What particular abilities has God given you? When God wove you together before you were born, and when he made you new in Christ, he chose gifts for you — special resources, experiences, and abilities for you to steward and practice. Do you believe that? If so, do you know what they are? Can you name some specific ways you’re striving to use them and grow in them?

If you believe in Jesus, he has given you something of his power and ability. Whoever you are, and however “gifted” you feel compared to others, you have abilities from God that are meant to make a difference in the lives of others.

Now there are varieties of gifts, but the same Spirit; and there are varieties of service, but the same Lord; and there are varieties of activities, but it is the same God who empowers them all in everyone. To each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good. (1 Corinthians 12:4–7)

In everyone means “in you.” To each means “to you.”

Where Abilities Wither

The reality is that while all of us have particular potential for good, not all of us realize that potential. Some squander the miraculous and personal gifts of God. They sit, as it were, on shelves in the basement, decorations of a life focused elsewhere.

The apostle Paul charges the church in Rome, “Having gifts that differ according to the grace given to us, let us use them” (Romans 12:6). So what keeps us from using our gifts well? What keeps you from putting to work the grace-filled abilities God has given you? When we squander our God-given resources and abilities, we often don’t realize we’re squandering them. This is part of Satan’s craft. If he can’t convince us to reject God altogether, he’ll draw us away from him in a hundred smaller ways. He’ll embed some subtle temptation, barely discernible, that slowly corrupts our impulses and buries our potential.

“Most spiritual gifts die not by outright rejection, but by distraction.”

Most spiritual gifts die not by outright rejection, but by distraction. These temptations become spiritual cul-de-sacs, comfortable places to live, but leading nowhere. Paul passes by four of these cul-de-sacs in Romans 12.

Selfishness Street

Perhaps the most common way we waste these gifts is by assuming they are about us and not about meeting the needs of others. Paul’s charge to use our abilities comes directly after this remarkable statement of our identity:

As in one body we have many members, and the members do not all have the same function, so we, though many, are one body in Christ, and individually members one of another. (Romans 12:4–5)

The abilities God gives us are not mainly for advancing our careers or unlocking favorite hobbies or giving us a sense of achievement or fulfillment; they’re for blessing and supporting the body of Christ, the church. You’re good at what you’re good at because the church needs that, in some way, shape, or form — because the church needs you.

This is not how the world thinks. What are gifts if they’re not mine to use and spend however I want? Like the 5-year-old hovering over his host of Matchbox cars, we survey our abilities, resources, and time, and declare, “Mine!” God sees gifts so differently. What are gifts, he asks, if they die on the vines of self? No, gifts are only truly experienced and enjoyed when we hold them loosely and gladly say to God, “Yours!”

Pride Boulevard

Beyond a selfishness that blinds us to the needs of others, we might squander our gifts because we think too highly of ourselves. A couple of verses earlier, Paul writes,

By the grace given to me I say to everyone among you not to think of himself more highly than he ought to think, but to think with sober judgment, each according to the measure of faith that God has assigned. (Romans 12:3)

Sometimes gifts spoil because we’re too focused on self; other times, because we think the needs we might meet are below us. We assume we’re too gifted for quiet, ordinary, thankless love. Pride inflates our heads, lifting us out of reality and making real needs seem small, even trivial, next to our conceited priorities. God-given abilities, however, suffocate at that elevation. They breathe and flourish when they’re rooted in real, ordinary lives with real, ordinary needs. Our gifts won’t reach the heights of their potential if we refuse to use them on our knees.

“Our gifts won’t reach the heights of their potential if we refuse to use them on our knees.”

Paul tucks a weapon against this gift-smothering pride in the verse quoted above: think sober thoughts about yourself, he says, “each according to the measure of faith that God has assigned.” The abilities you have are assigned by God. Even the faith you have is assigned by God. “What do you have that you did not receive?” (1 Corinthians 4:7). Anything you do well, remember, you do well only by the creativity and generosity of God.

Worldliness Lane

A third cul-de-sac may be the most prevalent and subtle: worldliness. We waste or misuse our gifts because we prize and prioritize what the world does, rather than seeking first the kingdom of God and his righteousness (Matthew 6:33). It’s far too easy to fall in line with the crowds casually strolling away from the cross. “Do not be conformed to this world,” Paul warns, “but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect” (Romans 12:2).

