Piper learned another piece of wisdom from his father in how his dad publicly addresses cultural issues. “We are in a day and age when pastors are expected or expect themselves—maybe it’s often self-inflicted—to speak out on every issue and to be experts in a lot of issues,” Piper said.
He noted that on his father’s podcast, John Piper speaks about many issues on which he is not an expert, “some of which I wish he hadn’t.” But Piper’s dad always turns to Scripture on topics he isn’t knowledgeable about.
“Bringing that into both parenting and pastoring has been so, so helpful because I feel the pressure to know how to give answers to everybody,” Piper said. “And I don’t have them and no pastor does.”
“Life is so complicated. There’s a thousand issues. People are intense and angry and feel deeply about so many things,” said the pastor. “But what I can do is to take a step back and go, ‘Well, how might Scripture inform how we approach this?’”
Something else that stands out strongly to Piper is that his “parents have been married since 1968, and they really love each other, and that is not a small thing.”
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“They are profoundly different people,” he said. While some married couples might be two peas in a pod, he sees his parents as more “like an orange and a bike chain.”
“Like, those are not the same entities,” said Piper. “And yet here they are. And they still love, and they still are committed.”
Moreover, he said, “I watch my parents continue to figure out how to be better parents.”
“I just have utmost confidence that there’s never a day when they’re not praying for me, and I now recognize a lot of the answers to those prayers, and I can thank them for those things,” said Piper, emphasizing his gratitude for their example to him of how to finish well. Given his age, Piper is about halfway through life if God allows him to live as long as the average American.
“I got a lot of time left to blow it,” he said. “And I look at them and go, ‘But there’s a model of how to not blow it.’”
