Kennystix's podcast
God's Word Has Not Fallen, Q & A
The following message is by Pastor John Piper. More information from Desiring God is available at www.desiringgod.org. Father, you know what needs to be talked about here and we could talk about a thousand things. And some of them would be less helpful and some more. And so would you guide the folks both who should ask and what they ask and then give me words, Lord, that would be faithful to Scripture and pastorally, sensitive and broadly helpful. Let your name be exalted, let pride be humbled, I pray, and grant that wisdom would be granted to people's lives and encouragement and help in whatever way is needed in this room. So make this a really useful time for your glory and for our good, I pray, in Jesus' name. Amen. I think we'll go out there, I'll just stack here, but I would like to encourage the people, even I haven't looked at these and I like to see the face and hear the voice of the people asking a question so that I know where it's coming from, it really is helpful to me. So I'm going to let you go first and if you don't have any questions, I'll look at this pile, but raise your hand and I don't know whether I should do the one to calling, but let's go over there and then we'll just kind of move across. So there was one right in here next and we'll do it this way. One of the aspects of election that I personally struggle with, I mean, I celebrate the fact that God is calling me an undeserving sinner to be saved and I thank God for that and I give them all the glory. But over the last couple years, thanks to a couple of fantastic friends have been turned on to your ministry and have really been wrestling with election and the part that I struggle with is further enrollments, I'm sure we'll get to it later today, versus say 18 through 23, the double predestination aspect of election, if you will, is how can we rejoice in the double predestination aspect of election that yes, while we are, there's nothing we can do to be taken out of God's hand and we're saved forever, but there are other people here on earth that they don't have a chance, they really have been created so we can further understand God's glory, but the rejoicing and that aspect of election is something I struggle with, I'm guessing I'm not alone, so. Yeah, no, you're not alone and I want to go back and affirm and qualify what you said. I would never say there's a person on planet earth who doesn't have a chance because I don't think the Bible addresses people that way, it doesn't move through the world saying well, no, there's person that doesn't need the gospel because they don't have a chance to believe and there's person doesn't need the gospel because they don't have a chance. The Bible urges us to preach the gospel indiscriminately, to pray for all people, to labor for all people, to lay down our lives for all people because whoever believes will be saved, whoever calls upon the name of the Lord will be saved. And if they don't, it is their choice not to and they are guilty for that choice and judgment will be owing to their guilt. For those outside the gospel, the judgment will be based, as Romans 1 says, on the way they responded to general revelation in suppressing the truth. The wickedness of men suppress the truth. So I just want to be careful in the way we state the problem. That's not the answer to your question yet. It's just be careful that we don't state they don't have a chance. I think that would be falling off one side of the mystery in a way that would be unbiblical. That still leaves the question of emotionally, how do we handle the fact that we know God has chosen that not all be saved and that therefore some be lost forever? And can you rejoice over that, especially if they're your loved ones? And you're right, we get to that tonight in chapter 9. But I'll go there with you right now since maybe we won't get there tonight. Who knows? But it's the bottom of the paragraphs, chapter 9, verse 20, 22. What if God, desiring, I'll just say it very quickly now because we really, I meant to get there today. What if God desiring to show His wrath and to make known His power has endured with much patience vessels of wrath prepared for destruction? And then comes a purpose clause. In order to make known to the riches, the riches of His glory for the vessels of mercy. So the purpose that in order that, at the beginning of verse 23, is the closest you get to a divine explanation for why He would ordain that there be vessels of wrath prepared for destruction, Esau. In order to make known the riches of His glory, if there were no lostness, there would be no grace, there would be no justice manifest, there would be no severity and power against sin, the holiness of God. I've got this long quote from Jonathan Edwards I'll say even maybe read tonight. But that's as close as I can get to the fact, and you sound like you've thought this through and you know that already, that in ordaining that there be lostness, judgment, God provides a way whereby He justly displays His power, displays His wrath which would not have been displayed in the same way for the enjoyment of and the trembling of and the gratitude of the elect for all eternity. To balance that out, we have to say the