September 2, devastated and delighted.

The Lord your God has chosen you to be a people for his treasured possession

out of all the peoples who are on the face of the earth,

Deuteronomy 7, 6.

What would the doctrines of grace, the old puritan term for the

Calvinistic teaching of God's sovereign grace in our salvation, tulip?

What would those doctrines of grace sound like?

If every limb in that tree were coursing with the sap

of Augustinian delight, that is, Christian hedonism.

Total depravity is not just badness, but blindness to God's beauty

and deadness to the deepest joy. Unconditional election means that

the completeness of our joy in Jesus was planned for us before we ever existed

as the overflow of God's joy in the fellowship of the Trinity.

Limited atonement is the assurance that indestructible joy in God is infallibly

secured for God's people by the blood of the new covenant.

Irresistible grace is the commitment and the power of God's love

to make sure we don't hold on to suicidal pleasures

and to set us free by the sovereign power of superior delights.

Perseverance of the saints is the all mighty work of God not to let us fall

into the final bondage of inferior pleasures but to keep us

through all affliction and suffering for an inheritance of fullness of joy

in His presence and pleasures at His right hand forevermore.

...