Barnabas Piper's Blog, page 74

5 Temptations I Face as a Public Speaker

Several times a year I get invited to speak various places ranging from local churches to high school chapels to conferences to youth retreats. I enjoy speaking and view these invitations as real opportunities, but with these opportunities come temptations. Each of the five temptations I list below is something I struggle with, often times all at once. I am not positive all speakers wrestle with these, but I know human nature well enough to guess they do in one way or another.

1) I believe I need to hit a home run.

Swing for the fences. That’s what my ego says. Crush it. Leave them dazzled and dazed. But here’s the thing: I am not a very dazzling speaker, and neither are most speakers. To continue the metaphor, I am a singles and doubles hitter (and so are most speakers). If I try to hit a homer I will swing and miss as often as not. I need to resist this temptation and simply do what I am capable of as well as I can do it. I need to be faithful, to be clear, to be truthful. I need to put a good swing on it and make solid contact – that’s what God gave me the ability to do. Maybe God will carry the ball over the fence, but I should not swing for that.

2) I believe I need to reflect my audience.

They are students, so be relevant and cool. They are pastors, so be knowledgeable. They are artists so be creative. It’s one thing, a good thing, to be conscientious about whom I speak to, but I cannot let that change who I am. Within reason, I can change my language or my jokes or my terminology to connect with an audience. But connecting and reflecting aren’t the same. I am not my audience. If I lose myself, my style, and my gifts trying to reflect them I will lose them too.

3) I believe I need to impress my fellow speakers.

Sometimes I get to share the stage with impressive people – authors, pastors, artists – which means they’re in the audience when I get up to speak. It is incredibly tempting to keep an eye on their head nods and note-taking for affirmation. As if they matter more than the listener in the sixth row. It is incredibly tempting to gauge the “success” of a message by the adulation of stage-mates rather than the faithfulness and clarity of the message itself. And it is incredibly tempting to feel proud or validated simply because my name appeared in the same speaker lineup as theirs. None of this has any bearing on the words, the truth, the benefit of a message I give, and to be caught up in it is to aim at the wrong target.

4) I believe I don’t belong.

The imposter syndrome is something most speakers, authors, performers, or artists wrestle with at some level. I do all the time. It is the fear that I will be “found out” – that we were invited by mistake, and if they really knew who I was or what I was (and wasn’t) capable of they would be horrified. I’m not talented enough. I’m too inexperienced. I’m too sinful. I simply don’t belong, especially not alongside all these super gifted, godly people.

This fear will deflate a speaker and a message. It will steal vitality and hope. And it will heighten the first three temptations to gargantuan size because I feel the need to make up for my lack of belonging. The reality is, I was invited for a reason – something I wrote or said gave them reason to believe I could help this audience. God put me on that stage in front of those people, so I simply need to go serve, to speak as well as I can in the time I am given. If He wants me there then it is not a mistake.

5) I believe I do belong.

Just as tempting as it is to feel like an imposter it may be more tempting to feel legitimate – like I am a bona fide speaker. I do belong alongside these talented people. This audience needs me. These event planners made a grand choice by inviting me.

The moment I stop being a little surprised and thankful for being invited to speak is the moment I should stop accepting invitations. It means I think I belong, like I deserve to be asked, like I have something to offer. It means that I have begun seeing myself as a half step above my audience as if I live on a stage and they live below. This temptation is real. Pride is insidious, even in ministry. No one is worthy of the stage; God has given some the ability and opportunity to speak from it. And when we are done we should step down and re-take our place on the ground where we belong.

He Reads Truth – Blessed Are Those Who Mourn

I have the privilege of contributing to He Reads Truth, a website of whose purpose is “To help men become who we were made to be, by doing what we were made to do, by the power and provision that God has given us to do it, for the glory of Jesus Christ.” They do this by providing scripture reading plans accompanied by reflections that can be accessed for free online or purchased as print books. For those of you looking to engage scripture in a fresh way – either because you are dried up or have been away from it, these studies/plans will refresh your soul and engage your mind.

