O come, O come, Immanuel,And ransom captive IsraelThat mourns in lonely exile hereUntil the Son of God appear.

Rejoice! Rejoice! ImmanuelShall come to thee, O Israel.

From Adam and Eve onward, the hope of God’s people has rested on a coming. We are a waiting people, a yearning people, a people who know we need rescue and know that only “the coming one” can bring it (Hebrews 10:37).

For over a thousand years, the hymn “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel” has put words to the church’s waiting, especially during Advent (a word that refers to an arrival, a coming). Advent, more than any other season, bids us to long for our coming Rescuer — and “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel,” perhaps more than any other hymn, provides lyrics for our longing.

This month at Desiring God, our team of teachers (with a few guests) will walk through the hymn with a focus on its seven titles for the Savior who came once and will come again. His name is Wisdom, Lord, Root of Jesse, Key of David, Day-Spring, King of the Gentiles — and here on the first day of Advent, Immanuel.

“Behold,” the prophet said, the angel told, “the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall call his name Immanuel” (Matthew 1:23). They shall call him God with us.

Land of Lonely Exile

At the heart of the human condition lies a deep and unshakable loneliness. We may find ways to mask the feeling, but however many people or pleasures surround us, we are by nature a lonely people on a lonely planet. For whoever and whatever is with us, we are nevertheless “without God in the world” (Ephesians 2:12).

Without God: like body without soul, tree without sap, family without father or mother, earth without sun. The words flash like the sword at Eden’s eastern gate: though with friends, with money, with job, with marriage, with pleasure, with power, with plenty — this one without ruins all. We are inescapably lonely without God. We are spiritually lost.

The hymn calls it our captivity, our lonely exile in a land “under sin” (Romans 3:9). We are like Israel in Egypt or the people of God “by the waters of Babylon” (Psalm 137:1) — but far worse, for our Pharaoh follows us wherever we go, and the rivers of our banishment run through our very soul. Without God, we are in exile everywhere.

Our home does not lie across a Red Sea or a wilderness but across the infinite chasm carved by human sin. So we live and die in a land of lonely exile, us without God. Unless, somehow, one should come named Immanuel, God with us.

Jesus Our Immanuel

Now, in one sense, Israel knew their God as Immanuel before the angel spoke to Mary. Moses wouldn’t leave Sinai unless God went “with us” (Exodus 33:15–16). In desperate moments, the people remembered that “the Lord of hosts is with us” (Psalm 46:6). The temple in particular stood as a precious sign of God’s presence with his people.

But the temple also stood as a trembling testimony of God’s distance from his people. The altar, the doorway, and the veil triple-locked God’s presence in the Most Holy Place from even the most upright of Israelites. Only one person could enter that Most Holy Place — “and he but once a year” (Hebrews 9:7).

In the deepest sense, then, God’s people were exiles even in Israel; they were lonely even in the promised land. However far west they went, they still lived east of Eden, for the angels embroidered on the temple’s veil still “turned every way to guard” the garden we once knew (Genesis 3:24; Exodus 26:31).

“At the heart of the human condition lies a deep and unshakable loneliness.”

We needed something more. We needed a temple “not made with hands” but having hands (Mark 14:58). We needed a Most Holy Place made human, a sanctuary with skin on, a veil born from a virgin. We needed a temple that John could lay his head upon and that Thomas could touch (John 13:23; 20:27). We needed Immanuel to enter the land of our exile. And we needed him to die like we exiles deserve.

And so he did. Jesus came, God with us, to restore relationship through ransom. He came to be Immanuel on the cross, crying out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Matthew 27:46). There Jesus embraced our captivity — and took captivity captive. There he entered our exile — and ended it from the inside.

The Son of God came to be with us so that he might experience all that it means to be without God — and so that, on the other side of that loneliest of exiles, our loneliness might come to an end as we say, “My God, my God, why have you welcomed me?”

Alone, Yet Not Alone

At the heart of the human condition lies a deep and unshakable loneliness. But at the heart of the Christian condition lies a deep and unshakable presence. Our sense of exile may linger, and we may feel, at times, the ache of old loneliness. But if we could read the secret script upon our heart, it would no longer say, “without God,” but rather “the beloved of Immanuel.”

Once, we were alone even when most surrounded; now, we are surrounded even when most alone. As Jesus told his disciples, “You . . . will leave me alone. Yet I am not alone” (John 16:32). Alone, yet not alone. So we are too in Christ, for the parting gift of Immanuel was to put another Immanuel in our hearts, the Spirit who is God with us and even God in us (John 14:17).

So even when we feel alone, we are not alone. Our captivity is over, our lonely exile ended. For Jesus, our Immanuel, has come.

He came into this world of sin,Made flesh and blood his dearest kin;He died, that he might take us in,And keep us till he comes again.

More than once, I’ve had such close calls with death that I felt the thinness of the wall between this world and the next. Those moments on the edge of my mortality — whether underwater or in a war zone — were at first breathtaking with suddenness and then sobering with what-ifs. But I was too busy living to think much about dying, and soon those close calls were in the rearview mirror.

However, my latest death threat is no near-miss. Nor can I outrun it. Successive cancer diagnoses in 2019, 2020, and 2021 have struck hard. My situation, though, is no different from what all of us will face because cancer is just another way to die. And one kindness from God I’ve seen (and I can count many of his kindnesses to me in this stretch of my journey) is that cancer has given me a clearer focus on the finish line.

I want to make every stride count — every day meaningful. I want to finish strong. As Eric Liddell, the Olympic gold-medal sprinter turned missionary, famously said, “I run the first two hundred meters as hard as I can. Then for the second two hundred meters, with God’s help, I run harder.” That’s how I want to run the race I’m in right now.

