When is it okay to speak up to call people to an account for what you think is an error you perceive in your local church?

That is just an unanswerable question from the outside, so all I can do is point you to a process to arrive at an answer rather than giving you the answer. The process is to plead with Christ for a spirit of discernment and to soak your minds in the Bible so that you’re not conformed to this age with all of its pride and all of its self exultation, and rather you are humble, lowly, loving, kind, tender, sensitive, and wise as serpents and innocent as doves, and he’ll let you know when.

Will you talk a little bit about the judgment seat of Christ? On the one hand, it seems like we’re going to get rewarded for things that have been only produced in our life by God’s grace and Spirit, and on the other hand, we will lose rewards for things that have been covered by his blood and the resurrection.

I think I see what you mean. That’s a complicated question. Let me see if I can take it a piece at a time. I think it is right to say we don’t get that teaching from that text only, but Romans 14, the Parable of the Talents, and 2 Corinthians 3:14–17, which says, “This light and momentary affliction is working for us an eternal weight of glory,” as though there’s a correlation between what we suffer here and what we benefit from there.

I think there are different levels of reward. I do believe that. Not everybody does. And they would base their view on the parable of the guy who comes to work one hour and the guy works 10 hours, and they both get the same thing. They say, “See, there’s no difference in rewards.” But I don’t think you need to push that parable to say there are no distinctions at all. I think it means that both can have the same blessing of being all there, get all of Jesus, and so on, and that what rewards are would be — leaning on Edwards and others — different capacities for enjoying the whole Christ that every believer gets in heaven.

Now your question is that we’re going to get rewards for what grace worked within us. And I think that’s exactly right, which is why we will cast our crowns at his feet. So he puts a crown on us and we take it off and put it back at his feet. And in that little picture that we get out of hymn, both truths are stated. We did a good thing. There was real virtue in it. I believe in virtue. The virtue happened to come ultimately from God. Hebrews 13:20–21 says:

Now may the God of peace who brought again from the dead our Lord Jesus, the great shepherd of the sheep, by the blood of the eternal covenant, equip you with everything good that you may do his will, working in us that which is pleasing in his sight, through Jesus Christ, to whom be glory forever and ever.

So who did the work? He did the work in you and through you, but you did it. You did it. You did a good thing. And he’ll say, “Well done, well done, good and faithful servant.” You were faithful, leaning on him. “Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who works in you” (Philippians 2:12–13). You do it because he’s doing it. So when you get to the judgment with that dynamic of sanctification having been operative, how does he speak appropriately about you and him in that moment? That’s judgment. He does it by rewarding you in whatever that stands for by saying what you did was good. He is saying, “I see it as good. I like it, I approve of it, I value it, and I delight in it.” And he finds a way to say that, but then and he knows and everybody in heaven knows, you wouldn’t have done it if he hadn’t enabled you to do it. And so you have to find a way at that moment to render back to him the praise he just gave to you.

It actually does say praise in Romans 2:25 and in 1 Peter 1:8. The true circumcision gets their praise from God, not from man. God praises me? Yikes. That’s another theology. Where’d that come from? And that’s the dynamic right there. I think, yes, it will be praise in the sense that he’ll say, “John, amen that you stayed with your wife all those years. John, amen that you stayed with the church through tough times. John, amen that you brought your kids up and read the Bible with them every day. That was good, John.” In other words, he’ll take all the C pluses to A minuses in my life and keep them in a file. And he takes all the D minuses and especially the Fs, and he burns them up in the cross.

So I’m going to lose the reward for those things. I’m not going to be punished for them. Jesus got punished for them. But I’m not going to get any reward for them. They’re all in a round file and it went poof at the cross. But he keeps this other file called Sanctification, works that he’s working in me, and some of those are really mediocre because I got them all contaminated while he was working in me. I just messed them all up with my remaining indwelling sin. And some, I did all right. I was given a moment of pure heart and I did something without a lousy motive, almost. I agree with J.I. Packer and the Puritans that I never did a good deed in my life for which I don’t have to repent.

