The Stable Man

Listen or read the following transcript from The Gospel Coalition as D. A. Carson speaks on the topic of godly men from James 1:12-18.

I would like to begin with a story of two men. The first is an Englishman whose name I shall not give you to protect the guilty. About 35 years ago, this young man felt called to the ministry. He went off to Bible college in England, and in due course he was appointed to his first charge. He turned out to be quite gifted. He was excellent in people relationships. He seemed to be a very capable preacher. He attracted other people to him.

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Unfortunately, after three or four years in the ministry, despite the fact that the church was growing rapidly, this man was caught out in adultery. He resigned, disappeared, and, in fact, immigrated to Canada. That’s where I met him. There he took some more courses in a seminary in Toronto where I was enrolled as a student. I knew nothing of his background. Neither did any of the seminary authorities.

In due course, he graduated. I graduated. I moved to the West Coast of Canada, and he became pastor of a church in Ontario. More years passed, and I moved to England. I heard through the perennial grapevine that this fellow, after some years of apparently fruitful ministry, had fallen into adultery and been dismissed. He disappeared from the scene. I moved back to the West Coast of Canada. This chap moved down to the United States.

Some years later, I moved to Trinity in Chicago, where I am now. I didn’t know the area. The administration asked me if I would help out at a nearby church which had really gone through some trauma recently. Apparently, its minister had, after some years of fruitful ministry, just been caught out in adultery. You guessed it. Same chap. Now besides what this says about churches not checking backgrounds of people, my point in telling you this is to relate something that he says now.

He is now in Ohio selling computer components, and if you ask him, “What went wrong?” he will say, “God is a liar.” You say, “Come again? Am I missing something?” He says, “The Bible tells me God will not allow you to be tempted above what you are able but will, with the temptation, make a way of escape, that you may be able to bear it. He made no escape. I wasn’t able to bear it, and God is a liar.” End of discussion.

Now having maligned the English by telling you a story like that, I suppose my second story should also be about an Englishman. This man does have a name. His name is Norman Anderson. He went to university in the 30s, and eventually, he and his wife became missionaries in Egypt and became quite proficient in Arabic. When World War II started, eventually he became an intelligence officer in the Middle East because he knew the language so well.

After the war, he moved back to Britain and eventually became professor of Oriental law at the University of London, where he taught Islamic law as a confessing Christian. He had the grasp of the background, yet he taught it as a historical and literary discipline with extraordinary capacity. He was an active layman in the Church of England, preached often, wrote Christian books, and eventually was knighted for an institution he founded.

He had three children. The first one became a medical doctor in the Belgian Congo, as it was then. At the time of the same struggles to which I referred a few moments ago, she was gang raped. She was a missionary … gang raped then furloughed home. She went off to California to retrieve something of her composure and get a little more medicine before planning on going back to Africa. Unfortunately, in California she tripped, fell down some stairs, knocked herself out, and drowned in her own spittle.

The second daughter died in circumstances almost as bizarre. The third child, a son, was considered brilliant. He had extraordinary grades at Cambridge University. He died of a brain tumor in his third year at Cambridge. That’s about when I met Norman and Pat. Not once … not once … did I hear a word of complaint against God.

Twenty years later, Pat came down with Alzheimer’s, and Norman, by then an old man, was nursing her. Not once did I hear a word of complaint. When he gave his testimony to the goodness of God at a large convention in Britain called Word Alive, there wasn’t a dry eye in the place.

Now my question for you this evening is … Which of those two men do you want to be? Do you want to be the kind of unstable person who flops around from one crisis to another crisis and always blames somebody else? Unstable. Fickle. Maybe gifted, but untrustworthy. Or do you want to be the kind of Christian who, regardless of the adversity, regardless of the challenge, puts down deeper roots and becomes a stable, solid oak in all the buffetings that will not be moved?

Weeps, yes. Hurts, yes. Faces the turmoil and struggles of life that sooner or later we all face but comes out somehow with such a firm confidence in the sheer goodness and reliability of God that he is stable. Which do you want to be? The passage before us gives us three extraordinarily important principles that constitute a dividing line between those two men. If you want to be a stable man, absorb these three principles into your life. Absorb them deeply. Think about them. Pray them into your life. Act in line with them. Here they are.

