The coronavirus is God's thunderclap call for all of us to repent and realign our lives with the infinite worth of Christ... The reason God exposes us to such losses is to rouse us to rely on Christ. Or to put it another way, the reason he makes calamity the occasion for offering Christ to the world is that the supreme, all-satisfying greatness of Christ shines more brightly when Christ sustains joy in suffering.

The most precious truth in the Bible is that God's greatest interest is to glorify the wealth of His grace by making sinners happy in Him—in Him!

In other words, when all the supports of human life and earthly happiness are taken away, God will be our delight, our joy. This experience is humanly impossible. No ordinary person can speak in truth like this. If God alone is enough to support joy when all else is lost, it is a miracle of grace.

When you bow down your head to pray Let the first thing that you say Be a lowly word and meek: "I admit that I am weak.

His beauty shines most brightly when treasured above health and wealth and life itself. Jesus knew this. He knew that suffering (whether small discomforts or dreadful torture) would be the path in this age for making him most visibly supreme.

Grace is free because God would not be the infinite, self-sufficient God He is if he were constrained by anything outside Himself.

There is only one explanation for God's sacrifice for us. It is not us. It is "the riches of his grace" (Ephesians 1:7). It is all free. It is not a response to our worth. It is the overflow of his infinite worth. In fact, that is what divine love is in the end: a passion to enthrall undeserving sinners, a great cost with what will make us supremely happy forever, namely, his infinite beauty.

God is gracious to whom he will be gracious. He is not limited by anyone's wickedness. He is never trapped by his own wrath. His grace may break out anywhere he pleases. Which is a great encouragement to the worst of sinners to turn from futile hopes and put their trust in future grace.

Satan . . . afflicted Job with loathsome sores," Job's response was, "Shall we receive good at the hand of God, and shall we not receive evil?

The point here is that there is no true knowledge of God and no salvation apart from childlike dependence on the grace of God in Christ crucified. If we are not willing to see ourselves as helpless, ungodly sinners and cast ourselves for mercy on the grace of God in Christ, we will not know God or be saved by him.

It is radically humbling to confess that the source of all our joy resides outside ourselves.

The most glorious thing about God is that he is so completely, fully self-sufficient that the glory of the fullness of his being overflows in truth and grace for his creatures. He doesn't need us. And therefore in his fullness he overflows for us. Such is the grace we receive at Christmas.