Kennystix's podcast
The Word of God Abides in You, and You Have Overcome the Evil One
The following message is by Pastor John Piper. More information from Desiring God is available at www.desiringgod.org. Oh, how we love your law. It is our meditation day and night. My heart's desire as I preach it now is that your people would be like trees. Planted by streams of water that brings forth fruit in season. And that their leaves would not wither and that in everything they would do. They would prosper and you tell us so plainly this happens. If we meditate on the law, the Lord day and night. Your word is sharper than a two-edged sword piercing to the division of soul and spirit bone and marrow and revealing the secret things of the heart. And you tell us Jesus lived it. Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God. Oh, how we love your word. So come and help me to be faithful to it. And would you grant that it would be spoken in power? And that great grace would be upon us all for hearing the word of God. I asked this in Jesus name. Amen. So here we are at the end of prayer week. This is a tradition, it's a great one at the front of prayer week. We put a message on prayer and at the back of prayer week today, we put. A message on the word and there's a reason for that tradition. Those two things, prayer and the word of God are the two fundamental means of grace by which God enables his people to be conformed to the image of his son. And the two means of grace of praying and meditating on the word of God are interdependent. That's why we put them together in one week. They are interdependent. The word of God commands prayer, encourages prayer, informs prayer, promises great things in answer to prayer, sustains prayer and turns around and works the other way. Prayer calls down upon the word illumination and understanding and the enablement to obey it, understand it, enjoy it. And so prayer and the word are always working together. Nobody will be able to understand the word long and faithfully without calling down by prayer, help from God. Nobody will be able to pray in any sustained God honoring way that doesn't inform their prayer with the word of God. It's a praying and Bible meditating people that become conformed to the image of Christ and the world is in great need of such people and therefore though we're talking about something that feels very private, in a sense, pietistic. It has radical social effects, radical global effects. And I pray that the effect of this message would be that you do it more. Our focus is on the second half of verse 14 in first John chapter two, just half a verse. It's all I want to talk about. In the middle of verse 14, first John two, I write to you, young men, because you are strong and the word of God abides in you and you have overcome the evil one. Now that's the second time he wrote that verse more or less. He said the same thing to the young men almost in the middle of verse 13. So let's read that one. I am writing to you, young man, because then he leaves out something. You have overcome the evil one. So when he comes around, circles around to say it the second time, he fills it out. He doesn't just say I write to you, young man, because you've overcome the evil one, he inserts, I write to you, young because number one, you are strong. And number two, the word of God abides in you. Now why? Those two things, you are strong in the word of God abides in you, answer two questions left unanswered by verse 13. Why can a mere human triumph over a supernatural being, the devil? Answer, you are strong. Second question, how can you be so strong as a mere human that the strength would be strong enough to overcome one who was once Lucifer, the great being under God. And now we can be strong enough to defeat him. Answer because the word of God abides in you. We don't have a prayer to overcome the devil if the word of God does not abide in us. Our strength, which can rise to the level of defeating the evil one, rises to that level by means of this word getting in here. That's the way it happens. So my main point is very clear and I'll state the main point so that if you fall asleep right now, you will have gotten at least the main point. The main point is we have a great enemy and we may overcome him, be strong enough to overcome him if the word of God abides in us. That's the main point. My goal for the rest of the message is that you will be motivated to immerse yourself in this book, that you build your life around this book. You'll be in it every day. So I brought my, my thick Bible today. Did you notice the difference? I usually bring my thin Bible because my thin Bible fits in my coat pocket when I'm walking over here. But today I didn't put it in my pocket. I brought my thick Bible because I wanted you to see the very book that lies open on my prayer bench when I'm doing battle every day for my holiness and your holiness. And I brought it so that you'd see these funny things sticking out the top here. You walk around Bethlehem and you see people's Bibles and a lot of them have these four piece of paper sticking out the top. You start to wonder what's this deal at Bethlehem. It's a Baptist thing. Everybody's got these little piece of paper sticking out the top of their Bible like this. And it's not a Baptist thing at all. It's, it's a plan to read through the Bible in a year. So you get for these, they come in sheets like this. I don't know if there are any more left, but they're on the table out there and they're free and you rip them like that and you stick them in in the right place and you get done with the whole Bible in a year. If you read