What’s left to do is to focus more specifically on the word, so I’m going to reverse the order of the outline a little bit. I think I have prayer before the word. I’m going to turn it around. We’ll focus on the role of the word more specifically in communion with God and the role of prayer more specifically. So it’s really more of the same, only getting down to brass tacks or particular texts and then we’ll shift over to fasting toward the latter part.

The Story of John Paton

I was thinking as I thought about this story from these illustrations from Paton. I know we have missionaries in the room, we have pastors in the room, and we have aspiring pastors in the room. I presume most of you will be God-centered lay people who care about bringing Christ and God to bear on your vocation, in your family, and in your leisure, but I really do want to be a seedbed for missions in Bethlehem and so I don’t mind making lay people uncomfortable in seeming to elevate missions and putting the rest of us in lower category. If it sounds like that, tough, because I’m willing to take that risk in order to be a sending church and a mobilizing church.

Jesus said, “Pray the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers.” If that makes the people who don’t get sent out feel second class, so be it. Let’s live happily as second class citizens if we’re not on a mission field, if that’s what it is. I doubt that that’s the right conclusion to draw, but if you tend to draw it, draw it and live with it. Humble yourself and be glad that there are first-class, frontline, lay-down-your-life, leave-America kinds of people in the world. It’s okay. Don’t whine about being here.

So I do hope that what happens in these sessions is that people will learn how to know God so intimately and commune with him so personally and feed themselves so consistently and pray back to God so effectually that when they’re cut off from this church, which feels life-giving to a lot of people on Sunday morning, they survive and they thrive because God’s there. Paton did that. Paton lived about 130 years ago and I think he died in 1907. But he flourished earlier than that. He lived to be an old man.

He went to what today is Vanuatu, called the New Hebrides back in those days. That’s about as far away as you can get though not quite, especially if you can go to Australia and India. Vanuatu in the South Seas is a long way away and, of course, he went by boat and didn’t come back for years. There wasn’t any easy flight home. So he’s one of those types that didn’t have the choice. He gets there and within two years his wife dies. He has been married for a year, and she had just had a baby and then he held the baby while the baby died, because what chance is there for the baby, right? There was no mommy’s breast to feed. He lived in the malaria infested part of this island called Tanna and he buried her with his bare hands on earth and he stood there alone. He was the only Christian. He was the only white man on the island and he buried his wife.

He said, “I would have gone insane had it not been for the promises of Jesus.” So something had happened to him. He served for 10 years in Glasgow as a city missionary, learned how to love people, learned how to lay down his life for city folks at home, and then God called him. He heard the missionary challenge waved in that little Scottish Reformed denomination and nobody was volunteering and tears were streaming down his face and he said, “I can’t believe nobody’s volunteering. I’ve worn out my life here in Glasgow for these poor people.” And he raised hundreds of them to come to these Bible studies. It was easy compared to the other and he thought, “Somebody has to go,” and nobody volunteered. So he just stepped up and said, “I’ll go.”

The Key to the Church’s Longevity

So they interviewed him and he got married. A year later, he was gone. And a year after that, his wife died. Maybe it was even less than a year, I can’t quite remember. And then his son died. But he continued on, he married again and he served in the islands there until he was, I think, 72. Today 80 percent of the people in Vanuatu are Presbyterian. Now there’s a lot of nominalism, just like there is in a lot of other mission fields that have been around long enough to grow up and get old and die.

I went to Cameroon thinking that Wycliffe Bible Translators was a frontline missionary organization. I’m going to go there again in April to beef up the spirits, hopefully, of the Wycliffe folks there. Do you know what Wycliffe is in Cameroon? It’s a church renewal movement. The church has been there a hundred years, grown up, flourished, spread, and died. Now that’s a little bit of overstatement, but I talked to Gary Stewart about the spiritual condition of the Cameroon Baptist Convention, and you’ll find out it’s not in a good place. We usually think of Third World churches, they’re the cutting edge churches. They’re just signs and wonders and great things are happening and it’s not true. There’s a lot of Third World churches that are old enough to have gotten tired of Jesus, just like we do.

So I want to give you the key, to show you the key to this man’s longevity. These are just some quotes from his autobiography. I commend it to you. We usually have it in the bookstore. He says:

Without that abiding consciousness of the presence and power of my dear Lord and Savior, nothing else in all the world would have preserved me from losing my reason and perishing miserably.

He’s just been through a great crisis here and notice what he focuses on — “the abiding consciousness of the presence and power of my dear Lord and Savior Jesus.” Presence, power, abiding consciousness. That’s what this seminar is supposed to be about. He also says:

His words, “Lo, I am with you alway even to the end of the world,” became to me so real that it would not have startled me to behold him as Stephen did, gazing down upon the scene. I felt his supporting power. It is the sober truth and it comes back to me sweetly after 20 years that I had my nearest and dearest glimpses of the face and smiles of my blessed Lord in those dread moments when musket, club, or spear was being leveled at my life. O the bliss of living and enduring as seeing him who is invisible.

I put in a footnote here. When it says, “Muskets and clubs and spears” were being leveled at his life, the muskets had been given to these native folk by very evil white traders who got them into all kinds of trouble and made the missionary life very hard. But they were trying to get rich off these folks. He said:

My constant custom was in order to prevent war, to run right in between the contending parties. My faith enabled me to grasp and realize the promise, “Lo, I am with you always.” In Jesus, I felt invulnerable and immortal, so long as I was doing his work. And I can truly say that these were the moments when I felt my Savior to be most truly and sensibly present, inspiring and empowering me.

