John Piper is founder and teacher of desiringGod.org and chancellor of Bethlehem College & Seminary. For 33 years, he served as pastor of Bethlehem Baptist Church, Minneapolis, Minnesota. He is author of more than 50 books, including Desiring God: Meditations of a Christian Hedonist and most recently Providence.

Audio Transcript

We’ve been on the topic of lifelong learning and talking about your new book on the topic, Foundations for Lifelong Learning: Education in Serious Joy. In it, you talk about “the excitement of learning” and mention the joy of learning hundreds of times, implying throughout that there’s joy in discovery and a joy-aim in this discipline of lifetime learning. You and I both get fired up when it comes to new discoveries we find in the Bible or in old books by dead guys. We talked about this in our episode before Thanksgiving.

But speak to someone who doesn’t feel this joy of discovery, or people who don’t think of themselves as lifelong learners. Maybe they never liked school. Maybe they didn’t get very good grades in school. They’re not wired to be lifelong students, not naturally. Maybe they’re doers, very practical, and not drawn to read hard books, to the point that even your new book on lifelong learning would be a daunting, hard sell for them. What encouragement would you give to them?

I’m reading this question and thinking, “Whom am I actually going to talk to in trying to answer this question?” They’re probably not listening. There are more than just two kinds of responses to lifelong learning. There are five, ten, twenty, hundreds of ways people respond to things like lifelong learning.

Everyone is on a continuum, from the most academically accomplished scholar on one end to the drug addict or the mentally ill person on the street outside my house that I spoke to yesterday. This person, who cannot make an ordinary conversation, has no concept of (let alone interest in) the foundations of lifelong learning. Everybody is somewhere in between those extremes. I do talk to both sides, the educated and the broken (which, maybe, is just two kinds of brokenness). I care about them. I share the gospel on the street. I pray for them. I pray with them. I try to connect them with sources of help for their mental condition, their economic condition, their housing condition, their physical condition, their spiritual condition.

Probably neither of those ends of the spectrum is listening to this podcast. That’s why I’m thinking, “Whom am I going to talk to when I answer Tony’s question?” Realistically, you haven’t asked a stupid question. I know the kinds of people that you’re talking about.

Averse to Learning

Maybe the most realistic audience is ordinary members of our churches who graduated from high school. They were glad to get out. Maybe they did trade school, professional school, an apprenticeship, or some college. Maybe they even graduated from college because their parents wanted them to, and now they are glad to be done. Maybe some of them are not readers at all. They may be dyslexic.

I know people like that. They function just fine in their jobs. They find a way to make it work. They might have ADD but have learned to live productively with it. They simply do not approach the world as a place you’d want to squeeze meaning out of. Well, that’s the way I feel about the world — squeeze some meaning out of this experience today; dig up discoveries.

Many just don’t think that way. They’re mainly passive in the way the world comes at them. They deal with it when it comes. They do what they have to do. They don’t see problems as a puzzle to solve or as an exciting challenge, wrestling their way to some new solution and greater understanding. When they think of learning, it’s basically just figuring out what the next thing is that needs to be done.

“God may show you a way to grow in knowledge and grace that is totally surprising and totally enjoyable to you.”

They read instructions, or they may go to YouTube instead, to watch someone else do it. Maybe they try a new recipe. That’s what they do to learn: get a new fishing lure or find an apartment. Life is not for learning; it’s for living. I get that. I know some of these folks. I think a person with that kind of disposition can lead a God-honoring, people-loving life.

What would I say to them about lifelong learning? I think what I should try to do is relay what the Bible says about growth in words and terms that are not connected to school, academics, study, or even reading.

Grow in Grace and Knowledge

Let’s assume that you do not resonate with the phrase “the joy of learning.” It may be that when you say, “I don’t find joy in learning,” what you may mean is this: “I don’t find joy in the process of thinking, or the process of intentional study, or the process of reading, or the process of focused observation, or the process of pushing the mind, exerting the mind, in some endeavor.” What feels off-putting is not so much the discovery of something wonderful, but the discipline or process of study and reading and analysis and mental exertion.

