Audio Transcript

How do I follow God’s lead in my daily decisions? I know he’s my shepherd. He’s leading me. I think so. But how do I know if I am following him?

That’s such an important question we all must answer for ourselves, and it was a question taken up by a very young Pastor John Piper, in his very first summer as a pastor. In fact, just a few weeks into his pastorate, Pastor John preached through some of his favorite Psalms. One of them being, of course, Psalm 23. “The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want. He makes me lie down in green pastures. He leads me beside still waters. He restores my soul. He leads me in paths of righteousness for his name’s sake” (Psalm 23:1–3).

I was 22 before I first saw one of the lines in this psalm. Now I’d seen it, but there is seeing and then there is seeing, right? Verse 3, “He leads me in paths of righteousness for his namesake.” I’d never seen “for his namesake” until I went to seminary. Well, yes, I’d seen it. I’d read the words, but you can read over phrases in the Bible a hundred times and they never hit you for what they mean.

Open My Eyes to See

I went to visit Mrs. Bromgren just before her surgery on Wednesday. She was getting her eye operated on, and it was all bandaged over, and I read to her this verse from Psalm 119:18,

Deal bountifully with thy servant that I may live and observe thy word, open my eyes that I may behold wondrous things out of thy law.

And I said, “Isn’t it true that one of the best things about having two good eyes is the Bible, being able to read the Bible? But isn’t it true, too, that there is another pair of eyes that God has given us? The apostle Paul calls them the eyes of the heart, and he prays in Ephesians 1 that the eyes of the heart might be enlightened. I think that’s what Psalm 119 is talking about: ‘May the eyes be open that we may behold wondrous things out of thy law.’”

Well, I hadn’t seen that phrase there in Psalm 23 as wondrous. I’d been as deaf to that theme as you could imagine, but there it was, “he leads me in paths of righteousness for his namesake.” The thought that God might have been causing me to do right ever since I was a little boy for his sake just never dawned on me. I just read right over that phrase. It never struck me, though I’d read it hundreds of times.

So I want to zero in on that phrase for a few minutes, but before we get there, we better look at the phrase before it, namely, “he leads me in paths of righteousness,” and ask how God does this.

How Does God Light Our Paths?

The picture, of course, here is a shepherd leading sheep along with his crook, or maybe with his call. “The sheep know my name, and they follow me.” But when we get out of the metaphor of sheep and shepherd into our own experience in our day and ask, “How does God lead in paths of righteousness,” we need to ponder a little bit and poke around in the Scriptures to see how he does it.

“In my experience, I have never seen a manifestation of God going before me at a fork in the road.”

Now, in my experience, I have never seen a manifestation of God going before me at a fork in the road. I’ve never seen a cloud of fire or pillar of cloud like they had in the wilderness. That’s not part of my experience, nor have I ever heard an audible word that I know was God speaking. A lot of people talk in that language, and maybe I’m just callous, but that’s never been part of my experience to see God in some clear manifestation showing me it’s this way and not that way, or to hear a voice like my teacher at Wheaton said he heard one day while he was shaving in front of the mirror, “Go to Wheaton from Boston.” He was in Boston. “Go to Wheaton.”

God can do that if he wants. He’s just never done it for me, and he doesn’t do it for most people most of the time. The way he leads us is apparently differently, and I think we can get a clue from what David would say in Psalm 119:105. There, he says, “Thy word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path.” And in that same psalm, verse 9, “How can a young man keep his way pure? By guarding it according to thy word.”

So one answer to the question, “How does God lead his people in paths of righteousness” is: he has revealed a lot about those paths of righteousness. He’s described what sort of paths are righteous paths and told us to walk in them so that we can read and obey. Surely, David did that often because he talked about meditating on the word day and night.

Why the Bible Is Not Enough

But now, that answer is only half the answer, isn’t it? By itself, the Bible will not keep us on track. No matter how wonderful the Bible is, and how we would be utterly lost without it, it is not enough by itself and for two reasons.

“By itself, the Bible will not keep us on track.”

