Welcome to the Paul Tripp podcast, where pastor and bestselling author Dr. Paul David Tripp connects the transforming power of Jesus Christ to everyday life.

If a Christian and an atheist are standing side by side watching a beautiful sunset together, who will enjoy the view more? Both get to take

in the common grace of the Lord in that moment, but in this week's Connecting clip of the week,

Paul Tripp and Shelby Abbott argue that the Christian can experience a deeper pleasure because

of knowing the God behind the sunset. This short episode is from a larger conversation Paul and Shelby had on the Connecting

podcast. To listen to the full episode, check out the Paul Tripp podcast, episode 225.

Now here's Paul and Shelby discussing the pleasure of a god-centric life.

You know, when you look at bark on a tree, if you would pull a little chunk of bark, it's not brown.

It's 700 shades of brown.

Now, because as an avocation, I'm an artist, that's always very interesting to me and the way God painted the bark.

But my enjoyment is not just, my pleasure is not just at the color range there, but the

pleasure that there's a God behind that.

And he gifted that to me because he's generous and

loving and the sunset is this beautiful generosity of the lord to just at the end of the day just

paint the heavens with these glorious colors. So I'm able to experience because he's at the

center of my worldview, a deeper pleasure than the guy, the atheist who's sitting next to me,

who is seeing the same sunset. Enjoying the beauty, but they don't know why.

For him, it's completely a physical thing.

Yeah.

For me, it touches the deeper pleasure of my heart because God is my ultimate pleasure.

Yep.

And so it's not like, okay, it's all about holiness and there's no pleasure in that because we're invited to the pleasure of pleasures that everything becomes deeper and fuller and more tasty than it would if we didn't know God.

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