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T.U.L.I.P. - Lesson 1

Introduction to T.U.L.I.P.

Romans 8:28-30 focuses on the idea that God works everything together for the good of those who are called according to his purpose. The Bible holds up Romans 8:28 with foreknowledge, predestination, calling, justification and glorification. The essence of idolatry is the entertainment of thoughts about God that are unworthy of him. We imagine things about God and act as if they are true. Verses like Ephesians 1:4 and Revelation 13:8 refer to God's plans that were in place before the "foundation of the world."

John Piper
T.U.L.I.P.
Lesson 1
Watching Now
Introduction to T.U.L.I.P.

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  • Romans 8:28-30 focuses on the idea that God works everything together for the good of those who are called according to his purpose. The Bible holds up Romans 8:28 with foreknowledge, predestination, calling, justification and glorification. The essence of idolatry is the entertainment of thoughts about God that are unworthy of him. We imagine things about God and act as if they are true. Verses like Ephesians 1:4 and Revelation 13:8 refer to God's plans that were in place before the foundation of the world.
  • Dr. Piper explains his assumptions about the authority of scripture, the importance of understanding and applying what it teaches and the role of the Holy Spirit in making it possible. The five points of Calvinism were first articulated in response to five objections that Arminians had to Calvin's theology in the 1600's.
  • Irresistable grace means we are brought to the place where grace gives us faith. Conditional talk from God to us should not be taken to mean he is dependent on us to meet the condition or that we should consider ourselves self-reliant in meeting the condition he has laid out. He intends to enable us to meet the condition so he can act. If grace were not irresistable, we would not incline to God because of our condition of total depravity. In summary, total depravity means that apart from any enabling grace from God, our hardness and rebellion against God is total. Everything we do in this rebellion is sin, our inability to submit to God or reform ourselves is total, and we are therefore totally deserving of eternal punishment.
  • "Total" depravity doesn't mean you are as bad as you can be. The point of unconditional election is that there are no conditions we must meet to be among the elect. God chooses individuals he will bring to faith. The Arminian position is that God chooses a corporate entity, so that it is not that individuals are in the church because they are elect, but that they are elect because they are in the church. We don't belong to God because we come to Jesus, we come to Jesus because we belong to God.
  • We are unable to believe in Christ but we are accountable for doing so. In election, God had a design in mind when he chose the foolish, the weak and the low to populate his church so that no human could boast in his presence and so we would praise and exalt God.
  • Is God's election based on his foreknowledge of your faith, or is faith the effect of your election? (see Romans 8:28-30) Faith is the effect because all the called, believe. Romans 9:1-23 is an argument for the justice of unconditional election. The heart of the righteousness of God is his unswerving allegiance to always uphold his glory.
  • God's aim was the revelation of the riches of his glory for the vessels of mercy prepared beforehand for glory. The apex of that glory is the glory of grace. The supreme demonstration of that grace was the death of Jesus. The atonement is the work of God in Christ, by his obedience and death, by which he cancelled the debt of our sin, appeased his holy wrath against us, and won for us all the benefits of salvation.
  • Even though believers are accepted in His Beloved, effectually called and sanctified by His Spirit, and slavery to sin is broken, sinful desires progressively weakened by the power of a superior satisfaction in the glory of Christ, yet there remain remnants of corruption in every heart that give rise to irreconcilable war and call for vigilance in the lifelong fight of faith. All who are justified will win this fight.
  • It's important to determine theological truths by basing your ideas on scriptural texts, not just logic. These scriptural truths can encourage us to live our lives in relationship to God, worship him, tell others about him and look forward to his kingdom being realized on earth.

God is sovereign and has planned everything about our salvation from before the foundation of the world. Romans 8:28-30 focuses on the idea that God works everything together for the good of those who are called according to his purpose.

We are thankful for John Piper's willingness to share these lectures with us. Copyright 2014 by Desiring God Ministries. Used with Permission. For more information, please visit www.DesiringGod.org.

