My preference is to take questions from the audience, but now I have 30 sheets of paper here in front of me and I’m just not sure how to handle it. I haven’t read them yet, and some of them are long and it will take a long time to read them. So I’ll just start doing a few here and then you’ll be thinking, and maybe some of you who handed these in would be able to raise your hand. One of the reasons for that is I really like to see the person I’m responding to and hear the tone of voice and see the face and their tears. To answer a vague, impersonal question is not as fruitful to me as talking with a human being.

If someone doesn’t believe but really wants to believe though they can’t, unless God grants him or her faith, then what are they to do?

Seek the Lord while he may be found, call upon him while he’s near. Now, if they don’t want to, then there’s nothing they can do. There’s something you can do as their friend, but there’s nothing they can do. If they say, “I want nothing of it, I don’t want to pray, I don’t want to seek, I don’t want to go to church, I don’t want to read my Bible, get off my case,” then you can do, you can pray that God would change their hearts and every occasion you get, you can put truth into their lives and you can be there when the tragedy hits because they’ll come to you. They’ll come. If you’re in the office and you’re the weird guy, the born-again type, and they all know you’re there and they don’t really want to have anything to do with you because you have boring weekends and they have exciting ones, you’re the one they’ll come to when the tragedy strikes — if you’re loving, if you’re tender, if you’re not hypocritical. So while there’s not much a person can do if he has no desire to do it, there’s something you can do.

As a Calvinist who’s a Baptist, do you practice infant baptism or believer’s baptism?

I practice believer’s baptism because it’s biblical.

What exactly does “dead” mean in Ephesians 2:1? I’ve heard this verse used to explain our inability to do anything for ourselves before salvation because dead people can’t do anything, including see or think. So how can a dead person, although a rotting stinking dead person, be punished for something they were powerless to change?

Well, that’s several questions, isn’t it? We are spiritually dead. Manifestly, we’re not physically dead, and we’re not emotionally dead; we’re spiritually dead. That means to the things of the Spirit, we are hostile. We have no capacity to discern the value of spiritual things. The cross is foolishness to those who are perishing. So you can think and you can feel and you can act with your body. You can do all kinds of things as a dead person, but you can’t love God, you can’t submit to the law, and you can’t delight in holiness. That’s the sense in which we are dead.

I guess the main question is, how are they punished for something they’re powerless to change? Because we’re punished for the evil of our rebellion. The fact that we are so rebellious to God that we can’t love him, the fact that we are so hard-hearted that we can’t delight in him, doesn’t get us off the hook. It puts us on the hook. The reason this sounds like a problem when you use the word “can’t” or “powerless” is it sounds like you’ve chained somebody in a chair and told them to get up. And they say, “I really want to get up. I’d get up if I could. I’d get up.” That’s not the case with a fallen sinner. No fallen sinner says, “I’d love him. I want to love him. I delight in God. Oh, if I could delight in God, but I can’t.” That’s not the case.

The “can’t” is a moral “can’t,” not a physical “can’t.” This is a big issue. I send you to Jonathan Edwards’s book, The Freedom of The Will for the distinction between moral inability and physical inability. Physical inability gets you off the hook. Moral inability does not get you off the hook because it simply is a statement of how deeply rebellious we are. So that’s my basic answer to why it’s right for God to punish the person who “can’t” (in the moral sense “can’t”), because he won’t. He’s so deeply corrupted and rebellious that he cannot, and it’s a real cannot, but it’s not the same as a physical “cannot” when you really want to do something.

I’m a college student who is thinking about going to graduate school, possibly seminary. As you went to graduate school, what was the biggest challenge to your faith? How did you deal with it?

Now, my answer to that question would probably be very different from lots of others. I know it is. The biggest challenge to my faith in Munich, Germany studying in the university there was not the intellectual challenges to the faith. God had brought me through many tests and many trials in college and seminary intellectually, and I was at home and at peace. In fact, I looked upon many world-class professors with pity because of the way they were handling the Bible with 18 and 19-year-old university students. That was just pathetic in my judgment, even as a 25 to 27-year-old student there.

