“Could she have included Jane in the scheme, every part would have been perfect.” So thinks Elizabeth Bennet in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. If only her sister were there, if only they could go for walks together, all would be complete — then she would be perfectly happy.

Yet another moment’s reflection teaches her a lesson untraveled by much of humanity:

“But it is fortunate,” thought she, “that I have something to wish for. Were the whole arrangement complete, my disappointment would be certain. But here, my carrying with me one ceaseless source of regret in my sister’s absence, I may reasonably hope to have all my expectations of pleasure realized. A scheme of which every part promises delight can never be successful; and general disappointment is only warded off by the defense of some little particular vexation.” (166)

Did you catch it? This paragraph will be surgical if you let it. Upon reflection, Elizabeth discovers that she doesn’t really want her sister there at all. Why? Because she wants to maintain at least one excuse for why she isn’t finally happy. She knows that if her sister comes — if they go for their walks through the gardens — she will still not possess that happiness she longs for. And what is worse: she will no longer possess any reason for why not. What then?

Then she would have to turn and face it: she does not know what will finally make her happy, what will finally banish the ache. Maybe in the end, all hopes are false. Should she risk touching bottom? No, thinks she, the shallow disappointment of a missing sister must shield from the deeper, tongueless throb silenced of rebuttals.

Chasing Our Tail

What makes Elizabeth’s reasoning so unsettling is that she knows her sister would not fulfill her happiness — yet she prefers deception to reality. Her passions rise in mutiny against reason; she allows them the helm without struggle. She prefers to wish for her sister than to have her sister (and so break the spell). Does that sound familiar (though we are less honest)? Sure, we sigh loudly enough, but have we ever noticed the relief that comes from realizing at least one of our Janes is elsewhere, and so certain disappointment is kept at bay?

Peter Kreeft describes man’s plight this way:

If he experiences winning, he is not happy for long; but if he plays with the hope of winning, he can be happy for a long time by being both diverted (by playing) and deluded (believing he’d be truly happy if he won). Success is the sure spoiler. We are happy only climbing the mountain, not staying peacefully on the summit; only chasing the fox, not catching it; only courting, not marrying; only traveling, not arriving; only fighting wars, not keeping a boring peace. (Christianity for Modern Pagans, 181)

Success is the sure spoiler. And so, the 27-year-old Tom Brady gives an interview with 60 Minutes atop the world’s mountain — three Super Bowl rings, fame, money, power — only to question, Is this it? There has to be more . . . And so, Yo-Yo Ma tells the story of getting halfway through a perfect concert — for which he trained his whole life — only to notice, of all things, his own perfect boredom. And so, the king of Ecclesiastes, who denied his heart no pleasure, writes over and over from within a stupor, “All is vanity.” Elizabeth, with great foresight, knows the yawn found at the world’s mountaintop, as we should too, if only we were brave enough to sit in a silent room and consider it.

Well at the World’s End

I wonder if our love for the chase but not the catch, the distraction but not the dominion, doesn’t also explain some of envy’s saltiness. If jealousy be that “green-eyed monster which doth mock the meat it feeds on,” have we no pleasure in being consumed?

We have a saying for finding our unmet desires (our Janes) living in another’s lawn: “The grass is always greener on the other side.” But what if we almost prefer it that way? What if our neighbor’s green grass (so pristine from this side of the fence) keeps our hopes of greater happiness watered and fed? Perhaps if we were unfortunate enough to receive an invitation into our neighbor’s yard, we might make the ill-fated discovery that our grass, in fact, is just as green (if not greener). What now?

