“We shouldn’t be here.”

As my wife stepped into our home after a full morning of language study, I greeted her with these four hasty words. While she was conjugating verbs, I had been doing some studying of my own. After only a few months in the country, I was certain we weren’t fit to be missionaries.

I explained to her that we had been neither adequately trained for the task nor affirmed by a local church. “We should go home,” I abruptly concluded. My wife agreed with my convictions, yet she reasonably talked me off the ledge of a rash decision. We had, after all, committed to serve our team for two years. Surely God could use the remainder of our time to mature us and even make our labors fruitful.

Her counsel was wise. We stayed to finish our term and, in his kind providence, God did develop us in significant ways. We were folded into membership at a local church in our city, and the pastor discipled me until we returned to the United States to attend seminary.

While I wouldn’t trade that experience for anything, I remain convinced that we were neither sufficiently equipped nor properly affirmed to be missionaries. Why would I suggest that? We both regularly practiced the spiritual disciplines, we were not coddling habitual sins, we loved the gospel, and we had previously spent time overseas. Why, then, had I become convinced that the title “missionary” was not ours to own? The answer boils down to this: we were not sent out from a local church to contribute strategically to the Great Commission.

Missionaries as Sent Ones

Our English word “missionary” comes from the Latin missio, a translation of the Greek verb apostellō. Apostellō refers to sending someone out to accomplish an objective. Bible readers are most familiar with the noun form of this verb, apostolos, transliterated into English as “apostle.” In the New Testament, the word apostolos does not only refer to the official apostles, Jesus’s specially appointed spokesmen, but also, in other contexts, to “messengers” sent out by the church to fulfill specific responsibilities in advancing Christ’s mission.

These all followed the pattern of Jesus, “the apostle and high priest of our confession,” who, sent by the Father, faithfully came to do his Father’s will on earth (Hebrews 3:1–2; John 6:38; 20:21). Like the sent Savior, a missionary is a “sent one.” And being sent, of course, requires a sender. There is no such thing as a self-commissioned missionary.

So, who sends missionaries? The Spirit of Christ is the primary sending agent for gospel laborers (Acts 8:29; 11:12; 13:4). Nevertheless, the New Testament also sets forth the pattern of missionaries being affirmed and sent by local churches (Acts 13:1–3; 15:40). Just as congregations call and affirm their own elders and deacons, so too their members test and commission those desiring to labor among the nations.

Since each local church determines whom they send, neither I nor anyone else has authority to create some across-the-board criteria of missionary qualifications. However, I would suggest three general characteristics a local church and its elders might look for in those they commission.

1. Love for the Church

One of my seminary professors once said, “Penultimate to worship, the local church is the fuel and goal of missions.” In other words, healthy local churches are the instrument and intended result of missions. Ideal missionary candidates, then, are meaningful members of a specific local church who desire to see healthy, reproducing congregations among the nations.

I have met Christians, even missionaries, who love Christ and claim to love his bride, yet fail to put this love to work by committing to build up and submit to a local church. However, biblical instructions regarding church discipline (Matthew 18:15–20; 1 Corinthians 5:1–12) and elder-congregant relationships (Acts 20:28; 1 Timothy 5:17–19; Hebrews 13:17; 1 Peter 5:1–5) assume that the universal church will organize itself into local assemblies with identifiable members. God calls Christians to gather and commit themselves to each other in local churches as a way of protecting and preserving his people and his word. Therefore, as a starting place, future missionaries should be faithful members of their local church.

Furthermore, missionaries need to know what a biblical church is, what it does, and the central role it plays in the Great Commission. The conviction that local churches are God’s kingdom outposts, designed precisely for advancing the name of Christ among the nations, is critical for those who aim to advance this work.

A full scriptural defense of the essential characteristics of a local church is beyond the scope of this article, but local-church leaders can help aspiring missionaries by providing a definition. For example, my church’s elder affirmation of faith defines a local church as a group of believers who “agree together to hear the word of God proclaimed, to engage in corporate worship, to practice the ordinances . . . to build each other’s faith through the manifold ministries of love, to hold each other accountable in the obedience of faith through biblical discipline, and to engage in local and world evangelization.”

If aspiring missionaries can’t explain and defend the basic elements of a church according to Scripture, they are not yet ready to plant or strengthen local churches overseas.

2. Knowledge of God’s Word

Explicit communication of God’s word is central to the Great Commission (Matthew 28:18–20). Therefore, global gospel laborers need deep roots in Scripture and the ability to articulate sound doctrine to others.

First, future missionaries should be personally transformed and increasingly sanctified by God’s word. The sacrificial love of Christ will form the central content of their missionary message. Missionaries faithful to this message will live in a manner that demonstrates deep gratitude for and dependence upon the gospel of Christ. Love for that gospel and that Christ will fuel their missionary ambitions.

In preparing candidates for missionary service, one of the local church’s tasks is to observe ongoing growth in godliness. Many churches have sent young people zealous for missions but lacking in spiritual maturity. Churches would do well, then, to ask a few diagnostic questions:

Does the word of God order their affections and behaviors?
Do they fight sin by the power and promises of the word?
Are their minds set on things above, or do they waste their time with social media and worldly anxieties?

Questions like these provide important data points for churches as they aim to send missionaries who are devoted to the truth, increasingly conformed to the image of Christ, and exemplary models for others.

Second, prospective missionaries need to know God’s word well enough to communicate it faithfully and effectively to others. Missions is fundamentally theological work. It requires missionaries to proclaim truth and teach others to know and follow Christ. The ability to faithfully explain sound doctrine and the meaning of biblical texts is not secondary to this task. Theological error, confusion, and syncretism easily arise in places where the gospel is newly advancing. This danger should encourage churches to send theologically astute members to lay solid foundations for the church in unreached regions of the world.

Sending churches can seek to discern candidates’ giftedness for proclamatory ministry by asking questions like these:

How frequently, clearly, and boldly do they share the gospel with others?
Can they give examples of people they’ve discipled and what that discipleship looked like?
Are they able and willing to gain fluency in another language and culture for the purpose of clear and credible communication of Christian doctrine?
Would we entrust them to teach in our Sunday assembly or in our Sunday school classes?

3. Fitness for the Task

Many influential evangelical voices have appealed to any and every Christian to consider becoming a missionary. Unfortunately, the emphasis on urgency sometimes overshadows the importance of sending those who are mature and competent.

The Bible does not call every Christian to be a missionary. Instead, it suggests that certain types of people will make good missionaries according to the abilities God gives them (Romans 12:6). The apostle John tells us that we ought to support gospel laborers “like these” or, more literally, “ones of such a kind” (3 John 8). We are wise to preserve a distinct category for those who go out “for the sake of the name” as evangelists, disciple-makers, church planters, and teachers (3 John 7). Churches can seek to use Spirit-led reason and judgment to determine which members they might faithfully send and what roles they might be best suited for.

Church leaders would do well to patiently observe the faithfulness and fruitfulness of members who aspire to minister cross-culturally. Just because someone desires the task does not mean he is competent for it. Discernment will come as churches fan the flames of those desires and test candidates’ zeal by guiding them toward robust preparation. If they endure and demonstrate effectiveness, churches can give them greater responsibilities and opportunities to develop. Asking pointed questions, calling attention to character flaws, challenging them toward growth, and watching how they respond form important aspects of this preparation.

At the end of the day, the nations need those your church would prefer not to lose — the people you would hire on staff, recommend for church office, or entrust with a major ministry area. We are not wise stewards if we send the unprepared and immature to the nonexistent or fledgling church abroad while we stack our own church staffs with the equipped and gifted. Be willing to dispatch to the nations those you’ve poured countless hours into, those you’ve seen grow in ministry effectiveness, those who have a proven track record of holiness and faithfulness to the word.

King Jesus transforms the nations through ordinary believers — each with weaknesses and sin struggles. But let us not use this as an excuse to send ill-equipped and premature people to the front lines of this work. If our goal in missions is to proclaim the gospel, make disciples, and gather them into healthy local churches, we will send people who love the church, know the word, and are fit for the task.

Some books have a strange and unanticipated ability to capture people’s attention and exceed all expectations in the number of copies they sell. That has certainly been the case with The Valley of Vision: A Collection of Puritan Prayers and Devotions. Over the almost fifty years since it was first printed, demand for this little resource has not only steadily increased but has often come from some unlikely quarters.

Given that the label “Puritan” often has pejorative connotations — even in some Christian circles — why has this anthology of Puritan prayers managed to bless such a broad cross section of the church for so many decades?

Puritan Rediscovery

The answer lies in some measure with the story of how the Banner of Truth came into existence. In the postwar years in Britain, largely through the influence of men like D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones and J.I. Packer, many rediscovered the Puritans and their writings with a fresh appreciation of what Packer once described as “Christianity of an older, deeper, richer, riper sort.”

During the seventeenth century in England, the Puritans served as heirs of the Protestant Reformation. They both preserved and built on the theological legacy of men like Calvin, Luther, and Zwingli. They also maintained the rich piety that marked that crucial era in church history — a piety rooted in the conviction that, as Paul says in Titus, “knowledge of the truth . . . leads to godliness” (Titus 1:1 NIV).

The Puritans were first and foremost pastor-teachers who sought not merely to educate and inform their congregations but to see their lives transformed by God’s word and Spirit. They were Bible men through and through, and the impact of their ministries was plain to see in the congregations they served. They wrote prolifically, and much of their writing simply offered in print what they taught and proclaimed from their pulpits week by week. This multipronged ministry led to the penetrating application of great Bible truths worked out in the everyday experience of their people.

It was hardly surprising, then, that the legacy of these men lived on through their books in the centuries that followed, with notable figures like George Whitefield being influenced by them and, in turn, being used by God in significant measure in their own days. However, with the dilution of evangelical convictions and the rise of liberal theology in the nineteenth century, the influence of the Puritans began to wane — that is, until their works were rediscovered in the aftermath of the Second World War.

In that surprising context, a new generation of preachers began to benefit from these classic works. Iain Murray was one of those young men, and he, along with like-minded friends, helped stir up fresh interest in the Puritan legacy.

Roots of a Classic

This was the soil into which The Valley of Vision sunk its roots. Through Murray’s contacts at that time and his early work with what would become The Banner of Truth, he encountered Arthur Bennett, an Episcopalian minister. When he came across Bennett’s writings on the life and work of David Brainerd (a close friend of Jonathan Edwards and missionary to the Delaware Indians in New Jersey during the eighteenth century), Murray sent Bennett some examples of Puritan prayers and suggested not only that he might find them helpful, but also that he might consider editing and abridging some of them to bring them back into circulation for the church.

The outcome of these interactions was an effort not merely to republish these prayers from the past but also to use them as a template for a book more suited to a new generation of Christians. In Murray’s words, they planned to use these Puritan prayers as “a source for a book in more modern form, taking thoughts, petitions, and, at times, even language, recast, and all more natural to [our] own prayer life today.” They hoped to create not only a record of the past but even “more a devotional work to aid Christians in their communion with God in the present day” (as the preface to the 1975 edition says).

