Audio Transcript

We jolt awake, grab our phone, silence the alarm — and there, lying in bed, phone in hand, we face our first decision of the new day. Do we shut off the screen? Or do we start scrolling?

I wanted to know how common this dilemma was among Christians. So back in April of 2015, I conducted an online survey of eight thousand readers of desiringGod.org. The survey focused on smartphone and social media habits. I asked a bunch of questions and received a lot of revealing results, a few which made it into my smartphone book.

But here were three stats that immediately stood out to me. Of the eight thousand respondents, half admitted to scrolling through their phones within the first minutes of waking up in the morning. This figure rose to over 60 percent among those aged 18–29. And when asked whether they were more likely to scroll through texts, email, and social media before or after their morning devotions, a staggering 73 percent admitted to that they normally did so before spending time with God in the morning.

And while scrolling social media may seem like a harmless indulgence, we all know it’s an unhealthy way to start the day, like eating chocolate for breakfast. So I want to ask you, Pastor John, in light of these stats, what’s a better approach in these moments just after we wake up in the morning?

I think there is a better course, but to help everybody understand why I think that and what that better course is, it might be helpful to start by analyzing why we are so prone to click on our phones before we do almost anything else. I thought of six possible reasons why we do this, and I got these reasons out of my head by analyzing John Piper’s soul and his temptations. I haven’t done any surveys, so if people think this is narrow, I say, “Well, yeah, it is.” It comes out of me. If people are like me, then they might get help.

It seems to me that all of these six things I’m going to say are rooted in sin rather than rooted in the desire to serve others and savor God. I put it like that because I do think the great commandment does set the agenda for our mornings and our midday and our evening. We are to love God with all of our heart, soul, mind, strength when we wake up in the morning, and we are to prepare ourselves to love our neighbor, serve our neighbor as ourselves (Matthew 22:34–40).

“The great commandment sets the agenda for our mornings and our midday and our evening.”

Given how sinful John Piper is, and I presume others are like me, very few of us wake up with our whole soul spring-loaded to love God and love people. This takes some refocusing, to put it mildly. This takes some focusing of our souls by means of the word of God and prayer. We have to remind ourselves about reality in the morning in order to begin to love God and love people the way we ought.

Candy and Avoidance

Here are my six guesses for why so many of us are drawn almost addictively to consult with our phones or devices when we wake up in the morning. The first three I call candy motives, and the second three I call avoidance motives.

1. Novelty Candy

First, I think we love to immediately take a bite of candy from our phones for our novelty hunger. Call this novelty candy. We simply love to hear what’s new in the world or among our friends, what has happened since the last time we glanced at the world.

Most of us like to be the first one to know something, and then we don’t have to assume the humble posture of being told something that smart and savvy and on-the-ball people already know — unlike us, who didn’t know. We want to be quick and have knowledge of what’s new in the world. Then maybe we can assume the role of being the informer rather than the poor benighted people that need to be informed about what happened. “If they were smart enough, they would’ve been on their social media earlier.” There’s a big ego trip, I think, in our novelty hunger.

2. Ego Candy

Second, I think we love to immediately take a bite out of our candy phone for ego hunger. What have people said about us since the last time we checked? Who has taken note of us? Who has retweeted us or mentioned us or liked us or followed us? In our fallen, sinful condition, there is an inordinate enjoyment of the human ego being attended to. Some of us are weak enough, wounded enough, fragile enough, insecure enough that any little mention of us just feels so good. It’s like somebody kissed us.

3. Entertainment Candy

Third, I think we love to immediately take a bite out of our candy for our entertainment hunger. This is entertainment candy. There is on the Internet, as we’ve all come to know, an endless stream of fascinating, weird, strange, wonderful, shocking, spellbinding, cute pictures and quotes and videos and stories and links. Many of us have gotten to the point where we’re almost addicted to the need of something striking and bizarre and extraordinary and amazing.

At least those three candy motives, I think, are at work as we wake up in the morning and have these cravings that we satisfy with our phones.

