Audio Transcript

Good Monday, everyone, on this day before Independence Day here in the States. Last time, last week, we addressed sibling rivalries — a common theme in the Bible, and a concern we should have for our own homes today. Sibling rivalries was Thursday’s theme, in APJ 1954. And today we look at forgiving family members.

The question is from a listener to the podcast, a young man who lives in Brazil. He writes this: “Hello, Pastor John, thank you for this podcast, which has been a huge resource God has used in my own sanctification. My question is this: My family struggles to forgive each other, and it’s been this way for years. They argue along the line that ‘even Jesus was harsh with his enemies, so why should I forgive my enemies?’ How would you answer them? In dealing with hurt in the past, what is the difference between Jesus dealing with his enemies like the Pharisees, contrasted with what God expects from us in dealing with our own family members who have sinned against us?”

This is utterly crucial. It’s a matter of life and death, and I mean eternal life and death, as we will see in just a moment. So, I take this question really seriously, and I hope this family will take the issue seriously also.

What Is Forgiveness?

First, let’s clarify what forgiveness is and isn’t. That’s a huge stumbling block for a lot of people. When they start arguing about whether they should forgive or not, they don’t pause to define what it is and isn’t. So, let’s do that.

First, forgiveness is not thinking or saying or acting as though no great wrong was done. A great wrong may well have been done against you.

Second, forgiveness is not reestablishing a wonderful relationship. In Romans 12:18, Paul says, “If possible, so far as it depends on you, live peaceably with all.” It may not be possible. He also says in Colossians 3:13, “[Bear] with one another and, if one has a complaint against another, [forgive] each other.” Now “bearing with one another” means, literally, “endure one another,” “forbear one another.” In other words, there will be frustrating, annoying, even hurtful things about others that no amount of forgiveness will fix, and they must be endured. We must bear with them. You’ll see why in a minute.

“Forgiveness can be real even if the other person does not accept it or want it.”

Third, forgiveness does not mean that trust is immediately restored. This is crucial. So many think that to forgive is to restore trust — to give trust to someone who has betrayed you. But that assumes that the person has reformed, and does not have those same untrustworthy patterns of life that made them do wrong. But, in fact, they may be worse, not better. Forgiveness may lead to new and deeper trust; it may not.

Fourth, forgiveness can be real even if the other person does not accept it or want it. They may not think they did anything wrong. That’s just a huge problem in marriage, for example. You want to forgive, and they don’t think they’ve wronged you. In those cases, the full transaction of repentance and forgiveness is not possible, but a forgiving spirit is still possible. And if that is all we can give, because they don’t want our forgiveness, then the Lord counts that — that forgiving spirit — as our forgiveness. We’ve done what we can do. We have shown that we are a forgiving person. You can love your enemy even while he remains your enemy if he chooses.

So then, if that’s what forgiveness is not, what is it? Forgiveness is wanting the good, not the ruin, of the one who wronged you, in spite of the wrong, and then acting for their good. You won’t let the wrong strangle your love. You won’t let their sin make you sin. You will lay it down and pray for their good and work for it.

Why Is Forgiveness Crucial?

Okay, with those clarifications in mind, why do I say forgiveness is so crucial?

1. We were greater enemies of God.

You as a Christian have been forgiven an offense against God that is millions of times greater than any human has offended or sinned against you. Ephesians 4:32 says, “Be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ forgave you.” The outrage of the way you have treated God in your sin and unbelief was so great that it cost God the death of his only divine Son to forgive you. In other words, your debt was infinite. Nobody who has wronged you has ever come close to wronging you as badly as you have wronged God. And yet we are forgiven. You and I, Christian, are forgiven.

What would it mean if we refuse to forgive? Here’s what it would mean. It would mean we think God is a fool to forgive us. “He’s acting like a fool, because I’m not going to act like that. I’m not going to be stupid and foolish like that. So, God must be foolish to forgive me since I’m not going to forgive.” That’s pretty serious. Let that sink in. That’s very serious to think God’s a fool or to act like he’s a fool.

2. Jesus died for his enemies.

Our friend in Brazil says that his unforgiving relatives say, “Even Jesus was harsh with his enemies. Why should I forgive my enemies?” One answer is that Jesus forgave his enemies. Hanging on the cross to purchase our forgiveness, he said, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do” (Luke 23:34). Of course, he was harsh with the Pharisees and scribes, good grief. And the reason he was harsh with them is because they were so unforgiving. But while being harsh, he was on his way to die for them if they would only trust him. So, Jesus forgave his enemies.

3. Forgiven people forgive.

Jesus said that if we don’t forgive, we won’t be forgiven. Matthew 6:14–15: “If you forgive others their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you, but if you do not forgive others their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses.”

And then he told a parable to emphasize this shocking reality. The king forgave a slave who owed him zillions. And that’s a pretty good translation because the amount is like twenty thousand years’ worth of wages. I mean, it is supposed to sound like zillions. He owed him zillions of dollars. Then the slave went out and wrung the neck of a fellow slave who owed him ten dollars. And the king said, “Throw him in prison till he pays everything,” which means forever (Matthew 18:23–35). Why? Because in relationship with God, forgiveness must go both ways. God gives and we receive. That slave did not receive the king’s forgiveness. He despised it, he mocked it, he scorned it, he trampled it in the dirt.

When you won’t forgive someone else his debt while claiming to love the God who forgave yours, it’s just pure hypocrisy. You’re acting like God was a fool for forgiving you. And so, if you keep on thinking God is a fool, you will perish and not be forgiven.

4. A great reward is coming.

When forgiveness seems hard, think about the reward. That’s what Jesus says in Matthew 5:11–12, “Blessed are you when others revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven.” So, when the hurt you have received seems so great that you can’t rejoice and forgive, Jesus says, “Remember your reward. Remember your reward. It will be very great.”

5. God will repay.

One more suggestion from Romans 12:19–20. One of the reasons we stumble over the command to forgive those who’ve hurt us is the sense that if we don’t punish them in some way, they’re going to get away with a great wrong; they’re going to get away with a real injustice. So, there’s a sense in which our very proper love for justice makes us hesitant to let the offense or the hurt go. We feel that if we let it go, justice will simply not be done, and that would be wrong, so we justify our vengeance.

“Nobody who has wronged you has ever come close to wronging you as badly as you have wronged God.”

But the problem with that way of thinking is that God has told us precisely that justice will be done, and that he will do it. He will do it far better than we could ever do it. Here’s what he says in Romans 12:19–21: “Beloved, never avenge yourselves, but leave it to the wrath of God.” Now, that leaving to God to deal with it is part of what goes into forgiveness — you leave it. Paul goes on, “For it is written, ‘Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord.’ To the contrary, ‘if your enemy is hungry, feed him; if he is thirsty, give him something to drink; for by so doing you will heap burning coals on his head.’ Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.”

Now, the amazing thing about this promise — “I will repay” — is that it is true for all the wrongs unbelievers do against us and all the wrongs believers do against us. If others wrong us and never turn to Christ and remain unbelievers till they die, they will go to hell, and all the wrongs that they have ever done will be duly repaid — indeed, repaid more terribly than anything we could ever do here. So, we don’t need to do it. We don’t need payback.

If those who wrong us are true Christians or become Christians in their lifetimes, then the wrong that they did to us — with all their other sins — was punished in the suffering of Christ. Christ bore the punishment for the sins they committed against us. Let me say that sentence again, because I just think it would have such a vast impact on the way we treat each other: Christ bore the punishment for the sins they committed against us.

Think what that means if we are unwilling to forgive their wrong against us. It means we are acting as if the sufferings of Christ were not enough. We are making light of the horrors he endured to bear the guilt of that wrong committed against us. We do not want to be found in that horrible attitude. We don’t. That’s a dangerous attitude to think that Christ’s sufferings are inadequate.

So, dear friend in Brazil, I will pray for your family and for you — that they would see the seriousness of what’s at stake in not forgiving, and that you would seek to be a beautiful example to them of what forgiveness looks like. I will pray for you. I hope you will for me as well.

The world is like a drunken peasant. If you lift him into the saddle on one side, he will fall off on the other side. One can’t help him, no matter how one tries. —Martin Luther (Luther’s Works, 54:111)

By 1520, Martin Luther was convinced that the Roman church couldn’t be helped. Or, at least, she wouldn’t. For centuries, the medieval church held that God’s grace was mediated chiefly through the sacraments and those invested with the authority to comprehend and administer them. Priests, therefore, inhabited a unique and higher order, and they alone were gifted by God to contemplate divine mysteries and mediate God’s grace. The priesthood was spiritual and holy; all other vocations were both temporal and profane.

Luther saw these teachings for what they were — the mere traditions of men. Like the Pharisees of Jesus’s day, the clergy of Luther’s day ascribed more authority to their tradition than to Scripture itself.

Priesthood of All Believers

Addled by power, however, the Roman curia wouldn’t be sobered by Scripture — no matter how Luther tried. So, in May of 1520, Luther appealed to Germany’s Christians.

It is pure invention that pope, bishop, priests, and monks are called the spiritual estate while princes, lords, artisans, and farmers are called the temporal estate. This is indeed a piece of deceit and hypocrisy. Yet no one need be intimidated by it, and for this reason: all Christians are truly of the spiritual estate, and there is no difference among them except that of office. Paul says in 1 Corinthians 12 that we are all one body, yet every member has its own work by which it serves the others. This is because we all have one baptism, one gospel, one faith, and are all Christians alike; for baptism, gospel, and faith alone make us spiritual and a Christian people. (Works, 44:127)

“Luther understood that, in Christ, all of God’s people have received a holy calling.”

Luther understood that, in Christ, all of God’s people have received a holy calling. As those united to Christ by faith, believers are “being built up as a spiritual house, to be a holy priesthood” (1 Peter 2:5). The Levitical system of the old covenant was fulfilled in the atoning death and victorious resurrection of Jesus, who is himself the great high priest (Hebrews 4:14). And Jesus’s priestly ministry is extended through his covenant people by the outpouring of his Spirit (1 Corinthians 12:4–11).

