The following message is by Pastor John Piper.
More information from Desiring God Ministries is available
at www.DesiringGod.org This morning, I invite
you to open your Bibles to the text
of Galatians, the fifth chapter.
We'll be reading verses 1 through 6, and
also 13 through 18.
It was for freedom that Christ set us
free.
Therefore, keep standing firm and do not be
subject again to the yoke of slavery.
Behold, I, Paul, say to you that you
received circumcision, Christ will be no benefit to
you.
And I testify again, every man who receives
circumcision, that he is under obligation to keep
the whole law.
You have been severed from Christ, you who
are seeking to be justified by law.
You have fallen from grace.
For we, through the Spirit, by faith, are
waiting for the hope of righteousness.
For in Christ Jesus, neither circumcision nor uncircumcision
means anything, but faith working through love.
For you were called to freedom, brethren.
Only do not turn your freedom into an
opportunity for the flesh, but through love serve
one another.
For the whole law is fulfilled in one
word, in the statement, you shall love your
neighbor as yourself.
But if you bite and devour one another,
take care lest you are consumed by one
another.
But I say, walk in the Spirit, and
you will not carry out the desires of
the flesh.
For the flesh sets its desires against the
Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh.
For these are in opposition to one another,
so that you may not do the things
that you please.
But if you are led by the Spirit,
you are not under the law.
Father, I ask you once more now as
we come to the word, that you would
help me to speak the truth, and to
speak it in a demeanor that is fitting.
The nature of the truth and its weight.
And I pray for an appropriate listening, as
those who are listening to the word of
God.
I pray that the Holy Spirit would move
in this room as we have heard in
this text, in waiting through the Spirit, and
walking by the Spirit, and being led by
the Spirit.
We need to hear by the Spirit.
I need to preach by the Spirit.
And so come, Holy Spirit.
And exalt Jesus Christ in this room.
Now, I pray.
And if any is among us who doesn't
trust and love Jesus, I pray that you
would mercifully quicken a spiritual life in their
souls, that they might see how compellingly, authenticatingly,
real, beautiful, and satisfying, true Jesus is.
And so save and sanctify, I pray, in
His, Jesus' great name.
Amen.
Now, there's an order and a progression to
these messages on education for exaltation, and I
want to back up and do a little
review so that you can get the order,
and feel the way I'm trying to build
things toward a climax.
At the beginning of the last decade, we
built a vision and a building for exaltation.
This one.
1991, we moved in here.
And at the beginning of this decade, we
want to build a vision, and Lord willing,
a building for education.
And the way the two are related to
each other, education and exaltation, is with this
little word for, education for exaltation.
Meaning that there is a foundation being laid
in education for the sake of something more
important than education, namely exaltation, or call it
worship, if you want to.
This gets right at the heart of the
way we think God has set up the
world, and set up our minds and hearts,
and how human beings ought to tick.
And it goes like this.
Education about God precedes and serves exaltation in
God, or learning truth precedes loving truth, or
right reflection on God precedes and serves right
affections for God, or right clear seeing of
the glory of Christ precedes savoring the glory
of Christ, or good theology is the foundation
of great doxology.
You see the order in all of those
pairs?
That's crucial to get that in life.
Because if you don't get that, you can
be vulnerable to some terrible, terrible mistakes.
And the two biggest ones go like this.
If we educate, and it does not produce
exaltation, if we do education without exaltation, that
education will degenerate into proud intellectualism.
And the other side works as well.
If we try by various emotional and technical
means to move into exaltation, not founded on,
shaped by, sustained by, true truth-driven education,
that exaltation will degenerate into proud emotionalism.
Some people think you can get proud in
terms of your intellect, but if you're emotional,
you're safe from that.
It is proud emotionalism if it's not rooted
in truth, and it is proud intellectualism if
it isn't giving rise to God-exalting exaltation.
Which is why keeping these together in this
order is so crucial.
It's the very warp and woof of what
makes the church tick.
So that is underneath, that's the conception of
education for exaltation that's underneath all of this
reflection.