So I think there won’t be any A pluses, zero A pluses. Jesus got all A pluses. I get no A pluses, and very few A minuses probably. Like this talk here, my guess is that a lot’s going to go up in smoke when I get to the judgment seat. He’s going to say, “If you had really prayed this much, or if you’d really been this less self-preoccupied with your theology and more preoccupied with Jesus . . .” He will just go right down the line, lay my heart bare, show all the crud in there, and say, “Things would’ve gone better. But I have this file over here. You did a few things right.” It’s like when it comes to the seven churches in Revelation, he says, “This I have against you and this I like.” I just think that’s the way it’s going to be. Now, I don’t know if that helps. Does that solve the problem? I think it’s right to reward us in that way for things that he worked in us, and I think it’s right that we not be rewarded for things that the cross consumed.

I was just curious as to your view on Hebrews 6:4–6, which says, “It is impossible, in the case of those who have once been enlightened, who have tasted the heavenly gift, and have shared in the Holy Spirit, and have tasted the goodness of the word of God and the powers of the age to come, and then have fallen away, to restore them again to repentance, since they are crucifying once again the Son of God to their own harm and holding him up to contempt.”

Well, let’s do it this way. The issue there, if you don’t have it fresh in your mind, is whether or not eternal security or the perseverance of the saints can stand in view of what happens to the man in Hebrew 6 or in Hebrews 10. In Hebrews 6, you have a man who’s tasted the powers of the age to come. He’s tasted the Holy Spirit, and he basically makes a shipwreck of his faith. He’s like a field that’s been watered and he brings forth thistles, and it’s good for nothing and it’s going to be cursed and trampled away.

So my view is if that man does that, if he apostatizes decisively, he never was saved and the tasting is a real tasting but not a full born-again experience. Now I hope that’s not just theologically dictated and I’m doing eisegesis there, dumping my theology into that text. The reason I don’t think I am is from Hebrews 3. Let me just point this out. Most of you who’ve been wrestling with these kinds of things know about this verse, but some of you may not know about this verse in Hebrews. It’s a very important verse. It comes right after the exhortation to exhort one another every day and encourage one another every day, as long as this is called today, so that none of you may be hardened by the deceitfulness of sin. And then he says (and the tenses of the verbs here are all important):

For we have come to share in Christ (a past event with a present experience), if indeed we hold our original confidence firm to the end (Hebrews 3:14).

Now reverse it and tell me what it would read if I started it like this: If we do not hold fast our assurance firm to the end, therefore, what? We had not come to share in Christ. It isn’t that we ceased to be. Do you see the difference? It would be one theology to say, “If I don’t hold fast, I stop being a partaker.” It’s another theology to say, “If I don’t hold fast, I never was a partaker.” And that’s what this second verse demands, which is why I think the writer of the Hebrews believes in the perseverance of the saints and eternal security.

Now, if you asked him, “Well, what in the world was happening in Hebrews 6 then? What was that experience?” It’s described as someone who tasted the good word of God, the powers of the age to come, was enlightened, tasted of the heavenly gift, and have been made partakers of the Holy Spirit. I think the best picture of those people is Matthew 7:21–23 where they’re at the judgment and they say, “Didn’t we do many mighty works in your name? Didn’t we teach in your name, cast out demons in your name?” And you know what I think the answer Jesus would be there? Jesus might say, “Yes you did. You cast out demons in my name. You did many mighty works in my name. I granted you power to do miracles, and you were never saved.” Now you have to have a category in your head for that. In other words, supernatural things can be allowed and performed by the providence of God in the lives of unregenerate people. You might say, “Well, that’s just the power of the devil, isn’t it?” Well, maybe not, or maybe it’s like Job. It’s the devil, yes, but God has the leash.

