One of the best fathers in the Bible is a man who had no children of his own. No biological children, that is.

The apostle Paul lived and died an “unmarried man,” always “anxious about the things of the Lord, how to please the Lord” (1 Corinthians 7:32). A frontier missionary; a restless church planter; a once-stoned, thrice-shipwrecked, five-times-lashed man — he had little room in his life for a stable home and a growing family. But he was, even still, a father. One of the best fathers the Scriptures offer.

“One of the best human fathers in the Bible is a man who had no children of his own.”

In fact, we find no other man so often associated with fatherhood in the New Testament. He called men like Timothy and Titus “my true child” (1 Timothy 1:2; Titus 1:4) and his churches “my beloved children” (1 Corinthians 4:14). He saw himself not simply as missionary or apostle or teacher, but also as “parent,” as “father” (2 Corinthians 12:14–15; 1 Thessalonians 2:11). Paul seemed to gather children wherever he went — even in prison (Philemon 10). He was a single man with many sons.

And in Christ, God calls any man, single or married, into the same kind of fatherhood.

Fathers Without Children

For long ages, the robust fatherhood we find in Paul was limited to, well, fathers — men with biological children. The Old Testament sometimes suggests a kind of spiritual fatherhood, as when Elisha refers to Elijah as “my father” (2 Kings 2:12). But for the most part, men who had no children of their own would have been tempted to say, “Behold, I am a dry tree” (Isaiah 56:3). The family line ends with me.

But then Jesus came: single, yes, and also the most fruitful and multiplying man who ever lived. Without marriage or children, without even a home where he might lay his head, he still surrounded himself with “his offspring” (Isaiah 53:10), “the children God has given me” (Hebrews 2:13). He was a dry tree in terms of biological lineage, yet his branches now cover the world.

In Jesus, then, we find a new kind of fatherhood alongside the old: a fatherhood not of the flesh, but of the spirit; not of the home, but of the church. Where once a father’s family tree required biological descent, now a single man like Paul can pass the gospel’s inheritance from one faithful son to the next (2 Timothy 2:2). Any man can be a father who will preach the gospel and disciple.

And more than that, Christian men are made for such fatherhood. We are made to be not only sons who follow behind, and not only brothers who walk alongside, but also fathers who chart the course ahead.

Four Paths to Spiritual Fatherhood

For a number of reasons, however, spiritual fatherhood may feel beyond reach. Some younger, struggling men may wonder how they could ever lead others. Others may wish they first had a spiritual father themselves, so that they had some example to follow. And then even older Christian men may look around, notice the lack of sons in their life, and feel unsure where to find them.

How then does a man in Christ become a father in Christ — young or old, single or married? Consider four paths to spiritual fatherhood from the life and letters of Paul.

1. Live worthy of imitation.

For Paul, two words lay near the heart of faithful fatherhood: “Imitate me.” He called his children not simply to listen or learn from him, but to follow him as he followed Christ. “I became your father in Christ Jesus through the gospel,” he tells the Corinthians. “I urge you, then, be imitators of me” (1 Corinthians 4:15–16). The first step to spiritual fatherhood, then, is leading a life worthy of imitation. Spiritual fathers are farther along on the journey of faith and Christian maturity.

Saying, “Imitate me” does not require perfection, of course. This side of heaven, any man worthy of imitation will wish he were more worthy of imitation. But saying “Imitate me” does require integrity. It requires an all-of-life pursuit of Christ. In other words, the house of a father’s life doesn’t need to be fully renovated, but there can’t be any secret rooms.

“The first step to spiritual fatherhood is leading a life worthy of imitation.”

By the transforming grace of Jesus, spiritual fathers are increasingly able to point to any area of life and say, “Follow me here as I follow Christ.” Follow my spending habits and my entertainment choices. Follow my spiritual disciplines and my work ethic. Follow, as Paul says elsewhere, “my teaching, my conduct, my aim in life, my faith” (2 Timothy 3:10). And when I fail in any of these areas, follow my repentance.

Regardless of whether anyone is following you closely right now, what if you lived expecting to be imitated? What if you awoke and worked and spoke and ate with the question in your head, “Could I call someone to follow me here?” Maybe, like a new biological father, you would begin to feel yourself freshly responsible for more than yourself, watched by more eyes than your own.

And when you discover some area where others should not follow you, don’t give up or despair. Most men, at most times, have some area that needs renewed attention and resolve. Focus on following Jesus there today, and then again tomorrow, and a life worthy of imitation will increasingly emerge.

2. Pursue specific sons.

Physical fatherhood is, at times, unintentional: a man can get a son without wanting one. Spiritual fatherhood, however, begins and continues only with careful intention. These fathers go and find their sons.

Of course, some men’s lives are so worthy of imitation that sons go and find them. But in each of Paul’s own father-son relationships, he initiated. Often, he had to initiate because the children in question were not yet in Christ. So, he became a father to churches like the Corinthians and to men like Onesimus by first winning them to Jesus (1 Corinthians 4:15; Philemon 10). Yet even when he didn’t have to initiate (when the son was already a Christian), we still find him doing so.

When Paul came to Derbe and Lystra and heard a good report there about a young man named Timothy, we read, “Paul wanted Timothy to accompany him, and he took him” (Acts 16:3). Paul wanted Timothy. He wanted this young man to serve with him “as a son with a father” (Philippians 2:22). And so, he took him. Thus was born the deepest, most enduring father-son relationship in the apostle’s life.

When I compare my own intentionality to Paul’s, I realize that I often expect spiritual fatherhood to happen on accident. But if a man has a relationship with a spiritual son, in all likelihood that relationship has come because he saw a man, befriended him, and then invited him to come along — to read along, pray along, eat along, evangelize along, rest along.

As you think of the younger men around you — younger in either age or faith — whom might you take intentional steps toward? Whom might you fold into your life in meaningful ways? Whose gifts might you “fan into flame” (2 Timothy 1:6), even at the cost of much time and attention? If we wait for spiritual fatherhood to happen on its own, it probably won’t.

3. Develop discipleship patience.

Any man who pursues younger men will realize (and often quickly) his need for patience. Much patience. Disciples tend to grow slowly, just like children (and just like us). But through every advance and setback, rise and fall, breakthrough victory and miserable retreat, spiritual fathers remain faithful. Steady. Patient.

“Discipling a spiritual son in Christ takes time, creative thought, precious energy, and lots of heart.”

Paul’s patience may appear most clearly in his fatherly heart toward the Corinthians. Only a forbearing father would remain loyal to such a church. And loyal Paul remained. He not only planted the church, but taught there a year and a half (Acts 18:11). He not only taught there, but wrote letters after he left, often addressing deep immaturity. And he not only wrote letters, but laced his words “with love in a spirit of gentleness” — the patience of a father (1 Corinthians 4:21).

Where did such patience come from? It came, in part, from Paul’s ability to look at immature sons and see an image of their future glory. Like Jesus with the twelve, Paul could trace a line between what is and what could be — and in Christ, what will be. He could see the possibility of purity in those struggling with lust, the hope of contentment in bitter hearts, the grace of diligence in sluggish hands.

And so, despite his incredible patience, he refused to lower the high bar of holiness, and instead raised his sons up to the bar. “Like a father with his children,” he wrote to the Thessalonians, “we exhorted each one of you and encouraged you and charged you to walk in a manner worthy of God” (1 Thessalonians 2:11–12). There could be no higher standard of conduct than walking “in a manner worthy of God.”

When you consider the younger, more immature men around you, do you see them with the dogged, deep-down hope that they, however weak or wandering, could walk increasingly worthy of God? As you see their weaknesses, do you see also their potential in Christ? And might your words — patient yet believing and bold — become one of the means God uses to call them higher?

4. Embrace the greater blessedness.

As we consider the intentional pursuit and patient investment of spiritual fatherhood, perhaps the cost looms large. Discipling a spiritual son in Christ takes time, creative thought, precious energy, and lots of heart. If we run the commitment through a relational calculator of profit and loss, we may well decide to remain childless. Jesus, however, would have us use a different calculator altogether: “It is more blessed to give than to receive” (Acts 20:35).

Paul models what it looks like to embrace this greater blessedness. As he writes to the Corinthians,

I seek not what is yours but you. For children are not obligated to save up for their parents, but parents for their children. I will most gladly spend and be spent for your souls. (2 Corinthians 12:14–15)

Hear the father’s heartbeat: “I seek not what is yours but you.” I do not seek your fast growth, your tit-for-tat repayment, your easy ego affirmations, or even your recognition of all that I do for you. Rather, I seek you. From the depths of my new heart in Christ, I seek the good of your heart in Christ. And therefore, every sacrifice and service, every hard word spoken and burden borne carries the unmistakable aroma of Christian gladness.

Or as another spiritual father put it, “I have no greater joy than to hear that my children are walking in the truth” (3 John 4). Behold the secret of spiritual fatherhood: under the sun, there is no greater joy than to see spiritual children walking in the truth. And those who taste such joy will be on their way to becoming a father, single or married, with many sons.

“What do you consider a ‘good death’?”

A furrow creased my eyebrows. The interviewer and I had spent the last ninety minutes discussing the intricacies of end-of-life care, delving into hard topics such as life-support measures, hospice, and advance directives. I navigated those delicate subjects with confidence, but this question so troubled me that I lapsed into silence. “I hate that phrase,” I finally answered.

