Living by Faith in Future Grace - Lesson 3 — John Piper

The following message is by Pastor John Piper. More information from Desiring God is available at www .DesiringGod .org.

Living by Faith in Future Grace

Okay, I think I'm ready. And if you are, I think we'll connect here in our Saturday morning continuation of this seminar on living by faith and future grace. And I would like to begin by reading you two things.

One is a passage from the end of the book of Habakkuk. And the other is the first part of a poem I wrote for my wife on our 20th anniversary. And the link between these two is that this text was read at our wedding in 1968.

And on that 20th anniversary I wrote this poem and read it to the whole church that December. But I want to read a little piece of that. The text goes like this. This is the last three verses of the book of Habakkuk.

Though the fig tree do not blossom, nor fruit be on the vines, the produce of the olive fail, and the fields yield no food. The flock be cut off from the fold, and there be no herd in the stalls. Yet I will rejoice in the Lord.

I will joy in the God of my salvation. God the Lord is my strength. He makes my feet like hinds feet. He makes me tread upon the high places. And it is a remarkable thing to me that in the Old Testament, which so many people equate with a religion that makes synonymous the blessings of God and the love of God, that you could have a text like this which says when all the blessings are taken away, like fig trees and vines and olives and fields and sheep and herds, it's all taken away and there's nothing, which means you're in an absolutely starvation situation, the Old Testament would say, yet I will rejoice in the Lord.

I will joy in the God of my salvation. Because it says in Psalm 63 .3, the steadfast love of the Lord is better than life. So if you die with God, you have the better portion than if all of the trees and vines and herds are flourishing without God.

And that's in the Old Testament. And it's a good way to build a marriage because all marriages will face these seasons, all of them, if they are obedient. So this was the first paragraph of this poem.

Although the fig tree blossom not, and all the vines of our small plot be barren, and the olive fail and the sheep grow weak and heifers frail, we will rejoice in God, my love, and take our pleasures from above.

The Lord our God shall be our strength and give us life, whatever length on earth he please, and make our feet like mountain deer to rise and cleat the narrow path for man and wife that rises steep and leads to life.

So for those of you on the front end of marriage or singleness and contemplating marriage, know that you need to have your hearts fixed together in something deeper than a smooth and downhill passage because you need to rise and cleat the narrow path for man and wife that rises steep and leads to life.

And when you have your hearts both fixed on something besides the marriage and it's pleasures of the marriage bed or it's pleasures of health or it's pleasures of children or it's pleasures of job and prosperity or whatever, then when your hearts are fixed on something bigger and better than the marriage itself, the marriage has a chance to survive.

And if you don't, then you will make a god of your marriage and those gods will inevitably. Father, I pray now that as we move into this three-hour session on future grace that we will realize that the heart and the essence of future grace is not the flourishing crops and it is not a large herd.

It is yourself offered to us in measure through fellowship now and then with ever increasing intimacy and joy throughout all eternity as the greatest satisfaction imaginable for our lives. So forbid, I pray, that there would be a misunderstanding now that future grace is some kind of prosperity thing in which the saints are guaranteed an easy life or an abundant material life.

But rather, O Lord, fix the hearts of your people now on yourself and your steadfast love. Grant us the strength for this morning. Grant us the wakefulness and the alertness and the intensity and the earnestness and the passion that we need to deal faithfully with these things, I pray.

The Foundations of Living by Faith in Future Grace

In Jesus' name, Amen. In our outline, we began section two last night, Is it Biblical? The Foundations of the Sanctifying Power of Living by Faith in Future Grace. And the first one we dealt with there was faith as the great worker.

And the second one was that the grace we trust in when we have faith is not just a quality in God and not just an act in the past, but a power of God exerted and promised to be exerted in the future that we will all need to survive in faith for eternity.

And then the third point was that faith is therefore future oriented. Since all that grace is being poured out on us in the future, therefore, faith which trusts in grace will be future oriented and will bank on the promises of God as it holds out grace to us for tomorrow, this afternoon.

So, for example, I've got to preach tomorrow morning on homosexuality. Well, did you see the front page of the Tribune this morning? That's what I'm preaching into. I hate. The boy may be dead by now as far as I know.

And so, if you're going to say things about the sinfulness of homosexual behavior into that context, it takes extraordinary wisdom and sensitivity. And so, my only hope, because I haven't even started writing this sermon yet, though I've thought about it for 20 years or so, my hope this afternoon is future grace.

