Contending for Our All is Book Four in John Piper’s “the swans are not silent” series. Like its three predecessors, it is a book I highly recommend.

Piper’s goal in this series is to present men who have served Christ and His church in extraordinary ways over the last 2000 years. Each book in the series contains mini-biographies of three men. In Contending for Our All, Piper illustrates for us Athanasius, John Owen, and J. Gresham Machen. In the introduction of this book, as he describes contending for the faith, Piper quotes Martin Luther:

If I profess with the loudest voice and clearest exposition every portion of the truth of God except precisely that little point which the world and the devil are at that moment attacking, I am not confessing Christ, however boldly I may be professing Christ. Where the battle rages there the loyalty of the soldier is proved, and to be steady on all the battlefield besides is the mere flight and disgrace if he flinches at that point.

And with that beginning, we find three heroes of the faith who serves as examples for us today.

Athanasius is one of the giants of early church history. He stood firm for years and years against the heresies of Arius. These heresies still exist today (called Arianism), found most noticeably in the cult known as Jehovah’s Witnesses.

Sometimes it seemed that Athanasius stood alone, against the world. Piper commented:

Athanasius contra mundum should inspire every pastor to stand his ground meekly and humbly and courageously whenever a biblical truth is at stake. But be sure that you always out-rejoice your adversaries. If something is worth fighting for, it is worth rejoicing over. And the joy is essential in the battle, for nothing is worth fighting for that will not increase our everlasting joy in God.

In this section of the book, as Piper addresses the handling of doctrinal differences, he writes an important section on “The Danger of Adapting to the ‘Seekers’”. He rightly comments

And if you want to grow a church, the temptation is to give the people what they already have categories to understand and enjoy. But once that church is grown, it thinks so much like the world that the difference is not decisive. The radical, biblical gospel is blunted, and the glory of Christ is obscured.

Chapter 2 covers the life of John Owen. The subtitle of the chapter is “How John Owen Killed His Own Sin While Contending for Truth”. In the mid-1600s, Owen wrote (at the tender age of 31) what has become his most prominent book, entitled The Death of Death in the Death of Christ.

Piper described how J.I. Packer was greatly influenced by Owen, and how Owen is considered one of the greatest of the Puritan theologians.

But Owen was no ivory-tower academic. He was a man who lived for and suffered for Christ. He was married for 31 years before his wife Mary went to be with Christ. During those years, God blessed him as Mary bore him 11 children. All but one of those children died as a child, and the other one died as a young adult. Owen buried all 11 of his children, and then his own wife, before he went to heaven 8 years later. Surely no man should so suffer; yet in God’s own perfect plan, that is what the Lord had for this man of God. Piper wrote

God has his strange and painful ways of making his ministers the kind of pastors and theologians he wants them to be.

Owen’s aim in life was personal holiness. Piper quotes Packer:

Owen, [though] a proud man by nature, had been brought low in and by his conversion, and thereafter he kept himself low by recurring contemplation of his inbred sinfulness.

Owen himself wrote something that would seem to come from another universe, according to much of "Christianity” today:

To keep our souls in a constant state of mourning and self-abasement is the most necessary part of our wisdom…

Why is the church in the sad state it is in today? One big reason has to be that we are pleased with ourselves, with our success, our ministries, our church buildings… and that we fail to see even a hint of the blackness of our own souls, and the resulting humility that is so essential to living for Christ.

Owen was a man who cared about communion with God as well as sound theology. He lived what he preached. May the Lord be pleased to raise up mini-Owens in our day.

Finally, Piper blesses us with the story of a man closer to our own time. J. Gresham Machen battled modernism (liberalism) early in the 20th century. In this chapter, we see the demise of the major seminaries (Harvard, Princeton, et al), and Machen’s own battles with understanding the fundamentals of the faith. We also see his differences with Fundamentalism at the time – perhaps better described as different emphases instead of core differences.

Piper quotes Machen on the subject of controversy thusly:

Men tell us that our preaching should be positive and not negative, that we can preach the truth without attacking error. But if we follow that advice we shall have to close our Bible and desert its teachings. The New Testament is a polemic book almost from beginning to end.

Machen came from a well-to-do family, and had the best education. He never married. And he had his shortcomings, his personality quirks, and he neglected his health, to his ultimate untimely demise. But as a figure who stood for the most holy faith, he stood at the front of the battlefield during his allotted days.

All three men are worthy examples for us, not because they were perfect, but because they were men of God who contended for the faith. Piper concluded

Contending for our all cannot be done in a way that contradicts the character of our all – namely, Jesus Christ. This means that when we contend for the fullness of Christ with our lips, we must confirm the love of Christ with our lives. All three of our swans knew this and labored to practice it.

I would encourage you to spend some quality time with John Piper and the three saints portrayed for us in Contending for Our All, as well as in the other “swans” books. They are not dry biographies, but inspirations, and I cannot imagine that you would walk away unchanged.