(upbeat music) 90 months ago, we started a little podcast called Ask Pastor John, and today we reach episode 1500. It's incredible. This is only possible, of course, with the support and the engagement of so many listeners out there around the globe. Your prayers, your listens, your emails, your suggestions, and your continued financial support.

Thank you so much for being a partner with us to make this podcast possible. And when you mix all the play counts together from the various podcast players that people use and the APJ app that was developed early on, plays from the website, and of course, all of the YouTube plays that have accumulated in recent years, if you add them all together, we are quickly closing in on 200 million episode plays all time, 200 million.

That baffles me. It's especially remarkable because as some of you know, we designed this podcast to cover us in 2013 when Pastor John was in Knoxville for a year. We wanted a way for his voice to remain very close to DG, and it worked. But we had planned to end the podcast with episode 400, but episode 400 was really the beginning.

It was the beginning of our launch into the stratosphere, and that epic episode, number 400, really propelled a growing momentum that has just continued to grow year after year ever since. So Pastor John, here we are, 90 months later. Let's step back and ponder this. Talk to us about work, especially how you work.

People look at your ministry and say you've written a lot, spoken a lot, accomplished a lot. What have you learned about your own personal productivity? Do you have any wisdom about productivity or creativity that you wanna share with us at this APJ milestone? - Well, I have thoughts. I'll let you and others judge whether it's wisdom or not.

You know as well as I do, Tony, that podcasts like this don't come into existence merely because of one person. It wouldn't exist without you curating the questions, mastering the systems, editing the episodes, serving them up to Desiring God, and it wouldn't exist without the team of computer experts at Desiring God and the spreading experts.

So I think first lesson, first piece of wisdom perhaps that any productive person needs to learn is that no man is an island. We are part of a body and the hand cannot say to the eye, I have no need of you. And if I let myself go down that road even further, I hear the Apostle Paul ringing in my ears, what do you have, Piper, that you did not receive?

And if you received it, why do you boast as though it were not a gift? And then I hear him say, I worked harder than any of them. Nevertheless, it was not I, but the grace of God that was with me. Paul is just so eager not to take any credit for his productivity as an apostle.

And if I keep walking down that path, I realize I've got a wife who has been spectacularly supportive for 52 years, never complaining. I pause here, Cody, to think, now are you exaggerating, Piper? My memory is flawed, so everybody should take this with a grain of salt. But to my memory, I do not recall Noel Piper ever getting in my face gently or angrily about my studying and writing and speaking like I do.

So I can't imagine what life would be like without her. But I have been recently pondering, especially since this milestone was approaching, I have been pondering milestones and looking back over 50 or 60 years, wondering how did that happen? How did books and sermons and lessons and classes and "Ask Pastor John" episodes come into being?

And I've got a few thoughts that might encourage others who are on the way with me toward heaven, and they want to be fruitful and productive as they go and not waste their lives. So here's a few thoughts. Number one, get a clear vision for why everything exists, including yourself.

Few things have been more helpful to me than realizing what Jonathan Edwards would call the end for which God created the world, including the end for which he created me. I used to carry around in my wallet, Tony, a piece of paper that basically said, "You exist to spread a passion for the supremacy of God in all things for the joy of all peoples.

Never, never, never, never forget it. Carry it in your wallet, if not in your conscious head all the time. Know why you are on this planet." That's number one. Number two, it's been powerfully animating to me to realize that as a human being, I am destined to be a maker.

Now I got this insight in college when I read Dorothy Sayers' "The Mind of the Maker." God is the great creator, maker, and he created humans in his image as secondary creator, makers. The Lord God took the man, put him in the garden to work it and to keep it, and we'll see how that's making and creating in just a minute.

We are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, good doing, good making. And I'm not talking just about artists and writers. I'm talking about every single human being. The Greek word poieo means do or make. Now why would that be? Why would one word, and Greek isn't the only language that's true in, it's numerous languages that do and make are the same word.

