The following message is by Pastor John Piper.
More information from Desiring God Ministries is available
at www.DesiringGod.org All that you are
and all that you have, we now afresh
receive by trusting you, banking our hopes upon
you.
And so now Lord, since you've taught us
that faith comes by hearing and hearing by
the Word of God, I pray that as
I attempt to unpack parts of your scripture
and illustrate the mercies of God, that you
would work faith in our lives, make our
faith stronger.
If there are those among us who don't
trust you, I pray that you would make
yourself appear to them what you really are,
namely trustworthy, and so that you would awaken
a reasonable faith in their minds and hearts.
Lord, we dedicate the rest of this worship
service to you and ask that you would
receive our exaltation over your Word and fill
us with increasing gratitude all through this week.
Through Christ I pray, Amen.
I want to begin by telling you where
I'm going, what my purpose is, and then
how I'm going to get there, and then
how we're going to close, namely by having
everybody look at that piece of paper that
you have in your worship folder, this one
right here, we're moving toward.
And the reason I want to tell you
up front very clearly what my goal is
and how I aim to get there and
how we'll close is so that you're alert
and able to assess what I say clearly.
I don't want there to be anything subtle
or I don't want any surprises to be
sprung on you.
I want you to have a sense, I
know where he's heading, I know how he
plans to get there, because truth really matters.
You know, we have a banner on the
building right over there, you can see it
from the freeway when you drive by, it
says, truth matters.
That's true in your life.
It's true in Florida right now.
It's true in the way I preach and
what I say.
Not only what I say, but how I
say it.
Is it truth governed?
And I know that when a preacher or
a politician or anybody speaks into the context
that we have in America today, the suspicion
that it is not truth driven is very
high.
And so, though I may be swimming against
the stream, I would dare to hope that
if I can be as open and above
board and up front with you about where
I'm going, you might give me the benefit
of the doubt and hope that he is
meaning what he says.
So here's my goal.
My goal in this message is to persuade
you that the biblical Christian diagnosis of the
human condition, your life and my life, is
true and relevant.
And that the biblical remedy for our condition
is true and is found nowhere but in
Jesus Christ and him crucified and risen from
the dead.
Now, that's what I'm after.
I'm on a persuasion crusade in these next
30 minutes or so.
So you need to know that.
I'm not trying to trick anybody.
I would like to persuade you to be
fully Christian.
And that's my aim.
Now, how am I going to get there?
What's my plan?
Number one, I'm going to read a passage
of scripture.
Number two, I'm going to comment on it
briefly.
Number three, I'm going to tell you some
stories from Friday morning in South Carolina where
I was in order to illustrate the mercies
of God as I remember them from my
childhood and how that leads into the issue
of God and sin and salvation and faith.
And then I'm going to outline very briefly
the biblical Christian solution to the problem that
grows out of my experience and your experience
and commend it to you for your serious
consideration.
Let's go to the text that I'm going
to read.
Lamentations chapter 3.
You may have a hard time finding it.
It's a teeny little book sandwiched between Jeremiah,
the big prophet, and Ezekiel.
And it's a book that I do not
expect many of you to know anything about
because it is so small and so tucked
away there.
It doesn't get read very much.
And one of the reasons it doesn't is
because it's such a horrible book.
Because it is so shot through with horrific
pictures of the judgment of God upon Jerusalem.
Jeremiah wrote this little book as Jerusalem was
destroyed in 587 BC and the pictures of
destruction are terrible, loss of life, starvation through
siege.
But, and here's the amazing thing, in the
middle of this five chapter book, the middle
chapter, comes some of the sweetest, most precious
words that God has ever put in the
mouth of a prophet to tell to his
people.
And those are the ones I want to
read because they have a special punch when
you realize where they are.
Verse 21 to 25 of chapter 3 of
Lamentations go like this.
This I recall to mind and therefore I
have hope.
The Lord's loving kindnesses never cease.
His compassions or his mercies never fail.
They are new every morning.
Great is your faithfulness.
The Lord is my portion, says my soul,
therefore I have hope in Him.
The Lord is good to those who wait
for Him.
