John Piper Quotes

Sin is what you do when your heart is not satisfied with God. No one sins out of duty. We sin because it holds out some promise of happiness.

The fundamental loss of a desire for God is the heart of original sin.

Our fall was, has always been, and always will be, that we aren’t satisfied in God and what He gives. We hunger for something more, something other.

God has so made man's heart that nothing can ever fill it but God himself.

Sin is what you do when you are not satisfied in God.

I don't know anyone who doesn't have an empty spot at the center of him, which must be filled in order to be really happy. That spot, like it or not, is reserved for God.

History has brought us to the point where the Christian message is thought to be essential concerned only with how to deal with sin: with wrongdoing or wrong-being and its effects. Life, our actual existence, is not included in what is now presented as the heart of the Christian message, or it is included only marginally.

See that your chief study be about heart, that there God's image may be planted, and his interest advanced, and the interest of the world and flesh subdued, and the love of every sin cast out, and the love of holiness succeed; and that you content not yourselves with seeming to do good in outward acts, when you are bad yourselves, and strangers to the great internal duties. The first and great work of a Christian is about his heart.

You have no questions to ask of any body, no new way that you need inquire after; no oracle that you need to consult; for whilst you shut yourself up in patience, meekness, humility, and resignation to God, you are in the very arms of Christ, your heart is His dwelling-place, and He lives and works in you.

Knowing that we are fulfilling God's purpose is the only thing that gives rest to the restless human heart.

Every Christian who keeps looking up stretches his heart's capacity for Heaven.

God is waiting to satisfy us, yet His goodness will not satisfy us if we are already full of other things.

If you aren't hungry for God, you are full of yourself.

It is unnatural for a Christian not to have an appetite for the impossible.

Christ will be master of the heart, and sin must be mortified. If your life is unholy, then your heart is unchanged, and you are an unsaved person. The Savior will sanctify His people, renew them, give them a hatred of sin, and a love of holiness. The grace that does not make a man better than others is a worthless counterfeit. Christ saves His people, not IN their sins, but FROM their sins. Without holiness, no man shall see the Lord.

It is grace that forms the void inside us and it is grace that can fill the void.

If you have no joy in your religion, there's a leak in your Christianity somewhere.

The Christian is the most contented man in the world, but he is the least contented with the world.

Down inside we have a longing for God-what Pascal called "the vacuum which God left behind.

People are hungry for something more beautiful, for something greater than people round about can give. There is a great hunger for God in the world today. Everywhere there is much suffering, but there is also great hunger for God and love for each other.

The heart of a man can never be satisfied with the things of this world. It is always empty, and hungry, and thirsty, and dissatisfied, till it comes to Christ. It is only they who hear Christ's voice, and follow Him, and feed on Him by faith, who are 'filled.'.

Your heart is like an infinitely large hole, and only God is big enough to fill it.

Take this to heart and doubt not that you are the one who killed Christ. Your sins certainly did, and when you see the nails driven through his hands, be sure that you are pondering, and when the thorns pierce his brow, know that they are your evil thoughts.

The Christian church was designed to make sinners sweat. I have always believed that, and I still believe it. The messages preached in our churches should make backslidden Christians sweat. And if I achieve that objective when I preach, I thank God with all of my heart, no matter what people think of me.

Nothing can discourage the appetite for divinity in the heart of man.