John Piper
John Piper
John Stephen Piperis founder and teacher of desiringgod.org and chancellor of Bethlehem College & Seminary in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He is a Calvinist Baptist preacher and author who served as Pastor for Preaching and Vision of Bethlehem Baptist Church in Minneapolis, Minnesota for 33 years. His books include ECPA Christian Book Award winners Spectacular Sins, What Jesus Demands from the World, Pierced by the Word, and God's Passion for His Glory, and bestsellers Don't Waste Your Life and The Passion of...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionClergyman
Date of Birth11 January 1946
CountryUnited States of America
Intensity is all that matters in painting.
I do not appeal to you to screw up your courage and sacrifice for Christ. I appeal to you to renounce all you have to obtain life that satisfies your deepest longings.
All the different ways God has chosen to display his glory in creation and redemption seem to reach their culmination in the praises of his redeemed people. God governs the world with glory precisely that he might be admired, marvelled at, exalted and praised. The climax of his happiness is the delight he takes in the echoes of his excellence in the praises of the saints.
I do not aim to be immediately practical but eternally helpful.
Adjust your doctrine - or just minimize doctrine - to attract the world, and in the very process of attracting them, lose the radical truth that alone can set them free.
We need God in ways we do not know. Don't limit your experience of God to what you can think to ask. Ask for the unknown joy.
We do not choose suffering simply because we are told to, but because the one who tells us to describes it as the path to everlasting joy.
We ought to celebrate the positive glorious gifts of God, but the worth of God shines in a powerful way to the world when in the midst of suffering we still don't curse God but say "The Lord gave and the Lord takes away, blessed be the name of the Lord."
If my life was to have a single, all-satisfying, unifying passion, it would have to be God's passion.
So, you have three possibilities in world missions. You can be a goer, a sender, or disobedient. The Bible does not assume that everyone goes. But it does assume that the ones who do not go care about goers and support goers and pray for goers and hold the rope of the goers.
One way to appreciate C.S. Lewis is to see how his Christian humility shaped his life and work.
Sin carries in it its own misery.
The Bible does not oppose or forbid interracial marriages but sees them as a positive good for the glory of Christ.
You don't give God authority over your life. He has it, totally.