In view of what I just said there about hour by hour walking in communion with God, I thought I’d begin with John Newton because I’m still oozing Newton from the pastors conference. So I just wrote down a new way to introduce this seminar. The last time I taught this, I had just lectured on John Paton so I used him. In fact, I may use him tomorrow morning as well, but here’s Newton.

The Legacy of Newton

John Newton wrote “Amazing Grace” and lived a couple of hundred years ago and was a British pastor after he had been a slave trader and a sailor and a real slut. He called himself a wretch, remember?

Amazing grace, how sweet the sound That saved a wretch like me

And that was not an overstatement. That wasn’t any gloss on his life. It was just for him a very sober understatement about what he’d become on the boat for 13 years of sin. On March 21st, 1748 on board the ship Greyhound on his way home after being at sea a long time and having been treated like a slave on the edge of Africa for two years, a storm hit. He was asleep in the middle of the night and water started to fill up his little hold. As he broke for the deck, the captain was on his way down and said, “Get a knife.” And when you turned to get a knife, another man ran up before him and was immediately washed overboard. That was about one of about six instances of incredible Providence in his life that made him think that he was appointed for something remarkable, which he was.

So he went up and he manned the pumps for six hours. He took the helm for a long time. He was scared to death. You would say if anybody should ever say literally that the hell was scared out of him, this would be it without any exaggeration. Because he had been absolutely dead to God and a blasphemer as he called himself all his life from about age 10 on, and now he was awakened. However, he did not see himself as fully converted because he did not yet know what communion with God was. Let me read you his own words here:

Though I cannot doubt that this change, so far as it prevailed, was wrought by the spirit and the power of God. Yet still I was greatly deficient in many respects. I was in some degree affected with a sense of my enormous sins, but I was little aware of the innate evils of my heart.

One defect he thought was that he didn’t yet understand the innateness of his evil. See, a lot of people get saved thinking that they do sins and that’s the main problem. They don’t know that they are innately corrupt. They just don’t understand their nature as a sinner. And you can learn these things later. You don’t have to know everything upfront when you become a Christian, but you need to know them. Well, that was a piece of his defect and it might be a piece of yours tonight that you just don’t understand how bad you are. You know the kinds of things you do, but you probably have not gotten down to the root of where that comes from and what it says about you. And to see ourselves like that is a wonderfully gospel-liberating thing. It hurts bad, but that bad hurt will change your marriage.

I know a lot of you aren’t married, but that’s where I live. To know how bad you are will change your marriage. It will really help you love your spouse the way you ought to. Because if you think you deserve a lot from her, you’ll demand a lot from her. And when you demand a lot from her, it won’t work.

Missing Spiritual Communion

Newtown continues:

I had no apprehension of the spirituality and extent of the law of God, how extensive it reached into human life and what it demanded of us, or of the hidden life of a Christian as it consists in communion with God by Jesus Christ (and here’s his meaning of that), a continual dependence on him for hourly supplies of wisdom and strength and comfort.

That’s what he didn’t know. And some of you tonight don’t know that. You are trying to live the Christian life and you don’t experience that — continual dependence on him for hourly supplies of wisdom and strength and comfort. And that list could go on there. The best way to find out how to finish that sentence is to read the psalms, read them every day. He continues:

This was a mystery of which I had yet no knowledge. I acknowledged the Lord’s mercy in pardoning what was passed, but depended chiefly upon my own resolution to do better for the time to come.

In other words, he didn’t understand future grace. This is why I wrote that book Living by Faith in Future Grace because I didn’t understand it for a long time. And I think a lot of Christians don’t get it. They don’t understand the futurity of grace and how it’s grace that’s going to help me get through this seminar tonight. And if I don’t lean on that grace tonight, you won’t benefit from this seminar, not if I have anything to do with it. If I lean on me and my resources, my intelligence, my understanding, my preparations and not on grace, then the Holy Spirit will be choked off. There won’t be the flow. Living by faith in future grace is what he didn’t get and it’s the key part of the essence of Christianity. The password, look here and the pardon is crucial, but he depended chiefly upon his own resolution to do better for the time to come. Newton says:

I cannot consider myself to have been a believer in the full sense of the word till a considerable time afterwards.

This is really significant. There’s a big scholarly debate I guess among Newton scholars as to whether he was a Christian or saw himself as one at the time when the storm hit or six years later when he began to come under the influence of George Whitfield and John Wesley and others in the Great Awakening at that time in England. Because he was on a boat as a slave trader, he was the captain of a vessel that traded slaves for six years after this experience. And it has hurt the cause of Christianity for that to be made known because you say, “Oh yeah, right. Get converted and deal in slaves. Right. That’s good Christianity. No thank you, I don’t care for that.” But Newton himself, I don’t think dated the genuineness of his conversion until six years later. Later in his life, he wrote a whole essay on his remorse and horror at having dealt in the slave trade.

Rich Devotional Life

Here’s one more thing from Newton about his devotional life, just to give you a glimpse. I know that I’m getting ahead of myself here, but that’s okay. I just want to give you a taste of what’s coming. This is sometime between 1752 and 1756. He was born in 1725. So this is right around when he was 25-years-old or so. On a morning in April, he wrote in his diary that his devotions consisted that day in praying over a part of the eighth chapter of Romans. How? How did he do it? He says, “In a way of paraphrase with some readiness.”

So one of the things I hope we pick up in this course is learning what it is to pray the word. As you read through Romans 8, you paraphrase it into prayer. That’s what he’s saying he did here. So maybe you read, “There is therefore now no condemnation to those who are in Christ Jesus” (Romans 8:1). Pause, eyes closed, heart directed to God: “Oh God. Thank you. From the bottom of my heart that there is no condemnation to me. Thank you for Jesus. Thank you for sending him. Thank you for the cross. Let me taste it. Grant me to experience as I begin this day that I’m not a condemned person. I’m a loved and accepted person.”

Pause, read. That’s what he did. He may have spent longer, I don’t know, but do that. Learn to do this. I’ll just admit right off the bat, I’m a lousy prayer without the Bible. I can’t pray long without the Bible. I can’t pray with significance without the Bible. It feels insignificant to me. He’s paraphrasing Romans 8, and he said:

I greatly failed in the duty of meditation and I’m forced to use some artifice with myself to do it at all.

What does he mean by artifice? Here’s what it means:

Thus, sometimes I turn them into a prayer form, sometimes I suppose myself in imaginary conversation, and sometimes I am called upon to speak to a point. Without something of this sort, I am not able to engage myself to attend with any fixedness of thought and with it, alas, how seldom I would remember to pray for grace and direction in this matter that my delight may be in the law of God to meditate therein day and night.

So here’s a man who is on his way, just like we’re all on our way, and you see his struggle and his sense of inadequacy when it comes to his own devotion in Bible reading. Well, so much for Newton. You want to raise any questions at that point or make a comment about Newton? Yeah, Go ahead, Marla.

Question and Answer

Were Newton’s hymns mainly written after he came to faith?

They were definitely written after faith. That last one was written however during that six-year period where he wasn’t even sure he was a believer. So that was 1752 to 1756. The storm happened in 1748. So he was awakened out of absolute wretchedness when he was 23-years old in 1748. We’re talking about what, four years? Four to six years after that. So near the end of that period. So he’s not a very long mature believer at that point.

