May 1, 2010

• Thank you, John Piper

  Recently Aaron (Like_A_Tigah) challenged us to make a list of our favorite posts. I've been deliberating doing that and I hope to do that eventually, but there's something I'd like to here first.
  
  For those of you who aren't aware, John Piper is starting an eight month leave from most of public ministry starting today through the end of this year. Besides Dr. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, I believe the most tags I have for any human preacher/teacher is John Piper. I'm drawn to both ML-J's and Piper's preaching and teaching because it's a wonderful and Biblically-honoring blend of orthodoxy and Holy Spirit fire and power...The Word must be preached with Holy Spirit power, boldness and assurance. Therefore my sincere hope and prayer is to be that kind of teacher/mentor/blogger. Orthodoxy alone doesn't cut it. And fire alone doesn't cut it. We've got to have both...
  
  So with that, I'd like to list some of the ways God has used Dr. Piper to build me up in my faith (and in the process, this will also touch on some of my top posts, by that I mean, the posts I consider most important to read).
  
  As I write this I will say I feel like I'm just scratching the surface here...there's so, so much...

  Thank you, John Piper,

  Yes, I've never met you, but I feel like I have.

  I've watched, read and listened to many of your sermons, and I've also read some of your books. I will say I'm almost (almost!) glad you are taking a break because maybe I can get to listening to your sermons on John...I've not gotten to listen to many of them, but what I've heard has been so, so edifying. Thank you, John Piper for not considering retirement an option but for taking on the book of John in 2008, knowing full well you might not live to preach through it all. I love it! In the same way, I want to take up all God has for me regardless of when He might put it on my heart! Age is no limit!

  (Yes, thank God not only for Guttenberg but also for the world wide web! Amazing. As much as we lament the misuse and abuse of the internet along with all branches of media, we must give thanks and praise to God for using such technology to His glory!)

  I have also had the privilege to hear you speak twice in person...

  Most recently at last year's Gospel Coalition Conference...

  Thank you, John Piper for reminding me there of the need to keep feeding the white-hot flame of God's gift...

  Thank you, John Piper for exhorting me there to keep gnawing and putting my noses down into The Book...

  Back in November 2006 at Bethlehem Baptist Church was the only other (and first) time I heard you preach in person. Thank you, John Piper for reminding that I ought not to fear anything that is frightening. Both of the sermons I heard you preach in person touched on fear. I don't think that's a coincidence in the Providence of God. I have struggled with fear, and I was really struggling at that time with a relationship and a fear of entrusting myself to God in that. Yes, I'm one of those people who dropped a prayer request anonymously in one of the boxes at the back of the sanctuary. I believe someone at Bethlehem prayed for me, and I will report to you that God worked immeasurably above all I could ask or imagine at the time. Thank you, John Piper.

  As I continue to thank you, John Piper, I know that you would want God alone to get all the praise, honor and glory, and indeed I am giving it to Him. I know you are but one of God's chosen instruments to bless me, and I know you know that. I know you know you are a sinner and you're bad. I thank you, John Piper for reminding all of us how bad we really are...

  Our badness – our total inability and total depravity makes the Gospel of Jesus Christ so, so glorious! Thank you, John Piper for showing me the glory of God in the Gospel...yes, I'd already begun to see it before I heard of you, but you magnified that for me and so you magnified God, and we both would agree that is always a good thing...in that is THE thing we must be doing with our lives. Whitefield wrote something about how Calvinism wasn't something a man taught him but rather that he learned it from the Bible itself. That's exactly how I feel. But I thank God for men like you whom God has raised up to teach this generation about the doctrines of grace. I find those doctrines ever-so glorious (but of course, never more glorious than God Himself!).

  Oh, yes, and speaking of George Whitefield, thank you, John Piper for those biographical messages you have faithfully prepared year after year since 1988. I've listened to and/or read most of them now, and I send other people to them. I know they were what got me hooked on reading Christian biography. I delight to read of the lives of the saints. I see myself in their struggles. You always remind us that these men show us that we are bad and that though all of us are bad and God alone is good – and yet in His inscrutable plan, God uses us all the same! Oh, yes, I know there's a real danger and snare in studying the lives of the saints, there's a wrong way to read them for I can get caught up in comparing myself to them and get really depressed, but if I read of these men in the right way, by the grace of God they can help me to be the best Karen ___ that ever lived. They all remind me that God uses men with no outstanding abilities. All of God's grace, all to God's glory alone! These stories give me a grander vision of what God can do in and through any of us because it is not of us but all of Him and all to Him that all these men ever accomplished anything at all. It gives me great hope and assurance that if God could use men like them, He can also use me.

