The Spirituality of the Gospel of John: Part 5

Listen or read the following transcript as D. A. Carson speaks on the topic of the spirituality of the gospel of John in part 5 of his series.

Now what I propose to do is take just a few minutes to review what we’ve done and then talk about its bearing on spirituality more generally before we throw it up to a free-for-all. Those of you who have been here from the beginning know that I began with about a half-hour summary of the history of so-called spirituality.

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It’s the use of the term in Catholic theology, both pre-Vatican II and post-Vatican II, and the fact that the term was really not used in Protestantism until the last few decades. We spoke instead of being spiritual or of devotional literature and this sort of thing, but spirituality as a discipline and an approach to walk with God is a terminology that really has been imported from Catholicism, where it has largely been tied to a perfectionist streak; that is, to being more spiritual.

There are a lot of Catholics out there, and then we pursue spirituality and become more elitist. Whether we become monastic or we become more interested in holiness through asceticism or through means of grace, through fasting, through prayer, through sacrifice, through whatever, we thus become more spiritual. Thus, spirituality was often tied in the history of the Roman Catholic Church to a kind of perfectionist streak.

Nowadays, it’s used so generically it’s not even a distinctively Christian term, so that we speak of Hindu spirituality and Buddhist spirituality. Of course, if you listen to talk shows now and then, you can hear someone from Hollywood saying, “I’m really quite a spiritual person. I just couldn’t get by without my crystals.” Thus, spirituality includes any sort of sense of being connected with the transcendent somehow or the great universal energy field or whatever.

Spirituality goes all the way from fundamentalist Christianity to Jodie Foster’s first contact, and unless you see that range of things, it’s almost impossible to communicate with people today who are talking very positively about spirituality. Spirituality has become one of those things that is very difficult to criticize unless you’re Richard Dawkins.

The problem with this is that because it means almost everything, it means almost nothing. Worse, as shanghaied by larger numbers of evangelicals, the term has come to mean something like a technique for connection with God. If spirituality is some sort of human connection with the divine or with the transcendent in some sense, then the pursuit of spirituality is often talked about in terms of technique, in terms of approach.

There are many evangelical authors today who will say, “Well, yes, the Reformed types are pretty good at doctrine, but if you want to be spiritual, you have to read the Catholic writers,” or “You can learn a great deal from Buddhist spirituality.” The problem is, of course, that once you’re in Buddhist spirituality, you’re in an entirely different frame of reference. You don’t even have a personal transcendent God in Buddhism, so what on earth does connection with the divine mean there, when your very notion of God is so very different?

Thus, everything begins to descend to mere technique. Provided you do the following things, you’re spiritual. You can have dissociative experiences and a sense of being connected with something bigger than yourself, which experiences can be, in some sense, nourishing or the like. Not for a moment do I want to suggest they’re not nourishing, but it’s a long way from what the New Testament means by being spiritual.

If, on the other hand, we begin with the transparent, that spirituality is talking about human connectedness with the divine, human connection with God, and then understand God in biblical terms, and then try to understand what the Bible says about connection with God.… What I’ve tried to show you from this dropping in on certain texts in the gospel of John is that the connections human beings can have with God are intimately bound up with the revelation of God in Christ Jesus, with the fulfillment of Old Testament patterns, and, above all, with the gospel, with the cross, with his substitutionary death, with being reconciled to the God who was against us.

In one sense, our biggest problem is God, because it is God who stands over against us in righteous wrath because of our rebellion, and our biggest hope is likewise God. Unless we see God in those terms, notions of spirituality become ethereal and merely subjective. Thus, spirituality then gets tied, in biblical terms, very strongly to the gospel.

So I tried to drop in, therefore, on a variety of John’s passages that dealt with prayer last night at the dinner, and this morning a text that is often bound up with sacrament, so it becomes a kind of sacramental spirituality, but other texts dealing with new birth and with temple and so forth. But having made all such connections (and we’ve only made a few of them) …

Once we have those sorts of things firmly in place, it is still worth asking, once those things are in place, what kinds of things we may legitimately do, contemplate, reflect on, to increase our conscious awareness of God himself, to increase the intimacy of our awareness of God. It is worth asking all of those questions, isn’t it?

The problem is if you ask those sorts of questions too soon, it merely devolves again into a matter of technique, so that the technique becomes abstracted from God. It becomes abstracted from Christ. It becomes abstracted from the gospel, which is precisely why I have spent as much time as I have on trying to show how connection with God in John’s gospel is so tied up with these things.