4. Boredom Avoidance

Then there are these three avoidance motives. In other words, these aren’t positive desires for something. These are facing things in life that we simply want to avoid for another five minutes.

First, I would call it the boredom avoidance. We wake up in the morning, we find that the day in front of us simply looks boring. It feels boring. There’s nothing exciting coming in our day and little incentive to get out of bed. Of course, the human soul hates a vacuum. If there’s nothing significant and positive and hopeful in front of us to fill the hope-shaped place in our souls, then we’re going to use our phones, perhaps, quickly to fill that hole and avoid having to step into all that boredom.

5. Responsibility Avoidance

Second, there is the responsibility avoidance. We have a role — father, mother, boss, whatever. There are burdens that are coming to us in the day that are fairly weighty. The buck stops with us. Many decisions have to be made about our children, the house, the car, the finances, dozens of other things. Life is full of weighty responsibilities, and we feel inadequate for them. We’re lying there in bed feeling fearful, maybe even resentful that people put so much pressure on us, and we just are not attracted to this day at all. We would very happily avoid it for another five or ten minutes, and there’s the phone to help us do it.

6. Hardship Avoidance

The third avoidance incentive is hardship avoidance. You may be in a season of life where what you meet when you get out of bed is not just boredom and not just responsibility, but you meet mega relational conflict, or issues of disease or disability in the home, or friends who are against you, or pain in your own body, in your joints, so that you can barely get out of bed because it hurts so bad in the morning. It’s just easier to lie there a little longer, and the phone adds to the escape.

Those, Tony, are at least six of the things I thought of that are probably functioning in my incentive when I’m inclined to go there first before something else.

Better Way to Begin the Day

There are pretty strong things that are keeping us in bed and keeping us on our devices, but there is a better way. Here’s what points to the need for it: What if you are the first one to the news — and it is horrible news? Or what if your search for some ego candy finds ego acid, and people have hated you overnight? What if you spend five minutes getting yourself happily entertained in the morning rather than facing the responsibilities of the day immediately, and you find at the end of those five minutes that they have dragged you down into a silly, demeaning, small-minded, hollow, immature frame of mind? Was it worth it?

What if you take five minutes to avoid the boredom and responsibility and hardship of the day only to find, at the end of those five minutes of avoidance, that you are spiritually, morally, emotionally less able to cope with reality in the day than you were before? Was it worth it?

I think there is a better way to begin the day, and it will require some decisions before the morning. It never works to make last-minute efforts to decide to do something different. You need to decide twelve hours earlier what this crisis moment is going to look like. It will take some planning. It will take some alarm-clock thinking and setting.

“What we want in the morning routine is to be filled with the Holy Spirit.”

What we want in the morning routine is to be filled with the Holy Spirit. We want something that gives us a zeal for the glory of Christ for the day’s work. We want to be strengthened to face whatever the day may bring. We want something that gives us joyful courage to resolve to count others better than ourselves and pursue true greatness, like Jesus said, by becoming the servant of all. That’s the real agenda in the morning. Very few of us wake up strengthened to do all those glorious things that we get to join Jesus in doing.

Steadfast Love in the Morning

The new course for the morning, I think, is laid out in the Psalms, and here’s a key verse: “O Lord, in the morning you hear my voice; in the morning I prepare a sacrifice for you and watch” (Psalm 5:3). Let the first thing out of your mouth in the morning, while you’re still on the pillow, be a cry to God: “I love you, Lord. I need you, Lord. Help me, Lord.” That is the first cry out of my mouth in the morning. “I need you again today.” Then “prepare a sacrifice . . . and watch.” I think that sacrifice is my body and my attention devoted to him. I watch for the Lord to show up — and do what? What am I watching for?

And Psalm 143:8 puts it like this: “Let me hear in the morning of your steadfast love, for in you I trust. Make me know the way I should go, for to you I lift up my soul.” I’m looking — I’m on the lookout for the steadfast love of God, and I’m on the lookout for it in his word.

