Jon Bloom's Blog, page 34

There Was a Man Sent from God

Right in the middle of perhaps the most beautiful, breathtaking, magisterial descriptions of the eternal Son of God ever penned, the apostle John, abruptly it seems, writes these words: “There was a man sent from God, whose name was John” (John 1:6). They almost feel like an interruption, like a distraction.

Is the apostle directing our eyes away from God the Son, the Word, the Life, the Light, in order to look at a man? No. The apostle is directing us to see the Son through a man. This seemingly odd insertion about John the Baptist reveals something else profound and mysterious: God has chosen to make witnesses the windows through which men see Jesus.

For fallen humans, witnesses are windows to the truth. That’s why whenever we must judge whether someone is telling us the truth or not, we almost always look for a witness. For us, there is something uniquely powerful about an objective person who confirms the truth of another’s testimony, someone who has nothing worldly to gain from verifying what he believes to be true. If that witness is willing to suffer loss by his verification, it’s even more powerful. And if many witnesses are willing to suffer loss, even their own lives, to confirm the truth of a person’s testimony, it is exponentially powerful.

John the Baptist “came as a witness . . . that all might believe through him” (1:7). He was the first in what has become a great “cloud of witnesses” (Hebrews 12:1) to the truth of Jesus’s testimony. This cloud has swelled to millions and millions, each witness having seen Jesus through the witness of another. Thousands more join this cloud every day. And many in the cloud have lost, or will lose today, their lives because of their witness. And because of their loss, all the more will see Jesus through the window of their witness and believe.

When we hear the call of Jesus and follow him, Jesus says to us, “You are my witnesses” (see Acts 1:8). Our faith is not a private matter. It is a public window through which God wants to reveal Jesus to others. That is our primary call on earth, no matter what other tasks God has given us to accomplish. We are not our own (1 Corinthians 6:19). We too are men sent from God.

Jon Bloom is a contributor to the new ESV Men’s Devotional Bible. This meditation was written to accompany John 1:1–18.

Related Resources

Slain in the Shadow of the Almighty: Sixty years ago, Jim Elliot, Nate Saint, Ed McCully, Peter Flemming, and Roger Youderian were speared to death in the Curaray River of Ecuador. (Article)

Why Sexual Metaphors of Jesus and His Bride Embarrass Us: Pastor John shares reasons why talking about sexual metaphors might cause embarrassment, but also why they are so beautiful. (Ask Pastor John)

Obey as People Who Are Free: How do servants of the King live and serve in a world with kings? In this lab, John Piper reveals the wonder of Christian freedom and the witness of being subject to human authorities. (Look at the Book)

Jesus Offers Escape from Hypocrisy

The Christians in Sardis had the reputation of being alive, but they were not (Revelation 3:1). Their reputation was a phantom of a former real greatness.

The seven Asian churches, which the Lord addressed through the apostle John in Revelation 2 and 3, clustered in a sort of geographical oval on the western edge of what is now Turkey. Sardis was in the middle on the eastern side of the oval.

In the collective historical memory of the peoples of Asia Minor, Sardis had a lingering reputation from a time when it had been great. Once it had been the dominant city of the region, the capital of the ancient Lydian kingdom. It had been very wealthy, powerful, and influential.

But in the centuries preceding John’s apocalyptic epistle, Sardis had been repeatedly conquered. Twice it had been invaded at night — the city was caught sleeping. Now it was a fading beauty, a withered version of what it had once been. Its past reputation exceeded its present reality.

So Jesus’s stinging words were chosen carefully:

“I know your works. You have the reputation of being alive, but you are dead. Wake up, and strengthen what remains and is about to die, for I have not found your works complete in the sight of my God.” (Revelation 3:1–2)

The historical parallel would not have been lost on the Christians in Sardis. The church, like its city, was a withered version of what it had once been; its reputation a lingering phantom of former greatness.

The Hypocrisy of an Undeserved Reputation

It is true that “a good name is to be chosen rather than great riches” (Proverbs 22:1). But that is only true to the extent that our good name, our reputation, accurately represents who we are. If we cultivate and promote a reputation for ourselves that is better than we actually are, God has a scathing term for us: hypocrite.

And hypocrisy includes maintaining and promoting a reputation that we once deserved but now do not. The Christians in Sardis had a reputation for being alive because once they had been. That’s why Jesus told them to “strengthen what remains and is about to die” (Revelation 3:2). They used to have life, but it was dying.

Why did they need this rebuke? Didn’t they notice their spiritual decline? Didn’t they discern their hypocrisy? Well, if they were anything like me, they probably did to some degree. But there is something powerfully deceptive about a reputation. We can easily be deceived into thinking that if others see us as “alive,” then perhaps it’s true.

Smoke and Mirrors

As a result of the fall, each one of us suffers from a sin-induced dissociative identity disorder. Our sin natures rebelliously dissociate our identities as dependent creatures, branches that are designed to joyfully, trustingly abide in our Creator-Vine (John 15:5), preferring to think of ourselves as creators-vines. But having unhinged our identities from our Creator, we lose our grip on reality — who we really are.

So to compensate, we try to stitch our identities together with chosen pieces of our own aspirations and the cumulative total of other people’s perceptions of us — our reputation. We use this reputation as a mirror to reflect to us who we are, and to project an image of ourselves that we want others to see.

But such an identity really is only smoke and mirrors. Our self-perception and other people’s perception of us do not reflect or project accurately who we are. They are misleading images because they are in large part imaginations.

We aren’t who we want to think we are or who other people think we are. All we truly are is who we are before God.

Jesus Provides the Escape from Hypocrisy

The hypocritical life, the smoke and mirrors life of inhabiting an undeserved reputation, is a trap. It can be a deluding trap that deadens our awareness that real spiritual vitality is ebbing away. It can also be a trap of pride. We may be aware that the social currency of our reputation is highly inflated, but the price of admission to that reality may appear more than we are willing to pay.

But into our blinding, impoverishing Sardisian pride comes Jesus, speaking words that at first sting badly, but in truth are full of grace: “I know your works” (Revelation 3:1). He knows. He knows who and what we really are. Before him we are fully exposed (Hebrews 4:13).

