God’s Goodness in Suffering

Don Carson: 

“Blessed is the man who perseveres under trial, because when he has stood the test, he will receive the crown of life that God has promised to those who love him. When tempted, no one should say, ‘God is tempting me.’ For God cannot be tempted by evil, nor does he tempt anyone; but each one is tempted when, by his own evil desire, he is dragged away and enticed.

Then, after desire has conceived, it gives birth to sin; and sin, when it is full-grown, gives birth to death. Don’t be deceived, my dear brothers. Every good and perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of the heavenly lights, who does not change like shifting shadows. He chose to give us birth through the word of truth, that we might be a kind of firstfruits of all he created.

My dear brothers, take note of this: Everyone should be quick to listen, slow to speak and slow to become angry, for man’s anger does not bring about the righteous life that God desires. Therefore, get rid of all moral filth and the evil that is so prevalent and humbly accept the word planted in you, which can save you.

Do not merely listen to the word, and so deceive yourselves. Do what it says. Anyone who listens to the word but does not do what it says is like a man who looks at his face in a mirror and, after looking at himself, goes away and immediately forgets what he looks like. But the man who looks intently into the perfect law that gives freedom, and continues to do this, not forgetting what he has heard, but doing it: he will be blessed in what he does.”

This is the Word of the Lord.

I want to begin by telling you about a man I knew some years ago. I first met him quite a few years ago, and the beginning of his story goes back even before I met him. He was an Englishman. In secondary school, he was converted. He went off to theological training in due course, feeling called of God to ministry. In due course, he became pastor of a church in England.

It turned out he was a pretty good communicator, a pretty good preacher. He worked hard at his ministry, and the church began to grow and flourish. Sadly, after three or four years, he was caught out in adultery. He resigned, of course, and disappeared off the face of the map. In fact, what he did was immigrate to Canada, which is where I met him.

We knew that he had been in the ministry, but we knew nothing of these background bits of information when he showed up at the seminary in Toronto where I was then studying. We graduated from seminary a year or so apart. I moved out to the West Coast, and he disappeared off into the wilds of Ontario somewhere and became a pastor of a church there.

Some years later, I moved to England. Through the perennial ecclesiastical grapevine, I heard that his church was flourishing, and things were going well. He was preaching, and people were getting converted. Then sadly, I heard that he had committed adultery. He resigned, and he disappeared.

More years went by. I moved back to Vancouver. Some years later, then, the Lord called my wife and me down to Chicago, where I started teaching at Trinity. I knew nobody in the Chicago area at the time, save a few faculty people at Trinity. The administration at the Divinity School asked if I wouldn’t mind filling in at a church nearby.

This church had been through some rocky times. They had had a pastor who was quite capable, a good preacher who led quite a number of people to the Lord. Then sadly, after a few years, he had been caught out in adultery, so the church was in a bit of a mess. Yes, it was your friend and mine: this same chap from England. Well, he disappeared again, this time to Ohio to sell computer parts, but this time we knew where he was.

For some time after that, if you asked him, “What went wrong? I mean, three times? Once is awful; it’s a terrible betrayal, but three times? Didn’t you learn anything? How could you do it three times?” he would simply say, quoting 1 Corinthians 10, “God says, ‘There is no temptation taken you but what is common to man, but God is faithful who will not allow you to be tempted above what you are able, but will, with the temptation, provide a way of escape, that you might be able to bear it.’ I wasn’t able to bear it. So God is a liar.” That’s all he would say.

Yet if we’ve been Christians even a short while, we have met other people, haven’t we, who have faced astonishingly powerful trials and temptations, and have come out stronger, more vibrant in their Christian faith, and full of courage and integrity. You put them under pressure and they just become more robust.

You put them through suffering, and they come out smelling like a rose or, better, with the very aroma of Christ and the gospel. What’s the difference between these two, between someone who turns out like this chap and someone who just grows in grace under trial and temptation? Of course, at one level, you could simply say, generically (and it would be perfectly true), “It’s the grace of God.” That’s true.