Still, as I pen these lines, I know I haven’t yet finished my course, and I strongly feel Spurgeon’s warning:

The trumpet still plays the notes of war. You cannot sit down and put the victory wreath on your head. You do not have a crown. You still must wear the helmet and carry the sword. You must watch, pray, and fight. Expect your last battle to be the most difficult, for the enemy’s fiercest charge is reserved for the end of the day. (Beside Still Waters, 2)

I am learning much through this experience, and God is certainly increasing my faith; but I admit it’s an uneven work because I am often a poor student. Thankfully, I have a patient Teacher. So, as I continue to press ahead in my race, there are three things I can tell you.

1. Number Your Days

The prayer of Moses in Psalm 90 is full of breathtaking awe and wonder over the God who is “from everlasting to everlasting” (verse 2). The Rock of Ages does not age. He was God before time, he is God who enters time, and he will be God when all our clocks and calendars, histories and monuments are no more.

But then, in cosmic contrast, there is another kind of breathtaking awe over just how brief our time is. Moses says our lives are “like grass” (verse 5) — here today and gone tomorrow. Even if we are granted a full life with enough birthday candles to set off the smoke alarm, yet the fire is extinguished with a breath, and we soon “fly away” (verse 10). So caught between brevity and eternity, we ask God to “teach us to number our days that we may get a heart of wisdom” (verse 12). Of course, none of us can add up in advance the number of days we will be given. But what we are to remember is that there is a number, and we can’t add a single hour to it (Luke 12:25).

We may imagine finishing well to look like a life full of years, perhaps like Jacob’s. “When Jacob finished commanding his sons, he drew up his feet into the bed and breathed his last and was gathered to his people” (Genesis 49:33). That’s a nice hope but an unlikely scenario, since death rarely operates on our timetable, and we don’t know whether we will be given ninety years or nineteen. Our finish lines often come suddenly, with little or no warning. There may be no home stretch — only Home, as quick as a wink. And so, given the here-today-gone-tomorrow reality of our vapor-like lives, the best way to finish life well is to finish each day well. We need to run with the heart and pace of a marathoner and with a sprinter’s eye for the swift finish.

2. Follow Closely

If life is brief — sometimes shockingly so — then wouldn’t it make sense to be careful and protect it? Certainly you should exercise, eat healthy, and look both ways before crossing the street, but the fact is that you cannot save your life. You can’t keep it. You can only spend it. So, spend it well.

Jesus told us how. “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). So, we must fully embrace, fully identify with, fully follow our Cross-bearer — whatever it will cost us and wherever it will take us. And clearly the path to fully following Christ is not found in a fear-driven, risk-averse, comfort-zone life. Risk will always be a basic and costly requirement of following and finishing well.

“The best way to finish life well is to finish each day well.”

This kind of risk isn’t just for missionaries who pursue Christ’s calling to the other side of the world. It’s also for speaking the gospel — with all its damning bad news and saving good news — personally, face to face with a coworker or neighbor in a society where “truth is looking stranger than the lies,” as Josh Garrels puts it in his song “Watchman.” In fact, being risk-averse is the opposite of cross-bearing. The One who carried the cross, died, and rose again says the way to life is to follow him in the fellowship of his sufferings and the power of his rising (Philippians 3:10) — and the fellowship of his sufferings necessarily involves suffering. Or as Elisabeth Elliot puts it,

To be a follower of the Crucified means, sooner or later, a personal encounter with the cross. And the cross always entails loss. The great symbol of Christianity means sacrifice and no one who calls himself a Christian can evade this stark fact. (These Strange Ashes, 145)

We want to make sense of suffering, but it rarely makes sense. We want the puzzle to come together and look like something meaningful, but too often there are missing pieces. Our dreams and plans never include chemo or car wrecks or the confusion that comes from deep disappointments and unexpected detours. My pastor often says, “God is calling us to follow him, and he rarely uses his turn signals.” So, we must follow closely and trust the lead and the love of the Shepherd with scars on his hands, who has already gone ahead of us into the darkness to crush Death to death.

3. Remember We Have a Great Savior

Our ultimate and only hope is in our great Savior. Finishing our days well — and our lives — is not about our grit or goodness, the length of our résumé, or the strength of our bodies and abilities. Paul’s letter to the Philippians was written from prison in Rome, and perhaps as his beloved Philippians read the letter, they remembered when Paul first came to their city and his preaching landed him in jail there. What happened in that Philippian cell was one of the most dramatic scenes in all of Paul’s missionary journeys:

About midnight Paul and Silas were praying and singing hymns to God, and the prisoners were listening to them, and suddenly there was a great earthquake, so that the foundations of the prison were shaken. And immediately all the doors were opened, and everyone’s bonds were unfastened. (Acts 16:25–26)

But as Paul writes this letter, months — perhaps years — have passed behind bars. There are no dramatic conversions, no midnight hymn sings, no earth-shaking, shackle-breaking deliverances. Far from his usual life in motion, Paul is chained and cannot walk out of his door. When darkness fell over that prison cell night after night, what hope could he possibly have that his life still made a difference? Paul tells us he labored on in hope “because Christ Jesus has made me his own.” So, from his four walls, he was still running hard toward Christ — straining, reaching, wanting to know him and make him known more and more, pressing “toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus” (Philippians 3:12, 14).

John Newton understood this, imprisoned behind his own bars of failing health. Though he had preached thousands of sermons and wrote hundreds of hymns, as his sight, hearing, and strength were fading, he summed up his situation in a sentence:

My memory is nearly gone; but I remember two things: that I am a great sinner, and that Christ is a great Saviour. (Wise Counsel, 401)

Newton’s body was failing, but his hope wasn’t. It was still as strong as when he penned this hymn in the early years of his ministry.

Rejoice, believer, in the Lord,Who makes your cause His own;The hope that’s built upon His WordCan ne’er be overthrown.

Though many foes beset your road,And feeble is your arm,Your life is hid with Christ in God,Beyond the reach of harm.

