Joy in the Triumph of Grace in Others

D. A. Carson’s sermon from 3 John explores the profound joy that John, the elder, experiences from witnessing the faithfulness and truth-walking of his spiritual children. Carson reflects on how spiritual leaders find great fulfillment and joy in seeing the transformative impact of grace in the lives of those they mentor, and the sermon underscores the importance of nurturing truth and righteousness within the Christian community.

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This evening, I would like to invite you to turn to 3 John, John’s third epistle, right toward the end of the Bible, one of the shortest books of the New Testament. In this short chapter, just 300 words or so, we find this remarkable statement written by the apostle John in old age after he has tasted everything a human being can taste that might give him joy. He writes, “I have no greater joy than to hear that my children are walking in the truth.” Now let me read the book.

“The elder, To my dear friend Gaius, whom I love in the truth. Dear friend, I pray that you may enjoy good health and that all may go well with you, even as your soul is getting along well. It gave me great joy to have some believers come and testify to your faithfulness to the truth, telling how you continue to walk in it. I have no greater joy than to hear that my children are walking in the truth.

Dear friend, you are faithful in what you are doing for the brothers and sisters, even though they are strangers to you. They have told the church about your love. You will do well to send them on their way in a manner worthy of God. It was for the sake of the Name that they went out, receiving no help from the pagans. We ought therefore to show hospitality to such people so that we may work together for the truth.

I wrote to the church, but Diotrephes, who loves to be first, will have nothing to do with us. So when I come, I will call attention to what he is doing, spreading malicious nonsense about us. Not satisfied with that, he refuses to welcome other believers. He also stops those who want to do so and puts them out of the church. Dear friend, do not imitate what is evil but what is good. Anyone who does what is good is from God. Anyone who does what is evil has not seen God.

Demetrius is well spoken of by everyone—and even by the truth itself. We also speak well of him, and you know that our testimony is true. I have much to write you, but I do not want to do so with pen and ink. I hope to see you soon, and we will talk face to face. Peace to you. The friends here send their greetings. Greet the friends there by name.”

This is the Word of the Lord.

A short book. John doesn’t even name himself. He just refers to himself as the elder, but he manages to mention three people in the course of this short book. To set our special verse, verse 4, in its context, I want to run through the apostolic remarks regarding these three people so you get the flow of the book, what’s going on in the background, in order to make more sense of John’s comments about joy.

1. Some apostolic remarks about Gaius and to Gaius

He says, “To my dear friend Gaius, whom I love in the truth.” Oh, I know there are some cultures where men are not supposed to say, “I love you,” to another man. John doesn’t have quite those inhibitions. The expression in the truth really does not mean, “Whom I love truly,” though that’s true.

What it means is, “Whom I love in the matrix of the truth of the gospel, whom I love in the fellowship we enjoy in Christ Jesus, whom I love because of the gospel of Jesus Christ such that we are fellow heirs of the grace of God, whom I love in the truth that God has disclosed in himself in Christ Jesus.”

I teach at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in Chicago, and as I look around the big cities of North America and beyond (about 27 percent of our students are internationals), what I observe is that in more and more world class cities there is more and more multi-ethnicity. There are more and more languages operating. There is more and more cultural diversity.

Some of us get really nervous about that. Others love it just because we like all the different restaurants. What I really look for in our graduates each year, especially from our MDiv track (the track that heads toward pastoral ministry), are students who can talk to anybody. We have some African-American students who are going to be really great in church planting on the south side of Chicago.

We have some European-American students who are going to be pretty good in Lincoln, Nebraska, but the ones I’m looking for every year and I move heaven and earth if I can manipulate anything (God loves you, but Don Carson has a wonderful plan for your life) is to get those people in our cities, in our cities, in our cities, in our cities.

I want to find young pastors who can talk to old and young, to rich and poor, to black and white and red and yellow and every other color in between. I want them to be able to talk to heterosexuals and homosexuals. I want them to be able to talk to the educated and the poor and the homeless.

That is what our cities are, and it takes this common fellowship in the truth to build bridges across race and ethnicities and income groups. I love to be in a church or an assembly where there is diversity, and I look around and I say, “What on earth holds this lot together?” Do you know what it is? The truth. The gospel.

It’s easy to put together a group where everybody is more or less the same (the same age or same ethnicity or same language group or whatever), and if you live in a corner of the world where that’s your demographic, fine. God bless you, but it’s no longer quite that way in Belfast, is it? It’s certainly not that way in London. It’s not that way in Chicago. John has come to learn in the international place of Rome that the framework, the context, the matrix of love of Christian for Christian is not mere cultural, racial, or ethnic similarity but the truth.

