Welcome back to the podcast. This week we focus on God's providence. Yes, God is in control. He's orchestrating all things. Your life, my life, this world, everything. And he's doing it even when it doesn't feel like it. Like in 2020. Well, he is. He's at work. And making this case is Pastor John's next book release, simply titled "Providence," a 750-page book releasing in less than two months on January 12th.

Monday, you may remember, I asked Pastor John about the book on Wednesday, last time we heard the introduction to the book. And today we hear the conclusion to the book. With the demands on his time, it's really doubtful that he'll read any more of it. But we're grateful that he spent the time to record the intro and conclusion.

For us, we mention the book this week because you can now pre-order the title from our friends at Westminster Books for just $19.99. We're thankful for their partnership and encourage you to order through them as you consider supporting faithful, independent Christian booksellers. Go to WTSBooks.com to pre-order. That's WTSBooks.com.

Last time we heard the 32-minute introduction. Today the conclusion. 55 minutes long. Combined, it's an hour and a half of audiobook readings that serve as our podcast content for this week and all of next week as well. I hope you take time to listen to all of it as we take a brief break for Thanksgiving.

We return with new episodes on Monday, November 30th, and with new features to unveil in the podcast in December. I can't wait to share those with you soon enough. Until then, here now is John Piper reading the conclusion to his forthcoming book, Providence, coming out on January 12th. Conclusion.

Seeing and savoring the providence of God. The providence of God, his purposeful sovereignty, is all-embracing, all-pervasive, and invincible. Therefore, God will be completely successful in the achievement of his ultimate goal for the universe. God's providence is guided by the counsel of his will. This counsel is eternal, all-knowing, and infinitely wise.

Its plans and goals, therefore, are perfect and cannot be improved. They never change. Providence is the purposeful sovereignty that carries those plans into action, guides all things toward God's ultimate goal, and leads to the final consummation. Job's prayer is true. You can do all things, and no purpose of yours can be thwarted.

Or as God himself states it positively, "My counsel shall stand, and I will accomplish all my purpose." The extent of providence. God's eternal plan includes everything, from the most insignificant bird fall, to the movement of stars, to the murder of his son. It includes the moral acts of every soul, its preferences, choices, and deeds.

Neither Satan at his hellish worst, nor human beings at their redeemed best, ever act in a way that causes a revision in God's all-wise plan. Whether God planned to permit something or planned to be more directly involved, nothing comes to pass but what God planned as part of the process of pursuing his ultimate goal.

Therefore, the extent of his providence is total. Nothing is independent of it. Nothing happens but by the counsel of his will, the infinite wisdom of his plan. Nature of Providence The nature of this providence is such that the preferences and choices of Satan and man are really their own preferences and their own choices.

They are blameworthy or praiseworthy owing to the way they relate to God in faith and to man in justice and love. God's providence is decisive in what Satan and man decide and do, but it is not coercive. That is, its ordinary way of working is to see to it that Satan and man decide and act in a way that is their own preference while fulfilling God's plan at every moment.

How God does this may remain a mystery while we see in a mirror dimly, but that he does it is what the Bible teaches. It is the glory of God to conceal things. The secret things belong to the Lord our God, but the things that are revealed belong to us.

Ultimate Goal of Providence One essential aspect of the ultimate goal of this all-embracing, all-pervasive, invincible providence is the beautification of the Bride of Christ, the Church, the people of God, the elect. This is why the final twelve chapters of this book have focused on the creation, transformation, and glorification of the Bride.

But defining the ultimate goal of providence requires more than pointing to the beautification of the Bride of Christ. Too much glory is left unexpressed. What is this beautification? It is her sanctification, her holiness. That is, it is her joyfully obeying all the Word of God. It is, most essentially, her love for God, which overflows in God-glorifying love for people.

It is her delight in God and her reflection of God. Therefore, to express it more fully, the ultimate goal of God's providence is to glorify His grace in the spiritual and moral beauty of Christ's undeserving, blood-bought Bride as she enjoys, reflects, and thus magnifies His greatness and beauty and worth above everything.

