Take Five

Two Timothy chapter 3:

“But mark this: There will be terrible times in the last days. People will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boastful, proud, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, without love, unforgiving, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not lovers of the good, treacherous, rash, conceited, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God—having a form of godliness but denying its power. Have nothing to do with them.

“They are the kind who worm their way into homes and gain control over weak-willed women, who are loaded down with sins and are swayed by all kinds of evil desires, always learning but never able to acknowledge the truth. Just as Jannes and Jambres opposed Moses, so also these men oppose the truth—men of depraved minds, who, as far as the faith is concerned, are rejected. But they will not get very far because, as in the case of those men, their folly will be clear to everyone.

“You, however, know all about my teaching, my way of life, my purpose, faith, patience, love, endurance, persecutions, sufferings—what kinds of things happened to me in Antioch, Iconium and Lystra, the persecutions I endured. Yet the Lord rescued me from all of them. In fact, everyone who wants to live a godly life in Christ Jesus will be persecuted, while evil men and impostors will go from bad to worse, deceiving and being deceived. But as for you, continue in what you have learned and have become convinced of, because you know those from whom you learned it, and how from infancy you have known the holy Scriptures, which are able to make you wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus. All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, so that the man of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work.”[1]

Amen.

Now just a brief prayer together:

Father, what we know not, teach us; what we have not, give us; what we are not, make us. For your Son’s sake we pray. Amen.

Well, as I say, it is a privilege to be here, to be back here, at Master’s. According to my own records, the first occasion of a visit here to the college for me was on the 30th of November 1987. And my most memorable visit for me was on the 26th of November 1990. The 26th of November was a Monday; that means that the 25th was a Sunday. (I’m pretty smart that way, just to let you know, and I figured that out.) But I remember it vividly, because I had been at Grace Church in the evening. I was driving out here to Santa Clarita with Dr. MacArthur to go and stay in his home. And as we got closer to his home, he said to me—he just turned and said in passing—“And you’ll be okay tomorrow morning for speaking at chapel, won’t you?”

I said, “No, I wasn’t planning on doing that at all.”

He said, “Well, I think it would be a good idea if you did.”

As you know, he doesn’t have many ideas. They’re usually a little more straightforward than that. And I said to him, “But I don’t have anything prepared. And what am I going to do? I’m just going to go to my bed, and get up, and it will be the morning, and then it will be time.”

And he said, “Yes.” He said, “It’s not a problem.” He says, “Why don’t you go to your bed and just say to yourself, ‘If there were five things that I would want to say to a group of young college students…’ And then just tell them what the five things are.”

So I said, “Fine.” So I went to my bed, and I had a little notepad, which I usually have with me, and I wrote on the top of the pad—these are the sheets from 1990—I wrote on the top, “Master’s College, November 26, 1990.” And then I said what I just told you, and then I wrote down, “So, I’m going to share with you some of the principles, encapsulated in a phrase or two, which largely frame my life and ministry.” And that was, I think, a super idea on John’s part then, and I thought it might not be a bad idea for now. Because, after all, you weren’t here, right? I mean, some of you actually were here, because the students then are now older than I was when I gave that talk then, which is a sobering kind of thought.

So, what I want to do is largely do that. Because I want you to know… I mean, if I were in your position, I’d say, “Well, they brought this old guy in, and apparently, he gave a talk twenty-four years ago, and it was quite good, but it couldn’t have been that good, ’cause he hasn’t been here for fifteen years.” So, they delayed—a fifteen-year delay—in the hope that I could get another talk, and then I come back and give the same talk that I gave twenty-four years ago. So, I probably… Next time I’ll be back, I’ll be about 77 if we work on the same principle.

The journey of Christian pilgrimage is not a few hundred-yard sprints. It is a cross-country run that lasts for the rest of your life.

But you see, I’m now addressing you. By and large, you all have the greater part of your life before you. For myself, unless I live to be 125, I have the greater part of my life behind me, and I have less in front of me. So, if I was a young person, I’d want to know not only, “Hey, how was it twenty-four years ago, when you were 38?” but “Are you jaded? Have the principles changed? Do you still believe? Are these really the things you would still want to say?” And I think there’s a test in that, because if they were valid then, then they should be valid now.

