Audio Transcript

We close the week with a question from me, Pastor John, about one of Paul’s most profound statements of applied theology — and it’s too often overlooked. It’s on my mind because I heard you recently explain it off-air. You were leading us in a devotional at a Desiring God Leadership Team meeting, something we do to open every meeting together. We gather and begin with a brief devotional and pray together, to focus our minds and hearts before we go on to plan and dream and make decisions.

And last time we met as a Leadership Team, you led us in a study of Galatians 4:4–7. It was a great little devotional. The guys in the room were all met pretty powerfully there, as you explained this cry: “Abba! Father!” And as soon as you were done, I was like, “Wow, I want that recorded and shared with the APJ audience.” So here we are. “Abba! Father!” What exactly is this experience? What’s happening to us — and in us? Is this “Abba! Father!” cry my own cry? Is it the Holy Spirit crying in and through me? Explain that. And then, does this text apply to struggling believers? How so? Explain all this for us on the podcast if you would.

What I have found, Tony, over the years is that being a Christian Hedonist — that is, being a person who believes that God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in him — what this has done to me is make me hungry for experiential theology. In other words, I have a discontent with theology that floats in the air above my life with no connection to my living now or living forever. So, I am on high alert when I read the Bible for statements that are intensely theological and intensely experiential.

Inward, Experiential Reality

One of those texts that took hold of me months ago is Galatians 4:4–6. So let me read the text and break it into four parts, and then I’ll address some of those things you ask.

The first part: “But when the fullness of time had come, God sent forth his Son, born of woman, born under the law . . .” So there’s the incarnation and the life of Jesus, lived perfectly under the law in fulfillment of the law.

Then the text goes on part two: “. . . to redeem those who were under the law . . .” So when Jesus died, a redemption price was paid to set free slaves of sin and death, slaves of law-keeping. A kind of legal transaction happened by which the Father satisfied all the demands of his own justice and purchased for himself a people.

Third, the text goes on: he redeemed those who were under the law “so that we might receive adoption as sons.” Now, the effect of that legal redemption, that price that was paid, was that God now legally possesses a people for himself — he bought them. They are legally his, his children. He’s adopted them, paid the necessary price for them. They are sons of God.

“Because we are legally sons, God gives us the experience of sons.”

Now, the last part, verse six: “And because you are sons” — so the legal transaction has taken place at the cross — “God has sent the Spirit of his son into our hearts, crying, ‘Abba! Father!’” Now, this is where that magnificent, glorious theology in the first three parts of those verses becomes intensely experiential. Until now, we have incarnation, we have redemption, we have legal transactions on the cross securing our adoption. All of that is historical, outside of us. That’s not inside of us. This is different. Now, he says, our hearts are in view — our hearts, the place of spiritual experience, the experience of perceptions and the experience of affections. Because we are legally sons, God gives us the experience of sons. The Spirit of the Son of God is sent into our hearts, and he cries in our hearts, “Abba! Father!”

Cry of Every Christian

Now that should shake everybody up and make every Christian say, “Have I experienced that? Am I real?” Now, Paul had already said just a few verses earlier: “You are all sons of God, through faith” (Galatians 3:26). So, there are at least three ways that we can talk about becoming sons of God. One, Ephesians 1:5 says, “He predestined us for adoption to himself as sons through Christ Jesus.” Number two, Galatians 4:5 (we just read it) says, “. . . to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as sons.” And third, now Galatians 3:26 says, “In Christ Jesus you are all sons of God, through faith.”

Predestination is not an experience in the heart. Redemption is not an experience in the heart — it’s on the cross. But faith is an experience in the heart. And that’s what Paul is describing when he says that God sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, “Abba! Father!”

Let’s think about this experience for just a moment. Every Christian has experienced this. And if that shakes you up and you say, “I can’t remember when I got the Spirit, crying, ‘Abba! Father!’” well, just listen carefully. Every Christian has experienced this, at least in some measure. Some of us have been so badly taught or not taught at all that we experienced this — we really did — and we had no idea what was happening to us. No one ever explained it to us. Oh, how keenly interested we should be in understanding what has happened to us to make us Christians and how we should understand our experiences as Christians. Paul is not saying that God sent the Spirit of his Son into a few special Christians — like pastors — crying, “Abba! Father!” That’s what he does to all the redeemed sons of God.

