Quotes About John Piper

#1. The world is not impressed when Christians get rich and say thanks to God. It is impressed when God is so satisfying that we give our riches away for Christ's sake and count it gain. John Piper

Ryan J. Murphy

#2. Am I desiring and seeking the temporal and eternal good of my neighbor with the same zeal, ingenuity and perseverance that I seek my own? - John Piper

Matt Perman

#3. When everything in life is stripped away except God, and we trust him more because of it, this is gain, and he is glorified.

John Piper

#4. One of the most important discoveries I have ever made is this truth: God is most glorified in me when I am most satisfied in him. This is the motor that drives my ministry as a pastor. It affects everything I do.

John Piper

#5. 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

#6. From eternity to eternity, the beauty of God is pervasive and practical. Ask him to open the eyes of your heart (Ephesians 1:18). Give your life to this quest - seeing and savoring more and more of the happifying beauty of God.

John Piper

#7. 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.

John Piper

#8. The sun of God's glory was made to shine at the center of the solar system of our soul. And when it does, all the planets of our life are held in their proper orbit.

John Piper

#9. I owe my life and hope to the gospel.

John Piper

#10. I've always wondered, am I a writer who preaches or a preacher who writes? I don't know. I love them both.

John Piper

#11. It is only a matter of time till the reality of the rest of the world comes home. And all the while we are called by Christ to go to them, love them, sacrifice for them, bring the gospel to them. The Great Commission is not child's play. It is costly. Very costly.

John Piper

#12. All the money needed to send and support an army of self-sacrificing, joy-spreading ambassadors is already in the church.

John Piper

#13. Therefore, Christ crucified is the foundation of all honest and everlast- ing joy. No self-deception is necessary to enjoy it. Indeed all deception must cease in order to enjoy it to the full.

John Piper

#14. Your mind was made to know and love God.

John Piper

#15. 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

#16. Theology is a means to enjoying and worshiping God, or it is useless.

John Piper

#17. Honoring Christ, magnifying Christ, making much of Christ. That was the meaning of Paul's life. It should be the meaning of ours. And Paul prays it will be the meaning of his death as well. We live and we die to make much of Christ.

John Piper

#18. God aims to look valuable in the world, and that happens when we treasure him above all else.

John Piper

#19. Well, God does not mean for us to be passive. He means for us to fight the fight of faith - the fight for joy. And the central strategy is to preach the gospel to yourself. This is war. Satan is preaching for sure. If we remain passive, we surrender the field to him.

John Piper

#20. 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.

John Piper

#21. In all the setbacks of your life as a believer, God is plotting for your joy.

John Piper

#22. Jesus's solution to our love affair with sin is that we be mastered by joy in a new reality, namely, God.

John Piper

#23. There is no point in winning an argument if you know or suspect you are wrong.

John Piper

#24. God is at work in the worst of times. He is at work doing a thousand things no one can see but him.

John Piper

#25. We do not smirk at the misery or the merrymaking of immoral culture. We weep. Being pilgrims does not mean being cynical. The salt of the earth does not mock rotting meat. Where it can, it saves and seasons. And where it can't, it weeps.

John Piper

#26. Don't be surprised. There is nothing new under the sun. Only endless repackagings

John Piper

#27. When you see Jesus as your Treasure, the Spirit has blown through your heart.

John Piper

#28. It was good of you to look for Quentin." "Good!" she exclaimed. "Good! O Anthony!" "Well, so it was," he answered. "Or good in you. How accurate one has to be with one's prepositions! Perhaps it was a preposition wrong that set the whole world awry." CHARLES WILLIAMS The Place of the Lion

John Piper

#29. No One Is a Relativist at the Bank

John Piper

#30. I know of no other way to triumph over sin long-term than to gain a distaste for it because of a superior satisfaction in God.

John Piper

#31. I do not appeal to you to screw up your courage and sacrifice for Christ. I appeal to you to renounce all you have to obtain life that satisfies your deepest longings.

