Over the last twenty years, I’ve had several great fathers in the faith. These men of God reached down to invest in me, and were far enough ahead of me that they could guide, challenge, and spur me on.

When I was a teenager, my Young Life leader Kevin Jamison helped me begin following Jesus and make the Christian faith my own. Bryan Lopina, who was a couple grades ahead of me, taught me, even then, how to invest in men younger than me. He also taught me that sexual sin was serious and would ruin me.

Then, when I was in my twenties, Tom Steller taught me how to read the Bible for myself, to see more than I’d seen before. Dieudonné Tamfu taught me to consecrate my time, my attention, my whole life more fully to Christ. Dan Holst taught me how to love a family, and then fold younger men into that family. Mike Meloch taught me how to know and pursue a wife and how to be a witness in the workplace.

And all along the way, my dad — my biological father and father in the faith — taught me how to work hard “as unto the Lord” (Colossians 3:23 ASV), how to love a woman like Christ loves the church, how to give generously to bless and support others, how to navigate difficult and tense situations with a calm and confident strength in God.

I’ve had wonderful fathers in Christ. Some of them have been in my life over decades; others for only a few years. Some have been much older than me (sometimes 30 or 40 years older); others have been just a few years ahead. Some came and found me; others I sought out myself. They’ve all, however, shaped and counseled and cheered me on in Christ. And they’ve each played different roles in fathering me. It really hasn’t been one man, but a village of good men.

Because I’ve tasted the fruit of such fatherhood, and because I see this kind of fathering again and again in Scripture, I want to encourage you to do what you can to find the spiritual fathers that you need.

God-Breathed Fathering

Where do we see these kinds of fathers in the Bible? Again, we could go to a number of texts, but I was drawn to the book of Proverbs, a whole book written by a father, for a son.

Hear, my son, your father’s instruction,     and forsake not your mother’s teaching,for they are a graceful garland for your head     and pendants for your neck.My son, if sinners entice you,     do not consent. (Proverbs 1:8–10)

Proverbs isn’t just a catalog of wise sayings. It’s a letter from a good dad to his boy. “My son . . . My son . . . My son . . .” — 23 times in 31 chapters. The book models the kind of fatherly counsel that young men need to navigate life. The book shows us (among other things):

How to make hard decisions (Proverbs 11:14; 12:15; 15:22),
What to eat and drink (and what not to eat or drink, or at least in moderation) (Proverbs 20:1; 23:20–21),
What kinds of friends to keep (and avoid) (Proverbs 27:10; 1:10; 13:20; 14:7),
The kind of woman to marry (and avoid) (Proverbs 18:22; 31:10; 5:3–5; 21:19),
How to love a wife and children (Proverbs 22:6; 31:11, 28–29),
How to make and spend money (Proverbs 30:7–9; 3:9–10; 14:21, 31),
When to speak up, and when to keep quiet (Proverbs 18:21; 12:13; 15:2),
How to become humble (Proverbs 3:5; 11:2).

Proverbs then, as a book, gives us a portrait of a good father. In it, Solomon applies wisdom to all the spheres of life, trying (in many practical, earthy details) to prepare his son to live well as a man of God.

So, you might think, Well, if this is the God-breathed counsel of a spiritual father, do I really need to find another father? Why not just memorize Proverbs? Well, that certainly wouldn’t hurt. Men who internalize and apply the 31 chapters of Proverbs would be in better shape than many. But we really need more than words (we all know this instinctively). Every young man needs men who can guide, teach, and train us. We need flesh-and-blood, life-on-life fathers.

Everyday Masculine Faithfulness

We see this kind of fathering all over the New Testament. For instance, why did Jesus spend most of his ministry on twelve men? He could have just hit the preaching circuit and wrote bestsellers, but he chose to focus his three short years of ministry on Peter, Andrew, James, John, Philip, Bartholomew, Thomas, Matthew, another James, Thaddaeus, Simon, and Judas. Think about that. Some vans hold more than twelve people, and yet that was his focus. Why?

Well, in part, because he knew his disciples needed more than a few great messages or books. For them to really get it, for them to live like God wanted them to live, they needed to see his life. They needed to see what masculine faithfulness looked like in real time — real situations, in a real place, among real people and challenges and temptations. They needed to see him when he was tired, when he was sick, when he was hungry, when he was distracted and interrupted. They needed to see him care for his family members, and talk to strangers, and make tough decisions in the moment. They needed to see him not get to everything he wanted to get done in a day. They needed to see him pray in secret.

And they needed to be seen by him. They needed to see his life, and they needed him to see theirs — up close and consistently. He knew these men well enough to correct and train them, to comfort and rebuke them — and specifically, not vaguely, like a good father.

Or look at the apostle Paul, and the many men he discipled from church to church, city to city — Timothy, Titus, Silas, Barnabas, Epaphroditus, Aquila, and more. Christianity gets passed from fathers to sons, who become fathers to more sons, who become fathers to more sons. That hasn’t changed because there’s two billion professing Christians in the world. God still says to spiritual fathers, “What you have heard from me in the presence of many witnesses entrust to faithful men, who will be able to teach others also” (2 Timothy 2:2) — father to son, father to son, father to son. From some men to you, and then from you to other men.

First Steps Toward Fathers

Finding good fathers in Christ can be hard, so I want to end with some practical advice. If you know you need a spiritual dad, but don’t have one, what can you actually do? Do you just wait for an older, wiser man in the church to notice you and put his arm around you?

No, in my experience, the younger man will often need to identify and go after the older man. You’ll probably need to ask to be fathered. It’s not always this way (and it really shouldn’t be this way), but it’s often still this way. So, what can we do as younger men in need of fathers?

LOOK

First, identify the godly, older men around you. You can’t pursue a father in Christ if you can’t name him. Start studying the older men God has put around you. And what are you looking for in these men? You’re looking, first, for mature Christianity, someone who has followed Jesus faithfully for longer than you have.

As a guide, you could look at the elder qualifications of 1 Timothy 3:1–7 or Titus 1:6–9. These men don’t have to be pastors or elders or even deacons to be a spiritual father, but those two passages sketch out dimensions of Christian maturity — Is he a faithful husband? Is he sober-minded and self-controlled? Is he gentle? How does he handle his money? How does he handle the Bible? Apart from competency in public teaching, every other qualification is something God expects of all believers. They’re traits he expects of you. Men don’t have to be spiritual superheroes to be good spiritual fathers. They only need to be far enough ahead in wisdom and faithfulness to stretch you to grow and mature.

In addition to maturity, look for overlap. It’s not enough for them to be more mature than you and for you to see them briefly on Sunday mornings and at a midweek gathering. You need to have actual access to their life — and, ideally, somewhat consistent access. Meaningful discipleship doesn’t happen in one-off conversations here and there. It requires time and space, and it requires regularity.

You need to see faithful men when they’re not dressed up for church and serving up front. You want to see them when they’re in their Saturday clothes and on the couch, when they’re disagreeing with their wife and when they’re watching football. To be a true son, we need some meaningful overlap.

ASK

Once you’ve identified the mature men around you, then try to initiate intentional time together. Again, don’t wait for a father to come find you. Go and ask them for wisdom, for counsel, for time, for fathering. And then as you start meeting more regularly, look for ways to come alongside them and help them in the ordinary rhythms of their lives. This isn’t just for their sake (who couldn’t use another set of hands?), but it’s also for your sake. Again, you want to see them doing ordinary things — yard work, grocery store runs, home repair, making dinner, watching kids — because real Christlikeness is often clearest in ordinary things. So, join them in those everyday, easily overlooked rhythms. Make it as easy as possible for them to spend time with you.

LISTEN

Lastly, listen carefully. Ask lots of questions. It’s actually a way to honor older, wiser men. We can sometimes be afraid we’re going to look a certain way if we start asking dumb questions, but questions about how to follow Christ — even the smallest, most random ones — are never dumb. And truly godly men, men worth following and imitating, won’t think they’re dumb. They’re going to be encouraged by your questions, honored by your questions — and they’re going to encourage you to keep asking them.

So, brothers, identify mature men to imitate, men who can teach you, challenge you, encourage you, and shape you. Initiate regular time with them (make it easy for them to spend time with you). And then ask lots and lots of questions. Listen well to what they say and observe carefully how they live, and then imitate their faith.

Audio Transcript

Happy Thanksgiving to all of you here in the States. Thanksgiving is a Pauline theme, ever relevant for all of us on any day. This national holiday is a fitting time for a question on Romans 1:21, and how Godward thanksgiving — or a lack of it — shapes the trajectory of our whole lives. How is the story of your life told by your thanksgiving?

This is a great question from a listener named James, who likely isn’t celebrating Thanksgiving Day because he lives in the beautiful, rugged peninsula of Cornwall, England. Here’s his email: “Pastor John, thank you for your ministry and for this podcast. I was wondering if you can explain the logic of the trajectory Paul talks about in Romans 1. Specifically, I want to better understand the role of God-centered thanksgiving in verse 21: ‘For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him.’ This failure to thank leads to deeper and deeper sin-bondage and greater and greater judgments from God on sinners. Negatively, how does thanklessness help us understand what sin is? Positively, how does thanksgiving shape the trajectory of our lives?”

This really is an astonishing text. I thought about it all over again. I spent a lot of time just soaking in the amazing statements of this text, especially because of its claim that every human being knows God. They know his eternity. They know his power. They know his being Creator of all. They know his deity. Everyone knows God. Atheists know God. Agnostics know God. Animists know God. Every person you meet on the street knows God.

Apart from God’s saving grace, Romans 1:18 says, every human being suppresses that knowledge. The reason we do is because every human being finds other things preferable to God, which is the very essence of evil, the essence of sin. Jeremiah 2:13 says, “My people have committed two evils: they have forsaken me, the fountain of living waters, and hewed out cisterns for themselves, broken cisterns that can hold no water.” This is the arch evil, the primal sin, the root of all other evils: humans find things, people, the creation preferable to God.

Even though those other things are like dirt by comparison, we don’t prefer God. We don’t find God attractive. We don’t find God desirable, beautiful, satisfying. That’s the evil of all evils, and that’s why, Paul says, we suppress the knowledge of God that we have — because that knowledge shows him as preferable to all things.

Heart of the Problem

So, we claim not to know God. We claim not to know him, but we do know him. We get angry at him for not making himself more plain, but Paul says that God made himself perfectly plain to everyone (Romans 1:19). Our problem is not lack of revelation; our problem is that we don’t want to see. We don’t want to see, and so we suppress and pretend that we don’t see. Paul says that’s our darkness, that’s our foolishness, that’s the futility of our minds (Romans 1:21).

“Every single thing that gives us any pleasure at all in this world is a gift of God.”

We find God unattractive, distasteful, offensive, even abhorrent. Then, in all kinds of ways, we exchange his infinitely beautiful, all-satisfying glory for pitiful substitutes, like images of ourselves or cultural artifacts that exalt our ingenuity and intelligence and creativity and vaunted independence. The result is that humankind is under the just wrath of God, so that he hands us over to more and more, greater and greater degradation, which we see happening all around us.

In the middle of this dreadful description of our human condition, Paul mentions the positive alternative to that darkness and foolishness and futility and suppression of the truth — namely, glorifying and thanking God precisely as God. That’s what’s missing: glorifying and thanking God. That would change everything.

Glory and Gratitude

Let me read the text so that people can hear for themselves everything I just said.

The wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth. For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them [or made it plain]. For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made [he’s our Maker, and we know it]. So they are without excuse. For although they knew God [that’s probably the most amazing statement in the text], they did not honor [or glorify] him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened. Claiming to be wise, they became fools, and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things. (Romans 1:18–23)

So, James is right. He is asking about the place and function of thankfulness in this text: “For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him.” I think Paul mentions both “honor,” which is like “glorify,” and “give thanks” because he knows that they are overlapping realities. When we thank God, we are showing him to be glorious, and no one can truly glorify God with a heart of ingratitude.

To glorify and to thank are overlapping realities, but they’re not the same. There are ways to feel and think and act that glorify God, but we wouldn’t call them thankfulness. The reality of glorifying God is wider, bigger. It’s a bigger reality than thanking God. Thanking God is a subset, a subspecies, of glorifying God. And yet Paul, of all the ways to glorify God that he could have said, chooses to mention thankfulness alongside glorifying God. Why is that?

Made to Thank

First, I think it relates to the fact that Paul has just said that what can be known about God is known through the things he has made. In other words, everywhere a human being looks, whether the sky, the forest, the mountains, the rivers, the sea, the land, family, the mirror — all of it — everywhere you look is made by God and is a gift of God, from the Maker to humanity. Every single thing that gives us any pleasure at all in this world is a gift of God.

