I thought I’d start with a couple of verses:

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 (Galatians 2:20).

He says, “The life I now live,” so I’m walking step-by-step through this day by faith in a person. I’m taking a step — speaking, eating, or whatever I’m doing — and I’m doing it by trusting a person. And then the next thing he says is “who loved me 2,000 years ago and gave himself for me 2,000 years ago.” Now, how does that work? That’s where we’re going here. What is the function of bygone grace?

That was Galatians 2:20. Put it together with Romans 5:8, which goes like this:

God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.

Isn’t that amazing? He shows (present tense) his love for us in that while we were yet sinners, he died. He shows by dying. He shows now by having died. He shows now by having died. So when I’m walking by faith in the one who loved me, the way Paul wants me to think about this is that because he died for me 2000 years ago, paid it all, covered my sins, established my righteousness, removed God’s wrath, grafted me to Christ, secured my glory forever, because that happened 2000 years ago, I should now feel loved now.

Now God shows his love. Shows (not showed) now that he died. And if he’s loving me now, then this next step I have to take, he’s going to help me. He’s not against me. Right? That’s the way we live. I live by faith in him. I live by faith in him, meaning he loves me. Now he’s going to make all the promises come true. Now, the next step I take through this day, every step I can bank on the fact that he’s for me. It’s going to help me. The promises are going to come true. I can believe each one of them for the next five minutes, for the next five hours, or the next five years or the next five centuries. I started there because I read Galatians 2 for devotions this morning and it moved me.

The Function of Past Grace

Let’s talk in a little more detail than what I’ve already said about the function of past grace. So this is that text that I preached on the day before yesterday. It is near the top, maybe the top of my all time useful, loved Bible verses.

He who did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all, how will he not also with him graciously give us all things?

This is called an a fortiori argument. It’s from the stronger to the weaker, from the greater to the lesser, from the harder to the easier. And whenever you have a rhetorical question like that in the Bible that doesn’t have an answer, it expects you to know the answer — namely, he will. He most certainly will. So the logic is since He did not spare his most precious possession in the pursuit of your salvation, but gave him up to beating and spitting and nail piercing, therefore he will give you surely everything with him. He’ll meet every need. Everything you really need will be there. That’s the argument.

So I go back to this text as the foundation of my future hope more than any other text. Because it is the most sweeping and the most ultimate of promises and foundations. The foundation happened 2,000 years ago, where God overcame the greatest obstacle to my salvation, namely his infinite love for his Son that surely would not let him allow that Son to be killed. He simply cannot allow his Son to be so scorned and so mistreated and so killed. He cannot allow that because Jesus is his most precious possession. But He did. He overcame the hardest obstacle imaginable, which means (a fortiori) that He will find it relatively easy to fulfill all the other promises to me.

This is breathtaking. I call this the solid logic of heaven. I don’t think this logic would be in the Bible if it weren’t useful to us. After I prepared that sermon, I was praying about the message and it just flooded my mind. This is why we have a college. This is why Christians plant schools, as well as churches. Logic matters, infinitely. That’s not an overstatement. If this logic doesn’t hold, nothing matters in the universe, right? I mean, he expects us to read Romans 8:32, and he’s reasoning with our souls. He’s saying, “Do you see that if he didn’t spare his Son, then he won’t spare any effort in caring for you? Do you see that? If you don’t see that, how can you be a Christian? How can you live the Christian life if you don’t see the argument from the greater to the lesser?”

So I shared this with my daughter at breakfast yesterday and she didn’t know the term a fortiori at 16. I said, “Okay, you’re going to learn a fortiori.” And then I gave the same illustration to her, I gave him the sermon. Carsten was six years old. This would be 32 years ago or so. I said, “Why don’t you run next door to Mr. Smith and ask him if we can borrow his pliers.” And Carson says, “But maybe Mr. Smith doesn’t want us to borrow his pliers. Maybe he won’t give them to me.” And I, a fortiori, with a six year old — blessed it the child that grows up in a home where reasoning is called this way. You say to the child, “Oh, I’m sure he’ll, he’ll let you have them because yesterday Mr. Smith loaned me his car all day happily. And I’m sure Carsten, if he is happy for me to have his car all day, he’ll be totally willing to let us have his pliers for an hour.” Little Carsten is processing the a fortiori argument. And he thinks, “Oh, okay.”

He doesn’t have to know the names, he just needs to reason. His life is hanging on this someday. Do you believe that? I mean, don’t belittle logic. This is logic in its pristine essential spiritual necessity. Romans 8:32, train your children up to think this way. Think clearly, think rationally. Reason comes from God. Arguments exist and are valid because God is valid. God is valid. He is what he is and he’s not what he’s not. That’s principle number one in logic. A is not, not A. Some of the things that are most obvious to us and would never have been questioned centuries ago are being questioned today. That’s why you have to say the obvious sometimes.

From Greater to Lesser

Consider Romans 5:9, which says:

Since, therefore, we have now been justified by his blood, much more shall we be saved by him from the wrath of God.

There it is again, exactly the same argument. Does that argument move you spiritually? Does it affect your heart and your emotions? Isn’t this amazing, reasoning is to make you willing to die. Reasoning is to make you willing to stay married. Reasoning is to make you happier than you’ve ever been in all your life. That’s what reasoning is for.

We, do you see if you have now been justified, then much more. It is more, it is more likely that something that hasn’t yet happened will happen, namely, he’ll save you from the wrath of God. The wrath of God is coming upon the world. Future grace says, “I’ll save you from it.” But how do I know I’m included? Are you justified? “I trust Jesus.” Then you’re justified. If you’re justified, you won’t be swept away in the wrath. That’s reasoning. Romans 5:10 continues:

For if while we were enemies we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son, much more, now that we are reconciled, shall we be saved by his life.

I’m illustrating how past grace relates to faith in future grace. And the past grace here is this: “I was an enemy. In spite of my being an enemy, he overcame my enmity and reconciled me to him and him to me. He did it by the death of Jesus. And if he did it, then all the more can you count on him saving me forever.”

I was 22 years old before I was self-conscious about seeing these things in the Bible, that is, arguments like this. I read my Bible very faithfully. No doubt intuitively I was picking them up as a teenager, but nobody ever paused to point out the nature of Paul’s reasoning here with the “much mores.” And they are precious.

Since We Have a High Priest

Hebrews 4:14–16 says:

Since then we have a great high priest who has passed through the heavens, Jesus, the Son of God, let us hold fast our confession. For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet without sin. Let us then with confidence draw near to the throne of grace, that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need.

When? Now? Five minutes from now, tomorrow, tonight, let us draw near with confidence. Why? On what basis shall we tomorrow and tonight draw near with confidence to get help in time of need? That’s all I am. I’m just one desperate, “Help! Morning, help Lord. Noon, help Lord. Evening, help Lord.” What confidence do I have to trust that is going to come?

We do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet without sin. Let us then with confidence draw near to the throne of grace, that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need (Hebrews 4:15–16).

This is why the title is “Future Grace,” That’s it. I mean, that might be one of the simplest verses to see it (Hebrews 4:16). Live by faith in future grace means, pray hour by hour, for the mercy and the grace to help in time of need. And do it on the basis of the fact that you have a high priest interceding for you in heaven who has passed through the curtains of his own flesh, into the Holy of Holies and there is pleading your cause, not on the basis of your good works or your merit, but on the basis of his perfections, and they cannot fail. I love Christianity. I’m so glad I’m a Christian. This is such good news, I can’t believe I get to do this.

Question and Answer

In the light of your statement last night regarding your inclination to be skeptical, how do you internally process dealing with professing believers who have little spiritual affection?

I try to crucify my inordinate skepticism first of all. I don’t want to belittle appropriate questioning and skepticism. I think I’m a sinner, and therefore my skepticism leans toward being inappropriate and inordinate. Do you know what verse checks me on this more than any other?

Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends . . . (1 Corinthians 13:7–8).

Or toss in 1 Peter 4:8, which says, “Love covers a multitude of sins.” Now, if the Holy Spirit begins to gain ascendancy in the control of my heart, I think I will look upon those people with more hope rather than writing them off. So my internal dealing as a skeptic is to first fight my battle, not their battle. I want to fight me, not them. That’s my first instinct: I'm a sinner. My skepticism could really, really damage a weak person here. If I’ve manifested I’m suspicious about you and you’re just a weak, struggling saint and not an unbeliever trying to pose, then I could really hurt you. I don’t want to hurt you. I’d rather err on the side of hope than the side of skepticism. So I fight that battle here.

And then, I just want to take people where they are and do what I do. I mean, I’m a preacher, I’m a writer, I’m a seminar leader, I’m a dad, I’m a husband. I’m a mover among people. And I want everywhere I go, everything I do, to point towards the things about God that awaken affections for him. That’s what I want to do for these folks.

You know, when it comes to manifest affections, personalities are so different. I mean, how many of you, north of the Mason-Dixon line, or maybe north of Brazil, grew up in homes where there weren’t any emotions except anger. That’s all you remember. Dad was angry and mom was sad. That’s all you remember. And you’re supposed to be radiant for Jesus and show it. That isn’t going to happen without a long-term transformation miracle. It doesn’t mean you’re not saved

It means that there’s all kinds of blockages, right? There are emotional blockages. This new person down here, that’s been awakened. There’s genuine affection for Jesus. You really do want him, love him, and treasure him. And it’s just bumping into all kinds of personality, dysfunctions in your life, all kinds of junk you’ve been through. It’s hardly ever getting out. You hardly ever express it the way you’d like to express it. You feel rotten that you can’t be like John Piper jumping up and down, waving his arms and shouting. You’re just kind of steady state. So I just want to own that when I’m dealing with such people. I want to say, “Am I dealing with a Swede here or an unbeliever?”

I told myself years ago in this church that I wouldn’t do that. This is the first Swedish Baptist church in Minneapolis. Do you know that? We changed the name in the 1930s, but you know what I mean. Just take it on the chin, all you blondes, for the sake of the cause.

Are you saying God’s promises, his future grace, do not apply to us if we do not accept or believe them?

That’s a very good question. His promises do not apply to you if you’re not among the elect, which means they do not apply to you if you’re not a believer. The way you know that you’re among the elect is that you trust in Jesus. The promises of God are promises in the covenant. They’re made to his covenant people. You’re in the covenant by faith in Jesus. And if you’re in there, they count for you even on your worst days. Some of those days can be really embattled.

