Strategies for Standing Firm Through Coronavirus

And welcome to Family Life Today.

Thanks for joining us. This is the virtual edition of Family Life Today, as we are not side-by-side as we normally are, but we're separated as we're supposed to do. And Dave, I think this is a time when all of us are adjusting to a new normal.

We don't know how long this normal is going to be the new normal. And all of us are having to be reminded regularly of what we know is true because we forget or we doubt or we get distracted. And those reminders are important, aren't they?

Yeah. I mean, I got to tell you, I wake up every morning and the first thing I want to do, and I usually do this, is go to the Word of God. And I'm saying that because the first thing I don't want to do is go to the news. But my phone opens up and notifications are waiting for me just to catch up on what's happening in the world.

And it's pretty much bad news. And I'm telling you, a couple days I just couldn't resist and I had to see how many cases, how many deaths, what's going on in Michigan, what's going on in Little Rock, you name it. And I got to tell you, I found myself almost depressed. I was very discouraged, scared, fearful, worried about economy, future, the church. And I tell you, I've never experienced anything like it. I don't think any of us have.

Yeah. And Ann, it's one thing for us to have to try to figure this out for ourselves, but then when we're leading a family and we've got kids involved and we're thinking, I've got to help them make sense of this, and I'm not sure I'm making sense of it myself, you're talking to a lot of moms who are trying to figure that new rhythm out, aren't you? Yeah, I think it's hard too because we may be feeling anxious and scared, and I think our kids pick up on those things, just they read us and they see it and they feel it. And I agree with Dave, even with young kids, maybe they're around you all the time, but even to play worship music, the word for me right now is the most important thing in my life.

It's my stronghold and my anchor, and I tell you, when I'm not in it, I can just go to bad places. And so I think even memorizing scripture with our kids, maybe singing some praise songs together and teaching them, this is how I get my mind stayed on Christ. I think those practices could be really essential even in this time. I said to our church recently, I said, I'm going to give you a very simple verse to memorize, it's nine words long, and you and your kids, everybody should have this one memorized.

It's Psalm 56, I think it's verse 3, when I am afraid, I will trust in you. And that's just one of those things we need to have in the forefront of our thinking during these days. We're getting some help this week in trusting in the Lord and understanding what God is up to in the midst of the coronavirus from Dr. John Piper. John, welcome again to Family Life Today. Thank you.

It's an honor to be here. You have spent the better part of the last couple of weeks praying and meditating and writing and thinking about how we can look at and think rightly about our current moment and about the coronavirus and all that we're living through in these days. The audiobook and the ebook of what you've written are available on our website at familylifetoday.com for any of our listeners who would like to go and download those, they are available for free. The printed edition of the book will be available here in a few weeks. And there's information available on our website if listeners would like to order copies of this book. And let me just say, I think this is a book not just to get and read for yourself, but this is the kind of thing I want to be handing out to neighbors. I want to be passing on to others who are asking spiritual questions in this moment in a way that I haven't seen people asking spiritual questions in the last decade.

And John, speak to that. This does seem to be an unusual moment for us to be engaged evangelistically, at least in America. Do you think?

Yes. When everything is rosy and you're healthy and your family is healthy and your business is prospering, you are inclined to feel self-sufficient more than when you have cancer or coronavirus or the whole world seems to be collapsing around you. And so, yes, I think when people feel vulnerable, they are in touch with reality because they are vulnerable. We are not God, and we tend to feel like God when all is well. And so, I think this is a golden moment for us to speak into people's lives. My dad was an evangelist.

He's in heaven now, I believe. And he used to say, Johnny, it's a lot harder to get people lost than it is to get them saved. That may be an overstatement, but I knew exactly what he meant after all my years of ministry. And that would be true especially, I think, in the prosperous West, perhaps.

At least there's a unique kind of self-sufficiency here where we have so much available to us. And I would say God is helping people feel lost, helping people feel desperate, helping people feel like they really are. In other words, it's a reality check. It's a heavy dose of reality.

We're always vulnerable. I mean, just think of it. I go to bed at night and I lift up my arm like this and take my pulse and think, boom, boom, boom. That's pretty fast right now. I'm excited with you guys.

I take it and I think, any one of those, any one of those could just be my last. Just like that. I have zero control over that. Isn't that amazing? Amazing. And so nobody hardly, who does that? Who pauses, feels vulnerable, feels desperate, knows they're going to meet their maker any minute. Are they ready?

No, they're not. Let's get ready. He said, a Savior? I'm going to embrace the Savior. I'm going to sleep in peace. I'm going to get rid of all my guilt and all my condemnation. Yes, now I can sleep.

Who does that? But now, you don't have to take your pulse. You just have to look out the window. My pulse is gone.

