I think you’ve been given either in paper or electronic form the syllabus. So pretty much everything that I have to say except for this first little part is on paper, which means that I hope we can have a good bit of interaction. I will leave specific times for questions and then I’ll repeat the questions so that it gets on the tape, but I don’t want your questions to have to wait until the end if they’re urgent along the way. So that’s the plan.

I have no idea how these 10 things are going to fit into these hours. I’ve never done this seminar before. I teach a class on preaching and all of this stuff, except for one section, which I’ll tell you when I get there, is drawn from that class, but it’s so discussion-laden when I teach it at home that I can’t tell how long it’s going to take to do it. So we’ll just pray, Lord, fill it up or overflow it or leave two or three hours for Q&A at the end, whichever would be good. So that’s the plan. We’re going to walk through these pieces that you have. So it’s fine for you to have them up there on your laptops or in paper as we go along, and you can be typing in observations or typing questions along the way.

Confidence in the Place of Preaching

The aim of the class is to strengthen the student’s confidence in the biblical centrality of preaching in the corporate life of the church, and to increase their ability to preach with biblical faithfulness, gospel-permeated exposition, Christ-exalting clarity, soul-converting power, culture-confronting courage, winsome humility, and love-producing effectiveness. I’m sure that list could go on and on, but I decided to stop there. So those are some of my dreams and some of my goals for you coming out of this class.

There are reasons for why the particular language is chosen. Let me just pause on one of them — increase your confidence in the biblical centrality of preaching in the corporate life of the church. It’s not obvious from the New Testament on the face of it that preaching should be a part of the worship life of the church. We just absolutely take it for granted, but if you look in the New Testament, almost all the preaching is evangelistic in the Book of Acts. There’s no illustration of preaching that I can see in a corporate worship setting. So for me to claim this needs defense and we will devote an entire unit on defending the existence of preaching in the church. We tend to assume it because it’s always been done in the history of the church except for marginal groupings that try to turn it into discussions or whatever. That never lasts very long.

Is there a biblical warrant for building the weekly corporate gathering around preaching? Because you won’t defend that very well by example in the Bible, but I’m going to argue you can defend it successfully from the Bible. So that’s the reason for choosing that little phrase, “corporate life of the church” and so on. I won’t go into all those, otherwise I’ll just start teaching all the class. I won’t walk through the schedule with you because we’ll just see how that shapes up. There are 10 of these units.

I thought it would be helpful just to start with some biography or autobiography about, okay, here you are. I’m 64 years old, married with five children, four sons who are married, 11 grandchildren, finishing this summer my 30th year at the same church. I’ve never pastored another church, which means my experience is limited in one sense, extensive in another because 30 years is a long time in one place. But it’s limited in that I’ve never known any other church. I’ve never known a rural church and I’ve never known a non-downtown urban church. So there’s all kinds of questions that I’ve had no experience in, so what I have to say has its limitations.

A Pilgrimage to Preaching

Let me go back to the beginning. I was born into a family with Ruth and Bill Piper as my parents. I would call them, who were both, I believe, in heaven now, the happiest fundamentalists I’ve ever known. And I use the word fundamentalist in their case with no negative implication because I consider myself a fundamentalist without the attitude and so would most people in the world. If the world knew what I believed, they would say I was just off the charts right wing, and most of you too, except you just look so cool that you trick them. I don’t look cool and so I really fit the deal.

So there they were, Bob Jones University was across the street, the bastion of historic fundamentalism. My dad went to Bob Jones University. So there I am born into a place where movies were looked upon with suspicion. We didn’t smoke, we didn’t drink, and those were all things that I avoided then and, by and large, avoid now. I go to movies every now and then, but by and large, almost everyone I go to, I wish I hadn’t. And it baffles me how many of the young people in my church are so utterly indiscriminate in what they expose themselves to. I don’t know how they will ever be holy in their passion for God and their passion for souls when they’re dumping naked women into their brains in most PG-13 movies, not to mention R and whatever else.

So you can see I’m just laying all my cultural cards on the table. I’m very, very picky about what I put into my brain because garbage in is garbage out. I’m just an addictive personality. I know my limits and one of them is I have to be really vigilant over my eyes because what I see, I keep and I mull over and I see on screen for a long time.

So there I am growing up in a fundamentalist home. It was the happiest home I’ve ever met. I never had any emotional pushback on conservative doctrine, believing that the whole Bible is the word of God and that avoiding every appearance of evil would be a good idea. My folks sang in the car on the way to go deep sea fishing with me in Florida. I mean, how many of us grew up in homes with mom and dad singing in the front seat? This is just off the charts unusual for a home like this. I admired my dad. I don’t resent my dad that he was an evangelist and was away for two thirds of my life, I suppose. He traveled. He was a little mini Billy Graham. Billy Graham held 50,000 person crusades, my dad held 500 person crusades in churches or in the early days he did it with tents.

And we all gathered around him and prayed for him and stuffed his envelopes and sent him out on planes that had a back wheel on the plane and propellers. Have you ever heard of propellers? And he would puddle jump to California with two or three landings and then he’d come home five weeks later and tell the triumphs of the gospel and a few new jokes. And the happiest days of my life were daddy coming home on Monday evening and telling the stories of drunks getting saved and prostitutes getting saved and deacons getting saved. It was just wonderful to grow up in this home. And so there he was believing in hell and wanting to rescue people from it, and believing in heaven and wanting to go there and leading us in prayer every night.

Some Thoughts on Complementarity

Here’s a little piece about complementarity, egalitarianism, complementarianism. I watched my mother when my dad was away be omnicompetent. She cut the grass, she cooked the meals, she painted the eaves, she made the beds, she kept the checkbooks, she ran a laundry business on the side. I looked at my mother and my father and I said, there’s zero difference here in competence, except my mom is probably more competent in more things. And when daddy came home to watch her transform her life into a submissive, “I’m glad you’re here, I’m glad you pray, I’m glad you open the door, I’m glad you drive the car, I’m glad you choose the restaurant, I’m glad you say ‘let’s go,’ made me marvel. So the two things, submission and headship and woman’s competency, were never at odds to me.

And then I went to Wheaton College where women were all smarter than the guys. They always ruined the curves in the classes. In my high school class, I think I was number 19 in my graduating class, and the 18 in front of me, except for Philip Rosner, were girls. So at Wheaton they were all smarter. In my high school all the ones in front of me were smarter, and my mother was smarter. And so psychologically I was not in any way inclined to think of any woman as inferior to any man in anything that really counts, and I still don’t.

