God Doesn't Try

The Book *God Doesn't Try* and Its Purpose

God is trying to build His church. God is trying to speak to us. God is trying to save people. Or is He? Welcome to the program, ladies and gentlemen. My name is Justin Peters. I hope that this finds you and your family doing well today.

I want to thank you so much for joining me. I am going to be talking about a book that I highly endorse and the title of it is God Doesn't Try. It's authored by Jim Osmond and Dave Rich. Both of these men are friends of mine.

They are elders at Kootenai Community Church. Jim has written a number of books. This is his most recent book and it is absolutely excellent. It would make a great book study for your small group class.

I'm going to interview Jim and Dave about this book. I think you'll find this very fascinating. It's an immensely helpful book. I can't say enough good things about it. If you haven't gotten yours yet, you need to.

All the links are down below in the description. Here's my interview with Jim and Dave. Towards the end of this interview, you'll see we have a little fun there at the end. Here we go. Well, Jim, Dave, brothers, thank you all for joining me.

How are y 'all doing today? I'm doing well.

Doing well. Good to see you, Justin. Yeah, you too, brother.

I think most people are probably familiar with Jim, but Jim,. Brief intro for us, bio sketch.

Yeah, I pastor Kootenai Community Church up in rural North Idaho, a small little church up here in a rural community. And I've known Justin since 2009. I've been pastoring here since 1996.

All right. And Dave? I'm Dave Rich. I have been at Kootenai Church since, I think, 1999 or 2000, been an elder at Kootenai Church since 2001. I'm what some people call bivocational pastor. I have a day job, I guess you'd say.

And I'm just glad to be here to talk about the book and anything else that you want to talk about.

Yeah. All right. All right. Well, thank you both very much, both of their elders at Kootenai Community Church. And I do want to talk to you about the book. So I have my copy here. God Doesn't Try, and it is an excellent, excellent book.

You got yours too, Jim?

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think mine's almost in the shot. You want me to sign it for you? What's that, Dave?

It's almost in the shot. It's a little low. Oh, there you go. There you go. Yeah. Well, this is a great book. And the two of you co-labored on it and wrote this book. So give us a little bit of background information.

How did this book come to be? What was the genesis of it and how did it come together between the two of you?

So the idea for the book came out of a sermon that Dave preached in 1 Peter. He's been going through 1 Peter every time he preaches for me a couple of times a year. He'll go into 1 Peter, he's working his way slowly through that book.

So this was probably way back in like 2015, 16, 17, somewhere in there, maybe. Dave was preaching in 1 Peter chapter one, and he made a statement in the message. He was talking about the sovereignty of God and salvation in the first few verses of 1 Peter.

And he said, I forget even how he was describing it, but he said he just made the statement, God doesn't try to save people. And he kind of made a couple of other statements like that. And instantly in my mind, I thought that should be a book.

God doesn't try. God doesn't try to save people. He doesn't try to speak to us. He doesn't try to protect us. God doesn't try to do anything, really. So I went up to Dave after the sermon. I said, one of these days, you and I are going to write a book and we're going to call it God Doesn't Try.

And I kind of gave him the gist of what I wanted to do. And he sort of nodded and said, yeah, that sounds like a good idea. And then I got one writing project after another. And finally, a couple of years ago, we decided to sit down and start organizing it.

And we organized it into kind of an easy, easily divisible set of chapters. And we kind of each worked on it together and met together to work on it and to think through what we wanted to present and how we wanted to do it and who was going to tackle what.

And it was a real joy to be able to work on the book together.

Yeah, yeah, I think it was first Peter begins with the first word that he uses to describe his readers as elect, chosen. And then he goes on to talk about God has caused us to be born again. Yes. So the context of that is, you know, God hasn't made our salvation possible.

God hasn't made our regeneration something we may choose now. God has caused us to be born again to a living hope to the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead. So it it really is a strong statement of God's sovereignty and salvation.

And so, yeah, Jim came up to me afterwards, you know, and I don't preach as often as as you guys do. So for me, it takes a lot of effort. You know, it's really an unburdening. It's a so I stepped down off the stage and Jim comes right.

