Desiring God Ministries presents the following message by
Dr. John Piper.
Let me recap where we've been and then
take you into this third and final, or
I might say third and fourth and final,
because really I'm going to give two lectures
in this morning's time, because as I got
to the end of number three, there was
a fourth one just begging, begging to be
delivered.
And so I'm going to outline it for
you at the end.
The aim of preaching is worship, which means
that all preaching should aim to wean the
human heart off of the breath of sin
and fill it with satisfaction in God.
I'm assuming when I say that, and I
say it like that, that the essence and
the heart of worship is being satisfied with
all that God is for us in Jesus.
And there's a premise behind that assumption.
And the premise is this, and it's the
most important sentence in my life and in
my theology and in my books.
And it's the one sentence that I would,
that you remember.
God is most glorified in you when you
are most satisfied in him.
Now, these are the two books in which
I defend and elaborate that statement.
That's why these books are written.
I dedicated this book to my sons.
I have four sons.
And to show you the importance of that
sentence in my life and in my family,
I want to just read the close of
the introduction here.
Finally, a word to my sons.
This book is dedicated to you, Carsten and
Benjamin and Abraham and Barnabas.
If there is any legacy I want to
leave you, it is not money or house
or land.
It is a vision of God, as great
and glorious a God as one could ever
see.
But more than that, I want to leave
you the legacy of a passion for this
God.
A passion far beyond what any human can
produce.
A passion for God flowing from the very
heart of God.
Never forget, sons, that God is most glorified
in you when you are most satisfied in
him.
But even more, this is my prayer for
you.
In God's time, may your satisfaction in him
be without measure as it becomes the very
pleasure of God in God.
I commend these books to you because they
are the very heartbeat of my life.
They are what I believe in, stand for,
live for, preach for, lecture for.
And if three lectures didn't make it plain,
I hope that the books will make it
plain.
Therefore, lecture number one was, the aim of
preaching is to bring people to be so
satisfied in God that they are weaned off
the breast of sin and that in being
satisfied with God, God is magnified in that
satisfaction and that is worship.
Day one.
Day two, actually lecture two, is the mission
or the matter of preaching.
That was the mission of preaching.
The matter of preaching in lecture two yesterday
was that if people are going to savor
God, they have to see it.
You can't savor what you don't see.
And therefore the preacher's task, the matter of
his preaching is to show the glories of
God.
That people might savor it, that is, be
satisfied in it and thus magnify God and
give him worship.
He must be seen concretely, specifically, compellingly as
he is revealed in his word and therefore
the matter of preaching is the exposition of
scripture.
I called preaching expository exaltation, which brings us
now to the third lecture.
The first, the mission of preaching, worship.
The second, the matter of preaching, the exposition
of the glories of God as they are
revealed in Holy Scripture.
And the third, can you give me the
third M?
Anyone want to venture?
Matter.
Yeah, you're bold.
That's great.
My sons wouldn't do it that loud.
The manner of preaching and be thinking about
what the fourth M might be that I
don't have time to do and will only
outline.
But now we must ask if that's the
mission and if that's the matter, what should
the manner be of the preaching itself?
And I have said it is exaltation.
Preaching is expository exaltation.
And when those two things come together, teaching
is translated into preaching.
That's my understanding of the difference between the
two.
Preaching should not only awaken in the people
a sense of God's glory, but it should
exhibit in the preacher a sense of God's
glory.
And one of the reasons I argued on
the first day that the people are more
engaged with God-centered lyric than they are
with God-centered preaching is that there's music
with the lyrics in the worship songs and
there's no music in the pulpit.
But there should be the music of the
preacher's heart, which I call worship or exaltation.
And if they can't hear the music, if
he's not singing over the truth he's preaching,
why should they care?
And many people don't care.
They come out of habit and duty and
legalistic strivings, but they're not set on fire
by the music in the preacher.
You don't have to forsake the centrality of
God, I argued.
You don't have to have the piano or
the synthesizer wooing people in the background while
you preach in order to engage people's emotions,
but there has to be a music in
here.