This is orphaned man: we have not known what we desire, yet we say it is just over there. Boys chasing dragons through the forest. “On whatever plane you take it, it is not what we were looking for,” C.S. Lewis writes. He whispers what we already know over our shoulders:

Lust can be gratified. Another personality can become to us “our America, our New-found-land.” A happy marriage can be achieved. But what has any of the three, or any mixture of the three, to do with that unnameable something, desire for which pierces us like a rapier at the smell of a bonfire, the sound of wild ducks flying overhead, the title of The Well at the World’s End, the opening lines of Kubla Khan, the morning cobwebs in late summer, or the noise of falling waves? (Afterword to The Pilgrim’s Regress, 237)

No idol has yet stayed true to its promises — but who could live in a world without worship? Should the next love, next promotion, next child finally be that ladder who makes a name for itself by placing its top in the heavens? We know (oh, we know). They too will fail to punctuate; our desires will remain running sentences. We thirst but cannot find the Stream, but our thirst proves there is a stream somewhere. “Nature makes nothing in vain” (237). “Nearly there now” — the refrain of our lives. But we’ve been “there” before. The nearer we got, the browner the water. We are lovers of if only.

Walk with Elizabeth

If I were to go on a walk with Elizabeth, I would tell her exactly what she fears to know: The child of her joy is too thin and frail to survive. Her honeyed hope is false, and she is but half-serious about living to be so freely swallowed by a dream. But the irrepressible longing to crown something her mirth’s monarch is not given in vain.

Her God has placed it there.

But she stands evicted from such heights of happiness, gripping a branch below with broken wings because of sin. Justice holds a rifle at her; her life (and joy) hang by a thread sustained by the God she has sought to find happiness without. She has not honored him or given him thanks, and so that “God-shaped hole in her heart” — along with her God-programmed conscience — bears witness (graciously) to her estrangement (Romans 1:21; 2:15). Both denounce her pride and her prejudice, and point her, if she has eyes to see, to the Lord of glory who authored her.

“If only” cannot defend against the inevitable disappointment (and what is much worse) of a life unreconciled to God. Only Christ can, who “suffered once for sins, the righteous for the unrighteous, that he might bring us to God” (1 Peter 3:18). And this Christ, fully God and fully man, through his sinless life and substitutionary death and subsequent resurrection, received by faith and repentance and evidenced by living obedience, offers to put his joy — supernatural joy — in you. “These things I have spoken to you, that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be full” (John 15:11).

Here, and nowhere else, can your joy be made full. One drink from this well, says he, and you shall never thirst again.

Audio Transcript

I love and respect my own parents a lot. But not everyone is blessed with parents like mine. And so we have several related questions in the inbox from adults who are trying to figure out how to honor their parents. For many, this becomes more and more perplexing. As we grow into adulthood, we see our parents’ faults more clearly. And in the late-teen transition to adulthood, parental authority changes; it lessens. The relationship changes. It all leads to various questions, like this one: Can we honor our parents if we don’t respect them? The question was put in particularly clear and brief terms by one listener to the podcast, an anonymous twentysomething listener. “Pastor John, my question is rather simple: How can I honor my parents when I don’t respect them? Or does honoring them assume that you do respect them?” Pastor John, what would you say?

Yes, I don’t think there is a great difference between the terms honor and respect. Respect, I think, refers most often to our inner assessment of someone’s character or achievement, while honor more often refers to our various demonstrations toward them in words or behaviors that express our respect.

So, I think the real question is this: How do we honor or respect parents who, without any repentance, act in dishonorable and blameworthy ways? That’s the question. This is a very crucial question, not only because every Christian has to come to terms with the biblical command of Jesus in Matthew 19:19 to “honor your father and mother” — even though thousands of people have had parents who consistently acted in dishonorable and blameworthy ways — but it’s also a crucial question because the same issue faces all of us in regard to all people, because 1 Peter 2:17 says, “Honor everyone” — not just “honor your parents” but “honor all people” — “Love the brotherhood. Fear God. Honor the emperor.” And there are horrible people in the world who have done despicable things all their lives and have died viciously hating people and rejecting God and seemingly having nothing honorable about them.

Seven Grounds for Honor

Now, what I have found to be most helpful in thinking through this question about how to honor the dishonorable is to discover in the New Testament that there are at least seven overlapping warrants or reasons or grounds for honoring someone. And these different reasons or grounds for honoring people regularly call for different ways of honoring people. If we take all these into account, some of them will apply to honoring parents who have acted in disreputable or criminal ways — and we’re not going to twist any language to make that work. So, here they are — here are the seven overlapping warrants for honoring someone in the New Testament.