Why would that be? And I suspect it's because all doing is to make something different than it was, all of it. So we are all creators, makers in some sense. Every time we act, every time we do anything, we make something into something else, some situation into something different than it was.

A rocky field into a garden, a stick into a spear, a room into a home, a cow into a steak, flour and sugar and fruit into an apple pie, snow into a snowman, sounds into melody, fire into lamps and heaters and locomotion, 11 men into a football team, and on and on and on.

We're all makers. And that truth has settled into me in such a way as to make me find tremendous pleasure in creating things. In my case, mainly with words, sermons, articles, books, poems, "Ask Pastor John" episodes. And if you were to ask my wife, she'd say, "Yeah, not just words, but messes in rooms." Piper has a low tolerance level for chaos.

I really do. I don't like it anywhere I find it. I'm on it. As soon as I see chaos in thought or chaos in a room or chaos in the way the grass is growing or the weeds are spreading, I am on it. I don't like to leave the world the way it is.

It ought to be a better place, more beautiful, more orderly, more wonderfully fruitful. So I love to compose things, things that have a beginning and a middle and an end and coherence and beauty. I have a love affair with being a maker. That started a long time ago, and I think it has to do with being human.

Third, we need to discover and embrace with zeal the difference between sloth and rest, laziness and leisure. I wrote a poem about seven years ago called "Pilgrim's Conflict with Sloth." People can listen to the whole thing at Desiring God, where sloth personified tries to lure me, John Piper, as I stop being a pastor and move into full-time with Desiring God, tries to lure me with the half-truth that Jesus said, "Come to me, all you who labor and are heavy laden, "that I will give you rest." And let me read you a little excerpt from that poem, how I answered sloth, because this is so crucial that people make the difference between sloth and rest.

So here's what I said. "As my God lives, I tell you, sloth, "He gives His rest under a yoke. "His sweet bequest, blood-bought and suited "to the back of every weary saint, "the knack of all our plowing, "Jesus makes the weighty burden light "and takes the yoke beams in His hand "and lifts and carries us, "our works, our gifts, and Jesus is the giver.

"Grace bought and powers every pace "and every enterprise. "Sloth, we were made and made again "to be coworkers with the maker of the world, "to see the world above and then to make the world below "more beautiful, to learn, to know, "and then to make, to shape, adorn, compose, produce, "and turn a thorn into an etching tool, "to write, to say what never has been said that way, "to sing, to draw, to paint, to build, "to stitch and weave until we fill the world with truth.

"For this God spoke and Jesus died. "This is our yoke, our happy yoke. "You will not take my work, sloth. "We were made to make." So I know, Tony, and everybody who's listening knows, there is a place, an absolutely crucial place for rest and leisure. The Sabbath principle holds.

We must know the difference between sloth and rest, laziness and leisure. That's number three. Here's number four. If we're going to do our work faithfully and abundantly, when I say abundantly, I have in mind 1 Corinthians 15, 58, be steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord.

Do lots of it. We must not be paralyzed by perfection and infinity. Arnold Toynbee, I pulled this article out of my files that I put away in 1970. I pulled it out and I reread it. The historian Arnold Toynbee said, "All human work is imperfect because human nature is.

"And this intrinsic imperfection of human affairs "cannot be overcome by procrastination." (laughing) That is awesome. That insight is just so incredibly fruitful. So many people fail to be productive because they stare imperfection, which is inevitable, in the face and they say, "Well, I'll just wait another day." As if waiting another day is gonna make the likelihood of their imperfection gonna go away.

That's an amazing and wonderful and fruitful insight. And then he said something very practical. He said, "Without realizing it, "I had pitted myself against infinity. "To extricate myself, I developed a way "for my own banning infinity. "Instead of going on and on acquiring knowledge, "ad infinitum." And oh my goodness, what a temptation that is in getting ready for Ask Pastor John episodes, right?