Now, to talk about that a little bit,
I want to direct your attention to a
text.
And so if you have a Bible, I
want you to open it to Philippians chapter
1.
Hope you have your Greek texts with you.
If you've got those, open that.
This is real simple Greek in verses 20
and 21.
And the main theological word here is going
to be gar.
And I had a great seminary teacher who
said, by all means, let gar be gar.
And that's one of the most important pedagogical
words I ever heard.
Let gar be gar.
And if you don't see the gars and
the uns and the who-toses in Scripture,
you will not be a theologian and you
will not be a preacher.
They are as important as the big words
on either side like life and death and
Christ and heaven.
That's not in the text either.
That's just a little personal conviction I have.
Philippians 1, 18 to 20.
What then?
Only that in every way, whether in pretense
or in truth, Christ is proclaimed.
And in this I rejoice.
You know the situation here.
He's in Rome.
He's in prison.
And the people that are glad he's in
prison, I can hardly fathom Christians feeling this
way, but it is possible that you can
be glad when a church across town fails.
Isn't that awful?
You can actually feel feelings of, we didn't
fail.
That's awful.
It happens now.
It was happening then.
They were magnifying his sufferings by saying, he's
in prison.
We're not in prison, so we will make
his suffering worse by gloating over our freedom
to preach.
Isn't that awful?
Well, Paul, in response to that, says, they're
preaching.
Isn't that great?
What a great, large heart.
And I will rejoice, for I know that
this shall turn out for my deliverance through
your prayers and the provision of the Spirit
of Jesus Christ, according, and here we're coming
to the main material, according to my earnest
expectation and hope that I shall not be
put to shame in anything, but that with
all boldness, Christ shall even now, as always,
be exalted, or you could translate it, magnified
in my body, whether by life or by
death.
Now, let's just stop there before we read
the next verse.
Ponder this for a minute.
What is his mission here?
His mission, his goal, his passion?
And it's clear.
Whether by life or whether by death, I
want my body, whether I lay it down
or whether it stands up, to magnify Christ,
that Christ be exalted, that I demonstrate that
Christ is great.
I want people to look at me dying
and look at me living and conclude Christ
is great.
Not Paul is great.
Christ is great.
That's his goal.
That's his passion in his life and in
his dying.
Now comes a verse connected with that all
-important little conjunction, which explains how it is
that Christ can be magnified in life and
in death.
And so notice the link up of live
with life and die with death between verses
20 and 21.
Now, I pointed out yesterday that you're supposed
to direct your people to the text.
What I'm asking you to do right now
is the way I preach every Sunday.
I tell people, look at verse 20.
Look at the word life.
Look at verse 21.
Look at the word live.
Look at the word death and look at
the word die.
Now, do you see the connection?
And they don't read Greek, and so I
don't fiddle with guards, but I look at
4, which means I do not preach from
the NIV.
This is touchy stuff here.
It happens to be there in this text.
The NIV is a paraphrase.
It's hard to preach from a paraphrase if
you preach the way I preach.
I preach from the NASB, it's NRPUs.
It's not the best thing because it's got
all these Vs and Vows in the Old
Testament.
Lockman tells me they're coming along with something
that finally gets into the 20th century.
But I just put in a little parenthesis
here that if you care about expository preaching,
and I know I'm stepping on toes here
because some of you probably worked on the
NIV.
If you care about expository preaching, you will
have misgivings about it because they leave out
so many precious words.
It's serious.
Everything's serious.
The NIV leaves out and paraphrases and decides
so many exegetical issues for you that you
have a hard time doing careful exegetical preaching.
Close parenthesis.
Notice now the connection between verses 20 and
21.
It's a connection that accounts for how you
magnify Christ in your living and in your
dying.
The answer it gives is that you magnify
Christ by treasuring Christ.
Verse 20 says, I hope to magnify Him
whether by life or death, for to me
to live is Christ and to die is
gain.
Gain, treasure, profit.
Do you see the logical connection between those
two verses?
In verse 20, he says that his expectation
and hope is to show that Christ is
great, to magnify Christ, to glorify Christ, which
is what preaching is all about.