judge of all the earth will do right. I have preached at the funeral of unbelieving people. Those are much harder than any other kind of funeral, professed unbelievers, and you don't become mealy-mouthed and try to say sweet nothings about nature and you know they're going to the ground and lilies will grow up or something, that just stupid stuff that gets said at unbelieving funerals. You preach the gospel and at the end you say the judge of all the earth will do right. We leave it in his hands and some day, and here's my bottom line answer to your emotional question, the question of the emotions. Right now I'm a sinner and my emotions are imperfect in every direction and therefore in all likelihood I cannot properly respond fully to anything God does, including judgment. The day will come in the moment, in the twinkling of an eye, the last trumpet when I will be changed and see things the way God does, I will know even as I'm known and at that moment I think I will be granted the emotional capacity to have the joy in God's justice that God has. And it probably is just beyond us right now. We can't look at hell right now and heaven right now and feel the kind of moral affirmation emotionally towards both that God in his infinite wisdom, seeing the end from the beginning has, but someday I think we will be able to look upon the whole of God's dispensations. In hell, election and non-election, reprobation and election and say, God is good. God is just for all these reasons. That was wise and he did wrong by nobody. He was not unjust toward anyone. So if that seems impossible right now, I think that's just an emotional counterpart to the mystery that we'd just better suspend our emotional judgment and say, I'll wait. There was, there was a hand right in here. Yeah. I'm just curious as to why this conference Romans 9 through 11, just the process that you went through and I'm grateful for it, how I let you do it. I was here last year on Romans 8 and people said, you're going to do 9 to 11? That was one and I just finished preaching through it until it makes preparation easier. I've spent two years on it. I've been in Romans for six years at my church, preaching on Romans. One of the things that makes me feel just a little bit better, you paid money to come here at Romans 9 to 11 and you're going to get Romans 9, it looks like. You should get back two-thirds of your money or what brought me feeling some relief as I came into this is every sermon I have preached and there's about 34 of them on these three chapters, you can listen to and read free online at desiringgod.org, which takes you over to biblical preaching. So you can hear me preach it or you can read it. Everything I have ever said about Romans 9 to 11 is free online. So if I don't get through it all, then I just gave you two-thirds of your money's worth in the website, but right there maybe. Questions in the stack, so I'll try to be brave and ask it. Thank you. Galatians 5-4 talks about people who are trying to be justified by the law but are severed from Christ and fallen from grace. In the light of the perseverance of the saints, I have a hard time understanding, I guess from Romans 9, I can see how you can be cut off from Christ and never be with Christ, maybe severed. I don't understand the fallen from grace. Right. Right. I'll read the verse that she's talking about. Galatians 5-4, you are severed from Christ, you who would be justified by the law. You have fallen away from grace. For through the Spirit by faith, we ourselves eagerly so on. It sounds like you're assuming that you understand the perseverance of the saints and would affirm that, and I do too, which means that if you are saved, that is you're born again, you will persevere in faith to the end. You will not be lost. God will see to it by grace that he completes the good work that he began in you, Philippians 1, 6. In view of that, I would simply ask, does falling away from grace mean falling away from saving grace, falling away from regenerating grace? Does this text demand that the person who's now fallen away was regenerate or was saved? And I don't think anything in the verse demands that. In other words, right now I would say all of you are sitting under grace. You're hearing the truth of God spoken. The Holy Spirit is at work in this room. He loves Christ and he loves the gospel and the Holy Spirit is moving through Word and through testimony in this room. Grace is happening in this room. You can find yourself even brought by the Holy Spirit to conviction of sin and to consider Christ seriously and to begin to go to church and not yet be born again. And if at any of those points along the way you turned around and began to do the works thing over again, I think you could legitimately say you have fallen away from grace. Grace was moving you towards salvation. It was moving you towards the fullness of God's regenerating work in your life and you halfway in, part way in, you stiff-armed it and turned around and went the other way. So my answer is that there is a kind of falling away that isn't from regeneration, it isn't from salvation, it's from God's gracious work in your life that doesn't come to completion. And I would go to texts in Hebrews to show that very same thing. In