John Piper Christ Quotations

There are two basic restrictions on marriage in the Bible: Number one, she should marry a man. Number two, he should be a Christian.

The task of all Christian scholarship—not just biblical studies—is to study reality as a manifestation of God’s glory, to speak and write about it with accuracy, and to savor the beauty of God in it, and to make it serve the good of man. It is an abdication of scholarship when Christians do academic work with little reference to God. If all the universe and everything in it exist by the design of an infinite, personal God, to make his manifold glory known and loved, then to treat any subject without reference to God’s glory is not scholarship but insurrection.

Some of you will die in the service of Christ. That will not be a tragedy. Treasuring life above Christ is a tragedy.

What was once foolishness to us-a crucified God-must become our wisdom and our power and our only boast in this world.

Christian fasting, at its root, is the hunger of a homesickness for God

Christ is glorified in you when he is more precious to you than all that life can give or death can take.

Bad theology dishonors God and hurts people. Churches that sever the root of truth may flourish for a season, but they will wither eventually or turn into something besides a Christian church.

God without Christ is no God.

The ministry and mission of the church is at the center of Christian giving.

All heroes are shadows of Christ

Why Christians do what they do is just as important as what they do. Bad motives ruin good acts.

Christians belive in a sovereign God who never says "Oops". We believe that all our days ... are divine strokes on the canvas of our lives by the Master Artist who certified his skill, his power, and his love in the Masterpiece of Calvary. If you doubt His skill in painting your life - look at the Calvary

Don't follow a defeated foe. Follow Christ. It is costly. You will be an exile in this age. But you will be free.

You get one pass at life. That’s all. Only one. And the lasting measure of that life is Jesus Christ.

Every good thing in the Christian life grows in the soil of humility. Without humility, every virtue and every grace withers. That’s why Calvin said humility is first, second, and third in the Christian faith.

Missions is not the ultimate goal of the church. Worship is. Missions exists because worship doesn't.

A Christian is not a person who believes in his head the teachings of the Bible. Satan believes in his head the teachings of the Bible! A Christian is a person who has died with Christ, whose stiff neck has been broken, whose brazen forehead has been shattered, whose stony heart has been crushed, whose pride has been slain, and whose life is now mastered by Jesus Christ.

The Christian life becomes impossible. That is, it becomes supernatural.

A God-centered theology has to be a missionary theology

Every experience in life is designed to magnify the cross of Christ.

The key that unlocks the treasure chest of God's peace is faith in the promises of God.

Spot the first risings of your besetting sin and kill it, till it is no more.

Prayer as a relationship is probably your best indicator about the health of your love relationship with God. If your prayer life has been slack, your love relationship has grown cold.

May we catch enough of a vision of Christ that we will not be satisfied unless we know him more fully.

God's greatest interest is to glorify the wealth of His grace by making sinners happy in Him.

Too many Christians are fighting graduate school sins with a grammar school knowledge of God.

Seeing & savoring Jesus Christ is the most important seeing and savoring you'll ever do.

One way to appreciate C.S. Lewis is to see how his Christian humility shaped his life and work.

The Bible does not oppose or forbid interracial marriages but sees them as a positive good for the glory of Christ.

The missionary question is not, 'Where are there unbelievers?' and then send a missionary there. There are unbelievers everywhere! The missionary question is, 'Where are there people's who don't have any Christians in them or don't have a church strong enough to do the neighbor evangelism that we can do if we just want to do it?' That's the missionary question.

Oh, how rare are the Christians who speak with a tender heart and have a theological backbone of steel.

I sometimes fear that we have so redefined conversion in terms of human decisions and have so removed any necessity of the experience of God’s Spirit, that many people think they are saved when in fact they only have Christian ideas in their head not spiritual power in their heart.

The way of the cross is the way of suffering. Christians are called to die, not kill, in order to show the world how they are loved by Christ.

There is a war going on. All talk of a Christian's right to live luxuriously "as a child of the King" in this atmosphere sounds hollow - especially since the King himself is stripped for battle.

We need a Savior. Christmas is an indictment before it becomes a delight.

