Imagine that the angel Gabriel has been recording your prayers for the last year. Every request for yourself or others has found its way into his heavenly ledger. What might such a record reveal?

How many petitions would fall under the heading of physical health? How long would be the column tracking requests about your relationships? How many tallies would you find next to “Work” or “School” or “Church”? How many vague prayers for “blessing” might you find?

I’ve been asking myself such questions lately, in part because of a striking observation from Tim Keller’s book Prayer. If you study the prayers of the apostle Paul recorded throughout his letters, Keller says, you may notice something striking: among the many requests Paul makes on behalf of the churches, he never once asks God to heal their bodies, fill their wombs, prosper their vocations, or lift their persecutions. In fact, Keller writes, “Paul’s prayers for his friends contain no appeals for changes in their circumstances” (20).

I fear that if I set my own prayer record next to Paul’s, some of my first prayers may appear last, and my last prayers first.

Heart-Deep Prayers

Now, we should beware of stating the case too strongly. Even though Paul’s prayers for others contain no appeals for circumstantial changes, the apostle clearly had a category for such prayers.

He invites the Philippians to “let [their] requests be made known to God,” without limiting the requests to a certain kind (Philippians 4:6). He calls Timothy to pray “for kings and all who are in high positions” (1 Timothy 2:1–2). When asking for prayer himself, Paul sometimes mentions personal safety and success in travel (Romans 15:31–32; 2 Thessalonians 3:1–2). He also pleaded three times for God to take his thorn (2 Corinthians 12:8).

Yet such requests form the background, not the foreground, of Paul’s recorded prayers; they are q’s and z’s in the alphabet of his intercessions, present but not frequent. Instead, Paul displays a relentless focus on the inward life, the Christian soul, the hidden realm of the heart — or, to use a phrase from Ephesians 3:16, the “inner being.”

So, for example, Paul prays that the Romans might “abound in hope” and know the presence of “the God of peace” (Romans 15:13, 33). He wants the Ephesians to have “the Spirit of wisdom and of revelation in the knowledge of him”; he wants Christ to “dwell in [their] hearts through faith” (Ephesians 1:17; 3:17). Paul yearns for the Philippians to abound in discerning love (Philippians 1:9) and for the Colossians to give thanks like heaven-bound saints (Colossians 3:12). He asks that the Thessalonians might be holy through and through (1 Thessalonians 5:23).

Even when Paul prays for outward matters like public obedience or visible unity, these always flow from somewhere deeper, somewhere inner. Paul’s prayers cut to the heart.

Why He Prayed What He Prayed

God gave us Paul’s prayers, in part, so that by rehearsing them our own requests might grow in biblical balance and substance. Like the Psalms, Paul’s prayers train our tongues in the language of heaven. They give us words before the throne of grace.

At the same time, growing in Pauline prayer means more than simply repeating his requests. As D.A. Carson notes, Paul’s prayers spring from a robust “biblical vision,” a vision that “embraces who God is, what he has done, who we are, where we are going, what we must value and cherish” (Praying with Paul, 43). If we abstract Paul’s prayers from the biblical vision that inspired them, they may feel unnatural (like a second language we can’t quite learn). But once we catch his vision, we find ourselves slowly becoming fluent in Paul’s heart-deep prayers.

What, then, was Paul’s vision? Among the several areas we could explore, consider how Paul’s prayers were shaped by past grace and future glory.

Prayer Furthers Faith and Love

The first part of Paul’s vision comes from the past. “He remembers the grace we have received in the past, and thinks through the direction of our lives,” Carson writes (42). In other words, Paul considers the “good work” God has already begun in the lives of his people, and in prayer, he aims to partner with God in “[bringing] it to completion” (Philippians 1:6). He sees the seeds of grace, and prays them into flowers.

And what is the good work God has begun? What grace does he intend to grow? Again and again, Paul thanks God for two signs of grace among the saved: faith and love. “Because I have heard of your faith in the Lord Jesus and your love toward all the saints, I do not cease to give thanks for you” (Ephesians 1:15–16). To Paul, faith in Jesus and love for God’s people were more precious than all the world’s silver and gold. Our body may be broken, our dreams undone, our relationships fraught — but if we have faith and love, God has lavished us with grace (Ephesians 1:7–8).

Paul’s prayers run like rivers from this fountain of past grace, flowing with faith and love. If God has begun the good work of faith, then Paul will pray (in a dozen creative ways) for faith to grow, for God to give “the Spirit of wisdom and of revelation in the knowledge of him” (Ephesians 1:17). And if God has begun the good work of love, then Paul will ask (again with wonderful creativity) for love to “abound more and more” (Philippians 1:9).

Paul’s prayers remind us of an easily forgotten truth: in this age, the character of our inner being is far more important than the circumstances of our outer being. As Paul writes elsewhere,

We do not lose heart. Though our outer self is wasting away, our inner self is being renewed day by day. (2 Corinthians 4:16)

One day, God will raise and glorify our “outer self” and banish every bad circumstance. But in the meantime, his good work happens mostly in the “inner self.” He aims to deepen our faith, love, and every other grace until we see him face to face. So, while Paul sometimes prays for the outer self’s welfare, he fastens his attention on the inner self’s renewal.

When Earthly Requests End

If Paul’s prayers keep one eye on the past, they keep another eye on the future — and not just the future vaguely, but one future moment in particular. Repeatedly, Paul returns to one future day, when God’s good work will finally come to an end: “the day of Jesus Christ” (Philippians 1:6).

Five times in Paul’s recorded prayers, he explicitly mentions the day of Christ’s return (Philippians 1:10; 1 Thessalonians 3:13; 5:23; 2 Thessalonians 1:9–12; 2 Timothy 1:18). He prayed, it seems, in the shadow of the second coming, with the returning Christ standing at the door of his prayer closet. And the power of that future promise governed what he asked of God.

When Jesus appears, the mists will rise, the fog will clear, and the true priorities of this age will stand forth in startling clarity. Our circumstances in this life, which are by no means insignificant, will bow before matters far weightier still. Healthy or sick, did we glorify God with our bodies? Arms empty or full, did we abound in thanksgiving to him? At peace or in conflict, did we display the patience of Christ? In success or failure, were we “filled with the fruit of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ, to the glory and praise of God” (Philippians 1:11)?

What if we prayed, for ourselves and our friends, under a sky ready to split before the glory of Christ? We might ask more often, and with greater fervor, that God would establish our hearts “blameless in holiness before our God and Father, at the coming of our Lord Jesus with all his saints” (1 Thessalonians 3:13). We might pray less for circumstances to change, and more for a heart that loves Christ in all circumstances.

Our Hearts His Home

When we kneel with Paul between past and future, grace and glory, Christ’s cross and Christ’s second coming, we find ourselves saying new words, praying fresh prayers. At the bottom of our prayers, we ask for faith and love, inward strength and heart-level holiness. Or, Paul writes in Ephesians, we plead for Christ to make our hearts his home.

According to the riches of his glory [may he] grant you to be strengthened with power through his Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith. (Ephesians 3:16–17)

Paul asks that Christ would take up his residence within, filling every hallway and room with his brilliance. He asks that we would have what Keller calls a “powerful sense of God’s reality” — a sense that transcends our present situation and even survives the grave.

“Without this powerful sense of God’s reality,” Keller writes, “good circumstances can lead to overconfidence and spiritual indifference. Who needs God, our hearts would conclude, when matters seem to be so in hand?” (Prayer, 21). But when Christ makes his home in our hearts, then we can make our home in every circumstance: in “plenty and hunger,” in “abundance and need” (Philippians 4:12).

So then, pray for healing, but pray also (and most) for holiness. Pray for relational peace, but pray also (and first) for relational patience. Pray for dreams still distant and hopes still deferred, but pray also (and chiefly) for Jesus to walk with you even among the ruins of the life you wish you had. Then, whether outward circumstances flourish or wither, all will be well within. For Christ will still dwell within.

In Revelation 5:9–10, the voice of heaven rings out in praise to Christ:

Worthy are you to take the scroll and to open its seals, for you were slain, and by your blood you ransomed people for God from every tribe and language and people and nation, and you have made them a kingdom and priests to our God, and they shall reign on the earth.

In other words, when Jesus Christ, the Son of God, was crucified, by his blood he paid the ransom to bring into being a new humanity under the lordship of Jesus Christ. He paid the debt that would satisfy and remove the wrath of God against everyone who would embrace Jesus as Lord and Savior and Treasure of their lives.

Therefore, Jesus is not a tribal deity. His kingdom, his new humanity, his church, his bride is “from every tribe and language and people and nation.” The ransom has been paid for this new humanity. It is finished. God is satisfied.