The first one was written later as a mature believer. In partial response to your question though, the people whose writings that we tend to quote from are people whose writings lasted precisely because they were wise people. Not everybody wrote and not everybody was as wise as an Edwards or an Owen or a Newton. And God has just given to the church a few dead saints that we house in our bookstore. This one’s called books by a bunch of dead guys and a few live ones.

They are a treasure. They’re a treasure to the church. The book of Hebrews in chapter 11 and 13 make it very clear that we ought to love them, read them, study them, and imitate them, not idolize them nor consider them perfect. In fact, one of the biggest mistakes you could make in this course would be to take tips you hear from me or one of these fellows and make that some kind of law or some kind of absolute or some kind of ideal. Here are two reasons you shouldn’t do that. One is that very likely if I were to tell you what I do in my devotional life now, I wouldn’t be doing it five years from now. I’ll be doing something different and you would have set it up as the thing to do.

And then lo and behold, if you heard this seminar in five years, you’d say, “Oh, don’t you do that anymore?” I’d say, “Well, I haven’t done that for a long time, but that’s what was really fruitful in those days.” So don’t idealize or absolutize things that are not explicitly biblical. And the other reason is just because we’re all fallible and even what we’re doing now may not be the best thing to do. You need to find the biblical application of truth in your life and how you do it, where it fits in your day and how long it should take you and how you mingle prayer in the word and so on.

Communion with God

Now, what I want to do in these overheads that I’m going to put up here first is talk about communion. These are Bible texts that point towards communion with God, how to do it in his Trinitarian reality. So we’ll begin with passages that promise that each of the persons of the Trinity will be given to us for our own personal intimacy and experience with them.

The Holy Spirit

So we’ll start with the Holy Spirit here in John 14:16–17:

And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Helper, to be with you forever, even the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees him nor knows him. You know him, for he dwells with you and will be in you.

I think that last clause there is a virtual identification in essence if not personhood of Christ and the Spirit. He is with you and he will be in you. Jesus is saying, “I will give you a helper and I will give you myself in giving you the helper. I am with you now and I will be in you,” which is why he said, “It’s better that I go away.” While Jesus was here on earth, he was limited in space and time because he was incarnate in a body. When he went back to the Father and poured out the Spirit who is the Spirit of Christ, he’s not limited anymore. And everybody everywhere in the world who will have it may have a personal intimate experience of the presence of Jesus Christ in your life. In Ephesians 3:14–17, Paul prays that Christians would be strengthened in the inner man through the spirit according to the riches of God’s glory, that Christ might dwell in your heart by faith.

How quickly and easily we pass over a sentence like that, usually dealing with children. We say, “Invite Jesus into your heart,” or, “Jesus lives in your heart.” And we don’t realize what a stupendous thing we are saying. I mean, he made the universe, he upholds it by the word of his power, he conquered death and hell, he commands demons, he commands winds and waves and they obey him, and we say, “This one dwells, inhabits, and lives in our heart a house. That is stunning, unspeakable reality.

That would cause a man like John Owen to write 300 pages. You talk about these old saints. One of the reasons these old saints left deposits of books behind is because when they said a sentence like that, they stayed on it for days and days and days. And they turned it and turned it and turned it like a diamond with an infinite number of facets and would not stop looking. They would not put it down. They would not just say, “Oh, I see that” and put it down and say, “Give me another nugget for tomorrow.”

They just turned it and turned it, and looked and looked, and wrote and wrote, and thought and thought, and prayed and prayed, and applied and applied. They were so vigorous in the way they handled spiritual truth. And that’s communion. That’s getting at what communion with God the Holy Spirit is. So he’s given to us here.

The Father

Here’s the promise of the Father in Hebrews 13:5–6:

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?”

This is a quote from the Old Testament. That’s why I’m treating it as God the Father, even though in the context here, it could flow over into the Lord Christ. Because I know that sometimes Old Testament quotes that refer to the father or God in the Old Testament, do refer to Jesus in the New, but it is a quote here.

So here we have the Father promising, “I will never forsake you.” God the Father almighty speaks to his children and says, “I will never desert you. I will never forsake you.” Therefore, communion is possible. It’s hard to communicate with people far away. We do have telephones and email and faxes and so on, but that’s different than sitting together over a table looking somebody in the eye. And God knows that distance is possible. You know you can send a telegram to God on the other side of the universe with your prayer if you want to conceive of it that way, but it’s different to say, “I’m there.”

He wants to communicate that to us. Another text on that is 2 Corinthians 6:16–17:

What agreement has the temple of God with idols? For we are the temple of the living God; as God said, “I will make my dwelling among them and walk among them, and I will be their God, and they shall be my people.

The church is the temple of the living God. He walks among us. This is one of the reasons. I’m not going to make a big deal in this course — and it’s one of the defects of the course — about corporate communion with God. I have a whole seminar on worship, especially corporate worship. And here I’m mainly thinking about our personal communion with God. But I do want to underline the fact that this “temple of God” is sometimes spoken of as our bodies being the temple of God and sometimes the body of Christ (the church) being the temple of God. We are the temple, not temples. We are the temple of the living God. Just as God said, “I will dwell in them and walk among them.”

So when the church gathers, when we’re gathered here right now under the word by the Spirit in faith, there is a moving of the Spirit here in this room different from when you’re at home alone. It’s not necessarily better, but different, and to have both of them is precious. God moves when his people gather, walks among them, does things among them, and manifests himself among them in ways that He doesn’t when we’re alone with him. And you’ll hear when I use this text from John Paton tomorrow morning how precious the individual is. I just want to make sure you see that the corporate reality is precious as well.

Here is one more on the father. Isaiah 41:10 says:

fear not, for I am with you;
     be not dismayed, for I am your God;
I will strengthen you, I will help you,
     I will uphold you with my righteous right hand.

Here’s God assuring the covenant people of God. He says he is with you. Your God is strengthening you, helping you, and upholding you. Now I’m going to argue in just a few minutes that the way you experience communion with God in a promise like that is by believing it. The Holy Spirit moves in and through the Word to the father personally known and experienced when we read that as the very personal word of God to you.

Trusting Particular Promises

I don’t know if I’ll get to it, but I use A.P.T.A.T. as my own way of drawing near to God and counting on him to draw near to me before I preach and teach like now or Sunday morning, APTAT stands for admit that you can’t do anything without God, pray for his help, trust a promise, act the miracle, and thank him for having helped you. So when I come to that trust, I come to a particular promise. I’m bowing in the front pew and one of these guys is reading the text on Sunday morning, and I’m in my head doing APTAT. I say, “I can’t do this without you.” I pray for the gift of love. I pray for the gift of humility. I pray for the gift of balance. I pray for the gift of biblical faithfulness. I pray for a prophetic gift that penetrates the heart. I pray for liberty of speech. I don’t stumble over my words. I pray for memory, so I can remember what I’ve prepared. I pray for love to abound for these people and whatever else still, it brings to my mind to ask for it at that moment.