If I took the time, I could show you something similar from Paul or Matthew or Isaiah or the Apocalypse and so forth. That is, knowledge of God is inextricably, ineluctably tied up with God himself, with his revelation, with Christ, with the gospel, with the bestowal of the Spirit, with a robust Trinitarian theology, and, thus, with the love of the Father for the Son and the Son for the Father, and so on, that we’ve already seen. That is the way the Bible hangs together.

Still, once you have those things in place, it is transparent that in the history of the church there have been people who could affirm all of those things who do not transparently walk with God. So it is still worthwhile asking questions that are in the domain of spirituality once those things are in place, because then when we look at the things that bring such grand truths, revelations, and historical realities home to us, there are certainly some things to learn.

Now if I had another 10 hours, I would spend eight of them, maybe nine, talking about more gospel-related matters and then the last one on some of the techniques for appropriating them. It’s still important to keep laying the foundations again and again and again. But still there is a place for that last hour, and instead what I’m going to do is take about 10 minutes to talk about that place.

In this connection, then, once the foundation is in place, it is worth reflecting on prayer, meditation, spirituality of the Word, spirituality born of relationships, the place of fasting, the place of Communion, and a whole lot of other things, because all of those things are means of grace in Scripture for us to know more deeply that we are the Lord’s and that we live and walk and move in self-conscious dependence upon him and in personal Spirit-born knowledge that we are his.

The Spirit does bear witness with our spirit that we are the children of God, to use Paul’s language in Romans 8. Now within that framework, let me offer just a few reflections on each of these rather quickly. For myself, one of the things that has helped me the most in the domain of prayer has been to work through the prayers of Paul or Moses or Daniel or whatever.

In fact, with respect to the prayers of Paul, I wrote a book on it once called A Call to Spiritual Reformation, where I started trying to teach myself to pray in the terms of all the Pauline prayers. What that did was teach me what to pray for, what arguments to advance, what things should be my chief concern in prayer, what language is patently biblical.

Although the Bible does say we’re to cast all our cares on God because he cares for us so that nothing is excluded, nevertheless, there are certain things that receive more underlining than others in terms of what to pray for and why. Thus, learning from others what to pray for and how to pray and for whom to pray and in what language, it shaped a great deal of my own devotional life for quite a while, simply because I was trying to constrain my own prayer life by Scripture.

Most of us, I suspect, at some point or other in our pilgrimage have resolved to pray, and then we’ve set aside time and got down on our knees, and then we’ve prayed for everybody we can think of and ascribed all the names of God we can think of to God. We prayed for in-laws and outlaws and all the missionaries we can think of in Pago Pago, and on and on and on. Then we’ve looked at our watch, and three and a half minutes have gone by.

You wonder about these Christians who pray for hours. It all seems so alien and strange. But I assure you that once you start writing out the prayers of even Paul, let alone adding in other writers, and start praying through them with respect to various people in your congregations and people in your circle of influence and then beyond.… Start obeying what Scripture says about whom to pray for and to what end and for what purpose giving those reasons, and then with very simple lists of things …

In the book, I indicated something that a man who was a Montreal missionary to China, an old China Hand.… He was one of the last Canadian missionaries out when the Communists took over. He didn’t get out until late ’51. One of his approaches to making prayer lists became mine. He taught at Trinity, an old man already when I first went there in 1978. He was a great encouragement along those lines, so I passed that on in the book as well.

Then I assure you it is quite easy to watch an hour go by pretty fast, especially if you’re doing it with two or three others. You can watch two or three hours go by pretty fast. Gradually you learn to pray. After all, the disciples approach Jesus and say, “Teach us to pray, as John also taught his disciples,” which presupposes that prayer can be taught. It’s not just caught; in some measure it can be taught. The best way of teaching it is precisely by using the Bible itself.

Then you quickly discover that the kinds of things Paul prays for are the kinds of things that are bound up with the gospel. Thus, you can’t escape the foundation. You can’t escape these fundamental things. One of Paul’s prayers in Ephesians 3, verses 14 and following, is that his readers might have power, together with all the saints, to grasp how long and wide and high and deep is the love of God, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge, that you might be filled to all the measure of the fullness of God.

