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Assessing Ourselves With Our God-Assigned Measure of Faith, Part 1
The following message is by Pastor John Piper. More information from Desiring God Ministries is available at www.desiringgod.org. Almighty God and Heavenly Father, I pray that pride would now be shattered by your word, wherever it is rearing its ugly head after such humbling songs. And I pray that the shattering would be decisive and long-term, that you would put in the place of an excessive view of ourselves, a sober view, according to the measure of faith that you have signed to each, a pray that we would be a congregation stunned and humbled by your sovereign mercy, that everything we have sung would come to bear upon our souls as we relate to each other in loneliness and servanthood and to the world. So come now and help me be faithful to especially verse 3 as I try to be a responsible shepherd of this food for your sheep. And if any is here, Lord, who does not believe in Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior and treasure of life, I pray that they would be saved by the power of your Holy Spirit and through the agency of your word in Jesus' name, amen. What we've seen now in verse 2 for a couple of weeks is that in order for us to discern the will of God, what is good, acceptable, and perfect, the revealed will of God, the will of command, to understand the Bible, to apply the Bible in complex circumstances and to spill over with the 90% of our lives that are not premeditated with holiness and love. What we've seen that in order for that to happen, we have to have a new mind. We have to be renewed in the spirit of our mind. Let me conform to this world, be transformed in the renewal of your mind so that you can prove what is the will of God and spill over with a life of love and holiness that accords with the revealed will of God in the Bible, which means that in order to understand the Bible, in order to apply the Bible, in order to be spontaneous in the 95% of our lives that are not premeditated, a new list will not do. Only a new mind will do because the vast majority of our lives spill over out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks, not out of consultation with lists the mouth speaks. It won't work. You will be who you are, and therefore the great challenge of the Christian life is not to get a new list, but to get a new heart and a new mind. That's the point of verse two. Christian living is not willpower religion. It's the overflow of a new mind and a new heart. It comes by the Holy Spirit, it is supernatural. You can't produce the Christian life. You can't make it happen by willpower. If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation, 2 Corinthians 5, 17. We are his workmanship created in Christ Jesus for good deeds. We're created by another inside a second creation or called a second birth. We serve, therefore, not under the old written code, but in the new life of the Spirit, Romans 7, 6. For the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life. You try to live by a list, you die. You have to have the Holy Spirit so that you can be free and do what you want to do because what you want to do is what you ought to do. Any other way is death. Won't happen without the Holy Spirit. You have put on the new self which is being renewed in knowledge after its Creator. So be renewed, Bethlehem, guests, get a new mind and be renewed in the way you think and the way you feel so that the spillover of your life accords with the will of God what is good and acceptable and perfect, which means now that everything in Romans 12, everything in Romans 12, is a description of the life that spills over from the new mind of verse 2. And therefore, if you want to move into that new mind and put it on fully and live out of it, you must immerse yourself in Romans 12, which is why I preach as slowly as I do. We will not finish verse 3 today because we need to be here. I hope you have thought this. I haven't said it, but I hope you've thought of it. Wow, he's going so slow we could memorize this chapter. Do that. Do that. It will change your life. We get a renewed mind first by the Holy Spirit transforming us from within and then having its shape by the Word of God from without. Now, to let verse 3 land on us as powerfully as it should, we need to remind ourselves of something. In verse 2, where it says, "Don't be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind," it doesn't tell us what the renewed mind thinks like. It just tells us the result of thinking this way. The result is you are able to prove what is the will of God and do what is good and acceptable and perfect. It doesn't say, "Well, what's going on in there? What changes happen? What's it look like? How does the mind think differently than before it got renewed?" And there were clues, but it didn't attack the issue directly. We saw two clues. We saw one when we related it to chapter 1, verse 28 and 23, remember where it said, "The depraved mind exchanged the