After thirty years of ministry, I feel more burdened for the lives of young men than I have ever felt before. Has a more challenging time existed for a young man to figure out who he is supposed to be? I have two teenage sons. They will soon be out in the world, navigating life as believers in an increasingly post-Christian society. I long and pray that they will walk wisely with Jesus in this confusing world and treasure him more than anything. So, I wrote this letter to them and other young men like them, in hopes that God uses it to keep them near himself.

Dear Sam and Isaac,

Your mom and I love you deeply. You’ve both grown into such strong and delightful young men. You are gifted in so many ways and have been flourishing as you’ve developed the gifts God has given you. I’m so proud of you both. I’m also burdened for you, however, because the world you’re growing up in has a level of spiritual warfare and complexity I’ve never seen before.

The very existence of something that could objectively be called “manhood” is questioned, and if it does exist, it is often viewed as toxic and oppressive — it deserves to fade into the patriarchal past. Our image-obsessed and hyper-sexualized culture has certainly done great damage to young ladies, but men have suffered as well. Great numbers of young men live in bondage to sexual sin of all kinds. Paul’s command to his son in the faith, Timothy, to “flee youthful passions” (2 Timothy 2:22), still applies to young Christian men, but you face some unprecedented temptations. So, what is the way to flee foolishness and find God-glorifying wisdom? More than anything else, I think young men need to believe and depend on the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.

A few years ago, a friend and seasoned counselor told me that he thinks the best way to begin all his counseling sessions, no matter the primary issue, is to ask the person, “Do you believe Jesus rose from the dead?” He is a wise and loving man to point people to Jesus’s empty tomb. The answer will frame the way you deal with whatever life brings your way. Trusting in Jesus as the resurrected Savior changes everything.

Raised to Hope

First, the resurrection means that you can have assurance of victory, even in the darkest days.

Many young people are reporting increased depression, hopelessness, anxiety, and fear about the future. Many young men today also seem to think it’s cool to be cynical and apathetic. God doesn’t think that. In the resurrection of Christ, God “has caused us to be born again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead” (1 Peter 1:3).

Sin, sickness, mental or physical illness, addictions, shame from our past, relational strife, war, pandemics, inflation, corrupt governments, ruthless leaders, financial hardship — these are all tragic symptoms of the fall. But because Jesus rose from the dead, none of these should lead us to despair. By faith and union with Christ, his resurrection is our resurrection. Because Jesus became truly human, he represents us not only in his life and death, but in his resurrection as well.

As C.S. Lewis said, “The Man in Christ rose again: not only the God. That is the whole point” (Mere Christianity, 179). If the Man in Christ rose again, then we were raised with him and can walk in joy, hope, and newness of life, even in the darkest times. We have nothing to fear because Jesus is alive and, by faith, we have been raised with him! We should not fear even death because one day we will be raised to new and eternal life together. The resurrection gives a future hope, but also a present daily hope that can give us confidence and peace in any circumstance.

Raised to Favor

Second, the resurrection means you have nothing to prove.

The Bible teaches that Jesus “was delivered up for our trespasses and raised for our justification” (Romans 4:25). This is at the heart of what we believe as Christians. Jesus obeyed, suffered, died, and rose from the dead for us so that we could be saved to the uttermost and find our identity in him. On my best days, when I’m thinking rightly, I understand and rejoice that my whole life depends on God’s grace. But I realized a long time ago that something deep in my heart resists grace. It comes from the influence of the old me — even though he died with Christ when I became a new creature by faith.

Men are taught from an early age to find their identity in athletic accomplishments, the attention of girls, and academic and professional success. These sources of identity are bound to fail us. My pride and the father of lies tell me that I need to earn, prove, demonstrate, deserve, and somehow make myself worthy of God’s love and forgiveness. But when I remember that Jesus provides everything I need for life and godliness (2 Peter 1:3), I find the peace and confidence I need. The resurrection frees us from the filthy rags of our so-called self-righteousness and the impossible burden of proving ourselves worthy of God’s kindness.

