Pastor John, speak to pastors and speak about pastoring in answering why you choose to tweet and blog in the midst of destructive natural disasters like tornadoes. What's the goal in doing this? Yeah. The goal, Tony, of pastoral ministry is faith in our people and glory for our God and all of that great faith, strong faith, indomitable faith, glorifying God, all of that spilling over for the same in the world.

We want more of that to happen in the world. We don't want our people to stumble into unbelief or into doubt when they are clobbered by some grief, loss, pain, suffering, and we don't want God to be dishonored. So two huge goals for pastoral ministry, and I think for all of life, is we want to help them be strong in faith and we want to help them give glory to God.

And pain and suffering and calamities and cancer and the loss of loved ones are huge tests of faith. And pastors aim to help their people be strong in those seasons, and we do it before them and during them and after them. And I think it's crucial that we focus on all three of those.

Before the calamity comes, we're preparing them with true views of God and his sovereign goodness and his deep love for them and their confidence in him, and we do it during the events by being there. This is really crucial that as pastors we be there for our people, perhaps even in silence like Job's friends in the first golden seven days of their ministry when they were not trying to persuade Job of bad theology, like God only blesses the good and he punishes the bad.

That's bad theology. So when they were quiet, they were more helpful than when they spoke. And I've sat for long stretches of time saying nothing with a 23-year-old man whose wife had just been killed after being married three months. I walked into that room, the body was in the next room, he hadn't even seen her yet.

And I sat down and I looked at this situation I said, "This is not a time to say anything." We sat there for, I don't know, half an hour maybe in total silence, and then I heard him begin to sing. He sang, he was singing a little song. And I started to cry and thought, "Okay, this man might be ready to hear me sing or say something." And on the other hand, Tony, I've walked into a room and the first thing a husband said to me with his wife in emergency surgery after heart attack was, "John, tell us something important from the Word.

Give us something from the Word, John." So I know that that during the moment, right in the moment of loss, there's time for silence, there's a time for speaking. And then afterwards, we should remember to help people afterwards. My mom died in 1974. I still get emails from people who remember December 16 for me.

Isn't that amazing? They write to me and say, "Thinking about your mom and what she meant to me on that. That's 38 years ago." So it matters that we get our people ready before, during, and after. And I think, Tony, most of our effort goes into helping them before, because that's where we spend most of our time.

We're not in calamity most of our life. We're preparing for it most of our life. And so I think we as pastors have to think through all of our options, and we have our pulpit, we have maybe a newsletter, we have maybe a blog or a Twitter account, we always have a bedside to go to.

And I think a pastor has to always be thinking, "How is what I'm doing preparing my people?" So Tony, one of the things I think about whenever a calamity happens is, not just, "What should I or shouldn't I say in the midst of it for those there in the calamity?" but, "What should I say?

How should I comport myself for the sake of my people, for the sake of my family, for those who are not in the calamity?" and/or watching what I say about a calamity when it comes. That's the way I'm thinking, partly when I think about my people as well as those who are in the calamity.

Yes, and with the Internet we can all be transported into a calamity within moments, live, even if we're not personally touched by it. So it seems there's an opportunity to address the situation in the moment, and maybe those on the ground who are touched by the disaster will not even hear what's going on in Twitter.

Right, and it's complicated because those on the ground may read it. I mean, that's the new phenomenon that we have with blogs and with Twitter, is that anybody, anywhere, in any condition, can read anything we say addressing any situation, and we have to be ready for the fact that if we say something we think will be helpful to one group, another group might read it and not be helped by it, and thus we're always making judgment calls about, "On balance will this be helpful or not to the greatest number of people?" and we can miss that sometimes, and we have to be ready for people to say, "You didn't help me," and another set of people say, "Thank you very much," and we just hope and we pray that we're wise enough, we say things often enough, and in a diverse enough way so that lots of people are blessed by what we say.

So one reason you want to address the natural disasters when they happen is so that those who are listening on Twitter will be thinking about God's sovereignty over life before they are themselves in the hospital facing cancer and facing calamity in their own life. Yes, I have in mind people who've been through the issue a year ago or ten years ago, people who are in the suffering right now, and people who will go through it in a year, because my goal is to spread a passion for the supremacy of God in all things, for the joy of all peoples.

I want their faith to be preserved. I want every tweet I tweet, every blog I write, every sermon I preach to be a means for people's indomitable joy in the face of horrible loss, whether they've gone through it, are in it, or will go through it. Thank you, Pastor John, and thank you for listening to this podcast at DesiringGod.org.

You'll find thousands of other free resources from John Piper. I'm your host Tony Reinke. Thanks for listening.