On John's dad, William Piper

This was posted yesterday on Justin Taylor's blog. Worth reading and I hear the book is life changing. After 27 years of life, I think it's time I read it.



From DG blog, for your prayers:

Pastor John is keeping vigil at his dad’s bedside as he prepares to meet Jesus. His death is imminent. Please pray that his communion with Jesus would be sweet and unbroken and that his body would be restful.

(Pastor John will not be traveling to California on Wednesday to speak at John MacArthur’s Shepherds Conference.)

Here is how Pastor John began his book, Don't Waste Your Life:

My father was an evangelist. In fact he still is, even though he doesn’t travel now. When I was a boy, there were rare occasions when my mother and sister and I traveled with him and heard him preach. I trembled to hear my father preach. In spite of the predictable opening humor, the whole thing struck me as absolutely blood-earnest. There was a certain squint to his eye and a tightening of his lips when the avalanche of biblical texts came to a climax in application.

“I’ve Wasted It, I’ve Wasted It”

Oh, how he would plead! Children, teenagers, young singles, young married people, the middle-aged, old people—he would press the warnings and the wooings of Christ into the heart of each person. He had stories, so many stories, for each age group—stories of glorious conversions, and stories of horrific refusals to believe followed by tragic deaths. Seldom could those stories come without tears.

For me as a boy, one of the most gripping illustrations my fiery father used was the story of a man converted in old age. The church had prayed for this man for decades. He was hard and resistant. But this time, for some reason, he showed up when my father was preaching. At the end of the service, during a hymn, to everyone’s amazement he came and took my father’s hand. They sat down together on the front pew of the church as the people were dismissed. God opened his heart to the Gospel of Christ, and he was saved from his sins and given eternal life. But that did not stop him from sobbing and saying, as the tears ran down his wrinkled face—and what an impact it made on me to hear my father say this through his own tears—“I’ve wasted it!
I’ve wasted it!”

This was the story that gripped me more than all the stories of young people who died in car wrecks before they were converted—the story of an old man weeping that he had wasted his life. In those early years God awakened in me a fear and a passion not to waste my life. The thought of coming to my old age and saying through tears, “I’ve wasted it! I’ve wasted it!” was a
fearful and horrible thought to me.

Praise God for William Piper, his tireless passion to spread the gospel, and a life not wasted.