God created me—and you—to live with a single, all-embracing, all-transforming passion—namely, a passion to glorify God by enjoying and displaying his supreme excellence in all the spheres of life.
The greatest cause in the world is joyfully rescuing people from hell, meeting their earthly needs, making them glad in God, and doing it with a kind, serious pleasure that makes Christ look like the Treasure he is.
Without a spiritual wakefulness to divine purposes and connections in all things, we will not know things for what they truly are.
The only people who soul can truly magnify the Lord are…people who acknowledge their lowly estate and are overwhelmed by the condescension of the magnificent God.
The evil and suffering in this world are greater than any of us can comprehend. But evil and suffering are not ultimate. God is. Satan, the great lover of evil and suffering, is not sovereign. God is.
humility is beyond our reach. if it were a product of reaching, we would instinctively be proud of reaching it. it is a gift.
The end of the creation is that God may communicate happiness to the creature
If you live gladly to make others glad in God, your life will be hard, your risks will be high, and your joy will be full.
Grace is the pleasure of God to magnify the worth of God by giving sinners the right and power to delight in God without obscuring the glory of God.
Don’t follow a defeated foe. Follow Christ. It is costly. You will be an exile in this age. But you will be free.
We are not as Christ-centered and cross-cherishing as we should be, because we do not ponder the truth that everything good, and everything bad that God turns for the good, was purchased by the sufferings of Christ.
God created us for this: to live our lives in a way that makes him look more like the greatness and the beauty and the infinite worth that he really is. This is what it means to be created in the image of God.
The wisdom of God devised a way for the love of God to deliver sinners from the wrath of God while not compromising the righteousness of God.
Every good thing in the Christian life grows in the soil of humility. Without humility, every virtue and every grace withers. That’s why Calvin said humility is first, second, and third in the Christian faith.
Love is the overflow of joy in God that meets the needs of others
Every aspect of the way God views and saves sinners is designed to undermine racism and lead to a reconciled and redeemed humanity from every people group in the world.
The aim of the gospel is the creation of people who are passionate for doing good rather than settling for the passionless avoidance of evil.
Headship is the divine calling of a husband to take primary responsibility for Christ-like, servant leadership, protection, and provision in the home.
Desire that your life count for something great! Long for your life to have eternal significance. Want this! Don’t coast through life without a passion.
But whatever you do, find the God-centered, Christ-exalting, Bible-saturated passion of your life, and find your way to say it and live for it and die for it. And you will make a difference that lasts. You will not waste your life.
All that looks like reality to us is dependent on God. There is creation and Creator, nothing more. And creation gets all its meaning and purpose from God.
When this world totally fails, the ground for joy remains.
There would be no obstacles to overcome. We won’t fight for joy in heaven. But we are not there yet.
If we were perfect—if there were no remaining corruption in our hearts—there would be no fight. There would be no obstacles to overcome. We won’t fight for joy in heaven. But we are not there yet.
The Word frees us from smallness of mind (1 Kings 4:29) and from threatening confinements (Psalm 18:19).
Imagination is the faculty of the mind that God has given us to make the communication of his beauty beautiful.
Most of your unhappiness in life comes from the fact that you are listening to yourself instead of talking to yourself.
Absolute statements of our unbelief that we make in the darkness are notoriously unreliable.
I recall hearing one of my professors in seminary say that one of the best tests of a person’s theology was the effect it has on one’s prayers.
Therefore we should pray for each other the way Jesus prays for us in John 17:17– “Sanctify them in the truth; thy Word is truth.
God aims to exalt himself by working for those who wait for him. Prayer is the essential activity of waiting for God: acknowledging our helplessness and his power, calling upon him for help, seeking his counsel.
By nature, we get more pleasure from God’s gifts then from Himself.
The most precious gifts you can think of are not ends in themselves. They all lead to God. Ultimately, that is what all His gifts are for.
Prayer is the open admission that without Christ we can do nothing. And prayer is the turning away from ourselves to God in the confidence that He will provide the help we need. Prayer humbles us as needy and exalts God as wealthy
What is love for, if not to intensify our affections—both in life and death? But, O, do not be bitter. It is tragically self-destructiveto be bitter.
Jesus – “the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily” (Colossians 2:9).
When God appoints the gospel of his Son as the universal remedy for the guilt and corruption of mankind, and we diminish that, the gospel is diminished. And you cannot diminish the gospel without being diminished yourself.