You break that down and think it through, and, boy, are you ever in the domain of spirituality. “That you might have power, together with all the saints.” So it’s not a Lone Ranger kind of thing. “Though all else fail you, yet not I.” No, no, no. Together with all the saints, to grasp something. To grasp how infinitely big the love of God is. How do you measure that? Well, Paul uses linear metaphor. “How long and wide and high and deep.” Three tons of love? Four acres of love? How do you describe love in vast array?

Then he uses paradox. “To know this love that surpasses knowledge.” To know what transcends knowledge, what is unknowable. To what end? “That you may be filled with all the measure of the fullness of God,” which is a Pauline locution for maturity. In other words, the assumption is unless you have the power to begin to glimpse how big the love of God is and to know this in your own life, you cannot be a mature Christian.

Aren’t we talking about spirituality here? But then how do you grow in such love? Do you grow in such love by fasting a little longer, by beating your chest? Are you not intrinsically more likely to be overwhelmed by the love of God by reflecting on it, by rereading the texts of Scripture that talk about it, by asking the Lord to open your blind eyes so you can see what the cross really did achieve?

So you’re back to the foundation again. If you try and teach Ephesians 3, that second petition, abstracted from the gospel, you’re missing the whole point. The point is the gospel. The point is that the spirituality comes precisely by the work of the Spirit in our lives that encourages us so to absorb the great truths of the gospel that they so overwhelm us we can no longer bear it scarcely.

So whether in a meeting of corporate worship contemplating the cross or on your knees with an open Bible quietly reflecting, you become so overwhelmed by the grace of God in the cross that you may even burst into tears, and then you are on the outskirts of the very beginning of maturity. That’s what the text says. To reduce all of that to mere technique and trying harder in prayer is a horrible abomination, for it’s abstracting things from the gospel itself.

Likewise in meditation. I worry about some of these meditation techniques. I was reading of one person the other day in the emergent church movement who went to a retreat center run by Brennan Manning, and they were told to spend the whole weekend in absolute silence, unless they were talking with Brennan for counsel, and not to read anything, including the Bible. “Just let God talk to you.”

“This book of the law shall not depart out of your mouth. You shall meditate on it day and night. Then you shall make your way prosperous, and then you shall have good success. Your Word have I hid in my heart, that I might not sin against you. How shall a young man cleanse his way but by taking heed according to your Word? Your Word is truth. Sanctify them by your truth.”

“Oh no, don’t do that. Just think. Just meditate.” Meditate on what, for crying out loud? Once again, it’s not the technique of meditation that concerns me but its object, what you’re meditating on. Will you take the time to meditate on God’s most Holy Word, turn it over in your mind, think about it, reflect on it, apply it to your life, wonder what you’ve missed, keep looking up passages, loving the Word of God because God discloses himself to us so often by his Word.

Oh, I know it takes the illuminating work of the Spirit, and I know it works out in relationships that can show us things. Yet, in fact, across all of redemptive history, God again and again and again disclosed himself in words. “The word of the Lord came to the prophet Isaiah, saying …” Then that word was conveyed to the people, and thus God revealed himself in words.

It wasn’t the only way he revealed himself. He revealed himself in mighty deeds too. He reveals himself in the secret recesses of the heart by his Spirit, but transcendently, across Scripture again and again and again, he reveals himself in word. So much so that Jesus himself dares to be called the Word of God, God’s self-disclosure.

That means when we’re preaching, for example, we’re not merely explaining an objective text. Preaching properly defined is not mere unpacking through exegetical disciplines of text. It is that, but it’s more than that. As God has disclosed himself by words in times past, the preaching of the Word, rightly done, is God disclosing himself by the same word again. Preaching that is faithful to the text is re-revelation. God revealed himself in the past. Now he is revealing himself again by the same word.

In other words, we ought to think of preaching and teaching of the Word of God as bound up with the very revelation of God. Thus, when you find a preacher or a teacher who’s particularly anointed, borne along by the Spirit of God, it’s the same words others are saying but, nevertheless, there is an encounter with God in it all, because it’s not just explanation. It’s not merely didactic cerebral material.

I shudder when the touchy-feely types start talking negatively about all this cerebral thinking. God disclosed himself again and again in words, and God’s Word, borne along by the Spirit, is God disclosing himself again. It is re-revelation. Thus, our meditation is along the same line too. We’re not just thinking about it as if we are masters of it. Our aim is not so much to be masters of Scripture as to be mastered by it. It’s part of what meditation that is reverent means. In that meditation on God’s Word, we actually meet God. But that’s bringing us back to what is central in that Word, which is back to the gospel and back to Christ again. It’s not a technique anymore.