“My dear Gaius, whom I love in the truth. Dear friend, I pray that you may enjoy good health and that all may go well with you, even as your soul is getting along well.” Isn’t that a terrific way to set up the standard? I suspect for some of us here, if the apostle came along and said, “I pray your health and prosperity may be in line with your spiritual vitality,” we’d all fall ill with typhoid and be diagnosed with melanoma, about to take us out in three months. This is a way of John saying the fundamental thing to get right is your spiritual health.

“My dear Gaius, I am so convinced of your spiritual health that what I pray for is that your physical well-being and your prosperity will in some way measure up to your spiritual health.” Isn’t that a great test? It’s not too surprising if he loves him in the truth. If he loves him in the matrix of the gospel, first things first. The first thing is not, “Get your physical health right and then hopefully you can sort of do enough to be spiritual enough to maybe get that up to second place,” but the other way around. In the light of eternity, it’s the only thing that makes sense.

“It gave me great joy,” John goes on to say, “to have some believers come and testify to your faithfulness to the truth, telling how you continue to walk in it.” Apparently, at this point John exercises a kind of apostolic supervision over a number of churches in the Asia Minor area, the western third of contemporary Turkey.

He’s an old man by this point, perhaps pushing 90, and he has some of these travelers, pretty common on Roman roads, which were very good. Roads in the ancient world were as good as anything in Europe all the way down to the early 1800s. He has some people coming back and forth giving reports, and someone has reported that his dear friend Gaius has a reputation for faithfulness to the truth, for walking in the truth, which presupposes two things: knowing it and living in line with it.

John says, “It just gave me such a kick! It was such a pleasure to hear of your faithfulness to the gospel, to the truth, your understanding of it and your conformity to it.” Then he adds, “I have no greater joy than to hear that my children are walking in the truth.” In particular, what John is grateful for he goes on to explain in verses 5 to 8.

“Dear friend, you are faithful in what you are doing for the brothers and sisters, even though they are strangers to you. They have told the church about your love. You will do well to send them on their way in a manner worthy of God. It was for the sake of the Name that they went out, receiving no help from the pagans. Of course, you are the one who has provided that help.”

In the ancient world, the church was growing so fast that it was difficult sometimes to have a well-trained pastor teaching in each assembly that was springing up. Increasingly, there were itinerant preachers a bit like old Methodist circuits, but in the ancient world, there was also no university system quite like ours.

What happened in the ancient world was that lecturers took up posts in market squares or they rented halls and they began to give talks. They began to address people, teach people, and if they were good, they could charge quite a bit. If they charged quite a bit, then of course, they had to be pretty good. Therefore, they would attract the children of the wealthy, and the wealthy liked to give to those who were clearly the best, so those who were more gifted would charge a little more. Eventually, they would have a reputation and build a whole school around themselves.

There were many itinerant lecturers, teachers, who taught philosophy in the ancient world going from center to center. By philosophy, they did not mean an esoteric, abstract subject taught in big universities in small departments. By philosophy, what they meant was how to live. That’s what they meant by philosophy. There was a Stoic philosophy. There were half a dozen other philosophies (cynic philosophies and so on) teaching you how to live.

Now along come the itinerant Christian preachers, and they were often viewed by the pagans as one more batch of philosophers coming along. Who was going to support them? The pagans? No, the people who were going to support them are Christians like Gaius, providing them with hospitality, food, adequate support so they could go from place to place and teach under the name of the apostle, under the authority of the apostle, the whole counsel of God, bringing local churches up to date, instruction after instruction after instruction.

This might seem slightly bizarre in Northern Ireland where there have been many strong churches for countless years, but in French Canada where I grew up, as recently as 1972 there were about 35 evangelical French-speaking churches in a population of about 6 million, something like four times the population of Northern Ireland.

In eight years, from 1972 to 1980, we grew from about 35 evangelical churches of all descriptions to just under 500. Did you hear that? From 35 to 500 in eight years. We had church after church after church where nobody had been an evangelical believer for more than six months. We were putting people aside as sort of interim elders at nine months because they were the most knowledgeable Christians in the entire assembly.

In that framework, we quickly developed roving teachers to go into these churches and teach and instruct and have teach-ins and concentrated seminars. We started giving courses by extension and so on precisely to try to bring the church up to a basic knowledge of the Word of God as quickly as possible.

