
TOPIC: The Happy God
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Sound doctrine [is] in accordance with the gospel of the glory of the [happy] God (1 Timothy 1:10–11)
John Piper Devotional 7th October 2023 MESSAGE:
A great part of God’s glory is his happiness.
It was inconceivable to the apostle Paul that God could be denied infinite joy and still be all glorious. To be infinitely glorious was to be infinitely happy. He used the phrase, “the glory of the happy God,” because it is a glorious thing for God to be as happy as he is.
God’s glory consists much in the fact that he is happy beyond our wildest imagination.
This is the gospel: “The gospel of the glory of the happy God.” It is good news that God is gloriously happy.
No one would want to spend eternity with an unhappy God. If God is unhappy then the goal of the gospel is not a happy goal, and that means it would be no gospel at all.
But, in fact, Jesus invites us to spend eternity with a happy God when he says, “Enter into the joy of your master” (Matthew 25:23). Jesus lived and died that his joy — God’s joy — might be in us and our joy might be full (John 15:11; 17:13). Therefore the gospel is “the gospel of the glory of the happy God.”
. . . The happiness of God is first and foremost a happiness in his Son. Thus when we share in the happiness of God we share in the very pleasure that the Father has in the Son.
This is why Jesus made the Father known to us. At the end of his great prayer in John 17, he said to his Father, “I made known to them your name, and I will make it known, that the love with which you have loved me may be in them, and I in them” (verse 26). He made God known so that God’s pleasure in his Son might be in us and become our pleasure.
John Piper was born in Chattanooga, Tennessee, to Bill and Ruth Piper January 11, 1946. When John and his older sister were still small, the family moved to Greenville, South Carolina, where John spent his growing-up years. His father was an itinerant evangelist, and his mother died in 1974 in a bus accident while visiting Israel.
In 1980, sensing an irresistible call of the Lord to preach, John became the senior pastor of Bethlehem Baptist Church in Minneapolis, Minnesota, where he ministered for almost 33 years.
Desiring God began inauspiciously in 1994 when John handed off the church’s tape ministry to his assistant, Jon Bloom.
What started with tapes and John’s books, Desiring God has blossomed into an international web ministry with 14,000+ free resources and 3.5+million monthly users. Today, John serves as lead teacher for the ministry.
READ MORE TOPICS: OPEN HEAVENS, OUR DAILY BREAD, IN TOUCH, SEEDS OF DESTINY, STREAMS OF JOY, JOEL OSTEEN, MOUNTAIN TOP LIFE, DCLM DAILY MANNA, UCB WORD FOR TODAY