Bloodlines Quotes

“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.”
― John Piper, Bloodlines: Race, Cross, and the Christian

“Racial tensions are rife with pride—the pride of white supremacy, the pride of black power, the pride of intellectual analysis, the pride of anti-intellectual scorn, the pride of loud verbal attack, and the pride of despising silence, the pride that feels secure, and the pride that masks fear. Where pride holds sway, there is no hope for the kind of listening and patience and understanding and openness to correction that relationships require.”
― John Piper, Bloodlines: Race, Cross, and the Christian

“Guilt is a huge player in the way blacks and whites relate to each other. It’s huge and deadly when it is denied. It’s huge and deadly when it is wallowed in. It’s huge and deadly when it is exploited. There is no deliverance and no relief and no healing in any of those ways of dealing with guilt. Denial drives it below the surface where it creates endless illusions and self-justifications. Wallowing in it produces phony humility and obsequiousness and moral cowardice. Exploiting it gives a false sense of power that turns out to be only the weapon of weakness. If guilt is not dealt with more deeply, there will be no way forward.”
― John Piper, Bloodlines: Race, Cross, and the Christian

“And now let us listen to the groans of Frederick Douglass, feel the lash with Amy, endure the satire of Du Bois, and measure the wrath of Malcolm X; let us contemplate the pathos of black childhood and the tragedy of black womanhood. And let us not forget that [as Martin Luther King Jr. said] “he who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetrate it. He who accepts evil without protesting against it is really cooperating with it.” And let us also remember that if God has given us a revelation of the true nature of man, surely we will render account if we do not live in the light of that revelation, and especially so if we are called to the holy office of the Christian ministry.”
― John Piper, Bloodlines: Race, Cross, and the Christian

“The more diverse the people groups who forsake their gods to receive the grace of the true God and follow Christ, the more visible is the superior beauty and power of Christ over all his competitors.”
― John Piper, Bloodlines: Race, Cross, and the Christian

“The church is not called to be responsible for the way unbelievers run their lives. But we are called to be responsible, by the power of the Spirit and for the glory of Jesus, for the way believers live and the kind of relationships that are cultivated in the fellowship of the church.”
― John Piper, Bloodlines: Race, Cross, and the Christian

“We Christians are called to love our enemies and to suffer injustice rather than return evil for evil (Matt. 5:43–48; Rom. 12:14).”
― John Piper, Bloodlines: Race, Cross, and the Christian

“Whatever the law says it speaks to those who are under the law, so that every mouth may be stopped, and the whole world may be held accountable to God” (Rom. 3:9–10, 19).”
― John Piper, Bloodlines: Race, Cross, and the Christian

“Make the mule of your tongue serve the mercy of your heart.”
― John Piper, Bloodlines: Race, Cross, and the Christian

“If we abandon the fullness of the gospel to make racial and ethnic diversity quicker or easier, we create a mere shadow of the kingdom, an imitation.”
― John Piper, Bloodlines: Race, Cross, and the Christian

“The bloodline of Jesus Christ is deeper than the bloodlines of race. The death and resurrection of the Son of God for sinners is the only sufficient power to bring the bloodlines of race into the single bloodline of the cross.”
― John Piper, Bloodlines: Race, Cross, and the Christian

“We know life is short and eternity is long. This eternal perspective does not take us out of the world. It gives us freedom from self-pity.”
― John Piper, Bloodlines: Race, Cross, and the Christian

“When you are the majority ethnicity, nothing you do is ethnic. It’s just the way it’s done. When you are a minority, everything you do has color.”
― John Piper, Bloodlines: Race, Cross, and the Christian

“The difference is that when you develop patterns of sin in the majority race, they have no racial connotation. Since majority people don’t think of themselves in
terms of race, none of our dysfunctions is viewed as a racial dysfunction.

When you are the majority ethnicity, nothing you do is ethnic. It’s just the way it’s done. When you are a minority, everything you do has colour.”
― John Piper, Bloodlines: Race, Cross, and the Christian

“the world we live in is a world where only the gospel of Jesus Christ can bring the kind of racial and ethnic harmony that we were made to enjoy.”
― John Piper, Bloodlines: Race, Cross, and the Christian

“We humans have never had the resources in ourselves to love each other well across ethnic lines. There is too much selfishness in all of us.”
― John Piper, Bloodlines: Race, Cross, and the Christian

“The aim of the gospel is the creation of people who are passionate for doing good rather than settling for the passionless avoidance of evil.”
― John Piper, Bloodlines: Race, Cross, and the Christian

“Every aspect of the way God views and saves sinners is designed to undermine racism and lead to a reconciled and redeemed humanity from every people group in the world.”
― John Piper, Bloodlines: Race, Cross, and the Christian

“Then what becomes of our boasting? It is excluded. By what kind of law? By a law of works? No, but by the law of faith. For we hold that one is justified by faith apart from works of the law. Or is God the God of Jews only? Is he not the God of Gentiles also? Yes, of Gentiles also, since God is one—who will justify the circumcised by faith and the uncircumcised through faith. ROMANS 3:27–30”
― John Piper, Bloodlines: Race, Cross, and the Christian

“The bloodline of Christ is deeper than the bloodlines of race.”
― John Piper, Bloodlines: Race, Cross, and the Christian

“Truth is grounded in God’s Word, not our works.”
― John Piper, Bloodlines: Race, Cross, and the Christian

“Only the gospel can do two seemingly contradictory things: destroy pride and increase courage. Destroy self-exaltation and increase confidence. Destroy the pushiness of self-assertion and deliver from the paralysis of self-doubt.”
― John Piper, Bloodlines: Race, Cross, and the Christian

“What is needed is a miracle. I mean that literally. A supernatural in-breaking of God through the gospel of Christ. It is not even possible to describe the hope-filled relational dynamics that may happen when the gospel explodes in two hearts that bring such radically different experiences of sin and suffering to the relationship.”
― John Piper, Bloodlines: Race, Cross, and the Christian

“...the gospel has an answer to both pride and guilt.”
― John Piper, Bloodlines: Race, Cross, and the Christian