The single most important principle I ever discovered is this: the goal or purpose of the Christian is precisely the pursuit of happiness - in God. The reason for this is that there is no greater way to glorify God than to find in Him the happiness that my soul so desperately craves.

Sam Storms

Categorized in : Christian Goal Pursuit Of Happiness

Tolerate nothing in your life that might diminish your hunger for Gods word. Apply it w vigor & spiritual energy!

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!

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!

God created you for the first and greatest commandment, to be a l... by Sam Storms

God created you for the first and greatest commandment, to be a lover of God.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

symphony evil people

Joy is not necessarily the absence of suffering, it is the presen... by Sam Storms

Joy is not necessarily the absence of suffering, it is the presence of God.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

arrogant dimensions knowing

Grace ceases to be grace if God is compelled to bestow it in the... by Sam Storms

Grace ceases to be grace if God is compelled to bestow it in the presence of human merit.

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.

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.

looking-in-the-mirror mirrors self

The only reason integrity should be a burden to you is if you enj... by Sam Storms

The only reason integrity should be a burden to you is if you enjoy being dishonest.

burden reason integrity