Tyrell Haag: Good evening, everyone. It’s wonderful that we have this opportunity this evening to have a Q&A with Pastor John and Pastor Conrad, and we thank you both for your agreement to participate in this. We’re just going to pray now together that this would be an edifying time, that this would be a blessing. We’re not just asking questions for the sake of it. We’re asking questions to grow.

I’m going to have the privilege, as I said, of asking the questions. My name is Haag, and I’m from Constantia Park Baptist Church. Really, it’s great to be in a chair that’s asking questions for a change instead of giving answers. I think you’re going to get a bit more tough questions than I get, and we hope that will be beneficial. But to start off with, to get to know you both a little bit better on a personal level, can you give us a picture of your daily routine? What does day-to-day life look like from morning to evening in your house? Pastor Conrad, why don’t you start first?

Conrad Mbewe: Thank you. Part of my life involves itinerant ministry, and because of that, what I’m going to give you as a typical day has to do with when everything is under my control and I’m at home in the church context. Like most pastors, I’m up between 5:00 a.m. and 6:00 a.m., and I disappear into a corner of my home for regular reading and prayer. I take a short break to see my wife off for work, and then continue, having freshened up, with study up until about 10:00 a.m. It is only after 10:00 a.m. that I then move over into my office. Thankfully, my home and office are a driveway across from each other, and that’s when I handle most of my office work.

In the afternoon, I then do some basic visitations or meet pastors and so on. That is the time when I have my meetings. I’m back home briefly in the first part of the evening, and then I go out to do visitations. I try to be home usually by about 8:30 p.m. At that point, I normally have a meal and also family devotions with my wife and children. I’m an early sleeper, and so generally speaking, around about 10:00 p.m., I migrate to the bedroom and do the kind of reading or chatting with my wife that’s meant to take me into the Land of Nod. So, generally, that’s it.

John Piper: Let me approach it a little differently and give you a week instead of a day. Here’s a caution. Anytime you read a biography or you hear a question like this answered and it sounds like that’s the way it was. It hasn’t been this way. What I’m going to describe now is not the way it was 10 years ago, that’s not the way it was 10 years earlier, and that’s not the way it was 10 years earlier. So please don’t consider this anything but a slice out of one peculiar person’s life. Nothing should feel normative about what we’re saying. I don’t think so.

I preach Saturday night at 5:30 p.m. That’s recorded, and I preach twice on Sunday morning. It’s the same sermon three times every weekend, and then the recorded one is used on other campuses. We have three campuses. So Saturday night and twice on Sunday, I am committed to preaching. I have no commitments usually Sunday afternoon, except what spontaneously comes up for visitation. I have a small group commitment to five families that I meet with once a month to pray for each other, and the men meet once a month. That puts us every other week in touch with each other.

Monday is a day off. I try to just kick back, play Scrabble with my wife, jog, sleep in late, read books I wouldn’t ordinarily read, and take walks. Tuesday is devoted to staff. That’s just because we have a larger church. There is a three-hour staff meeting in the morning, and then there is a smaller staff meeting after lunch, and then there are individual staff issues. It’s all internal staff stuff on Tuesday. Wednesday is open. We have a midweek service in the evening. I sometimes have responsibilities there to teach. I sometimes don’t. So I can either study, prepare for things like this, or tackle stuff that has to always be produced. If you’re leading, people always have questions to answer, so you’re constantly answering questions, answering emails, making decisions, thinking through children’s ministries, and children’s curriculum, youth stuff, and structural things all the time.

Thursday is the same thing. So Tuesday and Thursday are flexible days. Friday is all sermon preparation. I don’t start my sermon preparation for the weekend until Friday morning, which is unusual for a lot of people. They would panic if they did it that way. I start early in the morning, and then I don’t go to bed until the sermon is finished. Then, I get up Saturday, and I consider Saturday morning a time for leisure and exercise. At noon, I’m with the Lord over that sermon until 5:30 p.m. so that it goes from paper to my heart, and then we start all over again. Those midweek days, Wednesday and Thursday, are the flexible various ones that could be counseling, visitation, crisis intervention, hospital visits, or it could be preparing for an event like this.

Haag: Well, you said you can’t prepare for Q&As very well, but Wednesdays are the time you say you get a lot of questions? This is your Wednesday. One of the topics that comes up often is from 1 Peter 3:19. I want to ask you about this, Pastor John. It says that Jesus died for our sins on the cross, but after it says that he died or suffered in the flesh, he then went to proclaim to the spirits that are now held in prison that were once disobedient in the days of Noah. People say that Jesus went and preached to the spirits that are in hell. What’s your take on that?

Piper: Let’s get it right first of all. We have to get the wording right because my take on it is not the historical take on it. I don’t recite that part of the Apostle’s Creed. I don’t think it should be in the creed. It’s way too marginal to be in the creed. The text says:

For Christ also suffered once for sins, the righteous for the unrighteous, that he might bring us to God, being put to death in the flesh but made alive in the spirit, in which he went and proclaimed to the spirits in prison . . . (1 Peter 3:18–19).

What if we translated it “who are now in prison?” It’s not that he went into prison and proclaimed to them there, but in his spirit through Noah, he preached to those who are now in prison. I’ll read it again just to see if that works:

That he might bring us to God, being put to death in the flesh but made alive in the spirit, in which [spirit] he went and proclaimed to the spirits in prison . . .

