If I am busy, I must be productive, right? A busy man is a faithful and fruitful man?

Nope. Busyness is no guarantee of productivity, faithfulness, or fruitfulness.

But why? What distinguishes a fruitfully busy schedule from a non-fruitful busy schedule?

I think it comes down to two important points: understanding our sin and understanding our roles. Today we’ll look at our sin and later we will look more closely at roles).

In the last post we looked at Walter Henegar’s candid account of how he procrastinated in getting to the root of procrastination.

In seminary, Mr. Henegar noticed a three-fold pattern of procrastination in his academic life:

• If it’s not due tomorrow, then I’ll take my time and put off the work.
• If it’s due tomorrow, I’ll start the project, stay up late, and drop all my other priorities.
• Once I’ve finished, I’m entitled to a reward.
  

And then Mr. Henegar enrolled in a seminary course on counseling, where he began to uncover the hidden side of his procrastination. He realized that “my prickly branches of procrastination were being nourished by unseen roots growing deep in the chambers of my heart” (p. 41).

He’s referring here to a diagram called “The Three Trees,” developed by the Christian Counseling and Educational Foundation (CCEF). The diagram, based on Luke 6:43–45, presents the situations of life (illustrated by sun or heat) that reveal the roots of sinfulness or godliness in our lives. These roots reveal what we really want and believe.

Under the heat of life’s circumstances, we sometimes respond in a godly way, revealing healthy roots that lead to fruitfulness (illustrated by a fruitful tree). Or these situations tempt us to respond sinfully, revealing a bad root and a lack of fruit (illustrated by a fruitless tree). The gospel is the centerpiece of the diagram, giving hope to the fruitless (through repentance) and reminding us that all godly fruit is a result of the gospel in our lives.

When he began recognizing the heart issues involved, Mr. Henegar continued through his semester with a closer watch on the roots of sin that nourished his procrastination.

This is how he describes his discovery:

I began to feel like I was really figuring myself out, and it was still early enough in the semester to think I was staying on top of things. I’d notice when I started slipping blatantly into procrastination, and it was easy enough to stop—at first. But soon midterms hit, and everything quickly fell apart. I found myself pulling all-nighters again, and it was back at square one. Ironically, though, I still had to work on an assignment for my counseling class. I reluctantly dove back, this time trying to get at deeper issues. It wasn’t hard to begin naming things.

Pride was surely operating: every time I pulled an all-nighter to finish a job, I was protecting my reputation before my friends and superiors.

Fear of others was closely related. When I had those mild panic attacks, the fear of others’ disapproval was foremost in my head.

Laziness wasn’t the main thing, but it definitely played a part; sometimes I just didn’t want to do anything.

Pleasure-seeking and escapism were big players, too, though I generally confined myself to acceptable thrills like watching movies and binging on Ben & Jerry’s. (p. 42, emphasis mine)

Mr. Henegar did the right thing after this discovery. He repented of his sin. He repented to his wife for the presence and effect of his sin. And he turned to a group of friends from his local church whom he offered “a standing invitation to show me my sin—and to remind me of the gospel” (p. 44).

What Mr. Henegar discovered was the simple truth that underlying our procrastination—putting off the most important duties we are called to accomplish—was not so much a busy schedule but a sinful heart.

The good news for all of us who are procrastinators is this: The gospel addresses these sins, provides forgiveness of sin, and gives us the power to weaken sin and cultivate true diligence. In the gospel we find hope to address the procrastinator within.

----------------

Related posts in this series:

1. Are You Busy?
2. Confessions of a Busy Procrastinator

In the past I thought that as long as I wasn’t idle, I wasn’t lazy. Not true. In fact, my laziness often shows up in the form of busyness.

And this was the same discovery Walter Henegar made in his life, as he explained in his candid autobiographical article “Putting Off Procrastination” in The Journal of Biblical Counseling (Fall 2001).

“I procrastinate,” he writes. “I’ve been doing it most of my life. If a particular task is even remotely unpleasant, my first and persistent tendency is to put it off. It’s not that I’m lazy; I’m actually very busy. I just wait as long as possible to do the really hard stuff. I always pull it off in the end, but it regularly makes me miserable” (p. 40).

Here is a glimpse into his life:

When I got married, my uncle, who married us, joked about my well-known tendency right in the middle of the ceremony. His sermon was about the necessity of change in marriage, and looking right at me, he said, “One who is a procrastinator…will put that off as long as he can.”

And that’s exactly what I did, though married life made it increasingly more difficult. My designated crunch times now belonged to my wife as well, and I had to push her away to get last-minute work done.…Can’t she just cut me some slack?

