Think Quotes

“What defines us as Christians is not most profoundly that we have come to know him but that he took note of us and made us his own.”
― John Piper, Think: The Life of the Mind and the Love of God

“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 make his manifold glory known and loved, then to treat any subject without reference to God’s glory is not scholarship but insurrection.”
― John Piper, Think: The Life of the Mind and the Love of God

“The ultimate difference between God's wisdom and man's wisdom is how they relate to the glory of God's grace in Christ crucified. God's wisdom makes the glory of God's grace our supreme treasure. But man's wisdom delights in seeing himself as resourceful, self-sufficient, self determining, and not utterly dependent on God's free grace.”
― John Piper, Think: The Life of the Mind and the Love of God

“Relativism poses as humble by saying: “We are not smart enough to know what the truth is—or if there is any universal truth.” It sounds humble. But look carefully at what is happening. It’s like a servant saying: I am not smart enough to know which person here is my master—or if I even have a master. The result is that I don’t have a master and I can be my own master. That is in reality what happens to relativists: In claiming to be too lowly to know the truth, they exalt themselves as supreme arbiter of what they can think and do. This is not humility. This is the essence of pride.”
― John Piper, Think: The Life of the Mind and the Love of God

“When you are deeply peaceful and confident that, because of Christ, God will bring you safely to his eternal kingdom and be the all-satisfying Treasure of your life forever, then you are free to see the truth, and love the truth, and speak the truth no matter what, and joyfully spread a passion for the truth whose name is Jesus.”
― John Piper, Think: The Life of the Mind and the Love of God

“I count myself as one of the number of those who learn as they write and write as they learn.”
― John Piper, Think: The Life of the Mind and the Love of God

“Pride is no respecter of persons. The serious thinkers may be humble, and the careless mystics may be arrogant.”
― John Piper, Think: The Life of the Mind and the Love of God

“The humility of wisdom is the happy consciousness that all things come from God, are sustained by God, and exist for God. This wisdom is rooted in the pride-destroying, joy-giving cross of Christ.”
― John Piper, Think: The Life of the Mind and the Love of God

“God is not honored by groundless love. In fact, there is no such thing. If we do not know anything about God, there is nothing in our mind to awaken love. If love does not come from knowing God, there is no point in calling it love for God.”
― John Piper, Think: The Life of the Mind and the Love of God

“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.”
― John Piper, Think: The Life of the Mind and the Love of God

“R.C. Sproul has written that "we live in what may be the most anti-intellectual period in the history of Western civilization." As far as my fundamentalist upbringing goes, Noll says that for the kind of thinking that embraces society, the arts, the human person, and nature—"for that kind of thinking the habits of mind fundamentalism encouraged can only be called disaster.”
― John Piper, Think: The Life of the Mind and the Love of God

“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 make his manifold glory known and loved, then to treat any subject without reference to God’s glory is not scholarship but insurrection.”
― John Piper, Think: The Life of the Mind and the Love of God

“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.”
― John Piper, Think: The Life of the Mind and the Love of God

“Loving God with all our mind means that our thinking is wholly engaged to do all it can to awaken and express the heartfelt fullness of treasuring God above all things.”
― John Piper, Think: The Life of the Mind and the Love of God

“The apex of glorifying God is enjoying Him with the heart. But this is empty emotionalism where that joy is not awakened and sustained by true views of God for who He really is”
― John Piper, Think: The Life of the Mind and the Love of God