Find your legs. Each new morning presents us with the fresh opportunity — and need — to do so.

First, of course, we need to find our literal, physical legs as we get out of bed. We’ve been laying down for hours, dead to the world and void of conscious movement. Now, as we roll out of bed, we hope to find them. Conditioned by habit (and clouded by grogginess), we may not realize how significant, and sometimes difficult, these first steps can be.

Then, less obviously, though more importantly, is the need each morning to find our figurative legs. Who am I? What am I doing here? Why did I get up, other than for coffee, breakfast, or a walk to the bathroom? What am I waking up to — to some good use of another priceless day of human life, to some calling from God to bless others and add value to the world?

In other words, as I rise to stand for the day — to get the bearings in my soul — what am I standing on? What gives me footing? How do I find my legs?

Warnings for All Who Lead

Long before Israel had a king, the nation’s first and greatest prophet left specific and perhaps surprising instructions for him, including where and how he would “find his legs” each day as the leader of God’s people.

In Deuteronomy 17:14–20, Moses describes a concession God would make one day, setting a human king over his people. As he does, he warns such kings about the dangers of “excessive silver and gold,” “many wives,” and “many horses” — that is, money, sex, and power (Deuteronomy 17:16–17). Moses gives a specific reason for these cautions: “lest his heart turn away.” This is where the point of departure will be, humanly speaking, for regimes and generations to come: the heart of the king.

As goes his heart, so goes the leader, and so goes the nation. Will he heed the siren calls around him, the subtle temptations to the compromises of acclaim and special privilege? Will he take advantage of his willing and submissive servants who are eager to give him benefit of the doubt? Will he slowly construct his own reality around him that serves his own private comforts rather than the holy interests of the people?

The battle lines will first be drawn in the king’s own heart. Which explains why Moses’s next instructions turn where they do, unexpected and perhaps peripheral as they may seem to some.

Keys to the Leader’s Heart

What the prophet says next is all the more striking because it’s issued generations before the nation would have its first king. When a new king ascends to the throne in Israel — with all the pomp and circumstance that will doubtless accompany such a coronation — as his first act, he is to take out a quill and write word for word, with in his own hand, his own copy of God’s law, and “read in it all the days of his life.”

And when he sits on the throne of his kingdom, he shall write for himself in a book a copy of this law, approved by the Levitical priests. And it shall be with him, and he shall read in it all the days of his life, that he may learn to fear the Lord his God by keeping all the words of this law and these statutes, and doing them, that his heart may not be lifted up above his brothers, and that he may not turn aside from the commandment, either to the right hand or to the left, so that he may continue long in his kingdom, he and his children, in Israel. (Deuteronomy 17:18–20)

Note the emphasis on his heart. God’s plan for his leaders so that their hearts not turn away, is that their hearts be formed and fed daily by God’s word. Consider, then, three aspects of this simple yet profound plan, which is just as relevant for Christian leaders and churches today.

1. The Book Shapes the King

This book, copied long hand by the king himself, is no journal. The new king is not recording his own feelings or preferences or decrees — not in this book. Rather, he is copying the book of God’s law — an objective, fixed text, not open to edits and adjustments. This hand-copied book then is to be reviewed and approved by the priests, to confirm that no changes have been introduced or anything omitted.

“The king doesn’t shape this book; this book shapes the king.”

In other words, the king doesn’t shape this book; this book shapes the king. However great he may be in the sight of his people, the king fundamentally does not shape the world (or even his own kingdom) through his words, but he is being shaped by God through God’s words.

2. The Book Keeps the King

God also designs that this book will keep the king, as he is bombarded by the world of privileges and temptations leadership can bring. As the king keeps the words of God in the book, the book will keep the king — that is, keep him from turning aside to the right or left, turning from the fear of God to fear of man, from faithfulness to God to the pursuit of his own private, sinful pleasures.

In shaping the king’s heart, the book keeps him from the subtle daily migrations away from God, which all sinners experience. Which is why Moses twice mentions the inner man, “the heart.” The unseen heart of the king will come, in time, into expression in his life and the nation’s. Self-humbling before God and his word will give rise to a whole trajectory of thoughts, feelings, words, and actions; pride, another. And the greater the king, the greater the effects, for good or ill.

3. The Book Calls Each Morning

Finally, the king’s hand-copied, priest-approved book, Moses says, “shall be with him . . . all the days of his life.” With him, that is, nearby, constantly within reach. Having completed this great hand-copying project, he is not to store the book away for future reference, but make it functional, accessible, active in his reign — increasingly in him through countless hours lingering over it.