This city is shut down. What's God up to? And he's up to a reality check. So, when we speak to people, I would think it's the most natural thing in the world to say, wow, easy to be afraid, isn't it? That makes you think about God, makes you think about death, makes you think about eternity, doesn't it? And if they say, no, I don't want to talk about that. Okay. But my guess is very few people are going to say that today.

So, yeah, it's a golden opportunity. You know, when 1 Peter 3.15 is quoted in good times, you know, when people ask you a reason for the hope that is in you, most of us feel kind of weird because nobody does. Right?

Why don't they? Because everybody's fine. That text was spoken into persecution and suffering. And if you're in the middle of suffering and persecution or suffering and disease and your hope is strong and your joy is undaunted and you're serving other people, then people might begin to say, hmm, hmm, what are you hoping in? Like you think this is going to turn around in a few weeks?

You think the economy's come roaring back and all your 401k is going to be restored? And you say, no, that's really not what I'm thinking. And then you can say the reason for the hope that is in you. One of the things you say in your book, John, is that God is calling us to repentance while there's still time.

What does that look like? Repentance, metanoia in the Bible means change of mind, change of heart. It's a transformation.

It's a turnaround. Its flip side is faith. Or I would say this, since Jesus is the one who used that more than anybody in the New Testament, what were the two big alternatives to that? And one was love God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength. And the other was whoever loves son or daughter more than me is unworthy of me. Whoever loves mother or father more than me is unworthy of me. So Jesus is saying love God with all your heart, love me more than you love anybody.

Those are the alternatives to unrepentance. So I think the answer is, and that repenting means bringing your life into alignment with the infinite value of Jesus. And when I say infinite value of Jesus, I mean value in his beauty as a person, an infinite, eternal, beautiful, perfect, morally glorious person. And I mean all the work that he did in dying for us and rising. I mean his reign today.

I mean his coming. The total reality of Jesus Christ is infinitely valuable, more valuable than life, more valuable than health. I mean Psalm 63 says the steadfast love of the Lord is better than life. So when people get to the point where Jesus and his love in their lives is better than health and better than life, they have now come to the goal of repentance. That's the essence of what God is calling for.

That's my prayer. When I bow in prayer, which I did again this morning, I ask God, Oh God, grant that millions of people would be stunned out of the slumbers of unbelief and brought into the experience of seeing the beauty and the glory, the sufficiency, the worth of Jesus Christ, and bring their whole life into alignment with his infinite worth. And I have to say, I was at the grocery store.

It's one of the few places I've been over the last two weeks. But I was at the grocery store and as I was checking out, I just asked the young woman who was doing the checkout, I said, What's your name? And she told me and I said, My wife and I just want to pray for those of you who are helping us.

Would that be okay? And right there in the checkout line, I just stopped and prayed for her that God would keep her safe and that he would keep her protected and thank God for her doing this. And John, it was interesting. That opened up the conversation. She started asking me about where I go to church and telling me about her grandmother who was a very godly woman.

And as she continued to check me out, we were able to engage very comfortably around spiritual issues and I gave her the website for our church and invited her to tune in and watch the Sunday service with us. We have some unprecedented opportunities here in this day to engage as I think we've never had before. That's awesome. Yeah. Well, may the Lord give us all grace to be that compassionate and that courageous.

I think that's a beautiful thing. You preached a sermon years ago. I don't know if you remember. You were preaching on Matthew 6 and you said in that sermon, I wake up anxious virtually every morning. For whatever reason, it's a very real experience that I hate and have to deal with every day.

I'm wondering if that's still true for you, if it's an increased anxiety that you're experiencing in these days and what you do with your own anxiety because we're all feeling it right now. Yeah, I think that's a thorn that I'm going to take to my grave. It's built into either my DNA or the way I was raised. I think it's a flaw.

I think it's a character flaw. Just like everybody's got different kinds of flaws and one of mine would be a proneness to feel guilty or feel anxious. In answer to your question, coronavirus has not made that worse because that's just frankly not where my anxieties come from. I'm not prone to be anxious about dying or about sickness or about the world coming to an end or about America becoming a footnote in the history of the world. Those do not cause me to be anxious. What causes me to be anxious is the possibility that I may not be a Christian, that I might be fake, that everything I've ever done might be a farce.

Those are horrible, horrible thoughts. Nevertheless, my warfare is the same, I think, as everybody's. And I take heart from the fact that the Bible says, when I am afraid, I will trust in you. Before I fear, I will trust in you and therefore I will never fear. I mean, we're not supposed to be afraid. It's a sin to fear if there's a promise that we don't have to be afraid. And yet, everybody's afraid and the Bible is so clear. When I am afraid, I will put my trust in you.

So that is a rhythm of warfare that happens to every single one of us. And Paul says at the end of his life, this is just so encouraging to me, you know, I have fought the good fight, I have finished the course, I've kept the faith. Henceforth, there's laid up for me a crown of glory waiting for me. And you're going to give it to everybody else who loves the appearing of the Lord. Well, I think what that means is, till the day he died, he was fighting for faith.

