In this breakout session, I’m excited to speak to you about what I think is one of the most important practical life and ministry topics we could discuss.

For one, the “secret liturgies” of spiritual leaders is a timeless topic: these truths remain the same across generations. For another, this topic is crucial. You cannot minister well to others for long without yourself being relatively spiritually healthy. So Paul says to Timothy, “Keep a close watch on yourself and on the teaching” (1 Timothy 4:16); and to the Ephesian elders, “Pay careful attention to yourselves and to all the flock, in which the Holy Spirit has made you overseers” (Acts 20:28).

Also, this topic of “secret liturgies” is perhaps especially important in our age — “the age of accelerations,” according Thomas Friedman, when many of us need “permission to just slow down.” Today, he says, “the pace of technology and scientific change outstrips the speed with which human beings and societies can usually adapt” (Thank You for Being Late, 39).

According to Friedman, “We are living through one of the greatest inflection points in history, perhaps unequaled since . . . Gutenberg, a German blacksmith and printer, launched the printing revolution in Europe, paving the way for the Reformation” (3). And the late Dallas Willard, who died in 2013, said near the end of his life that “hurry is the great enemy of spiritual life in our day.”

So for those reasons, and more, I’m eager to address the topic of the leader’s “secret liturgies” and focus, very practically, on what we might call “the private worship behind a public Christian leader.”

Needy for Repeat

I’m especially eager to address this topic with those of you who are music people because of one little word you know well from hymnbooks and the sheets of worship music: repeat. Of all people, you know the power of repetition in corporate singing, however much you might be able to explain it or not.

Now, to be sure, many modern church-goers are miffed by repetition in corporate worship. The Information Age is conditioning us for new content, fresh ideas, new data. Why re-read what we’ve already read, why rehearse what we’ve already heard, why re-sing lines we’ve already sung, when new information is available like never before?

But do we know what our unprecedented access to novelty is doing to us? Indications so far seem to be that it’s making us shallower, not wiser and more mature. Running our eyes across the page and mouthing words to a song are not the same as experiencing the reality in our hearts. Our hearts simply don’t move as quickly as our eyes and our mouths.

Which makes worship of the living God — both in public and “in secret” — such an important remedy for what is increasingly ailing us today. God made us to worship him. And we are shriveling without it.

Consider the Psalms

Take Psalm 136 as just one example of the power of repetition. The psalm is twenty-six verses, and each verse ends with “for his steadfast love endures forever.” It rehearses God’s goodness and supremacy, his wonder-working and world-creating, his delivery of his people from slavery and provision for them in a rich land.

Twenty-six times the psalm repeats this refrain — and not one of them is wasted. With each new verse, another attribute or rescue of God is celebrated, and then our souls are ushered deeper into his steadfast, ever-enduring love with each glorious repetition.

The goal of the song is not to make God’s steadfast love old and boring, but exactly the opposite: to help us feel it afresh and at new depth. The dance of each new verse, with each return to the refrain, is designed to bore the central truth about God’s resilient love deeper and deeper into our inner person.

The psalm is not a treatise on the unwavering, persistent love of God, but what we call a meditation — less linear and more circular, or spiral — crafted to help auger the reality of his love from information on our mental surface down to an experience and taste in our hearts.

Heart of Leadership

Our task in this session is to focus very practically on the private worship behind the public leader. So let me take you to Deuteronomy 17 as we consider the “secret liturgies” of those who would lead the public liturgies of corporate worship.

Long before Israel had a king, the nation’s first and greatest prophet left specific instructions for him, including where and how he would find his bearings each day as the leader of God’s people. In Deuteronomy 17:14–20, Moses describes a concession God would make one day, setting a human king over his people. As he does, he warns such kings about the dangers of “excessive silver and gold,” “many wives,” and “many horses” — that is, money, sex, and power (Deuteronomy 17:16–17).

Moses gives a specific reason for these cautions: “lest his heart turn away.” This is where the point of departure will be, humanly speaking, for regimes and generations to come: the heart of the leader. Look at verses 14–17:

“When you come to the land that the Lord your God is giving you, and you possess it and dwell in it and then say, ‘I will set a king over me, like all the nations that are around me,’ you may indeed set a king over you whom the Lord your God will choose. One from among your brothers you shall set as king over you. You may not put a foreigner over you, who is not your brother. Only he must not acquire many horses for himself or cause the people to return to Egypt in order to acquire many horses, since the Lord has said to you, ‘You shall never return that way again.’ And he shall not acquire many wives for himself, lest his heart turn away, nor shall he acquire for himself excessive silver and gold.”

“As goes the leader’s heart, so goes the leader, and so goes the people.”

So, we might say, as goes the leader’s heart, so goes the leader, and so goes the people. Will he heed the siren calls around him, the subtle temptations to the compromises of acclaim and special privilege? Will he take advantage of his willing and submissive followers who are eager to give him benefit of the doubt? Will he slowly construct his own reality around him that serves his own private comforts rather than the holy interests of the people?

