John Piippo
Thoughts about God, culture, and the Real Jesus.
Friday, July 11, 2025
Letter to My Redeemer Family
54 Thoughts About Prayer
Thursday, July 10, 2025
A Disciple Grows in Discernment
I began taking guitar lessons at age five. I have taught and played guitar for sixty-nine years. (How old am I?)
How familiar am I with guitars? Very! I am able to discern whether a guitar is in tune, or out of tune. I can hear chords played, and without looking at the guitar being played, tell you what chord it is. (Mostly, not entirely…) I can listen to a song for the first time, and (mostly) immediately play it. (Really accomplished guitarists do this better than I can.)
I became a disciple of Jesus just before my twenty-first birthday. I have talked and walked and lived with Jesus for fifty-three years. (How old am I?) Jesus became to me, as one scholar calls him, a “familiar stranger.”
From the beginning, Jesus felt familiar to me. I felt safe, at home, with him. Coming to Jesus was a great homecoming!
And, just as the first disciples found the ways and words of Jesus strange, like his use of parables, so did I. Yet I, like those disciples, was, and remain, attracted to him.
I am familiar with Jesus, with more understanding coming daily. I am able to discern what is of Jesus, and what is not of Jesus. The discipleship principle I have learned is:
Discernment is a function of familiarity.
Discernment is in direct proportion to intimacy.
I want you to be familiar with our Lord Jesus. I want your spiritual discernment to increase.
Apprentices become familiar with their teachers. My Teacher has taught me this: The more I know him, the more I see and understand him.
This is what happens to disciples of Christ. May it be so, in you.
DECLARATIONS
I am becoming more familiar with Jesus every day.
I am able to discern spiritual realities.
I can separate the good from the evil.
Revelation from Jesus is increasing in me.
It excites me to think there is so much more to Jesus waiting for me to comprehend.
There is no greater privilege than knowing Jesus my Lord!
(From my book 31 Letters to the Church on Discipleship)
Saturday, July 05, 2025
Logic and Truth
Friday, July 04, 2025
Some Quotes from My Conference Message
(Green Lake, Wisconsin)
At our annual conference's fifty-year anniversary I gave a retrospective on things I have learned at the conference.
Here are some quotes, from some of our past speakers.
Jack Hayford - 1992
“Doors don’t open for the interfacing of the body of Christ until there comes love for the body of Christ.
“The essence of renewal is not the power of the HS. It is the voice of the HS, and responding to it.”
“Teach your people how to respond to the culture non-cynically as healers of that culture.”
“Fears are always liars. They are always prompted by some spirit.”
"You would worry less about what people think of you if you realized how little they do."
Dean Sherman - 1999
“If you want to work with Jesus, build church. If you want to work against Jesus, tear the church down.”
John Dawson - 1998
“In the absence of the glory, there is an inrush of the demonic.”
Donna Hailson - 2005
“Church is not measured by its attendance but by its deployment.”
Dan Fountsin
"Christianity is the only caring culture in the world.
Hinduism is
not caring.
Buddhism is
not caring.
Islam is not caring."
Grant Mullen
“Comparison is the rocket fuel of shame.”
J. P. Moreland
“The American people are intoxicated with wanting ‘happiness’.
The emphasis on happiness is not working.
The paradox of hedonism is: You won’t be happy by trying to be
happy.
Happiness is a wonderful byproduct but a terrible goal of
life."
Jo McIntyre
"Pray with apostolic authority."
Randy Clark - 2010
“Most of the time when I pray for people to be healed I feel nothing.”
“My faith isn’t in my performance. It’s in God’s Word and what God has told me, not in my performance.”
Rachel Hickson.
“It’s not about how you feel. It’s about how you are connected.”
Bill Johnson
"Prophetic ministry is not to be focused on
the sins of the world. It takes very little discernment to find the dirt in
people’s lives. The prophetic in its purest form is designed to find the gold
in people’s lives and call it to the surface."
Greg Boyd - 2005
“The Kingdom of God always looks like Jesus. Everything
hangs on this.”
