My thinking here is that if the first two talks were to highlight the supremacy of God in preaching and the pursuit of radical obedience for his supremacy in the life of our people, and there’s a way to preach for that, the question then becomes: How do you become that kind of preacher and stay that kind of preacher? What can you do? What are strategies in your own life that will help you to stay alive and in love with God? So that’s what I’d like to talk about for a little while here.

There’s a little slogan at our church that we’ve used for these many years because we have found ourselves from time to time at a sprint pace saying, “This isn’t going to work for a marathon.” So you help each other as a staff, if you have another person. If you don’t have other pastors, you get lay people around you who care about you and your longevity, and you ask them to help you find a pace to finish the race. There’s a pace that’ll kill you, and there’s a pace that’ll help you finish, and there’s laziness. And you need to you need to find your pace in between those. So that may be part of it here.

Drink and Say

I want to read Isaiah 12 with you and point out a few things that helped me so much. We have to go deep in our grasp of God’s greatness to hang in there. We have to be passionate in our love for the glory of God. We have to be confident in his sovereign goodness. We have to be God-entranced in our grasp of reality and so on. That’s not natural. There’s nothing natural about the ministry. It’s all supernatural if it’s being done right.

You will say in that day:
“I will give thanks to you, O Lord,
     for though you were angry with me,
your anger turned away,
     that you might comfort me.

“Behold, God is my salvation;
     I will trust, and will not be afraid;
for the Lord God is my strength and my song,
     and he has become my salvation.”

With joy you will draw water from the wells of salvation. And you will say in that day:
“Give thanks to the Lord,
     call upon his name,
make known his deeds among the peoples,
     proclaim that his name is exalted.

“Sing praises to the Lord, for he has done gloriously;
     let this be made known in all the earth.
Shout, and sing for joy, O inhabitant of Zion,
     for great in your midst is the Holy One of Israel.”

Now notice the connection between verse 3 and verse 4. Verse 3 says, “With joy you will draw water from the wells of salvation.” Then, I think the logical connection between 3 and 4 is a result or effect — the effect that follows from drinking like that. “And you will say” — now that’s the preacher. You will say. It’s not just that you’ll have some experience, but you’re going to say something after you get up from drinking.

With joy you will draw water from the wells of salvation. And you will say in that day:
“Give thanks to the Lord. (Isaiah 12:3–4)

So you’re going to speak about God. You’re going to call attention to God when you get up from drinking at the wells of salvation. You will draw water, and you will speak. You will drink water, and you will speak. So we must drink at the wells of salvation so that we can go on saying what needs to be said about God. There’s the rhythm; there’s the connection.

So my people — and here you need to persuade them with this if they don’t get it — must expect from me that I drink from the wells of salvation. They must give me time to do it. They must insist that I do it. They must spot it when I’m not doing it and chastise me and say, “Get back to the well, pastor. Get on your face; put your face in the water. Things are getting a little thin, little sterile, little managerial around here. It doesn’t taste the same anymore, so drink faster. Drink — and then come and tell us about how great the drinking was and what you tasted there.”

Past, Present, Future Salvation

So let’s take these words here and unpack them for a little bit. Take the word salvation. Now we all know that in the Bible the word salvation is a very, very big word. It’s not to be limited. And it has at least these three dimensions.

It has the past dimension — Ephesians 2:8 says, “By grace you have been saved through faith.” It’s past: you were saved. Then you’ve got a text like 1 Corinthians 1:18: “To us who are being saved [the cross] is the power of God.” Present continuous action. So you have been saved, you are being saved, and then there are numerous texts for the future. Romans 13:11 says, “Salvation is nearer to us now than we first believed.” It’s not here yet. So you have been saved (Ephesians 2:8), you are being saved (1 Corinthians 1:18), and salvation hasn’t arrived yet, not in its consummation and fullness (Romans 13:11).

So salvation is a big, big concept, which I think helps us understand why the word wells in verse 3 is plural. I can imagine a liberal taking that text out of context and arguing, “There are many wells of salvation. There’s the Christian well, and the Buddhist well, and the Hindu well. You can find your own well. It doesn’t say well; it says wells.” And I can just hear that sermon developing.