Hey, that's a book. So, yeah, it was really it's one of the great joys of my life to have been able to just spend the time with Jim and working through talking about God's sovereignty. You know, that doctrine has meant so much to me personally and so much to the people that we've helped in counseling and preaching and teaching.

And it's such a meaningful. Doctrine for people that it was a real joy to to think about and to study and to learn what God's word has to say about God and his power and goodness. So, yeah.

Amen, amen. Well, back then, Kathy and I were still we were members of Kootenai Community Church, and we still live there in Sandpoint back in those days. And I remember you preaching through First Peter, Dave.

And I can't honestly say that I remember that exact line, but I do remember you preaching through that book and doing a very, very good job at it. So, yeah, I appreciate that.

I'm all the way up to chapter two, verse eight, Justin. So, oh, man, I did that last week. That was a powerful one. You're flying. Yeah, I need to bring up the Jim's taking over. Yeah, yeah.

All right. Well, let's dive into the book a little bit more. There's a line here that I have highlighted. The idol of American evangelicalism can't fall soon enough. This book aims to accelerate its demise.

And I don't know which one of you wrote that line or that particular section, but what does that mean? The idol of American evangelicalism can't fall soon enough. And you aim to accelerate its demise.

I think that sounds like it comes from the introduction to the book where we talk about your perspective of God and how that informs our worship and our ecclesiology, our eschatology, our soteriology.

Everything comes back to our view of who God is and what he is doing and how he does what he does. So basically, my point there is that American evangelicalism has a God that is very much in our own image.

And I think often of that phrase in the psalm where God condemns Israel and says, you thought that I was altogether like you. American evangelicalism has created a God that is very much like itself. It's consumer-centered, it's seeker-centered, seeker-driven.

It's your own personal Jesus, as Tepesmo used to sing about. And it's a God with a small g who really can't do anything without our permission. It's the God preached by Joel Osteen. It's the God of the New Apostolic Reformation.

It's the God of the Word of Faith movement, the Charismatic movement.

But you know what? When you ask a question, and I know that many people have said this, maybe in these exact words or possibly you've rephrased it, but you've said, why does God let things like this happen?

You know, when you say something like that, that shows that you are making an assumption that God could just control things if he wanted to, that God could stop this. And you know what? That is an absolutely wrong assumption.

And I can guarantee you with a lot of the religious doctrine that we have, especially the sovereignty of God teaching, there are going to be people all over the world that are just shocked that I would say something like that because they believe that, of course, God can do anything he wants to.

That is not true.

And that really is an idol of our age. And a lot of people adopt those perspectives on God and those doctrines of God without even really thinking them through, and especially without thinking through the implications of what those doctrines mean for our life and for handling difficulties and trials and afflictions and stuff like that.

Yeah. So in writing the book, what we wanted to do is give people a lofty view of God and remind them that no matter what we're talking about in terms of our interaction with God and God's dealing with us as individuals, with his church or with all of creation, God is not attempting to do anything and then failing to do it.

Right. Because, Dave, to say that God tries, and you hear that lingo a lot, you know, God is trying to do such and such. He wants to do this, you know, blah, blah, blah, variations of that. But to say that God tries to do anything, doesn't that by definition imply the possibility of failure?

Yeah, we go through that. It's kind of the explanation in chapter two. We call it do or do not. There is no try, that famous Yoda line. You must unlearn what you have learned. All right, I'll give it a try.

No, why not? Do or do not. There is no try. All right. And that's true for God. God does or does not. He doesn't try. And so we look at that. There's basically one Hebrew word and one Greek word that could be translated try with the meaning to attempt.

And those words are never in scripture applied to God in that way. Why? Because God is not capable of trying. God cannot try. God doesn't try. And it's because to try includes the possibility of failure.

God can't fail. Why? Because God is omniscient and omnipotent. One who knows all and one who can do all that he pleases is not capable of failure. And so if you're not capable of failure, you can't try.

So all of the stuff that talks about how God's trying to speak to me and God's trying to teach me this and God's trying to sanctify me or God's trying to prosper me. Kosti Hinn in the forward to the book does a great job of connecting this up to that prosperity gospel where God would prosper you if only you would allow him or only you would sow the seed or only you would do this or that or the other thing, putting the power back into the hands of people.

And we had multiple purposes for writing the book, but it really is one of them is to correct that careless use of language that really blasphemes the sovereignty and goodness of God. Yeah, indeed.