Ongoing Mission

What’s not finished is world missions, the ingathering of the bride from all the peoples of the world. “I lay down my life,” Jesus said, “for the sheep. And I have other sheep that are not of this [Jewish] fold. I must bring them also, and they will listen to my voice. So there will be one flock, one shepherd” (John 10:15–16). I will “gather into one the children of God who are scattered abroad” (John 11:52).

And how will they hear his voice? Paul answers with a series of questions:

How are they to believe in him of whom they have never heard? And how are they to hear without someone preaching? And how are they to preach unless they are sent? As it is written, “How beautiful are the feet of those who preach the good news!” (Romans 10:14–15)

How are they sent? How does that happen? It happens because God, in a service like this (and in ten thousand other ways), stretches out his hand in the preaching of his word and touches goers to go and senders to send. A miracle happens. The Spirit blows where he will. And goers come into being. Senders come into being. And it is wonderful in our eyes.

He uses words like Matthew 28:

All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age. (Matthew 28:18–20)

Is that going to happen? Is that ever going to be finished? Jesus left no doubt: “This gospel of the kingdom will be proclaimed throughout the whole world as a testimony to all nations, and then the end will come” (Matthew 24:14). There are a thousand uncertainties in the world today. This is not one of them. “I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it” (Matthew 16:18). Through goers and senders, through people like you, in ways nobody can explain.

Missions Amidst War

Someone might say, “You know, with war in the Middle East and Europe and across Africa, this is not an optimal moment for world evangelization and for you to call for new missionary recruits in this service.”

The problem with that is that Jesus says the opposite:

You will hear of wars and rumors of wars. . . . Nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom. . . . And this gospel of the kingdom will be proclaimed throughout the whole world as a testimony to all nations, and then the end will come. (Matthew 24:6–7, 14)

Jesus says they happen together. Wars and world evangelization. They’ve always happened together.

During the American Civil War (1861–1865):

Sarah Doremus founded the Women’s Union Missionary Society for sending single women to Asia.
The Episcopal Church started missionary work in Haiti.
The China Inland Mission (today OMF) was founded by Hudson Taylor.

During the First World War (1914–1918):

C.T. Studd was glorying in a great revival movement in the Congo.
The Interdenominational Foreign Mission Association (IFMA) was founded.

During the Second World War (1939–1945):

Cameron Townsend founded Wycliffe Bible Translators.
New Tribes Mission was founded.
The Conservative Baptist Foreign Mission Society was founded (now named WorldVenture).
Mission Aviation Fellowship was formed.
Far East Broadcasting Company was founded.

During the Korean War (1950–1953):

The World Evangelical Alliance was organized.
Bill Bright created Campus Crusade for Christ at UCLA.
Trans World Radio was founded.

Wars and rumors of wars are not going to stop world evangelization.

So, we do today what we have done every second Sunday of Missions Focus for decades at Bethlehem. At the end of this message, I am going to invite three groups of people to come to the front as evidence of God’s work in your life: (1) global partners, (2) those who are in Bethlehem’s Nurture Program, (3) and those who believe God is stirring in your life to move you sooner or later toward cross-cultural missions long-term. You may be 16. You may be 60. You may be sure. You may not yet be sure, but that is the direction you are moving unless he stops you.

Costly Call

One of the ways that God mysteriously calls people into missionary service is through the preaching of God’s word, especially from texts about how not to waste your life — like today’s text, Luke 9:23–27.

Jesus has just said in verse 22 that he is on his way to die: “The Son of Man must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed, and on the third day be raised.” It’s not surprising, then, that the next thing he does is describe the cost of being the disciple of such a Savior: I lead the way by suffering and dying. You follow by suffering and dying. Verse 23: “And he said to all [not just some], ‘If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me.’”

There are three ways to get behind Jesus and be his disciple.

1. Deny yourself.

First, to get behind Jesus and be his disciple requires self-denial. “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself.” There will always be pleasures, comforts, and securities in this life that Christians must renounce to be faithful followers of Jesus. If you are set on pursuing all the earthly pleasures you can imagine, and all the comforts of this life, and all the security of power, you will not be able to be a Christian.

2. Take up your cross.

Second, to get behind Jesus and be his disciple requires that you take up your cross daily. Verse 23: “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily.” The cross is the beam of wood where you will be crucified with Jesus. To take up your cross is to take up your electric chair, to take up your gas chamber, to take up your lethal injection. It is to join Paul in saying, “I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me” (Galatians 2:20).

Like the lieutenant said in Band of Brothers, the way to not be afraid of getting killed in battle is to assume you’re already dead. It’s a wonderful thing to face death every day as a person who is already dead. To wake up every morning (“daily”!) and say, “I belong, body and soul, to Jesus Christ. He is my life. I am not my own. I have died to self-rule, self-sufficiency, self-exaltation, self-preservation. He may do with me anything he pleases. My life is his, not mine.”

3. Follow him.

And third, to get behind Jesus requires that we follow him. Verse 23: “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me.” “Me.” Not mainly my healing, but me. Not mainly my exorcisms, but me. Not mainly my forgiveness, but me. Not mainly my deliverance from hell, but me. To be a disciple of Jesus is to desire Jesus more than you desire his gifts.

Do you remember the words of John Paton, the missionary to the New Hebrides, after he had been surrounded by hostile natives as he hid in a tree just above their heads? Years later he wrote,

Alone, yet not alone! If it be to glorify my God, I will not grudge to spend many nights alone in such a tree, to feel again my Savior’s spiritual presence, to enjoy his consoling fellowship. If thus thrown back on your own soul, alone, all alone, in the midnight, in the bush, in the very embrace of death itself, have you a Friend that will not fail you then? (quoted in John Piper, Desiring God, 240–41)

So, from verse 23, to be a Christian means the denial of many pleasures, comforts, and securities, the death of self-rule, self-sufficiency, self-exaltation, and self-survival. And delight in Jesus above all things. Denial. Death. Delight.

Four Foundation Stones

Now, in verses 24–27 come four foundation stones holding up the truth of verse 23 — four arguments, each in turn supporting the one just before. You can see it: verse 24 begins with “for” (because!), verse 25 begins with “for,” and verse 26 begins with “for.” And even though verse 27 doesn’t begin with “for,” that’s the way it functions. Let’s listen to the Lord Jesus as he argues why being his disciple requires self-denial, daily death on the cross, and delight in him.

1. If you lose your life, you’ll save it.

Verse 24: “For [because] whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will save it.” If you try to save your life by refusing self-denial and refusing to take up your cross and refusing to delight in Jesus, you will die, you will perish, you will go to hell and lose your life. That’s the negative half of the argument in verse 24. The positive half is this: if you do lose your life — that is, if you embrace self-denial, if you embrace daily death on a cross, if you embrace Jesus as your treasure — you will save your life (literally, you will save “it,” that is, “your self”). If you lose yourself, you save yourself.

Here’s the way St. Augustine stated the paradox: “If you love your soul, there is danger of its being destroyed. Therefore you may not love it, since you do not want you to be destroyed. But in not wanting it to be destroyed you love it” (quoted in Desiring God, 241).

That’s right. And Jesus knew it was right. There is nothing sinful about wanting to live forever with Jesus — nothing. It’s sinful not to want to live forever with Jesus. Which means there is no such thing for the Christian as ultimate self-denial. There’s only temporary self-denial for the sake of long-term gain.

Jesus scolded his disciples when they gave the impression that it was a burden to follow him.

Peter said, “See, we have left our homes and followed you.” And he said to them, “Truly, I say to you, there is no one who has left house or wife or brothers or parents or children, for the sake of the kingdom of God, who will not receive many times more in this time, and in the age to come eternal life.” (Luke 18:28–30)

And, of course, that doesn’t mean that if you leave your house you get ten houses, and if you leave your wife you get ten wives. It means that if you lose everything in this world and still have Jesus, you are rich beyond calculation. Which is why so many missionaries who have suffered so much have said with David Livingstone, “I never made a sacrifice” (quoted in Desiring God, 243).

2. The world is not worth your soul.

In verse 25 comes the next foundation stone in Jesus’s argument. It supports verse 24: “For [because] what does it profit a man if he gains the whole world and loses or forfeits himself?”

The answer is nothing. So, the argument goes like this: “Whoever would save his life will lose it,” because even if you succeed in saving your life — by avoiding all self-denial and all cross-bearing and all spiritual delight — and gain the whole world, you lose your life. It profits nothing. You die and go to hell.

If Warren Buffett and Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates and Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg don’t deny themselves and take up their cross daily and delight in Jesus, they will perish. The richest men in America are on a collision course with total loss if they don’t have Jesus.