The biggest challenges for me were then, are now, always will be pride and lust and self-pity and anger and resentment and basic sin stuff. That’s the problem in life. That’s not to minimize others who really have tremendous challenges trying to believe, “Is the Bible inerrant? And did Christ rise from the dead? And did Jesus do miracles? And what about the horrible things in the Old Testament?” But that’s not where I battle. I battle to love my wife the way I should and to be patient with my seven-year-old the way I should, and to have courage and boldness to witness to people the way I should. The things that cause me to doubt my salvation from time to time are moral things, not intellectual things.

You mentioned in the exposition of Romans 8:4 that the purpose or intention of the law is fulfilled in us as we look to Christ’s perfect satisfaction. Was God’s purpose in the law in the Old Testament that it be followed or that man would look in faith to a Savior? In the New Testament is God’s purpose in the law any different? To what extent does he desire or expect our obedience?

He expects our total obedience. He desires our total obedience. Jesus said, “Be perfect as your father in heaven is perfect.” So that’s the standard, we are to be perfect. I think that was the purpose of the law in the Old Testament and the law has multiple purposes. When the law says, “Do this and you will live, and don’t do this and you’ll die,” that’s the standard. In Galatians 5:4, Paul says:

You are severed from Christ, you who would be justified by the law; you have fallen away from grace.

If you want that, you’ll have to keep the whole law. So if you want to use the law in order to get right with God, you are bound to keep the whole law perfectly. So that was one of the purposes of the law, to call for that perfection, which is why by the way, in the Old Testament, there had to be animal sacrifices because even in the Old Testament, there had to be redemption, there had to be blood sacrifices in order there could be saints in the Old Testament by these sacrifices that typified the coming Savior, which alone would take away sins.

But the law has a larger purpose because it knows that its subordinate purpose will never happen. The law comes along and says, “Be perfect,” and God knows good and well that’s not going to happen. And so the bigger purpose of the law is to point to a Savior. The goal of the law is Christ for righteousness to all who believe. So I would say today, the purpose is the same and then the purpose is the same. The law calls us to live a life of perfect conformity to God’s will and we fail, and therefore the law also points us to a Savior who is our only hope and our only redeemer. We’ll say more about that in our exposition.

In Romans 7:13–25 is Paul describing the Christians or the non-Christians life. Explain how you arrived at your interpretation?

I argued that Romans 7 is describing Christians. In other words, when he says, “The good that I want to do, I don’t do. And the bad that I don’t want to do, I do.” He cries out, “Oh, wretched man that I am, who will deliver me from this body of death. Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ.” And then at the end of the chapter he says, “Therefore, with my flesh, I serve the law of sin. With my mind, I serve the law of God.” The fact that he ends that way inclines me to think it’s still the case with Paul. I don’t think Romans 8 is describing the normal Christian life and Romans 7 is describing the pre-Christian life. I think Romans 7 with all of its embattled, indwelling sin is describing the battle we all face. We’re called to always be moving from Romans 7 into Romans 8. We should be moving from the battle and the defeat of indwelling sin to the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus, setting me free from the law of sin and death. But I cannot escape what looks to me like a real “I” in Romans 7, and it is the Christian eye as far as I can tell.

Every sermon I have ever preached for the past 23 years is available free online at Desiring God. So all you do is go there and find the resource. I gave 9 reasons and that was about three years ago, but it’s all there and I can’t remember all the arguments. But that’s my view anyway.

You said last night that memorizing Romans 8 was life-changing and this morning that to walk in the Spirit required a mind-set, attitude-set, and heart-set. Could you explain how Scripture memorization has worked in your mind to help you accomplish this?

I’m going to postpone that because that will be the main agenda tonight when it says, “Put to death the deeds of the body by the Spirit.” So I’ll get to that later.

Can you offer insight into what you do for your devotional time?

