Is there a difference between a bitter providences that come owing to sin in our lives and those that don’t?

Let me take you to Psalm 107. It’s obvious some bad things happen to us because we make stupid mistakes. I mean, if you drive over the speed limit and miss a turn and your car flies off the cliff, that’s your fault. But, God was in charge of it. He could have called you to slow down, he could have given you a blowout, he could have put a policeman in the way, and he could have changed your mind. Your free will is not at stake there, if there were such a thing as free will. Maybe there is, maybe there isn’t, depending on your definition. You can ask that if you want. In other words, God can stop you from going over the speed limit, from making that choice. He can stop you from making that choice without contradicting the power of choice.

I’ll give you an illustration I gave to one of the brothers beforehand this morning. When Abraham and Sarah went down into Egypt, Abimelech was the king. Abraham lied about Sarah being his wife and Abimelech took her into his harem. And you have sex with your new woman the night you get her and try her out, and he didn’t. The next morning, he finds out that she’s the man’s wife and he’s afraid, and he’s mad at Abraham and God speaks to him and says, “I prevented you from having sex with her.”

Now, if in a pagan king’s life God can cause him not to incline with effectual will towards a sin, he can do that anytime, anywhere, without jeopardizing our accountability. So to say that I sinned and got myself into this trouble does not mean God was not in charge. It doesn’t mean God couldn’t have stopped it. Those that throw up against me all kinds of horrors and tragedies in the world caused by men against men and say, “Don’t blame God for this, because where man is doing evil to man, God is not doing it,” I say, “Well, you may say that in principle, but I’ll tell you, the mothers involved and the husbands involved and the kids involved know better. They know that as the pain is happening through the enemy, God could stop the enemy if he wanted to.” It’s the fact that he doesn’t that causes the theological problem. It’s not the fact that he’s not doing it directly, but that Satan is doing it. That doesn’t mean that we have a nice easy solution. If we say, “Oh good, Satan caused Job’s boils not God.” Well, that wasn’t Job’s solution at all, because Job said, “Shall we receive good at the hand of the Lord and not receive evil?”

So there are two answers to this question. Yes, there are differences between the evils that come to us because of our sin and the ones that don’t. But the difference does not lie in the sovereignty of God. He’s sovereign in both. He manages sin in the world and he manages righteousness in the world. He’s in just as much in charge of sinful circumstances as he is in righteous circumstances. He’s not ever dropping the ball. You can point to many instances in the Bible where God is orchestrating sin. I’ll give you two.

The descent of Joseph into Egypt is through sin, and God is doing it. It says, we read it last night. You helped me find it. Psalm 105:16 says that God sent Joseph.” How did he do it? By sinful brothers who threw him into a pit and sold him into slavery. That’s sin. God was orchestrating sin to accomplish his good purposes. It’s the same thing — and this is the most vivid one — on the cross. The greatest sins that have ever been committed are the hammering the nails through Jesus, Pilate’s expediency, the, “Crucify him, Crucify him,” the mockery, the spitting, and the slapping. Every bit of it was orchestrated and planned by God. It’s all sin.

Now, if you can handle that, you’ve got a theology to live by. If you can’t handle that, you don’t have an atonement. Or you have to say, “God didn’t want it to happen but Jesus made it happen.” Or you say, “Really, no, Jesus didn’t make it happen. Pilate made it happen. Thank you for my salvation, Pilate.” There’s no way to make sense out of the Old and New Testament when you realize the detail to which Christ was submitting in the last hours of his death. Every time the writers say, “It was being fulfilled. It was being fulfilled. It was being fulfilled,” and Psalm 22 is opening before us. You have the sovereignty of God orchestrating the sin of man right down to the plucking of the beard and the spitting in his face.

So it’s not biblically difficult to show that the pain that comes into our lives owing to our own sin or other sin is not because God has dropped the ball. He’s in charge, he rules. Yes, ultimately it’s a mystery. I don’t have any problem sending you away with mysteries. If you can’t figure a few things out, like how God can be sovereign and rule all things and himself not be a sinner, well live with that. I mean, here’s the key bottom line sentence in my mystery. God is not a sinner when he wills that sin be. It is not sin for God to will that sin be. If it were, then God would be a sinner or there’d be no sin. And if you insert free will as the solution, it’s not a solution. It’s just a name on the mystery. You just put a name on it.