In God’s providence, Bennett’s predecessor in his parish in Hertfordshire was Rev. E. Bickersteth, a gifted evangelical Anglican poet and hymn writer. Bickersteth clearly influenced Bennett and his work in compiling his devotional anthology.

Prayers for Every Season

The beauty of this collection of prayers is multifaceted, traversing the entire scope of the Christian journey from the depths to the heights. The prayers express the deep desires of the heart and the perplexities of our Christian experience in language full of deep reverence for God on the one hand and, on the other hand, a down-to-earth sense of our needs, longings, and failings. Through them all, there is the rich gospel realization that, despite our manifold sins and transgressions — through omission as much as commission — the grace of God in Christ is more than sufficient for our guilt, and the aid of the Holy Spirit is more than equal to our human weakness.

The prayers are organized topically. They begin, quite appropriately, with an acknowledgment of the Holy Trinity — eternally one God in three persons. What follows is a sequence of prayers that both savor God’s triune glory and celebrate the benefits that belong to us through our union and communion with God in Christ. From there, the prayers cover the nature of our salvation — its grounds and benefits — and our communion with God as we grow in grace.

An entire section of prayers expresses our daily need of penitence as one of the hallmarks of genuine conversion. In addition, other sections offer prayers for our spiritual needs and prayers to remind us of the various privileges we enjoy: our access to God in prayer, the gifts God lavishes upon us as his children (which we so easily undervalue), and the calling we have as disciples of Christ. Another section relates to the work of the ministry (but which can be prayed by all Christians for their own pastors). The closing section takes a heaven’s-eye view of the challenges and struggles we face in daily life. This little volume contains, quite literally, “a prayer for all seasons of life.”

Awake to God

Those of us who belong to this present era — some fifty years after this rich devotional resource was compiled — might find its language and form somewhat alien to what we are used to. Whether we try using the prayers in our own personal prayer life or in public prayer, their style and tone may sound quaint. Even still, we should not allow this impression to put us off.

The very fact that their style, tone, and content take us out of our often-thoughtless comfort zones should give us pause for thought. Not least because, when we reflect on the tone as much as the content of these expressions of praise and petition, we realize they convey an affectionate regard for God’s glory, holiness, and beauty too often absent in our own day.

In that sense, this collection of prayers from a different era in the church’s history reflects a depth of communion with God and an awareness of his glory and attributes that many churches of our time lack. The Valley of Vision, then, may become for us what it has become for so many: a time-honored aid to cultivating our daily appreciation of God and our moment-to-moment need of him.

In the summer of 1962, a famous Swiss theologian named Karl Barth (1886–1968) made a celebrated seven-week trip to the United States. While here, he came in contact at a Chicago Q&A session with another Carl — Carl Henry (1913–2003), who was editor of Christianity Today.

Henry stood up, introduced himself, and asked Barth about “the historical factuality of the resurrection of Jesus.” Barth didn’t appreciate the question. He seemed to become angry, remembers Henry, and pointed at the editor and said, “Did you say Christianity Today or Christianity Yesterday?” “The audience — largely nonevangelical professors and clergy — roared with delight.” Then, once the room was quiet, Henry answered, in the words of Hebrews 13:8, “Yesterday, today, and forever.”

Verse 8 on the sameness of Jesus — his constancy, his immutability — is such a precious truth, and right at the heart of this final chapter of Hebrews.

Last week, we saw that chapter 12 culminated with verse 28:

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.

Chapter 13 then follows under this banner of “acceptable worship.” And that word “acceptable” appears again in 13:15–16 as “pleasing” (same root in the Greek, euarest-):

Let us continually offer up a sacrifice of praise to God, that is, the fruit of lips that acknowledge his name. Do not neglect to do good and to share what you have, for such sacrifices are pleasing to God.

This section, from the end of chapter 12 through 13:16, is knit together as a vision for practical life that is pleasing to God. We might think of this sketch in chapter 13 as glimpses of how to please him.

Divine Pleasantness

But before we spend the rest of the message under this banner of pleasing God, let’s first put chapter 13 in the context of chapters 1–12. What has been the repeated refrain from the beginning of Hebrews? Jesus is better. Better than the angels. Better than Moses. Better than Joshua. Better than Aaron. And better than the first covenant and its place and priests and sacrifices. Jesus makes better promises and gives us better hope and a better country, and he is the better possession over all worldly possessions.

So, in saying, again and again, that Jesus is better, the message of the first 12 chapters has been: Jesus is pleasing. He is gain; he is better; he makes our souls happy with the very joy of the eternal God.

Jesus, as the second person of the triune God, shares in the infinite happiness and unshakable bliss of the Godhead. As we say in the Cities Church leadership affirmation:

God is supremely joyful in the fellowship of the Trinity, each Person beholding and expressing His eternal and unsurpassed delight in the all-satisfying perfections of the triune God.

This God is so blessed, so infinitely happy, so satisfied in himself, so full in his joy that he overflows in pleasure to create the world, and then, even more wondrously, to redeem his people from sin and death, by coming himself in the person of Christ as the true High Priest (chapters 5–7) and as the true sacrifice (chapters 8–10).

So, to this point, for 12 chapters, the refrain, in one sense, has been the pleasantness of Jesus — the very joy and blessedness of God himself, in himself, shared with us in and through Jesus and by his Spirit. And when our souls come to taste and enjoy the pleasantness and joy of God, and that Jesus is better than any standard of comparison, what do we want to do?

Well, for one, we want our lives to be pleasing to God. It pleases us to please him. Which does not mean that he’s a sad God whom we make happy. There is no sad God. To be God is to be infinitely happy, infinitely pleased, quite apart from us or anything else outside of him. But amazingly, he gives us the dignity of pleasing him, in some modest measures, as echoes of his own pleasantness. As C.S. Lewis says at the end of his sermon “The Weight of Glory,”

To please God . . . to be a real ingredient in the divine happiness . . . to be loved by God, not merely pitied, but delighted in as an artist delights in his work or a father in a son  —  it seems impossible, a weight or burden of glory which our thoughts can hardly sustain. But so it is. (39)

Hebrews 13 gives us a vision for this pleasing life — the Christian life, a life that is first pleased with God and then, in a real way, pleases God. So then, what does it look like to live such a life, pleased in God, believing that and enjoying that Jesus is better?

It’s captured here in six glimpses.

1. We express our joy out loud.

That is, we praise him. Lips of praise are an aspect of lives of worship. God is pleased by heartfelt words of praise. Verse 15:

Through him [that is, through Jesus] let us continually offer up a sacrifice of praise to God, that is, the fruit of lips that acknowledge his name.

So, the God-pleasing life includes praise. We “acknowledge his name” with our mouths. We say out loud, “I’m a Christian. I love Jesus. I worship him. He is my Lord. He saved me. He is my Treasure. Jesus is better.” And we gather here weekly to “acknowledge his name” together.

We express our joy in Jesus both in professing our faith and in corporate praise. We clearly, publicly, unashamedly identify with and commend Jesus, and we make a habit of corporate worship, beginning each new week together, setting the tone, and re-consecrating ourselves to him with joyful praise. And lips that praise him lead to lives that please him.

2. We fight to free our hearts from money.

Even twenty centuries ago, Christians could not free their hands from money. Even Jesus was asked about the temple tax and miraculously produced a coin for himself and Peter.

We live in a physical world, with physical needs, served by coins and bills and credit cards that represent and transact value for the betterment of our lives and society. In this age, there’s no going without money. But what Hebrews warns about here is not money itself but “love of money.” Verses 5–6:

Keep your life free from love of money, and be content with what you have, for he has said, “I will never leave you nor forsake you.” So we can confidently say, “The Lord is my helper; I will not fear; what can man do to me?”

How do we use money without loving money? Through being content with what you have. Do you have modest food and clothing? Then, in an important sense, you can be content, as Paul says in 1 Timothy 6:8: “If we have food and clothing, with these we will be content.” That’s enough; it’s sufficient.

But then Hebrews gives us this remarkable personal reason to be content in the last part of verse 5: “For he has said, ‘I will never leave you nor forsake you.’” In other words, don’t just be content with what you have, but with whom you have! Have another Love — a bigger one, a deeper one, a love that relativizes the pull of money on your heart. In Jesus Christ, we have God. If you have Jesus, you have God himself as your great possession. And he says he will never leave nor forsake you. If you have God, what more could you need? To have God is to have everything you ultimately need. The clock is ticking on every material possession and dollar.

Verse 5 gets right to the bottom of this chapter, to the joy and pleasantness and blessedness that upholds and energizes this whole practical vision: in Jesus, God will never leave us nor forsake us. As long as you don’t abandon Jesus, God will not abandon you (and he works in us so that we won’t abandon Jesus, Hebrews 13:21). “So we can confidently say, ‘The Lord is my helper; I will not fear; what can man do to me?’” Which relates not only to verse 5 but also to verses 1–3.

3. We love and serve others.

We could say so much under this heading about these verses. For now, let me just address this in sum.

Joy in Jesus does not lead to turning in on ourselves, to isolating ourselves and neglecting the needs of others, or to just sitting around endlessly by ourselves enjoying the glory of Christ. Rather, being pleased with his pleasantness leads to our wanting to please others with his pleasantness. Or, we might say, from our fullness of joy in Jesus, we do good for others; we share; we love. Verses 1–3 and 16:

Let brotherly love continue. Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for thereby some have entertained angels unawares. Remember those who are in prison, as though in prison with them, and those who are mistreated, since you also are in the body. . . . Do not neglect to do good and to share what you have, for such sacrifices are pleasing to God.

4. We prize marriage.

So, there are four kinds of love in verses 1–4: brother-love, stranger-love, sympathy (or compassion), and marital love. And let me just say, verse 4 is for all of us. It says, “among all.” This is relevant for all, married and single, old and young. And so, ask yourself, What does this mean for me? How do I hold marriage in honor? Are there ways in which I’m tempted to not hold marriage in honor? What’s your heart’s default perspective on marriage? Salvation? Fear of commitment? Pain? Annoyance? Verse 4:

Let marriage be held in honor among all, and let the marriage bed be undefiled, for God will judge the sexually immoral and adulterous.

First, let’s be clear about the second half of verse 4 — in case what was once obvious for all Christians may no longer be so among some. Earlier this year, a congresswoman from South Carolina, who professes to be a Christian, made a few comments from the podium, at a Christian prayer breakfast, about her live-in fiancé that made it clear they were sexually immoral. She was joking about it, totally clueless about verse 4.

So, let there be no confusion here about verse 4. If there was any confusion about it, be confused no more. We have come to verse 4. And it’s not the first time we’ve seen this Hebrews. In 12:15–16, we are given several “see to its.” The third one is, “See to it . . . that no one is sexually immoral” (same word, pornos).

But I want to linger over the first part of verse 4, which is an even higher bar of application for each of us. The first part includes the second part and more: “Let marriage be held in honor among all.” So, ask yourself, What would it mean for me to hold marriage in honor?