What would be the most helpful thing to say? I am right now, this is my Bible, and I right now am doing the Discipleship Journal Bible Reading Plan, which is available online. If you just type that in Google, you’ll find it. And it’s a way to read through the Bible in a year. I’ve used this for years and years. There are different methods. This one is helpful for me because I’m so imperfect, and what makes this so helpful for imperfect people is that it gets you through the Bible reading 25 days a month. And you know how many days there are in a month? There are 30, which means you always have five days to catch up. Somebody knew human nature when they designed this because the reason people don’t read the Bible through is that by February, they’re too far behind and they give up. Well, you can always catch up in the last five days of the month because you have no assignment. So in the first 25 days, you’re reading four places of Scripture.

I read the Bible every day. I got up this morning and I read 1 Chronicles 20–23, plus a little bit in Colossians, plus a little bit in Luke, and plus a Psalm. And I read one of the Psalms with my family. My personal devotional life is every morning for about an hour or so with God, praying the Scriptures, and praying in concentric circles. This might be helpful. If you wonder, “How do you pray for an extended period of time?” Two things I would say. You pray in centric circles. I start with John Piper because he’s the most needy person I know, and if he doesn’t get fixed, I can’t pray for anybody else. So I cry for my soul to be awakened, to be purified, to be what I need to be. And then I move out to my little family, saying, “Lord, I pray for Carson, Shelley, Milley, Francis, Benjamin, Melissa, Abraham, Molly, Barnabas, Talitha, Noël.” That’s my next circle.

And then I move out to my wider family and to my staff, and I name 60 people to God every day by memory. I have them in little clusters in my head so that I can remember them. That includes the elders and then all the pastoral staff and all the support staff. They’re my next circle. Then it’s the church, the evangelical movement, the missions movement, and then it’s “hallowed be thy name” in all the earth, and that takes a while. Then, lest you become rote because that can become old, I admit, you can just say the same stuff over and over again, you pray Scripture. You take those passages. And this morning, we had such a good time as a family even though we didn’t spend a lot of time on it. The Psalm assigned for me for today was Psalm 136. And you know what that one does? It’s got that repeating line, “The steadfast love of the Lord endures forever” about 30 times. So I started reading and I said, “Now, Noël, why don’t you and Talitha say, ‘The steadfast love of the Lord endures forever?’” So we did that.

When you look at these things, here’s the insight that came to me this morning as we were reading this. It says, “He divided the Red Sea, for his steadfast love endures forever,” and, “He made Israel pass through the midst, for his steadfast love endures forever,” and, “He overthrew Pharaoh and his host in the Red Sea, for his steadfast love endures forever.” Not to Pharaoh. Isn’t that interesting? That’s striking, shocking. Pharaoh was drowned forever, with all of his hosts. The steadfast love of the Lord was manifested. That’s not what I thought love was.

See, my devotions are the birthplace of theology, simply because I can’t read over that and not say, “I have to handle that. I have to figure that out.” And he goes on. He does the same thing, he says, “Who struck down great kings, for his steadfast love endures forever,” and, “He killed mighty kings, for his steadfast love endures forever,” and, “Sihon, king of the Amorites, for his steadfast love endures forever,” and, “Og, king of Bashan, for his steadfast love endures forever.” These are all manifestations of love to his people. We have such a wishy-washy view of love in America today. Unbelievable. God has to do nice things to everybody or he’s not a loving God. Well, you better have another book.

I’m getting off devotions here, aren’t I? So pray in concentric circles, pray the Scriptures, and read through the Bible. If you’re not into reading long periods of time, memorize something every day, take away a verse every day. I took away this morning a text from 1 Chronicles 28:20, where David says to his son Solomon, who’s supposed to now build the house:

Be strong and courageous and do it. Do not be afraid and do not be dismayed, for the Lord God, even my God, is with you.

Of course, it’s Joshua 1:9, right? So I went back and re-memorized Joshua 1:9 because you got the whole thing there, but it was striking to me that David said that to his son.

How did Bethlehem Institute get started?

