John Piper Quotes

I count myself as one of the number of those who learn as they write and write as they learn.

~ John Piper

Pride is no respecter of persons. The serious thinkers may be humble, and the careless mystics may be arrogant.

~ John Piper

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

The humility of wisdom is the happy consciousness that all things come from God, are sustained by God, and exist for God. This wisdom is rooted in the pride-destroying, joy-giving cross of Christ.

~ John Piper

Did you wake up feeling fragile? Read the bible till you find a promise strong enough to carry you through the day.

~ John Piper

The Spirit inspired the Word and therefore He goes where the Word goes. The more of God's Word you know and love, the more of God's Spirit you will experience.

~ John Piper

Christmas cut history in two ages, the Age of Promise, and the Age of Fulfillment.

~ John Piper

One great function of Bible verses: To keep us from drawing false inferences from other Bible verses.

~ John Piper

...for poets, at least, experiencing something inexpressible does not mean silence. It's precisely the inexpressible something that poetry is meant to help us see or feel. If it were merely expressible - if there were nothing ineffable about it - there would be no need for a poem. But everywhere in the Bible we meet reality that exceeds our expectations.

~ John Piper

Minimizing the importance of transformed feelings makes Christian conversion less supernatural and less radical. It is humanly manageable to make decisions of the will for Christ. No supernatural power is required to pray prayers, sign cards, walk aisles, or even stop sleeping around. Those are good. They just don’t prove that anything spiritual has happened. Christian conversion, on the other hand, is a supernatural, radical thing. The heart is changed. And the evidence of it is not just new decisions, but new affections, new feelings.

~ John Piper

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.

~ John Piper

The Apostle “Paul’s antidote for wimpy Christians is weighty doctrine. . . .everything that exists—including evil—is ordained by a holy and all-wise God to make the glory of Christ shine more brightly. We don’t make God. He makes us. We don’t decide what he is going to be like. He decides what he is going to be like. He decides what we are going to be like. He created the universe, and it has the meaning he gives it, not the meaning we give it. If we give it a meaning different from his, we are fools. . . . our eternal joy and strength and holiness depend on the solidity of this worldview putting strong fiber into the spine of our faith. Wimpy worldviews make wimpy Christians. And wimpy Christians won’t survive the days ahead.

~ John Piper

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

Let the freedom to fail give you the hope to fight.

~ John Piper

He came to destroy sin because it is fatal.

~ John Piper

Relativism poses as humble by saying: “We are not smart enough to know what the truth is—or if there is any universal truth.” It sounds humble. But look carefully at what is happening. It’s like a servant saying: I am not smart enough to know which person here is my master—or if I even have a master. The result is that I don’t have a master and I can be my own master. That is in reality what happens to relativists: In claiming to be too lowly to know the truth, they exalt themselves as supreme arbiter of what they can think and do. This is not humility. This is the essence of pride.

~ John Piper

The fight for joy is first and always a fight to see.

~ John Piper

But we also need stories. Great stories.

~ John Piper

The critical question for our generation—and for every generation—is this: If you could have heaven, with no sickness, and with all thefriends you ever had on earth, and all the food you ever liked, andall the leisure activities you ever enjoyed, and all the natural beautiesyou ever saw, all the physical pleasures you ever tasted, and nohuman conflict or any natural disasters, could you be satisfied withheaven, if Christ were not there?

~ John Piper

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. It is not simply a way to “enhance” your walk with the Lord. Until your heart has hit upon this pursuit, your “faith” cannot please God. It is not saving faith. Saving faith is the confidence that if you sell all you have and forsake all sinful pleasures, the hidden treasure of holy joy will satisfy your deepest desires. Saving faith is the heartfelt conviction not only that Christ is reliable, but also that He is desirable. It is the confidence that He will come through with His promises and that what He promises is more to be desired than all the world.

~ John Piper

...the gospel has an answer to both pride and guilt.

~ John Piper

When you take all three categories of temptation to self-reliance – wisdom, might and riches – they form a powerful inducement toward the ultimate form of pride, namely, atheism. The safest way to stay supreme in our own estimation is to deny anything above us. This is why the proud preoccupy themselves with looking down on others. A proud man is always looking down on things and people and, of course, as long as you are looking down, you cannot see something that is above you. But to preserve pride it may be simpler to proclaim that there is nothing above to look at (Psalm 10:4). Ultimately, the proud must persuade themselves that there is no God.