Leif Hetland - 2013
“The coming move of God is going to be nameless and
faceless.”
Leif’s life verse is John 17:26 - I have made you known to
them, and will continue to make you known in order that the love you have
for me may be in them and that I myself may be in them.”
Francis McNutt - 2001
“I can’t measure my success as a minister of the gospel by what people think of me.”
J.P. Moreland – "McNutt’s book on healing is the best book on the subject ever written."
The great theologian John Wayne -
"Courage is being afraid but saddling up anyway."
Tuesday, July 01, 2025
Wednesday, June 25, 2025
God Is Wrathful Because God Is Love
Yale theologian Miroslav Volf personally witnessed the horrors of the Bosnian war. Out of this context he wrote,
I used to think that wrath was unworthy of God. Isn’t God love? Shouldn’t divine love be beyond wrath? God is love, and God loves every person and every creature. That’s exactly why God is wrathful against some of them. My last resistance to the idea of God’s wrath was a casualty of the war in former Yugoslavia, the region from which I come. According to some estimates, 200,000 people were killed and over 3,000,000 were displaced. My villages and cities were destroyed, mypeople shelled day in and day out, some of them brutalized beyond imagination, and I could not imagine God not being angry. Or think of Rwanda in the last decade of the past century, where 800,000 people were hacked to death in one hundred days!
How did God react to the carnage? By doting on the perpetrators in a grandparently fashion? By refusing to condemn the bloodbath but instead affirming the perpetrators basic goodness? Wasn’t God fiercely angry with them? Though I used to complain about the indecency of the idea of God’s wrath, I came to think that I would have to rebel against a God who wasn’t wrathful at the sight of the world’s evil. God isn’t wrathful in spite of being love. God is wrathful because God is love.
Volf, Free of Charge: Giving and Forgiving in a Culture Stripped of Grace, (Zondervan 2005) pp. 138-139
As I read this, I thought of H. Richard Niebuhr's famous quote, as he critiqued a soft and shallow theological liberalism.
"A God without wrath
brought men without sin
into a kingdom without judgment
through the ministrations of
a Christ without a cross."
(For more on the love and wrath of God, see Kevin Kinghorn and Stephen Travis, But What About God's Wrath? The Compelling Love Story of Divine Anger.)
Monday, June 23, 2025
JESUS-FOLLOWING, POLITICS, and CULTURE
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(Sermon-prepping, in Starbucks.) |
I had a recent encounter with a person, call them X.
Politically, America is deeply divided. As a follower of Jesus, how do I evaluate this? What do I do about this? How shall I think about this?
Here's my approach,
1) I identify certain guiding principles; and
2) I keep studying and learning.
A FEW GUIDING PRINCIPLES FOR ME
- Deepen your abiding life in Christ, as the first thing to do. All relevant, Spirit-led action comes from this ongoing attachment to Christ.
- Change hearts first. When hearts are changed, systems transform.
- Focus on issues, not political alignment.
- I must understand before I evaluate. This takes time. I hesitate to jump on someone's political bandwagon. Because, I don't yet understand the issues.
- Attack arguments, not people (no ad hominem abusiveness please). Evaluate arguments; formulate arguments. Love people.
- Read contrary viewpoints, as much as you can.
- Lift up Jesus, the one who changes hearts and minds, and from whom we Christians acquire our ethics.
- When the Holy Spirit identifies a socio-cultural need and burdens you with it, labor in the Spirit to achieve transformation. For example, my church family helped begin a soup kitchen that provides a meal every day of the year, serving 75-150 a night. For example, my church family has been involved in serving and raising support for ministries that rescue women out of sex trafficking. For example, Linda and I have, over the decades, provided free counseling for needy marriages and families (this is ongoing, to the very moment I am typing these words).
- Study and grow in learning about the relationship between following Jesus and political involvement. This will assist you in transcending shallow, uninformed, hate-filled debating. Here are some resources that have taken me deeper.
- Jonathan Wolff, An Introduction to Political Philosophy.
