My purpose tonight is to talk about prayer, but in the broader sense I see tonight and tomorrow morning as an effort to translate this morning into good news. Because I know that a message like this morning’s lands on people who haven’t thought about it as much as they might have as a strange thing — the God-centeredness of God. If you’ll give me tonight and tomorrow and especially tomorrow night, I think you will be able to come away saying, “That’s some of the best news I have ever heard, that strange thing I heard this morning. That’s really good news.”

The reason I didn’t include Wednesday morning is because in a sense, this morning, tonight, tomorrow morning, and tomorrow night I will try to persuade you that it’s good enough news to die for, which is what I want to talk about on Wednesday morning. Wednesday morning will be a hard word, and I believe a very, very crucial word for world evangelization.

In my head, that’s my plan and it means a lot to me that you’re here tonight and I thank you for coming. Thank you that you’re willing to give me another chance to try to make plain some things that are very precious to me, and that the Lord has, I believe, worked into my head and heart over the years since I left Wheaton in 1968.

Beware of Serving God

As you might imagine, I walk around the campus here and have all kinds of queasy emotions. This is my 30th reunion. I can’t ever come because I’m a pastor and don’t leave on the weekends, but it means a lot to me to be back at times like this. Thank you for making it good.

I think the title that I gave tonight was something like How Not to Serve God in Going and Sending. Let me try to set a stage for why that title is the way it is. Why would I say, “How not to serve God . . .” Acts 17:25 has proved to be a very liberating, very shocking verse in my life. It says:

[God] is not served by human hands, as though he needed anything, since he himself gives to all mankind life and breath and everything.

God is not served by human hands, so you must be very careful not to serve God. That’s where the title came from. Beware of serving God.

Now that, of course, is surprising because the apostle Paul identifies himself over and over again as a servant and a slave of God, and we know that it has a great and esteemed history in the church and it has warrant in the New Testament. So a verse like that is shocking, it’s troubling. What am I to do then? God is not served by human hands as though he needed anything. I hope you can hear in that little phrase “as though he needed anything” a lot flowing out of this morning’s message. Because if you understood this morning, what you will not only feel is a kind of weight that this God is huge and he’s awesomely taken up with his own glory, but also that he is totally self-sufficient and does not need us, so that we are free from having to serve him as though he needed anything.

In other words, just a slight shift will turn this morning’s heavy word into liberty. God is not served. This kind of God that we talked about this morning will not be worked for. The gospel is not a “help wanted sign”; it is a “help available” sign. So when you begin to just shift your thoughts around a little bit, you begin to say, “Oh, that really could be good news. That kind of God could be good news.” And a verse like this, I think, comes really close to saying it is really good news.

The Service of the Son of Man

Let me give you another passage that’s in the same direction. Mark 10:45 says:

The Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life a ransom for many.

So don’t you dare contradict the point of the incarnation by serving Jesus. The Son of Man came not to be served. It’s amazing isn’t it, that there are these warnings in the New Testament lest we begin to serve him in a way that would somehow dishonor him or compromise his commitment to work for us?

He’s saying, “I’m coming into this world not to get you to work for me. I’m coming into this world because you are paralyzed and sick and dead so that I can work for you, and save you, and awaken you, and give you life, and give you strength, and give you guidance, and give you joy. That’s why I’m coming. So don’t work for me. Let me work for you.”

The Debtor’s Ethic

There is an ethic in the world that I don’t think understands how to serve Jesus. It doesn’t understand these warnings. There are different names for it. I’ve called it the debtor’s ethic in the book Future Grace. I like to call it the Tonto ethic. Does anybody know who Tonto is? Have you ever heard of Tonto from Lone Ranger? “Hi-ho, Silver, away!” This really dates me, I know. I was about 10 when I watched these programs on TV.

He would ride up on the hill, and Silver the white horse would go up on his back legs, and he would say, “Hi-ho, Silver, away!” And there were the silver bullets and ah, it was a great show. And Tonto was this Indian sidekick. They could never do this today. It was totally politically incorrect the way they had Tonto acting. But Tonto was a really admirable character.

