Audio Transcript

Am I confident, or am I just arrogant? We get this question a lot, and we have to answer this question for ourselves. Lionheartedness and humility are not contradictions in God’s will, nor are they contradictions in the life of our Savior. He came to bring peace, and he came to bring a figurative sword too. But in our own lives, we must figure out the difference between confidence and arrogance, and that’s the challenge a listener named Max wants to figure out today.

“Hello, Pastor John!” Max writes in his email to us. “My question for you is this. Can we feel powerful or confident or have a high self-worth in who God has made us to be through Christ? How do you distinguish this from pride that leads to destruction? If so, how do we do this? How do we pursue the feeling of power or confidence or high self-worth in living out what God has created us to be, but humbly so? You seem like someone who does it well. Thank you!”

Well, I have to admit that I gag on the term “high self-worth.” The reason I do is because I have watched now for fifty years — yes, fifty years — that term (and its sister term “self-esteem”) be used by secular, godless culture as an explanation for most negative psychological conditions and as a remedy for how to make a person more useful and productive. Lack of self-esteem is the diagnosis for a thousand problems today. Higher self-esteem is the prescription for a thousand improvements.

And the reason for that, it seems to me, is pretty obvious. When God disappears, the next most likely focus for esteem and confidence and reliance and trust is me — self. I think that was exactly the temptation in the garden of Eden. I think that’s the biblical essence of sin — replacing God with self as our treasure, our trust, our esteem, our worth.

Okay, now I’ve got that off my chest.

‘Well Done’

The question is still valid, because I do know from the Bible that God intends for us to lead lives that are significant, effective, productive, joyful, confident, courageous, fearless, competent. The world would just default to interpret every one of those in terms of self-exaltation, and I don’t interpret any of them that way. The Bible worldview says all those words in a completely different view of things.

“Do you love to see Christ made much of above all things, whether you get any recognition or not?”

When our lives are done, and we have trusted him for his enabling grace for every good work, God wants us to hear the words “Well done, good and faithful servant.” It’s not wrong to want to hear from Christ the words “Well done. You’ve been faithful.” The question is, Will he say, “Well done” to a person who had high self-worth, or to a person who has been a God-dependent, God-centered, God-reliant, Christ-exalting servant of others? That’s the question.

So, I would rephrase the question that I’m being asked to something like this: What’s the difference between acting in pride and acting so that our lives are significant, fruitful, fearless, competent, productive, happy, confident without pride?

Questions for Diagnosing Pride

Here are eight diagnostic questions to detect the rising of pride in our lives as we pursue those goals.

Question 1: Do I believe and happily embrace — and they’re both important, believing in your head and happily embracing in your heart, your will — the fact that my very existence and personality and gifting are owing to God, not me?

“By the grace of God I am what I am” (1 Corinthians 15:10).
“Not that we are sufficient in ourselves to claim anything as coming from us, but our sufficiency is from God” (2 Corinthians 3:5).
“What do you have that you did not receive? If then you received it, why do you boast as if you did not receive it?” (1 Corinthians 4:7).

The question is not just “Do I believe this principle?” but “Do I love to have it so?” Do you delight and revel in the absolute dependence on God for who you are?

Question 2: Do you believe and happily embrace the fact that every one of your circumstances, in all of its details, is owing to God and not yourself?

“You ought to say, ‘If the Lord wills, we will live and do this or that.’ As it is, you boast in your arrogance. All such boasting is evil” (James 4:15–16). In other words, if something happens in life that takes you up or takes you down, it’s from the Lord. Are you glad that he’s in charge to that extent in your life?

Question 3: Do you believe, and are you happy to embrace, the fact that all your hard work and your personal effort and your willpower to accomplish things are owing to God?

Some people say, “Well, yes, God is in charge of my circumstances, but what I make of them, yeah, that’s owing to me, and that’s why I can be proud and boast. I pulled myself up by the bootstraps, while other people are languishing down there.” That’s not true. Paul said, “I worked harder than any of them, though it was not I, but the grace of God that is with me” (1 Corinthians 15:10). So, Paul attributed to God’s grace not only his existence and his salvation and his circumstances, but also his willpower to work hard.

Are you glad that, when your day’s work is done, you can say of all your efforts, “Not I, but the grace of God that was with me”? Are you glad? Or does that feel like God is robbing you of something?

Question 4: Do you make it your aim to be consciously dependent on God in all you are doing in such a way that, when your service is complete, God will get the glory rather than you?

