John Piper on Holiness | Theocast

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Hi, this is John, and today on Theocast, Justin and I want to do a review of a recent sermon by John Piper on holiness directed towards pastors.

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And we just want to walk through some of his points and look at them from the Bible and ask ourselves, is this the most accurate way of understanding these passages?

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And we're here to kind of walk through the idea of preaching holiness from the pulpit and how it should be done and what's the aim and use some historic and reformed understandings of the

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Bible to think through and filter through some of the things that John has presented. We hope this is helpful. If you'd like to help support

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You can also follow us on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook. Plus, we have a Facebook group if you'd like to join the conversation there.

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Thanks for listening. Welcome to Theocast, encouraging weary pilgrims to rest in Christ.

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Conversations about the Christian life from a confessionally reformed and pastoral perspective. Your hosts today are

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Pastor Justin Perdue of Covenant Baptist Church in Asheville, North Carolina. And I'm John Moffitt, a pastor of Grace Reformed Church in Spring Hill, Tennessee.

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And Justin, as usual, Wednesday mornings is something I look forward to. We didn't record last weekend. It threw me off.

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It's like my whole day was off. So it's good to be back on track today. My friend, how are you?

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I'm doing okay, man. I'm tired. A lot going on in life, in ministry, but I don't need to bore the listeners.

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I'll say this. The reason why Justin's tired is that it makes everyone exhausted anytime you move houses.

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And he just moved last week, so, you know, the unpacking never ends. Yeah. We're really thrilled to be in our new house.

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It's been a long time coming, so we're very grateful to God. The saints of Covenant Baptist Church have definitely been rejoicing with those who rejoice.

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And that's been cool. Big topic today, man. Yeah. Tons going on. Big topic. Let's get back to it.

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Just for the sake of time, go ahead and bring us in and kind of tell our listeners why it is that we felt it be necessary to do this today.

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Yep. So last week was the Together for the Gospel conference in Louisville, Kentucky.

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And a number of our listeners will know that it was the last T4G that is planned to be held. And so this is a conference that started in 2006 and held every other year with the exception of 2020 when the pandemic changed the world, right?

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So yeah, this conference happened and there are a number of speakers who come and give plenary addresses there.

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And we want to be really clear just at the outset that a number of the messages given were very good and very encouraging and helpful.

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We would point people to Alistair Begg and Sinclair Ferguson, Shai Lin also, I thought was really good.

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By the way, the interview with Alistair and Sinclair was so funny.

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Those guys are a hoot, man. They're great. Yeah. They're something else. Yeah. Alistair in particular has a tremendous sense of humor.

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So, this is not a review of Together for the Gospel wholesale at all, but we received a lot of correspondence,

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John and I did individually, Theo Cass did as a ministry, about John Piper's message in particular.

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And that's understandable because John has a very significant platform, a very wide reaching influence in evangelicalism after his decades of writing and speaking and preaching.

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And so, his message was, I can't remember the title off the top, John, you could help me with that, but was effectively on the holiness of the believer.

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He bore our sins that we might live to righteousness. What is the gospel for? What is the gospel for?

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And so, we're going to interact today with John Piper's message, again, because we felt it necessary given the amount of correspondence that we were receiving on the talk and people wanting us to offer our thoughts on it.

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And so, we're happy to do that today. And the way that we're going to go about doing this is we're going to play a few clips.

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I think four of them we have. They're not long, but from our perspective, they give the sense of the message.

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And so, we're going to play a clip and then we're going to interact with it for five or ten minutes. And then we'll play another clip and interact with it and we'll just do that until we're done.

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And, yeah, John, I don't really feel the need to say a lot other than what's been said. I think our tone will come through.

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We don't mean to be overly critical or anything like that. And if I'll add, for those of you, if this is the first time you've heard

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Theocast, you can go back and look at our… Not something we normally do. No. If you go look at our catalog of episodes, we aren't typically critiquing sermons.

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But being that it's a unique situation and something that so many people asked us about, we thought it would be helpful to kind of give one answer versus so many emails and text messages.

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Correct. It's sufficient. And it was an address given to thousands of people and also streamed on the internet.

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And so, this is not us looking for something to criticize either on that front.

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And like you said, it's not something we normally do. So, with all that by way of front -loading this thing to no end, let's go ahead and do this,

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John, and pray that this is really helpful for the listener. Yeah. All right. So, here's our first clip.

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It never says you got to tear out your eye for it's better for you to lose one of your members than for your whole body to be thrown into hell, congregation,

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Christian. Never says that. It never says pursue the holiness without which you will not see the

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Lord, beloved. It never says strive to enter through the narrow door for many

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I tell you are going to seek it and they won't find it, congregation. They don't preach like that.

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They're just allergic to that kind of imperative and warning and firmness of command.

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So, this is in reference to the introduction to his sermon.