But there’s probably another reason for why it says wells. One of those reasons is that if you start at Egypt, and you head for Palestine, and you go via Sinai, you better have more than a well at the beginning and a well at the end. And that’s life. Life is a wilderness of scorpions, and mountain lions, drought, Amalekites. And if you don’t have some oases between here and the Promised Land, you’re going to drop dead in the wilderness. So there have to be wells of salvation. You don’t just get a nice gulp at the beginning of your Christian life and an eternal gulp after you die. There better be wells along the way if you’re going to make it, and be Christian, and stand up and say, weekafter week, after week, after week, “Great is the Lord” — and mean it from your heart. You better be drinking a lot.

May those who love your salvation
     say continually, “Great is the Lord!”

So how are you going to do that? How are you going to not go dry? My main warfare in the pastorate is not dying. It’s not the people; they’re not my main problem. I’m my main problem. I don’t even say the devil. He’s a biggie, but he can only get at me through my flesh and sin. Green apparitions on the ceiling in the middle of the night are no big deal, neither is the roaring of any sound in the basement, nor is the rattling of sabers outside, or any mob, because they can’t do me in. They can’t damn me; only sin can damn me. Therefore, the only real damage Satan can do to me is to make me sin. I fight at the level of sin — not Satan.

Devil’s Foothold

Do you want me to lecture on spiritual warfare? I’m not going to talk hocus pocus about the devil very much. I’m going to talk about his strategies to get me to sin and how the Bible gives us counterstrategies not to sin, and thus frustrate the devil, and give him no hook. “Do not let the sun go down on your anger, and give no opportunity to the devil” (Ephesians 4:26–27). That’s the way to do spiritual warfare. Fight wrath in your life, and he has no hook. Don’t open the door to anger at night. If you have a spout with the wife at 6:00, get it fixed by 10:00.

I know that’s naïve. I’ve been married thirty years, and there have been nights when my wife and I kneel together at night by the bed when we have not been able to pray. It is so hard. The emotions are so raw. The conflict is so intense. The misunderstandings are so deep. The twenty-five years of trying to work out this particular difference in our personalities is so worn, and we are so frayed, you barely have the wherewithal to get on your face. And I wait. She waits. And I say, “You want to pray?” No. I’m the man here. I believe with all my heart in headship, and it’s my job. And I have numerous times simply said, “Oh God, help us. Amen.”

So I don’t mean to say “get it fixed” as though it’s easy to fix. I just mean: don’t let it simmer without working at it, at least with “Oh God, help us.” Because if you let it go, and go, and go, there goes the door. And that’s what Satan will do: he’ll get in there, and he’ll make that thing so ugly, and so deep, and so long, that it’s the sin that will do us in. So we’ve got to have strategies of fighting sin in our lives. I’m my main problem, and I fight my death in the ministry with as much vigilance as I fight any error that’s out there. And that’s what I want to talk about with you.

Drink Deeply of the Well

What are wells? What is this plural wells? It’s the place where you taste salvation. So there are as many wells as there are moments of drinking salvation. There’s no particular place. They’re not located anywhere, the wells of salvation. They have no location. They are wherever you have the wherewithal to pause and to drink refreshment from God.

Now, what is this salvation? Verse 2, I think, gives the reason why this is wonderfully simply, wonderfully deep, and why you can do it anywhere at any time: “Behold, God is my salvation.” There’s the answer: the wells of salvation have God at the bottom of them splashing about.

“Behold, God is my salvation;
     I will trust, and will not be afraid;
for the Lord God is my strength and my song,
     and he has become my salvation.” (Isaiah 12:2)

So the wells of salvation are the places and the times when you draw near to God, and drink in God, and get strong on God, and taste God. Taste and see that the Lord is good. “Come to me. I’m the bread of life. I am water of life. You drink from me, you’ll never thirst. God in the Old Testament, Jesus in the New Testament, drawing us in to drink and to eat from them. You must find a place and a time, and you must make them where God himself you meet.

Now, I believe in discipline, and I believe in lists for prayer and for reading. I am praying through the whole Bible. I pray through the Bible every year on schedule. I carry around. I put it in my briefcase. I finished Deuteronomy last night. Because what is today? I believe in discipline, but I also believe in reality, and spontaneity, and authenticity — like farmers believe in discipline: you must plow your field, and you must plant your seed. But they also watch it grow and know not how. “The kingdom of God is as if a man should scatter seed on the ground. He sleeps and rises night and day, and the seed sprouts and grows; he knows not how” (Mark 4:26–27). The ministry is both, isn’t it? It is both rigorous, hard, discipline, work, and it is infinitely more than that. God does amazing things.

