Why Does John Piper Journal?
00:00:00.000 | (upbeat music)
00:00:02.580 | - Well, John Piper is a prolific journaler in private,
00:00:09.160 | and many of you know that already, but why does he do it?
00:00:12.560 | Today we find out thanks to this question
00:00:14.840 | from a podcast listener.
00:00:16.900 | Pastor John, hello, my name is Danny.
00:00:19.040 | As a 19-year-old, I'm interested in starting a journal
00:00:22.360 | to track the outworking of God's providence in my life.
00:00:27.120 | I know that you have journaled for a long time.
00:00:30.080 | When did you start, why did you start,
00:00:32.500 | and how much time do you spend journaling each day?
00:00:35.560 | And why do you continue to do it today,
00:00:38.120 | assuming you still do?
00:00:39.540 | - Right, well, I do still journal,
00:00:44.140 | but it might not be what people think.
00:00:46.000 | Let me begin by saying behind my practice
00:00:52.440 | of writing in my journal are some huge assumptions
00:00:57.440 | that I should probably make explicit.
00:01:01.400 | One is that an infinitely holy, wise, powerful,
00:01:06.400 | good, loving, just God exists.
00:01:12.520 | That he created the world and everything in it
00:01:16.600 | and has absolute authority and rights
00:01:20.280 | over everything in the world, including me,
00:01:23.280 | and that I, by nature, am selfish to the core
00:01:28.280 | and in rebellion against him
00:01:32.060 | and constantly prone in my self, my old self,
00:01:37.060 | constantly prone to exalt myself above him and above others,
00:01:43.060 | and that he owes me nothing,
00:01:46.640 | but that I deserve his just anger.
00:01:49.720 | And yet, these are all assumptions
00:01:52.360 | that I bring to journaling,
00:01:53.640 | and yet he sent his divine, eternal son, Jesus Christ,
00:01:58.640 | into the world to deliver me from the guilt
00:02:01.920 | and the power of this selfishness
00:02:04.640 | by dying in my place, bearing my guilt,
00:02:07.280 | providing my righteousness, rising again,
00:02:09.960 | pouring out his Holy Spirit of repentance and faith on me
00:02:14.800 | so that I was brought out of darkness into light
00:02:19.800 | with the divine purpose over my life
00:02:23.080 | that I would prefer him over every earthly good
00:02:26.880 | and be holy as he is holy and shine in what I write
00:02:31.880 | and in what I think and in what I feel and in what I do,
00:02:36.920 | shine with the light of his glory in this world,
00:02:40.620 | which means all of that is a massive set
00:02:44.220 | of glorious realities, assumptions that I bring
00:02:48.640 | to whether or not I journal,
00:02:51.420 | which means that my whole life is devoted
00:02:55.900 | to seeking out ways with God's guidance in his word,
00:03:00.400 | ways of pursuing this holiness, this likeness to Christ,
00:03:05.400 | this shining, this reflection of what he is,
00:03:10.220 | ways of pursuing seeing him and clarifying what he's like
00:03:15.220 | and keeping him before me as my daily satisfaction
00:03:19.840 | and peace and confidence so that I am conformed increasingly
00:03:24.840 | to his character and his ways.
00:03:28.600 | Over my life, I just see flying these,
00:03:32.820 | not only glorious promises and works of God,
00:03:36.180 | but commands, "God has not called us to impurity,
00:03:40.400 | "but to holiness," 1 Thessalonians 4.
00:03:44.280 | "As he who called you is holy,
00:03:45.860 | "be holy in all your conduct.
00:03:48.200 | "Strive for holiness without which no one will see the Lord.
00:03:51.620 | "You must be perfect as your heavenly father is perfect."
00:03:54.300 | So journaling for me is part of a constant quest
00:03:59.300 | to see Christ and know Christ and enjoy Christ
00:04:05.800 | and be like Christ so I live to the glory of Christ.
00:04:10.800 | Now, I'm pretty sure, Tony,
00:04:14.500 | that I would not have articulated my motives
00:04:19.500 | in journaling that way at every point in my life.
00:04:24.300 | That's the way I think about it today.
00:04:27.480 | And it's interesting that Danny would say he's 19
00:04:31.900 | because I think I'm accurate in saying
00:04:35.880 | I began journaling when I was 19
00:04:39.020 | as a sophomore at Wheaton College,
00:04:42.460 | and I've been doing it on and off ever since.
00:04:45.080 | There may have been seasons, I think there were seasons
00:04:49.060 | in the last 53 years of journaling
00:04:51.800 | when I felt a commitment to write something every day
00:04:55.660 | or every week, but by and large,
00:04:57.520 | I've never approached it that way.
00:05:00.160 | I'm not keeping a diary.
00:05:03.200 | So let's make that distinction clear.