Yet this chapter that we’ve just read deals so fundamentally with some of the issues that are involved in trial and temptation that, if these truths and principles and realities are not just understood but thoroughly absorbed into our lives, they will change everything. They will change how we respond to these matters. There are four of them.

1. When you are struggling under trial, remember the Christian’s goals.

Verse 12: “Blessed is the man who perseveres under trial, because when he has stood the test, he will receive the crown of life that God has promised to those who love him.” In other words, he’s blessed, under trial, because there is an ultimate goal: this crown of life, which God will ultimately give him.

Before you get to verse 12, those who read James regularly will recall that James has already said something similar a few verses earlier. Verses 2 through 4: “Consider it pure joy, my brothers, whenever you face trials of many kinds, because you know that the testing of your faith develops perseverance. Perseverance must finish its work so that you may be mature and complete, not lacking anything.”

This is an astonishingly powerful statement. “Consider it pure joy when you fall under trials of various kinds, because you know that the testing of your faith develops perseverance. Perseverance, when it has done its work, will make you mature.” When I was an undergraduate at McGill University a long time ago, studying chemistry and mathematics, we had someone come on the campus to give us an exposition on the book of James.

Now in those days, back in the oxcart days, everybody used the King James Version which reads: “Count it all joy, my brethren, when ye fall into divers temptations …” Not divers’ temptations, as if it’s a swim meet, but divers temptations, as in trials of many kinds. In the first exposition, it was explained to us in some detail how we’re to count it joy when we face these kinds of things because we recognize that it’s these sorts of pressures, these sorts of trials, that make us stronger.

We know about this in every other domain of life, don’t we? An athlete keeps pushing and pushing and pushing, knowing that by the pushing, you build up the stomach muscles and the stamina. You become stronger because of it. Chicago has just run its marathon, and we have three or four chaps on our faculty who train for it every year.

Pretty soon, about two weeks before the end, they hit that 20-mile mark in their training. In fact, our guys regularly go to 23, not just as a matter of principle, but partly because they’re all aging, and they want to make sure they can still do it. So they’re strong enough, they’re healthy enough to go and run the marathon.

The same is true in intellectual arenas, in leadership in business, and elsewhere. You press, and you learn some responsibilities under stress. Gradually, you learn a little better how to handle them and how to become a little more mature in your judgments and so forth. So also in the Christian faith.

Under trial, under pressure, you face these things, and you see, however unpleasant they are, that nevertheless, they’re teaching you something of perseverance. If you keep persevering, ultimately you’re learning something of maturity. You can’t really become mature in your faith unless you face some of those kinds of things. If life is always easy, your faith is never stretched and tested so that you learn perseverance and, ultimately, maturity.

So count it all joy when ye fall into trials of various kinds, because you have a different set of goals. Your goal is not simply to get through life with as few challenges as possible, happy as a lark. Your goal as a Christian is to be mature. So when you face trials of various kinds, remember the Christian’s goals.

When we heard this chap explaining this passage, some of us made a quiet resolution among ourselves that we would covenant together, and anytime we heard anyone else in this group whinging or whining or complaining, we would quote this verse at them to remind them. So you can guess what happened.

The next day, somebody wandered onto the campus for a calculus exam at 10:00, complaining about the hardness of this course. Somebody smirked and said, “Count it all joy, my brethren, when ye fall into divers temptations.” It was kind of like, “One up for me.” Then somebody came onto campus and complained about an impending breakup with a girlfriend or a boyfriend. “Count it all joy, my brethren, when ye fall into divers temptations.”

Of course, it didn’t help. It was like pouring salt into a raw wound. It didn’t help at all. It was a bit of a game of spiritual one-upmanship. After a while, however, in the mercy of the Lord, it came, also, to be something more than that. It came to be something important. It is what Scripture says. We are actually to count it a joy when we face trials of various kinds because they will make us mature.

Our constant reminding of one another meant that, in due course, the whining and the complaining, the petty stuff, all ceased. It just dried up. That year at McGill, of the four years that I was there, we saw more people converted that year than the other three put together. What can I say? I don’t know if there was cause and effect, but that’s what happened.