The heart-response that God created for glorifying him for his gifts is thankfulness. That’s what he created, that’s what he designed, in the human heart as a response to this vast, vast array of made things, of gifts. Of course, it’s not wrong to speak of being thankful to God for God. That’s not wrong, but in the Bible thankfulness mostly relates to God’s gifts and his deeds to bless us. For sure, God himself is the gift, and if we don’t arrive there, we haven’t arrived.

Still, it is right and good that our hearts brim, they just brim, with thankfulness that God is a Maker. Everything that is not God was made by God. Therefore, at every turn, everywhere we look, all the time, 24-7, we should feel profoundly, continually, earnestly thankful for God’s gifts. I think that’s one of the reasons why he lists thankfulness as the counterpart to “honor” or “glorify” in this text.

Made to Depend

Secondly, I think Paul calls out being thankful to God alongside glorifying God because built into thankfulness is humility, a sense of dependence and gladness in needy receiving. Humility, dependence, glad neediness — not surprisingly, these sound a lot like faith.

I think if you pressed Paul, he would say true thankfulness toward our all-glorious, all-powerful, all-providing Creator includes humble, dependent, glad trust. Thankfulness and trust may not be the same thing, but they are so intimately and integrally connected that Paul thinks thankfulness is a good thing to mention here, where he also wants to call attention to trust.

Can anyone truly say, “I am joyfully thankful to God for his all-satisfying beauty and his all-governing power and his all-providing goodness to me — but I don’t trust him”? Nobody can talk like that. Something is inauthentic if that kind of sentence is spoken. Thankfulness, when oriented on God, is a deep and powerful experience.

“The heart-response that God created for glorifying him for his gifts is thankfulness.”

And so, when thankfulness fails, Paul describes its absence like this: “They became futile in their thinking. Their foolish hearts were darkened. Their claim to be wise was shown to be foolishness, and they fell into the sacrilege of exchanging God for images, especially the one in the mirror.” That’s the absence of thankfulness. It’s a horrible, horrible description.

World’s Desperate Need

So yes, I think James is right. The absence of thankfulness as the absence of humility, dependence, glad neediness, and trust is one way of describing the darkness and folly and futility of our own times.

It’s the opposite, you could say, of Pride with a capital P, the very Pride that calls our shame “glory,” exactly the way Romans 1 describes it, when they exchange God for the person in the mirror. The exchange of the opposite sex for the same sex in our passions is an outflow, Paul says, of that very exchange of God for the person in the mirror.

There are many ways to describe the desperate need of the world, and according to Romans 1, one way is repentance from pride and independence and self-sufficiency toward a humble, dependent, happy, trustful neediness for God as he has revealed himself in Jesus, which we call thankfulness.

No one had ever seen a more unusual band of soldiers. Or heard. As the men slowly advanced toward the front lines, no armor glinted in the sunlight; no war cry pierced the air. Instead, colorful robes adorned these soldiers’ shoulders, and they were armed with nothing but a song. And at the heart of the song were two words that seemed severely premature: “Give thanks.”

Give thanks to the Lord,     for his steadfast love endures forever. (2 Chronicles 20:21)

So sang the vanguard of King Jehoshaphat’s army; so marched his first men into war.

Their enemies, surely disoriented, perhaps took some courage, thinking Judah’s warriors had lost their minds. But as the next minutes would show, the soldiers’ song of thanks proved more powerful than any sword. For “when they began to sing and praise, the Lord set an ambush against the men of Ammon, Moab, and Mount Seir, who had come against Judah, so that they were routed” (2 Chronicles 20:22).

Judah’s enemies were routed by song, vanquished by praise. And the first sounds to fill the expectant air of war were those two surprising words: “Give thanks.” Many a war today is won with the same words, even if our foes have changed. Many a sin lies slain, many a lie gets daggered, and many a devil flees at the sound of this weapon called “thank you.”

Weapon Called ‘Thank You’

Often, in Scripture, thanksgiving arises after deliverance — after God has answered the prayer, brought the rescue, trampled the enemy. But among the many examples of post-deliverance thanksgiving, we find several striking examples of the saints thanking God before the battle begins — as a weapon of war.

Alongside Jehoshaphat’s army, we might recall what Daniel did when faced with King Darius’s insane decree: “Whoever makes petition to any god or man for thirty days, except to you, O king, shall be cast into the den of lions” (Daniel 6:7). Daniel would not, could not, endure a month of prayerless days, much less make petition to a creature of dust. So, “he got down on his knees three times a day and prayed, . . . as he had done previously” (Daniel 6:10).

Were I Daniel, my prayers would no doubt plead and beg and earnestly ask for deliverance. Daniel, however, did more: he “gave thanks before his God” (Daniel 6:10). Let kings rage and lions roar; Daniel will still be heard saying “thank you” to his God. And with this weapon, he silenced fear, proclaimed God’s faithfulness, and so trusted in his God all through the awful night.

“Under God, thanksgiving can become not only the raised cup after battle, but the drawn sword beforehand.”

Chief among gratitude’s soldiers, however, stands our own Lord Jesus, who knew how to thank his Father before the four thousand were fed (Mark 8:6), before Lazarus shook off his graveclothes (John 11:41), and even before his own betrayal. “He took a cup, and when he had given thanks he gave it to them” (Matthew 26:27). Maundy Thursday heard the agonized prayers of Gethsemane; it heard also the stunning sounds of gratitude. And in part through that “thank you,” Jesus saw more clearly the joy set before him, “that day when I drink it new with you in my Father’s kingdom” (Matthew 26:29), and he found strength to trust until the empty tomb.

Under God, thanksgiving can become for us an army marching forward, declaring God’s steadfast love against the hordes of unbelief. It can become not only the raised cup after battle, but the drawn sword beforehand.

Counting Blessings, Killing Sins

Consider now your own life. You are no soldier marching toward battle, no Daniel facing the lions’ den, no Savior engulfed in darkness. But in Christ, you have many strong and subtle foes. And Godward gratitude is one of your sharpest swords.

Take worry. How do you repel a rising anxiety and welcome the peace that passes all understanding? How does your embattled mind become garrisoned by the forces of grace? Not only by “[letting] your requests be made known to God,” but also by doing so “with thanksgiving” (Philippians 4:6–7). “Father, though worry weighs on me so heavily, thank you. You have proved your faithfulness so many times; you will prove your faithfulness again.”

Or take sexual temptation. How do you create an atmosphere in your heart that chokes the lungs of lust? Not only by removing “filthiness,” “foolish talk,” and “crude joking” from mouth and mind, and not only by remembering that “everyone who is sexually immoral . . . has no inheritance in the kingdom of Christ and God,” but also by filling your soul with the fragrance of gratitude. Instead of sexual sin, Paul says, “let there be thanksgiving” (Ephesians 5:4–5). For lust cannot live in an utterly thankful heart, a heart that gratefully knows God as its treasure.

Or take bitterness. How do you “let the peace of Christ rule in your heart” when someone in your community drives you crazy (Colossians 3:15)? How do you go on forgiving and forbearing instead of allowing anger to kill your love — or bitterness to cool it (Colossians 3:13–14)? In part, by obeying the command to “be thankful” (Colossians 3:15). When we sincerely thank God for his mercy in Christ, when we gratefully trace the kindness that covers our sins, another day of love feels a little more doable.

We’re not talking here about a bland and banal, cross-stitched and clichéd “count your blessings.” We’re talking about war. Thanksgiving is an act of war. We count our blessings to kill our sins.

Begin and Abound

A habit of thanksgiving, however, rarely comes easily — especially in the grip of temptation. Far easier to allow worry over the walls, to cede ground to lust, to open the gates before bitterness, than to boldly raise gratitude’s flag. And understandably so. When Paul travels to our sin’s twisted center, he finds there an ancient thanklessness: “Although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened” (Romans 1:21). Sin never says “thank you” — not sincerely, not from the heart.

So, how might naturally thankless people wield the weapon of thanksgiving? We might consider a two-part plan: begin and abound.

Begin

A habit of thanksgiving grows, in part, from beginning our prayers with gratitude and praise. On some regular basis, then, we might resolve to say “thank you” before we say “help me.” Before we voice whatever burdens feel most pressing, we might pause, remember, and spend some time naming God’s past faithfulness, his present help.

Such a practice holds dangers, of course, because thanksgiving holds no value apart from what John Piper calls thanksfeeling. Habitually “thanking” God from a thankless heart warrants the rebuke of Jesus: “This people honors me with their lips, but their heart is far from me” (Matthew 15:8). In fact, perhaps the worst prayer in the Gospels begins with “thank you” (Luke 18:11–12).

At the same time, Scripture gives us warrant to begin with thanksgiving; it also gives us hope that such a practice may nourish into our hearts not only the words, but the feeling too. The Levites of old “were to stand every morning, thanking and praising the Lord, and likewise at evening” (1 Chronicles 23:30). Whatever the circumstance, each day found the Levites adorning the dawn with thanksgiving and bedewing the dark with gratitude.

“Thanksgiving is an act of war. We count our blessings to kill our sins.”

In the New Testament, Paul commands us to “give thanks in all circumstances” (1 Thessalonians 5:18) — indeed, to thank God “always and for everything” (Ephesians 5:20). Such commands suggest more than mere spontaneity. By grace, resolving to thank God “always” can push us to remember our many reasons for thankfulness. And remembrance, like a net thrown into the heart’s waters, often catches fresh feelings.

As you begin with thanksgiving, then, remember particular answers to past prayers. Remember the gifts God has scattered so generously about you. Remember how much you have that you don’t deserve — and how little you have that you do. Remember the main reason for gratitude named in the Old Testament: “For he is good; for his steadfast love endures forever!” (1 Chronicles 16:34, 41). And then trace that goodness and love in the figure of your dying Savior, resurrected Lord, ascended King, and coming Groom.

As we do so, the Lord may well set a table before us in the presence of our enemies — our own worry, our lust, our bitterness — and our cup will overflow with thanks.

Abound

If we regularly begin with thanksgiving, we may find ourselves slowly doing more: abounding in thanksgiving. Paul names such abounding as one of the central pillars of the everyday Christian life:

As you received Christ Jesus the Lord, so walk in him, rooted and built up in him and established in the faith, just as you were taught, abounding in thanksgiving. (Colossians 2:6–7)

Abounding in thanksgiving is not a discrete practice; it’s not a step of prayer on the way to petition. Abounding in thanksgiving is a lifestyle. When we abound, we find gratitude rising from our hearts as our bodies rise from bed. We say “thank you” unplanned, unpremeditated, as our eyes catch red falling leaves or the morning’s frosted dew. We bow our heads before meals not merely by brute force of habit but by a living impulse of the heart.

And when the forces of temptation advance, we wield thanksgiving like a weapon well used and close at hand. With Jehoshaphat’s singers, we march toward the battle with song. “Thank you!” we sing, and the sword descends. “I trust you!” we shout, and sin lies slain.

Zach Howard: I am Professor Zach Howard, dean of the college programs here and professor of theology and humanities, and it’s my joy to welcome you into this conversation we’re going to have here about Dr. Piper’s recent book. We have some students here who have read the book and have some questions and we’re glad you’re here to listen in on that conversation. This is the book we all have in our hands, Foundations for Lifelong Learning: Education in Serious Joy. Pastor John, I’m curious what the book’s about and why you wrote it.

John Piper: Let me just illustrate how it works. That would be the best way to do it. We believe that there are six habits of mind and heart for lifelong learning. You get a start here and you do this the rest of your life: observation, understanding, evaluation, feeling, application, and expression.

For example, a few weeks ago I was working on Look at the Book in 1 Corinthians 15, and I noticed that in 1 Corinthians 15:1–2 it says that Paul has preached the gospel, “which you believe and which you stand, by which you are being saved, if you don’t believe in vain” (my translation).

Now, I had never noticed before that 1 Corinthians 15:10 says that God’s grace “was not in vain toward me, but I worked harder than any of them. Nevertheless, it was not I but the grace of God that was with me” (my translation).

So, I observed and thought, “Those are connected.” I had also never noticed in 1 Corinthians 15:58, the end of the chapter, “Therefore, my beloved brothers, be steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, knowing that in the Lord your labor is not in vain.” Now I had three observations, two of which I never had before. That’s level one.

Next is understanding. I’m asking, what’s that about? Why are those verses there? Do they shed light on each other? Are they interwoven in some way? And there’s a pattern there. You believe not in vain because grace comes to you; grace is not in vain because it enables you to work hard; and you work hard and that work is not in vain because there’s a resurrection from the dead. That’s the pattern. This chapter is about not living in vain.

