Pastor John, as someone who enjoys writing, I am interested to hear your thoughts about

a writer's influence, how he or she engages a reader with the written word.

And you rather strongly encourage writers to better appreciate the influence that they

can have on those readers.

Explain this for us.

Explain the importance of a writer's influence.

I tweeted recently that if you're not praying that what you write influenced people,

it's because you don't believe in what you say and think it doesn't matter is because

you don't think people matters, people matter, which means that I think it's wrong not

to want to influence people when you write because Jesus or Paul said that everything

be done in love and he said do all to the glory of God.

So when we're writing either we're loving people or we're not, we should be loving people.

And we're either seeking to glorify God or we're not.

We should be seeking to glorify God.

And I think the way you love people is by influencing them, persuading them, winning

them, awakening them to delight in God above all things.

Which means that whenever you write you should be writing in such a way as to make God

look better than anything else in the world, to make the path of sin look worse than anything

else in the world, and to make the path of righteousness look beautiful in spite of

all the difficulties that the path of obedience might bring.

So whether you're writing fiction or whether you're writing a blog or whether you're writing

a poem or whether you're writing a book, a theological treatise, it seems to me that

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