The Spirit Gives Us Our Voice

So, what is it like? What is this experience of the Spirit of the Son of God crying in our hearts, “Abba! Father!”? To answer that question, let’s bring in the really close parallel from Romans 8:15–16:

For you did not receive the spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received the Spirit of adoption as sons, by whom we cry, “Abba! Father!” The Spirit himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God.

In Galatians 4:5, Paul says the Spirit is poured into our hearts, he himself crying, “Abba! Father!” But in Romans 8:15, he says we have received the Spirit, and we cry, “Abba! Father!” So, is this an experience of us crying, “Abba! Father!” from our heart, or the Spirit crying, “Abba! Father!” in our heart?

And then Romans 8:16, the next verse, gives us the answer: “The Spirit himself bears witness with our spirit that we are the children of God.” We don’t hear a voice inside of us saying, “Abba! Father! Abba! Father!” as though we were separate from the experience, watching it happen and then deciding whether we like it or not. That’s not at all what’s happening here. This is the Spirit of the Son of God taking possession of God’s child and giving voice.

He’s giving voice to the child, his Spirit witnessing with our spirit — a voice, our voice, inside our heart. It’s a voice of recognition, a voice of affection, a voice of joy. It says something like this: “I have God as my Father. He has paid for me. He has adopted me. He cares for me. He wants me. He loves me. He protects me. He provides for me. He has made me an heir of all that he owns. God is my Father.”

Jesus’s ‘Abba’

Now, the word crying — crying, “Abba! Father!” — doesn’t mean lament. I mean, in English, the word cry so often has been connected with weep. That’s not the meaning here. This is a cry of joy — unspeakable joy. It’s the same word used when the children back in the Gospel said, “Hosanna to the son of David!” (Matthew 21:15). They were crying that, and that’s the way we should hear the word crying here — not weeping, but crying, “Hosanna! Father! Abba! I can’t believe I’m a child.”

That’s the spirit of this cry. And the word abba is the Aramaic word used by Jesus himself in speaking to his Father in Mark 14:36. When Paul chooses to use this Aramaic word, taken over into Greek — it isn’t a Greek word — he takes it straight over and transliterates it in Greek as abba. When he does that, he makes clear that we are being drawn into the very experience of the Son of God. The Son of God called his Father, “Abba! Father!” and that word stuck with the early church because the Holy Spirit creates the very experience of the Son of God toward his Father in our heart so that we are sensing the same kinship with God that the Son of God has as our elder brother in the family.

So, this experience is the inner voice of the Spirit-indwelt child of God. It’s the experience of God’s Spirit causing to rise up in us a spiritual sight of God’s blood-bought, fatherly care and a spiritual taste of the sweetness of Christ’s own love for his Father. It’s the Spirit of the Son crying, “Abba! Father!” in and with our spirit.

Now, let me make one more connection that I had never seen before when I was thinking about this a while back. In John 7:37–39, Jesus stood up, and it says, he “cried out, ‘If anyone thirsts, let him come to me and drink. Whoever believes in me, as the Scripture has said, “Out of his heart will flow rivers of living water.”’” And then he adds this: “Now this he said about the Spirit.” So, believing is described as the thirsty soul coming to Jesus to drink. And the effect of that drinking, that believing, Jesus says in John 4:14, is that we will never be thirsty again. The water will become a spring, a spring of water, ever self-replenishing.

And then, he says in John 7:38, “No, more than a spring — a river.” And then he adds, “This is the Spirit.” This is the experience of the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of the Son of God, the Spirit of the risen Son of God: the sight and the taste of God becoming our all-satisfying Father through Christ.

Word to Strugglers

So, you asked, Tony, “How does this apply to a struggling believer?” So may I put it like this? Jesus was trying to help his disciples experience the loving provision of God as their Father in Matthew 6, remember, where he said, “Don’t be anxious about anything. Your heavenly Father feeds them. Your heavenly Father knows that you need them all.”

“God is very patient with his children as they grow up into the wonders of what their adoption really means.”