00:05:05.240 | My journaling is what I would call
00:05:07.840 | an occasional thought notebook, not a diary.
00:05:11.540 | You wouldn't find there an account of my daily activities.
00:05:16.140 | I may have done that once or twice in 50 years,
00:05:19.160 | but by and large, I'm not doing what John Wesley did
00:05:22.960 | of morning till night, here's what happened.
00:05:26.800 | I think I began because I needed to sort out my thoughts.
00:05:31.800 | In other words, I found so much confusion
00:05:38.160 | and uncertainty in my mind about so many things
00:05:43.160 | that it was very hard to know what to think or feel or do.
00:05:48.960 | That's a great impediment to obedience.
00:05:53.560 | It's a great impediment to glorifying Christ
00:05:57.160 | if you're constantly confused about what the Bible means
00:06:01.720 | and how to apply it.
00:06:03.080 | So I needed clarity about Bible passages.
00:06:08.080 | I needed clarity about the will of God
00:06:11.120 | and the pros and cons of various paths for my life.
00:06:13.960 | I needed clarity about relationships,
00:06:17.600 | that what they should look like.
00:06:19.920 | Friends, in the early days, a girlfriend
00:06:22.960 | or not a girlfriend and friends,
00:06:25.440 | and now wife and children and grandchildren.
00:06:30.240 | Clarity about social issues and ethical issues.
00:06:34.400 | And I was discovering at age 19
00:06:36.760 | what today I know to be a fact,
00:06:39.760 | namely, I cannot get clarity in my mind
00:06:44.760 | about biblical texts or the will of God
00:06:47.840 | or relationships or ethical or social issues.
00:06:50.840 | I can't get clarity in my mind without writing.
00:06:55.840 | I read somewhere that Albert Einstein
00:06:58.240 | could hold an idea in his head for hours and days
00:07:01.840 | and weeks at a time and come at it
00:07:03.960 | from a dozen different angles,
00:07:05.840 | probing and pondering and relating
00:07:07.600 | all these various perspectives to each other
00:07:09.400 | until he got clarity about some massive insight.
00:07:13.740 | And well, I cannot do that in my head.
00:07:19.380 | I lose the train of thought
00:07:21.420 | as soon as the tracks split into two,
00:07:24.620 | (laughs)
00:07:26.300 | let alone 22 or 42.
00:07:29.740 | And those tracks of thought must split
00:07:33.420 | because they are various routes of analysis
00:07:37.100 | and angles by which you have to ask
00:07:39.140 | lots and lots of questions about an issue,
00:07:41.860 | whatever the issue is,
00:07:43.180 | you have to come at it from so many different ways.
00:07:45.620 | I can't hold all that in my head.
00:07:48.540 | I can't hold all that in my head
00:07:50.420 | and figure out how all those angles relate to each other
00:07:53.540 | and what the stages of the arguments are
00:07:56.380 | and what the implications of one insight
00:07:58.620 | has to do with another insight.
00:08:00.340 | How in the world does anybody except an Einstein
00:08:03.340 | hold all that in your head?
00:08:06.160 | Now, of course, you don't have to do this kind of thing
00:08:09.260 | in a journal.
00:08:10.100 | You can just do it in random notes,
00:08:11.860 | sheets of paper, documents.
00:08:13.500 | It can be scattered all over your computer,
00:08:15.580 | all over your desk and your drawers and your files,
00:08:18.140 | which probably isn't helpful.
00:08:21.580 | Scattered insights that you can never find again
00:08:24.740 | are not helpful,
00:08:26.060 | which brings me to another reason
00:08:28.540 | why it's good to do journal,
00:08:29.780 | namely because you wanna keep everything
00:08:32.180 | in some kind of place or sequence
00:08:35.340 | or use an index or system or something
00:08:39.180 | so that you can cross-reference and file things.
00:08:43.020 | When you look at Jonathan Edwards' notebooks,
00:08:45.420 | it's amazing.
00:08:46.260 | He didn't have any computer or anything
00:08:47.780 | and he'd say, "See number 1,235."
00:08:52.100 | So you know where to look for things over the years.
00:08:55.620 | So I've tried to keep a little index
00:08:58.020 | at the end of each of these journal volumes.
00:09:01.920 | This has been very good for my humility and thankfulness.
00:09:08.900 | Frankly, I don't like the John Piper of my early journals.
00:09:15.940 | He seems to me to be immature, self-absorbed,
00:09:20.940 | excessively critical.
00:09:22.660 | And if you're honest,
00:09:25.780 | your journal really does bear witness to your sins,
00:09:30.780 | even when you are talking about someone else's sins,
00:09:34.580 | maybe especially when you're talking
00:09:37.100 | about someone else's sins,
00:09:39.780 | which is humiliating.