Keys to the Leader’s Heart

The battle lines will first be drawn in the leader’s own heart — which explains why Moses’s next instructions turn where they do, unexpected and perhaps peripheral as they may seem to some. And what Moses writes next is all the more striking because it’s issued generations before the nation would have its first king.

When a new king ascends to the throne in Israel — with all the pomp and circumstance that will doubtless accompany such a coronation — as his first act, he is to take out a quill and write word for word, with in his own hand, his own copy of God’s law, and “read in it all the days of his life.”

And when he sits on the throne of his kingdom, he shall write for himself in a book a copy of this law, approved by the Levitical priests. And it shall be with him, and he shall read in it all the days of his life, that he may learn to fear the Lord his God by keeping all the words of this law and these statutes, and doing them, that his heart may not be lifted up above his brothers, and that he may not turn aside from the commandment, either to the right hand or to the left, so that he may continue long in his kingdom, he and his children, in Israel. (Deuteronomy 17:18–20)

Note again the emphasis on his heart. God’s plan for his leaders so that their hearts not turn away, is that their hearts be formed and fed daily by God’s word. Consider, then, three aspects of this simple yet profound plan, which is just as relevant for Christian leaders and churches today.

1. The Book Shapes the Leader

This book, copied longhand by the king himself, is not a journal. The new king is not recording his own feelings or preferences or decrees — not in this book. Rather, he is copying the book of God’s law — an objective, fixed text, not open to edits and adjustments. This hand-copied book, then, is to be reviewed and approved by the priests, to confirm that no changes have been introduced or anything omitted.

In other words, the leader doesn’t shape this book; this book shapes the leader. However great he may be in the sight of his people, the king fundamentally does not shape the world (or even his own kingdom) through his words, but he is being shaped by God through God’s words.

2. The Book Keeps the Leader

God also designs that this book will keep the king, as he is bombarded by the world of privileges and temptations leadership can bring. As the king keeps the words of God in the book, the book will keep the king — that is, keep him from turning aside to the right or left, turning from the fear of God to fear of man, from faithfulness to God to the pursuit of his own private, sinful pleasures.

In shaping the king’s heart, the book keeps him from subtle daily migrations away from God, which is why Moses twice mentions the inner man, “the heart.” The unseen heart of the king will come, in time, into expression in his life and the nation’s. Self-humbling before God and his word will give rise to a whole trajectory of thoughts, feelings, words, and actions; pride, to another. And the greater the leader, the greater the effects, for good or ill.

3. The Book Calls Each Morning

Finally, the king’s hand-copied, priest-approved book, Moses says, “shall be with him . . . all the days of his life” (Deuteronomy 17:19). With him — that is, nearby, constantly within reach. Having completed this great hand-copying project, he is not to store the book away for future reference, but make it functional, accessible, active in his reign — increasingly in him through countless hours lingering over it.

This book is designed to be read daily. And not the sort of reading to which the pace and pixels of our modern lives have accustomed us: fast-break, hurried, distracted reading, with words coming out of the head almost as quickly as they went in.

Different Kind of Reading

Rather, the kind of reading God intends for his servant is meditative — slow, unhurried, enjoyable feeding on the text, at the pace of the text, rather than the pace of the world. Pondering God’s words. Rolling them around in the mind long enough to get a sense of them on the heart. Such daily meditation on the words of God is what God so memorably expects of Joshua as he becomes Israel’s new leader in Moses’s place:

This Book of the Law shall not depart from your mouth, but you shall meditate on it day and night, so that you may be careful to do according to all that is written in it. (Joshua 1:8)

So too, generations later, when Israel finally had its king, the first psalm celebrated where the godly king would find his sense and wisdom to rule: “His delight is in the law of the Lord, and on his law he meditates day and night” (Psalm 1:2). And not only the king, but every man of God: “Blessed is the man . . .” (Psalm 1:1).

So too, when the ultimate man, David’s great heir, came among us, his shaping and keeping and wisdom to live and lead grew out of regular feeding on the words of his Father: “Man shall not live by bread alone,” he said, quoting Deuteronomy 8:3, “but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.”

In the words of Sinclair Ferguson, “Jesus’s intimate acquaintance with Scripture did not come [magically from heaven] during the period of his public ministry; it was grounded no doubt on his early education, but nourished by long years of personal meditation” (The Holy Spirit, 44).

His Father appointed means for his stability in his truly human life. And it was not some extraordinary means or special trick. It was the same great and modest, amazing and ordinary daily means heralded by Moses, tested by Joshua, embraced by David, and imitable by the godly today: daily meditation on the very words of God.

Let’s say more about meditation, which is increasingly a lost art in our age.

What Makes Meditation Christian?

Non-Christian forms of meditation seek to empty the mind and transcend concrete specifics into the ethereal, and experience some form of meaningless enlightenment. But Christian meditation fills the mind with biblical truth and chews on it, seeking to savor it appropriately.

