Instruments in the Redeemer's Hands: People in Need of Change Helping People in Need of Change

by Paul David Tripp

What is the best news you can imagine? What is your “If only . . .” dream?

Rather than loving people and using things to express it, people loved things and used people to get them.

The news begins with these words: “The time has come.” Jesus is saying, “This is what God has been working on. All of history has been moving toward this one moment.”

Christ makes it clear that this kingdom is not a political, earthly rule. He calls it a “within you” kingdom (see Luke 17:20–21). God’s redemptive solution would not come by political revolution or physical war. The primary battle would be fought and won in human hearts.

The King came not to make our agenda possible, but to draw us into something more amazing, glorious, and wonderful than we could ever imagine.

His kingdom is about the display of his glory and people who are holy. This is the change he came, lived, died, and rose to produce. This is the life and work he offers us in exchange for the temporary glories we would otherwise pursue. This kingdom agenda is intended to control our hearts and transform our lives.

The Bible defines repentance as a radical change of heart resulting in a radical change in the direction of one’s life.

The sin that grips our hearts makes everything more difficult. It morphs love into selfish lust. It takes the God-ordained safety of home and makes it a place where the deepest human hurts can occur. It corrupts the workplace, robs government of its good, and even stains the church. And at the end of the day, it results in death.

We must faithfully proclaim, “Hope is only to be found in Jesus Christ, the King of Kings. In him, lasting, personal heart change is possible.” Any other message encourages false hope.

People struggling with life in a fallen world often want explanations when what they really need is imagination. They want strategies, techniques, and principles because they simply want things to be better. But God offers much more. People need to look at their families, neighbors, friends, cities, jobs, history, and churches, and see the kingdom. They need imagination—the ability to see what is real but unseen. This is what Paul fixed his gaze on (2 Cor. 4). They need to look at a city and see the glorious company of the redeemed being gathered, amidst a brutal spiritual battle, to live in union with God. They need to look at their children and see a Redeemer pursuing their hearts for his own. They need to scan history and see God accomplishing his purpose. People need to see the shining hope of human existence: people can know, love, and serve God. They can commune with him forever and form a community of love that is possible no other way. All of this is possible because the King has placed his love and grace on them.

Worth the book right here.

We must not offer people a system of redemption, a set of insights and principles. We offer people a Redeemer.

This is where our culture gets it completely wrong. In rejecting a biblical view of people, the world eliminates any hope of answering the “what is wrong?” question accurately. And if it wrongly answers this question, how can it possibly provide a proper solution?

If sin is part of our nature, we will always be dealing not only with our history, but with how sin distorts the way we handle it. Help will only come as we deal with our past and own our sin. This is essential because sinners tend to respond sinfully to being sinned against.

Sin not only causes me to respond sinfully to suffering, it causes me to respond sinfully to blessing. The smart kid teases the dumb kid. The athlete makes fun of the kid with two left feet. Something is so wrong inside us that we can’t even handle blessing properly.

It is not just that we are rebels and fools. Sin makes us moral quadriplegics. We are fundamentally unable to do what is right. Which of us could say that our anger toward our friends has always been righteous? What husband could say he has always loved his wife as Christ loves the church? What person consistently loves his neighbor as himself? We fail at these things even when we desire to do right, because our moral muscles have been atrophied by sin. We simply cannot do the good we were created to do. This is one of the most tragic results of the ultimate disease, sin.

The Redeemer turns rebels into disciples, fools into humble listeners. He makes cripples walk again. In him we can face life and respond with faith, love, and hope. And as he changes us, he allows us to be part of what he is doing in the lives of others.

What mission board, what ministry, what local church would use the people God used in Scripture? There was Moses (an exiled murderer), Gideon (fearful and hiding), David (the shepherd boy with no military training), Peter (who publicly denied Christ), and Paul (persecutor of the church), to name a few.

If it is true that there is more informal ministry than formal ministry in any given week, then surely we should evaluate the quality of our counsel in those informal moments.

If you were asked to teach a Sunday school lesson, preach a sermon, or lead a Bible study, you would immediately ask yourself, “Do I have the time I need to prepare?” Yet we often respond to our neighbor, golfing buddy, or church volunteer with little preparation, reflection, or prayer. Why do we spend hours preparing to teach while we offer important personal direction without a second thought? We forget that God uses those interactions to apply the transforming power of Scripture to people’s hearts. We forget that God’s Word is our primary tool of change. Instead, we come up with a little personal wisdom and personal experience and let the words fly.

