So the question then, on the basis of those two texts, becomes, “Well, how do you minister in such a way so that you don’t disobey those, and so that God gets the glory?” Those texts are in the Bible to prevent us from serving a certain way. We all know that Paul calls himself a doulos of Christ. He’s a servant, he’s a slave. And he does serve God and he does serve Jesus. And yet, Jesus said, “Don’t serve me.” And God said, “Don’t serve me.” So there must be a way to serve that is offensive to God in a way that is pleasing to God.

And I wrote the book, Future Grace, to answer that question. “What’s the difference?” And maybe I’ll state that in a provocative way and then stop and let you ask questions. And this grew out of, well, it’s grown out of a lifetime of thinking about, “How do you live the Christian life? How do you get out of bed in the morning in such a way that it glorifies God? How do you drink orange juice to the glory of God? Because the Bible says to, whatever you do, whether you eat or drink, orange juice, pizza, do it to the glory of God.” So if you don’t think about those things, you’re just indifferent to the Bible and disobedient to God. So future grace — living by faith in future grace — is my answer to the question, “How do you serve God so that God gets the glory and doesn’t get offended by what you’re doing?”

And it all originated by asking whether the debtor’s ethic is right. Now the debtor’s ethic is the gratitude ethic that almost all evangelicals think is the main way you motivate Christian ministry. That is, I think most evangelicals say, “I serve God out of gratitude. I serve God out of gratitude.” I don’t ever say that. And I think you can’t find it in the Bible. I looked in vain for months and months, trying to find an explicit place where obedience is motivated by gratitude. Explicit, explicit. And I don’t find it.

In fact, I think the gratitude ethic is very, very dangerous. I call it the debtor’s ethic to put it in a bad light. And basically, it says things like, “He gave his life for me. What have I given for him? God did so much for me. What can I do for him?” And you’re just a hair’s breath away from heresy there, and maybe already crossed over, depending on how you conceive of the transaction, what he did and what you’re about to do.

So I’ll tell you how living by faith in future grace avoids heresy, the heresy of the debtor’s ethic. The debtor’s ethic is a payback ethic. “Christ has done so much for me, I’ll spend my life paying him back.” That’s heresy, for several reasons.

1. You can’t do it. You can only go deeper in debt if you believe in sovereign grace or enabling grace. That is, if you look back and you see something good God did for you, the cross, the resurrection, the giving of his own Son, the shedding of his own blood, the pouring out of the Holy Spirit, the providential bringing of yourself to himself. “How can I not now?” And then, if your mind says, “I’m going to now pay God back by an act of obedience. I’ll visit somebody this afternoon or work hard on a sermon or I’ll whatever.” You don’t pay God back, not even a sliver. You go deeper into debt, because grace enabled you to do that.

First Corinthians 15:10 states, “By the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace toward me was not in vain. On the contrary, I worked harder than any of them, though it was not I, but the grace of God that is with me.” So, the way Paul conceived of his work for Christ is that God was doing it by grace. So, if he had the mindset that “Grace has blessed me. I must now repay some grace,” he just goes deeper into debt because every obedience step that he takes is enabled by grace. And so, his debt is bigger, not less. So, he can’t do it. It’s hopeless. Grace is before you. Grace is in front of you. Grace is over you, under you. It’s all of grace.

The second reason is that if you could do it, it would cease to be grace and become a business transaction. If I could do something to pay him back, and eventually we could say “tit for tat,” then it’s business. It’s a trade, it’s a barter, it’s a deal. It’s not grace anymore.

The third thing, and this is what triggered the book, is that the Bible portrays grace as hugely future, to be dependent on this afternoon and tomorrow and tomorrow and eternity. And if you have the gratitude ethic or the debtor’s ethic, you minimize that reality. If you say, “My life has been one history of past grace” or if I just focus on the cross and say, “The cross is a massive work of grace to save my soul. And now in the future, I am going to do things that settle accounts with that.”

The main problem there is from this point on, God gives grace to keep you alive. The text in Romans 15:18 states: “I will not venture to speak of anything except what Christ has accomplished through me to bring the Gentiles to obedience.” He wouldn’t open his mouth except to say that everything he did that was of any value was wrought by Jesus Christ. So that’s more grace, more grace, future grace. So if I’m going to bring about the obedience of faith in anybody this afternoon through witness, it will be a gift of grace. And so, you don’t pay anybody back for anything. You’ll go into deeper debt.

Or Romans 8:32, probably my favorite verse in the Bible, states: “He who did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all.” That’s past grace, and it’s glorious. The next phrase is an a fortiori argument: “How will he not also with him graciously give us all things?”

So here’s the way the Christian life works, I think. You look back briefly to see the magnitude of the grace of God that has been shown to you in Jesus Christ and all of the life and church history leading up to where you are at this very moment in this chapel. Then as you turn, your mind does not say, “Oh, yeah. I’ve got to now, in the power of my gratitude, obey this afternoon.” You don’t think that way. You rather say, “If he did that, if he did not spare his own Son, how shall he not then with him, for the rest of this time together, give me the grace of breath and wisdom to respond here?” So I’m not paying him back for anything. I’m depending on more grace.

Another key verse is 2 Corinthians 9:8 where it says there is grace. “God is able to make all grace abound to you, so that having all sufficiency in all things at all times, you may abound in every good work.” You have enough for yourself, and you have enablement for good work. So he gives grace to enable good works. So if I’m going to use good works, it will be to go deeper in debt as I depend on grace.

So my answer to the question of “How do you serve God so that God gets the glory, rather than you getting the glory or trying to pay him back?” is that you depend on future grace. So what’s the means by which I will finish this course here in Birmingham? By getting up early in the morning, reading my Bible, finding a promise: “I’ll never leave you. I’ll never forsake you. I’ll help you. I’ll strengthen you. I’ll hold you up with my victorious right hand.” And in that strength, I walk down the hill and I get in that pulpit and say, “God, please do this. Help me.” And I do it. And I’m not paying anybody back for anything. I am depending on rivers of grace that are breaking over me every day.

