John Piper’s Ministry in One Bible Text

00:00:00.000 | Hi, my name is Brad.

00:00:02.200 | I'm a husband, father of three awesome kids, and a minister in Houston, Texas.

00:00:07.240 | I've been a Desiring God ministry partner for five years now.

00:00:11.400 | You're listening to the Ask Pastor John podcast with John Piper.

00:00:19.560 | Brad has a story I want to share with you in a moment, but speaking of ministers and

00:00:23.600 | the ministry, if you want to understand John Piper and why he does ministry the way he

00:00:27.920 | does, I think you must understand David's bold claim in Psalm 119, verse 99.

00:00:34.280 | I have more understanding than all my teachers, for your testimonies are my meditation.

00:00:42.880 | Understanding God's word rests on personal meditation, not simply in surrounding yourself

00:00:46.760 | with the sharpest academic minds.

00:00:49.280 | This text proved vital to Pastor John's early formation in ministry.

00:00:53.760 | The broader context of Psalm 119, verses 97 to 100 is important, too.

00:00:58.720 | On the podcast, we talked briefly about this text one time back in APJ 1533.

00:01:03.600 | There, Pastor John, you talked about why, when we have so much good Bible scholarship,

00:01:09.200 | we still need to be trained to study the Bible for ourselves.

00:01:13.040 | And on Twitter, you've cited verse 99 a few times.

00:01:16.160 | Here are two of those tweets, both very provocative.

00:01:19.840 | In my 20s, I knew I could not outread my liberal professors, but I took heart from this verse

00:01:25.600 | that I could out-meditate them.

00:01:28.480 | So can you?

00:01:29.480 | In a couple of years earlier, you tweeted this on the same text and said, "One true

00:01:35.560 | citation from God's word may silence a whole semester of human speculation."

00:01:42.600 | I was wondering, Pastor John, can you don your biographical hat, take a Bible truth

00:01:46.760 | and apply it to one life—in this case, apply Psalm 119, verses 97 to 100—to your own

00:01:53.280 | formation?

00:01:54.280 | Well, I will try.

00:01:57.440 | Let's read the Psalm.

00:01:58.500 | Not everybody knows these verses, so they are very, very precious, and I hope they are

00:02:03.440 | to the folks who are listening or will become so.

00:02:06.280 | So Psalm 119, 97 to 100, "O how I love your law."

00:02:13.520 | And by the way, just a little comment here, this is not even in my notes.

00:02:17.960 | Torah, the word for law, means basically instruction.

00:02:23.480 | So if people have in their mind law means just rules, that's all it is, just rules,

00:02:28.240 | rules, rules, you need to get that out of your brain.

00:02:31.040 | "O how I love your instruction.

00:02:33.200 | O how I love everything you say."

00:02:36.360 | Okay, close that parenthesis.

00:02:38.120 | "O how I love your law, your instruction.

00:02:41.020 | It is my meditation all the day.

00:02:44.360 | Your commandment makes me wiser than my enemies, for it is ever with me.

00:02:48.960 | I have more understanding than all my teachers, for your testimonies are my meditation.

00:02:56.400 | I understand more than the aged, for I keep your precepts."

00:03:02.680 | Now I think the first thing to say here is this.

00:03:06.360 | When I was undergoing an awakening to the life of the mind at Wheaton College between

00:03:13.020 | 1964 and 1968, under the influence of Clyde Kilby and C.S. Lewis, Stuart Hackett, the

00:03:22.500 | philosophy teacher, Francis Schaeffer indirectly, whole English department where I was a major,

00:03:29.640 | two things were growing in me which relate to this text.

00:03:35.640 | One was the deepening and intensifying of my affections, my emotions, my heart response

00:03:45.820 | to the good, the true, and the beautiful, and ultimately of course the highest good

00:03:55.160 | and the highest affections for God himself and his word.

00:03:59.520 | That's one thing.

00:04:00.700 | The other was a similar intensifying of my analytical bent toward probing and questioning

00:04:09.880 | and scrutinizing and defining and dissecting, all the while as a lit major knowing that

00:04:16.080 | Wordsworth had warned, "We murder to dissect."