That’s what was going on in the first century, and Gaius, for his part, is not only knowledgeable about the truth and faithful in his own obedience to it, but, “Dear friend, you are faithful in what you are doing for the brothers and sisters.” These are strangers, not friends as they come by. “They have told the church about your love. You will do well to send them on …” That’s an ancient Greek way of saying, “Please.”

“You will do well to send them on their way,” really reads, “Please, send them on their way.” That is, provide adequate support. “You will do well to send them on their way in a manner worthy of God.” How do you like that for mission appeal? You support the ministers of the gospel, not least those doing church planting and cross-cultural work, not with the attitude, “Lord, you keep them humble and we’ll keep them poor.” Nope. You send them on their way in a manner worthy of God. No wonder John loves this Gaius!

“It was for the sake of the Name that they went out …” The name of Christ and his gospel. “… receiving no help from the pagans.” Of course, the other itinerant lecturers aren’t going to receive help from the pagans. We can’t expect the pagans to support this lot. “We ought therefore to show hospitality to such people so that we may work together for the truth.” Those are John’s remarks to and about Gaius.

2. Some apostolic remarks about Diotrephes

Verse 9. Look at his character. John writes, “I wrote to the church, but Diotrephes, who loves to be first, will have nothing to do with us.” The books of 1 John and 2 John clearly have a lot to do with a major heresy that was troubling the church at the time. That may be operating behind the scenes in 3 John (I don’t know), but no heresy is actually mentioned here.

What’s mentioned here instead is one character who just has to be the boss, number one. He loves to be first, and boy, has he caused trouble. You read on in the following lines, “He will have nothing to do with us.” He won’t even listen to the apostle John. He won’t even submit to apostolic authority.

For us today, that’s the equivalent of not being willing to listen to the apostolic authority as it is manifest in Scripture, Scripture arguments clearly taught in God’s most Holy Word under apostolic sanction and sent by the Spirit of God. They mean nothing to these people because, for them, everything is a power game. They want to be number one. They might reject the pope. They want to be little popes.

John says, “When I come, I will call attention to what he is doing.” In other words, he’s going to follow the instruction of Christ Jesus and tell it to the church. “I will tell the church. I will show how he spreads malicious nonsense about us.” That is, the expression that is used in the original suggests the talk is not only malicious in motive but ridiculous and senseless in content.

“Not satisfied with this …” That is, this malicious nonsense. “… he refuses to welcome other believers.” He not only excludes John, but he excludes other believers. “He also stops those who want to do so and puts them out of the church.” He believes in second- and third-degree separationism. “I don’t like John. Therefore, I don’t like anybody from John. Therefore, I don’t like anybody who accepts anybody from John,” until there are barriers everywhere for no other end than that he continues to be number one.

Believe me. Such sins did not stop at the end of the first century. “Dear friend, do not imitate what is evil but what is good.” For the truth of the matter is all of us are imitators in some degree. I first started thinking seriously about this when I was a very young man. I have a mother who has now gone to glory. She was born in the East End of London. She was a Cockney born within the sound of Bow Bells, with all the wit and the mouth pertaining thereto.

When I was still young and single and just beginning to learn to preach, I fell under the godly influence of a slightly older brother. He was 10 years older than I. He was equally single. He was the pastor of a church, and he was supervising me as I was trying to plant a church in the Ottawa Valley.

He had a certain kind of way of preaching that halfway through a thought he would sort of drop his lip just a wee bit and sort of look puzzled. To me, it looked so thoughtful, insightful, as if he was meditating on God’s most Holy Word, and quite unselfconsciously I began to imitate him until one day my mother heard me preach.

“Don, I have a question for you. Why do you stop and leer at the congregation halfway through your points?” We all imitate. In one fashion or another, we all imitate. That’s why I tell young men who are training for the ministry, “Don’t just copy one preacher. It will make you a clone. Don’t just copy two preachers. It will make you confused. Copy 50 preachers. You’ll begin to learn some wisdom.”

As a general distinction, the fundamental divide is that it’s not style or personality. “Do not imitate what is evil but what is good. Anyone who does what is good is from God. Anyone who does what is evil has not seen God.” You know, get some fundamentals in there. If you’d like a foil on Diotrephes, try another “D,” Demetrius.