fact it might be helpful to do that because this relates to what somebody else asked me a minute ago, let's go to Hebrews because many of you are familiar that Hebrews 6 and Hebrews 10 sounds like you can get pretty far with God and then be lost. But the text in Hebrews that is most significant in that regard is chapter 3 verse 14. And it all hangs on the tenths of the verb which I'll have to bring out. Chapter 3 verse 14 of Hebrews says, we have become shearers. Now that's a literal translation and the have is crucial. We have become shearers in Christ if indeed we hold our original confidence firm to the end, which is why we believe in the perseverance of the saints. If you persevere, what does it say? You shall share in Christ, no. If you persevere, you have shared in Christ. And if you don't persevere, you haven't shared in Christ. In other words, perseverance is the evidence of a past reality, not merely the striving towards a future reality. And so anybody who goes to church for 20 years, teaches Sunday school is a deacon and then rejects Christ, falls away from the church, lives in a life of dissolute sin and dies in his sin. I do not assume he's a Christian. In spite of 25 years of church membership, Deacon keeping his nose clean because the saints persevere to the end. And you don't say he lost his salvation. You say, we have shared in Christ if we hold our confidence firm to the end. And if we don't, we haven't. We never were born again. Another clearer text than this one is 1 John 2, 19, they went out from us because they were not of us for if they had been of us, they would not have gone out, but they went out that it might be plain that they were not of us. So there's a situation which people are in the church. It looks like they're of us and then something happens and they're gone and they go into sin and reject Christ and you don't conclude, oh, they were really of us. They were born of God and now they've lost their salvation, they became unregenerate. You can get in and out of Christ and in and out of salvation. You don't find that in the Bible. You find there can be these remarkable spiritual attainments, seemingly spiritual, Sunday school, teaching, attendance, be a deacon, be an elder, preach, an evangelist, ill-mergantry type, and not be Christian. It's very scary. Jesus said, many will say to me in that day, Lord, Lord, did we not do many mighty works in your name and you will say, depart from me, you workers of iniquity. I never knew you, so it's much easier for me to handle that text by saying the grace you fall from is not saving grace or regenerating grace, but rather the grace of God that was brought you into the fellowship of believers, brought you into a Christian family, brought you under the teaching of God's Word, brought you under conviction of sin, and then you threw it away. Hate is a pretty strong word and normally we are taught that God loves the sinner, but hates sin. What we have seen this morning is completely opposite of that, which is God hates the sinner. How does this word hate, how is it compatible with the word love, where God is love and his attribute of love, and then the second part of my question is, there is John Stark's views on the love of God, where he has come out saying that the annihilation versus eternal damnation, that God is such a God of love that he would not let these sinners perish and suffer for eternal. Right, those are two different questions. Who is those that's one question? Whenever we talk about love and hate, we have to talk about kinds of love and kinds of hate. Another question is, how do you talk about God's love for sinners, if in fact he hates Esau? I think the first thing I want to say is that God hates all that is evil, a proper emotional response towards corruption of creation and distortion of God-centeredness is evil and should be responded to with strong moral disapprobation, that is, hate, which means God hates the sinner in the sense that if the sinner himself is corrupt, is rebellious, is God-defying, a proper response to that is strong disapproval and hate, which does not rule out his love for that very person. I wrote this little book, The Passion of Jesus Christ, 50 Reasons Why Jesus Came to Die, and I put the first chapter where it was, God sent Jesus to absorb the wrath of God, knowing that's the hardest one for people to get. God sent Christ to die for God first. The reason is because God's angry at sinners, now I think that's not very different from hate because Malachi says he's angry at Esau. God is angry at sinners who rebel against him and don't believe him and he's angry. He hates them in their corruption, which is who they are, so it's not wrong to say he hates them. Do I not hate them with perfect hatred, Psalm 19, Psalm 19, somewhere, one of the Psalms, do I not hate them with perfect hatred? But God can love a person that he hates that way. He did. He looked upon me and he said, "The way John Piper is in himself, I hate that. He is doomed and he deserves hell." Now, I also have more in my heart than hate. I have love and I will therefore, since I cannot just let bygones be bygones and sweep his sin under the rug and treat all that God dishonoring sin as though it didn't impune my infinite worth, I will