The central theme is understanding and achieving what it means to please God, which is fundamentally rooted in believing and acting upon His revealed Word, rather than human-made interpretations or self-serving actions.
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I think we’re all indebted to Chris Larson all of the time but particularly for this
conference.
Duties were placed upon him that he hadn’t necessarily expected, and we’re thankful
for the effective and gracious and charming way in which he has done that.
And I think so highly of Chris that I’m always surprised that he gives me such difficult
topics to speak on.
I’ve tried to be nice to him, and I don’t know why he can’t be nicer to me.
Ligonier gives me titles like “Statism.”
There is a title to draw the masses.
And slightly better than the title I got one year.
I got, “Part Two.”
And I don’t know about you, but when I saw this title, “Pleasing God,” -- maybe it’s
the tendency to too much Calvinism in my heart – my first reaction was, can we please God?
And then as I heard a number of the addresses at this conference on the sublime holiness
of God, and how all our righteousness is as filthy rags before Him, it did seem to me
a bit of a problem to figure out how are we to please God.
And yet, as I wrestled with this topic and thought about it and studied it, one of the
things that came to me very powerfully from the Scriptures is that over and over again
the Scriptures do tell us that God is pleased with His people – not the disobedient ones
but the goers and the senders.
It’s amazing that as powerfully as the Scriptures speak about the continuing sinfulness even
of the regenerated, it also speaks about how God does delight in His people.
And part of what I want to do today is think with you how both those things can be true
at the same time.
I’m part of a church that uses the Heidelberg Catechism as one of its confessional documents.
And after the Heidelberg Catechism discusses the Ten Commandments with some care, it asks
the question, “Can we keep all these things perfectly?
And the answer is, “No, in this life even the holiest have only a small beginning of
the obedience to which we are called.”
I think that’s right.
I think that’s Biblical.
I think the holiest of us not only have only small beginnings of the obedience to which
we are called, but the holiest of us have only small beginnings of knowing how sinful
we really are.
But the catechism goes on to say, “Nevertheless, we begin by the power of the Holy Spirit to
keep not only some but all of His commandments.”
And part of what that means is we can never be content to say, “You know, I’m doing
pretty good, pretty well with that no images thing.
I just have this little remaining problem that I’m an ax murderer.”
You can’t keep nine of the commandments and think that will be enough.
We have to be making progress with all of the commandments, and the great word of the
Scripture is that Jesus by His Spirit is powerfully at work in His people to lead us on and on
to become more holy, and He delights in that.
He is pleased with that.
He rejoices in that.
And although we may be often almost overwhelmed with a sense of our continuing sinfulness,
Jesus says, “I am accomplishing My purpose in you.
I am working out My life in you.
I am showing to the world fruit in you.
And when I return,” and this is one of the verses that always amazes me, 2 Thessalonians
1, verse 10, “When I return, I,” Jesus says, “I will be glorified in you.”
Now I think our tendency rightly is to think, when Jesus returns we will be glorified in
Him.
And that’s true, of course.
But Jesus is saying to us throughout the Scriptures, “You know, I’m accomplishing things in
my people, and when I return I will be able to point out to the world that My grace, My
power, My Spirit accomplished remarkable things in you.”
It was glorious to hear John Piper talking about what the Lord has been accomplishing
in the missionary work of the church in the last hundred years.
Now since I’m a professional historian, I thought I’d add a kind of intriguing footnote
to what he said.
Do you know that Egypt was once one of the most Christian nations on the earth and produced
some of the most influential theologians in the ancient church, and that Egypt, when it
became an overwhelmingly Christian nation, had maybe about seven million Christians because
that was about the total population of Egypt in the ancient world?
Do you know how many Christians are in Egypt today?
Eight million, eight million.
There are now 72 million Muslims.
The population has grown.
But isn’t it intriguing God has kept a people for His name.
There are Christians in all sorts of surprising places, and God has done remarkable things.
We had a graduate from our little seminary who was a pastor in Baghdad because God has
had a people in Iraq as well.
And so how are we to think about what God is doing in us?
How are we to think about what it means for us to please God?
How can we think about leaving this conference and going on with the purpose of pleasing
God?
And the first thing I need to say as a professional historian – I’m assuming you’re going
to get very tired of that phrase – is that one of the sad things that the history of
the church shows us is how frequently people who set out to please God run amuck.
