Do Non-Christians Ever Please God?
00:00:00.000 | Happy Friday everyone and welcome back to the Ask Pastor John podcast with longtime
00:00:08.600 | pastor and author John Piper.
00:00:11.880 | Well we finished the week with a question from a listener named Nancy and it's this,
00:00:16.800 | "Dear Pastor John, thank you for this podcast.
00:00:18.640 | Here's my question for you.
00:00:21.000 | Can an unbeliever please God and if not, what are we to make of the account of Cornelius
00:00:27.280 | in Acts chapter 10?
00:00:29.160 | Can you explain this to me and thank you in advance."
00:00:33.560 | Let me begin with a couple of passages of scripture that draw out our answer to Nancy's
00:00:39.720 | question about whether unbelievers can please God and then on the basis of that we'll tackle
00:00:45.560 | Cornelius.
00:00:46.560 | This is Hebrews 11, 6, "Without faith it is impossible to please God.
00:00:53.880 | For whoever would draw near to God must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who
00:00:58.320 | seek him."
00:00:59.320 | And then Romans 14, 23, "Whatever does not proceed from faith is sin."
00:01:05.600 | So I infer from those two passages, we could add others, that there is a sense in which
00:01:15.580 | everything that comes out of an unbelieving heart displeases the Lord.
00:01:20.320 | Or to say it differently, nothing that comes out of the heart of unbelief pleases the Lord.
00:01:28.080 | Of course, this doesn't mean that unbelievers can't perform acts which outwardly conform
00:01:36.480 | to God's law.
00:01:38.220 | They don't kill, they don't steal, they don't lie.
00:01:42.460 | In other words, they conform outwardly to some of God's revealed will.
00:01:48.920 | But what this shows is that it's not simply external conformity to prescribe deeds that
00:01:56.120 | pleases the Lord, right?
00:01:58.440 | We parents know that.
00:01:59.440 | We don't want external compliance from our kids while their hearts are far from us.
00:02:05.000 | What pleases the Lord is a heart of trust and love.
00:02:10.220 | What comes out of that heart pleases the Lord.
00:02:14.920 | So in that sense, even the so-called "right things" that an unbeliever does are not pleasing
00:02:25.240 | to the Lord, because they are not deeds of faith.
00:02:30.660 | Faith towards God, love for Jesus.
00:02:33.180 | Now this raises the question of how God looks upon the steps that a person takes toward
00:02:39.300 | Christ before they believe on Christ.
00:02:43.900 | That's getting toward Cornelius, but we're not there yet.
00:02:47.320 | The answer, I think, is that each of those steps is a gift of free, unmerited grace as
00:02:56.560 | God moves a person toward the gospel, toward salvation, toward faith, and as God looks
00:03:04.920 | upon the person himself, he sees him as unworthy of that gift of grace.
00:03:12.560 | That's why we call it grace.
00:03:14.400 | Grace is undeserved, done for a person who is not in himself pleasing the Lord, which
00:03:21.640 | is what we all feel when we finally get saved, when we finally believe, don't we?
00:03:28.920 | We say, "Grace brought me here."
00:03:33.320 | God looks upon his own work as a good and right and pleasing thing that he's doing
00:03:40.920 | to get somebody to faith.
00:03:44.160 | It's good that a person be drawn to Christ.
00:03:47.920 | Now, what about Cornelius?
00:03:51.480 | It's not only chapter 10, but chapter 11 is all-important as it retells the story again.
00:03:58.800 | Cornelius gets a lot of attention in the book of Acts.
00:04:01.640 | It's really, really amazing, and there are reasons for that.
00:04:05.240 | Let's refresh our memory about Cornelius.
00:04:08.320 | He was a Gentile centurion, that is, a non-Jewish Roman military official, and he's described
00:04:15.040 | in chapter 10, verse 2 of Acts, as a man who "feared God and gave alms generously and
00:04:21.800 | prayed continually to God."
00:04:24.040 | And an angel shows up in a vision and tells him that his prayers have ascended to God
00:04:29.800 | and that he should now send for the apostle Peter.
00:04:34.920 | In other words, the angel doesn't show up and say, "You're a very good man.
00:04:39.280 | You pray a lot, and you do good deeds, and that's that.
00:04:42.000 | Way to go.
00:04:43.000 | You'll go to heaven."
00:04:44.000 | He doesn't say that at all.
00:04:45.760 | He says, "Your prayers have been heard, and what the answer to the prayer consists
00:04:48.880 | in is go get a gospel messenger.
00:04:52.080 | You got some news you need to know in order to be saved," which is exactly what Luke's
00:04:56.800 | going to say in just a minute.
