John Piper Friday

If you didn't catch it in Sunday night's sermon:


"God’s holiness is his infinite value as the absolutely unique, morally perfect, permanent person that he is and who by grace has made himself accessible in Jesus Christ."

John Piper Friday

"If God exists, then He is the measure of all things, and what He thinks about all things is the measure of what we should think. Not to care about truth is not to care about God. To love God passionately is to love truth passionately. Being God centered in life means being truth-driven in ministry. What is not true is not of God. What is false is anti-God. Indifference to the truth is indifference to the mind of God. Pretense is rebellion against reality, and what makes reality reality is God. Our concern with truth is simply an echo of our concern with God. And all this is rooted in God's concern with God, or God's passion for the glory of God."


-Sorry I can't find the exact reference for this, though I think it is somewhere in The Pleasures of God.

John Piper Friday

"...to put it most simply and starkly: the ultimate reason that suffering exists in the universe is so that Christ might display the greatness of the glory of the grace of God by suffering in himself to overcome our suffering. The suffering of the utterly innocent and infinitely holy Son of God in the place of utterly undeserving sinners to bring us to everlasting joy is the greatest display of the glory of God’s grace that ever was, or ever could be.
In conceiving a universe in which to display the glory of his grace, God did not choose plan b. This was the moment—Good Friday—for which everything in the universe was planned. There could be no greater display of the glory of the grace of God than what happened at Calvary. Everything leading to it and everything flowing from it is explained by it, including all the suffering in the world."*

This assertion by Piper (based upon Revelation 13:8, 2 Timothy 1:9, Ephesians 1:4 and Revelation 5:9-12) leads him to the following challenging conclusion;

"Do you see what this implies about sin and suffering in the universe? According to this divine plan, God permits sin to enter the world. God ordains that what he hates will come to pass. It is not sinful in God to will that there be sin. We do not need to fathom this mystery. We may content ourselves by saying over the sin of Adam and Eve what Joseph said over the sin of his brothers, when they sold him into slavery: “As for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good” (Genesis 50:20)."*

Is this true?



*The Suffering of Christ and the Sovereignty of God, 2005 Desiring God National Conference. October 9, 2005.

John Piper Friday (...on saturday)

"Prayer pursues joy in fellowship with Jesus and in the power to share his life with others. And prayer pursues God's glory by treating him as the inexhaustible resevoir of hope and help. In prayer we admit our poverty and God's prosperity, our bankruptcy and his bounty, our misery and his mercy. Therefore, prayer highly exalts and glorifies God precisely by pursuing everything we long for in him and not in ourselves."

Desiring God. p150. Multnomah Press (1989).

John Piper Friday

When commenting on Galations 2:10, Piper concludes;

"The point is: the apostles were agreed on the importance of ministry to the poor because it flows from the center of the gospel—the cross—and because Jesus lived it out. The apostles were eager to bless the poor. It was part of their foundational ministry. I assume therefore it should be a crucial commitment in the church today—in missions and in the ongoing ministry of the church."

Sermon - Gospel to the Nations, Generosity to the Poor. October 23, 2005.

John Piper Friday

"The goal of world missions is the gladness of the peoples in the glory of God. The fuel of that goal is our own gladness in God. If we are not real and deep and fervent in our worship of God, we will not commend him among the peoples with genuineness. How can you say to the nations, "Be glad in God!" if you are not glad in God?"

Sermon - Let the Nations Be Glad. November 7, 1993.

John Piper Friday

“The more deeply you walk with Christ, the hungrier you get for Christ . . . the more homesick you get for heaven . . . the more you want “all the fullness of God” . . . the more you want to be done with sin . . . the more you want the Bridegroom to come again . . . the more you want the Church revived and purified with the beauty of Jesus . . . the more you want a great awakening to God’s reality in the cities . . . the more you want to see the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ penetrate the darkness of all the unreached peoples of the world . . . the more you want to see false worldviews yield to the force of Truth . . . the more you want to see pain relieved and tears wiped away and death destroyed . . . the more you long for every wrong to be made right and the justice and grace of God to fill the earth like the waters cover the sea.
If you don’t feel strong desires for the manifestation of the glory of God, it is not because you have drunk deeply and are satisfied. It is because you have nibbled so long at the table of the world. Your soul is stuffed with small things, and there is no room for the great. God did not create you for this. There is an appetite for God. And it can be awakened.”

