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.
John PiperOne of the most important discoveries I have ever made is this truth: God is most glorified in me when I am most satisfied in him. This is the motor that drives my ministry as a pastor. It affects everything I do.
John PiperGod is not an employer looking for employees. He is an Eagle looking for people who will take refuge under his wings.
John PiperGod created us to live with a single passion: to joyfully display his supreme excellence in all spheres of life. The wasted life is the life without this passion. God calls us to pray and think and dream and plan and work, not to be made much of, but to make much of him in every part of our lives.
John PiperHeadship is the divine calling of a husband to take primary responsibility for Christlike, servant leadership, protection, and provision in the home.
John PiperWhy don't people ask us about our hope? The answer is probably that we look as if we hope in the same things they do. Our lives don't look like they are on the Calvary road, stripped down for sacrificial love, serving others with the sweet assurance that we don't need to be rewarded in this life.
John PiperWoe 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!
John PiperThe way of the cross is the way of suffering. Christians are called to die, not kill, in order to show the world how they are loved by Christ.
John PiperOne accurate way to describe abortion is subtle infanticide. That is: child-killing done in a way that the people don't recognize it as child-killing. That reality is why the word abortion exists. Some words are created to cloak reality the same way procedures are created to cloak reality. "Abortion" is cloaked child-killing
John PiperWe 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."
John PiperI've never heard anyone say the really deep lessons of life have come in times of ease and comfort. But, I have heard many saints say every significant advance I've ever made in grasping in the depth of God's love and growing deep with Him, have come through suffering.
John PiperToo many Christians are fighting graduate school sins with a grammar school knowledge of God.
John Piper...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.
John PiperDon't follow a defeated foe. Follow Christ. It is costly. You will be an exile in this age. But you will be free.
John PiperWe are not as Christ-centered and cross-cherishing as we should be, because we do not ponder the truth that everything good, and everything bad that God turns for the good, was purchased by the sufferings of Christ.
John PiperWe have a name for those who try to praise when they have no pleasure in the object. We call them hypocrites.
John PiperThe 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.
John PiperChristianity is fundamentally convalescence.. .God is not only the doctor who prescribes, He is the nurse who lifts up our powerless head and puts the spoon in our mouth...And He is the medicine.
John PiperAt 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.
John PiperAt 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 PiperSometimes 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.
John PiperSatan's aim is to destroy our joy and trust and delight in God, and to make God look worthless in the world's eyes. Everytime someone forsakes God for the world, gets angry at God when part of the world is taken away from them, they highlight the world as valuable... and everytime someone stays with God, when the world is taken away, and praises God, they highlight the value and glory of God.
John PiperWhy 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.
John PiperSleep 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 PiperIt is unbiblical and arrogant to try to worship God for any other reason than the pleasure to be had in Him.
John PiperThe Great Commission will not get done if we’re not ready to risk our lives and the lives of our family.
John PiperDo you feel more loved when God makes much of you or do you feel more loved when God at the cost of His Son allows you to make much of Him?
John PiperThe importance of prayer rises in proportion to the importance of the things we should give up in order to pray
John PiperWe 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 PiperAll of history is moving toward one great goal, the white-hot worship of God and His Son among all the peoples of the earth. Missions is not that goal. It is the means. And for that reason it is the second greatest human activity in the world.
John PiperThe Bible does not oppose or forbid interracial marriages but sees them as a positive good for the glory of Christ.
John PiperMy mother, who grew up in Pennsylvania, literally washed my mouth out with soap once for saying, 'Shut up!' to my sister. She would have washed my mouth out with gasoline if she knew how foul my mouth was racially when she wasn't around.
John PiperWays to be actively involved in the solution: 1. Consider adoption. 2. Be a regular giver of your money to Crisis Pregnancy Centers. 3. Volunteer in a Crisis Pregnancy Center. 4. Be involved in spreading truth with good literature. 5. Make your presence know at the abortion clinics in town (by) writing or phoning or visiting and talking, if you can, with those who work there. 6. Dream a new kind of ministry. 7. Pray!
John Piper