Some of the most life-changing verses in the Bible are those that come alive years after we first read them. We read them and pass over them, read them and pass over them, read them again, and then suddenly reality breaks through, and their meaning explodes in our imagination. I wonder if any verses like that come to mind for you.

Years ago, a line in Psalm 4 leapt out of the fog of familiarity and arrested my attention. At first, it exhilarated me, awakening me to spiritual wells I had walked by (and looked past) again and again. Then it humbled me, confronting me with how weak and fickle my heart can be. And then, finally, it has strengthened me, stirring my desire and ambition for Christ and building my courage in him. King David writes,

You have put more joy in my heart than they have when their grain and wine abound. (Psalm 4:7)

Surprised by Joy

The verse slid under my radar for years, I think, because it rang like a cliché to my immature and naive ears — like a sentence beautiful enough for Pinterest, but just out of touch with the heavier realities of real life. I would read verses like this, feel vaguely inspired for a moment, and then move on and forget them minutes later. The vagueness evaporated, however, when I slowed down enough to finally see through the window this verse opens for us.

David does not say, “You have given me great joy,” or even, “You have given me as much joy as those in the world have in their finest meals and fullest pleasures.” No, he says, “You have put more joy in my heart than they have when their grain and wine abound.” If it was a word that seized me, it was the word more. As David weighs his joy in God against the greatest pleasures on earth — the most expensive experiences, in the most exotic places, with the most famous people — he finds the world’s offer wanting. He prefers what he has tasted through faith over anything else he might see or do or buy.

Do you think about your faith in God that way? When you think about Jesus, do you ever think in terms of joy, delight, fulfillment, pleasure? Have you actually been taught, subtly or explicitly, to pit him against your happiness? The discovery for me, at that time, was that I did not have to walk away from joy to follow Jesus. In fact, I could only find the richest, most intense happiness in him.

Stubborn Longings for Less

The more you sit with a verse like this, however, the heavier it can become. The promise of experiencing a joy like David’s can give way to the troubling realization that we do not yet experience it. Can I really say, with him, “God, you have given me more joy than the world has in its greatest joys?” Am I as happy in Jesus as they are in their food, and friends, and careers, and vacations, and possessions? We know we should be able to say what David says, and yet we also know our own hearts well enough to wonder whether we can.

I feel how slow my heart can be to enjoy God. Sin never prefers God over grain or wine or television or self. And sin still lives in me. As John Piper says, we humans, in our sin, “have a deep, unshakable, compelling preference for other things rather than God” (“What Is Sin?”). This sin isn’t just a lingering tendency to do the wrong thing, but a stubborn longing for the wrong thing. So, Bible reading can sometimes feel burdensome. Prayer can sometimes feel stale. Fellowship can feel forced. Joy in God can feel distant and theoretical.

“Sin isn’t just a lingering tendency to do the wrong thing, but a stubborn longing for the wrong thing.”

To be clear, appreciating grain and wine is not sin. The psalmists celebrate and worship God for both (see Psalm 65:9; 104:19). Our joy in grain and wine and every other good gift from God is meant to kindle our joy in him, not compete with him (James 1:17). Preferring grain or wine or anything else to God is sin. And according to 1 John 1:8, we all, at times, prefer wrongly. We crave lesser, thinner joys over all we have in Christ.

How Long, O Lord?

Even if we overcome our inner resistance to this joy, though, the harsher realities of life also become hurdles to joy. The book of Psalms, after all, is not one long chorus of joy. It holds out a life of worship that is not comfortable or predictable, but difficult and demanding, even agonizing, at times.

Be gracious to me, O Lord, for I am languishing; heal me, O Lord, for my bones are troubled. My soul also is greatly troubled. (Psalm 6:2–3)

How long, O Lord? Will you forget me forever? How long will you hide your face from me? How long must I take counsel in my soul and have sorrow in my heart all the day? (Psalm 13:1–2)

The cords of death encompassed me; the torrents of destruction assailed me; the cords of Sheol entangled me; the snares of death confronted me. (Psalm 18:4–5)

Again and again, the brighter moments of gladness punctuate song after song of hardship. David’s life, in particular, was terribly painful. After he was chosen to be the next king, he was hunted by Saul. After he committed adultery and had the woman’s husband killed, he lost his infant son. Later, another son, Amnon, died at the hands of his own brother, Absalom, who then fled. And when the estranged son eventually returned, he betrayed his father, organized a mutiny, and stole the kingdom.

