Jon Hoglund: My name is Jon Hoglund, and I’m one of the professors here at Bethlehem College and Seminary. Welcome to this book discussion session. Joining me on stage is pastor John Piper, along with current students at Bethlehem College and Seminary — both college and seminary students.

We’re going to be discussing together Let the Nations Be Glad: The Supremacy of God in Missions. Pastor John wrote this book originally in 1993, and it has gone through several editions, including the most recent thirtieth anniversary edition. We look forward to sharing that with you.

All of these students have read the book and are prepared with questions. We’d like to invite you into a conversation about it, and also to give you a taste of why this book continues to shape conversations about missions, even 31 years later.

For our first question, Sang is going to introduce us by asking us a question about his interest in missions.

Sang: Pastor John, in this book — and through the rest of your ministry — you put forward the supremacy of God and his glory, and its relationship to our experience as human beings. You say, “God is most glorified when we are most satisfied with him.” You’ve written that Jonathan Edwards was instrumental in helping you to see these realities, and how this was a life-changing moment for you. My question is, Did your passion for missions grow in connection with that discovery? When did missions first become important to you, and what has that looked like in your life since then?

John Piper: Christian Hedonism emerged in my consciousness in about 1968, but it did not have — to my shame — a dominant or significant impact on my world Christianity until 1983. I had fifteen years of percolating, while I was reading my Bible badly. This is a lesson on how Bible-oriented people like me, who read the Bible all the time, can miss things. And when someone eventually points you to them and hits you with a two-by-four, you say, “How did I miss that?”

The kindling was laid early. My dad loved missions. He prayed about the glory of God and mission every night when he was home. And Wheaton, where I went for college, had a missions focus. I remember it. It was inspiring. At Fuller also, I took courses from Raph Winter, who was the craziest gung-ho missions statesman there ever was in the twentieth century. But it didn’t affect much in my life. Then I came here to be a pastor in 1980, and we had a mission conference here that I inherited. It involved two weekends and the days in between. They didn’t have the pastor preach either of those Sundays, so I didn’t have to preach on missions. Nobody asked me to until 1983.

I was preaching a series on Christian Hedonism, and they said, “Pastor, why don’t you do the first week of missions week?” That was epoch-making. The book Let the Nations Be Glad is an epoch. The sermon I preached that day was titled “[Missions: The Battle Cry of Christian Hedonism.]” And I just had to think, what does a Christian Hedonist say about the nations? That’s something I should have said over and over in fifteen years, but I didn’t. I’ll give you several texts that just exploded.

The sermon text for that sermon was Mark 10:17–31, which is about the rich young ruler. He walked away and Jesus said, “It is hard for the rich to get into the kingdom of heaven.” The disciples threw up their hands and said, “Well then who can be saved?” And Jesus said, “With man it is impossible, but with God nothing is impossible.” I can remember in 1967 Noël and I went to Urbana. There was a man who spoke there who said, “When I first went to the mission field, I thought, ‘If I believed in predestination, why would I ever be a missionary? If God has already decided who is going to be saved, why would I go to the mission field?’ Now, after twenty years in Pakistan, I say that if I didn’t believe in predestination I wouldn’t go to the mission field.” Now I’m a seven-point Calvinist, but at the time that didn’t do it for me. It shows how slow we are to make connections between what we hold dear and things we don’t think much about. So that part of the text about the sovereignty of God was connected to how God can save anybody. So, then, we should get going on it globally.

The other part of the text was about how Peter said, “We’ve left everything and followed you.” I think he was saying, “We’re not like the rich guy. We’ve left everything. We’ve made the appropriate sacrifice.” Jesus didn’t like that. Do you remember what he said? He said,

Truly, I say to you, there is no one who has left house or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or lands, for my sake and for the gospel, who will not receive a hundredfold now in this time, houses and brothers and sisters and mothers and children and lands, with persecutions, and in the age to come eternal life. (Mark 10:29–30)

In other words, “Get off your self-pity kick, Peter. Nobody can out-sacrifice me. You’re in it for joy, and I mean for you to be.” That was my paraphrase of what he said. So, we have the sovereignty of God, and he can conquer anyone’s heart. And then Jesus is also telling Peter, “This is not about self-pity or sacrifice, ultimately. It’s about finding where your true treasure is and going for broke.”

Here is one more text. And this seals the deal because of the title of the book. Psalm 96:1–3 says,

Oh sing to the Lord a new song;     sing to the Lord, all the earth!Sing to the Lord, bless his name;     tell of his salvation from day to day.Declare his glory among the nations . . .

There you have glory, and then then Psalm 67:1–3 says,

May God be gracious to us and bless us     and make his face to shine upon us,that your way may be known on earth,     your saving power among all nations.Let the peoples praise you, O God;     let all the peoples praise you!Let the nations be glad and sing for joy . . .

So you have, “Go tell them I’m glorious,” and, “Go tell them to be glad.” After that, the battle was over. Then for the next decade, a lot of what I did was conference after conference on missions, in order to make up for lost time on world missions. A Christian Hedonist is a person who believes that God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in him, and there you have the Psalms saying, “Go tell the world to be satisfied,” and “Go tell the world I’m glorious.” That’s Christian Hedonism.

Hoglund: Excellent. Thank you very much. The beginning of the book talks about the purpose, the power, and the price of missions. Selah is going to begin a few questions for us on those topics.

Selah: In reading your book, I wondered if there is a danger in treating people simply as a means to the end of God’s glory. While we see in your book that it is important to be zealous for all people to worship God and also to show compassion, how do we keep that big picture of God’s glory in mind while not thinking of people as projects to complete for the sake of God’s glory? Or is there even a problem with that type of thinking?

Piper: Here’s the nub that I’m hearing in your question. You’re going to head into the world and you’re going to say your dominant motive is, “I want God to be glorious in this world. I want every human being to know he is God. And he is glorious. I’m in the world to get you to do that.” They might feel like, “What about me? Do you care about me at all? Do I matter to you?” That’s the question you’re getting at, and let me state the other half about Christian Hedonism because this has been said to me.

People say, “Are you saying that not only do you want to be motivated by the glory of God but also your own happiness? You want your joy to increase? So, you’re in this business of Christianity to be happier?” That’s exactly right. I am. Christian Hedonism is a life devoted to pleasure. So, people say I’m just selfish. They say, “You don’t care about me; you care about you. You’re going to make me a project for your joy.” So, we have two problems, not just one: Am I making people a project to get glory for God? And am I making people a project to make myself happy? These questions do not intimidate me. I am so excited to answer these kinds of questions. I love that question because Christian Hedonism is the answer to both of those questions.

Let’s take mine first. You have to have an answer to this if you even come close to being a biblical Christian. You’re talking to someone about Jesus, and you want to lead them to Jesus, and they pick up on your hedonism and they say, “So you really are talking to me right now to increase your happiness?” I would say, “That’s exactly what I’m doing.” They say, “Isn’t that selfish?” And I would say, “It’s not selfish because no one would accuse a person of selfishness if they’re willing to lay down their lives to draw another person into the sharing of their joy.” Nobody is accused of selfishness if they say, “I will lay down my life to include you into the joy that I am pursuing. And not only will I lay down my life to include you into it, but it will make my joy bigger if you come. Your joy will be my joy.” That’s a Bible statement from 2 Corinthians 2:3. I think you can persuade unbelievers that it makes sense, even if they don’t like it.

I used to go to the hospital to visit people when I was a pastor. Let’s say I’m going to visit Maybel. We’ll call her Maybel because she’s 85 years old. She just had a heart attack, and her son asked me to visit her. So, I go into Maybel’s room, and she’s all hooked up with tubes. I don’t know if she’s going to make it. Her eyes are closed, and her skin is all shriveled, and there are bruises all over her. And I didn’t feel like going to visit her. I walk up to her and put my hand on her arm, and she says, “Oh pastor, you shouldn’t have.” (Old people always say, “You shouldn’t have.” Young people say, “It’s about time.”) At that moment when she says that, I could say, “I know, and I didn’t want to, but I’m a pastor and I have to. It’s my duty.” I don’t say that. I say, “Maybel, I’m here because it makes me so happy to share the best news in the world with you right now.” Not in a thousand years would she say, “You’re so selfish. You just want to make yourself happy.” She wouldn’t say that because it’s not true. That’s the answer to my question, which you didn’t ask.

It’s the same answer in relation to the glory of God. If they say, “You don’t care about me. You just care about your God. You just want him to look glorious, but you don’t care at all about my happiness.” My first response to that is, “Can I tell you about what the beauty of Christianity is? The beauty of Christianity is that we have the kind of God who gets the most glory in making you most happy in him.” This is not about choosing between a person’s happiness and God’s glory. It just doesn’t work that way in Christianity. It might work that way in other religions. I don’t know. But in Christianity, you dare not choose between your happiness and God’s glory. You look them right in the eye and say, “Do you get that? You may not choose between your happiness and God’s glory. As soon as you decide to nullify your happiness, God will not get the glory he deserves. You must pursue your happiness. Right now. You must pursue your maximum happiness. That’s why I’m here. I’m elevating the glory of God because that’s the only thing that can make you truly happy. You were made for something way bigger than all that stuff you’re living for right now.”

So, I just wouldn’t buy it that I have turned a person into a project because the key to God getting glory is the person getting happy in him. And a person whose happiness is being pursued like that doesn’t feel like a project.

