http://rss.desiringgod.org/link/10732/14800481/the-body-makes-the-body-grow
John Piper is founder and teacher of desiringGod.org and chancellor of Bethlehem College & Seminary. For 33 years, he served as pastor of Bethlehem Baptist Church, Minneapolis, Minnesota. He is author of more than 50 books, including Desiring God: Meditations of a Christian Hedonist and most recently Providence.
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Redeeming Discipline: How Grace Reforms Our Effort
Say you have a friend whose approach to the Christian life seems somewhat extreme. Too strict. Overly disciplined.
You heard him say something the other day about beating his own body — figuratively (you think), but still. In fact, the way he talks often makes you squirm a little bit. Strain, agonize, struggle, labor, strive — these are common words for him. Maybe too common for someone saved by grace.
Then again, he does regularly celebrate God’s grace — more than you do, actually. He’s a joyful, worshiping man, not gloomy or obsessive in the typical sense. His seriousness is almost always tinged with something merry, and for all his drive he seems marked by unusual peace. He’s warm toward you, friendly.
But still, the man never seems to let up. He reads his Bible, and prays, and speaks of spiritual things with an earnestness that embarrasses you. He talks of fighting sin as if he had a sword strapped to his thigh. He denies himself many innocent pleasures (without expecting you to do so) because, he says, they “slow his pursuit of Christ.” You can’t help but feel a touch kittenish in his presence, your Christianity more purr than roar. So you wonder.
Is this legalism? Asceticism? An attempt to be superhuman?
And then, once again, you remember that this friend is the apostle Paul.
Pauline Paradox
Now, if the apostle himself had overheard our concern, he may have sympathized, at least a little. For Paul had known the dangers of discipline. Hebrew of Hebrews, law-keeping Pharisee, zealous persecutor, Paul ran harder and faster than most (Philippians 3:5–6; Galatians 1:14). Yet his disciplined feet only carried him farther and farther from Christ (1 Timothy 1:13). He was rigorous, precise, self-denying, and lost.
“When Paul lost his legalism, he did not lose his discipline. Not even a little bit.”
Yet, remarkably, when Paul lost his legalism, he did not lose his discipline. Not even a little bit. God transformed him, instead, into a stunning apostolic paradox: He preached justification by faith alone, and he pursued holiness with fear and trembling (Philippians 2:12–13). He worshiped God for his grace, and he “worked harder than any” (1 Corinthians 15:10). He boasted of Christ’s sufficiency, and he beat his body lest somehow he should fail to finish the race (1 Corinthians 9:27).
We struggle to live such paradoxes. The grace of God, for many of us, seems to produce a more casual Christianity, a faith without a sweat. But when Paul’s own discipline passed through the fires of grace, it emerged on the other side not consumed but refined — free from the dross of self-righteousness, aglow with the Spirit’s flame.
Redeeming Discipline
Mentions of discipline lace Paul’s letters. We could consider his toil in teaching (Colossians 1:29), his striving in prayer (Romans 15:30), his refusal to use his full apostolic rights (1 Corinthians 9:12), or that startling statement already mentioned: “I strike a blow to my body and make it my slave” (1 Corinthians 9:27 NIV). But we may hear the heartbeat of Paul’s discipline most clearly in Philippians 3:12–14 and its context:
Not that I have already obtained this or am already perfect, but I press on to make it my own, because Christ Jesus has made me his own. Brothers, I do not consider that I have made it my own. But one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus.
Paul the persecutor died on the Damascus road — and in his place arose a man who pressed and strained for Christ. A mighty discipline still drove him forward, but a discipline far different from the one he had known. A new power, new purpose, and new pleasure now gripped him.
New Power
Paul had known something of power in his pre-Christian life, but it was power “from a self-strength,” as John Owen puts it (Works, 6:7). The source of Paul’s unredeemed power was Paul; he relied on self, not the Spirit, for his strength. Not only did such power prove powerless against sins of the heart (Romans 7:7–8), but also, being an offspring of the flesh, it could never please God (Romans 8:8).
But then, Paul says, “Christ Jesus . . . made me his own” (Philippians 3:12). And with Christ’s presence came Christ’s power — power from above and beyond him, and yet power now dwelling within him. And so, Paul saw former sins, once unconquerable, fall dead at his feet (Romans 8:13). He “pressed” and “strained” with a new kind of strength (Philippians 3:13–14). And he worked as one who knew “it is God who works in you, both to will and to work for his good pleasure” (Philippians 2:13).
