All paths lead to God, but only one path will present you before God without fault and with great joy. Pick a path, any path—it will take you to God. Trust me: you will stand before Him one day. You will meet your Maker. You will see the face of Christ. There are many ways up the mountain, but only one will result in life instead of destruction.
It would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.
Heaven, as conventionally conceived, is a place so inane, so dull, so useless, so miserable that nobody has ever ventured to describe a whole day in heaven, though plenty of people have described a day at the seaside.
Joy is the serious business of Heaven.
God cannot give us a happiness and peace apart from Himself, because it is not there. There is no such thing.
Religion will prove to the believer a comforter and a sure guide to the fountain of true happiness.
All these toys were never intended to possess my heart. My true good is in another world, and my only real treasure is Christ.
Suddenly I heard the words of Christ and understood them, and life and death ceased to seem to me evil, and instead of despair I experienced happiness and the joy of life undisturbed by death.
A thing of beauty is a joy for ever: Its loveliness increases; it will never Pass into nothingness; but still will keep A bower quiet for us, and a sleep Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing.
Life passes. Eternity comes to meet us with great strides. Soon we shall be living with the very life of Jesus. Having drunk deep at the source of all bitterness, we shall be deified in the very source of all joys, of all delights.
But even so, amid the tornadoed Atlantic of my being, do I myself still for ever centrally disport in mute calm; and while ponderous planets of unwaning woe revolve round me, deep down and deep inland there I still bathe me in eternal mildness of joy.
Ironically, brothers and sisters, the natural man who is so very selfish in so many ordinary ways is strangely unselfish in that he reaches for too few of the things that bring real joy. He settles for a mess of pottage instead of eternal joy.
My Paradise: With Christ. Not sinning. No pain. New earth. Precious in that order.
The peace of the world concerns only body and time but the peace, the joy, that Christ gives enriches the soul for eternity
The Christian man must aim at that complete obedience to God in which life finds its highest happiness, its greatest good, its perfect consummation, its peace.
Do it for joy and you can do it forever
If Heaven exists, to know that there's laughter, that would be a great thing.
What brings a real and lasting joy is our relationships with God, and our love for His other children He has put in our lives. It's people; friends and family that fulfil us. All else, fame, popularity, beauty, is so fleeting.
So to live is heaven; to make undying music in the world.
The Gospel is the news that Jesus Christ, the Righteous One, died for our sins and rose again, eternally triumphant over all his enemies, so that there is now no condemnation for those who believe, but only everlasting joy.
The only test of a soul's salvation is its inward happiness.
And as a Christian, I got something the world didn't give me, the world can't take away, so I find joy that can never be reduced to anything.
There is a place called ‘heaven’ where the good here unfinished is completed; and where the stories unwritten, and the hopes unfulfilled, are continued. We may laugh together yet.
For whoso dies for Christ, he is conqueror and is delivered from all misery and attains the eternal joy to which may it please our Saviour to bring us all.
Shouldn't we suppose that many of our most painful ordeals will look quite different a million years from now, as we recall them on the New Earth? What if one day we discover that God has wasted nothing in our life on Earth? What if we see that every agony was part of giving birth to an eternal joy?