My picture of grace is that there is an inexhaustible reservoir extending infinitely into the future. So you stand on a dam, the dam is the present. Where it cascades over this split second we call the present, which is non-existent in my judgment. The present doesn’t exist in my way of thinking. I am living on a razor’s edge, moving into the future from the past. And as soon as I say, “This is present,” it’s past. See? Two seconds old, there it goes. I live on this razor’s edge with this infinite reservoir of future cascading over me into the past.

If I turn this way, I feel gratitude. Oh. And gratitude is essential. You can’t go to heaven without being a grateful person, it says in Romans 1:20. But when I turn this direction, it is not gratitude that energizes me. It is faith that energizes me, that this thing is all-sufficient and all-supplying and glorious coming my way.

All right. I’m done. Now I’ll give you a minute. Get your breath here. You do not have to ask me any questions about that. You don’t have to ask me any questions about this morning. You can ask me about my daughter if you want to. Ask me about my daughter.

Were there other things that you would do now that you know them?

Oh, I could talk all afternoon. I really could. I really should let you know. Do you want me to get a new mic? So people can hear. I’m happy to repeat the questions if we’re taping it.

Last spring I spoke with Jerry Bridges concerning the book Future Grace. And he said that your understanding of grace was not the traditional Reformed view because you include creation as an act of grace, whereas the traditional Reformed view of grace only emphasizes those things that pertain to our salvation from our fallen state. And I was wondering if you could respond to the comment that he made.

I’ll bet I could find somebody Reformed who views creation as grace. But I’m happy to say he’s right, and that’s no big deal, because I don’t live before the fall. And none of you do, and therefore, everything I say pertains to fallen people. And we can quibble about whether creation was gracious or not, but here’s the deeper issue that he’s addressing and that Meredith Kline is on my case about. The covenant of works and the covenant of grace, I don’t operate in that system. I don’t think there is such a thing as a covenant of works.

Now that’s real troubling to a covenant theologian. His whole system comes crashing down, and he thinks the main problem there is that I, therefore, attacked the cross. Because if you don’t have a covenant of works that Adam failed at, then you don’t have a glorious work of a second Adam fulfilling the covenant and thus meriting salvation for the beneficiaries of the covenant. That would be Meredith. If he were here, he’d say, “That’s John Piper’s biggest problem.”

And I think Jerry, who’s a very, very gracious person, is getting at it the same way. Grace is a response to demerit in covenant theology. Therefore, you can’t have grace before you have demerit. And you don’t have demerit until the fall.

I define grace as giving where there’s no merit, not just demerit. Adam did not deserve to be created, and therefore it was a gracious thing. Adam did not deserve any day of his life to have breath. That is, he never merited anything from God. Everything Adam got from God before the fall was free and absolutely undeserved. God was his gracious Father, loving him in the garden, meeting every need, which is why the fall was so heinous. It was so in God’s face. “I don’t trust you to be my father anymore.”

Now I know that I have changed. I’m using a definition that Jerry isn’t using, but once you get to the fall, that disagreement at whether or not from this day on or from the fall on, everything comes to us as free grace, his definition and mine, we’re on the same ball field.

Let me just answer Meredith Kline’s thing because there may be some covenant theologians out there, half of you maybe, or all of you. I do not believe that I, in any way, torpedo the cross. It is my life. It is the center of our theology and grace. Jesus Christ did not relate to his father in his earthly obedience as employee to employer, earning wages. He fulfilled the law perfectly, but the law is a law of faith.

Romans 9:32, “[Why did Israel not attain unto the law the righteousness thereof?] Because they did not pursue it by faith, but as if it were based on works.” Which it isn’t and never was meant to be. The law is not a covenant of works. I’m seeing Dr. Matthews back there. I wonder if he agrees with this. I don’t know. Nowhere on Sinai and nowhere in the law do you find God commending legalism, commending Galatianism, commending that we earn our salvation. That’s heresy. I’m overstating the case, but not much, not much. Galatianism is the belief that you can both get justified and get sanctified by your efforts, earning God’s either justifying approval or sanctifying approval. So it’s heresy according to Galatians 1:9. If an angel tells you that, let him be damned.

Now covenant theology comes along and says, “God taught that we should earn our salvation before the fall.” Merited, that’s the covenant of works. And when they failed, we all fell. We needed a covenant of grace that didn’t depend on earning anymore, and Christ came as the second Adam to earn it where Adam had failed. And now having earned it, we and him as our federal head have life. I think that whole structure is defective, and so did, I believe, John Murray, before he died. He said things about there are needs for some deep, significant inner rethinking of the covenant of works.

Now you didn’t ask for all that, and I’m sorry. I gave you all that. But that’s important. My theology, I’m a pastor. Nobody takes my theology seriously in academic circles. A lot of lay people do. A lot of people are changed, I praise God, but nobody’s writing dissertations about John Piper’s theology. But a few people see big implications like Meredith Kline and Jerry Bridges and a few others. And they’re troubled because it is not in step with traditional covenant theology, even though I’m a seven-point Calvinist.

What are the other two points?

What are the other two points? I know somebody who does that. Number one: God not only predestines the elect to life, he predestines the reprobate to damnation. And two, this is the best of all possible worlds.

Are you familiar with Hugh Ross and his progressive creationism view?

I know the name. I own a book, and I’m not familiar enough to comment on it. But I’m happy to hear what you have to say.

Oh, I wanted to know what your view was, especially in light of what you said this morning about the creation and all. And I didn’t know if you had a view on that. Well, can I move to another question?

Sure.

What’s your view of the signing of the document “Evangelicals and Catholics Together” — both the first one and the second one. Do you have a view on that?

I’ve got a view on that. The question was about ECT and the justification statement and now the gift of salvation statement, which I have read, and I’ve read some of the responses to it. And I put in my briefcase to bring along the most recent article by Don Carson in JETS. Don was there at the discussion for the second document, and Don did not sign it. As soon as I looked at it, I looked and his name wasn’t there. And I’m troubled by that, because I know your president signed it, right? President Dean George, he signed it.

You’re safe. If that document were abstracted out of the context of the world we live in, I could sign it very easily. It’s a beautiful statement, a magnificent statement in many ways. In fact, it’s an incredibly Reformed statement. Regeneration is made the cause of faith in that statement. It’s a stunning statement.