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And so, he's talking about the kind of preaching that has happened over the last 40 years, gospel -centered preaching. And so, to give context of what he's saying, he's saying that there are pastors who are not willing to stand up and say these phrases, basically calling the congregation to holy living.

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And so, those are the three examples to which he gives as why aren't you standing and using these as an example to call your congregation to fearful holy living.

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He says it at the beginning of this comment, too, that there's a kind of preaching that is allergic to imperatives, that is scared of and is allergic to using the imperatives that exist in the

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New Testament in communicating to their people what God requires of them.

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I think there are preachers who are allergic to imperatives. I think there are people who dance around and are not willing to call sin sin and make light of the holiness of the

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Lord. So, I don't disagree with that. Justin Perdue And I agree that there are people who deny the third use of the law, that the law guides the life of the

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Christian. And so, any kind of imperative, any kind of law statement whatsoever, is really something that we just need to avoid altogether.

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There is a kind of preaching that is out there, and we agree that that is not good. Jon Moffitt 100 percent.

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And again, we're not trying to be petty here. Jon, in his sermon, builds upon his argument.

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So, we're going to basically play a clip for almost every five to seven minutes of the sermon, just to kind of watch the progression down.

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And one of the reasons we pulled this particular clip is that he uses three illustrations. So, he uses Hebrews, right?

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Without holiness, you will not see the Lord. Then he talks about the brutality. Justin Perdue Two from the

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Sermon on the Mount. Jon Moffitt Right, two from the Sermon on the Mount. So, Justin, let's go ahead and start with Hebrews when he says, without holiness, no one will see the

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Lord. So, we'll start, first of all, and say we did what's called Dazed and Confused on this. It's a podcast that we did a long time ago, probably in our first year together, explaining.

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So, we walked through the whole section of that passage. But to do a quick review of that, Justin, kind of help us with context here, because in the context, we aren't dealing with a fear -based warning in that section.

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How is the writer of Hebrews using this phrase? And are we talking about positional holiness or not?

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Justin Perdue So, Hebrews 12, 14 is the verse in question, and we agree with Kevin DeYoung and Piper and others that positional holiness is not what's meant right there in verse 14.

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However, that said, the thrust of the entire letter of Hebrews... Jon Moffitt Just, sorry, for sake of so people understand, positional holiness...

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Justin Perdue Positional holiness would be our holiness in the Lord Jesus Christ, our status, right?

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Jon Moffitt Declared righteousness. Justin Perdue Correct. It's our justification. It's that we have been given in the righteousness of Jesus Christ, His act of obedience under the law is imputed to us.

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That's what we mean by positional holiness. Jon Moffitt The reason we are seen as holy is because that holiness was given to us. Justin Perdue Correct. We're going to talk about the act of obedience of Christ later.

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But, yeah, so we agree that that's not what's in view in Hebrews 12, 14. However, the thrust of the entire letter of Hebrews is effectively on the sufficiency of the

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Lord Jesus Christ, how He is the yes and amen to all of the promises of God, and how He is the fulfillment of everything that had come before Him in the

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Old Testament, in the Old Covenant. How all of that was a type and a shadow that pointed to Him and what

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He would come and do, and how He is utterly able to save all those who draw near to God through Him, how

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He has perfected for all time those who are being sanctified. And so then at the beginning of chapter 12, we're exhorted to look to Christ.

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We're to set aside everything that entangles and look to Him, who is the author and the perfecter of our faith.

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And then He gets into a section on not growing weary when we encounter the fatherly loving discipline of God.

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And so He makes it very clear that God disciplines those who are His. And the reason you would ever be disciplined by the

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Lord is because you are His children, and He is doing that so that we might share in His holiness, verse 10 of Hebrews 12.

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Then He goes on to say, therefore, Hebrews 12, 12, lift up your drooping hands, strengthen your weak knees, bear up under the discipline of God.

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And strive for peace with everyone and for the holiness without which no one will see the Lord. That holiness is something that God is working in His children.

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And so what the exhortation of the writer is effectively, do not grow weary in pursuing righteousness, do not grow weary in fleeing from sin, do not grow weary when you go through difficult discipline from the hand of God, because He's your father and He loves you and He's doing good things in your life.

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So this is meant to put steel in the spine of the believer, not scare them. That's right.

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It's not a fear -based warning. It's a comfort reality.

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He's comforting the believer. What you're going through is hard, but take heart because God is with you.

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Right. And the reason why we wanted to point that out is that John is using it, and we'll see later, and I don't believe we're misquoting

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John, John is using it to create fear in the person. In other words, if you aren't producing this holiness, you should be afraid.

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You should be afraid. And we would argue that that's not the context. Now, moving on for the sake of time, moving on to the two illustrations from the

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Sermon on the Mount, if you're unwilling to pluck out your eye because it's been an offense used for sin, is one illustration that he uses.