Then you evaluate. Is that important? It’s life-and-death important, right? If I believe in vain, I’m dead. I’m going to hell if I believe in vain. So, the evaluation is off-the-charts important.

What about feeling? What should I feel? I should feel fear if I’m drawn away from the gospel and start to live my life in vain, believe in vain. I should feel fear, or I should feel motivated to fly to grace so that I do the work he’s called me to do.

Then comes application. Devote yourself to living in the promises of God, because they’re the ones that enable you to do the obedience that you’re called to do by grace.

And finally comes expression. I’m doing this right now. That’s a little, three-minute introduction to those six habits that are being expressed to you because I had that experience.

That’s what I mean by the six. I live this way. In fact, I think I say in the closing part of the book that I began the book doing six habits of lifelong learning, and I end by saying that these are six habits of lifelong living. This is the way I live.

Very briefly, it works outside the Bible too. I drove to the airport a week ago to go to TGC, and I drove by and I saw the tent out here. There are people living in a tent 50 feet from here. That’s my observation. I observed that and I said, “I’m going over there when I get home. I’m going to talk to those people and get some understanding and ask, ‘What’s your situation?’” I don’t like this. I don’t like this happening by my church. I want to help.

So, I walked over yesterday when I got home, got off the airplane, greeted my wife, and I changed my clothes because I didn’t want to look too weird to the tent people, and I went there. They were all gone. The one had a big sign up that said, “Move the stuff or we’ll move it out.” But oh, how I got some understanding.

There’s so much stuff out there that it would take a pickup to move it away. This did not happen overnight. Some understanding was happening. They didn’t just show up here and pitch their tent. This required days of gathering stuff that’s out there. There are kids’ toys out there. I took a picture. I’ve got it on my phone here, and I showed it to my wife and we analyzed it. There were sleeping bags and a radio and there were kids’ toys in there. So, that was a little bit of an understanding.

I talked to a guy on the way home and he said, “Yeah, I talked to him and they want the new drug. It’s called Go-Fast. It’s a combination of cocaine and fentanyl. This is what they told me. It’s really dangerous. That’s what they were asking for.” I had a little more understanding, maybe. I took his word for it. I got home and I had some understanding, then I evaluated it. This is sad; this is common. This is in every city in America right now. Nobody has an answer at all for homelessness.

So, now what? I have an evaluation, what should I feel? I feel anger at the situation. I feel frustrated because nobody knows what to do. I feel like I’ve got to do something. This is like the rich man and Lazarus, right? I can’t walk by this every day, feasting sumptuously at home, living in my nice house, and not caring or doing anything. I’ve got these feelings keeping me awake at night, and then I look for some application.

I went online and typed in “emergency care housing,” and dozens and dozens of resources came up, if connections could be made in this city for homeless people. All you have to do is go online to find them. And then there’s the expression, which is what I’m doing right now.

It works in the Bible, and it works outside the Bible. This is the way I think we should live, and we should get better and better at observing, understanding, evaluating, feeling, applying, and expressing.

Howard: You just heard that a lot of these students are upperclassmen and we’ve been doing this in the classroom, and they’ve read your book and they’re coming with questions about how you articulated it, and they’re wanting to do exactly what you just described with the book. So, I’m going to unleash them to ask those questions. Maybe we can start with Andrew over here. What’s your question, Andrew?

Andrew Hague: I know you love the Bible, and I know you know that it’s paramount for the Christian walk, and you say as much in your book. You write, “The Bible is the compass that keeps all our reading from unfruitful directions. Being saturated with the Bible enables us to test all things and hold fast the good in everything we read.” You also write, “Nothing is more important to observe in all our observing than Jesus himself, especially as he shines in the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ.” So, my question is this: if this is true, why the liberal arts? Why shouldn’t students go to a school whose chancellor says, “This is not a liberal arts school”?

Piper: Here’s some truth in advertising — I have notes. I’ve seen these questions, thank goodness. I said to this gang, these were hard. Half of them were hard. I worked all yesterday afternoon and all this morning on these questions, so there you go. I’m not winging anything. I don’t wing anything that I don’t have to wing, and that one was one of the hardest for me.

Why should we even have a liberal arts college? He’s asking, “You say the Bible is of paramount importance, but we spend many hours in classes studying philosophy and history and anthropology and human nature and politics, and then here’s the Bible. Why don’t you have a Bible school, and say, ‘We’re not a liberal arts college; we’re a Bible school’?”

Observation number one: we make no claim to perfection with regard to proportion. How much time should you spend in class and in your personal life devoted to rigorous, face-to-face Bible study? You should ask yourself that question. Right now in your life, how much should you do that, and how much should you devote to your vocation and leisure and all the other things that go into your life? We don’t claim to have it perfect. Every school does this differently, whether you call them Bible school, Christian arts college, or whatever. We all work at a proportion that we think is going to bear good fruit in these students’ lives. That’s the first observation.

Observation number two: these four years are unusual years. They’re not normal. You get four golden years to do some things you’ll never be able to do again in this proportion. And there is a huge world of history and philosophy and politics and all kinds of access to human nature out there, outside the Bible, and there’s the Bible. We believe that in order to live in the world, you need to know the world. You need to know the roots of the world that you live in. You need to know the way the world thinks and the way the world puts itself together and leaves deposits in books, especially. We think it’s very difficult to talk with people, converse with people, and live with people who live most of their lives dealing with their vocational issues, their political issues, and their personal-problem issues if you don’t have any experience, directly or indirectly, with those kinds of issues in which they live.

Now, there are lots of other ways to come at it, but it’s a big, big world out there. I thought to myself, if all of life outside the Bible, all of history, and everything that’s been written down about human nature and about nature and society could be written in a 1,000-page book, that might change things. Because that’s what the Bible is. It’s 1,100 pages long. Suppose all that could be known could be written in 1,100 pages. That would change things, wouldn’t it? How much time you would devote to that 1,100-page book and this 1,100-page book would be dramatically different, but we don’t have one book that captures all that’s ever been thought, all that’s ever been created, and all that’s ever been practiced.

We have thousands of books and thousands of years of history, and so much of it is rich with wisdom and insight about how to do it and how not to do it, and to be exposed to that reality will enable a person to take the Bible and live more wisely and more effectively in the world than if one only studied the Bible.

So, whether we’ve got the proportion right or not, we’re working at it, and I think the way we do it is not the way everybody does it. It’s not the way everybody should do it. And one of the reasons some of you are here is to find out, Does this taste like the way I want to do it?

Melanie Amarante: Going deeper into that, in your introduction to the book and in the first habit — that is, observation — you quote the Bible many times. I will read a quote of yours. You say, “God created the world to communicate truth about himself.” And all these Bible verses talk about nature and the created world. However, this school is more focused on unregenerate authors. And the question is, How can one see God’s glory through something as corrupted as the history of religions?

Or another way to say it is, How can we see God’s beauty through the lenses of men who can’t? Shouldn’t we try to avoid these writers and just stick to those who are regenerate and who actually can see the glory of God that is in creation, and not through the ones that it may be even dangerous for us to see what they have been seeing?

Piper: When I read that sentence, I thought that was a really good way of asking this question. How can you see the glory of God through the lens of a person who can’t see the glory of God? That’s good. I like that. Well done. A couple of questions were like this. I’m going to get them all jumbled up.

There’s a principle, and the principle goes like this: God created everything that’s not God, and all of it reveals something of God. It all reveals something of God, but that revelation is a manifestation of God; it is not God. The demonstration of the glory of God is not the glory of God.

Unbelievers can see the manifestation and not see God. They can see the manifestation often way better than you can as a regenerate person. The easiest illustration would be scientists who build telescopes and send them into orbit, and they send back pictures, and those scientists are on their faces with awe. Albert Einstein said that one of the reasons he didn’t go to church was because he had seen so much more glory than the preachers. He thought it was like they were not talking about the real thing. I’ll tell you, when I read that years ago, I just said that’s not going to happen to me. If he comes to my church, I don’t want him to say that. But he might because he’s a good seer. He sees, and not just galaxies.

I’m watching the Discovery Institute guys and hearing them talk about the cellular machines in our bodies at the level of atoms and subatomic particles and the kind of things that happen in our cells. Unbelieving scientists are flabbergasted at the complexity of it all. A few of them actually make the jump out of secular evolution into God. So here we have unbelievers, at the microlevel and the macrolevel, seeing things the rest of us aren’t seeing. Now, when I read what they see, I see God. They didn’t, but I do.

I typed in the optical illusion of an old woman and a young woman. Do you know what I’m talking about? Okay, most of you know. You have an optical illusion, and you’re looking at this picture, and depending on who you are, you see an old woman or a beautiful young woman. The nose of this witch makes her look really ugly, but the nose is the cheek line of the beautiful girl. Now, that’s exactly the way it works. The world looks at nature and they see an ugly woman, or they see a beautiful woman, but we see God. We see the manifestation of God.

The short answer is that we don’t see God through his lens, spiritually speaking. We look through his lens, this unbeliever who has just seen something, and see God. And this is not just true of nature. Unbelievers can write amazing analyses of human culture and get it all wrong, but they see some amazing things, and we see them, and we can think, “Oh my, that implies this, this, and this.” And with the Bible, it all makes sense. But they don’t see how it makes sense.

So, we look through what they’re seeing — their telescope or their microscope or their analysis of culture — and we see the truth that they don’t see. I think that happens all the time, and that’s one of the reasons — back to Andrew’s question — that we should pay attention to really shrewd observers who are not yet believers.

Amarante: That helps me read the next hundred pages I have of history, so thank you.

Piper: You’re welcome.

Graham Litrenta: My question is also about this interaction between special and general revelation. You say at one point, “Honing our skills of understanding God’s word fits us for understanding God’s world, all of it.” I was wondering if there’s also a similar, reverse way to go about that. Can understanding God’s world and his creation help us understand the Book, the word, better? And are there particular risks or rewards associated with that?

Piper: Just to make sure, I’ll say what I’m hearing and see if that’s what you heard. We love to emphasize that in order to know the world rightly, you need to know the Bible so that when you go to the world with the Bible, you see the world more clearly. You understand the world better because God’s perspective on the world is the true perspective. This question is the reverse. Can you go to the world, study, learn, observe, and be a better Bible reader because of it? Does your reading of the Bible get enriched by observing God’s other book called the world? And the answer is that the Bible expects you to, and it demands you to. You cannot understand the Bible if you don’t live in the world with your eyes open. You can’t. You won’t even know the words, right?

There are words that the Bible assumes you learned before you came to the Bible, right? Here are some examples: vineyard, wine, wedding, lions, bears, horses, dogs, pigs, grasshoppers, constellations, businesses, wages, banks, fountains, springs, rivers, fig trees, olive trees, mulberry trees, thorns, wind, thunderstorms, bread, baking, armies, swords, shields, sheep, shepherds, cattle, camels, fire, green wood, dry wood, hay, stubble, jewels, gold, silver, law courts, judges, and advocates. The Bible defines none of those.

If you go to the Bible and you don’t know what green wood is, what are you going to do when Jesus says, “if they do this while the wood is green, what will they do when it’s dry?” (see Luke 23:31). What was that? You have to go camping. Dad sends a kid out to get some wood, and he gets all green wood, and he throws it on the fire. Nothing happens. Jesus is green wood. It’s hard to burn Jesus, and they’re doing it anyway. They’re killing him. But oh, those who are ripe for judgment are dry wood. And when the fire comes in 70 AD, this place is burning.

So, there are just dozens of ways the Bible expects us to have gone to school outside the Bible and come to the Bible with a whole store of knowledge that the Bible assumes that we already have. Let me just give another kind of illustration.

Consider some emotions, like love, joy, peace, patience, goodness, kindness, and meekness, or consider the negatives like anger or clamor. “The anger of man does not work the righteousness of God” (James 1:20, my translation). I don’t think you can have anything but a dilettante, merely academic knowledge of the Bible if you’ve never been angry, or if you’ve never seen patience. The word “patience” in the Bible is a word. It’s not patience, it’s a word. Patience is a reality. Joy is a reality. Love is a reality. The only way to taste reality is to taste reality. Those are words.

So, I think understanding sentences like “the anger of man does not work the righteousness of God” means for John Piper to get on his face and deal with his bent to anger, how I relate to my wife, and how I relate to situations in the world where my first trigger response is anger and not compassion.

I have to go inside of me and say, okay, the reason it says this does not work the righteousness of God is because this anger is killing everything in me that’s good. It’s eating up like a monster every other good emotion. I’m watching it do it. I’ve seen it in others. If you grow up in a home where there’s nothing but anger and your dad is angry all the time, where are you emotionally at age 19? You’re angry. You’ve got one or two other tiny little emotions that can rise above the fray. You have to know yourself.

