, is one such place where God teaches us to rightly read events in nature like thunderstorms.

‘Woe to the Bloody City’

Nahum’s brief oracle, a mere 47 verses in our English translations, thunders with God’s righteous judgment against Nineveh, one of the great cities of the ancient Assyrian empire. We usually associate Nineveh with the ministry of Jonah. Jonah knew God to be “a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love, and relenting from disaster” (Jonah 4:2). Thus, he preached to Israel’s enemies with reluctance, knowing that his prophetic word of judgment might just lead to Nineveh’s preservation.

We know the story. Nineveh repented, and God, in keeping with his character, relented from unleashing disaster upon them (Jonah 3:6–10). These events took place during the reign of Jeroboam II of Israel (2 Kings 14:25), which lasted from about 793 to 753 BC (Dictionary of the Old Testament: Prophets, 456).

It may come as a surprise, then, that Nahum’s prophecy a century or so later contains only words of judgment against Nineveh, with no opportunity to repent. Prophesying to Judah around 650 BC after the fall of the northern kingdom in 722 to Assyria (Dictionary, 560), Nahum declared that Assyria would be washed away “with an overflowing flood.” God would “make a complete end of the adversaries” of his people (Nahum 1:8).

The once-repentant Nineveh had spurned the mercy of God and directed its armies against God’s chosen people, leading the northern kingdom of Israel into captivity and even laying siege to Jerusalem itself during the reign of Hezekiah (2 Kings 18:17–25).

God directed his fury against this “bloody city, all full of lies and plunder” (Nahum 3:1), declaring that the name of Assyria and Nineveh would no longer be perpetuated among the nations of the earth (Nahum 1:14). And through the poetic tongue of Nahum, he captured his fury with the image of a storm.

Chariots of Wrath

Nahum’s oracle begins with a threefold declaration that Yahweh takes vengeance (nōqêm) on his enemies. Similar to how the threefold “holy, holy, holy” in Isaiah 6:3 emphasizes the completeness of God’s holiness, Nahum’s repeated nōqêm reveals the fullness of God’s wrath. The fierce clouds seethe in the distance, and none can stay their path. Though “slow to anger” — a slowness Nineveh had experienced in the past — “the Lord will by no means clear the guilty.”

His way is in whirlwind and storm,and the clouds are the dust of his feet. (Nahum 1:3)

Nahum’s opening salvo (1:1–8), like the West African rainclouds piling upon each other, heaps image after image to describe the poured-out wrath of God. Before his rage, bodies of water dry up, vegetation withers, mountains quake, the earth heaves, and rocks split. His wrath is “like fire” (1:6), like “an overflowing flood” (1:8).

Who can stand before his indignation?Who can endure the heat of his anger? (1:6)

Anyone who has been caught in the elements by a powerful storm can appreciate, in part, the terror and doom Nahum intends to convey. Through such storms, God means for us to understand in a small way what it feels like to face his judgment with no hope. The hymnist appropriately captured this sense when he penned,

His chariots of wrath the deep thunderclouds form,And dark is his path on the wings of the storm.

Strong storms that flash and rage, that whip dust into frenzies and hurl rain in torrents, that envelop the earth in darkness, declare the glory of his just judgment on the wicked, teaching us not to treat his wrath lightly. They symbolize the frightening words uttered by God against unrepentant sinners: “Behold, I am against you” (Nahum 2:13; 3:5).

Named No More

In 612 BC, about forty years after Nahum spoke his oracle against Nineveh, the city was overrun and destroyed by the Babylonians. Though a few Assyrians escaped and tried to reestablish themselves, they too were wiped out in 609 BC. The Assyrians disappeared (ESV Study Bible, 1710). In fact, a mere three hundred years later, a whole army passed over the place where Nineveh had been without even recognizing the location of the once-famous city (The Books of Nahum, Habakkuk, and Zephaniah, 72).

The Lord has given commandment about you:“No more shall your name be perpetuated. . . .I will make your grave, for you are vile.” (Nahum 1:14)

Nahum’s prophecy was no hyperbolic description of God’s vengeance. Every word came to pass. Nineveh took its stand against the awesome storm of God’s wrath — and perished.