When Satan mocks you and throws your sin in your face, these words from Martyn Lloyd-Jones may help: “We must never look at any sin in our past life in any way except that which leads us to praise God and to magnify His grace in Christ Jesus” (Spiritual Depression, 75). If you are going to be confident men who can focus on the needs of others, you’ll need to live with nothing to prove. We need to preach the gospel to ourselves often, and, as Robert Murray M’Cheyne said, take ten looks at Christ for every one look at ourselves. Jesus is enough.

Raised to Power

Third, the resurrection means that you are no longer a slave to sin.

You are daily bombarded with messages that tell you that your desires, feelings, experiences, and personality type define you. You are told that, to be your authentic self, you need to fully express all that stirs within you, even if it dishonors God and hurts others. “Follow your heart” has become the cardinal doctrine of our time. Jesus teaches the opposite. He tells us that true life is found only in dying to ourselves and living in him through the power of the resurrection.

The apostle Paul said that his great aim in the Christian life was to “know [Christ] and the power of his resurrection, and . . . share his sufferings, becoming like him in his death” (Philippians 3:10). When I baptized both of you at church, you remember I said, “buried with him in baptism, and raised to walk in newness of life.” The same power that raised Jesus from the dead has made you a new creation in Christ and now lives in you. By the resurrection power of Christ, you can overcome sinful temptations and desires that conflict with God’s ways (Romans 6:4–5).

Romans 6 is worth your serious study, meditation, and memorization. Even though you may feel, at times, like sin has a death grip on your heart and life, God promises that the power of sin has been defeated by Jesus and that you are now slaves to righteousness (Romans 6:17–18). When you obey God, you are living according to your new identity. God promises that when we trusted Christ, he “made us alive together with Christ — by grace you have been saved — and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus” (Ephesians 2:5–6). Live like he has raised you from the dead.

Press On, Young Men

My dear boys, the resurrection is not merely a doctrine to be affirmed intellectually; it is the resounding affirmation that Jesus reigns over all. The power that raised him from the dead is your power for living the Christian life on earth and your assurance of eternal life in heaven. The resurrection changed everything, and you now have the hope, identity, and power to become the men of God that he created you to be — men who will walk in humble confidence, empowered by the Spirit that raised Jesus from the dead (Romans 8:11), to lay down your lives in Christlike service for the good of others and the glory of Christ. Press on, young men of God.

Audio Transcript

Welcome back to the podcast.

Well, God is happy in himself. Amen. And God wants us to be happy in himself. Amen. If you start applying biblical categories here, you begin to ask this question: How does God’s joy become my joy? That’s our question today — a really good one — from a listener named Heather in Chicago.

“Hello, Pastor John, and thank you for this podcast,” she writes. “My question for you is about the nature of who God is and how he relates to our joy. Can you explain to me, from the Bible, the person and work of the Holy Spirit as the love and joy shared between the Father and the Son? I don’t quite understand this without making his person seem more like a force or a cosmic energy. And then how does the person of the Spirit enable us to experience God’s joy within us? It seems like those two realities connect, the person of the Spirit and the joy in us. But it doesn’t connect for me. Not yet. Can you help me understand these two dynamics from the Bible?”

I think it’s crucial, as we try to understand our relationship with the Holy Spirit, that we fix it firmly in our minds that we are dealing with a distinct person. Just fix it, so that whatever else is uncertain, don’t let that be uncertain: a person, a divine person, the third person of the Trinity.

Fellowship of the Spirit

In fact, I’ve been struck recently — even before I heard this question — how the New Testament encourages us to enjoy fellowship with each of the three divine persons of the Trinity, not just fellowship with God in the abstract or general way, but fellowship with God the Father, fellowship with God the Son, fellowship with God the Spirit. For example, 1 Corinthians 1:9 says that God called us “into the fellowship of his Son.” Second Corinthians 13:14 refers to “the fellowship of the Holy Spirit.” First John 1:3 says, “Our fellowship is with the Father.” So, we’re taught to have fellowship — communion, personal relations — with the Father, the Son, the Holy Spirit.

