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:

1. Love God will all your heart and soul and mind and strength inthe presence of other people. It is contagious.
2. Love other people from the power of God's grace. That is, showthem the beauty of Christ through his love for them in the way youlove them.
3. Tell stories about those who were ravished by the beauty andglory of God. It seems that true narratives of peoples' experiencewith the worth of God are very awakening.
4. Describe God's value—his treasure—in lavishterms.
5. Teach the people how to pray for the transformation of theirown hearts, that is, teach them how to pray with the psalmists,"Incline my heart to Thy testimonies and not to getting gain."
6. Model for the people extended meditation and reflection on theword of God. Most people do not know how to take a word or phraseor sentence of scripture, commit it to memory and roll it overagain and again in their mind and look at it from different sidesand ask many questions about it and apply it to different aspectsof their life and think of analogies of it in their mind. But it'sprecisely in this cogitating that the juices in the fruit begin toflow down and awaken the taste buds of the soul.
7. Show the people how to find specific, particular promises inthe Bible to savor. When Paul says in Romans 15:13, "May the God ofhope fill you with joy and peace in believing . . .", he ispointing out that joy and peace rise up as we trust in God'sprecious and very great promises. So people need to do morespecific searching for promises and then hold them in their mindsand dwell on them as they go through the day.
8. Pray for your people that their hearts would be softened andmade tender and more susceptible to the beauty of Christ.
9. Help your people to turn off the television. Few things in ourculture are more spiritually numbing than the television. Even theso-called "good" shows are by and large banal and low-minded andanything but cultivating of a rich, deep capacity to enjoy God. Andwhen you add to that the barrage of suggestive advertisements thataccompany virtually every program, I do not wonder why so many ofour professing Christians are spiritually incapable of experiencinghigh thoughts and deep emotions.
10. Point the people to God-centered biography. The struggles andthe triumphs of Christians who have known the glory and greatnessof God are very engaging and awakening.
11. Show the people how to transpose their joys in natural thingsinto joy in God. Here's what I mean. Even the most joyless personseems to have one or two things in their lives that make themhappy. It might be their family. It might be the night sky in thenorth woods. It might be fishing. Help them to make atransposition, that is, to take the line of music called "joy" intheir soul and transpose it up from the natural to the supernaturalby an act of faith in God as the one who created the family or thenight sky or the fishing. Help them see that all the things thatare truly delightful in this world, which awaken pleasures in theirhearts, are gifts of God and are reflections of his character andhis goodness. If they are capable of delighting in natural things,then by the grace of the Holy Spirit they may be capable oftransposing those very joys into a higher key and thus discoveringjoy in God.
12. Call the people for confession and renunciation of plaguingsins that make them feel inauthentic and block true affection forGod.
13. Teach them about the necessity and value of suffering in theChristian life and how it is not worth comparing to the glory to berevealed.

Those are some of the things that might help your people.What I find is that the most helpful things are simply to attendto your own soul and what it is that kindles delight for God in youand then share that with others.Blessings on you as you perform the high task of mid-wifery inbringing joy in God to birth in your congregation.