Nineveh’s fate reveals the holiness of God. He will not, cannot, allow sin to remain in his presence. Every unrepentant sinner stands, as it were, on the garden mound of ancient Nineveh’s ruins, shaking a fist in the face of God and daring him to unleash the winds of wrath. God does not change. The same words he uttered against Nineveh he will speak again in judgment. “Behold, I am against you.” “Depart from me, you cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels” (Matthew 25:41). No sinner will stand in the assembly of the righteous people of God (Psalm 1:5).

‘Stronghold in the Day of Trouble’

Though it may seem like a misnomer for one tasked with prophesying judgment, Nahum’s name means “comfort.” But where shall one find comfort in his oracle?

Though Nahum spoke a word against Nineveh, his audience was the people of God, those remaining in the southern kingdom of Judah. Twice in the opening chapter, the Lord speaks directly to his people (1:12–13, 15), giving them reason to hope as he lifts the yoke of oppression Assyria had laid upon them. This wicked nation will not pass through Judah again to bring terror. As his word of wrath displays his holy character, so too does this word of comfort. The punishment of God’s enemies displays, at the same time, his covenant-keeping love for his people.

Tucked away in Nahum’s opening description of divine wrath stands a little verse, a place of shelter from the storm:

The Lord is good,a stronghold in the day of trouble;he knows those who take refuge in him. (Nahum 1:7)

This knowing refers to more than God’s knowledge about his people. It suggests an intimate knowledge that means salvation, a setting of love upon his own. This is the same knowing described by the Good Shepherd, who knows his own sheep and preserves them to the end (John 10:14, 28–29). This knowing serves as a firm foundation for hope (2 Timothy 2:19).

Those who are known by God have a shelter to which they can flee: not the pitiful garden mound, but the secure home, with windows that fasten tight, solid walls, and a strong roof. Though the storm rages outside, in this stronghold peace reigns.

Flee for Shelter

God has always provided a shelter from the storm. To Noah and his family he gave an ark, a fortress to carry them through the cleansing flood of wrath. To Moses he gave a basket of reeds and pitch, a floating bassinet to guard the future leader from the storm of Pharaoh’s decree. To Jonah he gave the belly of a fish, a place of repentance and preservation. To the disciples, he gave the God-man, whose words made a haven for a wave-tossed boat. To us he gives the risen and exalted Christ, and he promises that all who take refuge in the shadow of his wings will find a shelter from the storm.

Flee, then, to this stronghold. Learn to read the weather and seek refuge in Christ. Tucked into his everlasting arms, we experience no raging storms of wrath. While his glory “thunders” and his voice “flashes forth flames of fire” (Psalm 29:3, 7), we ascribe him glory, and we rest secure in his peace and under his eternal reign.

As a child, I had an unhealthy fear of voicemails.

Since voicemails now are something of an endangered species, this may require some explanation. When I was in school, most phones were still attached to walls and didn’t have caller ID. So, if you called and no one picked up, no one would know that it was you who called — unless you left a voicemail. Seems easy (and safe) enough, right?

One day (I was probably ten), I called to see if a friend across the street wanted to play, but no one picked up. I hung up. A few minutes later, I called again. No answer, I hung up. I did this a few more times over the next hour. My mom noticed my strange behavior and asked what I was doing.

“I was just calling to see if my friend wanted to play, but no one’s home.”

“Well, why don’t you just leave a message?”

I tensed up. “Oh no, no. . . . I’ll just try again in a few minutes.”

“No, Marshall, that’s rude to keep calling like that. You really should leave a voicemail.”

“No, really, Mom, it’s not a big deal. They don’t mind.”

“No,” she said firmly, “you’re going to pick up that phone right now and leave a voicemail.”

I waited to see if she was serious, then slowly lifted the instrument of terror from the wall. There was something about being recorded — with no opportunity to delete, or try again, or call timeout — that made me feel exposed. It certainly didn’t help that my (female) friend could be a bit of a bully and relished just about any opportunity to laugh at my expense.