And to get even more specific, the word translated honor here is typically understood in a more affectionate way: highly valued, or prized, or precious. Like 1 Peter 1:19: “the precious blood of Christ.” Or 2 Peter 1:4: “He has granted to us his precious and very great promises.”

So, hear verse 4 like this: “Let marriage be precious among all.” Let it be highly valued. Let it be prized. Among husbands and wives. Among unmarried and widows. Among children and teens. And this doesn’t entail any devaluing of singles or widows or children. So, consider how you talk about marriage. Is it the butt of jokes? The old ball and chain? Most comedy routines have a section on marriage, and men and women. I get it. Some of it can be funny, and a way of enjoying God’s plainly different design in men and women. And some of it reveals a heart that does not highly value marriage and does not shape us, as we laugh, to highly value marriage.

We honor marriage and God’s idea and design by prizing it in our minds and hearts and words and obedience.

5. We seek the better city.

This may be the most countercultural of all, especially in a day when our world is so focused on “the immanent frame” — that is, what we can see and hear and touch and smell and taste.

Verse 14 is not the first mention of city in chapters 11 and 12. We have already heard about looking to the city to come:

11:10: Abraham “was looking forward to the city that has foundations, whose designer and builder is God.”
11:14–16: “People who speak thus [acknowledging they are strangers and exiles] make it clear that they are seeking a homeland. . . . They desire a better country, that is, a heavenly one.”
Then the seven glories of Mount Zion that are not only to come but also already ours, in some sense, by faith — 12:22: “You have come to Mount Zion and to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem.”
Then 13:14: “Here we have no lasting city, but we seek the city that is to come.”

There is, in Christianity, a principled liberation from the immanent frame, from this world. Clearly that doesn’t mean we don’t love each other and love strangers and show sympathy to the mistreated and prize marriage. We don’t neglect to do good or share what we have — such sacrifices are pleasing to God. But in it all, above it all, beneath it all, we are not finally at home here — which frees us to love and serve our earthly city and neighbors. We seek the city that is to come. “Our citizenship is in heaven,” Paul says in Philippians 3:20.

This is such an important reminder as 2023 draws to a close, because next year is 2024. And 2024 is an election year in this country. And in an election year, some otherwise seemingly sober-minded people lose their heads. But as we orient on our here-and-now city (the polis, and its politics), Christians, in principle, are those who say, “Here we have no lasting city. We seek the better city, the heavenly city that is to come” — which frees us to love and serve here, and not “get ours” here and now.

Which leaves verses 7 and 17.

6. We thank God and pray for our leaders.

Again, we find a very different approach than what’s on offer and assumed in the world regarding leaders. First, verse 17:

Obey your leaders and submit to them, for they are keeping watch over your souls, as those who will have to give an account. Let them do this with joy and not with groaning, for that would be of no advantage to you.

So, we might say, the pursuit of joy is critical in a healthy dynamic between church leaders and their people.

Here’s how it works: first, Christian leaders aspire to the office and desire good work (1 Timothy 3:1). They want to do it. From joy, they set out in joy, to work for the people’s joy in Jesus. So, they seek to persuade the people, convince them, and win their hearts with the word of God. They do not demand raw obedience.

“Obey” here comes from a word (Greek pethō) that typically means to convince, or persuade, or make confident, or win trust. This is essentially what it means in its three other uses in Hebrews, including the next verse: “Pray for us, for we are sure [convinced, confident, persuaded] that we have a clear conscience” (Hebrews 13:18; also 2:13 and 6:9).

Second, then, the people, if they are spiritually healthy, want to be led by worthy leaders. They’re eager to be taught, eager to be persuaded from the word, eager to be convinced. They have a disposition to yield to and receive worthy leadership, and being so won, they gladly submit — that is, congregants to the leaders (plural, together; we are not here talking about the gathered body in a congregational meeting, or congregants to individual elders in informal contexts). And in this disposition, wise Christians know that it will be to their own advantage and gain if their leaders labor with joy and not with groaning. This doesn’t mean that it’s the church’s job to make the pastors happy. And it also means it’s not the church’s job to make the pastors miserable.

The healthiest dynamic in the church is leaders that don’t presume submission but seek to persuade and win the congregation from the heart, and a congregation that isn’t just willing, but eager, to be led and persuaded by the leadership.

Yesterday and Today

Verse 17 relates to present leaders; verse 7 to past leaders. We finish with verse 7:

Remember your leaders, those who spoke to you the word of God. Consider the outcome of their way of life, and imitate their faith.

He says “your leaders” spoke to you God’s word. In Christianity, good leaders teach, and good teachers, in time, come to lead. The authority for Christian leadership comes from the Word — from Jesus, his gospel, the Scriptures — not ourselves or elsewhere. We are people of the Book; our leaders are to be men of the Book, who teach and lead from the Book.

And their words and their way of life go together: they not only speak the word but model a way of life, and a way of finishing their course, that validates their words. Words and way belong together. Words give meaning to way of life. And way of life models and confirms words.

But Hebrews doesn’t say to imitate their “way of life.” Rather, “imitate their faith.” Remember that these are past leaders, not present. A new generation has come, with its own challenges. The new generation encounters (slightly) different circumstances and contexts than those before them (times do change, though it’s easy to over-anticipate this and overstate it). Situations change, and the particular expressions of love required may vary, but imitate their faith. Why? Because faith focuses on its object — who is the same yesterday and today.

So above all, imitate this about your leaders: they followed Jesus. They leaned on him, trusted him, looked to him, and staked everything on him. And Jesus proved himself reliable and steady and trustworthy to them. And so he will be to us. From one generation to the next to the next. He is the same yesterday (for those who came before us) and today (for us).

On its own, sameness is not glorious. Satan is the father of lies and has always been the father of lies. That sameness is a disgrace, not glorious. But if someone tells the truth, and is the Truth, then his enduring “sameness” accentuates and sweetens the glory of truth-telling.

And when someone — namely, Jesus — is better than any standard of comparison, the question remains, Will that change? He may have proven himself to be enough for the generation before us. But will he be enough for us? To that, Hebrews says he is the same yesterday and today — gloriously the same, constant, steady, immutable, unchangeable. And then he adds, and forever. To the ages. In every generation to come.

What’s underneath this whole chapter is that Jesus is better (as Hebrews has argued) and that will not change. He is not only better right now. He will always be better. He will not lose his better-ness, and so we will not lose our grounds for joy, for being pleased in God, and living to please him.

And so we come to the Table.

Feed at the Altar

Verse 10 mentions an altar: “We have an altar from which those who serve the tent [the priests of the old covenant] have no right to eat.” This altar is not first and foremost the Lord’s Table, as if Hebrews is saying, the Jews have their food, and we have ours.

When verse 10 says, “We have an altar,” it means the sacrifice and blood of Jesus. He is our altar. He died to make us holy and happy. We are not strengthened by ritual foods, but our hearts are strengthened by grace (Hebrews 13:9). And this Table is an expression and application of the true altar that is the cross of Christ and his body and blood.

When I first began at Desiring God, a monitor hung on a wall in the office. Of many other useful functions, it showed our staff how many people were on the website in real time. If you looked at the smaller type at the bottom, you could see how many users were on particular pages. So, for a new article published that morning, you might look over and see a few hundred people on the page. You could watch the numbers rise as the article spread, and see it top out a few hours later, and begin its slow decline.

Over time, that monitor, like Sauron’s lidless eye, came to stare at me. I watched as some of my articles were shot down mid-flight. By afternoon, the article dipped into the dozens. The warm tingle would wash over me: insecurity. I worked hard on that article. I thought more people would read it. Is this really God’s call on my life?

I remember resonating with Shakespeare when he described man as not being able to feel what he owns, but by reflection (Troilus and Cressida, 3.3.99). He meant that a man could not know himself to be what he thought himself to be unless others acknowledged it. Was I any good? I could only know by reflection. Warm admiration or high numbers on a screen needed to tell me so. If a writer publishes an article, but it doesn’t receive any compliments, was it even worth writing? The temptation begins to creep in: Will they be impressed? Will it be good enough to be envied?

That screen not only showed me my own numbers, but others’. I’m sure you can imagine the temptation: Dashboard, dashboard on the wall, who’s the fairest of them all? Though not all writers, we all know the enticement, don’t we? They may track different stats, but we each have our monitors.

Sickly Eye

What is envy?

Envy: The favorite son of pride, the dark appetite that turns allies into enemies and angels into demons.

Envy: The rival moon unable to share the sky with the sun, for fear to discover itself to be the lesser light.

Envy: The genesis of human murder, a sin of which Abel’s blood still speaks.

Envy: The disease that festers with God’s blessings . . . given to others.

Envy: That bitter wind that chills the king’s throne, even after victory, as it hears the singing in the streets, “Saul has slain his thousands, and David his ten thousands” (1 Samuel 18:7 NASB).

When Pride heard that song, the text tells us, “Saul eyed David from that day on” (1 Samuel 18:9). The bloodshot eye set on others’ successes, the inward grimace when others are better noticed, better complimented, or (you hate to admit it) simply better than you at the thing that you’re good at. Do you know that sickly eye that looks down upon brothers, spear in hand, and thinks, I will pin David to the wall? We all have our javelins. We have our ways of explaining why our rivals aren’t really that talented or wonderful or beautiful or godly at all.

Envy, the bewitchment that bids a man kill his brother or a man his God: “Do you want me to release for you the King of the Jews?” Pilate once asked. “For he perceived that it was out of envy that the chief priests had delivered him up” (Mark 15:9–10).

Wisdom of Demons

It was during that season of temptation that God gave me grace to do what my flesh protested: I took a brother aside one day and confessed to him my temptations to envy him and his recent success. It was a humbling, embarrassing, sin-slaying light. Are you tempted to envy anyone close to you? Consider confessing the temptation to them that you might war together against this demonic wisdom.

“Demonic” is no hyperbole. The apostle James writes, “If you have bitter jealousy and selfish ambition in your hearts, do not boast and be false to the truth. This is not the wisdom that comes down from above, but is earthly, unspiritual, demonic” (James 3:14–15).

How do we resist? To answer, I want to bring in C.S. Lewis’s fictional demon, Screwtape, to help us, not with the diagnostic (in which Lewis excels), but to guide us to a cure. In letter 14 of The Screwtape Letters, the demon writes to his nephew,

The Enemy wants to bring the man to a state of mind in which he could design the best cathedral in the world, and know it to be the best, and rejoice in the fact, without being any more (or less) or otherwise glad at having done it than he would be if it had been done by another. The Enemy wants him, in the end, to be so free from any bias in his own favor that he can rejoice in his own talents as frankly and gratefully as in his neighbor’s talents — or in a sunrise, an elephant, or a waterfall. (71)

Don’t you want that kind of heart? The kind that says with Moses, whatever your particular giftings, “Oh, that all were prophets!” (see Numbers 11:29). Or, “Oh, that all were mature mothers, powerful preachers, resourceful men living to the glory of God!” To be like Paul, so about his Master’s business that he remarks of jealous ministers,

Some indeed preach Christ from envy and rivalry, but others from good will. . . . The former proclaim Christ out of selfish ambition, not sincerely but thinking to afflict me in my imprisonment. What then? [Only that in every way they should be silenced? Only that in every way God would curse their ministries?] Only that in every way, whether in pretense or in truth, Christ is proclaimed, and in that I rejoice. (Philippians 1:15–18)

O Lord, give us hearts like this.

