Well, on social media, why is it that John Piper mostly avoids talking about politics and breaking news and hot trends? It's a great question today from an alert podcast listener named Blake. Hello Pastor John and thank you for the podcast and for all the many answers you have provided over the years.

As I look back through all those episodes, they seem to be primarily life application and theology and clarity on Bible passages. For the most part, you seem to avoid addressing current events and political hot button issues here on the podcast. And I think this is true of most of your ministry in general.

I'm just curious why not? Why do you avoid saying much about current events and politics? Yeah, I've given a lot of thought to that, not just when I heard this question, but other people have made that observation and I make that observation and wonder why it is. Why am I the way I am?

It is a generalization, let's be clear. It's a generalization because I wrote a whole book on racism for goodness sakes and it has political ramifications everywhere and lots of storms and articles on abortion, marriage, homosexuality. You know, I've looked Obama right in the face and spoken stuff on YouTube.

But Blake is right. And in general, that is the impression you would get, I think, of my life's work of sermons and messages and articles and APJs and look at the books. Piper doesn't come at current events very often. In other words, when the Twitter is ablaze with some new controversy, where is Piper?

Where's Piper? He's over there quoting Bible verses like he doesn't even know what's going on. Don't you know we're about to lose the Supreme Court nominee? Come on, do something. Okay, here's my six observations about why this is the case. I was raised in an atmosphere where the spiritual condition of a person's soul, soul, or a people's soul is infinitely, get this, infinitely more important than any political transaction on the face of the earth.

Like C.S. Lewis saying, "The salvation of a single soul is worth more than the preservation of all the literary masterpieces in the world." That is an amazing and true sentence. It's not clear what the implications of it are for people who make their lives writing and studying masterpieces like Lewis himself, but it's true.

So I still live in that atmosphere. That's who I am. I believe that is the atmosphere of the New Testament. Okay, that's number one. Number two, I feel today that most of the macro in international political economic issues are too complicated for me to figure out, and that therefore I don't have anything authoritative to say from the Bible about particular strategies for how to solve various political or economic issues.

I just can't get to the level of expertise that makes me feel warranted to get up and say, "Listen to me, folks. I feel that way about the Bible. I want people to listen to me. I want them to hear my perspective on the Bible, but seldom do I come to the point where I feel like some complex issue out there.

I have risen to the level of knowledge that would warrant my voice to be authoritative." And besides that, I have a deep skepticism in our day about whether we can know the facts of most situations well enough to make pronouncements about them, especially from a distance. Good night. Here's an immediate example of the kind of thing I feel.

So just last night, or I guess maybe now it's the night before last, so just night before last, I watched an interview with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who won the Democratic primary in New York's 14th Congressional District. She is to the left of Bernie Sanders on socialism. She's a Democratic socialist, explicitly so.

Now you might say this is a kind of test case of the sort of thing, should I write an article about, preach about, let's ask Pastor John about, what about the rising tide of socialism in America? Will I write and speak about this? Probably not, though I will be very, very glad that some do, and I'll probably read some of what they say.

But here's the reasons. Number one, the time and focus it would take for me to do the research about Ms. Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders and the socialist experiments in Venezuela or Sweden and the historical examples of its failures or successes and the reasons a minimum wage law works or doesn't work or the pros and cons of rent control, whether they work or don't work to accomplish anything good long term for the poor, or the probabilities of corruption in a socialist government versus a capitalist government, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, would lead me into a wholly different life than the one that I am presently called to do, namely the enormous task of understanding the scriptures and preaching what they mean in their original context and insofar as I'm able to apply them to people's real lives.

In other words, I deal with the Bible pretty far upstream from the flow down into the nitty-gritties of political realization. That's number one. Number two, I probably will not make myself a teacher about socialism or capitalism because I am a hundred – that's a generalization. It might be 200 or 190.

I'm a hundred times more passionate about creating the kind of Christians and the kind of churches that stand unshaken, faithful, biblical, countercultural, spiritually minded in a socialist America than I am in preventing a socialist America. I am a hundred times more passionate about creating Christians and churches that will be faithful, biblical, countercultural, spiritually minded in a socialist America, in a Muslim America, in a communist America than I am in preventing a Muslim America, a communist America.