Dr. John Piper T.U.L.I.P. LD625-01 Introduction Lesson Transcript [00:00:00] The following message is by Pastor John Piper. More information from Desiring God is available at www.DesiringGod.org. Father in heaven. I'm not the only one here who needs your help. We all need it. We need it because hearts by nature are not wired to love the truth, but to love error. The kind of error that exalts us and minimizes you. But when we were born again, we were given a new inclination. And I pray that that new inclination would flourish here, and that we would all be eager and hungry to hear truth. And it would. We would see it when we have it proclaimed to us, when we find it in your word, that you would humble us to it, incline us to your testimonies and not to getting gain that you would open the eyes of our hearts to see what's really there and wonderful things in your Scriptures that you would unite our heart to fear your name, that you would satisfy us in this seminar with your steadfast love as it's revealed in the Scriptures. Well, we live in a world that is very God minimizing and God ignoring and God re shaping and re conceiving and God denying. And here we are about to talk about some of the most magnificently God centered God exalting things in the universe. And therefore, most of what has fed into our lives in these years has not prepared us for this moment. Your spirit will. And so we ask him to come. Come. Holy Spirit. Be our teacher. Help me to be faithful to your word, Father. I ask this in Jesus name, Amen. So the first thing we want to do is introductory remarks. Just stage setting. So you know where I'm coming from and what's on my front burner. [00:02:49] 1985 I went back and confirmed it on the internet from October 13 to November 3rd. I delivered seven messages at Bethlehem on Romans eight, 28 230. We know that all things work together for good for those who love God and to call according to His purpose. For those whom he for knew he predestined to be conformed to the image of his son, that he might be the first born among many brethren and those whom he predestined. He also called and those whom he called. He also justified and those whom he justified. He also glorified seven messages on those verses. Up until that point in the life of our church had been here for five years. We had not made any issue at all about so called Calvinism. We hadn't made any issue at all of this controversial thing. I had just tried to be faithful to biblical texts because I think that's what wins the confidence of God's people. They don't they don't want to hear system. Mainly they want to hear Bible mainly, which is what they ought to mainly here. And so I tried to just win their trust to say, I'm a Bible man, I'm not a system man mainly. But after five years, it seemed like the time was right to talk about those verses. And they present to you one of the reasons why this issue of the sovereignty of God in Salvation or Tulip, which we'll talk about shortly, or Calvinism, however you want to describe it. One of the reasons for it is because these realities are in Romans eight, the foundation of the most precious promise in the world, namely that everything works together for our God. So did you see you see the connection? I put it up here for you. [00:05:18] We know that for those who love God, all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose. So most people find that to be one of the most precious promises in the Bible. All things work together for good for those who are called according to his purpose. But not many people contemplate this word right here. The foundation for that promise is for those whom he for knew he predestined and those whom he predestined, he called and those whom he called he justified and those whom he justified, he glorified. Those are links in a chain which, if any of them breaks, that promise is over. And to see that is practically very, very important for me. I don't ever want to lose. Romans 828. I build my life on Romans 828. I do my pastoral ministry on Romans 828. I face seminars like this with voice challenges on the basis of Romans 828. If I lose Romans 828, I can't do my ministry. I don't know how I would do life. So how the Bible supports Romans 828 holds it up, makes a big difference to me. And the way it holds it up is through foreknowledge, predestination, calling, justification, glorification, and they all hang together. So that's the first thing. By way of introductory remark, I wanted to say that that historically I introduce these things to the church after about five years of being here and I introduced them where I want them always to be as a precious, powerful support for the most practical realities in the world. These things aren't aren't for fighting about to me. They are for winning arguments about the art to pull yourself up or distinguish yourself from anybody there, to live by there to survive with. [00:07:56] You could tell you how many people over the years have come to Bethlehem. They'll be here about five months. Their 21 year old son gets lumps in his neck. You go to visit in the hospital after the test the next day. They give him about five months to live and he dies. And they say, Why? You're standing around the hospital in his last hours. Had I not heard the word concerning the absolute sovereignty of God over my life, I would have gone insane in losing my son. Not everybody responds that way. I know that. But I have heard it enough from the depths of people's being, and I live it enough to know that's reality. That's the way it's supposed to work. These doctrines are not mainly there just to entertain our intellects. They're there to provide rock under our feet when everything around our soul gives way, which it will sooner or later in your life. So that's the first one. The second one. These are just introductory thoughts to set the stage. I want to read a few quotes from A.W. Tozer. Tozer was a pastor in the middle of the last century who wrote quite a few books and almost all of them about God. And He had a very huge passion to reorient the American church on a bigger God. He lived at the same time that JB Phillips was living, and if you're my age or roundabout, you can remember what JB Phillips contributed to the church in the sixties. He contributed a paraphrase of the New Testament, and he contributed a little book called Your God Is What? Too Small? Your God is Too Small. So you had Jamie Phillips and you had Debbie Tozer, and there have always been others helping the church wake up to the American minimization of God. [00:10:31] We Americans are so amazingly self-sufficient and self-determining and self, almost everything that for Americans to hold a high view of the greatness of God is more difficult than some. So here are a few quotes that resonate with me to this very day. This was written 60 years ago, but they're still true. He said, It is my opinion that the Christian conception of God current in the middle years of the 20th century is so decadent as to be utterly beneath the dignity of the most high God, and actually to constitute for professed believers something amounting to a moral calamity. All the problems of heaven and earth, though they were to confront us together at once and at once would be nothing compared with the overwhelming problem of God. That is that He is what he is like and what we as moral beings must do about him. The man who comes to a right belief about God is relieved of 10,000 temporal problems. That's an amazing statement. One of my philosophies of ministry, if you want to call it that, of preaching, is that even though I don't know in this room here, how many, say two or 3000 problems you're facing right now, corporately and collectively and summing up all the problems, I don't know what they are. So how am I supposed to address them? How am I supposed to say anything that's helpful to you on Sunday morning or in the seminar? Being a pastor and looking out on several thousand folks week after week and thinking you're going to be relevant by addressing each problem specifically. You're not. They're going to bring people are going to bring to the church and to this room issues I've never even dreamed that you're facing. [00:12:46] Does that mean I cannot say anything that God would be pleased to use for that very thing that I've never heard of? And the answer for me is if I keep God himself central and lift him up week after week and do everything I can to make him look and feel magnificent, that very issue will solve a hundred problems in your life that you