What follows is one of the pieces I wrote on The Beatitudes. You can find the full plan HERE.

Matthew 5:4, Isaiah 61:1-3, Romans 7:21-25, 2 Corinthians 7:8-10

Nothing is more frustrating than a problem we cannot fix. I can think of about seven billion of these problems: people. We can’t fix people. Yet we try with blood, sweat, and tears. We try to solve their hearts and their sin and their pain. Sometimes we help. Often we are fruitless. Instead of a tidy resolution we are left with the residue and detritus sin leaves behind in all its acidity and stink.

And none of this touches on the misery of trying to solve ourselves. Just as we cannot fix the sin of others, we cannot fix our own hearts either. Each day we wake up and realize we must live another day as the same person who went to bed the night before. And each day that person is just barely bearable. By distraction and grit, we make it. And then the next day we start again.

Left to itself, this reality would exhibit the laws of spiritual inertia—a decline to death, decay, and rot. Without an outside force good enough and powerful enough to solve these problems, they are condemnation. We are left with no hope, nothing but sadness. But we have such a force, and He spoke a few simple words a few thousand years ago to a few thousand people on the side of a mountain: “Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted” (Matthew 5:4).

Jesus was not offering trite promises of happiness. He wasn’t merely giving out hugs and smiles to make people forget their unsolvable sin (though I am sure He did not lack those for the needy). Neither was He setting up mourning as an aspiration—“blessed are those of you who can maintain a certain level of moroseness and misery”—as some Christians seem to believe. Jesus was offering hope to resolve the unresolvable. He was the hope.

All the way back in Isaiah, God promised One who would come to “heal the brokenhearted” and “comfort all who mourn” (Isaiah 61:1-2). Like us, the people then would have heard that as someone to rescue them from circumstances and make life all better. Jesus fulfilled Isaiah’s promise by doing both much more and much less. He did make life all better by crucifying sin and death. He did rescue us from the worst of our circumstances: our own sinfulness.

But Jesus did not fix our daily circumstances. Not yet at least. We still live in the pain of sin’s effect, but we know with certainty that our mourning will be comforted in full when Jesus comes again. Because our lives and hope and happiness depend on this comfort, our thanks run deep. We are thankful for the rescue that has already happened and for the one yet to come—the present comfort and the future comfort too.

New Happy Rant: New Tattoos, Smartphones Ruining Kids, and Overrated Actors

In this episode of the Happy Rant podcast Ted and Barnabas manage sans Ronnie and discuss the following:

The joys of minor league baseball
Their new tattoos and the stories behind them (Don’t worry – it’s PG)
Are smart phones really ruining kids or are we being doomsday and overwrought about this?
Overrated and underrated actors and some who are properly rated too.

Visit HappyRantPodcast.com to get your Happy Rant signature roast coffee from Lagares s Roasters AND to sign up for Live in Louisville, coming this October. It’s really happening, and we’d love to see you there! While supplies last you can get a free copy of Hello, I love You: Adventures in Adoptive Fatherhood by Ted when you place an order with Lagares Roasters too!

To listen you can:

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Episode #155

Why Churches and Church Leaders Need Curiosity

Humans are unique. God did not make anything else in His image. No other mammal is an image bearer. Even the angels are not even made in God’s image.

Author Joe Rigney explains the most significant implication this way: “Being made in God’s image is a vocation, something that we are called by God to do and to be.” A vocation, a calling, a work we are to dedicate out lives to. That means it is on purpose and with a purpose, not just a state of being. Our vocation will not be done by accident or with passivity any more than your to-do list at work will complete itself while you take a nap or your infant will feed himself while you watch TV. We must reflect God intentionally each day.

The Curious Vocation of the Church

What this means for the Church, and for churches, is profound. We are a community of image-bearers, each uniquely gifted and tasked to reflect something particular of God. Curiosity is how we do this.

God is an eternal, infinite being with a nature and characteristics we can never emulate, but our reflection of God is not passive. Our echoing is not inactive. We do not echo like a canyon wall, still and static while noise bounces off of us. We echo like town criers, taking up the message and passing it along clearly and loudly. We reflect on purpose, with intention, by taking action.