As a holy priesthood, believers now offer “spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ” (1 Peter 2:5; see also Romans 12:1). Peter reminds his readers,

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)

In the same way, the heavenly anthem declares that Jesus’s redemptive work has made his people “a kingdom and priests to our God, and they shall reign on the earth” (Revelation 5:10).

Therefore, Luther argued, the division between holy and profane vocations was wholly human and artificial. The true “spiritual estate” belonged to all Christians.

Whoever comes out of the water of baptism can boast that he is already a consecrated priest, bishop, and pope, although of course it is not seemly that just anybody should exercise such office. (Works, 44:129)

The Reformation recovery of the priesthood of all believers disintegrated the medieval hierarchical view, and nurtured an evangelical understanding of the church. It emphasized the urgency and necessity of the Great Commission, and ignited a global missions movement with widespread and lasting impact.

While the intent was to remove a hardened and unbiblical distinction, however, the unintended consequence has occasionally been to remove all distinctions whatsoever. Over the ensuing centuries, many denominations permitted an individualistic cultural impulse to eclipse the ecclesial context Luther clearly had in view. Rather than celebrating both the equal standing of all Christians and the intentional distinctions of office and role, radical individualism often dissolved biblical teaching into base egalitarianism. Only barely in the saddle, some fell off the other side of the horse. Perhaps nowhere is this reality more evident than in the early American republic.

Beneath Every Man’s Hat

While the enlightenments of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries had exalted personal autonomy and eroded confidence in established authority, it was the American experiment that pressed individualism and egalitarianism into the church in surprising ways.

The antiestablishmentarianism of the American founders was frequently reflected by calls to reject Protestant confessional and covenantal frameworks in favor of “primitive Christianity” — a so-called return to New Testament Christianity where any person could be a preacher and any gathering a church. No longer were there biblical distinctions of office or role. The priesthood of all believers was transmogrified into the priesthood of the believer.

In my own tradition, Baptist leaders like Francis Wayland (1796–1865) and even E.Y. Mullins (1860–1928) argued that each individual person was independently competent to determine matters of religious importance. This logic inevitably led to the idea that every believer has the absolute right to private judgment about biblical doctrine and the liberty to interpret Scripture with complete autonomy. The practical effect, as historian Winthrop Hudson famously said, was “to make every man’s hat his own church” (Baptists in Transition, 142).

“The radical individualism of early American culture has become a celebrated feature of American Christianity.”

The radical individualism of early American culture has become a celebrated feature of American Christianity. Skepticism toward an educated pastorate, dismissiveness about the importance of local-church membership, promotion of women to the office of elder (and rejection of the biblical qualifications) — these are all disorders inherited from our American forebears.

As Luther warned, unbounded egalitarianism dissolves the wise distinctions designed by God for the good of his church.

Whoever comes out of the water of baptism can boast that he is already a consecrated priest, bishop, and pope, although of course it is not seemly that just anybody should exercise such office. Because we are all priests of equal standing, no one must push himself forward and take it upon himself, without our consent and election, to do that for which we all have equal authority. For no one dare take upon himself what is common to all without the authority and consent of the community. (Works, 44:129)

The biblical doctrine of the priesthood of all believers establishes the equal standing of all believers in the spiritual estate. But as Paul reminded the Corinthians, “God arranged the members in the body, each one of them, as he chose” (1 Corinthians 12:18). Luther, again, writes,

There is no true, basic difference between laymen and priests, princes and bishops, between religious and secular, except for the sake of office and work, but not for the sake of status. They are all of the spiritual estate, all are truly priests, bishops, and popes. But they do not all have the same work to do. . . . Further, everyone must benefit and serve every other by means of his own work or office so that in this way many kinds of work may be done for the bodily and spiritual welfare of the community, just as all the members of the body serve one another. (Works, 44:130)

Back in the Saddle

Sobriety in our day would lead evangelicals in North America to jettison radical individualistic and egalitarian cultural impulses, and embrace the biblical distinctions designed by God for the good of his church. Distinctions in role or office are not gradations of value or fundamental to our identity. By God’s wise design, we “do not all have the same work to do.” As countercultural as it may seem in our antiauthoritarian, individualistic era, there is goodness, beauty, and joy in embracing God’s good order.

Rather than every man being his own priest, we must also remember Luther’s insight that every Christian is someone else’s priest, and we are all priests to one another (Timothy George, Theology of the Reformers, 96). There is nothing noble about the lone-ranger Christian nor any hope in the quest for purely individual spiritual fulfillment. As a holy priesthood, we are designed and intended to pursue Christ together, united around a common confession “that there may be no division in the body, but that the members may have the same care for one another” (1 Corinthians 12:25).

Hebrews 13 is not mainly about leadership, even though verse 7 says to imitate your leaders, and verse 17 says to obey and gladden your leaders, and verse 24 says to greet your leaders. This chapter is mainly about a radical Christian way of life, which is purchased by Jesus Christ through his suffering, and then worked out through us by God the Father through Christ.

Nevertheless, as much as any other chapter in the New Testament, Hebrews 13 relates that radical Christian way of life to the leadership of the church. So, in an unusual way, this chapter gives me the opportunity to summon you, South Cities Church, to this radical Christian way of life, and to draw attention to the gift that you and I have received for 35 years in David Livingston’s pastoral leadership.

Let me draw your attention to the radical Christian way of life in this chapter, and then we’ll focus on how it was purchased for us by Jesus and how it is worked out through us by God the Father through Jesus. Then we’ll close with a look at how leadership in the church relates to all of that, as we give thanks for God’s faithfulness to us and to David and Karin Livingston, in 52 years of pastoral ministry.

Four Marks of Radical Christian Living

The first six verses of the chapter give some examples of this radical Christian way of living. They address brotherly love, hospitality, compassion for imprisoned Christians, marital fidelity, and the dangers of the love of money.

Let brotherly love continue. Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for thereby some have entertained angels unawares. Remember those who are in prison, as though in prison with them, and those who are mistreated, since you also are in the body. Let marriage be held in honor among all, and let the marriage bed be undefiled, for God will judge the sexually immoral and adulterous. Keep your life free from love of money, and be content with what you have. (Hebrews 13:1–5)

So, the first and overarching command is to keep on loving each other in the Christian community (v. 1). Then he gives four examples of what love looks like.

First, open your homes to Christians in need (v. 2). This command is not mainly about friends hanging out; it is mainly about Christians being driven out of certain areas into others and having no place to stay. They need brothers and sisters to open their homes, lest they sleep on the streets. You can tell that this verse is mainly about strangers because it says you might wind up “entertain[ing] angels unawares.” If you were not aware that it was an angel, clearly you didn’t know the person. The people you know are not angels. They are people you don’t know, which is one reason I call it a radical way of life.

Second, when fellow Christians are arrested and put in prison, be courageous enough to go visit them and supply what they need, even if you risk getting in trouble (v. 3).

Third, never commit adultery, and never commit fornication (v. 4). Notice how at the end of this verse both kinds of sexual immorality are mentioned: “God will judge the sexually immoral and adulterous.” In other words, sexual immorality before marriage and in marriage is not only about your own personal purity before God, but also about being a loving person toward others.

“Jesus died to provide not only pardon for sins, but also power to stop sinning and start loving.”

We are still under the banner of verse 1. It is never, ever loving to sleep with somebody who is not your spouse. It doesn’t matter how good it feels. If you, as a man, sleep with a woman who is not your spouse, you are hating her. And if you, as a woman, yield to a man who is not your spouse, you are hating him. I say that because, as you can see at the end of verse 4, you are confirming the other person in the path of God’s judgment. Only sexual purity is an act of love, no matter how “loving” sexual immorality feels.

And fourth, keep your life free from the love of money (v. 5). Covetousness and greed are great love-killers. As soon as money-craving takes over your heart, love for people moves to the back burner (at best). Money and God, Jesus said, cannot both be your God (Matthew 6:24). And when God is not your God, you can’t love people — not in a way that honors God and does people good forever.

So, there’s a glimpse of the radical Christian life that Hebrews 13 is calling for: persevering, sacrificial love expressed in open, welcoming homes; compassion for persecuted, imprisoned Christians; sexual purity inside and outside marriage; and putting greed to death so that the love of money does not get in the way of loving people.

Radical Through and Through

There are several other references to this radical Christian life. Notice verses 12–13: “Jesus also suffered outside the gate in order to sanctify the people through his own blood. Therefore let us go to him outside the camp and bear the reproach he endured.” That’s a picture of a lifestyle of risk-taking. Going “outside the camp” means going outside the places we feel secure. Christians move toward need, not comfort. And “bear[ing] the reproach he endured” means that we are willing to follow Jesus into the very circumstances where we know people will not like us.

Verses 15–16 give us another look at the radical Christian life for which this chapter calls:

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

So, there are two kinds of sacrifices we are called to make: the sacrifice of lips in praise to God (v. 15) and the sacrifice of life in practical service as we seek to meet needs (v. 16). When this passage says, “Do not neglect to do good and to share what you have, for such sacrifices are pleasing to God,” we know that this “doing good” is the same as what we saw in verses 1–5 — namely, love, hospitality, prison ministry, not defrauding anyone sexually, freedom from greed.

Let’s look at one last reference in the chapter to this radical Christian life: verses 20–21. It’s part of the closing benediction, which says, “May God . . . equip you with everything good that you may do his will, working in us that which is pleasing in his sight, through Jesus Christ, to whom be glory forever and ever. Amen.” Doing God’s will — namely, doing what is pleasing in his sight — is the aim of the Christian life.

