Kennystix's podcast
Brothers — Feel, Think, Preach God (Part 2)
Let's pray one more time before I begin. I just want to personalize that for myself, Lord, prone to wander, Lord, I feel it prone to leave the God I love. Take my heart, O God, and seal it. Seal it for that quartz above. Bind me with chains to your throne, I pray. Your sovereign, keeping power to awaken me, moment by moment. I will not be a Christian at the end of this message without your keeping grace. Grant me, I pray, to stand, and I pray that for all the brothers and sisters here. Now please help me to be faithful to your Word, and would you do something for our minds, Lord, in Jesus' name, amen. So the centrality of God in our hearts with the assumption that in order for him to be central in our hearts, he needs to be the gladness of our joy. We need to pursue our joy in him all the time in order to be loving shepherds. So joy in him is crucial for his centrality to us and crucial for our people. That's where we have been. And now the centrality of God in the mind, the work of the mind, the life of the mind. I don't know if you've ever thought about how Psalm 100 is structured in the relationship between joy and theology. It goes like this, and I'm going to make indentations as supports with my hands. Make a joyful noise to the Lord, all the earth, serve the Lord with gladness, come into his presence with singing. Now so far, that's the first session, you got that, right? Make a joyful noise to the Lord, all the earth, serve the Lord with gladness, come into his presence with singing the poise plane in those two verses, right? That's verses one and two. There's a command, not an option. If you serve the Lord, you serve him with gladness, or you displease him, the Lord loves a cheerful giver, shepherd the flock of God eagerly. Now next phrase, no, got it? Joyce, no, K-N-O-W, not you know, know that the Lord is God, it is He that made us, so this indentation means it's supporting, right? Know that the Lord is God, is He that made us, and we are His people, we are His people in the sheep of His pasture. Now back out to the margin again, enter his gates with thanksgiving and his courts with praise, give thanks to him and bless his name. Now back to the inside margin, for the Lord, Lord, for the steadfast love of the lures endures forever or something like that. You see the structure, joy, knowledge, joy, knowledge. Now that's all I have to say, is that knowledge serves joy, and therefore the life of the mind, doctrine, doctrine matters huge for the sake of joy, I'm a real stickler on doctrine. So I put the order the way I did so that you would understand the indentation. Life is not about theology, it's about doxology, but there is none that glorifies God, which without true knowledge, if you would enjoy Him duly, you must know Him truly. People that make light of knowledge and doctrine are shooting themselves in the heart. Not the foot. So that's what this session is about, the life of the mind, the use of the mind, especially for pastors, who are charged to be apt to teach and to equip the saints by being faithful pastor teachers, according to Ephesians 4. Romans 10-2 says, "They have a zeal for God, but it is not according to knowledge." Now you won't, you know, the striking thing about that context, they're not saved. And verse 1 says, "My earnest desire and prayer to God for them is that they might be saved, for they have a zeal for God." Is that not crazy logic? My prayer to God for them is that they might be saved because they have a zeal for God. They're not saved, so they listen to the first session, and by some amazing mental process, put it through a sieve, and they took away the joy with no God. They're going to go back to their church and use music and all kinds of happy strategies of family and backslapping, and all kinds of stuff were going to make the joy happen, and they just didn't get it. So this session becomes really crucial because I don't think joy in God will glorify God if it is joy in the true God. I'll give you a little illustration, a visual thing that helps me. You are walking down the street with a bag of cash, $10,000, on your way to deposit it at Wells Fargo. And you realize that you have another appointment to make, and if you do it, then you're going to miss your appointment. So you stopped a stranger on the street and said, "This is $10,000 cash, and here's my account number, and would you please make that deposit for me? See you later. I've got to go." He graduated. