John Piper Quotations | Page 2

Bitterness about your parents’ brokenness will kill you. Be the grace-filled end of generational sin in your family.

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

The highest meaning and the most ultimate purpose of marriage is to put the covenant relationship of Christ and his church on display. That is why marriage exists. If you are married, that is why you are married. If you hope to be, that should be your dream.

Our obedience is God's pleasure when it proves that God is our treasure.

If you live gladly to make others glad in God, your life will be hard, your risks will be high, and your joy will be full.

Do we eagerly long for the coming of Christ? Or do we want him to wait while our love affair with the world runs its course? That is the question that tests the authenticity of faith.

God is pursuing with omnipotent passion a worldwide purpose of gathering joyful worshipers for Himself from every tribe and tongue and people and nation. He has an inexhaustible enthusiasm for the supremacy of His name among the nations. Therefore, let us bring our affections into line with His, and, for the sake of His name, let us renounce the quest for worldly comforts and join His global purpose.

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.

If you alter or obscure the Biblical portrait of God in order to attract converts, you don't get converts to God, you get converts to an illusion. This is not evangelism, but deception.

The wisdom of God devised a way for the love of God to deliver sinners from the wrath of God while not compromising the righteousness of God.

It is better to lose your life than to waste it.

Why don't people ask us about our hope? The answer is probably that we look as if we hope in the same things they do. Our lives don't look like they are on the Calvary road, stripped down for sacrificial love, serving others with the sweet assurance that we don't need to be rewarded in this life.

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

The deepest longing of the human heart is to know and enjoy the glory of God. We were made for this.

God has ordained that our preaching become deeper and more winsome as we are broken, humbled, and made low and desperately dependent on grace by the trials of our lives.

The ultimate difference between God's wisdom and man's wisdom is how they relate to the glory of God's grace in Christ crucified. God's wisdom makes the glory of God's grace our supreme treasure. But man's wisdom delights in seeing himself as resourceful, self-sufficient, self determining, and not utterly dependent on God's free grace.

God seldom calls us for an easier life, but always calls us to know more of him and drink more deeply of His sustaining grace.

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.

The critical question for our generation—and for every generation— is this: If you could have heaven, with no sickness, and with all the friends you ever had on earth, and all the food you ever liked, and all the leisure activities you ever enjoyed, and all the natural beauties you ever saw, all the physical pleasures you ever tasted, and no human conflict or any natural disasters, could you be satisfied with heaven, if Christ were not there?

Do not be more devoted to your own brain than you are to the Bible.

Grace is the pleasure of God to magnify the worth of God by giving sinners the right and power to delight in God without obscuring the glory of God.

Prayer is the open admission that without Christ we can do nothing. And prayer is the turning away from ourselves to God in the confidence that He will provide the help we need. Prayer humbles us as needy and exalts God as wealthy

In our proud love affair with ourselves we pour contempt, whether we know it or not, on the worth of God's glory. As our pride pours contempt upon God's glory, His righteousness obliges Him to pour wrath upon our pride.

Christ did not die to forgive sinners who go on treasuring anything above seeing and savoring God. And people who would be happy in heaven if Christ were not there, will not be there. The gospel is not a way to get people to heaven; it is a way to get people to God. It's a way of overcoming every obstacle to everlasting joy in God. If we don't want God above all things, we have not been converted by the gospel.

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.

In EVERY situation and EVERY circumstance of your life, God is always doing a thousand different things that you cannot see and you do not know.

The Gospel is not how people get to heaven. The Gospel is how people get to God.

Life is not a straight line leading from one blessing to the next and then finally to heaven. Life is a winding and troubled road. Switchback after switchback. And the point of biblical stories like Joseph and Job and Esther and Ruth is to help us feel in our bones (not just know in our heads) that God is for us in all these strange turns. God is not just showing up after the trouble and cleaning it up. He is plotting the course and managing the troubles with far-reaching purposes for our good and for the glory of Jesus Christ.

I've never heard anyone say the really deep lessons of life have come in times of ease and comfort. But, I have heard many saints say every significant advance I've ever made in grasping in the depth of God's love and growing deep with Him, have come through suffering.

Marriage is not mainly about being or staying in love. It’s mainly about telling the truth with our lives. It’s about portraying something true about Jesus Christ and the way He relates to his people. It is about showing in real life the glory of the gospel.

Grace is not simply leniency when we have sinned. Grace is the enabling gift of God not to sin. Grace is power, not just pardon.

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.