Again, no one answered. The dreaded beep came. My mom stared at me intently. “Hi, uhhh, Jenna. . . . This is Marshall. Umm . . . just wanted to see if you were home and wanted to play. So . . . give me a call when you get back. . . . Umm . . . in Jesus’s name, Amen.”

My mom’s eyes widened, and she covered her mouth. Her cheeks strained to fight back laughter. My young, insecure blood boiled. She made me do that. How could she!

It’s funny, but my (tiny) humiliation plays out a common paradox in prayer: Those three words — in Jesus’s name — were already so deeply ingrained in my mind through countless prayers in our home that they instinctively poured out. At the same time, they had become so familiar that they had begun to lose their weight and meaning (so that I blurted them to the 10-year-old girl across the street). Many of us have forgotten, through lots of meals and bedtimes, services and Bible studies, what we hold in these three staggering words: in Jesus’s name.

Six Facets in the Name

Where do we learn to pray in Jesus’s name, anyway? The Lord’s Prayer doesn’t end that way. In fact, when you go looking, you realize that we don’t have any actual prayers in Scripture that end with those words.

We hear people baptize in the name of Jesus (Acts 2:38), heal in the name of Jesus (Acts 3:6), teach in the name of Jesus (Acts 4:18), exorcise demons in the name of Jesus (Acts 16:18), and perform wonders in the name of Jesus (Acts 4:30). The apostle Paul goes as far to tell us to do everything we do, in word or deed, “in the name of the Lord Jesus” (Colossians 3:17). The clearest teaching on praying in Jesus’s name, though, comes from Jesus himself, on the night he was betrayed.

In John 14–16, we have Jesus’s last words to his disciples before he goes to the cross, and in all three chapters he mentions the power of praying in his name: “Whatever you ask in my name” (John 14:13) . . . “Whatever you ask the Father in my name” (John 15:16) . . . . “Whatever you ask of the Father in my name” (John 16:23). In the repetition, we see how critical this kind of prayer will be for followers of Jesus, and we learn at least six reasons for Christians to pray in his name.

1. Access: God listens to you.

When we pray in Jesus’s name, we rehearse our only reason for believing God will actually hear our prayers. We dare to bow before the Father only because the Son chose to bow upon the cross. Before he encourages his disciples to pray this way, Jesus says to them, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me” (John 14:6). No one comes except in me — but everyone who comes in my name will be received, heard, and loved. His life, cross, and resurrection lift our prayers into heaven.

Jesus goes as far as to say (really listen to what he says here), “I do not say to you that I will ask the Father on your behalf; for the Father himself loves you, because you have loved me and have believed that I came from God” (John 16:26–27). In other words, I don’t have to ask him anything for you anymore. No, in me, you can ask the Almighty yourself.

2. Love: God chose you.

God doesn’t only listen to our prayers because Christ died for us, but because, long before his Son was born and took the cross, he had already chosen us as his own. He decided, based on nothing in or about us, to love us and save us in Christ.

“You did not choose me,” Jesus says, “but I chose you and appointed you that you should go and bear fruit and that your fruit should abide, so that whatever you ask the Father in my name, he may give it to you.” (John 15:16)

I chose you, so that your prayers would have power. That means every prayer we pray in his name is an opportunity to remember the undeserved wonder of our election. The God of heaven and earth, the one who made all that is, the one whom you rejected and assaulted in your sin, chose to love you.

And if he had not chosen you, you would not believe, much less pray. Jesus says, “No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him” (John 6:44; also 6:65).

3. Power: God can do anything.

When Jesus ascended into heaven, he left his disciples, but he didn’t really leave them. Before he rose into the clouds, he said, “Behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age” (Matthew 28:20). How could he say that as he was literally leaving them? Because he had told them, “I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Helper, to be with you forever, even the Spirit of truth” (John 14:16–17, see also 14:25–26).

By the Spirit, Jesus still lives with us, even within us. Therefore, his name is a constant reminder of his abiding, satisfying, empowering presence.