The issue wasn’t inferiority, the issue was the dance. The issue was the feel, the dynamic of manhood and womanhood. The issue was my daddy’s a man, my mama’s a woman, and they dance differently in the ballet. She falls into his arms, not because she can’t stand up, because it makes it beautiful for everybody watching. And he strongly catches her, and then she does her move in a way that he could never do her a move. And I just hope that since Acts 29 is marked by this, that you men will speak it well because it’s just absolutely amazing to me that a movement of Reformed, church planting, culturally edgy young men is complementarian today.

When I was fighting this battle in the early 1980s, I was called names you guys wouldn’t dream of. And I thought, “I’m going to lose this battle, but I’ll die fighting,” and now to see that there are actually young people who think this is life giving. There are hundreds of young 20 something women in our church who think this is life giving. We want men who are men. We don’t want to lead devotions. We don’t want to take over at home. We want men who will take us to church and set a moral tone for the family and so on. And so I’m just saying all of that because in my home I grew up in that set me to be what I am, I was watching my mom and my dad do this dance in a way that why would I even want anything else? I have an omnicompetent mother, a bumbling domestic and financial dad who’s a superstar preacher in my judgment, and he needs her and she needs him and they love the way this works. So that was a piece, the complementarian piece.

Prayer and Preaching from a Father

My dad was a praying man and taught me to pray for missions and taught me to pray for the church and to pray for the family. He would gather us together every night to pray. And he was a preacher. I loved to hear my dad preach. I didn’t hear him very often because he wasn’t a pastor. He traveled, but the few times that I would go with him and watch him, I would tremble. My dad preached with such power. I would tremble as a little boy when he used certain illustrations. I can see his eyes almost as he quoted, “It is appointed unto man once to die, and after that, the judgment.” And there was a certain squint in his eye and you’d think, “Whoa, that’s heavy. How would anybody be drawn to that?”

Remember, he’s the happiest man I ever knew. He began every sermon with a joke. I’ve never begun a sermon with a joke, ever. I never will unless I fall asleep or get mind controlled by some computer somewhere. It’s not the way I want to do it, but my father was both unbelievably earnest and serious and the happiest holy man I’ve ever known. So he was a preacher.

A Fear of Public Speaking

Now here’s the catch. Everybody would say, and they did say when I was a teenager in junior high school and high school, “Are you going to be a preacher like your dad?” And I would say without hesitation, no, and there was a simple reason. In about the seventh grade, something happened. I mean, I don’t know when it started, but as soon as I was asked to do things in public, read a part in training union at the Southern Baptist Church, or to read a paragraph for my science experiment in the eighth grade, or whatever, I couldn’t do it. I absolutely froze. I was psychologically incapable of speaking in public. So I had no doubt in my mind I would never preach.

My mom took me to a psychologist. We were so concerned about this. This is back in the day when there was no such thing as a Christian psychologist. So this for a fundamentalist family was unbelievably risky. I remember sitting in that room as they showed me this little Rorschach chart of a squiggly thing here and said, “What do you see?” I don’t remember what I saw, but I remember at the end of that, the woman counselor saying, “I think probably your mother has something to do with this inability to speak.” That made me so angry, I never went back because I knew one thing. Mama was the one person who understood. Mama was the one person who sat on my bed as I cried at night. Mama was the one person who rubbed my shoulders and sent me off to school saying, “It’s all right, you’ll make it.” So I never went back to that, and to this day, I don’t know why. I don’t understand what happened.

I went off to Wheaton College knowing that I had to navigate my way through this school without any public speaking, which seemed absolutely impossible. A speech class was required for graduation and Spanish or a foreign language was required, and in all of them you had to give oral talks for modern foreign language, and I took Spanish.

Breakthroughs and Calling to Ministry

In the summer of 1966, some life-changing things happened, three huge things happened. Number one, I was approached by Evan Welch, and I’m just saying this to the glory of God. He said, “Johnny, would you be willing to pray in the summer school chapel?” About 500 people came to the summer school chapel. I don’t know why I didn’t just immediately say no, but I said, “How long do you have to pray?” He said, “Just for 30 seconds or a minute, just to get us started.” And I said, yes.

I don’t remember what was going through my mind. I just know that when he was done, I was walking back and forth across this beautiful front campus lawn of Wheaton College. I made a vow. I’ve never made another vow like this that I can remember. I said to God, “I will never say no to another speaking engagement out of fear if you will get me through this. Just help me to finish a 30-second prayer in front of 500 people,” and he did. It was a huge pulpit. I could hold on. I memorized it cold and got through with my heart beating so hard that I could see my shirt move. And I think I’ve kept my vow, and have never said no to a speaking engagement since then out of fear, and something broke. I don’t know. I don’t know whether it was demonic. I don’t know whether it was psychological. I don’t know what it was, but something broke. That’s the one thing that happened in summer 1966.

The Second thing was that I met Noël Henry and we married two and a half years later. So I met my wife in the summer and I got liberation from this paralysis. And number three, I was lying in the hospital with mononucleosis in September of 1966 and had to drop out of organic chemistry. I thought I was going to be a pre-med student. And listening to the ETN radio as Harold John Ockenga about 200 yards away in the Wheaton Chapel, was giving the spiritual emphasis week, and the expositions that he was giving made me say, “God, I would love to know the Bible and handle the Bible like that.” That’s what I said.

And when those three weeks in the hospital were over and I was done with organic chemistry, everything in me was saying, “Forget medicine and study the Bible.” And I date my call to the ministry from that hospital stay. Thank God for mononucleosis. It was a little parable of how God uses hard times. You think your career is going like sand through your fingers and your life is being ruined, but God is making something brand new. So be careful. Don’t begrudge yourself the seminary of suffering.

So I said to my fiance — she wasn’t my fiance yet, but we were talking about marriage already after about four weeks — “What would you think if I did not go to medicine, but went to seminary and studied the Bible?” And she said, as she always has, “Where you go, I’ll go.” And so we went to Fuller Seminary and I’ve always said that Wheaton was like the intellectual kindling being put on the fire of my life, but the fire not coming down. The kindling was being arranged. C.S. Lewis was being put there. I was reading philosophy. I was a philosophy minor. That was being put there. The life of the mind and all the excitement of study was being put there. Disciplines and habits and the excitement of the intellectual life was being laid in place, but there was no passion for any vision of what it was all about. What’s it for? What are you thinking for? What’s at the center of the worldview? All this worldview, each talk was being talked.