glory of God for the glory of created things." And our favorite one is the one we see in the mirror. That's the most seductive idol on planet Earth. And then verse 28 said, "Therefore the depraved mind does not want to have God in its knowledge, and so one clue about the new mind is it reverses that exchange." The depraved mind exchanges the glory of God for the glory of created things, especially ourselves and the new mind switches that around, gets the glory of God back at the center, back at the top and gets ourselves in the proper place. That was one clue about the way the new mind thinks. It was the second clue, the relationship between verse 2 and verse 1 of chapter 12, because verse 1 is all about turning your bodily life, present your bodies as a living sacrifice, wholly acceptable God, which is your spiritual service of worship, which means that what the new mind does is guide the body into behaviors that make Jesus look really good. It's worship. Worship is making Christ look good, making much of Christ, displaying Christ, magnifying Christ, showing the worth of Christ. So if verse 2 is a means to verse 1, which it is, then one clue about the way the new mind thinks is that it must have Christ really central because it's making the body do things that make Jesus look good. But verse 2 did not tell us in any significant detail the way the renewed mind thinks. So we read on, and that's exactly what verse 3 does, and we need to realize what's going on with verse 3 so that it can land on us with the force that it should. Verse 3 is about one of the most fundamental changes in the new mind. So let's read verse 3, 4, "By the grace of God," I'm sorry, "for by the grace given to me I say to everyone among you not to think," so we're into mind words here, "not to think of himself more highly than he ought to think, but to think with sober judgment." Four times, you get a brain word, a mind word. He is still with the new mind to verse 2 when he gets to verse 3, and he's talking about the way it thinks, especially about the way it thinks of itself in relation to God and other people. I didn't finish it, let me finish it. But to think with sober judgment, each according to the measure of faith that God has assigned. Now that's remarkable. Ask yourself this question, if you had written verses 1 and 2, and now wanted to begin to unfold the way the new mind works, and what changes happen in the renewed mind of the Christian, where would you begin? Isn't it remarkable? I find it remarkable, telling about my own heart, that the first thing Paul addresses in dealing with the newness of the new mind is pride, and how the new mind thinks about itself in relation to God and in relation to other people. This is going to be a kind of bridge into the body metaphor, and how all the body parts fit together. And Paul knows it's going to be hitting a wall of impossibility when I get to the body metaphor, if I don't get these people thinking rightly about themselves, because they're going to be pushing themselves and exalting themselves and doing all kinds of proud stuff, and the body thing will never work. So verse 3 is a massively important, deep work that's got to happen in this church before we can do the "we're all members of one another," and doesn't that work well? Well, it will not work well until verse 3 is dealt with. So let's deal with it. It will take more than one Sunday to deal with it. This is not a new issue for Paul. This is not like Paul saying, "Oh, the church of Rome is sort of a problem church. They're proud people there. I shall deal with this problem church." That's not the mindset of Paul. Paul's mindset is this is a massively human problem. There is no culture on planet earth where the number one problem is not pride, none. Verse 11, verse 18, "Don't be arrogant toward the broken off Jewish branches." Chapter 11, verse 20, "Stand fast in your faith. Don't become proud." Chapter 11, verse 25, "Lest you be wise in your own conceits." I want you to understand the mystery. Chapter 12, "Future," verse 16, "Don't be haughty but associate with the lowly. Be out with the lowly. Never be conceited." Chapter 14, verse 4, "Who are you to pass judgment on the servant of another?" This is a big deal for Paul. This is not one little isolated thing. Pride is huge. And lest we think that it is somehow just a Rome-related issue to whom he's writing, let's take chapter 8, verse 7 as foundational to the problem. Chapter 8, verse 7 says, "The mind that is set on the flesh," now that simply means your mind before the Holy Spirit makes you new. You've got two kinds of mind in the world. That's all. The mind set on the flesh and the mind set on the spirit. The mind that is old and belongs to the fallen Adam and you, before you saved, converted into out by the Holy Spirit, and then the new mind which is being changed and renewed into the image of its creator Christ. So what does he say about the mind of the flesh? Look at the essential nature of it. The mind that is set on the flesh is hostile to