1. When you are struggling under trial, remember the Christian’s goals.

Verse 12: “Blessed is the man who perseveres under trial, because when he has stood the test, he will receive the crown of life that God has promised to those who love him.” In fact, something along this line has already been said earlier in the chapter, and it is important to get this broader context. Go back to verses 2–4.

“Consider it pure joy, my brothers, whenever you face trials of many kinds, because you know that the testing of your faith develops perseverance. Perseverance must finish its work so that you may be mature and complete, not lacking anything.” In verses 2–4, we’re to consider it joy when we face trials, because we know that this tests our faith and produces perseverance, which ultimately makes us mature.

Then in verse 12, those who persevere under trial do so with the blessing of God, because, ultimately, such people receive the crown of life God has promised to those who love him. Together, then, these trials offer us two goals we’re to hold up before our eyes. One is endurance, as an athlete endures in order to build up endurance. So also when we face difficulty we persevere because it builds up perseverance.

In the second place, that perseverance has a longer end in view; namely, this crown of life, this consummation of life. In this world, there is an end. There is death. But beyond this world, there is the life to come, the consummation of life, eternal life in a new heaven and a new earth, the home of righteousness. The Bible speaks of this in a variety of ways. In Revelation 2 we read, “Be faithful even to the point of death, and I will give you the crown of life.”

C.S. Lewis, in one of his books, speaks of rewards along these lines. Picture, he says, two men. The first goes down to the red-light district in town, pays his money, and has his woman. He gets his reward. The second falls in love with a young woman, courts her, woos her, comes to be trusted by the family, asks the father for her hand in marriage, eventually proposes to her, she accepts, they get married, and he has his reward. What’s the difference?

The difference, he says, is that in the first instance, the payment and the reward are so incommensurable the whole thing is grotesque. It is odious. In the second case, however, the consummation is merely the extenuation of the growing relationship of love. He loves her, and the love is consummated. So it is with the reward of this crown of life.

It’s not as if we live here endlessly in death. Rather, already we have something of this life from God. We enjoy it now. The reward, this crown of life, is the culmination of this walk with God, this life with God, this pulsating, innervating, energizing, Spirit-given life we enjoy already as Christians now. It is the consummation of what we already have in Christ Jesus. The rewards, in other words, are of a kind that only a true Christian would be able to appreciate.

If a Christian’s goals, then, are faithfulness of character, endurance, maturation, perseverance, on the one hand, and on the other, the eternal life in all of its consummated splendor, then when we pass through hardships and trials, when we’re stretched to the limit, we cannot help but think of those experiences within the framework of the larger goals. If, instead, our goals are entirely lined up with the things of this world, we will be endlessly frustrated.

We have to come to terms with the fact that God is more interested in our holiness than in our happiness. He is more interested in our faithfulness than in our financial resources. He is more interested in our purity than in our power. He is more interested in our self-control than in our sexual prowess. He is more interested in our eternal life than our external wealth. He is more interested in our endurance than in our reputation.

Thus, all of the harsh things we go through in this fallen, broken world are configured differently if we remember the Christian’s goals. All of this, we’re told, is for those who love him. Verse 12: “Blessed is the man who perseveres under trial, because when he has stood the test, he will receive the crown of life that God has promised to those who love him.” In this framework, it is almost as if this very love for him is part of what needs to endure and persevere and fructify, become deeper, fruit-bearing.

A friend of mine, a pastor of a church for many years, tells of a funeral he conducted for an elderly woman. She had been married for 50 years, and her bereaved husband was shattered by the sheer loneliness of the whole thing. They had been Christians. They had reared a Christian family, seen grandchildren, even great-grandchildren, but this old man was finding it very hard. Trying to put a pious face on things, he turned to my pastor friend and said, “I suppose God has still something for me to do, else why has he left me here?”