She did cut me some slack, but only as much as her chronically ill body would allow. Repeated hospital stays and constant bouts with pain forced her to lean heavily on me to take care of her—and our two children. If marriage is God’s cold chisel for sanctifying us, then children only sharpen the edge. The three of them drove my work responsibilities deeper into my free time and farther into the hours of the night. I slept less and less. I still managed to pull most things off, but the quality of my work suffered, and my list of un-done to-do’s grew. I was continually weary, discouraged, and feeling sorry for myself. A couple of times, in the throes of last-minute working, I even experienced something like panic attacks. I envied my more disciplined friends but saw little hope of becoming like them. (pp. 40–41)

As he began studying his heart, Mr. Henegar discovered that his sin operated from three predictable manifestations of what he calls his “flow chart of if-thens”:

• If my task is not due anytime soon, put it off.
• If the task is due tomorrow, cast aside all other responsibilities and focus on this one task.
• And after accomplishing a large task, take a break and reward yourself.
  

As he continued to study his own heart, he began to understand that although his day was filled with busyness—and even with genuinely good activities—he was procrastinating. “There I was, buzzing diligently around the room, while that thing, the one thing I needed to do most, sat unheeded in the middle of it. I wasn’t just a procrastinator; I was a work-around-er” (p. 41).

Then came the decisive point in his life when he learned more about this procrastinator within.

About two years ago, a counseling class in seminary challenged me to give Scripture a shot at diagnosing my problem and setting a course for change. What captured my imagination was the biblical metaphor of a tree, and the suggestion that my prickly branches of procrastination were being nourished by unseen roots growing deep in the chambers of my heart. A hope even flashed that I might uncover the root, and somehow cut it out once and for all. In retrospect, this second hope was a reflection of my procrastinator’s heart, always looking for a shortcut or a silver bullet. (p. 41)

But there was no shortcut.

Next time we’ll discover how Mr. Henegar confronted the procrastinator within.

---------

Related post: Are You Busy? (11/12/08) 

 

Lazy? Not me. I’m busy. Up early, up late. My schedule is filled from beginning to end. I love what I do and I love getting stuff done. I attack a daily to-do list with the same intensity I play basketball. Me lazy? I don’t think so!

Or at least I didn’t think so. That is, until I read about the difference between busyness and fruitfulness, and realized just how often my busyness was an expression of laziness, not diligence.

I forget now who first brought these points to my attention. But the realization that I could be simultaneously busy and lazy, that I could be a hectic sluggard, that my busyness was no immunity from laziness, became a life-altering and work-altering insight. What I learned is that:

• Busyness does not mean I am diligent
• Busyness does not mean I am faithful
• Busyness does not mean I am fruitful
  

Recognizing the sin of procrastination, and broadening the definition to include busyness, has made a significant alteration in my life. The sluggard can be busy—busy neglecting the most important work, and busy knocking out a to-do list filled with tasks of secondary importance.

When considering our schedules, we have endless options. But there are a few clear priorities and projects, derived from my God-assigned roles, that should occupy the majority of my time during a given week. And there are a thousand tasks of secondary importance that tempt us to devote a disproportionate amount of time to completing an endless to-do list. And if we are lazy, we will neglect the important for the urgent.

Our Savior understood priorities. Although his public ministry was shorter than one presidential term, within that time he completed all the works give to him by the Father.

The Father evidently called him to heal a limited number of people from disease, raise a limited number of bodies from the dead, and preach a limited number of sermons. As Jesus stared into the cup of God’s wrath, he looked back on his life work as complete because he understood the calling of the Father. He was not called to heal everyone, raise everyone, preach copious sermons, or write volumes of books.

While we must always be extra careful when comparing our responsibilities with Christ’s messianic priorities, in the incarnation he entered into the limitations of human life on this earth.

So join me over the next few days as we discover the root and nature of laziness, so that we might devote ourselves to biblical priorities and join our Savior in one day praying to the Father, “I glorified you on earth, having accomplished the work that you gave me to do” (John 17:4, ESV).

---------

No one has taught me more about biblical counseling, progressive sanctification, and how to evaluate my heart in the shadow of the cross than Dr. David Powlison. If you are not familiar with David, you can get to know him well in this candid and colorful interview with Mark Dever. Download the 70-minute interview audio here or listen here:

Life and Counseling with David Powlison

If you are looking for more from David, I highly recommend two of his books: Speaking Truth in Love: Counsel in Community (New Growth Press, 2005) and Seeing with New Eyes: Counseling and the Human Condition through the Lens of Scripture (P&R, 2003). Though I recommend the entirety of each book, readers new to David will get an excellent intro to his teaching by starting with two chapters of Seeing with New Eyes: chapter 8 (“I Am Motivated When I Feel Desire”) and chapter 13 (“What Do You Feel?”). Enjoy!

Five days after the 2004 presidential election, my friend Al Mohler preached at Covenant Life Church a message titled “After the Election.” What follows in this post are a number of lengthy but very helpful excerpts from that message that will provide you with a biblical perspective, regardless of who becomes the 44th president of the United States. I encourage you to take a few moments to read them.

-------------

We are here on the Sunday after a national day of decision. And when I was asked to come and to preach to you on this day and to speak about the meaning of the election, we had no idea what would happen on Tuesday that would frame the background of our discussion today. In one sense it really mattered. In another sense it really didn’t.

