Reading the Bible Supernaturally Quotes

“This is how God has designed the Scriptures to work for human transformation and for the glory of God: the Scriptures reveal God’s glory. This glory, God willing, is seen by those who read the Bible. This seeing gives rise, by God’s grace, to savoring God above all things—treasuring him, hoping in him, feeling him as our greatest reward, tasting him as our all-satisfying good. And this savoring transforms our lives—freeing us from the slavery of selfishness and overflowing in love to others. This joy-sustained, God-exalting transformation of love is then seen by others, who, by God’s grace, glorify God because of it.”
― John Piper, Reading the Bible Supernaturally: Seeing and Savoring the Glory of God in Scripture

“Genuine love is the glad effort to make others glad in God forever. Genuine love is being willing to suffer and die to draw as many people as we can into the pursuit and enjoyment of God.”
― John Piper, Reading the Bible Supernaturally: Seeing and Savoring the Glory of God in Scripture

“True worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth” (John 4:23). Truth matters. There is no real worship without it. Intense affections for God, when we do not know God, are not truly affection for God. They are affections for a distortion of God in our imagination.”
― John Piper, Reading the Bible Supernaturally: Seeing and Savoring the Glory of God in Scripture

“What this means for our reading the Scriptures is that seeing the glory of God may not always awaken, first, the sweetness of his worth and beauty. It may awaken the sorrows of remembered sin and remaining corruption in our hearts. “Savoring” this painful truth would mean welcoming it rather than denying it or twisting it. It would mean being thankful and letting the rebuke and the correction have their full effect in contrition and humility. And it would mean letting it lead us to the mercies of God and the sweet relief that comes from his saving grace in Christ.”
― John Piper, Reading the Bible Supernaturally: Seeing and Savoring the Glory of God in Scripture

“Which means, therefore, that our Bible reading is never just for seeing, never just for learning and doctrine. It is not even just for savoring, if that savoring is thought of in a private way that leaves us unchanged in our relationship with others. No. We read the Bible—we always read the Bible—for the kind of seeing and savoring Christ that transforms us into his likeness.”
― John Piper, Reading the Bible Supernaturally: Seeing and Savoring the Glory of God in Scripture

“As soon as God’s Word becomes known through you, the devil will afflict you, will make a real doctor of you, and will teach you by his temptations to seek and to love God’s Word. For I myself . . . owe my papists many thanks for so beating, pressing, and frightening me through the devil’s raging that they have turned me into a fairly good theologian.”
― John Piper, Reading the Bible Supernaturally: Seeing and Savoring the Glory of God in Scripture

“One of the places where the method of sentence diagramming is laid out fully and helpfully is in chapter 5 of Thomas Schreiner’s Interpreting the Pauline Epistles.”
― John Piper, Reading the Bible Supernaturally: Seeing and Savoring the Glory of God in Scripture

“Jonathan Edwards once formed this resolution: “Resolved, when I think of any theorem in divinity to be solved, immediately to do what I can towards solving it, if circumstances don’t hinder.”
― John Piper, Reading the Bible Supernaturally: Seeing and Savoring the Glory of God in Scripture

“Resolved: To study the Scriptures so steadily, constantly, and frequently, as that I may find, and plainly perceive, myself to grow in the knowledge of the same. Jonathan Edwards”
― John Piper, Reading the Bible Supernaturally: Seeing and Savoring the Glory of God in Scripture

“The historic view, and the one I am assuming here, is that God’s intentions are present in all of Scripture, and they are mediated to us through a proper understanding of what the human authors intended to communicate when they wrote.”
― John Piper, Reading the Bible Supernaturally: Seeing and Savoring the Glory of God in Scripture

“Lewis was once asked by a person who did not share his (or my) aim in reading: Why should I turn from a real present experience—​​​what the poem means to me, what happens to me when I read it—​​​to inquire about the poet’s intentions or reconstructions, always uncertain of what it may have meant to his contemporaries? Lewis responded: There seem to be two answers. One, is that the poem in my head which I make from my mistranslations of Chaucer or misunderstandings of Donne, may not be so good as the work Chaucer or Donne actually made. Secondly, why not have both? After enjoying what I made of it, why not go back to the text this time looking up the hard words, puzzling out the allusions and discovering that some metrical delights in my first experience where due to my fortunate mispronunciations, and see whether I can enjoy the poet’s poem, not necessarily instead of, but in addition to my own.3”
― John Piper, Reading the Bible Supernaturally: Seeing and Savoring the Glory of God in Scripture

“I shall, therefore, fix this assertion as a sacred truth: Whoever, in the diligent and immediate study of the Scripture to know the mind of God therein so as to do it, doth abide in fervent supplications, in and by Jesus Christ, for supplies of the Spirit of grace, to lead him into all truth, to reveal and make known unto him the truth as it is in Jesus, to give him an understanding of the Scriptures and the will of God therein, he shall be preserved from pernicious errors, and attain that degree in knowledge as shall be sufficient unto the guidance and preservation of the life of God in the whole of his faith and obedience.1”
― John Piper, Reading the Bible Supernaturally: Seeing and Savoring the Glory of God in Scripture

“Charles Spurgeon put it like this: We may hammer away at a text sometimes in meditation, and strike it again and again, and yet it may not yield to us, but we cry to God, and straightway the text opens, and we see concealed in it wondrous treasures of wisdom and of grace. . . . To read only is unprofitable: to pray without reading is not so soul-enriching; but when the two run together, they are like the horses pulling the chariot, and they speed along right merrily.4”
― John Piper, Reading the Bible Supernaturally: Seeing and Savoring the Glory of God in Scripture

