Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Enjoy the joy of being enjoyed by God.
Our giving is but a reflex of God's giving.
Where there is no fruit, there may be no root.
You need never fear feeling too good about God.
The ultimate goal of theology isn't knowledge, but worship.
Everything without God is pathetically inferior to God without everything.
Joy is not necessarily the absence of suffering, it is the presence of God.
There's always the threat of "spiritual one-up-manship" that we must avoid.
God created you for the first and greatest commandment, to be a lover of God.
The only reason integrity should be a burden to you is if you enjoy being dishonest.
Grace is God satisfying our souls with His Son so that we're ruined for anything else!
Whatever and whenever God blesses, Satan curses. What God creates, Satan counterfeits.
Sin turns ugly and is subject to defeat only when seen in the light of Christ's beauty.
Grace ceases to be grace if God is compelled to bestow it in the presence of human merit.
Integrity... does not mean sinless, but it does describe a person who by God's grace "sin less."
Adultery is an obvious violation of the rights of another. You are stealing what doesn't belong to you.
Tolerate nothing in your life that might diminish your hunger for Gods word. Apply it w vigor & spiritual energy!
Self-image, the concept we have of ourselves, must begin not by looking in the mirror but by looking into the face of God.
All prophecy is based on a revelation from God, but always operates at a lower level of authority than that of inspired Scripture.
The New Testament never once warns us that humbly seeking and praying for spiritual gifts will bring anything other than a blessing.
The focus of Satan's efforts is always the same: to deceive us into believing that the passing pleasures of sin are more satisfying than obedience.
A hypocrite [is the one who] wants to impress others with an external facade of religious piety that he knows is devoid of internal spiritual substance.
Worship is first and foremost a feasting on all that God is for us in Jesus... [One] in which God is the host, the cook, the waiter, and the meal itself.
The biblical basis is the numerous biblical texts which describe prophecy as a spiritual gift that should characterize God's people in the age of the New Covenant.
Sometimes people base their identity on their gifting. But our identity is in Christ and ultimately has no relation to whatever gift the Spirit may have granted to us.
A simple definition of prophecy is that it's when we speak forth in merely human - and thus often fallible - words something that the Holy Spirit spontaneously brings to mind.
If you come to worship for any reason other that the joy and pleasure and satisfaction that are to be found in God, you dishonor Him...God's greatest delight is your delight in Him.
God is most glorified in us when our knowledge and experience of Him ignite a forest fire of joy that consumes all competing pleasures and He alone becomes the treasure that we prize.
God's creative design was that your ravenous appetite for pleasure find fulfillment in Him, for nothing more wonderfully reveals His glory than the joy the creature has in its Creator.
God does not reveal information by communication: He reveals Himself by communion. Revelation is a personal meeting of God with man. It is a meeting of mind with mind or person with person.
The inspiration and authority of the Bible is the bedrock upon which our faith is built. Without it, we are doomed to uncertainty, doubt, and a hopeless groping in the darkness of human speculation.
Spiritual gifts, to put it as simply as I know how, are the more or less concrete and tangible ways in which the Holy Spirit manifests his presence in and through the individual members of the church.
If your reason for worshipping God is merely from a sense of moral duty, God would rather you not worship Him at all. To say that God is pleased with worship that lacks passion is to say God endorses hypocrisy.
God is able to cause all things people do to us, even the bad things, to work together for our good (Rom. 8:28). That isn't to say that all things are good, but that God can orchestrate the evil into a symphony of glory.
The Spirit has determined that he will operate through certain means and at certain times and if we sinfully put obstacles or warnings or prohibitions in the way, he may well not do for us what he otherwise would have done.
The essence of loving living as a follower of Jesus isn't in trying harder but in enjoying more. I'm not saying you can change without trying. I'm saying that enjoyment empowers effort. Pleasure in God is the power for purity.
God loves to glorify himself by suspending his gifts and blessings on our asking him for them. We should never presume to receive from God apart from prayer what he's clearly told us in Scripture will be ours only through prayer.
To say that worship is either about glorifying God or finding personal satisfaction is to put asunder what God has joined together. His glory and your gladness are not separate tracks moving in opposite directions. Rather His glory is in your gladness in Him.
God limits the happiness and pleasure we have now precisely so we might not become attached to this world or dependent upon it or fearful of leaving it (dying), as well as to stir in our hearts a longing and yearning and holy anticipation for what is yet to come.
I simply define glory as the beauty of God unveiled. Glory is the resplendent radiance of His power and His personality. Glory is all of God that makes God God, and shows Him to be worthy of our praise and our boasting and our trust and our hope and our confidence and our joy.
The single most important principle I ever discovered is this: the goal or purpose of the Christian is precisely the pursuit of happiness - in God. The reason for this is that there is no greater way to glorify God than to find in Him the happiness that my soul so desperately craves.
Worship is not about my enjoyment. It is about my enjoyment of God. It is not about my pleasure or my delight or my satisfaction. It is about my pleasure, delight, and satisfaction in God. Worship is not simply about glorifying God. It is about glorifying God by enjoying Him forever.
God created us so that the joy He has in Himself might be ours. God doesn't simply think about Himself or talk to Himself. He enjoys Himself! He celebrates with infinite and eternal intensity the beauty of who He is as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. And we've been created to join the party!
The ultimate goal of theology isn't knowledge, but worship. If our learning and knowledge of God do not lead to the joyful praise of God, we have failed. We learn only that we might laud, which is to say that theology without doxology is idolatry. The only theology worth studying is a theology that can be sung!
This is the glory and miracle of grace, that God, through the Holy Spirit, is able to transform a stubborn, rebellious, and unbelieving will into a passionate, obedient, believing will without violating the integrity of the individual or diminishing the voluntary nature of one's decision to trust Christ for salvation.
The Christian is not free to do what the Bible forbids. Christian freedom does not entail the right to fornicate or to steal or to lie or to persist in an unforgiving attitude or to do anything else the Scriptures explicitly prohibit. And a person who lovingly points this out to you is not a legalist for having done so!
Grace does not demonize our desires nor destroy them nor lead us to deny them. Grace is the work of the Holy Spirit in transforming our desires so that knowing Jesus becomes sweeter than illicit sex, sweeter than money and what it can buy, sweeter than every fruitless joy. Grace is God satisfying our souls with His Son so that we're ruined for anything else!
There are no term limits on His reign. He has always been King and He always will be King. There is no death that threatens the perpetuity of His sovereign authority. There is no usurping of power by a lesser rival to His throne. There are no coups, no revolutions (at least, none that succeed). There is no threat of impeachment. He is a King who rules eternally.
What elevates the human soul and empowers it to live in the fullness of its created purpose is not religious intimidation or new rules or an anxiety induced by spiritual scoldings. It is faith in the promise that the enjoyment sin brings is fleeting and futile, but at God's right hand, and in the presence of His radiant glory, are pleasures evermore (Ps. 16:11).
Worship without wonder is lifeless and boring. Many have lost their sense of awe and amazement when it comes to God. Having begun with the arrogant presumption of knowing about God all that one can, they reduce Him to manageable terms and confine Him to a tidy theological box, the dimensions of which conform to their predilections of what a god ought to be and do.