Is God More Happy with Other Christians Than Me?
00:00:00.000 | (upbeat music)
00:00:02.580 | Landon, a seminary student, writes in to ask this,
00:00:08.240 | "Pastor John, I struggle with envy towards a brother
00:00:10.600 | "and a dear friend in Christ who has received
00:00:12.580 | "abundant gifts and opportunities from the Lord
00:00:14.960 | "in this life that I simply have not.
00:00:17.920 | "Many times it can become very difficult not to question
00:00:20.700 | "whether God loves my friend more than he loves me.
00:00:24.640 | "Does God delight in some of his children
00:00:26.860 | "more than others?"
00:00:29.440 | - I'm gonna answer that with a yes or no in just a minute,
00:00:33.140 | but let me say at the beginning,
00:00:35.520 | I think there's a good deal of confusion about this
00:00:40.520 | because of an unbiblical overplay or overextension
00:00:46.380 | of the doctrine of justification.
00:00:49.600 | That is, drawing out inferences from justification
00:00:55.940 | that the Bible does not draw.
00:00:59.600 | Like, since God sees me in Christ
00:01:04.400 | and his perfect righteousness as his child,
00:01:08.060 | therefore, he sees all his children the same
00:01:13.960 | with the same emotional response to each one
00:01:18.300 | because each one is perfect in Christ.
00:01:22.520 | Now, that, I say, is an unbiblical overextension,
00:01:27.520 | overplay of the doctrine of justification.
00:01:32.720 | It needs to be corrected by scripture instead of logic.
00:01:37.720 | God does not have the same emotional response
00:01:42.680 | to all his children.
00:01:45.020 | What the imputation of the righteousness of Christ means
00:01:49.200 | is that God does not see my sin as any longer condemning me.
00:01:54.200 | There is no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.
00:02:00.920 | My sins are all forgiven,
00:02:05.280 | and the perfection that God's standards call for are met,
00:02:10.280 | and I will never come into condemnation.
00:02:13.840 | That's what justification means.
00:02:17.240 | That does not mean that God does not see my sin
00:02:21.640 | and my obedience and feel differently about each one.
00:02:27.600 | God is pleased with my obedience,
00:02:31.760 | and he's grieved by my sin.
00:02:35.420 | That's abundantly clear in the language
00:02:39.100 | of the New Testament letters, Ephesians 4:30,
00:02:41.800 | to not grieve the Holy Spirit,
00:02:46.280 | or positively, children, obey your parents in everything,
00:02:50.400 | for this pleases the Lord,
00:02:54.320 | or 1 Thessalonians 4, I wrote to you
00:02:58.820 | how you ought to walk and to please God.
00:03:02.220 | These are justified people who please God more or less.
00:03:07.220 | So the answer to Landon's question,
00:03:11.000 | does God delight in some of his children
00:03:14.100 | more than others, is yes,
00:03:16.960 | and he delights in you some days
00:03:20.400 | more than he delights in you other days.
00:03:24.680 | And we should heed Paul's exhortation in Ephesians 5,
00:03:29.680 | try to discern what is pleasing to the Lord,
00:03:35.400 | Ephesians 5, 10, that is,
00:03:37.240 | try to discern what delights the Lord
00:03:41.840 | so you can be as fully delightful to him as possible.
00:03:46.840 | But Landon's question went in a different direction.
00:03:52.740 | When a brother has superior gifts to mine,
00:03:56.540 | is this a sign that God delights in him more than me?
00:03:59.740 | That's a different question.
00:04:02.540 | And the answer to that is no, no.
00:04:05.820 | That's not what those gifts mean.
00:04:10.020 | God chose the worst man he could find on the planet
00:04:15.020 | to give the greatest gift of apostleship to,
00:04:18.680 | Paul the murderer, so that it would be clear
00:04:22.840 | these gifts were owing to mercy, not merit.
00:04:27.460 | When Paul describes the gifts that Christians have,
00:04:31.960 | he's at pains in 1 Corinthians 12
00:04:35.640 | and the writer of Hebrews 2,
00:04:37.640 | he's at pains to show that they are owing
00:04:42.640 | to his free sovereignty and not to our superior delightfulness.
00:04:49.120 | So listen to 1 Corinthians 12, 11.
00:04:54.440 | All these gifts are empowered by one in the same spirit
00:04:59.440 | who apportions to each one individually as he wills.
00:05:06.120 | And the point is he's free,
00:05:07.880 | he does it in ways that are above what you can think.