When a friend asks for help, prepare an answer, don’t just speak natural wisdom off the cuff.

The Bible has nothing explicit to say, for example, about schizophrenia, A.D.D., teenagers, family television viewing, or sexual techniques for married couples. If you try to use your Bible as God’s encyclopedia, you will either conclude that it has little to say about some crucial issues of modern life or you will bend, twist, and stretch passages to suit your purposes.

Our deepest problem is that we seek to find our identity outside the story of redemption. If the entire goal and direction of our lives are wrong, we need much more than practical advice on how to do the right thing in a particular situation.

For example, what do you learn from the story of the Exodus and the crossing of the Red Sea? Do you see a hero named Moses and a call to be like him? Principles for dealing with difficulty? Keys to leading a rebellious people? Hints for crossing large bodies of water? The seven habits of highly effective nomads? You’ve probably heard sermons or Sunday school classes to that effect. But they all forget what the Exodus story is ultimately about. The Exodus is but one chapter in the larger story of redemption. It points to our need for a Christ who delivers us from slavery, defeats the Enemy, and leads us in the way we should go. If you learn how to take that identity to your marriage, it will help you understand the passages that directly discuss God’s plan for marriage.

We cannot use the Bible as a divine self-help book! We will always try to use it to get the things our hearts are set on, though this is precisely the bondage that sabotages our relationships.

Imagine how this rest could change the marriage of the couple we have been considering. Their constant war of words, competition for power, and mutual condemnation are rooted in a deeper battle about who or what will rule their lives. Marriage exposes their controlling desire to get what they want. When my hope is in my ability to rule the day, my spouse becomes a constant threat rather than an intimate companion. This destroys any hope of experiencing the loving, self-sacrificial unity at the heart of any good marriage. All of the Bible’s marital passages rest on this theme. Each of them calls me to entrust my mate and myself to the Lord, and to joyfully do what he says is right and best, knowing that my hope rests in his power, not mine.

Marriage!

The story tells me in a thousand ways that God has made a way to deal with my deepest problem, sin. It reminds me that my life need not be imprisoned by my own rebellion, defeated by my own foolishness, or paralyzed by my own inability. God’s grace is most powerful and effective at the moment of my greatest weakness.

Satan was offering a different path to wisdom, holding out the promise that people can discern life on their own. His words suggest that however beautiful God’s revelation, it is not really necessary. Satan’s wisdom places peoples’ lives in their own hands, so that they rely on their own ability to think, interpret, understand, and apply. The Serpent is selling Eve the most attractive and cruelest of lies, the lie of autonomy and self-sufficiency. He offers her wisdom that does not need to bow the knee to God.

This is what sin does to us. It reduces us to fools who live in ways that deny both God and our own nature. We may not profess to be atheists, but in practice we live purely horizontal, godless lives. The things of this world capture and enslave us. We may go to church and possess a high level of biblical and theological knowledge, but these pursuits can exist on the fringes of our lives. They are the icing on an all too self-absorbed, self-directed, and self-sufficient cake. Another system of counsel commands the thoughts and motives of our hearts.

It all starts with the person giving in to the sinful desires of his or her heart. A married man becomes interested in a woman at work. He thinks about what it would be like to get to know her better. He begins to spend way too much time studying the way she dresses, the look of her face, the way she keeps her hair, and the shape of her body. As he does this, his desires grow. He has not considered a physical relationship, and he is not thinking of leaving his wife at this point. He decides to talk with the woman. What harm could it do? After all, she is colleague, so he ought to have a good relationship with her. It isn’t long before they are having long lunches together and talking often during the day. One day he offers to take her home and spends forty-five minutes sitting close to her on the couch. He touches her hand and tells her how much he appreciates their friendship. On the way home, for the first time he wishes he wasn’t married. When he arrives home he is careful about how he reports on his day. That night he lies in bed next to his wife, thinking about the woman at work. He is progressively giving in to subtle patterns of sin, but he doesn’t see them for what they are. Yet there is something else going on inside him, the conviction of the Holy Spirit. He is uneasy. He feels a bit guilty. He doesn’t experience the joy he once did at seeing his wife at the end of a long day. He knows he is all too excited to go to work in the morning. He knows he has begun to b...

The progressive anatomy of an adulterous affair described well.

I need to wake up in the morning and say, “God, I am a person in desperate need of help. Please send helpers my way and give me the humility to receive the help you have provided.” And I need to pray further, “Lord, make me willing to help someone see himself as you see him today.”

A morning prayer!

