Happy Friday everyone and welcome back to the Ask Pastor John podcast with longtime pastor and author John Piper. Well we finished the week with a question from a listener named Nancy and it's this, "Dear Pastor John, thank you for this podcast. Here's my question for you. Can an unbeliever please God and if not, what are we to make of the account of Cornelius in Acts chapter 10?

Can you explain this to me and thank you in advance." Let me begin with a couple of passages of scripture that draw out our answer to Nancy's question about whether unbelievers can please God and then on the basis of that we'll tackle Cornelius. This is Hebrews 11, 6, "Without faith it is impossible to please God.

For whoever would draw near to God must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who seek him." And then Romans 14, 23, "Whatever does not proceed from faith is sin." So I infer from those two passages, we could add others, that there is a sense in which everything that comes out of an unbelieving heart displeases the Lord.

Or to say it differently, nothing that comes out of the heart of unbelief pleases the Lord. Of course, this doesn't mean that unbelievers can't perform acts which outwardly conform to God's law. They don't kill, they don't steal, they don't lie. In other words, they conform outwardly to some of God's revealed will.

But what this shows is that it's not simply external conformity to prescribe deeds that pleases the Lord, right? We parents know that. We don't want external compliance from our kids while their hearts are far from us. What pleases the Lord is a heart of trust and love. What comes out of that heart pleases the Lord.

So in that sense, even the so-called "right things" that an unbeliever does are not pleasing to the Lord, because they are not deeds of faith. Faith towards God, love for Jesus. Now this raises the question of how God looks upon the steps that a person takes toward Christ before they believe on Christ.

That's getting toward Cornelius, but we're not there yet. The answer, I think, is that each of those steps is a gift of free, unmerited grace as God moves a person toward the gospel, toward salvation, toward faith, and as God looks upon the person himself, he sees him as unworthy of that gift of grace.

That's why we call it grace. Grace is undeserved, done for a person who is not in himself pleasing the Lord, which is what we all feel when we finally get saved, when we finally believe, don't we? We say, "Grace brought me here." God looks upon his own work as a good and right and pleasing thing that he's doing to get somebody to faith.

It's good that a person be drawn to Christ. Now, what about Cornelius? It's not only chapter 10, but chapter 11 is all-important as it retells the story again. Cornelius gets a lot of attention in the book of Acts. It's really, really amazing, and there are reasons for that. Let's refresh our memory about Cornelius.

He was a Gentile centurion, that is, a non-Jewish Roman military official, and he's described in chapter 10, verse 2 of Acts, as a man who "feared God and gave alms generously and prayed continually to God." And an angel shows up in a vision and tells him that his prayers have ascended to God and that he should now send for the apostle Peter.

In other words, the angel doesn't show up and say, "You're a very good man. You pray a lot, and you do good deeds, and that's that. Way to go. You'll go to heaven." He doesn't say that at all. He says, "Your prayers have been heard, and what the answer to the prayer consists in is go get a gospel messenger.

You got some news you need to know in order to be saved," which is exactly what Luke's going to say in just a minute. So we see that God is at work in his free grace to bring Cornelius to the point where he can hear the gospel and be saved.

Meanwhile, Peter, in Joppa, is receiving a similar kind of vision to get him ready to do something as a Jew would be very hard to do, namely go hang out in the house of a Gentile. And he gets this vision of all these unclean animals, and God says, "Don't call anything unclean that I call clean." And part of that vision, he's told that he should be ready to associate with Gentiles, these unclean Gentiles, without fretting or worrying because they are just as "acceptable"—that's the word—they're just as acceptable into God's family as any Jewish unbeliever would be if they believed in Jesus.

So in Acts 11-12, Peter says that the Spirit made it plain that we should "make no distinction" between these unclean Gentiles and these unbelieving Jews. They're both equally valid candidates for faith in Jesus. So according to Acts 11-14, what the angel said to Cornelius was that Peter would "declare to you a message by which you will be saved." That's why I said chapter 11 is so important.

Let me say it again. 11-14, the angel says to Cornelius, "Peter will declare to you a message by which you will be saved." So in all his praying and almsgiving and fearing God, he's not saved. Anybody who uses the story of Cornelius to say there are a lot of saved people out among the nations that don't need to hear the gospel are turning the story exactly upside down.

The whole point of the story is, yes, there are people out there who need the gospel, and God intends to save because he's not prejudiced against any ethnicity. "Declare to you a message by which you will be saved." So then, go to the Gentiles, and God has granted repentance to life.

That's what the Christians infer. When the Christians watch Cornelius and his family believe, they say, "Whoa!" Then to the Gentiles also, God has granted repentance that leads to life. So the point of the story of Cornelius is that there are Gentiles scattered through the world who are "acceptable to God" in the sense of being able to be saved just as much as anybody else, no matter what their ethnic condition is.

But there are many people throughout the world whom God, in his amazing grace, is not only finding acceptable, but is granting that they pray and that they have visions and they be drawn into contact with the gospel so that they can be saved. So we should not look upon those prayers or those deeds as good in and of themselves—that's her original question—but as wonderful acts of God's grace leading a person toward repentance, toward faith in the hearing of the gospel.

So bottom line, conclusion to Nancy's question, without faith, it is impossible to please God. But God, in his mercy, draws unbelieving sinners to himself and in the process grants them desires and actions that lead to an encounter with the gospel so that they may believe and then lead a life of faith-pleasing to the Lord.

Yeah, that's a very helpful distinction to make. Thank you, Pastor John, and thank you for the question, Nancy, and to all the listeners out there, thank you for listening and making the podcast a part of your week and commute and part of your weekly routines. We really appreciate it.

You can subscribe to our audio feeds and search our past episodes in our archive, even reach us by email. The question you may have of your own, do all that through our online home at DesiringGod.org/AskPastorJohn. So today's question was whether or not non-Christians can honor God, and then that raises a related question which is, does God love the non-elect?

If not, why not? And if so, how is his love to the non-elect displayed to them? This is a very common question that we get in the inbox. It's a question faced by all Reformed teachers throughout the centuries, really, and it is scheduled on Monday when we return on the Ask Pastor John podcast.

I'm your host, Tony Reinke. We'll see you then. 1