The Roots of Endurance

Written by John Piper

Review by Rob Lee

The Roots of Endurance is a challenging and thought-provoking book.  It tells of the strength that three heroes of history evidenced in the face of difficulty.  John Newton is best-known today because he wrote the universally well-loved hymn “Amazing Grace”.  Charles Simeon, the least famous of the three, was a pastor for most all of his life.  William Wilberforce is renowned as the man who led the fight to abolish the slave trade and slavery itself in all of the British Empire.  But this book is not a brief biography of these men.  It is, instead, a study in how they dealt with the difficulties each faced.

More specifically, it is a revelation of the core beliefs that enabled these men to endure and succeed in the face of great challenges.  Each one faced a different challenge and each one had a different focus for endurance.  They were contemporaries, two pastors and one politician.  They also shared in the vast changes that were impacting their culture during their lives, not unlike our present-day situation.

Perhaps the most eye-opening part of the book is the introduction.  John Piper gives a compelling presentation of why endurance is something that is needed by Christians.  He presents the idea that we should expect that endurance is needed to be an effective and fruitful follower of Jesus.  Consider this paragraph from the second page of the introduction (page 18). 

This mind-set [of pain-free, trouble-free existence] gives a trajectory to life that is almost universal – namely, away from stress and toward comfort and safety and relief.  Then within that very natural trajectory some people begin to think of ministry and find ways of serving God inside the boundaries set by the aims of self-protection.  Then churches grow up in this mind-set, and it never occurs to anyone in such a community of believers that choosing discomfort, stress, and danger might be the right thing – even the normal, biblical thing – to do.

The sections entitled Stress and Danger Are Normal and Christians Move Toward Need, Not Comfort are persuasive.  If a person is looking to avoid a biblical basis for needing endurance, by all means do not read the section titled The Biblical Urgency of the Call for Endurance.

The one thing I found a bit more work than I prefer in a book is that John Piper extensively quotes from the journals and writings of these men, as well as their biographers.  Since they lived in the late 18^th and early 19^th centuries, a few of the words and phrases that they used, common and understood in their day, were sometimes not clear to me.  But I found the effort (endurance?) required to interpret and understand their quotations worth the effort.

Should everyone read this book?  Likely.  Will everyone want to read this book?  Almost certainly not.  It is to be expected that this book is not going to be to everyone’s taste.  It is probably a bit more real than some people like for their walk as disciples of Jesus to be.  But for those who are willing to look at the whole of Scripture and the lives of these three men who towered above most in their lifetimes, the benefits will, I believe, be significant.  I recommend this book to all who desire to become more effective and genuine disciples of Jesus.