And that is very good news, because Jesus provides the escape from the guilt, power, and identity-confusion of hypocrisy that we so desperately need. He is our Creator-Vine, our source and the source of our real identity (1 Corinthians 1:30). And he is full of grace (John 1:14), having died for us while we were yet sinners (Romans 5:8), fully paying the debt of every sin (Colossians 2:14), and offering complete forgiveness if we repent (1 John 1:9). His rebukes, if heeded, always lead us out of sin’s captivity to abundant life (John 10:10).

And from his word to the Sardis church, here is the escape from hypocrisy Jesus offers us: “Remember, then, what you received and heard. Keep it, and repent.” (Revelation 3:3) Do not waste any more of your life playing with smoke and mirrors. Do not be content with a phantom reputation of past zeal and achievements. Remember what you received from Jesus; remember his word (John 15:7). Repent of hypocrisy; come clean to Jesus, and anyone else if necessary. Keep his word. Pursue the joyful, humble life of an abiding branch, and you will bear much fruit (John 15:5).

The reward is great for those who receive Jesus’s offer of escape: “The one who conquers will be clothed thus in white garments, and I will never blot his name out of the book of life. I will confess his name before my Father and before his angels.” (Revelation 3:5) Let us hear what the Spirit is saying.

The church in Sardis seems to have listened to the Spirit. In the 2nd Century the church was known as a bastion of doctrinal fidelity and bold defense of the faith and a church remained there until the 14th Century.

Incentives to Kill My Love of Human Praise

What Does It Mean to Be Real?

God’s Response to Hypocrisy: Kindness and Judgment

Don’t Live Strong, Live Wise

As I write this, I’m visiting my mother. On the desk in the guest bedroom is an antique case containing old greeting cards that my grandfather gave to my grandmother more than 80 years ago. These cards are carefully and affectionately preserved because they express a love that at the time felt and was very significant to Roland and Esther.

But that time is long past. There are few of us left who personally witnessed the preciousness of what this couple shared over 60 years of marriage. It won’t be long before their love will pass beyond living memory and these greeting cards will lose all personal significance and likely disappear.

And this is why I recommend that you memorize Psalm 90 this year. It’s only 17 verses long and you can commit it to memory in a week or two and recite the whole psalm in less than 2 minutes.

And the benefits you’ll reap are huge. This prayer of Moses will help you keep life — your real life, your really short life — in perspective. It will help you remember what is transient and what is eternal. It will help you live wisely.

Your Life is Like Grass, then Comes Eternity

We all suffer from time-confusion. We know our lives are short and yet we all find this hard to actually believe. That’s because God is eternal (Psalm 90:2), we are made in his image (Genesis 1:27), he has put eternity in our hearts (Ecclesiastes 3:11), and yet as fallen creatures he has placed us all under the judgment of our bodies returning to dust (Genesis 3:19, Psalm 90:3). So we have both transiency and eternality at work in us — a spiritual dissonance. We will die, but after this there is judgment (Hebrews 9:27) leading either to eternal life (John 3:16) or eternal destruction (2 Thessalonians 1:9).

We also suffer from significance confusion. We intrinsically know that our lives are significant. God himself makes us, and he does so after his likeness, how could we be anything but significant (Psalm 139:13–14, Genesis 1:26)? Yet sinful pride causes us to want to measure our significance, not by God’s gracious endowment, but by other people’s admiration. Our sin natures are not satisfied by the humble, yet staggering knowledge that God made in his image; we want people to venerate us. We are significant creatures, but we want to be significant gods.

Psalm 90:1–11 is soul medicine for our time-confusion and significance confusion. Moses reminds us what our earthly lives are really like: grass that flourishes in the morning and fades in the evening (vv. 5–6). To the Maker of such grass, such grass is significant. In that sense, we are more significant than we know. But we are not as significant as we think, in the sense that we most often want to think.

Live Wise

Lance Armstrong popularized the phrase “Live Strong.” That’s an inspiring motto for fallen humans who so badly want to be self-sufficient and self-determining. We want to live long and live strong. But the belief that we can really do that is a delusion.

Moses is under no such delusion. He knows that under any circumstances we won’t live long and he knows we certainly aren’t strong (Psalm 90:10). What Moses wants is to “Live Wise.” That’s why he prays, “so teach us to number our days that we may get a heart of wisdom” (Psalm 90:12). Living wise only comes from knowing who God is and who we are.

If God is eternal and our earthly lives are transient, then there is only one place the wise will choose to live: in God, our forever dwelling place (Psalm 90:1). If we are brought to an earthly end by the righteous wrath of God for our sins (Psalm 90:7–8), then there is only one thing the wise will seek during this brief terrestrial sojourn: God’s mercy and favor (Psalm 90:13,17). And if our fleeting, grass-like lives are full of “toil and trouble” (Psalm 90:10), then there is only one satisfaction the wise will pursue: the steadfast love of the everlasting God (Psalm 90:14).

And daily numbering our days — recalling how increasingly few of them we have — is the way Moses knows will cultivate a heart of wisdom. Living wise is not resolving to increase our strength, but to increase our faith. Living wise is growing in dependence, not a growing independence.

Psalm 90 will help you live wise this year. Commit it to memory and make it part of your daily prayers. It’s a small investment that will yield you a large return. It will help you number your days, it will remind you that you are grass, it will help you trust all your toil and trouble to the providential righteous judgment of God and seek him as your refuge, and it will give you God’s words to pray for God’s mercy and for satisfaction in him alone.

Someday someone will sift through the few artifacts that remain of your life. So much of what seems so important to you now will have passed away into oblivion. Are you spending your short life on what really matters? Life is too short to waste. Live wise.

The Insanity of Leaning on Our Own Understanding

Don’t Waste Your Life

Don’t Follow Your Heart

Auld Lang Syne

This song, loved and sung around the world, is thought to be partially composed by an unknown Scottish bard in days, as its most famous refrain says, “old long since.” Today we would say (less poetically) long, long ago or days gone by.

