I love Clyde Kilby's Ten Resolutions for Mental Health (remembered by John Piper).

How small-minded of us in our hopelessness to look at our closed Bible and say, "What I need is ____, and this is not in the Bible." How do we know we need _____ and not some utterly unexpected hope that the Bible will awaken in us when we read it in faith?

Indeed, we may lack hope because we think we need something we do not need. It may take the Word of God to show us what we really need, and then to give us the power to get it. In the end what we really need is Christ. He is the sum of all our hopes. . . . Sometimes what we need from the Bible is not the fulfillment of our dream, but the swallowing up of our failed dream in the all-satisfying glory of Christ. We do not always know the path of deepest joy. But all Scripture is inspired by God to take us there.

John Piper, When I Don't Desire God: How to Fight for Joy

I urge you to plan for [early morning prayer]. Think ahead what the time will be. Win the victory the night before, not in the morning. Decide the evening before when the alarm will call you from sleep to prayer.

The discipline to rise early is not as difficult as the discipline of going to bed. This did not used to be so. Before electricity and radio and television and the Internet, going to bed soon after dark was not so difficult. There wasn't much to do. Today the strongest allurements to stay up and be entertained are against us. Therefore, the battle against weariness, which makes us drowsy as soon as we open our Bible in the morning, has to be fought in the evening, not just in the morning. When you have decided when the alarm will call you to prayer, then decide when you must go to bed so that you are not exhausted when the alarm goes off. If you need caffeine to keep you awake in the morning, I will leave that with your conscience. Maybe that's why God created it. Staying awake to pray is certainly a better use of caffeine than staying awake for almost anything else.

John Piper, When I Don't Desire God: How to Fight for Joy, pp. 161-62

I would commend a longer time in focused prayer and meditation early in the morning, perhaps an hour (the length will vary with your situation in life), and then two or three other short times later in the day, roughly corresponding to lunch, dinner, and bedtime. These may be no more than a few minutes. What matters more than the length is the intensity of the focus.

In these later times of prayer, I am not referring to the thoughts directed Godward as you walk back to work from the cafeteria or as you run to the car. These are good. They are part of praying without ceasing. Rather I am referring to a few minutes of very focused stillness and solitude, with the Bible open in front of you--or the memory serving up some nourishing text on the tongue of your soul. The aim is to call to mind a few verses and to pray that God would now satisfy your heart in him for the next part of the day and free you from sinful desires, so that you exalt Christ and love people. In this way each segment of the day (and then the night before you go to bed) is consciously dedicated to God by an act of consecration in focused prayer. It is amazing how just a few minutes over the Word at midday and mid-evening can bring spiritual clarity and power and peaceful joy to the next few hours, even in the midst of much pressure.

John Piper, When I Don't Desire God: How to Fight for Joy, pp. 160-61

[Early morning prayer] signals to our conscience that this is of first importance in the day. That witness from our action to our conscience has a joyful effect on the Christian mind. Second, early morning prayer strikes the first blow in the battle of the day, instead of waiting till we are besieged from all sides. Third, what we do daily and do early shapes the spirit of our minds and brings us into a disposition of humility and trust that will bear better fruit than anxiety or self-reliance. Fourth, since beginning the day with the Word of God is crucial, therefore prayer is equally crucial since the Word will not open its best wonders to us without prayer: "Open my eyes, that I may behold wondrous things out of your law" (Ps. 118:18). Fifth, it is uncanny how Satan can use even good things to squeeze prayer out of our schedule if we miss the early-morning hour. I have seen it again and again. If I say to myself, "I will give some time to prayer later," it generally does not happen.

John Piper, When I Don't Desire God: How to Fight for Joy, p. 159 

"Lead us not into temptation" (Matt. 6:13). "Watch and pray that you may not enter into temptation." (Matt. 26:41). What is temptation? It is always, in one way or another, the deception that something is more to be desired than God and his ways. Therefore, the prayer for deliverance is that we would not fall for that deception but always taste and know that God and his ways are to be desired above all others.

John Piper, When I Don't Desire God: How to Fight for Joy, p. 147

I have often counseled people who tell me that they don't see anything when they read the Bible, "Go home and this time, write the text, instead of just reading it. If anything stands out as helpful, make a mark and write down your ideas about it. Keep writing till you are done with that insight. Then keep reading and writing the text till you see something else to write about, or until you are out of time."