Unlike mere reading, even slow reading, where our minds and eyes keep moving at some pace, meditation slows us down, way down. We pause and ponder. Reading keeps us marching in linear fashion, while meditation moves us into a more spiral pattern by limiting the information set and seeking to press and apply the truth to our hearts, to actually experience the truth and not just let it run on through our minds on our way to the next thing.

Meditating Together

One remarkable aspect of corporate worship is that it gives us the opportunity to meditate together. The pinnacle of a good sermon is typically a form of corporate meditation, led by the preacher, as he circles around his main point and verbally kneads its goodness into our hearts.

And the summits of our best praises together in song are essentially meditative. It’s not the discovery and delivery of an obscure stanza that binds our hearts and draws us highest together toward heaven, but returning to the refrain, which has been enriched with each additional verse.

The verses provide fresh content, but the refrain bores the truth even deeper into our souls. The verses and refrain together help us to know the reality even better, as we collectively digest the truth from our heads into our hearts. They help us actually experience and be affected by the truth in our inner person, not just rehearse the data on the surface.

Secret Meditation

But we need to say more about “secret meditation,” or private meditation. Meditation involves a process. It’s not a switch to flip on. You don’t just meditate. Meditation is the goal and apex of Bible intake, and as a middle (often forgotten) habit, it involves lead-up and follow-up. You move into it, and move out of it.

Biblically, we find two kinds of meditation. One is spontaneous. It’s the kind of meditation that happens as we live and go about the day. Psalm 19:14 prays, “Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable in your sight” (also Psalm 49:3). That could be during the day (“Oh how I love your law! It is my meditation all the day,” Psalm 119:97), or Psalm 63:6 speaks of remembering God and “meditat[ing] on [him] in the watches of the night” (also Psalm 77:3; 119:148).

Another kind of meditation, we might say, is more focused, or intentional, or guided by God’s words. Genesis 24:63 tells of Isaac going “out to meditate in the field toward evening.” Joshua 1:8, as we’ve already seen, says, “This Book of the Law shall not depart from your mouth, but you shall meditate on it day and night . . .”

So too say many psalms. Psalm 1:2: the wise man’s “delight is in the law of the Lord, and on his law he meditates day and night.” Psalm 119:48: “I will lift up my hands toward your commandments, which I love, and I will meditate on your statutes.” Psalm 119:15: “I will meditate on your precepts and fix my eyes on your ways.” This is word-guided meditation.

And while the New Testament may not use the same precise language of meditation, it does speak of setting the mind or fixing the mind (Matthew 16:23; Mark 8:33; Romans 8:5–7; Philippians 3:19). Perhaps most significant is Colossians 3:2: “Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth.”

“What we choose to meditate on, we will gravitate toward meditating on in our spare moments.”

And these two kinds of meditation are related. Focused or intentional meditation — that is, meditation that we choose — leads to spontaneous meditation, the meditation that seems to happen to us as we go about our lives. What we choose to meditate on, we will gravitate toward meditating on in our spare moments.

Learning a Lost Art

Our focus here is on intentional, focused meditation. Having made time for such meditation, and found an undistracting place for such meditation, how might we go about pursuing it?

First is pace. By that, I mean read at the pace of the text and of understanding, and enjoyment. For most of us, this is a slower pace (perhaps a far slower pace) than we default to when reading other texts in our lives. In our age of accelerations, technology and society condition us to read faster and faster. But the Bible, as an ancient book, was written slowly and carefully to be read slowly and carefully. So we begin with an unhurried reading (and re-reading) of God’s word.

Second, then, is pause — or meditation proper. Having read the biblical text, we now pause over it to meditate on it. Without moving on, we want to go deep in this phrase or verse or idea, letting the words themselves lead us. That we not only have words in us, but we are in the words. Now what? Consider three encouragements about meditation.

1. God made us to meditate.

Meditation is a distinctively human trait; you know how to do this more than you think, like walking. And our souls were made for new mercies daily — to turn toward God. In meditation, we are fulfilling a vital aspect of how God made us: not just to do, but to think, ponder, reflect, to glorify him.

As Creator, he is glorified by his creatures doing what they do (tigers, cheetahs, eagles, whales). But he’s more glorified when his creatures acknowledge him. And he’s most glorified when they appreciate and adore him. As John Piper says, “God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in him.” So meditate in pursuit of satisfaction in God.

2. Meditation forms and shapes us.

Meditation changes us. We will meditate (that is, spontaneous meditation). Our minds will run somewhere. The question is not if, but on what. Sports? Image and physique? Job and money? Your children? Politics? Anxiety about society? News?

“We will meditate. Our minds will run somewhere. The question is not if, but on what.”

Ask yourself, What continually captures my attention? That will shape you. In fact, it is already shaping you. And especially so with what we choose to give our attention to: what we click. What you meditate on, in time, reformulates your desires. Christian meditation requires setting and resetting our minds, and in particular our hearts, on the greatest focuses possible.

