Hi, my name is Brad. I'm a husband, father of three awesome kids, and a minister in Houston, Texas. I've been a Desiring God ministry partner for five years now. You're listening to the Ask Pastor John podcast with John Piper. Brad has a story I want to share with you in a moment, but speaking of ministers and the ministry, if you want to understand John Piper and why he does ministry the way he does, I think you must understand David's bold claim in Psalm 119, verse 99.

I have more understanding than all my teachers, for your testimonies are my meditation. Understanding God's word rests on personal meditation, not simply in surrounding yourself with the sharpest academic minds. This text proved vital to Pastor John's early formation in ministry. The broader context of Psalm 119, verses 97 to 100 is important, too.

On the podcast, we talked briefly about this text one time back in APJ 1533. There, Pastor John, you talked about why, when we have so much good Bible scholarship, we still need to be trained to study the Bible for ourselves. And on Twitter, you've cited verse 99 a few times.

Here are two of those tweets, both very provocative. In my 20s, I knew I could not outread my liberal professors, but I took heart from this verse that I could out-meditate them. So can you? In a couple of years earlier, you tweeted this on the same text and said, "One true citation from God's word may silence a whole semester of human speculation." I was wondering, Pastor John, can you don your biographical hat, take a Bible truth and apply it to one life—in this case, apply Psalm 119, verses 97 to 100—to your own formation?

Well, I will try. Let's read the Psalm. Not everybody knows these verses, so they are very, very precious, and I hope they are to the folks who are listening or will become so. So Psalm 119, 97 to 100, "O how I love your law." And by the way, just a little comment here, this is not even in my notes.

Torah, the word for law, means basically instruction. So if people have in their mind law means just rules, that's all it is, just rules, rules, rules, you need to get that out of your brain. "O how I love your instruction. O how I love everything you say." Okay, close that parenthesis.

"O how I love your law, your instruction. It is my meditation all the day. Your commandment makes me wiser than my enemies, for it is ever with me. I have more understanding than all my teachers, for your testimonies are my meditation. I understand more than the aged, for I keep your precepts." Now I think the first thing to say here is this.

When I was undergoing an awakening to the life of the mind at Wheaton College between 1964 and 1968, under the influence of Clyde Kilby and C.S. Lewis, Stuart Hackett, the philosophy teacher, Francis Schaeffer indirectly, whole English department where I was a major, two things were growing in me which relate to this text.

One was the deepening and intensifying of my affections, my emotions, my heart response to the good, the true, and the beautiful, and ultimately of course the highest good and the highest affections for God himself and his word. That's one thing. The other was a similar intensifying of my analytical bent toward probing and questioning and scrutinizing and defining and dissecting, all the while as a lit major knowing that Wordsworth had warned, "We murder to dissect." I said, "I get that.

I'm sorry, William. I'm not killing anything. I'm trying not to, but it is a danger. It is. You dissect something, you kill it first." So I have always felt like I am two kinds of person in one, a highly analytical question asker and a romantic pursuer of deep and authentic, satisfying emotional responses to what I see and experience.

So when I read verse 97 of Psalm 119, "Oh, how I love your law. It is my meditation all the day," the two persons inside of me latch on to those two words, right? One of me took hold of the word "love." "I love your instruction, Lord. I value it.

I embrace it. I cherish it. I enjoy it. I long for it. I admire it. I eat it. I drink it. It makes me happy. It awakens life and joy and hope in me." And the other me took hold of the word "meditation." "I will think about your law.

I will probe into your law. I will ask questions of your law. I will analyze your law and press for definitions in your law until I squeeze from your law every drop of reality juice that I possibly can." So that double response to Psalm 119, 97, one, loving God's Word, two, meditating on God's Word set—I think this is what you're asking me to talk about.

I might misunderstand. It set the course of my life. It really did. I think everything I have done, written or spoken, has been shaped by the double grasp of God's Word in these two ways. Now, what you pointed out in those tweets was that over the next six years of my seminary education three years and doctoral studies for three years, I found that my bent toward loving the reality that biblical texts were seeking to communicate and spending long hours staring at the text, wrestling, digging, querying, praying, paid more dividends for me than if I had spent all of that time reading secondary sources.

