Audio Transcript

Good Monday morning. You may remember that last year Pastor John and I recorded five podcast episodes in Nashville, at the Sing! Global 2022 Getty Music Conference. We recorded live before a couple thousand of you who were there. A lot of church leaders and worship leaders and musicians were in the house. It was a great experience. And they were very engaged, as you’ll hear. Today we feature one of those recordings, on getting the Sunday-morning worship vibe right.

Let’s get more specific into musical worship and how you begin a Sunday morning gathering. Let’s talk about the call to worship for a moment. Steven is a listener to the podcast in Indiana. He writes in with a question about the call to worship. “Hello, Pastor John, and thank you for Ask Pastor John. It has helped me think through a lot of pastoral issues over the years. I don’t exactly remember where I heard it, but I remember you saying that Paul’s claim that Christians are ‘sorrowful, yet always rejoicing’ (2 Corinthians 6:10) — that dual claim informed how you framed your welcome and call to worship in the opening moments of the Sunday morning gathering. You believed it was your calling to set the tenor of the corporate gathering in such a way that whether people were coming from a glorious wedding feast last night, or whether they just arrived from the hospital with a dying spouse in the ICU, that this moment of worship together should feel relevant to both groups. Can you expand on how your call to worship did this on Sunday morning?”

Whether my call to worship did it, some others will have to judge, but that certainly was my aspiration. It starts like this. The leader, let’s just say the pastor, who’s going to welcome people into this event right now called corporate worship — at that moment, he’s setting the tone for what he thinks should take place here.

Weight of Glory

He ought to be profoundly aware that to be a human being, a consciousness in a universe created by, governed by, upheld by, guided by a person — God, three in one — is an awesome thing. To be a person is an awesome thing. To be a human being is a staggering reality.

So you start there. You say, “I’m alive. I exist in that kind of personal universe, created in the image of the one who made and upheld everything.” You just let it sink in. You exist, pastor! This is awesome! Then add to that the fact that God exists, Christ exists, the Holy Spirit exists. The incarnation — unspeakable — happened. The Son of God lived. He died. God died for sinners. He rose again. He reigns in heaven today. The Holy Spirit inhabits his people. Faith connects us with God. There’s a hell to which people are going. There’s a heaven, an eternal joy to which we’re going.

These are staggeringly glorious realities — all of them beyond imagination, beyond speaking. He should be utterly overwhelmed with the weight of glory. That’s where you start.

Another World of Joy

And if you start there, you don’t welcome people with slapstick. You don’t. I mean, we just get an hour a week, basically, and we’re dealing with the greatest and most glorious and weighty things in the world. People have been saturated with television, saturated with movies, saturated with social media all week long. I find it incomprehensible that pastors would think, “Well, what we need to do is sound more like that entertainment.” That’s just the opposite of the way I think. I’m desperately pleading to God for words and a demeanor that would communicate another world of joy than that.

“I’m desperately pleading to God for words and a demeanor that would communicate another world of joy.”

And I have the suspicion that most people today younger than me — younger than 76 — have grown up mainly in a world of entertainment, and they are shot through with the whole world of this world. And happiness and joy and gladness and pleasure and well-being are all in those categories, so that if I try to present an alternative to that, it will only sound like morose, dismal, glum, boring.

They have no categories for an alternative. If you say, “Not that — not that chipper, superficial, chatty, slapstick, casual, talk-show-host demeanor,” then the only thing they can think of is dull. That’s tragic — as if there were no such thing as 2 Corinthians 6:10: “sorrowful, yet always rejoicing.” So that’s one way to come at it — namely, it is a mysterious and glorious thing to be a human being. And the realities of the Bible are the greatest realities in the world. And the emotions that correspond to them are infinite in joy, infinite in horror as we contemplate hell, and they’re not trivial.

This Morning’s Tragedies

The other way I came at it was this: I tried to keep my finger on the pulse of the tragedies of the world. So, my people have heard this week — and if they haven’t, they’re watching the wrong newscast — that Pakistan today is one-third underwater, some of it ten feet deep. A thousand people have been killed, three million are displaced, and it is desperate. One-third of America would be the east coast to the Mississippi, underwater.