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Wait a minute. There's $10,000 in here? Yeah. Why are you trusting me with this $10,000? Why do you feel trust in me right now? And you say, "No reason. Just I do. I don't have any rational reason at all. So would you please do that?" And you leave. How's he going to think about you, he's going to think you're full? Will he be complimented? He will not be complimented. There's no reason to trust him. Okay, rerun the tape. You're walking to the bank, got to get there, and you stop somebody. And you say, "Would you take this?" And he says, "Sure. Why are you trusting me?" You say, "I work at the same place, you don't know me, but I've been watching you for about a year. I watch everything you do. I watch how you do your time cards, I watch how things get in on time. I watch the way you talk. I've even asked questions about your family. I know you will. You will make this deposit." How does he feel? Honored. Without knowledge for why we're trusting, it doesn't honor the one trusted. If there's no knowledge underneath our joy in God, he gets no honor from our joy. If it's just fluff, if it's just worked up, there's no glory going to him. It's a wonderful thing that God in these last 20-plus years has been in my judgment building increasingly rich doctrinal lyrics into our worship music. The new stuff, the old self already had it, but now the new stuff has it. There are songwriters growing up everywhere who realize just saying the same old stuff over and over again won't cut it. And there is no lack of magnificent contemporary worship music of all stripes. So I am thrilled that God is working that in our day. So here's what I'd like to do. I wrote down one, two, eleven, nineteen biblical pointers toward how to use the mind for the sake of God. And I will not get through all nineteen, but we'll make this available online if we don't or something like that. They're just bullet points with thoughts written after them and let's just get through as many as we can in the hour that I have. Number one, the Bible calls us to think over what the apostles taught. Second Timothy chapter two verse seven is a seminal verse for my understanding of the life of the mind. Second Timothy two seven says, think over what I say, for the Lord will give you understanding in everything. Think Timothy, think over, so I've written things down, now it's a command, think over what I say. This is a command to all pastors to ponder texts, think, think, think, Timothy, what I say. Now, the next phrase warns us against intellectualism that would presume that we can think our way into right understanding without His help because the next phrase says, for the Lord will give you understanding in everything. Now so many people divide it up and you're either the one or the the other. One group says, we're thinkers and we break through to right theology. And the other says, we pray and we ask for illumination and God gives what we need. And the text says, you do the thinking because He does the giving and evidently then He does the giving through the thinking. It wouldn't be let think over here and then without any connection to that thinking you get your theology some other way, kind of vertical, it doesn't work that way. So there's a clear mandate, think over what I say, for the Lord will give you understanding in everything. If you want to see another text that moves me on this, and it's even better than this one, but it's in the Old Testament. So I read the other one first, Proverbs chapter two, listen to how this goes. My son, this is chapter two, verse one. My son, if you receive my words and treasure up my commandments with you, receive treasure. Making your ear attentive to wisdom, listen, inclining your heart to understanding, to understanding. Oh God, give me understanding. Yes, if you call out for insight and raise your voice for understanding, if you seek it like silver and search for it as for hidden treasures, now that's a long if clause. And here comes the then clause, then you will understand the fear of the Lord and find the knowledge of God, and then comes the same point as 2 Timothy 2, 7b, namely for the Lord gives wisdom. You thought you were seeking until you were blue in the face and finally found it, well you did because he gave it to you. So the Lord gives wisdom and out of his mouth come knowledge and understanding. You see the logic there is exactly the same as 2 Timothy 2, 7. Be a miser when it comes to knowledge, dig and search and pursue and treasure. Remember that phrase, Martin Luther, when he was getting his breakthrough to the gospel, he said, "I beat, importantly, upon the Apostle until the Greek of Romans 1 17 gave way." Have you had any Friday afternoons like that? Maybe yours is Monday, Friday, Saturday, and you look at its text, it is not breaking. What? I don't know what to say from this text. I have a little note on the top of my computer screen, I use Bible works to hardly ever open my paper Bible while I am praying for sermon Bible. I mean Bible works all the time, and here I have got a little note pitch, "Help, Lord!" That's all it says, "Help, Lord, Bible works won't cut it." I don't know what I do without it though because it is such an immediate concordance in my main text, my main help after the Bible is the search engine in that machine. I want to know what patho means here in Hebrews 13 17. I want to know that word for joy, is it got some special twist? I don't go to a dictionary, I almost never go to the dictionary. I just hit search lemma, or search the form, and that's where I get meaning. Oh, what a gift, what a incredible gift, praise God for computers. But I have my note, "Help, Lord!" Because I hit the wall over and over again, I just can't make sense of this, the logic doesn't flow, I don't figure it out, I don't know the meaning of that word. But just, how does it fit with this verse over here at the end? I've got to say something tomorrow morning. So we work our tails off, and we say, "For the Lord gives wisdom from his mouth comes knowledge and understanding." That's number one, number two. The Bible calls us to be mature in our thinking, not babies. 