Now, back up four weeks with me, and
we began with education for exaltation in God.
And from Isaiah 43, we lifted up two
things.
We said God is God, deity, and God
is sovereign, sovereignty.
And we exalt in that, that God is
God and God is sovereign, because His sovereignty
undergirds and supports all of His blessings and
promises to us.
And if He weren't sovereign, we'd have no
guarantee that all the blessings that He is
for us and promises to us would, in
fact, one day be ours in full.
Then, the second week, we added one three
-word sentence to those two great truths.
God is God, and God is sovereign.
We added, Jesus is God.
He who has the Son has life, therefore.
And he who does not have the Son
does not have life, and we exalt in
the Son.
Not just the Father in His sovereignty, but
the Son and His equality with the Father.
And then, in the third week, we asked
this.
Why did the Son become flesh and dwell
among us?
Why did He come?
In the beginning was the Word, and the
Word was with God, and the Word was
God, and the Word became flesh and dwelt
among us, and we beheld His glory.
Glory is the only begotten of the Father,
and we have received of His fullness grace
upon grace.
Remember, waves of grace that last forever and
ever and ever.
And we asked, why did He come?
And the answer is, to purchase that grace.
Because there's not a person in this room
who deserves any of it.
I'm a sinner.
You're a sinner.
Remember, the only thing we deserve from God
is condemnation, judgment, and hell.
That's how far short we've fallen, and how
infinitely worthy He is of our love, which
He gets hardly any of.
And therefore, if there's going to be any
reconciliation between this holy, just, good God and
us sinners, the only hope is that God
would come, clothe Himself with the flesh, in
which He could then die, rise again, so
that He could give the obedience to God
in perfection that we didn't give, and could
pay the penalty that we couldn't pay, so
that we could now in this age be
accepted and loved and justified for Jesus' sake
and in Jesus.
That's why He came.
And so, two weeks ago, we exalted in
the cross.
And we said, with Paul in Galatians 6
.14, God forbid that I should exalt or
boast in anything except the cross.
And we thought, now, how can that be?
Because we do exalt in other things, and
we are happy that we have clothes, and
we have food, and we have health, and
that we have relationships, and we have a
church, and that we have friends.
We're happy in these things.
And so what I said was, the meaning
of that is, since we only deserve hell,
and instead we get blessing after blessing after
blessing, they're all blood-bought blessings.
The only reason God can do anything good
for you, or take all the bad things
that happen to you and make them turn
for good for you, the only reason He
can do that is because Jesus died for
you.
And therefore, all your exalting in those good
things should be at root an exalting in
the cross that bought them for you.
That's the way I explained Galatians 6.14.
So we are a God-centered, Christ-centered,
cross-centered, cross-permeated, Christ-permeated, God-permeated
people which brought us to last week.
And I said, come on now.
Lots of you, go with Rick Gamache, and
go with Randy, and move to Grace-Richfield.
Let's get a band of people and leave
Bethlehem, and go down there and infuse that
church with a rebirth of a God-centered
vision, which they had invited us to do.
And the banner that I would fly now,
the words I would use to put over
that sermon last week, and reinforce it this
week, is this.
When I say education for exaltation, I'm not
merely or maybe even mainly thinking about exaltation
here, alone.
I'm thinking about for exaltation in Guinea, Tanzania,
Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Philippines, Japan, Indonesia, China.
We educate for the sake of exaltation, yes,
here, so that we'll do it with all
our heart, but so that it will spread.
So I've got a new phrase now.
I have two new words to insert in
this slogan.
I'll try them both out on you.
Education is for the propagation of exaltation.
That's one of them.
And the other one is, education is for
the multiplication of exaltation.
That's the other one.
And we've already got everything printed, so we
won't change anything.
But everything is coming clearer to me as
I preach on these things of what we're
about here, in terms of sending out bands
of worshippers to infuse a fresh God-centered
dynamic into another church, and then go on
planting churches throughout the next decade to relieve
some of the growth pressures here, and then
send out missionaries to the places where there
isn't worship.
You know, one of the sentences we love
in this church is, missions exist because worship
doesn't.