World Turned Upside Down

But when I got to Fuller Seminary and walked into Dan Fuller’s hermeneutics class on Philippians and my world just got turned upside down. And that’s the most decisive place after my father where theology happened. So the two things that I came away with from Fuller Seminary were a method called arcing by which you take a passage of Scripture, break it down into propositions, link them all together to trace the author’s argument, and then see the one main point and how each of the other points fits together. I’ll show you that maybe tomorrow morning, Lord willing. And to this day, 40 years later, it’s more fruitful than any other method I’ve ever run into. I still use it. I just think it now. I see reality this way.

And the other is Christian Hedonism, or a big God-centered universe where God’s passion for his glory is not at odds with my passion for my joy. Those two came together from 1968–1970, and that I’ve been working out ever since was simply mind bogglingly important for the making of this preacher. I won the Clarence Roddy Preaching Award at Fuller Seminary. It’s the senior award given to somebody who, from the preaching classes, gets asked to speak in chapel service, and then you get a prize. I don’t think there was any award, I just remember it. And the sermon that I preached was called “Big Bad John.” It was a song in those days, and it was almost like rap. I don’t know if you remember it. Of course you don’t remember. You weren’t born yet, but you may have heard of it.

I took the song and I applied it to the incarnation and the substitutionary atonement and how this Big Bad John went down into the mine and the mine started to cave in. All these miners were down there and the big bad back, he held it up while they got out and he died. And I just drew all the implications out of that and built everything around that illustration and that won the award. And I stood and thought about that. Here’s John Piper, who could not run for vice president of the senior class in high school because he had to give a two-minute speech, and now God was beginning to make a preacher.

Munich, Teaching, and Midnight Fire

I went to Germany for three years because I didn’t know what to do yet. I didn’t know whether I should be a pastor or a teacher or a missionary or a writer or whatever. So all the counselors around me said, “Go ahead and get one more degree and then all the doors will open.” I said, “Okay, I’ll do that.” I went off to Germany to get my final degree, and that’s about all I got there. I was discouraged about the way theology was done there. I didn’t grow very much in those three years. If you want to get a PhD, don’t get it for the name. Go to a place where they let you study the Bible and you actually grow. I don’t think there’s much reason to get a PhD these days unless you want to be a part of some academic enterprise that requires it.

Then I was called. I came to the Indiana three. I’m 28 years old now, I have a wife and a son, and I’ve never had a job in my life, never had a full-time job. And so it was time to grow up, get a job, and support my family. And one door opened up, namely Bethel College, and I walked through that door. They needed a one-year sabbatical replacement for one of the professors. I taught Bible and New Testament introduction there, and that stretched into six years. And I loved it. I loved teaching and taught a lot of book studies that helped me get ready to be a pastor, not at all thinking I would be a pastor.

And then an absolutely crucial night happened October 14th, 1979. I had been increasingly disillusioned in my classes. Now, I hope this protects some of you from thinking the grass is greener on the academic side of the fence. I became increasingly disillusioned with teaching the same courses over and over teaching the same kind of 18 to 21 year old blonde, middle class students over and over, and grading papers. Oh man, did it become a non-romantic drag. Meanwhile, every Sunday I would sit and watch John Holkey and listen to John Holkey preach at Olivet Baptist Church. John Holkey was a pastor whose arms looked like about eight feet across when he stretched out his arms. And he took us through the Bible. I remember him taking us through Galatians, and every time he preached a great sermon, I said, “Oh, I’d love to do that.” And every time he preached a bad sermon, I’d say, “We have to do better than that.” So whether it was good or whether it was bad, I was being pulled.

This is my description now of my calling out of academia into pastoral life. There was the push from the academic side, there was the pull from the church side, and then on October 14th, 1979, I stayed up till about 1:00 a.m. writing about nine pages in my journal about what the implications would be for my family. What would it be for the rest of my life? Is this a stepping stone to seminary teaching since I was teaching in the college? What are my motives here? Are they vain or are they godly? What about all the committee work, all the administration, all the hassle? I thought, “You’re really a student, not a preacher and not a pastor.” And what can you say about the call of God? What can you say? I really believe the call of God is not rationally distillable into an articulable sentence. All I know is when it was done at 1:00 a.m., I said to God, “If Noël in the morning when I tell her what’s happened here says, ‘yes,’ I’m gone. I’m out of academia and we’ll just look for a church.” I didn’t have a church in mind.

Coming to Bethlehem

I was lying there at about 6:00 a.m. waiting for her to wake up. And when she stirs, I poke her and say, “What would you think if I left Bethel and looked for a church to be a pastor?” And she said, “I could see it coming. That’d be fine.” So I went to all my trusted counselors and said, “What do you think? What do you think?” And they all said, “Go.” So I turned in my resignation, went over to the Baptist General Conference headquarters, said to them, “I’m quitting at Bethel. I’d like you to help me find a church in the Baptist General Conference.”

And Dick Turnwahl said, “I think I know the church. It’s in downtown Minneapolis and you should check out Bethlehem.” I’d never been there in my life. Marvin Anderson, the church historian at Bethel, was on the church committee, and he called me up. We began to meet and I preached sometime in February of 1980, my candidating sermon. And then I was called and began June of 1980, and that’s where I’ve been ever since.

The church had about 300 people on Sunday morning. It was at that time 111 years old. It was downtown four blocks from the Metrodome where the Vikings play, surrounded by freeways. If you can see it, you can’t get there. It was that kind of a setting. And there was a sea of gray hair. All the middle-aged people had moved to the suburbs with the white flight and the church had hung on by its fingernails for a decade while the pastor was driving from 50 miles away. It was on a slow path towards extinction. And I looked at it and I thought, “This is perfect. This is perfect.” I thought I would start in a little tiny rural church since I had never been a pastor. I skipped all the practical courses in seminary. I had never buried anyone. I had never baptized anyone. I had done two weddings for two of my students. I had never done a communion service. I had never dedicated a baby. At 34 years old, I was as green as you could possibly be. Why would they call me to this church downtown?

They were so tickled just to have any living body that would want to come down there and try to revive that church. It wasn’t very competitive. So I said yes, and a whole lot of students came with me. And that was a little trick that I didn’t count on and they didn’t count on. Within weeks it wasn’t just old gray heads. There were a lot of Bethel students and other students were there as well. And now the church is on three campuses and I hope we’ll be four within about two years if one can get going out west. And I think they’re about, I don’t know, 23 pastors or so and 4,000 or 5,000 folks on Sunday morning. And you all know that I was not asked to be the king.

