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The Dissatisfied, the Smug and the Broken

Matthew 11:16-30

Listen or read the following transcript as D. A. Carson speaks on the ministry of John the Baptist from Matthew 11:16–30


May I invite you to turn in your Bibles, please, to Matthew 11? I know you have just sat down, but once you have found the text, perhaps, in line with the dominant tradition in this area, we should stand to our feet again for the reading of God’s Word. I shall begin at verse 16 and read to the end of the chapter. Hear, then, what Holy Scripture says:

“ ‘To what can I compare this generation? They are like children sitting in the marketplaces and calling out to others: “We played the flute for you, and you did not dance; we sang a dirge, and you did not mourn.” For John came neither eating nor drinking, and they say, “He has a demon.” The Son of Man came eating and drinking, and they say, “Here is a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and ‘sinners.’ ” But wisdom is proved right by her actions.’

Then Jesus began to denounce the cities in which most of his miracles had been performed, because they did not repent. ‘Woe to you, Korazin! Woe to you, Bethsaida! If the miracles that were performed in you had been performed in Tyre and Sidon, they would have repented long ago in sackcloth and ashes. But I tell you, it will be more bearable for Tyre and Sidon on the day of judgment than for you.

And you, Capernaum, will you be lifted up to the skies? No, you will go down to the depths. If the miracles that were performed in you had been performed in Sodom, it would have remained to this day. But I tell you that it will be more bearable for Sodom on the day of judgment than for you.’

At that time Jesus said, ‘I praise you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because you have hidden these things from the wise and learned, and revealed them to little children. Yes, Father, for this was your good pleasure. All things have been committed to me by my Father. No one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son and those to whom the Son chooses to reveal him.

Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.’ ”

This is the Word of the Lord.

Please be seated. Now I gather that there are some here this morning who were not here last night. Because the two parts of this chapter cohere, perhaps it would be helpful for such people if I take a couple of minutes to run through the argument of the first half of Matthew 11. In Matthew 11, Jesus unpacks the ministry of John the Baptist in a particular way.

The crucial verse is Matthew 11:11, where Jesus says that John the Baptist is greater than all who came before him. John the Baptist is greater than Abraham, greater than David, greater than Isaiah, greater than Esther, greater than Ezekiel, greater than King David. He says he’s the greatest born of women, up to that point, which is a pretty sweeping comparison. I can think of only one possible exception if the defining moment is born of women.

Yet it’s important to understand the axis of comparison. John the Baptist is not greater than David militarily. He’s not a more significant canonical prophet than Isaiah, and so on. No, the explanation is given in the preceding verses: John the Baptist is greater because in God’s providential ordering of things, it has fallen upon him to be the one who immediately points out who Jesus is.

In verse 10, according to the quotation from Malachi, it has come to John the Baptist to say, “There! He is the One. He is the messenger of the covenant. He is the One who was to come.” So although Moses points forward to Jesus and David points forward to Jesus and Abraham points forward to Jesus, it fell to only one man, John the Baptist, to say with immediacy and the greatest priority, “There! That’s the One.”

Then Jesus says, “The least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than John.” That’s because John loses his head in three more chapters, whereas the least in the kingdom … you and me, people this side of the cross and the resurrection and Pentecost, the least … each of us has a greater understanding of the truth that Christ is simultaneously the promised king and the suffering servant. He actually is himself the Passover Lamb. He is the One who takes our sin in his own body on the tree.

The least in the kingdom understands that and can point out who Jesus is with greater clarity than even John the Baptist could. It’s a remarkable thing. Thus, even if you’ve been a Christian for a few weeks, you can say some clear, true things about Jesus than John the Baptist himself did not quite know about, did not quite get straight. That’s what makes us great.

It has nothing to do with our intrinsic superiority or vastly increased knowledge or digital awareness. It’s bound up with our knowledge of Christ and our ability to make him known, because we live this side of the cross, with greater clarity and immediacy than all who came before. It is an unimaginably great privilege. All of Christian ministry and mission springs out of this sense of privilege.

Nevertheless, that does not mean that the world is all that happy about hearing this. In fact, what you get in the rest of the chapter are diverse responses to Jesus’ own teaching and preaching along these lines. For convenience, I’ve broken them up into three groups: the dissatisfied, the smug, and the broken.