Doctrine of Given Gifts

Screwtape goes on to highlight a doctrine that God has used in my life to bring down the monitors from the walls of my heart.

The Enemy will also try to render real in the patient’s mind a doctrine which they all profess but find it difficult to bring home to their feelings — the doctrine that they did not create themselves, that their talents were given them, and that they might as well be proud of the color of their hair. (72)

They might as well be proud of the color of their hair. Fellow Christians, your gifts — are you ready? — are gifts. You only and always exercise gifts from God — and that for the building up of others. Whenever you begin to think that you really are something after all, ask Paul’s question, “What do you have that you did not receive? If then you received it, why do you boast as if you did not receive it?” (1 Corinthians 4:7).

Engraved over our best successes, our best works, our best moments will be two words: Things Received. Or one word: Grace. This doctrine frees us to live in community with others more (and less) talented than we are, and — dare I say — even celebrate the achievements of others.

Brooms to Sweep the Floor

John the Baptist is such a good example for us. His disciples tempted him toward envy: “Rabbi, he who was with you across the Jordan, to whom you bore witness — look, he is baptizing, and all are going to him” (John 3:26). What is the first thing out of his mouth? “A person cannot receive even one thing unless it is given him from heaven” (John 3:27).

Let me share with you a poem I wrote a decade ago, meditating on this scene between John and his disciples:

Disciples

Rabbi, I have news to tell,I’m afraid you will not take it well,Another brother has set sailTo the man across the way.

You said he’d take our sin away,But our brothers, night and day?I wonder what you have to say,Should he now rise to reign?

On the other shore he now remainsAre both baptisms just the same?Is ‘Baptist’ also in his name?We wait for your reply. . . .

John

A man cannot receive but from on High,His sandals, I still dare not untie,My question for you is simply whyAre you still with me upon this shore?

He who comes after me ranks before.I baptize with water, nothing more.I am but the broom to sweep the floor,Before the King comes in.

Behold, the One of David’s kin,The Bridegroom with his Bride to win,The Lamb who takes away your sin,And heals all our disease.

He who buckles sinner’s knees,Has not the Spirit in degrees,The One of whom the Father’s pleased,And all creation hails.

It’s not as though the mission fails,When the Master over the slave prevails.All disciples set your sails,To the One across the way!

He must increase; we must decrease. Our talents are given us for Christ. We are but brooms to sweep the floor before the King comes again.

The Puritans, at their best, cultivated a communion with the living God that flowed naturally into prayer. Moreover, as Christlike pastors, they prayed Christlike prayers, reflecting the desires and priorities of their Savior for his people.

In learning prayer from the Puritans, we are not seeking to become mere mimics. We do not live in the seventeenth century; we may not live in those places where the Puritans walked. We are not trying to simply ape their vocabulary and the cadence of their intercessions. At the same time, we do want to understand how they prayed — from pulpits and in prisons, among their families, and in their churches. It is not carnal to ask, “Teach us to pray” (Luke 11:1). We learn well by listening to those who pray well, not with empty eloquence but with heavenly fervor.

As we listen to Puritan and Puritanesque praying, putting our ears to their doors, what do we hear? What can we seek to imitate?

Pray with Intelligence

We hear, first of all, intelligence. I do not mean that their prayers sounded clever, displayed their academic learning, or impressed with their oratory and vocabulary. I mean that they prayed from true knowledge.

First, they possessed a knowledge of God — an experiential and affectionate knowledge of their God and Father. Have you ever heard someone pray who walks with God, who is accustomed to communion with him, who knows what it is to be in the presence of the Almighty and returns there by familiar paths? I have sat stunned as a praying man seems to take me by the hand and lead me with him into the presence of God. That cannot be manufactured.

In addition, the Puritans show intelligence in their thinking about prayer. The Westminster Catechisms define prayer like this: “Prayer is an offering up of our desires unto God, for things agreeable to his will, in the name of Christ, with confession of our sins, and thankful acknowledgment of his mercies.” A succession of further questions delves into the nature of prayer.

John Bunyan wrote a treatise exploring this definition: “Prayer is a sincere, sensible, affectionate pouring out of the heart or soul to God, through Christ, in the strength and assistance of the Holy Spirit, for such things as God hath promised, or according to the Word, for the good of the church, with submission, in faith, to the will of God” (Prayer, 13).

William Gurnall said that “prayer is called a ‘pouring out of the soul to God.’ The soul is the well, from which the water of prayer is poured; but the Spirit is the spring that feeds, and the hand that helps to pour it forth; the well would have no water without the spring, neither could it deliver itself without one to draw it” (The Christian in Complete Armour, 467).

Puritans distinguished between public and family and private prayer; between personal and pastoral intercession; between regular habits of prayer, special seasons of prayer, and sudden cries in prayer; between feeble, faithful, and fervent prayer. They argued about scripted prayers as opposed to extemporaneous prayers. They did this not to bewilder or confound, but because they wanted to honor God in their praying. So, they studied the spirit and substance of true prayer according to God’s revelation.

Pray with Reverence and Confidence

The Puritans’ knowledge of God led them to pray also with reverence. Puritans knew that they approached a high and holy God. Like the publican in the temple, they were conscious that sinners like them could approach the throne of the Almighty only through the blood of sacrifice.

In Thomas Cobbet’s language, “No sooner do the saints essay to draw near unto God, than the beams of the glory of God reflect upon their souls, which do thus awe and abase them; they see in the glass of that excellency their own vileness” (Gospel Incense, 212). This is true humility, a profound awareness that coming to God under the terms of the new covenant does not in any way diminish a sense of his holiness but rather enhances it (Hebrews 12:22–29). They realized that nothing but the blood of Jesus could open a way for sinners to come to the God of light.

But such reverence is matched by confidence. Alongside that holy fear was a holy familiarity. Because Puritans came to God by Christ, they had “confidence to enter the holy places by the blood of Jesus, by the new and living way that he opened for us through the curtain, that is, through his flesh.” And having “a great priest over the house of God,” they drew near “with a true heart in full assurance of faith” — their “hearts sprinkled clean from an evil conscience and [their] bodies washed with pure water” (Hebrews 10:19–22).

Trusting in Christ for their reception, and assured that they were accepted in the Beloved, the Puritans came to their Father in heaven, crying out to him as beloved sons, in tones at once intimate and expectant: “Let us . . . with confidence draw near to the throne of grace, that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need” (Hebrews 4:16). For them, the promises of Luke 11:9–13 were no empty rhetoric, but the very basis on which they came with large petitions.

They loved to speak of coming to a throne of grace, to the mercy seat where God both displays and dispenses his favor to those who come in faith: “As long as God hath a mind to give mercy and grace, as long as any of the children of men are sensibly needy of grace and mercy, and askers and receivers thereof from the Lord, (and that will be till the heavens be no more), this throne of grace will be plied and praised” (The Works of Robert Traill, 1:14).

Pray with Substance

When they came to the throne of grace, we also hear the substance of Puritan prayers. Several collections of prayers by the Puritans and others of their spirit demonstrate this substance (for example, The Valley of Vision, Piercing Heaven, The Pastor in Prayer, or Into His Presence).

It is one thing to theorize about the Puritans at prayer; it is another to read them teaching and preaching about praying; it is something else altogether to lurk at their shoulder as they approach God on behalf of his people. One is tempted to say, “If this is how they spoke with the Lord in public, what must have been their communion with him in private?” These are men who deal with God, who plead the promises of Scripture, who wrestle with a tenacity learned from Jacob (Genesis 32:28), with a humility and dignity that has something of Christ himself about it.

If you read a prayer like Daniel’s in chapter 9 of his history and prophecy, you see the whole woven together from strands drawn from previous revelation. The Puritans do likewise. Their prayers, therefore, reflect divine priorities and concerns. Such scriptural substance gives their intercessions richness and depth, and underscores their confidence because they are asking for what God has already promised.

Some Puritans offered helps for prayer, sometimes culling Scripture (or, at least, “bibline”) phrases from the word of God to supply the saints with appropriate vehicles for their wants and needs, their praises and their pleas (such as Matthew Henry’s A Method for Prayer). They loved the Psalms and similar portions of Scripture as fruitful expressions of a praying heart; they explored the recorded prayers of Christ and his apostles. This scriptural familiarity gave their prayers at once a glorious variety (for they plucked their flowers from the whole field of revelation) and a delightful simplicity (for the language they used — while of its time — is earthy and potent). They drive straight at the mercy seat, echoing God’s word back to him.

To the Throne of Grace

Without wishing or needing to become anachronistic mimics, the Puritans can teach us to pray. They teach us what prayer is, to consider it intelligently, to engage in it reverently, to pursue it confidently, and to deal with God substantially.

At root, if you had asked a Puritan how to pray, I suspect they would have said to study God in Christ. Why? Because when we thus perceive God by faith, we become praying people. The spirit and substance of our prayers should be conditioned by our coming through the gracious Spirit by the beloved Son to the almighty Father, seated on a throne of grace. Here we arrive at the very heart of true prayer, and here we begin all true eloquence.

Audio Transcript

Our culture talks a lot about bucket lists: doing things, experiencing things, achieving things before the clock of life runs out. Mainly, it’s used to talk about travel, places to see, places to go. So, what about Christians talking about bucket lists?

That’s the question from a listener named Christine: “Pastor John, hello. Recently, you wrote this on Twitter: ‘Retirees pack in their bucket list quick before they die as if there is no glorious resurrection, no new earth, no wonders of the new world, no presence of Christ to sweeten every venture in eternity. It is a very strange way for Christians to act in a world of desperate need.’ That’s poignant.

“I feel this pressure as a twenty-year-old woman. All my friends have bucket lists, too, for places to see and travel to before they get married and have kids. I’ll admit I’m tempted here, to get all my adventuring in now. It’s not just a retiree temptation. Can you further unpack this point for me? It seems tied to your themes of not wasting our lives and ‘anti-retirement.’ But how do you balance this eternal hope for the next life while taking and enjoying vacations with your family in this life?”

Let me clarify at the outset that, yes, I am on a little crusade to motivate Christians over the age of 65 (and those who are planning to be over the age of 65 someday) not to waste their remaining healthy lives in bondage to the worldly mindset that earthly adventures are to be packed into our final years, as though on the other side of death, just a few years away, the adventures with Jesus will not be a thousand times better. Instead, they will probably be enhanced if we spend our final healthy years here serving other people rather than chasing earthly excitements.

I don’t know how you can read and believe the Bible and look at this pervasively broken, suffering world, this lost world, and think otherwise. I really don’t. Baby boomers, my generation — I’m the oldest baby boomer, just eleven days short (my birthday is January 11, 1946) — baby boomers own half of the nation’s $156 trillion in assets. Seventy-five million American boomers are expected to be retiring or to have retired seven years from now — all of us, more or less, retired by 2030.