There’s not only this goal of perseverance, and therefore, maturity, in verses 2 to 4, but now, down in verse 12, something further. It’s a further goal. “Blessed is the man who perseveres under trial, because when he has stood the test, he will receive the crown of life that God has promised to those who love him.”

Now this expression the crown of life doesn’t occur very often in the Bible, but where it does, it’s pretty clear what it means. Revelation 2:10 says, “Be faithful, even to the point of death, and I will give you the crown of life.” What it means is crowning life, life in all of its fullness, life in its perfection, life in its resurrection splendor, life as it must be in the presence of God forever. “I will give you the crown of life.”

So persevere. This too is part of the Christian’s goals. You’re not just trying to get through life and make it. You’re trying to press on toward the ultimate goal of receiving this crown of life in the new heaven and the new earth. If these trials that come along the way press you and train you and prepare you for that, well, you’re blessed indeed. What could be more wonderful than that?

Now of course, this language of rewards troubles Christians. You do this, and then I will give you this crown of life. It almost makes us embarrassed after we’ve heard about the gospel of grace, now we receive this thing freely. There are quite a lot of passages in the Bible that do speak of rewards. How shall we think of them?

The best illustration that I know was penned by C.S. Lewis some decades ago. It doesn’t cover every text, but it covers quite a few of them. He pictures two men. One of them goes to the red-light district in town, pays his money, and has his woman. He has his reward. The other courts a young woman, woos her, treats her with immaculate dignity and respect, and wins her confidence and love, and that of her whole family. In due course, there’s a wonderful wedding. They’re married, and he has his reward.

What’s the difference? Lewis says that the difference is this: In the first case, the reward is so incommensurate with the payment that the transaction is an obscenity. In the second case, the reward is nothing other than the consummation of a relationship. That’s surely the way it is in the Christian way.

This crown of life that is our reward is the consummation of a relationship that is grounded in Christ and the gospel. It’s grounded in grace, and it bears fruit in grace. We receive our reward, the consummation of this relationship. That’s why pressing on and persevering under trial is so important. When you are suffering under pressure, under trial, remember the Christian’s goals.

I have a friend who is retired now, but for many years he was a pastor. He was a very fruitful, shrewd pastor who was full of insight. He told me once, a number of years ago, that he took the funeral of an elderly woman who was 84 or so when she died. She and her husband had been married for 60 years. At the graveside, the old man said to him, “I suppose God must have something more for me to do, else why has he left me here?” My pastor friend said to him, “My dear brother, God doesn’t have anything more for you to do except to love him still.”

Because, you see, so often, our identity is bound up with what we do. The man did not mean that God literally didn’t have anything more for this chap to do. He might have had quite a lot for him to do, but should his identity be bound up just with doing? What does this text say in verse 12? “Blessed is the man who perseveres under trial, because when he has stood the test, he will receive the crown of life that God has promised to those who love him.”

God doesn’t have anything more for you to do except to love him still. It’s the grace of the gospel that restores us to our heavenly Father and teaches us what it means; it empowers us to begin to love him with heart and soul and mind and strength. Listen, when you are struggling under trial, remember the Christian’s goals.

2. When you confess God’s sovereignty, do not misunderstand God’s motives.

Verses 13 to 15. Now verse 13 is easily misunderstood. Our translations render it a number of different ways, partly because in the original language, the word for trial is the same word as the word for temptation. It’s the same word.

In English, we make a distinction between them. In temptation, you are being tempted to do something bad, but a trial, by itself, is not a temptation to do something bad but rather some kind of pressure that has come upon you. Which is meant by the word in the original depends entirely on the context. There’s not a separate word for it.

If I had to paraphrase the first part of verse 13, I would put it like this: “If you are tempted by such trials, do not say, ‘God is tempting me.’ ” In other words, you will face some trials, but when you face these trials, if you are then tempted by the trial, don’t say, “God himself is inducing me to sin.”

In other words, James plunges from one to the other, from trial to temptation, because he is writing it as we experience it. The same events that are opportunities to go forward are also temptations to go backward. The same things that might become opportunities to persevere, press on, and grow in maturity can also become occasions to nurture bitterness, resentment, self-pity, and even blasphemy of God because we have to face these wretched things. Trial becomes temptation because it finds as answering chord within us.

