To see Him and know Him and be in His presence is the soul’s final feast. Beyond this there is no quest. Words fail. We call it pleasure, joy, delight. But these are weak pointers to the unspeakable experience.
John PiperThere is a warning. The path of God-exalting joy will cost you your life. Jesus said, “Whoever loses his life for my sake and the gospel’s will save it.” In other words, it is better to lose your life than to waste it. If you live gladly to make others glad in God, your life will be hard, your risks will be high, and your joy will be full. This is not a book about how to avoid a wounded life, but how to avoid a wasted life. Some of you will die in the service of Christ. That will not be a tragedy. Treasuring life above Christ is a tragedy.
John PiperMarriage. The roots are deep. The covenant is solid. The love is sweet. Life is hard. And God is good.
John PiperIf we cannot claim to live sinless lives, then the only thing that can keep us from despairing before a holy God is that we have an Advocate in heaven and He pleads our case not on the basis of our perfection but of His propitiation.
John PiperIf we have no zeal for the glory of God our mercy must be superficial, man-centred human improvement with no eternal significance. And if our zeal for the glory of God is not a revelling in his mercy, than our so-called zeal, in spite of all its protests, is our of touch with God and hypocritical.
John PiperThe very longing for contentment that ought to drive us to simplicity of life and labors of love contents itself instead with the broken cisterns of prosperity and comfort.
John PiperJesus' teaching in general [implies] that happy and fulfilling sexual relations in marriage depend on each partner aiming to give satisfaction to the other. If it is the joy of each to make the other happy, a hundred problems will be solved before they happen.
John PiperHe 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 PiperGod created us for this: to live our lives in a way that makes him look more like the greatness and the beauty and the infinite worth that he really is. This is what it means to be created in the image of God.
John PiperObedience does not consist in paying God back and thus turning grace into a trade. Obedience comes from trusting in God for more grace - future grace - and thus magnifying the infinite resources of God's love and power.
John PiperHomosexual behavior has been exploited, and reveled in, and celebrated in art, for millennia.
John PiperAll the different ways God has chosen to display his glory in creation and redemption seem to reach their culmination in the praises of his redeemed people. God governs the world with glory precisely that he might be admired, marvelled at, exalted and praised. The climax of his happiness is the delight he takes in the echoes of his excellence in the praises of the saints.
John PiperEvery criticism or slight against you, warranted or not, received or endured humbly, is written in heaven for your reward.
John PiperThe infinite reservoir of future grace is flowing back through the present into the ever-growing pool of past grace. The inexhaustible reservoir is invisible except through the promises. But the ever-enlarging pool of past grace is visible; and God means for the certainty and beauty and depth to strengthen our faith in future grace.
John PiperGod's global aim in creation and redemption is not only the glory of his name, but also the gladness of the peoples.
John PiperPastors and missionaries (need) to know God and to find in him a Treasure more satisfying than any other person or thing or relationship or experience or accomplishment in the world.
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 exists because worship doesn't. Worship is ultimate, not missions, because God is ultimate, not man.... When this age is over, and the countless millions of the redeemed fall on their faces before the throne of God, missions will be no more. It is a temporary necessity. But worship abides forever.
John PiperFight 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 PiperOnly the # gospel can do two seemingly contradictory things: destroy pride and increase courage.
John PiperIt has to do with seeing God. “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God” (Matthew 5:8).
John PiperNo one will be able to rise to the magnificence of the missionary cause who does not feel the magnificence of Christ.
John PiperThe gospel is the good news that the everlasting and ever-increasing joy of the never-boring, ever-satisfying Christ is ours freely and eternally by faith in the sin-forgiving death and hope-giving resurrection of Jesus Christ.
John PiperGrace 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 PiperIt isn't sex by itself that makes abortion. It is sex plus covetousness: desiring things that God does not will for us to have because we are not willing to find our satisfaction in him. Illicit sex and unencumbered freedom without children: for these we covet, and abortion is the result.
John PiperSin is what you do when your heart is not satisfied with God. No one sins out of duty. We sin because it holds out some promise of happiness.
John PiperLoving God with all our mind means that our thinking is wholly engaged to do all it can to awaken and express the heartfelt fullness of treasuring God above all things.
John PiperWe 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 PiperIf you can't see the sun you will be impressed with a street light. If you've never felt thunder and lightning you'll be impressed with fireworks. And if you turn your back on the greatness and majesty of God you'll fall in love with a world of shadows and short-lived pleasures.
John PiperYou can't make yourself saved. This is very threatening to people, even Christians, because of what it seems to say about freedom.
John PiperOh that God would help me waken in you a single passion for a single great reality that would unleash you, and set you free from small dreams, and send you, for the glory of Christ, into all the spheres of secular life and to all the peoples of the earth.
John PiperWe embrace the hand we've been dealt, because we know the Dealer, and he never deals badly.
John PiperGrace is not simply leniency when we have sinned. Grace is the enabling gift of God not to sin. Grace is power, not just pardon.
John PiperThe great danger of riches is that our affections will be carried away from God to His gifts.
John PiperEvangelicals are distraught over the state of America because they have not been taught that we're aliens here.
John Piper