Quotes from John Piper

God has revealed his purposeful sovereignty over good and evil in order to humble human pride, intensify human worship, shatter human hopelessness, and put ballast in the battered boat of human faith, steel in the spine of human courage, gladness in the groans of affliction, and love in the heart that sees no way forward.

Now there was only one hope, the sovereign grace of God. God would have to transform my heart to do what a heart cannot make itself do, namely, want what it ought to want. Only God can make the depraved heart desire God.

Know the spirit of the age and consciously resist conformity to it (Romans 12:2). As D. L. Moody said, "The ship belongs in the water of the world, but if the water gets in the ship, it sinks.

Conocer la verdad con la mente y aferrarnos a ella como un tesoro en nuestros corazones es la clave a la santidad.

it is to no avail merely to believe that God is holy and merciful. For that belief to be of any saving value, we must "sense" God's holiness and mercy. That is, we must have a true taste for it and delight in it for what it is in itself. Otherwise the knowledge is no different than what the devils have.

In other words, the path to glory for God's incarnate representative on earth was the path through suffering. The path to majesty was through meekness. The path to exaltation was through humility. The path to power was through weakness.

Perseverance Here is a key to great earnestness in preaching. If you really believe that "[those who endure] to the end will be saved" (Mark 13:13), and that not only the first act of faith but all subsequent, acts of persevering faith are sustained by the Spirit through the Word of God, then virtually every sermon is a "salvation sermon," and the souls of the saints are being saved every Sunday.

If we are not captured by his personality and character, then all our declarations of thanksgiving are like the gratitude of a wife to a husband for the money she gets from him to use in her affair with another man.

The more you have of a rational knowledge of divine things, the more opportunity will there be, when the Spirit shall be breathed into your heart, to see the excellency of these things, and to taste the sweetness of them.

The Bible-oriented preacher wants the congregation to know that his words, if they have any abiding worth, are in accord with God's words. He wants this to be obvious to them. That is part of his humility and his authority. Therefore, he constantly tries to show the people that his ideas are coming from the Bible. He is hesitant to go too far toward points that are not demonstrable from the Bible.

what we need from the Bible is not the fulfillment of our dream, but the swallowing up of our failed dream in the all-satisfying glory of Christ.

Expose yourself to Bible-saturated people, both the living and the dead. Their lives and their words are a great help to our joy.

Qué el deleite infinito y eterno de Dios en el mismo Dios pueda ahora fluir en nosotros a través del Espíritu Santo! Ésa es nuestra gloria y nuestro gozo.

There is no point in winning an argument if you know or suspect you are wrong.

You will leave all your material wealth behind, but a wealth of knowledge goes with you.

The strength of our desire is not the measure of the strength of the final pleasure.

The great end of all study--all theology--is a heart for God and a life of holiness. The great goal of all Edwards's work was the glory of God. And the greatest thing I have ever learned from Edwards, and the driving vision of this book, is that God is glorified most not merely by being known, nor by merely being dutifully obeyed, but by being enjoyed in the knowing and the obeying.

Mental health is, in great measure, the gift of self-forgetfulness. The reason is that introspection destroys what matters most to us- the authentic experience of great things outside ourselves.

True 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." (Desiring God, 81-82)

There is no thought in the Bible that Satan had to be paid off to let sinners be saved. What happened to Satan when Christ died was not payment, but defeat.

I have the profound sense that many people who complain of not being able to rejoice in God treat the knowledge of God as something that ought to be easy to get. They are passive. They expect spiritual things to happen to them from out of nowhere.

Prepara tu corazón para recibir a Cristo ¿Cómo va a ser posible que ustedes crean si unos a otros se rinden gloria, pero no buscan la gloria que viene del Dios único? – Juan 5:44

Therefore everything that you enjoy in Christ - as a Christian, as a person who trusts Christ - is owing to the death of Christ.

God reveals more or less of his glory in different times and settings. But it is always his glory! It is never minor. Never insignificant. Never negligible. It is always some measure of the infinite excellence. It is always worthy of seeing and knowing and loving.