Abide in me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit by itself, unless it abides in the vine, neither can you, unless you abide in me. I am the vine; you are the branches. Whoever abides in me and I in him, he it is that bears much fruit, for apart from me you can do nothing. (John 15:4–5)

In his name, anything is possible through prayer. Apart from his name, we can do nothing.

4. Safety: God keeps your faith.

As he comes to the end of his final words, he says to his disciples, “I have said all these things to you to keep you from falling away” (John 16:1). I’ve repeatedly told you (among other things) to pray in my name, so that you will not fall away from me, so that you won’t fall into temptation and make shipwreck of your faith. Fearful days were coming, days that would strain their faith (if possible) to the point of breaking. “In the world you will have tribulation,” he warns them a few verses later. “But take heart; I have overcome the world” (John 16:33). And in my name, you will too.

So, our prayers in Jesus’s name are not only accomplishing great things out in the world and among those we love, but they’re doing something supernatural inside of us. Through them, God is fortifying our faith in God. He’s exerting his infinite power to guard our love for him (1 Peter 1:5). Prayer is perhaps the single greatest way that God works in us the kind of heart and life that please him and persevere to the end (Philippians 2:12–13).

5. Confidence: God won’t dismiss his Son.

Why won’t the Father ignore prayers in the name of his Son? Jesus tells us, “Whatever you ask in my name, this I will do, that the Father may be glorified in the Son. If you ask me anything in my name, I will do it” (John 14:13–14). The glory of God himself is at stake in our prayers (even our seemingly small or insignificant prayers), and God will not surrender or violate his glory. That means no prayer is insignificant to God. He will answer your prayers in Jesus’s name because he’s fiercely devoted, with all his sovereign might, to the exalting of that name. For God to disregard requests made in the name of Jesus would be to abandon his reason for creating the universe: his glory.

Our prayers, then, aren’t just in the name of Jesus, but for the name of Jesus. And that means, when we pray in this name, we join Jesus in doing what he most loves to do, what he’s utterly and eternally resolved to do, and that is to glorify God.

6. Reward: Your joy will be full.

Jesus gives us at least one more great incentive to pray in his name always and with boldness:

Truly, truly, I say to you, whatever you ask of the Father in my name, he will give it to you. . . . Ask, and you will receive, that your joy may be full. (John 16:23–24)

Just a chapter earlier, he says, “These things I have spoken to you, that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be full” (John 15:11). So, God answers our prayers in Jesus’s name for the sake of his glory — “that the Father may be glorified in the Son.” And God answers our prayers in that name because he wants us to be as happy as possible — “that your joy may be full.” Those are the two great ambitions of a healthy prayer life: the glory of God and our fullest possible joy in him.

And because God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in him, those two ambitions are not really two but one. They’re two sides of the same prayer. John Piper writes,

The unity of these two goals — the glory of God and the joy of his children — is clearly preserved in the act of prayer. Therefore, Christian Hedonists will, above all, be people devoted to earnest prayer. Just as the thirsty deer kneels down to drink at the brook, so the characteristic posture of the Christian Hedonist is on his knees. (Desiring God, 160)

How to End a Prayer

A couple decades after my harrowing voicemail experience, I had another encounter that has shaped how I say these three words. At the time, I was studying in seminary and serving in ministry, regularly leading up front in my local church. During one of the services, I gave the prayer of praise, which strives to give voice to our congregation’s collective gratitude to God for his kindness, his provision, his sovereign and saving love. I had given some serious time preparing to lead our congregation.

After the service, an older man in the faith came up to me and thanked me for the prayer. “I’ve noticed something, though, about your prayers,” he said. I was surprised and a little nervous. Am I doing it wrong? Did I say something heretical? You can still hear the little boy with the corded phone and all those fears. “It’s how you end your prayers,” he said. “You rush through the words — ‘in Jesus’s name.’ They sound like an afterthought. They’re not an afterthought. Slow down on those words. Savor them.”

I’ve never prayed the same since. And so I turn to you, as a good father might with his son. The three most important words in prayer are not words to be rushed or mumbled, but relished and declared. They frame the doorway to fellowship with God — access, love, presence, safety, confidence, joy. Slow down on those words. Savor them.