She raised her eyebrows in surprise. “Really? Why?”

While she awaited my reply, a plethora of faces and voices cluttered my mind. I saw swollen eyes and tear-stained cheeks. I felt desperate grasps of my arm as loved ones crumpled to the floor in agony. I recalled the questions that hung in the air after the dying drew their last breath. I heard cries of shock and heartbreak echoing on and on, like breakers on a relentless sea.

“Because death is never good,” I said. The memories gripped me, and my voice caught. “Grief testifies to the backwardness of it. That we cry hints at an undoing of God’s created order. He designed us for something different.”

Is Death Ever Good?

The question of a “good death” may seem reasonable, even natural, given shifting views on death in Western countries. In 2021, ten thousand people in Canada died by physician-assisted suicide (PAS), wherein a doctor prescribes a lethal dose of medication for a person to self-administer, ending his own life. Canadian law now permits individuals with mental rather than terminal illness to pursue the practice. In other words, those who are otherwise healthy but suffer from psychological conditions, like depression, can seek medical help to end their own lives. In the United States, the legalization of PAS creeps across more and more states yearly.

Such trends hint at an increasingly prevalent viewpoint that death, rather than a terrible consequence of the fall, is a reasonable option to escape suffering. According to this thinking, death can be “good” if it provides relief from pain. What is more, the movement reflects a culture that upholds self-determination as an ultimate good; we live for ourselves, rather than for God.

Dear friend, when you encounter such ideas, remember that Scripture refers to death not as a phase to celebrate, but as the last enemy (1 Corinthians 15:26). Death comes to us all, and God can and does work through even this for good to those who love him (Romans 8:28), but never lull yourself into the lie that death itself is anything but the terrible wages of our sin, from which we desperately need salvation (Romans 6:23). Remember that “Satan disguises himself as an angel of light” (2 Corinthians 11:14).

Scripture is abundantly clear that we were never meant for death. And lest we forget, the experience of grief — to borrow from C.S. Lewis’s The Problem of Pain — shouts as with a megaphone to remind us.

For Now We Groan

God has confronted me with the harsh realities of death and grief more frequently than I ever would choose. As a trauma surgeon, I witnessed deaths both sudden and prolonged, peaceful and traumatic. Many of these losses imprinted on my memory, the tragedies and sorrows burned into my mind as with a branding iron.

I’ll never forget the mother who cried, “You were supposed to save my baby!” when I couldn’t rescue her young son from his injuries after a car accident. I remember another mother crawling into her daughter’s hospital bed to hold her as she drew her last breath, how her words eked out, strangled by her sobs. I flash back to the wife who clenched her fists and cried out to the sky, the father who fell to the floor and screamed, the families — so many — who held the hands of their loved ones and wept in subdued, hushed tones as the monitor tracing dwindled. Afterward, they would drift out of the room as though stumbling through a dream, their eyes bloodshot, their minds far away and disbelieving.

In all the moments I spent at the bedside of the dying, I witnessed none where pain did not overcome the survivors. Even in deaths that were anticipated, like those among elderly people who had suffered the ravages of long-standing terminal illness, the loss left scars. Families who voiced acceptance of a loved one’s impending death struggled afterward, blindsided by the abrupt absence of someone dear to them. It was as if a part of their heart had been removed suddenly.

What Death Leaves Behind

Weeks after a death, I’ve had loved ones come and express to me surprise that grief had so afflicted them, and at how deeply the hurt coursed. Reminders of a loved one’s quirks — her fondness for emojis, his habit of calling promptly at eight o’clock in the morning — would break into their days, and suddenly their wounds would open anew. They’d struggle even to breathe.

Death does this. Even in the most merciful of scenarios, like the losses for which we feel prepared, death leaves suffering in its wake. Even when it occurs peacefully and quietly, death guts the hearts of those who remain.

The reality of grief — the phenomenon of heartache after we’ve bid someone farewell this side of heaven — hints that we were made for a different world, a different fate. We were created for neither death nor sorrow, but for God, the one who made us in his everlasting image to steward his vibrant creation, to be fruitful, and to multiply (Genesis 1:22, 27). Apart from him, all creation groans (Romans 8:22). Apart from him, the soul balks at the brokenness into which our sin has plunged us and cries out for rescue.

Man of Sorrows

By grace, God provided the rescue for which our souls so desperately thirst (Psalm 42:1–2). And he accomplished our salvation astonishingly, magnificently, remarkably, through “a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief” (Isaiah 53:3).

Our Savior knows the burden of grief that so torments us. In Gethsemane, as he anticipated bearing the crushing wrath of God in our place, Jesus was “very sorrowful, even to death” (Matthew 26:38), “and being in agony he prayed more earnestly; and his sweat became like great drops of blood falling down to the ground” (Luke 22:44). Even as we cry out and lament, and our hearts break, our hope springs from the work of a Savior who can sympathize with our every pang and tear (Hebrews 4:15). He laid down his life for us, willingly, to free us from the bonds of death that so pain us (John 10:18).

We weep and grieve because our world is fallen, “but God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ” (Ephesians 2:4–5). The sufferings of this world, and our enslavement to sin and death, are precisely why Jesus came. Through the cross, he has overcome the world (John 16:33). Through his resurrection, the wages we once owed have been “swallowed up in victory” (1 Corinthians 15:54). We have been “born again to a living hope” (1 Peter 1:3).

Weep No More

The horrors of death and grief point to our experience as Eden’s exiles, displaced from a world without suffering. Through Christ, the world for which we yearn — a world without tragedy and affliction, a world where death mars no complexion and tears dampen no cheek — is not a lofty ideal or childish daydream, but a promise, an assurance, “an inheritance that is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading” (1 Peter 1:4).

Apart from Christ, our “hurt is incurable,” and our “wound is grievous” (Jeremiah 30:12). Yet by Christ’s own wounds — wounds he suffered as he walked “through the valley of the shadow of death” in our place (Psalm 23:4) — we are healed (1 Peter 2:24). Although for now we groan, Christ is making all things new (Revelation 21:5). When we join him in the world for which we were made, in the new heaven and new earth, he will wipe away every tear from our eyes. Death, that gray shadow harrowing the heart, shall be no more. Grief and sorrow will fade away like withered grass.

And we will “dwell in the house of the Lord forever” (Psalm 23:6).

Audio Transcript

How do we return to normal life after life-altering loss? Today’s question is from a broken woman named Andrea. “Dear Pastor John,” she writes, “my husband went home to be with the Lord two months ago after a four-month battle with pancreatic cancer. We were both divorcees who met in October of 2019. God restored our lives, and we married in October 2020. I’m very thankful to have been married to my late husband. The Lord had restored our lives and relationship. There was so much joy to live with someone who loves you so much. My late husband had a son, now twenty years old. We expected to spend the rest of our lives as a family unit.

“But our blissful days together were short, and our worlds came crashing down. We held on to the word of God, expecting a miraculous healing right to the end. He was not healed and didn’t recover. In fact, he suffered a lot of pain in the end. Many of our friends supported and prayed for us. But now, after my husband’s passing, I can’t find any purpose in life. Is it normal to feel this way? Friends ask me how I am, if I’m returning to work. I can only say, ‘I’m okay.’ But deep in my heart I’m not okay. How do I continue to live my life? My heart feels very heavy. I try to listen to sermons and read the Bible, but nothing seems to be getting into my heart. Thank you, and God bless.”

Andrea asks, “Is it normal to feel this way?” — namely, not being able to find purpose in life after her husband passed away. There are so many factors that affect how we function after a major loss that it’s hard to say what is normal. Everybody’s situation is so different: age differences, employment differences, health differences, family differences, wider relationships, church, location, gifting, maturity, faith, and on and on. There are so many differences.

But I think I can say, with some degree of certainty, that the more your life is embedded in or intertwined with what or whom you’ve lost — whether it’s your spouse, job, health, home, or child — then the more normal it is to feel disoriented and aimless. That’s true. So, I think the answer will be closer to “yes, it is normal,” than to “no, it’s not normal.”

Andrea’s real question, it seems to me, is not so much “Am I normal?” but “What do I do?” As she puts it, “How do I continue to live my life?” Here are some thoughts from Scripture, because God is the one we have to turn to ultimately, isn’t he?

1. Wait for the Lord.

The first thing I would say is to wait for the Lord. Don’t assume that the way you feel today is the way it will always be. In time, the Lord will change things. He will, which means that this is a God-appointed season of waiting.

I’ve learned this over years and years of watching my own heart and counseling lots of people. Americans, or maybe you could say modern people in general, want quick solutions to our problems. We don’t like waiting, but God is seldom in a hurry. It’s amazing. God is simply seldom in a hurry. It’s almost as if he prefers the slow pace of healing and strengthening.

Early in my ministry — in fact, six weeks after starting my pastorate in the summer of 1980 — I preached a sermon about waiting from Psalm 40. It’s called “In the Pits with a King” because David says in Psalm 40, “I waited patiently for the Lord.” That’s the key sentence.