  Thank you, John Piper for exhorting me not to waste my life...I've read your book Don't Waste Your Life a few times now...The first time was in the summer of 2006. God used it to begin to wake me up, to give me a Philippians 3 mentality. I don't want to squander my life. I don't want to be an American tragedy...I want to finish my life well here...I want to take hold of that for which Christ Jesus has taken hold of me...I am coming to see my full enjoyment of God in this life will only come when I don't waste my life here: that my journey is His journey for my joy...and that I can know the fullness of His joy only when I walk with Him by faith...and that this life is just a precursor to the life to come, where we will sing praises and exult in Him forever and ever and ever...

  Thank you, John Piper for helping me to discover a holy ambition for my life. I am praying all those who read here would also discover a holy ambition for their lives as well and not waste their lives. (It says this is a message for young people. Listen to it regardless of how old or young you are. This is a much-needed message for all ages!)

  About a year ago I wrote about that holy ambition... The apostle Paul wrote:

  thus I make it my ambition to preach the gospel, not where Christ has already been named, lest I build on someone else's foundation.

  That's been the ambition God has kept writing on my heart and putting in my mind more deeply over the past couple years. However, the place "not where Christ has already been named" is not what you think of as the standard mission field. In other words, God has not been giving me (not yet anyhow) an ambition to go to an unknown people group or some place where people have never literally heard the name of Jesus Christ spoken. What do I mean by that? The ambition God has been giving me is to go to the places where though Christ is technically being named, He's not truly being named.a desire to take the Gospel where it's not been heard, yet where it's already been heard: the Church herself.

  It's come to the point where false, incomplete and watered down gospels really grieve me. Really grieve me. They abound in the Church today. In the past year or so, my eyes have been opened wide to the ruins in the Church. Legalism, licentiousness, social gospels, emphases on works > grace, Christianity being taught without regeneration and wrong emphases on the work of the Holy Spirit and so on... Oh, there's too much for me to go on about here right now, but I will say in short, thank you, John Piper, for holding the line on the centrality and vital importance of true, meaty Gospel preaching.

  I want to try to do the same with my teaching and with with my blogging here so I might to blog to the glory of God and for the furtherance of the Gospel in order to build up the ruined church of God.

  A couple ways you've held the line here...

  First, by clearly preaching the difference between nominal Christianity and authentic Christianity...Thank you, John Piper!

  Second, by reminding us that the prosperity gospel is no gospel...Thank you, John Piper!

  Thank you, John Piper for reminding me that despite all my sin, God is gracious and continues to bear with me and desires to lift me up and out of that. I remember sitting at the kitchen table listening to your message on how to deal with the guilt of sexual failure at Passion '07 on my laptop. No, I wasn't really dealing with very heavy guilt at that point in my life, but I thank you for the reminder you gave then that there is always forgiveness in Christ for all who genuinely repent and that God doesn't want us caught up in false guilt. That message on Micah 7 was so wonderful. Little did I know how later that year guilt would begin to consume me and eat away at me and begin to entangle me for a long time. Yes, there was some godly guilt and godly sorrow which I needed to address, but then there was so much false guilt and uncertainty in my life. Yes, I knew I was saved, yet I was so paralyzed by the overwhelming guilt of my sin and my overall depravity. There were days I felt hopeless; I felt and believed that though God could certainly sanctify others, there was no way He could do so with me. I saw His holiness so high and great and lifted up and my sin so deep and dark and devastating, in a way I'd never seen before.

