A Christian Heart For Injustice & Suffering | John Piper

Equipping Faith Lectures

In this lecture, John Piper reflects on the apparent tension between worship in a comfortable setting and the harsh realities of ministry in Scotland’s most difficult neighborhoods. Using 2 Chronicles 20, he shows that God links the praise of His people with His power to defeat spiritual enemies. Piper illustrates this through a personal story of witnessing deliverance from demonic oppression through persistent singing.

He argues that the ministries represented – such as 20Schemes and the Gettys’ work – embody a Christianity defined by two core convictions.

First, Christians care about all suffering, following Jesus’ compassion toward physical and emotional pain, but they care especially about eternal suffering. Piper challenges modern disbelief in hell, insisting that Jesus taught its reality and that genuine love requires warning others.

Second, Christians care about all injustice, but especially injustice against God. He defines injustice as treating someone worse than they deserve, and since God deserves infinite honor, humanity’s failure to worship Him is the greatest injustice. The gospel announces that Jesus bore the penalty for this injustice—justice denied to Him so it could be granted to sinners.

Piper concludes that true Christians will embrace these two sentences as life-shaping commitments, bringing hope to both Scotland’s schemes and every community.