But in our milieu, where the Catholic church is alive and well and in my judgment profoundly defective, getting the gospel wrong in many ways on justification and sacramentally, and in baptismal regeneration, and in the nature of the mass and its impartation of forgiveness, and in the nature of authority, and in the nature of purgatory, and in the view of Mary, and in the veneration of the saints.

It’s just a defective church, through and through. I am very uneasy with signing on so that I can tell all the Catholics in South America, Evangelicals, and Catholics really believe the same thing about salvation. Wow, that’s a big responsibility. That’s a huge responsibility that these signers have taken on, which I wouldn’t do at this point in history.

I’m having supper with Dr. George tonight. I’ll ask him why he signed it. And he’ll have a good answer, and he’s probably already told you what the answer is. So a lot of my friends signed it, people I love and respect. And my guess is they just assess our historical moment differently than I do.

People assess historical moments differently. The document is beautiful. The document, every sentence in it is true, as far as I could tell. I read it with a microscope looking for a problem. It’s a beautiful document. The first one was more troubling, I think, on justification, and unleashed a lot more substantive critique from R.C. Sproul and John MacArthur and those guys. Feel free to continue in one direction or change the direction. So go ahead.

Thank you for this morning. I was stirred in my heart to do better and to quit at the same time, as a pastor in Orlando. Two questions. A hot book in our city right now is Jim Cymbala’s from Brooklyn Tabernacle Church, Fresh Wind, Fresh Fire. And he draws an application at the end in the interest of making our church worship more prayer-centered, that perhaps we should do a bit less preaching and spend more time bringing people to the altar of grace to find help in time of need. In light of yesterday’s talk, could you comment on that?

And then, if I may press for a second question, I’ve heard it taught, “Don’t preach it if you can’t or won’t illustrate it.” And yet, as I observe your anointed pattern by God’s grace, your concern with illustrations and stories seems not as great, as much of the content that you bring with such heart. And could you comment then on that principle of how often to illustrate as you preach pastorally and balance with your content? Thank you very much for your answers.

I have not read Jim Cymbala’s book. I had lunch with him one time. And I’ve watched the video that his church puts out of his church, and I loved his music, his wife’s music. And he’s doing an amazing work there. I think, tongue in cheek, I would say, “Okay. If what you’re really after is bringing people to the throne of grace and putting prayer more at the center of your worship service, don’t you sing less?” You’ve got to choose. The singing half of the preaching half, why are you choosing the preaching half to minimize? And his answer might be, “I want there to be participation, and singing involves the people more.”

I have never heard Jim Cymbala preach except once at our denominational meeting, and it was a very powerful message. And it’s interesting what he did at the end. He closed by using a strong application to parents in pain, parents who have kids that they’re broken-hearted about. And he said, “If you’re a parent in this room, and you have a kid that you’re deeply concerned about, stand up.” Two thousand people stood up. It was a huge crowd, half the people.

And he waited, and then he said, “Well, I think you ought to all come to the front, so come on up here.” I was standing up. We all came to the front, and he said, “Now I think what we need to do is pray for each other about these kids and for each other. And so, I want the men to pray for the men and the women to pray for the women. So just put your hand on the shoulder of some woman or man nearby, and ask them the name of their kid and pray for them.”

That was a powerful moment. There were tears everywhere. Those people were bawling their heads off as they prayed for each other. I think that’s what he means. “Get that into your service.” And I say, “Get it into your service. Lengthen the service. Don’t shorten the sermon. Why should you shorten the sermon? The people need the word of God.”

Now, that moment, see if somebody feels the force of that like I did that night, I go away saying, “I don’t want that to happen at Bethlehem. I want that to happen at my church.” Well, I can go home and get that to happen what? Once, twice a year, two years? Frankly, it’s going to get old, folks. It’s going to get old. You try to pull the cord on people’s emotions Sunday after Sunday and get them to do some kind of tear thing at the end, Sunday after Sunday, it’s going to get old. It’s going to get old. And preaching, I believe, in the power of the Holy Spirit never gets old, at least not in 17 years at my church. I am so excited about God and his word at age 52 and about preaching that I can hardly stand it that there’s only one Sunday in the week.

Second question, remind me. Got it. Okay, illustrations. I don’t know why I get asked to preach on preaching. I took one course on preaching. I don’t read many books on preaching. I’m afraid if I were to read how to do it, I’d get so mixed up. I’d be so afraid to teach a homiletics class because you’d have to read two or three books and tell the students how to do it, and I don’t have a clue how to do it. So I’m really not a good one to answer that question.

The reason I don’t use more illustrations is that they only give me 35 minutes. It’s not because I disapprove of illustrations. Didn’t you like all those statistics about the universe this morning? I thought that was sort of cool.

It’s not the essence by any means, but it kind of sobers you to think that God did that. And I’ll tell you about my son, Benjamin. All I have to do in my pulpit is mention one of my kids, and the place becomes silent enough for a pin to drop. If anytime in the sermon I say, “This morning at the breakfast table,” there’s a totally different effect in the room.

So I know the power of illustration. I know how stories work. But frankly, I’m on kind of a rebellion because I know pastors who use that, and that’s all they do: story after story after story because they know they’ve got their people. If they can get their people to cry, if they can get their people to laugh, if they can get the place to get dead silent with a story, it feels very powerful to a pastor. It’s about power.

I say baloney. That’s so easy. That is so easy. You don’t need a homiletics class to learn that, good grief. Everything in nature tells you stories move people. Illustrations get attention. That’s easy to do. The hard thing is to teach theology in the pulpit with such passion that kids hang on your words. That’s what I’m after. I’m after 6, 8, 9, 10-year-old kids for predestination. And thankfully, the team, the man and wife team that does our children’s ministries are totally with me, writing the curriculum for the kids on the providence of God. Forty lessons Sally Michael wrote on the providence of God, the hardest questions you could ask about suffering, for kids in fourth, fifth, and sixth grade.

I get note after note from parents to say, “They’re getting it. They’re getting it.” I’ll give you a little illustration. We have the PAL notebooks that we give to our kids. The pastor, I forget what PAL stands for, it’s P-A-L, pastor something. Oh, shoot. But we give them to these kids. There’s one page for every Sunday, and they’re to take notes, draw a picture if you don’t know how to write, of what Pastor John is saying. And then, I get together with the kids once a quarter and they can ask me questions.