Absolutely. And we often think in terms of God can do anything. He's omnipotent. He has all power. There's nothing he can't do. But there are some things that God not only will not do but cannot do. And God cannot lie.

He cannot change, not just that he won't lie or he won't change. He can't change. He cannot deny himself and he cannot fail. Right?

Right. And for the same reasons, God can do anything that is consistent with his character and can do nothing that is inconsistent with it, nor would he. So he can do all that he pleases, but nothing that he doesn't please.

So he's not capable of failure because he can't fail. He's not capable of trying because he can't fail. So it's perfectly legitimate to say there's some things that God cannot do, but he cannot do them because of the perfection of his character, not any defect in his character.

It's the opposite of us. We fail because of limitations. God cannot fail because of his perfection. Anything we say God cannot do, it's because of his perfections. And that's really the emphasis that we make throughout the book.

We take God's sovereignty, his perfections, and we try to show the absolute nature of his perfections and all the implications of that for a person's thinking, doctrine for their life, for comfort and affliction, all of those areas where I think God's sovereignty is just the most lovely and important doctrine that we can contemplate as we go through this life.

Yeah, that's right.

Amen. This is a loose quote from Charles Spurgeon, but the sovereignty of God is the pillow upon which I lay my head at night. I've seen a few different iterations of that, but the doctrine of God's sovereignty is a great comfort to us as believers.

It's something that I think every professing Christian would at least give some lip service to God's sovereignty, but they don't really think through the implications of what God's sovereignty means and entails and logical conclusion of that.

This may be my favorite line out of the book. It's on page 43. Jim, I can tell you wrote this just because it's your style. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think so. Oh, why do men entrusted with proclaiming the gospel and unflinchingly preaching the whole truth avoid the hard edges of the gospel and dance around the truth like a tribal shaman conjuring a rainstorm?

That was me. That was you?

Yeah. Yeah. So talk to us a little bit about that. What do you mean? That's in the chapter on God doesn't try to save his people, and in the beginning of that chapter, I tell a story about a time that Dave and I went to a funeral of a man who died here in our community, and it was in a big church that seating capacity was probably three or four times the seating capacity of where we were meeting at the time.

The place was packed because this guy grew up in the community, knew almost everybody in the community, and he died at kind of a young age. And the pastor got up, and after talking about spiritual things in the most general and benign sense possible, he basically said, so-and-so, I forget what the guy's name was, but so-and-so made that decision, and I hope that you will someday too.

And he didn't even talk about sin. He didn't talk about atonement. He didn't talk about the cross of Christ, the death and resurrection, the wrath of God, none of the things that were associated with the gospel.

Just generally, he made a decision about God and Jesus in his life, and I hope that someday you'll make that decision too. And that was the closest he swerved to the gospel. And so my point in that is that there's only one, well, there's a number of things, but primarily there is something that explains such an aversion to being close to the truth, and that is that by not speaking the truth in a forthright and what could be offensive manner to unbelievers who are present, your hope is that you sort of nudge them toward the gospel, but not so much that they would back away from it, that you kind of just give them an almost inoculate them or expose them to the gospel enough that they would not be offended by it, and then leave it at that, hoping that somebody sometime down the road is going to come along and move them a couple inches closer to the gospel.

And the assumption behind that is that God is desperately trying to save this person, but he needs us not to run them off with a bold and straightforward presentation of the gospel. And that's how most people handle in gospel presentations.

Dave and I have been to Awana conferences and massive Awana events and heard guys stand up and present the gospel in front of, you know, say two, three thousand people there at an Awana Games event or something like that.

And you just want them to speak the truth in a bold way that would just make people realize what they're being told, rather than put it in the shadows and shade it, hoping that nobody is offended by the truth.

Yeah, yeah, indeed. Indeed. That's one of the early chapters there. God doesn't try to save his people. And, you know, Jesus said, I came to seek and to save that which is lost. He didn't say, I came to seek and to make salvation possible.

Amen. Or to try and save. Or to try and save. I came to seek and say, you shall call his name Jesus, for he will try to save his people from their sins. No, he will save.

Yeah, and in that passage, I go through John 6 and John 6, 10 and 17 are three chapters that all describe the same sovereignty of God and salvation to three different groups of people from three different perspectives using three different analogies.

