God created us for this: to live our lives in a way that makes him look more like the greatness and the beauty and the infinite worth that he really is. This is what it means to be created in the image of God.

heaven is a place of unparalleled and indescribable joy

There is a warning. The path of God-exalting joy will cost you your life. Jesus said, “Whoever loses his life for my sake and the gospel’s will save it.” In other words, it is better to lose your life than to waste it. If you live gladly to make others glad in God, your life will be hard, your risks will be high, and your joy will be full. This is not a book about how to avoid a wounded life, but how to avoid a wasted life. Some of you will die in the service of Christ. That will not be a tragedy. Treasuring life above Christ is a tragedy.

The strength of patience hangs on our capacity to believe that God is up to something good for us in all our delays and detours.

Feeling loved by God means feeling glad not only that He crushed His Son so that I can be forgiven, but that He's crushing everything that takes away from my praising of the glory of His grace.

It is unbiblical and arrogant to try to worship God for any other reason than the pleasure to be had in Him.

If the pursuit of God's glory is not ordered above the pursuit of man's good in the affections of the heart and the priorities of the Church, man will not be well served, and God will not be duly honored. I am not pleading for a diminishing of missions but for a magnifying of God. When the flame of worship burns with the heat of God's true worth, the light of missions will shine to the darkest peoples on earth. And I long for that day to come!