So when I go to this word, I plead with God: do more than just let me go over Deuteronomy 33 and 34! And he does. Deuteronomy 33:26 says,

“There is none like God, O Jeshurun,
     who rides through the heavens to your help,
     through the skies in his majesty.

That was worth the half an hour of discipline in Bible reading to find and memorize. This is right off the front burner this morning. Meditation follows the reading and mingles with memorization. And meditation is the system of asking questions about the text. So I said to myself, “There’s none like God.’ Really?” And the text says, “Because he rides through the heavens to your help, through the skies in his majesty.” And I thought, “Only God rides through the heavens? Demons and angels can ride through the heavens, can’t they?” So what do you mean there’s none like God who rides through the heavens? And I said, “Oh, but it says ‘to your help.’” So that rules out demons. They’re gone now. But what about angels? Hebrews 1:13 says, “Are they not all ministering spirits sent out to serve for the sake of those who are to inherit salvation?” So they come to my help, don’t they? So why do you say there’s none like God who rides to your help? You just answer your questions with the text. Then I said, “It says, ‘In his majesty through the skies.’” And that rules out the angels.

So the meaning of the text came home to me like this: There is none like God who rides through the heavens because of two things about the way he rides through the heavens: (1) he’s on the way to help me, not kill me; and (2) he’s riding with majesty to help me. That’s soul food, brothers and sisters. That’s drinking at the wells. Then you just stop and you savor it. You lick the lollipop of revelation over and over. You taste it, and it just kind of goes down into your heart and you say, “God, let me see this, let me feel this, and let me preach today on that platform. Make my teaching drop like rain and my words distill like the dew on this people because I have tasted and seen the rain this morning; it fell on me.” That’s the way I fight the fight of faith day in and day out.

So God is our salvation. And he, therefore, is in the well because it’s called the wells of salvation. Do you see the connection now? So there are multiple wells because God is everywhere you’re willing to meet him. And at the bottom of the well, when you send your bucket down, it’s not some alternative to God or even the gifts of God, but God himself is down there.

Seminary of Suffering

Now, here’s another thing I want to draw out on this text: I really believe that the making of a pastor, not just a preacher, but a lover of people, an empathizer with the suffering, has a lot to do with the space between the wells and your experience of it — that is, the lean seasons, the dry seasons, and how you handle them, and what you do with them, and what you’re willing to wait out and to fight through. I believe with all my heart that God saves and makes a pastor through the wells and the space between the wells.

I’m not commending that you not drink if you can drink. I’m saying there are seasons when you can’t drink — and they’re scary seasons. They’re scary to your own faith. You begin to wonder, “Have I been playing games? Have I preached, and myself proved to be a castaway?” Or short of that, you may ask, “Did I enter the ministry because of a romantic notion of something and not for godly motives, and I’m finished here, and the Lord is done with me, and he’s laid this vessel aside?” And those questions come. And how you live with those questions, and answer those questions between the wells has so much to do with how you’re going to minister to people.

Suffering is absolutely essential in ministry. I get that from numerous texts from Paul, and some from the Psalms, and a wonderful teaching from Martin Luther. Remember Luther’s three Latin words, the key to exegesis and application to his people? Oratio means prayer. Medetatio — meditation. And the third one, surprisingly, is tentatio, which he got from Psalm 119:71. It means struggle or affliction. That’s key to interpreting the Bible because Psalm 119:71 says, “It is good for me that I was afflicted, that I might learn your statutes.” Are you willing to go to that seminary, the seminary of suffering? If you say, “I won’t attend the seminary of suffering; I don’t like the curriculum,” you will not understand many texts, and you will not care for many people. Because the only way you’re going to care for some people is to have walked through enough suffering that they can listen to you because the suffering in your churches is absolutely immense. If they think “Here’s a pastor who’s never tasted anything negative; everything has gone well for this man. He seems to be utterly oblivious to the pain that I’m going through,” then it’s going to be hard to have an authentic ministry with that family or that person.

