if you die tonight are you going to heaven?

John Piper on happiness, Christianity in America and fasting from preaching

11:39pm Tuesday, 6th September 2011  

John Piper gives a stunningly honest interview to John Sandeman.

Eternity: At the Lausanne Conference you made a statement that went roughly “God is against all suffering, particularly eternal suffering”. Do you think you were heard by that conference or were you a bit of a prophet in the wilderness?

Piper: Let me say it precisely: I thought for two or three hours about that sentence. I created that sentence the afternoon before I spoke it. It wasn’t in my manuscript when I got there. And I knew that you can’t say “God is against all suffering” because he believes in hell. What I said was “Christians care about all suffering, especially eternal suffering” and the reason was to strike in both directions. Anti-social action people are going to be annoyed by “care about all suffering”, and the liberals who don’t want to talk about hell are going to be annoyed by “especially eternal suffering”.

I meant to go after both.

And the answer to your question is: I was heard by lots of people. Because there was a lot of buzz after which got back to me. Some tables were very upset—you had six to eight people at each table with different nations at each table. Some loved it. And since then there has been a lot of conversation.

And the leaders of the conference were very thankful for that sentence. Some said with deep affection, “That captured what we wanted to say”.

So I think it is a mixed answer. They heard with their ears. But whether it sunk in and they care, and will shape ministries that way, time will tell.

I want to ask you a general question about happiness. You ask people to desire God (desiringgod.org), and you call yourself a “Christian hedonist”. Are you a happy man?

That is a good question. And the answer is: not exactly as a I should be. And not exactly as I want to be.  But I think, [I am] more content in God now than before.

That is, I hope there is growth. When I think happiness I think of restfulness in God that is compatible with pain and sorrow. Second Corinthians 6:10 is like a banner that flies over our church and my life “sorrowful yet always rejoicing”. “Weep with those who weep. Rejoice with those who rejoice.”

Christians are very, very tearful people, because there is so much pain in the world. But Christians “rejoice always and again I say rejoice”.

We have the capacity in our most mature state, and in our best moments, to be simultaneously sorrowful about sin in our lives and others; and happy because God has loved us and God is all satisfying.

So I think the … answer would be to say Christ has given me the fruit of joy and it is an embattled fruit like all of them. I have to fight for joy, daily.

I think I am wired to be a melancholy person. I think I get up in the morning and feel an unaccountable gloominess and have to go to the word and remind myself, and pray, that God has done great things for me, has made great promises to me.

And I revert to certain ones over and over again to strengthen my hand.

Almost always he gives me the capacity to get up off my knees and then my bucket leaks through the day and I have to fight for it again.

Are you a spokesman for Christian joy?

Yes. A spokesman. (Laughs). Not the spokesman. I consider it my life calling to magnify the glory of God.

I want my life to count for making God to look great.  And my theological conviction is  that God is made to look great in lives when we are profoundly happy in him. So happy in him that we can lay down our lives in the hardest places of the world for his glory.

So I want to be a spokesman for that kind of joy. The kind of joy that is rooted in right views of God, and because it is satisfied in God makes much of God.

Should Christians therefore be the happy person in their workplace?

They should strive to be.

But they should not define happiness as the kind of breezy, light, superficial, smiley-faced, praise-God-anyhow, that gives the impression to others that they don’t know suffering, and that they are hypocritical and superficial.

That is the danger I fear when you ask it, should they be a happy person.

I would want to say they should be the person who looked like they maintain a sweet contented disposition when the stock market is high—and when it is low. When the hurricane is blowing the city away or hasn’t blown the city away. When their health is good, and when their health is bad.

The beautiful thing in the marketplace would be a person whose profound contentedness in God doesn’t spike and plummet with circumstances. That is what will testify to the rock-solid reality of God as their joy.

Do you think we are very good at that?

No. I don’t think anybody is good at that. I don’t think we will be good at that until Jesus comes. I think we will always be sinners.  There’s this indwelling reality- it's sin.

I think there are remarkable saints. I knew one in Roland Erickson. Roland could not compute with my battle with discouragement. He just said: “I don’t think I have ever been discouraged in my whole life”. And he was not a superficial man.

He was on the call committee when I came to church. He brought me to Bethlehem Baptist Church. He was endlessly hope-filled. Beautiful.

I can think of others.  I think Mark Dever [a friend of Piper's, Senior pastor of Capitol Hill Baptist, Washington], he probably struggles, but there is something about Mark’s personality that is endlessly hope-giving. You are around him and he is looking on the hopeful side; he is just good for me. I like to be around people like that. I’d like to be a person like that.

In answer to your question I don’t think there are many people like that.

You have just come from a week including the Oxygen conference which drew thousands of pastors. You had an even bigger crowd in the Sydney Entertainment Centre. So a lot of people have asked me to ask you: how do you stay humble?

They asked me that at Oxygen I think. And my answer was:

First, God brings things into my life that keeps me and others from being too impressed. He does not let me get very far before something really painful happens—whether its is with my children or with my marriage or with the ministry. And I feel like a failure. Or I feel discouraged.

