We ascribe to God. We don’t add to Him.
Desire for and delight in God’s Word are inseparable.
A famous cigarette billboard pictures a curly-headed, bronze-faced, muscular macho with a cigarette hanging out the side of his mouth. The sign reads ‘Where a man belongs.’ That is a lie. Where a man belongs is at the bedside of his children, leading in devotion and prayer. Where a man belongs is leading his family to the house of God. Where a man belongs is up early and alone with God seeking vision and direction for the family.
Most foundationally, marriage is the doing of God. And ultimately, marriage is the display of God.
When something drops into your life that seems to threaten your future, remember this: the first shockwaves of the bomb are not sin. The real danger is yielding to them. Giving in. Putting up no spiritual fight. And the root of that surrender is unbelief – a failure to fight for faith in future grace. A failure to cherish all that God promises to be for us in Jesus.
The pathway to maturity and to solid biblical food is not first becoming an intelligent person, but becoming an obedient person.
Enjoyment of Jesus is not like icing on the cake; it’s like powder in the shell.
The key to endurance in the cause of self-sacrificing love is not heroic willpower, but deep, unshakable confidence that the joy we have tasted in fellowship with Christ will not disappoint us in death.
When this age is over, and the countless millions of the redeemed fall on their faces before the throne of God, missions will be no more. It is a temporary necessity. But worship abides forever. Worship, therefore, is the fuel and the goal of missions.8.
The final answer is that God rewards fasting because fasting expresses the cry of the heart that nothing on the earth can satisfy our souls besides God. God must reward this cry because God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in him.
Some of us are afraid of getting too emotional when we sing. But the problem isn’t emotions. It’s emotionalism. Emotionalism pursues feelings as ends in themselves. It’s wanting to feel something with no regard for how that feeling is produced or its ultimate purpose.
God’s reality is overwhelmingly intrusive in all the details of life.
The point is that an $80,000 or a $180,000 salary does not have to be accompanied by an $80,000 or a $180,000 lifestyle. God is calling us to be conduits of his grace, not cul-de-sacs. Our great danger today is thinking that the conduit should be lined with gold. It shouldn’t. Copper will do. No matter how grateful we are, gold will not make the world think that our God is good; it will make people think that our god is gold. That is no honor to the supremacy of his worth.
Apathy is passionless living. It is sitting in front of the television night after night and living your life from one moment of entertainment to the next. It is the inability to be shocked into action by the steady-state lostness and suffering of the world. It is the emptiness that comes from thinking of godliness as the avoidance of doing bad things instead of the aggressive pursuit of doing good things.
This is the meaning of Christmas. Oh, that God would waken your heart to your deep need for mercy as a sinner! And then ravish your heart with a great Savior, Jesus Christ. And then release your tongue to praise him and your hands to make his mercy shine in yours.
There is a kind of happiness and wonder that makes you serious. C. S. LEWIS.
Christmas cut history in two ages, the Age of Promise, and the Age of Fulfillment.
Not to enjoy God is to dishonor Him.
Worship is nothing less than obedience to the command of God: “Delight yourself in the Lord”!
The one thing God is doing in all of redemptive history is to show forth his mercy in such a way that the greatest number of people will throughout eternity delight in him with all their heart, strength, and mind.