do not even know is the solution to the problems. We're made for God. We're made to see him and know him and and tremble in his presence and be awed by him. And if we are seeing him as he is and responding as we are, there are a hundred things that get worked out in our brains, in our hearts and our circumstances that would not have gotten worked out had we been presented with a lesser God. So when he said that, I think he's he's right. The man who comes to a right belief about God is relieved of 10,000 temporal problems for he sees at once. These have to do with matters which at the most can concern him for very long. But even if the multiple burdens of time may be lifted from him, the one mighty single burden of eternity begins to press down upon him with a weight more crushing than all the woes of the world piled one upon another. No words. If we could solve that issue, understand that issue. Get that settled. Who is God? What's happening to me in eternity? How do I relate to him? Continuing down the page a little bit. Let us beware, lest we in our pride, accept the erroneous notion that idolatry consists only in kneeling before visible objects of adoration, and the civilized peoples are therefore free from it. [00:15:00] The essence of idolatry is the entertainment of thoughts about God that are unworthy of him. I think that's a very penetrating and indicting definition of idolatry. It begins in the mind and may be present where no overt act of worship has taken place. Wrong ideas about God are not only the fountain from which the polluted waters of idolatry flow. They are themselves idolatrous. The idolatry simply imagines things about God and acts as if they were true. In other words, according to that definition of idolatry, you must think rightly about God in order not to be in idolatry. Because if you entertain thoughts about Him that are untrue about him or unworthy of him, those very thoughts your affections are responding to and they're not the way he is. One more section. The first step down for any church is taken when it surrenders its high opinion of God before the Christian church goes into Eclipse anywhere. There must first be a corrupting of her simple, basic theology. She simply gets a wrong answer to the question What is God like? And goes on from there. Though she may continue to cling to a sound nominal creed, her practical working creed has become false. The masses of her adherents come to believe that God is different from what He actually is, and that is heresy of the most insidious and deadly kind. The heaviest obligation lying upon the Christian church today is to purify and elevate her concept of God until it is once more worthy of Him in net. So that's Tozer. And it rang true with me. I think that's exactly right that we live in a day where the churches in America, by and large, as David Wells has said so powerfully in his book, No Place for Truth and God in the Wasteland, in which the the glory of God weighs lightly upon the church. [00:17:51] God is not felt in your typical church as a weighty reality. People people want to be cheery. They want to be light hearted, not weighty. And so in order to feel friendly, we calculate everything in an entertainment mode so that people feel chipper. And how can a magnificent God survive in that atmosphere? How can a right view of God and write affections for God? I when I when I read this book, I get a different flavor. This book is an amazingly serious book. There's weightiness everywhere you turn in this book. And so it seems if we're to be biblical, which we are, that our churches should have about them of flavor, not of morose ness, but of serious joy, weighty joy. So that's number two in my introductory reflections, the the toes are missing piece of the great big God in our culture and in our churches, in our psyche. Third, let me put on the overhead a few texts that I have been moved by recently. Just to give you a flavor, I think catching the flavor of this seminar is is very important. Texts that have moved me in recent months. I just sent off to the publisher the sermon series that I did last year called Spectacular Sins and Their Global Purpose in the Glory of Jesus Christ, which is an extremely offensive title because it implies that sins have purpose in the glory of Christ. I mean, it doesn't imply it. It says it. And you'll see that sermon series grew out of this burden. And these burdens are now extensions of things I've been seeing all along. You know, as you grow older, you read the same Bible over and over again, Right? But, oh, what we see that we hadn't seen before. [00:20:36] Isn't it's wonderful how you can just see so many things you've read 100 times and affectionately they grip you new. But even insights are new. Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places, even as he chose us in Him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before him. In love. In love, he predestined us for adoption as sons through Jesus Christ, according to the purpose of his will, to the praise of His glorious grace, or literally to the praise of the glory of His grace, which he has blessed us with, which is blessed us in the beloved. So before the foundation of the world. He chose us. He chose us in Christ. And you chose this for a purpose that we should be holy and blameless before him. He predestined us, that is, he assigned to those who he chose a destiny. And the destiny was adoption as sons. Through Jesus Christ. And we know that this adoption through Jesus Christ was through His cross. It was through grace. All of this happening before the foundation of the world, according to the purpose of his will. How did he make these choices? He chose them not according to any constraint outside himself, but he knew what he had planned to do, and he planned to do it and did it. And it was all aiming. This is the aim right here to the praise of the glory of his grace. That's one of the most sweeping and one of the most determinative texts in the Bible for helping me understand why I exist, why the ministry exists, why the church exists, why the universe exists, why you exist. [00:23:13] The ultimate reason you exist is unto the praise of the glory of his grace. And if you just linger over that, I mean, that's worth days of meditation. What does it mean to exist? That the universe exists, that the church exists, that history exists, that you exist in order to praise the glory of the grace of God? Well, one of the implications that hit me more recently last year was that grace is a response to sin. Grace is when you don't deserve something and you get it anyway, which means that the purpose of the universe, framed from before the foundation of the world, took sin into account. So before there was anybody around to sin, God was planning with sin in mind. In fact, what's even more stunning is that his ultimate aim is that his grace in dealing with sin be praised. So his ultimate purpose did not just kind of work around just work around sin. It required that there be sin, can't have grace and people praising it. If you don't have Christ dying for sinners and displaying the grace of God, these are mind boggling things. And it's good to have your mind boggled. So many people run away from mind boggles. They don't they don't want to have their mind boggled. They like Jesus in a little box. Just. Just be manageable. And I'm wired to want to be boggled. I feel like I'm really not encountering God unless I'm being shocked. I mean, why? Why would I? Why would I think any other way? Just a little simple computation of how big the universe is and that he created it with his fingers. According to soul mate, the moon and the stars which you have made with your fingers means his scope can't be any other than that. [00:26:00] If I even get within a billion light years of him, I'm going to be shocked. So I'm not eager to make anything on shocking. I'm in the business of looking to be shocked because I feel like if he's just provincial, if he's just fitting in, if he's just like your old man, then what's let's do. So let's eat, drink and be merry For tomorrow we die. We got better things to do than mess around with a little teeny God. Why would we even want to think of it? Second. Timothy one nine. He saved us and called us to a holy calling. Not because of works, but because of his own purpose and grace. Which he gave us in Christ Jesus before the ages began. So he saved us, called us not by works. Praise God. But he doesn't contrast it with faith here. He contrasts with his own purpose and with