And they run amuck by really pleasing themselves.
I remember years ago reading a biography of King Henry VIII, and in that biography the
biographer commented of Henry, “He more than most people had trouble distinguishing
what he wanted from what was right.”
I’ve always remembered that because I think that’s true of most people.
We are very good at convincing ourselves that what we want is what is right.
And that’s happened over and over again in the church, that we have acted in the name
of pleasing God in ways that really only please ourselves.
I think of, well as a historian I think of strange things, but I think of that great
church built in Constantinople by the Emperor Justinian, the Church of Holy Wisdom, the
Hagia Sophia.
And Justinian would have proclaimed to the Empire – this church they say that bankrupted
an empire, so costly was its construction, so glorious its appearance – and Justinian
said, “I’m building to glorify God.”
Well, he was really building to glorify Justinian.
God had never asked for edifices of that fantastic quality and beauty and size.
He was really testifying to how important Justinian was.
We as Christians always have to be careful that our generosity isn’t a generosity that
is really self-aggrandizing.
And that’s always a danger in the history of the church.
There’s a…
There’s a more subtle way of going astray as well.
And that’s appearing to be so very self-denying and to deny ourselves all sorts of things
that God hasn’t asked us to deny ourselves.
So Martin Luther became a monk, and he fasted himself skinny and sick.
And he prayed endlessly in ways that could have damaged his health.
And he showed how holy he was by taking ropes and tying knots in them and beating his back
until he bled.
Oh, wasn’t he self-denying?
Wasn’t he disciplined?
And oh, wasn’t he doing something that God didn’t care anything about?
He wasn’t pleasing God.
He was pleasing himself with a sense of how tough he was, how self-denying he was, how
self-disciplined he was.
But he was disciplined in all sorts of ways that didn’t really please God.
I was reading in The New York Times yesterday about an art exhibit in New York of reliquaries,
of Medieval works of art that were designed to hold bones and clothing of the saints.
And these were beautiful, expensive objects that were designed to put people in touch
with the holy, so that if I touched these objects, some of the holiness might rub off
on me.
And people gave a great deal of money for this purpose.
But it didn’t please God.
It’s not a path to holiness.
One of the early manifestations of this tendency we find in the Scriptures, don’t we, in
Exodus 32 with the construction of the golden calf.
Israel needed a god.
Moses, the spokesman for God seemed to have disappeared.
So they did something eminently reasonable.
They made a god.
They needed a god they could see.
They wanted a god they could touch.
Aaron seems to have been a Republican.
He wanted them to give up all their earrings.
So they melt down all their gold, and they make this golden calf.
And Aaron calls him Yahweh.
The people dance around the golden calf.
They’ve made the god they want.
Now they worship him in the way they want.
Did they please God?
They had given and given and given.
Apparently they danced and danced and danced.
But God was not pleased.
God doesn’t want us to make up ways to please Him.
He wants us to please Him in the way that He has revealed.
And so I want to read you a wonderful story.
I tried to find one you wouldn’t know, but I think this group you probably know most
of the stories in the Bible.
But I want us to look at one that I think goes to the very heart and essence of what
it means to please God from Matthew, chapter 26, the first 13 verses.
Matthew 26, the first 13 verses, and there we read.
When Jesus had finished all these sayings, he said to his disciples, “You know that
after two days the Passover is coming, and the Son of Man will be delivered up to be
crucified.”
Then the chief priests and the elders of the people gathered in the palace of the high
priest, whose name was Caiaphas, and plotted together in order to arrest Jesus by stealth
and kill him.
But they said, “Not during the feast, lest there be an uproar among the people.”
Now when Jesus was at Bethany in the house of Simon the leper, a woman came up to him
with an alabaster flask of very expensive ointment, and she poured it on his head as
he reclined at table.
And when the disciples saw it, they were indignant, saying, “Why this waste?
For this could have been sold for a large sum and given to the poor.”
But Jesus, aware of this, said to them, “Why do you trouble the woman?
For she has done a beautiful thing to me.
(It could also be translated, “has done a good work for Me.”)
For you always have the poor with you, but you will not always have me.
In pouring this ointment on my body, she has done it to prepare me for burial.
Truly, I say to you, wherever this gospel is proclaimed in the whole world, what she
has done will also be told in memory of her.”
This is a really remarkable statement, isn’t it?
