ABSTRACT: Some Christians presume the story of evangelicalism in America to be one of steady decline, from the robust faith of the founding generation to the increasing secularism of today. In fact, America was far more evangelical in 1860 than it was in 1776. The Second Great Awakening of the mid-1800s brought a surge of new members into the nation’s churches, especially its Methodist and Baptist churches, both of which sought to reach the masses on the frontiers and among the slave populations. Whether America on the eve of the Civil War can be called a “Christian nation” is doubtful; nevertheless, in 1860 the nation was more deeply influenced by evangelical faith than it ever had been before, or ever has been since.

For our ongoing series of feature articles for pastors, leaders, and teachers, we asked Thomas Kidd, Vardaman Distinguished Professor of History at Baylor University, to trace the development of evangelical faith from America’s founding through the Second Great Awakening.

Brilliant as he may have been as a writer, Thomas Jefferson was a lousy religious demographer. In 1822, he wrote to his friend Benjamin Waterhouse about the future of American religion, and his preference for a non-Trinitarian, naturalistic version of Christianity. After denouncing the “demoralizing dogmas of Calvin,” the former president issued a bold prediction: “I trust that there is not a young man now living in the U.S. who will not die a Unitarian.”1 If there were a list of the all-time worst religious predictions in American history, this would have to be at the top of it.

“By the eve of the Civil War, America was as deeply influenced by evangelical faith as it ever had been before.”

Even as Jefferson wrote — much to his chagrin — the Second Great Awakening was turning America into a heavily evangelical nation. By the eve of the Civil War, America was as deeply influenced by evangelical faith as it ever had been before, or ever has been since.

Scarce Among the Founders

Evangelical Christianity was not inconsequential at the time of the American founding, of course. For example, we can thank evangelical Christians, especially Baptists, for many of the Revolutionary-era gains in religious liberty. Non-evangelical politicians such as Jefferson and James Madison depended on rank-and-file Baptists to pressure state governments to drop their official state denominations, or “establishments” of religion. Virginia abolished its official tie to the Church of England (or Episcopal Church) in 1786, guaranteeing all Virginia citizens liberty of conscience. This created a veritable free market of religion in the state. Virginia’s move was a critical precedent for the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, with its prohibition on a national established denomination, and its promise of “free exercise of religion” for all. It was not only evangelicals who wanted full religious liberty, but it would be hard to imagine America achieving religious freedom to the extent that it did without the aid of evangelical Christians.

Yet evangelicals did not have anything like the dominant religious and cultural position in 1776 that they would enjoy by the 1850s. Among the major Founders, evangelicals were rare. To find clear examples of evangelical believers, one has to look to lesser-known leaders such as John Jay of New York, author of a few of the Federalist essays, and first Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. Then there’s the devout Roger Sherman of Connecticut, the only person to have signed all four great state papers of the American founding: the Continental Association,2 the Declaration of Independence, the Articles of Confederation, and the Constitution. Among the most recognizable Founders, there were moderate but deistic-leaning Anglicans such as George Washington, wandering and reticent figures such as Alexander Hamilton,3 Unitarians such as Jefferson and John Adams, and self-described deists such as Ben Franklin. Dyed-in-the-wool evangelicals were scarce.

Born out of the Great Awakening in the 1740s, the evangelical movement was growing across America in 1776, but it remained a minority within most segments of American Christianity. The dominant denominations in America prior to 1776, including Anglicans, Presbyterians, and Congregationalists, usually had a conflicted attitude toward the revivals and revivalists of the First Great Awakening. Church of England officials had an especially rocky relationship with George Whitefield, the leading evangelist of the Great Awakening, who died on his last visit to America in 1770. By the mid-1740s, many Congregationalist ministers in New England also had denounced Whitefield as a rabble-rouser. These “Old Light” Congregationalists had their counterpart in “Old Side” Presbyterians, who worried that revivalists would splinter the churches and bring established ministers into disrepute.

Even many of the pre–Great Awakening Baptist churches in America opposed the revivals. But the Separate Baptists changed that stance. The Separate Baptists were former Congregationalists who not only supported the revivals, but who questioned the validity of infant baptism. Separate Baptists started to become the most dynamic evangelical group in America during the mid-1740s. By the 1750s, they transported their fervor from New England, where they originated, to the southern colonies. This began the century-long transformation of the South into America’s “Bible Belt.”

Rise of Methodism

Arguably the key factor in the story of American evangelical ascendancy was Methodism. Going back to his student days, Whitefield was considered a type of Methodist, because of his association with John and Charles Wesley, and with the so-called Holy Club of pious students at Oxford. But the Wesleys spent little time in America, and John Wesley and George Whitefield had a terrible split during the Great Awakening, due to differences over their respective Arminian and Calvinist beliefs. For a quarter century, they would struggle even to get back on speaking terms. Thus, Wesleyan Methodism had almost no impact on American revivals until the 1760s, when Wesleyan preachers began to appear in Virginia and Maryland.

In the early 1770s, John Wesley vociferously opposed the burgeoning American Patriot movement. The small numbers of Methodist preachers in America accordingly had to lay low, or return to Britain, during the American Revolution, for fear of Patriot reprisals. After the Revolutionary War (1775–1783) ended, Wesleyan Methodists came to the fore again. Wesley granted the American Methodists their functional independence in 1784, ensuring that the denomination would remain nimble and responsive to local American conditions. By the mid-1780s, the Methodists were seeing massive numbers of conversions and new church members, especially in the mid-Atlantic states.

One of the Methodists’ converts-turned-preachers was the former slave Richard Allen, who would go on to become one of Methodism’s most formidable leaders and the organizer of the Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Philadelphia. Bethel was one of the founding churches of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, the first African American–led denomination in the country. Few African Americans were affiliated with any churches at all during the American colonial period. By the 1780s, groups such as the Methodists and Baptists began to make great evangelistic inroads among African Americans. They were especially effective when these groups employed blacks such as Allen as preachers and evangelists. When most enslaved African people had arrived in America, they had no Christian background whatsoever. The Second Great Awakening represented a major pivot in the mass conversion of most of the African American population, at least nominally, to some kind of Protestant faith.

“The Second Great Awakening represented a major pivot in the mass conversion of most of the African American population.”

Before the Civil War, some of those African American Christians attended black-pastored churches such as Richard Allen’s. In the South, it was more common for black Christians to formally attend white-pastored congregations. There were also functionally independent (and often secret) “brush arbor” meetings, held by enslaved people in isolated groves on the plantations. We often think of early America as a time of pervasive Christian commitment, but that was decidedly not the case for the enslaved population of the colonies. But the Second Great Awakening began to change the religious character of the American enslaved population. By the 1840s, the evangelization of the African American population (free or slave) was hardly complete, but the church had already become the most important social institution in the African American community.4

Methodism experienced the most remarkable growth of any of the evangelical churches between the Revolution and the Civil War. Methodist organizers such as Allen, Francis Asbury, and countless other itinerants and “circuit riders” kept up with the breakneck pace of population growth in the early American republic. Their tireless evangelistic and church-planting efforts explain much of the Methodist surge during the era. By 1784, there were around 15,000 American Methodists. Within six years, that number had increased fourfold to 60,000; by 1810, there were some 150,000 Methodist adherents in the nation. By the 1840s, as the sectional crisis over slavery loomed, the Methodist Church had become the largest denomination in America.5

Revived Baptists

Were it not for the Methodists, we might regard the Baptists’ expansion before the Civil War as the most remarkable story of religious growth in American history. The Baptists had an older history in America than the Methodists did, dating back to the early colonial period. Some of the Regular Baptists did support the Great Awakening, at least tentatively, but the Separate Baptists put the denomination on a path of massive revivalist increases on the trans-Appalachian frontier. Baptists claimed about 35,000 members as of 1784, but grew to 170,000 by 1810. The Methodists soon exceeded Baptist membership, however, only to be overtaken again by the Southern Baptist Convention as the nation’s largest Protestant denomination during the mid-twentieth century.

As of 1800, almost all Baptists were moderate or strict Calvinists.6 The new Freewill Baptist denomination had begun to challenge Calvinism’s supremacy among the Baptists, however. By the 1820s, doctrinaire Calvinism waned among many mainstream Baptists. Hard Calvinist conviction became more characteristic of the Primitive Baptists, who also opposed newfangled national missionary societies, such as ones sponsored by the Baptists’ Triennial Convention. The Primitive Baptists regarded these missionary societies as unbiblical and elitist.7 Many Presbyterian and Congregationalist pastors remained Calvinists, though, and revivalist Christianity and Reformed theology found important institutional homes in new schools such as Andover Theological Seminary (1807) and Princeton Theological Seminary (1812). Older divinity schools such as Harvard’s came under the influence of Unitarian and Transcendentalist thought.

Arminian Popularity

Overall, evangelicals during the Second Great Awakening took a big step toward becoming more theologically Arminian, due especially to the increasing dominance of Wesleyan Methodism. This is an aspect of the Second Great Awakening that Reformed or Calvinist readers might well view with concern and ambivalence. The evangelical faith of the First Great Awakening in America (less so in Britain) was almost uniformly Calvinist. That of the Second Great Awakening was a mix of Calvinist and Arminian convictions. If Jonathan Edwards’s theology was representative of the First Great Awakening, John Wesley’s was more typical of the Second. Calvinist revivalism certainly retained an important place on the Anglo-American religious scene, but Calvinism’s former dominance was becoming increasingly contested by Arminian perspectives on free will, the atonement, and other doctrinal issues.

This turn toward popular Arminian theology was capped by the enormous success of Charles Finney in the northern states in the 1830s. Finney was not the most precise or consistent theologian, but there can be no doubt that his philosophy of revival was more human-centered than Edwards’s. It clashed with Edwards’s well-known emphasis on the sovereignty of God in conversions and awakenings. Finney’s wildly popular Lectures on Revivals of Religion (1835) reviled the notion that people needed to wait on God to do anything in revival. God had given churches and ministers all they needed to see revival happen; the only contingency was whether people would obey God by praying for and preaching revival. With Finney, the concept of a planned revival, foreign to Edwards’s view of the “surprising” nature of true awakening, became a standard feature of American evangelical culture. “Religion is the work of man,” Finney explained. “It is something for man to do.” Finney regarded the notion of the church waiting on God to send revival as devilish. Instead, God was waiting on the church to obey him in seeking revival.

