Top 100 John Piper Quotes
#1. This is why it is often called sovereign grace: it raises the dead. The dead do not raise themselves. God does by his grace. And it is this "glorious grace" that will be praised for all eternity.
John Piper
#2. All the money needed to send and support an army of self-sacrificing, joy-spreading ambassadors is already in the church.
John Piper
#3. Do you love the cross because it makes much of you? Or do you love it because it enables you to enjoy and eternity of making much of God?
John Piper
#4. I am not a good example of an urban pastor. Because of the way I believe God calls me to use my time, I don't have significant relationships with most of my neighbors.
John Piper
#5. God uses means to awaken joy in himself,
John Piper
#6. The call of God creates sight in us. It's the work of God in our hearts to awaken us before his word.
John Piper
#7. 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.
John Piper
#8. Missions is the overflow of our delight in God because missions is the overflow of God's delight in being God.
John Piper
#9. We waste our lives when we do not pray and think and dream and plan and work toward magnifying God in all spheres of life. God created us for this: to live our lives in a way that makes him look more like the greatness and the beauty and the infinite worth that he really is.
John Piper
#10. We should waken to the truth that it is a treacherous sin not to pursue our fullest satisfaction in God.
John Piper
#11. 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.
John Piper
#12. We ought not speak too long about God with our minds before we turn and speak to God from our heart. We must stir a lot of prayer into the stew of our theology.
John Piper
#13. Look to Jesus this Christmas. Receive the reconciliation that he bought. Don't put it on the shelf unopened. And don't open it and then make it a means to all your other pleasures. Open it and enjoy the gift. Rejoice in him. Make him your pleasure. Make him your treasure.
John Piper
#14. The essence of faith is being satisfied with all that God is for us in Jesus.
John Piper
#15. Without the renewed mind, we will distort the Scriptures to avoid their radical commands for self-denial, and love, and purity, and supreme satisfaction in Christ alone.
John Piper
#16. God has made us to be conduits of his grace. The danger is in thinking the conduit should be lined with gold. It shouldn't. Copper will do.
John Piper
#17. You cannot know what prayer is for, until you know that life is war.
John Piper
#18. It is a myth that man in his natural state is genuinely seeking God. Men do seek God. But they do not seek him for who he is. They seek him in a pinch as one who might preserve them from death or enhance their worldly enjoyments. Apart from conversion, no one comes to the light of God.
John Piper
#19. God is infinitely valuable. I can't think of anything that would have a greater impact on your life than for you to believe that.
John Piper
#20. Life is war. That's not all it is. But it is always that. Our weakness in prayer is owing largely to our neglect of this truth. Prayer is primarily a wartime walkie-talkie for the mission of the church as it advances against the powers of darkness and unbelief.
John Piper
#21. 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.
John Piper
#22. I am not a missionary, but I have wanted my life to count for the unreached peoples of the world.
John Piper
#23. Lavish giving and open homes are close to the center of life in Christ.
John Piper
#24. There are a thousand needs in the world, and none of them compares to the global need for the gospel.
John Piper
#25. The end of the creation is that God may communicate happiness to the creature
John Piper
#26. All that looks like reality to us is dependent on God. There is creation and Creator, nothing more. And creation gets all its meaning and purpose from God.
John Piper
#27. Apart from new birth, I am my problem. You are not my main problem. My parents were not my main problem. My enemies are not my main problem. I am my main problem. Not my deeds, and not my circumstances, and not the people in my life, but my nature is my deepest personal problem.
John Piper
#28. As much as we can, let's defend the truth by pointing to what the apostles taught, and let's call out sin by pointing to the inconsistencies between what we say we believe and what we do.
John Piper
#29. Homosexual behavior has been exploited, and reveled in, and celebrated in art, for millennia.
John Piper
#30. I simply find it impossible to believe that the human drama of the centuries, with its quest for meaning and beauty and truth, has no deeper root than molecular mutations.
John Piper
#31. I don't know how people pray who don't believe in the sovereignty of God to do the impossible. Because all the things I want to happen are impossible. If they're possible I'll do them.
John Piper
#32. Reading and understanding the Bible involves lots and lots of interpretation. Not just in light of the world and culture around us, but in reference to other parts of the Bible.
John Piper
#33. God created us to live with a single passion: to joyfully display his supreme excellence in all spheres of life. The wasted life is the life without this passion. God calls us to pray and think and dream and plan and work, not to be made much of, but to make much of him in every part of our lives.