When it comes to fasting, similar things can be said. If it’s merely a technique, then it’s a kind of merit theology. “I fast more than you have, so I should have more blessings from God.” If it’s instead a kind of private self-abnegation in order to set time aside to seek the face of God in confession and repentance and intercession, then it’s a godly discipline. Otherwise it’s another form of idolatry.

I have already said enough this morning on the nature of the Lord’s Table and its proper function. Much more obviously could be said. Even in terms of the relationships that are there in the church with brothers and sisters in Christ correcting, rebuking, and encouraging one another.… There is no such thing in the Bible as Lone-Ranger spirituality.

The last person who said “Though all else disown you, yet not I,” did not turn out very well. No, it’s as iron sharpens iron, so a man’s countenance sharpens that of his friend. We build one another up in our most holy faith. We weep with those who weep. We rejoice with those who rejoice. We rebuke and we are rebuked. There’s a kind of spirituality of the community too, then.

Brothers and sisters in Christ, all of these sorts of things can be greatly expanded upon, but I submit to you that if you expand upon them without the foundation firmly in place, laid out by John, for what constitutes a proper connection between human beings and God, then we are likely to sidle off, especially in the contemporary world, into forms of spirituality that are not distinguishable from raw paganism. Once the foundation is in place, then it’s merely another way of saying, in effect, that we are striving by God’s grace to become consistent gospel people.

Now this is the place perhaps to open up for questions and answers. We will finish at noon, since that was the agreement and I don’t want to abuse your time. You’re all busy people. If you want to raise questions and make comments, this is the time to do so. If you want to leave now, that’s fine too. I have observed that every time I speak, there are millions who stay away, so I’m never offended.

Male: [Inaudible]

Don: I have no objection if someone prays through the Psalter, so long as they also pray through Moses and Paul and the Apocalypse and everywhere else. The strongest form of praying through the Psalter that becomes quasi-exclusive turns on a certain interpretation of the regulative principle, which argues that the only possible form that’s legitimate of public worship is that which is unambiguously and specifically mandated.

Thus, some have understood this to mean that Christian hymns are not legitimate; you have to use the first-century church’s hymnbook, which is the book of Psalms. That becomes, then, the controlling place. I think this is a false interpretation, historically speaking, of the regulative principle, although there are many who go down that track.

In any case, I don’t think it’s the right interpretation of the Colossians and Ephesians passages about songs, hymns, and spiritual songs. I don’t think it understands the Apocalypse very well. I don’t think it understands the freedom that’s in Christ very well. My problem is not with using the psalms in this way. My problem is with using the psalms in an exclusive way along these lines. It seems to me that it’s likely to become too Old Testament a view in a sense that does not adequately recognize the wonderful fulfillments and so on.

If someone is deeply, deeply knowledgeable of biblical theology and the nature of typology, then of course they can’t read very much of the psalms without seeing the fulfillments in Christ, so they’re bringing that sort of thing along as well, but there are a lot of people who will hear the exhortation to make the psalms your primary focus for prayer and contemplation and reflection who won’t have that biblical theology, who will make a lot of mistakes without even realizing.

Male: [Inaudible]

Don: I don’t think that’s fair to Anglicanism. Anglicanism also has callings, for example, that are all deeply Christian. Anglicanism is very flexible. The psalms are part of it, but it’s certainly not the only part, even within the prayer book. As you rightly say, Anglicanism was never governed by the regulative principle. It was much more governed by the Hooker principle, which was far more flexible. So I just don’t think that’s a correct reading of Anglicanism.

Male: Would you care to comment on the use of the term real presence at the Lord’s Table?

Don: It’s one of those words that means different things by different people. There are contexts in which I could affirm the real presence at the Lord’s Table and contexts in which I would deny it. The more something is disputed in the church, the more, for the sake of peace, I am inclined to try to use restrictively biblical language, and then to try to determine, on the basis of exegesis, what the biblical text is saying.

As a result, I have no fundamental objection to the term real presence, but I doubt we can get very far in discussing whether it’s appropriate unless we go through all of the different assumed and sometimes articulated definitions of what real presence means. What it means to a devout Roman Catholic who has a medieval view of transubstantiation is not exactly what it means to a Reformed Presbyterian. Both use the expression.