grace. So not works, but grace. And then he says, He gave us this grace before the ages began. I just. I'm just pointing out that in the last year and a half, I've just been blown away by these statements in the Bible that my grace, that amazing grace, how sweet the sound saved a wretch like me. Has has gone up in amazing ness by being told. And you got it. He gave it to you billions of years ago, before there was a universe. That's where you got your grace. One more. All who dwell on the earth. Revelation 13 eight. All who dwell on the Earth will worship the beast. Everyone whose name has not been written before the foundation of the world. In the Book of Life of LAMB, who was slain. Now, there are two amazing things there, more than two. [00:29:07] One is that there's a book, and the book existed before the foundation of the world. And the book has a name. It's the book of the Life of William who was slain. That's the name of the book. So before the universe was, there was a book and the book had a name, and the book's name was just the book of life. What do you mean, life? The life of the lamb who was slain. Slain? History doesn't exist yet. I know. This book will require a history. There will be a history to make sense out of this book. But the book is here now in eternity. And. Christ was slain in God's mind before the foundation of the world. This is where it's going as Christ as God contemplated the creation of a universe. One way he thought about it was. I'm going to design a universe. I'm going to design a universe in which the apex of my glory will be the glory of grace manifest in the slaughter of myself. There were slaughter is the literal translation of the word slain, just like Jejomar is an ugly word. Slain softens it. So God contemplating what kind of universe he would make, says the main event of the universe that I will create will be Good Friday, and it will be my son united with human flesh who will be tortured then who will be killed like a lamb is killed with his throat slit. Takes your breath away. Here's the other amazing thing. All who dwell on the earth will worship the beast except everyone whose name has not been written. Think of that. If your name is not in the book, you will worship the beast. Which must mean that having your name in the book is the ground of why you don't worship the beast he's making. [00:32:23] Whether the name is in the book or not, the criterion of who worships a beast or doesn't worship the beast, it's not the other way around. Like if you worship the beast, your name is not in the book, or I will put your name in the book. And if you do worship, if you worship the beast, I will put your name there. And if you don't, I'll put your name there. So just the opposite. Everyone whose name has not been written before the foundation of the world in the book will worship the Beast. All of it pointing toward where we're going in dealing with some of these weighty matters. One last introductory thought was still an introduction. I didn't always believe what I do today about what the Bible teaches concerning the sovereignty of God in our salvation. My home growing up was an evangelistic home in which my dad loved the sovereignty of God and love the glory of God and manifestly prayed it in manifest the lived it. He didn't articulate it much to me. We didn't talk much theology. Growing up, my father was not a theologian in the sense of being an analytical thinker who faces problems and then solves them. He was a proclaimers of biblical gospel. He was an evangelist. It's the way he was put together. And that's the was his calling. And and I'm very different from my dad in that regard, in that I see problems everywhere. I'm just wired to see problems. And I devote most of my life to trying to solve them or cope with them because I can't not see them. And I've worked, in fact, relatively hard in the last 30 years to cultivate that skill, because I think John Dewey was right when he said nobody begins to think until they see a problem. [00:34:47] When you see a problem, your your mind comes into gear and you start working on it. But if you seeing problems, your mind just generally stays in neutral and you don't apply your mind to make sense out of anything. It's when you bump into apparent contradictions or puzzling things in nature, or puzzling things in people, or puzzling things in the Bible that your your mind starts to ask questions and put things together and formulate hypotheses and rule out options. And in thinking happens and I happen to think that's a really good thing for some people to do. Not everybody should devote their energies to that, but I have. And so I grew up in that kind of a home. I'm deeply thankful for it. I absorbed a high view of the sovereignty of God, a high view of the glory of God. But I wasn't a Calvinist, not by a long shot. And and at Wheaton College, I did not have my Armenian ism challenged. I'm not sure whether that was intentional on the part of teachers or not. I can remember reading one book in particular about John 15, which I thought was very compelling about the fact that you can lose your salvation. But in 1968, I moved from Wheaton to Pasadena, California, and was on the brink of having my world profoundly rocked. Didn't know what I was about to get in for, and it was not John Calvin who did it, not by a long shot. It was a. Conspiracy of other people. I just to give you a flavor. I was so rabid in my belief in sovereign free will in my heart that I was in a class on systematic theology with James Morgan, and he was teaching on sovereignty of God. [00:37:14] And I didn't know what he was or what are you saying? Things that I didn't like. And I walked up to him after class. One day was quite a big man and and I was quite a feisty 1968, you know, 22 year old. And those were feisty days anyway, people going barefoot to class and wear black armbands and marching in the street. And I said, Morgan, I think I actually called him Morgan Isn't that awful? I said, watch this. Put this right in front of his nose like this. I dropped it. I dropped. I remember doing it, but God didn't do that. I did that. I have a will. Like, that was profound. And I wrote That was one class. And then there was Philippians and I was bumping into things like Work out your salvation with fear and trembling, which of course I liked very much. Next verse four It is God who is at work in you to Will and to do for His good pleasure and in order to do that. And and so those two And then there was Jonathan Edwards. They were all coming together. And I remember writing in a blue book Final Exam for that course by Jim Morgan of Romans nine is like a tiger prowling around seeking to devour Freewheelers like me. So Romans nine played its part. And just just to comfort some of you. Well, it is isn't really comforted. I hope it's sustaining Grace. I would go home. I was in emotional best case anyway, because I was madly in love with no oil and shoes thousands of miles away. And we were going to get married in December. And I went to school school without her in September, 3000 miles away. And so I'm just looking forward to marriage. [00:39:32] And here my whole world is being turned upside down and I'm about to get married and and oh, my goodness, this is this is just a mess. And I remember going back to my apartment single go back to my apartment and sitting down after class after class and putting my face in my hands and weeping. Which is. I mean, those memories incline me to be patient with those of you who have come to this and are willing to expose yourself to texts we'll look at for the next six or seven or eight or nine or 10 hours and and and yet find it so difficult to fit it in to the way you have seen the world. Tears are a regular accompaniment when worldviews collapse, it's not an easy thing to have your structure of reality profoundly altered or some foundation pillars underneath shaken. It feels like your your emotional equilibrium won't know how to cope anymore because you've learned how to cope with this vision of the world and this vision of God and know these pillars are starting to crumble. And you're looking around for alternative pillars and they haven't put in place yet. And so emotionally it can be unbelievably disorienting and distressing and then sad and tearful. So that's the way it was. So those are my preliminary introductory remarks. Thank you for listening to this message by John Piper, Pastor for preaching at Bethlehem Baptist Church in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Feel free

