John Piper recently published a helpful post on the Desiring God blog, titled “Hero Worship and Holy Emulation.” There he reflected on the danger of worshipping well known Christians and the value of learning from godly men and following their example.
Kevin DeYoung followed with an equally helpful post where he noted that we should both give thanks for godly people the Lord has used in our lives and pray for them, while also recognizing that they are merely men. He then followed with particularly keen insights on the nature of Christian publishing and gaining notoriety (it is an odd, strange arena where the best are not always recognized and normal people can suddenly be put on display), and the following nugget on the need to own your faith and passion:
Don’t let others’ passion be a substitute for your own. Sometimes we preach or teach more than we really feel. We admire the intensity of others and make it our own. But it never really is our own. Or if it is, we haven’t figured out how to make it true to our personality.
I have caught myself in recent months, entering into a time of prayer and having a favorite preacher’s voice inflections and style come to mind as I pray. While it is good to capture a vision of godly passion, it is obviously unhealthy if you don’t then own your own passion.
To this discussion, I will add the idea that God has given every believer spiritual gifts that are to be used to edify the body of Christ (1 Cor 12-14, Eph 4, Rom 12) and a sovereignly-ordained context in which to use them.
In the Bible Fellowship Group of young couples I co-lead, we have been walking through different marriage topics, such as headship, submission and communication. We have chosen to use John Piper’s This Momentary Marriage as an aid to our study, but this was not a decision we made lightly.
As Christian ministers, we should never, never, never communicate to our people that only a few men are actually godly examples of Christian men who we can trust and follow. Especially when such men are not in the congregation in which we worship!
So, when I stood up to talk about how we were going to use Piper’s book, I said that what we did not want to communicate was that we want everyone in our class to become like John Piper. I said that God had gifted every single person in that room and we wanted to encourage them to use their gifts to minister to one another. This included sitting under the teaching of the four men in our class who share the teaching responsibilities.
Every single person in God’s kingdom and the local churches that make up God’s universal church are gifted to minister: we are a royal priesthood (1 Pet 2). We need to encourage the employment of these gifts to the service of God’s kingdom and the praise of His name.
So why did we use Piper’s book?
Because while we believe that we all have spiritual gifts we can use to serve and edify one another, we also want to be humble and seek to learn from men who we believe are godly. And that does include men and women outside our local congregation. After all, we don’t have sole claim to the deposit of godliness in the world.
But we do claim to all have spiritual gifts. And these gifts, regardless of the person, are from the same Spirit (1 Cor 12:1-4).
So, respect those in a visible ministry context who are worthy of respect. Imitate them in so far as they imitate Christ. It is biblical to do so.
But it is also biblical to use the spiritual gifts that God has given you and to learn from the gifts of the people participating in the same local church as you week after week after week. Each week, God works in thousands of congregations across the country, ministering His grace to His beloved children through men and women who are just like you (if you are a believer in the Lord Jesus Christ).
In our zest to read the latest Piper book or hear the most recent Keller sermon, it would be a shame it we missed out on the spiritual blessings God has for us right across the room.
Check here for a different perspective on Piper’s understanding of holy emulation.