I’m thinking of 1 Peter 4:11. It’s been just a hallmark of my prayer as I move toward any ministry — like I’ll move toward a ministry midday today that I need help with. “Whoever serves, [let him serve] by the strength that God supplies — in order that in everything God may be glorified through Jesus Christ. To him belong glory . . . forever and ever. Amen.” So, what that says is this: it’s not only true that God gives me what I need; I actively trust him in doing it. I’m conscious of the fact that I’m nothing here. I can’t do anything on my own.

Question 5: Are you hungry for the praise of man, and do you try to position yourself so that people will see your good works and give you praise?

Jesus warned against those who love the praise of man. “Woe to you Pharisees! For you love the best seat in the synagogues and greetings in the marketplaces” (Luke 11:43). Oh, how we need to test our hearts — when we’re 25 and 75. Do I love and crave and angle for the praises and recognition of other people?

Question 6: Do you associate with the lowly, or do you always need to be hanging around with important people?

“Live in harmony with one another. Do not be haughty, but associate with the lowly. Never be wise in your own sight” (Romans 12:16).

Question 7: Do you feel entitled to recognition and comfort and respect so that you’re angry when you don’t get it instead of responding the way Jesus said to — namely, “Rejoice when people persecute you, speak evil of you, don’t give you the respect you deserve” (see Matthew 5:11–12)?

A sense of entitlement is one of the clearest signs of deeply rooted pride.

Question 8: Finally, and swimming among all the others, do you love to see Christ magnified? Do you love to see Christ made much of above all things, whether you get any recognition or not?

“God intends for us to lead lives that are significant, effective, productive, joyful, confident, courageous.”

“He must increase, but I must decrease” (John 3:30). Paul said, “My eager expectation and hope [is] that . . . Christ will be honored in my body, whether by life or by death” (Philippians 1:20). I think that was one of the first sermons I preached when I came to Bethlehem. My goal, folks, my eager expectation, is that Christ be magnified. I want to preach in such a way, I want to write in such a way, I want to do podcasts in such a way so that Jesus looks great, and people come away saying, “Christ is great. God is great.”

To Him Be Glory

So, by all means — this is circling back now to the essence of the question that I think he was asking — use all your gifts and all your intelligence and all your circumstances and relationships and competence and courage to live the most productive, significant life possible. And do it all to make Christ look great and beautiful and precious by saying and by loving the truth that “from him and through him and to him are all things. To him be glory forever” (Romans 11:36).

God never makes a mistake.

I vividly remember those words, a chapter title in Evelyn Christenson’s book What Happens When Women Pray.

Honestly, when I first read them, I was cynical. They sounded trite and naive. I arrogantly assumed that the author hadn’t struggled much in her life, or else she wouldn’t have made such a bold claim. In my mind, God was good and all-powerful, but to say that he never made mistakes had sweeping implications that seemed inconsistent with the massive evil and suffering in the world. Christenson’s statement so annoyed me I was tempted to stop reading.

As I read her book, I had just been through the fallout of a marital crisis while also pregnant with our oldest daughter. I was grateful we had put our marriage back together, but to say that God didn’t make a mistake seemed far-fetched. My life had been difficult on many fronts already. I had lived in and out of the hospital after contracting polio as an infant. I had been bullied throughout grade school. I had recently suffered three miscarriages.

I had a hard time imagining that God hadn’t made a mistake somewhere in my trials.

All My Suffering?

While I struggled to believe he had never made a mistake, I did believe that God had been in at least some of my early suffering.

“God had not made a mistake in making my son, in giving him to us for a time, and in taking him back to himself.”

When I came to Christ, even at sixteen, I was already beginning to see God’s purpose in my disability. I had happened upon John 9, where Jesus tells his disciples that the blind man’s condition was not because of any sin, but so that his life could glorify God. When I read that, I knew that God was speaking directly to me. He reassured me that my suffering had a purpose, which changed how I viewed my life and my struggles.

Still, even though I had seen God use my physical challenges for good, I doubted that principle applied to all my suffering.

What God Says About Sovereignty

Despite my skepticism, since I was leading the discussion on Christenson’s book at church, I had to keep reading it. I pored over the Bible before our meeting, asking God for wisdom and guidance, and was drawn to passages on God’s sovereignty and purpose. I grabbed a concordance and made a list of Scriptures that stuck out to me, like these:

Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? And not one of them will fall to the ground apart from your Father. But even the hairs on your head are numbered. (Matthew 10:29–30)

I know that you can do all things, and that no purpose of yours can be thwarted. (Job 42:2)

Many are the plans in the mind of a man, but it is the purpose of the Lord that will stand. (Proverbs 19:21)

My counsel shall stand, and I will accomplish all my purpose. . . . I have spoken and I will bring it to pass; I have purposed, and I will do it. (Isaiah 46:10–11)

I kept rereading these verses even though they made no sense to me.

