Top 450 John Piper Quotes (2025 Update)
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401. “This sounds very strange. Most of us think serving God is a totally positive thing; we have not considered that serving God may be an insult to him.”

— John Piper

402. “God is committed to rewarding those acts of the human heart that signify human helplessness and hope in God.”

— John Piper

403. “The best thing in the universe is to be united to Christ. To be in Christ. To enjoy union with Christ.”

— John Piper

404. “Say to the next generation again and again: God is truthful; God keeps his word; God does not lie; God can be trusted! That’s one blessing of Advent. Receive it as a wonderful Christmas gift, and give it to as many people as you can.”

— John Piper

405. “Once upon a time, there was a safe, private place to take your controversial stand for Jesus. No more. If you are going to stand, you will be shot at – either figuratively or literally.”

— John Piper

406. “Word corresponds to hearing, and glory corresponds to seeing. Ultimately God has spoken in order to reveal his glory for the enjoyment of his people. Therefore we must hear what he says in order to see what he reveals. The Bible does not speak of hearing the glory of God, but seeing it. Hearing is the means. Seeing is the goal. The aim of all our hearing of God’s truth is the seeing of God’s glory.”

— John Piper

407. “A prayerless Christian is like a bus driver trying alone to push his bus out of a rut because he doesn’t know Clark Kent is on board.”

— John Piper

408. “Rather we say that in the cross, God had in view the actual, effective redemption of his children from all that would destroy them, including their own unbelief. And we affirm that when Christ died particularly for his bride, he did not simply create a possibility or an opportunity for salvation, but really purchased and infallibly secured for them all that is necessary to get them saved, including the grace of regeneration and the gift of faith.”

— John Piper

409. “God owns and controls all things. And there is nothing that he could give you for Christmas this year that would suit your needs and your longings better than the consolation of Israel and the redemption of Jerusalem, restoration for past losses and liberation from future enemies, forgiveness and freedom, pardon and power, healing the past and sealing the future.”

— John Piper

410. “Life is too precious to squander on trivial things. Grant us, Lord, the unswerving resolve to pray and live with David Brainerd’s urgency: “Oh, that I might never loiter on my heavenly journey!”

— John Piper

411. “By nature, we get more pleasure from God’s gifts then from Himself.”

— John Piper

412. “DOING is often God’s remedy for despair.”

— John Piper

413. “O, how easy it is to do religious things if other people are watching! Preaching, praying, attending church, reading the bible, acts of kindness and charity-they all take on a certain pleasantness of the ego if we know that others will find out about them and think well of us. It is a deadly addiction for esteem that we have.”

— John Piper

414. “Grace is free because God would not be the infinite, self-sufficient God He is if he were constrained by anything outside Himself.”

— John Piper

415. “God and God alone is the final, ultimate goal of our quest. All that God is for us in Jesus is the Object of our quest for joy. When I speak of fighting for joy, I mean joy in God, not joy without reference to God. When I speak of longing for happiness, I mean happiness in all that God is for us in Jesus, not happiness as physical or psychological experience apart from God.”

— John Piper

416. “Think and mull and ponder and chew until you see God the way they see God – namely, as precious and valuable and beautiful and desirable. This is how the Word serves joy. Thus, even as the Spirit and the Word are inseparable in our lives, so prayer and meditation are inseparable. The fight for joy always involves both. Prayer without meditation on the Word of God will disintegrate into humanistic spirituality. It will simply reflect our own fallen ideas and feelings – not God’s.”

— John Piper

417. “May the pulpits of the land ring with exposition of the Word of God and exultation in the God of the Word.”

— John Piper

418. “Taken as a whole, the story of Ruth is one of those signs. It was written to give us encouragement and hope that all the perplexing turns in our lives are going somewhere good. They do not lead off a cliff. In all the setbacks of our lives as believers, God is plotting for our joy.”

— John Piper

419. “The aim of the climb is not intellectual satisfaction. The aim is worship. God gets more honor when we worship on the basis of what we know about him than he gets if we worship on the basis of what we don’t know.”

— John Piper

420. “There is no point in romanticizing other religions that reject the deity and saving work of Christ. They do not know God. And those who follow them tragically waste their lives.”