Weak as you are, you shall not faint,Or fainting, shall not die;Jesus, the strength of every saint,Will aid you from on high.

Christ is the one through whom and for whom we finish well. He is the one who gives the endurance we need, the joy we have, the cross we bear, and the hope we embrace until faith becomes sight.

Jon Hoglund: My name is Jon Hoglund, and I’m one of the professors here at Bethlehem College and Seminary. Welcome to this book discussion session. Joining me on stage is pastor John Piper, along with current students at Bethlehem College and Seminary — both college and seminary students.

We’re going to be discussing together Let the Nations Be Glad: The Supremacy of God in Missions. Pastor John wrote this book originally in 1993, and it has gone through several editions, including the most recent thirtieth anniversary edition. We look forward to sharing that with you.

All of these students have read the book and are prepared with questions. We’d like to invite you into a conversation about it, and also to give you a taste of why this book continues to shape conversations about missions, even 31 years later.

For our first question, Sang is going to introduce us by asking us a question about his interest in missions.

Sang: Pastor John, in this book — and through the rest of your ministry — you put forward the supremacy of God and his glory, and its relationship to our experience as human beings. You say, “God is most glorified when we are most satisfied with him.” You’ve written that Jonathan Edwards was instrumental in helping you to see these realities, and how this was a life-changing moment for you. My question is, Did your passion for missions grow in connection with that discovery? When did missions first become important to you, and what has that looked like in your life since then?

John Piper: Christian Hedonism emerged in my consciousness in about 1968, but it did not have — to my shame — a dominant or significant impact on my world Christianity until 1983. I had fifteen years of percolating, while I was reading my Bible badly. This is a lesson on how Bible-oriented people like me, who read the Bible all the time, can miss things. And when someone eventually points you to them and hits you with a two-by-four, you say, “How did I miss that?”

The kindling was laid early. My dad loved missions. He prayed about the glory of God and mission every night when he was home. And Wheaton, where I went for college, had a missions focus. I remember it. It was inspiring. At Fuller also, I took courses from Raph Winter, who was the craziest gung-ho missions statesman there ever was in the twentieth century. But it didn’t affect much in my life. Then I came here to be a pastor in 1980, and we had a mission conference here that I inherited. It involved two weekends and the days in between. They didn’t have the pastor preach either of those Sundays, so I didn’t have to preach on missions. Nobody asked me to until 1983.

I was preaching a series on Christian Hedonism, and they said, “Pastor, why don’t you do the first week of missions week?” That was epoch-making. The book Let the Nations Be Glad is an epoch. The sermon I preached that day was titled “[Missions: The Battle Cry of Christian Hedonism.]” And I just had to think, what does a Christian Hedonist say about the nations? That’s something I should have said over and over in fifteen years, but I didn’t. I’ll give you several texts that just exploded.

The sermon text for that sermon was Mark 10:17–31, which is about the rich young ruler. He walked away and Jesus said, “It is hard for the rich to get into the kingdom of heaven.” The disciples threw up their hands and said, “Well then who can be saved?” And Jesus said, “With man it is impossible, but with God nothing is impossible.” I can remember in 1967 Noël and I went to Urbana. There was a man who spoke there who said, “When I first went to the mission field, I thought, ‘If I believed in predestination, why would I ever be a missionary? If God has already decided who is going to be saved, why would I go to the mission field?’ Now, after twenty years in Pakistan, I say that if I didn’t believe in predestination I wouldn’t go to the mission field.” Now I’m a seven-point Calvinist, but at the time that didn’t do it for me. It shows how slow we are to make connections between what we hold dear and things we don’t think much about. So that part of the text about the sovereignty of God was connected to how God can save anybody. So, then, we should get going on it globally.

The other part of the text was about how Peter said, “We’ve left everything and followed you.” I think he was saying, “We’re not like the rich guy. We’ve left everything. We’ve made the appropriate sacrifice.” Jesus didn’t like that. Do you remember what he said? He said,

Truly, I say to you, there is no one who has left house or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or lands, for my sake and for the gospel, who will not receive a hundredfold now in this time, houses and brothers and sisters and mothers and children and lands, with persecutions, and in the age to come eternal life. (Mark 10:29–30)

In other words, “Get off your self-pity kick, Peter. Nobody can out-sacrifice me. You’re in it for joy, and I mean for you to be.” That was my paraphrase of what he said. So, we have the sovereignty of God, and he can conquer anyone’s heart. And then Jesus is also telling Peter, “This is not about self-pity or sacrifice, ultimately. It’s about finding where your true treasure is and going for broke.”

Here is one more text. And this seals the deal because of the title of the book. Psalm 96:1–3 says,

Oh sing to the Lord a new song;     sing to the Lord, all the earth!Sing to the Lord, bless his name;     tell of his salvation from day to day.Declare his glory among the nations . . .

There you have glory, and then then Psalm 67:1–3 says,

May God be gracious to us and bless us     and make his face to shine upon us,that your way may be known on earth,     your saving power among all nations.Let the peoples praise you, O God;     let all the peoples praise you!Let the nations be glad and sing for joy . . .

So you have, “Go tell them I’m glorious,” and, “Go tell them to be glad.” After that, the battle was over. Then for the next decade, a lot of what I did was conference after conference on missions, in order to make up for lost time on world missions. A Christian Hedonist is a person who believes that God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in him, and there you have the Psalms saying, “Go tell the world to be satisfied,” and “Go tell the world I’m glorious.” That’s Christian Hedonism.

Hoglund: Excellent. Thank you very much. The beginning of the book talks about the purpose, the power, and the price of missions. Selah is going to begin a few questions for us on those topics.

Selah: In reading your book, I wondered if there is a danger in treating people simply as a means to the end of God’s glory. While we see in your book that it is important to be zealous for all people to worship God and also to show compassion, how do we keep that big picture of God’s glory in mind while not thinking of people as projects to complete for the sake of God’s glory? Or is there even a problem with that type of thinking?