Then verse 21 shows how that happens.
First, let's talk about death.
How does it happen through death?
How do you magnify Christ by your dying?
He says, the way you do it is
to die in such a way that it
is gain.
That you experience death as gain.
My desire is to depart.
Verse 23 explains this.
My desire is to depart and be with
Christ.
That's why it's gain.
So why is it gain?
Death is gain because it's more of Jesus.
Death is gain because it's more of Jesus,
which means Jesus is the treasure.
Jesus is the gain.
Jesus is the profit.
Therefore, the logical connection, reading back through the
4 up to verse 20, is that Christ
is magnified in my dying, when in my
dying I manifest that I'm gaining.
Prizing is the key to praising.
If you don't prize Him manifestly in your
dying, so that when you die and everything
you love is taken away from you, you
experience it as gain, He's not magnified unless
you do it that way.
But if you die in such a way
that when everything goes, wife goes, children go,
health goes, money goes, preaching goes, church goes,
books go, computer goes, everything goes, the hope
for retirement goes, and you count it gain,
there's only one conclusion.
Christ is great.
He's magnified.
And so what I'm doing right now is
giving you a textual foundation for the sentence
God is most magnified or glorified in you
when you are most satisfied in Him.
Does that make sense?
Do you hear where I'm moving?
I'm giving you a textual basis for believing
that sentence by showing you the logic of
the gar between 20 and 21 and the
link up of die and dying.
Let's look at living.
Same thing.
We magnify Christ.
I say I want to magnify Christ if
I live in my body.
And then the verse says for me to
live is Christ.
Now, what does that mean?
Is, is, is.
For me to live is Christ.
How do you unpack that?
If you were preaching on this, where would
you turn?
If you just wanted to stay with those
words and unpack that and use this book,
where would you go?
Here's where I went.
Three, eight, three, verse eight.
I think this is his unpacking because the
very word gain is used here.
That's used in verse 21 with regard to
death.
And so I think the life part is
also being unpacked.
Three, eight, I count all things as loss.
He's talking about his life now while he's
still alive.
I count all things as loss in view
of the surpassing value, treasure, prize of knowing
while I live.
Christ Jesus, my Lord, for whom I have
suffered the loss of all things and count
them as rubbish that I may.
Here it is again.
Gain, profit from, get a treasure called Christ.
So when he says, I want to magnify
Christ in my living for me to live
is Christ unpacked by three, eight, meaning while
I live, nothing means anything to me but
Jesus.
The only conclusion you can draw if you
watch a lifestyle like that and say, wow,
he doesn't look like he cares about money.
He doesn't look like he cares about status.
He doesn't look like he cares about his
family as the ultimate issue.
All he seems to care about is the
magnificence of gaining Christ.
So Christ must be greater.
He's crazy.
That's the way you magnify him in your
living.
The common denominator between living and dying is
that Christ is the all satisfying treasure in
both.
And that's the way verse 20 shows how
to magnify him in verse, I mean, verse
21 shows how to magnify him in verse
20.
Christ will be exalted and magnified in our
living and our dying when Christ is our
treasure.
Prizing Christ is the key to praising Christ.
The music, here we are, the music in
the heart of the preacher is the pride
he feels in knowing Jesus.
Can the people see when you stand before
them to preach the glories of Christ that
you have prized him?
That he is all to you, that you
have let goods and kindred go, that you
count everything as rubbish.
You count your house as rubbish.
You count your neighborhood as rubbish.
You count your family as rubbish.
You count your salary as rubbish.
That you don't need to make the budget
to exalt.
You don't need to have a perfect small
group system to exalt.
You don't need to have a...
well, you fill in the blank.
Whatever you're supposed to have today to be
happy in the ministry.
You people need to see that you at
least are one person in the world whose
heart is so linked up with an unshakable
reality.
And an unstoppable triumph and an immeasurable treasure
that when the church goes up and the
church goes down and the people come in
and the people go out, you're a rock.
Because Jesus never changes.
Jesus is never bearish.