My pastor friend replied, “He has not left you to do anything except to love him still.” Oh, it’s true he may well have been left behind to do all kinds of things, but the solution is not just doing more things. It’s even in the loss, even in the bereavement, to love God still. “When he has stood the test, he will receive the crown of life that God has promised to those who love him.” So when you are struggling under trial, remember the Christian’s goals.

2. When you confess God’s sovereignty, do not misunderstand God’s motives.

Verses 13–15: “When tempted, no one should say, ‘God is tempting me.’ ” Now part of the challenge of understanding these verses is that the root behind trial and temptation in the original is the same one. James goes back and forth between the two words, and it’s always the context that determines the meaning.

James plunges from one to the other because he is writing as we experience these things. The same events that are opportunities to go forward are temptations to go backward. Trial becomes temptation because it finds an echoing chord within us, and we want to lash out and hurt someone. Verse 13, paraphrastically, reads something like this: “If you are tempted by such trials, do not say, ‘God is tempting me.’ ”

In other words, the assumption is we will face trials, but when we face those trials, don’t say … When you are tempted to go off the rails because of the trials, don’t say, “God is tempting me.” After all, God does test people in the sense that he purposely brings them into situations where their willingness to obey him is tested, where he stretches their faith in exactly the same way we take our children and allow them into situations where the choices they make will be theirs and they have to face certain kinds of consequences. We test them and push them a little bit.

After all, the Bible explicitly says God tested Abraham in Genesis 22. It tells us God tested Hezekiah by leaving him alone for a while to see what he would do. But although God may test us to prove his servants’ faith or to lower their pride or to foster endurance, he never does so to induce us to sin or to destroy our faith. He has no interest in tempting us. That’s the point of verse 13.

“When tempted, no one should say, ‘God is tempting me.’ For how could this be? God himself cannot be tempted by evil. He has no interest in tempting others, therefore.” James says, “If you want an accurate assessment of temptation, let me give it to you.” That’s the burden of verses 14–15. A true account of temptation looks rather different, he says. “Each one is tempted when, by his own evil desire, he is dragged away and enticed.”

In fact, the word is a fishing term. The lure is put out. The temptation is there. At the end of the day, the fish grabs it because it looks attractive. The temptation finds an echoing chord in the person being tempted, so we grab it, we’re hooked, and then we’re dragged in. That’s one image. Then the image changes. “Then, after desire has conceived, it gives birth to sin; and sin, when it is full-grown, gives birth to death.”

Here the mother is desire. She conceives and has a child called sin. Then sin grows up, and it’s nothing but death. Thus, gives birth to death is meant to be a grotesque image. It is shocking language. To be full-grown and stillborn all because of this desire we have within us to do that which is ugly and evil. Sin corrodes. It corrupts. It becomes enslaving. There are many parts of the Bible that make this point. One of them is found in the opening verse of the opening psalm.

“Blessed is the man who does not walk in the counsel of the ungodly or stand in the way of sinners or sit in the seat of mockers.” Here is, first of all, a person who is walking in the counsel of the ungodly. That is, picking up the advice from people with an alien worldview, an ungodly worldview, absorbing this advice and beginning to walk along that pattern. If you do that long enough, you stand in the way of sinners.

Now that’s not a good translation, but it’s what all of our English translations have. To stand in someone’s way in English means to hinder them, to get in their way. It’s like Robin Hood and Little John on the bridge. Each stands in the other’s way, and one of them lands in the water. But to stand in someone’s way in the original means to stand in their moccasins, to do what they do, to absorb their habits and lifestyle. You pick up the advice and the counsel of the ungodly, and pretty soon you stand in the way, you absorb the lifestyle, of sinners.

The third step is to sit in the seat of mockers. Now you’re in your armchair, reclining, looking down your long, self-righteous nose at all of those stupid, right-wing, bigoted, narrow-minded Christians, and you sneer in eminent condescension toward their narrowness, not only proud of your sin but dismissive of all those who don’t participate in it with you. At this point, Spurgeon says, a man receives his master’s in worthlessness and his doctorate in damnation.

The idea, of course, is that sin corrodes. We’re enticed. We’re dragged in. Then you change the image. We’re born into it, and we die. It’s death from the beginning. Or to change the image again, we become sneering and condescending and hardened in it. Patterns of behavior are deeply rooted, and our instincts and reactions are all determined by our deep commitment to this way of sin.