3. Some apostolic remarks about Demetrius

“Demetrius is well spoken of by everyone—and even by the truth itself.” That’s probably meant to be slightly ambiguous. That is, the testimony about him is true, but the gospel is so much aligned with his life that the gospel confirms he’s a good man. It’s the truth working out in him. “We also speak well of him, and you know that our testimony is true.”

He ends, “I have much to write you, but I do not want to do so with pen and ink. I hope to see you soon, and we will talk face to face.” At the risk of stretching apostolic intent, I want to say just a minute about the Internet. I doubt John had the Internet in mind. Yet, there is a kind of intimacy that can hide behind pen and ink, or better yet, the zeroes and ones of the digital world, that becomes less than personal.

I’m not a Luddite. I’m chairman of the GRAMCORD Institute which is a digital research institute for the biblical languages, and I’m president of The Gospel Coalition which has a powerful website. I even have a cell phone in my pocket. Mercifully, it’s off. But, boy, it’s easy to hide in that world. How many hours a week do you waste on the blogs? Have you ever punched out things you would never say in person that you would say hiding behind the anonymity of your user name?

I know the digital social structures can be really helpful. We have one in The Gospel Coalition. It’s called The Gospel Coalition Network. Social networks in the digital world can be extremely helpful. We can link many, many youth pastors from around the country. We can marry together all kinds of people interested in apologetics in university campus work together. We can put together many, many useful things in the digital world, but it’s also a horrible place to hide.

Somewhere along the line, you must remember it cannot ever replace the local church where you see people face to face. If the apostle John could feel that tension when it came to pen and ink versus face to face in the first century, we jolly well had better feel it more acutely when it comes to digitized messages versus face to face in the twenty-first century. Personal relationships cannot finally be reduced to the digital world, however useful that world may be. I got off my hobbyhorse. I’ll get back to the text.

“Peace to you. The friends here send their greetings. Greet the friends there by name.” That’s the flow of the argument. It’s pretty clear, which brings us back to verse 4, John writing to Gaius. “I have no greater joy than to hear that my children are walking in the truth.” I have three pastoral reflections, and I’ll cast them as questions.

A) Where is your greatest joy?

There are a lot of valid sources of joy. Playing with your grandchildren. I was talking with John Kirkpatrick. Motorcycle riding. Music. Building something with your hands. Your garden. Playing with your grandchildren again. Watching your kids go on in maturity. Coming out of a surgery for melanoma and discovering they got it all. Maybe even who won the Ashes. Okay, fine.

We’re embodied people. This is a good thing. We’re not spiritually abstracted people. We’re embodied. We live in the give and take of the material world. This is the world God has made, but what is your greatest joy? John says, “I have no greater joy than to hear my children are walking in the truth.”

By children, he may mean his own converts, people whom he has led to Christ. I have only known a little of that, but I’m getting old enough now to see it. A few years ago, I was back at Cambridge University doing a university mission, and some lovely 18-year-old flounced up to me, and she said, “You don’t know me, but my parents were converted under your ministry at a Cambridge mission 25 years ago, and that’s why I’m here.” “I have no greater joy than to hear that my children are walking according to the truth.”

It might not be people he has actually led to the Lord. It might simply be people whom he is training as adopted children, as it were, as he serves this apostolic ministry in this Asia Minor region, the towns of Ephesus and Laodicea and Hierapolis and Colossae, towns like that. He could have said, “Guys, I’m the last of the Twelve. The others are gone. You ought to be thinking about how you enhance my ministry.”

Acolytes often think in those terms. They all want to enhance John, but that’s not how John is thinking. He’s saying, “My greatest joy is hearing how my children walk in accordance with the truth, both faithful to the truth and living in conformity to it.” I ask you again, where is your greatest joy?

B) What obvious extension is there of this source of joy?

You could, if you were cynical enough, come to this text (verse 4) and say, “Well, you know, he’s an apostle. He’s allowed to say things like that, and I suppose when I’m old enough and I’ve led a few people to the Lord, then maybe I can jump on the same bandwagon and share the same joy.”

It misses the point. There is an obvious extension. The extension is the Christian joy of seeing fellow believers forge ahead. They may be people whom we have directly influenced ourselves in some way. Then there’s a special joy to it. There’s no doubt about it. But the assumption in all of this is there is a wonderful joy in seeing brothers and sisters in Christ growing in conformity to the truth, knowing the truth better and better and living in the light of it. It’s the obvious extension. As soon as you’ve said that, you can see a thousand applications.