One, we make lots of decisions in life which are not prescribed for us in the Bible — hundreds of little decisions every day and some big ones in which we look in the Bible and there are no sentences about that. How many children to have, where to send your child to school, where to go to work, this, that, just hundreds of little things that we have to decide every day, and we don’t want to bracket those and say, “Well, that’s not part of Christianity. I’ll just make those decisions anyway I please, and then Christianity is something else.” God has to do with all those decisions. But the Bible doesn’t give explicit guidance for every one of those little decisions and, therefore, something more has to be said if we’re to walk in right paths in those decisions, as well as the ones where the Bible is perfectly explicit.

The second reason that the Bible, by itself, is not enough to guide us in those paths of righteousness is this: a path of righteousness is doing the right thing with a right attitude or a right motivation. It’s not just a bodily action. It’s having a right attitude towards your wife as well. But, reading words on a page doesn’t always change attitudes.

You can read over what you ought to feel like in the Bible a hundred times and maybe your attitude is just the same. Something else has to come into play, and I think that’s why David said, “God leads us in paths of righteousness,” and why Paul said, “All who are led by the Spirit are the sons of God.” We need not only revelation coming to us from outside, namely the Bible, we need transformation coming to us inside from the Holy Spirit. The word and the Spirit together are the leadership that we need.

Renewed in the Mind of Christ

Paul says in Romans 12:2 this very familiar word, “Don’t be conformed to the world but be transformed by the renewal of your mind” — why? — “so that you can prove — or better, approve of — “the will of God, what is good, acceptable, and perfect.” In other words, you’ve got to have something happen up here on the inside, some changed attitudes, some changed feelings, or when little decisions present alternatives, you won’t know how to prove which one of those is the will of God.

So the Bible is the input into that new mind, and the Spirit takes the word and begins to shape our thinking, mold our emotions, so that even when there’s no explicit command in Scripture for this decision you’re facing, you weigh all the alternatives and you’re weighing those alternatives with the mind of Christ. Paul says, “We have the mind of Christ.” And then when you make the decision, you look back and you don’t say, “My, what a smart fellow was I,” but rather, you say, “Thank you for your word that informed the principles of my life, and thank you for the Spirit that shaped my emotions and my priorities so that I made this decision your way,” and God then gets the credit for the leadership, which means personally, for me, that I have been driven basically for all of life to meditate day and night on the word and to pray continually that the Holy Spirit would work on me.

You can’t over-intellectualize the Bible. You can’t over-spiritualize your private experience with God. It’s both/and, not either/or. It has been in my experience, and I haven’t found the two in conflict but tremendous complements for guidance in life.

Some spiritual darkness feels so woven into the fabric of our souls, so enmeshed in our personality and wiring, so deeply rooted and subtle, that escaping it can feel like trying to run from our own shadow. An ingrained and abiding lack of assurance, a distorted relationship with body image or food, the twisting temptations of unwanted desire — such darkness has a way of hounding at the heels.

Perhaps you feel, as I have, like “a man in a shipwreck who sees land and envies the happiness of all those who are there but thinks it is impossible for him to reach the shore,” as Henry Scougal once described the experience (The Life of God in the Soul of Man, 108). You see clearly enough what a life free from your darkness would look like, but every attempt to reach that happy shore has left you wave-tossed and battered upon the rocks. So you look wistfully from the deeps, still desiring deliverance, but no longer trying so hard. You settle into a life of treading water.

Some years ago, as this fatalistic spirit began to settle on me, I struck upon a piece of counsel that offered a mighty and needed shake. John Owen (1616–1683), addressing spiritual doubters in particular, writes,

Be not . . . heartless or slothful: up and be doing; attend with diligence to the word of grace; be fervent in prayer, assiduous in the use of all ordinances of the church; in one or other of them, at one time or other, thou wilt meet with Him whom thy soul loveth, and God through Him will speak peace unto thee. (Works of John Owen, 6:614)

“Up and be doing.” Certainly this is not the only counsel the spiritually stuck need to hear (nor is it the only counsel Owen offers). But in my own entrenched struggles, I have found great help from this gentle but firm hand on the shoulder, this kind but resolute look in the eye, this warm but weighty voice telling me I am no prisoner to my past or present and bidding me not to grow weary in seeking God.

‘Up and Be Doing’

Perhaps you read counsel like the above and sigh. “Read the Bible more? Pray more? Go to church more? I’ve already tried all that.” A similar sigh has passed through my own lips more than once. I’ve already asked, sought, and knocked, I’ve thought to myself, but it just hasn’t worked. Eventually, however, my mind drifts back to Scripture’s own examples of long and earnest seeking, and the words “I’ve already tried that” fall limply to the ground.

