To Him Glory Forever

Excerpt from notes taken during Sam Storms:  The Practical Sin-Killing Power of Christian Hedonism

Here are five ways to work for your own joy and the joy of your people:

1. Weave into the spiritual and intellectual fabric of your people the awareness that God's designs in the moral commandments of Scripture are to expand their capacity to enjoy him and not to inhibit it. (See Jonathan Edwards' sermon "Christian Happiness.")
   
   
2. Preach often on the bigness and the beauty of God.
   
   
3. Labor to turn their eyes from the pathetic, little, transient pleasures of what can be seen and felt and tasted to the grand and eternal pleasures of the glory that is to come.
   
   
4. Build into the mental, emotional, and theological framework of your people an understanding of how suffering serves joy. (For a good resource, direct your people to Matt Chandler's videos about the brain cancer he is facing.)
   
   
5. Be an example to them of joy in your own life and relationship with God.

My greatest desire for you is that you and I would be utterly captivated and consumed by the same spiritual energy that led the apostle Paul to cry out, "Oh, the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments and how inscrutable his ways! 'For who has known the mind of the Lord, or who has been his counselor?' 'Or who has given a gift to him that he might be repaid?' For from him and through him and to him are all things. To him be glory forever. Amen" (Romans 11:33-36).

What your people need most is for you to immerse yourself in the fountainn of this joy-generating revelation of God and to be saturated to the bone with what caused Paul to explode with this declaration. People are in bondage to sin today because they are bored stiff with God, and that's our fault. If your people don't hear you speak the same truths that Paul did and if they don't sense the enthusiasm in you that was in him, they will just go home and turn on whatever anesthetizes their pain.