So, that’s the radical Christian way of life Hebrews 13 calls for: doing God’s will, pleasing him (v. 21); doing good, sharing what you have as a kind of sacrifice to God, praising him at all times (vv. 15–16); and persevering love, open homes, compassion for prisoners, sexual fidelity, and freedom from the love of money (vv. 1–5).

Purchased for Us

We turn now to the origin of such a way of life. Where does it come from? I suggested it was purchased for us by Jesus and worked out through us by God the Father through Jesus. Where do I see that? First, consider verses 9–12:

Do not be led away by diverse and strange teachings, for it is good for the heart to be strengthened by grace, not by foods, which have not benefited those devoted to them. We have an altar from which those who serve the tent have no right to eat. For the bodies of those animals whose blood is brought into the holy places by the high priest as a sacrifice for sin are burned outside the camp. So Jesus also suffered outside the gate in order to sanctify the people through his own blood.

The “diverse and strange teachings” of verse 9 are tempting Christians to go back to Jewish sacrifices and to get strength from eating meat that has been sacrificed on a Jewish altar, the remains burned outside the camp. To this the writer says, “No!” As verse 9 puts it, we will be strengthened by grace, not foods. Then he compares Christ to the old sacrifices to show where the power for our sanctification — for this new way of life — comes from. Verse 12: “So Jesus also suffered outside the gate in order to sanctify the people through his own blood.”

Jesus has taken the place of all animal sacrifices. His blood replaces and brings to an end all blood-shedding as a way of strengthening or purifying God’s people. From now on, all our strength comes from the grace purchased by Jesus’s sacrifice.

And notice in verse 12 precisely what he suffered to achieve: “Jesus suffered outside the gate in order to sanctify the people through his own blood.” In other words, this radical, sanctified way of living that we have seen in Hebrews 13 was purchased for us by the blood of Jesus. Jesus died to provide not only pardon for sins, but also power to stop sinning and start loving.

It’s power for sanctification, power for the radical Christian life that Hebrews 13 describes. God’s power for this kind of life flows to us because the death of Jesus removes the barriers of guilt and wrath. When they are gone, omnipotent grace flows out to help us live this life.

Worked Out Through Us

I said this life was not only purchased for us by Jesus, but also worked out through us by God the Father through Jesus. You can see this fact in the chapter’s beautiful benediction, verses 20–21, which we partially read before:

Now may the God of peace who brought again from the dead our Lord Jesus, the great shepherd of the sheep, by the blood of the eternal covenant, equip you with everything good that you may do his will, working in us that which is pleasing in his sight, through Jesus Christ, to whom be glory forever and ever. Amen.

The radical Christian life of Hebrews 13 is not only purchased by Jesus; it is worked out through us by God the Father through Jesus. We see this twice in verse 21: he “equip[s us] with everything good that [we] may do his will,” and he “work[s] in us that which is pleasing in his sight.” This is how it happens. We don’t just wind up our willpower and become radical risk-takers. It’s a gift. It’s a miracle. God works in us and through us.

And one of the ways he does this work is by securing all his promises for us in Christ. How shall we be freed from the love of money? How shall we be freed from the deceitful promise of sexual sins? How shall we have the courage to visit the prison and open our homes and take the risks of love? How can we have contentment in God that frees us for risk-taking love? Look back at verses 5–6: “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?’”

“We break the back of sin’s deceitful promises by believing the superior promises of God.”

We break the back of sin’s deceitful promises by believing the superior promises of God, who says, “I’ll never leave you. I’ll never forsake you. I’ll always help you. Don’t be afraid of strangers, prisons, a lifetime of sexual chastity, or the scarcity of money. Don’t be afraid to go outside the camp. Don’t be afraid. Trust me. Look to the blood of Jesus, and realize how committed I am to you! I will keep my promises.”

Imitate the Faith of Past Leaders

We have seen the radical Christian life Hebrews 13 calls for, and we’ve seen the way Christ purchased this radical, holy life by his blood, alongside the way the Father works it in us through Christ by his superior promises. Now we look, finally, at how leadership in the church relates to all of this, as we give thanks for God’s faithfulness to us and to David and Karin, through 52 years of pastoral ministry. Three times, the writer calls us to think about our leaders in the church.

Remember your leaders, those who spoke to you the word of God. Consider the outcome of their way of life, and imitate their faith. Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever. (Hebrews 13:7–8)

Obey your leaders and submit to them, for they are keeping watch over your souls, as those who will have to give an account. Let them do this with joy and not with groaning, for that would be of no advantage to you. (Hebrews 13:17)

Greet all your leaders and all the saints. (Hebrews 13:24)

The “leaders” of verse 7 are leaders of the past. You can see this in the words remember (your leaders), spoke (to you), and outcome (of their way of life). Evidently, significant leaders had passed off the scene. They had spoken the word of God. They had modeled a life of faith.

The way these leaders relate to this radical Christian life of love is that they spoke it and they lived it. They spoke the word of God — the will of God and the work of God in Christ. And they lived a life of faith in God’s promises. This is Christian leadership: preach the word, and practice what you preach. Then the job of the church is to listen to the word, to look at the life, and to imitate the faith. After 52 years of pastoral leadership in three churches, David Livingston never brought any reproach on the gospel. He has spoken it, and he has lived it, and many of us have been inspired to imitate it.

I think the reason this word about leaders in verse 7 is followed by verse 8, which says, “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever,” is because the writer wants us to realize that even though those beloved leaders are gone, Jesus is not gone. The Jesus those leaders trusted — the Jesus that enabled them to live the radical life of risk-taking love — is the same Jesus who is alive and at work in the church now. The turnover of leadership is never a turnover of lordship. He is the same yesterday and today and forever.

Gladden the Hearts of Present Leaders

But the leaders in verse 17 are present, not past: “Obey your leaders and submit to them, for they are keeping watch over your souls, as those who will have to give an account. Let them do this with joy and not with groaning, for that would be of no advantage to you.” The basic idea is this: when your leaders — your elders — bring forward a proposal, a vision, a plan, let your inner response be support, not suspicion.

We know that all the biblical relationships of authority and submission are not absolute. Government and citizen, husband and wife, parent and child, master and servant, pastors and people — all of these imply real authority, but it is not absolute. Allegiance to Jesus is always greater than allegiance to any human authority. Nevertheless, God has put in place these authority structures for the good of his people and the good of the world. In a healthy church, the elders are wise and loving shepherd-leaders, and the people are glad supporters of that leadership.

But the really unusual thing about verse 17 is the second half: “Let [the leaders] do this [watch-care over your souls] with joy and not with groaning, for that would be of no advantage to you.” In other words, your job as a church is to gladden the hearts of your pastors and elders. Do all you reasonably can to make the ministry of your pastors a happy ministry. Why? Because a sullen pastor, a groaning pastor, will be of no advantage to you.

“If you seek the gladness of your pastors, you seek the health of your own souls.”

Which has this amazing implication: If a pastor does not find his own delight in serving his people, he will be of no advantage to them, and he will not be loving them. To love them is to delight in serving them. Unhappy pastors make unhealthy churches. This means that if the people would be a happy and healthy people — if they would flourish in this radical, risk-taking life — they must seek the joy of their leaders. If you seek the gladness of your pastors, you seek the health of your own souls.

Over Fifty Years Faithful

So, David, thank you for speaking the word of God to your people — to Olivet and to Elkhorn, to Bethlehem and to South Cities Church, in season and out of season, to groups large and small. Thank you that the outcome of your faith has been 52 years of ministry unsullied by moral failure. You have never brought disrepute on the people of God. Your stability and constancy in Christ are worthy of imitation.

And thank you for being a glad pastor, a happy partner in the work. We were on the same pastoral team at Bethlehem for 26 years. We have been friends for almost 50 years. You have been a rock of happy constancy for me in the ups and downs. You have made me healthier in the ministry and in my marriage, and you have been a glad shepherd of a healthy South Cities Church from the beginning. We thank you.

The other text about leaders in this chapter is verse 24, which simply says, “Greet all your leaders.” You might say that this is what this day is for — to greet you and Karin and to say, “Well done.”

We felt safe with Seth.

I was 16 years old, in tenth grade — right in the middle of those promising and perilous teenage years — when he came to our church as the new youth minister. I was surrounded by the pressures and confusion of adolescence, and yet Seth Buckley brought a clarifying, stabilizing presence. He embodied mature Christian manhood, with both strength and gentleness.

None could question his physical strength. He had played linebacker at Alabama, and he could squat and bench far more than any of us high-school athletes. Yet he played the guitar and sang solos. And his tender heart for Jesus, and teenagers, came through, often with tears, in heartfelt rehearsals of the gospel every Wednesday night.

The reason we felt safe with Seth wasn’t because he was weak. He emphatically was not. He was strong — both physically and emotionally. And he was gentle. That is, he knew how to use his strength to life-giving ends. To the gift of his strength, he had added the virtue of gentleness.

Neither effeminate nor brutish, neither soft nor violent, Seth modeled for us teenaged men-in-training the kind of men we wanted to be deep down — the kind of men the gospel produces over time. In this way, knowing Seth helps me imagine what it may have been like to know King David.

Expert in War

We might remember David as “the sweet psalmist of Israel” (2 Samuel 23:1) and forget he was first a fearless, strong, and skilled man of war. But a striking scene at the end of his life gives a fuller picture of David than the simple singer-songwriter. When David’s son Absalom rebels against his father, marches on Jerusalem, and sends David momentarily retreating, David’s friend Hushai plays loyal to Absalom in order to defeat the rebel counsel. As he makes his case (which carries the day), he characterizes David, in terms that all agreed with:

You know that your father and his men are mighty men, and that they are enraged, like a bear robbed of her cubs in the field. Besides, your father is expert in war. (2 Samuel 17:8)

Not just his men, but David himself is mighty — and expert in war. And this wasn’t new. When we first meet David (even before Goliath), he is introduced as “a man of valor, a man of war”:

Behold, I have seen a son of Jesse the Bethlehemite, who is skillful in playing, a man of valor, a man of war, prudent in speech, and a man of good presence, and the Lord is with him. (1 Samuel 16:18)

In the following chapter, the Goliath account, we learn that David has already killed lions and bears (1 Samuel 17:34–36). He has the courage to face the giant, and the skill to conquer him. And though still a youth, David is strong enough to take Goliath’s massive sword, draw it from its sheath, and take off the giant’s head (1 Samuel 17:51). Soon the imposing Saul, who stood head and shoulders above the rest, would hear his people singing of David’s strength: “Saul has struck down his thousands, and David his ten thousands” (1 Samuel 18:7).