Finney became famous (or notorious, in critics’ eyes) for his use of “new measures” to induce revival, such as protracted, multiday meetings. The characteristic new measure was the “anxious seat” or bench, where men or women wishing to break through to assurance of salvation could come to the front of a sanctuary and receive prayer and exhortations to believe. Finney also followed John Wesley in his emphasis on holiness, and the prospect that devout believers could achieve a virtual state of sinless perfection in this life. This state did not necessarily last forever, or render it impossible for the believer to sin. Yet Finney and his followers taught that God’s call to holiness was not impossible to meet. After conversion, there was an opportunity to consecrate one’s life entirely to God, and to live for stretches of time with no taint of sin at all.8

Women Leaders

The evangelical movement always had powerful female figures, such as Whitefield’s patron Selina Hastings, or Sarah Osborn, whose small home became the epicenter of a remarkable revival in Newport, Rhode Island, in the 1760s. Limited numbers of women were chosen as deaconesses or eldresses in certain Baptist congregations in the mid- to late 1700s. But virtually all evangelicals understood that there were biblical and historic limits on women’s formal authority in congregations. Most obviously, women were not permitted to become ordained ministers. The Arminian proponents of revivalist Christianity — again following the example of John Wesley — tended to be more open to informal speaking and offices for women than were traditional Calvinists. These roles even led occasionally to arguments for the legitimacy of women serving formally as pastors and preachers.

One such advocate for female preaching was Jarena Lee. Lee, born to free African American parents in New Jersey, worked as a domestic servant in Philadelphia, and experienced conversion under the preaching of Richard Allen. She was baptized in 1807. Lee was inclined toward charismatic piety, and she believed that God called her in a vision to become a preacher. She requested that Allen and the Methodists appoint her as an evangelist, a request that Allen denied. This did not stop her from becoming a sought-after exhorter and an independent Methodist itinerant. Allen later relented and ordained her in the African Methodist Episcopal Church. Lee wrote, “If the man may preach, because the Saviour died for him, why not the woman? seeing he died for her also. Is he not a whole Saviour, instead of a half one?”9 Despite such occasional protests, it remained far more common for evangelicals to adhere to limitations on women’s public teaching, guided by passages such as 1 Timothy 2:12 or 1 Corinthians 14:34–35.

Splits and Sects

Biblicism was a defining mark of the evangelical movement, but as seen in Jarena Lee’s struggle to preach, or in Wesley and Whitefield’s feud over Calvinism, biblicism did not end disagreements among evangelicals regarding what the Bible taught. This problem became more acute during the Second Great Awakening. American evangelicals grew more individualistic, and confident about the power of reason to interpret Scripture, without the aid of creeds, confessions, or church tradition. This kind of populist biblicism led to an incredible proliferation of new denominations and sectarian movements in the first half of the nineteenth century. The end of established state churches also fueled the centrifugal trend within evangelicalism. Before the Revolution, the established Church of England, and the Congregationalist churches in New England, kept a lid on disruptive church practices or aberrant theology, and they could employ the force of the state to suppress dissent. Now, the same freedom that allowed for the phenomenal growth of the Baptists and Methodists led to the virtually unchecked work of other new religious movements, prophets, exhorters, and visionaries.

Some of these movements developed jarringly innovative theology, and in the case of the Mormons, entirely new scriptures. Other movements, such as the Churches of Christ, would go on to become standard fixtures of the American Protestant landscape. The Churches of Christ, led by figures such as Barton Stone and Alexander Campbell, were the ultimate products of the evangelical “Bible alone” ethos. Stone and Campbell imagined that through an unaided, plain reading of Scripture, they could take their movement back to the simple purity of the New Testament church. This effort led to distinctive priorities such as prohibiting the use of musical instruments in worship services. Not even members of the Churches of Christ could agree whether such strictures were truly biblical, however, leading to a split that divided the Churches of Christ from the Disciples of Christ in the late nineteenth century.10 Evangelicals were finding that sola scriptura, while an indisputable first principle of Protestants, was more difficult to practice in a unifying fashion when it was unmoored from Christian history and creedal traditions.

Reaching the Masses

For better or worse, then, the Second Great Awakening was arguably more formative than the First in American religious and cultural history. The first reason for its massive impact is that by the mid-1800s, white and black Americans were far more “churched” than they had been in 1776. In 1776, church life in America was more urban-centered and exclusively white than it was by 1860, when evangelical churches had made much progress in reaching frontier white populations and the African American community, both free and enslaved. Whites remained the leaders of most churches and denominations, yet African Americans not only were surging into Baptist and Methodist congregations but sometimes led their own churches and even denominations, as Richard Allen did. The vast church-planting initiative led by Baptists and Methodists not only facilitated the conversion of untold thousands of Americans, but it also provided basic social structure to the burgeoning frontier. For many frontier settlers or enslaved people on plantations, the church was the only social support outlet they had.

“The Second Great Awakening was arguably more formative than the First in American religious and cultural history.”

The second reason that the Second Great Awakening was so consequential was that it led to a range of ambitious missionary and moral reform initiatives. The formal evangelical missionary movement had begun in Britain in the 1790s, but American evangelicals readily adapted to missions too, initiating evangelistic works in city slums, in Native American villages, and to the ends of the earth. Through agencies such as the American Bible Society (founded in 1816), evangelicals made physical copies of the Bible nearly ubiquitous in American homes. Finally, Christians in the Second Great Awakening era took on moral reform causes, such as ministering to the homeless and to prostitutes, curbing alcohol abuse, and opening countless schools and colleges. Some evangelicals engaged in antislavery activism, too, though their influence among evangelical whites was exceeded by proslavery sentiment, especially in the South.

Christian America?

To conclude, let’s return to Jefferson’s faulty prediction. Unitarianism may have been growing in 1822, but on the broader American religious landscape, it was hardly the main event. Americans, especially devout Protestants, tend to recall the American founding as a time of intense Christian fervor, and maybe even evangelical dominance. Sometimes they imply that American history has been a story of decline and decay from that idyllic origin of 1776. As usual, the historical truth is more complicated. America was far more churched and more evangelical in 1860 than it was in 1776.

Did this mean that America was a “Christian nation” by 1860? The brutal nature of chattel slavery, and the ruthless expropriation of Native American lands, should give us pause about making unequivocal claims to Christian identity for the nation, even by 1860. In terms of religious adherence, however, America on the eve of the Civil War was probably as Christian as it ever has been in its history. Indeed, the era of the Second Great Awakening demonstrates the incredible capacity of churches focused on the Great Commission to transform the religious character of a nation.

Zach Howard: I am Professor Zach Howard, dean of the college programs here and professor of theology and humanities, and it’s my joy to welcome you into this conversation we’re going to have here about Dr. Piper’s recent book. We have some students here who have read the book and have some questions and we’re glad you’re here to listen in on that conversation. This is the book we all have in our hands, Foundations for Lifelong Learning: Education in Serious Joy. Pastor John, I’m curious what the book’s about and why you wrote it.

John Piper: Let me just illustrate how it works. That would be the best way to do it. We believe that there are six habits of mind and heart for lifelong learning. You get a start here and you do this the rest of your life: observation, understanding, evaluation, feeling, application, and expression.

For example, a few weeks ago I was working on Look at the Book in 1 Corinthians 15, and I noticed that in 1 Corinthians 15:1–2 it says that Paul has preached the gospel, “which you believe and which you stand, by which you are being saved, if you don’t believe in vain” (my translation).

Now, I had never noticed before that 1 Corinthians 15:10 says that God’s grace “was not in vain toward me, but I worked harder than any of them. Nevertheless, it was not I but the grace of God that was with me” (my translation).

So, I observed and thought, “Those are connected.” I had also never noticed in 1 Corinthians 15:58, the end of the chapter, “Therefore, my beloved brothers, be steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, knowing that in the Lord your labor is not in vain.” Now I had three observations, two of which I never had before. That’s level one.

Next is understanding. I’m asking, what’s that about? Why are those verses there? Do they shed light on each other? Are they interwoven in some way? And there’s a pattern there. You believe not in vain because grace comes to you; grace is not in vain because it enables you to work hard; and you work hard and that work is not in vain because there’s a resurrection from the dead. That’s the pattern. This chapter is about not living in vain.

Then you evaluate. Is that important? It’s life-and-death important, right? If I believe in vain, I’m dead. I’m going to hell if I believe in vain. So, the evaluation is off-the-charts important.

What about feeling? What should I feel? I should feel fear if I’m drawn away from the gospel and start to live my life in vain, believe in vain. I should feel fear, or I should feel motivated to fly to grace so that I do the work he’s called me to do.

Then comes application. Devote yourself to living in the promises of God, because they’re the ones that enable you to do the obedience that you’re called to do by grace.

And finally comes expression. I’m doing this right now. That’s a little, three-minute introduction to those six habits that are being expressed to you because I had that experience.

That’s what I mean by the six. I live this way. In fact, I think I say in the closing part of the book that I began the book doing six habits of lifelong learning, and I end by saying that these are six habits of lifelong living. This is the way I live.

Very briefly, it works outside the Bible too. I drove to the airport a week ago to go to TGC, and I drove by and I saw the tent out here. There are people living in a tent 50 feet from here. That’s my observation. I observed that and I said, “I’m going over there when I get home. I’m going to talk to those people and get some understanding and ask, ‘What’s your situation?’” I don’t like this. I don’t like this happening by my church. I want to help.

So, I walked over yesterday when I got home, got off the airplane, greeted my wife, and I changed my clothes because I didn’t want to look too weird to the tent people, and I went there. They were all gone. The one had a big sign up that said, “Move the stuff or we’ll move it out.” But oh, how I got some understanding.

There’s so much stuff out there that it would take a pickup to move it away. This did not happen overnight. Some understanding was happening. They didn’t just show up here and pitch their tent. This required days of gathering stuff that’s out there. There are kids’ toys out there. I took a picture. I’ve got it on my phone here, and I showed it to my wife and we analyzed it. There were sleeping bags and a radio and there were kids’ toys in there. So, that was a little bit of an understanding.

I talked to a guy on the way home and he said, “Yeah, I talked to him and they want the new drug. It’s called Go-Fast. It’s a combination of cocaine and fentanyl. This is what they told me. It’s really dangerous. That’s what they were asking for.” I had a little more understanding, maybe. I took his word for it. I got home and I had some understanding, then I evaluated it. This is sad; this is common. This is in every city in America right now. Nobody has an answer at all for homelessness.

