Neutralizing Evangelicalism

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Here are a couple of excerpts I found here.

“Bible-believing Christians would do well to beware of the New Evangelicalism for four valid reasons.

  • First, it is a movement born of compromise.
  • Second, it is a movement nurtured in pride of intellect.
  • Third, it is a movement growing on appeasement of evil; and
  • Finally it is a movement doomed by the judgment of God’s Holy Word.

Strong language, this? Let us face the facts.”  William E. Ashbrook – 1958 (John E. Ashbrook’s father), The New Neutralism.

“I believe that the mainspring of new evangelicalism is found in three determinations of its founder which may be clearly traced in the state of things today.

  • First, new evangelicalism determined to reject Biblical separation.
  • Secondly, new evangelicalism determined to find acceptance by the world.
  • Thirdly, new evangelicalism determined to add the social gospel to the Scriptural gospel….”  John E. Ashbrook – 1992, New Neutralism II

I  found the entire text of New Neutralism II online here. It’s an interesting read. In this post, I am not taking a particular stance, but am merely sharing the main points, which I find worthy of serious consideration.  The author’s conclusion reads in part:

“My grandfather, on whose farm I spent my summers, used to drill corn with a one row corn planter. One spring he had a young mare called Nellie pulling his planter. Nellie panicked and ran away with the planter. When she had finished her fling, she ended up where she began, and Grandfather finished the job. After the corn came up, we could stand on the hill overlooking the field and trace Nellie’s adventure. A great circle of corn was imposed on the orderly rows. When my father began his Evangelicalism: The New Neutralism in 1958, new evangelicalism was ten years old. As I write these lines in 1992, it is forty-four years old. After ten years it may be hard to see where a movement is going. After forty-four years it is easy to see where it has been.

Early in this book I stated that the mainspring of new evangelicalism is to be found in three determinations of its founder. First, new evangelicalism determined to reject Biblical separation. This determination removed the fences God had ordained to protect the church. From the hilltop of history it is easy to see that new evangelicalism, like Nellie, has traced a great circle back to the fellowship of apostasy The heroes of the 1930’s led their followers to separate from apostasy New evangelicalism has led back into the apostasy their forefathers left. Worse still, the reformation has been vitiated, and the Pope is ready to welcome the wanderers home. The doctrinal fence which kept the charismatic movement in another pasture has been rolled up. New evangelicalism is moving toward one flock, no matter what men believe.

…

Satan is building the one-world church of the end time.  . . . The effect of new evangelicalism has been to deliver much of this portion back to the devil’s program. Neutralism is an attack on Biblical obedience. When Biblical obedience is destroyed, it eventually destroys Biblical faith.

Secondly, new evangelicalism determined to find acceptance by the world. At first this was a craving for acceptance in scholarship and intellectual esteem. Soon that desire for acceptance moved on to culture, music and life style. The desire for acceptance has led to absorption into the world.

One of the key thoughts of new evangelicalism is toleration. That thought has led to the toleration of almost anything in the name of Christianity. Scripture does not say that God is tolerant, but it does say that God is holy. God said, “Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world.” A craving for the world’s acceptance, even in scholarship, will displace love for the Lord. “If any man love the world, the love of the Father is not in him” (I John 2:15).

The third determination of new evangelicalism was to add the social gospel to the scriptural gospel. … Contemporary new evangelicalism has forgotten that distinction and set the saving gospel and the social gospel side by side as equally important. Since man is a fallen creature, the social gospel will win the day. Man is always more concerned with the needs of his body than with the needs of his soul.”

I find that last statement rather compelling. It might explain, in part, today’s evangelicalism’s intense me-centeredness, including the almost exclusive use of temporal “blessings’ in much of our evangelism.

Theological Triage – Albert Mohler

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In every generation, the church is commanded to “contend for the faith once for all delivered to the saints.” That is no easy task, and it is complicated by the multiple attacks upon Christian truth that mark our contemporary age. Assaults upon the Christian faith are no longer directed only at isolated doctrines. The entire structure of Christian truth is now under attack by those who would subvert Christianity’s theological integrity.