All Scripture is God-breathed . . .

This often-quoted Scripture about Scripture in 2 Timothy 3:16 gets a lot of attention today (and it should). Many fine defenses of the classical understanding of these three Greek words (pasa graphē theopneustos) have been published in recent decades. The God-inspired, or God-exhaled, nature of holy Scripture is worth receiving and defending and — as the rest of the verse reads — putting to use. Theorize and argue about it as we might, a second foot lands that makes this a strikingly practical text:

All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness . . .

Take up Scripture, and use it, Paul writes. It is profitable, that is, valuable, beneficial, useful (Greek ōphelimos). We might even say it’s doubly useful — not only for those who are taught, reproved, corrected, and trained, but also for the teacher himself. That’s the purpose Paul gives: “. . . that the man of God (the teacher himself!) may be complete, equipped for every good work” (2 Timothy 3:17). Scripture not only profits the people; it equips the teachers. Christian pastors dare not feign to teach and preach to God’s people apart from using Scripture — with the kind of use (and not abuse) that God intends.

Are the Four in Order?

Now, ancient letter-writing was an expensive and time-consuming endeavor (we shouldn’t assume the kind of speed and carelessness with which we dash off emails today). Skilled craftsmen like Paul would thoughtfully plan and draft and rewrite and edit and proof their epistles before those words hit the Roman roads.

So, when an apostle lists a sequence like the last part of 2 Timothy 3:16 — “for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness” — he means it. He thought of this list, ordered it, drafted it, reviewed it, and finalized it. The Theological Dictionary of the New Testament goes as far as to say that this is “obviously a planned sequence in this list of nouns.”
While guarding against over-reading the order, we can look for reasons why Paul chooses these particular words and arranges them like he does.

Let’s consider, then, this planned sequence for the pastoral use of Scripture in the local church. How might these specific activities clarify our calling and practice as pastor-teachers?

First and Foremost: Teach

It’s no surprise that Paul would begin with “teaching.”

Teaching is the distinctive, central labor of the pastor-elders in the life of the local church. The risen Christ gives his church its pastors and teachers (Ephesians 4:11), leaders who speak the word of God (Hebrews 13:7), overseers who not only exercise authority but do so mainly through teaching the gathered church (1 Timothy 2:12). Good pastor-elders “labor in preaching and teaching” (1 Timothy 5:17). The heart of their calling is not their own wisdom or life hacks or executive savvy, but feeding souls through teaching and preaching God’s word.

So, Paul takes a deep breath after verse 17 and then says, after a long, loaded preamble, “preach the word” (2 Timothy 4:2). And such pastoral preaching in the life of the local church is clearly bound up with teaching:

preach the word . . . reprove, rebuke, and exhort, with complete patience and teaching. For the time is coming when people will not endure sound teaching . . . (2 Timothy 4:2–3)

Let’s not miss the prevenient nature of Christian preaching and teaching: ideally, instruction in sound doctrine begins before the church encounters error. Preaching the word and teaching the Scriptures is steady-state, everyday Christian pastoral ministry. We feed the souls of the sheep on God’s words. His Scriptures are the green pastures and still waters to which good shepherds lead their flock. First comes faithful, heartful preaching and teaching, as daily bread and water; then comes the defense of the flock as various threats arise.

If the sequence of nouns in 2 Timothy 3:16 represents four distinct aspects of the pastoral use of Scripture, then it is hard to imagine another activity appearing first. Teaching is the pastors’ first and foremost call, and its coming first helps us to recognize what we might call a “didactic order” — a logical sequence here that lists teaching first, then rebuke, then correction, then training.

Next: Expose Error to Light

Appropriately, “reproof” comes next. Now the term is negative and responsive, complementing the positive and pro-active endeavor of teaching. However well the pastors teach their people, errors and deceptions inevitably emerge, often related to prevailing errors in the world (or overreactions to those errors) that find sympathy in the church. We Christians also have plenty of indwelling sin to originate our own errors as well. Every church and all Christians are susceptible to both innocent and culpable mistakes, in belief and practice, that need to be exposed to the light.