It may be pornography. It may be cherished bitterness. It may be a style of speech that is endlessly unkind and dismissive. It may be a form of harshness to one’s spouse that is distant, supercilious, never sacrificial. It may be a kind of nurtured enmity against our children because they’re slipping past us and doing things we wish we could have done and never will be able to do. We justify our existence by putting them down. It may be the kind of sustained prayerlessness that confesses the creed but acts as if God just isn’t there.

Eventually, those sins become so deeply ingrained and imbedded in us they stamp our whole character. Or it may be that these things erupt when we face a crisis. You lose a child. You get fired from a secure job. You lose a spouse. You have a crippling car accident. In all of this, because you have some Christian commitment, you want to know, “What is God doing with me? Why doesn’t he back off and give me some room? I’m not doing anything wrong. Why is he picking on me?” What starts off as a tragedy becomes a deep-seated enmity, a hatred of God.

Now this is not the place to try to work out the doctrine of the sovereignty of God in the context of a fallen and broken world. All I will say is this. The Bible insists, on the one hand, that God is utterly sovereign and, finally, nothing happens in this broken world that utterly escapes the outermost bounds of his sovereignty. That’s a given in Scripture.

On the other hand, the Bible also insists that God is good, irrefragably good, immovably good, unavoidably good, inevitably good. He’s not corrupt. He’s not whimsical. He’s not arbitrary. He’s not mean. He’s not cruel. He’s good. Now out of all of that, there are ways of formulating how we operate under his sovereignty as sort of secondary agents who do what we want to do because we are evil. I won’t explore those sorts of things.

I want, instead, to direct you to two passages to show you how this looks in Scripture before coming back to this text again. In Genesis, chapter 50, verses 19–20 … At this point, the father of the 12 patriarchs has died. Jacob is dead. Joseph is still ruler in Israel. The remaining brothers are afraid that now that the old man has died, their brother Joseph will take some sort of nasty revenge, because they sold him into slavery.

So they come to him with a song and dance about how their father had really said before he died that Joseph shouldn’t do this, and so forth. Joseph says, in tears if you please, “When you sold me into slavery, you meant it for evil, but God meant it for good to save many people alive as it is today.” Now notice what Joseph did not say. He did not say, “God had intended to send me down to Egypt first class in an air-conditioned limousine. Unfortunately, you chaps mucked it up. As a result, I came down here as a slave.” He doesn’t say that.

Nor does he say, “Your intention was all evil. You sort of took God by surprise in that nasty little bit of politicking, but fortunately, God is so wise and sovereign he came in after the fact and rescued me from this wretched slavery and prison and turned the whole thing around until I became prime minister of Egypt.” He doesn’t say that.

Rather he says, “In one and the same event, God meant it for good, and you meant it for evil.” That framework so governed Joseph’s life that all of the years he was in prison, all of the years he was a slave, he regarded faithfulness to this God as an immovable point in his life, because he still trusted the sheer goodness of God even in the midst of appalling circumstances.

Second example, more important yet. This one is found in Acts, chapter 4, with respect to the death of Christ. At this point, the first whiff of persecution is beginning to descend on the leaders of the church. They go back and report to the Christians what has happened, and the Christians get down on their knees and begin to pray. They pray in the words of Psalm 2.

“Lord, why do the nations rage? The kings of the earth have gathered together against you and against your holy Son Jesus,” and so forth. Then they say, “Indeed, the words of this psalm have been fulfilled. Herod and Pontius Pilate and the leaders of the Jews conspired against your holy servant Jesus.” Then they add, still praying, “They did what your hand had determined beforehand should be done.” Now that’s remarkable.

When you stop to think about it, any other framework destroys the Christian faith. You see, if you wanted to argue that Jesus died on a cross primarily because there were a lot of corrupt politicians in the first century who were twisting the court system for political advantage so that Jesus wouldn’t come into power as king and use military power to unseat them then his death and crucifixion becomes nothing more than a perversion of justice by two-bit politicians in a tin-pot Mid-Eastern state. Then God came along afterwards, fortunately, and sort of turned it around so it’s also the way by which he pays for the sins of people.