That's where the fight is. Every day, all day long, we fight for faith. And I think the way we fight is by the Word of God and the Spirit of God and prayer. We take promises, we preach them to ourselves, we call down the Holy Spirit by prayer upon those that the eyes of our hearts would be opened to see what is the hope of our calling and the greatness of our inheritance and the power at work in those who believe. And God comes, he sweetly comes in the midst of our early morning or late night anxieties, and he takes those promises like a balm and they break over us, they break over us with a peace that passes all understanding.

So good. I wanted to ask you, and it probably goes along with what you just said, as we talk to our kids who are fearful or who are anxious, who are maybe they're in high school or middle school questioning God's goodness. How do we help them understand God's goodness and love in the midst of this pandemic? Well, if my grandchildren could visit me, they came over the other day but they didn't come in the house, and my answer is if I had kids at home, I would be telling them stories from the Bible, and then some from church history, but especially the Bible, stories in which it is crystal clear that God is sovereign, God is good, God is wise, God does not keep us from pain, he does not keep us from hard times, he brings us into them in order to do good.

And then you tell them stories, and here are the stories I would tell them. I would tell them the story of Joseph in the Old Testament, right? So 13 years, I would actually graph it, I drew a graph of this one time for my church of how horrible life became for Joseph, sold into slavery, lied about, left in prison, and after 13 years, the reason becomes clear. He's going to be made Vice President of Egypt and save the people of God from starvation. He didn't have a clue that's what God was doing. For all those years, he didn't know what God was doing.

I think kids will take hold of that and love that. Same thing with Ruth, the story of Ruth in the Old Testament. She loses her husband, she loses two sons, she loses one daughter-in-law, she loses her country, all owing to a famine. She comes home and says, the Lord has dealt bitterly with me, and it looks like everything is ruined. Her life is totally ruined, and it's not.

It's not ruined. She's got Ruth. Ruth is going to bear a child, the child is going to be related to her, and the child is going to be the ancestor of Jesus. Same thing with Esther, same thing with Jesus. And Jesus is of course the most important one to tell kids. I remember one time somebody asked a group, who killed Jesus? And they said, Pilate killed Jesus. The soldiers killed Jesus. No, the crowds crucified him. They killed Jesus. No, his father killed him. I mean, jaws dropped.

Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. It was the Lord who bruised him. It pleased him to put him to grief. And you look at your kids with their jaws dropped, and you say, he did it for us. He did it for us, and he raised him from the dead, and he reigns in heaven today. So all that horrible experience was planned, scripted by God in the Old Testament for his son to suffer and die.

And then I would bring it right into their lives with Romans 8, 32. He who did not spare his own son but gave him up for us all, will he not with him freely give us all things? You say to your kids, what are the all things that God will give us since he didn't spare Jesus? He promises to give us all things because he didn't spare Jesus. And then they give out their answers, and you say, let's look at the verse that follows. And the verse that follows is what can separate us from tribulation or distress or persecution or famine or nakedness.

And then you get this word, no, we are being killed all day long. We are counted as sheep to be slaughtered. That's one of the things that he gives us. And while your kids are saying, how's that a gift, you say, no, in all these things, we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. We've got to teach our kids the radical understanding of the sovereignty of God in the midst of suffering, that God plans painful things for his children for their good. If they don't have that category, they'll probably give up on the faith. That's not just our kids.

I think all of us need to be reminded just of that. Gorgeous little kids. They're just desperate little kids. Please, Daddy, please help me understand what's going on.

Yeah. John, talk to my neighbor. He's scared to death. He doesn't believe in God.

He thinks God is the cause of all this evil in the world. And he wakes up stricken with fear. And I get to walk across the front yard and stand six feet away. And I get to share some words because he's asking questions even though he's mad and he's scared. What would you say?

So much of what I would say would depend on what I know about him and what we've said before and what he's looking like and feeling like right now. I think since he's thinking about God being a bad God, not denying that he is God, I would probably go to the bigger issue than the world's issue of suffering and say, You know, in God's mind, a thousand years is as a day and a day is as a thousand years. And eternity is going to be very long. And you and I both are going to be there very soon. Even if this pandemic goes away tomorrow, we're going to die and we're going to spend eternity somewhere. And God is a God that is just and merciful. He has shown his justice in judgment and he has shown his mercy in sending Jesus into the world. And I want to spend eternity with you. And there is one way that we can be together in this. And that is for you to receive Jesus as your savior and Lord and the treasure of your life. That's how good God is that he would suffer what the cross suffered. I'd go there and in a sense I would deflect the other issues.