I don’t know that Jesus says anything like this anywhere else.
I don’t know anyone who is commended in quite this same way.
The good news is that we’re doing what Jesus told us to do.
We’re remembering this woman today.
We’re talking about what she did.
Psalm 67 in a sense is fulfilled in part wherever this woman is talked about.
She pleased God.
And the question before us, what exactly did she do that pleased God?
Why does Jesus so highlight her action at this point?
Why does He so pause and focus on her?
And surely if we had time to look at the whole context here we’d see how she does stand
out in these chapters about the end of Jesus’ life about how He is surrounded by chief priests
and scribes who are plotting against Him, who hate Him, who have rejected Him, and are
looking for a way to kill Him.
And he’s surrounded by disciples who don’t get it, who don’t seem to understand that
the end is approaching.
He’s surrounded by disciples, one of whom is so self-confident in his faithfulness and
yet will deny Him at the end.
And He’s surrounded by another disciple who is a traitor in his heart, a thief who
will betray him.
And in this… in this mess in which our Lord finds Himself, in this turmoil, in this plotting,
in this confusion, in this indifference, there’s this woman who gets it, this woman who stands
out in a crowd, this woman whose action is so foundational, so central, so key, that
Jesus says, “Everywhere the gospel is preached, she should be remembered.”
And so Matthew has done that.
He’s recorded it in the Scriptures for us.
Mark has done it.
He’s recorded it in the Scripture for us.
John records it with a little more detail, so that we learn this woman is Mary, the sister
of Martha and Lazarus.
Mark hasn’t mentioned them before.
That’s probably why Mark doesn’t give us her name here.
Her name isn’t important.
It’s what she has done that’s important here.
Interestingly, Luke doesn’t record this message.
I have a theory about that.
Now I’m only a historian, so this theory may not be all that valuable, but I think
Luke does memorialize Mary, just with a different story, a very parallel story, the famous Mary
and Martha story.
It’s very parallel, as we’ll see.
Well, what’s going on here?
Jesus is at dinner.
John tells us actually this is before the triumphal entry, just before the triumphal
entry.
This is kind of a flashback in Matthew’s gospel.
He’s in Bethany.
He’s at dinner.
And Mary comes in with this jar of ointment, and she breaks it over Him.
And the disciples are annoyed.
It’s a waste.
Estimates are that the ointment she pours out in today’s money might have been worth
as much as $20,000.
That’s a lot of money.
Judas will sell Jesus in today’s money for probably $25, thirty pieces of silver.
She’s come with this fabulously expensive ointment, and she just poured it out.
And the disciples say, “What a waste.
It should have been sold, the money taken and given to the poor.”
One of those voices is that of Judas.
And John tells us and Judas is thinking to himself, “I keep the purse.
If this $25,000 had gone in the purse, I could take a little off the top.”
That’s probably not what’s in the mind of the other disciples, but they’re annoyed.
And you know, we can… we ought to be a little sympathetic because Jesus has just been talking
in Matthew 25 of the importance of clothing the naked and feeding the hungry.
He’s just told them that what they do unto the least of the brethren in need is done
unto Him.
They have the poor on their mind, and they’re thinking, “This woman doesn’t get it.”
And after they’ve criticized her, Jesus intervenes and says, “No, it’s you who
don’t get it.
She really gets it.”
So what has she gotten?
Well, it may have been that the fundraisers for Justinian’s Hagia Sophia quoted this
verse and said, “See, lavish gifts to Jesus, that’s what you need to give, so give lavishly
to me that I can build this lavish church, and that’s the same as what this woman does.”
I think she’s been used for a lot of capital campaigns.
But that’s not why Jesus commends her.
Why does Jesus commend her?
Why is she pleasing to God?
And the answer is so simple that we probably easily miss it.
Jesus has said, “The Passover is coming, and I am going to be crucified.”
What do the disciples have to say about that?
They couldn’t even muster Peter’s statement, “Lord, that will never happen to you.”
They seem to sort of just ignore it, don’t they?
They just go on.
They’re not paying attention.
But Mary has been listening.
Mary has been believing.
And Mary has realized Jesus is shortly going to be crucified.
We’re going to lose Him.
They’re going to kill Him.
I need to prepare His body for burial.
In terms of what the text says, she’s the only one who has heard, who has understood,
who has believed, and she has come out of her devotion and out of her love to Jesus
because she has believed His word.