now put my son between me and him and I will pour that wrath out on my son. I will hate my son in that sense. I kill him. I brought all my anger and all my wrath against my son precisely to spare the one that I am so angry with and thus remove my anger. That's what propitiation means. So sad that we take that word out of the Bible. It only occurs about three times, Romans 3, 25, 1 John 2, 2, another time in 1 John. God put forward Christ as a propitiation by his blood. That means wrath removing, appeasing and angry God. But God did that. You don't do that. God did that. He appeased his own wrath. So what my answer is that it is okay in a carefully worded way to talk about God hating all sinners. And then inserting Christ, absorbing that hatred, that anger and thus forgiving, removing it, and now this is the glorious thing about the atonement, is that the only disposition God has towards you in Christ is mercy. There is no hatred anymore. There is no judging anger anymore. There's only fatherly disapproval followed by chastisement, which is all love according to Hebrews 12. I think John Stott is just dead wrong about annihilation. Most of you don't know what he's talking about, perhaps. I love John Stott, a father in the faith to me. I remember his little yellow book in 1966, "Men Made New," that turned me on my head and set me on an exegetical course. I met him last summer, shook his hand with almost tears, weren't a bow down in worship almost because of the reverence I feel for John Stott and what he's done for the church and the 98 percent beauty of everything he writes. So read John Stott and if he hears this tape, I hope he feels loved, but he's wrong about annihilation and I think deep down he knows he's wrong and he's backed up a little bit. What he said was annihilation happens to people rather than hell. There's no eternal conscious torment. There's only obliteration and now if you ask him what he believes, he says, "I'm just agnostic on what happens," which is not good enough because I think as terrible as it is, the Bible is clear that there is weeping and gnashing of teeth and that just as eternal life is eternal, Matthew 25, 46, so eternal punishment is eternal. They are coordinate times and coordinate experiences and here is it just does not make any sense to say to an unbeliever, "Your punishment for your sin will be obliteration." That's not punishment, that's exactly what they want. They're expecting it and so glad for it to happen. It's not a judgment, it's a deliverance from judgment. That's my bottom line argument is that he's saying judgment now becomes annihilation, go into nothingness, have no consciousness at all, I say that is salvation from judgment, which most sinners desperately want to happen. Just take me out when my time is over and if I'm conscious of nothing good or bad, I can't regret it. Can't feel regret, that's not punishment. So, I answered both your questions whether I should ever not. Let's just keep going back and forth here, maybe over, okay, I don't like being the one who chooses to see you, go ahead. This may be a place you're going tonight, but would you comment on believe, like in verses 10, 9, and 11, there are no denominations in the Bible, we know that. But just if you could define in some sense, believe, amen. Chapter 10 verse 9, believe in your heart that God has raised him from the dead. That's a good place to go since we're here. If you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. How should I do this? Taking all that I see in the New Testament into account with regard to the word believed, some of it here, some of it not here, I'm very happy to go with the historic pieces of faith that say, faith is first, believing is first, affirming factual content about Jesus. He is God, he died for my sins, he rose from the dead, he is the ground and fulfillment of my righteousness and the fulfillment of all of God's promises, those are facts which the devil can affirm, which means they're inadequate to save anybody. So but they've got to be there, so that's an indispensable but not a sufficient definition of faith that we affirm certain true facts about Jesus. Secondly, we accept those facts as true, maybe that's not different to the way I said the first one. See the facts? Accept the facts. Then the third one is trust and trusting your life to those facts and say, I bank on you, I count on you, I rest in you. Now I'm going to go one step further in defining faith based on texts like John 635, I'm the bread of life, whoever comes to me will not hunger whoever believes in me will never thirst. And I define faith there as a coming to Jesus for soul satisfaction such that we never thirst again. That is we don't go after our souls cravings outside him, we know where they're found. So I'm bringing in a very strong emotional component to faith which I think is missing in a lot of places which is why you can have these nominal Christians, carnal Christians who think they're Christians, there've been no change in their emotional framework whatsoever. You listen to them pray, are they connected at all, is there any love at all? So faith here focuses on the fact that Jesus raised from the dead, believe in your heart, that's important in your heart, not just in your