He’s trying to persuade these disciples, “If you follow me, come to me, trust me, God almighty will be your all-providing Father.” And then he says, “O you of little faith” (Matthew 6:30). So, I take that to be the struggler. I mean, what else is struggle except, “I hear John Piper talk about this — I don’t know if my faith reflects what he’s just described”? That’s who I’m talking to right now. So what did Jesus say when he said, “O you of little faith”? “Get out of here I’m done with you”? Thank God he doesn’t do that. Instead, he gave them eight reasons to trust their heavenly Father. He didn’t throw them out. He named them as little-faith strugglers, and then he kept on pleading with them, “Listen to me. Listen to me. I’m talking about the birds; I’m talking about the lilies.” There are eight reasons to trust him as our Father.

So, I would say to all strugglers: Get to know what has happened to you. Get to know it. You’ve got to learn it from the Bible. You can’t learn it any other way. We can’t interpret what has happened to us if we don’t read our Bibles through and through. Get a biblical understanding of how you came to faith, because you probably don’t know how you came to faith, if nobody’s taught you truly.

Get a biblical understanding of all those emotions in your heart. You can’t even name them. You can’t describe them. You don’t know what’s going on inside of you when the Holy Spirit is stirring you up from within. God is very patient with his children as they grow up into the wonders of what their adoption really means.

I can still remember the pang of distress that flushed through my body when I discovered that our country of service was no longer classified as “unreached” by the Joshua Project. Four percent of the ninety-million-person population was reportedly Christian. That percentage is twice the standard threshold for qualifying as unreached.

Since we had gone to the field with the idea that the unreached were of highest priority, we wondered, If we are not serving among the statistically unreached, can we justify being here? One of the important lessons we’ve learned is that missionaries serving among the reached can still have a profound impact on the unreached by leaning into the global church.

To be clear, identifying and pursuing people who do not have access to Scripture, discipleship, and healthy churches remains vital within the global church’s missions strategy. Wherever barriers to access exist — and wherever those barriers are most impermeable — missionaries should strategically seek to overcome them for the glory of God and the good of his people.

However, we also would do well to remember that getting the gospel to every tribe, tongue, nation, and people — however one understands those categories — is a vision and responsibility given to the global church. To see what I mean, consider the ministry of Robert Morrison (1782–1834), nineteenth-century missionary to the Chinese.

Reaching by Leaving

In 1807, Robert Morrison was appointed by the London Mission Society (LMS) to serve in China. He was the first Protestant missionary the LMS sent to East Asia. At the time, however, China was notoriously closed to outsiders — especially missionaries. The foreign trading companies that had established themselves in China were also averse to hiring missionaries. So, Morrison’s initial attempts to begin ministry in China were met with resistance and false starts.

In the eleventh year after he was appointed, however, Morrison took a fresh angle on ministry to the Chinese: he left China. Morrison relocated to neighboring Malacca (modern-day Malaysia), providing him the opportunity to engage Chinese people living there — people who could freely return to China and serve as native missionaries among the people he had struggled to reach. Despite the counterintuitive nature of leaving the country to reach its people, Morrison realized a strategic way to reach China was to prepare a missionary force of Chinese people who would assume their Great Commission responsibility, carrying the gospel farther into China than he could.

Following Morrison’s Example

Today, despite the best efforts of the Chinese government, the gospel has spread all over China, with Chinese believers leading the way. There are many other places, however, that present similar difficulties to foreign access as China did in Morrison’s day. The context my wife and I served in is surrounded by such places.

Though we found ourselves in a country no longer classified as unreached, some of our dear friends were local believers whom we saw God mobilize to go and serve among unreached people in nearby countries. We did not strategically design this plan — God providentially allowed us to watch it develop as the national believers sensed the weight of the Great Commission for the first time.

Better yet, a more intentional example of this strategy is present in a church I will call First Baptist Church in a major city of Southeast Asia. This country is populated by almost seventy unreached people groups whose native lands are notoriously difficult for foreigners to access. Despite operating in English, First Baptist Church has become a hub for gospel advance among foreigners, nationals, and the unreached by leaning into and mobilizing local believers into hard-to-reach places. Consider three elements of the church’s strategy.