“Lucifer, why’d you do that first sin?” One answer is free will. Another answer is God’s inscrutable foreordaining providence that does not make him a sinner. Well, this is the biblical one and this is not, because free will is no explanation. It doesn’t do anything. It’s utterly absurd, causeless, and it doesn’t have any significant explanation. And here’s the bottom line reason why it’s not a biblical answer: The Bible teaches that God planned our salvation from all eternity through Christ, which means, he had to have planned sin. If he planned from all eternity that there’d be a cross, he had to have planned from all eternity that there’d be a need for the cross.

Now let’s see. I was going to take you to Psalm 107. In Psalm 107, you have this wonderful encouragement. I’ve used this Psalm in counseling sessions probably as much as any other text, and here’s why. Let’s go to Psalm 107:10, say. There’s this paragraph after paragraph about people who experience trouble, and they call out to God and he rescues them. Some of the trouble is caused by people outside of them and not them, and some is caused by them. Now here at Psalm 107:10 it says:

Some sat in darkness and in the shadow of death,
     prisoners in affliction and in irons,
for they had rebelled against the words of God,
     and spurned the counsel of the Most High.
So he bowed their hearts down with hard labor;
     they fell down, with none to help.
Then they cried to the Lord in their trouble,
     and he delivered them from their distress.

That same verse occurs in Psalm 107:6, Psalm 107:19, and Psalm 107:28. “They cried out, he saved them. They cried out, he saved them. They cried out, he saved them,” applies to people who are in fixes that they brought on themselves through sin, and some that they didn’t bring on themselves through sin. So practically, the answer to this question is, God’s sovereignty and God’s mercy make it so that there’s no significant difference as to whether what you’re dealing with now was brought on yourself or not. So right now in this room, maybe some of you have diseases. Some of you might have smoked for 40 years, that’s why you have lung cancer. And another might say, “I never smoked a day in my life and I’ve got lung cancer.” Another may be, “I got divorced and to my knowledge, I did absolutely nothing to bring this on. Nothing that came close to warranting his or her leaving me.” And another one you know did almost everything wrong, and wish you could do it all over again. But where you are right now is right here in Psalm 107:12. God is humbling you. They stumbled, there was none to help.

You may feel that way and then Psalm 107:13 is where I want you to be, which says, “They cried out to the Lord in their trouble.” And if you say here, “Yeah, but if my trouble is caused by my own sin, I can’t cry out.” Well no, that’s not true because this text says that they were in that situation because of their own rebellion. So you don’t have to decide how much of it was your fault and how much of it was somebody else’s fault. What you need to decide is, will I cry out and trust the mercy of God?

Last Sunday, I was on this point about our own depravity and I said, “My view of my own depravity is that I’ve never done a good deed for which I don’t have to repent.” That’s how bad I think I am. I’ve never done a good deed for which I don’t need to repent. Meaning, I don’t think in this life, short of a totally renewed heart, I will ever have perfect motives. Which means very practically as a pastor, I’m freed when people come into my office and they say, “I tried to do this but I just don’t know whether my motives were pure or not.” I say, “I know. They weren’t, and you don’t need to break your brain trying to figure out whether they were or not.”

Nobody has ever done a good deed with perfect motive except Jesus. And therefore, if the only way you’re going to be able to appropriate Romans 8:28 — “God works all things together for good for those who love God and are called according to his purpose” — if you have perfect love for God. Or you did enough good things with good motives, that now you qualify for loving God, and now you can have hope in that promise, then you will have no hope in that promise. That promise will never do you any good at all, because you’ve made it into such a legalistic thing that you have to earn it.

You have touched on free will. Could you expound on it more?

I’ll tell you two ways that people tend to use “free will,” one of which I would agree with and one of which I wouldn’t. And the wouldn’t one is the one that tends to be the technical one. I think most people who have not spent a lot of time wrestling with the hard texts of the Bible in a docile way and are trying to put together all the pieces of the Bible — and that’s most people — mean by free will I have to choose in order to be saved. And God’s going to hold me accountable to choose, and my choices have to be real and authentic and not puppet-like.

I think that’s all they mean. They stop right there. They don’t ask you more questions. That’s all they mean by it. And so if they would hear me say, “I don’t believe in it,” they would hear something untrue, because I do believe in that. We must choose, our choices must be real and authentic. That’s not philosophically what Arminians mean by “free will.” The technical term that separates Calvinists and Arminians, and if you don’t like the word Calvinism, chuck it, because I don’t believe everything Calvin believed. I’m a Baptist, for example, not a Presbyterian, though 60 percent of you may be Presbyterian or whatever. That’s a small thing.