Pared with teaching, this reproof, says Gordon Fee, is “the other side of the task; [the pastor] must use Scripture to expose the errors of the false teachers and their teachings” (1 & 2 Timothy, Titus, 13). Exposing error to light, through words, is the heart of this second activity (John 3:20; Ephesians 5:11, 13). Good preaching and teaching exposes errors, yet without letting error set the agenda. Teaching is the tip of the spear — and the advancing spear divides truth from lies (and half-truths), and sheds fresh light on unlit nooks and crannies, enlightening darkened minds and convicting compromised hearts.

Pastoral exposition, then, not only exposes our people to the light by faithfully teaching Scripture; it also exposes remaining pockets of darkness in us and in our habits of life. And such exposure of error need not be combative or heavy-handed. Rather, like pastoral admonition (an even stronger term in the New Testament), reproof is familial. The apostle Paul says he wrote to the Corinthians not to shame them, but as a father to beloved children (1 Corinthians 4:14).

If even admonition is to be brotherly (2 Thessalonians 3:15), rather than adversarial (and works hand in hand with teaching, Colossians 1:28; 3:16), then wise shepherds, as fathers and brothers to the flock, will expose errors with the same hope, patience, and Christian grace they exercise in their teaching. The call to reprove is no license to sin, abandon self-control, or to draw attention to the teacher’s own smarts as the one who knows better.

Good pastors lovingly expose error — however gently or severely the situation requires (Titus 1:13; 2:14) — because we have a clear, objective, fixed standard of truth, outside ourselves. In a world of endless shades of gray, how could we presume to claim to say what’s in error and what’s not? Because we have and teach the Scriptures. Not our own abilities, but God’s written word. As Robert Yarbrough comments, “On what basis does any pastor stand in undertaking such a daunting responsibility? It is the Scriptures that furnish guidance and divine authority for servants of that word to perform this necessary function” (The Letters to Timothy and Titus, 687).

Then: Envision the Path Forward

So, back to the sequence. Let’s say God’s word is being taught, and along the way error is exposed — now what? Then follows “correction.”

Correction (Greek epanorthōsis) moves from ideas to actions, from exposing false teaching to envisioning godly living and tactical hope. Correction charts a course for healing, for restoration, for reformation, shining light on the path that is an escape from the dark. According to Yarbrough, “Pastors do not merely rebuke: they restore and point in corrective directions.” Correction, says Philip Towner, is “the activity that follows” rebuke.

Hebrews 12:13 captures it, using the same root word (orth-, meaning straight): “make straight paths for your feet, so that what is lame may not be put out of joint but rather be healed.” Correction re-sets the broken bone, that it might properly heal. It’s a companion to reproof that “emphasizes the behavioral, ethical side” (Fee). While reproof brings error to light, correction directs sinners toward recovery. When errors come to light — when you realize, Oh no, I’ve been wrong! — correction is the next step.

Tactical as it is, such correction is no less than the full application of God’s grace in Christ — both outside of us in Christ and his work, and in us through his indwelling Spirit. God’s word both announces his forgiveness of our exposed sins, and summons us to practical holiness, empowered by the Spirit. Christian teaching of God’s full word prompts sinners to cast themselves on mercy, and learn to stand and walk in grace as well.

Finally: Train Them to Live Well

Last of the four, and a fitting conclusion to the didactic sequence, is training — a freighted concept in the ancient world and New Testament (Greek paideia). Not merely verbal, but tactical, this “corresponds to correcting, as its positive side” (Fee). Training involves conditioning the inner person through “inculcating the acts and habits that will reflect God’s own character (his ‘righteousness’) in relationship with his people” (Yarbrough, 688).

As Jesus spoke about his disciples being trained during their time with him (Matthew 13:52; Luke 6:40), so we mean to disciple our people toward Christian maturity. And maturity, in any sphere of human life, does not come automatically, but through intentional conditioning (Hebrews 5:14). Discipling actually does something; it changes the disciple, it reshapes the soul and its patterns of thought and delights — and greatly so over time. And such training is typically not easy but requires persisting in moments of discomfort, even pain, to endure on the path toward the reward set before us (Hebrews 12:11).