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And then the second illustration he uses is the narrow way, few that find it. And the problem with this is that, we're not going to spend a ton of time on this because the next clip

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I think is going to illustrate this as well, but we have a confusion of the law and the gospel here, and here's what

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I mean by that is that, Justin, if the requirement for salvation or to be assured, to know that you truly are, because he's saying, preach this way to your congregation, is that if you're not willing to pluck out these sins out of your life, then you should have no assurance of your salvation.

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I don't find it possible for one to fully remove all the remnants of sin in our life, we're not even aware of the sin that's in our life.

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So to make that as part of the requirement for one to feel fully justified,

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I find it, I mean, it's the gleamings of sinless perfectionism, which

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I know John would require, he would absolutely deny that anyone could ever be perfect.

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Fully sanctified in this life. Yeah. And so that's, you know, when we're talking about the illustration of the

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Sermon on the Mount, when he's talking about plucking out your eye, I don't believe Jesus is meaning that in such a way to where you should not have assurance of salvation unless you're doing these things.

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Well, and in the context of the Sermon on the Mount, the greatest sermon on the law ever preached. Right. Jesus has made it clear that he has come to fulfill the law and the prophets, that what is required of people is a righteousness that's greater than that of the

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Pharisees. At the end of chapter five, he's going to say that we need to be perfect as our heavenly father is perfect. And he, in this section, you know, where he will talk about tearing your eye out and cutting your hand off, he is applying the law to the hearts of men, where he is making plain that you've heard it said, don't murder.

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But I'm telling you, if you've been angry with your brother, you've broken the law. That's right. You've heard it said, don't lust or don't commit adultery.

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Excuse me. But if you've lusted after someone, then you've broken the law. In other words, we're all guilty. Right. That's right.

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And he then does use very strong language about how we should then flee from sin. But to think that that is to be done for righteousness before God is a collapsing of the law and the gospel and a misunderstanding of the

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Sermon on the Mount wholesale, which is also, I think, on display with how John Piper understands

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Matthew seven in terms of the narrow gate and the broad way.

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You could comment on that maybe. Well, yes. When he's, you know, the illustration narrow is the way and few that find it.

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If, if we're going to take it the way in which John Piper is using it, what you're saying is that the way you find salvation, because that's the point of it is, is by your obedience.

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So those who obey and are holy are the ones who find it. And again,

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I don't, I don't believe that John believes that. I don't believe he truly believes that our obedience is what earns us salvation.

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But in his passion and in his desires for us to be holy, he has collapsed categories and verses down.

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And, you know, if we had the opportunity to sit down with him, I think he would say, no, no, no, that's not what I meant. And I would wish that he would do that.

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And I want to be really clear. We share, I know you agree, John, because we talked about this before we hit record. We share

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Piper's passion and desire that piety would be realized amongst the saints.

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We absolutely are burdened as pastors for our congregations that we all would be sanctified.

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I mean, I can say that we pray for this at every single elders meeting we ever have. We pray for the sanctification and the piety of our people.

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And we pray that our people would pursue righteousness and flee from sin and all these things and for God to protect us and keep us from sin and all these things.

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And so we share John Piper's burden there. Our concern is that he is weaving obedience and holiness into the fabric of what it is to be justified.

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And that creates all kinds of problems, which we're going to be able to talk about more as we look at other clips.

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So here's our next clip. He obtained what he paid for.

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The holy conduct of God's people is sure, which is why the

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Bible repeatedly makes plain, if you don't have this holiness, you have no warrant to think you're among the redeemed or the ransomed.

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You don't. This is serious, right? This is farther down in the sermon.

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So he's continuing his logic. And the reason why we play that clip is that people hear that we're not trying to misrepresent

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John. John has now said twice, and he's going to say it actually two more times, that if there is not the evidence of holiness, you should not have assurance that you belong to the redeemed.

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So I just restated what he said. The struggle here, when you hear this kind of language, is what kind of holiness are we talking about and how much holiness are we talking about?

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The reason I say kind is that there are two different kinds of holiness. There is perfect righteousness.

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That's Christ's holiness that is imputed to us. And then there is what's called covered righteousness, meaning that our union with Christ covers our imperfection and makes, as the confession says, makes our imperfect works acceptable to the

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Father based upon what? Our union in Christ, based upon Christ's righteousness.

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So our works are only accepted because they are offered by faith in the righteousness of Christ.

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So the problem here is that if I am looking at my actions and saying, if I do not have the right actions,

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I do not have the right stance, what's hard about his sermon is that John never really offers you what that obedience level is.

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Is it one act a day? Is it multiple acts a day? Is it a mindset?

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Is it a status of progression? There's just never anything. It's so vague, and I'm going to argue that that's not what the scripture provides us anyways.

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But when you make that ultimatum statement, then the question is, how much?

