People don't enjoy salt. They enjoy what is salted. We are the salt of the earth. We do not exist for ourselves.
The Bible is the ultimate authority and infallible, not the pastor and not the elders. And it doesn't mean that you believe everything he says without examining it.
My feelings are not God. God is God. My feelings do not define truth. God’s word defines truth. My feelings are echoes and responses to what my mind perceives. And sometimes - many times - my feelings are out of sync with the truth. When that happens - and it happens every day in some measure - I try not to bend the truth to justify my imperfect feelings, but rather, I plead with God: Purify my perceptions of your truth and transform my feelings so that they are in sync with the truth.
We weren't meant to be somebody--we were meant to know Somebody
The Gospel is not how people get to heaven. The Gospel is how people get to God.
The deepest longing of the human heart is to know and enjoy the glory of God. We were made for this.
Faith begins with a backward look at the cross, but it lives with a forward look at the promises
Your mind was made to know and love God.
God is on the move to rescue people from misery to everlasting happiness, which can only be found in him.
Our obedience is God's pleasure when it proves that God is our treasure.
I've never heard anyone say the really deep lessons of life have come in times of ease and comfort. But, I have heard many saints say every significant advance I've ever made in grasping in the depth of God's love and growing deep with Him, have come through suffering.
A woman who fears the Lord will not run away from God to satisfy her longings and relieve her anxieties. She will wait for the Lord. She will hope in God. She will stay close to the heart of God and trust in his promises. The prospect of departing into the way of sin will be too fearful to pursue; and the benefits of abiding in the shadow of the Almighty too glorious to forsake.
There are only three kinds of Christians when it comes to world missions: zealous goers, zealous senders, and disobedient.
Do all things without grumbling. Why? You have a sovereign God who is on your side, who works everything together for your good.
Headship is the divine calling of a husband to take primary responsibility for Christlike, servant leadership, protection, and provision in the home.
The greatest act of freeing happened when Jesus died in our place and paid our debt.
Where passion for God is weak, zeal for missions will be weak.
The cross is not a mere event in history; it's a way of life! Take up your cross DAILY, Jesus said!
Servanthood does not nullify leadership; it defines it. Jesus does not cease to be the Lion of Judah when He becomes the lamblike servant of the church.
You get one pass at life. That’s all. Only one. And the lasting measure of that life is Jesus Christ.
There is hope in forgiveness
Whatever opposes prayer opposes the whole work of ministry.
Christianity is fundamentally convalescence.. .God is not only the doctor who prescribes, He is the nurse who lifts up our powerless head and puts the spoon in our mouth...And He is the medicine.
What could be a greater privilege than to listen to the voice of God, and be granted by God himself the ears to hear?
Love is the overflow of joy in God that meets the needs of others.
Every criticism or slight against you, warranted or not, received or endured humbly, is written in heaven for your reward.
A Christian is not a person who believes in his head the teachings of the Bible. Satan believes in his head the teachings of the Bible! A Christian is a person who has died with Christ, whose stiff neck has been broken, whose brazen forehead has been shattered, whose stony heart has been crushed, whose pride has been slain, and whose life is now mastered by Jesus Christ.
If you don’t know God as beautiful and satisfying, you don’t know him.
God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in Him.
Life is precarious, and life is precious. Don't presume you will have it tomorrow, and don't waste it today.
What is sin? It is the glory of God not honored. The holiness of God not reverenced. The greatness of God not admired. The power of God not praised. The truth of God not sought. The wisdom of God not esteemed. The beauty of God not treasured. The goodness of God not savored. The faithfulness of God not trusted. The commandments of God not obeyed. The justice of God not respected. The wrath of God not feared. The grace of God not cherished. The presence of God not prized. The person of God not loved. That is sin.
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.
Worship is a way of gladly reflecting back to God the radiance of His worth.
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
You never outgrow your need to preach to yourself the gospel.
The more of God's Word you know and love, the more of God's Spirit you will experience.
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 immensity of His worth is reflected in the intensity of your worship.
God took the record of all your sins-all your sexual failures-that made you a debtor to wrath, and instead of holding them up in front of your face and using them as the warrant to send you to hell, he put them in the palm of his Son’s hand and nailed them to the cross.
It is about the greatness of God, not the significance of man. God made man small and the universe big to say something about himself.
Christ did not die to forgive sinners who go on treasuring anything above seeing and savoring God. And people who would be happy in heaven if Christ were not there, will not be there. The gospel is not a way to get people to heaven; it is a way to get people to God. It's a way of overcoming every obstacle to everlasting joy in God. If we don't want God above all things, we have not been converted by the gospel.
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.
Faith is born and sustained by the Word of God, and out of faith grows the flower of joy.