He can pull him out as he wishes so that he comes to Job and he kills his kids and Job says, “The Lord took away” (Job 1:21). Or it says in Job 2:7, “Satan afflicted him with boils from the top of his head to the bottom of his feet.” And Job says to his wife, “Shall we receive good at the hand of the Lord and not receive evil?” (Job 2:10). I mean, there are complex things. God’s ways of working here in terms of signs and wonders is not easy to sort out. Nothing is very clear. If I see a sign or a wonder, a healing, or somebody falls over, so-called “slain in the Spirit,” or laughter like in Toronto, or a casting out of a demon, supposedly, I do not immediately jump to any conclusion, positive or negative.

The way I describe it is “critical openness.” That’s my view towards these things. I’m critically open. I don’t rule them out. I don’t say, “Satanic stuff is going on here.” That’s not obvious to me at all. I think God is free. He can do whatever he wants to do in that regard. So I’m going to look for evidence of holiness, evidence of Christ-centeredness, and evidence of the esteem of the word of God. And as long as we’re on charismatic stuff, I’ll say one more thing. I’m getting way afield from whatever the question was, but I’ll go ahead and maybe cancel out about five other questions with this one.

If you perceive that there’s some group doing something strange, say somebody says, “What do you think of that?” I don’t feel obliged from my distance, say, of 1,600 miles or something between Minneapolis and Pensacola to make any judgments. I simply say, “Okay, here’s what I would do if I were there. I’d get up and I’d preach God-centered, glorious, Calvinistic, Reformed theology and see how they responded.” And if they respond poorly, I’d say something bad is happening here. And if they respond positively, I’d say, “He who is of God hears the words of God.”

In other words, you don’t have to be God here. Just preach the word of God. Another way to do it, if they don’t let you preach, is to check their preaching out. And I’ve found something in some of these places. I’ve been to lots of them because I’m open to this kind of thing. I’ve been to lots of them where the preaching is simply a pump used to prime the ministry time. They think, “We’ll just take about 15 minutes to get the people ready and then we’ll do some prophecy here.” And then someone says, “You grew up in such-and-such and your wife had a red shirt in 1953.”

And now, see, I don’t say, “That can’t be happening.” I say, “That 15 minute Theology Light is going to damage this church over the long haul. Let’s fix that.” And you know what happens? If you fix that, other things get fixed too. That’s my strategy with regard to signs and wonders and charismatic things. I’m not on a crusade against charismatics. I’m on a crusade for God-centered theology. And I find that if you’re willing to promote God and the whole counsel of God, many charismatic people absolutely love it and they realize what they’ve been starving for all their lives. They don’t want to give up some of their energetic aspects of emotional engagement in worship, and I’m not eager to create a church where they have to.

So my little strategy, and you don’t have to buy it, is probably rescuing as many people from the downside of the charismatic movement as going on a crusade against charismatics would. Okay, now nobody even asked that question, and there I am talking about it. So I believe it teaches eternal security in Hebrews.

I’m coming from Bob Jones, and I hate to admit that I did, but I have a question about secondary separation. Where do you stand as far as that goes, as far as people who don’t agree with covenant theology and more along the dispensational end and music? You know how Bob Jones takes a strong stance.

I don’t know if I’m on the inside to know how everything is articulated, and I’m not even sure I could give a good definition to secondary separation. Would you like to define it for me so I don’t answer the wrong question?

It’s about going along the area of separating from people that do not separate from Roman Catholics or Muslims or whatnot.

Well I’m not even very good at primary separation, but liberals think I am. So it’s a funny thing. I’ll just give you a really concrete example. I don’t know if I should do this or not. There was a big 20,000 person prayer event in the dome the Sunday night after the calamity on September 11. They were evangelicals. I was called to ask if I would participate in being one of the leaders, and I have met and prayed with just about every stripe of Christian human being there is. I’m not eager to pray with those who won’t pray in the name of Jesus. Why do that? But if people pray in the name of Jesus, I generally go there because how can that hurt? Because God might teach somebody something in that moment.. But I asked, “Will so-and-so be speaking?” And the answer was that he was. So I said probably not because that issue for me that we disagree on is big enough to separate over. I don’t think it should be in our denomination. I don’t think you should be teaching at our school. You all have figured out who it is. So there’s an example of where I’m willing to draw the line.