Relate it back to 1 Peter 1:10–11, which says:

Concerning this salvation, the prophets who prophesied about the grace that was to be yours searched and inquired carefully, inquiring what person or time the Spirit of Christ in them was indicating when he predicted the sufferings of Christ and the subsequent glories.

So you already have a reference in 1 Peter 1:10–11 that the Spirit of Christ was preaching through the prophets, and then you come to 1 Peter 3:19, and the Spirit by which and in which he was raised, in that Spirit, he preached to those people who are now in prison because they formally did not obey when he preached. So that’s the way I take it. I don’t think there’s any biblical warrant for saying Christ descended into hell.

Now, if he did, I’m okay with that. I grew up believing that, and then I just began to look at this and say, “Well, I’m just not sure.” So I take the view Wayne Grudem does in his systematic theology that these texts here and the one in Ephesians 4:9 which says “he descended in the lower parts of the earth," don’t refer to Christ’s descent into hell. I don’t think savingly we lose anything in that. But I don’t know if that’s the way you’d take it or not.

Mbewe: I would be 100 percent on the same page as John with respect to the fact that this must be referring to the Spirit of Christ having preached to these people who are now in prison, and they’re now in hell. So he preached through Noah in those days. I think it’s one of those statements that at one time would have been interpreted in a particular way, and unfortunately, it got into black and white, and it has outlived the initial interpreters. That would be my comment.

Piper: One other observation to stir in would be this. On the cross, Jesus says to the thief, “Today, you will be with me in paradise.” So if I have any indicator of where he went between his death and his resurrection, it’s paradise.

Mbewe: Yes. Also, I think we all know that nobody in hell has been given a second chance to pop out. So that makes the point. So there’s no point in Jesus going down to preach to them if their fate has already been sealed.

Piper: The answer they would give to you, which I disagree with, is that he didn’t go there to give them a second chance. He went there to seal their doom because he knew they would reject him, and nobody goes to hell without rejecting Jesus. That’s the argument I’ve heard, but that isn’t necessary because they rejected Jesus in Noah. That’s the point of 1 Peter 1:11.

Haag: That’s helpful, and it’s a controversial issue or at least a debated issue in this.

Piper: I would encourage you not to spend a lot of time on that. I travel around, and frankly, I’m sometimes dismayed at the marginal things people have been out of shape about. Churches are getting all worked up over things that they ought not to get worked up over. If I were a pastor, I’d pass over that really fast. If your people are all worked up about it, I’d preach on why they shouldn’t be. That’s not central enough to get upset about. So I don’t care if you disagree with me on that. I’ll shake your hand, love you, and hug you.

Haag: Well, talking about shaking hands, and loving, and hugging, Mbewe, I want to ask you. What is your take on dating and where that fits into today’s culture? Is it biblical, at least the way dating is done today? Is that the way it’s supposed to happen?

Mbewe: Well, I’ve written a book. It’s in that little corner there. Get yourself a copy. I think basically, from the context of the culture in which we are and also my understanding of Scripture, male-female relationships need to grow in the context of the Christian Church, in the context of the wider family and community, and the whole process of mate selection should be primarily one in which you are relating to one another in terms of compatibility and also in terms of seeking the Lord in genuine prayer that induces on him whatever your final leading might be of him. But the key in finding a right partner is that of spiritual compatibility, and then of course, there’s vocational compatibility — what it is you’ll be doing together for life. Dating as I seem to come across it in the Western world is a foreign phenomena for our own people back home.

Haag: Pastor John, do you want to add anything?

Piper: I wish it were a foreign phenomenon. I just read a blog yesterday — and this may or may not be true — that said the biggest moral change in the last 50 years is the change in attitude towards premarital sex. If that’s true, and I suspect it is, surveys in America would say that something like half of eighth graders have experienced intimacy, or something like that. Those are just staggering numbers. Now, where did that come from? It came from dating. It came from new attitudes of what boys and girls are supposed to do with each other starting around 12 or 13 years old. We tell them, “Find a friend and hang out.” That’s ridiculous. The chemistry of male and female isn’t designed that way.

So here’s what we encourage. You have to define dating. If dating means pairing off at 13, 14, 15, or 16, so that you have a boy and a girl spending a lot of time together, doing stuff together, there’s only one thing that can happen. They’re going to feel real strong towards each other. They can like each other a lot. That liking is going to become sexual. Then, they’ve got this massive pull, which is all designed for marriage, which is probably six years out — or two, or three, depending on your culture. What in the world? How are they going to manage that? We encourage them into that. Instead, I think we should encourage church-oriented groups, boys and girls together. You can’t isolate them from each other.

I encouraged my kids all the way along. I have four sons and now I have a daughter. I said, “Just be groupy until you’re in college, okay? Till you’re 18. Do group stuff. Have a great time. Go places, do things, but always be four, six, or eight people. Don’t pair off. Don’t fall for a guy. Don’t linger with a guy or a girl.” Now, not all my sons followed my advice on that. I mean, they were careful, but it’s hard to prevent that sort of thing. So no, I’m not really encouraged and impressed with the system of dating in the West.

I think the emphasis of I Kissed Dating Goodbye is probably a good idea. Josh Harris is saying wise things. Courting may get a bad name if it becomes too silly, too narrow, and too negative. But it’s a good idea to think that pairing off is preparation for marriage, so when it begins to happen, both of them should be thinking that way. They should be testing, “Do I like you? Do you like me?” Fifteen year olds don’t think that way. They just have these hormones that say, “I like to be with you, and then I want to touch you, and then I want to touch all of you, and then I want to get in bed with you.” That’s the way it goes, so the statistics are not surprising. I’m sorry for what the West has done, and if your culture isn’t that way, you should praise God.

