“Christian faith isn’t a general religious awareness. Nor is it the ability to believe several unlikely propositions…it is the faith which hears the story of Jesus, including the announcement that he is the world’s true Lord, and responds from the heart with a surge of grateful love.”

“We do not approach people to call them out of happiness and assign them to a ritualistic, grim existence in which they please God by mere duty. We reach out to lost people to tell them that they are letting their inferior principles drive their appetites and passions, and that if they continue to do so, this pattern will lead them infinitely and unalterably far from the presence of God. It is not pleasure and happiness that they need to give up; it is sin, and the sinfully oriented pleasures that they seek. We call them to repent of these ways, to forsake sin, and to trust Jesus Christ, the Savior who waits to lead them into pleasures evermore (Psalms 16:11).”

“For if we love him not for his own sake, but for something else then our love is not terminated on him, but on something else, as its ultimate object…if we love not God because he is what he is, but only because he is profitable to us, in truth we love him not at all. If we seem to love him, our love is not to him, but to something else.”

“God [has] not made mankind to be miserable. Being a Christian [does] not mean the absence of pleasure. Much to the contrary, God [has] made mankind to experience unending delight and joy in Him, to be happier and happier as knowledge of God increase[s], and to constantly soak up the sweetest pleasure the world affords in the life of faith - all of which flow together to constitute “the good life”…any life created by the majestic, undomesticated, loving god of the Bible [can] not be mundane or boring.”

“We want [the world] to know, above all, that the church is not just another organization, another club to join and profit from, but is a holy movement of God’s Spirit that calls people to not be served, but to serve, to lay down their lives in order to glorify God and fulfill His purpose for humanity…the church is not incidental to true Christianity; it is essential to the sustenance of a Spirit-filled heart.”

“The true Christian, however, takes joy not most in what the church does for them, but in what God is doing in and through the church.”

“A person living under the influence of common grace (as we all do) and acting out of some form of self-love (as we all do) could easily take pleasure in the doctrines and experience of Christianity without actually knowing the Lord [Jesus] in a salvific sense. The truths of Christianity can appear beautiful on a surface level to the unconverted heart…however, unless this knowledge is personally applied in repentance of sin and wholehearted faith in the person and work of Jesus Christ, it does not save us from sin and judgment.”

“He that is [truly a Christian] truly apprehends and sees it, or has a sense of it. He does not merely rationally believe that God is glorious, but he has a sense of the gloriousness of God in his heart. There is not only a rational belief that God is holy, and that holiness is a good hing, but there is a sense of the loveliness of God’s holiness. There is not only a speculatively judging that God is gracious, but a sense how amiable God is upon that account, or a sense of the beauty of this divine attribute.”