Before I begin, I want to thank Jonathan Gilmore and Italian Ministries for the privilege

of being here with you.

And I want to thank you for the very warm and affectionate greeting and welcome that we've had over these days.

It's been a really sweet privilege to be with you.

And knowing a little more now about your situation here and in the Balkans will make our prayers for you more real, more intense.

On the first day I argued that God created the world and does everything that he does in order to glorify his name.

The ultimate reason Christ exists and came into the world is so that there would be a magnifying of God's grace in Christ, and that grace reaches its highest,

most beautiful demonstration in the cross and the resurrection where the Son of God dies for his enemies.

And then yesterday I argued that God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in Him.

And I based that on Philippians 120 and 121, where Paul says,

it is my eager expectation and hope that I might not at all be ashamed,

but that now, as always, Christ might be magnified in my death, for to me to die is gain. So if you are so satisfied in Christ that when you lose everything this life

gives you and you die and you have only Christ and you call it gain,

Christ is magnified in that satisfaction. So the point was not when I glorify God I am happy but rather when I am happy

in God above all things God is glorified.

And then I gave nine arguments for the implication of that, namely if that's true, if that's

true, you should pursue your joy in God with all your might all the time.

And I left out one or two arguments because that was going to be today's message.

So that's where we are. Today's message is if you

abandon your quest to be happy in God, fully happy in God forever, if you abandon that pursuit, you cannot love people.

So that was the argument I left out yesterday.

Loving people on the horizontal level depends on you pursuing your joy in God fully and forever.

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