And so, I had ten on that occasion. I’m going to do a favor to you this morning and make it twenty—no!—and reduce it to five. And reduce it to five. I want to, if I may, just give you five. I’m not doing it expositionally. I’m doing it topically. I hope you will see that each thing that I say to you is firmly grounded in the Scriptures. If it isn’t, then you shouldn’t pay much attention to it. But I’ve read from 2 Timothy purposefully, because—not of the opening section of it but because of the “You, however…” or the “But you…”

He is addressing Timothy, as you know, in the prospect of his departure, his demise, his death—that is, Paul the apostle. They’re going to move from the apostolic to the postapostolic church. The question is: How is it going to go? It’s therefore imperative that Timothy, as a young man, is able to stand in the stead of the apostle, is able to proclaim the apostle’s words, and to do so in a context where there is all of the external persecution, where there is the infiltration of false teachers, where there is the willingness on the part of some to be always learning but never coming to a knowledge of the truth. And it is in that context that Paul is able to say to Timothy, “You know two things: You know your teachers, and you know the Scriptures. And I want you,” he says, “to continue in the things you have learned and have become convinced of.” So he issues this call to continuance in the things that are his basic convictions.

And, I think, in every life, the journey of Christian pilgrimage is essentially that journey. It is—in the title of a book from a long way in the past—it is “a long obedience in the [one] direction.”[2] It is the ability to sustain life by the enabling grace of God. It’s not a few hundred-yard sprints that last for a moment, and then you can lie down on the grass, but it is a cross-country run that lasts for the rest of your life. And the convictions to which you come at this point in your lives will largely frame the rest of your lives.

And so, here are my five.

No Ideal Place to Serve God

Number one: There is no ideal place to serve God except the place he sets you down. There is no ideal place to serve God except the place he sets you down.

“Abraham, I want you to go to a place.”[3] “What place?” “Don’t you worry about the place. I know where I want you to go. I’d like you to go.”

“Jonah, I would you like you to go to Nineveh.”[4] “I was thinking more about Tarshish.” “No, I would like you to go to Nineveh.”

“Begg, I would like you to go to Cleveland.” Well, how unfair is that? I mean, I’m not a world traveler, but I’ve been coast to coast in America, and if you had to choose a spot, you know—you know, even in the top twenty… And I say that with the greatest respect for all of you who come from Cleveland, but it’s not exactly the rolling hills of Scotland. In fact, I believe some people very unkindly refer to it as “The Mistake by the Lake.” Who wants to live in a city that has a tower that is Terminal and a lake that is Erie? That’s where I live! It’s apparently the buckle on the Rust Belt of America. It is the very heart of it all.

How in the world do you ever end up where you end up? Only by the providential, overruling hand of God. And this is a very simple point, but I want to make it for you. Because I receive résumés from young people like you all the time. And a lot of them—justifiably, deservedly—go in the round file, because you have never understood this point. Because you’ve never understood that the song we’ve just been singing actually has an impact on all of life—including geography, including location, including place of service. And it will be a tremendously liberating thing for you if you can fasten on to this and grab ahold of it, so that you won’t write letters saying, “I believe that I should be serving in a multigenerational church. I should be on a pastoral team of at least a dozen. I’m most skillful in area y and area z, and I’m very competent in everything else”—the usual boring, horrible résumé stuff. And frankly, it just sounds like you’re blowing your own horn. I might give you a job—maybe in the nursery or car parking to begin with, since you’re so good and since you’re so clear about where you need to be. But, of course, you would never have written to me, would you? Not unless you’d been rejected in the first twenty-five places to which you’d applied, and now you find yourself in Cleveland, Ohio.

No, but it’s not that. Think for a moment about John the Baptist. John the Baptist. Where did John the Baptist operate? You remember, he had that amazing city-center church in Jerusalem. It was perfect; he was doing urban ministry. No, he wasn’t. No, he was out in the suburbs of Jerusalem! He had a beautiful, beautiful, spreading campus with freeway access—I mean, no traffic lights in between himself and the campus. No, it was just perfect. No. No, no, no! He was actually operating, Luke tells us,[5] in the Judean wilderness—what is referred to by one commentator as “a hot, uninhabit[able] depression”[6] situated between 600 and 1300 feet below sea level. Not what you would call an ideal place for ministry!