in those four places every day, the verses that it tells you read on that sheet of paper. So I've been doing this for what 15, 20 years or so reading to my Bible once a year. And that's the way I do it. I find it helpful. Some of you do not everybody because everybody's got their own way to work on the Bible and read the Bible. That's okay. But this morning I'll give you a little, show you how it works. So here I am at my Bible at 630 and I read in Genesis. Is anything too hard for the Lord? This is God to Abraham about his 90 year old wife who's going to have a baby. Is anything too hard for the Lord? Next chapter gets very serious. Sodom and Gomorrah get burned to a cinder. Lots of wife turns into a pillar of salt and the word that I hear from the gospel. And Genesis, remember, Piper, remember lots of wife. So that's there from Genesis in my head. And then I get to Psalm seven and I read this warfare and this word, if you do not repent, the Lord will wet his sword. How sober is man? Six forty-five in the morning and then I get to Matthew. That's that one right there. Matthew chapter four and appointed for this day's message amazingly happened over and over again. Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes out of the mouth of God. That was in my devotions on schedule this morning. And then I got to chapter, whatever it is, an ax, chapter four, verse 33, and the apostles with great power were giving witness to the resurrection. And great grace was upon them all. So now do you see how this works? I read all that this morning. It's in my head. It's informing the way I pray for you. It's informing the way I think about this message. It will inform the people that I talk to after this message. It will inform who I eat lunch with today. It will inform my van ride to the pastor's study retreat tonight. Everything comes off my front burner. You know what happens if you don't feed your soul, the word of God day by day? You know what happens? You fall into ruts and use the same language over and over and over again. And people around you start to feel like Christianity is a little kind of a little thing you've got in your back pocket and you pull out this religious language every now and then, and it sounds the same every time you open your mouth because you're not full of this. This is a thick book and it's so rich. So my goal in trying to unpack this one half verse is that you will read it every day, meditate on it every day and memorize it, or at least be able to paraphrase parts of it at noon time when the temptation comes. That's my goal is just to take away as many barriers as I can get away from you that keeps you from reading your Bible. OK, so here's the plan. Here's where we're going. Satan, the evil one in this verse has two strategies to attack your faith. Number one, accusation. Number two, temptation. And I'm going to argue from this verse that if the word of God abides in you, you overcome him in his accusatory role and you overcome him in his tempting role. And those are the two halves of the sermon. First half is long and the second half is short. So here's the first half. The victory of the word over Satan's accusation. I want to get this one right because we don't get this one right. We'll try to do the other one and we'll become legalists. Here we got to figure out this issue of how do you overcome his accusation of you? Because you know, they're virtually all valid. So go with me, if you'd like to, to Revelation chapter 12. Revelation 12, I'm going, here's the way I'm thinking, but I'm thinking exposition of first John. I'm thinking, OK, mainly I want to get inside John's head. It's the inspired head here and go where he wrote. So I'm going to Revelation. I'm going to Gospel of John, going to first John. I'm going to move around inside what John wrote mainly, not only, but mainly. So here we are in John's Revelation, or Jesus' Revelation to John in chapter 12, verse 10, and you're going to discover something about Satan in his accusatory role. And I heard a loud voice in heaven saying, now, salvation and the power and the kingdom of our God and the authority of his Christ have come for the accuser. There's his name. The accuser of our brothers has been thrown down who accuses them day and night before God. And here's the triumph, verse 11, they have conquered him. That's the same word as in first John. Overcome him by the blood of the lamb and by the word of their testimony for they love not their lives, even to death. So Satan is accusing you and he's got lots of valid arguments. Accusation has to do with sins we've already done. Temptation has to do with sins he wants us to do. So we're on accusation. You've already done them. And he's in front of the face of God saying, they did this and this and this. And you said in your Bible that those who do this perish, they're done for. They're jerks, they're losers. Your children are losers. And this text says that those accusations fall to the ground. If you're covered with the blood of Jesus, they conquered him by the blood of the lamb and by the testimony, the word of their testimony, that is they have embraced Jesus as they're covering and they are testifying to it to death. They love not their lives, even to death. There's a man in prison in Kazakhstan today for translating my book, "Desiring God." His family was arrested. His mother denied Jesus and are free. He and his sister are still in prison and will come to trial and could be executed. I don't know what will come of it. I get emails every few weeks about the process. You know what triumph over the devil is? Not life. Not prosperity, not health. Triumph