00:04:19.040 | I said, "I get that.

00:04:21.000 | I'm sorry, William.

00:04:22.000 | I'm not killing anything.

00:04:23.000 | I'm trying not to, but it is a danger.

00:04:25.000 | It is.

00:04:26.000 | You dissect something, you kill it first."

00:04:29.080 | So I have always felt like I am two kinds of person in one, a highly analytical question

00:04:36.480 | asker and a romantic pursuer of deep and authentic, satisfying emotional responses to what I see

00:04:46.960 | and experience.

00:04:48.280 | So when I read verse 97 of Psalm 119, "Oh, how I love your law.

00:04:58.560 | It is my meditation all the day," the two persons inside of me latch on to those two

00:05:06.240 | words, right?

00:05:08.600 | One of me took hold of the word "love."

00:05:12.000 | "I love your instruction, Lord.

00:05:14.280 | I value it.

00:05:15.280 | I embrace it.

00:05:16.280 | I cherish it.

00:05:17.280 | I enjoy it.

00:05:18.280 | I long for it.

00:05:19.280 | I admire it.

00:05:20.280 | I eat it.

00:05:21.280 | I drink it.

00:05:22.280 | It makes me happy.

00:05:23.280 | It awakens life and joy and hope in me."

00:05:26.920 | And the other me took hold of the word "meditation."

00:05:30.560 | "I will think about your law.

00:05:34.600 | I will probe into your law.

00:05:37.120 | I will ask questions of your law.

00:05:39.760 | I will analyze your law and press for definitions in your law until I squeeze from your law

00:05:46.280 | every drop of reality juice that I possibly can."

00:05:52.080 | So that double response to Psalm 119, 97, one, loving God's Word, two, meditating on

00:06:01.680 | God's Word set—I think this is what you're asking me to talk about.

00:06:06.480 | I might misunderstand.

00:06:08.120 | It set the course of my life.

00:06:09.960 | It really did.

00:06:11.360 | I think everything I have done, written or spoken, has been shaped by the double grasp

00:06:19.840 | of God's Word in these two ways.

00:06:22.880 | Now, what you pointed out in those tweets was that over the next six years of my seminary

00:06:30.800 | education three years and doctoral studies for three years, I found that my bent toward

00:06:39.400 | loving the reality that biblical texts were seeking to communicate and spending long hours

00:06:46.960 | staring at the text, wrestling, digging, querying, praying, paid more dividends for me than if

00:06:56.080 | I had spent all of that time reading secondary sources.

00:07:00.560 | That's what I discovered.

00:07:01.560 | Now, I wish I've dealt with the Lord a lot of times on this and have had to have him

00:07:05.740 | rebuke me because of my discontent, but I could wish that I read faster and comprehended

00:07:14.360 | more quickly and remembered things long enough that I could be a person who is both widely

00:07:21.800 | read and intensely focused on particular biblical texts.

00:07:28.420 | But I'm not that person.

00:07:29.960 | I'm not.

00:07:31.120 | And so I have opted to be a very focused text analyzer and reality lover rather than being

00:07:41.160 | a widely read scholar.

00:07:44.900 | So I tweeted, "I knew I could not outread my liberal professors, but I could outmeditate

00:07:53.080 | them," or I wrote, "One true citation from God's Word may silence a whole semester

00:07:59.900 | of human speculation."

00:08:01.820 | In a sense, that's my biographical living out of Psalm 119.98-100.

00:08:10.900 | It goes like this.

00:08:11.900 | This is the other part of the text you cited.

00:08:15.180 | "Your commandment makes me wiser than my enemies, for it's ever with me.

00:08:21.700 | I have more understanding than all my graduate school teachers, for your testimonies are

00:08:28.060 | my meditation.

00:08:29.780 | I understand more than the aged."

00:08:32.260 | I was in my 20s then.

00:08:35.060 | So what does it mean now?

00:08:38.060 | You'll have to work that out for another session.