Today’s Christian faces the daunting task of strategizing which Christian doctrines and theological issues are to be given highest priority in terms of our contemporary context. This applies both to the public defense of Christianity in face of the secular challenge and the internal responsibility of dealing with doctrinal disagreements. Neither is an easy task, but theological seriousness and maturity demand that we consider doctrinal issues in terms of their relative importance. God’s truth is to be defended at every point and in every detail, but responsible Christians must determine which issues deserve first-rank attention in a time of theological crisis.

A trip to the local hospital Emergency Room some years ago alerted me to an intellectual tool that is most helpful in fulfilling our theological responsibility. In recent years, emergency medical personnel have practiced a discipline known as triage – a process that allows trained personnel to make a quick evaluation of relative medical urgency. Given the chaos of an Emergency Room reception area, someone must be armed with the medical expertise to make an immediate determination of medical priority. Which patients should be rushed into surgery? Which patients can wait for a less urgent examination? Medical personnel cannot flinch from asking these questions, and from taking responsibility to give the patients with the most critical needs top priority in terms of treatment.

The same discipline that brings order to the hectic arena of the Emergency Room can also offer great assistance to Christians defending truth in the present   age. A discipline of theological triage would require Christians to determine a scale of theological urgency that would correspond to the medical world’s framework for medical priority. With this in mind, I would suggest three different levels of theological urgency, each corresponding to a set of issues and theological priorities found in current doctrinal debates.

First-level theological issues would include those doctrines most central and essential to the Christian faith. Included among these most crucial doctrines would be doctrines such as the Trinity, the full deity and humanity of Jesus Christ, justification by faith, and the authority of Scripture.

In the earliest centuries of the Christian movement, heretics directed their most dangerous attacks upon the church’s understanding of who Jesus is, and in what sense He is the very Son of God. Other crucial debates concerned the question of how the Son is related to the Father and the Holy Spirit. At historic turning-points such as the councils at Nicaea, Constantinople and Chalcedon, orthodoxy was vindicated and heresy was condemned – and these councils dealt with doctrines of unquestionable first-order importance. Christianity stands or falls on the affirmation that Jesus Christ is fully man and fully God.

The church quickly moved to affirm that the full deity and full humanity of Jesus Christ are absolutely necessary to the Christian faith. Any denial of what has become known as Nicaean-Chalcedonian Christology is, by definition, condemned as a heresy. The essential truths of the incarnation include the death, burial, and bodily resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ. Those who deny these revealed truths are, by definition, not Christians.

The same is true with the doctrine of the Trinity. The early church clarified and codified its understanding of the one true and living God by affirming the full deity of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit – while insisting that the Bible reveals one God in three persons. In addition to the Christological and Trinitarian doctrines, the doctrine of justification by faith must also be included among these first-order truths. Without this doctrine, we are left with a denial of the Gospel itself, and salvation is transformed into some structure of human righteousness.

The truthfulness and authority of the Holy Scriptures must also rank as a first-order doctrine, for without an affirmation of the Bible as the very Word of God, we are left without any adequate authority for distinguishing truth from error.

These first-order doctrines represent the most fundamental truths of the Christian faith, and a denial of these doctrines represents nothing less than an eventual denial of Christianity itself.

The set of second-order doctrines is distinguished from the first-order set by the fact that believing Christians may disagree on the second-order issues, though this disagreement will create significant boundaries between believers. When Christians organize themselves into congregations and denominational forms, these boundaries become evident.

Second-order issues would include the meaning and mode of baptism. Baptists and Presbyterians, for example, fervently disagree over the most basic understanding of Christian baptism. The practice of infant baptism is inconceivable to the Baptist mind, while Presbyterians trace infant baptism to their most basic understanding of the covenant. Standing together on the first-order doctrines, Baptists and Presbyterians eagerly recognize each other as believing Christians, but recognize that disagreement on issues of this importance will prevent fellowship within the same congregation or denomination.