“Here’s the way Jonathan Edwards describes the paradox of God’s grace and power in our lives: We are not merely passive in it, nor yet does God do some and we do the rest, but God does all and we do all. God produces all and we act all. For that is what he produces, our own acts. God is the only proper author and fountain; we only are the proper actors. We are in different respects wholly passive and wholly active.2”
― John Piper, Reading the Bible Supernaturally: Seeing and Savoring the Glory of God in Scripture

“Is the Bible the Word of God? Then be sure you never read it without fervent prayer for the help and teaching of the Holy Spirit. Here is the rock on which many make shipwreck. They do not ask for wisdom and instruction, and so they find the Bible dark, and carry nothing away from it. You should pray for the Spirit to guide you into all truth. You should beg the Lord Jesus Christ to “open your understanding,” as He did that of His disciples. The Lord God, by whose inspiration the book was written, keeps the keys of the book, and alone can enable you to understand it profitably. Nine times over in one Psalm does David cry, “Teach me.” Five times over, in the same Psalm, does he say, “Give me understanding.” Well says John Owen, Dean of Christ Church, Oxford, “There is a sacred light in the Word: but there is a covering and veil on the eyes of men, so that they cannot behold it aright. Now, the removal of this veil is the peculiar work of the Holy Spirit.”
― John Piper, Reading the Bible Supernaturally: Seeing and Savoring the Glory of God in Scripture

“There is no glory, no peace, no joy, no satisfaction in this world, to be compared with what we receive by that weak and imperfect view which we have of the glory of Christ by faith; yea, all the joys of the world are a thing of nought in comparison of what we so receive.1”
― John Piper, Reading the Bible Supernaturally: Seeing and Savoring the Glory of God in Scripture

“He irradiates the mind,” as John Owen puts it, “with a spiritual light, whereby it is enabled to discern the glory of spiritual things.”3 This”
― John Piper, Reading the Bible Supernaturally: Seeing and Savoring the Glory of God in Scripture

“God is glorified not only by His glory’s being seen, but by its being rejoiced in.”
― John Piper, Reading the Bible Supernaturally: Seeing and Savoring the Glory of God in Scripture

“When the heart is cast indeed into the mold of the doctrine that the mind embraceth,—​​​when the evidence and necessity of the truth abides in us,—​​​when not the sense of the words only is in our heads, but the sense of the things abides in our hearts,—​​​when we have communion with God in the doctrine we contend for,—​​​then shall we be garrisoned by the grace of God against all the assaults of men.9”
― John Piper, Reading the Bible Supernaturally: Seeing and Savoring the Glory of God in Scripture

“Stephen Charnock (1628–1680) uses a quaint phrase to express what I am trying to say. God’s holiness, he says, is that he “works with a becomingness to his own excellency.”
― John Piper, Reading the Bible Supernaturally: Seeing and Savoring the Glory of God in Scripture

“I recall one day when I was in college, Clyde Kilby, my favorite English teacher, said something to this effect: “One of the greatest tragedies of the fall is that we get tired of familiar glories.”
― John Piper, Reading the Bible Supernaturally: Seeing and Savoring the Glory of God in Scripture

“When the churches of Galatia were starting to drift away from the gospel of Jesus, Paul wrote to them and said, “O foolish Galatians! Who has bewitched you? It was before your eyes that Jesus Christ was publicly portrayed as crucified” (Gal. 3:1). This “portrayal” came with words, not pictures. But it was so real, and so vivid, that Paul said it was an appeal to their eyes—​​​“before your eyes Jesus Christ was publicly portrayed.” They saw the peculiar glory of Christ in the preaching of the gospel.”
― John Piper, Reading the Bible Supernaturally: Seeing and Savoring the Glory of God in Scripture

“Another way to say it is that God reveals more of himself through his word when it is read in community than he does when it is read in isolation.”
― John Piper, Reading the Bible Supernaturally: Seeing and Savoring the Glory of God in Scripture

“God does not intend to replace us when we are united to Christ; he intends to renew us and empower us and guide us.”
― John Piper, Reading the Bible Supernaturally: Seeing and Savoring the Glory of God in Scripture

“If we are attracted by the desirability of something God promises, and hope to enjoy it without enjoying God in it and by it, then we are turning God’s promise into a summons to idolatry.”
― John Piper, Reading the Bible Supernaturally: Seeing and Savoring the Glory of God in Scripture

“God did not create the world to keep his glory invisible, and he did not re-create Christians to keep our passion for his glory invisible”
― John Piper, Reading the Bible Supernaturally: Seeing and Savoring the Glory of God in Scripture

“No man can have the least ground of assurance that he hath seen Christ and his glory by faith, without some effects of it in changing him into his likeness. John Owen”
― John Piper, Reading the Bible Supernaturally: Seeing and Savoring the Glory of God in Scripture

“Emotions for God that do not spring from seeing God cannot honor God.”
― John Piper, Reading the Bible Supernaturally: Seeing and Savoring the Glory of God in Scripture

“God reveals more or less of his glory in different times and settings. But it is always his glory! It is never minor. Never insignificant. Never negligible. It is always some measure of the infinite excellence. It is always worthy of seeing and knowing and loving.”
― John Piper, Reading the Bible Supernaturally: Seeing and Savoring the Glory of God in Scripture

“We were made to find our deepest pleasure in admiring what is infinitely admirable, that is, the glory of God. The glory of God is not the psychological projection of human longing onto reality. On the contrary, inconsolable human longing is the evidence that we were made for God’s glory.”
― John Piper, Reading the Bible Supernaturally: Seeing and Savoring the Glory of God in Scripture