Isn't that amazing?

That's gutsy guilt.

That is gutsy guilt.

I am a guilty sinner. I won't minimize it.

I am broken and contrite.

I look up and he's frowning.

But I do not despair. He will plead my cause.

There will come a time when he lifts me out of this. He will redeem me. He'll restore

to me the joy of my salvation, and I will wait for him.

What does it take to sustain joy in God when life feels overwhelmingly difficult?

In this episode of Light and Truth, John Piper explains how the daily pursuit of joy is essential to persevering in faith.

Originally preached as four messages in 1988 at Trinity Baptist Church in Wheaton, Illinois.

This episode begins with a helpful summary of the first three.

The topic tonight is the practical one of now that we've heard about the necessity of joy in all that we do, how do we stoke those fires?

But I see a lot of new faces, some friends out there, and I want to sum up the first three

messages.

So let me try to do that here if I can in five minutes.

The first message was, the greatest heart for God in all the universe is God's heart.

In everything he does, he seeks to exalt his own name and magnify his worth and preserve and display his honor.

He is central in his own affections.

And then the second part to the first message was that this is not unloving of God, even though it sounds very self-centered and contrary to what we usually think of as love.

And the reason it's not unloving, but rather the foundation of love, is that God is the one being in all the universe

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