Mbewe: Amen.

Haag: We have a few questions about raising children and about families, and it’s related. Pastor Mbewe, the Bible commands parents to raise their children in the admonition of the Lord. What would you encourage Christians to do with regards to sending their children to secular boarding schools and secular kinds of institutions? What kind of wisdom is there in that?

Mbewe: Again, some of these questions are related to which part of the world you are in because if, for instance, I was to think in terms of Zambia and think in terms of rural Zambia, the parents in the church there would not be thinking in terms of sending their children anywhere else but to government-run schools. Therefore, I think the primary issue is the principle, and the principle is that it is the responsibility of parents — notice the phrase I’m about to use — to oversee the education of their children.

Now, how that fleshes out depends on, really, where you are and the opportunities that are there for you. The Bible speaks in terms of the role of fathers to teach and admonish their children. You are preparing them for responsibility in adulthood, and consequently, it matters who is educating your children at different phases of their lives. You need to be relating to your children enough to ensure that they are developing a biblical worldview as they are growing up. But as to where exactly they should be, I think that ought, at the end of the day, to be left to the husband and the wife who are the governors of homes. I think that’s what I would say.

Haag: On that, Pastor Piper, what practical ways could parents use to instill a God-centered worldview in their children, especially when in the world, they’re often faced with the totally opposite worldview?

Piper: The most important thing a parent can do is be. The main job of a parent is to become a Christian — a full-blooded, articulate, consistent, non-hypocritical Christian — whether in the kitchen, in the bedroom, in the living room, or in the car. They should aim to be a consistent, Christ-exalting, God-centered, Bible-saturated human being. Because 90 percent of children’s ethos is caught, not taught. So I think you should spend 90 percent of your time becoming a Christian and 10 percent studying parenting because that’s about the proportion that children get. That’s the first thing. Go to conferences like this until you’re dead, and keep growing and growing.

Your children are watching you. They’re always watching you. They’re watching you when they don’t know they’re watching you. They’re absorbing your demeanor, your attitudes, your tones of voice, and your attitudes toward each other all the time. You can’t plan that. It’s scary to be a parent. That’s the first thing.

The second thing, don’t minimize — like I just did perhaps — the value of planning Bible reading and prayer with your wife alone and with your children together every day, once or twice. Few things change people that aren’t done every day. It’s daily habits that stick. Even when these children may go haywire when they’re 19, it never leaves them. A deposit is given. If you have a child, say, for 18 years, you start from the time they’re six months old, teaching them to pray and read their Bible. You can set a little child down as a year old or less with a tape player and a story in it about the Bible and have them have personal devotions. A one-year-old can have personal devotions. We did it.

Don’t wait until they’re six. They love stories. They love music. Get some of this music we’re having, put it on a little tape. Tell them, “You sit in that corner for three minutes, listen to the tape, talk to Jesus, and then we’ll come back.” Build it into him. So we’re going to instill personal devotions, family devotions, and model life devotions, and the content of that should be the Bible. You don’t have to be educated at all to do this in any formal way. You just have to be able to read, and if you can’t read, give it to your wife because she can read. You say, “Honey, read a few verses from the Gospel of John.” I’m not kidding.

I’ve done that with men in my church. I had a man say to me, “I can’t lead my wife. She’s got a college education. I’ve got an eighth-grade education. There’s no way I can lead.” I said, “I don’t believe it. Can you say let’s? Can you say let’s? Try it. Okay. If you can say let’s, you can lead.” I said, “Tell them, ‘Let’s have devotions.’ Try it tonight. I require you. Come back next week. I want you to try it tonight. Say to your teenagers, ‘Let’s go to the living room.’ When you’re all there, say, ‘Carol, let’s read the Bible. Would you choose a chapter and read it?’” He’s done. That’s leadership. You can make that happen.

So don’t worry. Don’t worry that your wife is more articulate and smarter. Most of them are, but she wants you to lead. She wants you to lead. She’s willing to read, she’s willing to do all that stuff that she’s better at, but she doesn’t want you to just be a couch potato. It’s really important that men take leadership here. Even men who feel like they don’t have much to offer can do it. It’s the Bible, a simple prayer, and then try to give some application.

Here’s one more thing that is absolutely crucial for building the gospel into your children’s lives. Repent often in front of them and to them. This is rare, I’m afraid, and I suspect in certain cultures, it’s more rare than others. There’s an aura of manhood or adulthood that keeps you from saying, “I’m sorry, I sinned” to a 15-year-old. I had to do that this morning. The breakfast came earlier than I thought. I thought we were going to meet at 7:30 a.m., and it came at 7:15 a.m. I said, “Shoot.” I was going to spend 15 minutes with the family, so I said, “Talitha and Noël, come back here in the bedroom.” I came down. I put my arms around each of them and said, “We’re going to pray together.” Before I did it, Noël called me on something I said and did that made her feel uncared for, and I thought, “Okay, she’s right.”

She told me in the bathroom, and I said, “I’m sorry. You’re right. I shouldn’t have done that.” That was over. It was settled. But Talitha was there. She was there. She didn’t feel that. So I put my arms around both of them and said, “Talitha, mommy drew to my attention that last night I did something, and it was uncaring.” She said, “I don’t think it was uncaring.” I said, “Well, it was, and I’m sorry to both of you.” Then, I prayed, and I confessed it to God. That’s huge. That’s hard. I did not like doing that. I find it very difficult. But all you dads and moms will breed gospel-loving children if you are broken and penitent in their presence often.