He doesn’t say how long he waited, and I’m glad he doesn’t tell us it was a week or a month or a year. Instead, he says, “I waited patiently for the Lord; he inclined to me and heard my cry” (Psalm 40:1). Yes, eventually God does. David goes on:

He drew me up from the pit of destruction,     out of the miry bog,and set my feet upon a rock,     making my steps secure.He put a new song in my mouth,     a song of praise to our God.Many will see and fear,     and put their trust in the Lord. (Psalm 40:2–3)

David is looking back on a season of misery. He calls it “the pit” and “the miry bog.” In this situation, he tells us his strategy: “I waited” and “I cried to the Lord.” Again, he doesn’t tell us how long, whether a week, a month, or a year. This is the calling of all Christians in various degrees, at various times in this life. Nobody escapes it. We all will find ourselves in seasons where we have no choice but to wait for the Lord — unless we’re going to rebel and throw in the towel, which would be very foolish.

David even gives us an explanation of what God was doing in this appointed season of waiting. He says that God eventually comes, sets his feet on solid ground, and puts a song in his mouth. The promised result? “Many will see and fear, and put their trust in the Lord.” In other words, this is evangelism, and sometimes it happens in our own lives. God draws people to trust in him as they watch us pass through the pits that we have to wait in.

David’s waiting and eventual deliverance was, in effect, for the good of other people’s faith. They trust the Lord because David’s patient waiting moved them to trust the Lord. One of my favorite hymns puts it like this:

He knows the time for joyAnd truly will send it when he sees it meet,When he has tried and purged thee, duly,And finds thee free from all deceit.

So, Andrea, God has his purposes for your season of loss, sorrow, and even aimlessness. Trust him in it. Wait patiently for the Lord. He will come. Psalm 23:3 says, “He restores my soul.” Right now, your soul feels numb, maybe even dead and unresponsive. That’s why you must wait. God promises, “I will restore,” and the word restore means “cause to return your soul.” It’s as if the soul is languishing. It’s numb. It’s dead. God says, “I will restore your soul.”

2. Dwell on the preciousness of Christ.

Second, I would say to think much about the preciousness of Christ alongside of the preciousness of your husband. When your memory calls up sweet and wonderful experiences with your husband, let the power of those affections intensify your love for Christ — because Ephesians 5 says that your marriage had that aim in the first place. Marriage is meant to be a portrayal, a drama of Christ’s love for the church and the church’s commitment to Christ. It was meant to help us feel the wonder and pleasure of what a relationship with Christ is like.

As your memory brings to your mind and to your heart how much you and your husband loved each other, how committed you were to each other, translate those affections. You also could use the musical analogy of transposing those affections into another key, so that husband-love is translated into, transposed into, the music of Christ-love.

“God has his purposes for your season of loss. Trust him in it. Wait patiently for the Lord.”

Say something like this to your husband: “I miss you so much. You were very, very precious to me. There is a huge hole in my life where you were.” Then turn to Christ: “Jesus, I know you are even more precious than that. If I did not have you, Jesus, I would miss my very life. There would be a great, unfillable hole in my soul. But I do have you, Jesus, and you are my true husband. I pray that you would help me feel for you and more the intensity of what I feel for the man I have lost.”

I think the reason God gives us so much pleasure in our spouse is to give us a taste of the pleasure that there is in belonging to Jesus. It follows that the pain we feel with the loss of our spouse can be another intensification of what it means to belong to Christ.

3. Pray for God to search your heart.

Third, I would say to pray Psalm 139:23–24:

Search me, O God, and know my heart!     Try me and know my thoughts!And see if there be any grievous way in me,     and lead me in the way everlasting!

The reason I say this is because we should always honestly reckon with the possibility that our love for our spouse could be a disordered love, meaning it might be encroaching on our love for Jesus.

Jesus said, “Whoever loves father or mother [in other words, family members] more than me is not worthy of me” (Matthew 10:37). We should regularly go before the Lord and ask him to reveal our hearts: “Lord, is there anything, is there anyone who is competing with you for my supreme affections?” If this has happened, it will almost certainly make the loss of that person more disabling than it ought to be.

4. Learn from this season.

Finally, while you’re waiting for the Lord to restore your joy and purposefulness, ask him to reveal what he aims to teach you in this season that you could learn from him and from the Christian life in no other way.

The reason I say that is because of Psalm 119:67–71. These verses are amazing. Verse 67 says, “Before I was afflicted I went astray, but now I keep your word.” Then there’s verse 71: “It is good for me that I was afflicted, that I might learn your statutes.”

In other words, don’t waste your sorrow, Andrea. Don’t waste this season of loss. In it, God has gifts for you and, through you, for others. Ask him what they are, and then take hold of them. Perhaps write them in a journal, and then let him use you in the lives of others. He will set your feet on a rock. He will put a new song in your mouth. Many will see and fear — and put their trust in the Lord.

He does not want to go home after daycare. During those hours, he experiences the nurturing care of women — that mothering touch that makes a little boy’s world go round. He cries when it’s time to leave. He stammers to leave the maternal — a second language in which he was born fluent — when he has to go back into the home of two men. The “married” men are openly promiscuous with other men. One pretends to be more effeminate than the other, but effeminacy (the boy knows by experience) is a gross and cruel substitute for the gloriously feminine.

He is trapped with men who “gave up natural relations with women and were consumed with passion for one another, men committing shameless acts with men and receiving in themselves the due penalty for their error” (Romans 1:27). Men who did not keep that penalty to themselves. They took the little boy directly from the hospital room to live in the lust-filled, wrath-stamped house of two men despising God and his design.

The little boy clings to his Christian auntie whenever she comes, she tells us, and cries when it’s time for her to leave his house, a house full of testosterone, aberrant desire, and a cheap mimicry of both fatherhood and motherhood. The boy, despite his catechizers, knows the real thing from the fake. He knows what it is to be held by the real, soothed by it, cuddled and made to feel secure in the safety of its arms.

The men who took him are “expecting” their second any day now.

What’s Wrong with the World?

A true story like this should anger us, fracture our hearts, and bend our knees to pray. What is wrong with the world?

What is wrong with the world? Paul gives us an answer in Romans 1:18–32: Mankind is at war with its Creator. Each generation has its own way of saying to the Father and his Son: “Let us burst their bonds apart and cast away their cords from us” (Psalm 2:3). Or with Pharaoh, “Who is the Lord, that I should obey his voice?” (Exodus 5:2). Romans 1 takes us behind the scenes for some context to desperate times.

Here we learn that fallen man, timid little creature that he is, dares not make eye contact with the Almighty, so he suppresses the truth about God to continue, all too happily, in his filth (Romans 1:18). A popular form of suppression today is atheism. “The fool says in his heart, ‘There is no God’” — and he does so because “they are corrupt” and “do abominable deeds” (Psalm 14:1). And those deeds do not wear masks and quarantine. Man denies God to practice and continue practicing homosexuality, as one of many rebellious ways, and then adopts children into his perversity.

But the grandeur of this world leaves ruined man without excuse (Romans 1:19–20). He, even he, lives within a masterpiece — God’s “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” (Romans 1:20). The great artist signs his name everywhere to be seen. Man quivers within heights and depths he cannot explore, in a cosmos more expansive than his imagination. Man’s brain (which is hostile to God apart from grace, Romans 8:7–8) surpasses a computer. His cells contain baffling intricacy. And yet his love for sin makes modern man shrug and call himself an atheist. His religion says that all came from original nothingness, from the great I Am Not. Claiming to be wise, he has become a fool.

The old watchmaker analogy highlights the absurdity of explaining nature by mere nature. If that atheist man finds an iPhone in the woods, he will always conclude someone must have left it there. That it was made. Chance did not design it. The passage of time cannot take credit. Though an Apple, it did not fall from a tree. Yet he lives and moves and has his being in the wide world of complexity that towers the iPhone as the heavens above earth and yet he says it all came from impersonal, unintelligent forces. They are without excuse.

Fattened by Sin for Slaughter

Unregenerate men of all sexual professions do not see God because they do not want God. They would pin him up and nail him to a tree again if they could. “This is the judgment: the light has come into the world, and people loved the darkness rather than the light because their works were evil” (John 3:19). As criminals want no All-Seeing Judge, so natural man chafes at the God who reminds him that man is no god and is not good. How dare God tell us what to do with our bodies? How dare he tell us what to do with our babies? How dare he tell us what marriage is? How dare he!

So sons of Adam reject God. They do not render him the honor due his name, or thank him for his goodness and mercy (Romans 1:21). Instead, they offer the Almighty insults and spit upon the hand of their Benefactor. As a madman who pulls out his teeth to throw them at the sky because he hates the moon, men harm themselves in their rebellion. They become useless in their thinking, and their foolish hearts are darkened (Romans 1:21). Deny God, and you deny reason, deny sanity, deny goodness, deny beauty, deny life. One becomes a spiritual Nebuchadnezzar — nails grow as talons, he stoops to eat grass like an ox — though he may live in a lake house, drive a fancy car, and be thought charming by this God-hating world.

He is at war with God, and God is at war with him. He is under the wrath of God, a wrath that is just now preheating (Romans 1:18). He has exchanged God for images, and now God gives him over to suicidal sinfulness: to the lusts of his heart, to impurity, to the dishonoring of his own body (Romans 1:24). He bowed before idols and prostituted God’s truth, so God brings him to grassy plains where he will grow fat for the day of slaughter.