John Piper
#34. Doing things in secret that you are ashamed for others to know is practical atheism. God's knowing doesn't count?
John Piper
#35. Asking questions is the key to understanding.
John Piper
#36. the bottom line of assurance comes when you stop analyzing and you look to Christ and you look and you look and you look until Christ himself in his glory and his sufficiency by reflex, as it were, awakens a self-forgetful "Yes!" to him.
John Piper
#37. This assumes that the glory of Christ is our highest treasure, not health, wealth, family or even life. So preaching must continually show not that Jesus is the means to prosperity but that he is better than prosperity.
John Piper
#39. God has ordained that Satan have a long leash with God holding on to the leash because he knows that when we walk in and out of those temptations, struggling with both the physical effects that they bring and the moral effects that they bring, more of God's glory will shine.
John Piper
#40. If you must choose between loving someone and acting so that they feel loved, always choose to love them.
John Piper
#41. The call of God does what the call of man cannot. It raises the dead.
John Piper
#42. Life and death! They seem like complete opposites-at great enmity with each other. But for Paul-and for all who share his faith-there is a unity, because the same great passion is fulfilled in both-namely, that Christ be magnified in this body-our bodies-whether by life or by death.
John Piper
#43. Bad theology will eventually hurt people and dishonor God in proportion to its badness.
John Piper
#44. James warns against the pride of presumption in speaking of
the simplest plans in life without a due submission to the overarching
sovereignty of God over the day's agenda. Man's plans might be interrupted by God's decision to take the life he gave.
John Piper
#45. Jerusalem meant one thing for Jesus: certain death.
John Piper
#46. God loves to show mercy ... His anger must be released by a stiff safety lock, but His mercy has a hair trigger.
John Piper
#47. If we come with a chip on our shoulder that there is nothing we can learn or no benefit we can get, we will prove ourselves infallible on both counts.
John Piper
#48. The key to praying with power is to become the kind of persons who do not use God for our ends but are utterly devoted to being used for His ends.
John Piper
#49. Judge not the Lord by feeble sense, But trust him for his grace; Behind a frowning providence He hides a smiling face.
John Piper
#50. Waiting for the Lord in a season of darkness should not be a time of inactivity. We should do what we can do. And doing is often God's appointed remedy for despair.
John Piper
#51. That is not just the story of Israel. It's the story of humanity. It's the story of my life and your life.
John Piper
#52. There will be no passion to draw others into our worship where there is no passion for worship.
John Piper
#53. The foundation of moral life as God's truthfulness.
John Piper
#54. Worship is the highest moral act a human can perform, so the only basis and motivation for it that many people can conceive is the notion of morality as the disinterested performance of duty. But when worship is reduced to disinterested duty, it ceases to be worship. For worship is a feast.
John Piper
#55. God is our supreme pleasure. We prefer above all else to know him and see him and be with him and be like him.
John Piper
#56. The greatest stumbling block for children in worship is that their parents do not cherish the hour. Children can feel the difference between duty and delight. Therefore, the first and most important job of a parent is to fall in love with the worship of God. You can't impart what you don't possess.
John Piper
#57. Jesus warns that the word of God, the gospel, which is meant to give us life, can be choked to death by riches.
John Piper
#58. 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.
John Piper
#59. The chief end of missions is the supremacy of God in the joy of all peoples.
John Piper
#60. We will wait. We will wait till all is made righteous (glorious) according to the word of God.
John Piper
#61. America is the first culture in jeopardy of amusing itself to death.
John Piper
#62. The gospel of the glory of Christ spreads better and flourishes more because of 6,500 languages, not in spite of them.
John Piper
#63. Christmas split history. Foretastes of the future abound. Drink deeply on what he achieved for us. And be filled with hope for all that is coming.
John Piper
#64. It is not surprising that prayer malfunctions when we try to make it a domestic intercom to call upstairs for more comforts in the den.
John Piper
#65. Zeal for the glory of God motivates world missions
John Piper
#66. The glory of Christ in the gospel is the decisive ground of saving faith because saving faith is the receiving of Christ as infinitely glorious and supremely valuable.
John Piper
#67. You can't praise what you don't prize.
John Piper
#68. Let the freedom to fail give you the hope to fight.