We could consider the Old Testament refrain to seek the Lord “with all your heart and all your soul” (Deuteronomy 4:29), or the prophets’ resolve, come what may, to “wait for the God of my salvation” (Micah 7:7), or the psalmists’ example of crying out “day and night before you,” even from the deepest, longest darkness (Psalm 88:1). But perhaps the Gospels offer the most powerful call to rise, lift up our heads, and seek God with fresh diligence.

“Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you,” Jesus tells his disciples. Fewer words hold more promise for those seeking a deliverance as yet ungiven. Fewer too hold more challenge. For when Jesus illustrates the kind of asking, seeking, and knocking he has in mind, he offers the parable of the impudent friend, that noisy midnight knocker who wouldn’t leave without his loaves (Luke 11:5–9). Of the various charges that might be brought against my own prayer life, I fear impudence is rarely one of them.

Meanwhile, the Gospels give us living portraits of the same point: women who break through crowds to touch the hem of his garment (Mark 5:27–28), fathers half-beaten by unbelief who nevertheless carry their sons to Christ (Mark 9:24), mothers who persist in their petitions, undaunted by refusals, until they receive their request (Mark 7:24–30). Such desperate souls asked and sought and knocked — and asked and sought and knocked again — until the gift was given, the treasure found, the handle turned.

Compared to such as these, how much of my own seeking has happened from half a heart, from a split soul, with one foot stepping toward God and one dragging lazily behind?

Draw Near to God

To be sure, Jesus does sometimes surprise his struggling people and, quite apart from our diligent seeking, grant the deliverance we need. Our Christian lives began when he raised us, Lazarus-like, from the tomb — and sometimes, our Christian lives progress when he blesses us unsought, or sought only feebly.

But we have no warrant for presuming he will do so. The spiritual world, like the physical world, has its causes and effects, its means and ends, its principle that “whatever one sows, that will he also reap” (Galatians 6:7). Neither creation nor Scripture gives us a category for a sanctified sluggard, whose spiritual crop grows without diligent plowing and planting, weeding and watering. Our Spirit-dependent efforts cannot earn God’s blessing — only Christ can — but very often they are the divinely appointed means of experiencing his blessing.

Knowing that God uses our diligence as a means of deliverance, we might ask questions like these when darkness persists:

Am I actively killing every known sin, including those that seem unrelated to my main struggle, and by comparison small (Romans 8:13)?
Have my prayers for deliverance looked anything like that holy impudence that knocks and knocks again (Luke 11:8)?
Do I meditate upon God’s word day and night (Psalm 1:2) — and in particular, am I intimately acquainted with passages that address my struggle?
On Sundays, do I listen to sermons and take the Lord’s Supper expectantly, looking to my Lord “as the eyes of servants look to the hand of their master” (Psalm 123:2)?
Have I kept pursuing Christian community, surrounding myself with Spirit-filled people rather than shrinking away into the shadows (Hebrews 10:24–25)?
Have I sought specific counsel from wise and trusted saints, inviting them to take a flashlight into the cellar of my soul?

Questions like these make me mindful of God’s mercy, which so often has met my half-hearted seeking with wholehearted kindness. He is a blessed and blessing God, always “ready to forgive” and give more than we ask (Nehemiah 9:17; Ephesians 3:20). Yet as I think about my own persistent struggles, these questions also remind me just how much territory remains to be explored in the promise of James 4:8: “Draw near to God, and he will draw near to you.”

Seeking from the Depths

We should beware, at this point, of reducing the deepest struggles to a mere matter of trying harder. Nor would I wish to imply that all who have sought some deliverance unsuccessfully have simply not sought earnestly enough. Sometimes, the shore remains out of reach not because we haven’t swum hard enough, but because the sea is long. Jesus promises that those who seek will find; he does not promise they will find immediately. So, in reality, our seeking may last much longer, and our progress may advance much slower, than we hoped.

“Sometimes, the shore remains out of reach not because we haven’t swum hard enough, but because the sea is long.”