3. Shame now leads to shame forever.

In verse 26, Jesus gives foundation stone three, supporting verse 25. “For [because] whoever is ashamed of me and of my words, of him will the Son of Man be ashamed when he comes in his glory and the glory of the Father and of the holy angels.”

The reason total success at gaining your life, and owning the entire world, is a catastrophe (verse 25) is that you would have to be ashamed of Jesus in this world in order to make that your life goal. And to be told at the glorious return of Jesus that you have been ashamed of Jesus is the second worst thing you will ever hear.

What’s the worst thing that the owners of the world could hear at the last judgment? Jesus tells us in verse 26: “Whoever is ashamed of me and of my words, of him will the Son of Man be ashamed when he comes.” The worst thing to hear is the King of the universe saying, “I would be ashamed to have anybody like you in my kingdom. Depart from me. I never knew you.”

Dear friends, deny yourself, die with Christ, delight in Jesus, and you will not hear those terrible words.

4. Glory really is coming.

The fourth foundation stone in Jesus’s argument comes in verse 27, which supports verse 26. Verse 27: “But I tell you truly, there are some standing here who will not taste death until they see the kingdom of God.” That’s a reference to Peter, James, and John and what happens before their eyes eight days later.

You see that in verse 28: “Now about eight days after these sayings he took with him Peter and John and James and went up on the mountain to pray.” He was transfigured before them, and they saw the glory of what Christ will be like at the second coming. They saw, before they died, a preview of the second-coming glory of verse 26: “when he comes in his glory and the glory of the Father and of the holy angels.”

That is the way Peter recounts the transfiguration in 2 Peter 1. It was a sight of the glory of the coming Christ. In that way, Peter, James, and John saw the coming kingdom before they died. So, the argument of verse 27 is this: the glory of verse 26 is really going to happen, because I’m going to show it to you in eight days on the mountain.

He Is No Fool

So, Jesus’s main point in this passage is that to be his disciple means three things: (1) to embrace the denial of many pleasures and comforts and securities; (2) to embrace the death of self-rule and self-sufficiency, self-exaltation and self-preservation; and (3) to pursue delight in Jesus himself.

The main foundation stone in support for this way of life is this: if you lose your life in that way — that self-denial, that death, that delight — you will gain your life forever. Which means that the missionary credo of Jim Elliot (and so many others) was exactly biblical when he said, “He is no fool to give what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose.”

Tim Keller didn’t write a book on prayer because he felt like an expert. By his own admission, he embarked on his yearslong study out of a sense of deficiency and necessity. He opens the first chapter by saying,

In the second half of my adult life, I discovered prayer. . . . It became clear to me that I was barely scratching the surface of what the Bible commanded and promised regarding prayer. (9)

When I first read those lines as a recent seminary graduate, I could hardly believe them. Tim Keller, a spiritual giant, preaching to thousands, publishing books, and yet barely scratching the surface?

He ties his prayer-life-changing discovery to his diagnosis of thyroid cancer in 2002. When the news came, he was in his early fifties and nearly thirty years into pastoral ministry. He had been pastoring Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York City for more than a decade. And then cancer did what adversity often does: it sparked something of a revival in his heart, an awakened sense of both his spiritual neediness and the powerful privilege we enjoy on our knees.

His prayer crisis sent him on a quest deep below the surface to experience the awe and intimacy that God promises to those who pray. Twelve years later, he sketched out a map, in fifteen chapters, of all he’d tasted and seen for those who want to go deeper themselves.

Emboldening Humility

Part of the power of the book is in its endearing humility. At one level, it really is an extended confession of how (unconsciously) inadequate his prayer life had once been. In an interview after the book released, he shared,

My wife and I would never want to go back to the kind of prayer life or spiritual life we had before the cancer. I really thought that I had a good prayer life. And when I broke through into another dimension, I realized that, frankly, my prayer life wasn’t very good.

His own personal humbling, and the subsequent years of concerted effort to grow, make the book both convicting and emboldening. Convicting, because we may find ourselves receiving the same diagnosis he received: frankly, our prayer lives aren’t very good. Emboldening, though, because he makes a vibrant prayer life feel wonderfully possible again. He’s relentlessly realistic about the difficulties of genuine prayer, but he also models grace-filled, joy-hungry perseverance in prayer.

“I can think of nothing great that is also easy,” he writes. “Prayer must be, then, one of the hardest things in the world” (24). He’s after a deeper experience in prayer that he himself had neglected and forfeited over many years. In the first pages, he tells us what he wants the reader to feel when we pray:

This book will show that prayer is both conversation and encounter with God. . . . We must know the awe of praising his glory, the intimacy of finding his grace, and the struggle of asking his help, all of which can lead us to know the spiritual reality of his presence. Prayer, then, is both awe and intimacy, struggle and reality. (5)

This quest sent him deep into church history, where he knelt beside spiritual forefathers like Augustine, Luther, and Calvin (along with Owen, Edwards, Lewis, Lloyd-Jones, Packer, and more). He uncovers a letter Augustine wrote to a woman who feared she was failing in prayer. He comes alongside Luther as he counsels a barber broken by sin and tragedy. He sits in on Calvin’s “master class” on his five rules for prayer. He listens to the similar and distinct ways all three pastors prayed the Lord’s Prayer. All of this makes the book a treasury of help from ancient prayer closets.

Praying Well Begins with Listening

For Keller, perhaps the single most important key to prayer is its marriage to the word of God. So many of the dangers of prayer are curbed (or eliminated altogether), and so many of the rewards are unlocked and unleashed, when we pray over and through and from what God has said.

Your prayer must be firmly connected to and grounded in your reading of the Word. This wedding of Bible and prayer anchors your life down in the real God. (56)

Without immersion in God’s words, our prayers may not be merely limited and shallow but also untethered from reality. (62)

Keller doesn’t set the Bible aside to try and have a better prayer life, as if an overemphasis on Scripture somehow undermines our prayers. No, the greater danger is that we can actually lose the true God in our rhythms of prayer. “If left to themselves our hearts will tend to create a God who doesn’t exist,” he warns. “Without prayer that answers the God of the Bible, we will only be talking to ourselves” (62).

After establishing the importance of Scripture early in the book, he circles back and does a whole chapter on how the practice of meditation serves prayer, letting John Owen teach us how to work the truth out with our minds and then work it in to our hearts.

Prayer Closets for Beginners

Keller was a theologian and an apologist, but he was just as much a pastor. And because he was a pastor of people who really struggled to pray, he wasn’t content to merely share ideas and principles. He wanted to offer real practical help on the how.

I wrote this book because, though many great books on prayer have been written, most either go into the theology of prayer, or they go into the practice of prayer, or they troubleshoot. I didn’t have one book I could give people that basically covered all the bases: a biblical view of prayer, the theology of prayer, and some methods of prayer. I didn’t have a good first book to give somebody. (“Prayers That Don’t Work”)

So, after developing a theology of prayer in Scripture and exploring what history teaches us about prayer, he offers ways to actually practice and experience what he’s describing.

For instance, he devotes a chapter to praying the Lord’s Prayer (Matthew 6:9–13). That may sound rather straightforward and elementary at first (you may have started praying that prayer even before you were in first grade), but Keller follows Luther in learning to use the prayer less for its exact words and more as a pattern to follow and expand in our own words (93–94). He found that this practice limits the distracting thoughts that inevitably come when we pray. It also teaches us to reach beyond the immediate needs or burdens that so often dictate where we focus in prayer.

Later in the book, he shares how regularly praying the Psalms transforms a prayer life.

Immersing ourselves in the Psalms and turning them into prayers teaches our hearts the “grammar” of prayer and gives us the most formative instruction in how to pray in accord with God’s character and will. (255)

He shares that he would read psalms in the morning and evening and then pray, sometimes praying the actual words of the psalm and other times praying in his own words. Following the The Book of Common Prayer schedule, he would work through all 150 psalms each month. Over time, his prayers (and soul) were slowly and deeply conformed to “the Bible’s prayer book.”

Along with the Lord’s Prayer and the Psalms, he collects and shares a number of other extremely practical paradigms and guides for daily prayer, ranging from short and simple models to longer and more involved ones.

