Natural Disasters and Pastoral Ministry
00:00:00.000 | [music]
00:00:05.460 | Pastor John, speak to pastors and speak about pastoring in answering why you
00:00:10.600 | choose to tweet and blog in the midst of destructive natural disasters like
00:00:15.340 | tornadoes. What's the goal in doing this?
00:00:18.540 | Yeah. The goal, Tony, of pastoral ministry is faith in our people and glory for our
00:00:28.500 | God and all of that great faith, strong faith, indomitable faith, glorifying God,
00:00:35.360 | all of that spilling over for the same in the world. We want more of that to
00:00:40.920 | happen in the world. We don't want our people to stumble into unbelief or into
00:00:46.720 | doubt when they are clobbered by some grief, loss, pain, suffering, and we don't
00:00:54.280 | want God to be dishonored. So two huge goals for pastoral ministry, and I think
00:01:02.200 | for all of life, is we want to help them be strong in faith and we want to help
00:01:06.760 | them give glory to God. And pain and suffering and calamities and cancer and
00:01:13.640 | the loss of loved ones are huge tests of faith. And pastors aim to help their
00:01:22.720 | people be strong in those seasons, and we do it before them and during them and
00:01:28.920 | after them. And I think it's crucial that we focus on all three of those.
00:01:33.160 | Before the calamity comes, we're preparing them with true views of
00:01:39.040 | God and his sovereign goodness and his deep love for them and their confidence
00:01:44.840 | in him, and we do it during the events by being there. This is really crucial that
00:01:50.800 | as pastors we be there for our people, perhaps even in silence like Job's
00:01:58.000 | friends in the first golden seven days of their ministry when they were not
00:02:02.880 | trying to persuade Job of bad theology, like God only blesses the good and he
00:02:09.800 | punishes the bad. That's bad theology. So when they were quiet, they were more
00:02:13.920 | helpful than when they spoke. And I've sat for long stretches of time saying
00:02:20.440 | nothing with a 23-year-old man whose wife had just been killed after being
00:02:24.760 | married three months. I walked into that room, the body was in the next
00:02:30.120 | room, he hadn't even seen her yet. And I sat down and I looked at this situation
00:02:34.680 | I said, "This is not a time to say anything." We sat there for, I don't know,
00:02:39.680 | half an hour maybe in total silence, and then I heard him begin to sing. He sang,
00:02:47.920 | he was singing a little song. And I started to cry and thought, "Okay, this man
00:02:55.640 | might be ready to hear me sing or say something." And on the other hand, Tony,
00:03:01.760 | I've walked into a room and the first thing a husband said to me with his wife
00:03:05.400 | in emergency surgery after heart attack was, "John, tell us something important
00:03:10.360 | from the Word. Give us something from the Word, John." So I know that that during
00:03:17.840 | the moment, right in the moment of loss, there's time for silence, there's a time
00:03:22.080 | for speaking. And then afterwards, we should remember to help people
00:03:27.800 | afterwards. My mom died in 1974. I still get emails from people who remember
00:03:38.520 | December 16 for me. Isn't that amazing? They write to me and say, "Thinking about
00:03:44.840 | your mom and what she meant to me on that. That's 38 years ago." So it
00:03:51.440 | matters that we get our people ready before, during, and after. And I think,
00:03:56.240 | Tony, most of our effort goes into helping them before, because that's where
00:04:00.880 | we spend most of our time. We're not in calamity most of our life. We're
00:04:04.480 | preparing for it most of our life. And so I think we as pastors have to think
00:04:09.040 | through all of our options, and we have our pulpit, we have maybe a newsletter, we
00:04:14.440 | have maybe a blog or a Twitter account, we always have a bedside to go to. And I
00:04:20.920 | think a pastor has to always be thinking, "How is what I'm doing preparing my
00:04:28.160 | people?" So Tony, one of the things I think about whenever a calamity happens is, not
00:04:35.000 | just, "What should I or shouldn't I say in the midst of it for those there in the
00:04:43.160 | calamity?" but, "What should I say? How should I comport myself for the sake of
00:04:48.960 | my people, for the sake of my family, for those who are not in the calamity?" and/or
00:04:53.880 | watching what I say about a calamity when it comes. That's the way I'm
00:05:00.200 | thinking, partly when I think about my people as well as those who are in the
00:05:06.040 | calamity. Yes, and with the Internet we can all be transported into a calamity
00:05:11.960 | within moments, live, even if we're not personally touched by it. So it seems
00:05:15.680 | there's an opportunity to address the situation in the moment, and maybe those
00:05:18.920 | on the ground who are touched by the disaster will not even hear what's going
00:05:22.400 | on in Twitter. Right, and it's complicated because those on the ground may read it.
00:05:29.080 | I mean, that's the new phenomenon that we have with blogs and with Twitter, is that
00:05:37.320 | anybody, anywhere, in any condition, can read anything we say addressing any
00:05:43.440 | situation, and we have to be ready for the fact that if we say something
00:05:49.400 | we think will be helpful to one group, another group might read it and not be
00:05:54.960 | helped by it, and thus we're always making judgment calls about, "On balance
00:06:00.760 | will this be helpful or not to the greatest number of people?" and we
00:06:06.760 | can miss that sometimes, and we have to be ready for people to say, "You didn't
00:06:13.720 | help me," and another set of people say, "Thank you very much," and we just hope
00:06:19.040 | and we pray that we're wise enough, we say things often enough, and in a
00:06:23.920 | diverse enough way so that lots of people are blessed by what we say. So one
00:06:31.160 | reason you want to address the natural disasters when they happen is so that
00:06:34.500 | those who are listening on Twitter will be thinking about God's sovereignty over
00:06:38.100 | life before they are themselves in the hospital facing cancer and facing
00:06:43.080 | calamity in their own life. Yes, I have in mind people who've been through the
00:06:50.880 | issue a year ago or ten years ago, people who are in the suffering right now, and
00:06:56.600 | people who will go through it in a year, because my goal is to spread a passion
00:07:01.800 | for the supremacy of God in all things, for the joy of all peoples. I want their
00:07:07.680 | faith to be preserved. I want every tweet I tweet, every blog I write, every sermon
00:07:13.360 | I preach to be a means for people's indomitable joy in the face of horrible
00:07:20.440 | loss, whether they've gone through it, are in it, or will go through it. Thank you,
00:07:26.600 | Pastor John, and thank you for listening to this podcast at DesiringGod.org.
00:07:30.440 | You'll find thousands of other free resources from John Piper. I'm your host
00:07:34.160 | Tony Reinke. Thanks for listening.
00:07:37.440 | [BLANK_AUDIO]