We don’t know how old the song is. Scotland’s most famous poet, Robert Burns (popularly credited as the song’s author), claimed to have discovered “Auld Lang Syne” in the late 1700’s and transcribed it as an old lowland Scot sang it for him. There may be truth to this, though it appears Burns improved the lyrics.

What makes “Auld Lang Syne” so powerful? It has nothing to do with a New Year and everything to do with an old friend. It is a tribute toast to treasured time spent roaming rolling Scottish hills and swimming stony Scottish streams with a cherished childhood companion.

The Treasure of Old Friendship

A new year may be a good time for new resolutions, but the ending of an old year is a good time for reflection on what has past. And I don’t mean merely lesson-learning reflection for future improvement. Some reflection is meant simply to treasure with gratitude what we were once given and will never have in the same way again.

Old friendship is that sort of treasure. Few gifts in life are as precious as companions with whom we once spent long summer days and talked long into the night; with whom we shared thrilling adventures and disastrous mishaps; with whom we bent over in convulsive laughter and sat silently in tearful loss; in whom we confided the hopes and fears of our youthful years.

Most often we didn’t choose our best friends as much as we were thrown together with them in “accidents” of Providence. Frequently, they happened to move in next door or up the street or in our tenement or began attending our church or had the locker or workstation next to us.

We became friends out of forced proximity, the joy of shared interests, and the deep, unspoken knowledge that it never has been good for man to be alone, which we learned meant far more than romantic love (2 Samuel 1:26; John 15:14–15). We sometimes fought and injured each other with wounds only intimates can inflict. But we carried each other’s hearts and had each other’s backs when others attacked.

Let Auld Acquaintance Not Be Forgot

Our old acquaintances, particularly those who helped us see and love what is true and pure and beautiful and excellent (Philippians 4:8), should not be forgotten. They should be recalled and reverenced. They left an indelible imprint on our souls and they still shape who we are. They were good, gracious gifts from God himself (James 1:17), to whom it is fitting to give heartfelt, profound thanks. The beginning of a new life chapter is a good time to remember precious characters of chapters past.

And perhaps it is time, before it’s too late, to schedule that lunch with or make that phone call or write that email or old-fashioned handwritten letter to a cherished friend simply to express again or at last what they have meant to you — still mean to you. Or if they are beyond contact now, it would be fitting to honor their significance to someone who can share with you the sweet melancholic memory of invaluable moments that you once knew.

As a New Year’s gift to you in honor of gifts of years’ past, below are the lyrics to Auld Lang Syne, with some translation help. And here is a beautiful Scottish reading of Burns’s transcription and here is a beautiful rendition of it in song.

As you toast the arrival of 2016, take a prayerful cup of thankfulness for the kindness God showed to you in days old long since.

Verse 1

Should auld acquaintance be forgot, (Should old acquaintance be forgot)

And never brought to mind?

Should auld acquaintance be forgot, (Should old acquaintance be forgot)

And auld lang syne. (And long, long ago)

Chorus:

For auld lang syne, my jo, (For long, long ago, my dear [or for the sake of old times])

For auld lang syne, (For long, long ago)

We’ll tak a cup o’ kindness yet, (We’ll take a cup of kindness yet)

For auld lang syne. (For long, long ago)

Verse 2

And surely ye’ll be your pint-stowp! (And surely you’ll buy your pint-jug!)

And surely I’ll be mine! (And surely I’ll buy mine!)

And we’ll tak a cup o’ kindness yet, (we’ll take a cup of kindness yet)

For auld lang syne. (For long, long ago)

Verse 3

We twa hae run about the braes (We two have run about the hills)

And pu’d the gowans fine; (And pulled the daisies fine;)

But we’ve wander’d mony a weary foot (But we’ve wandered many a weary foot)

Sin auld lang syne. (Since long, long ago)

Verse 4

We twa hae paidl’d i’ the burn, (We two have paddled in the stream,)

Frae mornin’ sun till dine; (From morning sun till dinner-time;)

But seas between us braid hae roar’d (But seas between us broad have roared)

Sin auld lang syne. (Since long, long ago)

Verse 5

And there’s a hand, my trusty fiere! (And there’s a hand, my trusty friend!)

And gie’s a hand o’ thine! (And give us a hand of yours!)

And we’ll tak a right guid willy waught, (And we'll take a deep draught of good-will)

For auld lang syne. (For long, long ago)

Christ Died to Give Us Christ-Exalting Friendships

Strengthen Each Other’s Hand in God

What Friendship Is Made of

Who Would Have Dreamed?

Christmas is a feast of song, a celebration known even more for its singing than its speaking. Christians cannot merely say the story; we are compelled to sing it — not only with beloved old songs, but with a steady stream of new songs. Why? Because some truths are simply too wild for the heart to ride with prose, they require the harness of verse.

On a starlit hillside, shepherds watched their sheep.

Slowly, David’s city drifted off to sleep.

But to this little town of no great renown

The Lord had a promise to keep.

And what a promise it was:

But you, O Bethlehem Ephrathah, who are too little to be among the clans of Judah, from you shall come forth for me one who is to be ruler in Israel, whose coming forth is from of old, from ancient days. (Micah 5:2)

This promise, combined with others, foretells an event so awe-full, so wildly incredible, that the Spirit must help our feeble minds conceive it. YHWH will become flesh (John 1:14, John 8:58–59, Philippians 2:11); Creator will become creation. A woman shall give birth to a child so holy that all the fallen, futile world is a filthy stable in comparison. It is so scandalous that no first-century Jew would have dreamed it. It is so wonderful that no human would have composed it.

And who would have dreamed or ever foreseen

That we could hold God in our hands?

The Giver of Life is born in the night

Revealing God’s glorious plan

To save the world.

Who would have dreamed that Immanuel would so literally mean God with us (Isaiah 7:14) — that some would hear him with their ears, see him with their eyes, and touch him with their hands (1 John 1:1)?

