Audio Transcript

Welcome back this Monday morning. We begin our new week together asking whether we should encourage non-Christians to pray for faith. Or is a faithless prayer like that basically pointless? Here’s the question: “Dear Pastor John, my name is Jeff, a PhD student in Los Angeles. My question is about faith. Many times, I have been evangelizing my friends and they say that they admire my faith, but they don’t possess faith like mine. They have difficulty believing themselves. I always tell them that God generously supplies faith, and it’s not something I mustered up myself. I might show them 1 Peter 1:3: ‘He [God] . . . caused us to be born again.’ Or 1 Corinthians 2:11–14: ‘We received the Spirit . . . that we might understand.’ What should I tell someone who realizes that God gives us faith, but who feels stuck, waiting for God to give them that faith? The natural person does not accept the things of the Spirit of God until they’ve been given the Spirit. Or should a faithless person not pray at all? Do they simply wait until God may (or may not) give his Spirit?”

Well, first let me agree with Jeff that saving faith is humanly impossible. The fallen, sinful, spiritually dead human soul does not have the moral ability to believe. They have the mental powers, they have the powers of volition, but the heart is so bent away from God, it cannot make itself prefer God. You can’t make yourself love God; you can’t make yourself treasure God; you can’t make yourself rely upon God if you are dead and bent away from God.

Dead, Blind, Unable

When the rich young man turned away from Jesus and refused to follow him, in love with his money, Jesus said, “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of [heaven].” And his disciples threw up their hands and said, “Well, who then can be saved?” (Matthew 19:24–25). And Jesus didn’t respond by saying, “Oh, you overinterpreted my words.” He didn’t say that. He said, “With man this is impossible, but with God all things are possible” (Matthew 19:26).

And Paul underscored this condition of the natural human heart with the words, “The natural person does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are folly to him, and he is not able to [he cannot] understand them because they are spiritually discerned” (1 Corinthians 2:14). In Romans 8:7, he said, “The mind of the flesh [that is the natural mind, the unregenerate, unconverted, non-born-again mind] is hostile to God, for it does not submit to God’s law; indeed, it cannot.” Or again, Ephesians 2:5, “We were dead in our trespasses” — and that’s how God found us and made us alive.

That deadness included a blindness to the glory of Christ: “The god of this world has blinded the minds of the unbelievers, to keep them from seeing the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God” (2 Corinthians 4:4). Christ does not look glorious or supremely valuable or desirable to the fallen human heart. A new birth is needed, a spiritual resurrection.

God Does the Impossible

Yet the command remains for unbelievers to believe. God has the right to require from humans what they ought to render to him, even if sin has made that rendering humanly impossible. We are responsible to do what we ought to do, even if we are so bad we won’t — and thus can’t — do it.

For example, in Acts 16:30–31, the jailer cried out, “Sirs, what must I do to be saved?” And they say, “Believe in the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved.” And Paul isn’t the first to command the impossible. Ezekiel looked out on a field of dry bones and prophesied, “Hey, dry bones, live.” And they did (Ezekiel 37:4–6). Jesus did the same in John 11 with Lazarus. He spoke to a dead man, “Lazarus, come forth” (John 11:43). And he did.

“Human evangelism is indispensable in the miracle God works to raise the spiritually dead and give them saving faith.”

And Jesus sends us — he sent Paul and us — out to do the same impossible thing. He said in Acts 26:17–18, “I am sending you to open their eyes so that they may turn from darkness to light, and from the power of Satan to God.” Human evangelism is indispensable in the miracle that God works to raise the spiritually dead and give them saving faith. “I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the growth” (1 Corinthians 3:6). Humans plant; humans water — absolutely essential. And God does the impossible — he gives life.

And the reason faith is impossible for spiritually dead sinners is not that spiritually dead sinners can’t make decisions, but that faith is more than a decision. Saving faith is a treasuring faith, a treasuring trust. Faith involves seeing Christ not just as useful for getting out of hell or getting well or getting rich. Saving faith sees Christ as glorious — better than any other treasure in the world. That’s why faith is not possible for sin-loving, self-exalting humans, unless they are born again. We must be born again.

Born Again by the Word

But Peter says — and now we’re getting close to the issue that was raised — Peter says the miracle of the new birth comes by the word. In other words, alongside 1 Peter 1:3, which Jeff quotes — “[God] . . . caused us to be born again” — we must put 1 Peter 1:23–25:

You have been born again . . . through the living and abiding word of God. For “all flesh is like grass, and all its glory like the flower of grass. The grass withers, and the flower falls, but the word of the Lord remains forever.” And this word is the good news that was preached to you.