Christians across a vast denominational range can stand together on the first-order doctrines and recognize each other as authentic Christians, while understanding that the existence of second-order disagreements prevents the closeness of fellowship we would otherwise enjoy. A church either will recognize infant baptism, or it will not. That choice immediately creates a second-order conflict with those who take the other position by conviction.

In recent years, the issue of women serving as pastors has emerged as another second-order issue. Again, a church or denomination either will ordain women to the pastorate, or it will not. Second-order issues resist easy settlement by those who would prefer an either/or approach. Many of the most heated disagreements among serious believers take place at the second-order level, for these issues frame our understanding of the church and its ordering by the Word of God.

Third-order issues are doctrines over which Christians may disagree and remain in close fellowship, even within local congregations. I would put most of the debates over eschatology, for example, in this category. Christians who affirm the bodily, historical and victorious return of the Lord Jesus Christ may differ over timetable and sequence without rupturing the fellowship of the church. Christians may find themselves in disagreement over any number of issues related to the interpretation of difficult texts or the understanding of matters of common disagreement. Nevertheless, standing together on issues of more urgent
importance, believers are able to accept one another without compromise when third-order issues are in question.

A structure of theological triage does not imply that Christians may take any biblical truth with less than full seriousness. We are charged to embrace and to teach the comprehensive truthfulness of the Christian faith as revealed in the Holy Scriptures. There are no insignificant doctrines revealed in the Bible, but there is an essential foundation of truth that undergirds the entire system of biblical truth.

This structure of theological triage may also help to explain how confusion can often occur in the midst of doctrinal debate. If the relative urgency of these truths is not taken into account, the debate can quickly become unhelpful. The error of theological liberalism is evident in a basic disrespect for biblical authority and the church’s treasury of truth. The mark of true liberalism is the refusal to admit that first-order theological issues even exist. Liberals treat
first-order doctrines as if they were merely third-order in importance, and doctrinal ambiguity is the inevitable result.

Fundamentalism, on the other hand, tends toward the opposite error. The misjudgment of true fundamentalism is the belief that all disagreements concern first-order doctrines. Thus, third-order issues are raised to a first-order importance, and Christians are wrongly and harmfully divided. Living in an age of widespread doctrinal denial and intense theological confusion, thinking Christians must rise to the challenge of Christian maturity, even in the midst of a theological emergency. We must sort the issues with a trained mind and a humble heart, in order to protect what the Apostle Paul called the “treasure” that has been entrusted to us. Given the urgency of this challenge, a lesson from the Emergency Room just might help.

R. Albert Mohler Jr. is the president of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and the author of Culture Shift: Engaging Current Issues with Timeless Truth (Multnomah).

This article originally appeared in the Summer 2006 Southern Seminary Magazine.

The Path of a Christian’s Growth – Dan Phillips

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Dan Phillips over at Pyromaniacs devoted a couple of blog posts to thoughts concerning the latest Florida ‘Revival’. In the second blog post I found this morning, concerning the path of a Christian’s growth to maturity:

We start out wrong about everything important. We have an innate sense of God, but we suppress and pervert it (Romans 1:1-32). We’re dead and blind (Ephesians 2:1-3; 4:17-19). In this condition, even if we hear the Word of God, nothing savingly significant happens (Matthew 13:4-7, 18-22).

  1. God sovereignly gives us life (Ephesians 2:5), causes His word to be life to us (1 Peter 1:23-25), enables us to see what we had been unable to see (2 Corinthians 4:3-6), and saves us by grace through faith as a gift (Ephesians 2:8-10).
  2. Thus awakened and made alive, we respond to God’s word in faith (Romans 10:17), yoke ourselves to Christ in repentant faith (Matthew 11:28-30; Acts 11:18; 17:31), in witness to which we are baptized and committed to a lifelong process of learning His word (Matthew 28:18-20; John 8:31-32).
  3. Our goal then becomes to grow to maturity in and unto Christ (Ephesians 4:15-16; 2 Peter 3:18).
  4. Specifically, what this maturity looks like involves (among other things) a grounded stability in God’s revealed truth that is resistant to the gusty winds of fad and fashion (Ephesians 4:13-14), and a well-practiced adeptness in the Word of God that enables us to assess, discern, and judge right from wrong, good from evil, and truth from falsehood (Hebrews 4:12; 5:14).