The agony David experienced (some because of his own sin, and much because of sins against him) makes his words in Psalm 4:7 even sweeter and more compelling. His pain doesn’t gut what he says about joy, but proves it, revealing that this joy is unusually potent and resilient.

Even as I Lose All

When David writes, “You have put more joy in my heart than they have when their grain and wine abound,” he is not writing from the comfort of a palace in peacetime; he is writing from hiding, while Absalom has seized his throne. Psalms 3 and 4 are the morning and evening psalms of a man betrayed. David suffered much throughout his life and reign, but did anything sting like the stab in the back from his own son?

“No amount of darkness and loss could take the depth and fullness of his joy in God.”

And yet he was not utterly miserable, even while he watched the boy he once held and fed and played with plunder his life’s work. No, “You have put more joy in my heart” — even now — “than they have when their grain and wine abound.” Even while my son indulges himself on my grain and my wine and my wealth, even as I lose nearly all that I love, even while I fear for my life, God, you have made me glad in you — more glad than sinners have in their happiest moments. No amount of darkness and loss could take the depth and fullness of his joy in God.

This joy isn’t merely for the lighter, more comfortable, more cheerful moments of the Christian life, but it’s also strong enough for the trenches, the valleys, the storms. What God did for a wounded and despairing king in the throes of betrayal, he now promises to do for us in the throes of whatever we face or carry. And what greater, more practical gift could he give us than to say, in any circumstance, however bleak or painful, I will not only keep your life, but make you glad?

All of Jesus’s human life led him to this garden. As he knelt and prayed in Gethsemane, waiting in agony — with beads of sweat “like great drops of blood falling down to the ground” (Luke 22:44) — here he made the Choice.

Countless decisions, big and small, brought him here, but only in the garden did he finalize the decision to go to the cross. Gethsemane marked his last and most distressing moments of deliberation. He chose to enter the garden, and he could have chosen to flee.

“Father, if you are willing, remove this cup from me,” he prayed. “Nevertheless, not my will, but yours, be done” (Luke 22:42). There, on his knees, Jesus chose — with his human will, like ours, which naturally recoiled at the threat of pain and death — to embrace the one divine will of his Father, which was also his, as eternal Son.

When he rose from prayer (Luke 22:45), the decision was done, his fully human will in perfect synch and submission to the divine. Now, as Judas and the soldiers arrived, he would be acted upon: arrested, accused, tried, struck, flogged, and crucified.

Two Wills in Christ

For centuries, dyothelitism is the term the church has used to refer to the two wills of Christ — the one divine will he (eternally) shares as God, with his Father (and the Spirit), and a natural human will that is his by virtue of the incarnation and his taking on our full humanity. We speak of two wills in the one unique person of the God-man.

“Jesus has a human will, like us, with which he sympathizes, strengthens, and saves.”

In multiple places in John’s Gospel, Jesus refers to his human will in distinction from that of his Father, “the one who sent me.” “My food is to do the will of him who sent me” (John 4:34). “I seek not my own will but the will of him who sent me” (John 5:30). “I have come down from heaven, not to do my own will but the will of him who sent me” (John 6:38).

Yet the place where Jesus’s distinctly human will stands out most is Gethsemane, in those final moments of Choice before he is taken and, humanly speaking, there is no turning back. Not only did Jesus teach his men to pray to his Father “your will be done” (Matthew 6:10), but in the garden, Christ himself prayed, “not as I will, but as you will” (Matthew 26:39), and then again, “your will be done” (Matthew 26:42). And in doing so, he embraced the divine will with his human volition.

Human All the Way?