- Greg Lukionoff and Haidt's The Coddling of the American Mind is the best book I've read in 2019. Haidt and Lukionoff help us understand, e.g., microaggressions and hatred and the American culture of "safetyism."
- Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided By Politics and Religion. Everyone should read this before opening their mouth about politics.
- Amy Chua, Political tribes: Group Instinct and the Fate of Nations. Still reading - excellent!
- Patrick Deneen, Why Liberalism Failed.
- Ross Douthat, The Decadent Society: How We Became Victims of Our Own Success.
- Brian Benestad, Five Views on the Church and Politics
- H. Richard Niebuhr, Christ and Culture (Arguably, this is THE classic text which nicely forms intelligent discussion. How is Christ relevant to the world in which we live now?)
- John Howard Yoder, The Politics of Jesus (This is essential reading for any who would engage in the discussion about how Jesus would have his followers respond to the political world we live in.)
- Greg Boyd, The Myth of a Christian Nation: How the Quest for Political Power Is Destroying the Church
- Jim Wallis, God’s Politics: Why the Right Gets It Wrong and Why the Left Doesn’t Get It
- Jim Wallis, On God’s Side: What Religion Forgets and Politics hasn’t Learned About Serving the Common Good
- Ronald Sider, Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger: Moving from Affluence to Generosity (In evangelical Christianity, this is one of the classics. Read the four gospels as background, making note of all Jesus says about our relationship to Money. See also Ben Witherington, Jesus and Money.)
- Shane Claiborne, Jesus for President: Politics for Ordinary Radicals (What should Christians do when allegiances to the state clash with personal faith?)
- Robert P. George, Conscience and Its Enemies: Confronting the Dogmas of Liberal Secularism (George, Prof of Law at Yale U., and a follower of Jesus, is a brilliant scholar who teaches us, among other things, how to civilly discourse about hard issues.)
- Alexandre Christoyannopoulos, Christian Anarchism: A Political Commentary on the Gospel (In a discussion with Greg Boyd he strongly recommended this book of readings to me.)
- Francis Beckwith, Taking Rites Seriously: Law, Politics, and the Reasonableness of Faith (I read this book last summer and learned much from it. Beckwith’s chapter on human dignity is brilliant. [Christian Smith’s chapter on human dignity in What Is a Person? Rethinking Humanity, Social Life, and the Moral Good from the Person Up is stunning.] Beckwith is Prof of Jurisprudence and Philosophy at Baylor U.)
- Martin Luther King, Jr., "Letter from Birmingham Jail"
- Charles Colson, God and Government: An Insider's View on the Boundaries Between Faith and Politics
- Howard Thurman, Jesus and the Disinherited.
- James Cone, The Cross and the Lynching Tree
- Gustavo Gutierrez, We Drink From Our Own Wells: The Spiritual Journey of a People
- Richard Stearns, The Hole in Our Gospel: What Does God Expect of Us? (If this book doesn’t break your heart and burden you for the poor, we’re going to have to give you an EKG.)
- Pellegrino, Schulman, and Merrill, Human Dignity and Bioethics. Arguably the book to read on: 1) What is human dignity?; 2) Is there such a thing as human dignity?; and 3) If there is, does it make a difference? Collected essays by a great variety of scholars.
- Wayne Grudem, Politics – According to the Bible: A Comprehensive Resource for Understanding Modern Political Issues in Light of Scripture
- John Corvino and Ryan T. Anderson, Debating Religious Liberty and Discrimination
- John Corvino and Ryan T. Anderson, Debating Same-Sex Marriage
- Ryan T. Anderson, Truth Overruled: The Future of Marriage and Religious Freedom
- Mark Yarhouse, Understanding Gender Dysphoria: Navigating Transgender Issues In a Changing Culture
- Dan O. Via and Robert Gagnon, Homosexuality and the Bible: Two Views
- James Beilby and Paul Eddy, Understanding Transgender identities; Four Views.
- Ed Stetzer, Christians In the Age of Outrage: How to Bring Our Best When the World Is At Its Worst. Very helpful.