1. The dissatisfied.

Matthew 11:16–19. Jesus pictures two groups of children in the marketplace. One group, apparently, is full of enthusiasm. Imagination is springing from them all the time. “Let’s play marriages! You can be the groom, you can be the bride, and you can be the minister. We need a flower girl. Let’s play marriages. It’ll be fun! We’ll have some happy dance music. This will be really good!” The others say, “Boring! We played marriages yesterday. We don’t want to play that game. It’s dumb!”

“Okay, okay. If you don’t want to play marriages, let’s play funerals. You can be the corpse. We need two pallbearers. Could somebody play a little bit of dirge music? No happy dancing music this time. Dirge music.” Then the others say, “Boring! We don’t want to do that. We played funerals yesterday.” Do you hear what they’re saying? “We played the flute for you, and you did not dance; we sang a dirge, and you did not mourn.”

Now the immediate application is teased out in terms of John the Baptist and Jesus. “John came neither eating nor drinking …” That is to say, he was an ascetic. He didn’t go to big parties. He held to Nazarite vows. He never drank any alcohol. He ate locust and wild honey and water in the desert. He was an ascetic. But anybody that’s that strict, that’s that ascetic, you know, somethings not quite right there. “He has a demon.”

Then along comes Jesus. He was known to be a bit of a party animal on occasion, even drinking. And you can tell a person by the company he keeps, you know? Adulterers? Public sinners? Politically compromised people like tax collectors? “The Son of Man came eating and drinking, and they say, ‘Here is a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and “sinners.” ’ ” You can tell a person by the company he keeps.

Then Jesus says, “But wisdom is proved right by her actions.” Now wisdom here, as frequently in the Old Testament, means how to live under the sun in God’s universe. It begins with the fear of the Lord and goes on from there. What Jesus is saying is that both in the case of John the Baptist and in the case of Jesus, wisdom is vindicated. In both instances, wisdom, by their actions, is proved right.

In the case of John the Baptist, his whole ministry and function and calling were bound up with calling people to repentance. It was calling people to turn away from their sins, to prepare the way of the Lord, to make his paths straight. Whereas in the case of Jesus, the bridegroom is here. The party has begun. There is something celebratory about that. Moreover, he is the One who comes to seek the broken and the diseased and the sinner. Of course he makes friends with such people! No shallow assessments here, please. “But wisdom is proved right by her actions.”

Meanwhile, the people who are making these cynical judgments are disappointed with everything and profoundly ungrateful. One of the most consistent sins, for which the people of God in Old Testament wilderness wandering times are condemned, is the sin of (what our older versions call) murmuring: grumbling and discontent. It’s linked again and again and again with just plain raw idolatry. Ultimately, what it’s really saying is, “I can’t trust God.”

Conversely, one of the marks of grace in a believer’s life is gratitude. Every church, every seminary, every Christian institution, every organization has more than its share of malcontents, whiners, and complainers. It’s either too hot, or it’s too cold. The minister’s sermons are too long (he’s just wordy and repetitive), or they’re too short (he hasn’t done his preparation). The music is too contemporary, or it’s too old-fashioned. And on and on and on. God knows there is rubbish in music around.

On the other hand, God is also today raising up a remarkable list of very gifted people: Rob Smith in Australia, Bob Kauflin in Sovereign Grace, and Keith Getty and Stuart Townend in the UK. (I spent some time with both of those chaps last week.)

There are reasons for giving thanks. In a broken world, everything’s distorted, but aren’t there things also for which to give thanks? Above all, to trust the living God for saving us, for wisely watching over our paths, and giving us his own dear Son. In the light of eternity, how can one not be thankful for that?

Instead, what you get here are the whiners, the disappointed, and the perennially critical. Now this is not suggesting there is no place for discernment or for the right sort of criticism that has tried to change things for the good, uttered in humility. It’s not denying any of that. But in the sketch that Jesus draws, the issue is not whether or not there is discernment. It’s whether or not there is gratitude. It’s whether or not there is a spirit that wants to participate and work and be thankful rather than merely criticize. So here is the first crew: the disappointed, the dissatisfied.

