You Can’t Please Everyone, So Try Pleasing God

More on Wilkerson, the Puritans, and theological differences:

Trying to please everyone is a wasted effort. Yes, trying to get along with others and striving for Christian unity is vital. But we know that divisions will always exist, and some folks just will not want anything to do with you! Seven years ago I said this in an article:

OK, a dozen more reasons for some Christians to hate on me:
-I am not a hardcore Calvinist
-I am not a hardcore Arminian
-I am not a hardcore Pentecostalist
-I am not a hardcore cessationist
-I am not a hardcore dispensationalist
-I am not a hardcore theonomist
-I am not a hardcore anti-theonomist
-I am not a hardcore premillennialist
-I am not a hardcore anti-premillennialist
-I am not a hardcore postmillennialist
-I am not a hardcore anti-postmillennialist
-I am not a hardcore ‘my theology only’-ist

https://billmuehlenberg.com/2017/04/12/minimalist-maximalist-christianity/

By that I did not mean I am seeking some middle ground in which everyone will like me. As Margaret Thatcher once reminded us, that is a risky place to be in: “Standing in the middle of the road is very dangerous; you get knocked down by the traffic from both sides.”

I am not saying I want some lowest common denominator when it comes to doctrine, theology and the like. But I am saying there can be some room to move in some of these areas. And I am aware that some Christians could easily love me for writing this piece, and some Christians could easily hate me for writing it! That is because I will step on some theological toes here and encourage some believers to move out of the very narrow theological box they have built around themselves.

No, I am not saying that doctrine does not matter and that we do not need strong theological boundaries. But I am saying that as I get older and hopefully more mature in Christ, I have learned to become less critical and judgmental of other Christians, at least in some areas.

As I have mentioned in some recent pieces, the way I was as a new Christian has changed a fair bit. For example, early on I was quite certain that only one eschatological view was correct, and all others were damnable heresies. I had a hard time even talking to other believers who dared not hold to the same views that I had.

Also, as a newer believer I had no time for anyone in Pentecostal and charismatic circles, thinking they were of the devil and beyond the pale. But there too, for various reasons, I have mellowed a bit over the years. So I have learned to be a bit more gracious and a bit less censorious. I am not claiming to have fully arrived in this regard, but by God’s grace I am slowly making some progress.

A main subject of my recent articles has been the famous American evangelist, David Wilkerson. I knew my Pentecostal friends would appreciate what I had written about him, but I was concerned that my more Reformed and Puritan friends would give it and myself a wide berth.

But I hoped that they would actually read on and see that even someone like Wilkerson was very much open to the Puritans of old and the doctrines of grace, and that they helped him so much in his life and ministry. See especially this piece: https://billmuehlenberg.com/2024/11/29/wilkerson-the-love-of-god-and-the-puritans/

Here I want to look just a bit further at his son’s biography of him. Gary Wilkerson’s bio appeared in 2014, three years after David passed away. I bought it when it first came out and have often discussed it and written about it. The way the Puritans impacted him is one main thing I keep wishing to highlight.

The other is how for so much of his life he questioned whether God really loved him! That seems rather amazing, given what an impactful ministry he had. And I know that there are countless other believers who also struggle in this way, so to learn about his story can be quite helpful.

In the book’s Introduction he brings up both these matters, as they are closely related. The final three pages are worth quoting in full:

At his most vulnerable times, my father wondered whether he was loved by God at all. He didn’t question the Lord’s goodness. He didn’t struggle over why evil exists. He didn’t wonder why people suffer. (And his family suffered as much as any. Through a genetic anomaly, my mother, both sisters, a niece, and now a nephew all have faced serious battles with cancer.) Very simply, my father wondered his whole life whether God loved him. It was a question he kept mostly to himself. Growing up, he had absorbed some of the traumatizing aspects of a theology that leaned toward works and legalism and sometimes fear. Although doctrinally he knew he was free in Christ, something in him still made him feel he had to work hard — that nothing he did was enough, that more was required to fill what was missing in his righteousness in Christ. My uncle Don, who for years worked alongside my dad in ministry, observes, “David had a lot of grace for other people, but he wasn’t always able to appropriate it for himself.”

 

Unlike some pastor fathers who battle in this area, my dad never placed that burden on us, his family; he reserved the struggle for himself. Yet in waging that battle alone, my dad withheld an important part of himself from us. It was a part we desperately needed, in retrospect. That’s why, more than three years after his passing, my siblings and I are each still raw in our grief over his loss, still wishing we had a part of him he chose to keep from us. (I don’t presume to speak in this book for my siblings. Their contributions here are ones they’ve chosen to make. Like children of any public figure, we have to work to keep those parts of our father that are due to us alone. Children of civil rights leaders speak of this kind of thing. They understood what their father was doing and why it was important, and that, in effect, they had to share him with the world. But even with that understanding, some say they still feel something crucial had been taken from them, and they wouldn’t surrender it again if given the choice.)

