Day 1 – Knowing God
“When Jesus had spoken these words, He lifted His eyes to heaven, and said, “Father, the hour has come; glorify your Son that the Son may glorify you, since you have given him authority over all flesh, to give eternal life to all whom you have given Him. And this is eternal life; that they know you the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent.” - John 17:1-3
- What does it mean to know God?
- Is knowing God more than just knowing facts about him? For example, you know some facts about your parents: when they were born, where they grew up, when they got married, who their families are, what kind of work they do. But is knowing those facts about them the same as really knowing your parents? Explain:
- If knowing God is more than knowing facts about God and agreeing that things the Bible says about God are true, then what does it mean for you to know God?
4. What do you REALLY think God is like as He relates to you?
“What comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us. … the gravest question before the Church is always God Himself, and the most portentous* fact about any man is not what he at a given time may say or do, but what he in his deep heart conceives God to be like. We tend by a secret law of the soul to move toward our mental image of God.” – (* portentous means telling or revealing. A portentous fact is something true about you that reveals or makes clear what you really are like)
“That our idea of God correspond as nearly as possible to the true being of God is of immense importance to us. Compared with our actual thoughts about Him, our creedal statements are of little consequence…A right conception of God is basic not only to systematic theology but to practical Christian living as well. (A.W. Tozer, The Knowledge of the Holy, p. 9-10).
5. Look at the verses from John 17 again. In light of the answers you’ve just written, what is the “eternal life” Jesus is talking about here and how is knowing God and His Son, Jesus, what it means to have eternal life?
PRAYER: Use these words from Psalm 119 to give you some ideas of what you can ask God to do in your life today:
Blessed are you, O LORD; teach me your statutes.
Open my eyes, that I may behold wondrous things out of your law.
O how I love your law! It is my meditation all the day.
How sweet are your words to my taste, sweeter than honey to my mouth.
I am your servant; give me understanding, that I may know your testimonies (Psalm 119:12, 18, 97, 103, 125).
SOMETHING TO THINK ABOUT:
We should…think that God leads a very interesting life, and that He is full of joy. Undoubtedly he is the most joyous being in the universe. The abundance of his love and generosity is inseparable from his infinite joy. All of the good and beautiful things from which we occasionally drink tiny droplets of soul-exhilarating joy, God continuously experiences in all their breadth and depth and richness.
While I was teaching in South Africa some time ago, a young man named Matthew Dickason took me out to the beaches near his home in Port Elizabeth. I was totally unprepared for the experience. I had seen beaches, or so I thought. But when we came over the rise where the sea and land opened up to us, I stood in stunned silence and then slowly walked toward the waves. Words cannot capture the view that confronted me. I saw space and light and texture and color and power…that seemed hardly of this earth.
Gradually there crept into my mind the realization that God sees this all the time. He sees it, experiences it, knows it from every possible point of view, this and billions of other scenes like and unlike it, in this and billions of other worlds. Great tidal waves of joy must constantly wash through His being.
It is perhaps strange to say, but suddenly I was extremely happy for God and thought I had some sense of what an infinitely joyous consciousness he is and of what it might have meant for him to look at his creation and find it “very good.”
We pay a lot of money to get a tank with a few tropical fish in it and never tire of looking at their brilliant iridescence and marvelous forms and movements. But God has seas full of them, which he constantly enjoys.
(I can hardly take in these beautiful little creatures one at a time.)
We are enraptured by a well-dome movie sequence or by a few bars from an opera or lines from a poem. We treasure our great experiences for a lifetime, and we may have very few of them. Btu he is simply one great inexhaustible and eternal experience of all that is good and true and beautiful and right. That is what we must think of when we hear theologians and philosophers speak of him as a perfect being. This is his life!
A short while ago the Hubble Space Telescope gave us pictures of the Eagle Nebula, showing clouds of gas and microscopic dust reaching six trillion miles from top to bottom. Hundreds of stars were emerging here and there in it, hotter and larger than our sun. As I looked at these pictures, and through them at the past and ongoing development of the cosmos, I could not help but think of Jesus’ words before he left his little band of students: “In my father’s house there are many places to live. I go to get some ready for you.”
Human beings can lose themselves in card games or electric trains and think they are fortunate. But to God there is available, in the language of one reporter, “Towering clouds of gases trillions of miles high, backlit by nuclear fires in newly forming stars, galaxies cartwheeling into collision and sending explosive shock waves boiling through millions of light years of time and space.” These things are all before him, along with numberless unfolding rosebuds, souls, and songs – and immeasurably more of which we know nothing (Dallas Willard, The Divine Conspiracy, p. 63-64).