3. Biblical meditation seeks joy in God today.

“Today” means right now (not just long-term formation). It aims to warm the heart, stir the affections, satisfy our souls right now in the one they were made for — as in these four statements about meditation from four seventeenth-century voices, back before meditation was a lost art:

*Thomas Watson (1620–1686): “Study is the finding out of a truth, meditation is the spiritual improvement of a truth.”
*Samuel Ward (1577–1640): “Stir up thy soul in [meditation] to converse with Christ. Look what promises and privileges thou dost habitually believe, now actually think of them, roll them under thy tongue, chew on them till thou feel some sweetness in the palate of thy soul.”
*Edmund Calamy (1600–1666): In meditation, be like “the Bee that dwells and abides upon the flower, to suck out all the sweetness.”
*William Bates (1625–1699): Since meditation often requires persistence, especially when you’re first learning the lost art, meditate “till thou dost find some sensible benefit conveyed to thy soul.” Many of us give up far too quickly and easily. Don’t let him go till he blesses you! Keep at it “till the flame doth so ascend.”

Practically, what kind of time might you set aside? I would say perhaps half an hour for beginners. And as you become familiar with reading the biblical text more slowly, and pausing to meditate on phrases and concepts that arrest your attention — and learn to find some sweetness, some sensible benefit to your soul — you’ll soon find yourself wanting more time and space, and perhaps grow it toward an hour.

We Pray to a Person

Moving toward meditation involves a certain pace — an unhurried reading of the text. Then meditation means pausing and going deep in, asking questions of, taking time to make connections and find insights. And finally, meditating leads to a third P: prayer. Prayer to God is “the proper issue,” the fitting completion of the process of meditating on him through his word. We hear from him in Scripture. We take it deep into ourselves in meditation. We speak back to him in prayer.

The way I like to say it is: begin with Bible, move to meditation, and polish with prayer. My encouragement is that once you have meditated on a verse or phrase or biblical concept for several minutes, turn it to prayer. Rather than pivoting to lists, pray through the text you’ve meditated on. Turn its concepts and promises and warnings into prayers for yourself, your spouse, your family, your church, your friends, your coworkers, your neighbors. Take God’s leading in meditation as his word to you that day, and invitation to prayer.

So: pace, pause, prayer — and if I could give you one more P, it would be Person. That is, Jesus. Bible reading is not just reading. It is God’s appointed medium, for now, by his Spirit, for our knowing and enjoying him through his Son. Remember in meditation: seek to enjoy the risen, living Christ, by his Spirit, through his word. Seek soul satisfaction in him.

Many of us expect too little when we come to the Bible and prayer. Christ is alive, seated on heaven’s throne. We have his word and his Spirit to make it alive to us. We are not just reading a book, but meeting with a living, divine Person. Jesus is real, and there, as we meet with him in meditation on his word.

Eat Like a King — and Sing!

Let me close by encouraging you to wake up each morning and eat like a king. That is, take the prescription of Deuteronomy 17 to heart, and take your cues from the commission to Joshua, and the celebration of Psalm 1, and the life of king David and king Jesus and linger in the words of God.

Steep in some specific text of Scripture. Feed your soul on the word of your Father. Come to the Bible not only to read and study, but to pause and ponder. Come to meditate on God’s word, in an unhurried, even leisurely, lingering and enjoying of God’s grace and truth in Christ.

And one last word for you as music leaders and choir members and soloists and accompanists, is this: sing. Sing! You know this better than most of us. This is what music and song are for — for slowing us down, for auguring soul-feeding and soul-sustaining truth down deep into the heart. For engaging our hearts, and shaping us, changing us, inspiring us, guiding us. Take your love of music, and your gifting in music, and put it to use in private, in secret, for the life and health of your soul.

We have a mission statement at Desiring God with several lines in it. The last line goes like this: “. . . grounded in, governed by, and saturated with the infallible Christian Scriptures.” That’s what we exist to be, and that’s what we encourage other ministries to be. So, one of the main reasons I’m here is that I believe Truth78 is one of those ministries — grounded in, governed by, and saturated with the infallible Christian Scriptures.

When the founders of this ministry, David and Sally Michael, were my colleagues in the ministry at Bethlehem Baptist Church (where we served for decades together), this was the glorious impact that they had on me and on the ministry to our children: everything was grounded in, governed by, and saturated with the infallible Christian Scriptures. They left a legacy not unlike that of John Bunyan.