What the articulate, schooled, thoughtful, educated Arminian means is ultimate self-determination. “Free will” means ultimate self-determination. So you push the choice issue back and back and back, as to why did you choose? And why did you choose? And why did you choose? The end answer, the last answer is man, not God. Whereas a Calvinist, when you push him back behind his choice to say, “Why did one person choose and not another?” he stops with God. That’s the difference.

So I don’t believe in free will if you say free will means ultimate self-determination. So when you stand at the judgment day and you give an account for why you believed and another person didn’t believe, what are you going to say? If that question comes up at the judgment, when you’re giving an account for your life as to why you should be accepted into God’s favor, and you say, “Christ loved me and gave himself for me. He provided for me an alien righteousness and a substitutionary death so that all my sins are forgiven for his sake, not my sake. And I am in him by faith. I received him as the treasure of my life.” That’s the right answer.

If St. Peter or Jesus or God the Father or somebody says, “Well just for Christ’s sake and to make sure he gets all the glory, why did you receive him and Joe didn’t?” What are you going to say? I hope you don’t say, “I was smarter. I was innately more spiritual. I was always given to spiritual things,” or something like that. I hope what you’ll say is, “It was not my own doing. It was the gift of God not of works. It wasn’t of myself. You overcame all my rebellion. You took out the heart of stone. You put in the heart of flesh. You moved in and You triumphed over all my objections. I was left standing face to face with an all-glorious Christ whom I could not reject because he triumphed in beauty and truth and love over all the other competing treasures of my life. And I simply yielded by virtue of his transforming work in my life.”

I mean you don’t have to be that fancy with your language. You can just say, “You gave it to me” or, “You caused it,” or, “You brought it about.” And I think a big smile will come across the Holy Spirit’s face, because his mission in the world is to glorify Jesus. And he wants Jesus to get the glory for all of your salvation, not just part of it. And an absolutely crucial part of your salvation is why you received him. Why did you receive him. Jesus says, “Nobody comes to me, nobody receives me, nobody cherishes me, nobody trusts me, unless the Father drags him.” Or I’ll give you one or two other texts.

In 2 Timothy 2:26, it says that we pastors and other church leaders are to correct our opponents with gentleness, “if perchance God may grant them repentance to come to a knowledge of the truth.” Grant them repentance.Now repentance is the choice. You see, repentance is not something that comes after you’ve made your choice. Repentance is the choice to be freed, to renounce, and to turn away from sin. And yet, I stand up on Sunday morning and I look people right in the eye and I say, “Repent, I call you to repent. You repent.” And there’s the tension that people feel. They think, “You’re saying it’s a gift and you’re telling them to do it.” I say, “Yes, because the word creates the deed.”

When Jesus said to the dead Lazarus, “Lazarus, come forth.” Did he obey? Yes, he obeyed, but he was dead. He was dead. So how did he obey? The command, “You obey,” created the obedience. That’s gospel preaching.

Now gospel preachers don’t even have to believe that for God to do that. That’s how gracious I think God is. If anybody gets saved, that’s how they got saved, whether they believe it or not. If anybody’s saved, it’s because God raised the dead (Ephesians 2:5). Paul says:

But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ — by grace you have been saved . . . (Ephesians 2:4–5).

Have you ever wondered why that little phrase, “By grace you’ve been saved,” is stuck in right there? It’s because it’s really coming in at Ephesians 2:8. It’s stuck in, it breaks the grammar in Ephesians 2:5. You were dead. He raised you from the dead, and he says as a parenthesis “by grace you’ve been saved,” and he made you sit in the heavenly places to show you this lavish kindness for all eternity. Now he gets to Ephesians 2:8 and he says:

For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast (Ephesians 2:8–9).

That’s because he wanted us to know that when he got to verse eight and he said, “By grace you have been saved through faith and that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God,” he wanted you to really feel the full force of what’s the gift of God — everything that comes after death. You were dead. And he said, “Lazarus, Piper, live.” And you know what happened at that moment? It’s not conscious. What’s conscious is, Christ suddenly is compelling. For years, he’s been a matter of indifference. Right now, I can point to people I love very much for whom Jesus is not compelling. He’s not compelling, and so they walk away. What has to happen? God has to say, “See.” And at that moment they won’t say, “What was that voice?” They won’t say that. They’ll just see. This is called “irresistible grace” or “effectual calling.” When God says, “See. Live. Behold,” we will see.

Probably the most important text for evangelism in my life would be on this score, 2 Corinthians 4:4–6, because it says in verse four, “The god of this age has blinded the minds of unbelievers to keep them from seeing the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ who is the image of God.” So there’s this blinding effect that keeps us from seeing the compellingness of the glory. Well, what’s got to change? Verse six says, “The God who said, ‘Let light shine out of darkness,’ has shown in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ.” That’s what has to happen.