1 Corinthians 14 20, "Breather, do not be children in your thinking, yet in evil be infants, babes, but in your thinking, be mature." What does it mean to be a baby in thinking? What do babies do with thinking, to do anything with it? They consider it holy, irrelevant. They have no experience in it. It does not entice them. It doesn't occupy any of their time. They're no good at it. So brothers, be that way about evil, don't be good at it, don't spend any time on it. Don't understand it very well from the inside. Oh, how many people think you've got to do bad stuff. You've got to watch those movies. Everybody's watching them. Aloni, my heart can't take that. I don't know how these people who write all these reviews of these horrible movies have any relationship with God at all. They must. I mean, they're doing that. Their business, this heart would not. This heart would go down. So I'm not operating from evil on the inside. I'm looking at it from the outside. I understand a little bit. I want to read about it. But I'm not going in to figure it out. Be a baby in evil. Don't have a lot of experience. Don't understand it very well. I'm glad when I see pastors commit adultery, I say, "I don't get it. How can that be? How can they do that to their wife? How can they do it to God? How can they do it to the church? I don't get it. I'm glad I don't get it. I see it. I know it. I deal with it. I've dealt with it in my church. But I'm glad there's something that doesn't taste it. Let him who stands take heed, lest he fall pike. But it says instead of being a baby in your thinking, be mature in your thinking. So have a lot of experience with thinking. Understand how thinking works. Be good at thinking. Better to speak five thought through words, to instruct your congregation than ten thousand words that make no sense to them. That's the preceding verse. Number three, the Bible assumes and encourages a proper analysis of nature and times and moral matters. The Bible assumes and encourages a proper mental analysis of nature. That's the book of the world and times and seasons and moral matters. Let me just give you one or two examples and draw out some implications from them. Luke 1254 to 57. Jesus was also saying to the crowds, "When you see a cloud rising in the West, immediately you say, 'Shower's coming,' and so it turns out. And when you see a South wind blowing, you say, 'Gonna be a hot day,' and it turns out that way. You hypocrites? Oh Jesus. How did you have any listeners at all? Lock them in and punch them in the face. You hypocrites? You know how to analyze the appearance of the earth and the sky. That's a good thing. But why do you not analyze this present time? Like me, I'm here. And why do you not even on your own initiative judge what is right? That's where I got this nature times moral. It's all there, those three pieces. So several things by implication from that text. I can remember back in my seminary days, you know, a little learning is a dangerous thing. Drink deep or taste not the Perrion Springs. So here we are. We all have a little bit of learning in those days and guys, we're waxing eloquent about Hebraic and Greek thought. And the Bible is Hebraic, Greek, linear and logical and Aristotelian and blah, blah, blah. I'm just ordinary common sense guy, so I don't get it, I don't know what you mean. But I mean, Hebraic thought and Aristotelian, that's not in the Bible. I said, What do you mean Aristotelian thought? That's just a big word. What do you mean Aristotelian? Well, like syllogisms, you know, all men are mortal, like that was a man, therefore Plato was mortal. That's Aristotelian thought. I said, sounds common, I believe that. I think that way, I think God thinks that way. I think everybody thinks that way if they're thinking. Of course, that doesn't cut any slack because you've got to show it in the Bible, like right here. Right? You say, whenever clouds come, showers arise, that's premise one. Clouds coming, that's premise two, therefore it's going to rain. That's Aristotelian. I don't care if Hebrews said it, now I don't care if Aristotle said it, God set up the universe that way. I was not impressed. I'm still not impressed with a lot of philosophical garbage that gets slung out by PhDs. Just read your Bible, know your Bible, think, think, think brothers. We're so prone to bump into a problem in the Bible and jump to a secondary source. Tell me something, Don Carson, help me. I love Don. I really love Don. I get a lot of help from Don. I didn't get help this past week, on