My desire to pray when I’m suffering can swing wildly in a single day — and sometimes within the hour. Through the severe trials in my life — losing a child, having a debilitating disease, losing my marriage — prayer has been both arduous and exhilarating. Exhausting work and energizing delight.

In relentless suffering, I can struggle with prayer. More accurately, I don’t want to pray. When I haven’t seen any change, it can feel pointless to pray. So, I avoid it. Or I pray mindlessly. As my motivation fades, my heart slowly drifts from God. When that happens, I first need to recognize the battle raging inside me. Only then can I admit my wandering heart and cry out, “Help me to want to pray!” After that, I follow the Puritan admonition: “Pray until you pray.” I pray until I’m truly talking to God again.

Other times, I want to pray, but I just can’t do it. Praying feels impossible when I’m overwhelmed by pain. I’m either too exhausted, too numb, or too desperate to focus, and I can only manage to plead, “Help me.” I don’t know what I need, or even how to articulate what I’m feeling. In those moments, I can rely on the Spirit with his groans too deep for words. God knows what I need, and the Spirit will intercede for me (Romans 8:26–27).

“Life with God, even when everything is falling apart, can be a place of joy and abundance.”

Still other times, my prayer life blossoms in suffering. I see God provide for all my needs. I sense his presence and pour out my heart to him throughout the day. I find that life with God, even when everything is falling apart, can be a place of joy and abundance. Such connection with God in the storm has led to exquisite intimacy, a mystical communion I will never forget, not because my circumstances were good, or even changing for the better, but because God felt near.

At a Loss for Words

There are also times when I want to pray, but words escape me. When I don’t know what to ask or say, I borrow the wisdom of others. Many mornings, my prayer time has begun with quotes I’ve pinned to my bulletin board to realign my heart. For example:

Lord, do thou turn me all into love, all my love into obedience, and let my obedience be without interruption. (Jeremy Taylor)

Lord, please lighten my load or strengthen my back. (Puritan prayer)

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference. (The Serenity Prayer)

Everything is needful that he sends; nothing can be needful that he withholds. (John Newton)

“God’s provision doesn’t always mirror my requests, yet his grace unfailingly meets me.”

These words have helped me focus as I add to them my own petitions. I might ask for rescue from my trials, wisdom for my decisions, strength for the day ahead. God’s provision doesn’t always mirror my requests, yet his grace unfailingly meets me. When I ask for a changed situation, I often receive a changed heart. When I ask for wisdom, I often have to proceed without clarity. When I ask for strength, I often still feel weak and uncertain. I have had to move forward in faith, trusting that God will provide what I need. Yet it is trusting God with the unknown, not leaning on my own understanding or even knowing where I am going, that has anchored my faith in him.

T.R.U.S.T.

Besides our pressing needs, what else might we pray for in suffering? The acronym T.R.U.S.T. encapsulates what I need in suffering — what we all need — but often neglect to ask for:

Turn me from temptation.
Revive me through your word.
Use this pain for good.
Show me your glory.
Teach me your ways.

Turn me from temptation (Luke 22:40; Luke 11:4).

Jesus encouraged his disciples to pray that they wouldn’t give in to temptation. Heeding his words means praying before we are tempted, which requires that we know what might derail us so we can be on the lookout for it. While each person’s struggle is unique, in suffering I’ve been tempted to

stop talking to God and subtly move away from him,
want certainty more than I want Jesus,
harbor bitterness toward those around me, even God, and
run from pain rather than staying dependent on God in it.

Revive me through your word (Psalm 119:25).

God has restored me countless times through Scripture. I’ve come to the Bible feeling hopeless and weary, unsure of how I can even make it through the day, and he has revived me through it. God has spoken directly to me through his word, giving me exactly what I’ve needed: reassurance when I’m doubting, comfort when I’m crying, peace when I’m panicking.

But first, I need to open the Bible, which in suffering can feel uniquely challenging. I often resist it at first, as I imagine it will taste like cardboard. So I pray for motivation to read, and then I specifically ask God to give me spiritual eyes to see his truth in it (Psalm 119:18). And then, miraculously, the words become sweet (Psalm 19:10).