How great is God – beyond our understanding! (Job 36:26).
DAY TWO - God Is Wise
“Oh, the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable His ways! For who has known the mind of the Lord, or who has been His counselor? Or who has given a gift to him that He might be repaid? For from Him and through Him and to Him are all things. To HIM be glory forever. Amen” (Romans 11:33-36).
- When you hear the words BRILIANT, INTELLIGENT and SMART, who comes to mind? List the top three to five people you think of as intelligent.
- When you hear the word GOOD, who comes to mind? List the top three to five people you think of as good people.
- Were any of the same people in your list of intelligent AND your list of good people? If so, whom?
Read the following observations:
If you play a game of word association today, in almost any setting, you will collect some familiar names around words such as smart, knowledgeable, intelligent, and so forth. Einstein, Bill Gates of Microsoft, and the obligatory rocket scientists, will stand out. But one person who pretty certainly will not come up in this connection is Jesus.
Here is a profoundly significant fact: In our culture, among Christians and non-Christians alike, Jesus Christ is automatically disassociated from brilliance or intellectual capacity. Not one in a thousand will spontaneously think of him in conjunction with words such as well-informed, brilliant, or smart.
Far too often he is regarded as hardly conscious. He is looked on as a mere icon, a wraithlike semblance of a man, fit for the role of sacrificial lamb or alienated social critic, perhaps, but little more.
A well-known “scholarly” picture has him wandering the hills of Palestine, deeply confused about who he was and even about crucial points in his basic topic, the kingdom of the heavens. From time to time he perhaps utters disconnected though profound and vaguely radical irrelevancies, now obscurely preserved in our Gospels.
Would you be able to trust your life to such a person? If this is how [Jesus] seems to you, are you going to be inclined to become his student? Of course not. We all know that action must be based on knowledge, and we grant the right to lead and teach only to those we believe to know what is real and what is best.
The world has succeeded in opposing intelligence to goodness. A Russian saying speaks of those who are “stupid to the point of sanctity.” In other words, you have to be really dumb in order to qualify for saintliness. Centuries ago, even, when Dante assigned the title “master of those who know,” he mistakenly gave it to Aristotle, not Jesus, for Jesus is HOLY.
[What we usually think is that] devotion to God is independent of human knowledge. Of course, the modern secular outlook rigorously opposes sanctity to intelligence. And today any attempt to combine spirituality or moral purity with great intelligence causes widespread pangs of “cognitive dissonance” [Cognitive dissonance means ideas that don’t go together, or at least most people don’t normally think of the two ideas fitting together]. Mother Teresa, no more than Jesus, is thought of as smart – nice, of course, but not really SMART. “Smart” means good at managing how life “really” is (Dallas Willard in The Divine Conspiracy, p. 124-125).
Very few people today find Jesus interesting as a person or of vital relevance to the course of their actual lives. He is not generally regarded as a real-life personality who deals with real-life issues but is thought to be concerned with some feathery realm other than the one we must deal with, and must deal with NOW. And frankly, he is not taken to be a person of much ability.
He is automatically seen as a more or less magical figure – a pawn, or possibly a knight or a bishop, in some religious game – who fits only within the categories of dogma and of law. Dogma is what you have to believe, whether you believe it or not. And law is what you must do, whether it is good for you or not. What we have to believe or do NOW, by contrast, is real life, bursting with interesting, frightening and relevant things and people (Dallas Willard).
- Do you think of Jesus more in terms of being smart and brilliant in what He says, or more in terms of being good, righteous and godly?
Think for a minute about what the Bible says is true about God (and the Bible claims Jesus is fully God). One of the most basic truths affirmed in the Bible about God is that He is WISE.
I Corinthians 1:25For the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men.
Ephesians 3:10 …so that through the church the manifold wisdom of God might now be made known to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly places…
Job 36:5 – Behold, God is mighty…He is mighty in strength of understanding.
Isa. 40:26-28 Lift up your eyes on high and see: who created these? He who brings out their host by number, calling them all by name, by the greatness of His might, and because He is strong in power not one is missing. Why do you say, O Jacob, and speak, O Israel, “My way is hidden from the LORD and my right is disregarded by my God”? Have you not known? Have you not heard? The LORD is the everlasting God, the Creator of the ends of the earth. He does not faint or grow weary; his understanding in unsearchable.
