Quotes from John Piper

The first thing we learn is that worship has to do with real life. It is not a mythical interlude in a week of reality. Worship has to do with adultery and hunger and racial conflict.

What you and I need is usually not a brand-new teaching. Brand-new truths are probably not truths. What we need are reminders about the greatness of the old truths. We need someone to say an old truth in a fresh way. Or sometimes, just to say it.

If you are sufficient for your task it's too small.

Christ is to be cherished, not just chosen.

If we live twenty-nine years or if we live ninety-nine years, would not any hardships be worth the saving of one person from the eternal torments of hell for the everlasting enjoyment of the glory of God?

In other words, physical evil is a parable, a drama, a signpost pointing to the moral outrage of rebellion against God.

If God alone is enough to support joy when all else is lost, it is a miracle of grace.

Most of our life is a gorging of one artificially inflamed appetite after another.

If the beams are beautiful, the sun is even more beautiful. God's aim is not that we merely admire His gifts, but even more, His glory.

That's the kind of love the Father has. It is a giving love. It gives his most precious treasure—his Son. Meditate on that this Advent. It was a very costly love. A very powerful love. A very rugged, painful love. The meaning of Christmas is the celebration of this love. "God so loved . . ." And wonder of wonders, God gives this costly love to an undeserving world of sinners, like us.

Life is wasted if we do not grasp the glory of the cross, cherish it for the treasure that it is, and cleave to it as the highest price of every pleasure and the deepest comfort in every pain. That is what the next chapter is about.

Therefore, the reason God seeks our praise is not because He won't be complete until He gets it. He is seeking our praise because we won't be complete until we give it. This is not arrogance. It is love.