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John Piper

John Piper

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.
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We can draw no deadlines for God. He hastens or He delays as he sees fit. And his timing is all-loving toward his children. On, that we might learn to be patient in the hour of darkness. I don't mean that we make peace with darkness. We fight for joy. But we fight as those who are saved by grace and held by Christ. We say...that our night will soon- in God's good timing- turn to day.
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Jesus calls for violence against our own lust because he loves our true and lasting joy.
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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.
topics: doctrine  
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...childlike wonder and awe have died. The scenery and poetry and music of the majesty of God have dried up like a forgotten peach at the back of the refrigerator.
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On the other hand, emotion without truth produces empty frenzy and cultivates shallow people who refuse the discipline of rigorous thought.
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Freedom in Christ is not freedom to do whatever you want; it is for sure-footed self-reflection and for avoiding the cultural bondage of sin. My freedom in Christ gives me eyes to see that not all things are helpful for me, helpful for others, or acceptable for my witness in the world.
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God created us in his image, male and female, with personhood and sexual passions, so that when he comes to us in this world there would be these powerful words and images to describe the promises and the pleasures of our covenant relationship with him through Christ.
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To know that our Father in heaven has ordained our pain is not a comfoftable truth, but it is comforting. That our pain has a loving and wise and all-powerful purpose behind it is better than any other view--weak God, cruel God, bumbling God, no God. To know that in his hands "this light momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison" (2 Corinthians 4:17) is profoundly reassuring.
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In the end, the only 'good name' that matters is not how men feel about us, but how God feels about us.
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The question of this book is simple: What is the best use of my smartphone in the flourishing of my life? To that end, my aim is to avoid both extremes: the utopian optimism of the technophiliac and the dystopian pessimistic of the technophobe.
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God’s grace is more clearly seen and more deeply savored in our weaknesses than in our strengths.
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The one God has chosen unconditionally he keeps invincibly. Being and staying a believer is decisively of sovereign grace.
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The horror of Hell is an echo of the infinite worth of God's glory.
topics: glory-of-god , hell  
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Life online is a whiplash between deep sorrow, unexpected joy, cheap laughs, profound thoughts, and dumb memes.
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The sad truth is that many of us are addicted to our phones because we crave immediate approval and affirmation. The fear we feel in our hearts when we are engaged online is the impulse that drives our "highly selective self-representations." We want to be loved and accepted by others, so we wash away our scars and defects. When we put this scrubbed-down representation of ourselves online, we tabulate the human approval in a commodity index of likes and shares. We post an image, then watch the immediate response. We refresh. We watch the stats climb-or stall. We gauge the immediate responses from friends, family members, and strangers. Did what we posted gain the immediate approval of others? We know within minutes. Even the promise of religious approval and the affirmations of other Christians is a gravitational pull that draws us toward our phones.
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Christians can be confident about their growth in sanctification and eternal security because they are confident in the God who promises it.
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God is willing and able to turn his judgements into joys . . . Don't ever think that the sin of your past means there is no hope for your future.
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real freedom is not liberty to do what we want or the absence of distress. Real freedom is the deep-seated confidence that God really will provide everything we need. The person who believes this is the freest of all persons on earth, because no matter what situation he finds himself in, he has nothing to fear. 
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It is not as important to God that we understand his purposes in a particular providence as it is that we trust in his character.
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Christian Hedonism is a philosophy of life built on the following five convictions: The longing to be happy is a universal human experience, and it is good, not sinful. We should never try to deny or resist our longing to be happy, as though it were a bad impulse. Instead, we should seek to intensify this longing and nourish it with whatever will provide the deepest and most enduring satisfaction. The deepest and most enduring happiness is found only in God. Not from God, but in God. The happiness we find in God reaches its consummation when it is shared with others in the manifold ways of love. To the extent that we try to abandon the pursuit of our own pleasure, we fail to honor God and love people. Or, to put it positively: The pursuit of pleasure is a necessary part of all worship and virtue. That is: The chief end of man is to glorify God by enjoying Him forever.
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