The market never goes down with Jesus.
Ever.
So why should you go down?
Unless your heart is really in love with
other things.
And that's where you're getting your stokes and
your stability.
There is a song that you can play
without a piano when you preach and you
need to play it.
It's called Prizing Jesus.
Loving Jesus.
Cherishing Jesus.
Treasuring Jesus.
The ministry therefore of preaching with all the
pain and all the pressure is a great
and happy work.
It's a great and happy work.
J.A. Alexander.
James Alexander.
James A...
J.W. Alexander.
Get it right.
One of these old Princeton preachers from 150
years ago.
Wrote a book called Thoughts on Preaching.
Banner of Truth publishes.
I recommend it to you.
He said, there is happiness in preaching.
The declaration of what one believes and the
praise of what one loves always gives delight.
And what but this is the minister's work.
That's good.
That's what I'm trying to say in this
third talk.
The declaration of what one believes, exposition.
And the praise of what one loves, exultation.
Preaching is expository exultation.
And if you don't come to exult in
what you're preaching, people will know it and
they won't care either.
You're doing your job, they'll even do their
job.
And there'll be no fire.
Now, John Owen.
I got into him about a year ago
on preaching.
And just immersed myself in his writings for
months.
And I want to draw things to a
close in this third message by showing you
that Owen knew these things.
And he is a great model of this
third point of expository exultation.
He warns us, and I warn you now,
that we preachers are very prone to preach
without penetrating into the things we say.
To the reality, to the thing, to the
reality.
Not just what's written there, not just the
gar.
Don't play with gars and think that you
have made a clever case for some logic
and go home and feel good about the
sermon.
If the reality of savoring Christ in life
and death is not tasted by the preacher,
you haven't preached yet.
And he says that words came easy for
him.
And when you've preached ten years or so,
words start to come easy.
They start to come easy.
And you can preach about mystery without feeling
awe.
And you can preach about purity without being
pure.
And you can preach about zeal without any
passion.
And you can preach about holiness without trembling.
And you can preach about sin without conviction
and sorrow.
And you can preach about heaven without eagerness.
And you can preach about hell without any
horror.
And there's an awful deadness that can come
into your life and preaching is depleted of
its power.
And therefore Owen said that he strove against
this inauthenticity with certain strategies in his preparation.
And I want to read you some of
his strategies to help you.
He said, I hold myself bound in conscience
and in honor, not even to imagine that
I have attained a proper knowledge of any
one article of truth, much less to preach
it unless through the Holy Spirit I have
had such a taste of it in its
spiritual sense that I may be able from
the heart to say with the psalmist, I
believe and therefore I spoke.
Oh, I commend that to you.
Don't enter the pulpit until you taste what
you are about to proclaim.
He wrote this great exposition of Psalm 130,
320 pages on eight verses.
And his biographer said, when Owen laid open
the book of God, he laid open the
same time the book of his own heart
in his own history.
It is rich in golden thoughts and instinct
with the living experience of one who spake
what he know and testified what he had
seen.
Here's the way Owen himself describes this.
A man preaches that sermon only well unto
others, which he preaches, which preaches itself in
his own soul.
And he that does not feed on and
thrive in the digestion of the food which
he provides for others will scarce make it
savory unto them.
Yea, he knows not but that the food
he hath provided may be poison unless he
have really tasted it himself.
If the word do not dwell with power
in us, it will not pass with power
from us.
That's what I'm trying to get across.
He said it well.
He was a man whose life was laden
with controversy, and he was a busy man.
He was a political man and a military
man and an ecclesiastical man and a theological
man.
Richard Baxter called him the great doer.
And if you knew that he produced these
17 volumes of theology that Roger Nicole says
is the best theology in the English language,
even, I don't believe it, better than Jonathan
Edwards.
How in the world could he be such
a busy man?
How did he sustain himself?
We pastors today, we think we're busy.
We think we're busy.
Well, when we write 17 volumes, and we
are the counselor for Cromwell, and when we
go on military expeditions to Ireland, and when
we become the pope of the independent movement,
and when we pastor a local church, and
when we have 11 children who die before
we die, then we can complain in the
20th century.