God says, “Let there be light in a dark heart,” and there is light. And that creates choice. So you must choose, you must choose. And morally right now, you will not choose for Christ until God says, “Let there be light.” And then you do the rational, obvious free choice. That’s why I’m willing to even use the word “free will.” Because when you do choose Jesus, it feels totally free. I’m doing it. He’s compelling. Why wouldn’t you do it? He’s glorious. He’s beautiful. He’s true. He’s all-satisfying. I freely embrace him.

We see tolerance for condoning sin in America but also there is a need for tolerance for those who don’t have the light you were just speaking about. Could you speak on this tolerance and where we are as zealous Christians, if we are?

This is very relevant for me. Somebody sent me an email in my own church the other day. We put banners on top of our church because we really are a right downtown church and people come off the freeways and see us. Thousands of cars go by every day, and we put huge banners up. The one that’s up there now is called, “Risk Reading the Bible.” We put things like that up, just little catchy statements. And one of them that was put forward was, “How about ‘truth not tolerance’?” I’ve vetoed that immediately.

I don’t do many vetoes in my church because that’s not a good way to lead. I’ve vetoed that. I wrote to Dave and said, “If you’ll let me, I will veto that.” And here’s the reason. The context in which I live right now is very heated and very controversial in regards to Jewish evangelism. You’re not asking about that. You’re asking about, I suppose, tolerance of various doctrines. And you said sin, so I’m not sure what you’re asking, but I’ll address what I feel like addressing. And then you tell me whether I’m anywhere close.

I believe Christianity is the best foundation for tolerance that there is, meaning this: The last thing a Christian believes in is coerced faith. You can’t get baptism with swords, guns, or bullets. We’re not Muslim fundamentalists who believe that you can use warfare to conquer lands on behalf of Allah. Jesus said, “If my kingdom were of this world, my disciples would fight.” Since it is not of this world, we suffer. He said that on his way to the cross. The crusades were wrong, and we should repent of them. And all Jewish anti-Semitism is wrong, and we should repent of it. All Jewish haters who call them Christ killers and do pogroms are wrong, and we should renounce it. In other words, Christianity is the religion of tolerance.

You see, I’m talking to a certain kind of issue here that may not be quite where you were, but I’m triggered by this. They want to hang up on our church, “truth not tolerance,” but I want to say, “Truth, therefore tolerance, of a certain kind.” Now you may be asking about the wimpy attitudes that evangelicals have about every kind of false teaching and every kind of sin in the world. And we’re so scared to stand up and say we disagree with anything, because somebody’s going to find fall with us. If that’s what you mean, amen, let’s chuck the whole thing. But let’s do better than, “Let’s not be tolerant.” Let’s talk about love here for what it really is.

I’ll just give the situation in Minneapolis, and you can judge this. We have Protestant controversies like open theism. That’s the teaching these days, that God doesn’t know the future because the future hasn’t happened yet. And therefore, it’s a non-entity and it can’t be known even by God, and that’s a way to get God off the hook. Clark Pinnock, Greg Boyd, and John Sanders have written the key books on that and support that kind of teaching. I think it’s dead wrong, and the tolerance that it finds to me is appalling. And when I say it shouldn’t be tolerated, what I mean is, not that there should be guns or swords, but that there should be clear, articulate, forceful, caring, loving, pastoral statements that it’s damaging doctrine.

Say it out loud, pastors. Say it out loud. Stand up at denominational meetings and say, “This should not be taught in our schools. This will hurt churches. It will hurt young people. It will hurt missions. It will hurt everything because it is such a false view of God.” But there should be no force, no hostility in the sense of ugliness and mean-spiritedness, but forcefulness and earnestness and contending for the truth. And it may involve firing people who don’t hold to certain doctrinal statements of faith. Now, there’s another piece of non-tolerance.

Once you’ve defined a community — a school, a church or whatever — with a certain affirmation of faith, and people in there start playing fast and loose with that affirmation of faith like they did in the Southern Baptist church for a long time at the seminaries, then a right view of tolerance would be to say, “We need right now to say that because they’ve agreed to live within this and they aren’t living within this, they should not be tolerated.” So am I getting close to what you had in mind?

The Jewish situation is this. “Jews for Jesus” is coming to Minneapolis in August, and they’re going to hit the streets and they’re going to put big billboards everywhere. And they’re going to try to lead Jewish and Gentile people to belief in the Messiah, Jesus Christ, without whom there is no life.

