Dr. Barnhouse and the Bible

Announcer (Female): The Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals

Announcer (Male): Presents the timeless teaching of Dr. Donald Grey Barnhouse.

Dr. Donald Grey Barnhouse: There are no circumstances that are beyond God's power, and nothing is so trivial that it is beyond his love. All that he wants is to be believed. And when we truly believe him, he will open the windows of heaven and pour out such a blessing that there will not be room enough to receive it.

The nub of the question is that we must become supremely convinced that his way is better than our way, and that it is the only right way.

Announcer (Male): Over a half a century ago, the late Dr. Donald Grey Barnhouse, then pastor of 10th Presbyterian Church in Philadelphia, saw the need to spread God's word beyond the hearing of his local congregation. He started the radio ministry, which has become known as Dr. Barnhouse and the Bible.

The application of God's word, as taught by Dr. Barnhouse, is as relevant today as when he first taught over the radio airwaves decades ago. The message we will be featuring on today's edition of Dr. Barnhouse and the Bible is entitled, “Triumph Through Submission.”

When a nation loses a war, their defeat is shown by their surrender to the enemy forces and submission to their terms. But in the spiritual realm, surrender and submission is the path to victory. God offers peace with himself to rebellious sinners through the death of his Son, and we can experience spiritual triumph when we trust in Jesus Christ and yield to his Lordship.

The Scripture text for this edition of Dr. Barnhouse and the Bible is Romans chapter 12 and verse 2. Here again is Dr. Donald Grey Barnhouse, with a message entitled, “Triumph Through Submission.”

Dr. Donald Grey Barnhouse: Through the Lord Jesus Christ, we come unto the our Father and our God, and in the Holy Spirit. Those of us who have been saved through the redemptive work of Christ, stand before you today as islands of calm and joy in the midst of the troubled sea of human history.

We rejoice that you are our God, and that you are the Lord of history and the God of current events. Even though the world is in confusion and many people are frustrated, those who rest in Christ are at peace.

Now bless this study as it is broadcast today and use it for the exaltation of the Lord Jesus Christ and the strengthening of your people. We ask it in the name and for the sake of our Savior. Amen.

Our text in Romans 12:2, that you may prove what is the good and acceptable and perfect will of God.

Now God desires those who have named the name of Christ as their Savior to know him as their Lord. We are to follow a path of living that takes us away from the schemes of this world and molds us into the likeness of the Lord Jesus Christ.

In the transformation that thus takes place in an individual, he can enter into experiences which will demonstrate to him moment by moment what the will of God is, good, acceptable, and perfect. If we look at these texts closely, we can see that there is a give and take and that both are to the advantage of the believer.

In order to understand this, we must realize that we are creatures and that God is Creator. Every good thing begins with him. We cannot furnish anything that begins in ourselves.

Because God is perfect, he must demand perfection of us, and since we do not have it, he must give it to us by grace. In the Psalms, David asks a question and then answers it in a way that shows God's completeness and our nothingness. In Psalm 116:12, “What shall I give back to the Lord for all his benefits toward me? What shall I give?” And the next verse replies, “I will take.”

That is the only way in which a creature can give anything to the Creator. By trusting in him, by understanding his goodness, his mercy, his loving kindness, his grace, we throw ourselves upon him completely and recognize that we are nothing and can do nothing without him, and that all things are in him.

If we then turn our faces toward him in love, confessing our own bankruptcy and his complete perfections, we shall receive all things from him. The earlier chapters of Romans have shown how God provided all things for us in Christ. With this chapter, we are brought face to face with our response to all of this goodness and grace.

Oh how sad it is that the Lord has to send a messenger to beseech us to love him and yield ourselves to him. But when we understand his grace and turn toward him, we discover that this presentation of ourselves is acceptable unto God.

The Greek word is much stronger than the idea which usually comes to our mind when we say that a thing is acceptable. The revisions and more modern translations read “well pleasing” or “agreeable.”

Perhaps the difference may be made clear by a simple illustration. A friend of mine paid $11,000 for a house and lived in it for about five years. He had to move to another city and so wanted to sell his house. He knew that prices had gone up and he thought that he might get $13,000 or $14,000 for it.

He put out a sign announcing the place for sale, and almost immediately a prospective buyer came to see him. When asked the price, the owner said, “Make me an offer.” Without batting an eye, the visitor said, “$17,000.”

My friend, hiding his amazement, replied, “Well, I'd like to get $20,000 for it.” The buyer pulled out a checkbook and said, “Let's split the difference, and I'll give you $5,000 down on account. I've got to catch a plane and get back home and get ready to move.” And the deal was concluded on that basis.