Bloodshed of Toddlers

God has given these two men up to dishonorable passions, to commit “shameless acts with men” (Romans 1:27). And then they conspire to adopt what God has forbidden them by nature. And then the delirious powers that be place kids in their “home” to be hit by the shrapnel of this skirmish with God.

And this is what God’s judgment does: Like striking a wasp’s nest, it incites man’s stinging left and right.

And since they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God gave them up to a debased mind to do what ought not to be done. They were filled with all manner of unrighteousness, evil, covetousness, malice. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, maliciousness. They are gossips, slanderers, haters of God, insolent, haughty, boastful, inventors of evil, disobedient to parents, foolish, faithless, heartless, ruthless. (Romans 1:28–31)

Who do these “haters of God” envy? Deceive? Slander? Murder? Themselves, others, and sometimes, children.

Rebellion against God becomes a wildfire. Wickedness is never satisfied to keep to itself; it mutinies. It enlists bedfellows. It stirs up and demands compliance. It slithers and has scales, takes over school systems and adopts children. And it co-opts those who know better: “Though they know God’s righteous decree that those who practice such things deserve to die, they not only do them but give approval to those who practice them” (Romans 1:32). These know such sins beg for God’s capital punishment, but instead of imploring them to repent — as love would dictate — they instead applaud them for their courage and “authenticity.”

Flee the Wrath to Come

God’s reality is inflexible. His law is perfect; his rules are true and righteous altogether. The Judge of the earth shall do right, and this is a terror for all here who despised his mercy, despised his designs for love, sex, and marriage, despised his day of salvation, and despised his crucified Son.

Today, dear reader, is the day of salvation — seek King Jesus. Blessed are all who take refuge in him. He has made a way, with his own blood, for you to be received. Are you a vast sinner? Have you murdered, taught false doctrine, adopted children into an abominable union before the Lord? Your wicked life is a wide opportunity for God to display the fathomless depths of his compassion and the eternal power of Christ’s sacrifice to forgive you. The terrorist of the church, the blasphemer of God, and murderer of Christians wrote,

The saying is trustworthy and deserving of full acceptance, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, of whom I am the foremost. But I received mercy for this reason, that in me, as the foremost, Jesus Christ might display his perfect patience as an example to those who were to believe in him for eternal life. (1 Timothy 1:15–16)

Look to this great example of mercy to give confidence to receive your own. Abundant pardon for abundant crimes. There is enough mercy for all who come.

Seek the Lord while he may be found;     call upon him while he is near;let the wicked forsake his way,     and the unrighteous man his thoughts;let him return to the Lord, that he may have compassion on him,     and to our God, for he will abundantly pardon. (Isaiah 55:6–7)

Jesus Christ has a throne of grace for the repentant, and a seat of terror for the impenitent. What is wrong with the world? Man’s sin. What alone is right with the world? Jesus Christ — his person, his redeeming work, and his church of redeemed sinners. He shines in the darkness, and still the darkness has not overcome him.

Friendship, C.S. Lewis concludes, is “unnecessary.” He says, “I have no duty to be anyone’s Friend, and no man in the world has a duty to be mine. No claims, no shadow of necessity. Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art” (The Four Loves, 103).

Friendship is a little bit like the offer of dessert after a wonderful meal. No one must eat it any more than the host must provide it — the unnecessary best part. So too with one’s friends. Friendship runs on the fuel of shared enjoyment, not by way of contract or debt or familial duty. Yet in friendless seasons, we feel at a loss — of companionship, comfort, sharpening, and edification.

The Scriptures show us just how strong the bonds of friendship can be, as with Jonathan and David: “He loved him as his own soul” (1 Samuel 18:3). We also see the pain of a friend not living up to the name, as with Job’s friends: “My friends scorn me; my eye pours out tears to God” (Job 16:20). We know “a friend loves at all times” and that the love of a friend even includes his willingness to injure us, for “faithful are the wounds of a friend” (Proverbs 17:17; 27:6).

Considering such a potent blessing, how can young women pursue godly friendships?

Pathways into Female Friendship

At times of transition in life, we can find ourselves friendless, or at least in short supply of any tried-and-true friends nearby. One thing I know is that you don’t make new friends by sitting around wishing for them. The best way I’ve found to make friends is to get busy doing whatever God has given me to do that day and then to see whom God puts in my path.

Now, it should go without saying that our closest friends are Christian friends, not just anybody in proximity to us. We need to be around people at church, in our family, and in our friendships that honor Christ and his ways. When we walk with the wise, we become like them — when we hang out with fools, we will suffer for it (Proverbs 13:20). Friendship is a fellowship, and “what fellowship has light with darkness?” (2 Corinthians 6:14).

I often observe that women admire someone from a distance and then invite her to grab coffee. Trying to spark a friendship isn’t wrong, but it may result in disappointment when the woman doesn’t live up to your ideal. In my experience, the best way to get to know someone is to do something alongside her rather than starting off primarily one-on-one and face-to-face. Serving shoulder-to-shoulder with women from church is a great way to have unpressured conversations. Inviting a family over for dinner is another helpful way to get to know a potential friend, as you will see a fuller picture of what she’s like when surrounded by her husband and children.

I’m occasionally surprised when a woman whom I seemed to get along with well in a private conversation isn’t as compatible when with our families or a larger group of friends. But I’m also surprised when someone with whom I didn’t sense any great kinship at the start eventually becomes a dear friend in the context of our families and shared work. In other words, get to know potential friends in real life, not just by sitting with coffee away from the bustle of children or classes or home life or service or work. Female friendships shouldn’t mainly be siloed away from husbands, children, parents, or hands-on work. Rather, our real-life context is fertile soil for healthy friendships.

“We have the opportunity to give our friends a precious, Christlike gift: our constant love.”

The most rewarding friendships God has given me are secure enough to take our eyes off the friendship, lock arms, and take a hill together. Maybe the hill is a feat of hospitality that’s too big for just one person. Maybe it’s trying to solve some tough problem and praying together. Maybe the hill is finding the best way to educate our children in the Lord. Maybe it’s working on a writing project with a friend, providing critical feedback or receiving it. In these cases, friendship has moved beyond itself to productive fruitfulness that spills over to others.

Enemies of Female Friendships

Certain weeds regularly find their way into the garden of friendship among women and can keep a friendship from becoming fruitful in the Lord. Female friendship grows in a particular kind of soil prone to particular weeds — envy, flattery, rivalry, pretense, deceit, complaining, and gossip, to name a few.

My first memory of an envious thought takes me back to twelve years old with a friend I loved (and love!) dearly. I envied her appearance and form. That envy sat in the background of my heart for several years, an unwelcome but persistent guest, before I realized I could do something about it. Likewise, I can recall rivalry — a competitive urge to be or do better than my friends — from an even earlier age.

What’s more, even as a grown woman over forty, I am still putting to death the occasional urge to gossip or complain or exaggerate when with friends. I thank God that he has given me a new heart that desires to put to death those sins and also desires to love my friends in truth. But the battle isn’t over yet. So, for the sake of our own souls and the good of our friends, we must relentlessly pull the harmful weeds out of our friendships.

We can start by developing the habit of dealing with those sinful tendencies lightning fast. If an envious thought springs up, kill it immediately by confessing it to God. Ask him to resurrect gratitude instead of envy, and then give thanks to him for the very quality you were about to envy in your friend. Thank him for her beautiful hair, or her good humor, or her lovely home. Then cheerfully move on — give it no more attention.

If you catch yourself shaping stories either by exaggeration or by withholding information to somehow protect your reputation or make others think better of you, then quickly, before another false word can come out of your mouth, walk it back. Tell your friend, “I’m sorry, that’s not right. Here’s what really happened.”

If you find yourself starting to gossip with a friend, do not succumb to the second temptation that would try to get out of it by acting like it never happened. Quickly deal with it on the spot. Say to your friend, “I’m sorry I was just gossiping. Would you forgive me?” Even if your friend also participated, take responsibility for your part, repent, and receive God’s forgiveness. Gossip and complaining provide cheap ways to intimacy. They make friends feel close and bonded. But in the end, they remain crumbling foundations for friendship.

Love Through Thick and Thin

While Lewis is right that friendship is not a duty that can be demanded from one to another, we do have the opportunity to give our friends a precious, Christlike gift: our constant love. This love is not something we give on the basis of how much fun they are to be around on any given day, but on the basis of our Savior, Christ, who calls us his friends and loves us to the end (John 15:15).

Our friends will face deep valleys and high peaks over the course of their lives. If we are to love them in the valleys, we must not be selfish; if we are to love them on the peaks, we must not be envious. God can grant us real enjoyment in our friends in every season because he has done a wonderful thing in uniquely making them, calling them, gifting them, and letting us partake in their lives. It’s a privilege to call someone friend — and still more to be called it in return.

Let me tell you a story. Once upon a time, there was a lost child wandering in a wood, who stumbled across a path lined with signposts. Strange and wonderful names adorned these signs, names like Phantastes, Beowulf, Harry Potter, The Odyssey, Pilgrim’s Progress, and The Return of the King. The child, guided by the posts, set out along the path. By way of many adventures, they led him through the Dragon’s Den, into the foggy Foothills of Longing, and finally up to the Peaks of Joy, where he caught a glimpse of a far green country under a swift sunrise. He now lives happily ever after, pursuing that path to the heights he was made to explore.

