If God is sovereign, why should we pray? Pastor John encourages us to seek God with confidence in his power and plan for our lives.

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Did the incarnation change history forever? John Piper shows from Hebrews 9:26–28 how Christ’s coming marked a new era in God’s story.

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I love spontaneity. I treasure unplanned, unexpected moments of joy with my family, with colleagues at work, with fellow pastors and members at our church, even with friends at the ballfield. Most of all, I cherish the sweet moments of surprising joy, with my Bible open, in communing with God.

I’ve come to learn over the years that spontaneity is often misunderstood. I myself have misunderstood it. But the hard knocks of stubborn reality can be a good teacher. By nature, I’m not someone who values discipline and routine. I despise dead ritual and lifeless liturgy. But my love for spontaneity has steadily drawn me over time to recognize, and appreciate, how the power of habit can serve spontaneous joy rather than replace or suffocate it.

Here’s the hard truth for those of us who love spontaneity: We will experience very few, if any, precious moments of spontaneity with our children or spouse if we have not made a habit of being together. These special, unplanned quality moments emerge in the space of planned, arranged-for quantity time together. The same is true with colleagues at work and fellow Christians in our church. If we don’t have planned, scheduled times of being together, we will not experience the joys of deep communion.

The same is true in seeking to have soul-feeding, heart-warming daily communion with the living God.

Planned Spontaneity with God

Joy in God’s presence disappears when I don’t make a habit of pursuing his presence. Daily communion with the living God doesn’t just happen as we go about our daily lives. Setting our minds on things above doesn’t just happen. God means for us to take some initiative and put in a little effort to do the mind-setting and heart-calibrating, and in those arrangements God loves to bless his people with surprising showers of his grace that have all the joy of the best spontaneity.

To get practical, consider five simple aspects of how you might orient, and make arrangements, for the joys of daily communion with God.

1. Have a Plan

It was no accident that Jesus rose early. Through the centuries, the general testimony of faithful saints has been that the quiet of the morning is far and away the best time to enjoy focused time with God. One way I think about it is that I want God’s voice, in his word, to be the first voice I hear each day. Most will find out over time that it is worth it to get off your screen the night before, get to bed on time, and get up early to meet with the living God.

A good plan includes not only a time but a place, which I mean in two senses: in the world and in the word.

• In the world means the physical location in which you’ll open your Bible and pray. For me, I want an uncluttered desk or table.
• In the word means a planned place to read in the Bible day after day.

I do not recommend opening the Bible at random, or just bouncing around each day to whatever feels interesting in the moment. That kind of spontaneity will prove crippling, not life-giving. Having some kind of Bible-reading plan helps to bring balance in the long term and clarity about where to go each morning. Find a time-tested reading plan, and take each day’s assigned readings as God’s gift to you that morning for his feeding of your soul.

2. Find the Pace

I suspect many mornings of Bible reading are ruined by rushing and impatience. Modern life can be so hurried. We have endless options of things to do and still just 24 hours in the day. So, we hurry. We hurry through meals, hurry on the roads, hurry to scroll through our feeds, hurry when we read articles and books, often just skimming, because we feel like we’re always running out of time. But hurry ruins Bible reading.

Let your daily season in God’s word be your first stance against the tides of hurry. Slow down when you open the Bible. Find the pace that accords with nourishing your soul for the day. God’s word is not fast food. For me, this means I need enough time to lose track of time. I need to find the pace that frees me to follow rabbit trails and check cross-references and have space to try to understand Scripture in the world of Scripture. What previous and later scriptures sound like this one, or use the same categories and language and terms and images?

3. Remember to Pause

Here I want to highlight the importance of not just reading but meditating. As you read slowly, find some place to pause and linger over some striking truth, some unexpected ray of God’s goodness, some glimpse of his majesty.

In meditation, you pause and ponder a truth, roll it around on the tongue of your soul, seeking to not only understand it but enjoy it, or feel the weight of it. Which leads, then, to addressing God (in prayer) as his word has addressed us and gone deep in us in meditation.

4. Polish with Prayer

Meditation is a bridge between Bible reading and prayer. Instead of doing your Bible reading over here, and then pivoting to pray lists over there, let your Bible reading lead to meditation, and meditation then lead to prayer. My general arc each morning is to (1) begin with Bible, (2) move to meditation, and (3) polish with prayer.