Whenever your heart starts to be anxious about the future, preach to your heart and say, 'Heart, who do you think you are to be afraid of the future and nullify the promise of God? No, heart, I will not exalt myself with anxiety. I will humble myself in peace and joy as I trust this precious and great promise of God - He cares for me.'
Don't follow a defeated foe. Follow Christ. It is costly. You will be an exile in this age. But you will be free.
If you don't feel strong desires for the manifestation of the glory of God, it is not because you have drunk deeply and are satisfied. It is because you have nibbled so long at the table of the world. Your soul is stuffed with small things, and there is no room for the great.
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.
Sin is what you do when your heart is not satisfied with God.
One of the great enemies of hope is forgetting God's promises.
Wimpy worldviews make wimpy Christians. And wimpy Christians won’t survive the days ahead.
The ultimate aim of the gospel is the display of God’s glory.
Satan's aim is to destroy our joy and trust and delight in God, and to make God look worthless in the world's eyes. Everytime someone forsakes God for the world, gets angry at God when part of the world is taken away from them, they highlight the world as valuable... and everytime someone stays with God, when the world is taken away, and praises God, they highlight the value and glory of God.
The Lord is kind. He is good to all who take refuge under his wings.
Don't coast through life without a passion.
Darkness comes. In the middle of it, the future looks blank. The temptation to quit is huge. Don't. You are in good company... You will argue with yourself that there is no way forward. But with God, nothing is impossible. He has more ropes and ladders and tunnels out of pits than you can conceive. Wait. Pray without ceasing. Hope.
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.
Nothing makes God more supreme and more central in worship than when a people are utterly persuaded that nothing - not money or prestige or leisure or family or job or health or sports or toys or friends - nothing is going to bring satisfaction to their sinful, guilty, aching hearts besides God.
If you alter or obscure the Biblical portrait of God in order to attract converts, you don't get converts to God, you get converts to an illusion. This is not evangelism, but deception.
If you are sufficient for your task, it's too small.
God will not turn away from doing you good. He will keep on doing good. He doesn't do good to His children sometimes and bad to them other times. He keeps on doing good and He never will stop doing good for ten thousand ages of ages. When things are going bad that does not mean God has stopped doing good. It means He is shifting things around to get them in place for more good, if you will go on loving Him.
Why Christians do what they do is just as important as what they do. Bad motives ruin good acts.
There is a great gulf between the Christianity that wrestles with whether to worship at the cost of imprisonment and death, and the Christianity that wrestles with whether the kids should play soccer on Sunday morning.
Sleep is a daily reminder from God that we are not God. Once a day God sends us to bed like patients with a sickness. The sickness is a chronic tendency to think we are in control and that our work is indispensable. To cure us of this disease God turns us into helpless sacks of sand once a day.
God is at work in the worst of times. He is at work doing a thousand things no one can see but him.
Doing things in secret that you are ashamed for others to know is practical atheism. God's knowing doesn't count?
Anger devours almost all other good emotions. It deadens the soul. It numbs the heart to joy and gratitude and hope and tenderness and compassion and kindness.
Marriage is not mainly about being or staying in love. It’s mainly about telling the truth with our lives. It’s about portraying something true about Jesus Christ and the way He relates to his people. It is about showing in real life the glory of the gospel.
Only the # gospel can do two seemingly contradictory things: destroy pride and increase courage.
"How are you doing?" - - - better than I deserve.
The gospel is not a way to get people to heaven; it is a way to get people to God.
In EVERY situation and EVERY circumstance of your life, God is always doing a thousand different things that you cannot see and you do not know.
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.
Worship is what we were created for. This is the final end of all existence-the worship of God. God created the universe so that it would display the worth of His glory. And He created us so that we would see this glory and reflect it by knowing and loving it-with all our heart and soul and mind and strength. The church needs to build a common vision of what worship is and what she is gathering to do on Sunday morning and scattering to do on Monday morning.
God is not an employer looking for employees. He is an Eagle looking for people who will take refuge under his wings.
You may be going through things right now that are painfully preparing you for some precious service to Jesus and to his people. When a person strikes rock bottom with a sense of nothingness or helplessness, he may find that he has struck the Rock of Ages
The Gospel is the news that Jesus Christ, the Righteous One, died for our sins and rose again, eternally triumphant over all his enemies, so that there is now no condemnation for those who believe, but only everlasting joy.
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.
May we catch enough of a vision of Christ that we will not be satisfied unless we know him more fully.
It is better to lose your life than to waste it.
Lives of faith are the great mirror of the dependability 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.
Prosperity cannot be a proof of God's favor, since it is what the devil promises to those who worship him. (Matt. 4:9)
The strength of patience hangs on our capacity to believe that God is up to something good for us in all our delays and detours.
God seldom calls us for an easier life, but always calls us to know more of him and drink more deeply of His sustaining grace.