We are living in one of those awkward moments when we are trying to decide what is really important, not only in terms of the present, not only in terms of our nation’s trajectory, but in terms of eternity.

We, as Christians, had to come together on a day like this in a service of worship to bring ourselves into the counsel of godly wisdom and to seek to unthink the thinking of the world. And this is so difficult because the seduction of worldly thinking surrounds us.

It is very easy for us to turn everything into a sociological calculus. We can explain these things on the basis of sociological patterns, voting demographics, and all the rest. It is very seductive for us to fall into some kind of amateur political science. We can map red and blue America. We can come up with the voting patterns. We can look precinct by precinct. It is very seductive to think we can psychologize this and determine why people made the choices they did in the voting booth. It was because they were afraid of this or afraid of that or they were hopeful of this or they had this need that was represented in this vote.

We could turn ourselves into therapists, psychologists, political scientists, sociologists, and we could pool all the wisdom that the secular world has to offer, and it would be an interesting conversation that in the end would tell us nothing about eternity.

So we are coming together this morning to think about what the election means. And in contrast, in order to do that faithfully, we are going to have to talk about what the election means and what the election doesn’t mean. We are going to have to talk about what is at stake and what wasn’t at stake. And we are going to have to try with godly wisdom, submitted to the authority of Scripture, to put all of this together.

In the Christian world, we face a perpetual temptation either to minimize the importance of the political question or to maximize it.…There is the temptation in both directions. We can trace the history of the church, and we can see at various times the church has been more tempted to go in one direction of unfaithfulness and at other times in that other direction of unfaithfulness. But our responsibility, perhaps most acutely on the Sunday after an election, is to get our hearts and minds together and submit them to the Word of God and ask: What should we make of all this?....

We are reminded that the political process is important, but it has its severe limitations. It is so important that I believe it is no exaggeration to say that by our political process we must contend for righteousness, uphold the dignity of law, uphold the administration of justice. And we do so as a disciple of the Lord Jesus Christ, knowing that justice is God’s gift and command and expectation to his people, that when God removes a sense of justice from a civilization, what follows is God’s judgment and wrath poured out in sheer chaos and dissolution.

We should be thankful insofar as we recognize [that] our opportunity to vote in this society is a Christian obligation to bear witness, even through that vote, to what we consider to be most important. That means at times we as Christians have to vote against our economic interest for a higher interest. We have to vote against our personal interest for a more significant interest.

With an issue like human life and human dignity on the line, a vote that would lead to the further destruction of human life or a failure to vote in a way that would restrict the destruction of human life is a vote that makes a citizen complicit in the taking and destruction of human life. There is no innocence. There is no neutrality.

Augustine, the great Christian theologian of the fourth century, tried to help the church understand this even as the Roman Empire appeared to be crumbling and eventually was destroyed, was fallen, and was no more. Writing in his famous book The City of God, Augustine said we must remember that there are two cities: a City of God and a City of Man. The City of God is ruled by a heavenly sovereign. It is the eternal city. It will never pass away. And there is the City of Man. It is God’s creation. In this age it is administered by sinners and has only a hint, at its best, of the grandeur of the City of God. At its very best it only hints at justice. For at our very best, our justice is tainted by our own finitude and our own sinfulness and our own limited wisdom. But in the City of God, justice reigns supreme because a just God administers his justice directly.

The same thing is true as we pass through all the virtues and all of our understandings of how God would order a society. But Augustine wanted his church members to remember that the City of Man is still important, because God created the city and put his redeemed people in it to make a difference for eternity.

Each of these two cities, Augustine said, has a love. In the City of God, the only love is love of God. It is an undiluted, undistracted, unrefracted love of God. But in the City of Man, there are many loves. Most of them are loves for the wrong things. All of them, even at their very best, [are] tainted by human sinfulness. Augustine said that love of neighbor should, in the City of Man, compel us to political responsibility, political honesty, and even political action.

But even as the church, the redeemed people of God in the City of Man is busy at work at policy, at politics, at strategy, and at tactics. All these things that do matter. The redeemed people of God must always have our hearts set on the City of God.

The apostle Paul put it this way. He said, “But our citizenship is in heaven” (Philippians 3:20, ESV). We are citizens, first and foremost, of a heavenly kingdom. But in this earth we are also, in this age, citizens of an earthly kingdom, and we must show the glory of God by being God’s people at work for good, at work for righteousness, at work for that which will preserve and protect and nurture. But most importantly, we must be in this age at work preaching the gospel, an issue that has no direct political allegiance, but does have political meaning, political extension, and political implications. We must understand that the main responsibility of the church in every age, whatever its government that is around us in our society—whether we be in the Roman Empire with Caesar sitting on the throne, or whether we be in some kingdom where there is some lesser king who considers himself a sovereign monarch, or whether or not we are in a representative democracy where we elect our own leaders, or if we are in any form of government imaginable to mankind. The one thing we must know is that this government, at its very best, is only an incompetent core of sinners doing, we hope, their very best.