Now, $13,000 or $14,000 would have been acceptable, but $17,000 was well pleasing and agreeable, while the final price of $18,500 was very well pleasing.

Now this is the sense of the word, used twice in our paragraph. The Lord God has planned our redemption, and Jesus Christ has accomplished it by giving himself for us. When we understand this and present our bodies to the Lord as a living sacrifice, it is not only acceptable to him, it is agreeable, it is well pleasing.

In return, he begins to show us his will for our lives, and then we begin to experience the actual reality. His will is good, well pleasing and perfect. If we would submit this proposition to cold logic, it would become apparent to our minds that it was true, that it had to be true, and that nothing else could be true. God is perfect.

This is why his will must be good, well pleasing, and perfect. Because God is what he is, he could not desire for us anything other than that which would be the best for us. And this is also the reason why God keeps working on us in order to teach us to seek his will and nothing but his will. This explains, too, why God is grieved when we do not obey his will.

In the Ten Commandments, we find an extraordinary phrase which some people have not understood. “You shall not make unto yourself any graven image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water that is under the earth. You shall not bow down yourself to them nor serve them. For I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God.”

Now, is this not a strange statement for God to make? It's strange only if we do not understand the real meaning of jealousy. In our day, the word has degenerated to its lowest sense, that of the green-eyed monster who selfishly desires something or some person for his own exclusive use. The Bible does not so use the word.

The jealousy of God is entirely alien to base envy and greedy desire. Occasionally, the word is used in a good sense. We say that parents are jealous for their children. Note well that they are not jealous of their children. To be jealous of someone is to desire something that he has and to be willing to deprive him of it for one's own use. But to be jealous for someone is to desire their highest good.

A mother sees her son entranced by a girl who is distinctly inferior. She has physical charm but no character, beauty of body but no beauty of soul. This is a moment in the life of the young man when he may be seduced by such lesser attractions and miss the highest and best that life may bring. His parents hold their breaths for anxious moments and hope that the son will not be caught in the web of the enchantress. They are jealous for him.

When the infatuation passes and he falls in love with a girl of outstanding goodness and beauty of character, they are no longer jealous for him, they are delighted. Now it is in this way that our Lord God is a jealous God. He does not want us to run after that which can only hurt us.

He knows that we are like moths attracted to flame, and he does not want us to burn our wings. And we must not say that the Lord God made us as we are, he did not. He made original man and woman pure and innocent and in his will. Sin drew away from him.

And sin keeps our desires on a low level and keeps our tastes degraded and momentarily satisfied by passing pleasures. Parents cannot break into the life of a son to keep him from making a fool of himself. God could break into our lives and forcibly prevent us from folly, but he will not do so because he wants the free and loving yieldedness to him that builds our souls and makes us more like himself.

And this is why he invites us to yield to him, saying that this is well pleasing to him. And then announces that in this way we will prove that he is well pleasing to us. As babies, we are born with a nature that wants to be gratified. We want our own way.

This characteristic was acquired for the race when Adam sinned, and it is built into every human being. “All we like sheep have gone astray. We have turned every one to his own way.” We can see this in a baby that is only a few hours old. The baby cries, and we pick it up.

It's quiet. We put it down. The baby cries. It wants to be held. You know the child isn't hungry, that it has been burped, that it's dry, and that no pin is scratching it. Nevertheless, it yells. Pick it up, and it will be quiet. It just wants its own way.

Now if allowed to have its own way, the child becomes worse as it grows older. You'll see such a child stamp its feet and hear it yell. Unhappy the child who does not have parents who discipline it sharply in such moments. Do not believe psychologists who teach that you must not discipline a child.

The Bible is God's word and is the greatest book on child training that has ever been written. Listen to some of its counsels. “A father disciplines the son in whom he delights.” Proverbs 3:12. And again in Proverbs, in several verses, “He that spares the rod hates his son, but he that loves him disciplines him in time.”

And again, “Discipline your son while there's hope, and let not your soul spare because of his crying.” And again, “Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old, he will not depart from it.”

In passing, let me say that a woman once came to me about her son. She insisted that she had trained her child properly, even though he was then far from the Lord. I told her that I must choose between her version of it and the Bible's flat statement. And I knew from long experience that the Almighty is always correct. Either she was deceived, or the Bible was not true.