1. Image of God

First, there is honor that is owing to human beings simply because they are created in the image of God, and should be treated differently than the animals. For example:

With [the tongue] we bless our Lord and Father, and with it we curse people who are made in the likeness of God. From the same mouth come blessing and cursing. My brothers, these things ought not to be so. (James 3:9–10)

“The sheer existence of a human being in the image of God should call forth from us a kind of honor.”

In other words, the sheer existence of a human being in the image of God, the likeness of God, should call forth from us a kind of honor. So, when my students used to ask me, “How do you honor a child molester, a rapist, a murderer, a leader of a genocide?” one answer that I gave was “You don’t shoot them like a stray ox that gored your neighbor” (Exodus 21:28–32). You give them a trial by jury, just because they are human and not animals. That’s a form of honor, even if the trial is followed by execution.

2. Natural Relationships

There is honor that is simply owing to natural relations as God has established them. And here I’m thinking about “honor your father and mother,” because it is a natural relation that God has established, and gains its honorableness from his ordering of things — not just from the quality of the parents. Or you could add to that the honor that is due to age. Leviticus 19:32: “You shall stand up before the gray head and honor the face of an old man, and you shall fear your God: I am the Lord.”

3. God-Ordained Authority

There is the honor that comes with God-ordained authority. Now, that overlaps with the second point, but this one is not rooted in nature the way that one was. In the secular sphere, Peter says, “Honor the emperor” (1 Peter 2:17). In church, Paul says in 1 Thessalonians 5:12, “Respect those who labor among you and are over you in the Lord.” In other words, there is a God-appointed authority in the world and a God-appointed authority in the church, and there is a kind of honor that we should show just by virtue of the roles of authority that God himself has appointed.

4. Valuable Labor

There is the honor that people should get because of the worth of their work. In 1 Thessalonians 5:13, Paul goes on to say that, in the church, we should “esteem [our leaders] very highly in love because of their work.” In other words, the work itself is valuable and worthy of our respect.

5. Servanthood

It’s interesting that Paul mingles love with honor there in 1 Thessalonians toward the church leaders who do their work well. Here’s verse 13 again: “Esteem [your leaders] very highly in love because of their work.” In other words, there is a kind of respect or an esteem or an honor that is drawn out of us by our love for those who serve us, not just from the quality of their work.

6. Weakness

There is an honor that should be drawn out toward weakness. Peter mentions this in the relationship between husbands and wives in 1 Peter 3:7: “Husbands, live with your wives in an understanding way, showing honor to the woman as the weaker vessel.” In other words, in Christ, the response toward weakness is not exploitation or mockery or abuse, but honor.

7. Christlike Grace

This may be the most important with regard to what is distinctly Christian. There’s a kind of honor that is freely bestowed without reference to any quality or position or reputation or virtue or rank or demerit in the person honored. In other words, there is a way of honoring that, as it were, doesn’t respond to honorableness but bestows it. It treats a person as though honorable, as though worthy of our service, because we give it to them.

Paul roots this way of honoring people in the very mind of Christ, and in his sacrificial incarnation and sacrifice on the cross.

Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility count others more significant than yourselves. . . . Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant. (Philippians 2:3, 5–7)

“There is a way of honoring that, as it were, doesn’t respond to honorableness but bestows it.”

So, there is a kind of honoring that we freely and graciously bestow on the undeserving. We treat them better than they deserve. We assume the position toward them of servants. And thus, in a way, we exalt them as though they were worthy to be served, when, in fact, they’re not worthy to be served. And thus, we bestow a kind of free honor upon them, which is called grace, the way Christ did to us, the way his sacrifice pours out onto us — honor as though we were honorable when we’re not.

To Whom Honor Is Owed

None of those seven reasons for honoring people, and none of those ways of honoring people, commits us to the hypocrisy of thinking others are honorable when they are dishonorable or praiseworthy when they are blameworthy. The Bible does not ask us to live a lie.