She’s hung upon His word.
And she has known that what He said was true.
And she has done this beautiful thing, this good work out of her trust in Christ and in
His word.
That’s why I think the story of Mary and Martha in Luke 10 is so parallel.
We all really identify with Martha, don’t we, when we read that story.
Martha is the good Samaritan.
Martha is working hard.
Martha’s got all these men to feed.
And there is that lazy sister sitting and doing nothing.
We’ve all had one of those in the family, haven’t we?
Martha, Martha, Martha, you’re worried about many things, but Mary has chosen the good
portion.
What’s the good portion that Mary has chosen?
The good portion Mary has chosen is to listen to Jesus, to see that whether lunch is served
late or early or not at all is not as important as listening to Jesus.
It’s a remarkably parallel story here.
It’s almost as if Mary had been on the Mount of Transfiguration or Mary had been at Jesus’
baptism.
She wasn’t, of course.
But the voice from heaven at His baptism said, “This is My beloved Son, in whom I am well
pleased.”
That’s at baptism.
And then at the Mount of Transfiguration, the same words, “This is My beloved Son,
in whom I am well pleased, listen to Him.”
Mary is a listener to Jesus, and that’s why she should never be forgotten.
That’s why she’s an exemplar for us all.
That’s why the memorial of this event is to be told wherever the gospel is preached
because this is the gospel.
The good news is we must listen to Jesus.
And what is the message that Mary heard?
It’s the message that Jesus is going to die.
And this story tells us that Mary in contemplating the death of the Savior, the death of the
Son of Man, the death of this man she has gotten to know, that she recognizes His supreme
importance.
That’s why she has lavished this gift upon Him.
She has understood something of His worth.
She couldn’t buy an ointment that would actually reflect His worth.
But she has done as much as she could.
She has…
She has recognized that all of human history is coming together at this moment, and that
this is not just a death.
This is not just the loss of a friend.
This is not just the loss of a teacher, but this is Messiah.
This is the Son of God going to His death to give His life a ransom for many.
And she can’t think of anything that can adequately express her devotion to Him, and
so she does this extraordinary, lavish, remarkable thing.
And Jesus commends her because she has sensed His importance.
When Jesus says, “The poor you have always with you,” it’s not His indifference to
the poor, but His recognition that she has rightly seen that He stands at the very center
of things and that what He does is of eternal consequence for the whole world.
Now we don’t know exactly how much Mary understood at this time, but we can look back
on it and say not only is she preparing His body for burial, but in a real sense, I think,
she’s anointing Him for resurrection.
We sang Psalm 23 yesterday, “You anoint my head with oil.
You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies.”
Here is King David speaking as conqueror, as victor over the enemy.
And I think we see an echo of that here where Mary is anointing His head with this ointment,
not only for burial, but also because in some way she senses or communicates to us at least
that this One, who will die a ransom for many, will rise as Lord of life, will rise as King
and victor, will rise to be triumphant over His enemies, will rise to inherit the nations.
And she recognizes that this is the most important moment and the most important man in all of
human history.
It’s so simple, isn’t it?
She believes His word, and she recognizes His importance.
There is something you and I can do to please God.
We can treasure His Word.
We can hang on to His Word.
We can look to His Word, and we can look to His Word to point us to Him and to His importance.
And when we do that, then we will be pleasing to God.
This might be a good place to stop, but I’m not going to.
We heard about some of the wonderful Puritan forebearers.
The Puritans weren’t perfect anymore than any of us are perfect, but do you know one
of the things that so characterized the Puritans?
They studied the Word of God with great care because they wanted to be sure and hear what
it had to say.
They didn’t want to be led astray into trying to please God in their own terms, in their
own ways.
They wanted only to please God in His way.
And therefore, they are part of that great company that speak to us and testify to us.
Be listeners in the first place.
Be believers in the first place, trusting the Word of God, depending on the Word of
God, taking Jesus at His Word, and recognizing that He stands at the center, at the heart
of all that’s happening in human history.
Part of our grief should be that the world rushes on, ignoring our Jesus.
And our grief should not be that this diminishes Him in any way.
Our grief should be that they so deprive themselves and that they are so headed for a Christless
eternity, and that should be our grief when we look at a world that doesn’t know Him
and hasn’t heard of Him.