2. The smug.

Matthew 11:20–24. They are the religiously privileged who, nevertheless, remain indifferent. They are people whose apathy is, quite frankly, appalling. These are the people of Galilee, where Jesus exercised a great deal of his ministry, the preponderance of his ministry, in towns like Korazin, Bethsaida, and Capernaum.

Jesus says that on the last day, it will be worse for them than for Tyre and Sidon (two pagan cities up the coast proverbial for their secularism, wealth, and arrogance). It will even be better for Sodom than for these Galilean cities, where Jesus has performed his miracles and where he has preached the gospel.

Now to make sense of this argument before we try to work out its application, three theological truths are presupposed, or else the argument makes no sense at all.

A. God owes salvation to no one.

If that isn’t true, then you would have to say that God is unfair in that Sodom was judged. If Sodom is less guilty than Bethsaida and Capernaum, yet Sodom is wiped off the map, then you would have to say that God is unfair unless God does not owe salvation to anyone.

For in truth, although Jesus here insists that it will be worse on the last day for Bethsaida and Capernaum than for Sodom, he does not say that Sodom is innocent. God does not owe salvation to Sodom … or to Manchester. Not to you and not to me. He doesn’t owe salvation to anyone.

B. There are degrees of responsibility and, correspondingly, of blessing and cursing.

This is the second large theological assumption in Jesus’ argument. Jesus can say that some are more guilty and less guilty, because there are degrees of responsibility and accountability. Then he can speak of more punishment and less punishment.

The crucial factor seems to be access to the truth, access to God’s revelation, and access to God’s self-disclosure. In this case, God’s self-disclosure is, above all, in Christ Jesus. Sodom never heard Jesus preach. Tyre and Sidon never saw his miracles, but Bethsaida did. If they did not respond, then they are all the more guilty for not responding to God’s gracious self-disclosure to them.

That’s why in the parables that Jesus tells, for example, he can depict some in the new heaven and the new earth as rulers over ten cities or five cities or one city. Conversely, in Luke 12:47–48, some, on the last day, will be beaten with more stripes and some with fewer stripes. There are degrees of felicity, and there are degrees of cursing. They are, in some way, bound up with our degrees of accountability.

C. God has contingent knowledge.

This is the last theological presupposition in all of this. That is to say, he knows not only what has been and what is and what will be, but he also knows what would have been under different circumstances. He has knowledge of the contingent. Otherwise, again, his comparison makes no sense. He knows what Sodom would have done if Sodom had seen the miracles: it would have repented.

Now this does not mean that Sodom gets off. Sodom responded badly to the revelation that it did receive, and God does hold Sodom to account for that. But God’s ultimate judgment takes into account God’s perfect knowledge and God’s perfect knowledge of the contingent. He knows what would have been under different circumstances, which guarantees that God’s judgment on the last day will be absolutely immaculately perfect. There is no factor he hasn’t taken into account. It’s spectacular.

What does that mean for us? It’s part of my job at Trinity, because of the peculiar appointment that I have, to travel to fairly distant parts of the world and see God’s work in diverse places. There is no language like English for access to books and articles expounding Scripture, explaining theology, and teaching truth. I was brought up in French. French doesn’t have anything in comparison. I read German and Spanish. Those languages don’t have anything in comparison.

What shall we say about Mandarin? Or Kikuyu? Or Kamba? Or a trade language such as Swahili? We have an astonishing array of materials in English. Have we taken advantage of them? Nowadays, you can get a lot of classics right on the Internet for free; it doesn’t even cost you any money. Indeed, in many parts of the Western world, English-speaking people (for no reason bound up with any intrinsic superiority) have enjoyed remarkable periods of reformation and revival, not the least in New England. What have we done with it?

Is it possible that the voice of God is saying, “Woe to you, New England! If the revivals you experienced under Jonathan Edwards and George Whitefield had been done in Kabul, Afghanistan, it would today be a lighthouse to the whole world”? This is a remarkable call for painful self-examination and confession, because our advantages (and we have many) are not of our doing and our guilt is.

