Neither Do I Condemn You

John 7:53-8:11
[[They went each to his own house, but Jesus went to the Mount of Olives. Early in the morning he came again to the temple. All the people came to him, and he sat down and taught them. The scribes and the Pharisees brought a woman who had been caught in adultery, and placing her in the midst they said to him, “Teacher, this woman has been caught in the act of adultery.Now in the Law Moses commanded us to stone such women. So what do you say?” This they said to test him, that they might have some charge to bring against him. Jesus bent down and wrote with his finger on the ground. And as they continued to ask him, he stood up and said to them, “Let him who is without sin among you be the first to throw a stone at her.” And once more he bent down and wrote on the ground. But when they heard it, they went away one by one, beginning with the older ones, and Jesus was left alone with the woman standing before him. Jesus stood up and said to her, “Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?” She said, “No one, Lord.” And Jesus said, “Neither do I condemn you; go, and from now on sin no more.”]]
This message is the kind I may give once every decade or so. The reason it's so rare is that the situation with our text is so rare. In most of your Bibles, you notice that John 7:53 to John 8:11 is either set off in brackets or is in a footnote. The reason for this is that most New Testament scholars do not think it was part of the Gospel of John when it was first written, but was added centuries later.
For example…
  • Don Carson, who teaches at Trinity, and is in my view one of the best New Testament scholars in the world, writes, "Despite the best efforts . . . to prove that this narrative was originally part of John's Gospel, the evidence is against [them], and modern English versions are right to rule it off from the rest of the text (NIV) or to relegate it to a footnote (RSV)." (The Gospel According to John, 1991, p. 333)
  • Bruce Metzger, one of the world's great authorities on the text of the New Testament until his death in 2002: "The evidence for the non-Johannine origin of the periscope of the adulteress is overwhelming." (The Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament, 1971, p. 219)
  • Leon Morris: "The textual evidence makes it impossible to hold that this section is an authentic part of the Gospel." (The Gospel According to John, 1971, p. 882)
  • Andreas Köstenberger: "This represents overwhelming evidence that the section is non-Johannine." (John, 2004, p. 246)
  • And Herman Ridderbos: The evidences "point to an unstable tradition that was not originally part of an ecclesiastically accepted text." (The Gospel of John, 1997, p. 286)
I think they are right. And this gives us a chance to spend a little while on the branch of Biblical Studies behind these judgments called Textual Criticism, and its implications for the trustworthiness and authority of the Scriptures. So let me summarize the reasons these scholars give for thinking this the story of the woman taken in adultery was not originally part of John's Gospel, and then give some general thoughts about the science of Textual Criticism that helps make sense of the arguments.

Reasons This Section Isn't Original to John's Gospel

The evidence goes something like this:
  1. The story is missing from all the Greek manuscripts of John before the fifth century.
  2. All the earliest church fathers omit this passage in commenting on John and pass directly from John 7:52 to John 8:12.
  3. In fact, the text flows very nicely from 7:52 to 8:12 if you leave out the story and just read the passage as though the story were not there.
  4. No Eastern church father cites the passage before the tenth century when dealing with this Gospel.
  5. When the story starts to appear in manuscript copies of the Gospel of John, it shows up in three different places other than here (after 7:36; 7:44; and 21:25), and in one manuscript of Luke, it shows up after 21:38.
  6. Its style and vocabulary is more unlike the rest of John's Gospel than any other paragraph in the Gospel.
Now saying all that assumes a lot of facts that many of you simply don't have at your fingertips. And nobody expects you to. This is a hugely technical field of scholarship that at the upper levels requires not only the ability to read ancient languages, but the ability to read them in kinds of ancient handwritten scripts that are very demanding. So let me give you just enough so that you can make sense of these reasons.

The Science of Textual Criticism


The New Testament that we know was originally written in Greek. The first printed Greek New Testament—that came off a printing press—was published by Erasmus in 1516. It turned the world upside down. If you want a great glimpse of this period and the heroism it produced, read David Daniell's biography of William Tyndale.
This means that for 1500 years the manuscripts of the biblical books were passed down to us through handwritten copies. This is how we have access to the actual words that the New Testament writers wrote with their very hands. None of those first, original manuscripts is known to exist. Which is probably just as well, since we would probably turn it into an idol and charge money for people come worship.
So the books of the New Testament were preserved for us by faithful, hardworking copyists. Some of these copies were in a script called uncials (referring to manuscripts with all capital Greek letters), others were in a script called minuscule (referring to manuscripts with small Greek letters). A smaller number are called papyri because they are very early and written on the special paper-like material made from the Papyrus plant that was prevalent in the Nile Delta. One last group of manuscripts is the lectionaries—which were collections of texts for reading in public worship.