God. It does not submit - there it is. Anybody untouched there? It does not submit to God's law. Indeed it cannot. That's who I am before Christ. I am so in love with my self-sufficiency and my self-determination and my self-exaltation get out of my life any authority that claims to be for me, beauty, truth, right, wrong. I will decide what's right, I will decide what's wrong, I will decide what's beautiful and ugly, and I will call the shots in this marriage, in this church. That's who we are. You don't have to go to school to learn that. You're born that way. Everybody is proud. Everybody is insubordinate. I think sometimes we look around the world and we see some people who are kind of broken down, and we see some people who have their three-piece suits on swaggering through the world making their millions. We say, "Well, there's a person who's got a problem with pride and this person doesn't." That is wrong. Every human being from the most broken down sinner to the most squeaky, clean, rich sinner has got a problem with pride. It just expresses itself in different ways. Did you know that self-pity is simply the other side of the coin? Is it from boasting? Self-pity is the expression of pride in the life of the weak. Boasting is the expression of pride in the life of the strong. It's the same issue. It'll just look kind of, "Oh, poor me." That's pride, through and through, a husband who doesn't get what he wants when he gets home from work and goes off and licks his wounds in the bedroom, wishing he had another wife, pure pride. Same thing with a wife. It just looks broken down and sad, and he said, "Woon it, ego." He didn't get what he wanted. We are proud, through and through, and therefore, verse 3 will take more than a week. Let's read it again. "By the grace given to me," I say to everyone among you, notice no one is left out here. This is not a gift problem, like some people have a gift to this, some people have a gift to that, and those who have a gift to this, they've got a problem. That's not what's going on here. This is everybody. Start again. "By the grace of God given to me," I say to every person in Bethlehem right now, this building, and anybody that listens to this, "every one of you, not to think of himself more highly than he ought to think," that's the issue. The issue is set up at the beginning of the verse, so you know what's being dealt with at the end of the verse. But alternatively, think with sober judgment. How? What's that mean? It means each according to the measure of faith that God has a sign, so what I want to deal with this morning and next week is the alternative to conceit, the alternative to boasting, the alternative to the first half of the verse. The first half of the verse is negative, don't think too highly of yourself, and the second half of the verse is think soberly, and then it defines soberly, namely in accord with the measure of faith you've been assigned. I've spent hours and hours thinking about that phrase. What in the world does that mean? According to the measure of faith that each has been assigned. That's the way to think about yourself. Everybody got that? Crystal clear? Wasn't to me, but I think I've got a handle on it now. That's my job, is to get a handle on it, take a lot of time, and then commend it to you. We have the Holy Spirit, you judge all things, like good Bereans, and if God's at work in me and you, we get it together. Let's pray that happens. So here's my question. Why does Paul describe thinking with sober judgment as thinking which accords with the measure of faith God has assigned to each? Why? He could have done this so many different ways. I made a list. Why'd you do it this way, Paul? I said, why didn't you, for example, Paul say that sober thinking about ourselves is thinking that accords with the doctrine of total depravity. You've spoken of that doctrine in this letter. That would be helpful and true. Or why didn't you say that sober thinking about ourselves was thinking that accords with the doctrine of the image of God in which we are created? That would be helpful and true. Or why didn't you say thinking soberly and accurately about ourselves is thinking that accords with our spiritual gifts and the very graces of gifts that you're going to talk about later in the verses. Why don't you do it that way? Why, Paul, did you say that sober, accurate, right, sensible thinking about ourselves is thinking that accords with the measure of faith each has been assigned by God? What is that? So I have four answers to that question. And two of them this morning and two of them, God willing, next week. And the reason I feel okay about spilling over in the next week is because the third and fourth answer are the bridge into the body image of our life together. So it's remarkable how Paul is flowing here. We want you to get the flow here. We're starting with God and worship in a new mind, dealing first with our self, then dealing with the body of the church, then dealing with how we deal with our enemies, then dealing