Thank You letter to John Piper for Resolved
Dear Pastor John,
Thank you so much for coming to Resolved this year. More accurately, I would like to praise God with you as a witness for the faithfulness that he has wrought in you. God’s grace to you has certainly been a means of God giving me grace to know Him, love Him, savor him, cherish Him, treasure Him, praise Him, serve Him, and proclaim Him.
After God saved me in December of 1999, I immediately developed an appetite for reading God’s Word and Christian books. While I still didn’t have any categories for Christian hedonism or doctrines of grace or really even an ability to discern with much accuracy good teaching from bad, God blessed me by making me pick up a copy of Desiring God. Desiring God was the 2nd book I read as a Christian (The Enemy Within was the first). Let the Nations be Glad was the third. A Hunger for God was the 5th. All of this as I was reading through the Bible. So as a Christian, God has used you instrumentally, perhaps more instrumentally than anybody other than my elders at my local church (Grace Bible Church in Tempe), in shaping who I am today…most importantly in shaping who I know God to be. What undeserved grace upon grace and love upon love to me!
I have read almost every one of your books and never grow tired of them – not because of you, your mind, or the quality of writing, although I do praise God for each of those – but because each of them shepherd’s my heart to God, to long for God, to Desire God, to not be content with the degree to which I now know Him or am in fellowship with Him. I never grow tired of reading your books or hearing your sermons because they uncover new sins of which I was previously unaware. To listen to your sermons (thank you so much for DesiringGod.org and the free material that has long been a source of God-saturated nutrition for my soul when I couldn’t afford many new books while in college) does not grow dull because a vision for the ultimate is cast before me. As I measure the trajectory of my life and my longings as they tend toward infinity, ultimate reality comes into view. I tremble with anticipation and trepidation as I approach your teaching because I know my sin will be revealed, my affections awakened, and God made known. I cannot sit comfortably by living the American dream after coming face-to-face with the God of the Bible through your teaching and shepherding of my heart and mind.
And now, as I look at my life most recently, as the Holy Spirit has brought—through the influence of Paul to the Galatians and Romans coupled with the teaching and writing of so many pastors, teachers, and authors—increasing conviction of the importance and centrality of the gospel of Jesus Christ, I want to thank you for perhaps the most important lesson of all, that God is the gospel.
All of this is meant first of all to declare to God that He is good, glorious, and gracious for doing this in your life and mine. Secondly, it is meant as an encouragement to you, that God is at work in you, doing His work through you. I have seen the same work that God did in my heart through you happen in the lives of others around me. Keep up the fight. I pray that if this letter finds you in a season of exhaustion in ministry, that God would grant you even more undeserved grace to strengthen you and encourage you onward. If this finds you in a season of great joy, happiness, and energy, may the same happen.
What a good God we have who desires to give His children good gifts. He has certainly given me a good gift when he gave me your mentorship through your writing and preaching. If God would grant us another year of your health, please prayerfully consider returning to Resolved next year.
Please pass on my gratitude to Noel as well. I know that those thousands of pages did not occur in a vacuum. Those sermons didn’t occur without sacrifice, and I know as I am just beginning to learn to preach, just how much of that sacrifice the wife makes. I owe, by God’s mercy, much of the growth that I have talked about, I recognize, to Noel. Praise God for her.
By His Grace Alone,
Jacob Hantla
