Make War Against Pouting
00:00:00.000 | Pastor John, you took a leave of absence in 2010.
00:00:07.820 | It was eight months away from the ministry altogether, and you said it was a soul check
00:00:11.780 | over all the parts of your life—marriage, worship, fathering, pastoring, public life,
00:00:17.540 | all of it.
00:00:18.540 | Now, three years later, are there any lessons from the leave that you'd like to share with
00:00:22.420 | us here?
00:00:24.380 | The conference that we did, Acting the Miracle, really came out of that eight-month leave
00:00:29.620 | because it was built on the text Philippians 2.12, "Work out your salvation, for God is
00:00:35.340 | the one who is at work in you."
00:00:38.580 | So God saves us by His grace.
00:00:41.620 | We don't save ourselves by our works, but we're saved for good deeds.
00:00:45.580 | We're created in Christ Jesus for good deeds, so we act out the fruit of our salvation,
00:00:51.780 | and our acting is a miracle because God is doing the willing and the acting.
00:00:58.660 | We do it.
00:00:59.780 | We do the acting.
00:01:01.700 | We do the kindness.
00:01:03.880 | We do the patience.
00:01:05.020 | We do the purity, the love, but God is the one willing it and doing it, and so we're
00:01:10.940 | acting the miracle.
00:01:12.860 | We're not puppets.
00:01:14.300 | We have wills and muscles and minds, and puppets don't have any of those, but when we exert
00:01:20.260 | our wills, when we think with our minds and our muscles produce an act of obedience, it
00:01:25.460 | says God is doing the thinking and the willing and the acting in us, so we're acting the
00:01:30.940 | miracle.
00:01:31.940 | Now, that was not new going into my leave of absence.
00:01:36.260 | Here's what was new along that line.
00:01:40.260 | I had all my adult life ferociously fought the sin of lust, sexual temptation, and I
00:01:54.260 | say ferociously or fiercely because Jesus said, "Gouge out your eye.
00:01:59.220 | Cut off your hand."
00:02:00.220 | I mean, that's really serious, but what I had not done, and this was the discovery.
00:02:06.980 | It was a huge and remains very important discovery.
00:02:11.140 | I realized in that leave of absence that I did not attack with tearing out the eye and
00:02:20.220 | cutting off the hand fierceness in the same way my sins of irritability and frustration
00:02:31.620 | and anger and self-pity and sullenness and pouting.
00:02:38.780 | I mean, I discovered how irrational I was.
00:02:44.220 | I had formed the irrational sense, maybe I didn't articulate it, but the irrational sense
00:02:49.820 | that, well, those sins are just who I am.
00:02:53.820 | I'm just bent that way, you know, towards being moody or being sullen or easy to getting
00:02:58.260 | frustrated or irritable or having a hair trigger.
00:03:02.100 | I'm just wired that way so, well, as if I'm not wired to have lust.
00:03:09.380 | I mean, you see the irrationality of it.
00:03:11.900 | I was excusing not making war on those kinds of sins with anything like the intensity that
00:03:21.220 | I made war on my lustful sins.
00:03:25.980 | In fact, you know, I used to develop all kinds of little acronyms like Anthem and so on to
00:03:32.340 | fight.
00:03:33.860 | I never created one of those for self-pity.
00:03:38.180 | And I stood back during that leave and I said, "What's wrong with you?
00:03:41.860 | Why don't you see these relationship damaging sins of yours in the same seriousness?"
00:03:53.580 | And when you state it, you can almost see why because it sounds funny.
00:03:57.780 | Like, what if I preached a sermon and I said to men, "Make war on pouting!"
00:04:04.980 | They would all say, "What?
00:04:07.500 | Make war on pouting, guys?"
00:04:09.620 | I mean, we come home and our wives don't welcome us the way we hope they would.
00:04:14.740 | Or they don't want to go where we want to go tonight.
00:04:18.180 | Or they don't do sex the way we hope they would do sex.
00:04:21.220 | Or they don't fix the favorite food.
00:04:23.300 | Or they criticize us when we got enough criticism at work today and we just kind of slink off
00:04:29.860 | to the den with our shoulders bent over and licking our wounds and saying, "Oh, poor
00:04:36.580 | me," like a little puppy.
00:04:40.260 | That's just stupid, evil, wicked, unmanly, unspiritual behavior, and we need to make
00:04:48.900 | war on it just as seriously as we make war on lust.
00:04:52.580 | So there it is, Tony.
00:04:54.980 | That's the key lesson that I got.
00:04:58.420 | God has resources for killing all sin.
00:05:02.700 | And we make so much out of pornography and so much out of lust that we forget that the
00:05:08.180 | same seriousness, the same ferociousness and fierceness should go into attacking our personality,
00:05:17.100 | sinful traits of irritability or frustration or anger or self-pity or sullenness or pouting.
00:05:23.740 | And so here I am, what, three years later, and I think, I think God has given me some
00:05:31.620 | new measure of triumph in my marriage and in my relationships so that I do treat the
00:05:40.500 | first whiff of self-pity now somewhat like the way I treat the first whiff of sexual
00:05:50.020 | temptation.
00:05:51.020 | Well said.
00:05:52.020 | Thank you, Pastor John.
00:05:53.380 | That conference mentioned earlier in the podcast, Act the Miracle, was our 2012 national conference,
00:05:57.980 | and the content of that conference was recently released in a book from Crossway under the
00:06:02.140 | title Acting the Miracle, God's Work and Ours in the Mystery of Sanctification, edited by
00:06:06.980 | John Piper and David Mathis.
00:06:09.300 | You can download the entire book free of charge at DesiringGod.org.
00:06:13.180 | Click on Resource Library, click on Books, and there you'll find it, Acting the Miracle.
00:06:17.180 | I'm your host, Tony Reinke.
00:06:18.180 | Thanks for listening.
00:06:18.420 | [end]
00:06:19.160 | [music]
00:06:19.660 | [music]
00:06:20.660 | [music]
00:06:21.660 | [music]
00:06:22.660 | [music]
00:06:23.660 | [music]
00:06:23.660 | [music]
00:06:24.660 | [music]
00:06:25.660 | [music]
00:06:26.660 | [music]
00:06:27.660 | [music]