He was a crazy man at times. You read stories of what he did in putting himself between two warring divisions, and it is amazing. Here’s one more quote. The situation here is that after about four years there, he’s being driven off the island and it’s not easy to know when to flee and when to stay. Our missionaries are facing this more and more these days. Paul did both. Sometimes he fled. He ran out of Thessalonica and headed off down the boat. When he was in Damascus, they let him out through the wall and down in a basket and he escaped. Other times, he walks right into a mob and they have to grab him and pull him away and say, “Paul, this is crazy, don’t do this.”

So how do you decide when to stay in a crisis where your life is in jeopardy and when to go? There’s no rule about them. I don’t have any rule, as if you say, “Now I’ve got three little points here, do these three points get fulfilled? Then I’ll stay.” There’s just a sense, I guess, for some people, this is the time to risk your life, and there is another time to say, “This is not the time to risk your life to that degree.” So I think we need to be very patient with people who stay and risk their lives and their children’s lives and not criticize them. That’s very Biblical. And be patient and understanding with those who don’t, because there’s a time for that.

An Exhortation for Unshakable Comfort

Here he is now. He’s being driven off the island. He’s been taken by night by a chief who promises to get him safely through the warring factions to a port where the boat is to show up in a day or two. And he doesn’t know whether he can trust this chief or not, and the chief says to hide in a tree. Who knows, maybe they’re setting it up just to burn the tree and sacrifice him or whatever. He has no choice. Here he is now. He’s in this tree:

Being entirely at the mercy of such doubtful and vacillating friends, I, though perplexed, felt it best to obey. I climbed into the tree and was left there alone in the bush. The hours I spent there live all before me, as if it were yesterday (it’s probably about 20 years later). I heard the frequent discharging of muskets and the yells of the savages, yet I sat there among the branches, as safe in the arms of Jesus. Never in all my sorrows did my Lord draw nearer to me and speak more soothingly in my soul than when the moonlight flickered among these chestnut leaves and the night air played on my throbbing brow, as I told all my heart to Jesus. Alone, yet not alone.

If it be to the glory of my God, I will not grudge to spend many nights alone in such a tree, to feel again my Savior’s spiritual presence, to enjoy his consoling fellowship. If thus thrown back upon your own soul, all alone in the midnight in the bush, in the very embrace of death itself, have you a friend that will not fail you then?

He turns it out to an exhortation to us in his own autobiography. He is saying, “When you are thrown back upon your own soul, alone, all alone in the midnight, in the bush, in the very embrace of death itself, have you a friend that will not fail you then?” Everybody should ask that question right now. Do you know him that way or do you lean on Sunday morning so heavily, and lean on small groups so heavily? It’s not wrong. We are called to exhort one another every day, as long as it’s called today. Small groups are right. Worship on Sunday morning is right. Families are right, but they are not God. God is God and he is to be your personal intimate friend, such that when all church is stripped away, all family is stripped away, and your small group is stripped away, you remain with him. This is going to happen to most of you, even though you don’t become a missionary.

Do you know where it’s going to happen? It will happen in the hospital room with tubes coming out of your nose at 3:00 a.m. and nobody is there anymore, and you wonder if you’re choking to death. That’s when it’s going to happen. It’ll happen to everybody in this room. You’re going to be absolutely alone, on the brink of death. For most, it’ll probably be in the hospital or at home in those last hours and it won’t be pretty. Death is seldom pretty and all of the satanic forces will rise against you to cause you to doubt the goodness of God at that moment. So life right now, it feels very much to me at 55, is preparing for that hour. I want to make good of it. I want to die well. I don’t want to make a shipwreck. I don’t want to bring reproach upon the Lord.

It’s relatively easy to be a Christian in a moment like this. The sun is shining. Everybody is sitting there and we have the word of God in front of us. There’s relative health in our bodies. We can see and we can hear. There’s food and juice and coffee and, oh my, this is easy. But the hour is coming when you’ll be facing some crisis, and I just ask you with John Paton, do you have a friend that will not fail you then? Get a friend. He’s there. He says:

Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light (Matthew 11:28–30).

He says, “I’ll never leave you. I’ll never forsake you. I will be with you to the end of the age.” That’s my motive and goal in this class.

Truth and Meditation

I want to turn now, a little different, I think, from the order you have in that little teeny outline at the end of this syllabus to talk about Biblical truth and meditation on the Bible and 10 reasons to do it. These are just bullets, I’m going to go through them fairly quickly, but basically I want to underline something that came out last night; namely, that the presence of God is a mediated presence and the primary material of the mediation is the word, not a tree, not crystals, not a glass ball, not a séance, not a moment of wordless prayer, not nature. These things are all around us today. Almost everybody is pursuing God in some way today and they’re pursuing him through all kinds of means other than his revealed word in history and Jesus and in the written Bible. I’m arguing that the Bible, the revealed, inspired word of God, is the place and the instrument and the material mediatorial way God gets to us and manifests himself powerfully and truly in us and with us. So I want to linger over this truth for a minute and just talk about 10 reasons to meditate and pray over Biblical truth. I’ll give 10 things that truth does that enhance communion with God.