00:05:10.600 | So don't try to figure him out why he gives
00:05:12.960 | to one this and to one that.
00:05:14.680 | Or Hebrews 2, chapter four,
00:05:18.240 | God bore witness by signs and wonders and various miracles
00:05:21.960 | by gifts of the Holy Spirit
00:05:23.760 | distributed according to his will.
00:05:28.160 | And if we start to ask,
00:05:29.920 | but can a person with greater gifts please God
00:05:34.520 | more than one with lesser gifts?
00:05:38.440 | The answer is absolutely not.
00:05:42.480 | Why?
00:05:43.660 | Because what pleases God is not that one can preach
00:05:48.480 | and another can pray,
00:05:50.960 | or one can write and another can work with his hands.
00:05:54.880 | What pleases God is how we use our gifts,
00:05:59.880 | not which ones we have.
00:06:04.400 | That's the point of the parable of the talents.
00:06:07.440 | Well done, good and faithful servant is not reserved
00:06:12.240 | for the man who got the most,
00:06:14.640 | but for those who were faithful.
00:06:16.640 | Here's an illustration.
00:06:17.760 | This moved me deeply years ago.
00:06:19.900 | So helped me as a younger pastor.
00:06:22.040 | Billy Graham came to town here.
00:06:23.800 | His headquarters used to be here in Minneapolis.
00:06:26.480 | And he came to town and he gave a chapel address
00:06:29.040 | to all the employees over at the Billy Graham Association.
00:06:31.600 | And lots of those folks went to our church.
00:06:33.320 | And so one of them, a secretarial person,
00:06:36.360 | told me this story.
00:06:37.840 | He said to them in chapel that he expected
00:06:41.240 | some of them would receive greater rewards
00:06:45.500 | in heaven than he would.
00:06:48.600 | When they responded skeptically, which they did,
00:06:51.860 | he could see it on their faces,
00:06:53.680 | he became very serious, she said,
00:06:56.440 | and said, "Do you not understand
00:06:59.960 | that God rewards faithfulness, not fruitfulness?"
00:07:04.960 | Oh, that line just made a huge difference for me.
00:07:10.520 | The faithful use of a small gift elicits more delight
00:07:15.920 | in God than the poor use of a huge gift.
00:07:22.780 | So envy, that's the question here.
00:07:25.480 | How to get over this envy.
00:07:27.920 | Envy is a trust issue.
00:07:30.560 | Do we believe that God is good and strong and wise
00:07:34.720 | and gives gifts in the very best, wisest way
00:07:38.600 | for his glory and for our joy?
00:07:40.960 | Or do we wanna say to God,
00:07:44.000 | "Well, I would have given them out differently
00:07:45.960 | and done a better job of it."
00:07:47.680 | No, we don't wanna say that.
00:07:49.440 | It's a trust issue and he's worthy of our trust.
00:07:52.560 | So preach to yourself the sovereign goodness
00:07:56.920 | and wisdom of God in the gifting of his people
00:08:00.440 | and preach the freeness of his grace in doing it.
00:08:05.200 | - That's very, very good.
00:08:06.280 | Thank you, Pastor John.
00:08:07.800 | And thank you, Landon, for the honest question.
00:08:09.960 | For more on envy and jealousy,
00:08:11.600 | see episodes number 151 and 152 in this podcast.
00:08:15.040 | They are respectively titled,
00:08:16.640 | "Battling Envy and Battling Jealousy."
00:08:19.920 | You can find those episodes and over 400 others
00:08:22.560 | on a mobile device using the free Ask Pastor John app
00:08:24.920 | for the iPhone, the iPad, and the Android.
00:08:27.320 | There's a lot of episodes,
00:08:28.400 | so we built in a search bar at the top of the app
00:08:30.480 | to make it easy for you to search the titles
00:08:32.320 | of all those episodes and to find answers
00:08:34.080 | to the pressing questions of your life.
00:08:37.080 | Well, when we pray to our triune God,
00:08:39.080 | should we pray to the Father or to the Son
00:08:41.540 | or to the Holy Spirit?
00:08:43.160 | It's a very common question
00:08:44.400 | and tomorrow I'll ask Pastor John.
00:08:46.160 | I'm your host, Tony Reinke.
00:08:47.000 | Thanks for listening to the Ask Pastor John podcast.
00:08:49.560 | (upbeat music)
00:08:52.140 | (upbeat music)
00:08:54.720 | [BLANK_AUDIO]