Haag: Anything you want to add to that, Pastor Conrad?

Mbewe: No. The emphasis on the leadership of the father on Bible-centered family devotions is good. I think those are the aspects that bring out the biblical worldview while you are in the real world.

Haag: Here’s another question for you, Pastor Piper. It’s something that’s been quite an issue in Africa, if you could just comment on it. The prosperity gospel, is it scriptural? Is it an overemphasis on a certain part of Scripture, and how does it impact one’s view of the sovereignty of God?

Piper: Oh, my. This is huge. Three papers have been written on this for the Lausanne Conference next week. It’s a big issue. In the third edition of Let the Nations Be Glad, my book on missions, which just came out last year, I begin with a chapter on the prosperity gospel. So if you want to know my most recent thoughts, I basically crafted it in terms of 12 things I want to say to prosperity preachers. They’re just cautions. I put it like that because in the past, I have said really strong, strong words like, “I hate the prosperity gospel.”

Now, I’ve backed up from that a little bit and said that I need to define it first because there are hateful things about it. If the prosperity gospel means you should come to Jesus because he will make you rich and healthy, and your wife won’t miscarry, and your pigs won’t die, that’s bad. That’s not the reason to come. Paul invited people to come and die. When the grace of God came to the Corinthians in Second Corinthians 8, it said that out of much affliction and extreme poverty, they became liberal and gave generously to the saints in Jerusalem. There was much affliction and extreme poverty. Poverty hadn’t gone away, and affliction had increased. Life gets worse when you become a Christian for many people, not better. So we need to present Jesus not as the one who fixes all your earthly problems, but the one who fixes your eternity, and as you grow in likeness to him, the wherewithal to deal with some of your earthly problems will increase.

This is why I want to be cautious, because there’s no doubt that where the gospel takes root over generations, life gets better. It does, because corruption goes away which is the great cause of poverty and misery in so many cultures. Big men are ripping off little men by stashing all the money away, and buying their big cars, and wearing their big rings, and flying their big jets, whether it’s American or African. That’s wicked. That sort of thing goes away when the gospel comes. So it does have a bettering effect, but selling it that way is backward.

We love Jesus, and we say, “Though he slay me, yet will I trust him.” As far as the sovereignty of God goes, God’s sovereignty in the life of Job is the point.

The Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord (Job 1:21)

If you say, “Oh, no, no, no. It wasn’t God. It was the devil,” it wasn’t the devil. A great wind came. God controls the wind, and Job said, “The Lord gave, and the Lord took away,” and he fell on his face and worshiped. He said, “Though he slay me, yet will I trust him?” God is sovereign in our pain. God is sovereign over our pain. The sovereignty of God doesn’t take away our pain. It orders our pain and makes us able to grow by it and not lose faith.

Mbewe: Amen.

Haag: Pastor Conrad, can you help us think for a moment around tithing 10 percent in the Old Testament? Is that a legalistic Old Testament thing, or is that something that should be taught in churches today? Can you comment on that?

Mbewe: Issues like this often cut Christians into two clean camps like a hot knife through butter. I’m not sure that the answer I will give will persuade one camp to cross over to the other. All that will happen is that you will know what one side thinks, and that’s the side I’m on. I believe that giving in the church is in terms of tithing and free will offering. It must not be done legalistically in terms of the absence of joy or the absence of gratitude. However, it provides something of a minimum figure, something of a working figure that enables people to appreciate where the Christian Church is coming from in the Old Testament, and one trusts that God’s people in the New Covenant will maximize a lot more on the fact that because the Lord has given his all, then I need to give as much as I possibly could to kingdom work.

In terms of passages, obviously, people will go to the Old Testament, but I tend to fall into 1 Corinthians 9 where, if I could just quickly read, the apostle Paul is speaking about the support for ministry. He puts it this way in 1 Corinthians 9:13–14:

Do you not know that those who are employed in the temple service get their food from the temple, and those who serve at the altar share in the sacrificial offerings? In the same way (drawing a parallel between the Old Testament and the New Testament), the Lord commanded that those who proclaim the gospel should get their living by the gospel.

What I seem to see there is that there was a method in the Old Testament through which the ministry was supported, and it was not just free will offering. The people of God took their tithes to the temple, and out of that the entire priesthood, and the ministry of the priests were supported. Paul says it’s in the same way. This time, it’s not the priests doing their regular routines in the temple; it is the preachers of the gospel who are now living the way in which the priests were supported in the Old Testament.

Paul is basically saying, “As a church planting missionary, I spared you during the phase of the church planting, but that doesn’t mean you should not grow up and begin playing your role now. Peter was supported, and I ought to be supported as well.” That would be my answer, but again, as I said in answering that question, I think it’s good for you to know what your church’s position is, and what your church elders think. I think it’s important to respect that. It won’t change your giving as an individual. So you respect that it’s not a matter for which you should abandon an entire church to go elsewhere. That’s what I’ll say.

Haag: Do you want to add anything on, Pastor Piper?