Finally, the “Day of the Grand Canyon” came. Dad had never been more excited—an emotion that was obviously not shared by my mother. He awakened us early and we soon were on our way. When we reached the Grand Canyon, Dad refused to see it at a location that was “all fences and tourist traps.” He began to explore, and we ended up driving down a dirt road and then over open ground until we parked 200 feet from the rim. Mark and I immediately ran for the edge. We pretended to push each other over the rim and sat dangling our feet over the mile-high wall of rock. We threw stone after stone over the edge, oblivious to anyone who might have been hiking and camping below us. It was amazing to witness stones silently disappearing without ever hearing or seeing them hit. We were having a blast, totally unencumbered by fear. Meanwhile, Mom hadn’t even gotten out of the car. She had one foot on the ground, tapping to make sure that the turf was solid. She had visions that the rim would crumble and we would all fall to the bottom of the Canyon with the car on top of us. My dad knew she was struggling so he had placed himself near the car. But then Mom would say, “Bob, the boys, the boys!” and Dad would run toward us to make sure we were okay. At that point, Mom would get queasy and call him back. In short, I don’t think my dad saw much of the canyon that day; he was too busy running back and forth, ensuring that everyone was having fun according to the plan. All of us were in the very ...

Excellent illustration of how the same situation reveals what’s in the hearts of different people.

This often happens in personal ministry. From a distance it looks as if the person has really changed. When held accountable, the person does and says different things. The husband seems to be gentle and attentive to his wife. The teenager seems to treat his parents with new respect. The depressed person is up and out of the house. The broken relationship seems to have been restored. But the changes don’t last and in six weeks or six months, the person is right back where he started. Why? Because the change did not penetrate the heart, so changes in behavior were doomed to be temporary.

This is what happens to the teenager who goes through the teen years fairly well under the careful love, instruction, and oversight of Christian parents, only to go off to college and completely forsake his faith. I would suggest that in most cases he has not forsaken his faith. In reality, his faith was the faith of his parents; he simply lived within its limits while he was still at home. When he went away to school and those restraints were removed, his true heart was revealed. He had not internalized the faith. He had not entrusted himself to Christ in a life-transforming way. He did the “Christian” things he was required to do at home, but his actions did not flow from a heart of worship. In the college culture, he had nothing to anchor him, and the true thoughts and motives of his heart led him away from God. College was not the cause of his problem. It was simply the place where his true heart was revealed. The real problem was that faith never took root in his heart. As a result, his words, choices, and actions did not reveal a heart for God. Good behavior lasted for a while, but it proved to be temporary because it was not rooted in the heart.

Good response to the assumptions of “Already Gone” by Ham

To make matters worse, this idolatry is hidden. It is deceptive; it exists underground. We can make this great exchange without forsaking our confessional theology or even our observance of the external duties of the faith. So we hold onto our beliefs, tithe, remain faithful in church attendance, and occasionally participate in ministry activity. Yet at the level of what we are really living for, we have forsaken God for something else. This is the silent cancer that weakens the church, robs individuals of their spiritual vitality, and leads to all kinds of difficulty in relationships and situations.

If we fail to examine the heart and the areas where it needs to change, our ministry efforts will only result in people who are more committed and successful idolaters.

Because our hearts are captured by a desire for human approval, we use an act of worship to get glory for ourselves!

This principle has several applications for personal growth and ministry. 1. Our hearts are always being ruled by someone or something. 2. The most important question to ask when examining the heart is, “What is functionally ruling this person’s heart in this situation?” 3. Whatever controls my heart will control my responses to people and situations. 4. God changes us not just by teaching us to do different things, but by recapturing our hearts to serve him alone. 5. The deepest issues of the human struggle are not issues of pain and suffering, but the issue of worship, because what rules our hearts will control the way we respond to both suffering and blessing.

Three principles in this passage speak to what we have been considering. 1. Everyone seeks some kind of treasure. (This is Christ’s operating assumption.) 2. Your treasure will control your heart. (“For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.”) 3. What controls your heart will control your behavior. (“No one can serve two masters.”)

We don’t typically think about our desires waging war. We think of surprising, powerful, or wrong desires. But we must understand the war metaphor James is using. If a war is being fought between nations, it is fought for geographical and political control. Control is the purpose of war. So it is with our desires, which fight for control of our hearts. What controls our hearts will exercise inescapable influence over our lives and behavior.