Marc: Staying with the heart issue there but going in a slightly different direction, you allude to Matthew 16:24 and say, “To take up a cross and follow Jesus means to join Jesus on the Calvary road with a resolve to suffer and die with him.” Shortly afterward, you then balance this with a reminder, saying, “Christian martyrs do not pursue death; they pursue love.” As you intentionally aim to stoke the fire of zeal in missions, how would you counsel churches to avoid developing a martyrdom complex, where we might have this burning zeal to die for Jesus but be comparatively cold toward more mundane daily ministry to people?

Piper: If I knew any church like that, I would be happy to work on that problem. Are any of your churches in danger of creating martyr complexes? I’m going to make your question valid anyway, because it is. Seriously, I wish that were a problem. The value in your question is that it is possible to head toward the mission field with idealized, romanticized notions even of suffering. It’s not going to go well if you think that way.

It’s interesting you referred to the Calvary road. The Calvary road ended at Calvary, but it was a road — and all of it was hard. If you think, “My life is going to end gloriously. Somebody will write an article about me, or maybe a biography,” that discounts the mundane. It discounts the Calvary road, like reading for class (which you’re supposed to do). It discounts washing your clothes and paying your bills. I think what I would do to counsel those churches is to say, “You need a robust doctrine of suffering.” By robust, I mean enough to handle martyrdom but also enough to handle setting your alarm early enough to have devotions. That’s a kind of self-denial. And isn’t it interesting that in Luke’s version of self-denial, he says daily. It says, “Take up your cross daily.” So, there is martyrdom, and then there are daily crosses. And most of them are very inglorious. They’re just plain boring, hard, and ordinary. Nobody is praising you for them. They don’t even know you were faithful in that obligation. I think that’s probably the way that I would counsel the church.

Marc: I think so. There’s this saying that everyone wants to save the world, but no one wants to help mom with the dishes. And it sounds like you’re saying that underlying it is a misguided zeal, and that having a more robust theology of suffering will help you in those mundane sufferings where you’re not constantly striving for the big suffering.

Piper: That’s a great quote, and I take your question as a warning to me. Because I do — and I will tonight — move toward the ultimate quickly. I think that’s a good test case to see how people respond to the ultimate suffering. But in view of what you just said, probably the other piece of the counsel that I would give to a church is that they shouldn’t send missionaries that they haven’t put to work in a lot of ordinary ways here. Are they just wanting the big glory over there? Or are they willing to walk down 11th Avenue and pick up the trash? Are they willing to walk up to a guy with his lighter under his tin foil, sniffing his smoke, and tell him about Jesus? And if they’re not, don’t send them.

Preston: In chapter 3, you quote from Jonathan Edwards’s sermon “Heaven Is a World of Love” in order to show how differing degrees of glory in heaven will not be the cause of envy or pride in glorified saints. However, while on earth, how are those who are not as successful in their missionary efforts — despite months, years, or decades of faithful labor — to keep from becoming envious? In other words, how would you counsel missionaries to think about fruitfulness even if they are not seeing obvious fruit in their labors?

Piper: That’s really important. Let me say a word about envy first, and then we’ll go to the other part. It’s not wrong to want to be fruitful. It’s not wrong to want to be as fruitful as someone else is fruitful. Envy is being resentful that they are more fruitful than you are. It galls you. That’s envy. The desire for more hope, more love, more patience, more kindness, more faith like a hero is not sinful. The Bible holds up examples all the time of people we are supposed to imitate. We should long to be like them. Envy is when we start this niggling sense of, “I’d like to see them stumble.” That’s dangerous. That’s so dangerous. You see somebody, and they’re making it and they don’t stumble, and then you think, “I’d like to see them take a fall.” That is so far from the Spirit of Christ. That’s envy, and it is owing to pride and ego. It says, “I need my ego to be stroked by superiority.” It’s not about fruitfulness but superiority. That’s wicked.

Now, what do you say to help people press on in all the varying degrees of fruitfulness in the world? Just look around this room. Nobody is identical to anybody. It’s amazing. We are so diverse, and some of you are good at some things and not good at other things. If you spend your life comparing yourself, you will die. Mark Noll told this story in my graduating class in Wheaton. He was my RA my senior year. Outside his door, he tacked up a little saying that said, “To love is to stop comparing.” Mark was a 4.0 student. He was operating from the side of being admired. And he knew that as long as people stood in such awe of him, he wouldn’t have very good relationships. So, we must be careful in that regard.

But how do you do it, then, if you’re not going to compare? Maybe you know that their church grew but your church didn’t grow. Paul said, “I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the growth. So neither he who plants nor he who waters is anything, but only God who gives the growth” (1 Corinthians 3:6–7). So, you bow before the sovereignty of God and say, “He gave growth there, and he didn’t give growth here. God is God. I’m not God. I love God. He’s good. He’s just. He’s wise.” That’s one answer. It’s the sovereignty and goodness of God disposing his gifts and blessings where he pleases.

The second thing you might take into consideration is this. When Billy Graham used to have his mission in town here, he said one time to his hundred-person staff, “You know, don’t you, that in line for rewards in heaven a lot of you will be ahead of me.” One lady told me this story and she said, “Most of us rolled our eyes at that. That’s inappropriate humility. But he got very stern. And he said, ‘God rewards faithfulness, not fruitfulness. A thousand people may walk to the front of my crusades, but maybe you’re the means of saving one person in your life and your reward will be great because your duties were fulfilled with greater care and you were faithful morning to night in a thousand ways.’” That’s so important, folks.

If you keep going in 1 Corinthians 3, you have the man whose life is passed through the fire and the wood, hay, and stubble are burned up. He doesn’t get rewards for that. Well, what was that? That was not about fruitfulness or a failure at fruitfulness. It was bad teaching. Paul laid the foundation, and other people were building on it with wood, hay, and stubble, and they are going to squeak by. You don’t say, “Oh, my lack of fruitfulness is going to get burned up at the last day.” That’s not what he’s talking about.

Here’s one other thing. I’ve often wondered what success I might have had as a pastor in Brazil or Mississippi — a place where they have emotions. Because I can get into that. I can preach to people like that. My church might grow. Here’s the point: planting a church in New Hampshire and planting a church in Mississippi are radically different challenges — not to mention Afghanistan. Therefore, if you measure yourself in New Hampshire by the guy in Mississippi, that’s not a wise thing to do. So, taking into account factors like gifting, location, culture, and all kinds of things, it might shape the kind of fruitfulness your life has.

Hoglund: Next, we have a couple of questions on missions practice and priorities, which come from the middle section of Let the Nations Be Glad.

Eddie: My question is about unreached people groups and the strategy that churches employ to reach them. It’s about the desire to finish the task. Should we think of missions as a continuous work of reaching unreached people groups as they sprout up, rather than a time-specific snapshot of people-group status collected by a mission organization? In a migration-heavy and constantly changing world, should missions be more about finishing or being faithful to the task?

Piper: Those are not alternatives in my mind. Work on finishing and work on being faithful are like comparing apples and fruit. Here’s what drives me not to write off the finishing mindset — finish the Great Commission; work on it; be part of it. Back in the 1980s, we were saying, “By 2000, come, Lord Jesus.” Date-setting is a bad thing to do, but praying for it is not. “Come, Lord Jesus” is a prayer every saint should pray. The sooner the better.

Finishing the task is still valid because Jesus said, “Go and make disciples of all nations” (Matthew 28:19). Whatever the panta ta ethnē is, go for it. Disciples them, baptize them, teach them, and keep doing it until you have all of them. Another text says, “You were slain, and by your blood you ransomed people for God from every tribe and language and people and nation, and you have made them a kingdom and priests to our God, and they shall reign on the earth” (Revelation 5:9–10). He died to ransom people from all of those nations, so we should be about the business of getting all of them from those nations. It’s like Paul in Corinth: “I have many in this city who are my people” (Acts 18:10).

The third text I would go to is Matthew 24:14, which says, “This gospel of the kingdom will be proclaimed throughout the whole world as a testimony to all nations, and then the end will come.” There’s a connection between the end and reaching all the nations. I remember George Ladd, a New Testament scholar who was a teacher of mine at Fuller, wrote an article on Peter’s phrase “hasten the day of God” (2 Peter 3:12). What in the world is that? God has a day fixed, so what does he mean by “hasten the day of God”? He said, “There is one way to hasten the day of God: finish the mission.” I thought that was pretty good. So that’s my impulse to not lose the finishing mindset. I hope you don’t. I know from talking to one person already that there are people in this room on their way to the mission field. I was praying with my wife 45 minutes ago that there would be more because of this moment right here. I pray that some of you would come to this, maybe being wobbly about your future, and by the end of it not be wobbly anymore.

On the being faithful side, we don’t know when the end will be. I think one of the things you think about, Eddie, is the fact that “unreached peoples” is an amorphous idea. It’s not clearly defined, even when you say “tribe, people, tongue, nation.” If you take those four, can you draw nice lines between them? No. Can you tell how wide they are? No. But there are a lot of them. It’s probably not taxi drivers in Mumbai. I don’t think that’s the kind of people Jesus had in mind. I think he had ethnolinguistic groups, which is more manageable than every layer of job you could have. But your point is that some of those are going out of existence, and some of them are coming into existence.

So, what did Jesus mean? Frankly, I don’t know. I don’t know how Jesus would answer that question. We should go to all the nations, and Jesus can see thousands of ethnolinguistic people groups, however many there are. He knew that some of those tiny tribes at that point in South America or North America wouldn’t exist by the time missionaries got there. All I can say is that he knew that, and he didn’t intend those things. We shouldn’t press it that hard. But faithfulness means that you do what you should wherever God calls you in the process of finishing. And we all fit into different places.

