Pastor John, as someone who enjoys writing, I am interested to hear your thoughts about a writer's influence, how he or she engages a reader with the written word. And you rather strongly encourage writers to better appreciate the influence that they can have on those readers. Explain this for us, explain the importance of a writer's influence.

I tweeted recently that if you're not praying that what you write influence people, is it because you don't believe in what you say and think it doesn't matter, or is it because you don't think people matter? Which means that I think it's wrong not to want to influence people when you write.

Because Jesus or Paul said, "Let everything be done in love," and he said, "Do all to the glory of God." So when we're writing, either we're loving people or we're not. We should be loving people, and we're either seeking to glorify God or we're not. We should be seeking to glorify God.

And I think the way you love people is by influencing them, persuading them, winning them, awakening them to delight in God above all things. Which means that whenever you write, you should be writing in such a way as to make God look better than anything else in the world, to make the path of sin look worse than anything else in the world, and to make the path of righteousness look beautiful in spite of all the difficulties that the path of obedience might bring.

So whether you're writing fiction, or whether you're writing a blog, or whether you're writing a poem, or whether you're writing a book, a theological treatise, it seems to me that love and the glory of God dictate that you can't be indifferent to whether you want people to be affected by this.

You want them to think true thoughts about God and life, and you want them to feel appropriate affections for God and about sin and life, and therefore writing is simply an extension of living. And living is to be lived for love for people and for the glory of God.

And when you start there, then you think backwards into, "Okay, what does that mean for the kinds of words that I use, the kind of sentences I use, the paragraphs I use, the length of the things I use, cultural illustrations?" And you begin to think through all the applications for writing.

But yeah, I start with the assumption that I'm on the planet to influence people. Pastor John, as you write, as you look at the screen of your computer, are you conscious of your readers in that moment of how you're trying to influence them? That's a really good question. I've heard somebody say one time, and they ask him, "Who does he write for?" He says, "He writes for people like him." I'm not a very good example of one who can crawl inside the skin of a particular age group or cultural segment.

What I feel like God has gifted me somewhat in is being able to crawl inside the skin of a human. And the way I've gotten to know humans mainly is by knowing John Piper. My sins, my worries, my longings, I'm so introspectively driven on these things and so second-guessing about everything I do that I think I've gotten to know this human pretty well.

And then I do try to read and watch. So I'm aware of the effects that I write, but I'm generally not saying this segment of people, let's say from 18 to 25, think this way. Therefore, I will say this. My mind just doesn't work like that. But as I'm writing, I do feel like if I say it this way, it's going to be off-putting.

If I say it this way, it will be acceptable, and yet it won't have any impact. I've got to find a way in between off-putting and blah, no impact, that penetrates the heart. And so at that point, I'm thinking very hard about how I think what I write will be heard.

It's just that I don't tend to categorize audiences. I'm probably just doing it intuitively because I know that if I were among, if I were writing explicitly for people who say hadn't never heard of Jesus, they'd never heard of Jesus, well, I would clearly write differently than if I were writing for somebody who did.

So I do have a kind of generic audience with some presuppositions in my mind when I write, but not very good focusing on particular groups. So how much of your writing really results in personal edification then? Always. I mean, I don't ever... Writing for me is a devotional exercise or an intellectual exercise by which I am ever seeking to see what I'm saying and feel what I'm saying.

And therefore it has become... This is why I would write quite apart from any publishing. You know, if the Lord said to me, "No more publishing," goodness, I wouldn't stop writing. He would say, "I'm not gonna let anybody read for the rest of your life, anything you write." Well, I wouldn't stop writing.

I would just write, put it in a notebook, and throw it in a basket somewhere or whatever. Because writing for me has become a way of seeing and a way of feeling. And so my answer is, I'm always writing for my own edification, my own growth in knowledge, and my own awakening to the kinds of affections that I think one ought to have for God.

And it's just stunning to me. I've recommended to people, if they say, "I'm stuck in my devotions," I just say, "Well, just write the text. Start there. Just write the text. And as you're writing, if you get an idea, write something else, too. But just write the text." Because for whatever reason, for some people, putting things on paper, whether with a pen or with a computer, actually causes thoughts to happen that you wouldn't have any other way.

I generally don't even have it until I write it. My head is generally in such a muddle until I start writing. When we were talking about the pastoral implications of the historical Adam, when somebody asked me about that who wrote to me a few days ago, everything was a muddle in my head.

I had no idea what I would say. And as soon as I started writing, eight ideas came to my mind. Because as I wrote one, I saw an implication, and that had to be another one. And then I saw two other implications and questions, I had to answer those, and that became another one.

That wasn't happening until I put pen to paper. Thank you, Pastor John, and thank you for listening to this podcast. If you have any questions for Pastor John, please send those to us via email. Send them to askpastorjohn@desiringgod.org. Please include your first name and your hometown. You can find thousands of other resources from John Piper online at desiringgod.org.

I'm your host, Tony Reinke. Thanks for listening.