So, those are two illustrations of living with our eyes open. Our understanding faculties and our evaluating enable us to come back to the Bible with greater insight. He said, I think, at the end, what are the “risks and rewards”? Benefits I just talked about, and the risk is huge. I say something to my preaching classes about this. It starts on Monday, and I’m so excited. I love teaching preaching here.

I’m going to say to those guys against all other counsel, bring your experience to the Bible. Most homiletics teachers say, “No, no, no. You don’t interpret the Bible in the light of your experience; you interpret your experience in light of the Bible.” And I get that. I say amen. However, it works the other way. It really does work the other way. If you don’t live with anger and live with joy, and you come and you get that word joy, that word anger, you’ll just be an academic dilettante.

When you try to talk in front of people with that kind of disposition, they’ll say, “That’s artificial, man. You’ve been to school too long. You have to live. You have to open your eyes and live.” So, I think the risk is real. And here’s the risk. The risk is that somebody hears Piper say, “Bring your experience to the Bible,” and they bring their experience to the Bible, and they mute what doesn’t fit their experience. For example, you have a friend who tells you, “I’m coming out as a same-sex attracted person.” You really like this person. You don’t want to hurt them. You don’t want to offend them. Biblically, you have a sense that it’s not right, and you need to approach this another way.

Your emotions and your relationship and your experience become so strong that your mouth shuts, and you don’t say, “If you walk into that and live there, that’s going to be sin. That’s going to ruin your life.” You don’t say it. And you come back, and you see the Bible says, “Love your neighbor as you love yourself” (see Matthew 22:39). And you can think, “I’m loving him. I’m loving him.” And you just mute 1 Corinthians 6:9, which says that those who do such things will not enter into the kingdom of heaven. You just wipe that out of the Bible because your experience is so strong in desiring not to offend that you just shut that down.

So, if you’re hearing me say, “Bring your experience to the Bible and let your experience shut the Bible down in its meaning,” you’re hearing me wrong.

Howard: About halfway through the book, when you get to the topic or the habit of feeling, you talk about it as a hinge habit. Evaluating and feeling are the hinges between observing and understanding along with applying and expressing. I think there were actually a number of questions here about that idea of feeling in particular. I just want to jump into several of those because that seems really important, what you just were doing in talking about observing your own anger, right?

Piper: Yes.

Howard: Feelings are really important. It seems that can help us or hinder us in rightly observing and understanding, or applying and expressing. I think, Riley, you have a question about these feelings.

Riley Carpenter: I naturally see how observing or understanding or evaluating or applying are all a part of learning, but it takes me a little bit more mental energy to figure out how feeling is necessary for the project of learning. So, I’m curious because you have it as an essential habit of the heart and mind. What do we miss as learners if we don’t feel appropriately about the things we’re learning?

Piper: Number one, what you’ll miss if you do not feel appropriately about your experiences in life and the things you observe and understand is that you will miss the capacity or the ability or the opportunity to glorify God as you ought. Because we believe here — and I’ve written endlessly about it — that God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in him.

Satisfaction is a feeling, and I’m arguing that if God is in something and we discern him, there’s an appropriate feeling, and that appropriate feeling will magnify something about God. It will correspond to what he’s just revealed of himself. If it’s judgment, fear; if it’s glory and beauty, then it’s joy. So, feelings that are stunted at that moment deny God a reflection of his glory. That’s answer number one.

Second, obedience will be forsaken because the Bible commands feelings on almost every page. I’ve made a list. It commands not to covet, it commands contentment, it commands fear, it commands hope, it commands joy, it commands zeal, it commands gratitude, it commands brotherly affection, it commands tenderheartedness, it commands lowliness, it commands contrition, it commands sorrowful empathy, it commands sympathy, and on and on. Feelings are not cabooses. My wife told me not everybody knows that word.

Howard: They haven’t been living in the world enough.

Piper: Is that an old-fashioned word? It’s the thing at the end of the train that looks useless. It’s where the staff lives, I think. Feelings are not cabooses; they’re the engine. I’m indicting big swaths of American evangelicals when I say that. Feelings are the engine. So, let me mention one more thing. When I say you’ll miss out on obedience, I mean that right feelings are the engine of love. One of my favorite verses for illustrating how Christian Hedonism produces love for people by love for God is in 2 Corinthians 8:2. It says that in a severe test of affliction, their abundance of joy and their extreme poverty overflowed with a wealth of liberality toward the poor saints in Jerusalem.

So, you have extreme poverty, and you have extreme affliction. You don’t have what you do need and you’re getting beat up because you just became a Christian, and this abundance of joy is like a volcano in the midst of those two. This is not prosperity preaching, right? This is joy. Second Corinthians 8:1 says that it’s coming from grace. It’s coming down. Your sins are forgiven. You’re adopted into God’s family. You’re thinking, “I can’t believe I’m a child of God. My sins are forgiven. I’m going to heaven. Hallelujah. Take another offering.” That’s exactly what they say. They give once and then they plead with him to take another offering. So, where did that generosity come from? It just says it so plainly. The overflow of abundant joy produced generosity.

So, if you were to make the case, which you’re not, that feelings don’t matter but what matters is obedience, what matters is discipline, what matters is self-control, and what matters is devotion and duty, I think you’re not reading your Bible, and you are denying what 2 Corinthians 8:2 says is the fountain of generosity for the poor in Jerusalem. So, that would be another answer of what is missing, what you lose if we here at this school do not prioritize appropriate emotional responses to the reality we’re looking at. Let me mention one more thing.

You also lose the fullness of your humanity and the richness of relationships. I look out at this group right here, and you are all over the map on your emotional capacities and maturities and balance. Some of you are very stunted; others of you are very lopsided. You’re all one emotion and you can’t even feel the other. The pastor talks about wrath, and you say, “No, please talk about the niceness of God,” and you don’t have any capacity for exulting in the fact that we have a great, glorious God of judgment. You just can’t do that. It’s not who you are. Maybe it’s because of the way your dad was or whatever, but you’re stunted.

So, the richness and fullness that God is calling you to be is limited, and we would like to help. Only God can do this, but we would like to help. I know personally what some of my stuntings are, and I know the people I need to be around to fix that, at least partly.

In other words, the people you are around, you tend to become like them. You do if you admire them. And I have a few people like that. I’ll mention one. I admire Mark Dever and Capitol Hill, and I hope you’re watching, Mark. Mark’s personality is so dramatically different from mine, and I like so many things about it. I just like hanging out with him because I go home and I’m a better person with my wife. I really am.

So, we hope that happens here. We don’t want sick professors. Sick professors make sick students, and sick pastors make sick churches. We want to be emotionally healthy. That means the whole range of emotions from the hardest and most difficult over to the sweetest and simplest childlike emotions. We want the whole range of emotions for you to be around and feel. This is about the richness of personhood and relationships.

Let’s just take wives, for example, who are so sad because their husbands are such emotional dolts. They want so badly for the husband to say something tender or take a little time, show some empathy, and this husband is just an idiot. And it’s a deep, sad idiocy that is emotionally in need of a lot of enrichment. In other words, this relates to our relationships, our marriages, and our children.

It’s so important to be able to get down on the floor with a 2-year-old or 1-year-old and be an absolutely good idiot dad, so that the child just loves to play with daddy. He just loves to play with daddy because daddy is so happy when they play. There are just millions of kids that never get that ever because dad doesn’t have any idea how to do that. Okay, I’m talking too much. There are other questions.

Howard: Let’s have some more questions about emotions.

Beck Stabley: I’m the next question, but I just want to say I feel that in my almost four years at Bethlehem from the professors here. There is such a diversity of personalities, and that’s been something that I can just testify to. I certainly have felt the shaping influence of the differences in our professors in my own life.

Piper: That’s encouraging.

Stabley: My question is that on page 46 of your book, in the chapter entitled “Observation,” you say, “Self-conscious gladness is self-defeating.” You say this in the context of being a genuine learner, noting the insincerity of self-awareness in spontaneous delight. So, how does this idea fit with Lewis’s idea that the expression of praise in a delighted thing completes the delight itself? Does not the expression of enjoyment entail some form of self-consciousness?

Take, for example, the expression of self-conscious, glad-hearted praise in an exclamation I often pronounce to my husband out of my sheer delight in spending time with him. I often will say, “I am so happy right now. I’m just so happy.” That is sometimes the only way I can find to express my delight in him. It would seem from this example that the completion of gladness — that is, the praise — is necessarily self-conscious. “I” is the subject of that expression of praise, right?

Piper: Right.

Stabley: So, is this expression of delight self-defeating? That would be very disappointing to know. Or to ask it differently, how would you define self-conscious gladness?

Piper: Oh my goodness, that’s one of my favorite questions. I can’t believe it. That just rocked me. I would write parts of my book differently because of that question. Okay, so here’s what she’s saying. She hears me say that self-conscious gladness is a problem. I use the word “useless.” It’s troubling if I look in on my gladness and I become self-conscious about the experience of gladness in here. And she says, “I say to my husband sometimes, ‘I’m really happy right now because I’m with you,’ which is conscious of happiness.” So, Piper, should she say that? That’s a really good question.

Okay, it’s very personal, right? We’re both coming from the same place, namely, Lewis saying that lovers keep on telling each other how beautiful they are because the joy is not complete until it is expressed. That’s the principle behind this, that the overflow through expression of the joy I’m feeling in you right now is completing the joy. That’s why we keep on saying to each other, “You’re beautiful.”

However, what happens if you turn away from the beloved and start, negatively, navel-gazing? You think, “I wonder if I’m as happy as I should be. I wonder what it’s like to be happy here.” And suddenly you lose touch with her, or him, or God. That’s the danger I’m trying to work with. I don’t want people to be so consumed with the experience of gladness that they forget about the source of the gladness. That’s what we want to avoid.

I remember Sam Crabtree when he was candidating. We hired him for this sentence. In Tom Steller’s living room, he said, “Well, there’s a problem in worship because some people love loving God more than they love God.” I said, “I want you on my staff, buddy.” That sentence is worth a million dollars to me. I mean, did you hear that?

Howard: Did you pay him that much?

Piper: I have a lot of million-dollar possessions I don’t pay for. I could name them. Okay, now I’m going to lose my train of thought.

Howard: Sorry.

Piper: No, no, no. I was losing it anyway. Okay, back to the question of her statement, when she says, “I’m so happy right now.” Here’s my answer: I think that sentence is probably not very dangerous because it’s code language for “you make me very happy right now.” She said, “I feel very happy right now in your presence.” And I’m saying that’s code language. It’s just another way in your vocabulary of saying, “You, husband, make me very happy,” which is a much more you-oriented statement, though maybe not by much.

Even though she’s using the language of self-consciousness, she intends not to be analyzing her emotions at the moment, not to be preoccupied with her emotions at the moment, but to make much of her husband. That’s her point and that’s her goal, as long as we’re agreed on that and she’s not going inside and ruining the relationship by being excessively preoccupied with her own experience of her husband.

So, you’re okay and you can decide for yourself what you want to develop in terms of some nuance to your statement. But let me give some warning here. The reason this matters relationally is because you can be a single person and have this craving inside of you for a relationship. You think, “I have to have a relationship with a gal or with a guy.” And what you start to mean is, “I have to have this thing scratched.” So, you go online, do some dating thing, or you go to a bar or whatever, and what you’re thinking is not, “Is there a beautiful, intelligent, articulate, wise, spiritual person whom I could admire?” but rather, “Can somebody scratch where I itch?” That’s going to destroy you because the experience that feels like love is probably narcissism.

Howard: A lot of what I think these people are wondering is, okay, there are these six habits of mind and heart. I’m starting to get a sense for them. Maybe they’re already pretty obvious to me. I’ve been doing them for a while. How do we get out of here and live for the rest of our lives in a way that cultivates and carries out these habits of mind and heart? So, I think there are a few questions about how we do that. In other words, how shall we then live? Jackie, did you have a question about what that looks like?

Jackie Thorne: Yeah, I love this theme of cultivating a life of learning throughout the span of your lifetime. As I seek to do that and get older, I was struck by a quote you used by C.S. Lewis in your book. In Mere Christianity, he wrote, “There is no good trying to be more spiritual than God. God never meant man to be a purely spiritual creature. That is why he uses material things like bread and wine to put the new life into us. We may think this rather crude and unspiritual. God does not. He invented eating. He likes matter. He invented it.”