1. Salvation

First Timothy 4:16 says:

Keep a close watch on yourself and on the teaching. Persist in this, for by so doing you will save both yourself and your hearers.

Biblical truth (doctrine) saves preachers and their hearers. If preachers drift away from the truth, they and their people won’t be saved. We are saved, that is God comes to us and rescues us. This is the foundation of communion. We’re talking about communion with God, having a friend that will not fail you. Do you think, “Oh that’s precious, but don’t bother me with doctrine.” You have to get that dichotomy out of your head.

Biblical doctrine about the cross, about the nature of this friend, about his deity, about his incarnation, about his virgin birth, about his miracles, about his atoning sacrifice, about his triumphant resurrection over death, about his intercession for us in heaven, about his pouring out the Holy Spirit, and about his communing with us in our hearts by the Spirit — these are doctrines that are taught in the Bible that are the very foundation of getting in a tree late at night and experiencing a friend who has a character that is such that he won’t leave us and you plead his character, you plead his blood, you plead his miracle-working authority over demons. You know him because you’ve gotten to know him in the Bible.

2. Freedom from Satan

Satan is a great enemy of communing with God. How do you defeat him?

You will know the truth, and the truth will set you free (John 8:32).

That’s freedom from sin and freedom from Satan. The one offensive weapon that we have, according to Ephesians 6, is the Sword of the Spirit, the word of God. And when Satan shoots those fiery darts at us, we hold up the defensive weapon of the Shield of Faith. But what do you trust in? Have you ever thought about that? Here come these fiery darts at you, doubts and lustful thoughts and greedy thoughts. I had one this morning that lodged in my head. I would call it self-pity thoughts. I went downstairs to get a glass of juice, took it back up to work on this, and I emptied the juice thing. It’s grapefruit juice. It’s one of these clear things that you can’t squash for recycling, so I put the whole thing under there and Noël said, “I think you should just put that outside or it will fill up the whole bucket.” And a fiery dart flew right out of Satan’s bow and landed here and I thought, “I’m doing a good thing. Don’t tell me I don’t put away the trash.”

I didn’t say this. I did not say this. I felt this. Where’d that come from? Well, it comes from me but it gets triggered in me. That’s what fiery darts are. She took it out of my hand and walked outside with it. So I just walked back upstairs with my juice and didn’t say a word. I sat down up there and for about five minutes preached to myself. I took the Shield of Faith and I preached to myself. I said, “Okay, biblically, my role in this family is Jesus. Husbands love your wives as Christ loves. So she’s the church, I’m Christ. Now does Christ get in a huff of self-pity and walk away from his bride?” I could think, “Okay, that’s the way you want to talk to me. You don’t appreciate that I’m putting it at least in the bin, not leaving it on the counter, where you might leave it.”

Those are the wheels that start to turn, right? There are about eight reasons why she shouldn’t have talked to me this way, and she didn’t talk to me in any of that way. So I’m preaching to myself up there. What I’m illustrating now is that the Shield of Faith that you hold up against this fiery dart is faith in something. It’s in word. So the Sword of the Spirit and the Shield of Faith are almost like one weapon. You thrust at him with this truth and say, “Get out of here. The Bible says I’m Christ in this situation. Christ doesn’t behave like that, so back off. I want to be what I’m supposed to be in this marriage.” And the Shield of Faith says you’re trusting the promise, “I’ll be with you. I’ll take care of you, humble yourself and be rid of that self pity.” So aren’t you interested in the end of the story? Okay, I’ll just skip that and I’ll come back to it at the end. That’s the way a lot of speakers keep people there for the whole service.

I don’t think Noël had a clue that I was feeling this. Maybe she did. I don’t know. So when I came back down, ready to leave, I sat down and said, “Let’s pray,” and I did the fighter verse and then prayed for Talitha, prayed for Noël, prayed for everybody, and then I gave Talitha a big kiss on the cheek. She always turns away from me. I say, “Don’t you turn away from me. I’m kissing you.” I kissed her again, and I said, “Mommy doesn’t turn away when I kiss. Watch this.” I went around the other side, I kissed her on the mouth, and Talitha said, “I don’t want to!” That was my reconciliation. If I need to say something, I’ll say it later.

3. Grace and Peace Imparted

Second Peter 1:2 says:

May grace and peace be multiplied to you in the knowledge of God and of Jesus our Lord.

We want grace and we want peace with God. We want to know him so deeply and so personally that we experience his grace and we taste his peace hour by hour. How does it happen? In the knowledge of God. Grace and peace are multiplied in the knowledge of God. So don’t sell yourself short thinking that emotional, affectional, sweet experiences of God are one thing and studying doctrine is another thing. Don’t let yourself fall for that. So many churches make that mistake and so many people do, too.

4. Sanctified in Truth

John 17:17 says:

Sanctify them in the truth; your word is truth.

So sanctification is becoming more holy and that happens through communion with God. It happens for communion with God and it happens through truth.

5. Service of Love

Philippians 1:9 says:

And it is my prayer that your love may abound more and more, with knowledge and all discernment,

So love abounds with knowledge and all discernment. If you just have feelings called love and you don’t have that feeling informed with knowledge, it won’t be loving probably, because you won’t even know what love is. Love is some things and not other things.