So in summary,

some acts of honoring others are owing to the image of God,
some to natural human relations that God has appointed,
some to authority structures that God has put in place,
some to the worth of the work that others do,
some to the relationship of love that we have,
some to a person’s weakness, and
some is absolutely free, in order to display the freedom of the grace of God to others.

And among those seven, I would say at least four, and possibly as many as six, apply to parents who, at one level, have lived in dishonorable ways. And I’ll let you think through which of those apply to your situation.

Audio Transcript

Chapel is designed to be a meeting on your part with the King of kings and the Lord of lords himself. Over the years, there has been the same, basic objective: that chapel is to be a time of worship. Not a lecture, not an entertainment, but a time of meeting the King.

Those were some of the closing words from a man’s final minutes on earth. The preacher is V. Raymond Edman. He’s 67 years old. It’s a Friday-morning chapel at Wheaton College, on September 22, 1967, five and a half decades ago. His sermon is titled “In the Presence of the King.” Edman preached for about eleven minutes, paused, collapsed, and died — and entered into the presence of the King of kings. A stunning event.

In chapel that morning, along with about two thousand other Wheaton students, was 21-year-old John Piper. And Pastor John, you rarely ever mention this event: once late in an article you wrote in 1995, but nowhere in a book or sermon, and never here on APJ. So, take us back to Wheaton in 1967. Who was V. Raymond Edman? What do you remember about that fateful Friday morning? What impact did the chapel have on your ministry? And as you listen to the audio recording over 55 years later, what strikes you now?

The room we were meeting in when “Prexy” (as those who knew him well called him), V. Raymond Edman, died was called Edman Chapel, named after Dr. Edman in 1960 when it was built. So, the building in which he died bore his name already. It’s a large, concert-like venue, beautifully white and blue, with huge chandeliers. It holds about 2,400 people, with a main floor where the students sat during chapel and then a balcony behind.

Chapel was required of all students in those days, so the main floor was almost always mostly full. I was sitting near the back on the main floor on the right-hand side as you face the platform (I think my row was about three or four from the back). We sat in alphabetical order. So, nobody chose whom they sat with.

Discipline of Stillness

So, what do I make, then, as I listen to these last minutes of Dr. Edman’s life (which I did in getting ready for this)? What an amazing experience to listen. Frankly, if you listen to the whole thing, I think you can hear Dr. Edman — in his voice and in the content of his message — that he was displeased with the casual way students were treating chapel.

His entire narrative of his meeting with Haile Selassie, the Ethiopian king, with its elaborate protocol of bowing and silence as one approached the earthly king, was designed by Dr. Edman to encourage students to come to chapel and meet the King of kings in that spirit. That’s the whole point of his message. “Stop talking as you enter the foyer,” he pleaded with them. He pleaded that, when they walk into chapel, they wouldn’t talk with each other, but cultivate what he called the discipline of “be still, and know that I am God” (Psalm 46:10).

He had written a book of devotions called The Disciplines of Life. I had the book. I can’t find it right now, but I remember reading it while I was still at Wheaton. His burden in the book — and in the chapel message and elsewhere — was paradoxical, like the Christian life. He knew on the one hand that the deeper life — “the exchanged life,” as he called it (he was very influenced by Hudson Taylor, by the way, in that regard). He knew that the deeper, exchanged life — Christ for mine, mine for Christ — was a profoundly free and Spirit-inspired life.

“Speak in a way that you would be okay with if a recording of your last minutes were played over and over again.”

Yet on the other hand, this life was marked by rigorous disciplines that flowed from the Spirit. And he saw those disciplines being eroded in the 1960s in the church and in the students at Wheaton. And that book and this chapel message were his way of earnestly calling students to discipline themselves to be still and know that God is God. And so, he lamented the roar of student conversation in chapel. He even asked — with, I think, only partial humor — “Is it louder than the lions at Brookfield Zoo?” I didn’t hear any laughter when he said that.