Piper: Here’s the nub that I’m hearing in your question. You’re going to head into the world and you’re going to say your dominant motive is, “I want God to be glorious in this world. I want every human being to know he is God. And he is glorious. I’m in the world to get you to do that.” They might feel like, “What about me? Do you care about me at all? Do I matter to you?” That’s the question you’re getting at, and let me state the other half about Christian Hedonism because this has been said to me.

People say, “Are you saying that not only do you want to be motivated by the glory of God but also your own happiness? You want your joy to increase? So, you’re in this business of Christianity to be happier?” That’s exactly right. I am. Christian Hedonism is a life devoted to pleasure. So, people say I’m just selfish. They say, “You don’t care about me; you care about you. You’re going to make me a project for your joy.” So, we have two problems, not just one: Am I making people a project to get glory for God? And am I making people a project to make myself happy? These questions do not intimidate me. I am so excited to answer these kinds of questions. I love that question because Christian Hedonism is the answer to both of those questions.

Let’s take mine first. You have to have an answer to this if you even come close to being a biblical Christian. You’re talking to someone about Jesus, and you want to lead them to Jesus, and they pick up on your hedonism and they say, “So you really are talking to me right now to increase your happiness?” I would say, “That’s exactly what I’m doing.” They say, “Isn’t that selfish?” And I would say, “It’s not selfish because no one would accuse a person of selfishness if they’re willing to lay down their lives to draw another person into the sharing of their joy.” Nobody is accused of selfishness if they say, “I will lay down my life to include you into the joy that I am pursuing. And not only will I lay down my life to include you into it, but it will make my joy bigger if you come. Your joy will be my joy.” That’s a Bible statement from 2 Corinthians 2:3. I think you can persuade unbelievers that it makes sense, even if they don’t like it.

I used to go to the hospital to visit people when I was a pastor. Let’s say I’m going to visit Maybel. We’ll call her Maybel because she’s 85 years old. She just had a heart attack, and her son asked me to visit her. So, I go into Maybel’s room, and she’s all hooked up with tubes. I don’t know if she’s going to make it. Her eyes are closed, and her skin is all shriveled, and there are bruises all over her. And I didn’t feel like going to visit her. I walk up to her and put my hand on her arm, and she says, “Oh pastor, you shouldn’t have.” (Old people always say, “You shouldn’t have.” Young people say, “It’s about time.”) At that moment when she says that, I could say, “I know, and I didn’t want to, but I’m a pastor and I have to. It’s my duty.” I don’t say that. I say, “Maybel, I’m here because it makes me so happy to share the best news in the world with you right now.” Not in a thousand years would she say, “You’re so selfish. You just want to make yourself happy.” She wouldn’t say that because it’s not true. That’s the answer to my question, which you didn’t ask.

It’s the same answer in relation to the glory of God. If they say, “You don’t care about me. You just care about your God. You just want him to look glorious, but you don’t care at all about my happiness.” My first response to that is, “Can I tell you about what the beauty of Christianity is? The beauty of Christianity is that we have the kind of God who gets the most glory in making you most happy in him.” This is not about choosing between a person’s happiness and God’s glory. It just doesn’t work that way in Christianity. It might work that way in other religions. I don’t know. But in Christianity, you dare not choose between your happiness and God’s glory. You look them right in the eye and say, “Do you get that? You may not choose between your happiness and God’s glory. As soon as you decide to nullify your happiness, God will not get the glory he deserves. You must pursue your happiness. Right now. You must pursue your maximum happiness. That’s why I’m here. I’m elevating the glory of God because that’s the only thing that can make you truly happy. You were made for something way bigger than all that stuff you’re living for right now.”

So, I just wouldn’t buy it that I have turned a person into a project because the key to God getting glory is the person getting happy in him. And a person whose happiness is being pursued like that doesn’t feel like a project.

Marc: Staying with the heart issue there but going in a slightly different direction, you allude to Matthew 16:24 and say, “To take up a cross and follow Jesus means to join Jesus on the Calvary road with a resolve to suffer and die with him.” Shortly afterward, you then balance this with a reminder, saying, “Christian martyrs do not pursue death; they pursue love.” As you intentionally aim to stoke the fire of zeal in missions, how would you counsel churches to avoid developing a martyrdom complex, where we might have this burning zeal to die for Jesus but be comparatively cold toward more mundane daily ministry to people?

Piper: If I knew any church like that, I would be happy to work on that problem. Are any of your churches in danger of creating martyr complexes? I’m going to make your question valid anyway, because it is. Seriously, I wish that were a problem. The value in your question is that it is possible to head toward the mission field with idealized, romanticized notions even of suffering. It’s not going to go well if you think that way.

It’s interesting you referred to the Calvary road. The Calvary road ended at Calvary, but it was a road — and all of it was hard. If you think, “My life is going to end gloriously. Somebody will write an article about me, or maybe a biography,” that discounts the mundane. It discounts the Calvary road, like reading for class (which you’re supposed to do). It discounts washing your clothes and paying your bills. I think what I would do to counsel those churches is to say, “You need a robust doctrine of suffering.” By robust, I mean enough to handle martyrdom but also enough to handle setting your alarm early enough to have devotions. That’s a kind of self-denial. And isn’t it interesting that in Luke’s version of self-denial, he says daily. It says, “Take up your cross daily.” So, there is martyrdom, and then there are daily crosses. And most of them are very inglorious. They’re just plain boring, hard, and ordinary. Nobody is praising you for them. They don’t even know you were faithful in that obligation. I think that’s probably the way that I would counsel the church.

Marc: I think so. There’s this saying that everyone wants to save the world, but no one wants to help mom with the dishes. And it sounds like you’re saying that underlying it is a misguided zeal, and that having a more robust theology of suffering will help you in those mundane sufferings where you’re not constantly striving for the big suffering.