So, now what? I have an evaluation, what should I feel? I feel anger at the situation. I feel frustrated because nobody knows what to do. I feel like I’ve got to do something. This is like the rich man and Lazarus, right? I can’t walk by this every day, feasting sumptuously at home, living in my nice house, and not caring or doing anything. I’ve got these feelings keeping me awake at night, and then I look for some application.

I went online and typed in “emergency care housing,” and dozens and dozens of resources came up, if connections could be made in this city for homeless people. All you have to do is go online to find them. And then there’s the expression, which is what I’m doing right now.

It works in the Bible, and it works outside the Bible. This is the way I think we should live, and we should get better and better at observing, understanding, evaluating, feeling, applying, and expressing.

Howard: You just heard that a lot of these students are upperclassmen and we’ve been doing this in the classroom, and they’ve read your book and they’re coming with questions about how you articulated it, and they’re wanting to do exactly what you just described with the book. So, I’m going to unleash them to ask those questions. Maybe we can start with Andrew over here. What’s your question, Andrew?

Andrew Hague: I know you love the Bible, and I know you know that it’s paramount for the Christian walk, and you say as much in your book. You write, “The Bible is the compass that keeps all our reading from unfruitful directions. Being saturated with the Bible enables us to test all things and hold fast the good in everything we read.” You also write, “Nothing is more important to observe in all our observing than Jesus himself, especially as he shines in the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ.” So, my question is this: if this is true, why the liberal arts? Why shouldn’t students go to a school whose chancellor says, “This is not a liberal arts school”?

Piper: Here’s some truth in advertising — I have notes. I’ve seen these questions, thank goodness. I said to this gang, these were hard. Half of them were hard. I worked all yesterday afternoon and all this morning on these questions, so there you go. I’m not winging anything. I don’t wing anything that I don’t have to wing, and that one was one of the hardest for me.

Why should we even have a liberal arts college? He’s asking, “You say the Bible is of paramount importance, but we spend many hours in classes studying philosophy and history and anthropology and human nature and politics, and then here’s the Bible. Why don’t you have a Bible school, and say, ‘We’re not a liberal arts college; we’re a Bible school’?”

Observation number one: we make no claim to perfection with regard to proportion. How much time should you spend in class and in your personal life devoted to rigorous, face-to-face Bible study? You should ask yourself that question. Right now in your life, how much should you do that, and how much should you devote to your vocation and leisure and all the other things that go into your life? We don’t claim to have it perfect. Every school does this differently, whether you call them Bible school, Christian arts college, or whatever. We all work at a proportion that we think is going to bear good fruit in these students’ lives. That’s the first observation.

Observation number two: these four years are unusual years. They’re not normal. You get four golden years to do some things you’ll never be able to do again in this proportion. And there is a huge world of history and philosophy and politics and all kinds of access to human nature out there, outside the Bible, and there’s the Bible. We believe that in order to live in the world, you need to know the world. You need to know the roots of the world that you live in. You need to know the way the world thinks and the way the world puts itself together and leaves deposits in books, especially. We think it’s very difficult to talk with people, converse with people, and live with people who live most of their lives dealing with their vocational issues, their political issues, and their personal-problem issues if you don’t have any experience, directly or indirectly, with those kinds of issues in which they live.

Now, there are lots of other ways to come at it, but it’s a big, big world out there. I thought to myself, if all of life outside the Bible, all of history, and everything that’s been written down about human nature and about nature and society could be written in a 1,000-page book, that might change things. Because that’s what the Bible is. It’s 1,100 pages long. Suppose all that could be known could be written in 1,100 pages. That would change things, wouldn’t it? How much time you would devote to that 1,100-page book and this 1,100-page book would be dramatically different, but we don’t have one book that captures all that’s ever been thought, all that’s ever been created, and all that’s ever been practiced.

We have thousands of books and thousands of years of history, and so much of it is rich with wisdom and insight about how to do it and how not to do it, and to be exposed to that reality will enable a person to take the Bible and live more wisely and more effectively in the world than if one only studied the Bible.

So, whether we’ve got the proportion right or not, we’re working at it, and I think the way we do it is not the way everybody does it. It’s not the way everybody should do it. And one of the reasons some of you are here is to find out, Does this taste like the way I want to do it?

Melanie Amarante: Going deeper into that, in your introduction to the book and in the first habit — that is, observation — you quote the Bible many times. I will read a quote of yours. You say, “God created the world to communicate truth about himself.” And all these Bible verses talk about nature and the created world. However, this school is more focused on unregenerate authors. And the question is, How can one see God’s glory through something as corrupted as the history of religions?

Or another way to say it is, How can we see God’s beauty through the lenses of men who can’t? Shouldn’t we try to avoid these writers and just stick to those who are regenerate and who actually can see the glory of God that is in creation, and not through the ones that it may be even dangerous for us to see what they have been seeing?

Piper: When I read that sentence, I thought that was a really good way of asking this question. How can you see the glory of God through the lens of a person who can’t see the glory of God? That’s good. I like that. Well done. A couple of questions were like this. I’m going to get them all jumbled up.

There’s a principle, and the principle goes like this: God created everything that’s not God, and all of it reveals something of God. It all reveals something of God, but that revelation is a manifestation of God; it is not God. The demonstration of the glory of God is not the glory of God.

Unbelievers can see the manifestation and not see God. They can see the manifestation often way better than you can as a regenerate person. The easiest illustration would be scientists who build telescopes and send them into orbit, and they send back pictures, and those scientists are on their faces with awe. Albert Einstein said that one of the reasons he didn’t go to church was because he had seen so much more glory than the preachers. He thought it was like they were not talking about the real thing. I’ll tell you, when I read that years ago, I just said that’s not going to happen to me. If he comes to my church, I don’t want him to say that. But he might because he’s a good seer. He sees, and not just galaxies.

I’m watching the Discovery Institute guys and hearing them talk about the cellular machines in our bodies at the level of atoms and subatomic particles and the kind of things that happen in our cells. Unbelieving scientists are flabbergasted at the complexity of it all. A few of them actually make the jump out of secular evolution into God. So here we have unbelievers, at the microlevel and the macrolevel, seeing things the rest of us aren’t seeing. Now, when I read what they see, I see God. They didn’t, but I do.

I typed in the optical illusion of an old woman and a young woman. Do you know what I’m talking about? Okay, most of you know. You have an optical illusion, and you’re looking at this picture, and depending on who you are, you see an old woman or a beautiful young woman. The nose of this witch makes her look really ugly, but the nose is the cheek line of the beautiful girl. Now, that’s exactly the way it works. The world looks at nature and they see an ugly woman, or they see a beautiful woman, but we see God. We see the manifestation of God.

The short answer is that we don’t see God through his lens, spiritually speaking. We look through his lens, this unbeliever who has just seen something, and see God. And this is not just true of nature. Unbelievers can write amazing analyses of human culture and get it all wrong, but they see some amazing things, and we see them, and we can think, “Oh my, that implies this, this, and this.” And with the Bible, it all makes sense. But they don’t see how it makes sense.

So, we look through what they’re seeing — their telescope or their microscope or their analysis of culture — and we see the truth that they don’t see. I think that happens all the time, and that’s one of the reasons — back to Andrew’s question — that we should pay attention to really shrewd observers who are not yet believers.

Amarante: That helps me read the next hundred pages I have of history, so thank you.

Piper: You’re welcome.

Graham Litrenta: My question is also about this interaction between special and general revelation. You say at one point, “Honing our skills of understanding God’s word fits us for understanding God’s world, all of it.” I was wondering if there’s also a similar, reverse way to go about that. Can understanding God’s world and his creation help us understand the Book, the word, better? And are there particular risks or rewards associated with that?

Piper: Just to make sure, I’ll say what I’m hearing and see if that’s what you heard. We love to emphasize that in order to know the world rightly, you need to know the Bible so that when you go to the world with the Bible, you see the world more clearly. You understand the world better because God’s perspective on the world is the true perspective. This question is the reverse. Can you go to the world, study, learn, observe, and be a better Bible reader because of it? Does your reading of the Bible get enriched by observing God’s other book called the world? And the answer is that the Bible expects you to, and it demands you to. You cannot understand the Bible if you don’t live in the world with your eyes open. You can’t. You won’t even know the words, right?

There are words that the Bible assumes you learned before you came to the Bible, right? Here are some examples: vineyard, wine, wedding, lions, bears, horses, dogs, pigs, grasshoppers, constellations, businesses, wages, banks, fountains, springs, rivers, fig trees, olive trees, mulberry trees, thorns, wind, thunderstorms, bread, baking, armies, swords, shields, sheep, shepherds, cattle, camels, fire, green wood, dry wood, hay, stubble, jewels, gold, silver, law courts, judges, and advocates. The Bible defines none of those.

If you go to the Bible and you don’t know what green wood is, what are you going to do when Jesus says, “if they do this while the wood is green, what will they do when it’s dry?” (see Luke 23:31). What was that? You have to go camping. Dad sends a kid out to get some wood, and he gets all green wood, and he throws it on the fire. Nothing happens. Jesus is green wood. It’s hard to burn Jesus, and they’re doing it anyway. They’re killing him. But oh, those who are ripe for judgment are dry wood. And when the fire comes in 70 AD, this place is burning.

So, there are just dozens of ways the Bible expects us to have gone to school outside the Bible and come to the Bible with a whole store of knowledge that the Bible assumes that we already have. Let me just give another kind of illustration.

Consider some emotions, like love, joy, peace, patience, goodness, kindness, and meekness, or consider the negatives like anger or clamor. “The anger of man does not work the righteousness of God” (James 1:20, my translation). I don’t think you can have anything but a dilettante, merely academic knowledge of the Bible if you’ve never been angry, or if you’ve never seen patience. The word “patience” in the Bible is a word. It’s not patience, it’s a word. Patience is a reality. Joy is a reality. Love is a reality. The only way to taste reality is to taste reality. Those are words.

So, I think understanding sentences like “the anger of man does not work the righteousness of God” means for John Piper to get on his face and deal with his bent to anger, how I relate to my wife, and how I relate to situations in the world where my first trigger response is anger and not compassion.

I have to go inside of me and say, okay, the reason it says this does not work the righteousness of God is because this anger is killing everything in me that’s good. It’s eating up like a monster every other good emotion. I’m watching it do it. I’ve seen it in others. If you grow up in a home where there’s nothing but anger and your dad is angry all the time, where are you emotionally at age 19? You’re angry. You’ve got one or two other tiny little emotions that can rise above the fray. You have to know yourself.