Truth I Could Not Shake

As the discussion began, everyone had an opinion on the same line that had arrested me: “God never makes a mistake.” Some people decidedly disagreed. It angered them. “Of course, hard things happen in the world,” they insisted, “but we shouldn’t attribute them to God.” Others shared their painful experiences and struggles with loss.

Someone said (rather matter-of-factly), “But we know Romans 8:28 says, ‘All things work together for good, for those who love the Lord and are called according to his purpose,’ which means that God is in control of everything and will use it all for our good.” Her cool words felt more like a platitude or cliché than the truth as they hung in the air. Her detached insistence on this doctrine, apparently without sympathy or understanding, tempted me to defend the other perspective.

Yet somehow, I couldn’t do that. Somehow, after reading the Bible carefully, I couldn’t dismiss the idea that God never makes a mistake. Somehow, deep inside me, I knew that the author’s words aligned with Scripture. Somehow, I believed this was life-changing truth. And so, I proclaimed my convictions to the group, even while I did not yet fully understand them.

Why Did My Son Die?

A few weeks later, I was asked to put my words to the test. At a routine 20-week ultrasound, we learned that our unborn baby, Paul, had a life-threatening heart problem that would require surgery. I told myself and others that God never makes a mistake. I repeated those words until they became part of my vocabulary. In an inexplicable way, God’s peace came while I declared those words, words that enveloped me throughout the pregnancy.

Paul had a successful surgery at birth and was thriving. But almost two months later, he died unexpectedly because of a doctor’s inattention. Though we were numb, my husband and I spoke at Paul’s funeral, reiterating that God never makes a mistake. We’d been helping each other find hope in the Lord through those words.

At the time, I meant those words sincerely, but weeks after Paul’s funeral, those same words once again seemed hollow and trite. Why did Paul die? Why did God permit this? This was because of a doctor’s negligence — hadn’t God made a mistake this time?

Theology — all of it — seemed empty and wooden to me. None of it made sense. The words would ricochet inside my mind and land nowhere. I didn’t know what to think or how to pray. So I didn’t. And I drifted from God.

Months later, God graciously drew me back to himself. While sobbing in my car, I encountered the radical love of God and I saw the rock-solid truth in the words I had pushed away. They were words I could build my life on. Words that could carry me through the darkest days. God had not made a mistake in making Paul, in giving him to us for a time, and in taking him back to himself. All of Paul’s life was filled with divine purpose.

God’s Plan A

After Paul’s death, I read Joni Eareckson Tada’s book When God Weeps, which further helped me see the importance of believing in God’s sovereignty. Joni says,

Either God rules, or Satan sets the world’s agenda and God is limited to reacting. In which case, the Almighty would become Satan’s clean-up boy, sweeping up after the devil has trampled through and done his worst, finding a way to wring good out of the situation somehow. But it wasn’t his best plan for you, wasn’t plan A, wasn’t exactly what he had in mind. In other words, although God would manage to patch things up, your suffering itself would be meaningless. (84)

“My suffering had meaning. All of it. I was living God’s plan A.”

Like Christenson’s chapter title, Joni’s words hit me hard. My suffering had meaning. All of it. I was living God’s plan A. Embracing and understanding her words changed my perspective on life, giving me strength to press on through the darkest trials, looking for God’s hand, grateful that my pain had a divine purpose.

Even in My Nightmares

God never makes a mistake. The phrase has shaped and reshaped my life and has anchored me through many storms. I clung to it when I was diagnosed with post-polio syndrome. And I kept repeating it after my first husband left us.

I needed the assurance that God was with me in my trials. The assurance that even when my nightmares came true, God had not made a mistake. He would use even my most dreaded outcomes for my good and his glory. Christenson says,

This is the place you reach when after years and years of trials and difficulties, you see that all has been working out for your good, and that God’s will is perfect. You see that he has made no mistakes. He knew all of the “what if’s” in your life. When you finally recognize this, even during the trials, it’s possible to have joy, deep down joy. (89–90)

I didn’t have a category for that kind of faith or perspective when I first read those words years ago. But now, over twenty years later, I am grateful for them. Grateful that the same God who walked with Evelyn Christenson through the various trials in her life, and taught her how to pray, has walked with me and taught me as well.

Most of all, I’m grateful to know that Jesus, who died that we might live, who loves us with an everlasting love, and who cares about every minute detail of our lives, will never make a mistake.