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

This is absolutely enraging to the Jewish community. We got a letter at our church because we’re hosting “Jews for Jesus.” And I’m a big church right downtown where all these other liberal big churches are. Nine pastors signed this letter who said, “If you do this, you’re not following the Spirit of Jesus to try to convert Jews to Christianity, and you are going to get trouble from us in the press.”

So I got on the phone and I took the guy who wrote the letter out to lunch. And after we had a lunch together and we found out in the two universes where we function, I called the most influential rabbi in the city, Joseph Edelheit, and took him out to lunch. He’s a Reformed Jew, and I listened to him tell me how this was like genocide, this is like the Holocaust to bring the “Jews for Jesus” in here. And tolerance is what they’re asking for. I’ll just give you the key sentence and then I’ll stop on this one. He looked at me and he said, “John, I have a place in my heart for Christians and their way of salvation. Why don’t you have a place in your heart for Jews and our way of salvation without Jesus?” Now, you can see all the ways language is being used there. He is saying, “You don’t have a place in your heart for Jewish people.” I mean, you say that in a public setting and you’ve almost won. You’ve almost won the battle, because it’s so clever. People today know how to work language. They really know how to work language.

Well, we were at Sydney’s Restaurant and we’re sitting across the table from each other. And I leaned across the table, about 18 inches from his face and I said, “When Paul said in Romans 10:1, ‘My heart’s desire and prayer to God for them, my Jewish kinsmen, is that they might be saved,’ and when he said in Romans 9, ’Would to God that I could be accursed and cut off from Christ for my kinsmen according to the flesh,’ he had a big place in his heart for them and so do I. You need to believe in Jesus to be saved.”

Well, that just about ended it, and he was furious. He’s really furious, and he will make life difficult for the Jews for Jesus. But I’m going to say out loud, I don’t believe tolerance means Jews shouldn’t go on the street at Nicollet Mall with big yellow T-shirts and take leaflets and find people and say, “Do you know the Messiah, Jesus?” and press for a decision, for eternity’s sake. I’m going to fight like crazy to preserve that, that form of love. That’s a form of love to evangelize like that. They call it arrogant and they call it intolerant. Those are the two catch words, arrogance and intolerance. I come back and say, “No, it’s love. It’s love.” So we’re in two universes of speech and two universes of Bible understanding.

Two of my young granddaughters, nine and six-and-a-half, have both accepted Christ. The older one has been baptized. They are in a Baptist Church, and the younger one is begging her mother to be baptized. When asked, “Why did you want to go forward,” the older granddaughter said, “I just love Jesus and I wanted to go forward and really accept him.” Now they know nothing of doctrine or theology or anything like that. Is it possible that God really put the light in their hearts and minds and pulled them forward at this young age?

Absolutely.

And then, after being taught Scripture through the years and so forth, their faith will enlarge?

Absolutely, good night. Just think of the people who got saved in the Bible knowing almost nothing. God in his sovereign, gracious, merciful, quickening power can save with a mustard seed of truth, and then cause that mustard seed to grow into a great tree. And it’s very difficult when you raise children in a Christian home to know when they believe. I’ve never had an unbeliever in my family, until he turned 21. My boys, I’ve never taught them, “Now we’re going to pray (let’s say before a meal), but I know you’re a pagan, unbelieving, unregenerate child and this prayer means nothing before the Living God.” I never talk to my kids that way. I say, “Say, dear Jesus.” They repeat, “Dear Jesus.” I say, “Thank you for the food.” They say, “Thank you for the food.” I say, “In your name.” They say, “In your name.” I say, “Amen.”

I teach my kids that. They learn these things from as soon as they can talk. And after they can handle a few more phrases, I’ll say, “Okay, let’s pray. Why don’t you pray, Talitha?” She might say, “No, you help me.” I’ll say, “Okay. Father in heaven.” And she says, “Father in heaven.” I’ll say, “Please help me to know you.” She’ll repeat, “Please help me to know you.” I’ll say, “Please help me to trust Jesus always.” She’ll repeat, “Please help me to trust Jesus always.” I’ll say, “Amen.” I’m not angling toward a crisis. Do you see the difference? I don’t say this with any great authoritative parental wisdom, because I obviously blew it with one of my sons. But I don’t know how else to really train up a child in the way he should go if I don’t teach him from six months on to talk to Jesus the way Jesus ought to be talked to, not knowing when this little child’s heart is made new. I’m just going to keep teaching the child that this is the way to love Jesus, this is the way to trust Jesus, and this is the way to talk to Jesus. And I pray earnestly that somewhere along the way their heart is awakened, so that they really mean what they’re saying. Even if I can’t put the day on it.