Dr. John Piper
T.U.L.I.P.
LD625-01
Introduction
Lesson Transcript

[00:00:00] The following message is by Pastor John Piper. More information from Desiring God is available at W WW dot desiring God dot org. Father in heaven. I'm not the only one here who needs your help. We all need it. We need it because hearts by nature are not wired to love the truth, but to love error. The kind of error that exalts us and minimizes you. But when we were born again, we were given a new inclination. And I pray that that new inclination would flourish here, and that we would all be eager and hungry to hear truth. And it would. We would see it when we have it proclaimed to us, when we find it in your word, that you would humble us to it, incline us to your testimonies and not to getting gain that you would open the eyes of our hearts to see what's really there and wonderful things in your Scriptures that you would unite our heart to fear your name, that you would satisfy us in this seminar with your steadfast love as it's revealed in the Scriptures. Well, we live in a world that is very God minimizing and God ignoring and God re shaping and re conceiving and God denying. And here we are about to talk about some of the most magnificently God centered God exalting things in the universe. And therefore, most of what has fed into our lives in these years has not prepared us for this moment. Your spirit will. And so we ask him to come. Come. Holy Spirit. Be our teacher. Help me to be faithful to your word, Father. I ask this in Jesus name, Amen. So the first thing we want to do is introductory remarks. Just stage setting. So you know where I'm coming from and what's on my front burner.

[00:02:49] 1985 I went back and confirmed it on the internet from October 13 to November 3rd. I delivered seven messages at Bethlehem on Romans eight, 28 230. We know that all things work together for good for those who love God and to call according to His purpose. For those whom he for knew he predestined to be conformed to the image of his son, that he might be the first born among many brethren and those whom he predestined. He also called and those whom he called. He also justified and those whom he justified. He also glorified seven messages on those verses. Up until that point in the life of our church had been here for five years. We had not made any issue at all about so called Calvinism. We hadn't made any issue at all of this controversial thing. I had just tried to be faithful to biblical texts because I think that's what wins the confidence of God's people. They don't they don't want to hear system. Mainly they want to hear Bible mainly, which is what they ought to mainly here. And so I tried to just win their trust to say, I'm a Bible man, I'm not a system man mainly. But after five years, it seemed like the time was right to talk about those verses. And they present to you one of the reasons why this issue of the sovereignty of God in Salvation or Tulip, which we'll talk about shortly, or Calvinism, however you want to describe it. One of the reasons for it is because these realities are in Romans eight, the foundation of the most precious promise in the world, namely that everything works together for our God. So did you see you see the connection? I put it up here for you.

[00:05:18] We know that for those who love God, all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose. So most people find that to be one of the most precious promises in the Bible. All things work together for good for those who are called according to his purpose. But not many people contemplate this word right here. The foundation for that promise is for those whom he for knew he predestined and those whom he predestined, he called and those whom he called he justified and those whom he justified, he glorified. Those are links in a chain which, if any of them breaks, that promise is over. And to see that is practically very, very important for me. I don't ever want to lose. Romans 828. I build my life on Romans 828. I do my pastoral ministry on Romans 828. I face seminars like this with voice challenges on the basis of Romans 828. If I lose Romans 828, I can't do my ministry. I don't know how I would do life. So how the Bible supports Romans 828 holds it up, makes a big difference to me. And the way it holds it up is through foreknowledge, predestination, calling, justification, glorification, and they all hang together. So that's the first thing. By way of introductory remark, I wanted to say that that historically I introduce these things to the church after about five years of being here and I introduced them where I want them always to be as a precious, powerful support for the most practical realities in the world. These things aren't aren't for fighting about to me. They are for winning arguments about the art to pull yourself up or distinguish yourself from anybody there, to live by there to survive with.

