Quotes from John Piper

Might God not ordain that his fullest blessings will come to the church when we prevail in prayer with the intensity of fasting? That kind of intensification of prayer is what fasting is. It's a physical exclamation point at the end of the sentence, "We hunger for you, O God, to come in power." It's a cry with our body, not just our soul: "I really mean it, LORD! This much, I hunger for you. I want the manifestation of you yourself more than I want food.

After escaping from Paris and finally leaving France entirely, Calvin spent his exile in Basel, Switzerland, between 1534 and 1536. To redeem the time, "he devoted himself to the study of Hebrew." (Imagine such a thing! Would any pastor today, exiled from his church and country, and living in mortal danger, study Hebrew? What has become of the vision of ministry that such a thing seems unthinkable today?)

The Christian's holiness and happiness in God are not two separate realities. Happiness in God is the essence of holiness.

Now we see that every experience in life is designed to magnify the cross of Christ.

We depend on him for our being and for our knowing—especially our knowing of him. We are because he is. We know because he reveals. We do not originate our existence or our knowledge. He is the ultimate source and foundation of both.

Keep Christ as the blazing center, and you will be satisfied; the world will be served; and God will be glorified.

So when you hold the "Institutes" of John Calvin in your hand, remember that theology, for John Calvin, was forged in the furnace of burning flesh, and that Calvin could not sit idly by without some effort to vindicate the faithful and the God for whom they suffered. I think we would, perhaps, do our theology better today if more were at stake in what we said.

The spirit of Jesus, when he set his face like flint to go to Jerusalem, runs through the generations of all his most inspiring followers.

God's gift of understanding is through thinking, not instead of thinking.

Not to pursue our joy in ministry is not to pursue the profit of our people...Begrudging service does not qualify as genuine love.

Everything we need to be satisfied in God, the cross has made certain. It cannot fail.

If they had more grace to hear, they would receive more that the writer has to give. But they are becoming hard and dull, and in danger of throwing away the little they have.

In other words, all the highest aims of language are decisively the work of God. They are decisively supernatural. And no amount of poetic effort or expertise in the use of words can bring about the great aims of life if God withholds his saving power.

The difference is that when you develop patterns of sin in the majority race, they have no racial connotation. Since majority people don't think of themselves in terms of race, none of our dysfunctions is viewed as a racial dysfunction. When you are the majority ethnicity, nothing you do is ethnic. It's just the way it's done. When you are a minority, everything you do has colour.

God gets glory when two very different and very imperfect people forge a life of faithfulness in the furnace of affliction by relying on Christ.

The rejoicing of all peoples in God, and the magnifying of God's glory are one end, not two. Why

Christmas means: the infinitely self-sufficient God has come not to be assisted but to be enjoyed.

The fight for joy is the fight to see and believe Christ as more to be desired than the promises of sin.

the world we live in is a world where only the gospel of Jesus Christ can bring the kind of racial and ethnic harmony that we were made to enjoy.

Doubtless the happiness of the saints in heaven shall be so great, that the very majesty of God shall be exceedingly shown in the greatness, and magnificence, and fullness of their enjoyments and delights.

La fe salvífica está basada en una visión espiritual de Jesús como lo que realmente es, el Hijo glorioso de Dios. Y esta visión espiritual nos es dada mediante la Verdad inspirada, las Escrituras. Así, los ojos de nuestros corazones son abiertos para reconocerlo y recibirlo, no por medio de la sabiduría humana, sino por medio de la obra reveladora de Su Padre celestial.

He is never in the maintenance mode, coasting or drifting. He is sending, pursuing, searching, saving. That's the meaning of Advent.

From the purest principles of reason, as well as from the fountain of revealed truth, he demonstrates that the chief and ultimate end of the Supreme Being, in the works of creation and providence, was the manifestation of his own glory in the highest happiness of his creatures.

The Christian preacher has nothing to hide. The Devil is in the business of hiding. The preacher reveals. The Devil obscures. The preacher clarifies. The Devil dulls the mind and heart. The preacher shines and burns. He is ashamed of nothing in his message. And this has everything to do with logic and right reason.