I’ve been traveling to Eastern Europe for quite a long time now. Six years or so after the wall came down in 1989 I was in again, this time in Slovakia. I was at a pastors’ conference that was organized by a friend, and in this small conference of Slovaks, the pastors could be divided essentially into two groups.

There were those who were 40 to 45 and older who had served all of their time under the communist regime. Some of them had been beaten and gone to prison. None of them had been allowed to do tertiary education, let alone tertiary theological education. Many of them had suffered considerable deprivation not being allowed to send their children for tertiary education just because they were Christian ministers.

They had a crisp grasp of the gospel and they knew something of the joy of Christian suffering that I dealt with on the second night, but the new world that was opening to them was really difficult. The other group were young ministers 40 and under. They were all onto their second and some of them onto their third degrees. They were wrestling with postmodern writers from Europe. They were wrestling with ambiguities of right and wrong. They weren’t worried about communism.

One pastor told me three weeks after the wall came down for the first time he saw printed pornography. It was being sold on the streets of Bratislava. The world had suddenly become a lot more complex, and the older pastors were looking at the younger ones, and frankly, they viewed them as untested, unbeaten, unpersecuted, and immature, and the younger ones were looking at the older ones as old-fashioned, out of date, intellectually reduced, and incapable of dealing with the new trends. Do you know what? Both groups were right.

I sat at a table at lunch with a translator, and one old pastor probably 65 or 70, with tears streaming down his face said, “Sometimes I wish communism were back. At least it was clear then where the enemy was.” What shall we say of Northern Ireland? There are not a few older pastors here who really have a good grasp of orthodoxy but have sometimes melded that to a certain kind of cultural conservatism, and they really don’t know to communicate with the under 30s.

There are some young pastors here who are so desirous of being hip that unwittingly they sometimes leave swaths of the gospel behind. Do you know what we need? We need gospel ministers on all sides of such debate to rejoice wherever the gospel is genuinely advancing with no greater joy than to see the gospel advance amongst old people and young people and rich people and poor people and old-stock northern Irish and new immigrants and the Polish people and others coming from Eastern Europe.

That’s what we need. People who will be saying all the time to each other, “I have no greater joy than to see my fellow believers walking in the truth.” Some of you may have heard of the names of Carl H.F. Henry and Kenneth Kantzer. They both have gone to their reward now. For much of the twentieth century these two were giants in North America in evangelicalism. They had considerably less influence worldwide, but in North American terms they were very important.

Carl Henry founded Christianity Today. He was a great friend of Billy Graham. He was the one who organized the first Berlin Congress on World Evangelism. He wrote something like 40 or 50 books. His six-volume God, Revelation, and Authority is still very important reading. When they were both in their mid 70s, we had them at Trinity give public lectures to 500 or 600 students at a shot, asking them to give their take on the last 50 years of their ministry.

How did they see the gospel progressing or being hindered? They both gave wise lectures and so forth. The next day.… This was all filmed. You can still get the video today. You can download it, in fact. The next day I was tasked with interviewing them, and I didn’t tell them in advance what I was going to ask them.

Toward the end of the interview, I said, “There are some men who, as they get older, begin to be defensive and ingrown. They actually begin to destroy what they built up. They begin to be a bit defensive toward a new generation that’s coming along behind. After serving so well and doing such a good job in promoting the gospel and preaching the gospel, whether it’s their emotional life or their physical energies, they’re sufficiently reduced and instead of stepping back just a wee bit and doing what they still have the energy to manage, they become defensive and begin to destroy what they’ve built and be resentful toward those coming along.

But I watch you two men, and you haven’t done that. You’re still asking questions about the future. You are both known to be encouragers of young men, guiding them and correcting them but so transparently loving them that they don’t want to fly in your face. They want to know you and learn from you. How have you done that? And don’t tell me it’s the grace of God. I know it’s the grace of God. How is the grace of God worked out in your life so this is what has happened to you?”

For the only time in those hours of video taping, they both stuttered and sputtered. It’s nice to watch Kenneth Kantzer and Carl Henry, so articulate, sputtering. Finally, Carl sputtered out, “How can anyone be arrogant when he stands beside the cross?” That’s exactly right. That’s why his whole life cried, “I have no greater joy than when my children walk according to the truth.”

My father was a Christian minister. He kept a journal, and after he died I read it. At one point, he said something extraordinarily stupid. It was international class balderdash. Do you know what he said? He said, “I am so thankful to you, heavenly Father, that my children are more spiritual than I am.”