I’ve never been a missionary. It should be a lesson for a lot of you that I wrote a book on missions that is used in classes and has made a difference, and I’ve never been a missionary. That’s weird. How can that be? That should tell you there are all kinds of ways God is going to use you. You can’t even imagine. So, yes to faithfulness and yes to finishing — both-and.

Jorge: There are lots of churches that send church-planting missionaries and evangelists to already reached places, such as countries in South America, Africa, and Asia. You talk about how the center of gravity in world Christianity is shifting toward the south and east. For instance, in my hometown in Mexico, there were lots of missionaries who came to preach the gospel though the gospel had already been preached there decades ago. Typically, a missionary would come, plant a church, leave, and an untrained or unqualified leader would rise up to the pulpit, eventually resulting in scandal, heresy, and a broken church. So, what should the emphasis of missions look like in countries like these? More specifically, should education and training — that is, theological education and pastoral training — replace the more traditional evangelism route as the primary focus?

Piper: My reaction to the last part of the question is no, but it’s not a quick no because the word “traditional” may carry a freight in your vocabulary that I’m not fully aware of. Let me see if I can put myself in your head and answer what you really mean. In 1985, I went to Cameroon for the first time, and I said, “I thought Wycliffe was a frontline mission organization, but Wycliffe is a church renewal project.” There were churches that had been there for 150 years. What is going on there? Why is there such dependence on the West after 150 years? I’ve thought a lot about those things.

And just to be fair, you didn’t come into being in 150 years. You came into being in two thousand years. This country is shot through with churches, publishing houses, seminaries, Bible colleges, and there is Christian influence at every level. And it’s not because of 150 years, but because of a long four hundred years of battling through the truth. And there was a long time of seasoning during the Middle Ages, and then there were hundreds of years of Reformation and a couple Great Awakenings. And there were new starts on this land, and here you are. You know a lot. You are more biblically informed than almost all Christians prior to three hundred or four hundred years ago. So here we are, and we look at a country that’s had the gospel for forty or fifty years and we say, “What’s wrong?” Are you kidding me? Who are we to be talking? We bear the fruit of thousands of years of labor and refinement. So we really need to be patient.

Now, your question is, Should we alter the strategies in such a way that we would keep what you just described from happening? And when I think of who is doing that, I think of Dieudonné in Cameroon, because Dieudonné loves his country, sees the doctrinal chaos and the weakness of the church, and he wants there to be evangelism — and I would have no problem saying “traditional evangelism.” He wants that to happen. Go tell people about Jesus. Have a strong church where they send them out as salt, tell people about Jesus, people get saved, and then they bring them in and disciple them. That’s what they should be doing, but he knows that he has to train pastors.

We know from recent news that you can be as trained as possible and still make shipwreck of your ministry, right? But what we need all over the world is both-and. Every question here is probably a both-and question. We need people with a vision for deep training, strengthening leaders, and growing up indigenous pastors who stand on their own two theological feet. Here’s a little anecdote to overstate the case, but I love Ralph Winter. He almost overstated everything. When I asked him, “What does it mean to be a reached people group?” he said, “When the local people have Greek and Hebrew and they are writing their own books for their own seminaries and colleges.” I said, “That’s a long time.” If you stay with a people group that long, you won’t reach all of them.

But another qualification is that some are called to stay there with them, and some aren’t. There are Paul-type missionaries and Timothy-type missionaries. Paul said, “I’m going to the unreached peoples,” and Timothy said, “I’m staying in Ephesus.” Timothy and Titus types are growing up elders and trying to reach the lost there. So, I think the answer to your question is that if in your judgment the traditional approach has been “get people saved and don’t do much theological preparation for fifty years from now,” that should change.

Piper B.: Since we believe that God will work in the hearts of those we interact with among the nations, and since we trust his sovereignty in each conversation we have with the unreached, how should we go about pursuing relationships with those who aren’t open to the gospel immediately? Should we consider this a closed door? Or should we continue to pursue relationships, trusting that the Lord will work through our faithfulness to the Great Commission?

Piper: You asked earlier which question I found most interesting, and I said, “I know which one I found most difficult.” It was that one. I have seen these questions before. Jesus sent out his disciples two by two and he said, “If you enter a town and they do not receive you, shake the dust off your sandals and go to another city” (Matthew 10:14). And Paul in Acts 13 goes on the first Sabbath to a synagogue and blows them away with this long sermon. Some say, “Come back next week.” And he comes back, and the opposition is enormous. I can picture Paul putting up his hands and saying, “If you judge yourselves unworthy of eternal life, I’m turning to the Gentiles.” He leaves the synagogue and leaves the people in their lostness, unless they want to come to the meeting.

So, I have these texts in my mind that are discouraging me at one level from lingering too long with resistant people. And you love people like that. And you would lay down your life for them right now. You don’t want people to forsake them. You’re praying right now that people would go into their lives and ask them for the thousandth time if they believe. You don’t want to go this route of shaking the dust off your sandals, and I don’t think the Bible had that as its only message on how to do evangelism. It’s one message, and it’s true. Jesus said, “Don’t cast your pearls before swine” (Matthew 7:6). I think that means something like, “If the resistance is so ugly, so bitter, so skeptical, so cynical, then you just say, ‘Okay, I’m going to talk to some other people right now. Excuse me.’” So, there is a place for saying, “I’m done with you.”

There are a couple reasons why I don’t think that’s the only message of the New Testament. First, it has to do with what I said earlier about there being two types of missionaries: Paul-type and Timothy-type. Paul was a frontier missionary, a pioneer missionary. When he had reached northern Greece (Illyricum) — starting in Jerusalem, going up through Syria, moving across Asia Minor, going over into Greece, coming down into Corinth, and then going up the coast to Illyricum and northern Italy — he said, “I have no more room for work in these regions” (Romans 15:23). Are you kidding me? There were tens of thousands of unbelievers in that region. What did he mean that he has no more room for work? He meant, “I’m a frontier missionary. The church exists here. I’m going to Spain.” Now, that kind of person will not spend too long with recalcitrant people.

But do you know what he did in Ephesus and Crete? He left Timothy and Titus. And he wrote letters to them to tell them how to do their work, and he said, “Do the work of an evangelist” (2 Timothy 4:5). What did that mean? It meant that they had a region they were responsible for, and they were supposed to stay right there. They should send their people out to be as loving and creative as they could be. They will figure out how long they can talk to a person, just like you’re trying to figure out how many emails you should write to your loved one.

Here’s the other biblical impulse that makes me think that knocking the dust off our sandals is not the only message. Do you remember the parable Jesus told where he said that a man owned a fig tree (Luke 13:6–9)? He says that the fig tree didn’t bear any fruit for three years, so cut it down because it shouldn’t even waste the ground. And this unknown spokesman — whoever it is — says, “Sir, could we wait just one more year and put some fertilizer around it? And then if it doesn’t bear fruit, you can cut it down.” Now, what’s the point of that parable? I think it’s a double point. I think the first point is that Israel is close to being cut down, so they shouldn’t toy with him. He came offering them the gospel, and they should repent and bear the fruits of repentance, or else they are coming down. And the point of the parable is that there is an impulse of patience. Give them another year. Give them another visit. I don’t know the right time, but your heart will make it plain, won’t it?

That’s what we do every day. We plead with the Holy Spirit. We say, “Make me know when to talk and make me know when not to talk — what to say and what not to say.” The Bible simply does not give us all the specifics on how frequently to talk to an unbeliever or what we should say. It’s a both-and again.

Hoglund: We have time for two more questions. Julia is going to ask one about chapter 7 in the book, which talks about the difference between inward and outward worship as a New Testament concept.

Julia: I’ve spent two years at the Getty’s Sing! Conference. I’ve always come away greatly enriched by their vision of the church, corporate worship, global missions, and most definitely eternity. At the conference this year, you pressed into the doctrine of God as the foundation of our delight in him, which should flow forth in praise. In chapter 7 of Let the Nations Be Glad, you place a similar emphasis on passion for God and his glory in Christ as the foundation for inward affection that leads to outward worship. But you also make clear that in the New Testament, Jesus presents a new model for worship that does not necessarily imply corporate gathering; rather, Jesus emphasizes a posture of heart over form and outward expression. In light of these things, is it problematic that we refer to worship as “corporate worship” if worship is in fact a primarily inward action?

Piper: It can be problematic. If I’m in a conversation, I will listen to discern how people use the word “worship” — whether they mean a set of forms or whether they mean something in the heart. So yes, it can be a problem.

Here’s a little anecdote about the book. The only sentence anyone ever remembers in this book is the first sentence, which is, “Missions exists because worship doesn’t.” I had these worship leaders coming up to me saying, “I love this sentence. This is so great.” And it really did serve a lot of people who did international worship ministries. But I could tell they were taking my meaning to be worship service: “Missions exists because worship services don’t.” I thought, That’s not what I mean! The key that preserves the error from happening is Matthew 15:8, which says, “This people honors me with their lips, but their heart is far from me; in vain do they worship me.” That’s the text that drives me in the essence of worship being in the heart. Forms and extensions and expressions of worship are external — singing, praying, kneeling, conversing, preaching. All those are forms, and they can be totally empty with zero worship happening in worship services. The Lord is holding his nose in the Old Testament during the solemn assemblies (Isaiah 1:13; Amos 5:21). Why is he holding their nose? They’re worshiping him. Listen to the language. They’re praising Yahweh. And he says, “They’re not paying their laborers.” So, I don’t like emphases on form.