And yet, what do we believe? What do we learn? “The whole Judean countryside and all the people of Jerusalem went out to him.”[7] Why? Because he was the ideal man in the ideal place? No! Because he was God’s man in God’s place—just the way that Esther was God’s woman in God’s place; just the way that Naomi, despite her triple bereavement, was God’s woman in God’s place. You wouldn’t have called it an ideal place. You don’t need to look for an ideal place. ’Cause there is no ideal place to serve God except the place he sets you down.

“He Who Is Humble and Contrite in Spirit”

Secondly—and there is in my mind, at least, some kind of progression of thought in this. Because part of the explanation for the effectiveness of the ministry of John the Baptist, if it is not to be found in, you know, the congenial nature of his circumstances, is to be found in this second point—not entirely but certainly. And here’s the second point. This is a quote from Isaiah 66: “This is the one to whom I will look,” says the Lord, “he who is humble and contrite in spirit and trembles at my word.”[8] “This is the one to whom I will look.” Who is the one to whom God looks? This is the description of it, absolutely clearly.

What a challenge that is in our day, isn’t it? Peggy Noonan, writing in The Wall Street Journal, as she does on Saturdays, in 2009 she made this comment: “For 30 years the self-esteem movement told the young [people that] they’re perfect in every way. It’s yielding something new in history: an entire generation with no proper sense of inadequacy.”[9] “An entire generation with no proper sense of inadequacy.” We’re not talking here about a false humility or some kind of obsequiousness. No, she says, there’s just “no proper sense of inadequacy”—no genuine, heartfelt awareness of the fact that I am by nature an inadequate person, that I am on my best day an unprofitable servant,[10] that I am a broken and a fractured vessel into which God pours the immensity of his grace,[11] no proper sense of that.

In The American Paradox, a book by David Myers where he says the American paradox is that never in the history of America have people had so much and yet never had so little[12]—and then he goes on to identify the fact that this sense of angst has permeated the millennials, young people in your kind of generation and slightly ahead of you. And he says it’s striking that it is not in the lives of individuals who grew up, as it were, on the wrong side of the tracks but rather in the lives of individuals who had a lovely home and a nice mom and dad and made it through school and got into college and university and graduated and found a job for themselves. And yet, he says, the amazing thing is that they testify to the fact that they’re empty. They’re baffled by their emptiness, because their self-esteem is high, but their self is empty. And if you read that book, you will find that he makes the point that I’m trying to make to you: that these individuals grew up being told they could be anything they wanted to be, but they don’t know what they want to be. They’ve never been more connected to people in their entire lives, by means of social media, and yet they testify to a sense of alienation that they can’t explain. They have, really, everything that they’d hoped to get at the end of their dream, and yet they got there, and they find that there’s nothing actually there for them.[13]

Now, the Christian world, the Christian testimony, the Christian youngster growing up, coming out of college in education in that environment, has something to say. What do we have to say? We have to say that united to Christ, our adequacy is ultimately found in him. After all, if Peggy Noonan was worried about this in 2009, goodness gracious, she couldn’t be prepared for the last five years! You are the young people that have introduced us to the selfie. The selfie! Of all names in the world, the selfie! What a horrible name! Right? I see people everywhere now with their arms—they try to extend their arms. In fact, I’ve even seen that you can buy these extenders, can’t you? You walk around with them like a sort of upended walking stick, and so you can take photographs of yourself no matter where you are. How bizarre is this! You say, “Well, it’s not bizarre. It’s just ’cause you’re an old guy. You don’t realize: This is it.” No, I do realize this is it. “Well,” you say, “well, Rembrandt, he did self-portraits.” Yeah, well, I knew Rembrandt, and you ain’t no Rembrandt, all right? All right?

Two Timothy 3, heading the list: Men will be what? Philautos—“lovers of themselves … rather than lovers of God.” You see how countercultural the message of the Bible, the gospel, is that needs to seep into the heart of our lives so that as we seek to make sense of the environment in which we live (we’ve got to be in it; we don’t have to be of it in every case), we have an opportunity to make a difference. Arrogance and selfie-ness abounds. The reason that you’re even surprised that I would point it out is because it is so endemic that you don’t even, many of you, notice it. For me, it’s an observation from the outside. For you, you’ve grown up with it. You largely created it. So it takes somebody from the outside to say, “Do you really think this is a good idea?” Do you really think that everybody in the world wants to hear about what you’re doing every fifteen seconds? I got news for you: They don’t!