Prophets had foretold it, a mighty King would come

Long awaited Ruler, God’s Anointed One

But the Sovereign of all looked helpless and small

As God gave the world His own Son

And what a prophecy it was:

For to us a child is born, to us a son is given; and the government shall be upon his shoulder, and his name shall be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace. Of the increase of his government and of peace there will be no end, on the throne of David and over his kingdom, to establish it and to uphold it with justice and with righteousness from this time forth and forevermore. (Isaiah 9:6–7)

Who would have dreamed that when the prophet said, “the virgin shall conceive and bear a son” (Isaiah 7:14), God meant an unwed pregnancy? Who would have dreamed that the “Everlasting Father” would become a nursing infant, soil his swaddling cloths, and lie in a feeding trough? Who would have dreamed that the Messiah of Bethlehem would grow into an uneducated peasant tradesman from Galilee (John 7:15, 52)? Who would have dreamed that he would choose fishermen, tax collectors, and prostitutes as disciples over scribes and Pharisees?

Wondrous gift of heaven: the Father sends the Son

Planned from time eternal, moved by holy love

He will carry our curse and death He’ll reverse

So we can be daughters and sons

Who would have dreamed that when this long-expected Savior, God the Son, arrived he would be rejected by Jew and Gentile and crucified by them both? And who would have dreamed that this was God’s plan all along (Acts 4:28), that he had always intended to become himself the Passover Lamb who, in this single act of supreme love, would bear away the sins of all his people throughout all the world for all time (John 1:29; Hebrews 9:26)? And who would have dreamed that after his brutal slaughter, he would rise again from the dead so that all who would believe in him would have eternal life (John 3:16)?

This story is not of merely human origin. There is nothing like it in any other human religion or mythology: the Incarnation for the sake of atoning substitution for the sake of our redemption. This stands alone in all of history, measurelessly glorious and fathomlessly mysterious. It makes us sing!

And the singing never stops. This modern Christmas hymn, Who Would Have Dreamed?, reminds us that not all the great Christmas verse was penned in centuries past. With theological richness, beautifully simple poetry, and skillful musical prosody it gives new voice to the timeless Story of all stories.

Each succeeding generation of the church is called to “repeat the sounding joy.” So, songwriters, help us sing the joy of Christmas! Like this hymn, give us new voice in profoundly fresh, skillful verse to harness the wild wonder of the arrival of the omnipotent Infant whose coming brought the advent of our eternal emancipation.

“Who Would Have Dreamed?” Words and music by Bob Kauflin and Jason Hansen. © 2014 Sovereign Grace Praise (Admin. by Capitol CMG Publishing (IMI). Used by permission.

O Come, O Come Emmanuel

What Child Is This?

The Hopes and Fears of All the Years

Christianity and Atheism

This is a time of year when strange-sounding doctrines of the Christian faith are on holiday display. In fact, they are sung by pop stars past and present on radio stations and over shopping mall sound systems. And Christmas gives some materialist atheists occasion to ridicule the silly gullibility of Christians to believe such things.

The Strange Christian Story

It’s true: The Christmas story is humanly strange. A young Palestinian virgin miraculously conceives a boy-child whose Father is God, the Creator of the universe. This boy-child is born in ironic ignominy, yet heralded by a miracle star and angelic hosts, greeted by shepherds and Persian astrologers, and hunted by a homicidally paranoid king.

The strangeness continues through Jesus’s sinless life, miraculous public ministry, his betrayal and horrible crucifixion, and then his resurrection from the dead. This is followed by his ascension after he affirms his promise to return and commissions his small band of followers to preach his gospel throughout the world. His followers carry out this commission and launch the most influential and multi-ethnic religious faith the world has ever seen.

Christianity forms a coherent belief system, but it admittedly sounds foolish to non-believers (1 Corinthians 1:23–25). And atheists are like, seriously?

Atheists Believe Strange Things Too

But to be fair, atheists also embrace wildly far-fetched, strange beliefs of their own.

To be an atheist is almost certainly to be a materialist (i.e. only matter and laws that govern matter exist). And materialists also believe in a miraculous conception and birth — of the universe. They eschew the term “miraculous,” since miracles “don’t happen.” But call it what you wish, they believe at some point in the ancient past the universe (or universes) was born without a parent(s). This wasn’t merely a virgin birth — the universe gave birth to itself, completely unintentionally.

Perhaps the universe was born from nothing, which is quite a thing to believe. In the beginning, Nothing created the heavens and the earth. However many billions of years you tack on to it, the impossibility of existence coming from non-existence does not become more possible. Such a doctrine makes the incarnation tame in comparison.

Atheists often point to the existence of evil as a conundrum for Christians. But the existence of existence is a bigger conundrum for atheists. The origin of evil presents God-sized questions. But still, nothing producing something is far more improbable than something going bad.

Atheists might cry foul. There could have been something that existed that caused the universal Genesis which they just don’t know about yet. Okay, so some non-intelligent, non-living thing eternally existed and somehow unintentionally exploded into everything that exists resulting in our contemplating this right now. That too is quite a thing to believe. If that doesn’t sound at least as improbable as God existing and undertaking the plan of human redemption that we call Christianity, we really haven’t thought it through.

Desperate Darwinism

Materialists like to think that science is on their side. But materialistic triumphalism, which gained steam in the later 19th Century, was waning by the mid-20th Century. For a while, scientific discoveries seemed to support materialistic answers to questions of origins. But as the 20th century progressed, science did not prove to be the reliable ally materialists thought it was.

For instance, science revealed that all the combined factors required for organic life to survive anywhere in the universe must be so precisely fine-tuned that the mathematical probability of this occurring randomly is for all intents and purposes impossible.

And that’s just the beginning of the improbabilities. Once the factors for life’s survival are impossibly in place, then begin the impossibilities of life actually emerging, then impossibly surviving, and then managing, with no guiding intelligence, to impossibly evolve into an organism as complex as a human.

For Darwinian materialists, Mount Improbable just keeps getting bigger and bigger.

This has forced some materialists to hypothesize multiverses in order to cope with the probability problem. The multiverse theory, of which there is no scientific evidence whatsoever, postulates that potentially billions of universes exist, most of them likely barren of any life. But, provided that sufficient billions of universes emerge, one of them is bound to get the statistically very, very, very, very improbable (to put it very mildly) formula just right and bingo! ours happens to be the lucky (or unlucky) winner of the multi-cosmic lottery!