One of those actions is discovery – about God Himself. In order to represent God to the world we must know Him, and to do that we must learn. We must search for truth about His nature, His character, and His work. We must explore both His Word and His world. We absolutely must be curious if we are Christians. Without it we cease to grow and we become incapable of fulfilling our purpose in life.

If we start by growing in this divine curiosity we will then be prepared to begin exploring and impacting this weird, complicated messy world. Together. As a church.

How Church Leaders Model Curiosity

For most Christians curiosity is either merely a nice concept or a frightening one, either nebulous or questionable. We need someone to teach us and show us what it means to live in godly curiosity. That is the job of church leaders.

It starts with being curious. Are you fascinated with the depths of God and the breadth of His world? Do the people you lead see you exploring big questions and significant relationships? Do they see you trying new things to grow in faith and to strengthen your ministry? Do you step outside the mundanity of your daily life to engage needs or encounter cultures and experiences other than your own? Are you modeling curiosity? After all, behaviors are caught much more than taught.

But this isn’t one of those “strong silent type” situations. You must teach curiosity and explain it. People will see what you model and will catch it, but you must teach them the why and the how. Teach them what you have discovered in your explorations of God and His world. Teach them what you have learned from your failings in relationships and crossing cultures. Teach them what is true and what the standard is for their curiosity – scripture. And give them a vision of where curiosity can take them – deeper into relationship with God and people and further than they ever imagined in knowledge and care for the world.

When church leaders model and teach curiosity, built on the profound truths of scripture, the culture of an entire local church can change. When the culture changes, even subtly, the impact of that church changes too.

A Curious Church and Its World

Likely the church would be a more caring place, deeply aware of people’s needs and challenges. It would be a safe place for those struggling because people would take the time and ask the questions to understand their difficulties. Tension and infighting would diminish because people would be curious enough to learn what others really said and really meant instead of construing meaning and creating drama or conflict.

It would move toward being more diverse racially, socioeconomically, and educationally because people would be deeply interested in those different than themselves instead of frightened of them or intimidated by them. And more than anything it would be a church full of people in rich relationship with God because they would be searching and asking and looking for what more there is about His character and person and work and word. They would be seeking truth, reality as God intends it to be.

Church members will connect with neighbors and co-workers by being genuinely curious about their lives, so those people will have a chance to see something of Jesus in their lives because of how they ask questions and learn and care. People in that community might begin to see Christianity as a belief system that changes lives and loves deeply – not just old time religion or bigoted conservatism – because it clings to and reflects a God who changes lives and loves deeply.

The fruit of godly curiosity is a bold, bright, clear image of God shown to the world. It is visible in individuals and unmistakable in a body of believers. Curiosity is not a mere trait that some quirky people have but rather the fuel that should drive spiritual disciplines, relationships, mission, and all forms of ministry. It brings vivacity to spiritual life and that makes our lives attractive to the world around us, inviting them to find out more about this infinite, majestic object of our curiosity.

For more on curiosity, ministry, life, and faith check out my latest book, The Curious Christian: How Discovering Wonder Enriches Every Part of Life.

If you would like to take a short (FREE) evaluation of your own curiosity visit CuriousChristianBook.com.

New Happy Rant: Pastors as Candy Bars, Hip Hop Beef, and Personality Tests

In this episode of The Happy Rant Ted, Ronnie, and Barnabas do as they always do – suss  out a random variety of church and culture topics of questionable importance.

Which pastor is which candy bar – Tim Keller, Matt Chandler, Don Carson, Mark Dever?
Shai Lynne and Lecrae are having a Christian hip hop beef. It’s like Biggie and Tupac but way nicer. Of course we weighed in.
What do we think of personality evaluations like Myers-Briggs, Strengths Finder, and the Enneagram?

Big thank you to our sponsor, Union University. If you are a student, are raising a future college student, or are in a position to give advice to prospective college students please Check Union out for a wonderful Christian liberal arts education.