John 14. But Wayne and I, we talked about that, forget that. Don't jump to the secondary source, first, think first, get a pen in your hand, fold a piece of paper in half and start doodling and drawing arrows and question marks and just think, I think, on paper or on the screen, think, think about this text. Here's another implication of this text, contrast it with Matthew 21, 23 to 27. I'll just tell you this story, paraphrase it for you. They came to Jesus and they said, Bob, what authority will you, are you doing these things? And Jesus, again, let me ask you a question first, I'll tell you why he did that judging by the way that the story ends. He's asking them a question back to see if he wants to talk to them because there's a certain kind of epistemology he won't deal with. Let me ask you a question first, John's baptism, was it from heaven or from man? And they have a little pow-wow, they say, if we say it's from heaven, then he'll say, why didn't you believe him and get baptized? And if we say it's from man, the people believe he's a prophet and we'll get stoned, what do we say? Let's say we don't know, so we come back, we don't know. And Jesus says, see you later, neither will I tell you about what authority I do this. What's going on in that text? The church stuff is going on in that text. The use of language to dodge doctrine, the use of language to do relational stuff without putting your finger down anywhere on the concrete, black and white, yes and no of a truth. Language has been given to us by God to know him and to know what the Bible says about him and to state it clearly, come what may, cost our job, cost our life. We speak openly, we don't peddle truth, we say clearly, when you ask me what I believe about the substitutionary atonement, I don't dodge. When you ask me about the inerrancy of scripture, I don't dodge. When you ask me about hell, I don't dodge, I speak openly. If we don't, Jesus doesn't talk to us. That's what's going on in this text. I'll tell you, thinking my way into these kinds of things years ago, shaped my epistemology, shaped my linguistic philosophy. How should we think about knowing? How should we think about articulating sentences and doctrines? Is there anything moral at stake here? I read a book one time by Edward John Carnell called Christian Commitment. One of the best books I've ever read hasn't been in print for decades, I don't think. Maybe it is and I just don't know about it. He died the year before I came to Fuller Seminary, a very great theologian, though not seeing everything the way I see it. And that book argued there is morality in epistemology. There's morality in the way you think about knowing. Philosophical constructs are not morally neutral. They flow from hearts that are bent one way or the other. And philosophical structures are used to justify sinful hearts or escapism. You've got to think, brothers, when you read something or see something online or in the Bible, you don't think, I hope you're thinking about what I say, I hope you're not gulping it down. You're processing it, you're putting it through, I hope a biblical grid. And you're throwing away the chaff, test all things, hold fast to what is good. I'm sure I'm going to blow it somewhere in these three hours. So be careful. It'd be good, I paraphrased it, it'd be good to go to 2 Corinthians 2. You've just got to feel the force of this because the day we live in. We're talking spin, brothers, it's in the church, had a denominational official say to a young pastor who came to me, wondered if it was okay. He was struggling with how to preach Romans 9. Ever had that problem, understandable. And he asked the denominational official, how would you preach Romans 9? Seems like it teaches pretty radical predestination and sovereignty of God and good night. This is, oh, I don't know if my people would take it. And the denominational official actually said to him, he quoted this to me, I wouldn't name him because he might have quoted him wrong. But this is what he heard. I think there's a way to preach Romans 9 so your people don't know what you think. Isn't that tragic? That's a real denominational official. A real postmodern, slippery, weaseling denominational official. Now test that with words like 2 Corinthians 2, 17 and 2 Corinthians 4, 2, here's 2, 17. We are not like so many peddlers of God's word, but as men of sincerity, as commissioned by God in the sight of God, we speak in Christ. Think that through brothers, think through who's listening, think through your position in Christ, think through the meaning of the word sincerity, and then speak how? In chapter 4 verse 2, we have renounced disgraceful, underhanded ways, couldn't be more relevant. We refuse to practice cunning or tamper with God's word, but by the open statement, open statement, I love it, open statement of the truth, we would commend ourselves to everyone's conscience in the sight of God who sees our mind and our mouth. Oh brothers, be like that. Be like that. It's costly to be like that. That's the only reason people weasel is because they