It begins to sound quite foolish. And I’m like, seriously? This is metaphysical Darwinism. Perhaps we should call it desperate Darwinism.

If someone does not wish to believe in God, so be it. They are free to believe as they choose. But let’s not have any condescending talk about religious people’s gullibility to believe strange, far-fetched things.

Choose Your Strangeness

Existence is a very strange phenomenon. Regardless of how we believe the universe or we ourselves came into being, it was, by any account, stranger than any fiction we’ve conceived. It’s nothing short of miraculous.

And the strange Christian doctrines of the Incarnation, miracles, atonement, and resurrection are really only silly if one concedes the premise that there is no God. But this is a premise that neither scientific evidence nor any other objective indicator gives us any clear reason to concede. Rather, if there is a God, such doctrines are eminently reasonable.

Materialism, on the other hand, while also a coherent belief system, requires us to suppress our reason in order to assign meaninglessness to essentially all that makes human life meaningful. All that essentially makes life worth living are illusions created by our non-intelligent genes in order to avoid natural selection’s ruthless knife. Materialists must embrace the belief that reality is ultimately absurd, and that’s very, very hard to believe. When humans really believe that, the result is often not good. It is far more likely to spawn nihilism, depression, and even suicidal despair. Materialism is not a good match for the human, dare I say it, soul. I suggest there is a clue to note here.

The strange Christian story we celebrate at Christmas turns out to align far better with the human condition and experience. It’s themes of good and evil, of purpose, providence, sacrificial love, justice, mercy, grace, redemption, forgiveness, and immortality resonate deeply within us. And we find them woven into all the greatest, most beloved stories humans ever tell. I suggest there is a clue to note here.

Materialists can assert that the Christian story is just wish fulfillment. But if it was merely that, it seems unlikely that the strange elements would have been incorporated, being unnecessary stumbling blocks to believability.

And the strangeness of the Christian story differs from the strangeness of materialism. Materialism has the alien strangeness of cold, hard, wild statistical impossibility. Christianity’s strangeness has the idiosyncratic markers of personality — as if the strange elements were intentionally designed, but not in ways humans would have thought to design them. In fact, once we understand them, we discover that these strange elements match what we most desperately need and we begin to see the power and wisdom in them (1 Corinthians 1:24).

The strange Christmas story offers us “good news of great joy that will be for all the people” (Luke 2:10). The strange materialism story offers us bad news of a great hopelessness that will be for all the universes.

So choose your strangeness. And choose carefully, for much hangs on the choice. I say, choose great joy.

9 Ways to Know the Gospel of Christ is True

One Strategy to Rule Them All

For Your Joy

Lay Aside the Weight of Slander

God hates slander (Proverbs 6:16, 19). It is evil. That’s why Paul lists it as a behavior of those who hate God (Romans 1:30) and why James calls it demonic behavior (James 3:15–16).

Slander occurs whenever someone says something untrue about someone else that results, intentionally or unintentionally, in damaging that someone else’s reputation. And when it occurs, it becomes a divisive, discouraging, and confusing weight that often affects numerous people — sometimes many, many people.

Because of its poisonous power, it is one of the adversary’s chief strategies to divide relationships and deter and derail the mission of the church. We must be on our guard against this closely clinging sin and frequently lay it aside (Hebrews 12:1).

The Subtlety of Slander

Sometimes saying something untrue and damaging about someone is bold and blunt. But often slander is insidiously subtle, especially since we have heard slander all our lives in almost every context and grown accustomed to it. This means we must heighten our sensitivity to it and lower our tolerance of it.

Slander can wear a hundred masks. I’ll mention a few common ones.

Sometimes we pass along slanderous information that seems almost like harmless hearsay, yet the effect it has on our listeners is to leave them with an unfairly negative perception of another. Sometimes we embellish with information or tone a negative report about someone in order to enhance our listener’s perception of ourselves.

Sometimes we have a very real concern about someone, but we share it with someone who cannot benefit from or help with the concern. We do this because we simply want our listeners to think worse of a particular person. Or if we share a concern with an appropriate person, we can sometimes indulge our speculations or presumptions, mixing them almost imperceptibly with facts for our listeners, distorting the concern in order to sway an outcome in a direction we desire.

The net effect of all forms of slander is to unjustly devalue another person’s reputation.

Slander Is Stealing

This devaluing is at the heart of what makes slander evil. The Bible tells us, “A good name is to be chosen rather than great riches, and favor is better than silver or gold” (Proverbs 22:1). In this context, a good name represents a person’s character, which is the most valuable thing about their identity. A good name is who we are in the minds of others. And since relationships trade in the currency of trust, a reputation is a very precious asset.

So whenever we handle a person’s name — who they are in the minds of others — we are stewarding a treasure that belongs to them. If we damage a person’s reputation unjustly, we are stealing their good name; we are vandalizing their character. This causes very real, sometimes long-lasting damage to people, because restoring a devalued name is very difficult. Who knows what love, joy, counsel, comfort, and opportunities we take from people if we care for their name carelessly?

God knows. And he hates it. God hates when we speak evil of his name (Exodus 20:7) and when we speak evil of others (Titus 3:2). He will hold us accountable for every careless word we speak (Matthew 12:36). This is great incentive for us to “put away all malice and all deceit and hypocrisy and envy and all slander” (1 Peter 2:1).

Fight Slander First in Yourself

The foremost slanderer we must silence is the one inside us. Full of malignant pride, our sin natures are not interested in truth, but in self-glory. So they seek to manipulate others through slander (or flattery) for our own selfish benefit.

Sin (and therefore our demonic harassers) seizes on a concern for or an offense we’ve received from another and seeks to distort it into thinking evil of that person.

Thinking evil of another is assigning imagined or exaggerated negative qualities to them that don’t exist. Often this begins as private fantasies where we nurture our concerns or offense by imagining ourselves justified in our righteousness and others condemned in their evil. But in truth, all we’re doing is passing our own evil thoughts on to imaginations disguised as other people. That’s our sin nature’s slanderer talking. We are fools to listen to it.

And when our slander spills out from ourselves to others — and it will if we don’t catch it soon enough — it is both selfishly indulgent and cowardly.