What Made Him Great?

Psalm 18, which David wrote in praise of God’s lifelong deliverance, celebrates the physical strength and ability that God had given and honed in his anointed. David “can run against a troop” and “leap over a wall” (Psalm 18:29); he says that God “equipped me with strength” (Psalm 18:39) and “made my feet like the feet of a deer” (Psalm 18:33). God “trains my hands for war,” making his arms strong enough to “bend a bow of bronze” (Psalm 18:34). And yet, right here, in mention after mention of his human strength, David celebrates the surpassing quality of gentleness. Strength and skill may have made him a good warrior and king, but “Your gentleness,” he says to God, “made me great” (Psalm 18:35).

“Both strong and gentle, David knows when to wield his strength and when to walk in gentleness.”

Strength, valor, and experience made David “expert in war,” but it was God’s own gentleness (which David learned firsthand) that made David great. Not only had the omnipotent God been gentle with his Anointed, in his finitude and many failings, but God’s gentleness had come to characterize David’s own leadership. As Derek Kidner comments, “While it was the gentleness God exercised that allowed David his success, it was the gentleness God taught him that was his true greatness” (Psalms, 95).

Where do we see this greatness? When did David add the surpassing virtue of gentleness to the valuable ability of his strength? Psalm 18 appears in 2 Samuel 22 at the culmination of the book, and two key mentions of David’s gentleness earlier in the story set up this climactic line and lesson.

Gentle with an Enemy

After the death of Saul, David’s commander, Joab, avenges the personal loss of his own brother. Saul’s commander, Abner, had struck down Joab’s brother, Asahel, after he had pursued Abner after battle. Abner had warned him to turn aside, and Asahel would not, and Abner struck him in the stomach. “A long war between the house of Saul and the house of David” followed, with David growing “stronger and stronger, while the house of Saul became weaker and weaker” (2 Samuel 3:1).

In time, Abner sought peace with David and delivered the rest of the kingdom to David. They feasted together, and David sent Abner away in peace. But Joab then drew Abner aside (under the pretense of peace) “to speak with him privately, and there he struck him in the stomach, so that he died, for the blood of Asahel his brother” (2 Samuel 3:27). The contrast between David and Joab is stark and pronounced. Both can be fearsome in battle. Both are strong, brave, and experts of war. But Joab, while an asset in war, is a liability in peace.

Joab’s unrighteous killing of Abner threatens the consolidation of the nation under David’s rule. So, David publicly mourns the death of Abner so that “all the people and all Israel understood that day that it had not been the king’s will to put to death Abner” (2 Samuel 3:37). David speaks to his servants to make clear his differences from Joab, the son of Zeruiah:

Do you not know that a prince and a great man has fallen this day in Israel? And I was gentle today, though anointed king. These men, the sons of Zeruiah, are more severe than I. The Lord repay the evildoer according to his wickedness! (2 Samuel 3:38–39)

Gentle with a Traitor

Second, near the end of David’s reign, when Absalom has rebelled against him, David sends Joab and the army out against Absalom, but with specific instructions. In keeping with his pattern of exercising strength, and adding to it the virtue of gentleness, David orders Joab, in the presence of many witnesses, “Deal gently for my sake with the young man Absalom” (2 Samuel 18:5).

Some commentators see weakness and indiscretion in David at this point; others see the gentleness that made him great. Peter Leithart comments,

These instructions were consistent with David’s treatment of all his enemies; he had treated Saul well, and just recently he had restrained Abishai from cutting down Shimei. He knew what Joab was capable of, and he wanted all his men to know that he treated enemies with kindness and compassion. David’s behavior again provided an Old Testament illustration of Jesus’s teaching about loving enemies. (A Son to Me, 278)

Joab, of course, defies David’s will and kills Absalom, again accenting the difference between the two men. Both are strong, but only one is great — and that through his gentleness.

Joab is the one-dimensional man of war — strong, tenacious, courageous in battle, a hero in combat. Yet his manhood is immature and incomplete. A liability at home and in peacetime, Joab is unable to cushion his strength and control his tenacity.

David, on the other hand, in masculine maturity, has learned gentleness and can thrive in all contexts. His abilities are multidimensional. He can lead a nation, not only an army. Both strong and gentle, he knows when to wield his strength and when, with admirable restraint, to walk in gentleness.

High and Exalted, Gentle and Lowly

In showing teenaged boys the strength and gentleness of mature masculinity, Seth showed us far more than the greatness of King David. While Psalm 18 gives tribute to God’s work in and through David, there is much in the psalm, writes John Calvin, that “agrees better with Christ” than with David.

“Gentleness is not the absence of strength but the addition of virtue.”

When the apostle John, on the isle of Patmos, caught his glimpses of the glory of Christ, he witnessed the paragon of mature masculinity, complete in power and grace. In Jesus, he saw not only man but “the Almighty” (Revelation 1:8). “His voice was like the roar of many waters,” and his face “like the sun shining in full strength” (Revelation 1:15–16). Later John would see this Lion of a man, sitting on a white horse, as the one who “judges and makes war” (Revelation 19:11).

From his mouth comes a sharp sword with which to strike down the nations, and he will rule them with a rod of iron. He will tread the winepress of the fury of the wrath of God the Almighty. (Revelation 19:15)

Yet when the apostle looked between the angels and the throne of heaven, he “saw a Lamb standing, as though it had been slain” (Revelation 5:6). A lamb-like Lion, and lion-like Lamb, awe-inspiring in his majestic strength, and yet seen to be truly great as the atoning sacrifice for the sins of his people.

Jesus’s gentleness cushions the application of his great power as he marshals it in the service of his weak people. Do not mistake his gentleness for weakness. Gentle is not code for weak. Gentleness is not the absence of strength but the addition of virtue to strength — in men like Seth, King David, and most admirably of all, the Son of God himself.

C.S. Lewis was fond of quoting English writer Samuel Johnson (1709–1784), who once said, “People need to be reminded more than they need to be instructed.” Both Lewis and Johnson believed that people often possess the knowledge they need; it simply needs to be brought to mind at the appropriate time.

I’ve found this to be especially true when it comes to godly masculinity. I need timely reminders to help me fulfill my calling as a husband and a father, as a friend and a brother. And thankfully, God’s word directs us to a daily and unavoidable reminder of what it means to be a godly man. We find it in Psalm 19:4–5.

In them [the heavens] he has set a tent for the sun,     which comes out like a bridegroom leaving his chamber,     and, like a strong man, runs its course with joy.

With these words, David invites us to sanctify our imaginations by seeing the sun with godly eyes.

Bridegroom and Warrior

The sun, as it moves across the sky, reminds David of something. He’s seen that brightness before. Then he recalls the wedding day of a close friend, and the link is made — the sun is like the bridegroom.

Those of us who attend modern weddings know that, when the wedding march begins, all eyes turn to the back of the room to see the bride, clothed in white and beautiful in her glory. But a wise attendee will also steal a glance toward the altar, where the groom waits with eager anticipation and expectant joy. The beauty of his bride is reflected in the brightness of his face. It’s that look that David remembers when he sees the sun as it rises in the morning.

But David doesn’t stop looking. David considers the sun again and is reminded of Josheb-basshebeth, one of his mighty men, running into battle with spear raised and eyes blazing because he is doing what he was built to do (2 Samuel 23:8). The warrior is intense and joyful because he is protecting his people with the strength and skill he’s developed.

So then, the sun is like the groom, and the sun is like the mighty man. Both are images of godly masculinity — the bridegroom and the warrior, the lover and the man of war. Both images direct us to a man’s calling in relation to his people. One points us inward, as a man delights in his wife (and by extension his children and the rest of his people). The other points us outward, as a man protects his people from external threats. Which means the sun is an ever-present reminder of what it means to be a godly man: bright, triumphant, blazing with joy and purpose, ready to fight and bleed and die for the ones he loves.

Manly Weight

When we press into this image, we see the gravity that lies at the heart of mature masculinity. A number of recent Christian books on manhood have underlined the importance of gravitas for godly men. Michael Foster and Dominic Bnonn Tennant define gravitas as the weight of a man’s presence (It’s Good to Be a Man, 141). It’s the dignity and honor that pull people into his orbit (much like the sun orients the planets by its mass).

“The fear of the Lord gives weight to a man’s soul, making him firm and stable and steadfast.”

Gravitas comes partly from a man’s skill and competence, and partly from his sober-mindedness and confidence. A competent and confident man catches the eye, much like the sun as it blazes a trail through the heavens. But ultimately, true gravitas comes from fearing the Lord. The fear of the Lord gives weight to a man’s soul, making him firm and stable and steadfast, not tossed to and fro by winds of doctrine or the passions of the flesh.

But as Psalm 19 shows, gravitas is only one half of the equation. Gladness completes the picture. It’s not enough to take initiative and responsibility for oneself and for others. A godly man runs his course with joy.

Manly Mirth

One of my favorite pictures of masculinity comes from Lewis’s The Horse and His Boy. King Lune tells his son Cor what kingship is all about.

This is what it means to be a king: to be first in every desperate attack and last in every desperate retreat, and when there’s hunger in the land (as must be now and then in bad years) to wear finer clothes and laugh louder over a scantier meal than any man in your land. (310)

“Biblical manhood bleeds and sacrifices with unconquerable joy.”