John Piper

#32. Betrayed by Judas, denied by Peter, abandoned by the eleven, forsaken by God. Darkness, you get one hour. Then you die.

John Piper

#33. If you remove enjoyment of God from faith in God, it ceases to be faith.

John Piper

#34. 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.

John Piper

#35. Labor, therefore, to fill your hearts with the cross of Christ . . . that there may be no room for sin.

John Piper

#36. "How are you doing?" - - - better than I deserve ...

John Piper

#37. 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.

John Piper

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

John Piper

#39. Do you feel more loved when God makes much of you or do you feel more loved when God at the cost of His Son allows you to make much of Him?

John Piper

#40. The call of Christ is a call to live a life of sacrifice and loss and suffering
a life that would be foolish to live if there were no resurrection from the dead.

John Piper

#41. Everyone who does wicked things hates the light and does not come to the light, lest his deeds should be exposed. Concealed sin keeps us from seeing the light of Christ.

John Piper

#42. Life is precarious, and life is precious. Don't presume you will have it tomorrow, and don't waste it today.

John Piper

#43. 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

#44. The one God has chosen unconditionally he keeps invincibly. Being and staying a believer is decisively of sovereign grace.

John Piper

#45. When people think about 'thinking,' they often think 'academia;' they think 'threat.' They think 'coldness.' I want to reverse all those images and say, 'No, the brain God gave you is intended to throw fuel on the fire of your affections for God. It's really good at it if you let it.'

John Piper

#46. Where feelings for God are dead, worship is dead.

John Piper

#47. The mind was designed not to defend what we want, but to discover what is ultimately true, which should shape our wants and satisfy them more deeply with God. The purpose of the mind is not to rationalize subjective preferences, but to recognize objective reality and to help the heart revel in God.

John Piper

#48. No one will be able to rise to the magnificence of the missionary cause who does not feel the magnificence of Christ.

John Piper

#49. God uses means to awaken joy in himself,

John Piper

#50. If a tornado twists at 175 miles an hour and stays on the ground like a massive lawnmower for 50 miles, God gave the command.

John Piper

#51. The importance of prayer rises in proportion to the importance of the things we should give up in order to pray

John Piper

#52. 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

#53. Lives of faith are the great mirror of the dependability of God.

John Piper

#54. Preaching is the pastor's main work, and preaching is heart work, not just mental work.

John Piper

#55. God is not a killjoy; he just opposes what kills joy.

John Piper

#56. He came to destroy sin because it is fatal.

John Piper

#57. We do not choose suffering simply because we are told to, but because the one who tells us to describes it as the path to everlasting joy.

John Piper

#58. Thinking for the Sake of Global Faithfulness: Encountering Islam with the Mind of Christ THABITI ANYABWILE

John Piper

#59. 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

#60. The offspring of the woman, Jesus Christ, came into the world to save women who have dethroned God, taken His place, defined personhood as tissue, and willed the death of their own child. It can't be reversed, but it can be forgiven. That is why Christ died.

John Piper

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

John Piper

#62. Third, I define loving God mainly as treasuring God. That is, it is an experience of cherishing, delighting, admiring, and valuing.

John Piper

#63. If we are cut loose from the anchor of God's Word, we will not be free. We will be slaves of personal passions and popular trends.

John Piper

#64. The new birth is the creation of spiritual life, not the imitation of life.

John Piper

#65. I just want to preach so bad I can hardly stand it. I love what I do.

John Piper

#66. One of the great enemies of hope is forgetting God's promises.

John Piper

#67. Only the gospel can do two seemingly contradictory things: destroy pride and increase courage. Destroy self-exaltation and increase confidence. Destroy the pushiness of self-assertion and deliver from the paralysis of self-doubt.

John Piper

#68. If God were not just, there would be no demand for his Son to suffer and die. And if God were not loving, there would be no willingness for his Son to suffer and die. But God is both just and loving. Therefore his love is willing to meet the demands of his justice.