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Like for instance, Justin, if a house costs $250 ,000 and that's a price tag on it and it says, well, unless you pay $250 ,000, you cannot have the house.

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When I hear someone say, if you want to be accepted by the Father, you must be holy.

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The question is, what kind of holiness does God accept? Sure. I'm going to frame it this way.

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He is talking about creating urgency as a preacher in your people. Do you create a sense of urgency and what does he mean?

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He means a sense of urgency about holiness and about obedience. He's very clear,

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I think, in how he means that we should go about creating that sense of urgency. He is arguing that what we say is this.

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If you are not holy, you're not in Christ.

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And here's kind of how the logic works. All those who are justified will be sanctified.

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All those who are justified will do good works. That's clearly biblical. As John Piper is saying, if there are no good works, if there is no sanctification, then one is not justified.

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True. Where he then goes is, therefore, pursue holiness to know that you're in Christ.

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Pursue good works. Do good works to know you're saved. That's where it falls apart.

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Because whether he intends to do so or not, he has inverted the relationship between justification and union with Christ, and then good works and holiness.

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One flows from the other. You can't reverse that relationship. You can't make the stream flow uphill, because it is very clear biblically that it is only via union with Christ, and it is only from justification that good works, holiness, and sanctification flow.

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I'm just going to go ahead and say this now, John, because it seems like it's as good of a time as any to go there. John Piper gave a message at T4G in 2010, where he was answering the question, did

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Jesus and Paul preach the same gospel? His answer was yes. He said some absolutely incredible things about this.

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He gave the wonderful illustration of the tree and its fruit. He made it very clear that fruit is only produced by a tree that's alive, and you can't try to weave the fruit into the ground, into the root of the tree, or you kill the tree.

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He's saying exactly what I just said. You can't alter this relationship. One thing flows from the other.

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It's life via justification, union with Christ that then produces fruit. He said that, and then he used the parable of the

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Pharisee and the tax collector from Luke 18 to beautifully articulate this. He makes the very good observation that the

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Pharisee is thanking God that he's not like other men. He's saying, look, this Pharisee is acknowledging the grace of God.

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The problem is that he is trusting in even God -wrought righteousness.

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He's trusting in that, and he looks at the audience and says, even if it's God -wrought righteousness,

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I don't care if it's the work of the Holy Spirit. Don't trust in it. We trust Christ alone.

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I'll never forget it. I was there. I will never forget it. And this message, this is,

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I guess, where I'm coming from in part, brother, is at best, this message that he just gave in 2022 is confusing, and it sounds in very many ways contradictory to a number of the things that he said a dozen years ago, and this confusion is a lot of our concern because you're introducing a tension and a seemingly inherent contradiction that the

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Scripture does not introduce. And our fear is that what you've done with the best of motivations and the best of intentions, you have inadvertently robbed all of the saints of assurance because there's no way that we could ever possibly assess our lives and derive any sense of peace from them.

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I think it's good and fair to say that, to believe that everything that John Piper has ever said is heresy and wrong and should be rejected.

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And that's just not true. That's absurd. I'm very thankful for a lot of what he has said, but there tends to be a thread through certain sections of his sermons or certain areas of his preaching that are very pietistic in nature, and if that's a new word to you,

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I would encourage you to go get our book on rest. We talk about what is pietism, but pietism is this hyper introspection where you're always examining self to determine whether you are acceptable in the eyes of God, whether God accepts you based upon performance, whether it be attitude, action, heartfelt, emotions.

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And the problem with this is that you will never be accepted or acceptable in the eyes of God based upon your performance because God makes it very clear that what is only acceptable to Him is perfection.

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That's the only thing that's acceptable. Now, to be clear, for instance, I just preached in James chapter five where,

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I mean, if you've ever had to preach James, there's tons of imperatives in James, right, so I'm not afraid to preach the imperatives in James, but James doesn't disconnect our grounding and union with Christ with our obligations for obedience.

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And the obligations of obedience is this, is that they are the outflow of our faith. It's always, as Justin, you just said, they are always the fruit of our faith.

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It's never the confirmation of our faith. It's never the establishment of our faith. And even this,

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James says, let your yes be yes and your no be no, lest you fall under condemnation. Well, he doesn't mean condemnation as if you will be condemned and guilty and sent to hell.

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He means that your works will not be acceptable there for the glory of God and for the benefit of others.

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And the reason we know that is that earlier on, he clearly talks about where our justification stands and what our purposes of our good works are.

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So it is, someone asked me the other day, is God ever displeased with us?

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And I would say, yeah, there are actions that we commit that God would not accept as acceptable, right?

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They are contrary to His nature. But I don't know if I've ever done an act with the full purity of heart and without sin that didn't need the covering of Christ's righteousness to make it acceptable before God by faith, right?