The early church endured attacks against both Jesus’s deity (from Arians) and his full humanity (from Docetists and Apollinarians), questioning his fully human body, emotions, and mind. The battle for his human will came last and was the most sophisticated. The conflict, prompted by political intrigue, raged in the seventh century and led to a sixth ecumenical council in 680–681, the third at Constantinople. Obscure as the refined nature of the controversy may seem to us today, the debate between dyothelitism and the opposing view (monothelitism) still carries the theological significance it did more than twelve centuries ago, and warrants our attention, perhaps all the more in circles where it has been neglected or forgotten.

In contrast to monothelitism, which claims the divine will of the Son animates the human body and soul of Jesus, dyothelitism presses for the full, uncompromised humanity of Christ. We find two wills in the agony of Gethsemane in the one person of Christ. There is a human nature in him that desires the removal of the cup — that there be some other way, if possible, than the divine will. The question, then, is when Christ prays, “not my will, but yours, be done,” whose will is “my will,” and whose is “yours”?

When the question was freshly pressed on the church in the seventh century, the explanation that emerged as most compelling, and enduring, was that of Maximus the Confessor (born 580) — even though he did not live to see the triumph. At the time, dyothelitism was not politically expedient to the emperor Constans’s ambitions to reunite Christian regions against the threat of Islam. Maximus was arrested and exiled, and he died in exile eight years later at age 81. Seven years later, Constans was assassinated. Soon the imperial attitude changed, and twenty years after Maximus’s death, his theology carried the day at the ecumenical council.

It was Maximus, claims Demetrios Bathrellos, who “was really the first to point out in an unambiguous way that it is the Logos (the eternal Son) as a man who addressed the Father in Gethsemane. . . . [Maximus] emphasized the fact that in Gethsemane Christ decided as man to obey the divine will, and thus overcame the blameless human instinctive urge to avoid death” (The Byzantine Christ, 146–147).

In this way, we confess two wills in the unique divine-human God-man. As God, Jesus “wills by his divine will and as man obeys the divine will by his human will” (174). In Maximus’s own words, “The subject who says ‘let this cup pass from me’ and the subject who says ‘not as I will’ are one and the same.” So, writes Bathrellos, “[B]oth the desire to avoid death and the submission to the divine will of the Father have to do with the humanity of Christ and his human will” (147).

Why His Wills Matter

Obscure as the ancient debate may seem at first, one reason for its enduring relevance is our own humanity. We are human as they were human. And in particular, our wills are human, constrained by finitude. Humans like us have an interest (not just intellectually but very practically) in the question, Was Christ indeed “made like [us] in every respect” (Hebrews 2:17)? And is he able “to sympathize with our weaknesses [as] one who in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet without sin” (Hebrews 4:15)?

“If Christ is not fully human, there is no great salvation for humans.”

Even more than sympathy, Is Christ truly able to save us? If he is not fully human, there is no great salvation for humans. As the famous maxim of Gregory of Nazianzus claims, that which Christ has not assumed, he has not healed. And not just healed eternally, but even in this life. What hope do we have of his reclaiming, sanctifying, and redeeming our own fallen, sinful human wills if the eternal Son has not descended to the full extent of our humanity, yet without sin? As Edward Oakes writes, “Since will is the very seat of sin, its fons et origo, we are still left in our plight if Christ did not have a human will” (Infinity Dwindled to Infancy, 162). Would Christ come in human flesh and blood, emotions and mind, and leave the human will, “the very seat of sin,” untaken, untouched, and unredeemed?

Also, a “trinitarian logic” informs and reinforces the two wills of Christ. According to Donald Fairbairn and Ryan Reeves, “Maximus argued that since in the Trinity there are three persons and one nature, and also one will, the will must be a function of the nature, not the person” (150). That is an important distinction: that the will, whether divine or human, is a function of the theological category “nature,” not “person.” Two wills in Christ (one human, one divine) correspond with one will in God. One will in Christ (divine only) would mean that the two wills in tension in Gethsemane would be between divine “persons” (Father and Son) rather than between “natures” (divine and human), challenging oneness in the Godhead, and thus revising not only orthodox Christology but also trinitarianism.