over the devil is keeping your testimony till you die and flying to Jesus. That's triumph over the devil. The devil wants you to be as happy, as prosperous and as healthy as you can possibly be provided. You don't make any difference for Jesus. That's why I hate the health, wealth and prosperity gospel so much. It plays right into his hand. Of course he'll make us healthy and wealthy and happy and prosperous. If we just stop being so meddlesome with his people in the world by testifying to the gospel of the blood of Jesus that cancels all of his accusations. So don't go there. Now, here's the question. What does that way of conquering have to do with the way of conquering in 1 John 2 14? Because they're not the same. This says by the blood of the Lamb, they conquered the evil one. Back in 1 John 2 14, it says they're strong and the word of God buys in them and they conquer the evil one. So what's the connection between blood of the Lamb covering and word of God in here? Conquering. Now to make the connection, let's go to chapter 2 of 1 John earlier in the chapter. 1 John 2 verses 1 and 2. We start to see the connection. It's not completed here. We'll finish it. My little children, he's always calling them children. My little children, I'm writing these things to you so that you may not sin. But if anyone does sin, he's a realist. If anyone does sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ, the righteous. He is the propitiation for our sins and not for ours only, but also for the sins of the whole world. Now you see in those verses, he has two purposes for his letter. Number one, I write this to you, that you not sin. He doesn't want us to sin. And if you read 1 John and you immerse yourself in 1 John and 1 John goes in here, you sin less. You will, you will sin less. He didn't write this book in vain. He wrote it to help us not sin. It does help us not sin. However, it doesn't make us perfect in this life. He knows that if we say we have no sin, we lie and deceive ourselves. That's in the same book. So he's writing that we not sin. He knows we're going to sin. And so he has another purpose for the book. If anyone does sin, he's going to tell us something here about the triumph over the guilt that Satan uses to accuse us in heaven. We have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ. I love the designation he gives to him here. He's the righteous one. You're not. He is. You need him. He's the righteous one. He is the, secondly, the propitiation. Big word, religious word. Wonderful word, glorious word. He is the propitiation for our sins and not for ours only, but for the sins of the whole world. What does that mean? It means that when Christ died, he became a curse for us. Galatians 3, 13, Christ became a curse for us as it is written, cursed. It is everyone who hangs on a tree. So becoming a curse for us means we don't get cursed. He gets cursed. It's called substitution and because the curse falls on us, it's no longer in the heart of God toward us, which is called propitiation. God got propitiated by Christ absorbing his wrath. There's another place that says it. Romans 8, 3, what the law could not do, weak as it was through the flesh. God did, sinning his own Son, the likeness of sinful flesh and for sin, God condemned sin in the flesh, whose flesh Jesus, whose sin, mine. That's substitution and the transaction is called propitiation. The condemnation was absorbed by Jesus. Doesn't any longer fall on me. And Satan is up there saying, they did this and they did this and they did this and they did this and they did this and we have an advocate and the advocate bases his plea on the propitiation that he performed at the cross. So Satan is done making his case against us as the prosecuting attorney and now the son steps forward to his father judge and he holds out his hands like this. And he says, Father, you know what these are, you ordain them, these wounds in my hand and this in my side and my feet and these scars around where the thorns were and these bruises where the slaps came. You know what that means, it means that I shed my blood, my body was laid out so that your wrath against your son's sin would fall on me and I plead my blood and I'm here as the righteous. I plead my righteousness and for my sake, I would ask that you acquit your child. And the father never turns his son down. And Satan at that moment is covered with shame. Happens every day. God hears the voice of his son every day, who shall bring any charge against God's elect? It is God who justifies, who is to condemn, it is Christ Jesus who died, yes, who is raised from the dead, who is at the right hand of the father who intercedes for us. That happens every day of your life. You have an advocate. Now, here's the question, we haven't, we still haven't completed the link with verse 14 of 1 John 2, but this verse will complete the link. For whom is Jesus an advocate? Is he an advocate for you? He's not an advocate for everybody. If he were an advocate for everybody, everybody would be vindicated. He succeeds in his advocacy. He never fails in his advocacy before the father with his wounds. So some people are advocated for by Christ in heaven and some are not. So who is and who isn't? Now we go to verse 24 of chapter 2. 