The following message is by pastor John Piper.

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D. Desiring God.

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Father in heaven, I'm thankful for my brothers and sisters here and I pray that you would come and grant me and them strength to listen to speak and faith and faith and faith

and faithfulness to your word. Your word is a sword that penetrates to the division of

soul and spirit, bone and marrow and reveals the secret things of the heart.

And so help me to stay close to your word.

And so you do your work now to awaken a kind of love

that is rooted in joy and that both magnifies you and meets the needs

of other people by helping them to magnify you.

Pray this in Jesus' name, amen.

So I said I left out the seventh argument from my eight that I was giving you as to why we

should pursue our joy in God all the time and now I want to talk about that seventh argument and the

argument was that if you don't find your joy in God, pursue your joy in God, seek to maximize your joy in God, you won't love other people.

You won't be able to love other people.

So let's go to 2 Corinthians, 2 Corinthians,

chapter 8.

And I find here in the first four verses of 2 Corinthians 8 a definition of love that makes joy essential to it.

What Paul is doing in verse chapter 8 and 9 of 2 Corinthians is seeking to motivate the

Corinthians to give generously to the collection that he's taking for the Saints in Jerusalem who are poor.

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