What's Simply Staggering

Now here is what's amazing. The abundance of these manuscripts of the New Testament, or parts of the New Testament, as compared to the number of manuscripts for all other ancient works is simply staggering.
  • There are 10 existing manuscripts of Julius Caesar's Gallic Wars (composed between 58 and 50 B.C.). And all of these date from the tenth century or later.
  • There are 20 manuscripts of Livy's Roman History written roughly during the time when Jesus was alive.
  • Only two manuscripts exist for Tacitus's Histories and the Annals which were composed around A.D. 100—one from the ninth and one from the eleventh century.
  • There are only eight manuscripts of the History of Thucydides who lived 460-400 B.C.
Compare those numbers with the manuscripts and partial manuscripts for the New Testament. These numbers are from the Institute for New Testament Textual Research in Muenster, Germany, which is the most authoritative collection of such data in the world. There are 322 uncial texts, 2,907 minuscule texts, 2,445 lectionary portions, and 127 papyri, for a total of 5,801 manuscripts. These are all hand-written copies of the New Testament or parts of the New Testament preserved in libraries around the world and now captured electronically. No other ancient book comes close to this kind of wealth of diverse preservation.

Problems and Solutions

What that wealth does is create problems and solutions at the same time. These copies do not all agree on what the wording was in the original manuscripts. So the more manuscripts you have, the more variations you find. On the other hand, the more manuscripts you have, the more control you have over which readings are the original ones. The more manuscripts you have the more variations you find, and yet the more they tend to be self-correcting.
For example, if you had only two ancient manuscripts of the Gospel of John and one has the story of the woman taken in adultery and the other doesn't, you would be hard put to choose. But if you have a hundred manuscripts of John, even though you may find more variations, you will be able to tell by the number and age and geographical diversity of the manuscripts whether the story was there or not. This is what the science of Textual Criticism has done with hundreds of variations in the manuscripts.
Here's the way F. F. Bruce put it a generation ago: "If the great number of manuscripts increases the number of scribal errors, it increases proportionately the means of correcting such errors, so that the margin of doubt left in the process of recovering the exact original wording is . . . in truth remarkably small" (The New Testament Documents, p. 19).

No Doctrine Threatened

But what is most significant for the reliability and authority of the New Testament is that the variations that Textual Critics are unsure of are not the kind that would change any Christian doctrine. For example, in our passage from John 7:53–8:11, no truth that this Gospel teaches is changed by omitting this story. Bruce says, "The variant readings about which any doubt remains among textual critics of the New Testament affects no material question of historic fact or of Christian faith and practice" (The New Testament Documents, p. 20).
Nothing on this score has changed in the last generation since F. F. Bruce wrote in 1943, except, perhaps, that people like Bart Ehrman of the University of North Carolina, have become very popular in questioning the reliability of our New Testament to give us what the original authors wrote.

Reason to Worship God

In 2006, Paul D. Wegner reaffirmed F. F. Bruce's assessment (A Student's Guide To Textual Criticism of the Bible, Downers Grove: InterVarsity): "It is important to keep in perspective the fact that only a very small part of the text is in question. . . . Of these, most variants make little difference to the meaning of any passage."
Then he closes his book by quoting Fredric Kenyon: "It is reassuring at the end to find that the general result of all these discoveries and all this study is to strengthen the proof of the authenticity of the Scriptures, and our conviction that we have in our hands, in substantial integrity, the veritable Word of God" (Frederic G. Kenyon, The Story of the Bible, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1967), p. 113, quoted in Wegner, p. 301).
So when I agree with the vast majority of scholars that the story of the woman taken in adultery was not in the Gospel of John, you should not think: "O my everything is up for grabs now." Or: "How can I count on any text?" On the contrary, you can be thankful that God has, in his sovereign providence over the transmission process for 2,000 years, ordered things so that the few uncertainties that remain alter no doctrine of the Christian faith. That is really astonishing when you think about it, and we should worship God because of it.

What's a Preacher to Do?

