God is at work in the worst of times. He is at work doing a thousand things no one can see but him.
John PiperWill I find spiritual communion with God sweet enough, and hope in his promises deep enough, not just to cope, but to flourish and rejoice in him?
John PiperThe engagement of the heart in worship is the coming alive of the feelings and emotions and affections of the heart. Where feelings for God are dead, worship is dead.
John PiperIn EVERY situation and EVERY circumstance of your life, God is always doing a thousand different things that you cannot see and you do not know.
John PiperMarriage is not mainly about prospering economically; it is mainly about displaying the covenant-keepin g love between Christ and his church. Knowing Christ is more important than making a living. Treasuring Christ is more important than bearing children. Being united to Christ by faith is a greater source of marital success than perfect sex and double-income prosperity.
John PiperGod loves to show mercy . . . His anger must be released by a stiff safety lock, but His mercy has a hair trigger.
John PiperChrist is glorified in you when he is more precious to you than all that life can give or death can take.
John PiperIt is not surprising that prayer malfunctions when we try to make it a domestic intercom to call upstairs for more comforts in the den.
John PiperThe main reason God has given us minds is that we might seek out and find all the reasons that exist for treasuring him in all things and above all things.
John PiperMarriage is not absolutely for making children. But it is absolutely for making children followers of Jesus.
John PiperMarriage is not mainly about prospering economically. It is mainly about displaying the covenant keeping love between Christ and his Church
John PiperSo saving grace, converting grace, for Augustine, is God's giving us a sovereign joy in God that triumphs over all other joys and therefore sways the will. The will is free to move toward whatever it delights in most fully, but it is not within the power of our will to determine what that sovereign joy will be.
John PiperThe great barrier to worship among God's people is not that we are always seeking our own satisfaction, but that our seeking is so weak and half-hearted that we settle for little sips at broken cisterns when the fountain of life is just over the next hill.
John PiperLife and death! They seem like complete opposites-at great enmity with each other. But for Paul-and for all who share his faith-there is a unity, because the same great passion is fulfilled in both-namely, that Christ be magnified in this body-our bodies-whether by life or by death.
John PiperO that we would so love the gospel and have so much compassion for lost people that tribulation and distress and persecution and famine and nakedness and danger and sword and gun and terrorist would turn us not into fearful complainers, but bold heralds of good news.
John PiperChrist 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 PiperWe 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.
John PiperThe key to Christian living is a thirst and hunger for God. And one of the main reasons people do not understand or experience the sovereignty of grace and the way it works through the awakening of sovereign joy is that their hunger and thirst for God is so small.
John PiperFrom 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.
John PiperBeing infinite, God is inexhaustibly interesting. It is therefore impossible that God be boring.
John PiperDo all things without grumbling. Why? You have a sovereign God who is on your side, who works everything together for your good.
John PiperThere is no other way the world is going to see the supreme glory of Christ today, except that we break free from the Disneyland of America and begin to live lifestyles of missionary sacrifice that looks to the world like our treasure is in heaven and not on the earth.
John PiperThe 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.
John PiperOne day America and all its presidents will be a footnote in history, but the kingdom of Jesus will never end.
John PiperTrue 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.
John PiperWe 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 PiperOut of the freedom from worry that God's generosity provides comes an impulse toward simplicity rather than accumulation.
John PiperThe 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.
John PiperPeople don't enjoy salt. They enjoy what is salted. We are the salt of the earth. We do not exist for ourselves.
John PiperThe vast majority of abortions are performed between the seventh and tenth week when the baby is already sucking his thumb, recoiling from pricking, responding to sound. All his organs are present, the brain is functioning, the heart is pumping, the liver is making blood cells, the kidneys are cleaning fluids, and there is a fingerprint. His genetic code is uniquely and unquestionably human. And, if we are willing, he can be seen by ultrasound.
John PiperBitterness about your parents’ brokenness will kill you. Be the grace-filled end of generational sin in your family.
John PiperSuffering in the path of Christian obedience, with joy - because the steadfast love of the Lord is better than life (Psalm 63:3) - is the clearest display of the worth of God in our lives. Therefore, faith-filled suffering is essential in this world for the most intense, authentic worship. When we are most satisfied with God in suffering, he will be most glorified in us in worship. Our problem is not styles of music. Our problem is styles of life. When we embrace more affliction for the worth of Christ, there will be more fruit in the worship of Christ.
John PiperWe have brought nothing into the world, so we cannot take anything out of it either.' There are no U-Hauls behind hearses.
John Piper