John Piper, Future Grace (Sisters, OR: Multnomah, 1995), pp. 55, 56:
Suppose you are in a car race and your enemy, who doesn’t want you to
finish the race, throws mud on your windshield. The fact that you
temporarily lose sight of your goal and start to swerve, does not mean
that you are going to quit the race. And it certainly doesn’t mean that
you are on the wrong race track. Otherwise the enemy wouldn’t bother you
at all. What it means is that you should turn on your windshield wipers
and use your windshield washer.
When anxiety strikes and blurs our vision of God’s glory and the
greatness of the future that he plans for us, this does not mean that we
are faithless, or that we will not make it to heaven. It means our
faith is being attacked. At first blow, our belief in God’s promises may
sputter and swerve. But whether we stay on track and make it to the
finish line depends on whether, by grace, we set in motion a process of
resistance—whether we fight back against the unbelief of anxiety. Will
we turn on the windshield
wipers and will we use our windshield washer?
. . . The windshield wipers are the promises of God that clear away
the mud of unbelief, and the windshield washer fluid is the help of the
Holy Spirit. The battle to be freed from sin, as we have seen, is “by
the Spirit and by faith in the truth” (2 Thess 2:13). The work of the Spirit and the Word of the truth. These are the great faith builders.
Without the softening work of the Holy Spirit, the wipers of the Word
just scrape over the blinding clumps of unbelief. Both are
necessary—the Spirit and the Word. We read the promises of God and we
pray for the help of his Spirit. And as the windshield clears so that
we can see the welfare that God plans for us (Jer 29:11), our faith grows stronger and the swerving anxiety smooths out.
Justin Taylor
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