And therefore you feel so desperate because this is not working in your life, this is not working in your life and this is not working … so what’s to get impressed about?

All I can do is go to God in prayer. So my first answer is it's not so much what I do to keep myself humble: God takes steps to keep me humble.

The second thing I would say is: at the centre of our relationships is the cross of Christ. And the cross says to me this is how bad you are Piper: if you had to be died for, if the Son of God had to be crucified in a gruesome way for you to be adopted into the family of God, you don’t even have a clue how bad your sin is.

The cross says other things. But that it says loud and clear.

That you are so sinful it took this to save you.

The third thing I would say is I am Reformed, I am a Calvinist, which means I believe God chose me, totally unconditionally. Meaning that he did not find anything in me, anything, attractive. His choice of me was owing entirely to his sovereign grace and mercy.

And therefore when reformed people become arrogant and use their doctrines to beat others up or exult themselves, they are contradicting what they believe. Right down the line I believe the doctrines of grace are humbling doctrines.

Last thing I would say is I ask God, I say: “Protect me. Protect me from notoriety. Protect me from the pleasures of being liked by people.”

I pray it before I preach. I pray it after I preach. I pray it at night.

There were 10,000 people for me and John Lennox and the worship team and I pray: “protect me, guard me”.

I pray this often. I say to people I think we should pray this: “Do whatever you must do to keep me humble. And if don’t see any way, take me out. Take me out before I mess this up. Just kill me and take me home before you let me drift into some kind of arrogance that would make me un-useful in your hands.”

I don’t think I have ever heard of a preacher fasting from preaching, before. You took eight months off last year. Can you tell me what were the main lesson you learned from not being a preacher for eight months?

I didn’t preach, I didn’t write for books, I did not blog, I did not tweet: everything in terms of public productivity I cut off.

I did not cut off reading. I read. I hung out with my wife and my children. I went to worship at another church besides my own. That was the gist of it.

It was a reality check for my soul, a reality check for my ministry, a reality check for my marriage and a reality check for my wider family—I have five kids four of them married with five grandchildren.

And in everyone of those areas I wanted to step back and ask: “Am I blind to anything?” with regard to my soul, my ministry and my family.

The big answer is I feel that 75% of my goals were reached.

There is too much sorrow in those relationships for me to be specific about why I can only say 75%. But I would say that our marriage was intensely focused on with some needed counselling help … “How do you feel about the pace and the life?” So there was a fresh level of honesty and conversation. And a re-thinking of priorities: how often will she (Mrs Piper) travel with me, and how often will we do off-site things. We have to re-adjust life a little bit.

I loved worshipping without preaching, which was a sweet re-affirmation of my faith to me. I think the danger for leaders is that over the decades we can love leading people to Jesus more than we love Jesus.

So to swear off that and to sit with the congregation and another person is preaching and another person is leading, and another person is welcoming and I am sitting there. Is that okay? And to find myself enjoying him in that moment was re-affirming—gratifying—to me.

Maybe there is one other thing I can say with regard to that is there are people around me who worry that I am a workaholic.

So I was seriously considering what is that—what is the “holic” side of it. I came away a little bit concerned that maybe in our day some people are prioritising the family and pace above faithfulness.

[They are] so constantly stressing family, so constantly stressing making a time for yourself, that the historic understanding of ministry in the Bible and outside, of being a life of sacrifice can be lost.

It was good for me in that regard too. To just say: “I am not sure that a hard, pressing longing to accomplish much for God is a bad thing”; as long as you are not leading to a divorce. Or making your kids hate the ministry.

One last question. In the sweep of history what do you think this period will be known as, in terms of God’s work in the world?

Well, whether it will be known for the little reformed resurgence is a totally opened question. Because it is so small on the global scale. It might turn into something big, but what is big is the global south.

History books are already being written by Phillip Jenkins, Mark Noll and others about what is happening in South America, Asia and Africa—namely that in the last century the centre of Christianity has moved from Europe to the south and to the East. From a tiny smattering of Christians in Africa in 1900 to fifty per cent [of Africa’s population] professing Christians in 2000.

These changes are simply stunning.

There is no doubt in my mind that in a century from now that will be a prominent [statistic], and accompanying it on the negative side in these decades will be the secularisation of the west—in Europe, and maybe Australia, the diminishing of Christian faith.

In America, interestingly, you have to be careful what you do with statistics. The Barna group [has claimed to show a decide in Christianity].  But there are people who are showing that the Barna group gets it wrong over and over. Because they skew their interviews with questions that get answers that aren’t quite right.

America has held steady for 50 years on church attendance. Unheard of. It contradict’s everybody’s prediction that the secularisation of Europe is going to come [to America] a decade later, and we would become an increasingly irreligious people.

It hasn’t proved the case yet.

I don’t know where it is going to go but in general in the last 50 years has resulted in a tremendous loss of Christian influence in Europe while it rises in the global south.

 

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