Five years ago, I was diagnosed with a severe sensitivity to gluten. As my poor wife can testify, I fought the diagnosis for months, but I eventually cut it out of my diet. And I felt better.

A year or so ago, I started experiencing similar pain, sometimes over multiple hours, so my doctor referred me to a specialist. We ran some tests and he asked me a bunch of questions. At one point, he asked me about the kinds of things I drink. I told him I had cut back on coffee and cut out soda completely, but that I still drank a fair amount of sparkling water. “Yeah, you should probably cut that out too,” he said. He went on to explain what should have been obvious, that pouring carbonation on a sensitive GI tract is likely to enflame your system, causing even more irritation and discomfort.

Unfortunately, I (like many of you) had always heard that if I had an upset stomach or tummy ache, I should drink a little Sprite or Ginger Ale to “settle my stomach.” So, for that whole year, whenever I would start to feel some kind of discomfort, I would go to the fridge and grab (you guessed it) a sparkling water, expecting it to make me feel better — and then wondering, completely confused, why I felt even worse.

Well, I cut out sparkling water, and my issues immediately stopped. Within days, my whole body felt lighter and healthier. And six months later, I’m still not having the same issues. So why am I telling you all of this? Because the more I look back and watch myself pouring sparkling water on my pain over all those months, the more I see how often we do the same with sin. Amid some pain or frustration or discouragement or exhaustion, we reach for some besetting sin, expecting it to make us feel better — and then wonder, completely confused, why we feel even worse.

Satan Hunts the Hurting

Satan knows how prone we can be to turn to sin in our suffering — and he preys on that weakness. The apostle Peter writes his first letter to believers in intense affliction. They were suffering fiery trials of various kinds (1 Peter 1:6; 4:12). In particular, many of them were being slandered and maligned for following Jesus (1 Peter 3:16; 4:4). People were saying awful things about them. Listen how he counsels them to suffer well:

Be sober-minded; be watchful. Your adversary the devil prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour. Resist him, firm in your faith, knowing that the same kinds of suffering are being experienced by your brotherhood throughout the world. And after you have suffered a little while, the God of all grace, who has called you to his eternal glory in Christ, will himself restore, confirm, strengthen, and establish you. (1 Peter 5:8–10)

“How often do we live as if the devil isn’t real, as if there isn’t a real spiritual war being waged against our faith?”

Now, the devil prowls around all the time, and would love to devour any of us at any time, but the apostle sees a particular vulnerability in suffering. He knows, from personal experience and from ministering to others, that Satan hunts among the hurting.

Peter has seen how seductive sin can be when life gets difficult and painful, and he’s heard the bad excuses we make for ourselves, so he presses three realities on the fragile hearts of sufferers.

1. You have a disturbing and hidden enemy.

One way Satan distracts us from his malicious power and influence in our lives is by introducing the turbulence of suffering. If he can shake our plane enough to bring the seatbelt lights on, he knows we might focus on our trials and forget he’s even there.

Peter warns us, however: “Your adversary the devil prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour.” You have an adversary, and he’s not some stray cat chasing mice; he’s a 500-pound lion, the king of the pride, and he’s stalking souls like yours and mine. And yet how often do we live as if the devil isn’t real, as if there isn’t a real spiritual war being waged against our faith?

The apostle Paul pulls back the curtain:

We do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places. (Ephesians 6:12)

When trials come, of various kinds, we need to be reminded that we have a serious enemy, that malice waits in our shadows to attack us at our most vulnerable.

2. You are not as alone as you feel.

When suffering comes, we need to be reminded that we have an enemy. We also need to be reminded that we’re not as alone as we tend to feel. Listen again to what Peter says: “Your adversary the devil prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour. Resist him, firm in your faith, knowing that the same kinds of suffering are being experienced by your brotherhood throughout the world” (1 Peter 5:8–9).

How do we resist our awful enemy? One way is to remember that many brothers and sisters in Christ are suffering in the same kinds of ways — and not just suffering, but suffering well. By God’s conquering grace, they’re enduring suffering and overcoming suffering (and some of them are surely suffering more than you are right now). Seeing the armies of God’s people braving intense trials should strengthen our souls to keep fighting for another day, another month, another year, if necessary.

Peter knows how isolating suffering can be. Many sufferers feel like no one else is going through what they’re going through, that no one knows their pain. He also knows that what we feel in suffering is not always reality. We need to be reminded to look up and see God comforting, strengthening, and satisfying his embattled church all over the world.