Paul wouldn’t have said to Timothy, “Fight the good fight of faith,” if there were no battle? I mean, if, if Timothy’s faith was always at a hundred percent, what’s to fight? If your faith is starting to languish, if your confidence in God for this afternoon is starting to languish, you need to be told, “Fight the fight of faith.” And so the question is, as that faith goes down, do those promises count? You have to read the promises in context and ask, is there a condition put on it? When it says in James, “Humble yourself before the Lord, because God gives more grace to the humble” (James 4:10), there is a correlation between my rising and falling humility and the kinds of graces within the covenant that rest upon me.

So for example, if a preacher goes into a season of self-sufficiency. He’s starting to feel pretty good about the church and, and you’re starting to be a self-reliance in the pulpit — it can happen to a Christian pastor — I think the grace of power can be withheld from the Lord. So the promise of God empowering you rises and falls with your reliance. It’s a humble reliance upon that power. So I’ve just made a distinction there in this question. Promises are valid for the elect, for those who are in the covenant, for those who are born again, for those who are believers. And in that covenant, some of those promises are made contingent and they rise and fall upon faith.

So the point of this course is that I want to live day by day in faith in those promises. I don’t want to try to figure out, “What’s the minimum? What’s the minimum blessing I can enjoy from God and the minimum faith I can have in order to squeak by the judgment and get to heaven?” That’s not the way the new born person thinks or talks.

The Spirit and the Work

I promised last night that when I mentioned faith as the agent of our holiness and our love and our obedience that you should have asked, “Wait, I thought the Holy Spirit was the agent and the real one who does the work?” Now we’re going to talk about the connection between those two. What’s the role of the Holy Spirit in enabling obedience? How does it relate to faith in future grace? So there are three verses from Galatians here. The fruit of the Spirit is love. So for the first statement, where does love come from? Love is brought about by the Holy Spirit, pushing fruit out on the limb of my life. Galatians 5:6 says:

For in Christ Jesus neither circumcision nor uncircumcision counts for anything, but only faith working through love.

So where does love come from? Comes from faith. Well, does it come from the Holy Spirit? Or does it come from faith? You probably see where I’m going. That’s the way I read my Bible. I see verses like that, and I just stop and get out a piece of paper, fold it in half, get my pencil, and start doodling possible solutions to that. And that feels like a problem to me. I want to know how that works. Love is coming by the Holy Spirit, and love is faith working. And that’s put together in Galatians 3:5:

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 . . .

I want that. I want to be a loving person. And Paul expects you to answer, what?

No, don’t be timid. He expects you to answer “no.” Does he do so by works of the law or by hearing with faith? And he expects you to answer yes to that. Good. All right. Now, we have them brought together. The supply of the Spirit and the working of miraculous things — both in terms of spiritual gifts and in terms of miraculous, moral transformations — he does that, not by works of the law. In other words, the Christian life is not, “Here’s the law. I read the 10 Commandments. I take those 10 Commandments. I have a will, I will not do it.” That’s not the Christian life. That’s moralism. That’s what the world thinks is the Christian life.

This is why Tim Keller is so helpful by saying that every time you preach against libertines (people would just sleep around, drink themselves drunk, smoke themselves dead, steal, and lie), you better also in that sermon preach a little bit against legalism. Why? Because those people that are doing that bad stuff have no conception of any alternative to what they’re doing except works of the law. That’s all they can think of is an alternative. Why would they think of anything else? They don’t know the gospel. Which means if you want them to stop doing what they’re doing for Jesus’s sake and become Christians and not moralists, you have to preach the gospel. You don’t just say, “Stop doing bad things, they hurt you.” That’s not Christianity.

So the way the Holy Spirit works and releases power to love is, not by works of the law, but by hearing with faith. That’s an interesting way to say it. He could’ve just said “by faith.” Why did he say “hearing with faith?” And the answer is because faith comes by hearing and hearing by the word of God, and the word of God is shot through with promises to believe. So if you ask me, “How do faith and the Spirit work to produce love?” The answer is faith. Faith is awakened by the spirit to believe the promises made by Christ and in being satisfied in all that God is for us in Jesus, which is what faith is, that faith itself consciously inclines us away from greed, away from fear, and into serving other people. The Holy Spirit awakened that and the Holy Spirit is flowing through that. So that Paul can say, “I worked harder than any of them. Nevertheless, it was not I” (1 Corinthians 15:10).

The Spirit Glorifies Jesus

Why does the Spirit unite himself to faith as the way of bringing about the works of love? I’m arguing that the Holy Spirit has chosen to move through faith and not another way. Why? Because the Holy Spirit’s mission is to glorify Jesus. And so he makes conscious faith in Christ exalting promises, the means by which he works. Does that argument make sense to you? According to John 16:14, the Holy Spirit is going to be sent to glorify Jesus. So the mission of the Holy Spirit is to glorify Jesus, to make Jesus look great. If you’re full of the Holy Spirit, you think Jesus is great. The evidence of the Holy Spirit being in your life is that Jesus is magnificent in your life.

Do you remember that awesome little short phrase from 1 Corinthians 12:3? It says, “No one can say Jesus is lord, except by the Holy Spirit.” And of course he doesn’t mean that computers can’t say that and spiritually dead human beings can’t pronounce that sentence. He means that you can’t mean it or say it from the heart. Nobody can feel the wonder of the lordship of Christ over the universe and feel a glad submission to him without the Holy Spirit, because it’s the Holy Spirit that is sent into the world to magnify the greatness of Jesus, according to John 16:14.

So why then does the Holy Spirit work holiness and love through faith in future grace? Because if the Holy Spirit did an end run around faith, left you doubting Jesus, and made you a loving person, Jesus would get no glory for your love because he’s being doubted right here. He’s not being loved. He’s not satisfying your heart. But if the Holy Spirit goes through this, if he awakens trust in Jesus, if he awakens treasuring of Jesus, if he awakens faith in future grace, then the love that comes from that gets glory for Jesus because Jesus is the one being trusted.

So if I’m walking into a situation where I need to love somebody, they’re very hard to love. Love will require that I talk to them. I don’t want to talk to them. But love says, “Talk to them.” What promise should I trust? One of the promises would be Jesus saying, “John, I will not leave you. I will not forsake you. I’ll be with you to the end of the age, including these 20 minutes of conversation. I will be there and I will help you. And I will strengthen you. I won’t leave you like an orphan. I will come to you. I will be a spirit of wisdom to you and I will bring to your mind what you need. I will steady your hand.” Now, if I trust him as he says that to me, that act of love makes him look good.

But if I’m not going at love that way, if I’m kind of skipping the faith piece, skipping the trust and the treasuring piece, and I’m just saying, “Holy spirit, please help me to do the hard thing,” and I’m not even thinking of any promise, even thinking of trusting Jesus, then Jesus doesn’t get any glory and the Holy Spirit doesn’t act where Jesus doesn’t get credit. You’re going in your own strength.

Does he who supplies the Spirit to you and works miracles among you do so by works of the law (no), or by hearing with faith (yes) . . . (Galatians 3:5).

This hearing is there because faith comes by hearing and hearing by the word of Christ. And what Christ says is, “I’ll be with you and I’ll take care of you and I’ll help you.” You believe that, and when you believe that the Holy Spirit is mightily at work in your life.

Question and Answer

What’s the joy set before him that Jesus was looking to in Hebrews 12:1–2? Is he modeling faith in future grace for us?

He is. I think that’s one of the slides that’s coming, but I’ll say a word about it from Hebrews 10–13. In all of those chapters, we have the most amazing sequence of texts in all the Bible with regard to how faith in future grace produces radical love.

If you put me before any group of people and you said, “You have 20 minutes, show them from the Bible that faith in future grace produces love,” I’d go straight to Hebrews 10–13. I might go to 2 Corinthians 8 as well, but these are powerful. And Hebrews 12 is the one that’s right in the middle, where we are to lay aside every weight and sin. Throw them off and look to your high priest, who for the joy set before him, endured the cross despising the shame and sat down at the right hand of God. For the joy set before him, he endured the cross. For the joy set before him, he endured the cross. I’m going to add the word trust. Can I do that? Because it says in 1 Peter 2:23 that he did not revile when he was reviled, but he entrusted himself to him who judges justly.

So Jesus is moving into the cross. He’s handing over his cause. He’s entrusting himself. And he’s looking to the joy set before him. And that question says, “What was the joy?” I think the joy is that he gets restored to the glory that he had before the world was and he gets the added glory of being the Lord now triumphant over death and sin and Satan and hell. He gets surrounded by untold numbers of redeemed saints who praise him forever and ever. And he gets to delight in making us like him and enjoying our joy in him and a hundred other things you could say about the joy that’s coming for Jesus. That joy sustained the greatest act of love.

So if you were to just say, give us one example of a great act of love being empowered by faith in future grace, I would say, “Christ died for the joy that was set before him. Christ was carried in Gethsemane. Christ was carried at the cross and Christ was carried into death and sustained so that he could maintain his faith in his Father by the joy set before him.

What books would you recommend to develop biblical, solid reasoning on logic?

I don’t know. I’ve never read a book on logic. Does that surprise you? Isaac Watts has one that’s still in print called Logic. I know the folks in Moscow, Idaho have a book on logic out there. So those are two, but I haven’t read them. I teach logic by preaching and by teaching arching when I get a chance — that is, how to break text down into pieces and relate them to each other.

I’ve never had a course on logic, but I have had lots of courses on logic. The first and most important course I had on logic was in the 10th grade from Mrs. Clinton. It was called geometry. It was one of the most important courses of my life, no exaggeration. She was awesome. We would learn a hundred axioms and build proofs for one year. That’s awesome. Never had a more important training for my brain in all my life than 10th grade geometry. Don’t despise math. Math is for exegesis. That is right. Math is for exegesis. It’s also for hospitals and getting on the moon and healing diseases and making cars and things like that. But, mainly math is for exegesis.

And the second one was two courses on philosophy at Wheaton. I drove home day after day after day thinking about the law of noncontradiction as he applied it to every bad philosophy. Sorry that I can’t be a better recommender. I have come to love logic by indirect means. And if you didn’t get it that way, it probably would be good to read a book on logic and it probably would be good for me too. But I haven’t.

Would you consider teaching a seminar on logic and exegesis?

No to the first and yes to the second, or yes and yes if they’re the same. My course in logic would only last an hour. I only know a few things and they make all the difference in the world. So maybe I should do that. I could have an hour-long course on logic. This is it. I mean, I’ve done it. I think I’ve said everything I have to say. There are complexities:

All men are mortal. Plato is a man. Therefore Plato is mortal.