On conversion, the new believer lays down as a basic premise the Lordship of Jesus Christ (1 Corinthians 12:3b). This is the controlling consideration for all that follows (Colossians 2:6-7). Insofar as he is true to his birthright and call as a Christian, he begins building a framework of truth, and continues building all his life (Proverbs 1:2-6). His goal is to be able to test all things, internal and external, in the light of God’s Word (Psalm 119:9, 11; Hebrews 4:12).

His hero isn’t Indiana Jones, so his motto isn’t “I don’t know, I’m making this up as I go.” His hero is Jesus Christ, whose life was a symphony of pursuit of His Father’s will (John 4:34).

And so he doesn’t drop his Bible and dance the Headless Chicken Jig every time —

  • someone tells a hair-raising barn-burner of a story; or
  • some World-Class Scholar (or mega-church pastor) writes a Newest, Greatest, Everything-Must-Change book; or
  • popular opinion turns against a truth he’s convinced of from Scripture; or
  • everyone who’s anyone is embracing a teaching he’s not convinced of from Scripture; or
  • the secular media’s fitful fascination lights briefly on some new religious entertainment.

The disciple’s goal is not conformity to the fickle fads of the world, secular or religious. Rather, it is (to coin a word) transformity, into the likeness of the mind, will, and character of God (Romans 12:1-2; 2 Corinthians 3:18).

NOTE: Dan Phillips initial blog about the Florida revival is here.

Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners – John Bunyan

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Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners, written during this imprisonment, is the spiritual autobiography of Bunyan, the traveling tinker who became the eminent preacher and author. It is in the genre of Augustine’s Confessions and Thomas a Kempis’s Imitation of Christ. It is not a detailed account of Bunyan’s early life, for it tells us very little of his youth, education, military experiences, and marriages.

Written in 1666, Grace Abounding chronicles Bunyan’s spiritual journey from a profane life filled with cursing, blasphemy, and Sabbath desecration to a new creation in Christ Jesus.

The Conclusion:

Of all the temptations that ever I met with in my life, to question the being of God, and the truth of His gospel, is the worst, and the worst to be borne; when this temptation comes, it takes away my girdle from me, and removes the foundations from under me. Oh, I have often thought of that word, ‘Have your loins girt about with truth’; and of that, ‘When the foundations are destroyed, what can the righteous do?’

Sometimes, when, after sin committed, I have looked for sore chastisement from the hand of God, the very next that I have had from Him hath been the discovery of His grace. Sometimes, when I have been comforted, I have called myself a fool for my so sinking under trouble. And then, again, when I have been cast down, I thought I was not wise to give such way to comfort. With such strength and weight have both these been upon me.

I have wondered much at this one thing, that though God doth visit my soul with never so blessed a discovery of Himself, yet I have found again, that such hours have attended me afterwards, that I have been in my spirit so filled with darkness, that I could not so much as once conceive what that God and that comfort was with which I have been refreshed.

I have sometimes seen more in a line of the Bible than I could well tell how to stand under, and yet at another time the whole Bible hath been to me as dry as a stick; or rather, my heart hath been so dead and dry unto it, that I could not conceive the least dram of refreshment, though I have looked it all over.

Of all tears, they are the best that are made by the blood of Christ; and of all joy, that is the sweetest that is mixed with mourning over Christ. Oh! it is a goodly thing to be on our knees, with Christ in our arms, before God. I hope I know something of these things.

I find to this day seven abominations in my heart:

  • Inclinings to unbelief.
  • Suddenly to forget the love and mercy that Christ manifests.
  • A leaning to the works of the law.
  • Wanderings and coldness in prayer.
  • To forget to watch for that I pray for. (
  • Apt to murmur because I have no more, and yet ready to abuse what I have.
  • I can do none of those things which God commands me, but my corruptions will thrust in themselves, ‘When I would do good, evil is present with me.’

