Quotes from John Piper

Now there was only one hope, the sovereign grace of God. God would have to transform my heart to do what a heart cannot make itself do, namely, want what it ought to want. Only God can make the depraved heart desire God.

Know the spirit of the age and consciously resist conformity to it (Romans 12:2). As D. L. Moody said, "The ship belongs in the water of the world, but if the water gets in the ship, it sinks.

it is to no avail merely to believe that God is holy and merciful. For that belief to be of any saving value, we must "sense" God's holiness and mercy. That is, we must have a true taste for it and delight in it for what it is in itself. Otherwise the knowledge is no different than what the devils have.

In other words, the path to glory for God's incarnate representative on earth was the path through suffering. The path to majesty was through meekness. The path to exaltation was through humility. The path to power was through weakness.

Perseverance Here is a key to great earnestness in preaching. If you really believe that "[those who endure] to the end will be saved" (Mark 13:13), and that not only the first act of faith but all subsequent, acts of persevering faith are sustained by the Spirit through the Word of God, then virtually every sermon is a "salvation sermon," and the souls of the saints are being saved every Sunday.

If we are not captured by his personality and character, then all our declarations of thanksgiving are like the gratitude of a wife to a husband for the money she gets from him to use in her affair with another man.

The more you have of a rational knowledge of divine things, the more opportunity will there be, when the Spirit shall be breathed into your heart, to see the excellency of these things, and to taste the sweetness of them.

The Bible-oriented preacher wants the congregation to know that his words, if they have any abiding worth, are in accord with God's words. He wants this to be obvious to them. That is part of his humility and his authority. Therefore, he constantly tries to show the people that his ideas are coming from the Bible. He is hesitant to go too far toward points that are not demonstrable from the Bible.

what we need from the Bible is not the fulfillment of our dream, but the swallowing up of our failed dream in the all-satisfying glory of Christ.

Expose yourself to Bible-saturated people, both the living and the dead. Their lives and their words are a great help to our joy.

There is no point in winning an argument if you know or suspect you are wrong.

You will leave all your material wealth behind, but a wealth of knowledge goes with you.