We are not that unusual.
How did he do it?
In his book called Mystery of the Gospel
Vindicated, he said, when the heart is cast
indeed into the mold of the doctrine that
the mind embraces, when the evidence and necessity
of the truth abides in us, when not
the sense of the words only in our
heads, but the sense of the thing abides
in our hearts, when we have communion with
God in the doctrine we contend for, then
shall we be garrisoned by the grace of
God against all the assaults of men.
So the key phrase in that to me
is, when we have communion with God in
the doctrine we contend for, do you commune
with the living God in every doctrine you
expound?
Are you dissatisfied with exposition that is not
living communion with God in the study of
it and the delivery of it?
So that in the very moment that you
commend it and defend it, you're communing with
the glory of it in the living God.
He ended his life at 77 in 1683,
and he was working on a book called
Meditations on the Glory of Christ.
The last thing he chose to write, Meditations
on the Glory of Christ.
And he had a friend named William Payne
who was helping him edit, he was very
old and very sick, and he said one
day, I think just a few days before
he died, Oh brother Payne, the long wished
for day has come at last, in which
I shall see the glory in another manner
than I have ever done or was capable
of doing in this world.
In other words, to die is gained.
And yet, because he saw so much glory
now, now, he is known today as a
holy man.
And his preaching is inflaming souls.
300 years later.
Why?
Because he communed with God in the doctrine
that he expounded.
He saw and experienced the glory of Christ
before he preached it.
So his preaching was real because the mission
was worship, and the matter was the glory
of God revealed in scripture, and the manner
was prizing Christ and exulting in him.
Now, that's the end of lecture number three.
I'm probably supposed to be done now, but
I'm going to outline lecture number four.
All right, fast.
The third M begged, just begged, I got
to this point, I'm sorry about this.
I know you're set up for three lectures.
But I got to this point, and I
had mission, I had matter, and I had
manner, and I knew that in the question
and answer time, the questions would be, How?
How do you become this kind of person?
Means is the fourth M.
The means of preaching.
So I'm going to give you the fourth
lecture in outline form in five minutes.
The means of being this kind of preacher,
number one, you must be born again.
And I used to take that for granted.
I think the pulpits are filled with unborn
again preachers.
I don't, I didn't used to think that.
Now I think it.
I'm becoming more skeptical and more pessimistic.
When I find that I do not resonate
at big city pastoral gatherings, and when I
speak of spiritual things and there's this blank
space and no resonance, I don't make any
judgments, finally, about any individual.
But Jesus said, unless one is born again,
he cannot see the kingdom of God.
If there is no life in the pulpit,
you need to ask, is there life in
the soul?
Number two, turn off the television.
It isn't necessary for relevance.
It is a deadly place to rest the
mind.
And you're least capable of critical interaction.
It's pervasive banality, sexual innuendo, and God-ignoring
values have no ennobling effects upon the human
soul.
It kills the spirit.
It drives away God.
It quenches prayer.
It blanks out the Bible.
It cheapens the soul.
It destroys spiritual power.
It defiles almost everything.
I have taught and preached for 20 years,
have never had a television, and nobody has
said I'm irrelevant.
Let me have an illustration just to follow,
and I risk personal testimony here at the
cost of exalting my own self-control or
whatever, but I'll do it anyway.
I'll take the risk.
You can say whatever you want.
I went to Brazil two weeks ago.
In the hotel, there's a TV in my
room.
In the car, driving to the hotel, we're
talking about billboards and culture and we're talking
about television and its influences in America, and
the man beside me said, yeah, it's probably
worse here because the nudity, even in the
advertisements, is really gross.
10,000 miles away from your wife, television
in your bedroom, and you're already told you
could catch it in the ads.
I never turned it on.
I never touched it.
And I would have liked to have seen
what Brazilian television looks like, and I think
I was free in Christ to do that,
okay?
I'm free to do that.
It's not a legalistic thing.
I never touched it.
One reason, I wanted power.