And about 28 percent of those 75 million boomers call themselves evangelical Christians. That’s about 21 million people. If we had the will, we could finish the Great Commission before we were off the scene, both by hundreds of thousands of us going and by billions of dollars being given to send others to the least-reached peoples of the world.

So, maybe you can see why I am on a crusade to say to Christians, “Don’t waste your final two decades chasing earthly excitements when excitements a thousand times better await you just over the horizon of this life.” That would be like a person on the way to inherit a million dollars spending the last mile picking up shiny pennies. It seems to me that it would make a lot more sense to spend the last mile emptying your pockets for lost and needy people.

Focus on Mindset

Now, I know Christine did not ask me about what I’ve just talked about — namely, the retiree. She asked me about twentysomethings who have bucket lists of adventures to pack in before they get married. And then more generally, she asks about the relationship between eternal hope and family vacations.

“Death is not the end of your bucket list. It’s the beginning.”

The reason I have spent half my time now talking about the final twenty years of life is because I think if I could win over some of the Christian twentysomethings to this way of thinking about future decades, then it would inevitably have a powerful impact on their present decade. It would. The reason people waste the last decades of their lives is because the world has taught them to for the previous sixty years, including their twenties.

So, I would say the same thing about globe-trotting at age 25 as I do at age 65: Is the mindset governing this way of life a biblical mindset? That’s the question. “Is it a biblical mindset?” is a different question than whether it’s right to take a family vacation or whether it’s right to buy your rail pass and spend the summer after college visiting every country in Europe. Both of those decisions may be right. The question is, What’s your mindset? Is it biblical?

That’s a different question, because we can’t spend every hour of every day or every day of every year in focused, productive, valid work, whether in Christian ministry or some other vocation. It is biblical and wise to build respite, rest, from work into our lives, both for the sake of recreation and for the sake of legitimate enjoyment of God’s world. Those two impulses are very different from a worldly mindset that is oblivious to the needs of the world, the shortness of life, the joys of service, and the preciousness of the glory of Christ.

Not only is respite from work wise and biblical, so that vacations and days off are totally legitimate, but the adventures themselves — the ones you might do during those times when you’re not working — the adventures themselves need not be merely self-gratifying.

For radically Christ-exalting Christians, adventures (whether in your twenties or seventies) won’t be conceived merely as checking off earthly excitements before you marry or before you die. These adventures will be conceived as adventures with God — on the lookout for his handiwork and his glory, eager to build experiences into our lives for greater usefulness in Christ’s cause, eager to approach every amazement worshipfully, eager to cross paths with people providentially placed there for you to bless.

So, my main desire for twentysomethings and seventysomethings is that they think like the Bible and not like the world, that they think God’s thoughts more than man’s thoughts, that they look at the world through a biblical lens. This would include at least these seven perspectives, which I’ll just name.

Seven Ways to Think God’s Thoughts

1. God “has delivered us from the domain of darkness and transferred us to the kingdom of his beloved Son” (Colossians 1:13). Therefore, we are sojourners and exiles here.

2. This earth is not our home. “Our citizenship is in heaven” (Philippians 3:20).

3. Life is a vapor, with many troubles here, and eternity is endless, with no trouble there — only joy (James 4:14; Psalm 16:11).

4. We are called to have a healthy, heavenly mindset, having our priorities and desires shaped by things that are above, things that are unseen, things that are eternal (2 Corinthians 4:18).

5. “To live is Christ, and to die is gain” (Philippians 1:21) — far more gain than anything obtained on earth. Death is not a threat to happiness. You don’t need to squeeze happiness in here because death is coming. That’s ridiculous — I mean, ridiculous. Death is not a threat to happiness. It’s the door to happiness. It’s not the end of your bucket list. It’s the beginning. Come on, we’re Christians.

6. Many people are lost, broken, and more important to help than places are to visit (Galatians 6:10).

7. Finally, life exists, old and young, for the sake of Christ, to make him look supremely valuable (Philippians 1:20). “Only one life, ’twill soon be past; only what’s done for Christ will last.”

I think if we embrace these seven biblical perspectives, God will show us how to use our earthly early and later years.

Dear older saint, I need to join you in the fight against the fears of aging, and to do so by faith in future grace. There are five fears that we will likely walk through together. God has given us antidotes for each in his word. These antidotes work through faith, and without faith they won’t work. But by faith they will work, and fear will be overcome, and we will go to be with Jesus in due time without walking in fear during our last season. That’s my confidence.

Let me first give a word about future grace. I picture the Christian life as a stream of divine grace flowing to me from the future. I’m walking into it. It flows over the waterfall of the present into a reservoir of the past. The reservoir is getting bigger and bigger, which means our thankfulness as we look back should be getting bigger and bigger. So, what’s the disposition of our hearts as we look out over that stream toward the future and that reservoir in the past? The answer is gratitude as we look back and faith as we look forward. That’s why I’m calling it faith in future grace.

By future, I mean the future five minutes from now, when you finish reading this, and the future 5,000 years from now. Grace will be arriving moment by moment as the sustaining power from God — free and gracious. So, in the future of these next five minutes, you’re going to sit there reading, being held and sustained by grace. It’s coming to you moment by moment, and we’re called to bank on it — to trust that God will keep supplying it, forever.

1. The Fear of Being Alone

Maybe you’ve lost your spouse, or you’ve been single all your life. Maybe singleness has been fine, but singleness is not looking as great when you’re outliving all your friends. Maybe you start to wonder, “Is anybody going to remember me?” Jesus says, “Behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age” (Matthew 28:20). I think “always” is even more important than the phrase “to the end of the age.” It’s one thing to say he’ll be with us to the end of the age; it’s another for him to say, “I’ll be with you every minute of your life.”

John Paton was a missionary to what’s now Vanuatu. He was driven up into a tree as 1,300 aboriginal natives were trying to kill him. As they were beneath him, he laid hold of the promise of Matthew 28:18, 20, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. . . . I am with you always.” And here’s what he wrote later — because he survived:

Without that abiding consciousness of the presence and power of my dear Lord and Savior, nothing else in all the world could have preserved me from losing my reason and perishing miserably. His words, “Lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world,” became to me so real that it would not have startled me to behold him, as Stephen did, gazing down upon the scene. I felt his supporting power. . . . It is the sober truth, and it comes back to me sweetly after 20 years, that I had my nearest and dearest glimpses of the face and smiles of my blessed Lord Jesus in those dread moments when musket, club, or spear was being leveled at my life. (John G. Paton, 342)

He will be there for you. I don’t want to create the impression that you should discount human people in your life. God made us a church. You shouldn’t have to live by yourself with nobody caring for you. That would be a failure of the community of Christians, and we should work at resisting that failure. So, I exhort you: While you can, look around, and see who’s alone. While you can, be there for others.

2. The Fear of Being Useless

I’m a man, so I am thinking mainly of men here. Ralph Winter said, “Men don’t die of old age in America. They die of retirement.” Built into men’s souls is the need to be productive. I’m sure that’s true of women in different ways, but I’m thinking of men right now. A man who loses his sense of productivity, usefulness, and accomplishment is running the risk of losing his entire identity and reason for being.

During the Olympics in 1992, I preached on “Olympic Spirituality,” comparing the Games with Paul’s language of running and fighting and boxing and wrestling. The next day, I was told that Elsie Viren, an aged member of our church, was in the hospital, dying. I had been saying, “Come on — let’s fight.” Realizing that Elsie would probably never get out of bed, I asked, “How does Elsie, probably ninety-plus years old and dying, do that?” I wrote an article called “How Can Elsie Run?” in the Bethlehem Star (our church’s newsletter), in which I asked, “What does her marathon look like right now?”

The key verses are 2 Timothy 4:6–7, “I am already being poured out as a drink offering” — yes, she was. She had served the church faithfully for 62 years. Then Paul says, “and the time of my departure has come. I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith.” When Paul ends by saying, “I have kept the faith,” he’s interpreting the first two phrases, about fighting and finishing. So, what does Elsie’s marathon look like? The answer is believe. Believe him. Trust him. Rest in him. Don’t let Satan win this battle to destroy your faith.

So, believing is the way to fight the fear of uselessness. Is it not amazing that Paul says in Ephesians 6:8, “[We know] that whatever good anyone does, this he will receive back from the Lord”? He says, “Whatever good . . .” Picture the smallest, most hidden good deed you can do this afternoon. It may be some simple good that nobody knows about. At the end of this age, you will receive your reward for every good deed. That’s useful. You’re useful. The smallest thing is eternally significant.

Or consider Philippians 1:20–21, “It is my eager expectation and hope that I will not be at all ashamed, but that with full courage now as always Christ will be honored in my body, whether by life or by death. For to me to live is Christ, and to die is gain.” Paul considers the possibility that his next appointment is death. Someone might say, “Are you telling me, pastor, that there’s usefulness in the next three days before I die? I can be useful? I have a tube down my throat.”

And the answer is that Paul said his aim was that Christ be magnified by his death. Over the next three days, there is a way for you to die that magnifies Jesus — or not. And here’s the way to do it: Die like Paul did. Die like death is gain.

3. The Fear of Affliction

Affliction, in the purposeful hand of God, has effects now in this life, and after death. It is never meaningless. It is never without God’s merciful design for our good. Romans 5:3–5 describes the effect of affliction while we live.

We rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.

Our mindset with regard to suffering and affliction and pain should be this: “This affliction is doing something good in me and for me and through me. It’s making me a kind of person.” That’s what that text teaches.

But what about when the hour of death arrives and that doesn’t make sense anymore because there is no time left for me to grow in character building? My death is hours away. You might think, “I’m not going to be alive to show anybody my character tomorrow. I’m going to be dead at six o’clock, and it’s now noon. I’ve heard all these arguments for how suffering can be turned for good, but I don’t understand the point of the next six hours because I’ll be gone after that.”

Second Corinthians 4:16–17 is very precious to me at that very point. See if you see what I see: “We do not lose heart. Though our outer self is wasting away, our inner self is being renewed day by day. For this light momentary affliction [by that he means a lifetime of affliction] is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison.” This affliction is preparing, bringing about, producing “for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison.” These last hours of suffering will have an effect for my good beyond the grave.

Let’s say I’m at a hospital bedside, and the sick person knows he has maybe one day at the most. He says, “Pastor, it hurts. It hurts. What’s the point?” I answer, “As God gives you the grace to endure to the end without cursing him, resting in him as much as you can, these next twenty hours are going to make a massive, precious difference in the weight of the glory you experience on the other side. These hours are not pointless.”

I really believe that. They are not pointless. True, they won’t make your character here shine because you are going to be gone. There will be no character on earth left to shine. But as soon as you cross that line between now and eternity, in some way God is going to show you why those twenty hours were what they were, and what they did for you. That’s good news.

4. The Fear of Failing Faith

By failing faith, I mean, “God, am I going to make it? I am so embattled, and doubts come. I have horrible thoughts.”

Consider one of the most magnificent ladies in Bethlehem Baptist Church when I became pastor there. She was a prayer warrior, and everybody probably would have said she was the most godly woman in the church. She is in heaven now.

