Latest / Pastor John Piper's answers / Is My Painting Hobby a Wartime Waste?

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Is My Painting Hobby a Wartime Waste? · Pastor John Piper's answers

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  Welcome back to the podcast. Well is the hobby of watercolor painting a wartime
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  waste of time and money? That's the question today from a listener named Amy.
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  Professor John, Hello to you, and thank you for your ministry over
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  these many years. She writes, I have benefited greatly from it your Seashell's
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  message it was especially profound to me. Yes one of the classic John Piper
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  sermons, which is titled Boasting Only in the Cross and preached on May twentieth,
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  two thousand. But that sermon left me with a lingering question I've never
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  resolved. Would you consider all hobbies like seashell collecting a waste of life?
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  I asked, Because I recently took up watercolor painting, I keep asking myself
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  does this glorify God? And to what purpose does this further His kingdom?
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  I'm not sure it does. Painting is a relaxing stress reliever for me,
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  and I've enjoyed using it to make homemade cards for people, But it seems
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  it's mostly for my benefit and my enjoyment. You clearly have a category for
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  hobbies. When Tony recently asked you to name your favorite hobbies, you said
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  scrabble with Noel and making your yard look perfect. That was an APGA eighteen
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  eighty two. So what guidelines can you offer us wartime Christians to discern when
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  hobbies are God glorifying and when they become life wasting. When I first tackled
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  this question nine years ago on APJ I was reading biographies at the time,
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  books about Hudson Taylor and by Hudson Taylor the missionary. And I think Hudson
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  Taylor at that time and now, if you were alive, would answer this
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  question pretty bluntly and say, come on, come on, let's give our
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  lives for the cause of the Gospel, especially world evangelization. So I have
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  that ringing in my ears even to this day. And I don't want to
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  soft pedal how radical the Christian life is by being culturally adapting as a Christian
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  and ignoring the horrific plight of the lost and the unreached of this world.
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  But here's what I think needs to be said. Biblically, we want to
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  be biblical and not just draw out our own inferences from situations that may not
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  accord with God's word. Yes, some people waste their lives playing. We
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  just have to admit that they do. Their whole life is jumping from one
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  fun thing to the next. What they really get excited about and what they
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  spend most of their time, most of their life thinking about, is the
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  next gadget or the next vacation, or the next streaming video series, or
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  the next concert or the next movie. If you want to get them animated,
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  bring that up. Not Jesus. Don't bring up salvation. They won't
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  have anything to say. There's no emotional kick there at all. Not the
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  hope of glory, not adoption into God's family, not the forgiveness of sins,
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  not the miracles of Jesus. Just what did you watch last week?
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  And oooh? They come alive with all kinds of verbal statements to show.
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  They can talk if they want to talk, they can feel if they want
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  to feel, And those people give little thought to the biblical truth that their
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  life is not their own. Paul said, you are not your own.
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  You were bought with a price. So glorify God in your body. That's
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  what you should think about. With your body, your eyes, your ears,
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  your hands, your tongue. Glorify God in your body. What could
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  be more wonderful, more clear, more radical than that statement? You are
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  not your own. You belong to God. Make him look great, and
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  when you do, be excited about that. Do that with your hobbies.
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  Those people act as if they can do whatever they please with no reference to
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  the one who owns them or bought them. And those people need to hit
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  pause pause on their life and ask, am I really born again? Do
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  I have any of the affections of my Lord Jesus or my Father in heaven?
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  Or are they all worldly? So to me? If you operate from
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  that verse one Corinthians six nineteen, then you ask of your hobbies, and
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  doesn't make any difference whether the hobbies are collecting coins or shells or climbing mountains.
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  You ask, is this the Lord's will from my life? That he
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  bought that he owns? And to answer that question about the will of God,
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  you ask, am I glorifying him in this hobby? Is this hobby
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  serving to make him look great and beautiful and valuable? Is it making me
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  like one who values his glory above everything? Pul said, whether you eat
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  or drink, do a hobby. Whatever you do, whether you climb mountains
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  or hunt deer, or collect coins, or do crossword puzzles or collect shells
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  or paint water colors. Do it all? He says, to the glory
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  of God, make Christ look like the treasure that he is. Now,
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  how does that happen in hobbies, or in leisure or in recreation? Because
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  I think it does, I will just mention three three ways, three questions
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  to ask. One is the hobby, the leisure, the recreation, the
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  hobby itself a participation in God exalting experiences. Now this is not mainly about
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  the effects of the hobby, but what it is in itself. Do you
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  see God in it? Does your spirit come alive to God in it?