Now that implies two things in answer to Jeff’s question about what to say to an unbeliever who listens to all of this and feels paralyzed, as if the only thing he can do is simply wait — like lie in bed, sit in a chair, and wait — for a gift of faith.

The first thing it implies is that “faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the word of God” (Romans 10:17 NKJV) — or to use Peter’s words, new birth comes by hearing, and hearing by the word of God. Therefore, the absolutely key thing to say to the unbeliever is, “Keep reading the word of God. Keep listening on your app to the word of God. Keep pondering the word of God. Don’t be passive. Here’s a book. Read it. Be greedy, greedy, greedy for understanding the word — as greedy as you are for silver and gold.”

This is how faith is sustained for believers; this is how faith comes into being and is awakened for unbelievers: “Faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the word of God.” New birth comes by hearing, and hearing by the word of God. Keep exposing yourself to the word of God in whatever way you can. And believer, keep putting it forward.

“Keep exposing yourself to the word of God in whatever way you can.”

The other thing implied in 1 Peter 1 is that we should encourage the unbeliever to call out to God for eyes to see and ears to hear and a mind to understand. Remember the man who cried out, “I believe; help my unbelief” in Mark 9:24? I think he could have said, “O God, help my unbelief!” In the Old Testament, several times we are taught that those who feel unable — in other words, paralyzed, trapped in their own inability, in their own sin — to return to God should cry out. This is an exact quote from Lamentations 5:21: “Cause me to return, and I will return, O God.” Isn’t that an amazing prayer? “Cause me to return, and I will return. Enable me, and I will be able. Make me come, and I will come. Do whatever it takes, God.” So we encourage the unbeliever to pray.

Christ in Our Concern

Besides keeping the word before unbelievers and encouraging them to pray, I would mention one more thing. Keep leaning in to their lives personally with care. Keep communicating, not to make yourself a nuisance — you need spiritual discernment to know when that’s happening — but to show them that you really do want them to believe and be saved, to be your everlasting brother or sister with God forever in joy. Just as God may open their eyes to see the glory of Christ in the gospel, he may also open their eyes to see the love of Christ in your concern.

In 2007, 14-year-old Yeonmi Park crossed a frozen river and three mountains in a desperate attempt to leave North Korea. Eventually, after suffering dreadful abuse in China, she made it safely to South Korea. In 2014, she received the opportunity to study in America, where she would be able to pursue an education in the “land of the free.”

Yeonmi entered a program at Columbia University. Founded in 1754, the school’s motto reads, “In Thy light shall we see light” (Psalm 36:9). The first universities were established on the basis that God’s creation is an objective reality that can be studied. Humans created in God’s image have the capacity to investigate and reason. The truth that ultimately comes from God is the only solid protection for freedom of thought, conscience, and belief. Earthly authorities can’t tell us what to believe and think (Mark 12:17). Sadly, Yeonmi’s experience didn’t remotely resemble the school’s founding vision.

Having escaped the tyrannical regime of North Korea, where criticism of “Dear Leader” can land you (and your family) in a concentration camp, she never anticipated the thought control she’d find at this elite American university. Her professors insisted that history and culture had to be seen through the lens of patriarchal, racist, heterosexist oppression. Belief in absolute truth and morality was regarded as dangerous and wrong. Transgression of the dominant orthodoxies resulted in social ostracism or lower grades. If she was to achieve the degree she wanted, she would have had to self-censor all she said and wrote.

The land of the free was not as free as she had anticipated. What was going on?

‘No Universal Truth’

By the end of the nineteenth century, increased acceptance of evolutionary theory had contributed to a widespread naturalistic worldview: “There is no Creator God, and there won’t be a judgment.”

Without a transcendent authority, who or what is left to judge between competing claims to truth? Radical doubt has now taken root in nearly all the major institutions of the West. Objective truth is challenged. What counts is the perception or “lived experience” of each individual, particularly those deemed to have suffered oppression. The new inquisition insists that the feelings of any perceived “victim” must never, ever, be hurt. It’s viewed as hateful to question their claims. And that means that an increasing number of academics have been “cancelled.”

Kathleen Stock, a professor at Sussex University, England, was effectively hounded out of her position in 2021 for affirming the biological reality that women are women:

The problems all started when I began making such controversial statements as: “there are only two sexes” and “it’s wrong to put male rapists in women’s prisons.” . . . It has been all too much for certain colleagues. My critics have produced an apparently unstoppable narrative, according to which I’m a bigot and a terrible danger to trans students. . . . Eventually any hopes I could lead a relatively normal life on campus were definitively extinguished.