This is not to lay a hopeless burden on everyone. It is to remind us all, if we are Christians at all, that we stand by grace, pure grace. Meanwhile, our call to the people around us has a certain kind of urgency, precisely because there are so many parts of the world that haven’t had anything like the advantages of New Englanders and who, quite frankly, face less judgment on the last day than New England. Or this passage makes no sense at all.

It’s important even to understand this sort of passage with respect to contemporary understanding of what secularization means. There are huge debates in academic publications as to what secularization is, but most today, frankly, would not say that secularization means the abolition of religion.

Secularization means, rather, the squeezing of religion to the peripheries. So you can be ever so religious, but it doesn’t mean anything. Your religion doesn’t mean anything. You can have all kind of religion so long as it’s private. Your religion is fine, because your religion doesn’t change anything.

Therefore, if you’re a Christian and also the head of a corporation and you think to yourself, “Well, on Sunday I’ll be a Christian: God first, family next, and company last. The rest of the week it’s: company first, family second, and God last,” then you’re secularized. So you can be ever so religious in your private mode, on Sunday, but it doesn’t much mean anything.

There are many strong voices pushing for a certain view, for instance, of the separation of church and state today, which means that all religion ought to be so completely privatized that nothing based on religious views can ever be articulated in public as an argument for something or other. Well, that’s certainly not what the Founding Fathers meant. Such a notion would have been simply incomprehensive to them.

They were talking about the establishment of religious denominations and the non-establishment of religious denominations, but today, because of the pressures of secularization, then religion can be very important so long as it has nothing to do with public policy and doesn’t say anything in the public arena. Suddenly, religion is privatized. It has no bearing on life. It is squeezed out.

So we get all excited about tax policy and about military policy, and so on, but not about God, because that is bound up with the purely private realm. Suddenly we’ve become religiously smug, unaffected, so that great things can be happening in the eternal dimension, and we’re not nearly as excited about that as who won the latest hockey game or who won the latest poll. So first of all, the dissatisfied, then the smug, and finally …

3. The broken.

Matthew 11:25–30. We’ll work through the text itself and then reflect on what it means for us today. It might be helpful to break up the thrust of the argument (describing the broken) in three clauses, or better put: one clause that expands.

A. The broken are children who are taught by God.

Matthew 11:25–26: “At that time Jesus said, ‘I praise you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because you have hidden these things from the wise and learned, and revealed them to little children. Yes, Father, for this was your good pleasure.’ ”

Note that, according to Jesus, God is actually to be praised for hiding things from the noble, the intelligent, the wise, and the proud. He is to be praised for it. As soon as you stop to think about it, you can see why. Supposing the gospel was best grasped, most quickly grasped, by the intelligent, then, of course, the church would be made up mostly of intelligent people, and we would have ground for praising ourselves.

Supposing, instead, the church was made up of people who got the gospel fastest if they were really beautiful or first-class hunks, then the church would be made of very beautiful and hunkish people, and they would have another ground for pride. Supposing that the gospel were best determined by people who were born athletes, or intrinsically great leaders, then the church would be overflowing with athletic prowess and dominant leadership, and we would have another ground for our praise.

What does God do instead? It’s wonderful. “I praise you, heavenly Father, that you’ve hidden it from people like that …” That’s what Jesus says. “… and, instead, you’ve revealed all this to the children. Yes, Father, for this was your good pleasure.” That’s why anyone who comes, finally, comes to God not because he or she says, “Yes, I think I finally grasp the intimacies of double imputation and so I will become a Christian.”

I’m not denying double imputation, that’s not my point. My point, rather, is that’s not how and why people come. Did anyone become a Christian here because they suddenly grasped double imputation? No, we become children. This is a way of saying not that we become innocent, because children aren’t innocent (if you think children are innocent, you’ve never been a parent).

The “children” factor is not a function of innocence, it’s not a function of even naivetÈ; it’s a function, rather, of dependence. Children are dependent beings. Whereas, we as adults like to boast in our independence, because we have more money, more freedom, more intelligence, more authority, a bigger 401(k), or whatever it is we have.

But children, small children.… Oh, they like to play their little mental games about how they’re a cowboy or a space astronaut or whatever, but deep down, if they have an “owie” they quickly go to Mommy and Daddy. If they’re hungry, they just hang onto your shirttails all around the kitchen. They know they are dependent, and they know where to turn to get something. They’re dependent creatures.