Incompetent, not in a human comparison with each other, but incompetence in the theological perspective that there is no government that will solve the problem of human sinfulness. There is no government that will come up with the end-all solution to human poverty. There is no government that will reach into the hearts of men and turn those who plot murder into those who no longer have such plans. No government will ever be able to reach inside the human soul and bring about transformation or regeneration.

Government, according to Paul in Romans chapter 13, has very specific, defined responsibilities. The first is to maintain justice, to punish the evildoer, to maintain the rule and administration of law—that law to also correspond to God’s moral law. And in the New Testament, we have very clear indications of the Christian responsibility. We are to pray for our leaders. We are to pray and we are to respect the king. And by extension, that means in our situation the government we elect, and especially the president and others who have the most strategic and important constitutional responsibilities.

We need to pray for our president. We need to pray for all of those who are in elected office. We need to pray for all of those that are in appointed office. We need to pray for all of those who are in the part of the ongoing mechanisms of government. We need to pray because those are men and women making very real decisions that will have very real impact in the City of Man.

And we know from the perspective of the City of God, they are often brushing up against matters of eternity without knowing it.…

I am thankful that we can, on this Sunday after the election, as Christians, come together and seek some theological sanity, and do so in a way that will mobilize us and prepare us for the big job that lies ahead.

I am thankful that as we stand here today, we come in the name of the one true and living God who is the electing God and not the elected God. We are here in the name of a sovereign, the God of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. His name is Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. We are here in the name of the triune God who reigns over all things. We are here in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ our Redeemer. We are here in the name of One who reigns over the affairs of nations, who looks down upon the affairs of men and sees grasshoppers, insects in debate, insects in decision, hopping bugs with the weighty affairs of state [Isaiah 40:22].

Scripture says that the Lord God shows his sovereignty in the rising and in the falling of nations, in the waxing and in the waning of empires. With biblical discernment, our task is to look to the affairs of the world and see the action of God, the judgment and the mercy of God outpoured as God’s sovereign and perfect will will dictate and as God’s humble people should observe.

We are people that know politics is important, but not ultimate. We know that politics has its place, an urgent and important place where, in the City of Man, decisions are made that can make the difference between life and death, injustice and justice, mercy and no mercy, commonweal or common disaster. But we also know that there is in this world at its very best only a hint of the kingdom that is to come, where God’s reign is supreme.

No government will ever be able to say, “Every tear has been wiped away.” No government will ever be able to say, “The blind have received sight and the deaf have received hearing and the lame now walk.”…That power is God’s alone.
 

What constitutes suffering for the name of Christ? Often we recall the most severe examples of suffering—Stephen crying out to the Lord as enraged Jewish leaders hurled rocks at his body; Paul and Silas with feet shackled to a Philippian prison, still feeling the pain of their earlier beating; Jim Elliot and his four missionary friends rushed by armed Huaorani Indians. These are all graphic examples of Christians enduring great sacrifices for the advance of the gospel.

Scripture teaches (even promises) that all Christians will suffer, but these graphic examples are not the norm for faithful Christians in the West today. So what does suffering for the name of Christ look like in twenty-first century America?
        
During one panel discussion at the Together for the Gospel conference, Ligon Duncan and I interviewed our friend John Piper on this issue.

------

Ligon Duncan: John, you have done a pretty extended exposition on kinds of suffering, available on the Desiring God website. You have done it in different forms. You are addressing this very question that, that suffering just means taking a bullet or getting your head hacked off. You make a great point in that message about how any kind of suffering can become suffering for Christ if you will embrace it that way.

John Piper: If you pick a text on suffering and you try to apply it to cancer, when it is dealing with persecution, a lot of people will say, “I don’t think that applies to me, because that is really applying to getting suffering from somebody hurting you or saying something evil.” So I have developed an argument: All suffering that a Christian endures in the path of obedience is suffering with Christ and for Christ (though not in the same way).

And there are a couple of reasons for that.

One is that in suffering, the temptation is the same whether it is coming from cancer or slander. And the temptation is to say, “God is not good and it is not worth serving him, and escaping from this suffering in some sinful way is to be preferred.” Those are the same. And so the real battle is the same, whether it is coming from a physical thing or another.

Secondly, I don’t think historically you can draw a line between suffering from persecution and physical suffering. Just try to imagine a particular kind of Pauline persecution, like being whipped 39 lashes, five times (2 Corinthians 11:24). Well, let’s just take the third time. You can imagine what his back must have looked like—39 times five is a lot—and it healed five times. So the third time his back is turned into jelly again.

Now they don’t know anything about antibiotics. When they are done with him, they throw him on the floor and his back is now covered with dirt. What happens when your back is lacerated and it is covered with dirt? I’ll tell you what happens: infection happens. What happens when you get an infection? Fever happens.

 Now which is the physical suffering here and which is the persecution suffering? Where are you going to draw that line between the fever and the lashes? Which is why I say that any fever experienced in the path of obedience—getting my sermon ready, making hard calls, staying up late with the suicide situation, and not enough rest and I have got this awful sore throat—tell me these are not the same suffering as being criticized for your ministry. It is the same essential suffering.