John Piper

#69. Avalanches of evil begin with a single pebble of sin.

John Piper

#70. The dismembering of a human being routinely in 30 minutes on an outpatient bases - or any other way - is barbaric. Four blocks from our church all year long - like churches within smelling distance of Auschwitz or Dachau or Buchenwald.

John Piper

#71. It is radically humbling to confess that the source of all our joy resides outside ourselves.

John Piper

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

John Piper

#73. Missions is the overflow of our delight in God because missions is the overflow of God's delight in being God.

John Piper

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

John Piper

#75. If you don't feel strong desires for the manifestation of the glory of God, it is not because you have drunk deeply and are satisfied. It is because you have nibbled so long at the table of the world. Your soul is stuffed with small things, and there is no room for the great.

John Piper

#76. The only freedom that lasts comes from pursuing what we want when we want what we ought.

John Piper

#77. Woe to us if we get our satisfaction from the food in the kitchen and the TV in the den and the sex in the bedroom with an occasional tribute to the cement blocks in the basement!

John Piper

#78. The reason there is so much misery in marriage is not that husbands and wives seek their own pleasure, but that they do not seek it in the pleasure of their spouses. The biblical mandate to husbands and wives is to seek your own joy in the joy of your spouse.

John Piper

#79. May our light shine in this world
so that people see you in our sacrificial deeds of love
and our compromising words of truth
and give glory to your hallowed name,
Father

John Piper

#80. The true dimensions of a soul are seen in its delights. Not what we dutifully will but what we passionately want reveals our excellence or evil.

John Piper

#81. In Colossians 2:12 and 1 Peter 3:21 baptism is an expression of the faith of the person being baptized. I [do] not see how an infant could properly receive this ordinance as an expression of his or her faith.

John Piper

#82. He shook my dozing soul and threw the cold water of reality in my face, so that life and God and heaven and hell broke into my world with glory and horror. (on CS Lewis)

John Piper

#83. The greatest cause in the world is joyfully rescuing people from hell, meeting their earthly needs, making them glad in God, and doing it with a kind, serious pleasure that makes Christ look like the Treasure he is.

John Piper

#84. 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.

John Piper

#85. Sin is what you do when you are not satisfied in God.

John Piper

#86. Sin can't enslave a person who is utterly confident and sure and hope-filled in the infinite happiness of life with Christ in the future.

John Piper

#87. Just being an obedient Christian is increasingly becoming a social, political, legal issue ...

John Piper

#88. Wise people know that all their money belongs to God.

John Piper

#89. Jesus Christ ... came into the world to vindicate the infinite worth of God's holiness which had been desecrated by our sin and which seemed ... to be taken lightly because it was being passed over for nothing more than the blood of bulls.

John Piper

#90. Fruit does not make a tree good. Fruit does not give life. Fruit is a sign of life and reality.

John Piper

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

John Piper

#92. All heroes are shadows of Christ

John Piper

#93. It doesn't take a new heart to want the psychological relief of forgiveness, or the removal of God's wrath, or the inheritance of God's world. All these things are understandable without any spiritual change. You don't need to be born again to want these things. The devils want them.

John Piper

#94. God has levels of willing and delighting. He wills and delights in things in different ways so that approval and disapproval can coexist without being contradictory, without canceling each other out. I am making the case here for infinite complexity.

John Piper

#95. Headship is the divine calling of a husband to take primary responsibility for Christlike, servant leadership, protection, and provision in the home.

John Piper

#96. The strength of patience hangs on our capacity to believe that God is up to something good for us in all our delays and detours.

John Piper

#97. Great waves, and blaze with fire like them.
In beauty, but do not condemn,
The seamen who embark and fail,
But only those who will not sail.

John Piper

#98. Early on, you talk about God because you consider Him to be most important. But later, you realize there are means by which God is known and portrayed.

John Piper

#99. The ultimate purpose of life is to show that Jesus is more precious than life.

John Piper

#100. 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