Welcome back to a new week on the Ask Pastor John podcast. Pastor John, here's the question. What do you want to be as your final words on Twitter? And 140 characters, Brittany writes in to ask it, "Dear Pastor John, if you could say one last thing to this world, what would your message be to us?" In other words, what is the one sentence message, the one last tweet that is the most important thing we need to hear from you and why?

I took Brittany seriously when she suggested it be one last tweet. So here's my 140 character, exactly, final tweet. The most important thing I think the world needs to hear, tweet size. It goes like this. And I had to drop a comma, frankly, too. But you can't see that, so it doesn't really matter.

This is 140 characters, including one comma and one period. "Jesus, God's son, died in the place of sinners and rose so that all who love him supremely might be forgiven all and have eternal joy in God." Now, I thought about saying instead, "Read your Bibles and pray for insight." Because there is so much that needs to be known about God that cannot be put into one sentence, and the only reliable source for all that needs to be known is the Bible.

So maybe the most important thing to do is not to try to sum up the Bible in 140 characters, but to cry out to the world, "Go read, go read, go read, pray as you read so that you see everything that's there." Maybe that's the most important thing to say.

But then on second thought, there are millions and millions of people who don't have access to the Bible, so that the last thing I should say to them is probably more specific than, "Go read your Bible." And I think the Bible itself would want me to talk mainly about, not about the Bible, but about what the Bible talks about.

So that's why I wrote what I wrote. And the reason I chose to focus the way I did was because the Apostle Paul already wrote that tweet. In 1 Corinthians 15, 3 to 4, I didn't count his characters, it's close. He said, "I deliver to you as a first importance," and I presume that would mean last importance also, "what I also received, that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures and that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures." So Paul says that of first importance is that Christ died for our sins and rose again.

Now, if that's a first importance for Paul, then I'm standing on firm ground in making it my last tweet, my most important thing that I say finally. So here it is again. I'll read it again and then just say a couple of comments about why I structured it the way I did.

"Jesus, God's son, died in the place of sinners and rose so that all who love him supremely might be forgiven all and have eternal joy in God." It seemed good and needful in our day to identify who Jesus is. So I said, "Jesus, the son of God," or God's son, and instead of saying, "died for sinners," I said, "died in the place of sinners" to make explicit what I think Paul means, namely that this is an act of substitution, not just an exemplary act or an act of advocacy, but that he really took the place of sinners when he died.

And I included "and rose," not just died, but "and rose" because Paul did in his summary and because if Christ is not raised from the dead, we're still in our sins, there's no victory over death or wrath or the devil, there's no gospel without the resurrection. The most controversial thing in my sentence, I think, is that I said the beneficiaries of this death are "all who love him supremely," rather than saying "all who trust him" or "all who believe in him." And I certainly don't mean to set this up as a way everybody should always present the gospel.

I might be wrong in choosing to emphasize loving Christ supremely instead of believing Christ. I certainly don't want to diminish the importance of trusting him and all he promises to be for us, but in view of 2,000 years of church history and millions and millions of nominal Christians who would say they believe in him and have not experienced the slightest heart change or the slightest change in their lives and are lost, I wanted to stress the necessity of the kind of faith that really transforms people at the level of our deepest affections so that Christ is our supreme treasure, not just a belief ticket out of hell, which he is for so many people who think they're believing.

Paul says everything works together for the good of those who love God. Love God. Not just believe things about God. He says at the end of 1 Corinthians, the very last verse of 1 Corinthians, "Those who do not love the Lord, let them be accursed." Not love the Lord, let them be accursed.

And James says, "The crown of life will be given to those who love him." And Jesus himself said, "Whoever loves mother or father more than me is not worthy of me." So I wanted to capture that. And then I summed up the benefits of Jesus in saying, "Forgiven all." I didn't say, "Forgive all sins," just because I couldn't fit it in the 140 characters.

"Forgiven all and have eternal joy in God." I wanted to say the negative side, all your problems, all your sins, all your failures are going to be canceled because Jesus died for them. And then I wanted to capture the positive side, namely that once our sins are forgiven, we're not left in limbo.

We're given eternal joy that's not merely an extension of worldly happiness, but something far, far greater, namely joy in the all-satisfying God. So Tony, I give you hereby formal permission that if I die before we get too many more of these recordings made, you may say, "John Piper said this should be his last tweet." Will do.

There it is, a preview of the capstone tweet. And the most important thing in the universe, may we never get calloused to how awesome these things are. Thank you, Pastor John. And thank you for the question, Brittany. And speaking of the most awesome things in the universe, we have just entered Holy Week 2017 as we move from Palm Sunday to Maundy Thursday, and then to Good Friday, all leading up to Easter Sunday, which is coming up soon.

It's my favorite day of the year. This special week is set aside for us to focus our eyes and our attention on the death and the resurrection of our Savior. And on Wednesday, we're going to do that very thing. We're going to take a very candid look into the horrors of crucifixion from its historical descriptions and physical dimensions.

And then on Friday, we're going to look at Calvary from its spiritual meaning and theological consequences. That's coming up on Wednesday and Friday of this week. I'm your host, Tony Reinke. Thanks for listening to the podcast and we'll see you next time.