Use this pain for good (Genesis 50:20; Romans 8:28).

Knowing that my pain has a purpose makes it easier to endure. Even when I can’t understand how God could use it for good, I can be confident that he will. I know that God will never allow me to suffer needlessly, and that he has precisely measured out my trials so that not a single drop of my suffering will be wasted. While these truths are unchanging, my prayer is to glimpse what God is doing through my suffering. I’ve seen God use my pain to draw me closer to him, to comfort others with the comfort I’ve received, to increase my endurance and faith, and more.

Show me your glory (Exodus 33:18–19; 34:6).

Seeing God’s glory means seeing, with the eyes of faith, his indescribable beauty and his invisible attributes. His love and faithfulness. His goodness and compassion. His mercy and grace.

When I ask God to show me his glory, part of that request is to see and experience his love. I don’t want to know just intellectually that he loves me; I want to experience and sense his love in my daily life. God demonstrates his love in myriad ways — this prayer is asking him for spiritual sight to see them.

Finally, when we see God’s glory, we know that he is with us. His presence is unmistakable. And that awareness is our greatest need in suffering.

Teach me your ways (Exodus 33:13; Psalm 25:4–5).

We don’t know the ways of God. His thoughts are so much higher than ours, and nothing can compare to his wisdom. Our perspective is partial and imperfect, while God’s view is unlimited and eternal. So when we ask God to teach us his ways, we’re acknowledging that we don’t know what’s best for us and are relying on the one who does. He alone can prepare us for what lies ahead. We need wisdom for our decisions and direction. Do we act now, or should we wait? Do we need courage or patient acceptance? Do we need lighter loads or stronger backs?

The work of prayer aligns our hearts with God and teaches us to trust him for all our needs. In prayer, we ask God to open our eyes to the realities before us — his presence in our lives, his provision for all our needs, and his purposes in our pain. Our deepest need is to find our rest and fulfillment in God alone, and suffering offers a unique opportunity to do that. And when we do, we learn that God really is enough, and that a life of dependence is a life of unending grace.

Which is more revealing of the “real you”: your spontaneous and unguarded emotions, or your purposeful and intentional choices? Put another way, which is more fundamental to who you are: the feelings that spontaneously erupt from your heart, or the choices that you intentionally make?

At Bethlehem College & Seminary, I teach a class called “Foundations of Christian Hedonism.” Alongside the Bible, we read Piper, Edwards, Lewis, and more. We talk about the supremacy of God, the indispensable importance of the affections, the Christian life, and pastoral ministry. I love it.

One stimulating aspect of the class is identifying tensions and disagreements between our favorite Christian Hedonists and wrestling together with them. Last semester, we discovered a seeming dissonance between how Piper talks about feelings and how Lewis talks about the will.

Piper’s Grief

In chapter 3 of Desiring God, Piper explores “Worship: The Feast of Christian Hedonism.” In doing so, he accents the importance of feelings, emotions, and affections in worship.

Piper emphasizes that genuine feelings are spontaneous and not calculated. Feelings are not consciously willed and not performed as a means to anything else. He gives numerous examples of feelings — hope (that spontaneously arises in your heart when you are shipwrecked on a raft and catch sight of land), fear (that spontaneously arises when camping and you hear a bear outside your tent), awe (that overwhelms you as you stand at the edge of the Grand Canyon), and gratitude (that spontaneously erupts from the heart of children when they get the present they most wanted on Christmas morning).

“Feelings are spontaneous, unsought, unplanned. They are our immediate and natural reactions to reality.”

The most poignant example of spontaneous feeling that Piper describes, however, is the grief that poured from his heart when he received the news that his mother was killed in a car wreck. In that moment, “The feeling [of grief] is there, bursting out of my heart” (91). No planning, no performance, no decision — just emotion and feeling. And here’s the crucial bit: “It comes from deep within, from a place beneath the conscious will” (91).

Lewis’s Prayers

At the same time, we were reading Lewis’s Letters to Malcolm. In Letter 21, Lewis discusses the frustrating irksomeness of prayer and the nature of duty. One day, when we are perfected, prayer and our other obligations will no longer be experienced as duties, but only as delights. Love will flow out from us “spontaneously as song from a lark or fragrance from a flower” (154). For now, we contend with various obstacles and impediments.