It was such rubbish, but you know what? A father who thinks like that does not alienate his children because he had no greater joy than to see that his kids walked according to the truth. You see, the application here extends far and wide as we view one another’s ministries around the province. Who’s up? Who’s down? Whose church is bigger? Whose church is smaller? Whose is richer? Whose is poorer? Who is growing? Who is not?

I have no greater joy than to watch my fellow ministers living and serving God in the truth, and not just putting up with it, not just disciplining yourself to keep your mouth shut, but “I have no greater joy.” Does it really matter who has more converts as long as people get saved? Are you more concerned about your reputation or about the bringing in of the elect? Where is your greatest joy? That brings us directly to the text. What obvious extension is there of this source of joy? That brings us to a huge swath. But now, more narrowly …

C) Are there particular foci of this principle in the New Testament?

In other words, we’ve taken the broad sweep, but are there particular foci we should really think about where this sort of principle surfaces again, and how does it relate to joy in the gospel? I wish I could mention three or four. I’ll briefly mention one, then mention another, and then we’re done.

The first is evangelism, church planting, and mission. What is this but the articulation of the gospel such that men and women are converted and then, following the commission as recorded in Matthew, we teach them to observe all things that Christ has commanded? Thus, we see some people walking according to the truth.

Although there are so many different things that can go into mission and church planting and cross-cultural communication and all of that, at the end of the day it’s pretty simple. You preach the gospel, you teach the whole counsel of God, and you pray that God by his Spirit will work powerfully in people such that from whatever tribe or tongue or people or nation, they actually begin to be conformed to Christ. That’s all it is.

They’re gathered into the local church and there they grow and they rub off each other and they teach one another and their various gifts work together. They go and plant another church and so forth. All of this is bound up with the assumption that it is a cause of joy to watch Christians grow, the greatest joy.

If you’re looking for Christian joy, start doing more evangelism, be generous with mission, teach the whole counsel of God, have a Bible study with your grandchildren, pray that God will take his truth and smash it right into their lives, and then discover holy joy, no greater joy than to watch another generation walking according to the truth.

I want to focus on another one that is very common in the New Testament. The language is not used exactly the same way, but it’s the same principle. It has to do with men-women relationships, supremely in marriage but even more broadly than that. A number of years ago, some of us at Trinity started a little organization (nothing big and nothing fancy) called Christ on Campus Initiative (CCI).

What we thought we’d do is try to solicit a number of essays written at a mature enough level for serious university students but not whole books that were going to turn people off, addressing something of the kinds of biases and blind spots so many secular students have. We have one, for example, on naturalism. We have one on how you form a worldview. We have one on sex. We have one on the question, “Is Jesus the only way?” We add three or four a year, and because we have a foundation behind us to pay for this stuff, we circulate them free on the web.

As part of preparing for all of this, the foundation enabled us to fly in six campus workers from around America. It’s such a big country that you can’t all drive there from different parts of the province. We had one or two from California. One guy from California came wearing flip-flops and a Hawaiian shirt and so on. We had one guy from the Ivy League universities on the East Coast. He actually came in a pin-striped suit. It’s hard to believe, but he did. We had some red brick universities in the middle and so on.

We brainstormed together. What we asked was, “What do you see is going on in university campuses today?” All six of these people had some theological training (a master of divinity or something like that or more), all had been in university work for a minimum of five years and some for as many as 25 years. These were mature, theologically trained, pretty astute people who had been on the ground for a long time.

We kept asking them, “What do you see?” I keep involved in the university world. I thought I understood. I listened to these people and I felt about this high. These people were so far ahead of me in the astuteness of their analysis of their understanding of what was going on. There was one young woman, a graduate of Trinity (she and her husband were both graduates of Trinity), who runs a ministry in connection with a ministry in an Ivy League university. That’s like Oxbridge.

In her ministry, she spent one-on-one discipling time with 28 young women a week. Part of their deal is if you join their group each of the workers takes on a variety of students with one-on-one Bible training at least an hour a week for the whole four years the students are at university. I’ve had students who have come out of this group come to Trinity and they are always a cut up because they’ve had all of this biblical theology, this one-on-one instruction and so on.

Out of five years of doing this, she said to me, “Let me tell you what makes the young women in our university tick.” You have to remember this was an Ivy League university. It’s not every university. It’s not every young woman who feels like this, but at her university she said this is what makes them tick.