don't want to have the consequence of nailing down something. Draw a line, goodness gracious, some people might be on the other side that you like. Being groomed is such a good job as an introduction to the new book that he just wrote on how evangelical feminism is a pathway to liberalism. Got a lot of arguments, but he's got really close friends that this is going to offend. And you knew that. How easy way it would have been for you not to write the book. He doesn't want to lose these friends, and he names them. He names them in his introduction, three of his closest friends out there in the theological world. And he says, "I know you're going to be offended by this, and I still love you." We can do that. We can draw the line, we can stand, and we can love love bombs. I got that from Francis Schaeffer in the Manifesto book at the end where he's calling for truth and he says, "We can have lines, but you don't have to hate across lines." You can love across lines. In fact, he argued that differences and disagreements and borders are golden opportunities for love. That's the way he argued. Golden opportunity for love, but we live in a day that's so, so relationally driven that that's the absolute, not the Bible and not God and not doctrine of any kind. So that's number three. The Bible assumes, and I went all over the place with that one, so I hardly came back to the point. The Bible assumes and encourages a proper analysis of nature, times, moral matters. You know what, my helpful, might be helpful to just read one more. Jesus uses parables, you know, about nature, lilies, birds, that sort of thing. Paul quoted pagan poets about culture. I would go there if I had time, but the mind engages with the weather, the mind engages with seasons and movements and moral matters, and the mind engages with everything and puts it to the service of Christ. Number four, the Bible calls for a wakeful sober preparedness of the mind for right use in the cause of Christ exalting hope. The Bible calls for a wakeful sober readiness of mind for the cause of hope, Christ exalting hope. And you know what verse I'm going to, 1 Peter 1, 13, therefore, now here participles matter. Reading requires reading when you have an inspired book. And if you can read it in the Greek, all the better, and if you can't work really hard to get the best literal translation, compare them, and use what helps you can. But if you have a chance, say you're still, say under 65, learn Greek in Hebrew. So Anodzo Sominoy is a participle, having prepared, girded, girded, having girded your loins, I'll just be literal here, most translations aren't literal here, having girded your loins, the loins of your mind. One participle, being sober, one is erist, one is present, having done this, now doing this, being sober in spirit, or just sober, fix your hope, or literally, hope, fully. Now you get the imperative. So you got two participles and an imperative. Having girded up the loins of your mind, and you know the picture don't you, they got all these long flowing robes, you reach down, and you grab the back of your skirt here, you're a guy, he's a guy, and you pull the skirt up through your legs like this, and you tuck it in here so they turn into pants. So you run, that's what you do to your brain, just do that to your brain. Your brain is kind of, you know, like this with these long robes and you're sluggish and you're not moving anywhere, you can hardly understand anything, it's this gird up your loins, reach down between you, the legs of your mind, and pull it up and make some pants out of this robe so you can do the thinking you need to do, why? So that you can hope in Christ that is coming. That's one of the clearest illustrations of how the second lesson today relates to the first lesson. Gird up the loins of your mind, girding up, having girded up, hope, having girded up, hope, having girded up, hope, so there must be a connection between the right use of the mind and the intensification and solidity of hope. Oh, brothers, your people need theology. I try, I've been 26 years at Bethlehem, and I try to build theology into my people so that they would hope in suffering. You know, hope has two functions. It's another way of saying joy because it's the joy of hope. It weans you off the pleasures of the world that will kill you because this hope is better and it sustains you in suffering because it's better than everything you've lost. Hope is the great key and it's rooted in Christ's assured coming and it's rooted in God's present sovereignty to turn everything for good. Frankly, I grieve over laypeople who have otheological pastors who do not prepare them to die or to lose a wife or to have cancer in their 11-year-old daughter, leukemia I'm thinking in my church, all these families, picture a family, they've been into church for five months, they walked to the front, this really happened, with their 21-year-old son, Mike, and they said, "We're going in for some tests tomorrow and momma can hardly keep on breaking down." And she said, "You see these?" She pointed at these three