Thank you.

Let's pray together.

Father, Let's pray together.

Father, even though our focus is not now primarily on an exposition of your word, but rather an explanation of what Jonathan Edwards saw there, I feel the need for your help. And I know we all need your divine illumination in order to see the kinds of things that Edward saw and was moved by.

And so I ask you to grant me to be plain and faithful to him and to you and all of us, Lord, to grasp in some measure the kinds of things that Edwards saw with

such dazzling clarity.

I ask this in Jesus name, Amen. I have some comfort in the fact that my talk has

very little application in it and the two comforts are number one that

everything I have said and done for the last 40 years has been an effort to apply this talk.

My life is an imperfect echo of what I'm going to say. I am not a dispassionate scholar

when it comes to Jonathan Edwards. I love the man. I do. I love him. And what I say

here I believe is true and therefore you can ask it as though I said it as my view. So there I've just ruined all scholarly distance and

dispassionate analysis and confessed that I am totally committed to the kinds of things that I have seen and love.

And my other comfort is that Todd Wilson, his heart beats with mine and what I leave out, he should add at the end.

And then we'll apply together, I hope.

So here we go. For Jonathan Edwards, joy is central and

essential for what it means to be God and what it means to be God glorifying.

Joy is not a secondary ethical issue in Christian theology.

It is foundational ontology.

It's part of what it means to be God.

Joy is not an emotional icing on the cake of Christian obedience.

It is an essential element in all God exalting obedience.

...