Children Desiring God Conference – Thursday Night – April 26, 2007
The first plenary session kicked off with a beautiful time of corporate singing. John Piper led in prayer, and after another song, two children read from Psalm 42 and Psalm 63:1-8.
Pastor David Michael then gave a personal state-by-state welcome to the conference attendees. There are about 200 guests from Minnesota (not counting volunteers), 80 from Texas, and 68 from California gathered at the Conference. The neighboring states (Wisconsin, Iowa, and North and South Dakota) combined have sent 114 guests. I guess that makes sense given the high populations of Texas and California.
But an astonishing 10% of the 1000 or so total Conference attendees are international guests. Indonesia, South Africa, Ethiopia, Hong Kong, Romania, England, Northern Ireland, Dominican Republic, El Salvador, and Canada are all represented. There are 41 attendees from the Spanish-speaking world.
Some pictures were shown of John Piper as a child. (I’m told this will be done for all of the plenary speakers.) Pastor David connected the photos of John to an exhortation that we consider the children in our Sunday school classes. God only knows all that He has in store for them. We don’t know who God might use to bless the succeeding generations. We need to love them and build the gospel into their lives.
Having been thus introduced, John Piper began to preach. He framed his message by saying that he was responding to three things.
I. The request from CDG to unpack the theme that God is the Gospel (also available in PDF format at no cost).
This is a book John Piper wrote to unpack the truth of I Peter 3:18. Jesus Christ died to bring us to God. Not only to justify us. Not just to get us out of hell. Not just to relieve our pain, or sense of alienation. And not just to bring us to heaven – heaven would not be heaven if God weren’t there.
II. A provocative quote by Spurgeon in Lectures to My Students (p. 340). Spurgeon is lamenting that some preachers, though they believe in justification by faith, unintentionally preach the very opposite. Spurgeon recounts:
“Justification by faith must never be obscured, and yet all are not clear upon it….Many do this when addressing children, and I notice that they generally speak to the little ones about loving Jesus, and not upon believing in Him. This must leave a mischievous impression upon youthful minds and take them off from the true way of peace.” (emphasis in the original)
John noted that this quote is convicting, because many of us talk more to children about loving Jesus than believing in Jesus. We need to wrestle with why Spurgeon said this.
III. Nominalism in the church.
John noted that there are many Christians whose lives seem to contradict Paul’s attitude expressed in Phil. 3:7. What do these people mean when they say that they believe in Jesus? Their lives don’t “ooze” Jesus, and this is confusing. What can we do about this?
John also noted that his talk is being framed by his 11-year-old daughter Talitha’s upcoming baptism in May. She has been going through a baptism preparation class over the last few months. In fact, she has an interview with an Elder at Bethlehem Baptist Church this coming Saturday morning in which she will be required to give her testimony.
This prompted John to reflect on the fact that when we ask people to give their testimony, they generally start with what happened to them. But our first thought should be to talk about how we got saved 2000 years ago. We should talk this way (and encourage others to talk this way) because if certain events in history had not occurred, we would have no testimony. So the first question is: What did God do to save you before you were born?
And here John has given Talitha a four-point outline:
I. God
II. Sin
III. Christ/Gospel
IV. Faith
To give these four words meaning, John noted, we must talk about them in propositions, since propositions (not single words) carry truth. Single words, without a clear context, are not illuminating.
Proposition 1: God
John noted in passing that Wayne Grudem has written a wonderfully substantive book of Bible doctrine called Systematic Theology. (I must say that I have found this book to be a fantastic resource for developing a robust, doctrinally-solid vision of God. It is also quite readable and relatively void of unnecessary jargon.)
God has created all things for His glory. Isaiah 43:6-7 reminds us of this truth.
So God is great, and we were made to live in such a way that makes Him look great. But in order to make Him look great, it is not enough to do the right things. We must also have the right affections. We cannot praise God begrudgingly. (That would be an oxymoron.)
The inference is that we must not teach children that they were created simply to do stuff. We glorify God by enjoying Him, by a sense of the beauty and glory of God being reflected in our own consciousness as being all-satisfying. So teaching kids doctrine is important, because knowing God is important. But we must also teach them to treasure God.
Proposition 2: Sin
How sin gets defined inevitably is related to how God is defined. If God is defined merely as one who commands, then sin is not doing what he says.
But if we conceive of God as the One who is to be the object of our delight and trust, then sin is not delighting in God. Sin prefers the glory of created things to the glory of our creator.
John noted that most idols, in and of themselves, are innocent (e.g., food, family, success). Are we happier that the Dow Jones is over 13,000 than what we read this morning in Colossians?