Spurgeon loved the classic Pilgrim’s Progress by John Bunyan. He loved it because it was grounded in, governed by, and saturated with the infallible Christian Scriptures. He said,

[Bunyan read the Bible] till his very soul was saturated with Scripture; and, though his writings are charmingly full of poetry, yet he cannot give us his Pilgrim’s Progress — that sweetest of all prose poems — without continually making us feel and say, “Why, this man is a living Bible!” Prick him anywhere — his blood is Bibline. The very essence of the Bible flows from him. He cannot speak without quoting a text, for his very soul is full of the word of God. (Autobiography, 2:159)

God-Centered Discipleship for Children

When David wrote us at Desiring God, asking me to come, he said,

My hope is that John will do what he has always done to validate the significance of faithful, God-centered, Christ-exalting, Bible-saturated, doctrinally grounded, mission-advancing discipleship beginning with the youngest of children.

The key to that long list of hyphenated phrases (that I love) is to realize that the phrase Bible-saturated gives rise to all the others. So, I want to try to pick one of those — namely “God-centered” — and reflect with you about its meaning, its rootedness in the Bible, and how ministry to children sheds light on it. In other words, it’s not only true that being God-centered shapes children’s ministry (which it does), but also that doing ministry to children shapes the way we think about God-centeredness. It goes both ways. Being God-centered shapes the way we do children’s ministry, and doing children’s ministry thoughtfully shapes the way we think about God-centeredness.

Beyond Contextualization

For example, what doing ministry to children clarifies for us is the limits of what’s called contextualization. Contextualization ordinarily means that you bring a truth to a culture or a group and you try to find some idea or practice or language in the group that would help make this truth understandable. Then you put the truth in the terms of something understandable in the target culture, all the while trying not to lose the truth. We all do this, for example, if we go to Germany and we have to use German in order to get our idea across.

But when children are the “target culture,” so to speak, what they make plain is that, to make truth about God understandable, we must do more than connect our ideas with concepts they already have. Because what we discover in their little minds — their glorious, Godlike little minds — is that they don’t yet have sufficient concepts for grasping many biblical realities. So, contextualization proves to be an insufficient method of communication. It’s important but insufficient. What needs to be added is this: concept creation. It’s not the adaptation of biblical reality to already-existing concepts but the actual creation in the mind of new concepts, new structures of thought, new ways of viewing reality.

Children are not unique in this regard. They are just a very special case. The Bible teaches that all human beings, apart from the renewal of the mind that comes through being born again, do not have the categories of mind for seeing reality for what it really is. For example, 1 Corinthians 2:14 says,

The natural person [what we are apart from the transforming effects of the Holy Spirit] does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are folly to him, and he is not able to understand them because they are spiritually discerned.

So, every pastor, every Sunday school teacher, and every parent has to deal not only with levels of mental maturity but with levels of spiritual capacity. There are important biblical realities that simply will not fit into the human mind until new concepts, new structures of thought, new ways of viewing reality are created by the Holy Spirit through parents and Sunday school teachers and pastors. This is what I’m calling concept creation. The ministry to children simply makes this necessity crystal clear.

We must so teach, and so pray, as to create categories of thought that don’t yet exist, so that strange and wonderful biblical realities will make sense.

Strange and Wonderful Truth

Let me mention a few of those biblical realities that don’t fit the natural human mind.

1. God rules the world, including the sins of human beings — like Pilate’s expediency, and Herod’s mockery, and the mob’s “Crucify him,” and the soldiers’ brutality (Acts 4:27–28) — yet in such a way that God does not sin as he governs sin.

2. God governs all the steps of all people, both good and bad, at all times and in all places, yet such that everyone is accountable before him and will bear the just consequences of his wrath if they do not believe in Christ.

3. Jesus Christ is one person with two natures, divine and human, such that he upheld the world by the word of his power while living in his mother’s womb.

4. The death of the one God-man, Jesus Christ, so displayed and glorified the righteousness of God that God is not unrighteous to declare righteous ungodly people who simply believe in Christ.

These kinds of mind-boggling, category-shattering truths demand our best thought and our most creative labors — especially when trying to communicate them to children (or at least to prepare children to someday be able to grasp them).

Biblical Defibrillator

Here is the way all this relates to my focus on God-centeredness. As I have tried to make a case for God-centered everything over the past fifty years, what I have found is that many Christians simply take that concept and fit it comfortably into their already-existing mental framework. They do not see how explosively contrary it is to things they hold dear but are in fact mistaken or out of proportion.

“Being God-centered shapes the way we do children’s ministry.”

I look at what the people do in worship, or preaching, or counseling, or teaching, or curriculum development for children, and I realize they don’t mean what I mean. They don’t mean what I mean by God-centeredness. It’s not having the same outcome. The phrase “God-centered” is fitting into a concept they already have, and it’s not the same as mine. I’m really not communicating.

So, I have felt that something more is needed here if communication is really going to happen. I really do need not just contextualization but concept creation. The reality I see is being adapted to another view of reality and being lost in the process, while the terminology remains the same.

What do you do to build into a person’s mind (adult or child) a reality that isn’t there? One strategy that I have used for many years is to state the reality I’m trying to communicate in such a shocking (and yet true) way that it requires either rejection or the biblical remaking of some part of the mind.