And John couldn't be any more clear about that subject, that Jesus will save all the Father gives to him. They will all come to him. He'll give life to all of them and raise all of them up on the last day.

And that's John 6. John 10 is he's the good shepherd. He lays down his life for his sheep. He doesn't lay down his life for the Pharisees. He said, you do not believe because you're not of my sheep. And he lays down his life for his sheep and then saves them and secures them infallibly and everlastingly.

And then John 17, triumphantly, Jesus says, I've kept all that the Father has given to me. And Judas was lost. Judas was not a believer given to him for the purpose of betraying him and fulfilling prophecy.

And Jesus' point and John's point in his gospel is that Jesus came and did exactly what the Father sent him to do, which was to pay the sin debt and then to secure through his death and resurrection on the cross, to secure infallibly the salvation of all that the Father chose.

And that's what Christ has done. So he doesn't come and attempt to save a whole bunch of people the Father hasn't chosen and try to save a whole bunch of people that the Spirit's not going to regenerate.

There is a perfect unity among the persons of the Trinity in saving God's people. Amen.

Amen and amen. And Dave, you wrote a chapter, one of the chapters that you wrote, God doesn't try to sanctify his people. And I really appreciated that chapter because one of the things that I've seen, unfortunately, a lot in our circles, our soteriologically reformed view of God's sovereignty and salvation, our more Calvinistic circles, is unfortunately in some pockets of our circles, I guess, there seems to be a real lack of sanctification, a lack of personal holiness, a relationship with the things of the world that's just far too chummy.

So talk to us a little bit about sanctification. God doesn't try to sanctify his people.

Sanctification, Holiness, and Church Discipline

Yeah, and that's true, Justin. I hadn't thought about that. In churches that insist on doctrinal precision, there is that risk that people come for the academics, and they kind of come for the doctrinal nuances, and so much that they're not necessarily devoting themselves to those same doctrines.

So we do see that. I wrote this chapter in part as a polemic against the free grace theology movement, which is really nothing new. It's just antinomianism in a new form. The idea that you come to Christ as Savior, but you needn't come to him as Lord.

There are no ethical requirements in the new covenant. It's all by grace, what Daryl Harrison calls gracism, that idea. And then partly, it was as kind of a pastoral emphasis that the degree to which you're sanctified is the degree to which God would have you sanctified in the moment.

And the sanctification process is a disciplined process, and sometimes difficult, and sometimes involves trials, or illness, difficulties, job loss, loss of people that you care about. These are all part of the sanctifying work of the Spirit.

And so we go through 1 Peter. I think the whole point of 1 Peter is to demonstrate that our difficult life is a sanctifying work of the Spirit, that there's purpose in our life, and that purpose is the glory of God and our good through sanctification being made into the image of his Son.

And then 1 John, I mean, that's a great book. John is so insistent on the sanctification of people. He believes that it's inevitable. The way he writes, anyone who is a believer demonstrates certain fruits of the Spirit.

He gives it in terms of tests, and I look at it as three tests. It's that there's a doctrinal test there that every believer believes certain things. There's a moral test that the believer keeps the commandments.

He says that over and over again. And there's a social test or a love test. Believers love other believers. That's just inherent in having eternal life, sharing in the same eternal life. So that level of sanctification is inevitable.

There's the idea of a carnal Christian that has been so popular is an oxymoron to John. John would have no part in that. We look at Hebrews 12 and the discipline that's part and parcel of being a believer.

So I want people to understand that, and there's also a little bit of an edge to that. You ought not to have assurance of your salvation if there is no evidence of your salvation. All right? If Jesus is not, in fact, your Lord, then you cannot claim him as your Savior.

Be holy because he is holy. That's given to us very clearly. So that was kind of the point of that chapter. And we preach that. I mean, Jim preaches that Sunday after Sunday. If you're sitting there in our church, we don't want you to be comfortable in a state of sin.

We perform church discipline as is necessary, and I think that's a hallmark of a decent church. If your church never practices church discipline, I don't think they have a solid enough commitment to the word and to the body of Christ.

And so that's kind of the point of that chapter. God doesn't try to sanctify. God is sanctifying, and when you're going through something in life, that's its purpose. Yeah.