That between 1 o 'clock and midnight or whenever it's over, there's going to be grace for Sunday morning. And that's why I can relax now and focus on this and don't have to be chewing my fingernails about homosexuality during these three hours.

That doesn't always work for me, but that's the way I try to live, is that burdens are stacked up in life. Sometimes they get stacked on top of each other, and you must have grace to handle the stack.

Often they come stacked behind each other, and you need to learn that sufficient unto the day is the stack thereof. And you just take them one at a time. And as your days, so shall your strength be. And if that's true, then the same would be true for hours, wouldn't it?

As your hours are, so shall your strength be. And you learn this more when you get older, because as I talk to people, as I go to visit older people and talk to them and say, How are you making it? How are you handling this loss of your vision or hearing or whatever?

And the usual answer is, One day at a time. One day at a time. And that's biblical. That's real biblical. We'll see that later on when we talk about battling anxiety. But we want to keep laying foundations for the next hour or so here, and we'll see how long point number two takes us.

Bygone Grace as the Foundation for Future Grace

Okay, 2 .4. The function of bygone grace. Namely, solid ground under faith in future grace. My favorite text in the Bible probably is Romans 8 .32. There are others running neck and neck from my favorite, but this one probably is at the top.

He who did not spare his own son, but delivered him up for us all, how shall he not also with him freely give us all things? Now there's a logic in this verse. It's got a past component. The first half is the past half, and the second half is the future half.

He who did not spare his own son, but delivered him up for us all. That happened at a point in history. Past. Now, this is a rhetorical question. You see it's got a question mark at the end. And that's what it is in the text.

Whenever you have a rhetorical question that has no answer following it, what you do in your head, what the author expects you to do in your head, is change the question into a statement. Now somebody paraphrase this for me by changing the second half into a statement which is being made by this rhetorical question.

Who would volunteer to do that? Somebody try it. He will also with him freely give us all things. And wouldn't you think that it would accord with Paul's intention to insert before that statement a strengthening word?

I think a rhetorical question implies something's obvious. You didn't go last night? Or, will you not go tomorrow? And surely you will go. So I would just add to Diane's paraphrase the word surely or something like that.

He who did not spare his own son but delivered him up for us all, surely he will now give us all things freely with him. There's an argument here. And the first half, 32a, is a foundation on which now stands 32b.

This is the foundation. And this is the consequence. And the consequence follows and stands upon and is supported by the foundation. And therein we see the function of bygone grace and the point of looking back in the Christian life.

So please, understand this. This is unbelievably important, lest I be seen as minimizing the cross, the death of Jesus and the resurrection of Jesus as a phenomenal and all-important historic demonstration of the grace of God for us.

If that had not happened, there could be no future grace. You see how important this is. The cross purchased all future grace. Had Jesus not died for my sin, I could expect one thing in the future from God.

What? Wrath. That's all I could expect. Justice would only be fulfilled in damning me. That's the only thing I could expect had Christ not died for me. So you see how unbelievably the backward look is.

But, here's the way to think about it. I'll act it out for you here. I'm walking into the past now. And I've arrived here at Calvary. And I embrace Christ. I love Him. I thank Him. I recognize in Him and this death the payment for all my sins and the impartation to me or imputation to me of His righteousness.

And I take my stand there. But I don't look down and I don't look back. I look forward. I stand here. That's my foundation. And I look forward and I walk into the future on this foundation. I have the confidence that there is a future for me because I've looked back at the payment that bought the future.

That's the relationship between bygone grace and future grace. And what I'm pleading for is that in our evangelism and in our Christian living, we don't leave people looking back and down as though the only thing they had to believe to be saved is that Christ died for them and rose for them.

And leave them hanging with regard to whether there's any grace for this afternoon's trials and whether saving faith embraces faith in future grace as well as past grace. I don't think you can be a Christian without trusting God for future grace.

Like I said last night, it's like trusting your wife on Monday and not the other six days of the week. It's like believing that Christ is half a Savior. He can make provisions for sin, but He can't make provisions for eternity.

Or He can't make provisions for this afternoon or make provisions for relationships or make provisions for finances or make provisions for health. He just can't handle all those things. Therefore, a lot of Christians live their lives the way the world lives their lives only they come to the end of the day and say, thank you that my sins are forgiven.