If you’re a Christian, I assume there are things about God, Christ, and salvation that are precious to you. You know them, you hold fast to them, and they are a help in daily life. If someone could add another one of those wonderfully precious truths to what you already have, if somebody could add another truth about God or salvation that made you happy because it was such good news, you’d be glad. You wouldn’t say, “Oh, I don’t want any more good news. I don’t want to be happier than I am now.” Nobody says that.

It’s not the happy outcomes of lifelong learning but the process that leaves you cold. Study, reading, thinking, analyzing, mental effort — all these feel so contrary to your personality. It would be a huge thing to recognize that you and I both love many of the outcomes of lifelong learning.

We should linger here for just a minute. When Peter says that we should grow in the grace and the knowledge of Jesus, it’s a command (2 Peter 3:18). He said that we should grow, though he doesn’t specify how. If a person says to me, “I don’t really want to grow, I don’t want to know more about Jesus, and I don’t want to experience more grace,” then I would say we’re dealing with a problem of disobedience, not a problem of neutral personality issues. That’s a defect of love, not a personality trait.

So, I am assuming that our non-lover of the process of learning would love to know more about Jesus, would love to have wonderful things about Christ feeding his mind that he doesn’t yet understand, would love to taste and enjoy and experience more of God’s grace and goodness in Christ.

These people hear the call to grow, and they hear the prayer of Paul that we should increase in the knowledge of God (Colossians 1:9–10). They hear Hosea’s warning that people perish for lack of knowledge (Hosea 4:6). That’s why he says later, “Let us know; let us press on to know the Lord” (Hosea 6:3). They hear all this, and they want this fruit. They want the outcome. They want these results. They realize that not to want them is a lack of love for Jesus.

Pave the Way with Prayer

I would say to them that if study and reading and lifelong learning is not the path, then pray earnestly that God would show you what the path is for you, for your particular personality and your way. You may be surprised how he answers.

For sure he will say this: “Get in a good church, and sit under the preaching of God’s word.” I know he’ll say that. That’s in the Bible. Everybody should do that. Every Christian should be in a good church. If they can, they should be in a small group of believers who pray for each other and share thoughts about what they’ve seen in the Bible.

God may show you a way to grow in knowledge and grace that is totally surprising and totally enjoyable to you. Don’t stop praying until he does. Don’t pray for a week and then say, “Well, nothing happened.” No, pray for a year, two, three. Pray as long as you need to in order to obey the command to grow.

Find your way to grow, to go forward. If you’re not going forward, you’re going to go backward. That’s the way it is. We’re not in a pond; we’re in a river, and it’s flowing the wrong direction. If we don’t swim forward, we’re going backward.

Leave Room for Surprise

Here’s one last thought. I hated to read until I was in the eleventh grade. It was really, really undesirable. I remember in the sixth grade how I had to put a sticker on the board in front of the class to show how many pages I had read. I would look for the books with pictures. Then something happened. After the eleventh grade, I loved it (though I am a very slow reader).

I know a man who barely finished high school. His grades were so bad. Reading was torture. He went into the army, and when he came out two years later, something had changed. He applied to Bible college on his own and put himself all the way through.

“What was once boring can suddenly, and for no apparent reason, become a lifelong passion.”

Here’s the last illustration. I was having breakfast with a friend recently, and he told me about his son who almost dropped out of high school. He finished, but for several years he worked a minimum-wage job. Then he got married to a good woman, and this woman, to use his phrase, “kicked him in the behind.” He applied to design school because she kicked him in the behind, and he finished design school. Today he designs visuals for companies all over the world.