John Piper and I were talking a little bit before his address, and we agreed that one
of the great things we ought to pray for is the collapse of Islam, not just Islam of course.
I am one of those people who grew up in a world where communism seemed an eternal inevitable
presence among us.
There would always be a Soviet Union.
There would always be a Berlin wall.
Communism wasn’t going away.
And what happened?
I don’t know if it surprised all the professional historians, but it surprised me.
The thing collapsed like a house of cards.
There was no there there.
If Christ isn’t there, there never is any there there.
And we ought to pray that some of the great edifices that have been raised against God
would in the power of His Holy Spirit in our day collapse – not because it’s important
that things happen in our day but because we want to see our Christ glorified.
We want to join in that glory and in that celebration.
We want to hear the Near East echo again with Psalm 67.
One of the early proponents of Psalm singing in the church was Athanasius of Egypt.
Wouldn’t it be wonderful if Psalm 67 echoed through the streets of Alexandria again?
God can do that, can’t He?
And we need to pray, pray fervently, pray expectantly that that will happen.
That will please God.
We will have believed His Word.
We will have seen the importance of His Son.
We will have listened, and then we will have done a beautiful thing to glorify Him.
But you know the Scripture tells us it’s not just individuals that please God.
It’s congregations that please God.
That’s important for us to remember.
We have a tendency in American Christianity to be very individualistic.
We tend to think just about how Christianity impacts on me.
And that’s important, but it’s not the whole story.
And the Bible reminds us that Christianity is also a communal endeavor and that congregations
please God.
Let me refer to just one of them, the church in Smyrna.
We have a graduate of our seminary who is now pastor of the church of Smyrna.
It feels sort of eschatological.
God is once again rebuilding His church.
But in the first century, Jesus had a word in Revelation, chapter 2, to the church of
Smyrna.
He writes seven letters, you all know, to seven churches.
Three of them were sort of so-so churches.
Two of them were in danger of having their candlesticks removed from the heavenly temple.
But with two of them, He was pleased.
So we read in Revelation 2, being at verse 8:
“And to the angel of the church in Smyrna write: ‘The words of the first and the last,
who died and came to life.
“‘I know your tribulation and your poverty (but you are rich) and the slander of those
who say that they are Jews and are not, but are a synagogue of Satan.
Do not fear what you are about to suffer.
Behold, the devil is about to throw some of you into prison, that you may be tested, and
for ten days you will have tribulation.
Be faithful unto death, and I will give you the crown of life.
He who has an ear to hear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches.
The one who conquers will not be hurt by the second death.’”
How is this church pleasing to God?
Well, first of all, they listened to the word of Christ.
They heard Him say, “I am the One who died and came to life.
And I am the One who can give you life.
I am the One, I am the only One who can give to you the crown of life.
Your mockers in the streets of Smyrna cannot give you a crown of life.
Your persecutors cannot give you a crown of life.
Your jailors cannot give you a crown of life.
Your murderers cannot give you a crown of life.
But I can and I will.
And that must put for you in perspective the mockery, the persecution, the imprisonment,
the death that you have to face because in the end of the day, it’s not that important.
It’s not that vital.
It will only last a little while.
You can make it for ten days, can’t you?
It’s only for a little while.
And what I will give you is a crown of life that you’ll wear through eternity.”
You see how Jesus says the choice isn’t really that hard, is it, a get out of jail
free card for ten days or a crown of life for eternity?
“For the one who hears, for the one who believes, for the one who lives for me, for
the one who is faithful, you’ll conquer, and the second death cannot touch you.”
The death of the body is nothing.
It’s the death of the soul you have to worry about, the second death, the final judgment,
the condemnation.
“But if you’re mine,” Jesus says, “if you belong to Me, if you believe My Word,
if that Word has led you to live for me, then the crown of life is yours forever.”
And see Smyrna had listened.
They had listened to the Word.
They had believed the Word.
They were living out the Word.
They were pleasing to Christ.
He comes to commend them.
You see, just like Mary, they had heard the Word, they had believed the Word, and they
had seen the importance of Jesus.
Notice how He begins this word, “I am the first and the last.”
He’s really quoting Isaiah there.
We read in Isaiah 44, verse 6, “Thus says the LORD the King of Israel and His Redeemer
the LORD of hosts, I am the first and I am the last, besides Me, there is no God.”