And so, one of them raises his hand. I said, “Got any questions?” And he said, “Do you know how many times you said the word God last quarter?” I said, “No. How many?” He said, “1,136.” I said, “How did you know that?” He said, “Well, every time you say the word God, I’d make a little mark.” And he showed me his notebook. That’s what his parents have taught him to do. And others, we have this dumbing-down idea in our head that you can’t use big words and you can’t preach 35-minute sermons and you can’t do doctrine and you can’t, you can’t, you can’t, you can’t, you can’t. And who is God here? Audience is God and just a few little people telling you these things, say it can’t be done.

I think you should say to them, “Says who? Says who it can’t be done?” Just because the 20th century hasn’t been able to pull it off, give me a break. This is just a little blip on the history of the world. There might be something to learn from other centuries when kids sat still for two hours and they learned things, and they went home and their parents taught them the words they didn’t know. And they got excited about learning new words instead of getting feisty with the pastor that he said a word they didn’t know. The mentality may be all wrong out there. You’ve got to teach them to change.

So all that to say, if they give you 45 minutes, use more illustrations. If they give you 25 minutes, use fewer illustrations. But don’t leave God out and don’t leave doctrine out and don’t leave the tough things out. And I think intensity and passion and reality in the preacher is more important than stories. That’s what I think. Wherever.

Dr. Piper, my buddies and I are reading your book Desiring God in our accountability group. Now we got into this discussion the other night about worship, and I guess worship through singing and that type of thing. And like you say, every morning you get up and some mornings you don’t feel like praising God, so to speak, and your soul has to be revived. Well, we were discussing when we go to church or go wherever or we’re singing praise songs and we don’t feel like it. I go through the words, and I say the words, and I mean them, but my heart may not always be in it, but my mind is. And I know you put a lot of emphasis on passion and stuff, is that wrong? How does God look at that, do you think?

That’s a very good question. It might be wrong, and it might not be, depending on what you’re saying to God and to others about it. The question is, given my Christian Hedonism and my high premium on delighting in God and pursuing God for the joy that there is in God, and the defect of a moral act in which there is no joy, can you do anything good if you don’t feel joyful? Can you worship? Can you change a tire for somebody in the rain?

Now the answer to that question is yes, to settle the matter immediately, but not a simple yes. You see, the difference between the Christian Hedonists like me and somebody who would disagree with Christian Hedonism is that they would say the emotion that Piper keeps telling you is essential is not essential. It’s the raw decision and will to do the good thing that God looks for. So if you don’t feel like worshiping, worship anyway. Say the words of the prayer, sing the song, listen to the message, etc.

If there’s a person stranded on the freeway and it’s thirty below zero in Minnesota, and you’re hurrying to somewhere and they look like they’re in danger. And you don’t feel like stopping at all, nothing in you is rejoicing in this good deed, you are not serving the Lord with gladness here, they would say, “It doesn’t matter. It has nothing to do with the morality of this moment. You stop and you help. That’s morality.” To which I say, “It is not that simple. It is just not that simple. Motivation is more important than that.”

I say, at that moment, “Yes, stop. And yes, sing. But do it repenting. Repent.” I do this all the time, folks. You get calls that you’ve got to go to the hospital in the middle of playtime with your little girl at 8:00 or 7:30. You’re tired. It’s been a long day. Nothing’s gone right. And the call comes, and I’m looking inside of me for good motivation and not finding one. Well, you say to your wife, “This is serious enough. I think I’ve got to go.” She says, “Yeah, you’ve got to go.”

And while you are going, what are you doing? Are you saying to yourself, “How I feel in this moment is irrelevant”? There are a lot of people teaching that kind of Christianity. It’s the caboose at the end of the train. It does not make any difference how you feel. Feelings are not of the essence of Christianity. I think that’s really, really, really wrong. And I wrote the book to prove it. Everything I write is to prove it.

I think the right thing to do at that point is to repent. And I do repent. I say as I’m driving down to Abbott Hospital, I say, “Father, I’m sorry. My heart is so disinclined to love this person, to feel like if I were there, I’d want somebody to come and care about me. And I’d be so happy if they came. And I’m not inclining towards this. Forgive me. I’m sorry I feel this way.”

The second thing you do is pray for joy. “Restore in me the joy of ministry.” This is why Jesus said in Acts 20:35, not just “It is more blessed to give than to receive,” but he said, “Remembering the words of our Lord, how he said it is more blessed to give than to receive.” Why did he say “remembering”? Because we need to remember it for the sake of motivation. So I remember it. And one of the ways I preach to myself is I pray, “Lord, God, give me joy in this. Help me to love this person so much it’s a delight to go there and stand beside their bed and bring good news to them.” And then, I preach to myself, “It is more blessed to give than to receive,” because Paul said, “Remember that. Remember that.”

There are a lot of ethicists today that would say, “Forget that. Forget that. It contaminates your motives. It contaminates. It contaminates. Forget it. Don’t get that in your head, because if you go down to the hospital because it’s more blessed for you, you are not doing a moral thing.” Is that common or what? Immanuel Kant and everybody since then just about, except a few faithful evangelicals like Jonathan Edwards, have taught that to pursue your own joy is selfish and defective and contaminating of morals. And I’m on a crusade in everything I write and in everything I preach to say, “It ain’t so. Not to pursue your joy in that makes it impossible for you to do a moral thing.” That’s my system.

So back to your singing. If you are saying to the Lord, “I’m sorry that you are far from me and there’s a cloud between us. I’m sorry I’m either too tired or I’m too angry or I’m too discouraged or I’m too broken that I can’t even barely feel your presence. But Lord, you’re my only hope. And so, I’m going to lift my voice in these songs, scarcely feeling a thing, with the prayer and the hope that you will come. Come as I sing and restore the joy of my salvation.” And then, you’re not a hypocrite. If you don’t say that and you’re just singing because everybody else is singing, we’ve got a name for you.

How do you deal with particular sins when you’re preaching? A lot of the church growth preachers I’ve listened to said, “Don’t deal with it because that’s negative preaching, and outsiders are offended by negative preaching.”