That’s syllogistic reasoning. And if you say, “Horses have four legs and Fido has four legs, therefore, Fido is a horse,” there’s a problem. Logic would help you know why. This just feels so obvious to me and yet it isn’t to a lot of people, so. That was an embarrassing question.

What’s the role of gratitude?

Now here’s the most controversial thing about my book Future Grace. We’re going to talk about that for the next few minutes. I have gone a lot of places and said things about gratitude that have really gotten me in trouble. I remember one time I went to Golden Gate Seminary in California, which is a Southern Baptist School in San Francisco. I preached on how bad the debtor’s ethic is or the gratitude ethic. And I could tell by looking at their faces that this was going down well here. I met with the faculty after. They were really angry. This was a long time ago. So it’s probably not the same faculty, I don’t know. But they were really angry with me because I had just said the opposite of what they say in all their classes. They say the number one motive for obedience is gratitude. And I’m saying you can’t find that in the Bible anywhere. It’s not in the Bible. The number one answer is not in the Bible.

So you probably wonder, “Really? You think that’s not in the Bible?” So we need to spend a little time on this. I can maybe clarify. I’m going to end this section with praise to gratitude. I love gratitude. You cannot be saved without being a grateful person according Romans 1. They neither glorified him or thanked him. Therefore they are without excuse. Gratitude is really important. Okay, don’t hear me belittling gratitude. I just want to get faith in future grace and gratitude for past grace in their right connection in your life and how they function together. I don’t want gratitude for past grace trying to take over the job of faith in future grace. That’s not your job. Go back where you belong, infinitely valuable gratitude. And I don’t want faith in future grace trying to take over the job of gratitude for past grace. That’s where you belong. Go where you belong. Do the work appointed for you and don’t get in each other’s way.

The Debtor’s Ethic

Nowhere in the Bible is gratitude connected explicitly with obedience as a motivation. And I’ll bet we’re going to get a question on that. We’ll see. If you can find one, put it on Twitter and we’ll show it up here. Nowhere in the Bible is gratitude connected explicitly with obedience as motivation. We do not find the phrase “out of gratitude” or “in gratitude” for acts toward God. So when somebody says we should obey God out of gratitude, I just say, “Show me one verse in the Bible that comes close to saying that.”

Christian obedience is called “the work of faith,” never “the work of gratitude.” We find expressions like “live by faith” and “walk by faith,” but never “live by gratitude” or “walk by gratitude,” never. We find the expression “faith working through love,” but never “gratitude working through love.” We read that the aim of our charge is “love that issues from sincere faith,” but not from sincere gratitude. We read that we are “sanctified by faith,” but never that we are “sanctified by gratitude.” We read that “faith apart from works is dead,” but never that gratitude apart from works is dead.

So here’s my preliminary conclusion: The explicit, conscious connection between the work of Christ and the grace of God on the one hand and our obedience and holiness and love on the other hand is faith in future grace, not gratitude. Let me say that again carefully. I’m looking for the connection between these things. So over here on this side is the work of Christ and the grace of God, and over here is obedience and holiness and love. I want to know how do we forge a link between all that grace and all this obedience? I’m arguing the link is forged not by gratitude, but by faith in future grace. That’s my contention.

So here’s my warning. The temptation to say, “God has done so much for me, what can I do for him?” is very great. I don’t want to overstate this. There is a way to say that that can be biblical and can be God honoring. And there’s a way to say it that is deadly. You know that the text that comes close to saying it is Psalm 116:12. It says:

What shall I render to the Lord for all his benefits to me?

Well I thought just you told us not to ask. No, no, no. It’s okay to ask that.

Bless the Lord, O my soul,
     and all that is within me,
     bless his holy name!
Bless the Lord, O my soul,
     and forget not all his benefits . . . (Psalm 103:1–2).

In Light of All His Benefits

And when you think of all his benefits, the psalmist in Psalm 116:12 says, “What shall I render to the Lord?” That sounds like a payback. It sounds like the debtor’s ethic. He says, “What shall I render to the Lord for all of his benefits to me? What’s his answer? He says, “I will lift the cup of salvation.” What’s that mean? Lift the cup of salvation. I can think of two possible meanings for when you lift the cup, both of them are biblical, I think. One is to lift the cup of salvation as if it were a toast to you, God — “To you, to life, a tribute of praise.” We’re honoring God by lifting the cup. That’s one meaning. I don’t think that’s the meaning.

The other meaning is, “Please more.” Because the next phrase is “and call upon the name of the lord.”

What shall I render to the Lord
     for all his benefits to me?
I will lift up the cup of salvation
     and call on the name of the Lord . . . (Psalm 116:12–13).

Do you know what God wants from you at the end of receiving the greatest blessing that you’ve ever received? He wants the cup lifted with a thankful “more please” because for the next five minutes you’re as needy as you were before. And if you don’t honor that and acknowledge, if I don’t have more, more blessing, more grace for the next hour, then you will take the past grace of the last hour and try to run my car on gas from yesterday. It’s burned. It’s gone. You can’t run tomorrow’s car on yesterday’s gas. Grace came yesterday. Gratitude isn’t designed to run your car. It’s designed to look back and say, “You’re amazing. You’re amazing. I love you. Thank you.”

I did that last night walking home. I said, “You did it. I Lasted three hours. Yes. Thank you.” And now I have a sermon to write. I went to bed at 2:00 a.m. this morning. Isn’t he awesome? Grace was three hours of gracious over and my heart was bubbling with gratitude. I’m getting ahead of myself now. Gratitude is feeding my faith. Because if he did it for three hours, you could do it for another three, four, whatever. And you trust him. Just to be honest, I was so confident he would, I watched the last six minutes of a March Madness basketball game. It was 11 p.m. and I watched Notre Dame go down for six minutes. I just love the endings of basketball games. I don’t care what happens in the first three quarters. I just love the tension of the last three minutes. So you’re not feeling sorry for me at all that I was up so late, right? You should not feel sorry because I ate cereal and watched a basketball game.

The question, “What shall I render to the Lord for all his benefits to me?” is an okay question. That’s what I’m pointing out. It’s the question, “God has done so much for me, what can I do for him?” That’s an okay question if you answer it the way the psalmist did, and the psalmist said, “I can’t pay you back and the gratitude that I feel right now is not the power that’s going to carry me forward. I need more grace. I’m calling upon you to fill my cup again. And when you fill it again, I will pour it into the day that it’s designed for. And then I’ll come back for more.” God being the infinite resource that he is loves that.

Main Objections to the Debtor’s Ethic

Do you love 2 Chronicles 16:9? Raise your hand if you love 2 Chronicles 16:9, amen.

For the eyes of the Lord run to and fro throughout the whole earth, to give strong support to those whose heart is blameless toward him.

What does that mean? God is saying, “I want to help somebody today. Where’s somebody to let me help them? I’ve got big shoulders. Where’s somebody that’s got some burdens I can carry? I’m feeling ready to carry a burden today.” That’s our God, if we would trust him. We had the question a long time ago about if we don’t have faith, do we not get the blessing? No. If you want to carry your burdens, he’ll let you be squashed for a while. But if you’ll hear the promise, “I’m looking for people that will let me be strong for them,” he will be. That is, we can slide into thinking that obedience is payback. Don’t go there. Obedience is not payback, but it is very dangerous for three reasons.

One of these we’ve seen already, let’s read them quickly. We can never pay God back, not one penny’s worth, because every move we make in love and holiness is a move that God himself supplies. So we are simply going deeper into debt to grace by our obedience, not paying any of it back, not paying off the debt. That may be one of the most important things I have to say in this seminar if you just get that. That was the illustration of, okay God’s been good to me. I say, “What can I render to the lord for all his goodness to me? I will obey out of gratitude.” And I step toward obedience. That step of obedience, if it is God honoring obedience, is done in the power that he supplies. And if it’s power that he supplies, it’s grace. And if it’s grace, I’m going deeper into debt with that step and deeper into debt with that step and there is zero payback, ever. You can’t pay God back.

Isn’t that why Romans 11 ends the way it does? Paul says:

Oh, the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments and how inscrutable his ways! “For who has known the mind of the Lord, or who has been his counselor?” “Or who has given a gift to him that he might be repaid?” For from him and through him and to him are all things. To him be glory forever. Amen (Romans 11:33–36).

In other words, he’s always the giver. God is not served by human hands as though he needed anything because he himself gives to all men life and breath and everything (Acts 17:25). Therefore, “Every step I take, I take in you, Jesus.” That’s a good song. When we go deeper in debt.

Second, if we could succeed in paying God back for all he does for us, or for any of it, to that degree we would nullify grace and turn it into a business transaction. Grace is free or it’s not grace. So if you want to try to get into the payback mode, you will nullify grace. You’ll cease to live by grace.

The third response to why the debtor’s ethic shouldn’t be pursued is that thinking of obedience as empowered by gratitude directs our attention backward to bygone grace rather than forward to future grace. In this way, the debtor’s ethic tends to divert us from the wealth of grace yet to be known and distracts us from the very power for obedience that we need. You can’t run your car on gratitude for yesterday’s gas.

I’m saying that in the moment when obedience is called for, and you’re thinking, “What’s the power for this obedience? How am I to connect with God’s grace?” If you say the connection is gratitude, it won’t work. If you say, “In the power of gratitude, I will step,” you are allowing yourself by a good thing to be misdirected from the very thing you need, and what you need is blood-bought grace for the next step. And it comes in a half second. It came, it came, it came, and that’s not the power of gratitude. That’s the power of grace coming right now, and the connection with it is faith. You’re saying, “I’m trusting you. I’m trusting you that in the next five minutes I’ll have this and the next I’ll have this, and the next I’ll have this.”

The Significance of Gratitude

Now having beat up on gratitude, I’m going to give a tribute to gratitude because God would not be pleased if I left you with a bad taste for this awesome thing. There are ways that gratitude helps bring about obedience to Christ. Now, if this sounds like backtracking, it’s okay. Maybe I am. There are ways that gratitude helps bring about obedience to Christ. One way is that the spirit of gratitude is simply incompatible with some sinful attitudes. Having a sweet, humble, childlike, excited gratitude for the red fire truck under the Christmas tree of grace rules out some sins. I think this is why Paul wrote, “There must be no filthiness or silly talk or coarse jesting, which are not fitting, but in their place should be the giving of thanks” (Ephesians 5:4).