According to Romans 1:18-19, omnipotent wrath is deserved for the devaluing of God.
And we’ve all done this—we’ve exchanged the glory of God at the pawn shop of our idolatries. It is not our treasure.
The gospel needs this background to land with force.
Proposition 3: Christ/Gospel
So is the answer: “Well, just start loving Jesus! You were made for that! Turn over a new leaf!”
That is not the answer for two reasons:
1. The problem isn’t my disposition toward God, but His disposition toward me. He is really angry with me. I can’t just start doing better. God’s just and holy wrath has passed a sentence on me. Condemn! So God is the One who is the problem here – and only God can change that.
2. When God undertakes to change it, by sending His Son to bear His wrath on our behalf, all of that redemptive work of Christ is not just designed to get me back on the road to glorifying Him, it is the apex of the display of His glory. (Rev. 5) The murder of Jesus on our behalf will be the ground of our praise forever.
Piper recounted five essential elements of the gospel:
1. The Gospel is an event. Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures.
2. He achieved something when he died. John unpacked seven achievements:
a) Christ absorbed the wrath of God on our behalf. (Gal 3:13)
b) He bore our sins and purchased our forgiveness. The payment and purchase occurred 2000 years ago – forgiveness (on a personal level) comes later.
c) He provided a complete and perfect righteousness for us. Philippians 2 tells us he was obedient unto death. And that obedience – the obedience of Jesus Christ – is the obedience of Romans 5:19. Christ completed it.
d) He defeated death itself. (Hebrews 2:14)
e) He disarmed Satan by suffering. (Colossians 2:14)
Satan can beat us up, but he cannot damn us, because his one weapon (unpaid sin) is gone. Where? Nailed to a cross. And Satan will be thrown into the lake of fire someday.
f) Christ purchased perfect final healing and peace for His people. (Isaiah 53:4-5) Some of this is experienced in our lifetime; most of it is not experienced until we reach heaven.
g) Christ secured for us eternal fellowship with Him. (I Peter 3:18)
3. The free offer to be received by faith alone, not works.
If there is a historical event (Christ’s death), and it is offered to works, then there is no gospel. We nullify the cross if we make our justification by works. So faith becomes crucial.
4. The application of the achievement to us.
When the Holy Spirit awakens us, we see Christ for who he really is, and we repent and cleave to Him in faith. And when that happened, our sins were forgiven and we were counted righteous in Christ. And it all happens through faith alone. Justification, forgiveness, and eternal life were purchased at the cross, but they become ours by faith when we believe. John emphasized that although step 4 is crucial, we should start our testimonies with the historical event of step 1 (which secured step 4).
Now most gospel teaching stops here, John noted. But we must press on:
5. God is the gospel.
We must embrace Christ as the gospel.
And unless we really grasp these things (all of the above), we won’t really know what faith us. And we’ll stumble over Spurgeon’s warning concerning children. Faith is of central importance.
Proposition 4: Faith
Faith has two dimensions, each of which sheds light on the “Why can’t a child just turn over a new leaf?” question:
A. Faith is essentially a receiving of what someone else does, and not what we do on our own. This is so contrary to our human hearts and so humiliating. Faith alone (in comparison to love) makes crystal clear that it was God that saved us, and we merely received it.
Children must be taught this: Another died in their place. Another provided their righteousness. Another paid their debt. “What must I do, Daddy?” Receive him! Welcome him!
John then asked: Why doesn’t this lead to nominalism? Or antinomianism? Because:
B. Faith receives Christ for who He really is — supremely valuable, the apex of the display of the glory of God.
John noted that many people speak of receiving Christ in a way that does not require a new birth. They do not receive him as a display of the all-satisfying God. They receive him as sin-forgiver (because they don’t want guilt), rescuer from hell (because they don’t want to go there), healer (because they don’t want to be sick), protector (because they value safety), prosperity-giver (because they love wealth), creator (because they prefer a personal God), even Lord of history (because they value order), but not supremely and infinitely valuable as who He is – the most wonderful, satisfying, all-glorious Person who ever was or will be.
So we should emphasize trust. John hastened to note that it is not that our subjective emotions accurately correspond with the infinite worth of God. But true Christians have a taste for it. Their hearts say “Yes and Amen” to God being supremely valuable, and they join in the life-long battle to see Him increasingly in this way.
John closed with a reminder that some of the kids we minister to are going to die at a young age. They need to be prepared to die by recognizing that Christ is an infinitely valuable treasure, so that they receive and embrace Him for who He really is.
DG has already posted the audio of this message.