Piper: I think the caution I would give, and I think I agree with what Conrad said, is that there is a way to get your people to exceed tithing by almost never mentioning tithing. I think churches are turned into legalistic, misery houses by harping on things like tithing. Now, I’m in an American context. Virtually all Americans are wealthy, even though they describe 10 percent of them as poor, but the poor are wealthy by worldly standards. I’m talking to middle class people who have lots of money to spare if they spend it the way they should. I say, “Tithing is a middle class way of robbing God, which means if you only tithe, you’re robbing God.” I mean, this is ridiculous. Tithing was an Old Testament minimum. Christ has died for you. You have all the privileges of the New Covenant, and you’re going to do less? Give me a break.

That’s the way I talk, and then I forget about it, and then I talk about diet. I say, “All of it is God’s. It’s all God’s. Do you think 90 percent is yours? Baloney. None of it is yours. You’re a steward. You’re a manager. You will give an account for every penny of it.” I’m more concerned with the videos my people rent than whether they tithe. I’m more concerned with the kind of car they buy than whether they tithe. I just think there are notes to strike about whole-life issues, whole-disciple issues, and laying your whole life down. The whole bank account is on the altar, and what they do on Saturday, Sunday, and Friday night is just as important as what goes on the offering plate on Sunday morning. The easiest text for this is:

You tithe mint and dill and cumin (criticizing how meticulous the Pharisees would tithe), and have neglected the weightier matters of the law: justice and mercy and faithfulness. These you ought to have done, without neglecting the others (Matthew 23:23).

That’s interesting, isn’t it? But do you see where the emphasis for Jesus fell? Justice, faith, and love. So be careful, pastors and teachers, that you not harp on things that are not worthy of harping. If you don’t have a people who tithe out of the overflow of their total allegiance to Jesus, what do you have? I mean, maybe a financially sustainable legalism, but what is that?

Mbewe: Amen.

Haag: In light of how powerful the witness is that God has given to both of you, people might feel that perhaps in themselves that their witness is so weak, insignificant, and puny that as much as you are such an encouragement to Christians, sometimes your example may even discourage them. What is your response to that from both of you? Pastor Conrad can go first.

Mbewe: I’m not conscious of any singular gifting on my part. I readily admit that. I do my bit. I study, I prepare, I teach, I write, I preach, and I dream, but I’m not conscious of anything beyond the ordinary. I must admit that. That’s where I find this question rather difficult. I have heard one or two comments. Maybe I’ve asked someone to come and preach in my church when I was supposed to have been away, and then I’m around, and then he begins to say something like, “With you being present, it’s a little difficult for me to preach,” but I’m not conscious of it myself.

The only answer I would give is to look at Paul, look at Peter, look at John, and look at James, and you can clearly see that they were completely different. Paul was a great mind. I think John, as we heard elsewhere, goes in circles a little poetically, but it makes you feel the truth rather than be able to plot it on a graph. James is a very practical individual, and that’s what he wants to see. He focuses on what you are doing, rather than a lot of doctrinal issues. So my answer, therefore, would be that you should be comfortable in your own skin. Be yourself and seek to better your ministry with time. Be the best you can be now and keep growing. I think that would be the answer. Ten years from now, you must have made progress. Twenty years from now, you must have made progress. Have good role models before you, but don’t try to be like them today because then you will be an empty echo. Walk with the Lord. Study his word. Pray. Be yourself. Maybe John has better things to say.

Piper: Nothing better, but there are endless things to say about this. Here may be the most important thing to say:

The eye cannot say to the hand, “I have no need of you,” nor again the head to the feet, “I have no need of you.” On the contrary, the parts of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable . . . (1 Corinthians 12:21–22).

That is the word of God. There’s not a person in this room who is a believer and is dispensable. Everybody is different. Be okay with what God made you. That’s what I was trying to get at with the weakness thing this morning. There are people I will never reach. I speak in front of 2,500 people, and I’m loud, and blah, blah, blah. How many people are in this city? I’m never going to see them. You know 20 of them. You are so uniquely positioned. One soul repents and all of heaven throws a party. You think you’re not significant? You might get one word spoken to somebody I’ll never see. What we need is a big theology of God’s sovereignty over your individuality. You are no mistake, male and female. No mistake. White or Black. No mistake. Smart or stupid. No mistake. The world needs stupid witnesses. They can relate. So be encouraged. You’re not an accident. Let’s just read it again:

The parts of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable . . . (1 Corinthians 12:21–22).

Put it on your wall if you think you’re one of those.

Haag: Pastor Piper, here’s a question for you. You’ve spoken much about joy and also about suffering. Could you make a few comments on how it’s possible to find joy in and through suffering versus not suffering at all?

Piper: Romans 5:3–5 says:

Not only that, but we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.

The logic is that affliction and suffering comes into your life. It produces hypomonē, endurance. It’s like a muscle. My wife and I are doing some personal training at a gym right now, and they make us hurt. They put weights in my hand and make me do this 25 times. On number 17, it hurts. He says, “Go, come one. Finish. Come on.” That’s pain. That’s artificial affliction. What’s that about? It produces physical hypomonē (patience). It tells the bicep, “Suffer, bicep, so that you learn how to lift 20 pounds.”

So God does that with our souls, and with our minds, and with our marriages, and with our children, and with our churches. He puts us through fire in order that this thing called patience and endurance might grow. Then, endurance, he says, produces dokimenē. I translate it “approvedness”. It’s what gold has when it’s gone through fire. All the dross is gone now, and the gold is left over. What’s he doing? He’s burning the dross out of your gold.