head, that God raised him from the dead and that implies if you raised him from the dead he'll raise you from the dead and all the things that he obtained for us by the resurrection I think are embraced there. So I think that the faith that saves is a faith that sees the truth, embraces the truth of Christ and then affirms it and has an experience of resting satisfaction in all that God is for us in Jesus. It's a change inside in your moral, spiritual preferences. You prefer Jesus now. Thank you. First of all, thanks for the prodigal's daughter, it is beautiful. Thank you. Very beautiful. Secondly, I wrote this question down so you could exercise your free will and whether or not to answer it. You gave that up and thank you. Two things you said last night, given that Jesus Christ is God and that our nation now is more diverse, wasn't your word, but pluralistic, pluralistic, yes, than ever before. How would you prefer that President Bush as a believer and as the leader of the whole nation publicly address, acknowledge or affirm people of other faiths, specifically Islam? Excellent question and I will use my will to answer it. And God knew a long time ago what I'm about to say. And I'm totally responsible for whether I make a mistake. What I would like President Bush to do is publicly say he's a Christian and Jesus is his Lord. Now whether he's able to do this or not, I don't know. If he can't, I don't think he should try because he'd give himself in big trouble. I think he should say, looking right into the camera, into the eyes of every American Jewish person, Islam person, Hindu person, pagan, unbelieving of any sort person and say you all know you've heard I'm one of those evangelical Christians. I believe in the scriptures as the foundation of my life. I believe Jesus has forgiven my sins and I believe this is true and that all people need to believe this. I believe in Jesus Christ who teaches me that faith in him is useless when it's coerced in any legal way or any forced way. My faith in Jesus demands that I endorse laws that do not require faith and protect people from being coerced in any faith. But what I, you see, most people agree with the second half of that. Let's all have laws that are not coercive. Don't push you to be a Christian, Muslim, Jew, Hindu, don't push, don't institutionalize and coerce any faith. And we think that in order to provide room for that kind of pluralism and protection of freedom of religion, we have to keep our mouth shut about what we believe. And we dishooted people all over the place in public life who go public with what they believe in. And the reason I think is because nobody has made a case publicly and clearly from a bully pulpit like the presidency that it is because we believe in the biblical Christ that we will never, ever coerce faith in the biblical Christ. We will labor to make room for everyone's faith because the only faith that counts with Jesus is freely given faith. If you put a gun to my head and say you go to jail, if you don't get a Christian, that's not a faith Jesus approves of, therefore he disapproves of that law. And therefore ironically, the Lord of Lords and the King of Kings who one day calls every need to bow would, I think, in a fallen world where faith must be given freely rather than coerced with the gun or the law, I think that very Lord of Lords would approve of laws that protect Islam in America from persecution, Jewishness from persecution and so on. Now that's sort of easy for me to say. I thought you were going to ask a harder question, but I won't tell you what it is. That the harder question is, how should we address lifestyles that are condemned by Christianity? Abortion is a lifestyle of murder and homosexuality, a lifestyle of sexual misbehavior. And there it's trickier, like do you go to the next step piper and say you should also have laws then that protect the marriage of homosexuals. And there we have to say publicly, here's the way I would say it, I think, I'm a Christian, I believe that God has ordained male and female for the good of the world and ultimately for the glory of His name and the demonstration of Christ and His church in a marriage of one man and one woman. And therefore personally, I am totally committed to marriage as one man, one woman for a lifetime. And I believe that is built into your nature and our natures and that is good for a culture. And now my argument in order for me to make a case for a law, a law that says you can't marry that way, I have to move from my religious conviction which is the foundation of my argument to the kinds of argumentation that might win a large majority. And if I can't, I lose, and I still can't, I can live with that. If I lose, I lose, I'm a citizen of heaven. I do not expect America to be a reflection of the kingdom of heaven. And if it goes that way, I'll be grieved and our society will pay big time, it will probably end as we know it. And judgment will fall, but you don't coerce with laws unless you can get enough people to say, like we do say with stealing, we all agree. You can't steal from me, we put you in jail for that and that's rooted in morality. We don't let you kill, we don't let you commit perjury and break contracts. In fact, you can be fined if you