Slander is indulgent because often what we really seek is the self-flattery buzz of our listener approving and admiring us more than the one we are slandering. We are robbing another’s reputation to get the drug of self-flattery.

Slander is cowardly because it’s a way of nurturing a concern or an offense and gaining sympathizers without doing the courageous work of bringing it directly to the source of our concern or offense. Our rationalizations for this can be countless, but essentially we don’t have the guts to deal with it head-on. This means our character is in serious question, since we are willing to vandalize another’s character to gain allies.

We must grow ruthless in ignoring and silencing our slandering sin natures.

Helping Each Other Fight Slander

When someone slanders another to us, we must remember that we are not mainly fighting flesh and blood, but spiritual forces of evil (Ephesians 6:12). Satan knows that slander deadens and splits churches, poisons friendships, and fractures families. He knows slander quenches the Holy Spirit, kills love, short-circuits spiritual renewal, undermines trust, and sucks the courage out of the saints. So our goal, particularly in the context of the church, is to help each other shed demonic weights and avoid satanic stumbling blocks.

So how do we do this? The best way is to become people who are not safe to slander around. We must ask each other questions like:

Have you shared your concern with this person directly? I’d be willing to go with you to talk to him.
Just to be clear, is this information I should know? Do you want me to help you pursue reconciliation?
Are you doing everything you possibly can to put away “all bitterness and wrath and anger and clamor and slander?” (Ephesians 4:31)
How can I help you guard this person’s reputation like a treasure? (Proverbs 22:1)

In other words, friends don’t let friends slander. Friends don’t let friends act like God-haters (Romans 1:30). The more we love people, the more we hate slander, because a slanderer hates his victims (Proverbs 26:28).

Let us remember that we are stewards of the treasure of each other’s good names. Let us resolve to avoid sharing information that is unnecessarily damaging to another person’s reputation and to repent to everyone affected if we do. Let us seek to silence the sin nature slanderer within and graciously give and receive others’ help when one of us slips, perhaps unaware, into slander. Let us do damage to Satan’s forces by speaking the truth in love (Ephesians 4:15).

Let us lay aside the destructive sin-weight of slander.

A Word About Slander and Abusive Situations

There are times when it is necessary and not slanderous to discuss or share information that is damaging to a person’s reputation. Remember, slander is untrue damaging information. But sometimes a person’s real sins are of such a nature that they must become public for the sake of justice and individual safety. Here are just a few sample scenarios:

Reporting confirmed, documented sin and abuse to appropriate people in positions of authority who can do something about it.
Participating as an appropriate person in spiritual, and in some cases civil, authority in an investigation such as a report of someone’s sinful, perhaps abusive, behavior with the intent of either confronting that person or clearing their good name.
Discreetly, and without unnecessary details, informing others of another’s confirmed sinful or abusive behavior because, without this knowledge, someone might suffer real harm.
Seeking pastoral counsel regarding how to navigate a complex and ambiguous situation, doing everything you can do to guard the reputation of a person in question from unnecessary damage.

Jesus’s instructions in Matthew 18:15–17 must guide us in such difficult cases. And Jesus expects us to behave circumspectly in them, always seeking to preserve others’ reputations as much as possible, knowing that gossip and slander are always temptations crouching at our doors.

In an age of social media, that lacks the functional information-spreading restraints of past eras, let us be all the more slow to post (“slow to speak” — James 1:19) analysis, speculation, and commentary on information about another person or group, even if it has become public in our slander-saturated culture, that might eventually prove slanderous. All the serious biblical warnings about slander still apply, which should make us all, especially those of us with “platforms,” tremble.

What Gossip Says About God

Why Gossip Destroys

Be Kind to One Another

Lay Aside the Weight of Low Self Image

If we find that we struggle with a low self-image, we need to look carefully at it, because it may not be low at all. It may in fact be a frustrated inflated self-image.

Paul wrote this in Romans 12:3:

For by the grace given to me I say to everyone among you not to think of himself more highly than he ought to think, but to think with sober judgment, each according to the measure of faith that God has assigned.

What our world often calls low self-image, I think Paul would say is just another way of thinking too highly of ourselves.

Holy and Unholy Ways of Thinking Highly of Yourself

There’s a holy and humble way to think highly of yourself. If you are a Christian, you are a saint who is part of “a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for [God’s] own possession that you may proclaim the excellencies of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light” (1 Peter 2:9). You are a new creation in Christ and no longer that old condemned person (2 Corinthians 5:17). God intends for this to be part of your self-image.

But there’s an unholy, prideful way to think highly of yourself — being selfishly ambitious and counting yourself more significant than others (Philippians 2:3). This should not be part of your self-image as a Christian, and if it is, it usually results in “quarreling, jealousy, anger, hostility, slander, gossip, conceit, and disorder” (2 Corinthians 12:20). This is probably the high thinking Paul had in mind in Romans 12:3.

Holy and Unholy Ways of Thinking Low of Yourself

Likewise, there are holy and unholy ways of thinking low of yourself.

If you see yourself as having once been the foremost of sinners (1 Timothy 1:15), only being what you now are by the grace of God (1 Corinthians 15:10), you look for the low seat at the banquet (Luke 14:10) because you consider others more important than yourself (Philippians 2:3), and the cry of your heart is “[Jesus] must increase, but I must decrease” (John 3:30). This is holy lowliness.

But if you suffer from a chronic sense of failure, underachievement, and shame because compared to others you just are not smart enough, attractive enough, competent enough, gifted enough, organized enough, educated enough, successful enough, rich enough, or prominent enough, that is almost always an unholy lowliness.

And this sort of low self-image also tends to result in “quarreling, jealousy, anger, hostility, slander, gossip, conceit, and disorder” (2 Corinthians 12:20). Because, in truth, we are thinking quite highly of ourselves indeed, and are sad, ashamed, and frustrated that we can’t garner the admiration of others we desire. And we are ripe to tear down those we see above us.

Fighting Unholy Lowliness

We all battle this at times. It is a temptation common to man (1 Corinthians 10:13). And Paul helps us fight this inverted form of thinking too highly of ourselves in Romans 12.