with the government, then dealing with, you see how he's moving here into 13? This is going to be good for us. Don't lose the forest for the trees. Answer number one. My question is, what does Paul accomplish or why does he take faith and it's got a signed measure to each person as the standard by which we assess ourselves? That's what I think he says he does and I'm asking why? What does he accomplish in doing that? That will shed light on how you do it. What effect it's going to have on the church? My first answer is this. In doing this, Paul shows the essential, that the essential newness of the new mind. Verse two, the essential newness of our renewed mind is its faith. That is, the essential newness of the new mind is the glory of Christ seen and savored as our highest treasure. Now the fact that I stated that in two ways instead of just one way flows out of the nature of faith. Let me say it again. One way to say my first point is, in doing it this way, in saying that the measure of ourself should be the faith that we have, that God measures to us, the first thing he accomplishes is by showing our faith is the very essence of the new mind. That's what the new mind does. It has faith in Jesus. And then I said that is, as though it were saying the same thing, which it is, the newness of the new mind is the glory of Christ seen and savored. Well, if you want another pair, beheld and embraced as the highest treasure of our lives. That's what faith is. Now let's linger on this for a minute. Let me try to explain because this is probably the most important thing I have to say. In choosing faith as the measure of the new self, do you want to know who you are? Measure yourself by the measure of faith, pointed to you, signed to you by God. In choosing to say that faith is the measure of the new self, Paul is choosing an absolutely unique act of the soul, or mind, namely faith. Why do I say that? Why do I say faith among all the acts of the soul, like love or hate or whatever? You can just list off all the things that the mind and the soul can do. Why do I say faith is absolutely unique and foundational to all other virtuous acts of the soul? And the answer is this, faith by its nature looks away from itself to Christ, seeing Him as the highest treasure, savoring Him as the highest treasure, beholding Him as the greatest worth and embracing Him as the greatest worth. Faith moves out from itself, from the soul. That's what's unique about faith. It goes out to embrace another. It is totally dependent on another. Faith is dependent on another. Its movement is away from me to Christ. It lands on Christ, it savors Christ, it banks on Christ, it enjoys Christ, it is satisfied with Christ, it embraces Christ, it cherishes Christ. Faith is moving out like that. That's what faith does. When faith stands in front of a mirror, the mirror becomes a window. With the glory of Christ on the other side and faith moves through the mirror window and cherishes, loves and delights in Jesus Christ. If the pain shuts and there's only mirror, faith vanishes. Faith looks away from itself to embrace Christ as the psalm in the judge of all that is true, beautiful, good, satisfying, right. So Paul is saying that the essence of the new Christian mind is that it sees and savors, it beholds and embraces Jesus Christ, not ourselves as the highest treasure. Say that again, the essential newness of the Christian mind is that it looks away to the glory of Christ, crucified, risen, reigning, coming with all that he is and embraces him not ourselves as our highest treasure. That's what faith does, that's what faith is. So now you see the astonishing thing that Paul is doing here. He's watching people puffed up, maybe at Rome, they may be at Bethlehem, they may be on the staff, they may be behind the pulpit, and he watches them get puffed up, thinking too highly of themselves, and he says to them, "Don't do that. Don't let that happen." That's the first half of verse three. Don't do that. Don't think of yourselves too highly. Rather, he says, "Make a measure of yourself by your faith and the measure of faith that you have." And in defining faith as that which goes out from itself to embrace Christ as its treasure and not itself, he's turning self-exaltation upside down. He's saying, "Do you want to have significance? Look to Christ as infinitely significant. Do you want to have value? Look to Christ as infinitely valuable. Do you want to have esteem? Look to Christ as infinitely worthy of your esteem." I'll be real careful here, because I know that I'm speaking into an American dense fog of pop psychology that has shaped every one of your minds. There is no escaping what is in the air we breathe, and I am very much aware that what I just said went through that fog and landed in your mind meaning exactly the opposite of what I intended. So, I'm going to linger here and just make sure as clear as I can be, you do not hear me say what I did not say, so I'll tell you what I did not say, and you test whether you heard it and how