That's what I discovered. Now, I wish I've dealt with the Lord a lot of times on this and have had to have him rebuke me because of my discontent, but I could wish that I read faster and comprehended more quickly and remembered things long enough that I could be a person who is both widely read and intensely focused on particular biblical texts.

But I'm not that person. I'm not. And so I have opted to be a very focused text analyzer and reality lover rather than being a widely read scholar. So I tweeted, "I knew I could not outread my liberal professors, but I could outmeditate them," or I wrote, "One true citation from God's Word may silence a whole semester of human speculation." In a sense, that's my biographical living out of Psalm 119.98-100.

It goes like this. This is the other part of the text you cited. "Your commandment makes me wiser than my enemies, for it's ever with me. I have more understanding than all my graduate school teachers, for your testimonies are my meditation. I understand more than the aged." I was in my 20s then.

So what does it mean now? You'll have to work that out for another session. "So I keep your precepts." So there's a double progression here. It moves from enemies to teachers to elders. And I can out-understand them all, it says. And it moves from, "Your Word is with me," to, "Your Word is my meditation," to, "I obey your Word." There's a progression in both the people and in the action.

So the overall point, it seems to me, is the more seriously and diligently and lovingly you dig into God's Word and let it dig into you, the more likely it is that you will be wiser and more insightful than those who get their learning another way, no matter how much older than you they are.

So I know it would be utterly presumptuous now to draw the inference, "So I have been wiser than all my teachers and all my enemies and all my elders for these yea many fifty years." And the reason that would be absolute folly to talk like that is—I mean, there are several reasons—but one is, there are others besides me who meditate on God's Word, of course.

But here's what I will say with a couple of anecdotes. When I was in seminary, I took every possible course with the teacher who valued this kind of rigorous attention to the text. This is Daniel Fuller. One time, a visiting scholar came to the seminary—well-known. You would know his name, Tony.

Lots of our listeners would know his name. He's not living anymore. But he came to just teach one course, and world-class New Testament scholar. I said, "Man, I'm signing up for that class." And so eager to learn from this giant about two or three classes in. My hand's just up, sticking up.

I'm raising my hand regularly in the class and asking particular questions about the text and about the way he's using them. This man was not used to that. His face would turn red, and he was manifestly unhappy with such questions. So you know what I did? I dropped the class.

I said, "Look, for me, education meant not being lectured to with what I could read in his books, but having my capacities of seeing and savoring deepened and ripened and intensified by rigorous observation and analysis and celebration with someone who's better at it than I am. Help me do this." So I just went and signed up for another class with Daniel Fuller.

Man, was I growing in leaps and bounds in my capacities. Now when I got to Germany—one more anecdote. When I got to Germany for graduate school, I had formed habits. So now for three years I've been forming these habits. I had formed habits of observation and analysis and text querying that were very fixed in my methodology.

I knew how I profited from Scripture. They were so fruitful. My methods were so fruitful in what they yielded from meditation, nothing could dislodge them. And I didn't see anything. In fact, I came to tears sometimes sitting in classes grieving over what these students in my classes were having to deal with because they were so inadequate.

I didn't see anything in the German methodology of those days in that school that came close to the fruitfulness of the methods of observation and analysis that I had learned. And my love for the reality that the authors of Scripture were trying to communicate had created a habit of mind that was impatient with mere textual gamesmanship that stayed at the grammatical, logical, historical level while never pushing through the words to the reality that was driving and animating everything in the Bible.

So these two habits—rigorous analysis of text plus earnest love for the reality behind them—Psalm 119.97—proved to be very unusual among my fellow graduate students in Munich, Germany in the early '70s. And I say this as a tragedy. There was such a fascination with almost everything but the actual nitty-gritty of the wording of the text and the glorious reality that the text was trying to communicate time and again—and this is embarrassing even—time and again in discussions.

I would listen for a while, and then I would kind of hesitantly ask a question to my three or four folks, fellow students, who were talking. I would ask a question about some grammatical particularity in the biblical text that seemed to have an implication for reality that they were not latching onto, and there would be silence.

You hit your ball over the tennis net and it never comes back. So to this day, Tony, my personal testimony is that my limited scholarly focus has not suited me to be a world-class scholar, but that very limited focus on loving the instruction of God and the reality behind it and meditating assiduously on God's expression of that reality in his Word has taken away from me any sense of being intimidated when it comes to a confident rendering of what God is communicating in his Word.