United to Christ, our adequacy is ultimately found in him.

I just read a piece about Dakota Fanning in Lucky magazine in September. “What were you doing reading Lucky magazine?” I don’t know! I find things lying around when I go to the doctor’s. And this is what she says. She is described as “a millennial with a baby boomer’s suspicion of social media.” “She doesn’t tweet or Facebook or pin or Instagram. ‘It’s a hole … I just don’t want to dive into. … I don’t want to know all these things about people. It’s like the mystery of life has been removed.’”[14] Totally self-preoccupied!

Now, if you get a child that’s grown up like that, I don’t care what college they go to. By the time they came out to serve on your pastoral team, unless something has happened to hammer them and to break them, then you don’t want to deal with them. Trust me! Because the one to whom God looks is the one who is humble, contrite, and trembles at the Word.

Go back to John the Baptist. John the Baptist—the people come to him and say, “You’ve been really preaching up a storm, John, and we’re going to include you in our magazine. We wanted to put a few things in about you. Who are you?”

He says, “I’m not.”

They said, “Now, let’s ask the question again: Who are you?”

He says, “I am not.”

They say, “Well, are you?”

He said, “No.”

They said, “This is not going well. We’re trying to put something in the magazine. What should we put in?”

He said, “Well, you could say that I’m a voice crying.[15] You could say that I’m a finger pointing. You could say that I’m a small light shining.[16] But I’m the best man; I’m not the groom.”[17]

This is what humility is: Be yourself, and forget yourself.

Have you ever been to a wedding where the best man thinks it’s his wedding when it’s not his wedding? I mean, it’s one of the worst things you could ever experience: He talks all the time. He takes the microphone and says, “I’m so pleased to be here at this wedding.” Get off, man! You’re done! You’re done! You held the ring. Now split! We’re finished with you! It’s nothing to do with you. It’s the bride, a little bit of the groom, the bride’s mother—but nothing to do with you!

Trace pastoral collapse in America in the last fifteen years since I’ve been gone, and trace it to one root. In every single instance—whether the guy has gone down socially, morally, politically, economically, whatever way he’s gone—it’s gone as a result of one thing: ’cause he never paid attention to Isaiah 66:2. And pride will kill you.

Now, humility is not Uriah Heep—remember, from “Master Copperfield”? Remember? David Copperfield? And Uriah Heep was always telling David Copperfield how “’umble” he was. Remember, he dropped his h’s. Yeah, you do. Some of you have read proper books, haven’t you, for goodness’ sake? Yeah. So, he said, “I’m an ever so ’umble man, Master Copperfield. I am an ’umble man.” And he explained how ’umble he was by dropping his h’s. If he had been a proud man, he would have said, “I am a humble man.” But he said, “I’m an ’umble man.” He wasn’t a humble man! He was a creep!

That’s not what we’re talking about when we talk humility. This is what humility is: Be yourself, and forget yourself. Just be yourself, and forget yourself. You don’t have to be the other guy in the group. You don’t have to be the other girl on the team. You have been made purposefully by God. He put you together exactly the way he wants you. You come in this morning, you don’t feel that good or that strong, whatever it may be—doesn’t matter! God has put you together exactly as he wants you. And the one to whom he looks is the one who isn’t necessarily championing every cause or is the leader in every pack but rather is this one.

We got time for another one? Okay. When does this thing finish? What? Oh, we got time for another two! Okay. Here we go.

Discipline for Our Good

Number three: “God disciplines us for our good, that we may share in his holiness.” “God disciplines us for our good, that we may share in his holiness.”[18] That’s Hebrews 12:[10]. Earlier in the chapter, the writer says, “Endure hardship as discipline; God is treating you as sons.”[19]

One of the things that we have to get really clear in our mind is that not only is God the creator and the sustainer of everyone and everything, but he is actually providentially involved in every detail of our lives—that nothing happens except through him and by his will. And when we have lived any length of time at all, upon reflection, we’ll be aware of the fact that not everything has been plain sailing. And everything may not be plain sailing for some of us this morning, and we’re tempted to assume that somehow or another, things must be out of kilter. And one of the sort of recalibrating factors of biblical instruction is the fact that the experience of suffering, the experience of difficulty, is often, in the economy of God, exercised in order to prove us and to reprove us.

