John Piper famous quotes

It was becoming clearer and clearer that if I wanted to come to the end of my life and not say, “I’ve wasted it!” then I would need to press all the way in, and all the way up, to the ultimate purpose of God and join him in it. If my life was to have a single, all-satisfying, unifying passion, it would have to be God’s passion.
-- John Piper

#Inspiration #Passion #Becoming

But whatever you do, find the God-centered, Christ-exalting, Bible-saturated passion of your life, and find your way to say it and live for it and die for it. And you will make a difference that lasts. You will not waste your life.
-- John Piper

#Inspiration #Passion #Differences

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

#Goal #Christian Inspirational #Church

God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in Him.
-- John Piper

#Christian #Powerful #Inspiration

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.
-- John Piper

#Giving #Grace #Delight

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

#People #Joy #Heaven

Don't follow a defeated foe. Follow Christ. It is costly. You will be an exile in this age. But you will be free.
-- John Piper

#Age #Christ #Defeated

There is hope in forgiveness
-- John Piper

#There Is Hope

We weren't meant to be somebody--we were meant to know Somebody
-- John Piper

#Love #Meant To Be

Life is wasted if we do not grasp the glory of the cross, cherish it for the treasure that it is, and cleave to it as the highest price of every pleasure and the deepest comfort in every pain. What was once foolishness to us—a crucified God—must become our wisdom and our power and our only boast in this world.
-- John Piper

#Christian #Easter #Pain

The wisdom of God devised a way for the love of God to deliver sinners from the wrath of God while not compromising the righteousness of God.
-- John Piper

#Wrath #Way #Compromise

The evil and suffering in this world are greater than any of us can comprehend. But evil and suffering are not ultimate. God is. Satan, the great lover of evil and suffering, is not sovereign. God is.
-- John Piper

#Evil #Suffering #Sovereign

Reading is more important to me than eating.
-- John Piper

#Reading #Important #Eating

It is better to lose your life than to waste it.
-- John Piper

#Waste #Theology

All heroes are shadows of Christ
-- John Piper

#Hero #Shadow #Christ

God is not an employer looking for employees. He is an Eagle looking for people who will take refuge under his wings. He is looking for people who will leave father and mother and homeland or anything else that may hold them back from a life of love under the wings of Jesus.
-- John Piper

#Mother #Jesus #Father

Life is not a straight line leading from one blessing to the next and then finally to heaven. Life is a winding and troubled road. Switchback after switchback. And the point of biblical stories like Joseph and Job and Esther and Ruth is to help us feel in our bones (not just know in our heads) that God is for us in all these strange turns. God is not just showing up after the trouble and cleaning it up. He is plotting the course and managing the troubles with far-reaching purposes for our good and for the glory of Jesus Christ.
-- John Piper

#Jesus #Jobs #Biblical

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

#Our Generation #Heaven #Earth

God tests His people through hardship.
-- John Piper

#People #Hardship #Tests

Prayer is the open admission that without Christ we can do nothing. And prayer is the turning away from ourselves to God in the confidence that He will provide the help we need. Prayer humbles us as needy and exalts God as wealthy
-- John Piper

#Prayer #Needs #Helping

Grace 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 Piper

#Grace #Enabling #Sin

God seldom calls us for an easier life, but always calls us to know more of him and drink more deeply of His sustaining grace.
-- John Piper

#Grace #Drink #Easier

We 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 Piper

#Gratitude #Past #Giving

What is the essence of evil? It is forsaking a living fountain for broken cisterns. God gets derision and we get death. They are one: choosing sugarcoated misery we mock the lifegiving God. It was meant to be another way: God's glory exalted in our everlasting joy.
-- John Piper

#Essence #Evil #Broken

I will not waste my life! I will finish my course and finish it well. I will display the Gospel of the grace of God in all I do. I will run my race to the end.” - Paul
-- John Piper

#Running #Race #Waste

We have brought nothing into the world, so we cannot take anything out of it either.' There are no U-Hauls behind hearses.
-- John Piper

#World #Behinds

What defines us as Christians is not most profoundly that we have come to know him but that he took note of us and made us his own.
-- John Piper

#Christian #Notes #Made

The 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 Piper

#Christian #Keys #People

humility is beyond our reach. if it were a product of reaching, we would instinctively be proud of reaching it. it is a gift.
-- John Piper

#Humility #Proud #Reaching

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

#America #Culture #Firsts

You don’t have to know a lot of things for your life to make a lasting difference in the world. But you do have to know the few great things that matter, perhaps just one, and then be willing to live for them and die for them. The people that make a durable difference in the world are not the people who have mastered many things, but who have been mastered by one great thing.
-- John Piper

#Differences #People #World

Ignatius, when he heard the clock strike, would say, "Now I have another hour to answer for." (Eph. 5:16)
-- John Piper

#Answers #Hours #Clock

The greatest enemy of hunger for God is not poison but apple pie. It is not the banquet of the wicked that dulls our appetite for heaven, but endless nibbling at the table of the world. It is not the X-rated video, but the prime-time dribble of triviality we drink in every night.
-- John Piper

#Night #Apples #Pie

All 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 Piper

#Moving #Mean #Son

God will not turn away from doing you good. He will keep on doing good. He doesn't do good to His children sometimes and bad to them other times. He keeps on doing good and He never will stop doing good for ten thousand ages of ages. When things are going bad that does not mean God has stopped doing good. It means He is shifting things around to get them in place for more good, if you will go on loving Him.
-- John Piper