So, those are two illustrations of living with our eyes open. Our understanding faculties and our evaluating enable us to come back to the Bible with greater insight. He said, I think, at the end, what are the “risks and rewards”? Benefits I just talked about, and the risk is huge. I say something to my preaching classes about this. It starts on Monday, and I’m so excited. I love teaching preaching here.

I’m going to say to those guys against all other counsel, bring your experience to the Bible. Most homiletics teachers say, “No, no, no. You don’t interpret the Bible in the light of your experience; you interpret your experience in light of the Bible.” And I get that. I say amen. However, it works the other way. It really does work the other way. If you don’t live with anger and live with joy, and you come and you get that word joy, that word anger, you’ll just be an academic dilettante.

When you try to talk in front of people with that kind of disposition, they’ll say, “That’s artificial, man. You’ve been to school too long. You have to live. You have to open your eyes and live.” So, I think the risk is real. And here’s the risk. The risk is that somebody hears Piper say, “Bring your experience to the Bible,” and they bring their experience to the Bible, and they mute what doesn’t fit their experience. For example, you have a friend who tells you, “I’m coming out as a same-sex attracted person.” You really like this person. You don’t want to hurt them. You don’t want to offend them. Biblically, you have a sense that it’s not right, and you need to approach this another way.

Your emotions and your relationship and your experience become so strong that your mouth shuts, and you don’t say, “If you walk into that and live there, that’s going to be sin. That’s going to ruin your life.” You don’t say it. And you come back, and you see the Bible says, “Love your neighbor as you love yourself” (see Matthew 22:39). And you can think, “I’m loving him. I’m loving him.” And you just mute 1 Corinthians 6:9, which says that those who do such things will not enter into the kingdom of heaven. You just wipe that out of the Bible because your experience is so strong in desiring not to offend that you just shut that down.

So, if you’re hearing me say, “Bring your experience to the Bible and let your experience shut the Bible down in its meaning,” you’re hearing me wrong.

Howard: About halfway through the book, when you get to the topic or the habit of feeling, you talk about it as a hinge habit. Evaluating and feeling are the hinges between observing and understanding along with applying and expressing. I think there were actually a number of questions here about that idea of feeling in particular. I just want to jump into several of those because that seems really important, what you just were doing in talking about observing your own anger, right?

Piper: Yes.

Howard: Feelings are really important. It seems that can help us or hinder us in rightly observing and understanding, or applying and expressing. I think, Riley, you have a question about these feelings.

Riley Carpenter: I naturally see how observing or understanding or evaluating or applying are all a part of learning, but it takes me a little bit more mental energy to figure out how feeling is necessary for the project of learning. So, I’m curious because you have it as an essential habit of the heart and mind. What do we miss as learners if we don’t feel appropriately about the things we’re learning?

Piper: Number one, what you’ll miss if you do not feel appropriately about your experiences in life and the things you observe and understand is that you will miss the capacity or the ability or the opportunity to glorify God as you ought. Because we believe here — and I’ve written endlessly about it — that God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in him.

Satisfaction is a feeling, and I’m arguing that if God is in something and we discern him, there’s an appropriate feeling, and that appropriate feeling will magnify something about God. It will correspond to what he’s just revealed of himself. If it’s judgment, fear; if it’s glory and beauty, then it’s joy. So, feelings that are stunted at that moment deny God a reflection of his glory. That’s answer number one.

Second, obedience will be forsaken because the Bible commands feelings on almost every page. I’ve made a list. It commands not to covet, it commands contentment, it commands fear, it commands hope, it commands joy, it commands zeal, it commands gratitude, it commands brotherly affection, it commands tenderheartedness, it commands lowliness, it commands contrition, it commands sorrowful empathy, it commands sympathy, and on and on. Feelings are not cabooses. My wife told me not everybody knows that word.

Howard: They haven’t been living in the world enough.

Piper: Is that an old-fashioned word? It’s the thing at the end of the train that looks useless. It’s where the staff lives, I think. Feelings are not cabooses; they’re the engine. I’m indicting big swaths of American evangelicals when I say that. Feelings are the engine. So, let me mention one more thing. When I say you’ll miss out on obedience, I mean that right feelings are the engine of love. One of my favorite verses for illustrating how Christian Hedonism produces love for people by love for God is in 2 Corinthians 8:2. It says that in a severe test of affliction, their abundance of joy and their extreme poverty overflowed with a wealth of liberality toward the poor saints in Jerusalem.

So, you have extreme poverty, and you have extreme affliction. You don’t have what you do need and you’re getting beat up because you just became a Christian, and this abundance of joy is like a volcano in the midst of those two. This is not prosperity preaching, right? This is joy. Second Corinthians 8:1 says that it’s coming from grace. It’s coming down. Your sins are forgiven. You’re adopted into God’s family. You’re thinking, “I can’t believe I’m a child of God. My sins are forgiven. I’m going to heaven. Hallelujah. Take another offering.” That’s exactly what they say. They give once and then they plead with him to take another offering. So, where did that generosity come from? It just says it so plainly. The overflow of abundant joy produced generosity.

So, if you were to make the case, which you’re not, that feelings don’t matter but what matters is obedience, what matters is discipline, what matters is self-control, and what matters is devotion and duty, I think you’re not reading your Bible, and you are denying what 2 Corinthians 8:2 says is the fountain of generosity for the poor in Jerusalem. So, that would be another answer of what is missing, what you lose if we here at this school do not prioritize appropriate emotional responses to the reality we’re looking at. Let me mention one more thing.

You also lose the fullness of your humanity and the richness of relationships. I look out at this group right here, and you are all over the map on your emotional capacities and maturities and balance. Some of you are very stunted; others of you are very lopsided. You’re all one emotion and you can’t even feel the other. The pastor talks about wrath, and you say, “No, please talk about the niceness of God,” and you don’t have any capacity for exulting in the fact that we have a great, glorious God of judgment. You just can’t do that. It’s not who you are. Maybe it’s because of the way your dad was or whatever, but you’re stunted.

So, the richness and fullness that God is calling you to be is limited, and we would like to help. Only God can do this, but we would like to help. I know personally what some of my stuntings are, and I know the people I need to be around to fix that, at least partly.

In other words, the people you are around, you tend to become like them. You do if you admire them. And I have a few people like that. I’ll mention one. I admire Mark Dever and Capitol Hill, and I hope you’re watching, Mark. Mark’s personality is so dramatically different from mine, and I like so many things about it. I just like hanging out with him because I go home and I’m a better person with my wife. I really am.

So, we hope that happens here. We don’t want sick professors. Sick professors make sick students, and sick pastors make sick churches. We want to be emotionally healthy. That means the whole range of emotions from the hardest and most difficult over to the sweetest and simplest childlike emotions. We want the whole range of emotions for you to be around and feel. This is about the richness of personhood and relationships.

Let’s just take wives, for example, who are so sad because their husbands are such emotional dolts. They want so badly for the husband to say something tender or take a little time, show some empathy, and this husband is just an idiot. And it’s a deep, sad idiocy that is emotionally in need of a lot of enrichment. In other words, this relates to our relationships, our marriages, and our children.

It’s so important to be able to get down on the floor with a 2-year-old or 1-year-old and be an absolutely good idiot dad, so that the child just loves to play with daddy. He just loves to play with daddy because daddy is so happy when they play. There are just millions of kids that never get that ever because dad doesn’t have any idea how to do that. Okay, I’m talking too much. There are other questions.

Howard: Let’s have some more questions about emotions.

Beck Stabley: I’m the next question, but I just want to say I feel that in my almost four years at Bethlehem from the professors here. There is such a diversity of personalities, and that’s been something that I can just testify to. I certainly have felt the shaping influence of the differences in our professors in my own life.

Piper: That’s encouraging.

Stabley: My question is that on page 46 of your book, in the chapter entitled “Observation,” you say, “Self-conscious gladness is self-defeating.” You say this in the context of being a genuine learner, noting the insincerity of self-awareness in spontaneous delight. So, how does this idea fit with Lewis’s idea that the expression of praise in a delighted thing completes the delight itself? Does not the expression of enjoyment entail some form of self-consciousness?

Take, for example, the expression of self-conscious, glad-hearted praise in an exclamation I often pronounce to my husband out of my sheer delight in spending time with him. I often will say, “I am so happy right now. I’m just so happy.” That is sometimes the only way I can find to express my delight in him. It would seem from this example that the completion of gladness — that is, the praise — is necessarily self-conscious. “I” is the subject of that expression of praise, right?

Piper: Right.

Stabley: So, is this expression of delight self-defeating? That would be very disappointing to know. Or to ask it differently, how would you define self-conscious gladness?

Piper: Oh my goodness, that’s one of my favorite questions. I can’t believe it. That just rocked me. I would write parts of my book differently because of that question. Okay, so here’s what she’s saying. She hears me say that self-conscious gladness is a problem. I use the word “useless.” It’s troubling if I look in on my gladness and I become self-conscious about the experience of gladness in here. And she says, “I say to my husband sometimes, ‘I’m really happy right now because I’m with you,’ which is conscious of happiness.” So, Piper, should she say that? That’s a really good question.

Okay, it’s very personal, right? We’re both coming from the same place, namely, Lewis saying that lovers keep on telling each other how beautiful they are because the joy is not complete until it is expressed. That’s the principle behind this, that the overflow through expression of the joy I’m feeling in you right now is completing the joy. That’s why we keep on saying to each other, “You’re beautiful.”

However, what happens if you turn away from the beloved and start, negatively, navel-gazing? You think, “I wonder if I’m as happy as I should be. I wonder what it’s like to be happy here.” And suddenly you lose touch with her, or him, or God. That’s the danger I’m trying to work with. I don’t want people to be so consumed with the experience of gladness that they forget about the source of the gladness. That’s what we want to avoid.

I remember Sam Crabtree when he was candidating. We hired him for this sentence. In Tom Steller’s living room, he said, “Well, there’s a problem in worship because some people love loving God more than they love God.” I said, “I want you on my staff, buddy.” That sentence is worth a million dollars to me. I mean, did you hear that?

Howard: Did you pay him that much?

Piper: I have a lot of million-dollar possessions I don’t pay for. I could name them. Okay, now I’m going to lose my train of thought.

Howard: Sorry.