First in, last out, laughing loudest. Here is competence and confidence — initiating, taking risks, and bearing burdens for others. Here is a king who cultivates his strength for God’s mission and the good of others. And he does it all with courage in the heart and manifest laughter in the soul. Biblical manhood bleeds and sacrifices with unconquerable joy.

Gravity and gladness are both essential. Without gravity, gladness declines into triviality. Without gladness, gravity degenerates into gloom. Together, they are a potent combination that inspires others, forms communities, and extends a man’s influence in the world.

Where the Images Land

Psalm 19 depicts the sun as a wonderful picture of true masculinity. But for David, the sun doesn’t merely draw our minds to the bridegroom and the strong man, to the lover and the man of war. More than that, the sun draws our minds upward to the splendor and majesty of the Maker. “The heavens declare the glory of God” (Psalm 19:1). The sun both reminds us of the glory of manhood and displays the glory of God.

More than that, these reminders point us to Jesus. He is the ground and goal of manhood. All true gravity and gladness come from him. He is the one who reconciles us to God so that, despite our sin and shame, we live beneath the smile of a happy Father who says to us, “This is my beloved son, with whom I am well pleased” (Matthew 3:17).

Jesus is our older brother, the firstborn from the dead, our model and example who ran his race for the joy set before him. He is the ultimate strong man — a man of war who killed the dragon to get the girl. He is the bridegroom who greatly rejoices over his bride and whose face is like the sun shining in full strength. And every day, he causes the sun to rise, reminding us of who he is and who we are to be.

Audio Transcript

Sibling rivalries. That’s our theme today. Welcome back to the podcast. We’ve talked about siblings on the podcast in a couple of contexts. We addressed the prodigal son and his older brother in APJ 1059. And we looked at how Jesus is our perfect elder brother in APJ 934. I love that episode and the fact that Jesus is our brother. He calls us brothers.

But today, we get a question about sibling rivalries in the home, something we have not yet addressed on the podcast. Here’s the question today, for you, Pastor John, who once again joins us remotely over Zoom. The question is from Stephanie. “Pastor John and Tony, thank you for all the work and thoughtfulness you put into APJ. I have listened for years, always encouraged by hearing brothers and sisters ask questions I would never even think to ask myself. Your careful responses exemplify 1 Peter 3:15, to ‘always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have . . . with gentleness and respect’ (NIV).

“My question for you is about sibling rivalry. In Genesis it seems that every family dynamic was affected by jealousy or envy between siblings. Cain and Abel. Jacob and Esau. Rachel and Leah. Joseph and his brothers. Just to name a few. What are gospel implications of this recurring plot theme in the Bible? And, seeing that many of these broken relationships are the result of favoritism or passivity by parents, what lessons can we learn as fathers and mothers today?”

Wow, what a good question it is. That caused me to do some serious thinking on things I haven’t quite posed in that way.

First Families

Let’s start at the beginning. God creates man, male and female, and designs that, by becoming one flesh in marriage, they would have children who are called, in their relationship to each other, brothers and sisters. So this is a universally understood relationship. It’s amazing — brothers and sisters. All over the world, everybody knows what that is. Every culture understands what brothers and sisters are. Together with marriage, this relationship is primal. It’s really basic. Brothers and sisters ordinarily grow up under the care of parents and are helped to be productive adults in the family structure all over the world.

Now, sin enters the world, and its first devastating effect is on the married couple. Adam blames Eve; Eve blames the serpent. Their innocence is over; shame and guilt come into their relationship and wreak havoc. And the next relationship that we read about as contaminated and ruined by sin is Cain killing his brother, Abel.

So the basic family structure is brought into being by God, and then sin moves out through that family structure to destroy all the relationships. Simultaneously, though, God’s grace enters into the world and begins to do its redemptive work. And what we are to see is that in these very broken and sin-ruined relationships of brother and brother and sister and sister, God nevertheless has worked redemptively, savingly. We see it in God’s relationship with Isaac and Ishmael. We see it in his relationship with Jacob and Esau. We see it in Egypt, where Moses said to two Israelites, “Why are you fighting? Are you not brothers?” And in that very context of brother against brother, God is saving his people.

Brothers of the King

When Jesus enters the world, two dramatic things happen in the way Jesus defines the relationship between himself and his followers, and then the way those followers understand their relationship with each other. First, he defines his relationship with those who follow him as brothers to himself, whether there’s any physical family relationship or not. For example, it says in Mark 3:32–35,

“The followers of Jesus who love like Jesus are brothers of the King of the universe.”

A crowd was sitting around him, and they said to him, “Your mother and your brothers are outside, seeking you.” And he answered them, “Who are my mother and my brothers?” And looking around at those who sat around him, he said, “Here are my mother and my brothers! For whoever does the will of God, he is my brother and sister and mother.”

And in the picture of the final judgment, when the disciples ask the King when they served him, it says, “The King will answer them, ‘Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me’” (Matthew 25:40). So the followers of Jesus who love like Jesus are brothers of the King of the universe.

Church as the Redeemed Family

This dramatic act of identifying as brother to his followers had a huge implication for how they understood their relationship to each other and how the apostles later taught about the nature of the church.

For example, Jesus said to his disciples, “You are not to be called rabbi, for you have one teacher, and you are all brothers” (Matthew 23:8). They weren’t physical brothers; they were a new kind of brother. So they are brothers to each other, not just brothers to him.

And then, when we turn to the apostle Paul and ask how he understood the relationship among believers in the church, we find an amazing fact. Just to give you a sense of proportion, this was a surprise to me. I’ve made a big deal out of Paul’s favorite name for Christians being saints, right? He loves to call Christians saints. Forty times he calls Christians saints. But when you ask, “Well, what about brother? What was his real favorite?” He refers to Christians as brothers over 130 times.

Paul picked up on Jesus’s reference to himself as brother as well as to each other. He says in Romans 8:29, “Those whom [God] foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, in order that he might be the firstborn among many brothers.” So God predestined us to be the brothers of the Son of God and for him to be preeminent. So the link is finally made with God — God explicitly. The Son of God, Jesus Christ, is the preeminent firstborn among many brothers — meaning that the whole church are the children of God and part of the divine family through the redemptive work of Christ. This is breathtaking if you just let it sink in.

God’s original creation order of husband and wife and then brother and brother become the two dominant ways of thinking about Christ and his church. He’s the elder brother to brothers and sisters in the church, and he is the husband to his bride, the church. God’s original design finds its fulfillment not mainly in redeemed, earthly, nuclear families, but mainly in the divine family with the Son of God as preeminent brother over his brothers and sisters and as the husband over his bride.

Minimizing Rivalry

Now what about the second part of Stephanie’s question? What can we do as fathers and mothers to foster peace, to minimize rivalry between our children? And I think the little survey that we just did sheds light on this. I think I’ve got four things here to quickly mention. So what should I do as a parent? I’ve got old kids now — the oldest is 50 — and many of our listeners have tiny kids. So what can we do to help minimize a sinful sibling rivalry?

1. Treasure God.

Don’t make the mistake of Adam and Eve. They rejected God as an all-wise, all-providing Father and replaced him with their own private preferences, and the result was a destroyed family. So turn that around and make God in Christ the supreme treasure of your life, and trust his word and his care implicitly. Let the children see you do that. “Mom and Dad trust and treasure God. Mom and Dad have a heavenly Father, and they trust him to take care of them and us.”

2. Point to the ultimate family.

Teach the children that this natural family that they’re part of is not ultimate. Belonging to God’s family is ultimate. Humans — boys and girls, teenagers — need something great to live for, something much greater than the natural physical family they’re a part of. If you idolize that family, it will not suffice for the human soul. If they can be captured by something glorious that is greater than the family — namely, the global family from all the nations — they will have resources to love their natural family better.

3. Teach true greatness.

Number three, teach them that squabbling over which is the greatest puts them in the category of those who do not understand Jesus. When the disciples did that — “Who’s the greater among you?” — Jesus said, “Who is the greater, one who reclines at table or one who serves? Is it not the one who reclines at table? But I am among you as the one who serves” (Luke 22:27). In other words, if you follow Jesus, then being a servant is true greatness. So if you want to try to be greater than your brother or your sister, be a greater servant.

4. Honor diversity.

When you think about the different gifts that your children have, don’t demean or discount any of them. Take your cue from Paul’s teaching in 1 Corinthians 12:24–25. He said, “God has so composed the body, giving greater honor to the part that lacked it, that there may be no division in the body, but that the members may have the same care for one another.”

“If you want to try to be greater than your brother or your sister, be a greater servant.”

There’s no point in pretending that your children are all equal in every way. They know they’re not; you know they’re not. Some are better at one thing, some at another. The key is teaching them the humility of viewing everyone as precious and useful in God’s sight as they are. Nobody is wasted. God doesn’t waste his creation. Nobody is pointless. Everyone has a design in God’s mind, and they’re called to something significant.

Stephanie, thank you for a very provocative and helpful question. It was good for me to think about this. May God help us to love being God’s children, Christ’s brothers and sisters, and may God make us good examples to our children.

I loved Dan Fuller. I still do, the way one does when the beloved slips from you by degrees until he dies at 97. And yet lives. Dan died in the wee hours of June 21, 2023.

He was the most influential teacher I ever had. It was the kind of influence that pierces to bone and marrow. The kind that changes the mental and emotional DNA. The kind that touches everything, forever. My eternity will be different because of Dan Fuller.

Grand Permission and Obligation

He was professor of hermeneutics at Fuller Seminary during my three years there, 1968 to 1971. I took every course he offered, starting with the required freshman hermeneutics class — call it a door to a new world, like a wardrobe opening to Narnia. Call it a jarring reveille wakening me from a 22-year sleep of inobservance. Call it the grand Permission and Obligation: you may and you must pursue joy. Call it the gift of a skill — to wring from texts their lifeblood, with a method called “arcing.” Call it a future, a life.

