It is impossible for a Christian living in the will of God to take a risk.

That sounds like a strange thing to say at the end of a message about risk taking. But it is where John Piper landed a few weeks ago, when he stood before our supporters at the PassionLife fundraising dinner in Atlanta, Georgia, and gave a keynote titled Risk Taking for Life and Fruitfulness. We hold these dinners in different places with different speakers — Gary Chapman spoke for us in North Carolina — but the Atlanta address has proven worth returning to again and again for the gems in it.

On the last few episodes of the PassionLife Podcast, we have been working through that keynote together. This week we turn to the idea Piper built the whole evening toward: God cannot risk, and you should. Let’s consider how these two truths are connected.

While this may not be a new theology, it is an important one, a life-changing one!

Doctrine Is Not a Dirty Word

Before we go further, it is worth pausing on that word theology.

People today tend to use doctrine and theology as negatives. Oh, that’s too heady. That’s intellectual. That’s academic. But everyone has a theology. Everyone has a belief system, a code they live by. We all base our entire lives on how we think about God and about God at work in us.

That means doctrine is never a side issue. It changes lives. And of all the truths we could point to in the Bible, this one — that God cannot take a risk — is one of the most liberating and empowering we know. It has been that for us, and we believe Piper laid it out faithfully from the Scriptures.

Risk or Sacrifice?

Piper began where every good argument begins: with a definition. A risk, he said, is an action that might expose you or others to loss or injury. And he leaned hard on that one word.

“Why the word might*? That word means that the only people who can risk are people who don’t know how it’s going to go. If you know how it’s gonna go, you don’t call it a risk.”*

If you know you are going to die when you throw yourself on a grenade, you do not say, I’m going to take a risk. You say, I’m going to make a sacrifice. I’m going to lay my life down. That is not a risk. That is a sacrifice.

So the only people who can take risks are people who don’t know the future. And you don’t know the future — which means you can take a risk.

Then Piper turned to Jesus. When Jesus set his face to go to Jerusalem, he did not say, This might be costly. He said they would mock him and spit on him and flog him and kill him, and after three days he would rise. That is not a risk. That is a fully aware, intentional sacrifice.

Which implies something about God himself.

“That’s Heresy”

“God cannot take risks.”

Piper told the room he has grown fed up, after hearing it for decades, with people trying to make God sound courageous or noble or loving or humble because he supposedly took a risk to create the world, or took a risk to send Jesus.

He called it what it is: baloney. Heresy.

God cannot take a risk, Piper said, because he knows exactly what he is doing. When he sent his Son, he was not crossing his fingers and wondering how it would turn out. He sent him to die. It was not a risk. It was a plan — to save by sacrifice.

And then he made a promise he would keep before the night was over: the fact that God cannot take a risk is exactly why you can, and should.

Be of Good Courage

But first, Piper wanted the room to watch some beautiful risk takers in the Bible. The first one he went to was Joab.

Joab was commander of the army of Israel, and his brother Abishai was his partner over that army. Coming against them was a pincer movement: the Ammonites on one side and the Syrians on the other. Joab did not know whether he could win. Here is what he said to his brother:

If the Syrians are too strong for me, then you shall help me; but if the Ammonites are too strong for you, then I will come and help you. Be of good courage, and let us play the man for our people and for the cities of our God, and may the Lord do what seems good to him. (2 Samuel 10:11–12)

Piper loves that scene. It is pure risk. I don’t know what the Lord is going to do. Let him do what he wants to do. I know one thing: I’m laying my life down for the cities of God.

He picked it for a personal reason. Early in his ministry, as his church grew and he got to build a staff, that is the kind of partner he wanted — an Abishai at his side, a man who talked like that. That is the kind of pastor he wanted to be.

He remembered saying to his deacons, back before he had persuaded the church it ought to have elders: Look, guys, could we just please fail at something? If you devote your life to avoiding failure, Piper said, you will not accomplish anything significant.

It’s just not a way to live.

What a picture that is — wanting an Abishai beside you, and wanting to be one. The way those two brothers spoke to each other on the edge of battle ought to inspire anyone who serves alongside others in the work of the gospel.

A Distinction That Rings True

What strikes us most in all of this is the difference Piper draws between taking a risk and making a sacrifice.