That puts me in a very different ballpark than many public voices. My main calling is not to help America be anything but to help the church be the church, the radical outpost of the kingdom of Christ, no matter what kind of America it happens to be in or any other people, group, or country in the world.

And I say that, again, glad, glad, glad, glad that there are Christians who are politically more active than I am in trying to shape laws that are just and wise. Third observation for why I am oriented this way. I've already hinted at it, simple limitations, not just that many issues are too complicated for me to be a teacher about them, but that my capacities for doing the necessary investigation and reflection are limited by how slowly I read and what my emotional and relational bandwidth is given the other commitments in my life.

I operate with very significant limitations that anybody who knows me knows what they are. And I have to steward the little strengths inside these massive limitations so as to be as useful as I can be. That's the third observation. Here's number four. We're all wired differently by God, and that includes the kind of things we naturally incline to think about and find interesting and provocative.

And my own bent is not towards social, cultural, political, macro issues. My bent, for whatever reason, it's just a personal bent, my bent is toward the way the individual soul works in relation to God and Christ and the Holy Spirit and faith and holiness and human relationships. Why do individual people love or hate?

Why are they afraid or have confidence? Why are they lazy or active? Why are they foolish? Why are they craving security or making sacrifices and taking risks? Why do they have joy? Why do some people have joy in pain and others get angry at God? These are the kinds of questions that stir my emotional engagement way more than whether rent controls are effective or not in helping people.

Number five. I do feel that the greater long-term impact for the glory of Christ and for the good of the nations, for the purity and strengthening of the church will come not through the politicizing of my voice, but through a more penetrating, personal, eternal focus on the human soul and how it can be most effectively conformed to Christ.

Proverbs 4.23 says, "Keep your heart with all vigilance, for from it flow the springs of life." Everything flows downstream from this spring. So my bent is to focus there, on the spring, up in the mountain, on the heart, and then trust God that there will be this ongoing, widening, spreading, leavening effect for good in churches and families and cities.

And last observation. The stream that flows from the spring of biblical faith will inevitably touch all the issues of life, including social, political issues. The people that live close to those issues, social, political realities, and who are Christian should, should speak and act in relation to those issues in ways that are distinctly Christian.

But what those Christians, those public and more engaged Christians than I am, what those Christians need from their pastors week in and week out is probably not that those pastors become experts in every issue that faces the local, state, national legislature, but rather that these public Christians be fed, steadily, steadily fed on a stream of exposition of what biblical texts actually mean with whatever measure of application the pastors can bring.

If a pastor is faithful to do consistent, rich, serious, careful, unflinching expositions of the whole counsel of God in Scripture, his messages will certainly touch on the ethical dimensions of social, political realities of the world where people live. And he will see when a biblical moral issue in Scripture has a clear and unavoidable connection to a current issue or prominent sin in the culture, and he'll draw that out and call for courage and righteousness and holiness in his people.

But, last comment, he will never lose sight that the greatest issues are not temporal, but eternal. For what does it profit a man if he gained the whole world and forfeit his soul? Amen. As a sobering end to the matter, thank you, Pastor John, for pointing us to those eternal truths once again, and thanks for listening to the podcast over at our online home.

You can explore about 1,300 of our episodes that we've released to date, and you can find a list of our most popular ones. You can read full transcripts, even send us a question of your own. Go to DesiringGod.org/AskPastorJohn. Well on Wednesday and Friday, we finish the week out with two questions from two couples facing premarital pregnancies, one involving a believer and an unbeliever, and another scenario involving two professing believers.

First up on Wednesday, Pastor John will answer whether or not a premarital pregnancy between a believer and an unbeliever, does that scenario nullify the unequally yoked principle? It's a really good question sent in from a pastor who's helping a couple walk through the decisions ahead. I'm your host Tony Renke, we'll see you back here on Wednesday.

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