6. Protection from Error

Ephesians 4:13–14 says:

Until we all attain to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to mature manhood, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ, so that we may no longer be children, tossed to and fro by the waves and carried about by every wind of doctrine . . .

One of the great problems with maintaining communion with God is that we’re so easily swept this way and that way about views of God or views of the church or views of ethics or views of the Bible. We’re just blown around because we have so little root that’s in knowledge of the Son of God, and then we’re carried to and fro by every wind of doctrine. And if you’re carried to and fro, then you won’t have an abiding, strong, deep, settled communion with Him. It’ll always be up for grabs.

7. Hope in Heaven

First Corinthians 13:12 says:

Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known.

In other words, our full experience of biblical truth will come in heaven when we know even as we are known. So we don’t have it fully here, it’s going to be our experience in heaven, so the more we can have here, the more of heavenly life and heavenly communion I think we will have. That’s why we have the Bible. It’s so that all that we are pointed to have in this age, which isn’t everything — many things are kept for the Lord, and they’re not ours to know — we can have if we’ll study it and meditate on it.

8. Truth Upheld in the Midst of Error

Second Timothy 4:3–4 says:

For the time is coming when people will not endure sound teaching, but having itching ears they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own passions, and will turn away from listening to the truth and wander off into myths.

If you love the truth, then you want to gather people into a small group or something, you shouldn’t be stunned when somebody simply rolls their eyes at the teaching of the truth and says, “Well, I don’t think that’s true,” and then goes out and finds a teacher that will suit those itching ears, even though if it stands plain in the Bible.

9. Approved by God

Second Timothy 2:15 says:

Do your best to present yourself to God as one approved, a worker who has no need to be ashamed, rightly handling the word of truth.

When you rightly handle the Word of truth, then you’re approved as a workman. There’s a way to handle the truth wrongly, there’s a way to handle it rightly. One of the reasons we have TBI at Bethlehem and we put such a premium on studying the word of God is because of texts like this that show you can mishandle the Bible. Second Peter talks about those who distort it to their own destruction. So we need to work at helping each other handle the Bible faithfully. Here’s an exhortation from Second Peter 3:18: “Grow in the grace and the knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.” It’s commanded to all Christians that we grow in grace and that we grow in knowledge. And going to what we read at the beginning, this grace is multiplied in this knowledge. So these aren’t two separate tracks, as if you go that direction to grow in grace and that direction to grow in knowledge.

Growing in grace is through growing in knowledge and it works the other way, too. As you become a more gracious and obedient person more things open to you in the Bible. It’s been one of the great pleasures of my life to be a pastor because one of the benefits of being a pastor is that I have to minister to people with the word of God. I don’t have the right to just treat the Bible as something for me. I have to always be thinking, “Okay, I’m going to preach this. I have got to teach this. I have got to share this in staff devotions. Somebody is going to call me with a hard phone call and I need to have the word ready.” That’s an incredible privilege. That’s an awesome gift to me, even for this reason.

10. Special Illumination

God loves to open his word for those who need to use his word graciously. There’s a special illumination, I believe, granted for anyone, any one of you, who’s heart is set on reading the Bible for your own soul and the soul of the person you’ll be working with today, because God loves it when his word doesn’t just land on you and stop. He loves it when his word is going to reverberate through you. So he’s more likely to give you light on that Word if you’re bent on sharing it than if you were bent on keeping it. So there’s an awesome privilege of illumination or opening the Bible for those who have the bent or the heart or the calling and the demand in their lives to share it.

I used to study the Bible a lot more, before 20 years ago, for myself. I was writing out things and trying to figure out problems and hit walls and maybe get breakthroughs and understanding. I still hit walls and don’t get breakthroughs at every point, but the experience so often now is I hit a wall while I’m studying for a sermon or a class or something and I’m saying, “I just don’t get this. I don’t understand how these two verses fit together, or how this argument flows, or how this word fits with that word or how this text here fits together with that text back there. Lord, this is not making sense.” And you pause and you just plead. You turn it into a moment of communion with God, this moment of misunderstanding and my fallibility and my finiteness becomes a moment of intense communion of “I have to have help here. You’re the only hope. You’re the only hope. I’ve read the commentaries. I’ve struggled, I’ve wrestled. I’ve read the Greek. I’m not getting this. Come and help me.”

The number of times that a thought about another text that fits with another text and another comes back here and suddenly the paradigm just opens up. I say, “Oh,” and I get it, or at least you get enough of it to hand it to another person with usefulness. Somebody gave me a tract the other day that had about five optical illusions in it. And they say, “Are these lines parallel?” And they look like they’re going all over the place because of the little things that are drawn in between them. They just can’t be parallel and they are. They’re parallel. Or do these steps go up or do they go down? They’re going up and you just kind of blink and now they’re going down. It’s those paradigm shifts.

That’s what happens to the Bible lots of times. You’re looking and you’re looking and you’re looking and these steps are just going up and they’re not supposed to go up, because they go down three chapters earlier. You can’t for the life of you see how they’re going down. And then the Holy Spirit says, “Did you notice the parallel three verses later? And did you notice that that word is used this way over here? And did you notice this?” These are natural observations, but once you see them, click. You say, “Oh, I see how they’re going down.” I think the Lord likes to do that for people who are in need of sharing the word.

