Top 502 Quotes & Sayings by John Piper - Page 6

God made us in His own image so that His image would be shown.

Why does God bless us with abundance? So we can have enough to live on and then use the rest for all manner of good works that alleviate spiritual and physical misery. Enough for us; abundance for others.

Oh that God would help me waken in you a single passion for a single great reality that would unleash you, and set you free from small dreams, and send you, for the glory of Christ, into all the spheres of secular life and to all the peoples of the earth.

America is the first culture in jeopardy of amusing itself to death.

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.

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

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

Husbands and wives, recognize that in marriage you have become one flesh. If you live for your private pleasure at the expense of your spouse, you are living against yourself and destroying your joy. But if you devote yourself with all your heart to the holy joy of your spouse, you will also be living for your joy and making a marriage after the image of Christ and His church.

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

Forgiveness costs us nothing. All our costly obedience is the fruit, not the root, of being forgiven. That's why we call it grace.

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

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.

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.

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.

If at the cross every sin was covered, Satan's mouth is shut. He has no weapon. He can gum you but his fangs are gone.

At the heart of mature masculinity is a sense of benevolent responsibility to lead, provide for, and protect women in ways appropriate to man's differing relationships.

Suffering for Jesus is temporary. Pleasure in Jesus is eternal.

The pursuit of joy in God is not optional. It is not an 'extra' that a person might grow into after he comes to faith. Until your heart has hit upon this pursuit your 'faith' cannot please God. It is not savng faith. Saving faith is the heartfelt conviction not only that Christ is reliable, but also that He is desirable.

John's baptism...was a radical act of individual commitment to belong to the true people of God, based on personal confession and repentance... This is one of the main reasons that I do not believe in baptizing infants, who cannot make this personal commitment or confession or repentance. John's baptism was an assault on the very assumptions that give rise to much infant baptism.

Seek to see and feel the gospel as bigger as years go by rather than smaller. Never let the gospel get smaller in your heart.

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

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

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.

We ought to celebrate the positive glorious gifts of God, but the worth of God shines in a powerful way to the world when in the midst of suffering we still don't curse God but say "The Lord gave and the Lord takes away, blessed be the name of the Lord."

You have to decide what those issues are for you. What do you think disqualifies a person from holding public office? I believe that the endorsement of the right to kill unborn children disqualifies a person from any position of public office. It's simply the same as saying that the endorsement of racism, fraud, or bribery, would disqualify him - except that child-killing is more serious than those.

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.

There are a thousand needs in the world, and none of them compares to the global need for the gospel.

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

What is God looking for in the world? Assistants? No. The gospel is not a help-wanted ad. It is a help-available ad. God is not looking for people to work for Him but people who let Him work mightily in and through them.

Worship is a way of gladly reflecting back to God the radiance of his worth. This cannot be done by mere acts of duty. It can be done only when spontaneous affections arise in the heart.

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.

It is evil to justify killing (unborn babies) by the happy outcome of eternity for the one killed. This same justification could be used to justify killing one-year olds, or any heaven-bound believer for that matter. The Bible asks the question: "Shall we sin that grace may abound?" (Romans 6:1) And: "Shall we do evil that good may come?" (Romans 3:8). In both cases the answer is a resounding NO. It is presumption to step into God's place and try to make the assignments to heaven or to hell. Our duty is to obey God, not to play God.

Spiritual leadership is knowing where God wants people to be and taking the initiative to get them there by God's means in reliance on God's power.

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

humility is beyond our reach. if it were a product of reaching, we would instinctively be proud of reaching it. it is a gift.

True worship comes from people who are deeply emotional and who love deep and sound doctrine. Strong affections for God rooted in thrush are the bone and marrow of biblical worship.

It has to do with seeing God. “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God” (Matthew 5:8).

Many people are willing to be God-centered as long as they feel that God is man-centered

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.

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 root cause of abortion is the failure to be satisfied in God as our supreme love. And, for all the great legal work that needs to be done to protect human life, the greatest work that needs to be done is to spread a passion - a satisfaction for the supremacy of God in all things. That's our calling.

The infinite reservoir of future grace is flowing back through the present into the ever-growing pool of past grace. The inexhaustible reservoir is invisible except through the promises. But the ever-enlarging pool of past grace is visible; and God means for the certainty and beauty and depth to strengthen our faith in future grace.

If my life was to have a single, all-satisfying, unifying passion, it would have to be God's passion.

At one level, the message of the book of Ruth is that the life of the godly is not a straight line to glory, but they do get there.

Humble us, O God, under your mighty hand, and let us rise, not as professionals, but as witnesses and partakers of the sufferings of Christ.

The highest act of love is the giving of the best gift, and, if necessary, at the greatest cost, to the least deserving. That's what God did. At the loss of His Son's life to the totally undeserving, God gave the best gift - the display of the glory of Christ who is the image of God.

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.

Christ died that we might live. This is the opposite of abortion. Abortion kills that someone might live differently.

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

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.

If we were made to watch a doctor pull off the little baby's legs and arms one by one and place them on the table like a dentist removing cotton from your mouth - if all Americans were made to see what it really is, the pro-life goal of abortion being unthinkable (not just illegal) would be much nearer.

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.

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

I am not a missionary, but I have wanted my life to count for the unreached peoples of the world.

God is love precisely because He relentlessly pursues the praises of His name in the hearts of His people.

Be glad in the Lord and receive willingly from His Hand all that he designs for my holiness - both painful and pleasant.

Adjust your doctrine - or just minimize doctrine - to attract the world, and in the very process of attracting them, lose the radical truth that alone can set them free.

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.

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.

Sometimes people stumble over this vastness in relation to the apparent insignificance of man. It does seem to make us infinitesimally small. But the meaning of this magnitude is not mainly about us. It’s about God… The reason for ‘wasting’ so much space on a universe to house a speck of humanity is to make a point about our maker, not us.