Matt Chandler - For the Common Good

If you have your Bibles, go ahead and grab them: First Corinthians chapter 12. 1998 was a huge year in my life; in fact, I would say it changed the trajectory of my life. It was around '98 that I first heard John Piper preach for the first time ever, and I don’t know how to say it except that he melted my face off. I had just never heard anything like what he was saying. I had become a Christian at First Baptist Church of Texas City, Texas. It was a faithful Southern Baptist church that preached the Bible and sang hymns, and it had Sunday night church and Wednesday night prayer meetings, along with all the programs of our age, Jase, and all that. I have nothing negative to say; it was a great experience. It was in that place that God drew me to Himself, and I’ll be forever grateful. After my conversion, I became friends with a group of Assembly of God kids and a group of Church of Christ kids, which was wildly confusing for a Baptist kid. Yet, there was something in that dynamic that began to set the stage for where the Lord was taking me. In 1998, I heard John Piper preach a message at Passion where he stood up and asked the question: Is God for God or God for man? I was like, «He’s for me, ” along with most of the other people in that room. He was like, „You’re wrong, ” and if you’re like, „Surely he didn’t, ” you have not listened to a lot of Piper. So, Piper opened up a world to me—a world of theologians I knew nothing аbout: dead men in history who thought deeply about the things of God. If you’ve been around, you know my personality; I’m an awe-and-wonder kind of brother. So, I read everything John wrote and then started going back to the primary sources. This led me to a lot of Jonathan Edwards, which then got me to John Owen, which eventually led me to the Puritans. I was just devouring it, right? Southern Baptists firmly believed in the sufficiency of the Scriptures, which has shaped me unbelievably. My whole Christian experience has been that nothing outweighs the Bible in matters of life, practice, faith, or anything; the Word of God is what informs us and shapes us to understand God rightly and to interact with the world correctly. I still stand there; I have not ever moved from that place. In '98, I heard Piper and took a deep dive into what, if you know these words, we consider reformed soteriology. If you don’t, don’t worry about it; I’ll teach it another day. So, man, I’m all in on reformed soteriology. In '98, I was dating this cute little girl from East Texas; her name is Lauren. You just finished listening to her sing. My wife and I headed to India in 1998, and I saw some things there that I don’t even have time to unpack—just supernatural, crazy Jesus stuff right now. I mean, I just saw it. There was no room for doubt about whether this could be the devil or demons trying to deceive me. It was supernatural revelation, supernatural healing—it rocked my world. So, I flew back in; I was in school out in Abilene, and now I had to understand how this works and what it is. So, I went on what Lauren and I call the Great Quest of '98-'99. I started dragging my beautiful new East Texas First Baptist Longview girl to all these charismatic revivals, and I think „craziness“ might not be the right words; more like „craziness mania.“ So, I’m with Lauren, and she was in the last service, and we got to chuckle about this as I was preparing this week: I’m in this little revival, and everyone’s being slain in the spirit but me. I mean, literally everyone is on the floor but me. Here’s my thing: if the Spirit wants to slay me, I’m willing to be slain, but the old fella in the suit isn’t pushing me down! Alright, so I’m there, and what happens is that if you’ve never been in that environment, it’s me and the elders of that church—something like the Church of Emanuel or something like that. So now I’m the primary focus of the room because it’s a failure if the Spirit doesn’t get me. All these brothers are surrounding me, praying in tongues and praying over me, and Lauren starts to cry and leaves to sit in the parking lot, thinking that she’s going to lose me to this cult. Where are we going? Most of what I saw in the Great Quest of '98 and '99 was maniacal craziness that rejected the sufficiency of the Scriptures and believed they were hearing revelations from God that superseded the text. That’s what I kept finding, and it was in that space that I learned to reject that nonsense. I felt like a miner in a dark, cold mine, discovering this little thin thread of gold. I started to follow it, and I found a group of men and women who defined themselves as reformed charismatics. What? There are no reformed charismatics; those two theological concepts are opposed to one another! So, I began to kind of follow that down, chasing that line of gold, until I found what I believe to be the jackpot: scripturally serious, robust doctrinal belief inflamed with the power of the Holy Spirit—reformed charismatics! This isn’t new; I’ve taught on this for 15 years. We have…