The Bethlehem Institute is a little ministry we have at our church where guys who are aiming for the pastorate come in for two years or three years and take a slug of courses from us and then they go on and finish in seminary. And it just grew up over the years, where we felt we had two main things that we weren’t sure seminaries were doing as well as we thought they needed to be done. One is a kind of teaching of how to put the argument of a text together and read the Scriptures carefully by relating propositions to each other. It’s a method that my associate, Tom Steller, teaches and we train those pastors in how to do that so they can feed their flock. And the other was a God-centered vision of all things in church and outside church with a really strong Christian Hedonist flavor and a Reformed perspective. And as we look around seminaries, we don’t taste all that we would like our young fellows to get. So that was the origin of that institute.

I’m just wondering if we shouldn’t do some public questions here? Would that be okay if those of you who wrote all these in jump to your feet maybe? Because goodness, look at that, there’s a whole page. If I try to do that, then we won’t get anywhere. So let’s just try this. If it doesn’t work, we’ll go back to the sheets, but go ahead and raise your hand and he’ll be bringing the mic.

In our diligence to place God in this proper and rightful and exalted place and to hold in high esteem the biblical doctrines of grace, especially the doctrine of God’s sovereignty in salvation, how far do we go in possibly excluding Bible study material from being used in our body that disagrees with and/or even refutes the Reformed or Calvinist position in regard to God’s role in salvation?

Some of this depends on the size and structure of your church, how much influence you exert on what your people are reading and using. The way I would do it is in concentric circles out from the center. I would say if that’s your conviction and the conviction of your core leaders, then say that’s the position of the pastoral staff or the elders or whatever you call them, and that’s what we want to encourage and therefore we will in all the official venues, ask for that to be used.

As far as what’s happening in small groups maybe or what’s happening in people’s personal lives, I don’t police my church like that. They can read anything they want to read and if they want to read critical stuff that tests me, that’s just fine. But I think what you do is since you love your flock and you want to feed them with good truth, you work out from the center and just try to spread the good rather than demand the good. It’s way better over time to win people to affirm doctrine than to smash it down on them from the top.

Not many years ago, my 14-year-old daughter who was a warrior for Christ, told us after she was diagnosed with cancer, “Daddy, the Lord may be able to use my life to glorify him more with this cancer in a short age than he would ever be able to use my life as an extended life, for 70 or 80 years.” We buried her 21 months later. So she left a great legacy. We’re so thankful to God for that and we have no regrets about the way we raised her and her relationship with the Lord and the influence that she had on us and the community as a whole, but it still hurts naturally.

Then 18 months after we buried her, my son who was a Georgia Tech rising junior, preparing to go on a six-month collegiate trip, had his car overturned and he was killed one night. So we buried him as well. And we thank the Lord for our children and we’re not living in bitterness toward God. We love the Lord and we taught our children that, but in some ways, we’re walking wounded. And while there’s not a specific question I have for you, it’s a very complicated part of life and we want God’s will to be accomplished in our lives too and we want God to use these experiences to glorify him through us. But would you take a minute and comment on situations like this?

This is why I like live questions. What a ministry you have had. We’re going to get there. Romans 8:23 says:

And not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies.

Creation is full of groaning. I love Romans 8, mainly because it’s just so full of reality, so full of groaning, and the Holy Spirit helps us in our weakness. The context of Romans 8:26 is that the Holy Spirit helps us in our weakness because we don’t know how to pray as we ought. How in the world do you pray? I think the context there is groaning of futility and fallenness, premature deaths, sickness rampant — vicious, horrible, ugly things. It’s just everywhere.

So you would say, “Do we pray, ‘Take it away’ with the 14-year-old? Or, ‘Glorify Christ in my death.’” And you don’t know which to pray for. I think that’s the very point of that verse. The Holy Spirit helps us in our prayer because we do not know how to pray as we ought, but the Spirit intercedes for you too with your groanings to the Lord, and the Lord hears and knows the mind of the spirit and will do what you need done when you don’t have a clue what to pray anymore. And my guess is this is incredibly fresh, even though you are managing pretty well. And that loss will be felt 30 years from now, big time.

