By John Piper (1946- ), former Senior Pastor at Bethlehem Baptist Church (1980-2013), Minneapolis, Minnesota; (in the above photo, Piper is the one on the right)
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Angola Prison in Louisiana is the largest maximum-security prison in the United States. It is home to 6,300 inmates. Those sentenced there are the worst of the worst: murderers, rapists, armed robbers, and habitual felons. The average sentence is 88 years, with 3,200 of the inmates serving life sentences. Ninety percent of the inmates will die there.
John Piper preached in Angola’s chapel on November 19, 2009. Eight hundred prisoners packed in to hear the message and hundreds of other prisoners heard the sermon through closed-circuit television, including those on death row. Piper urged his listeners to keep their eyes on eternity. Here is a portion of that sermon…
Paul said, ‘I count everything as loss.’ Now, you guys have lost so much. You’ve got such a head start here, if God would just grip you with this. Paul says, ‘I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord . . . that I may know him and the power of his resurrection, and may share his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, that by any means possible I may attain the resurrection from the dead.’
Next stop after Angola: heaven — if he’s precious, if he’s precious beyond anything in this world that you’ve already had to lose. When you eat of the bread of life, you get eternal life — that is, a new chapter is added to your life. Angola is not the last chapter. It’s the next-to-last chapter. Eternity is the last chapter, and it lasts forever, and it is infinitely happy.
So many Americans work their fingers to the bone to have twenty years of so-called ‘retirement,’ thinking retirement is the last chapter. It isn’t. It’s the next-to-last chapter. Too many of us have this little, puny, fragile hope that as an old, wrinkled, aching, aged person you’re going to go golf somewhere for twenty years or go fish somewhere for twenty years.
But you can have so much more. You can have absolute certainty — all of us — of an everlasting cabin by the lake with Jesus, an everlasting ocean cruise with Jesus, an everlasting evening by the fire with a good book and Jesus…
You men don’t dream that way (about golf and fishing); and that’s very good. I hope all that dreaming that you thought one day might have for that, shifts on to the last chapter. I’m old, so I’m going there soon…
This life is very short, brothers, very short. It may seem long. But it’s short. And eternity is really long. It’s really long, and it can be really good… and, it’s free. Christ died in our place. He rose again from the dead. He lived a life of perfect righteousness. He stands freely available to everyone who will have faith in him…
What I’d like you to do is to read your Bible, but not because reading your Bible saves you. Open your Bible to Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, and just get to know Jesus better every day, so that when you meet him, there won’t be too many surprises. Fall in love with Jesus. Fall in love with him, now. You need to love him now, know him now, and trust him now…
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Philippians 3:7-14 — But whatever were gains to me I now consider loss for the sake of Christ. What is more, I consider everything a loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whose sake I have lost all things. I consider them garbage, that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which is through faith in Christ—the righteousness that comes from God on the basis of faith. I want to know Christ—yes, to know the power of his resurrection and participation in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, and so, somehow, attaining to the resurrection from the dead. Not that I have already obtained all this, or have already arrived at my goal, but I press on to take hold of that for which Christ Jesus took hold of me. Brothers and sisters, I do not consider myself yet to have taken hold of it. But one thing I do: Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead, I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus.
I Corinthians 2:9, 10 — As it is written: “What no eye has seen, what no ear has heard, and what no human mind has conceived;” this is what God has prepared for those who love him. These are the things God has revealed to us by his Spirit.
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Lord Jesus Christ, Son of the Living God, have mercy on me, a poor sinner.
–Ancient Jesus Prayer
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Here is John Piper’s entire sermon at Angola (48 minutes):
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