Randy Alcorn's Blog

By putting God first and His creation second, the world and its beauties become instruments of joy and worship. We love them better when we love God more than them.

I think we underestimate just how much of our lives here is from the hand of God in the first place. The life that we now know and the things we enjoy so much—the parts untainted by sin—we would naturally expect to have carried over, including distinctive personalities.

I love this article by Greg Morse, staff writer for Desiring God. How easy it is to fall into a Christian life of drudgery where we wearily put one foot in front of another, thinking, “I’m going to try my best to live for Jesus,” all the while neglecting to actually focus on Him.

Deliberately and unceasingly, the tide of God’s grace brings us wave after wave of God’s goodness. The next wave crashes onto the beach before the previous wave is diminished. God’s grace is constant, but it isn’t stationary. It keeps moving toward us day by day, hour by hour, minute by minute. It’s always there when we need it—and there’s never a moment we don’t. 

Our thankfulness glorifies God and makes Him happy: “The one who offers thanksgiving as his sacrifice glorifies me” (Psalm 50:23). Puritan John Boys echoed the sentiment of the psalmist: “As the Lord loveth a cheerful giver, so likewise a cheerful thanksgiver.” But God isn’t the only one affected when we give thanks.

Over thirty years ago, while researching and writing my first book Christians in the Wake of the Sexual Revolution (later revised as Restoring Sexual Sanity), I realized what a prominent and distinctive earmark of the early church its sexual purity really was. Christians were known to be Christians partly because they thought and lived differently when it came to sex.