However, there was only one show that showed Tonto and Lone Ranger’s relationship. There were probably 10 years that this thing went on. I don’t know how long the show lasted, but Tonto was Lone Ranger’s sidekick, and he got him out of scrapes over and over and over again. How did Tonto get attached to the Lone Ranger? There was only one show where that flashback was given. In Indian culture, if a man saved your life you were bound to that person to keep on doing that forever, evidently. So it showed this scrape, and he got him out of it, and then he just attached himself to the Lone Ranger and that was the motif of the show for the rest of my years as a kid. And Tonto would get him out of scrapes.

So the mentality of Tonto was that the Lone Ranger got him out of a scrape, and then he was bound to serve the Lone Ranger. So he wanted to spend the rest of his life paying back the Lone Ranger. I call it the Tonto ethic because that’s the way a lot of people relate to God. God saved you, right? He saved you at a tremendous price to himself and his Son. Now, how do you live for him? Well, you spend the rest of your life trying to pay him back. Maybe you have heard the song, “He gave his life for me, what have I given for him?” And there’s this subtle, non-articulated sense that I’m in debt and I have to work like I’m paying off debt. So obedience is like mortgage payments on this debt I owe to God.

Arguments Against the Debtor’s Ethics

That’s what these texts are meant to warn us about. That’s not a good way to relate to God, and I want to give you several reasons why you shouldn’t get involved in the debtor’s ethic, or the Tonto ethic, and spend your life doing missions (like going into Kazakhstan) to pay him back. There are several reasons. Here’s number one. This is kind of a theological reason that you need to ponder.

1. The Debtor’s Ethic Is Impossible

It’s impossible because every act of obedience you perform thinking to make up some of the debt you owe only puts you deeper in debt, if you believe in grace that enables obedience. Deep theological things are going on here. If you believe, of course, that it doesn’t take sovereign grace to work obedience in your life, but rather that you, by your own, autonomous, free, sovereign will — out of your creative resources — produce obedience and offer them up to God and he receives them as a gift, then you might make up some of the debt.

But if you believe 2 Corinthians 9:8, then it will be different. It says:

God is able to make all grace abound to you, so that having all sufficiency in all things at all times, you may abound in every good work.

That’s a long sentence. Let me collapse it down so that you get it. God is able to make all grace abound to you, so that you will be able to perform every good work he has for you. Grace enables obedience. So, if you conceive of obedience as trying to make up your debt to grace, it doesn’t work. You go deeper in debt with every act of obedience. Isn’t that wonderful? God is not into settling debts with you by your obedience. Grace pays debt; it doesn’t create more debts. The cross is given not to make you a debtor. You’re already a debtor. Sin is debt.

Forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors.

You’re in debt to God because of sin. Grace comes to pay debt, and every act of obedience you perform in response to grace and by the power of grace, puts you further in debt, if you think of it the other way. So my first reason for why you should not do the Tonto ethic thing, or the debtor’s ethic, is that it’s impossible.

2. Grace Would No Longer Be Grace

If it were possible, grace would no longer be grace; grace would be a business transaction. God gives you this, you now pay back this, and if you can succeed at paying back, then you would say, “Okay, the accounts are settled. I gave this, you gave that. Even Steven.” That’s not grace anymore. So if you want to nullify grace, you can go ahead and do the Tonto ethic thing, and do the debtor’s ethic, and try to go and be a missionary, or be a sender, or be a sacrificial urban worker or something, in order to pay God back for all the good things he’s done for you. You can try to do that, but all you will wind up doing is nullifying grace, and making yourself colossally miserable.

3. The Debtor’s Ethic Minimizes Future Grace

This is the third reason, which prepares us for finding another way instead of the debtor’s ethic, which I’m moving toward: it minimizes future grace while focusing on past grace. Now, past grace are all the good things God has done for you up to this moment in your life, especially his Son’s death on the cross. That was the greatest point of past grace.

