What Does It Really Mean to Meditate on Truth with Dr. Paul Tripp
As we dreamed about wrapping up this series, we really thought about who should come on and close it. My daughter Kate regularly gets up in the morning and grabs this man’s devotional. It’s called New Morning Mercies and it’s written by Dr. Paul Tripp. She talks about how when she reads that devotional in the morning, a peace comes over her before she heads into her day doing public school. Watching my daughter grow from someone else has been so rewarding to me. So I wanted to invite Dr. Tripp on and I’m so honored he’s here with me today.
Let’s start with your devotion. The focus is that the gospel can enter our everyday lives. It has been transformative in my own life. Talk about where that journey began for you.
There's really two things that ignited my desire to write an everyday devotional. The first is just the recognition that as human beings, we don't live life based on the facts of our experience, but based on our interpretation of the facts. We've been wired by God to be meaning makers. So every day, everybody, all the time, is making sense out of our lives. And that's a profoundly important thing. It's deeply spiritual. The way you make sense out of your life will not only impact what you do, but it will impact your emotions, your sense of wellbeing, your sense of identity, and of meaning and purpose. The thing about that is for most of us, we don't think about how we're not self conscious that we're always interpreting. What we then do and how we then feel is really based not just on the facts of what's going on around us, but our interpretation of those facts. That's the first thing. The second thing is I recognized something in myself that I became convinced other people felt too - that we’re gospel amnesiacs. Many people have a good understanding of salvation past (the forgiveness they've received in Jesus) and salvation future (the guarantee of this awesome eternity with the Lord), but they're not really aware of the present benefits of what I call the “nowism” of the gospel of Jesus Christ. When you get the gospel right here, right now, it changes the way that you live. The gospel is not just “I’m saved and I’m going to heaven,” but it’s a lens that I use to look at everything in life. I just finished my 24th book and I jokingly saw that I’ve really only written one book. I just retitle it every year. It’s always just turning and looking at something else with these gospel glasses on and asking the question, “how would this look different if I look at it through the person and work of the Lord Jesus Christ and who I am and what I’ve been.”
I’m going to interrupt you there because I think you just changed my life. I’m going to say that about what I do because I feel that way! I could literally never run out of books to write. Until I’ve covered every way that Jesus changes something, I don’t know that I’ll get to the end. It’s not just to know the gospel, it’s to know how the gospel changes the way I parent, the way I think, everything.
There's a real interesting passage in 2 Peter 1 where Peter proposes that there are people who really do know the Lord, but who are ineffective and unproductive in their knowledge of the Lord Jesus Christ. Very interesting diagnosis. When you dig into that passage, he says they're ineffective and unproductive because they've forgotten that they've been cleansed from their past sins. What he's saying is they don't know who they are and they don't know what they've been given. Yes, they're going to go to heaven someday, but right here, right now, their lives are not fruitful because they're amnesiacs.
I’m going to ask you a really big question theologically. Are those people saved?
Yes, I think it's possible to be rescued by the gospel and not be living in light of all I've been given in the gospel. Let me give you an example. Let's just say I have a rich uncle and I happened to be his final living relative. He's just passed on and I get a call from the bank that I have $50 million in my trust now. My life has been completely changed by this man. So I go down to the bank and take out $10,000 and take my wife to Paris to eat and we have this glorious weekend. Then several months later, my wife says to me, “Paul, I don't understand you. You say we're rich, but we're still living like we're poor. I don't understand.” And I say, “well, yeah, we are, but it's so hard to go down that bank and they treat me like a criminal and have to fingerprint me and I have to wait in one of those Disney World long lines.” That would be crazy. Why are you not experiencing all that those riches would afford for you? I think that's the life of many believers. They are rich in grace, but they're not living out. They’re living as if they're poor. That never leads to peace of heart. It never leads to healthy relationships. Never leads to hope and courage, it just doesn't.
Let’s go back to the devotional because you knew something was missing in our everyday lives. What was your hope for the people that did gain that perspective, that courage, that hope from having the gospel be presented to them everyday?
