Pastor John Piper does not think Oprah Winfrey fully understands the Bible, since she reportedly gave an inaccurate interpretation of Psalm 37:4.
Winfrey shared in a recent episode of "The Late Show With Stephen Colbert" that her favourite passage reads: "Delight thyself in the Lord. He will give you the desires of your heart."
For Winfrey, the verse means that if people focus on being a force of good, then goodness will come. She likened it to the Third Law of Motion, which is also karma.
In his Desiring God blog, Piper says her belief is wrong because she removed Yahweh from the verse. "You know whenever you see the all-caps LORD in the English version that means it is a reference to the particular personal name of the God of Israel, not to a generic name of God," he says.
That particular verse actually reads: "Delight yourself in Yahweh, the God of Israel, the God and Father of the Messiah, Jesus Christ, who descended to the world to die for sinners and rise again and establish an eternal kingdom."
Piper says "this is the God that is being known and delighted in here."
He also disapproves of how Winfrey interpreted the second half of the verse into an act of cause and effect. Winfrey believes that if people do good, they will then get their desires. Or if people devote themselves to good things, then they reap good things.
"Now I think the relationship is, yes, cause-effect, but more than cause-effect. I think delighting yourself in the Lord is what shapes the desires of your heart so that it will be good for you for God to grant them," Piper writes. "In other words, there are a lot of desires in our hearts that are impure and unwise, and this is not a promise that, if you delight in God, then you get all those evil desires in your heart."
Piper says he is amazed by Winfrey's talent, but he sincerely hopes she would "recover more of her gospel roots and find her way back to the particularities of the Christian faith rather than distancing herself from them in order to pull all the religions into the same orbit."