Visit HappyRantPodcast.com to get your Happy Rant signature roast coffee from Lagares s Roasters AND to sign up for Live in Louisville, coming this October. It’s really happening, and we’d love to see you there! While supplies last you can get a free copy of The Pastor’s Kid when you place an order with Lagares Roasters too!

To listen you can:

Subscribe in iTunes.
Listen on Google Play
Listen on Stitcher.
Leave us a rating in iTunes (it only takes 1 click and it really helps us).
Listen using the player below.

Episode #154

He Reads Truth – When Jesus Wept

I have the privilege of contributing to He Reads Truth, a website of whose purpose is “To help men become who we were made to be, by doing what we were made to do, by the power and provision that God has given us to do it, for the glory of Jesus Christ.” They do this by providing scripture reading plans accompanied by reflections that can be accessed for free online or purchased as print books. For those of you looking to engage scripture in a fresh way – either because you are dried up or have been away from it, these studies/plans will refresh your soul and engage your mind.

What follows is one of the pieces I wrote on the book of John. You can find the full plan HERE.

John 11:1-57, Daniel 12:2-3, 1 Thessalonians 4:13-14

So. So is a word that indicates purpose. I am tired, so I take a nap. I am hungry, so I get a snack. My daughter is talking, so I listen (sometimes—she talks a lot).

John 11 turns on the word so. People brought Jesus word that His close friend Lazarus was deathly ill. You’d expect Him to drop everything and rush to Lazarus’s home, especially because Jesus could heal any illness. But He didn’t. The passage says, “so when He heard Lazarus was sick He stayed two more days.” What? Why? That seems insane or negligent or insanely negligent—even more so when Jesus said that the sickness would not lead to death. Of course it would if nobody healed him. But Jesus waited on purpose.

“This sickness will not end in death but is for the glory of God that the Son of God may be glorified through it” (John 11:4). Those are Jesus’ words. Except Lazarus did die. And dead is dead, final, life over. Jesus could have stopped it, and Lazarus’s sisters knew it. Yet He intentionally waited to show up and then had the audacity to say Lazarus had “fallen asleep.”

What was Jesus getting at? What did all this add up to? A display of both His full humanity and full deity, His deep connection to His friends and His power over all.

When Jesus arrived in the town where Lazarus had lived, He walked into the pain of loss. Martha and Mary, Lazarus’s sisters, met Him and—as people do when they are overcome with pain and are grasping for answers—asked why Jesus hadn’t been there to heal their brother. “If you had been here,” they said. If. Jesus had stayed away on purpose. He had let Lazarus die.

But Jesus wept. How could He weep when He had allowed the pain to happen? Jesus wept over the loss of a friend and over the pain of death. He wept over the pervasive evil that steals life from everyone and the devastating effects of sin on the world. He wept for the pain of Martha and Mary. He wept because He was a man who deeply hurt.

Then He showed why He’d waited, what that so was all about. “Lazarus, come forth,” He commanded. (John 11:43). Jesus gave death an order to depart, and it did. For a moment He pulled back the curtain and gave a glimpse into the resurrection to come, the impending death of death He would bring about by laying down His own life.

In that moment, in the midst of mourning, Jesus proved the hope that all His followers have, a hope greater than death.

New Happy Rant: Bieber the Church Planter, Worst Sermons, and Altar Calls

In this episode of The Happy Rant Ted, Ronnie, and Barnabas riff on the following:

Feedback from kind fans
Justin Bieber cancelling a tour for the sake of planting a church
What kind of church planter would Bieber be?
The worst messages we’ve ever preached.
The awkwardness of altar calls (especially at messages we’ve preached)

Don’t forget to visit HappyRantPodcast.com to order your Happy Rant Signature roast coffee and to gt your tickets for our forthcoming Live in Louisville event (October 22)!

Visit HappyRantPodcast.com to get your Happy Rant signature roast coffee from Lagares s Roasters AND to sign up for Live in Louisville, coming this October. It’s really happening, and we’d love to see you there!

