Home > Work > Take Care How You Listen: Sermons by John Piper on Receiving the Word
1 " The pathway to maturity and to solid biblical food is not first becoming an intelligent person, but becoming an obedient person. "
― John Piper , Take Care How You Listen: Sermons by John Piper on Receiving the Word
2 " All the fullness of God is in Jesus (Colossians 2:9). All the treasures of wisdom and knowledge are in Jesus (Colossians 2:3). Beyond what the Old Testament told us, whatever we need to know about God and how he relates to our lives we learn from what we hear and see in God’s final, decisive Word, Jesus Christ. "
3 " Preaching is one thing—and it is crucial. But hearing is another thing—and it is just as crucial. "
4 " Dullness of hearing” is hearing without faith and without the moral fruit of faith. It’s hearing the Bible or the preaching of the Bible the way you hear the freeway noise on I-94, or the way you hear Muzak in the dentist’s office or the way you hear recorded warnings at the airport that this is a smoke-free facility. You do but you don’t. You have grown dull to the sound. It does not awaken or produce anything. "
5 " A persistently fruitless hearer of the Word cannot be a disciple of Jesus "
6 " A persistently fruitless hearer of the Word cannot be a disciple of Jesus. "
7 " Fruit does not make a tree good. Fruit does not give life. Fruit is a sign of life and reality. "
8 " If we come with a chip on our shoulder that there is nothing we can learn or no benefit we can get, we will prove ourselves infallible on both counts. "
9 " Deaf people can be the sharpest hearers and blind people can be the sharpest see-ers. It’s not physical. Dullness of hearing, you remember from 6:12 and 3:18, is the failure to make use of the Word heard to nurture faith and bear the fruit of obedience. "
10 " If they had more grace to hear, they would receive more that the writer has to give. But they are becoming hard and dull, and in danger of throwing away the little they have. "
11 " What this means is that if you want to grow up and feast on the fullness of God’s revelation, you don’t do it by jumping from milk to meat. You do it by the way you drink the milk. The milk has to make you a certain kind of discerning person before you can digest the meat. "
12 " There is a world of difference between the silence of apathy and the silence of passion! "