I mean, Calvin in his Institutes talks about this when he talks about heaven, and he talks about the appeal of heaven, and he talks about how although we might say a lot about wanting to go to heaven and to be with Jesus, deep down, so many of our treasures hold us here—which is understandable. And he says, “And so, in light of that, God, because he loves us so much and wants to prepare us so properly, brings into our experience all kinds of things because he loves us.”[20] Because he loves us.

Now, in my experience—and you may be able to concur with this—the providences of God are seldom self-interpreting. I’m not a fan of somebody explaining to me, you know, “The reason this has happened is because”—you know, in the immediacy. ’Cause most of the time, we don’t know the reason anything has happened to us. Mainly, looking back over the vantage point of time, and some only from the ramparts of eternity, will make clear to us all these dark threads in the midst of the tapestry of God’s purposes—our cancers and our failures and our loss of loved ones. The taking away of a loved one is like an amputation—that we live through it, that we experience it—a loss of a member of the student body, a well-loved faculty member, all these things. And we’re tempted to say, “Lord, what is going on here?” Well, the disciplining and the chastening of God is because he loves. And I think that over time, you may come to agree with me that when you reflect upon the progress of your life in Christ, you will actually come to the conclusion that you have made more progress through tears and disappointment than you actually have made through laughter and success.

Now, that doesn’t mean that we’re going to embrace some kind of morose, half-empty perspective on life. But it does introduce a sense of realism, doesn’t it? One of the things that, it seems to me—and I’ve observed this, and I lived through it; I’m a part of it, so I don’t speak in judgment—but one of the things that I think we’ve struggled with within the framework of evangelicalism is any kind of meaningful theology of suffering—that we have done a poor job of first of all acknowledging that we in Christ also suffer, that we live under the chastening hand of God, that we’re not triumphalists. We know that there is “a land that is fairer than day, and by faith we [shall] see it afar,”[21] but it is often a very far way off, it would seem in our minds, and far distant from where we are. And until we then begin to reckon with that, it becomes precious difficult for us to embrace a culture that is aware of the fact that there is so much sadness and so much suffering. And the message that we bring is not simply “Oh, cheer up, you’re going to be fine” but rather “God is a gracious God”—even when we cannot understand his hand, that we’re able to trust his heart.

The disciplining and the chastening of God is because he loves.

John Bright, in his work on the kingdom, has one little purple passage where he says the trouble that we face is that “we want a Christ who suffers” in order “that we may not have to, a Christ who lays himself down that our comfort may be undisturbed.”[22] And God, again… George Herbert, the poet—the religious poet—in one of his poems that became a hymn, commenting on the way that God orders things, he says,

Or if I stray, he doth convert
  And bring my minde in frame:
And all this not for my desert,
  But for his holy name.[23]

That actually, what he’s doing is accomplishing his purposes from all of eternity, some of which we may understand by and by and many of which we will not understand even now. Therefore, it is important to hold on to this third principle, that God chastens and disciplines his children because he is treating us as his sons and daughters and because he loves us.

The Narrow Way

Fourthly, penultimately: “The narrow way was never hit upon by chance, neither did [a] heedless man,” or woman, “ever [live] a holy life.”[24] The narrow way. Remember? “Enter in at the narrow gate. Broad is the road that leads to destruction. Narrow is the road that leads to life.”[25] Jesus. “The narrow way was never hit upon by chance.” You didn’t just all of a sudden waken up one morning and find yourself there. I think that quote is from Thomas Manton, but I couldn’t source it.

The emphasis is all the way through the Scriptures, isn’t it? Paul writes to Timothy in his first letter, and he says—quoting it in a paraphrase—“[Physical] fitness [is of] certain value, but spiritual fitness is essential both for this … life and for the life to come.”[26] And so he says, “Take time and trouble to keep yourself spiritually fit.” Now, I don’t want to introduce a guilt trip in any way on this, but if I think about my own interest in my physical well-being as opposed to my spiritual well-being—how easy it is for me to buy tennis shoes or running shoes; how easy it is for me to go spend an hour in a gymnasium, even if it doesn’t look like it; and how easy it is to be preoccupied with these things—and then I say, “And how concerned am I really for my own spiritual fitness?” it is a challenge, just in terms of the disbursement of funds and the use of time and so on.

How, then, will a young man—or a woman, for that matter—keep themselves pure?