What does the wrong kind of conformity look like? We spend the best parts of ourselves at the office, rather than at home and in church. We’re more excited about our hobbies than we are about heaven. We find the most comfort and “rest” by scrolling through the leftovers of others’ lives on social media. We stay up to date on our favorite shows and movies, but struggle to find time to sit and meet with and enjoy God.

When our hearts are in all the wrong places, it’s no wonder when our gifts — our time, our attention, our resources, our abilities — consistently land in the wrong places too (or never land at all). Those who use their gifts well reject what the world would teach them to do with their gifts. They carry and spend their gifts where God leads them through his word, prayer, and the fellowship of other believers.

Passivity Circle

The last cul-de-sac along this narrow path of faithfulness brings us back to Romans 12:6: “Having gifts that differ according to the grace given to us, let us use them.” Like an especially fertile weed, passivity poisons the gardens of giftedness.

How many God-given abilities shrivel because we’re too preoccupied or insecure or lazy to even try? We had an impulse to serve in this way or that, but we kept putting it off. We knew that person might need a call or a visit, but we assumed someone else would reach out. We heard the church was looking for someone to cover that base, but we kept finding excuses to stay in the dugout. Paul says to the church — young and old, male and female, new believers and older saints, healthy and hurting, outgoing and shy, musical and, well, not — “You have abilities (yes, even you), so use them.” Find some way, any way, to use whatever you do well to care for someone else.

Being gifted in these ways doesn’t mean you’re more gifted than everyone else or that God doesn’t expect us all to teach and serve and exhort (and give and lead in various ways); it just means that there’s evidence God has given you greater measures of grace in certain areas to meet the needs of others. “As each has received a gift, use it to serve one another, as good stewards of God’s varied grace” (1 Peter 4:10). Whatever experience or ability God has assigned to you, start using it.

Wait, What Are My Gifts?

Some, however, still may not know what their gifts are. Perhaps you’ve never really thought of yourself as “gifted,” and can’t point to any particular skill or knowledge you would consider a gift. How does someone begin to uncover his or her gifts?

In Romans 12:6–8, Paul does give us a few examples: Some are gifted to teach, so find someone to teach, even if it’s three or four 6-year-olds in Sunday school. Some are gifted to serve, so find someone to serve, even if it’s helping out around the house for a widow who sits a few pews away. Some are gifted to exhort — to encourage, to challenge, to correct, to inspire — so find someone to exhort, even if it’s the guy faithfully teaching three or four 6-year-olds.

A lot more could be said here, but you might start with a simple question: What do you enjoy doing well that a ministry or family in your church might need? What do other people thank you for doing? It could be teaching, or encouraging teachers. It could be leading music, or setting up equipment. It could be serving meals, or cleaning up meals. It could be hosting big gatherings, or befriending lonely people. It could be greeting guests as they come in on Sunday morning, or faithfully praying for fellow members. Every church, however small, has real and significant needs. Sometimes the needs are even bigger in smaller churches because there are fewer leaders and resources. What’s something you do well that meets the needs of others?

If your gifts have wandered into a cul-de-sac and begun to wither, it’s not too late to revive them and put them to use. Lay aside the pride, selfishness, worldliness, and passivity that devour what God has given you. Liberate your gifts from the cul-de-sacs that suppress them. Identify something you do well by God’s grace, and ask him to help you find a need to meet.

If you were to ask me what I take to be among Scripture’s most comforting passages, my answer may surprise you: Psalm 90 and Ecclesiastes.

Psalm 90 is Israel’s poignant lament that, even though they are God’s chosen people, they are also Adam’s children, subject as he was to God’s righteous anger at their sin. Moses’s poetry in Psalm 90 leads us, step by step, deep into the cellar of their life’s brevity, pain, and toil. The third verse begins that descent by echoing God’s words to Adam in Genesis 3:19:

You return man to dust     and say, “Return, O children of Adam!” . . .You sweep them away as with a flood; they are like a dream,     like grass that is renewed in the morning:in the morning it flourishes and is renewed;     in the evening it fades and withers.For we are brought to an end by your anger;     by your wrath we are dismayed.You have set our iniquities before you,     our secret sins in the light of your presence.For all our days pass away under your wrath;     we bring our years to an end like a sigh. (Psalm 90:3, 5–9)

We aren’t exactly sure of the details — perhaps, as Allen Ross argues, Moses penned this psalm at the end of Israel’s forty years of wandering in the wilderness (A Commentary on the Psalms, 3:26–27). Whatever the specific backdrop, the Israelites had gone through a period of intense suffering and had thus learned the hard way that God’s anger against their sin meant that, even if they lived unusually long lives, their best years would be but toil and trouble that would soon be gone, and then they would fly away (verse 10).