don't clean up the dog poop in your backyard in Minneapolis. It's incredible how much coercion we use because we have consensus as a culture. You can't put up a rock band at 3 a.m. in the morning outside my bedroom window. We have laws that say you'll be fined if you do that. We coerce people all over the place because we have consensus as a culture what will work. Now if we lose that consensus on marriage, we'll pay for it, but we might lose it. So it's not wrong, it doesn't fall out of bounds to argue for a law in regard to a lifestyle. I don't think that would contradict in other words what I said about protecting religions. Well that's huge. Do we go over here? Once again thank you for your ministry to the body and I know that I believe that I would speak for all of our folks at our church that were aware of Abraham's situation. And assuming that he was a member of Bethlehem, would you mind speaking to the church discipline process in that case? I would not mind at all, it was very painful and very wonderful. We excommunicated my son and I read the letter of excommunication with tears. The elders worked with my son for a long time, they did not want to do this. I made them do it. I mean they knew it was right to do but they knew this would be awful. And by the way they labored for six months studying the scriptures to see if I needed to resign. Because it says in First Entitus that an elder should have believing children. Now what does that mean? Does "pistah" there mean faithful, reliable, honest? Does it apply to little children, all adult children? But if you have four children who are walking with the Lord and one isn't, now does it mean all the children have to be? You know this was a very complex issue and my elders didn't blow it off. I said guys you must be faithful to Scripture here, you do what you have to do. So they spent six months studying Scripture, then they spent months with Abraham. They would go pray over him, they would invite him in and pray over him, put their hands on him and ask for God to open his eyes. And before they would, this was not a precipitous thing that they did in other words. I'm not saying you know you've got one person who seems to become an unbeliever, boom you got to kick him out of the church just like that, it's not easy or simple. But eventually it came that Abraham is where he is, the church is where we are in our commitment to Scripture and so the elders voted unanimously to put him out of the church. And I read that letter at an open meeting, the church with trembling and voted, all in favor, "I," I mean there's a certain kind of "I" to some votes and a certain kind of "I" to other votes, and that "I" was a very sober, painful, tearful "I." I went home, I got on the phone, I said, "Abraham, we voted to excommunicate you tonight." And he said, "Good, I knew you would and that's the right thing to do." So I admire you for it, that's the way he was, that's where he was spiritually, never had any animosity towards me or the church, strange, isn't it? So that lasted then for how long, maybe two years, that's how much grace they were giving him early on. And then when he wrote that email, I sent that out to the elders, we all rejoiced, it took about six months process for them working with him and me to be assured, "This is real," and he's back, and that night, that public meeting was sweet. That's the goal of church discipline. Every excommunication is with a view to restoration, right? You know just good, got rid of that group, that's not the point of excommunication in the New Testament, the whole point of severing relations, holy ostracism, don't even eat with such a one, sometimes it says? The point is not mean-spiritedness, the point is broken-hearted longing and praying and wooing and winning back. Well, a lot of painful things had happened in his life emotionally, I think, and he stood before the people, one of the elders, a good friend of his, administered to him the church covenant. We usually do it with large groups of people. There's one kid in front of several hundred people, "Do you engage to this and do you engage to this?" I do, I do. And then they ask him to give a testimony of God's grace in his life, and I'm sitting beside my wife, my eight-year-old, and Abraham's new girlfriend, Molly, who he's married to, and because it's six months into his walk with the Lord. And we're all sitting about eight rows back at the business meeting, and he just narrates the story, he points over here and says, "I was sitting right there by that post when I decided I was not a Christian four years ago. My dad was teaching." Just like Isaiah preached and make the heart of this people fat. You preach and you bring reprobation on some people. So under my dad's preaching, I decide I'm not a believer. And he just takes off and does his own thing for four years. And he said, "Here's the way God brought me back." And then he looks up right at me and I wondered, "He's a really non-emotional matter of fact down to earth, get it done, in your face, argumentative guy." And as he tried to say, "I'm so sorry. I brought so much shame upon you in the church," he just broke down and wept uncontrollably for about a minute. And the people just kind of sat there. I could tell