I wanted power in those 13 messages I
had to give.
And I didn't touch the TV over in
that room at E7 either, because I wanted
power in this room.
And I know that one single glimpse can
hold me for days and kill me.
And it'll kill you, and some of you
are dead because of it.
Some of you live on it.
Some of you are so broken and tired
and despairing of your future, you spouse on
the TV every night.
Don't do that.
This preacher says, if you want power in
the pulpit, turn it off.
Number three, meditate on the Word of God
day and night.
Paul said, don't get drunk with wine.
He should have said drunk, but he guarded
his language.
He said, don't get drunk with wine, but
be filled.
He meant drunk.
Be filled with the Holy Spirit.
And so if you ask, how do you
get filled with the Spirit in the pulpit?
The answer is the same way you get
drunk with wine.
You drink a lot of it.
One sip won't make you drunk.
One sip of the Spirit and then TV
won't make you drunk.
If you want to be drunk with the
Spirit, you drink a lot of it.
And then you have to ask, well, how
do you drink the Spirit?
It's pretty clear.
1 Corinthians 2.14. It's by welcoming the
things of the Spirit.
Or Romans 8.5. It's by setting the
mind on the things of the Spirit.
What are the things of the Spirit?
It's clear in Paul's language what the things
of the Spirit are in the context.
It's the Word taught by the Spirit.
Very simple.
If you want to be filled with the
Holy Spirit, read 52 chapters of the Bible
without stopping.
I got that from Wesley Duell in his
book on prayer.
He said, sometimes I'm so saturated with the
world, I have to go away for a
prayer retreat.
And before I can even commune with God,
I had to read 50 chapters of the
Bible before I was disconnected from the world
and in tune with God.
I mean, we are so saturated with the
world, we cannot even talk about what it
means to be filled with the Holy Spirit.
To be filled with the Spirit, be filled
day and night by meditating on the Word
of God.
Take the Word of God and put it
like a lozenge.
Like one of these, I got this awful
throat problem, so I went down there and
I charged to the school.
Believe it or not, I charged this to
the school.
Hall's Cough Drop.
I'm sorry, Dean Hunter, I used your card.
I confess publicly, I used your card, not
for breakfast, but for these Hall's Cough Drops.
Take a word lozenge, take a word lozenge
every day and put it on the tongue
of your soul and let it dissolve all
day long down into your soul.
Because if you don't, you don't even have
to have a TV.
The billboards will fill you.
They'll put the lozenge there and the little
radio thing will put a lozenge there and
a grousing church member will put a lozenge
there and you can become real bitter before
the day is over and real worldly.
Number four, plead with God unceasingly for passions
that match His reality.
When you read that Bible, ask yourself this
question.
Is there an emotional response in my soul,
in my spirit, that accords with this reality?
If it's hell, am I trembling?
Am I terrified?
If it's heaven, am I flying?
Am I full of gladness?
If it's the crucifixion, am I broken with
love and penitence?
You name it.
Is there an appropriate response here in my
soul to this reality?
And if there isn't, don't say, oh, emotions
don't matter.
They're just the caboose on the end of
the train and they're insignificant.
And so I'll just do my duty and
I will use my will and I will
do what pastors are supposed to do.
Forget that.
If those emotions aren't there, you get on
your face and repent for hardness of heart.
Repent for hardness of heart.
You think emotions don't matter?
Read your Bible.
They are commended everywhere.
Fear and joy and hope and gratitude and
delight and tenderness are commended.
They're not optional.
And if you don't have them, you're hard.
And you need to repent and cry, oh,
God!
I read it this morning.
It was just there.
I'm reading Ezekiel from my devotions.
And I got to chapter 11, verse 19,
and this glorious new covenant promise, I will
take out of you the heart of stone
and I will give you a heart of
flesh and you'll walk in My statutes and
obey Me.
I cry that every day.
A renewed softening of my new heart that
so easily begins to crest over and the
capacities for emotions that are appropriate to truth.
And we're not talking about worked up emotionalism.
We're talking about just if you're on hell,
is there a hell kind of emotion?
