Missions for God’s Glory Still Inspires
I grew up in a mission-minded church and home. The regular playbook for missions was an annual missions conference with projection slides and stories of mission field dangers and God’s protection. These would often include very strong appeals to leave the comforts of our current lives, go into the world, and make disciples. I grew up in fear that God might want me to do that. In the fundamentalism of my youth, guilt, and shame were regularly inflicted to motivate godly living and, for the lucky few, missional engagement.
Then, along came John Piper (and others) with a message of God’s passion for his glory and eternal love to share his goodness with all peoples on earth. For guilt-motivated evangelists like me, I had never heard of missions connected with God’s glory and worship. It was radical, refreshing, and reorienting. Themes like “God is the gospel” and “God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in him” take the emphasis off man-centered dependencies and place them on God. Piper’s thematic repetition meant that, in a sense, every book, sermon, and conference message all revolve around the same theme of the grandeur and greatness of God. To hear one is, in a sense, to hear them all. The glory of God serves as the compelling reason to sacrifice your life for the mission of God. It resonated with millions of others and me through his ministry.
Suffering for Jesus’ Sake is Worth It
Piper’s tether of love for Jesus with a willingness to suffer for Him is a second powerful motivation. It is a whole chapter in “Desiring God” and a common sub-theme to his teaching. He writes,
Therefore all suffering, of every kind, that we endure in the path of our Christian calling is a suffering “with Christ” and “for Christ.” With him in the sense that the suffering comes to us as we are walking with him by faith, and in the sense that it is endured in the strength that he supplies through his sympathizing high-priestly ministry (Hebrews 4:15). For him in the sense that the suffering tests and proves our allegiance to his goodness and power, and in the sense that it reveals his worth as an all-sufficient compensation and prize” (Piper 1996, 216).
Here is Piper at his finest. His high view of Christ’s supremacy is secured to a necessary willingness to display his worth by suffering for his name. He draws deeply from the rich heritage of missionaries who have suffered deeply to advance the gospel. This is the noble battle cry young people rally to, and Piper heralded it to my generation, swelling the ranks of people going, sending, adopting, and doing risky things for the kingdom of God.
Don’t Waste Your Life
According to Piper, the flip side to living passionately for God’s glory is to live for something infinitely less worth your life. Piper calls unworthy living a waste. His book entitled “Don’t Waste Your Life” reminds us of his entrance to the evangelical stage with his sermon “Seashells” and his portrayal of wealthy retirees wasting their later years gathering seashells on the beach. He begins the book by describing his personal search for a “single passion to live by.” The writings of C.S. Lewis and Jonathan Edwards were used by God to help him see the worth and beauty of Christ and the goal of “gladly making others glad in God.” This led him to the conclusion that “God created me-and you-to live with a single, all-embracing, all-transforming passion-namely, a passion to glorify God by enjoying and displaying his supreme excellence in all the spheres of life” (Piper 2003, 31). As Piper is in the twilight of his life and years of ministry, we can reflect on the sum of his writings (more than 50 books), pastorate of Bethlehem Baptist Church, founding and leadership of Desiring God Ministries, involvement in national and global ministries that bear his imprint, conference messages to hundreds of thousands of people, and see how he has avoided wasting his life on seashells.
I conclude with a cherished memory. In the 1990s, John Piper came to College Church of Wheaton, Illinois, to speak at a small gathering of church leaders. This was in the season of his ascension to the national evangelical stage. I took several staff with me to hear him. My vague memory is that he preached on the Great Commission, missions, and the gospel. While I do not remember his outline, I do remember it as the most powerful personal experience of a sermon I have ever had. When he concluded, I could hardly breathe. It wasn’t just me; it was an unusual movement of the Holy Spirit in the room. I have not experienced a sermon quite like that one since.
What caused it? I have heard better orators than John Piper. I have read deeper theologians than him as well. It was the unusual combination of passion, exposition, mission, and unction that filled the room that day. I was deeply affected. Tens of thousands of others have had a similar experience of heart-piercing gospel truth urging us not to waste our lives on trivialities but “to glorify God by enjoying and displaying his supreme excellence in all the spheres of life” (Piper 31). God gifts others to ideate, organize, envision, plan, and go. John Piper’s unique gift to the church was and is to reawaken our God-centered “why” for missions. God is the gospel, and spreading his glory is the purpose. Missions exist because worship doesn’t. We need prophets, and John Piper has served this role for decades. He has helped the church desire God.