If you want to argue along those lines, then the cross is nothing more than an afterthought in the mind of God. It doesn’t make sense of the whole Bible. The whole Bible’s sacrificial system is announcing that a lamb must come, a savior must come, a suffering servant must come. It’s all irrelevant. It’s not planned by God. It’s not foreseen by him. He’s nothing more than a clever chess player who turns around human evil for advantage after the fact.

If, on the other hand, you argue, “Listen, God planned the whole thing from the beginning, and because God planned it, God planned for his Son to die on the cross; therefore, all of those who made the political decisions that sent him to the cross are absolved,” then suddenly you can’t blame Herod and Pontius Pilate and the Jews for their conspiracy.

For that matter, you can’t blame anybody who lives under the sovereignty of God for anything, in which case there’s no sin, in which case there’s no need for a cross, and you’ve destroyed Christianity by another route. In the Bible, these two points are immutable. You can’t make sense of the whole rest of the Bible without them. There are all kinds of philosophical ways of tweaking them and getting them together, but the points themselves are immutable.

First, God is sovereign and you can trust him. Second, God is good. Because he is good, in the midst of your suffering, in this fallen, broken, rebellious world with all of its entailments in judgment and wrath, with all of its entailments in sin and sickness and death, never, ever think that God is malicious or that you can absolve yourself of your temptation and your fall by blaming God.

James says, “When tempted, no one should say, ‘God is tempting me.’ For God cannot be tempted by evil, nor does he tempt anyone; but each one is tempted when, by his own evil desire, he is dragged away and enticed. Then, after desire has conceived, it gives birth to sin; and sin, when it is full-grown, gives birth to death.” Here is the point. When you confess God’s sovereignty, do not misunderstand God’s motives.

3. When you feel abandoned and crushed, do not forget God’s goodness.

“Don’t be deceived, my dear brothers,” James goes on to say. That is, “Do not allow yourself to wallow in rebellious self-pity or in some sort of accusing stance, kidding yourself that you are exempt from these sanctions. Don’t kid yourself. God is good.” “Every good and perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of the heavenly lights, who does not change like shifting shadows.”

What is the most stable thing we know in the created order? Most of us, I think, would finally say, “The heavenly lights, the stars.” Of course, modern astronomy will tell us the universe is expanding. Our whole solar system is gradually slowing down. In any case, even at the experiential level, if you’re way out in the bush somewhere on a night when there’s no moon and just stars, no lights from the city …

If you just stand there and watch the shadows in the gum trees, they move. The earth is still rotating, and the Southern Cross passes through its course in the sky. The most stable thing we know still has shifting shadows, but not God. God has no shifting shadows. God is immutably good. He is unchangeably good. It’s not that he has some good days and some bad days. He’s just good good. He can’t be anything but good.

Verse 18 provides us with the outstanding example of God’s good gifts. “Do you want the final proof that God is good?” James says, in effect. “He chose to give us birth through the word of truth, that we might be a kind of firstfruits of all he created.” Now some people have tried to understand that this expression give birth to is talking about creation. God gave birth to us, in effect, in creation. But that’s not what it means.

In this context, give birth to is talking about the new birth, which is produced by the Word of Truth, we’re told, which is an expression found only five times in the New Testament and in every single case means the gospel. For example, in Ephesians 1:13. “You also were included in Christ when you heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation.”

So if we unpack verse 18 in contemporary terms, James is saying that the most outstanding demonstration of the sheer goodness of God is that he chose to give us the new birth through the gospel, and this that we might be a kind of firstfruits of all he created. This isn’t the end. We’re not even to judge things by the present order of things. We have to look to the end.

The ultimate hope is a new heaven and a new earth. We’re the firstfruits. Already born again with the life of God pulsating within us, still living between the already and the not yet, still in this veil of shadows, still with death over us, but ultimately the firstfruits of the consummated glory still to come, and this because of the gospel, because of the cross, because Jesus died.