But even that expression of God's ultimate goal needs one more expansion in order to have its biblical proportions. We must echo here the climax of Part 2. To be sure, the ever-increasing joy of the Bride in the inexhaustible riches of the glory of Christ's grace will be the essence of how God is glorified in the coming ages.

But its essence is not its totality. The Bride will inhabit a new creation, and in that new creation she will see dimensions of the glory of God as never before. The heavens will be glad. The sun and moon and stars will praise the Lord. The earth will rejoice. The sea will roar with praise.

The rivers will clap their hands. The hills will sing for joy. The field will exult and everything in it. The trees of the forest will chant their praise. The desert will blossom like the crocus. The created world, liberated and perfected, will never cease to declare the glory of God.

That will be our dwelling. But the dwelling is not the family. The beauty of the new world is not the Bridegroom. The perfected theater of creation will be glorious, radiant with God. But the drama, the human experience of God in Christ, not the theater, will be foremost in magnifying the God of all-embracing, all-pervasive providence.

And the unparalleled beauty and worth of the reigning Lamb who was slain will be the main song of eternity. And the joy of the children of God, the Bride of Christ, will be the main echo of the infinite excellencies of God and the focus of his eternal delight. Ten effects of seeing and savoring this providence.

God did not reveal these glories for nothing. He meant them to be known and loved, or as I like to say, seen and savored. He intends that this seeing and savoring would result in showing, showing the greatness and the beauty and worth of God in his providence. So before I bid farewell, I offer ten examples of the effects that knowing and loving this providence will have.

I say this providence, meaning the providence we have seen in the 45 chapters of this book, this providence, the all-embracing, all-pervasive, invincible, purposeful sovereignty of God. One, seeing and savoring this providence awakens awe and leads us into the depth of true God-centered, Christ-exalting, Bible-saturated worship. I stand back from the breathtaking panorama of God's glory in the Bible and lift my hands in silence, groping for words that do not feel pitiful before this majesty.

He is great beyond our comprehension. Not that our praises ring loudest as we focus on what we do not know. No. God has shown us more of himself and more of his ways than we will ever exhaust in this world. I have filled a book by simply tracing his counterintuitive wonders.

He has not been sparing in the revelation of his splendors. Before we sing of what we cannot comprehend, let us spend a lifetime singing of what he has revealed. Those who see and savor this providence sing, not because of ritualistic expectations, but because it's the nature of the God-besotted soul to sing.

And how can we not be God-besotted when every day we are immersed in an ocean of God-given, God-governed, God-revealing wonders? Did not Hannah sing over this providence? The bows of the mighty are broken, but the feeble bind on strength. The Lord kills and brings to life. He brings down to shield and raises up.

The Lord makes poor and makes rich. He brings low and exalts. Poor Samuel 2, 4, and 6 through 7. Did not Miriam sing over this providence? Sing to the Lord, for he has triumphed gloriously, the horse and the rider he has thrown into the sea. Exodus 15, 21. Did not Moses sing over this providence?

I will sing to the Lord, for he has triumphed gloriously. Pharaoh's chariots and his host he cast into the sea. In the greatness of your majesty, you overthrow your adversaries. You send out your fury. It consumes them like stubble. Who is like you, majestic in holiness, awesome in glorious deeds, doing wonders?

Exodus 15, 1, 4, 7, 11. Did not the psalmists sing over this providence? The Lord brings the counsel of the nations to nothing. He frustrates the plans of the peoples. The counsel of the Lord stands forever, the plans of his heart to all generations. Psalm 33, 10 through 11.

Come, behold the works of the Lord, how he has brought desolations on the earth. He makes wars cease to the end of the earth. He breaks the bow and shatters the spear. He burns the chariots with fire. Psalm 46, 8 through 9. Whatever the Lord pleases, he does in heaven and on earth, in the seas and all deeps.

Psalm 135, 6. Did not Mary sing over this providence? He has shown strength with his arm. He has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts. He has brought down the mighty from their thrones and exalted those of humble estate. Luke 1, 51 to 52. And did not Paul sing over this providence?

Oh, the depth of the riches and the wisdom and the knowledge of God. How unsearchable are his judgments and how inscrutable his ways. For who has known the mind of the Lord or who has been his counselor or who has given a gift to him that he might be repaid?