If you make it through the suffering to the other side, you look at yourself, and you say, “I’m real.” I speak for myself now. When I’m not having any problems, the devil can say things like he said to God concerning Job: “The reason he’s praising you is because everything is going well for him.” Then, you wonder, “Is that true?”and you start to wonder about your own salvation. So Paul says suffering comes into our life among other reasons to produce this sense of, “I’m real. I survived a test. I endured temptation. I endured the trial. I’m on the other side of this one. Here comes another one. I’m a little bit stronger for this one now,” and your faith grows.

As your faith grows and your approvedness grows, hope grows. Now, hope, I think, is one of those affections I was talking about which is all interwoven with joy. A hopeful person is not a sad person. It’s a joyful person. So that’s the sequence that Paul says suffering is intended to produce. Our job is to trust him through all that, that he’s really a good therapist, or a good doctor who does surgery well, or a good personal trainer in the gym who makes you hurt because he cares about you, wants you to be strong so that you’ll live longer, and serve better, and lift heavier burdens for people.

Haag: On the issue of perhaps doubts in your salvation then, Pastor Conrad, what would you suggest someone needs to do who thinks that they’re saved, but they’re just unsure? What kind of thing would you say to that person?

Mbewe: The whole question of assurance of salvation is a sensitive one, and my advice would always be if you’re battling with assurance of salvation, spend time with one of your church leaders. If you got a pastor, go and speak to them because you really need a physician of souls. You need to be in the hands of somebody whose knife cuts what needs to be cut off and keeps what needs to be kept. That would be what I would say. As you share what is robbing you of assurance of salvation, that physician of souls is able to see where your logic is wrong, where your thinking is wrong, and help you to see things biblically. Even when he helps you to see things biblically, he may need a number of sessions with you so that with time, you begin to heal on the right side.

That’s really the answer that I would give. There are a lot of people who, when God first saves them, he gives them the kind of joy that can be compared to a cloudless sky, a sunny sky for days on end. Then, the first time they experience the reality of indwelling sin or remaining sin, poof, they sink, and they come looking very low, sad, depressed, and say, “Pastor, I don’t think I’m saved.” When you listen to what they’re talking about, it’s the normal Christian life. So one can then take them through the scriptures to make them see that all that has happened is that the honeymoon is over, and God is now saying you need to work out your salvation with fear and trembling. So there would be that reality, although that does not mean that you don’t have individuals whose doubt, in fact, is healthy because they were not Christians in the first place. So my advice would always be to go to somebody who’s a trusted physician of souls, and let that person help you.

Haag: Here’s a question for you, Pastor John. The Bible makes it clear in quite a few passages that a man’s responsibility is to his wife and to his family, and Paul talks about that to Timothy and for the position of an elder. How does sacrificing things in one’s life, maybe in missions kind of living, relate to that command because sometimes they seem at odds? Can you comment on that?

Piper: I don’t know what to say because you’re right, sometimes they feel in conflict and are in conflict. At the beginning, I said, I think, be sure you marry the right person, but you don’t know what he or she will become. Marriage is one of the biggest risks we all take. We couldn’t enter it without God. That’s what Jesus said, “Let the one who is able to receive this receive it” (Matthew 19:12). So you marry, you enter ministry, she’s okay with that, and then you get a passion for a place or a kind of ministry, and she thinks, “I didn’t sign up for that. It wasn’t part of the deal,” and there feels like conflict. It might be missions, or it might be an inner city, risky place to live. It might be working with down-and-outers. It might be working with up-and-outers. She didn’t want to do that.

I would say the answer is not this or that. The answer is process. Love her well. Listen deeply. Pray along. Be patient. Stay together. God will bring her along, or God will bring him along. I have couples in my church where the women wanted to pursue missions. She was in Thailand five years before he was in her head. She’s way ahead of him. He’s still a businessman, and now they’re both there serving the poor in the poorest district of Bangkok, and he’s totally there, but she was there way earlier. I’ve had it be the other way around where the man goes first. In both cases, they were patient with each other. They prayed. They came to me and said, “I want to go, and he doesn’t want to go,” and, “I want to go, and she doesn’t want to go.” Or it could be a lifestyle, or a purchase, or a house, or whatever.

In these lifestyle choices, I think the marriage is supreme, the covenant. You didn’t make a covenant with a ministry when you married. You made a covenant with a woman, and that covenant is together, “Till death do us part.” So it has a certain priority over lifestyle issues. A ministry calling will never produce divorce. Something else is going to produce that. You want her heart in it and his heart in it. So I think all I would say is trust the Lord to find the right person, and then trust the Lord that he’s going to work in both of you, and he does. I’ve seen it happen over and over again.

I suppose one last thing is that I think men should take the initiative here and press forward in God’s leading in their life, always consulting, always talking to his wife, always taking her wisdom into account concerning the children and concerning the marriage.

Mbewe: Amen.

Haag: Pastor Conrad, what do you think we’re going to be doing in heaven? If we could describe it as 24/7, what are we going to be doing all the time?

Mbewe: It’s not really an opinion. God is wonderful beyond description. His glory is indescribable. We will be absorbed with him, and eternity will be too short. That’s my answer.

Haag: Going off of that to the opposite, Pastor John, in a lot of your messages you’ve spoken of how God wants people to enjoy him. A question that someone could ask is, does God want everyone to enjoy him, even those objects that were prepared for wrath?