Now there’s lots of people who do not feel that way about him. That’s secondary, right? So how do I relate to those people? Well, I’m not about to run away from them. I’ll be all by myself in the middle of the wilderness if I do. I guess I just don’t see things as clearly as maybe some of the fundamental brothers and sisters do. Let’s take music for example. You raised the issue of music and somebody else raised music the other night. I’ll tell you the question I heard. Someone said, “Piper, we should be radically counter-cultural. So if we’re going to be radically counter-cultural, how come we sing these kinds of songs we sang last night, which are taken over as folk ballads from the world?”

I think about that sort of thing a lot. And here’s a rough answer, with a couple of pieces to it. When you call for radical countercultural allegiance to Jesus, you have to choose your battles. All you have to do is just look at me. My clothes are not radically countercultural. This is pure conformity to what I thought might be southern expectation. My hair is not really long. That’s a cultural expectation. I use a PalmPilot, that’s cultural. I dial 911, that’s cultural. I drive a car, that’s cultural. I speak English, that’s cultural big-time. I’m about the most non-countercultural person in the world, right?

In other words, you choose your battles. I’m going to speak English. I’m going to dress basically like an American. I’m going to eat almost exactly the same stuff every pagan in America eats. I’m going to listen to public radio, NPR, which is what most upper-scale pagans in Minneapolis listen to. I can make a list a mile long of my conformities to American culture. Here I am calling for a radical counter-cultural life, why don’t I do the Amish thing? Why don’t I drive buggies and wear a black hat and have a long beard and just figure out every way I can to look as weird as I possibly can.

It’s because I choose my battles strategically as best I can. I’m going after a generation of martyrs. I don’t care what they’re wearing when they die, and I don’t care what song they sang before they died. I’m invited to go to Alive in Ohio next summer. It’s 40,000 teenagers. You’d call it a rock concert, a Christian rock concert. They want me, 55 year-old, thin-hair-on-the-top, wearing-a-tie, John Piper to speak to children who are all caught up in this music. So now should I do the separatist thing here and say, “Oh, no. That would encourage that.” I accept it. I’m going to go there. I’ll be center stage Saturday morning and talk to 20,000 kids about laying their lives down for Jesus. This is exactly my same approach to the charismatic thing. If I can get God-centeredness from the inside exploding with a full-orbed biblical theology, you know what? In due time, the peripheral things like forms of worship and forms of music will begin to change in their lives. And that’s the only way I’d want them to change anyway.

I have high respect for fundamentalism and think that probably it’s healthy that we have fundamentalism as it is in America. But one of the things I have a problem with is that as you try to clamp down on the secondary matters of conformity to the culture, like music forms or whatever, the constraints are so heavy from the outside that you run the risk of a lot of hypocrisy on the inside. Now I’m willing to risk hypocrisy. I think my whole last message was a risk of hypocrisy, because here I am calling you to be excited about Jesus and you may walk out and think, “Well, I guess I better look excited for John Piper. I guess I better really appear passionate because he says you’re supposed to be passionate.” So all I did was create a bunch of hypocrites.

I’m willing to take that risk because I think the essence is at stake. I don’t think the essence is at stake with regard to forms of music. A little bit is at stake. And yes, it probably is true that if you sing a certain kind of music and cultivate a certain kind of emotional dependence on the music, it will damage theology in the long run. I’m willing to say that. But if you say, “Now, how should we solve that? Should we work from the outside by creating constraints, by drawing lines at certain kinds of beats, or certain kinds of rhythm, or certain kinds of energy?” I mean, how in the world would you do that? It would be so artificial. Or do you work from the inside with a radical God-centered theology into more and more biblical faith and hope that the spiritual taste buds will make them feel awkward about certain sensualities and certain expressions of sound. That’s my strategy.