Then the next one is, “Will you trust me, John? You’ve just asked me to do a lot of things. Are you just going to walk away from that request and cross your fingers and think maybe it’ll happen, maybe it won’t? Or are you going to trust me?” Now, what warrants the trust at that point? And the answer is promises, which is why you have to have a stock of them in your head, or if you don’t have a good stock in your head, why you have to get up early in the morning and get one into your brain. And then if your brain is not good enough, carry around a little sheet. This is my sheet from this morning. I read the whole slug of chapters in Exodus. I’m trying to catch up because I’m behind. And I saw so much that, my brain at age 55 tends to have a leak, it’s a leaky bucket. And so I put a lot during in the morning, but at about 9:00 a.m. I think, “What did I read?”

I know I read the Bible this morning but can’t remember a thing I read, so I carry around these little sheets, which is why I have to work really hard at memorization. I wrote down 14 observations on the passage like little bullet points on my little sheet, so that anytime during the day I could pull out my little sheet to fight back unbelief. One of them was that beautiful picture of getting to Mara. Mara means “bitter” in Hebrew and the water was called “Mara” because it was bitter. And the people got all bent out of shape with Moses and God and angry and God came down and instead of just wiping these people out, he makes the water sweet forth, not just drinkable, but sweet. Is that the way you treat people who grumble at you? We say, “Why’d you do this? Why didn’t you get here on time? Why’d you put it that way? Why’d you write that? Why didn’t you do this?”

Do you say, “Can I make your water sweet? How can I make your water sweet?” That ministered to me, that rebuked me, that assured me that I have a Father like that, that told me how to go down to talk to Noël and Barnabas and Talitha. That gave me a clue about something you might need tonight. So I just lingered over that for a while and communed with my bitter-turning-into-sweet God. How many providence’s have you met in your life that were bitter? And now looking back, he did something sweet for you — painful, but sweet.

The Son of God

What about communion with the Son? We’ve talked about the Spirit, the Father, now the Son. There are a lot of texts on the son, because He’s the center of everything now that He’s come into the world. Matthew 28:20 says:

Teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age.”

That was John Patton’s favorite promise. And I’ll give you some stories tomorrow morning about that. He says, “I will be with you always to the end of the age.” The Bible is a very thick book and a very daunting, a very discouraging book in the sense that if you feel like, and this is usually Satan talking, “I’ve got to know this whole book, I’ve got to memorize this whole book, I’ve got to know what’s on every page in this book before I can really be an effective witness or a sin-conquering Christian,” well, that’s just a lot of baloney. And here’s one of the biggest evidences for it. Nobody in the first century had the whole Bible and they turned the whole world upside down. We have the whole Bible, which means we have a lot of places we can go and we should be reading the whole thing every year or something like that. But you need to pick out some things that are like dynamite to you. That you can go back to again and again, and this would probably be one of them, mingled with Matthew 28:18, which says, “All authority in heaven and on earth is mine.” And bring that along with Matthew 28:20.

I mean, just picture yourself now, it is in the middle of the day, something horrible and unexpected has come up at work. You’re going to have to confront somebody, or you just got a devastating phone call or something. And the bottom absolutely drops out of your life or your job or a relationship or something, and everything in you feels like, “I can’t do this. I cannot handle this. I am over, I’m history, emotionally or physically.” Now, what are you going to do at that moment? At that moment, that’s where you find out how to be a Christian. When things are just rolling along, all the natural resources are holding you up. Your health is holding you up. Your friends are holding you up. Your income is holding you up. Everything’s holding you up. Who needs God, right? Wrong. He’s doing all those things, but you don’t feel it. It’s when the bottom falls out that you find out whether you’re leaning on him or not.

So at that moment, you have to have a few of these. You have to, at that moment, say, “You said you’ll never ever leave me and you’ll be with me always to the end of the age. And you said that all authority is yours in heaven and on earth. So you have authority over this situation, over my little weak heart, and you’ll never leave me and I count on you. Come through, here we go.” There may be trembling, there may be shaking, and there may be sweaty palms, and a dry throat and tears pushing up from behind the eyeballs as you move into this whatever happens. But this you can bank on, the son will be there to be enjoyed, communed with. Revelation 3:20 says:

Behold, I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in to him and eat with him, and he with me.

This is spoken to Christians, not non-believers. We use it as an evangelistic verse, and it’s true, as an evangelistic verse, but it’s not in the context of an evangelistic verse, it’s an intimacy verse, it’s a communion verse. He’s inviting the church to commune with him. He’s saying, “Church, Bethlehem, you started to get all lopsided in some of your emphases. You’re forgetting me, knock, knock, knock.” And then we swing the door wide and he’ll always come. He’ll always come in. And the picture he has is eating. I love to eat with people I love. Now we ought to eat with people we don’t love too. Thar’s really clear and Luke 14. You should invite over the people that can’t invite you back and you’ll be rewarded in the resurrection. So don’t only eat with the people that are your close friends, but that’s appointed too, sweet. And one of the best things you can do with your friends is eat with them, right?

We love to just eat with them because there’s something about sharing a meal that you’re relaxed. I don’t know what the dynamic of that is. Lots of different appetites are being satisfied or enjoyed at the same time. But that’s what Jesus wants to do with us. He wants to dine with us, eat with us spiritually.

Matthew 18:20 says:

For where two or three are gathered in my name, there am I among them.

There’s that corporate dimension, again, of being there in a special way. Those are texts on the three persons of the Trinity offering themselves to us for our enjoyment of their communion here and now — close, not far.

Fellowship with the Trinity

So let’s talk about our fellowship being with the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Fellowship or communion are words I’m using almost interchangeably. First Corinthians 1:9 says:

God is faithful, by whom you were called into the fellowship of his Son, Jesus Christ our Lord.

There it is. We should live in fellowship with Jesus. If you enjoy fellowship with your close friends, you should enjoy something like that with Jesus Christ, the Son of God. Second Corinthians 13:14 says:

The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all.

The word “communion” there is the same word as the other one (koinonia). It’s the fellowship of the Holy Ghost. So you have fellowship with the Son and fellowship with the Holy Spirit. Philippians 2:1-2 says:

So if there is any encouragement in Christ, any comfort from love, any participation in the Spirit, any affection and sympathy, complete my joy by being of the same mind, having the same love, being in full accord and of one mind.

We have two texts here referring to communion or fellowship with or in the Spirit. The Spirit should become a real living person to you, that you talk to and fellowship with. First John 1:3 says:

That which we have seen and heard we proclaim also to you, so that you too may have fellowship with us; and indeed our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son Jesus Christ.

Now we have the third person of the Trinity. So we have fellowship with the Son (2 Corinthians 1:9), fellowship with the Spirit (2 Corinthians 13:14 and Philippians 2:1–2), and now fellowship with the Father. This is why this book Communion with God by Owen, is built around the persons of the Trinity. He has long sections on fellowship with God as one and fellowship with each of the persons of the Trinity, which is really unique, I think. I don’t know another book like it. John continues:

And we are writing these things so that our joy may be complete. This is the message we have heard from him and proclaim to you, that God is light, and in him is no darkness at all. If we say we have fellowship with him while we walk in darkness, we lie and do not practice the truth. But if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus his Son cleanses us from all sin (1 John 1:4–7).