1 John 2, 24, "Let what you heard from the beginning abide in you." Now stop there, that's the link with 2.14, the Word of God abiding in us, we get victory over the evil ones. So there's the link. What you heard from the beginning, they didn't hear the whole Bible, this is for a lifetime. This Bible is for a lifetime of learning and growth and strength giving, but this Bible is the foundation, explanation and application of a center, which is the gospel. Christ crucified and risen for sinners, so that his blood and righteousness becomes ours, if something, if something. Now let's finish reading this verse. "Let what you heard from the beginning abide in you, if what you heard from the beginning abides in you, if it abides in you, then you too will abide in the son and in the father." When Jesus advocates, He advocates for those who are in Him. When you are in Jesus, in the Son, His righteousness stands for you and His blood covers you. If you're in Jesus, what Jesus is counts for you. If you're not in Jesus, then the accusations of the devil land on you and Jesus doesn't count for you because you're not in Him. Now, how do you get in Him? If what you heard from the beginning abides in you, then you will abide in the Son. There's a name for welcoming the Word of God into your life and having it abide there. There's a name for that. Let's go to chapter 5 to get the name for it. Chapter 5 verses 4 and 5. It's called faith. You know, here's something to just give you a little more appreciation maybe for John's writings. John and Paul are unbelievably different writers. Are they not Romans? And first John whirls apart in style. John's mind, which God uses and inspires, is like a bee buzzing around a flower. He just says the same thing over and over again. He sees the flower from this side, then he sees the flower from this side. And you get to chapter 2 and then you should read it again in 3, read it again in 4, read it again in 5. That is so wonderful because if you don't get it the way he said it in 2, you might get it the way he said it in 3. If you didn't get it in chapter 2, you might get it here. So let's read it here. This is the same thing. Chapter 5 verse 4 and 5. And this is the victory that has overcome the world and you could say the world and the devil. This is the victory that has overcome the world. Our faith. Who is it that overcomes the world except the one who believes that Jesus is the Son of God. So a name that you put upon hearing what you heard from the beginning and then receiving it, welcoming it. The Gospel comes. It's coming right now. It's coming in this room. Are you receiving it? If you are, that's called faith. And if you are, it will live within you. And if it lives within you, you will live within Christ. And if you live in Christ, all of the accusations of the devil don't count against you. That's why you have eternal life. It's absolutely glorious. So we welcome into our lives the Word of God. We hear He's a propitiation. We hear that His blood will cover our sins. We hear that He's the righteous one and we're not and He can count for us. And we say, yes, I need that. I will live by that. That will be my treasure. That will be my joy. Yes. And when you say that, yes, you're in Him. And when you're in Him, it counts for you. No accusation will stand against you. There is there, give you a little test here. You finish the first. There is therefore now no condemnation to those who are in Christ Jesus. So you've got to be in there. And this text, 224, says, if the Word's in here, you're in there. Oh, friends, don't minimize this book. Too many people think about Christianity in terms of events rather than life. I got saved here by believing. And then they got no categories for all this life. The Word of God does not just come to get a point of belief. The Word of God comes to get a life of belief. If the Word is in here, if the Word is in here, we are in Him every morning. Put it in there again and again and again. God is saving you. He has saved you. He is saving you. He will save you. It is a warfare. I'll save more on that later. Let me sum up this first point and then go to the shorter second one. Seven steps on how the Word in here triumphs over the accusatory role of the devil. Step one, Jesus Christ, the righteous died in our place. Step two, the wrath of God is thus propitiated. That is, its removal from us is secured by Jesus bearing it for us. Number three, Christ is raised from the dead, triumphant and goes to God's right hand and intercedes for us there every day of our lives. Number four, the Word of God 2,000 years later arrives in our ear. Billy Graham, your mom, my mom and dad, when I was six, bam, I'm a sinner. On my knees, Fort Lauderdale, Florida, 1952, I believe that was real and I believe it's been real every day since. If I begin to count on that six-year-old event and say, I don't need to read this. I don't need to fight for this. I could make such shipwreck of my faith in my life that it would be proved that was not real. Nobody loses its salvation but a lot of people who think they have it don't. That's step four. The Word of God arrives and you believe it. You believe it. It comes into your life. You say, yes, I need that. I'll take that. I'll build my life on that. Number five, step five, we abide in Christ because His Word is in us and what He is counts for us now. All that righteous one is for us and all that blood is for us. Number six, Satan now accuses us with damnable things. I mean, the little things are damnable. He accuses every day because he's got a lot to say. Yesterday's record of your life is enough to send you to hell. If you don't believe that, you don't know how holy God is and how much you're supposed to love Him with all your might, heart, soul, mind. So yesterday's record is enough to damn me. Satan knows that. God knows that. Jesus knows that. And there's this thing in heaven going on with Satan having a good case against you. And your only hope is He's your advocate and you're in Him and