To meet with God is not only to hear his words in the Bible, but also to speak back to him, in response to his word, in prayer. It’s a relationship. We call it communion. First, God speaks in his word, and we listen deeply and take it all the way in through meditation. Then, amazingly, God wants to hear back from us. In Christ, we have his ear. He means for us now, in light of what he says in his word, to address him in praise, thanks, confession, and supplication.

5. Enjoy a Person

Fifth and finally is the person, whose name is Jesus. Meeting with God, in his word, is no mere task or activity. It’s not mainly an exercise in learning. It is meeting with a person, who is not only God but also man like us. To see Jesus — by the Spirit, through the word — is to see the Father. To know him is to know God. To enjoy him is to enjoy God. To feed your soul on him is to have true life.

Bible reading and meditation and prayer are means to an end. They are God’s means of grace to the great end of knowing and enjoying Jesus as the Pearl of Great Price (Matthew 13:45–46), as the great Treasure hidden in a field and found in joy (Matthew 13:44), as the Surpassing Value worth counting all as loss to have (Philippians 3:8).

Your most pressing need is not to master the Bible but to be mastered by God in Christ, through his word, day after day, for a lifetime.

Why should Christians wait confidently to the end? Because not only has God equipped us with many gifts, but he will preserve us in his faithfulness.

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Your life is like a series of rooms connected by the hall of Time. Behind you stretches a long line of past places, rooms you’ve lived and loved in, rooms you’ve suffered and rejoiced in, some you would give everything to reenter, others you would give everything not to reenter, none of which you can reenter. Before you, the hallway branches in a hundred directions, presenting a parade of rooms you might move through, some you plan to get into, others you desperately want to avoid, all of them hazy and uncertain.

In this series of rooms, the only one you can live in is now. And yet, if you’re anything like me, you often try to live anywhere but the present. I tried to capture the power of this absurd impulse in a poem:

The door is cracked to elsewhen,
     Ajar and wooing you astray
With heaps of golden oncewhens
     And dreams that never stay.

Recall the vault of past good,
     But beware its siren song,
Which lures from the Here and Now
     With memories embalmed.

Lotus Eaters know too well
     Those long-fondled treasures.
Leave them for the sunny isle
     Of living, present Pleasures.

The future seems a canvas blank
     On which to scrawl my will,
A fiction I would dwell in,
     If Time’s winds were ever still,

But only Now is sacramental,
     Where forever meets my story;
This Moment is a burning bush,
     A Gift of grace and glory.

Like stone, the past is petrified;
     The future flits away.
But in the present of the Present,
     God draws near Today.

If we want to truly live, we must practice the discipline of being present. The past is a trap. For now, the future is a fiction. God only presents us with the present.

The Door to Elsewhen

Why is the past so attractive to us? Why do we have whole industries built around the lure of nostalgia? Why does Google Photos house over nine trillion images of memories embalmed? Surely in part because the past is familiar to us. We know it; we’ve been there. We’ve lived in those rooms. They smell like childhood; they’re packed with trophies; they’re full of memories of God-given pleasures. We were thinner then, or prettier, or healthier, or more spiritual, or had more time . . . or . . . or . . .

Many of us spend our whole lives banging our heads against those doors, trying to lay hands on those heaps of golden oncewhens. We schedule class reunions, scroll through old pictures, hoard mementos of these long-fondled treasures. Like the Lotus Eaters in The Odyssey, we can become so intoxicated by the past that we don’t live in the present. Or like Miss Havisham from Great Expectations, we can set all our clocks to one immovable moment and rot away in the morass of “what if.”

We often want the present to be what it used to be, but a river is never the same twice. Once we’ve crossed the threshold of those rooms, we can’t go back. We can see but never touch, remember but never reenter. Of course, we must heed God’s relentless command to recall the vault of past good, but only so the memory can affect how we live in the present, inspiring faith, kindling courage, ruining us to the allures of sin. God does not promise to give back the past. He has too many other good things to give, too many other blessings to bestow, too many other merciful hardships for us to endure.

Besides, the past is seldom as good as its siren song makes it out to be. Solomon cautions us, “Say not, ‘Why were the former days better than these?’ For it is not from wisdom that you ask this” (Ecclesiastes 7:10). Often, “the glory days” were just as perplexing, just as full of hardship, just as baffling as these days, but what we experience as a whisper, memory replays as a shout. Wisdom rejects this naive nostalgia, knowing that providence weaves the threads of life together so that each stitch and knot has a fitting place, beautiful in one particular time (Ecclesiastes 3:11).