So I know it’s a little bit pressing the text, but let it be a jumping off place to say: between the wells in the wilderness, there is the scorpion in the desert. And it is so important to us. Don’t take it as a detour. If you believe in the sovereignty of God and believe in Romans 8:28, there are no detours. It probably took Joseph 17 years to learn that because it looked like a detour when they threw him into that pit. And when they pulled him up out of the pit and sold him into Egypt, that looked like a detour. And when Mrs. Potiphar lied about him and he got thrown into prison, that looked like a detour. I mean, these detours are getting worse, and worse, and worse. Then when he talks to the butler and the baker, he says, “Remember me?” and they forget him for two more years — that looks like a two-year detour. And he doesn’t get this. All he does is hang on to the sovereignty of God, and the hand of God is with him, and he believes something’s coming from this.

I wonder if you’re on year 16 of your so-called detour. Some of you are, I’ll bet. Year 16 of inexplicable pain — inexplicable; no answer. Don’t give up. Don’t throw it away. There’s a well just around the corner at year 17 for Joseph. And suddenly he’s the vice president of Egypt, and God announces through Joseph: “As for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good.”

What a story. I love the story of Joseph. It’s just the story of the incarnation — kind of. And oh, it ministers in so many settings. It ministers to my life.

Sovereign Struggle

I think I told the story of my own struggle in Future Grace in the chapter on anxiety. I tell my story of eighth grade through sophomore year in college. It was a long wilderness for me because I could not speak in front of a group. And you had to speak in front of groups, supposedly. I would freeze up. My throat would go solid. My shoulders would become stiff. I could not get any words out. This is different from knee-knocking, and butterflies, and shaky voice that everybody kind of relates to. This is different. I have never looked back on this and laughed about it ever — ever. I laugh about butterflies; I don’t laugh about what I experienced from eighth grade to sophomore year.

And I tell you, when I go to my kids’ so-called creativity nights at Calvin Christian School and other places where they make the kids read a poem, or recite, or something to train them in public speaking, and I watch one 11-year-old boy try his best, get about three sentences into it, and then walk out of the room crying, nothing in me smiles. This is torture. This is agony. I say, “Why do they do this to this kid? Don’t make him do this. Give him his own time,” because I walked through that so often and hated it.

So when I was in the eighth grade, I had to read one paragraph to report on a science project. And it’s just emblazoned on my memory that I said, “Well, maybe if I got one of these thick lecterns like this, it wouldn’t shake so bad.” So I wrote it down. I went over it, and over, and over. And as the person in front of me did theirs, walked up, read for 15 seconds, came back, and the next one walked up, read for 30 seconds I cried the rest of the class. That was the story of my life for about eighth grade to sophomore year in college.

In tenth grade, Mr. Vermilion said, “John, you’ve got to give an oral book report to get an A in this class.” I said, “I can’t do it.” “Well, you have to do it or you get a C.” “I’ll take a C.” And I took a C because I couldn’t do it. I never ran for an office because you have to give those little speeches, right? Vice president, president of class, they’ve got to give a little speech. Never, ever, ever did I run.

Do you know what God was doing in those days? I think God was clogging my mouth in order to make a pastor. Because my father’s an evangelist with a golden tongue. And I was a kid with so many pimples they sent me to the dermatologist. It probably had to do with this anxiety stuff. I don’t know. I just had a terrible complexion. They bleach away at you. They’ll rub dry ice on my face. And here’s my dad with a golden tongue. And here’s this preacher’s kid who can’t even give a 30-second part in training union in the Southern Baptist Church at 6:00 at night in front of six of his peers.

I would lie down on my front lawn and look out over Piney Ridge Mountain and listen to the train far away and say, “I think I’d like to get on that train and just disappear where nobody would ask anymore why the preacher’s kid can’t even give a book report.” Or I would sit under the dogwood tree on my front lawn and write a poem to my mother who was the only person who understood.

They took me to a psychologist one time. My parents were desperate. They didn’t know what was wrong. They thought I was just going to make total wreck of my life. So they took me to a psychologist. There were no Christian psychologists in the early sixties. Or maybe there were and I didn’t know about them. But it wasn’t in its own element yet. So we go to this woman, and I spend one hour with her. She puts the Rorschach charts in front of me and tells me, “What do you see?” And asked me a whole lot of questions. And when she’s done, in a nutshell, what I heard her say was, “It’s your mother’s problem.” I was so angry, I never went back. Because I said inside, “There’s one person in this world who understands me, that cares about me, and rubs my back at night, and cries with me, and that’s my mother. And it was not her problem.”

