Fear-based repentance makes us hate ourselves. Joy-based repentance makes us hate the sin.
God is so committed to your ultimate joy that he was willing to plunge into the greatest depths of suffering himself for you.
There is a joy available that the deepest grief cannot put out. No circumstance or person can take away the joy God gives.
But resurrection is not just consolation — it is restoration. We get it all back — the love, the loved ones, the goods, the beauties of this life — but in new, unimaginable degrees of glory and joy and strength.
A triune God would call us to converse with him . . . because he wants to share the joy he has. Prayer is our way of entering into the happiness of God himself.
While marriage is many things, it is anything but sentimental. Marriage is glorious but hard. It's a burning joy and strength, and yet it is also blood, sweat, and tears; humbling defeats and exhausting victories.
The most rapturous delights you have ever had - in the beauty of a landscape, or in the pleasure of food, or in the fulfillment of a loving embrace - are like dewdrops compared to the bottomless ocean of joy that it will be to see God face-to-face (1 John 3:1-3). That is what we are in for, nothing less. And according to the Bible, that glorious beauty, and our enjoyment of it, has been immeasurably enhanced by Christ's redemption of us from evil and death.
Christianity offers not merely a consolation but a restoration - not just of the life we had but of the life we always wanted but never achieved. And because the joy will be even greater for all that evil, this means the final defeat of all those forces that would have destroyed the purpose of God in creation, namely, to live with his people in glory and delight forever.
The sin under all other sins is a lack of joy in Christ.
The lack of joy in your life is due to your lack of mission.
While other worldviews lead us to sit in the midst of life’s joys, foreseeing the coming sorrows, Christianity empowers its people to sit in the midst of this world’s sorrows, tasting the coming joy.
Accepted in Christ, we now run the race 'for the joy that is set before us' rather than 'for fear that comes behind us'.
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