Well, the gospel is offensive. That’s the first answer. But that’s not the best answer. That’s the way a lot of my Reformed buddies would answer it. “Offend?” Okay. “Say something else helpful.” But here’s the answer. And everything comes out of my understanding of Christian Hedonism, which is, I pray, biblical.

To answer that question, I would go straight to Jeremiah 2:12–13:

Be appalled, O heavens, at this; be shocked, be utterly desolate, declares the Lord, for my people have committed two evils: they have forsaken me, the fountain of living waters, and hewed out cisterns for themselves, broken cisterns that can hold no water.

Sin is asinine forsaking of joy. That’s positive. That’s not negative. “You fools. Why would you die? Call everyone who thirsts, ‘Come to the water. You who have no money, come buy and eat. Come buy wine and milk without money, without price. Why do you spend your labor on that which is not bread?’”

Sin is the forsaking of the fountain of life for a broken cistern that can hold no water. So when I preach sin, I preach it as ugly. I preach it as a suicidal enemy of your soul. First Peter 2 — these lusts “wage war against your soul” (1 Peter 2:11). You see, if you don’t think it’s wrong to tell people to want to be happy, you can do this. If it’s okay to want to be happy in God, you can tell them the essence of sin is forsaking the pursuit of happiness in God, which is what I tell my sons. This is what I tell my church over and over again.

The problem with sin is not that it’s on a list of nasties. The problem with sin is that it cuts you off from joy. And I know. If I get a pagan who stands up in the sermon and says, “It doesn’t cut me off from joy, man. You should have seen what I had last weekend.” I would say, “The flower falls and the grass withers. You’re here for two seconds, man, and then eternity. And you’re going to burn if you don’t change. And I’ll tell you, the trade-off is not very high. An eternity in hell and an eternity where God says, “In my presence is fullness of joy, and at my right hand are pleasures forevermore,” you’re making a foolish deal, man.” That’s one thing I’d say. Whether I’d say that or not really depends on the moment.

But then, I would say, “Even in this life, even in this life, let me ask you something. You’re going to be 75-years-old one of these days, wrinkled, won’t have much sexual punch anymore, and no woman is going to be interested. And you might live another five years, another ten years. Let me tell you. Let me ask you this. Wouldn’t it be to look across an old breakfast table in the country into a wizened-faced woman that you’ve been married to for 55 years, and smile with your toothless grin and say, ‘We made it. We made it.’”

I want that more than anything in the world with my wife. We’ve gone through some awful stuff together, just difficulty with one of our boys and 33 months in Christian counseling and trying to learn how not to hurt each other. I’ll tell you, I want one thing. In thirty more years, we’ll be married thirty years this December, I want to look across from her and say to Noël, we already say it, “We made it. Praise God, we made it. We’re together. Isn’t it good? Isn’t the pain worth it?” And it’ll be worth it.

So I would say to a guy like that who thinks really that maximizing his momentary lustful pleasure, I think I can touch that man at a place where that stuff on the weekend isn’t touching him at all. And he knows it. He knows it late at night. He knows it when it’s getting old.

Oh, we’ve got to preach on sin. We’ve got to preach on sin, and name it and describe it as ugly. And mainly it’s ugly because it does two things. It robs you of joy and it robs God of glory. And that’s what the universe is about, your joy and God’s glory. It’s not negative to talk about sin that way.

Just two probably quick answers. One is you’re obviously very busy. How much time do you have for sermon preparation? I’ve had the opportunity to receive the manuscripts for several years, and obviously they’re very thoughtful. How much time do you spend? The second is, are you familiar with the Jack Miller’s Sonship Discipleship Program, because I see a lot of overlap in concepts.

Interesting. I never met Jack Miller. I wish I had before he died, but I met people who were kind of his disciples, who resonate with a lot that I say and sometimes wonder if we’re quite on the same wavelength. And so, all I can say is I have real good impressions and real good vibrations when I’m with his friends. But I can’t say anything. I’ll tell you what I can say. His wife’s book, well, their book, Come Back, Barbara. Why that book went out of print from, what was it, Zondervan? That’s a great book for parents with wayward kids. I love that book.

Well, anyway, back to your other question. I’ll just say if you’ve got a teenager, 17, 18, or 16 years old, who left the faith, left home, get that book. It is in print now from Jack. He does it himself. What are they called? World Harvest Ministries. They put it back in print. You can get it. I give them out in my church. Parents come to me weeping their eyes out. I keep stacks of them. Give them this book. “Read this. This will help. There’s hope. There’s hope.”

Sermon preparation, you asked two questions. How much time do I have, and how much time do I use? My week is structured so that I have all day Friday and Saturday. I don’t touch my sermons until Friday, except to plan them. I go away and plan out a series or a fall or something. But as far as getting down to work on the exegesis and the writing, I don’t begin before Friday. I used to. When I first entered the ministry, sermon preparation, I’d start, well, I’ve been taught, “Study and write in the mornings, visit in the afternoon, get a family evening.” Right. Sure. My sermon filled up every morning.

Work expands to fill the amount of time you have to do it in. So if you’ve got other things you want to do with your life besides write sermons, you can’t start on Monday unless you’ve got incredible discipline. I can’t because that’s all I would do because there are so many unanswered questions in every text, so many applications you could trace out, so many books to read, articles to read, commentaries to read. It just expands forever and ever and ever on every sermon.

So how are you going to pull it in? I pull it in by just forcing myself to pull it into Friday and Saturday. But while that could add up to twenty hours or so, I never use all that anymore. I used to use a lot of it, but I can write a sermon now in four or five hours if I have worked on the text at some time in the past. The actual composition and thinking through the structure with the help of a word processor. Oh, I’ll tell you, what computers did for me in 1984 when I went from a legal pad to a computer was a three-hour savings.

And just to encourage you, you’re probably all into this because you’re all computer people, I was a terrible typist. All I needed proof of was that I could type roughly as fast as I could write. That’s slow. That’s real slow because then I knew I wouldn’t lose time and I would probably get faster. Simple. So I got a computer. And I have gotten faster, and so the actual composition time goes really fast if my head’s clear.