For from him and through him and to him are all things. To him be glory forever. Amen. Romans 11, 33 through 36. If there are believers or churches whose worship feels thin and passive and routine, could it be that they do not know this providence, this God? Two, seeing and savoring this providence makes us marvel at our own salvation and humbles us because of our sin.

God chose us from eternity when he saw that we deserved nothing but condemnation. He predestined us to be his children and share the likeness of his son in spite of our unworthiness and treason. He purchased us at the cost of his son's life. He called us the way Lazarus was called, out of death.

He caused us to be born again. He gave us the gift of repentance and faith. He justified us. He gave us his Holy Spirit as a guarantee. He is working in us what is pleasing in his sight. He will keep us from falling and bring us to glory. He took away the sting of death and will bring us through it into the presence of Christ.

He will perfect our souls, raise us from the dead, give us new bodies like his glorious body and present us with a new world for our eternal habitation where his glory is the light and the lamb is the lamp. It is a great tragedy that millions of Christians do not know that this is true about them.

They have been taught a salvation with themselves as the decisive cause at the point of conversion. This view of their own decisive power obscures the glory of what God has actually done for them, strips them of stunned thankfulness for the gift of faith, dulls the intensity of their amazement that they were raised from the dead, and takes away the wonder that their perseverance is owing to the omnipotent moment-by-moment keeping of God.

But if we see and savor this providence, oh, how we will exult in the freedom and fullness and sovereign effectiveness of our salvation. We will be glad that it is all from God and through God and to God. We will be made humble and happy and hopeful. We will give all the glory to God.

The lowliness we feel because of our unworthiness will be accompanied and tempered by the wonder of God's merciful and infinitely loving providence. We saw Jonathan Edwards' beautiful expression of the saints' humility in chapter 10. I love this quote so much and long for this experience so earnestly that I give the last sentence again.

The desires of the saints, however earnest, are humble desires. Their hope is a humble hope, and their joy, even when it is unspeakable and full of glory, is humble, brokenhearted joy and leaves the Christian more poor in spirit and more like a little child and more disposed to a universal lowliness of behavior.

Three, seeing and savoring this providence causes us to see everything as part of God's design, everything as from him and through him and to him for his glory. When we hear God say that he works all things according to the counsel of his will, and then we see him doing this very thing countless times in his word and in his world, we are given a worldview with stunning implications.

Everything, absolutely everything relates to God. As R.C. Sproul would often say, "There are no maverick molecules, nor are there any maverick athletes or actors or singers or presidents or scholars or street people. All are in the sway of God's pervasive providence. All things and all persons fit into God's all-embracing plan." That is where ultimate meaning is found.

If we are going to understand anything at the most important level, we start with this reality. God created the world, holds it in existence, and governs all of it for his purposes. Everything relates to everything because everything relates to God. The knowledge of this and the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.

Where this is denied, all knowledge is enveloped in a cloud of folly. Where it is affirmed, the possibilities of profound, amazing, beautiful, helpful insights abound. Four, seeing and savoring this providence helps protect us from the trivializing effects of culture and from trifling with divine things. One of the curses of our culture, and it has permeated the church and most Christian communication, is banality, triviality, silliness, superficiality, and an eerie addiction to flippancy and levity.

This is accompanied by what to me seems like a baffling, allergic reaction to seriousness, dignity, and articulate precision in public speech. Carelessness in speech and casualness in demeanor turn up in times and places where you would expect carefulness, clarity, earnestness, and even gravity. My impression is that at the root of this culture of inarticulate, casual trifling is a loss of the weight of the greatness and awfulness of God.

Everything is light and funny because God is a lightweight. The boats of our communication bounce around with a chipper bearing on the waves of cultural trifling because the heavy ballast of a big and holy God has been offloaded at the docks of man-centered theology and endless screen time. This is a tragedy not only because it is the fruit of trivializing God, but also because it hinders us from seeing him and experiencing him as he really is in the majesty of his providence.

My guess is that some who read these lines will have no categories for viewing what I am saying any other way than as a summons to somberness and boredom. We live in a culture that can scarcely imagine something like glad gravity or joyful sorrow. Humor has been so identified with the silliness and levity of slapstick verbal antics that the robust, reality-rooted, natural explosiveness of humor is for many inconceivable.