“Daniel Fuller was the most influential teacher I ever had.”

Something else happened in that class of a different kind. A single sentence was spoken that went deep into my fragile self-understanding. I entered seminary uncertain of my abilities. I was a B student at Wheaton College. This did not inspire confidence that I could excel in seminary or go on for doctoral studies.

One assignment in the hermeneutics class was to write a review essay of James Smart’s The Interpretation of Scripture. As Dr. Fuller was handing back the papers, we were clustered around his desk. He did not know me by name. It was a huge class. He looked at the paper, and said, “John Piper.” As I took the paper from his hand, he looked at me and said, “You’ve got ability.” Someone who mattered had just built into me, “You can do this.”

Hermeneutics for Eggheads

Then came 22 hours of electives — Bible, Bible, Bible. Not “introductions.” Not “overviews.” Not “surveys.” Not “Forschungsgeschichte.” But put your nose in these propositions, and don’t come up till you smell the reality — not just the words, not just the ideas, but the reality. Class after class, Bible book after Bible book, forming for a lifetime the habit of discontent until a text yields, and gives up its riches.

There was one exception — a course not focused on the Bible. Dr. Fuller announced it on the bulletin board outside his office: “Hermeneutics for Eggheads.” Six of us signed up.

We met at his house once a week until our heads hurt, as we Adlerized Fuchs, Ebling, Robinson, Gadamer, and Hirsch. “Adlerized” — as in Mortimer Adler, How to Read a Book. No talking back to a book until you can state the author’s view to his satisfaction. Then sic ’em. Flag every factual mistake, every inattention to relevant facts, every non sequitur. Who would have thought that the first book to be mastered in graduate school is a book that should be mastered in high school — Adler. Fuller knew his plebes.

Then came the climactic, required (desired!) integrating course, “Unity of the Bible.” This was not a course in mixing paints and knowing brushes and learning line and form and perspective. This was the completion of the canvas, the panorama. The effort to say the unsayable: “What no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the heart of man imagined, what God has prepared for those who love him” (1 Corinthians 2:9).

This was the end for which God created the world. This was seven-point Calvinism without the name. This was Jonathan Edwards marinated in the whole Bible. “The beams of glory come from God, and are something of God, and are refunded back again to their original. So that the whole is of God, and in God, and to God; and God is the beginning, middle and end in this affair” (Works of Jonathan Edwards, 8:531).The climactic course was the merging of theology into doxology. Knowing into enjoying.

Prayers, Promises, and Warnings

One of the earliest signs in seminary that great changes were happening was the effect of Fuller’s teaching on our prayers. Noël and I were newly married (December 1968). Right away we put in place the practice of praying together every night (a practice still in place 55 years later). Then came the discoveries:

The goal of God in everything he does is the glorification of God. It was God himself who told us to pray for his name to be hallowed. So we did.
The goal of the human soul in all we do is to be satisfied in God above all things. It was God himself who demanded that we serve the Lord with gladness (Psalm 100:2). God himself told us to pray, “Satisfy us in the morning with your steadfast love” (Psalm 90:14). So we did.
The goal of persevering faith is reached by a proper fear of unbelief. This was God’s word: “They were broken off because of their unbelief, but you stand fast through faith. So do not become proud, but fear” (Romans 11:20). So we prayed for the fear of unbelief.

Dr. Fuller taught these realties. He pointed to them in actual biblical texts. Look at these words, these phrases, these propositions, these arguments. Then he would look at us, with utter seriousness and affection, and say, “We will go to hell if we ignore these things.” All the glories, all the promises, all the threatenings are there to help us fight the fight of faith. They are there to prevent the shipwreck of faith. They are there to get us home. It is suicide to ignore the promises and threatenings of Scripture.

After Class Ended

It was the urgency of the classes that gave them their weight. The skills, the truths, the realities were all kindling. But the fire was the urgency — the blood-earnestness. There was absolutely no academic gamesmanship. This was life and death. If you didn’t feel this, you shouldn’t be in the ministry. Because real ministry is an aroma from death to death and life to life (2 Corinthians 2:15–16).

“There was absolutely no academic gamesmanship. This was life and death.”

He loved us. I felt it in class. And even more, I felt it after class. These were the best of times. The two-hour give-and-take of the Galatians class was over. And four or five of us would not move. The others left the room. Dan sat down, and for another hour he would respond to our questions. What made these times powerful was not that he had all the answers, but that he was as eager as we were to ask the right questions and together find what the text actually meant. He was vulnerable. He was actually excited to learn things from our interaction. This was electric for neophytes.

Not everyone loved Dan Fuller the way some of us did. There were a handful of students in that first hermeneutics class who sat at the back and rolled their eyes at his stammering voice and his radical commitment to rationality. Once one of them complained out loud in class that Fuller was too rational. Dan’s response was a life-changer for me. He said,

Why can’t we be like Jonathan Edwards, who could be writing a treatise that would challenge the most philosophical minds, and then break into a paragraph of devotion that would warm your grandmother’s heart?

I knew almost nothing of Jonathan Edwards then. But that one sentence sent me running to the library to find that signature mixture of reason and emotion. And until June 21, 2023, I would have said that Edwards was my most influential dead theologian.

Great Logic of Heaven

Now the fight is over. It was a good fight. For decades he taught us and showed us how to fight it. Near the end, as the outer man wasted away, others fought for him, reciting into his almost deaf ears the promises of God. The precious promises of God. “He who did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all, how will he not also with him graciously give us all things?” (Romans 8:32). This is the great reason why Daniel Fuller loved logic. This is the great logic of heaven. This is the most glorious a fortiori.

Because God did the hardest thing — give his Son — he will most certainly do the easier — give us all things. Everything good for us. Faith-sustaining grace for 97 years, and now face to face with the Son of God.

I have chosen Mr. Baggins and that ought to be enough for all of you. If I say he is a Burglar, a Burglar he is, or will be when the time comes. There is a lot more in him than you guess, and a deal more than he has any idea of himself. —Gandalf (The Hobbit)

This year, I finally returned with Bilbo to the Lonely Mountain. While many of the paths and perils were familiar, the whole adventure felt noticeably different. When I first read The Hobbit in my twenties, life felt more like the perilous journey — mountains to climb, places to discover, new friends to meet, dragons to face. Since then, I’ve added a wife, a house, and three small children. Now, I can relate more to the security and predictability of the Shire.

That is not to say that life with a wife and small children is all warm biscuits and second breakfasts. As any young family knows, some days at home feel an awful lot like the dark, goblin tunnels beneath the Misty Mountains. But the gravitational force of family life often draws us (by necessity, to some degree) away from risk and toward safer, more familiar rhythms of living. The Shire, notice, isn’t portrayed as a problem — until its comforts might keep a man from stepping out into the right battles.

The Hobbit resonates with us so deeply, all these years later, because the tension in Bilbo is a tension in all of us. We want to live for more than our little comfortable life, and yet we want to preserve the sense of security and control that a little comfortable life affords us. Then Jesus knocks and calls us out of our spiritual shires: “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it” (Matthew 16:24–25).

Because I know you, like me, need unlikely courage to do whatever Jesus has called you to do, I want to briefly draw you back into Bilbo’s great journey.

More Than a Calling

We’ll begin where all journeys must: at the beginning. Where does this sudden “Tookishness” emerge in the hobbit? The Tooks, an unusually brave and adventurous brood of hobbits, were Bilbo’s ancestors on his mother’s side. And so, throughout the story, Tolkien names Bilbo’s newfound courage after this family line.

When the renowned wizard first darkens the door of Bilbo’s hole in the hill, with his tall pointed blue hat, grey cloak, silver scarf, and long white beard, he doesn’t find the brave hobbit we meet later in the tale. Gandalf announces he’s recruiting for an adventure, and Bilbo melts into a trembling puddle on the floor. The wizard bears with the flustered hobbit and eventually presses his mission:

“For your old grandfather Took’s sake, . . . I will give you what you asked for.”

“I beg your pardon, I haven’t asked for anything!”

“Yes, you have! Twice now. My pardon. I give it you. In fact I will go so far as to send you on this adventure. Very amusing for me, very good for you.” (8–9)

This call, it turns out, was more than an invitation. It began doing something in Bilbo. The fearful hobbit again refuses, but invites Gandalf back the next day. And Gandalf does return, but not before sending thirteen dwarves along first.

Awakening Tookishness

When all the dwarves and Gandalf had arrived, they did what dwarves love to do: they sang. They sang of mountains and caverns, of hoards and wars, of history and legacy, of dragons and of gold. And as they sang, something happened inside of Bilbo, a sudden spring broke over his long, cozy winter:

As they sang the hobbit felt the love of beautiful things made by hands and by cunning and by magic moving through him, a fierce and a jealous love, the desire of the hearts of dwarves. Then something Tookish woke up inside him, and he wished to go and see the great mountains, and hear the pine-trees and the waterfalls, and explore the caves, and wear a sword instead of a walking-stick. (18)

This isn’t a simple courage. It’s a courage ignited by curiosity and beauty, by evil and need, by love and longing. Isn’t that a lot what it was like when you first began to realize who Jesus is and what life with him might be like? If God is truly calling — by his Spirit, somewhere deep in our hearts — when the invitation comes, we sense the wonder of a whole new world, of mountains unseen and caves unexplored, of dangers to be faced and dragons to be slain, of gold to be uncovered.

Why else would words like these draw us? “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me.” No one signs up for a cross — unless there’s greater joy and beauty on the other side of that cross than there is on this one. Unless we were made for a fullness of life we’ll only find if we brave the forests and caves before us, the goblins and dragons set against us. Suddenly, the hobbit holes we’ve made for ourselves feel smaller, more cramped. We were made for mountains.

