John Piper (theologian) Quotes

85 Sourced Quotes

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

John Piper
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
Marriage. The roots are deep. The covenant is solid. The love is sweet. Life is hard. And God is good.

John Piper
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.

John Piper
It is unbiblical and arrogant to try to worship God for any other reason than the pleasure to be had in Him.

John Piper
Where the Bible is esteemed as the inspired and inerrant Word of God, preaching can flourish. But where the Bible is treated merely as a record of valuable religious insight, preaching dies.

John Piper
We cannot know what prayer is for until we know that life is war.

John Piper
The essence of faith is being satisfied with all that God is for us in Jesus.

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

John Piper
Lives of faith are the great mirror of the dependability of God.

John Piper
Where passion for God is weak, zeal for missions will be weak.

John Piper
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.

John Piper
If we love God's fame and are committed to magnifying His name above all things, we cannot be indifferent to world missions.

John Piper
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.

John Piper
There is a war going on. All talk of a Christian's right to live luxuriously "as a child of the King" in this atmosphere sounds hollow - especially since the King himself is stripped for battle.

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

John Piper
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
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.

John Piper
Our deeds are not the basis of our salvation, they are the evidence of our salvation. They are not foundation, they are demonstration.

John Piper
So you can see what is happening in the New Testament. Worship is being significantly deinstitutionalized, delocalized, de-externalized. The whole thrust is being taken off of ceremony and seasons and places and forms and is being shifted to what is happening in the heart - not just on Sunday but every day and all the time in all of life.

John Piper
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.9 God did not create you for this. There is an appetite for God. And it can be awakened. I invite you to turn from the dulling effects of food and the dangers of idolatry, and to say with some simple fast: This much, O God, I want you.

John Piper
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.

John Piper
If gratitude is not rooted in the beauty of God before the gift, it is probably disguised idolatry. May God grant us a heart to delight in him for who he is so that all our gratitude for his gifts will be the echo of our joy in the excellency of the Giver!

John Piper
If God should turn away from himself as the Source of infinite joy, he would cease to be God. He would deny the infinite worth of his own glory. He would imply that there is something more valuable outside himself. He would commit idolatry... Where will we find a Rock of integrity in the universe when the heart of God has ceased to value supremely the supremely valuable?

John Piper
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

John Piper
God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in Him.

John Piper
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
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.

John Piper