  But in God's grace, He kept at me. The Hound of Heaven kept hitting me over the head with the message of forgiveness and cleansing for me in Jesus Christ through the cross even while the devil continued to hit me with false guilt time and time again. And finally, praise God, in His sovereign way and time, the Lord led me to an assurance of forgiveness and cleansing and then later an experience of joy in Him I thought not possible. I'm not a joyful person in and of myself, so it amazes me of the work God has done in me. I have to pinch myself. I will say I'd read and listened to your teachings on Christian hedonism, and though I'm embraced them on a certain level, praise His holy Name, I truly know I've begun to taste and see that God IS good, o so good! A joy and a delight in Him for who He is, not for what He does for us! A joy that goes beyond our circumstances. Yes, there are times I have to fight for that joy, but having received it, there is no place i would rather be! In God's presence there is fullness of joy and at His right hand there are pleasures forevermore...starting today and continuing everyday and then culminating (and yet really beginning) the Day we enter into the joy of our Lord and see Him face to face, where a joy without end we shall attain!

  O, I thank God for that struggle with my past sin and guilt and for all the broken hearts God ordained for me because as a result of that, He led me to write a lot about dealing with past sins and guilt. I had to examine these things in the Word of God for myself and become even more rooted in the work of Christ for me. I was desperate, I was being crushed by my guilt. My life was wrapped up in guilt. There were times though I looked pretty good, I was all but non-functional. How could I ever be free to serve God with a holy ambition? I could only end up wasting my life if I continued to be obsessed with my guilt rather than the pearl of great price. How could I be free to live my life as God designed if I remained mired in lingering guilt over past sin?

  I do believe that one reason God has me blogging here is to let all His blood-washed children know the good news that there is no condemnation in Christ Jesus – no means none! – and that God does not want us to be bound up with false guilt but to experience His joy deep in our souls, far deeper than I would have ever imagined possible. All those posts I've written on dealing with past sins and guilt and assurance and joy have been some of the most important things I've written. I continue to come across Christians who've struggled and are struggling as I did, and I hope and pray I might be used to show them the freedom Christ makes available to them. Yes, I will say I based part of my post on false guilt vs. Godly guilt on your message at Passion '07 on Micah 7. Often when I come across Christians who are struggling with guilt over their sin, I will take them to Micah 7. Thank you, John Piper.

  Along with the clear message of forgiveness and freedom we have in Jesus Christ, thank you, John Piper for reminding us we must take our sin seriously and make war against it. Jesus tells us our sins are forgiven, but with that, He tells us to go and sin no more and gives us the power to do so through His resurrection life.

  Thank you, John Piper, for showing me Jesus Christ as the greatest treasure...

  May I keep Him always as the greatest treasure! May we keep Him always as our greatest treasure!

  Along with countless others, I will be praying for you and Noël during your break from ministry the next few months. I can relate somewhat to your drive for public productivity, not that I'm anything close to being a public figure like you. But I know that you so eat and breathe the Gospel. Gospel invades every part of your being. God has been working a similar passion in me over the past few years. It's hard to shut that off, I know. I'm praying we both might be able to find rest in the yoke of Christ at all times and honor Him as we do so. We are to be poured out for Him, but only as He directs.

  Hmm...Not like I feel worthy to tie your shoes...yet I know you and I are all at the cross of Christ, sinners saved by the love, mercy and grace of God alone; therefore I'm offering up my prayers for you, John Piper. Not that you know me, but I believe I am speaking for the thousands of lives you've impacted: know that we will miss you, but we know that you are following God's lead and I believe God has business to do in you and with you while you are hidden away for this time. I am trusting you will not waste these eight months away and I am trusting God to do a great work in your soul, much as He has done in my soul through your ministry.

  Thank you, John Piper for being part of the great cloud of witnesses! As the apostle Paul did for the Ephesian elders and as you have done for so many of us, I now do the same for you:

  I commend you to God, and to the word of his grace, which is able to build you up, and to give you an inheritance among all them which are sanctified.

  I look forward to the day we will all meet together around the throne of God and share together in that inheritance.

  Your sister in Christ,
  Karen

  Thank you, God, for John Piper!

  * * *

  Is Christ your all-surpassing treasure?
  Does your life show it?
  Do you have a holy ambition?
  Are you wasting your life?

  Have you known the freedom from sin and guilt God in Christ has for you?
  Have you known the freedom from the power of sin God makes available to you through Christ?
  Have you begun to taste and see the Lord is good?

  Do you grieve over false gospels in the Church?

  What Christians has God used to bless you and build you up in the faith?
  Have you thanked them lately?

  • 1:56 PM
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