Brothers, We Are Not Professionals Quotes

“Banish professionalism from our midst, Oh God, an din its place put passionate prayer, poverty of spirit, hunger for God, rigorous study of holy things, white-hot devotion to Jesus Christ, utter indifference to all material gain, and unremitting labor to rescue the perishing, perfect the saints, and glorify our sovreign Lord.

Humble us, O God, under your mighty hand, and let us rise, not as professionals, but as witnesses and partakers of the sufferings of Christ.”
― John Piper, Brothers, We Are Not Professionals: A Plea to Pastors for Radical Ministry

“Legalism is a more dangerous disease than alcoholism because it doesn’t look like one. Alcoholism makes men fail; legalism helps them succeed in the world. Alcoholism makes men depend on the bottle; legalism makes them self-sufficient, depending on no one. Alcoholism destroys moral resolve; legalism gives it strength. Alcoholics don’t feel welcome in the church; legalists love to hear their morality extolled in church.”
― John Piper, Brothers, We Are Not Professionals: A Plea to Pastors for Radical Ministry

“The domestication of God is a curse on preaching in our day. We need to recover reality and the language of majesty and holiness and awe and glory: “Who is like you, O Lord, among the gods? Who is like you, majestic in holiness, awesome in glorious deeds, doing wonders?” (Exod. 15:11).”
― John Piper, Brothers, We Are Not Professionals: A Plea to Pastors for Radical Ministry

“There is an infinite difference between the pastor whose heart is set on being a professional and the pastor whose heart is set on being the aroma of Christ, the fragrance of death to some and eternal life to others (2 Cor. 2:15–16).”
― John Piper, Brothers, We Are Not Professionals: A Plea to Pastors for Radical Ministry

“When we depend upon organizations, we get what organizations can do; when we depend upon education, we get what education can do; when we depend upon man, we get what man can do; but when we depend upon prayer, we get what God can do. A. C. Dixon”
― John Piper, Brothers, We Are Not Professionals: A Plea to Pastors for Radical Ministry

“When we depend upon organizations, we get what organizations can do; when we depend upon education, we get what education can do; when we depend upon man, we get what man can do; but when we depend upon prayer, we get what God can do.1”
― John Piper, Brothers, We Are Not Professionals: A Plea to Pastors for Radical Ministry

“So I arrive at this definition of gratitude. Gratitude is a species of joy which arises in your heart in response to the goodwill of someone who does or tries to do you a favor.”
― John Piper, Brothers, We Are Not Professionals: A Plea to Pastors for Radical Ministry

“remember this: there is no standing still in the Christian life. Either we are advancing toward salvation, or we are drifting away to destruction. Drifting is mortal danger.”
― John Piper, Brothers, We Are Not Professionals: A Plea to Pastors for Radical Ministry

“The life-giving preacher is a man of God, whose heart is ever athirst for God, whose soul is ever following hard after God, whose eye is single to God, and in whom by the power of God’s Spirit the flesh and the world have been crucified and his ministry is like the generous flood of a life-giving river.”
― John Piper, Brothers, We Are Not Professionals: A Plea to Pastors for Radical Ministry

“We may think we are centering our lives on God when we are really making Him a means to self-esteem.”
― John Piper, Brothers, We Are Not Professionals: A Plea to Pastors for Radical Ministry

“We must train our people that it is not irreverent to see difficulties in the biblical text and to think hard about how they can be resolved.”
― John Piper, Brothers, We Are Not Professionals: A Plea to Pastors for Radical Ministry

“A pastor who feels competent in himself to produce eternal fruit—which is the only kind that matters—knows neither God nor himself. A pastor who does not know the rhythm of desperation and deliverance must have his sights only on what man can achieve.”
― John Piper, Brothers, We Are Not Professionals: A Plea to Pastors for Radical Ministry

“In fact the astonishing thing is that every good deed we do in dependence on Him to “pay Him back” does just the opposite; it puts us ever deeper in debt to His grace.”
― John Piper, Brothers, We Are Not Professionals: A Plea to Pastors for Radical Ministry

“the destruction of conceived human life—whether embryonic, fetal, or viable—is an assault on the unique person-forming work of God. And therefore to the degree that we recognize even in fallen person-hood a unique value, because of its potential to glorify God with conscious obedience and praise, to that degree will we shrink back with reverence and fear from assaulting or obstructing the”
― John Piper, Brothers We Are Not Professionals

“What we suffer from today is humility in the wrong place. Modesty has moved from the organ of ambition. Modesty has settled upon the organ of conviction; where it was never meant to be. A man was meant to be doubtful about himself, but undoubting about the truth; this has been exactly reversed. Nowadays the part of a man that a man does assert is exactly the part he ought not to assert—himself. The part he doubts is exactly the part he ought not to doubt—the Divine Reason… . We are on the road to producing a race of man too mentally modest to believe in the multiplication table.”
― John Piper, Brothers We Are Not Professionals