Without Bed and Breakfast

After Gandalf introduces Bilbo as his chosen burglar, the dwarves understandably doubt his judgment (especially after the hobbit faints while hearing about the adventure). Gloin openly questions whether he could handle the dangers of a dragon’s cave. Bilbo overhears him from the other room, and then (Tolkien tells us),

The Took side had won. He suddenly felt he would go without bed and breakfast to be thought fierce. (20)

He emerged from hiding and said to the dwarves, “Tell me what you want done, and I will try it, if I have to walk from here to the East of East and fight the wild Were-worms in the Last Desert” (21). Bilbo barely recognized himself in the moment (and in later moments comes to regret this burst of courage), but Gandalf’s call had changed him. “If I say he is a Burglar, a Burglar he is, or will be when the time comes” (21–22).

“Any calling of God carries with it a sufficiency for the calling.”

So it is for those who’ve been called by God. “Those whom he predestined he also called, and those whom he called he also justified, and those whom he justified he also glorified” (Romans 8:30). This calling of God carries with it a sufficiency for the calling. When Christ effectively calls you to follow him, there is suddenly a lot more in you than others can see, and a deal more than you have any idea of yourself.

A Very Different Hobbit

Through mountains and forests, goblins and wolves, we do find a lot more in our hobbit than anyone could see at first. He spies on giant trolls (and nearly gets eaten), leaps over a jealous, murderous creature hunting him in the caves, takes on giant spiders in the dark forest of Mirkwood, rescues his friends from the Wood-elves prison, and then, most memorably of all, he braves Smaug’s cave alone.

He crept noiselessly down, down, down into the dark. He was trembling with fear, but his little face was set and grim. Already he was a very different hobbit from the one that had run out without a pocket-handkerchief from Bag-End long ago. He had not had a pocket-handkerchief for ages. He loosened his dagger in its sheath, tightened his belt, and went on.

If Gandalf had shown him at the start where he would end up, Bilbo would have never left his hole. But facing trolls, goblins, and dragons made him a very different hobbit. What has God called you to do that feels too uncomfortable, too costly, too unlike you? Who might you become if you trusted him and took the risk?

As Bilbo creeps down further, the fire begins to burn redder and redder before him and a deafening gurgling sound throbbed in his ears. All his senses confirmed what he wished wasn’t true.

It was at this point that Bilbo stopped. Going on from there was the bravest thing he ever did. The tremendous things that happened afterwards were as nothing compared to it. He fought the real battle in the tunnel alone, before he ever saw the vast danger that lay in wait.

The bravest thing he ever did was that first, quiet, resolute step. And isn’t it the same in so many of our battles — in conflict and crisis, in correction and confession, in evangelism and ministry, in marriage and family and so many of our relationships? What small, brave first step could you take, even today? You may be surprised what courage you stumble into.

Your Unlikely Courage

What might Jesus be calling you to do that feels too inconvenient or costly, at least right now? Where do you feel yourself too bound to the comforts and security of your routine? What could you step out and do for Jesus, whether large or small, that would take real, unlikely courage?

As I said at the beginning, the mountains and dragons often change from season to season. As a young father, I am learning that raising toddlers, with love and patience and a resolve to teach them Jesus, sometimes requires supernatural strength and courage. As one of my favorite parenting articles says,

There is a war on children, and we are all, in one way or another, playing some role in it. Every time we move forward as faithful parents, . . . we are wrestling demons — because there is little the demons hate more than little children.

“Often, the dragon within us will demand the most courage from us.”

And demons hate whatever good God has called you to do in his name — the difficult marriage that needs repairing and reviving, the workplace that desperately needs the light of Christ, the children who need a Sunday School teacher, the friendship that’s cooled and grown distant, the local food shelf looking for volunteers, the grieving widow who’s learning loneliness. And in and around all those callings, souls are dying, needing rescue before the flames fall. Our neighbors, co-workers, and friends live in the perils below the Lonely Mountain but imagine themselves in the safety of the Shire. Will we tell them?

The fiercest and most intimidating dragons, though, loom even larger and closer to home. Every day we wake up, we face temptations to overcome and sins to confess and kill. Will we leave behind our comforts and insecurities and fight, or will we quietly cuddle up with our secret sins — with lust, with bitterness, with envy, with anger, with pride? Often, the dragon within us will demand the most courage from us.

Every stage of life as a Christian, and every area of the persistently faithful Christian life, requires some unlikely courage. My nearly forty years now has taught me that Jesus will keep stubbornly calling us out of comfortable and familiar, because he loves us — and because we were made for mountains.

As C.S. Lewis ended his lecture on petitionary prayer, he asked his audience of clergymen a question: “How am I to pray this very night?” He did not know. “I have no answer to my problem, though I have taken it to about every Christian I know, learned or simple, lay or clerical, within my own Communion or without” (C. S. Lewis: Essay Collection, 204).

What problem could he not solve? In short, he could not reconcile the seemingly mutually exclusive ways in which we are taught to make our requests known to God.

The first way, which Lewis calls “the A Pattern,” is the “Thy will be done” prayer. The deferential prayer, the creaturely prayer. We bring our requests to our All-Wise Father, but leave them at his feet to answer how he sees best.

Jesus taught us to pray this way in the Lord’s Prayer: “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done” (Matthew 6:10). Jesus prayed this prayer himself in that most dire hour in Gethsemane, when he first asked for deliverance from the cup and yet ended, “Nevertheless, not my will, but yours, be done” (Luke 22:42). In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus assures us that our Father in heaven will give us good things when we ask him, but often not the exact thing we ask for (Matthew 7:9–11). We ask for “bread” and only know our Father will not give us a “serpent.”

So far, so good.

Ask Whatever I Wish?

Then comes “the B Pattern,” the “Ask whatever you wish” prayer. Instead of explicit deference, this prayer requires faith that what is actually prayed will be given by God. “Whatever you ask in prayer,” the perfect Pray-er also taught, “believe that you have received it, and it will be yours” (Mark 11:24). Or again, “And whatever you ask in prayer, you will receive, if you have faith” (Matthew 21:22). This pattern requires “faith that the particular thing the petitioner asks will be given him” (199).

Jesus is not bashful to teach this pattern. “Ask whatever you wish, and it will be done for you” (John 15:7). Jesus (not some modern prosperity preacher) teaches, “Whatever you ask in my name, this I will do, that the Father may be glorified in the Son. If you ask me anything in my name, I will do it” (John 14:13–14; John 15:7; 16:23–24).

So, the question: “How is it possible at one and the same moment to have a perfect faith — an untroubled or unhesitating faith as St. James says (James 1:6) — that you will get what you ask and yet also prepare yourself submissively in advance for a possible refusal?” (Letters to Malcolm, 35).

When he (now we) bend the knee in prayer, interceding for ill Mrs. Jones, by which pattern do we pray? Do we ask for her healing if the Lord wills (Pattern A)? Or should we pray for her healing in Jesus’s name, expecting — and not doubting — this to happen?

Lewis wrestles:

Have all my own intercessory prayers for years been mistaken? For I have always prayed that the illnesses of my friends might be healed “if it was God’s will,” very clearly envisaging the possibility that it might not be. Perhaps this has all been a fake humility and a false spirituality for which my friends owe me little thanks; perhaps I ought never to have dreamed of refusal, μηδὲν διακρινόμενος [without doubting]? (Essay Collection, 203)

If we pray prayers of deference (Pattern A) when we should have prayed prayers of assurance (Pattern B), could we be the doubter who clogs the drain of his own prayers (James 1:6–8)? Yet, if we pray Pattern B when A was best, we expose ourselves to presumption, false expectation, and disappointment.

What Wicked Men Understand

To deepen the question, we hear this same promise on the lips of another in the Gospel of Mark. Though he was a wicked man, the scene provides another valuable lens.

When Herodias’s daughter came in and danced, she pleased Herod and his guests. And the king said to the girl, “Ask me for whatever you wish, and I will give it to you.” And he vowed to her, “Whatever you ask me, I will give you, up to half of my kingdom.” (Mark 6:22–23)

This, you remember, is how John the Baptist’s head ends up on a platter. What did he mean by this promise? When Salome requested the prophet’s head instead of half the kingdom, “the king was exceedingly sorry, but because of his oaths and his guests he did not want to break his word to her” (Mark 6:26). He realized (and assumes his guests realize) that having promised “whatever she wished” up to half the kingdom, anything other than John’s head would break his word.

This understanding strikes the nerve of our silent misgivings over Pattern B. What do we make of the unanswered prayers of so many saints who thought they prayed with expectant faith? “Every war, every famine or plague, almost every death-bed, is the monument to a petition that was not granted” (Letters to Malcolm, 35). Again, he sees no problem with Pattern A — God always knows best. But how can we comfortably make eye-contact with Pattern B when it contrasts so much with our experience, dwelling now on the borderlands of the unbelievable?

Unhappy Birthdays

Some hurry to man the gap between the promise and our apparent experience of the promise by insisting that “whatever you ask” really means “whatever you ask . . . according to his will.” They cite 1 John 5:14: “And this is the confidence that we have toward him, that if we ask anything according to his will he hears us.” See, “according to his will.” Whatever is not a blank check in which one can write “a new Ferrari” or “a Christian spouse” or even “the conversion of my son” and safely believe to have it. Only checks that accord with his definite plan will cash.

Lewis finds this answer unsatisfactory.

Dare we say that when God promises “You shall have what you ask” he secretly means “You shall have it if you ask for something I wish to give you”? What should we think of an earthly father who promised to give his son whatever he chose for this birthday and, when the boy asked for a bicycle gave him an arithmetic book, then first disclosing the silent reservation with which the promise was made? (Essay Collection, 203)

Although the book might be better for the child, Lewis argues it arrives with a sense of “cruel mockery” for the boy without his bicycle. And Lewis’s understanding that sees whatever as quite simply whatever accords better with Herod’s understanding as well.

Splashing in the Shallows

As I wrestled with the tension Lewis exposes here, I began to realize a problematic tendency in my own prayer life: How often I have defaulted to Prayer A as a way to protect unbelief?

