Paul David Tripp Quotes

As we face our vulnerability and weakness, there are things you and I should pray for regularly. We should pray for purity of desire, wisdom to recognize the enemy's tricks, and strength to fight the battles we can't avoid.

Becaise I love God, I want to handle his truth with accuracy, clarity, and specificity. I want to build bridges of understanding from the wisdom of the Word to the details of people's lives. And because I love people, I will not be satisfied with lobbing grenades of general truth at them. Rather, through good questions, committed listening, and careful interpretation, I will enter their world with the understanding necessary to bring Christ's help to where it is really needed.

Be thankful his majesty is your protection, his glory is your motivation, his grace is your help, and his wisdom is your direction. He is infinitely smarter than you and me in our most brilliant moments

Don't be discouraged at the spiritual war you're called to fight every day. The Lord almighty is with you and wars on your behalf.

Whatever sits on the other side of your "if-only" is where you are looking for life, peace, joy, hope, and lasting contentment of heart.

Perhaps before you start confessing your sin you should first confess your righteousness.

Here's the bottom line: you and I struggle with the faithfulness of God, not because he has been unfaithful, but because we have.

Every day you preach to yourself a gospel of your loneliness, inability, and lack of resources or you faithfully preach to yourself the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ.

. . .most people who are angry with God are angry with him for being God. They're not angry because he has failed to deliver what he promised, They're angry because he has failed to deliver what they have craved, expected or demanded.

Next time you face the unexpected, a moment of difficulty you really don't want to go through, remember that such a moment doesn't picture a God who has forgotten you, but one who is near to you and doing in you a very good thing. He is rescuing you from thinking that you can live the life you were meant to live while relying on the inadequate resources of your wisdom, experience, righteousness, and strength; and he is transforming you into a person who lives a life shaped by radical God-centered faith.

Only when awe of God rules your heart will you be able to keep the pleasures of the material world in their proper place.

There simply aren't any grand moments in life, and we surely don't live in those moments. No, we live in the utterly mundane. We exist in the bathrooms, bedrooms, living rooms, and hallways of life. This is where the character of our life is set. This is where we live the life of faith.

So many of our prayers are self-centered grocery lists of personal cravings that have no bigger agenda than to make our lives a little more comfortable. They tend to treat God more as our personal shopper than a holy and wise Father-King. Such prayers forget God's glory and long for a greater experience of the glories of the created world. They lack fear, reverence, wonder, and worship. They're more like pulling up the divine shopping site than bowing our knees in adoration and worship. They are motivated more by awe of ourselves and our pleasures than by a heart-rattling, satisfaction-producing awe of the Redeemer to whom we are praying.

It is a fundamental denial of your humanity to narrow the size of your life to the size of your own existence,

Listen to the present tense gospel in the words of Galatians 2:20: "I have been crucified with Christ [a statement of historical redemptive fact]. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me [a statement of present redemptive reality]. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me [living in light of the gospel right here, right now].

the character of a life isn't set in three or four big moments of life, but in ten thousand little, virtually unnoticed moments.

We, with all of our sin, weakness, and failures are welcome to do what should blow our minds. We are not only tolerated by God at a distance; no, we are welcomed into intimate personal communion with the King of kings, the Lord of lords, the creator, the sovereign, the Savior. We, as unholy as we are, are told to go with confidence into his holy presence.

We rarely do anything with on single motive.

For students who have not been required to confess that it is easier to learn theology then live it, it is tempting to think maturity is more a matter of knowing in a matter of living

Since God writes your story, he knows what you're facing and exactly what grace you'll need to live his way.

So the desire for good possessions is not wrong, but it must not rule your heart.

How many believers really live a lifestyle that results from believing that God has graced them to be not just recipients of the work of his kingdom but instruments of the work of the kingdom as well? When you believe this, you live with a constant ministry mentality that results in an everyday ministry lifestyle.

when you blame other people for your circumstances or for the wrongs that you do, you are, in fact, blaming God. You are saying that God didn't give you what you needed to be what he has called you to be and to do what he has called you to do.

Your theology won't always work toward your obedience, because your use of theology is dictated by the condition of your heart. If your heart is not submitting to the plan of God, you will actually use your theology to justify things that should not be justified.

The Bible is the story of a love drama that looked as if it would end in tragedy - but then Jesus came.

you become like the treasure that you seek.

