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f7e7f02
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This sounds very strange. Most of us think serving God is a totally positive thing; we have not considered that serving God may be an insult to him.
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John Piper |
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ab004a0
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He loved us to the uttermost. And let us be so moved by this love that it becomes our own.
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John Piper |
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c513f16
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for poets, at least, experiencing something inexpressible does not mean silence. It's precisely the inexpressible something that poetry is meant to help us see or feel. If it were merely expressible - if there were nothing ineffable about it - there would be no need for a poem. But everywhere in the Bible we meet reality that exceeds our expectations.
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poetry
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John Piper |
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fa9b9cc
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Honoring Christ, magnifying Christ, making much of Christ. That was the meaning of Paul's life. It should be the meaning of ours. And Paul prays it will be the meaning of his death as well. We live and we die to make much of Christ.
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John Piper |
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0744d94
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When the glory of God is the treasure of our lives, we will not lay up treasures on earth, but spend them for the spread of his glory. We will not covet, but overflow with liberality. We will not crave the praise of men, but forget ourselves in praising God. We will not be mastered by sinful, sensual pleasures, but sever their root by the power of a superior promise. We will not will nurse a wounded ego or cherish a grudge or nurture a veng..
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John Piper |
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7ea0788
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Absolute statements of our unbelief that we make in the darkness are notoriously unreliable.
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despair
prospective
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John Piper |
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d2937ce
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We waste our lives when we do not pray and think and dream and plan and work toward magnifying God in all spheres of life. God created us for this: to live our lives in a way that makes him look more like the greatness and the beauty and the infinite worth that he really is.
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John Piper |
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263e6d8
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Less extreme is the simple costliness in time and convenience and money and effort to replace excessive and addictive leisure with acts of servant love.
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John Piper |
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387f2ae
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Be glad in the Lord and receive willingly from His Hand all that he designs for my holiness - both painful and pleasant.
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John Piper |
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50eebce
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conversion is the creation of new desires, not just new duties; new delights, not just new deeds; new treasures, not just new tasks.
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John Piper |
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6e73b63
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On the contrary, Christian Hedonists are persuaded with Edwards that the only affections that magnify God's value are those that come from true apprehensions of His glory. If the feast of worship is rare in the land, it is because there is a famine of the Word of God (Amos 8:11-12).
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John Piper |
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9dcbda9
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Don't make peace with the sin in your life.
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spiritual-warfare
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John Piper |
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d183f61
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The key to endurance in the cause of self-sacrificing love is not heroic willpower, but deep, unshakable confidence that the joy we have tasted in fellowship with Christ will not disappoint us in death.
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John Piper |
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b0798e2
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Don't waste your life on experiments. There are proven paths. They are marked out in the Word of God. They are understandable. They are precious. They are hard. And they are joyful. Search the Scriptures for these paths. When you find them, step on them with humble faith and courage. Set your face like flint toward the cross and the empty tomb-- your cross and your empty tomb. Then, for the joy set before you, may a lifetime of sacrifices i..
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John Piper |
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15bf51e
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Now there was only one hope, the sovereign grace of God. God would have to transform my heart to do what a heart cannot make itself do, namely, want what it ought to want. Only God can make the depraved heart desire God. Once when Jesus' disciples wondered about the salvation of a man who desired money more than God, he said to them, "With man it is impossible, but not with God. For all things are possible with God" (Mark 10:27). Pursuing w..
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christian-devotional
christian-life
desire
freedom
heart
jesus
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John Piper |
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492f08c
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When this age is over, and the countless millions of the redeemed fall on their faces before the throne of God, missions will be no more. It is a temporary necessity. But worship abides forever. Worship, therefore, is the fuel and the goal of missions.8
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John Piper |
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b1f252f
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Some of us are afraid of getting too emotional when we sing. But the problem isn't emotions. It's emotionalism. Emotionalism pursues feelings as ends in themselves. It's wanting to feel something with no regard for how that feeling is produced or its ultimate purpose.
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John Piper |
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a5bd645
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Pragmatism and subjectivism obscure the reality of the truth. They engage the mind, but they make it the servant of our desires and our work. But they can't answer which desires I should pursue and which work is worthwhile.
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John Piper |
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2bdbb71
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Picture salvation as a house that you live in. It provides you with protection. It is stocked with food and drink that will last forever. It never decays or crumbles. Its windows open onto vistas of glory. God built it at great cost to Himself and to His Son, and He gave it to you. The purchase agreement is called a 'new covenant.' The terms read: 'This house shall become and remain yours if you will receive it as a gift and take delight in..
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John Piper |
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e51ef0c
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The point is that an $80,000 or a $180,000 salary does not have to be accompanied by an $80,000 or a $180,000 lifestyle. God is calling us to be conduits of his grace, not cul-de-sacs. Our great danger today is thinking that the conduit should be lined with gold. It shouldn't. Copper will do. No matter how grateful we are, gold will not make the world think that our God is good; it will make people think that our god is gold. That is no hon..
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John Piper |
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968d5a5
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Tell people the good news from a heart of love and a life of service.
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John Piper |
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db1950c
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Apathy is passionless living. It is sitting in front of the television night after night and living your life from one moment of entertainment to the next. It is the inability to be shocked into action by the steady-state lostness and suffering of the world. It is the emptiness that comes from thinking of godliness as the avoidance of doing bad things instead of the aggressive pursuit of doing good things.