Training doubtless includes what we might more narrowly call discipline (Hebrews 12:3–11), even as we note well the difference between discipline as a means and punishment as an end (1 Corinthians 11:32). The whole process of pastoral training is comprehensive and constructive, not just responsive. It’s holistic, not just intellectual.

This training in righteousness — in righteous living, Christian behavior — begins in our teaching, but doesn’t end with our words. To train our people, we pastors must be among them, and have our people among us (1 Peter 5:1–2). Together as pastoral teams, we teach the church how to live from Scripture and then model Christian conduct in everyday life (1 Peter 5:3; Titus 2:7).

In the midst of caring for the whole flock — through teaching, counseling, and example — we also “entrust [the central truths] to faithful men, who will be able to teach others also” (2 Timothy 2:2). That is, we disciple and seek to invest in future leaders, vocational and nonvocational, who we hope will join us in the work and do the same. We labor to raise up men who will use God’s word well to teach, reprove, correct, and train in righteousness even long after we’re gone.

Audio Transcript

It was called a “brew-haha,” and it all started because you decided to tweet about coffee, Pastor John. On September 30, you posted a quote from Hebrews — and of course a chorus of “he-brews” jokes followed. But that text, Hebrews 12:28, is no joke. It’s an anti-joke, a serious text that raises questions about the tone of our Sunday gatherings.

Hebrews 12:28 says this: “Let us offer to God acceptable worship, with reverence and awe.” And then you followed that text with a comment — even an open question, not a statement. It was this open question: “Can we reassess whether Sunday coffee-sipping in the sanctuary fits?” A provocative question for sure, especially here in the States, where Sunday mornings can be a pretty casual experience in many churches.

Your tweet very quickly got loved, and it got hated, and it got spread all over the Internet, like things tend to do that are both loved and hated. After a couple weeks, it had 1,000 retweets, 1,500 comments, 3,000 likes, and 2.7 million views, and it sparked feature articles from Fox News here in the States and the Daily Mail in the UK.

I didn’t see any of that, Tony. I did not see one retweet. I follow my one hundred people, and those people are all nice people. This was all news to me when people said, “Have you seen what happened to your tweet?” I said, “I have not seen anything,” nor to this moment have I. So, what you’re saying — I’m taking your word for it.

All right, well, all of that is true. And thousands of people loved what you said online, too, just to be clear. At least as many people loved the tweet as hated it. Not knowing if you had seen all of the responses (and assuming you had not), I gathered up a dozen or so of the themes I saw and sent you a digest of responses to see if you were willing to jump in and address this hot-button topic further. You said yes, so here we are.

I doubt this will be one episode. Likely, it will be a little series on transcendence in our Sunday worship. We’ll see. So let me start this conversation by simply asking, Now, after seeing this huge online response, and reading a digest of some of the themes of what people were saying in response, what’s your response?

Let me try to get right to the heart of the matter. The heart of the matter is not coffee in the sanctuary. That’s only a symptom, and there are lots of other symptoms of what I’m concerned about. The heart of the matter is the absence of an existential, ongoing, terrifying, shocking, awe-inspiring, trembling, mouth-shutting, comforting, safe, satisfying encounter with the majesty and mercy of the great “I am who I am” (Exodus 3:14), whose Son said, “Before Abraham was, I am” (John 8:58). And he was killed for it.

More Than a Coffee Mug

What’s missing is a kind of experience of God that shapes a person’s entire life with serious joy, glad gravity, sweet sorrow, the weight of glory. It’s the kind of experience of God that has transformed reverence and awe — those two words from Hebrews 12:28, “reverence and awe” — from being mere words into being the profoundest of experiential pleasures.

And I say all of that without denying the preciousness of the ordinary, the down-to-earth, the everyday, the casual, the kiss-your-baby-on-the-cheek life that we live most of the time. I’m not calling the preciousness of any of that into question when I talk about what I’m so concerned about here.