And then Psalm 90:14 tells me how to think about praying for it when it comes: “Satisfy us in the morning with your steadfast love.” Don’t just look for it and see it and “Here it comes!” but ask the Lord, “Oh, satisfy us with this steadfast love, that we may rejoice and be glad in you all our days.” We watch in God’s inspired word for revelations of his steadfast love and his guidance for our lives, and for a profound sense of satisfaction in our souls that he is beautiful and that he cares for us.

My eyes are awake before the watches of the night, that I may meditate on your promise. (Psalm 119:148)

How precious to me are your thoughts, O God! . . . I awake, and I am still with you. (Psalm 139:17–18)

I suggest that before you go to bed tonight, you make some choices and some plans and that you free yourself from the candy addictions and the habits of avoidance that have been ruining the strengthening potential for the beginning of the day.

“The truth about a man lies first and foremost in what he hides.” So wrote the French novelist, art critic, and statesman André Malraux in 1967, in a weighty diagnosis of the human predicament (Anti-Memoirs, 5). Malraux was on to something. We may broadcast what we want to be known for, but we hide what we are.

We might think first of the dark side of this insight. We may keep the skeletons safely in the closet, our secret sins and hidden idolatries, thinking to ourselves, “If others knew who I really am, they’d despise me.” We well know that we are what we hide.

But there’s a positive side to the insight as well, and our Lord may be said to commend it. Jesus encourages us to hide, in a manner, what’s closest to our hearts: “Beware of practicing your righteousness before other people in order to be seen by them” (Matthew 6:1). We face a common and strong temptation to do what we do to receive the praise and admiration of people. The appearance of righteousness can easily become more important to us than righteousness itself. But true righteousness, we might say, isn’t merely something we show, but also and especially something we hide. Thus arises Jesus’s exhortation to practice righteousness — almsgiving, prayer, and fasting — “in secret” (Matthew 6:2–18).

Call to Secret Prayer

Jesus’s words and warnings about almsgiving, prayer, and fasting clearly overlap. We are to take care lest our motivation for them is the ephemeral reward of others’ esteem (Matthew 6:2, 5, 16). But prayer seems to be central among these three, and not only because it’s sandwiched in the middle. For one thing, Jesus spends twice as much time addressing prayer as he does almsgiving and fasting combined. For another, when it comes to prayer in the middle, Jesus warns against a second problematic motivation in addition to seeking others’ admiration.

“When you pray, do not heap up empty phrases as the Gentiles do, for they think that they will be heard for their many words” (verse 7). At root, it seems, “the Gentiles” pray to acquire things of want and felt need, thinking prayer to be simply a means to that end. But additionally, they presume that the divine needs goading to deliver the goods. So, they heap up many words — perhaps thinking that God needs to be informed of our grocery list of needs, or that long-winded eloquence may impress him to act, or that abundant articulation of “truth” is required to pass a threshold.

Jesus blocks off all such wrong ways at the trailhead: “Your Father knows what you need before you ask him” (verse 8). Apparently, we don’t need to pray long to inform God. Neither are long prayers needed to butter God up for generosity and care that he isn’t already inclined toward. For the Father’s knowledge of our need signals his intention to provide for us his children, whom he loves more than he loves larks and lilies (Matthew 6:25–34), and to whom he would never dream of giving rocks or serpents in response to prayer (Matthew 7:7–11).

Secret prayer doesn’t secure the loving orientation of the Father toward us. In Jesus’s outlook, the Father’s loving attention and wise intention to meet our truest needs precede our praying and invite it. We don’t need to enter the prayer closet anxiously angling after our good.

Centrality of Secret Prayer

If prayer isn’t best thought of as merely an effort to get what we desire or need, and if it’s to be done in secret where no one else is looking, then what motivates it? Is it not simple love for and desire to commune with the Father who sees in secret?

We are what we hide because what we do in hiddenness — in secret, in the closet, when no one else is looking — is what we love. And we are what we love.

