How Much Can Christians Learn from Non-Christians?

Ask Pastor John

Desiring God

John Piper, Unknown, 163859, Pastor, Ask, Theology, Desiring God, Religion & Spirituality/christianity, Christianity, Religion & Spirituality, Questions

4.8 • 3.8K Ratings

🗓️ 29 March 2019

⏱️ 11 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Christians can learn many important facts from non-Christian teachers. But they cannot learn the most important facts — or how to love them.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Here's today's question, Dear Pastor John, I am a female student at a secular university.
0:10.5	I'm normally pretty joyful in my relationship with God and in day-to-day living, however
0:15.2	the wickedness of my surroundings continues to grieve me.
0:19.5	Today in a lecture I could barely keep from crying as we discussed a novel so full of
0:24.1	depravity I decided to just read the spark notes of the book instead of read the book itself.
0:30.1	But even the summary is hard to read. My heart is so weighed down and broken. I feel that I'm the
0:35.5	only one who even senses the evil around me and I'm warned that I am in a setting that is forcing
0:41.7	me into a knowledge that seems premature. I don't understand their pragmatic justifications. Every
0:49.1	poem, short story and novel we have covered is filled with sex, rape, grotesque and graphic
0:54.8	depictions of murder, infant side, slavery, and cursing. It makes me so weary and they call those
1:01.9	things morally ambiguous. What can I do? What should I do? Pastor John, what would you say to this
1:10.3	female college student? Well, there's so many different angles that we could come at this.
1:18.0	I could camp on that word morally ambiguous and say, are you kidding me? Just have one of
1:23.6	their children raped and see if they call it morally ambiguous. That's a lot of baloney.
1:27.3	But I'm not going to come at it that way. This may be a good occasion to give a few thoughts
1:34.7	about my understanding of the way Christians should seek to be educated. That's the direction
1:40.2	I'm going to go and just apologize ahead of time. If that's not what she needs most, but
1:48.0	it just felt like I should do this. So when I say, how should a Christian be educated? I mean,
1:53.6	how should our character be formed? From the time we're little to the time we're 80, how should
1:59.8	our character be formed? How should our worldview be shaped? Who should shape it? How should it
2:06.1	be shaped? The way we view everything? And third, how should our skill? How should we be equipped
2:12.7	with the necessary skills for the particular calling that we have? That's those three things that
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