00:08:41.860 | "So I keep your precepts."

00:08:43.780 | So there's a double progression here.

00:08:46.780 | It moves from enemies to teachers to elders.

00:08:51.880 | And I can out-understand them all, it says.

00:08:55.460 | And it moves from, "Your Word is with me," to, "Your Word is my meditation," to, "I

00:09:00.140 | obey your Word."

00:09:01.140 | There's a progression in both the people and in the action.

00:09:04.700 | So the overall point, it seems to me, is the more seriously and diligently and lovingly

00:09:11.940 | you dig into God's Word and let it dig into you, the more likely it is that you will be

00:09:18.700 | wiser and more insightful than those who get their learning another way, no matter how

00:09:25.900 | much older than you they are.

00:09:28.860 | So I know it would be utterly presumptuous now to draw the inference, "So I have been

00:09:35.420 | wiser than all my teachers and all my enemies and all my elders for these yea many fifty

00:09:41.140 | years."

00:09:42.140 | And the reason that would be absolute folly to talk like that is—I mean, there are several

00:09:46.980 | reasons—but one is, there are others besides me who meditate on God's Word, of course.

00:09:54.180 | But here's what I will say with a couple of anecdotes.

00:09:58.940 | When I was in seminary, I took every possible course with the teacher who valued this kind

00:10:06.780 | of rigorous attention to the text.

00:10:08.740 | This is Daniel Fuller.

00:10:11.900 | One time, a visiting scholar came to the seminary—well-known.

00:10:16.820 | You would know his name, Tony.

00:10:18.180 | Lots of our listeners would know his name.

00:10:20.340 | He's not living anymore.

00:10:22.580 | But he came to just teach one course, and world-class New Testament scholar.

00:10:27.740 | I said, "Man, I'm signing up for that class."

00:10:30.620 | And so eager to learn from this giant about two or three classes in.

00:10:35.960 | My hand's just up, sticking up.

00:10:39.300 | I'm raising my hand regularly in the class and asking particular questions about the

00:10:44.100 | text and about the way he's using them.

00:10:47.140 | This man was not used to that.

00:10:51.140 | His face would turn red, and he was manifestly unhappy with such questions.

00:10:58.340 | So you know what I did?

00:11:00.140 | I dropped the class.

00:11:01.700 | I said, "Look, for me, education meant not being lectured to with what I could read in

00:11:09.140 | his books, but having my capacities of seeing and savoring deepened and ripened and intensified

00:11:17.020 | by rigorous observation and analysis and celebration with someone who's better at it than I am.

00:11:24.740 | Help me do this."

00:11:25.740 | So I just went and signed up for another class with Daniel Fuller.

00:11:29.140 | Man, was I growing in leaps and bounds in my capacities.

00:11:33.900 | Now when I got to Germany—one more anecdote.

00:11:36.700 | When I got to Germany for graduate school, I had formed habits.

00:11:41.660 | So now for three years I've been forming these habits.

00:11:44.020 | I had formed habits of observation and analysis and text querying that were very fixed in

00:11:51.800 | my methodology.

00:11:52.800 | I knew how I profited from Scripture.

00:11:56.620 | They were so fruitful.

00:11:58.020 | My methods were so fruitful in what they yielded from meditation, nothing could dislodge them.

00:12:04.880 | And I didn't see anything.

00:12:06.180 | In fact, I came to tears sometimes sitting in classes grieving over what these students

00:12:11.140 | in my classes were having to deal with because they were so inadequate.

00:12:14.940 | I didn't see anything in the German methodology of those days in that school that came close

00:12:22.140 | to the fruitfulness of the methods of observation and analysis that I had learned.

00:12:27.580 | And my love for the reality that the authors of Scripture were trying to communicate had

00:12:34.340 | created a habit of mind that was impatient with mere textual gamesmanship that stayed

00:12:42.300 | at the grammatical, logical, historical level while never pushing through the words to the

00:12:47.540 | reality that was driving and animating everything in the Bible.