Now the question is: What should I, the preacher, do with this story? Both Don Carson and Bruce Metzger think the story probably happened. In other words, they think this is a real event from Jesus's life, and the story circulated and later was put in the Gospel of John. Metzger says, "The account has all the earmarks of historical veracity" (Textual Commentary, p. 220). And Carson says, "There is little reason for doubting that the event here described occurred" (The Gospel According to John, p. 333).
Perhaps. I would like to think so. Who doesn't love this story? But that does not give it the authority of Scripture. So what I will do is take its most remarkable point and show that it is true on the basis of other parts of Scripture, and so let this story not be the basis of our authority, but an echo and a pointer to our authority, namely, the Scriptures, that teach what it says.

The Most Remarkable Point

The most remarkable point of this story is that Jesus exalts himself above the Law of Moses, changes its appointed punishment, and reestablishes righteousness on the foundation of grace. I don't doubt that this is why the story was preserved. It is an amazing story. Let me show you where I get that lesson and why I think it is a faithful echo of the rest of the New Testament.
The woman is caught in adultery and brought to Jesus. In verses 4–5, the scribes and Pharisees put Jesus to the test. We have seen this before in the Gospels. This has the ring of truth. Here's what they say, "Teacher, this woman has been caught in the act of adultery. Now in the Law Moses commanded us to stone such women. So what do you say?" So this is a blatant test to see if Jesus will contradict the Law.

Pharisees Taking Aiming at Jesus

The law said, "If a man is found lying with the wife of another man, both of them shall die" (Deuteronomy 22:22; see Leviticus 20:10). There is already something fishy going on here that only the woman is brought forward. There is no such thing as adultery where only one party is guilty. But there she is and no man. So how committed are these scribes and Pharisees really to the law? Or is the law a pretext for their prejudice against Jesus?
Verse 6 makes explicit what their motives were, and so we don't expect a great deal of justice: "This they said to test him, that they might have some charge to bring against him." They were using her, and using the law, to get rid of this troublemaker.

The Law Fulfilled in Love

In verse 7, Jesus says, "Let him who is without sin among you be the first to throw a stone at her." Now of course, that won't work as a basis for social justice. No criminals would be brought to justice if judges had to be sinless. That's why I said Jesus is going to reestablish righteousness. He's going to do it on the foundation of grace. For now there is zero grace, zero humility, zero compassion. Which means there is zero law-keeping.
Throughout the Gospels, we see Jesus standing against the Pharisees' view of the law and saying in effect, "Go and learn what this means, 'I desire mercy, and not sacrifice'" (Matthew 9:13; 12:2). Or: "If on the Sabbath a man receives circumcision, so that the law of Moses may not be broken, are you angry with me because on the Sabbath I made a man's whole body well?" (John 7:23). In other words, "the Law is fulfilled in one word: Love your neighbor as you love yourself" (Galatians 5:14; cf. Matthew 7:12).

Jesus Reestablishing Righteousness

So Jesus forced them to expose their own misuse of the law. They all walked away. The point is not that judges and executioners must be sinless. The point is that righteousness and justice should be founded on a gracious spirit, and if it's not, what you get is the heartlessness and hypocrisy of Pharisaism. That's the point throughout the Gospels, not just here.

When they are all gone, Jesus ends the story saying to the woman, "Neither do I condemn you; go, and from now on sin no more" (recall John 5:14). Not: Neither do I condemn you, so it doesn't matter if you commit adultery. But: I am reestablishing righteousness in your life—and the for Pharisees, if they will have it—on the basis of an experience of grace. Don't commit adultery any more. Not mainly because you fear stoning. But because you have met God, and have been rescued by his grace—saved by grace!

Come for Grace—And Sin No More

The story may not belong to John's Gospel. In fact, the story may never have happened. But this point of the story is unshakably true. This is the pervasive message of the New Testament. Jesus exalted himself above the Law. He wrote it! Jesus altered some of its sanctions. He pointed to its main goal of Christ-exalting love. And he reestablished righteousness on the basis of an experience of grace.
The story points us to the message of the whole New Testament: We are called to be holy as God is holy. God hates sin. But pursuing holiness without a profound experience of grace in our own lives produces hypocrisy and doctrinaire cruelty. Jesus came into the world to provide that grace through his cross, and to establish holiness, righteousness, and justice on the foundation of our experience of his grace. So come to him for grace, and set your face to sin no more.