I have no idea where the problem was or what it was, except to say that, in the providence of God, between the wells as I walked through those dry, lean seasons, God was driving me off the fast track of popularity and parties into introspection, and reflection, and feeling. And that today, I do believe, is bearing fruit for the kingdom. So whatever your leanness is, whatever your struggle is, don’t begrudge the seminary of suffering. It will make you a reader of the Bible like very few others. If somebody close to you dies, or you have to do a funeral, or there’s been some tragedy, and you go to the word, and you see things in those few hours that you’ve never seen before because of what’s going on inside of you: a kind of readiness you have to see ultimate things. I’ve done more funerals than I can count. And every time I do a funeral and I don’t know the person very well, and so it has not touched me emotionally, and I don’t want be hard and callous to these people who have just lost a precious person, do you know what I do as I’m sitting there? I just very consciously perform an act of imagination that it’s one of my boys or my wife. That’s easy for me to do. I’ve lost my mother now when I was 28, and I’ve lost a lot of precious people in my life. So it’s not hard for me to do that simple act of imagination. And I’ll tell you, if I’m not careful, I can concoct very artificial tears. I have to be careful to walk a fine line, but I feel the loss when I just project onto that my own loss.

So between the wells, there is a grey seminary, and I encourage you to accept it, walk through it. In 2 Corinthians 1:6, Paul says, “If we are afflicted, it is for your comfort and salvation.” Pastor, can you say that? If I am afflicted — you name it. If I am afflicted, it is for your comfort, my people. Because God turns your affliction for their good in ways that you don’t even imagine.

Patience in the Pain

So what happens now when you drink from the wells and when you walk between the wells patiently waiting? Do you remember David in Psalm 40? “I waited patiently for the Lord.” How long? How long?

     He inclined to me and heard my cry.
He drew me up from the pit of destruction,
     out of the miry bog,
and set my feet upon a rock,
     making my steps secure.
He put a new song in my mouth,
     a song of praise to our God.
Many will see and fear,
     and put their trust in the Lord. (Psalm 40:1–3)

There was a meaning for the pit. You waited. How long? A week, two weeks, a year, 16 years? You wait in the pit. “O Lord, O God, help me, save me, rescue me.” And then he delivers. A song is in your mouth, and people hear the song, knowing the pit, and they praise God.

I met a teacher at Reformed Theological Seminary in Orlando. Some of you may know him. I was down there doing some mission talks couple years ago. I noticed his van was real unusual. It had a handicap setup. He showed me a picture of his family and about six or seven kids. His oldest daughter is in a wheelchair. He said, “Our daughter probably has the mind of a 16-month old.” She is 17 years old. I said, “Wow, that’s got to be hard. How’d you do that? How’d you handle that?” He said, “It took about eight years, about eight years. It’s OK now. We see it. We can handle this. This is good. God’s got a purpose in this. There’s a great ministry. She smiles. She makes people happy at church. She tenderizes people.” But it took eight years to fight that one through until he got some handle on her or until he felt like “I can still embrace this God.”

So you’ve got to be patient with people, no matter what your theology is. I’m a Calvinist to the core. I believe in sovereignty of God big time. The Lord kills, and the Lord makes alive. The Lord wounds, and the Lord heals (Deuteronomy 32:39). But you don’t force that on anybody, and you don’t hurry anybody into that — especially not in the midst of their loss. You just hug them and love them. And when they’re ready, you put the rock under their feet, and the rock is the sovereignty of God working everything together for good.

When you come up from drinking and walking, this text says that you’re going to do some God-exalting preaching. Verse 4 says: You will say. You will say. You will preach. You will speak. Give thanks to the Lord. Call on his name. Make known his deeds among the peoples. Proclaim that his name is exalted. So that’s what I was asking you to do this morning. Preach like that. Say to your people, “The Lord is exalted.” But this text says you say that after you drink at the wells and as you walk between the wells.