3. Whatever your pain is, it will end soon.

Before you shrug this off as trite, remember that the man writing this letter was persecuted, threatened, imprisoned, and eventually crucified upside down. His suffering was not short or infrequent or minor, by any measure. And yet he can say, next verse:

And after you have suffered a little while, the God of all grace, who has called you to his eternal glory in Christ, will himself restore, confirm, strengthen, and establish you. (1 Peter 5:10)

After you have suffered a little while. . . . Some of you are tempted to scoff. You’ve had the pain you bear for years, maybe even decades (and it’s not letting up). I won’t pretend to know what it’s like to suffer like you have. But I will promise you, the apostle did not misspeak, even in your case.

Compared with the countless years of painless bliss coming to all who follow Christ, any suffering for any amount of time is only a little while. These years will one day seem as minutes. God will soon restore you, and you’ll never be broken again. God will soon confirm you, and you’ll never feel unsure or insecure again. God will soon strengthen you, and you’ll never again stumble or faint for weakness. God will soon establish you in his presence, and you will stand — radiant, with no discomfort, no illness, no heartache — in the eternal glory of Christ forever, no turbulence, no interruption, no bad news ever again.

So, knowing what God’s about to do for you, can you suffer just a little longer?

What Secret Sin Tempts You?

This dangerous tendency in us, to turn to sin in our suffering for satisfaction and relief, reminds me of Jeremiah 2:13. God says through the prophet,

My people have committed two evils:they have forsaken me,     the fountain of living waters,and hewed out cisterns for themselves,     broken cisterns that can hold no water.

In their thirst, they’ve forsaken the fountain of living waters — “Whoever drinks of the water that I will give him will never be thirsty again” (John 4:14) — and they’ve sucked down the sparkling water of sin instead.

Sin’s worse than that, though. The prophet describes sin as “broken cisterns” — as cups with cracks and holes. Nothing’s staying in, and so nothing’s pouring out. So, what’s that cup for you? What secret sin are you tempted to turn to when you’re feeling down, or lonely, or frustrated, or stressed out and overwhelmed? I’m not a doctor, but you need to cut that out. I promise you, the comforts of sin — the comforts of impatience, of overeating, of anger, of binging shows or movies, of anxiety, of bitterness, of lust — will only make your pain worse in the end.

And I promise you, only the comforts of Christ hold what your soul craves in the valley. We won’t find healing for our suffering or power to overcome temptation simply by refusing our besetting sin. We need to drink from a better, deeper, more satisfying well. We need to see and savor Jesus — through his word, through prayer, through one another — and all the more when suffering comes.

Audio Transcript

How do I see the glory of Christ? This is a key question for everyone. We must see Christ’s glory. His glory is the epicenter, the engine, of the entire Christian life. We must see it and delight in it, because to not see Christ’s glory is to not be a believer. It’s that simple. The stakes are that high. And those high stakes are why we got this email from a listener named David. “Hello, Pastor John. I have a question for you,” he writes. “Your articles on what true saving faith is really opened my eyes to see what it is, and to see that I don’t have this. I don’t see Jesus as beautiful. I feel blind to his glory. How does one have his eyes opened? I know I can’t do anything. I am desperate. Can you help me?”

Let me try to clarify David’s reference to what I have said about the nature of saving faith.

Treasuring Trust

I believe the Bible teaches that saving faith is a trusting and treasuring of Jesus Christ that rises from a Spirit-given sight of the truth and greatness and beauty and worth of Jesus as we see him at work in the gospel.

“Saving faith sees Jesus as supremely desirable, supremely great, supremely beautiful.”

And what David rightly sees in this understanding of faith is that faith is not mere agreement with facts about Jesus, and it’s not a mere trust in Jesus to do for us things that even unbelievers want done. Saving faith does not receive Jesus merely as useful. Saving faith receives Jesus as himself, the greatest gift of the gospel. This means that saving faith sees Jesus as supremely desirable, supremely great, supremely beautiful, valuable, all of which the Bible sums up by saying that Jesus has divine glory.

So those words valuable, beautiful, great, desirable — they’re all subsumed I think in what the Bible means by glory. Saving faith is a treasuring trust in Jesus as more valuable, more beautiful, more satisfying than anything else.