I am not here as a king because I don’t know how to be a king. Mark Driscoll is the king of kings, and I’m about the most unkingly person you could imagine. So we have a good time talking about my incompetences at Bethlehem and he’s always scolding me saying, “You should have a lot more people and whatnot.” And I don’t know how to do much except preach and try to help everybody love God with all their heart, soul, mind and strength and then lean pretty heavily on others to get things organized.

Love to learn

Thirty years of weekly exposition brings me to this point. So I feel like I’ve got some experience about preaching, which is what this class is about. And I hope that you can ask questions that would draw out things from me that I wouldn’t think to say otherwise.

Here’s one more thing on this pilgrimage piece. This is all an autobiographical introduction before we jump into the pieces. It’s really important that you guys be lifelong learners. If people ask me, “Do you need seminary education? Do you need college? Do you need this?” I say, “Well, need? It depends. It depends. You need to know some things. You need to have some wisdom. You need skills, but how you get them is not of the essence.” I really want to encourage you not to think of your learning, your education, as what happens at the front of your ministry, but what happens in front of your grave, like for the 60 or 70 years leading up to it. And then forever, I think you’ll learn in heaven. I am so thankful that God has wired me to love to learn, especially love to learn from this Book.

This is a very thick book. This is a very deep book. Most of us have just scratched the surface of what is to be seen, known, savored, loved, and lived from this book. This will never ever let you down if you want a challenge, if you want a deep ocean in which to dive and swim, dive in here and swim here. And just to illustrate that lifelong learning piece, here’s the way it works for me. I’ve been asked to preach tonight. And when I was asked, they needed a title. So I gave them the title of a message that I love to give: The Strange, Wonderful Love of Christ or something like that. I threw that old manuscript with a whole bunch of other little notes in a folder and got on the plane. I had three and a half hours on the plane this morning as I opened it and began to write my introduction for tonight, the thing just filled up three and a half hours and I’ve got a new message.

It’ll have some of the message that I’m planning to give, but I began to ask myself questions and here’s how it works. I’m using this in illustration for you to be rigorous, theologically alive growers, I used to say all over the country, and I’ll say it again tonight, “Do you feel more loved by God because he makes much of you or do you feel more loved by God because he frees you from yourself to enjoy making much of him forever?” That’s a very provocative and troubling sentence. I went to visit a friend a couple of weeks ago and she confronted me by saying, “I’m not really happy with that question.” This is a woman my age and extremely intelligent and mature. I said, “Really? Why?” She said, “Well, it gives the impression that you don’t think God makes much of us. Do you not think he does?” Now, I won’t take you through the rest of that conversation, but that’s in the back of my mind as I get ready for this sermon, right? And on the plane, I was wrestling with this question.

I thought, “I need to come to terms with whether I’m misleading people with that question. I’ve used it so often. Will I use it again tonight? Will I leave it or will I let this input shape this sermon?” We’re talking about sermon preparation from life, from counseling. Sermon preparation is all of life. So sermon preparation was at that house, sitting on the couch in the living room with this 64 year old woman in my face saying, “I’m not sure you should say that.” That’s sermon preparation. This sermon tonight came out of that conversation. I spent three and a half hours thinking through that. So if you’re here tonight, just listen for that. I rethought the whole thing. And in rethinking how to say it, I saw things that I had never seen before. So Mars Hill will receive tonight, frontline discovery in John Piper’s effort to preach. And here’s the scary thing about that. I said to David as we got off the plane, “This is exciting and disappointing because that means if I say it better tonight, I haven’t said it as well as I could for the last 20 years.”

That’s the danger of learning, isn’t it? I mean, I used to argue with my dad about pre-trib rapture. I am a post-trib guy. He’s a pre-trip guy. And he said something to me one time with great earnestness in his face, and it pretty much stopped the conversation and we didn’t go back to it anymore. We just lived knowing where each other stood. He said, “Johnny, if you’re right, son, I’ve misled people for 40 years.” So lifelong learning is dangerous, right? It’s dangerous, it’s threatening. But what would we expect? A 28-year-old gets it right on everything? No way.

So you have to be willing. Preaching is risky business. You’re going to be preaching with authority on some things at age 28, 29, 30, and 35, which at age 65, you’re going to be wishing you would’ve said it differently. And all you can do is say, “God, I am who I am. They are who they are.” I usually pray at the end of a sermon, “Lord, cause anything that I have said that has been amiss to be blown away and cause anything that I have said that’s faithful and balanced and biblical to land home with tremendous power. Be the sieve, Lord, that helps these people be protected from my inadequacies.” Because what else can we say? We’re imperfect people and we undertake this audacious thing called preaching.

Preaching and Lifelong Learning

Would you get your Bibles and turn to Ephesians 3. Now we’re into preaching and I’m going to show you something I saw last week for the first time. I probably had seen it before, but not this way. Funny you can’t remember what you’ve seen before. So you don’t know whether it’s new or not, but it feels new. The speakers for the Lausanne Missions Conference in October were meeting in Cairo, Egypt last week and I was there. We are all going to preach from Ephesians in October, one chapter for each speaker each day. I got chapter three.

As we were doing a manuscript study together for about 12 hours a day for two days, I saw something and I said, “I’m going to start this class on preaching with this.” So here we are at Ephesians 3, and I’m going to start here just to elevate preaching for you, Biblically. I really don’t care about what anybody else says about preaching. I want to know what the Bible says about preaching. I want my mandate to come from the Bible, not Charles Spurgeon, or Jonathan Edwards, or John Calvin, or Savannah Rola, or Martin Luther. I want the Bible to say, “Preach. And it’s really big and it’s really important and it’s really weighty and you’ve devoted your life to one of the most important things in the world.” I want the Bible to talk to me that way. Nobody else’s encouragement has the same authority as this book telling me that. So let’s read Ephesians 3:7–10 and you’ll see why perhaps this gripped me afresh:

Of this gospel I was made a minister according to the gift of God’s grace . . .

Now I think even though he’s an apostle and is speaking in a very particular way about his Damascus road, sovereign call, I hope all of you could talk that way because you can find language throughout the New Testament that elders are put in place by the Spirit in the church. They’re put there. It says that in Acts chapter 20:28: “Among whom the Holy Spirit has made you overseers.” He put you there. So I hope all of you from the inside, when you become a pastor or if you are now one, you’ll be able to say, “I was put here by God Almighty.” Something like this. Paul continues:

Of this gospel I was made a minister according to the gift of God’s grace, which was given me by the working of his power. To me, though I am the very least of all the saints (because he persecuted the church), this grace was given, to preach to the Gentiles the unsearchable riches of Christ . . . (Ephesians 3:7–8).

