One great function of Bible verses: To keep us from drawing false inferences from other Bible verses.
Preferring anything above Christ is the very essence of sin. It must be fought.
When everything in life is stripped away except God, and we trust him more because of it, this is gain, and he is glorified.
The best thing in the universe is to be united to Christ. To be in Christ. To enjoy union with Christ.
Seeing the glory of Jesus Christ in the gospel awakens joy.
This sounds very strange. Most of us think serving God is a totally positive thing; we have not considered that serving God may be an insult to him.
If you cannot embrace the pain of learning but must have instant gratification, you forfeit the greatest rewards of life.
Worship is the highest moral act a human can perform, so the only basis and motivation for it that many people can conceive is the notion of morality as the disinterested performance of duty. But when worship is reduced to disinterested duty, it ceases to be worship. For worship is a feast.
Jesus calls for violence against our own lust because he loves our true and lasting joy.
We would do our theology better if more was at stake in what we said.
We Boast Best in the Cross When We Bear It.
The reason there is so much misery in marriage is not that husbands and wives seek their own pleasure, but that they do not seek it in the pleasure of their spouses. The biblical mandate to husbands and wives is to seek your own joy in the joy of your spouse.
Missions is not the ultimate goal of the church. Worship is. Missions exists because worship doesn’t.
God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in Him.
The deepest longing of the human heart is to know and enjoy the glory of God. We were made for this.
Life is too short, too precious, too painful to waste on worldly bubbles that burst.
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.
One of the great uses of Twitter and Facebook will be to prove at the Last Day that prayerlessness was not from lack of time.
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.
Do we eagerly long for the coming of Christ? Or do we want him to wait while our love affair with the world runs its course? That is the question that tests the authenticity of faith.