A prayerless Christian is like a bus driver trying alone to push his bus out of a rut because he doesn’t know Clark Kent is on board.
Faith is born and sustained by the Word of God, and out of faith grows the flower of joy.
The call of Christ is a call to live a life of sacrifice and loss and suffering–a life that would be foolish to live if there were no resurrection from the dead.
The only freedom that lasts comes from pursuing what we want when we want what we ought.
Grace is not simply leniency when we have sinned. Grace is the enabling gift of God not to sin. Grace is power, not just pardon.
A godly life is lived out of an astonished heart—a heart that is astonished at grace.
God has made us to be conduits of his grace. The danger is in thinking the conduit should be lined with gold. It shouldn’t. Copper will do.
I count myself as one of the number of those who learn as they write and write as they learn.
Pride is no respecter of persons. The serious thinkers may be humble, and the careless mystics may be arrogant.
Knowing and thinking exist for the sake of love — for the sake of building people up in faith. Thinking that produces pride instead of love is not true thinking.
The humility of wisdom is the happy consciousness that all things come from God, are sustained by God, and exist for God. This wisdom is rooted in the pride-destroying, joy-giving cross of Christ.
Did you wake up feeling fragile? Read the bible till you find a promise strong enough to carry you through the day.
The Spirit inspired the Word and therefore He goes where the Word goes. The more of God’s Word you know and love, the more of God’s Spirit you will experience.
Christmas cut history in two ages, the Age of Promise, and the Age of Fulfillment.
One great function of Bible verses: To keep us from drawing false inferences from other Bible verses.
I know of no other way to triumph over sin long-term than to gain a distaste for it because of a superior satisfaction in God.
Let the freedom to fail give you the hope to fight.
The fight for joy is first and always a fight to see.
…the gospel has an answer to both pride and guilt.
America is the first culture in jeopardy of amusing itself to death.
The aim of the climb is not intellectual satisfaction. The aim is worship. God gets more honor when we worship on the basis of what we know about him than he gets if we worship on the basis of what we don’t know.
God is the greatest thing that exists, ever has existed or ever will…for us to glory in anything else, would be sin, as there is nothing greater than God, there is no calling greater than praising God.
…childlike wonder and awe have died. The scenery and poetry and music of the majesty of God have dried up like a forgotten peach at the back of the refrigerator.
God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in Him
Missions is not the ultimate goal of the church. Worship is. Missions exists because worship doesn’t.
Do you feel loved by God because you believe he makes much of you, or because you believe he frees you and empowers you to enjoy making much of him?
I want you to see persecution and opposition and slander and misunderstanding and disappointment and self-recrimination and weakness and danger as the normal portion of faithful pastoral ministry.
We would do our theology better if more was at stake in what we said.
The horror of Hell is an echo of the infinite worth of God’s glory.
God is willing and able to turn his judgements into joys . . . Don’t ever think that the sin of your past means there is no hope for your future.
Desire for and delight in God’s Word are inseparable.
Salvation is the creation of new desires, not just new goodies.
Tasks don’t have to be high-impact to be worthy of high effort. Most things we do in any given day are relatively low impact. The cumulative impact of thousands of low-impact test is huge. These tasks can be transposed into worship.
If we are cut loose from the anchor of God’s Word, we will not be free. We will be slaves of personal passions and popular trends.
If truth does not lead to falling in love, it fails.
An eye for beauty instead of bleakness might have lightened some of his load.
Christmas is an indictment before it becomes a delight. It will not have its intended effect until we feel desperately the need for a Savior.
If death is no longer a fear, we’re really free. Free to take any risk under the sun for Christ and for love.
We will wait. We will wait till all is made righteous (glorious) according to the word of God.
The gospel of the glory of Christ spreads better and flourishes more because of 6,500 languages, not in spite of them.
You can’t ever be your heroes, but you can love their gifts.
Whenever the strength of God is not recognized as the source of our strength, we are breaking the First Commandment: Do not have any gods before me.
The most dangerous thing in the world is the sin of self-reliance and the stupor of worldliness.
The Gospel is not a theory the Gospel is not a philosophy or an idea the Gospel is not a way of thinking or feeling. The Gospel is an event in history.
God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in Him.
The essence of faith is being satisfied with all that God is for us in Jesus.
When I believe in Jesus, I am united to Christ. Therefore, what he did and achieved becomes mine by this union through faith alone. His righteous life is imputed to me. What Christ achieved is counted as mine.