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  Or is it dragging you down? Is it leading you to be more distant
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  from Christ, more indifferent to him, more in love with the world,
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  and less in love with Him? Now I can easily imagine Amy's water color
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  hobby feeding her soul spiritually, as she looks at the world with the eyes
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  of a worshipful Christian, as she sees the glory of God and seeks to
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  capture some of that beauty in what she paints, all the while being amazed
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  that she herself is a kind of creator in the image of her Creator.
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  It seems to me that most hobbies that involve making things could have this worshipful
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  effect of experiencing the wonder of being a maker like our God is a maker,
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  and then bending what we have made to God's service so that both the
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  process and the product reflect God's glory. Number two. Second question to ask,
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  is the hobby, the leisure, the recreation refreshing you physically, emotionally,
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  spiritually for the other parts of your life where you need energy and focus
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  to live for God's glory as part of your vocation or part of your family.
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  Or is the hobby depleting you and weakening you and making you less able
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  to do that part of your life to the glory of God. This is
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  a question about physical depletion and spiritual depletion or weakening or even deadening. We
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  need to be really honest whether what we're focusing on for hours is shaping our
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  minds for greater spiritual alertness and wisdom and love and worship or misshaping our minds
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  to be more at home with sin. Third question to ask last one,
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  how is your hobby or leisure or recreation serving your relationship with other people for
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  their good? And I ask it like that rather than what I used to
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  say, way back nine years ago, when I thought about this question,
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  namely, I asked, are you involving other people in your hobby? I'm
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  not saying that now because I realized that there are recreations or hobbies or diversions
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  that are specifically designed to isolate you, but not selfishly, not selfishly,
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  but for loving reasons. For example, one of the things I like to
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  do, besides scrabbles and yardwork I'd like to do is when I'm not under
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  pressure to do what everybody else expects me to do, is to write poetry.
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  Now this would be like Amy's watercolors, I think only probably I am
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  much more insistent than she would be that I must be left alone. She
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  might be able to paint with people around her. I can't writing, especially
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  discipline. Creative writing is intensely focused action. I cannot do it while others
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  are around me. So the hobby itself is not gregarious. It's isolationist.
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  But my aim is always to write to be read. I want to speak
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  to somebody what I'm writing. I want to use it to encourage them and
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  to glorify God with it. I want the poems to capture something about God
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  and his word and his world that will awaken others to what I say and
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  experienced in a way that magnifies Christ. So I think it is a good
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  question to ask, how is your hobby or your leisure serving your relationship with
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  other people for their good? The apostle Paul said in One Corinthian sixteen fourteen,
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  Let all that you do be done in love. So he said it.
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  On the one hand, let all that you do do it to the
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  glory of God. And hear he's saying, which I think is a subset,
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  Let all that you do be done in love love for people. So
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  it is a good biblical question for all our hobbies. Is this expressing my
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  love for others? Is this hobby forming me into a person who cares for
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  others, wants to live for others good, is willing to sacrifice for others?
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  So I think if we're honest with those three questions, the financial part
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  of the hobby will probably take care of itself. In other words, I
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  think the God focused ministry, focused love focused emphasis of those questions will put
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  a governor on any exorbitant spending in our support of the hobby. We live
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  in a very needy world, and one of the effects of those three questions
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  will be to make us more alive to those needs, so that we embrace
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  a wartime lifestyle for the good of the world and the glory of Christ.
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  How many seashells do you have in your home? I'm not aware of any,
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  none, but there might be. There might be. There might be
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  some downstairs with a plant growing in it. My son in law has a
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  jar of seashells in his office at church, which his wife insisted that he
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  put there. And when he took a picture of it and put it on
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  Twitter, he said, let the reader understand, Oh wonderful, Thank you,
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  Pastor John. And if you're still trying to figure out how and why,
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  John Piper and seashells go together like peanut butter and jelly, or maybe
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  like oil and water, maybe is a better way to put it. C
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  Apja twelve hundred, ABG twelve hundred. Reflections on the Seashell Sermon eighteen years
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  later, Episode twelve hundred in the archive. I was a twenty eighteen episode
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  that we recorded, and can you believe we've not talked about seashells on this
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  podcast since that episode five and a half years ago. It seems hard to
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  believe, but it's true. Who hosts this thing? Anyways, I to
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  Tony Reiki at your service, See you one day.