And so I think I can develop textual and thoughtful arguments for why almost all texts on suffering can help our people, whether their pain is coming from a difficult marriage, coming from slander, coming from cancer, or coming from wherever.

The issue is in all suffering, when we trust him and keep trusting him, we will find some evidences of his sovereign mercy toward me. And the source of it is a very minor part when it comes to the real battle down here of “Will I trust him? Will I hold on to him or not?”

C.J. Mahaney: Knowing you, John, and knowing your church, you have devoted much time to addressing the topic of suffering and to preparing your church for suffering. Why and how would you recommend that local pastors here do the same?

JP: Well, the why is because the Bible promises, “Through many tribulations we must enter the kingdom of God” (Acts 14:22, ESV). It is a given that to come to Jesus is to compound your suffering, not minimize your suffering. Certain kinds of sufferings get minimized. The suffering that comes from drunkenness will probably go down. So don’t hear me saying nothing changes or is beneficial. That is not true. There are amazing releases for conscience. A lot of psychological things will improve, but others will get worse.

So, if you are now in a marriage where one of you is a believer and one is not, that is this sort of thing. They will suffer.

And the second is because you see it out there. You see the little Down-syndrome kids, and you see the people in the wheelchair, and you see the painful marriages that are out there. You see it, and you either are going to just ignore it, or you are going to give them something to help.

Third, I don’t think Christ is glorified anywhere more than when suffering people rejoice in him as their treasure. If everything is going rosy for all my people, the possibilities of us making a name for Jesus in the city is smaller than if things are going hard for our folks. Then the possibility of making a name for Jesus is greater. What the world wants to see is not for you to tell them, “Jesus makes things go well for me.” Things are going well for them, too, probably better than for you, and it is money and doctors that are doing it for them. So that argument has teeny-weeny effectiveness.

Rather, when neighbors know that the baby in your womb has a liver outside his body, no spinal column, and you have carried this baby to the end and they watch you, the possibilities of making much of Jesus are staggering.

Not many people see life that way. My job as a preacher is to help that mom, way before the pregnancy, get ready for it so that she has some resources. And one of the most satisfying things in ministry, guys, is to do this long enough so that you get a steady stream of testimonies that come to you at funerals and in hospitals and other places where a mom or a son or a relative just takes you by the hand and says, “So glad we have been at Bethlehem. We would be insane if we didn’t have a big God, if we didn’t have a strong God, if we didn’t have a sovereign God, if we didn’t have a holy God.”

I love those testimonies and I get a lot of mileage of late-night work out of testimonies like that, and they are pretty common stream.

We have got a lot of strong women at our church. They bear a lot of things. They endure pain through marriages and through kids that are disabled…Strong women are magnificent testimonies to Christ because, if they are complementarian, they are combining things the world can’t explain. They are combining a sweet, tender, kind, loving, submissive, feminine beauty with this massive steel in their backs and theology in their brains.

------------

Listen to the T4G panel discussion here.

 

 

At a number of conferences, I have had the privilege and joy of sitting in the front row to hear my friend John Piper speak. And a few times I have been assigned to speak after him. It’s never my preference to speak after John. Preaching after John is always a humbling experience.

As you know, I cannot preach like John Piper. But what I have discovered over time is that great preachers like John, Charles Spurgeon, and Jonathan Edwards do model practices all preachers can emulate and benefit from.

At the Together for the Gospel conference, I had the privilege to participate with Mark, Al, and Lig in interviewing John. During the panel discussion, John provided us with a glimpse into how he prepares his sermons, and how he prepares his heart as he prepares his sermons.

----------------

C.J. Mahaney: Most of these guys are already in the process of preparing a sermon for this Sunday. If they were to meet with you for lunch, how would you counsel them about both the preparation process and the preaching event?

John Piper: The most important thing I want to say in answer to that question is this: There isn’t any technique to preaching. It is not a technique. It is not a profession that you go to a homiletics class to learn how to do.

God is doing sermon preparation when your throat is blazing with yellow pustules and you have a fever and you feel like quitting. He is doing sermon preparation there. Don’t begrudge the seminary of suffering. Don’t begrudge the marriage difficulties. Don’t begrudge the parental stuff that is so hard. He is making you a preacher. He is making you a pastor.

So the main preparation work is walking with him through it all, and going deep with him, and being there and not running away from it into endless food or television. That would be a—very practical thing to do would be to get rid of your television so that you have some time, family time and reading time and reflection time, and basically keep your mind free from pornography.

We were talking about this pornography thing over lunch the other day, and we who are 60 years old were reflecting on how difficult it was to get pornography when we were teenagers. The implication of that is that in my brain I have two pornographic images from my teen years. I found a Playboy in a Laundromat, and they were passing a really weird book around in the locker room one day. I remember both images like I saw them yesterday. Most of you have a thousand images in your brain. That really makes sermon preparation hard, but not impossible. He died to purify our conscience, although you make your job a lot harder if you keep going to that cesspool.