The Word as a Means of Communion with God

Now we’re shifting over to a few texts where the word is made the means of communion with God here. To see, I want to drive home that the word is the material or the instrument of communion with God. First John 1:1–3 says:

That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we looked upon and have touched with our hands, concerning the word of life — the life was made manifest, and we have seen it, and testify to it and proclaim to you the eternal life, which was with the Father and was made manifest to us — that which we have seen and heard we proclaim also to you, so that you too may have fellowship with us; and indeed our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son Jesus Christ.

So the aim of this letter that he’s writing is so that these people will have fellowship with them as they are now having it with the Father and the Son. So you have John here and you have the people here and you have the Father and the Son, and the goal is to get them all into fellowship. It’s not just John and people having fellowship with each other, and not just John and the Father and the Son having fellowship with each other, but the people having fellowship with John as John and the Father and the Son have fellowship with each other. So I want you to have fellowship with us, yes. I love the horizontal dimension of this reality, but then I’m going to add, “And indeed, our fellowship (that you now share with us) is with the Father and with the Son. So I want you to come into communion with us.”

Now what is the meaning of that? I circled so that. How does that come about? What he stresses is, “I, John, am an apostle. I saw, I looked upon, and touched with my hands the Word of Life, Jesus Christ, the Son of God. Life was manifested and now I’m testifying and I’m proclaiming it to you, so that you may enjoy this fellowship.” So my argument here is that this book is written as a proclamation and revelation of Christ, who is life, in order that these people might enjoy fellowship with him and with the Father and with the Son. So if you say, “How does fellowship with God and with his people come about?” Answer: through the proclamation of Christ, the Word of Life. The word is the means by which fellowship comes about.

The Testimony of Man and the Testimony of God

Now this text at the end of the same book (1 John 5:9–13) is a very mysterious text. I don’t think I fully understand this text but, nevertheless, I thought it should be included so that you could see the mysteries and maybe pursue them more fruitfully even than I’m able to. So let’s read it:

If we receive the testimony of men, the testimony of God is greater (what is that?), for this is the testimony of God that he has borne concerning his Son. Whoever believes in the Son of God has the testimony in himself. Whoever does not believe God has made him a liar, because he has not believed in the testimony that God has borne concerning his Son (1 John 5:9–10).

What is this testimony? When and how did God do that? Remember now it’s greater than the testimony of the man. It’s not identical. It may be in the testimony of a man or through the testimony of a man, but it’s not the same as the testimony of the man, per se. It’s greater. First John 5:11 continues:

And this is the testimony, that God gave us eternal life, and this life is in his Son.

I’ll tell you what I think it means, though this is very opaque to me. I think John is the hardest writer in the New Testament to understand and it’s written in the simplest form of all. Everybody tells people, “Read the Gospel of John if you’re a new believer. It’s simple.” And they’re right, at one level. At one level, John is very simple. I mean it reads almost like a third grade primer. This is this and this is this, and this is this and this is this. But how it all fits together is so difficult. Here’s what I think this means. When he says, “The testimony of God is this, that God has given us eternal life and this life is in his Son” I think he means that the testimony of God is the Life of God in us, in his Son.

It’s the quickening life. So here comes the testimony of man, John, proclaiming to us the word of Life, Jesus. The word enters our ears, into our brain, and now what happens? What happens spiritually? Either we come to life in that word by believing it and it becomes our all in all and we’re born again and we know him, or it doesn’t and people are left unbelieving and unsaved. Well, if you got saved, if you’re a believer, it says, “You have the testimony. He who believes the Son has the testimony.” Why? Because the testimony is the life that came to you that enabled you to believe. What God does is different than what John can do when he speaks. God doesn’t just add more words. You say, “Okay, John says, ‘Believe Jesus,’ and God says, ‘That’s true.’” So we have two testimonies here and now I have to do something with both of them. I don’t think that’s the picture.

The Word of Life Imparted to the Soul

The picture is more like this. John the Apostle says, “Believe Jesus, Jesus is God, Jesus died for your sins. Know Jesus. He’s infinitely valuable. You can escape hell, you can go to heaven, you can have peace with God. Know this, trust this.” And what does God do? When I say that, what does God do? God gives life. God makes alive through his Son. God causes in a mysterious way the word to land on me and cause life. You are born again by the living inviting word. You come to life. Some people come to life and some don’t. Why? Why is it when the gospel is preached, some people say, “Yes, oh, that is exactly what I need. That is true, that is awesome, and I will embrace that. I’ll lay down my life for that. I’ll live for that”? Why do some people respond that way and others say, “Huh, that’s just foolish.”

It’s a stumbling block to Jews, foolishness to the Gentiles, but to those who are called, it is the power of God and the wisdom of God. What’s that called? It’s the testimony of God, powerfully saying, “Live!” And as you come to life and you’re not a dead soul anymore, as you live, you see, you taste. The word of the apostles now becomes truth and life to you. That’s my effort anyway, to come to terms with what he’s doing here. Let’s read the rest of it:

Whoever has the Son has life; whoever does not have the Son of God does not have life (1 John 5:12).

He came to his own, and his own people did not receive him. But to all who did receive him, who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God . . . (John 1:11–12).