Now then, what this text says is, “When you face trials which are turning into temptations, don’t say, ‘God is tempting me.’ ” Of course, God does test us. God is sovereign over the trials. There are many passages that say that God does test his people, bringing them into situations where their willingness to obey him is pressed. In Genesis 22, the text says explicitly that God tested Abraham in the matter of Isaac. In Judges 2:22, it says that God tested Israel. Or in 2 Chronicles 32:31, King Hezekiah is tested by God.

Although God may test us to prove his servants’ faith, to lower their pride, to foster endurance, to press them toward an eternal hunger for our eternal home, he never does so in order to induce sin. He never does so to destroy our faith. So we read, “When tempted, no one should say, ‘God is tempting me.’ For God cannot be tempted by evil, nor does he tempt anyone.” How can you possibly imagine that God is interested in tempting us to sin?

He himself isn’t tempted by sin. He has no interest in sin. Temptation, after all, is an impulse to sin. Since God is not susceptible to any such desire, why should we imagine, even for a moment, that he is interested in inducing us to sin? How can you possibly think that God has some interest in saying, “Go ahead, Don, suck on this one. It’ll be fun!” It’s bizarre. He’s not interested in temptation or evil himself, so why should we think that in his sovereignty, he is actually trying to induce us to sin?

No, no, no. A true account of temptation is found in verses 14 and 15. “Each one is tempted when, by his own evil desire, he is dragged away and enticed.” It’s fishing language, in part. There’s a lure. Then James breaks up the metaphor, and it’s really quite startling. You’re dragged away and enticed by something that is within you. It’s as if the something that is within you is actually the lure that attracts you to drag you away.

“Each one is tempted when, by his own evil desire, he is dragged away and enticed. Then, after desire has conceived, it gives birth to sin; and sin, when it is full-grown, gives birth to death.” The language is bizarre. It’s meant to be bizarre. It’s meant to be shocking. Here the mother is the desire who conceives and gives birth to the child, which is sin. When the sin is full-grown, it’s nothing but death. Here’s a child full-grown and stillborn, as it were, bringing nothing but death.

It’s bizarre imagery to show how vile it is, and it all comes from within us. It’s who we are. So we begin with a desire that takes us away from God, wants to cherish one-upmanship, or wants to dethrone God. The desire bleeds into an act. The act is repeated and becomes a habit. The habit stamps our character. At some point, to use the language of Charles Spurgeon from more than a hundred years ago, “we receive our master’s in worthlessness and our doctorate in damnation.”

So what does James say? When you confess God’s sovereignty, do not misunderstand God’s motives. Which brings us to the third point that James makes.

3. When you feel abandoned and crushed, do not forget God’s goodness.

Verse 16 is transitional. “Don’t be deceived, my dear brothers.” It’s saying, “Don’t kid yourself.” That works going backward and forward. Don’t kid yourself about where the real sin comes from. It comes our own inner desires. The temptation does not come from God. Don’t kid yourself.

It also points forward. God is just immaculately good. Don’t kid yourself. Don’t imagine something different. “Don’t be deceived,” James says. “Every good and perfect gift from above comes down from the Father of the heavenly lights, who does not change like shifting shadows.”

This place is pretty well lit. There are spotlights there and there and there; there are fluorescents here and there. There are lights along the walls. Here at the lectern, there’s pretty even light over my Bible and so forth. Even so, if I hold my hand here, over these papers, I can see shadows of my fingers from the spotlight here, and I can see shadows over here from my fingers from the spotlight over there. For you see, in a finite world, wherever you have bright light and anything gets in the way, it casts a shadow. It just can’t be any other way.

All the great lights of the universe, all of those stars and all of that: God made them all. They all induce shadows. “Every good and perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of the heavenly lights …” The one who made them. “… who does not change like shifting shadows.” In other words, God has no dark side. He has no shadow. He doesn’t shift. He may have made all of those lights, but he himself is only light. As 1 John puts it, “In him is light, and in him there is no darkness at all.” He is only good.