So people tend to, when they work out of the Tonto ethic, have a backward-oriented look to what God has done. They say, “He died for me, he rose for me, he reigns for me, and he has done so many good things for me.” Then they turn around, and the way it’s usually articulated so that it doesn’t sound as bad is that out of gratitude they live their life. There’s a key word that makes it sound good: “out of gratitude”. They will now do this on the basis of that grace. So you could call it the gratitude ethic.

I used to call it the gratitude ethic and so many people got upset at me because gratitude is a good thing in the Bible. So I quit talking about the gratitude ethic. But the word gratitude is usually put on it, subtly and unintentionally, I think. The number one dominant motif of obedience in evangelicalism is gratitude. People say, “Obey out of gratitude,” and, “Do such and such out of gratitude.”

Now, I say that ethic minimizes future grace. Future grace is the grace that begins right now and continues coming to me forever. About eight seconds of it has now become past grace. My heart kept beating, my brain was still working. Nobody has dropped dead in this room. My lungs are breathing. That’s all grace. Isn’t that all grace that you’re alive right now?

I’m strange in these ways. Sometimes I’ll lie in bed at night and all put my hand on my pulse, and I’ll look at the clock and I’ll take my pulse, and it hits me sometimes with an overwhelming force that I don’t have anything to do with making that thing beat. Nothing.

It could just stop. I don’t start it. I don’t stop it. That’s grace. So if I make it to the end of this message, it will be grace. It will be future grace. Future grace is constantly cascading over the present into the past as we move into the future. So you can look back with gratitude, and you must have gratitude for all the grace that’s gathering in this great pool in the past that you can look back on with memory. I assume that’s what the last line of that song meant. It said, “Look at our lives.” I thought, I’d rather not do that. I want to look at God’s life, but always wanting to put the best spin on music lyrics, I say, “Okay, ‘look at our lives’ must mean, ‘Look at the grace of God in this room.’”

I would guess that most of you are believers here. That’s a miracle. Look at that. Now future grace is out there, and the promises of God are all about it. He is able to provide you with every grace and abundance that you may have enough of everything and do every good work. That’s out there, and what we’re supposed to do is believe it, and in the strength of that future grace step into those acts of obedience. It will not be looking backward and saying, “Thank you for that grace,” while trying to do future acts of obedience in the power of past grace. You can’t run your car tomorrow on gratitude for yesterday’s gas.

You have to have more grace for more obedience. And if you try to do your obedience, whether it’s missions or anything, on yesterday’s grace, you nullify grace, you belittle future grace, you nullify the promises of God, which are all there to empower you and free you to step out onto that wonderful grace and live in it.

Living by Faith in Future Grace

So for those three reasons, I urge you not to do the debtor’s ethic or the Tonto ethic. So what’s the alternative? This has all been a kind of warning. Watch out how you serve God. Don’t serve him as though He needed anything. Don’t serve the Son of Man because he came to serve you. Don’t get into the Tonto ethic by which you look back on how much he did serve you and then leave that in the past and try to serve him and obey him and pay off your debt to him in the future by obedience and sacrifice. Don’t do any of that. That’s the negative. So let me try to shift gears now and put an alternative in its place, and it all has to do with prayer.

How do you serve God? How do you move into the future with acts of obedience and service in such a way that he gets the glory, you get the enablement, the liberty, the freedom, the joy, and the power. The answer is that it is by faith in future grace mediated to you through prayer. Prayer becomes the issue here. I’m going to give you a few key texts.

Psalm 50:15 says:

Call upon me in the day of trouble;
     I will deliver you, and you shall glorify me.

Now, to me, that sums up what prayer is all about and how it relates to this morning’s message. He says, “Call upon me in the day of trouble; I will deliver you, and you, because of that deliverance, will glorify me.” So you get the deliverance, and he gets the glory; you get the help, and he gets the praise; you get the joy, and he gets the credit. Now to me that is awesomely good news.

Our Inadequacy, His Sufficiency

The only people that don’t hear it as good news, are people who have this deep bondage to wanting the credit, the glory. They want to be able to say, “I did it. It is my will. It was my resources. It was my power. And I want the praise and I want the glory and I want the credit.” If that’s the way your heart still functions, a verse like this will not sound very good. It will sound threatening. “Call upon me,” God says, “in the day of trouble; I will deliver you and you will glorify me.”