Daniel 2:20 …”Blessed be the name of God forever and ever, to whom belong wisdom and might…”
- What does it mean to be wise? Is it the same as being smart?
Can you think of any smart people that you wouldn’t necessarily describe as being wise? Have you known any brilliant people who lack common sense and can’t get along with their wives or children (or anyone else)? They can figure out solutions to amazing problems, but can’t figure out how to LIVE. Knowing how to live is wisdom, according to the Bible. And God is INFINITELY WISE. That is, God knows better than anyone how life should be lived. Jesus, being the eternal Son of God, is infinitely wise. Do you ever think of Him like that?
6. What difference would it make if you believed what Jesus says is the most brilliant description of real life that can possibly be found?
7. When do you question God’s wisdom in your life? Do you sometimes think you could do a better job of deciding what should happen in your life than God does?
For further thought:
The real God too has eternal wisdom…how marvelous in their complexity and economy of structure are the things that He has brought into being. Much has been known about the larger structures, such as the eye and the ear, for some generations. Even they are almost incredibly ingenious mechanisms, which it is very, very hard to believe developed by chance. But what of DNA, that beautiful and seemingly absurdly simple double helix, which is found in every cell of every living creature? DNA contains the genetic “instructions” which direct the growth of an organism. Francis Crick, the Nobel prizewinner, says that if this genetic code were to be written out in English it would occupy about 500 large books, which means “instructions” perhaps a hundred times the length of the complete works of Shakespeare in every cell. If all the molecules of DNA were taken from one human body and laid end to end, they would stretch a distance comparable to the diameter of the solar system. “The fool” may dismiss this as just one of those things which happen to be. The one who believes in God sees it as inescapable evidence of God’s limitless wisdom. He who designed such a world and who so unhurriedly prepared it for man’s coming can be trusted – trusted to make no mistakes in his care for us (John Wenham, The Goodness of God, p. 176).
We must look at reality – look at it hard…till we realize that we are children, that we are fools, that we are at heart conceited, stiff-necked rebels, who will get everything wrong, unless we are prepared to give up telling God what He should be like and what He should do; till we realize that we can know only what God is pleased to tell us. We must listen and try to understand…sinful, finite man sees in a glass darkly (John Wenham, p. 10).
PRAYER:
James 1:5 – If any of you lacks wisdom, let him ask God…
Ask God to give you the grace to believe that what He says about reality is the truth! Ask Him to show you where your thinking about life has been distorted by the way the world around you thinks.
DAY 3 – God Is Good
Psalm 100 – Make a joyful noise to the LORD, all the earth. Serve the LORD with gladness! Come into His presence with singing. Know that the LORD, He is God. It is He who made us, and we are His; we are His people, and the sheep of His pasture. Enter His gates with thanksgiving, and His courts with praise! Give thanks to Him; bless His name! For the LORD is GOOD; his steadfast love endures forever, and his faithfulness to all generations.
The Bible affirms over and over again that God is GOOD!
- How do you see God’s goodness in your life? How has God been good to you?
Here’s some food for thought:
Psalm 145:9 The LORD is good to all, and his mercy is over all He has made.
15 The eyes of all look to you, and you give them their food in due season.
16 You open your hand; you satisfy the desire of every living thing.
Every meal, every pleasure, every possession, every bit of sun, every night’s sleep, every moment of health and safety, everything else that sustains and enriches life, is a divine gift. And how abundant those gifts are! (J.I. Packer, Knowing God, p. 147).
Psalm 107:1 Give thanks unto the LORD, for He is GOOD… v. 31 O that men would praise theLORD for His goodness, and for His wonderful works to the children of men!
“You have experienced the goodness of God every day of your life. Has this experience led you to repentance and faith in Christ? (J.I.Packer)
- Do you sometimes have a hard time believing God is good to you personally? Do you ever think, “I know I’m supposed to believe God is good, but it doesn’t feel like He is good to me!”? In what kinds of situations do you think that?
- What do you think it would mean for God to really be good to you? What do you think He would do differently in your life if he was good to you?
