(upbeat music) - Here's another question from the Passion Conference we received from a podcast listener. Pastor John, I was at the Passion Conference where you spoke. I heard many people, college students mostly, say things such as, "Piper just talks right over my head," or, "He is too hard to understand." Why do you think so many people respond that way to your teaching?

- Oh dear. Well, let's just be honest. It could be that I'm confusing. It could be that I'm muddle-headed. I don't really know what I mean. I mean, people can't help others understand what they mean if they don't know what they mean. It could be that I don't take the time necessary to make things as simple and understandable as they ought to be, that I'm unprepared, unclear.

So yeah, that's possible. I will let others be the judge. I certainly work hard to be clear and to be cogent. And to be interesting. I don't aim to be hard to understand. That's not one of my goals. (laughs) That would be a bad goal. I wanna be hard to understand.

Get a reputation of being unintelligible. No, that's not what I'm after. But here's another possible explanation. And it's probably a combination. I think the main reason is that the educational bar has been set so low for children in elementary school and high school and at home, there's no great premium put on thinking.

Thinking is work. It really is. In a sense, the mind is a muscle. Like the biceps are a muscle. Your arm will just lie there, right? Just lie there in your lap. Until you make the mental effort to say, "Bicep, lift my arm." And then the bicep does what you say.

Isn't that amazing? It does. But you have to make this effort. Now that's a small effort. There are other things that require large effort. Like if you've got a 50 pound weight in your hand and you say, "Bicep, lift it." Then that's gonna be a little more difficult. It's the same with your mind.

It just lies there until you make the effort to set it to thinking. And most people's minds just lie there and passively receive stimuli from television or entertaining speakers. But if someone comes along and they start weaving an argument, and what they say at one point is required for understanding what they say at the next point is required for what they say at the next point, then the mind has to be told, "Hey, get up.

Wake up, work, listen. Gotta put this together, put the pieces. He's building something here. If you miss the first two, the third one will dangle in the air. Follow this chain of reasoning." And most people are not accustomed to doing that. And they don't want to make the effort.

We're all by nature mentally lazy. Children need to be taught the joy and the great benefits of overcoming this laziness and making the discoveries that only thinking can make. So someone might say, "Well, given this reality then in your audience, why don't you adjust and change your way of speaking so that more understanding can happen?

And here are my reasons for not adjusting any more than I do. And I don't claim to have the adjustment perfect, but here are the reasons. Number one, the Bible reasons. I would be untrue to the Bible if I did not create the lines of reasoning in the Bible.

The Bible is a demanding book, really demanding. Even the parts that are simple at one level are profoundly challenging at another level. If I were to constantly communicate to the people, you don't need to make an effort in order to understand the truth. I would lie to them about what's required in reading the book of Romans or the book of John or the book of Isaiah or the Psalms.

It is a demanding book. You must ask about the relationships of one clause to the next. Otherwise you will miss the meaning. Number two, I think God has called me to lift the level of thinking about God, not simply to adjust to how low it is. And number three, the Bible itself demands that we think when it comes to discerning the meaning of God's word.

For example, 2 Timothy 2:7, "Think over what I say, for the Lord will give you understanding." It doesn't say, "You don't need to think because the Lord will give you understanding." It says, "Think because the Lord, through your thinking, will give understanding." Or 1 Corinthians 14, 20, "Be infants in evil, but in your thinking, be matures." That's what I wanna say to this generation.

In your thinking, don't be babies. They just wait for mama's breast and then they suck as though no effort were required to think. No, you are now grownups. You must think. And here's a fourth thing that comes to mind. The people who are willing to make the effort to follow a train of thought are generally the kind of people who will be leaders someday.

They are the people I am most eager to persuade. They will be the influencers. People who mentally coast and don't put out the effort to think things through are generally followers. That's what they are by nature because they want other people to think for them. They don't want to do it for themselves.

They want others to think and then provide them conclusions. And those won't be leaders. That's just the definition of leader is you outthink the people that are following you. I'm eager to win over thinkers because they will be the leaders. So I'll always keep working. I'm gonna try. I'm gonna try.

I want people to understand what I'm saying. I wanna be as understandable, intelligible as possible, but not at the cost of losing the depth and richness that come from following the lines of thought in the Bible. - That's good, Pastor John. So to paraphrase Peter, there are just some things in Piper that are hard to understand.

- I'm glad to be associated with Paul. I wouldn't presume that. - All right, excellent. Another episode on this topic is one titled Childlike, Not Childish, where you explain how intellectual development should work to make us increasingly more childlike in our faith. That's episode 135. We'll be back tomorrow to answer the question, is it possible for a husband to lust after his own wife?

It's never boring around here. I'm your host, Tony Reinke. See you tomorrow. (upbeat music) (upbeat music)