What I mean by the New Testament being so different from the Old is that there are almost endless instructions about how to worship in the Old Testament outwardly. There are endless instructions on how to do it right. And there is almost nothing in the New Testament like that — almost. I don’t want you to say that Piper thinks there shouldn’t be corporate worship services. I make a case in my preaching book for that. I had a missionary write to me and say, “We have a lot of missionaries who don’t believe in preaching. Do you have anything to defend the normativity of preaching in worship services?” I said, “Yeah, I wrote a book about it. It’s called Expository Exultation. The first quarter of the book is about that.” I believe that you can read the New Testament carefully and know that you ought not to forsake the assembling of yourselves together, and there is enough evidence that you ought to sing and preach in those services.

So, let it be said. Sunday morning, I sit right over there, and I love it. My marriage has been saved by corporate-worship services. I’ve told Noël that. You have a squabble with your wife on Saturday, and you’re not talking. You’re emotionally ticked and you’re self-pitying. And then you come into a service and suddenly lift up — with four hundred or five hundred people — the bigness of God, the mercies of God, the kindness of God, and you feel like an idiot. You think, “Why am I wrecking this relationship with my piqued, emotional, self-pitying selfishness?” God has appointed corporate worship services to save marriages and other things. I love corporate worship, but I love real worship in the heart more.

James: I have a little bit of a hypothetical question for you. Suppose there is a young couple who is interested in missions and has been praying for a door to be opened for several years. Then suddenly a door opens before them. However, as they investigate this opportunity, they suddenly realize that being overseas would look quite different from what they had expected. Therefore, the couple is then split over what action to take. One desires to continue ahead, while the other is unsure that this is truly what they’re being called to do. What encouragement or advice do you have for this couple?

Piper: Someone said, “What was the most interesting question?” I say, “Let’s talk about complementarianism.” We have one minute. That’s not going to happen.

Some of you don’t even know what that word means. We’re complementarians — I am, and Bethlehem College and Seminary is happy to use that word. It simply means that when we read Ephesians 5, it says, “Wives, be subject to your own husbands, as to the Lord” (Ephesians 5:22), and, “Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church” (Ephesians 5:25). Husbands are called the “head” of their wives (Ephesians 5:23). So, we have the husband taking his cues from Christ, and we have the wife taking her cues from a glad, obedient, maturing church. And that’s what marriage is. The world doesn’t know that’s what marriage is. They don’t have any idea what marriage is. In the Bible, marriage is a parable, a drama, of Christ and the church. That’s what it’s for. It was conceived that way from the beginning in Genesis 2. That’s complementarianism. Husbands lead, provide, and protect, and wives are glad to have it so. They think, “Give me a man like that, a mature man that I can respect. He’s biblical. He’s Christlike through and through. I’ll go anywhere with him.” That brings us to your question.

I’ll bet everyone is assuming that the guy wants to go, and the woman is dragging her feet. In my forty years at this church, that’s not been the case mostly. It’s the woman who says, “Honey, let’s go,” and he’s saying, “I’m not sure. Maybe we didn’t have it right.” So let me just deal with both. What do you do? You have a wife who wants to go, and the man doesn’t — or maybe you have a husband who wants to go, and the wife doesn’t. Those are the two different scenarios, and I don’t think they are solved in exactly the same way. It’s the non-parallelism that makes you complementarian.

Let’s think about the guy first. He wants to go. He believes it’s God’s will for them to go to the mission field, and now she has seen enough that she’s saying, “I’m not sure about this.” What does a head do? This is where you have to be so careful and biblical. He remembers that he is like Christ, but he’s not Christ. He’s not infallible like Christ. He’s not sinless like Christ. And that’s enough to make him slow to take Christ’s place in her life. This woman has a direct line to Christ. That’s the priesthood of the believer. And she’s claiming that her sense of this is not so sure. And his sense is different. He knows that he’s not God. And therefore, he doesn’t preempt conversation. He doesn’t assume that he doesn’t need counsel and wisdom. He doesn’t assume that he shouldn’t pay attention to her. That’s crazy, not only because it is unprincipled biblically, but also because you have to have her on board. You can’t have her dragging her feet. You have to be together. It’s not going to work if she isn’t in this. And not everybody did that in history.

That’s the first scenario. It means that he’s going to say, “Tell me the problems,” and he’s going to take the time to listen, discuss, argue, read the Bible with her, and pray with her. And over time, he’s going to hope that they go together. And here’s the difference between this and the other situation. There may come a point where he discerns that she is strong enough and that even though she has these misgivings, it’s time. They’re going to go. He says to her, “You can do this.” And I think she should say, “You’re the man. I’m going.”

Now, what if she wants to go and he is saying, “I don’t know”? She’s not the head, and she wants to persuade him, and she ought to want to persuade him. That’s the way it is in 1 Peter 3. The wife is desperately trying to win him to Christ — or in this case, she is trying to win him to the missionary calling they once had and she thinks they still have. She’s going to do similar things. She’s going to pray. She’s going to talk. She’s going to give her reasons. She’s going to be patient and wait. But she will not, like him, come to the point where she says, “We’re going. Pack your bags, hubby.” That’s not going to happen in a complementarian marriage. But she can win him. And she needs to. They have to do this together. That’s the bottom line.

Maybe I’ll close with this. I stood at the front there for about thirty years, and people would come to me with the most intractable questions. I would think, “I don’t have any idea what the answer is to your question.” It seemed like a situation of “damned if you do, damned if you don’t.” It would seem like there was no way forward in a relationship with their dad, or their wife, or their employer. I would generally say, “I don’t know. But I do know there is a third way. God has a third way. He has a way that will be obedient and right. Right now, you can’t see it and I can’t see it. But God can see it. Let’s ask him.” I would say that. So maybe the woman would think, “This is deadlocked. This is going to be miserable for the next ten years.” Or maybe the man might say that. But I would say, “No, there’s a way. There is a way. God will show you a way. You’re going to have a happy, fruitful marriage of ministry together. He’s going to make that happen.”

Hoglund: Thank you, Pastor John. Would you join me in showing appreciation for Pastor John and for these students?

The Christian grandmother, talking with me about her daughter and grandson, was heartbroken.

As her daughter unveiled her new life, beliefs, and rules, this grandmother felt the ground was no longer solid. She raised this prayed-for daughter in the church. As a teenager, her daughter made a profession of faith. But then everything changed. The daughter rapid-fired her war against “heterosexism” and the new rules that would be mandatory for any future relationship. She demanded exclusive use of preferred names and pronouns. And she told her mother she could never share Bible verses or church lessons that contradicted LGBTQ+ beliefs.

This grandmother was sure she couldn’t keep the rules straight in her head even if she tried. She could barely understand what “heterosexism” was, although her daughter had explained it many times as “the dangerous belief that heterosexuality is normal.” Why would anyone go to war against this? the grandmother wondered.

Wrong Side of History

The ultimatums and blackmail landed hard: failure to comply resulted in being cut out, disowned. Her daughter, Jade, declared herself “non-binary” and used the pronouns “they” and “he.” Her three-year-old grandson, Allan, would now be raised as a girl and addressed as Sierra, presumably because he wore a tiara at a child’s birthday party and liked it. None of this made sense. The grandmother was sure her daughter was deluded by some social contagion.

This grandmother wanted to do the right thing. She tried to find the middle road and walk the thin line that allowed her to retain a relationship with her daughter, but she wondered: Am I on the wrong side of history? Should I comply with my daughter when I believe she is seriously deluded? And what about my grandson? Is he a “trans” child or an abused one? She asked herself, What if I get it wrong?

When the grandmother reached out to her pastor, he didn’t know what to say. He told her to extend empathy and try to see things from her daughter’s point of view. The small group she attended was divided on what to do as well. Some people in her small group even warned her against being “transphobic” and told her anyone can be trans and Christian, or gay and Christian. Is this true? she wondered. Some people in her small group treated her like she caused her daughter’s problems.

Life in the War Zone

I know there are many sides to stories like these.

I know for years some evangelical leaders have wanted to understand this story from the LGBTQ+ perspective, some even sponsoring gay-sensitivity checklists and conferences. But what about the grandmother? Does her point of view matter? And what about God’s? Romans 3:4 makes God’s perspective the priority: “Let God be true though every one were a liar.” What God reveals about our lives is the true truth. The Bible knows us and our needs better than we do. And that is the very best news of all.

This grandmother’s family and church life had suddenly become a war zone, and she is not alone. I hear stories like this almost every day. If you, like the grandmother, have ever felt that you live amid a civil war, you are not alone either. On the one hand, we expect the church to conflict with the world. Indeed, John Calvin tells us to “count the rage of the whole world as nothing” (365 Days with Calvin, March 19). We see the rage of unbelief all around us. We understand the rage of the world because we remember when we were once God’s enemy.

It’s not conflict with the world that surprises us; the division within the visible church confounds us. Our Lord calls us to walk in unity amid this “crooked and twisted generation” (Philippians 2:15). He does not ask us to become compliant with its perversion, and especially when the world demands as much. Jesus calls us to model the fathomless unity of the holy Trinity: “that they may be one even as we are one” (John 17:22). But how can we do this when some use the Bible to call sinners to repentance and others use the Bible to call the repentant to sin?

These are the times in which we live, and Christians must face the facts.

Three Subtle Reasons

I believe there are three reasons for our divided churches. And these three reasons have unleashed five lies that many evangelical churches have embraced.

Because I have believed all these lies at different points in my life, I understand how seductive they are. God knows the times in which we live and has provided a solution. Our calling is to repent of the lies that we have believed and attempt to stay connected with loved ones lost to them — and without our becoming indoctrinated. Easy to say, but impossible to do without God’s help. What are the three reasons?

REASON 1

First, we have failed to see that the seeds of the gospel are in the garden.