So if you want to know, “What should I preach?” the short answer is: the unsearchable riches of Christ. They are unsearchable, meaning you’ll never exhaust them. You’ll never get to the bottom or the top or the side of them. No matter how far you search into them, there’s more yet to search. And if anybody says, “I’ve just run out of stuff to preach,” they’re blind. You should be praying daily in the ministry, “Oh my God, oh my God. Don’t let me go blind to this book. God, don’t let the fire ever cease to burn. Don’t let the book ever cease to be intriguing and exciting and deep and powerful. Don’t let it become boring to me or blank.”

I like treasuring language. It’s biblical language — riches language and treasuring language. It’s not just believe language, affirm language, or follow language. Those all sound vacuous to me when it comes to the affections. But it’s treasuring riches like a miser. I go to the Bible like a miser. Where’s the gold? Where’s the silver? Or like a bear, like Pooh Bear. I say, “Where’s the honey?” Paul continues:

And to bring to light for everyone what is the plan of the mystery hidden for ages in God, who created all things . . . (Ephesians 3:9).

So as you unfold the unsearchable riches of Christ, his person and his work, you bring to light a mystery. And the mystery has been unfolded for us back in the first six verses and in chapter two about how Jew and Gentile are made fellow heirs of God’s inheritance. Gentiles are made fellow heirs of God’s inheritance, one new people, not two, reconciled to each other and to God in Christ. It’s this great mystery of how all things are being summed up in Jesus Christ. You’re bringing all that to light, which had been hidden for ages in God, who created all things. Now, here’s the purpose in Ephesians 3:10:

So that through the church the manifold wisdom of God might now be made known to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly places

You have rulers and authorities in the heavenly places and God has a magnificent, many-colored divine wisdom in history to be displayed to them so that they are stunned by it and he’s bringing it to light through preachers in the church.

Mysteries Revealed in the Church

That just makes my spine tingle because, when I said that one of the goals here is that your confidence in the biblical centrality of preaching in the corporate life of the church would be increased, these are the kinds of things I had in mind.

God’s call on you is that you take the body of Christ in your specific area and you unfold the unsearchable riches of Christ there and you bring to light the big global, universal, cosmic purposes of God, and you put in that church, on display for demons and angels, the wisdom of God. It’s just breathtaking. It’s just absolutely breathtaking what we’re called to be. That’s what I came away from those 24 hours or so with in the study of Ephesians. This book, probably more than any other book, is a breathtaking book. Paul is grammatically breathtaking here — 14 verse sentences and that sort of thing — and he is theologically breathtaking and he’s ecclesiologically breathtaking.

I just so much want for you to rise up out of the low views of preaching. There’s just so many low views of preaching that don’t make any sense of the fact that we are displaying the unsearchable riches of Christ, bringing to light a mystery hidden for ages, and putting the great purposes of God on display for the demonic and good powers of the universe. How many pastors think this way? They’re going and they’re reading illustration books. I’m so thankful that I had a homiletics teacher in seminary who said, “Burn them! Burn them!” He wouldn’t ever let us touch an illustration book. I’ve never owned one. It makes me want to gag when I think about, “I’ve got this point. I need an illustration.” Live! Live! Open your eyes.

I remember standing in a homiletics class with that same teacher and he stopped one day. He said, “Stop.” He waited about 30 seconds of silence. He said, “Okay, you got it? Got your illustration?” We didn’t have any idea what he was talking about. He said, “The siren. The siren on Colorado Avenue. It was an ambulance siren. It’s going either to the hospital with somebody or going to get somebody. Somebody right now, right now, as we are in this class, is suffering. Somebody needs emergency help. Are you feeling this? Are you alive?”

Man, that had an impact on me. Good night. I thought, I don’t want an illustration book. I want a life. I want to walk through every day smelling every rose, seeing every cloud, looking at every face. I want life to come in on me. I want to know people. I want to understand that billboard. I want to understand that conversation. I want to understand why that guy stands that way over by the ditch instead of working. I want life to get into my sermons, not canned stories. I’ve talked to pastors that have 2,200 note cards of illustrations, and that may be the way you do it, but I’m just witnessing here, okay? You’re just watching one imperfect pastor talk here and you put it through the sieve of your experience and see what you think. All that brings us to the end of my first pilgrimage and transition.

Question and Answer

Would you say that you and your wife were able to recreate that happy home for your kids, the way your parents did for you?

My answer is no, but you probably want more than that, don’t you? I’ll just take singing for example. We have devotions in the morning and evening as a family. We have different ways in the morning, different ways in the evening, and we sing both times. We’ve put together our own little 14 or 15 pages of printed-out songs and worship songs and hymns that we like, but it feels so different.

My mother and my father were singers. Their personalities were such that they seemed more free. Noël and I are way more critical and way more analytical. Here’s what I’ve learned. That no answer could be taken to mean, “Oh, well then you did something wrong,” and I’m sure we have. Or it could be we are very different people than our parents, really different. I’m so different from my dad. I’m analytical, I’m critical, and I’m forceful. I jump on an idea right away and pick it apart and put it back together and tell the person that they should do better.

My dad never did anything like that. Never. He was just effusive. He was a proclaimer, a proclaimer. I’m an explainer — explain, explain, explain. Which means I’ve got disabilities everywhere. I’m limping, emotionally, everywhere. It hurts. I mean, I’ve written a bunch of books that people seem to get help from and yet I’ve got wounds everywhere in my family and in my church. I don’t know if you were going somewhere with that that I haven’t gone, but my answer is no. We have not recreated that. The name of my book is called Desiring God, not Having Arrived at Full Joy in God. Then another one is called When I Don’t Desire God. I’m a struggler. I’m a pretty melancholy guy, which means joy is a fight for me. I don’t think it was a fight for my dad. I think he was incredibly wired to be optimistic and to look on the bright side of everything. I’m more like Eeyore or Puddleglum.

My intention was to see what you would say the tension is between leading a church body and also caring for your home.