 

The revelation of my father’s lifelong struggle was stunning to many. “I preach a lot about the love of God nowadays, and it was David who had the greatest influence on me for that,” says Bob Phillips, who copastored with my father at Times Square Church. “It’s based on what I learned from him in his years as a pastor, not just from his preaching but from how he believed and lived.” Like so many others who worked closely with my dad, Bob never would have guessed this struggle to be my father’s deepest.

 

From the outside, those who understood my dad’s early life would say he never stood a fighting chance. Yet, characteristic of my father, a few decades ago he set himself on a journey to correct things within himself. At that time, in the eighties, he was still busy traveling the world as an evangelist. Yet his own soul was dry; he had become weary of preaching the same messages to crusade audiences. Between those events, he began reading a stack of books given to him by a discerning friend, author and preacher Leonard Ravenhill. These were classic works that had endured the centuries, most of them written by Puritans, names many of us have never heard of. As my father dug into those treasures, his heart opened to a new revelation of Christ. Grace awakened in him, coming alive in a way he had never known. The old books stirred him once again to study the Scriptures cover to cover, this time with a new understanding of the gospel. As he explored the full extent of the finished work of Christ, he experienced joy.

 

Toward the end of his life, my father confided to me that he still struggled to know whether he was loved. He couldn’t escape completely the emotional cobwebs, but he was seeing more and more clearly the work that Jesus had done for him. In my last conversation with him, he told me of how deeply he had probed, how he had scoured every page of every writing he could find on the glorious subject of God’s covenant grace. And yet I could see in his eyes there was a yearning for more. There were things he still wanted to know about the depth and breadth of Christ’s finished work. That’s when he urged me to dig deeper in my own search on the subject, not to be satisfied but to go farther. It was as if he were saying, “I got a late start. I want you to have it better. I want my grandchildren to have it better. Don’t ignore this truth. if you catch it now, it can save you years. Son — do you see?”

 

A few weeks after my father’s funeral, my brother-in-law sent me the last book that Dad had left open on his study table. It was a classic work by Thomas Brooks. Almost every page was underlined and highlighted, with comments filling every open margin. There was my father, nearly eighty years old — after sixty-five years of serving in ministry — still yearning, still reveling in the gospel of Christ, its glories never ceasing to unfold new beauties of assurance.

 

In this way, my father was like Paul. with every achievement, his estimation of himself had grown smaller. Early on, Paul went from strength to strength in his accomplishments for the gospel. In AD 55 he wrote to the church in Corinth that he was no less than any of the other apostles. Two years later, he wrote something very different to the Ephesians, stating, “I am the least of all saints.” Finally, in his last known letter, Paul wrote, “I am the chief of sinners.”

 

That was my father. In the beginning of his ministry, David Wilkerson was a crusading young zealot, making a massive imprint on the world for Christ. Later, as he gazed hard into his own brokenness, he realized, “I am dependent on God for everything,” and he offered genuine encouragement to others in their sufferings. By the end of his life, amid his anguished battle to know love, he claimed, “I can do nothing. He did it all. ‘It is finished.’” (pp. 28-30)

Again, critics of Pentecostalism might argue that they are all heart and no head. There is some truth here. But Wilkerson wanted both, which is why he so much loved and devoured the Puritan writers, and others like them. This continued to the end of his life: “Dad still had his beloved books – C. H. Spurgeon, William Bridge, Thomas Brooks, and especially John Owen, the Puritan writer who had captivated him for twenty years.” (p. 286)

Critics also can easily point to the excesses of the charismatic and Pentecostal world. But Wilkerson also did this:

Dad spent much of those long crusade bus trips in his back compartment writing. And more and more he found himself critiquing the charismatic movement. He saw a growing excess when “demonstrations” of the Spirit became the focal point rather than Jesus.

 

He was as thoroughly Pentecostal as anybody I’ve ever known, but he always seemed to have questions about what was going on in the charismatic movement,” David Patterson says. “He didn’t like a lot of things he saw. But leaders would keep reaching out to him as a spokesperson. He had some reservations about them, and they didn’t quite know how to take him either.” (p. 169)

More can be said, but Wilkerson sought to learn from the Puritans and others. And this should work the other way. Those in the Puritan and Reformed camp might be surprised to discover that they might be able to learn something from people like Wilkerson as well.

I am writing pieces like this in part because I often have feet in both camps. I am hoping both groups can see that we all actually need each other in various ways. One camp tends to have a lot of heart and a lot of life, but not much head and theology. The other camp tends to be just the reverse.

The truth is we need it all. We need more of the Spirit. We need more sound doctrine. We need more passion for the lost. We need more grace. We need more love. I know that I certainly do. If saying all this gets some believers upset, well, I can’t please everyone. Nor do I need to. All I must strive to do is please God, and please him fully.

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