~ John Piper

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

~ John Piper

It was a costly triumph. But God’s values are not so easily reckoned. If God had simply terminated Satan, then it would not have been so clear that God is both stronger and infinitely more to be desired than Satan. God wills for his glory to shine forth not only through acts of physical power, but also through acts of moral and spiritual power that display the beauty of his grace with lavish colors. To take sinners out of Satan’s hands by virtue of Christ’s sin-bearing sacrifice and his law-fulfilling obedience to the Father was a more glorious victory than mere annihilation of the enemy.

~ John Piper

Impatience is a form of unbelief. It's what we begin to feel when we start to doubt the wisdom of God's timing or the goodness of God's guidance. It springs up in our hearts when our plan is interrupted or shattered. It may be prompted by a long wait in a checkout line or a sudden blow that knocks out half our dreams. The opposite of impatience is not a glib denial of loss. It's a deepening, ripening, peaceful willingness to wait for God in the unplanned place of obedience, and to walk with God at the unplanned pace of obedience - to wait in his place, and go at his pace.

~ John Piper

The aim of the climb is not intellectual satisfaction. The aim is worship. God gets more honor when we worship on the basis of what we know about him than he gets if we worship on the basis of what we don’t know.

~ John Piper

God is the greatest thing that exists, ever has existed or ever will…for us to glory in anything else, would be sin, as there is nothing greater than God, there is no calling greater than praising God.

~ John Piper

We ascribe to God. We don't add to Him.

~ John Piper

Long looking with admiration produces change. From your heroes you pick up mannerisms and phrases and tones of voice and facial expressions and habits and demeanors and convictions and beliefs. The more admirable the hero is and the more intense your admiration is, the more profound will be your transformation. In the case of Jesus, he is infinitely admirable, and our admiration rises to the most absolute worship. Therefore, when we behold him as we should, the change is profound.

~ John Piper

...childlike wonder and awe have died. The scenery and poetry and music of the majesty of God have dried up like a forgotten peach at the back of the refrigerator.

~ John Piper

Sleep is a daily reminder from God that we are not God. Once a day God sends us to bed like patients with a sickness. The sickness is a chronic tendency to think we are in control and that our work is indispensable. To cure us of this disease God turns us into helpless sacks of sand once a day.

~ John Piper

Part of what we pick up in looking at Jesus in the gospel is a way of viewing the whole world. That worldview informs all our values and deeply shapes our thinking and decision-making. Another part of what we absorb is greater confidence in Jesus' counsel and his promises. This has its own powerful effect on what we fear and desire and choose. Another part of what we take up from beholding the glory of Christ is greater delight in his fellowship and deeper longing to see him in heaven. This has its own liberating effect from the temptations of this world. All these have their own peculiar way of changing us into the likeness of Christ. Therefore, we should not think that pursuing likeness to Christ has no other components than just looking at Jesus. Looking at Jesus produces holiness along many different paths.

~ John Piper

Christ did not die to forgive sinners who go on treasuring anything above seeing and savoring God. And people who would be happy in heaven if Christ were not there, will not be there. The gospel is not a way to get people to heaven; it is a way to get people to God. It's a way of overcoming every obstacle to everlasting joy in God. If we don't want God above all things, we have not been converted by the gospel.

~ John Piper

It is better to lose your life than to waste it.

~ John Piper

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

~ John Piper

Fight for us, O God, that we not drift numb and blind and foolish into vain and empty excitements. Life is too short, too precious, too painful to waste on worldly bubbles that burst. Heaven is too great, hell is too horrible, eternity is too long that we should putter around on the porch of eternity.

~ John Piper

Do you feel loved by God because you believe he makes much of you, or because you believe he frees you and empowers you to enjoy making much of him?

~ John Piper

God is pursuing with omnipotent passion a worldwide purpose of gathering joyful worshipers for Himself from every tribe and tongue and people and nation. He has an inexhaustible enthusiasm for the supremacy of His name among the nations. Therefore, let us bring our affections into line with His, and, for the sake of His name, let us renounce the quest for worldly comforts and join His global purpose.

~ John Piper

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! God wills to be displayed and known and loved and cherished and worshiped.

~ John Piper

I want you to see persecution and opposition and slander and misunderstanding and disappointment and self-recrimination and weakness and danger as the normal portion of faithful pastoral ministry.

~ John Piper