Piper: No, no, no. I was losing it anyway. Okay, back to the question of her statement, when she says, “I’m so happy right now.” Here’s my answer: I think that sentence is probably not very dangerous because it’s code language for “you make me very happy right now.” She said, “I feel very happy right now in your presence.” And I’m saying that’s code language. It’s just another way in your vocabulary of saying, “You, husband, make me very happy,” which is a much more you-oriented statement, though maybe not by much.

Even though she’s using the language of self-consciousness, she intends not to be analyzing her emotions at the moment, not to be preoccupied with her emotions at the moment, but to make much of her husband. That’s her point and that’s her goal, as long as we’re agreed on that and she’s not going inside and ruining the relationship by being excessively preoccupied with her own experience of her husband.

So, you’re okay and you can decide for yourself what you want to develop in terms of some nuance to your statement. But let me give some warning here. The reason this matters relationally is because you can be a single person and have this craving inside of you for a relationship. You think, “I have to have a relationship with a gal or with a guy.” And what you start to mean is, “I have to have this thing scratched.” So, you go online, do some dating thing, or you go to a bar or whatever, and what you’re thinking is not, “Is there a beautiful, intelligent, articulate, wise, spiritual person whom I could admire?” but rather, “Can somebody scratch where I itch?” That’s going to destroy you because the experience that feels like love is probably narcissism.

Howard: A lot of what I think these people are wondering is, okay, there are these six habits of mind and heart. I’m starting to get a sense for them. Maybe they’re already pretty obvious to me. I’ve been doing them for a while. How do we get out of here and live for the rest of our lives in a way that cultivates and carries out these habits of mind and heart? So, I think there are a few questions about how we do that. In other words, how shall we then live? Jackie, did you have a question about what that looks like?

Jackie Thorne: Yeah, I love this theme of cultivating a life of learning throughout the span of your lifetime. As I seek to do that and get older, I was struck by a quote you used by C.S. Lewis in your book. In Mere Christianity, he wrote, “There is no good trying to be more spiritual than God. God never meant man to be a purely spiritual creature. That is why he uses material things like bread and wine to put the new life into us. We may think this rather crude and unspiritual. God does not. He invented eating. He likes matter. He invented it.”

As I’m processing some of these questions and your responses of feeling, I’m also weighing some of the practicality of academic rigor and exhaustion. Exhaustion can sometimes lend itself to spiritual dryness even. So, how would you counsel students in an academic season, but also as lifelong learning students, who are just in a season of life where they’re trying to cultivate this? There are ways to look at how it relates to student life, but also we want to keep going after our academic time at school. So, how do we temper these things? We’re physical beings, but we’re spiritual creatures. How would you counsel us in that?

Piper: She’s picking up on Lewis when he says, “Don’t try to be more spiritual than God.” God made matter, which includes your skin and bones and sexual drives, your hair, your shape, your height, and your complexion. He likes matter. That’s amazing. I mean, you don’t make something you don’t like if you’re God. He made a universe of stuff. It’s just astonishing. And we will be stuff forever. That’s why there’s a resurrection of the body.

I just read the end of Luke 24 this morning where Jesus shows up and, for joy, they’re unbelieving. They’re thinking, “This is too good to be true.” And they think they’re seeing a ghost. And he says, “Here, touch me.” And they don’t do it. And he says, “Do you have anything to eat?” And they give him a piece of fish, and he eats it. That’s the resurrection body. Okay, so we are in this for keeps. And God chose to do it that way.

Now, it’ll be a spiritual body, which is unimaginable, but there’ll be some kind of continuity with this body. Her question is, “How do you navigate the goodness of it and the weakness and danger of it?” I wrote down here, “Immerse yourself in the Bible so deeply and steadily that you keep before you the good purposes of the body and the dangers of the body, because the Bible is really earnest about both.” For example, listen to 1 Corinthians 6:13. I remember the first time I saw this. I thought, “I can’t believe it says that.” It says, “The body is . . . for the Lord.” I get that — my mama told me that since the day I was born. She said, “Glorify God in your body.” And then it says, “And the Lord [is] for the body.” What?

The Lord is for the body, not against the body. That’s what it says. And then it says, “You are not your own, for you were bought with a price. So glorify God in your body” (1 Corinthians 6:19–20). Whether it’s your tongue, your hands, your feet, your eyes, or your sexual organs, make God look great by the way you handle your body. That’s life, and it’ll always be that way, forever. The way you use your body is to make Christ look magnificent, which would include being willing to be burned at the stake rather than renounce him. That’s one way to glorify God with your body. Paul said, “My earnest desire is that I would magnify Christ whether by life or by death” (see Philippians 1:20). So, there are some of the positives.

Another one would be Romans 12, where it says, “I beseech you by the mercies of God to present your bodies to God as living sacrifices” (see Romans 12:1). That’s saying, “Take me; use me whatever way you can,” which is why I think this whole issue of feelings and living out a healthy spiritual life is just so crucial. Or it’s like Jesus saying, “Let your light so shine that men may see your good deeds” (see Matthew 5:16). How are they going to see your good deeds? You do them with your body. There’s no other way. You do them with your body.

However, in Romans 7:23, Paul says, “I find in my members another law, the law of sin.” And therefore, Paul says in 1 Corinthians 9:27, “I pommel my body.” Literally, he says, “I give it a black eye, lest I myself should be a castaway.” His body is viewed by the Bible as a good thing, a God-created thing, a destined-for-glory thing, and it’s a great enemy when sin takes occasion to tempt us through the body. Lots of our temptations come through the body, not all. And many sins are more emotional, more spiritual. But lots of them come through the body. And therefore, Romans 8:13 says, “Put to death the deeds of the body.”

I’m right now shepherding a guy who might even be here. He won’t mind me sharing. He has real temptations with lust. I’m back and forth with emails, and we have been for a couple of years, and I’m trying to help him. He asked me about the contradiction that he saw in John Owen’s The Mortification of Sin. Owen says that we are saved by grace through faith, and then he says, “If you don’t put to death the deeds of the body, you will go to hell.” Which is it?

A lot of people have that question, and it’s a great question. And it shows a fundamental failure to grasp the essence of the Christian life. The essence of the Christian life is that you are a new, unleavened lump of dough; therefore, get the leaven out. That’s the Christian life. You are crucified with Christ, so put yourself to death. These paradoxes run all through Christian ethics. The essence is that if you’re a child of God, you are accepted, loved, forgiven, and righteous in Christ; now become what you are.

So, the body has to be renounced in order to reclaim it for who we really are. Basically, my answer is to be immersed in the Bible, to be readily aware of the glories and potential of worshiping and glorifying Christ in the body. And be aware of its pitfalls and its laws that Romans 7 says can really ruin you.

Thorne: How would you say you are specifically tempted to be more spiritual than God? What would be something you would see that students should watch for?

Piper: Let’s just take students as an example. You would be tempted to be more spiritual than God if you didn’t think you needed sleep. I remember when I was in graduate school it really baffled me that patience was said to be a fruit of the Spirit when I knew from experience that patience was a fruit of sleep. The less sleep I got, the shorter my fuse became. And my answer to how that contradiction works is that the reason patience is also a fruit of sleep is that the Holy Spirit gives you the humility to acknowledge you have a body. You’re not God. Go to bed.

Thorne: Okay, I will. I’ll go home.

Piper: And this will depend somewhat on your season of life. I know I have a daughter with a nine-week-old baby. This is not a sleep season. So I get that, and we do the best we can. But that would be just one example of thinking that we can ignore the demands of this body. Just take appetite for example, or exercise. A lot of you function as though you really are a gnostic. You really are people who think your body is just a mirage, like it doesn’t need any attention regarding what you eat and whether you sleep and whether you get exercise.

I’m saying if you want to be a properly spiritual person, you better pay attention to your body. God doesn’t want you to unnecessarily kill yourself. He might want you to kill yourself by being willing to sacrifice your body in a risky situation. But ordinarily, he doesn’t want you to kill yourself. “Thou shall not kill” applies to the person in the mirror as well as the person beside you in bed or on the street (Exodus 20:13). So, those would be a couple of examples.

Howard: We’ll have one more question. Katie, do you want to ask a question?

Katie Semple: In your chapter on understanding, you talked about the relationship between willing and understanding, and you said that God has made humans in such a way that the mind sees more clearly when the will inclines to the truth. So, my question is, as students who are taking in truth all day long from many different disciplines, we have opportunities day in and day out, hour by hour, to take in truth, submit to it, and obey it. How can we cultivate that kind of attitude so that we are doers of what we are learning?

Piper: Don’t miss the premise of that question. To me, it’s one of the most amazing verses in the Bible. It’s John 7:17, where Jesus says, “If your will is to do God’s will, you will know whether the teaching is from God or from men.” I remember sitting in a chapel at Wheaton College when a preacher read that, and I sat there thinking, “That changes everything.” To bring your will by grace somehow — that’s what you’re asking — into alignment with God enables you to know things.

My first part of the answer about how you cultivate a willing heart, an obedient heart for the sake of that kind of knowledge, is to be amazed at that verse. Just be amazed that in God’s way of reckoning, right willing often precedes right knowing.

Now, the flip side works also: you know in order to will rightly. That’s true. Paul’s constantly saying in 1 Corinthians, “Do you not know?” It means that if they knew, they wouldn’t be acting this way. So, knowing does produce right willing, but it works the other way around. If your heart is bad, if there’s a rebellion in your heart, if there’s a resistant spirit, there are things you will not be able to know. So, that’s one answer. Just be amazed that God set it up this way.

In my struggle to be a humble, wise, godly, obedient person, the top of my agenda is to ask God to incline my heart. Psalm 119:36 says, “Incline my heart to your testimonies.” Pray that he would make your heart obedient. Pray that he would make your heart hungry. I’ve had people come into my office for counseling, and they talk about not desiring to read their Bible or having few spiritual desires, and I say, “Well, when was the last time you asked God to make you desire it?” It’s amazing how many people haven’t even asked him, “Make me desire.”

We sing that song, right? It says, “Make me love you as I ought to love you.” In general, people sing that song, and I think a lot of them feel uncomfortable singing that song because it sounds coercive. It says, “Make me love you as I ought to love you.” And I say, “Coerce me, kill me, slay me.” Augustine should get some say here, right? He said, “Command what you will, and give what you command.” We can say, “Make me what I need to be.” So, prayer is right at the top of the list. Then immersing myself in the word would be another thing. Faith comes by hearing and hearing by the word, and faith is the source (Romans 10:17).