all His righteousness and all His suffering counts for you. And number seven, we stay in the Word and we stay in Him and as the Word is dwelling in us, we triumph over the evil one in His accusatory role. Now the second one is shorter. The victory of the Word over Satan's temptation. Two things He does, He accuses and attempts. This has to do with your past sins. This has to do with your future sins. He wants you to sin more. This verse, I believe, teaches not only that you are triumphant over Him in His accusatory role, but you are triumphant over Him in His role as tempter. How does He tempt? How does He tempt? Let me make sure that you don't limit temptation to sex. First thing we think of, we think of temptation is ooh, pornography or ooh, fornication or something like that. Well, that's not mainly what I'm thinking about here. To clarify how we are to understand temptation, you need, you don't need to, but it might be helpful to know that the Word for temptation in Greek is the same as the Word for test. There's no difference. Pyrosmas, you're being tested, you're being tempted, same Word, we divvy them up. So, every time you're being tempted to do something you shouldn't do, a test of your faith is happening. And every time you're being tested by some hard difficult circumstance in life, you're being tempted to abandon God, that's why you don't need two words here. Every test is a temptation. Every temptation is a test. Now, once you see that, then this list will make sense. This is what I mean by temptation, as well as all those other bad behaviors. I mean number one, cancer. And Satan's designed to destroy your faith when you hear you've got it, or unbearable pain, relentless pain in your life, the loss of a loved one, sickness in your children, financial hardship, marriage tensions, political strife, natural disasters, threatening crime in your neighborhood, mob violence, and the list could go on. Every time something like that comes into your life, Satan has a design, God has a design, they are not the same. Satan's design is always the same. Destroy this faith. You know, Satan is not an orchestra, not an orchestra. He's got a little instrument, I don't know what instrument is, but pick an instrument that you don't like. And he's got this one instrument, and the note he plays, he plays a thousand ways. And the note has two parts. He's a liar, and he only has two lies. When you get tested, his lie is, God is bad. And when you get tempted, his lie is, sin is better. That's all he has to say. He's not real creative, except in the use of those two lies in our lives, and we dupes, believe him, over and over again. You're sitting from the computer, and you believe the lie. It'll be better to go there. Something will be better, won't be better, be worse. It's a lie. Satan clobbers you with some horrible circumstance in life, and the lie is, God is weak, or God is bad, got no choice. That's it, because this kind of thing you're experiencing would not be produced or allowed by a good and sovereign God. So he's bad or he's weak, check out. Two lies. God is bad, sin is better. Now, this is real simple. This is, this is something a six-year-old can answer. If the main only, I think only way, Satan brings about faith-destroying misbehavior in our lives is lying to us. What's the antidote? Tell me, truth. So it's not surprising in John's writings. We read it this week in prayer week, John 17, 17, Jesus prays, sanctify them in the truth. Your word is truth. Wow, what a clear statement. Make John Piper more holy by means of the truth that defeats the lies of the devil. Your word is truth, Piper. Get in here. And you'll defeat it. Live here, immerse yourself here. Be a Bible-saturated pastor. Kill pride here. And you know this one too. John 8, 32, you will know the truth and the truth will finish it. Set you free. So the word in 1 John 2, 14 is you are strong, young man, young woman, old man, old woman, little boy, little girl, you are strong. The word of God is in you. And by means of that true word, you will spot and by grace the affections for that Christ in that truth will rise and they will sever the root of sin and defeat the power of the evil one. And it happens till you die. You're an old man or old woman here. You got work to do. You got young child, a long life of work to do. Remember what Paul said to Timothy, young Timothy, 1 Timothy 6, 12, fight the fight of faith, Timothy, and lay hold on eternal life. So that's the old man talking to the young man. Fight the fight of faith. Then 2 Timothy 4, 8, the old man signs off on his way to the grave. This last word, last book he wrote, last word he wrote. Remember what he said? "I have fought the good fight. I have kept the face. I have finished my course now." Henceforth, there is laid up for me, a crown, and he's dead. But until he's dead, he's fighting. There is no moving beyond the fight of faith. And faith comes by hearing and hearing by the Word of God. And that's just not when you get saved. That's when you stay saved by the Word of God. Don't think I just said you can lose your salvation. People always come to me when I talk like that. Oh, you must not believe that. We stay saved, but not without means. It's not automatic. It's the Word. It's this precious book we close with an illustration. Noel and I have been married for 38 years. Two weeks ago, we had our 30th anniversary. We went away. We always go away. God willing. The time worked. It's not on Christmas Eve or something. And so we went away, had a, you know, day and a half or so together. And we have a tradition in our anniversary away. We take the Bible and sit on a