“Yes, Father, for this was your good pleasure …” People come to God acknowledging their brokenness, their dependence, and their inability to satisfy God on their own terms. So in other words, we come to the living God because we begin, in God’s grace, by recognizing that, in front of him, we’re mere children. So these broken folk, then, are children taught by God. No one truly comes to God with his or her head held high, almost acting as if they are doing God a favor. Grace answers to need.

B. The broken are children who are taught by God by the agency of the Son.

Matthew 11:27. Now the clause is expanding. “All things have been committed to me by my Father. No one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son and those to whom the Son chooses to reveal him.”

Some people have called verse 27 the “Johannine thunderbolt.” That is to say, the language here is very reminiscent of the kind of truth that his taught in John’s gospel again and again and again. Johannine is simply the adjective for John. So in the midst of the argument is this thunderbolt of typically-Johannine emphasis. It’s the Johannine thunderbolt.

In Greek, what it is saying is that now that the Son has appeared, our deepest and most comprehensive disclosure of who God is is bound up in Jesus Christ himself. Thus, if Jesus Christ is not understood or is set aside, despised, or marginalized, then there really cannot be any genuine knowledge of God. Because Jesus knows the Father perfectly and the Father perfectly knows him, the one who knows the Son knows the Father and the one who has the Son has the Father. The one who does not have the Son does not have the Father.

Before the eternal Son was manifested in space and time, there was some knowledge of God disclosed under the terms of the old covenant, the old sacrificial system, and all of the patterns disclosed in the tabernacle and temple and priestly categories, and so on, but now that the Son has come all of these things have focused down on him.

He is the ultimate temple. He is the ultimate priest. He is the ultimate sacrifice of Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. He is the ultimate Passover. He is the Son of God. He is the Lamb of God, slain before the foundation of the world. He knows God from the beginning, and he’s perfectly known by God. As one with God, he has perfect authority to disclose the Father to whom he will.

So if somebody comes and claims to know God while marginalizing the Son, Jesus says that the broken come to God as little children who are taught by God by the agency of the Son. That’s what the text says. “All things have been committed to me by my Father. No one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son and those to whom the Son chooses to reveal him.”

C. The broken are those who are children who are taught by God by the agency of the Son, and they alone find rest.

Now the clause is expanding one more time. So we read, “Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me …”

The yoke, in rabbinic thought, was a yoke of teaching. In other words, “Come under my tutelage and, hence, learn from me. You who are weary and broken, come to me. Learn from me, and you will find me not a miserable taskmaster. I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.”

It is no accident, of course, that the text goes on to chapter 12. Originally, there were no chapter and verse breaks; they came later. So those reading this gospel in the first instance would not be having their devotions from chapter 11 today and then tomorrow have devotions from chapter 12, having forgotten what’s in chapter 11 and then learn afresh from chapter 12.

They would have naturally read on, and then they would see, transparently, that Jesus promises rest while the very next verses depict people very concerned with maintaining the Sabbath with a whole set of rules and the like, without any genuine knowledge of rest that is anchored in God himself. It’s a huge contrast.

Now what shall we say about the thrust of this passage for us today? Let me come at this through the side door. A couple of years ago, some of us at Trinity started a new organization called Christ on Campus Initiative. For a start, we are producing about five essays a year, each between 12,000 and 15,000 words, for biblically illiterate undergraduates.

I’ve been doing university missions on university campuses now for 30 years. Nowadays, if folks on campus are not Christians, as most are not, then the overwhelming majority are so biblically illiterate that they don’t know the Bible has two testaments. They’ve never heard of Abraham, Isaiah, or David. If they’ve heard of Moses, they confuse him with Charlton Heston or the more recent cartoon figure.

It’s not as if they have a blank slate, as if they don’t know anything religious and all you have to do is write on it. It’s rather like a computer hard drive where they have all these really bad files. If you try to put truthful files on there, they’re all going to clash. There is some unlearning to do as well.