He reminds us that “as in one body we have many members, and the members do not all have the same function, so we, though many, are one body in Christ, and individually members one of another” (Romans 12:4–5). We are meant to be different because we have different functions. This undermines envy and encourages our sense of stewardship.

And Paul tells us these different functions come to us as grace-gifts from God: “Having gifts that differ according to the grace given to us, let us use them” (Romans 12:6). What we have, we have received from God, and he wants us to be content with what we have (Hebrews 13:5). And we are to use what we have received “according to the measure of faith that God has assigned” (Romans 12:3). The gifts come from God and the faith to use them comes from God. In fact, we “cannot receive even one thing unless it is given [us] from heaven” (John 3:27). This undermines covetousness and encourages our faith in God.

Unholy lowliness comes from comparing ourselves with one another in the spirit of the disciples who competed over “which of them was to be regarded as the greatest” (Luke 22:24). No doubt some felt clearly superior, while others felt envy due to their lesser giftings, opportunities, or attention.

But if we put this unholy lowliness to death by choosing to believe that all of us have been assigned by God sacred functions in Christ’s body, and humbling ourselves under God’s mighty hand, trusting him to exalt us at the proper times and ways (1 Peter 5:6). If we really seek to consider others more important than ourselves (Philippians 2:3), and not trust our impulse to be first, and remember that the least among us often is the one God considers great (Luke 9:48), then we will be thinking with godly “sober judgment” (Romans 12:3).

Low self-image — unholy lowliness — which is in truth thinking too highly of ourselves, is weight we must lay aside in order to run our faith race (Hebrews 12:1). Let us look to Jesus (Hebrews 12:2) who showed us how to do this by coming to us as one who serves (Luke 22:27) and humbling himself to the lowest place for us (Philippians 2:8)

Woe to You When All Speak Well of You (video)

One Voice on Christian Social Media (article)

What Child Is This? (article)

It Takes Work to Stay Warm

I live at latitude 44.9778° north, longitude 93.2650° west. If you’re not a geography or cartography geek (I’m not either), those are the coordinates for Minneapolis, Minnesota. Perhaps all “Minneapolis” means to you is cold. Some think Minneapolis is a suburb of the North Pole. Not quite true, but it feels like it sometimes.

With the return of December, winter is now bearing down on us. We Minnesotans will spend a considerable amount of the next four months managing snow, ice, and frigid temperatures. Our furnaces have fired up and we’ve dug out our sweaters, coats, hats, gloves, scarves, boots, shovels, and (for those fortunate ones) snow blowers. Once again we’re allowing extra time to brush snow and scrape ice off our cars before driving anywhere. We veterans of the tundra understand this very well: It takes a lot of work to stay warm.

Fire: Key to Surviving the Cold

But 150 years ago it took a lot more work to stay warm during a Minnesota winter. I have great respect for the native peoples and settlers who endured the Lord’s cold (Psalm 147:17) before the days when natural gas was piped directly into homes equipped with automatic, thermostat-regulated heating systems. A sesquicentenary ago, most people had only one way to keep a house or teepee warm: Tend a fire.

Life during winter revolved around tending fire, because fire was key to surviving the cold.

And tending a winter fire was a lot of work. It began during the warm seasons, because you had to think and plan ahead for the winter fire. You knew unpredictable snowstorms and severe cold were coming. You’d still have to do nearly everything you had to do in the summer, but everything would take longer in the winter, and you would have less daylight in which to do it. If you ran out of fire fuel in the bitter cold, you would be in trouble. So you were cutting down trees long before the first flurries, chopping them into logs, and figuring out ways to keep them secure and dry.

When winter hit, the fire was always on your mind, no matter what else you were doing. If you didn’t fuel the fire, it went out. If the fire went out, the temperature dropped quickly and it took a lot more — more wood, more work, and more time — to reheat a cold room and cold furniture than to keep them warm in the first place. So every day, besides the rest of life’s demands, you split wood, restocked the fireside, kept the fire fed, and cleaned out ashes. The fire was the first thing you tended in the morning and the last thing you tended at night.

Tending the fire was a lot of work, but it was necessary work because fire was key to survival.

Cold Is a Stealthy Killer

If you wonder why some of us live up here where it gets cold (sometimes we wonder too), one answer is that we are given the privilege of living a parable of a spiritual reality.

The constant spiritual climate of this world in which our souls inhabit is much more like Minneapolis in December in 1865 than it is San Diego — whenever. The spiritual temperature is dangerously low and if we are not careful, our love, like many, will grow cold (Matthew 24:12).

And the thing about severe cold, which we Minnesotans know well, is that it damages us before we realize it. The effects of frostbite are typically not felt when it’s happening. Only later do we realize the seriousness of our injury. Every year people lose digits and limbs to the cold. And some freeze to death. Cold is a stealthy killer, for a heavy drowsiness descends on its victims and they lose consciousness, drifting off to death.

You Must Tend Your Fire

The key to surviving the spiritual polar climate we live in is fire. We’ve got to stay warm. If we don’t, it can result in injury or even death. And it takes a lot of work to stay warm. You don’t just wing it in the winter. You’ve got to dress for the weather and keep your fire burning, which requires preparation and maintenance.

The fire is your faith-filled love for, your desire for, your hedonistic delight in the Triune God. And this fire is fed with the Holy Spirit fuel of the kindling of the word and fervent prayer.

But I don’t mean a passive Bible reading and cool praying. Simply passing your eyes over words of Scripture won’t keep your fire going, and neither will minimal, distracted, disengaged praying. This is like going out to the woods of Minnesota and thinking that if you looked at the trees and said, “God, I need some logs to burn,” you would magically have logs for your fire.

No. You need to chop at the trees, you need to split logs, you need to protect them from the elements, praying earnestly all the while for the grace to keep the fire burning. Yes, the fire is God’s grace, and the work it requires is God’s means to obtaining the grace. Making firewood is hard work, but its reward is a warm, abundant life. The alternative is the damaging numbness of the cold.