Many of us foolishly believed that we could reinvent our calling as men and women, render men and women interchangeable, defy God’s pattern and purpose for the sexes, and somehow reap God’s blessing.

God’s plan for men and women — the creation ordinance — is first found in Genesis 1, and it is central — not peripheral — to the gospel of Jesus Christ: “God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. And God blessed them. And God said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it’” (Genesis 1:27–28).

We bear the image of God by growing in the knowledge, righteousness, and holiness of the Lord Jesus Christ (Ephesians 4:24). Homosexuality and transgenderism represent forms of rebellion against God’s creation ordinance and image-bearing. They are manifestations of the world, the flesh, and the devil, and must be repented of, not celebrated.

Homosexuality and transgenderism are not part of anyone’s creational design, no matter what our feelings say. Our feelings are not free of sin, and they don’t trump God’s truth. Christ promises to forgive and restore all who repent and trust in him for salvation. Christ does not make an ally with the sins his blood crushes on the cross and washes clean. There is hope for all in the gospel.

REASON 2

Second, we have failed to read the times in which we live (Romans 13:11–14; Luke 12:56).

In the 2015 case Obergefell v. Hodges, the United States Supreme Court declared so-called gay marriage the law of the land. It also introduced the idea of “dignitary harm.” According to Obergefell, we are harming someone’s dignity by failing to “affirm” their LGBTQ+ identity.

In our post-Obergefell world, we now have two competing ideas of what it means to be human — and these ideas have collided. The Freudian/Obergefell idea is that sexual orientation is an accurate category of personhood; LGBTQ+ is who you are rather than how you feel. After Obergefell, laws quickly were put in place to honor, affirm, and celebrate being LGBTQ+. The biblical idea, however, is that bearing the image of God according to eternal and creational categories of man or woman determines who you are. It’s Obergefell or Christ: you either celebrate and affirm your sin nature, or you repent of the culpable and unchosen sin nature you inherit in Adam.

REASON 3

Third, we have failed to love our enemies and instead pretended that our enemies are our friends.

Many of us have failed to understand that loving our enemies is an act of godly confrontation, a weapon of our warfare and a great kindness (2 Corinthians 10:4). Christian love destroys arguments and lofty opinions raised against Christ (2 Corinthians 10:5). Christian love doesn’t pretend that the world is a safe place or that the enemies of Christ are harmless — even if they are your daughter. Christian love seeks to make friends out of enemies through repentance and forgiveness. Christian love doesn’t delude us into believing that sin is no big deal, or that we are more merciful than God. Pretending our enemies are our friends is a cowardly cop-out.

Five Seductive Lies

These three reasons have introduced five lies into far too many evangelical churches. The five lies coalesce in rejection of biblical authority, defiance against Christ, and celebration of pride.

Lie #1: Homosexuality is a normal sexual variant.Lie #2: Being a “spiritual person” is kinder than being a biblical Christian.Lie #3: Feminism is good for the church and the world.Lie #4: Transgenderism is a normal gender variant.Lie #5: Modesty is an outdated burden that serves male dominance and holds women back.

These five lies rely on several false claims, but the biggest is the feminist invention that “gender” is distinct from biological sex. To create false categories of personhood, and then try to build a Christian life on top of them, is futile and foolish. As pastor Christopher J. Gordon puts it in The New Reformation Catechism on Human Sexuality, “To introduce gender as a new category of personhood, separate from the biological category of sex, in pursuit of a different sexual identity, is unnatural to the creation order and harmful for the purpose for which God made us” (13).

God promises that lies — even prominent ones that have become foundational to powerful governments and academic institutions — do not have the last word. He tells us that only the truth will set us free. As Jesus says, “If you abide in my word, you are truly my disciples, and you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free” (John 8:31–32). Jesus does not say freedom will come if you stand in the shoes of your “non-binary” grandchild by inviting a “gay Christian” ministry into your church, or if you march in the pride parade with your lesbian daughter, or if you go to your son’s gay wedding. It’s not kindness to stand in someone’s shoes when that person needs to be rescued.

Freed from the Fear of Man

The Bible calls the fear of man a snare (Proverbs 29:25) — an instrument of execution from which you cannot extricate yourself. But as my husband says a lot, the gospel sets you free from the fear of man. So, if you find yourself wondering if you are on the wrong side of history, and if you have all of this wrong, remember the blood of Christ. Remember how it bore down on demons and delivered you from hell. Remember how Jesus became a curse so that you could receive blessing. Remember that the truth of Christ sets you free, not compliance with lies.

Understand the times. Know the reasons. Defy the lies. And love your enemies well enough to tell the truth.

Audio Transcript

Twenty years ago today, at 8:14 a.m., American Airlines Flight 11 was highjacked. And with it began a nightmare no one who lived through it will forget.

I was roofing my house that Tuesday morning, radio on, when national broadcasters broke in to announce that the North Tower of the World Trade Center in New York City was on fire. The cause was maybe a bomb. Other rumors said it was an accidental plane crash, though doubtful on such a clear day. We now know it was Flight 11. Twenty minutes later, the South Tower was hit by Flight 175, and all doubt was removed. America was under attack.

I remember the FAA grounding all flights immediately. I remember the roll call, as the flight paths of the last twenty commercial jets in the air were anxiously narrated on radio. I remember hearing fighter jets were scrambled to the sky if needed to shoot down hijacked jets. I remember looking up into the atmosphere for confirmation of what was unfolding 1,200 miles away, and finding a clear sky emptied of jets and condensation trails. I remember finding my way to a television in time to watch the towers fall. I remember street-level recordings emerging, the sound of glass raining down on concrete, and the sight of people fleeing from grey clouds of dust and copy paper pouring between buildings. I remember seeing the Pentagon on fire, evidence of a third attack, and unconfirmed rumors of a fourth flight that crashed into a field somewhere. I remember people pulled from rubble piles. I remember footage of jubilation and celebration in foreign places. I remember Air Force One flying the president to the military base sixteen miles from me. The shock of that day remains fresh, even twenty years later.

Meanwhile, in Minneapolis, as the news broke on Tuesday morning, Pastor John gathered his pastoral team into a conference room. They pulled out a radio and put it in the middle of the table. “We listened and turned it off and prayed and listened and prayed,” recalled Piper. The pastors interceded for about an hour total, mingled with radio updates. They asked God to pour out mercy “for wisdom in the mouths of Christian spokesmen who will be called upon to say something” and “for a widespread awakening from banal pursuits.”

Then the pastors gathered the staff and planned out the week. A 7:00 prayer gathering would be held that evening at Bethlehem Baptist Church. It was announced on local radio stations under the title “A Service of Sorrow, Self-Humbling, and Steady Hope in our Savior and King, Jesus Christ.” It was an evening for mourning and prayer. Two hundred attended.

The following morning, Pastor John was called on to be one of the Christians who would speak into the tragedy — for him, on KTIS, a local radio station. Where was God on 9/11? There, for about forty minutes, he spoke wisdom into the shock and sorrow.

We want to share the recording with you today on Ask Pastor John, on this twentieth anniversary. The interview covers the importance of grieving and creating space for sorrow, yet a sorrow under God’s all-encompassing sovereignty. Pastor John explains why 9/11 was a call for national humbling, a wake-up call. God was shaking the foundations of America and calling sinners to come to Christ — a global call not just for Americans but also for Palestinians, Saudis, and Afghans.

In the interview, Pastor John goes deep, explaining how God can, “in his sovereign, overarching providence of the world, ordain that something be permitted or caused” — even a “massive sin” like 9/11 — “and yet disapprove of the very thing that he has permitted or ordained.” The cross of Jesus Christ exemplified this truth, because, says Piper, “I don’t think New York — the hijacking, the terrorism — was a greater sin than the killing of the Son of God. The killing of the Son of God was more horrific, more terrible, more wicked, more horrible, than what we’ve just seen. And yet God planned it” (Acts 4:24–28).

The tragedy of 9/11 foregrounds God’s orchestrating providence, human sin, and the magnitude of the world’s daily suffering. It reminds us Satan is alive and active. And it gives parents an opportunity to explain that, ultimately, God has “billions of purposes,” doing an uncountable number of good things in lives through a tragedy at this scale. The whole interview remains instructive two decades later.

“God was so merciful to me and helped me,” Piper later wrote, reflecting on his studio visit. “I was tired and tense and aching with so many emotions. I think I said what God wanted said. What a kind God — in misery and gladness.”

The forty-minute interview has not, to date, appeared on the website until now. Here’s John Piper, the morning after 9/11, on KTIS, a local FM radio station in Minneapolis, being interviewed by hosts Jon Engen and by Chuck Knapp, whom you will hear first. Here’s the interview.

‘Make Us a Sacrificial People’

Chuck Knapp: Would you bring us before the Lord in prayer and lead us?

John Piper: I’d love to.

Father, make us a sensitive, compassionate, grieving, weeping people. There are so many who are wired not to be able to cry. There are so many, all day long, that if they’d given themselves one opportunity, would have wept like a baby, and they just held it back and held it back. And so, I pray for the capacities to grieve. Christians need to grieve better than we do. So help us to do that, I pray.

And then I pray for a great self-humbling in my heart and the heart of my church. Lord, guard us from anger: “The anger of man does not produce the righteousness of God” (James 1:20). Help us to “be . . . slow to speak, slow to anger” (James 1:19). Let us look to ourselves. O God, I pray that I would look to my own sin and my own bitterness, my own unforgiveness, my own disregard for God, my own indifference to your things that should bring judgment upon me. So grant the church and the country to be humbled before you, our great sovereign King.