Yet, “even more significant,” notes Fairbairn and Reeves, is the “soteriological conviction that the unassumed is unhealed” (150). Human salvation in Christ is at stake in the human will of Christ, not only in his receiving in himself the penalty of our fallen wills (as we’ve seen), but also in his own obedience, as the God-man, to his Father. As man, Jesus “learned obedience through what he suffered” (Hebrews 5:8), and as man, “he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death” (Philippians 2:8). “The many will be made righteous,” says Romans 5:19, “by the one man’s obedience” — a human obedience, by virtue of the incarnation, he could not have rendered apart from a human will.

Cult of Will

Not only does dyothelitism correlate best with God’s triune nature, our human nature, and the nature of the atonement, but in locating the will as a function of the “nature,” rather than the “person,” dyothelitism guards us against the modern “cult of will.” Oakes warns, “When personhood is identified without further ado with the will, then the cult of will in Friedrich Nietzsche and his postmodern successors inevitably follows” (164). Oakes points to Bathrellos’s “extremely thought-provoking observation that so many of the ethical outrages of today can be traced to the . . . error of identifying nature with person.” Says Bathrellos,

The tendency to identify personhood with nature or natural qualities and especially with the mind . . . seems to occur quite often in the history of human thought. It is remarkable that in our own day some philosophers of ethics give a definition of “person” based on mental and volitional capacities, and in doing so make it possible to justify, for example, abortion and even infanticide. (14)

However far-reaching the implications of Christ’s two wills, and full humanity, we as Christians are worshipers first and foremost. We declare, as the cardinal confession of our faith, “Jesus is Lord” — and when we do so, we submit to a Sovereign not only infinitely high above us as God but one who has drawn near as our own brother and friend, and went so low to serve and sacrifice himself for us. In addition to his divine will as God, Jesus has a human will, like us, with which he sympathizes, strengthens, and saves.

Audio Transcript

Welcome back to the podcast. Tomorrow, we come to a text in our Bible reading that should compel all of us to be driven by gospel-sized ambition in this life. The text is Acts 20:24. We’ve already looked at it — and this huge aspiration — from a couple different angles, as you can see in the APJ book on pages 69–70, in episodes looking specifically at following our heart and chasing after ambitious careers in this world. How do we do big ambition well, to glorify God in our aspirations?

This glorious text comes in Paul’s final, parting words to the beloved Ephesian elders in Acts 20:17–38, a deeply moving account that we read together tomorrow, and a text on the mind of a listener named Derek. “Pastor John, hello! I graduate from seminary this spring, and as I prepare for full-time ministry, I want to better understand Paul’s claims in Acts 20:24 when he says, ‘I do not account my life of any value nor as precious to myself, if only I may finish my course and the ministry that I received from the Lord Jesus, to testify to the gospel of the grace of God.’ For your life as a pastor, what do you take from this text? What did this Pauline conviction for the gospel over life look like — and feel like — for you?”

I love this text, Acts 20:24. And it’s one of the reasons that I love the apostle Paul. So, I’m happy to meditate on it again, as I have so often over the years.

Life Is Better Lost Than Wasted

Way back when I wrote the book Don’t Waste Your Life, over twenty years ago, this text, among others, had taken hold of me and was driving my thinking, my feeling. In fact, when I preached on this text at a university some years ago, my summary statement of the text was “better to lose your life than to waste it.” I think that’s exactly what Paul is saying in this verse: better to lose your life than to waste it.

So, let me quote the text with the two preceding verses (Acts 20:22–23) and then try to answer the question more specifically about its impact on my ministry. “And now, behold,” Paul says — and he’s speaking to the Ephesian elders as he says farewell to them, never to see them again. “And now, behold, I am going to Jerusalem, constrained by the Spirit, not knowing what will happen to me there, except that the Holy Spirit testifies to me in every city that imprisonment and afflictions await me. But I do not account my life” — this is Acts 20:24 now — “of any value nor as precious to myself, if only” — this is the one sense in which he does value his life — “I may finish my course and the ministry that I received from the Lord Jesus, to testify to the gospel of the grace of God.” Which I paraphrase, “Better to lose your life than to waste it.”