Jesus, you see here, has been asserting not only is He the One who died to bear the sins
of His people, not only is He the One who is resurrected as Lord of life, but He is
eternal God.
That’s the claim that He’s making here.
When He says, “I am the first and I am the last,” He’s identifying with what God
has said through His prophet Isaiah when He says, “I am God and there is none besides
Me.”
And this is a remarkable claim, isn’t it?
Can you imagine that little church of largely converted gentiles presumably in Smyrna, and
they look at the vast Roman world that surrounds them, and they look at what may have been
an impressive synagogue building, and they are facing prison, and they think to themselves,
can we really believe?
Is it really true that our Jesus is God come in the flesh?
That’s…
That’s the sort of pressure that we all feel in every age of the church, no matter
how many Christians there are.
We all face that question.
We’re all forced to confront that fundamental question.
Is Jesus really who He says He is?
Can it be that that man who walked among us and had no form or comeliness that we should
desire Him is eternal God?
How many voices through history have said, “That’s ridiculous.
That’s crazy.
He might be a nut, and He might be a nice guy, but it’s obvious He’s not God.”?
But Jesus says, “I am.
I’m the first and the last.
Before Abraham was, I am.”
Do we believe Him?
Do we see His importance?
Do we see His centrality?
Do we relate our whole life to Him and out of Him and for Him?
That’s what at the deepest level it means to please God.
Now as a historian I’m always looking for anniversaries to celebrate, and this is the
450th anniversary – as I’m sure you’re all aware – of the writing of the Belgic
Confession.
What sort of group have I found myself in?
The Belgic Confession was written by a French speaking Protestant from what today we would
know as Belgium, where Calvinism flourished for a time.
A man by the name of Guido de Brès and he wrote a confession to make clear in the struggles
of the 1560s what it was that Reformed churches really believed.
They had been lied about.
They had been misrepresented.
They had been confused with other groups, and so de Brès wrote this confession.
He modeled it on a confession that Calvin had written for the French Reformed church,
but because of the peculiar circumstances faced in the Low Countries de Brès’ confession
is about twice as long as Calvin’s to clarify certain points in dispute there.
And Guido de Brès is in many ways not a famous man, but he wrote a powerful confession, and
when he published it, he accompanied it with this statement that he and those who stood
with him in this confession confessed their faith in Jesus Christ, and they wanted the
Roman Catholic authorities to know that they would (quote) “offer their back to stripes,
their tongues to knives, their mouths to gags, and their whole bodies to the fire, well-knowing
that those who follow Christ must take up His cross and deny themselves.”
This was not rhetoric for de Brès.
He knew that Reformed martyrs had died in France having their tongues cut out, so they
couldn’t sing Psalms on the way to the stake to be burned.
And de Brès, I believe, is the only major Reformer who actually sealed his confession
with his own blood.
Six years after the publication of this confession, he was a martyr.
He was captured.
He was held in a filthy prison, and he was hanged for the faith.
I believe he was pleasing to God, not because his life was so holy but because he had believed
the Word of God and sought by the strength in him to live out that Word.
He had written about good works and faith in his confession.
Let me read them to you.
“These works, as they proceed from the good root of faith, are good and acceptable in
the sight of God for as much as they are all sanctified by His grace.
What you do for God out of faith according to His Word, however actually marred with
sin it is, is accepted to Him because He washes it with His grace and with His love.”
Nevertheless de Brès wrote, “These good works are of no account towards our justification,
for it is by faith in Christ that we are justified even before we do good works.”
That’s wonderfully put, isn’t it?
Those who have faith in Christ will do good works, and those good works will be pleasing
to God because He’ll wash them by His grace, but they don’t justify us.
They show our justification.
They express our justification, because we are justified by faith alone.
We are made God’s people by faith alone.
We are made God’s people because we have listened to Christ.
And by His grace, by the work of His Spirit in our hearts, we’ve believed Him.
And because we’ve believed that He is the One who will die for sin and rise to glory,
carrying with Him the crown of life for His people, we trust Him, and we live for Him.
And if God calls us as He called Guido de Brès, as He called those saints in Smyrna
to lay down their lives for Him, we’ll do that because the suffering of this present
world is not worth comparing to the glory to be revealed.
Jesus said it.
It’s true, and we believe it.
And when we do, we’re pleasing to Him.
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