Well, now we can say education exists because
exaltation doesn't, in lots of places, in the
Twin Cities and among the unreached peoples of
the world.
So that brings us to where we are.
Now, where are we?
Those four messages brings us to today in
the sequence, God, Christ, cross, promulgation.
Here we are now at a how question.
This morning is the question, all right, if
we're to educate toward God-wardness, and toward
Christ-centeredness, and toward cross-centeredness, and toward
going, if all of that exaltation is to
be produced by this kind of education, then
how do you do it?
I'm not thinking mainly here in terms of
lesson plans or something like that.
I'm thinking something deeper.
And the answer in our text that I
have chosen, and it's right there in your
title of the message in the worship folder,
is we do it through the Spirit by
faith.
Now, I didn't make up that phrase.
So open your Bibles again, and let's look
at it.
It's in verse 5 of Galatians 5.
Through the Spirit by faith.
Let's read verses 4 and 5.
You have been severed from Christ, you who
are seeking to be justified by the law.
You have fallen from grace.
Don't do that.
Don't seek to be justified by faith.
That is, I mean, by law.
Don't seek to try to get yourself right
with God by performances of things commanded in
the law of commandments.
Don't try to do that, because you will
simply find yourself cut off from Christ if
you do that, and cut off from grace
if you do that.
A good way to keep yourself separated from
Jesus is to try to get right with
God by your efforts to obey the law.
Instead of to go to Jesus and do
it His way.
So, verse 5 then says, For we, through
the Spirit by faith, that's where I got
that phrase.
See, I didn't make that up.
That's there in the Bible.
Through the Spirit by faith, are waiting for
the hope of righteousness.
That's how we are to go about education
for exaltation.
So here we are now.
Step back and try to picture this.
From verse 5.
Here we are, waiting.
For what?
The hope of righteousness.
You mean we're not righteous?
Well, we know we are.
Romans 5.1 Therefore, having been justified by
faith, we have peace with God.
Romans 5.9 Therefore, having been justified by
His blood.
Romans 5.10 Therefore, since we have been
reconciled by His death.
Ephesians 2.8 We have been saved by
grace through faith.
These are done things.
They're done.
We're justified.
We're reconciled.
We're saved.
And therefore there is a sense of confidence
and triumph and exaltation in the Christian life.
And then comes verse 5.
And we are waiting.
Waiting.
For the hope of righteousness.
What does that mean?
It means that while I have a legal
standing of acquittal and forgiveness and acceptance and
justification.
Reckoned, counted, just.
Christ's righteousness imputed to me.
And my guilt laid on Him.
And all my forgiveness purchased, finished on the
cross.
Though we have that glorious title to life
and eternity and sonship.
There is in the Christian life a not
yet of groaning and waiting.
Paul says it in Romans 8.23, right?
We who have the first fruits of the
spirit groan inwardly.
Waiting for our adoption.
The redemption of our bodies.
Wretched man that I am.
Who will deliver me from this body of
death?
Not that I am already perfected or have
already attained.
But I press on to make Him my
own who has made me His own.
This is the tension in which we live.
I want to just stop here for a
moment and linger on this.
Because I want in this whole thing of
education for exaltation.
I want you, especially newer people among us.
To feel the flavor or we like to
use sometimes the word ethos about this place.
And it's not unique to us.
Every place that has tasted these two things.
The already of I'm right with God.
I'm forgiven.
There's now no condemnation to those who are
in Christ Jesus.
I am reconciled to God.
I have, as our fighter verse says, eternal
life.
I will not perish.
Yet, I hate my sin.
One of you sent me a letter recently.
Pouring out your heart about your battles, your
struggles.
And one sentence just so riveted me.
I wish I could be as detailed as
the letter was detailed.
But I feel that might be inappropriate.
But one sentence said, with the sin that
you're struggling with.
As I do it, I weep.
That's where we are.
As I, and then you named the sin.
As I do it, I weep.
We, as a church, have not arrived.
I get that not by experience, though I
could easily.
I get it from verse five.
We await the hope of righteousness.