With Paul, disciplined Christians do not run on the strength of self-resolve; they know and fear the manufactured power of the flesh. But they also take seriously those four familiar, radical words: “God works in you.” God works in you — and therefore you are not bound to the narrow limits of your self-strength. God works in you — and therefore laziness is not a celebration of his grace but a tacit denial of his presence. God works in you — and therefore every resistance is an opportunity to prove his power.
New Purpose
The power behind Paul’s discipline, then, was decidedly different after Damascus. And so too was the purpose or aim of his discipline. Once, Paul ran to attain “a righteousness of my own that comes from the law” (Philippians 3:9). But then, blinded by the risen Christ, he realized there was only one righteousness worth having, and it was one that discipline could never win: “the righteousness from God that depends on faith” (Philippians 3:9). So, in a moment, Paul stopped running for righteousness.
But he did not stop running. For though he already wore the robe of Christ’s righteousness, another robe still awaited: the robe of resurrection. “The resurrection from the dead” was the “it” he pressed on to make his own, the “prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus” (Philippians 3:11–12, 14). By discipline, Paul reached to share his Lord’s undying life.
Paul knew, of course, that discipline could not earn his resurrection — nor was he ultimately uncertain about reaching that land beyond death. He could already feel the hand of Christ upon him; he could already say, “Christ Jesus has made me his own” (Philippians 3:12). And yet, Paul also knew that God-empowered discipline — pressing on, straining forward — was Christ’s way of bringing his people to glory. In a world where many professing Christians give up after making a good start, discipline keeps the righteous running till resurrection.
By discipline, we throw off every hindrance that slows our pace toward heaven. We shake off every hand that wraps around our ankles. We set our gaze ahead, where Christ himself awaits us. And with holy resolve we say, “By the power of God within me, I won’t allow sin to keep me from him.”
New Pleasure
Perhaps Paul once saw discipline as many of us have: as a purse-lipped virtue, a grim necessity, a healthy fruit with sour taste. Discipline is an alarm at 5:00am; it is wind sprints and diets and long hours over dull books. Yes, Paul may have seen discipline as such. But then he saw the face of Jesus, and discipline became filled with new pleasure.
What spark lit the fire of Paul’s resolve? What gunshot sent him racing toward resurrection? This spark, this shot:
I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things and count them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ and be found in him. (Philippians 3:8–9)
“The surpassing worth of Christ has captured our hearts, calling forth our own surpassing work.”
Christian discipline may press and strain. It may rise early to read and pray; it may fast and go willingly without; it may say many a painful no. But not from any barren sense of oughtness. Rather, the surpassing worth of Christ has captured our hearts, calling forth our own surpassing work.
Not that we always feel the same sense of Christ’s worth. Sometimes, discipline is the song of living longing; other times, it is the prayer of longing lost. But whether discipline moves mainly from desire or for desire, its sights remain set on him whose presence is our pleasure. Out, then, with any thoughts of stern and frowning resolve. The only discipline worth the name runs under the banner of delight.
From ‘Done’ to ‘Do’
So, say you have a friend whose approach to the Christian life seems somewhat extreme. Too strict. Overly disciplined. So you wonder. Doesn’t the gospel cry “Done!” rather than “Do!”?
Indeed it does (John 19:30). But as you watch your friend more closely, you realize that on the other side of the gospel’s “done,” there is another kind of “do”: not the doing that strives for God’s favor or adds anything to Christ’s cross, but the doing that rises from fresh power, resurrection purpose, and a new and deep pleasure in God.
So, by grace, you start running harder. You pray and press on; you trust and strain forward. And you begin to discover that God’s grace is a bigger wonder than you once thought. Not only does grace grant our forgiveness and win our worship, but it works — hard. And to top off the paradox, it keeps us happy while we work.
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Grace Will Order All Your Pain: Retirement Message for Dana Olson
Yesterday in The New York Times, there was an article about a picture taken by the James Webb Space Telescope, which launched two and a half years ago and currently orbits around the sun about a million miles from Earth. The picture is of a vast stretch of galaxies, and right near the bottom is a perfectly framed question mark formed by a pair of giant dust clouds.
Now, this was quite an energizing providence to me for today’s message. Not because I’m going to talk about astronomy, but because the last paragraph of the article filled me with a sense of sadness, urgency, and wonder that I get to talk to you about the Creator of this universe and his purposes for this church and Dana Olson’s family.