As I’m processing some of these questions and your responses of feeling, I’m also weighing some of the practicality of academic rigor and exhaustion. Exhaustion can sometimes lend itself to spiritual dryness even. So, how would you counsel students in an academic season, but also as lifelong learning students, who are just in a season of life where they’re trying to cultivate this? There are ways to look at how it relates to student life, but also we want to keep going after our academic time at school. So, how do we temper these things? We’re physical beings, but we’re spiritual creatures. How would you counsel us in that?

Piper: She’s picking up on Lewis when he says, “Don’t try to be more spiritual than God.” God made matter, which includes your skin and bones and sexual drives, your hair, your shape, your height, and your complexion. He likes matter. That’s amazing. I mean, you don’t make something you don’t like if you’re God. He made a universe of stuff. It’s just astonishing. And we will be stuff forever. That’s why there’s a resurrection of the body.

I just read the end of Luke 24 this morning where Jesus shows up and, for joy, they’re unbelieving. They’re thinking, “This is too good to be true.” And they think they’re seeing a ghost. And he says, “Here, touch me.” And they don’t do it. And he says, “Do you have anything to eat?” And they give him a piece of fish, and he eats it. That’s the resurrection body. Okay, so we are in this for keeps. And God chose to do it that way.

Now, it’ll be a spiritual body, which is unimaginable, but there’ll be some kind of continuity with this body. Her question is, “How do you navigate the goodness of it and the weakness and danger of it?” I wrote down here, “Immerse yourself in the Bible so deeply and steadily that you keep before you the good purposes of the body and the dangers of the body, because the Bible is really earnest about both.” For example, listen to 1 Corinthians 6:13. I remember the first time I saw this. I thought, “I can’t believe it says that.” It says, “The body is . . . for the Lord.” I get that — my mama told me that since the day I was born. She said, “Glorify God in your body.” And then it says, “And the Lord [is] for the body.” What?

The Lord is for the body, not against the body. That’s what it says. And then it says, “You are not your own, for you were bought with a price. So glorify God in your body” (1 Corinthians 6:19–20). Whether it’s your tongue, your hands, your feet, your eyes, or your sexual organs, make God look great by the way you handle your body. That’s life, and it’ll always be that way, forever. The way you use your body is to make Christ look magnificent, which would include being willing to be burned at the stake rather than renounce him. That’s one way to glorify God with your body. Paul said, “My earnest desire is that I would magnify Christ whether by life or by death” (see Philippians 1:20). So, there are some of the positives.

Another one would be Romans 12, where it says, “I beseech you by the mercies of God to present your bodies to God as living sacrifices” (see Romans 12:1). That’s saying, “Take me; use me whatever way you can,” which is why I think this whole issue of feelings and living out a healthy spiritual life is just so crucial. Or it’s like Jesus saying, “Let your light so shine that men may see your good deeds” (see Matthew 5:16). How are they going to see your good deeds? You do them with your body. There’s no other way. You do them with your body.

However, in Romans 7:23, Paul says, “I find in my members another law, the law of sin.” And therefore, Paul says in 1 Corinthians 9:27, “I pommel my body.” Literally, he says, “I give it a black eye, lest I myself should be a castaway.” His body is viewed by the Bible as a good thing, a God-created thing, a destined-for-glory thing, and it’s a great enemy when sin takes occasion to tempt us through the body. Lots of our temptations come through the body, not all. And many sins are more emotional, more spiritual. But lots of them come through the body. And therefore, Romans 8:13 says, “Put to death the deeds of the body.”

I’m right now shepherding a guy who might even be here. He won’t mind me sharing. He has real temptations with lust. I’m back and forth with emails, and we have been for a couple of years, and I’m trying to help him. He asked me about the contradiction that he saw in John Owen’s The Mortification of Sin. Owen says that we are saved by grace through faith, and then he says, “If you don’t put to death the deeds of the body, you will go to hell.” Which is it?

A lot of people have that question, and it’s a great question. And it shows a fundamental failure to grasp the essence of the Christian life. The essence of the Christian life is that you are a new, unleavened lump of dough; therefore, get the leaven out. That’s the Christian life. You are crucified with Christ, so put yourself to death. These paradoxes run all through Christian ethics. The essence is that if you’re a child of God, you are accepted, loved, forgiven, and righteous in Christ; now become what you are.

So, the body has to be renounced in order to reclaim it for who we really are. Basically, my answer is to be immersed in the Bible, to be readily aware of the glories and potential of worshiping and glorifying Christ in the body. And be aware of its pitfalls and its laws that Romans 7 says can really ruin you.

Thorne: How would you say you are specifically tempted to be more spiritual than God? What would be something you would see that students should watch for?

Piper: Let’s just take students as an example. You would be tempted to be more spiritual than God if you didn’t think you needed sleep. I remember when I was in graduate school it really baffled me that patience was said to be a fruit of the Spirit when I knew from experience that patience was a fruit of sleep. The less sleep I got, the shorter my fuse became. And my answer to how that contradiction works is that the reason patience is also a fruit of sleep is that the Holy Spirit gives you the humility to acknowledge you have a body. You’re not God. Go to bed.

Thorne: Okay, I will. I’ll go home.

Piper: And this will depend somewhat on your season of life. I know I have a daughter with a nine-week-old baby. This is not a sleep season. So I get that, and we do the best we can. But that would be just one example of thinking that we can ignore the demands of this body. Just take appetite for example, or exercise. A lot of you function as though you really are a gnostic. You really are people who think your body is just a mirage, like it doesn’t need any attention regarding what you eat and whether you sleep and whether you get exercise.

I’m saying if you want to be a properly spiritual person, you better pay attention to your body. God doesn’t want you to unnecessarily kill yourself. He might want you to kill yourself by being willing to sacrifice your body in a risky situation. But ordinarily, he doesn’t want you to kill yourself. “Thou shall not kill” applies to the person in the mirror as well as the person beside you in bed or on the street (Exodus 20:13). So, those would be a couple of examples.

Howard: We’ll have one more question. Katie, do you want to ask a question?

Katie Semple: In your chapter on understanding, you talked about the relationship between willing and understanding, and you said that God has made humans in such a way that the mind sees more clearly when the will inclines to the truth. So, my question is, as students who are taking in truth all day long from many different disciplines, we have opportunities day in and day out, hour by hour, to take in truth, submit to it, and obey it. How can we cultivate that kind of attitude so that we are doers of what we are learning?

Piper: Don’t miss the premise of that question. To me, it’s one of the most amazing verses in the Bible. It’s John 7:17, where Jesus says, “If your will is to do God’s will, you will know whether the teaching is from God or from men.” I remember sitting in a chapel at Wheaton College when a preacher read that, and I sat there thinking, “That changes everything.” To bring your will by grace somehow — that’s what you’re asking — into alignment with God enables you to know things.

My first part of the answer about how you cultivate a willing heart, an obedient heart for the sake of that kind of knowledge, is to be amazed at that verse. Just be amazed that in God’s way of reckoning, right willing often precedes right knowing.

Now, the flip side works also: you know in order to will rightly. That’s true. Paul’s constantly saying in 1 Corinthians, “Do you not know?” It means that if they knew, they wouldn’t be acting this way. So, knowing does produce right willing, but it works the other way around. If your heart is bad, if there’s a rebellion in your heart, if there’s a resistant spirit, there are things you will not be able to know. So, that’s one answer. Just be amazed that God set it up this way.

In my struggle to be a humble, wise, godly, obedient person, the top of my agenda is to ask God to incline my heart. Psalm 119:36 says, “Incline my heart to your testimonies.” Pray that he would make your heart obedient. Pray that he would make your heart hungry. I’ve had people come into my office for counseling, and they talk about not desiring to read their Bible or having few spiritual desires, and I say, “Well, when was the last time you asked God to make you desire it?” It’s amazing how many people haven’t even asked him, “Make me desire.”

We sing that song, right? It says, “Make me love you as I ought to love you.” In general, people sing that song, and I think a lot of them feel uncomfortable singing that song because it sounds coercive. It says, “Make me love you as I ought to love you.” And I say, “Coerce me, kill me, slay me.” Augustine should get some say here, right? He said, “Command what you will, and give what you command.” We can say, “Make me what I need to be.” So, prayer is right at the top of the list. Then immersing myself in the word would be another thing. Faith comes by hearing and hearing by the word, and faith is the source (Romans 10:17).

Maybe I’ll give just one illustration of how it actually works. The goal is, How can I become a person with a more obedient heart, so that in my classes, in my studies, I recognize what’s really there, and then become a more effective person in the world? And my short answer under prayer is, Get a good storehouse of promises that God has made to his children, and believe them. Because it’s believing promises that frees you from the selfishness and the fear that hinders obedience.

I’m just right off my front burner this morning. We’re finishing Hebrews in my discipleship reading plan from this morning. If you’re on the discipleship reading plan, you’re right with me. I was in Hebrews 13. Although if you’re on time, you finished three days ago. I’m always a little behind.

It says, “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?’” (Hebrews 13:5–6). So, if you’re tempted to be a disobedient person with your money, a greedy person, a fearful person, the answer to being an obedient person is to believe that promise. Believe when it says, “I’ll never leave you. I’m God. I’ll take care of my children. I will never leave you. I will never forsake you.” And then respond to that by saying, “What can man do to me?”

So, I think believing promises is the key, under prayer, to becoming an obedient person with a heart that then, when it reads the Bible, can see what’s really there.

Howard: Thank you, Pastor John.

Identity — it is one of our society’s greatest obsessions today. Even we Christians can preoccupy ourselves with knowing who we are and what our purpose is. This pursuit is not altogether bad. The desire to understand who we are and what we are here for is natural and God-given. The problem arises when we look in the wrong places to discover our identity and purpose.

Many look to social media, self-help resources, life coaches, models of the psyche — you name it — for direction and affirmation. We may even naively accept mantras like “Be true to yourself” and “You do you,” thinking we can determine our own identities and express them however we want. But such paths lead only to more confusion and despair.

If we as Christians want to understand who we are, we must look to Jesus Christ. As the God-man, he is the true revelation of both God and of humanity. He alone can reveal to us who we are. And one concrete way he reveals our identities is through his appointed Supper.

People Who Remember

The Lord’s Supper, along with baptism, is one of the most debated Christian practices. Believers from various traditions disagree over what exactly happens during the meal; we also disagree over how frequently it should be celebrated. Despite such disagreements, all Christians agree on at least this: the Lord’s Supper is a meal whereby we remember who Christ is and what he has done for us (Luke 22:19; 1 Corinthians 11:24–25).

Many of us do not realize, however, that the Lord’s Supper is also a time when we remember who we are in Christ. In a key way, the Table strengthens our identity in him. Indeed, Christ himself forms and fortifies our identity in this meal because he is present to us and lives in us (John 14:20, 23; 17:23, 26). Just as food and drink strengthen the body, so Christ’s body and blood, received by faith, strengthen our souls in a way that helps us understand ourselves.

The Lord’s Supper shapes our identity in part because the meal is analogous to the Passover. The Passover was a ritual feast whereby the Israelites meditated on God’s saving actions and reassured themselves of who they were as God’s people. They identified themselves with the exodus generation every time they celebrated the rite.

When Jesus celebrated the Passover with his disciples on the night before his death, he did far more than identify with the exodus generation; he gave the meal greater significance because he was about to accomplish his mission as the true Passover Lamb. Just as the historical exodus and old covenant defined Israel’s existence, so Christ enacted a new exodus and a new covenant that now defines our existence in him — our very identity and way of life. And when Jesus commanded us to eat in remembrance of him (Luke 22:19; 1 Corinthians 11:24–25), he was not instructing us to simply ponder past events, just as he was not simply recalling the exodus when he celebrated the Passover with his disciples.

Many today think that to remember is to merely think about something from the past. But biblically, to remember involves bringing the past into the present and allowing the past to actively shape the present. So, when we remember Christ in the Supper, we are not thinking about someone who is absent and disconnected from us. Rather, we are, by faith, identifying with and being shaped by someone who is with us — indeed, in us.

Because remembrance is an act of identification, we identify with Christ when we partake of the Holy Meal. Like the Passover, therefore, the Supper shapes our identity. When we eat the bread and drink the cup, we taste who we are: people loved and redeemed by the Lord of all life. We belong to him, and we are made to be like him. And when we feast on Christ by faith, he transforms us more and more into his own image.

People Who Commune

Because we belong to the Lord Jesus and are made to be like him, we cannot find our true identity by looking inside ourselves. The Lord’s Supper subverts the notion that identity is an individualistic enterprise because in this meal we participate with Christ. “The cup of blessing that we bless,” Paul writes, “is it not a participation in the blood of Christ? The bread that we break, is it not a participation in the body of Christ?” (1 Corinthians 10:16). Thus, many Christians rightly call this meal Communion. By it, we fellowship with Christ and remember that we are people who live in vital connection with Christ — like branches joined to the vine or a body to the head (John 15:1–6; Ephesians 5:23; Colossians 1:18).

