(upbeat music) Ryan, a listener to the podcast who is also a pastor, writes in with a very good question. Pastor John, how much of the news should I read? I'm a pastor and a very average reader in terms of speed. I want to stay up on the news to be a good citizen and an informed leader.

I want to help my congregation think biblically about major cultural trends and issues when relevant, but I could spend hours every morning reading different online newspapers and opinion pieces, perhaps to the neglect of my Bible and solid theology books. So my question is not whether to read the news, but how much of it to read.

Is there any practical advice you can give from your years as both a Christian and as a pastor that would help discern how much is too much and how little is too little? I do have one main piece of advice from my experience, and it might be partly owing to my own limits and reading slowly and things like that, but more important for your people, our people, and their ability to be Christ-exalting husbands and wives and community participants and civic contributors and vocationally effective, more important for all those things than a pastor's being widely read and culturally up to date on lots of fronts is the way he deals in preaching and leading and living with a few key social issues, like three or four or five over his ministry, say.

And the principle I have in mind here is the same one that drives me in understanding the aims of education in school, and the principle is to impart to your people by the way you preach and teach and the way you think, biblically and culturally, you impart to them a way of thinking, a way of dealing with issues, a way of reading their Bible, a way of applying their Bible on various issues so that you don't bear the burden of thinking you have to be the expert on all the issues.

You have to model for them how they become the expert on the issues that are facing them most immediately. So we go deep on a few issues, and we're aware, of course, of more. Then we preach and teach on the few that seem urgent and major, and we'd be sure that, we try to be sure that the sermons are not mainly political.

When I say deal with the issues, I don't mean mainly be a politician, but mainly aiming to show how to think and pray and act from the roots of things, and how they're rooted in human nature and how they're rooted in God's purposes for the world and rooted in Scripture.

And then we show them those roots in Scripture and roots in human nature, and we pray that certain kinds of outcomes of behavior will result in a kind of righteous life in the culture. We show them how it all relates to God and His ways in history and in the world and in this city, in this situation in particular.

You don't need to be a world expert to address the biblical and ethical matters relating to the key issues. You need to go deep with your Bible and with human nature. That's your bread and butter as a pastor, the Bible and human nature. That's your expertise, and that's what your people want and they need from you.

Another implication of this approach would be that we should make clear to our people, we think they, not we, are to become the experts in the fields where they endeavor. I think there's a lot of misunderstanding here in the church that if a big ethical issue comes up in their vocation, the pastor should have the answer.

(laughs) How in the world? If they're lawyers or doctors or carpenters or computer programmers or salesmen, they bear the main responsibility to think through how Christianity bears on the nitty gritty of their vocation. That's not the pastor's job. I think sometimes there's a blame shifting here that's a cloak for laziness.

Pastors should give help for sure. Rich biblical insights week in and week out from the scriptures, but there are hundreds of issues in every line of work, every vocation that the pastor does not and cannot know about. He's not the expert in that vocation, that business, that trade. The people in those vocations bear that responsibility.

That's what it means to be a Christian where you are. That's what makes those jobs a place of influence for Christ. Christians thinking and reading and studying and praying and talking about what it means to be a Christian in this job. There are hundreds of them, and it's naive to think that a pastor can be an expert in any of them.

So I'm a little disenchanted these days about the way some of this is talked about. So we empower and we encourage our people to become the experts on how faith and work fit together, how the issues they're dealing with in life fit together, all the while the pastor is pointing and encouraging and pointing them to the scriptures and feeding their souls.

And not just jobs, I was thinking vocation when I said all that, but issues as well. Out there in our congregation, people should be studying healthcare and immigration issues and racial profiling and police reform and the roots of poverty in their neighborhood and so on. I mean, there are just dozens of social, ethical, moral, justice issues in the world that our people ought to be engaged with and that vastly outstrip the ability of the pastor to be up to date on all of them.

So my point is, whatever else a pastor reads, whatever else you read for focus and for learning and for awareness, focus on a few key issues and bring God's word to bear on those. Model in preaching and teaching and leading and living how a Christian thinks about those issues and tell them, tell the people you hope they can take that method, what they see you doing with these texts and that issue and apply them in other issues where they may run into ethical conundrums that the pastor hasn't thought about and that they haven't thought about.

And let part, I want to say to this pastor, let part of your modeling be courage, courage to address hard issues. And let part of it be wisdom in how to relate to those who disagree with you. Model for your people that as well as the right position on an issue, but how to deal with people who don't take that position.

And whatever you do, don't try to sound like you know more than you know. And don't try to drop clever phrases that make you look like you're culturally informed. That's just fluff and it's ego. It will entertain the superficial, but it will disappoint the spiritually insightful. So admit to them your limits and take them as deep into God's word as you can on a few key issues.

- Boy, that is gonna help liberate a lot of pastors. Thank you, Pastor John. Well, it's time for us to break for the weekend. And we talked about weekends on Monday, by the way, and now you have time to catch up on the episodes you missed this week. And for everything you need to know about this podcast, to send John Piper a question, to download our apps, anything, go to DesiringGod.org/AskPastorJohnPiper.

And on Monday, we return to address a question from a listener who battles doubts and cynicism that prevent her from living in the victory of Christ. I'm your host, Tony Reinke. We'll see you on Monday. (upbeat music) (upbeat music)