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Without faith, it's impossible to please the Father. So there's a confusion here that if you are trying to offer your good works as means of assuring yourself of your salvation,

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I can promise you, you've never obeyed perfectly, not at one moment in your life, that God would accept it.

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Because there is no relativation of the law. It's either complete or incomplete, right?

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And so if you're going to be accepted on the basis of your own righteousness, you are going to be doomed.

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So this also goes back to, which we're going to look at some of these clips, two more clips here in a minute, and I'll reference more of this, but the purpose is behind good works.

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I mean, as of right now, Justin, Pietism says the purpose of your good works is the confirmation of your salvation, and that's exactly what it sounds like with Piper.

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Justin Perdue It's to prove you're saved. It's to prove you're saved. Jon Moffitt And that is not what the primary purpose of the New Testament is not given to good works for that.

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Justin Perdue No, and even when it comes to our own assurance, the confessions are clear that our good works can bolster our assurance, but the emphasis of the confessions, though, and the emphasis of the scriptures regarding good works is the benefit of our brothers and sisters, and then thereby the honor of God.

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So, all right, I'm going to make this observation on this clip, and then we'll move to the next one. I have a sincere question here that I would ask

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Jon Piper or others. If the conclusion you're drawing is that many of the people listening to your sermons are not regenerate, they're not in Christ, because I'm understanding there needs to be this urgency about holiness, and a lot of people in the church aren't holy, and if they're not holy, they're not in Jesus, and we'll talk more about that in a minute.

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But if you really have concluded that a lot of the people hearing you preach are thereby probably not

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Christians, then why is your message, the emphasis of your message, you need to try harder to be holy?

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Why are you not crushing these people with the law, its holy requirements, and then giving them

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Christ? Here is God's standard. You have fallen so far short of this standard.

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We can't even describe that distance between you and it, and this law is your death sentence.

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Yet, here is the one who came to fulfill it for you, who was born of woman, born under the law to redeem those who are under the law.

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Here is the one by whom his obedience and his righteousness, many will be accounted righteous.

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Here is the one who came to give himself as a satisfaction for sin, and he did it once and for all.

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Why are we not doing that? If we think that people, by the virtue of the fact that they're not holy enough, they're not in Christ, then why are we not preaching law and gospel?

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Crush them with the law and give them Christ. Why are we telling them to try harder? You can't tell a dead person to try harder, and I know that John Piper agrees with that.

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You could tell people who are not born again all day long to be holy, and they can, by the effort of their own willpower and by pulling themselves up by their own bootstraps and getting after it, they can change patterns of behavior.

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People do that all the time, but that's not the holiness that we're talking about here. So, I just don't understand that, and I have that confusion wholesale,

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John, with a lot of the preaching that's out there. If we think that people really might not be

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Christians because they're not living appropriately, then why are we just telling them to be more holy?

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Why are we not giving them law and then Christ so that they might actually be born again and united to Christ?

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Well, this whole sermon is based out of 1 and 2 Peter, and we reference this often, and 2

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Peter says that everything that we've ever needed—this is 2 Peter 1, 1 through 3—everything we've ever needed for life and godliness, he's already granted to us.

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And this is the way he says, now, add to your faith. Another way of saying add that is work out, like go do this, like practice these things.

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Because of this, then do this. And so, he lists everything that we would ever want to be, right?

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Patient, kind, godly, meek, long -suffering. And then he says, verse 9, right?

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If these are not yours and increasing and make you ineffective and unfruitful. So then he says, what's the solution to that?

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His solution is verse 9, right? He says, if this is true about you, you have forgotten that you've been cleansed from your former sins.

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He actually goes back and uses the gospel as their motivation, not fear, not dread, not questioning their salvation.

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He says, the reason why you're not acting in accordance to who you are is because you've forgotten who you are. There's a difference there.

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And he's not using good works to, he's not using those good works as a means to give them assurance.

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He's like, you have assurance. Now go and do these things based upon them.

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So we're all for holiness and piety. The question is, how is this realized in God's people? And the law guides it, but the law cannot empower it.

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Only union with Christ. And then in an ongoing way in the church, it's the preaching of the word of Christ in the administration of the sacraments.

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It's the ordinary means of grace that empower sanctification. It's so good. It's another podcast for another day, but let's play another clip,

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John. All right. Now it's not enough.

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It's not enough to say that God paid the ransom for his wife.

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So God's wife is kidnapped. She's across the plaza and he's going to get her for himself.

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And he pays an infinite price. And it's not as though she steps out free from her captors and goes and shacks up with another man.

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That didn't happen at the cross.

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So much to be said here. Yes, go ahead. I mean, on a number of levels,

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I'm like, amen, he didn't fail. That's right. His sufficiency is the definite article, whole and only ground of our hope and peace before God.

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And he did it. There is nothing potential. You know, there's nothing hypothetical. It is done.