To be born of God is to receive the Son and in the Son you have life. He who does not have the Son of God does not have life. If you reject the Son, you don’t have life. Life is in the Son. He continues:

I write these things to you who believe in the name of the Son of God, that you may know that you have eternal life (1 John 5:13).

Now how does that work? How does your assurance follow from this? I’m writing this letter. I’m reading. These things were written so that in this room, right now, people who believe in the Son can know that they have eternal life. How? Because if you believe, that is evidence that you are alive and God has testified by your life that you are his. You have the Son. And one of the reasons our assurance is weak is because we don’t understand how we got to be a believer. We think we just did that, and if you think you just did that, you know what you’re going to answer to God when he says at the judgment, “Why are you here?” you will say, “Well, it’s because I chose to believe.” He’ll say, “Well, why didn’t others choose?” Will you say, “Uh, I was smarter? I was more insightful? I was more humble than they were?” You’re going to point right here to yourself. He’s not going to like that. That’s not the right answer.

The answer is, “Because you God, in a way that I don’t understand and for reasons I cannot comprehend and your incredible grace, testified to my heart and caused it to live in the Son. Your testimony was life to me. It was my eternal life. You imparted life to my soul. That’s why I believed. You called me effectually out of the grave of blindness. You gave me eyes to see and ears to hear, what can I say? It was all of grace, all of you.” I know that’s very controversial. I know that raises all kinds of problems for some. I have another whole seminar called TULIP, which is on Calvinism and the Sovereignty of God. It’s a whole weekend, so just watch for when it comes and we’ll wrestle more deeply with that, but here’s the reason for bringing this text in here.

Lazarus, Come Forth

How does the testimony of man, the word of God written, and the testimony of God relate to each other? I think it’s the relationship between Jesus saying, “Lazarus, come forth.” Now those are words you could write down on a page — “Lazarus, come forth.” You can say, “Lazarus (direct address) come (verb) forth (maybe an adverb of direction).” You can do all that kind of stuff. That’s the word of man, coming out of Jesus’s mouth. It’s a little different because Jesus is God but take the analogy. Paul did the same thing, the Apostles when they raised the dead. And the testimony of God is in and through that word, Lazarus stood up and walked out.

So that’s what the call of God is in First Corinthians 1:23–24:

We preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God.

So this call, this testimony, this new birth gives life. So if you want to have a living fellowship with God, you must experience the testimony of God in the testimony of the word. So we’ll be talking about how you pray. How do you pray in view of that reality? Now are there any questions or comments?

Question and Answer

What’s the relationship between the word of God written, the Bible, in its entirety (Genesis to Revelation) and the eternal Word of God, the Son of God, and this testimony of God?

How you say it is, I suppose, delicate and complex. I want to say very, very strongly those words written on that page, to the degree that they are an accurate rendition of what the inspired Apostles and prophets wrote is the very word of God written. Now, that doesn’t mean that they don’t need to be animated and empowered by the Holy Spirit when we read them. Because Jesus was God and he spoke words and some of them were absolutely effectual in quickening faith or bringing healing or death and others landed on the pharisees. It didn’t change them and it’s because there’s a will in Jesus. It says in Matthew 11:25–27:

No one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son, and anyone to whom the Son chooses to reveal him.”

So he can be calling with his words, which are the very word of God, and sometimes those words become effectual in causing knowledge to happen. He says:

To you has been given the secret of the kingdom of God, but for those outside everything is in parables (Mark 4:11).

And to the others it’s non-effectual. So the fact that this is the very word of God does not mean that it doesn’t need animation by the work of God and the Spirit of God. You could call that the effectual word of God. I mean there are different names you could put on that power or that work or that testimony or that call. But I don’t want to get into a neo-orthodox or liberal position where we say, “Some of the Bible is the word of God,” or where I say, “This is the word of man that becomes the word of God when the Holy Spirit lands on it.” I think that’s a dangerous position as well.

Does the fact that it says “the word of life” point in the direction of it being the effectual word of God?

You want to let the context guide you. I mean sometimes, word of life will mean one thing and sometimes word of life will mean another thing. Sometimes Christ might be a reference to more than just the historical person or the law might have one meaning in one place and one in another. Let’s just be contextually sensitive as to what the author is saying.

The Instrument of Our Enjoyment of God

Here’s another illustration of how the word is the material and the instrument of our communion with and enjoyment of God. This is so simple and yet I didn’t see it for a long time. It was a few years ago. I was crossing the bridge and this hit me like a ton of bricks. This bridge out here is a place of discovery for me.:

Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! According to his great mercy, he has caused us to be born again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, to an inheritance that is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading, kept in heaven for you, who by God’s power are being guarded through faith for a salvation ready to be revealed in the last time (1 Peter 1:3–5).

Now stop there and ask, “What in the world is all that? What have we just read?” We’ve read truth, lots of objective truth statements. God is blessed. He has mercy. His mercy caused us to be born again. We have a living hope. This hope comes through the resurrection of Jesus so Jesus is risen from the dead. We have an inheritance and this inheritance is of a certain kind. This is imperishable and undefiled and it’s not going to fade away. In fact, it’s not only not going to fade away, it’s kept in heaven for you, and by the way, you are kept for it. It’s kept for you and you are protected by the power of God. So God is powerful. He uses his power to keep his own, to protect them and hold them for heaven. That happens through faith. Salvation is going to be revealed in the last time. I could preach for 10 weeks on those verses easily. There is so much doctrine there.