Good But Unfathomable Providence

Ecclesiastes is best understood “as an arresting but thoroughly orthodox exposition of Genesis 1–3,” as David Clemens observes. In particular, it makes “the painful consequences of the fall . . . central,” clarifying how disconcerting life after the fall can be. The Preacher knows that God generally administers his providence through the world’s regular causal processes (Ecclesiastes 1:4–7, 9). Fools and sluggards generally get what they deserve because they refuse to conform to creation’s ordered patterns (Ecclesiastes 4:5; see also Proverbs 6:6–11; 20:4; 24:30–34). Wisdom is better than folly because the wise understand and honor those patterns and thus can see where they are going, while fools stumble around in the dark (Ecclesiastes 2:13–14).

But still, “time and chance happen to them all” (Ecclesiastes 9:11). In other words, what God, in the course of his ordinary providence, ordains creation’s structures and processes to bring us, is not only outside our control but also beyond our finding out. Yet nothing can be added to what God does, nor anything taken away from it. “God has done it, so that people fear before him” (Ecclesiastes 3:14).

A healthy, holy fear of God’s providence thus keeps us humble and dependent as we acknowledge that he has so ordered life “under the sun” that, however hard we may strive to understand what was or is or will be, we won’t fathom much. “No one can comprehend what goes on under the sun. Despite all their efforts to search it out, no one can discover its meaning. Even if the wise claim they know, they cannot really comprehend it” (Ecclesiastes 8:17 NIV).

More specifically, we can’t tell from what is happening whom God truly loves, since the same events happen to good and bad alike. In this fallen world, righteousness is not always rewarded, and wickedness doesn’t always receive the punishment it deserves: “There is a vanity that takes place on earth, that there are righteous people to whom it happens according to the deeds of the wicked, and there are wicked people to whom it happens according to the deeds of the righteous” (Ecclesiastes 8:14; 7:15). How God will apportion good and bad, joy and sorrow, ease and difficulty to each of us in our earthly lives exceeds our grasp (Job 9:1–12; Luke 13:1–5).

God Has Not Abandoned Us

The stark realism of Psalm 90 and Ecclesiastes may seem disheartening. Yet, the apostle Paul tells us that “everything that was written in the past was written to teach us, so that through the endurance taught in the Scriptures and the encouragement they provide we might have hope” (Romans 15:4 NIV). So how do these passages encourage us and give us hope?

They remind us that, since the fall, suffering is an ordinary part of human life under sin’s regime. God’s judgments in Genesis 3:16–19 anticipate some of the sorts of suffering that are now endemic to human life. Genesis 4 then drives home just how excruciating human life can be: Adam and Eve’s first son, Cain, murders their second son, Abel, and then is condemned to be a fugitive and a wanderer on the earth.

“Since the fall, suffering is an ordinary part of human life under sin’s regime.”

Yet we must not conclude that our lives will be nothing but unrelieved suffering. In addressing the pagan polytheists in Lystra, Paul reminds them that God had not left himself without a witness, “for he did good by giving you rains from heaven and fruitful seasons, satisfying your hearts with food and gladness” (Acts 14:17). Eve’s daughters will suffer physically and emotionally as they marry and have families (Genesis 3:16), but they may experience great joy in their marriages and families as well. Adam’s sons will always have to scratch out a living (Genesis 3:17–19), but the end of long days may still be satisfying if we have labored as we should.

Psalm 90 and Ecclesiastes caution us against expecting settled happiness now. Since the fall, even creation itself groans because of its subjection to the futility of sin (Romans 8:18–21). And so, if life gets bad for us, it isn’t a sign that Christianity is untrue or that God has abandoned us. In fact, when we have faced significant suffering and survived it, we often experience the opposite: we find we can rejoice in our suffering, knowing that it teaches us endurance, and that endurance makes us stronger and deeper in ways that prompt us to hope for our final and complete salvation as we sense God’s love for us through the presence of his Holy Spirit (Romans 5:3–5; James 1:2–3; 1 Peter 1:3–9).