I think that is tremendously encouraging for young aspiring pastors to hear, that if they will love God and love his Word, and if they will give themselves untiringly to careful handling meditation on God's text, they will never have to be cowed by their enemies, their teachers, or the aged—even the aged John Piper.

They will be able on their own to get what they need and preach the Word. That's a great encouragement for any pastor. Thank you, Pastor John. And speaking of pastors, you met Brad, a pastor in Houston, at the top of this episode. I have him on the phone now.

Brad, thank you for joining us on the podcast today. Tell us a little bit about yourself and how Pastor John's ministry intersected with your own ministry. When I was in college, my brother had gotten started in youth ministry and had found Desiring God and some of the books that John Piper had written.

And so we started—I first read Desiring God and then found the website and started listening over and over again to a lot of the different biographies that were on there. And then that moved into sermons and then just being so encouraged and really shaping so much of my theology of what does it mean to be a Christian and money and marriage and just Christian life and all those things just made such a big impact on me as I was growing spiritually.

Ten years ago, my brother and I had an opportunity to go to the pastors conference and meet Pastor John and it really just made a huge impact in our lives to have someone that we looked up to so much, that we had listened to so many things, and it really helped shape so much of our faith.

And then just to have a chance to meet him, to see other people there, and just the encouragement that was brought to so many pastors by Desiring God in the ministry that they do. That's great to hear. So as a pastor today, how do Desiring God resources continue to equip you and how do you make use of the resources as a pastor, particularly this podcast?

Yeah, that's a great question. And I recommend Desiring God and a lot of the resources that are there in so many questions that Pastor John answers to our people all the time when they have questions about their marriage, about parenting, usually when they're struggling through what is the right thing to do, what's the godly thing to do.

So I recommend Desiring God to our people all the time when they have questions about the Bible or particular passages, and it's so easy to find the answers that they're looking for. And then also, I think just for me personally, if I'm teaching a lesson or going through verses that I'll always go back and check what resources are out there to help make sure that I'm on the right track and ways of teaching and presenting these things.

It is an everyday thing that I use Desiring God. And that's hard to get across, I think, in trying to be brief, just the level of impact that it's made. Well, even briefly put, that's moving to me, Brad. Thank you. You are right now talking to a bunch of listeners to the podcast, many of whom have received a lot from the ministry but have never given back.

What would you say to them? Yeah, so I've been listening and really using Desiring God resources for over 15 years, but it wasn't until five years ago that my wife and I decided that we needed to start giving and part of that came in reading 1 Corinthians 9, 11.

It says, "If we have sown spiritual things among you, is it too much if we reap material things from you?" And we just talked about how much we had received spiritually from Desiring God and from the sermons, from the Ask Pastor Johnson, all the different resources that are there.

So we've received so much spiritually and just thinking that we want other people to have access to that, too. And as we've gotten older, realizing that even though everything on Desiring God is free for people to access, that there's still a cost to it, that someone's paying to keep all those things running and moving.

And since it made such a big impact in our lives, we want to continue to see that happen. They can make an impact in the lives of others as well. And so it wasn't something that we felt like we had to do, but that we were excited to get to do.

And we feel like every dollar that we invest in Desiring God is a great investment into the kingdom. Yes, an investment that makes it possible for our resources to be made and to be spread around the world free of charge. Five years supporting Desiring God as a ministry partner and many more years of purposefully sharing our resources and seeing the strategic value of our resources to serve you as a pastor and serve your congregation.

That's exactly the kind of intentional vision for our resources that encourages our work, Brad. So thank you so much. In so many ways, you're a gift to us. Yeah, thank you. We are really grateful. Man, it's so encouraging. As we enter the final weeks and days of the year, if you believe this, if you believe that Desiring God is making pastors and churches better and more faithful, consider joining Brad to become a monthly ministry partner.

Much of our financial support comes from folks who give on average just $30 a month. To set up monthly giving, go to give.desiringgod.org. That's give.desiringgod.org. It's always appreciated. I'm your host, Tony Rehnke, and Pastor John and I return on Monday. We'll see you then. 1 Desiring God is making pastors and churches better and more faithful.

Much of our financial support comes from folks who give on average just $30 a month. To set up monthly giving, go to give.desiringgod.org. That's give.desiringgod.org.