My mother died when I was 28. I’m 57. We’re coming up on 30 years now and I can taste it like it was yesterday when that bus accident happened and the autopsy said, “Lacerated medulla oblongata.” It’s like yesterday. So I don’t want to be all breezy and say you’ll get over it. You really won’t. You’ll never get over it. It will be like an amputation and you will always be trying to scratch your nose and the arm will not be there. And so you’ll take that to your grave and just like your daughter said, God will, in ways you never dreamed, turn it for his glory and for your good.

I really like coming to The Cove because so many hurting people come here. So many. I think maybe it’s because I started with Ruth and Job. The flavor of this place for me is pain, which is why I love it because I’m a Christian Hedonist, right? I go around trying to tell people to be happy all the time. And the older I get, the more I go to 2 Corinthians 6:10, where Paul says, “Sorrowful but always rejoicing.” He was always sorrowful, and always rejoicing. The Christian life is a miracle. It’s a paradox.

You made a comment about Peter saying that Paul was hard to understand and that sounds just like something Peter would say and then turn around and write in 1 Peter 3:18–22 what he wrote. Could you help me with that passage? It almost sounds like Jesus went and preached to dead people and they had a second chance. And then he makes a comment about baptism, which saves us, which doesn’t sound right. Can you just talk about Paul?

You better just choose one of those questions. Which one do you want? Preaching to the dead or being saved by baptism? There are problems in the Bible. I find them every day and spend most of my time trying to think them through. I’ll just tell you, get Wayne Grudem’s commentary in the IVP little paperback and his view is my view. I think it’s the right view and it does not mean that Jesus went to hell. The text says:

For Christ also suffered once for sins, the righteous for the unrighteous, that he might bring us to God, being put to death in the flesh but made alive in the spirit, in which he went and proclaimed to the spirits in prison . . . (1 Peter 3:18–19).

That can either mean he did it then between his death and resurrection, or that he did it back in the days of Noah, for example, which is what the reference is here. So let’s read it again. That might just give you a new possibility to think about:

[He was] made alive in the spirit, in which he went (2,000 years ago) and proclaimed to the spirits in prison, because they formerly did not obey, when God’s patience waited in the days of Noah . . .

So that text does not demand a descent of Jesus into hell preaching to the spirits who then have a second chance to get out. I think it does mean that the Spirit in which he was raised is the Spirit that he was preaching through when Noah preached to those in his day. And with regard to being “saved by baptism,” it’s ironic that that sounds like baptismal regeneration in the very verse that is the clearest definition that baptism must be faith — no offense to the Presbyterians. Just a little bit of offense. But it’s not to alienate us from one another. All my heroes disagree with me on baptism, so you can be a hero of mine too. First Peter 3:21 says:

Baptism, which corresponds to this, now saves you (and here comes an all-important qualification), not as a removal of dirt from the body but as an appeal to God for a good conscience, through the resurrection of Jesus Christ . . .

Insofar as baptism is an appeal to God (that’s faith), it saves. In other words, what baptism represents, saves. That’s my understanding of this. James Dunn in his book, Jesus and Baptism, says that’s the clearest definition of baptism in the New Testament — an appeal of a good heart to God. So I don’t think a baby can do that, which is why I don’t baptize babies.

Given Paul’s comments about circumcision in Galatians, why does he circumcise Timothy in Acts 16?

Because he’s free to do whatever advances the gospel. In other words, in Galatians 2, when they spied out their freedom and wanted to get Titus circumcised, he said, “The gospel hangs on this. I will not circumcise him,” because in that context, to compromise and say, “Well, to really be right with God and completely acceptable, you got to be circumcised,” he wouldn’t touch it with a 10-foot pole. However, when Timothy is brought into the apostolic band, nobody’s making a big deal out of his fact that his father was a Greek and he was uncircumcised. He says, “Now, what would be the most strategic thing to do here for the gospel?” And he’s free. He’s free to be under the law, he’s free to be without the law. And so he said, “Timothy, I think probably to avoid a stumbling block, let’s just get this taken care of and then we won’t have to deal with this in every synagogue where we go to.”

I think that that’s just a good model for how free we are with non-essentials. We’re really free to do things or not do things. There are all kinds of things that Christians quibble about, which I think we’re just free to do or not do according to what we believe will advance the cause of the gospel.