The author of the article, Dennis Overbye, closes like this:
We’ve barely begun to know anything — that’s why we build telescopes. Once the Webb has completed its rounds of investigations two decades from now, we might know a bit more about how this bowl of stars works. But we still won’t know why we are here. That question mark, our profound cosmic ignorance, is one of the great gifts of science.
So, the great gift of science is to underline the “profound . . . ignorance” that we do not know why we exist.
If that were the gift of science (and I don’t believe it is), it would be not a gift, but a curse. To wake up every morning and have to say, “I have no idea why I exist” — that is not a gift. It is a curse. And millions of people are taught to live under this curse.
But we — we who have been born again “through the living and abiding word of God” (1 Peter 1:23) — we know why we exist. We exist to know and enjoy and reflect the glory of our Creator and Redeemer, especially the glory of his sovereign, sustaining grace.
What Is Sovereign, Sustaining Grace?
What is God’s sovereign, sustaining grace? Where does God make plain that this is our portion? That’s my focus in this message. Let me give you a rhyming definition to illustrate what I mean from experience, and then I’ll show its meaning from the word.
Not grace to bar what is not bliss, Nor flight from all distress, but this:The grace that orders our trouble and pain, And then, in the darkness, is there to sustain.
I stress this because to celebrate a grace that bars what is not bliss, and gives flight from all distress, and does not order our pain — that grace would be biblically false and experientially unrealistic.
Our experiences and the Bible teach us that grace does not prevent pain, but orders, and arranges, and measures out our pain, and then in the darkness is there to sustain. Grace will one day banish all pain. But not yet.
Scarred by Grace
For example, years ago Bob Ricker was the president of the Baptist General Conference. He spoke at his daughter’s wedding. He pointed to some small scars on her neck and called them memorials of God’s grace — his sovereign, sustaining grace.
She had been in a car accident. Her injury prevented her from breathing right there at the scene of the accident. In the car behind her was a doctor who happened to have an air tube in his pocket. By the time he got to her, she was already turning blue. He forced the tube into her throat and saved her life. At her wedding a few years later, Bob told her: those scars you have to live with — they are memorials of sustaining grace.
Now, Bob Ricker is not naive. He knows that if God can ordain that in the car behind there be a doctor, and that this doctor have a breathing apparatus in his pocket, and that he have the presence of mind to use it savingly, then this God is fully able to prevent the accident in the first place. This is the God of whom Paul said in Ephesians 1:11, “[He] works all things according to the counsel of his will.” Bob even stressed, “‘All things’ means all things” — including, I assume, the paths of cars and airplanes and arrows and bullets and chromosomes and cancer cells. That was the inspiration for my little rhyming definition of sovereign, sustaining grace.
Not grace to bar what is not bliss, Nor flight from all distress, but this:The grace that orders our trouble and pain, And then, in the darkness, is there to sustain.
The God Above the Farmer
Here’s another story of grace, which I confirmed with Noël in the car yesterday driving over from Minneapolis. Noël, Abraham, Barnabas, and Talitha were traveling to Georgia, and the car broke down on a lonely stretch about an hour south of Indianapolis. The radiator was shot.
“Grace does not prevent pain, but orders, and arranges, and measures out our pain.”
A farmer in his mid-sixties pulled over and offered help. Noël said that she supposed they needed a motel and hoped that Monday morning there would be a garage open to work on the car. The farmer said, “Would you like to stay with me and my wife?” Noël hesitated. He said, “The Lord said that when we serve others, it’s like serving him.” He called his wife to get the okay and added, “You could go to church with us in the morning, if you can take a Baptist church.”
So, they stayed with the farmer — who was also an aviation mechanic that diagnosed the problem, drove to town Monday morning, bought a new radiator, came back, put it in at no expense, and sent the family on their way. In the meantime, Barnabas had pulled his fishing rod out of the car and caught a nineteen-inch catfish — the icing on the cake. Spectacular, sovereign, sustaining grace.
The God who can cause a farmer to stop to help Noël, and who sees to it that he is a Christian (even a Baptist!), and that he and his wife have room for the family to stay, and that he is a mechanic, and that he finds a radiator first thing Monday morning, and that he is willing to take the time, and that he has a pond with catfish — this God is perfectly able to keep a radiator from bursting open in the middle of Indiana. But in this fallen world of futility, that is not usually the way sustaining grace works. It does not always spare us frustrations and disappointments and losses.