1. Modeling a Healthy Church

First, this church has established itself in a city that is accessible to foreigners. At the same time, First Baptist distinguishes itself from other international churches by its healthy ecclesiology: it is led by a plurality of biblically qualified elders, it is congregationally governed, it promotes expositional preaching of the word, and it practices believer’s baptism. The members of this church observe the one-another commands of Scripture and engage actively in evangelism in their local communities.

“Missionaries serving among the reached can still have a profound impact on the unreached.”

This model contrasts with a more common model of an international church, where doctrinal statements and ministerial practices prioritize breadth rather than depth, often sacrificing biblical convictions in order to gain social community. Instead of aiming at an essentials-only vision of the church, First Baptist calls its members to covenant together under explicit convictions and doctrines that intend to protect the integrity of the body and its ability to display and convey the gospel. The healthy example of a convictional church benefits believers and unbelievers — whether foreign or local — in this city.

2. Developing Indigenous Leadership

Few of the nationals surrounding First Baptist speak English well enough to participate in church services. However, some are multilingual. The elders of First Baptist have taken special care to develop a ministry internship designed to disciple nationals toward the maturity, competency, and character qualifications required of ministry leaders and biblically qualified elders.

This effort has been led by a local believer — we will call him Paul — who has been a partner in ministry from the early stages of the church. Paul serves as a pastor at the church and feels the weight of the Great Commission to equip and go with his own people in missionary service.

While the internal partnership between foreign and local pastors is beautiful in and of itself, the next step in Paul’s ministry is to develop a core team of other nationals and to be sent by this English-speaking church to establish a local-language church nearby. Lord willing, in the next few years, this new church will be serving as a pillar and buttress of the truth for the local population in their own tongue.

Already, then, this English-speaking church is having an impact on the local context, partnering with and mobilizing local believers to Great Commission obedience. Although progress is slow and requires the initial partners to have proficiency in English, this pathway holds promise for seeing the gospel advance, disciples mature, and churches established in the broader context.

3. Reaching Unreached Language Groups

Along with the multiplication mentioned above, First Baptist also serves as the staging ground for two teams that intend to plant churches in other parts of the country among unreached language groups. Because these teams are composed primarily of missionaries (at least currently), they need to learn the culture and trade language of the country before attempting to enter the subculture and minority language groups they are targeting. Again, Paul has been a key partner in consulting and advising these missionaries.

Language learning and cultural adaptation take considerable time — usually two to three years to attain fluency and cultural savvy. It can be unhealthy for believers to spend those years without gathering with a church. By landing in this major city, both teams have had access to formal language-learning opportunities, have been immersed in the culture, and have also been members of a healthy church that aims to reach its neighbors. These teams are already in contact with national church-planting partners in their target location.

When the time comes for these teams to launch into their second context, First Baptist will be involved in sending them to their fields of service. While they are members at First Baptist, the missionary teams can also mobilize locals to join these pioneer church plants as they prepare to launch. More than that, they provide a vision and example for the nationals of how to strategically engage needs beyond their context. The missionary teams are already challenging nationals to respond to the Great Commission by making them aware that the majority of unreached groups in the area are far more inaccessible to foreigners. The best mobilization comes not from voices pushing you from behind but from voices calling you from ahead.

Don’t Panic — Mobilize

The historical example of Robert Morrison and the contemporary example of First Baptist are not a critique of or replacement strategy for direct missionary engagement in pioneer settings. The church in the West still needs to send missionaries directly to unreached people groups. However, the church’s missionary force does not come only from Western countries. All believers everywhere inherit the Great Commission and have a role in the “all nations” aspect of our disciple-making command.

The danger that “reached” places might get more attention from Western missionaries because they are easier to access and more comfortable is real. However, Westerners cannot neglect the opportunities to raise up and mobilize local believers in those places and equip them to go farther than Westerners can go on their own.

Morrison’s example reminds us that some places considered reached might become staging grounds for the equipping and mobilizing of a missionary force that will outlast our lifetimes and extend beyond our limitations. So, if you find yourself serving in a place that the Joshua Project deems “reached,” don’t panic — mobilize.

