by John Piper

“This might be a place to say a word about the Y2K scare. Do you want
a prophetic word about Y2K? I have two prophetic words about Y2K.
First, the greatest need on January 1, 2000, will not be basements
stocked with food and water and generators, but hearts stocked with
the Word of God. You will be fruitful, you will flourish, you will be
life-giving not by seeking the very things the world seeks (Matthew
6:32), but by delighting in the Word of God and meditating on it day
and night. What the world will need and does need from the church is
the Word of God that fits us to say, “Who will separate us from the
love of Christ? Will tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or
famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? . . . In all these things
we are more than conquerors through him who loved us” (Romans
8:35-37).

The other prophetic word about Y2K is this: Nothing is going to happen on
January 1, 2000, nothing, that is as bad as what is already happening to
persecuted and starving Christians in Sudan. Or to the staggering number
of orphans in Malawi and other AIDS-devastated countries of Africa. Or to
survivors in Honduras and Nicaragua. Or to lonely, dying old people in
dozens of skilled care centers around the Twin Cities who have outlived
their families. There is something that smells of hypocrisy in the talk
about stockpiling supplies in our homes to “minister” to others in the
coming Y2K crisis when there are more places to minister this very day
that are worse crises than anything that is going to happen a year from now.

Y2K will happen to someone every day in 1999 – many of them within your
reach.

Delight yourself in the Word of God, meditate on it day and night, and
then take the fruit of your life and go minister to the lost and the hungry
and the thirsty that are already so many. Then you won’t even notice
when Y2K happens.”

Matthew 6:25-34

25 “Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will
eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more
important than food, and the body more important than clothes?

26 Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away
in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much
more valuable than they?

27 Who of you by worrying can add a single hour to his life ?

28 “And why do you worry about clothes? See how the lilies of the field
grow. They do not labor or spin.

29 Yet I tell you that not even Solomon in all his splendor was dressed
like one of these. 30 If that is how God clothes the grass of the field,
which is here today and tomorrow is thrown into the fire, will he not
much more clothe you, O you of little faith?

31 So do not worry, saying, ‘What shall we eat?’ or ‘What shall we
drink?’ or ‘What shall we wear?’ 32 For the pagans run after all these
things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them.

33 But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness,
and all these things will be given to you as well.

34 Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will
worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.