(upbeat music) - A friend of ours, Greg Lucas, is a police officer and he writes in to ask this, "Pastor John, what can a white Christian police officer "who loves Jesus and his fellow man do "to make a God-honoring difference "in the race issues facing our country?" - Well, I'd say to Greg, why am I teaching you anything about this?

I'm the one who ought to be sitting at your feet at this point. In fact, I really do believe we need to sit at the feet of godly policemen right now and have them talk to us because we may, John Piper may be a bit naive in things that I write and say about my reaction to police, but he beat me to the question, so perhaps I have to say something.

My respect for Greg Lucas is enormous. Especially because of his care for kids with disabilities and his own faithfulness as a dad in his book, "Wrestling With an Angel." Greg is a thoughtful, caring, fair-minded dad and police officer, and of course there are thousands like him and he's a Christian, and so the way he posed the question comes out of that.

Can a white officer who loves Jesus and his fellow man make a god-honoring difference in the race issues? And the answer is he can, and maybe even though I'm saying this with great hesitancy because I've never been a policeman, I've never stared down anybody with a knife or a gun or anything that would make my heart beat so hard, I'd probably just collapse in a moment.

I'm gonna say some things and then expect the officers who listen to take them and do whatever tweaking and adjusting is necessary to give them a flavor of reality that I've never walked through. So here's my first suggestion. Greg and all the other officers develop a God-given thick skin.

Everybody who leads, and all police officers lead and pastors lead, and goodness, everybody leads in some way, but everybody who leads, especially publicly, will be criticized, often unjustly. There are bad apples in every barrel, white barrels and black barrels, and community barrels and police barrels. There are bad apples in every barrel, and some people criticize the whole barrel, and the good apples can really get easily angered and hurt so that even the good apples then can start to be part of the problem, and that could be prevented if there was a God-given thick skin able to hear angry words and not be wounded or made vengeful by them.

Or here's another way to say it, maybe more positively, would be that we need to cultivate, whether it's police officers or anybody, seeds of patience. I think Christian police officers will help others see that there are historic reasons for outcries against the police, and that there are some situations, some situations where there's warrant for the outcry, but that does not mean that all officers are being indicted, though it may feel that way in the moment, and I think it's just a great mark of maturity and patience to be able to hear criticism, and only own what is yours, and not what is not yours to own.

I would say to Greg, speak to the issue of racial harmony in the department, the police force, when it's not a red-hot public issue. In other words, when the issue goes away from the front pages, and it will go away from the front pages, that's the golden moment, I think, to talk the issue of racial harmony, and racial reconciliation, and diversity, and justice, and you wanna sow seeds of ethnic harmony rooted in the Christian vision of man, created in the image of God, and man reconciled to God through Jesus Christ.

And then I would say, cultivate freedom from personal revenge as a motive in the use of power. And here's what I have in mind. Just yesterday, I read an article in the New York Times about a Navy pilot. He happened to be a classmate of mine. I didn't even know about this, from Wheaton.

He was a helicopter pilot in Vietnam, flew 500 combat missions. And what gave it such a personal twist is that his dad was a missionary in North Vietnam and had been killed by the Vietnamese, and how easy it would have been for this Navy pilot flying 500 combat missions to have his teeth grinding every time with revenge.

And here's what he said in the article. "I was taught that vengeance was the Lord's, and you defer to that." So this is being reported in a major newspaper. He said, "After a strike, I was pleased that I could say, 'Mission accomplished,' but I never felt, 'Ah, I got somebody back.' In fact, if I had a junior officer that I knew was out for revenge, I would probably keep him out of the air." Now, I suspect that's probably good advice for police officers as well, which simply means I think Christians want to sow the seeds that there's justice to be done here, but it's not an occasional for personal revenge, and where personal vengeance is starting to take the upper place, the officers are gonna probably not do their job as well.

And then I'd say, "Spot and expose policies, regulations, rules, procedures, traditions in the department that might be expressing or shaping racist attitudes." In other words, give attention to this whole issue of structural stuff and not just individual stuff. Just a couple more things. When I tweeted back in November, right after the Michael Brown case had come down with the non-indictment of Officer Wilson, I tweeted this, "An indictment of Wilson may not have been the way, but what's needed from police now is good evidence of firm resolve of equal treatment." Now, I got a lot of upswell of like what's, and so my next tweet, I think it was just an hour later maybe, was, for example, "Empathetic public resolves from the police." Two, "Redoubled effort to hire and train minority officers." Three, "Increased research and development on how to disarm without killing." And I think all three of those are important and serious.

And the last thing I would say is, I just was reading a few weeks ago, and I put this in the blog I wrote recently after our experience down in Nashville, I mean Memphis, Richmond, California, a city with a high crime rate, has not seen any deaths from policemen on community since 2007.

And the reasons were given like this, and I'll just tick 'em off. "One, an emphasis on alternatives to bullets like tasers and pepper spray. Two, an ethos of accountability, every bullet has your name on it. Three, monthly firearm training, quarterly role-playing in hard situations. Four, a strong force with manpower and money to deploy and train wisely.

Five, a change in culture from the top down. Six, strong efforts in neighborhood relations. And seven, all of this flowing from a new culture-changing leader." So those are just random ideas and thoughts about how Christian police officers might move towards creating change for good in racial harmony and just treatment.

But again, I just wanna say how thankful, how thankful I am in my neighborhood for policemen and how much I tremble for what they face over and over again, and how much I don't want to second-guess them, and how much I respect them, because biblically I'm supposed to pray for them.

They are the instruments in God's hands for my protection and for the doing of justice. And so if they hear anything in this that sounds naive or like it's really out of touch with reality, well, it probably is, and forgive me, but if anything could be helpful, I offer it.

Wonderful, Pastor John, thank you. And thank you for the question, Greg. This reminds me of an episode we released a while back titled "Should Christians Be Cops and Soldiers?" That was episode number 318, and you can find it in the Ask Pastor John podcast archive, in our free apps, or on our website, DesiringGod.org.

We're gonna break for the weekend now, but we return with John Piper on Monday. Until then, please email your questions into us at AskPastorJohn@DesiringGod.org. Please keep your questions brief and to the point. Keep it to one to three sentences, if you can, please. And of course, this weekend, you can visit us online at DesiringGod.org to find thousands of books, articles, sermons, and other resources from John Piper, all free of charge.

I'm your host, Tony Reinke. Have a wonderful weekend. (upbeat music) (upbeat music)