This is the tale of many men and many women — those who have heeded the signposts of story on the path of life. Followed faithfully, this path can lead to the heights of happiness, what the poet calls “fullness of joy” and “pleasures forevermore” (Psalm 16:11). C.S. Lewis perhaps best articulated his adventures on this road. He began the trek as a hardened atheist, but along this path of good stories, God led him to Jesus. And though he has long since passed beyond our vision, happily heeding the invitation of Aslan to come further up and further in, we can glean much from his journey.

Lewis champions all kinds of stories — fairy tales, myths, fantasies, biblical narratives, allegories, even histories — as God-given means of leading men and women Godward. And other Christians, like Tolkien and Chesterton, heartily agree, attesting to the enduring value of stories for both believers and unbelievers. So, how exactly do good stories serve as signposts, guiding us to the God we were made for?

Through the Dragon’s Den

First, good stories can guide us through the dragon’s den. Lewis once said that he wrote fairy tales because they allowed him to steal past the watchful dragons that stand guard over our hearts (On Stories, 70). Tolkien took the image one step further and argued that stories can also steal from those dragons. Tolkien recognized that, often, the more we see things, the less we see them; our eyes become hooded with the film of familiarity. For Tolkien, this leads to a kind of draconic possessiveness. We lay hold of things, claim them as our own, lock them in our hoard, and then cease to look at them. We become unwatchful dragons.

Thus, we need what Tolkien calls recovery — a renewed sense of wonder at the world. We need someone to raid our “hoard and let all the locked things fly away like caged birds” (On Fairy-Stories, 68). As it turns out, stories make excellent burglars. Like the warm breath of Aslan, good stories restore life to things that inattention has long since turned to stone.

Good stories, especially good fiction, create opportunities for us to come to grips with reality. As Chesterton might say, myths parade before us sheep with golden coats to astonish us that ours wear robes of white. Fairy tales brandish wooden wands sprouting magic spells so that they might land on us with wonderful weight that our branches cast leaves. Stories conjure up hoary Ents to remind us that our trees too are giants, telling ancient tales of earth and sky. Good stories signpost the riches of creation.

When all these gigantic treasures are dragged back into the Light, foiled by fantasy, they can awaken in us what Chesterton calls the ancient instinct of astonishment and dazzle us into gratitude. This impulse to give thanks acted as a signpost for the unbelieving Chesterton, causing him to realize that thanks must be given to someone. Gifts need a Giver. Magic needs a Magician. Creation needs a Creator.

“Like the warm breath of Aslan, good stories restore life to things that inattention has long since turned to stone.”

Stories can also recover things from the shadowy prison of abstraction. Through narrative, imagination can incarnate what reason excarnates. When you have stood beside Aragorn before the black gates of Mordor and seen the innumerable hosts of Sauron swarming like ants, good and evil cease to be simply ideas. When you’ve basked in the golden goodness of Aslan, you’ve seen a glimmer of the beauty of Jesus. In this way, stories can be radically iconoclastic, ridding our hoard of the little idols of God that we construct and creating imaginative space for the immense God of the Bible.

In short, stories help undragon us. They enable us to taste and see the goodness of good, and so fuel our desire for the God who is Good.

Into the Hills

Thus, good stories can cultivate holy longing. In his autobiography, Lewis recounts how stories often gave him a stab of desire, and in doing so, they served as signposts and foretastes of something “other and outer” (Surprised by Joy, 238).

Lewis knew by experience that the heart of man is haunted by a sense of homesickness — which Lewis terms Joy symbolized by a Blue Flower. Ultimately, Joy is a longing to home in the triune God, a far-off echo of the enormous bliss lost in Eden. Eternity smolders in our hearts, and though we cannot fully snuff out this longing, we do smother it. Part of the tragedy of modernity is that almost everything is aimed at weeding out the Blue Flower. God planted the seed deep in our souls, but we are poor gardeners. Even though all souls thirst for the living God, few of us are ever quiet enough to identify the ache.

But good stories can remind us of the restlessness that besets our souls. Thus, many find their way into the foggy foothills of desire through the pages of great books. You need look no further than the astonishing success of the Harry Potter series to prove this. Harry proclaims to all who have ears to hear that modernity still yearns for something more — something that even the Room of Requirement cannot satisfy.

The best storytellers know how to fuel this holy longing. Tolkien, the maker of Middle-earth, defines a successful story as one that “awakens desire, satisfying it while also wetting it unbearably” (On Fairy-Stories). Jesus himself, the master storyteller, understood this narrative power and so wielded fantasy to this effect, regaling his listeners with tales of buried treasure and quests for legendary pearls.

Lewis’s imaginative mentor, George MacDonald, armed all of his fiction with the stab of Joy. For MacDonald, the best thing good stories can do for a man is “not to give him things to think about, but to wake things up that are in him.” And so, in all his subcreation and storytelling, MacDonald made it his aim to “assail the soul of his reader as the wind assails an aeolian harp. . . . [For] if there be music in my reader, I would gladly wake it” (A Dish of Orts, 239–40).

Given this emphasis, it should come as no surprise that when, as an atheist, Lewis first read MacDonald’s enchanting tale Phantastes, he was overwhelmed with a sense of longing, dazzled by what he would later identify as holiness. He recounts, “I saw the bright shadow coming out of the book into the real world and resting there, transforming all common things” (Surprised by Joy, 181). Lewis began to see the meaning of his insatiable longing, the tune of the song of his soul. And MacDonald’s fairy tale served as his alpine guide, leading him ever up.

In good stories, we hear rumors of glory, hints and bright riddles of the Home we were made for. And it is good to be haunted by this yearning, for above the mists of myth and the veil of story lies the goal of all our longing.

Up the Mountain

Finally, when good stories have raided the Dragon’s Den and guided us through the Foothills of Longing, they lead us yet further up. As the horns of elfland sing, for a moment the fog parts, and we are given a stunning vista of happily ever after.

Tolkien names this visionary virtue the Consolation of the Happy Ending, and he held it to be the highest good of good stories. And this happy ending is no mere wish fulfillment. For Tolkien, in a well-told tale, the happy ending echoes the gospel. It does not diminish the reality of sorrow and suffering. In fact, sorrow and suffering set the stage for the story’s most powerful moment.

Precisely here, when the tale turns, when against all odds and all hope evil is overcome, “a fleeting glimpse of Joy, Joy beyond the walls of the world” breaks through the cloud of story and lights up the breathless reader (On Fairy-Stories, 75). Tolkien calls this moment eucatastrophe — literally a good catastrophe. And for him, every thunderbolt of eucatastrophe in subcreated stories reflects the Great Eucatastrophes of the incarnation and resurrection, giving us a glimpse of the staggering heights of triune joy.

Who, indeed, can be unmoved when Frodo, after facing the fires of Mount Doom, gets his first glimpse of the Undying Lands? “The grey rain-curtain turned all to silver glass and was rolled back, and he beheld white shores and beyond them a far green country under a swift sunrise” (The Return of the King, 1,030). And what attentive reader does not feel the thrill of hope and yearning that jolts the heart at the mere mention of Aslan’s country?

Like Samwise finally returning to the Shire, we may turn the final page of a good story and, with a deep sigh, say, “Well, I’m back.” We may indeed be back, but not all of us. Something remains in the Otherlands. We left a splinter of soul in Lothlorien, a piece of heart in Narnia. We will never be free from Faerie. We carry with us the scent of the Blue Flower. And that homesickness reminds us that we are made for another world.

The magical lands of story can serve as a placeholder for the better country we are bound for (Hebrews 11:16). They can stretch our imaginations further and further in anticipation of our future home — a home that no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor heart imagined (1 Corinthians 2:9). But oh, there have been hints. We have heard echoes. We have caught glimpses. We’ve smelled the Blue Flowers of Eden, and now we can never finally be content with the here and now.

Good stories are signposts — alpine guides leading us up the path of life. Like Lewis, we can follow them past dragons, over hills, and high up into the mountains. In the pages and paragraphs of great tales, we can hear the voice of our Aslan echoing off the mountain walls, bidding us to come further up and further in. Will you heed his call?

Audio Transcript

In every generation, the church is gifted with a few influential leaders — dynamic voices that emerge and leave an indelible mark on countless lives with the gospel. Pastor John, this would include you in our current era. However, as you well know, all such leaders eventually exit the stage — a harsh reality we faced this spring. And this void left by such leaders can evoke fear about the church’s future — an anxiety put to words by Natasha from Jacksonville, Florida, in her email to you.

“Pastor John, your ministry has built my and my husband’s faith for the last twenty years,” she writes. “We adopted three girls from Liberia — inspired to not waste our lives. I’ve always felt so much encouragement in my walk knowing I’m part of a larger body of Christian believers and leaders. My problem is the fear that I find myself feeling over the state of the modern church. Many leaders have fallen to temptation or quit the ministry altogether. It seems very few last as long as the older generations did. When Tim Keller passed away earlier this year, I found myself worried over what leaders — and what quality of leaders — will take the baton in the future. I know the Lord wants me to find my hope in him and him alone. However, I find myself thinking negatively and would like some insight into the hope of the Christian church when the elder statemen — like yourself and Tim Keller — are gone.”

This question has a special relevance for me because I can remember the very place I was standing on our back porch in Greenville, South Carolina, when I was fourteen years old as the fearful thought entered my mind, “What will we do if Billy Graham dies?” I mean, I can remember that just so clearly. It was a very powerful moment.