I’m a college student and I just started walking with the Lord about two years ago, and God really brought me to a church that nurtured me and really was a major catalyst for my growing in Christ. They teach the baptism of the Holy Spirit as a second experience, and I’ve wrestled with that in Scripture and I’ve always wondered what you thought about that and if you could comment on that?

Let’s see, I want to say two things. The baptism of the Holy Spirit as Paul understands it in 1 Corinthians 12:13 is I think virtually synonymous with regeneration, and therefore it happens once and it happens to every Christian. We are baptized into Christ. I suspect that Luke’s use of that term in Acts 1 is different from Paul’s, and refers to the outpouring of the Holy Spirit for acts of witness and power, which can then be also repeated. If somebody wants to ask me, “What do you think about the baptism of the Holy Spirit?” I want to say, “Do you mean Paul’s term or Luke’s term?”

Now, theologically, I want to disagree with the theology you’re probably talking about, that is first you get saved and you have the Holy Spirit and your sins are forgiven and you’re right with God. And now this second thing needs to happen, called the baptism, in which . . . and then how do you fill up what it means? And in one tradition it means speaking in tongues. Until you speak in tongues, you haven’t been baptized. Now, I think that’s wrong for several reasons. I don’t think everybody does speak in tongues, even though I’m not against the gift in principle. I don’t think it can be made a mark of maturity. Paul clearly doesn’t want to make it a mark of maturity. In fact, it’s more of a problem than a help in Corinth in his view.

But what I want to say positively about the charismatic movement and the Third Wave version of it, not the historic Pentecostal way, but the Third Wave type is that we all need to pray for the fullness of the Holy Spirit. Paul commanded, “Be filled with the Holy Spirit,” in Ephesians 5:18, and he prayed in Ephesians 3:19 that we would, “Know the love of Christ which passes knowledge, and be filled with all the fullness of God.” Now, that, many Christians are not experiencing, and they ought to.

So I would just say it’s not just a second blessing, but third, fourth, fifth, sixth, 10th, or 100th. We ought to be filled over and over again. If some people want to call the first time that happens, baptism, I’m not going to squabble about that, but we all need more power than we have. Jesus says:

But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the end of the earth (Acts 1:8).

How are you doing? That’s what happens when you’re filled with the Holy Spirit. You’re dynamically, joyfully, overflowingly, courageously, testifying to the grace of God in your life. And there’s not a person in this room as full as you ought to be. And so let’s pray for the fullness of the Holy Spirit but not limit it to just a second one-time thing.

Is there biblical direction to an Acts 2 type of church, as to the balance between inward feeding the flock and outreach to the secular community? I’m thinking particularly of the needy, the alcoholics, the addicts, the social needs of the surrounding community that are not being met by any other organization.

I think that’s probably the test of whether they’re getting good food. In other words, I don’t want to play those two off at all. In fact, I think social action, which is imperative — mercy ministries, let’s call them. Tim Keller has an excellent book on mercy ministries. Let’s call them that. Those are the fruit of being well-taught, well-fed and empowered. If my people are not ministering to the needs of others, taking risks, laying their lives down, being sacrificial, I feel like I’m not accomplishing what I should. I don’t care how good their doctrine is. We must teach in such a way that good doctrine kindles a flame of love for broken people, of all those kinds you mentioned. This is a big deal for us right now at my church because I don’t think we’re doing as well as we should, and a lot of people are reading that book and we’re trying to figure out how we can do better in the city than we’ve done in Minneapolis, and how should we structure the church in terms of growth and multiple services and ethnic orientations and kinds of worship?

These are things that I am no authority on and am constantly blubbering around trying to figure out the next way forward. But I just know that when I lay down my life, I will take more joy in a church that has loved people than has gotten their doctrine straight, because good doctrine is meant to serve love.

I’ll add a little anecdote here. I was in Scotland a couple of weeks ago, talking to 400 pastors, and this is going to get on tape and get one of those guys, but that’s okay. I said it to them, “Okay, what’s our calling as pastors? It’s 1 Timothy 1:5. The goal of our instruction is . . .” Nobody said “love.”