She broke down and admitted that she had spoiled her son terribly, and was indeed the cause of his departure into sin and even crime. She had given him his own way, so that now he thought that he had the right to pursue his own way even against all of the laws of God and society.

Now continue in these quotations about child training. In Proverbs 22, “Foolishness is bound in the heart of a child, but the rod of correction shall drive it far from him.”

I suppose that if you should quote that to the four children of a family that I know well, they would smile wryly and tell how they had been made to stand in a corner and recite, even while they were sobbing over their punishment which was about to take place, “Foolishness is bound in the heart of a child, boohoo, and the rod of correction, boohoo, will drive it far from him.”

And then followed prayer and punishment, and they knew that it was on a biblical basis. Still another strong passage needs to be considered. In Proverbs 23, “Withhold not correction from the child, for if you beat him with the rod, he will not die. You shall beat him with the rod, and shall deliver his soul from hell.”

Now that's an extraordinary statement, and we need quote no further from the many divine commands to discipline your children. These are enough to show the divine principle. The parent who disciplines his child is enabling that child to turn away from his own will, submit to the guidance of the parent, the rules of society, and much more, to the laws of God. The child who learns to obey his parents will find it easy to obey God.

It is also terribly true that the child who has not been taught obedience to the parent will find it very difficult to obey God and may well land in hell because of the indolent softness of the parent.

Whenever we come to the place where we recognize the rights of God and trust in the Lord Jesus Christ as Savior, he will take up this work of discipline in order to bring us to his best for us. It's necessary for us to grasp this text with our intellects as well as with our hearts and wills. In fact, there may be times when holding the truth of our text with our intellects will be the only thing that will save us from losing our minds. God's way is the best way.

His way is good, well pleasing and perfect. Now my way is not the best way unless it is his way. I must conform my will to his. I must yield myself to him. It is when I yield myself to him that I will be able to prove in actual practice that the ways of his wisdom are ways of pleasantness and that all of his paths are peace.

Now it may be difficult to speak these truths boldly if we are following the casket of a child to the cemetery, or if we have just been fired from a job. If we have not learned to prove that his will is good and well pleasing and perfect in small things, we may have a great struggle in times of the larger disappointments.

When we are young, we may recite glibly the aphorisms of trust, but they need more to be learned than memorized. It's easy to memorize and repeat that we must spell disappointment as his appointment. The truth of it may not be understood at times until many years after the disappointment.

One of my dearest friends, a man of my own age, lost his left arm at the shoulder when he was only 17 years old. He told me that he had cried himself to sleep every night until he was 12 years old. It was hard then to think of this amputation as the will of God and as being good, well pleasing and perfect. Then he began to conquer his handicap.

He lived on a farm and he learned that he could hoe as many rows as his brothers by tucking a long handled hoe under his armpit, and that he didn't get as tired as they did hoeing with two arms, but using their wrists.

Later, he began to sell life insurance, and he was a success. He learned to play handball and soon was beating all comers and held the national championship for many years. One day word came to him that a 13-year-old boy was lying in a hospital with the same amputation that he had had. The boy had no will to live, and his condition was rapidly worsening.

My friend took his scrapbook of pictures and went to see the boy. Not one word was spoken about the arm, but the boy looked at the various newspaper clippings which acclaimed the one-armed champion and recounted his prowess at golf, hunting, and fishing. And finally he asked my friend if it were really true. My friend removed his shirt and showed the boy the empty shoulder. The boy sighed deeply and soon fell asleep. Three days later, he was on the mend and ready to leave the hospital.

My friend has spent his life with insurance, athletics, and Christian work among young people, in that ascending order of importance. And he has testified many times to his satisfaction with life and with the will of God for him. Oh, it was not well pleasing at first to be the town cripple.

But the compensations became so great that he soon saw that God's way was the best way for him and he would not have it any other way. Now it would be possible to tell that same story with a thousand variations in a thousand lives.

But each story would be no more than an illustration of the truth of our text that God wants you to learn, not from the experience of others, but from your own experience. You are to prove this in your life. You are to take your life as it is today, stop whining about it.

Ask God to make good on his promises. He will do so if you will put him to the test. It must be remembered that this is not a universal promise. God does not promise the unbeliever either joy or happiness, and the unbeliever may find that life is bitter and frustrating.

But the one who knows the Lord Jesus Christ as personal Savior has the right to know him as Lord, and to enter into the sublime joy of moment by moment triumph in his will. If we present our bodies as a well pleasing sacrifice to God, we will be transformed and will be able to prove the truth of this verse for ourselves.