Now that’s very different from the debtor’s ethic isn’t it? What that means is that one of the reasons people become filthy in their language and silly and coarse is that they’re not thankful people. They’re not. They’re not thankful. They’re not blown away by grace. An over-flowingly thankful person may have a robust and glorious sense of humor. But it’s not silly. It’s not given to levity all the time, making every situation into a joking situation. He knows the balance of situations and he’s not given to ugly speech and he’s not foul in his talk. Those are all signs of a very ungrateful heart.

So hear me saying that the dynamics of holiness and the dynamics of sanctification also involve states of heart, like gratitude, which are incompatible with certain kinds of sinful attitudes and therefore are wonderful agents of sanctification. Gratitude is a humble, happy response to the goodwill of someone who has done or tried to do a good favor for you. This humility and happiness cannot co-exist in the heart with coarse, ugly, mean attitudes. Therefore the cultivation of a thankful heart leaves little room for such sins.

A Strengthener of Faith

A second way that gratitude advances obedience is that it strengthens faith and vice versa. When gratitude for God’s grace, past grace, is strong, the message is sent that God is supremely trustworthy in the future because of what he has done in the past. In this way, faith is strengthened by a lively gratitude for God’s past trustworthiness. So now remember I had faith in future grace and gratitude set against each other? And now I’m saying if gratitude for all that God has done is lively, the message is being sent to this fellow over here, “Hey, you know what? He’s going to keep his promises because look, look what he’s done.” So that message is being sent. So a lively gratitude is a strengthening of faith in future grace.

On the other hand, when faith in God’s future grace is strong, the message is sent that this kind of God makes no mistakes so that everything he has done in the past is part of a good plan and can be remembered with gratitude. Ephesians 5:20 says give thanks for everything. In this way, gratitude is strengthened by a lively faith in God’s future. That’s a little more complicated to see. Do you see it?

So if God has graced you to be looking into the future and he has brought some promises to your mind — “He’s going to work everything together for your good,” or, “He will withhold no good thing from you,” or, “He will pursue you with goodness and mercy all your days,” or, “He will help you” — the message is being sent back here to Mr. Gratitude is, “Mr. Gratitude, I’ve noticed you’ve been doubting that what happened to you when you were a kid could possibly fit into any good plan for you. You’ve been doubting that. You’ve been doubting that the marriage that broke up 20 years ago has anything in it you could really give thanks for.” Well, I’m telling you, this God, who’s making these promises out here that I’m so confident about, he was the same God back there, and you can trust him with that. You can be thankful for that.

I’ll close this section with a tribute to gratitude. This interwovenness of the profoundly and pervasively future-oriented nature of faith and the ordinarily past-oriented nature of gratitude is what prevents gratitude from degenerating into the debtor’s ethic. So that conversation between faith and gratitude, I think, prevents us from the payback ethic. Gratitude for bygone grace is constantly saying, “Be strong, and do not doubt that God will be as gracious in the future as I know he’s been in the past.” And faith in future grace is constantly saying to gratitude, “Gratitude, there is more grace to come, and all our obedience is to be done in reliance on future grace. Relax, exult in your appointed feast. I will take responsibility for tomorrow’s obedience.” That’s what faith says to gratitude.

How Does Faith Work for Holiness?

We have two units left. One is called, “How Does it Work for Holiness?” And the other is called, “How Does it Work Against Sin?” And they’re the same, only working for holiness is asking, “How does faith in future grace positively produce love?” And how faith works against sin is asking, “How does faith in future grace kill the things that kill us?” Now, that’s the difference. When you kill the things that kill you, love is what happens, but we’ve broken it up anyway. So this is the origin of radical love, and I’ve already argued that holiness and radical love are the same lifestyle. We’ve seen Galatians 5:6 that faith is working through love. So there’s the clue, that love comes from faith. And we’ve seen 1 Timothy 1:5, which says, “The aim of our charge is love, and it comes from a sincere faith.”

Now, let’s take these two units from Matthew (Matthew 5:43–44 and Matthew 5:11–12), and see how particularly faith in future grace produces enemy love. I want you to love your enemies. My sermon tonight and tomorrow is about loving. Jesus said:

A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another: just as I have loved you, you also are to love one another. By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another (John 13:34–35).

Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends (John 15:13).

Jesus laid down his life for his friends who happened to be his enemies at the time. So, we should love our enemies and we should love our fellow Christians. How? Jesus says:

You have heard that it was said, “You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.” But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you . . . (Matthew 5:43–44).

There is a specific illustration of love. So, one form of love is praying for those who persecute you.

Satisfied in the Future Reward

Now, I’m going to go back to Matthew 5:11, and the reason I’m going back is because I want an answer to this question. Which is harder? Praying for those who persecute you or rejoicing in that persecution? And my answer is it’s much harder to rejoice in persecution than to pray for your persecutors, because you can say prayers, no matter how you feel. You can not be rejoicing in your persecution and you can pray, “Oh God, have mercy upon these people. They don’t know what they’re doing.” If God could give us joy in persecution, which is the harder thing, then he would also help us pray for them, which is the easier thing. And praying for them is called love, so love would come from whatever it is that helps us rejoice in persecution. That was reasoning. That was called reasoning. In Matthew 5:11–12, Jesus says:

Blessed are you when others revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for so they persecuted the prophets who were before you.

He’s arguing that the key to gladness in the midst of persecution is reward in heaven. Christ will be there. You will be totally satisfied forever with Jesus in heaven. Every wrong will have been righted and you will not struggle with any sin or disease or sickness or disappointment anymore. There will only be full and increasing happiness in the ever-revealed glory of God. The reason I always talk in terms of joy in heaven being ever-increasing — not implying that there’s a state where you’re unhappy and then you get happy, but rather this happiness becomes a better happiness and that becomes better and better — is because God is infinite and you are finite. This brain and this heart, which has a capacity to know and a capacity to feel, are finite. God is infinite. How does an infinite being reveal the fullness, infinite fullness of his knowledge and his beauty to a finite mind and heart? Answer, it takes forever. This is mind boggling. The concept is mind boggling, no end. There’s no end to God showing you more of himself, which means heaven will never be boring. You won’t ever get tired of it.

Every day’s new dimension of discovery will shed a fresh light over everything you’ve already known and make it fresh. You’ll wake up every morning — I don’t know if we’re going to sleep in the age to come — and there will be such a fresh and new and glorious sight of more of God that you’ll be more glad. I’m just unpacking the phrase “great reward” here. And therefore in this moment, when things aren’t going the way you want and persecution is coming, you can be glad. And if that is true, if you can rejoice, then you can pray. Surely, you can pray. And that prayer is a form of love. Therefore, love comes from the great reward and your satisfaction in it.

I will be able to love my enemy if I am so satisfied in my future reward, that I have the wherewithal to rejoice and out of this joy meet his need. My definition of love is, love is the overflow of joy in God that meets the needs of others, including your enemies. That’s an argument that holiness or love happens by faith in future grace, because I’m just saying faith in future grace, the future grace in this case is the great reward. And faith is being set aside with all that God is for us in Jesus.

A Father Who Never Fails

Here’s another illustration from Jesus:

Or which one of you, if his son asks him for bread, will give him a stone? Or if he asks for a fish, will give him a serpent? If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is in heaven give good things to those who ask him! (Matthew 7:9–11).

Now, pause there before we read the next verse and just get what he said. He’s talking about prayer. He had just said, “Ask and you’ll receive. Seek and you’ll find knock and the door will be opened.” And then he gives you an analogy. There are evil dads. All dads are evil. And one of those evil dads is named John Piper who has four sons and a daughter. And if they ask for bread, will I open the back door, go out, find a stone, bring it in and put it on their plate? No. And if they ask for a fish, will I go scrounging around somewhere to find a snake and slip it into their lunch pail? No, I’m not going to do that. They’re my children. Well, if you then, who are a sinner by birth, know how to give good gifts, your Father will take care of you.

The Sermon on the Mount is just shot through with arguments for why we shouldn’t be anxious. It’s in Matthew 6:25–33. He says:

Therefore I tell you, do not be anxious about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, nor about your body, what you will put on. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing? Look at the birds of the air: they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? And which of you by being anxious can add a single hour to his span of life? And why are you anxious about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow: they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which today is alive and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will he not much more clothe you, O you of little faith? (Matthew 6:25–30).

Do you see how he is arguing? He’s saying, “My people, don’t be anxious. I’ll take care of you. Your Father knows what you need before you ask him.” That’s what he’s doing here. Now comes this word in the Greek in matthew 7:12: oun (therefore). He says:

So whatever you wish that others would do to you, do also to them, for this is the Law and the Prophets.

What’s that called? It’s called The Golden Rule. Whatever you wish that others would do to you, do to them. You fulfill the whole Law and the Prophets if you live that way. There’s another word for that. It’s called love. Now, if this is love, if Matthew 7:12 is love, where does it come from? When therefore introduces it on the basis of what went just before, where does it come from? It comes from faith in future grace. What future grace? My God won’t give me stones, ever.

Never a Stone or a Snake

Here’s a little lesson on answered prayer. My favorite illustration of my Fatherly answering a prayer that wasn’t answered is when Benjamin, probably about four years old, wanted a cracker. Snack time, you get a cracker. He said, “Can I have a cracker?” Okay, snack time. I reach up, get the cracker, open it. They’re covered with mold. I say, “Oh, Benjamin, they’re covered with mold.” He doesn’t have a clue what mold is. I say, “They’re covered with mold. Look, they have fuzz all over them.” And he said, “I’ll eat the fuzz.” That’s what he said, “I’ll eat the fuzz.” So he was praying to his Father for a cracker. The cracker had mold on it. He was willing to eat the mold and I wouldn’t give it to him. I said no to his prayer. I forget what I got him. I got him something that wouldn’t hurt him. That’s what this text says.

When you ask for bread, he won’t give you a stone. He may not give you bread. He may give you Pepto-Bismol or whatever you need at the moment. I love Tom Stellar’s word about prayer. When we pray, nothing never happens. So, the point of that big part is God hears the prayers of his children and he takes care of them either the way they want him to or better. The way they want him to or better. Therefore, love your neighbor.

Let’s think that one through. To think it through, you have to ask what hinders me from loving? What hinders me from doing to them what I would like to be done by? And the answer is greed, fear, and selfishness. And he’s saying, if you have a Father who has promised to take care of you, that will kill your fear. He has promised to satisfy you, and that will take away your greed. He has promised to be everything you need and to glorify you some day, and that will take away all your selfish cravings for human approval and needing to have your own way now. All those things are going to go away if you have this kind of Father here. You do have that kind of Father. Trust his care and step into love. It comes from there. That’s what the word therefore means.

