Solid Joys Daily Devotional

When Christ redeems marriage, he does not dismantle loving headship and willing submission. He restores it.

Husbands and wives should seek to live after the distinctive model of God’s pure and glad design for Christ and the church.

The first priority in praying is to ask our heavenly Father to cause his name to be hallowed. In us. In the church. In the world. Everywhere.

The union between Christ and his bride is so close that any good done to her is a good done to himself.

Jesus did not want a dirty and unholy wife. Therefore, he was willing to die to cleanse her so that he could present her to himself.

You can steal to get; or you can work to get; or you can work to get in order to give.

It is a horrifying thing to use your God-given life to commit adultery against the Almighty.

One of the main reasons we so often fail to have consistent habits of happy, fruitful prayer is simply that we don’t plan to.

God takes out our old proud hearts and gives new soft ones, which are easily humbled and crushed by the sin that remains.

The very heart of God’s glory is the fullness of grace that overflows in kindness to needy people.

God aims to be our servant, because he aims to get the glory as the Giver.

God is glorified when we turn away from ourselves to him in the confidence that he will provide the help we need.

The greatest news is that the cross upholds the worth of God’s glory, the honor of his Son, and the eternal salvation of his elect.

The good news is that God himself has decreed a way to satisfy the demands of his justice without condemning the whole human race.

All the omnipotent energy that drives the heart of God to pursue his own glory also drives him to satisfy the hearts of those who seek their joy in him.

Be freed from the burden of bearing your own load. Let God do that work. God loves to show his God-ness by working for us.

When we share in the happiness of God, we share in the very pleasure that the Father has in the Son.

When you lay down the burden of vengeance, God will pick it up.

Imagine being able to enjoy what is most enjoyable with unbounded energy and passion forever. One day, God’s delight in his Son will be in us.

God does not need us. Instead, his infinite self-sufficiency spills over in love to us who need him.

If none of God’s purposes can be frustrated, then he must be the happiest of all beings.

The quest for joy is not optional, but commanded.

Joy is not a mere option alongside worship. It is an essential component of worship.

Take up the Bible, ask the Holy Spirit for help, lay the promises up in your heart, and fight the good fight — to live by faith in future grace.

God’s greatest interest is to glorify the wealth of his grace by making sinners happy in him.

The truth of Christ frees us from the slavery of sin, for the freedom of holiness.

Confidence in God’s absolute control is the source and power of radical obedience to the call of God.

The Bible is no empty word. It is your very life — the foundation and kindling of your joy!

What sustained Christ in the dark hours of Gethsemane was the hope of joy beyond the cross.

When it comes to being a candidate for grace, your background has nothing to do with God’s choice. That’s good news.

You have a possession in heaven that is better, and lasts longer, than anything this world can offer.

God intends for particular promises to help you fight against particular anxieties.

The Lord has spoken: It is more blessed to love than to live in luxury! More blessed now, and forever.

In Jesus Christ we who are born of God have the unspeakable privilege of knowing Yahweh as our Father.

Only Jesus, the Son of God who died and rose for us, can make us truly free.

Sit down to the feast of joy in Christ and worship the King of Glory. The banquet hall is very large.

To see God, and know him, and be in his presence is the soul’s final feast.

Two things have to be true if your joy is never to be taken from you. One is that the source of your joy lasts forever and the other is that you last forever.

If we live by faith in God’s promise of future grace, it will be very hard for anxiety to survive.

God will see to it that you are not tested in any given day more than you can bear.

God will certainly take his energy and creative skill, and use it to care for his children since they will live forever.

Jesus helps us to fight the good fight against unbelief and to be free from anxiety.

The way you fight the good fight for faith is by meditating on God’s assurances of future grace and by asking for the help of his Spirit.

If you treated your salvation no longer as a gift, but as a purchase, God would no longer be the free benefactor.

You can’t give anything to God or do anything for God that he hasn’t first given to you and done for you.

