Gratitude is the joy that arises in response to God’s good will toward us in all his gifts.

This is God's universal purpose for all Christian suffering: more contentment in God and less satisfaction in the world.

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.

It horribly skews the meaning of the cross when contemporary prophets of self-esteem say that the cross is a witness to my infinite worth. The biblical perspective is that the cross in a witness to the infinite worth of God's glory, and a witness to the immensity of the sin of my pride.

Sin carries in it its own misery.

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.

Every sin flows from the failure to treasure the glory of God above all things.