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We talk about this all the time. It's objective, stands outside of us, and it is declarative.

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It's finished. Like he said, it's finished. And so I could not agree more that what

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Christ meant to accomplish in his life and in his death, he did it.

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And it's the only reason I'm here, John. It's the only reason I'm on this podcast today. It's the only reason I'm a Christian. That's right. You know,

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I mean, good grief. If that's not true, then what are we all doing? You know, I mean, but so I want to start with that.

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But then immediately, John, my mind goes a whole host of verses I could quote. And for the sake of time,

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I'm just going to quote a few. Hebrews 10, like read the entirety of the chapter, but verses 11 to 14, in particular,

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Christ made priests in the Old Testament, in the old covenant. They had to stand daily, you know, and offer sacrifices.

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They had to offer sacrifices annually, you know, at the day of atonement. Why? Because what they were doing,

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I mean, they were dying. They couldn't keep holding their office. They had to keep offering sacrifices because it wasn't sufficient.

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But then Jesus, once and for all time, made a single sacrifice for sins.

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And then he sat down at the right hand of God because it's over. And then verse 14 of Hebrews 10, and he has perfected for all time those who are being sanctified.

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That's right. He did it. And we are being conformed unto his image and the

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Lord will accomplish his work and his people. So I agree on so many levels, but the leveraging of it.

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You know, to motivate the saints out of fear and dread, rather than pointing people to the sufficiency of Christ, his beauty, the finality and the completeness of what he did.

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And then saying, pursue sanctification because Christ has perfected you. I don't get that,

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John. Yeah, no. And, you know, in his illustration, he says, once the bride has been ransomed, she doesn't, you know, run and go shack up with another man.

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And the hard part about that is that it is an extreme illustration, but it's hard to wonder.

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It's like, John, what you're making this sound like is that there is no struggle against sin.

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There is no falling. You know, why are there all these warning passages about the believer who can get entangled into sin, who can be trapped in sin?

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Galatians 6 .1, those of you who are spiritual, go restore such a one -what that is enslaved to sin.

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So it's like there's a denial of the saint -sinner reality. There's a denial of a

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Roman seven reality here. The remaining corruption of the flesh. Right. That all of a sudden that, you know, once you're redeemed,

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God does not fail. I mean, you hear that, and he is so passionate about saying it, that he does not fail.

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I completely agree that that's Hebrews 12, right? He who began your faith is going to be the one who completes it.

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He's the perfecter of it. And Philippians 1 .6. Yeah. He who began a good work and you will complete it. That's right. I completely agree with that.

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But the time between our justification and our glorification, it isn't a clean, slight line that's like, okay, now that I'm justified,

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I live this perfect life of sanctification. And I know, and I know in my heart of hearts,

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John agrees with that. Of course. The way he is saying this, it's like, John, the way that you are presenting this and you're encouraging pastors to preach and forcing this upon them is that their people better have this never failing faith and there's never...

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I mean, why else? It makes people uncomfortable when you quote verses like this. But God expects you to sin.

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He has put it in side the word of God that the expectation is if you're going to sin and if you think you're not going to sin, you're a liar.

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This is 1 John flat out. So there's an idea that, and I know that John believes that, but when you word it the way that he words it, it makes it sound like there's slippage here and there, but the

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Christian life doesn't have failures and I'm just like, how many illustrations from the Bible do we need to give that Christians can have immense failures and epic failures?

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It's like we've said many times, the difference between people who are Christians and those who are not is not that Christians don't sin and others do.

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It's that Christians, two things, Christians have agreed with God about their sin and they have sided with God against their sin and there is struggle in that, right?

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Like you said, Romans 7, Galatians 5, so many other passages in the scriptures make it very plain that that is the ongoing internal war that only the saints know and there will be failures, but the regenerate part overcomes, to use the language of the confessions, and God sees that through.

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I think, like you said, I trust that Piper agrees with that, yet his communication in a message like this obscures that reality.

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Yeah, so here's the last clip and then we'll kind of give some final thoughts on it, so this is towards the end of his sermon.

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His blood is not ineffective. It was not in vain. The ransom bought a new life for his people, a new holiness for his people.

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They will walk in the way he bought. If they don't, they have no warrant to believe they're his.

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You create that kind of urgency for your people? You make them uncomfortable like that?

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Whoa, wait a minute. What about Kevin's message? His blood is not in vain. So towards the end, he's asking the preachers that are sitting there, are you creating that urgency within your people?

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And so just to recap what he said, he's saying that God ransomed you, therefore you're going to walk in these ways, and if you aren't walking in those ways, you should not consider yourself to be a part of the ransomed.

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And I know he gave some illustrations towards the end about kind of what holiness is, and he talks about watching movies and drinking alcohol and the way that we conduct ourselves.

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But Justin, the hard part about this kind of preaching, I grew up with a lot of this type of preaching.