Some more food for thought:
From Knowing God by J.I. Packer: Never, perhaps, since Paul wrote has there been more need to labor this point than there is today. Modern muddle-headedness and confusion as to the meaning of faith in God is almost beyond description. Men say they believe in God, but have no idea who it is that they believe in, or what difference believing in Him may make. The Christian who wants to help his floundering fellows into what a famous old tract used to call “Safety, certainty, and enjoyment” is constantly bewildered as to where to begin: the fantastic hotch-potch of fancies about God that confronts him quite takes his breath away. How on earth have people got into such a muddle? He asks. What lies at the root of their confusion?
…One is that people have got into the way of following private religious hunches rather than learning of God from His own Word…
…A second answer is that modern man thinks of all religions as equal and equivalent, and draws his stock of ideas about God from pagan as well as Christian sources…
…A third answer is that men have ceased to recognize the reality of their own sinfulness, which imparts a degree of perversity and enmity against God to all that they think and do….
…A fourth answer…is that people today are in the habit of dissociating the thought of God’s goodness from that of His severity…
The habit in question, first learned from some…theologians of the last century, has infected modern Western Protestantism as a whole. To reject all ideas of divine wrath and judgment, and to assume that God’s character, misrepresented (forsooth!) in many parts of the Bible, is really one of indulgent benevolence without any severity, is the rule rather than the exception among ordinary folk today….Modern Protestants are not going to give up their “enlightened” adherence to the doctrine of a celestial Santa Claus merely because [some theologian] suspects this is not the whole story. The certainty that there is no more to be said of God (if God there be) than that He is infinitely forbearing and kind, is as hard to eradicate as bindweed. And when once it has put down roots, Christianity, in the true sense of the word, simply dies off. For the substance of Christianity is faith in the forgiveness of sins through the redeeming work of Christ on the cross. But on the basis of the Santa Claus theology, sins create no problem, and atonement becomes needless…
Yet the Santa Claus theology carries within itself the seeds of its own collapse, for it cannot cope with the fact of evil. It is no accident that when belief in the “good God” of liberalism became widespread, about the turn of this century [1900], the so-called “problem of evil” (which was not regarded as a problem before) suddenly leaped into prominence as the number-one concern of Christian apologetics. This was inevitable, for it is not possible to see the good-will of a heavenly Santa Claus in heartbreaking and destructive things like cruelty, or marital infidelity, or death on the road, or lung cancer. The only way to save the liberal view of God is to dissociate Him from these things, and to deny that He has any direct relation to them or control over them; in other words, to deny His omnipotence and lordship over His world…[we are] left with a God who means well, but cannot always insulate His children from trouble and grief. When trouble comes, therefore, there is nothing to do but grin and bear it. In this way, by an ironic paradox, faith in a God who is all goodness and no severity tends to confirm men in a fatalistic and pessimistic attitude toward life. – Packer, p. 144-145.
From The Goodness of God by John Wenham: …it is good that we cannot know everything…..That God has wise and loving reasons for all His actions we know, but He has not been pleased to tell us why He made from the same human stock “one vessel for beauty and another for menial use” – “vessels of wrath…vessels of mercy”. We are simply allowed in [humility] and adoration to contemplate the fact that any APPARENT unfairness in God’s treatment of us arises not because some have too much punishment, but because some of us, by virtue of the cross, appear to have too little.
God’s world is a great mystery, yet paradoxically no supposedly comprehensive water-tight system of answers could possibly be right. No creature could conceivably “comprehend” God – could, that is to say, encompass God’s uncreated mind within his created mind. The very paradox of God’s incomprehensibility is part of the case for biblical theism….God has given us plenty of evidence if we are willing to believe, and He has given us plenty of perplexities if we want to buttress our disbelief.
Man’s happiness lies in accepting his creature hood from the hands of his wonderful Creator. When one thinks about it, it is really absurd for a being as ignorant as man to EXPECT fully to understand the whole complex web of purposes which go to make up his God-given experiences. The truthful answer to the question: “Why has God allowed this?” must always be prefaced by: “I cannot pretend fully to know.” In one single, apparently simple act of God there may be a dovetailing of purposes which concern many people, including perhaps those involved, those who observe and those who come after. Retribution, discipline, warning and instruction may all be intended, so that an easy answer will inevitably be an oversimplification. God is perfectly consistent in His doings, but the circumstances in which He acts are never identical…..Who is man to pretend to understand the infinite wisdom and complexity of the divine purposes? It is man’s desire to be as God which has been his undoing (pages 84-85).