Not grace to bar what is not bliss, Nor flight from all distress, but this:The grace that orders our trouble and pain, And then, in the darkness, is there to sustain.
Responding Like Paul
A young man in our church who was dealing with a physical condition that did not get better in spite of prayer said to me, “It would be easier if Jesus hadn’t healed, but instead had given grace to endure the absence of healing.” One of the things I said to him was this: “That’s exactly what Jesus did do — and for that very reason — in 2 Corinthians 12:9–10.”
God’s grace ordained that Paul have a thorn in the flesh for the sake of his humility, and then he does not remove it in answer to prayer. Instead, God says, “My [sovereign, sustaining] grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.”
To which Paul responds, “Therefore I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may rest upon me. For the sake of Christ, then, I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities. For when I am weak, then I am strong.”
Not grace to bar what is not bliss, Nor flight from all distress, but this:The grace that orders our trouble and pain, And then, in the darkness, is there to sustain.
Grace Abounds Even in Babylon
Our text in Jeremiah 32 is about this kind of sovereign, sustaining grace and holds the key to why Faith Baptist Fellowship exists after 44 years, and to why Dana and Christa and the girls served so faithfully.
Jerusalem and God’s chosen people are in darkness and distress, and it is God himself who has ordered it so. Look at verse 36: “Now therefore thus says the Lord, the God of Israel, concerning this city of which you say, ‘It is given into the hand of the king of Babylon by sword, by famine, and by pestilence.’” That’s what those outside of Israel are saying, and it is true. Grace has not spared them this calamity. Nor will the grace of God spare you your appointed calamity. He will spare you many sorrows, but not all.
But what they say about God’s chosen ones is not the last word. God has the last word. And it is a word of sovereign, sustaining grace. Verse 37: “Behold, I will gather them from all the countries to which I drove them in my anger and my wrath and in great indignation. I will bring them back to this place, and I will make them dwell in safety.”
So, God declares that he has ordered the trouble and pain: I have driven them to these foreign lands. And he declares that he himself will deliver them and bring them back to himself and to their land. In other words, sovereign grace will eventually triumph over the calamity.
What Makes Us Saints So Sure?
How can we be sure of this triumph of grace in our lives, our churches, our souls? It is one question to ask, Why has Faith Baptist Fellowship endured for 44 years? But an even more urgent question is, How can we be sure that grace will triumph for this church and in our own lives in the future? How can you be sure that grace will sustain you to the end in the faith and holiness that brings you safe to heaven?
That’s what the rest of this text is about. The answer is sustaining grace for God’s chosen people is sovereign grace. That is, sustaining grace is omnipotent grace. It is grace that overcomes all obstacles and preserves the faith and holiness that bring us home to heaven. This is our only sure confidence for the future. You and I, in ourselves, are utterly fickle and unreliable. If we were left to our own powers to persevere, we would make shipwreck of our faith. It is sure. This is why the saints have prayed and sung for centuries,
Oh, to grace how great a debtorDaily I’m constrained to be!Let thy goodness, like a fetter,Bind my wandering heart to thee.Prone to wander, Lord, I feel it,Prone to leave the God I love;Here’s my heart; Oh, take and seal it;Seal it for thy courts above.
Is that the way saints should pray? Is that the way to pray for your future and for Dana’s future and for this church’s future? Is that a biblical way to pray?
Make your goodness like a fetter — a chain — that binds my wandering heart to you. Seal my heart with an unbreakable bond for the courts of heaven. In other words, keep me! Preserve me! Defeat every rising rebellion! Overcome every niggling doubt! Deliver from every destructive temptation! Nullify every fatal allurement! Expose every demonic deception! Tear down every arrogant argument! Shape me! Incline me! Hold me! Master me! Do whatever you must do to keep me trusting you and fearing you till Jesus comes or calls.
May we — should we — pray and sing like that?
Four Promises of Sovereign, Sustaining Grace
The answer from this text is yes. That kind of singing and praying is rooted in the new-covenant promise of sovereign, sustaining grace. Let’s read it. Keep in mind that this is one of several Old Testament promises of the new covenant that Jesus said he sealed with his own blood for all who are in him. It is not just for Jews, but for those who are true Jews by virtue of union with Jesus, the seed of Abraham (Galatians 3:7, 16). Jeremiah 32:38–41 says,
They shall be my people, and I will be their God. I will give them one heart and one way, that they may fear me forever, for their own good and the good of their children after them. I will make with them an everlasting covenant, that I will not turn away from doing good to them. And I will put the fear of me in their hearts, that they may not turn from me. I will rejoice in doing them good, and I will plant them in this land in faithfulness, with all my heart and all my soul.