Charles Spurgeon was a very funny man, but he was not a man of levity. He did not trifle with sacred things or think that worship was a place for casual clowning. He was not allergic to seriousness or dignity. Three years after his death, Robertson Nicole expressed my concerns and used Spurgeon as a counter-example.

Some of the humorous type may attract multitudes, but it lays the soul in ashes and destroys the very germs of religion. Mr. Spurgeon is often thought by those who do not know his sermons to have been a humorous preacher. As a matter of fact, there was no preacher whose tone was more uniformly earnest, reverent, and solemn.

Of course, every mature and healthy person knows that unbroken seriousness of a melodramatic or somber kind will inevitably communicate a sickness of soul. But that is not our danger in the first half of the 21st century. My point here is that seeing and savoring the all-embracing, all-pervasive providence of God has a wonderful effect in helping us recover the gift of authentic earnestness and the beautiful interweaving of gladness and gravity.

Five, seeing and savoring this providence helps us be patient and faithful amid the most inexplicable circumstances of life. When our minds are saturated with Scripture and day after day we are exposed to God's inscrutable ways in the Bible, we become accustomed to trust him in the dark. It is one thing to be told by God, "My thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways," declares the Lord.

But it is even more sobering and peace-giving to immerse ourselves in his providence and watch him time and again do and say things that are strange and contrary to our ordinary ways of thinking and acting. In this way, the reality of providence shapes our minds and affections. We become less vulnerable to panic and perplexity and dread, not because there are no perplexing and fearful circumstances, but because we have seen this before in God's Word.

God has shown us again and again that things are not what they seem and that he is always weaving something wise and good out of the painful, perplexing threads that look like a tangle in our lives. A story may help us grasp how seeing and savoring God's providence helps deal with the perplexities of life.

I created this story based very loosely on a tale from T.H. White's The Once and Future King. Once upon a time, there was a very wise old man named Job. In his old age, God gave to him a daughter whom he named Jemima, which means "little dove." He loved his little girl, and she loved her daddy.

One day, Job decided to go on a journey and asked Jemima if she would like to go along. "Oh, yes," Jemima said. "I would love to go along." And so they started off on their journey and walked all day. At sundown, they saw a little cottage and knocked on the door.

A very poor man and his wife and baby lived there. Job asked if he and Jemima could spend the night there before they continued on their journey in the morning. The poor man and his wife were very happy to let them stay. They gave Job and Jemima their own room and made them a simple supper.

This special treat was fresh milk from their only cow. This was how the poor couple made a living. Their cow gave good milk, which they sold for enough to live on. In the morning, when Job and Jemima got up, they heard crying. The cow had died during the night.

The poor man's wife was weeping. "What will we do? What will we do?" she sobbed. The poor man was about to cut the cow into pieces and sell the meat before it spoiled. But Job said, "I think you should not cut the cow in pieces, but bury him by your back wall under the olive tree.

The meat may not be good to sell. Trust God and he will take care of you." So the poor man did as Job suggested. Then Job and Jemima went on their way. They walked all day again and were very tired when they came to the next town and noticed a fine home.

They knocked on the door. A very wealthy man lived in this house, and they hoped that they would not be an inconvenience to one so wealthy. But the man was very gruff with them and said they could stay in the barn. He gave them water and bread for supper and let them eat it by themselves in the barn.

Job was very thankful and said to the wealthy man, "Thank you very much for the bread and water and for letting us stay in your barn." In the morning, Job noticed that one of the walls of the house was crumbling. So he went and bought bricks and mortar and repaired the hole in the wall for the wealthy man.

Then Job and Jemima went on their way and came to their destination. As they sat by the fire that night, Jemima said, "Daddy, I don't understand the ways of God. It doesn't seem right that the poor man's cow should die when he was so good to us and that you should fix the rich man's wall when he was so bad to us." "Well, Jemima," Job said, "many things are not the way they seem.

Perhaps this once I will tell you why, but after this you will have to trust God, who does not usually explain what He is doing." The poor man's cow was very sick, but he didn't know it. I could taste it in the milk that he gave us for supper.