Even still, we have rich moments in the present — “refreshments ‘unimplored, unsought, Happy for man so coming’” (156, quoting John Milton). But then Lewis makes this statement:

I have a notion that what seem our worst prayers may really be, in God’s eyes, our best. Those, I mean, which are least supported by devotional feeling and contend with the greatest disinclination. For these, perhaps, being nearly all will, come from a deeper level than feeling. (157)

In other words, our best prayers may be the ones we pray even when we don’t want to pray, when our prayers are not riding on positive feelings toward God, but are actively, deliberately trying to overcome resistance within us. The will, Lewis might say, rises from deep within, from a place beneath even our feelings, proving who we really are at bottom.

Clarifying the Tension

We can see the tension, can’t we? Are feelings deeper than the will (as Piper says)? Or is the will deeper than feelings (as Lewis claims)?

Before evaluating, we need further clarity. We can begin by noting key areas of agreement. First, both Piper and Lewis agree that we ought to distinguish feelings from the will.

Second, they seem to agree about some of the key differences between feelings and the will. Feelings are spontaneous, unsought, unplanned. They are our immediate and natural reactions to reality (like birds singing and flowers blooming). The will, on the other hand, involves intention, planning, choice, and execution.

Third, both Lewis and Piper agree that the will and the feelings ought to be viewed in some sort of hierarchical arrangement, with one being “deeper” than the other. We might call this sort of arrangement of the mind’s faculties a “tiered psychology.” Certain faculties are deeper (or perhaps higher) than others.

These three points of agreement help to clarify the tension. The arrangement of the mind’s capacities into different levels implies that one level may somehow be more important (or at least more revealing). The implication, in both Lewis and Piper, is that one level is more genuine, more authentic, more reflective of the real self (one could say, deeper). The corresponding implication is that the other level is somehow less genuine, less authentic, and less reflective of the real self (one could say, more superficial).

So then, which level better reflects the real self — our feelings or our willing?

From Feelings to Passions

We turn now to evaluation. And this is where we might simply conclude that one of them is right and one of them is wrong. Or perhaps, that both of them are wrong. That sometimes happens, even with very intelligent authors. My own goal, however, is to honor the truth in both perspectives by attempting to take up whatever aspect of the truth each author is emphasizing. Perhaps with some minor modifications and clarifications, the two perspectives might yet be reconciled.

For example, Lewis and Piper both refer to feelings. However, the older word for the phenomenon they are discussing is passions. Passions are the immediate, spontaneous reactions or motions of the soul.

Reframing feelings as passions enables us to see how Lewis and Piper can be reconciled. On the one hand, Lewis is correct that the will is deeper (or higher) than the passions. In classical tiered psychology, the intellect and the will are considered the higher faculties of the soul, with the intellect as the faculty that reasons, reflects, contemplates, and judges reality, and the will as the faculty that moves toward or away from what the intellect perceives.

Additionally, the soul also has two lower faculties: “sense apprehension,” which receives impressions from the senses, makes snap judgments about those impressions, and stores the impressions in memory; and “sense appetite,” which immediately reacts to what the sense apprehension perceives and thus is the seat of the passions.

Thus, the human will frequently has to contend with the disinclinations of the feelings at the lower level. While the will can restrain and sometimes overcome the passions, it doesn’t directly control or direct the passions. The very term passions suggests that we are passive; they aren’t consciously willed or decided upon in that moment. They occur spontaneously.

The Will Constrains Passions

Reframing feelings as passions demonstrates the truth in what Piper emphasizes as well.

Piper is adamant that feelings (passions) are spontaneous. Thus, when he says that his grief comes from “beneath the conscious will,” he means the grief bypasses conscious decision-making in the moment. Our feelings are more like snap reactions than considered responses. They are spontaneous, not because they are necessarily deeper (or more reflective of our genuine self), but because they are closer to the surface, more visceral and therefore frequently intense, and almost always tied to some bodily expression (such as tears or laughter).