Therefore, Tim Keller rightly calls secret prayer “the infallible test of spiritual integrity” (Prayer, 23). This is not to deny that “secret” almsgiving and fasting are also tests of spiritual integrity. But simple love for God is not so easily discernible as the motivation for them. For example, philanthropy might impel secret almsgiving (which, of course, is nothing to sneeze at). And a desire for mere self-optimization might impel secret fasting (I’m going on a “technology fast” to kick a bad habit!).

In secret prayer, our love is most clearly manifested. It is the crucial and indispensable test of the wholeness, rather than double-mindedness and dividedness, of our souls before God.

Complications in Secret Prayer

Of course, secret praying might not always feel like it flows from much warmth of love for God. This lack of feeling, however, need not discourage us from the practice. Indeed, it provides us with a key supplication as we enter our prayer closets: confession of “internal, innate blindness, unbelief, doubts, [and] faintheartedness” (as the 1563 Palatinate Church Order puts it) and earnest petition that “the joy of . . . salvation” and “a willing spirit” might be restored (Psalm 51:12).

In the Christian life, we often go to private prayer not from a wellspring of warmth, but for one — yearning, seeking, and supplicating for “more love to thee, O Christ, more love to thee!” The psalmist acknowledges to God, “When I was pricked in heart, I was brutish and ignorant; I was like a beast toward you” (Psalm 73:21–22); but, though his flesh and even his heart may fail, he will continue to turn to God, who remains “the strength of my heart and my portion forever” (verse 26). It is a wise plan.

Having honestly admitted our lack, as is often necessary, what then might our prayers alone with God consist of? Knowing what to do and say in secret prayer, beyond confession and contrition and appeal for spiritual renewal, is a frequent complication. In this regard, let me offer a couple words of advice.

SCRIPTURE

On the one hand, pray with your Bible open. As a sword is for enfolding in the hand, so the sword of the Spirit is especially for folded hands. The word of God helps, stimulates, and shapes our prayers, and this in numerous ways. As a basic starting point, it gives us words to pray. I think here especially of praying the Psalms. These prayers are a gift of the Spirit to help give us voice when entering our prayer closet. The Psalter can function like a divinely inspired form of speech therapy, training the underdeveloped muscles of our mouths and hearts in shapes and sounds and speech-acts they may not be used to making — particularly prayers of adoration and praise of the splendor of God’s glory (also, for example, prayers of lament, and intercession for widows and orphans).

A key assumption here is that we must be taught to pray. Healthy prayer is not merely automatic and instinctual. Well do the disciples ask Jesus to teach them to pray (Luke 11:1). And wisely, with great compassion, does the Lord so teach them. But how he teaches them is telling. He doesn’t simply talk about praying and its nature, logic, and motivations. Jesus gives his disciples a specific form, actual words to pray, which we call the Lord’s Prayer (Luke 11:2–4; Matthew 6:9–13). The Son of God’s prayer pedagogy is the same as that of his Father, whose Spirit inspired the Psalms: he gives words to pray to help his people get started.

SILENCE

On the other hand, silence in secret prayer isn’t to be avoided. “To draw near to listen is better than to offer the sacrifice of fools,” the Preacher asserts. Indeed, “Be not rash with your mouth, nor let your heart be hasty to utter a word before God, for God is in heaven and you are on earth. Therefore let your words be few” (Ecclesiastes 5:1–2). The prayer closet is first a place of listening in silence before we find the proper words to speak — silent meditation on the word, silent vulnerability before God.

To be sure, silences are awkward, which may be as much a reason as any for the “Gentile” propensity to prattle. Or maybe, at root, the “Gentiles” feel they need many words to secure the caring attention of the divine because they presume that, under normal conditions, they do not already have it. Without confidence in one’s standing before God, the solitary silence can be downright terrifying. For there I am alone with my God and Lord and Judge. And how can the real me, which I try so hard to hide, feel anything but shame and terror before One who sees in secret? Such fearful uncertainty is one of the greatest complications in secret prayer.

