John Piper: Money, Sex and Power Can Be Used to Glorify God
While money, sex and power can be dangerous if used incorrectly, they should also be viewed as gifts that can be used to glorify God, John Piper writes in his new book Living in the Light: Money, Sex, and Power.
Piper, a theologian and the chancellor of Bethlehem College & Seminary in Minnesota, said in a recent blog post that the focus of his new, 150-page book is both on the dangers of money, sex and power but also the rewards that these things can bring, if used and respected correctly.
The evangelical teacher explains in a post on his DesiringGod.org website that "money, sex, and power are not just dangers. They are potentials. They are gifts. They are opportunities to make God look great in the world and advance his cause in the world."
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Piper explains that while he originally tried to use the metaphor of an iceberg to explain the dangers of sex, money and power by suggesting that we only see the "tip" of these temptations' potential dangers, he realized he needed a symbol that also showed the positive effects that each of these things can have.
Ultimately, "[…] money, sex, and power are good gifts of God that may be used with great love and effectiveness in serving other people and glorifying God," Piper explains.
These things were originally gifts, the theologian continues, and if they end up being used as "instruments of sin," it is because we turned them into such.
Because "money, sex, and power all have a unique potential to magnify the worth and beauty of Christ," then we as Christians must work to "define, defeat, and deploy" them. That is, we must define these things, defeat their potential for sin, and deploy their potential to work as God's gifts.
"[…] take hold of power, take hold of money and make them a means of advancing the cause of the Giver and, more than that, see in the actual gift of sex and money and power dimensions of God's goodness that, when you enjoy them rightly, you are enjoying him," Piper concludes.
Another evangelical leader, Paul David Tripp, who heads Paul Tripp Ministries, wrote about the dangers of sex and money in his 2013 book Sex & Money: Pleasures That Leave You Empty and Grace That Satisfies.
Tripp told The Christian Post in 2013 that he felt the need to write the book after being inundated with a culture of sex and money in the West.
"Looking at my own heart and life and then looking at the surrounding culture I think if you just take Western culture, two places where we've pretty much gone insane is in the two areas of sex and money," Tripp said at the time. "It's almost to the point where you can barely watch television or go to a movie or be at a mall or read a magazine or listen to a piece of contemporary music without having your morals assaulted."
To combat the temptations of sex and money, Christians need to create a "culture of grace" based on honesty and forgiveness.
"We just need to have a culture that's honest, that says we all struggle in these areas, we all don't know how much we're struggling because sin tends to make us spiritually blind," Tripp told CP. "The way you do that is by candor and confession and forgiveness. And those are all rooted in this truth that there is nothing that could ever be exposed about me that hasn't already been covered by the blood of the Lord Jesus Christ."