Solomon warns about the past because he knows there is no better way to spoil living, present Pleasures than to put them in the dock with the past as judge and jury. Too often, we reject the goods God wants to give us Here and Now because we reach to have the ones he gave us then. When our hands hold the past with white knuckles, we can’t receive God’s new-every-morning mercies. C.S. Lewis flags the dangers of this lust for encore:

On every level of our life — in our religious experience, in our gastronomic, erotic, aesthetic, and social experience — we are always harking back to some occasion which seemed to us to reach perfection, setting that up as a norm, and depreciating all other occasions by comparison. But these other occasions, I now suspect, are often full of their own new blessings if only we would lay ourselves open to it. God shows us a new facet of the glory, and we refuse to look at it because we’re still looking for the old one. (Letters to Malcolm, 34)

Or as Solomon says, “Better is the sight of the eyes than the wandering of the appetite” (Ecclesiastes 6:9). If we are not willing to let the past be the past, to let yesterday’s blessings become faith-fueling memories and not embalmed mummies, we will never learn to live the abundant life our Lord wants to give us today.

A Fiction Yet to Be

The endless rooms of the future also prove unfit to dwell in. In fact, in many ways, they are worse. At least the past has solidity. The way is shut, but we know what happened. But the future is a fiction. For a temporal creature like man (it surely is very different for God), the future is a mirage: lovely to look at, impossible to touch; always coming, never arriving. Even eternity (with God or without) we will experience as a succession of present moments. The future seems a canvas blank, on which to scrawl my will, but no matter how hard I chase after it, Time’s winds keep it flitting down the path just out of reach.

There are, of course, fitting ways to think about the future. God often calls our attention to what he promises to do in the days to come. We should long for the time when we will see him face to face and enjoy being present in his presence forever. And sometimes it is our present duty to plan for the morrow. But we can no more live in the future than we can the past. Pascal issues a devastating warning to anyone who tries:

Let each of us examine his thoughts; he will find them wholly concerned with the past or the future. We almost never think of the present, and if we do think of it, it is only to see what light it throws on our plans for the future. . . . Thus we never actually live, but [only] hope to live, and since we are always planning how to be happy, it is inevitable that we should never be so. (Pensees, 36)

Scheming to be happy in God is not the same as being happy in God. Hoping to live is not the same as living. Plotting out the rooms to come is not the same as abiding. Often, the future is merely a distraction from the present duty or pleasure. As Screwtape points out, “[God] wants men to be concerned with what they do; our business is to keep them thinking about what will happen to them” (The Screwtape Letters, 34).

But there’s a darker side to the future than mere distraction because sin thrives on the fiction of the future. Sin’s promises (which it never keeps in the present) depend on a fanciful time to come. Screwtape again: “Nearly all vices are rooted in the future. Gratitude looks to the past and love to the present; fear, avarice, lust, and ambition look ahead” (77). Sin offers dreams that never stay.

Satan loves a man who tries to live in elsewhen — a fool whose eyes are on the distant horizon (Proverbs 17:24) — because you can’t act in the future (or the past). But his minions fear a man who truly lives in the present “because there, and there alone, all duty, all grace, all knowledge, and all pleasure dwell” (79).

The Present of the Present

Your life is a series of rooms. But the only one you can live in is Now — This Moment. We buck against these temporal limits by grubbing up the past or trying to impose our will on the future, but wisdom teaches us to embrace how God designed us. Now is the only room he gives us in which to be holy and happy.

If you want to be holy now, you must be wholly now. All of our God-given duties impinge on the present. The past is no help. No amount of past faithfulness will keep you from sin (think of David). No amount of past wisdom will keep you from being a fool (think of Solomon). No past experiences of spiritual mountaintops will keep you in the faith (think of Judas). And the future is still a fiction that will have its own highs and lows (Matthew 6:34). We do or don’t do, sin or don’t sin Now.

Only Now is sacramental; God gives grace only for the current cross. Thus, our King teaches us to pray, “Give us this day our daily bread” (Matthew 6:11). Like manna, yesterday’s stock is gone, and you cannot hoard any for tomorrow. His mercies are new every morning. Reader, what does God expect of you today? That’s what he’ll fit you for.

