“We’ve had some wonderful conversations in my adult years where they’ve looked back and said, ‘You know, we wish we had understood some different things and done things differently,’” Piper answered, “which is so encouraging to me because it means they’re continuing to have tender hearts and to grow as parents.”
He does believe that his parents’ generation had a “one-size-fits-all” approach to parenting, although anyone can reflect on the past and come up with ways they could have made better choices.
“They have the firm conviction, and I don’t think they’re wrong, that if you plant the seeds of God’s Word, there is no telling how the Holy Spirit can grow those things,” Piper pointed out.
So if his parents observed him or his siblings having “a bad attitude or being frustrated, I think they generally looked at it and said, ‘Yeah, but the greater good here is to implant God’s Word and see what grows down the road.’ And I don’t think they were wrong.”
Their approach “created some obstacles in my relationship with Scripture that then I had to work through,” said Piper, but he also now has “a mental access to Scripture that I think I wouldn’t have otherwise had because of what my parents invested in me.”
Barnabas Piper on John Piper’s Influence
Barnabas Piper said when he was young, he felt known within his church as a pastor’s kid. But he was unaware of the broader platform and influence his father had “until I was well into high school.” John Piper was “a central figure” in the Passion OneDay Conference, an earlier iteration of the ongoing Passion Conference, as well as in what is known as the Young, Restless, Reformed movement.
“That’s when it started to dawn on me more and more that my dad was well-known outside,” Piper said. “You know, you go to like Chick-fil-A anywhere in the country and somebody recognized him because that’s where the Christians hang out…that was a really common experience.”
Heppner mentioned a famous sermon that John Piper preached, urging his listeners not to waste their lives. In the sermon, John Piper described a retired couple frivolously collecting seashells as an illustration of how not to live.
“That’s a joke that gets made at me or to me twice a month…somebody brings up that,” said Piper. “There’s part of me that kind of rolls my eyes at it, and there’s part of me that goes, ‘How many sermons preached in my lifetime have resonated and or even just registered with that many people?’”
“There’s a uniqueness to [John Piper’s] participation in what God did then. And I know that there’s been some fallout from it and, you know, history is always complicated,” Piper observed, “but there’s no question that there was a significant movement of the Lord that he was able to be part of. And that sermon is one that sticks with people, even if they make bad jokes about it.”
Piper shared that during that time period of his life, he did not see his father’s influence in a particularly positive light. “I did not see it as a gift at the time, other than from an ego standpoint,” he said. “There’s a real sort of titillating, enjoyable aspect to being well-known until you learn that there’s a cost to it. I just generally didn’t love it at the time.”