 By living according to your word.
I seek you with all my heart;
 do[n’t] let me stray from your commands.
I[’ve] hidden your word in my heart
 that I might not sin against you.[27]

The Pacific Ocean is fantastic, isn’t it? I’ve been here now three weeks running—first in Laguna, then in Santa Barbara, then in San Francisco, and now I’ve hit the high spot in Santa Clarita. But when I’ve been on the ocean, I’m not that bright, but I did notice that sailboats can go in different directions. Right? You’ve seen that as well, right? Okay, yeah. So, how do they do that? ’Cause it’s the same wind. It’s the same wind. And yet one goes east, one goes west.

Well, I’m glad you asked. The story is told—I believe it to be true—of a chaplain in the Royal Navy in Portsmouth in England. He’s working with some young men, and the young men are pushing back against the chaplain, who’s calling them to a life of purity and to the exercising of themselves in terms of godliness and holiness. And they say to the chaplain, they say, “You know, Chaplain, if you were living in the real world, you wouldn’t be laying such a heavy trip on us. Because, you know, you don’t realize just how hard it is to be out there. I mean, we’re just swept along, you know. I mean, there’s nothing we can do about it.” And he said, “Well, let’s just look at those boats for a moment.” And then he says, “Did you notice that one boat goes east, one boat goes east, by the self-same winds that blow? And it’s the set of the sails, and not the gales, that determines which way they go.”[28]

The same wind may blow you to your knees or inflate your ego and extend you into a life of uselessness. You’ve got—we’ve got—to set our sails. And I thought, when I was your age, that, you know, in a big act of resolution and consecration, I could get this thing sorted out. I certainly thought, when I was your age plus ten, that it would be easier, and by the time you get into my age now, I thought I’d be done with all of this. No! Every day you’re going to set your sails. You set your sails in the destination of God’s purposes and his glory, or you’re going to set the sails in your own direction, your own desires, and so on. It’s a daily thing.

“If Jesus Christ Be God and Died for Me…”

Finally… Don’t you love that word in chapel? It’s a great word. I’m tempted to think that I may be cursed with the same the same approach as your own dear president, in that “finally” doesn’t really mean very much. But I learn from the best.

Here’s my last one: “If Jesus Christ be God and died for me, then no sacrifice that I can ever make for him could ever be too great.”[29] That’s C. T. Studd, the missionary of the past. “If Jesus Christ is God” (which he is) “and died for me” (we’ve been singing about that this morning) “then no sacrifice that I could ever make for him could ever be too great.” We sang about that as well: “Were the whole realm of nature mine”—if I owned the entire universe, and if I could bring the entire universe and give it to you as an offering—that would be “an offering far too small, because your love, which is so amazing and so divine, demands my soul, my life, my all.”[30]

Don’t just read church history. Let’s make some church history.

You see, when Paul says in Philippians 2 that one day “at the name of Jesus every knee [will] bow … and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord,”[31] he’s not saying there that that will be some great, emotional surge of praise, that the statement “Jesus Christ is Lord” is the overflow of emotion. No, the statement “Jesus Christ is Lord” is a statement as to his identity—that everybody will say on that day, “He is Lord, he is the Creator, he is sovereign, he is Savior, he is Commander, and he is the King.”

And so there is an inherent logic in it which runs all the way through, particularly, the Pauline Epistles and classically when he gets to chapter 12 of Romans, when he says, “Therefore, in light of all the things I’ve just said, I beseech you, by the mercies of God, to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, which is your reasonable service of spiritual worship.”[32] What are the mercies of God? Where are the mercies of God revealed? Throughout the whole of history but finally and savingly in the work of Jesus. The picture he’s using there is an Old Testament picture. There were sacrifices that were propitiatory, and there were sacrifices that were dedicatory—the propitiatory ones offered up for sin, the dedicatory ones offered in thanksgiving for the acceptance of the propitiatory ones. And he says, “Here it is: that in the mercies of God, at the cross of Christ, the propitiation has been made—that God’s wrath has been absorbed and deflected and caught up in Christ, and all of his forgiveness has been granted to us. Now,” he says, “I want you to offer your lives as a dedicatory response—one that is living, one that is lasting, and one that is logical.”