“The kind of reading that does God’s keeping is the kind of reading that feels like steeping.”

This Book is designed to be read daily. And not the sort of reading to which the pace and pixels of our modern lives have accustomed us: fast-break, hurried, distracted reading, with words coming out of the head almost as quickly as they went in. Rather, the kind of reading God intends for his servant is meditative — slow, unhurried, enjoyable, feeding on the text, at the pace of the text, rather than the pace of the world. Pondering God’s words. Rolling them around in the mind long enough to get a sense of them on the heart. The kind of reading that does God’s keeping is the kind of reading that feels like steeping.

Such daily meditation makes us, over time, the kind of person — with a shaped, kept, and fed heart — who can approve what is excellent (Philippians 1:10; Romans 2:18) and discern what is the will of God, good and acceptable and perfect (Romans 12:2), even in the complex, confusing challenges of life and leadership.

Day and Night, Today and Tomorrow

Such daily meditation on the words of God is what God so memorably expects of Joshua as he becomes Israel’s new leader in Moses’s place:

This Book of the Law shall not depart from your mouth, but you shall meditate on it day and night, so that you may be careful to do according to all that is written in it. (Joshua 1:8)

So too, generations later, when Israel finally had its king, the first psalm celebrated where the godly king would find his sense and wisdom to rule: “his delight is in the law of the Lord, and on his law he meditates day and night” (Psalm 1:2). And not only the king, but every man of God: “Blessed is the man . . .” (Psalm 1:1).

So too, when the ultimate man, David’s great heir, came among us, his shaping and keeping and wisdom to live and lead grew out of regular feeding in the Bible. In the words of Sinclair Ferguson, “Jesus’s intimate acquaintance with Scripture did not come de caelo (‘from heaven’) during the period of his public ministry; it was grounded no doubt on his early education, but nourished by long years of personal meditation” (The Holy Spirit, 44).

His Father had appointed means for his stability in his truly human life. And it was not some extraordinary means or special trick. It was the same great and modest, amazing and ordinary daily means heralded by Moses, tested by Joshua, embraced by David, and imitable by the godly today: daily meditation on the very words of God.

Eat Like a King

How do you find your legs each day? However many you lead, whether as pastor, as father, as mother, as friend, as boss — whether in business, at church, in the home, in the community — how do you get your bearings on the shifting deck of life? Where do you find the stability you need to lead well for the long haul, including today?

Give your first and most formative moments to feeding on the word of God. Let his voice be the first you hear each day. Let him feed and keep you like he fed and kept the godliest of kings.

Audio Transcript

Welcome back to the podcast on this Monday. Today in our Bible reading, we read Jeremiah 23–25 together. It included a beautiful new-covenant text that one listener wants you to explain more. The listener is Matthew. He wrote, “Pastor John, hello to you. I find myself often in debates with friends and family over Calvinism and Arminianism. They’re all Arminian. I try to represent the other side with clarity and charity.

“One of the arguments that I come back to repeatedly is about free will and what I see in Jeremiah 24:7: ‘I will give them a heart to know that I am the Lord, and they shall be my people and I will be their God, for they shall return to me with their whole heart.’ What I see in this text is that, of course, we all have free will, the ability for our hearts to do and believe what we most desire. So, what we need are new desires that want the right things. God must act to give us new desires or we are hopeless. This is sovereign grace in the miracle of regeneration. How much of your discussions over free will centers on this fact, that we all have free will, and we all need a new heart, a new will?”

First, let me commend Matthew for defining what he means by free will. That’s really unusual. I appreciate it very much, because in most discussions people use the phrase as though it were clear, when in fact most people have very different views of what free will means. He has defined it, so I can answer his question with more precision.

Defining ‘Free Will’

He says that free will is “the ability for our hearts to do and believe what we most desire.” That’s a pretty shrewd and careful definition. Freedom of the will, he says, is the freedom “to do and believe what we most desire.” And I think that if we are going to affirm the existence of free will among fallen people like us, that’s the definition we need to use, because it answers the question of how people can be free whom the Bible says are dead in trespasses (Ephesians 2:5), slaves of sin (Romans 6:20), under the dominion of sin (Romans 3:9), blind to spiritual reality (2 Corinthians 4:4), hardened against God (Ephesians 4:18), and unable to submit to God (Romans 8:7).

