Quotes from John Piper

Racial and ethnic segragtion is a gospel issue! Cephas' fear and wihdrawal from fellowship across ethnic lines was "not in step with the truth of the gospel." Christ had died to tear down this wall.

God created us in his image, male and female, with personhood and sexual passions, so that when he comes to us in this world there would be these powerful words and images to describe the promises and the pleasures of our covenant relationship with him through Christ.

But we also need stories. Great stories.

It seems to me that Christians in the West are being coddled. We suffer little in the name of Christ. Therefore, we read the Bible not with a desperate hunger for evidences of God's triumph in pain, but with a view to improving our private pleasures.

Not to aim to show God is not to love, because God is what we need the most deeply. And to have all else without Him is to perish in the end.

God is not honored by groundless love. In fact, there is no such thing. If we do not know anything about God, there is nothing in our mind to awaken love. If love does not come from knowing God, there is no point in calling it love for God .

Adjust your doctrine - or just minimize doctrine - to attract the world, and in the very process of attracting them, lose the radical truth that alone can set them free.

When everything in life is stripped away except God, and we trust him more because of it, this is gain, and he is glorified.

God created us with sexual passion so that there would be language to describe what it means to cleave to him in love and what it means to turn away from him to others.

On the other hand, emotion without truth produces empty frenzy and cultivates shallow people who refuse the discipline of rigorous thought.

It isn't the size of the window that determines how much you see. It's which way the window is facing, and how close you are, and whether the glass is clear.

childlike wonder and awe have died. The scenery and poetry and music of the majesty of God have dried up like a forgotten peach at the back of the refrigerator.

Are you able—theologically, personally, and resource-wise—to be harmoniously, sweetly, and deeply in love with Jesus together in marriage?

We can draw no deadlines for God. He hastens or He delays as he sees fit. And his timing is all-loving toward his children. On, that we might learn to be patient in the hour of darkness. I don't mean that we make peace with darkness. We fight for joy. But we fight as those who are saved by grace and held by Christ. We say...that our night will soon- in God's good timing- turn to day.

Enjoying and displaying are both crucial. The wasted life is the life without a passion for the supremacy of God in all things for the joy of all peoples.

It is only a matter of time till the reality of the rest of the world comes home. And all the while we are called by Christ to go to them, love them, sacrifice for them, bring the gospel to them. The Great Commission is not child's play. It is costly. Very costly.

Forgiveness is essentially God's way of removing the great obstacle to our fellowship with him. By canceling our sin and paying for it with the death of his own Son, God opens the way for us to see him and know him and enjoy him forever. Seeing and savoring him is the goal of forgiveness. Soul-satisfying fellowship with our Father is the aim of the cross. If we love being forgiven for other reasons alone, we are not forgiven, and we will waste our lives.

The wasted life is the life without a passion for the supremacy of God in all things for the joy of all peoples.

God loves us by liberating us from the bondage of self so that we can enjoy knowing and admiring him forever.

We waste our lives when we do not pray and think and dream and plan and work toward magnifying God in all spheres of life. 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.

Knowledge about Him will not do. Work for Him will not do. We must have personal, vital fellowship with Him; otherwise, Christianity becomes a joyless burden.

Jesus calls for violence against our own lust because he loves our true and lasting joy.

The one God has chosen unconditionally he keeps invincibly. Being and staying a believer is decisively of sovereign grace.

Was that a tragedy? Two lives, driven by one great passion, namely, to be spent in unheralded service to the perishing poor for the glory of Jesus Christ—even two decades after most of their American counterparts had retired to throw away their lives on trifles. No, that is not a tragedy. That is a glory. These lives were not wasted. And these lives were not lost. "Whoever loses his life for my sake and the gospel's will save it" (Mark 8:35).