Final Moments

So, we were all sitting there when, suddenly, he stopped for no apparent reason. There were a few seconds of silence. He turned to his left and just collapsed. It was not a gentle collapse, as I recall. He hit the floor like a log, and the sound was frightening. He didn’t crumple. You thought it was quiet before? Good night. Now it was breath-holding quiet as two thousand students trembled inside. “Oh no. What has just happened?”

Dr. Armerding, the new president, who was sitting right behind him in the main chair behind the pulpit, immediately knelt down over Dr. Edman. Then he stood as medical people were coming to the platform, and he said with beautiful, perfect equanimity and the dignity he was known for, “Let us pray.” And he prayed briefly for Dr. Edman and dismissed us in silence.

So, I went to my classical Greek class with Gerald Hawthorne in Blanchard Hall, and after we prayed, we tried to go on with our lessons. But soon the chapel bell tolled a long series of solemn bells. And we assumed that meant the chancellor had died. And he dismissed class, and that’s basically where my memories stopped.

Verge of Eternity

As I listened to those last minutes of the chapel message, about eleven minutes before he collapsed, several things struck me.

As I listened yesterday, I was trembling inside. I had this awareness, “This man is going to meet Jesus in eleven minutes.” It was as though I were there, and I knew something he didn’t know. “You’re going to die in eleven minutes. 10, 9, 8, 7 . . . You’re going to meet the King of the universe face to face in eleven minutes. You will not finish this message, Dr. Edman. You will not finish anything that is not finished now. Your life will be over in eleven minutes.”

I actually looked over to my computer screen at the numbers ticking off the seconds. And they felt like heartbeats to me. And then he stopped. Now, I’m ten years older than Dr. Edman was when he died. This was a good rehearsal for me. That’s what this is for. This is a rehearsal.

I think the final minutes of Dr. Edman’s life and message have been a bit romanticized. It’s more realistic to say that in those last minutes, not only did he speak of entering the presence of the King — that’s what’s been remembered, and rightly so — but he was also dealing with student misbehavior, just real down-to-earth, inglorious, practical, disappointing behavior. And he talked about speakers who come to chapel and are bad speakers. “They tilt like windmills,” he said, and say things unhelpful. That’s not glorious.

Ordinary Deaths

This is the way it struck me: that’s the way most of us are going to die. We won’t be on some mountaintop of sinless spiritual fervor. We won’t. We’ll be dealing with some mundane, frustrating, ordinary issue like students making a ruckus coming into chapel, speakers that are embarrassing to listen to — trying to say something helpful about this frustrating reality. And here’s the beautiful thing: in the midst of dealing with ordinary, mundane, frustrating disappointments, Christ will shine through. And he did.

The very last things, the very last words out of Dr. Edman’s mouth, were an exhortation not to return evil for evil, or (to say it positively) to treat disappointing chapel speakers better than they deserve — that is, courteously. Here’s what he said in his last words, words of counsel about how to treat unhelpful speakers. He said, “Our part as Christians is to be courteous. Any indication of disinterest or displeasure on our part would be an unnecessary discourtesy to him, and so I would ask you to desist.” And he fell over. So, the last word, the very last word, was, “Treat them better than they deserve.” Just like Stephen, right?

That’s the way the Christian life is going to be at the very end. I think it’s going to be a mixture of mundane, frustrating, disappointing reality and shafts of light — shafts of light from the word of Christ breaking in, and yes, the glory of the King just over the horizon, a moment away.

Live with the End in View

As I listened and counted down, I thought, “These could be my last eleven minutes right now.” Even as we talk, right? I could drop over here at my desk. I’m standing. I could fall to my left, fall to my right. So, Piper — here’s the admonition that’s landing on me — speak in a way that you would be okay with if a recording of your last minutes were played over and over again on earth and in heaven.

My prayer after listening to this message again after 55 years is that when I die, I would be found like Dr. Edman, commending the love of Christ — and that while I live, I would be found like Dr. Armerding, beautifully discerning what love calls for in every unexpected moment.