Now there came a day when, with all of my four sons (and Talitha is on the front end of this), I felt like there was a kind of conscious awakening about guilt and sin. That’s what you look for is when do they start feeling really guilty, genuinely wrong and know it in terms of sin. And then, I have gone to them each and said, “Do you think it might be time to drive a stake in, and in a formal, concerted, focused way, commit yourself to Christ, acknowledge him as Lord and Savior of your life, pray a very decisive prayer, and write it in your Bible?” And that’s been around ages of six, seven, or eight with each of the boys.

Now, maybe I shouldn’t have done that. Maybe I should have waited longer. And maybe I didn’t need to do that, because none of them was saying, “I’m an unbeliever here.” They were just ready to do something more, so that we could say, “I prayed with my daddy in a very decisive way to say, ‘Jesus is Lord.’” We wrote it in all their Bibles. We wrote the prayer that they prayed and it wasn’t, “Come into my heart.” You’re assuming they aren’t there if you pray that way. So you must know more than I do about your kids. But I don’t know that he’s not there, so I feel funny praying that he’d be there.

So I pray what the Bible talks about. The Bible never says, “Pray that Jesus comes into your heart.” Revelation 3:20 is written to Christians. The Bible says, “Believe on the Lord Jesus and you will be saved (Acts 16:31). Confess him with your lips and you will be saved” (Romans 10:9). The Bible talks about faith. So we pray prayers of, “Lord, I am now trusting you as my Savior and Lord. I am now decisively turning from sin. I am now renouncing Satan in all his ways and all his works.” I use my baptismal formula. When we’re in the water, I don’t know what you pastors do, we ask three questions to people.

We say, “Are you now trusting in Jesus Christ alone for the forgiveness of your sins and for the fulfillment of all of his promises to you, even eternal life?” They say, “I am.” The second question is, “Do you now, God helping you, resolve to follow Jesus as Lord and obey his teachings?” They say, “I do.” The Third question is, “Do you now renounce Satan in all his ways and all his works?” They say, “I do so renounce.” We then say, “On your profession of faith in Jesus as your Savior and as your Lord, I now baptize you in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.” Now you take those three things — faith in him, embracing him as Lord, and renouncing Satan — and you can turn that into a prayer for a six-year-old or an eight-year-old or whatever.

So my long answer to a short question is absolutely. The judgment of charity I would use toward every little child who prays that kind of prayer or makes that kind of profession. I would treat them as a Christian and assume that they’re born again and nurture and nurture and nurture. And if when they turn 21, they turn on Jesus, I will either say this is a temporary backsliding and rebellion that God will in due time turn around. Or I will say, if it continues indefinitely, that it was all a hoax and they really didn’t. They really didn’t.

There’s a very popular book out now about the prayer of Jabez. I’m hoping you’ve read it.

I haven’t read it. But go ahead and ask me anyway.

Wilkinson seems to have a very different view of God’s sovereignty, in that our prayers can limit God’s work and what he really wants to do. And I’m wondering if you might comment on that.

I can comment on that, because that’s biblical. James 4:2 says, “You have not because you asked not.” Any other questions? When James says that, “You have not, because you asked not,” and, “You ask and do not receive, because you ask wrongly to spend it on your passions,” clearly he’s saying that God correlates the things he does for us with our prayers. He does. So I’m not about to say prayers don’t matter, good night. Calvinists are the one people who can really pray, because they believe God is sovereign. And if God is not sovereign, he can’t do what we really need to have done, namely the hardest things in the world being fixed. So Calvinists are praying people and evangelistic people and mission-driven people.

But to say that God is limited by our prayers has to be qualified in this way. If I do not pray for what I ought to pray and thus do not receive what I ought to receive, why don’t I? One answer is free will. Another answer is you are choosing not to pray. Why? Because ultimately, God is not granting you the spirit of supplication at that moment. He could overcome that, couldn’t he? I mean, it’s very interesting to follow the prayer movement today. There’s thousands of people in big prayer movements. What do they often pray for? They often pray for a spirit of prayer. Somebody must have prayed for them to pray for a spirit of prayer. And somebody prayed for that person.

If you’re going to really say man is the final buck stopper, then you have to trace some primal prayer that happened way back in the Garden of Eden that caused all other prayers to happen. Well, I don’t think that’s the way to look at it. I think God is sovereign, and in your life right now, nobody in this room is praying as consistently and fervently and biblically as you could pray. We all could grow. So what do we pray when we pray? I pray, “God give me a heart of prayer. I’m always leaning away from prayer and leaning on my own and understanding. God help me to pray.”