A Hunger for God. Crossways Books (1997).

John Piper Friday

"What if we asked someone, “Would you want to watch a football game where all the players were no better than you? Or watch a movie where the actors could act no better than you and were no better looking than you? Or go to a museum to see pictures by painters who could paint no better than you?” Why are we willing to be exposed in all these places as utterly inferior? How can we get so much joy out of watching people magnify their superiority over us? The biblical answer is that we were made by God to get our deepest joys not from being superior ourselves but from enjoying God’s superiority. All these other experiences are parables. God’s superiority is absolute in every way, which means our joy in it may be greater than we could ever imagine."

The Supremacy of Christ and Joy in a Postmodern World, 2006 Desiring God National Conference. October 1, 2006.

John Piper Friday

"I would guess that probably two generations of men and women have been raised in this country [USA] without a positive vision of what it means to be male or female. We have been told many negative things—things we ought not to be, things we are to be liberated from.

For example, manhood is not sexual exploitation. Manhood is not cool, rational unemotionalism. Manhood is not the ruthless task-oriented drive to conquer. Etc. So be liberated, men! On the other hand womanhood is not boring domesticity. Womanhood is not homebound motherhood. Womanhood is not mindless emotionalism. Womanhood is not sexual compliance. Etc. So be liberated, women!

But when all our talk is done about what manhood and womanhood is NOT, what have we got? A big void of confusion about what they are. Frustrating, guilt-producing, destructive confusion. And with it a tidal wave of homosexuality, an epidemic of divorce, an increase of violent crime, growing domestic abuse, and tens of thousands of suicides every year, 75% of whom are men."

Sermon - Manhood and Womanhood: Conflict and Confusion After the Fall - May 21, 1989.

John Piper Friday

"One of my favorite poems is "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard" by Thomas Gray in 1751. One of the stanzas says,

Full many a gem of purest ray serene,
The dark unfathomed caves of ocean bear:
Full many a flower is born to blush unseen,
And waste its sweetness on the desert air.

Gray had been moved by the thought that on the bottom of the ocean there were beautiful gems that no human eye would ever see, and that in distant deserts millions of flowers would bloom, blush with vivid colors, give off a sweet fragrance, and never be touched or seen or smelled by anybody—but God!
The psalmist is moved by the same thing, it seems, in Psalm 19, verse 7: "Praise the Lord, you sea monsters and all deeps!" He doesn't even know what is in all the deeps of the sea! So the praise of thedeeps is not merely what they can testify to man.
It seems to me that creation praises God by simply being what it was created to be in all its incredible variety. And since most of the creation is beyond the awareness of mankind (in the reaches of space, and in the heights of mountains and at the bottom of thesea), it wasn't created merely to serve purposes that have to do with us. It was created for the enjoyment of God. "

Sermon - The Pleasure of God in His Creation, February 8, 1987

John Piper Friday

"The cross is the pinnacle of God's love for sinners, not because it demonstrates the value of sinners, but because it vindicates the value of God for sinners to enjoy. God's love for man does not consist in making man central, but in making himself central for man. The cross does not direct man's attention to his own vindicated worth, but to God's vindicated righteousness.

This is love, because the only eternal happiness for man is happiness focused on the riches of God's glory. "In your presence there is fullness of joy; in your right hand are pleasures forever more" (Psalm 16:1 1). God's self-exaltation is loving, because it preserves for us and offers to us the only all-satisfying Object of desire in the universe – the all-glorious, all-righteous God."

Did Christ Die for Us or for God? 'Taste and See' article. January 1, 1995.

John Piper Friday

"The church has not been spending its energy to go deep with the unfathomable God of the Bible. Against the overwhelming weight and seriousness of the Bible, much of the church is choosing, at this very moment, to become more light and shallow and entertainment-oriented, and therefore successful in its irrelevance to massive suffering and evil. The popular God of fun-church is simply too small and too affable to hold a hurricane in his hand. The biblical categories of God’s sovereignty lie like landmines in the pages of the Bible waiting for someone to seriously open the book. They don’t kill, but they do explode trivial notions of the Almighty."

Ten Aspects of God's Sovereignty Over Suffering and Satan's Hand in It. 2005 Desiring God National Conference. October 7, 2005.