Well, let’s just be really honest here. I’m not at all confident that in the last 30 years I’ve gotten that right. In fact, John Bloom, David, and three others were at my house yesterday to think that through with me and to ask whether the next season of my life needs significant changes. Because while Noël and I are tight — divorce is about as far from our minds as can be — we’re tight and tense. It’s not as sweet as it should be. I have four grown sons and all of them have issues. Some issues are with me, all of them issues with God or family or something. There’s no family in my family that I would look to and say, “Be like that.” How much of that has been owing to my pace, my pressures, my priorities? I don’t know.

I’m really glad you asked the question. I wanted to just lay that out in front of you. I do not come to you as the one with answers on that issue. That the question be asked where you are, is really good. I used to say, and I still do, date your wife every week. I mean be with her more often than that, but date her every week and on the date, do a state of the marriage assessment with her doing most of the talking.

You can ask, “How’s the schedule? How’s the kids? How’s my attentiveness? How are we doing?” And now I’m going to add, make her be really honest. My wife, I think, is such a servant and such a supporter of me that she may have been saying “fine” for my sake and not for everybody else’s sake. So, push on her and say, “Honestly, I want you to know you are precious to me. You are precious to me.” She needs to feel treasured and precious, not just that we hang good together and that we’re a good team or we’re good partners. It’s not, “You support me. I support you. You got your ministry. I got my ministry.” Marriage is more than that. You have to push into that, perhaps more than I did. Good question. We can go back to that later again if you want.

What was it that sparked that passion when you went to Fuller?

It was the combination of a method of exegesis that caused lights to go on everywhere. Arcing was one of them, which I’ll show you in the morning, Lord, willing, together with a majestic vision of a sovereign God and the God-centeredness of all things. It was a pathway into the Bible through exegesis and a God showing up everywhere in the Bible that blew all my categories. I went to seminary as an Arminian and within about nine months I had wept my way out of Arminianism as my world collapsed around me. I never read Calvin in seminary. I read Romans. I read the Sermon on the Mount. I read Galatians. I read 1 Corinthians. My Reformed soteriology was birthed by verses. So those are two things.

The way I’ve put the pathway into the Bible is I would say more or less, I was a pearl collector up until 1968, meaning I read the Bible as a collection of pearls. I want a pearl for today. Or you could use the image of a lozenge. I would take a lozenge and put it in my tongue and suck on it all day. Frankly, I think that’s pretty good. That’s okay. But it didn’t hit me that these verses are linked and they form chains — golden, glorious, strong chains with an anchor in heaven, as Paul puts arguments together. And when I began to see Philippians woven together in a train of thought that was moving somewhere, and these propositions interwoven with a kind of divine logic, that changed everything. And then the God of Philippians 2:12–13 amazed me:

Therefore, my beloved, as you have always obeyed, so now, not only as in my presence but much more in my absence, work out your own salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who works in you, both to will and to work for his good pleasure.

A Definition of Preaching

Now what I want to do is take verses from the Bible and see whether or not I can come up with a definition of preaching, because I don’t think preaching is teaching. I don’t think it’s mere communication. I think it is a unique thing. It’s a thing that’s different, and I want to make a case for that from the scriptures. So let’s just work through these texts quickly and in two pages come to a definition that we’ll test as we go along.

How then will they call on him in whom they have not believed? And how are they to believe in him of whom they have never heard? And how are they to hear without someone preaching? (Romans 10:14).

Now, I stuck the Greek in here. I don’t know how many of you have had any Greek. This is not teaching. The word kērux is where we get the word kerugma. You’ve heard the word kerugma, a proclamation. A kērux is someone who did kēryssō. They were a herald. So a man comes into a town before there’s internet, before there’s newspapers or printing press, before there’s radio, before there’s television, and how did the king deliver his messages? He did it through a herald: “Hear ye, hear ye, hear ye! The king has a royal decree. All the citizens will gather and listen, as I read the word of the king!” That’s what the herald does.

And how are they to preach unless they are sent? As it is written, “How beautiful are the feet of those who preach the good news!”

There the word preach is in this word euangelizō, so it’s not that same word. It’s a good news-er. So you have “preach,” “sent,” and “good news bringer.” There’s some clues as to what preaching is.

The Preacher and the Teacher

Then 2 Timothy 4:2–3 says:

Preach (same word but in the imperative) the word; be ready in season and out of season; reprove, rebuke, and exhort, with complete patience and teaching. For the time is coming when people will not endure sound teaching . . .

Now, the reason I quote this here, and I’m going to do some others this way, is so that you see the connection in the context between preach and teach. So preach the word. Why? Because the time is coming when people won’t endure sound teaching. So the logic there suggests that teaching is at least part of preaching or goes with preaching or is included under preaching or something, because otherwise it wouldn’t make any sense. Preach the word because the time is coming when people won’t endure sound teaching. I’m going to argue that preaching has some teaching element to it.

Colossians 1:28 says:

Him we proclaim, warning everyone and teaching everyone with all wisdom, that we may present everyone mature in Christ.

“Proclaim” is not the same word from before but “announcing” and this also includes teaching. Acts 5:42 says:

And every day, in the temple and from house to house, they did not cease teaching and preaching that the Christ is Jesus.

Here they are good-newsing and teaching, the combination of these two kinds of words. First Timothy 2:7 says:

For this I was appointed a preacher and an apostle (I am telling the truth, I am not lying), a teacher of the Gentiles in faith and truth.

He was appointed as a kērux (a preacher) and he was appointed a teacher didaskalos. And the question for me is, are those totally separate? Are they interwoven? And that’s what I’m seeing. Whenever Paul does this preaching, it has this didactic teaching element to it. Matthew 11:1 says:

When Jesus had finished instructing his twelve disciples, he went on from there to teach and preach in their cities.

They’re different, and yet they seem to go together. I’m not getting the impression here that Jesus had a little teaching moment then a little preaching moment, but rather there’s something in what he says that is preaching and something that is teaching. Before I read the definition, here’s what I have in mind in my picture. So the herald comes into town, unrolls the decree from the king. “Hear ye, hear ye, hear ye. In the name of the king I pronounce that there is an amnesty declared for all the rebels who will lay down their arms and swear fealty to the emperor.” This is gospel. Lay down the weapons of your rebellion and swear allegiance to the king. And a little boy comes up and taps on the leg of the herald says, “Excuse me. Excuse me. What does fealty mean?” Because he had just said “all those who lay down their arms and swear fealty to the king.” What does fealty mean? And the herald realizes that the crowds probably don’t know what fealty means. So he has to explain and that’s what I mean by teaching.