It is one of those things that rings true the moment you hear it, even if you had never quite seen it that way before. Yes, that’s exactly right. If you throw yourself on a grenade, you are giving your life away. That is not a risk. That is a sacrifice.

And Piper drew the distinction for a reason. He wanted us to see that God made a sacrifice, but God did not take a risk. That is a powerful thing to grasp.

The God Who Doesn’t Know

There is a popular idea that Piper plainly cannot stand: that because God loved you so much, he risked everything. That he took a huge risk to give you free will, to let you decide whether or not you would follow him.

Piper did not call that a bad idea or bad theology. He called it heretical. And we agree.

It is a subtle claim, but ultimately a God-dishonoring one — that God took a risk in creating you and giving you what people call free will, the opportunity to make choices, to reject him or embrace him. It is horribly destructive thinking, because it asks you to trust a God who doesn’t really know the future and has no power over it.

Put in theological terms, it dismantles the truth that God is omniscient. That belongs to what is called theology proper — the doctrine of God himself. What is God capable of? What is his character, his nature? When you take the Scriptures and begin to analyze them, there is no question that it is heretical to suggest God is not omniscient. He knows everything, from the beginning, from eternity past. So there are no surprises. And there are no risks.

Why People Say It

Why would anyone preach or write along these lines? Most likely because they believe it will help people love God. Bad things happen in the world, and if God did not really have control over those things, then he can’t be blamed. They are trying to protect the name of God.

But we don’t need to protect God’s reputation. He has not asked us to.

It is far better to make your peace with, and be reconciled to, the God who is — the God who has ordained hard things, unbelievably hard things, even unjust things, in this dark and fallen world. Things like the death of his own Son, the greatest act of injustice in human history: the man without any sin, perfect, suffering at the wicked hands of men and women.

That was not a risk. It was a sacrifice. It was intentional.

And that is what lays the foundation for us to take a risk.

Planning and Performing

Piper had promised to come back at the end and make the connection between God cannot risk and you should. Here is how he did it.

The reason God cannot risk is that he knows everything and he can do everything. He is sovereign. He is omnipotent. He is omniscient.

“A person who knows everything and can do everything cannot risk. They can only plan and perform, which is what God does.”

God governs the world. He performs his word.

Now add to that, Piper said, that God sent Jesus Christ into the world to die for sinners — for you and for me. When Christ dies for sinners, and God draws his elect to himself and unites them to himself by the Spirit, all their sins are forgiven. In that room, everyone trusting Jesus could know there was not one guilty person present. The wrath of God is gone.

And all of that omnipotence and all of that knowledge is in the service of his mercy.

“Nothing happens to you but mercy, Christian. It’s hard — hard as hell, because it’s hell on earth — but it’s not wrath. It’s mercy.”

More Than Conquerors

So how does that relate to risking your life? Piper answered from Romans 8:

Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or danger, or sword? As it is written, “For your sake we are being killed all the day long; we are regarded as sheep to be slaughtered.” No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. (Romans 8:35–37)

Which means, amazingly, that God takes all of it — tribulation and distress and persecution and famine and nakedness and peril and sword — and makes us super-conquerors. More than conquerors.

So you can’t risk either, Piper said. Then he caught himself. Well, that’s not quite right. You’ve got to be more careful.

Yes, you can take a risk in this life. But ultimately, no Christian takes a risk. It is going to turn out well. It is going to turn out wonderful, no matter what happens here.

“That Ought to Be in the Bible”

Then Piper did something we at PassionLife never expected.

He had come across our dinner brochure online a few weeks earlier and had it in front of him, full of what he called juicy sentences. He had already read one line from it earlier in the evening. Now he turned the room to another, about two-thirds of the way down the first column on the inside page. He did not know who had written it, he said, but he assumed John Ensor, our president, was behind it — and it was a summary of his own message, written by people who had no idea what he was going to talk about.

If you have faith that God is watching over you, then you know nothing bad can happen to you that isn’t good for you.

That is a great sentence, Piper said. Oh, read it again, it’s so good. That ought to be in the Bible. And then: Actually, it is in the Bible. It’s called Romans 8.

He finished with a word of blessing on the ministry. PassionLife, he said, had served the evening well, had served the nations well, had served the children and the mothers and the fathers well, and had served the gospel well. And he prayed that God would give PassionLife decades of fruitfulness as it continues to take risks for the cause of Christ.

