The greatest joy is joy in God. This is plain from Psalm 16:11: You [God] will make known to me the path of life; in Your presence is fullness of joy; in Your right hand there are pleasures forever. F...
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...
Now there was only one hope, the sovereign grace of God. God would have to transform my heart to do what a heart cannot make itself do, namely, want what it ought to want. Only God can make the deprav...
The mind was designed not to defend what we want, but to discover what is ultimately true, which should shape our wants and satisfy them more deeply with God. The purpose of the mind is not to rationa...
In all of knowable reality, God is unique. He is knowable not like the multiplication table or the table of elements; he alone is knowable as the one totally in control of being known. He is not at th...
God is not honored by groundless love. In fact, there is no such thing. If we do not know anything about God, there is nothing in our mind to awaken love. If love does not come from knowing God, there...
The greatest enemy of hunger for God is not poison but apple pie.It is not the banquet of the wicked that dulls our appetite forheaven, but endless nibbling at the table of the world. It is notthe X-r...
Life is wasted if we do not grasp the glory of the cross, cherish it for the treasure that it is, and cleave to it as the highest price of every pleasure and the deepest comfort in every pain. What wa...
Christmas cut history in two ages, the Age of Promise, and the Age of Fulfillment.
He has made me wary of chronological snobbery. That is, he showed me that newness is no virtue and oldness is no vice. Truth and beauty and goodness are not determined by when they exist. Nothing is i...
He came to destroy sin because it is fatal.
God created us in his image, male and female, with personhood and sexual passions, so that when he comes to us in this world there would be these powerful words and images to describe the promises and...
Faith is born and sustained by the Word of God, and out of faith grows the flower of joy.
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.
It was becoming clearer and clearer that if I wanted to come to the end of my life and not say, I’ve wasted it! then I would need to press all the way in, and all the way up, to the ultimate purpose o...
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.
Woe to us if we get our satisfaction from the food in the kitchen and the TV in the den and the sex in the bedroom with an occasional tribute to the cement blocks in the basement!
The Bible says he was raised not just after the blood-shedding, but by it. This means that what the death of Christ accomplished was so full and so prefect that the resurrection was the reward and vin...
The Apostle Paul’s antidote for wimpy Christians is weighty doctrine. . . .everything that exists—including evil—is ordained by a holy and all-wise God to make the glory of Christ shine more brightly....
Keep your life free from love of money, and be content with what you have, for he has said, I will never leave you nor forsake you. So we can confidently say, The Lord is my helper; I will not fear; w...