Messages by Desiring God

Missions is a summons to pursue joy. Trials will come, but your joy in Jesus will outweigh any sacrifice.

The Bible is our God-given kindling for igniting the flames of faith.

Prayer opens our eyes to our weakness, but also draws us near to the one who is more than strong enough to help.

Marriage is a mystery. It contains and conceals a meaning far greater than what we see on the surface.

How you use your money reveals the true desires of your heart.

We will glorify God and love people better when we serve out of joy instead of duty.

Worship is the melody of your heart as it repents of sin, delights in grace, and thirsts for more and more of Christ.

You are converted to Christ when Jesus becomes for you a treasure chest of holy joy.

God enjoys eternal happiness in himself, and he delights in satisfying his people with the overflow of that abundant joy.

There are at least four reasons for why God has given work to mankind.

The mindset of the new creation does not just agree that Christ died for sinners; it glories in the cross.

When you get your paycheck, do you look to the Spirit for how to use this money for God's kingdom?

If we really care about a person's ultimate welfare, we will confront them with their sin as well as comfort them in their trouble.

People who bear the fruit of the Spirit know they are worthy only of condemnation. They know that the only pay they can earn is the wrath of God.

A Christian is not a person who experiences zero bad desires. A Christian is a person who is at war with every distorted desire by the power of the Spirit.

Freedom flows forth in love just as surely as a bubbling spring flows forth in a mountain stream.

Being a loving person is absolutely essential to being saved, because the faith which saves by its very essence works through love.

Your enjoyment of freedom is much more important to God than many of the day-to-day decisions that fill us with so much concern.

For Paul, the experience of freedom is not icing on the cake of Christianity. Freedom in Christ is Christianity.

We are freed from the burden of the law when we are given the power to fulfill it from within. And that happens when Christ is formed in us.

If Satan can't get you to disobey God's commands, then he'll try to make you obey them with the wrong spirit.

When you entrust yourself to Christ you honor him, and he would be denying himself to turn you away.

If we don't understand why the law was given, we can kill ourselves with it.

It would be terribly wrong to say that the Mosaic law was opposed in its teaching to the Abrahamic covenant.

When Christ experienced the curse of the law on the cross it was not his own but ours.

If your life is flat, empty, without exhilaration, without significance, without a single and fulfilling orientation, it is because you do not see the risen Christ for who he really is.

Though arrogance and rage assail, conspiracy will not prevail.

The central concern of your life is to ensure that you are a child of Abraham.

The essential mark of a Christian is not how far you have progressed in sanctification, but on what you are relying to get there.

The transgression against God is to presume that you can climb your way up a ladder of morality into his favor.

When you finally hear and believe the drumbeat of the gospel, the rhythm of your step changes. There is a life in step with the gospel, and there is a life out of step with the gospel.

Very few people today stand up and praise the unity and coherence of truth.

To try to explain the change from Paul's pre-conversion persecution to his post-conversion passion for the gospel merely by the work of men is to grasp at a straw.

There is one, and only one, gospel. It is therefore astonishing — and tragic — to turn away from it and lose both God and his grace.

The freest people in the world are those who submit most fully to the authority of Christ in Scripture.

Jesus makes it clear that eternal life hangs on whether we are ready when he comes.

The essence of lukewarmness is the statement, "I need nothing." The lukewarm are spiritually self-satisfied.

The point of Hosea is that God exalts his mercy by not giving up on his promiscuous wife.

Christ came at Christmas to build a bridge across the chasm of sin to eternal life, but the name of the bridge is purity. Christmas is for purity.

God uses little towns, youngest sons, and slingshots to magnify his self-sufficient and most magnificent glory.

The fountain of forgiveness has been opened for you. And if you cleanse yourself through faith in that fountain, all the subsequent promises to God's people are yours.

Nothing you do is a trifle if you do it in the name of God. He will shake heaven and earth to fill your labor with splendor.

The belly of a fish hardly seems like salvation. But it was.

The violent nation will not boast forever. Very soon the recompense will come, and after that all the nations will render an account to God.

Am I ready to take my stand in the divine courtroom and hear the Judge pass an eternal sentence on me? We cannot face this unless we have faith.

Conversion isn't just changing your mind but exchanging the love of comfort for the love of goodness and justice.

Every staff on which we try to lean in our pride will snap and pierce us through. One refuge will be secure: God.

God will fight against us and clog the joy of our lives until we return with our whole heart to him. For his purpose is to be God alone in the midst of his people.

Every Christian has received a gift from God which he is responsible to use for the good of the church and for the glory of God.

God aims to be an utterly unique, wonderful, and exalted God, by condescending to forgive sinners and work for those who wait for him.