These things I continually see and feel, and am afflicted and oppressed with; yet the wisdom of God doth order them for my good.

  • They make me abhor myself.
  • They keep me from trusting my heart.
  • They convince me of the insufficiency of all inherent righteousness.
  • They show me the necessity of flying to Jesus.
  • They press me to pray unto God.
  • They show me the need I have to watch and be sober.
  • And provoke me to look to God, through Christ, to help me, and carry me through this world. Amen.

The Postmodern Gospel

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Found a couple of thought provoking quotes over at Reformed Voices:

“The postmodern individual may be the easiest sinner in 200 years to interest in the faith. Yet he is capable of living with contradictions. He can claim to have received Jesus but not believe in his historical existence. He can claim to believe in the inerrancy of Scripture but deny absolute truth. When the gospel is presented as a means of improving self-image, giving us a spiritual and thrilling experience, providing a source for success and fulfillment, or helping us overcome loneliness, we may be speaking the language of the age; however, we have trivialized and distorted the gospel message as to make it meaningless.”
…
“Perhaps there has never been a time when it has been more vital to present the gospel message clearly and without apology. That Christ died on the cross to save us from our sins and give us his righteousness is the good news, which the sinner must understand. The issue on the table is sin, not felt needs. Our postmodern generation needs to hear that we have offended a holy God and are thus separated from him. If we do not tell them this we are in danger of preaching another gospel (Gal. 1:9).”
-Gary E. Gilley, This Little Church Stayed Home p50-51

NOTE: Gary Gilley has been Pastor of Southern View Chapel in Springfield, Illinois since 1975 and has written several books about current trends in evangelicalism.

Another gospel?

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“I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting the one who called you by the grace of Christ and are turning to a different gospel–” Galatians 1:6

Martin Luther’s commentary on the above verse states:

“When the devil sees that he cannot hurt the cause of the Gospel by destructive methods, he does it under the guise of correcting and advancing the cause of the Gospel. He would like best of all to persecute us with fire and sword, but this method has availed him little because through the blood of martyrs the church has been watered. Unable to prevail by force, he engages wicked and ungodly teachers who at first make common cause with us, then claim that they are particularly called to teach the hidden mysteries of the Scriptures to superimpose upon the first principles of Christian doctrine that we teach. This sort of thing brings the Gospel into trouble. May we all cling to the Word of Christ against the wiles of the devil, “for we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.”

Within the Galatian church, the false prophets to whom Paul referred were those who would add to the sufficiency of the gospel of grace through faith. Luther, like Paul, was concerned with the adding of works to the principles of faith. Paul’s clear teaching is that adding ‘works’ to grace is ‘another gospel’.

When we look around at the landscape of American Christianity we can find, even today, examples of adding works to the principles of faith in the matter of the salvation of the soul, as well as in the matter of the assurance of our salvation. In contrast, a far greater danger today might be what has been taken away from the teaching of the gospel rather than what is added. Gone, for the most part, is clear preaching and teaching concerning the problem of sin (before and after salvation), along with the adjacent topics of wrath, judgment to come, and the spiritual warfare faced by every believer as he/she works out their salvation with ‘fear and trembling’.

Without mentioning specific examples of today’s popular ministry methods, here’s the question/food for thought: Are omissions from the gospel as preached and taught in Scripture, for whatever reason, examples of ‘another gospel’?

The Effect of Preaching the Gospel

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John Newton, former slaver trader and author of the hymn “Amazing Grace” had this to say about the effect of preaching the gospel of Jesus Christ:

“When the Gospel first comes to a place, though the people are going on in sin, they may be said to sin ignorantly; they have not yet been warned of their danger. Some are drinking down iniquity like water; others more soberly burying themselves alive in the cares and business of the world; others find a little time for what they call religious duties, which they persevere in, though they are utter strangers to the nature or the pleasure of spiritual worship; partly, as thereby they think to bargain with God and to make amends for such sins as they do not choose to relinquish; and partly because it gratifies their pride, and affords them (as they think) some ground for saying, “God, I thank thee I am not as other men.” The preached Gospel declares the vanity and danger of these several ways which sinners choose to walk in. It declares, and demonstrates, that, different as they appear from each other, they are equally remote from the path of safety and peace, and all tend to the same point, the destruction of those who persist in them. At the same time it provides against that despair into which men would be otherwise plunged, when convinced of their sins, by revealing the immense love of God, the glory and grace of Christ, and inviting all to come to him, that they may obtain pardon, life, and happiness. In a word, it (the preaching of the gospel) shows the pit of hell under men’s feet, and opens the gate and points out the way to heaven.” – John Newton (1725-1807) (Emphasis mine)

The ‘preached gospel’ described above doesn’t seem to have much in common with the ‘gospel’ heard in most churches today.  Food for thought. . .

What is the state of the ‘natural man’?

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I think most of the ‘issues’ of the American church ultimately revolve around what we think of the state of human beings apart from Christ. Are we basically good with a few rough edges that need smoothing out? Are we able to choose Christ out of our purely human nature? Is NOT choosing Christ going against our human nature? Or are we born in a depraved state and in a ‘natural’ state of rebellion and hatred toward God?

The Case for Theology and Apologetics

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I’ve been downloading and listening to this year’s series of discussions concerning Christianity and the Christian church over at The White Horse Inn. Last week and this week thay have been discussing the title of this post. They can both be downloaded from OnePlace.com. Just click the MP3 icon. There is a short registration process (no cost) to download the broadcasts.

Is God for Us or for Himself? – John Piper

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I would like to try to persuade you that the chief end of God is to glorify God and enjoy Himself forever. Or to put it another way: the chief end of God is to enjoy glorifying Himself.

The reason this may sound strange is that we tend to be more familiar with our duties than with God’s designs. We know why we exist – to glorify God and enjoy him forever. But why does God exist? What should he love with all his heart and soul and mind and strength? Whom should he worship? Or will we deny him that highest of pleasures? It matters a lot what God’s ultimate allegiance is to!

If you asked my four sons, “What’s the most important thing to your dad?” and they said, “I don’t know,” I’d be really disappointed. But if they said, “I don’t care,” I’d be crushed – and angry. It ought to matter to a son what a father regards as ultimately important. It ought to matter a lot to us what God is committed to with all his heart and soul and mind and strength. What is the impulse that drives the Almighty? What does he pursue in all his plans?

God did not leave us to guess in this affair. He answers the question at every point in redemptive history from creation to consummation. Let’s survey some of the high points to see what he says.

Why did God create us? Isaiah 43:6-7, “Bring my sons from afar and my daughters from the ends of the earth (says the Lord), everyone who is called by my name, whom I created for my glory.”

Why did God choose a people for himself and make Israel his possession? Jeremiah 13:11, “I made the whole house of Israel … cling to me, says the Lord, that they might be for me a people, a name, a praise and a glory.”

Why did God rescue them from bondage in Egypt? Psalm 106:7-8, “Our fathers, when they were in Egypt, did not consider thy wonderful works…but rebelled against the Most High at the Red Sea. Yet he saved them for his name’s sake that he might make known his mighty power.”

Why did God spare them again and again in the wilderness? Ezekiel 20:14, “I acted for the sake of my name, that it should not be profaned in the sight of the nations in whose sight I had brought them out.”

Why didn’t God cast away his people when they rejected him as king and asked for a king like the nations? 1 Samuel 12:20-22, “Fear not, you have done all this evil yet do not turn aside from following the Lord … For the Lord will not cast away his people for his great name’s sake.”

Why did God use his sovereign power to bring back his people from exile after punishing four generations of sin? Isaiah (48:9,11) put it like this, “For my name’s sake I defer my anger, for the sake of my praise I restrain it for you … For my own sake, for my own sake I do it, for how should my name be profaned? My glory I will not give to another.”

Ezekiel 36:22-23,32 puts it like this: “Thus says the Lord God, ‘It is not for your sake, 0 house of Israel, that I am about to act, but for the sake of my holy name … And I will vindicate the holiness of my great name … and the nations will know that I am the Lord. It is not for your sake that I will act,’ says the Lord God. Let that be known to you. Be ashamed and confounded for your ways, 0 house of Israel.'”