That speaks volumes about what we're like.
And we're not there yet.
We're not there yet in the parking lot.
When somebody tells us, don't park here.
We're not there yet as we move into
the pews.
And an usher gives us a glance, a
pleading glance.
Could you please move your coat and make
some room for somebody?
And righteousness doesn't happen.
Mercy doesn't happen.
It's not there in the marriages.
Our beloved, we lay down our life for
each other.
And we drive each other up the wall.
Doesn't happen in parenting.
Who's more precious to us than our children
are precious to us?
And how many tears, how many tears can
a parent shed?
We're not there yet.
And that creates a kind of ethos because
we're walking this razor's edge as a people.
On the one side, with a shout, I'm
accepted, I'm loved, I'm forgiven, I'm justified.
I have eternal life, I'm secure.
Nobody can pluck me out of the Father's
hand.
Amen.
Let's sing, let's dance, let's exult.
And I sin.
And I hate my sin.
And I hurt others with my sin.
And they hurt me with my sin.
And I sink sometimes to the lowest emotional
level of wondering whether you can keep on
for one more day.
That's where we live.
And I say it and I stress it
because I want you to know that this
church is made up of those people on
that continuum.
Every Sunday morning.
Some so paralyzed with their own failures that
they can barely get out of bed in
the morning.
And some so excited about the triumphs of
grace in their lives that they wonder why
everybody's not as happy as they are.
And if we both know that we're here,
it will create a certain kind of ethos
here.
Every joy will have a pain in it.
And every pain will have a joy in
it.
It'll be that way until Jesus comes.
It'll affect the way we do music.
It'll affect the way we do preaching.
It'll affect the way we talk to each
other in the commons.
It'll affect everything we do that there's a
broken hearted boldness about this place.
There's a confident meekness.
There's a hope filled humility about this place.
That's my desire anyway.
I see all that in verse five.
We are waiting, waiting, waiting.
I'm waiting.
I'm groaning.
I groan every day.
God make me a better husband.
God make me a better father.
God make me a better pastor.
God triumph over my crummy attitudes.
God give me more zeal for your name.
God give me more boldness in witness.
Oh God, why am I so far behind
your standards at age 54 having been saved?
Now, I professed faith when I was six.
You do the math.
Why?
So my answer to the question how do
we do education for exaltation is we do
it with broken hearted boldness.
That's not the main point of the message.
Is that kind of a parenthesis that gripped
me?
Here's the main point of the message.
When I ask how the verse says through
the spirit by faith, what does that mean?
And let's do this quickly.
Through the spirit by faith.
Those two phrases are the answer to the
question in this message.
How do you do education?
How do you do exaltation?
How do you do music?
How do you do preaching?
How do you do listening?
How do you do car driving?
How do you do housewife whiffering or whatever
it is?
How do you do computer work?
How do you do teaching?
How do you do doctoring and lawyering and
bricklaying and carpentering and whatever else we do?
How do you do it through the spirit
by faith?
So let's take a few minutes to unpack
each of those.
Here are the verses that will unpack through
the spirit.
Verse 16, you see it?
But I say, walk by the spirit.
So there we're walking by the spirit.
Verse 18.
If you are led, there you have the
spirit pulling us and drawing us and leading
us.
If we're led by the spirit, you're not
under the law.
Then verse 22.
The fruit of the spirit is love, joy,
peace.
So there you got three different images.
Walking by the spirit, led by the spirit,
bearing the fruit of the spirit.
Now, what's the point of all those?
Isn't the point that we have to find
the demeanor and the mindset whereby we trust
in, depend upon the spirit to do those
things in us.
If we have the mindset, I'm going to
run my life.
I'm going to do these things.
I'm going to get this accomplished.
I'm going to be the right preacher.
I'm going to be the right husband.
I'm going to be this.
I can do this.
Failure.
So we have to get that whole mindset
changed and realize that we depend upon the
spirit.
And the reason is because if you depend
upon the strength of another, the other gets
the glory.
And that comes from first Peter 411, which
goes like this.