You know what book I would recommend, Tony: John Owen, Communion with the Triune God. Nobody, I don’t think, in the history of the church has helped people come to terms with what it means to relate to each person of the Trinity like John Owen. I would recommend Communion with the Triune God by John Owen.

Now, that implies that the Holy Spirit is a person — someone you can relate to, talk to — which is exactly the way Jesus spoke of him. He says in John 14:26, “The Helper, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, he” — and yes, it is masculine, not neuter (to agree with spirit, pneuma) — “he will teach you all things.” So, he is distinct from the Father, because the Father sends him, and he’s a teacher when he comes, not just a force or gas.

“The New Testament encourages us to enjoy fellowship with each of the three divine persons of the Trinity.”

The apostle Paul picks up on this very reality of the Spirit as distinct from the Father and a very personal teacher in 1 Corinthians 2:10, 13, where he says, “The Spirit searches everything, even the depths of God.” What an amazing statement. “The Spirit searches . . . the depths of God. . . . And we impart [things of God] in words . . . taught by the Spirit.” So, Paul is just like Jesus. Paul is picking it up and continuing what Jesus taught. Jesus and Paul treat the Holy Spirit not as an impersonal force or power, but as a person who comes and teaches and indwells believers and who can be related to personally.

Spirit of a Spirit?

Then consider that Jesus said in John 4:24, “God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth.” In other words, God is not material. He’s not physical. He is spirit, which means that when we say that one of the persons of the Trinity is the Spirit of God, we are saying he is the Spirit of a spirit.

Now, what does that mean? What does it mean to say the spirit has a Spirit? We are not saying he’s the image of the spirit or the radiance of the spirit or the logos or word of the spirit, all of which are said about the Son. So, what are we saying when we refer to the Holy Spirit of God, who is himself as Trinity spirit?

Here’s what Jonathan Edwards — who has helped me so much — says: “The word ‘spirit’ in Scripture, when used concerning minds . . . is put for the disposition, inclination, or temper of the mind.” For example, when Ephesians 4:23 says, “Be renewed in the spirit of your mind,” it refers to the disposition or temper of your mind. Edwards goes on,

So, I suppose when we read of the Spirit of God, who we are told is a spirit, it is to be understood of the disposition, temper, or affection of the divine mind. . . . Now, the sum of God’s temper or disposition is love, for he is infinite love. (Works of Jonathan Edwards, 21:122)

Now, when he says that, we must resist — as Heather pointed out — the temptation to think of love as a mere force or power rather than a person. Edwards is not denying the personhood of the Holy Spirit when he talks of him as the temper or the disposition or the love of God. Edwards is simply trying to put all the biblical pieces together.

Eternal Love of God

The New Testament doesn’t just come out and tell us in a doctrinal statement, “The Holy Spirit is a person,” or, “The person is the very embodiment of the love of God.” It doesn’t say that. The various statements of the New Testament point in this direction. But you have to put the pieces together, which means we need to be careful — oh, how careful — lest we go off the rails and become heretics. I think all of our human efforts — I’d say this in general now about Edwards, myself, or anybody else — to conceptualize the relationships within the Trinity need to confess that we see through a glass darkly until we know even as we are known (1 Corinthians 13:12), which means, “Be careful.”

“The Spirit, in his essence, is God’s joyful love, loving joy in person.”

Now, here’s another pointer to the question that Heather’s concerned about. First John 4:12–13 points to the Holy Spirit as the love of God in us. Here’s what it says: “If we love one another, God abides in us and his love is perfected in us. By this we know that we abide in him and he in us, because he has given us of his Spirit.” So, if you put all that together, God in us, his love in us, his Spirit in us, all seem to point to the fact that the way the love of God abides in us is by his Spirit. That is his disposition, his temper. That is his love in person, abiding in us by the person of the Holy Spirit.

Eternal Joy of God

Now, the piece that remains to be added for Heather’s question is joy. This is added by pondering that the love that God is from all eternity is not a sacrificial love between the Father and the Son. They are infinitely beautiful, infinitely worthy of each other’s love, which means that they delight in each other infinitely. That’s what their love is.