Joy with the Morning

To be a Christian means to believe in our Lord’s bodily resurrection (Romans 10:9), and to believe in his resurrection entails believing in our own resurrections (1 Corinthians 15). Our hope for the ultimate redemption of our bodies is, as Paul puts it, the hope in which we were saved (Romans 8:24).

This hope, Paul tells us, keeps us from losing heart, for while “our outer self is wasting away, our inner self is being renewed day by day” (2 Corinthians 4:16). No matter what is happening to us, we can recognize that it will ultimately count as little more than a “light momentary affliction” that is “preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison, as we look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen. For the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal” (2 Corinthians 4:17–18; Romans 8:18).

“Our suffering can and should prompt us to look up and long for what God has prepared for us.”

Our suffering, in other words, can and should prompt us to look up and long for what God has prepared for us. And what is that? It is a life of no more sorrow, no more tears, when sin and death will be no more (Revelation 21:4). It is the life of complete joy in communion with God that our Lord has prepared for those who wait for him (Isaiah 64:4).

Psalm 90 and Ecclesiastes encourage me to look only to God and not to anything or anyone in this world for every good thing (Psalm 90:13–17). They also assure me that, for those of us who have become his children through faith in his Son’s work, God’s anger against our sin will last for only a moment, while his favor toward us will last forever. While our weeping may last through the night, unending joy will come to us in the morning (Psalm 30:5).

Audio Transcript

Pastor John, I was tinkering around the other day on ChatGPT. And I asked it to spit out a tweet for me about artificial intelligence and Christian joy — and to write it all in your voice. Here’s what it said:

Artificial intelligence may bring new levels of convenience and productivity, but let us not mistake it for true joy. Our ultimate satisfaction can only be found in Christ, who alone can satisfy the deepest longings of our hearts.

Simplistic connections here, but not too bad. It does actually sound like you. But get this. That second sentence, as it’s written — “Our ultimate satisfaction can only be found in Christ, who alone can satisfy the deepest longings of our hearts” — that statement has never appeared in your written works, or anyone’s! It has never appeared online, anywhere, according to Google. From what I can see, it’s an original sentence, which is wild.

As you know, we’re in the early stages of AI, when large datasets can be crunched and synthesized, and computers can essentially spit out what appear to be thoughtful responses to prompts. Your ministry has produced one massive dataset, to put it crudely. And a day is not far off, and maybe is here, when people will be tempted not to go to this podcast or to your sermons or books to hear from you; they will simply prompt for a summary answer to what John Piper might say on a given ethical dilemma or Bible text. And some AI model will spit out a summary response in text, or maybe one day in your own spoken voice or even in a video-generated response that looks like you talking.

It’s all still very early. Much is going to change. But I want your early thoughts here, and to get us there, I want to put one subtopic aside and make one assumption. First, there are legal issues all over this. Let’s put those aside for now. Second, let’s assume, for the sake of today’s episode, that the generated text is actually pretty good and a reasonably accurate representation of what you have said. What’s your first gut instinct here, at the highest level? What would you want the age of computer-generated John Piper AI to hear from you, in your own living voice, about how you want your legacy of works to be viewed in this coming age of AI?

Well, I like that last question; namely, focusing my attention on the highest level, which I’ll try to do. But it’s remarkable that this shows up right now, because just a few weeks ago in the faculty forum at Bethlehem College & Seminary, where I teach and serve as chancellor, the issue of artificial intelligence, and specifically ChatGPT, was part of the planned discussion.

Detecting Deception

In preparation, one of our professors sent around the results of his request from ChatGPT (which stands for Chat Generative Pre-Trained Transformer, I learned). And he had given the chatbot this instruction: “Write an essay on Augustine’s view of disordered love.” And it produced a four-hundred-word essay, which I read, and which I suppose would get a passing grade in your typical lit class in the university (and for sure in high school), which of course is a great concern for teachers.

And there are (I learned also) plagiarism-detection programs like Turnitin, which claim to be able to spot artificially produced essays at about 99 percent accuracy. So who knows: maybe with the advancing possibilities of cheating, and calling AI productions your own work, there will be equal advances in software to detect that deception. And as you point out, really not just as potential but as realities, there are people right now producing artificial John Piper quotations and artificial John Piper voices, which are close enough to accurate that the average person won’t know the difference.