I was with her as she was dying in the hospital. Her tongue was black like a cinder. I walked into the room, and she was trembling. She took my hand. She said, “Pastor John, they come, and they dance around my bed. They dance around my bed, and they’re taking their clothes off.” She was describing horrible things. It was so unlike her. She was being harassed by the devil. An old, godly saint was being harassed by the devil as she died. That taught me something as a young pastor: the battle is never over. I used to think that as you lived a faithful and godly life, you became more free from terrible attacks of the evil one. That’s not true.

So, in horrible moments like those, Philippians 3:12 has been a favorite verse for me: “Not that I have already obtained this or am already perfect, but I press on to make it my own, because Christ Jesus has made me his own.” Here I am, pressing on: “I want you, Jesus. I want to make it through death as a believer and not commit apostasy and throw you away. I want you, and I want to make it.” And he reminds me, “The only reason you’re reaching out for me is because I have hold of you.” The only reason you want Jesus is because he laid hold of you. You wouldn’t otherwise reach out so passionately for him.

One of the greatest doxologies in the Bible says, “Now to him who is able to keep you from stumbling and to present you blameless before the presence of his glory with great joy, to the only God, our Savior, through Jesus Christ our Lord, be glory, majesty, dominion, and authority, before all time and now and forever” (Jude 24–25). That passage is all built on the fact that he keeps us. One of the more recent worship songs that speaks powerfully to this fear of failing faith is “He Will Hold Me Fast.” “He will hold me fast, for my Savior loves me so. He will hold me fast.” I love this song.

5. The Fear of Death

Here’s a little glimpse into my life. I sleep on my side because I can’t sleep on my back. I lie there on my back, saying, “Oh, this feels so good. I wish I could go to sleep like this,” but I never do. So I finally turn on my side, and I imagine the Lord saying to me as I dose off, “John Piper, I did not destine you for wrath, but to obtain salvation through the Lord Jesus Christ, who died for you so that whether you wake or sleep, you will live with him” (1 Thessalonians 5:9–10). Almost every night I say that. No wrath. No wrath! Whether I live or die.

Noël and I bought plots to be buried near our granddaughter. We’re not going back to South Carolina. We’re in Minnesota to die. So up on a hill, we have our plot, and we’ve chosen some stones, and we’ve chosen Bible verses for our stones. And 1 Thessalonians 5:9–10 — those are my verses.

For some reason, for me to have God look me in the eye and say, “I didn’t destine you for wrath. It’s not going to happen. Ever. No wrath. My Son bore the wrath you deserve. If I take your life tonight at 3 AM, it will not be a problem because my Son died for you.” That helps me fall asleep.

I know that in the context “whether you wake or sleep” means whether you are alive when the second coming happens or dead when the second coming happens. But the application to my sleeping or waking now works. He is saying, “Whether you’re awake or asleep (live or die, now or later), you’re going to be alive with me.” And I need that. I can’t go to sleep thinking, What if I die? What if I die? He says, “Not a problem. We’ve got that covered. We took care of that.”

What Would He Not Do?

To end, let me give you what I think is one of the most important verses in the Bible: “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?” (Romans 8:32). This means that if God did the hardest thing in the universe — namely, giving his Son to be tortured and killed — what would he not do for you? That’s the logic, and he states it. He’ll do everything for you. He will give us “all things.” This applies to every promise that we’ve looked at. God’s giving Christ for us guarantees those promises.

Therefore, trust Christ. That’s the issue for us all right now. Do you trust Christ and his purchase of all these promises? Do you trust his word? Trust his promises of ever-arriving future grace. He’ll always be there. Be glad in him. Be freed by this gladness for service, not self. Glorify him by your gladness in him and your service to others. And along with those around you, pray for each other. Help each other to die well and to live well till then.

ABSTRACT: Muslims revere the prophet Muhammad as a foundation of their faith. However, the traditions surrounding him were compiled more than two centuries after his death and do not offer highly credible evidence about the person of history. Furthermore, many nominal Muslims attach a mythical, deified status to the prophet that does not comport with the Islamic faith. Christian sources from the seventh century provide a more accurate, though still incomplete, picture of who he was. By studying the historical figure and his reception in Islam, Christians can be better equipped to engage in fruitful dialogue with Muslim neighbors.

For our ongoing series of feature articles for pastors and Christian leaders, we asked A.S. Ibrahim (PhD, University of Haifa; PhD, Fuller Theological Seminary), professor of Islamic studies and the director of the Jenkins Center for the Christian Understanding of Islam at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, to explain who Muhammad really was and why it is important for Christians to understand him.

Muhammad is the most important human figure for the over 1.8 billion Muslims in the world. They view him as the final prophet sent by their deity, Allah, to proclaim truth and provide guidance to humankind. According to Muslims, Allah revealed his word to humankind through many prophets and messengers throughout history, but the best and ultimate revelation came through Muhammad, whose message surpasses and suppresses earlier revelations.

Islam, as a faith system, has two main foundations, Allah’s word and Allah’s messenger — the Quran and Muhammad, respectively. Muslims say that Allah’s word is perfectly applied by Allah’s final messenger; to comprehend Allah’s word, see it applied in the life of Allah’s prophet. The common factor in these two foundations is Muhammad. He is the vessel of the divine message and the exemplary executor of it. Muhammad is vitally important to all Muslims.

Despite his importance, however, the majority of Muslims have only conventional knowledge about him. Many aspects of his life and teachings remain mysterious to them. The matter is even worse for non-Muslims, who usually lack even the basic details about the man revered by billions. So, where can people go to learn more about Muhammad?

Reliable resources detailing the life of Muhammad are few. Surprisingly, the Quran itself mentions Muhammad by name only four times and does not provide specific details (Q 3:144; 33:40; 47:2; 48:29). Furthermore, the Muslim sources that do provide details about Muhammad’s teachings and deeds have apparent discrepancies and contradictions; they also were all written at least two centuries after his presumed death.

So, what do we actually know about Muhammad? Who was he to his followers and to his contemporaries? Did he really exist? What did he preach? This essay seeks to shed critical light on these questions by considering the Muhammad of tradition, the Muhammad of legend, and the Muhammad of history.

The Muhammad of Tradition

According to Muslim traditions, Muhammad was born in Mecca in 570 and died in Medina in 632. (Both Mecca and Medina are located in today’s Saudi Arabia.) His father, Abdullah, died four months before Muhammad was born. Also according to tradition, several physical signs and cosmic wonders accompanied Muhammad’s advent. Supposedly, his mother, Amina, had no labor pain, and upon his birth, a celestial light emerged in the room.

Furthermore, on the night of his birth in Mecca, a mansion in Persia — about a thousand miles away — shook, and fourteen of its pillars collapsed. Even the holy fire of the land of Persia — which had burned constantly for a millennium — was mysteriously quenched. While these signs may seem like forgeries invented to amplify the status of Muhammad, many Muslims wholeheartedly believe they occurred.

These traditions were authored by Muslim narrators of the Abbasid caliphate, who lived centuries after Muhammad presumably lived. They intended to communicate a picture of Islam’s prophet to Christians and Jews who resided in the conquered lands that turned into an Islamic caliphate. As the Islamic rationale goes, if signs and wonders accompanied the births of the prophets Moses and Jesus, then Muhammad’s birth followed in due course. (This claim, however, may pose a problem because the Quran itself insists that the only miracle Muhammad ever performed was the Quran. See Quran 6:37; 11:12; 13:7; 28:48; 29:50–51.)

Muslim traditions claim that Muhammad was a shepherd and a trader, known among the Meccans as “The Honest” and “The Trustworthy.” A wealthy woman, Khadija, hired him and later loved him and proposed to marry him, although she was fifteen years older than he was. As for his religious journey, traditions claim that Muhammad never adopted the polytheistic worship of his people in Arabia. He always leaned toward worshiping the one true deity, Allah, in contrast to the idol worship of his Meccan relatives at the shrine known as the Ka’ba. Muhammad would seclude himself and go to an isolated mountain in Mecca to meditate and worship Allah.

According to tradition, the angel Gabriel appeared to Muhammad when he was forty and declared that Allah chose him to be a prophet with a clear and unmatched message: Allah is one, and only one. This tradition shows why Islam preaches a strict monotheism — the deity is one, with no plurality and no partners. After initially resisting Allah’s call, Muhammad began preaching Islam only to his Meccan relatives and in secret because he feared retaliation from the Meccan pagans. When some discovered his monotheistic preaching, we are told, they began to persecute him and his handful of followers. The suffering and misery continued for thirteen years, as all those who accepted Islam were persecuted by Meccan idol worshipers.

After those years of persecution, Allah instructed Muhammad and his few followers — about thirty men — to emigrate from Mecca to Medina, a nearby oasis, where they could avoid persecution. There Muhammad grew in power, became a statesman, and began launching military raids and expeditions against three groups: Arab pagans in western Arabia, Jews in Medina and its surroundings, and Christian tribes in the Byzantine frontiers of Greater Syria. Muslim traditions portray Muhammad as a successful military commander, aided by Allah and leading Muslim warriors in raids where he killed infidels, seized lands, grabbed possessions, and extended dominion and power.

Though this militant picture might seem odd in today’s world, it is the portrayal Muslim historians advanced about their prophet. These historians, it seems, desired to depict a prophet clearly supported by the deity — evidenced in accumulated economic gain and political dominion — even if this picture included killing many people and plundering their wealth.

In one of these military expeditions, we are told, a Jewish woman invited Muhammad to a home-cooked meal after he killed her father, brother, and uncle. When Muhammad accepted the invitation, she roasted a lamb but poisoned the meat. This meal was the reason for Muhammad’s death as a martyr — although, we are invited to believe, the poison remained in his blood for four years before he succumbed to its effect.

The Muhammad described here is best viewed as the Muhammad of the Muslim tradition, or simply the traditional Muhammad. He is the Muhammad who lives in the minds of religious Muslims well-versed in Islamic sources. Among this group, the details about Muhammad’s life matter, and they cherish what the tradition says.

However, multitudes of Muslims are not so sophisticated and particular about the details of this portrayal.

The Muhammad of Legend

Whereas the traditional Muhammad derives from ancient Islamic sources — even if the sources were written centuries after Muhammad’s death — the legendary Muhammad derives more from popular imagination and folklore. Many nominal or cultural Muslims hold to the legendary portrait of Muhammad, an ideal portrait in which he is the best in everything. For these Muslims, Islam is usually a cultural identity. They are Muslims because they were born that way, not because they studied Islamic sources.

Many nominal Muslims venerate and revere this legendary Muhammad, sometimes to the extent of worship. While in many cases the legendary Muhammad does not match the traditional portrayal of trusted Muslim sources, cultural Muslims may not pay attention to the differences. Their Muhammad is a mosaic built from three intertwined parts: some ideas from the Quran, some circulated traditions, and ample mystical and mythical elements. In the minds of these cultural Muslims, of course, this Muhammad is not legendary; he is the real Muhammad. He lives; he listens; he sees. He visits homes, heals the sick, and, to some, possesses divine powers. He is simply the best human who ever lived. Many educated Muslims — those who cherish the traditional Muhammad — find numerous elements of the imaginary Muhammad heretical and blasphemous.

