Brothers We Are Not Professionals

by John Piper

I do not nullify the grace of God, for if justification were through the law, then Christ died for no purpose” (Gal. 2:21). No gore, no grace, no glory. All

(Gal. 5:11).3

aim of this book is to spread a radical, pastoral passion for the supremacy and centrality of the crucified and risen God-Man, Jesus Christ, in every sphere of life and ministry and culture.

for radically Bible-saturated, God-centered, Christ-exalting, self-sacrificing, mission-mobilizing, soul-saving, culture-confronting pastors! Let the chips fall where they will: palm branches one day, persecution the next.

For there is no professional childlikeness (Matt. 18:3); there is no professional tenderheartedness (Eph. 4:32); there is no professional panting after God (Ps. 42:1).

business is to weep over our sins (James 4:9). Is there professional weeping?

We have been crucified with Christ; yet now we live by faith in the one who loved us and gave Himself for us (Gal. 2:20). What is professional faith?

Is there a way to be a professional clay pot?

he is sent by God to save people from hell and to make them Christ-exalting,

world sets the agenda of the professional man; God sets the agenda of the spiritual man. The strong wine of Jesus Christ explodes the wineskins of professionalism.

deliver us from the professionalizers! Deliver us from the “low, managing, contriving, maneuvering temper of mind among us.

conversation. Restore to us the childlike joy of our salvation. Frighten us with the awesome holiness and power of Him who can cast both soul and body into hell (Matt. 10:28). Cause us to hold to the cross with fear and trembling as our hope-filled and offensive tree of life. Grant us nothing, absolutely nothing, the way the world views it. May Christ be all in all (Col. 3:11).

I defined spiritual leadership as “knowing where God wants people to be and taking the initiative to get them there by God's means in reliance on God's power.”

So the goal of spiritual leadership is to muster people to join God in living for God's glory.

Martyn Lloyd-Jones that the fight to find time to read is a fight for one's life. “Let your wife or anyone else take messages for you, and inform the people who are telephoning that you are not available. One literally has to fight for one's life in this sense!”

pouring. My spirit does not revive on the run. Without time of unhurried reading and reflection, beyond the press of sermon preparation, my soul shrinks, and the specter

I mean pastors who feel the weight and glory of eternal reality even in the midst of a business meeting; who carry in their soul such a sense of God that they provide, by their very presence, a constant life-giving reorientation on the infinite God.

One of the most helpful discoveries I have made is how much can be read in disciplined blocks of twenty minutes a day.

like John Calvin's Institutes

I needed twenty minutes a day, six days a week.

books! John Stott says that an hour a day is an “absolute minimum for time for study which even the busiest pastors should be able to manage.”

In fact one of my greatest complaints in seminary was that professors trained students in bad habits of superficial reading because they assigned too many books.

“A student will find that his mental constitution is more affected by one book thoroughly mastered than by twenty books which he has merely skimmed, lapping at them.”

Your people will know if you are walking with the giants (as Warren Wiersbe says) or watching television.

Take that early morning twenty minutes, for example. Perhaps you should not view it in isolation from your season of morning prayer but as an organic part of it and help to it.

seeing all that God is for us in Jesus (2 Cor. 3:18).