dense the fog is between your ears, that you have just absorbed. I've absorbed it, which is why it takes hours and hours to get the fog out of my mind and see the Bible clearly. I did not say, "Do you want to have significance?" Then look to Christ as the means of your significance. I did not say, "Do you want to have value?" Look to Christ as the one who gives you value. I did not say, "Do you want to have esteem?" Then look to Christ as the means of your esteem, "I did not say that." But some of you heard that because that's all you can conceive of as a way to be happy. He's got to endorse me rather than my finding my happiness in a self-forgetful, joyful endorsement of Him. You can't even conceive of it. You've been saturated for 40, 50, 60 years, some of you, with pop psychology that has the self-square at the center of life and the universe, and God exists to endorse it. And so I'm going to say again what I said and see if you can hear it this time. What I said was, "Do you want to have significance?" Then embrace Christ as the one who is infinitely significant for you. Do you want to have value? Then embrace Christ as the one who is infinitely valuable to you. Do you want to have esteem? Then embrace Christ as the one who is worthy of infinite esteem. Faith in Christ is the measure of our significance, our value, our esteem, because faith means looking away from ourselves and embracing Him as the sum of all that is significant, all that is valuable, all that is worthy of esteem and resting there and not turning Him into a stepping stone by which we get back to endorsing us, making ourselves the center again, and He becomes the stepping stone into my pride. And now I finally have a divine endorsement of my value. It's really hard for some of you to get that, I think. If Christ is more to you, you are more. If Christ is less to you, you are less. Your measure rises and falls with your measure of Him. Your valuing Him, this may be the best way to say, I went home and I did a debrief with Benjamin and Melissa last night after this sermon, and their heads were spinning. And I said, "I think the three sentences I'm about to say right now were the clearest and most important point," and Benjamin said, "Those are the ones that totally confused me." I'll try again. Your valuing of Christ is the value that you have. Your esteeming of Him is the esteem that you have. Your treasuring of Him is the treasure that you are. That's the best I can do to try to get at the first answer. Why is it, Paul, that you made faith, the measure of who I am when faith is a looking away from me to another? In the last ten minutes is my effort to answer that question. It's a miracle that if it happens in your heart, I pray that it will. Here's my second and last question this morning. I mean, answer this morning. I'm asking the question, what does Paul accomplish by making faith the measure, the God-assigned measure of myself? Answer, Paul makes faith the measure of thinking soberly about ourselves because faith is a gift of God and undermines and eliminates all boasting. Faith is a gift of God, and so if you make faith the measure of yourself, and that's a gift, boasting is gone. Now, let's see where I get that in verse three. It's right plain at the end of the verse. This with sober judgment, each according to the measure of faith that God has assigned. You don't create your own faith. God creates faith. You're deader than a doornail before God moves in on you and dead people don't believe in Jesus. Faith is awakened when the new birth brings you alive so that suddenly, like never before, you're listening to a radio program or you're reading a tract or you're fluffing the Bible open, which you've hated up until now and in your desperation, suddenly these words look like wisdom and power, and you don't know what's happened. You do now know what's happened. You have been born again. You have been awakened from the dead, a new creation has happened, a measure of faith has been assigned to you. Ephesians 2.8, "By grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing. It is the gift of God, not a result of your works, lest anyone should boast." The whole point in making faith a gift is to eliminate boasting. Let him who boasts, boast in the Lord. Let him who boasts in himself be damned. There is only one possible way to heaven, stop boasting in yourself and begin to boast in the Lord. That is, it's away from you, it's away from you. It's not about you. It's about your enjoying him and thus magnifying him. Let him who boasts, boast in the Lord, 1 Corinthians 4, 7, what do you have that you did not receive? And if you received it, why do you boast as if it were not a gift? Answer nothing. This should be the most grateful, humble, non-bosting people on planet Earth. We Christians who have awakened to the truth that the air we breathe is a gift. The eyes with which we see are gifts. The beat of a heart is a moment by moment undeserved gift of grace, and the cross is a lavish free gift while we were yet