Soon he would have sold bad milk, and the people would have gotten sick and died, and they would have stoned him. So I told him not to sell the meat, but to bury the cow under the olive tree by his back wall, because the Lord showed me that if he dug the grave there, he would find a silver cup buried from long ago and sell it for enough money to buy two good cows, and in the end, things would be better for him and his wife and child.

When we spent the night at the rich man's house, I saw the hole in the wall, and I saw more than that. I saw that hidden in the wall from generations ago was a chest full of gold. If the rich man had repaired the wall himself, he would have found it and continued in his pride and cruelty.

So I bought brick and mortar and closed the wall so that the man would never find this treasure. "Do you see, Jemima?" "Yes, Daddy, I see." 6. Seeing and savoring this providence shows us that the problem of God's sovereignty in suffering is more than relieved by the sustaining purpose and power of his sovereignty through suffering.

I mean this as a theological truth in the ultimate sense and as a precious experiential reality for those who trust Christ. Many people stumble over the conclusion of this book because the all-pervasive providence of God means that his purposeful sovereignty holds sway over all suffering. Satan's power to deceive and destroy is real.

Human sin against fellow humans is real. Natural disasters are real. But what we have seen in this book is that neither Satan, nor man, nor nature ever does anything that was not in the plan of God. In the entire sequence of events in the world, God decides finally which causes will be effective.

Therefore all suffering is in the sway of God's providence. He could always stop it. When he doesn't, his permissions are planned and purposeful and, in his overall design, wise. This wise, purposeful sovereignty will be the final answer to the justice and goodness of God's painful dealings in this world.

As we saw in chapter 22, all his ways are justice. He loves righteous deeds. Righteousness and justice are the foundation of his throne. He will judge the world with righteousness. His righteousness endures forever. No one will ever be able to rightly accuse God of treating him worse than he deserves.

Sin is universal in the heart of man and its denigration of God is an outrage beyond all its painful consequences. Why have things come to this? The closest the Bible comes to giving an ultimate answer is Romans 9, 22, and 23. If God, desiring to show his wrath and to make known his power, has endured with much patience the vessels of wrath prepared for destruction in order to make known the riches of his glory for vessels of mercy, which he has prepared beforehand for glory, how should this sentence be completed?

I argued in chapter 7 that Paul's intention was that we complete it with something like this, "Then no legitimate objection can be raised." The reason no legitimate objection can be raised is that it is right and fitting that the fullness of the glories of God be manifest, including, as verse 22 says, wrath and power.

Therefore a world exists in which God's holy wrath and righteous judgment fall on guilty sinners. If anyone in this world for whom the painful wrath of God is not fitting is swept away in the judgments, God will restore, confirm, strengthen, and establish them in the age to come. For those who trust Christ, God's sovereignty in suffering is not an unyielding problem but an unfailing hope.

It means that in the suffering of Christians, neither Satan, nor man, nor nature, nor chance is wielding decisive control. God is sovereign over this suffering, which means it is not meaningless. It is not wrath. It is not ultimately destructive. It is not wanton or heedless. It is purposeful. It is measured, wise, and loving.

Even if, as I have seen personally, the suffering is terrible in the last hour of death, when there is no life left in which the sufferer can be sanctified by it, even then it is eternally purposeful. For this light momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison as we look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen.

For the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal. If I may bear witness from fifty years of ministering the Word of God to many suffering people, here is what I would say. For every one person whom I have heard or seen forsaking the truth of God's all-pervasive providence because of suffering, or more often because of the suffering and death of a loved one, I have seen ten others bear witness that the biblical truth of God's absolute sovereignty in and over their suffering and loss saved their faith, and some have said their sanity.

Indeed, it saved not only their faith in God and sanity of mind, but also their love for people. How is that? Love cannot flourish where fear and greed consumes the heart with self-protecting or self-enhancing passions. The heart must be set free from self-focus for the sake of focusing on others.

Something must break this double power, fearing loss and craving gain. What breaks this power is the unshakable certainty of hope warranted by the unstoppable, blood-bought omnipotence of merciful providence. We saw how this works in chapter 43, killing sin and creating love, by faith. If our suffering turns us in on ourselves, we will not love well in the midst of affliction.