I’m pleading for the kind of experience of God that makes a person hungry for regular encounters with God and his people that capture and embody something of his majesty, something of the infinite scope of his boundless power and inscrutable wisdom and furious wrath and sovereign grace that leave the awestruck soul speechless with thankfulness and then overflowing with the praises of serious joy, lofted on the wings of the kind of gladness that soars only in the atmosphere of the grandeur of God. That’s what I’m after. That’s what I so long for, for myself and for others.

“The heart of the problem is not the absence of rules, but the absence of reverence.”

I’m arguing that many Christians have not tasted this existential, terrifying, awe-inspiring, trembling, mouth-shutting, comforting, safe, satisfying encounter with the mercy and majesty of God. Therefore, when they hear me question the appropriateness of coffee-sipping in a certain atmosphere of reverence and awe, they have no experiential categories to grasp what I’m talking about. Inside their experience of God, nothing is more natural than to meet him in worship, coffee mug in hand. It’s just so natural. “What’s Piper all worked up about?” they say.

So, the heart of the matter is not the coffee mug in hand. It’s the absence of a kind of experience with God that would make a Christian soul long for regular encounters with God and his people that are so profoundly satisfying in the depth of their being, with his majesty and his sweetness, in the seriousness of their joy and the weightiness of his glory, that a coffee mug would simply feel strangely out of place.

Lopsided Worship

Let me try to shed light on what I’m saying by simply putting two kinds of Scripture side by side. The one that I quoted in the tweet is from Hebrews 12. Let me give the context. Here’s what it says:

See that you do not refuse him who is speaking [that is, God]. For if they [the Old Testament Hebrews] did not escape when they refused him who warned them on earth, much less will we escape if we reject him who warns from heaven. At that time his voice shook the earth, but now he has promised, “Yet once more I will shake not only the earth but also the heavens.” . . . Therefore let us be grateful for receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken, and thus let us offer to God acceptable worship, with reverence and awe, for our God is a consuming fire. (verses 25–26, 28–29)

That’s really serious. And so, God says in Isaiah 66:2, “This is the one to whom I will look: he who . . . trembles at my word.” Now, that’s one dimension.

Here’s the other dimension: Matthew 11:28–30. This is Jesus now:

Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.

God is our friend. He’s our Savior, our Shepherd, a person with whom we can relax. Yes, we can be close, casual. We can. He will meet you in your pajamas in the middle of the night. Yes, he will. I know that from a thousand experiences.

My concern is that, in the last forty years or so, the evangelical church has put so much emphasis on the casual, the intimate, the “come as you are,” the accessibility of the gentle Christ, that two unfortunate things have happened.

One is that this emphasis has morphed into a pervasive form of entertainment-like worship, with an atmosphere of chipper, funny, lighthearted cheerleading, so that nothing would feel more natural than to grab your drink and join the party as we go into the worship space. And the other effect of this lopsided emphasis on the casual approachability of God is that the kind of existential encounter with the majesty of God that I’m talking about has become, for many people, inconceivable and, therefore, undesirable.

Moving Forward

The irony of this is that I’m really a low-church kind of guy. I don’t think the solution to this problem is the embrace of a prescribed, formal liturgy. I think that approach to corporate worship does not provide enough freedom, and it can be too vulnerable to sounding like empty, rote recitation. I think the way forward is not rules.

In fact, when I think about rules, I don’t think that in my 33 years as a pastor I ever said anything to people about bringing drinks into the sanctuary, pro or con. I don’t think I ever mentioned it in 33 years. The heart of the problem is not the absence of rules, but the absence of reverence.

So, the way forward is (1) a fuller, deeper vision of God, (2) more God-centered, serious, passionate, Bible-saturated, whole-counsel-of-God preaching, and (3) worship leadership that fosters an atmosphere of sustained, God-focused, experiential gladness and gravity, with minimal distractions from a radically vertical orientation.

Maybe next time, Tony, we could go there. We could try to get more nitty-gritty practical for pastors and people about how they can move a church away from inappropriate casualness in worship and toward something better.