00:04:58.640 | So we see that God is at work in his free grace to bring Cornelius to the point where
00:05:05.720 | he can hear the gospel and be saved.
00:05:08.480 | Meanwhile, Peter, in Joppa, is receiving a similar kind of vision to get him ready to
00:05:15.400 | do something as a Jew would be very hard to do, namely go hang out in the house of a Gentile.
00:05:21.040 | And he gets this vision of all these unclean animals, and God says, "Don't call anything
00:05:24.880 | unclean that I call clean."
00:05:26.800 | And part of that vision, he's told that he should be ready to associate with Gentiles,
00:05:34.960 | these unclean Gentiles, without fretting or worrying because they are just as "acceptable"—that's
00:05:46.720 | the word—they're just as acceptable into God's family as any Jewish unbeliever would
00:05:51.680 | be if they believed in Jesus.
00:05:54.160 | So in Acts 11-12, Peter says that the Spirit made it plain that we should "make no distinction"
00:06:03.280 | between these unclean Gentiles and these unbelieving Jews.
00:06:07.800 | They're both equally valid candidates for faith in Jesus.
00:06:14.920 | So according to Acts 11-14, what the angel said to Cornelius was that Peter would "declare
00:06:22.040 | to you a message by which you will be saved."
00:06:25.800 | That's why I said chapter 11 is so important.
00:06:27.400 | Let me say it again.
00:06:29.320 | 11-14, the angel says to Cornelius, "Peter will declare to you a message by which you
00:06:38.080 | will be saved."
00:06:39.360 | So in all his praying and almsgiving and fearing God, he's not saved.
00:06:46.440 | Anybody who uses the story of Cornelius to say there are a lot of saved people out among
00:06:50.300 | the nations that don't need to hear the gospel are turning the story exactly upside down.
00:06:56.400 | The whole point of the story is, yes, there are people out there who need the gospel,
00:07:00.280 | and God intends to save because he's not prejudiced against any ethnicity.
00:07:04.960 | "Declare to you a message by which you will be saved."
00:07:08.600 | So then, go to the Gentiles, and God has granted repentance to life.
00:07:15.280 | That's what the Christians infer.
00:07:16.720 | When the Christians watch Cornelius and his family believe, they say, "Whoa!"
00:07:21.400 | Then to the Gentiles also, God has granted repentance that leads to life.
00:07:29.700 | So the point of the story of Cornelius is that there are Gentiles scattered through
00:07:35.520 | the world who are "acceptable to God" in the sense of being able to be saved just as much
00:07:43.360 | as anybody else, no matter what their ethnic condition is.
00:07:48.840 | But there are many people throughout the world whom God, in his amazing grace, is not only
00:07:55.040 | finding acceptable, but is granting that they pray and that they have visions and they be
00:08:01.200 | drawn into contact with the gospel so that they can be saved.
00:08:07.080 | So we should not look upon those prayers or those deeds as good in and of themselves—that's
00:08:15.440 | her original question—but as wonderful acts of God's grace leading a person toward repentance,
00:08:24.720 | toward faith in the hearing of the gospel.
00:08:28.320 | So bottom line, conclusion to Nancy's question, without faith, it is impossible to please
00:08:35.680 | God.
00:08:36.680 | But God, in his mercy, draws unbelieving sinners to himself and in the process grants them
00:08:46.280 | desires and actions that lead to an encounter with the gospel so that they may believe and
00:08:54.560 | then lead a life of faith-pleasing to the Lord.
00:08:57.840 | Yeah, that's a very helpful distinction to make.
00:09:00.360 | Thank you, Pastor John, and thank you for the question, Nancy, and to all the listeners
00:09:04.320 | out there, thank you for listening and making the podcast a part of your week and commute
00:09:08.880 | and part of your weekly routines.
00:09:11.480 | We really appreciate it.
00:09:12.480 | You can subscribe to our audio feeds and search our past episodes in our archive, even reach
00:09:16.360 | us by email.
00:09:17.360 | The question you may have of your own, do all that through our online home at DesiringGod.org/AskPastorJohn.
00:09:24.360 | So today's question was whether or not non-Christians can honor God, and then that raises a related
00:09:31.960 | question which is, does God love the non-elect?
00:09:35.840 | If not, why not?
00:09:37.480 | And if so, how is his love to the non-elect displayed to them?
00:09:41.520 | This is a very common question that we get in the inbox.
00:09:44.320 | It's a question faced by all Reformed teachers throughout the centuries, really, and it is
00:09:49.100 | scheduled on Monday when we return on the Ask Pastor John podcast.
00:09:53.720 | I'm your host, Tony Reinke.
00:09:54.720 | We'll see you then.
00:09:54.820 | [END]
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