Piper: That’s a great quote, and I take your question as a warning to me. Because I do — and I will tonight — move toward the ultimate quickly. I think that’s a good test case to see how people respond to the ultimate suffering. But in view of what you just said, probably the other piece of the counsel that I would give to a church is that they shouldn’t send missionaries that they haven’t put to work in a lot of ordinary ways here. Are they just wanting the big glory over there? Or are they willing to walk down 11th Avenue and pick up the trash? Are they willing to walk up to a guy with his lighter under his tin foil, sniffing his smoke, and tell him about Jesus? And if they’re not, don’t send them.

Preston: In chapter 3, you quote from Jonathan Edwards’s sermon “Heaven Is a World of Love” in order to show how differing degrees of glory in heaven will not be the cause of envy or pride in glorified saints. However, while on earth, how are those who are not as successful in their missionary efforts — despite months, years, or decades of faithful labor — to keep from becoming envious? In other words, how would you counsel missionaries to think about fruitfulness even if they are not seeing obvious fruit in their labors?

Piper: That’s really important. Let me say a word about envy first, and then we’ll go to the other part. It’s not wrong to want to be fruitful. It’s not wrong to want to be as fruitful as someone else is fruitful. Envy is being resentful that they are more fruitful than you are. It galls you. That’s envy. The desire for more hope, more love, more patience, more kindness, more faith like a hero is not sinful. The Bible holds up examples all the time of people we are supposed to imitate. We should long to be like them. Envy is when we start this niggling sense of, “I’d like to see them stumble.” That’s dangerous. That’s so dangerous. You see somebody, and they’re making it and they don’t stumble, and then you think, “I’d like to see them take a fall.” That is so far from the Spirit of Christ. That’s envy, and it is owing to pride and ego. It says, “I need my ego to be stroked by superiority.” It’s not about fruitfulness but superiority. That’s wicked.

Now, what do you say to help people press on in all the varying degrees of fruitfulness in the world? Just look around this room. Nobody is identical to anybody. It’s amazing. We are so diverse, and some of you are good at some things and not good at other things. If you spend your life comparing yourself, you will die. Mark Noll told this story in my graduating class in Wheaton. He was my RA my senior year. Outside his door, he tacked up a little saying that said, “To love is to stop comparing.” Mark was a 4.0 student. He was operating from the side of being admired. And he knew that as long as people stood in such awe of him, he wouldn’t have very good relationships. So, we must be careful in that regard.

But how do you do it, then, if you’re not going to compare? Maybe you know that their church grew but your church didn’t grow. Paul said, “I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the growth. So neither he who plants nor he who waters is anything, but only God who gives the growth” (1 Corinthians 3:6–7). So, you bow before the sovereignty of God and say, “He gave growth there, and he didn’t give growth here. God is God. I’m not God. I love God. He’s good. He’s just. He’s wise.” That’s one answer. It’s the sovereignty and goodness of God disposing his gifts and blessings where he pleases.

The second thing you might take into consideration is this. When Billy Graham used to have his mission in town here, he said one time to his hundred-person staff, “You know, don’t you, that in line for rewards in heaven a lot of you will be ahead of me.” One lady told me this story and she said, “Most of us rolled our eyes at that. That’s inappropriate humility. But he got very stern. And he said, ‘God rewards faithfulness, not fruitfulness. A thousand people may walk to the front of my crusades, but maybe you’re the means of saving one person in your life and your reward will be great because your duties were fulfilled with greater care and you were faithful morning to night in a thousand ways.’” That’s so important, folks.

If you keep going in 1 Corinthians 3, you have the man whose life is passed through the fire and the wood, hay, and stubble are burned up. He doesn’t get rewards for that. Well, what was that? That was not about fruitfulness or a failure at fruitfulness. It was bad teaching. Paul laid the foundation, and other people were building on it with wood, hay, and stubble, and they are going to squeak by. You don’t say, “Oh, my lack of fruitfulness is going to get burned up at the last day.” That’s not what he’s talking about.

Here’s one other thing. I’ve often wondered what success I might have had as a pastor in Brazil or Mississippi — a place where they have emotions. Because I can get into that. I can preach to people like that. My church might grow. Here’s the point: planting a church in New Hampshire and planting a church in Mississippi are radically different challenges — not to mention Afghanistan. Therefore, if you measure yourself in New Hampshire by the guy in Mississippi, that’s not a wise thing to do. So, taking into account factors like gifting, location, culture, and all kinds of things, it might shape the kind of fruitfulness your life has.

Hoglund: Next, we have a couple of questions on missions practice and priorities, which come from the middle section of Let the Nations Be Glad.

Eddie: My question is about unreached people groups and the strategy that churches employ to reach them. It’s about the desire to finish the task. Should we think of missions as a continuous work of reaching unreached people groups as they sprout up, rather than a time-specific snapshot of people-group status collected by a mission organization? In a migration-heavy and constantly changing world, should missions be more about finishing or being faithful to the task?

Piper: Those are not alternatives in my mind. Work on finishing and work on being faithful are like comparing apples and fruit. Here’s what drives me not to write off the finishing mindset — finish the Great Commission; work on it; be part of it. Back in the 1980s, we were saying, “By 2000, come, Lord Jesus.” Date-setting is a bad thing to do, but praying for it is not. “Come, Lord Jesus” is a prayer every saint should pray. The sooner the better.

Finishing the task is still valid because Jesus said, “Go and make disciples of all nations” (Matthew 28:19). Whatever the panta ta ethnē is, go for it. Disciples them, baptize them, teach them, and keep doing it until you have all of them. Another text says, “You were slain, and by your blood you ransomed people for God from every tribe and language and people and nation, and you have made them a kingdom and priests to our God, and they shall reign on the earth” (Revelation 5:9–10). He died to ransom people from all of those nations, so we should be about the business of getting all of them from those nations. It’s like Paul in Corinth: “I have many in this city who are my people” (Acts 18:10).