Entering the Happiness of God

Having read a number of Keller’s books, perhaps the most surprising character in this particular book was joy. In fact, rereading the book made me wonder if his battle with cancer freshly awakened him not only to prayer, but also to the prominent place of happiness in the Christian life. Very early, he charts the course:

The Westminster Shorter Catechism tells us that our purpose is to “glorify God and enjoy him forever.” In this famous sentence we see reflected both kingdom-prayer and communion-prayer. Those two things — glorifying God and enjoying God — do not always coincide in this life, but in the end they must be the same thing. We may pray for the coming of God’s kingdom, but if we don’t enjoy God supremely with all our being, we are not truly honoring him as Lord. (4)

For as sweet as the camaraderie was between Tim Keller and John Piper over the years, I don’t think I’ve ever heard them sing with such harmony. According to Keller, the prayers “Hallowed be your name” and “O God, my soul thirsts for you” are not unrelated or at odds, but at their deepest root, the same.

And why would our enjoying God glorify him? Because he is Happiness — Father, Son, and Spirit infinitely and eternally delighting in one another. “We can see why a triune God would call us to converse with him, to know and relate to him. It is because he wants to share the joy he has. Prayer is our way of entering into the happiness of God himself” (68). From his knees, Keller found the only thing big enough, full enough, and intense enough to satisfy the human soul: joy in the happy God.

And now that joy is full. On May 19, 2023, Tim Keller went from prayer to sight. In the sovereign hands of a loving Father, cancer had given him prayer, and now cancer has given him Christ. He has truly entered the happiness of God. Oh, to read a sixteenth chapter from heaven.

Prayer lies at the heart of our relationship with God. Prayer preaches that God is God and we are weak and needy creatures. And yet how many Christians persist in the sin of prayerlessness? We desire to pray, yet prayerlessness lies close at hand. We delight in prayerfulness, in our inner being, but we see in our members prayerlessness waging war against that inner desire, leaving us living like little gods pursuing godliness without depending on the power of God. Although Jesus tells us “always to pray and not lose heart” (Luke 18:1), we get discouraged regularly (perhaps because of our lack of prayer).

In my own struggles to pray, I have found it helpful to think more clearly about why prayerlessness is such a serious sin — and how God puts our prayerlessness to death. My mind goes back to a story in 1 Samuel 12, where Israel rejects God’s rule, and rules out crying to God for themselves, asking Samuel to pray for them (1 Samuel 12:19).

First, Samuel encourages God’s people not to fear, even though they have done “all this evil” (1 Samuel 12:20). “The Lord will not forsake his people, for his great name’s sake, because it has pleased the Lord to make you a people for himself” (1 Samuel 12:22). Despite their grievous sin, God will not forsake them, and Samuel resolves to pray for them.

Second, Samuel pledges: “Moreover, as for me, far be it from me that I should sin against the Lord by ceasing to pray for you, and I will instruct you in the good and the right way” (1 Samuel 12:23). I find Samuel’s words fascinating because, at this point in redemptive history, God has not yet commanded prayer. He has not enshrined into the law, “You must devote yourself to prayer.” Yet Samuel sees prayerlessness as a sin: “Far be it from me that I should sin by ceasing to pray for you.” Why? Consider four compelling reasons for Samuel’s conviction.

God’s Story

According to Samuel, Israel’s history has been a story of God crowning Israel’s cries with deliverance. God saved Israel when they cried to him in slavery, gave them the land (1 Samuel 12:8), and has been their help till date (1 Samuel 7:12). In suffering for sins, Israel has cried to God often, and God has saved them (1 Samuel 12:8, 10–11).

Samuel does not see prayerlessness as sin because the law commands prayer, but because God’s relationship with his redeemed people compels prayer. How can he not depend on God for Israel’s future when Israel’s past has been a story of humiliation and humble dependence on God? God has been her help in ages past, and only God will help her now.

Like Israel, our salvation begins with a cry of faith to God for deliverance. Israel cried out to God in their slavery to Egypt, and we cried out to God in our slavery to sin. We are God’s people today because he heard our cry. If our story has been one of crying to God for help and experiencing his deliverance, what future do we have but one of crying to God for help? Prayerlessness is sin because it ignores God’s story and God’s design for his people. It is God’s design that we depend on him and cry out to him so that he can save us again and again and again. God’s story is one of crowning our cries with salvation, and the future will not be different. God will crown your prayerful cries with salvation. Only be sure to cry.

God’s Promises

Because God has promised, “I will not leave you or forsake you” (Joshua 1:5), Samuel trusts that “the Lord will not forsake his people” (1 Samuel 12:22). This promise motivates Samuel to pray. Indeed, without God’s promises, we would have no basis for prayer. The promises of God powered David’s prayer. David found courage to pray because God promised to work (2 Samuel 7:27). So did Daniel (Daniel 9:1–4), and the early church (Acts 4:23–30), to list a few.

What is prayer, then? Prayer is asking God to do what he has committed himself to do. Prayer is not a human attempt to overcome God’s reluctance to work for the good of his people. Rather, biblical prayers are powered by God’s commitment and promise to work. God’s promises for his people motivate prayer. Prayer voices our confidence in God who has promised to do us good.

So, what is prayerlessness? It is a failure to trust God and his promises. Samuel knew that such prayerlessness would be a gross sin. How can you not trust the promises of the God who has been so faithful, and voice that trust in prayers?

God’s Glory

Samuel knows that God could only preserve Israel after they reject his kingship “for his great name’s sake” (1 Samuel 12:22). So, he seeks God’s glory by praying that God would not forsake Israel. God’s commitment to glorify himself makes prayerlessness sinful. God says he will not abandon his people “for his great name’s sake” (1 Samuel 12:22). Samuel intercedes for Israel because God is passionate about his glory, and so is Samuel.

When we pray, we align our passions, desires, and will with God’s. If God has committed himself to save his people for his glory, then it becomes sinful for his servants to not seek his glory in the salvation of his people through prayer. Prayerlessness, then, is a failure to seek God’s glory. Prayerlessness betrays not only our lack of love for God’s people, but also our lack of love for the God who spreads his fame through the salvation and preservation of his humble and crying people.

God’s Gospel

Unlike Samuel, we have received commandments from God to pray (Romans 12:12; Colossians 4:2; 1 Thessalonians 5:17; James 5:13). When we fail to pray, we are breaking God’s command. But, according to the New Testament, we find the power to keep God’s commandments in the gospel. So, prayerlessness shows that we are not grasping the gospel.

At the cross of Christ, God makes a people for himself at the cost of his only Son’s life. At the cross, God displays his commitment to never forsake his people. At the cross, God works to save and preserve a people for his name’s sake. In the cross, we find God’s Yes to all his covenant promises (2 Corinthians 1:20). His covenant love, his faithfulness, and his commitment to save for his own glory revealed at the cross make prayer possible and render prayerlessness sinful.

Putting Prayerlessness to Death

Knowing that something is a sin does not give us the power to kill it. We need gospel power. The cure for our prayerless hearts is not more commands to pray but the healing balm of the gospel. The cross exposes our sinful pride, our lack of dependence on God. At the cross, we know that we could never pray enough to earn God’s favor. At the cross, we know that we could never merit God’s mercy. At the cross, we know that no good work is good enough for our good God. We are humbled at the cross, and that humility is the fuel for prayer.

Humbled by the God who saved us when we could not possibly save ourselves, we prayerfully depend on him. And the God who saved us from condemnation is the same God we need to save us from sin’s power day after day. The cross that saved us is the same cross we need to cling to day after day. Understanding the gospel destroys the pride of prayerlessness.

Jesus died for our prayerlessness, and he also sets the example for how to pray. Jesus prayed without ceasing on earth, and he continues to intercede for us in heaven (Hebrews 7:25). Far be it from Jesus, the new and better Samuel, to sin against his Father by failing to intercede for the church, the new-covenant people of God. As Charles Wesley sang,

Five bleeding wounds he bears,Received on Calvary;They pour effectual prayers;They strongly plead for me:“Forgive him, O, forgive,” they cry,“Forgive him, O, forgive,” they cry,“Nor let that ransomed sinner die!”

The scars from the cross plead for us right now before the throne of God. When we pray, we join the crucified, risen, and ascended Lord in his passion to see God keep the people he made at the cross for his name’s sake. There are few privileges on earth so great as being able to pray with our Savior. In the power of the gospel, we follow Jesus’s example.

When Prayerfulness Goes Wrong

As we labor to join Jesus in prayer, however, we should beware of a type of prayerfulness that is still sin against God. After Jesus uses the parable of the persistent widow to teach us to pray without losing heart (Luke 18:1), he tells another parable about a tax collector and a Pharisee who both go up to the temple to pray.

The tax collector prays and confesses his neediness, simply pleading, “God, be merciful to me, a sinner!” (Luke 18:13). At the same time, a prayerful “saint” — who has done far more good works than the tax collector — stands confidently before God and recounts his qualifications for acceptance: “God, I thank you that I am not like other men, extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week; I give tithes of all that I get” (Luke 18:11–12). This Pharisee is not prayerless like other sinners. He is so prayerful, in fact, he intensifies his prayers with fasting. But his prayers are corrupt for two reasons.

