John Piper, Advice to Pastors: How to Help Your People Be More Satisfied in God
Here’s some extremely helpful advice that John Piper gave to pastors in February 1996:
- Love God will all your heart and soul and mind and strength in
the presence of other people. It is contagious. - Love other people from the power of God’s grace. That is, show
them the beauty of Christ through his love for them in the way you
love them. - Tell stories about those who were ravished by the beauty and
glory of God. It seems that true narratives of peoples’ experience
with the worth of God are very awakening. - Describe God’s value—his treasure—in lavish
terms. - Teach the people how to pray for the transformation of their
own hearts, that is, teach them how to pray with the psalmists,
“Incline my heart to Thy testimonies and not to getting gain.” - Model for the people extended meditation and reflection on the
word of God. Most people do not know how to take a word or phrase
or sentence of scripture, commit it to memory and roll it over
again and again in their mind and look at it from different sides
and ask many questions about it and apply it to different aspects
of their life and think of analogies of it in their mind. But it’s
precisely in this cogitating that the juices in the fruit begin to
flow down and awaken the taste buds of the soul. - Show the people how to find specific, particular promises in
the Bible to savor. When Paul says in Romans 15:13, “May the God of
hope fill you with joy and peace in believing . . .”, he is
pointing out that joy and peace rise up as we trust in God’s
precious and very great promises. So people need to do more
specific searching for promises and then hold them in their minds
and dwell on them as they go through the day. - Pray for your people that their hearts would be softened and
made tender and more susceptible to the beauty of Christ. - Help your people to turn off the television. Few things in our
culture are more spiritually numbing than the television. Even the
so-called “good” shows are by and large banal and low-minded and
anything but cultivating of a rich, deep capacity to enjoy God. And
when you add to that the barrage of suggestive advertisements that
accompany virtually every program, I do not wonder why so many of
our professing Christians are spiritually incapable of experiencing
high thoughts and deep emotions. - Point the people to God-centered biography. The struggles and
the triumphs of Christians who have known the glory and greatness
of God are very engaging and awakening. - Show the people how to transpose their joys in natural things
into joy in God. Here’s what I mean. Even the most joyless person
seems to have one or two things in their lives that make them
happy. It might be their family. It might be the night sky in the
north woods. It might be fishing. Help them to make a
transposition, that is, to take the line of music called “joy” in
their soul and transpose it up from the natural to the supernatural
by an act of faith in God as the one who created the family or the
night sky or the fishing. Help them see that all the things that
are truly delightful in this world, which awaken pleasures in their
hearts, are gifts of God and are reflections of his character and
his goodness. If they are capable of delighting in natural things,
then by the grace of the Holy Spirit they may be capable of
transposing those very joys into a higher key and thus discovering
joy in God. - Call the people for confession and renunciation of plaguing
sins that make them feel inauthentic and block true affection for
God. - Teach them about the necessity and value of suffering in the
Christian life and how it is not worth comparing to the glory to be
revealed.
Those are some of the things that might help your people.
What I find is that the most helpful things are simply to attend
to your own soul and what it is that kindles delight for God in you
and then share that with others.
Blessings on you as you perform the high task of mid-wifery in
bringing joy in God to birth in your congregation.