And as people united to Christ, we are also united to other Christians. Paul explains, “The bread that we break, is it not a participation in the body of Christ?” (1 Corinthians 10:16). We participate in Christ as well as in the life of the church, who is vitally connected to Christ the head. Paul continues, “Because there is one bread, we who are many are one body, for we all partake of the one bread” (1 Corinthians 10:17). By sharing this meal, we declare to both ourselves and one another that we are communing persons: we belong to Christ and each other.

We are not isolated selves. We do not have the inner resources to become whoever we want to be. Nor do we have leeway to live however we want. We are joined to the Lord Almighty, who alone has a rightful claim on all creation. And we belong to the body of Christ, the community of faith that shapes us and shows us how to live.

People Who Proclaim

Because we are people joined to Christ and his body, the church, our purpose in life is not to self-actualize and self-gratify. We have been chosen and redeemed so that we may joyfully serve and glorify God.

When we partake of the Lord’s Supper, we proclaim Christ’s death until he returns (1 Corinthians 11:26). Yet such proclamation is not limited to our sharing in this meal of thanksgiving — thus the name Eucharist (from the Greek word for thanksgiving). As persons who participate in Christ, we are called to proclaim him with our entire lives. As we eat the bread and drink the cup, God reminds us that we are called to be eucharistic persons, persons who gratefully proclaim the goodness of Christ crucified with all we are in all we do.

Our purpose in life, therefore, is not to express ourselves but to express Christ. Our focus ought to be on him and not ourselves because he is our life (Colossians 3:4), and the life we now live we live by faith in him (Galatians 2:20).

When we receive the Lord’s Supper, we remember that our lives are not our own. We do not exist for ourselves, and we do not live for ourselves. We live for and with Christ, who “came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many” (Mark 10:45).

When we receive the Supper, we remember that we have died with Christ in baptism and that he bids us take up our crosses in daily death to self, just as he humbled himself throughout his earthly life and ultimately gave himself on the cross on our behalf. We are united with the truly self-sacrificial one so that we too may live self-sacrificially — for the good of others and to the glory of God. When we continually die to ourselves, in this meal and in our daily lives, we become more like him, the true human. When we conform to him, we become more authentically human. This is where the Supper leads us.

The seemingly mundane elements of the Lord’s Supper force us to reimagine who we are. They reveal that we are a people who belong to Christ, a people identified with Christ, a people shaped by Christ, and a people becoming like Christ. We are redeemed by him, and we exist for him. He is our life, and he determines our identity. When we look to Christ in this most holy of meals, we see more clearly who Christ is and who we are in him. And as we commune with him, we become more like him. The Table truly reshapes and fortifies our identity.

God’s Judgment and Homosexuality
When humans exchange the glory of God for disordered sexual desires, the consequences are profound. In this episode of Light + Truth, John Piper opens Romans 1:24–28 to show the relationship between God’s judgment and homosexuality.

Audio Transcript

As Thursday’s episode ended, Pastor John, you had just begun to talk about the joy of learning. We’ll never understand your model for lifelong learning or education if we leave the affections and emotions out of the equation. This explains why joy and feeling — terms of emotion and affection — are terms we see all over your older book Think: The Life of the Mind and the Love of God. In that book, you mentioned those terms — joy and feeling — 110 times, closely linking proper thinking with proper feeling. Think is twelve and a half years old.

I was eager to see how often you used the joy or feeling language in this new book, and they dominate even more! The words joy and feeling appear 357 times in your new book, Foundations for Lifelong Learning: Education in Serious Joy. They’re all over this new book — to the point you make this claim explicitly: “Some people think that emotions are marginal in the task of education. We regard them as essential.” Unpack this. What essential role do joy and feeling play in Bible-learning and in all our learning?

This is so, so important for understanding the nature of true education. When I try to help people understand what we are doing at Bethlehem College & Seminary, or what I am doing in my life, I regularly mention the following six habits of mind and heart that we’re trying to build into the lives of our students or that I’m trying to build into my own life. They apply both to college and seminary students and to everybody else who will listen.

“Education is the formation of a mature disciple of Christ who can go on learning for a lifetime.”

At Bethlehem College & Seminary, we don’t think education is mainly the imparting of information or mainly the training of a technical skill. Mainly, it’s the formation of a mature disciple of Christ who can go on learning for a lifetime of wisdom and wonder in whatever vocation God calls them. So, when I’m trying to help folks understand what we do, I mention these six habits: observation, understanding, evaluation, feeling (alarm bells go off), application, and expression.

The order is really important because these habits are governed by a Christ-exalting, God-centered, Bible-saturated worldview. First we observe accurately — we’re honest people. Then we understand truly what we’ve observed. Then we evaluate fairly on the basis of accurate observation and true understanding. Then we feel appropriately. Then, in all the ways of wisdom, we apply what we have observed, understood, evaluated, and felt. Then we give expression with our mouth (and in writing) in compelling ways that glorify God and bring blessing to people.

Why Feel?

What I find is that it’s the fourth habit of mind and heart that puzzles people. It causes them to have a kind of question mark on their face. It’s the same one that you are asking about, Tony. Feeling or joy — or whatever appropriate emotions — should arise as one is observing and understanding and evaluating. We observe, we understand, we evaluate, and then we feel appropriately, I say.

And people wonder, “Really? Really? I mean, one of your six aims of a college education or a seminary education is feeling?” The answer is a resounding and unashamed yes. When all is said and done in education, this may be the one habit of mind that distinguishes true education from artificial intelligence.

At one level, computers observe, understand, evaluate, apply, and express, but no computer will ever love or hate or admire or hope or rejoice or sympathize. No matter what emotional words the computer speaks out, and it doesn’t matter what a computer says, it’s not going to happen. These are distinctively human acts of the God-created image of God’s soul.

Not Optional or Peripheral

And these emotions are all-important in the Bible. The number one commandment in the Bible is not “know the Lord your God,” but “love the Lord your God with all your heart” — all of it, all your heart (Matthew 22:37). Then Paul said, “If anyone has no love for the Lord, let him be accursed” (1 Corinthians 16:22). He also said that the whole Old Testament was written that “we might have hope,” an emotion (Romans 15:4).

Over and over, we are commanded to “rejoice” in the Lord (Psalm 70:4), to “serve the Lord with gladness” (Psalm 100:2). We are commanded to “rejoice with those who rejoice, weep with those who weep” (Romans 12:15). We’re commanded to “be . . . tenderhearted” (Ephesians 4:32). “Tenderhearted” — that’s not a thought; it’s a feeling. We’re also commanded to feel compassion (Colossians 3:12).

These are not optional. They’re not peripheral in the Bible. They are essential to being a whole human being, an educated human being. They are essential to being a Christian. Nobody is saved by thinking true thoughts about God or even by believing true things about God.

The devil believes more true things about God than we do because he knows more than we know about God, but he hates these things that he knows about God. That’s a feeling — he hates them. It’s not what he thinks that’s the problem, but that he feels all the wrong things. That’s what makes him the devil.

Shall we neglect in education the very thing that sets us apart from the demons, the very thing that fulfills the Great Commandment? Shall we neglect the very thing that shows we’re not mere walking computers? We are humans created in the image of God.

That’s why we seek to build into our own lives, and the lives of our students and our APJ listeners right now, the habits of observing accurately, and understanding truly, and evaluating fairly, and — I wish I could scream it from the housetops — feeling appropriately, and applying wisely, and expressing compellingly.

‘Men with Chests’

When we say “feeling appropriately,” we mean that there are healthy, mature, and virtuous emotions in response to different realities. Then there are unhealthy, immature, and evil emotions in response to different realities.

It’s evil to rejoice over the spreading of a lie. It’s a sign of mental unhealth not to feel empathy for a fellow Christian languishing in prison for his faith. It’s a sign of emotional immaturity to giggle at a slipup in a public communication. This is the real stuff of education. Knowledge is good; knowledge is necessary. Love is better. A critical mind is a gift; a well-formed soul with deep and virtuous emotions is a greater gift.

C.S. Lewis — we love Lewis — wrote about education in The Abolition of Man. Alan Jacobs, in his biography of Lewis, sums up Lewis’s point in The Abolition of Man like this: “Lewis passionately believed that education is not about providing information so much as cultivating ‘habits of the heart’ — producing ‘men with chests,’ as he puts it in his book The Abolition of Man.”

Then here’s his explanation of men with chests: “People who not only think as they should but respond as they should, instinctively and emotionally, to the challenges and blessings the world offers to them” (xxiii). To which I say, “Exactly. Exactly.” Education aims at right thinking about the world and right emotional responses to the world.

What Makes a Feeling Virtuous?

Now of course, once we say and believe that, we are launched into the massive question of what makes a feeling virtuous. This is why secular colleges and universities cannot state the aims of their education the way we do. They cannot say that their aim is to build into their students’ lives the habit of forming virtuous feelings because there’s no consensus in the universities about what makes a feeling virtuous.

When it comes to a feeling about sex outside of marriage, a feeling about trying to change your sex, a feeling about killing unborn children, a feeling about certain economic strategies, or a feeling about Jesus Christ and the way of salvation, secular institutions have no way that they can agree on what is a virtuous feeling in response to those massive realities. This is a tragedy when you think about it, that our kids are being educated in institutions that cannot state their goals that way.

“We are not well-educated people until we can respond to reality in healthy, mature, virtuous ways.”

The fact that in this new book, Foundations of Lifelong Learning, I include an entire chapter on the lifelong educational goal of appropriate or virtuous feelings only makes sense because I believe in radically Christian, Bible-saturated, Christ-exalting education. This podcast, that book, Bethlehem College & Seminary, all of this, all my life, aims at cultivating the mental and emotional habit of experiencing virtuous feelings. A virtuous feeling in response to an accurately observed, rightly understood, truly evaluated object is a glorious thing.

Educated for Joy

Yes, a virtuous feeling is a glorious thing. A virtuous feeling is an authentic overflow of the good treasure of the heart of faith. A virtuous feeling is shaped and intensified and limited by the fruit of the Holy Spirit. A virtuous feeling is an expression of love to God and people, even when it is hatred of evil. A virtuous feeling is a Christ-exalting feeling.

We are not well-educated people until we can respond to reality in healthy, mature, virtuous ways, as we feel appropriately. That will include abhorrence of what is evil (Romans 12:9). It will include sympathy for the suffering (Romans 12:15). It will include fear of any hint of unbelief rising in my heart (Romans 11:20). It will include overflowing joy in response to the gospel of the grace of God (2 Corinthians 8:2).

That’s why the subtitle of the new book is “Education in Serious Joy.” Joy will be the dominant feeling for the Christian in this life, but in a world like ours, it will be serious, even sorrowful, joy.

“Unceasing praise, songs of passion, a desire for triumph, unity of spirit, an object of worship, lament over wrongdoing, flawless attendance, and all in a beautiful sanctuary.” That may sound like a church service, but it was actually the experience I had years ago at a professional soccer game in England. In spite of the setting, it was encouraging to hear men sing with passion, a passion often lacking in congregational worship.

In this way, professional sports reveal that we were made to worship, celebrate glory, and admire excellence. We are worshiping beings. It is not whether we worship but what or whom we worship. And many today worship sports in some form or another. I have spent enough time in various sporting contexts (as an athlete, fan, and coach) to understand that both men and women, boys and girls, can be very passionate about sports and the teams they support. Yet particularly men and boys seem to be especially given to idolatry in supporting their favorite sports teams.

Worldly Passions

Enjoying sports and supporting one’s favorite team is not necessarily a problem (like I said, I’ve been a player, fan, and coach). Like anything in the Christian life, though, we must learn to manage God’s gifts wisely. However, sometimes we misuse God’s gifts, and we become worldly in our thoughts and deeds. John tells us to “not love the world or the things in the world” (1 John 2:15). This doesn’t mean we can’t love a beautiful lake or a nice meal, but it does mean we need to be careful that we don’t love created things in place of the Creator. In the world are “the desires of the flesh and the desires of the eyes and pride of life” (1 John 2:16). Professional sports teams offer ample opportunities for worldly desires to come to full expression.

God created us with good desires, such as the desire to love or give vent to our joy. However, our sinful nature easily corrupts these powerful desires so that we love things we should not love, or we love things in ways or degrees that do not fit their God-given purposes. The Greeks used to speak of four passions, and Augustine and others saw these as helpful tools to analyze and understand human behavior: (1) desire, which is the good wished for; (2) joy, which is the good obtained; (3) fear, which involves an evil to be avoided and the good threatened; and (4) grief, which is when an evil happens and the good is lost. These passions run rampant among many sports fans, and where strong passions roam wild, one must proceed with great care.