I gave an example earlier in the Q&A about a kind of holy ostracism. I believe separatism of a kind is a biblical doctrine, but I guess I draw my lines and my battlegrounds in different places. And frankly, if you ask, “What should be our attitude towards one another in that regard?” I am not going on a crusade against fundamentalism. I hope it didn’t sound like that. I went to Fuller Seminary, which is now anything but fundamental. But it wasn’t when I was there, and I came out of a fundamentalist home. My dad went to Bob Jones. He was on the board until the big crisis in 1957. So I grew up in home hearing with all those standards. They’re my standards, and I still keep a lot of them. I’ve been a teetotaler to this day. I’ve never puffed on a cigarette to this day. I feel uncomfortable in a movie theater to this day, and those kinds of things. That’s all in my blood.

But when I went to Fuller and heard men who were probably 10 years older than I was dumping on fundamentalism, it sounded very childish to me. It sounded adolescent to me. It sounded like kicking against the spur. They never have grown up yet. Come on, grow up. This is where you guys have come from. Show some respect, show some appreciation. Look for the common ground. Don’t make fun. Don’t use innuendo. Don’t always be doing the put down. Why? What good does it do? How are you going to win? What world are you going to impress? So I’m not out to say anything ugly about Bob Jones or whatever.

In fact, I’ll just give you a little teeny story here. The Bob Jones counterpart is Pillsbury College and Central Seminary in Minneapolis. Here I am, downtown. I’m sort of off limits. Folks like that put me off limits. And this church, I gather, is one of those too. And I’m not bent out of shape by that because you know what? Those students sneak over. And now Pastor McLaughlin calls me up on the phone and says, “Let’s get together.” Because I went to his church. I had a vacation day, and I went to his church. He saw me. He almost fell over. He couldn’t believe I would come to worship with them, and I was there to worship. I wasn’t there to snoop or anything.

I thought I might hear a good sermon for a change. I’ve been to so many liberal churches on vacation to see how they function. I want to hear something worthwhile. I thought I might hear it at a fundamental church. And I did. It was a great sermon on Acts 2. He called me on the phone and he said, “Can we get together?” He came over and brought one of his systematic theology teachers with him. He said, “Look, I just admit you’re having a big influence on our students. We like a lot of what you’re doing. Can we talk about a few of our differences?” I said, “Yes, yes. This is what ought to be happening.”

And that’s part of the fact that I think over the years, I haven’t been shooting at these guys. That’s probably enough. That’s enough. I have all kinds of stories to tell you, but I just want to give you a flavor there. Sorry if it didn’t get close enough on the exact question. I just don’t understand enough. We’d have to get down to texts, I think, to really make progress on that separation thing.

In your message, you made reference to what I think Wayne Grudem would call “the unconverted evangelical.” It’s in terms of someone who’s been presented with the gospel, but obviously they’re not embracing the full delight in the Lord. My question would be, either in your opinion or what you do at Bethlehem, do you do altar calls? How is that presented? If you could, speak to us as leaders. It’s sometimes hotly debated.

It’s so interestingly relevant, because I came down here and we had the sweetest two hours with my dad and my sister. Monday morning we had breakfast together. Beverly made grits and biscuits and eggs for this southerner who hasn’t eaten right for 20 years. And that was the question she asked me. She said, “I’ve always wondered, Johnny, you do invitations?” Because she was asking out of the context of her church. She goes to Presbyterian church in Charlotte, a good solid church, and they don’t. She grew up in a Southern Baptist church. Of course, she had invitations every Sunday and people joined the church just like that. Boom, there was an experience, a baptism, a letter, whatever. And you would just fill it out and everyone would all vote right there.