“In the first case, we use our own power to make ourselves moral. In the second case, we use our own power to make the church moral. In the first case, we fail to rely on the power of God for our own sanctification. In the second case, we fail to rely on the power of God for the sanctification of others.”
― John Piper, Brothers We Are Not Professionals

“...when Paul says in Romans 4:3, 5, 9, and 22 that 'faith is counted as righteousness,' he does not mean that our faith is our righteousness. He means that our faith unites us to Christ so that God's righteousness in Christ is reckoned to us.”
― John Piper, Brothers, We Are Not Professionals: A Plea to Pastors for Radical Ministry

“The Bible-oriented preacher wants the congregation to know that his words, if they have any abiding worth, are in accord with God’s words. He wants this to be obvious to them. That is part of his humility and his authority. Therefore, he constantly tries to show the people that his ideas are coming from the Bible. He is hesitant to go too far toward points that are not demonstrable from the Bible.”
― John Piper, Brothers, We Are Not Professionals: A Plea to Pastors for Radical Ministry

“Nowhere else in all the Bible is there a preface to a command like this one: “I charge you in the presence of God and of Christ Jesus, who is to judge the living and the dead, and by his appearing and his kingdom: preach the word” (2 Tim. 4:1–2). The command is three short words. “Preach the word”—in the context of 2 Timothy 3:16–17 meaning the “God-breathed” word of Scripture. But the introduction to the command is spectacular. It is calculated to make us take a deep breath and be sober minded about the task of preaching. “I charge you.” “In the presence of God.” “And in the presence of Christ Jesus.” “He will judge.” “The living.” “And the dead.” “By his appearing.” “And by his kingdom.” In view of these weightiest of realities, preach the word. How could Paul have made preaching any more momentous”
― John Piper, Brothers, We Are Not Professionals: A Plea to Pastors for Radical Ministry

“Perseverance Here is a key to great earnestness in preaching. If you really believe that “[those who endure] to the end will be saved” (Mark 13:13), and that not only the first act of faith but all subsequent, acts of persevering faith are sustained by the Spirit through the Word of God, then virtually every sermon is a “salvation sermon,” and the souls of the saints are being saved every Sunday.”
― John Piper, Brothers, We Are Not Professionals: A Plea to Pastors for Radical Ministry

“Sin’s outcome is eternal misery. What infinite ugliness then must be the ugliness of sin. This is the constant subject of preaching, for this is what we must ever overcome. It is more serious than Satan and sickness and insanity. None of those can damn a soul. Only sin can damn. This we must defeat in preaching, or all is in vain. Flippancy in and around our preaching communicates to people that sin is not as serious as the Bible says it is.”
― John Piper, Brothers, We Are Not Professionals: A Plea to Pastors for Radical Ministry

“I believe pastors should put their lives and ministries on the line in this issue. The cowardice of some pastors when it comes to preaching against abortion appalls me. Many treat the dismemberment of unborn humans as an untouchable issue on the par with partisan politics. Some have bought into the incredible notion that they can be personally pro-life but publicly pro-choice or noncommittal. In response to this attitude our church sponsored an ad in the Minneapolis StarTribune with these simple words: “I am personally pro-life, but politically pro-choice”—Pontius Pilate.”
― John Piper, Brothers, We Are Not Professionals: A Plea to Pastors for Radical Ministry

“What makes born-again people glad is not at bottom that they have God’s gifts but that they have God.”
― John Piper, Brothers, We Are Not Professionals: A Plea to Pastors for Radical Ministry

“So the goal of spiritual leadership is to muster people to join God in living for God’s glory.”
― John Piper, Brothers, We Are Not Professionals: A Plea to Pastors for Radical Ministry

“Education is helping people understand something they don’t already understand. Or, more accurately, education is helping people (young or old) learn how to get an understanding that they didn’t already have. Education is cultivating the life of the mind so that it knows how to grow in true understanding. That impulse was unleashed by God’s inspiring a book with complex demanding paragraphs in it.”
― John Piper, Brothers, We Are Not Professionals: A Plea to Pastors for Radical Ministry

“Emotions are like a river flowing out of one’s heart. Form is like the riverbanks. Without them the river runs shallow and dissipates on the plain. But banks make the river run deep. Why else have humans for centuries reached for poetry when we have deep affections to express? The creation of a form happens because someone feels a passion. How ironic, then, that we often fault form when the real evil is a dry spring.”
― John Piper, Brothers, We Are Not Professionals: A Plea to Pastors for Radical Ministry