Piper: Yes and no, because the word “want” is ambiguous. I don’t say this to create problems. I say this because of texts. God desires all men to repent and come to the knowledge of the truth (1 Timothy 2:4). He desires it, and I don’t think it works to say “all kinds of men.” I know that’s the standard Calvinistic way of saying it. I don’t think so. I think John 3:16 — “For God so loved the world that he gave his only-begotten Son, that whoever believes” — means that God loves lost people, all of them, such that anyone who believes will be saved. That’s the way the verse works. It says:

For God so loved the world that he sent his only Son, that whoever believes in will not perish, but have eternal life.

We should preach that whoever absolutely and indiscriminately to all people. God loves you such that any of you who believes will be saved. We can say, “This free offer that I’m throwing out to you now, this lifeline, is a real, genuine, bonafide love offer, and you could call that a want. It’s the same thing in 2 Peter 3:9. It says:

[The Lord is] not wishing that any should perish, but that all should reach repentance.

First Timothy is saying that God desires all to be saved, and here it says that he desires them to repent and come to knowledge of the truth. Those two verses are usually thrown back at Reformed people as contradicting the doctrine of election and irresistible grace, and I don’t want to weasel at all on those. I simply want to say there is a level (and this is mysterious) in God’s wisdom and mind that is a bonafide willing and a bonafide wanting. But beneath that is a level of God’s choices according to his infinite wisdom about what he will in fact do, and he doesn’t save everybody.

It might be helpful if I just read this, and then I’ll be quiet. This may be helpful. I wrote a paper one time called “Are There Two Wills in God?”. The answer is yes. I remember reading a response to that in a book by a collection of Arminian theologians. One of them was written by I. Howard Marshall. He’s a very famous New Testament scholar who would not consider himself reformed in a Calvinistic, five-point sense. He said, after quoting 1 Timothy 2:4, “There is no indication in the pastoral letters that God has another kind of will than that one.” That’s not true, and I’ll read it to you. Second Timothy 2:24–26 says:

The Lord’s servant must not be quarrelsome but kind to everyone, able to teach, patiently enduring evil, correcting his opponents with gentleness. God may perhaps grant them repentance leading to a knowledge of the truth, and they may come to their senses and escape from the snare of the devil, after being captured by him to do his will.

That’s the very language of 1 Timothy 2:4, where it says God wills for all people to come to a knowledge of the truth. Here, it says God may grant them repentance leading to a knowledge of the truth, and they may escape from the snare of the devil, and he may not. I would say that’s a very clear evidence that at one level, God is willing that none perish but all come to a knowledge of the truth, and then, when God consults his infinite wisdom, all things taken into account, he makes choices about who he will decisively bring to repentance and a knowledge of the truth. So, yes, we should say to unbelievers indiscriminately, “God wants you saved,” and then we interpret that by offering them Christ. Anyone. I don’t care how many sins you’ve sinned, I don’t care how many girls you’ve slept with, God can wipe your sins clean, and he will do it, and he wants to do it, if you will trust in Jesus. If they come a little closer, you put your arm and say, “Could we pray?” and then you pray, “God, grant my friend repentance.” If he’s listening, he’ll think, “Oh, he thinks God has to do this,” and he does.

Haag: Pastor Conrad, in predestination, does God only predestine the big decisions of life so that we will eventually end up where God wants us with regards to careers and things like that in life? How does God’s sovereignty or God’s predestination interact with the decisions that we feel we make?

Mbewe: Here’s my answer, and I think it’s an answer that clears out this matter. As human beings, we tend to think at one plane at a time. We tend to think either of human responsibility or of God’s sovereignty at any one time. Our minds are not able to operate — to borrow the picture that John used here a moment ago — with the two planes where you are dealing with what it is that we are responsible for and the way we function, and at the same time, how God, first of all, has predetermined all things and also works all things out. He didn’t just decree and go to sleep. He’s a God who, in providence, governs history.

However, both of them are realities. They are as real as though the other one didn’t exist. So then, to come to this situation, we are all free agents. The process by which you will decide when to rise from that chair, which door to use as you get out here, which staircase to follow, and who you will go home with is a process you’ll be going through quite consciously, desiring and not desiring your heart’s affections, taking your volition one way or the other. You are a free moral agent in that sense.

However, having said that, God has a hand in all the action that finally comes out. His word says that again, and again, and again. Nothing in the whole of creation happens by chance. God doesn’t just create the right environment, and then hope that you will fall into it. To use the positive statement in Philippians 2:13, he speaks about God working in such a way as to cause you both to will and to do according to his good pleasure. Similarly, when you think of the negative, it’s always good to think of the worst of all negatives, and that is when wicked men laid their hands on Jesus Christ.

Again, when the Bible gives us a peep into that, you see that God did not just create an atmosphere in which these people then did things that were good, as if he wasn’t too sure whether they will do it. I’ll just read that text to you:

To do whatever your hand and your plan had predestined to take place (Acts 4:28).

I think the difficulty we tend to have is when it’s something which is sinful, because clearly, God does not tempt anyone to sin, and God himself is not guilty of any sin. The answer that I would give would take us quite a bit of time. It still doesn’t take away from the biblical truths that we’ve seen in this text because the killing of God’s Son was a wicked act. So whatever immediate, easy answer you might have doesn’t take away the fact that his will decided beforehand what should happen. The Puritans put it this way. I can’t quite recall where I read it, but it said something like this. It’s a little phrase for you to just think about, but I found it very helpful:

God has a hand in the act of the sin, but not in the sin of the act.

That’s just food for thought.

Haag: Pastor John, talking about complementarianism, how would you approach the subject of women ministers or women preachers? Can you comment on that?