And that's why there's no power. That's why there's no holiness. That's why there's no radical risk-taking in Christian living. Because we're functioning with the same values and the same worries, the same anxieties, the same cravings, the same covetousness, the same bitternesses, because we don't have any future grace out there on which to cast ourselves to deliver us from those things.

We just keep saying, my sins are forgiven, my sins are forgiven, my sins are forgiven. All this messing up that I do every day, it's forgiven, it's forgiven, it's forgiven, as though that's Christianity.

That's half Christianity and therefore, no Christianity. Romans 5 .9 gets at it again. Much more than having now been justified, notice the past backward look, having now been justified by His blood, we shall be saved from wrath of God through Him.

So that's the long look into the future, but the structure of the argument is exactly the same as 8 .32. He did not spare His own Son, so surely He will give us all things with Him. He justified us in the past, so surely He will save us from wrath.

Verse 10, same thing. If while we were enemies, we were reconciled, passed, to God through the death of His Son, much more having been passed, shall we be saved by His life? The future hope of grace is built on the past act of grace.

Or here's one. Hebrews 4 .14 -16. Since then, we have a great high priest who has passed through the heavens, Jesus the Son of God. Now notice, past tense. We have, that's present, who has passed. He has passed through the heavens.

So Jesus died. He rose. He entered into heaven in the holy place where He pleads our case now. Jesus the Son of God. Let us go on holding fast our confession, for we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who has been tempted in all points as we are yet without sin.

Let us therefore now draw near with confidence to the throne of grace that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need. Now this is how you should live this afternoon. See? This is for future.

If you quibble with this and say, oh, I think it's for the present, then you've got to realize what I believe about the present. Namely that it doesn't exist. I don't think the present exists. That's an overstatement probably, although it's a mystery to me where the present is.

Can you point to it? As soon as you point, it's gone. What is time at the point between the future and the past? I don't know. It's a mystery to me. Is there a line? Is it without dimension? In geometry, a line has no dimensions except sideways, right?

If you cross a line, you're not crossing any space. So is there space between the past and the future? Is there a place where you have a self-consciousness there? It seems to me that life is like a reservoir out in front of you and a river behind you leading to an ocean, and you're the waterfall or the dam.

And the present is like a dam, and the reservoir of the future is cascading over the dam continually, turning into a past river. And you live there and you can look in two ways. You can look back on the river with gratitude, which you should, or you can look forward into the reservoir, which in God's mind is infinite, and you can exult.

And you can see just a little millimeter away, like 29 minutes after 9. You can look at that part of the reservoir. You can say, this is the present. We're living in the present this morning, and God is here in the present.

Okay, fine. If you want to talk that way, that's fine. And just understand that you will need God in five seconds to keep you breathing, according to Acts 17 .25, to keep the building from not being blown up or caving in, or keep the sun from not darkening.

And there, now it's passed. That much grace is gone, and you should be grateful for those five seconds of life. So, just understand that if you want to call this the present activity of Christ, that's fine.

But as you start to pray right now for grace, for well-timed help, then know that you're asking for a future thing. And it's promised here on the basis of the past fact that He has passed through the heavens and He's there at God's right hand.

He's interceding for you. And He has great grace from this throne to help you in time of need. If there weren't help for a time of need, if there weren't future grace to be trusted like that, then this text would be in vain and I wouldn't know how to live my life at all.

Now, that's the end of number four. And the point was, bygone grace is not insignificant, it is infinitely significant. Because all of future grace rests on the bygone grace of Calvary. Comment or question on that?

Faith as Treasuring God in Christ

2 .5. This was Sam's question last night. At least, if I understood him correctly, it was part of his question. Faith is a being satisfied with all that God is for us in Jesus, not just an assent to truths, past or future, but a heartfelt valuing and treasuring of all that God promises to be for us in Jesus.

Now, that is a huge claim. Because if that's true, then there may be many people who think they are believers who are not believers and therefore not saved. Because I think in many, many brands of Christianity, we do a kind of evangelism and then we do a kind of preaching and teaching that tends to foster nominalism.

That is, we are so eager for numbers, you know, we want to get statistics that we have figured out ways to do evangelism that can get numbers quick. We lead people in prayers and we get them to sign cards and we get them to do things that their willpower can do.