How do you start? How do you start explaining to gospel with this degree of biblical illiteracy? Of course, it’s not just on campuses now. They’re in the Pacific Northwest and in the New England states and so on. Often, there is a degree of biblical illiteracy where people are missing each other entirely when they start talking. Isn’t that your experience?

Not too long ago, I had to do one of these TV things where they had me as the evangelical talking head. It was Larry King’s show. At the last minute, they needed somebody in to do the evangelical bit. So they phoned me up, and because it was so late of an arrangement, they sent a limo for me. That’s not normally the way these things happen, but this time they did. From the far north suburbs where I live, they brought me down to the Chicago studio. They had one talking head from LA and one talking head from Atlanta; you know how these things go.

On the way down, in the car, I paid no attention to the driver because I was busy scrambling to read some papers to make sure I knew what I was talking about so I wouldn’t appear like an absolute twit on national television. On the way back, then I was relaxed. The driver was driving me home, and I started chatting just to find out a little more about him.

It turned out he was a 59-year-old Jew. He was an interesting man. All of his family had been killed in the Holocaust. He had recently divorced and was married to a 29-year-old PhD student in comparative religion. As we talked, it turned out that he had a 32-year-old daughter who had recently flipped her SUV in a Kansas ice storm and was now brain dead. They were just waiting to pull the plug.

I said, “How are you coping with this?” He said, “I’ve decided you have to think about it this way, ‘Molecules bounce. These things happen,’ or else you go mad.” I said, “Is that what you think about the Holocaust? Molecules bounce.” Well, he blew up, which is what I wanted. “Oh no! That was outrageous! That was evil! That was disgusting! How can you talk like that, that molecules bounce?” I said, “So you have outrage over the Holocaust but not over your daughter’s death?” He came back with, “Are you saying that my daughter’s death is evil?”

“Of course that’s what I’m saying! It’s the last enemy, because death is not the way it’s supposed to be. The apostle Paul himself says so. I’m not saying that your daughter is more evil than anybody else. All I’m saying is that death is itself a function of all of the evil in all parts of the universe. Of course death is an abomination. Tell me, would you see this a little differently if you really believed that there is life after death?”

“Oh,” he said, “I know just what you mean. My daughter has this glorious garden in Kansas, and I think she’d like to come back as a butterfly.” Have you ever had an experience like that? You think you’re actually getting somewhere and you’re making some progress and then, suddenly, you realize that you’re on a different planet.

So because of this, we put together this Christ on Campus Initiative and started producing papers. They’re all downloadable for free. We have two or three of them out now, and we’re adding one about every two or three months. You can find them on the Gospel Coalition website, thegospelcoalition.org.

As part of our preparation, we brought into our campus gospel workers in various campus ministries. All of them had at least one theological degree, some of them a PhD. We brought campus workers from all over: East Coast, West Coast, central states, North, and South. All of them had at least five years of experience, and some of them had up to 30 years of experience, so these were not overgrown teeny-boppers trying to figure out which end was up. These were serious people in serious campus ministry.

Well, there were a lot of things I learned. I thought I understood campus ministry, and I still keep doing it, but these people made me look like an amateur. They’re doing it all the time. They understand it. One of the most insightful set of remarks was made by a young woman. She and her husband both did degrees out of Trinity. They were 4.0 at Princeton, and then they came to Trinity and were 4.0 with us, and that’s hard to get. Now they’re back at an Ivy League school involved in a ministry on that Ivy League campus.

Her particular ministry insists that anybody who joins their group must have at least one hour a week of one-on-one time with a staff worker, so she spends 28 hours a week one-on-one with young women. She takes them for four years, so when they come out the other end, they are streets ahead of most undergraduates. That means, also, she has a lot of experience with young women. She said, “After doing this for five years, let me tell you what drives young women today:

1. From their parents (and from themselves): “Never get less than an A.”

Now that doesn’t happen on every campus. Don’t forget this is Ivy League. So from their point of view, that’s a high order of desirability.

2. Be yourself.

Don’t let anybody squeeze you into some mold. Be free. Be yourself. Now as part of that, by all means give a little time to help victims of Katrina or go work in Africa with the AIDS people for a while, but apart from that restriction, be yourself. Be free. (Now how you put together number one and number two is not really all that clear.)