The third text I would go to is Matthew 24:14, which says, “This gospel of the kingdom will be proclaimed throughout the whole world as a testimony to all nations, and then the end will come.” There’s a connection between the end and reaching all the nations. I remember George Ladd, a New Testament scholar who was a teacher of mine at Fuller, wrote an article on Peter’s phrase “hasten the day of God” (2 Peter 3:12). What in the world is that? God has a day fixed, so what does he mean by “hasten the day of God”? He said, “There is one way to hasten the day of God: finish the mission.” I thought that was pretty good. So that’s my impulse to not lose the finishing mindset. I hope you don’t. I know from talking to one person already that there are people in this room on their way to the mission field. I was praying with my wife 45 minutes ago that there would be more because of this moment right here. I pray that some of you would come to this, maybe being wobbly about your future, and by the end of it not be wobbly anymore.

On the being faithful side, we don’t know when the end will be. I think one of the things you think about, Eddie, is the fact that “unreached peoples” is an amorphous idea. It’s not clearly defined, even when you say “tribe, people, tongue, nation.” If you take those four, can you draw nice lines between them? No. Can you tell how wide they are? No. But there are a lot of them. It’s probably not taxi drivers in Mumbai. I don’t think that’s the kind of people Jesus had in mind. I think he had ethnolinguistic groups, which is more manageable than every layer of job you could have. But your point is that some of those are going out of existence, and some of them are coming into existence.

So, what did Jesus mean? Frankly, I don’t know. I don’t know how Jesus would answer that question. We should go to all the nations, and Jesus can see thousands of ethnolinguistic people groups, however many there are. He knew that some of those tiny tribes at that point in South America or North America wouldn’t exist by the time missionaries got there. All I can say is that he knew that, and he didn’t intend those things. We shouldn’t press it that hard. But faithfulness means that you do what you should wherever God calls you in the process of finishing. And we all fit into different places.

I’ve never been a missionary. It should be a lesson for a lot of you that I wrote a book on missions that is used in classes and has made a difference, and I’ve never been a missionary. That’s weird. How can that be? That should tell you there are all kinds of ways God is going to use you. You can’t even imagine. So, yes to faithfulness and yes to finishing — both-and.

Jorge: There are lots of churches that send church-planting missionaries and evangelists to already reached places, such as countries in South America, Africa, and Asia. You talk about how the center of gravity in world Christianity is shifting toward the south and east. For instance, in my hometown in Mexico, there were lots of missionaries who came to preach the gospel though the gospel had already been preached there decades ago. Typically, a missionary would come, plant a church, leave, and an untrained or unqualified leader would rise up to the pulpit, eventually resulting in scandal, heresy, and a broken church. So, what should the emphasis of missions look like in countries like these? More specifically, should education and training — that is, theological education and pastoral training — replace the more traditional evangelism route as the primary focus?

Piper: My reaction to the last part of the question is no, but it’s not a quick no because the word “traditional” may carry a freight in your vocabulary that I’m not fully aware of. Let me see if I can put myself in your head and answer what you really mean. In 1985, I went to Cameroon for the first time, and I said, “I thought Wycliffe was a frontline mission organization, but Wycliffe is a church renewal project.” There were churches that had been there for 150 years. What is going on there? Why is there such dependence on the West after 150 years? I’ve thought a lot about those things.

And just to be fair, you didn’t come into being in 150 years. You came into being in two thousand years. This country is shot through with churches, publishing houses, seminaries, Bible colleges, and there is Christian influence at every level. And it’s not because of 150 years, but because of a long four hundred years of battling through the truth. And there was a long time of seasoning during the Middle Ages, and then there were hundreds of years of Reformation and a couple Great Awakenings. And there were new starts on this land, and here you are. You know a lot. You are more biblically informed than almost all Christians prior to three hundred or four hundred years ago. So here we are, and we look at a country that’s had the gospel for forty or fifty years and we say, “What’s wrong?” Are you kidding me? Who are we to be talking? We bear the fruit of thousands of years of labor and refinement. So we really need to be patient.

Now, your question is, Should we alter the strategies in such a way that we would keep what you just described from happening? And when I think of who is doing that, I think of Dieudonné in Cameroon, because Dieudonné loves his country, sees the doctrinal chaos and the weakness of the church, and he wants there to be evangelism — and I would have no problem saying “traditional evangelism.” He wants that to happen. Go tell people about Jesus. Have a strong church where they send them out as salt, tell people about Jesus, people get saved, and then they bring them in and disciple them. That’s what they should be doing, but he knows that he has to train pastors.

We know from recent news that you can be as trained as possible and still make shipwreck of your ministry, right? But what we need all over the world is both-and. Every question here is probably a both-and question. We need people with a vision for deep training, strengthening leaders, and growing up indigenous pastors who stand on their own two theological feet. Here’s a little anecdote to overstate the case, but I love Ralph Winter. He almost overstated everything. When I asked him, “What does it mean to be a reached people group?” he said, “When the local people have Greek and Hebrew and they are writing their own books for their own seminaries and colleges.” I said, “That’s a long time.” If you stay with a people group that long, you won’t reach all of them.

But another qualification is that some are called to stay there with them, and some aren’t. There are Paul-type missionaries and Timothy-type missionaries. Paul said, “I’m going to the unreached peoples,” and Timothy said, “I’m staying in Ephesus.” Timothy and Titus types are growing up elders and trying to reach the lost there. So, I think the answer to your question is that if in your judgment the traditional approach has been “get people saved and don’t do much theological preparation for fifty years from now,” that should change.

Piper B.: Since we believe that God will work in the hearts of those we interact with among the nations, and since we trust his sovereignty in each conversation we have with the unreached, how should we go about pursuing relationships with those who aren’t open to the gospel immediately? Should we consider this a closed door? Or should we continue to pursue relationships, trusting that the Lord will work through our faithfulness to the Great Commission?

