When I think about the people who have shaped the way I see the world, John Piper sits near the top of the list. That is true for almost everyone connected to PassionLife, the ministry I help lead. We go to the countries with the highest abortion rates and work alongside local churches to mobilize ordinary believers at the grassroots level, saving mothers and babies one life at a time. Two passions hold that work together: the sanctity of human life and the global spread of the gospel. Those happen to be the same two passions that have animated John Piper’s entire ministry. So when he agreed to come to the Atlanta area this July and speak on behalf of PassionLife, it felt less like booking a famous guest and more like a long friendship coming full circle.
A book that woke me up
My first encounter with Piper came through a book. I graduated high school in 1993, the same year he published Let the Nations Be Glad, and I was just waking up to my own call to missions. In college I picked it up, and it became my first real exposure to his thinking. The premise has never left me. Piper argues that world missions is the second most important activity human beings can engage in. The most important is worship—the glad worship of God. Missions ranks second only because there are people in the world who do not yet know this God who deserves to be glorified, and it falls to us to go and tell them, so that they too can do the first and greatest thing a human being was made to do: worship their Maker. “Missions exists because worship doesn’t,” he wrote. It is a beautiful book, heavily quoted across the missions world, and if you have spent any time in that world you have almost certainly read it or heard it referenced.
Around the turn of the millennium, Piper was invited to speak at a one-day event called Passion OneDay 2000, where some forty thousand college students camped on a farm outside Memphis. It had rained the night before; volunteers built a wooden stage and read Scripture aloud from it almost continuously, the way the people did in the days of Ezra and Nehemiah. Many of my friends were there. One of them, who lives right down the street from me, still talks about Piper’s “seashells” sermon. Piper had read a story in Reader’s Digest about a couple who retired early and spent their days collecting seashells along the beach, and he held it up as a picture of a wasted life—a mindless, self-centered existence that misses the whole point. That message became the seed of his book Don’t Waste Your Life, another title that left a deep mark on me. Across the years, Piper has devoted himself to helping people understand the Word of God in a deep and rich way, so that they might glorify him with how they actually live.
A friendship that goes back fifty years
What many people don’t know is that my connection to John Piper is personal, and it goes back half a century. In the fall of 1976—fifty years ago now—I was a senior at Bethel College in Minnesota, hungry to learn as much of the Bible as I could. I had been a Christian only two or three years and was preparing for seminary, so I signed up to study New Testament Greek. The professor was brand new to the school, about thirty years old. His name was John Piper.
He taught two sections of Greek that semester, which turned out to matter a great deal. I noticed a young woman in the hallway who caught my eye, and I learned she was enrolled in Piper’s other Greek section. Too much of a coward to simply ask her out, I suggested instead that we study together for an upcoming exam, since we were covering the same material. So my first date with the woman who became my one and only wife was a Greek study session for a class John Piper taught. He made sure I passed.
I have always tried to get to know my professors, and I worked at getting to know John and his wife, Noël. He had a houseful of small children then, and somehow I got myself invited over for lunch, where I would pepper him with the theological questions of an earnest twenty-something. When I got engaged later that year, my fiancée Kristen and I asked John to officiate. Forty-eight years ago last week, he drove out to the Salem Evangelical Free Church on Staten Island and married us. He was about thirty-two; I was twenty-two. If you ever see the wedding photo, you’ll spot a sharp waistcoat and the kind of hair that was very much in style at the time.
We stayed connected through the decades, and our paths kept crossing in ways that deepened my appreciation for him. In the late 1980s, both of us—unknown to each other—were asked to serve on a prayer commission within our denomination, then the Baptist General Conference. He was pastoring Bethlehem Baptist Church in Minneapolis; I was pastoring Calvary Baptist in Boston. The commission promoted prayer among church leaders and helped fuel the concerts-of-prayer movement that was rising at the time. My small claim to fame is co-writing a booklet with him called Toward a Movement of Prayer. I wrote the first half, answering the question “Why do we need a movement of prayer?” with a single word: victory—pointing to the historical record of revivals in England and America, where prayer movements preceded the spread of the gospel and the conquering of social injustice. John wrote his half around a different word: war—the conviction that we are in a spiritual battle that drives us to call on the resources of heaven.
Years later, when I was thirty-nine, I was finally invited to write a book of my own. Someone had once told me not to write one until I had at least forty years of life seasoning, and that advice had stuck. John was kind enough to write the foreword. That book is now titled The Great Work of the Gospel, and it’s available as a free download at passionlife.org. About a decade ago, the three of us—John, the musician Lecrae, and I—sat down for a video conversation about abortion, God’s forgiveness, and how the arts can carry a message of mercy, the way art and poetry once strengthened the abolition movement. You can still find that interview on our website.
Holding the two together
Now I am seventy and John is eighty, and what we want to spend our remaining days doing is clear to us both. For me, the whole calling of PassionLife can be summed up in one phrase: to help the church rescue the innocent in a way that brings good news to the guilty. That is harder than it sounds, because history shows how nearly impossible it is to keep mercy and the gospel together. They may start joined, but they drift. Medical missions began as a doorway to the spiritual needs of people; some missionaries kept the evangelistic edge for a generation, while others quietly became practitioners of medicine alone. The YMCA started as an urban evangelistic outreach. Harvard began as a school to train pastors. Wellesley was founded on the radical Christian conviction that women deserved the same education as men—and lost its Christian foundation within a decade. Drift in one direction or the other is the constant danger.
So at PassionLife we start medical clinics to help women and couples choose life, and we labor to keep that joined to the invitation to trust the Lord Jesus as the Creator and Provider—not only of daily bread but of the bread of their souls. I am wary of two errors. One is the “bait and switch” version of pro-life work that cares more about counting gospel presentations than about the woman in front of you. The value of an unborn child stands on its own; the Good Samaritan story has no evangelistic edge, and pulling someone from a burning car is good and merciful all by itself. Yet I cannot help believing the rescued man wants to know who saved him, and why. The gospel is precisely what gives us love for people in crisis in the first place.
This is the tension John Piper has held faithfully for decades. He never let abortion become the dominant theme of his ministry, the way it must be in mine, but every January, for the sanctity of human life, he addressed it—some thirty sermons over thirty years, all available at Desiring God. Keeping together what God has joined: a temporal value to human life and an eternal one. That is why I’m so eager for him to come to Atlanta.
If our work stirs you, I’d encourage you to join us. Come to the event if you’re near Atlanta, register early because seating is limited, or sponsor a table at $700 if you can give but can’t attend. And whatever you do, go to passionlife.org and download The Moral Crisis of Abortion and World Missions. Then join us in the great challenge of living freely and powerfully to rescue the innocent—and doing it in a way that brings good news to the guilty. That is a very good way to live your life.
This article is adapted from the episode transcript.