Some of our younger listeners may not even know who Billy Graham is, right? I was talking to somebody the other day — they did not know who he was. I thought, “Oh my goodness!” Billy Graham was the most well-known evangelical Christian in the twentieth century.

As an immature, provincial, fourteen-year-old Christian, I thought, The future of Christianity hangs on the preservation of Billy Graham. So, I have tasted this anxiety expressed in this question. Is there a healthy, strong future for the Bible-believing, evangelical church when influential leaders are passing off the scene?

Now, I think I could point out some factors among the younger generation today that would be encouraging. I think I could do that. But I think it will have more lasting and deeper effect on our encouragement if I cite instead five Scriptures that relate to this issue very definitely.

1. Jesus stays the same.

The author of the book of Hebrews says, “Remember your leaders, those who spoke to you the word of God. Consider the outcome of their way of life, and imitate their faith” (Hebrews 13:7). Do you know what the very next words were out of that author’s mouth after he said, “Remember your leaders”? The next words were these: “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever” (Hebrews 13:8).

Now, why did he do that? Why did he say that? Why was that the next thing to say after the command to remember the leaders and imitate their faith? Why a promise that Jesus is the same from generation to generation? Surely he did that to counter the fear that if leaders are passing off the scene — which they were; this is past tense in Hebrews 13:7 — then we’re going to be bereft of the kind of leadership that we’ve been used to and that we need. To remedy that fear, the writer says, “Actually, Jesus will be there, and he will be the same. He will do what needs to be done.”

2. God keeps his people for himself.

When Elijah was despairing over the condition of Israel in his own day, he said,

I have been very jealous for the Lord, the God of hosts. For the people of Israel have forsaken your covenant, thrown down your altars, and killed your prophets with the sword, and I, even I only, am left, and they seek my life, to take it away. (1 Kings 19:10)

“Ultimately, the perseverance and the strength of the church is owing to the will of the sovereign Christ.”

Now, the apostle Paul picks up on Elijah’s despairing words and asks in Romans 11 if, in his own day, God had rejected his people the way Elijah feels like it’s over for Israel. And he quotes Elijah’s words. But then he writes, “But what is God’s reply to [Elijah]?” God’s reply is, “I have kept for myself seven thousand men who have not bowed the knee to Baal” (Romans 11:4) — from which Paul concludes, “So too at the present time there is a remnant, chosen by grace” (Romans 11:5).

The key words are “I have kept for myself.” So, God never leaves the fate of his people to mere chance or to the vagaries of human history and the rise and fall of leaders — even Christian leaders. He does the keeping of his people.

3. Godly leaders come from God.

The existence of godly leaders in Christ’s church is Christ’s gift to the church. It’s Christ’s gift to the church — not history’s gift, not the church’s gift, not fate’s gift. Christ gives leaders. They don’t just happen. They are Christ’s appointment, not the mere work of man.

So, Christ “gave” shepherds and teachers to the church to equip the saints (Ephesians 4:11). Elders, “pay careful attention to yourselves and to all the flock, in which the Holy Spirit has made you” — etheto in Greek, from tithēmi, meaning “set you,” “put you as” — “overseers” (Acts 20:28). The Spirit did that. Man didn’t do that.

Paul says in Colossians 4:17, “Say to Archippus, ‘See that you fulfill the ministry that you have received in the Lord.’” The Lord gives the ministry. Jesus says in Luke 12:42, “Who then is the faithful and wise manager, whom his master will set over his household, to give them their portion of food at the proper time?” The Lord sets managers over his household. This is not a mere human thing. It’s not a mere matter of the ebb and flow of history. The Lord of history appoints leaders.

So, our role is Matthew 9:37–38, “The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few; therefore pray earnestly to the Lord of the harvest [the Lord of the church, the Lord of the harvest, the Lord of the mission, the Lord of the world] to send out laborers into his harvest.” That’s what we should be praying. And we usually just restrict that text to missionaries, but it means that anywhere there’s some initiative needed to harvest and to grow the church, pray it down.

4. Christ preserves his church.

Jesus said in Matthew 16:18, “I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.” So, ultimately, the perseverance and the strength of the church is owing to the will of the sovereign Christ — not to his leaders, but to Christ himself, who uses leaders and raises them up. We must always look finally to him.

5. God can bring leaders out of nowhere.

When we read the history of the kings of Israel, one of the things that stands out is the quality — the faithfulness — of the kings and how it does not depend on who their father was. In other words, a very bad king may have a good son. A good king may have a bad son. So, godliness in the line of Judah’s kings may skip a generation or two.

Now, you might feel this is pessimistic because I am suggesting that can happen in the evangelical church. But the fact that God is in control of that — and this has happened many times before — means there’s always a future. For example, Jotham was a good king — not a perfect king, but 2 Kings 15:34 says, “He did what was right in the eyes of the Lord.” But his son, Ahaz, was a wicked king. But his son, Hezekiah, was a faithful king. But his son and grandson were wicked kings — Manasseh and Amon. But Amon’s son, Josiah, was a good king.

What this implies is that the godliness of leadership in one generation is no guarantee of the godliness of the next generation. But more hopeful is the other implication: the ungodliness of leadership in one generation is no guarantee that the next generation will be ungodly. I’ve seen this in the church today. Just when you think that the sources of faithful leadership have all gone astray, faithful leaders come out of nowhere.

This is what God loves to do. In fact, this is precisely why he chose to make Abraham and Sarah the parents of all future godly leadership, because it was humanly impossible. Abraham was too old; Sarah was barren. All hope of godly leadership coming out of their loins was futile — it wasn’t going to happen. But Paul makes it crystal clear what God was doing, and he knew what he was doing. God, he says, made the promise to Abraham that he “gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist” (Romans 4:17). There it is.

So, maybe this is the word to close on with this issue of leadership: if you look around and you wonder, “Will there be faithful pastors and leaders to come?” and you don’t see what you want to see — remember, God calls into existence things that do not exist.

One afternoon this summer, my 6-year-old came running through the house to find me. His eyes were wild with excitement. “Dad, you’ve got to come look — right now. Come look, come look, come look! Hurry, you’re going to miss it!”

We raced back to the living room, to the big window looking out over our backyard. From the day we moved in, that window has been our favorite room in the house. My son’s eyes searched one of the trees, searching and searching, and then he saw it again. “Dad, there! There! Do you see it? Do you see it?” And I did. Probably 25 feet up in one of our tallest trees was the backside of a big raccoon, comfortably perched out on one of the branches.

I mean, at first, we assumed it was a raccoon (too big to be a squirrel, too small to be a bear, too fat and furry to be a bird). We sat transfixed, watching that rear end — waiting for the animal to eat, or climb, or fall, or even just scratch an itch. Then it moved. Its tail swung down where we could see it, with its trademark black and gray stripes. “Dad, its tail! It is a raccoon!”

As I looked in my son’s eyes — and there was so much in those eyes — I saw a wisdom I once had and now sometimes struggle to remember. For that moment, he was my teacher, and I was his son.

Monotony or Creativity?

For the “mature” like me, raccoons are almost immediately a nuisance. They make homes under porches and climb down into chimneys. They tear away shingles and break holes in walls. When we see them, we reach for the phone to pay someone to come and remove them. Within a business day, if possible.

When my children see a raccoon, they see an entirely different creature. They’re not worried at all about the structural integrity of porches or the possibility of a four-legged home invasion. To them, animal control may as well be the KGB (just watch any animated movie with animal control workers). No, when they see a raccoon, it may as well be a triceratops. They don’t see problems; they see curiosities. They ask questions (lots of them): Where did he get his stripes? Why is he sleeping during the day? Does he have any friends? Can I pet him? We see trouble; they see beauty. We see monotony; they see creativity. We see a nuisance; they see a story.

Oh, how much we might learn from them, how much more we might see through their eyes. G.K. Chesterton writes,

Children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, “Do it again”; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. (Orthodoxy, 81)

What 6-Year-Olds See

I recently felt my flabby imagination when our family went to pick KinderKrisp apples at a local orchard. Having tasted apples every week of their lives, it was our children’s first chance to actually grab one from a tree.

You could see their minds spinning, trying to connect the dots — they knew both apples and trees, but could not imagine them holding hands like this. They stared up in amazement as branches like the ones they’ve found in our front yard now reached out, wrapped in bright green cardigans, and nearly handed them the juicy red fruit. And, of course, they tasted better than any we ever bought from one of those bins at the store.

“God made a world even God could admire.”

To our shame, my wife and I weren’t connecting dots anymore. We were just trying to keep our kids from throwing apples at each other or bothering the innocent bystanders filling bags around us. So which of us saw the actual reality of the orchard? Who saw the apples as they really are — the 6-year-old or the 36-year-old? Chesterton weighs in,

When we are asked why eggs turn to birds or fruits fall in autumn, we must answer exactly as the fairy godmother would answer if Cinderella asked her why mice turned to horses or her clothes fell from her at twelve o’clock. We must answer that it is magic. . . . The only words that ever satisfied me as describing Nature are the terms used in the fairy books, “charm,” “spell,” “enchantment.” They express the arbitrariness of the fact and its mystery. A tree grows fruit because it is a magic tree. Water runs downhill because it is bewitched. The sun shines because it is bewitched. (71–72)

Our decades-long familiarity with this magic doesn’t make creation any less magical.

