Piper on Justification and Its Role in World Missions

Counted Righteous in Christ: Should We Abandon the Imputation of Christ's Righteousness?Why devote so much time to defend­ing the impu­ta­tion of Christ’s right­eous­ness when there are so many unreached people groups and mil­lions of people who have no access to the Gospel? I will men­tion two things. One is that over the past twenty years of lead­ing a missions-​mobilizing church I have seen with increas­ing clar­ity that teacher-​based church plant­ing and not just friendship-​based church plant­ing is cru­cial among peo­ples with no Chris­t­ian his­tory. In other words, doc­tri­nal instruc­tion becomes utterly cru­cial in plant­ing the church.

This is not sur­pris­ing, since embed­ded in the Great Com­mis­sion is the com­mand, ‘teaching them to observe all that I have com­manded you’ (Matthew 28:20), and since Paul planted the church in Eph­esus by rea­son­ing daily in the hall of Tyran­nus for two years, ’so that all the res­i­dents of Asia heard the word of the Lord’ (Acts 19:10). In other words, it is more clear to me now that doing mis­sions with­out deep doc­tri­nal trans­fer through patient teach­ing will not only wreck on the vast reefs of igno­rance but will, at best, pro­duce weak and everde­pen­dent churches. There­fore, pas­tors who care about build­ing, send­ing, and going churches must give them­selves to build­ing send­ing bases that breed doctrinally-​deep people who are not given to emo­tional depen­dency on fads but know how to feed them­selves on Christ-​centered truth.

The second thing I would say about the doc­trine of jus­ti­fi­ca­tion and mis­sions is that Paul devel­ops this doc­trine in the book of Romans in a way that shows it is absolutely uni­ver­sal in its rel­e­vance. It crosses every cul­ture. It is not a tribal con­cept. He does this by build­ing part of the doc­trine out of the con­nec­tion between Adam and Christ in Romans 5:12-21. For exam­ple, take only verse 19: ‘For as by the one man’s dis­obe­di­ence the many were appointed sin­ners, so by the one man’s obe­di­ence the many will be appointed righteous.’ This, along with the whole con­text, shows that what Christ came to do in his obe­di­ence was uni­ver­sal in its scope and sig­nif­i­cance. It is not just for the pos­ter­ity of Abra­ham, but for the pos­ter­ity of Adam’namely, everyone.

The prob­lem Jesus came to solve was a prob­lem unleashed by the first man, lead­ing to con­dem­na­tion and cor­rup­tion for all people every­where in all cul­tures and all times. This is a stun­ning dis­cov­ery for many people. The diag­no­sis of what needs to be reme­died is the same in all cul­tures because it stems from Adam, the father of all cul­tures. There­fore the work of Christ to pro­vide a ‘free gift of righteousness’ (Romans 5:17, ESV) to all who will ‘receive’ it is absolutely suf­fi­cient and nec­es­sary for every person in every cul­ture every­where in the world. And thus the doc­trine of jus­ti­fi­ca­tion becomes a war­rant for the uni­ver­sal claim of Chris­t­ian mis­sions.
John Piper, Counted Right­eous in Christ: Should We Aban­don the Impu­ta­tion of Christ’s Right­eous­ness? (pgs. 32-33)

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4 total comments, leave your comment.
  1. Jessica Stoehr
    May 12th 2006

    Hey Chris-
    So a few weeks ago, you had posted some­thing about a guy who was on your campus or some­where near you telling people that they were sin­ning and what not. You had a link to a letter your brother wrote and I read it. Anyway, we had a very sim­i­lar guy on our campus yes­ter­day and today, and a friend and I were walk­ing passed him today and he called out and said you two girls are sin­ning and need to repent. Anyway, just won­der­ing if it may have been the same man. I’ve never seen any­thing like that before, and just made me wonder what this guy must be think­ing to want to go to col­lege cam­puses and speak to stu­dents like that. All right, I hope you’re doing well!!!
    Jessi

  2. Chris
    May 12th 2006

    It might have been the same move­ment, but prob­a­bly a dif­fer­ent guy (being that we are on the other side of the coun­try). Here is the arti­cle my brother wrote.

  3. Alecia Niese
    May 12th 2006

    Loving the posts as always… But man the evo­lu­tion of dance video… hehehe… I have to wonder. If dance ‘evolved’ wouldn’t be more dif­fi­cult to acquire a mas­tery of, more diverse and more intel­li­gent? I think that exam­ple proves that the dances of today have indeed degraded grad­u­ally from what they once were. I think I will stick with swing dancing…It is def­i­nitely some­thing I will be work­ing my entire life to become good at and I can’t learn it after a 30 second demo. Well, enough of this soap box… esp since you and many other people actu­ally don’t care all that much about dancing… Let’s see a better topic.. And speak­ing of evolution… people think we have evolved? Hehe… not touch­ing that one.

  4. Leroy
    May 12th 2006

    Amen to the quote, Chris, that is us.

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