Quotes from John Piper

The reason I use the word reflex to describe these traits of selfishness is that there is zero premeditation before they happen. When these responses happen, they are coming from my fallen nature, not from reflection and resolution. I don't sin out of duty. I sin spontaneously. They are the reflexes of my original, unmortified sinfulness.

Emotionalism can also assume that heightened feelings are the infallible sign that God is present. They're not. The emotions that singing is meant to evoke are responses to the truths we're singing about God—his glory, his greatness, and his goodness.

Christian, be a Christian: live by faith; walk by the Spirit; serve in the strength that God supplies.

Worry is a mild form of atheism.

Then what becomes of our boasting? It is excluded. By what kind of law? By a law of works? No, but by the law of faith. For we hold that one is justified by faith apart from works of the law. Or is God the God of Jews only? Is he not the God of Gentiles also? Yes, of Gentiles also, since God is one—who will justify the circumcised by faith and the uncircumcised through faith. ROMANS 3:27–30

Edwards's piety continued on in the revivalist tradition, his theology continued on in academic Calvinism, but there were no successors to his God-centered worldview or his profoundly theological philosophy. The disappearance of Edwards's perspective in American Christian history has been a tragedy. Mark Noll

Edwards believed his Biblical theology was, in fact, a true rendering of reality, and therefore could stand confidently in the marketplace of philosophical ideas and give an account of itself--which in his hands it would do.

Of all the books which can be put into your hands, those which relate the labors and suffering of good men are the most interesting and instructive.

Romans 8:32 may be the most important verse in the Bible, because it establishes the unshakable connection between the greatest event in the universe and the greatest future imaginable: "He who did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all, how will he not also with him graciously give us all things?

If we don't want God above all things we have not been converted by the gospel.

On July 30, 1723, when he was nineteen years old, Edwards wrote in his diary, "I have concluded to endeavor to work myself into duties by searching and tracing back all the real reasons why I do them not, and narrowly searching out all the subtle subterfuges of my thoughts." A week later he wrote, "Very much convinced of the extraordinary deceitfulness of the heart, and how exceedingly… appetite blinds the mind, and brings it into entire subjection.

I exist to magnify Jesus Christ. That is, I am on this planet for one ultimate reason: to do whatever I can to make Jesus Christ known and treasured—a knowing and a treasuring that accords with his infinite beauty and immeasurable worth.

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.

When God put Christ in our condemned place, he did this not only to secure heaven, but to secure holiness. Or even more precisely, not only to secure our life in paradise, but also to secure our love for people.

have also assumed that the mark of this people is not merely that they are "chosen before the foundation of the world," but that they have willingly responded to God in a certain way. In this chapter I have focused mainly

God's glory consists much in the fact that He is happy beyond all our imagination.

True gratitude must be rooted in something else that comes first, namely, a delight in the beauty and excellency of God's character.

In dying he satisfied the claims of sin; and in living he satisfies the claims of God.

The highest of missionary motives is neither obedience to the Great Commission (important as that is), nor love for sinners who are alienated and perishing (strong as that incentive is, especially when we contemplate the wrath of God . . .), but rather zeal—burning and passionate zeal—for the glory of Jesus Christ. . . . Only one imperialism is Christian . . . and that is concern for His Imperial Majesty Jesus Christ, and for the glory of his empire.2

It's a season for cherishing and worshiping this characteristic of God—that he is a searching and saving God, that he is a God on a mission, that he is not aloof or passive or indecisive. He is never in the maintenance mode, coasting or drifting. He is sending, pursuing, searching, saving. That's the meaning of Advent.

Sin's outcome is eternal misery. What infinite ugliness then must be the ugliness of sin. This is the constant subject of preaching, for this is what we must ever overcome. It is more serious than Satan and sickness and insanity. None of those can damn a soul. Only sin can damn. This we must defeat in preaching, or all is in vain. Flippancy in and around our preaching communicates to people that sin is not as serious as the Bible says it is.

The coronavirus is God's call to his people to overcome self-pity and fear, and with courageous joy, to do the good works of love that glorify God.

Christ is the glory we were made to see. His light alone will fill us and give the light of life and meaning to every part of our lives. And

True worship must include inward feelings that reflect the worth of God's glory.