But that is precisely where Christian love should shine. In a severe test of affliction, their abundance of joy overflowed in a wealth of generosity. Joy overflowing with generosity in affliction, that is the beauty of Christian love. And how can there be such triumphant joy in affliction? Hope, certain hope.

We heard of the love that you had for all the saints because of the hope laid up for you in heaven. What are you when others persecute you? Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven. Jesus, for the joy that was set before him, endured the cross.

In every case, hope, the confidence of a joyful future, broke the power of fear and greed and freed the heart for love. This is how the Christian soul in suffering is saved from bitterness and revenge and self-indulgence and self-pity. God promises to turn every sorrow to joy, every loss to gain, every groan to glory.

And this promise does not hang in the air. It is rooted, warranted, secured, and guaranteed by the power that enables Christ even to subject all things to himself. In other words, for thousands of suffering Christians, the all-pervasive providence of God is not a barrier for faith, but the ground of faith-preserving, sanity-sustaining, love-empowering hope.

The all-embracing, all-pervasive, invincible providence of God found in the Bible is theologically more comprehensive and experientially more comforting and more fruitful than its denial. 7. Seeing and savoring this providence makes us alert and resistant to man-centered substitutes that pose as good news. Indeed, I would say that seeing and savoring this providence sends the roots of our counter-cultural conviction so deeply into the rock of Scripture that lovers of this truth are not easily blown over by the winds of false teaching.

Why this is true may be owing mainly to the fact that this providence is so contrary to fallen human nature and so out of step with self-exalting culture that if Christians break ranks with the world on this point, they can on any point, which means they are safe from much deception.

But I think the reason goes deeper than that for why embracing this providence makes us resistant to man-centered substitutes. I think the sheer enormity of God, the sheer weight and seriousness and authority of God creates in the soul a spiritual sense, a kind of holy acumen that can detect in any idea or doctrine or behavior a tendency toward exalting man while diminishing God.

Eight, seeing and savoring this providence makes us confident that God has the right and the power to answer prayer that people's hearts and minds would be changed. Prayer is one of the great wonders that God has given to the world. That God would plan for his own sovereign hand to be moved by the prayers of his creatures is amazing.

It is a thoughtless objection to say, "There's no point in praying since God has all things planned anyway." It's thoughtless because just a little thought would reveal that God has planned millions of human acts every day that cause other acts to happen. A nail sinks into a board because God planned for a hammer to hit it.

A student makes an A on a test because God planned for the student to study. A jet flies from New York to Los Angeles because God planned for fuel to be available, wings to stay put, engines to thrust, and a pilot to know what he's doing. In none of these cases do we say that the cause was pointless—the hammer, the studying, the fuel, the wing, the engine, the pilot.

Neither is prayer pointless. It is part of the plan. In fact, the all-embracing, all-pervasive, unstoppable providence of God is the only hope for making our most heartfelt prayers effective. What is your greatest longing? Your most heartfelt prayer? Probably it is for the salvation of someone you love. Or it may be for the liberation of your soul from some sinful bondage.

When you pray that God would save your loved one or liberate you from bondage to sin, what are you asking God to do? You are asking him to do what he promised to do in the new covenant, which Jesus bought with his blood, which is why we pray in Jesus' name.

So we pray, God, take out of their flesh the heart of stone and give them a new heart of flesh. Lord, circumcise their hearts so that they love you. Father, put your Spirit within them and cause them to walk in your statutes. Lord, grant them repentance and the knowledge of the truth that they may escape from the snare of the devil.

Father, open their hearts so that they may believe the gospel. The only people who can pray like that are people who believe that saving faith is a gift of providence. Many people do not believe this because they believe that human beings have the power of ultimate self-determination at the point of conversion.

In other words, God can woo sinners, but he cannot create their faith. Man must have the final say. At the point when faith comes into existence, man, not God, is decisive. My point here is that people who really believe this cannot consistently pray that God would convert unbelieving sinners.

Why? Because if they pray for divine influences in the sinner's life, they are either praying for successful influence, which takes away the sinner's ultimate self-determination, or they are praying for unsuccessful influence, which is not praying for conversion. So either they must give up praying that God would convert people or give up ultimate human self-determination or go on acting inconsistently.