Change begins at the level of the heart.

Human beings by their very nature are worshipers. Worship is not something we do; it defines who we are. You cannot divide human beings into those who worship and those who don't. Everybody worships; it's just a matter of what, or whom, we serve.

Jesus demands everything, not just so we would submit to his control, but to free us from the control of things that were never designed to control us.

You are called to be an instrument of wisdom in your teenager's life. To do so, you must be gentle, humble, patient, and persevering.

When your ears hear and your eyes see the sin, weakness, or failure of your husband or wife, it is never an accident; it is always grace. God loves your spouse, and he is committed to transforming him or her by his grace, and he has chosen you to be one of his regular tools of change.

An instrument s a tool that is actively used to change something, and God has called all of his people to be instruments of change in his redemptive hands

Autonomous Christianity never works, because our spiritual life was designed by God to be a community project.

God never intended for us to simply be the objects of His love. We are also called to be the instruments of that love in the lives of others.

Love calls you to be silent when you want to speak, and to speak when you would like to be silent. Love calls you to act when you would really like to wait, and to wait when you would really like to act. Love calls you to stop when you really want to continue and it calls you to continue when you feel like stopping. Love requires you to lead when you really would like to follow, and to follow when you really want to lead. Love again and again calls you away from your instincts and your comfort. Love always requires personal sacrifice. Love calls you to give up your life.

The person next to you doesn't need the gospel more than you do; he just needs it differently than you do. All people sin and fall short.

The struggle of midlife is fundamentally rooted in the idolatries of the heart.

God is not willing for this broken-down world to stay in its sorry condition. As Creator, he is able to look at it and see promise, the promise of a total restoration of its beauty. And he has asked you to move in with him to be one of his tools of restoration.
While it is hard to live in a house that needs to be restored in some ways it is even harder to live there while the restoration takes place.

We don't often take time to sit and meditate on what our lives would've been like if the mercy of the Redeemer had not been written into our personal stories.

Only love for Christ has the power to incapacitate the sturdy love for self that is the bane of every sinner, and only the grace of Christ has the power to produce that love.

Remember, it is not your weakness that will get in the way of God's working through you, but your delusions of strength. His strength is made perfect in our weakness! Point to His strength by being willing to admit your weakness.

Remember, waiting isn't just about what you are hoping for at the end of the wait, but also about what you will become as you wait.

If you're God's child, you will never again have just you to depend on. No, you've been blessed, right here, right now, with grace.

If you are not requiring yourself to get your deepest sense of well-being vertically, you will shop for it horizontally, and you will always come up empty.

Standing near someone you love in a time of trouble is its own reward.

Sadly, prayer for many of us has been shrunk to an agenda that is little bigger than asking God for stuff.

Human self-righteousness denies the need for the saving, enabling grace of Christ. Human righteousness embraces the cruelest of Satan's lies, that a person can be righteous by keeping the law. If that were true, there would have been no need for the birth, life, death, and resurrection of Christ.

The kingdom of self tends to be more focused on what the hands can touch than what the heart should embrace.

God's design in our pain enables us to look back and say: He loves me enough to take me where I would have never wanted to go in order to produce in me what I never could have achieved on my own.

We love ourselves so much that we have little energy left to love the One who is love.

Prayer is an act of worship. Prayer is act of submission. Prayer is act of obedience. But prayer is also an act of admission. Every instance of prayer is a confession in which I own my condition and embrace my need ... To reduce prayer to a grocery list of things you ant and think you need not only demeans prayer, but it also demeans the sacrifice of love that the One to whom you are praying made so that you and your prayers would be received. The heart of true prayer is vertical confession, not horizontal desire.

Can you tell the story of redemption in one sentence? Sin has driven us out of the garden, but grace drives us right into the Father's arms.

May your kingdom so rule my heart that stepping over your boundaries would no longer be attractive to me.

He knows that his plan will confuse and confound you. And he knows that real rest cannot be found in understanding. Real rest is found in trust.

We must not offer people a system of redemption, a set of insights and principles. We offer people a Redeemer.

So peace is found only in trust, trust of the One who is in careful control of all the things that tend to rob you of your peace. He knows, he understands, he is in control of what appears to be chaos, he is never surprised, he is never confused, he never worries or loses a night's sleep, he never walks off the job to take a rest, he never gets so busy with one thing that he neglects another, and he never plays favorites. You need to remind yourself again and again of his wise and loving control, not because that will immediately make your life make sense, but because it will give you rest and peace in those moments that all of us face at one time or another - when life doesn't seem to make any sense.