Every question should have a book written on it. Every question could be spent days and days researching. Well, what am I gonna do? So he said, "I started to do something "with the knowledge that I already possessed. "And this active use of knowledge gave direction "for the future to my acquisition of knowledge." And I think one of the main reasons that I have been as productive as I have is that I made peace decades ago.

I made peace with imperfection and finitude. I have no illusions, Tony, that I will say the last word about anything. My job while I live is to speak the truth as I see it in God's word, as well as I can say it and let God do what he wants to with that imperfection.

Number five, and this I have heard from Arnold Toynbee, Martin Lloyd Jones, Jonathan Edwards, and others, namely, "Act promptly as soon as you feel "that your mind is right for taking action." In other words, seminal ideas, far-reaching, fruitful thoughts come to us at night while we're reading, meditating, praying, walking, playing.

And if you don't capture those in some way in writing, you'll almost certainly lose them. So find a way to, quote, this is Toynbee, quote, "Act promptly when your mind is ripe with insight." Two more briefly, and these two relate especially to ask Pastor John and the fact that we're at 1,500 when we thought, oh, 400 would be crazy.

We need to be deeply persuaded that steady, small chops with a good sharp ax will most certainly, after a few hundred blows, bring down a very big tree. Yeah, I told Noel last night, did you know that we're at 1,500? Asked Pastor John, and she laughed, and she said, just like reading 15 minutes a day, because she remembered the fact that for many seasons of my life, being a slow reader, I've said, okay, I'm gonna read a huge novel, I'm gonna do it at 15 minutes a day.

And I still do things like that. Take a little chop every day at something, and the tree is going to fall. You pick up a good ax and you take regular chops, you will make good progress. If you have to see a tree fall, every time you pick up an ax, you will spend your life on little projects.

There are great trees worth turning into beautiful houses, which can only be brought down by a thousand small, faithful chops. When I was in seminary, I gotta bring this home because this really wallowed to me when I was 23 years old, 1970, Jeffrey Bromley was my church history professor.

He translated all 10 huge complex volumes of Theologisches Wörterbuch zum Neuen Testament into the Theological Dictionary of the New Testament. 10 big blue volumes full of Greek and Hebrew and French and German, and oh my goodness. And he's a church history professor. And I asked him, "Would you write an essay for our student magazine on how you work?" And he wrote this sentence, "It might be of interest to note that two and a half hours per day mean two and a half pages of TWNT per day, 12 and a half pages per week, and 560 per year, a steady average, which makes possible a fairly rapid publication." A fairly rapid means probably one volume every two years, like 20 years.

So what a lesson for a 23-year-old like me. Just keep chopping, keep chopping at whatever worthy task you have. And finally, Tony, I think we should say to everybody, let your motto be the principle of the Apostle Paul, forgetting what lies behind, pressing forward to the goal. In other words, never get to the point in your life where you are more contented with what you have already done than you are excited with what is yet to be done.

At every stage, 24, 44, 64, 74, 84, pray with all your heart, "Oh God, make the next season of my life the most fruitful season ever for the supremacy of God in all things, for the joy of all people." So it's been a good run, Tony. 1500 is a good run, but now we start the beginning of the second 1500.

If God wills, we will live and do this or that. - Yeah, amen. I know I speak for a lot of people when I say thank you, Pastor John, for investing so much of your life and thought into the hundreds of hours of your time that are represented in these 1500 episodes.

And if the incoming questions are any indication, we will have plenty to talk about until episode 3000. - I don't doubt that we will run out of questions, but I do doubt that we will run out of life sooner or later. But the Lord governs that. - Yeah, he sure does.

Thank you, Pastor John. And thank you for joining us today on the podcast for our feed, our archive of 1500 episodes, or to send us a question of your own, go to desiringgod.org/askpastorjohn. Next time we look at self-pity, how do we wage war on self-pity? That's on Monday as we now aim towards episode number 3000.

I am Tony Reinke. Thanks for listening and for supporting us over these 90 months together. I'm really grateful to God for all of you out there. Pastor John and I will see you on Monday. Have a great weekend. (upbeat music) (upbeat music)