people just wanted to go up and hug him, you know, just grab and say, "It's okay. It's okay. You know, we forgive you." But nobody moved and he got control of himself and finished his statement. So I felt really good about those tears. They were, I think, what everybody needed at that moment to hear. Is his heart really there? Or is he just, you know, doing this for other reasons? Thanks for asking. Happy ending. Let him pass you the microphone right, right there. How do you use these texts in your personal evangelism and then do you have a successful or effective analogies or word pictures to use to expand on the doctrine of reprobation? Well, say the first sentence again. How does it, what? How do you use these texts in your personal evangelism? Use these texts. These would not be the first texts I'd go to in personal evangelization. In personal evangelism, well, they're different kinds, aren't they? There's relational. You know the people. Everyone's struggling with and you're talking into a situation you understand. And then there's cold turkey going out on Tuesday nights knocking on doors. Or I call mine jogging evangelism. I go out in the morning. I carry two quests for joys in my back sweaty pocket and just start jogging for half an hour. Pray in that God would lead me to people and usually they're street people or people walking to work at, you know, seven in the morning or something downtown. So there's that kind of evangelism and you just want to sow a seed. You're not going to get very far. You're dripping sweat. They don't want to talk to you anyway. And so into the relationship you find texts that are suited to the need. And there's so many glorious promises in the Bible and you want to speak the word of promise and then draw them toward the cross and toward Christ and get them to that simple act 1631. What shall I do to be saved? Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and you will be saved. Now for the average American today probably saved doesn't mean anything. And so you need other texts that draw them in. These texts about election I think are going to come in through encountering obstacles with people. And I gave you illustration of the fact that if a person says, "I'm too evil, I've done too much, I've sinned too much," you know, there are two ways you could go with that. One way is to say, don't treat the cross that way. The payment paid here was so full, so rich, so deep, it's sufficient to cover all the sins you've ever done. That's one. The other way would be to go to an election text where you are chosen before the foundation of the world without reference to anything you've ever done. And therefore you can't use the bad things you've done to rule you out of whether you're chosen. Now I don't know if I didn't want to bring up chosenness to an ice cold, new, inquiring believer, but they often do. They often bring up things like that. You know where it comes up most is in the doctrine of irresistible grace. They get when you're a Calvinist. So do you hear they're sitting in my office? Do you think I can believe? And the glorious thing about irresistible grace, the Lord opened her heart to give heed, or as many as were foreordained under eternal life, believed, Acts 13, 48. The glorious thing about that is to say to a person, "Look, right now can you make yourself love Jesus? Can you make yourself feel that Jesus is more precious to you than money and sex and power and family and health and life itself? Can you just push a button by your will and make yourself a door Christ? Everybody knows you can't." I'd say, "So your only hope is grace, and I'd like to pray with you right now that as I share texts with you about the gospel and the beauty and glory of Christ, he would open your eyes to see." And you pray, Lord, for Grant that Mary would have eyes to see that when Christ died on the cross, it was enough that when God sent his son, it was to save sinners. He didn't come to save the righteous. He came to call sinners to repentance, and as you pray, and you're just longing that Lord bring text to your mind that'll be used by the Holy Spirit to penetrate right through whatever obstacles are there. So I find that the doctrines of grace, total depravity, unconditional election, limited or definite or effective atonement and perseverance of the saints, and what I'll even have, irresistible grace, I find that those are very helpful and useful in dealing with people's souls because sober people know that they can't turn it on and off. They can't make themselves. By the way, I think the reason evangelism in America has become, in large measure, so "decisionistic," so that all we call for is a choice, sign a card, walk a Nile, go to a church, is because we can control that. And we want effects. We want to be able to report to the guys that are supporting us. We've had these many decisions. I can control decisions. I can get people to make decisions. I can get people to sign cards and do stuff. Anything you just use your will to do, I can give them to do it. But you don't have to be born again to sign a card. You don't have to be born again to walk an Nile or anything. You have to be born again to see Jesus as glorious, to see Jesus as beautiful, to see Jesus as attractive and winsome