The new birth is the creation of spiritual life, not the imitation of life.
When a sinful person meets the holy God in Christ, what he hears is Yes. God, do you love me? Yes. Will you forgive me? Yes. Will you accept me? Yes. Will you help me change? Yes. Will you give me power to serve you? Yes. Will you keep me? Yes. Will you show me your glory? Yes.
Life is too precious to squander on trivial things. Grant us, Lord, the unswerving resolve to pray and live with David Brainerd’s urgency: “Oh, that I might never loiter on my heavenly journey!
God’s work in us does not eliminate our work; it enables it. We work because he is the one at work in us. Therefore, the fight for joy is possible because God is fighting for us and through us.
If we are Christ’s, then what befalls us is for His glory and for our good, whether it is caused by enzymes or by enemies.
Rejoicing without the content of Christ does not honor Christ.
In John 3:16, Jesus teaches us that the God who exists loves. Let that sink in. The God who absolutely is. Loves. He loves. Of all the things you might say about God, be sure to say this: he loves.
Word corresponds to hearing, and glory corresponds to seeing. Ultimately God has spoken in order to reveal his glory for the enjoyment of his people. Therefore we must hear what he says in order to see what he reveals. The Bible does not speak of hearing the glory of God, but seeing it. Hearing is the means. Seeing is the goal. The aim of all our hearing of God’s truth is the seeing of God’s glory.
So the question we need to ask today is this: if the teaching in our church was limited to the songs that we sing, how well taught would we be? How well would we know God? We should make it our aim not only to preach the whole counsel of God but to sing it, as well.
Make the mule of your tongue serve the mercy of your heart.
The fight for joy in Christ is not a fight to soften the cushion of Western comforts. It is a fight for strength to live a life of self-sacrificing love.
God is glorified in his people by the way we experience him, not merely by the way we think about him. Indeed.
But not only does the pursuit of joy in God give strength to endure; it is the key to breaking the power of sin on our way to heaven.
By nature, we get more pleasure from God’s gifts then from Himself.
O, Lord, how devious we can be! Our hearts are deceitful, and we look quickly for reasons to believe that our disobedience is not serious. Humble us before the truth that there is one Judge and one God whose fellowship and fatherly delight is more precious than all the pleasures of sin. Forbid that we would forfeit this fortune – even for a season – while justifying our sin by thinking that it is small and partial surrounded by other good deeds.
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.
The healing of the soul begins by restoring the glory of God to its flaming, all-attracting place at the center. We are all starved for the glory of God, not self. No one goes to the Grand Canyon to increase self-esteem. Why do we go? Because there is greater healing for the soul in beholding splendor than there is in beholding self.
The coronavirus is God’s thunderclap call for all of us to repent and realign our lives with the infinite worth of Christ... The reason God exposes us to such losses is to rouse us to rely on Christ. Or to put it another way, the reason he makes calamity the occasion for offering Christ to the world is that the supreme, all-satisfying greatness of Christ shines more brightly when Christ sustains joy in suffering.
Suppose you answer, “I want to be free from self and full of joy in God; I want to enjoy making much of God, not me. And I want the fullness of my joy to last forever.” If you respond this way, then you will also have an answer to the fear I mentioned earlier, that you are just being used by God when he creates you for his glory. Now we see that in creating us for his glory, he is creating us for our highest joy. He is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in him.
The most precious truth in the Bible is that God’s greatest interest is to glorify the wealth of His grace by making sinners happy in Him – in Him!