This is what I’d be saying to my people. I’d be saying, “Folks, as we gather, we know that this has happened.” And I would just say, “That’s the world, folks. That’s this morning’s world.” And if you don’t have a theology that can turn that into serious joy, you don’t have the right theology. Because if knowing about Pakistan can only ruin your day, all your days will be ruined. There’s always a Pakistan. It’s just one of a dozen horrors that are going on right now. So that’s a piece.

Pulse of the Room

Then lastly, I’ll just say, I try to keep my finger on the pulse of this people right now in this room and what they’re dealing with. For example, I can remember this one. Our Fighter Verse was Psalm 34:20, “He keeps all his bones; not one of them is broken.” We always recited our Fighter Verse. I tried to weave it into our welcome.

“The realities of the Bible are the greatest realities in the world.”

Well, there’s a boy sitting in the third row with a cast on his arm. He’s probably 9 years old. And I’m saying, coming out of my mouth from the word of God, “He keeps all his bones; not one of them is broken.” What are you going to do about that — ignore it? Now, I hadn’t seen him until I got down there. I didn’t have this plan, but I spotted that cast. And how easy it would have been to joke. I don’t know how you would turn it into a joke with a psalm, but somebody would.

And I walked back to him. I said, “Whoa.” I think I knew his name. I can’t remember right now. “What happened?” This is in the welcome to worship. And then I said — let’s call him Timmy — “Timmy, you know what I think the psalm means?” You’ve got to decide for yourself what that psalm means, because Psalm 91 and Psalm 34, they say things like that.

I said, “I think that means he will never let your bone be broken unless he’s got something amazing planned that he wants to do through that broken bone. So watch out for it.” Something like that. Now that was serious. It was light in the sense that he’s a 9-year-old, so I’m not going to sound real heavy. But it was a powerful moment for me and for our church.

So, a human being is big. God is big. The world is horrible. Pain is in your church. How can you be chipper? How can you create silliness as the modus operandi of welcome to worship?

Audio Transcript

From dating (last time) to marriage (today). Marriage is a beautiful institution, designed by God to point the world to Christ and to his bride. One wedding at a time, marriage exists for us because God decreed that Christ would purchase his bride, the church. And because of sin, that church, that fallen bride, must be redeemed from her ugly sin and be made beautiful in holiness. It’s an amazing drama played out in history, and in our lives, and it’s a drama played out in harmonious marriages and one played out even in hard marriages too. Painful marriages are no less reflective of God’s plan. And so, we have several episodes now on marriage challenges, which you can see. I gathered up all those APJ episodes and summarized them into one digest in the APJ book, one whole section just on this topic of hard marriages on pages 197–221.

And today, Pastor John joins us over the phone for a question from a perplexed father who wrote us anonymously. “Pastor John, hello. I write to you because my adult son wants to get a divorce from his wife. They have been married for two years and have a one-year-old son and a newborn baby girl of only ten days old. I’m totally perplexed by the timing. I don’t understand why he feels unhappy, but he claims he is ‘no longer in love’ with his wife anymore. What would you say to someone who has ‘fallen out of love’ with their spouse, and why that’s no grounds for divorce?”

Well, what I would say to them face to face would depend partly on their demeanor. But I don’t have him face to face, and so I’m just going to say what I think he probably needs to hear. Whether I would say it exactly like this, I don’t know. But here we go.

Embracing Realism

We would be naive, I think, to suppose that people — young or old, our own children or those of others — will act on the basis of reason and biblical truth when it comes to justifying divorce. I would guess that in 95 cases out of 100 people do what they want to do and then find reasons to do it. Especially those who claim to believe the Bible will find biblical reasons to do it. They just know what they’re going to do. They want to do it. They do it. So, we should be realistic as we talk to people, and we should pray. I think that’s the greatest realism — pray and fast that God would do what our biblical arguments and reasonings by themselves could never do.