And if they're scared enough or if enough friends are doing it on the beach or if the music is good enough and the fellowship looks neat, we can get them to do these things. And then we've got our numbers and then we tell them they're saved and they may not be because nothing's changed.

Their hearts do not delight in God. They just don't want to be damned. Well, nobody wants to be damned. The devil doesn't want to be damned. Not to want to be damned is quite carnal. It takes no spiritual life whatsoever not to want to be damned.

That's not a saving affection. A saving affection is delight in God. It's not whether you don't want to go to hell, but do you want to go to heaven if the only person there were God? And no golf. And no beach.

No basketball. Go ahead. The question is what about the parable of the shrewd servant who negotiated with the debtors of his master in order to get a place to live when he was put out of his stewardship?

Well, the conclusion at the end of that parable is be like that person and use unrighteous mammon to gain for yourself eternal habitations. And then you have to just ask what is that? And I think eternal habitations means being with God forever.

Behold, I go to prepare a place for you and when I come, I will take you to myself. So, the Bible is full of images of heaven which are material images. Streets and trees and rivers and the lamb will lie down with the lamb and so on.

And I do believe in the resurrection of the body and a new heavens and a new earth where there will be something like stuff. But my point is you don't have to be born again to want stuff. You don't have to be born again to want to escape hell or to want to have an eternally happy life of playing like you enjoy playing here.

But you do have to be born again to love God. The natural man does not love the things of the Spirit, does not receive the things of the Spirit. And we must be born again to be saved. What I'm illustrating here is that as I now define faith like this, I am simply upping the stakes of our evangelism and our nurturing so that we don't give people false assurance that they are saved when they have no new affections.

That is, no spiritual affections. Decisions alone without changed heart affections don't save. Heart changes save. You must have taken out the heart of stone and put in the heart of flesh. You must delight yourself in the Lord.

You must love God with your heart and soul and mind and strength. 1 Corinthians 16 .22 Paul closes the letter. Imagine closing a letter this way. He who does not love the Lord, let him be damned. Anathema means damned.

Let him be anathema. And he chose the word love, not believe. He who does not love the Lord, let him be accursed. God works all things together for the good of those who what? Love God, not trust God.

See, I am going to argue now that trust includes as part of its essence love. That is what I am going to argue for. But I am afraid in much evangelicalism, our pragmatism, our American pragmatism has wrenched apart the controllable from the uncontrollable.

Because we want to be in control. We've got to get statistics here. We've got to get results. Well, you can't get results quite as easily if you tell people they've got to be transformed miraculously from the inside and give evidence of a heart transformation.

How are you going to tell if that's happened on the beach? It takes a little time. It doesn't have to. There might be a sudden, dramatic, wonderful conversion like at Pentecost. Cut to the heart. What must we do, brethren?

They're slain in their conviction. And he says, believe on the Lord. And then they believe and they continue in the apostles' teaching and the breaking of bread and prayer. They love prayer now. They love prayer.

They love to commune with God. Okay, now we need to defend this biblically. I've said it, but now I need to show it. So let's look at a few passages of Scripture to see whether this is so. I do believe, lest I minimize this, that we call for acts of the will to be performed in response to our evangelism.

Choose ye this day whom you will serve, Elijah says. And many, many texts like that in the Bible. Line up with God. But what we mean by that is what Jeremiah meant and others when he said, get yourselves a new heart.

Circumcise your heart. And then he'll turn around and say in the New Covenant promise, God circumcises the heart. God takes out the heart of stone and puts it in the heart of flesh, but He calls on us, get yourself a new heart, etc.

Faith, Christ, and Imputed Righteousness

Philippians 3 .8. More than that, I count all things as loss in view of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whom I have suffered the loss of all things and count them but rubbish.

Now notice the logic here. I count all things as rubbish. Look at the logical connector here. In order that I may gain Christ. So the pathway or the means of gaining Christ is to have a heart that as it regards Christ and everything but Christ, looks at the everything but Christ and counts it, feels it, regards it as rubbish.

In order that, having regarded it as rubbish, Christ might be owned as the all-satisfying treasure. That's my understanding of those verses, those words. Now the question is, is that faith or is that something after faith?

Or is that different from faith? Is the counting of all things as rubbish that you may have Christ faith? Now let's look at verse 9. In order that I might gain Christ and may be found in Him, not having a righteousness of my own derived from law, but that which is through faith in Christ, the righteousness which comes from God.