Maybe I’ll give just one illustration of how it actually works. The goal is, How can I become a person with a more obedient heart, so that in my classes, in my studies, I recognize what’s really there, and then become a more effective person in the world? And my short answer under prayer is, Get a good storehouse of promises that God has made to his children, and believe them. Because it’s believing promises that frees you from the selfishness and the fear that hinders obedience.

I’m just right off my front burner this morning. We’re finishing Hebrews in my discipleship reading plan from this morning. If you’re on the discipleship reading plan, you’re right with me. I was in Hebrews 13. Although if you’re on time, you finished three days ago. I’m always a little behind.

It says, “Keep your life free from love of money, and be content with what you have, for he has said, ‘I will never leave you nor forsake you.’ So we can confidently say, ‘The Lord is my helper; I will not fear; what can man do to me?’” (Hebrews 13:5–6). So, if you’re tempted to be a disobedient person with your money, a greedy person, a fearful person, the answer to being an obedient person is to believe that promise. Believe when it says, “I’ll never leave you. I’m God. I’ll take care of my children. I will never leave you. I will never forsake you.” And then respond to that by saying, “What can man do to me?”

So, I think believing promises is the key, under prayer, to becoming an obedient person with a heart that then, when it reads the Bible, can see what’s really there.

Howard: Thank you, Pastor John.

Here’s a little outline of where we’ll be going in these sessions. In this first one for the Sunday School hour, we’re just going to talk about the idea of means of grace. First of all, that God is gracious and that he has his particular, chosen, appointed means for our lives to live in the supply of his grace. Then the sermon this morning will focus on God’s word as a means of grace. Jonathan Edwards called the word of God the “chief” and “soul” of the means of grace.

Tonight the topic is fellowship, and we’ll also have a special accent on the Lord’s Supper as part of the means of grace that are related to the fellowship of the local church. And I believe we get to celebrate the Lord’s Supper together tonight. Then tomorrow night will be a focus on prayer and on fasting. Fasting in particular is an accent to prayer.

My heart for these sessions is that I would love to clarify, simplify, and inspire, and here’s what I mean by that. I want to clarify the source of the Christian life as God’s ongoing grace. Christianity is not to encounter grace in the past and then live in your own strength; Christianity is to live on God’s ongoing supply of grace. So we want to talk about those means. What are the means that God himself calls us into, to live on the ongoing supply of his grace?

Then I want to simplify the pursuit of his grace. Sometimes we think about spiritual disciplines and we make a long list, like, “Oh, there’s 12 things you need to do, or actually 18, or more like 24.” Think of your full list of spiritual disciplines. If you were to try to do those disciplines at all times in your life, it would be your full-time job. So what I want to do is simplify that list and ask, what are the main principles? What does God want us to know about his ongoing means of grace? And then how might we, in our various seasons of life, with our particular bent and our particular calling, see the principles of God’s grace be operative in our lives without just checking off somebody else’s boxes from some long list of spiritual disciplines?

Then lastly, I want to inspire you to cultivate habits of grace through varying seasons of life, and to do so for a lifetime. So I’ll speak about the grace of God, then the means of grace, and then “habits of grace” is my way of talking about our own lives, our own application, and the ways in which we access God’s timeless means of grace in our various seasons of life, so that we might know and enjoy him, and in enjoying him, we glorify him in our lives through our actions and words.

My hope is that I want to put and keep the gospel and the energy of God at the center of this whole pursuit of spiritual disciplines or means of grace. And as I hope we see tonight, by taking a full session to emphasize the corporate dynamics of the Christian life, I want to emphasize those corporate dynamics in a way that I think often gets overlooked in discussions about spiritual disciplines. Often spiritual disciplines are really focused on what I do and what I do alone, like Bible reading and prayer by myself. And I think a very important dynamic — we’ll see this in biblical texts and we’ll talk about it at length tonight because it’s critical in the Christian life — is the covenant fellowship of the local church that we are means of grace to each other. And then I want you, however old or young, to know, to enjoy, and to glorify Jesus, and to have some sense of how to do that for a lifetime.

It is my prayer that this seminar would help you make God’s means of grace, and your own habits that develop around his means, not just accessible and realistic but truly God’s means for your knowing and enjoying Jesus for a lifetime. And you see there how the connection is made between looking at Jesus (seeing him), as we prayed before with Bill and Dan, and savoring him. I love that language. We want to employ the means of grace as a means to that end.

Faucets and Light Switches

So here in session one then we want to talk about the means of grace. I love this encouragement from Jonathan Edwards. We’ll get to the quote in context here in a few minutes. He says, “Lay yourself in the way of allurement.”

When I talk about means of grace, it’s helpful for me to think about faucets and light switches, maybe because as I was teaching this material to college students, I was becoming a homeowner for the first time, and I was beginning to think about things for the first time that I hadn’t thought about before. You grow up and turn the faucet and the water comes on. With the light switch, somebody else takes care of that. If you have the problem of turning that faucet and no water comes out, somebody else is going to deal with that. When you’re a homeowner, ain’t nobody else going to deal with that. You have to take care of what’s going on there.

The main thing that’s helpful about faucets and light switches (though it’s not a perfect illustration) is that it helps to demonstrate what means of grace are like in the Christian life. Because for me, I don’t provide the water. For me, the city of Minneapolis does that, and I’m not a plumber. I didn’t put it in my house, and I don’t know how to fix it if it goes awry. Fortunately, I married into the family of a plumber. My father-in-law is a plumber, but he’s two hours north. If we start to have a problem, that’s a long time before he can get onsite. I feel this now as a homeowner.

When I turn that faucet on and water comes out, I don’t celebrate what I did, saying, “Look at me, I turned the water on.” As the kids go to the sink to get water, as they shower, as they do whatever they do in the house, I don’t say, “Look what your dad did. Your dad gave you water.” They turned on the faucet and they engaged the means, the appointed means. The water was there waiting, and the power, the electricity, was there waiting because somebody else is supplying the power and we need to just release that power in the appointed place. We don’t walk around the house saying, “Water,” and water comes out. No, if you want water, you turn the faucet. If you want electricity, you flip the switch, or tell Alexa to turn the light on. But you do the appointed means to release the supply of power.

There are similarities in the Christian life. We can be prone to think, “Oh, I want God’s power. I want to walk in the wilderness and have God give me his power.” But God has given us appointed means. He has provided water, and he has plumbed the house, and he has put in a faucet, and he has told you, “That’s where the water comes from.” He has provided the electricity and he tells us where the switch is, as if to say, “That’s where it happens.” And get this, it’s not automatic. Just because I flip the switch doesn’t mean the lights will always go on. But if I don’t flip the switch, the lights aren’t going to turn on. Likewise, with God’s means of grace he has given us his regular places where he wants us to go to access his ongoing supply, his ongoing grace for the Christian life.

The Grace of God

Here is our outline for session one. We want to talk briefly, but not just briefly, about the grace of God. I don’t want to skip over this. I don’t want to assume this. We don’t want to say, “Oh yeah, God is gracious, move on.” We want to linger over the God of all grace and his graciousness. That’s so important in coming to him, because our awareness, our consciousness matters to him. He doesn’t want to just supply grace anonymously. He loves to give donations of grace that are connected to the name of his Son. So we want to talk about his grace. Then we’ll look at his appointed means of grace. And then at the end, I’ll say something very briefly about our cultivation of habits to regularly access his means of grace. Then I have to talk about the end of the means again. We want to end with that.

I’ve already given you a glimpse of the end of the means, but let’s come back because we have means, and means are means to some end. Means means something, and it means going to some end, and we’ll rehearse that at the end.

The Grace of Justification

First, let’s focus on the grace of God. It is so important that we duly acknowledge God and appreciate him in all his import, as he’s revealed himself to us as the God of all grace. That’s why I have 1 Peter 5:10 here. It says, “After you have suffered a little while, the God of all grace . . .” Brothers and sisters, this is the God who made you. This is the God who is, this is the God who sent his own Son, this is the God who has appointed means and wants to sustain you in the Christian life. He is the God of all grace. All true grace for your life, for your ongoing health, and for your ongoing survival as a Christian, is in him. He provides the grace. He’s the God of all grace. He has called you to his eternal glory in Christ. He himself will restore, confirm, strengthen, and establish you in suffering and in times of life that aren’t acutely difficult. In all seasons, he’s the God of all grace, supplying the grace of our Christian life.

But let’s say that with a little more specificity. We can do this big category of grace in general, but what are some of the specific manifestations of his grace in the Christian life? First and foremost, let’s rehearse the foundation of his grace. Before we do anything or participate in any way, he has a foundation of grace, and there is 100 percent acceptance of us apart from what we do in Christ Jesus. We call this the grace of justification by faith. We could go to many texts, but let me give you two and summarize the grace of justification by faith alone. This is Romans 4:4–5:

Now to the one who works, his wages are not counted as a gift but as his due (we’re talking about a gift; wages are not the way to pursue acceptance with God). And to the one who does not work but believes in him who justifies the ungodly, his faith is counted as righteousness.

We all need righteousness to stand before the living, holy God. We cannot, as sinners and as humans, provide that righteousness. But God sent his own Son to live out that righteousness in our human flesh, and die for us to cover our sins, so that being joined to him by faith we might have our sins paid for in him and have his righteousness in order to be fully, 100-percent accepted before his Father. This is the foundation of the Christian life in the grace of justification by faith. Before we do anything, before we act (we don’t deserve it in any way), he justifies us by faith by connecting us to his Son, in whom is righteousness.

Titus 3:4–7 says:

But when the goodness and loving kindness of God our Savior appeared, he saved us, not because of works done by us in righteousness (hear the language of righteousness that is not by works and is the foundation of our acceptance), but according to his own mercy, by the washing of regeneration and renewal of the Holy Spirit, whom he poured out on us richly through Jesus Christ our Savior, so that being justified by his grace (justification is a manifestation of God’s grace) we might become heirs according to the hope of eternal life.

First and foremost, God’s grace meets us before we’re engaged. We receive by faith. Before we’re engaged with our will, our energy, our actions, and our works, he justifies us in Jesus. This is remarkable grace.

The Grace of Sanctification

Sometimes people stop there. It is amazing grace, the grace of forgiveness, the grace of justification by faith. May we no way ever minimize the grace of justification by faith. And God’s even more gracious than only to justify us and accept us fully based on the righteousness of Christ. Calvin and the Reformers had this Latin phrase: duplex gratia.