First, in his mind, his prayers are the grounds for God’s acceptance of him. He lists all that he has done for God, but he asks nothing of God. He prays as though God needs his good works but he does not need God’s gracious work at the cross.

Second, his prayers also become the grounds for competition with others. He compares his faithful and intensified prayers with others and sees that others fall far short. His prayerfulness becomes his own condemnation because it is the ground for condemning others. He leaves his place of prayer feeling good, but not because he enjoyed God, received mercy from God, or rested in God’s work of salvation. Rather, he feels good because he prayed longer, more regularly, and more passionately than others. The perceived prayerlessness of others boosts his pride before God, but God rejects him and his intense prayers (Luke 18:14).

God designed prayer not for self-justification or competition, but for humiliation. Genuine prayer kills our pride and promotes his praise. Pray regularly, earnestly, and faithfully, but never put your confidence in your prayerfulness or compete with others through them.

Far Be It from Us

Far be it from us that we should sin against God by prayerlessness, and far be it from us that we should sin against God by trusting in our prayerfulness. The cross makes humble, dependent prayer possible and necessary, and the cross is our only merit before God.

Let the cross of Christ kill your prayerlessness and prideful prayerfulness. Let the cross kindle prayer that trusts in Christ’s sufficiency and pleads for God’s mercy. When you struggle to pray, do not look to yourself. Do not expect guilt or better planning or stronger resolve to ultimately transform the way you pray. Look to Jesus. The gospel is the cure for our prayerlessness. The gospel purges our guilt of prayerlessness, proves our need for God’s grace, grounds our hope for answered prayers, powers our resolves to pray, promotes our dependence on God in prayer, and protects us from boasting in our prayers.

Audio Transcript

I love this question from Sarah, who lives in New Haven, Connecticut. It’s a deep one and a thoughtful one. Here it is: “Pastor John, hello. I think one of the most important things I have ever learned from you, of the many things, is also something so far beyond my brain that I can only barely begin to grasp it. It’s what you say about 2 Timothy 2:13. There Paul writes, ‘If we are faithless, [God] remains faithful — for he cannot deny himself.’ This verse celebrates God’s faithfulness to God. It’s not about our own faithfulness, really.

“I’ve hunted down all the places where you talk about this passage. In your book Spectacular Sins, you write, ‘God acts in righteousness when his actions accord with his own infinite worth and beauty.’ Amazing! And I read in Providence this statement: ‘God is faithful to himself. He is unwaveringly committed to uphold and display what is infinitely valuable, beautiful, and satisfying, namely, his own perfect and glorious being’ (324). I read these lines, and they seem to contain depths I don’t understand yet.

“Can you take a few minutes to explain this text? Why do we need to know this about God? How does this define ‘righteousness’? Why do we need to know this in the context of our own faithfulness? How does God’s commitment to his own worth define what holiness is for us? And how does it explain the worth or value of our own salvation?”

Well, the reason this matters — that God does not deny God, that God is faithful to God, that God is passionate to uphold and display the glory of God — the reason all that matters is that this commitment of God is the foundation of our salvation. That’s why it matters.

Just consider a text like Psalm 25:11, “For your name’s sake, O Lord, pardon my guilt, for it is great.” In other words, “O God, find a way to base your mercy toward me on your zeal for your own name. Let the commitment that you have to the glory of your name be the foundation of your commitment to me, as I cling to you for mercy.” Isn’t that what he’s saying? According to Psalm 25:11, there would be no pardon for me if it could not be based on God’s zeal for his name, his commitment to the worth of his name. “For your name’s sake, O Lord, pardon my guilt.”

“God’s passion for God is the foundation of God’s mercy to us.”

So, that’s my answer to the last question about relevance. Why does it matter to us? God’s inability to deny himself is relevant to our lives because God’s passion for God is the foundation of God’s mercy to us. So, we pray with the psalmist, “For your name’s sake, O Lord — for your commitment to your glorious name — have mercy. Forgive me.”

Right(eous) to Glorify

Now, how does that relate to God’s righteousness? (And I could develop the same argument for holiness, but we only have time for righteousness. I think you can make the extrapolations for yourself.) How does this relate to his righteousness? We see the answer pointed to in Psalm 143:11: “For your name’s sake, O Lord, preserve my life! In your righteousness bring my soul out of trouble!” So, there’s a parallel. “For your name’s sake . . . preserve my life” is parallel to “in your righteousness bring my soul out of trouble.” Or we could say “for your name’s sake” is parallel with “in your righteousness.”

What that text points to is this: God’s righteousness, at its most essential center or basis, consists most basically in his unwavering commitment to act for the glory of his name. To say it again, God’s righteousness consists most basically in his unwavering commitment, his faithfulness, to act for the glory of his name.

And if you think it through, this makes really good sense. For God to do right — to do what’s “righteous” — to what measuring rod does he look to determine whether one of his actions is right or righteous? The answer to that question is that there are no measuring rods outside God or above God that he looks to. He does not consult anybody’s measuring stick to decide if what he’s doing is right, as though rightness originated from another source besides God.

Well then, what does he consult in discerning the right and what’s righteous? The answer is that he consults the infinite value and beauty and greatness of his own name, his own self. That’s the standard: himself. Which means this: God does right, or God is righteous, when he acts in a way that conforms perfectly to his own worth and his own beauty and his own greatness.

So, when Paul says in 2 Timothy 2:13, “[God] cannot deny himself,” it’s another way of saying, “He can’t be unrighteous. He can’t act in a way that denies his infinite worth or beauty or greatness.” Not to deny himself means not to deny or contradict his Godness — that is, the whole transcendent panorama of his glory, his greatness, his beauty, his worth.

Why the Cross?

Now, we can see this in action for our salvation if we go straight to the heart of the gospel in Romans 3:25: “God put [Christ] forward as a propitiation by his blood, to be received by faith.” Why did he do this? “This was to show [or demonstrate, or make crystal clear] God’s righteousness.” Christ was put forward to die as a propitiation to demonstrate God’s righteousness.

Why did God’s righteousness need to be demonstrated by the death of the infinitely valuable Son of God? Here’s what the text says: “because in his divine forbearance [in God’s divine patience] he had passed over former sins.”

How is that a reason for the necessity of demonstrating the righteousness of God in the death of his Son? In this way: by passing over many sins of Old Testament saints, like David’s sins, it looked as though God did not properly disapprove of or punish actions that despised his glory. Nathan tells David that he despised the Lord when he committed adultery with Bathsheba and had her husband killed, saying in effect, “You despised the Lord. You trampled on the Lord’s glory and his word” (2 Samuel 12:9). And Paul had just said (in Romans 1:23 and 3:23) that sin is a failure to embrace and treasure the glory of God and to bring your life into conformity to the worth of his glory.

So, passing over all those sins is to act apparently unrighteously — that is, not out of zeal for his glory and his name. Sin means acting as though God were of no consequence: God is not a treasure. God is not a friend. God is not a Father. God is not a satisfier of our souls. “I’ll just do whatever I want to do.” That’s sin.

And if God just says, “Oh, we’ll just sweep those thousands of God-belittling, glory-trampling sins under the rug. That’s what we’ll do. We’ll just sweep them under the rug,” he would not be righteous. Righteousness is acting in accord with the infinite worth of God’s name. Therefore, Paul says, God put Christ forward as a propitiation, a wrath-removing punishment by his blood, to show that God does not sweep any sin under the rug.

“God’s righteousness consists most basically in his unwavering commitment to act for the glory of his name.”

He’s righteous. He acts to uphold the worth of his glory. The value of Christ in dying because of forgiven sins is the value of the glory of God that we despised in sinning. Embedded in this all-important paragraph of Romans 3 is the assumption that God’s righteousness is his unwavering commitment always to act for the glory of his name. That’s why Jesus died — not so that God could be both righteous and the one who looks like he sweeps things under the rug. No, here’s the wording of Romans 3:26: that God could be both righteous and the one who justifies the unrighteous.

His Glory, Our Hope

So, in answer to Sarah’s leading question, we need to know these things because our fullest confidence and our fullest joy, as undeserving sinners who need a Savior, are based on God’s inability to deny himself — that is, God’s unwavering commitment to act in accord with his infinite worth. That is God’s righteousness. Our salvation is based on God’s righteousness. The death of the Son of God is the declaration of the righteousness of God in passing over sins of people who have trampled the glory of God by our sin. God’s passion for God is our only hope.