[00:07:56] You could tell you how many people over the years have come to Bethlehem. They'll be here about five months. Their 21 year old son gets lumps in his neck. You go to visit in the hospital after the test the next day. They give him about five months to live and he dies. And they say, Why? You're standing around the hospital in his last hours. Had I not heard the word concerning the absolute sovereignty of God over my life, I would have gone insane in losing my son. Not everybody responds that way. I know that. But I have heard it enough from the depths of people's being, and I live it enough to know that's reality. That's the way it's supposed to work. These doctrines are not mainly there just to entertain our intellects. They're there to provide rock under our feet when everything around our soul gives way, which it will sooner or later in your life. So that's the first one. The second one. These are just introductory thoughts to set the stage. I want to read a few quotes from A.W. Tozer. Tozer was a pastor in the middle of the last century who wrote quite a few books and almost all of them about God. And He had a very huge passion to reorient the American church on a bigger God. He lived at the same time that JB Phillips was living, and if you're my age or roundabout, you can remember what JB Phillips contributed to the church in the sixties. He contributed a paraphrase of the New Testament, and he contributed a little book called Your God Is What? Too Small? Your God is Too Small. So you had Jamie Phillips and you had Debbie Tozer, and there have always been others helping the church wake up to the American minimization of God.

[00:10:31] We Americans are so amazingly self-sufficient and self-determining and self, almost everything that for Americans to hold a high view of the greatness of God is more difficult than some. So here are a few quotes that resonate with me to this very day. This was written 60 years ago, but they're still true. He said, It is my opinion that the Christian conception of God current in the middle years of the 20th century is so decadent as to be utterly beneath the dignity of the most high God, and actually to constitute for professed believers something amounting to a moral calamity. All the problems of heaven and earth, though they were to confront us together at once and at once would be nothing compared with the overwhelming problem of God. That is that He is what he is like and what we as moral beings must do about him. The man who comes to a right belief about God is relieved of 10,000 temporal problems. That's an amazing statement. One of my philosophies of ministry, if you want to call it that, of preaching, is that even though I don't know in this room here, how many, say two or 3000 problems you're facing right now, corporately and collectively and summing up all the problems, I don't know what they are. So how am I supposed to address them? How am I supposed to say anything that's helpful to you on Sunday morning or in the seminar? Being a pastor and looking out on several thousand folks week after week and thinking you're going to be relevant by addressing each problem specifically. You're not. They're going to bring people are going to bring to the church and to this room issues I've never even dreamed that you're facing.

[00:12:46] Does that mean I cannot say anything that God would be pleased to use for that very thing that I've never heard of? And the answer for me is if I keep God himself central and lift him up week after week and do everything I can to make him look and feel magnificent, that very issue will solve a hundred problems in your life that you do not even know is the solution to the problems. We're made for God. We're made to see him and know him and and tremble in his presence and be awed by him. And if we are seeing him as he is and responding as we are, there are a hundred things that get worked out in our brains, in our hearts and our circumstances that would not have gotten worked out had we been presented with a lesser God. So when he said that, I think he's he's right. The man who comes to a right belief about God is relieved of 10,000 temporal problems for he sees at once. These have to do with matters which at the most can concern him for very long. But even if the multiple burdens of time may be lifted from him, the one mighty single burden of eternity begins to press down upon him with a weight more crushing than all the woes of the world piled one upon another. No words. If we could solve that issue, understand that issue. Get that settled. Who is God? What's happening to me in eternity? How do I relate to him? Continuing down the page a little bit. Let us beware, lest we in our pride, accept the erroneous notion that idolatry consists only in kneeling before visible objects of adoration, and the civilized peoples are therefore free from it.

[00:15:00] The essence of idolatry is the entertainment of thoughts about God that are unworthy of him. I think that's a very penetrating and indicting definition of idolatry. It begins in the mind and may be present where no overt act of worship has taken place. Wrong ideas about God are not only the fountain from which the polluted waters of idolatry flow. They are themselves idolatrous. The idolatry simply imagines things about God and acts as if they were true. In other words, according to that definition of idolatry, you must think rightly about God in order not to be in idolatry. Because if you entertain thoughts about Him that are untrue about him or unworthy of him, those very thoughts your affections are responding to and they're not the way he is. One more section. The first step down for any church is taken when it surrenders its high opinion of God before the Christian church goes into Eclipse anywhere. There must first be a corrupting of her simple, basic theology. She simply gets a wrong answer to the question What is God like? And goes on from there. Though she may continue to cling to a sound nominal creed, her practical working creed has become false. The masses of her adherents come to believe that God is different from what He actually is, and that is heresy of the most insidious and deadly kind. The heaviest obligation lying upon the Christian church today is to purify and elevate her concept of God until it is once more worthy of Him in net. So that's Tozer. And it rang true with me. I think that's exactly right that we live in a day where the churches in America, by and large, as David Wells has said so powerfully in his book, No Place for Truth and God in the Wasteland, in which the the glory of God weighs lightly upon the church.

[00:17:51] God is not felt in your typical church as a weighty reality. People people want to be cheery. They want to be light hearted, not weighty. And so in order to feel friendly, we calculate everything in an entertainment mode so that people feel chipper. And how can a magnificent God survive in that atmosphere? How can a right view of God and write affections for God? I when I when I read this book, I get a different flavor. This book is an amazingly serious book. There's weightiness everywhere you turn in this book. And so it seems if we're to be biblical, which we are, that our churches should have about them of flavor, not of morose ness, but of serious joy, weighty joy. So that's number two in my introductory reflections, the the toes are missing piece of the great big God in our culture and in our churches, in our psyche. Third, let me put on the overhead a few texts that I have been moved by recently. Just to give you a flavor, I think catching the flavor of this seminar is is very important. Texts that have moved me in recent months. I just sent off to the publisher the sermon series that I did last year called Spectacular Sins and Their Global Purpose in the Glory of Jesus Christ, which is an extremely offensive title because it implies that sins have purpose in the glory of Christ. I mean, it doesn't imply it. It says it. And you'll see that sermon series grew out of this burden. And these burdens are now extensions of things I've been seeing all along. You know, as you grow older, you read the same Bible over and over again, Right? But, oh, what we see that we hadn't seen before.