So that’s my main point this afternoon: that drinking at the wells unleashes God-exalting preaching. And there it is in verse 4: that’s God-exalting preaching. That’s not just the Isaiah saying, “I give thanks to the Lord”; he is saying to others to give thanks to the Lord in preaching. And you could say it’s also missions-mobilizing preaching because he goes on to talk about the nations.

Four Helps for Drinking Deeply

When you go to the Bible, which is where I meet God and drink, read intentionally on the lookout for the greatness of God. I think our reading of the Bible tends to be less intentional than it should be.

1. Look for God and Jesus Christ.

At least one of the questions you should be asking when you read the Bible — since it’s God’s word, and he’s the author of it, and he’s the goal of it, and He’s the center of it — should be: Show me something of God here. Show me something of Jesus here?

When you read the Gospels and you read the stories of the last weeks or the last days of Jesus’s life in Holy Week, are you reading with a view to figuring out something about Pilate, or figuring out about Peter, or Judas, or whatever? Or are you asking, “Jesus, show me something of your glory here. Show me something of your character here”? We read the whole Gospels like that. There are other questions that are legitimate to ask. But at least when you drink, remember: God is our salvation. So if you’re going to drink at the wells of salvation, you drink God. But if you’re going to drink God, you’ve got to ask questions from the Bible. Show me God in creation. Show me God in the exodus. Show me God in the wilderness. Show me God in the conquest of Canaan. Show me God in the Judges. Show me God in King. Show me God in the Prophets. Show me God in Jesus, in the Epistles, and show me God in Revelation. I want to see God in this Book.

It’s not just facts about redemptive history. It’s God; I want to meet the living God. He’s either real and e’s alive in heaven and moving in the world right now and able to be related to as a person or he’s not. And if he’s not, I quit. Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die” (1 Corinthians 15:32). But if he is, oh, don’t settle for thoughts about him, or about history, or about grammar. Don’t settle until you’ve got the person with you on your knees, knowing him, loving him, treasuring him.

I’ll give an example: I came to the point where Jesus is confronted by his adversaries, and they ask him questions. “By what authority do you do these things?” And he says, “Let me ask you a question.” Why does he do that? Why doesn’t he just answer them: “God’s. God’s authority”? Why didn’t he do that? He said, “Let me ask you a question. The baptism of John, was it from heaven or from man?” They go have a little huddle. “Now, if we say it’s from heaven, he’s going to say, ‘Why didn’t you believe on it?’ And if we say it’s from man, the people might stone us because they think he’s a prophet. So what are we going to do? Let’s say we don’t know. We don’t know.” And Jesus does not laugh. He says, “Neither will I tell you by what authority I do these things.”

What’s that mean? What’s all that about? It’s a way of saying, “I don’t deal with people like you.” And it’s everywhere, folks. It’s everywhere. I’m embroiled in it big time in my own situation: the use of language not to state truth but to weasel and win with no reference to truth at all. And Jesus says, “I don’t talk to people like that.” Now, when I read that, the question I was asking is: “I want to know Jesus.” I think I know Jesus a little better now: Jesus loves the truth. Jesus does not truck with expediency. So those are the questions I’m asking: Jesus, show me your glory. And so I encourage you to do that: to ask questions about Jesus.

2. Linger over particular verses.

Here’s the second observation. There are just little practical tips. Don’t feel like all your time in the Bible at the well must be spent covering many chapters. Frankly, I do cover my chapters. I do, out of discipline. But I get fed on verses. I have to stop and linger. I have to linger over precious nuggets, because big, sweeping chapters, I don’t get around them very well. I’ve got to have something that I can say in a sentence to minister to my soul during the day.

So when I read a few days ago this piece of paper that I’m carrying in my pocket here — “May my teaching drop as the rain, my speech distill as the dew” (Deuteronomy 32:2) — I spent fifteen minutes on that, praying it, pleading for it, thinking about what rain meant, and what dew meant, about what teaching and speaking meant, and longing, just longing for God to do that for me. And I had to make quick work of the rest of the chapter because I had to get to work,, you know?

So all I’m saying is at this point: when you go to the well to drink, one ladleful, one mouthful might be sweeter than all the thirty besides. Savor it. Memorize it. Take it with you during the day. Write it on a piece of paper if your memory is a 53-year-old memory.