To the person who seeks Him.
Now that should boggle your mind because those
precious words, especially the words, His mercies are
new every morning, is spoken in a situation
that was horrific in its suffering.
The afflictions, the devastation, parents were eating their
children.
They were so hungry and the siege was
so horrible.
Now how did these words, how did these
words get into that book?
And as a partial explanation I want to
read two more verses.
Drop your eyes down, if you're still there,
to verses 32 and 33.
For if He, meaning God, if He causes
grief, then He will have compassion according to
His abundant loving kindness.
For He does not afflict willingly or grieve
the sons of men.
Now the very least we can draw out
of those verses is this.
The mercies of God are often hidden and
hard to see while they are happening.
Because it says He does cause grief and
He does afflict and yet it says there's
a merciful purpose in it all.
And it's not coming from the bottom of
His heart.
He does not willingly afflict the sons of
men.
There are purposes for His affliction.
It's not the thing He delights most to
do and yet He does it.
And if we'll trust Him, there are mercies
hidden there for us.
It's just like the book of Job.
You know the story of Job.
He lost everything he had.
He lost ten of his children, all of
them.
He lost all of his possessions.
He lost all of his health.
And James, Jesus' brother, thousands of years later,
in his little book called James, writes in
chapter 5 verse 11 this interpretation of that
book.
He says, You have heard the endurance of
Job and have seen the outcome of the
Lord's dealings, that the Lord is full of
compassion and is merciful.
So there's the point of the book of
Job according to James.
He lost all of his children.
He lost all of his health.
He lost his possessions.
And this says, The purpose of the Lord
was compassion and merciful.
So if we'll trust Him, that was the
meaning of the destruction of Jerusalem.
That's the meaning of the loss of His
health.
And I don't know where you are this
morning, but if you will trust God, mercy
is in your life right now.
It is all over your life.
Mercy, a design, a compassionate design.
If you will trust God and hold on
to Him for that, it will show itself
sooner or later.
We could say it in the words of
Susan Shelley, Marshall Shelley's wife.
Marshall Shelley is one of the editors for
Christianity Today.
1991, November 22, a few days before Thanksgiving,
8.20 p.m., their son was born.
And at 8.22, two minutes later, he
died.
Marshall wrote an article in CT about four
years ago about it called, Two Minutes to
Eternity.
Magnificent article.
The nurse standing over her, holding her dead
baby said, Does the baby have a name?
And she said, Toby.
It's short for a biblical name, Tobiah, which
means God is good.
And when Marshall came to speak to the
Wheaton alumni a few years ago down at
Wheaton and told this story, he said at
the end of his talk, summing it all
up, Life is hard and God is good.
Life is hard and God is good.
That's the meaning of lamentations.
That's the meaning of Job.
You might say that's the meaning of the
Bible.
Life is hard and God is good.
And many of you are right in the
midst of proving it to be so.
Now, at least if you would trust Him,
if I could persuade you this morning that
God is trustworthy in it, and you held
on to Him, you would discover that life
is hard and God is good.
Oh, that God this morning would give us
eyes to see His mercies in our lives,
and we would see them all the more
clearly, and know that they were mercies if
we knew the price that He paid for
them for us.
He sent His Son, Jesus Christ, into the
world to die so that my guilt would
be taken away, His wrath would be removed
from me, and there would be a free,
open course for His mercies to flow to
me, while He is just, even though I'm
a sinner, I could be treated with mercy.
That's a glorious thing that God has done
in Jesus Christ.
And we would taste the mercies all the
more sweetly if we knew the price.
Now, here's what happened on Friday morning.
Here's what happened that brought all this home
to me so powerfully.
I mean, I haven't had experiences like this
for quite a while.
And it all relates to what I'm trying
to persuade you.
So this is trying to draw you in
now to my experience, to taste what I
tasted, and then to see whether or not
God would help you interpret it the way
I think the Bible interprets it.
I flew on Thursday to Greenville, South Carolina.
I grew up in Greenville.
My father is in Greenville.
He's 81.
And my stepmother, his wife, had very serious
surgery a couple of weeks ago.