Whoever serves, let him do so as one
who is serving by the strength, which God
supplies so that in everything, God may get
the glory.
The giver of the strength gets the glory
for the deed.
So we must learn how to do education
and exaltation and everything else we do in
another person's strength, namely the spirit through the
spirit.
We are waiting through the spirit.
We endure the hardships of this life through
the spirit.
We enjoy the joys of this life.
Everything must be through the spirit.
So God gets the glory.
Phrase number two.
Here's how you get that mindset, namely by
faith through the spirit.
By faith, we are waiting.
Now, there are just two other verses to
unpack that Galatians 220 and Galatians three, five.
We read them to you.
Galatians 220.
I have been crucified with Christ.
It is no longer I who live, but
Christ who lives in me.
Now, there you have life lived in the
strength of another.
I'm not living.
Christ is living in and through me by
his spirit.
Well, then what do you do?
That's the next phrase.
And the life which I now live in
the flesh, I live by faith in the
son of God who loved me and gave
himself for me.
So through the spirit, by faith.
So if you say, OK, through the spirit,
that sounds like God is doing it.
Yes, yes, that's true.
So what do I do?
What's my role?
How do I get connected?
How do I become a channel?
What's the role of my head, my will?
Where do I fit in this?
And the answer comes in this little phrase
by faith.
You trust, you trust.
And what do you trust?
You trust promises.
You trust words coming out of the mouth
of God.
I get that from Galatians three, five.
Look at it.
Galatians three, five.
How does he who provides the spirit to
you?
Notice the spirit is coming now into you.
How does he come?
How does he work?
Does he who provides the spirit and works
miracles among you do it by works of
the law or by hearing with faith?
Answer not works of law, but hearing with
faith.
Notice the word hearing.
Hearing what?
Words, the word of God.
God speaks words of promise to us and
warning to us and guidance to us.
And faith takes those words and says, yes.
And in that, yes, the spirit is moving.
The channel through which the spirit moves on
us so that we can say I'm waiting
through the spirit is faith.
Now, let me close with a very practical
illustration.
Last week, I threw out the net to
everybody.
Come on.
Let's consider going with Rick and Randy to
Grace Church, Richfield and gather on Wednesday night
and gather on the following Sunday nights and
dream a dream.
Get a new venture.
And suppose last Sunday that God had been
readying you and there had been stirring in
your heart something like, oh, I want a
new venture for God.
I'm so stuck in a rut.
I want to move beyond where I am
in my devotional life and my service life
and I'm married life and my parenting life
and my vocational life.
I want a new day in my life.
I'm so tired of the same old, same
old here.
I want to get moving with God.
And then you heard that challenge.
Maybe that's it.
Maybe I'm too comfortable at Bethlehem and I
need to pour my energies into a new
vision with Rick and Grace, Richfield.
And so you began to dream.
You came on Wednesday night.
God stirred you up.
And then come these bombarding thoughts.
Thought number one.
You may be excited now, but you know
what?
You're going to get real discouraged down there.
Then what are you going to do?
Thought number two.
I have so many friends here.
I got so many friends here.
I love my friends.
I lean on my friends.
If I go there, I hardly know anybody.
I don't know if anybody's going to go
that I know.
Thought number three.
My teenager doesn't want to go.
Now, here's the question.
How do you go to do exaltation at
Grace Church, Richfield in spite of those three
obstacles?
And the answer is through the spirit, by
faith.
By faith in what?
Three tailor-made promises for each fear.
Number one.
Over against the first fear of, I'm going
to be discouraged down there.
I know I can have an emotional high
here, but there I'm going to have a
low.
And what will I do if I get
into a low?
And you go to the promise of Psalm
23.
Three.
The Lord is my shepherd.
I shall not want.
Makes me lie down in green pastures.
He leads me beside still waters.
He, what's the next phrase?
He restores my soul.
Really?
Will He do that?
Do you believe that?
Do you believe that God restores the soul
in Richfield and not just Minneapolis?
He only restores souls in Minneapolis.
Or you could take the specific application of
that in Psalm 19, 7.
The law of the Lord is perfect.