From a critical standpoint, neither the Muhammad of tradition nor the Muhammad of legend describes the real Muhammad. Though cherished by many Muslims, the legendary Muhammad exists only in the minds and memories of believers. Similarly, the traditional Muhammad comes from sources far removed from Muhammad’s lifetime and seems to be, to a large extent, the crafting of medieval Muslims who wanted to present their prophet to their communities and to non-Muslims around them.

The Muhammad of History

So, was there a man named Muhammad who lived in seventh-century Arabia and preached a religious message? The answer is yes, all reasonable considerations indicate that there was. We may call this Muhammad the historical Muhammad. We can learn about him from independent sources — sources written by non-Muslims who were contemporary (or nearly contemporary) to his life and career in Arabia. As it turns out, many non-Muslims, mostly Christians, who lived around Arabia in the seventh century were aware of someone named Muhammad. They mostly described him unfavorably. Who was that Muhammad for them?

Some of these non-Muslims depicted Muhammad as a preacher without giving any specifics about his message; others spoke of him as a trader, a shepherd, a warlord who initiated fights, a conquering king, a lawgiver, or a false prophet.1 In particular, Christians who resided near Arabia — some of them eyewitnesses of Muhammad — attempted to understand who the man really was; thus, by relying on their testimonies, we may reconstruct a better picture of the presumed prophet of Islam.2

A seventh-century Greek source, Doctrina Jacobi nuper Baptizati, refers to “the prophet who has appeared with the [Arabs],” identifying him unfavorably: “He is false, for the prophets do not come armed with a sword.”3 Here we find a description of an unnamed false prophet who appeared among the Arabs and was a tribal raider. Scholars argue that this Greek source was “purportedly composed in Africa in July 634.”4 If Muhammad really died (as the tradition claims) in 632, then this Greek reference dates to only two years after his presumed death. If we consider that numerous other sources place his death a few years later, in 634–635,5 then this reference is of even higher value.

While the Doctrina Jacobi does not mention Muhammad explicitly, another Syriac source from the same year (634) does. Scholars argue that this document offers the first explicit reference to Muhammad in a non-Muslim source. It dates precisely to Friday, February 7, 634, and is attributed to the Syriac priest Thomas the Presbyter, who reports, “There was a battle between the Romans and the Arabs of Muḥammad. . . . The Romans fled, leaving behind the patrician bryrdn, whom the Arabs killed. Some 4000 poor villagers of Palestine were killed there, Christians, Jews, and Samaritans. The Arabs ravaged the whole region.”6

This report suggests that, in 634, a priest from today’s Iraq was aware of Muhammad and his Arab warriors. It is plausible to assume that a warlord lived in Arabia and led military armies, plundering villages and killing Christians and others. In fact, this Syriac report strengthens our confidence in the Greek source, Doctrina Jacobi, which referred to a supposed prophet among the Arabs without mentioning his name. Both sources date from the same year but come from two different regions.

In the same vein, Sophronius, the patriarch of Jerusalem from 634 to 638, spoke about the Arabs and Muhammad in his sermons. In 636 or 637, Sophronius described “the Arabs’ atrocities and victories,” as they “overrun the places which are not allowed to them, plunder cities, devastate fields, burn down villages, set on fire the holy churches, overturn the sacred monasteries.”7 For Sophronius, these warriors were “the vengeful and God-hating” Arabs “who insult the cross, Jesus, and the name of God, and whose leader is the devil.”8 Thus, for Sophronius and some of his Christian contemporaries, the warriors had a leader — equated to the devil — who led God-hating Arabs to attack Christians and insult their God and Jesus.

Granted, Sophronius does not explicitly mention Muhammad. However, a similar description in a Syriac source from 637 explicitly refers to Muhammad: “Arab troops decisively defeated Byzantine forces,” and “many villages were destroyed through the killing by [the Arabs of] Muḥammad.”9 Here, a Christian explicitly mentions Muhammad as the leader of Arab warriors who assaulted Christians.

Therefore, based on contemporary non-Muslim sources, we can plausibly conclude that there was a man named Muhammad in seventh-century Arabia. He led troops of Arabs, attacked Christians and others, and had a religious message that insulted God, Jesus, and the cross. The advantage of these non-Muslim sources is their chronological proximity to Muhammad; their disadvantage lies in the scarceness and brevity of their descriptions. Conversely, Muslim sources are numerous and full of details, but they are also late and unreliable from a critical standpoint.

The Prophet and the Book

Ultimately, then, there are three Muhammads: the traditional, the legendary, and the historical. Practically, Muslims do not distinguish between the three. They have only one Muhammad, cherished, respected, and valued in their hearts and minds. For them, Muhammad came as the final prophet of Allah and delivered the perfect scripture, the Quran, which — unlike other revelations, including Jewish and Christian Scriptures — Allah himself guards and protects against corruption.

An important question now arises: Who is Muhammad in the daily life of Muslims, and how can Christians converse with Muslims about him?

For Muslims, the Quran is the message Muhammad proclaimed, not wrote. Allah dictated words to Muhammad through Gabriel, which resulted in the Quran. This belief is important for Christians to grasp. In the Muslim understanding, Allah’s word and Allah’s final prophet are holy and revered. Out of respect, a Muslim can never place the Quran on the floor. Muslims often kiss the Quran and touch it to their forehead as signs of honor and veneration. Similarly, whenever Muhammad’s name is mentioned, Muslims repeat an honorary phrase — “peace be upon him” — to emphasize their reverence. These two foundations are so sacred that they are essentially unquestionable in the daily life of Muslims.

Muslims believe the Quran is totally inerrant and infallible. Muhammad, too, as Allah’s final messenger, is infallible. He never — according to the vast majority of Muslims — erred because all prophets, according to Islam, are immune from error. This is one reason why most Muslims are often appalled when they hear the Jewish and Christian teachings that David committed adultery. For Muslims, prophets are immune from sin and cannot err.

Perhaps we can now understand why the notion of thinking critically about Muhammad or his message is unfathomable for Muslims. For them, he is a prophet who perfectly and purely proclaimed a divine message and lived it to the letter — no questioning or doubting is acceptable. Many Muslims and non-Muslims alike throughout history have endured severe persecution or suffered death because they dared to question the sacred. Many Muslims get furious when Muhammad is mocked or the Quran is questioned.

Despite how frequently Muslims persecuted non-Muslims into silence for centuries, Christians have always — since the inception of Islam — engaged Muslims concerning Muhammad and his message. Many Christian thinkers questioned Muhammad, his character, his deeds, and his teachings in the presence of even elite and powerful Muslims.10

Three Ways to Engage Muslims

As we consider the Muslims in our own cities and neighborhoods, I encourage you to speak with them about faith. Even the life and teaching of Muhammad is not off-limits — it just requires wisdom. In our day, Muslims are questioning their faith as never before, in part due to easily accessible information about Muhammad on the Internet that was hardly accessible generations ago. Here, then, are three points to consider as you talk with Muslims about Muhammad.

First, if you want to engage Muslims the best you can, read and study Muhammad and his message. Speaking knowledgeably with Muslims is much better than being ignorant of the basics. Learning about Muhammad and the Quran from reliable Christian resources will open great horizons for you to raise good questions and answer others as you engage Muslims with the gospel.11

Second, love and respect Muslims as people created in God’s own image. At the same time, remember that no Christian is required to respect any ideology, including Islam. Similarly, while we love Muslims, we do not need to cherish Muhammad, especially as his life and teachings contain anti-Christian claims and heresies condemned by the Bible. Christians do not need to use the honorific title after the mention of Muhammad, nor do we need to show any particular reverence for Muhammad in order to appeal to Muslims. Simply be respectful of Muslims, and do not feel intimidated as you talk with them. Christians have compelling and plausible answers and should be bold. Moreover, Muslims in general value assertiveness and confidence.

Third, if you must refer to Muhammad, especially in the early stages of a relationship, simply speak of him as “your prophet.” However, I usually encourage Christians to avoid talking about Muhammad in the early stages of getting to know a Muslim. The topic will eventually emerge. If a Muslim asks your opinion on Muhammad, I suggest saying, “Trust me, my friend, it does not matter what I think of Muhammad. I know more about Christ, and I want you to see his love and salvation.”12 Opening the Bible and speaking about Jesus is always prudent.

When pressed to give your opinion of Muhammad, you might indicate, “My friend, Muhammad is your prophet, and I respect you. I have read a lot about him because I know he is important to you. You are important to me. However, I do not believe in him as you do — if I did, I would become a Muslim.”13 After you develop a deeper friendship with a Muslim, the time might come for you to ask sincere critical questions about Muhammad.

Our ultimate goal is not to destroy Muhammad but to magnify and honor Christ. So, speak with Muslims about Christ. Preach the word and reach the world. Muslims are here in our backyards, nearer than you think. The gospel of hope is their ultimate need.

Audio Transcript

How do I decode the point of a whole chapter of the Bible? How do I summarize the main point of a whole psalm? Welcome back to the podcast. That’s the question we need answered today. And if you’re reading your Bible along with us, using the Navigators Bible Reading Plan, our reading schedule hits January 8 today. That means we’re reading Psalm 8 together. Psalm 8 is rather hard to make sense of, hard to summarize, so it’s a good time in our Bible reading to pause and ask Pastor John how he summarizes it and other whole chapters and whole psalms.

Philip asks this very question: “Dear Pastor John, I’ve really enjoyed the way you go through individual verses and explain them very clearly by breaking them down and explaining each part. I understand that meditating on small parts of Scripture can help us really suck all the nourishment from it, but sometimes my problem is in understanding entire chapters or larger sections of the Bible.

“I read something like Psalm 8, and although I can understand small parts of these texts, I really get lost and fail to follow the entire flow of argument or where the chapter is going. I’m often confused by a whole psalm. It seems disjointed to me, and I can’t follow how one line leads to the next. Could you help me to figure out ways to understand large sections of Scripture as a whole, rather than just small chunks disconnected from other parts? Thank you.”

Let me see if I can help, first with an analogy — namely, an analogy of a jigsaw puzzle — and then with an exhortation about the hard work of seeing a whole chapter. Then I’ll give an example from my own experience.

Scripture as a Puzzle

Think of a larger unit of Scripture, like a chapter or a few paragraphs or maybe several chapters — think of it as a jigsaw puzzle, a five-hundred-piece jigsaw puzzle. There are five hundred pieces laid in front of you, and as you look at them, they do not look at all like the painting on the front of the box. They are just one big jumble.

That’s how the words and phrases and clauses might look to you in a chapter in the Bible when you try to think of the chapter as a whole. They’re just lots and lots of words and phrases and clauses that might say some nice things, but my oh my, they don’t make one big picture.

How do you go about seeing the whole picture instead of five hundred scattered pieces? Of course, the Bible doesn’t have a picture on the top of the box. You’ll work a little harder here. How do you see a chapter as a whole, with a main point, with all the pieces fitting together to make that main point, instead of just seeing sixty or seventy scattered clauses and phrases? That’s the goal.