She came home for a few days.
Then it was so serious she had to
go back, and now she's been moved to
a nursing home.
And when I learned that, that she'll probably
never come home again, and that my father
is now alone in that big house, I
said, maybe we should use some of our
frequent flyer miles.
I'm just going to go down there and
help Daddy adjust and go and pray with
her maybe the last time.
And so that's what I did.
Flew down on Thursday and had a good
evening with the both of them, ate together
with them, and prayed with her and read
the Great Eight with her.
That's Romans 8.
And we just enjoyed our hope together.
Both of them are believers in Jesus, and
their hope is strong.
And then I spent a good evening with
Daddy alone in the big house.
Never done that before.
And we talked about a lot of things,
about his situation.
Can he stay there by himself?
How's he going to manage?
What if he falls down and doesn't have
anybody to call and all this?
And then we slept and got up and
had another good time in the morning.
And then it was time to go, and
he took off to a meeting and left
me there for a few minutes in that
house.
I'll come back to that in a minute
and tell you what happened there.
But I got in the car and said,
I've got more time than I need here
to do what I need to do.
I'm going to drive to the old stomping
grounds and just move through my life for
about an hour.
So instead of just getting on the plane
and coming back, I drove about 12 miles
to where I grew up, and I passed
the Coca-Cola bottling company.
That's what it used to be.
It's all boarded up now.
And just beyond it is a house where
the dermatologist used to be, who worked on
me during high school.
I had a terrible, terrible case of acne.
And my mother was so concerned about it
that she sent me to a dermatologist, and
he would burn my face with a lamp,
and then he would take dry ice, and
he rubbed around like this, and it would
sizzle on my face.
And then he would poke at me for
about 30 minutes until I looked like a
boxer when I was done.
And then I'd leave, get in the car,
look at myself in the mirror, and go
underground for about five hours, hoping nobody would
see me, and then come up.
Because even when you came up, it wasn't
all that great to look at.
And as I drove by that dermatologist's house,
40 years ago, we're talking now, maybe 38,
I felt it was all mercy.
It was all mercy.
Because it kept me off the fast track,
it kept me away from girls, at least
from my standpoint, nobody would ever want to
be near me, and made me depend on
God.
And I'm thankful.
I'm thankful.
It was mercy.
Hard mercy.
Kept on driving, and I say this next
illustration with sensitivity and delicateness, through the black
section, we called it, 40 years ago.
And I felt so much shame, because I
was part of it.
I was part of that racist, southern mentality.
And as I thought about that, and repented,
as I've done so many times, the last
40 years of my life just broke over
me with such gratitude, that the path I
took to Wheaton, and Fuller, and Germany, and
St. Paul, and Bethlehem, has brought us to
where we are as a church, that I
feel so thankful, so thankful, that even though
we're very much in process on that issue,
and everybody in this room is a sinner
in regard to racism, and we have so
far to go as a church, and so
far to go as a culture, and a
society, and an evangelicalism, I am so thankful
for the mercy of God, to open some
of my eyes, anyway, to what has gone
on in this nation of ours, and what
needs to happen in our church, and our
nation.
And I was so thankful that I am
where I am, and so eager to go
farther.
Man, I drove to the neighborhood, and I
turned up on the road between the two
motels, they have totally different names now, and
turned right on Bradley Boulevard, and headed down
the hill, I wanted to go by Billy
Shaughnessy's house, because we always played football as
teenagers in Billy Shaughnessy's front yard, and it
was so small, it looked so small.
And we never played touch football, or flag
football when I was growing up.
You don't play touch football, if you're a
male.
And we tackled each other.
And I remember the Saturday morning that we
tackled Billy Shaughnessy, and broke his neck.
And, which is why we don't do that
so much anymore.
And he wore a very thick brace, I
remember, like this, and he did not suffer
paralysis.
And my heart just, it was a strange
thing, it just welled up, because I didn't
say, oh, thank you that I've never been
killed, or thank you that I've never been
injured, I said, thank you that I've never
killed anybody, and thank you that I've never
injured anybody permanently, because of the weight that
would be.