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I'm very aware of it. You have to begin to give people measurable means to look at, and then no one agrees on the measurable means.

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So that's the one issue, is that what you consider to be holiness doesn't seem to agree with everybody else of what they consider to be holiness.

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And so then we question your salvation because the movies that you watch and if you drink alcohol or how much alcohol you drink, what you wear, what is modesty and all of that.

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And then I'll let you respond to that as well. And then the second thing I struggle with is that we lose sight of the purposes of holiness.

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And this is where the biggest issue, and I know we'll spend more time on this in Separer from Manda, but my biggest issue is that John, he's pressing in.

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I mean, I think almost in every clip we've played so far is he's basically saying people's obedience is for the sake of questioning their salvation, to affirm their salvation.

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And when I read about holiness in the New Testament, I'll give you two examples of this. Ephesians 4, Paul says, walk in a manner worthy of the calling to which you have been called.

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And he points the believer to the responsibility of loving and caring of the congregation, of the church, right?

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He says, with meekness and gentleness and patience and longsuffering. And then he says this.

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So the purposes of preaching, this is later on in chapter four, he says that the word of God is to be preached to equip the saints for the work of ministry, that they might grow, what?

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In unity and in love. And so preaching and obedience are designed not to affirm one's salvation, but it's to conform us into love and to encourage us in the body of Christ.

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So I really struggle when John's saying, are you preaching this way? And my response to that is, no,

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I don't preach to cause people to question their salvation. I preach to ground them in Christ.

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This is what Paul says to do, so that they might respond out of love in unity with the body of Christ.

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Amen. A few thoughts. The way that John Piper is presenting it is something like this.

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Believe upon the Lord Jesus Christ and you will be justified. Now, if you're in Christ, you are to live this way.

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And if you are not living this way well enough, then you're not in Christ. And so you better dot, dot, dot.

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That's how it goes. My question to the listener is, is that how the apostles write?

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In the New Testament, my answer to that question is no. They write something like this.

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You are in Christ by faith. You are justified. You have been adopted as a child of God.

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You have been given every spiritual blessing on account of Christ alone.

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And now, given that you're a child of God, given that you're justified, given that you are in Christ, now live this way.

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Here is how the redeemed live. Then they'll use the law in multiple ways.

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The law as the guide for the Christian's living and upon occasion of arrogant sin.

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For example, 1 Corinthians 5 and 6. The apostles will use the law on occasion to say, why would you ever pursue things for which the judgment of God is coming?

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Why would you do that? You used to be that, but now you're this, right?

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You used to be all of these things, but now you've been cleansed. You've been sanctified on account of Christ.

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That whole put off, put on thing, it's about identity, John. You used to be that, but you're not that anymore.

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Live like what you are now. That's how the apostles write. So that's how you and I, brother,

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I trust. Do we do it perfectly? No, but that's how you and I aim to encourage our people and exhort our people to pursue holiness.

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Live like who you are. You might not know this, but this is how the saints live.

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This is what we're going to do. That's how we talk, not calling anybody's salvation into question.

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The only time we ever get into those conversations about what's going on with this person in terms of how they even understand

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Christ and the gospel and the Christian life is in cases of excommunication, church discipline, where we really get to that level.

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Even then, we're not saying they're not a believer because only God knows that. We're just saying you're living in ongoing, unrepentant sin, and this is concerning.

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When that person stops agreeing with God on their sin, that's an issue. That's what we said.

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You're not agreeing with God against your sin, and it doesn't seem that you're siding with him against it either. And so that's a concern to us.

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And so we're going to put you out so that you might be sobered. But that's in cases of discipline.

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Just to add real quick another passage to that, since I'm in James. James does say this. He says, so walk and act as those who live under the law of liberty, those who've been liberated by the law, right?

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He says you can't hold on to faith and partiality at the same time. That's his whole point is that our faith is what gives us the reason and motivation for our obedience.

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He literally says, humble yourselves that you might be exalted. So everything we're trying to earn by sinful gain, he's saying it's already been granted to you by every perfect gift,

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James 1 .16. So he's always grounding us in our justification and saying you are safe and secure, and that's why by means of sanctification, it's the outflow.

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The obedience is always the outflow of gratitude, not of trying to ground your salvation.

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All right. So I think we should each give maybe a couple of final thoughts. Yeah, so I've got, it's one observation, but it's two prongs, and I trust this will make sense.

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I think my single biggest woe, as I reflect on the whole message, is that you have a message about the righteousness of the

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Christian, the holiness of the Christian, and in a 45, 50 minute talk, there is no mention of the active obedience of Christ, and there is no mention of union with Christ, and I am astonished by that.

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How could we give a message on holiness or righteousness in the life of the believer and not mention the active obedience of Jesus in fulfilling the law for us that's been counted to us, and how can we not talk about union with Christ, which is the ground, not only of our justification, but is what guarantees our sanctification?