Picture yourself in a group Bible study. Your small group is studying the book of Ephesians, and you’ve made it to chapter 5. Someone reads aloud verse 18: “Do not get drunk with wine, for that is debauchery, but be filled with the Spirit.” Then Steve, the new guy, says, “Well, Paul clearly forbids getting drunk on wine. I’m just thankful that he said nothing about getting drunk on whiskey. That’s my favorite way to become intoxicated.”

We all intuitively recognize that Steve is mistaken. We might even think him absurd. But how do we explain his error? My guess is that we would say something like, “Steve, that’s not what the Bible means. Paul intended to prohibit all drunkenness, not just drunkenness from wine.” To which Steve might reply, “But that’s not what the Bible says. Paul mentioned wine only. I’m sticking to the text.” Or he might say, “That’s just your interpretation. I’m talking about what the Bible means to me.”

Learn the Habit of Reading Well

When people ask what I do for a living, I often say, “My job is to teach college students how to read.” This is only half a joke, because the reality is that our educational system and society has left many people incapable of reading well. That’s why, at Bethlehem College & Seminary, our approach to education centers on imparting to our students certain habits of heart and mind.

In all of our programs, we aim to enable and motivate students

to observe their subject matter accurately and thoroughly,
to understand clearly what they have observed,
to evaluate fairly what they have understood by deciding what is true and valuable,
to feel intensely according to the value of what they have evaluated,
to apply wisely and helpfully in life what they understand and feel, and
to express in speech and writing and deeds what they have seen, understood, felt, and applied in such a way that its accuracy, clarity, truth, value, and helpfulness can be known and enjoyed by others.

“You can’t say whether something is true or false, good or bad, until you first know what the something is.”

There is a certain order to these habits. Before you can feel appropriately, you must evaluate rightly. And before you can evaluate rightly, you must first observe accurately and understand clearly. Note this: evaluation depends upon understanding. Without clear understanding of what someone has said or written, evaluation is impossible, because you have nothing to evaluate. You can’t say whether something is true or false, good or bad, until you first know what the something is.

Meaning and Significance Are Not the Same

My own experience as a teacher suggests that there are many confusions and pitfalls around the question of “meaning” when we read a text. Consider this a crash course on the meaning of meaning.

Let’s begin with the Golden Rule: “Whatever you wish that others would do to you, do also to them” (Matthew 7:12). When it comes to reading, we ought to practice Golden Rule Interpretation. That is, we ought to treat authors the way we want to be treated. No one wants his own words treated like a wax nose that a reader can bend according to his will. No one likes to have his words twisted into something he didn’t intend. When we speak or write, we mean something, and we want that meaning to stand — to be understood and respected as ours (even if others disagree with us). And so, given that’s how we want to be treated, we ought to treat authors the same.

To do this, we must distinguish between what the author meant by his words and the effects of his words on subsequent people and events. For clarity, let’s refer to the first as meaning. Texts mean what authors mean by them. The second we may call significance. The author’s meaning can be related to different texts, contexts, concepts, situations, people, places — anything you can think of, really.

Meaning and significance are distinct. Meaning is stable through time; significance may and does change. Meaning is about what authors do in public by means of words (as one theologian puts it). Significance is about the effects of those words on everything else. Meaning is fixed and bounded; significance is, in principle, limitless. When an author writes something, he means this and not that. But significance has to do with the relation between the author’s meaning and this, that, and the other.

With this basic distinction in hand, let’s consider four puzzles in relation to meaning: the source of meaning, the means of meaning, the levels of intent, and the boundaries of meaning. To aid in solving these puzzles, we’ll use Steve’s surprising interpretation of what the Bible says in Ephesians 5:18 as a test case.

Puzzle 1: Source of Meaning

The first puzzle has to do with the source of meaning. Note that I introduced the quotation as “what the Bible says.” But if we’re thinking carefully, we realize that this must be a form of shorthand. People say things, not objects. So when we say, “The Bible says . . .” what we (ought to) mean is, “Paul says (or God says) in the Bible . . .”

“Texts are not free-floating entities with autonomous meaning. Instead, authors are the source of meaning.”

Meaning, then, is a matter of the author’s intent. This is crucial to remember. Whenever we talk about meaning, we are talking about persons. Sometimes we say things like, “The text means what it says.” But this again is misleading. Texts don’t mean; only people mean. To put this another way, a text doesn’t mean what it says, because it cannot say anything; instead, it means what the author says. Or to say it in yet another way, if there is meaning, there must be a mean-er. Meaning exists only when someone has meant.

Thus, we stress that texts are not free-floating entities with autonomous meaning. Instead, authors are the source of meaning.