…Keep your minds from being contaminated, because the preparation moment is a heart/mind thing in which every three minutes you are crying out to the Lord as you are reading your text in Greek or Hebrew or English. You are reading it and you are saying, “God, please. I have got to have a word. I have got to have a word for my people. Let me see what is really here.” That is a prayer for the mind part. My points must be here in the text. I can’t make this up. My people have to see it. I have to see it. I don’t want to pull rank on these folks by quoting Greek—and they say, “I don’t see that,” and I say, “Well, believe me it is there.” I don’t want to do that. I want them to see what is really there, so I need to see what is really there. So I am pleading with the Lord, “Show me what is there.”

And then I am pleading just as strong, “Help me to feel what is there. If it is a horrible thing, help me to feel horrible. If it is a beautiful thing, help me to feel thrilled over its beauty. Bring this dead heart into some kind of conformity—moral, affectual conformity to what is really there.”

Those are my two kinds of prayers, light and heat. If you try to work it up without the Holy Spirit giving it, people will know. They will know. Your people will know sooner or later. “I don’t think that was a real affection. That was planned.”

So there are a thousand details I could say about the preparation moment as far as poking at the text, but the preaching moment is the same. You plead with the Lord.

I do APTAT, before I stand up.

A—I admit, O Lord, that I can do nothing of any lasting value.

P—I pray for self forgetfulness, for fullness of the Holy Spirit, for love, for humility, for passion, for zeal, for prophetic utterance that may come to my mind while I am preaching so that I can say things that I hadn’t prepared that might penetrate where nothing else would.

T—I trust a particular promise from the Lord that I have found in my devotions early in the morning. So today I read Deborah’s song in Judges 5 as well as Psalm 84 between 6:30 and 7:00 this morning, and pointed out a verse to Mark as we were sitting there. “Oh my soul, ride on in strength.” That was my word this morning.

The Lord gave a word from his Word this morning: “Ride on in strength.” So I take that. That’s my T: trust. So as I am walking up, I am saying, “This is your work. It has come. Don’t leave me here. You have got to do something here. I am counting on you.”

And he is saying, “I got this under control.” He is God.

A—Then you act. You have got to do it. It is your hands that are moving. It is your voice that is moving. You have got to do this. Walking by the Spirit, putting to death the deeds of the body by the Spirit, being led by the Spirit, bearing the fruits of the Spirit is a mystery. “I worked harder than any of them, though it was not I, but the grace of God that is with me” (1 Corinthians 15:10, ESV). That is the mystery. So sermon preparation is: You put out when you are preparing and when you are preaching. You put out, but if you have prayed and done APTAT and God is merciful, you won’t be putting out. He will be putting out.

T—Thank God. And when you have acted and you go sit down, you thank him. He is going to do, and is doing what he is going to do, and he regularly does more than you think he does.

I don’t think after 28 years of preaching that I can correlate with any degree of confidence my sense of effectiveness in the moment and the true effectiveness of the moment. I don’t know any keys to know how to correlate those two. This keeps me from being too excited or too depressed.

The Lord will be sure to put me in my place if I do the one and lift me up if I do the other, because he said, “I am working out there in ways you can’t make happen at all. You thought that was a good thing to say? That wasn’t it. You missed it. That wasn’t what did it. This thing over here that you didn’t even know I gave you did it, and you will find out in heaven that that happened.”

------------

Listen to the T4G panel discussion here.

 

 

At the Together for the Gospel conference, I had the privilege to participate with Mark, Al, and Lig in interviewing John Piper after he presented his message (“How the Supremacy of Christ Creates Radical Christian Sacrifice”). During the panel discussion, John provided us with some serious provocation and wisdom. Over the next few days I want to focus on three specific excerpts from our conversation.

In this first excerpt from the beginning of the panel discussion, John encourages us to make radical sacrifices right where we are.

-------------

C.J. Mahaney: In your message, “How the Supremacy of Christ Creates Radical Christian Sacrifice,” you have called us to a radical, risk-taking life. However, most of the pastors here are laboring faithfully in preaching and caring for those who have been entrusted to them in their local church. They desire to stay there for years, hopefully to die in their church, and follow the example of men like you who have had a ministry in one church over the decades. So for many of them, if not most of them, they are not going anywhere. For them, what does radical sacrifice look like?

John Piper: Well, it will look different for each of them, and one of the reasons it will be different for each is because what is hard for one to do is not hard for another to do that ought to be done.

It is not hard for me to do what I just did. There is so much deep, personal gratification in spending time in the Word and preaching that this is no sacrifice. So I don’t count what I am doing here as “going outside the camp.” It might be for you if you are people person, one of these Myers Briggs “E” people, and you get strength by being with people instead of being with a book. That might mean study more. Go deep. Go against your grain. One reason things look different, circumstances are different.