…If only we could see things straight, we should realize that it is stupid to say: “I don’t approve of the way God has made His world”; or “I don’t approve of the way He manages it.” This attitude is in fact worse than stupidity; did we but realize it, it is arrogance – man presuming to tell God what to do. Whether or not it seems so to us, God’s ways are good and wise and loving, and he will not change them. We must seek His help to change ours. We must school ourselves not to complain about the facts, but to learn from them. The facts of Providence are material from which we can come to understand more clearly the loving wisdom of God’s ways (p. 87-88).
The child of God who lives in the world of the Bible knows himself to be a very little person in a great and awesome universe. Yet he is given a glimpse of the eternal counsels of the love of God, wherein, before the foundation of the world, the Son took for himself the role of the Lamb to be slain for sinners; wherein the Father pre-ordained to give his chosen ones to the Son as His bride. It is against this backdrop that man, though puny in his ignorance and twisted in his sinfulness, is seen to be the object of God’s love.
There are indeed terrible evils in the world, but if we are to see things in proportion, we dare not dwell exclusively on them. There may be times when we feel the whole earth to be a vile place, and we never want to open a newspaper or watch a news program again. Yet to think of it in these terms patently represents only a half-truth. Almost all of us have a host of memories, if we care to summon them, of exquisite and breath-taking pleasures – the joys of friendship and humor, of home and love, the joys of adventure, the joys of the natural world, the joys of mental discovery, of literature, of drama. It is more nearly true to say that “every prospect pleases, and only man is vile.” If we once take our sin seriously, and extract all the evils caused by sin from our view of the world, we have to admit that most of what is left looks like something worthy of a good and glorious Creator (p. 48).
Concluding thoughts: Your experience in life is not the key to an accurate understanding of who God is. Can you rest your faith in what God says is true about Himself – that He is working for your good in everything that happens in your life?
Read Romans 8:26-39.
Remember this truth: God never asks you to believe that bad things are really good things in disguise! Evil is always evil. Wrong things that happen to you are wrong. Sin is always displeasing to God. Christians aren’t asked to pretend that everything is really good. We are asked to believe that GOD IS GOOD! There is no evil in God. God has no dark side that delights in hurting people. He is GOOD always in everything He does. Why He tolerates evil in his world remains a mystery that won’t be explained until the story of this world is finished. In the meantime, we are asked to trust Him and believe that He is working in all circumstances, even the wrong and sinful things that He allows people to do, to accomplish the greatest possible good.
Remember that your story isn’t finished yet! You can’t see clearly yet what God is doing. You don’t know how things that seem bad and things that really are bad that happen to you will be used by God for good in your life when it is all done. But you can know and rest in the truth that God knows what He is doing and He is working to accomplish the greatest good in your life.
Will you trust God and believe that He is good?
PRAYER:
Take some time to thank God for the good things you can think of today. And ask God to give you the grace to believe that He is good to you and that He is working for your ultimate good, even when things in your life don’t look very good.
Day 4 – God Is Infinitely Desirable
O God, you are my God; earnestly I seek you; my soul thirsts for you; my flesh faints for you, as in a dry and weary land where there is no water. So I have looked upon you in the sanctuary, beholding your power and glory. Because your steadfast love is better than life, my lips will praise you…(Psalm 63:1-3).
- What do you desire most in life? If you are honest, what do you want more than anything?
- The Bible teaches us to believe that there is nothing we could desire in this world that is of greater value or more satisfying than God Himself. But we have a hard time believing that. The world is full of wonderful things! Life offers many pleasures – I’m not talking about sinful pleasures but perfectly legitimate pleasures that were made by God for our enjoyment. With so many things pulling at our hearts, how do we learn to delight our hearts in God and to want Him more than we want the things He has made?
HOW DO WE LEARN TO KEEP DESIRE FOR GOD ALIVE AND INFLAMED IN OUR HEARTS?
Some suggestions to ponder:
1. Learn to really see! C.S. LEWIS wrote this: Pleasures are shafts of glory as it strikes our sensibility [our senses – we experience the world through taste, touch, smell, sight, and sound]…But aren’t there bad, unlawful pleasures? Certainly there are. But in calling them “bad pleasures” I take it we are using a kind of shorthand. We mean “pleasures snatched by unlawful acts.” It is the stealing of the apples that is bad, not the sweetness. The sweetness is still a beam from the glory…I have tried since…to make every pleasure into a channel of adoration. I don’t mean simply by giving thanks for it. One must of course give thanks, but I meant something different…Gratitude exclaims, very properly, “How good of God to give me this.” Adoration says, “What must be the quality of that Being whose far-off and momentary coruscations* are like this!” One’s mind runs back up the sunbeam to the sun…If this is Hedonism, it is also a somewhat arduous discipline. But it is worth some labor.