It is not wrong to desire relaxation at the end of a long day. It is wrong to be ruled by relaxation in such a way that I am irritated with anyone who gets in the way. It is not wrong to desire the tender attention of your husband. It is wrong to be so ruled by it that your days are filled with bitterness because of its absence and your nights are filled with manipulative attempts to get it.

When a certain set of desires rules our hearts, we reduce prayer to the menu of human desire. Worse, we shrink God from his position of all-wise, all-loving, all-powerful Father to a divine waiter we expect to deliver everything we ask. But God will not shrink to this size. He will only be our Father and King, who “satisfies your desires with good things so that your youth is renewed like the eagle’s” (Ps. 103:5). He knows what is best, and he will not let there be peace until he alone controls our hearts.

The objects of most of our desires are not evil. The problem is the way they tend to grow, and the control they come to exercise over our hearts. Desires are a part of human existence, but they must be held with an open hand. All human desire must be held in submission to a greater purpose, the desires of God for his kingdom. This is what Christ expressed in the Garden of Gethsemane when he cried, “Not my will, but yours be done” (Luke 22:42).

What is James’s solution? The turnaround in this passage is very interesting. You would think that his first counsel would be to go the people we have sinned against and confess it. But James’s turnaround is first vertical (with respect to God) and then horizontal (with respect to people). James’s first call is for us to “humble ourselves before God.” This is a direct plea to deal with the idolatry (spiritual adultery) of our hearts. If human conflict is rooted in spiritual adultery, change must begin by bowing before God in humble repentance for the idols that have replaced him in our hearts.

Every aspect of my existence was meant to be filled with the glory of God. Everything I think, every decision I make, every word I speak was meant to be shaped by a humble acknowledgement of his claim on my life. I was created to live for his glory. As we’ve seen, every human life pursues some kind of glory. If it is not the glory of God, it will be some kind of earthbound pseudo-glory. It may be money and possessions or acceptance and respect. It could be achievement and success or intellectual prowess and philosophical acumen. Perhaps it is the power to control people, the affection of a certain person, or a certain standard of living. At the root of many difficulties and disasters is the pursuit of the wrong glory.

In Christ, the truth of God takes on flesh. Jesus is the ultimate exposition of how God intends people to think and live. In his life and teaching, he confronts our foolishness with true wisdom.

What is God calling you to in your marriage? To be an ambassador. What is God calling you to as a parent? To be an ambassador. What is God calling you to regarding your friends and neighbors? To be an ambassador. What is God calling you to at work and in leisure? To be an ambassador. We represent God’s purposes to the people he places in our lives. This is much broader than a commitment to formal ministry occupying a portion of our schedule. It acknowledges that our lives belong to the King. But this is where we get ourselves into trouble. We don’t really want to live as ambassadors. We would rather live as mini-kings. We know what we like and the people we want to be with. We know the kind of house we’d like to own and the car we want to drive. Without even recognizing it, we quickly fall into a “my desire, my will, and my way” lifestyle, where the things we say and do are driven by the cravings of our own hearts. If we were honest, we would have to confess that the central prayer of our hearts is “my kingdom come.”

Love, Know, Speak, Do

Love Love highlights the importance of relationships in the process of change. Theologians call this a covenantal model of change. God comes and makes a covenant with us. He commits himself to be our God and he takes us as his people.

Know Know has to do with really getting acquainted with the people God sends our way. When you assume that you know someone, you won’t ask the critical questions you need to ask to get below the surface. We tend to think we know people because we know facts about them (who their spouse is, where they work, some likes and dislikes, their children, etc.), but we really don’t know them. Knowing a person means knowing the heart.

Speak

He saw the church as a well-designed, well-led, successful organization. But when I look at the church, I see a hospital full of people in various stages of dealing with the disease of sin. Imagine a doctor coming out of an examining room to say to his receptionist, “Sick people, sick people, sick people! All I ever see is sick people! Why don’t healthy people ever come and visit me?” The church is full of people dealing with the effects of sin, people who are not fully formed into the image of Jesus Christ. The church is full of people who have lost their way and don’t even know it, who haven’t made a connection between their daily problems and the transforming grace of Christ. Everywhere you look, you will find couples who are struggling to love, parents who are struggling to be patient, children who are attracted to temptation, and friends who battle the disappointments of imperfect relationships. This is 100 percent of the church’s membership! The church is not a theological classroom. It is a conversion, confession, repentance, reconciliation, forgiveness, and sanctification center, where flawed people place their trust in Christ, gather to know and love him better, and learn to love others as he has designed. The church is messy and inefficient, but it is God’s wonderful mess—the place where he radically transforms hearts and lives.

Excellent!