Puzzle 2: Means of Meaning

If authors are the source of meaning, what then are texts? Texts are the means of meaning, and therefore are absolutely crucial for interpretation. Stressing the importance of texts helps us avoid another confusion and solve another puzzle.

When we are interpreting a text, we sometimes say that we are looking to “get inside the mind of the author” and to “see what he wanted to do.” Now, this could be another form of shorthand, a way of stressing that we are interested in the author’s intention, and seeking to avoid usurping his place by imposing our own meaning on his text.

However, speaking like this could also be misleading. It could lead someone to think that the aim of interpretation is to somehow recover the author’s psychological state at the time he was writing. We might attempt to psychoanalyze him, and discover the hidden motives of his mind. So someone might try to discern what in Paul’s personal background led him to prohibit drunkenness in Ephesians 5. And because many recognize the impossibility of such a task, this mistake has sometimes led interpreters to abandon the idea that the author matters at all.

How, then, can we avoid this error? By stressing both the author and the text. The text is the public means by which an author accomplishes his purpose. As we said above, meaning is about what authors do in public by means of words. Note this: meaning is not about what the author wanted to do, or what the author tried to do, or what the author subconsciously attempted to do. It’s about what the author did do through his text.

Meaning, then, is a public affair, because through the text it is shareable and reproducible. The norms of our language establish the boundaries of what we can say. Within those boundaries, we select the appropriate elements (words, grammar, syntax, and more) and put them to use to accomplish our purposes. Someone who shares our language is thus able to discern our intent in what we’ve said. Authors are the source of meaning, and texts are the means of meaning.

Puzzle 3: Levels of Intent

Now we introduce an additional puzzle, having to do with the English word intent, which is potentially ambiguous. Consider the simple phrase “Do not get drunk.” When Paul writes this phrase to the Ephesians, we can see two different levels of intention. At one level, his intent is to exhort or issue a command. That’s what his words do. At another level, his intent is that his command be obeyed. That’s what he hopes his words accomplish.

But it’s important to keep these two levels distinct. The first level is entirely within Paul’s power. Assuming he writes clearly in a language his audience understands, he accomplishes his intent simply by writing, regardless of whether the Ephesians obey or not.

The second level is not within Paul’s power. While he may intend (in the sense of “hope for”) the obedience of the Ephesians, securing that obedience is not within his power. The first level refers to the force of Paul’s words — what he is doing in speaking at all. The second refers to the desired results of his words — what he is trying to accomplish by speaking. But these are distinct. The first level — issuing the command — is a matter of meaning; the second level — the Ephesians’ obedience or disobedience — is a matter of significance.

Puzzle 4: Boundaries of Meaning

The final puzzle has to do with the boundaries of meaning. Earlier, we noted that meaning is stable, fixed, and bounded. But how do we determine such boundaries? When Steve says that Ephesians 5:18 only prohibits getting drunk with wine, but has nothing to say about getting drunk with whiskey, how can we explain his error?

One way might be to focus on the logic of Paul’s statement. “Do not get drunk with wine, for that is debauchery.” The word for indicates the ground on which the command is issued. And drunkenness is debauchery and corruption, whether it is caused by wine or whiskey or beer.

But even without the grounding statement, we can know our friend to be in error if we recognize that meaning is both explicit and implicit. When Paul explicitly mentions wine, he is using wine as an instance of intoxicating beverages. Wine is a type of intoxicating beverage that represents the entire class. Implicit within Paul’s statement is an etcetera; we might reproduce his full meaning as, “Do not get drunk with wine (and things of that sort), for that is debauchery.”

This is how communication works. We can’t say everything all the time. We can’t identify every instance of every type. And so, we frequently will the type of thing that we mean, and trust that, using language and shared context, our audience is able to discern the boundaries of our meaning.

How Good Readers Interpret

Much more could be said about meaning. But being a good reader means learning to think clearly about the task of interpretation. When we interpret, we are looking for the author’s intent or meaning. This original intent is distinct from the significance of that meaning to us. The author is the source of meaning, and the text is the means of meaning. Because the text is public, readers are able to attend to the author’s intention embedded in his words. And good readers attend both to the explicit and implicit dimensions of an author’s meaning.

The task of interpretation does not exhaust our responsibilities as readers, especially as Christian readers who are interpreting for ourselves or trying to help friends like Steve. As mentioned above, our school seeks to teach students to evaluate, feel, apply, and express what they learn from their reading. But none of those steps can happen apart from patient, persistent, humble observation and understanding — that is, hard work. And that hard work of good reading is not without great reward.