Now, here’s a glimpse of this truth in 2 Corinthians 4:4: “The god of this world has blinded the minds of unbelievers, to keep them from seeing the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God.” Amazing! Let me say it again: “The gospel of the glory of Christ.” Paul is happy to sum up the gospel as “the gospel of the glory of Christ.” This is why David is right in his question when he says that we need to see the glory of Christ in order to have saving faith, because the gospel is the gospel of the glory of Christ.

So, I take David’s question very seriously. It is the right question to ask. “If I don’t see Christ as glorious, as supremely beautiful and valuable and satisfying, what should I do?” That’s his question.

God’s Glory in Creation

So let me come at it like this. Let me try to at least partially demystify the idea of God’s revealing his glory. Those very words may just sound like nonsense to some people.

Psalm 19:1 says, “The heavens declare the glory of God, and the sky above proclaims his handiwork.” Jeremiah 10:12 then puts meat on those bones: “It is [the Lord] who made the earth by his power, who established the world by his wisdom, and by his understanding stretched out the heavens.” And then Romans 1:20–21 says,

[God’s] invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse. For although they knew God, they did not [glorify] him as God.

So, from these texts, I conclude that God has made visible his glory, his beauty, his power, his wisdom, his greatness, and his worth in the works of his hands, in nature. And it’s our obligation as humans to see this glory and recognize it as a manifestation of the beauty of God, the greatness of God, the worth of God, and not just the beauty and greatness and worth of stars.

And the reason I said that this is a demystification of the revelation of God’s glory is that, on the one hand, most of us catch on to the notion of glory as beauty and greatness and worth when we see the magnificence of the galaxies, and the power of a bolt of lightning, and the great sound of rolling thunder, and the majesty of soaring mountains. It’s not a complete mystery that such glory in nature is a revelation of God. Most people can catch on to that.

Christ’s Glory in the Gospels

But the reason it’s only a partial demystification is that apart from the regenerating work of the Holy Spirit, we won’t see this glory for what it really is — namely, God’s glory. So, if there is a partial clarification of the revelation of God’s glory by looking at nature, maybe David will be able to make the transition to the revelation of the glory of Christ in the inspired stories in Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, because that’s why they’re there.

This is why God inspired the writing of these stories, just as he put the stars in place. He inspired them so that glory would shine through — Christ’s glory. Here’s John 1:14 — this is why Christ walked the earth, and the Gospels were written to show him to us: “And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth.” And when Jesus starts to do his work, John says in John 2:11, “This, the first of his signs, Jesus did at Cana in Galilee, and manifested his glory. And his disciples believed in him.”

So, John is showing us why his Gospel is written: to reveal the glory of Christ and awaken faith. It’s the gospel of the glory of Christ. And at the end of his life, Jesus prayed, “[Father,] I glorified you on earth, having accomplished the work that you gave me to do” (John 17:4). That’s what his life and work were for: to reveal in himself, through himself, the glory of God. Or another way to say it is from John 20:31: “These things are written so that you may believe.” That’s what happens when you see the glory of Christ for what it really is — you believe!

Four Paths to Sight

So, David’s question is, “If Satan blinds the minds of unbelievers the way 2 Corinthians 4:4 says he does, and if we by nature are resistant to the beauty of God’s supremacy, what can we do?” What should he do? That’s what he’s asking. “Pastor John, tell me what I can do. Is there anything?” He says, “I can’t do anything,” but that’s not true. So, here are four things.

“As much as it lies within you, renounce your love affair with the glory that comes from people.”

First, as much as it lies within you, David, renounce your love affair with the glory that comes from people. Because Jesus said in John 5:44, “How can you believe, when you receive glory from one another and do not seek the glory that comes from the only God?” It’s a great obstacle to love the glory of man. All of us are born loving the glory we get from other people. While that love is supreme in our hearts, we cannot believe. So, let’s renounce it. As much as it lies within you, say to God, “I’m done with it. I want to be done with it. Deliver me. I want to be free from this bondage to the love of human glory!”

Second, read and listen to the word of God as much as you can — especially the Gospels, since God inspired his word as a revelation of his glory. And he said, “Faith comes by hearing, and hearing through the word of Christ” (Romans 10:17). This is true for the rest of our lives. Saving faith is awakened and saving faith is sustained by the word of God as long as we live.