She wondered, “How do you do it?” And I said, “Well, I think that approach towards immediate admission into membership and the immediate acceptance of somebody’s statement of where they are spiritually produces a church with 600 in attendance and 1,500 on the rolls. And the 600 in attendance are half-carnal and probably not converted.” So I’m not interested in this system. I want a better system. Over the years, I’ve thought through this. I want people converted in my services, but I’m going to preach to the saints. I think you preach the same gospel to saints and sinners. It’s the same thing. You say, “Believe. Trust him. He’s great. He’s good. He’s worthy. Trust him.” Unbelievers can understand that, and believers need to hear that every Sunday. So here’s what we do. To join Bethlehem Baptist Church, you must go to a class called “Ask”. It’s five hours, either taught five Sundays in a row on Sunday morning, or two hours on Friday night and three hours on Saturday over and over and over again.

I’m constantly inviting people to these classes. To get there, you can go through a class called “Getting Acquainted with Bethlehem,” and learn all about our theology, about our ministries, about our mission and so on. That’s a 14-week series and it rolls over all the time. Every Sunday that’s being taught on Sunday morning. It covers youth ministries, music ministries, outreach ministries, social ministries, and whatever. Just go and find out more. So people come to church, they’ll be there a month, two months, a year, or three years sometimes. That’s terrible when that happens. But you can’t make people go away and you can’t make them join.

So they go through that, they find out enough, and finally God gets them. I’ll preach one tough sermon on membership and how they ought not to be audience participants. And then the “Ask” class fills up. They go through that and then they get interviewed by the elders. An elder and his wife or two elders meet with everybody who wants to join. They interview them, ask them about their personal experience with Christ, and they ask, “Do you have any problems with the affirmation of faith?” And if they say “we’re on” and the elders approve, then they sign the church covenant, not in blood, but almost. They just sign the church covenant, which commits them to uphold the doctrine and live a certain life. And then they stand in front of the church and say out loud, “I do” to the covenant when I read them the paragraphs. Then we take their picture and put it on the bulletin board and now they’re members. That’s the process for joining.

Now with regard to ends of services and seeing what God’s doing in the services, I do not have an invitation usually. I almost always do during missions week, but I don’t every Sunday. I can remember as a teenager growing up that every time it started, people started putting on their coats. They start putting on their coats. Here you are at one of those solemn moments in history, supposedly, and everybody is shoving around, putting on their coats, because it’s just worn out. So I don’t do that every Sunday. Here’s what we do, either I just pray after a moment of silence and dismiss with the benediction, or we sing a song, and then we have prayer teams. They’ve been trained. You’d call them counselors maybe. They get badges that say “prayer team,” and they’re trained to pray with people about their sickness, their depressions, their marriage, their job problems, and their lost condition, or whatever the problem is.

In other words, this is a very broad general opportunity. We have 30 minutes between our three services and then the last one goes forever, and they stand there. There’s a team there, and I stand here for 20 minutes after the service and I pray with people every Sunday. And I’m there for 45 minutes to an hour after the third service praying with people. They usually end before I do because a lot of people want to talk to me that don’t want to talk to them. So we are wide open. I just say, “Come on up after the service, anything at all. We’ll talk, we’ll pray. We’ll deal with what you’re dealing with.”

I’ll just give you a little example of how it happens. Last Sunday after the second service, Todd, one of our prayer team members, came back and said, “Yes, she got saved!” This was a woman who was a nominal Catholic who had been brought to church by a friend, and she had been witnessing to her for who knows how long. And she was in tears at the end and her friend said, “Would you like to go pray with one of the pastors on the prayer team?” She said, “Yes, I would.” So she came up, she prayed, she professed faith, and now she’s got the connection with the woman in our church. So that’s what we’re doing.

I’m not on a crusade against alter calls. I would never write a book like The Invitation System, by Iain Murray. I would never do that. I have bigger fish to fry than to take pot shots at the way Southern Baptists do invitations. But I do take the shots. I just wouldn’t write a whole book.

