So many people live with a deep sense of failure. So many people go through their lives convinced they are a constant disappointment to the ones they so naturally long to please.

Children consider their parents and feel a sense of shame, certain that in some way their parents regard them as a disappointment. Meanwhile, parents consider their children and feel that same sense of shame, sure that their children regard them with disapproval.
Husbands consider their wives and wives their husbands and, while they may not know exactly what they’ve done wrong or what standard they have failed to uphold, they are convinced their spouse looks toward them with a displeased eye.
Church members are often convinced their pastor is disappointed in them for their level of involvement in the church or for the minimal strides they have made in sanctification. Pastors, meanwhile, often feel a deep sense of disapproval from church members, perhaps because they are ordinary preachers rather than extraordinary ones or because they simply do not have enough hours in the week to accept every meeting and fulfill every request.
There are so many Christians who live under a cloud of disappointment and disapproval. And we cannot allow ourselves off the hook here. Our husbands and our wives, our parents and our children, our pastors and our congregations—all can feel that withering sense of censure from the likes of you and me.
And, if we’re honest, such censure is often real rather than imagined. It is real because we are all susceptible to expecting people to live up to our standards rather than to God’s. Yet where God’s standards are holy, ours are tinged with evil; where God’s standards are rational, ours are arbitrary; and where God’s standards are fixed, ours are constantly shifting. People fail to live up to our standards because it’s impossible for them to live up to our standards. And neither should they, for we have no right to call people to live to any standard other than God’s.
A great gift we can give to others is the gift of our approval. We can assure them that our desire for them is not that they live according to our standards, but that they live according to God’s. If they heed the will of God and live according to a sanctified conscience, we can, we should, and we must be satisfied. We must believe that the best thing they can do is please God and please themselves. And if they have done that, we must not be disapproving of them or be disappointed in them.
Husband, one of the greatest gifts you can give your wife is the assurance that you approve of her and that you delight in her. Let her know: “Please God and please yourself, and you shall never displease me.”
Wife, one of the greatest blessings you can bestow upon your husband is the confidence that you are pleased with him and that you find joy in him. Let him hear it: “Please God and please yourself, and you shall never displease me.”
Parents, your children want to know that you approve of them. So be sure they know: “Please God and please yourself, and you shall never displease me.”
Children, your parents want to know that you approve of them just as much as you want to know that they approve of you. So be sure to tell them: “Please God and please yourself, and you shall never displease me.”
Pastors and church members, you know what to do. Whether you use these exact words or others like them, make sure the sentiment is plain: “Please God and please yourself, and you shall never displease me.”*
There would be nothing more foolish than to disapprove of decisions that have been approved by God or to be disappointed by actions that please God. There would be nothing more cruel than to make someone believe they have failed in your eyes when they have succeeded in God’s. There would be nothing more disheartening than for them to live a life that’s pleasing to God only to find that they have lived a life that’s displeasing to you. So whether it’s your child or parents, your husband or wife, your pastor or congregation, let them know, and then relate to them in such a way that they believe it: “Please God and please yourself, and you shall never displease me.”

I have seen these words attributed to the Puritan Philip Henry, but have not been able to trace them back to a source.

Quite a long time has passed since we witnessed the unexpected rise of a new kind of Calvinism. Few had anticipated that in the twenty-first century, so many millions of people spanning a host of nations and traditions would find themselves affirming such old and controversial doctrines. Yet many did so because they were wary and weary of the kind of big-box church-growth Evangelicalism that had been packaged and professionalized and very nearly franchised out.

Growth and Change

As a movement grows from infancy to maturity, it becomes necessary to ask some questions about it. Particularly, it becomes necessary to ask if it is possible that it over-corrected in response to some of the concerns that caused it to grow in the first place. It becomes necessary to ask where it may need to change before those over-corrections become too deeply entrenched to ever change.
The purpose of Andrew Heard’s book Growth and Change: The Danger and Necessity of a Passion for Church Growth is to get church leaders thinking about the connection between the two terms—between growth and change. “This book is designed to help you think about a very important and very emotional topic: change. And not just change in some generalized sense, but a kind of change that could have great significance in your life: change to our churches, our gospel ministries, and our Christian leadership.” It is change that would spur growth.
Why is such change so necessary? He explains in the introduction:

I am convinced that many of the ways we are running our churches and ministries, and many of the ways that we are exercising our leadership within our churches and ministries, has become a significant hindrance to the fundamental growth of the church, both numerically and spiritually. Or, again to put it positively, I’m convinced that with some significant changes to church life and to our leadership patterns and practices, we will see a greater penetration of the gospel into the lost community around us and so see many more people saved. I’m convinced that we can see more men, women and children come to faith in Christ and grown to maturity in Christ.