If all he did was come to town and start explaining terms, he wouldn’t be a herald. And if all he did was herald what can’t be understood because it’s not connecting, then he wouldn’t have any teaching element. So here’s my effort to put all what we’ve seen there into a definition:

The heralding (that is, the action of a kērux) about God in Jesus Christ based on a written word of God from a messenger sent by God including enough teaching to make the news plain and helpful.

You’ll notice the accent falls on heralding.

The Tone of Our Preaching

Now, I don’t want to be pushy here because I know I’m putting pieces together there instead of taking a definition directly from scripture, but I do want to encourage you not to be afraid to herald the word of God. There’s a hokey way to do this, which has brought preaching into having a bad reputation, because it has a certain tone to it. As soon as the guy comes into the pulpit, he sounds like a different human being than he is outside. Now, I do too. I lift up my voice. I don’t ever talk like this at home. I don’t ever say, “Lift up your voice Talitha, my daughter!” So I sound different in the pulpit also, but I hope, I really hope there’s a continuity of reality and authenticity to it so that the heralding that I do, the lifting up of my voice, the announcing quality of the sermon doesn’t feel like, “Whoa, that’s unreal. That’s unreal.” If it sounds unreal, don’t do it. Don’t do it. Go out in the woods and practice until it’s real or just get another way.

Being real is more important than sounding a certain way about exultation. But I’m pleading with you, I think there are a lot of reactionary young guys today who think that clear diction, not having any stammering, not having any “ums” and “ahs” is artificial. So I’m going to put in a lot of “ums” and “ahs,” I’m going to not be coherent and people will relax and think I’m just a good Joe. I just don’t want you to stay there. I really don’t. And you can say, “Well, that’s your style and I know where I work, I know where I live.” And if you do, that’s fine, because I don’t think this is the essence of preaching.

In the next unit, as I give you the biblical basis for preaching, I’m going to argue that this definition is rooted in the very way God is. So that this heralding dimension should happen. Jesus said, “Oh Jerusalem, Jerusalem, how often would I have gathered you and you would not. Would that you had known the day of peace. Now your house is forsaken.” I wish you could talk like that. That’s not ordinary conversation talk. That’s just passionate heralding type talk. We’re going to take a break here in just a minute. You can do that with a dozen people or 12,000 people. I know that having a big church has affected the way I preach — that is having 1,000 people to talk to instead of 10.

I was asked to speak once by the people with allergies in our church who can’t come into the room because of the perfumes and shaving creams and deodorant and all that. We had a little special room for them where they sit off with no carpet and no nothing and they sneak in another door, they watch me on the video, and then they go home. It’s kind of a sad way to do church, but at least they can do it, because up until now there’ve been no opportunities for them to go out in public in a worship setting. They came to me one time and said, “Would you take a shower one time and come over to our house? Don’t wear any colognes, don’t wear any deodorants, and don’t put anything on your hair and preach to us. Have a worship service just for us, if we could see you in the flesh just once.” I said, “I’ll do it.”

In that living room, sitting on couches like you are there, there were about 12 folks. And I sat. I didn’t stand. It felt weird to stand. I sat on the edge of a little stool. I didn’t sit back, relaxed like most of you are sitting right now. I sat on the edge, leaning over, had my Bible in my hand, and I took about 30 minutes and opened the word to them. And I found myself heralding it, not just conversing. I found myself heralding it. I didn’t say this. I didn’t talk in this language. I didn’t ever lift my voice at this level. I never did that. That’s stupid. You have 12 people, why would you talk like that? But there is an intensity, there is a lifting up of your voice that is different than just conversing and just explaining. I hope you begin to get what I’m saying here, because it’s very hard to put into words the difference between teaching and heralding, but I believe it’s real and we’ll get more at it in just a little bit.

Question and Answer

You talked about being called as pastors and preachers. You didn’t mention that in your front end. Do you believe a guy is called to preach?

The question is, do I believe that a person is called to preach? I alluded to it in regard to the summer of 1966 and October 14th, 1979. So let me go back there, say something autobiographical, then say something biblical. Autobiographically, I believe God called me to the ministry of the Word in September of 1966 by making me sick with mononucleosis and causing me to listen to four expository messages by Harold John Ockenga, messages which made a burning desire come into my heart I could not shake.

And this is the way Spurgeon talks about it. One of the most important things I’ve ever read is Lectures to my Students by Charles Spurgeon. Right off the bat, in the call to the ministry, he puts “a strong and irresistible desire for the work.” So I believe God cut me off from my medicine providentially, and he did something emotionally that time proved not to be a flash in the pan, and I interpret that as the work of the Holy Spirit to take hold of me. It has never gone away. My love for the word of God, to give my life to understand and explain and herald this Book, has never gone away. I believe that was a divine call.

Secondly, I was 20 years old when that happened. The form it had until I was 28 was totally ambiguous. I was in school all that time. The door opened for teaching, I felt some giftedness in teaching, and I just accepted it. I thought, “All right, I believe the calling in my life for the next little while is teaching.” But it didn’t feel at all like that first thing. It was just like, “Here’s a door, walk into it. Be faithful. You have got to support your family.” Six years later, in October of 1979, it happened again. It was an accumulation of influences, but that night the desire came. I didn’t even really explain how it happened.

I was writing the book The Justification of God, which is an exposition of Romans:9. I had been tripping over Romans 9 for years, wondering, “What does this text mean? Can you preach it? Can you live it? Can you believe it? It is just so off the charts with God’s sovereignty. How can you do Romans 9?” And I wrote this long book. And day after day what God seemed to say to me through the Bible — and I think this is the way calls happen — “I will not just be explained, I will be proclaimed, John Piper. The God of Romans 9 won’t just be analyzed, he will be announced.” That became so strong that night, I couldn’t shake it. So that when Noël gave her blessing to it, to this day I feel that was a call to the pastorate, to the preaching ministry of the word. So my answer is yes, I believe that a man is called, and I don’t believe it has to be just like that.

Now, biblically, I referred to that passage in Acts 20:28 where Paul says, “This is the church of God in which the Holy Spirit has made you overseers.” He says that to all the elders at Ephesus, “The Holy Spirit has put you as overseers.” And I didn’t include this in the lecture. I’ve got a whole lecture on is there a call to the ministry, but I decided not to bring that one. I think there are a half a dozen other passages in the New Testament that describe becoming an elder as an event that is not contrary to a book like Decision Making and the Will of God.

He says he doesn’t believe there is a call to the eldership because it says in the Bible, “He who desires the ministry desires a good thing.” And so it’s just a desire. I say, “Yes, but why does one person feel an irresistible desire and another person doesn’t?” Who can explain that?