Anybody know what that means? It means double grace. It’s grace times two. We all want God’s grace and justification. Amen. Never minimize it. And, what Calvin emphasized — probably with Luther’s weakness in the background — is that we believe in double grace. He gives us the grace of full acceptance in Christ and the grace keeps going. He gives us the grace of being practically rescued from the misery of sin. It would be an amazing grace to have our sins covered and then still have to live with the misery. But the double grace of sanctification now begins to remove us from the misery of sin.

Sin is not a good thing. It’s not joyful in the end. Pleasurable as it may feel in the moment, it will not be good for you in the long run and for eternity. It is a double grace to be rescued from the power of sin, not only pardoned from your sin. This is the grace of sanctification, and I rehearse it because it relates to means. These means of grace, we locate them in the part of the Christian life that is about sanctification, about becoming more holy, about being engaged in the progress that the Holy Spirit is making in us. Justification is apart from works, apart from our means. We’re not doing anything. We’re not reading any Bibles or doing any prayers for justification. But in sanctification we have the dignity of being engaged, of discovering the joys of holiness.

Here’s Titus 2:11–12. The appearance language is very similar to Titus 3:4–7. Titus loves to talk like this. Before he said, “God our Savior appeared,” and down here we have, “the grace of God appeared in Jesus.” So grace for the Christian has a face. Grace came. The God of grace has come in grace incarnate in Jesus.

For the grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation for all people . . . (Titus 2:11)

Think of how that corresponds with the aspects of grace that are in justification and forgiveness. He continues and says this grace is “training us to renounce ungodliness and worldly passions, and to live self-controlled, upright, and godly lives in the present age . . .” (Titus 2:12). So grace not only receives us apart from our training to get us right with God, but grace also then begins to go to work on us. Grace trains. It’s like an athlete being trained. You engage, you work, and you train, and it changes shape over time. The person is changed. They become a better runner, a better player, or a better actor as they do the training. Likewise, grace begins to work on us, training us to renounce ungodliness and worldly passions, and to live self-controlled, upright godly lives in the present age. There’s a double grace here — the grace of salvation coming and the grace going to work on us that trains us. Grace trains us.

A Holy Work Ethic

In 1 Corinthians 15:10, I love Paul’s expression of this training, changing, transforming grace. He says:

By the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace toward me was not in vain. On the contrary, I worked harder than any of them . . .

You know who the “them” is here? It’s not lazy Corinthians. The “them” are the other apostles. He says, “I worked harder than any of them,” and I’m assuming Paul is not prideful at this point. I’m assuming he had such an industrious, Herculean work ethic that the differences were manifest, so that he could talk about them with humility and not brag. Everyone knew Paul worked so much harder than Peter and John. That’s okay. That was Paul’s particular gift, whatever it was. He worked harder than all of them. But you know what? It was the grace of God. He says, “Though it was not I, but the grace of God that is with me.”

So God’s grace not only met him on the road to Damascus, changed his heart, and saved him apart from him doing anything, but the grace of God went to work in him and he was a manifest worker. Paul’s a work ethic guy. He talks a lot about work, and that work is work that is done by the grace of God. So God’s grace not only saves, forgives, and justifies, but God’s grace trains and goes to work in and through us.

Philippians 2:12–13 is another place to show this dynamic of God working and our working. We need to have a place in our Christian life where we think of how God works and we don’t. That’s the place of justification. It’s a very important category to have in our reception of grace, and seeing God as the God of all grace. And we need to have a category for God working through our working. Philippians 2:12–13 says:

Therefore, my beloved, as you have always obeyed, so now, not only as in my presence but much more in my absence, work out your own salvation with fear and trembling . . .

Then we’re given the reason why. Now, notice he doesn’t say “work for your salvation.” They’re justified. They’re accepted 100 percent, based on Christ alone and not their works. He is saying, “You’re accepted, now work that out.” Don’t work for it, work it out. And here’s why. Here’s why you work it out. It’s not in your own strength. He says:

For it is God who works in you, both to will and to work for his good pleasure. (Philippians 2:13)

God goes to work by the power of his Spirit in the Christian. He begins to change us, he begins to, by his word and by the Spirit, give us good desires and inspire us for holiness, and not sin. He gives us the will, and we want to work it out and do it in such a way that we’re not earning God’s favor. But because we have his favor, we are delighted to work it out with joy for his glory and the good of others.

The Grace of Glorification

Then finally, to bring this to a close in this parsing out his grace, we’ve spoken of the past grace in our experience of justification, present grace in sanctification, and now we have future grace in glorification. It’s amazing. I don’t know what the Latin phrase would be for triple grace. We should probably do triple grace too. The grace that is coming is the grace of glorification. Isn’t it crazy that we talk in that language, that God will glorify us? It’s amazing. Second Thessalonians 1:11 says:

May [God] fulfill every resolve for good and every work of faith by his power . . .

Just note here this idea of “work of faith.” Because there’s faith, the Christian works it out, and does so by his power, which is what we’re talking about in the means of grace, spiritual disciplines. And then Paul says, “So that the name of our Lord Jesus Christ may be glorified” (2 Thessalonians 1:11). Yes, it’s the glory of Christ. Amen. That’s what we’re for, the glory of Christ. May Jesus be glorified. And then Paul says, “and you in him” (2 Thessalonians 1:12). May he be glorified in you, and then you will be glorified in him. He will be glorified in you according to the grace of our God and the Lord Jesus Christ. So God’s grace accepts us apart from our works, goes to work in us, rescues us practically from the miseries of sin, and his grace will glorify us as we glorify Jesus.

The last text here on this section is Ephesians 2:4–7. This is about the ongoing grace of God into eternity. Don’t think that first and foremost we’re saying grace is a past thing. We don’t live the Christian life in gratitude for grace, as if grace happened in the past and now we live in gratitude. That’s not how it works. And even going into the future it will be ongoing grace, upon grace, upon grace. Paul says:

But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ — by grace you have been saved (a reference to justification) — and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, so that in the coming ages (this is future) he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus.

“Before we’re engaged with our energy, our actions, and our works, God justifies us in Jesus.”

It will take eternity for our God to continue to show us the bounty of his grace. That’s what’s coming. That’s a way to capture what’s going to happen in heaven, and in the new heavens and new earth. God is going to continue to show us the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Jesus Christ. He’s the God of all grace. First and foremost, we have to start with God being gracious. Don’t take that as a given or an assumption. Let’s love it and let’s rehearse it.

The Means of Grace

The second thing we will focus on is that he has appointed means. There are means of his grace. In the last generation or so, there has been a revival of this language of spiritual disciplines. Maybe it’s a revival, and maybe the first time the language has been used was in the late 1970s. Richard Foster had a book on the celebration of disciplines, and there have been many good books that have talked about spiritual disciplines. That is the subject we’re talking about here. This is about spiritual disciplines.

However, by starting with this accent on God’s grace and wanting to use that term “means of grace,” I think there’s some significance in it. I find this personally helpful. I found it helpful with college students and as I’ve talked with folks over the years. Casting it in terms of means of grace rather than spiritual disciplines puts the accent in some different places. It really helps how we think about the concept. D. A. Carson has said that “means of grace” is a lovely expression, and is less susceptible to misinterpretation than “spiritual disciplines.” You can interpret spiritual disciplines appropriately. It’s okay to have that in my subtitle. That’s the language people are using, but I really want to accent that these are means of grace.

Reading J. I. Packer was the first time I saw the connection between spiritual disciplines and means of grace. This is actually an endorsement for Don Whitney’s book, and remember that being a disciple means being a learner. J.I. Packer wrote:

The doctrine of the disciplines (disciplinae, meaning “courses of learning” or “training”) is really a restatement and extension of classical Protestant teaching on the means of grace.

Then he summarizes these means of grace in his parenthesis in an endorsement for a book. I love it. Packer endorsed many books. I think he saw these as teaching opportunities. He doesn’t typically just say, “Hey, I like this person. Get the book.” He usually sees it as a little teaching opportunity. He lists the means of grace as the word of God, prayer, fellowship, and the Lord’s Supper. I’ve already told you our outline. The word of God is the sermon this morning, prayer is tomorrow night, and fellowship and the Lord’s Supper I’m putting together tonight.

The Necessity of Means

We’ll see more about this phrase. I find that J. C. Ryle is particularly helpful here. I really like the way that Ryle talks about the means of grace and the categories he puts them together in. Here’s what Ryle has to say. We’ll probably come back to this tonight as a quick summary before talking more about fellowship. He’s writing over 100 years ago, so see the timelessness of this. This is not trendy. This isn’t a big means of grace trend. This is not trendy, this is timeless. He says:

The means of grace are such as Bible reading, private prayer, and regularly worshiping God in church . . .

So at least here we have the word, prayer, and fellowship. And he talks about regularly worshiping, which is a corporate means of grace. He says, “Here, one hears the word taught and participates in the Lord’s Supper.”

You have the word being taught, and the word is the Bible. Then there is this connection with Lord’s Supper. These guys keep wanting to mention the Lord’s Supper. We’ll see why in just a minute. Ryle continues, and this is a very important sentence:

I lay it down as a simple matter of fact, that no one who is careless about such things must ever expect to make progress in sanctification.

That’s amazing. He says, “No one who is careless about such things must ever expect to make progress in sanctification.” What are the “such things”? It’s the word, prayer, and fellowship (the local church, corporate worship). He continues:

I can find no record of any eminent saint who ever neglected them. They are appointed channels through which the Holy Spirit conveys fresh supplies of grace to the soul, and strengthens the work which he has begun in the inward man . . . Our God is a God who works by means and he will never bless the soul of that man who pretends to be so high and spiritual that he can get on without them (the means of grace).

A similar observation I’ve heard before and seen in my own life is that I’ve never met a strong leader in the church or a Christian (someone who’s strong in the faith and benefits others) who has ignored the means of grace — in particular, accessing God’s word on a regular basis, praying about it, and being part of the local church. Let any of these slip, any of these three, and the matrix of strength for the Christian life goes away. And barring unusual circumstances of suffering, anyone who’s just languishing in their faith, very rarely (or ever) have I spoken with someone like that who couldn’t identify some lapse or pattern of neglect related to the word, or prayer, or the local church.

I’m not saying there’s a precise relationship where if you miss a day of devotions and you’re doing terrible spiritually. However, over the patterns of our life, there is a remarkable correspondence between attending to the ways God has told us that he has appointed for ongoing grace and spiritual health. We’ll come back to the Ryle quote.