But I would say I don’t know what to say on average. What I do on Friday with the time that I don’t is read and think and answer mail, so much mail, people asking me questions about everything under the sun. And so, just kind of a lot of stuff, but almost everything I read and do is flowing into sermon preparation. I’m a preacher. I’m a preacher. I think preaching, so that everything I experience on the street with my wife, with my children, with my reading here, you guys will no doubt become a sermon illustration somewhere along the way. Oh, I’ll tell people about Jonathan Edwards, and they’ll love that. Being here is building what I do at home. And what I did there is building what I do here.

Preaching is not a compartmentalized thing for me. It’s sort of life. I remember my homiletics teacher in a class on communication, when we were talking about illustrations, he said, “Get rid of these books of illustrations. Yeah, you don’t read those.” And then he said, “Now stop.” I remember this in Pasadena, 1969.He said, “Stop,” with about eighty of us in the class. “Be quiet.” And we all waited about ten seconds. He said, “Did you hear that?”

And everybody said, “What?” “The siren on Colorado Avenue, the siren. Somebody’s really hurt right now while we’re in here. Does that make a difference to you?” And little things like that cause me to say, “I’m not listening. I’m not listening to reality.” And he said, “All you need to do is be awake if you want illustrations. Watch people. Look into their eyes. Get in their lives. Look at nature. Be awake.” So all day Saturday, typically. Another question.

Dr. Piper, I hope this doesn’t hurt your enemies—I mean hurt your friends and all that. I’m Pentecostal, and I found your book, Desiring God, to be one of the most exhilarating spiritual experiences in my life. And I wanted to ask you, how, now that you’re coming to this understanding of God’s intention for our great joy, has it affected the way you do worship in your church?

And maybe as a follow-up with that, in the midst of the critiques that I think you would probably sustain, and many of which I’d agree with, about the emotionalism that goes with much charismatic and Pentecostal worship, do you yet see something in that that is at all similar to the kind of exaltation of God that I experienced as I hear you preach and as I read in your book?

In fact, yesterday I came late, and I was sitting on the step out here, and when we reached the end of the sermon, I wanted to do something very charismatic. I wanted to stand up and say, “Praise God. Amen. Lord, we exalt you.” So, anyway, that’s something for you there to deal with as you wish.

Yes. Right. Well, the answer to the last question is yes, of course, I do see in the best of the charismatic experience what I mean by exaltation. When I used the phrase “expository exultation” yesterday, I spelled that with a U. Nobody at lunch caught that. Everybody heard “A: exaltation.” I meant exultation.

Exaltation is an intransitive verb. Exult is a transitive verb. You exult over something, and you exalt something. And what I’m saying preaching is, is the exulting over the word and the God of the word. So, you’re exposing him, and you are, in the doing of it, exulting over what you see and say. That’s pretty charismatic.

Now, the worst of charismatics, of course, are way too weak on exposition, and the best are trying to bring them together. And my crusade is to get them together, to get head and heart together, feeling and understanding together, seeing and savoring together. I want to make more intellectuals out of charismatics and more charismatics out of Reformed intellectual types. I want to work on both sides.

And amazingly, I have a hearing on both sides. I’m going to go talk to the Vineyard folks this summer, and I get invited over to the AG faculty at North Central College. And yet, I go to PCA things and I came to Beeson, whatever you are. I’m trying to figure out what you are here. And that was the second half of your question.

Yes, I value what the Third Wave especially has done for us. It has some downsides. And I know my Reformed sidekicks; they are always harping on the downside of charismatic stuff and the dangers it has for the sufficiency of Scripture and emotionalism and not the centrality of the word and so on. But frankly, I’m willing to take some risks like that in order to get some life into the churches. Now, remind me of the first half.

How does this affect you in worship?

Our worship. Right. Okay. Well, the first thing I want to say is that I don’t think Christian Hedonism, as I’ve expounded in Desiring God, commits you to any particular form of worship. I think a liturgical person can read that book and say, “Yes, that’s what we do.” And a charismatic person can say, “Yes, that’s what we do.” Because that whole book is driven at the heart. It’s not driven at form. Whether the hands are in the air or safely tucked under a heavy hymnal is not what that book is about, or whether gifts are being exercised in public on Sunday morning or not believed in. That’s not what that book is about.

That book is about intensity, reality, authenticity. Those are the words that transform worship, when people are real, when people are intense, when people are passionate, when people go hard after God. So the answer is it does transform worship. It profoundly transforms worship when you release a people to pursue joy in God. In fact, when you teach a people Sunday after Sunday that the reason they should be coming to this room is to seek God and eat God and drink God, it changes their mindset.

Instead of what most pastors, maybe, not most, many, they get mad at their congregations. You know what they say? “The problem here is that you folks come to get, not to give. If you’d just come to give a little bit not to get, then we’d have better services.” That’s a lot of baloney.

The problem is not that they’re coming to get. They got last night with the television, and they don’t want to get anything from God in this service. They’re there because they think it’s a duty, and they’ve got to give him their dutiful presence and their dutiful singing and their dutiful listening. And that kills worship. Worship is a banquet table, and I’m one of the cooks. And my job is to spread an irresistible banquet of glory and grace. And those people are invited to come eat, and when they eat to say, “Ah.” That’s worship, “Ah.” So it has a profound effect on the way you conceive of worship and then the spirit of the worship.

But I don’t want to argue for any particular forms like hymns versus contemporary worship music or liturgical versus free or whatever. That is just not of the essence as I see it, though we ourselves, just in case you’re curious, we are very blended as they call it. It’s almost impossible to be blended, but we work at it. Believe it or not, last Sunday we followed “Immortal, Invisible, God Only Wise” with “Shine, Jesus, Shine.”

Now we actually did that. That takes an incredible effort. You can’t just do that. You’ve really got to figure out how to do that because otherwise, it sounds ridiculous. Big majestic atmosphere. And then, the drums kick in. “Can we just stay in one world, please?” But we’re working at it. We’re just working at it.

I am just recently married and looking to be trained to go into the pastorate. And one of my concerns is how to balance what I’ve seen just in my church experience is the tremendous time draw of the pastorate with giving time to my family. And the question you were answering earlier really sparked my thinking about that. And I’m just curious to what some of your thoughts are and how you’ve managed to balance that, those issues.