sinners. Christ died for us. We didn't deserve it. We didn't measure up for it. Having his gift, how can we be proud? How can we boast over one another? How can we exalt ourselves? Sure, we've got some convictions and we think the world is going to hell in a handbasket. But when you speak that, there's a brokenness. If you've wakened to your sin and to your absolute dependence, I don't like the swagger of contemporary evangelical politicians. There shouldn't be a swagger when we talk about marriage and what it is. There shouldn't be a swagger when we talk about pro-life and what it is. There should be a brokenness that we have seen anything of the truth is sheer gift. Of course we're willing to die and go to jail, but we won't swagger our way to the jail. So the second answer to the question of why he made faith the criterion of assessing ourselves is because faith is a gift and therefore whatever I am, it is my faith and that's a gift too. So let's draw this to a close. Let me tell you where we're going in the third answer. Third answer we begin with next week. The third answer goes like this. The reason Paul chose to make faith the criterion of who I am in its God-given measure is that God assigns faith differently in different proportions to different people in the body. Thus, this is why it's going to take half the message to explain this, and thus produces humble interdependence and humble servanthood. Because here are some questions that just blow me away. I want to say to Paul, now wait a minute, are you sure that if your goal is to get the church at Rome and the church at Bethlehem, sort of in sync with each other like a hand and an arm and a knee and a thigh and an eye and a foot, you want us to really be working together, pulling for each other and with each other? Are you sure that you want to create that unity, draw attention to different levels of faith? That's going to produce a kind of either pride for those who think they have a little more than others, and despair for those who think they have a little less than others. I don't think you want to go there, Paul. That's the way I feel when I read this verse. So I couldn't squeeze that into the last three minutes of this message, which I plan to do at the beginning, but gave up. So that's where we're ... Well, here's another question. Paul, you're talking about faith being assigned by God, 1 Timothy 6, 12 says, "Fight the fight of faith. You've just taken all the fight out of me by telling me it's a gift." Haven't you? Let me summarize where we've been and hope that you'll show up next week to finish this with me. Here's where we've been. Verse 3 of Romans 12 is a continuation of an opening and an unpacking of the new mind of verse 2. What makes us new? How are we new? What's different about us now? And he says, "Now, be careful, lest in asking that question you get a high view of yourself that you shouldn't have." And so here's my alternative to the excessively high view of who you are. The alternative is to think soberly about yourself. How do you do that? To measure yourself by the measure of faith that God has assigned to you. And in doing that, he puts self-exaltation right on its head because he makes the definition and the value and the significance and the esteem of who I am totally defined by my going away from myself and embracing another. So that my valuing him becomes who I am. My esteeming him becomes who I am. My treasuring him becomes who I am. And we will get along with each other pretty good. If that's the way we understand ourselves like this. Our worth consists in treasuring the worth of Christ. Our value consists in treasuring the value of Christ. Our esteem consists in esteem for Christ. Our significance consists in savoring the infinite significance of Christ. That's the renewed mind. That's the central, essential foundational nature of the renewed mind, which is why it has to come first before you get to verse 9 and you hear this wonderful statement, "Let love be genuine." You're getting nowhere with verse 9 until you get the knee problem fixed. Let's pray. Father, I know that some of this has been weighty and I pray that the Holy Spirit would have mercy upon me and all of us now lest our minds just be puzzled and not our minds and our hearts broken because of our inveterate self-centeredness and humbled into a believing child like throwing open the window instead of just looking at the mirrors, throw it open and let Christ shine there so that like a little child we say, "That's all I need. That's all I need is Jesus. If His glory is there, if His beauty is there, if His justice is there, if His wisdom is there, if His grace is there, if His love is there, if His knowledge is there, if His patience is there and it's all available for my enjoyment, that is all I need." To work that in our church, I pray, in His name, amen. Thank you for listening to this message by John Piper, pastor for preaching at Bethlehem Baptist Church in Minneapolis, Minnesota. 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