Let’s take our theme, God-centeredness, as an example. To awaken people to what I mean by God-centeredness, I have regularly used the phrase God’s God-centeredness. That phrase has a double effect. First, it’s strange: people have not used it. And second, it’s troubling: they don’t like it. Why is that? Because it implies that God does what he forbids us to do — namely, exalt himself and make himself central. It forces people to ask whether it might be right for God to do this but wrong for us to do it. And why might that be? And that is a very fruitful question. That might take us to glorious discoveries. Even our children will be troubled by the fact that God does things he tells us not to do.

So, what I’m trying to do is to create a concept, a view of reality called God’s God-centeredness, that does not yet exist in people’s minds (or in a child’s mind), so that when it takes root as fully biblical and beautiful, it makes all God-centeredness as radical as it really is.

Tour of Concept Creation

So, come with me, if you will, on a short biblical tour of how I have tried to do this kind of concept creation. This is what we have to do with our teachers in children’s ministry so that there is a trickle-down effect for the children as gifted teachers find age-appropriate ways of creating concepts in their minds.

There are about four stations on this tour.

Station 1: Awakening Through Provocation

I start with a provocative, shake-you-out-of-your-slumbers quiz to force people to face the issue of whether they will say God is God-centered or not. These questions could be adapted for different age groups, even for children.

Question 1: What is the chief end of God?
Answer 1: The chief end of God is to glorify God and to enjoy magnifying his glory forever.
Question 2: Who is the most God-centered person in the universe?
Answer 2: God.
Question 3: Who is uppermost in God’s affections?
Answer 3: God.
Question 4: Is God an idolater?
Answer 4: No, he has no other gods before him.
Question 5: What is God’s chief jealousy?
Answer 5: God’s chief jealousy is to be known, admired, trusted, obeyed, and enjoyed above all others.
Question 6: Is your enjoyment of the love of God mainly owing to the fact that he makes much of you, or is it mainly that he frees you to enjoy making much of him forever?

I press on these unusual questions because if we are God-centered simply because we believe God is man-centered, then our God-centeredness is in reality man-centeredness. But pressing the reality of God’s God-centeredness forces the issue of whether we treasure God because of his excellence or mainly because he endorses ours.

So, now people are agitated. The concept of God-centeredness isn’t fitting so neatly into their minds as they thought it would. They are troubled by the possibility that a way of thinking they’ve never dealt with might be true — namely, God’s God-centeredness.

Station 2: Validation Through Scripture

Now we flood the mind with Scripture about God’s God-centeredness. God’s eternal, radical, ultimate commitment to his own self-exaltation permeates the Bible. God’s aim to be exalted, glorified, admired, magnified, praised, reverenced, trusted, and enjoyed as a supreme treasure is seen to be the ultimate goal of all creation, all providence, and all saving acts. What I have found is that the following litany of God’s God-centeredness proves overwhelming to people, either winning them or losing them. Many professing Christians bury their heads in the sand of their own theological preferences and ignore the clear teaching of Scripture. But here’s what we find:

1. “He predestined us for adoption to himself as sons through Jesus Christ . . . to the praise of the glory of his grace” (Ephesians 1:5–6 my translation).

2. God created the natural world to display his glory: “The heavens declare the glory of God” (Psalm 19:1).

3. “You are my servant, Israel, in whom I will be glorified” (Isaiah 49:3).

4. “He saved them [at the Red Sea] for his name’s sake, that he might make known his mighty power” (Psalm 106:7–8).

5. “I acted [in the wilderness] for the sake of my name, that it should not be profaned in the sight of the nations” (Ezekiel 20:14).

6. After the people sinfully ask for a king, Samuel says, “Do not be afraid. . . . For the Lord will not forsake his people, for his great name’s sake” (1 Samuel 12:20–22).

7. “Thus says the Lord God: It is not for your sake, O house of Israel, that I am about to act [in bringing you back from the exile], but for the sake of my holy name. . . . And I will vindicate the holiness of my great name . . . And the nations will know that I am the Lord” (Ezekiel 36:22–23).

8. “[Christ] died for all, that those who live might no longer live for themselves but for him who for their sake died and was raised” (2 Corinthians 5:15).

9. “God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name, so that . . . every tongue [should] confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father” (Philippians 2:9–11).

10. “I am he who blots out your transgressions for my own sake” (Isaiah 43:25).

11. “Whoever serves, [let him serve] as one who serves by the strength that God supplies — in order that in everything God may be glorified” (1 Peter 4:11).

12. “Immediately an angel of the Lord struck [Herod] down, because he did not give God the glory” (Acts 12:23).

13. “. . . when he comes on that day to be glorified in his saints, and to be marveled at among all who have believed” (2 Thessalonians 1:10).

14. “Father, I desire that they also, whom you have given me, may be with me where I am, to see my glory” (John 17:24).

15. “The earth will be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the Lord as the waters cover the sea” (Habakkuk 2:14).