And as Pascal points out, now is the time to be happy in God. This Moment is a burning bush. God invites us to enjoy his presents and experience his presence in the present. After wrestling with how fast the past flees and how uncertain the future is, Solomon concludes,

Behold, what I have seen to be good and fitting is to eat and drink and find enjoyment in all the toil with which one toils under the sun the few days of his life that God has given him, for this is his lot. Everyone also to whom God has given wealth and possessions and power to enjoy them, and to accept his lot and rejoice in his toil — this is the gift of God. For he will not much remember the days of his life because God keeps him occupied with joy in his heart. (Ecclesiastes 5:18–20)

Solomon shifts our attention from the products of our work (either anticipated in the future or hoarded up in the past) to the process of our work. Only in the present process — “enjoyment in all the toil” — does God keep man “occupied with joy in his heart.”

If you want to be happy and holy and truly live, learn the discipline of being present. Let the past go; let the future worry about itself. Put down your phone; lift up your eyes. There’s no better (or other) time than now to attend to God and this Gift of grace and glory. This is our lot.

Like stone, the past is petrified;
     The future flits away.
But in the present of the Present,
     God draws near Today.

Can sin undo God’s purposes? John Piper opens 1 Samuel 12:6–25 to show that God sovereignly guides sinful choices for his glory.

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How can the pastor of a growing church care for each member? Pastor John encourages shepherds to care tenderly for the flock and depend on God’s mercy.

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Why don’t you read the Bible more than you do?

Our minds might rush to all kinds of reasonable excuses. “My job has been really demanding this season.” “My child won’t sleep through the night.” “The mornings are my only chance to exercise.” “I’ll start again when life slows down a bit.” Oh, how Satan loves the pitifully tiny hurdles we allow to keep us from the Bible. And believe me, I’ve spent time stuck behind each of those hurdles.

If we’re honest with ourselves, a lot of modern American excuses boil down to one: I’m just too busy right now.

Really?

Am I really too busy to hear from God? Am I too busy to have my soul revived by his living and active word? Am I too busy to receive the wisdom I desperately need in all of my busyness? Am I too busy to have my dim eyes awakened again to ultimate, spiritual reality? Am I too busy to have my easily distracted mind focused on the most important things? Am I too busy to taste the sweetest honey and receive the finest gold? Are we really too busy?

We’re not — and we know it. So, why don’t we read God’s word more than we do? In part, because we haven’t admitted the real reasons we don’t read the Bible.

Battling Spiritual Illiteracy

At Desiring God, our team of teachers wants to bring Bible-saturated, Christ-treasuring theology to bear on the greatest needs of our day. We’re first and foremost committed to the enduring needs in every generation: Christ and the gospel, sin and holiness, the church and prayer, heaven and hell. We’re also aware, though, that some needs are particularly acute in each generation, and so we’re studying the needs of our day and asking God how we might help.

This series is an attempt to address the disturbing decline in reading, especially the reading of the Bible. According to one study, 84 percent of American adults read for five minutes or less per day. According to Lifeway, only 31 percent of churchgoers read the Bible daily. That means less than 10 percent of all American adults read the Bible daily. That’s a crisis if you believe Romans 10:14–17:

How then will they call on him in whom they have not believed? And how are they to believe in him of whom they have never heard? . . . So faith comes from hearing, and hearing through the word of Christ.

Life and death hang on our ability to hear God — and to hear God, we have to read (or at least listen while someone else reads). He reveals himself, his will, and his gospel through words. Therefore, you can argue that reading is the most important thing we’ll ever do — and fewer people today are reading anything, much less reading the Bible. In a day when people are reading less and less, we need to teach people the vital, happy habit of meeting God in his word.

Why You Don’t Read the Bible

So, why don’t we read the Bible? When we look below our busyness and read what God tells us in his word, we see several deeper causes. The series will address a number of the biggest barriers to faithful, life-giving Bible reading, but I’ll mention a few here. I wonder which most accurately diagnoses your Bible neglect.

First, we’re witnessing a general apathy toward divine revelation. We’re living in an increasingly illiterate culture, and in that decline, we’re witnessing a pandemic of apathy toward the self-revelation of God. In other words, many (even self-professing Christians) couldn’t effectively read the Bible if they wanted to (illiteracy), but they don’t even want to (apathy). Jesus warns that some people “hear the word, but the cares of the world and the deceitfulness of riches and the desires for other things enter in and choke the word, and it proves unfruitful” (Mark 4:18–19). We want you to want to read the Bible.