I pray about my heart’s inclinations more than I pray about anything, and I get it straight out of the Bible. Psalm 119:36 says, “Incline my heart to your testimonies and not to selfish gain.” What are you asking God to do when you say that? You say, “Incline my heart to your testimonies.” You can say, “We’re limiting God by not reading the Bible and memorizing the way we should.” Yes, but God can clearly incline our heart to his word. We ask him to in Psalm 119:36.

So ultimately, God is sovereign and is not limited by anything outside himself. That’s the ultimate thing. Whether Bruce believes that, I don’t know. I hope he does. I think he probably does. So I want to be careful how I say that. And whether he’s careful in that book to say it in a way that will not mislead people, I don’t know. I haven’t read it. People ask me about that book all the time. I read the first 18 pages and got the illustration I wanted, and it was a positive one, totally positive. I used it in my sermon and people came up to me after and said, “Did you read that book?” I said, “No, I just read the first 18 pages because I wanted to show how he used a life verse like I used a life verse.” And they said, “I think you better read it because I don’t think you’d agree with all of it.” I said, “Oh really?”

So in my second two services I said, “I’m going to use this illustration again anyway, but people told me I should read this book before I use this illustration, because I might not agree with it.” And that’s all I said. I haven’t read it yet because I have other things to read.

As a believer, does God become angry at me when I sin?

If you can distinguish between judicial wrath and fatherly displeasure, yes. I think we probably all can make that distinction. What I mean by judicial wrath is what Jesus absorbed on the cross. When Christ died for me, he bore the wrath of God. There’s double jeopardy if he gets mad at me again. I mean Jesus bore the wrath of God. Either he has lifted it from me and there is therefore now no condemnation — no judicial wrath against me as a sinner in a courtroom, guilty before a holy God. That’s been absorbed by Jesus. That’s my freedom, that’s my hope, that’s my life. But that doesn’t mean he likes everything I do, and that there’s no spankings in the world.

That’s my effort to distinguish between the judicial wrath of God that has been totally removed from me and his fatherly displeasure. He’s my Father. Everything, everything including my spankings on the behind, even if it’s as severe as some terrible accident, or anything in my life, is good for me. It’s Hebrews 12:1–11. He disciplines every son that he receives. He disciplines and no discipline is pleasant at the moment, but it works the peaceful fruit of righteousness. If you read Hebrews 12:1–11, you’ll see a Father who can get upset with his children, discipline them, but all of that is a sign of love, not wrath.

I’ve listened to some of your tapes about the biblical roles of men and women in the church. Our church is a fairly large church, about 1,800 people. They’ve gone with an elder-led program over the past few years. At one point, they brought a woman from a very large ministry in Illinois. I won’t mention it. She is an elder in that church. They brought her to answer questions about eldership and so on. And we inquired at that point, “Will we see women elders in our church?” And there were questions as to whether we would or not. Now, we’ve seen our children’s ministry director, who is a woman, and our senior ministry director, who is a woman, be referred to as “pastors.” There are a lot of concerns about that. Would you address that issue?

I share those concerns. I want to see women fully engaged in ministry, but I want to see that ministry function within biblical parameters, biblical definitions and bounds. I’m persuaded and have written extensively on it in Recovering Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, and I was part of “The Council On Biblical Manhood and Womanhood” and its founding. I’m still on the board. So I share those concerns. What I see in the Bible is that in 1 Timothy 2:12 it says, “I do not permit a woman to teach or to have authority over men.” Those two phrases are the very two things that set an elder apart from a deacon in the list of qualifications. Elders govern, or rule (1 Timothy 5:17), and they must be apt to teach (1 Timothy 3:2). Deacons do not have to be apt to teach and deacons are never described as having this governing function.

So the very two things that distinguish an elder, a presbuteros — which is in my mind interchangeable in the New Testament with “overseer” and with “pastor” — are the very two qualifications that distinguish a deacon from an elder, and a woman is not supposed to do that. So my position would be that women should not be elders. They shouldn’t be part of the ruling counsel of the church. And since I equate “pastor” and “elder” — because I think that’s the way the New Testament deals with those terms — I wouldn’t call a woman “pastor.”

Now we have a man and a woman who are in charge of our children’s ministry, and it’s a huge ministry. Sally is the key writer of the curriculum, so she’s very significantly involved in preparing teaching for children. We call them associate pastor and minister for parenting and children’s discipleship. That’s how careful we are. We use the word “minister” for her, just to safeguard the biblical terminology. Because once you start playing fast and loose with the terminology, you’ll probably wind up playing fast and loose with reality. And I think reality matters. Names in the end don’t matter, but in the long run, they probably matter.