What it means to a Lutheran in the Wartburg heritage is not exactly what it might mean to a Reformed Baptist like Mark Dever, who can use the expression but certainly doesn’t mean what Lutherans mean. So unless you unpack the term, how can you bless it or disagree with it? It is based finally on what is meant by, “This is my body,” which are probably the four most disputed words in the history of the church.

At the end of the day, that question turns on huge matters of exegesis and the interpretation of the texts and their context and so forth. In part, the only way you’re even going to begin to come to agreement on this sort of thing is by working through passage after passage, as I have tried to do in this text.

In other words, if I were working with Lutherans or Catholics on this one, I would want to work right through John 6 several times to see if we could come to agreement about what John 6 means. Then I’d want to do something similar for 1 Corinthians 10 and 1 Corinthians 11, and so on. Now whether we get agreement or not, I don’t know; but that’s what you have to do in the first place: go back to what Scripture actually says.

Male: [Inaudible]

Don: If I were simply leading a Lord’s Supper without the possibility of explanation, I would restrict myself to quoting biblical words. If, on the other hand, I am pastor or co-pastor or one of the elders in a church where I have time to unpack things, then at each Lord’s Table I may take five minutes to unpack one more little chunk.

I was a member of a church in England for many years, where I have seen the Lord’s Table being used in an evangelistic context. Not the way the emergent church does, which in my view is really deeply wrong, where they speak of belonging before believing, encouraging people to have their first encounter with God through the sacrament. I think that’s horrible. It doesn’t understand anything.

On the other hand, what does Paul mean when he says, “By this you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes”? The term proclamation, the kerusso word group, is almost always used in terms of proclaiming to others, to outsiders. In what sense can you use the Lord’s Table as a proclamation of the gospel until he comes?

Well, I’ve done it myself. We’ve had Sunday evenings, for example, at Eden Baptist Church, a Reformed Baptist church in Cambridge University, a church I’ve been connected with since 1972, with hundreds of students present, let alone everybody else in the church, with many, many, many unbelievers. Instead of saying, “All right, now it’s time for Communion; everybody who’s not a member please leave,” we will wrap the Lord’s Table right into the whole service.

So it will focus on Christ’s death and what he has accomplished on the cross, and then the words of institution. “What did he mean by this? Why should we think about this again and again and again?” Then we’ll read, for example, the text of 1 Corinthians 11, briefly expound them, and say, “Now, of course, if you’re not a Christian, you can’t even speak of remembering Jesus’ death in a reverent way. That would be folly. On the other hand, understand what we mean by this.”

Then three minutes to summarize what I’ve just said of John 6, for example. “Either he dies or I do.” Just beginning there. “So we take this bread, and we remember that Christ’s body was broken. His blood was poured out. His life was ended that I might live and have a resurrection life and a resurrection body and eternal life coursing through me.

So I can remember. If you’re not a Christian, of course, it would be folly to claim that you do remember. But as the Christians take the bread and drink the wine, watch us. This is important to us. If you’re going to understand what Christianity is, you must understand what we reverence and why. We reverence one who shed his blood and broke his body that we might live. Watch us as we remember.”

Then the elements are passed without any singing, any background music stuff. How can you pray in public with background music? Anybody who has any sort of musical brain in his head is busy following the music rather than the prayer. In absolute solemnity the whole thing is done. It’s all handled. Then I will stand up and say, “Christ is risen,” and the whole congregation will stand and sing a contemporary hymn on the resurrection posted in the words above.

Let me tell you, that’s proclamation of the gospel. You proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes. So there are all kinds of creative ways, it seems to me, of breaking out of the narrowness of our inherited traditions where we’re busy protecting things and not seeing how flexible the New Testament is even in such matters. That too surely is spirituality.

Male: [Inaudible]

Don: Well, clearly, when they start asking, “How can you eat his flesh or drink his blood?” either they are thinking, “How can he be recommending cannibalism?” and they obviously don’t think he means that transparently, you know, “Let’s go take a bite of Jesus right now …” What they are saying is, “What does he mean?”

Now it’s not a question of kosher food laws, because kosher food laws or otherwise you’re still not supposed to be a cannibal. I don’t think the kosher food laws are the issue at all. The issue is.… What does he mean by such words? In the context when they were first uttered, without the Lord’s Table around, without the Lord’s Table already in place, without the words of institution anywhere nearby, they have to be understood in some sort of metaphorical way.