Fear not. Your adversaries can do no more than God grants. And he will grant you the faith you need. Those are gospel promises.

Nothing will separate us from the love of Christ because Christ is alive and is still loving us right now.

God loves us so much that he will not allow our preciousness to become our god.

In the old covenant, the gracious enabling power to obey God was not poured out as fully as it is since Jesus.

If you feel vulnerable, you can say to God, “Lord, help me. I’m not even sure how to pray.” Trust that he will respond and will help you.

This is one of the beauties of the biblical doctrines of grace: their worst devastations prepare us for their greatest delights.

God is never forced into a situation where he must do something in which he cannot rejoice.

The worth and beauty of the Son come not just from his majesty, nor just from his meekness, but from the way these mingle in perfect proportion.

By all means work. But always look to the Lord for the decisive, supernatural work needed to fulfill his purposes.

Never grow weary of exploring and exulting in the inexhaustible privilege of being “in Christ Jesus.”

The Father’s infinite pleasure in his own perfections is the fountain of our everlasting joy and forgiveness.

The extent of Christ’s reign reaches to the smallest and biggest enemy of his glory in your life, and in this universe. It will be defeated.

God rejoices in the works of creation because they point us beyond themselves to God himself.

The sweetest experience of God’s love is conditional on our transformation into the kind of people whose emotions and choices and actions please God.

Day and night are saying one thing: God is glorious! Turn away from the creation as your supreme satisfaction, and delight yourself in the Lord of glory.

God is love precisely because he relentlessly pursues the praises of his name in the hearts of his people.

If God loves us enough to make our joy full, he must not only give us himself; he must also win from us the praise of our hearts.

God’s pursuit of praise from us and our pursuit of pleasure in him are the same pursuit.

The Bible is a window that opens onto the sunrise glory of the risen Christ.

Christ’s resurrection is God’s declaration that we cannot work our way to glory, but that he intends to do the impossible to get us there.

You will always be better off to obey than to disobey Jesus, even if that obedience costs you your life.

Authentic speaking about God’s goodness and greatness must come from the soul. Blessing God with the mouth without the soul would be hypocrisy.

If we are to be sexually pure, God must have the supreme place in our feelings and thoughts.

All the other gifts of the gospel — forgiveness, justification, propitiation, eternal life — exist to make fellowship with God possible.

The death of the Son of God is outrageous enough, and the glory of God that it upholds is great enough, that God is vindicated to forgive our sins.

The power of God to fulfill your resolves will come to you as you trust in the future grace of his promises.

When we see the face of Christ, we see the face of God. And we see the glory of his face when we hear the story of the gospel of his death and resurrection.

Grace is not only God’s disposition to do good for us when we don’t deserve it. It is also a power that makes good things happen in us.

We know more of the mystery of our redemption than David did. We know Christ. But we lay hold of the mercy in the same way he did.

The gospel is the good news that God bought for us the everlasting enjoyment of God.

Stand in awe and be at peace, knowing that no natural event is outside of God’s wise and good purposes, and perfect control.

God made humans in his image so that the world would be filled with reflectors of God. Images of God. So that nobody would miss the point of creation.

God is totally committed to the perseverance and eternal security of his blood-bought children.

Yahweh is a proper name (like Peter) built out of the word for “I am.” It teaches us that God absolutely is.

Between eternity past in God’s predestination, and eternity future in God’s glorification, none is lost.

God will honor the work of his Son by raising our bodies from the dead, and we will use our bodies to glorify him forever.

God has justified us. There is only future grace in front of us. Satan cannot overturn that decree.

Sometimes God makes seemingly strong people weaker so that his divine power will be the more evident.

Suffering must not drive you from God. Instead, it should drive you from everything but God.

Faith is like muscle tissue: if you stress it to the limit, it gets stronger, not weaker. When your faith is tested, the result is greater capacity to endure.

Our sovereign God says there is an appointed number of martyrs. They have a special role to play in planting and empowering the church.