lumps on her son's throat. The doctors are real concerned about this and would you pray for him, please? He died 18 months later. I did his wedding between the diagnosis and his death, knowing he would die. I've never done that in any other situation. I married him. I created a widow. That mom, Bonnie, said to me over and over again, "I don't know what I would have done if I hadn't sat under five months of the sovereignty of God. I would have gone insane had I not learned in the last five months that God reigns over this disease." There's just so many people who think that's not true. They think the sovereignty of God simply creates problems for suffering people. Twenty-six years of experience is the opposite. I don't recall anybody in my church walking into suffering, God is absolutely suffering. There are no maverick molecules in the world, as Arcy Sproul loves to say. Arcy Sproul has come up and said, "That didn't help." Maybe they just don't come. Maybe they don't come and maybe there are some like that. But I get such a stream that they do. So I have one here, and I don't think I'll take the time to read it, but this lady walks up to me, day before yesterday, after the conference we did, and sticks this in my hand with tears in her eyes and walks away, doesn't say anything. And tells me the story of her husband, who's, "Oh, well, thank you. Your kind, that will be written down in heaven." I'd love to talk about that for about twenty minutes. Unfulfilled, intended love. But huge implications, theologically, but she, he died, and as he was dying, he was reading the pleasures of God, which is one of my, you know, heavy, heavy, heavy theology books. He's got chapters in it like God's delight in everything he does, tsunamis and cancer. And she just wanted to thank me for the sovereignty of God, and that when he closed the book, when he closed the book, he said to her, "Everything's going to be okay now," and he died seven months later. I just hear too many stories, I can't, I base my theology on the Bible, but it's nice to have people come and say it works, it's really nice. All of that from 1 Peter 1, 13, "Therefore, having girded up the loins of your mind, being sober, hope fully." The mind's engagement with truth is the means of hoping fully. If you want your people to hope fully through cancer and hopefully through the loss of the job and hopefully through the divorce, you have to gird up your mind, help them gird up their mind and think their way into some glorious, solid, granite foundational truths. Number five, "The Bible calls us to work hard at accurately handling the Word of God." Second, Timothy 2, 15, "Be diligent to present yourselves approved to God as a workman who does not need to be ashamed." This next word is not easy to translate. I think the only other place that occurs in the Bible is two times in Proverbs. It's translated here in this version, "accurately handling the Word of truth, artho-tamun-tah." One, it's translated in Proverbs 3, 5, "Trust in the Lord with all your heart, do not rely on your early insight, in all your ways acknowledge Him, and He will artho-tamun-tah." Translate, make your way straight, guide your paths, that's the word here. Be diligent, brothers. Be a workman and handle the Word of God to help your people cut a straight line toward the truth, toward its proper application, what a high calling. Let not many of you become teachers, brothers, because we will be judged more strictly. Why? Because so many people follow our line, we're cutting through the Bible. What will open theus say on the judgment day if they make it? You told everybody that I didn't know the future. You cut my word that way? Can I show you a few texts? Would you just think about, "I'm God, G-O-D, capital letters, Elohim Yahweh, I am." What have you done? I am not impressed, I just get so bent on a shape with how many people see so many nice guys, they're nice. I can say something, all heretics are nice. Arius had the reputation of being unbelievably nice. If you're going to be a heretic in Minnesota, you've got to be nice, Minnesota nice, and we're just afraid in our day of tolerance and niceness to say anything tough. You've got to cut brothers be diligent in the use of your mind, be a workman, be a workman so that you don't have to be ashamed, I think I will be ashamed of some things probably that I talked. In other words, I'd be God, right? If I made no mistakes, because that's what James 3 says, everybody makes mistakes with his mouth, so John Piper is going to have his knuckles wrapped at the judgment day. I'm spending huge amounts of time trying to minimize that discipline, and I would like you to join me in being a faithful workman. Number six, the Bible calls us to have a thorough and deep knowledge of scripture as a protection from harmful error. Matthew 22, 29, Jesus answered and said to them, "You are mistaken, plonoste. You went astray. You were misled. You erred, not understanding the scriptures or the power of God." If you understood the scriptures, you wouldn't have erred on this, how many husbands