Now here’s the point: “In this you greatly rejoice.” Where does your joy come from? You’re not a happy Christian. Is there something to be said here about that situation? Where does our joy come from? Peter is saying, “It comes from knowing these truths that I just spoke out of my mouth and wrote down in the first five verses of my letter.” And notice the situation in which this joy happens, because this is not an easy place to rejoice:

In this you rejoice, though now for a little while, if necessary, you have been grieved by various trials, so that the tested genuineness of your faith — more precious than gold that perishes though it is tested by fire — may be found to result in praise and glory and honor at the revelation of Jesus Christ (1 Peter 1:6–7).

So the point here is that our joy in the midst of fiery trials that threaten to burn everything away and are meant to burn up the dross and leave only the proved faith, because this proved faith, this genuine faith, is more precious than gold and gold is perishable. If perishable gold is tested by fire, how much more is your faith going to be tested by fire? I mean, you might lose gold by testing and by fire. It might be consumed. Your faith is not going to be consumed. It’s so valuable. It’s going to be tested by fire and the goal is that it may be found to result in praise and glory and honor at the revelation of Jesus. In that you rejoice. In that situation you rejoice in this doctrine.

He is the Lord. He is the Father. He is God. He is merciful. You’ve been born again. You have a living hope. He is raised from the dead. Your hope comes through that resurrection. You have an inheritance. It’s imperishable, it’s undefiled, and it’s not going to fade away. It’s kept. God is not going to let any moth and rust destroy it. You are being kept and protected. By the power of God, nothing can pluck you out of God’s hand. Faith is the instrument. There’s a salvation coming that’s going to be rescuing you from every possible fire some day. It’s going to be revealed in the last time. You have to know those things if you’re going to rejoice in the midst of the fire. My job is to teach those things, to proclaim those things, to get you ready to walk through the fire and to help you through the fire.

The Nature of Our Communion

And then 1 Peter 1:8 talks about the nature of our communion with the living Christ:

Though you have not seen him . . .

I love it when the apostles who did see him, put themselves in the skin of those of us who are in the category of those who didn’t get to see him. We might think, “You saw him, we didn’t see him.” It was a generation that they were writing to who were like us. They didn’t see him. They had to get it all of it second hand through writings and testimonies, and we have those writings and testimonies. So he says:

Though you have not seen him, you love him. Though you do not now see him, you believe in him and rejoice with joy that is inexpressible and filled with glory . . . (1 Peter 1:8).

So this joy here in 1 Peter 1:8 is the same as this joy as 1 Peter 1:6, which says, “In this you rejoice.” He says:

[You rejoice] with joy that is inexpressible and filled with glory, obtaining the outcome of your faith, the salvation of your souls (1 Peter 1:8–9).

It’s rooted in the salvation ready to be revealed in the last time. You’re going to obtain the salvation of your souls. It’s the joy we have even though we don’t see him. This is why Paul said, “To die is gain.” Nevertheless, now we walk by faith and not by sight, and our joy comes from knowing the truth. That’s the point that I’m making.

Question and Answer

That text highlighted God keeps us and protects us through faith for salvation ready to be revealed. The treasure is kept in heaven. We’re kept on earth. But how does that security, that assurance, relate to the diagram or the mental picture of life as a river flowing down to hell. Heaven is at the headwaters and we’re in the water, swimming, and if we stop swimming, we go backwards into destruction. How does that possibility relate to that assurance?

Good question. Well, it changes the way you think about eternal security from being automatic to dynamic. The automatic view of eternal security says, “I made a profession of faith one time and received Jesus into my life and therefore I’m secure, period. And it doesn’t matter whether I swim or not.” That’s an automatic view of eternal security. I don’t think that’s biblical. I think the biblical view is to say, “I have been born of God — I made a decision, I trusted Christ, I received him in my life, I was made a new creature — and now I serve in the Spirit, not in the letter. The Spirit gives life. I’m a new person. The Holy Spirit is in me, Christ is in me, and God has promised that ‘those whom he justified will be glorified,’ and that ‘he who began a good work in me will complete it unto the day of Christ,’ and that ‘no one can pluck them out of my Father’s hand because the Father is greater than all.’” There are many other texts on perseverance and assurance.

But the difference is that the way we are kept is a dynamic way. It’s God enabling us to swim. You’re asking, “Now how do I keep that possibility in mind that I could go over that waterfall and still have assurance?” The answer is this: I believe in God’s promise to keep me swimming. Does that work? See, my security lies not in an act that I performed in the past, in a kind of automatic way. My security lies in a God, who because of that past act and present reality in my life has made some promises to his own: “I will keep you. will not let you fall. I won’t let you stumble. You’re mine. You’re the apple of my eye. I will keep you.” Now my security enables me to say, “If I apostatize and forsake the faith, I will go to hell,” and to say, “That is not going to happen, because God will keep me from doing that.” Can you say both those things? Are they contradictory?

