Awakening a Sense of Christ’s Value

My desire and prayer for you is that your life and ministry have a radical flavor. I say that for the glory of Christ. The world does not glorify Jesus as their supreme Treasure because of our health, wealth, and prosperity. Those are the same treasures they live for. The fact that we use Jesus to get what they want makes it clear to them that we have the same treasure as they do—and it is not Jesus. He’s just the ticket. And tickets are thrown away when the show begins.

What the world is waiting to see—what might awaken a sense of Christ’s value— is something radical. Some risk. Some crazy sacrifice. Some extraordinary love. Something salty and bright. They may not like it when they see it. They may crucify it. But they will not be bored. Stephen’s face shown like an angel (Acts 6:15). His wisdom was irresistible (Acts 6:10). So they killed him. But they did not yawn, and they did not go to sleep. And Acts 8 makes clear his death was not in vain.

Where Are God’s Men?

My desire and prayer for you is that your life and ministry have a radical flavor. The flavor of risk, sacrifice, love, simplicity, joy, freedom, and precarious adventure.

In 1939, Howard Guinness, one of the early founders of the International Fellowship of Evangelical Students, wrote a little book called Sacrifice. He was trying to do then what I am trying to do now. He wrote,

Where are the young men and women of this generation who will hold their lives cheap, and be faithful even unto death, who will lose their lives for Christ’s, flinging them away for love of him?

Where are those who will live dangerously, and be reckless in this service?

Where are the men of prayer?

Where are the men who count God’s Word of more importance to them than their daily food?

Where are the men who, like Moses of old, commune with God face to face as a man speaks with his friend?

Where are God’s men in this day of God’s power?ⁱ

Indeed, where are the pastors who say with the apostle Paul, “I do not account my life of any value nor as precious to myself, if only I may finish my course and the ministry that I received from the Lord Jesus, to testify to the gospel of the grace of God” (Acts 20:24)?

Where are the pastors who say with Joab to his brother Abishai, when surrounded by Syrians and Ammonites, “Be of good courage, and let us play the man for our people, and for the cities of our God, and may the LORD do what seems good to him” (2 Samuel 10:12)?

Where are the young women—single and married—who say with Esther, when the life of her people hung in the balance and Mordecai asked her to risk her life, “I will go to the king, though it is against the law, and if I perish, I perish” (Esther 4:16)?

The Certainty of Suffering

I ask you this not just because the world desperately needs to see that kind of pastor, but also because Jesus makes it crystal clear that if you take him seriously, you are going to suffer. In other words, radical willingness to risk and sacrifice and suffer is the only authentic ministry there is. The Lord has made it very plain:

If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. (Matthew 16:24)

If they have called the master of the house Beelzebul, how much more will they malign those of his household. (Matthew 10:25)

A servant is not greater than his master. If they persecuted me, they will also persecute you. (John 15:20)

They will lay their hands on you and persecute you, delivering you up to the synagogues and prisons, and you will be brought before kings and governors for my name’s sake. . . . You will be delivered up even by parents and brothers and relatives and friends, and some of you they will put to death. You will be hated by all for my name’s sake. But not a hair of your head will perish. By your endurance you will gain your lives. (Luke 21:12-19)

The hour is coming when whoever kills you will think he is offering service to God. (John 16:1)

God Promises Trials

And after Jesus, Paul made this teaching the bedrock of his counsel to new believers. On his way back from the first missionary journey, he was teaching the new disciples in every church “through many tribulations we must enter the kingdom of God” (Acts 14:22). And he adds in 2 Timothy 3:12, “All who desire to live a godly life in Christ Jesus will be persecuted.”

Then he poses the question in Romans 8:35, “Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or danger, or sword?” Of course, the answer is no. But is the answer no because God spares us these things? Or because he ordains these things for us and keeps us in them? The next verse gives the answer: “As it is written, ‘For your sake we are being killed all the day long; we are regarded as sheep to be slaughtered.’ No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us” (Romans 8:35-37). God does not spare his people these trials. He promises them.

“Why Not Me?”

So does Hebrews 12:8: “If we are left without divine discipline we are illegitimate children and not sons.” Suffering for followers of Christ is a sign of God’s merciful Fatherhood. And it includes all the pains of the world in general. That’s what Romans 8:23 makes plain: “Not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies.”

Sir Norman Anderson, former Professor and Director of the Advanced Legal Institute at London University, supported International Fellowship of Evangelical Students for sixty years. He had lost all three of his children in their early adulthood and his wife was so senile she could not recognize him.

At one of the last public events where he spoke he was asked, “When you look back over your life and reflect on the fact that you have lost all your three children, and how your wife of sixty years no longer recognizes you, do you ever ask the question, “Why me?”

. . . “No, I’ve never asked that question, ‘Why me?’ but I have asked the question, ‘Why not me?’ I am not promised as a Christian that I will escape the problems encountered by others; we all live in a fallen world.

. . . I am however, promised that in the midst of difficulties, God through Christ will be present with me, and will give his grace to help me cope with the difficulties and bear witness to him.”ⁱⁱ

“Beloved, do not be surprised at the fiery trial when it comes upon you to test you, as though something strange were happening to you” (1 Peter 4:12-13). Jesus, Paul, Peter, Hebrews—they all bear witness: Followers of Jesus will suffer. I do not want to be excluded from that number.

Must I be carried to the skies
On flowery beds of ease,
While others fought to win the prize,
And sailed through bloody seas?

My desire and prayer for you is that you will not even try to be carried to the skies on flowery beds of ease, but that there will be a radical, risk-taking, sacrificial flavor to your life and ministry.

How the Supremacy of Christ Creates Radical Christian Sacrifice, a sermon delivered by John Piper at the Together for the Gospel Conference, on April 17, 2008.

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Read the rest of this sermon on the Supremacy of Christ that catapults us to a life of radical Christian service and living for the sake of the Gospel and the glory of God here. You can also download it in mp3 here, in video here.

Footnotes

1. Howard Guinness, Sacrifice (1936), in Lindsay Brown, Shining Like Stars: The Power of the Gospel in the World’s Universities (Nottingham: InterVarsity Press, 2006), p. 151. [↩]
2. Ibid., pp. 160-161. [↩]