Fellowship with God has a very definite moral effect. I wonder who that “one another” includes. Is it only horizontal? You and me or John and the people he’s writing to one another? Or is it also vertical? If we walk in the light as he is the light, we have fellowship with one another. I’m inclined to think that since the fellowship has been spoken of here is with the Father and with the Son and then he broadens it out to have fellowship with the church, this one another includes both the vertical and the horizontal.

Our Experience of Promises

So now we’ve seen texts that show that we’re to have fellowship with the Son, fellowship with the Spirit, and fellowship with the Father. The first set of texts were about the Spirit, the Son and the Father coming to us, making themselves available to us and intimate with us. The second set of texts that we just looked at was about what we do about that, namely fellowship with them, commune with them.

Now, how is this fellowship experienced through the promises of God? Here’s a long quote from Owen. How is it experienced through the promises? Because that’s the way I think we experience fellowship with God. We have his word and his word becomes his own intimate communication to us, especially the promises. So let’s read Owen’s way of understanding it:

The life and soul of all our comforts lie treasured up in the promises of Christ. They are the breasts of all our constellation. Who knows not how powerless they are in the bare letter, even when improved to the uttermost, by our considerations of them and meditation on them?

In other words, if just left to ourselves without the Spirit, even considering the promises is going to be powerless. Owen continues:

How unexpectedly they (promises) sometimes break upon the soul with a conquering, endearing life and vigor. Here, faith deals peculiarly with the Holy Ghost. It considers the promises themselves, looks up to him, the Holy Spirit, waits for him, considers his appearances in the word depended on.

That’s a very profound statement. The Holy Spirit makes his appearances in the word trusted, the trusted word. What does he mean? Let’s see if he unpacks that for us:

. . . considers his appearances in the word depended on, and owns him in his work and efficacy. No sooner doth the soul begin to feel the life of a promise, warming his heart, relieving, cherishing, supporting, delivering from fear, entanglements, troubles, but it ought to know that the Holy Spirit is there, which will add to his joy and lead him into fellowship with him.

In the Word Depended On

Now, this is why Owen is so worthy of our attention. I think I probably had to read that 10 times in order to get what he was saying here. Because what he’s saying is that you don’t do an end run around the Bible or around the word in trying to commune with the Spirit. You don’t shut your Bible, go off in the woods and, “Say, now spirit, make yourself known to me,” and hope for a falling down or laughter or fluttering eyelids or shaking knees or sweaty palms or a palpitating heart or some kind of manifestation. Those may come at any time in life, when the Holy Spirit moves in power. He can do anything he wants with us physically. But those things are absolutely negligible when it comes to real communion, spiritually, because they can be there without the Spirit and you can have the Holy Spirit without those things.

So they are not the essence, the essence is this experience of the living person in his speaking. And his conception is that when the soul, pondering the word, considering the promises themselves, looking up to the Spirit, waiting for him, considering his appearances in the word depended on, you have communion. So here you are. You read, “fear not, for I am with you; be not dismayed, for I am your God; I will strengthen you, I will help you, I will uphold you with my righteous right hand” (Isaiah 41:10). You focus on that and you say, “God help me believe it. Holy Spirit come, enliven this promise, arrive here, apply it to me, make me hear it as though you are standing here speaking it to me yourself.” And as you see that becoming true and strengthening you to do what you have to do — witness, talk to somebody, whatever — you know he’s here. That’s what Owen says here:

No sooner doth the soul begin to feel the life of a promise, warming his heart, relieving, cherishing, supporting, delivering from fear, entanglements, troubles, but it may, it ought to know, that the Holy ghost is there.

The evidence of the presence of the Holy Spirit is the vitality and the life and the power of the word changing you to have freedom from entanglements and fear and warming your heart and relieving you from anxieties and creating a cherishing in you and supporting you. These are the sweet things that we long for. And we know he’s there and if we know he’s there, then this will add to our joy in the word and lead us into fellowship with the Holy Spirit.

Question and Answer

Do you want to ask a question about that or make any comment about that dynamic right there? This is a spiritual thing we’re talking about here. And unless you’ve ever tasted it, it may sound very strange, very foreign. And if you haven’t, you should just ask, as you read the Bible, that the Holy Spirit would minister the word to you in that way, would come to you. Sometimes around Bethlehem, I hear people praying and I think we’ve all got it from the same place. There’s a text in 1 Samuel, where it talks about how God revealed himself to Samuel through his word. So I hear people praying, “Oh Lord, stand forth from your word, in your word, by your word.” Is there any question or comment on this particular aspect?

What do you mean by communing with the persons of the Trinity? It seems intangible.

It is intangible. Maybe you’re implying things in person that I’m not. By person, I don’t mean body, I don’t mean physical. But I do mean personality. I do mean will, I do mean conviction, and I do mean joy. It’s a being that has the capacity to experience personal dynamics, relate to somebody with a mind and with a heart, you see this all over the New Testament. You find evidence that the Holy Spirit is not it. He’s not it. For example, in Ephesians, it says “don’t grieve the Holy Spirit” by which you were sealed in Christ. You can grieve the Holy Spirit.

But isn’t the Holy Spirit referred to with neuter words in Greek?

It’s neuter in many cases, but in some cases it’s not. The only reason it’s neuter is because in Greek, the word pneuma is neuter. Wind is neuter. The gender in Greek is not female or male specific, trees can be masculine or a boat can be feminine. Gender in Greek doesn’t dictate whether something is personal or not. What’s remarkable is that in two or three places in John’s Gospel, the neuter, pneuma (spirit) is followed by a relative pronoun in the masculine, which breaks the grammatical rule in order to make clear that John thinks of him as a person, at least I think that’s John’s point.

There is a neuter relative pronoun that you would use if you want it to be grammatically consistent, which it doesn’t use. Here’s something I’d recommend. If that’s an issue for different ones of you — the personhood of the Holy Spirit — get Wayne Grudem’s book on Systematic Theology and go to the section of the Holy Spirit. He’ll have a whole section on the person of the Holy Spirit.

Does God commune with us apart from his word?

We have to be really delicate I think in how we say yes or no to that. If I say no, I think of a text like, “The heavens are telling the glory of God and the firmament declares his handiwork.” You’re to walk out tonight into this bitter cold and you’re to think of a text like, “Who can stand before his cold?” and you’re to sense God doing this, this is God’s cold. And you’re to look up into those skies and say, if you see a star tonight, “Well, if it’s cold here, between here and there is really cold.” And then you’re to remember that night unto tonight pours forth knowledge. And so knowledge is to be streaming from those stars into your head about God and as it comes to you about God, you’re to commune with him now.

But right at that point, I want to almost say, no, you won’t commune with God and you shouldn’t try to commune with God apart from his special revelation in Jesus Christ, because you won’t get that. You will not have any genuine spiritual communion with God, if you don’t have a relationship with Him. And you can’t get a relationship with him any other way than through Jesus Christ. And you can’t get Jesus Christ any other way than through the gospel, which is the word. And so we have to be nuanced and careful when we talk about there being revelatory works of God that are not in the Bible, like nature and our own consciences. And yes, every time God reveals something of himself, there should be a receiving of it on our part, a rendering back of proper acknowledgements and affections, which is a communion. It’s something’s coming to me from God and something is going back to God for me, and that’s what I mean by communion. But all of that is possible because he’s not my enemy.

