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A Service of Remembrance for the Life of Larry Jens Christensen
The following message is by Pastor John Piper. More information from Desiring God is available at www.desiringgod.org. I want to thank the family for this privilege of having a part in the funeral service for Jan Stinkiwicki in particular for being a friend over the years and for asking me to have this part. It's an honor to be here. Funerals have different meanings for different people. They are times of great grief for some and they're times of great thanksgiving for others and sometimes for the same people. Times of great relief for others after long suffering and times of wisdom, I hope, wisdom getting because, at least this is the way I walk through funerals, I take them as rehearsals for my death. I don't know if you're strange like that, but every time I'm at a funeral I think of it as a rehearsal. I'm going to be in that coffin some day and things will be said about me. I wonder what they will say about me and I think about my life in regard to leading up to that moment and that's an opportunity for great wisdom because the psalmist in the Bible wrote this. Speaking of God, you sweep men away like a flood. They are like a dream like grass that is renewed in the morning and in the morning it flourishes and is renewed in the evening it fades and withers. The years of our life are 70 or if by reason of strength 80, yet their span is but toil and trouble. They are soon gone and they fly away. So teach us to number our days that we may get a heart of wisdom. So every time I stand in a place like this, I say, "God, would you please teach me to number my days that I might get a heart of wisdom?" And I think what he means is just realize your days are not going to be long. Even if they're 80 they're not long. It gets faster and faster and faster and as you stand at age 62 or 73 or 71 or 80 it just goes very fast and your memory starts to fade and that means your life collapses down into a smaller part because you can only remember a little bit of it and it feels like it was a very small thing as you come to the end and all of that's intended for wisdom. So what I hope happens here is that I can so speak and we can maximize the meaning of this for the sake of all of us becoming wiser. Now what would that mean? Well a wise person sees reality for what it is, right? A fool sees what's not there and acts on the basis of imaginary things. Wise people see what's really there. Is God really there? Is heaven there? Is hell there? Is truth there? Is Jesus there? Is the cross there? What's real? A wise person sees what's real and then builds life around reality. A fool misses what's real and builds life around things that aren't really there and at the end regrets tremendously the way he lived. So my hope is that we would be wiser because of this day. Here's a word that would help us get a piece of wisdom. This is from the book of James in the Bible about presumption, about life and death. See if you fit here. Are you wise or are you foolish in relation to this? Here's what he says, "Come now, you who say today or tomorrow, we will go to such and such a town and spend a year there and sell and trade and make a profit." You do not know about tomorrow. What is your life? You are a mist. It appears for a little while and then it vanishes. Instead you ought to say, "If the Lord wills, we will live and do this or that." As it is, you boast in your arrogance and all such boasting is evil. That's amazing. So the Bible says if you say, "I'm going to Duluth tomorrow. I'm going to spend a week there. I'm going to do some business and then I'm coming home." You're a fool because you don't know if you're going to go to Duluth tomorrow. What you ought to be thinking at least is if the Lord wills, I'll go to Duluth tomorrow and if he doesn't, I'll die. The Lord gives, the Lord takes away. We are totally dependent on God's grace to stay alive. That's wisdom. It's foolish to be presumptuous. We ought to live, the Bible says, in the consciousness that God is God. We're not. I just think about in my heart. I said to the people a week or so ago, "I want to be a coronary Christian rather than an adrenaline Christian." A adrenaline gives you strength to get through something like a funeral and then you collapse and you need some more energy later. Adrenaline lasts for a moment, gives out on you, does what it's supposed to do, gets you through a crisis. The heart never gives up on you until you die. Loved up, loved up all night long. When you like your heart, it's beating for you. When you forget about your heart, it's beating for you. The heart just goes on beating and beating and beating and beating until you're done and then it stops and I want to be that kind of person who lives in the presence of God all the time. I don't have a God moment here and a God moment there. A funeral is a God moment. Maybe Sunday is a God moment. Lose a friend. That's a God moment. Have an accident. That was close. That's a God moment. I want to be a God-aware person because God's the most real thing in the universe. He made it. He holds it in being. Let's live our lives ever in the consciousness of God. So here's the question. And Vicki, I believe, maybe the whole family teamed up in giving this answer with this text. But the question is, when you rehearse your death at a funeral, like this, you rehearse it, okay? This is going to happen to me someday. How's it going to be? What's the criterion by which you will assess your readiness? Now, they chose a text. It's, and I invite you to look at it with me. It's printed. It's printed here on the inside folder. This text gives the answer to that question. So let's read it, and then I'll just take a few minutes to talk about it. I have fought the good fight. This is Paul. Now, he's this letter that he wrote here. He wrote it to Timothy. This is the second letter he wrote to Timothy. This is the last letter he wrote. He's probably in Rome. He gets executed by Nero soon after this. So he knows that's