There are no circumstances that are beyond God's power, and nothing is so trivial that it is beyond his love. All that he wants is to be believed. And when we truly believe him, he will open the windows of heaven and pour out such a blessing that there will not be room enough to receive it. The nub of the question is that we must become supremely convinced that his way is better than our way, and that it is the only right way.

A story may help to illustrate this. When my older son was approaching his tenth birthday, I told him that we would do anything that he wanted to do on that day. He was silent a long moment and then he said, “Daddy, you had me make the choice last year, and it wasn't nearly as nice as when you planned something. So will you plan what we're to do and surprise me with it?” Did that ever put me on the spot?

He was not only accepting my guidance but asking for my will and acknowledging that it turned out better than his. We can, of course, see the limitations in such a story. But when we turn to our Heavenly Father, there are no limitations whatsoever. Beyond any question what God plans is better for us than anything that we could plan for ourselves.

When something in life has gone sour, we often find that the cause of our bitterness is in some choice that we have made for ourselves without submitting to his will. In the light of this, we cannot overestimate the importance of the phrase in the prayer of our Lord that he taught his disciples, “Our Father which are in heaven, hallowed be thy name, thy kingdom come, thy will be done, in earth as it is in heaven.”

“Thy will be done in earth.” Now I do not have any control over the earth in Russia that God's will should be done there. I do not have control over the earth in Washington, D.C. or in Harrisburg, or in the City Hall in Philadelphia. I can control very imperfectly the earth that is in my garden by planting, cultivating, irrigating, and keeping the weeds down.

But there is one bit of earth where I am in full control, and this I must yield to my Lord. This body of mine has a history of earthiness. “Dust you are, and to dust you shall return” is my past and my future. My heart must be surrendered to the Lord so that I may truly say, “Thy will be done in this dust that is my body, even as thy will is done in heaven.”

If you will understand that principle, and if you will pray that prayer in your heart with that meaning in it, your Heavenly Father will find it well pleasing, and he will order your life so that you will find his will good, well pleasing, and perfect. And we ask of our God and Father that you shall work these wonders in the lives of all believers who listen this day. We ask it in Jesus' name. Amen.

Announcer (Male): Turn from sin and disobedience and submit to the Lord Jesus Christ in repentance and faith, and you can then experience a life of spiritual triumph and victory. You have been listening to Dr. Barnhouse and the Bible. We hope you've benefited from today's message, “Triumph Through Submission.”

To listen to more Bible teaching by Dr. Barnhouse, visit us online at AllianceNet.org. An audio copy of today's teaching is available by calling us toll free at 1-800-488-1888. Today's message again is entitled, “Triumph Through Submission.” Or simply request message number R12-8.

We would also like to make available to you a free copy of our booklet entitled, “All Things Work Together.” Romans 8:28 declares, “We know that all things work together for good to them who love the Lord, even to them who are called according to his purposes.” Yet many times, we may feel that nothing good could ever come out of our problems and circumstances.

This free booklet shows how this precious and powerful promise applies to any situation you may be facing and can fill you with hope and encouragement when you need it the most. Ask for your free copy of “All Things Work Together” when you call or write. Dr. Barnhouse and the Bible is a radio ministry of The Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals, headquartered in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

We exist to promote a biblical understanding and worldview. Drawing upon the insight and wisdom of Reformation theologians from decades and even centuries gone by, we seek to provide contemporary Christian teaching which will equip believers to understand and meet the challenges and opportunities of our time and place. The Alliance also produces the radio broadcast, The Bible Study Hour, featuring the teachings of the late Dr. James Montgomery Boice, and Every Last Word, featuring the Bible teaching of Dr. Philip Graham Ryken.

For a full list of radio stations carrying our programs, visit us online at AllianceNet.org. Dr. Barnhouse and the Bible comes to you through the generous gifts of listeners like you. If you have benefited from this broadcast and would like it to continue, prayerfully consider a donation to help us keep this ministry on the air. For more information or to make a contribution to help further our work, contact us by calling toll free 1-800-488-1888.

Again, that's 1-800-488-1888. Write to us at Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals, Box 2000, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19103. Visit us online at AllianceNet.org. Be sure to ask for a free resource catalog featuring books, audio teachings, commentaries, booklets, videos, and a wealth of other materials from outstanding reformed teachers and theologians, including Donald Grey Barnhouse, Dr. James Montgomery Boice, Dr. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, and Dr. Philip Graham Ryken. Thank you for listening. Join us again next time for more classic teaching on Dr. Barnhouse and the Bible.