#Children #Mean #Age

Death is like my car. It takes me where I want to go.
-- John Piper

#Christian Inspirational #Car #Want

If truth does not lead to falling in love, it fails.
-- John Piper

#Falling In Love #Fall #Doe

Life is too short, too precious, too painful to waste on worldly bubbles that burst
-- John Piper

#Life Is Too Short #Waste #Painful

The Bible is the ultimate authority and infallible, not the pastor and not the elders. And it doesn't mean that you believe everything he says without examining it.
-- John Piper

#Believe #Mean #Authority

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

#Passion #Names #Christian Inspirational

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

#Believe #Empowering #Enjoy

God created me—and you—to live with a single, all-embracing, all-transforming passion—namely, a passion to glorify God by enjoying and displaying his supreme excellence in all the spheres of life.
-- John Piper

#Powerful #Inspiration #Passion

Your mind was made to know and love God.
-- John Piper

#Mind #And Love #God Love

At 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 Piper

#Book #Godly #Messages

Books don't change people; paragraphs do, Sometimes even sentences.
-- John Piper

#Book #People #Sometimes

What is sin? It is the glory of God not honored. The holiness of God not reverenced. The greatness of God not admired. The power of God not praised. The truth of God not sought. The wisdom of God not esteemed. The beauty of God not treasured. The goodness of God not savored. The faithfulness of God not trusted. The commandments of God not obeyed. The justice of God not respected. The wrath of God not feared. The grace of God not cherished. The presence of God not prized. The person of God not loved. That is sin.
-- John Piper

#Greatness #Wrath #Justice

Every good thing in the Christian life grows in the soil of humility. Without humility, every virtue and every grace withers. That’s why Calvin said humility is first, second, and third in the Christian faith.
-- John Piper

#Christian #Humility #Grace

Why 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 Piper

#Sweet #People #Needs

Don’t be surprised. There is nothing new under the sun. Only endless repackagings
-- John Piper

#Sun #Endless

Go, send, or disobey.
-- John Piper

#Christian Inspirational #Missionary #Missions

Suffering 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 Piper

#Christian #Joy #Style

The really wonderful moments of joy in this world are not the moments of self-satisfaction, but self-forgetfulness. Standing on the edge of the Grand Canyon and contemplating your own greatness is pathological. At such moments we are made for a magnificent joy that comes from outside ourselves.
-- John Piper

#Greatness #Self #Joy

Desire that your life count for something great! Long for your life to have eternal significance. Want this! Don’t coast through life without a passion.
-- John Piper

#Passion #Christian Inspirational #Long

God without Christ is no God.
-- John Piper

#Christ

Taken as a whole, the story of Ruth is one of those signs. It was written to give us encouragement and hope that all the perplexing turns in our lives are going somewhere good. They do not lead off a cliff. In all the setbacks of our lives as believers, God is plotting for our joy.
-- John Piper

#Encouragement #Taken #Giving

My feelings are not God. God is God. My feelings do not define truth. God’s word defines truth. My feelings are echoes and responses to what my mind perceives. And sometimes - many times - my feelings are out of sync with the truth. When that happens - and it happens every day in some measure - I try not to bend the truth to justify my imperfect feelings, but rather, I plead with God: Purify my perceptions of your truth and transform my feelings so that they are in sync with the truth.
-- John Piper

#Echoes #Feelings #Mind

One of the great uses of Twitter and Facebook will be to prove at the Last Day that prayerlessness was not from lack of time.
-- John Piper

#Christian Inspirational #Use #Lasts

You get one pass at life. That’s all. Only one. And the lasting measure of that life is Jesus Christ.
-- John Piper

#Jesus #Life Is #Christ

The strength of patience hangs on our capacity to believe that God is up to something good for us in all our delays and detours.
-- John Piper

#Believe #Delay #Detours

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.
-- John Piper

#Joy #Risk #Glad

If you alter or obscure the Biblical portrait of God in order to attract converts, you don't get converts to God, you get converts to an illusion. This is not evangelism, but deception.
-- John Piper

#Biblical #Order #Religion

God 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 Piper

#Mean #Greatness #Looks

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.
-- John Piper

#Strong #Long #Drunk

There 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 Piper

#Jesus #Book #Joy

Redemption is not perfection. The redeemed must realize their imperfections.
-- John Piper

#Perfection #Imperfection #Redemption

Christ did not die to make good works merely possible or to produce a half-hearted pursuit. He died to produce in us a passion for good deeds. Christian purity is not the mere avoidance of evil, but the pursuit of good.
-- John Piper

#Christian #Passion #Evil

The Lord is kind. He is good to all who take refuge under his wings.
-- John Piper

#Wings #Kind #Lord

...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 Piper

#Dark #Despair #Pessimism

When you are deeply peaceful and confident that, because of Christ, God will bring you safely to his eternal kingdom and be the all-satisfying Treasure of your life forever, then you are free to see the truth, and love the truth, and speak the truth no matter what, and joyfully spread a passion for the truth whose name is Jesus.
-- John Piper

#Jesus #Passion #Names

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.
-- John Piper

#Christian #Writing #Biblical

heaven is a place of unparalleled and indescribable joy
-- John Piper

#Joy #Heaven

Whether sexual orientation can change or not, hearts can change and turn any sexual orientation into an occasion for the glory of Christ. Those with same-sex attraction glorify Christ through sexual abstinence and through the enrichment of significant Christ-exalting relationships in other ways.
-- John Piper

#Sex #Heart #Way