Now, if you would ask me, “What happened? What happened in all those instances, including yours?” I’d say, “I don’t know what happened. God just brought something into our lives. It was time something changed, and things changed.” What was once boring can suddenly, and for no apparent reason, become a lifelong passion. It happened to me. It might happen to you. Don’t be a fatalist. Today is the first day of the rest of your life. You might be surprised.

Some years ago, a professor told our class about a brief word from his wife that lodged itself like an arrow in his chest.

A new semester was approaching, and he had labored to develop syllabi that would serve his students. He chose the books, outlined the assignments, scheduled the essays and exams, and charted a careful academic course from August to December. Then his wife, noticing such thorough professorial planning, asked her honest question: “Why don’t you give the same kind of thought and planning to our family?”

Though a single man at the time, I could still understand the sting. Now a husband and father myself, however, I can feel it. I know many men can. All too easily, we can devote tremendous effort and creativity to career or ministry, perhaps not even thinking of doing the same for family. We can show far more ambition — more thought, more planning, more intentionality, more eagerness — toward work or church than toward fatherhood. We can be passionate employees or ministry leaders, but comparatively passive dads.

Surely kids need to see a dad whose eyes look upward and outward, ambitious about serving God in work, church, the neighborhood, and beyond. But with equal surety, kids need to see a dad ambitious about being dad.

A Father’s 5-to-9

God’s own descriptions of fatherhood in Scripture show us a man who yearns to do good in the world, yes, but who also gives vast energy to the world of his family. He has not only a 9-to-5 job but a 5-to-9 job, a calling just as demanding, and often more so, than his career (and one that includes mornings and weekends as well).

The Bible’s most extended portrayal of fatherhood comes to us in the book of Proverbs, which records a father’s words to his maturing son. Much in the book reminds us that God made men for outward dominion: the call to work hard, the instructions about business and farming, the picture of the father sitting “in the gates . . . among the elders of the land” (Proverbs 31:23). But the very structure of Proverbs — affectionate, earnest, persistent counsel from a father to his son — reminds us that a man’s dominion includes being dad.

Proverbs portrays fatherhood as an all-of-life affair. The book’s dad is a Deuteronomy 6:7 kind of man, one who disciples his son at home and abroad, from morning till night. He teaches a course called “Life” in a classroom as broad as the world. We can perhaps imagine him talking to his son as they walk past the forbidden woman’s street (“Do not go near the door of her house,” 5:8), as they nearly step on an anthill (“Go to the ant,” 6:6), or as they sit down for a meal (“Eat honey, for it is good,” 24:13).

His teaching covers topics both spiritual and practical, both eternal and everyday. Across the book’s 22 instances of the phrase “my son . . .” he speaks to his son’s head, heart, hands, feet, eyes, soul, mouth, and more. He knows his boy’s particular strengths and follies. He spends enough unhurried time around him to say, “Let your eyes observe my ways” (Proverbs 23:26). And though this father has ambitions beyond his boy, he can hardly imagine himself glad apart from this young man’s lasting good (Proverbs 10:1; 17:25; 23:15, 24). He is, in a word, ambitious to be dad.

Home for Ambition

Such a broad, demanding vision of fatherhood suggests at least one reason why men can find outward ambition easier or more natural. In the end, being a godly father may prove harder than starting a company, building a career, or even becoming a pastor.

I for one feel that I have entered a more difficult job when I walk through the doorway after work. Children do not simply ask us to be good accountants or teachers or engineers or project managers: they ask us to be good men. And they do not simply require eight hours of our attention, but in some sense, all of it. If we want to be able to say, “My son, give me your heart” (Proverbs 23:26), then we will need to give them our very selves.

We need some good reasons, then, to put our passivity away and devote ourselves to being better dads. Alongside the simple fact that Scripture gives us our pattern for godly fatherhood (and all God’s patterns are good), consider three other reasons our ambition needs not only an office or a pulpit but a home: for our own soul, for the world, and for our kids.

Honest Ambition

First, ambition at home serves a man’s own soul, particularly by keeping his other ambitions honest.