“God knows how to govern all things, including the human will, in such a way that we are truly responsible.”

So, given Matthew’s definition of freedom, such dead, enslaved, dominated, blind, hard, impotent people have freedom of the will, because it means that they are free to do and believe what they most desire — namely, sin. That’s what they’re free to do. And I would agree that if we’re going to maintain that the will is free, that is the definition we should use. So, to speak of free will then is to speak of a will that is free to do and believe what it most desires — but is not free to desire God above all else.

What Arminians Want

What I have found, therefore, is that most people who reject Calvinistic or Reformed understandings of human depravity and sovereign grace — which is required to bring a dead, hard, blind person to saving faith — is that this definition of free will is not acceptable to them. It’s not acceptable because it still leaves a person unable to provide the decisive thing that leads to conversion — namely, the strongest desire to trust Christ. It leaves a person in the bondage of their strongest desires, which are against God.

Saying that a person is free to do what he most desires, but he’s not free to create desires for God, does not give the Arminian what he wants. And what’s that? A fair definition of what the Arminian requires is free will defined as the power of decisive self-determination. In other words, what the Arminian requires is that, at the precise point of conversion, where saving faith comes into being, it is man and not God that at that point provides the decisive and effective influence. That’s what the Arminian must have to make his views work. Whatever influences God may give prior to that point — call them “prevenient grace,” which is what the Arminian wants to call all the illuminating, freeing grace of God — the Arminian insists that the final, decisive creation of the strongest effective desire for Christ must be self-determined, human-determined, not God-determined.

So, Matthew asks me, “How much of your discussions over free will centers on the fact that we all have free will, and we all need a new heart and a new will?” My answer now is that I don’t usually start with Matthew’s definition of free will. It may be helpful in some discussions to define free will that way, but I find that it is most illuminating, most convicting, most clarifying to start with the definition of free will that Arminians really do need in order for their views to make sense — namely, the definition that free will is the power of decisive self-determination (or I sometimes use the phrase “ultimate self-determination”). With this definition, then, it appears that Arminians believe in such free will and Calvinists do not believe in such free will. I certainly do not believe there is such a thing as human free will defined as decisive self-determination.

Bound to Sovereign Grace

At this point in my conversations, what proves to be most clarifying is two things.

First is the abundance of biblical texts that describe the bondage of the will and the necessity of sovereign grace to bring a person out of spiritual deadness into life and faith. For example, in Ephesians 2:5–6, Paul does not say that when we were spiritually dead God gave us a kind of halfway regeneration where we now, in that new halfway state of life, provide ourselves the decisive, self-determining act of faith — the act of producing the strongest desire for Jesus that pushes us over the line to believe. What Paul says is that while we were dead, God not only made us alive but also raised us up with Christ and seated “us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus.” In other words, God’s action is decisive — all the way from death through spiritual resurrection to our firm, saved position in the presence of God in Christ. There are many texts that teach the same thing concerning sovereign grace. That’s the first thing.

“Without God’s sovereign grace, we would be utterly hopeless in the bondage of our spiritually dead hearts.”

The other thing that I find clarifying and helpful in conversations with folks is to point out that free will, understood as the power of ultimate or decisive self-determination, is not taught anywhere in the Bible. Not a single verse, not a single text teaches that there is such a thing as the power of ultimate human self-determination. So, where does that idea come from that we must have ultimate self-determination? It comes from a philosophical presupposition that people bring to the Bible. The philosophical presupposition is that if we don’t have ultimate self-determination, we cannot be held accountable for our own beliefs and actions before God. Well, the Bible simply does not affirm that presupposition.

The Bible teaches that God has ways we do not understand and that he knows how to govern all things, including the human will, in such a way that we are truly responsible, truly accountable — and he, at the same time, is truly sovereign. And oh, we should be thankful for this sovereign grace, because without it, we would be utterly hopeless in the bondage of our spiritually dead hearts.

So, if you find yourself — and I’m speaking to those of you who are listening right now — if you find yourself unable to love God, unable to trust Christ, don’t despair. Jesus said, “With man this is impossible, but with God all things are possible” (Matthew 19:26). Resolve to seek him, come to him. Look to his suffering for the worst of sinners, and ask God for the grace to see and savor Christ.

Part 6 Episode 226 Why must we understand who Jesus is and what he’s done for us on the Bible’s terms? In this episode of Light + Truth, John Piper looks to Hebrews 4:14–5:3 for the categories Scripture provides for knowing Christ.