You know how you do that, how you balance family time and ministry time and personal devotional time and going out of town like this hangs so much on who your wife is. Wives are so different, and you’ve got to be incredibly insightful here. You must know her. First Peter 3, “Live together with her according to knowledge” is the literal translation, “according to knowledge as a weaker vessel” (1 Peter 3:7).

Well, my wife is, in my judgment, one of the strongest people in the universe, which has freed me to lead a schedule that I could name a few otherwise I know who could not begin to tolerate. They’d be resentful and they’d be hurt and they’d be overwhelmed by the children.

My wife is just kind of like self-sufficient. I’m hardly needed. That’s the way she’s wired. She grew up in a home where neediness was not thought of. She’s not a needy person. There are needy people. Some pastors are very needy. It’s not a male/female thing. But you’ve just got to know her. Okay? That’s the first thing.

And then, don’t presume upon her, like some of your wives are probably saying to themselves right now, “You’d better be careful, Piper. Don’t presume upon Noël’s strength as though she didn’t need you or want you because she makes it so well without you. Don’t neglect her.” And that’s absolutely true.

So the second thing is you’ve got to make time that’s really special for her and for those kids. So for all my years in the pastorate, after supper is playtime. We eat at 5:30, take half an hour, 45 minutes to eat. Until 7:00 is playtime. It has been for 17 years. And those boys, as they were growing up, that’s their time. They know that. They ask for it, they expect it. And all the committees at my church that I’ve ever served on know they cannot start before 7:15, because I’ve got to walk to church between 7:00 and 7:15. I don’t go anywhere before 7:00. And then I’ll stay till 11:00 if I have to at this committee. But those kids are getting from 6:00–7:00.

And the one who’s 25 and the one who’s 22, my 22-year-old called me from Georgia the other day and said he was talking with some of his buddies who had been wrestling and struggling with something. And he said, “I didn’t realize how fortunate I was that my dad had playtime with me, that you actually played with me every night, including Saturdays for half an hour or so.”

It gets hard when you’ve got four boys and they’re different ages. But we worked at it. We just took turns. And you’ve got a 4-year-old and you’ve got a 12-year-old, and the 12 and the 4 don’t want to do the same thing. But we worked at it. We kind of took turns. He was just overwhelmed.

And the effect that has had on them. Now, that doesn’t cost me a lot. And I went to a lot of soccer games. A pastor is wonderfully flexible in the afternoon. Who’s asking you to do anything at 3:00? Who cares what you do, right? They don’t know what you’re doing at 3:00. Go to the soccer game. That’s what I did. I went to all my boys’ soccer games that were at home at 3:00 in the afternoon. I work late. I stay up all night if I have to to get my job done. But I was at those soccer games. I’d fly in from out of town early.

I’d say to Beeson here, if I had a boy playing soccer right now and he had a game on Thursday afternoon, I’m getting in at 6:00 on Thursday. I’d say, “You’ve got to pay for another flight. We’ve got to do this differently. I need to get in at 1:00. We’ve got a 3:00 soccer game on Thursday.” Beeson or no Beeson, that’s the way I would do it. I might miss the one on Tuesday, but I doubt if I’d missed both of them. If you can juggle it, we’d juggle it.

My wife and I date. Every Thursday, we date. Thursday noon is her lunch. And every Saturday I take a different boy to Pizza Hut. Talitha is too young, but she’ll probably kick in about age three. We’ve done this for 15 years. I’ve spent thousands of dollars at Pizza Hut. And I mean that. I’ve added it up. It’s horrible to think about how much pizza I bought at Pizza Hut. They know me, they know us all. And I bring a different boy there every Saturday.

We sit, and I ask questions about masturbation, girls, devotions, school. These are not just throwaway times. These are “You’re my son, I’m your father. I love you.” Say that. Just say that. “I love you. Let’s talk about something. What are you studying in Sunday School? Do you believe that? What difference does it make in your life?”

And then I asked my wife, I said, “How many evenings a week do you need me? What would be ideal? If you waved a wand, forget pastorate, forget anything. You know me, you know you. You know us and how we click, when we get on each other’s nerves because we’re together too long. Just wave a wand.” And she said, “Well, three nights would be nice.” I said, “And what would you like to do those nights?” And she said, “Just sit in the same room. You can read, and I’ll read. Just so you’re there.” That’s easy. You read your theology, and there she is. But really, a lot of things happen during that time.

It’s the inaccessibility of a pastor that frustrates wives. You can’t get an edge. You never seem to be there. Even when you’re there, you’re not there. So if you can be there and really be there, and she knows that for her to say when you’re reading your theology book, “I got this call from Abraham’s teacher today, and I didn’t know what to say.” And you can be like, you’re into it. So I don’t have any rules about time or whatever, but that’s some thoughts anyway.

Thank you for being here. I’m reminded of Paul and the thorn he had in the flesh, and that he wrote that he was given that so that he would not be exalted above measure. And I don’t want to be so personal to ask what thorn you have, but I’m aware that you are very popular, very well-known. And I’m wondering what you believe God has sent you to be perhaps a thorn in the flesh to keep you humble. And even second, what proactive actions do you take in an effort to stay humble, given your notoriety?

That’s a really good question. And it’s probably impossible to answer without it backfiring, in other words, if I tell you how humble I work to stay. But I think I can say some things without letting my right hand know what my left hand is doing, or you know what my left hand is doing.

First of all, the financial danger of writing books is huge, or doing things like this where they give nice honorariums. And everybody who does that sort of thing needs to put a cap on it. And so, I don’t take any of my royalties. They all go to Desiring God Ministries. The money component I’m really afraid of because Jesus says, “It’s hard for a rich man to get into the kingdom.”

And I don’t want to be rich. I’m scared of being rich, and so I put a cap on my earnings. The church pays me enough to live on. I don’t need all that money. And so, I’m excited to see it plowed back into ministry. And so, all the publishers have a little paragraph, it’s paid to them and not to me because money and pride, money and power and pride are just real thick.

Well, when it comes to pride, I’ll tell you the most recent experience I had that scared the living daylights out of me, at Wheaton. When you speak like I do every Sunday, and most of the feedback is positive, though there’s enough negative that that functions as a thorn. It’s almost something negative every week, not huge numbers, but one negative note is worse than a hundred positive notes. It hurts more. Well, those come. Those come.