Wrath isn’t resting on me, it’s been removed by Jesus and now I’m a son and I can have access to a Father so that what is revealed to me can become the stuff of friendly communion rather than the stuff of condemnation. So yes and no, is the answer to that question, with those qualifications.

What would you say to somebody who is not experiencing that communion with God?

Lord, what should I say? And what he brings to my mind right now is Psalm 40:1–3, which says:

I waited patiently for the Lord;
     he inclined to me and heard my cry.
He drew me up from the pit of destruction,
     out of the miry bog,
and set my feet upon a rock,
     making my steps secure.
He put a new song in my mouth,
     a song of praise to our God.
Many will see and fear,
     and put their trust in the Lord.

But here’s the question, how long did I wait? Don’t fly over those first words that say, “I waited for the Lord.” That’s David talking. I remember about 19 years ago, standing right here, right in this spot. Pews, carpet, and no junk in the balconies. There were about 200 people here on a Sunday night. I was a brand new pastor in my first series on Sunday night, or somewhere near the front end, was Summer Psalms. I think it was my first summer here, Summer Psalms. And when I got to Psalms 40, I entitled it In the Pits with the King. I still remember the title. I hardly remember any of my sermons, but I remember that one. Some sermons you remember because of the resonance you get from your people. And that one struck a chord, because everybody’s in the pit lots of the time. That’s where we live lots of the time. That’s why the Psalms are the most favorite book for most people, because the Psalms are so utterly, blatantly realistic about the frustrations of life and the pain of life.

And David, who was a man after God’s own heart says, “I’m in the pit. I’m in this slimy bog. It’s like quicksand. It’s like this soggy mud. How long? I wait, I wait, I wait.” And God came. So the first thing I would say is you’re not alone. I get there too. David was there. Don’t throw in the towel on God, be patient.

I cry. That is the second thing. He said, “I cried to the Lord. I cried to the Lord.” You say, “God, don’t leave me here. Please have mercy upon me. Open the eyes of my heart.” The third thing I might say is Psalm 32. Is there any concealed sin? Anything that God wants you to get out? Because it says in Psalm 32, “I hid my sin. I did not confess it. And my bones rotted within me. I confessed my sins and I was free.” So I would probe a little bit. If this person gave me their time and their trust and their life, then I would say, “Talk to me about the rest of your life. Not just your devotions. Talk to me about the way you treat friends, the way you act at work.” I watch some people in they’re like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

I’ll give you an example. I know a guy who’s here every Sunday. I could tell you where he sits every Sunday morning. Every time I talk to him, he’s like a little teddy bear when he’s here. And I’ve called him at work and he gets upset and then says, “Oh, hi Pastor.” Something’s wrong. There’s a disconnect here. So he came to me and said, “I’m not getting anywhere in my devotions.” I said, “Well I think there’s a bigger issue here. I wonder if you are wanting relief from your own sins when you’re not relieving anybody at work. You’re making life really hard for people at work. There’s a blockage. The sweetness that you want is not flowing through you. It’s just getting blocked at about 8:30 a.m. You’re a bulldog to everybody. You need to soften up. Sweeten up. Get the clogs out of the way. Something’s got to flow through you. When it starts flowing through you more will come into you.” So that’d be one thing I’d say, check your life for sins.

A fourth thing would be this. I really have to stop because I can go on for 14 points here. I have a little paper online that is titled “How to Help Your People Be Satisfied in God”. This is the most common question I get asked everywhere I go. If I talk about Christian Hedonism and being happy in God and triumphing over sin. People everywhere raise their hand and say, “But that’s not where I live. How? How? How?” That’s why I’m doing this seminar. That’s what this seminar is about — the “how” question of the Christian life. And so there’ll be more, but just be encouraged for you and for all those that you’re speaking for. And for me, that we’re all there from time to time and we have seasons of light and seasons of darkness.

I’ve been in the pastorate now for 20 years. And then before that other kinds of things. There have been lean seasons and there have been vital and lively seasons. I’m just a very fortunate person that I’m surrounded by encouragers. I got another email today and basically it was a response to the pastor’s conference we had plus something else I’d done down at Moody whenever it was, a day or two ago. And basically the last line said, “Please, John Piper, don’t ever give up. Don’t ever give up. Don’t ever give up.” He said it about five times, right across the bottom. Because this person just considers me with my books and my speaking, as a sitting duck for Satan to shoot at to get another one of those big shot pastors and bring reproach on the whole church of Jesus Christ. And he just pleaded with me. Don’t give up, don’t throw in the towel. Don’t make shipwreck of your faith. Hang in there.

So when you have a lot of people around you exhorting you and calling you to account and correcting you and encouraging you, that’s a great help. That would be a fifth thing. I’d say who’s in your life helping you? Anybody helping you with this problem? You’ve told it to me now, but I want to say, who else do you talk about this with? Because it says in Hebrews 3:13 it says to exhort one another every day, as long as it is called today, lest there be in you, an evil heart of unbelief leading you to fall away from the living God. Everybody is falling. The Christian life is like swimming in a river. The current is leading to hell and heaven is at the headwaters. Anybody who coasts goes backwards. When you get tired, who grabs you?

I was a water safety instructor when I was a teenager and worked for camps and I was taught how to get people out of the water when they were dead and when they were fighting. You’d swim up to them, they’re flailing around. They’re going to drown you if you get them, right? They’re going to latch around your head and drown you. So before you get there you go down. You learn how to take their knees, switch them around, come up to the top, give them a good hook around the neck. One arm goes under here, one on the neck, they’re falling out around, but you got them under control. You get one arm free and the scissors kick, and you take them home.

I should do that for you or somebody should. There’s people in your life that are drowning right now, drowning in sin, drowning in indifference, drowning in lust, drowning in greed, drowning in sadness and depression and discouragement and overwork and bad management of their lives, and your main job is not to criticize them, but to go in there and, and dive down under their knees so they don’t drown you with them, switch them around, come up, give them a good headlock and say, “We’re going to go talk about Jesus.”

I was told once upon a time that just the sheer raw act of praying is faith, not that it was an experience one had in praying. I’ve come to see that that’s not the way to look at it. Is that right?

I would agree with that. That’s not the way to look at it. And now the longing is that in and through prayer, there is a rising sense of confidence that God is for you. That he’s a father who’s hearing you, that he loves you, that he’s going to be there for you to do what you ask or something better, and that you want that to rise. And if it does, is that the work of the Holy Spirit? It is. The Holy Spirit bears witness with our spirit, that we are the children of God. Those who are led by the Spirit of God are the children of God. It’s the rising sense that God is our Father. We say, “Abba Father,” and the Spirit bearing witness with our spirit that we are the children of God. When we cry from the heart, genuinely “Abba Father” and trust him, that’s the Spirit enabling us, bearing fruit or bearing witness with our spirit that we are the children of God. So yes, I would say, yes, that’s the work of the Spirit in your life. And you can, at that moment, enjoy communion with him.