Even Piper’s example of extreme grief suggests the will’s capacity to restrain and overcome the passions. When he receives the news of his mother’s death, he takes his own baby son off his leg, hands the child to his wife, and walks to the bedroom to be alone, before collapsing in tears for the next hour. In other words, as grief begins to bubble up, Piper’s will is able to temporarily hold back the floodgates of the passion until he is alone and able to give expression to them. He puts on the brave face until the occasion for release is right.

The Real You

So then, we now have a tiered psychology, consisting of the higher powers of intellect and will, and the lower sense powers. The will performs actions; the sense powers experience passions or feelings. What then can we say about which level is more genuine, authentic, and reflective of the real self?

“Both our actions and our passions, our willings and our feelings, are reflective of who we are as embodied creatures.”

The truth is that they both are. Both our actions and our passions, our willings and our feelings, are reflective of who we are as embodied creatures. This is doubly so since our passions flow from all of our previous history, including our beliefs, the stories that we tell ourselves, our experiences, our memories, and our choices. While the will does not despotically direct the feelings, the higher powers can train and cultivate habits of heart that spontaneously flow in particular directions.

Again, we can infer this from Piper’s story of grief. While Piper may not have consciously chosen feelings of grief in the moment, he had, for 29 years, been shaped and molded into the kind of person who spontaneously responded to that news in that way. The spontaneous tears and visceral sorrow of that day were the fruit of nearly thirty years of motherly kindness and filial gratitude, of hundreds of tender hugs and bedtime kisses, of lively dinnertime conversations and glad-hearted, lifelong obedience to the fifth commandment.

One can imagine a different mother, a different son, a different relationship and history, different choices and actions, a different setting, and therefore different feelings when the phone call comes.

With Piper and Lewis

Thus, we don’t need to choose between Piper and Lewis on the will and feelings. We can bring them together. We are complex creatures, bodies and minds, capable of both spontaneous reactions and intentional responses. We make choices and experience feelings, and our choices shape our feelings and our feelings shape our choices.

This is how God made us, and this is how he is remaking us in the image of his Son. With our new hearts and transformed minds, we willingly offer our bodies (including our passions) to God as our spiritual act of worship (Romans 12:1). We put off the old man, with its desires and practices, and we put on the new man, which is being renewed in knowledge after the image of our Creator (Colossians 3:10).

ABSTRACT: Faithful discipleship means following Jesus and submitting to his authority in every area of life, including how we treat the Bible. Jesus appealed to the authority of Scripture in the face of temptation and opposition. He used it in teaching his disciples. And importantly, he looked to Scripture to explain who he was, the message he preached, and the works he accomplished. Faithful reading of Scripture follows in Jesus’s steps by submitting to the authority of the Bible that both anticipates and explains him.

For our ongoing series of feature articles for pastors and Christian leaders, we asked Mark D. Thompson (DPhil, University of Oxford), principal of Moore Theological College in Sydney, Australia, to explain how Jesus treated Scripture and how his approach shapes the task of Christian theology.

What does it mean to be a Christian disciple? Putting it as simply as possible, being a disciple means following Jesus Christ. Christian disciples want to follow their Lord in everything, to be shaped by his teaching and his example in the way they think, feel, and behave. We want him at the center of our perspective on the world, his mission as the priority of our life, his glory our chief concern in every endeavor. That is as true for the Christian theologian as for any other disciple.

Christian theology can helpfully start at any number of places. Its fundamental ground lies in the triune God himself. Theology has long been defined as “words about God and all things in relation to God.” Yet because what we know about God is made known by God — spoken through the prophets and apostles, and given to us in the more permanent form of Scripture — all true theology arises from and is tested by the Bible. So, we could start the discussion of any theological topic with a reflection upon the person of the triune God or upon what the Bible tells us about that specific topic.

But what makes theology specifically Christian theology is the critical place accorded to Jesus Christ, the incarnate Son of God and Savior of the world. He is the one in whom the revelation of the triune God finds its proper focus (John 1:18; Hebrews 1:1–3; 2 Corinthians 1:20), he is the one who enables us to come before the God who made us without fear (Ephesians 3:11–12), and he is the one who both endorsed the Old Testament (Luke 24:44) and commissioned the apostolic program that produced the New Testament (Matthew 28:19–20). Prior attention to what Jesus taught is how the Christian theologian demonstrates faithful discipleship.