I was just so thankful of the mercies
of God, that Billy made it, and that
he's fine today.
I had two more stops.
At the top of the next hill is
122 Bradley Boulevard, the house where I grew
up.
1951 and 1952, my parents designed and built
this house.
I moved in when I was six.
All the memories that I have are there.
I have no memories before six years old,
in Greenville, South Carolina, strangely enough.
But, there were my teenage years, and there
were my school years, and I got out
of the car, parked on the side, and
just wanted to smell it as well as
see it.
I didn't have enough time in order to
go knock on the door.
I don't know who lives there anymore, so
I could just look.
There's a big blue house over here, sitting
right on top of my pet cemetery.
Desecration.
And the big blue spruce has gone out
of the front yard.
The big crab apple tree is gone.
The front panel window is all different paint.
They must have had to replace it.
All the shrubbery is different.
The colors are different.
But the dogwood tree is still there, right
off center.
And it's about this big around at the
bottom, instead of this big around.
And it took me back to those times,
I've written about them and told you about
them, of sitting with my acne on the
front lawn, under that beautifully blossoming tree, looking
out across Delwood Valley to Piney Mountain, and
feeling very much alone, and very sad, and
writing poems, because they seemed to give shape
and meaning to my feelings.
And I was so thankful that God gave
me hope, over and over again, as I
did that.
That there would be a future.
There would be a future.
He came to me again and again and
again, through His Word, through my mom, and
through friends.
There's going to be a future for your
life.
There's going to be a hope for your
life.
Last stop.
My mom was killed in 1974 in a
bus accident in Israel.
And we buried her, and that's where I
was going now, going to the cemetery.
And I pulled over, and I was 28
when she died.
And I remember the scene very clearly, as
we sang there, around her grave.
It took me about five minutes to find
the brass stone.
I felt embarrassed by that.
There was nobody there to be embarrassed with.
I just felt good grief.
I should know where this is.
And I found it.
And there's where, of course, as you can
imagine, the dam broke, and I got a
good 54-year-old cry, because nobody's within
a thousand yards of me.
And I just didn't do any effort to
hold it back.
But those tears just overflowed with, thank you,
thank you, thank you for a mom like
that.
Thank you for 28 years of a mom
like that.
Thank you that though my little children never
knew their grandmother, they taste their grandmother every
day because of her faithfulness in my life.
It was all mercy.
I don't understand to this day why the
Lord took her at age 56.
I don't understand that.
But I accept it.
I bow before it.
I regard it as mercy that I had
her so long.
And I'll find out later why.
Why the timing, Father, of that departure.
Now, all these little stories about the mercies
of God are connected to what I'm trying
to do here because of how they fed
in to a sense of God and sin
and salvation and faith that came to a
point before the mourning happened.
And that was back there when my daddy
had left the house.
I was alone in this big house.
This is not the house I grew up
in.
I stood on the sun porch looking out
over the backyard.
I've been visiting this house for 25 years.
My father will celebrate his 25th wedding anniversary
in two weeks.
And he was married to my mother for
36 years.
That's a lot of marriage.
36 plus 25.
But I stood there looking out over this
backyard, looking, feeling the strangeness of this house.
So I've been there for 25 years.
It's not my house.
This is my dad's and stepmother's house.
And it hit me, one of these old
saints is going to die soon.
Daddy will move out or he'll die first.
And I will stand here one last time
trying to divvy up what's hers and his.
And I'll never come back again.
I won't darken the door of this house.
And I won't come to Easley again in
my life.
And the closedness of it all.
The coming to an end of something that
seemed so imminent was very powerful.
And you know what happened?
There was this almost a cry of rebellion
that said, Lord, is life just an accumulation
of endings?
As you move through life, are chapters just
closing and closing and closing so that there's
less and less life to live and more
and more memories to have?
Is that all there is?
And as I reflected on that moment since
then to get ready for this message, this
is the question I've asked.
And I ask it to you now because
you've all tasted these things.
You've all tasted this.
If you're old enough at least, you have
tasted closings of chapters.
A 10-year chapter, a 25-chapter, a
50-year chapter.