I don’t often tell stories about my children, but I’m probably enough thousands of miles away that this one won’t get back to them. I have two teenagers, and a couple of years ago my daughter … We were living in England at the time. My daughter was expecting her best friend in the whole world to come out and visit us at Christmas. The day before I was to drive down from Cambridge to Heathrow to pick her up, we got a phone call from her parents. This girl, a strapping six-foot blond athlete, had just been diagnosed with leukemia.

Melissa’s health descended quickly, and at Easter we sent my daughter back the other way. She stayed with Christian friends and visited Melissa and her family daily. Neither Melissa nor her family came from Christian homes at all. Tiff, my daughter, spent 10 hours a day in the hospital, cleaning out Melissa’s trach tube and bullying friends to come in and see her. Tiffany came back home after three weeks, and then in June Melissa died. In July we returned to Chicago.

My daughter at this point was making no profession of Christian faith. Emotionally she was handling things very well. I was very proud of her. She was grieving properly. She was talking about it. She wasn’t hiding it from us. She had been so helpful with Melissa and so forth. But I could see there was no Christian anchoring in her. In September, I went into her room, and she was crying her eyes out. I put my arm around her and said, “What’s the matter?” She said, “Daddy, God could have saved my friend, and he didn’t, and I hate him.”

I held her and let her cry and cry. Not knowing quite what to say, I said, “Tiffany, I’m so glad you told me, because God knows what you think already. You can’t hide from him. Moreover, the psalmists and Job come pretty close under pressure to talking like that. All I’m going to say is two things. Sooner or later, you have to decide whether you want God to be like the genie in Aladdin’s lamp, very powerful but ultimately controlled by whoever holds the lamp …

Do you want a god who ultimately serves you and does whatever you want, whenever you want, or is he sometimes going to do some things you don’t understand because you’re not big enough yet, and you serve him? Second, you can never, ever accurately assess the love of God unless you remember the cross. You lost your friend. God lost his Son. In fact, he gave his Son.”

Do you see? The high point of the demonstration of God’s goodness is the gospel. It’s the cross. Add up all of your sorrows. Add up all of your losses. Add up all of the shattering experiences you have had, could have, or fear. Add them all up. Multiply them by a couple of million. The fact of the matter is that if you know Jesus Christ, all of those other things are as nothing.

Oh, it’s not that they’re nothing. It’s not that there should be no tears. Don’t misunderstand me. We sorrow, but not as those who have no hope. Fifty billion years into eternity, when we’re still thanking God for the provision he secured for us on the cross, we will understand a little more completely what Paul meant when he insisted that all of the sorrows of this world are as nothing compared with the glory still to be revealed.

I saw this another way in a conference I was speaking at a few years ago to a group of missionaries in this case. Along the line, I had taken a cheap shot in one of these addresses at a counseling device called rebirthing. Let me explain what that is or you won’t understand the point of the story.

In rebirthing techniques, which were developed in American psychology and then given a kind of Christian formulation, a person who has gone through some traumatized experiences is, in the Christian form of this, brought into a room, often in a small group, and told to shut their eyes and imagine their birth. They are to be born again, as it were. Not in the spiritual sense, but to live through their moment of birth again.

As they come out of their mother’s birth canal, there is Jesus, in this imaginary recreation, standing to ease them out of the birth canal, cut the umbilical cord, slap their bottoms to help them suck in that first breath of life, and cuddle them, to help them understand that from the beginning Jesus was really there. Some who have been through this technique claim that they weep for a sustained period of time, and for the first time it twigs on them that Jesus really has loved them from the beginning, and they find this wonderfully cathartic and emotionally stabilizing.

I had made some passing dismissive comment. After this meeting, one of the missionary couples came up to me and said, “We need to talk.” I went around to their place for lunch, and the long and the short of it was that the man in this missionary couple had been brought up in a very abusive family. His whole vision of what a father was was pretty grotesque. Then he had gone off to an evangelical church and got converted at the age of 17.