Every Christian who struggles with depression struggles to keep their hope clear. There is nothing wrong with the object of their hope - Jesus Christ is not defective in any way whatsoever. But the view from the struggling Christian's heart of their objective hope could be obscured by disease and pain, the pressures of life, and by Satanic fiery darts shot against them... All discouragement and depression is related to the obscuring of our hope, and we need to get those clouds out of the way and fight like crazy to see clearly how precious Christ is.

Treasuring life above Christ is a tragedy.

The best news of the Christian gospel is that the supremely glorious Creator of the universe has acted in Jesus Christ's death and resurrection to remove every obstacle between us and himself so that we may find everlasting joy in seeing and savoring his infinite beauty.

This is God's universal purpose for all Christian suffering: more contentment in God and less satisfaction in the world.

It is not saving faith to confess Christ as true. Saving faith receives Christ as a Treasure.

Nothing is more vital than prayer in Christian existence, and few things are more vulnerable to neglect.

To be a Christian is to move toward need, not comfort.

Lavish giving and open homes are close to the center of life in Christ.

My take on tithing in America is that it's a middle-class way of robbing God. Tithing to the church and spending the rest on your family is not a Christian goal. It's a diversion. The real issue is: How shall we use God's trust fund-namely, all we have-for His glory? In a world with so much misery, what lifestyle should we call our people to live? What example are we setting?

Wimpy worldviews make wimpy Christians. And wimpy Christians won’t survive the days ahead.

We are not as Christ-centered and cross-cherishing as we should be, because we do not ponder the truth that everything good, and everything bad that God turns for the good, was purchased by the sufferings of Christ.

Christ did not die to make good works merely possible or to produce a half-hearted pursuit. He died to produce in us a passion for good deeds. Christian purity is not the mere avoidance of evil, but the pursuit of good.

Desire that your life count for something great! Long for your life to have eternal significance. Want this! Don’t coast through life without a passion.

Go, send, or disobey.

Suffering in the path of Christian obedience, with joy - because the steadfast love of the Lord is better than life (Psalm 63:3) - is the clearest display of the worth of God in our lives. Therefore, faith-filled suffering is essential in this world for the most intense, authentic worship. When we are most satisfied with God in suffering, he will be most glorified in us in worship. Our problem is not styles of music. Our problem is styles of life. When we embrace more affliction for the worth of Christ, there will be more fruit in the worship of Christ.

There are only three kinds of Christians when it comes to world missions: zealous goers, zealous senders, and disobedient.

You can't make yourself saved. This is very threatening to people, even Christians, because of what it seems to say about freedom.

CHRISTIAN LIVING MOVES from what God has freely done for us in Christ to what we should freely do for others.

The key to Christian living is a thirst and hunger for God. And one of the main reasons people do not understand or experience the sovereignty of grace and the way it works through the awakening of sovereign joy is that their hunger and thirst for God is so small.

What defines us as Christians is not most profoundly that we have come to know him but that he took note of us and made us his own.

God revealed himself through the Law, which pointed to Christ as its end and goal, commanded the obedience that comes from faith, increased transgressions, and shut the mouths of all humans because no one has performed the righteousness of the Law so as not to need a substitute.

Do all things without grumbling. Why? You have a sovereign God who is on your side, who works everything together for your good.

Death is like my car. It takes me where I want to go.

The giving of the Quran is in Islam what the incarnation of Christ is to Christianity. If this is so, then Quran-burning is parallel to Christ-crucifying.

The absence of God in most spheres of life is perceived to be normal, and even Christians feel it as normal - which is why absorbing the culture all around us and its priorities is so dangerous.

God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in Him.

It was becoming clearer and clearer that if I wanted to come to the end of my life and not say, “I’ve wasted it!” then I would need to press all the way in, and all the way up, to the ultimate purpose of God and join him in it. If my life was to have a single, all-satisfying, unifying passion, it would have to be God’s passion.

But whatever you do, find the God-centered, Christ-exalting, Bible-saturated passion of your life, and find your way to say it and live for it and die for it. And you will make a difference that lasts. You will not waste your life.

Life is wasted if we do not grasp the glory of the cross, cherish it for the treasure that it is, and cleave to it as the highest price of every pleasure and the deepest comfort in every pain. What was once foolishness to us—a crucified God—must become our wisdom and our power and our only boast in this world.

Sin is what you do when your heart is not satisfied with God.

One of the great uses of Twitter and Facebook will be to prove at the Last Day that prayerlessness was not from lack of time.