[00:20:36] Isn't it's wonderful how you can just see so many things you've read 100 times and affectionately they grip you new. But even insights are new. Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places, even as he chose us in Him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before him. In love. In love, he predestined us for adoption as sons through Jesus Christ, according to the purpose of his will, to the praise of His glorious grace, or literally to the praise of the glory of His grace, which he has blessed us with, which is blessed us in the beloved. So before the foundation of the world. He chose us. He chose us in Christ. And you chose this for a purpose that we should be holy and blameless before him. He predestined us, that is, he assigned to those who he chose a destiny. And the destiny was adoption as sons. Through Jesus Christ. And we know that this adoption through Jesus Christ was through His cross. It was through grace. All of this happening before the foundation of the world, according to the purpose of his will. How did he make these choices? He chose them not according to any constraint outside himself, but he knew what he had planned to do, and he planned to do it and did it. And it was all aiming. This is the aim right here to the praise of the glory of his grace. That's one of the most sweeping and one of the most determinative texts in the Bible for helping me understand why I exist, why the ministry exists, why the church exists, why the universe exists, why you exist.

[00:23:13] The ultimate reason you exist is unto the praise of the glory of his grace. And if you just linger over that, I mean, that's worth days of meditation. What does it mean to exist? That the universe exists, that the church exists, that history exists, that you exist in order to praise the glory of the grace of God? Well, one of the implications that hit me more recently last year was that grace is a response to sin. Grace is when you don't deserve something and you get it anyway, which means that the purpose of the universe, framed from before the foundation of the world, took sin into account. So before there was anybody around to sin, God was planning with sin in mind. In fact, what's even more stunning is that his ultimate aim is that his grace in dealing with sin be praised. So his ultimate purpose did not just kind of work around just work around sin. It required that there be sin, can't have grace and people praising it. If you don't have Christ dying for sinners and displaying the grace of God, these are mind boggling things. And it's good to have your mind boggled. So many people run away from mind boggles. They don't they don't want to have their mind boggled. They like Jesus in a little box. Just. Just be manageable. And I'm wired to want to be boggled. I feel like I'm really not encountering God unless I'm being shocked. I mean, why? Why would I? Why would I think any other way? Just a little simple computation of how big the universe is and that he created it with his fingers. According to soul mate, the moon and the stars which you have made with your fingers means his scope can't be any other than that.

[00:26:00] If I even get within a billion light years of him, I'm going to be shocked. So I'm not eager to make anything on shocking. I'm in the business of looking to be shocked because I feel like if he's just provincial, if he's just fitting in, if he's just like your old man, then what's let's do. So let's eat, drink and be merry For tomorrow we die. We got better things to do than mess around with a little teeny God. Why would we even want to think of it? Second. Timothy one nine. He saved us and called us to a holy calling. Not because of works, but because of his own purpose and grace. Which he gave us in Christ Jesus before the ages began. So he saved us, called us not by works. Praise God. But he doesn't contrast it with faith here. He contrasts with his own purpose and with grace. So not works, but grace. And then he says, He gave us this grace before the ages began. I just. I'm just pointing out that in the last year and a half, I've just been blown away by these statements in the Bible that my grace, that amazing grace, how sweet the sound saved a wretch like me. Has has gone up in amazing ness by being told. And you got it. He gave it to you billions of years ago, before there was a universe. That's where you got your grace. One more. All who dwell on the earth. Revelation 13 eight. All who dwell on the Earth will worship the beast. Everyone whose name has not been written before the foundation of the world. In the Book of Life of LAMB, who was slain. Now, there are two amazing things there, more than two.

[00:29:07] One is that there's a book, and the book existed before the foundation of the world. And the book has a name. It's the book of the Life of William who was slain. That's the name of the book. So before the universe was, there was a book and the book had a name, and the book's name was just the book of life. What do you mean, life? The life of the lamb who was slain. Slain? History doesn't exist yet. I know. This book will require a history. There will be a history to make sense out of this book. But the book is here now in eternity. And. Christ was slain in God's mind before the foundation of the world. This is where it's going as Christ as God contemplated the creation of a universe. One way he thought about it was. I'm going to design a universe. I'm going to design a universe in which the apex of my glory will be the glory of grace manifest in the slaughter of myself. There were slaughter is the literal translation of the word slain, just like Jejomar is an ugly word. Slain softens it. So God contemplating what kind of universe he would make, says the main event of the universe that I will create will be Good Friday, and it will be my son united with human flesh who will be tortured then who will be killed like a lamb is killed with his throat slit. Takes your breath away. Here's the other amazing thing. All who dwell on the earth will worship the beast except everyone whose name has not been written. Think of that. If your name is not in the book, you will worship the beast. Which must mean that having your name in the book is the ground of why you don't worship the beast he's making.