I’ve been reading The Swans Are Not Silent. I don’t remember you dealing with it much in The Hidden Smile of God about Christian Hedonism and great Christian saints who’ve struggled their whole life with depression.

William Cowper is one of them. I have no single standard of intensity or consistency or exuberance or personality for what a passion for Jesus should look like. You are wired in this room so differently. Your personalities are all over the map. I served in Scandinavia where Arnie, who’s probably 65 now, watched his son kick the field goal in a championship game that set a record for the state from 52 yards out in college. Everybody went wild. He just clapped a few times. He told me that one time after a sermon when I was pleading with people to be a little more emotionally engaged. He just looked at me and he said, “Pastor John, you have to understand something. When my son kicked the field goal that set the state record that holds to this day, I just clapped a little bit. That’s as enthusiastic as I will ever get.”

I love Arnie to death, and I love his son. His son’s pretty much like him. And I guess it’s because his dad was like that too. Those were hard times, hard times. I’ve learned a lot from the old folks in our church who are not exuberant. They had hard times. When they sang in worship, it wasn’t these upbeat, happy songs. It was, “We’re barely making it. Is there a sovereign God who can get us through one more week of pain?” And their whole ethos was one of a more deep-rooted, settled sense that God is good and God will get us through. The upbeat songs are bred in part by how good things are for us in America these days. You sort of have the leisure to turn a worship service into a celebratory moment. Well, for example, the night after the calamity, I said to Chuck, our worship leader, “You have to get this right tonight, Chuck. You have to get this right. We will not sing upbeat songs. There will be no drums tonight.” We have drums almost every Sunday. I said, “We are not going to do that tonight. We are weeping tonight.” There’s a kind of music and a kind of demeanor.

Well, it was much more like that, I think, consistently for them. So you have people who grew up in homes, who grew up in eras, where the expressions of emotion are so different. And so now back to the depression question. I’m not about to look out on my church and pass judgment, okay? I’m not going to say, “You’re without emotion and you’re without emotion and you’re without emotion.” I’m married to a non-emotional person. If you put females and males on a scale and list all the things, you know what? In my family, I’m the female and she’s the male. So I get Noël in my mind when I’m criticizing people. This counts for my wife and I know my wife. I know what she’d lay her life down for, and I know what she cannot do in worship and so on.

That’s the first kind of outward thing. With regard to real-life clinical depression, I think there are ambiguities there that nobody knows. There are physical components, family components, circumstantial components, emotional components, spiritual components, demonic components. It takes an incredibly insightful community of faith around a person to help them sort that through, live it through, fight it through, and get as much out of it as they can. And some people like William Cowper never rise very high, and I don’t think we should despair. John Newton never gave up on William Cowper. William Cowper sat in his house for 17 years or something like that. He never went to church, though he was about 300 yards from the church. John Newton visited him every day, and loved him to Jesus. He tried to commit suicide three times and just kept loving him. He never assumed the guy was reprobate.

So I just think we ought to give people the benefit of the doubt if they’re really struggling with that kind of thing. I had one man in my church for eight years in depression. He was kind of depressed that if this was the bathroom door, he would just stand in front of it. He was like a zombie for eight years. He would follow her around everywhere. She’d walk into the bathroom, and he’d walk up to the bathroom door and just stand there. When she came out, he’d follow this way. That was for eight years. He’d come to sit in the church, and he was healed. He came out of it by memorizing Scripture. Now he tried to memorize Scripture before. It was just God’s time. That’s all I could say. It was just God’s time. He’d been through every possible clinical thing. He’d been through every possible medication. He’d been through everything. It just wasn’t the time. I don’t know. Maybe his body changed, maybe his wife’s attitude changed, maybe he started memorizing the right verses, who knows? He just got well.

So I don’t think anybody in those eight years should have said, “Bob is lost. Bob can’t get any victory here, so Bob is lost.” There are reasons why we have our down seasons.