The law of the Lord is perfect, restoring
the soul.
How does He do it?
He does it with His Word.
The Word exists in Richfield.
God is in Richfield.
The Word is in Richfield.
This promise is therefore true in Richfield.
And you take the promise, you embrace it,
and you slay the lie of fear with
it.
Second, you take that, but Lord, I have
friends here.
I have so many friends.
It's going to be so hard to leave
so many people that I've known for these
years.
And you take a promise like this from
Mark 10, 29.
Truly, truly, I say to you, there is
no one who has left house or brothers
or sisters or mother or father or children
or farms for my sake or for the
gospel's sake that will not receive back 100
times as much now in the present age.
Houses and brothers and sisters and mothers and
children and farms, along with persecutions and in
the age to come, eternal life.
In other words, if you embrace that and
move on that promise, Jesus says your needs
will be met 100 fold.
Your needs will be met 100 fold.
And it gets better in the age to
come.
And lastly, the teenager.
I'd love to preach a whole sermon on
this because I've got such strong feelings about
the way our culture and sometimes churches deal
with teenagers.
Most of them are not here in this
room now.
They were in the first hour, though some
may be.
I have two promises for parents and teenagers
at this point.
One is this.
Jesus said in Acts 20, 35.
It is more blessed, Barnabas.
That's my 16 year old.
It is more blessed to give than to
receive.
I think we probably labor with trembling to
provide for our children a youth program and
a youth ministry that makes them excessively dependent
on it.
And I love this church's youth ministry.
And I'm thankful that my four sons have
grown up in it and through it.
And it's getting better all the time.
But I know that the average mindset of
the teenager is I come here to get,
not to give.
I don't come to usher.
I don't come to work in the nursery.
I don't come to teach Sunday school.
I don't come to direct traffic in the
parking lot.
I come here to have a good time
with my friends and a happy worship experience.
And we're thrilled if they'll come because we
don't want them somewhere else.
And there may be a higher vision for
teenagers than that.
It is more blessed to give than to
receive.
So I would say to my Barnabas, perhaps,
you know, it may be that God has
a joy for you and a happiness for
you and a depth for you and a
strength for you as you throw yourself into
serving at Grace Richfield rather than being served.
And the other text I would use would
be this one.
Jesus said, follow me, Barnabas, and I will
make you fishers of men.
In other words, build a youth group.
Get a vision for your life.
We in this culture specialize in elongating adolescence
almost to age 80.
We do.
Watch the advertising.
Watch men and women in their middle years
and what they're commended to look like and
act like and do.
We are in the big business of lengthening
adolescence as long as we possibly can for
one reason.
It makes money.
Because adolescents are peer-driven.
And the longer you can produce peer-driven
immature people, the more money you can make
off of them by shifting styles every six
months.
From the thickness of the soles of their
shoes to the wideness of their lapels or
anything else.
Money is driven here.
And frankly, I don't want to be a
part of it.
The church doesn't need to do that.
Why can't we take our young people and
say, talk your parents into going to grace
because you have a dream of founding a
youth ministry.
Building a youth ministry.
Are there a few teenagers in the world
who could be so counter-cultural that they
don't think in terms of leaning on and
needing and needing and needing and needing and
needing and needing that they could actually find
Christ sufficient for their needs and say, I'll
go there and I'll work with fifth grade
and in the meantime, we're going to pray
into existence one of the most dynamic youth
ministries in Minneapolis.
Only it'll be in Richfield.
Well, that's what I would say to my
Barnabas.
And I'm done.
Let me close by simply summarizing like this.
How do we do education for exaltation?
We do it as sinners saved by grace,
justified and yet not yet made just because
we're waiting for the hope of righteousness and
therefore we're all broken people, we're all discouraged
people from time to time and yet from
time to time we're exalting people and thrilled
people and happy people.
And that's where we are.
I'll be here at the front.
Others will be here to pray about your
soul or anything else you want to pray
about.
You're dismissed.
Thank you for listening to this message by
John Piper, pastor for preaching at Bethlehem Baptist
Church in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
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