Quotes about Joy

Sometimes people ask: should we pursue obedience to God or joy in God? Edwards would answer: The question involves a category confusion. It's like asking: should I pursue fruit or apples? Obedience is doing what we are told. And we are told to delight ourselves in the Lord. Therefore pursuing joy in God is obedience. In

The best news in the world is that there is no conflict between your greatest possible happiness and God's perfect holiness. Being satisfied with all that God is for you in Jesus magnifies him as the greatest treasure and brings you more joy---eternal, infinite joy---than any other delight ever could.

Salvation is the creation of new desires, not just new goodies.

Let's not overlook that eating the Lord's Supper with God's people is a kind of preaching that is also meant to feed the joy of Christ's people. "For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord's death until he comes" (1 Cor. 11:26). The death and resurrection of Christ are being

Worship is nothing less than obedience to the command of God: "Delight yourself in the Lord"!

Glorifying God and enjoying Him were one end in their minds, not two.

God is not glorified if the foundation of our gratitude for the gospel is the worth of its gifts and not the value of the Giver. If gratitude for the gospel is not rooted in the glory of God beneath the gift of God, it is disguised idolatry. May God grant us a heart to see in the gospel the light of the glory of God in the face of Christ. May he grant us to delight in him for who he is, so that all our gratitude for his gifts will be the echo of our joy in the excellency of the Giver!

Nothing shows the direction of the deep winds of the soul like the demand for radical, sin-destroying, Christ-exalting joy in God.

We will not find a frustrated, gloomy, irritable Father who wants to be left alone, but a Father whose heart is so full of joy that it spills over unto all those (Christian Hedonists) who are thirty.

Observe, It is our duty and privilege to rejoice in God, and to rejoice in him always; at all times, in all conditions; even when we suffer for him, or are afflicted by him. We must not think the worse of him or of his ways for the hardships we meet with in his service. There is enough in God to furnish us with matter of joy in the worst circumstance on earth. . . . Joy in God is a duty of great consequence in the Christian life; and Christians need to be again and again called to it

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

But we are supposed to have our roots planted somewhere other than circumstance. The roots of our lives are supposed to be drawing up the nutriments of joy from a source that cannot be depleted—the river of God and his Word. The one who delights in the Lord is "like a tree planted by streams of water.