Now, if he wants to circle back, I'm happy to do that. I've got all kinds of biblical things to say and I think you can build out from the cross and from the core of the gospel to those other things. Because God oversaw the crucifixion of his son, which was worse than the coronavirus. And if he oversaw the crucifixion of his son, which is worse than the coronavirus, then God can be a good God even in overseeing the coronavirus. But so much of what I would say to people in a situation like that are going to depend on every moment, how they're responding, what they're looking like, what they're saying.

But that would be my guess of how I would do it. John, we have just been through the celebration of the resurrection of Christ as the church around the world. This is a unique season to be reflecting on his resurrection and the hope of the gospel. How should this recent celebration of the resurrection encourage us and inform us to live in the midst of the coronavirus this week? Well, the Bible makes explicit the connection between the resurrection of Jesus and the resurrection of believers. If the spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, then he who raised Christ Jesus from the dead will give life to your mortal bodies also. So I think at this moment when we all feel our mortality more than we usually do, it's perfect to say we just celebrated Easter. In Christ, Easter is going to happen to every single person that believes.

And make that connection for people and the opposite connection. If you reject Christ, you enter into eternity without Christ. If you embrace Christ, then your body is raised from the dead. You're given a glorious body like his glorious body, Peter says in 1 Peter 3.21.

And you live with Christ in joy forever and ever. So the line between Easter or the resurrection of Jesus and his triumph over death, that line to our hope and our resurrection is explicit and clear and unbreakable in the Bible. We have hope for our resurrection precisely because Jesus was raised from the dead. And I think it is right to draw people's attention to eternal hope, not just temporal hope. If you were to ask me, should we care about people's temporal well-being as opposed to their eternal well-being, the sentence that I have used now for 10 years is Christians care about all suffering, especially eternal suffering. Or Christians care about saving all life, especially eternal life.

Or Christians care about all injustice, especially injustice against God. I think it's right to draw people's attention in the midst of temporal suffering to eternal hope. You know, when Christians back in the plagues, especially in the first two centuries, became risk-taking, loving caregivers for those who were dying when nobody else would, the reason that made such an impact on the world is two reasons, not just one. One reason was they had answers to people's biggest questions. And the other reason was they were willing to risk their lives to bring people some measure of relief. And the answers they had was, you know, if you die in the next few days, I can tell you how to be happy forever in God. There is a way that God has made for you to come home to him, not as an enemy and a judge, but as a friend.

And that news made a big difference. I mean, people know when there's no more hope in this world. And if the only hope you have to offer people is this world, then you haven't got a very good message. And that is the reason the Easter story is the greatest story of all time. It gives resurrection power to people that have no power to have joy they could never manufacture in this world, to have life they could never manufacture in this world. What a grace-giving, life-giving message we have to offer.

We have the answer, and everyone is looking for that answer. So let's use this opportunity to bring that to the world. And John, you've given us a tool to be able to help do that with this book that you've written. Thank you for the last two days. They have been an encouragement and full of hope for me, I'm sure for our listeners. And thanks for the book. We're so grateful to have you here on Family Life Today. Thank you.

I'll pray that with you, that God will break into many people's lives. And let me just encourage our listeners once again. Your book, which is called Coronavirus and Christ, we're making that available free for Family Life Today listeners. You can go to our website, familylifetoday.com, and you can download the audiobook or the e-book. The print edition of this book is going to be available here in a couple of weeks. There's information on our website about how you can order a copy of the print book once it's available. But if you'd like to get the audiobook or the e-book now, it's available for free. And thank you, Dr. Piper and the folks at Desiring God, for making this available for Family Life Today listeners.

We're grateful for that. Find the link on our website at familylifetoday.com so you can get the audiobook or the e-book for free. There's also a link on our website that will give you information about other resources we're making available here at Family Life. Family Life TV, a weekly presentation that's available online. You can find that at familylifetoday.com. And our team has been putting together resources to help your family make the most of this season of confinement and social distancing.

And I know every couple of days folks are looking for new resources, new things to do to engage with the kids. Go to familylifetoday.com. There's a link there to what we're calling Not Cancelled because family is not cancelled, loving your neighbors is not cancelled.

There's a lot that's not cancelled in the midst of the coronavirus. So again, go to familylifetoday.com and all the information you need is available there. Now tomorrow we want to talk about the importance of friendships, healthy, thriving friendship relationships.

And we live in a culture that is chronically lonely. Kelly Needham is going to join us to talk about how we deal with loneliness and how we pursue friendships, which are more important now than maybe ever, right? So we'll talk about that tomorrow. I hope you can be with us for that. I want to thank our engineer today, Keith Lynch, along with our entire broadcast production team. On behalf of our hosts, Dave and Ann Wilson, I'm Bob Lapine. We'll see you back tomorrow for another edition of Family Life Today. Family Life Today is a production of Family Life of Little Rock, Arkansas, a crew ministry. Help for today. Hope for tomorrow.