He’s not like “the Force” in Star Wars, which is both good and bad, and then which one works depends on you. He is only good. He’s sovereign over the whole, but he himself is only good. Now we wrestled with those things yesterday, in a different sort of vein. Here it is the goodness of God that is being stressed. He is good. He is very good. He is only good. He is good, good, good, good, good. He cannot be other than good. The same God, who is never less than sovereign, is never less than good.

Now our danger, when we face trials and temptations, is to begin to have the kind of pity party that wants to lash out at God himself. Thus by lashing out at God, in effect, we’re charging him with not being good. “Boy, I could sure arrange the universe a lot better than this! What did I do to deserve this cancer? Why should I lose my job? Other people in the church haven’t lost their jobs? What are you doing to me?” The implication of these kinds of questions is: “God, you’re not good, not fair, not just.”

But the God of the Bible is good, good, good, good, good, good, good. He’s only good. He’s never less than good. He cannot be other than good. He’s not only sovereign, but he’s good. So in other words, what James is stressing is this crucial point: when you feel abandoned and crushed, do not forget God’s goodness.

Then James gives the ultimate proof of God’s goodness in verse 18. “He chose to give us birth through the word of truth, that we might be a kind of firstfruits of all he created.” Now there are some people who think that this reference to making us “a kind of firstfruits of all he created” is talking about God’s initial creation of us. He created the human race, and in his sovereignty, he brings us to birth, so our life, our very breath comes from him, and the word that is in view is the creative word that brings things to pass. That’s not right, however.

This expression, the Word of Truth, that James uses is found only five times in the New Testament. Every time, it refers to the gospel. For example, Ephesians 1:13: “And you also were included in Christ when you heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation.” So this birth must be the new birth that is brought about by the gospel. Verse 18: “He chose to give us new birth through the gospel, that we might be a kind of firstfruits of all he created.” We are a firstfruits of all he created for the coming new heaven and the new earth.

Do you want to see the ultimate demonstration, then, of God’s goodness? You return to the gospel, and that takes you back to the cross. It takes you back to all that he has done, bearing our sin in his own body on the tree, and all of its outworking in all of our lives as Christians, not only now but for all eternity.

This includes already receiving the Spirit as the down payment of the promised inheritance; already finding brothers and sisters in Christ in the context of the church; already finding our sins forgiven, reconciled to this God against whom we have rebelled and from whom we have been alienated; and looking forward, ultimately, to transformed living in the new heaven and the new earth, with resurrection bodies.

Go and re-read Revelation 21 and 22. It will be a new order, we’re told, in which there will no longer be any sin, sorrow, death, decay, covetousness, idolatry, or rebellion. And that’s just the negative side of things! We will be so transformed that we will love God perfectly with heart and soul and mind and strength. This will not be just for a weekend or two, a sort of holiday into holiness, but forever and ever.

He chose to give us new birth through the gospel. There’s the demonstration. So the trials and pressures and even the temptations we face, as awkward as they are, inevitably, they will look different 10 years after you’re dead, 50 years after you’re dead, or 50 billion years after you’re dead (if we can think of eternity in the categories of time; I don’t know that). That’s the demonstration.

It’s important to focus on that central demonstration of the goodness of God. There is a sense, of course, in which we want to give thanks to God appropriately for the other good things we enjoy. In this room, I am quite sure that all of us here get enough to eat. Mind you, there are parts of the world where people don’t get enough to eat. As bad as the HIV/AIDS ravage is in this country, it’s nothing compared with Central Africa. Aren’t you glad you were born here?

Most of us have access to a reasonably decent education. Some of us are quite athletic. Some of us are very grateful to God for our children or our grandchildren. Some of us are grateful to God for the privileges we’ve had at work: a good job, holding down a steady income, interesting work. It’s worth remembering all those things, but you know, there’s a problem with them.

The more we focus on those things, we forget how many brothers and sisters we have in Christ, even in our local church, without all of those things. Some don’t have good health. Some don’t have children. Some are out of work. Some are riddled with disease that is going to take them out in a few years or a few months.