I knew that I needed it. I wrote it for me and then I gave it away because I knew I needed to start every day remembering who I am and what I've been given. Here's the impact: for example, in my marriage, if you don't understand that you really do have everything you need in Christ, you begin to ask the people around you to be your own personal Messiah, to hold your identity, to hold your hope, to be what they could never be. I'm married to a wonderful lady, but she's not the Messiah. If you forget what you've been given, then you try to control things that you cannot control. It has an immediate impact on your relationships and on the way that you approach every day. It's wonderful for me to remember that. The one who is my savior is also sovereign. The Bible says that he rules over everything for the sake of his people. That's amazing to me. I never enter a situation that somehow, some way isn't under the rulership of my savior. That's so comforting. It's just, it's mind boggling to me. I love when Jesus sends out the disciples, these guys are scared to death. They're going to carry this message of the Messiah, and he says two things: all authority is given to me on heaven and earth. I rule. And then he says, oh, and I am with you always. I will go with you wherever you go. I'll never send you someplace without going with you. The reliability of God’s promises are completely dependent on God’s sovereignty. You can only guarantee that you will deliver a promise in situations in which you have control. That’s the way it is. The reason God can guarantee his promises are true is because he controls the situations in which those promises need to be delivered. I can guarantee promises in my house, but I can't in the house next door because I have no control there. Those things bring peace to my heart. I don’t have to try to be somebody I’m not and do things I can’t.
Let’s talk about this idea of our thought lives because we're bumping up against it as we're talking. But I want to talk about really practically, how do we fix our minds on God and what is it exactly that you're thinking about when you choose to do that?
I think of a place in the Psalms where David's facing horrific things and he says, one thing I want to do is I want to run to the temple and behold the beauty of the Lord. What does he say? I must recalibrate my thinking or I'm in trouble. And the way I do that is I remember the beauty of the Lord, who he is, and what I am as his child. I counsel people all the time to wake up every morning and spend just a few minutes gazing upon the beauty of the Lord. Most of them say they don’t know how to do that. Well, Isaiah 40 is this amazing rift on God's glory. Go read that. Then I want to remind myself that what I've just considered forms my identity because that beauty has been poured down on me by grace. Now I've at least recalibrated the way I think. You wake up in the morning and you get flooded with all the responsibilities of the day, all the problems that are around you, and all the necessary tasks you have to do. We have to start our day by just focusing your mind on who God is, who you are as his child, and what you’re here to do. So what role does the Holy spirit play in this? Let's talk about the power and comfort that God has given us through him. Because I think sometimes we don't know where to put him. God knew that my need was so great that it was not enough just to forgive me, praise God for that. He literally unzipped me and got inside of me by his spirit because between the already of my conversion and not yet of my home calling, I'm still being matured and living in a dramatically broken world that does not function the way God intended. I can not be what I'm supposed to be. I need help, and so God sent a helper and I don't have to get an appointment because he actually lives within me. I mean, these are things so awesome for me. It's hard for me to wrap words around the glory of this sometimes because it is so awesome. We don't know how to get our heads around it, and so we don't. We miss this truth that's supposed to change absolutely everything. I understand as I face my day, that there is awesome, incalculable, divine power living inside of me. God's made me the temple where he lives, and so I'm never out there by myself. I have resources greater than I would ever have on my own. His greatest gift to me is himself. And that is so ridiculously counterintuitive. It's so dramatically different from the way I normally think about myself. I've got to remind myself of that every day.
What do you think keeps us from doing that? What keeps people from sitting in that? If it's that good, what keeps us from meeting every morning and from remembering every day what we have?
I think it’s a couple things. One thing is it’s nowhere enforced in the culture around us. The icon of Western culture is a self-made person. The Bible would teach us the self-made person is always poorly made because it takes a divine intervention, divine recreation, and divine rebuilding. But that's the icon. I'm not going to get this enforced at my workplace, maybe not by my extended family, in my neighborhood, in education, in politics, or in cultural entertainment. The second thing is I still have the artifacts of sin within me. What is the DNA of sin? It's self-reliance. What was the hook in the garden? It wasn't fruit. It was independence from God. And so I still have in me a bit of that inertia towards self-reliance. I want to independently be able to do this. So it's very easy to name yourself as okay and to name yourself as capable when you're not.
That’s what I found when I did all the research on the brain. I looked at it first through scripture and taught through scripture on it, but then I went to neuroscience and I saw all of the self-help and it was all about the hope that was in us. I remember thinking even if I didn’t believe in God, that would not do it for me. I know I fall short. That’s not something somebody has got to tell me. It happens everyday, almost every moment. Why is that such an effective lie?
