Tag Archives: John Piper

Piper on Superstar Pastors

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It’s interesting that during the Basics 2009 Conference in Cleveland I mused to myself about the seeming incongruity of the attendees standing in long lines for an opportunity to meet the speakers (John Piper, Alistair Begg, John Lennox, Keith Getty, et al). I myself have stood in these lines at previous conferences either for an opportunity to meet a speaker or to have my photo snapped with them.

Is this behavior consistent with the humility that is supposed to characterize followers of Christ? Are there pride issues that need to be addressed either in the heart of the seeker or the heart of the speaker?

I resisted the temptation after the Basics Conference to blog on my observations. But now John Piper has addressed this issue in a recent blog post of his own, which I commend to you:

Hero Worship and Holy Emulation

Kevin DeYoung offers his thoughts on Piper’s post: Thoughts on Evangelical Superstardom

Coddled Christians and Their Wimpy Worldview

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With panic overtaking the global financial markets and the outcome of the U.S. presidential election looking favorable to Senator Obama, these words from John Piper in his latest book Spectacular Sins need to be heard:

It seems to me that Christians in the West are being coddled. We suffer little in the name of Christ. Therefore, we read the Bible not with a desperate hunger for evidences of God’s triumph over pain, but with a view to improving our private pleasures.

Therefore, we read the Bible selectively. We pick a text here or there to fit our felt needs. This is like a doctor who forgets how to write prescriptions for the best antibiotics because everybody seems healthy, and he has spent the last decades tweaking good healh with hip-hop excercise videos, unaware that pestilence is at the door. It’s like the soldier who forgets how to use his weapons because the times seem peaceful, and he has spent the last decades doing relief work and teaching children how to play games.

But the times are changing. For seventy million baby boomers, for example, life has changed. It seems very short now. What used to be a fond nostalgia for the sixties has turned into an ache that the beloved decade is now so far away that its main meaning is: we are dying. Different ages get the message in different ways.

And not only life, but the world too is shrinking. People who don’t like Christians are all around us. Only a strange providence keeps our churches from being bombed. It’s only a matter of time till the reality of the rest of the world comes home…

The coddled Western world will sooner or later give way to great affliction. And when it does, whose vision of God will hold? Where are Christians being prepared for great global sorrows? Where is the Christian mind and soul being prepared for the horrors to come? Christians in the West are weakened by wimpy worldviews. And wimpy worldviews make wimpy Christians. God is weightless in our lives. He is not terrifyingly magnificent. His sovereignty is secondary (at best) to his sensitivity.

. . . . . . . . . .

I am writing this book to build a vision of God into our lives that will not let us down in the worst of times. I mean really bad times. Horrific times. Who is prepared to meet the Agony that is coming?

. . . . . . . . . .

Global cataclyms and personal catasrophes are coming. I say this not as one with my finger in the wind, but with my finger in the Bible.

The election of Barack Obama will be the beginning of sorrows for followers of Jesus Christ. The more I learn about Obama, the more convinced I am that he is a closet Muslim with anti-Israel sympathies. His adulation by people around the world, and the admiration he has gained from world leaders with no record to support such a response leads me to believe that there is a spiritual power at work which has elevated this man above his pay-grade.

I am convinced that should God appoint this man to office, God will use him to inflict great persecution against the church of Jesus Christ, driving Christians to their knees while separating wheat from chaff and sheep from goats. Will the real Christians please stand up!

God’s glory makes sin necessary

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I’m in Corolla, NC (Outer Banks) on a short vacation. While here my goal is to read several books, one of which I am halfway through: John Piper’s Spectacular Sins (and Their Global Purpose in the Glory of Christ).

It has been a great joy to rise every morning with the sun, make my way to the deck over looking the Atlantic, and allow John Piper to preach to me the majesties of the glory of Christ Jesus.

Piper’s objective in this short book is to demonsrate that God is sovereign over sin without sinning Himself. Piper deals with hard questions like, if God imprisoned the angels that sinned, why does he allow Satan to roam free and wreak havoc on humanity? Or, if creation was “good” (as God pronounced it in Genesis 1) where did the Serpent come from? Where did sin originate? Or if God knew that Adam would sin, why did He create Adam in the first place?

In answering these and other tough questions Piper consistently points us to “the purpose of God,” as when he speaks of the fall of Satan:

I conclude, therefore, that God permitted Satan’s fall, not because He was unable to stop it, but because He had a purpose for it. Since God is never taken off guard, His permissions are always purposeful.

What is God’s ultimate purpose when he allows evil in the form of “spectacular sins” to triumph?

Satan’s fall and ongoing existence are for the glory of Christ. The Son of God, Jesus Christ, will be more highly honored and more deeply appreciated and loved in the end because He defeats Satan not the moment after Satan fell, but through millenia of long-suffering, patience, humility, servanthood, suffering, and decisively through His own death.

God had Jesus’ glory in view when He planned Adam’s sin. Adam’s sin is not a response by God to something He hadn’t considered possible. Adam’s sin was purposed by God so that the full-orbed Glory of Jesus Christ could be put on display through God’s plan for humanity’s salvation. In commenting on 2 Timothy 1:9 Piper notes:

…grace was planned before human sin was there to need it. This means that God’s plan to save us through grace was not a response to human decisions to sin. Saving grace was the plan that made sin necessary. God did not find sin in the world and then make a plan to remedy it. He had the plan before the ages, and that plan was for the glory of sin-conquering grace through the death of Jesus Christ.

Meditate and mull over Piper’s phrase: “Saving grace was the plan that made sin necessary,” and then thank God for His unspeakable gift.

John Piper wishes John Calvin a Happy 499th!

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From the DesiringGOD Blog:

Happy birthday, John Calvin. Today we celebrate your 499th birthday. Your preaching inspires me to press on with this great and glorious task of heralding the Word of God.

T. H. L. Parker’s 1975 biography tells why:

And so we trace him preaching on Sundays with one hundred and eighty-nine sermons on the Acts between 1549 and 1554, a shorter series on some of the Pauline letters between 1554 and 1558, and the sixty-five on the Harmony of the Gospels between 1559 and 1564. During this time the weekdays saw series on Jeremiah and Lamentations (up to 1550), on the Minor Prophets and Daniel (1550-2), the one hundred and seventy-four on Ezekiel (1552-4), the one hundred and fifty-nine on Job (1554-5), the two hundred on Deuteronomy (1555-6), the three hundred and forty-two on Isaiah (1556-9), then one hundred twenty-three on Genesis (1559-61), a short set on Judges (1561), one hundred and seven on 1 Samuel and eighty-seven on 2 Samuel (1561-3) and a set on 1 Kings (1563-4).

Before he smiles at such unusual activity of the pulpit, the reader would do well to ask himself whether he would prefer to listen to the second-hand views on a religion of social ethics, or the ill-digested piety, delivered in slipshod English, that he will hear today in most churches of whatever denomination he may enter, or three hundred and forty-two  sermons on the Book of the Prophet Isaiah, sermons born of an infinite passion of faith and a burning sincerity, sermons luminous with theological sense, lively with wit and imagery, showing depths of compassion and the unquenchable joyousness of hope. Those in Geneva who listened Sunday after Sunday, day after day, and did not shut their ears, but were “instructed, admonished, exhorted, and censured,” received a training in Christianity such as had been given to few congregations in Europe since the days of the fathers. (92)

Thank you, John Calvin, for believing in the majesty of the word and for demonstrating by your life the glory of preaching the Bible.