To listen you can:

Subscribe in iTunes.
Listen on Google Play
Listen on Stitcher.
Leave us a rating in iTunes (it only takes 1 click and it really helps us).
Listen using the player below.

Episode #153

My Dad’s Foreword to The Pastor’s Kid

The Pastor’s Kid: Finding Your Own Faith and Identity released three years ago. My dad, John Piper, was kind enough to write the foreword for it. It was a kindness because he was willing to lend his name and reputation to the work, but even more because of the first two lines he wrote, as you will see. Yet he did it any how. Here is that foreword.

 

You will ask, “Was it painful for me to read this book?”

The answer is yes. For at least three reasons.

First, it exposes sins and weaknesses and imperfections in me.

Second, it is not always clear which of its criticisms attach to me and the church I love.

Third, this is my son, and he is writing out of his own sorrows.

Writing this book has been hard. Maybe it’s more accurate to say that a lot of hardship went into writing this book, some of it in my own family and some of it through the pain of other PKs I connected with along the way. So many PKs carry so much pain and anger and sorrow with them. Some of them have fallen into bitterness, and others are rightly doing the hard work of trust in Jesus to help them through.

I am overwhelmingly thankful that Barnabas is in that last category. It took trust and courage to write this book. The road has been hard. And sometimes, as he says, “We need to pour out what is boiling in us.” When that happens, pressure is relieved and people get burned.

But Barnabas is not out to burn. Not me or any pastor. His aim is healing. “That is part of why I wrote this book,” he says, “to help PKs make sense of, sort through, and express those bottled-up frustrations and pains.” Frustrations built up from carrying an “anvil-like weight,” of being the most “watched”—“the best known and the least known people in the church.”

But the boiling over does burn. “I have been hard on pastors throughout this book. I have pointed out weaknesses and tendencies and failures. I have prodded and demanded and pushed them to be different, to change, to become aware.” My suggestion for the reader is that, if it gets too hot in the boiler room, you take a break from the heat and jump in the pool of chapter eight.

There is a stream of grace that runs through this book. You taste it along the way. But it becomes a pool at the end. A soothing. Barnabas is honest about his own struggles and failures. He has drunk deeply at the fountain of grace. He knows from experience the ultimate solution for all of us:

I desire to point to Jesus as the turner of hearts and the lifter of all burdens. . . . Grace, the undeserved favor of God, through Jesus, is the source of life and personhood and identity. . . . It is in the freedom of Jesus’ overwhelming love that the PK can break out of false expectations and see what it is that makes Jesus happy.

As it turns out, when the boiling is over, and the burns begin to heal, there is hope for PKs and pastors and churches.

“It’s not all bad news for PKs.” Through it all they have been unwitting, and sometimes unwilling, apprentices. They have seen—and many have benefited from—the bad and the good.

We have seen the pleasures of ministry. . . . Helping mend a broken marriage, praying with a heartbroken widow, serving the destitute man who knocks at the door . . . the close fellowship of a united church staff or . . . the deep, humbling satisfaction of seeing God use faithful ministry over time to right a sinking ship of a church.

Boiling over because of painful experiences may be unavoidable at some point, but Barnabas beckons his fellow PKs not to “wallow and bemoan them. Rather we must own what responsibilities are ours: to honor Jesus, to honor our fathers and mothers, to love and support the church, and to go about our lives not as victims but as the redeemed. Grace is here for all of us.”

And that includes the sinful and wounded pastors. “No man is adequate to be a pastor . . . That is a job no person is up for, not alone, not without profound grace. And that is the key to all this: grace.” And, of course, it is true for the wife and mother, watching, with tears, the drama play out between her son and husband, or bearing the weight of her daughter’s rejection.

And finally there is grace for the church. “The church is our family, it’s the family that God gave us, so don’t give up on it. There isn’t a better place out there to be restored.”