(*Coruscate means to give off flashes of light, to glitter, to sparkle, to shimmer. So coruscations would be shimmering glimpses, and in this sentence Lewis is asking, if the short, sparkling glimpses we get of the beauty of God in the things He has made are wonderful, how much more beautiful and wonderful must God Himself be?).
- Reflect on what the Bible writers have said:
Psalm 42:1-2 As a deer pants for flowing streams, so pants my soul for you, O God. My soul thirsts for God, for the living God.
Psalm 73:25-26 Whom have I in heaven but you? And there is nothing on earth that I desire besides you. My flesh and my heart may fail, but God is the strength of my heart, and my portion forever.
Psalm 130:5 I wait for the LORD, my soul waits, and in His word I hope.
Psalm 27:4 One thing have I asked of the LORD, that will I seek after: that I may dwell in the house of the LORD all the days of my life, to gaze upon the beauty of the LORD and to inquire in His temple.
Psalm 16 Preserve me, O God, for in you I take refuge. I say to the LORD, “You are my Lord; I have NO GOOD APART FROM YOU.”…The LORD is my chosen portion and my cup…You make known to me the path of life; in your presence there is fullness of joy; at your right hand are pleasures forevermore.
- Reflect on what other writes have said:
Jesus, thou joy of loving hearts, Thou fount of life, Thou light of men,
From the best bliss that earth imparts, we turn unfilled to Thee again. – Bernard of Clairvaux
Jesus, priceless treasure, source of purest pleasure, truest friend to me:
Long my heart hath panted, ‘til it well-nigh fainted, thirsting after Thee.
Thine I am, O spotless Lamb, I will suffer nought to hide Thee,
Ask for nought beside Thee. – Johann Franck
Jesus, I am resting, resting in the joy of what Thou art;
I am finding out the greatness of Thy loving heart.
Thou hast bid me gaze upon Thee, and Thy beauty fills my soul,
For by Thy transforming power, Thou has made me whole. – Jean Sophia Pigott
When [David] proclaimed, “Your love is BETTER than life,” he wasn’t saying “Your love makes life worth living” or “With your love I can do anything”; rather, he was saying, “I love being loved by you more than I love being alive.” How does one’s heart come alive to THIS kind of relationship with God?…David wrote these words from a hot Judean desert at a time of great internal conflict and weariness. Among other heartaches, his own son Absalom sought to take David’s life. Difficult circumstances and hard providences often become a primary means by which the Holy Spirit quickens our thirst for the fountain that God alone can open up. No one and nothing but God can satisfy the cravings He has placed within the hearts of his children. We are our most sane and free when we live in light of this truth.
Spurgeon spoke well when he said, “This is an insatiable longing after one of the essentials of life. There is no reasoning with this longing, no forgetting it, no despising it, no overcoming it by stoical indifference. Thirst will be heard. The whole person must yield to its power. So it is with the divine power that the grace of God creates. IT IS A GIFT TO BE THIRSTY FOR GOD (Scotty Smith, Objects of His Affection, p. 85-86).
4. PRAY – ask God to make you thirsty!!
John Piper: …conversion is the creation of new desires, not just new duties; new delights, not just new deeds; new treasures, not just new tasks. (When I Don’t Desire God, p. 16).
The aim is to sustain love’s ability to endure sacrificial losses of property and security and life, by the power of joy in the path of love. The aim is that Jesus Christ be made known in all the world as the all-powerful, all-wise, all-righteous, all-merciful, all-satisfying Treasure of the universe. This will happen when Christians don’t just SAY that Christ is valuable, or SING that Christ is valuable, but truly experience in their hearts the unsurpassed worth of Jesus with so much joy that they can say, “I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord (Phil. 3:8) (When I Don’t Desire God, p. 21).
In the end the heart longs not for any of God’s good gifts, but for God Himself. To see Him and know Him and be in His presence is the soul’s final feast (John Piper, Desiring God, p. 69-70).
Prayer: Ask God this morning to make you thirsty for Himself, not just for any good gifts He might give you. Ask him to work in your heart so you will long for Him – to know Him and experience His goodness and beauty and wisdom and desirability in your life. | 