Jesus’s View of Scripture

With that understanding of theology in mind, when we think about the nature and function of the Bible — “the enduring authority of the Christian Scriptures” (as one impressive tome puts it) — keeping Jesus at the center of our thinking is not optional.1

The record we have of his life and teaching in the Gospels comes from eyewitnesses, either directly in the case of Matthew and John or indirectly in the case of Mark (who, early testimony confirms, recorded the recollections of Peter) and Luke (the companion of Paul who collected statements from a vast number of eyewitnesses and wove them into a coherent narrative). Studies of the phenomenon of eyewitness testimony point out not only that the Gospels were “written within the living memory of the events they recount,” but that even the differences of perspective and detail confirm rather than undermine their veracity.2 The Gospels are the recollections of multiple eyewitnesses of what Jesus said and did, and thus they reveal what Jesus thought about the authority of Scripture.3

What, then, are we told about Jesus’s attitude toward the Scriptures he inherited (our Old Testament) and those by means of which his apostles would fulfill his commission to take the gospel to the ends of the earth until the end of the age (the New Testament)?

Authority of the Old Testament

Most basically, Jesus understood the words of the Old Testament to bear the authority of God, an authority that surpasses that of any other person, institution, or body of writing. This is clear from his appeal to Old Testament texts when tempted by the devil in the wilderness (Matthew 4:1–11), when challenged by the Pharisees and Sadducees (Matthew 19:1–9; 22:15–46), and when teaching his disciples (Mark 9:13; 14:21, 27). At each point, the Scriptures he quotes are enough to settle the matter. They are definitive in the sense that they are what God has to say on the matter.

Rejecting Temptation

The temptation in the wilderness is an interesting case in point. There are clear parallels here to the temptation faced by Adam and Eve in the garden (Genesis 3:1–6). The tactic employed by Satan in the garden of Eden is one he has continued to employ throughout human history. He casts doubt first on the clarity of God’s word (“Did God actually say . . . ?”), then on the truthfulness of God’s word (“You will not surely die”), and then finally on the character of God and the motives behind his word (“God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God”).

Jesus enters the wilderness to be tempted immediately after his baptism by John in the Jordan. There he had heard the voice from heaven say, “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased” (Matthew 3:17).

It should be no surprise, then, that the first temptation Jesus encounters is to doubt the word of God and seek to prove his identity on some other terms: “If you are the Son of God . . .” (Matthew 4:6). Jesus responds by appealing to Deuteronomy 8:3: “Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God” (Matthew 4:4).

With the second temptation, Satan assaults the truthfulness of God’s promise in Psalm 91, to which Jesus answers with Deuteronomy 6:16: “You shall not put the Lord your God to the test” (Matthew 4:7).

The third temptation, to fall down and worship the devil, is an assault upon God himself and is met with Deuteronomy 6:13: “You shall worship the Lord your God and him only shall you serve” (Matthew 4:10). At each point, Jesus’s confidence in the word of God and its authority is on display.

Refuting Opponents

In his exchanges with the Pharisees, Jesus often cites Scripture with the words “it is written” (Mark 7:6; John 6:45; 8:17) or “have you not read?” (Matthew 12:3, 5; 19:4; 22:31; Mark 12:10). Jesus expects the words that God had given his people through the prophets to be sufficient to settle the matter. He tells the parable of the rich man and Lazarus to make precisely that point (Luke 16:19–31). It is of no use to search for confirmations in the miraculous, as hard hearts will always find ways to explain the evidence away, as they did when the tomb was empty after Jesus’s resurrection (Matthew 28:13). “If they do not hear Moses and the Prophets, neither will they be convinced if someone should rise from the dead” (Luke 16:31).

The “have you not read” question has an edge to it. Jesus expects them not only to have read but to have understood, believed, and obeyed what they read. This question carries with it the assumption that the meaning of Scripture is accessible. In the words of the Protestant Reformers, Scripture is clear. Of course, that doesn’t mean that every single part of the Old Testament is simple or easy. It doesn’t mean that any individual text can be plucked out of its context and, without reference to the rest of the Old Testament, immediately make sense. Nevertheless, it is accessible. Comparing one part of Scripture with another, the harder parts with the easier, sheds light over time.