You take one piece, right? (I love to do puzzles like this because I love figuring this out.) You take one of the pieces, and you look at the piece very carefully. You don’t just keep scanning your eyes over the five hundred pieces superficially while saying, “Oh, let me see something. Oh, let me see something.” No, no, no, no. You get nowhere that way.

You take one piece, and you examine it very carefully. You notice that half of this piece is solid red and the other half is gold, solid gold, and you notice that the little protrusion at the top is split in half. Half of it is gold and half of it is red. From this you infer, with careful thinking, that there is another piece somewhere here, somewhere, that will be half red and half gold, and instead of a protrusion there’s going to be an indention in the bottom of the piece, leading up into half red and half gold.

Now you’re looking very specifically for that piece. As you scan the five hundred pieces, this time you’re looking specifically for it. You find maybe six or seven or eight pieces that have this half red and half gold, and you slide them around, looking for how they can fit together.

You push them off to the side of the table in a corner, and you find one or two that fit, and then another and another, and pretty soon you realize that you’ve got five, six, seven, eight pieces all fitting together. You notice, “Oh my, this is a robe draped over the arm of a throne. So, that’s going to go here, probably.” You set that midsize unit aside now, and you do the same thing all over again with another piece and its peculiar characteristics, fitting the pieces together as you go.

That’s how you build little pieces into midsize units. We might call those two or three verses, or a paragraph, and we’ve got maybe five paragraphs to fit together. Now you’ve got several — maybe three, four, five, six, seven, eight — midsize units, and you should be able to ask of those three, four, five verses in each unit, “What’s the main point here?” because of how they fit together.

Resist the Urge to Quit

Now, here’s my exhortation. One of the reasons we don’t move from the part to the whole in reading the Bible is because it is very hard work. It is hard work to fit all the midsize pieces together so as to see the whole. For most of us, and I certainly include myself here, we simply cannot do this in our heads. There’s where people run into trouble. They’re reading devotions, and they’re trying to do this in their head.

Well, I can’t even begin to do this in my head. We have to do it on paper. We have to write it down. We have to jot down the main point: “The red-and-gold midsize unit means ‘robe over the arm of a throne’” — that kind of a thing. And then we jot down the next main point of the next midsize unit, and so on, until we’ve got on our piece of paper six, seven, eight sentences, each one now summing up the midsize unit in the chapter, in the larger unit we’re trying to understand. Finally, we try to go about seeing how those midsize units relate to each other.

And my exhortation is simply this: Don’t give up on that. Use a pencil and a paper. Draw lines between them. You just have no idea how they might all fit together. You’ll be amazed at what you’re able to see by trying to fit those midsize units and their main points together to make the larger piece.

Unpacking Psalm 8

Now, I’ve been baffled over the years by the main point of Psalm 8. It seems like the main point is the phrase “O Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth!” because it begins with that and it ends with that (verses 1, 9). That’s a wonderful structural thing to see.

But in the middle, you have these babies who cry out, and God who gets victory over his foes through the mouth of infants (verse 2). So, I jotted that down: “Okay, so the meaning of the first part of the psalm, just the first couple of verses, seems to be that God gets victory over his foes by babies saying things.” And I have no idea how that works — none. That’s just what it says, so I jotted that down.

And then I move on to the next unit, which seems just totally different: “When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers . . . what is man that you are mindful of him?” (verses 3–4). And through this man, who’s just “a little lower than the heavenly beings,” God governs the whole world filled with fish and birds (verses 5–8). Now, what’s the main point? I’ve put a few pieces together here. I wanted to jot down on my piece of paper the main point of this midsize unit, so I jotted down, “God exercises dominion over his earth through insignificant man, who, compared to the stars, seems like nothing.”

And as soon as I wrote it, I thought, “Oh, I get it. The babies are insignificant, and God works his victories through babies. Man is insignificant, and God exercises dominion through man.” And the psalmist ends by essentially saying, “How great is his glory and his majesty?” Surely, then, the point is this: one of the peculiar aspects of the majesty and glory of God is that he gets his victories, and he exercises his dominion, through the use of weak and insignificant things.

Amen. Praise God. And that’s exactly the use that Matthew makes of it on Palm Sunday, as Jesus enters the city where the babies are crying out, “Hosanna!” (Matthew 21:15) — and he’s on a donkey, of all things.

Look, Write, Pray to See

So, the point is to look at the pieces very carefully, to fit them together in midsize units, to jot down the main points of the midsize units until you have them all on a half sheet of paper, and then to think and think, and pray and pray, and think and pray and think and pray, and to organize and draw lines, and to try to fit them all together until they fall into place and you see how these five, six, seven, eight, nine points of the midsize units are in a flow that make one big overarching point. You will be surprised, if you take up pencil and paper and do this, what you will see.

“Rejoice that your names are written in heaven.” In Luke 10:20, Jesus tells his followers to rejoice that their eternal future with God is assured. It may seem odd that he commands such joy. If someone said he was sending you to a tropical paradise for an all-expenses-paid vacation, wouldn’t you rejoice without being told to do so?

And yet, there are many reasons we may not rejoice frequently or fervently in our salvation. Perhaps we’ve lost sight of the glories of heaven because we’ve become absorbed with the joys of this world. Or maybe present anxieties have jostled out future realities. It could be that we’ve been Christians for so long we can hardly remember a time when we weren’t following Jesus. Our salvation feels like a comfortable old T-shirt — safe and familiar, but not a cause for great excitement.

Here’s another possible reason for not rejoicing in our salvation: we think of our personal conversion as a normal and, therefore, boring one, as not a very big deal. I understand the sentiment: I was converted as a little boy. Unlike some of my friends, I wasn’t dramatically delivered from highly visible sins. At four years old, my drink of choice was milk or orange juice, and my most serious habit was overeating Pez. If your story is like mine, you may be tempted to consider your conversion simply as a continuation of the path you were already on, rather than as a dramatic break with your unconverted life.

Whatever the reason, Jesus comes to our aid in Luke 10. He doesn’t just command us to rejoice in our salvation; he himself rejoices over the salvation of souls. And then he provides reasons for his joy — and ours. Jesus says that our salvation is (1) the work of the Father, (2) the choice of the Son, and (3) the climax of the ages. If we press into these three realities, they can fuel our own deep and daily joy.

1. Our salvation is the work of the Father.

Your conversion moment may have looked outwardly humdrum. For me, it was kneeling with my dad and brother on a brown rug in my bedroom on Center Street in Monson, Maine. I heard no voice from heaven. The roof didn’t split open. I didn’t even get to extend my bedtime later than normal that night! Others of us can’t even point to the moment of our conversion, it seemed to happen so gradually. You just know there was a time when you didn’t love Jesus and then a time when you did.

No matter what your conversion looked or felt like, Jesus declares that it was a direct work of God the Father: “In that same hour [Jesus] rejoiced in the Holy Spirit and said, ‘I thank you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, that you have hidden these things from the wise and understanding and revealed them to little children; yes, Father, for such was your gracious will’” (Luke 10:21).

In the context, “these things” includes the offer of gospel peace and the coming of God’s kingdom. Jesus is saying that God has revealed the gospel to some and hidden it from others. He’s referring to an inner revelation from God whereby he causes the gospel not only to make sense to us, but also to be desirable and attractive. The only reason someone comes to faith is because God inwardly opens that person’s mind and heart to the gospel. Our salvation is the result of God’s will: “Yes, Father, for such was your gracious will.”

Think about what this means. If you’re a Christian, it’s because God the Father willed that you would be. He was directly, personally involved in your conversion. There are no insignificant conversions, because everything God does is highly significant. I experienced a miracle on the brown rug of my childhood bedroom. I prayed to receive Jesus because the God of the universe knew me and drew me.

Notice that Jesus responds to God’s concealing and revealing work with gratitude. He thanks God, calling him “Father” to emphasize his goodness and trustworthiness and “Lord of heaven and earth” to highlight his sovereign authority. Moreover, the very joy Jesus calls for from his disciples in verse 20, he experiences and expresses in verse 21: “He rejoiced in the Holy Spirit.” This is a remarkable moment of intra-Trinitarian joy: the Son rejoicing in the Holy Spirit and praising the Father.

What began these fireworks of joyful gratitude? It was my prayer on the brown rug, along with every other conversion of ordinary, unimpressive people — “little children.” Jesus joyfully thanks God for your conversion, which is an exquisite miracle wrought by God’s own hand. Your salvation is the will and work of the Father.

2. Our salvation is the choice of the Son.

Jesus then provides another reason for rejoicing in our salvation. He says, “All things have been handed over to me by my Father” (Luke 10:22). He then immediately identifies one of the things the Father has given him — the right to reveal God to those whom he chooses: “No one knows . . . who the Father is except the Son and anyone to whom the Son chooses to reveal him.” We learn three things from this remarkable verse.

First, Jesus says he “reveals” the Father. He makes God known. When we’re saved, we don’t just come to know facts — we come to know God himself. Our salvation isn’t about winning a ticket to heaven. It’s about enjoying an eternal relationship with God.

Second, only Jesus can reveal the Father to us, because only Jesus fully knows the Father. If you want to know God the Father truly and deeply, you must know him through Jesus.

Third, the only way Jesus will reveal the Father to us is if he chooses to do so. We can’t coerce Jesus to reveal the Father to us. It’s his decision.

Again, consider what this means. If you’re saved, it’s because Jesus chose to reveal God the Father to you. There’s nothing normal, boring, or humdrum about that! Your conversion is a supernatural event, a direct result of the Father’s will and the Son’s choice.

3. Our salvation is the climax of the ages.

In Luke 10:23–24, Jesus begins to speak privately to his disciples, helping them to see the extent of their enormous privilege: “Blessed are the eyes that see what you see! For I tell you that many prophets and kings desired to see what you see, and did not see it, and to hear what you hear, and did not hear it.” Though the Old Testament prophets and kings enjoyed great access to God and his ways, they longed to see the Messiah and the coming of the kingdom of God. But it’s happening in the disciples’ day — that’s why they’re “blessed” by God.

Like the first disciples, we live after Jesus’s first coming and before his second coming, in the time of God’s inaugurated kingdom. We read in the Bible of Jesus’s words and works. We know the love of God through Jesus’s atoning death on the cross. We know the grace of God through the gospel message of justification by grace alone through faith alone. We know the power of God through Jesus’s resurrection. We know the presence of God because his Holy Spirit lives within us.

As Christians living when we do, we’re nothing special in ourselves, but we are specially blessed.

Miraculous News

Every single time the triune God writes someone’s name in heaven, it’s a divine miracle. Your conversion, whatever it looked or felt like to you, was nothing less than supernatural. There are no ordinary conversions.

And this leads us back to Jesus’s command in verse 20: “Rejoice that your names are written in heaven.” If we understand the miracle of our conversion, then like Jesus himself we’ll respond with exuberant thanks to God. We’ll rejoice in the fatherly love and sovereign goodness of the Lord of heaven and earth.