The Power of a Precious Passage

Now, Derek is asking what I take from this text for pastoral ministry. Or, more specifically, what did it look like or feel like for me to embrace this text in my ministry?

1. Return to the Point

I felt the poignancy of this text because it is among the last words Paul speaks to his friends that he’ll never see again in this life, as far as he knows. At the end of the passage, Acts 20:37–38, it says, “There was much weeping on the part of all; they embraced Paul and kissed him, being sorrowful most of all because of the word he had spoken, that they would not see his face again.”

“Better to lose your life than to waste it.”

So, when I see a Christian pastor or missionary or a father taking leave of his family or taking leave of a church or a people for the last time, knowing they’ll never see each other again in this life, I listen. I listen because I expect something profound and moving, something that tries to sum up what’s been the point of it all. And I want to know what the point of it all is. I want to know what the point of life is, the point of ministry, the point of the universe, which is exactly what we get in this verse. That’s the first thing.

2. Escape Comfort

I have felt, as I have returned to this text again and again, an urgent desire to renounce every distraction and follow Jesus and escape the materialistic forces of the American dream, and the dangers of being rich, and the temptations of comfort and security, and the deadening effects of worldliness that strip a pastor of his power. “I do not count my life of any value nor as precious to myself,” he says, “except for one thing.” And it isn’t prosperity or comfort or ease or security in this world. “I have been given a race to run and a ministry to perform.”

It’s like a marathon. I’m on it. This is why I live. This is what my life means. Finish the race. Fulfill the ministry. Don’t stop. Don’t leave the course. Don’t get sidetracked. Don’t go backward. If you do, your life will be wasted. Paul really believed Psalm 63:3: the steadfast love of the Lord “is better than life.” There is a path of life that leads to the everlasting enjoyment of the steadfast love of God. Better to lose your life than to go off that path. That’s Acts 20:24.

3. Lean on the Spirit

This text has always felt like a miraculous work of the Spirit, not an accomplishment. Acts 20:22 says, “I am going to Jerusalem, constrained by the Spirit.” Paul wasn’t a self-reliant hero. He was a walking miracle. If Acts 20:24 happens in your life, that’s what it’s like. It’s the work of the Spirit. It’s a miracle.

4. Embrace Uncertainty

This verse felt in my ministry like the thrill and the test of not knowing what the future would bring. Acts 20:22: “I am going to Jerusalem, constrained by the Spirit, not knowing what will happen to me there.” If you have to know enough about tomorrow to feel safe in this world, you’re going to waste your life.

5. Expect Suffering

Acts 20:24 felt like it was a call to suffer. Acts 20:23: “. . . except that the Holy Spirit testifies to me in every city that imprisonment and afflictions await me.” God has said that to all of us, not just Paul. He says to all of us, “Through many afflictions you must enter the kingdom” (see Acts 14:22). And, “If you would live a godly life in Christ Jesus, you will be persecuted” (see 2 Timothy 3:12). And, “He who would follow me,” Jesus said in Matthew 16:24, “must deny himself and take up his cross,” the instrument of death. The single-minded devotion to the call of Jesus is an expectation of suffering.

6. Run to the End

Finally, I’ll mention that now, at age 79, this verse burns in my heart with the desire not to waste my final years — not to waste them with the worldly notion that the last years of our lives on earth are for leisure and not ministry. “Come on, Paul. You’re getting old. How about a little cottage on the Aegean Sea? You’ve already done more in your ministry, Paul, than most people do in five lifetimes. It’s time to rest, Paul. Let the last twenty years of your life be for travel and golf and shuffleboard and pickleball and putzing around in the garage and digging in the garden, Paul. Let Timothy have a chance, for goodness’ sake. He’s young. You don’t have to go to Jerusalem. They’re going to bind your hands and feet and hand you over to the Gentiles. You’re an old man. Get out of your head that crazy notion of going to Spain at your age. You’re going to get yourself killed. It isn’t American. It’s not what you’re supposed to do.”

So, I love this verse. I love it. “I do not account my life of any value nor as precious to myself, if only I may finish my course and the ministry that I received from the Lord Jesus, to testify to the gospel of the grace of God” (Acts 20:24).