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Sign In | Cart (Empty) | Contact | Support DG Desiring God International Home Resource Library Blog Store Events About Us Home / Resource Library / Sermons / Praying in the Closet and in the Spirit Praying in the Closet and in the Spirit January 03, 2010 | by John Piper | Scripture: Matthew 6:1-15 | Topic: Prayer Subscribe to... Watch: Full Length Listen: Full Length Excerpt Download Click To Play This is the first Sunday of our annual, year-beginning, Prayer Week. The very fact that we have such a thing as a Prayer Week raises the question I want to deal with today. But the question is much bigger than Prayer Week. The question is the relationship between discipline and freedom and spontaneity in prayer. Discipline By “discipline,” I mean planning to do certain things in regard to prayer, like… have a Prayer Week, or pray for before meals, or pray before an elders meeting, or kneel and pray in your wedding right after your vows, or at the beginning of a sermon, or early in the morning before breakfast going down in the basement nook with the space heater running, or with your spouse, just before you go to bed at night, or over the lunch hour in your cubicle, or on Tuesday and Friday mornings at church, or three times a day on your knees like Daniel (Daniel 6:10), or seven times a day like the psalmist (Psalm 119:164), or in the watches of the night (Psalm 119:148), or during and after your read your Bible in the morning. I call these “disciplines” of prayer because they don’t just pop out of you. You think about them, and decide they are a good thing to do, and then you intentionally do them. There is a certain measure of intentionality. Some people are very intentional, and we call them “disciplined.” And others are somewhat intentional. And others are not very intentional at all. And there are hundreds of gradations in between. We are all different. Freedom Alongside this, we think of “spontaneity.” Sometimes we use the word “freedom” to distinguish the difference from discipline. But I don’t want to put freedom alongside discipline because that would imply that there can’t be freedom in discipline. Which is not true. You can plan to pray in your wedding, and work out all the details down to how you will help her with her wedding dress, and hold each others’ hands, and yet, in that moment, feel an overwhelming, joyful, unfettered freedom of spirit—which means, you are doing just what you want to be doing and you are loving doing it. That’s what I mean by “freedom”—doing a good thing and loving doing it as you do it. The same is true for everyone of those disciplined acts I mentioned. In those acts of discipline, there can be wonderful freedom and joy. But it is also true that, because something is planned and we do it with some intentionality, we might also wind up doing it whether we enjoy it or not. You might be so light-headed when you kneel to pray at your wedding that you would just like for his moment to be over, and the sooner the better. This is not what we usually call “freedom.” You are not enjoying this moment, and can hardly compute what the pastor is saying. Or you might plan to pray with your roommates each night, and then have the joy go right out of the act because of tensions in the room. Or you might continue the tradition of praying before meals, and drift so far from God that the prayers become empty words, and they are done more like a machine than lover. Which would not be freedom. So I don’t put freedom alongside discipline as distinct from it. It can be wonderfully and powerfully present in any act of discipline. That’s what we long for. Spontaneity But alongside disciplined praying, like the ones I mentioned, I do put spontaneity. This is different from discipline. “Spontaneous” means that you didn’t plan it, but it rises up in your heart, and you do it without any specific earlier plan or intentionality. Something in the situation, or from the Holy Spirit, awakens the desire to pray. There is intention, but it happens in the moment spontaneously. You might… whisper a thank-you to God after a close call on the highway, or ask God for help in the middle of an exam, or confess to God your sin after saying something hurtful to a friend, or pray out in church during one of our congregational prayer times, or praise God for a beautiful sunset, or silently ask him for wisdom in the middle of a difficult phone conversation, or ask for strength when you are ready to drop and have another task to do, or pray for a missionary when you open his email and realize he needs help right now, or stop several times during an elder meeting to thank God and seek his guidance on some difficult matter facing the church. None of this is specifically planned. It is spontaneous. We tend to feel most free in our spontaneous praying, and often not as free in our disciplined, planned praying. A Swing of the Pendulum? So my question is: What does the Bible say about discipline and spontaneity and freedom in prayer? I was drawn to this topic this year because my sense is that, at least in the part of the evangelical church that I watch most closely, I think there is a swing of the pendulum from discipline to spontaneity in the name of gospel freedom. In other words, there is a concern to be gospel-driven, not discipline-driven. And this is often put in terms of legalism versus freedom. Or law versus grace. Overall, I think this way of thinking is a very good sign. If we