You stand there.
You relive it.
And the question is, is this immense, massive
longing, the things not closed, that they not
be that way, this almost reflexive rebellion against
the endings of good things, is that just
a chemical evolutionary reaction that's happening in your
animal body a little farther down the evolutionary
chain than what a dog might feel?
Or is that a testimony of God saying,
the reason you feel this way is because
you were made for something else?
This is an echo of something for which
you are made that is permanent and lasting
and personal and not mechanistic.
And the reason these endings feel so awkward
and so foreign and so alien is because
you weren't made for endings.
You were made for something lasting, for something
permanent, for something resilient, for something that will
never grow old.
Could that be a true assessment of what
goes on in the human soul at moments
like those?
Is this not an echo of what the
Bible is teaching us about ourselves?
And so, I want to close this message
by outlining for you what I believe the
biblical diagnosis and the biblical remedy is for
the issues that rise at a moment like
that and say, no, it can't just be
a series of endings.
There's got to be something more permanent.
And as I look back with remorse and
I look forward with some fears, what's the
solution to that?
Number one, four observations quickly.
In Genesis 1.27, we are taught by
the Bible that we're created in the image
of God.
God created man in His own image.
In the image of God, He created him.
Male and female, He created them.
That's the Bible's identity teaching of who you
are.
You are made in the image of God.
That's why you are so different from the
animals.
That's why as you contemplate what goes on
inside of you, there are loves, there's a
sense of justice, there's a sense of duty,
there's a sense of right and wrong, there
are fears, there are remorses, there are longings,
and these are not things you share with
the animals.
You know at your best, highest, most honest
moments that the erupting of your heart in
love and hate and in justice as you
assess what might happen in Florida, say, and
something rises up inside of you and say,
they better not do it that way.
Or you're maybe on the other side, they
better not do it that way.
That's not an animal reaction.
That's a justice issue.
And that's a reflection of the image of
God in you.
Oh, how I get so upset with this
Ranger Rick magazine that I get in the
mail every month.
Because it is so evolutionary in its assessment
of these kids that it's written for, calling
them animals, teaching them that they're animals.
Oh, I just burned.
I read it last night.
You may say, well, why do you subscribe
to that thing?
And I do it because I like the
pictures.
These strange fish and spiders and the armadillo.
Have you ever looked at an armadillo?
You worship when you look at an armadillo.
But when I read with my little girl
Talitha last night about her and all the
other animals, I almost tore the magazine in
half.
Don't say to me, well, technically, biologically, we
are in the animal blah, blah, blah.
Well, yes, that's not the point.
Of course there's an overlap.
I breathe, there's oxygen, I know all that.
That's just utterly beside the point.
You know you don't want to be treated
like an animal.
You know you're not an animal.
There is an infinite qualitative difference between you
and the animals and it's because, at least
this is the Bible's teaching, and I'm commending
it to you as the best explanation of
humanity.
You are created in the image of God.
That's why we have buildings like we have
buildings and roads like we have roads and
transportation and entertainment and business and commerce and
philosophy and love and songs and marriage and
children.
And, oh, you're going to call this evolution?
Matter plus time and energy, a little sprinkling
of information from who knows where, and you
get you.
You don't believe that.
You know that's not an adequate explanation.
And so the first thing the Bible teaches
us is who we are, namely we're created
in the image of God, which sheds light
on so much, so much.
But here's the second thing it teaches, and
this finishes shedding light.
We are all sinners against God.
We haven't trusted Him, we haven't loved Him,
we haven't followed Him, we haven't worshipped Him,
we haven't thanked Him the way we ought,
and therefore there's an alienation between us, and
He's just and holy and good and can't
look on sin.
So there's this breach between us.
Our own conscience is testified to us.
You wake up in the morning, you feel
dirty or guilty.
You go to bed at night and you
feel this unspecified sense of inadequacy and wrongness
about something in the universe, and you and
you haven't lived up to your own standards,
let alone society's, let alone God's, and your
own conscience is just constantly teaching you're made
for God.
You're made for God.
Come home.