Sin is powerful, but not as powerful as the liberating power of grace.

It was humbling to admit that I wasn't living the simple life because I was spiritually committed to it. I was living the simple life because I was poor.

When Christ is my hope, he becomes the one thing in which I have confidence. I act on his wisdom and bank on his grace. I trust his promises and I rely on his presence. And I pursue all the good things that he has promised me simply because I trust him. So, I am not manipulating, controlling, or threatening my way through life to get what I want, because I have found what I want in Christ. He is my hope.

The more you understand the magnitude of God's grace, the more accurate will be your view of the depth of your unrighteousness ; and the more you understand the depth of your unrighteousness , the more you will appreciate the magnitude of God's gift of grace.

Forgiveness is a vertical commitment that is followed by a horizontal transaction.

To live for yourself is to rob yourself of your own humanity. It is only in living for Christ that we actually begin to become what we were meant to be.

Do you require yourself to remember? In order to live as you can and should, you first must remember who you are and what you've been given.

Prayer always forsakes the kingdom of self for the kingdom of God,

God was neither surprised nor afraid. You see, there is no mystery with God. He is never caught off guard. He never wonders how he is going to deal with the unexpected thing. I love the words of Daniel 2:22: "He knows what is in the darkness, and light dwells with him." God is with you in your moments of darkness because he will never leave you. But your darkness isn't dark to him. Your mysteries aren't mysterious to him. Your surprises don't surprise him. He understands all the things that confuse you

I no longer need to carry the burden of the past on my shoulders, so I am free to fully give myself to what God has called me to in the here and now.

We are hardwired for glory because we are hardwired for God.

God has chosen to let you live in this fallen world because he plans to employ the difficulties of it to continue and complete his work in you.

Sin is much more than doing the wrong thing. It begins withloving, worshiping, and serving the wrong thing.

God is using the difficulties of the here and now to transform you, that is, to rescue you from you. And because he loves you, he will willingly interrupt or compromise your momentary happiness in order to accomplish one more step in the process of rescue and transformation, which he is unshakably committed to.

The brokenness around you affects you in different ways at different times. .................... . At every point and every moment, your life is messier and more complicated than it really ought to be because everything is so much more difficult in such a terribly broken world.
But let us also see that this world of ours is more than a broken-down house. It is a broken-down house in the process of being restored.

You can be courageous in admitting your sin precisely because God is richly abundant in his mercy. He comes to you in mercy not because you are good but because you are a sinner, and he knows that because of this condition, you are unable to help yourself.

It is a sweet thing that we serve a dissatisfied God who has destinations in mind for us that we would never choose for ourselves. It really is a good thing that he will not be satisfied until he has gotten us exactly where he created us and re-created us to be. Most of us would have been satisfied to stay at home, and many of us would have quit the journey long before it was completed. But our heavenly Father won't give up until each one of his children has completed the journey.

Our purpose (in relationship) is to get what we want but God's purpose is to give us what we really need. We think things are going well only if we are getting along with others. But God says that it is also when we are not getting along with others that he is accomplishing his purpose.
God has designed our relationship to function as both a diagnosis and a cure.

Biblical faith lives at the intersection of shocking honesty and glorious hope.

We are all capable of fighting for what has little value while forgetting things of transcendent value.

If you are in Christ, you've been chosen to transcend the borders of your own glory, to reach out toward a greater glory, the glory of God.

If your hope disappoints you, it is the wrong kind of hope. You see, hope in God never disappoints, precisely because it is hope *in God.* This means that hope placed in any other thing will always end up disappointing.

When I come to the Lord after I've blown it, I've only one argument to make. It's not the argument of the difficulty of the environment that I am in. It's not the argument of the difficult people that I'm near. It's not the argument of good intentions that were thwarted in some way.

I come to the Lord with only one appeal; his mercy. I've no other defense. I've no other standing. I've no other hope. I can't escape the reality of my biggest problem; me! So I appeal to the one thing in my life that's sure and will never fail. I appeal to the one thing that guaranteed not only my acceptance with God, but the hope of new beginnings and fresh starts. I appeal on the basis of the greatest gift I ever have or ever will be given.