The main value in this is that writing forces us to slow down and see what we are reading. Some of us have very bad habits of passive reading that certain types of formal education have bred into us, by forcing us to read quickly when we ought to be reading slowly--thinking as we go. Writing is a way of slowing us down and opening our eyes to see what we do not otherwise see.

John Piper, When I Don't Desire God: How to Fight for Joy, p. 124

Some Christians take the path of stoicism in the fight against sensuality. It doesn't work. It's not biblical. It is hopelessly weak and ineffective. And the reason it fails is that the power of sin comes from its promise of pleasure and is meant to be defeated by the ... promise of superior pleasure in God, not by raw human willpower. Willpower religion, when it succeeds, gets glory for the will. It produces legalists, not lovers.

John Piper, When I Don't Desire God: How to Fight for Joy, p. 103

The main art in the matter of spiritual living is to know how to handle yourself. You have to take yourself in hand, you have to address yourself, preach to yourself, question yourself. . . . You must turn on yourself, upbraid yourself, condemn yourself, exhort yourself, and say to yourself, "Hope thou in God"--instead of muttering in this depressed, unhappy way, and then you must go on to remind yourself of God, Who God is, and . . . what God has done, and what God has pledged Himself to do. Then having done that, end on this great note: defy yourself, and defy other people, and defy the devil and the whole world, and say with this man: "I shall yet praise Him for the help of His countenance, who is also the health of my countenance and my God."

Martyn Lloyd-Jones, qtd. in Piper, When I Don't Desire God: How to Fight for Joy, pp. 81-82

It's the Lord's Day, and I began this day by reading a chapter of When I Don't Desire God: How to Fight for Joy, a book that has been a tremendous help for me lately. The chapter I read is entitled, "The Fight for Joy Is a Fight to See"--and what I need to fight to see is the glory of Christ. These words in particular stuck out to me:

By seeing the glory of Christ in the gospel we are changed. In what way? Not first externally, but first internally. What is this internal change that comes from "beholding the glory of the Lord"?

It is the awakening of joy in Christ himself, and all that God is for us in him. It is the awakening of a new taste for spiritual reality centering on Christ. It is the capacity for a new sweetness and a new enjoyment of the glory of God in the Word of God. Therefore, nothing is more important for us in life than to "behold the glory of the Lord."

John Piper, When I Don't Desire God: How to Fight for Joy, p. 66

The fight for joy is good because by it God is greatly glorified. When we devote ourselves to resist the idolatrous power of every craving, every desire, every pleasure that is not God, then God is exalted as the superior Treasure of our lives. Fighting against all alien joy shows that we know the infinite worth of God. Therefore the fight for joy is a good fight.

John Piper, When I Don't Desire God: How to Fight for Joy, p. 39

I have found for thirty years that preaching and teaching about God's demand that we delight in him more than anything else breaks and humbles people, and makes them desperate for true conversion and true Christianity. Oh, how easy it is to think we are what we ought to be when the emotions are made peripheral. Mere thoughts and mere deeds are manageable by the carnal religious mind. But the emotions--they are the weathercock of the heart. Nothing shows the direction of the deep winds of the soul like the demand for radical, sin-destroying, Christ-exalting joy in God.

John Piper, When I Don't Desire God: How to Fight for Joy, p. 31

Fasting is supposed to be the ordinary practice of the godly. Christ does not make light of it, but merely cautions them against its abuses.... It is an appendage to prayer, and designed to aid its importunity. It is humbling, and in a manner, chastising ourselves before God.... The spirit of it is expressed in the following passages--"So do God to me and more also, if I taste bread, or aught else, till the sun be down." "Surely I will not come into the tabernacle of my house, nor go up into my bed; I will not give sleep to mine eyes, nor slumber to mine eyelids, until I find out a place for the Lord, an habitation for the mighty God of Jacob." No mention is made of the time, or how often the duty should be attended to.... It is only a means, however; if rested in as an end, it will be an abomination in the sight of God.

Andrew Fuller, qtd. in John Piper, A Hunger for God, p. 191

"Half of Christian fasting is that our physical appetite is lost because our homesickness for God is so intense. The other half is that our homesickness for God is threatened because our physical appetites are so intense. In the first half, appetite is lost. In the second half, appetite is resisted. In the first, we yield to the higher hunger that is. In the second, we fight for the higher hunger that isn't. Christian fasting is not only the spontaneous effect of a superior satisfaction in God; it is also a chosen weapon against every force in the world that would take that satisfaction away." (John Piper, A Hunger for God)

"The common path to sure knowledge of the real Jesus is this: Jesus, as he is revealed in the Bible, has a glory--an excellence, a spiritual beauty--that can be seen as self-evidently true. It is like seeing the sun and knowing that it is light and not dark, or like tasting honey and knowing that it is sweet and not sour. There is no long chain of reasoning from premises to conclusions. There is a direct apprehension that this person is true and his glory is the glory of God."