“Your boss is dead. You’re taking his place.”

Not the words we might expect to accompany a promotion. But that’s how Joshua’s new role began. Here’s how God told Joshua the sobering news:

Moses my servant is dead. Now therefore arise, go over this Jordan, you and all this people, into the land that I am giving to them, to the people of Israel. (Joshua 1:2)

In other words: “Joshua, your first task as successor to Moses — the Moses — is to do the one thing your mentor could not do: take Israel into the promised land.”

How do you think Joshua felt? Competent and confident? Or fearful and timid? The next several verses suggest he was insecure and nervous.

Learning from a Rare Leader

The impending conquest of Canaan had hung over the Israelites for the last forty years, a whole generation growing up in the shadow of their parents’ failure. Therefore, in the first chapter alone, God tells Joshua four times to “be strong and courageous.”

Perhaps an even greater shadow lingered though: the legacy of Moses, his mentor and hero. Moses, who was forty days and forty nights on the thundering mountain. Moses, who spoke face to face with the God beyond facing. Moses, who performed the ten plagues and delivered God’s people from four hundred years of slavery. Moses, who split the sea and proceeded confidently to claim God’s promises.

Joshua was not Moses. The pressure was on. The task was daunting. The responsibility was real, and the need was now pressing. How would he lead?

Perhaps you can relate in some small way. Maybe you’ve recently taken on responsibility. Maybe expectations linger from a previous leader. Or you might be self-conscious of your limitations — in capacity, experience, knowledge, giftings. Maybe you’re stepping into a leadership role at your church. Whatever your responsibility, Joshua offers rich lessons for every leader. In contrast to later judges, Joshua rarely failed morally or practically. So, what might we learn from this remarkable leader?

Among many lessons, consider one: whenever he had to rise to the occasion, Joshua started by rising for the occasion. Which is to say, he got up early.

Joshua Got Up Early

Where do we see this leader rising for the occasion? Four times in the book of Joshua, we are specifically told that he got up early — it’s a refrain in the story. Let’s start with the Jordan River.

1. AT THE JORDAN

Joshua rose early in the morning and they set out from Shittim. And they came to the Jordan, he and all the people of Israel, and lodged there before they passed over. (Joshua 3:1)

Can you imagine Joshua standing on the banks of the Jordan? The image of Moses standing at the edge of the Red Sea must have been vivid in his memory. Perhaps the Israelites saw the shadow too. What would happen? Would Joshua falter in the face of an impossible task? Or would he be strong and courageous, and follow the path before him?

Joshua took the step of faith.

But his first step wasn’t into the dry riverbed. It was onto the floor beside his own bed. Though the crowd saw Joshua’s mighty faith, faith that trusted God to part the waters, Joshua didn’t suddenly start trusting God then. He had already been walking in faith — and a small evidence is the detail that he got up early. He knew what his Lord expected of him, and he stepped out in faith.

2. OUTSIDE JERICHO

The momentum of that step carried Israel across the river, all the way to Jericho. God told Israel to march around the city. Joshua followed God’s command — promptly.

Joshua rose early in the morning, and the priests took up the ark of the Lord. And the seven priests bearing the seven trumpets of rams’ horns before the ark of the Lord walked on, and they blew the trumpets continually. . . . So they did for six days. (Joshua 6:12–14)

Joshua continued to trust God. He led the people with strength, courage, and faith. He (and the people) got up early so they wouldn’t delay obedience. Faith in God and faithfulness to God meant, at least on this occasion, a sunrise salutation.

3. AFTER DEFEAT

In the next chapter, we learn Israel was defeated by Ai because of treasure-snatching Achan. God tells Joshua to take inventory. What does he do?

Joshua rose early in the morning and brought Israel near tribe by tribe, and the tribe of Judah was taken. (Joshua 7:16)

You know the rest. Achan is judged, and Israel advances in their conquest.

What if Joshua had been squeamish about the confrontation? What if fear of man had led him to procrastinate? Would more Israelites have perished? I don’t know. But I know he was active in his faith and dealt with the issue swiftly — starting with an early morning.

4. INTO BATTLE

Lastly, after they cleaned house, God strengthened Joshua:

Do not fear and do not be dismayed. Take all the fighting men with you, and arise, go up to Ai. See, I have given into your hand the king of Ai, and his people, his city, and his land. (Joshua 8:1)

Rather than sitting back or sleeping in, “Joshua arose early in the morning and mustered the people and went up, he and the elders of Israel, before the people to Ai” (Joshua 8:10). He heeded the exhortation to be “strong and courageous” because the Lord was with him. God’s promises were not Joshua’s excuse to sleep in — they were his strength to get up and to get up earlier than he might have otherwise.

Power of Well-Spent Mornings

Hope in God’s word is what ties Joshua’s daybreak discipline to the broader theme of mornings in Scripture. When a leader has important work to do in the Bible, he often begins early in the morning.

Abraham rose early to go and discern Lot’s situation (Genesis 19:27–28). Isaac rose early when it was time to finalize his reconciliation with Abimelech (Genesis 26:31). Moses chose to confront Pharaoh early in the morning (Exodus 8:20; 9:13). Job rose early to intercede for his children (Job 1:5). And this doesn’t apply only to men: Scripture commends the Proverbs 31 woman because “she rises while it is yet night” to set her household up for success in the dawning day (Proverbs 31:15).

Clearly, many leaders in the Bible knew the importance of rising for the occasion. Perhaps they saw what the psalmists saw. God’s poets took unusual (and frequent) delight in the dawn:

O Lord, in the morning you hear my voice;     in the morning I prepare a sacrifice for you and watch. (Psalm 5:3)

Satisfy us in the morning with your steadfast love,     that we may rejoice and be glad all our days. (Psalm 90:14)

I rise before dawn and cry for help;     I hope in your words. (Psalm 119:147)

Let me hear in the morning of your steadfast love,     for in you I trust. (Psalm 143:8)

In the New Testament, we get real glimpses of Jesus’s sleeping (and rising) habits:

Rising very early in the morning, while it was still dark, he departed and went out to a desolate place, and there he prayed. (Mark 1:35)

Amid the pressing needs of ministry, Jesus prioritized one thing above all: to meet his Father in prayer. And toward that end, he often found fitting opportunities in the shape of early mornings.

Sunrise Opportunity

Joshua’s example is not a command to set all alarms for five o’clock. He does hold out, however, a burden of responsibility, a legacy of faithfulness, and a wise pattern of early mornings.

The sunrise is an opportunity. It’s not the solution for everyone, in every moment, for every season. We need prudence in applying this principle. There may be times when refusing to stay up late could be a dereliction of duty. (If Joshua hadn’t marched through the night, for example, Israel wouldn’t have rescued the Gibeonites; Joshua 10:9.) There is a season for everything under the sun — and for every sleeping pattern.

If God has made us a leader and given us responsibility for others, we might ask, How can I be a better steward of those God-given responsibilities? We will be judged more strictly, especially if we lead a local church (James 3:1; Hebrews 13:17). So, we must be all the more diligent. Part of the answer might be a commitment to get up early, and go after God and the callings he has given us. Joshua led that way, so why not you and me?

I began committing the Bible to memory just a few weeks after my conversion to Christ during my junior year in college in 1982, so I have now been memorizing Scripture for more than forty years. I can easily say this has been the most beneficial spiritual discipline in my life.

Day after day, Scripture memory keeps my mind on the glories and details of God’s perfect words rather than on the muck that the world, the flesh, and the devil would have me wallow in. Since I have been so lavishly blessed by this practice, I regularly advocate it to my brothers and sisters in Christ. Almost without exception, they genuinely want to memorize Scripture. They see the obvious blessings. Even still, many also confess to a regular pattern of making excuses for not beginning (or continuing) the practice. And we shouldn’t be surprised, for Satan wages war against everything the Spirit leads us to do in our journey toward Christlikeness — and all the more if that work is so threatening to his dark empire.

So, what kinds of excuses have you raised against Bible memory? Let me list some I’ve heard (and fought personally) again and again, and then attempt to help you over each one. My desire is to fill your arsenal with weapons of righteousness that have the power to demolish Satan’s strongholds against this beautiful labor of Scripture memorization so that you will be equipped to take every rebellious thought captive to the obedience of Christ (2 Corinthians 10:3–5).

1. “I don’t have a very good memory.”

The human brain is perhaps the most complex and astonishing physical creation God has made. It has as many neural interconnections as there are leaves in the Amazon rainforest!