Piper: You asked earlier which question I found most interesting, and I said, “I know which one I found most difficult.” It was that one. I have seen these questions before. Jesus sent out his disciples two by two and he said, “If you enter a town and they do not receive you, shake the dust off your sandals and go to another city” (Matthew 10:14). And Paul in Acts 13 goes on the first Sabbath to a synagogue and blows them away with this long sermon. Some say, “Come back next week.” And he comes back, and the opposition is enormous. I can picture Paul putting up his hands and saying, “If you judge yourselves unworthy of eternal life, I’m turning to the Gentiles.” He leaves the synagogue and leaves the people in their lostness, unless they want to come to the meeting.

So, I have these texts in my mind that are discouraging me at one level from lingering too long with resistant people. And you love people like that. And you would lay down your life for them right now. You don’t want people to forsake them. You’re praying right now that people would go into their lives and ask them for the thousandth time if they believe. You don’t want to go this route of shaking the dust off your sandals, and I don’t think the Bible had that as its only message on how to do evangelism. It’s one message, and it’s true. Jesus said, “Don’t cast your pearls before swine” (Matthew 7:6). I think that means something like, “If the resistance is so ugly, so bitter, so skeptical, so cynical, then you just say, ‘Okay, I’m going to talk to some other people right now. Excuse me.’” So, there is a place for saying, “I’m done with you.”

There are a couple reasons why I don’t think that’s the only message of the New Testament. First, it has to do with what I said earlier about there being two types of missionaries: Paul-type and Timothy-type. Paul was a frontier missionary, a pioneer missionary. When he had reached northern Greece (Illyricum) — starting in Jerusalem, going up through Syria, moving across Asia Minor, going over into Greece, coming down into Corinth, and then going up the coast to Illyricum and northern Italy — he said, “I have no more room for work in these regions” (Romans 15:23). Are you kidding me? There were tens of thousands of unbelievers in that region. What did he mean that he has no more room for work? He meant, “I’m a frontier missionary. The church exists here. I’m going to Spain.” Now, that kind of person will not spend too long with recalcitrant people.

But do you know what he did in Ephesus and Crete? He left Timothy and Titus. And he wrote letters to them to tell them how to do their work, and he said, “Do the work of an evangelist” (2 Timothy 4:5). What did that mean? It meant that they had a region they were responsible for, and they were supposed to stay right there. They should send their people out to be as loving and creative as they could be. They will figure out how long they can talk to a person, just like you’re trying to figure out how many emails you should write to your loved one.

Here’s the other biblical impulse that makes me think that knocking the dust off our sandals is not the only message. Do you remember the parable Jesus told where he said that a man owned a fig tree (Luke 13:6–9)? He says that the fig tree didn’t bear any fruit for three years, so cut it down because it shouldn’t even waste the ground. And this unknown spokesman — whoever it is — says, “Sir, could we wait just one more year and put some fertilizer around it? And then if it doesn’t bear fruit, you can cut it down.” Now, what’s the point of that parable? I think it’s a double point. I think the first point is that Israel is close to being cut down, so they shouldn’t toy with him. He came offering them the gospel, and they should repent and bear the fruits of repentance, or else they are coming down. And the point of the parable is that there is an impulse of patience. Give them another year. Give them another visit. I don’t know the right time, but your heart will make it plain, won’t it?

That’s what we do every day. We plead with the Holy Spirit. We say, “Make me know when to talk and make me know when not to talk — what to say and what not to say.” The Bible simply does not give us all the specifics on how frequently to talk to an unbeliever or what we should say. It’s a both-and again.

Hoglund: We have time for two more questions. Julia is going to ask one about chapter 7 in the book, which talks about the difference between inward and outward worship as a New Testament concept.

Julia: I’ve spent two years at the Getty’s Sing! Conference. I’ve always come away greatly enriched by their vision of the church, corporate worship, global missions, and most definitely eternity. At the conference this year, you pressed into the doctrine of God as the foundation of our delight in him, which should flow forth in praise. In chapter 7 of Let the Nations Be Glad, you place a similar emphasis on passion for God and his glory in Christ as the foundation for inward affection that leads to outward worship. But you also make clear that in the New Testament, Jesus presents a new model for worship that does not necessarily imply corporate gathering; rather, Jesus emphasizes a posture of heart over form and outward expression. In light of these things, is it problematic that we refer to worship as “corporate worship” if worship is in fact a primarily inward action?

Piper: It can be problematic. If I’m in a conversation, I will listen to discern how people use the word “worship” — whether they mean a set of forms or whether they mean something in the heart. So yes, it can be a problem.

Here’s a little anecdote about the book. The only sentence anyone ever remembers in this book is the first sentence, which is, “Missions exists because worship doesn’t.” I had these worship leaders coming up to me saying, “I love this sentence. This is so great.” And it really did serve a lot of people who did international worship ministries. But I could tell they were taking my meaning to be worship service: “Missions exists because worship services don’t.” I thought, That’s not what I mean! The key that preserves the error from happening is Matthew 15:8, which says, “This people honors me with their lips, but their heart is far from me; in vain do they worship me.” That’s the text that drives me in the essence of worship being in the heart. Forms and extensions and expressions of worship are external — singing, praying, kneeling, conversing, preaching. All those are forms, and they can be totally empty with zero worship happening in worship services. The Lord is holding his nose in the Old Testament during the solemn assemblies (Isaiah 1:13; Amos 5:21). Why is he holding their nose? They’re worshiping him. Listen to the language. They’re praising Yahweh. And he says, “They’re not paying their laborers.” So, I don’t like emphases on form.