Repaid at the Resurrection

Here’s another illustration:

He said also to the man who had invited him, “When you give a dinner or a banquet, do not invite your friends or your brothers or your relatives or rich neighbors, lest they also invite you in return and you be repaid. But when you give a feast, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind, and you will be blessed, because they cannot repay you. For you will be repaid at the resurrection of the just” (Luke 14:12–14).

When I was doing my studies in Germany (1971 to 1974) I wrote my doctoral dissertation on the command, love your enemies. And I spent three years reading about ethical motivation. And it was amazing to me, how many (supposedly) Bible scholars argued that if you are ever motivated by a future reward, the act you are performing is not loving but selfish. That seemed to be in the air. Maybe still is as you breathe it. If you are motivated to seek a blessing through an act of kindness, you’re not really kind, you’re selfish. If that’s true, Jesus is a bad teacher. Because Jesus said, “Invite the poor because you’ll be paid back at the resurrection.” I mean, you can go with the ethical logic that’s out there in the air or you can go with Jesus.

Now, once you choose to go with Jesus, you should answer the objection: “Isn’t that selfish?” No, not in any kind of abusive way. It is certainly self-gratifying. I do want to be raised at the last day. I do want to be happy in heaven and not suffering in hell. But you know what keeps it from being selfish? My confidence that I’m going to be raised and that Jesus will be my all in all is freeing me to take you with me at any cost to me now. That’s my answer. My confidence that he’s for me and he’s going to bless me for every little sacrifice I make — whether it’s just having dinner with people that may be hard to talk to — he’s going to make it up ten thousand-fold in the age to come. You will be repaid at the resurrection of the just. For me to be freed by that promise to do the hard thing with a view that my joy in him would become their joy in him is not abusive, is not manipulative. I’m not stepping on them to get to heaven. So, I don’t buy it.

I do not buy the argument that if you do something out of longing for and confidence in a greater reward, you’re not a loving person. That would only be true if the people that you are acting with and toward you didn’t care about and you didn’t want to take them with you. I’m not only wanting to take them with me. I would tell them if they asked me, “You’re going with me, makes my joy in God bigger. A shared joy is a double joy. So come, make my day. Yes, I am loving you in order for me to be happier, because when you’re happy in him, I’m happier in him.”

So, faith in future grace means that when you read Luke 14:14 and trust it, you are freed on Thanksgiving to not just have your family. Invite a foreign exchange student who can barely speak English or invite somebody from the Andrew home who is mentally ill. I could name a few people in this church who’d be very hard to get along with at the Thanksgiving table. You know who they are. We love them dearly. They’re just weird people. Every church has them. And they’re there by appointment according to first Corinthians 12–14, the weaker members we clothe because they are indispensable to the church no matter how hard they are to deal with. You can have them over for Thanksgiving dinner, not because it’s going to be easy, but because your reward is getting bigger every year in heaven and you want those people to feel the love of Jesus flowing from you and have the same confidence you do to do some hard things in their life.

Looking to the Reward

I said that Hebrews 10–13 illustrated this. Let’s look at Hebrews 11: 24–25:

By faith Moses, when he was grown up, refused to be called the son of Pharaoh’s daughter, choosing rather to be mistreated with the people of God than to enjoy the fleeting pleasures of sin.

Now that’s an amazing choice. Are you going to do that? He chooses to share ill treatment with the people of God. Some of you young folks are planning to be pastors or maybe even a wife of a pastor. And your husband is thinking about taking this church. The church has a record of killing pastors, figuratively. And you talk it over and you pray, and say, “You know, this might not work. This might really not be a happy 10 years or life.” You say, “I know. I know, but they need a pastor. Perhaps God will use us to work a miracle here. Would you go with me? Can we choose to be mistreated with the people of God, rather than enjoy the fleeting pleasures of sin?”

Now at that moment, how should you be motivated — wife, husband, link arms. How should we be motivated? And you can think of whatever ill treatment you might need to walk into. Hebrews 11:26 says:

He considered the reproach of Christ greater wealth than the treasures of Egypt, for he was looking to the reward.

That’s exactly the same argument that Jesus used. Here’s an opportunity to love a rascal murmuring people. I mean, you read the story of the Exodus and the wilderness wanderings, and you want to tear your hair out that God can bring water out of a rock and a few hours later they’re grumbling. You see yourself in the mirror and poor Moses gives 40 years of his life to this and then can’t go into the promised land, because he blew it and God disciplined him. He chose it. He was the meekest man on the planet and he chose it. Why?

Because, as he thought about the fleeting pleasures of Egypt, fleeting pleasures — got any fleeting pleasures that are enticing you today? — and then he thought about the wealth of what it would be to be with Christ in persecution and mistreatment, and he weighed the fleeting pleasures of porn or wealth or the approval of my friends and being liked and the eternal weight of pleasures of walking with Jesus through hard times and loving people, and the weight went weigh down. The reward is greater. That’s the way faith in future grace produces love.

For the Joy Set Before Him

We saw that one already:

Let us also lay aside every weight, and sin which clings so closely, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is seated at the right hand of the throne of God.

Where did the greatest act of love in the history of the universe come from? It came from faith in future grace. For the joy that was set before him, he endured the cross.

Hebrews 13:12–14 says:

So Jesus also suffered outside the gate in order to sanctify the people through his own blood. Therefore let us go to him outside the camp and bear the reproach he endured. For here we have no lasting city, but we seek the city that is to come.

Now that is endlessly applicable to your life. Jesus has gone outside the city. He has shed his own blood for your holiness. Therefore, because he did that, we’re going to go where? Well, you name it. You choose it. Afghanistan would be a big missionary thing, or for you it might be staying in the marriage, or making a call to your 35 year old son that you haven’t talked to for five years, or going to work in the nursery and miss worship once a month, or whatever teeny little sacrifice it might be. And the answer is because here we have no lasting city. I’m not going to put my heart in the fleeting pleasures of Minneapolis and what it offers. I am seeking a city that is to come. This life is very, very short and eternity is very long.

Why would we try to have heaven now when we’re promised heaven then? I think most of our ethical issues are a problem of eschatology or arriving too quickly. We forget that we’re pilgrims and we insist on having heaven now, instead of saying, “It’s coming, live for love now.” Don’t live for maximizing your immediate pleasures. Live for the big pleasures, the long pleasures, that’s future grace.

Question and Answer

I’m a debtor’s ethic driven parent. I find myself quick to remind my kids of what I provide for them: house, food, clothes, toys. In a moment I can recall a long list of things. I am making an implicit claim that my children should therefore respond to me in joyful obedience. It often doesn’t work for me and it usually piles guilt on them. Any thoughts on the debtor’s ethic dynamic in the home?

That’s a wonderful discovery. I mean, that’s a great place to start. “Know thyself” is the beginning of one kind of wisdom. So, start there and then I think the focus of our energies would be not first on the parenting dynamics, but the God-me dynamics, because this is probably flowing from a misconception of how God loves us, how God relates to us, and how we relate to him. And the reason we are trying to coerce our children into responding to us a certain way is because there’s a certain neediness in here that is feeding off of their approval and their rightness. And they can sense that and it makes manipulation pretty easy and makes life hard. So, let’s make sure the vertical dynamic gets revolutionized, that God is ready to give me grace by grace. I’m stepping into grace. I am increasing my joy as I trust God for every day’s grace. And He’s for me. He’s devoted to me. My stepping in obedience is not getting him to be for me. He’s already 100 percent for me. This does not make him for me.

And then you pause and you say, “Okay, if I’m getting it with God, now how could my children begin to feel that way? If I’m like God, and they’re like me, how could they begin to feel that way?” And there would need to be a declaration, probably repeated, words really matter. It’s so sad. I heard a 63 year old wife say something. I did this reconciliation thing. His wife said, “I’ve never heard Mom say she loves me. I’m sure she did.” That’s tragic.

Words really matter. So, this parent is saying to the children, “I want you to know you’re my child. I love you. That’s a given. Nothing can ever change it.” There is a sense of real solidity. That really happens. I mean, kids grow up and they can sense that even if everything else isn’t in order. They can say, “I know I can always come home. Dad will have me?”

The next thing I would say with regard to the parent who is setting up a debtor’s ethic with the kids is to teach them this in devotions so that they realize obedience can flow, not in order to get mom on your side, because mom is already on your side and it is more blessed to give than to receive. But maybe I should just stop by saying work on the vertical relationship, speak much affirmation and love into the children’s lives, and teach them the dynamics of grace and faith in future grace.

How about when you pray and you ask God and you feel like he’s giving you that stone and bad things seem to happen, right?

I would admit that it feels like that sometimes. You might pray for healing and the person dies. That felt like a stone. And my answer is that when circumstances inevitably look to us like stones and serpents, faith in future grace says, “That’s not the way God is.” You trust the promises and the promises say, “No good thing does he withhold from his own,” and, “All things work together for good.” Paul said, “I was brought up to the edge of despair of life itself and that was to make me rely on the God who raises the dead.”

This is the way faith works. There’ve been points in the life of this church when so many bad things accumulated, it would have been very easy to just despair of God, despair the ministry, walk away from it all. At those moments, you take a promise and you say, “My perspective on this is not God’s perspective. It is flawed. It is finite. I cannot see beyond this crisis. I know that God is at work and I will simply trust him to turn this snake into a rope by which I will be saved.” That’s the way I do it.

How does the reality of future grace affect our praying for big things and dreaming big gospel dreams? For example, John Knox prayed, “Give me Scotland.” Because of future grace, are we led to pray this way?

Yes. I thought of something before I said yes. The reason I said it was the promise, “Thisgospel will be preached throughout the whole world as a testimony to all the nations and then the end will come.” Now I was just trying to think of a big promise to go with the big hope, big prayer, and that’s the one that came to my mind. There are others. The earth will be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the Lord, like the waters cover the sea. But if he’s going to be witnessed among all the unreached peoples of the world, I think we should get on our knees and say, “Give us 4,000 Muslim peoples, give us the Near East, Lord.” And what I mean by that is not that everybody gets converted, my eschatology just won’t go there, short of Jesus coming. We can talk a long time about postmillennialism and premillennialism, and being a hopeful premillennialist like me and how there are negative premillennialists, but my hope is there will be stunning works of the gospel in the world, according to Matthew 24:14. And we have not yet seen all that God can do, and we should lay hold on him for magnificent things. I’ll give you one illustration of what I mean.

