“Would you want to go to heaven if God were not there, only His gifts?”

“I have no pleasure in the death of anyone, declares the Lord GOD” (Ezekiel 18:32).”

“True worship must include inward feelings that reflect the worth of God’s glory.”

“Not to pursue our joy in ministry is not to pursue the profit of our people...Begrudging service does not qualify as genuine love.”

“Putting it in my own words, [Edwards] said that the infinite complexity of the divine mind is such that God has the capacity to look at the world through two lenses. He can look through a narrow lens or through a wide-angle lens. When God looks at a painful or wicked event through his narrow lens, he sees the tragedy or sin for what it is in itself and he is angered and grieved. "I have no pleasure in the death of anyone, says the LORD God" (Ezekiel 18:32). But when God looks at a painful or wicked event through his wide-angle lens, he sees the tragedy or the sin in relation to everything leading up to it and everything flowing out from it. He sees it in all the connections and effects that form a pattern or mosaic stretching into eternity. This mosaic- in all its parts- good and evil- brings him delight.”

“Nadie comprenderá la necesidad de la conversión si ni siquiera sabe por qué nos creo Dios. Nos creó a su imagen para que pudiéramos reflejar su gloria en el mundo. Fuimos creados para ser prismas que reflejen la luz de la gloria de Dios en todos los aspectos de la vida. Es un gran misterio por qué quiso Dios compartir con nosotros el resplandor de su gloria.”

“Up to the age of 30 or beyond it, poetry of many kinds … gave me great pleasure, and even as a schoolboy I took intense delight in Shakespeare.… Formerly pictures gave me considerable, and music very great, delight. But now for many years I cannot endure to read a line of poetry: I have tried to read Shakespeare, and found it so intolerably dull that it nauseated me. I have also almost lost any taste for pictures or music.… I retain some taste for fine scenery, but it does not cause me the exquisite delight which it formerly did.… My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts, but why this should have caused the atrophy of that part of the brain alone, on which the higher tastes depend, I cannot conceive.… The loss of these tastes is a loss of happiness, and may possibly be injurious to the intellect, and more probably to the moral character, by enfeebling the emotional part of our nature.13”

“Phillips Brooks, an Episcopalian pastor in Boston a hundred years ago, caught the spirit of Peter’s counsel to pastors: I think, again, that it is essential to the preacher’s success that he should thoroughly enjoy his work. I mean in the actual doing of it, and not only in its idea. No man to whom the details of his task are repulsive can do his task well constantly, however full he may be of its spirit. He may make one bold dash at it and carry it over all his disgusts, but he cannot work on at it year after year, day after day. Therefore, count it not merely a perfectly legitimate pleasure, count it an essential element of your power, if you can feel a simple delight in what you have to do as a minister, in the fervor of writing, in the glow of speaking, in standing before men and moving them, in contact with the young. The more thoroughly you enjoy it, the better you will do it all. This is all true of preaching. Its highest joy is in the great ambition that is set before it, the glorifying of the Lord and saving of the souls of men. No other joy on earth compares with that. The ministry that does not feel that joy is dead. But in behind that highest joy, beating in humble unison with it, as the healthy body thrills in sympathy with the deep thoughts and pure desires of the mind and soul, the best ministers have always been conscious of another pleasure which belonged to the very doing of the work itself. As we read the lives of all the most effective preachers of the past, or as we meet the men who are powerful preachers of the Word today, we feel how certainly and how deeply the very exercise of their ministry delights them.8”

“It is not a bad thing to desire our own good. In fact, the great problem of human beings is that they are far too easily pleased. They don’t seek pleasure with nearly the resolve and passion that they should. And so they settle for mud pies of appetite instead of infinite delight.”

“Our mistake lies not in the intensity of our desire for happiness, but in the weakness of it.”

“God is not worshiped where He is not treasured and enjoyed. Praise is not an alternative to joy, but the expression of joy. Not to enjoy God is to dishonor Him. To say to Him that something else satisfies you more is the opposite of worship. It is sacrilege.”

“All sin comes from not putting supreme value on the glory of God—this is the very essence of sin.”

“The first thing we learn is that worship has to do with real life. It is not a mythical interlude in a week of reality. Worship has to do with adultery and hunger and racial conflict.”

“People lift their hand to rebel against the Most High only to find that their rebellion is unwitting service in the wonderful designs of God.”

“self-interest is not the same as selfishness.”

“The joy of the Lord will arm us against the assaults of our spiritual enemies and put our mouths out of taste for those pleasures with which the tempter baits his hooks.”5”

“I want you to see persecution and opposition and slander and misunderstanding and disappointment and self-recrimination and weakness and danger as the normal portion of faithful pastoral ministry.”

“No true Christian can endure in battling unrighteousness unless his heart is aflame with new spiritual affections, or passions. “Mere knowledge is confessedly too weak. The affections alone remain to supply the deficiency.”1”

“No true Christian can endure in battling unrighteousness unless his heart is aflame with new spiritual affections, or passions.”

“Therefore, the reason God seeks our praise is not because He won’t be complete until He gets it. He is seeking our praise because we won’t be complete until we give it. This is not arrogance. It is love.”