And then, Lord, I pray for hope to abound, hope in our Savior and King, Jesus Christ. No hope in horses or chariots or the CIA or the government or the military, but hope in you. Some hope in horses, some hope in chariots, but we hope in the name of the Lord our God (Psalm 20:7). Build that hope into our land. Build that hope into our churches. You’ve gotten our attention. And now, O God, I pray that we would yield to your grace and your power and live for Christ, that we would make you the center of our lives, and not ourselves and not our business and not our vacations.

And then, Lord, make us a sacrificial, serving people, ready to lay down our lives to get the gospel to the unreached peoples around the world. O Lord, set our priorities straight, I pray. In Jesus’s name, amen.

God Has Our Attention

Knapp: We are visiting with Dr. John Piper this morning, and it’s a blessing to have you with us. He is the author of many, many books and pastor for the sheep and the lost. He is a Fuller Seminary graduate. There are so many things we could say. I’m just so thankful that you were here in town and able to come and lead us in a whole healing process that needs to occur.

Piper: Thank you.

Knapp: I saw pictures on television yesterday of young children in Israel in the Arab sections who were cheering. And there were adults there, likewise. And one can’t help but become upset on many levels — anger and frustration — at seeing that image of the world across the television screen. But as I look and as I listened to you talking about humbling ourselves, I think that so much of what the world sees of Americans is anything but humble. And I think that that gives them fuel for what they return to us, that anger that they feel toward us. And so, your message and that part about humbling ourselves really hits me in the heart as I think about that in particular.

Piper: I think one of the missing ingredients — I mean, it’s the main missing ingredient that makes that difficult for people — is that God doesn’t have the place that he needs to have in their lives. I mean, the Bible’s message of humility is not a horizontal message, mainly. It’s not “Humble yourself under terrorists.” It’s “humble yourselves . . . under the mighty hand of God” (1 Peter 5:6). If God doesn’t look mighty in your life, if he isn’t central and supreme and glorious, then humility is going to be a very artificial thing in your life. And if he’s there in his proper, central, supreme place, humility will come naturally.

Somebody said to me out in the hall that Anne Graham Lotz said, “God’s got our attention now,” or “Sometimes God withholds his protection so that things can happen to wake us up.” And I think that’s very, very true. And if you ask, “Well, what does he want to communicate now that he has our attention?” and we say that Jesus is calling us to repentance, you have to ask then what repentance is about. And repentance is turning away from sin. And what’s sin about? And sin is fundamentally about treason against God. But you can’t even grasp the meaning of sin if God isn’t viewed as worthy of infinite adoration and infinite delight and infinite allegiance and infinite love and infinite valuing — which he isn’t for most people in America. And so, the responses that are appropriate are almost emotionally impossible for people because God is so foreign to their experience.

“You can’t even grasp the meaning of sin if God isn’t viewed as worthy of infinite adoration and infinite allegiance.”

One of the things that troubles me about these calamities is that God comes onto the agenda suddenly in people’s lives, and where he finds himself is in the dock, being accused. It’s funny: Why don’t we have a radio program or a big call-in thing to account for God’s mercy every time the sun comes up on New York? Jesus said that God “makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust” (Matthew 5:45). This is an inexplicable grace to our land. Why not call God to account for treating wicked people so kindly?

I heard you say this morning, Chuck, when I got up, that you wanted to focus on the cross. And I love that. I love that. And I said, “Oh, good. Good. If we focus on the cross, we’ll be safe today.” But the text that’s most central about the cross in relation to this supremacy of God in all of our calamities is Romans 3:23–25, where it says,

All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God, and are justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as a propitiation by his blood. . . . This was to show God’s righteousness, because in his divine forbearance he had passed over former sins.

Now, if you just think about that for a moment, what he’s saying is this: God said, “I must sacrifice my Son in order to vindicate my righteousness, in view of how leniently I have treated sinners.” Now that’s the gospel. That’s the meaning of the cross that we want to make central here at KTIS. The cross is the moment and the means by which God vindicates his righteousness in the face of how unjust his mercy appears. What American worries about that? What American loses sleep over the injustice of God in the sun rising and people being spared? And when the stock market is climbing and when the interest rates are falling and when the commerce is flourishing, which one of us says, “How can God treat us this way? We’re so bad!” Who says that? But that’s what we ought to say.

Instead, when anybody gets their wills crossed or anybody endures pain — whether it’s cancer or a plane crash — God gets called to account. There’s something wrong here. And what’s wrong is that he’s simply not supreme, and therefore we don’t understand sin, and therefore we don’t understand the cross, and therefore our whole worldview is bent out of shape. So, when others, like I’ve heard in the hallway out here, say, “God’s got our attention,” I think he wants to say, “I am God. I am God. I love people. If they would bow to me, I have put my Son forward to forgive their sins and have them home with me forever and ever. But don’t toy with me.”

Christian Nation?

Knapp: People across the world see that of us: that we, as an American people, are not, for the most part, humble.

Piper: Right. And yet, they call us a Christian nation, and therefore Christianity gets made synonymous with all of America’s music and all of America’s movies. We’re the “Great Satan.” And I just want to, for one, on the air, say, I’m not speaking as an American. I am an alien and an exile on this planet (1 Peter 2:11). My citizenship is in heaven. I await a Savior who will come, who will transform this lowly body into a body like his (Philippians 3:20–21). I’m a foreigner in America. I’m a foreigner in Palestine and Israel and Russia and Indonesia. I speak, I hope, for another King and another allegiance. The Muslim world, the Hindu world, the Buddhist world, the secular world, they need to hear that Christians are not synonymous with Americans.

Knapp: What a perspective. I hope it causes us to stop and really think. I hope it causes us to assess where we all are, personally and in self-examination.

Jon Engen: This is what I was thinking when you were saying that: Colossians 3:16 says, “Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly, teaching and admonishing one another in all wisdom, singing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, with thankfulness in your hearts to God.” And this is what you were just saying: “And whatever you do, in word or deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him” (Colossians 3:17). We are here as aliens, but we are his representatives.

Rebuilding the Foundation

Piper: Yeah, it’s so hard — I feel for you guys. I said to Neil Staven last night — he dropped over and visited us — “I don’t really look forward to being on the radio because it’s hard to talk theology and do pastoral care in this medium. And yet, these guys have to do it.” You’re stuck with it. You can’t run away like other people can. I said, “I feel for these guys. I want to join them there.” And I just want to encourage you to do that: to be representatives of Jesus Christ.

And what makes it so hard for you and me is that we’re speaking into an audience that doesn’t have in place the worldview to make sense out of things that would fall into place for us. I mean, they’ll ask you some just blunt, painful question about a piece of the tragedy, and you’ve got to take them back to the foundation. You’ve got to go deep. You’ve got to go back to the beginning and say, “Where did sin come from, and what has happened to humanity?”

What is the depravity that Romans 1 talks about, where God just hands people over to their own depravity?
What is the futility of Romans 8, where it says that God subjected the creation to futility, which means the pain and the suffering in the world? Even “we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for adoption as sons” (Romans 8:23). All of it awaits redemption.
What is death, which came into the world through one man? “Just as sin came into the world through one man, and death through sin, so death spread to all men because all sinned” (Romans 5:12).

Those massive underpinnings of how we explain everything aren’t in place for your listeners, many of them. And so in order to answer questions at the upper level, we have to go down to the lower level and rebuild some foundations.

“The killing of the Son of God was more horrific than what we’ve just seen — and yet God planned it.”

I just want to encourage you: When you get a tough question, which no doubt you do — we all do — Jesus didn’t automatically just jump in at the level of the questioner. He sometimes just said something that must have made them scratch their head, because he knew they didn’t have the categories for understanding his answer. So we need to rebuild, and we’re doing that right now. That’s part of what we’re doing.

God’s Mysterious Sovereignty

Knapp: I was looking through several excerpts from editorials, and one from Oklahoma that struck me earlier this morning, a part of that article or editorial in the paper, said, “Some will blame God for Tuesday’s events. How could he not protect us from such evil?” So that’s how the world looks at this.

Piper: Right, and the very way that question is crafted is almost unanswerable. Because as soon as you use the word blame, you’ve implied guilt. Blame implies guilt. So they’ve muddied the waters, because they cannot make the theological, biblical distinction of ordaining that something be that you may, in fact, grieve over and disapprove of. See, now there’s a category that is very hard for people to get ahold of. And yet, I find it all over the Bible: that God can, in his sovereign, overarching providence of the world, ordain that something be permitted or caused — he’s involved causally in different ways in different acts — and yet disapprove of the very thing that he has permitted or ordained. People simply can’t get it.

So, the word blame immediately hangs you on the horns of a dilemma you don’t want to be hung on — because when you say, “No, you don’t blame him,” they think, “Oh, you mean he was on a vacation. He’s out there. He had nothing to do with this. He wasn’t watching. He fumbled the ball. He couldn’t manage it.” Or otherwise, you’ve got him as a sinner. I mean, those are your two options with regard to a question like that.

Well, those aren’t the biblical options. God is sovereign. And yet, when he wills and ordains that there be pain and suffering in our lives, he’s not doing it as a sinner or as an evil God. God has ways to ordain things in his mysterious sovereignty that are for our good, in spite of being incredibly painful and — here’s the mystery — in spite of involving massive sin. And the place where that is so vividly clear in the Bible is at the cross.