Now, this Bible bath of God’s God-centeredness (God’s relentless self-exaltation) often creates a crisis, because people do not yet have a category for how God can be so self-exalting and still be loving.

Station 3: Clarity Through Objections

God’s God-centeredness is not megalomania because, unlike our self-exaltation, God’s self-exaltation draws attention to what gives us the greatest and longest joy — namely, himself — while our self-exaltation lures people away from the one thing that can satisfy their souls: the infinite worth and beauty of God in Christ. When God exalts himself, he is loving us. He is showing and offering the one thing that can satisfy our souls forever — namely, God.

Listen to how Jesus prays for us in his last hours in John 17: “He lifted up his eyes to heaven, and said, ‘Father, the hour has come; glorify your Son that the Son may glorify you . . .’” (John 17:1).

“Don’t underestimate how the Holy Spirit can use God-centered teachers to build glorious concepts into children’s minds.”

He’s asking God to glorify God by glorifying the Son. Then in John 17:24, he prays for us and draws us into this glory: “Father, I desire that they also, whom you have given me, may be with me where I am, to see my glory.”

Lest we think we might see him in his glory and not be able to love him and enjoy him as fully as we ought, he adds this prayer in John 17:26: “[I pray, Father, that] the love with which you have loved me may be in them, and I in them.” In other words, “When they see my glory, grant them to love and enjoy it (me) with the very love and joy that you’ve had in me from all eternity.”

This is God’s radical and loving God-centeredness. And to receive it requires a profound, Holy Spirit–given concept creation, not just the adaptation of a biblical reality to a fallen, man-centered mind.

If a person has the greatest treasure in the world, and he wants to share it, most people would embrace that person as loving. But if a Person is the greatest treasure in the world, and he wants to share it, many people will reject him as an egomaniac. For that to change, the mind must be renewed. God is the one being in the universe for whom self-exaltation is the most loving act, since love offers what is supremely and eternally satisfying — namely, God.

Station 4: Awakening to Happiness

If God is merciful in shaping this new mental framework that we have seen in the Bible, people awaken to the fact that the pursuit of their happiness in God is, in fact, the fulfillment of God’s purpose to be magnified. God exalts himself as the all-satisfying treasure of the universe, and we magnify that greatness by, in fact, being supremely satisfied with him. God’s pursuit of his glory and our pursuit of joy turn out to be the same pursuit.

This is what Christ died for. First Peter 3:18 says, “Christ . . . suffered once for sins, the righteous for the unrighteous, that he might bring us to God.” And what does he intend for us to find when we are brought to God as the greatest treasure in the universe? Psalm 16:11 says, “In your presence there is fullness of joy; at your right hand are pleasures forevermore.”

Children can get this. Don’t underestimate how the Holy Spirit can use God-centered teachers to build glorious concepts into their minds. You say to the first and second graders in your class,

Let me tell you a story about two brothers. One brother was sixteen years old and the other was just your age. He was seven. The younger brother liked his older brother a lot. He liked him so much that nothing made him happier than to spend time with his big brother. He would rather be with his big brother doing things together than anything else.

Now, the big brother knew this. He knew that he was the greatest treasure in his little brother’s life. He knew that he had great value in his little brother’s eyes. So, on his little brother’s birthday, he gave him a box about the size of a shoebox. In the box was a note that the older brother had written. His younger brother opened it and read,

Here’s a gift to make you glad,Nothing wrong, and nothing sad.The best I have, I’m sure you’ll see:A fishing trip, just you and me.

Then you ask the kids in your class, “Do you think the older brother was bragging when he said that the best gift he could give his little brother was to give him a whole day of fishing with his big brother?”

The need is very great for the next generation to be rescued as early as possible from the natural man-centeredness with which we are born.

Scripture tells us that “every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights” (James 1:17). But have you ever received a good gift from the Father that arrived in a package that appeared to be anything but good?

Jesus came into the world to make the Father known to all whom “he gave the right to become children of God” (John 1:12, 18). He came to help us “see what kind of love the Father has given to us” (1 John 3:1), that “as a father shows compassion to his children, so the Lord shows compassion to those who fear him” (Psalm 103:13). He wanted us to know that the Father abounds “in steadfast love and faithfulness” toward us (Exodus 34:6).

This is why, when Jesus promised us, “Whatever you ask of the Father in my name, he will give it to you” (John 16:23), he made sure we understood the Father’s heart toward us:

Which one of you, if his son asks him for bread, will give him a stone? Or if he asks for a fish, will give him a serpent? If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is in heaven give good things to those who ask him! (Matthew 7:7–11)

It’s an astounding promise of astonishing goodness and faithfulness: “For everyone who asks receives” (Matthew 7:8). Why? Because our Father wants our “joy [to] be full” (John 16:24).