“This is my beloved Son, with whom I am [totally delighted]” — that’s my paraphrase of “well pleased” (Matthew 3:17). To say that the love of the Father and the Son for each other is embodied in the Spirit is to say that the Spirit, in his essence, is God’s joyful love, loving joy in person, because God’s loving from eternity has been his enjoying from eternity. That’s how the persons of the Godhead have related to each other. They’re not disappointed; they don’t have to overcome any obstacles to delight in each other.

So, when Jesus says, “My joy I give to you” (see John 15:11), or when he says, “Enter into the joy of your master” (Matthew 25:21), he is welcoming us into the fullest experience of the Son’s love for the Father. It seems right, then, to say this is experienced by being filled with the Holy Spirit, who is the very person who is the love of God and the joy of God. Paul speaks in 1 Thessalonians 1:6 of “the joy of the Holy Spirit,” the joy that the Holy Spirit gives by coming himself to live in us as the very love and joy of God.

I pray that God would help you, Heather, and all of us, as we humbly and carefully try to faithfully put the pieces of God’s precious word together.

Fathers, I have a confession: I get “the feels” around all things Christmas. Listening to nonstop holiday music (after Thanksgiving, of course), the sight of a tree on a car, exterior illumination that would make Clark Griswold proud, the smell of evergreen — I love it all. I don’t need Andy Williams to tell me, “it’s the most wonderful time of the year,” but I sure can’t wait until he does!

If you don’t relate to this confession, though, don’t worry. I’ve got another one: on multiple occasions, I’ve arrived at Christmas morning feeling that it snuck up on me. This moment of recognition usually happens in the middle of our Christmas Eve service, when I glance around and see my wife and our five kids joyfully singing praises to “Christ, the newborn King,” or listening intently to the story of Jesus’s birth. On a number of years, this joyful moment has been accompanied in my heart with a twinge of sadness. Another Christmas has almost passed, and yet again, it snuck up on me.

Stewards of Hearts

I’m aware that these two confessions may sound contradictory. On the one hand, as a man who’s a kid at heart, I eagerly anticipate and count down the arrival of the holiday season. On the other hand, as a father who’s a steward of hearts, I have a tendency to arrive at the end of the holiday season and feel like I wasn’t ready for it — and now it’s gone.

I’ve heard quite a few fathers say that their daughter’s wedding day snuck up on them. They don’t mean they didn’t see it coming or were surprised by its arrival. No, it snuck up because the many things they needed to do (host family, write toasts, pay invoices, and much more) distracted them from the one thing they were honored to be: “Daddy.” In short, the significance of what they were a part of was lost on them until it had passed. Even if they were present in the moment, they were not prepared to win the moment.

This illustration has helped put words to the sadness that I’ve felt at the end of too many holiday seasons (and I don’t think I’m alone). If we are not mindful on the front end, the many things we “need” to do this December will distract us from the one thing we need to be: children of our good and generous God. And if we fathers personally neglect the significance of the Advent season, it’s unlikely we will lead our families any differently.

Fathers, let’s do more this year than be physically present; let’s get spiritually prepared to lead our family to win the moments. If you’re inspired to join me but don’t know where to begin, I’d like to offer three practices that have consistently enabled our family to win the holiday season, moment by moment.

1. Create Devotional Moments

The first practice is to create devotional moments. By “devotional moments,” I’m talking specifically about creating time for the family to gather and hear God’s word together.

Before I share what my wife and I have found helpful, let me make sure you are picturing our family correctly. Imagine a quiet and orderly group of serious, scholarly believers, gathered together to eagerly learn from the Scriptures. Got those people in mind? Now picture the opposite of that group. That’s our family. There are seven of us, and for some reason just saying the words “family devotion” produces an effect like drinking a Red Bull, where everyone “gets wings.” Even the dogs get in on the madness.

But while family devotions aren’t always easy and can go south quickly, we’ve discovered that a little planning and perspective can set us up for success. Years ago, we set it as our goal to create family devotional times that were fun, engaging, and memorable. We observed that many kids leave Christian homes feeling that the Scriptures are boring, irrelevant, and hard to understand. Not only do our three goals counter these, but they can create a learning environment that kids might even look forward to. As a father, I consider it a huge win anytime I can spark in my children an eagerness, or even an openness, for the living and active word of God (Hebrews 4:12).

