R.C. Sproul, author, pastor, founder of Ligonier Ministries, and dear brother in Christ, passed away on December 14, 2017. Four years ago, Desiring God asked Sproul to record John Piper’s “The Calvinist,” a poem that captures God’s sovereign intersection with the life of a sinful man.

We initially released a video-poem in December of 2013 that featured Sproul, Piper, and five others reading various stanzas of the poem. John Piper wrote of the collaboration, “I love these men. And you will hear why in the way they read.” In these four minutes, hear Sproul’s original recording of the entire poem — and hear the conviction of a man who loved his sovereign God, lived to make him known, and died in the truth of the poem’s last stanza:

See him nearing death.
Listen to his breath,
Through the ebbing pain:
Final whisper: “Gain!”