That’s why I’m so glad you’re staying here at the cross, because I don’t think 9/11 — the hijacking, the terrorism — was a greater sin than the killing of the Son of God. I think the killing of the Son of God was more horrific, more terrible, more wicked, more horrible than what we’ve just seen — and yet God planned it. It’s so clear. Acts 4:27–28:

Truly in this city [Jerusalem] there were gathered together against your holy servant Jesus, whom you anointed, both Herod and Pontius Pilate, along with the Gentiles and the peoples of Israel, to do whatever your hand and your plan had predestined to take place.

All the biblical promises of the coming of the Son — to bear our sorrows and to bear our griefs — were predicted seven hundred years before they happened, and yet there wasn’t a more sinful act in the universe than the nailing of the Son of God to the cross. And therefore, if we’re going to be believers in the love of God for sinners at the cross, we have to believe that he has the capacity to ordain that his Son die, and yet not be a sinner in killing him. If he can do that, then I’m going to stand up on Sunday and say, “Though I don’t have all the answers, my God, and your God, reigned on September 11. And he is not cruel, he is not wicked, and he’s not a sinner. And the glory is that because he reigns, he can comfort every soul, he can answer every prayer, he can heal every disease, he can rescue from every calamity, he can hold back from us every harmful thing that would not be good for us. And if he weren’t sovereign, then I don’t know what hope we could ultimately have for our future. And we would lose our gospel.”

Engen: And let me just mention, I appreciate, dear sir, your heart on providing the answer. It’s not necessarily grabbing a piece of the tragedy, and then trying to define that little piece. You have to define it, first of all, in light of the tragedy as a whole, but also the foundation as a whole as well.

Where Was Satan?

And as God’s people, we are not simply representing this tragedy in the United States; we’re representing the whole of Christ and the offering of God and what sin does to us. And we were born broken, and we’re watching this happen again.

Piper: Yeah, and not just the whole of Christ, but the whole of pain, because what’s so strange and irrational about the human heart is that it takes a pulling together, in one cataclysmic calamity, to awaken us to what’s happening every moment of every day, like in hospitals across the country. There are a lot of people right now whose mom or dad or wife or husband is breathing their last with pulmonary disease and gasping — just like some of those folks are gasping right now under the rubble. That’s not unique.

And so it’s awakening us to feel the magnitude of the world’s misery, which forces an issue that we ought to be dealing with all the time: What is this misery all about? And the biblical answer is this: it’s all about sin. And therefore, it’s all about the God who is moral and holy and just and who defined sin as sin and whether there’s redemption. That’s the message. And so, you’re right. We’re forced back to deal with huge things.

There’s a piece that we haven’t mentioned yet, that we probably should, as far as worldview goes, and that’s Satan. Satan is a massive part of the Christian worldview. And we ought to ask, Where was Satan yesterday? And of course, nobody knows precisely, except to say that the biblical picture is that Satan hates God. He hates his purposes. He wants people to dishonor God, mainly. He tries to squash the faith out of everybody’s life. He demanded, it says in Luke 22:31–32, to “sift [Peter] like wheat.” But Jesus says, “I have prayed for you that your faith may not fail.” Now I think that picture means this: just like you’d put wheat in a sieve, shake it, and it would tear at the wheat and rip off the outside to get the kernel, Satan wants to shake Peter, tear off his faith, and just have the natural Peter fall through and live the rest of his life in happiness and peace off in the suburbs somewhere. He’s fine — but without faith. And Jesus said, “I have prayed for you that your faith may not fail.”

And then he says this absolutely sovereign word: “When you have turned again, strengthen your brothers.” In other words, “I know you’re going to turn, and I have effectually interceded with my Father on your behalf. You are going to drop three times tonight, but you’re going to stand again, my friend.”

So Satan is involved in all these things, and he’s moving people to do horrific acts. And I don’t doubt that he was stirring and moving in the evils on those planes and in the weeks and years that led up to it. But “he who is in [us] is greater than he who is in the world” (1 John 4:4). He holds Satan on a leash. He commands the evil spirits, and they do what he bids. So, Satan can never get outside God’s control. That’s the point of the book of Job, I think. He’s got to get permission to mess up this man’s life and take his children and put boils on his face and on his body (Job 1:6–12). And Job stands back and says, when Satan has done all this, “The Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord” (Job 1:21).

“Satan is to be hated. Satan is to be fought. Satan is to be resisted. But God reigns over Satan.”

Or when his wife says, “Curse God and die.” What in the world is Job holding fast to his integrity for? Job says, “You speak as one of the foolish women would speak. Shall we receive good from God, and shall we not receive evil?” And we’re kind of shocked, saying, “Wait a minute, Job. You missed it. Satan did that. It says Satan did that. What do you mean ‘shall we not receive evil as well as good at the hand of the Lord?’” And the writer adds, “In all this Job did not sin with his lips,” as though he knew we were going to misinterpret at that point (Job 2:9–10). What Job was testifying to is that Satan is to be hated. Satan is to be fought. Satan is to be resisted. But God reigns over Satan. He’s not running loose in the world without his leash in the hand of an Almighty, sovereign God. If he were, our hope would be very fragile — and, I think, non-existent.

Our Enemy Within

Engen: That’s the thought I had last evening as I was going to sleep: Satan did his work long ago on this one, on the people who were involved in such an incident. We read yesterday Psalm 36, where it says,

Transgression speaks to the wicked     deep in his heart;there is no fear of God     before his eyes.For he flatters himself in his own eyes     that his iniquity cannot be found out and hated. . . .He plots trouble while on his bed;     he sets himself in a way that is not good;he does not reject evil. (Psalm 36:1–2, 4)

Well, he did their work, and I’m imagining Satan just sat back and watched it happen.

Piper: Yeah, he sat back and watched it happen, or he did what he did to Judas: he “entered into Judas called Iscariot” (Luke 22:3). So, Satan has indirect and direct ways of working, and perhaps Satan entered in that morning; he just did a decisive work. But he also does these preparatory works.

Let’s not be too quick to say, “Oh, Satan did this.” Our flesh is plenty evil to do this sort of thing. The world is plenty evil to set things up so that we do it. Paul called sin a power, an indwelling power within us, that rises up and takes us captive (Romans 6:12; 7:9–10). So, we don’t need to blame Satan for every evil thing that happens, because we’re bad enough to do it without bringing him in as an explanatory factor. This is why I think Jesus didn’t focus on Satan when they brought him the news about the tower in Siloam falling on the eighteen or the mingling of the blood of the Galileans with their sacrifices. He simply said, “Repent” — not “Run away from Satan” (Luke 13:1–5).

Engen: On Sunday morning was our communion Sunday at church. And I preached on Paul’s warning to examine yourselves. Why have you come to this table? What have you brought with you? And of course, all the other things Paul talks about up to 1 Corinthians 11, dealing with divisions and dealing with sin in the church and the astonishment he has that they’re kind of pleased with themselves, that they’re accepting all these things. And then he comes to the table, and says that you must examine yourself if you come to worship. I walked away from the sermon on Sunday just beating myself, asking, “Were we too harsh in saying, ‘You and God have got to get this right’?” And this is exactly what you’ve been saying all morning: You and God have got to get this right. What we saw yesterday lies in the heart of all of us.

Piper: In fact, if you go on and read the rest of that passage, something absolutely stunning is said, that would really make you wonder if you’d been too harsh. Because he says that if you don’t discern the body and you don’t examine yourself carefully, “this is why many of you are weak and ill, and some have died” (1 Corinthians 11:30).

Engen: We said that. Somebody said it’s the most dangerous service a church can hold because how you approach it has direct consequences.

Piper: But what makes it so mysterious and amazing and wonderful is that the death there is pictured as a way of not coming into condemnation. We are being judged by the Lord that we might not be condemned by the Lord. Even death — and this is relevant; oh, is this relevant — even death can be a mercy from God.

Hope for Everlasting Peace and Joy

Engen: Well, we’re talking to Pastor John Piper of Bethlehem Baptist Church. And we so appreciate you coming in and just opening the word and setting our eyes back on Christ. We mentioned this morning Hebrews 12:3, where the writer says, “Consider him who endured from sinners such hostility against himself” — and that’s what we’re doing — “so that you may not grow weary or fainthearted.”

Knapp: Well, now at three minutes before eight o’clock, I wonder, Dr. Piper, if you would lead us again in prayer for healing and understanding.

Piper: Father in heaven, our hearts go out to hundreds of thousands of family members who to this moment don’t know what’s become of their loved ones. And I pray that you would turn their hearts to you and that you would cause them to submit their wills and their hearts and their lives to you. And to look to you for help and strength.

“Jesus Christ died for all, so that whoever will believe of any color may have eternal life and escape perishing.”

I pray, O God, that you would bring your unique kind of consolation through Jesus Christ, who loved us and gave himself for us. I pray that you would pour out the Holy Spirit upon us, O God, as the church of Jesus Christ and upon the world for awakening. I pray that you would assert your glorious, gracious, kind, merciful, powerful, just, holy supremacy into the American life and make Jesus Christ the issue today and make people see him for who he really is and savor him and love him and trust him and treasure him and count him more precious than anything else in all the world.

O God, let this tragedy not happen in vain, but get people’s hearts for yourself, so that they not only have some relief in this world, but everlasting joy, everlasting peace, everlasting life. Lord, we want to see the greatest possible joy come. And that will come for eternity through Jesus Christ alone. So magnify your Son, Lord, in this calamity, I pray, so that people will reap a harvest of righteousness and a harvest of everlasting peace and joy. Through Christ I pray. Amen.

Knapp: Spoken from the heart. Amen. KTIS-FM in the Twin Cities at ten minutes after eight o’clock. We are visiting with Dr. John Piper, who is helping us “overcome evil with good” (Romans 12:21).