When I received the manuscript of this book and read it, I gave a copy to our seventeen year-old daughter. “Would you read this, and then talk to me about how I can be a better dad?” She did. It was a good talk. It’s not over. I suspect she will have ideas about that when she is 30 and I am 80. I hope she will be spared some sorrows because of her big brother’s book. Of course, most of that hangs on me. And, as we have seen, on grace. Which is why I appreciated Barnabas’s encouraging conclusion:

But now I want to express thanks. I want to say that PKs are blessed to have parents who devote their lives to serving Jesus. . . . So thank you, pastors (and spouses). You have given your lives to serving Jesus and His church , and that is a blessing.

He Reads Truth – The Call of Abram

I have the privilege of contributing to He Reads Truth, a website of whose purpose is “To help men become who we were made to be, by doing what we were made to do, by the power and provision that God has given us to do it, for the glory of Jesus Christ.” They do this by providing scripture reading plans accompanied by reflections that can be accessed for free online or purchased as print books. For those of you looking to engage scripture in a fresh way – either because you are dried up or have been away from it, these studies/plans will refresh your soul and engage your mind.

What follows is one of the pieces I wrote on the book of Genesis. You can find the full plan HERE.

Genesis 12:1-20, Genesis 13:1-4, Matthew 1:1-2

Faith is risky and risks are hard. It’s tough stepping out into the unknown to follow what you believe God is calling you to do.

A few years ago I lived in the suburbs of Chicago and had a decent job, when an opportunity came along for a different position in a different state that seemed like a better fit for the coming years. So I prayed, and I thought, and I followed (that’s what faith looks like most of the time) —all the way down I-65 through two intervening states to the strange and foreign southern land of Nashville. It was scary. Exhilarating and hopeful, but scary.

Abram received a much clearer and much more frightening call than I did when God told him to move from his home in Ur to some place called Canaan, away from his family ties and all that was familiar. God called him to the unknown but blessed Abram on his way, even telling Abram he would be a blessing to all nations. So Abram followed with his wife and livestock and servants. He acted in faith (Genesis 12).

Sometimes the risk of faith looks to be too much, especially when we face challenges. We realize we’re walking in the dark, that we’re in an unknown place. Yes, we followed God’s leading to get here, but what now?

Abram felt that too. There he was in Canaan, trying to make a go of things, when famine hit. For a nomadic herdsman, that was deadly. He could lose everything, even his life. What was he to do? God called him to this place, but now this? So Abram left the land God led him to and fled to Egypt, where he promptly lied about the identity of his wife to protect himself—though in the process he put her at great risk.

This is the kind of thing we do when we lose sight of the One leading us, when we forget the prompting that got us to where we are. When we forget the promise and the call, we go our own way and we inevitably fall. We stumble in the dark. We make rash decisions.

Abram’s waffling and stumbling isn’t remarkable; it’s completely normal. What’s remarkable is God’s faithfulness. God called a man to a faraway place, blessed him not just on his journey but for all time, protected him in spite of his failings, and established him in that blessing. Abram later became Abraham, and through Abraham all the nations of the world have been blessed because from Abraham came Jesus Christ, the true and living blessing (Matthew 1:1-2).

Abram isn’t so much our example of action as he is our example of hope. Is there a step of faith you need to take? Have you taken a step and fallen? Take hope; the blessing that God gave Abram is a promise we can trust no matter the risk or the stumble.

New Happy Rant: Acts 29 Goes Gala, Bucket List Items, and More

In this episode of The Happy Rant Ted, Ronnie, and Barnabas do what they always do – taken the quirks and oddities of evangelicalism and culture.

Acts 29, famous for aggressive manly preachers and faux lumberjacks hosted a gala at a nice hotel
Why do Pastor’s need special retreats and vacations?
What are our personal bucket list items?

Visit HappyRantPodcast.com to get your Happy Rant signature roast coffee from Lagares s Roasters AND to sign up for Live in Louisville, coming this October. It’s really happening, and we’d love to see you there!

To listen you can:

Subscribe in iTunes.
Listen on Google Play
Listen on Stitcher.
Leave us a rating in iTunes (it only takes 1 click and it really helps us).
Listen using the player below.

Episode #152