Strengthen your heart and renew your courage by fixing your gaze on the invisible truth you see in the testimony of those who saw Christ face to face.

If you don’t fight lust with a seriousness that is willing to gouge out your own eye, you will go to hell and suffer forever.

The heart that loves money is a heart that pins its hopes, and pursues its pleasures, and puts its trust in what human resources can offer.

The way to thwart the devil is to strengthen the very thing he is trying most to destroy — your faith.

Jesus is interceding for us today that our faith may not fail. Our endurance in faith and joy is finally and decisively in the hands of God.

When God’s word feeds faith’s appetite for God, it weans our hearts away from the deceptive taste of lust.

Trusting God’s future grace comes by hearing the word. Therefore, preaching the word to ourselves is all-important in overcoming spiritual depression.

The Bible is replete with saints struggling with sunken spirits. But God includes such testimonies so that we might use them to fight the unbelief of despondency.

Prayer is the great link of faith between the soul of the saint and the promise of God’s future grace.

God promises not merely that we will find grace “to help in time of need,” but that the grace is well-timed by God.

Moment by moment, God supplies the strength in which we serve. He does this because the ongoing, inexhaustible supplier of power gets the glory.

Whatever added signs and wonders God may show to amplify our witness to Christ, they will come through his grace and power.

Believe in the promise that in this day God will be at work in you to will and work for his good pleasure.

Paul prayed for grace for the day, trusted that it would come with power, and then acted with all his might.

You may think you need to save your life in order to do your ministry. On the contrary, how you lose your life may be the capstone of your ministry.

Costly acts of love don’t just happen. They are impelled by a new appetite — the appetite of faith for the fullest experience of God’s grace. We want more of God.

The glory of Christ is magnified when we are more satisfied with his future grace than we are with the promises of sin.

When we don’t believe all the promises of God, we won’t receive the full measure of the Spirit.

“Works” longs for the joy of being glorified as strong. “Faith” longs for the joy of seeing God glorified as strong.

When he was in anguish, Jesus rested his soul in the sovereign wisdom of God.

Faith in God’s forgiveness means savoring the truth that a forgiving God is the most precious reality in the universe.

All the wrongs that have been done against us by believers were avenged in the death of Jesus. Look to the cross of Christ.

No one has ever lived who was more worthy of honor than Jesus; and no one has been dishonored more. But he triumphed by entrusting himself to God.

Your very soul is in danger if you hold on to an attitude of unforgiving bitterness. Leave it to the wrath of God.

Imagine being able to enjoy what is most enjoyable with unbounded energy and passion forever. That is not our experience now, but it will be one day.

It is good news that God is gloriously happy. No one would want to spend eternity with a gloomy, unhappy God.

As the source of every good pleasure, God himself pleases fully and finally. It is therefore astonishing how little effort is put into knowing God.

Even if we know that God is good to us, we may believe that his goodness is constrained. But Jesus is at pains to help us not feel that way.

The unwillingness of others to repent will not hold the saints hostage. Hell cannot blackmail heaven into misery.

Faith in God’s promises must be so real that the love it produces proves the reality of the faith.

What can sustain the will to die for others, when you are innocent? Jesus banked on love and future joy.

The experience of future grace often depends on whether we will take refuge in God, or whether we will run for cover to other shelters.

There is a fear that is slavish and drives us away from God, and there is a fear that is sweet and draws us to God.

What’s at stake in fleeing covetousness and fighting for contentment in future grace is eternal life.

Whenever we sense the slightest rise of covetousness in our hearts, we must turn on it and fight it with all our might using the weapons of faith.

God is glorified when the power to be holy comes from humble faith in future grace.

The fight for good works is a fight to believe in future grace. Therefore, learning to fight for holiness by faith in future grace is supremely important.

The essence of faith is being satisfied with all that God is for us in Jesus. Faith embraces God — not just his promised gifts — as our treasure.

Grace is not simply the pardon of our sins; it is the power to press on in obedience. We trust in God’s ever-arriving gracious power to enable us to do what we should.