What I mean by the New Testament being so different from the Old is that there are almost endless instructions about how to worship in the Old Testament outwardly. There are endless instructions on how to do it right. And there is almost nothing in the New Testament like that — almost. I don’t want you to say that Piper thinks there shouldn’t be corporate worship services. I make a case in my preaching book for that. I had a missionary write to me and say, “We have a lot of missionaries who don’t believe in preaching. Do you have anything to defend the normativity of preaching in worship services?” I said, “Yeah, I wrote a book about it. It’s called Expository Exultation. The first quarter of the book is about that.” I believe that you can read the New Testament carefully and know that you ought not to forsake the assembling of yourselves together, and there is enough evidence that you ought to sing and preach in those services.

So, let it be said. Sunday morning, I sit right over there, and I love it. My marriage has been saved by corporate-worship services. I’ve told Noël that. You have a squabble with your wife on Saturday, and you’re not talking. You’re emotionally ticked and you’re self-pitying. And then you come into a service and suddenly lift up — with four hundred or five hundred people — the bigness of God, the mercies of God, the kindness of God, and you feel like an idiot. You think, “Why am I wrecking this relationship with my piqued, emotional, self-pitying selfishness?” God has appointed corporate worship services to save marriages and other things. I love corporate worship, but I love real worship in the heart more.

James: I have a little bit of a hypothetical question for you. Suppose there is a young couple who is interested in missions and has been praying for a door to be opened for several years. Then suddenly a door opens before them. However, as they investigate this opportunity, they suddenly realize that being overseas would look quite different from what they had expected. Therefore, the couple is then split over what action to take. One desires to continue ahead, while the other is unsure that this is truly what they’re being called to do. What encouragement or advice do you have for this couple?

Piper: Someone said, “What was the most interesting question?” I say, “Let’s talk about complementarianism.” We have one minute. That’s not going to happen.

Some of you don’t even know what that word means. We’re complementarians — I am, and Bethlehem College and Seminary is happy to use that word. It simply means that when we read Ephesians 5, it says, “Wives, be subject to your own husbands, as to the Lord” (Ephesians 5:22), and, “Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church” (Ephesians 5:25). Husbands are called the “head” of their wives (Ephesians 5:23). So, we have the husband taking his cues from Christ, and we have the wife taking her cues from a glad, obedient, maturing church. And that’s what marriage is. The world doesn’t know that’s what marriage is. They don’t have any idea what marriage is. In the Bible, marriage is a parable, a drama, of Christ and the church. That’s what it’s for. It was conceived that way from the beginning in Genesis 2. That’s complementarianism. Husbands lead, provide, and protect, and wives are glad to have it so. They think, “Give me a man like that, a mature man that I can respect. He’s biblical. He’s Christlike through and through. I’ll go anywhere with him.” That brings us to your question.

I’ll bet everyone is assuming that the guy wants to go, and the woman is dragging her feet. In my forty years at this church, that’s not been the case mostly. It’s the woman who says, “Honey, let’s go,” and he’s saying, “I’m not sure. Maybe we didn’t have it right.” So let me just deal with both. What do you do? You have a wife who wants to go, and the man doesn’t — or maybe you have a husband who wants to go, and the wife doesn’t. Those are the two different scenarios, and I don’t think they are solved in exactly the same way. It’s the non-parallelism that makes you complementarian.

Let’s think about the guy first. He wants to go. He believes it’s God’s will for them to go to the mission field, and now she has seen enough that she’s saying, “I’m not sure about this.” What does a head do? This is where you have to be so careful and biblical. He remembers that he is like Christ, but he’s not Christ. He’s not infallible like Christ. He’s not sinless like Christ. And that’s enough to make him slow to take Christ’s place in her life. This woman has a direct line to Christ. That’s the priesthood of the believer. And she’s claiming that her sense of this is not so sure. And his sense is different. He knows that he’s not God. And therefore, he doesn’t preempt conversation. He doesn’t assume that he doesn’t need counsel and wisdom. He doesn’t assume that he shouldn’t pay attention to her. That’s crazy, not only because it is unprincipled biblically, but also because you have to have her on board. You can’t have her dragging her feet. You have to be together. It’s not going to work if she isn’t in this. And not everybody did that in history.

That’s the first scenario. It means that he’s going to say, “Tell me the problems,” and he’s going to take the time to listen, discuss, argue, read the Bible with her, and pray with her. And over time, he’s going to hope that they go together. And here’s the difference between this and the other situation. There may come a point where he discerns that she is strong enough and that even though she has these misgivings, it’s time. They’re going to go. He says to her, “You can do this.” And I think she should say, “You’re the man. I’m going.”

Now, what if she wants to go and he is saying, “I don’t know”? She’s not the head, and she wants to persuade him, and she ought to want to persuade him. That’s the way it is in 1 Peter 3. The wife is desperately trying to win him to Christ — or in this case, she is trying to win him to the missionary calling they once had and she thinks they still have. She’s going to do similar things. She’s going to pray. She’s going to talk. She’s going to give her reasons. She’s going to be patient and wait. But she will not, like him, come to the point where she says, “We’re going. Pack your bags, hubby.” That’s not going to happen in a complementarian marriage. But she can win him. And she needs to. They have to do this together. That’s the bottom line.

Maybe I’ll close with this. I stood at the front there for about thirty years, and people would come to me with the most intractable questions. I would think, “I don’t have any idea what the answer is to your question.” It seemed like a situation of “damned if you do, damned if you don’t.” It would seem like there was no way forward in a relationship with their dad, or their wife, or their employer. I would generally say, “I don’t know. But I do know there is a third way. God has a third way. He has a way that will be obedient and right. Right now, you can’t see it and I can’t see it. But God can see it. Let’s ask him.” I would say that. So maybe the woman would think, “This is deadlocked. This is going to be miserable for the next ten years.” Or maybe the man might say that. But I would say, “No, there’s a way. There is a way. God will show you a way. You’re going to have a happy, fruitful marriage of ministry together. He’s going to make that happen.”

Hoglund: Thank you, Pastor John. Would you join me in showing appreciation for Pastor John and for these students?