coming. It's right around the corner. He's going to be killed. It's probably about my age. We don't know for sure when he was born, but I have fought the good fight. I have finished the race. I have kept the faith. Henceforth, there is laid up for me the crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous judge, will award me on that day. And not only to me, but to also to all who have loved his appearing. That means his second coming. What was his hope? Before we look at the criterion of readiness, what was he hoping for? And you can see it right there. He hopes for a crown of righteousness, about the fifth line down. Henceforth, there's laid up for me a crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous judge, will award to me. Now, what is that? So he's coming right up to his death. You are coming right up to your death soon. Jens came right up to his death last Wednesday. What's the hope on the other side? And Paul's hope was you going to put God, the righteous judge. Jesus is going to put a crown. Now, it's not a crown like he's going to be the king of the universe. So God takes the crown off his head and puts it on Jens' head or your head or my head. That's not what's happening. God doesn't say, "Okay, now you're God and I'm not God." This is not, this is, this is, I have run the race. This is that kind of crown. You get in a wreath, a crowner's, you know, you won the race. You finish the race. You get a wreath. That's the kind of crown. So the crown signifies you finished. You crossed the line. Might be first place, second place, third place, but you finished the race. Here goes the wreath on your head. Applause. Welcome. Take your stand. Gold, silver, bronze. That's the picture. So I take the crown since it's put there by a righteous judge, which means there's, there are no steroid tricks in this race. Like a few months later, you got to do a blood test. Up, take the crown away. Didn't really win the tour de France. This, this is a righteous judge. He knows exactly whether you've used steroids or not. So there will be zero tricks. The righteous judge puts the crown, the wreath on the head, and it signifies righteousness. This is the crown of righteousness. Now, peace creates for us a mega problem, doesn't it? Which is why I'm a Christian and why I love the gospel because the gospel solves the problem we're up against here. And the problem is I'm not righteous. Genes was not righteous. You found ways of saying it delicately, right? Tenacious, hard-headed. Let's face it. He wasn't righteous and neither are you or I. And we face a righteous judge. We all know this. Intuitively, we know this. You don't hardly need a Bible to tell you this. Your conscience bears witness, God is righteous. I've got a conscience. Where'd that come from? I condemn myself for doing bad things, and I reward myself for doing good things, and I feel bad when I do bad things. Where did that crazy thing come from? Monkeys don't act like that. Humans have a conscience because they're created in God's image. We know God is righteous and we're little images of God and we fail over and over. He never fails. And here's a picture of Jens or us, we pray, receiving a crown of righteousness. You ran the race, you finished it, crown, and inside we know I don't deserve this crown. They called me hard-headed at my funeral. How can it be that Jens, the imperfect or Piper, the imperfect or Livingston, the imperfect or all of you, the imperfect, can from a perfectly righteous judge receive a crown of righteousness? How can such a thing be? Right here, you look at this church, this is Baptist church. Most of you are not Baptist, I'll bet, because Jens was Lutheran. He came here and sat right over there over and over again. He never joined this church. I think he could never get himself free from his Lutheran tradition, Baptist. Those are such strange people. Holy rollers, all kinds of weird stuff they believe. What I'm telling you, I'm a Baptist pastor. I stand in this pulpit most Sundays. Nothing that I'm saying to you right now is distinctly Baptist. Okay, we get this clear. Martin Luther, the lover, the founder of the Lutheran church, he, if you were standing here, he would say exactly what I'm saying, all right? I'm getting this straight out of Lutheran theology. Let's just relax here. This is not, there's not a Baptist thing I'm saying here. And what I'm about to tell you about how in the world we imperfect people can be accepted and crowned by a holy righteous judge. How can that be? This is shared across these denominational lines. And the, the answer is, I have kept the faith. See that there? I have kept the faith. Now, faith in what is the question? Me? Faith in me? Self-faith? No way. If you trust yourself, you get what yourself deserves. What? Martin Luther, and I believe Jens, I pray Jens, trusted in was Christ. Jesus Christ, that's what you're talking about, who loved his appearing, the appearing of Jesus, he trusted him. Now, what, what did Jesus do that makes him worthy of our trust so that we, the imperfect can receive a crown of righteousness? And the answer is God sent his son into the world, Jesus Christ, to do two things for us. He died to bear our punishment because we know we deserve it. And he died to live an absolutely perfect life because we haven't been able to live a perfect life. And if we trust him, his punishment becomes our punishment, and his righteousness becomes our righteousness. And we are free from punishment, and we're home with righteousness. Faith in Christ means Christ becomes our righteousness and Christ becomes our punishment. Let me just read you a couple of verses from the Bible. So, you know, that's just not my idea. This is just straight out of the Bible. This is Galatians 3.13, one of Paul's letters. Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law, having become a curse for us. That's awesome. This is awesome. You, Jim, I are under the curse of the law. The law says, be perfect as I am perfect. We say, I can't be perfect. And the law says, you better be perfect because judgment will fall upon you if you're not perfect. God is perfect. Judgment falls upon you if you're not perfect. And we say, I'm imperfect. And God, out of amazing love for rebels like us, sends Jesus, Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law, having become a curse for us. So, there's one verse about how He took our punishment. Here's one about how He became our righteousness. This is Philippians 3.9, the letter to the Philippians, chapter 3, verse 9, that we may be found in Him. That's what happens when you trust Him, you're united to Him. That we may be found in Him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which comes through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God that depends on faith. In other words, it's an alien righteousness. It's not my own or 2 Corinthians 5, 21. For our sake, God made Christ to be sin. He counted my sin as belonging to Him. In order that in Him, we might become the righteousness of God. This is the great exchange. This drove Martin Luther and shaped everything he wrote and all great theologians who love the gospel. The great exchange is that Jesus Christ takes our sin and our guilt and our death and our punishment upon Him and we take His righteousness and His life and His holiness and His perfection upon us and it's imputed to us by faith so that when we get to heaven and we face a righteous judge like Jens did last Wednesday, the only plea, now get this right because I'm almost done, the only plea in this courtroom that will pass is I trust your son, not my goodness. It's the only thing. So please, get wise for Jens' sake, your sake, Christ's sake, the gospel's sake, your loved one's sake, get wise and act in accordance with reality. And the reality is you and I and Jens are unrighteous. We're not good enough. I don't deny that Jens was a good person in the sense that he did everything he said he did. He could have been a wicked person and he wasn't a wicked person. He could have been a lot worse. I don't mean that we're all as bad as we could be. I just mean measured against God. We miss. And we know it. Our conscience bears witness. We need gospel. Jesus came to give gospel. The good news, the gospel is Jens, depending on himself, perishes. Jens, depending on Christ, lives forever. Enjoy. And so do you. So that's wisdom and how I pray God would make it play. Let me say one last thing. What does it mean to keep the faith and to run the race, fight the fight? This is strange because I mean his faith easier is it hard. Fight sounds hard. Race sounds. I mean, marathons are hard. Boxing is hard. You beat up. So when he says I fought the good fight, I ran the race, I kept the faith and all of those are kind of parallel things. Is faith easier? Is it hard? And the answer is, look at one way, it's really hard. And look at another way, it's really easy. And I'll close by just telling you how hard it's going to be for you and how easy it's going to be for you if you believe like this. You have a disease. Cancer, diabetes. Is it easy or is it hard to rest in the all-sufficiency of Jesus when you've got a disease? And the answer is, nothing could be easier than to rest, but what could be harder than to keep on believing God's for me when I suffer so much? You see how it is? It's not that faith requires great mental or physical effort. It just requires relaxing in his arms like the letter you read from dad in heaven. Or here's one other example, which is harder to make a fortune or give a fortune away. Well, to make a fortune is hard because it takes a lot of effort and savvy, but to give it away is hard for totally different reasons. Now I love it. I lean on it. I depend on it. What could be easier than to give your money away unless you love it? Now that's the sense in which faith is a fight and faith is a race. In one sense, nothing is easier than faith. All faith is saying, I can't cut it. Jesus is perfect. I totally rely upon him and receive him to be my righteousness, my treasure, my life, my all. Nothing could be easier unless you love something else more, which is why it's hard. So I pray, in fact, I will pray now as we close and if Scott sings, I'll pray that the gospel would be commended to you by Christ who is alive in heaven today by the power of his spirit so that it would land upon you not as something, I don't think so. I don't think I want to go that direction, but rather as something that's just too good to be true. Why would anybody not want that? Let's pray. Father in heaven, I don't know the spiritual condition of these friends here in this room, but you do. You know their heart through and through. And I know gens would have wanted me to tell them the Lutheran Baptist gospel of Christ crucified for sinners and risen for the dead. And so I command now the gospel to these friends and ask that for gen's sake and for their sake and for Christ's sake, they would find it easy and wonderful to rest in Christ. What a day it will be when we arrive in heaven and have depended not on ourselves, but on your son. In his name we pray. Amen. Thank you for listening to this message by John Piper, pastor for preaching at Bethlehem Baptist Church in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Feel free to make copies of this message to give to others, but please do not charge for those copies or alter the content in any way without permission. We invite you to visit desiring God online at www dot desiring God dot org. There you'll find hundreds of sermons, articles, radio broadcasts and much more all available to you at no charge. Our online store carries all of Pastor John's books, audio and video resources. You can also stay up to date on what's new at desiring God. Again, our website is www dot desiring God dot org or call us toll free at 1-888-346-4700. Our mailing address is Desiring God, 2601 East Franklin Avenue, Minneapolis, Minnesota, 55-406. Desiring God exists to help you make God your treasure because God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in him. [BLANK_AUDIO]
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