If I apostatize, if I forsake the faith, if I make shipwreck of this and throw it all away and trample on the cross of Jesus and die, I’m going to go to hell. I don’t care how many years I’ve lived and preached. And then in the next breath, someone could say, “Well, aren’t you afraid then? As you look into the future, don’t you lose assurance and you lose hope and become fragile and wonder whether you’re going to make it?” And my answer is, “No, because God has promised to keep me.” He who began a good work in me will keep it until the day of Christ. My hope is in the present covenant-keeping work of almighty God by his Holy Spirit in my life.

You see, the difference is this makes my engagement in my security dynamic and active, because I have a hand in this. The way God works in and through me is by the word and by prayer. So if I throw away the means of grace called the word, throw away the means of grace called prayer, throw away the means of grace called worship, throw away the means of grace called small group exhortations, and throw away the means of grace called getting a good’s night rest and eating right and so on so that I don’t get depressed because my electrolytes aren’t functioning, then I’m saying, “I don’t trust you anymore. I don’t need you anymore. You’re not the one who keeps me. I won’t look to you, I won’t go to your word,” and that is a growing possible evidence I’ve never been born of God. It would mean I’ve never been born of God. I don’t think anybody can lose salvation. I just preached on this down at Moody a couple of days ago.

If you don’t know these things, will it undermine your assurance?

Yeah, you can’t have the full-orbed kind of assurance that you ought to have if you don’t know these things, and really, instead of speaking black and white here, we should probably speak on a continuum. The more you know, the more assurance you can fully and rightly enjoy. It’s not like there’s a group that knows it and there is another group that doesn’t. That’s not the case. There’s all different degrees of knowing, and so those who don’t know will either concoct a false kind of assurance to handle their tormented conscience or they will struggle with a lack of assurance all their lives. So you can solve this by correcting the faults if you have assurance and increasing their knowledge. And you’re talking a rich knowledge, not just a heady knowledge, but a full-orbed love knowledge so that they come to a deep settled confidence in having been chosen by God, loved by God, and holy.

I told you, I use APTAT as I get ready to walk into the pulpit. Admit you know you can’t do anything, Pray for help, Trust a promise, Act the miracle, and then Thank him. When I get to that trust, one of the texts I go to often is Colossians 3:13, which says:

Put on then, as God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved, compassionate hearts, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience . . .

Now just ponder this for a minute. Paul writes to you, Christian, and he expects you to hear that as a wonderful blessing of God on your life to be called that way. He says, “So as those who have been chosen, holy, beloved, put on a heart of compassion.” So here I am sitting there on the front pew, and I hear Paul say, “John Piper, as one who is chosen by God, holy, and loved, go preach compassionately.” Now, see, the challenge I’m facing is, “Can I preach again? Can I preach with compassion? Can I preach with love? Can I preach with truth? Can I preach with conviction? Or is my mind just going to check out and go off towards worldly things and lose all fervor and lose all conviction and lose all hope and just make a shipwreck out of the ministry and the marriage and the faith or not? How am I going to swim?” And the answer is that I hear him say, “I chose you and you are set apart for me as holy.” I think he means, “You’re mine. You’re set apart and I love you.”

Sometimes we put the little “beloved” on the front and it just kind of waters it down. That’s some kind of hocus-pocus religious language. We just should say “loved.” It says “chosen, holy, and loved,” and I just say it to myself and I do one of those little John Newton tricks. I pretend, as I’m sitting there on the pew, that God almighty is stooping down through that 60 foot high ceiling and speaking to me very personally. He is saying, “I call you to preach. That’s your job here. I put you here. The Holy Spirit has put you here. You are mine. I’ve set you apart for myself. I chose you. You didn’t choose me and I love you. Now you get out there. Do it and I’ll be with you.” That’s how I fight.

When my soul is sitting on that front pew begins to waver, and I think, “Is the whole thing a fake?” These are arrows that come. I think, “Am I real or do I just like the applause of men? Is this whole 20 year thing here a charade?” What do you do? Do you just do the negative thing and say, “Get out of my head.” You should do that. I speak to thoughts a lot of times. I say, “Get out of my head, thought.” I do it with lustful thoughts, I do it with greedy thoughts, I do it with advertisements for stuff I don’t need. I do it with all kinds of thoughts. I say, “Get out of my head.” But that’s not enough.

You have to say that: “In the name of Jesus, be gone, thought.” Then what do you do? You send a demon out of your head, and leave it empty, how many coming back? Seven. I don’t know how it is with girls. I don’t talk to girls much about their lustful thoughts, but this is why a lot of guys fail. They only do half of it. They say, “Get out of here. Don’t think that.” They stop, it comes back. Two of them come back. They say, “Stop, get out of here.” They go away and three of them come back. They just don’t get it. You have to put something else in there. You’ve got to stock that imagination with another beauty, another desire, another passion, and another satisfaction.

So it comes and I say things to deal with it. I’m just giving you one text. I use lots of different other ones and usually I try to get them right off my front burner. The one this morning I got from Exodus 19:4, which says, “I brought you out on eagle’s wings to myself.” He said to the people of Israel. Well, I’m in Christ. If he says it to Israelites, how much more does he say it to his own children in Christ: “I brought you on eagle’s wings to myself, John Piper, to myself. It was not just some task to minister but to myself.” So you are holy, you are chosen, and you are loved. So this whole course is to try to help you handle the Word like that, for maintaining communion with God. That’s a very good question about the threats of the Bible — and there are many — function in our lives to keep us swimming and yet not destroy our assurance.