But having said that, I totally believe in speaking the truth in love because it’s God’s way, it’s God’s design, that people should know the truth and the truth would set them free (John 8:32). (And that context is free from sin, like leaving your wife.) So, I would hang my thoughts on three words: joy, significance, and ownership. I would try to make those three words as compelling and winsome as I can, but also as forceful as Jesus and the apostles did, for the sake of staying married. So, let me say a word about what I mean by joy, significance, and ownership.

Joy

Joy. I would say to this young man who wants a divorce because he’s not in love, “Oh, what joy lies ahead for those who do not break their covenant even when their hearts are broken.” And here’s what I mean. I believe that most couples who stay married for fifty or sixty years fall in and out of love numerous times. And I say that with not the slightest hint of trying to be funny. It is, in my judgment, almost ludicrous to think that we experience “being in love” for the entire sixty years what we felt at the beginning of that relationship. That’s just utterly crazy. It is naive and immature to think that staying married is mainly about staying in love.

“You are free to break your marriage covenant when Christ breaks his covenant with his bride.”

In a relationship between two sinners, forced to live as close as married couples live, it is naive to think that every season will be one of warmth and sweetness and sexual romance. That’s just contrary to almost the entire history of the world and contrary to every makeup of fallen human nature. Staying married is not first about staying in love; it’s about covenant-keeping, promise-keeping, being a man and woman of your word, a man and woman who keep the vows to be committed for better or for worse, a man and a woman of character. That’s what it’s about.

This covenant-keeping relates to being in love the way gardening in the fall relates to roses in the spring. This is why I said a minute ago, “Oh, what joy lies ahead for those who do not break their covenant even when their hearts are broken.” The modern world of self-centeredness and self-exaltation and self-expression has taken the normal fifty-year process of falling in and out of love and turned it into a fifty-year process of multiple divorces and remarriages. That pattern has not and will not bear the fruit of joy. It leaves a trail of misery in the soul and misery among the generations.

Marriage is the hardest relationship to stay in and the one that promises glorious, unique, durable joys for those who have the character to keep their covenant. So, that’s what I mean by joy.

Significance

Now, here’s what I mean by significance. God offers to husbands and wives the highest possible significance for their marriage relationship by showing them what its greatest and most glorious meaning is — namely, the replication in the world of the covenant relationship between Christ and his bride, the church. That’s what the highest meaning of marriage is. There is no higher, more glorious, more significant conception of marriage than the one that Paul portrays in Ephesians 5, a parable of the greatest, strongest, deepest, sweetest, richest relationship in the universe — the blood-bought union between Christ, the Son of God, and his bride, the church. That’s the meaning; that’s the significance of marriage.

And I would just say to this young man that you are acting, or about to act, on one of the lowest views of marriage — not one of the highest, but one of the lowest, views of marriage. If you divorce because you don’t feel love anymore, there is nothing noble, nothing great, nothing beautiful, nothing high, nothing truly significant about such a motive. What does it say about Christ, the model of a man’s commitment in marriage? What does it say if he forsakes his wife because he doesn’t feel like staying anymore? What does it say about Christ? That’s the issue.

Marriage is an act of worship. It’s a display of the price and the preciousness of the covenant-keeping love between Christ and his church. Covenant-keeping in marriage glorifies Christ and the blood he shed to possess a bride forever. We cannot even conceive of a greater significance of marriage than the one God has given.

Ownership

And lastly, the word ownership. What do I mean by ownership? What I mean by ownership is that the union between a man and a woman isn’t theirs to break. They didn’t create it; they can’t break it. It’s not theirs. Jesus said, “What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate” (Matthew 19:6).

It’s another sign of the man-centeredness and contemporary self-centeredness of Christianity that a young couple would have the mindset that they created the union called marriage, and therefore they can break it. They didn’t create it; they can’t break it. God made it; God breaks it with death. Or as I think Paul would say, “You are free to break your marriage covenant when Christ breaks his covenant with his bride.”

So, for the sake of maximum long-term joy, and for the sake of the deepest and highest significance, and for the sake of the Maker and Owner of your union, keep your covenant. Oh, what joy lies ahead, beyond anything you can presently imagine, for those who keep their covenant even when their hearts are broken.

