Quotes About Joy

What makes born-again people glad is not at bottom that they have God's gifts but that they have God.

For Jesus, the demand for joy is a way to live with suffering and to outlast suffering.

The road to heaven is a hard road, but it is not joyless.

God is glorified not only by His glory's being seen, but by its being rejoiced in.

When we understand that seeing Christ is what leads to enjoying Christ, and that therefore the fight for joy is mainly a fight to see, we grasp how the fight does not undermine the fact that joy is a gift and a spontaneous experience

Love is the overflow of joy in God that meets the needs of others.

God is not worshiped where He is not treasured and enjoyed. Praise is not an alternative to joy, but the expression of joy. Not to enjoy God is to dishonor Him. To say to Him that something else satisfies you more is the opposite of worship. It is sacrilege.

The fight for joy is first and always a fight to see.

If God alone is enough to support joy when all else is lost, it is a miracle of grace.

God is our supreme pleasure. We prefer above all else to know him and see him and be with him and be like him.

God communicates himself to the understanding of the creature, in giving him the knowledge of his glory; and to the will of the creature, in giving him holiness, consisting primarily in the love of God: and in giving the creature happiness, chiefly consisting in joy in God.108 These are the sum of that emanation of divine fullness called in Scripture, the glory of God. The first part of this glory is called truth, the latter, grace

Only exult in the cross of Christ. Only rejoice in the cross of Christ. Paul says: let this be your single passion, your single boast and joy and exultation

My hope is that every reader will see that God's God-centeredness-- God's commitment to magnify his name, his holiness, and his glory as the ultimate aim of his providence-- is not a threat to our joy but the basis of it

Every man, whatsoever his condition, desires to be happy. There is no man who does not desire this, and each one desires it with such earnestness that he prefers it to all other things; whoever, in fact, desires other things, desires them for this end alone.

The joy of the Lord will arm us against the assaults of our spiritual enemies and put our mouths out of taste for those pleasures with which the tempter baits his hooks."5

God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in Him

If you live gladly to make others glad in God, your life will be hard, your risks will be high, and your joy will be full.

Christ did not die to forgive sinners who go on treasuring anything above seeing and savoring God. And people who would be happy in heaven if Christ were not there, will not be there. The gospel is not a way to get people to heaven; it is a way to get people to God. It's a way of overcoming every obstacle to everlasting joy in God. If we don't want God above all things, we have not been converted by the gospel.

He is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in him.

The really wonderful moments of joy in this world are not the moments of self-satisfaction, but self-forgetfulness. Standing on the edge of the Grand Canyon and contemplating your own greatness is pathological. At such moments we are made for a magnificent joy that comes from outside ourselves.

His joy was a release of Paul's conversion, not the heavy backslapping practical-joking humor of the Victorians, nor the cynical satire or the flippancy of the twenty first century mass media, just the gift of not taking himself or his adversaries too seriously.

He who has learned how to laugh at himself shall never cease to be entertained.

The warning to flee the Daughter of Babylon couldn't be any plainer than Zechariah's words. God, likewise, in Isaiah 48:20, warns the Jewish residents of the Daughter of Babylon to flee: "Leave Babylon, flee from the Babylonians! Announce this with shouts of joy and proclaim it. Send it out to the ends of the earth; say, 'The LORD has redeemed his servant Jacob'.

Knock, knock! Who's there? Ya. Ya who? I'm excited to see you too!