Passionate sports fans desire the joy of victory, but in many cases, the fear of defeat and the accompanying grief can reveal how disordered our passions can be. I have heard it said by many players, coaches, and fans that they hate losing more than they love winning. For many, sports is the clearest window into their soul, where they show more joy or grief than in any other realm of life!

Enslaved Fans

In diagnosing whether sports have an unhealthy grip on our lives, we should ask ourselves some questions. For example, is our love for sports drawing us away from corporate worship on the Lord’s Day or consistently distracting us during worship? As in all things, can we enjoy God and give thanks to him in and through our delight in sports (Ephesians 5:20)? Or are we merely indulging self-focused desires? Remember, whatever is not of faith is sin (Romans 14:23). Even in the realm of enjoying sports, we must do so by faith, which also guards our passions as we seek enjoyment as God’s people enjoying his various gifts. We are to do all things to the glory of God, including support sports teams (1 Corinthians 10:31).

When we take pleasure in sports, are we causing damage to anyone — including ourselves? Some men can become so inordinately distressed or angry when their team loses that they take their anger out on others, even their own family members. This is a violation of the sixth commandment.

We could also ask, are we given to the pleasure of supporting a team, or is the pleasure given to us? In other words, we should not allow the failures of a sports team to dominate how we feel days after a loss. When we are given to something, it controls us rather than us controlling it. The art of enjoying sports is to remember that we can learn to be content whatever the circumstances (Philippians 4:11).

I say this as an extremely competitive person (who hates losing more than I enjoy winning), but I need to continually see the success of the teams that I support and coach in both a temporal and eternal perspective. Even temporally, isn’t it amazing how we can get so riled up over sweaty men with whom we have no relationship except that they happen to wear a different color jersey than another group of sweaty men? And none of these sweaty men care in the least about my feelings. Plus, even when your team wins the championship, the joy is short-lived: on to next season where we will worry about the coaching or the quality of newly acquired players.

Greater Glory

The solution to our worldliness and idolatry in relation to sports cannot be found in merely showing the ultimate emptiness of becoming an enslaved fan. As Thomas Chalmers (1780–1847) famously argues in “The Expulsive Power of a New Affection,” you cannot destroy love for the world merely by showing its emptiness. Love of the world — and specifically an inordinate, enslaving love for sports — can only be expelled by a new love and affection for God from God.

Love for God the Father, as his children (1 John 3:1), is a delight that frees us from slavery to the glory of sports. So, unless we have a love for God based upon all that he has done and will do for us, we will find ourselves increasingly addicted to worldly pursuits like sports.

In addition, John also connects the beatific vision — seeing Jesus face to face — to our love for God. As God’s children, we patiently await what we shall one day become: fully conformed to the image of Christ (Romans 8:29). When Jesus appears, “we shall be like him, because we shall see him as he is” (1 John 3:2). Both our love for the Father and our hope of being made like Christ when we see him give us a passion to make worship of God, not sports, central to our daily living as God’s people.

And if supporters of sports teams can gather week after week to sit on cold metal, loudly chanting and singing to spur their team to victory, should we not also be able to gather each Lord’s Day with our brothers and sisters to celebrate, all the more enthusiastically, the victories of our King and his eternal glories?

Just last week it was a necklace.

My 6-year-old daughter brought me the tangled mess and pled for help. With a little effort and patience, it was like new in a few minutes.

The week before it was leather strings on a baseball glove. First we had to loosen two entrenched knots; then we could tighten up the space between the fingers.

Before that, it was a shoestring. And every winter, on repeat, it’s the laces on the kids’ ice skates.

As a father of four, I find myself working regularly at untying knots. I try to count it a privilege, rather than burden. Parents often undo knots for our children, not only because we have the required strength in our hands and the tips of our fingers, but also, let’s hope, because we have the required patience.

Whether repairing a ball glove or unlacing a shoestring, complex knots require both strength and strategy, both effort and patience. The task simultaneously makes two demands on us that create a certain tension: engage your attention and energy and, at the same time, exercise patience. If you dive right in and start pulling on strings, you will worsen the knot. Or, if you only observe the tangle, and reflect on strategy, but neglect to actually engage your fingers, the knot will only persist.

This duel demand for initiative and patience, for effort and composure, captures well what Christ often requires of local-church leaders in the complexities of church life. We regularly go to work on untying figurative knots, complex relational messes — and with the stakes raised. Here neglect won’t leave the knot as is, but only make it worse.

Knotty by Nature

The risen Christ calls pastor-elders to two main tasks in the local church: teaching and governing. To make it rhyme, we feed and we lead. We exercise abilities to teach God’s word, and we exercise oversight to lead the church. So, among other qualifications, pastor-elders must be both “able to teach” and “sober-minded.”

Strangely, some aspiring or current pastors would rather not teach. This is odd, and not ideal, and may reflect confusion about the nature of the office. Among other things, pastors are teachers, and as Don Carson captures it well,

A substantial part of the ruling/oversight function is discharged through the preaching and teaching of the Word of God. This is where a great deal of the best leadership is exercised: “What does Scripture say?” means “What does God say?”

From the beginning, Christianity has been a teaching movement. Its best leaders teach, and its best teachers soon become leaders. Healthy churches thrive on ongoing, healthy preaching and teaching.

However, as vital as pastoral word-ministry is, this is not the entirety of the calling. Carson lands the other foot:

Oversight of the church is more than simply teaching and preaching. . . . [A] comprehensive vision of the ministry of the Word demands oversight . . . of the entire direction and priorities of the church. . . . [I]f [a man] shows no propensity for godly oversight, then no matter how good a teacher he may be, he is not qualified to be a pastor/teacher/overseer.

We not only feed and teach but also lead and govern. And in this exercise of oversight is the underserviced task of regularly untying some complicated knots — that is, seeking to bring order to the chaos of church life.

Order in the Church

Paul in particular writes about the need for “order” in church life and assumes this to be, in some measure, the work of Christian leaders.

“From the beginning, Christianity has been a teaching movement. Its best leaders teach, and its best teachers soon become leaders.”

This is his explicit commission to Titus as his delegate: “I left you in Crete, so that you might put what remained into order, and appoint elders in every town . . .” (Titus 1:5). Not only will Titus’s own teaching and oversight bring order to the disordered young church, but also the appointing of elders will bring about further order. Their very appointment will create clarity and structure in church life, and then the tangible effects of their work, over time, as they are faithful and fruitful, will bring more order.

This was true for Paul himself, as he saw it, in his apostolic teaching and governing. Speaking frankly to the Corinthians about marriage and divided interests, he writes, “I say this for your own benefit, not to lay any restraint upon you, but to promote good order and to secure your undivided devotion to the Lord” (1 Corinthians 7:35). He would not be content with confusion and disarray in the household of God. Bringing order to the chaos would be a fitting summary of his work in both spoken and written word.

Perhaps Paul’s most memorable mention of “order” comes in the context of corporate worship, in the same letter to Corinth. Here he lays it down almost as a maxim: “all things should be done decently and in order” (1 Corinthians 14:40). If we ask why, Paul has given his reason already, in the context, grounding it in the nature of God himself: “For God is not a God of confusion but of peace” (1 Corinthians 14:33).

The language of “decently” in verse 40 that Paul pairs with order (“decently and in order”) is the same as his charge to “walk properly” in Romans 13:13 and 1 Thessalonians 4:12. Beneath the collective order and decency of church life is the order and decency produced in individual Christian lives by the Spirit through steadfast faith: “though I am absent in body, yet I am with you in spirit, rejoicing to see your good order and the firmness of your faith in Christ” (Colossians 2:5).

Sin brings chaos, disorder, and confusion to human lives and relationships, and so one critical aspect in Christian ministry is our envisioning restored order and seeking to move our people, from their hearts, toward that order. Increasing order and holy propriety, on God’s terms, characterizes the maturing Christian life, and maturing church. Which makes it very much a pastoral concern.

Order on the Way to Order

Such order not only means putting desires and words and behaviors in their proper places, but also having a sense of sequence, the steps in which the vision might be pursued — the order in which to pursue the order.

Some issues in church life are simple and can be addressed in single actions. These issues might appear on the pastors’ meeting agenda once, and in a manner of minutes, a next and final action becomes clear. This was no knot; just a need. The pastors gave it their brief focus, made a decision, and life moves on.

But other issues are complex and cannot be tackled all at once. They appear on the agenda meeting after meeting for a season. These thorny situations cannot be adequately addressed in a single discussion and action but require a sequence of actions — some particular wise arrangement of steps, in proper succession, toward the goal of restored order.

This sequence is the order on the way to order. This is the kind of order Paul writes about in 1 Corinthians 15:22–24, where one item follows another in proper sequence:

in Christ shall all be made alive. But each in his own order: Christ the firstfruits, then at his coming those who belong to Christ. Then comes the end . . .

We see such ordered sequences particularly in Luke’s Gospel and its sequel. Luke explicitly set out “to write an orderly account” (Luke 1:3) and speaks of events in the life of Christ that followed after others (Luke 8:1). In Acts, Peter explains his story “in order” (Acts 11:4), specific prophets follow after others (Acts 3:24), and Paul moves “from one place to the next” in his missionary journeys (Acts 18:23).

In God’s ordered world, sequences matter — in biblical events, and in pastoral ministry — and especially when we encounter the most complex and convoluted of knots. Able oversight (“ruling well,” 1 Timothy 5:17) requires more than a single moment, meeting, action, or conversation, but humble and evolving multiple-step processes of pastoral attention, and the pastoral superpower called patience.

Call for Attention

First, gnarly pastoral knots demand our attention and engagement. Here the danger is neglect. We’d rather not deal with this complicated and emotionally draining issue: the divisive person, the troubled marriage, the flagging finances. We got into this work to preach and teach the Bible, and would rather not have to untangle all these thorny knots.

True, some potential ministry “black holes” might quickly drain far more energy and time from us than they are worth. We can consider that and set boundaries. But negligence is not the answer. Rather, as a team, we need to dedicate sufficient time to getting our minds together around enough of the details to make wise collective decisions that aren’t manifestly distorted by glaring unawareness.

Our tendency once briefed, especially as men, can be to get the problem fixed all at once. Again, some pastoral issues require only one step. But many need sequences. And when we come across these complicated knotty ones, we do well to identify one clear, worthwhile next step, even as we begin to envision some kind of sequence of actions toward resolution, whether it might take weeks or months or longer.

The need of the hour is to decide what step to take next, then gather further intel, and later identify the following step. All the while, the team keeps moving the issue forward, however deliberate the pace, and doesn’t let it stall out and go underground.

Call for Patience

It’s one thing to get up to speed and begin a sequence, one careful step at a time. But it’s another to walk the process with patience. And note well, true patience is not neglect. Patience is not slumber or naivety. Patience is wide awake and alert, with self-control.

Here the danger is hurry. We’ve assessed the problem and are ready to fix it right now. But complex knots can’t be expedited. We must untangle a thread at a time. Often these clusters are so layered that we cannot see all its sections at the outset. We need to first untangle a strand or two, or a few, to then get a line of sight deeper into the nub and discern what steps will follow.

Christian patience is not laxity. Nor is it weak, if rightly exercised, but a force for good. Spurgeon was speaking about his deacons, but might as well have been speaking of pastor-elders, when he said that such spiritually mature men “reduce chaos to order by the mere force of Christian patience” (Spurgeon the Pastor, 162). Even if we don’t smite the beast in one fell swoop, there is power in a band of godly men deliberately surrounding a nuisance, keeping their eyes on it, and moving slowly toward it together. We can be confident of resolution in due time.

After all, the pastor-elders should embody and exemplify normal, healthy Christian maturity, and be among the most patient souls in the church, and also the least resigned. They should be resolute about not being lazy or apathetic, and be assured of Christ’s commitment to build and bless his church.

We learn to roll our anxieties onto the broad shoulders of our chief Shepherd, and try to count it a privilege, rather than burden, to work at untying these knots.

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

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

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

Christians, the Voice of His Excellencies

Don’t shrink back from this, as if it were meant only for apostles. Do you remember what Peter said about who you are? You are Christians: “You [you!] are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for his own possession, that you may proclaim the excellencies of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light” (1 Peter 2:9). You are the voice of his excellencies. That’s not a missionary calling. That’s your Christian identity. It’s who you are — the mouthpiece of the excellencies of God.

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

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

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

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

Whom the Father Seeks, He Will Have

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

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

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

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

“Yahweh calls the Messiah a priest ‘forever.’ Forever? Now we are at a new level of lordship.”