Comfort for Secret Prayer

Crucially, our Lord speaks of the Father who sees in secret. The emphasis is unmistakable and insistent: in Matthew 6:1–18, Jesus speaks of God only as Father, and that in a tenfold manner (verses 1, 4, 6 [2x], 8, 9, 14, 15, 18 [2x]). Jesus wants us to know that the God who sees us in secret is one who looks upon us with the relational orientation of a Father.

But can we know for sure that God is not only Lord and Judge, but Father? We can know it because the one who speaks of God in this way, the one who invites us with him (in him) to pray to “our Father” (Matthew 6:9; see also John 16:23, 26–27; 20:17), is himself, by eternal begetting, the Son of God who has ever known the joy of calling upon his Father. Jesus has come to reveal the Father’s identity to us. And Jesus has come to reveal the Father’s love for us.

According to the loving plan of God the Father, the Son was sent into the world to accomplish — through his life, death, resurrection, and ascension — a great exodus work of deliverance (Galatians 1:3–4). By faith in Christ, we are delivered from our sin and adopted as beloved children of God. Indeed, God’s own Spirit of adoption is poured out into our hearts. And what does this Spirit do? He leads us in the privilege and wonder of filial prayer: “Abba! Father!” (Galatians 4:4–6). Because of the gospel of Jesus Christ, as a traditional invitation to the Lord’s Prayer has it, we are bold to pray, “Our Father . . .”

In Christ, we need not be unsure of God’s posture toward us. We need not strategize about how — by our persuasion and prolixity — we might secure God’s attention and get into his good graces. We need not let uncertainty and fear block the way to the prayer closet. Rather, we can turn and turn again to the gospel, and know the love of the Father for us made flesh, and find welling up in return love for him. Which is as good a reason as any to find a secret, undistracted, hidden place to speak forth our thanks in love to the Father.

In March 1557, a group of Protestant French tradesmen landed on an island off the coast of Brazil, coming to be a part of a new French colony that needed more people, especially skilled workers. Along with this company were two Protestant ministers, Pierre Richier and Guillaume Chartier, who had been invited to teach the other Europeans and to evangelize the native people. This landing marked the first Protestant missionary enterprise to the New World.

Before long, however, the Catholic governor of the colony exiled the Protestant preachers to the mainland, and then eventually he forced them to return to France. Thus, while this missionary effort to the Americas did not last long and saw little fruit, it was the first Protestant attempt to brave the great difficulties involved in bringing the gospel to the people in these new lands.

What sort of church and what kind of leaders were behind such a daring and dangerous undertaking? What was the soil from which this great, historic endeavor emerged? Contrary to some contemporary expectations, this missionary enterprise arose from the church in Geneva under the leadership of John Calvin.

Though this episode (and others like it) are well-known and discussed in academic circles, the general public commonly assumes, and missions textbooks confidently assert, that the Protestant Reformers lacked zeal or urgency for world missions. Some assume that the Reformers’ high view of God’s sovereignty undercut missions concern; others, more sympathetically, state that the press of survival and rebuilding the church kept them from being able to concentrate on missions. Yet the church in Geneva supplied the first Protestant missionaries to the New World.

The effort did not have much success. We cannot judge such work by the success we see, however, but by the willingness to obey. And this was dangerous obedience — traveling to an unknown world, all while risking health, stability, and even life in interaction with Catholic authorities, unknown diseases and animals, and potentially hostile natives. Still they went.

Joyful Cause

Some have sought to downplay this effort, suggesting it merely supported commercial activity or provided religious services for the French settlers. However, we have a firsthand account of the Genevan church’s actions in the personal journal of Jean de Léry, a member of the church in Geneva.

According to de Léry, the Genevan church was asked to provide preachers and other people “well-instructed in the Christian religion” so that they might teach the other Europeans and “bring savages to the knowledge of their salvation.”1 The missionary element of the endeavor is crystal clear. Furthermore, the response of the church to this request is striking. De Léry records, “Upon receiving these letters and hearing this news, the church of Geneva at once gave thanks to God for the extension of the reign of Jesus Christ in a country so distant and likewise so foreign and among a nation entirely without knowledge of the true God.”2 Not only was evangelistic outreach a part of the original plan, but it was also a prospect that brought great joy to the church!