Part of that amazing creation is our memory — the ability to recall the past so we can live well in the present. If you are able to read this article and understand it, you have a good enough mind to memorize Scripture. While you may not have a world-class memory (or even a memory as good as some of your friends’ memories), you have a much better memory than you think you have.

Consider that you have countless facts committed to memory: the vast vocabulary your parents taught you, the words to countless songs stuck in your head (even songs you hate), people’s names, their birthdays, capital cities, street names, and so on. If your mind can hold all of that information, sometimes over decades, it has the power and capacity to begin storing up the words of God. And beyond the capacities of your mind, Christ can right now open your mind so that you will understand and remember more of his word. Ask the Lord to do this for you!

What’s more, your memory ability will grow the more you invest in this discipline. No matter where you are now, you will be better a year from now if you put in the effort.

2. “It will take too much time.”

God has entrusted time to us as a stewardship. “This is the day that the Lord has made” (Psalm 118:24). God wrote all the days he has ordained for us in his book before one of them came to be (Psalm 139:16). On judgment day, we will give an account to him for how we spent the moments of our lives. So, the excuse that Scripture memorization will take too much time is really just an admission of bad priorities. We haven’t ordered our lives or our schedules wisely — that is, around what’s truly most important.

We often say we’re too busy, but we’re busy doing what we’ve chosen to do. Even if we’re compelled by circumstances beyond our control (for instance, working at multiple jobs to support our family), we still have plenty of time to pause and commit something God has said to memory. Then, the more Scripture begins to transform our priorities, the more we will want to invest our time, energy, and resources in those things that most glorify God. And immersing our minds in biblical truth is one of those mosts. Memorizing Scripture is blue-chip stock, promising dividends both in this life and in eternity.

3. “I’ve tried it before, and it didn’t work.”

I understand that Scripture memory is hard, and many of you have made attempts (maybe many attempts) in the past. I’ve said for years, though, that the enemy of Scripture memorization is giving up. Jesus told the parable of the persistent widow so that his disciples would “always . . . pray and not lose heart” (Luke 18:1). I would exhort similar tenacity when it comes to memorizing the Bible.

The words in these pages are not idle words for you; they are your life (Deuteronomy 32:47). “Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God” (Matthew 4:4). This practice will feed your soul for the rest of your life — if you don’t give up.

4. “I read the Bible every day. Why should I memorize it?”

This is a good question. I do not look at Scripture memorization as a replacement for daily Bible reading, but rather as a supplement. In addition to slowly memorizing books of the Bible, I read through the entire Bible once a year. The two habits together provide knowledge in breadth and in depth. What Scripture memory adds is deep meditation on passages and the ability to recall them with accuracy in vital moments — in temptation, evangelism, counseling, teaching, prayer times, and so on. Whereas regular Bible reading shapes the overall landscape of our minds, memorization cultivates richness and precision.

5. “I might become prideful.”

Some time ago, I made this painful discovery about myself: I am already deeply prone to pride. You may have made a similar discovery about yourself. There’s some pride in nearly every decision we make and every action we take. The powerful working of the Holy Spirit alone can make us truly humble in Christ — and how does the Spirit work? He uses the words of God. No doubt, if we make good progress in memorizing Scripture, we will be tempted to boast about it. To combat that temptation, I recommend memorizing a few key verses to help keep such sinful pride in check, verses like James 4:6, “God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble.”

My dear friend, I am so grateful that God has led you to consider this marvelous discipline. The benefits are endless, but I’ve focused instead on the obstacles. I’ve sought to help you overcome excuses that the devil will put in front of you to hinder you. If you trust Jesus and stick with it, I promise that God will bless your hard work for his glory, your own joy in him, and the souls of others.

Audio Transcript

Happy New Year’s Day! Welcome to 2024. It’s a great honor to be doing the Ask Pastor John podcast for another year, the start of our twelfth year in a row. God has been kind to us as we record episodes numbering over two thousand now. That’s a lot of episodes!

Well, if you use a read-through-the-Bible plan, you probably started afresh today. I did. Pastor John, I know you did. We’ve been talking a lot about Bible reading on the podcast. We recently looked at how you study the Bible on a given topic. That was APJ episode 1998. So practical. And then we saw how even the grammar of the Bible intends to have a practical, emotional, intellectual, behavioral effect on our lives today. Another super practical Bible-reading tool you gave to us in APJ 2002. And then we looked at why a daily Bible-reading habit is essential for our spiritual growth. That was episode 2003.

And then last time, on Thursday in episode 2006, we asked, What do we do when our Bible reading seems flat? And you pointed us to Proverbs 22:17, the text that calls us to the discipline of applying our hearts to what we read. And you demonstrated the practice in your own life. If any of us are going to get through the whole Bible this year, that element — Proverbs 22:17 — will be an essential ingredient to the success. That was last time.

And speaking of reading the entire Bible in 2024, it’s a huge achievement. I know many of you want to do it or have tried in the past. It’s daunting. We want to encourage you to do it this year. Pastor John and I use the Discipleship Journal Bible Reading Plan. That’s what we are going to be using again in 2024. In fact, it has been recently renamed the Navigators Bible Reading Plan, so that’s what we will now call it. You can download the plan online. I’ll mention this in the outro as well.

But for now, in this New Year’s Day episode, Pastor John, exhort us to do it. Motivate us to read our entire Bible in 2024. Explain why you use it. And perhaps end the episode with a prayer that God would bless our resolve and use it to draw us closer to him in the process.

On this first day of the year, Tony and I want to invite you to join us in reading through the whole Bible this year using the Navigators Bible Reading Plan. I simply want to motivate you in this episode of APJ to join us. I’ve been reading through the Bible every year, using this plan, for decades. Now and then I have tried other plans, but I have always returned to this one for two simple reasons.

Why This Plan?

First, it guides me every day in reading from four different parts of the Bible. Now, not everybody is helped by this approach, but I love it. For example, we start today in Matthew, Acts, Psalms, and Genesis. It is an amazing providence that over the years there has almost always been something in one of these four readings that God has especially suited to my need. So, that’s the first reason I return to this plan each year. I love reading the Bible every day in four different places.

The second reason is probably decisive for me, because there are other plans that read in four different places in the Bible, or two different places. But what’s unique about this plan, as far as I know, is that it leads us through the whole Bible by having us read 25 days a month — not 30, but 25.

To my mind, that was a stroke of sanctified genius. Why? What’s one of the main reasons people give up on reading through the Bible? Well, it’s largely because they get behind, and around about March they can see they’re never going to catch up. They might as well stop and take another approach (so the thinking goes).

But when you have five catch-up days at the end of every month, you can keep going. It’s like a surprise birthday party every month, only you know it’s coming. And if you are all caught up after 25 days, right where you’re supposed to be, you can read wherever you feel like it. That’s why it’s a birthday party.

Or you can do what I do if I’m all caught up — which I seldom am, by the way. I need those days. But if I do have three or five or two days without any assignment from the plan, I spend the time working on Bible memorization. It’s just a great thing built into every month, to have several days you can review your Bible memory.

Also, one of the great things about doing this together is that we plan for the APJ episodes this year to regularly relate to the Bible reading for that day — not always, but often enough that if you’re reading with us, you’ll probably notice it.

Why Read Regularly?

Let me give you one main reason just simply for reading the Bible at all regularly. In 1 Samuel 3:21, it says, “The Lord appeared again at Shiloh, for the Lord revealed himself to Samuel at Shiloh by the word of the Lord.” This is the spiritual, miraculous assumption all through the Bible: God reveals himself by the word of God. He reveals himself by his word. We hear God in his word. We see the nature of God in his word. We taste the goodness of God in his word. We enjoy God in his word. We fellowship with Christ in his word.

“This is the spiritual, miraculous assumption all through the Bible: God reveals himself by the word of God.”

Paul says in 1 Corinthians 1:9 that God has called Christians “into the fellowship of his Son.” Now, if that reality — fellowship with the Son of God — is strange to you, and you don’t know what you would point to in your life as fellowshipping with the risen Christ, this is where it happens: it happens as you read and meditate on and pray over and respond to his word. And we would love for you to join us in it.

So, let me pray that God would help us with this resolve in the new year.

Pastor John’s Prayer

Father, Paul prayed for the Thessalonians what I now pray for our friends through Ask Pastor John; namely, I ask you, Father, that you would fulfill every resolve for good in this new year, every work of faith by your power, so that the name of our Lord Jesus would be glorified in us as we read and obey and fulfill those resolves (2 Thessalonians 1:11–12). Grant that we would have resolves to read the Bible this year. Grant faith to trust you for that. Grant fulfillment of that resolve by your power, and grant that Jesus would get the glory, because it’s his power that fulfilled the resolve.