In Matthew 24, it also says that the love of many will grow cold. I think that’s going to happen in this age. Jesus says, “The love of many will grow cold, but those who endure to the end will be saved.” And it will cost some of you your lives. I think some premillennialists become so pessimistic about everything, they don’t believe anything possible can happen as the age draws to a close. That’s illogical. If there’s a glacier spreading over parts of the world, parts of the church, and the love of many is growing cold, is there anything in the Bible that says I can’t take my God-centered, Christ-exalting, Bible-saturated passion, and torch the glacier above Minneapolis and a hole opens up and this whole city turns to Jesus? No, there is nothing in the Bible that says that can’t happen. So I stand at the window in my study, facing that magnificent cityscape right there, right across the highway over there, and I pray for it regularly.

I look at those high rises and I say, “Bring them to Christ. Tens of thousands of people like ants down there are going up and down and working down there. Bring them to Christ. Raise up Bible studies. Cause those 10 mainline churches in the downtown area to explode with reformation and revival.” In my best moments those are the kinds of things I pray for. So the reason future grace would move me to pray like that is because God is sovereign. God owns the world. God means for his name to be exalted. There is no limit put on the Bible for any given city, and how godly it might prove to be before the end comes.

How Does Faith Work Against Sin?

I’m starting with anxiety and the reason I’m starting with anxiety as a sin that needs to be overcome is because it’s so pervasive, it’s in every other kind of sin just about that I can think of. There’s always a piece of anxiety everywhere and I think anxiety for finite fallen, sinful human beings is so pervasive and endemic. It’s so part of our nature. It’s not just John Piper, who was nervous as a kid and has to still fight anxiety. It’s everybody. So that’s why we’re starting here. Here’s my definition of anxiety: The loss of confidence, security in God, owing to feelings of uneasiness or foreboding that something harmful is going to happen. This might be something as little as the thought that you’re going to be embarrassed by wearing the wrong kind of dress to the prom, or you’re going to try to speak and try to recite something by heart, and you can’t remember it. Or it could be you’re imprisoned in Afghanistan and you could die. And that produces anxiety. You might think, “What will the pain be like? Will they torture me? Will my faith survive?”

So Jesus argues against anxiety like this:

Therefore I tell you, do not be anxious about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, nor about your body, what you will put on. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing? Look at the birds of the air: they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? And which of you by being anxious can add a single hour to his span of life? And why are you anxious about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow: they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which today is alive and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will he not much more clothe you, O you of little faith? Therefore do not be anxious, saying, “What shall we eat?” or “What shall we drink?” or “What shall we wear?” For the Gentiles seek after all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them all. But seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be added to you (Matthew 6:25–33).

All Things?

For a long time in my life. I struggled with that as I’m sure you do too. I thought, “Really? Don’t be anxious about what you should eat? Don’t be anxious about what you should drink? Don’t be anxious about what you should wear and the list would go on? Seek the kingdom, trust your Father, and you’ll have them?” Now we know Jesus said, people will be killed for their faith (Matthew 24). So you get killed for your faith and all your needs are met. Just before that, he said, “Not a hair of your head will perish. They will kill some of you, but not a hair of your head will perish.” What does that mean? Jesus is not a schizophrenic. He doesn’t do double-talk. He doesn’t have a fork tongue. He means what he says: “Not a hair of your head will perish, and some of you they’ll chop your head off.” He means that every need that you have in this life in order to fulfill his perfect God glorifying will for you will be provided including in the moment of your execution or to make it really hard, including in the moment of your starvation.

This text says, “What you eat, what you drink, seek the kingdom first, and all these things will be yours.” And I’m saying a Christian can starve while doing the will of God? Yes. Some of you know what text I will go to to base that on:

Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or danger, or sword? As it is written, “For your sake we are being killed all the day long; we are regarded as sheep to be slaughtered.” No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us (Romans 8:35–37).

So maybe in the stones, in the snake, we are more than conquerors — tribulation, distress, persecution, yes, even famine and yes, even nakedness, peril, sword. In all those things, we are more than conquerors. So what this means in its gospel context and New Testament context — “All these things will be added to you” — is that all food, clothing, drink, housing, friendships, education, transportation, vocation, and everything will be added to you that you need to do his God-glorifying will. There’s no promise here that Christians don’t suffer and don’t lack. The promise is that you get everything you need. Philippians 4:19 is one of those promises that’ll be in store right back here: “My God will supply all your needs, according to his riches in glory in Christ Jesus, even as you die.”

I mean, Paul said in the same book that he’s in prison and he wants to glorify God in his body, whether by life or by death. He says, “My God will supply all your needs in prison there in Rome, and when the sword is about to fall, every need you have to hold the faith will be there.”

Feeling the Force of God’s Fatherly Care

This is my only hope because I pondered, “Well, what if I, I don’t know what it’s going to be like to die. I don’t know how much it will hurt. I don’t know how scared I’ll be. I don’t know how many promises will go out of my head and all I’ll see is a black, bleak future. And there won’t be anybody there maybe that night to talk to me and sing with me and pray with me. I don’t know.” Oh, yes, I do. I know one thing, “I’ll never leave you. I won’t forsake you.” Don’t be anxious. Trust him.

I alluded to this before but I want to lodge it in your mind, because it’s just so useful:

The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases;
     his mercies never come to an end;
they are new every morning;
     great is your faithfulness.

Now to feel the force of this, you have to realize that Lamentations with its five chapters is the most horrible book in the Bible — yes, more horrible than Job. Jerusalem has been sacked. They are boiling and eating their children. It is the lowest moment in the history of Israel, the exile, and here are two chapters, which are acrostics and here’s a unique structural chapter in the middle called number three, composed in a different way. This whole book is written as the most crafted book in the Bible. The book that is called Lamentations and is the most intensely horribly emotional book is the most crafted book in the Bible structurally and in the middle is this, square in the middle:

The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases . . .

That was a stone if there ever was one for Israel. His mercies never come to an end, they are new every morning. Now here’s what I want to draw your attention to. I think “new every morning” means that tomorrow morning, there will be new mercies. And you’ll be okay if we substitute the word “grace,” won’t you? Just so it fits my seminar? There will be future grace (I hope it’s okay) tomorrow morning. It’ll be new. It is not here right now. This is why we live by faith. Maybe I’ll feel tonight as I get ready to preach on four hours of sleep that I’m not sure the grace is going to be there tonight for this and tomorrow. I’m not sure. What should I do? I go here to the Bible. It’s not there now. It’s not there now. The grace to do this seminar is not the grace to preach at 5:30 p.m. It’s either going to be there or it’s not going to be there. I’m going to trust that it’s going to be there. Will it be there? It says it’s going to be there.

New Troubles, New Mercies

When it says “They’re new every morning,” well morning here is not morning in China. Okay, so don’t be picky here, like, “They only come in the morning.” Well, it’s morning somewhere. Here’s why that is so important. He says, “Don’t be anxious about tomorrow,” and tomorrow is always happening to somebody. It’s midnight somewhere. He continues:

Therefore do not be anxious about tomorrow, for tomorrow will be anxious for itself. Sufficient for the day is its own trouble (Matthew 6:24).

Now what does that say? That says every new day brings fresh troubles. Every new day brings its own trouble. So don’t import tomorrow’s troubles into today. Leave tomorrow’s troubles for what? Tomorrow. That’s the connection between those two texts that I love with all my heart. If somebody comes along and says, “Don’t you realize we’re in transition in Bethlehem and you’re about to switch off to another pastor? I mean, things could just fall apart.” And they start listing off things that could go bad. I say, “Have I been here in vain? What?” If any troubles show up tomorrow, guess what? So do mercies — exactly tailor-made mercies. Yes, they do. There are exactly tailor-made mercies for tomorrow’s trouble. That’s what it says, the mercies are new every morning and the troubles are new every morning and they’re designed by God to match. And the thing that makes them match in your heart is faith in future grace.

So I’m going to bed tonight. I asked you last night, “What makes you think you’ll wake up a believer in the morning?” Answer: new mercies. It’s not in me to wake up a believer. New mercies wake me up a believer. I’ve been praying for the last several days, since I got my sermon ready for last Thursday, that God would just help me stop being such a crummy morning person. I pray, “Wake me up happier,” and you know what? He’s been doing it. I spanked myself for not praying more consciously. I’ve been saying, “I’m not a morning person at all,” and I haven’t been praying like I should that I would wake up conscious of the promises of God, conscious of the mercies of God emotionally, not just intellectually. He’s been doing it. I’m really praising him for that. So we are freed from anxieties about tomorrow morning because even though we know tomorrow morning brings its own trouble, it brings sufficient mercies.

Future Grace for Monsters, Weakness, and Aging

That’s the argument from that text and here are just a few closing on this anxiety piece. One of our fighter verses my little kids used to say was, “When I am afraid, I will trust in you.” That’s what our little kids used to say. I say, because kids are afraid, kids know fear. If you give them something really juicy for battling fear, they’ll appreciate it. They go to bed at night and say, “Are you afraid?” They say, “Yeah.” You say, “Why?” They say, “Monsters. There are monsters in the closet and they come out.” These are real for kids. Whether it’s in their head or whatever. It could be shadows, demons, whatever. And you say, “Okay, I’ve been afraid, too. I get afraid. And you don’t grow out of fear. Fear goes away with promises of God. God takes care of it. God’s in this room. He’s stronger than these monsters, and so when you are afraid, put your trust in him for the future grace that you need at 3:00 a.m.” He says:

Cast all your anxieties on him because he cares for you (1 Peter 5:7).

I got a whole slew of examples about particular anxieties, and I think looking at the clock, I’m going to skip them all because they’re all just specific examples of what I just said. I’ll just let you name them.

So there’s anxiety about being useless and a promise to go with that. These are all going to be online next week — anxiety about feeling weak, anxiety about difficult situations and having guidance, anxiety about afflictions, and anxiety about aging, which is increasingly relevant for me. There are promises that go along with these. For old age:

Even to your old age I am he,
     and to gray hairs I will carry you.
I have made, and I will bear;
     I will carry and will save (Isaiah 46:4).

You needed a dad when you were one and you’ll need a dad when you’re 81. He is saying, “I’ll be there.” That’s good news. It could be battling anxiety about not persevering. Are you afraid you’re not going to last after all that talk about holiness last night? There’s a promise for that. It could be battling anxiety about death. Are you afraid to die? There’s promise for that.