couch either in the evening or in the morning of that day away. And we pick a passage of Scripture. Usually it's a little longer, like the whole book of Philippians and the whole book of Colossians, some shorter thing. This time we just chose first Corinthians 13. I wrote the star about it. You saw that already? And what we do is we read through it together. Out loud, thick turns. She reads paragraph, I read paragraph and back and forth. And then we pray through it, praying about our lives, our children, our marriage, our church. And we step back and we say, now how are we doing? How am I doing, Noel? On this measuring rod of first Corinthians 13, 4 to 7. Love is patient. Love is kind. Love does not envy or boast. Love is not arrogant or rude. Love does not seek its own way. Love is not irritable or resentful. Love doesn't rejoice. When wrong things happen, it rejoices with the truth. Love bears all things, believes all things hopes. All things love endures. All things love never ends. How am I doing, Noel? And we said, we would like the last chapter of our marriage. Could be a week, could be, I don't know, my dad's 87. We want it to be the best chapter ever. And when we said that, we did not mean nicer stuff, longer vacations, more leisure, more play, fewer hardships, less work, less risk. I hate that vision of retirement. Sorry about that. What we meant was, here's my list. This is what I, John Piper, with my wife's help and the word will work on. More humble, more kind, more patient, more empathetic. She made that suggestion. More empathetic. You know what that is, don't you? You stay inside your wife's skin. You feel what she feels. You say words that are appropriate to the moment. You don't pounce. You don't fix you. So join her in prayer about that. More tenderhearted, more expressive of affection. That's with this instrument right here. And more fruitful in witness and that we would be better images of Christ. Now here's the reason it relates to this message. When we were done analyzing and assessing and wanting to be different people than we are and have the last chapter be more that way, we asked, "So how's that going to happen?" We didn't want any things for a long time. How's that going to happen? And we know it's going to be prayer, word, prayer, words, somehow or other. And so we assessed how we do them with prayer, word, as a couple. She doesn't know what I even do in my study over the Bible for an hour. She doesn't know. She's down there with her little computer program, Bible program. And I'm upstairs with my Bible open and we don't even know what we're doing with each other. How we're doing together? And the answer was, I think we've fallen into bad habits. Like we used to kneel beside the bed by a year ago and we gradually crawled into bed to pray. Which means she really sleeps easy. So by the time I'm done, that's not a good pattern. So we've got a new plan. I won't go into details. We've got a new plan and I said, "No, what would you like to read?" We need to read something together. In here, she said, "I found a book, as I was doing research on all these missionaries, called Daily Light for the Path, that missionaries for generations have used." It's a cluster Bible verses and you can get it in Amazon. I ordered it the day before yesterday. It cost 11 bucks. And we're going to read Scripture for every day, not in bed. And then both going to pray. We're both going to pray. And I want her. I'm going to tell you, pray these for me. If she forgets, I'm going to remind her. You pray empathy. You want me to be empathetic. See, I can go to my study. I have for years and pound on this proud heart and say, "Change. Lord, change me. Change me." But I think there will be more power if I humble myself before my wife and say, "You pray that for me. Out loud. You pray that for me. And I'm going to do the same. Whatever she invites me to do. You don't preach it to your wife by praying for her. You've got to be careful here. Make sure you do this and this. She's over there saying, "Let's talk about that before you." I've learned a few things. It's a long time. So, I'm done. I'm inviting you to join Noel and me. I'm inviting you to join Noel and me. So, you're married or not married. It doesn't matter. You're man or woman. You're older, young. I'm inviting you all into this fresh encounter with this precious, powerful Word of God. For your own soul, for your relationships, and for our difference in the world. And I hope that you will join us in whatever way God leads you. We're all different. We need different ways to read it. My wife is so different from me in how she reads the Bible. And I just want her to do it her way. And you do it your way. Let's pray. Father in heaven, man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes out of the mouth of God. So, Grant, that these friends here will live by the Word of God. And that every day we will be in the Word, meditating, memorizing. And where we're puzzled by the Word, which you often are, keep us moving and you'll show us something that helps until the puzzle later on can be soft. So, God, Grant, I pray that our church would be saturated by the Bible. We don't throw these hyphenated words around lightly. A Bible saturated Christ exalting church is not a throwaway phrase for us. So come and saturate your people with your Word, I pray in Jesus' name, 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.desiringgod.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.desiringgod.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. [ Silence ]
Live in God's word and in prayer, and you will be strengthened to defeat the devil.