will she have in heaven in question. So if you want to avoid error, it says a thorough knowledge of the Bible is implied in escaping. Ephesians 4, 13, there'll be children blown and tossed by waves, wind of teaching. Be mature. Help your people not be blown by craftiness. It's interesting, there are three words used there. I looked them up last night, got to know what they were in Greek. Cubaya, craftiness, panorgya, cunning, methadion, scheming, isn't that amazing that he would choose three ways to say craftiness, cunning, scheming. All of that, to tell pastors how to equip their people, excuse me. So that's number six, seven. The Bible commends thoughtful musing on the Word of God day and night as a way to fruitful ministry. Psalm 1, blessed is the man who walks not in the council of the wicked or stands in the seat of scoffers nor sits in, let's say the man who walks not in the council of the wicked and stands in the way of sinners nor sits in the seat of scoffers, but his delight is in the law of the Lord and on his law he meditates day and night, muses, ponders, sinks. Do you do that? Sometimes I get the feeling that some pastors only muse on church growth books. I'll just be honest with you, I can't read them. So I have to be careful not to criticize them. I'm real about, can't criticize what you haven't read. But the reason I haven't read them is because I die, I die. I'm just too vulnerable to being bored out of my socks with practicalities that aren't rooted in the Bible. I just love the Bible, I get so much help from the Bible, I get life from the Bible. I get strategies from the Bible, I get illustrations from the Bible, I think I get a teeny-weeny little bit of relevance from the Bible. And so my reading is kind of narrow and I want to, if I'm going to do something all day long with my brain, I want to do what this text says, meditate on the law of the Lord day and night. So very practically, you know how that affects my devotions in the morning? This morning, get up early enough to have a season with the Lord in prayer and in the Word, don't have anything to do with this, just, I'm me and him, we're meeting. And so I read this section in 1 Peter and I memorize a verse, I try to memorize a verse or something every morning. Why? So you can do this. How do you meditate on the law of the Lord day and night if you don't memorize? I have no idea. I mean, I have, I have this thing right here, this little PDA, and there's Greek on here and Hebrew on here and 3 or 4 English versions, but you can't pull this out all the time. It's got to be here. And so I memorize this verse, we're here. In as much as you share the sufferings of Christ, rejoice so that you will rejoice and be glad when His glory is revealed. And you know what I'm going to be meditating on all day, is the word that because I'm not sure I get it. In as much as you share the sufferings of Christ, rejoice that in order that you might rejoice and be glad at the revelation, all day long I'm going to be trying to figure that out. There's a correlation between my joy at the Second Coming and my joy in suffering now. That's what it says. And it sounds like means in, right? Means in. Rejoice now in suffering so that you'll be able to rejoice there. That's scary. Or is it just kind of quantitative? What is it? This is called meditation, thinking, mulling over, possibility after possibility, weighing it with other texts, trying to see whether it could be result, could be purpose. But you know what? In this case, it's a problem either way. So you scrap that solution and you move on to another one and all day long in any neutral moment, you're thinking that I may rejoice and it's coming. You rejoice now in suffering that I may rejoice when you get this meditation. Do that every day. Guess what? You'll become a theologian and you'll put rock under your people's feet. You will have granite under your own feet because the Bible will be a life. God will be your central value. Everything will be viewed through biblical lens. You'll think another way. Number eight. The Bible calls us to understand the ground of our faith well enough to give good answers to those who ask for Peter 3.15. Sanctify Christ as Lord in your hearts. Now don't miss that. Christon Hagiasate, hallowed be your name Christ in my heart. Sanctify him. Set him apart as infinitely valuable in the class by himself. Set Christ apart as your treasure in your heart, always being ready to make a defense to everyone who asks you to give an account for the hope that is in you. Little readiness to give evidences for your hope out of reverence for Christ. Number nine. The Bible shows that not understanding truth about God and his way has destructive effects. Not understanding. Have you ever noticed this is struck you as remarkable? Your shapes the way I think about morality and ethics and life change in my people. When Paul says, do you not know that we are to judge angels? Do you not know that joining yourself to a harlot makes you one body with her? Do you not know that those who are baptized into Christ have put