Well, it's two responses. It's been reported, and I don’t know the reliability of this, but they say that one of the highest buying audiences of self-help books on Amazon or Barnes and Noble are Christians. I get that because a Christian would tend to be more serious about life and about the consequences of their behavior. If you just think of the Bible as an entrance and an exit and not as a living reality, then you're going to go elsewhere for help. Here's the second thing, and I think this is more fundamental. The way the gospel of Jesus Christ works is you have to accept the bad news before the good news means anything to you. And the bad news is that the biggest problems in my life are inside of me, not outside of me. The thing that I most need to be rescued from is myself. My problem is my own mind and my own heart, and until you humbly accept that I'm a person in need of help, you don't seek the wonderful help that's there in the Bible. I tweet the gospel every day, and this month I’ve been tweeting about the incarnation of the birth of Jesus. That story is deeply humbling, because if God would go to such an effort to do this miraculous thing where the son of God would actually become a baby and take on the human condition and live in this fallen world, I mean, it's just mind boggling how desperately incapable of helping ourselves must we be apart from that divine help. Even if I follow Jesus for a thousand years, the next day, I would need his grace as much as I did the first day. That shouldn’t discourage you, because his grace is a limitless fountain, and it will never run out. It never grows tired. He never grows weary. I am never disgusting to him. On the cross when Jesus dies, the greatest suffering he faces is relational. When the father turns his back on the son and Jesus cries out, “my God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Now here's what this means for me. Jesus took every shred of my rejection so that I would never ever again see the back of God's head. God loves me on my worst, stupid, most self-oriented day because of what Jesus has done. He will always greet me with arms of mercy and I will never outgrow my need for that. It would've been nice to be able to say I've outgrown that, but I haven't. Every day I need that. I need that mercy and it's mine and it will never end and God will never turn back. That changes you when you get ahold of that and it makes me sad so many people are looking for security someplace else or looking for identity someplace else in places it can't deliver. It makes me want to weep when this beautiful thing has been given to us. That's why I wrote the devotional.
Even as we're talking, I just feel this urgency of wanting people to be free. Wanting people to know God like this and realizing that so many days we miss what we could have. I love the bank account analogy. I feel like it's so accurate of what is ours and how crazy we are if we don't access it every chance we get. One of the things I talk about in this book is the idea that beauty and worship and delight can crumble our walls that we erect in our hearts. You are a poet, and you’ve wrote a new devotional that involves poetry. How has God used worship to connect you with him and to change you?
I think it begins with the creative world. I love what it says in Isaiah, “Holy, Holy, Holy is the Lord God almighty. The whole earth is filled with his glory. “ There's a way in which you can't get up in the morning without bumping into God because he's everywhere visible in his creation. God did that so that we would be drawn to the one who was a source of all this glory, all this beauty. I'm a bit of a museum rat and I stand in front of a big glorious painting and it always hits me that if this glory could be produced by a frail human being, how glorious is the God who gave him those gifts? How can you look at a painting without worshiping? How can you warm mashed potatoes with butter melting over then without worshiping? Because all of those came out of the mind of God and are there because of the goodness of God. The way that God uses beauty to draw us toward him is a very important thing. I want beauty in my life, not just because I like nice things, but because I want that beauty to help me to see beyond that beauty. Here’s another illustration: if I told my kids we were going to Disneyworld and I showed them all the pictures online and they got super excited, then on the way there we stop at the first sign that says Disneyworld 120 miles out and I said, “We’re here! Let’s unpack the car.” You would think I’m crazy. The sign points to the thing, but it’s not the thing. That’s what we do when we celebrate creation. We try to feed ourselves on the creation, when the creation was designed to point us to the creator who alone can satisfy our hearts. We're like a bunch of people, 120 miles from Disneyworld hoping that we can have a good time and the sign will never give us that. Why does God give me a relationship? That the relationship would remind me of my relationship to him. Everything in the creative world is a big finger pointing to him, but you can't stop at the sign. You'll never be satisfied. You'll be a bit crazy because it can't deliver what it's pointing to.
For the person listening right now who feels completely stuck in negative thought patterns and they believe there's not a way out, what would you say to encourage them?
I would say two things: God's word is a wonderful resource. It's not a dark, dusty book. The Psalms is a place to go that is honest about life, but gloriously hopeful. I also understand that my spiritual health is a community project. There are times I can't get out of my own head and I'm thankful for people in my life who will speak grace into my head and get help. Reach out and find people who you know, can help you to begin to establish some habits of control so that you begin to live in some of the riches that you've been given.