Battling Covetousness

Now, this is the second sin. The first was anxiety. Here’s my definition of covetousness: Desiring something, not for God’s glory or in such a way that we lose our contentment in God as our supreme treasure. That’s my definition of covetousness because you know in the Bible, the word covetousness is just the word “desire.” And you have to say “bad desire,” because not all desire is bad. So I’m trying to say what’s bad about desire. There’s some desires that are bad, and my first answer is desiring something not for God’s glory. My second is in such a way that the desire though, it may be a good thing — like I want to be married or I want a job or want to get well — may be such that the desire is taking away all of your contentment in God as your supreme treasure. So what do you do to fight this sin of covetousness?

Hebrews 13:5–6 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?”

I’m going to argue with my soul. I’m going to become an attorney with my soul, and say, “Soul, we’re going to dump this covetousness for that iPad3, or for that car that doesn’t have that funny clunk in the back, and we’re going to dump this on it. We’re going to be content with what we have because he has said, ‘I’ll never leave you or forsake you.’ I’m going to be content with what I have because He won’t forsake me.” In other words, He’s enough, and he’ll be enough tomorrow. This is an iPad2. Oh, phooey. The three has four pixels for every pixel on the screen. My life will be so much better with the iPad3. Philippians 4:19 says:

And my God will supply every need of yours according to his riches in glory in Christ Jesus.

So don’t fret, coveting things you don’t need or. I love this one:

Not that I am speaking of being in need, for I have learned in whatever situation I am to be content. I know how to be brought low, and I know how to abound. In any and every circumstance, I have learned the secret of facing plenty and hunger, abundance and need. I can do all things through him who strengthens me (Philippians 4:11–13).

This is amazing. What this is saying is “My God will supply all your needs, according to his riches and glory in Christ Jesus.” What needs? The need to face hunger well, the need to face need well, the need to handle abundance well, and the need to handle plenty well. That’s what we are in America, mainly. He says, “I can do all things . . . ” What are the “all things” I can do? I can be needy. I can be hungry well, through him who strengthens me. And Philippians 3:8 says:

Indeed, I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things and count them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ

Is that the secret? I think that’s the secret. He says, “I have learned the secret of facing plenty and hunger.” How? Well, what’s the secret? “I count everything as loss for the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord.” So when abundance comes, I count it as loss, and when poverty comes, I count what’s loss as loss. I have Jesus. He’s my all and satisfies every need. He’ll take me right through death. That’s the secret. So the aim of this course is not a secret anymore. It’s just that’s what we aim toward, pray toward, live toward, knowing him that well, and treasuring him that well.

On Guard Against All Covetousness

Luke 12:15 says:

Take care, and be on your guard against all covetousness, for one’s life does not consist in the abundance of his possessions.

I’m including these because I said last night that Scripture warnings may not sound like promises of future grace, but they’re based on the tragedy of losing the supremely precious future grace. So they’re the flip side of promises of future grace. If you keep going down this path of covetousness, you will lose the treasure. You don’t want to lose the treasure. He is all satisfying and this is not.

But the cares of the world and the deceitfulness of riches and the desires for other things enter in and choke the word, and it proves unfruitful.

So we need to be aware that riches lie to us. They lie to us. Oh, do they lie in the desire for other things. Things lie to us. One of the biggest lies of the devil is that having makes you happy. Having makes you happy. We think, “I need to have, I need to have a better this and a better this and more of this — have, have, have, have, have, have, have, have, have.” There’s no correlation between having and happiness. Not godly happiness. Godly happiness is that we are had. We are owned. We are loved. We are possessed. We are taken hold of. We are being drawn into and we’ll have the universe someday. And to the degree that we put all that aside and try to get our happiness in having, having, having, having, having, it will backfire.

More people jump off the Coronado Bridge than the Brooklyn Bridge to kill themselves. Coronado Bridge is in San Diego. It’s beautiful. It connects the mainland with one of the wealthiest little islands in the world. Brooklyn is poor. Poor people don’t kill themselves as often as rich people. There’s no correlation between having and happiness. Therefore kill covetousness.

But those who desire to be rich fall into temptation, into a snare, into many senseless and harmful desires that plunge people into ruin and destruction. For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evils. It is through this craving that some have wandered away from the faith and pierced themselves with many pangs (1 Timothy 6:9–10).

If you ever needed a warning not to want to be rich, not to put your happiness in having, there it is. It’s suicidal to want to be rich. I’m using my language carefully. It’s suicidal to want to make a lot of money. You can want a lot of money if God has given you the grace to give a lot of money. The problem with making a lot of money or inheriting a lot of money is that the temptation is so strong to keep a lot of money. And not only keep it, but surround yourself with all the symbols of wealth; certain clothes, certain jewelry, certain cars, certain houses, and certain neighborhoods because you have it and you should show that you have it. I’ve seen the ads in the magazines on the airplanes where they know who they’re appealing to, “You should have a La-Z-Boy chair because rich people have this kind of La-Z-Boy chair and you made it.”

That’s evil. That’s what this text is talking about. It pierces people. It leads them into many harmful desires and plunges people into ruin, plunges people into destruction, and pierces them with many pangs. Covetousness is suicidal and deadly. Be content in Jesus.

Question and Answer

What do you tell a person who is already trusting God with all their heart, but still experiences anxiety in the medical sense — panic attacks, pain in the body, etc.?

That’s a very good question. The intersection of the body and the spirit is a mystery that nobody has figured out. And I think we, Christians, should own that mystery, not deny it, that there are ways that bodies and genetic makeups are so constituted that they affect experiences of the soul. And we know, I’m arguing, that experiences of the soul by faith can have physical effects. Now, I would not go so far as to say that the only way that God blesses the soul body-union is solely by the means of spiritual exercises. In other words, I believe in exercise. I think God has given us bodies with muscles that are intended to be used. And if they’re not used, not only do they get floppy, but your brain gets floppy because the exercise produces little weird things called endorphins or whatever. I don’t know how it works. I just know it works. When I beat my body at the gym for 40 minutes, I am a happier, more patient, more kind, more loving, more ready to go to work kind of person. And you could say, “Whoa! That’s just carnal. Where’s faith and future grace in that?”

It’s because I learned from God that he created this body, gave it to me, designed it to function a certain way with the brain and the soul and told me to discipline myself so that certain states will come about. He told me that. He taught me that. Or to make it even simpler. What about sleep? You have exercise and sleep. If you don’t sleep. I just risked it last night by not getting enough, but I’ll make it up. If you don’t get enough sleep, do you know what happens? You get crabby. Crabbiness is a sin. Some sin comes from lack of sleep, not the devil. But it’s not so simple. The devil knows that lack of sleep makes you crabby. Therefore, the devil gives you the desire to watch the midnight movie. This is very complicated stuff. So part of spiritual warfare is to get enough sleep. Most of you need eight or nine hours and you get six or seven. You wonder why you’re sinning so much, you don’t get enough sleep. Seriously.

If somebody comes to me with depression and they say, “I’m depressed,” I’m going to ask them right off the bat, “How much sleep do you get?” And the first thing we’re going to do is try a week or two of eight hours. Even if you have to have some help to do it, no coffee or whatever for two weeks. And then we’re going to talk and see how you’re doing after that. Then we’ll know a little more about what you’re dealing with. So sleep, exercise, and sugar is another one. Maybe you shouldn’t eat so much. I went off of all processed sugar years ago. Why? Spikes. I saw it in the early morning. It would be spike, depression, spike, depression, discouragement. I could hardly function at 10:00 a.m. Is it godly to go off that? You bet it’s godly. God showed me the way my body affects my soul. And then he told me, “Use your discipline to do what you need to do.” Now those are simple and easy to illustrate a principle: You are embodied souls and bodies affect souls.

And that raises the question of antidepressants. A third of you are probably on them right now. I just want to say on a continuum, I’m not going to call that a sin. It can be a sin. You can go there too fast and you can stay there too long and you can become a junkie and you can begin to be artificially sustained. I know it’s impossible to know where that is. I know that. So I would just say, let’s link arms with the medical profession and bring what we know to bear on depression and discouragement and the hardships of life and let what they’ve learned and we’ve learned about the body and its effects, and let’s bring them together in biblically appropriate ways that are not easy to find. There’s a lot of disagreement about these things, but that’s where I am.

Battling Lust

Let’s keep going here with lust. Here’s a definition of lust: Pursuing elicit thoughts or images in the mind with a view to stimulating sexual pleasures with or without external stimuli. I’m just talking about lust here, not fornication and not adultery, although from the lesser to the greater, if it applies to this, it applies to that. I’m just talking about lust, the stuff that’s going on on the inside. Not all sexual thoughts are lustful. I’m treating lust as sin. Lust is sin. I’m asked, what’s bad lust and good lust? What’s bad sexual desire and good sexual desire? This is my effort to define bad sexual desire, not all sexual desire. Husbands and wives should have all kinds of good sexual desires in their heads and out acting. So pursuing elicit thoughts or images in the mind with a view to stimulating sexual pleasures with or without external stimuli. You might use pornography, you might not. It doesn’t matter. It can still be lust.

Lust grows out of suppressing the knowledge of God and his promises. I’m not making that up. Let me give you some verses:

Put off your old self, which belongs to your former manner of life and is corrupt through deceitful desires (Ephesians 4:22).

What does that mean? It means that you were the slave of desires, and the way they enslaved you was by deceiving you. How do they deceive you? They make you, in the moment, feel they are more compellingly satisfying than God and fellowship with him and friendship with him and sweet intimacy with him, which you sacrifice when you indulge in lust. So they lied to you and they deceived you, which means they took away knowledge from you.

As obedient children, do not be conformed to the passions of your former ignorance . . . (1 Peter 1:14).

So you’re a Christian now and there were passions. You don’t have to be conformed to those passions because those passions belong to ignorance. In other words, now you know some things about a treasure and when you didn’t know the treasure, you craved junk. And now that you know the treasure, you crave the treasure. You know something. You know him. Not knowing (ignorance) produced those passions, gave them free reign, and you had no power to stop them. And now you know something. This knowledge has power. You may say, “It doesn’t have any power in my life.” It’s there. It’s in the text. Here’s another one:

Each one of you [should] know how to control his own body in holiness and honor, not in the passion of lust like the Gentiles who do not know God . . . (1 Thessalonians 4:4–5).