The aim of our charge is love that issues from a pure heart and a good conscience and a sincere faith (1 Timothy 1:5).

So faith yields love, a good conscience yields love, and a pure heart yields love. Everything is aiming at love in the ministry. And those guys couldn’t finish the verse. I got really mad at them. I said, “How could you be pastors and not know what your calling is?” There was silence in the congregation. I reeled that one back in and said, “Sorry guys. Maybe you don’t memorize Scripture in Scotland.” That didn’t help either.

Last night, you just made a passing comment about the fact that some people have different views now about what’s going to be the eternal destination of those who don’t respond to Jesus Christ? You talked about a conscious torment and it just seems like recently, I’ve been reading more things from respected evangelical pastors and scholars that seem to be changing their view on this, to think maybe of annihilationism or some kind of non-existence. Could you just share briefly what your thinking is on that?

Annihilationism is one wrong view and it saddened me a lot when a couple of my heroes went in that direction. What that means for those of you who don’t know is that there really will be no people in hell forever. What happens to unbelievers when they die is that they get annihilated. And so there’s no conscious eternal torment, which I think is unbiblical. I think two factors are feeding the resistance to the exclusivity of Christ and the eternality of hell. And they are the multi-faith context in which we increasingly live, and the a-doctrinal relational sensitivity in which we live — these two impulses. All the religions are getting closer to us and it’s very hard in the presence to stay this way. You go to public school, you have Hindus and Buddhists and Muslims there. It’s very hard to sound loving and say they will all perish if they don’t believe in Christ, which is what we absolutely must say.

Then with regard to the emotional side, the relational side, I just think we are a touchy-feely country and we’re a touchy-feely church, and it’s very hard for typical American Christians to stand on principle when they get called names like “intolerant” or “hard” or “unfeeling” or “uncaring.” We hate to be wounded like that. We love to be liked and therefore we are so relational. We want to keep relationships good so that we will begin to compromise principle and truth. And one of the truths that goes quickly is hell, because it’s hard. It’s a hard thing. We ought to weep when we talk about hell and not get angry mainly when we talk about hell and defend our position. We ought to weep over the people that are heading there and plead with them with all our heart not to go there and offer them Jesus at any cost to us in order for them to escape. So I think those would be two impulses for why so many are moving in that direction.

Could you comment on what Paul talks about for women on head covering?

My understanding of First Corinthians 11, and I’ve written a paper on this and it’s available online, is that that text says women are praying and prophesying in public. And to do that, Paul says, “To be appropriate, they should cover their heads.” There’s a little bit of ambiguity about whether this is some kind of headgear that connotes submissiveness to the men in the church. It doesn’t silence them. I came from a home where they go to a church where the women can’t talk at business meetings. I think that’s a mistake because of 1 Corinthians 11. They are praying and they are prophesying. Some kind of word from the Lord is being shared in public.

Now, Paul and I are complementarians, not egalitarians. That is, I believe that there are differences between men and women. Those differences, God intends to be reflected in different roles. The rub is trying to just get those roles right in the home with headship and submission, without any ugliness. And in the church I believe men should be the elders and the women should respond happily and joyfully to support that and have lots of freedom in ministry within that kind of context.

Now, with regard to the head covering, here is a thought. I really don’t have time to give all the arguments from, “Does not nature teach you that long hair is a woman’s glory?” You say, “How does nature teach that?” Because in all of the animals of the world, the males have more hair than the women, including humans, like on our face. And if we let our hair grow, it’ll get as long as a woman’s hair. So how does nature teach you that long hair is a woman’s glory? It might’ve been what they used to bind up and cover a certain kind of thing to signify, “We are women and we’re not trying to push ourselves here.” My answer to that is that “nature” there means your native sense of propriety in this culture shows you that when women speak, they should have a head covering.