don’t live on the gospel—that is, on the work of Christ for us on the cross—all our praying will indeed become a bondage and a stench in God’s nose. A Legalism of Resisting Discipline? On the other hand, it is possible to be a half-biblical person, and get real excited about the freedom and spontaneity of the gospel, and lose touch with the place that God has assigned to discipline, or intentionality. Our experience with God may be so shallow that the only way we have of conceiving of discipline is in terms of legalism—as though any intentionality that drives you to do a thing when you don’t feel like it can only be a work of the law, or an act of merit, or a way of earning salvation, or a strategy to get God on your side. And indeed, any act of discipline, no matter how good, may be just that. But what some fail to realize is that steadfast opposition to discipline may reflect a heart of legalism also. It is possible to turn any act or any resistance to an act into a legal performance that fails the gospel test. Which means that whether you are a person who leans toward discipline or a person who leans toward spontaneity, you are just as liable to trust in your own righteousness—your righteousness of discipline, or your righteousness of spontaneity—rather than Christ’s righteousness. The Heart of the Gospel The heart of the gospel is that Christ died for our sins (1 Corinthians 15:3). That is shorthand for saying that the only way to be right with God is on the basis of who Christ is and what Christ has done, not who you are and what you have done. Or another way to say the gospel is this: God’s being 100% for you is based on Christ alone, which we receive and enjoy by faith alone. You can’t get God any more on your side than he is on the basis of Christ alone received by faith alone. The biblical basis is 2 Corinthians 5:21: “God made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.” He takes our sin. We become his righteousness. And that happens not by our doing a few righteous works—like disciplined praying or like the anti-discipline of spontaneous prayer. It happens by faith in Christ alone. As Paul says in Philippians 3:9, I want to be “found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which comes through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God that depends on faith.” The Dangers of Discipline and Spontaneity So when it comes to prayer and our standing with God, discipline counts for nothing, and resistance to discipline counts for nothing, but only faith working through love (Galatians 5:6). And that faith may be expressed in love through acts of discipline, or through warning against legalistic discipline. And that faith may be compromised by turning disciplined prayer into performance to get God on your side, or by turning the warning against legalist discipline into a performance to get God on your side. The opposite of legalism is not spontaneity. And the opposite of faith is not discipline. Spontaneity may be legalistic. And discipline may be an act of faith. Praying Both in the Closet and in the Spirit So let’s let the Bible teach us about the discipline of prayer and the spontaneity and freedom of prayer. I titled this message “Praying in the Closet and in the Spirit.” And the point of the title is to say that both are good and needed. The text from Matthew 6 refers to prayer in our closet, or our inner room. The texts that refer to praying “in the Spirit” are Ephesians 6:18 and Jude 1:20. Ephesians 6:18: “Pray at all times in the Spirit, with all prayer and supplication. To that end keep alert with all perseverance, making supplication for all the saints.” Jude 1:20: “But you, beloved, build yourselves up in your most holy faith and pray in the Holy Spirit.” Spontaneity in the Spirit What does it mean to pray “in the Spirit”? There is a good clue in 1 Corinthians 12:3, where Paul says, “No one speaking in the Spirit of God ever says ‘Jesus is accursed!’ and no one can say ‘Jesus is Lord’ except in the Holy Spirit.” It seems clear to me that speaking “in the Spirit” means speaking under the guidance of the Spirit, or energized and helped by the Spirit. That’s why no one can say “Jesus be accursed” when speaking “in the Spirit.” And no one can say, “Jesus is Lord” (and mean it) unless he is speaking “in the Spirit.” So I take it that praying “in the Spirit” means praying under the guidance and with the help and energy of the Spirit. The Spirit is shaping our prayers and helping us pray. This is the way we pray when we are living on the gospel. This is the prayer-counterpart to faith in the gospel. When we are trusting God to love us and accept us and help us for Christ’s sake alone, the Holy Spirit is at work. He moves in and through that faith. How the Gospel Leads to Spontaneous Prayer The key verse is Galatians 3:5: “Does he who supplies the Spirit to you and works miracles among you do so by works of the law, or by hearing with faith?” The answer is that God supplies the Spirit by hearing with faith. That is, the Spirit moves in our lives and helps us pray and do everything else God calls us to do, not by being coerced by works, but because we are trusting God on the basis of Christ alone for this help. We don’t work our way into the Spirit. We trust God that, because of Christ—because of the blood and righteousness of Christ—the Spirit comes to help us and guide us. This is how the gospel relates to our praying in the Spirit. We don’t deserve this help from the Spirit. How do we get it? By works or by faith? Galatians 3:5 says by faith. We look to God, not as our enemy or as a frustrated father who can never be pleased, but as our Father who is 100% for us because of Christ alone. Therefore, we trust him, that because of Christ (his death and righteousness), he will give us the Spirit—and everything else we need. That is how we pray “in the Spirit.” That is what it means to be gospel-sustained. That is gospel-praying. Discipline in the Closet Now, what about praying in your closet—in your inner room? Jesus says in Matthew 6:5–6, When you pray, you must not be like the hypocrites. For they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and at the street corners, that they may be seen by others. Truly, I say to you, they have received their reward. 