That we’ve watched God do his magic over and over and over again, doesn’t make it less miraculous. That we can begin to predict what will happen — birds from eggs, apples from trees, rainbows from storms — doesn’t suddenly render any of it “natural.” As much as modern science might have us think otherwise, nothing in all of creation is on autopilot. No, the Son of God “upholds the universe,” every apple of every kind in every orchard, “by the word of his power” (Hebrews 1:3) — even the ones in those store-bought bins.

God Has Not Grown Old

In this way, our cute, “naïve” children are our theology professors. Watch as Chesterton traces a typical boy’s imagination into heaven:

Grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, “Do it again” to the sun; and every evening, “Do it again” to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we. The repetition in Nature may not be a mere recurrence; it may be a theatrical encore. (81–82)

Don’t believe him? Then let God tell you in his own words:

God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. And God saw that the light was good. . . . God called the dry land Earth, and the waters that were gathered together he called Seas. And God saw that it was good. . . . And God saw that it was good. . . . And God saw that it was good. . . . And God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good. (Genesis 1:3–31)

God made a world even God could admire. And we only assume he eventually got bored with it all because we’re not him, because we don’t see this world like he does — because we assume he’s like us.

“Give yourself some space to be curious again, to ask the questions you haven’t asked in decades.”

If you understand what Chesterton’s saying, you can’t see a sunset the same. It’s even more stunning when you realize (as a pastor once showed me) that God not only paints a new sunset for us every 24 hours, but that as the world spins, he’s always painting sunsets. He never puts the brush down. Somewhere in the world, right now, he’s ushering the sun below the horizon again, conducting her slowly with his brush, mixing in oranges, purples, and blues.

And as he does, his heart soars over what he sees. Because when it comes to sunsets, God is more my son than he is me.

Remember That You Forget

This dulling dynamic in adults is rooted in a subtle but dangerous forgetfulness. Chesterton warns us that, in the end, all of this is really not about raccoons, apples, and sunsets:

We have all forgotten what we really are. All that we call common sense and rationality and practicality and positivism only means that for certain dead levels of our life we forget that we have forgotten. All that we call spirit and art and ecstasy only means that for one awful instant we remember that we forgot. (74)

Have you been lulled into forgetfulness? Have you even forgotten that you’ve forgotten? Have the cares of the world and the deceitfulness of riches and the desires for other things slowly choked out your ability for awe and wonder? Then find an orchard or a local park. Go outside at dusk. Take that walk you’ve wanted to take. Be on the lookout for the bunnies, squirrels, birds, and bugs you’ve trained yourself to ignore. Give yourself some space to be curious again, to ask the questions you haven’t asked in decades.

And if you happen to have one, take a 6-year-old with you.

“Tell Bud, ministry isn’t everything. Jesus is.”

Ray Ortlund Jr. tells the story of his father’s last words for him. Ray and his wife were overseas on July 22, 2007, when Ray Sr. awoke in his hospital room in Newport Beach, California, and realized that day would be his last. The rest of the family gathered to read Scripture and sing. Then the dying patriarch went around the room addressing his beloved with final blessings and admonitions.

“Bud” wasn’t in the room, so Ray Sr. left these memorable, and beautiful, last words to pass along to the son who had followed him into full-time ministry.

For two decades, beginning in the late fifties, Ray Sr. had been pastor of Lake Avenue Congregational Church in Pasadena, where he had pastored a young seminarian named John Piper and convinced him that, despite the talk of the late sixties, the local church had a future, and always would. Ray Sr.’s name and signature are affixed to Piper’s ordination certificate dated June 8, 1975.

Ray Sr. loved the church, and gave decades of his life to full-time Christian ministry. So, on his deathbed in 2007, he was no armchair critic throwing shade on his beloved son. But he was a man who knew his own heart, and his son’s. He knew both the remarkable joys of pastoral work and the attendant dangers. And he knew where his final counsel should terminate: on the one who is the sovereign Joy.

Good Work, Great Joys

At the outset of the pastor-elder qualifications, the apostle talks joy: “If anyone aspires to the office of overseer, he desires a noble task” (1 Timothy 3:1). This labor is bound up with aspiration, desire, joy.

“Noble task” here is literally “good work.” He desires a good work. Christian ministry is good work — and work to be done by those who desire it. Ministry is not for those who don’t really want to do it but can exercise their will to make the sacrifice for Jesus. Rather, in this calling, aspiration and the desire for joy are nonnegotiable.

In the pastoral vocation, as distinct from other callings, laboring from joy, with joy, and for joy is essential. According to Hebrews 13:17, pastors must labor “with joy and not with groaning” if they are to be an “advantage” to their people’s faith, rather than a disadvantage. So too Peter requires that pastor-elders work “not under compulsion, but willingly, as God would have you; not for shameful gain, but eagerly” (1 Peter 5:2).

Christian ministry is good work, and often joyful, to be undertaken by those who desire and anticipate the joys that will make its many hardships sufferable. Yet in such good and joy-giving work lies a danger. It’s the good, more often than the overtly evil, that inches its way past Christ himself as foremost in the Christian minister’s heart.

Ministry Joys, Amen

Jesus himself puts his finger, and surpassingly powerful words, on this precise point in Luke 10:20.

“In the pastoral vocation, as distinct from other callings, laboring from joy, with joy, and for joy is essential.”

Jesus had sent six dozen “others,” beyond the twelve disciples, “on ahead of him, two by two, into every town and place where he himself was about to go” (Luke 10:1). He commissioned these 72 with solemnity, warning them about rejection and being “as lambs in the midst of wolves” (Luke 10:2–16). Yet their training exercise proved far more fruitful than they might have anticipated, and they were thrilled. They return with joy, exclaiming, “Lord, even the demons are subject to us in your name!” (Luke 10:17).

Jesus, the master teacher, seizes upon the importance of this moment. Here is an opportunity to leave an impression for a lifetime, and for the whole church age. To be sure, it is no evil to rejoice in ministry fruit, to find joy in what God Almighty graciously chooses to accomplish through his people in the lives of others, whether in preaching and teaching, or offering cold water, or dispatching demons.

Here the 72 marvel, in part, at “even the demons.” Their joys were not only those of steady-stream, ordinary ministry but the pulsing thrills of the extraordinary, the delight of the unexpected, the felt-sense of supernatural power. Clearly their ministry had been fruitful. The 72 were not mistaken in what they observed and reported. Jesus affirms it, and their joy: “Behold, I have given you authority to tread on serpents and scorpions, and over all the power of the enemy” (Luke 10:19). “Yes,” Jesus says, in effect. “These are real joys and good ones. It is right to rejoice at seeing God’s kingdom advance and oppressed souls set free.”

Then comes the twist.

Ten Thousand Times Better

Jesus stuns the delighted ministers by transposing their song into a different register. He honors ministry joys, and does so by taking them up into heaven, making the moment electric by drawing attention to what is even more important:

Nevertheless, do not rejoice in this, that the spirits are subject to you, but rejoice that your names are written in heaven. (Luke 10:20)

Surprising as it may be, spirits subject to you is really a small thing in Jesus’s way of reckoning. Even greater than what God does through his ministers, even over supernatural powers, is what he does for them. Far surpassing a ministry name below is the etching of their names above. With the declaration “your names are written in heaven,” Jesus puts ministry joys in their place — for the 72 and for us — not by talking them down, but by talking up something even better.

How much better? As good and right as it can be to rejoice in ministry fruit, here Jesus would have us feel the force of the contrast. He says, “Rejoice not in this . . .” Jesus does not oppose ministry joys, or charge us, universally, to never rejoice in them. Rather, Luke 10:20 is an acutely comparative statement, cast in these simple, stark terms to emphasize how much greater our rejoicing can be, should be, will be, in what God does for us than in what he chooses to do through us.

Which is why “names written in heaven” matters so much.

Where We Enjoy God Himself

“Names written in heaven” is so significant because God himself, in Christ, is the sovereign Joy, the Joy of all joys, and heaven is where he is. “Names written in heaven” is the surpassingly superior joy not because heaven gives us all that our hearts want apart from God, but because there, in the immediate presence of God, we get proximity to him, closeness to him, unhindered enjoyment of him.

“The heart of Christian ministry is the person and work of Christ, not the person and work of the minister.”

In heaven we get God himself. Heaven is where, finally, the many barriers and distractions and veils of earth are removed, that we, without further obstruction and distortion, might more fully know and enjoy the one we were made to know and enjoy.

Which brings us back to the dangers that accompany ministry joys, as good and important as they are.

Made for More Than Ministry

When working for Christ takes the place of Christ himself as the chief enjoyment in the soul, the shift is both subtle and significant. The incremental incursions can be so small as to be hardly recognizable at first, but if the pattern persists, the long arc will be utterly devastating — to the minister himself and to his people. Paul thought it perilous enough to issue repeated warnings to ministers to pay careful attention not only to the flock and to their teaching but to themselves. “Pay careful attention to yourselves” (Acts 20:28). “Keep a close watch on yourself” (1 Timothy 4:16).