on death died with him? Do you not know the little leaven leavens the whole lump? Do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom? Do you not know that your bodies are members of Christ? Do you not know that friendship with the world is enmity with God? What is the point of that kind of talk? The point is, if you knew, you wouldn't be doing what you're doing. There's so many people who say doctrine doesn't work. It doesn't change behavior. If that's true, the Bible is false. Because Paul said, don't you know that you're doing with that woman, you must not know something. He was trying to deal with this sex issue in 1 Thessalonians 4 and he said, keep your vessel, your wife or your sexual organs, keep it pure, keep it right, and receive her not in the passion of lust like the Gentiles who do not know God. You can't talk like that if you don't believe knowledge controls sex. Knowledge is not a simple thing if you understand. I mean, the devil is more orthodox than anybody in this room. He knows more right doctrine than any of us and he hates righteousness. So if you threw that back at me and say, see, it doesn't work. Theology doesn't work. You wouldn't be understanding what I mean by no. You would have forgotten the first session. To know is to embrace as precious. When you know something, my body is members with Christ. You don't just, it's not a thought in your head when it arrives there and you have meditate on it all day. It becomes one of the most thrilling things in the world, amazing. My body, united to the king of the universe, that's worth about a year's worth of meditation. And once it grips you, it's going to be pretty hard to use this body to steal with or commit adultery with. I know I'm out of time. So let me just look at my list and see what else I might want to include as I stop. What I think I want to do is go back to number five. The cutting a straight line, being a good workman, this is our daily bread, it's what we do, this book. This book is a book. It has to be read. To read, you have to learn how to read. Learning how to read is a mental exercise. There is no way to short circuit the life of the mind and honor God's book. He has chosen to manifest himself to the 21st century, mediated through a book. We mediate the book with preaching. We try to explain the book and help make a connection with the book and therefore the priority of number five, be diligent to present yourself a workman who doesn't need to be ashamed, cutting a straight path to right meaning and cutting a straight path with it to write application and being a faithful right handler of the book. I want to draw your attention to something I hadn't seen before preparing for this, namely that I'll just ask you, what opposite word would you use for straight? What's an opposite for straight? Crooked. What's another biblical word for crooked that people do with truth? Twist. There you got him. And I hadn't seen that connection before, that what he's telling us to do here is not do what they were doing in Acts 2030 or 2 Peter 3 16, Acts 2030 he's talking to the elders like I'm closing with you now, he's talking to the elders and he's saying they're going to rise up among you among your own number and they're going to be nice, they're going to rise up among your own number, these nice people that you've ministered with for a long time and they are going to speak twisted things, that's the opposite of cutting a straight line, they're going to take the book and they're going to say doesn't mean that, you're going to twist it, you're going to twist it and 2 Peter 3 16 says, Peter talking about poor Paul, some of those things he wrote are hard to understand, and he said that and then he had this, which the amatha toy or whatever it is, the untaught and unstable twist to their own destruction and bring churches down with them. So brothers, for the sake of love, for the sake of joy, for the sake of the church, for the sake of the nations, don't belittle thinking, don't belittle the life of the mind, don't belittle study, don't belittle write doctrine, let's pray, oh Father, I know that I am mere flesh, that my brain is fallen and contaminated with the sins of my heart, often using words to aggrandize my self or my family or my church, I confess to not have arrived and therefore I pray for myself and I pray for these folks that we would be purified in our hearts and thus purified in our minds so that our minds become servants of the truth, servants of our heart, so that our heart would see truth in the mind, that the mind is seen in the Bible and seeing truth in the mind would exalt in that truth, find joy in you and then may it spill over in sacrificial acts of love so that our churches might be blessed, we want to bless them with love, bless them with right thinking, help us to feel duly because we have thought the truth truly, pray this in Jesus name, amen. [ Silence ]
John Piper | Pastoral ministry is a call to an intellectually robust life that thinks and meditates and ponders over God’s word and God’s world for the fame of Jesus’s name.