Seeing Jesus’s life and ministry as the fulfillment of the promises made in the Old Testament puts the last and most important piece in place (which is what the Ethiopian eunuch found in Acts 8:26–38). But the point that Jesus is making is that what we have been given is enough — enough for the Israelites who had only the words from Sinai (Deuteronomy 29:29); enough for those who only had the Law, the Prophets, and the Writings (our Old Testament, Luke 24:44); and enough for those who have all that and its fulfillment in the gospel and in the ministry of Jesus’s specially commissioned messengers, the apostles (2 Timothy 3:16–17).

Jesus as Old Testament Fulfillment

It is especially important that Jesus locates himself, his identity, and his mission against the backdrop of the history and promises of the Old Testament. At the very beginning of his ministry, when he attends the synagogue at Nazareth, he reads Isaiah’s prophecy of the one anointed by God in Isaiah 61 and then says, “Today this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing” (Luke 4:21).

His favorite form of self-description, “the Son of Man,” evokes the scene in Daniel 7 where “one like a son of man” is given the authority to execute the judgments of God. Though he does not use the title “Son of David” for himself, he responds positively to those who do, and he himself makes use of Psalm 110, which refers to the Davidic King (Matthew 22:42–45). When he is identified as the promised King coming to Jerusalem, and the Pharisees insist he rebuke those who do so, he answers, “I tell you, if these were silent, the very stones would cry out” (Luke 19:40).

He contrasts the hard-heartedness of the religious leaders with the responses to the wisdom of Solomon (Matthew 12:42) and the preaching of Jonah (Matthew 12:41), and he says, “Something greater than Jonah is here. . . . Something greater than Solomon is here.”

As the time of his crucifixion approaches, he speaks more frequently of the prophecies concerning the suffering of the Messiah (Luke 9:22; 17:25; cf. 24:26–27), and at the Last Supper he uses the language of the “blood of the covenant” (Matthew 26:28; Exodus 24:8), and the “new covenant” (Luke 22:20; Jeremiah 31:31), to describe what is unfolding on the night of his arrest. He knows that, as the suffering servant, he will be “numbered with the transgressors” (Luke 22:37; Isaiah 53:12).

In sum, Jesus clearly understood himself in Old Testament categories and as the fulfillment of various strands of prophetic promise in the Old Testament.

Jesus’s Exegetical Method

Jesus understood the deep structures of the Old Testament: its covenant framework (Luke 22:20), its dynamic of promise and fulfillment (Matthew 26:54, 56), and its focus on the descendants of Abraham in a way that includes outsiders like the widow of Zarephath and Naaman the Syrian (Luke 4:25–27). In the Sermon on the Mount, he exposes the real intent of the Law: not mere outward observance, but a changed heart and a deep personal faithfulness that demonstrates a righteousness exceeding that of the scribes and Pharisees (Matthew 5:17–48).

Intriguingly, in a debate with the Sadducees over the resurrection, Jesus appeals to the account of Moses’s encounter with God at the bush that did not burn up. There God told the great prophet of the Old Testament, “I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob” (Exodus 3:6, 15). At first glance, Exodus 3 says nothing about the resurrection of the dead (and, to be fair, Jesus doesn’t say it does). Yet if you believe what God says in Exodus 3, then you cannot avoid the conclusion that life continues beyond the grave, and the dead are indeed raised. The Sadducees’ denial of the resurrection is entirely wrong if you take those words of Scripture seriously. Jesus here identifies what later theologians would describe as a “good and necessary consequence” of the teaching of Exodus 3. He demonstrates the same principle by his reflection on Psalm 110 in Mark 12: “David himself calls him Lord. So how is he his son?” (Mark 12:37).

There is nothing superficial about Jesus’s appeal to Scripture, which is a constant feature of his ministry. The word of God (and he refers to it as such in Matthew 15:6) gave him his understanding of himself and his mission, and directed all that he did during his earthly ministry. He was confident in its authority and reliability, even to the smallest details. He might not have written a treatise on the doctrine of Scripture or even delivered a sermon devoted to unfolding each of its characteristics. Neither did he use the terms we so often associate with the doctrine, such as inspiration, inerrancy, perspicuity, sufficiency, efficacy, and the like. Nevertheless, the way he spoke of and used Scripture confirms he believed in all these things.