Why did he add that? Don’t live with your wife or your girlfriend or movies or internet like that. Don’t live in the passions like the Gentiles. Why? They don’t know God. You know God. That’s why. The Bible assumes that if you know him, really know him, know him in his worth, his glory, his value, his wonder, his wisdom, his power, his amazement, it will change you.

Freedom Through a More Compelling Desire

Here’s a little analogy. March Madness is going to come down to the final four and then one last game, and you know what? While you’re watching that game, you’re not going to be masturbating. You’re not even clicking through to look at anything. Do you know why? You’re thinking, “This is fun! I’m loving this. This is awesome! Look at that shot! Look at that move! Look at that steal! Look at that last two second play!” You are so into this, sex is not functioning here. You’re free.

A person who knows God experiences something like that. He does. Our quest is to know him. I tell you, God’s action in history, God’s present action in running the world, God’s future transformation of the world, and God’s characteristics in the panorama of his perfections are 10,000 times more exhilarating than the most exciting Final Four game you ever saw. We don’t know him. That’s why we’re lustful.

Second Peter 1:3–4 says:

His divine power has granted to us all things that pertain to life and godliness, through the knowledge of him who called us to his own glory and excellence, by which he has granted to us his precious and very great promises, so that through them you may become partakers of the divine nature, having escaped from the corruption that is in the world because of sinful desire.

That’s a complicated sentence, but gloriously powerful in our lives. We escape from sinful desire by sharing in the divine character, which comes from the promises of glory and excellence. Faith in future grace frees from sinful desire. Promises of glory, promises of excellent promises of wonder do this.

What no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the heart of man imagined, what God has prepared for those who love him . . . (1 Corinthians 2:9).

We should cultivate such a wonder of what’s out there on the way to us that we would be set free from these sinful desires. Jesus says:

Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God (Matthew 5:8).

So if you keep your heart pure from lust, you see more of God. If you don’t give way to a life of lechery, you will see him finally

Killing Sin by the Spirit

I’m going to pause on this one to finish my answer to the very first question that was asked last night. I was going to bed last night, I thought, “I didn’t finish the answer.” The answer was from Romans 8:12, where it says, “Therefore, we are debtors not to live according to the flesh, for if you live according to the flesh, you will die.” And then you expect him to say, “We are debtors to the Spirit.” Well, in effect, he does say that, but look how he says it. This is the next verse. He says:

For if you live according to the flesh you will die, but if by the Spirit you put to death the deeds of the body, you will live (Romans 8:13).

Yes, we’re debtors to the Spirit. Not in the sense of payback, but in the sense of constantly needing him, constantly needing to be in debt to his daily provision. So you’re seeing a deed of the body in front of you — clicking on through to the pornography, or not quite reporting all of your honorariums on the tax return. A deed of the body is about to be performed that is sinful. And this says, “Put it to death. Kill it before it happens by the Spirit,” which means the sword of the Spirit is the word of God.

The Spirit flows through faith in the promise of a better future. You trust that God will take care of you better than lying on your tax forms or better than clicking through to pornography. You trust him. And by trust you are appropriating Galatians 3:5 — “Does he who supplies the Spirit to you do so by works of the law or by hearing a promise through faith?” You have power and there’s no click and no lie. And you’re a debtor again to the Spirit. So yeah, if that’s what’s meant by debtor, we need to be his debtor every day, if we use the word that way.

Battling Bitterness

What about bitterness and an unforgiving spirit? Here’s my definition: Holding a grudge or savoring the thought of getting even with no true desire for the salvation and reconciliation of the offending person. Grudge holding. There are people that are still rolling around on the tongue of their soul, an act that was done against them 30 years ago. That is so sad. Here’s a crucial consideration of bygone grace becoming influential:

Be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ forgave you (Ephesians 4:32).

So there’s a backward look, and don’t hear me minimizing that in all this emphasis on future grace. That’s a backward look that has great power when you’re contemplating how hard you are towards your spouse, your kid, your neighbor, or the guy who wronged you at work. You become hard. You’re not tender anymore, you’re hard. You’re not kind. The hardness is giving rise to unkindness and avoidance. You’re not kind. Because there’s no forgiveness going on here.

What should you do? You should, among other things — besides all the arguments I’ve given for looking at future grace that will be there for you as you move into actions of love — look back and say, “He forgave me. Look how much he’s forgiven me. He loved me with that kind of love. That’s the kind of love I should have.” Looking back, I’m getting convicted by how well I was loved by Jesus and how badly I’m loving here, how much I was forgiven by Jesus, how much I’m not forgiving here. I’m convicted and now as I see that, and then I feel how much that love is here for me now and now it shifts over to the future, and I want to move toward that person with more tenderness as I trust that love will help me do that.

Doing Good When Wronged

Jesus, when he died, modeled for us what to do with our sense of just wrong. You have been wronged. That’s what makes your vengeance feel so right. People have wronged you, they really have, and it’s wrong. God knows it’s wrong. You know it’s wrong. Other people may or may not know it’s wrong, but you know you’ve been wronged and you feel, “Justice isn’t being done and justice ought to be done. They ripped me off and they’re getting away with it.” And here’s what Jesus did when that happened:

For to this you have been called, because Christ also suffered for you, leaving you an example, so that you might follow in his steps. He committed no sin, neither was deceit found in his mouth. When he was reviled, he did not revile in return; when he suffered, he did not threaten . . . (1 Peter 2:21–23).

How did he not? It was so wrong for him to be reviled. It’s wrong for you to be reviled. And it was wrong for him to be reviled. What did he do? And can you do the same? When he suffered, he did not threaten. It feels so right to threaten when you’re unjustly mistreated, but here’s what he did:

But continued entrusting . . .

And usually the text adds “handing over himself” or “handing over his cause.” And I think that’s right, but he hands over that situation to him who judges justly. So he is hanging on the cross and he knows that the mockery that’s going on out there. They’re saying, “Bring yourself down if you’re the Messiah. You healed others, heal yourself. Blah, blah, blah.” He knows that language is infinitely blasphemous and deserves to be struck with lightning right now and worse. What does he do with that? That’s what all had happened. That ought to happen. Knowing that it ought to happen, he hands it over to the judge who judges justly and says, “It’s your cause not mine. I’m here to love and die for and forgive. Father, have mercy and I hand it over to you.”.

I think you can go with him there. I think you must go with him there. You’ve been wronged, though not more wronged than Jesus. You need confidence. This will be settled. This won’t be swept under the rug of the universe. If you thought that the wrong done against you is just going to be swept under the rug of the university and nobody will know about it, nobody will care about it, you wouldn’t be able to survive it. It won’t be swept under the rug. It’s going to be punished in hell or punished on the cross. And therefore you can hand over to him who judges justly and say, “I don’t want to be consumed with bitterness and I hand it over to you.”

Beloved, never avenge yourselves, but leave it to the wrath of God, for it is written, “Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord” (Romans 12:19).

In the end, there will be no unrecompensed sins. So you don’t need to worry about that. They will be duly punished either on the cross or in hell.

Battling Impatience

The last one is impatience. Impatience is the murmuring against providence that we are forced to walk the path of obedience in an unplanned place or at an unplanned pace. You get impatient. You might think, “This is not the pace I’m meant to be driving. This is not the pace I’m meant to be single. This is not the pace I’m meant to be out of a job. I am just churning with impatience.”

The story of Joseph is a great help to me. Maybe I’ll just end by summarizing its lesson, and then we’ll stop. Joseph is sold into Egypt at age 17. That was bad. He’d been thrown into a pit. As he was being brought up, he thought, “Oh, they’re going to let me go.” And they sold him. He goes down there and he lives right. He doesn’t have sex with Potiphar’s wife. And the result of being so good is that he gets thrown in jail. In jail, he’s also good. He’s so good the jailer lets him help take care of the prisoners. The baker and the butler come to him with their dreams and he answers their dreams. The baker is going to be killed and the butler is going to be restored. They both come true. And he says to the butler, “Remember me when you get back there. Remember me.” And he forgets him for two more years.

Now, this is a story of your life — in the pit (down), brought up with hope into Egypt (up), some responsibility in Potiphar’s household and she lies about you (down), in jail with hope that the butler might remember you (up), and then down for another two years. I graphed this one time for our people in a Bethlehem Star article. I just graphed it. This is life. And I said, “Where are you on that 13-year downward spiral?” Where are you? Because if you were Joseph, really, at any given point, as he goes down, down, down for 13 years, wouldn’t you say, “God, I tried to live for you.” And he was. He was a good man. He could think, “I’m trying to live for you and you throw me in a pit. I’m trying to live for you, and I get sold into Egypt. I’m trying to live for you and she lies about me. I’m trying to live for you and this rascal butler forgets me for two more years.”

And God, if he had said anything, would say, “Be patient, I have a plan for you.” And then the butler remembered when Pharaoh had a dream and they called him out and he became the vice president of Egypt. And in the famine, he saved his family. He says:

As for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good, to bring it about that many people should be kept alive, as they are today (Genesis 50:20).

Trust the Promise When Clouds Are Dark

So what’s the key to patience during the 13 years when you don’t understand what’s going on at all? The answer is to know the stories of the Bible. I think written over every life, even over the Garden of Eden and the demonic deception of the human race, is, “Devil, you meant it for evil and God meant it for good.” That’s written over your life. You or your spouse, or your boss or your kids, or whoever ripped you off, meant for evil, but God says, “I have a plan for you, a good plan. And therefore, be patient in it.”

I was going to end with this hymn:

God moves in a mysterious way His wonders to perform; He plants his footsteps in the sea and rides upon the storm.

Deep in unfathomable mines of never-failing skill; He treasures up his bright designs, and works his sovereign will.

Ye fearful saints, fresh courage take; the clouds ye so much dread are big with mercy and shall break in blessings on your head.

Judge not the Lord by feeble sense, but trust him for his grace; behind a frowning providence He hides a smiling face.

His purposes will ripen fast, unfolding every hour; the bud may have a bitter taste, but sweet will be the flow'r.

Blind unbelief is sure to err, and scan his work in vain; God is his own interpreter, and he will make it plain.

That’s Joseph. William Cowper wrote that.

Here’s the summary: Future grace is promised. Faith lays hold on it and he’s satisfied by it. Out of that joyful heart in Jesus yields a life of love and God is glorified by it, so that all three of our passions come true. I am amazed. We made it to the end. Is God good or what? We missed it by four minutes. Who could do that? I didn’t do that. Thank you so much for being here. I hope that’s just a little parable of God’s grace.