Future Grace - by John Piper

"Sin is what you do when your heart is not satisfied with God. No one sins out of duty. We sin because it holds out some promise of happiness. That promise enslaves us until we believe that God is more to be desired than life itself (Psalm 63:3)." (pg. 9-10)

"Could it be that gratitude for bygone grace has been pressed to serve as the power for holiness, which only faith in future grace was designed to perform?" (pg. 11)

"...faith is the God-appointed means of justification and sanctification because, better than any other act, it highlights the freedom of grace and magnifies the glory of God." (pg. 19)

"In regard to justification, faith is not the channel through which a power or a transformation flows to the soul of the believer, but rather faith is the occasion of God's forgiving and acquitting and reckoning as righteous. ... However, in regard to sanctification, faith is indeed the channel through which divine power and transformation flow to the soul; and the work of God through faith does indeed touch the soul, and change it." (pg. 26)

"The only debt that grace creates is the "debt" of relying on more grace for all that God calls us to be and do." (pg. 42)

"As unbelief gets the upper hand in our hearts, one of the effects is anxiety. The root cause of anxiety is a failure to trust all that God has promised to be for us in Jesus." (pg. 54)

"Every act of grace shown to a person because he is a sinner is also an act of mercy because his sin brings misery. And every act of mercy shown to a person because of his miserable plight is also an act of grace because he doesn't deserve it." (pg. 77)

"God made us alive and secured us in Christ so that he could make us the beneficiaries of everlasting kindness from infinite riches of grace. This is not because we are worthy. Quite the contrary, it is to show the infinite measure of his worth." (pg. 82-83)

"Belief is not merely an agreement with facts in the head; it is also an appetite for God in the heart, which fastens on Jesus for satisfaction." (pg. 86)

"Pride does not like the sovereignty of God. Therefore pride does not like the existence of God, because God is sovereign." (pg. 92)

"God reigns so supremely on behalf of his elect that everything which faces us in a lifetime of obedience and ministry will be subdued by the mighty hand of God and made the servant of our holiness and our everlasting joy in God." (pg. 116-117)

"Justification by faith secures final glorification. God has ordained it. God accomplishes it. The future grace of glorification is guaranteed by the past grace of justification." (pg. 125)

"...much of what makes us feel shame is not that we have brought dishonor to God by our actions, but that we have failed to give the appearance that other people admire. Much of our shame is not God-centered but self-centered. Until we get a good handle on this, we will not be able to battle the problem of shame at its root." (pg. 134)

"Loving your enemy doesn't earn you the reward of heaven. Treasuring the reward of heaven empowers you to love your enemy." (pg. 163)

"...the strength of patience hangs on our capacity to believe that God is up to something good for us in all our delays and detours. This requires great faith in future grace, because the evidence is seldom evident." (pg. 174)

"All future obedience comes by the power of future grace." (pg. 185)

"Therefore, two things are necessary for saving faith to emerge. One is to use our perception and our mind to hear and see and understand and validate a testimony to the truth of Christ. The other is that we must apprehend and embrace the spiritual beauty and worth of Christ through the illumination of the Holy Spirit." (pg. 202)

"The safest place in the universe is with our arms around the neck of God. And the most dangerous place is any path where we flee from his presence." (pg. 243)

"It is not the memory of past grace that 'wills and works for God's good pleasure.' It is God himself, graciously arriving each moment, that brings the future into the present." (pg. 292)

"When something drops into your life that seems to threaten your future, remember this: the first shockwaves of the bomb are not sin. The real danger is yielding to them. Giving in. Putting up no spiritual fight. And the root of that surrender is unbelief - a failure to fight for faith in future grace. A failure to cherish all that God promises to be for us in Jesus." (pg. 307)

"The key to assurance is not to eliminate the biblical commands for endurance, but rather to magnify grace as a future power to believe, as well as a past pardon of sin." (pg. 317)

"All true virtue comes from faith in future grace; and all sin comes from lack of faith in future grace." (pg. 323)

"Faith stands or falls on the truth that the future with God is more satisfying than the one promised by sin. Where this truth is embraced and God is cherished above all, the power of sin is broken." (pg. 326)

"...the test of whether our faith is the kind of faith that justifies is whether it is the kind of faith that sanctifies." (pg. 332)

"The challenge is not merely to pursue righteousness, but to prefer righteousness." (pg. 338)

"God so values our wholehearted faith in future grace that he will, graciously, take away everything else in the world that we might be tempted to rely on - even life itself." (pg. 347)

"If the nature of faith is to be satisfied with all that God is for us in Jesus, then the universal biblical mandate to believe is a radical and pervasive call to pursue our own happiness in God." (pg. 386)

"My discovery is that God is supreme not where he is simply served with duty but where he is savored with delight." (pg. 399)

John Piper, Future Grace (Sisters, Oregon: Multnomah Publishers, Inc., 1995)