Piper addresses a wide range of issues, from the theological to what many might call “social,” though I’m sure Piper would argue they are all, from justification by faith alone to racism, theological at heart. There are thirty chapters, as there are in many of Piper’s books-a month’s worth of daily quiet-time reading. The rest of the book is a series of articles on issues on which Piper believes the Christian minister must take an unmovable stand. When reviled, we bless when persecuted, we endure when slandered, we try to conciliate we have become the refuse of the world, the offscouring of all things. We do not try to secure a professional lifestyle, but we are ready to hunger and thirst and be ill-clad and homeless. Piper dispenses with those distinctions in the first chapter, and a convicting series of distinctions it is: It’s a price worth paying, though, for any man who believes he is “sent by God to save people from hell and make them Christ-exalting, spiritual aliens in the world,” (3).Īs I opened it, I expected the book to be an extended discussion of the differences between professionalism and Christian ministry. This time, Piper pleads with pastors of local churches to realize they are not part of a cultured profession rather, the very heart of their calling as pastors is to be radically God-centered, most often at the expense of a respected position in the world. Piper’s latest book, Brothers, We Are NOT Professionals!, is one more missile in what has become an arsenal of books aiming at the apathy and hum-drum routine of most American churches. Like many others of you reading his books, I can only pray that our Lord will give me a small fraction of the explosive love for God that He has given to John Piper. I bought one of his books that day- The Pleasures of God-and over the next few weeks as I pored over its pages (reading one chapter of it at least ten or twelve times!) my thinking, my theology, and my life were set on a new, “white-hot” trajectory of recognizing and exulting in God’s majesty! I have read several of Piper’s books since then, and my respect for and admiration of him have only been increased. Piper speak, you can probably guess the topic on which he spoke that day: God’s passion for His own glory and the Christian’s hard pursuit of joy in that truth. John Piper speak at a conference in Austin, Texas in the dead of winter, 1998.
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