Quotes from John Piper

If we are attracted by the desirability of something God promises, and hope to enjoy it without enjoying God in it and by it, then we are turning God's promise into a summons to idolatry.

God communicates himself to the understanding of the creature, in giving him the knowledge of his glory; and to the will of the creature, in giving him holiness, consisting primarily in the love of God: and in giving the creature happiness, chiefly consisting in joy in God.108 These are the sum of that emanation of divine fullness called in Scripture, the glory of God. The first part of this glory is called truth, the latter, grace

It's not merely a rule to be followed. It's a miracle to be experienced. A grace to be received. It's a promise to be believed. Do you believe, do you trust, that God sees every wrong done to you, that he knows every hurt, that he assesses motives and circumstances with perfect accuracy, that he is impeccably righteous and takes no bribes, and that he will settle all accounts with perfect justice? This is what it means to be "conscious of God" in the midst of unjust pain.

What does it mean to be a Christian? Charles Hodge, one of the great nineteenth-century Reformed theologians, sees the answer in this text: "It is being so constrained by a sense of the love of our divine Lord to us, that we consecrate our lives to him."6

In fact the astonishing thing is that every good deed we do in dependence on Him to "pay Him back" does just the opposite; it puts us ever deeper in debt to His grace.

Sin can't enslave a person who is utterly confident and sure and hope-filled in the infinite happiness of life with Christ in the future.

You're not all that God has called you to be, as a follower of Jesus, if you're missions-minded but not engaged in God's mission here and now.

the gospel has an answer to both pride and guilt.

Christ came to prove that God tells the truth, that God keeps his promises. Christmas means that God can be trusted.

James warns against the pride of presumption in speaking of the simplest plans in life without a due submission to the overarching sovereignty of God over the day's agenda. Man's plans might be interrupted by God's decision to take the life he gave.

Denying rights that protect lesser values to maintain rights that protect greater values is what good laws are supposed to do.

So we can go deeper than Mather's point. Behind God's commitment to reign as king is the deeper foundational commitment that his glory will one day fill the earth (Num. 14:21; Ps. 57:5; 72:19; Isa. 11:9; Hab. 2:14).

Being persuaded that Christ and his promises are factual is not by itself saving faith. That is why some professing Christians will be shocked at the last day, when they hear him say, "I never knew you,' even though they protest that he is "Lord, Lord." Believing that Christ and his promises are true, based on a testimony, is a necessary part of faith. But it is not sufficient to turn faith into saving faith.

Only exult in the cross of Christ. Only rejoice in the cross of Christ. Paul says: let this be your single passion, your single boast and joy and exultation

The minuteness of the human race within the vastness of the universe is not an incongruity because the vastness of the universe is not about the greatness of man but about the greatness of God. Man has his greatness, but it lies in his capacity to know and worship the God who calls the universe "the work of [his] fingers" (Ps. 8:3).

Labor, therefore, to fill your hearts with the cross of Christ . . . that there may be no room for sin.

If God has respect to something in the creature, which he views as of everlasting duration, and as rising higher and higher through that infinite duration, and that not with constantly diminishing (but perhaps an increasing) celerity;114 then he has respect to it, as, in the whole, of infinite height; though there never will be any particular time when it can be said already to have come to such a height.

As the sin of Adam was legally and effectively the sin of his race; so the death of Christ was legally and effectively the death of his people."7 Since our death has already occurred, we do not bear that condemnation (Romans 8:1–3). That is the essence of the love of Christ for us. Through his own undeserved death, he died our well-deserved death and opened his future as our future.

A Christian is one who recognizes Jesus as the Christ, the Son of the living God, as God manifested in the flesh, loving us and dying for our redemption; and who is so affected by a sense of the love of this incarnate God as to be constrained to make the will of Christ the rule of his obedience, and the glory of Christ the great end for which he lives.

May the one thing that you cherish, the one thing that you rejoice in and exult over, be the cross of Jesus Christ.

if God be this center, then God aimed at himself. And herein it appears, that as he is the first author of their being and motion, so he is the last end, the final term, to which is their ultimate tendency and aim.

The gospel at Christmas is: Christ has trampled this enemy underfoot at the cross. So for everyone who trusts in him, their sins are cast into the depths of the sea.

My hope is that every reader will see that God's God-centeredness-- God's commitment to magnify his name, his holiness, and his glory as the ultimate aim of his providence-- is not a threat to our joy but the basis of it

Every man, whatsoever his condition, desires to be happy. There is no man who does not desire this, and each one desires it with such earnestness that he prefers it to all other things; whoever, in fact, desires other things, desires them for this end alone.