Now this calls for thought. Think with me here about this. Between this counting of everything as rubbish in order to gain Christ and faith, we want to know are these two the same or are they related in some other way or is one included in the other?

And the way I'm going about it is to see which or what each of them gains. Does the counting of everything as rubbish gain Christ and does faith gain Christ? And if both gain Christ, then probably they're part of each other.

And they do both gain Christ. Look, I count everything as rubbish. I count them as rubbish in order that I might gain Christ and may be found in Him not having a righteousness of my own. Alright, so the counting of everything as rubbish to gain Christ also gains him this righteousness that I might gain Christ and be found in Him not having a righteousness of my own based on law.

So, if he counts everything as rubbish, he gains Christ and has a righteousness not of his own and not that based on law. So he's now justified. But, it's not based on law, but that which is through faith.

So it's faith that you gain this righteousness and thus gain Christ. You can't have Christ without His righteousness. So when I saw that, that flow of thought there, I could not bring myself to disconnect these two things.

Faith and counting all things as rubbish in order to gain Christ. Now that's my first argument for why faith should be understood to include a being satisfied in Christ. Now stop there and see if anybody wants to check me on that.

Am I drawing out from that text a legitimate inference there? Can you imagine on the basis of this text, Paul saying, I can have faith in Christ and regard all this rubbish as really, really not rubbish and just as valuable as Christ.

Can you imagine him saying that? I can't. Luke 14 .33. He who would come after me must renounce everything that he has. Luke 14 .33. In other words, now I don't want to overstate the case here because otherwise I'll start sounding like a perfectionist.

The only people who can be saved are perfect people. We're talking about a principle or a seed sown in the heart by the Holy Spirit at new birth. The Spirit comes in and He plants Himself there and He begins to release His power in the transforming work of sanctification.

And so what you're looking for early on in the Christian life are the seeds and trajectories of these things. You're not looking for full-blown the booze goes and the homosexuality goes and the cigarettes go and the pornography goes and the swearing goes and everything just like that.

Or you can't think of yourself as a Christian. We're talking about the redirection of a river of life. I like the little phrase because it's memorable. The evidence is not perfection, but direction. Not perfection, but direction.

So the river is flowing toward the world and all of your satisfaction is coming from things. Innocent things, sinful things, whichever. And it comes from things and suddenly God awakens you to spiritual reality and the importance of your own soul and the reality of God.

Jesus is made to be beautiful to you and compelling and self-authenticating in His saving power. And you want forgiveness and you want a new treasure in your life. You want eternal existence with Him.

And you, by an act of will granted by the Spirit, turn to Him. And a new direction is forged. And as the river begins to flow in this direction, there's a lot of mud in this river. There's a lot of mud left over from the way the river was flowing.

And it's got to flow in this channel of fellowship with Jesus for some time usually before it begins to clear up. And the way the devil works and the way our old nature tends to work is that we tend to contaminate it periodically as we go to glory.

The devil is heaving his clumps of mud in there and you often try to go out of bounds for a little while and get it all muddied. But the direction is fundamentally different. There's a new reality in this life calling it again and again to fight this mud, to clear itself up, and to keep on going.

Justification, Sanctification, and Saving Faith

But now, let's go back to your question. There are a few ambiguities in that statement. Let me say it again for the tape and for the rest of you who may not have heard. We are saved by faith plus nothing was the statement.

Is that true? And does it mean the same as we are saved by faith minus everything else? The first ambiguity is the word saved. I would be happier if you asked me about justified. Because you see, the word saved in the Bible is so massive it includes everything that happens to us from the first work of God for us in election to the eternal keeping of God in heaven.

And so it includes election and predestination and the atonement and the shed blood of Christ and the resurrection and the conviction for sin and the origin of faith and the justification and then sanctification and then keeping and perseverance.

All that is called salvation in the Bible. Some of salvation is contingent upon obedience. There is future salvation out there. Justification is not contingent on works at all. It happens in the twinkling of an eye at that first authentic awakening of faith.

Genuine saving faith. So, if you were to ask me about are we justified by faith plus nothing? I would say absolutely. If you were to ask me are we glorified by faith plus nothing? I would say now we got to be careful here because I gave you about ten texts last night that say pursue holiness without which you will not see the Lord.