If you're on heaven, is there a heaven
kind of emotion?
If you're on the crucifixion, a crucifixion kind
of emotion.
If you're on adultery and fornication, is there
a trembling kind of fleet emotion?
If you don't feel those things, it may
be that you're hard or it may be
you should never be in the ministry.
There are personality types that should not be
preachers.
I don't know if you agree with that
here in the practical theology department, but there
are personality types that are so incapable of
translating what they feel in here, out here,
they shouldn't preach.
They shouldn't.
And there are perhaps too many of them
in the pulpit.
Don't conclude from that little sentence that you
gotta have my personality.
Jonathan Evers never did this kind of stuff.
He never waved his arms.
His left elbow was on a cushion.
His manuscript, four by six inches, was in
his hand.
And he read it.
And he turned New England upside down.
How?
Intensity.
You don't have to have my kind.
You have to have your kind.
It has to be real, manifest, discernible to
your people that the song is being sung
inside.
Number five, linger in the presence of God
besotted saints.
Hebrews 13.7 Remember those who led you,
who spoke to you the word of God,
considering the result of their conduct and imitate
their faith, which is a biblical mandate for
heroes.
Heroes.
Find a God-saturated hero.
Most of them are dead.
Not good to choose living ones.
Choose dead ones.
Find them and live with them.
Live with them.
Immerse your life in John Owen.
Immerse your life in Charles Spurgeon.
Immerse your life in Jonathan Edwards, John Calvin,
Martin Luther, John Wesley.
Wesleyan though he be.
Immerse.
Those old-fashioned Armenians were different.
They cared about God.
So many pastors read more Barna, more Schaller,
more Drucker.
You can't preach Barna, Schaller and Drucker.
It won't cut it.
I have to be careful there because it's
just my own personal weakness that I get
dead reading those people.
And I commend to you the possibility that
there might be more life and more God
and more power and more life-changing vision
in John Owen and Jonathan Edwards and Charles
Spurgeon than in Barna, Drucker and Schaller.
You judge for yourselves who the writers are
who are saturated with God and live with
them.
Finally, I'm done.
Number six.
Get up.
Leave your study.
Go to a hard place.
Take a risk for the kingdom and prove
to your own soul at the airport or
the red light district or at Andrew House
where all the people who are mentally disturbed
live or in Cabrini-Green.
Go to a hard place and prove to
your own soul that Jesus is more valuable
than life.
Prove it.
Because if you don't get up and leave
and not just think about it, talk about
it, read about it, pray about it, meditate
on it and act on it, you won't
even know if you're real.
You won't even know.
And in the dark night, Satan will come
to you and he'll say, you talk big.
You talk big.
You're a chicken.
You wouldn't risk your house.
You wouldn't risk your wife.
You wouldn't risk your life.
You wouldn't risk your health.
You wouldn't risk disposition to anything.
You are fake.
That's what Satan would say.
He might be right.
He's usually not.
He doesn't usually tell the truth.
He's a liar.
But you need to get ready and the
best readiness is authenticity.
And so I commend to you, make the
mission of your preaching worship.
Make the matter of your preaching the glories
of God manifest in Scripture.
Make the manner of your preaching an authentic
exaltation in Him.
And make the means of your preaching an
engagement with the Word and prayer protected from
the evil influences of a contaminating world.
Oh, Father in Heaven, I commend these brothers
and sisters to you for your blessing.
And I ask that if I have, in
the heat of my own emotion here, said
anything ill-advised or perhaps overstated something, you
give them the wisdom to recognize that and
to take what is true and to live
it and seek you in it.
I just pray that the ripple effect now
in these lives and in their churches would
be so wonderful that you would be honored,
that your son, Father, would be exalted, that
your spirit would be active and powerful, that
your word would be elevated.
I commend these messages into your care.
We ask that you would take them like
little loaves and fishes and make them to
feed far more than these, but through them,
5,000, 10,000, in Jesus' name.
Amen.
This concludes Dr. Piper's message.
For information on other resources produced by Desiring
God Ministries, contact us at the address or
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