Big if true, as the young folk say. But also challenging because “we won’t change the things that need to be changed until the pain of not changing is greater than the pain of changing.” The author’s task, then, is to help us see and feel the pain of not changing to such a degree that we actually begin what could be a long and difficult process. The greatest part of that pain is the pain of knowing that the people around us are perishing and that it is our responsibility to reach them with the good news that could save them. “Unless we share God’s heart for the lost in such a way that it pains us greatly to see people perish without Christ, and unless that pain exceeds the pain that we know will accompany our efforts to make changes, we will almost always opt for the status quo. Of course, this is not the only factor that will determine whether we work to bring about change. But it’s a significant and inescapable part of the equation.”
I need to pause here to say that Heard is one of us. He’s not some church growth guru who is writing from a completely different theological perspective. He’s not one of those guys who wants to be able to start a new movement with his name attached to it or a consultant whose over-priced plan is to water down the gospel to make it more palatable to unbelievers. Not at all. He loves the gospel and would do nothing to tamper with it or adapt it to modern sensibilities. Yet he is also concerned that many churches—many of our churches—have too little concern for the growth of their churches and, therefore, for the salvation of the people in their communities. “If we develop a passion for church growth without being aware that this is one of the most dangerous passions a person can have, then the passion will destroy us and our work. What’s more, it’s one thing for the leaders of a church to be passionate about growth, but when that passion extends to the members of the church, the situation becomes even more dangerous.” In other words, he wants us to consider growth with a prudent awareness of the temptations it can bring and the many ways it can go wrong.
So the goal of his book is to create a passion for growth and a heart that is willing to bear the pain of change. It is to commit to being faithful, but also to assess whether we are being truly fruitful—to think deeply about both inputs and outputs, the things we do and the results we see in response. It is to convince Christians that it is honoring to God to consider and do those things that will spur growth, yet always in such a way that God’s Word reigns supreme over both means and ends.
Acknowledging that such talk makes some people nervous, it is perhaps worth noting here that no less than D.A. Carson provided the foreword and proclaimed it the best book in its field. “Andrew Heard,” he insists, “is a reliable guide to the biblical, theological, evangelistic and pastoral issues that will confront all Christian leaders who aim for growth, recognize the need for change, and hunger to work out of a rich and faithful biblical theology. Andrew is well known and well trusted in Australia, his homeland. Now we pray that his influence may multiply exponentially around the world.” And having read Growth and Change, I find myself echoing both the praise and the hope. I read this book with a deepening sense of conviction and with a deepening sense that I need to go back and read it again, and possibly again after that.

We’ve all heard that marriage was designed to make us holy more than to make us happy. And though it’s a bit of a trite phrase that threatens to force a false dichotomy between holiness and happiness, there is a measure of truth to it. At its best, marriage does, indeed, help us grow in holiness. It helps us in our lifelong quest to put sin to death and come alive to righteousness. Aileen and I knew this was true when we got married all those years ago, but as time has passed we’ve been surprised to learn how it’s true.

It had been our assumption that marriage would make us holy because we would essentially be enlisting another person to our cause—a person who would assist us in identifying sin and in helping us put it to death. “This is the will of God: your sanctification,” says Paul, and each of us would be involving ourselves in embracing God’s will for the other.
Certainly there have been times when each of us has helpfully and even formally pointed out where the other has developed patterns of sin and selfishness. There have been times when we have each helped the other fight a particular sin or a general sinfulness. Yet as we look back on the past twenty-three years, we see that this has been relatively rare. It’s not that we don’t see plenty of sin in one another and not that we are firmly opposed to pointing it out. No, it’s more that there is another way that marriage has helped us grow in sanctification—a way in which our efforts are directed at addressing ourselves more than fixing each other.
Each of us has our sins, our imperfections, and our shortcomings. Each of us is pretty well established in who we are and how we behave and each of us is, at 45, pretty unlikely to experience dramatic transformations in this. That’s not to say that we have given up or declared ourselves as holy as we can ever be. Far from it! But at this point we are assuming that the sins that dog us today will probably continue to dog us to the end—though hopefully with diminishing strength. And this means that the sin we have each had to tolerate in the other is sin we will likely need to tolerate for however many more years the Lord gives us. So while Aileen may grow in holiness by having me confront her in her sins, she seems to grow more in holiness by patiently tolerating my sinfulness—by loving me despite my sin and loving me as the Lord helps me progressively put that sin to death.
Then, while each of us has our sins, each of us also has our quirks, our preferences, our idiosyncrasies, our annoyances. And just like we assume that the sins that have dogged each of us through the first twenty-three will dog us for the next twenty-three, we assume that the things that just plain annoy us about one another today are likely to persist as well. And let’s be honest—it is often harder to tolerate a bad habit than a bad sin. It is often harder to tolerate the way your spouse chews his food or leaves her clothes on the ground than the way he sins against you or the way she remains unsanctified. And again, while Aileen might grow in her sanctification by having me formally point out a way in which she is sinful, she seems to grow more in sanctification by learning to accept and perhaps even embrace some of those non-moral but oh-so-annoying things I do—those eccentricities and matters of preference.
So perhaps the foremost way that marriage has helped make us holy is not so much in calling each of us to serve as the other’s second conscience, a junior assistant to the Holy Spirit in bringing conviction of sin. It is not in calling each of us to be a kind of moral sandpaper to actively scour off each other’s rough edges. Rather, marriage has helped make us holy by calling each of us to extend a kind of divine mercy toward the other—to simply live lovingly with someone who is prone to be sinful and irritating.
In marriage, God allows us to see one another as we really are, then to accept one another as we really are—as holistic human beings who are a mixture of holy and depraved, grownup and immature, wonderful and almost unbelievably annoying. Marriage makes us holy not just in compelling us to identify and confront sin in the other, but also in calling us to bear patiently with another person’s sin, preferences, and bad habits. In other words, marriage makes us holy in the way it calls us to be like God in overlooking offenses, in imparting mercy, in extending forgiveness, in displaying compassion, in refusing to be petty. Thus, the great sanctifying challenge of marriage is not so much to fix one another, as to imitate Christ.