and more valuable than life and health and stuff. And so evangelism is impossible without the Holy Spirit. People know that if you call for what Jesus called for. I mean, I just read it again yesterday in Luke 14, unless you renounce all that you have, you cannot be my disciple. Unless you hate mother and father, sister and brother, wife and children and your own life also, you cannot be my disciple. There has to be such an emotional, Copernican revolution that you now look upon mom and dad and wife and brother and sister as tremendously, I'll just use the word tremendously instead of infinitely, tremendously less to be desired than Jesus, than you're born again. But nobody can make that happen in his own soul. You can choose to do a few things, but you can't make that happen. You got to cry out, oh God, take out the heart of stone, put in the heart of flesh, write your law on my heart, draw me to the Savior, open my blind eyes, raise this dead corpse. So I find praying like that with people is dictated by my theology and it's exactly what they know they need, maybe one more it looks like. I was wondering if you could summarize Edward's beliefs on the Trinity and whether you agree or disagree. Yeah, yeah, I do agree and I'll try in 30 seconds to, oh no, we had three minutes it looks like. I recommend that you read Edward's essay on the Trinity, it's only about 30 pages and it really is quite understandable unlike Freedom of the Will, which is harder to understand. But his view is that God the Father from all eternity has had a perfect idea of himself, a perfect picture of himself, a perfect to use the biblical word image of himself. Jesus is the exact image, radiance, essence of the Father. And this idea is invested so fully with all that God is that it stands forth. It has stood forth as long as God has been, which is eternally as a separate person. So that God knows himself in his Son and the Son knows himself in his Father and so his conception of the Son is that it is the perfect personal idea of God only way more than an idea because when God has an idea of himself, the wholeness of God is in his idea and therefore it stands forth as a completely distinct and separate person, one in essence because it's his idea of the Father. Now the Holy Spirit is that there's a love and energy and delight that goes back and forth between the Father and the Son and as they have a communal relationship with one another, which they've always had from all eternity, this communion that they have is like an esprit de corps, spirit of the body, spirit, it stands forth as a separate person embodying all the love and all the delight and all the admiration that the Father has for the Son and the Son has for the Father so that the essence of the Holy Spirit is all that the Father is toward the Son and all that the Son is toward the Father and a third person stands forth and what's so remarkable about the essay on the Trinity is that Edwards uses texts to support this. He finds texts and they illumine, the texts become illumined in relationship to the Trinity in a most remarkable way because you'd never take them that way. For example, when it says in Romans, I think it's 5'5 where it says we rejoice in our tribulations because tribulation works patience, patience, reprovenness and approvingness, hope and hope does not disappoint because the love of God is poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit. What does that mean? In its fullness. What does that mean? The love of God and his argument is that God's love is poured out because God's love is his Holy Spirit or God's Holy Spirit is the embodiment of the love that he has for the Son and the Son and the Father so that all the love that God has had from all eternity in delighting in the Son and the Son delighting in the Father, he now pours into us so that what the presence of the Holy Spirit is admiration for and delight in the Son which is why the Holy Spirit is given, namely to glorify the Son. The Holy Spirit comes with the very energy that the Father has for the Son so that in us there is the presence of God loving the Son with the love of the Father for the Son. That's the kind of thing you read in Edward's essay on the Trinity and it just causes you to see the relevance of the Trinity but back to your question about agreement, disagreement. I'm fully willing to simply say this is a human construction in some measure to say idea known by the Father which becomes a person because it's so full of the Father and is the Father in reflection and then the Holy Spirit is the energy and the life and the love and delight that goes back and forth so much so that all of them are in that and he is a person in his own right, that's a human effort to get our hands around probably what will never be fully understandable for us but it's one that I think does not contradict Scripture and has been personally very helpful to me as I've tried to conceive of the Trinity. 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 20601 East Franklin Avenue, Minneapolis, Minnesota 55406. Everything God exists to help you make God your treasure because God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in Him. [BLANK_AUDIO]
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