End of Free Speech

In The Madness of Crowds, Douglas Murray (who is himself gay and an atheist) describes this worldview, which insists that society is made up of different hierarchies. If you don’t accept the claims of anyone in a “victim” group, you may be condemned as bigoted, sexist, racist, homophobic, or transphobic. This signals the end of free speech, as people become anxious about stumbling over hidden trip wires. One ill-judged comment could make someone a social pariah.

“When you repeat lies, it destroys your integrity. Eventually you may come to believe them.”

Many go along with this madness because they’re scared to speak out, but it’s demeaning and soul-destroying to go along with claims you don’t believe to be true. Abigail Shrier, the author of Irreversible Damage, was invited to speak at Princeton in 2021. An investigative journalist, Shrier has documented the social contagion leading large numbers of teen girls into gender transition — and the regret that often followed, sometimes after irreversible damage had already been done. The invitation caused a furor. She had to speak in a venue with limited capacity away from the campus. Shrier took the opportunity to urge the students not to tell lies, to speak the truth openly, to refuse to be “bought” with flattery and to “keep their integrity.”

Sadly, too many university students churn out what they know their professors want them to say, even when they know it’s patently untrue. They “put truth on hold.” It’s too costly to challenge the current orthodoxies. But when you repeat lies, it destroys your integrity. Eventually you may come to believe them.

When Truth Retreats

The late Francis Schaeffer (1912–1984) observed that whenever truth retreats, tyranny advances. The Creator God will hold all, including all rulers, to account (Romans 13:1–3). He has placed his moral law on the hearts of all (Romans 1:18–21). The blessings of freedom are found within the framework of order (Deuteronomy 30:19–20). The Lord Jesus is the ruler of kings on earth (Revelation 1:5).

When you deny that there is a God, and deny any transcendent truth or absolute morality, you are left with unfettered human freedom. That quickly degenerates into anarchy. And then, out of fear, people may respond by submitting to an all-powerful state. Totalitarianism arises when you look to human reason alone to create utopia. We need only look back at the twentieth century to see the price tag in blood and suffering.

“If the retreat of truth leads to tyranny, the reverse must be true as well. The advance of truth will turn back tyranny.”

But if the retreat of truth leads to tyranny, the reverse must be true as well. The advance of truth will turn back tyranny.

Only Firm Basis for Dignity

The biblical worldview is the only firm basis for human dignity. Every person has value because each one has been created in the image of God. The biblical worldview is the only solid foundation for real freedom: no government, academic institution, or employer has the authority to tell us what to think. We will each answer to God.

History has shown that when the gospel has influenced a society, freedoms have been extended to more people. Far from limiting human endeavor, Christians were the first champions of universal education, the founders of the first universities, and the pioneers of modern science and medicine.

We are living in times that have been poisoned with lies. We have an opportunity to hold out truth. If we learn to fear the Lord, we won’t need to fear anyone or anything else. As we grow in love for God and his word (Psalm 119:97; John 14:15), and as we daily sing joyful praises (Psalm 92:2), our courage will be renewed. We’ll love others, even those who hate what we believe, speaking truth with grace (1 Peter 3:8, 14–16), serving humbly, and showing by deed as well as word that our God is a God of compassion and grace (Matthew 5:44; Isaiah 58:6–8).

God calls us to stand for truth and seek to rescue those imprisoned by deceit. In John 8:32, our Lord Jesus Christ promises to all who come to him: “Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.”

Audio Transcript

We’re now about a dozen years into the podcast — or eleven and a half years of podcasting, to be more exact. We have talked a lot about work over those years. We have talked about career building and finding our vocational calling, how to glorify God at work, and on the issues of when to leave a job and how to avoid overworking and idolizing a career, and issues of laziness and personal productivity, and how you define all those things — many huge issues now covered, and I tried to write those up into a digest in the Ask Pastor John book on pages 67–94 if you want to see the ground that we’ve covered.

In that section, and in this podcast, we’ve also taken up the question of what vocations are worthy of the Christian and which ones are not worthy of the Christian. A marketer at Nike once emailed in to ask if his job marketing luxury goods to people who don’t need them but want them — was that life vain? You might remember that episode, APJ 1519. That comes to my mind.

We’re back on a similar topic in today’s question from an anonymous man. “Hello, Pastor John! I am a building contractor. And in my region recently I was asked to join up with a construction partner I have worked with before, and one I really like and enjoy working with, to help complete one of their own projects. The project is a Mormon temple. Is this out of the question for a Christian who leads a construction crew to consider working on such a project like a temple like this, or even a mosque or casino or other things like that? How should I think through making this moral decision on behalf of the crew I lead?”