Notice four promises of sovereign, sustaining grace.
1. God will be our God.
God promises to be our God. Verse 38: “They shall be my people, and I will be their God.” All the promises to his people are summed up in this: “I will be your God.” That is, “I will use all that I am as God — all my wisdom, all my power, and all my love — to see to it that you remain my people. All that I am as God, I exert for your good.”
2. God will change our hearts.
God promises to change our hearts and cause us to love and fear him. Verses 39–40: “I will give them one heart and one way, that they may fear me forever. . . . I will put the fear of me in their hearts.” In other words, God will not simply stand by to see if we, by our own powers, will fear him. He will sovereignly, supremely, mercifully give us the heart that we need to have, and give us the faith and the fear of God that will lead us home to heaven. This is sovereign, sustaining grace. (See also Deuteronomy 30:6 and Ezekiel 11:19–20; 36:27.)
3. God will not let us turn away.
God promises that he will not turn away from us and that we will not turn away from him. Verse 40: “I will make with them an everlasting covenant, that I will not turn away from doing good to them. And I will put the fear of me in their hearts, that they may not turn from me.” In other words, his heart-work is so powerful that he guarantees we will not turn from him. This is what’s new about the new covenant: God promises to fulfill by his power the conditions that we have to meet. We must fear him and love him and trust him. And he says, “I will see to that. I will ‘put the fear of me in their hearts’ — not to see what they will do with it, but in such a way that ‘they may not turn from me.’” This is sovereign, sustaining grace.
4. God will do this with infinite intensity.
Finally, God promises to do this with the greatest intensity imaginable. He expresses this in two ways, once at the beginning and once at the end of verse 41: “I will rejoice in doing them good, and I will plant them in this land in faithfulness, with all my heart and all my soul.” First, he says that he will exert this sovereign, sustaining grace with joy: “I will rejoice in doing them good.” Then he says (at the end of verse 41) that he will exert this sovereign, sustaining grace “with all [his] heart and all [his] soul.”
How Great Is God’s Desire to Do You Good?
He rejoices to sustain you, and he rejoices with all his heart and with all his soul. Now, I ask you, not with any sermonic exaggeration, or with any rhetorical flourish, or with any sense of overstatement at all — I ask you, I challenge you, can you conceive of an intensity of desire that is greater than a desire empowered by “all [God’s] heart and all [God’s] soul”?
Suppose you took all the desire for food and sex and money and fame and power and meaning and friends and security in the hearts and souls of all the human beings on the earth — say, about eight billion people — and you put all that desire, multiplied by all those eight billion hearts and souls, into a container. How would it compare to the desire of God to do you good implied in the words “with all [his] heart and all [his] soul”? It would compare like a thimble to the Pacific Ocean, because the heart and soul of God are infinite, and the hearts and souls of man are finite. There is no intensity greater than the intensity of “all [God’s] heart and all [God’s] soul.”
“Grace will one day banish all pain. But not yet.”
And that is the intensity of the joy he has in sustaining you with sovereign grace: “I will rejoice in doing them good . . . with all my heart and all my soul.” Some of you may be tasting the sweetness of such sovereign, sustaining grace for the first time this morning. That is the work of the Holy Spirit in your life, and I urge you to yield to it and be mastered by sovereign, sustaining grace.
Others of you have lived in this sweet assurance for decades. It has sovereignly sustained you in the worst and best of times. Pain has not pushed you into bitterness; pleasure has not lured you into idolatry; God has kept you. He has held you fast — with all his heart and all his soul.
He has done it for your church, and he has done it for Dana and Christa and Anna and Mary and Betsy, and he will — with all his heart and all his soul. This is sovereign, sustaining grace. To know it, rejoice in it, and reflect it is why you exist.
Not grace to bar what is not bliss, Nor flight from all distress, but this:The grace that orders our trouble and pain, And then, in the darkness, is there to sustain.However long the sorrows last, This mighty grace will hold you fast.
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How Paul Prays Eternal Comfort into Heart Comfort: 2 Thessalonians 2:13–17, Part 7
What is Look at the Book?
You look at a Bible text on the screen. You listen to John Piper. You watch his pen “draw out” meaning. You see for yourself whether the meaning is really there. And (we pray!) all that God is for you in Christ explodes with faith, and joy, and love.