3. They won’t admit this, but from themselves, from competition with their peers, from Madison Avenue: Be hot.

That affects how you dress, what signals you’re sending out. There are only so many single Christian guys around, you know? Be hot.”

She went on to say, “The trouble is that in all of those areas you’re bound to have some failure. Not everybody is going to get an A. You can’t always do what you want to do. Not everybody is hot. On top of that, the culture is saying, ‘You’re a woman; you can be anything you want to be,’ which is eventually heard as, ‘You’re a woman; you must be everything,’ which, therefore, engenders yet another expectation and failure.

Then they become Christians, and pretty soon, with this as their background, they have to be the best Christians. Attend all the Bible studies, all the prayer meetings, show your zeal, do Christian service, or whatever. And on and on and on.

What it breeds, eventually, is more and more and more failure so that 80 percent of young women on Ivy League campuses end up, at some point in their four-year time, on Prozac or something comparable, and almost 80 percent, at some point, are either bulimic or anorexic or both.” And I hear the voice of the Master saying, “Come to me, all you who are weary, and I will give you rest.”

Then I come to young men. A few years ago, I was speaking at a Christian medical fellowship meeting. There were around 300 doctors and a few nurses, but mostly doctors. After a couple of days with them, a bunch of the younger ones said, “We want to talk to you privately over breakfast. We’ve arranged a table in a private room in a restaurant. Would you come and join us tomorrow morning?” I said, “Sure.”

I arrived there the next morning, and there were over 40 of them there: all single, all young (between the ages of 26–40), all doctors … and me. I said, “Why have you asked me here?” They stuttered, looked a bit embarrassed, didn’t know what to say, then finally one of them blurted out, “Why can’t we get married?”

So I just started asking some questions. “How many of you come from broken homes? How many of you are already shacked up? What are you looking for in a spouse? What do you understand marriage to be? Do you want any children?” And on and on and on. Do you know what I discovered? It’s something that is transparent; anybody studying the literature today knows this is the case.

We’re producing a generation of young men.… Oh, I know this is a generalization (perhaps the young men here are a remarkable exception), but by and large we are producing a generation of young men who may be very confident in their own disciplines but who are emotionally very slow to grow up. They are unable to make lifelong decisions, looking over their shoulders all the time in case something better is coming along. (A better … what? A better job, a better career.)

They are without any sense of self-sacrifice or self-service, an astonishingly narcissistic generation, with very little understanding that you receive by giving, you live by dying, and you come into your freedom as the sons of God by being a slave to Jesus Christ, and all that builds up a series of cases and impossible structures that are so deeply anti-God, even while we confess with our mouths, “Jesus is Lord.” It is so painful, and do you know what’s missing from both these young women and these young men? Grace.

We’re so busy striving, so busy trying to live up to ideals, so busy taking our images from Madison Avenue, so busy taking our understanding of sex from Madison Avenue, and so busy taking our expectations from the world all around us that we’ve forgotten that the first responsibility of sentient creatures is to recognize their creatureliness, and the first responsibility of morally broken sentient creatures is to go to God himself for forgiveness and reconciliation. All of this springs from grace.

So the Christian life operates out of grace. Supposing you recognize, out of sheer gratitude (you’re not one of the smug; you’re not one of the perennially disappointed), that if you’re a Christian at all, you operate out of grace! God has disclosed himself to you in Christ Jesus! And it changes everything. You want to please him. You take your cues on dress or habits or relationships from him and his most Holy Word, because you really do believe that that is for your good.

He’s the Designer, the Author, the Creator, and he’s our judge. On the last day, it will go worse for those of us who’ve had exposure to so much biblical truth than it will with those who were buried off in Northern India and never heard the name of Jesus. Suddenly, we come into the freedom of the sons and daughters of the living God, and already, 2,000 years ago, the Master himself said, “Come to me, all you who are weary and broken, and I will give you rest. My yoke is easy; my burden is light.” Grace. Let us pray.

Lord God, we confess with shame how easily we transmute the gospel of your dear Son into mere duty that finally cripples us. O Lord God, teach us to be obedient children out of gratitude, with a response of joyous faith. For Jesus’ sake, amen.