However, Jesus, of all people, also knew that some of the good gifts our loving Father gives in answer to our prayers — some of his best gifts, in fact — arrive in painful packages we don’t expect. When we receive them, we can be tempted to think the Father gave us a serpent when we asked for a fish, not realizing till later the priceless goodness of the gift we received.

“Some of the good gifts our loving Father gives in answer to our prayers arrive in painful packages we don’t expect.”

Why would the Father do this? As just one in the great cloud of God’s children across the ages, I can bear personal witness that he does it so that our joy may be full. And I’ll offer that witness here, with the help of one of history’s most beloved pastors and hymn writers. Because both he and I know how important it is to trust the Father’s heart when we’re dismayed by what we receive from his hand.

Near Despair an Answered Prayer?

John Newton was the godly eighteenth-century English pastor most famous for penning the hymn “Amazing Grace,” which describes the best gift Newton ever received from the Father: the forgiveness of his sins and eternal life through Christ.

But at times he also received, as I have, gracious gifts from God that amazed him in a different sense. He expressed this amazement in a lesser-known hymn, “I Asked the Lord That I Might Grow,” which begins,

I asked the Lord that I might growIn faith and love and every grace,Might more of his salvation know,And seek more earnestly his face.

’Twas he who taught me thus to pray;And he, I trust, has answered prayer;But it has been in such a wayAs almost drove me to despair.

I remember vividly the first time I experienced the reality Newton describes here, just after I turned 21. Following an extended season of asking God for the gifts Newton described in his first verse, I received an answer that had the same effect as that second verse. It devastated and disoriented me. I found myself reeling.

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Like Newton,

I hoped that, in some favored hour,At once he’d answer my request,And by his love’s constraining powerSubdue my sins, and give me rest.

Because my prayers reflected a sincere “hunger and thirst for righteousness” (Matthew 5:6), I assumed God would answer my prayers with a sort of download of growth in grace. And I envisioned this occurring as God led me through “green pastures” and along “still waters” (Psalm 23:2).

However,

Instead of this, he made me feelThe hidden evils of my heart,And let the angry powers of hellAssault my soul in every part.

“I assumed God would answer my prayers with a sort of download of growth in grace.”

As it turned out, the holiness and righteousness I (and Newton) hungered for — greater freedom from sin and greater capacities for faith and love and joy — were not available in a download. Such sanctification is available only if we’re willing to enter a “training in righteousness” (2 Timothy 3:16). And apparently the best training environment for us was a “valley of the shadow of death” (Psalm 23:4).

Lipstick on a Pig?

The season of disorientation and confusion usually lasts a while before we grasp what’s going on. And while it lasts, we feel dismayed. What’s happening? Did we do something wrong? Is God angry with us? Newton voices the confusion we feel:

Lord, why is this? I trembling cried;Wilt thou pursue this worm to death?

At this point, we can also be tempted to doubt God’s goodness. Having sincerely asked him for a good gift, a gift Scripture says aligns with our Father’s desire for us, and having received in return a severe trial or affliction, we can wonder if our attempt to interpret God’s answer as a good gift is like trying to put lipstick on a pig. Perhaps God simply gave us a serpent instead of a fish after all.

I mean, what kind of loving father intentionally gives his child pain when he asks for joy?

The Father often lets us wrestle with that question for some time, allowing the pain to do its sanctifying work. But when the time is right, he will reveal his answer, which Newton concisely captures:

This is the way, the Lord replied,I answer prayer for grace and faith.

These inward trials I now employFrom self and pride to set thee free,And break thy schemes of earthly joy,That thou may’st seek thy all in me.

See What Kind of Love

Like John Newton, I had asked the Father for what I wished and found him faithful to give me what I asked for, though I didn’t expect it to come in the package I received.

But Jesus, the Son, the Firstborn, came into the world to help us, through his teaching and example, to “see what kind of love the Father has given to us, that we should be called children of God” (1 John 3:1). And one manifestation of the Father’s love is to sometimes answer his child’s request for joy with a painful experience if it will result in his child ultimately experiencing more profound good and greater joy than if he withheld the pain. Because our Father wants our joy to be full.

And there’s a great cloud of God’s children bearing witness to the goodness of the Father’s painful gifts, each from his own experience. They would recite for us the famous proverb:

My son, do not despise the Lord’s discipline     or be weary of his reproof,for the Lord reproves him whom he loves,     as a father the son in whom he delights. (Proverbs 3:11–12)

They would quote the famous epistle:

[Our earthly fathers] disciplined us for a short time as it seemed best to them, but [our heavenly Father] disciplines us for our good, that we may share his holiness. For the moment all discipline seems painful rather than pleasant, but later it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness to those who have been trained by it. (Hebrews 12:10–11)

And they would “Amen” the famous psalmist, whose painful discipline produced this prayer: “In faithfulness you have afflicted me” (Psalm 119:75).

For when our training in righteousness has done its sanctifying work, one of the peaceful fruits is that we learn to joyfully trust the Father’s hand because we’ve learned to trust the Father’s heart.