“Fathers, do what it takes to carve out some planning time on the front end of the holidays (now!).”

During the holidays, we try to gather at least two times a week for family devotions. For us, family-devotion topics typically emerge as my wife and I share with each other what we are learning in our respective Advent devotionals. If we have any “secret sauce” to share, however, it’s what we do next. Julia and I then spend a few minutes brainstorming about three things: teaser, takeaway, and treasure hunt. (The more you do this, the better you get at it.)

The teaser starts our family devotions. We tee up our time with a fun question that gets everyone talking and points toward the message. The takeaway is the one big idea from Scripture that we want the family to walk away with. A concise takeaway focuses the devotion and gives the family language to rally around. Last, the treasure hunt is when things really get fun. Prior to the family devotion, we secure some sort of holiday treat (like a family game, a dessert to make, a holiday movie) and hide it somewhere in the house. Here’s the catch: the treat is hidden somewhere that is connected to something from the devotional. The one rule about the treasure hunt is that all the kids have to discuss and hunt together.

I hope you can envision how powerful it can be to create family devotional moments that are fun, engaging, and memorable.

2. Capitalize on Seasonal Moments

The second practice is to capitalize on seasonal moments. Unless you live on Mount Crumpit, others in your area have already put together holiday events that can provide your family with memorable moments. If setting aside time to pray and think creatively is the key to the first practice, this second one hinges on the willingness to do a little calendar coordination. In all likelihood, your area schools will have holiday programs, churches will host Christmas concerts, community theaters will produce shows, and the city at large will plan a slew of seasonal events. It’s all there, simply waiting to be leveraged by those who will take some time now to look ahead and make a few decisions.

For years, we had the same experience over and over: I would find the greatest holiday events for the family to enjoy — and we wouldn’t ever go. Before you think I live with a bunch of hermits, I should add that I would find these events the day of the show, and either the tickets would be sold out or someone in the family had other plans. Bah humbug!

My wife had been telling me about this thing called “planning” that adults sometimes do, and when I finally applied it to the holiday season it was a game changer. At the start of the Christmas season, we take some time to identify important moments for each family member (so we can all plan to attend), as well as a few special holiday events. (By the way, news of a special seasonal event makes a great treasure hunt discovery after an enjoyable family devotion!)

3. Copy Memorable Moments

Last, I would encourage you to copy memorable moments year after year. It doesn’t take long in life to realize that change is inevitable — and navigating through a world of constant change can lead to a feeling of instability, especially among children. As a father, I long for my children to know they have a God who is “the stability of your times” (Isaiah 33:6) and one who is “the same yesterday and today and forever” (Hebrews 13:8). As we teach these truths, we can also seek to create a home environment that models it. We have leaned on our family traditions as a way to provide a sense of constancy in an ever-changing world.

What are your family traditions that you copy year after year? Our holiday season is full of memorable and repeatable moments that provide an anchor for our family. We have traditions that are unique to us (“elf knock,” holiday game night after devotions, ham-and-steak holiday meal, stockings hid on Christmas morning, sibling gift exchange before Christmas) as well as some that I imagine many families do (family pajamas on Christmas Eve, birthday cake for Jesus, reading Luke 2 and praying together before opening gifts). To quote my good friend Cousin Eddie, a meaningful family tradition is “a gift that keeps on giving” year after year.

Seize the Season

The prophet Isaiah provides much-needed wisdom for what it’s going to take to see these ideas become a reality: “He who is noble plans noble things, and on noble things he stands” (Isaiah 32:8). Fathers, do what it takes to carve out some planning time on the front end of the holidays (now!). Get a plan for creating devotional moments, coordinate how you will capitalize on seasonal moments, and identify the memorable moments to copy year after year.

For those who apply these three simple practices, I am confident that you will look at your family on Christmas Eve with a whole lot of gladness and very little sadness. For this holiday season came, and you were ready for it.