— John Piper

421. “In other words, when all the supports of human life and earthly happiness are taken away, God will be our delight, our joy. This experience is humanly impossible. No ordinary person can speak in truth like this. If God alone is enough to support joy when all else is lost, it is a miracle of grace.”

— John Piper

422. “One great function of Bible verses: To keep us from drawing false inferences from other Bible verses.”

— John Piper

423. “Worship is the highest moral act a human can perform, so the only basis and motivation for it that many people can conceive is the notion of morality as the disinterested performance of duty. But when worship is reduced to disinterested duty, it ceases to be worship. For worship is a feast.”

— John Piper

424. “Absolute statements of our unbelief that we make in the darkness are notoriously unreliable.”

— John Piper

425. “The new birth is the creation of spiritual life, not the imitation of life.”

— John Piper

426. “He has made me wary of chronological snobbery. That is, he showed me that newness is no virtue and oldness is no vice. Truth and beauty and goodness are not determined by when they exist. Nothing is inferior for being old, and nothing is valuable for being modern. This has freed me from the tyranny of novelty and opened for me the wisdom of the ages.”

— John Piper

427. “Christmas split history. Foretastes of the future abound. Drink deeply on what he achieved for us. And be filled with hope for all that is coming.”

— John Piper

428. “He loved us to the uttermost. And let us be so moved by this love that it becomes our own.”

— John Piper

429. “The foundation of moral life as God’s truthfulness.”

— John Piper

430. “It is true that God can be known and enjoyed in every legitimate vocation; but when he deploys you from one place to the next, he offers fresh and deeper drinking at the fountain of his fellowship. God seldom calls us to an easier life, but always calls us to know more of him and drink more deeply of his sustaining grace.”

— John Piper

431. “This is the message of the coronavirus: Stop relying on yourselves and turn to God. You cannot even stop death. God can raise the dead.”

— John Piper

432. “God’s purpose in permitting your sin was to give his people the pleasure of seeing and savoring the glory of his grace in the inexpressible suffering and triumphs of his Son.”

— John Piper

433. “The end of the creation is that God may communicate happiness to the creature.”

— John Piper

434. “We Boast Best in the Cross When We Bear It.”

— John Piper

435. “And what we have seen is that this embracing of suffering is not just an accompaniment of our witness to Christ; it is the visible expression of it. Our sufferings make Christ’s sufferings known so that people can see the kind of love Christ offers. We complete Christ’s afflictions by providing what they do not have, namely, a personal, vivid presentation to those who do not see Christ suffer in person. The.”

— John Piper

436. “The Lord is kind. He is good to all who take refuge under his wings.”

— John Piper

437. “Jesus calls for violence against our own lust because he loves our true and lasting joy.”

— John Piper

438. “This is why it is often called sovereign grace: it raises the dead. The dead do not raise themselves. God does by his grace. And it is this “glorious grace” that will be praised for all eternity.”

— John Piper

439. “No One Is a Relativist at the Bank.”

— John Piper

440. “If we desire that there be no boasting except in the cross, then we must live near the cross-indeed we must live on the cross.”

— John Piper

441. “Without a spiritual wakefulness to divine purposes and connections in all things, we will not know things for what they truly are.”

— John Piper

442. “We ascribe to God. We don’t add to Him.”

— John Piper

443. “God’s reality is overwhelmingly intrusive in all the details of life.”

— John Piper

444. “God is glorified in his people by the way we experience him, not merely by the way we think about him. Indeed.”

— John Piper

445. “God and his word are the reality we need – the Rock under our feet.”

— John Piper

446. “When this world totally fails, the ground for joy remains.”

— John Piper

447. “My biggest concern about the effects of the prosperity movement is that it diminishes Christ by making him less central and less satisfying than his gifts.”

— John Piper

448. “Seeing the glory of Jesus Christ in the gospel awakens joy.”

— John Piper

449. “Most of your unhappiness in life comes from the fact that you are listening to yourself instead of talking to yourself.”

— John Piper

450. “No man,” Wilberforce wrote, “has a right to be idle.” “Where is it,” he asked, “that in such a world as this, health, and leisure, and affluence may not find some ignorance to instruct, some wrong to redress, some want to supply, some misery to alleviate?”

— John Piper