But the principle is that “the camp” is the place where it is comfortable, it is secure and relatively easy. Outside the camp is Golgotha. And Jesus went outside the camp and then he tells us, “Take your cross and go with me.”

So you all know what is hard for you to do in the cause of love. I am not advocating asceticism in some artificial way like taking a cold shower every morning. I mean you have a neighbor and you are scared to talk to him. You have a colleague and that colleague needs to be confronted about some bad habit. You have a marriage problem and you have been running from it forever and you need to tackle it because it is going to be emotionally exhausting to do it. You read Romans 12 with all the exhortations and you know that some of them are extremely difficult for you to do.

So my prayer is that this message will help me mainly to have more affection for the treasure of Christ so that in the moment—when your will is locked into fear, greed, and self-exaltation—you can see a pathway that is costly but looks biblically right, and have enough motive in the truth that I have seen that the Holy Spirit will take those truths and you will act.

But I really think there are probably in everybody’s circumstances some really risky involvements in some causes that Christ has in the world. I’m thinking mainly evangelism (for myself especially). Pastors run away from evangelism, because we believe it is not our gift and we are to equip the saints to do the work of the ministry. And yet we have ringing in our ears the words from Paul to Timothy, a man who did not have the gift of evangelism—he was timid—“Do the work of an evangelist” (2 Timothy 4:5, ESV).

So whatever it is, whether it is evangelism or the marriage or your children. You know, some of your kids are tying you around their little finger, and you are afraid to deal with them—especially if they are 14 you are afraid to deal with it because they could run. And they are just tying you up because you don’t have the courage to get on their case and tell them, “You won’t talk to her that way…We don’t tolerate that in this house…You go to your room. I will be there in a minute.” You just let them run over you. You command them five times to do the same thing. Why? Because you are sitting on the couch watching television and it is a pain in the rear end [to] get up and go spank him. [Applause]

Or since I got applause on spanking…some of you are so good at spanking you have never touched your child’s heart—never! You haven’t said anything to them that would open them like a flower because your mother wasn’t that way and you got beat up as a kid and you are not about to change. “Deal with it, kid!” Instead of, “How are you feeling? Talk to me about what is going on inside of you.”

So the whole range of parenting and the whole range of marriage and the whole range of pastoring and the whole range of evangelism—all of it has hard stuff. And so this is a message to say, “Find the hard stuff, get satisfied in Jesus, find him sufficiently motivating and enjoy the fellowship of his sufferings.”

Have you ever heard anybody say, “While walking on the primrose path of sunshine I discovered the deepest and most lasting fellowship with Jesus”?

Never.

You come to me after this session if that is you. Always and without exception—and I have never heard anybody gainsay this—human beings say, “I met him most, I went deepest with him, I enjoyed him, I saw more of him on my dark road, on my hard road.” And so why would we not embrace commanded hard roads like evangelism or anything that will stress you?

CJM: I dare anybody to come to you after this session and say to John that your deepest fellowship with Jesus has taken place in the midst of the “primrose path of sunshine.” I want to be there for it. [Laughter] So if you are going to do that, if you would alert me ahead of time I just want to watch what kind of “fellowship” takes place between the two of you.

------------

Listen to Dr. Piper’s T4G message here and listen to the T4G panel discussion here.

Since we’re talking about Os Guinness, I pulled my stack of well-worn copies of his books off my shelves. And one of the most dog-eared, check-mark-littered, and highlighted copies is the book Prophetic Untimeliness: A Challenge to the Idol of Relevance (Baker, 2003).

The book is a piercing critique of the church’s uncritical pursuit of relevance for the sake of relevance. His argument: “Never have Christians pursued relevance more strenuously; never have Christians been more irrelevant” (p. 12). Guinness explains it like this:

By our uncritical pursuit of relevance we have actually courted irrelevance; by our breathless chase after relevance without a matching commitment to faithfulness, we have become not only unfaithful but irrelevant; by our determined efforts to redefine ourselves in ways that are more compelling to the modern world than are faithful to Christ, we have lost not only our identity but our authority and our relevance. Our crying need is to be faithful as well as relevant. (p. 11)

This is because, as Guinness writes, faithfulness to eternal truth is the means to genuine cultural relevance. In every generation, our goal is centered on the proclamation and advance of the gospel of Jesus Christ through the local church. Only because of the gospel’s continued relevance is it rightfully called the “good news.”

