Quotes from John Piper

Delighting in God was not a mere preference or option in life; it was our joyful duty and should be the single passion of our lives. Therefore to resolve to maximize his happiness in God was to resolve to show him more glorious than all other sources of happiness. Seeking happiness in God and glorifying God were the same.

The really wonderful moments of joy in this world are not the moments of self-satisfaction, but self-forgetfulness.

The end of the creation is that the creation might glorify [God]. Now what is glorifying God, but a rejoicing at that glory he has displayed?"32 "The happiness of the creature consists in rejoicing in God, by which also God is magnified and exalted."33

We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.5

So my prayer for this book is that God would stand forth and reassert his Creator-rights in our lives, and show us his crucified and risen Son who has all authority in heaven and on earth, and waken in us the strongest faith in the supremacy of Christ, and the deepest comforts in suffering, and the sweetest fellowship with Jesus that we have ever known.

The further up you go in the revealed thoughts of God, the clearer you see that God's aim in creating the world was to display the value of his own glory, and that this aim is no other than the endless, ever-increasing joy of his people in that glory.

To the world the gospel doesn't look like power at all. It looks like weakness—asking people to be like children and telling them to depend on Jesus, instead of standing on their own two feet. But for those who believe, it is the power of God to give sinners everlasting glory.

When we look back to the death and resurrection of Christ, God shows us in the present the enormity of his love for us, and thus warrants all our confidence in future grace. "God shows [present] his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died [past] for us" (Romans 5:8). Without the death of Christ, there would be no future grace.

in reference to God, the noun providence has come to mean "the act of purposefully providing for, or sustaining and governing, the world.

We are on the road to producing a race of man too mentally modest to believe in the multiplication table.2.

It is crucial that we realize that grace in Paul's vocabulary is not just a divine disposition to pardon sin. It is also a divine power to work in us all that God requires from us.

no se consiguen ni la salud ni la santidad a base de escapar de la gente que está pereciendo. El camino del amor, por enlodado y peligroso que sea, es el camino a la salud mental y al cielo.

Nadie comprenderá la necesidad de la conversión si ni siquiera sabe por qué nos creo Dios. Nos creó a su imagen para que pudiéramos reflejar su gloria en el mundo. Fuimos creados para ser prismas que reflejen la luz de la gloria de Dios en todos los aspectos de la vida. Es un gran misterio por qué quiso Dios compartir con nosotros el resplandor de su gloria.

You have God- and all that he is for you in Jesus.

In all this Job did not sin or charge God with wrong" (Job 1:22, RSV).

If you love the glory of God, you cannot be indifferent to missions.

Education is helping people understand something they don't already understand. Or, more accurately, education is helping people (young or old) learn how to get an understanding that they didn't already have. Education is cultivating the life of the mind so that it knows how to grow in true understanding. That impulse was unleashed by God's inspiring a book with complex demanding paragraphs in it.

If we aim in what we do to display God's glory, we worship.

it would be a great mistake to think that the awakening of desire for the Bridegroom would produce a wave of monastic withdrawal into the fasting and prayer of passive waiting. That is not what the awakening of desire for Christ would produce. It would produce a radical, new commitment to complete the task of world evangelization, no matter what the cost. And fasting would not become a pacifistic discipline for private hopes, but a fearsome missionary weapon in the fight of faith.

The wisdom of God's providence in bringing us from conversion to glory engages our wholehearted pursuit of holiness but reserves the decisive power for God himself. We act the miracle. God causes it.

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.

What must be seen is not mere news and not mere knowledge. What must be seen is light.

The root meaning of the Old Testament word for holiness is the idea of being separate—different and separated from the ordinary. And when applied to God, this separateness implies that he is in a class by himself. He is like a one-of-a-kind diamond, supremely valuable. We can use the word transcendent for this kind of divine separateness. He is so uniquely separate that he transcends all other reality. He is above it and more valuable than all of it.

Suffering for Jesus is temporary. Pleasure in Jesus is eternal.