Audio Transcript

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone — or, I guess, technically, happy Thanksgiving Eve. On this holiday built around gratitude we can learn a lot from the apostle Paul, a man who loved to celebrate God’s grace in others with heartfelt thanks. As we’ve seen several times on this podcast, Paul says learning to speak thanks is what cleans up the mouth — cleans it up from using crude and vulgar language. Thanksgiving has a powerful, cleansing effect on our lives. Paul’s life models gratitude. He mentions “thanks” about fifty times in his epistles, leading to one of my favorite quotes, a claim by New Testament scholar David Pao, who once wrote (quoting Paul Schubert), “The apostle Paul mentions the subject of thanksgiving more frequently per page than any other Hellenistic author, pagan or Christian” (Thanksgiving, 15). Wow. A high claim, but a claim that explains a text like 2 Thessalonians 2:13–14, where Paul writes,

But we ought always to give thanks to God for you, brothers beloved by the Lord, [why?] because God chose you as the firstfruits to be saved, through sanctification by the Spirit and belief in the truth. To this he called you through our gospel, so that you may obtain the glory of our Lord Jesus Christ.

In this text, we see four truths that motivate our thanksgiving. Here’s Pastor John, at the end of 2001, to explain.

The first one is found in 2 Thessalonians 2:13. Paul says, “We ought always to give thanks to God for you, brothers.”

Dangerous Duty

Now notice: that’s prayer — prayers in the form of thanks. He says we should do this, so it’s a duty: should implies duty. However, it’s the kind of duty that, if you experience it as burden, you haven’t experienced it yet. If you experience gratitude as a burden, you don’t know gratitude, because true gratitude is not an exertion of the will; it’s an overflow of a sense of being treated better than you deserve.

“Gratitude is the kind of duty that, if you experience it as burden, you haven’t experienced it yet.”

A kid who gets black socks for Christmas from his grandmother when he wanted a fire truck might be told by his mother, “Say thank you to your grandmother.” And he might say, “Thank you, Grandmother, for my socks.” He does not experience gratitude at that moment. The words “thank you” are a burden and a duty, and it feels like hypocrisy for one simple reason: the emotion is not there.

However, had he opened the fire truck first (maybe that’s coming next; Grandmother’s not done), he might exclaim, “Oh, yes, woo-hoo! Thank you, Grandma.” That’s not a burden. That’s not a burden. You don’t know gratitude yet if this should here lands on you like law. You need to know him. You need to come to the end of this year, and look back over this year, with all of its horror, and feel something really freeing about how good he’s been to you, way better than you deserve — and me.

Reason to Rejoice

So it’s a duty here, but look at where it comes from. Look where gratitude comes from in verse 13, when he says, “We ought always to give thanks to God.” Here is a prayer happening called thanks. But where does it come from? It comes from four reasons — which come from knowledge, which come from the word — about how God saved the Thessalonians.

You are “beloved by the Lord” (verse 13).
God has chosen you from the beginning for salvation, “through sanctification by the Spirit and belief” (verse 13).
“He called you through our gospel” (verse 14).
The aim of this call was “that you may obtain the glory of our Lord Jesus Christ” (verse 14).

“True gratitude is not an exertion of the will; it’s an overflow of a sense of being treated better than you deserve.”

Do you see where his thanks are coming from? God loved them. God chose them. God called them. God will glorify them. That’s what he knows in his head, and it produces the emotion of, “O God, how good you’ve been to the Thessalonians.” It just bubbles up. “Look what you have done for the Thessalonian church. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.” And that’s the way I feel about Bethlehem over and over again, for reason after reason. But there have got to be reasons. Why? So that God will get the glory, not the Thessalonians. God has chosen you. God has called you. God is going to glorify you. God loved you. Praise God! Thank God for you!

Spirit and Truth

And if you need to see where I got the essential structure of this sermon, look at verse 13 and notice the word Spirit and the word truth. God saves us, it says, “through sanctification by the Spirit and belief in the truth.” Now there you have Spirit and truth, Spirit and truth — Spirit and word brought together.

How do you get changed? How do you get changed? Everybody in this room needs to change — and ought to want to change to be more like Jesus, more like Jesus, more affections like him, more behavior like him, more attitudes like him, more change. “Oh, make 2002 change city.” How’s that going to happen? Answer: Spirit and truth. Spirit and truth. And prayer corresponds to our reliance upon the Spirit, and meditation corresponds to our faith in the truth, and so we will bring the two together.