God in His Rightful Place

Yesterday I was numb; I was just numbed by all of it. Twenty-four hours ago we were here watching the monitors and saw something go on. We didn’t know what it was. And we thought perhaps it was an accident. Well, then a second plane flies into the other tower. And then within minutes, here we are; we’re in the same shock that I felt as a kid when President Kennedy was assassinated. I felt it again when the shuttle exploded. There’ve been other times in my life as well: when Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated, when Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. These are all things that I, in my twenties, have imprinted now. It just feels like it’s in my DNA, this shock. And then the plane goes into the Pentagon. And you realize this is an awful day.

And so now the shock — I don’t know if it’s wearing off, but now it’s like, How do we make any sense? Where do we start? How do we rebuild? And I know the focus needs to be on the cross because I’ve said that. I’ve been taught that in the last ten years, but that’s difficult too. So you’re helping to shape the perspective and then maybe just sharpen the image.

Piper: Well, I think you said it well — that the order is one moving from the immediate, personal experience of emotion, which the Bible cares a lot about, to the more reflective, quiet coming to terms with truth. We need both. We can’t just jump in with both feet at the theoretical, theological level at the most raw moments of life. There’s a time for silence and a time for speaking (Ecclesiastes 3:7). There’s a time for embracing and a time to refrain from embracing (Ecclesiastes 3:5).

And so, as the time goes by, pastors need to step up to the plate with fiber in their tree and give people a rock to stand on and a trunk for the branches to hang on. And whether we’re quite there or not, we’re forced to be there. And my passion is to spread a passion for the supremacy of God in all things for the joy of all peoples. And so, the reason I come back, again and again, to the supremacy of God in these moments is because, I think, if we lose it, we lose the most precious thing in the world. We lose everything.

And one of the texts that’s been on my mind, in recent minutes especially, is the book of Lamentations. Now there’s not a more horrific book in the Old Testament because it’s after the carnage of Jerusalem by the Babylonians. And it is so horrible that women are boiling and eating their children (Lamentations 4:10). And out of that setting, Jeremiah writes two things that, I think, if you lose the one you lose the other. The one we all love is basis of the hymn “Great Is Thy Faithfulness.” Right in the middle chapter, he writes,

The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases;     his mercies never come to an end;they are new every morning;     great is your faithfulness.“The Lord is my portion,” says my soul,     “therefore I will hope in him.” (Lamentations 3:22–24)

I mean, how can he say that mercies are new every morning when things like this are happening? Mercies are new every morning. And just a few verses later in the chapter, he says,

The Lord will not     cast off forever,but, though he cause grief, he will have compassion     according to the abundance of his steadfast love;for he does not afflict from his heart     or grieve the children of men. (Lamentations 3:31–33)

So there you have, back to back, the Lord causes grief and his mercies are new every morning. So, my gut feeling is this: I want mercy in my life. I want to live by mercy. I want to give mercy. I want to embody mercy for people. And I think I’m going to lose verses 22–24, the mercy verses, if I lose the supremacy verses just a few verses later. Which is why I’m so zealous that God be given his rightful place in these moments and that we not kind of shuttle him to the side and say, “Well, let’s just deal with human misery here,” because my only hope in dealing with human misery is a great, holy, good, gracious, sovereign God who, with all of his mystery, can answer our prayers and can do miracles beyond what all humans can do.

He can restrain sin, like he did with King Abimelech in Genesis 20, when Abraham said, “She’s my sister. Sarah’s my sister.” And so she goes into the harem and could be slept with that night. And Abimelech doesn’t sleep with her. And in the morning, God confronts him, and he apologizes because he didn’t know what was up. And God says, “It was I who kept you from sinning against me” (Genesis 20:6). Now, God can do that. God can keep people from sinning. One puff of his breath, and the plane misses the tower. One slight restraint, and this guy falls down in the plane instead of going into the cockpit. God can do that. And that he can do it creates problems for us in dealing with the calamity, and it creates hope for us in coming out of the calamity into a life where we know he will not let anything befall us but what is good for us (Romans 8:28).

It’s so important to me that, even though it’s painful sometimes to hear in moments of crisis, we give God his rightful place as the sovereign, merciful Lord of the universe, so that we have a gospel for people.

More Than We Imagine

Engen: Well, it’s been quite the morning and, Dr. Piper, we just want to say thank you for sharing your heart with us. I know that it has been a part of the refuge that God has been using to bring some peace to some hearts — maybe raise more questions, I guess, as well. But I pray that they’re questions about the solid rock, the foundation that we’re all standing on as God’s people. When you were speaking about Lamentations, I was thinking of David’s words when he says,

I waited patiently for the Lord;     he inclined to me and heard my cry.He drew me up from the pit of destruction,     out of the miry bog,and set my feet upon a rock,     making my steps secure. (Psalm 40:1–2)

Philosophy can’t do it. Determination can’t do it. Consensus can’t do it. And just a vote at a voting booth can’t do it. It’s God.

Piper: And he goes on and says,

He put a new song in my mouth,     a song of praise to our God.Many will see and fear,     and put their trust in the Lord. (Psalm 40:3)

Which means that the extended time of desolation was the means to a new song, which was the means to people trusting Christ. Those are the kinds of connections our people have just got to see, so that they don’t linger in the desolation without thinking that God has no good designs here.

Engen: Exactly — and that there is a rock, that there is a solid foundation. And as I was speaking to one of our listeners and staff members here on the college campus, he said, I think very vividly, “We’ve watched this house built on sand crumble to the ground. Now, what are we going to do? Are we going to build our new house on the rock, the firm foundation of Christ? Or are we going to try the sand thing again? Well, let’s go to the rock.”

Knapp: Does your life look like the World Trade Center coming down? The trigger word for me in all of that is fear. That’s the word: “Many will see and fear” (Psalm 40:3). And I see that word in so many places: “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom” (Psalm 111:10; Proverbs 9:10).

Piper: Right. And I just read in Isaiah when Christ is described. It says, “His delight shall be in the fear of the Lord” (Isaiah 11:3). If we find the covert in the cleft of the rock, where we’re safe in Jesus through the cross, the hurricane of God’s might ceases to be threatening and becomes gloriously satisfying. In the eye of the hurricane is a safe place to look at this mighty God. “Our God is a consuming fire,” Hebrews says (Hebrews 10:27). And yet, he doesn’t have to be frightening to the soul that is safe in Jesus.

And you mentioned to me on the phone yesterday, Chuck, about children and struggling. In fact, I heard on some station people talking about that this morning. I was just trying to find you this morning quick before I came over, and they were talking about children. And I just want to stress to parents that we expect too little of our children. They are capable of discerning and grasping some pretty weighty things about God, and they are probably willing to embrace them more quickly than many adults. When we tell them the story of the flood, we ought to tell them it’s about the judgment of God on humanity, and everybody drowned because of how horrible sin is.

“When you say, ‘What’s the purpose of God in these kinds of things?’ one answer is ‘Billions of purposes.’”

And when we tell them the story of the feeding of the five thousand, we shouldn’t tell them this is just about the sharing of a lunch. This is about a mighty Christ who takes five little loaves of your life and feeds five thousand people. He can do wonders with your little life. Give yourself to him. We need to get our kids into a big vision of God. And I’ve got a little 5-year-old girl. She’s sitting right outside that window there. This is a homeschool outing for her to see how radio works. And she said this morning, “Now a plane was stolen and hit a building?” And I said, “Do you know what happened? God allowed something very terrible to happen, so that he might bring about great good. Let’s pray that millions upon millions of divine, gracious, merciful purposes would happen in people’s lives. For example, Talitha, we’re praying right now. We’re praying. We wouldn’t have been praying like this before.”

I mean, when you say, “What’s the purpose of God in these kinds of things?” one answer is “Billions of purposes.” God is doing things that we can’t even imagine. And we just need to put our hands over our mouths, submit to him, and go back to the cross.

Greatest Thing in the World

I see the clock coming to an end there, and I need to go and you need to go, and I’m so glad Michael Smith is coming. But let me just end on the gospel. Can I?

Knapp: Yes, please.

Piper: I’ve been reveling in Romans for three years at Bethlehem and preached last Sunday: “There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus” (Romans 8:1). And I want the listeners to hear this and know it with all their hearts: the fact that there can be no condemnation is rooted not in our goodness, but in Christ’s sufficiency on the cross. The Son of God died for sinners. Everyone who comes to him can have absolute, total pardon and forgiveness. They can be clothed in a righteousness not their own (Philippians 3:9). When they’re faced with the last judgment or the accusations of Satan, they can say “No, there is over me no condemnation because I am in Christ Jesus.”

But here’s the note I think we need to strike this moment: That message goes out to every nation, every people group, every color, every ethnic group in the Middle East, in Saudi Arabia, in Afghanistan. And that same gospel saves every kind of person. So, I just plead with the church of Jesus Christ not to fall into the trap of starting to stereotype Arab people or Palestinian people or people of a certain color as having a certain bent. That is the essence of racism. It’s the essence of prejudice: lumping a group together, taking one lousy apple and making the whole barrel rotten. Oh, that the church would say, “Jesus Christ died for all, so that whoever will believe of any color may have eternal life and escape perishing.”

Whether they go down in a plane, whether they go up in smoke, Christians have a message in the midst of tragedy — they have a message at funerals, a message at weddings. And it is a glorious thing to be a Christian. I buried an old man when I came to the church 21 years ago, who looked up from the bed to me, and he smiled as he was dying. He said, “Pastor John, the greatest thing in the world is to be saved.” And we can offer that to every single person.

So bless you, brothers, as you keep offering the good news on this station. It was an honor to be here with you.