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John Piper |
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d7f06ad
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Richard Foster is justified in writing: I am concerned that our reading and our writing is gravitating to the lowest common denominator so completely that the great themes of majesty and nobility and felicity are made to seem trite, puny, pedestrian. . . . I am concerned about the state of the soul in the midst of all the cheap sensory overload going on today. You see, without what Alfred North Whitehead called "an habitual vision of greatn..
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John Piper |
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3b2cfa4
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When you take all three categories of temptation to self-reliance - wisdom, might and riches - they form a powerful inducement toward the ultimate form of pride, namely, atheism. The safest way to stay supreme in our own estimation is to deny anything above us. This is why the proud preoccupy themselves with looking down on others. A proud man is always looking down on things and people and, of course, as long as you are looking down, you c..
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self-reliance
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John Piper |
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ea3ca02
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When God appoints the gospel of his Son as the universal remedy for the guilt and corruption of mankind, and we diminish that, the gospel is diminished. And you cannot diminish the gospel without being diminished yourself.
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gospel
jesus
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John Piper |
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39e3464
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A famous cigarette billboard pictures a curly-headed, bronze-faced, muscular macho with a cigarette hanging out the side of his mouth. The sign reads 'Where a man belongs.' That is a lie. Where a man belongs is at the bedside of his children, leading in devotion and prayer. Where a man belongs is leading his family to the house of God. Where a man belongs is up early and alone with God seeking vision and direction for the family.
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John Piper |
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09167fc
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The sins that should have brought condemnation on us, God laid on Jesus. God's love planned an amazing exchange: Jesus endured what we deserved so that we might enjoy what he deserved--eternal life. And the way we come to enjoy this life is by believing in Jesus. That's what he said: 'Truly, truly, I say to you, whoever believes has eternal life' (John 6:47; cf. Luke 8:12).
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John Piper |
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e096d10
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The sun of God's glory was made to shine at the center of the solar system of our soul. And when it does, all the planets of our life are held in their proper orbit.
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John Piper |
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876f92c
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Therefore, the task of all Christian scholarship- not just biblical studies- is to study reality as a manifestation of God's glory, to speak and write about it with accuracy, and to savor the beauty of God in it, and to make it serve the good of man. It is an abdication of scholarship when Christians do academic work with little reference to God. If all the universe and everything in it exist by the design of an infinite, personal God, to m..
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John Piper |
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471c8f7
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Jesus came into the world with good news, not bad news. He does not call us to a willpower religion that feels only duty and no delight. He calls us to himself and to his Father. Therefore, he calls us to joy. Of course, it is not joy in things. Jesus is not preaching a health, wealth, and prosperity gospel--one of America's most lamentable exports to the world. It is joy in God and in his Son.
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John Piper |
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061fcbf
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Belief in Jesus does not come by the waving of a magic wand. It comes by hearing the word of God through Jesus.
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John Piper |
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fc135ed
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If we only trust Christ to give us gifts and not himself as the all-satisfying gift, then we do not trust him in a way that honors him as our treasure. We simply honor the gifts. They are what we really want, not him.
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John Piper |
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4bdff14
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O Father, touch us with fresh faith that we might believe the incredible. The very pain of Christ that makes us despair is our salvation. Open our fearful hearts to receive the gospel. Waken the dead parts of our hearts that cannot feel what must be felt-that we are loved with the deepest, strongest, purest love in the universe.
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John Piper |
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6224237
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The discipline to rise early is not as difficult as the discipline of going to bed. This did not used to be so. Before electricity and radio and television and the Internet, going to bed soon after dark was not so difficult. There was not much to do. Today the strongest allurements to stay up and be entertained are against us. Therefore, the battle against weariness, which makes us drowsy as soon as we open our Bible in the morning, has to ..
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John Piper |
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be95b6a
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When we depend upon organizations, we get what organizations can do; when we depend upon education, we get what education can do; when we depend upon man, we get what man can do; but when we depend upon prayer, we get what God can do. A. C. Dixon
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John Piper |
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8d8faaf
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What is love for, if not to intensify our affections--both in life and death? But, O, do not be bitter. It is tragically self-destructive to be bitter.
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emotions
grief
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John Piper |
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dc0fa4d
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Therefore, we read the Bible selectively. We pick a text here and there to fit our felt needs. This is like a doctor who forgets how to write prescriptions for the best antibiotics because every- body seems healthy, and he has spent the last decades tweaking good health with hip-hop exercise videos, unaware that pestilence is at the door. It's like the soldier who forgets how to use his weapons because the times seem peaceful, and he has sp..
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John Piper |
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a99431a
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There never has been a greater act of love than that Jesus laid down his life to save sinners (John 15:13; Rom. 5:6-8).
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John Piper |
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ced786c
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The reason there is so much misery in marriage is not that husbands and wives seek their own pleasure, but that they do not seek it in the pleasure of their spouses. The biblical mandate to husbands and wives is to seek your own joy in the joy of your spouse.
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John Piper |
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53fe85a
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Normal Christian life is a process of restoration and renewal. Our joy is not static. It fluctuates with real life. It is vulnerable to satan's attacks.
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sanctification
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John Piper |
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5500d0c
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Desire for and delight in God's Word are inseparable.
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maturation
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John Piper |
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df03f3f
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Jesus - "the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily" (Colossians 2:9)."
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John Piper |
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e4c11c6
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It is not surprising that prayer malfunctions when we try to make it a domestic intercom to call upstairs for more comforts in the den.
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John Piper |
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3cb0320
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Knowing and thinking exist for the sake of love -- for the sake of building people up in faith. Thinking that produces pride instead of love is not true thinking.
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love
pride
thinking
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John Piper |