So it is right to thank God for all of these temporal blessings. That’s right, but if you so stress the temporal blessings that you lose sight of the eternal ones, then you actually turn out to be just a wee bit divisive in the church, because there are always some who don’t have those kinds of things, who are just quietly hurt by the comparisons.

However, when you focus on the things that are the commonalities that all Christians have … reconciliation with the living God, new birth, something of God’s nature given to us already in anticipation of the perfection of God’s nature given to us in resurrection existence in the new heaven and the new earth toward which all Christians press, all secured by the Word of Truth, the gospel of Jesus Christ … then we have a community of people who are abundantly thankful for God’s immaculate unqualified goodness, in which we all participate and partake.

So when you confess God’s sovereignty, do not misunderstand God’s motives. When you are abandoned and crushed, do not forget God’s goodness. And finally …

4. When you hear gospel instruction, do not merely listen to it as something belonging to the past.

Verses 19 to 25. I think these verses are sometimes a wee bit misunderstood. Verse 19: “My dear brothers, take note of this: Everyone should be quick to listen, slow to speak and slow to become angry, for man’s anger does not bring about the righteous life that God desires.”

Now if this is following on naturally from the preceding, then the anger, the loose tongue, may be in function of facing trials and temptations that are making us bitter and wanting us to lash out and slam God or other people. Ugly things. There may be more coherence in this chapter that we sometimes realize.

“My dear brothers, take note of this: Everyone should be quick to listen, slow to speak and slow to become angry, for man’s anger does not bring about the righteous life that God desires. Therefore, get rid of all moral filth and the evil that is so prevalent and humbly accept the word planted in you, which can save you.” Now what word is this? The only word in the context is the Word of Truth that has been mentioned in verse 18. Continue on. There’s no break in the original.

In other words, this word is again referring to the gospel. The text is saying, “Humbly accept the gospel planted in you, which is able to save you.” Don’t forget, however, this is written to Christians. How can this gospel planted in us, save us, when we’re already saved? If we’re Christians, we have been saved. The point is the Bible can speak of this gospel still doing its saving, transforming work within us.

This text is saying the gospel must continue to do its saving, transforming work within us. You can’t forget that. You can’t read these gospel texts and then pretend that they’re only for the newcomers who come into the church who have never heard the gospel before. “The gospel will save them, but I’m already saved. I don’t need saving.”

If we act like that, then.… James says in verse 22: “Do not merely listen to the word …” That is, this gospel word, this word of truth. “… and so deceive yourselves. Do what it says.” That is, still live under its gospel ages. It’s not simply saying, “Make sure you are even evermore obedient and perform adequately well, and then maybe God will bless you.” No, you live out what it means to live under the gospel. You do what it says. You become a gospel person.

“Anyone who listens to the word but does not do what it says is like a man who looks at his face in a mirror and, after looking at himself, goes away and immediately forgets what he looks like. But the man who looks intently into the perfect law of freedom …” It’s the gospel that liberates us, this perfect principle of freedom, this gospel word, this Word of Truth. “… not forgetting what he has heard, but doing it: he will be blessed in what he does.”

Let me give you an illustration. I mentioned yesterday at the conference that Tim Keller and I, and, ultimately, about 50 pastors, have put together something that we call The Gospel Coalition. You can find out about it at thegospelcoalition.org. One of the things that our site hosts is another overlapping organization that is called CCI (Christ on Campus Initiative).

CCI is a group of us that are trying to produce four or five papers a year that are downloadable for free by undergraduates everywhere. We give them away to InterVarsity or Campus Crusade; anybody who wants them can have them for free. These papers are designed for undergraduates who are biblically illiterate. They don’t know anything. They don’t know how the Bible is put together. They often bring their own baggage with them, however.

So we have a paper, for example, on what a Christian worldview is, a paper on pluralism and the exclusive claims of Christ, a paper on Islam, a paper on naturalism, and so on. None of them are too long, 13,000 or 14,000 words, just enough to be rigorous without being too technical or too lengthy. These things are also hosted on that site.

