John Piper is a theologian and pastor known for his thought-provoking insights on Christianity. His quotes inspire and challenge believers to live passionately for God, and to seek a deeper understanding of their faith.
1. The abortion industry kills as many Black people every four days as the Klan killed in 150 years.
2. 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!
3. Do you have a hunger for God? If we don’t feel strong desires for the manifestation of the glory of God, it is not because we have drunk deeply and are satisfied. It is because we have nibbled so long at the table of the world. Our soul is stuffed with small things, and there is no room for the great. If we are full of what the world offers, then perhaps a fast might express, or even increase, our soul’s appetite for God. Between the dangers of self-denial and self-indulgence is the path of pleasant pain called fasting.
4. 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.
5. Boasting is the voice of pride in the heart of the strong. Self-pity is the voice of pride in the heart of the weak.
6. 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 too small.
7. 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.
8. God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in Him.
9. Out of the freedom from worry that God’s generosity provides comes an impulse toward simplicity rather than accumulation.
10. The impulse to create the world was not from weakness, as though God were lacking in some perfection which creation could supply.
11. It is a precious thing beyond all words – especially in the hour of death – that we have a God whose nature is such that what pleases Him is not our work for Him but our need for Him.
12. I don’t so much pray that my death will be without pain, but that it will be without doubt.
13. The essence of faith is being satisfied with all that God is for us in Jesus.
14. Faith is the evidence of new birth, not the cause of it.
15. 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?
16. 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.
17. Grace is the enabling gift of God not to sin. Grace is power, not just pardon.
18. God’s interest is to magnify the fullness of His glory by spilling over in mercy to us. Therefore the pursuit of our interest and our happiness is never above God, but always in God. God’s greatest interest is to glorify the wealth of His grace by making sinners happy in Him.
19. Interest is to magnify the fullness of His glory by spilling over in mercy to us. Therefore the pursuit of our interest and our happiness is never above God, but always in God. God’s greatest interest is to glorify the wealth of His grace by making sinners happy in Him.
20. There will be no people in heaven who want to be around their things more than Jesus.
21. Consider Jesus. Know Jesus. Learn what kind of Person it is you say you trust and love and worship. Soak in the shadow of Jesus. Saturate your soul with the ways of Jesus. Watch Him. Listen to Him. Stand in awe of Him. Let Him overwhelm you with the way He is.
22. The aim of God in creating and redeeming us is the delight He Himself enjoys in seeing His creatures delight in Him. As Edwards said, “[The] glorifying of God is nothing but rejoicing in the manifestations of Him.” In other words, the purpose of the knowledge of God is the enjoyment of God because “God is most glorified in you when you are most satisfied in Him.”
23. When justice is divorced from morality, when rights of individuals are separated from right and wrong, the only definition you have left for justice is the right for every individual to do as he pleases. And the end of that road is anarchy and barbarism.
24. Trying to work for God without worshipping God results in joyless legalism. Work minus worship magnifies your will power not God’s worth. If you try to do things for God without delighting in God you bring dishonor upon God. Serving God without savoring God is lifeless and unreal.
25. The chief end of man is to glorify God by enjoying him forever.
26. Love is the overflow of joy in God! It is not duty for duty’s sake, or right for right’s sake. It is not a resolute abandoning of one’s own good with a view solely to the good of the other person. It is first a deeply satisfying experience of the fullness of God’s grace, and then a doubly satisfying experience of sharing that grace with another person.
27. If we have no zeal for the glory of God our mercy must be superficial, man-centered human improvement with no eternal significance. And if our zeal for the glory of God is not a reveling in his mercy, than our so-called zeal, in spite of all its protests, is our of touch with God and hypocritical.
28. Missions is the overflow of our delight in God because missions is the overflow of God’s delight in being God.
29. The climax of God’s happiness is the delight He takes in the echoes of His excellence in the praises of His people.
30. 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.
31. 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.
32. God has given us prayer as a wartime walkie-talkie so that we can call headquarters for everything we need as the kingdom of Christ advances in the world. Prayer gives us the significance of front-line forces, and gives God the glory of a limitless Provider. The one who gives the power gets the glory. Thus prayer safeguards the supremacy of God in missions while linking us with endless grace for every need.
33. My burden is to plead for the supremacy of God in preaching–that the dominant note of preaching be the freedom of God’s sovereign grace, the unifying theme be the zeal that God has for his own glory, the grand object of preaching be the infinite and inexhaustible being of God, and the pervasive atmosphere of preaching be the holiness of God.
34. Preachers must have a passion to produce people whose satisfaction in God is so solid, so deep, and so unshakable that suffering and death – losing everything this world can give – will not make people murmur or curse God, but rest in the promise, “In His presence is fullness of joy, at His right hand are pleasures forevermore” (Psm. 16:11).
35. It horribly skews the meaning of the cross when contemporary prophets of self-esteem say that the cross is a witness to my infinite worth. The biblical perspective is that the cross in a witness to the infinite worth of God’s glory, and a witness to the immensity of the sin of my pride.
36. This is God’s universal purpose for all Christian suffering: more contentment in God and less satisfaction in the world.
37. Sin gets its power by persuading me to believe that I will be happier if I follow it. The power of all temptation is the prospect that it will make me happier.
38. It’s unpopular to take a strong stand on anything (these days) except tolerance.
39. God aims to exalt Himself by working for those who wait for Him.
40. The deepest need that you and I have in weakness and adversity is not quick relief, but the well-grounded confidence that what is happening to us is part of the greatest purpose of God in the universe – the glorification of the grace and power of his Son – the grace and power that bore Him to the cross and kept him there until the work of love was done.