Spiritually speaking, we may feel somewhat like the woman with the twelve-year flow of blood, stuck in a place of undesired darkness despite our best efforts. Why did God let her sickness linger for twelve years instead of ten — or two? We don’t know. We do know, however, that in the fields of God’s kingdom, no seed of diligence, buried and watered with patient perseverance, remains fruitless forever (Galatians 6:9). God has never told his people, “Seek me in vain” (Isaiah 45:19). Nor does he show us the happy shore to merely tantalize us in the water. He shows it because it really can be ours — maybe not immediately or all at once, but really.

So, in the midst of long seeking, don’t lose heart. Your God sees you. His ways may soar high above your understanding, but they are never unwise or unkind (Isaiah 55:8–9). And if you go on seeking him, if every time you fall you rise up again and be doing, the sun will sooner drop from the sky than you be put to shame (Isaiah 49:23).

Our Hand on His Hem

Diligent seeking also holds its dangers, of course. And chief among them may be this: as we pray, and read, and gather with God’s people, and hear counsel, we may rely more on these means than on the One who made them. We may hang our hopes for deliverance not upon Christ, but upon all our efforts to seek him, like travelers too focused on the road to see their home.

Here again, a mind immersed in the Gospels may be our best guide. For in all our seeking, we are doing spiritually what so many Gospel characters did physically: getting as close to Jesus as we can, certain that he is our only hope.

“All our best efforts are only the hand on the hem of Christ’s garment, and all the blessing belongs to him.”

Our prayers may rise like Bartimaeus’s cry, but they are not the voice that bids us see. Our Bible reading may kneel us like the leper before Jesus, but it is not the touch that heals us. Our Sunday worship may stretch out an arm like the sick and anguished woman’s, but it is not the power flowing. All our best efforts are only the hand on the hem of Christ’s garment, and all the blessing belongs to him.

But oh, what blessing awaits those who do cry out and keep crying, kneel and keep kneeling, reach and keep reaching. In all our hardest wrestlings, we are not bound to the narrow fences of our own personality, our own power, our own past: we are bound to Christ himself. And in him, the long and desperate darkness can finally begin to lift, and the shipwrecked saint can finally draw near to shore, carried on the waves of his strength.

Audio Transcript

From the first year of this podcast, we decided to address mature topics and awkward questions. No apologies. If you’re comfortable asking it, we will address it. Needless to say, today’s question is a mature one for married couples. The question arrives from men and from women. Here are three representative emails I’ve picked out.

First, from an anonymous wife: “Pastor John, I have a question. It’s embarrassing. But here it is. My husband likes to use role-playing in the bedroom, and various levels of bondage and dominance. He wants me to say things like ‘I am your slave.’ He wants me to wear certain collars around my neck. To the far extreme, he likes to fantasize that he is raping me. But he’s a very nice person outside of the bedroom. He only asks if he can play out the fantasy in bed. What should I do?”

Second, another anonymous wife writes in: “Dear Pastor John, thank you for the podcast. I have been married for twenty years. Before we got married, my husband told me he had struggled with porn. After we were married, he asked me to try some of the things he saw in the porn he had watched. I consented. Our premarital counselor told us that anything was okay in the marriage bed with mutual consent, and I wanted to please my husband. But this has had a detrimental effect on our marriage. I am now to the point where I don’t want any physical intimacy, and he doesn’t feel loved. Was it okay for us to do those things since we agreed at the time? I think dominance in the bedroom is completely anti-biblical. My husband continues to think it’s fine with mutual consent.”

Third, and finally, the question also arrives from a husband: “Pastor John, my wife recently told me she was unfaithful to me and hasn’t had an emotional connection to me in sex or in general since we got married three years ago. She wants to engage in domineering sexual acts that I see as sinful. She thinks I’m too boring in bed. She now wishes to leave me so I can find a new wife, and so she can engage in sexual experiences with other men. How do I respond?” Pastor John, how would you respond?

Here are five perspectives on sexuality that I hope will help couples get their bearings if they are willing to seriously seek God’s will for their sexual lives. And I do promise that God’s will for your sexual lives is the most satisfying way of life.

Fantasized Sin

First, fantasizing sin is sin. Playing out a situation or behavior in your mind because of its pleasure that is sinful — a sinful situation or a sinful behavior if you did it outwardly — is sin in your mind. And if this is true for fantasies, then it is all the more true that playacting sin is sin. Pretending to do something that, if you did it when not pretending, is sin — that pretending is sin. I say this because of Matthew 5:27–29.