Second, many fail to read, understand, and live the Bible because of stubborn pride and spiritual immaturity. These readers fail to persist and grow because they’re content to circle the Bible from high above, in a comfortable holding pattern. They refuse to mature because maturing requires submission and risk. God warns the immature, “Though by this time you ought to be teachers, you need someone to teach you again the basic principles of the oracles of God. You need milk, not solid food” (Hebrews 5:12). Being too proud to submit to anyone or anything besides themselves, they do not receive the word with meekness (James 1:21), and so they forfeit Scripture’s life and power.

Third, again, we’re seeing a widespread functional illiteracy that leads to an unsettling insecurity in interpretation. For people to meaningfully commune with God in his word, they have to know some basic tools for reading well. Proverbs 2 exhorts us,

My son, if you receive my words
     and treasure up my commandments with you,
making your ear attentive to wisdom
     and inclining your heart to understanding;
yes, if you call out for insight
     and raise your voice for understanding,
if you seek it like silver
     and search for it as for hidden treasures,
then you will understand the fear of the Lord
     and find the knowledge of God. (Proverbs 2:1–5)

God promises to give understanding, but only to those who listen carefully, pray for help, and persistently seek insight like someone searching for treasure. How many have no idea where and how to search? Some who seem to lack the hunger for Scripture just lack the ability and confidence to read it for themselves.

Fourth, attention spans have dwindled to anemic levels, especially as our pace of life has accelerated. The author of Psalm 119 prays,

Lead me in the path of your commandments,
     for I delight in it.
Incline my heart to your testimonies,
     and not to selfish gain!
Turn my eyes from looking at worthless things;
     and give me life in your ways. (Psalm 119:35–37)

Even with basic reading comprehension tools, we need the ability to sit and focus for more than sixty or ninety seconds. We need to do what Martha failed to do when she was scrambling to serve Jesus while Mary sat listening at his feet. “Martha, Martha, you are anxious and troubled about many things, but one thing is necessary. Mary has chosen the good portion, which will not be taken away from her” (Luke 10:41–42). Reading the Bible well takes time and focus, and many modern people are woefully short on both.

These are just a handful of the deeper hurdles to consistent and vibrant communion with God in his word. If you’re willing to look a layer deeper, you may see deeper reasons for your own Bible-reading struggles. And you may find a deeper, more compelling invitation to come and feast.

‘I Have Found the Book’

In 2 Kings 22, the good King Josiah ascended the throne in Israel and decided to use the national treasury to repair the temple. As the carpenters, builders, and masons went to work, the high priest stumbled onto a book. Hilkiah told the secretary, “I have found the Book of the Law in the house of the Lord” (2 Kings 22:8). The secretary took the book to Josiah and read it before the king. And “when the king heard the words of the Book of the Law, he tore his clothes” (2 Kings 22:11).

We don’t know how long the book had been lost, but it seems like at least a couple of generations, going back to Josiah’s wicked grandfather Manasseh. As Josiah realized what he was hearing, his heart broke and leapt all at once. He was devastated by how badly the book had been neglected (2 Kings 22:13). And he freshly resolved to recover and obey all that God had commanded (2 Kings 23:3).

We hope this series might be a 2 Kings 22 moment for you. As you pick through the broken-down temple of your daily devotions, trying to discern why you haven’t been more consistent and as engaged as you’d like to be, we hope you might rediscover the power and wonder of the book. If God is merciful, you may find yourself wanting to tear your clothes in repentance. Along the way, we hold out a grace-filled, no-cost invitation to come back and feast:

Come, everyone who thirsts,
     come to the waters;
and he who has no money,
     come, buy and eat!
Come, buy wine and milk
     without money and without price.
Why do you spend your money for that which is not bread,
     and your labor for that which does not satisfy?
Listen diligently to me, and eat what is good,
     and delight yourselves in rich food.
Incline your ear, and come to me;
     hear, that your soul may live. (Isaiah 55:1–3)

What stability might more regular Bible reading bring to your troubled soul? What peace to your distress, what counsel for your confusion, what perspective to your disorientation, what hope for your future? Why don’t you come and read the Bible with us?

Because God calls all Christians, all Christians call on God. Our one Lord and one confession unite us with all believers across time and space.

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Love moved Jesus to let Lazarus die. Why? Jesus wanted Lazarus, his family, and the watching crowd to taste his all-satisfying glory.

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