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

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

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

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

Belief as Soul-Satisfaction

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

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

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

Believing John Dewey, the American educational reformer who died in 1952, said, “We never think until we have been confronted with a problem.” That may be an overstatement, but not by much. Thinking, especially thinking with a view to attaining more truth for the sake of more worship and more obedience, is hard work. Thinking demands effort.

But the Bible encourages us to think. Paul said to the younger Timothy, “Think over what I say, for the Lord will give you understanding in everything” (2 Timothy 2:7). And to the Corinthians he said, “Do not be children in your thinking. Be infants in evil, but in your thinking be mature” (1 Corinthians 14:20).

A lot of people have given me T-shirts over the years. My favorite was in 1980, when I finished six years of teaching biblical studies at Bethel College and became a pastor at this church. My students gave me a T-shirt with the initials of Jonathan Edwards on the front, and on the back it said, “Asking questions is the key to understanding.” That made me feel like I had at least partially succeeded in my six years at Bethel.

The reason John Dewey’s statement and that T-shirt go together is because asking questions is a way of being confronted with a problem. We don’t think until we have a problem, Dewey said. And we don’t understand until we think. And asking questions is a way of posing problems. Therefore, asking questions triggers thinking, and thinking is a path to understanding. One of my goals as a teacher is to build into students the habit of asking good questions — not because I want them to be skeptics, but because I want them to be thinkers. “Be infants in evil, but in your thinking be mature.”

Man of Questions

One of the reasons this is relevant to our text is that, in the four Gospels, Jesus asks over three hundred questions. I checked this out, just to make sure, by reviewing the list online. Now, in my ESV Bible, the Gospels fill 101 pages, which means that on average Jesus asks three questions on every page. I don’t doubt that there are far more reasons for why he did that than we will ever know in this world, but one of those reasons was, surely, to make people think — to think their way into truth, or to think their way into self-incrimination and silence.

Which is what happens in our text. So, let’s read Matthew 22:41–46. There are four questions in this text, all directed at the Pharisees:

Now while the Pharisees were gathered together, Jesus asked them a question, saying, [Question #1] “What do you think about the Christ? [Question #2] Whose son is he?” They said to him, “The son of David.” He said to them, [Question #3] “How [therefore does] David, in the Spirit, [call] him Lord, saying,

“‘The Lord [Yahweh] said to my Lord [adonai],“Sit at my right hand,     until I put your enemies under your feet”’?

If then David calls him Lord, [Question #4] how is he his son?” And no one was able to answer him a word, nor from that day did anyone dare to ask him any more questions.

Jesus had silenced the Sadducees in verses 29–33 when they asked about the resurrection. Then the Pharisees tested him in verse 35 by asking what the Great Commandment is. He answered them, and now come his own four questions, after which — you can see in verse 45 — no one asked him any more questions: “nor from that day did anyone dare to ask him any more questions.”

Let’s take Jesus’s questions one at a time to see if we can grasp what he is trying to communicate with these four questions.

Question #1: ‘What do you think about the Christ?’

“The Christ” means “the Messiah” — that is, the long-expected king of Israel who would fulfill the promises and bring Israel into her destiny as God’s chosen and ruling people in the world. Remember that the woman at the well in John 4 said,

“I know that Messiah is coming (he who is called Christ). When he comes, he will tell us all things.” Jesus said to her, “I who speak to you am he.” (John 4:25–26)

And here in Matthew, Jesus asked the disciples,

“Who do you say that I am?” Simon Peter replied, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.” And Jesus answered him, “Blessed are you, Simon Bar-Jonah! For flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father who is in heaven.” (Matthew 16:15–17)

In other words, “Yes, I am the Messiah.”

So this — “What do you think about the Christ [the Messiah]?” — is an explosive question because it has more than one level of meaning. At one level, it’s a biblical, theological question about the meaning of “Christ” or “Messiah.” Jesus and the Pharisees will have a lot of common ground on this question.

But at another level, the question touches on Jesus himself. Is he the one? The answer to the first level is not explosive at first. But the answer to the second level will get Jesus crucified. At his trial the high priest will say, “I adjure you by the living God, tell us if you are the Christ, the Son of God” (Matthew 26:63). To which Jesus responds, signing his own death warrant, “I tell you, from now on you will see the Son of Man seated at the right hand of Power and coming on the clouds of heaven” (Matthew 26:64). In other words, he will be seen as David’s Lord, sitting at God’s right hand, according to Psalm 110.

But now in our text, after asking his first question, Jesus does not wait for an answer to this general question of “What do you think about the Christ?” Because he knows where he is going with these questions, and he is not interested in a general answer about the Christ. He aims to be more specific. So, he moves to the second question.

Question #2: ‘Whose son is he?’

Now, every Jew knew at least one right answer to that question because of 2 Samuel 7:12–13, where God says to King David through the prophet Nathan,

When your days are fulfilled and you lie down with your fathers, I will raise up your offspring after you, who shall come from your body, and I will establish his kingdom. He shall build a house for my name, and I will establish the throne of his kingdom forever.

The Messiah would be the son of David. This is what the ordinary folks called Jesus. When he entered Jerusalem, they cried out, “Hosanna to the Son of David! Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord!” (Matthew 21:9). The Jewish leaders knew what this meant, and so they asked him, when the children called him the son of David, “Do you hear what these are saying?” To which Jesus responded, “Out of the mouth of infants . . . [God has] prepared praise” (Matthew 21:16).

So, when Jesus asks in our text, “Whose son is he?” we have these two levels of meaning again. At one level there is theological agreement: the Messiah is the son of David — no controversy. At the other level, just below the surface, is the question, Is Jesus this son of David?

The Pharisees answer Jesus’s second question: “The son of David” (Matthew 22:42). There’s the theological agreement: the Christ is the son of David.

But now comes the third question, which the Pharisees will not answer, because Jesus is leading them with Scripture to a place they do not want to go, and they can see it coming. This is often how questions work.

Question #3: ‘How does David call him Lord?’

Let’s reread what surrounds this question.

He said to them, “How [therefore, in view of your correct answer, does] David, in the Spirit, [call] him Lord, saying,

“‘The Lord [Yahweh] said to my Lord [adonai],“Sit at my right hand,     until I put your enemies under your feet”’?” (Matthew 22:43–44)

This question has often puzzled me. But before I explain why, let’s nail down five details.

Five Clarifications

First, verse 44 is a quotation of Psalm 110:1: “The Lord says to my Lord: ‘Sit at my right hand, until I make your enemies your footstool.’”

Second, the phrase “in the Spirit” (from “David, in the Spirit, calls him Lord”) means that Jesus regards these words as written by David and inspired by the Holy Spirit. This is not human opinion; it is God’s word.

Third, the first reference to “Lord” in the quote from Psalm 110:1 in Hebrew is the proper name of God, Yahweh. And the second word for “Lord” in the Psalm (“the Lord said to my Lord”) is the generic word for a master or a lord, adonai, which is used over three hundred times in the Old Testament for human masters. And the word “my” refers to David, the writer of the psalm: “The Lord [Yahweh] said to my Lord [adonai].”

Fourth, the second word for “Lord” (verse 44, or “master,” adonai), refers to the promised Messiah. And we know that because it says he will sit at God’s right hand, ruling over all his enemies. There was no disagreement about this reading of Psalm 110 so far with the Pharisees.

So fifth is that, since David is writing this, when he says, “[Yahweh] said to my Lord [my adonai],” David is calling the Messiah his Lord.

What’s So Controversial?

Now, what has puzzled me about Jesus’s third question — “How does David call him Lord?” — is why it would be considered controversial. Why would it stump the Pharisees, when in fact the Pharisees agree that David called the Messiah his Lord? Jewish people, from then till now, don’t deny that when or if the Messiah comes, he will be greater than David. He will be David’s superior and leader and Lord. That’s not news. That’s what the text says, and that’s what Jews have believed.

The way I used to read it simply does not seem to create the crisis Jesus seems to be creating. I think I’ve been reading it with the wrong twist. So, I’m going to suggest that we put the emphasis in this question on a different word, which I think solves my problem — my misunderstanding. I’m going to put the emphasis on the word “how” in verse 43 and treat it as a real “how” question.

Verse 43: “How [in what way, therefore, does] David, in the Spirit, [call] him Lord?” I think it’s misleading to translate it this way: “How is it then that David, in the Spirit, calls him Lord?” Because if you translate it, “How is it that . . .” it means, idiomatically, in English virtually the same as “Why does he call him Lord?” And that’s what throws me off, because the answer to that question would be easy for the Pharisees to answer. Why? Because he is.

But I don’t think Jesus is asking why David calls the Messiah his Lord, but how — in what way is he Lord? In what sense is he Lord? How is the Messiah the Lord of David, according to Psalm 110? Jesus is beckoning us into the whole of Psalm 110 to see how David writes about the Messiah to bring out what his lordship involves. This would require another sermon — to work our way, verse by verse, through Psalm 110, so let me just summarize what I see.

How David Calls the Messiah His Lord

In verse 1, “[Yahweh] says to my Lord: ‘Sit at my right hand, until I make your enemies your footstool.’” The Messiah sits at the exalted place in heaven at Yahweh’s right hand. Then in verse 4, Yahweh speaks again about the Messiah: “[Yahweh] has sworn and will not change his mind, ‘You are a priest forever after the order of Melchizedek.’” Yahweh calls the Messiah a priest “forever.” Forever? Now we are at a new level of lordship. The Messiah is a priest-king at God’s right hand forever.

“When David called the Messiah his Lord, he was pointing to the divinity of the Messiah.”

Then he says in verse 5, “The Lord [adonai] is at your right hand.” And the most natural meaning of the word “your” is the “you” of the preceding verse — verse 4: “You are a priest forever.” Then comes verse 5: “The Lord is at your right hand.” Which means that David, as he composes Psalm 110, is now saying that God is at this priest-king’s right hand. In other words, they have, in essence, switched places from verses 1 to 5: in verse 1, the Messiah sits at God’s right hand, and in verse 5, God is at the Messiah’s right hand.

I’m suggesting that what Jesus saw in this psalm is that when David called the Messiah his Lord, he was pointing to the divinity of the Messiah. The Messiah and Yahweh are one God. This is how the book of Hebrews understands this psalm in Hebrews 1:13. This is how Matthew understood Jesus’s messiahship: he is “God with us” (Matthew 1:23). This is what I mean by focusing on the word “how” in verse 43. How does David call the Messiah his Lord? The way he does it is by showing that the Messiah is David’s God.

That’s a lot to pack into a question that gets no answer. But the fact that there is no answer from the Pharisees suggests that they can smell that Jesus is leading them somewhere they don’t want to go. So, with that understanding of what was in Jesus’s mind, we turn to the fourth question.

Question #4: ‘If then David calls him Lord, how is he his son?’

This question now means, “If David calls the Messiah his God, we have a real problem. How is the Messiah David’s son?” That’s a problem because, to be David’s son, one has to be human and be in the human line of David. But if the Messiah is God, how can that be? No answer. In fact, public debating with Jesus is over. And the final question ringing in our ears is, If the Messiah is God, how is he a man, specifically a man in David’s human lineage?

Matthew has left us no doubt as to his answer: Jesus was divine and human because he was conceived in a human virgin by the divine Holy Spirit. Matthew 1:18: “Now the birth of Jesus Christ took place in this way. When his mother Mary had been betrothed to Joseph, before they came together she was found to be with child from the Holy Spirit.”

And Joseph, in the royal line of David, legally adopts Jesus, and Jesus becomes the legitimate son of David. Matthew 1:20: “An angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream, saying, ‘Joseph, son of David, do not fear to take Mary as your wife, for that which is conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit.’” And in taking Mary as his wife, he takes Jesus as his son. And Matthew clarifies the miracle of a divine-human Messiah with these words: “‘They shall call his name Immanuel’ (which means, God with us)” (Matthew 1:23).

Back to question #4: “If then David calls him Lord, how is he his son?” (Matthew 22:45). That is, “If, then, David calls him God, how is he a man in David’s line?” Not: “Is he?” But: “How is he?” Answer: by human birth in the womb of a virgin, and by legal adoption by a son of David.

Will We Have Him for Who He Is?

We are left not mainly with a question about who Jesus is.

Jesus (and Matthew) makes plain, “I am God, and I am the human son of David, the Messiah. Follow me. Devote yourself to me for the rest of your life. Treasure me above all things. Your sins will be forgiven. Your life will have its fullest meaning. And you will live forever in the joy of God’s presence.”

The question we are left with is not “Who is he?” but “Will we have him as our greatest treasure?” I pray your answer is yes.