Look at the Book

The prophecies of the Bible can be confusing. One way to help us interpret them is to understand how prophets saw the future.

If men and women and children could see rightly, they would fall over themselves to enter the kingdom of a King like ours.

Only he whose hands bear the scars of nails, hands strong enough to bear our wrath, can hold the scepter over the redeemed people of God.

When God came to conquer his enemies, he prevailed so thoroughly that they became useful for his purposes and our good.

The Bible is beautifully coherent. Join John Piper as he studies the great prophecy given of Jesus in Isaiah.

If you read the Bible and don’t feel anything, cry out to God, “Satisfy me in the morning with your steadfast love.”

We are so prone to distraction. Has the prayer “Unite my heart to fear your name” ever been more relevant?

God must give us both eyes to see his glory in the word and hearts to love that glory.

What can I do when I don’t want to read my Bible?

When Paul thought of Christian ministry, he thought of a soldier, an athlete, and a farmer. Do you?

You do not need new curriculum to disciple someone in the Bible; you need supernatural strength from God.

If you think you have received grace but have no new power to seek God and kill sin, you may not have received God’s grace.

Those who expect to have spiritual insight without thinking hard do not know how God gives understanding.

If you desire God to get glory from your life, take your joy in him very seriously.

Pursuing greater, deeper joy in God increases, not diminishes or hinders, our love for other people.

Suffering with joy in this world is one of the greatest advertisements for the reality of the next.

Joy in Christ is not passive or timid. It severs, with holy aggression, all boasting and self-pity still within us.

If our faith in Jesus does not involve an enjoying of Jesus, it is not saving faith.

The essence of genuine conversion to Christ is awakening to Christ as supremely valuable.

We should pursue our fullest and most lasting satisfaction in God because to find that satisfaction anywhere else is the essence of evil.

It is our duty, not just our opportunity, to pursue God. And he underlines this reality by threatening judgment if we will not seek happiness in him.

God cares more about your happiness than you do. He is so serious about your joy that he threatens hell if you refuse to find it in him.

Christian Hedonism: A life devoted to pursuing the fullest and longest pleasure in God through Jesus Christ.

God does not call us to stand firm in our own willpower, relying on our own strength. He calls us to stand firm in the Lord.

Other Christians will stand as evidence on the last day that you truly loved the Lord Jesus during your lifetime.

How can the apostle Paul call other believers “my joy” when he just said that he counts everything as loss compared to knowing Christ?

The apostle Paul expressed a deep love and longing in his letters. How often do you express that kind of love to other Christians?

How can God say he will provide us with an escape in our tests and trials while also saying he will help us endure them?

Don’t limit the word “temptation” to something that lures us into sin. Anything that tries to pull us away from God is a temptation. Anything.

When this life comes to an end, when our frail bodies sputter for the last time, God will raise us from the dead and give us glorious bodies.

Someday soon we get to exchange our crippled and lowly body for a glorious and heavenly one.

If you are Christ’s, you don’t belong here. This is not your home. Your citizenship is in heaven.

Even though Paul could outdo every Pharisee in law-keeping, he had no confidence in the law. But he had full confidence in the cross.

God’s enemies will face God’s eternal wrath. So who are these enemies of the cross, and how do I know I am not one of them?

The cross was designed by God to humble us. It reminds us that we need Christ’s blood to rescue us, and his power to strengthen us.

To love the world and all its riches may scratch an itch for a moment, but it will cost you everything in the end.

As hard as it may be, we must face the reality that hell exists and is promised to all of God’s enemies.

God does not call us to learn just from Paul’s teaching but also from his emotions. Do you weep over the lost like the apostle Paul?

The question is not if you are imitating, but who. We either imitate those who walk toward heaven or those who walk toward hell.

God has given you life to honor him, display him, and summon others to follow him.

Though God may take away, he has made a promise — and sealed it with his Son’s blood — that he will give back more.

We have a refuge in times of trouble, safety amid life’s storms. Only a fool curses the shelter and runs into the eye of the storm.

No suffering takes God by surprise. He alone is the perfect help in our pain. Should all around our soul give way, he then is all our hope and stay.

We cannot respond however we want when we suffer. Though we can grieve and mourn, if we never get to worship, we’ve stopped short.

If God stripped away our gifts — our income, our family, even our own health — would we curse him or bless his name?

Job remained steadfast in his suffering and has left us with a model for how to trust God with our pain.

No one starts as a mature Christian. Keep seeking God. Keep laboring to grow. And keep trusting that God will bring about our maturity.

God changes minds through ordinary means: Our gaze fixed upon his word, our knees bowed in prayer, and our time spent with our eternal family.

We cannot disagree with Christians in any way we want. God has given us boundaries and ways forward.

A heavenly mindset will not be lofty and self-righteous, but humble and God-dependent.