Inspirational Quotes by John Piper
“You are satisfied with your day when there is a match between what you value and how you spent your time. On the other hand, when what you actually work on and accomplish during the day is mostly different from what really matters to you, you feel unfulfilled.”
“Michael Horton gets at the heart of this: “The heart of most religions is good advice, good techniques, good programs, good ideas, and good support systems. . . . But the heart of Christianity is Good News. It comes not as a task for us to fulfill, a mission for us to accomplish, a game plan for us to follow with the help of life coaches, but as a report that someone else has already fulfilled, accomplished, followed, and achieved everything for us. Good advice may help us in daily direction; the Good News concerning Jesus Christ saves us from sin’s guilt and tyranny over our lives and the fear of death. It’s Good News because it does not depend on us. It is about God and his faithfulness to his own purposes and promises.”
“Shoddy work is not just shoddy work. It's a failure of love.”
“Truth: We cannot be truly productive unless all our activity stems from love for God and the acknowledgment that he is sovereign over all our plans.”
“Since a mission statement is, after all, a “mission,” it’s easy for the focus to be exclusively what we must do. But if your mission is all about what you have to do, it’s all law and no gospel, which means that ultimately it cannot motivate or work.”
“As Augustine said, God has made us for himself, and our hearts are restless until they find our rest in him.”
“[The Christian] knows therefore that this holiness is not to precede his reconciliation to God, and be its cause; but to follow it, and be its effect. — William Wilberforce, A Practical View of Christianity”
“embracing the truth that God accepts us apart from good works is the precise thing that causes us to excel in good works.”
“As Michael Horton has said, “Knowing your purpose is a form of law.”6 Anytime we are in the realm of what we are to do, we are in the realm of law. The law is not bad; it’s simply that the law’s role is only to guide our lives and not ultimately empower them. The gospel — what God has done for us in Christ — is the ultimate motivation for what we do. We are to be purpose directed but gospel driven.”
“If Jesus simply came to tell us what to do and provide moral instruction so we could try harder to please God, then his life would have been an utter failure.”
“a concern for time management should actually lead us right up to God. What we see here is that love for God should also lead us to be concerned with time management. As Peter O’Brien has said, “those who are wise will have a right attitude toward time.”
“Michael Horton gets at the heart of this: “The heart of most religions is good advice, good techniques, good programs, good ideas, and good support systems. . . . But the heart of Christianity is Good News. It comes not as a task for us to fulfill, a mission for us to accomplish, a game plan for us to follow with the help of life coaches, but as a report that someone else has already fulfilled, accomplished, followed, and achieved everything for us. Good advice may help us in daily direction; the Good News concerning Jesus Christ saves us from sin’s guilt and tyranny over our lives and the fear of death. It’s Good News because it does not depend on us. It is about God and his faithfulness to his own purposes and promises.”5”
“It doesn’t matter how efficient you are if you are doing the wrong things in the first place. More important than efficiency is effectiveness — getting the right things done. In other words, productivity is not first about getting more things done faster. It’s about getting the right things done.”
“God hasn’t given us all the time we need because he wants us to rely on other people as well as our own resources and gifts. God has given us all we need, to be sure, but the mistake is thinking that all we need is time. What”
“The chief arena in which we serve God is the vocation of our everyday lives. At the same time, as we see here, God also calls us to go beyond and meet needs wherever they are as we have opportunity to do so. The”
“Slack work is like vandalism because it makes life harder for people — just like vandalism.”
“At root, what we see is that productive things are things that pass muster at the final judgment — and hence receive the verdict of being “eternally productive.” At the same time, this does not take us off into some spiritual never land, but actually underscores the importance of the things we do every day and knowing how to navigate our lives in this world, because it is in the things we do every day that we serve God and others.”
“True productivity is not first about efficiency — doing things right and doing them quickly — but effectiveness — doing the right things.”
“Paul is essentially saying that through living in a Christ-honoring way among unbelievers in the world — in the context of our jobs, communities, trips to the grocery store, and everything else we do in everyday life — the light of the gospel shines through our behavior, with the result that some people come to faith.”
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John Piper (1946 - Present)
is a Calvinistic Baptist Christian preacher and author currently serving as Pastor for Preaching and Vision of Bethlehem Baptist Church in Minneapolis, Minnesota. 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 Jesus Christ. The evangelical organization Desiring God is named for his book Desiring God: Meditations of a Christian Hedonist (1986).In 1980, after what he described as an "irresistible call of the Lord to preach", Piper became Pastor of Bethlehem Baptist Church in Minneapolis, Minnesota, where he has been ministering ever since. Piper hit the evangelical scene after the publication of his book Desiring God: Meditations of a Christian Hedonist (1986) and has continued to publish dozens of other books further articulating this theological perspective. In 1994, he founded Desiring God Ministries, which provides all of Piper's sermons and articles from the past three decades, and most of his books online free of charge, as well as offering for sale books, CDs, and DVDs and regularly hosting conferences.
John Stephen Piper is a Reformed and Baptist theologian, preacher, and author, currently serving as Pastor for Preaching and Vision of Bethlehem Baptist Church in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He is the author of numerous books.
Piper's motto in ministry, preaching, and teaching is: "God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in him." He calls those who live out this motto Christian Hedonists. Piper places a heavy emphasis on the objective and absolute nature of truth and is confident in the Christian's ability to grasp that truth through the guidance of the Holy Spirit.