Quotes about Life

Only when the greatest pleasure in your life is the knowledge that God is pleased by the way you are living can you handle pleasure properly.

God is working right now, but not so much to give us predictable, comfortable, and pleasurable lives. He isn't so much working to transform our circumstances as he is working through hard circumstances to transform you and me.

You're not aware of it, but your envy of others and the pain it produces lock you into a view of life that has a disastrous past and a painful present but is functionally without a future. It feels as if what is will always be.

Our agenda, our definition of what a good God should give us, is a life that is comfortable, pleasurable, and predictable; one in which there's lots of human affirmation and an absence of suffering. But consider God's agenda,

we look to creation for life, hope, peace, rest, contentment, identity, meaning and purpose, inner peace, and motivation to continue. The problem is that nothing in creation can give you these things. Creation was never designed to satisfy your heart. Creation was made to be one big finger pointing you to the One who alone has the ability to satisfy your heart.

Prayer calls me to abandon the present as my only lens on life and commit to look at life from the perspective of reality.

Worshiping the creation is never a pathway to life; it leads you in the opposite direction.

God's purpose in controlling the details of your life (the exact length of it and the locations where you live) is so that at any moment in the middle of your unfolding story, you can reach out and touch him, because his rule makes him very near to every one of us. What each of us really needs in our finite and faltering humanness is not so much the success of our plans, but God himself.

Everything that was created was made by God and for God. All the glories of the created world were designed to point to his glory. The universe is his, designed to function according to his purpose and plan. That includes you and me. We were not made to live independent, self-directed lives. We were not meant to exist according to our own little self-oriented plans, living for our own moments of glory. No, we were created to live for him.

Here is what life is all about. At its center is a God of awesome glory—glorious in power, wisdom, faithfulness, love, and grace. Here is what everyone needs—rescue by this glory. Here is what everyone was created for—to live for this glory. Here is grace—that God would choose to splash his eternal glory down on inglorious, unthankful, rebellious, and self-oriented people such as us.

Your life is not good because it is easy or predictable, but because the I Am has invaded your existence by his grace.

Suffering, sadness, and death are not yet no more. It is hard to live in the middle, but that is exactly where we live. We live in a world that is still sadly and terribly broken.