John Piper's Quotes

As a child and a teenager, my attitudes and actions assumed the superiority of my race in almost every way without knowing or wanting to know anybody who was black, except Lucy. Lucy came to our house on Saturdays to help my mother clean. I liked Lucy, but the whole structure of the relationship was demeaning.

Don't assume that all fat people are gluttons. And don't use the word 'fat.' There is a principle here. Learn from logic and experience not to associate things - especially in preaching - that don't necessarily go together.

God has levels of willing and delighting. He wills and delights in things in different ways so that approval and disapproval can coexist without being contradictory, without canceling each other out. I am making the case here for infinite complexity.

God has ordained that Satan have a long leash with God holding on to the leash because he knows that when we walk in and out of those temptations, struggling with both the physical effects that they bring and the moral effects that they bring, more of God's glory will shine.

God was alive when this universe exploded into existence. He was alive when Socrates drank his poison. He was the living God when William Bradford governed Plymouth Colony. He was the living God in 1966 when Thomas Altizer proclaimed him dead and Time magazine absolutely absurdly put it on the front cover.

I can be poor, I can lose a job, I can have a hospital bill that I don't know how to pay, for I can do all these things through Him who strengthens me.

I have tried to devote my life - with all my husband failures, father failures, pastor failures, friend failures, any other possible failures I'm sure I've done them - to the God-centeredness of God and my aspiring, yearning to join Him in that activity. God is passionate about hallowing the name of God.

I owe my life and hope to the gospel. Without it I would still be strutting with racist pride, or I would be suffering the moral paralysis of 'white guilt.' But the gospel has an answer to both pride and guilt.

Jesus Christ... came into the world to vindicate the infinite worth of God's holiness which had been desecrated by our sin and which seemed... to be taken lightly because it was being passed over for nothing more than the blood of bulls.

My mother, who grew up in Pennsylvania, literally washed my mouth out with soap once for saying, 'Shut up!' to my sister. She would have washed my mouth out with gasoline if she knew how foul my mouth was racially when she wasn't around.

The Bible is the ultimate authority and infallible, not the pastor and not the elders. And it doesn't mean that you believe everything he says without examining it.

The Christian - the biblical - concept of mercy toward wrongdoers only exists in relation to justice. Showing mercy, in relation to wrongdoing, means treating someone better than they deserve.

The giving of the Quran is in Islam what the incarnation of Christ is to Christianity. If this is so, then Quran-burning is parallel to Christ-crucifying.

The Gospel is not a theory; the Gospel is not a philosophy or an idea; the Gospel is not a way of thinking or feeling. The Gospel is an event in history.

There are many pointers in the Bible concerning the rightness, the goodness, the beauty, the justice, the preciousness of racial harmony and diversity.

We are all responsible to Jesus first, and then, under him, to various other persons and offices. Discerning the path of love and obedience when two or more of these submissive relationships collide is a call to humble, Bible-saturated, spiritual wisdom.

When I believe in Jesus, I am united to Christ. Therefore, what he did and achieved becomes mine by this union through faith alone. His righteous life is imputed to me. What Christ achieved is counted as mine.

When people think about 'thinking,' they often think 'academia;' they think 'threat.' They think 'coldness.' I want to reverse all those images and say, 'No, the brain God gave you is intended to throw fuel on the fire of your affections for God. It's really good at it if you let it.'

Whether sexual orientation can change or not, hearts can change and turn any sexual orientation into an occasion for the glory of Christ. Those with same-sex attraction glorify Christ through sexual abstinence and through the enrichment of significant Christ-exalting relationships in other ways.

God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in Him.

Woe to us if we get our satisfaction from the food in the kitchen and the TV in the den and the sex in the bedroom with an occasional tribute to the cement blocks in the basement!

God tests His people through hardship.

Blind people don't decide to see. Jesus says, 'See!' and they see.