So there must be holiness if we are going to be glorified. So, the word saved creates an ambiguity and forces me to make distinctions. So, if you're asking justification I say faith alone. What I'm doing here is arguing that faith alone includes this.

It's not plus this. It is this. Well, that's what faith is. You see, the imputed righteousness of the law or the imputed righteousness of Christ is through faith. Now, faith is an act of the human heart.

It is a subjective reality in me. I believe it's wrought by the Holy Spirit. It's a gift of God according to Ephesians 2, 8 and 9. So, you can't play off this subjective experience right here against the objective imputation of righteousness.

That is, the counting of them as rubbish cannot be played off against the objective imputation of righteousness because what this counting of everything as rubbish corresponds to is this faith. Both of these are subjective inner realities.

The objective thing that happens to us is a reckoning of righteousness to us through this. So, I'm arguing, well, if counting of everything as rubbish is that through which I gain Christ and have a righteousness not of my own, and if faith is that through which I have a righteousness not of my own, then this must be a part of faith.

Counting everything as rubbish must be a part of faith. So, here's my point. I understand saving faith with all of its imperfections at the beginning to be at least that response to God which has in it the seed of a renunciation of everything besides Christ as the satisfaction of the soul.

So, if you ask a new believer, do you believe that God or Christ is the satisfaction of your soul so that you can turn away from everything and find satisfaction in Him? And are you now engaging in that turn?

If they say yes, then I credit them as having saving faith. Now, if in a week or two or a year, I find that they have deceived me and perhaps themselves and really have idols everywhere, and Christ is one idol on the shelf and there are many other idols on the shelf, then I simply say that they didn't do 2 Peter 1 .10.

Confirm your calling and election. I have led numerous people to Christ. I lead them right up to and they'll pray a prayer in my office. I give a big hug and welcome them as a brother. I don't usually hug the women in my office, but do whatever you're supposed to do with women when they believe.

And I say, this is an awesome thing that has happened. And now, press on and confirm the reality of what's happened here. That's what I talk about. Confirm the reality of what's happened here. I don't say, oh, maybe you're not saved.

I don't try to discourage them. I say, this is awesome. This is wonderful. This is beautiful. I've seen God at work in your life. You got into my office because God was at work. This conversation took the turns it took because God was at work.

You prayed that prayer because God was at work. Now let us confirm in these future days of devotion and prayer and fellowship and worship and obedience that this work of God was a saving work. And I'm with you in that battle.

I think that's the way we should talk because then you're not stuck in a year or two years with having that person or their relatives come back and say, I lost my salvation. Or they lost their salvation.

You say, no, no, no, no. Nobody loses their salvation. It just wasn't real. John 6 .35 Jesus said to them, I am the bread of life. He who comes to Me shall not hunger. And he who believes in Me shall never thirst.

Now I think it would be fair in John's theology as he's recording these words of Jesus and in Jesus' own thinking to say, coming to Jesus in order to have your heart hunger satisfied is what it means to believe.

These are parallel here. This and this are parallel. He who comes to Me shall not hunger. He who believes in Me shall never thirst. So you've got a picture of thirst and hunger, and clearly he means spiritually there because he's dealing with this woman at the well and he's trying to get her from the natural to the spiritual.

She can't understand it any more than Nicodemus could. In the Gospel of John, Jesus runs into these people and says, you must be born again. And Nicodemus says, oh, climb back into my mother's womb? And he doesn't get it spiritually.

He says, I've got water to drink that you don't know anything about. And she says, oh, Jacob gave us this well. Are you greater than Jacob? You can produce water out of the ground without a well? She doesn't get it either.

These are paradigms of the people we meet in the world. You try to share Christ with a person in spiritual reality, there are no categories. I mean, without the Holy Spirit opening the eyes of the blind, the analogies are not available.

So he's talking here spiritual hunger and spiritual thirst and the way you get them satisfied is by believing. So faith, there's no difference in the Greek between the word faith and belief. Same word.

Faith is a coming to Jesus to be satisfied. That's my definition of being satisfied with all that God is for us in Jesus. There are many others. I don't think I'll linger long over these, but I'll just show them to you.

John 7, 37 -38. Same thing in John 3, 19 -20 where it has to do with loving and hating the light. And so the issues of coming to the light have to do with do you love the light? John 5, 40. You are unwilling to come to Me that you may have life.