“First, from themselves and from their parents, from their high profile brightness …” It’s Oxbridge, after all. “… the first principle is, ‘Never get less than a first.’ ” That’s what got them into the place in the first instance, but it’s transparent that not everybody is going to get a first, so already the potential for failure is very significant.

“Secondly, from their parents, from the surrounding culture, and from their fellow students, ‘Be yourself. Don’t let anybody squeeze you into a mold. Maybe give a week for AIDS victims in Africa or something like that once in a while, but apart from that, be yourself. Don’t let anybody domesticate you anywhere. Be free.’ ” Now, how you put the first and the second exactly together I’m not quite sure. We’ll let that drop.

“Thirdly, from the media, from advertising, from the pop magazines they sometimes read that were picked up at corner stores and all of that, from the kind of stuff you see on TV, although not all of them would admit it,” my young Christian lady worker said, “the third axiom was, ‘Be hot,’ ” which affected dress, relationships with young men, what kind of things they were looking for, and so forth.

Of course, these are generalizations, but then on top of all of that, there was another overlay. “They would hear, ‘You’re a woman. Women can do anything,’ which many of them heard as, ‘You’re a woman. Women must do everything.’ The result? Between 80 and 85 percent of young women at that university at some point in their four years will be anorexic or bulimic. At least the same percentage will be on Prozac or some other drug to try to take away stress and depression and so on, because in every area the potential for failure is there.”

Not everybody will be first. You can’t always be what you want to be. Let’s be quite frank. It may come as a surprise to some, but not everybody is going to be hot, too. On top of all of that, you can’t do everything. You make choices. She said, “Now what if one of these young women becomes a Christian. She learns genuinely the gospel of grace. She really trusts Jesus as her Savior.

She knows she is accepted because of what Christ has done for her. Pretty soon, with this background, she has to be the best Christian, lead Bible studies, be at all the prayer meetings, be one of the leaders, and get on the executive. She has to be the best, the best, which means there is only room for failure again.”

You think I’m picking on women, don’t you? Your turn, guys. I have a pastor friend in California. It’s California. What can I say? It’s another planet in some ways. He and his brother are co-pastors of a church out there. Their family name is Jolley, so the people in their church are pastored by the Jolley brothers.

It’s a church of between 800 and 1,000, a lot of young people, and in a recent email he told me, “The biggest challenge my brother and I face as we try to disciple young men and form leaders for the future is to find young men who are willing to be disciplined enough to learn enough to be leaders. They’re too busy surfing.”

You have to understand, both of these Jolley brothers surf. I’m not saying there’s something wicked about surfing, but it’s the culture that is so hedonistic that you work in order to play, and the notion of studying and taking courses and growing and learning and reading the Bible and becoming an elder, a pastor, watching over the souls of other people and living with eternity’s values in view, the attitude they see is, “Well, you know.… I’d rather surf.”

I have another pastor friend on the other side of the country. Isn’t it a good thing I’m locating all of this stuff outside of Northern Ireland so none of it pertains to you here, does it? He says the biggest pastoral problem he faces when he is trying to mentor and pastor and teach the gospel and preach the gospel to young men in his church, and he has thousands of them … mostly by conversion growth, is to teach them what it means to be a Christian husband.

He says it’s almost as if this generation of young men are coming along and looking over their shoulder all the time to see if somebody hotter is coming along so they can’t ever fasten on anybody. If my pastor friend says, “Look at her! She’s wonderful and mature. She’d be a great wife and a terrific mother,” they say, “Yeah, but there’s no chemistry.”

A few years ago I was speaking at an organization in another country, Christian Medical Fellowship, where a group of the doctors came to me and said, “Don, tomorrow morning, if you don’t mind we’d like you to get up early and meet with a bunch of us privately for breakfast offsite.” That was a bit of a challenge. They had my curiosity if they didn’t have anything else. So I got there, and there were maybe 30 or 40, quite a few, all between the ages of 25 and 40, doctors or in training to be doctors, some of them specialists already.

We sat around tables and so on with closed doors. It felt like the Mafia. Finally, I said, “What’s your agenda?” They sputtered around and finally the person who had obviously been appointed spokesman said, “Why can’t we get married?” I had dreamed of all kinds of questions; that one hadn’t occurred to me.

I started asking questions. “How many of you come from broken homes? What are you looking for in a marriage? What does the Bible say marriage is like? How many of you are sleeping around? How many of you take time to actually build a relationship out of friendship? How many of you spent any time at all getting to know the young woman’s family? How many of you thought through what it means to be a good dad in the light of God’s most Holy Word?”