So my answer is yes, there is a call and that you’re going to need, as you stand up to do this audacious thing of saying, “Thus saith the Lord,” and lead a people of God to see the riches of Christ and to see the mystery hidden for ages and to display before the principalities and powers the wisdom of God, you need a sense of warrant where you know you’re authorized to do this.

Could you elaborate on what worship at home has been like over the years?

I’ll try. No children, it looks like one thing. One-year-olds, it looks like one thing. Six-year-olds, it looks like one thing. Teenagers, it looks like one thing. After children, it looks like one thing. So don’t hear me saying there’s only one way. It will be determined by that, including the nature of what you read with pictures and stories. But the principle is that according to Deuteronomy 6 and 11, we are to speak for our children. We are pastors of our children. We are elders of this small group as well as the church small group, and this one is very, very precious to us. And I believe children should see in their father a praying, worshiping, studying person, whether he’s a pastor or not.

For us, that has always meant praying at meals, of course, but that’s just there. It has included two times of devoting ourselves to the Lord. We call them devotions. It’s devoting ourselves outwardly and explicitly to the Lord. So at breakfast time, when the boys were small, we read a passage of Scripture and daddy prayed. It took three minutes sometimes for those little teeny ones. And our view of parenting is that children should obey and they can be made to obey for three minutes, meaning, “Stop eating, stop throwing, stop talking, and at least pretend like you are listening.” And they need to be made to serve the moment, rather than let every moment serve their fancy. So the little child was there and he listened. Then as they grew older, they would pray.

Evening was a little longer and we would build in a text. And for the last, I would guess, 25 years, we’ve read the “Global Prayer Digest,” which stirs in a page of missions every morning. You take an unreached people or group, you read a little bit about them, and you pray for them. This builds missions and unreached peoples into the lives of the family. In the evening, everybody prays. We go right around the circle, and today it’s just three at home, me and Noël and Talitha, and we all pray in the evening. When Talitha is asleep and Noël and I are getting ready for bed, we pray together as a couple before we go to bed. Sometimes we read Scripture together. I think we should do that more. So at that point, I don’t think I’m ideal right now. Right now we are just praying, but I think probably that’s not enough as a couple. I think we need to do more without the kids around.

So it’s a life of beginning and ending the day in prayer and devotion, some attention to the word. We sing in both of those now with hymns and spiritual songs that we have written down. And all of it is to build into the kids, “Our lives are devoted to Christ.” And that needs a special demonstration at the beginning and the end of the day. I just don’t buy the notion in lots of ways that, “Why do you need special days? Shouldn’t every hour be the Lord’s?” I remember running into people in Pasadena, California in the late 1960s who didn’t believe in birthdays because every day should be a celebration of life. They thought you shouldn’t celebrate your birthday. It’s wrong. And I thought, “Why not have an especially good day? Why shouldn’t one day be special?” And I feel that way about hours in the day.

Some might say, “Pray without ceasing. You don’t need to set aside time to pray. Pray while you’re driving the car.” I remember I talked about devotions one time and a man in our church — this man didn’t get very far in leadership, I promise you — was almost livid. He was raising his hand when I was talking about kneeling and reading and praying and meditating and having time set aside. He just scoffed at the idea and said, “I pray while I’m driving. I think the Lord can be approached anytime.” Like that’s something I don’t believe? But clearly that man’s out of touch with the reality I’m talking about. How would your wife feel if you said, “We don’t need a date. I’m always here for you. We don’t need to hang out together in the evening. We don’t need to have special conversations. I’m always there.” Baloney. And God, I think, is similar.

When you were younger compared to now, did you plan for those moments of heralding, or did it come naturally?

That’s a really, really shrewd question, I think. Good question. Because you do mature. You do relax. You do become yourself more. And that’s what you’ve got to be. You can’t copy me or Driscoll or anybody else. You have to find you and be you. You listen to everybody, you look at everybody, and then you copy nobody and you be you.

In the early days, I was very self-conscious. I had probably preached 15 times when I became pastor at Bethlehem. I was 34-years-old and never thought I’d be a preacher until God did that work, so I had very little experience. I didn’t know what I should sound like. I didn’t know what it would be like. I didn’t know whether to use a manuscript. I had skipped all the preaching classes I could. So everything was from scratch, it felt like, and therefore, my self-consciousness level was high in those early days. I was much more bound to my manuscript than I am now. I’ve always preached on Sunday morning from a manuscript for 30 years. I never altered except for one time when we were going to do a praise march and I was preaching without a pulpit, without a microphone and in a T-shirt before we went outside to hit the streets doing praise marches, which we did in the end of the 1980s. Every other Sunday except one in 30 years, I’ve taken a manuscript into the pulpit.

Well, in those days, I took a very long manuscript into the pulpit and I was much more bound to it. And if I was looking somebody right in the eye, I’d tend to lose my thought. I couldn’t look at people because if they had just the slightest alteration in their expression, I suddenly wondered, “What are they thinking?” And then when I asked what they’re thinking, I couldn’t think about what I was thinking and I would lose my place. And so that was the mark of youth and inexperience, and you just get beyond that.

Maybe this gets closer to your question. This may not be entirely accurate. I was going to say I never have gotten in front of a mirror and done a sermon to see what it looks and sounds like. I have never done that. But I do work through it Saturday afternoon to preach Saturday night. I work through it and go very slowly, making marks, and I’m listening to myself in my head. And there are times when I say, “That would sound really weird if I said it in a prosaic, ho-hum manner. If I don’t lift my voice here, that’s going to sound weird. In another place, it would sound really weird if I did.” You don’t read the phone book.

One of the problems I have with some pastors who get on a roll — crescendo, crescendo, crescendo — and now they’re up here and the voice level never changes and they announce the hymn and the closing of the sermon in the same way that they preach. Weird, right? Just weird. “And now we’ll all turn to page 315 to close the . . .” That’s the way you were talking about the Resurrection. There’s no connection here between your voice and that reality. You just got into a mode. You pushed a button. So I want to be sensitive. If that starts to happen, I just don’t want to be there.

So I think you’re right to draw attention to the fact that experience lets that happen way more naturally. This message that I’ll give tonight is scribbled on airplane pages, and I won’t have but a half an hour to look at it probably between this class and that thing. So I’m winging a lot tonight. I would’ve been terrified at this moment if it was 25 years ago, and I’m not terrified now. I’m excited. I’m so eager to try out this new idea on these folks tonight.