Showing posts with label Joy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Joy. Show all posts

6/13/15

How does the smallest grain of dust exist? How did nothing become Something? One grain of dust should cause us to fall to our knees in wonder. And yet God gives us much more than a handful of dust. He gives us a leaf! We should fall to our knees in thanksgiving at the gift of a leaf! And yet, when I look out of the window, I see a forest of trees, a tsunami of green that towers over me! And that tidal wave of wonder is made of millions of leaves. Only one would be enough – and yet I have been given a gift of millions, all of which can be seen every day from my office window. I am truly a millionaire! 
Above the trees, I see rolling clouds and a blue sky, and above them is the sun, by the light of which I see everything. And yet there is a light in me that is mightier than the sun. This can be seen from the fact that I can see the sun but the sun cannot see me. The sun is massive and mighty and has a physical power that is awe-inspiring but it is an inanimate object. It has no eyes or heart or mind. I am a soul, made in the image of the One who made me, who can look up at the sun and the moon and the stars, and the trees and my neighbours, and, like the One who made me, can see that they are good.
Joseph Pearce, "Reasons to Be Cheerful: Living in the Best of All Impossible Worlds"

8/3/14

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

8/1/14

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

5/19/13

From Augustine's Confessions, Book 2:
The life which we live in this world has its attractiveness because of a certain measure in its beauty and its harmony with ... objects that are beautiful. Human friendship is also [a source of happiness]. Yet sin is committed for the sake of all these things ... when, in consequence of an immoderate urge towards those things which are at the bottom of the scale of good, we abandon the higher and supreme goods, that is you, Lord God, and your truth and your law (Ps. 118: 142). These inferior goods have their delights, but not comparable to my God, who has made them all.

8/26/12

This is Augustine’s understanding of grace(:) Grace is God’s giving us sovereign joy in God that triumphs over joy in sin. In other words, God works deep in the human heart to transform the springs of joy so that we love God more than sex or anything else. Loving God, in Augustine’s mind, is never reduced to deeds of obedience or acts of willpower. It is always a delighting in God, and in other things only for God’s sake. . . .

. . . Grace governs life by giving a supreme joy in the supremacy of God.

John Piper, The Legacy of Sovereign Joy

8/13/12

I had been . . . wrong in supposing that I desired Joy itself. Joy itself, considered simply as an event in my own mind, turned out to be of no value at all. All the value lay in that of which Joy was the desiring.

C. S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy