http://rss.desiringgod.org/link/10732/15898103/how-do-i-push-truth-from-my-head-to-my-heart
Audio Transcript
Welcome back to the podcast on this January 11th. This is always a big day for us. The podcast, Ask Pastor John, turns ten years old today. Episode 1 aired on January 11, 2013. And more importantly, John Piper was born on January 11, 1946. He’s 77 years young today. So Pastor John, when you hear this episode, happy birthday to you, my friend. Thank you for this unforgettable decade on the podcast. And wherever you are today, enjoy that Butterfinger Blizzard to the glory of God!
Well, we are talking Bible reading today. How do we turn our daily Bible reading into daily worship? Early in the new year is a very good time for a refresher on this topic of how to get truth from our heads into our hearts. So, we open to Psalm 77. Last Wednesday, we saw how the psalm teaches us to push past personal discouragement to get God’s truth into our heads. Asaph, its author, tells us to remember, to meditate, and to muse upon the deeds and wonders of God in history. Why? Because “the central biblical strategy” to escape the discouragements of life is through “a conscious effort of the mind.”
Even when life hurts the most, we discipline ourselves to get truth into our minds. And then once it’s there — in our heads — we need to get that truth into our hearts. And today Pastor John is going to explain how he does that by illustrating the practice from his own life, in what I think is a pretty remarkable sermon excerpt, again taken from his New Year’s sermon on Psalm 77, preached back in the early moments of the year 2000. Here’s Pastor John.
I know there are more obstacles to joy than absence of knowledge. I know that there are physical obstacles, I know that there are medical reasons, I know that there are family reasons, and I know that there are hereditary reasons.
Puritan Wisdom
In fact, Aaron shared with me a great essay or excerpt from a book by Richard Baxter, who was a great soul doctor three hundred years ago, in which he was dealing with melancholy. (That’s the old-fashioned word for discouragement or, in its worst cases, depression.)
These old Puritans knew two things. They knew their souls, and they knew their Bibles. They knew these souls were connected to bodies, and they knew these bodies were connected to — they didn’t know anything about genes, but they knew about moms and dads and granddads and great-granddads. And they knew the William Cowpers, who tried to kill himself three times, and they knew his parents, and it wasn’t too hard to figure out, “There’s something going on here — physically as well as family dynamics.”
And therefore, the most amazing thing about this essay was that he had practical guidelines for how to eat, how to sleep, how to exercise — even something to do with the way you eat and the posture you’re in when you eat. Can you believe that? Puritans telling people how to sit while they eat in order to avoid melancholy. So please, don’t hear me unfolding this strategy of the Christian life as oblivious of the fact that these matters are more complex than simply knowledge in the head.
Emotional Coasting
But here’s my question — for me, mainly, and I’ll let you listen. When I say, “I have it in my head — this Bible knowledge about God — and it’s not working; I’m feeling low still,” my question to me is, When you say, “I have my head filled with Bible doctrine or Bible knowledge, is that the same as what’s being said here?” “I will remember. Surely I will remember the deeds of old. I will meditate. And surely I will muse.”
And I have a feeling, I have this little suspicion that American evangelicals are a very passive bunch of people when it comes to our emotions. They come on us, and we’re passive, and we’ve been taught to think, “Somebody did this to me,” or “I did it to myself, but it’s happening to me.” And now what? Now what? And there’s this absence of the great old biblical Puritan awareness.
“There’s a war to be fought here. There’s a delight to be struggled for here.”
There’s a strategy of life here. There’s a war to be fought here. There’s a delight to be struggled for here. There’s an intentionality and a purposefulness here. And if you have just a little mustard seed left under the weight of the darkness to do something, there are things that can be done here that might be blessed of God with Psalm 77:13. So, I don’t think — and I’m just talking to myself still here, John Piper — I don’t think when you say, “I know that about you, God, and it’s not helping me,” I don’t think that’s meditation. I don’t think that’s musing. I think that’s coasting.
So what is meditation? What is musing? This is something different from saying, “I’ve got lots of Bible knowledge in my head, and it doesn’t help.” That’s very different from saying, “I will remember something that’s in my head. I’ll pursue it. I’ll dig around in there until I find it.” And then what do you do? “Okay, I found it. I’ve got it.” Or maybe you have to dig in the Bible because your mind’s just not working well enough to remember. You go dig in there, and you dig, and you find it.
Moving into Meditation
Then what do you do with it? Do you do anything with it? What is meditation? What is musing? Well, let me just draw things to a close with an illustration. I’ll just do it out loud for you, okay? We’ll do a little bit of this now. You just watch me do it. I will talk out loud what I would talk inside.
Suppose I come in the year 2000, and I’m feeling absolutely like a failure. Last year was terrible. I hardly ever read my Bible. I hardly ever prayed. I mouthed off over and over again in the wrong circumstances. Lust got all out of hand. Blah, blah, blah. It was one awful year. And I frankly feel worthless and hopeless as I enter the year 2000.
So suppose that’s where you are now. And you hear a sermon like this. You say, “Well, it doesn’t work. Didn’t work last year. Doesn’t work. I grew up in the church for goodness’ sake. My head’s stocked full of Bible knowledge about the exodus. Doesn’t work.”
I will remember the deeds of the Lord. I remember a day 2000 years ago, when on a Roman cross of execution, there was the greatest, most loving, most kind, most gentle, most wise, sinless man that ever was hanging on the cross. I will call this to mind. And he is suffering greatly. His head is thorned, and his face is beat up. His beard is plucked out. His back is lacerated. Nails are through his hands and his feet. He can barely breathe. He has screamed himself hoarse and can no longer scream and is on the brink of death.
And next to him on either side is a thief. They have both railed at him, cursed him. “Get yourself and us down if you’re some big-shot Messiah.” And then I will call to mind that one of those thieves suddenly, inexplicably, awesomely looks over at this Christ and says, “Remember me when you come into your kingdom” (Luke 23:42).
Moving into Blessing
I will call to mind, “Where’d that come from?” He was cursing the Lord. He was making fun of this bleeding Messiah. Where did that come from? And I will remember the work of grace, the work of sovereign grace in the eleventh hour. Here’s a man who did nothing but wrong all his life — never had one act of obedience, of faith. He deserves hell, and he’s about twenty minutes away from hell. And he presumes to say, “Remember me.”
“I will linger with that sentence. I will take hold of that sentence and not let it go until it blesses me.”
“Remember you? I’ll remember you. I’ll send you straight to hell. That’s what I do with people like you, thieves all their life long.” I will meditate on the mighty deeds of Christ, who looked over the nail on his right hand and said, “Today you will be with me in paradise” (Luke 23:43). And I will not leave that and go off to my pity party and say, “It doesn’t work. I’ve got that knowledge in my head, and it doesn’t change anything.”
I will linger with that sentence. I will stay with that sentence. I will take hold of that sentence and not let it go until it blesses me. And it doesn’t have to be long with that sentence — for me, anyway. “Today, you thief, in the eleventh hour, with nothing to commend yourself to God whatsoever — you don’t even have time to get out and obey and show yourself that you are real — you are going to go straight with me to paradise.” What kind of grace is that that I might be a part of?
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Ten Authors for Your Soul
Audio Transcript
This week we’re talking with Pastor John about book reading. On Monday we looked at the seven ways books have impacted your life, Pastor John. You gave us a brief theology of reading as well, looking at that incredible text in Ephesians 3:4. As you were talking about those seven ways that books have changed your life, I could hear you eager to give specific recommendations. So, let’s do the who today. Whom do you read? That’s today’s question from a listener named Sam. “Hello, Pastor John and Tony! In a recent Solid Joys devotional I listened to, Pastor John, you mentioned the practice of reading ‘rich doctrinal books.’ What would you consider to be your top ten ‘rich doctrinal books’ that have helped you grow over the decades?”
Well, I have an awful time answering “top” questions, or “most” questions. But I can answer ten rich doctrinal books that have made a walloping impact on my life — whether I leave one out that’s in the top ten, my memory’s not good enough to say.
Here’s what C.S. Lewis said about our longing for the heart — our hearts — to sing with joy over what we see about God in our devotions. He said,
For my own part, I tend to find the doctrinal books often more helpful in devotion than devotional books. And I rather suspect that the same experience awaits others. I believe that many who find “nothing happens,” when they sit down or kneel down to a book of devotion, would find that the heart sings unbidden when they are working their way through a tough bit of theology with a pipe in their teeth and a pencil in their hand. (“On the Reading of Old Books,” 223)
My response to that is, “Well, you can leave the pipe aside.” You don’t want to get mouth cancer on your way to devotions. Leave the pipe aside, but do pick up the pencil, and a doctrinally rich book, and see what happens. So, here are ten authors who have done this for me — made my heart sing because of what they showed me of God and his ways from the Bible.
1. Four Books from Jonathan Edwards
No historic theologian has shaped me more. I’ll mention four books: The End for Which God Created the World, Religious Affections, Essay on the Trinity, and Freedom of the Will. One of those showed me the nature of God as three in one. Another showed me the goal of God to glorify himself in all that he does. Another showed me that my affections are essential to the worship and obedience of God. And the fourth showed me the compatibility between God’s absolute sovereignty and my human accountability before him.
2. Three Books from John Owen
This little book The Mortification of Sin — eighty or ninety pages — takes us into the depths of how God overcomes sin in our lives. Communion with God shows us what it actually means to have fellowship with each member of the Trinity. And The Death of Death in the Death of Christ clarifies the glory of particular redemption — namely, that Christ really did secure the new covenant blessings for God’s elect.
3. Stephen Charnock, The Existence and Attributes of God
Crossway just put out a brand-new double-volume edition of this. That book — that giant 1,500 pages in two volumes — sat on my bedside table for (I can’t remember exactly) a couple of years, and I soaked with just two or three pages at night before I went to bed. I soaked in God’s holiness, his eternity, his immutability, his patience, his goodness. Someone asked Bernard of Clairvaux in the Middle Ages, “Why don’t people love God more?” And he said, “Because they don’t know him.” Charnock is a great remedy for that ailment.
4. J.I. Packer, Knowing God
If you don’t want to start with a two-volume, 1,500-page book, then start with J.I. Packer, Knowing God (250 pages instead of 1,500). The first sentence goes like this: “As clowns yearn to play Hamlet, so I have wanted to write a treatise on God.” Packer knows God is infinite, and he’s finite. The chasm between him and God is wider than the universe. Packer is a good, humble guide. He’s not presumptuous, but he is profound in his own special, accessible way. So, start with Packer if Charnock sounds daunting.
5. John Murray, Redemption Accomplished and Applied
I learned my Calvinism not from Calvin, but mainly from Romans, and Ephesians, and Philippians, and the Gospel of John. But at certain points along the way in my theological pilgrimage, a book would come along that put so many pieces together in a beautiful, coherent way that I found them extremely helpful.
“Even if you read these books in your chair, not on your knees, be kneeling in your heart.”
The very title Redemption Accomplished and Applied still functions for me like a bright light. God accomplished my redemption on the cross once for all, decisively. It’s over, it’s done, it’s finished, it’s accomplished: propitiation, redemption. And then he sovereignly, at age six, applies that to my life — justification, adoption, sanctification, glorification — by giving me faith, bringing me to himself.
So, after Packer, go to Murray.
6. John Bunyan, Pilgrim’s Progress
You might not think that this interesting story, which children can enjoy, a fascinating allegory, is doctrinally rich, but it is. One of the things about an allegory is that you can read it at different levels. It’s just an interesting story with monsters and dangers — or you can read it at the profound level of how the Christian life really works under the sovereignty of God.
7. J.C. Ryle, Holiness
One of the great strengths of this book that makes it so doctrinally rich is that he keeps in clear view the difference between justification and sanctification, and how they relate to each other in the quest for holiness. It also has the hidden benefit of being 150 years old, so that we can see — I was just glancing at my notes yesterday — how some of the challenges to holiness that we face, and we think are new, are really not new or peculiar to our age.
8. D.A. Carson, The Difficult Doctrine of the Love of God
This is only 84 pages, but it goes a long way to keep us from talking in sentimental nonsense about the love of God. Almost everybody in the post-Christian West thinks of God as more or less lenient and kind. They bring their conceptions to the Bible, and when the Bible says, “God is love” (1 John 4:8), they fill it up with meaning that they already had in their head, which may be completely wrong. Don Carson helps us see what God is really like in what he revealed about his love.
9. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, The Sermon on the Mount
This two-volume collection of sermons on Jesus’s most famous sermon opened my eyes in the summer of 1968 to how doctrinal preaching could set the heart on fire. When I read it, I was 22 years old, and I thought, “That’s how I’d like to preach someday.”
10. Two Books from George Ladd
I’ll mention George Ladd’s A Theology of the New Testament and The Presence of the Future. Dr. Ladd was my New Testament professor in seminary and introduced a whole generation of American evangelicals to the fact that the New Testament is eschatological cover to cover, meaning that Israel’s long-awaited kingdom of God has already arrived and yet is not entirely here. He showed us that the “mystery of the kingdom” that you read about in the Gospels is fulfillment without consummation — that’s the mystery.
The kingdom of God is already here in some senses, and it is not yet here in other senses. And the tension between the already of the kingdom and the not yet of the kingdom affects everything in the Bible, everything in life. So, eschatology is not just a final chapter about end times in the systematic-theology textbook, but a pervasive reality touching everything in the New Testament and in life.
Read on Your Knees
Those are my ten suggested authors and some of their doctrinally rich books. Remember, as you read, to be like B.B. Warfield. When he was criticized that “ten minutes on your knees would give you a truer, deeper, more operative knowledge of God than ten hours over your books,” he replied, “What! . . . Than ten hours over your books, on your knees?” Even if you read these books in your chair, not on your knees, be kneeling in your heart. And then the rich doctrine will make the heart sing.
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Hope Will Put You to Work: 1 Thessalonians 1:2–7, Part 1
http://rss.desiringgod.org/link/10732/15335099/hope-will-put-you-to-work
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What Is the Christian Alternative to Stealing? Ephesians 4:25–29, Part 7
http://rss.desiringgod.org/link/10732/14883912/what-is-the-christian-alternative-to-stealing