Do you know why that just does not sound like good news? It means I’m weak. I’m in trouble. All of my life I’m in trouble. Right now, you’re in trouble. You’re leaving books unread and papers unwritten to be here. There’s weight upon you. Things are rotten at home. Your dad and mom are divorced, or you just noticed how bad it is when you went home, or your sister or your brother flipped out on drugs, or your aunt is leaving her husband. There’s just so much bad news in the world.

We’re in trouble all the time. Dr. Ross Anderson graduated with me in 1968 and came down here to pray with me, and we were talking in the car on the way over here tonight, how good life is for us 52-year-olds right now. We’ve both walked through some deep waters in our past, but at this particular season things are so sweet in our families. Our kids are walking with the Lord and our marriages are sweet, our churches are healed, and our bodies are basically healthy. And we were just saying, “Why so much goodness all at once?”

And yet I know that if I were to really probe Ross and his wider circle of love, there would be pain there and right here where you are. So when I quote this verse, “Call upon me in the day of trouble,” I hope you don’t have in mind, “Well, one day I might get into trouble. One day I might do missions and there might be a mob, and then I’ll use that verse.”

Use that verse every day. Because if you don’t realize you’re in trouble, you’re blind. You don’t know Satan well enough, you get to know him a little bit because he’s never on vacation and his minions are everywhere. And your own flesh is not totally crucified, and there are pitfalls everywhere. Temptations are lurking on all sides and there is a need to cry to the Lord. We are very weak, we are very helpless, and God is awesomely sufficient for these things. So Psalm 50:15 is an answer to the question, “How do you serve God so that God gets the glory?” One piece of the answer is, you call upon God for help, and you rest in the help that he promises. “I will deliver you, and in that you’ll glorify me.” You get the help and he gets the glory. Prayer is meant to be very good news. Don’t wear prayer as a ball and chain around your neck.

Joy for Us, Glory for God

Let me put two verses together for you. John 16:24 says:

Until now you have asked nothing in my name. Ask, and you will receive, that your joy may be full.

So here’s Jesus telling you the point of prayer is joy. Don’t miss that. The point of prayer is your joy. Then compare that with John 14:13, which says:

Whatever you ask in my name, this I will do, that the Father may be glorified in the Son.

So the point of prayer is the glory of God. We’re getting close to the main point of this series of messages. The main point of prayer is joy for you, and the main point of prayer is glory for God. If you get that, then you don’t need to come back tomorrow. You don’t need to. The glory of God and the joy of his people are pursued in the heart of God as the same thing. They’re not at odds. Or I like to say it this way, and I’ll say it probably every message from here on out: God is most glorified in you when you are most satisfied in him.

And prayer is the place where those two things meet. God is being glorified and you are being satisfied. That meets in a moment of prayer, where you say, “I’m weak. I’m empty. I’m helpless. I’m hurting. I’m inadequate. I’m a nobody at Wheaton College. Everybody seems smarter than I am. Everybody seems to be connected. Everybody has relationships. Everybody seems to know what they’re going to do. And I am so out of it. Would you help me? Would you be my friend? Would you be my sufficiency? Would you be my strength? Would you be my treasure? Would you be my all in all?” He will do that for you. He will be that for you.

Strong Support for the Weak

Second Chronicles 16:9 says:

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.

Is that your view of God, that God is so self-sufficient, so full, so all-defining, so free from needs, so free from defect, so free from any kind of dependence on us that his whole occupation is to move through the world looking for people to work for? He is thinking, “Where is somebody weak enough, needy enough, dependent enough, trusting enough, and broken enough that I can move in there and show off my power?” I say it only in times and places where it will be heard with sympathy: God is a show-off.

Did you ever ask why it took 10 plagues to get out of Egypt? We are told why in Exodus 14:4. He meant to get glory over Pharaoh. And one wasn’t enough. God loves to show off his glory, and his glory is always shown off in helping power for those who wait for him.