Life is too short, too precious, too painful to waste on worldly bubbles that burst

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

God will not turn away from doing you good. He will keep on doing good. He doesn't do good to His children sometimes and bad to them other times. He keeps on doing good and He never will stop doing good for ten thousand ages of ages. When things are going bad that does not mean God has stopped doing good. It means He is shifting things around to get them in place for more good, if you will go on loving Him.

What is sin? It is the glory of God not honored. The holiness of God not reverenced. The greatness of God not admired. The power of God not praised. The truth of God not sought. The wisdom of God not esteemed. The beauty of God not treasured. The goodness of God not savored. The faithfulness of God not trusted. The commandments of God not obeyed. The justice of God not respected. The wrath of God not feared. The grace of God not cherished. The presence of God not prized. The person of God not loved. That is sin.

My feelings are not God. God is God. My feelings do not define truth. God’s word defines truth. My feelings are echoes and responses to what my mind perceives. And sometimes - many times - my feelings are out of sync with the truth. When that happens - and it happens every day in some measure - I try not to bend the truth to justify my imperfect feelings, but rather, I plead with God: Purify my perceptions of your truth and transform my feelings so that they are in sync with the truth.

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.

If you can't see the sun you will be impressed with a street light. If you've never felt thunder and lightning you'll be impressed with fireworks. And if you turn your back on the greatness and majesty of God you'll fall in love with a world of shadows and short-lived pleasures.

The deepest and most enduring happiness is found only in God. Not from God, but in God.

Husbands are not Christ. But they are called to be like him. And the specific point of likeness is the husband's readiness to suffer for his wife's good without threatening or abusing her. This includes suffering to protect her from any outside forces that would harm her, as well as suffering disappointments of abuses even from her. This kind of love is possible because Christ died for both husband and wife. Their sins are forgiven. Neither needs to make the other suffer for sins. Christ has borne that suffering. Now as two sinful and forgiven people we can return good for evil.

Therefore bread was created for the glory of Christ. Hunger and thirst were created for the glory of Christ. And fasting was created for the glory of Christ. Which means that bread magnifies Christ in two ways: by being eaten with gratitude for his goodness, and by being forfeited out of hunger for God himself. When we eat, we taste the emblem of our heavenly food—the Bread of Life. And when we fast we say, “I love the Reality above the emblem.” In the heart of the saint both eating and fasting are worship. Both magnify Christ.

Our lives become trivial. And our capacity for magnificent causes and great worship dies.

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.

Sleep is a daily reminder from God that we are not God. Once a day God sends us to bed like patients with a sickness. The sickness is a chronic tendency to think we are in control and that our work is indispensable. To cure us of this disease God turns us into helpless sacks of sand once a day.

My joy grows with every soul that seeks the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. Remember, you have one life. That’s all. You were made for God. Don’t waste it.

We are more than a collection of appetites - we are of God.

O that we would so love the gospel and have so much compassion for lost people that tribulation and distress and persecution and famine and nakedness and danger and sword and gun and terrorist would turn us not into fearful complainers, but bold heralds of good news.

We will wait. We will wait till all is made righteous (glorious) according to the word of God.

He has made me wary of chronological snobbery. That is, he showed me that newness is no virtue and oldness is no vice. Truth and beauty and goodness are not determined by when they exist. Nothing is inferior for being old, and nothing is valuable for being modern. This has freed me from the tyranny of novelty and opened for me the wisdom of the ages.

The answer, The answer, my friend, is not yours to invent or create. It will be decided for you. It is outside you. It is real and objective and firm. One day you will hear it. You don’t create it. You don’t define it. It comes to you, and sooner or later you conform to it—or bow to it.

The Lord is kind. He is good to all who take refuge under his wings.

Not to abide in Jesus’ love would mean that we stop believing that we are loved by Jesus. We look at our circumstances - perhaps persecution or disease or abandonment - and we conclude that we are not loved by Jesus anymore. That’s the opposite of abiding in the love of Jesus. So abiding in his love means continuing to believe, moment by moment, that we are loved.

We can say that true gratitude does not give rise to the debtor's ethic because it gives rise to faith in future grace. With true gratitude there is such a delight in the worth of God's past grace, that we are driven on to experience more and more of it in the future...it is done by transforming gratitude into faith as it turns from contemplating the pleasures of past grace and starts contemplating the promises of the future.