Third, in all of your listening, in all of your reading, in all of your hearing, turn to Christ. Don’t just read passively. Don’t just read vaguely. Paul said in 2 Corinthians 3:16, “When one turns to the Lord, the veil is removed.” And he means the veil that keeps you from seeing the glory of Christ. Don’t just read and listen passively. Direct your heart as you read and listen to Christ and say, “Show me yourself, Christ! Show me yourself in your word. Show me that you are real. Show me your truth, and greatness, and beauty, and worth. Show me your glory!”

And then finally, fourth, in and through it all, pray that the eyes of your heart would be opened. Paul models this for us in Ephesians 1:18: “[I pray that] the eyes of your hearts [would be] enlightened, that you may know what is the hope to which he has called you.”

Arise and Go to Jesus

So those are four things, David: renounce pride, read the word, turn to Christ, and pray for sight. And I would just close with this. Maybe go online and get a copy of the song “Come, Ye Sinners, Poor and Needy,” and sing it or say it, especially this verse:

I will arise and go to Jesus;He will embrace me in his arms.In the arms of my dear Savior,Oh, there are ten thousand charms.

Audio Transcript

We end the week with episode 1800. It’s an incredible benchmark for us, and it’s only possible because of you. So thank you for a decade of support and for your encouragements, email questions, and 250 million episode plays — and for hundreds of thousands of subscribes over the years. This podcast happens because you invest time with us — precious time that we don’t take for granted. That’s why we don’t have ads or sponsors, and it’s one of the reasons we don’t dillydally around with windy introductions. So, moving on to the episode.

Today’s question is a great one, Pastor John. Scripture gives us a constellation of ways to think of the Christian life. And a listener to the podcast named Jason wants to know how they relate. Here’s what he asks: “Pastor John, hello! Can you help me figure something out? Is the key to personal sanctification more about ‘looking to Jesus,’ as Hebrews 12:2 says? Or is it more about being united ‘to him who has been raised from the dead,’ as Romans 7:4 puts it? Or is it mostly about ‘beholding’ Christ’s glory, as 2 Corinthians 3:18 puts it? Or is it more about just obeying and doing the ‘work of faith,’ as 2 Thessalonians 1:11 says?

“I know the answer is likely going to be, ‘Yes, it’s all of those!’ But I am trying to connect them all in a way that is practical to teach and live. I find myself jumping from one to the other as though they are multiple things. Surely there are logical connections that make them all one and the same.” Pastor John, how would you put this puzzle together for Jason?

Wow, I just love this kind of a great question — not only this kind of question, but just this way of thinking. Taking different parts of Scripture — they use very different language — and asking, “Are there deep, common, unified, coherent realities here?” That is so helpful to do.

So let’s see if I can weave these four strands together into some kind of cord that the Lord might use to bring us along in our pursuit of sanctification. That’s what they’re designed for, and I think the Lord is very pleased when we try to put the different parts of his word together in order to see the common realities behind them, even when different words are used to describe those realities.

One Great Work of God

The realities in these four passages of Scripture would include these (I just made a list of them as I read these passages):

God
word of God
Christ
death of Christ
glory of Christ
law of God
faith in Christ
faith in his word
hope
joy
Christian freedom
the Holy Spirit
human resolve

All of those are realities, and they are all at work in these passages, and they are not doing contradictory things.

“There is one great work of God weaving all these realities together in the process of making us holy.”

There is one great work of God weaving all these realities together in the process of making us holy, making us sanctified, more Christlike. Different texts focus on different ones of these realities, but none of them leads us in a direction that would in any way contradict the other passages. We’ve misunderstood the text if one text is sending us off in a direction that flies in the face of the other passages. So, let me take them one at a time and just see if I can draw out some of the common connections.

Looking to Jesus

Since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight, and sin which clings so closely, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is seated at the right hand of the throne of God. (Hebrews 12:1–2)

So in this text, “looking to Jesus” is given as the means by which we run our race with endurance. That race, of course, includes becoming holy, staying on the narrow racetrack to the end. And when we look to Jesus, we see three things that affect our running.

First, he’s called “the founder and perfecter of our faith,” which means he has done the decisive work in dying and rising and sitting down at the right hand of God. Because of Christ, our faith is well-founded and well-finished. It’s as good as done. In other words, because of Christ, we’re going to make it to the finish line. He founded our faith. He’ll finish our faith.

“Because of Christ, we’re going to make it to the finish line. He founded our faith. He’ll finish our faith.”

Second, we look to Christ as inspiring our endurance because of his endurance — enduring the cross. He ran his race successfully through suffering. This emboldens us to run our race through suffering.