You have heard that it was said, “You shall not commit adultery.” But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lustful intent has already committed adultery with her in his heart. If your right eye causes you to sin, tear it out and throw it away. For it is better that you lose one of your members than that your whole body be thrown into hell.

“To the degree that you pursue some act as more pleasurable because it is illicit, you are in a fool’s bondage.”

In other words, Jesus’s standard of holiness is not merely a standard of bodily deeds, but also of mental delights. If you pursue a pleasure in your mind that is unlawful for your body, you are sinning. What is sin? Think of it. Sin is the heart’s preference for anything above God and his ways. Sin is not primarily the movement of the muscles or the body. It is primarily and fundamentally the movement of the soul, the movement in pursuit of pleasure in a way that God has forbidden. It’s the failure to pursue pleasure in God himself above all else.

So, it was an overstatement or a misstatement (I’m not sure which the counselor would admit to) when the premarital counselor said that anything you mutually agree on in the marriage bed is permitted.

If you mutually agree to playact a rape, it is sin.
If you mutually agree to pretend you are having sex in Times Square with a thousand people watching, it is sin.
If you mutually agree to pretend that you are two strangers who happened upon each other in the woods and have sex, you are sinning.

Fantasized sin is sin, no matter how many people agree on it. Playacted sin is sin.

Self-Serving Sex

Second, demanding or coercing unnatural and bizarre sexual acts when they displease the partner is sin.

Romans 12:10 says, “Outdo one another in showing honor.”
Philippians 2:3 says, “Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility count others [like your wife] more significant than yourselves.”
1 Corinthians 6:19–20 says, “You are not your own, for you were bought with a price. So glorify God in your body.”

All of that leads to the conclusion that in the marriage bed, the other person’s desires and delights and disapprovals and displeasures are as important as our own — indeed, more so. To press for your own private bodily satisfaction at the cost of the spouse’s displeasure is

a failure to honor,
a failure to count the other more significant,
a failure to glorify God with your body, and
a failure to show you are not your own but bought with a price, belonging to Jesus.

If you need ever more kinky sex — ever more bizarre, unconventional sexual acts at the expense of your spouse’s enjoyment — you are elevating your appetite above his or her delights. That’s not the way of Christ.

Folly of the Forbidden

Third, if you pursue a sexual act or an imagined sexual situation because it is more stimulating, scintillating, pleasurable because it is forbidden, then you are living out the way of the fool, and you are embodying the principle of bondage. Proverbs 9:16–17 says, “To him who lacks sense [folly] says, ‘Stolen water is sweet.’” If you pursue forbidden water because its prohibition makes it sweeter, you’re a fool.

Paul got at the principal like this. He said in Romans 7:7–8,

If it had not been for the law, I would not have known sin. For I would not have known what it is to covet if the law had not said, “You shall not covet.” But sin, seizing an opportunity through the commandment [through the prohibition], produced in me all kinds of covetousness.

“Fantasized sin is sin, no matter how many people agree on it.”

In other words, when you see a child have no interest in a toy until it is forbidden, you are watching bondage to a sinful nature.

So, in the marriage bed, to the degree that you pursue some act as more pleasurable because it is illicit, you are in a fool’s bondage to a sinful impulse.

Disordered Desires

Fourth, if sexual desire has become so prominent in the way you pursue satisfaction in life that you must push the limits of sexual conventions in order to be a joyful and contented person, your God and your purpose for living have become too small. Bodily appetites become gods when God diminishes. Sexual urges become too big when we lose big purposes for our lives.

Paul says in 2 Corinthians 3:18, “Beholding the glory” — now, that’s an infinitely beautiful thing he’s just mentioned. “Beholding the glory of the Lord, [we] are being changed into [his] image from one degree of glory to another.” In other words, we need a big, beautiful, glorious, transcendent, majestic vision of God and his purpose for our lives if sex is to stay in its pleasurable, small place.

Love Where It Matters

Finally, I would say to men especially, if you hope to have a thrilling, joyful, mutually satisfying sexual relationship with your wife for the next fifty years, you absolutely will not have it by demanding or expecting ever more bizarre exploits. Rather, you will have it by devoting 99 percent of your effort to loving your wife well outside the bedroom, so that she finds you somebody she really desires.

I don’t promise paradise. There’s too much brokenness in the world. But I do promise you, you will not find fifty years of mutual pleasure on the path of playacted perversion.