Audio Transcript

Does holy anger kill our delight in God? It’s a good question from Matt, a listener in Wisconsin. “Pastor John, hello and thank you for this podcast! I think we are living in an age where Christians are taking hard stances on just about anything and everything, making decisions about vaccines and politicians and masks — decisions all held with unflexing, biblical conviction. And then those staunch positions, and the resulting strong language, is justified by Christians in terms of righteous anger — like Jesus flipping tables and not sinning.

A long time back, in an episode on abortion, APJ 672, you made a case for using righteous anger to call out the evil of killing the unborn. It witnesses to the world the degree of such an injustice. But later you were asked about the distinction between unholy anger and holy anger. That was in APJ 1100. And there you said,

I was much more optimistic about a righteous place for anger when I was 30 than I am now. I have seen the destructive power of anger in relationships, especially marriage, to such a degree over the last forty to fifty years that I am far less sanguine about so-called righteous anger than I once was. Anger is not just a relationship destroyer; it is a self-destroyer. It eats up all other wholesome emotions.

I’m wondering if that last phrase is connected to your overwhelming emphasis in your ministry on delighting in God and desiring God. Were you there suggesting that ‘righteous anger’ tends to ‘eat up’ the proper, more dominantly necessary emotions of delight and satisfaction in God? And where are you at now in life with the value or dangers of righteous anger?”

I’m glad to address this again. I feel very strongly about it. So was I suggesting that righteous anger can become a destructive anger that eats up the God-glorifying emotions of joy and peace and delight in God? Yes, absolutely, I was suggesting that and believe it. Anger of a certain kind and a certain duration will not only eat up all God-glorifying emotions, but it will eat up virtually all emotions and leave a person with an outward, plastic, superficial personality or persona, and an inward, easily offended cauldron of suppressed anger. I have seen it in life. I see evidences of it in the Bible.

So let’s look at a few passages for why I see things this way and feel as strongly as I do, and perhaps I can give some help not to go there.

Slow to Anger

You have this famous statement in James 1:19–20:

Let every person be quick to hear, slow to speak, slow to anger, for the anger of man does not produce the righteousness of God.

Now notice the logic, the logical connection: be slow to anger because the anger of man does not produce the righteousness of God. So a quick-tempered person is generally experiencing anger that is not of God. And that’s the logic: It is simply man’s anger. Quick anger is regularly man’s anger, not God’s anger. It’s not righteous. It’s destructive. Now listen to these proverbs to see where James has rooted all this. I think James is the closest thing we get to the book of Proverbs in the New Testament. I don’t doubt that he was deeply schooled on Proverbs.

Proverbs 14:17: “A man of quick temper acts foolishly.”
Proverbs 14:29: “Whoever is slow to anger has great understanding, but he who has a hasty temper exalts folly.”
Proverbs 15:18: “A hot-tempered man stirs up strife, but he who is slow to anger quiets contention.”
Proverbs 16:32: “Whoever is slow to anger is better than the mighty, and he who rules his spirit than he who takes a city.”
Proverbs 19:11: “Good sense makes one slow to anger, and it is his glory to overlook an offense.”

Wisdom from Above

So then you go over to James 3. I think it is really important to align James 1:19–20 with James 3:14–18, and you see the heavenly alternative to the merely human anger that does not produce the righteousness of God. Here’s what it says.

The wisdom from above [it’s heavenly; not just from a man] is first pure, then peaceable, gentle, open to reason, full of mercy and good fruits, impartial and sincere. And a harvest of righteousness is sown in peace by those who make peace.

And remember that James 1:20 said that anger does not produce the righteousness of God. So here you get a harvest of righteousness, and this harvest is sown in peace by those who make peace — in other words, the opposite of anger. Anger seldom accomplishes the good ends that James is after — namely, a harvest of right, good, wholesome, just, loving behavior. It may. I’m going to get to the fact that there is such a thing as righteous anger, but it is really rare, I think, and therefore, James says, “Be slow to go there — very, very slow to get there.”

