Enter into Your Master’s Joy

The idea of entering into the Master’s joy is a telling picture of Heaven. It’s not simply that being with the Master produces joy in us, though certainly it will. Rather, it’s that our Master himself is joyful. He takes joy in himself, in his children, and in his creation. His joy is contagious. Once we’re liberated from the sin that blocks us from God’s joy and our own, we’ll enter into his joy. Joy will be the very air we breathe. The Lord is inexhaustible — therefore his joy is inexhaustible.

Randy Alcorn, Heaven (Carol Stream, IL: Tyndale, 2004), 223.

God’s Glory in the Person of Christ

God cares about the universe because He patterned the universe after the mystery of Christ. God cares about humanity because He patterned humanity after the mystery of Christ. God cares about family because He patterned family after the mystery of Christ. Everything that exists, apart from the parasitic barnacles of sin and curse, testifies to God’s glory in the person of Jesus Christ.

Russell Moore, Onward: Engaging the Culture without Losing the Gospel (Nashville: B&H Publishing, 2015 ), 60.

Christ’s Incarnation Shares in Our Weakness

God could, had He pleased, have been incarnate in a man of iron nerves, the Stoic sort who lets no sigh escape him. Of His great humility He chose to be incarnate in a man of delicate sensibilities who wept at the grave of Lazarus and sweated blood in Gethsemane. Otherwise we should have missed the great lesson that it is by his will alone that a man is good or bad, and that feelings are not, in themselves, of any im­portance. We should also have missed the all-important help of knowing that He has faced all that the weakest of us face, has shared not only the strength of our nature but every weakness of it except sin. If He had been incarnate in a man of immense natural courage, that would have been for many of us almost the same as His not being incar­nate at all.

C.S. Lewis, The Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis

The Glory of the Incarnation

The glory of the incarnation is that it presents to our adoring gaze not a humanized God or a deified man, but a true God-man — one who is all that God is and at the same time all that man is: on whose almighty arm we can rest, and to whose human sympathy we can appeal. We cannot afford to lose either the God in the man or the man in the God; our hearts cry out for the complete God-man whom the Scriptures offer to us.

B.B. Warfield (1851-1921)