3. Write and type for insight.

You say to somebody, “Go to the wells, read,” and they don’t have the discipline to read. They come back a week later and you say, “Did you read the text I gave you?” “Well, no.” “Why not?” “I don’t know. Just didn’t take the time.” You can either kick somebody like that out and say, “Well, if you don’t have the discipline to read, then get out of my life,” which isn’t real pastoral. Or you have to come up with another practical idea and just keep trying. You keep trying. I mean, I suppose there comes a point where you might give up on somebody, but not quick. Love suffers long and is kind. Lewis Smedes has a great book, Love within Limits. In the chapter on “love suffers long and is kind,” that’s the way he concludes: longer than you think.

One young woman said, “I did read it. I do read. But frankly, I don’t get anything. You seem to get lots. I don’t get anything.” I said, “Try this. You got a notebook? Got a tablet?” “Got a tablet.” “Got a pencil?” “Got a pencil.” “This time write the text. Just write it. Don’t read it; write it. And tell me next week what happens.” She came back glowing. She came back glowing. So the week before, “I don’t see anything.” And now she’s saying, “I saw so many things when I was writing the text.” I think there’s a real simple reason for that: speed; it slows her down. And as you’re writing, your mind is faster than your hand, and so you’re forced to dwell on words. That’s one possible reason.

I’m a writer; I write books. I would write if every publisher in the world boycotted John Piper, and I would never publish another thing again. I would write, because it is in me to write, and the reason it’s in me is because I learn when I write. John Calvin said in the introduction to the Institutes, “I count myself to be among the number who write as they learn and learn as they write.”

I used to say, before computers, I used to say there’s insights in my pencil. I can’t explain it. There’s insight in my pencil. I don’t have to explain it. All I have to do is start writing and I see. Now, the same thing is true with the keyboard. I just work straight off the keyboard now. And as I start to write out what I saw with one sentence, Boom! There’s another sentence there. Boom! Another sentence. Boom! Another insight. Questions are flowing and you’re trying to write down the questions so you can remember all. And one answer to one question leads to three other questions. And the two answers of those leads to two others. And before you know it, insight is flowing.

I applied for a job one time at Fuller Seminary to teach in 1978 while I was still teaching at Bethel. Ralph Martin was the New Testament specialist there at the time, and I told him about how I leaned on writing for thinking and how I drew little doodles and things. He said, “Isn’t that just a crutch?” I said, “It certainly is; and I am a cripple big time.” You learn what your weaknesses are. Albert Einstein, I have read, was able to take an idea in his head, and for weeks on end, with no writing and uninterrupted, hold it there and look at it from a hundred angles. I see dust on the venetian blinds, and it’s over. I can no more hold an idea in my head unassisted by pencil than the man on the moon.

4. Memorize portions of the Bible.

Memorize precious portions of the Bible. Pick a few high points. Don’t feel like, “Oh, yeah. There are people who know five hundred verses by heart or a thousand verses by heart. Some people memorize the whole New Testament. Or Zwingli knew it all in Greek by heart.” Don’t intimidate yourself and get paralyzed like that. There’s no point in that. Pick out a few texts: Psalm 23, Psalm 46, Romans 8. I challenge you. Maybe take away one practical challenge from this time. Before 1999 is over, memorize Romans 8 — all 39 verses — and you will not be the same again. Everybody should know the mountain peak of the Bible by heart. It doesn’t get any better than the “Great Eight, as the Puritans called it. Memorize the whole chapter. Because you know what you’ll do? You won’t recite the chapter very often, and you’ll have to review it often if you’re going to keep it. But pieces of it will come again, and again, and again. And it will meet a thousand needs in your own life, and a thousand needs in your people’s lives because Romans 8 is of universal value.

Memorize a lot of Scripture for your own soul. Take it with you during the day. When your mind goes into neutral, what is the sound of the whirring of the gears? I’ve often wondered: If I were to be hit by a car, thrown to the side, almost dead, what would come to my mind? What would be the last thoughts? No effort can be expended. You’re hurt too bad to make any efforts. What would be there automatically? That’s a good question to ask yourself and to begin to build some automatics into your mind. I think it might be Isaiah 41:10, “Fear not, for I am with you; be not dismayed, for I am your God; I will strengthen you, I will help you, I will uphold you with my righteous right hand.” Because I have used that so many thousands of times in moments of crisis, in moments of fear.