And third, when we look to Jesus, he shows us how he ran his race. He says he ran it “for the joy that was set before him.” Therefore, the key to our endurance is to stand on that finished work of Christ and be confident that all-satisfying joy is just over the horizon. He’s going to finish it. He’s going to bring us great joy. That’s how we keep going, because that’s how he kept going.

So this confidence in the joy that is set before us is called, in Hebrews, faith. In the chapter just before, faith is the substance of things hoped for, the joy hoped for. Faith is the foretaste, the substance (Hebrews 11:1). Right now you can taste it — the foretaste of the joy of the promise of God, over and over. In Hebrews 11, the saints obey by faith — that is, this faith, this confident hope of a joyful future, is the key to their obedience, just like it was the key to Jesus’s obedience. So that’s the picture, and that’s the reality of how we are sanctified, in Hebrews 12.

New Way of the Spirit

Now here’s Romans 7:4, 6:

You also have died to the law through the body of Christ, so that you may belong to another, to him who has been raised from the dead, in order that we may bear fruit for God. . . . We are released from the law, having died to that which held us captive, so that we serve in the new way of the Spirit, and not in the old way of the written code.

Now, the new reality that Paul introduces here that wasn’t in Hebrews 12 is the fact that when Christ died, we died. Specifically, we died to the law. We were released from law-keeping as the way of getting right with God, as the way of ongoing fellowship with God.

That’s new, right? Nothing was said about the law in Hebrews 12:1–2. So Paul is coming at sanctification with a different problem in view: not the need for endurance through suffering — that’s the issue in Hebrews; that’s not the issue here — but the need for liberation from law-keeping. That’s the issue here. How do we relate to God? How do we become holy without law-keeping as the foundation for our lives (because that we died to)?

And the other new reality that Paul introduces in Romans 7:4 is the Holy Spirit. He says that we “have died to the law . . . so that we serve in the new way of the Spirit and not in the old way of the written code” (Romans 7:6) And that wasn’t in Hebrews.

And I would say that this new way of the Spirit is precisely the way of Hebrews 12, describing the Christian life — namely, the life of faith in the promises of God to fulfill us, to fill us with hope for future joy. That’s the new way of the Spirit in Romans 7. That’s the alternative to law-keeping as a way of walking with God. So, they are complementary texts, coming at sanctification from two very different angles.

Beholding the Glory of Christ

Third, Jason introduces, or he brings up, 2 Corinthians 3:18. In this text, Paul combines the reality of the Holy Spirit (mentioned in Romans 7) and the reality of looking to Jesus (mentioned in Hebrews 12). And he adds the realities of glory and freedom, neither of which had been mentioned explicitly in those other two texts, but are mentioned here. So he says,

Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. And we all, with unveiled face, beholding glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another. For this comes from the Lord who is the Spirit. (2 Corinthians 3:17–18)

What this text adds to the “new way of the Spirit,” described in Hebrews 12 and Romans 7, is that looking to Jesus in Hebrews 12 means not only seeing him as enduring the cross, but seeing him as glorious in all that he’s done.

The focus is on how beautiful and glorious and magnificent he is — and finding that glory so riveting, so satisfying, that it has the effect of transforming us. We tend to take on the traits of those we most admire. This is freedom, because it happens by the Spirit as a natural process.

This is what Paul called “bearing fruit for God” in Romans 7. Faith and hope and joy are not mentioned in 2 Corinthians 3, but I would say that they are implied in the phrase “beholding the glory of the Lord.” I think that transforming “beholding” is the sight of faith. That’s the way faith sees Christ. Faith beholds the beauty of Christ. Faith finds joy in him when it looks at him and all that God promises to be for us in him. And by beholding him that way, faith transforms. And that’s sanctification.

Work of Faith

One more. Jason refers us to 2 Thessalonians 1:11, where Paul says, “May [God] fulfill every resolve for good and every work of faith by his power.” So in the process of sanctification, we do make resolves. Yes, we do. We intend things. We will things. We exercise our will. But Paul says that all of these volitional actions are works of faith by God’s power. In other words, we are back in the realm of God’s empowering Spirit. We work by trusting God’s promise that he is at work in us.

So, Jason, good question. I think if you bore into the actual reality of these four descriptions of sanctification, you will find they are deeply unified and mutually illuminating. It’s a thrilling thing to meditate on the realities of Scripture until we see how beautifully they cohere.