When we hear God’s promises and trust him with courage, fearing the reproach brought upon God by our unbelief, then he is greatly honored.

Prayer ascribes to God the right and honor to be the free and sovereign God that he is to choose and to save sinners.

The prayer of the upright that delights God comes from a heart that at first feels precarious in the presence of God. It trembles at his word.

The Lord is pleased not by those who treat him as a needy watering trough, but as an inexhaustible, all-satisfying spring.

With God the honeymoon never ends. He is infinite in power and wisdom and creativity so that there will be no boredom for the next trillion ages of millenniums.

God’s anger must be released by a stiff safety lock, but his mercy has a hair trigger. He is infinitely energetic with unbounded and unending enthusiasm to do us good.

God did not spare his own Son, because it was the only way he could spare us and still be a just and holy God.

Not only are spiritual gifts a work of God’s free grace in our lives, but so also is the very faith with which we use those gifts.

In order to live the radical lives Christ calls us to live, we must embrace him as the only one who can truly satisfy our souls.

Our hearts exploit our minds to justify what our hearts want. Our deepest desires incline our minds to perceive and think in a way that will make our desires look right.

If we recognize our sin, fight it, and cling to the cross of Christ as our hope, then God will hear us and answer our prayers.

Worship is all the acts of the heart and mind and body that intentionally express the infinite worth of God.

The faith that justifies and the faith that sanctifies are not two different kinds of faith.

The best news in all the world is that our alienation from God is ended. We have been reconciled to the Judge of the universe.

Be devoted to glorifying the dependability of God. Lives of faith are the great mirror of his faithful love and provision.

Open your eyes to the better country, the city of God that he has prepared for us, and let yourself desire it with all your heart. God will not be ashamed to be called your God.

Faith glorifies God because it is a future-oriented confidence in God’s integrity and power and wisdom to follow through on all his promises.

We don’t become heirs of Abraham’s promises by working for God but by being confident that God works for us.

Why does faith not nullify the grace of God? Because faith calls all attention to grace and magnifies it, rather than nullifies it.

The worship of daily obedience is not at bottom a burdensome giving to God, but a joyful getting from God. That is the true service that God demands.

Faith nullifies boasting and glorifies grace. Wherever faith looks, it sees grace behind every praiseworthy act. So it cannot boast, except in the Lord.

God has wise and holy purposes when he does not answer our prayers as we want. Trust him. He knows what he is doing.

The sovereign grace of God can turn the unplanned place and the unplanned pace into the happiest ending imaginable.

We can know that our sins are taken away and that we will be safe in the judgment, if we trust Christ in such a way that it makes us eager for his coming.

Patience is indeed a fruit of the Holy Spirit, but the Spirit empowers us (with all his fruit) through hearing with faith.

What feels to us like a waste is what God plans. He works through the most hopeless circumstances.

Our election is unconditional in the strictest sense. Neither our faith nor our obedience is the basis of it. It is free and utterly undeserved.

When we sit down to calculate the cost of following Jesus — when we weigh the “worst” and the “best” — he is worth it. Abundantly worth it.

Jesus knows all his sheep by name; that is, he knows them individually and intimately.

God is so eager to work for us that he goes around looking for more work to do for people who will trust him.

When you love Christ, you don’t take much thought for your life in this world. Rather, you live for the glory of God’s grace.

What makes the whole Trinity rejoice together? The free, electing love of God to hide the true spiritual identity of Christ from the intellectual elite and to reveal it to babes.

Don’t replace Christ this summer with trifles. Seek the things that are above. Flight from Christ into Christless leisure makes the soul parched.

Consider these five digital dangers and some accompanying resolutions to avoid and redeem them.

God’s electing love is absolutely free. It is the gracious overflow of his boundless happiness guided by his infinite wisdom.

Trust God. Commit your way to him. Roll onto him your anxieties, frustrations, and plans — indeed, your very life.

Hope and love do not come from nowhere. They grow out of ideas — views of reality — revealed in the Scriptures.