An elder “must manage his own household well,” Paul writes, “for if someone does not know how to manage his own household, how will he care for God’s church?” (1 Timothy 3:4–5). A man who struggles to lead the little fellowship inside his home will struggle to lead a larger fellowship outside it, at least in a way that pleases God. Paul’s principle holds in part because leadership skill carries over from sphere to sphere, but also for another reason: home trains a man for the specific leadership required of a Christian.

“In large part, our job as dads is to offer a faithful image of the Father who delights in his Son.”

Truly Christian leaders do not despise humble acts of hidden service (Mark 10:43), and home provides such opportunities in spades. Christian leaders gladly associate with the lowly (Romans 12:16), and children are a knee-high society. Christian leaders patiently invest in people slow to change (1 Thessalonians 5:14), and family gives daily (often hourly) practice for that kind of patience. And Christian leaders wisely apply God’s word to each person’s needs (1 Thessalonians 2:11–12), and kids come with strikingly diverse personalities and temptations.

Like Peter or John hurrying past the children, I sometimes imagine Christian ambition in terms far larger than these little ones. But then I look back and notice my Lord lingering there among them, his own ambition large enough to include kids. And I remember that unless my ambition includes the same, I am not yet fit to lead well elsewhere.

Archer’s Arrows

Second, and counterintuitively, ambition at home serves the world, at least when blessed by God.

Negatively, we might consider the sad examples of passive dads whose kids grew up to dismantle much of their work in the world. David was a mighty king, but his lack of attention at home caused chaos in his kingdom (2 Samuel 13:20–22; 1 Kings 1:5–6). And Eli lost his priesthood for letting his sons run amok (1 Samuel 2:29).

Positively, however, Scripture gives us an image of children that is anything but insular and homebound: “Like arrows in the hand of a warrior are the children of one’s youth,” Solomon writes (Psalm 127:4). When a father raises children with godly ambition, he is not excusing himself from God’s mission in the world. He is an archer bent beneath the wall, sharpening his arrows. And in a world of warring spiritual kingdoms, it is no waste of time to sharpen arrows.

As with all discipleship, one paradox of fatherhood is that we often serve the world best when we focus on a few. Jesus changed the world through a few ordinary men. Fathers seek to go on changing the world through a few ordinary children. Such children may divide a man in the moment, taking his time away from good pursuits elsewhere. But with God’s favor, they do not leave him divided, but multiplied. A father’s faithful children are that man made many.

Godly men will seek to make disciples beyond their families, of course. At the same time, they will not see fatherhood as something different from making disciples. All this time at home, all these moments saying, “My son,” “My daughter,” all those days retreating from the rush of the world, all the daily dying to self — these are like a man drawing his bow, aiming to die with arrows in the air.

Dad’s Delight

Finally, ambition at home serves the eternal souls of children.

The image of arrows is helpful as far as it goes. We do well to remember, however, that children are not simply tools or weapons to be wielded — and many children have come to resent a dad who treated them as such. No, children are also gifts to be embraced. They are treasures to be cherished. They are endlessly interesting persons to be known. And in a Christian family especially, they ought to know themselves beloved.

That word beloved strikes close to the heart of good fatherhood, the kind that comes from the Father above (Ephesians 5:1). Hear this first Father’s benediction over his dear Son:

This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased. (Matthew 3:17)

In large part, our job as dads is to offer a faithful image of the Father who delights in his Son. And in a world that often twists fatherhood into something utterly unlike the true Father, one of the best things we can do for our kids is to give God’s pleasure a bodily presence in our big laughter and bright eyes and strong arms — to love them so manifestly that they fall asleep feeling, My dad delights in me.

That kind of love and delight draws out generous amounts of our time and attention. It warrants creative thought and planning. It calls for the kind of initiative we often give to our career or our ministry, such that when our children look at us, they see a dad ambitious to be dad.