And when that is absent doubt tends to creep in and well, it should. I mean, it’s inevitable. If you don’t have faith, you’re doubting, but now there’s this issue of faith. Let’s just make a little comment here. I don’t mean that you must be absolutely assured that what the very thing you asked for, and the very timing that you’re asking for is going to happen, or you have no faith. I think there is a kind of faith that is granted like that from time to time. It’s the gift of faith. I don’t know that I’ve ever experienced it. Which might be just an indictment of my own level of piety. I asked my father, who’s a very godly evangelist, “Have you ever experienced that kind of faith? Where when you prayed, you knew you had it. The specific thing in the time that you had it.” He said he did maybe five times in 50 years of ministry.

I said, “Give me an example.” And he said, “Well, one time I was doing a crusade.” My father was an evangelist, a little mini Billy Graham, and a church or two would come together and there’d be 100, 200, or 300 people for his nightly preaching. And he preached the gospel and nothing was happening. He was discouraged out of his mind as a young man. And he got on his knees. He said, “Lord, I got to have a breakthrough. I don’t know that I can keep on in the ministry of evangelism if you don’t work through me, if I don’t have a gift, then I can’t do it. If you won’t use me to bring people to yourself.” And you said at about 2:00 a.m. he received this, call it what you will, mystical assurance: “Five people tomorrow night. I’ll give them to you.”

He said he got off his knees and it was done. He said he’d never had it before. And not many times since. It was done. Five people are going to receive Jesus tomorrow night. So he walked in there and he announced that five people are going to receive Jesus tonight because God told him so. That’s dangerous. You shouldn’t do that. But he did it. And he preached and gave his invitation and four people walked forward. He closed the service and turned them loose and just waited. And a person got partway home and turned around and came back. The fifth one turned around and came back. So here was my key question for my daddy. I said, “Why don’t you pray like that all the time? And stay up till 2:00 a.m. in the morning, wrestling with God.” And you know what he said? “I’d be dead.”

Meaning when you pray from 10:00 to 2:00 a.m. and sweat drops of blood and your heart is breaking and the emotions are so intense that you can hardly endure, you can’t do that every night. You’re not wired that way. You’re not intended to be that intense all the time. So I don’t know for you. I think we have different gifts. I mean if you read 1 Corinthians 12, the gifts of the Spirit, one of them is faith. One of them is miracles. One of them is healings, knowledge, prophecy. So some of you in this room might get that every other week. You might.

I cannot point to one instance of that in my life, just to encourage the rest of you. Don’t say, “Well, if John doesn’t get it, I’m not going to get it either.” Don’t say that. Because there may be weaknesses in me, there may be unbelief in me. There may be fears in me. There may be obstacles that I’m just going to be reproved for someday when my heart is laid bare before the judge of all the earth. I’d like to see why now. And I’m open to that. But don’t stop seeking him.

So here’s the point, back to your question. When I say you should always have faith and when you say you want faith in all you’re praying, I mean something different than what my dad experienced that night. I mean the confidence God is hearing you. God loves you. God’s going to do what’s good for you. No doubt about it. Either he gives me what I’m asking or his delays are wise for holy and good purposes. And you submit, you say, “Nevertheless, not my timing, but thine.” I mean, I don’t know how to handle prayer any other way, because if you develop a nifty little program that says, “Okay, you get whatever you ask for if you ask according to the will of God,” premise one. Premise two, it’s the will of God that everybody be saved. Premise three, I am now praying for my son Abraham’s salvation. Premise four: He’s going to be saved. That’s baloney. Because otherwise I could pray for everybody and they’d be saved.

Of course, God desires all to be saved in one sense. And of course we should ask according to his will, but there is too much experience and too many other texts to be that simplistic about what faith really is. You don’t run the world. God runs the world. Prayer is a mystery to me, a great mystery — asking from your finite, sinful, perspective that God would do things the way you think they should be done. It could be something like, “Give us 9 million dollars to tear this building down, build another one here. And another one beside it.” We’re going to tell God that’s the way to run the world? I think not. But he tells us, “Ask me, ask me. I love to do things for my children when they ask me. You have not because you ask not. You ask and don’t receive because you ask wrongly to spend it on your private worldly passions.” This is a very amazing thing. I call it weird.

When I spoke to Perspectives class a few weeks ago. I said, prayer is one of the weirdest things in the world. I would just give you a little tip here, because you all, I presume you come to this thing because you care about these things. And if you care about them, you probably want to go out from here in the weeks and years to come and bless people with your lives. You want your lives to count. People do not get enamored or helped by a Christianity that glosses over its weirdness and tries to make it easy and palatable and boring. Christianity comes alive to people when they see it as weird. And you say, “Yeah, it’s wildly weird. It’s so weird it’s true. In fact, one of the weirdest things about it is that it’s true.” And instead of running away from its weirdness like prayer — prayer is one of the weirdest things of all — is to just push its weirdest.

Faith as a Means of Living in Communion with God

You did a good transition for us here. Now I’m going to argue that faith in those texts and in promises is a means of living in communion with God, through his word. Here’s some texts that point to the role of faith in this regard. Galatians 2:20 says:

I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.

So which is it? I no longer live or I now live? Who is this “I”? We’re not living and we are living. We died and yet we’re alive. We were crucified and now we live. We’re living in the flesh, our ordinary life. I don’t think there’s any negative to the word “flesh” right there. It’s just in our ordinary body. And the way we live is by faith. Now that’s the difference between the “I” who’s living and the “I” who is not living. The no longer living “I” was the unbelieving “I.” The “I” that is now living is the believing “I.” Therefore, the channel or the mark or the median or the material of the life that the Holy Spirit imparts is faith. Faith is the channel through which the Holy Spirit is imparting life. Faith is the mark of the living person in communion with Christ. The faith spoken of here is this second kind of utter dependence on God’s being for you, loving you, caring for you, providing your needs as he judged needs.

Galatians 5:5 says:

For through the Spirit, by faith, we ourselves eagerly wait for the hope of righteousness.

So how do we live now? As we wait, it’s not here yet fully. How do we wait? We wait through the Spirit, by faith. I think those are correlatives. That is, they always go together. When you have faith. This was your question. Is that the Spirit? Yes, it is. Through the Spirit we have faith, and when we have faith, it is the Spirit working in and through that. Those two go together. And that’s the way we wait for the hope of righteousness now.

You could say, “Well, how do we live the Christian life? Do we live by faith, or do we live it by the Spirit?” And the answer is yes, because your job, your dependent job is to trust the promises. And Owen is right. When trust is rising in the promises the Holy Spirit is there. He’s doing that.

Galatians 3:5 says:

Does he who supplies the Spirit to you and works miracles among you do so by works of the law, or by hearing with faith . . .

There it is made explicit. Here they’re just side by side. Through the Spirit by faith. Here they’re not side by side, they’re made instrument and end. How do you get a supply? Now this is present tense. Ongoing action. It’s not that he gave you the Holy Spirit when you got converted. Evangelicals are really good at saying when we’re born again, we’re born of the Spirit and so we’re indwelt by the Spirit from then on. True. Gloriously true, but we’re not as good in realizing and living in this ongoing provision. The Holy Spirit is there day by day, hour by hour for us.