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How could we do that? And I just want to be really clear, like 11 .1 of the 1689

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London Baptist Confession, and there is similar language in Westminster, and the Heidelberg Catechism and the

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Belgic Confession has great language on all these things, like Article 22, 23 in the Belgic, et cetera.

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The active obedience of Christ in fulfilling the whole law and the passive obedience of Christ in his death, paying the penalty of the law that sinners deserve, is counted to us, it's imputed to us on the basis of faith, and that righteousness of Christ is our whole and only righteousness received by faith.

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And to my knowledge, I could be wrong. The listener can go back and correct me if I'm wrong. I do not believe that Piper talks about any of that, other than giving a nod to Kevin DeYoung's talk on justification.

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And John, I'm just blown away. It is concerning, and we've made reference to this before on his final justification material, that he denies the covenant of works, which the covenant of works literally believes that Adam failed and Christ obeyed where Adam failed.

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In the covenant of grace, Jesus came and did it. Just so you understand why this is so important. For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.

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When Jesus rose from the grave, Hebrews, he brought many sons to glory. Why? Because when he rose from the grave, he vindicated his works, meaning that they were perfect.

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They were righteous. They were acceptable before God. If not, Jesus would have stayed dead. He would have stayed in the ground because he deserved death.

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Jesus did not stay in the ground. The spirit rose him because he did not deserve to be there. He paid for ours, and he brought many sons to glory, meaning this.

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He was the second Adam. He perfectly obeyed where Adam failed, and therefore that righteous obedience is what brings us to glory.

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Now, that is the grounds of our salvation and justification.

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We now imperfectly are being sanctified. Sanctification means separation from. So we are gradually being separated from our old being into this new being, but we still live in these duality of this world.

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We're a saint and sinner at the same time. And the full separation happens at our glorification. And when you don't use

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Jesus's obedience as the ground of your glorification, basically, Justin, this is what you're arguing for, is that your sanctification is what guarantees your glorification.

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That is not true. The Holy Spirit is the one who is sanctifying us. The second thing I'll add to this, and I'll throw it back over to you.

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These are kind of my final thoughts, is that the obedience that is required of the believer is always for two reasons.

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It is always for the advancement of the gospel and for the care of other believers. Always. It is always for that.

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In other words, it's for the good of neighbor. That's right. It is for the sake of a horizontal line.

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We are working out. We love other people because He first loved us. And then 1

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John says, if you don't love your brother, which is the outflow of God's love for you, then you don't have the love of the

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Father. It's always outward for the sake of others, not for the sake of our salvation.

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I don't have a lot to say in terms of a pointed thing theologically. I'll just conclude with this.

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I think there are certainly aspects of John's message that are concerning, and I think clearly so.

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And at a minimum, I think what we would have to say is that his message is confusing, even when you stack it up against some things that he has said in other together for the gospel messages, for example.

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So that's partly my takeaway too, is if the best thing we can say about this message is that it's confusing and it obscures the nature of salvation, then that's not good.

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I trust the motivations are good. We share a lot of John's passion and concern for the lives of the saints and how we conduct ourselves, how we live in the world.

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And at the same time, our position is that we can go about it a more biblical, a more confessional way that centers on Christ and His work, and then our living is an outflow of that.

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Amen. So we're going to do SR, and we'll continue this conversation. We've always said this, and we'll explain this more in SR, but pietism has the right assessment that there's something wrong, but it has the wrong conclusion of what to do about it.

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In other words, often people struggle with sin, and they give in to sin, and they're living unholy lives. That's the right assessment.

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I agree with that. John's assessment of the worldwide culture is a correct one.

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There is a lot of unholiness. And there's a lot of trouble in the church, John, that's a result of bad methodology and theology too.

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But it's not the lack of preaching of holiness that's the issue, because the writers of the New Testament, let's take 1

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Corinthians as an example. 1 Corinthians is that Paul is dealing with the issue of ungodliness, unholiness.

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So we'll talk about that in Semper Firmata, but pietism is not the result of that, it's heralding Christ in whom crucified and grace, as James says to those who are the adulterous children of God, but He gives more grace.

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That's James 4. We'll talk about that in Semper Firmata. For those of you who don't know, Justin and I do a second podcast every week called

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Semper Firmata, Latin for always reforming, we're always looking at scripture, changing our hearts back to the glory of Christ and the foundation of Christ throughout all of history.

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And this is a special podcast we do for those who are partnered and support our ministry. If you'd like to be a part of that community, there's a whole app that's there and we have a lot of fun.

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Justin and I post in there almost daily. And there's another podcast that we do just for them. So you can go to theocast .org

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to learn more about that. And for those of you that are not going to be joining us over there, we look forward to talking to you, not hearing from you, but we do enjoy hearing from you next week.