These were intellectual, above-average types. These were bright young men. You don’t get to be a doctor in any country unless you have at least some gray cells, and they were emotional pygmies, average age 18. At the risk of a horrible generalization, this is a narcissistic, “Me first” generation on both sides of the sexual divide.

It manifests itself in different kinds of ways. I understand that. But this is not a generation coming along that, by and large, has been tested early on and is not so interested in narcissistic pleasure or not so interested in self-identity that it wants to serve, it wants to be God centered. Even its desire for God-centeredness can be a kind of narcissism. “I want to experience spirituality,” which guarantees you won’t.

All of that coming to a passage like Ephesians 5, where we read, “Husbands, love your wives just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her.” You men who are married, and you younger men who want to be married, the standard of your love for your wife is Christ on the cross. Do you know what that means? Self-sacrificially for her good. That’s what it means. Self-sacrificially for her good.

In case we don’t get it, Paul goes on, “… to make her holy, cleansing her by the washing with water through the word, and to present her to himself as a radiant church, without stain or wrinkle or any other blemish, but holy and blameless. In this same way, husbands ought to love their wives.” For their good, because they have no greater joy than to see other Christians forge ahead, starting with the spouse, and all that is is following Christ on the cross.

On the women’s side, there will be less concern about self-identity and fulfillment and far more about service. On the men’s side, there will be a lot more about self-sacrifice for the sake of building the other, loving with self-denial for the sake of the other. Listen. “I have no greater joy than to have some believers come and testify to me about your faithfulness and the truth, how you continue to walk in the truth. I have no greater joy than to hear that my children are walking in the truth.” Let me close with one more passage. It’s Matthew 20:20–28:

“Then the mother of Zebedee’s sons came to Jesus with her sons and, kneeling down, asked a favor of him. ‘What is it you want?’ he asked. She said, ‘Grant that one of these two sons of mine may sit at your right and the other at your left in your kingdom.’ ” Do you see what she’s saying? She’s saying, “I want my sons to be chancellor of the exchequer and defense minister. You can be prime minister. I don’t want that job for them, but the other two.… Nail them down.”

Now this does not mean these two are really concerned that the other apostles advance. They’re not concerned for the growth of the ministry. They don’t even understand at this point. They just want to be like Diotrephes … number one. Or if not number one, at least numbers two and three. “ ‘You don’t know what you are asking,’ Jesus said to them. ‘Can you drink the cup I am going to drink?’ ”

Speaking of his own suffering. “ ‘We can,’ they answered.” With spectacular ignorance. “Jesus said to them, ‘You will indeed drink from my cup …’ ” He’s chuckling under his breath, because after all, one of them will become the first apostolic martyr and the other will be exiled to Patmos. They will have a little bit of suffering. They don’t know what they’re asking for.

“ ‘… but to sit at my right or left is not for me to grant. These places belong to those for whom they have been prepared by my Father.’ When the ten heard about this, they were indignant with the two brothers.” Not, of course, because they thought the brothers had stepped out of line but because they didn’t get their dibs in first. “Jesus called them together and said …” Here’s the whole point. “You know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them.” They want to be number one.

You enter politics and you might genuinely want to reform, but pretty soon you view all of this as your due, and the security as your due, and the chauffeured cars are your due, and the honor and respect and the power and the clout are all your due. You go up the ladder of executive control in a company, and you may have started with genuine desires to reform, but pretty soon, that’s your due. That’s what you deserve. That’s where you are.

“You know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them and their high officials exercise authority over them. Not so with you. Instead, whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wants to be first must be your slave—just as the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.”

We’re back to the gospel. This does not mean Jesus doesn’t have authority. It doesn’t mean the local minister might not have authority. It means the motives are such that what we want above all is for others to grow. That’s what Jesus wanted when he went to the cross. He didn’t relinquish his authority, but he wanted others to grow.

That’s why this statement of John in 1 John 4 is so profoundly gospel related. He receives such joy because he sees people in conformity with the gospel, with the truth, but even more, to adopt this attitude is itself living out the gospel, for it is following the way of Jesus.

I want to know, will some of you tonight, where you sit, resolve … so help you God … to take this on board? For some of you it will mean giving up your small ambitions and hungering for vocational ministry. For others it will change your priorities. Here is the beginning of reformation and revival of elevating the gospel.