Starting right now, would you incline the hearts of your people to your word? Bend our desires, Father, to the Bible and not to money or entertainment. Grant that we would meet you there, in your word. Grant that we would gain deep wisdom for life as we read. Grant that we would all — those listening and Tony and I — grant that we would all gain gospel hope and strength for holiness, for radical love, and for risk-taking in holy ways in this year’s obedience. Grant that the eyes of our heart would be open to see glorious, beautiful, wonderful things in your word. Grant that we would understand what we see rightly. Grant that we would feel appropriate spiritual affections of what we see, over what we have understood. Unite our hearts so that as we read, we’re not distracted and fragmented in all the ways that can happen.

Guard us from Satan, who plucks the word out of the minds like birds snatching seed off a path. Oh, may every word find good soil this year, and every day may there be some good measure of fresh satisfaction in our hearts as we read. We believe, Father, that you are glorified in us when we are satisfied in you. So, for your glory and for our joy, we pray that you would cause us to taste and see that you are good as we read.

We love your word, Lord. We thank you for your word. It is our life, because without it, we would not know you. Help us to meet you in your word, all of your word, through this year. I pray in Jesus’s name. Amen.

Part 8 Episode 190 When the apostle Paul says that Christians “eagerly wait for the hope of righteousness,” what specifically are we waiting for? In this episode of Light + Truth, John Piper opens Galatians 5:1–12 to unfold what’s to come for those who believe.

We live in a world awash in words. The competition for your attention, your eyes, and your headspace — and that through your earspace — has never been more aggressive and ruthless. Our modern lives teem with digital and analog voices vying for our limited focus. They clamor for our money, our time, our energy, our love, our worship.

Oh, the countless, incessant voices of modern life, and with them, the unnerving lack of silence! Voices in the air, voices in print, the cacophony of voices that accompany and empower the endless scrolls and reels of images on our screens, moving and stationary. Yes, we are flooded in visuals as well, but our pixels do not thrive in silence. Even as loneliness becomes epidemic, few of the lonely know true silence and solitude.

In such times and spaces as ours, and at such an occasion as a new year, how might we learn to better drown out the remote, digital voices that have so few messages of importance for us, and better hear the near, precious, embodied voices? And in particular, what if the voice of Jesus carried the most weight of all?

Hear His Voice

Jesus says that his sheep will hear his voice (John 10:3), know his voice (John 10:4), and listen to his voice (John 10:16). As they read and reread and meditate on his word in Scripture, his people, illumined by his living and active Spirit, hear the voice of their living and active King, seated in power on the throne of the universe.

In his living and active word, they hear — we hear — his voice roar like many waters (Revelation 1:15) and console like the chords of many harps (Revelation 14:2). We hear his majestic voice thunder like a trumpet (Revelation 1:10), slicing through foes like a two-edged sword from his mouth (Revelation 1:16), and we hear him patiently, gently stand at the door and knock (Revelation 3:20), ready to perform the most exacting of life-saving surgeries with his verbal scalpel.

The very voice that said, “Lazarus, come out” (John 11:43), and cried aloud from the cross (Matthew 27:46, 50) — and one day will announce, “Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man” (Revelation 21:3) — this very voice continues to speak, even in 2024, through his written word and by the Spirit.

What might it mean for the voice of Jesus to genuinely be first in our lives? More than podcasts and radio and Spotify. More than television and movies. More than the voices on ESPN and Saturday Night Live and cable news and YouTube. More than the talking heads and hot takes of online influencers and endless political drivel.

What might it mean to really put his voice first?

First in Delight

Start with the heart. Our goal and deepest prayer is that we, like John the Baptist, would be among the friends who rejoice greatly at our bridegroom’s voice (John 3:29). This joy is what we aim at, long-term, with the fresh resolves and prayers of a new year: a better-conditioned heart, the slowly and stubbornly re-formed frame of our soul’s plasticity.

How often do we hear Christians concede (sometimes as a veiled excuse) to be “wired” a certain way? Indeed, there are some ways you’re wired. But often we talk about being hardwired in ways we’re actually far more plastic. And society’s not helping us with this. Our world has come to feign plasticity in precisely the places we’re hardwired (like biological sex) and to pretend hard-wiring in the places we’re plastic (desires and delights).

Mark this well for a new year: your desires, good and bad, are not givens. Now, you may not, in the moment, simply be able to will yourself into some specific delight, or disgust, but you can retrain your palate over time. In fact, with each passing day, you’re either solidifying and deepening your heart in its present desires and delights, or retraining it for different ones (Romans 6:19; 12:2).

So, this, among other designs, is what we aim at with new-year resolves and prayers: reshaping, reconditioning, retraining our hearts, to delight in what’s truly delightful (and so find appropriate disgust in what is truly disgusting). We seek to acquire new tastes, holy ones. And there is no person, and no voice, more worthy of our supreme delight than the voice of Jesus.

First in Deference

Next, as Jesus’s voice becomes the one we delight in most, so his voice comes to have greater functional authority and power in our lives. We grow in applying, and complying with, his word. Despite our old instincts as sinners, “in the midst of a crooked and twisted generation” (Philippians 2:15), we learn to defer to Jesus’s voice in Scripture over the chorus of other voices, including our own.

In times when many play fast and loose with truth in public, we might well rally afresh to truth even without bending our eyes and ears more attentively to the word of Christ. But as Jesus said to Pilate, “Everyone who is of the truth listens to my voice” (John 18:37).

Are you really “of the truth”? Do you truly, practically, habitually listen to the voice of Jesus, and defer to his word, over your own preferences and partisan peers, when he says, on the one hand, “God made them male and female” (Mark 10:6), or on the other, “Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you” (Luke 6:27)?

Do you hear him speak, and obey accordingly, when he says through his apostles that those who practice homosexuality will not inherit the kingdom (1 Corinthians 6:9; 1 Timothy 1:10), nor those who revile (1 Corinthians 6:10)? “Let marriage be held in honor” (Hebrews 13:4). Amen. And, next verse, “keep your life free from love of money” (Hebrews 13:5). Amen. On the one hand, “No longer walk as the Gentiles do” (Ephesians 4:17); on the other, walk “with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love, eager to maintain the unity of the Spirit” (Ephesians 4:2–3).

Deferring to the voice of Jesus will scarcely make us fit nicely into the secular parties of this generation. It will keep us on holy footing, rather than careening right or left with the swell of preferred voices. It will keep us from really finding a homeland here with the many faces of unbelief. The words of Jesus will be goads, on every side, to keep us from subtle worldly traps that would domesticate us to cities here (or prairies here), rather than to the city that is to come.

First Each Day

Finally, such delight and deference to Jesus’s voice will lead to a growing sense of need, and joy, to make his word a clear, objective, demonstrable priority in our lives — and that at the daily level.

I’m not interested here in suggesting any new laws about all true Christians doing morning devotions. Far and away, the testimony of saints throughout the centuries has celebrated the priority of starting the day, and setting the day’s mood and trajectory, with the voice of Jesus, but I can grant a few exceptions in some seasons of life.

Whatever we may claim about our bent or wiring, what we do first in the morning is telling. In some good measure, it reveals the priorities of our souls.

Strangely, most of us do go looking for words when we wake up, however consciously. This might be one of the things God has wired deeply in our human souls, to wake up looking for direction and nourishment, not just physical but spiritual. Tragically, many turn their morning hunger to notifications and news, to social media and news, to video clips and news. Some also turn to news.

But this hunger of soul you awake with every morning is not designed to feed on today’s news but on timeless good news. And that not just through our own rehearsals of gospel truths remembered from previous encounters, but through fresh communion with the God of the gospel, in his Son, by his Spirit, through his written word.

Now, “first each day” doesn’t mean “first only,” as if we might start with giving our attention to Jesus, then move on and scarcely ever have his person and voice return to our consciousness. We want his voice to abide, that is, remain, in us all day, not just in the morning (John 5:38; 8:31; 15:7; 1 John 2:14). So, we might ask about last each day as well. And in the middle. After all, that happy man of Psalm 1, whose “delight is in the law of the Lord,” not only seizes the mornings but “meditates day and night” (Psalm 1:2).

Resolved

Perhaps you’d resolve this with me for the new year: to put the voice of Jesus first. First in delight, first in deference, first each day. First in preference, in power, in priority.

Let’s resolve to have the very voice of God almighty, through his eternal Son, by the Spirit, in Scripture, dominate and liberate this new year. Through Bible reading, rereading, and meditation. Through sitting attentively under faithful preaching. Through committed engagement in the life of the church, with the people of the Book.

Resolved: to put the voice of Jesus first in 2024.