00:09:42.460 | It really is.
00:09:43.780 | I mean, I knew at certain points along the way,
00:09:47.340 | I knew what I was doing.
00:09:49.220 | I knew this is gonna bite.
00:09:52.100 | This is gonna come back to bite me someday.
00:09:55.820 | And I thought, it's just better to be real.
00:10:00.820 | I mean, if Christianity and John Piper have any reality,
00:10:05.860 | it's either gonna be there or it's not.
00:10:08.700 | There's no point trying to fake anything.
00:10:12.100 | So on the other hand,
00:10:17.100 | that very fact of humiliation causes me to be amazed
00:10:23.140 | at the mercy and the patience
00:10:26.460 | and the grace of God in Jesus Christ.
00:10:31.460 | God could have justifiably thrown me away at any time.
00:10:37.980 | And my journals, my own journals,
00:10:42.180 | I think would have been adequate evidence
00:10:45.860 | at the judgment day that he did me no wrong.
00:10:49.220 | And maybe I should make just a little clearer
00:10:51.700 | when I talk about sorting through relationships
00:10:55.540 | and ethical issues.
00:10:56.860 | This really does include my life.
00:11:01.260 | I'm not just talking abstract, my life,
00:11:03.260 | my family, my children, my wife, my workplace,
00:11:07.020 | my colleagues, my struggles in the ministry.
00:11:10.300 | Over the years, there have always been crises in my life
00:11:14.860 | that have been very painful as well as other experiences
00:11:18.940 | that have been exquisitely happy.
00:11:21.380 | And I write about these, I try to sort through what's wrong.
00:11:25.580 | Why is the marriage the way it is?
00:11:28.100 | Why are my kids the way they are?
00:11:29.340 | Why are things at Bethlehem the way they were?
00:11:31.580 | How are we doing at DG?
00:11:33.060 | Et cetera, et cetera.
00:11:35.260 | All kinds of issues that I'm facing,
00:11:37.940 | I need to just sort it out.
00:11:40.460 | So when I say that my journal is a thought notebook
00:11:44.740 | for trying to get clarity about texts and the will of God
00:11:48.820 | and relationships and social and ethical issues,
00:11:51.300 | I don't mean that to sound theoretical or abstract.
00:11:56.300 | Think very concrete, very personal,
00:12:00.220 | and often very painful.
00:12:02.980 | It might, just in closing here,
00:12:05.020 | it might put a whole different slant
00:12:09.140 | on the term occasional thought notebook or on journaling.
00:12:14.060 | If I told you or I told Danny that journaling is for me,
00:12:19.060 | often like going to see a personal counselor,
00:12:23.620 | where I tell him all my problems and seek his wisdom,
00:12:28.580 | and the journal is the counselor's office.
00:12:32.100 | And he lets me pour out my confusion,
00:12:34.900 | my feelings and ideas about my problems.
00:12:39.100 | And he listens very patiently.
00:12:41.260 | He's totally silent.
00:12:44.220 | He waits for me in silence to pray,
00:12:49.620 | and then he leads me by the Spirit
00:12:53.140 | to passages of Scripture where I see Jesus more clearly
00:12:57.300 | and find hope and guidance.
00:12:59.780 | So a word to Danny, Danny, we're all so different.
00:13:04.620 | There's no biblical requirement that anybody keep a journal,
00:13:08.820 | let alone any particular kind.
00:13:11.100 | There is a biblical requirement that all of us
00:13:14.220 | pursue a clear, transforming knowledge of Jesus
00:13:19.220 | and that we walk in holiness.
00:13:22.020 | And if journaling helps you get that clarity
00:13:25.180 | and walk that walk, do it.
00:13:28.660 | - Amen, that's good insight
00:13:30.180 | in your own journaling practices.
00:13:31.700 | Thank you, Pastor John.
00:13:32.740 | And thanks for listening to the podcast
00:13:34.780 | over at our online home.
00:13:36.040 | You can explore nearly 1,300 episodes
00:13:39.180 | that we've done today.
00:13:40.020 | You can scan a list of our most popular ones,
00:13:42.600 | read full transcripts, and even send us a question
00:13:44.940 | of your own.
00:13:45.960 | Go to desiringgod.org/askpastorjohn.
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00:13:56.980 | On the other side of the weekend,
00:13:57.940 | we return and I'll ask Pastor John,
00:14:00.180 | why does he seem to avoid talking politics
00:14:03.020 | and what's hot and trending on Twitter?
00:14:05.900 | It's a really good question.
00:14:07.100 | That's Monday.
00:14:07.940 | I'm your host Tony Reinhke.
00:14:08.780 | We'll see you then.
00:14:09.620 | (upbeat music)
00:14:12.200 | (upbeat music)
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