00:12:52.580 | So these two habits—rigorous analysis of text plus earnest love for the reality behind

00:12:59.580 | them—Psalm 119.97—proved to be very unusual among my fellow graduate students in Munich,

00:13:10.060 | Germany in the early '70s.

00:13:12.860 | And I say this as a tragedy.

00:13:15.820 | There was such a fascination with almost everything but the actual nitty-gritty of the wording

00:13:21.420 | of the text and the glorious reality that the text was trying to communicate time and

00:13:27.620 | again—and this is embarrassing even—time and again in discussions.

00:13:34.500 | I would listen for a while, and then I would kind of hesitantly ask a question to my three

00:13:41.380 | or four folks, fellow students, who were talking.

00:13:46.060 | I would ask a question about some grammatical particularity in the biblical text that seemed

00:13:52.440 | to have an implication for reality that they were not latching onto, and there would be

00:13:58.220 | silence.

00:13:59.220 | You hit your ball over the tennis net and it never comes back.

00:14:04.500 | So to this day, Tony, my personal testimony is that my limited scholarly focus has not

00:14:14.500 | suited me to be a world-class scholar, but that very limited focus on loving the instruction

00:14:23.580 | of God and the reality behind it and meditating assiduously on God's expression of that reality

00:14:32.140 | in his Word has taken away from me any sense of being intimidated when it comes to a confident

00:14:42.780 | rendering of what God is communicating in his Word.

00:14:48.300 | I think that is tremendously encouraging for young aspiring pastors to hear, that if they

00:14:55.180 | will love God and love his Word, and if they will give themselves untiringly to careful

00:15:04.020 | handling meditation on God's text, they will never have to be cowed by their enemies, their

00:15:13.220 | teachers, or the aged—even the aged John Piper.

00:15:17.660 | They will be able on their own to get what they need and preach the Word.

00:15:22.140 | That's a great encouragement for any pastor.

00:15:24.980 | Thank you, Pastor John.

00:15:26.460 | And speaking of pastors, you met Brad, a pastor in Houston, at the top of this episode.

00:15:30.540 | I have him on the phone now.

00:15:32.020 | Brad, thank you for joining us on the podcast today.

00:15:35.220 | Tell us a little bit about yourself and how Pastor John's ministry intersected with your

00:15:39.460 | own ministry.

00:15:40.460 | When I was in college, my brother had gotten started in youth ministry and had found Desiring

00:15:46.500 | God and some of the books that John Piper had written.

00:15:49.740 | And so we started—I first read Desiring God and then found the website and started

00:15:54.820 | listening over and over again to a lot of the different biographies that were on there.

00:15:59.260 | And then that moved into sermons and then just being so encouraged and really shaping

00:16:04.940 | so much of my theology of what does it mean to be a Christian and money and marriage and

00:16:13.180 | just Christian life and all those things just made such a big impact on me as I was growing

00:16:20.620 | spiritually.

00:16:21.620 | Ten years ago, my brother and I had an opportunity to go to the pastors conference and meet Pastor

00:16:27.580 | John and it really just made a huge impact in our lives to have someone that we looked

00:16:33.340 | up to so much, that we had listened to so many things, and it really helped shape so

00:16:38.540 | much of our faith.

00:16:39.540 | And then just to have a chance to meet him, to see other people there, and just the encouragement

00:16:44.580 | that was brought to so many pastors by Desiring God in the ministry that they do.

00:16:49.220 | That's great to hear.

00:16:50.580 | So as a pastor today, how do Desiring God resources continue to equip you and how do

00:16:56.260 | you make use of the resources as a pastor, particularly this podcast?

00:17:00.620 | Yeah, that's a great question.

00:17:03.020 | And I recommend Desiring God and a lot of the resources that are there in so many questions

00:17:08.820 | that Pastor John answers to our people all the time when they have questions about their

00:17:12.900 | marriage, about parenting, usually when they're struggling through what is the right thing

00:17:18.460 | to do, what's the godly thing to do.