John Piper
#69. Not seeing the divine glory of Christ in the gospel is blameworthy. It is not an innocent blindness, but a culpable love of darkness. "They
John Piper
#70. We ascribe to God. We don't add to Him.
John Piper
#71. You get one pass at life. That's all. Only one. And the lasting measure of that life is Jesus Christ.
John Piper
#72. Less extreme is the simple costliness in time and convenience and money and effort to replace excessive and addictive leisure with acts of servant love.
John Piper
#73. Feeling loved by God means feeling glad not only that He crushed His Son so that I can be forgiven, but that He's crushing everything that takes away from my praising of the glory of His grace.
John Piper
#74. We need a Savior. Christmas is an indictment before it becomes a delight.
John Piper
#75. Taken as a whole, the story of Ruth is one of those signs. It was written to give us encouragement and hope that all the perplexing turns in our lives are going somewhere good. They do not lead off a cliff. In all the setbacks of our lives as believers, God is plotting for our joy.
John Piper
#76. 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.
John Piper
#77. When God appoints the gospel of his Son as the universal remedy for the guilt and corruption of mankind, and we diminish that, the gospel is diminished. And you cannot diminish the gospel without being diminished yourself.
John Piper
#78. Bitterness about your parents' brokenness will kill you. Be the grace-filled end of generational sin in your family.
John Piper
#79. You will leave all your material wealth behind, but a wealth of knowledge goes with you.
John Piper
#80. God created me - and you - to live with a single, all-embracing, all-transforming passion - namely, a passion to glorify God by enjoying and displaying his supreme excellence in all the spheres of life.
John Piper
#81. Pragmatism and subjectivism obscure the reality of the truth. They engage the mind, but they make it the servant of our desires and our work. But they can't answer which desires I should pursue and which work is worthwhile.
John Piper
#82. We embrace the hand we've been dealt, because we know the Dealer, and he never deals badly.
John Piper
#83. Abstraction is the way to the heart - it is not the heart itself.
John Piper
#84. When I believe in Jesus, I am united to Christ. Therefore, what he did and achieved becomes mine by this union through faith alone. His righteous life is imputed to me. What Christ achieved is counted as mine.
John Piper
#85. No true Christian can endure in battling unrighteousness unless his heart is aflame with new spiritual affections, or passions. "Mere knowledge is confessedly too weak. The affections alone remain to supply the deficiency."1
John Piper
#86. Does Christ get a good reputation because of the way we live? Is the excellence of Christ displayed in our lives? That should matter to us, not whether we ourselves are praised.
John Piper
#87. Nothing sobers a wandering philosophical imagination like the thought of having a wife and children to support.
John Piper
#88. When you bow down your head to pray
Let the first thing that you say
Be a lowly word and meek:
I admit that I am weak.
John Piper
#89. Loving God with all our mind means that our thinking is wholly engaged to do all it can to awaken and express the heartfelt fullness of treasuring God above all things.
John Piper
#90. The church is not called to be responsible for the way unbelievers run their lives. But we are called to be responsible, by the power of the Spirit and for the glory of Jesus, for the way believers live and the kind of relationships that are cultivated in the fellowship of the church.
John Piper
#91. The Great Commission will not get done if we're not ready to risk our lives and the lives of our family.
John Piper
#92. Absolute statements of our unbelief that we make in the darkness are notoriously unreliable.
John Piper
#93. God took the record of all your sins-all your sexual failures-that made you a debtor to wrath, and instead of holding them up in front of your face and using them as the warrant to send you to hell, he put them in the palm of his Son's hand and nailed them to the cross.
John Piper
#94. Knowing and thinking exist for the sake of love
for the sake of building people up in faith. Thinking that produces pride instead of love is not true thinking.
John Piper
#95. I recall hearing one of my professors in seminary say that one of the best tests of a person's theology was the effect it has on one's prayers.
John Piper
#96. We need God in ways we do not know. Don't limit your experience of God to what you can think to ask. Ask for the unknown joy.
John Piper
#97. God is the one being in the universe for whom self-exaltation is the most loving thing. Anyone else who exalts himself distracts us from what we need, namely, God.
John Piper
#98. Thinking is one of the important ways that we put the fuel of knowledge on the fires of worship and service to the world.
John Piper
#99. God wills to be displayed and known and loved and cherished and worshiped.
John Piper
#100. CHRISTIAN LIVING MOVES from what God has freely done for us in Christ to what we should freely do for others.
John Piper
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