Prayer is a spectacular gift. No one believed more firmly than Paul that humans do not have the final say in their conversion but that God does. It depends not on human will or exertion but on God who has mercy. But probably no one prayed with more tears and more urgency than Paul for the conversion of sinners.

I have great sorrow and unceasing anguish in my heart for the sake of my brothers, my kinsmen according to the flesh. My heart's desire and prayer to God for them is that they may be saved. He prayed this way because he knew that the new birth is not a mere decision but a miracle.

With man this is impossible, but with God all things are possible. The providence we have seen in this book does not make prayer a problem. It makes prayer powerful. 9. Seeing and savoring this providence shows us that evangelism and missions are absolutely essential for people to be converted to Christ because God makes them the means of his work in creating saving faith.

Just as thoughtless as the previous objection about prayer is the objection that says there's no point in evangelism and missions since God has planned whom he will save. A moment's thought will reveal that the plan to save people through the Word of God includes the plan to send preachers of the Word.

No one believes and is saved without hearing the gospel. The new birth comes through the living and abiding Word, the gospel. You have been born again, not of perishable seed but of imperishable, through the living and abiding Word of God. And this Word is the good news that was preached to you.

This gospel is not written in the clouds. It is entrusted to Christians who become witnesses and missionaries. If there were no human witnesses, there would be no salvation. Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved. How then will they call on him in whom they have not believed?

And how are they to believe in him whom they have never heard? And how are they to hear without someone preaching? And how are they to preach unless they are sent? So faith comes from hearing and hearing through the Word of Christ. Romans 10, 13 through 15 and 17.

When Paul spoke of his own commissioning from the risen Christ, he described it in the most impossible terms. Jesus commissioned him to the Gentiles to do what only God can do. Jesus said to Paul, "I am sending you to open their eyes so that they may turn from darkness to light, from the power of Satan to God, that they may receive forgiveness of sins and a place among those who are sanctified by faith in me." Acts 26, 17 to 18.

Open blind eyes? Liberate from Satan? That's Paul's mission and ours. This is how the blind see and the enslaved are set free—by evangelism and missions. They are the instruments. But the instruments are not the miracle of conversion. They are another kind of miracle—the miracle of obedience. But we are talking here about evangelism and the miracle of conversion.

When the Word is spoken, the Lord opens hearts. That is what we read about Lydia. The Lord opened her heart to pay attention to what was said by Paul. The Word spoken by Paul is the essential instrument. The work of the Lord is the miracle of the heart-opening conversion.

As in the case of prayer, the unthwartable providence of God is not a problem for evangelism and missions. It is their only hope of success. The obstacles to missions around the world today are insurmountable but for one thing—the providence of God is unstoppable. It cannot be stopped by closed countries.

It cannot be stopped by hostile religions. It cannot be stopped by difficult languages and cultures. And it cannot be stopped by the ultimate self-determination of the fallen human soul because in the world of God's purposeful sovereignty such self-determination does not exist. We may and we must build our lives and our mission on this confidence.

I will build my church and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. And to that end, this gospel of the kingdom will be proclaimed throughout the whole world as a testimony to all the nations and then the end will come. I pray that God will use this book to catapult thousands of new missionaries into God's harvest with undaunted confidence.

10. Seeing and savoring this providence assures us that for all eternity God will be increasingly glorified in us as we are increasingly satisfied in him. Running through this book like a golden thread is the truth that God designed the world and performs his providence so that his glory in saving us and our joy in seeing him would be forever united as each increases in the increase of the other.

When the immeasurable riches of God's glory in saving us through the slaying of the lamb are forever and continually dispensed from his infinite treasury, our gladness will increase with every fresh sight. And as our gladness in God increases, his worth will be seen as a greater and greater treasure reflected in the pleasures of his people.

The all-embracing, all-pervasive, unstoppable providence of God is precious in proportion as we hope for this day to come. And it will come. God will forever be increasingly glorified in us as we are increasingly satisfied in him. In your presence there is fullness of joy. At your right hand are pleasures forevermore.

Be exalted, O God, above the heavens. Let your glory be over all the earth. Our Lord, come. Amen.