Why did the Son of God come to earth and to his final decisive hour? John 17:1, “Father, the hour has come; glorify thy Son that the Son may glorify thee.” A beautiful conspiracy to glorify the Godhead in all the work of redemption!

And why will Jesus come again in the great day of consummation? 2 Thessalonians 1:9-10, “Those who do not obey the gospel will suffer the punishment of eternal destruction and exclusion from the presence of the Lord and from the glory of his might, when he comes on that day to be glorified in his saints and to be marveled at in all who have believed… ”

From beginning to end, the driving impulse of God’s heart is to be praised for his glory. From creation to consummation his ultimate allegiance is to himself. His unwavering purpose in all he does is to exalt the honor of his name and to be marveled at for his grace and power. He is infinitely jealous for his reputation. “For my own sake, for my own sake I act,” says the Lord. “My glory I will not give to another!”

My experience in preaching and teaching is that American evangelicals receive this truth with some skepticism if they receive it at all. None of my sons has ever brought home a Sunday school paper with the lesson title: “God loves himself more than he loves you.” But it is profoundly true, and so generation after generation of evangelicals grow up picturing themselves at the center of God’s universe.

I am going to make the assumption, though, that the vast majority of you do not want to usurp God’s place at the center of his universe. You probably have two other objections coming to your minds against making God so self-centered. One is that we don’t like people who act that way, and the other is that the Bible teaches that we shouldn’t act that way. I’ll try to answer these two objections, and in doing so, I hope I can also show why God’s commitment to his own glory is immensely relevant for your life.

First Objection: we don’t like people who are enamored with themselves.

We just don’t like people who seem to be very enamored by their own skill or power or looks. We don’t like scholars who try to show off their specialized knowledge or who recite for us all their recent publications and lectureships. We don’t like businessmen who go on and on about how shrewdly they have invested their pile of money and how they stayed right on top of the market to get in low and out high every time. We don’t like children to play one-upmanship hour after hour. Unless we are one of them, we disapprove of women and men who dress, not functionally, simply and inoffensively, but to be in the latest style. They do this so they will be thought in or cool or preppy or north-woods or laid-back or whatever the world this week says you are supposed to look like.

Why don’t we like all that? I think it is because all those people are inauthentic. They are what Ayn Rand calls “second-handers.” They don’t live from the joy that comes through achieving what they value for its own sake. Instead, they live second-hand from the praise and compliments of others. We don’t admire second-handers, we admire people who are composed and secure enough that they don’t feel the need to shore up their weaknesses and compensate for their deficiencies by trying to get as many compliments as possible.

It stands to reason, therefore, that any teaching which would seem to put God in the category of a second-hander would be suspect to Christians. And for many the teaching that God is seeking praise and wants to be admired and is doing things for his own name’s sake, does in fact seem to put God in such a category. But should it? One thing we may say for certain. God is not weak and has no deficiencies. “All things are from him and through him and to him” (Romans 11:36). He always was. Whatever else is, owes its being to him and so can add nothing to him which is not already flowing from him. That is simply what it means to be God and not a creature. Therefore, God’s zeal to seek his own glory and to be praised by men cannot be owing to his need to shore up some weakness or compensate for some deficiency. He may seem, at a superficial glance, to be in the category of second-handers. But, he is not like them and the superficial similarity must be explained another way. There must be some other motive that prompts him to seek the praise of his glory.

Second Objection: seeking one’s own glory is not loving.

There is another reason, from experience, why we don’t like those who seek their own glory. It is not merely that they are inauthentic, trying to conceal weakness and deficiency, but also that they are unloving. They are so concerned for their own image and praise that they do not care much for what happens to other people. This observation leads us to the Biblical reason why it seems offensive for God to seek his own glory. 1 Corinthians 13:5 says, “Love seeks not its own.” Now this indeed seems to create a crisis, for if, as I think the Scriptures plainly teach, God makes it his ultimate goal to be glorified and praised, how then can he be loving? For “love seeks not its own.” “For my own sake, for my own sake I act, my glory I will not give to another” (Isaiah 48:11). But if God is a God of love, he must be for us. Is God for himself or is he for us?