He eventually met this woman who became his wife. They eventually went to Bible college, and now they were training to be missionaries. They were in the last stages before becoming Bible translators. He said, “Just a few months ago, someone came through here and led me through one of these rebirthing sessions, and for the first time, I knew. I knew intellectually before, but for the first time I felt that Jesus loved me.”

He said, “I wept for 40 minutes. The results of all of that are, to be frank, I love my wife better. I think I have a better integrated emotional life. I love Jesus more. Why should you criticize that which helps me love my wife more and Jesus more? How dare you? There’s nothing in the Bible that says, ‘You shall not participate in rebirthing techniques.’ ”

So I said to him, “O my dear brother, if you really do love Jesus better and your wife more, I’m not going to start by throwing stones at you, but if you want a serious answer to your serious question, some of what I say is going to hurt. Are you up for it?”

“Yeah, go ahead.”

“All right,” I said. “I want you to answer two questions first. The first question is this. Where, according to the Bible, is the love of God most profoundly displayed?”

“Oh,” he said, “unquestionably, in the cross. No doubt about it.” He was right, and I expected he would say that, but I wanted to hear him say it to make sure he didn’t have some purely sentimental notion percolating in the back of his mind.

I said, “My second question is could you imagine that you might have had the same cathartic, healing, transforming experience if someone had taken, let’s say, a passage like Ephesians 3 and worked it out in your life with you, praying that you might know the height and length and depth and breadth of the love of God in Christ Jesus, that you might be able to know this love that surpasses knowledge?

Can you imagine that if someone had taken the cross and applied it to your life carefully, you might have been so touched and transformed that as a result you would have wept for 40 or 50 minutes and come out loving Jesus more? Could you imagine that?” He thought about it, and he said, “Yes, I can imagine that it might have happened like that, but my point is that it didn’t happen like that. It happened instead with rebirthing techniques. I don’t care how it comes out so long as the result is there.”

I said to him, “But now you’ve conceded everything I need for my argument, because I want to know when the next person comes to you who is feeling restless and unsure of the love of God, are you going to point him to the Jesus of the cross or to the imaginary Jesus who stands between your mother’s legs and wipes yuck off your face?” Do you see what the issue is? The end test is not our emotional catharsis, as important as emotional healing is. The test, finally, is the historical reality, the cross.

Do you remember the passage in Exodus 33? After the people have sinned and rebelled in the matter of the golden calf, Moses is feeling terribly frustrated and alone and isolated. He’s praying before God, and finally he says, “Show me your glory.” God says, “I will cause all my goodness to pass in front of you, but no one can see my face and live.”

So Moses is hidden in the cleft of a rock, and God goes by. Moses is hidden over, and as the Lord goes by, he intones, “The Lord, the Lord, full of compassion, plenteous in grace and truth.” As he has passed by, Moses is permitted to peek out and glimpse something of the trailing edge of the afterglow of the glory of God.

John picks this up in his gospel. He says, “We have seen his glory all right, full of grace and truth.” As his book unfolds, the supreme place where the glory of God is displayed, where the Son of Man is glorified, is the cross. Do you want to see the glory of God? Look for the goodness of God. Where is the goodness of God most displayed, where is God most glorified but in the cross?

Now if the cross means nothing to you, none of what I have said tonight makes sense. Then my concern for you is that where you sit right now, you lift your heart heavenward and say, “Lord, have mercy on me for Jesus’ sake. I see he died for a sinner like me.” But most of us here are Christians, and then it is imperative for us to see when you feel abandoned and crushed, do not forget God’s goodness. Put it in the perspective of the cross. That goodness is immutable.

The sheer glory of the gospel must shape all our evaluation, so that no matter what loss we suffer, what frustration, what blind spot, what bereavement, what disappointment, we have the cross. We have known the love of God. We have experienced the forgiveness of sin. “God commends his love toward us in that while we were yet sinners Christ died for us.” We have received this new birth through the Word of Truth, that we might be a kind of firstfruits of all he has created.

Here it is, then, the list of criteria that separate the two categories I described at the beginning. When you are struggling under trial, remember the Christian’s goals; when you confess God’s sovereignty, do not misunderstand God’s motives; and when you feel abandoned and crushed, do not forget God’s goodness.

Amen.