Probably I should start where I’m going to end — namely, by saying that this is the kind of question that has enough layers of ambiguity that I should not be dogmatic but admit that good Christians believing the same Bible may come to different conclusions. There are just so many aspects to take into consideration. But having said that, let me spell out maybe four or five principles or thoughts that I hope will give some guidance to the consciences of God’s people.

Ethics in Light of Eternity

The first thing I feel constrained to say is that believing in the reality of hell the way Jesus does — and he’s more explicit on this in the Bible than anybody — gives a kind of seriousness to most questions, especially questions like this. It just makes things so serious, and I mention this because Christians who keep the reality of hell out of their minds and sometimes are not even sure they believe in it — those folks simply won’t feel the weight that I feel in answering a question like this. Because when I think of a question like this, one of the questions I ask is this: Is this building that I’m working on going to be devoted to beliefs and activities that lead to eternal destruction?

Some people don’t even raise that question in trying to do ethics. I’m asking the eternal question about what becomes of human beings when they participate in what this building is for. A person who doesn’t think about hell just won’t take it that seriously, and therefore the question doesn’t have the same weight that it does for me. That’s the first thing I think I should draw attention to.

Many Works of Darkness

The second thing would be to draw attention to the fact that there are many more applications for the ethical issue at stake here than just building a Mormon religious house. What about building an abortion clinic for Planned Parenthood? What about building a mosque for Muslims? What about building a brothel in a red-light district? What about building a casino in northern Minnesota that you know is going to soak the meager savings of many poor people and continually divert their attention away from a healthy, productive life?

“If you don’t know what the building is for, you are probably not guilty for doing a good job in building it.”

What about building a room in somebody’s attic without taking out a permit, so that they can avoid fees from the city? What about building a meeting space for the central committee of the political party that makes child killing and homosexual behavior a matter of celebration? What about building a bar and a nightclub that includes striptease performances? What about providing fixtures, doors, countertops, lights, tile for any of those structures?

And the list goes on and on. So, this question has a much broader relevance and layers of complexity than one might think.

Incidental and Integral Evil

Another thing to take into account here is the degree to which the structure you’re working on not only will be the place where evil happens, but also the place designed and intended for evil to happen. That’s the purpose of the structure. Evil is not incidental here, but integral. Now, hardly any building anywhere is free from evil, right? I mean, you can’t build anything where evil’s not going to happen. Evil happens everywhere in every structure.

So, the morally relevant question when it comes to participation in the building of structure is whether that’s the intention of the structure; that’s the reason it exists.

Degrees of Responsibility

Here’s another factor to take into account: To what degree does the person involved in building the structure know what is involved in it, know what the intention is? Or to say it differently, given what a person knows — a builder knows, a construction worker knows, a provider knows — how clearly and substantially does his work add to the construction of the structure he disapproves of?

Now, that’s complicated. Let me illustrate. If you work in a factory that makes windows — we have got a big one in Minnesota here — you may have no awareness at all as you do your work in that factory that some of these windows are being sold to a mosque or a casino or an abortion clinic. It’s just not in your mind at all as you go to work every day and make a window. The causal connection between your daily work and the purposes of those structures is so remote that I think it is of little moral significance.

Your part is so remote that there is little moral connection between them. Your part in the window factory is not going to be seen as morally implicated by the evil purposes of the buildings down the economic chain, far out of your sight, than if it were part of what you’re immediately intending to help construct.

How Much Do You Know?

The principle that is most explicit in the Bible, I think, and most helpful in all of this, is in 1 Corinthians 10:27–28, which may not sound like a building text. Listen carefully:

If one of the unbelievers invites you to dinner and you are disposed to go, eat whatever is set before you without raising any question on the ground of conscience. But if someone says to you, “This has been offered in sacrifice,” then do not eat it, for the sake of the one who informed you, and for the sake of conscience.

In other words, if you don’t know that the food involves you in the support of a pagan ritual, you can eat it. But if you do know that this pagan ritual is what the host intends, you won’t eat it. So, whether you eat or you don’t eat depends on whether you know what the eating signifies about the false religion.

It seems to me that this same principle applies to building something that is devoted to a false, destructive religion or lifestyle. So, if you don’t know what the building is for, you are probably not guilty for doing a good job in building it. You’re just doing the job to the glory of Christ as best you can. But if you know that you are involved in promoting a destructive religion or practice, then your participation may well be wrong. In fact, my inclination would be to encourage the Christian builder and construction worker or provider not to be part of a building that is widely known to be explicitly anti-Christian.

Building Wisely

So, I’m going to end where I began. In general, I want to encourage builders and workers not to contribute to structures devoted to anti-Christian beliefs and practices. But I realize that the complexities of various situations are such that we should be very careful not to pass judgment on a brother’s effort to make a biblically informed, conscientious decision.