The whole thing is funded by a small foundation that, before we started this series of papers, paid to invite to our campus six campus workers from different organizations, different ages, and from different parts of the country. There was a chap who came in from California; he arrived wearing a Hawaiian shirt and shorts. The guy who came in from Harvard came in a pinstripe suit; I kid you not. They came in from different parts of the country, and they were different in their outlooks and so on.

We made sure that all of these campus workers were theologically trained, too. They weren’t just keen people, but they were theologically trained. They all had somewhere between five and thirty-five years of experience on campuses. What we did was we asked each of them to make a presentation to those of us who were involved, and then we brainstormed together.

We asked, “What are the trends on university campuses? What’s going on? What do students, who are biblically illiterate undergraduates, on our nation’s campuses today need? What are they asking about? What are their biases? What’s going on?” Now I like to tell myself that I know what’s happening on campuses, but these people were so far ahead of me. I’m just an amateur compared to these people who spend all their lives working in this way on university campuses.

One of the workers that we invited was a young woman called Danielle. She and her husband had both trained at Trinity and, in fact, she and her husband had both been students at Princeton before they came to Trinity. So they studied at Princeton, came to us, and then they had gone back to Princeton to serve in something called the Princeton Evangelical Fellowship.

This is one of the most remarkable campus groups I have ever seen, partly because of its philosophy of ministry. If you join the Princeton Evangelical Fellowship as a student, you are committing yourself not only to the big meetings that they have but also to one-on-one mentoring by one of the full-time staff people. In other words, their staff-to-student ratio is really quite remarkable, and as a result, each student gets one-on-one mentoring every week, for at least an hour, for the whole four years that they’re there. Can you imagine what this gives them?

They have homework to do, things to read, and things to work through, so that at the end of four years, they come out just so much stronger and so much better trained in the basics of the Christian faith and how the Bible is put together. Chris and Danielle had been through this and then had come to Trinity, got some theological training, and gone back to work with the Princeton Evangelical Fellowship.

Now Danielle was back, telling us her experiences of the previous five years, during which she had spent an average of 28 hours each week one-on-one mentoring young women at Princeton. She said, “I’m going to tell you what makes Princeton undergraduates tick. Inevitably, it’s a generalization, obviously. Moreover, I’m picking on women here, but I could equally give you similar reports for young men. They’re a bit different and work slightly differently, but there are very similar things that could be said.” She said, “There are three things that make Princeton undergraduate women tick:

1) From their parents and from their own push to get into an Ivy League school: ‘Never get less than an A.’ ” Now you’re not going to find that in every university, are you? Some universities are known as party universities in which the main aim is to date a football hunk or to be a football hunk, or the main aim is to get through and enjoy as many parties as possible. Or maybe it’s just to get through part-time while you’re paying your own way and washing dishes at a restaurant somewhere.

There can be different philosophies, but in an Ivy League school, that’s what she was finding. “ ‘Never get less than an A.’ You don’t get into Princeton unless you have that mentality in the first place. It’s the way it is. Of course, that’s also a setup for failure, isn’t it? Because I don’t care how clever you are, there are going to be lots and lots of people in Princeton who don’t get A’s. So the first one is already a setup for failure.

2) From the general media, from the culture all around, from friends, and from your own perception of what freedom is: ‘Be yourself.’ Now we’ll have a footnote under that one: Make sure you give a little bit of time to the victims of Katrina or go and work for a week in a clinic for HIV people somewhere.

Make sure you have some sort of compassion somewhere about injustice, but basically be yourself. Don’t let anybody squeeze you into a box and tell you anything. Now how you put together the idealism of the first point and the second point is already a challenge.

3) From Madison Avenue and from peers: ‘Be hot.’ ” She says not everybody would admit this, but in her view, it’s almost universal just the same. “That affects how you dress, how you present yourself, what you want people to think of you, how you get noticed, how you find a mate or a boyfriend, and how you rank socially. It’s bound up there somewhere. ‘Be hot.’ Of course, that’s also going to set you up for failure, isn’t it? Because even at our most charitable, we all recognize that we’re not all hot.