6 But when you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret. And your Father who sees in secret will reward you. Jesus says in verse 6: “Go to your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret.” Now, to go to your room and shut the door requires some movement. You have to be intentional about it. To leave people and find a private place, where you won’t be heard by others, takes some effort. Jesus says this is good. Do this. This simple command stands for a hundred ways you may plan to pray or be disciplined. This is just one: Be sure to make part of your praying the private prayer where it is just you and God. Take whatever steps necessary to secure this kind of praying in your life. And if this kind of intentionality can be a fruit of the gospel, so can the other kinds that the Bible talks about. How the Gospel Leads Us to Disciplined Prayer And my point is that this intentionality—this discipline of private prayer where no one else can hear you—is indeed a fruit of the gospel. It is a fruit of faith in God’s love for us on the basis of Christ alone. You can see this in three simple ways. 1) Obeying Our Savior Gospel-based faith trusts Christ, so that if he tells us that something is good for us, we believe him and do it. We have no reason to doubt his word. He died for us to prove that he and his Father are 100% for us. So if he says go to your room and pray to the Father, we trust him—not to make him be on our side, but because he is on our side. 2) Desiring to Receive More Gospel-based faith has tasted and seen that the Lord is good and is always eager to receive as much of Christ as we can. So when he bids us go to the closet to be rewarded by our Father, we go with great expectation that he has a gift for us—more of himself. In the gospel, we have seen that not only is Christ the basis of all we need, he is the sum of all we need. Because of what we have seen in the work of Christ, we have fallen out of love with the praise of men, and now crave the surpassing value of Christ. We come to the closet to have all that God is for us in Christ. He is our reward. That’s what faith does because of the gospel. It seeks more of Christ, more of God in private prayer. It’s not what man can give that satisfies us, but the reward of God himself. That’s blood-bought, gospel faith. 3) Knowing All Our Needs Are Met Finally, because of the gospel—because Christ died for us—we know that everything we need has been purchased for us. “He who did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all, how will he not also with him graciously give us all things?” (Romans 8:32). “All the promises of God find their Yes in him” (2 Corinthians 1:20). In other words, every answer to prayer that would be good for us, Christ purchased by his blood. We did not and cannot purchase them. So when we go to our closet, we are not going to make a purchase. We are not going to negotiate. We are going because God has ordained that what Christ obtained for us, we receive by asking. Intentionality Rooted in the Gospel If you were starving, and the food of life were in a locked container, and Christ died to open the container, you would not be a legalist if you walked five miles and stood all day stood in line to receive your food with tears of expectancy and gratitude. Knowing that he had absolutely secured your food at the cost of his life would make you confident and humble and grateful, but it would not make you say, “I don’t need to stand in line. I don’t believe in such discipline.” “I’ll just wait till it spontaneously falls into my mouth.” No. There is simple discipline. Simple intentionality rooted in the gospel. Ask and you will receive. Seek and you will find. Knock and the door will be opened (Matthew 7:7). “When you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret. And your Father who sees in secret will reward you” (Matthew 6:5–6). For More of Jesus For the sake of your own soul. For the sake of your family. For the sake of his church. For the sake of your vocation. For the sake of the nations. Plan this in 2010. Be intentional about this. Because Christ died for you, and through prayer God will give you what you need—mainly more of himself. © Desiring God Permissions: You are permitted and encouraged to reproduce and distribute this material in any format provided that you do not alter the wording in any way and do not charge a fee beyond the cost of reproduction. For web posting, a link to this document on our website is preferred. Any exceptions to the above must be approved by Desiring God. Please include the following statement on any distributed copy: By John Piper. © Desiring God. 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