Christian ministry is undermined, and soon utterly corrupted and ruined, when the ministry itself becomes first and foremost in the soul. The nature of Christian ministry is such that it cannot long operate, and will not in the end prove fruitful (no matter how successful it seems in the moment), if it turns in on itself as the sovereign joy. The very nature of Christian ministry is that the person and work of Christ himself is the origin and essence, not the person and work of the minister for him. The minister’s work is important, but as a second principle; Christ’s work, and Christ himself, is vital as the first and final principle.

Ministry for the King can be treasonous if it becomes a replacement of the King himself. And the peril is in how subtle and common a shift it is, even for the healthiest of Christian workers. Yet we have this hope: how readily the hearts of healthy ministers fly back to their first love when awakened to marks of the subtle shift.

Practically, the return can happen each new morning, with our nose in the humbling word and prayer. It comes through knowing our sin and being honest about our ongoing failures, weaknesses, and needs for change. It comes, then, through never letting the world-changing weight and wonder of Matthew 9:2 become old hat: “Take heart, my son; your sins are forgiven.” And apart from our initiative, it comes through God’s special brew of providence in our lives, his particular humbling moments, seasons, and conditions for each of us. He has his ways. For some, it’s marriage or parenting. For others, it’s finances. For others still, disease, disability, chronic pain, the devastating setback.

Ministry Isn’t Everything

Ray Sr.’s final words to “Bud” were perceptive. And much like Jesus’s own to the 72. And every pastor and minister and missionary — all those in full-time ministry vocations and beyond, in all posts of formal and informal labor — will do well to heed them from Ray Sr., as Bud did, and all the more from Jesus.

Jesus is the Joy of all our joys. Apart from him as central and supreme, ministry joys soon hollow and spoil. Yet, with the King of kings himself on the throne of our soul, the ministry joys of sharing him with others are real and substantial, and continually lead us back to him.

On paper, Henry Dunster (1609–1659) was the ideal choice to become the first president of America’s first college. As a “learned Orientalist,” he was fluent in several languages.1 Educated at Cambridge under English divines like John Preston and Thomas Goodwin, he was a Puritan of Puritans. When Dunster arrived in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1640 as the inaugural president of Harvard, he envisioned a “school of the prophets” in New England modeled after the Old.

His pastor Thomas Shepard, one of the leading voices against Anne Hutchinson in her heresy trial just two years earlier, called Dunster “a man pious, painful, and fit to teach, and very fit to lay the foundations of the domestic affairs of the College; whom God hath much honored and blessed.”2 Almost immediately after landing in the New World, Dunster began laying those foundations. The course requirements he established in rhetoric, divinity, and languages remained relatively unchanged for most of the seventeenth century.3 With such a pivotal role in the Puritan experiment, Dunster helped determine the future of America itself.

Therefore, when Dunster withheld his fourth child from baptism at Cambridge Church in the winter of 1653, it made news. The man entrusted with the theological education of New England’s ministers had deprived his own child of the sacred “seal of the covenant.” One of the most enlightened, influential figures in colonial America had become, in the words of Cotton Mather, “entangle[d] in the snares of Anabaptism.”4

In a so-called “godly commonwealth” where church and state were intertwined, Dunster’s decision was not just shocking; it was potentially cataclysmic. Withholding an infant from baptism was subversive to the public order. Such radical views might have been acceptable in Rhode Island or even in Plymouth Colony, but not in Massachusetts Bay. In the land of the Puritans, Dunster’s action was equivalent to the president of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary sprinkling his newborn — if credobaptism were state law.

Brave Affiliation

Indeed, to publicly affiliate with Baptists in seventeenth-century New England was a bold, even brave, endeavor. In 1635, Roger Williams had been banished to the colony of Rhode Island for espousing Baptist views. In 1651, just two years before Dunster decided to keep his child from baptism, a man named Obadiah Holmes from the town of Lynn was tied to a whipping post in Boston Common and lashed thirty times for baptizing several people. The imprisonment of Holmes and fellow Baptists John Clarke and John Crandall in Boston was a turning point for Dunster.

Although he had never been immersed himself, Dunster had always been somewhat skeptical about infant baptism. When he joined the church at Cambridge twelve years earlier, he confessed that he saw biblical evidence for immersion. Nevertheless, he told the church that as “there was something for sprinkling in the Scriptures, he should not be offended when [it] was used.”5 Dunster’s conscience was ultimately tied to the Bible. However, the Puritan treatment of Baptists opened his eyes anew to the ills of state-sponsored religion.

School officials rushed to quiet their beloved president. If Dunster could keep silent about his objections to infant baptism, Harvard would look the other way. However, as any Puritan worth his salt, Dunster could not approve of something he could not find in the Bible. Not long after withdrawing his child from baptism, the usually mild-mannered Dunster decided that he had been silent long enough. To declare his views, and to avoid the appearance that he had been muzzled with the threat of being fired, he chose the most public space in New England society: the church.

‘Paedobaptism Hath None’

According to Baptist Isaac Backus, Dunster “boldly preached against infant baptism, and for believers’ baptism, in the pulpit at Cambridge in 1653, the year after Messrs. Clarke, Holmes and Crandal were imprisoned at Boston[.]”6 In the sermon, Dunster took aim at any form of baptism predicated on someone else’s faith. In one of Dunster’s manuscripts written around the same time, he wrote,

If parents’ church-membership makes their children members, then John admitted makes his first-born a church member; excommunicated for 7 years makes suppose 4 children non-members, restored in ye 9th yeare makes his 6th child a member. Show me where Christ ever indented such a covenant.7

When Dunster was summoned before a conference of ministers and elders to defend his views, his thesis was very simple: Soli visibiliter fideles sunt baptizendi (“Only visible believers should be baptized”).

For Dunster, the question was about biblical authority. “All instituted gospel worship hath some express word of Scripture,” he insisted. “But paedobaptism hath none.” Drawing upon the Puritan understanding of salvation, he also noted, “If we be engrafted into Christ by personal faith, then not by parental.”8 Baptism was more than an issue of church polity; it had potentially eternal consequences. As Dunster later articulated in a letter, the true danger of infant baptism was its potential to deprive sinners of their “due consolation from Christ and dutiful obligation to Christ.”9

The conference was not moved. In their view, the president had fallen into a grave “mistake.” To make matters worse, Dunster was brought before the General Court of Massachusetts. Due to his significant influence over the youth of the colony, his views on baptism became a civil matter. He was deemed “unsound in the faith.” But Dunster would not change course. Evidently, he cared more about his faithfulness to the Bible than his job. He later wrote to the Middlesex County Court, “I conceived then, and so do still, that I spake the truth in the feare of God, and dare not deny the same or go from it untill the Lord otherwise teach me.”10

Humble Resignation

In fact, Dunster had one more “Here I Stand” moment. In a desperate attempt to retain their president, Harvard informed Dunster that he could remain at his post as long as he refrained from “imposing” his views upon others. However, this too was not enough to change his mind. Dunster officially submitted his resignation and once again preached at Cambridge Church against infant baptism! Of his five points, his chief point was that “the subjects of Baptisme were visible pennitent believers.” His last point was a warning and a foreshadowing of the so-called “Halfway Covenant” that would evoke the disdain of later Puritans like Jonathan Edwards: “That there were such corruptions stealing into the Church, which every faithful Christian ought to beare witnes against.”11

Dunster resigned his post at Harvard with such humility and dignity that some historians have marveled at the lack of “apparent controversy” in the entire episode.12 The disgraced clergyman did not instigate a debate in the public square, and Harvard did much to cover up the embarrassment. Ironically, for Dunster’s replacement, Harvard chose Charles Chauncy, another Congregationalist who believed in immersion. However, unlike Dunster, Chauncy agreed to keep tight-lipped about his views.

As a pariah in Puritan society and receiving little support from Harvard for his family, Dunster moved to the more tolerant neighbor colony of Plymouth, where he took up a ministry position at the Independent church in Scituate, only 28 miles from Boston. As his biographer (and Baptist president) Jeremiah Chaplin notes,

He probably never identified himself with a Baptist church, as indeed in his lifetime there was scarcely an opportunity of doing. We judge that he was content, under the circumstances, to remain in fellowship with his Independent brethren so long as they did not interfere with his liberty of conscience.13

Friend of the Baptists

Whether or not Dunster was a Baptist or simply baptistic is difficult to say.14 The evidence suggests that he was never immersed himself and was never excommunicated from the church in Cambridge.15 Nevertheless, Baptists on both sides of the Atlantic were fond of the man who had defied the Puritan establishment.

Thomas Gould, the first pastor of the First Baptist Church of Boston, called Dunster his friend, leading the historian Chaplin to speculate whether Dunster would have joined First Baptist if he had been alive when it was established in 1665 (Dunster passed away in 1659).16 In July of 1656, Dunster also received a letter from Irish Baptists inviting him to move his family to Ireland and “have free liberty of your conscience.”17 In the end, Dunster stayed in Plymouth, symbolizing his warm relations with Congregationalists and Baptists alike.

This combination of conviction and conciliatory ministry was his legacy. Even Cotton Mather, who had little affection for Roger Williams, extolled Dunster for bearing “his part in everlasting celestial hallelujahs.” “If,” Mather wrote, “unto the Christian, while singing of psalms on earth, Chrysostom could well say, ‘Those art in a consort with angels!’ how much more may that now be said of our Dunster.”18