Our obedience is God's pleasure when it proves that God is our treasure. This is good news, because it means very simply that the command to obey is the command to be happy in God. The commandments of God are only as hard to obey as the promises of God are hard to believe. The Word of God is only as hard to obey as the beauty of God is hard to cherish.

What is the essence of evil? It is forsaking a living fountain for broken cisterns. God gets derision and we get death. They are one: choosing sugarcoated misery we mock the lifegiving God. It was meant to be another way: God's glory exalted in our everlasting joy.

The mind serves to know the truth that fuels the fires of the heart.

People don't enjoy salt. They enjoy what is salted. We are the salt of the earth. We do not exist for ourselves.

Faith is born and sustained by the Word of God, and out of faith grows the flower of joy.

And in these last hours, the lifetime of this year passes before my eyes, and I face the inevitable question: Did I live it well? Will Jesus Christ, the righteous judge, say “Well done, good and faithful servant”?

Obedience does not consist in paying God back and thus turning grace into a trade. Obedience comes from trusting in God for more grace - future grace - and thus magnifying the infinite resources of God's love and power.

We give glory to God when we trust him to do what he has promised to do-especially when all human possibilities are exhausted. Faith glorifies God. That is why God planned for faith to be the way we are justified.

Not grace to bar what is not bliss, Nor flight from all distress, but this: The grace that orders our trouble and pain, And then, in the darkness, is there to sustain.

Worship is ultimate, not missions. Because God is ultimate, not man.

The Gospel is the news that Jesus Christ, the Righteous One, died for our sins and rose again, eternally triumphant over all his enemies, so that there is now no condemnation for those who believe, but only everlasting joy.

When it comes to killing my sin, I don't wait for the miracle, I act the miracle.

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.

Don't coast through life without a passion.

For the mind of faith, a promised act of God is as good as done.

Christianity is fundamentally convalescence.. .God is not only the doctor who prescribes, He is the nurse who lifts up our powerless head and puts the spoon in our mouth...And He is the medicine.

The goal of Bethlehem College and Seminary cannot be expressed with man as the end point. Christ is the endpoint.

The call of God creates sight in us. It's the work of God in our hearts to awaken us before his word.

Love is the overflow of joy in God that meets the needs of others.

The great barrier to worship among God's people is not that we are always seeking our own satisfaction, but that our seeking is so weak and half-hearted that we settle for little sips at broken cisterns when the fountain of life is just over the next hill.

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

To see Him and know Him and be in His presence is the soul’s final feast. Beyond this there is no quest. Words fail. We call it pleasure, joy, delight. But these are weak pointers to the unspeakable experience.

Faith begins with a backward look at the cross, but it lives with a forward look at the promises

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

In demanding our praise God is demanding the completion of our pleasure (in him).

God's global aim in creation and redemption is not only the glory of his name, but also the gladness of the peoples.

One day America and all its presidents will be a footnote in history, but the kingdom of Jesus will never end.

My Paradise: With Christ. Not sinning. No pain. New earth. Precious in that order.

Put your ear to the ground of God's word and listen to the rumble of His faithfulness coming.

The further you go in the revealed thoughts of God, the clearer you see that God's aim in creating the world was to display the value of his own glory.

The line of lovelessness is not drawn between speaking and doing, but between speaking and doing in the truth, and speaking and doing in emptiness. Truth turns word-love into deed-love.

Whenever your heart starts to be anxious about the future, preach to your heart and say, 'Heart, who do you think you are to be afraid of the future and nullify the promise of God? No, heart, I will not exalt myself with anxiety. I will humble myself in peace and joy as I trust this precious and great promise of God - He cares for me.'

Being infinite, God is inexhaustibly interesting. It is therefore impossible that God be boring.

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.

The call of God does what the call of man cannot. It raises the dead.

The rich fruit of spontaneity grows in the garden that is well tended by the discipline of schedule.

The more of God's Word you know and love, the more of God's Spirit you will experience.

If you are sufficient for your task, it's too small.

I wrote this poem called “The Calvinist” to capture a glimpse of God’s sovereign intersection with the life of a sinful man. There is no part of life where the greatness of God does not penetrate deeply. I want to help you feel that.

Not going to God because your faith is weak is like not going to the doctor because you feel sick.

Mission exists because worship doesn't.

Marriage is not absolutely for making children. But it is absolutely for making children followers of Jesus.

Gratitude is the joy that arises in response to God’s good will toward us in all his gifts.

The immensity of His worth is reflected in the intensity of your worship,

We make a god out of whatever we find most joy in. So find your joy in God and be done with all idolatry.