I leave the courtroom of my own defense, I come out of hiding and I admit who I am. But I'm not afraid, because I've been personally and eternally blessed. Because of what Jesus has done, God looks on me with mercy. It's my only appeal, it's the source of my hope, it's my life. Mercy, mercy me!

You cannot ask for forgiveness without acknowledging that there is something in life that is more important than the progress of your own kingdom.

Running from the presence of God has the futility of "trying to shovel smoke with a rake".

The Bible says that our core problem, the fundamental reason we do what we do, is sin.

I understand why many people who call themselves Christians are not excited about grace. If you think your environment is your problem, you won't esteem grace, but once you admit that you're your biggest problem, you will celebrate the grace that rescues you from you.

Our need is so desperate an idea, a thing, a law can't help us. It took one thing, the gift of gifts, God in the flesh, to rescue us.

In his mind, he held up all the artifacts he had collected over the years and wondered about their true value.

The Bible isn't a storybook with many heroes. No, there's only one hero in Scripture: the Son, the Lamb, the Savior, the King, the Redeemer - Jesus.

If your faith is based on your ability to fully understand your past, present, and future, then your moments of confusion will become moments of weakening faith.

I am my biggest marital problem

when you forget the grace that you've been given, it becomes very easy to respond to the people around you with nongrace.

Every time you make creative, interactive, and harmonious jazz with your Redeemer, whether in your home, friendships, community, church, or at work, while staying inside of his parameters, you are expanding what you touch to the size of God's kingdom.

The Psalms welcome us to a faith where God's agenda is more important than ours and where we are asked to live out our faith in the context of a disastrously broken world. But this is also precisely where we experience the highest personal joys, as we put our hope in the covenant love of the Lord and make the pursuit of his glory the goal of our lives.

There's not a day without sin rearing its ugly head and not a day in which God's abundant mercies are not new.

God created an awesome world. God intentionally loaded the world with amazing things to leave you astounded. The carefully air-conditioned termite mound in Africa, the tart crunchiness of an apple, the explosion of thunder, the beauty of an orchid, the interdependent systems of the human body, the inexhaustible pounding of the ocean waves, and thousands of other created sights, sounds, touches, and tastes - God designed all to be awesome. And he intended you to be daily amazed.

The entire hope of fallen humanity rests on this one thing - that there is a Savior who is eternally steadfast in redeeming, forgiving, reconciling, transforming, and delivering love.

Real peace is only ever found in the presence, power, and grace of the Savior, the King, the Lamb, the I am. That peace is yours even when the storms of life take you beyond your natural ability, wisdom, and strength. You can live with hope and courage in the middle of what once would have produced discouragement and fear because you know you are never alone. The I am inhabits all situations, relationships, and locations by his grace. He is in you. He is with you. He is for you. He is your hope.

The earthly father is a God-given mnemonic device to remind us of the glory of the heavenly Father. The shepherd is a mnemonic device to remind us of God's care for his own. The snow is meant to remind us of the Lord's purity and holiness. The storm is a mnemonic device to remind us of God's power and wrath. The daily rising sun is a mnemonic device to remind us of God's faithfulness. We're literally surrounded by gracious reminders of the presence, power, authority, and character of God because he designed created things to function mnemonically. He knows how quickly and easily we forget and how vital it is for us to remember, so he embedded reminders everywhere we look in his creation.

Look at your trials and see grace. Behind those difficulties is an ever-present Redeemer who is completing his work.

God designed us to be worshipers. Everything we do is the product of worship. We are always giving our hearts to something, and if it's not God, it's something God created. All

The Bible tells you that real peace is found in resting in the wisdom of the One who holds all of your "what-ifs" and "if-onlys" in his loving hands. Isaiah captures this well with these comforting words: "You keep him in perfect peace whose mind is stayed on you, because he trusts in you" (Isa. 26:3). Real, sturdy, lasting peace, peace that doesn't rise and fall with circumstances, isn't to be found in picking apart your life until you have understood all of the components. You will never understand it all because God, for your good and his glory, keeps some of it shrouded in mystery. So peace is found only in trust, trust of the One who is in careful control of all the things that tend to rob you of your peace.

Here is one of the most beautiful fruits of grace - a heart that is content, more given to worship than demand and more given to the joy of gratitude than the anxiety of want.