pleasure on Sacrifice

We sometimes imagine surrender to God as emotional starvation. Every pleasure feels suspicious, and every passion feels in competition with our love of God. We think that the more miserable we are in ...

Lenten practices of giving up pleasures are good reminders that the purpose of life is not pleasure. The purpose of life is to attain to perfect life, all truth and undying ecstatic love – which is th...

The church is often called a killjoy for protesting against sexual license. But the real killing of joy comes with the grabbing of pleasure. As with credit card usage. the price tag is hidden at the s...

Jesus: You gave us Your love at a high price – Your own death on the cross in our place! By Your grace you give us eternal life and entrust to us Your creation. Thank You, Lord! We come today as Y...

Dieu pardonerra; c’est son métier; God forgives you — it’s his thing. *for contrast

Every human activity, except sin, can be done for God's pleasure, if you do it with an attitude of praise.

[The] Puritans made good use of the Latin phrase omnis vita gustu ducitur -every life is led along by its tastes. They knew that each creature is piloted by an inner yearning for its favorite food. E...

Prayer of Confession All: Certainly God is good to his people, to those pure in heart, but as for me, I nearly stumbled; I nearly lost my sure footing. I struggle with envy as I look at the those in ...

In this excellent little character study, Tolstoy describes the inner monologue of the character Pierre Bezuhov from War & Peace , who is able to justify and convince himself that a promise made ...

All men who live only according to their five senses, and seek nothing beyond the gratification of their natural appetites for pleasure and reputation and power, cut themselves off from that charity w...

Indeed, there comes a time in the life of every believer and of every church where a voice inside us simply asks, Now what? After we have been introduced to Jesus and have found peace with God through...

I have a photo of one of my children: on a day of pure sunshine, he is running down the hillside, leading with his chest, his smile and stride wide as his speed picks up. Running is pure delight. Agai...

We aim for happiness but we settle for pleasure…which is only momentary.

I walked a mile with Pleasure; She chattered all the way. But left me none the wiser For all she had to say. I walked a mile with Sorrow And ne'er a word said she; But oh, the things I learned fro...

As a third-century man was anticipating death, he penned these last words to a friend: “It’s a bad world, an incredibly bad world. But I have discovered in the midst of it a quiet and holy people who ...

In his classic fictional work on spiritual warfare, The Screwtape Letters , C. S. Lewis imagined a senior demon (Screwtape) corresponding with one of his protégés (his nephew Wormwood) as the latte...

[Maturity is] the ability to delay gratification. Delaying gratification is a process of scheduling the pain and pleasure of life in such a way as to enhance the pleasure by meeting and experiencing t...

Pursuit of the good life will not help humanity save itself, nor is democracy alone enough…A turning to and seeking of . . . God, is needed. The human race constantly forgets, that he is not God.

"A pleasure is full grown only when it is remembered…What it will be when I remember it as I lie down to die, what it makes in me all my days till then-that is the real meeting. The other is only...

Of all the animals, man is the only one that is cruel. He is the only one that inflicts pain for the pleasure of doing it.

Pleasures are like poppies spread: You seize the flow'r, its bloom is shed.

An ever increasing craving for an ever diminishing pleasure is the formula.

All sin starts from the assumption that my false self, the self that exists only in my own egocentric desires, is the fundamental reality of life to which everything else in the universe is ordered. T...

Most men pursue pleasure with such breathless haste that they hurry past it.

Work is so foundational to our makeup that it is one of the few things we can take in significant doses without harm. Indeed, the Bible does not say we should work one day and rest six or that work an...

Is any pleasure on earth as great as a circle of Christian friends by a fire?"

You and I were created for more than filling up our schedules with the self-satisfying pursuits of personal pleasure.

Take the great American writer Ernest Hemingway, for example. Born in 1899, he was the epitome of the twentieth-century man. At age 25, he sipped champagne in Paris, and later had well-publicized game...

How singular is the thing called pleasure and how curiously related to pain, which might be thought to be the opposite of it . . . yet he who pursues either is generally compelled to take the other; t...

In this short excerpt from C.S. Lewis’ Screwtape Letters, the fictional demon Screwtape complains to his advisor Wormwood about all the pleasures God has created that point back to a loving creator: ...