How is he there? That’s what he’s asking. Does he do this ongoing provision by works of the law? He means to say no to that, you work your way to get the Spirit to be provided for you. Do you try to show yourself morally sufficient? Do you try to demonstrate that you are worthy of the Spirit and use works like that? No. Well then, what do you do? Is there anything you can do? Answer: hearing with faith. And the hearing brings in the word idea and the faith of course, the faith. Hearing the word with faith is the way the Spirit is provided to you.

Hearing with Faith

This is so, so helpful because it gives you a concrete way to do your life. It tells you what your devotions are about in the morning. It tells you what Bible memory is about. It tells you what exhortation in the word to another person is about. It’s about the miracle of the provision of the Holy Spirit. You don’t just say, “Oh, the Holy Spirit is the key to life so let’s close our Bibles and stop learning and stop studying and just call on the Holy Spirit to come and fall.” That’s not what it says. It says if you want that to be provided. It’s going to come through hearing with faith. And this hearing is the hearing of the gospel, the hearing of the word of God with faith. So if you want somebody to have the Holy Spirit that you love, keep dishing them the Bible. Keep sending them promises.

I have one of these pocket calendars. And if you go in here to my calendar and tap calendar and go to Thursday morning there is a recurring meeting at 9:00 a.m. Do you know what it’s going to say? Write to your sons. I have four sons. Talitha is too little. She doesn’t read yet. But she’ll be there one day. Write to your sons. They’ve all got email now. All four of them can hear me every day. One is in Chicago, one is in Worthington, one is in South Minneapolis, and one is living at home with his computer eight feet from mine through the wall. I can get at my sons everyday or every week. One of them I send more often than once a week. And what do I do? Do I just say, “How’s the weather? Aren’t the Wolves cool? Eleven wins in a row.” That’s not what I say. I don’t even know. I say, “He who finds a wife finds a good thing. I’m praying that you’ll wait for her. The Christian one.” Or another day, another thing. Another day, another thing.

I come off my devotions in my communion with God asking not just for settings like this where I speak to 100 maybe, but for my boys, for my wife, and for Talitha. Today, what can I say? How can I be a means of providing them with the Holy Spirit? I pray, “Oh Spirit come. Oh Spirit illuminate. Oh Spirit preserve. Oh Spirit fight. Oh Spirit hold back from life-destroying sin. Oh Spirit open their eyes.” I don’t leave it at that, because the Bible says not to leave it at that. It says, how do you get that? You get it by hearing with faith. So I send him something to hear and then I pray down faith. Then it’s God’s hands. It’s in God’s hands. There are other things you can do. You can love them. You can sacrifice for them. You can show them Christ as well as talk about Christ, which is also important. But I just want you to see that communing with the Holy Spirit is communing through faith over the word. That’s what Owen said and I think that’s what Paul is saying here in Galatians.

The Love of God Poured Out in Us

Here’s another illustration of it in Romans 5:5:

Hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.

He was given? Yes, absolutely. There was a point where he came. When we were born of God, he came. But the love of God has been and is being poured out in our lives. So the question a lot of people have as Christians and we ought to have it, is the love of God just to just a fact that you’re supposed to believe and say, “Well I don’t feel it but the Bible says he loves me. So I just take it for granted. He must love me.” Is that all the Christian life is supposed to be? Well be there if that’s where you are. Be there. But you don’t have to stay there because this text says the love of God is poured out within our hearts through the Holy Spirit.

So the Spirit means to cause you to commune with God in his love for you experientially, not just cognitively alone, but in your heart there’s an outpouring of the love of God so that you sense being loved by God. You feel yourself embraced by God. The words “I will never leave you, I will never forsake you” are actually applied to you by the Spirit. He draws you in and he says, “You’re mine,” and you sense that very personal, intimate, you are mine, I love you, and I gave my Son to you in particular. I’m going to fight for you. I’m going to bring you home to heaven. I’m going to be your God forever and ever, and it’s going to get better and better. Though I take you through deep waters here, I’m in charge and I love you and I’m going to be your God.” You sense that powerfully because the Holy Spirit is pouring it into your life. He’s pouring it out in your heart. You’re not just reading it on a page and saying, “Well, inferentially, there it is. The Bible is true. I believe it. Fact.” Off we go to work. Yes, stay there and be there if that’s where you are, but oh ask for this, press for this.

An Ongoing Demonstration of Love

Now, how does it work? Notice what he does as he goes on:

and hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us. For while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly. For one will scarcely die for a righteous person — though perhaps for a good person one would dare even to die . . . (Romans 5:5–7).

Let’s stop there. What’s he doing? He just told us about an experiential thing that the Holy Spirit is doing right now in our hearts, and he grounds it with a historical fact. At the right time Christ died. That’s 2000 years ago, an outside us, non-experience, actual fact. It’s the most important fact in history and in the universe. Christ died for the ungodly, me. Now how’s that a support for this experience? Well, because he means for us to meditate on this finished historical work of Christ on the cross as that by which, now let’s keep reading. By which what?

For one will scarcely die for a righteous person — though perhaps for a good person one would dare even to die — but God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us (Romans 5:7–8).

You would have expected the past tense there (showed) just like it says Christ died here, as if to say, “When he died, God demonstrated.” But what it says is that God demonstrates. In an ongoing, continuous action — his love toward us in that while we were yet sinners Christ died. Now he’s back to past tense again. What’s the interplay here between past and present and present experience? The interplay is this, the gospel, the word of God revealed in the scriptures is meant to carry historical reality. God once entered this world. If he didn’t enter this world and Christ didn’t die and rise historically, our faith is vain. All the heebie-jeebies experiences we can have will do us no good whatsoever.

But if Christ really became man, if he was really God, if he really died for sinners, if he really rose again, if he really reigns in heaven today, if he’s really coming again, then to meditate on that, that word, about that historical event is the means by which the Holy Spirit demonstrates now, present tense, the love of God and pours it into your life. I just don’t know how to make that feel to you how important it is, maybe a story.

Powerful Experience Rooted in the Historical Gospel

When I was in Germany studying 30 years ago or whenever it was, I went to the only Baptist church that was in Munich, Germany. There were a million people and one Baptist church with about five little outpost preaching places. It was a pretty big church for them, 300 or 400 people, a great choir, and wonderful people. There was a nursery. That’s a big deal there because most of the state churches didn’t have nurseries. I tried to go to the state church for a while and we took our little six-month-old Carsten and the associate pastor took us aside and said, “We don’t usually bring babies to church.” There were 60 people in this church, most of them old ladies. My wife sat at the back with the baby who never made a peep. I said, “Well what would you suggest? Is there a nursery?” He said, “Well what we usually suggest is that you take turns coming to church.” I said, “I see, and that’s it?”

So we found a Baptist church and they had a nursery and they had a choir and they preached the gospel, which that church didn’t either. One day, maybe it was Easter, they let a woman give a testimony who was a Jehovah’s Witness formerly, until a week ago. She stood up and with tears in her eyes, she said, “On good Friday, I was ready to kill myself because of the hopelessness of feeling I could ever measure up in the system of works that I saw in Jehovah’s Witnesses, holding my magazines, putting in my hours, walking the neighborhoods, trying my best to be one of the 144,000 or whatever, and it was all over. One of your women came to me and said, ‘Don’t hurt yourself. May I suggest this? Then you call me, you call me if this doesn’t work.’ I would like you to read, tonight before you go to sleep, the whole Gospel of Luke. Give yourself that chance. Read the whole Gospel of Luke tonight. Then, if that is not a place where you meet the true and living Christ, then we’ll talk. I’m not sure what I’ll have to say to you, but don’t hurt yourself till you call me.’”