Here is the answer of which I want to persuade you. Since God is unique as the most glorious of all beings and totally self-sufficient, he must be for himself if he is to be for us. If he were to abandon the goal of his own self-exaltation we would be the losers. His aim to bring praise to himself, and his aim to bring pleasure to his people, are one aim. They stand or fall together. I think we will see this if we ask the following question.

In view of God’s infinitely admirable beauty, power and wisdom, what would his love to a creature involve? Or to put it another way: what could God give us to enjoy that would show him most loving? There is only one possible answer, isn’t there? HIMSELF! If God would give us that which is best and most satisfying, that is, if he would love us perfectly, he must offer us no less than himself for our contemplation and fellowship and joy. “In thy presence is fullness of joy. In thy right hand are pleasures for evermore.” (Ps. 16:11)

This was precisely God’s intention in sending his son. Ephesians 2:18 says that Christ came that we might “have access in one Spirit to the Father.” And 1 Peter 3:18 says, “Christ died for sins once for all, the righteous for the unrighteous that he might bring us to God.” God is after us to give us what is best – not prestige, wealth or even health in this life, but a full-blown vision of, and fellowship with, himself.

Now we are on the brink of what, for me, was a grand discovery, and is the solution to our problem. To be supremely loving, God must give us what will be best for us and delight us most; he must give us himself. But what do we do when we are given or shown something excellent, something we enjoy? We praise it. We praise new little babies that manage not to be all bent out of shape in birth; “O, look at that nice round head; and all that hair; and his hands, aren’t they big!” We praise a lover’s face after a long absence. “Your eyes are like the sky; your hair is like silk; 0, you are beautiful to me.” We praise a grand slam in the bottom of the ninth when we are down by three runs. We praise the trees in the fall.

But the great discovery I made, with the help of C. S. Lewis and Jonathan Edwards, was not only that we praise what we enjoy, but that this praise is the climax of the joy itself. It is not tacked on later; it is part of the pleasure. Listen to the way Lewis describes this insight from his book on the Psalms.

But the most obvious fact about praise – whether of God or anything – strangely escaped me. I thought of it in terms of compliment, approval, or the giving of honor. I had never noticed that all enjoyment spontaneously overflows into praise unless (sometimes even if) shyness or the fear of boring others is deliberately brought in to check it. The world rings with praise – lovers praising their mistresses, readers their favorite poet, walkers praising the countryside, players praising their favorite game – praise of weather, wines, dishes, actors, horses, colleges, countries, historical personages, children, flowers, mountains, rare stamps, rare beetles, even sometimes politicians and scholars … My whole, more general difficulty about the praise of God depended on my absurdly denying to us, as regards the supremely Valuable, what we delight to do, what indeed we can’t help doing, about everything else we value.

There’s the key: we praise what we enjoy because the delight is incomplete until it is expressed in praise. If we were not allowed to speak of what we value and celebrate, what we love and praise, what we admire, our joy would not be full. Jonathan Edwards said, “Joy is a great ingredient in praise … Praise is the most joyful work in the world.” Therefore, if God is truly for us, if he would give us the best and make our joy full, he must make it his aim to win our praise for himself. Not because he needs to shore up some weakness in himself or compensate for some deficiency, but because he loves us and seeks the fullness of our joy that can only be found in knowing and praising him, the most beautiful of all Beings.

God is the one Being in the entire universe for whom self-centeredness, or the pursuit of his own glory, is the ultimately loving act. For him, self-exaltation is the highest virtue. When he does all things “for the praise of his glory,” he preserves for us and offers to us, the only thing in the entire world, which can satisfy our longings. God is for us, and therefore has been, is now and always will be, first, for himself. I urge you not to resent the centrality of God in his own affections, but to experience it as the fountain of your everlasting joy.

By John Piper. © Desiring God. Website: www.desiringGod.org.