The gospel is good news. In fact it is “the best news ever” because it addresses our human condition appropriately, pertinently, and effectively as nothing else has, does, or can—and in generation after generation, culture after culture, and life after life. Little wonder that the Christian faith is the world’s first truly universal religion and in many parts of the world the fastest growing faith, and that the Christian church is the most diverse society on planet earth, with followers on all continents, in all climates, and under all the conditions of life and development. Of course, Christians can make the gospel irrelevant by shrinking and distorting it in one way or another. But in itself the good news of Jesus is utterly relevant or it is not the good news it claims to be. (p. 13)

Escaping the Cultural Captivity

The strength of Guinness’s book is not only the insightful criticism, but the constructive vision he presents to the reader. Chapter six, “Escaping Cultural Captivity” (pp. 95–112), was especially helpful. Guinness writes,

Without God, our human knowledge is puny and perverse, limited on the one hand by finitude and distorted on the other by sin. That said, and that said humbly, three things can help us cultivate the independent spirit and thinking that are characteristic of God’s untimely people. In ascending order, they are developing an awareness of the unfashionable, cultivating an appreciation for the historical, and paying constant attention to the eternal. Each is crucial for effective resistance thinking. (p. 96)

Guinness then develops each of these points:

1. Awareness of the Unfashionable: Because the cross runs across the grain of human thinking, the faithful choice is often not the culturally popular choice. Guinness introduces the countercultural actions of Dietrich Bonhoeffer in Nazi Germany. While the Führer demanded complete allegiance, Bonhoeffer was stressing the cost of discipleship and allegiance to Christ alone. In all generations, the church needs to cultivate an awareness of the unfashionable to avoid being captured by the popular or “relevant.”   

2. Appreciation for the Historical: Americans, Guinness writes, seem to know everything about what’s happened over the past 24 hours, but little about the past 600 or 60 years. “Essential for untimeliness is appreciation for the historical, for no human perspective gives us a better counterperspective on our own day” (p. 100).

Guinness continues,

Mere lip service to the importance of history will not do. We each have to build in a steady diet of the riches of the past into our reading and thinking. Only the wisdom of the past can free us from the bondage of our fixation with the present and the future. C. S. Lewis counseled, “It is a good rule, after reading a new book, never to allow yourself another new one till you have read an old one in between.” (p. 104)

On the next page, he quotes Lewis again: “The only palliative is to keep the clean sea breeze of history blowing through our minds, and this can be done only by reading old books” (p. 105).

3. Attention to the Eternal: “Essential for untimeliness is attention to the eternal, for only the eternal is eternally relevant” (p. 105). The way to remain relevant is to stay on the path of eternal truth. Guinness asks us to consider, if we are seeking to be relevant, why? To what end are we seeking relevance? “Nothing is finally relevant except in relation to the true and the eternal….Only the repeated touch of the timeless will keep us truly timely” (pp. 106, 112).

Yet again, it’s worth quoting him directly:

How then do we lift ourselves above the level of the finite and the mundane to gain an eternal perspective on what is true and relevant? The biblical answer is blunt in its candor. By ourselves we can’t. We can’t break out of Plato’s cave of the human, with all its smoke and flickering shadows on the wall. We can’t raise ourselves above the level of the timebound and the earthbound by such feeble bootstraps as reason. But where we are limited by our own unaided efforts, we have help. We have been rescued.…God has broken into our silence. He has spoken and has come down himself. And in his written and living Word we are given truth from outside our situation, truth that throws light on our little lives and our little world. (p. 107)

Conclusion

I highly recommend Prophetic Untimeliness, especially for pastors. We would do well to heed Guinness’s call to faithfulness: “It is time to challenge the idol of relevance, to work out what it means to be faithful as well as relevant, and so to become truly relevant without ever ending up as trendy, trivial, and unfaithful” (p. 15).

From the beginning, cultural influences have threatened to weaken the church. The Apostle Paul exhorted the Roman Christians to resist the temptation to be “conformed to this world” (Romans 12:2 ESV). And then he continued to remind his readers of the importance of thinking and discernment. Biblical nonconformity requires that we become aware of the forces in our culture that threaten to press in, confine, and reshape the church.

The story of [theological] liberalism is the story of adapting, accommodating, and then surrendering to the spirit of the age.

When I came to Christ, evangelicals had a high view of worldliness. Often the things that were considered worldly were rather trivial, so called “no-nos.” But now in some circles we don’t even have any view of worldliness. And you can see that with the rise of the church growth movement in the extremes, the seeker sensitive movement in the extremes, the desire to be relevant, etc. Evangelicalism has its own version of the liberal tendency. And many people are taking on modern ideas, modern practices, without a thought, and it is absolute folly…

Capitalism has trounced all its enemies: socialism and communism and the rest. But it is now at its greatest danger, both as a theory and as something practical in terms of, say, daily consumerism. And we as followers of Jesus must give a theoretical critique of capitalism and a very practical critique of capitalism in terms of shopping malls, etc. And if we don’t, it is going to undermine itself and our culture.

Guinness on Pluralization

Pluralism is just a social fact. There is a diversity, a great many people, a lot of differences, faiths, social backgrounds, languages, cultures, and so on. That is pluralism.…The early church, [although it] was born in a pluralistic climate,…was absolutely faithful to the exclusiveness of Christ. And they would die for it.

Pluralism is different from what the social scientists call pluralization, which affects us psychologically and spiritually.

So for instance, in a simple, traditional, culture, the idea that you had your faith that was for all of life was relatively easy. Like one man, one woman, till death do us part. But I often say, if I had my grandfather’s silk handkerchief and I lost it, I would loo