Jesus is constantly talking in those terms. Then the question is.… What does he mean metaphorically? When you work through the passage, it seems to me you see pretty clearly what he means metaphorically. So I don’t think we should make the text more difficult than it is, I guess is what I’m saying.

Male: [Inaudible]

Don: No. The first thing is to understand it in the context of John 6, and it seems to me I’ve already done that. In other words, I acknowledge that their concern for having enough food and so on is in the context of a poor society, where 80 percent of income went.… I’ve already explained all of that.

I would have to explain it less in a rural country in Africa. They would leap on it much faster. I’ve been to most of the poorest countries of the world. I can say in a poor country, “Of course, wouldn’t you like to have someone provide all your food every day? Wouldn’t that increase your income dramatically?”

“Oh, yes, yes, yes.”

“Isn’t it much more important to have the kind of food that gives you eternal life?”

But in terms of explaining the text, my explanation doesn’t change. How I will weight things might change a wee bit. Here, to be quite frank, I have to spend a lot more time explaining Tesco’s or Supervalu or whatever your store is. In rural India, I don’t have to explain that. In fact, it’s one of the things that you find when you work in the so-called Third World, especially in the poorer parts of the Third World.

One has to be very careful about using expressions like Third World nowadays, because there are some wonderfully rich areas in some parts of the Third World too. But in the poorer parts of the world, you have to be very careful about the kinds of illustrations you use, because they just won’t connect.

What that does is remind you that very, very often their cultural frame of reference, their worldview, their orders, their values are often much closer to those of the first century than are ours in Burlington. We might have to spend more time explaining the obvious here and less time there. You don’t have to explain the nature of clan and sonship and things like that in those sorts of contexts. It’s in our context, with our rugged individualism, that you have to spend more time explaining those things.

Male: [Inaudible]

Don: Yeah, I think that’s probably trying to make language run on all fours. After all, the Synoptic accounts of the death of Christ point out the reason why, in God’s providence, the soldiers did not break Jesus’ legs was to fulfill the Scripture, “Not a bone of his body would be broken.” So there’s a certain kind of typology there that answers directly that question.

In crucifixion, as you know, you pull with your arms and push with your legs in order to open up your chest cavity so you can breathe. Then the muscle spasms start. The physical pain of crucifixion was muscle spasm. Then you sagged because you couldn’t sustain it anymore, and then you couldn’t breathe, so you pulled and pushed again so as to breathe. That could go on for hours, even days.

So if there was some reason the soldiers wanted to finish you off faster, all they would do was just come along and smash your shins. Then you couldn’t push anymore, and you’d suffocate in a few minutes. The uniqueness of Jesus’ death in terms of the wounds on him was precisely that no bone was broken. In fact, somebody came along instead and shoved a javelin up under his rib cage just to make sure he was dead.

Within that framework, the broken body does not mean broken in terms of bones broken. The texts explicitly say the bones weren’t broken in fulfillment of a typological structure from the Psalms. Nevertheless, we use the term broken in broader ways, and the Hebrews did as well. For example, you watch somebody who is running through a financial dilemma in his company, let’s say. Maybe his financial comptroller has run off with a million bucks, and they’re now heavily in debt, and he doesn’t know how they’re going to pull it out.

You see him graying before you, and in six months he puts on about 10 years and drops 20 pounds, and we say, “He’s a broken man.” Which bone? Well, clearly it’s not using language that way, is it? So in fact, Jesus was broken. His body was broken, and it just misses the point to say, “Which bone?” So let me pray.

We confess with shame, Lord God, how easily we lose sight of the foundation. We confess with equal shame that even when we understand the foundation well, how easily it becomes distanced from us, outside of us. Help us to return, Lord God, again and again and again to the glories of the incarnation, the glories of the atonement, the glories of the resurrection, the glories of the ascension, the glories of Christ’s high priestly ministry, the glories of the return still to come.

To hide this Word in our hearts that we may learn not to sin against you, to use all the means of grace that you have ordained, to learn afresh to pray, to trust, to intercede, to fast, to seek, to have fellowship, indeed, to be increasingly conformed to the likeness of your dear Son. In an age when many talk of spirituality, help us not only to talk about spirituality, but to be so transparently spiritual people that others will take knowledge of us that we have been with Jesus. We ask in his name, amen.