To love God does not mean to meet His needs, but rather to delight in Him and to be captivated by His glorious power and grace, and to value Him above all other things on earth. All the rest of the commandments are the kinds of things that we will do from our hearts, if our hearts are truly delighted with and resting in the glory of God's grace.
Why don't people ask us about our hope? The answer is probably that we look as if we hope in the same things they do. Our lives don't look like they are on the Calvary road, stripped down for sacrificial love, serving others with the sweet assurance that we don't need to be rewarded in this life.
Put your ear to the ground of God's word and listen to the rumble of His faithfulness coming.
God created us to live with a single passion: to joyfully display his supreme excellence in all spheres of life. The wasted life is the life without this passion. God calls us to pray and think and dream and plan and work, not to be made much of, but to make much of him in every part of our lives.
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.
Loving God with all our mind means that our thinking is wholly engaged to do all it can to awaken and express the heartfelt fullness of treasuring God above all things.
God is not a killjoy; he just opposes what kills joy.
The assurance of the believer is not that God will save him even if he stops believing, but that God will keep him believing--God will sustain you in faith, he will make your hope firm and stable to the end. He will cause you to persevere.
Christ is glorified in you when he is more precious to you than all that life can give or death can take.
If God's love for his children is to be measured by our health, wealth, and comfort in this life, God hated the apostle Paul.
The deepest and most enduring happiness is found only in God. Not from God, but in God.
The ultimate purpose of life is to show that Jesus is more precious than life.
The most dangerous thing in the world is the sin of self-reliance and the stupor of worldliness.
The ultimate difference between God's wisdom and man's wisdom is how they relate to the glory of God's grace in Christ crucified. God's wisdom makes the glory of God's grace our supreme treasure. But man's wisdom delights in seeing himself as resourceful, self-sufficient, self determining, and not utterly dependent on God's free grace.
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 was once foolishness to us—a crucified God—must become our wisdom and our power and our only boast in this world.
The critical question for our generation—and for every generation— is this: If you could have heaven, with no sickness, and with all the friends you ever had on earth, and all the food you ever liked, and all the leisure activities you ever enjoyed, and all the natural beauties you ever saw, all the physical pleasures you ever tasted, and no human conflict or any natural disasters, could you be satisfied with heaven, if Christ were not there?
The key that unlocks the treasure chest of God's peace is faith in the promises of God.
Prayer as a relationship is probably your best indicator about the health of your love relationship with God. If your prayer life has been slack, your love relationship has grown cold.
We cannot know what prayer is for until we know that life is war.
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.
We embrace the hand we've been dealt, because we know the Dealer, and he never deals badly.
The highest mental health is not liking myself but being joyfully interested in everything but myself.
Christmas: the Son of God expressing the love of God to save us from the wrath of God so we could enjoy the presence of God.
In all the setbacks of your life as a believer, God is plotting for your joy.
The great danger of riches is that our affections will be carried away from God to His gifts.
When GOD is our deepest pleasure we display Him as our highest treasure.
If you can't see the sun you will be impressed with a street light. If you've never felt thunder and lightning you'll be impressed with fireworks. And if you turn your back on the greatness and majesty of God you'll fall in love with a world of shadows and short-lived pleasures.
Our main work is, by the spirit of God, with the Word of God, to portray the glories of God as more beautiful and more satisfying than anything.
God is not an employer looking for employees. He is an Eagle looking for people who will take refuge under his wings. He is looking for people who will leave father and mother and homeland or anything else that may hold them back from a life of love under the wings of Jesus.
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.
Life is not a straight line leading from one blessing to the next and then finally to heaven. Life is a winding and troubled road. Switchback after switchback. And the point of biblical stories like Joseph and Job and Esther and Ruth is to help us feel in our bones (not just know in our heads) that God is for us in all these strange turns. God is not just showing up after the trouble and cleaning it up. He is plotting the course and managing the troubles with far-reaching purposes for our good and for the glory of Jesus Christ.
Prayer causes things to happen that wouldn't happen if you didn't pray.
Gratitude is the joy that arises in response to God’s good will toward us in all his gifts.
Not going to God because your faith is weak is like not going to the doctor because you feel sick.
Do not be more devoted to your own brain than you are to the Bible.
Bitterness about your parents’ brokenness will kill you. Be the grace-filled end of generational sin in your family.
Life is too short, too precious, too painful to waste on worldly bubbles that burst
Don't ever think that the sin of your past means there is no hope for your future.
God is always doing 10,000 things in your life, and you may be aware of three of them.
Our deeds are not the basis of our salvation, they are the evidence of our salvation. They are not foundation, they are demonstration.
O, God of wonder, enlarge my capacity to be amazed at what is amazing, and end my attraction to the insignificant.