[00:32:23] Whether the name is in the book or not, the criterion of who worships a beast or doesn't worship the beast, it's not the other way around. Like if you worship the beast, your name is not in the book, or I will put your name in the book. And if you do worship, if you worship the beast, I will put your name there. And if you don't, I'll put your name there. So just the opposite. Everyone whose name has not been written before the foundation of the world in the book will worship the Beast. All of it pointing toward where we're going in dealing with some of these weighty matters. One last introductory thought was still an introduction. I didn't always believe what I do today about what the Bible teaches concerning the sovereignty of God in our salvation. My home growing up was an evangelistic home in which my dad loved the sovereignty of God and love the glory of God and manifestly prayed it in manifest the lived it. He didn't articulate it much to me. We didn't talk much theology. Growing up, my father was not a theologian in the sense of being an analytical thinker who faces problems and then solves them. He was a proclaimers of biblical gospel. He was an evangelist. It's the way he was put together. And that's the was his calling. And and I'm very different from my dad in that regard, in that I see problems everywhere. I'm just wired to see problems. And I devote most of my life to trying to solve them or cope with them because I can't not see them. And I've worked, in fact, relatively hard in the last 30 years to cultivate that skill, because I think John Dewey was right when he said nobody begins to think until they see a problem.

[00:34:47] When you see a problem, your your mind comes into gear and you start working on it. But if you seeing problems, your mind just generally stays in neutral and you don't apply your mind to make sense out of anything. It's when you bump into apparent contradictions or puzzling things in nature, or puzzling things in people, or puzzling things in the Bible that your your mind starts to ask questions and put things together and formulate hypotheses and rule out options. And in thinking happens and I happen to think that's a really good thing for some people to do. Not everybody should devote their energies to that, but I have. And so I grew up in that kind of a home. I'm deeply thankful for it. I absorbed a high view of the sovereignty of God, a high view of the glory of God. But I wasn't a Calvinist, not by a long shot. And and at Wheaton College, I did not have my Armenian ism challenged. I'm not sure whether that was intentional on the part of teachers or not. I can remember reading one book in particular about John 15, which I thought was very compelling about the fact that you can lose your salvation. But in 1968, I moved from Wheaton to Pasadena, California, and was on the brink of having my world profoundly rocked. Didn't know what I was about to get in for, and it was not John Calvin who did it, not by a long shot. It was a. Conspiracy of other people. I just to give you a flavor. I was so rabid in my belief in sovereign free will in my heart that I was in a class on systematic theology with James Morgan, and he was teaching on sovereignty of God.

[00:37:14] And I didn't know what he was or what are you saying? Things that I didn't like. And I walked up to him after class. One day was quite a big man and and I was quite a feisty 1968, you know, 22 year old. And those were feisty days anyway, people going barefoot to class and wear black armbands and marching in the street. And I said, Morgan, I think I actually called him Morgan Isn't that awful? I said, watch this. Put this right in front of his nose like this. I dropped it. I dropped. I remember doing it, but God didn't do that. I did that. I have a will. Like, that was profound. And I wrote That was one class. And then there was Philippians and I was bumping into things like Work out your salvation with fear and trembling, which of course I liked very much. Next verse four It is God who is at work in you to Will and to do for His good pleasure and in order to do that. And and so those two And then there was Jonathan Edwards. They were all coming together. And I remember writing in a blue book Final Exam for that course by Jim Morgan of Romans nine is like a tiger prowling around seeking to devour Freewheelers like me. So Romans nine played its part. And just just to comfort some of you. Well, it is isn't really comforted. I hope it's sustaining Grace. I would go home. I was in emotional best case anyway, because I was madly in love with no oil and shoes thousands of miles away. And we were going to get married in December. And I went to school school without her in September, 3000 miles away. And so I'm just looking forward to marriage.

[00:39:32] And here my whole world is being turned upside down and I'm about to get married and and oh, my goodness, this is this is just a mess. And I remember going back to my apartment single go back to my apartment and sitting down after class after class and putting my face in my hands and weeping. Which is. I mean, those memories incline me to be patient with those of you who have come to this and are willing to expose yourself to texts we'll look at for the next six or seven or eight or nine or 10 hours and and and yet find it so difficult to fit it in to the way you have seen the world. Tears are a regular accompaniment when worldviews collapse, it's not an easy thing to have your structure of reality profoundly altered or some foundation pillars underneath shaken. It feels like your your emotional equilibrium won't know how to cope anymore because you've learned how to cope with this vision of the world and this vision of God and know these pillars are starting to crumble. And you're looking around for alternative pillars and they haven't put in place yet. And so emotionally it can be unbelievably disorienting and distressing and then sad and tearful. So that's the way it was. So those are my preliminary introductory remarks. Thank you for listening to this message by John Piper, Pastor for preaching at Bethlehem Baptist Church in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Feel free to make copies of this message to give to others, but please do not charge for those copies or alter the content in any way without permission. We invite you to visit desiring God online at w WW dot desiring God dot org. There you'll find hundreds of sermons, articles, radio broadcasts and much more all available to you at no charge.

[00:42:00] Our online store carries all of Pastor John's books, audio and video resources. You can also stay up to date on what's new at Desiring God. Again, our website is w WW dot desiring God dot org. Or call us toll free at 1888346 4700. Our mailing address is desiring God. 2601 East Franklin Avenue. Minneapolis, Minnesota. 55406. Desiring God exists to help you make God your treasure because God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in Him.

to make copies of this message to give to others, but please do not charge for those copies or alter the content in any way without permission. We invite you to visit desiring God online at w WW dot desiring God dot org. There you'll find hundreds of sermons, articles, radio broadcasts and much more all available to you at no charge. [00:42:00] Our online store carries all of Pastor John's books, audio and video resources. You can also stay up to date on what's new at Desiring God. Again, our website is w WW dot desiring God dot org. Or call us toll free at 1888346 4700. Our mailing address is desiring God. 2601 East Franklin Avenue. Minneapolis, Minnesota. 55406. Desiring God exists to help you make God your treasure because God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in Him.