If your reason for worshipping God is merely from a sense of moral duty, God would rather you not worship Him at all. To say that God is pleased with worship that lacks passion is to say God endorses hypocrisy. Sam Storms More Quotes by Sam Storms More Quotes From Sam Storms Tolerate nothing in your life that might diminish your hunger for Gods word. Apply it w vigor & spiritual energy! Sam Storms vigor energy spiritual The ultimate goal of theology isn't knowledge, but worship. If our learning and knowledge of God do not lead to the joyful praise of God, we have failed. We learn only that we might laud, which is to say that theology without doxology is idolatry. The only theology worth studying is a theology that can be sung! Sam Storms learning religious god Grace does not demonize our desires nor destroy them nor lead us to deny them. Grace is the work of the Holy Spirit in transforming our desires so that knowing Jesus becomes sweeter than illicit sex, sweeter than money and what it can buy, sweeter than every fruitless joy. Grace is God satisfying our souls with His Son so that we're ruined for anything else! Sam Storms sex son jesus God created you for the first and greatest commandment, to be a lover of God. Sam Storms commandments lovers firsts God is most glorified in us when our knowledge and experience of Him ignite a forest fire of joy that consumes all competing pleasures and He alone becomes the treasure that we prize. Sam Storms treasure fire joy Spiritual gifts, to put it as simply as I know how, are the more or less concrete and tangible ways in which the Holy Spirit manifests his presence in and through the individual members of the church. Sam Storms individual church spiritual Many Christians are either woefully deficient in their knowledge of Scripture or noticeably devoid of any experience of God's power. The Lord never intended this for His people. We have all seen firsthand the joyless intellectual arrogance the absence of spiritual power can produce, as well as the fanatical emotional excess that comes from the lack of theological integrity. Sam Storms spiritual christian integrity I simply define glory as the beauty of God unveiled. Glory is the resplendent radiance of His power and His personality. Glory is all of God that makes God God, and shows Him to be worthy of our praise and our boasting and our trust and our hope and our confidence and our joy. Sam Storms radiance personality joy The Christian is not free to do what the Bible forbids. Christian freedom does not entail the right to fornicate or to steal or to lie or to persist in an unforgiving attitude or to do anything else the Scriptures explicitly prohibit. And a person who lovingly points this out to you is not a legalist for having done so! Sam Storms christian attitude lying God is able to cause all things people do to us, even the bad things, to work together for our good (Rom. 8:28). That isn't to say that all things are good, but that God can orchestrate the evil into a symphony of glory. Sam Storms symphony evil people Joy is not necessarily the absence of suffering, it is the presence of God. Sam Storms suffering absence joy The inspiration and authority of the Bible is the bedrock upon which our faith is built. Without it, we are doomed to uncertainty, doubt, and a hopeless groping in the darkness of human speculation. Sam Storms inspiration darkness doubt Just as a husband cannot be indulgent of adultery in his wife, so also God cannot and will not endure infidelity in us. What would we think of a man or woman who does not experience jealous feelings when another person approaches his or her spouse and threatens to win his or her affection? We would regard such a person as deficient in moral character and lacking in true love. Sam Storms jealous husband character If you come to worship for any reason other that the joy and pleasure and satisfaction that are to be found in God, you dishonor Him...God's greatest delight is your delight in Him. Sam Storms delight satisfaction joy There are no term limits on His reign. He has always been King and He always will be King. There is no death that threatens the perpetuity of His sovereign authority. There is no usurping of power by a lesser rival to His throne. There are no coups, no revolutions (at least, none that succeed). There is no threat of impeachment. He is a King who rules eternally. Sam Storms reign limits kings Worship without wonder is lifeless and boring. Many have lost their sense of awe and amazement when it comes to God. Having begun with the arrogant presumption of knowing about God all that one can, they reduce Him to manageable terms and confine Him to a tidy theological box, the dimensions of which conform to their predilections of what a god ought to be and do. Sam Storms arrogant dimensions knowing Grace ceases to be grace if God is compelled to bestow it in the presence of human merit. Sam Storms merit humans grace God has sovereignly pulled back the curtain on His glory. He has disclosed Himself on the platform of both creation and redemption that we might stand awestruck in His presence, beholding the sweet symmetry of His attributes, pondering the unfathomable depths of His greatness, baffled by the wisdom of His deeds and the limitless extent of His goodness. This is His beauty. Sam Storms greatness depth sweet Self-image, the concept we have of ourselves, must begin not by looking in the mirror but by looking into the face of God. Sam Storms looking-in-the-mirror mirrors self The only reason integrity should be a burden to you is if you enjoy being dishonest. Sam Storms burden reason integrity