Here’s another verse. Isaiah 64:4 says:

From of old no one has heard
     or perceived by the ear,
no eye has seen a God besides you,
     who acts for those who wait for him.

What that means, when you stop and think about it, is that there are no other gods like him. It says, “No eye has seen a God besides you, who acts for those who wait for him.” In other words, all the other gods of all the other religions insist that you work for them. And only in Christianity does a God say, “You dare not work for me. I will work for you.” And prayer is the means by which we renounce self-reliance, and call upon him to work for us and rest in him to be the worker.

The God Who Carries Us

I want to get this picture in your head. In Isaiah 46:1–4 there’s a picture where God is contrasted with the Babylonian gods, Bel and Nebo. Have you ever heard of these gods, Bel and Nebo? It says:

Bel bows down; Nebo stoops;
     their idols are on beasts and livestock;
these things you carry are borne
     as burdens on weary beasts.
They stoop; they bow down together;
     they cannot save the burden,
     but themselves go into captivity.

Listen to me, O house of Jacob,
     all the remnant of the house of Israel,
who have been borne by me from before your birth,
     carried from the womb;
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.

Now what’s the point here? Imagine I’m giving you a little essay test in a Bible class on the difference between Yahweh and Bel and Nebo. What would the answer be? Give me a half a page on the difference. And the answer would be that Bel and Nebo, in their idol form, were being carried on these carts. They were being carried, and the prophet saw Bel and Nebo being carried on carts, and he said, “Some gods! They have to be carried by human work, or the work of an ox. Speak Lord, and identify your difference over Bel and Nebo.” And God says, “I do all the carrying. I do all the bearing. I do the work.”

Well how does that feel? What’s that look like? I mean, that’s nice language, but you have to leave here and go do some homework later probably. Is God going to do it for you? Well, he works for those who wait for him, and you’re here because of some kind of priority structure in your life. I’m putting the best reading on you being here. Maybe you just like the music for all I know. But it might be that you are saying in your heart, “I’m weak, I’m needy, and I think there might be some truth here tonight that will come into me from you, and by your Spirit be used to sustain, help, carry, enable, and empower me to get through another day.” That’s a really good motive for being here, and it’s true. Does God conceive of service like that? I said at the beginning, don’t serve God.

Serving in the Strength He Supplies

Here are some key verses. I’m almost done. These are key verses to help you see service another way than the debtor’s ethic, or the Tonto ethic. First Peter 4:11 comes back to me as the ministry philosophy of my life, more than any other verse I suppose. It says:

[Let him who serves] serve by the strength that God supplies — in order that in everything God may be glorified through Jesus Christ. To him belong glory and dominion forever and ever.

Now that moves from such a practical thing to such a glorious ending. You’re going to serve tonight. I hope you will, anyway. You’re going to do those lessons in a serving way. But this text says it’s possible to leave this place in 45 minutes, or whenever the worship band is done, and go home and do it like this. It says, “Let him who does homework, do it in the strength that God supplies, so that in the homework God gets the glory through Jesus.”

Wouldn’t you love to discover how you do that? I’m still discovering it. It’s the miracle of the Christian life. Do your hospital visitation in the strength that God supplies, so that in everything God gets the glory by that visit. Do your preaching tonight, right now, and tomorrow morning, in the strength that God supplies, so that in everything God gets the glory. Date in such a way that God does the dating and gets the glory. That will change the way you conceive of dating, which will guard you from a lot of things.

Not I, But the Grace of God with me

Here’s another one. First Corinthians 15:10 says:

But by the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace toward me was not in vain. On the contrary, I worked harder than any of them, though it was not I, but the grace of God that is with me.

Now there’s the paradigm. You are going to go home and do it tonight. You’re going to do the reading and do the writing. You’re going to do the thinking. You’re going to do it. But if you do it right, when you’re done, you’re going to be able, with integrity, to say, “It was not I, but the grace of God that was with me.”

Make that a lifelong discovery path for yourself. How do I discover how to do everything I do, whether sending or going, whether homework or employment — maybe you’re a night watchman and you have to stay up all night tonight — in the strength that God supplies?