How many of my own If the Lord wills prayers have, beneath the surface, really been prayers saying, “I don’t really expect you to answer, so I’ll not get my hopes up?” How much has unbelief masqueraded, in Lewis’s words, as “fake humility and a false spirituality”? A tying of a rope around my waist as I venture out to meet Jesus upon the waves — just in case.

How many of us are men and women of little faith, not seriously considering Prayer B as an unconscious strategy to ward off suspected disappointment? I see this most in myself in my willingness to pray grand and abstract prayers, but rarely granular and specific prayers. Even if I ask Whatever I want prayers, they’re general requests that beget general (and open-ended) answers. But if I pray specific, time-dependent prayers, I know whether they’re answered as I prayed them or not.

Although I abide in Christ, ask in his name, have his words indwelling, possess a concern to bear fruit for his fame, I too often beach-dwell, splashing in the shallows of prayer, tempted to distrust that I ever will see whales and dolphins in the depths, as God offers.

Where Did Lewis Land?

How does Lewis answer his own riddle? Lewis guesses that Prayer B prayers must be expressions of a special God-given faith for specific kingdom work.

My own idea is that it occurs only when the one who prays does so as God’s fellow worker, demanding what is needed for the joint work. It is the prophet’s, the apostle’s, the missionary’s, the healer’s prayer that is made with this confidence and finds the confidence justified by the event. (Letters, 37)

In other words, this is a special “prayer of faith” for God’s fellow-workers. And the faith for this prayer, for Lewis, is not manufactured by us through a feat of “psychological gymnastics,” rather, it is God-given. We do not clench our fist and furrow our brow and prod our imaginations and confuse this with faith. God must give the gift. “For most of us,” Lewis admits, “the prayer in Gethsemane is the only model” (Letters, 37).

So, how should we pray tonight?

Lewis reasons along these lines, “Can I ease my problem by saying that until God gives me such a faith I have no practical decision to make; I must pray after the A pattern because, in fact I cannot pray after the B pattern? If, on the other hand, God ever gave me such a faith, then again I should have no decision to make; I should find myself praying in the B pattern” (Essays, 204).

Even this solution, however, did not ease all tensions,

But some discomfort remains. I do not like to represent God as saying “I will grant what you ask in faith” and adding, so to speak, “Because I will not give you the faith — not that kind — unless you ask what I want to give you.” Once more, there is just a faint suggestion of mockery, of goods that look a little larger in the advertisement then they turn out to be. (204)

How Will You Pray This Night?

For my own part, I look forward to help from wiser, more experienced saints. I confess my weakness, that I still do not know how to pray as I ought (Romans 8:26). Yet doesn’t Paul unearth a secret to our trouble with the next line commending the Spirit’s help to our faltering prayers? “The Spirit himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words,” and, “the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God” (Romans 8:27). He always prays B-pattern prayers on our behalf (if so they can be called). So, I must pray as I’m able, knowing that the Spirit’s groans make up perfectly for my ignorance.

How will I petition this night? I will petition God as one who loves God, his glory, his church, and his world. I will petition to bear fruit and to see souls bow to Jesus. And I will pray for faith to pray more boldly, more expectantly, as one who has a check signed by the King. I pray to experience this prayer of faith (if so it is). And I also pray reverently, “Thy will be done,” leaving room in my prayers for his will, the Spirit’s groans, but not for unbelief.

How will you pray this night?

Audio Transcript

Good Monday, and thank you for listening to the Ask Pastor John podcast. Well, male and female roles in the local church are clearly defined in the Bible. We believe those roles are clearly defined in the Bible. But do these roles hold outside the church, and particularly in a parachurch ministry structure? Increasingly, parachurch organizations are saying no. But that’s the open question for you today, Pastor John, who joins us remotely over Zoom.

The question is from a man inside a parachurch right now. “Pastor John, hello. I work for a global parachurch organization which is well-known. Recently our leadership decided that all positions of leadership within the organization will be opened to women. This includes campus leadership, regional leadership, and national leadership. Women will be permitted to teach men from the Scripture, to be in positions of spiritual authority over men, to shape and correct doctrine within the organization, and to mentor men in their ministry roles. Previously, these positions of spiritual authority over men were reserved for men alone. The reason given for this change is that a parachurch organization is not the church. Therefore the commands addressed to churches about the role of men and women in relationship to one another do not apply in this case. How do you see it?”

Well, that’s sad to hear to me, but it’s not surprising and it’s not new. The position that the teachings of the Bible concerning sexuality have no bearing on human relationships outside the church or the home is naive. Actually, to call it naive is perhaps too gentle because it could also be called culturally compromised. In other words, the pressures of our culture to view maleness and femaleness as having no built-in, natural, God-ordained differences that would shape our different relationships and responsibilities, those pressures — those cultural, societal pressures — are so great that many Christians today surrender to them rather than looking like fools in the eyes of the world.

Rejecting Authority

The world today is in a free fall of denial that nature teaches us anything about what maleness and femaleness are for. And that denial used to be — back when I was in the early days of fighting these battles — that male and female personhood teaches us nothing about what God intended our roles to be. But now the denial is that our bodies, not just our persons, teach us nothing about what life should be as male or female. You can cut off breasts; you can cut off the penis; you can cut out the uterus; you can replace estrogen with testosterone; you can grow facial hair on a female cheek.

“The world today is in a free fall of denial that nature teaches us anything about what maleness and femaleness are for.”

So at the root of the rejection that nature teaches us that men and women should relate in certain ways is the absolute refusal in our culture, by and large, to allow our individual freedom to be limited in any way by an authority outside our desires. Whether tradition or God or Bible or nature or instinct or society, we will not let anything infringe upon our autonomy and the sovereignty of our desires. So if God designs women to be women and men to be men, both in their bodies and in every cell of their bodies, and if his designs are written on their hearts, these God-given designs must be absolutely rejected because they infringe so obviously upon the autonomy of my sovereign self.

So at the root of the rejection that nature teaches us that men and women should relate in certain ways and not other ways is the old reality of Romans 8:7–8: “The mind that is set on the flesh” — that is the natural, fallen human mind — “is hostile to God, for it does not submit to God’s law” — whether that law is in the Bible or written on the heart — “indeed, it cannot [submit]. Those who are in the flesh” — that is, who are merely human, apart from regeneration and the work of the Holy Spirit — “cannot please God.” Or 1 Corinthians 2:14: “The natural person does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are folly” — they are foolishness — “to him,” which is why the person who holds my understanding today would be regarded as foolish.

Headed for a Fall

The culture as a whole is in a free fall of denial. Nobody in this free fall has on a parachute. It’s all going to end tragically, the evidences of which are all around us. They make you want to weep when you see what’s happening to young people, what’s happening to relationships, the kind of remorse and regret and carnage that is being unleashed on our culture as a penalty for the free fall denial of God and his ways.

And the gravitational pull of this free fall is in almost every movie, every online drama, every advertisement, every newscast, so that a person who stands up and draws attention to God’s word or the teaching of nature and questions the wisdom of undifferentiated sex roles will not only be thought a fool, but also unjust and, very likely, soft on abuse, even though all the while the sex-leveling egalitarian impulses wreak havoc at every level of our culture, mocking and distorting the very kind of strength and responsibility and leadership that we so need from men.

All of that to say, the argument that the biblical teachings on manhood and womanhood don’t have any bearing on roles outside the home and church is both naive and culturally compromised.

God and Nature Teach

Let me offer two reasons for thinking this way. One is that when the apostle Paul gave his instructions that only spiritually qualified men should teach and exercise authority in the church, his argument was not based on culture or on family or church or structures — ecclesiastical structures or any others. It was based on two things: (1) the order of man and woman in creation and (2) the dynamics between man and woman in the fall.

He said, “I do not permit a woman to teach or exercise authority over a man; rather, she is to remain quiet.” And here comes the argument: “For Adam was formed first, then Eve.” That’s argument number one. And two, “Adam was not deceived, but the woman was deceived and became a transgressor” (1 Timothy 2:12–14).

So Paul saw in the Genesis account of God’s word that built into creation from the beginning, before the fall, was a peculiar responsibility of men to bear the burden of leadership and care. And he saw in the way Adam was present and silent as Satan drew Eve into deceit that the abandonment of this leadership — in that case, Adam’s passivity and silence — bears very bad fruit. So the fact that Paul gave instructions for how this original design relates to the church in no way implies that it is limited to the church or the home. That was one application of many.

And you can see this again in 1 Corinthians 11, where Paul is helping the church preserve the dynamics of manhood and womanhood. He says at one point, “Does not nature itself teach you that if a man wears long hair it is a disgrace for him?” (1 Corinthians 11:14). Now, what I take that to mean is this: “Has not God put in man, by nature, the impulse that to take on culturally feminine symbols is disgraceful?” And we should agree with him. Nature teaches that it is disgraceful. The Bible teaches and nature teaches.

We might say today, “Does not nature teach you that for a man to wear a dress and stockings and high heels and lipstick is a disgrace?” Yes, it is. And nature teaches that. It is written on the heart. Millions are suppressing this truth of nature, but it is there. It is inescapable.

Parachurch Application

With regard to men and women in parachurch organizations, I think Paul would say, “I have taught, Moses has taught, nature teaches that it goes against man’s and woman’s truest, God-given nature to place a woman in a role of regular, direct, personal leadership over men.”

Now if you wonder, “Well, what do you mean, Piper, by ‘regular, direct, personal’?” then since this is a short podcast, I have to refer you to my little booklet What’s the Difference?. You don’t have to buy it. You can download it for free. And on page 58 and following, I define “regular, direct, personal” so that it will, I hope, make sense.

These are days of great shifting in people’s convictions and alignments on this issue of how men and women should relate to each other. So I pray for our brother who sent us this question, and I pray for myself and all of us, that God would guide us into truth and give us the courage to stand for it.