So now one of these young women gets into one of these Bible studies and becomes a Christian. She learns something of the wonderful gospel of grace. She’s accepted before God not because she’s a Princeton student, maybe even despite the fact she’s a Princeton student. She’s accepted before God because of what Christ has done on her behalf, bearing her sins in his own body on the tree.

She becomes a Christian, but with all of these pressures from the world around her, pretty soon, she wants to become the best Christian: all the Bible studies, all the prayer meetings, lead the best Bible studies, make sure you do all your preparation in advance, read more than others, make sure you go on the next Christian mission trip down to Pago Pago or wherever you’re going. You’re going to be one of the best Christians! Pretty soon, now, you’re into this mode, once again, where you can only fail because you’re never, ever good enough. Where is grace?

On top of that is a whole culture yelling at young women, ‘You’re a woman! You can be anything!’ Women are hearing, ‘You’re a woman, so you’d better be everything!’ Then there’s only more room for failure. Do you realize that in our Ivy League schools, 80 percent of young women, at some point, will have an eating disorder, and 80 to 85 percent will, at some point, be on Prozac or one of the others?”

What James says is this: “This gospel word, this Word of Truth saves you. Now don’t just be hearers of it. Live in it. Live under it. Do the gospel, because this gospel, written to Christians, is still able to save you.” It’s this message of the gospel that comes to you and still transforms you, saves you, and teaches you that you are accepted before God because of Jesus, not because you’ve led a superb Bible study! You are accepted in the beloved because of what Christ has done, not because you attended yet one more prayer meeting.

It’s not that there’s no place for obedience. Of course there’s a place for obedience! Yet if it’s more obedience and nothing else, then you just become one of the next-door Pharisees. No, no, no. The Christian life is lived out in gratitude to God for his grace. There’s a freedom in the gospel. This is the perfect law of freedom. There’s a freedom so that, yes, we learn to serve and we might pursue excellence, but it is in the matrix of gratitude to God for all that he has done.

We are, in one sense, like poor beggars telling other beggars where there’s bread. In one sense, we’re never more than unprofitable servants, and we live our lives out of a thankful response to grace. Let this word that is already implanted within you, now so constrain all your mind and thought, that you discover it is still about to save you. For anything else just becomes one more layer of legalism on top of the gospel, instead of the glorious freedom of the sons and daughters of God.

In other words, we come back to that which is absolutely central: the love and grace and goodness of God. We live our lives in gratitude and adoration there. In the words we sing by Stuart Townend:

How deep the Father’s love for us,

How vast beyond all measure,

That He should give His only Son

To make a wretch His treasure.

How great the pain of searing loss:

The Father turns His face away,

As wounds which mar the Chosen One

Bring many sons to glory.

Behold the man upon a cross,

My sin upon His shoulders;

Ashamed, I hear my mocking voice

Call out among the scoffers.

It was my sin that held Him there

Until it was accomplished;

His dying breath has brought me life;

I know that it is finished.

And then this:

I will not boast in anything,

No gifts, no power, no wisdom;

But I will boast in Jesus Christ,

His death and resurrection.

Why should I gain from His reward?

I cannot give an answer;

But this I know with all my heart:

His wounds have paid my ransom.

Let us pray.

It may well be, heavenly Father, that some are hearing the gospel of Christ this morning for the first time. That we, who are sinners by nature and choice, rebels at heart, may be reconciled to you, our Maker, our Judge, because of what you have provided in your own dear Son, who came to pay for our sin, to bear it himself. Lord God, work in such people right now, so that from the bottom of their hearts, they lift their hearts heavenward and cry, “Lord, I believe; help my unbelief. God, have mercy on me, a sinner.”

But for so many of the rest of us, who have been Christians for some time, O Lord God, this Word of Truth, this gospel word that has been implanted in us, help us not to forget it but still to live it, to do gospel living, to live under this good news, which is still able to save us from our wretched tendency toward self-exoneration and self-promotion and self-presentation, as if somehow, now, we can win your favor by dint of our hard effort.

Open our eyes to see again the glories of the cross, so that all of our obedience is a function of sheer gratitude to God for the grace that has been showered out upon us. For Jesus’ sake, and for his people’s good, amen.