I only just managed to get the time to listen to John Piper’s Together for the Gospel conference message. As I discovered when I heard him in Wales, Piper is best experienced in the same room, but something of the anointing or unction came across, even in this recording.
Piper’s passion is for his hearers to have radical Christian lives that persevere for decades and are heaven-focused. I hope that all of you will feel the urge to go and listen to this message if you have not already done so. It exposes the weaknesses of many of us in the modern church.
One of the quotes he used was the following, which he also read in Wales:
“Where are the young men and women of this generation who will hold their lives cheap, and be faithful even unto death, who will lose their lives for Christ’s, flinging them away for love of him? Where are those who will live dangerously, and be reckless in this service? Where are the men of prayer? Where are the men who count God’s Word of more importance to them than their daily food? Where are the men who, like Moses of old, commune with God face to face as a man speaks with his friend? Where are God’s men in this day of God’s power?”
Quoted from Howard Guinness, Sacrifice (1936), in Lindsay Brown, Shining Like Stars: The Power of the Gospel in the World’s Universities, Nottingham: InterVarsity Press, 2006, p. 151.
May God make me and many of you, my readers, into those who are clearly sold out for God. May he raise up an army of people who are not satisfied with our typical mediocre Christian lives.
I think that listening to this great preacher pray is almost as instructive as listening to his preaching, and gives some clues as to the source of his all too rare anointing as he declares God’s Word. I tried to capture the words of his prayer here, but you should listen to it. Here is a man talking to a God who he knows well, and yes, with whom he is intoxicated!
“Father, we together now renounce all self-reliance. We renounce all vain glory, pride, greed, covetousness. We renounce cowardice and the fear of man. We renounce lust and those pornographic things that threaten to sweep our brains away. We renounce anxiety about what’s going on at home and ask for freedom. We renounce sinful anger and bitterness at people in our church, spouses who disappoint, a mum who doesn’t understand what I am dreaming. We renounce Satan in all his works and all his ways. Together collectively we submit to Christ and we submit to your Word. We ask for the Holy Spirit to brood over these thousands that something extraordinary would happen here for the sake of the glory of Christ and the good of the Church and the reaching of the nations. Exceedingly abundantly beyond everything we have dreamed, and we have dreamed much. Come, come Holy Spirit, I ask in Jesus’ name. Amen.”
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