--From Seeing and Savoring Jesus Christ, Piper

From Seeing and Savoring Jesus Christ, by John Piper:

God raised Jesus Christ from the dead. Everybody knew he was dead, from the governor to the executing soldiers to the women who buried him to the adversaries who feared a conspiracy of resurrection rumor. They all knew he was dead. That is why the fabrication concocted to explain the empty tomb was not that he wasn't really dead, but that the disciples stole the body. But it didn't work, because people don't risk their lives for a self-made falsehood. The body was not in the tomb, otherwise the enemies would have put a stop to Christianity with Jesus' remains. The disciples were ablaze with boldness, risking their lives by preaching that Jesus was alive. The evangelist Stephen and the apostle James lost their lives. And for forty days Jesus was appearing to individuals and groups, some as large as five hundred. Most of these were not gullible, but hard to convince.

As the possibility dawned on the skeptical disciples that the resurrection might be true, the first speculation was that the Jesus they saw was a ghost or apparition of some kind. But Jesus was ruthless to abolish this speculation immediately. To doubting Thomas he said, "Put your finger here, and see my hands; and put out your hand, and place it in my side. Do not disbelieve, but believe." And before the the stunned disciples on another occasion, Jesus insisted on eating fish to show them that he was not a ghost. 

A prayer from John Piper's Seeing and Savoring Jesus Christ:

O Father of glory, this is the cry of our hearts--to be changed from one degree of glory to another, until, in the resurrection, at the last trumpet, we are completely conformed to the image of your Son, Jesus Christ, our Lord. Until then, we long to grow in grace and in the knowledge of our Lord, especially the knowledge of his glory. We want to see it as clearly as we see the sun, and to savor it as deeply as our most desired pleasure. O merciful God, incline our hearts to your Word and the wonders of your glory. Wean us from our obsession with trivial things. Open the eyes of our hearts to see each day what the created universe is telling about your glory. Enlighten our minds to see the glory of your Son in the Gospel. We believe that you are the All-glorious One, and that there is none like you. Help our unbelief. Forgive the wandering of our affections and the undue attention we give to lesser things. Have mercy on us for Christ’s sake, and fulfill in us your great design to display the glory of your grace. In Jesus’ name we pray, amen.

From Piper's Seeing and Savoring Jesus Christ:

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. Indeed, what could be more ludicrous in a vast and glorious universe like this than a human being, on the speck called earth, standing in front of a mirror trying to find significance in his own self-image? It is a great sadness that this is the gospel of the modern world. 

But it is not the Christian Gospel. Into the darkness of petty self-preoccupation has shone "the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God." The Christian Gospel is about "the glory of Christ," not about me. And when it is--in some measure--about me, it is not about my being made much of by God, but about God mercifully enabling me to enjoy making much of him forever.

From Seeing and Savoring Jesus Christ, by John Piper:

The created universe is all about glory. The deepest longing of the human heart and the deepest meaning of heaven and earth are summed up in this: the glory of God. The universe was made to show it, and we were made to see it and savor it. Nothing less will do. Which is why the world is as disordered and as dysfunctional as it is. We have exchanged the glory of God for other things.

From A Godward Life, John Piper:

Do not be anxious about tomorrow, for tomorrow will be anxious for itself. Sufficient for the day is its own trouble. (Matthew 6:34, Piper's translation) 

... 

With each day's measure of pain, [God] gives new mercies. This is the point of Lamentations 3:22-23, "The Lord's lovingkindnesses indeed never cease, for His compassions never fail. They are new every morning; great is Your faithfulness." 

God's mercies are new every morning because each day has enough mercy in it only for that day. That is why we tend to despair when we think that we may have to bear tomorrow's load on today's resources. God wants us to know that we won't. Today's mercies are for today's troubles. Tomorrow's mercies are for tomorrow's troubles. 

... 

The manna in the wilderness was given one day at a time. There was no storing up. That is the way we must depend on God's mercy. You do not receive today the strength to bear tomorrow's burdens. You are given mercies today for today's troubles. Tomorrow the mercies will be new.