You're going to feel rotten and inadequate.
Everything in your life is going to go
wrong, and society's going to go wrong as
long as we keep running from God and
don't come home and rest and trust and
worship and thank and love and obey God.
And none of us do.
We go our own way.
We're all rebels to the core.
And the third thing the Bible teaches is
that the remedy for this diagnosis is Jesus.
God sent His Son into the world to
die for us.
So many Bible passages teach this so beautifully.
You know the most famous one of all,
for God so loved the world that He
gave His only begotten Son that whosoever believes
in Him should not perish, not that closing,
but have eternal life, endless mercies forever and
ever and ever.
I love the passage.
I'll use this one other passage.
From Romans 5, 6, following where it says,
While we were yet helpless, Christ died for
the ungodly.
Scarcely for a righteous man will one dare
to die.
Yet perchance for a good man one might
even die.
But God commends His love for us in
the while we were yet sinners, Christ died
for us.
Much more then, having been justified by His
blood, shall we be saved by Him from
the wrath of God.
And if while we were enemies we were
reconciled to God by the death of His
Son, how much more now being reconciled shall
we be saved by His life.
It's such a clear, powerful teaching that the
remedy for my alienation from God, from which
flows all the mess of my life, my
sense of remorse.
I was driving up Bradley Boulevard, and I
have no idea why this happened, just before
I got to the house, and I was
trembling.
Why was I trembling?
And I asked myself, are you trembling because
as you are almost transported back into age
14, 15, you're scared somebody's going to find
out.
They thought you were a pretty good guy,
White Oak Baptist Church.
They didn't know what was going on inside
your head.
Everybody in this room has remorse about something.
Fears about the future, failures in the past.
God has not only an identification teaching for
you that you're in the image of God,
not only a diagnosis for you that you
and I are sinners, He's got a remedy
for us.
That Jesus Christ came into the world to
bear my sins so that sinner though I
be, I can be forgiven, my guilt can
be taken away, His wrath can be removed
justly, and I can have everlasting joy and
new mercies and be transformed in this world
so that I might be of some use
someday to somebody, even though I'm imperfect.
That leaves one last teaching from the Bible
that I want to commend to you, and
that is that the only way we enjoy
this gift of salvation is by receiving it
as the treasure of our lives.
So if you were to sit there now
and say, Okay, I hear the diagnosis, I
hear the identity, I hear the remedy, Christ
died for our sins, do I have to
do anything?
How do I get in on it, if
that's true?
If this begins to hit home to me
as the best explanation of reality that I
know of, and I want to reach out
and embrace it and put it to the
test, what do I do?
And John, the apostle of Jesus said, As
many as received Him, to them He gave
the power to become the children of God.
Receive Him.
Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and you
will be saved, the Bible says.
Or to make it really crystal clear over
against the alternative, Ephesians 2.8, By grace
are you saved through faith, not of yourselves,
not of works, so that nobody might boast.
There's only one way to participate in God's
great remedy, and that is receiving Jesus, receiving
grace, receiving salvation as the treasure of your
life.
Not working for it, not trying to earn
it.
Well that's it, that's my outline of the
Christian message.
And I would just remind you that you're
on a porch right now, looking out over
the backyard, and a 10-year or a
25-year or a 50-year chapter is
closing this morning.
And God has you here for a reason,
in this room right now.
And the reason is that you would be
hearing God's interpretation of your life.
What's the meaning of your life?
What's the meaning of your potential?
What's the meaning of your sin?
What's the meaning of your hope and your
fears?
And He's summoning you, come back to me,
you're made for me.
Come back through my Son, Jesus.
And Father, I pray that as they go,
that you would minister to every need in
this room, solidify the work that you've begun,
I pray, and set us on a course
where there's not closings merely, but an opening
to everlasting joy and everlasting life, where there'll
be no more pain, no more crying anymore,
for the former things have passed away.
In Jesus' name I ask it.
Amen.
Have a great Thanksgiving week.
You're dismissed.
Thank you for listening to this message by
John Piper, pastor for preaching at Bethlehem Baptist
Church in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
Feel free to make copies of this message
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