John Piper

“The end of the creation is that God may communicate happiness to the creature”

“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.”

“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.”

“Supernatural does not mean methodological stupidity.”

“The task of all Christian scholarship—not just biblical studies—is to study reality as a manifestation of God’s glory, to speak and write about it with accuracy, and to savor the beauty of God in it, and to make it serve the good of man. It is an abdication of scholarship when Christians do academic work with little reference to God. If all the universe and everything in it exist by the design of an infinite, personal God, to make his manifold glory known and loved, then to treat any subject without reference to God’s glory is not scholarship but insurrection.”

“It's amazing how many introverts go into the ministry.”

“...we should all fortify ourselves against the dark hours of depression by cultivating a deep distrust of the certainties of despair. Despair is relentless in the certainties of its pessimism. But we have seen again and again, from our own experience and others', that absolute statements of hopelessness that we make in the dark are notoriously unreliable. Our dark certainties are not sureties.”

“This point is often missed by evangelical feminists. They conclude that a difference in function necessarily involves a difference in essence; i.e., if men are in authority over women, then women must be inferior. The relationship between Christ and the Father shows us that this reasoning is flawed. One can possess a different function and still be equal in essence and worth. Women are equal to men in essence and in being; there is no ontological distinction, and yet they have a different function or role in church and home. Such differences do not logically imply inequality or inferiority, just as Christ’s subjection to the Father does not imply His inferiority.”

“It's amazing how many introverts go into the ministry. It's amazing how many people go into the ministry who don't really like to be with people.”

“When something drops into your life that seems to threaten your future, remember this: the first shockwaves of the bomb are not sin. The real danger is yielding to them. Giving in. Putting up no spiritual fight. And the root of that surrender is unbelief - a failure to fight for faith in future grace. A failure to cherish all that God promises to be for us in Jesus.”

“Do all things without grumbling. Why? You have a sovereign God who is on your side, who works everything together for your good.”

“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.”

“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.”

“The Gospel is not a theory; the Gospel is not a philosophy or an idea; the Gospel is not a way of thinking or feeling. The Gospel is an event in history.”

“Does not the Old Testament promise that God will prosper His people? Indeed! God increases our yield so that by giving we can prove that our yield is not our god. God does not prosper a man’s business so he can move from a Ford to a Cadillac. God prospers a business so that thousands of unreached peoples can be reached with the gospel.”

“The bloodline of Jesus is thicker, deeper, stronger than the bloodline of race, ethnicity and family.”

“Don't assume that all fat people are gluttons. And don't use the word 'fat.' There is a principle here. Learn from logic and experience not to associate things - especially in preaching - that don't necessarily go together.”

“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?”