(upbeat music) We close out our third full year of episodes on the Ask Pastor John podcast with episode number 761. My, that is a lot of grace, that's a lot of episodes. And so many of you are financial partners of the ministry who support our work. And I wanna say thank you for partnering with us and for making those 761 episodes possible.

As we near the end of one year, we get reflective. And as we approach the new year, we get prophetic. And one question we tend to see this time of year, Pastor John, looking into 2016 is this. Pastor John, from your vantage point, what are the biggest challenges facing the evangelical church today and into the near future?

What events or issues come to mind? Well, I'm never very good at contemporary events or the latest hot button issues. And that doesn't bother me too much because I don't think the major challenges in any generation are unique to that generation. There are unique challenges to every generation. They just don't happen to be the main challenges in every generation because the main challenges stay the same from generation to generation.

And so when my mind presses into main, deepest, strongest, greatest challenge, I think in a sequence from, there's a cluster of challenges around truth and knowledge, and that means Bible. And then there's a cluster of issues around heart and affection and faith and response. And then there's a cluster of issues around behavior or action or deeds in the world.

And so let me just walk through that. That's the way my mind works. I just think those are the huge issues because if you start at the beginning, the first and great commandment says, "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and soul and mind and strength." So I would think since that's the first commandment, that's the first challenge in every generation.

Does the church, does the world love God with all their heart and all their soul and all their mind and all their strength? And I was talking to Louis Giglio the other day, on a podcast that he does, and he said that someone had asked him the question and he wanted to pitch it to me about, "Why so much talk about theology?

Why does Piper always come to Passion and do the heavy lifting of theology and others get into theology? And Louis, you're known for taking the Bible so seriously. What's the point of all this theology?" And my answer was to quote a Middle Ages theologian, and I think it was Bonaventure, who when asked, "Why don't people love God more?" His answer was, "They don't know him better." In other words, if we don't know God, we can't love God.

I'm not one of those people who think that the intensity of authentic worship rises to the degree that we don't understand the mystery of God. I mean, there are people who seem to wanna correlate, "Oh, my worship is just so strong when I realize what I don't know." I say, "Well, there is a sense in which God is vastly beyond us because infinite is beyond finite, but our worship to glorify God must be based on what we've seen of God, what we know of God, what he's revealed of himself." If we're just worshiping a haze, God is not getting a lot of glory from the warm feelings that we're having in our hearts because of the ignorance in our heads, because of the haze over our lives.

I've got this picture in my head of somebody who runs up to me on the road and says, "Here's $10,000. Please go put it in my bank, and here's my pin, and here's my account number." And I say, "I don't even know you. What are you doing?" And he just said, "I trust you." I say, "Why do you trust me?" And he says, "Oh, I don't know.

I'm just trusting you. I feel inside like I should trust you." My response is not to be honored. I feel like this guy's a nut. However, if he runs up to me and says, "Here's $10,000 in cash. Please, here's my account number, here's my pin number. Would you deposit it for me?" And I say, "Look, I don't even know you.

Why do you trust me?" He says, "Oh, I know you. We work in the same building. I've been watching you for a year. You're trustworthy. I'll trust you 'cause I know you." Then I feel honored. And that's the way it is with God. If we say, "Oh, I'm just coming to God.

I trust him. I don't have any reasons for trusting him. I don't need that theology stuff." God thinks we're nuts. We're not honoring him. We're honoring a haze. And so knowledge really matters underneath the commandment. You gotta love God with all your heart and soul. So today, I think the biggest challenge is, do people know God?

Do people have a knowledge that is trustworthy and therefore a huge issue is, what's the role of the Bible in the church today? And is it trustworthy? And are people basing their lives on it and they're preaching on it? Are they getting the whole counsel of God so that they can love the whole God?

So those are kind of the first two clusters for me, all woven together. The knowledge issues is true knowledge being disseminated about God. Is the whole counsel of God really being taught in the church? Is the wholehearted love of God happening in response to this knowledge? And that leads to the third cluster, namely, I'm teaching First Peter right now.

And First Peter, if anything is competing in First Peter with prominence, with hope, competing in prominence with hope, that's a big theme in First Peter, what's competing with it is good deeds, good deeds over and over again. So Peter has the conception that we should not be conformed to the passions of our former ignorance.

Do you see the sequence there? Ignorance leading to passions, leading to bad behavior. And he says, no, you're not in your former ignorance anymore, you've got knowledge of God, knowledge of Christ, knowledge of hope, knowledge of the resurrection, knowledge of new birth, knowledge of the second coming, knowledge of his care for you at every moment in your suffering, you've got knowledge, and this knowledge is gonna produce new passions, and these passions now conform you to a new set of behavior.

And so over and over again, he says, keep your conduct among the Gentiles, honorable and good, so that when they see your good conduct, they will glorify God on the day of visitation. So that's our goal in this world. We're on a mission in this world to bring people to glorify God.

That is the biggest challenge. So to know God, to love God, to act in ways that the world will stand up and say, whoa, tell me the reason for the hope that is in you, because you're acting in a way that is so counterintuitive to my hopes that you must have different hopes.

And then we're off to the races in bearing witness to the, what he calls, the excellencies of the one who called us out of darkness into his marvelous light. A new year with the same mission. That is so good. Thank you, Pastor John. And as we step into the new year tomorrow, we will be talking about the spiritual disciplines.

And it's a good time to think through the habits and patterns to set in place for our spiritual flourishing. In 2016, it's always good to start the new year thinking about these things, and we'll do that tomorrow. I'm your host, Tony Reinke. Thanks for listening to the Ask Pastor John podcast.

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