Think Quotes

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“But when objective truth vanishes in the fog of relativism, the role of language changes dramatically. It’s no longer a humble servant for carrying precious truth. Now it throws off the yoke of servanthood and takes on a power of its own. It doesn’t submit to objective, external reality; it creates its own reality. It no longer serves to display truth. Now it seeks to obtain the preferences of the speaker. This gives rise to every manner of spin. The goal of language is no longer the communication of reality but the manipulation of reality. It no longer functions in the glorious capacity of affirming the embrace of truth, but now it functions in the devious capacity of concealing defection from the truth.”
― John Piper, Think: The Life of the Mind and the Love of God

“No One Is a Relativist at the Bank”
― John Piper, Think: The Life of the Mind and the Love of God

“Asking questions is the key to understanding.”
― John Piper, Think: The Life of the Mind and the Love of God

“the main reason God has given us minds is that we might seek out and find all the reasons that exist for treasuring him in all things and above all things.”
― John Piper, Think: The Life of the Mind and the Love of God

“It is my eager expectation and hope that . . . Christ will be honored in my body, whether by life or by death. For to me to live is Christ, and to die is gain. . . . To depart and be with Christ . . . is far better. . . . I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. (Phil. 1:20–21, 23; 3:8)”
― John Piper, Think: The Life of the Mind and the Love of God

“Thinking is one of the important ways that we put the fuel of knowledge on the fires of worship and service to the world.”
― John Piper, Think: The Life of the Mind and the Love of God

“If you cannot embrace the pain of learning but must have instant gratification, you forfeit the greatest rewards of life.”
― 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

“all thinking—all learning, all education, all schooling, formal or informal, simple or sophisticated—exists for the  love of God and the  love of man. It exists to help us know God more so that we may treasure him more. It exists to bring as much good to other people as we can— especially the eternal good of enjoying God through Christ.”
― John Piper, Think: The Life of the Mind and the Love of God

“Edwards’s piety continued on in the revivalist tradition, his theology continued on in academic Calvinism, but there were no successors to his God-centered worldview or his profoundly theological philosophy. The disappearance of Edwards’s perspective in American Christian history has been a tragedy. Mark Noll”
― John Piper, Think: The Life of the Mind and the Love of God

“The point here is that there is no true knowledge of God and no salvation apart from childlike dependence on the grace of God in Christ crucified. If we are not willing to see ourselves as helpless, ungodly sinners and cast ourselves for mercy on the grace of God in Christ, we will not know God or be saved by him.”
― John Piper, Think: The Life of the Mind and the Love of God

“Relativism, as we saw in the previous chapter, undermines that effort. It kidnaps the happy handmaiden of truth and makes her serve the pride and pleasure of pragmatists. Relativists don’t pursue truth. They make the denial of truth serve them.”
― John Piper, Think: The Life of the Mind and the Love of God

“So what has become of the mind and its handmaid, language, here in Matthew 21:23–27? The mind has become the nimble, dodging slave of the priests’ and elders’ passions. And language does the tricky work of covering up the corruption. Truth is irrelevant here in guiding what they say. It doesn’t matter whether John’s baptism is from heaven or from man. Truth does not matter. What matters is that we not be shamed and that we not be harmed. So we will use language to cover our indifference to truth and our allegiance to the gods of pride and comfort; and we will say, “We do not know.”
― John Piper, Think: The Life of the Mind and the Love of God

“Thinking is not just entertainment on the stage of life where nothing is real. It is really useful in knowing the God who is really there. It is useful in knowing what God has revealed about himself and about this world and how we should live in it.”
― John Piper, Think: The Life of the Mind and the Love of God

“Thomas Goodwin (1600–1679), one of the English Puritan pastors and, for a time, president of Magdalen College, Oxford, expressed this wonderful mutual benefit of serious thinking and spiritual affections: Indeed, thoughts and affections are sibi mutuo causae—the mutual causes of each other: “Whilst I mused, the fire burned” (Psalm 39:3); so that thoughts are the bellows that kindle and inflame affections; and then if they are inflamed, they cause thoughts to boil; therefore men newly converted to God, having new and strong affections, can with more pleasure think of God than any.3”
― John Piper, Think: The Life of the Mind and the Love of God

“In other words, in all my rejoicing over all the good things that God has made, God himself is the heart of my joy, the gladness of my joy. In all my rejoicing in everything, there is a central rejoicing in God. Every joy that does not have God as its central gladness is a hollow joy and in the end will burst like a bubble. This is what led Augustine to pray, “He loves thee too little who loves anything together with Thee, which he loves not for thy sake.”2”
― John Piper, Think: The Life of the Mind and the Love of God