8 Therefore whoever disregards this, disregards not man but God, who gives his Holy Spirit to you.ĩ Now concerning brotherly love you have no need for anyone to write to you, for you yourselves have been taught by God to love one another, 10 for that indeed is what you are doing to all the brothers throughout Macedonia. 7 For God has not called us for impurity, but in holiness. 3 For this is the will of God, your sanctification:that you abstain from sexual immorality 4 that each one of you know how to control his own bodyin holiness and honor, 5 not in the passion of lust like the Gentiles who do not know God 6 that no one transgress and wrong his brother in this matter, because the Lord is an avenger in all these things, as we told you beforehand and solemnly warned you. 2 For you know what instructions we gave you through the Lord Jesus. Note especially the verses towards the end:įinally, then, brothers,we ask and urge you in the Lord Jesus, that as you received from us how you ought to walk and to please God, just as you are doing, that you do so more and more. 1 Thessalonians 4 contains an admonition from Paul about what Christian living should look like. The interpretation of Christian warring not as continual but as seasonal helps us also make sense of two other Pauline passages that describe the Christian life in very noncombat-like terms. In other words, Paul seems to understand Christian warfare not as a description of the believer’s relationship to all of his world, but as a seasonal posture towards the encroachment of unbelief on the advance of the Gospel. Paul says that his Gospel ministry wages a specific kind of war against a specific enemey (unbelief) for a specific purpose (taking every thought captive to the mind of Christ). Particularly in 2 Corinthians, the spiritual warring that Paul describes has both a definite object and a finite purpose. What’s interesting about Paul’s use of the warring motif is that he doesn’t use general terms to describe the permanent state of the believer. There, Paul uses the imagery of combat to illuminate the reality of spiritual warfare against indwelling sin and the world’s bastions of unbelief and hostility towards the Gospel. Now of course he doesn’t mean physical war against human combatants, but spiritual war, against unbelief, sin, and Satan.īiblical support for the warring state of the Christian is found in 2 Corinthians and Romans. That idea he fleshes out consistently in DWYL, and it’s come out in a few of his sermons and other books. The first thing Piper is saying is that the life of the Christian is the life of constant war. There are two things Piper is saying, and if we don’t correctly identify the differences between the two, any criticism of what Piper says here will sound like an endorsement of materialism or worldliness. Everybody gets his toys: bigger house and car, more clothing, more fine food, etc., without even thinking about how the war effort is advancing. The alternative is to just go with the flow. But you might not eat out as often, or you might buy a used car so that you can buy that computer. In a wartime lifestyle you always ask yourself, How can my life count to advance the cause of Christ? And if it means buying a computer to keep in touch with your missionaries through email, then you’re going to invest several thousand dollars into a computer and software. Instead you would just move out to Idaho, plant potatoes, and be irrelevant. In a simple lifestyle, however, you wouldn’t fiddle around with bombers. In wartime you may need to build a B-52 bomber, which costs millions and millions of dollars, in order to win the war. That’s why I say “wartime” and not “simple” lifestyle because of this complexity. When I say “wartime lifestyle” I mean something very complex. More specifically: I’m not sure the idea that “all of life is war” and that Christians should adopt a continual, in-the-trenches worldview really has the full support of Scripture.įor some context, take Piper’s words in this blog post from Desiring God: I think Piper’s emphasis on “war-time living” is an example of trying to make the Bible mean what it doesn’t actually say. So please don’t hear a pernicious 25 year old trying to correct a theological lion like John Piper, especially a 25 year old who has wept during Piper’s sermons and experienced transformation through his books. Yours truly is a humble undergrad with a blog. Now, Piper is of course an incredibly godly, incredibly seasoned pastor-theologian. His book isn’t as rich with concrete examples or superlative language as David Platt’s Radical. As I noted in my previous post, Piper’s book is more of a theological reflection on making life count for Christ. Thinking about this conversation brought to mind some questions that I had when first reading John Piper’s Don’t Waste Your Life.
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