Here’s one last verse on this. Philippians 2:12–13 says:

Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who works in you, both to will and to work for his good pleasure.

So you are doing the homework, or you will choose to go as a missionary or send, because God is at work in you to will and to do his good pleasure. So yes, there’s you doing it; but no, it’s not you. It’s the grace of God that is with you.

The Practice of Living by Faith

Let me close by giving you the most practical thing I have found in moving toward this kind of non-Tonto ethic way of living and depending on grace and seeking by prayer to get the resources to live like that. I call it APTAT, and it’s an acronym for these five things. When you face a challenge, whether it’s a test in a class, or a hard confrontation with somebody that needs a rebuke, or a talk with a missionary representative here about the possibility of laying your life out for the cause of Christ in that way, or it’s some hard relationship. Whatever it is, when you face something like that, what steps do you take so that you are not relying upon yourself, but relying upon sovereign grace, so that when you’re done you can say, “I did it in the strength that God supplied so that God gets the glory”? What can you do? You can use APTAT.

A — Admit

Admit that without God, you can do nothing. In John 15:5, Christ said:

Without me, you can do nothing.

The heart is just a symbol of everything else. My heart is beating and I have nothing to do with it. You can’t do anything of any lasting value apart from Christ. Just admit that. As you face this test, say, “I can’t do this without you. I can’t do the test. I can’t do the relationship. I can’t do the missions thing. I can’t do it.”

P — Pray

Pray and call upon God for help. Call upon him. Ask him for help. Psalm 50:15 says:

Call upon me in the day of trouble;
     I will deliver you, and you shall glorify me.

He is saying, “I’ll help you. I’ll come. I won’t leave you alone. I’ll never leave you. I’ll never forsake you.” You can constantly say, “The Lord is my helper, whom shall I fear?” So P is for pray.

T — Trust

Trust a particular promise. Now to do this, you need to store up promises in your heart. There are hundreds of promises in the Bible tailor-made for your life. I always walk through this APTAT before I preach. I sit there, and as the last song is being sung, or a prayer is being prayed, or an introduction is being given, I’m walking through this. I’m saying, “A, I can’t do it. P, God help me. T . . .”

Now the T changes all the time because of what I’ve been reading in my devotions in the morning or the day before. I try to take it right off the front burner of my communion with the Lord, and two days ago it came from the Psalms. I’m reading through the Psalms, and Psalm 31:19 has been so good. It says:

Oh, how abundant is your goodness,
     which you have stored up for those who fear you
and worked for those who take refuge in you . . .

Now, I take that as a promise. I hear God saying, “John Piper, I have goodness stored up for you that is absolutely staggering in its size if you will fear me and take refuge in me.” I love those two qualifications: fear and refuge. Usually we run away from things we fear, not into them. But that verse says, “Fear me and take refuge in me.” The safest place, in fact, the only safe place from the fearful wrath of God is in God. So take refuge in him if you fear him, and it will be evidence of your fear. And your fears will be relieved.

Twas grace that taught my heart to fear, And grace my fears relieved.

Because I was in two separate places. When Grace taught my heart to fear, I was running from him, and when my fears were relieved by grace, I turned to him and ran into him and found relief in the cover of his hurricane. There’s no safer place in a hurricane than in the eye of the storm. That’s another sermon that’s off the track.

The point there was to illustrate trust in promises. And the promise for me for the last two days has repeatedly been, “John Piper, I’m God talking to you here. I have incredible goodness stored up for you. I’ve told you about it in Psalm 31:19, so fear me and take refuge in me.”

A — Act

This says you have to do it. You have to read the books tonight. You have to write the papers. I have to preach. I have to go home and get ready for tomorrow morning. That’s something to “do”. It’s like Paul saying, “Work out your salvation with fear and trembling” (Philippians 2:12). So you act, having done those three.

T — Thank

And when you have acted, like I will be done in a moment, and you go sit down and we go and worship, what do you think the last T is? Thank. You’re going to say, “Thank you, Jesus, for helping me. Thank you for this day. Thank you for the energy. Thank you for the insight. Thank you for the grace. Thank you for the promises.”