Authority of the New Testament

All of this raises the question of the New Testament. Since it did not exist during the time of Jesus’s earthly ministry, there was no New Testament text with which he might interact. However, the critical thing about the New Testament is its connection to the ministry of the apostles, those called and set apart by Jesus to be the foundational messengers of the gospel.

Jesus entrusted his words to the apostles. He commissioned them in a unique way. Revelation 21 signals their significance in the great vision of the New Jerusalem: just as the gates of the New Jerusalem are inscribed with the twelve tribes of the sons of Israel, so the twelve great foundations of the city contain “the twelve names of the twelve apostles of the Lamb” (Revelation 21:12–14).

In the upper room, on the night he is arrested, Jesus promises his disciples the Spirit of truth, who will “teach you all things and bring to your remembrance all that I have said to you” (John 14:26), “guide you into all the truth,” (John 16:13), and “take what is mine and declare it to you” (John 16:14). Having been given all authority in heaven and on earth, Jesus commissions them to “go . . . and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you” (Matthew 28:19–20).

The apostolic authority of the apostles — including Paul, as “one untimely born” (1 Corinthians 15:8) — lies behind the New Testament. They were Christ’s ambassadors (2 Corinthians 5:20). They had a unique place in God’s purposes arising from their commissioning by the risen Jesus. While all subsequent faithful Christian ministry takes up their message and follows their example, they maintain that special role. Jesus gave them his words (John 17:14) and even prayed for those who would believe because of the words they would share (John 17:20). Thus, Jesus’s attitude toward this apostolic ministry shapes and guides ours toward the New Testament.

Seeing What Jesus Saw

The Christian faith is a personal trust in a living Lord. It means delighting in God and all that he has done in creating us and redeeming us. It means following his Son, given so that the terrifying problem of our sin might be dealt with from the inside, thoroughly and forever. There remains something deeply personal about genuine Christian discipleship. Jesus is not known from a distance.

Tragically, some have attempted to set this personal relationship of trust and love over against confident yet humble obedience to the teaching of Scripture. “We follow Jesus, not the Bible,” one man foolishly wrote.4 Yet that is a false choice that would have made no sense at all to Jesus himself. If we are going to take Jesus seriously, we must take the Bible seriously, because he did! Conversely, if we do not take the Bible seriously — expecting our thinking to be changed, shaped, and directed by its teaching — then in the end we are not taking Jesus seriously. Jesus and the Bible are not somehow competitors for the mantle of truth. The one who said, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life” (John 14:6) also said to his Father, “I have given them your word. . . . Sanctify them in the truth; your word is truth” (John 17:14, 17).

What did Jesus see in the Scriptures? He saw the written word of God given for the rich benefit of his people and the glory of his own name. He saw a word that challenges facile religiosity and invites us into the joy of faithful living in fellowship with the God who created all things with just a word. He saw a word that is worth trusting because, though what was written was originally written by human beings, it came into existence only through the work of the Holy Spirit. These are truly the words of Moses or David or Jeremiah, actively and creatively involved in their utterance — but these are finally the words of God to us.

So, Christian theologians, like all other disciples of the Lord Jesus, find in him the example that challenges and directs all that they do. Keeping Jesus at the center of our doctrine of Scripture prevents us from pitting his authority against that of the biblical text. It also keeps us from unsettling the proper balance between biblical theology and historical theology, even in the interest of a retrieval of “the great theological tradition,” as God’s words are always more important than the words of those who speak about God.

Finally, it reminds us that our engagement with Scripture is personal and relational, not merely theoretical and abstract, though it does involve the applications of our minds. We cannot rightly speak about God from a distance or (as a friend of mine used to say) “as if he has just stepped out of the room for a minute.”

In following Jesus, we find that we stand in the place indicated by the prophet Isaiah: “This is the one to whom I will look: he who is humble and contrite in spirit and trembles at my word” (Isaiah 66:2).