Michael in St. Paul, Minnesota asks, "Pastor John, are you aware of the influence your ministry has had and is having on the Christian hip-hop scene?" I have seen some of my words show up. I doubt that I could say I'm aware in any kind of formal way of any extent of influence, I don't really know, but what I've seen, I saw, for example, in Tadashi's "Make War," I knew that was my voice I just heard, and yes, that was my phrase, and then I watched what he did with it and I thought, "Whoa, that's pretty powerful." I know that Lecrae's "Don't Waste Your Life" video was related to the book "Don't Waste Your Life," and I'm honored by that.

I've listened to those and many, many others. So here's just a few thoughts, mostly positive and a couple of cautions. I just rejoice that so much truth in our day from evangelical guys, I guess it's mainly guys, I don't know if I've ever heard a woman do rap, are pouring so much truth into this form.

I just love it when glorious truth gets poured into different cultural forms, because I care about the truth way more than I care about the forms, even though I know we can't be indifferent to forms. There's something about this form that enables it to be very dense with the Bible.

And it has the advantage of being, in large part, narrative. A lot of hip-hop lyrics are stories. They move with a narrative, which gives it an advantage of telling a story about someone's experience or the movement of the history of redemption. Another factor about it that gives it remarkable clout, I think, is that I would call it almost linguistic energy.

At least all the hip-hop I see or listen to is phenomenally energetic. It's just drivenly energetic. And when I think about that, I think, "Well, life is war, and that sounds like the kind of energy that it's going to take to push back the enemy." And I have thought, I'll just stick this in, because I thought of this a little while ago, it may be that one of the limitations is that particular energy.

I would like to challenge hip-hop artists to record a rap lullaby to help their child go to sleep. See what that would sound like. My guess is it's doable. I've just never heard anything like it. So there's my little challenge to throw out there. And you might try one for the funeral as well.

Try a rap for the death of your seven-year-old. And what would change about the drivenness of it, the loudness of it, the forcefulness of it, if you're trying to put your baby to sleep with the truth of Jesus and you're laying your baby in the ground with the truth of Jesus?

That's not a criticism. It's just saying, "Is the form adaptable to that?" And if it is, let's do it. And if it's not, we just own that. There are lots of other kinds of music you don't play at a funeral too, besides rap, and you don't use for lullabies.

It's an interesting kind of test to see what's the nature of the form. I would also say this. At its best, there is a poetic effort going on in hip-hop that sometimes is remarkably shrewd. It's good. It's striking. It's smart. It's awakening. It's surprising. And that's the way I think we should do language.

We should surprise people with turns of phrase. And rap artists, it seems to me, are doing that pretty much all the time at their best. Just a couple of cautions and dangers, and everybody's thought of these. There's nothing fresh or new here, but I find the words hard to understand regularly, which is why I don't listen to much of it.

I'm 67 years old, and I just can't understand it. I need the words written in front of me in order to know where they're going, because it goes by so fast and so complicated that I usually miss three-fourths of it, and then it's not helping me very much. That's one downside for me personally.

Second is, of course, the associations are bleak. The origins, I suppose, I don't know this with anything other than anecdotal evidence, the associations and the origins of rap are pretty ugly, and a lot of foul stuff has been sung to that medium. And that means for a lot of people, it's probably going to be hard for them to get over that while pouring the purity of the sinless Christ into a medium that for them might be very, very associated with something utterly inimical to the purity of Christ.

And the third thing is that, will it for those who are being drawn to Christ through it, will it lead them on to a fuller, richer, wider experience of forms and music? We would hope that that's the case, because all of us come in somewhere, right? We come into the faith through some cultural medium, and all of us want, I hope we want, to broaden our experience and not limit ourselves to one form of art.

Thank you, Pastor John, and thank you for listening to this podcast. Please email your questions to us at AskPastorJohn@DesiringGod.org. You'll find thousands of other free resources from John Piper. I'm your host, Tony Reinke. Thanks for listening.