Then she said, “When I got to the cross and Gethsemane, and slowly read my way through this man’s sacrifice, heaven opened and I saw Christ. I saw grace. I saw the true meaning of the cross. I saw what it meant to have your sins forgiven and God accept you apart from works of the law.” So God at that moment demonstrated to her in her experience, and the love of God was poured out into her life. But the agent was the word, and behind the word history, fact.

So frankly, in my life, I am not very impressed by people who direct me away from the word to marvelous experiences. Every religion has marvelous experiences. It’s frightening to read the miracles of Hinduism and the miracles of Buddhism. If you think that you’re going to be a great Christian because you can do a miracle or two, you are very wrong. It’s the word of God opened by the Holy Spirit, transforming sinners into holy people that is the great mark of authentic Christianity. So those are texts pointing to faith as the means of living in communion with God. Communion with God happens here as the Holy Spirit pours out the word of God into their lives as they focus on historical reality, the death of Christ mediated now presently by God the Holy Spirit into their lives.

Communion in the Promises of God’s Presence and Help

Communion with God is rooted in contemplating the word of God with faith, especially the promises of his presence and help. Here’s another quote from Owen. Let me give you the context here. He had just been talking about the beauties of Christ and the great work of Christ in his role as mediator between God and man, and now he says, What poor, low, perishing things do we spend our contemplations on?”

I got a letter and for all I know the one who sent it to me, may be in this room, though I don’t think so. I think she was from out of town. Wouldn’t matter. She told me her story, that in 1986, she came to this church as a student at the University of Minnesota, invited by a friend. She was in a campus ministry, came out of a good, solid Christian home. In her perspective now, she was legalistic to the core she was. She thought, “Oh, I don’t like this John Piper. He’s too emotional and a Christian Hedonism sounds all wrong to me.” So she never came back. Hasn’t been back since, in fact, for 14 years.

She said that she got married, kept on going with her disciplined way of Christian life and then hit the wall. There were some marital problems, and her life absolutely dried up. She said for 12 years I was absolutely addicted to soap operas. I’ve never had anybody tell me that before. I just assume that’s true. I don’t know why they’d be on TV otherwise if they weren’t an addiction because they’re so banal and ugly and gross and disgusting and whatever. I think they are. At least at Pizza Hut they are, because that’s is the only time I ever see TV.

Then she said somebody invited her into a Bible study two years ago to read Desiring God. That’s the book I wrote about Christian Hedonism. She said, “Oh no, it’s crazy quack Piper again with his hedonism stuff.” She read the first two chapters by assignment, and she said, “God put the thought in my head, ‘What if this is true? What if God does mean to be pursued as our ultimate satisfaction? What if we should try to be delighted in him? What if this is our highest calling, to enjoy God and not just work for God?’”

That seed thought enabled her to keep reading, and she said, “God turned me so upside down that I was able to stand back and look at my life and what I really delighted in and all I saw everywhere was idolatry — idolatry in TV, idolatry in food, idolatry in family. There was idolatry everywhere.” Because that’s what she really loved. That’s what she was really satisfied by. That’s where she really got her joy, her kicks, her everything. She was the most broken person that ever was, she said. She repented profoundly, began to set her face like a flint to find satisfaction in God, and she said, “These two years have been like heaven on earth.” Now you know where she goes to church? Grace Richfield.

She said she heard that we were sending a whole slug of people down there. She drives from a city pretty far out. Owen said:

What poor, low perishing things do we spend our contemplations on.

It’s like soap operas or sports? It’s okay to like sports, but not much. Not much. Some of the young guys. Grow out of it. It’s a phase, and if you don’t grow out of it you’ll remain an adolescent all your life and you’ll have substitute warfare. That’s what football is, right? So is basketball nowadays. It didn’t used to be but it is now. It’s just warfare. So guys who can’t really go to war just have vicarious war. They have their armies and they move the little soldiers around. Did you ever play army?

You girls don’t know what we’re talking about here, probably. Excuse me, ladies, girls, when you were little. I’m very stereotyped in my ideas, but my little girl is so different from my boys. I can’t believe it. I try to play with her like I played with them and I’m having to learn from her how to play with her. I knew how to play with my boys. We had helicopters and bombs and you build a tower to knock it down. Everything was blowing up. I thought we would do that, and she just wants to play people. What would you like to do? She says, “Play people.” She opens her house and she puts people around the table. I say, “What’s going to happen here? Where’s the bomb? Where’s the guns? You get on that side of the table and we’ll bring something out here.” I’m learning. I’m trying to figure this out. Don’t get too excited about sports.

Always Delighting Our Souls

Owen continues:

Were we to have no advantage by this (the mediatorial role of Christ) astonishing dispensation, yet, its excellency, glory, beauty, depths, deserve the flower of our inquiries, the vigor of our spirits, the substance of our time, but when, withal, our life, our peace, our joy, our inheritance, our eternity, our all, lies herein, shall not the thoughts of it always dwell in our hearts, always refresh and delight our souls?

Let me just boil that down to plain up-to-date English. Aren’t the beauty, and the glory, and the excellence, and the depths of Jesus Christ and his work worthy of our dwelling on them and refreshing ourselves by them and delighting in them all the time, rather than spending our contemplations on so much that is so low? We all do this. How much time do you spend on the crossword puzzle in the paper? How much time do you spend reading the comics in the paper? How much time do you spend going over the sports page, or maybe you’re a mutual funds person and you spend a half an hour analyzing that page and everything. Then you say, “Oh, I guess there’s no time to read my Bible this morning.”

We are profoundly evil people, and thank goodness God is patient with us and merciful toward us that we are so bent towards the world, and so bent away from the holy and the good and the beautiful and the glorious. I struggle with it all the time. So communion with God is rooted in contemplating the word of God with faith, especially the promises of his presence and help.

Responding with Fitting Affections

Communion with God is responding with fitting affections and communications of our heart to God through the Spirit. He comes to us by his word through faith and we render back to him communications, both intellectually and emotionally, through prayer.

Ephesians 6:18 says:

Praying at all times in the Spirit, with all prayer and supplication. To that end, keep alert with all perseverance, making supplication for all the saints,

Pray in the Spirit to God.”

Jude 1:20 says:

But you, beloved, building yourselves up in your most holy faith and praying in the Holy Spirit . . .

The Holy Spirit doesn’t just open the word to you. He opens you to God and enables you to pray as you ought. Sometimes when he moves, there’s such a liberty and a freedom in prayer and other times it’s hard work because he suffers us to languish for a season.

Lastly, Romans 8:26 says:

Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness. For we do not know what to pray for as we ought, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words.

Sometimes the Holy Spirit takes us in our great groaning, our great weaknesses and our great confusion and our worldliness, and all he produces in us is groanings. “Oh God, Oh God, Oh God, Oh God.” And God interprets those according to the Spirit’s loving purpose for our lives.