Piper: I would try to approach it biblically. I would go to Genesis 1, 2, and 3, talk about male and female and the emergent roles that are implicit there, and I would talk about the effects of the fall. I would go to Ephesians 5, and the home, and headship and submission. I would go to 1 Timothy 2 where a woman is not to teach or have authority over men. I’ll try to draw all this together. Wayne Grudem and I have tried really hard to do this in a balanced way in the book Recovering Biblical Manhood and Womanhood. Get all that pulled together, and then be very careful and very discerning about how we speak. Your question is ambiguous because you used the words “minister” and “pastor” or something. You used two words as a synonym. I’m not taking them as a synonym because I want to caution us to be really careful with our language.

Every woman should be a minister, a diakonos. Elders exist to equip the saints to do the work of the ministry. All of them. Every woman should be ministering, not just watching soap operas. What a prostitution of her brain. You can hear the way I’m approaching this. I’m starting where egalitarians think I never go. I’m going to go after women and call them into the army. Their roles in the church, in the neighborhood, in society, in volunteer organizations, and in missions are massive and should be massive.

There is one office alone to which they should not aspire, the office of elder. Elders, which I equate now with pastors, bishops, and shepherds, have qualifications. When Paul said, “I don’t permit a woman to teach or have authority over men” (1 Timothy 2:12), those two things are the very two things missing from the list of qualifications of a deacon, and distinguishing the elder from the deacon, which means I’m okay with women deacons, which is anathema in a lot of Baptist churches because they don’t even have elders. They only have deacons who are elders, which really mixes things up biblically. If your deacons are elders, then you’re going to consider what I’m saying now heresy. They shouldn’t be elders. They should be deacons, and elders should be elders, and elders have the governance. So elders must be apt to teach, and elders rule. Deacons don’t have to be apt to teach, and they don’t rule.

Paul says, “I don’t think a woman should teach or rule.” In other words, she shouldn’t be an elder. That’s what he’s saying. So I think it’s biblical to have an office in the church of men, and these men should be, to the church, like husbands are to wives, Christ-like. They should lay down their lives, build up the children, the women, and the men, and not lord over the saints. The eldership is a servant role that takes responsibility for leadership. It is a weight to be born, not a right to be demanded. That’s true of being a husband, and that’s true of being an elder. So, in sum, all the saints, including women, should be ministers. All women are gifted, all women are called, and all women should be building up the church according to their gifts.

Back in the days when I was being called horrible names by egalitarians, I would go to speak in seminaries back in the 1970s and 1980s when this battle seemed to be a lot more intense. Women at the seminaries would stand up with fire in their eyes and say, “You’re going to call my calling into question?” That would be one question, and my response was generally, “I don’t want to call your calling into question. I want to call into question your interpretation of it. There may be a calling on your life to teach, and a calling on your life to minister, and a calling on your life to lead, but you may be construing it to mean teach men, lead men, and lead a church of men and women, and maybe instead it’s a Beth Moore type ministry or a Nancy DeMoss ministry.

If these women were hearing me talk right now, they’d say, “Amen, amen. That’s right. What you’re saying is right.” So I don’t want to say God hasn’t spoken to you. I don’t want to say there isn’t any call in your life, but the Bible is the sieve I’m putting it through. I’m not God. This is God’s word, not mine. Then, the other response I sometimes got — and I don’t want to make it sound too silly — was when women said, “What are we supposed to do?” I would say, “You mean if I tell you that there’s one office you can’t have, that 10,000 roles are not open to you?”

So I wrote this little book, What’s the Difference?, and at the end, I have a list of 80 kinds of ministries besides eldership that women should flourish in. I just wanted to make a list. I mean, it’s not a complete list. So when that question comes up, I say, “Anything. Just do anything. Two-thirds of the world is made up of women and children. Most of them are suffering. Most of them are lost. Do anything to reach them.” That’s what I say to women who are coming at me and saying, “What are we supposed to do?” Good night. There’s a world who needs you in a thousand ways. They need your teaching, they need your care, they need your mothering, and they need your leadership. Just relax and say, “It’s a beautiful thing when godly, humble, non-authoritative, Christ-like men sound a note and take the lead.”

Most women flourish in churches like that. If the men are big shots and try to lord it over them, women think that’s ridiculous, and it is ridiculous. But where men are shepherds, and are caring and loving, women are glad. Because a lot of these women have unbelieving husbands at home. They’d like them to come to church. They don’t want them to come to church and see a stage filled with women — all women worship leaders, all women leaders, and a woman preacher. This guy is going to come and say, “It’s a woman’s thing. I wouldn’t go there.” It doesn’t usually work the other way, that a woman comes, sees a man preaching, and says, “This is a man’s thing.” Some may, but not usually. It’s not the way most women are wired.

Haag: Would you like to add anything, Pastor Conrad?

Mbewe: Amen.

Haag: Well, we’ve run out of time, and it’s gone very quickly. Thanks to everyone who sent in questions via Twitter, email, and the box. A special thanks to Pastor John and Pastor Conrad for sharing with us and allowing us to grill you like this. I want to ask, Pastor Conrad, if you’ll just close and pray for us now.

Mbewe: Before I do so, this will be my last time to speak tomorrow. Let me take this quick opportunity to thank all of you for your fellowship, for your prayers, for your commendation. It’s been a joy for me to preach together with John and also have the ministry of Stuart. I’d like to thank him too for his outstanding ministry. I trust the Lord will continue to give the increase to the seed that has been sown and will be sown tomorrow, and also to that which will continue to be watered in months and years ahead.