So I would be somewhat concerned. I mean it may be that in those two functions, nothing inappropriate is happening in the relationship between the woman and the kind of ministry she’s performing. And yet to call her a pastor will for most people totally confuse them, and lead toward an evening out so that the Willow Creek understanding of things will survive. I mean, Willow Creek is a big and growing church. I don’t even know if that’s the one you have in mind, but they’re not ashamed to be named in that regard. They stand firmly behind an egalitarian view of things. And I think it will bode ill for the church in the long run.

I think the dynamics that God has ordained for marriage and for the church are a beautiful choreography of manhood and womanhood that are different and are complementary. We’re not to merely ask competency questions, but sexuality and manhood and womanhood questions when we talk about leadership, because something will be lost. I could tell you so many stories of my own experience and what women have told me over the years of what happens in churches that begin to be led by strong women. And there are a lot of strong women, way stronger than men, way more biblically literate than men, way more articulate than men.

The feeling is, “Well, if they have greater moral strength, if they’re more spiritually sensitive, if they understand their Bibles better, if their theology is more coherent, if they are better expressers and teachers of it, then why in the Sam Hill shouldn’t they be the pastors and teachers in the church?” I’d say, well, all those things are true, I think. They probably are in a lot of churches and a lot of families, but the dynamics of manhood and womanhood will be undercut, if you only ask competency questions and not calling and fitness questions.

I’ll just give you one example from marriage, just to share what I mean by this competency issue. There’s a couple in my church that helps illustrate this. This applies to church and family, but this is what’s on my brain’s front burner right now. The husband has an eighth grade education and she’s a high school graduate. They’re simple folks. They’ve been with me for all my ministry, and love Christ, are faithful in the church, and want to do right biblically. I’ve counseled them through some really, really hard times in their marriage.

The man, let’s call him Joe, looks at me and he says, “John, I know you say I’m supposed to lead Mary, but Mary can read way better than I can. I never finished high school because I had a reading disability, and it’s so hard for me to read. And so I can’t even read like she can. And she just seems to talk with ease about spiritual things, and I stumble all over the place and can’t talk. So I think what you’re asking of me is absolutely unrealistic.” She’s sitting there and I know what she has said to me is, “I want this man to lead. I’m so tired of saying, ‘Can we talk about this money thing? Can we talk about the kids’ discipline thing? Can we talk about the house situation? Can we talk about the church?’ He’s always following, and I want him to lead.”

I said to him, “I disagree entirely with your argument. You’re just referring to competencies. That’s not the issue. Here’s what I want you to do tonight. When you go home, get the three kids together. Can you do that? Can you say, ‘Ronnie, Deborah, and Jim, come in here.’ Can you say that?” He said, “I can say that.” I said, “Okay, well say that tonight at about 8:00 p.m. And when they all get there, say this: ‘We’re going to have devotions.’ Can you say that?” He said, “Yeah, I can say that.” I said, “Okay. Do you think you can find a Bible?” He said, “I can find a Bible.” I said, “Get a Bible. And after you’ve got them all seated, say, ‘We’re going to have devotions in this family. We’re going to have them every night. And I think we should maybe read the Gospel of John together. So Mary, find the Gospel of John.”

So Mary finds the Gospel of John with big smile on her face. She turns to the Gospel of John and he says, “Now mom is going to read us some verses — maybe the first chapter or whatever you want to read.” And Carol, with a big, glad heart, reads. And I said, “And after she reads it, can you say, ‘Ronnie, I think it said that in the beginning was the Word. That’s Jesus. So thank Jesus for being the Word of God and existing forever.’” Ronnie prays. That’s leadership.

You don’t have to have any degree at all to do that. You don’t have to have any competency. You know what you have to have? Obedience. You need a courageous heart that’s willing to admit she’s smarter, she’s more articulate, and she’s outshining you in every way, but one thing she wants from you is leadership. Let her have her gifts. Let her do her thing, lead. My definition of headship is in the church and in the home is who says “let’s” most often. A woman will flourish in a marriage where the husband says a big percentage of the “let’s.” He says, “Let’s go out to eat. Let’s take a vacation. Let’s talk about our finances. Let’s deal with discipline.” Let’s, let’s, let’s. Now she wants to be included, clearly. She has to be included. This is a partnership here. But she doesn’t want to always have to be the one saying, “We haven’t eaten out in a long time, let’s do something together.”