Amen. Amen. Unfortunately, we've seen a rather dramatic example of that. In the last couple of months in our circles with Steve Lawson, all the doctrinal I's dotted and T's crossed, and yet he was living this double life.

And you said it well, Dave, if you don't know Jesus, if you can't claim Jesus as your Lord, you can't claim him as your Savior either.

Jesus simply is Lord and Savior. We don't make him either one of those things. To hear that kind of language, again, it's careless language that blasphemes the person of Christ. Yeah. I'm not going to do that.

Yeah.

Amen. Amen. Well, Jim, I'm not going to go through all these chapters, but I want to hear a few of them. One of the chapters you wrote, God doesn't speak, and this kind of harkens back to the book you've already written titled God doesn't whisper.

So is this a chapter kind of like a summation of that? We hear that language a lot in the evangelical world. I think God is trying to tell us such and such. I think God told me this and that.

God Doesn't Whisper or Speak in Mystical Fragments

Yeah. In one sense, the book really expands upon the theme of God doesn't whisper. Dave mentions that in the first chapter that he wrote there, God doesn't do or do not, there is no try. He mentions how we're really just applying that thinking to all of the Christian life and to all of creation.

And then that chapter really is God doesn't whisper. I tried to boil that down into one chapter, and it was the toughest chapter to write, because the book God doesn't whisper was tough to write, because I had to boil down a whole bunch of stuff into just that one 300-page book.

And then I had to try and take that book and condense it down into one chapter. So that chapter is not going to answer all your questions that you might have answered or answer all the objections to that perspective.

But it really is just trying to show that when we talk about, when we try and portray God as a God who is attempting to communicate, attempting to talk to us, attempting to teach us things, we're really talking about God as if he were a two-year-old that's unable to form complete sentences and put multiple words together.

And that's the perspective of John Eldredge. John Eldredge, when he talks about God speaking to him, it's in one and two-word sentences that are opaque and mystical and undefined and uninterpretable nonsense.

It's gibberish. And that whole perspective of how God speaks to us in that type of language, the type of stuff that's described by John Eldredge, the type of stuff even, frankly, that's described by Matt Chandler in his pirate ship analogy that you've had on your channel and we've talked about on multiple occasions, that is just a blasphemous presentation of God.

That is not how God speaks. God is able to clearly articulate exactly what he wants to say when he wants to say it.

What exactly is the hermeneutical grid for pirate ships? I don't know. I don't recall studying that in hermeneutics. I don't know. Maybe that's the PhD level. I hadn't gotten to it yet. Dave, back to you, brother.

God Doesn't Try to Provide

God doesn't try to provide. Talk to us a little bit about that. We all know that God provides, but maybe you can kind of weave this into your answer. By God's grace, I've been able to preach in some of the poorest countries in the world, and I see precious believers who are living in basically dirt houses, grass huts, some of them no power, some of them no running water.

What do you mean by God doesn't try to provide? How do we square that with believers that we see around the world who, from our perspective, they don't seem to have any provision?

Yeah, Justin, I'm a little bit trepidatious to answer that question with you because I think you could probably answer that much better than I with all the work you've done over the years. But I saw this chapter as a bit of a pastoral rejection of the idea that we're seeing a lot of today where people say they have anxiety, they have depression, and so that's their excuse for basically denying the sovereignty of God.

And that's the biggest point of this. So I look at all the words for fear and anxiety in the scripture, worry, and you get three basic principles. You look at all of those words. We're to fear God. Over and over again, we're told to fear God.

The fear of God is the beginning of wisdom, over and over again. We're told not to fear man, right? Fear not him who can kill the body but is not able to kill the soul, rather fear him who is able to throw both soul and body into hell.

And then we're told not to fear anything else. And an example of Hagar, when she was told not to fear because God hears. The widow of Zarephath was told, don't worry because God will provide. And God chose to provide for it.

The whole Matthew 6, do not worry. What will be provided for us? Food and shelter will be provided for us. But we make a mistake. That's all that God promises is to meet our basic needs until such time as he determines we no longer need them.

That's the extent of his material promise. We are nowhere promised any level of what we would call prosperity on this planet. And again, at some point when God determines that the end of our life is nigh, then he is, of course, well within his rights to do what he wishes with what is his and to end our lives through the lack of provision of those things.