During the mission, one of the missionaries sent a letter to Calvin. He described the difficulties of their evangelistic efforts, but said, “Since the Most High has given us this task, we expect this Edom to become a future possession of Christ.”3 Not only was this clearly a mission endeavor; the missionaries themselves persevered in a most difficult task buoyed by confidence in a sovereign God.

Churches on Mission

This account is not out of character for the churches of the Reformation. The churches in Wittenberg and Geneva trained pastors, and sent them out to preach the gospel all over Europe, crossing national borders and risking their lives. Geneva has been described as a vast mission hub: as refugees poured in from across Europe, they were trained and then sent back out to preach the gospel.

The Genevan church kept a Register of the Company of Pastors, a sort of book of minutes, which catalogs the sending of missionaries to various places. As early as 1553, there is mention of a pastor being sent to a group of embattled Protestants in France. By 1557, the same year Richier and Chartier arrived in Brazil, the Register shows that the sending of missionary pastors formed a regular part of the work of the Genevan church. By 1562, religious wars in France made it too dangerous to record these activities, but by then the Register had already recorded 88 missionaries by name sent out since 1557, and other records indicate that many more were sent in those later years, including more than 100 in one year alone.

This was no accidental missionary fervor; it grew in these churches because Martin Luther, Calvin, and others taught their people to pray for the salvation of the nations, gave them songs to sing about missions, and regularly exhorted them in sermons toward evangelism.

Kingdom Prayers and Songs

In his brief work written to teach his people how to pray following the Lord’s Prayer, Luther provides an example of how one might pray from each petition. In each of the first three petitions, he explicitly prays for the conversion of unbelievers.4 Luther’s exposition of the Lord’s Prayer in his Large Catechism also teaches that “your kingdom come” calls us to pray that the kingdom “may gain recognition and followers among other people and advance with power throughout the world.”5

Similarly, Calvin expounds Paul’s call to pray “for all people” (1 Timothy 2:1), exhorting his people to “call upon God and ask him to work toward the salvation of the whole world, and that we give ourselves to this work both night and day.”6 Indeed, throughout his series on 1 Timothy, preached in the year leading up to the mission to Brazil, Calvin regularly concluded the sermons with a prayer for the salvation of the nations.7

Luther’s hymns, which were a hallmark of his work and spread to other churches, also exhorted believers to take the gospel to the nations, and reflected on God’s desire for the “heathen” to come to faith.8

Laboring for Souls

Last, not only did these Reformers call for prayer for world mission, but they called for direct witness. Luther says, “One must always preach the gospel so that one may bring some more to become Christians.”9 Furthermore, “It would be insufferable for someone to associate with people and not reveal what is useful for the salvation of their souls.”10 Indeed, Luther says, “If the need were to arise, all of us should be ready to die in order to bring a soul to God.”11

Calvin taught, “If we have any kindness in us, seeing that we see men go to destruction until God has got them under his obedience: ought we not to be moved with pity to draw the silly souls out of hell and to bring them into the way of salvation?”12 He told pastors that God had made them ministers for the purpose of saving souls, and thus, God calls them to labor “mightily, and with greater zeal and earnestness” for the salvation of souls.13 Even when people reject the salvation offered to them, we continue to “devote” ourselves to this evangelistic work and “take pains” in calling people to faith so that they might “call as many to God as they can.” Indeed, “we must take pains to draw all the world to salvation.”14

In fact, Calvin strongly rebukes those who lack evangelistic concern:

So then let us mark first of all that all who care not whether they bring their neighbors to the way of salvation or not, and those who do not care to bring the poor unbelievers also, instead being willing to let them go to destruction, show plainly that they make no account of God’s honor. . . . And thus we see how cold we are and negligent to pray for those who have need and are this day in the way to death and damnation.15

It is no wonder that churches receiving this sort of instruction developed a heart for seeing the gospel go to the ends of the earth. Rather than disparaging these brothers and sisters who went before us, we should humbly look to them to learn from their zeal and perseverance.