Now, I ask then, “Okay, what would be the native sense of propriety in this culture that a woman should use to signify that she’s supportive of the male leadership of the church?” Here’s an illustration of what I mean by native sense of propriety. If a man walks into this room in a dress and high heels and stockings, I would say, “Doesn’t nature teach you not to dress like that?” And all I mean by that is in this culture, everything about that guy signifies femininity, which is a mistake. He shouldn’t do that. Whereas kilts and robes and in other cultures may be totally different as far as what signifies femininity and what signifies masculinity.

I would just ask all the women, who share my view anyway, to think through now what might be ways that I can dress and act and speak to call attention to the fact that I’m supportive of the spiritual Christ-like, humble, male leadership of this church? I just leave it at that and I’m flexible. We have about three women who wear little white things on their heads in my church. I don’t get in their face and say, “Oh, that looks funny, don’t do that.” And we have women with real short hair like my wife, and we have women with hair’s never been cut, and we’re just all over the map on those things. And at the level of symbol, I have a lot of freedom, in other words, just like with Timothy.

I wonder if you could address either now or in your treatment of sanctification, the situation with long-term bondages of the past and wreckage, especially among prisoners and present prisoners, ex-inmates, who struggle excruciatingly with coming and going and prodigalism of all types? Maybe people who are genuinely saved and struggle with that?

That’s the issue is how you can have assurance of your salvation when you struggle as much as many do. And we will get to it tonight as we move towards the witness of the Holy Spirit in Romans 8:16, which says, “The Holy Spirit witnesses with our spirit that we are the children of God.” We’ll talk about how that relates to being led by the Holy Spirit, which means fighting sin. I don’t know how much sin God tolerates in any given person’s life before he deems it as without sufficient evidence that they’re born of God. I don’t know the answer to that. I just know there is a sinning which is unto death, and we shouldn’t sin that way. And therefore, our passion with prisoners or addicts or people with long-term battles of all kinds is to constantly be helping them and struggling with them. I don’t think we’re ever called upon to give up on them.

John Newton never gave up on William Cowper, the depressed one who for the last seven years of his life was so depressed that he never went to church. He tried to kill himself twice. And Newton laid hold on this man and loved him and wouldn’t let him go. I’ll just be very practical here and bring the rest of you up to date. When I was here last time, I asked people to pray for Abraham, my son who’s on his detour away from Christ and rejecting my vision of God and calling himself an unbeliever and he broke my heart. And last October, God laid hold of him and brought him to himself. It was a beautiful email I got. The first line of it from Pensacola, Florida where he was living in a van making rock music was, “I am saved.” That’s the sweetest sentence a father could hear. And then he gave the things that had happened. And on the 30th of July, when I get back from vacation, we’ll have a reconciliation service at the church because we excommunicated my son. It was the worst business meeting I’ve ever been at.

Now, here’s the point of this illustration though. The elders, maybe since January, have wrestled with whether he could have been a believer or not, because it bears on baptism. Can you go for two years saying you don’t believe and be born again? I never had to wrestle with it so long. And the elders were very slow to assume he was an unbeliever because of what they knew of him for 20 years and his walk with God, and the evidence that they saw during these three years of waywardness in which he could have gone over an edge that he didn’t go over. And there were certain evidences of respect for me that he kept over those years. They wrestled at a level as to how to treat him now. And I don’t really have an answer for that. I’m open to things I didn’t know I’d be open to in terms of backsliding, and that God may suffer a person to go for a season of actual verbal rejection of God.

That’s easy for you to understand in the short run, isn’t it? You can all imagine a person so angry and so depressed and so broken and so hurt that they say something they wish they hadn’t said to God. They just say it. And Job calls that “words for the wind.” A wise counselor will just let them be words for the wind. They won’t say, “Oh, if you say that, you can’t be a believer.” No, no, no. We’ll wait. We’ll say, “Oh my. They didn’t mean that. It didn’t come from the bottom of their heart.” Now the question would be, how long could such a period like that last? A night, we can handle, right? They confess it in the morning. We can handle that. Can you handle two nights, three, four?

All I know to say is I never gave Abraham any encouragement that he was saved, and I don’t think you should ever give a person encouragement like that. When they’re saying, “I’m not a believer,” treat them that way. We excommunicated him. He wasn’t a believer.