Jim has a quote that I've heard him say many times. If he were to wake up in a ditch, God has done him no wrong. We deserve nothing more than this. And you know, Justin, from your experience, some of those people who have next to nothing are the happiest and most satisfied believers on the face of the planet because they understand that God has provided for them graciously.

We sit here in our abundance, and if we don't have even more abundant provision, then somehow God has failed us. And that's kind of the point. God has nowhere promised us the level of provision that we hold him accountable for very often.

And no one has done more work in this area than you have. The whole prosperity gospel, word of faith movement, the whole idea that God must provide for us at some extravagant and highly prosperous level is, again, a blasphemy.

It's calling God a liar because he doesn't do something that he never promised to do. Yeah.

Amen. That's right. God was certainly providing for Stephen, even as he was being stoned in Acts 7. God was providing for Paul and John the Baptist as they languished in prison and were executed. And God was providing for Peter as he was executed, even in our hardships, even all the way up to martyrdom, God's provision for us is still there, maybe not in creature comforts, but he sustains us ultimately for his glory.

And then he does so eternally. And that's the ultimate provision that should be our hope and what motivates us all the time. We fix our hope on that. And then we can live through whatever happens on this earth.

Yeah.

Amen. Amen. And he provides for all of our mental and spiritual needs. I've said in sermons before, you know, when we go through hardships, when we go through even times, if you want to call it depression, which Paul even refers to himself as depressed in 2 Corinthians chapter 7.

But Paul, over and over, he calls God the God of all comfort, who comforts us in all of our affliction, not some, not most, but all of it.

Yeah. And we have to get, we're not denying affliction. We're not denying that these trials are heavy, as the King James says, or distressing. They are. We know that they are. We don't deny that. The point being, God has not failed in those things.

They're for a purpose, and God is providing for his glory and our good through them. I think very often we insult God as we look at our station in life, and we're not happy with it. We're not content.

And that's kind of the point. So there's an extended quotation from Tozer's Pursuit of God in the book, and I wrote down one of the quotes I think is really good from Tozer. It says, only yesterday you were telling God that you were nothing, a mere worm of the dust.

Where's your consistency? Come on, humble yourself and cease to care what men think. I think if we can understand that, Tozer also said, you have nothing of which to be ashamed except your sin. If we can get to that level where we're not measuring ourselves against other people, we're seeing ourselves as God sees us, and we who've come to the cross have already admitted that we have nothing to offer.

We come begging for salvation as abjectly poor men with nothing to offer, and then we take pride, and we're upset because the other man got the promotion, or because somebody else has a new car, and we don't.

It's completely inconsistent. So if we remain as we are at the foot of the cross, then we see these things in the right light.

God Doesn't Try to Build or Organize His Church

Yeah, amen, amen. And you have two other chapters here. Maybe we can kind of combine them into one discussion. God doesn't try to build his church, and God doesn't try to organize his church. Building his church, I think, goes right along with God doesn't try to save his people.

I guess maybe let's talk a little bit about organizing his church. I grew up in a Southern Baptist framework and was Southern Baptist for the first 37 years of my life, and I just assumed every church was supposed to have a senior pastor, and he pretty much calls the shots, and you've got the deacons, and they're there, and they do stuff, and they might offer some opinions.

But ultimately, it comes down to the head cheese there, whoever the senior pastor is, and what he says goes. Is that not how God tries to organize his church, if God doesn't try to organize his church?

That's not biblical in the least, actually. And just before, I mean, I'll kick this off to Dave to talk about biblical eldership here in a moment, because I'll leave it to somebody who's not sort of, who's the lay elder to talk about that.

Not the lay, yeah, is a lay elder, not the paid elder to talk about this. But you'll notice as you kind of move through the sections of the book that we're dealing first with individuals, save his people, speak to his people, prosper his people, provide for his people, et cetera.

And then we expand that to the church, and we say, okay, this is how God works with us individually in his sovereignty, and now in terms of the church, God's people corporately, the same thing applies.

God doesn't try to do these things for his church as a body of people either. And then the last third of the book is applying the same theology of God's sovereignty to creation and in controlling creation, executing justice, and establishing a kingdom.