Laying in the Way of Allurement

Let me give Zacchaeus and Bartimaeus as an example of what I mean by positioning ourselves. The title here on “laying yourself in the way of allurement” is important. Sometimes spiritual disciplines to me seem like they accent my doing. I have to take the initiative and I have to make this happen. This is on me. I need to muster up the strength and make it happen.

With means of grace, I want to accent the positioning of ourselves and the posturing of ourselves. God is the God of all grace. He has told us the places in which his grace is flowing, so the responsible response on our part is to position ourselves and posture ourselves to receive his grace. This isn’t first and foremost a posture of action, it’s a posture of reception. See that here in these back-to-back stories in Luke’s gospel about Bartimaeus and Zacchaeus.

As he drew near to Jericho, a blind man was sitting by the roadside begging. (Luke 18:35)

This is interesting. Bartimaeus was not wandering in the wilderness, and lo and behold, the Savior of the world comes upon him in the wilderness. He was sitting by the roadside. There was a path, and he was sitting by the path. The passage continues:

And hearing a crowd going by, he inquired what this meant. They told him, “Jesus of Nazareth is passing by.” And he cried out, “Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!” And those who were in front rebuked him, telling him to be silent. But he cried out all the more, “Son of David, have mercy on me!” And Jesus stopped and commanded him to be brought to him. And when he came near, he asked him, “What do you want me to do for you?” He said, “Lord, let me recover my sight.” And Jesus said to him, “Recover your sight; your faith has made you well.” And immediately he recovered his sight and followed him, glorifying God. And all the people, when they saw it, gave praise to God. (Luke 18:36–43)

Now, we can emphasize several things in this passage. The reason I’m emphasizing the positioning or the place where Bartimaeus was for our purposes regarding means of grace is that the next story is also along the path.

Positioned in the Pathway of Grace

Now let’s focus on Zacchaeus, a wee little man, maybe you know the song. Zacchaeus illustrates this better than Bartimaeus.

He entered Jericho and was passing through. And behold, there was a man named Zacchaeus. He was a chief tax collector and was rich. And he was seeking to see who Jesus was, but on account of the crowd he could not, because he was small in stature. (Luke 19:1–3)

This comes upon Bartimaeus in a way he didn’t expect, but he’s along a path when it does. He’s the kind of guy who wants help. He’s blind and he needs help. So where do you go to get help? Where people are. Where are people? On the path. So there’s a reason Bartimaeus was there. But it’s all the more here in this passage because Zacchaeus is seeking Jesus. He wants to access grace. So how do you access the grace in Christ? You go to the path where he’s coming. The passage continues:

He was seeking to see who Jesus was, but on account of the crowd he could not, because he was small in stature. So he ran on ahead and climbed up into a sycamore tree to see him, for he was about to pass that way. (Luke 19:3–4)

He postured himself and positioned himself along the path where the grace was passing. Then it says:

And when Jesus came to the place, he looked up and said to him, “Zacchaeus, hurry and come down, for I must stay at your house today.” So he hurried and came down and received him joyfully. (Luke 19:5–6)

He positioned himself to receive the grace as it came. Here’s a quotation from Jonathan Edwards:

Persons need not and ought not to set any bounds to their spiritual and gracious appetites.

Your desires for God, your holy desires for the one who made you and showed you himself in his Son, and rescued you, you need to put no bounds on those appetites. We need to put bounds on various earthly appetites, and yet in our spiritual appetites for Jesus and for God, put no bounds on them. Edwards continues on how to pursue it:

Rather, they ought to be endeavoring by all possible ways to inflame their desires and obtain more spiritual pleasures.

That’s what we’re after in means of grace. These are not mere duties to check the box, as if to say, “You must do this.” We want to inflame desire and obtain more holy, spiritual pleasure. And Edward continues on to say, “Endeavor to promote spiritual appetites by laying yourself in the way of allurement.”

Because of the nature of our God as a God of grace, and because he has given us his typical patterns, his appointed means of grace, the counsel is, “Do you want to know him? Do you want to enjoy him? Do you want to increase your spiritual pleasure? Lay yourself along those paths. Know what the paths are, and then cultivate habits of life that put you along those paths.”

The Lifeline of the Early Church

Here’s an example in the early church. This is Acts 2:42–47. What an amazing moment. It’s like the honeymoon moment of the local church before things get really bad with increasing persecution.

They devoted themselves (habitual language) to the apostles’ teaching and the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers. (Acts 2:42)

The apostles were teaching the word, people were praying, and people were devoting themselves to the fellowship. In that context, there was the breaking of bread, which probably meant eating together. And in that eating together, they were taking the Lord’s supper together as well. We want this, and people want this. This is exciting:

And awe came upon every soul, and many wonders and signs were being done through the apostles. And all who believed were together and had all things in common. And they were selling their possessions and belongings and distributing the proceeds to all, as any had need. And day by day, attending the temple together and breaking bread in their homes, they received their food with glad and generous hearts, praising God and having favor with all the people. And the Lord added to their number day by day those who were being saved. (Acts 2:43–47)

We all want this effect, but do we want the means of grace? The wonder, the signs, the generosity, the sharing, and the adding to their number comes out of Acts 2:42. This is their patterns, their habits, and their devotion. It’s the apostles’ teaching, the fellowship, and the prayers.

Historic Confessions and the Means of Grace

I’ll skip through this, but I just want to mention that means had such an important foundation in the Reformed and Baptistic confessions for centuries. This is why Packer referred to the classic Protestant doctrine of the means of grace. The language of “means” comes again and again in the New Hampshire Confession of 1833, which is a Baptist confession. It’s used over and over again. It also goes back to Westminster and the Belgic Confession, which is almost 100 years before Westminster. It talks about “our gracious God” — make sure to cast him in terms of grace — who “nourishes and strengthens our faith through the means where he works by the power of the Holy Spirit.” And Jesus Christ is presented as the true object of them.

The Canons of Dort from 1619 refers to means again and again, and the Westminster Confession of Faith in 1648. Again and again it speaks of “the use of means.” And so, we come back to Acts 2:42, where they devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching, the fellowship, and the breaking of bread, and the prayers. These are a means of God’s ongoing grace.

Hear His Voice, Have His Ear, Belong to His Body

So here’s how I summarize them. This is what we’ll be doing in the sermon tonight and tomorrow. How do we put ourselves, how do we position ourselves along the path of God’s grace? Number one, we hear his voice in his word. Number two, we have his ear in prayer. Number three, we belong to his body in the fellowship of the local church.

The reason I’m putting them in those terms is that I want to capture the personal nature of the Christian life, the personal nature of a relationship with God in Christ. We shouldn’t think of word, prayer, and fellowship as merely things, but aspects of relationship with God and with each other. So we hear his voice. You’ll see in the sermon here, I’m not going to accent hearing his voice apart from his word. The voice that’s in your head is you. Do you want to hear God speak? Open the book, hear the book, and hear him speak by the power of the Spirit in his book. I have to stop myself before I get into the sermon.

Then have his ear in prayer. It is amazing that we have the ear of God Almighty. The fact that he revealed himself is amazing, but even more the fact that he stops, and stoops, and listens, and says, “I want to hear your response to my word.” It is such a privilege we have in prayer that we’ll linger it over tomorrow night.

And then we belong to his body. We are means of grace to each other in the body of Christ. In particular, I’m going to linger in Hebrews. The sermon this morning will be Hebrews, and these will be the texts that I’ll use in the sermon. You can talk about having his ear in Hebrews through these two big exhortation passages that parallel each other. Do you want a nice Bible study? Take Hebrews 4:14–16 and Hebrews 10:19–23 and work through them together and see the connections, and be drawn into prayer. And then the main focus for tonight before we talk about the Lord’s Supper will be to look at Hebrews 10 and Hebrews 3 about being means of grace for each other.

Habits of Grace

Let me finish quickly with this. I told you the last two points are very brief. This is about our various habits of grace. What is a habit? It’s kind of a negative word. There’s been a kind of revival of the language and it’s becoming more positive. People talk about habit formation.

There were two books that were very popular to help bring about this idea of habits and tap the neuroscience of habit formation, which is really new in the last generation since MRIs were available. I mean, neuroscience has been huge in the last 25 years, and habit formation has been part of those discoveries. Habits, scientists say, emerge because the brain is constantly looking for ways to save effort. Left to its own devices, the brain will try to make almost any routine into a habit because habits allow our minds to ramp down more often.

Now, here are a couple of things that are important in spiritual life related to that. I’ll summarize it in a second. The real key to habits is decision-making, and more accurately, the lack of decision-making. Part of this in trying to cultivate habits in our Christian life is to not drain down the power of decision-making that we could be putting toward God’s word, and prayer, and fellowship, and also not go through making the decision over and over again so that sometimes you decide not to make it. And then you choose other less valuable things than his word, prayer, and fellowship in their proper proportions and patterns.

Here’s a summary: Habits free our focus to give attention and be more fully aware in the moment. Habits protect what is most important; that is, they keep us persevering in the faith. And habits are person specific. I’m not trying to lay on you Saul’s armor, as if to say, “Here’s how I do my devotions and here’s how I pray. And here’s the patterns of Cities Church, and you should do the same ones.” This is not Saul’s armor. You’re not supposed to have somebody else’s armor on, but you can develop these in your season of life with your bent. And then, habits are also driven by desire and reward. Habits are formed because you are being rewarded in some way. You don’t form habits when there’s no reward, and all the more in the Christian life.

The End of the Means

So we end the morning session here with the end of the means. I want to put text with this. I don’t want to just say, “Jesus is the end, Jesus is the end.” Let’s put two texts on it, among others. We’re talking about means here. Means are means to some end. This is the end:

And this is eternal life, that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent. (John 17:3)

That’s the essence of eternal life, knowing the Father and the Son in him. And in our means of grace, we want to move toward that great end. That’s the goal. That’s the reward that would inform and cultivate our habits.

In Philippians 3:7–8, the apostle Paul says:

But whatever gain I had, I counted as loss for the sake of Christ. Indeed, I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord.

So brothers and sisters, in talking about these spiritual disciplines (the means of grace) this morning, this evening, and tomorrow night, this is what we’re pursuing. It’s the surpassing value of Christ. It’s not the value of achievement, nor the value of feeling good about myself, nor checking boxes, nor the value of doing what somebody else told me to do, but the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord through his word, through a relationship with him in prayer where I respond to him based on who he’s revealed himself to be, and doing so in the body of Christ, in the covenanted local church community where we are means of grace to each other, so that we know more of Jesus in and through each other.