So the very least we can say from James is that if anger should come, it should come slowly — not necessarily temporally slowly, though that’s probably the case ordinarily, but rather in this sense: It’s got to go through some real serious filters in your soul. It’s got to go through the filter of humility, and through the filter of patience, and through the filter of wisdom, and through the filter of love, and through the filter of self-control. And if it comes out on the other side, it might be righteous anger. It should be slow in the sense that you put it through the paces. Don’t just go there.

Now here comes Ephesians 4. That’s the only other text we will look at in a significant way.

Be angry and do not sin; do not let the sun go down on your anger, and give no opportunity to the devil. (Ephesians 4:26–27)

So James says, “Be . . . slow to anger.” And Paul says, “Be quick to stop being angry.” That’s really significant, isn’t it? Paul puts a high premium on the duration of anger. “Do not let the sun go down on your anger.” Be done with it by sundown. It’s dangerous. And the danger is the devil. So, James and Paul treat anger as a hot potato: Be slow to catch it. And if you’ve got to catch it, toss it quickly to somebody else — or better, toss it in the river.

Now, why? And Paul gives the reason why it’s so dangerous. He says, “Don’t let the sun go down on your anger. Get rid of it quick. Don’t give place to the devil.” So to go to bed seething, to go to bed with a grudge, to go to bed with anger that’s not dealt with — not forgiving people, holding a grudge — is an invitation as you go to sleep to the devil to come on in. And it seems that the devil specializes in moving into this deadly work, his deadly work, where anger is held onto day and night.

So one of the signs of righteous anger is that it comes slowly, and it leaves quickly. It does not dominate. It does its work in the moment, and it doesn’t stay around to contaminate. It doesn’t give place to the devil. And what I’ve been saying for years is that what the devil does, when you give him place by holding onto anger longer than you should, is eat up every alternative, good, God-glorifying emotion. And I would add from what I’ve seen in recent days, that he not only eats up good affections and emotions, but that, in the absence of those affections, he eats truth. He distorts true perceptions. We don’t see things as clearly when anger eats us up.

Consumed Affections

I have seen it. I’ve seen people move from the most mild assessments of someone’s error to damnation. I mean, you wonder, Where did that come from, that they would move to the point of actually damning another person for what started out to be a relatively minor fault? And I think part of the answer is that anger eats up love, anger eats up affections, anger eats up thankfulness, and anger eats up true perceptions of reality. So the point is this:

The devil hates joy in God.
The devil hates tenderhearted compassion.
The devil hates us to be kind to suffering people.
The devil hates sweet affection for our families.
The devil hates it when husbands and wives are tenderhearted and kind and forgiving to each other (Ephesians 4:32).
The devil hates wonder and admiration at the beauties of nature.
The devil hates all the fruit of the Holy Spirit — love, joy, peace, patience, goodness, kindness, meekness, faithfulness, self-control (Galatians 5:22–23).

He hates them all. And when we give him place in our hearts at night, going to bed with anger, the jaws called anger consume, over time, all those precious affections.

So the present state of my mind here — he asked, “Where’s your mind presently on this issue?” The present state of my mind, both biblically and culturally on this question about anger, is that anger is a dangerous emotion — not necessarily sinful. God, by the way, is the only person who is holy enough to manage it really well. And he does get angry, and he never sins. But we, however, being fallen and sinful, must consider it much more dangerous for us than it is for God. It’s not dangerous for God. Nothing is dangerous for God. It has a proper place, therefore, only when it comes slowly, leaves quickly, and in between, is truly governed by a love for people and the glory of God.

Joyfully Overwhelmed

So, let me end the way Paul does, following up on his admonition not to go to bed angry. He says in the next verses,

And do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God, by whom you were sealed for the day of redemption. Let all bitterness and wrath and anger [now we’re told that not only do you give place to the devil, but you grieve the Spirit, if you hold onto anger] and clamor and slander be put away from you, along with all malice. Be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ forgave you. (Ephesians 4:30–32)

And there’s the key, isn’t it? We must let our affections be joyfully overwhelmed that, while we deserve wrath and anger from God, amazingly, we have been forgiven by the death of the only innocent person who ever lived. That state of mind and heart — being forgiven and amazed at our forgiveness, like John Newton in “Amazing Grace” — will keep anger from rising too quickly or staying too long.