The fire needs to always be on our minds, no matter what else we are doing. If we don’t fuel the fire, it will go out. If the fire goes out, the temperature in our souls drops quickly and it takes a lot more work to reheat them than to keep them warm in the first place. If you need some fresh help for Bible reading and prayer, take advantage of what’s available.

Spiritual cold is a stealthy killer. It lulls people to sleep and they lose consciousness not realizing their peril. That’s why our lives must revolve around tending the fire, because the fire is key to surviving the cold. And the fire should be the first thing we tend in the morning and the last we tend at night.

Four Steps Toward Joy in Repentance (article)

Your Suffering Is Working for You (interview)

Quiet Time Doesn’t Earn God’s Grace (video)

Prepare Him Room

The season of Advent is beginning again. Advent — a season, so full of tradition, so full of memory, so full of legend. And a season so full, often over-full, bustling and bursting with the exhausting activity of keeping traditions, creating memories, and recalling legends.

And as Advent begins, Luke comes to us, as a kind of a holy ghost of Christmas past, bidding us to lay aside for the moment our Christmas lists, leave the half-trimmed tree, pause the holiday movie, dry our hands from washing the cookie pans, and follow him. And as we do, all we see begins to swirl into an unfamiliar darkness.

Suddenly, we find ourselves standing in what we somehow know is a small, ancient Palestinian village on an unusually starry night. The shapes and shadows of buildings look strange. The human and animal noises sound strange. The smoky scents of fire, foods, burning oils, and manure smell strange. The utter absence of electric lighting is strange. We reach for our smartphone. It’s dead.

Disturbing Advent Sight

Luke leads us beyond the village and down a dark, twisting rocky path to some ignored, ignoble spot where we suddenly come upon a sight that we find surprisingly disturbing. Not ten feet away, asleep on the ground, near a small fire that has burned down to embers, is a peasant girl. She has bits of straw in her long, messy, dark hair, and she is wrapped in dirty cloaks and a blanket. A split-second look tells us how difficult this night has been for her. And she is so young.

Even more distressing, we see beside her a small, crude, dirty feeding trough in which lays a sleeping newborn, wrapped tightly in unsanitary, blood-smeared cloths.

We take a few tentative steps forward. We know this child, and we know this girl. But the scene is strange to us. It does not look anything like the manger scenes and illustrated books of our childhood. Our Advent traditions did not prepare us for the earthy realness of the real Advent.

Mary is not serene. She’s bone weary. And no divine, heavenly glow emanates from the child. He is not even especially beautiful (Isaiah 53:2). In fact, there is nothing about this child to suggest the unfathomable mystery of who he is. We are unnerved to realize that had we not already known, we would not have recognized him at all.

This scene, the real Christmas, has nothing of the feeling of the Christmas we know. It has all the feel of undesired, desperate homelessness — more like a scene we’d find under a bridge than under our Christmas tree. And we are hit with the shock of a truth we’ve known all our lives: this young girl just gave birth to a baby — the Baby — in a pasture!

Our visceral response is pity and sadness. This poor girl and her baby! We know this story, but as we see it as it really was, it seems so wrong. Our impulse is to do something to help them. We look incredulously at Luke. He, calmly looking from the child to us, quietly says, “There was no place for them in the inn” (Luke 2:7). No place? No place besides a field for the Maker of the world? The cosmic incongruity stuns us.

“Surely we can find some room somewhere!” we respond. “Can you?” Luke replies. Then he turns and begins back up the path.

We look back at girl and the child, just as Palestinian darkness begins to swirl with a familiar light.

Prepare Him Room

Suddenly, we find ourselves standing where Luke had found us. There are the Christmas lists, the half-trimmed tree, the holiday movie paused, and pans in the sink. The familiar stress of the bustling and bursting schedule of Advent activities reawakens.

But seared in our minds is the pathetic picture of the holy, homeless mother and child. Bustling and bursting Bethlehem had no room for the advent of Jesus. And echoing in our ears are our own words, “Surely we can find some room somewhere!”

Can we?

The real Christmas was nothing like the Christmas we’ve come to know, with its traditions, memories, and legends. It was a desperate moment that occurred for a desperate reason.

The Word became flesh (John 1:14) so that the Word could become sin for us condemned sinners, and die for us that we might be made righteous in him (2 Corinthians 5:21). He was born outside a village and he died outside a city. “He was in the world, and the world was made through him, yet the world did not know him” (John 1:10).

As Advent season begins again, call to mind the only detail the Holy Spirit, who inspired Luke’s writing, decided to provide us about the actual birth of Jesus: Mary had to lay him in a manger because there was no room for them in the inn.

It is no less ironic that Jesus can stand on the periphery of our busy Advent activities than it was that he, the Son of David, lay in a manger in a field on the periphery of the city of David.

Therefore, as we plan our Advent season, “let every heart prepare him room.” Surely we can find some room somewhere.

Readings for Advent

Good News of Great Joy: Daily Readings for Advent

These 25 short daily devotional readings from John Piper begin December 1 and go through Christmas Day. This book of Advent meditations aims to put Jesus at the center of your holiday season. These readings correspond to the daily readings in Desiring God’s free devotional app, Solid Joys (available in iTunes and Google Play), as well as online.

The Dawning of Indestructible Joy: Daily Readings for Advent

Advent is for adoring Jesus. The Christmas season is one of the busiest times of the year. But it is also a season of reflection and preparation for that special day when we mark Immanuel’s coming — the arrival of our eternal God in our own frail humanity. These are 25 more brief devotional readings from John Piper for December 1 to Christmas Day. Our hope is that God would use these meditations to deepen and sweeten your adoration of Jesus and help you keep him at the center of your Christmas season.

The Innkeeper

Only two weeks from his crucifixion, Jesus has stopped in Bethlehem. He has returned to visit someone important — the innkeeper who made a place for Mary and Joseph the night he was born. But his greater purpose in coming is to pay a debt. What did it cost to house the Son of God? Through this imaginative poem, John Piper shares a tale of what might have been — the story of an innkeeper whose life was forever altered by the arrival of the Son of God. (Watch the video of John Piper reading The Innkeeper.)

For Christmas gift ideas, see Spread the Word for Christmas.