How did you come to be a Christian? Join Charles Spurgeon and joyfully confess, “I ascribe my change wholly to God!”

When God becomes our treasure, we treat our adversaries out of our own fullness with the all-satisfying glory of God.

You have heard echoes of God’s glory everywhere; tune your heart to the original music. The best place to get your heart tuned is at the cross of Jesus Christ.

God is pursuing with omnipotent delight a worldwide purpose of gathering a people for his name from every tribe and language and nation.

This is the essence of what it means to love God: to be satisfied in him — not just his gifts, but God himself, as the glorious person that he is.

Faith overcomes our inborn hostility to God and his will, and frees us to keep his commandments.

God will gladly receive anything from us that shows our dependence and his all-sufficiency. Therefore, we can gladly cast all our anxieties on him.

The only joy that reflects the worth of God and overflows in God-glorifying love is rooted in true knowledge of God.

Joy comes from the Holy Spirit, not our own efforts or imagination or family upbringing. Therefore, the call to joy is a call to earnest prayer.

Gratitude looks back to past grace received and feels thankful. Faith looks forward to future grace promised and feels hopeful.

Praying for forgiveness should be based not only on an appeal to God’s mercy, but also on an appeal to his justice in crediting the worth of his Son’s obedience.

The goal of everything God takes us through is hope. He wants us to feel unwaveringly hopeful through all tribulations. He wants us to know he loves us.

God requires good works not as the ground of our justification (which is the righteousness of Christ alone), but as an evidence of it.

In this life of sin and pain, how shall we fight for joy? Here are fifteen ways.

The age of sin and misery and death is almost spent. The day of righteousness and peace and total joy is dawning.

Our sins are laid on Christ and his righteousness is laid on us. That is the great exchange — and it becomes ours not by works but by faith.

It could not be otherwise but that Christianity be a singing faith. The founder sang. We are a singing people because we are the children of a singing God.

When we speak of being a God-centered people, remember, this is because we are joining God in his God-centeredness.

The point of Paul’s conversion happening the way it did is to make Christ’s incredible patience vivid for you.

When we live by faith, rooted in God’s forgiveness, we are freed from the lingering, paralyzing effects even of shame we deserve to feel.

Christians care about all suffering — especially eternal suffering. That’s the greatest danger every city faces.

Not being afraid shows that you treasure God as your generous Shepherd, Father, and King.

The key to joy is faith in God’s future grace — that is, being satisfied in all that God promises to be for us.

Cherish the goodness of the Lord, fear straying from him, flee from every sin, and take refuge in him.

This is the gospel: Even though you have sinned greatly, nevertheless there is a future and a hope. Fear not!

The One with infinite power in the universe reaches down to personally touch and transform us.

Faith in Christ is not just assenting to what God is for us, but also embracing all that he is for us in Christ.

We won’t bear tomorrow’s load on today’s resources. Today’s mercies are for today’s troubles. Tomorrow’s mercies are for tomorrow’s troubles.

Come to God in prayer, to confess your sins, and to accept, as needy little farmyard chicks, the direction of God into the barn of his protection and provision.

God delights in having his name known and honored. The first and most important prayer that can be prayed is, “Hallowed be your name.”

Sheer sowing produces reaping. You must remember this, even when your tears tempt you to give up.

Trust Christ, no matter what. Go with him, no matter where. You cannot lose in the end.

When you are cast into the cellars of affliction, remember that the great King keeps his best wine there.

The biblical criterion for misplaced shame and for well-placed shame is radically God-centered.

It is good not to talk very long about God without talking to God. Frequently interrupt your talking about God by talking to God.

When Christ died and rose again, Satan was defeated. Jesus struck the decisive blow at Calvary.

Don’t just do good things for your enemies. Desire their best, and express those desires in prayer, even when they’re nowhere around.

Jesus is not just alive from the dead, but he is alive as the King who will reign forever — of his kingdom there will be no end.