00:17:20.860 | So I recommend Desiring God to our people all the time when they have questions about

00:17:25.860 | the Bible or particular passages, and it's so easy to find the answers that they're looking

00:17:30.780 | for.

00:17:31.780 | And then also, I think just for me personally, if I'm teaching a lesson or going through

00:17:36.660 | verses that I'll always go back and check what resources are out there to help make

00:17:41.740 | sure that I'm on the right track and ways of teaching and presenting these things.

00:17:47.220 | It is an everyday thing that I use Desiring God.

00:17:50.540 | And that's hard to get across, I think, in trying to be brief, just the level of impact

00:17:56.620 | that it's made.

00:17:57.620 | Well, even briefly put, that's moving to me, Brad.

00:18:00.420 | Thank you.

00:18:01.420 | You are right now talking to a bunch of listeners to the podcast, many of whom have received

00:18:06.260 | a lot from the ministry but have never given back.

00:18:09.140 | What would you say to them?

00:18:10.900 | Yeah, so I've been listening and really using Desiring God resources for over 15 years,

00:18:17.380 | but it wasn't until five years ago that my wife and I decided that we needed to start

00:18:22.020 | giving and part of that came in reading 1 Corinthians 9, 11.

00:18:27.300 | It says, "If we have sown spiritual things among you, is it too much if we reap material

00:18:33.140 | things from you?"

00:18:35.220 | And we just talked about how much we had received spiritually from Desiring God and from the

00:18:42.260 | sermons, from the Ask Pastor Johnson, all the different resources that are there.

00:18:46.260 | So we've received so much spiritually and just thinking that we want other people to

00:18:51.540 | have access to that, too.

00:18:53.180 | And as we've gotten older, realizing that even though everything on Desiring God is

00:18:58.060 | free for people to access, that there's still a cost to it, that someone's paying to keep

00:19:03.780 | all those things running and moving.

00:19:06.660 | And since it made such a big impact in our lives, we want to continue to see that happen.

00:19:11.420 | They can make an impact in the lives of others as well.

00:19:13.820 | And so it wasn't something that we felt like we had to do, but that we were excited to

00:19:17.980 | get to do.

00:19:18.980 | And we feel like every dollar that we invest in Desiring God is a great investment into

00:19:23.420 | the kingdom.

00:19:24.420 | Yes, an investment that makes it possible for our resources to be made and to be spread

00:19:28.780 | around the world free of charge.

00:19:31.620 | Five years supporting Desiring God as a ministry partner and many more years of purposefully

00:19:35.380 | sharing our resources and seeing the strategic value of our resources to serve you as a pastor

00:19:40.300 | and serve your congregation.

00:19:41.980 | That's exactly the kind of intentional vision for our resources that encourages our work,

00:19:47.500 | Brad.

00:19:48.500 | So thank you so much.

00:19:49.500 | In so many ways, you're a gift to us.

00:19:50.500 | Yeah, thank you.

00:19:51.500 | We are really grateful.

00:19:52.500 | Man, it's so encouraging.

00:19:54.700 | As we enter the final weeks and days of the year, if you believe this, if you believe

00:19:58.380 | that Desiring God is making pastors and churches better and more faithful, consider joining

00:20:03.180 | Brad to become a monthly ministry partner.

00:20:06.260 | Much of our financial support comes from folks who give on average just $30 a month.

00:20:12.780 | To set up monthly giving, go to give.desiringgod.org.

00:20:16.300 | That's give.desiringgod.org.

00:20:17.300 | It's always appreciated.

00:20:18.300 | I'm your host, Tony Rehnke, and Pastor John and I return on Monday.

00:20:23.420 | We'll see you then.

00:20:23.860 | [END]

00:20:24.860 | 1

00:20:24.860 | Desiring God is making pastors and churches better and more faithful.

00:20:25.860 | Much of our financial support comes from folks who give on average just $30 a month.

00:20:26.860 | To set up monthly giving, go to give.desiringgod.org.

00:20:27.860 | That's give.desiringgod.org.

00:20:27.860 | [END]

John Piper’s Ministry in One Bible Text

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