But your question at this point — thankfully, because I’m no expert — is not about legal issues. It’s not about detection possibilities. It’s about this: What’s your first gut instinct here at the highest level? What would you want the age of computer-generated John Piper AI to hear from you, in order for your own living voice to inform the world of how you want your legacy of works to be viewed in the age of AI?

My gut doesn’t reach out first to my tongue. My gut reaches out first to my mind, where there’s a lot of Bible circulating around, and my gut consults with my mind and says, “Hey, mind, what does the Bible say, or imply, about this?” So, here’s the distillation of my answer to that way you posed the question (really high level).

Right Thinking and Right Rejoicing

The biblical vision of Christian Hedonism really does provide a remarkable framework for responding to artificial intelligence. This was a surprise to me because I haven’t thought about it before. Remember, Christian Hedonism says that God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in him. Now, what that does is elevate the spiritual affections of the human heart to the highest possible level in the unique role that human beings play in the purposes of God in the creation of the world.

“God glorifies himself in the life of humans when those humans understand him truly (in their minds) and rejoice in him duly (in their hearts).”

God created the universe in order to put his glory on display and to communicate himself to his creatures for our understanding and our enjoyment (Psalm 19:1; Isaiah 43:7; Romans 1:19–21; Romans 9:20–23; and on and on). The purpose of God to glorify himself in creation reaches its God-intended climax when human beings not only rightly understand but rightly feel the nature of God’s reality and the preciousness of his fellowship. God glorifies himself in the life of humans when those humans understand him truly (in their minds) and rejoice in him duly (in their hearts). If either of those is missing, mind-understanding or heart-rejoicing, God is not glorified as he ought to be.

And if either of those is missing, the other one is flawed. Right ideas without right rejoicing are barren, mechanical — and yes, you could say artificial. Even in the human mind — not just in the computer — they’re artificial if they are not penetrated with rejoicing duly. Rejoicing without right ideas, on the other hand, is like froth on a drink and not fruit on a vine.

For right thinking to glorify God, it must be attached to right rejoicing in God. And for rejoicing in God to glorify God, it must be rooted in right thinking about God. In other words, the spiritual affections of the human heart are of the essence in the achievement of the purposes of God in creating the world.

Joy of the New Heart

These spiritual affections, the affections of the human heart, will never be the product of computerized data banks. And I say that not only because computers will never be human hearts — that is, they’ll never be created as humans in God’s image. I say it also because, not only are human hearts or souls of another nature from computers and computer language, but (and this is even more significant) the God-glorifying, Christ-exalting human heart is a new creation that is brought into being by a supernatural — not a natural, not a computerized — intervention by the Holy Spirit.

It’s called “new birth,” or “new creation,” or “new person.” The new creation in Christ, the newborn heart, the supernaturally created person, is the only person who can rejoice in God for who he really is. The eyes of the heart have been opened by the Holy Spirit. The spiritual beauty of Christ in the gospel is seen, and the echo of this beauty in the heart is to trust him and rejoice in him and treasure him.

Those God-glorifying affections, spilling over in outward acts of love, are the reason God created the universe. Which means, for ChatGPT, that it is quadruply cut off from God-intended purposes for intelligence.

Quadruply Cut Off

First, it is a kind of intelligence, not affections. But affections are of the essence in living a Christ-exalting, God-glorifying human life.

Second, this so-called intelligence is the product of a machine, not a heart. And the heart is of the essence in living a Christ-exalting, God-glorifying human life.

Third, the causes and defects of this so-called intelligence are all natural, not supernatural. But the Bible makes plain that the merely natural man (and all the more the natural computer) cannot be what humans are created to be; namely, God-glorifying persons.

Fourth, this artificial intelligence is defective in the same way that a natural man is defective. It can rise no higher than the natural, fallen, unregenerate heart of man. Intelligence, as God gave it at first, was designed not only to perceive natural, external reality — and then to assemble it — but also to see in it, to see through it, the reality of the glory of God: the greatness, the beauty, the worth of the infinite Person who created us. When intelligence cannot do this — cannot spiritually discern, see, and feel that glory — it fails in the most important reason that intelligence exists.

So, in answer to the question, I would like the legacy of my works to be viewed as the fruit of a finite, and fallible, and imperfect human mind and human heart that were touched by the supernatural work of God in Christ, and enabled to see the glory of God, and feel something of the worth of God, and reflect for the world the glory of God, for the supernatural enjoyment of as many people as possible.