It was that inherent biblical logic that caused a young student—the same age as many of you this morning—when he was at Wheaton College to go back to his room and to write down in his journal: “He is no fool who gives [up] what he cannot keep to gain [what] he cannot lose.”[33] And what I want to say to you is simply this: Don’t just read church history. Let’s make some church history. Right? Remember the famous story about Dwight L. Moody, when he hears somebody preaching, and the guy says, “And the world has yet to see what God will do with a life wholly dedicated to him”? And Moody’s sitting up somewhere in the balcony, and he says inside of himself, he says, “I’ll be that man if I can.”[34] What, Moody? You’re not that bright. You’re certainly not that good-looking. Frankly, you’re fat! And you only got about twelve sermons. So how do you explain Moody? “This is the one to whom I will look,” says the Lord.

You see, because what you are in the privacy of your own bedroom is what you are. And I know that, because that’s all that I am. And God knows that, too, and he don’t share his glory with anybody—not you, not me, not anyone. How good that he doesn’t! How wonderful that he gives us a place in his purposes! And how kind of you to listen so carefully.

Let us pray:

Father, thank you for the Bible. Thank you that we can read our Bibles and see if these things are actually so.[35] We acknowledge that you are the sovereign Lord and King. We want, as we go out into this day and into the balance of the week, to bow before you and to give you the glory that you alone deserve. So help us, as we close and sing to your praise, to do so from the fullness of our hearts. Because we ask it in Christ’s name. Amen.

[1] 2 Timothy 3:1–17 (NIV 1984).

[2] Friedrich Nietzsche, quoted in Eugene H. Peterson, A Long Obedience in the Same Direction: Discipleship in an Instant Society, 2nd ed. (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Books, 2000), 17.

[3] Genesis 12:1 (paraphrased).

[4] Jonah 1:2 (paraphrased).

[5] See Luke 3:1–3.

[6] R. C. H. Lenski, The Interpretation of St. Luke’s Gospel (Columbus: Wartburg, 1946), 176.

[7] Mark 1:5 (NIV 1984).

[8] Isaiah 66:2 (ESV).

[9] Peggy Noonan, “A Farewell to Harms,” Wall Street Journal, July 10, 2009, https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB124716984620819351.

[10] See Luke 17:10.

[11] See 2 Corinthians 4:7.

[12] David G. Myers,The American Paradox(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 1, referenced in David F. Wells,God in the Whirlwind: How the Holy-Love of God Reorients Our World(Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2014), 22. While the notion of the “American paradox” is raised by Myers, the analysis that follows belongs to Wells.

[13] Wells, 22–23.

[14] Laura Morgan, “The Natural,” Lucky (September 2014), 145.

[15] John 1:19–23 (paraphrased).

[16] See John 5:35.

[17] John 3:29 (paraphrased).

[18] Hebrews 12:10 (NIV 1984).

[19] Hebrews 12:7 (NIV 1984).

[20] John Calvin, Institutes 3.9.1. Paraphrased.

[21] Sanford Fillmore Bennett, “In the Sweet By and By” (1868).

[22] John Bright, The Kingdom of God: The Biblical Concept and Its Meaning for the Church (New York: Abingdon-Cokesbury, 1953), 154.

[23] George Herbert, “The 23 Psalme” (1633).

[24] C. H. Spurgeon, The Treasury of David, vol. 5, Psalm CXI. to CXIX. (London: Marshall Brothers, n.d.), 157.

[25] Matthew 7:13–14 (paraphrased).

[26] 1 Timothy 4:8 (Phillips).

[27] Psalm 119:9–11 (NIV 1984).

[28] Ella Wheeler Wilcox, “The Winds of Fate” (1916), quoted in Derek Prime, From Trials to Triumphs (Ventura, CA: Regal, 1982), 32. Paraphrased.

[29] C. T. Studd, quoted in Norman P. Grubb, C. T. Studd: Athlete and Pioneer (Harrisburg, PA: Evangelical Press, 1933), 145. Paraphrased.

[30] Isaac Watts, “When I Survey the Wondrous Cross” (1707). Lyrics lightly altered.

[31] Philippians 2:10–11 (NIV 1984).

[32] Romans 12:1 (paraphrased).

[33] The Journals of Jim Elliot, ed. Elisabeth Elliot (Grand Rapids: Fleming H. Revell, 1978), 174.

[34] W. R. Moody and A. P. Fitt, Life of D. L. Moody (London: Morgan and Scott, n.d.), 42–43. Paraphrased.

[35] See Acts 17:11.