But at Wheaton, when I go out and do these kinds of one-night stand things like this, I get to give you my best — things I’ve worked on a long time and things you haven’t often heard about — so you’re kind of, “Wow. We haven’t heard it said that way before. And thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you.” And so you just get a lot of these strokes. It’s not your problem, okay? For those of you who said thank you, it’s not your problem. And that feels good. Nobody in the universe is hurt, emotion. That is, it doesn’t feel bad. It always feels good.

So this is like drinking coffee or pop or whatever you like, wine. You do that with Ethan? I don’t know, drink. And suddenly, without knowing it, you might be addicted to it, addicted to praise, of positive feedback because it feels so good. Sex feels good, and you can get addicted to that. Food feels good, and you can get addicted to that. Praise feels good, and you can get addicted to that.

I had three messages in chapel, addressing two thousand students at Wheaton two weeks ago. And I just gave them the hardest punch on God-centeredness just like I’m doing here. And when I was done, not a soul spoke to me. Now you guys are all lining up, “Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you.” I’m thinking, “Whew. Okay. Somebody liked it.” Not a soul spoke to me. That was a thorn, a little teeny thorn. I went through the rest of that day feeling like I was coming off a drug cold turkey.

And it was a very good thing to happen to me because I think I had become addicted. I need that, just emotionally. It felt so bad not to get it. I wondered if I preached the truth. The questions I was asking myself were awful. Paul got stoned for preaching, and nobody came to talk to me. And he didn’t doubt his message, and I was starting to doubt my message. Isn’t that awful? That’s awful.

And I told my wife, I said, “I’ve got to tell. I’ve got to confess. I’ve got to confess to somebody.” And I said, “Noël, you know what happened to me today?” She was with me on this trip. I said, “Nobody talked to me, and all day I have felt awful. I think I’m addicted to praise. Pray for me.”

But God does little things like that. Theologically, I think I have a theology that should abase me, the doctrine of free and sovereign grace that says, “It wasn’t anything in you, Piper, that caused me to choose you. And it isn’t anything in you that causes me to keep on using you. I choose freely to touch you the way I want.” And that theology works to keep humble.

My church doesn’t grow very fast. I have 1,200 people after 17 years. Now you may say if you’re in a church of 50, “That’s a huge church.” I have friends who’ve tripled that size in half the time. So why isn’t my church growing? How many converts can I point to this year? How many weeks are we into the year? Twenty-five, four weeks, eight weeks into the year? I can count two converts this year so far. I’m ashamed. I feel bad. What’s wrong with me?

So the Lord confronts me again and again with the inadequacies. The only reason people get excited about John Piper is because they only know half or a third of a piece of John Piper. My wife is not excited about me, and she keeps me very, very humble by never giving me positive feedback. That’s one of the reasons we went to Christian counseling. That’s no joke. “Why don’t you resonate with my ministry?” “I resonate with your ministry.” “Well, you never say so.” “Well, I feel it.” “Well, say it.” But her dad never said it; her mother never said it. It’s not in her to say it. It hurts me. But now after thirty years, I’m sort of quitting demanding that.

Larry Crabb says, “Stop being a demanding person.” But she is that way. She does not function as a mirror of excitement about me, just rock solid faithfulness. And she’s with me theologically. When she speaks, I love to sneak in on my wife’s speaking engagements because it’s my theology.

There are a lot of things in my life that are senses of failure. I give such a strong impression in the pulpit that, “God is great and I love God, and let’s do this thing.” And if you knew me hour by hour by hour, you’d know how many senses of discouragement and failure and staffing problems and kid problems and breakdowns in the church where things aren’t working and people are unhappy and they say we’re not a friendly church, and some visitor got forgotten and it’s just an avalanche.

These kinds of things are unreal, because you get three messages, they’re sort of fresh for you. You respond positively, I get strokes. And then, we say farewell. I don’t know your problems. You don’t know my problems. This is Disney World, right? But I go home. I live in a real world, which is why I’m a pastor. I could live off my royalties. I don’t need my church to live. I could be a gallivanting speaker and do this every week. That would be dangerous.

I love the pain of my church. Sounds funny? I love the pain of my church. I love the fact that I have to deal with dying people, alienated kids, and everything else under the sun. I got a postcard, actually it was a CD, two CDs, Smoky Mountain Hymns, from a young woman left in my box with a card. This is a woman I walked through two years of bulimic hell with about ten years ago.

And I wouldn’t trade that for anything. I had no answers. I didn’t know what to do with her. I just was there. And we worked on it, we prayed, we talked, we just stayed. And she’s making it today. She’s above it. And she keeps giving me these gifts every year of Smoky Mountain Hymns and other kinds of music, some of which I don’t like and some of which I do.

So the pastorate has its way of keeping people apprised of their sin and weakness. Last question. I’ve got a thing I’m supposed to go to here with the women, I think.

How intimately involved is God in the world today? Apart from God’s word, does he directly involve himself in the guidance of man in specific ways that the Bible doesn’t talk about, guidance for their lives? Can God direct by intervention?

Not only can, he does. I believe that, along with Charles Spurgeon, the direction of every dust mote in this room is determined by God. I stand in my bedroom at nine in the morning, and at this time of year, the sun comes through in our little room like a beam across like this. If you stand in the beam, you can’t see anything. It’s a blinding light. If you stand outside, the beam is dust. It’s all these dust particles. I say, “I breathe that in this room every night? No wonder my nose clogs up.”

I believe God guides the track of every dust mote in the wind. If you ask me the biblical basis of that, I would say, among many texts from Proverbs 16, “The lot is cast into the lap, but its every decision is from the Lord” (Proverbs 16:33). Every roll of the dice in Las Vegas is governed by God. Every king is in place because God puts Saddam Hussein and Bill Clinton in place. When they come down, and they will come down, both of them, he’ll bring them down.

And that creates a huge problem for suffering. But there are answers. Job is written for that reason. Your text, 2 Corinthians 12, is written for that reason. That was not a comfortable thing that Paul had. Second Corinthians 1:9, “We felt that we had received the sentence of death. But that was to make us rely not on ourselves but on God who raises the dead.” There’s a reason for every suffering in the universe, the most horrible suffering. God governs for his sovereign, wise, loving just purposes.