It is not only that Piper words things so well, though he does. It is that he gets so excited, almost like a child, and hearing that sentence read aloud in his wonderful, preachy Southern voice — lit up with delight as he discovered we had been on the same page all along — was a moment we will not forget.

At a Fork in the Road

But Piper did not leave it with PassionLife. He believed God had given him the message for everyone in that room, right where they were.

Everyone in the room, he said, was at a fork in the road, or would be soon. Many of them were older, and for them the fork might be retirement: what to do next, what to do with the house, what to do with the boat, what to do with the twenty years of health God might give between sixty-five and eighty-five. Others were younger. But every person was at a fork, or would be.

And his charge was this: because of the Bible, because of grace, and because of God’s inability to take a risk — and ultimately your own inability to take a risk — take a risk.

Nothing Bad That Isn’t Good

That sentence is worth reading one more time: If you have faith that God is watching over you, then you know nothing bad can happen to you that isn’t good for you.

It was not written fresh for the brochure. Piper’s guess was right — John wrote it. He first put it down during COVID, in an article he had been asked to write on Psalm 91, the psalm about how God protects his people. Of course, bad things still happen to God’s people. But the argument of Psalm 91 is that if God has you on mission, if he has called you to do something, you could step on a snake and it is not going to hurt you, because he is protecting you to carry out his will and purpose.

Something very close to that happened in Acts 28. On the island of Malta, a viper came out of the fire and fastened onto Paul’s hand. Everyone waited for him to swell up or drop dead on the spot. Paul shook it off.

Nothing bad can happen to you that isn’t good for you. That does not mean bad things don’t happen. It means that in the providence and sovereignty of God — who has loved us and reconciled us to himself through Jesus — he has our back.

Immortal Until the Work Is Done

There is a nuance in all of this we don’t want to miss. It is not impossible for Christians to take risks in this life. We can take risks, and some of them will be bad risks. They can be misjudgments. They can turn out poorly from a worldly standpoint. What Piper was saying is that in the end no Christian takes a risk, because in the end everything will work out exactly the way God has decided it will.

There is a line commonly attributed to the missionary David Livingstone that says it well: We are immortal until God has finished with his purposes for us.

You could throw yourself on a grenade, and if God is not finished with you, somehow, some way, you will survive the blast. You can be thrown off a ship and swallowed by a great fish, and still not be finished. You can have the deadliest snake on Malta latch onto your hand — the kind people don’t survive — and shake it off and go about your day.

That is not a license to take foolish, dangerous risks in order to put God to the test. Plenty of people have taken passages like these out of context, and that is not what we mean. What we mean is this: because God is sovereign, and because his watchful eye is on us, even the things that look bad from a worldly perspective are still good for us, and serve God, his glory, and his purposes.

Entrusted for Safekeeping

And the point of all of that is to live a bold, risk-taking life.

Look at the hall of faith in Hebrews 11. By faith they did this. By faith they did that. Risk is the nature of saving faith itself. Faith says, I have entrusted my life to God for safekeeping, and therefore I can risk it.

When God calls us in Proverbs to rescue those who are being taken away to death, those stumbling to the slaughter (Proverbs 24:11), where do we find the courage and strength to do it? We find it by knowing that God has his eye on us and will keep us safe in the ultimate sense, even if not in the temporal sense.

That is the theology. And it has shaped lives.

Off to China

Asked what it was like to hear John Piper read his sentence aloud and say it belonged in the Bible, John admitted that everybody likes a little applause. But the point, he said, was that Piper was recognizing PassionLife had stated, in its own way, the grand truth Romans 8 is trying to give to all of us. It was a sweet moment, and he praises God for it.

Mostly, though, he praises God because this is the theology that has shaped his own life. When John went to China for the first time, it was a big risk. He and his wife, Kristen, looked at each other and said, We’re going to go for it, and trust that anything bad that happens to us is good for us.

And off they went.

That is still how PassionLife operates around the world. We trust God to send us into places that may or may not be the safest.

Read the Brochure

The brochure from that evening — the one with the sentence John Piper said ought to be in the Bible — is linked alongside this episode, wherever you found it. Download it, read it, and pray for PassionLife. You can follow our work at passionlife.org, where John Piper’s full keynote is also posted.

We would love to welcome you into the PassionLife family.

This article is adapted from the episode transcript.