The title for this message this morning is “A Biblical Alternative to Serving God: Living By Prayer.” I choose the provocative phrase “an alternative to serving God” for reasons that you’ll see in a few moments. But behind this title is a desire to find a way to do missions and to do ministry that accomplishes some foundational things. And so I need to back up and lay some foundation so that you can see where this is coming from and answer: Why this title? Why are you moving in this direction? Why do you describe an alternative to serving God? Aren’t we supposed to serve God? And why do you call it “living by prayer”?

In order to answer those questions, I have to go beneath this topic and lay some foundation, and that requires, in a sense, me going way back in my life, maybe thirty years, to take you on a kind of a pilgrimage of discovery with me. Let me set the stage by saying there are two underlying passions in what’s governing me in my pursuit of how to do missions, how to hold a heart of prayer and a movement of prayer toward world evangelization.

There are two passions: One, I saw in the Bible first, and then by grace I began to find it in my heart. The other, I found in my heart first, and then by grace I began to find it in the Bible. The first one is a passion for the glory of God, and the second one is a passion to be happy, a passion for joy. And probably the most important discovery I have ever made is that those are not two passions, but one. Let me say that again because, if I can’t lay this foundation effectively, if I can’t help you discover what I have discovered, then you won’t get why I’m pursuing this title, this topic, this life prayer. A passion for the glory of God, a passion to be happy, have now emerged in my understanding of reality as one thing, not two things. So let me try to explain that and that’s the foundation-laying that I want to do, and that’s the pilgrimage that I want to take you on.

All for God’s Glory

I said that I saw in the Bible that God was to be glorified. Then, by grace, began to find it in my heart. And I think that’s the way it is for everybody. It doesn’t ever occur the other way around. We are quickened by the word of God. So we see things in the word of God that are brought to life in our heart with regard to godward reality.

I grew up in a home where my father was a full-time itinerant evangelist, and he would leave on Fridays usually, and come back on Mondays. He’d either be gone a week or he’d be gone two or three, and he led more people to Christ than I’ll ever preach to, probably. And he’s still holding forth at age 81 and he’s one of my great heroes. And whenever he was home, he took charge. This is one of the reasons manhood and womanhood is a big issue for me because my mother is omnicompetent. And I learned this because my dad was gone most of the time, and therefore she did everything. She taught me how to cut the grass, she taught me how to cook, she taught me how to pull up Bermuda grass so it didn’t come back. She taught me how to paint the eaves, she taught me how to balance a wheelbarrow. I can remember the sweat dripping off the end of her long, Teutonic nose, pushing a wheelbarrow of sand into the basement as she and I laid a floor.

My mother was omnicompetent. She handled the checkbook. We had a little laundry onetime to supplement the income. She ran the business. So I never grew up thinking that women... I’ve got to be careful here. I’m going to get on a different topic. This is all background. At any rate, she was magnificently sufficient when Daddy wasn’t home. But the marvel was that when he came home, he was the head of the house, and she loved it. He led us in devotions when he was home. He got us to church on the few Sundays in the year that he was here on a Sunday. He took us out to the restaurant, and he asked for the check. He drove the car, he opened the garage door, he led and, she loved it.

Now it never occurred to me that she’s incompetent. I was rescued from those stupidities and was able to see that submission and headship have nothing to do with competencies. Zero. They have to do with God-appointed headship and leadership that creates a rhythm in a marriage that is wonderfully beautiful, healthy, satisfying. I commend it to you.

This is all about seeing in the Bible the glory of God. My father, probably more than any other text, as we gathered in devotions, would take us again and again to 1 Corinthians 10:31: “So, whether you eat or drink, or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God.” I grew up knowing that verse. I saw that in the Bible. I knew that was to be my vocation.

Radical God-Centeredness

But what put fire under that for me was what I learned from Jonathan Edwards, and a great seminary professor, and through them, from the Bible — namely, that God doesn’t just call me to do everything for his glory; he does everything for his glory. That I had not gotten. I’m sure my father believed that and preached that, but I wasn’t hearing that. I was just hearing it was a duty of mine to give him glory, and I didn’t hear the radical, mind-boggling, biblical teaching that God, from creation to consummation, does everything he does to uphold and display and magnify his glory.

• I didn’t notice texts like Ephesians 1:6: that he chose us “to the praise of his glorious grace.” He chose me for his glory.

• I didn’t notice Isaiah 43:6–7: he created me for his glory.

• Jeremiah 13:11: he called Israel and made Israel a name, a praise, and a glory for him.

• Psalm 106:8, 47: he rescued Israel for his name’s sake from Egypt.

• Ezekiel 20:14: he didn’t wipe out this murmuring people in the wilderness but spared them for his name’s sake.

• Isaiah 48:9–11: when he brought them back from exile, Isaiah looks forward and says, “He did it why? “For my own sake, for my own sake, I do it, for how should my name be profaned? My glory I will not give to another.” So he’s driven by his own glory to rescue his people from Babylon.

• I never noticed that the reason for the reincarnation was mainly, fundamentally, ultimately, to magnify God. Romans 15:8–9: “Christ became a servant to the circumcised to show God’s truthfulness, in order to confirm the promises given to the patriarchs, and in order that the Gentiles [nations] might glorify God for his mercy.” To collapse that down, he became incarnate, born under the law, so that nations would glorify God. God sent the Son that the nations might glorify God.

This is a radically God-centered purpose here, and I hadn’t seen things like that. They began to just pour onto me through reading Jonathan Edwards and studying the Bible.

• I hadn’t noticed texts like Isaiah 43:25: he pardons our sins for his name’s sake.

• Psalm 25:11: he gives pardon for his name’s sake.

• Or Philippians 1:10: we are “filled with the fruit of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ, to the glory and praise of God.”

• Or why is he coming back a second time? Second Thessalonians 1:9: he is coming “to be glorified in his saints, and to be marveled at among all who have believed.” Think on it. Why is he coming again? He’s coming to get glory for himself. He’s coming to be marveled at for himself.

I hadn’t heard this news; it hadn’t been heralded clearly to me — at least, I was deaf to it if it was. And now I was seeing it. It was jarring me: this amazing God-centeredness of all that God does.

Six Questions to Evaluate God-Centeredness

I began to test my heart and now I will test your heart with some questions. I began to ask some questions to myself, and I’ve tried to design questions to keep me in check over the years, and these are almost in chronological order — questions that, over the years, I’ve posed to myself.

1. Who is the most God-centered person in the universe? Answer: God is the most God-centered person in the universe.

2. Who is uppermost in God’s affections? Answer: God is uppermost in God’s affections. God loves his glory more than he loves you. God is infinitely more valuable than you are. And I wasn’t picking that up in any Sunday school papers, which is why we have a ministry now in our church where we’re writing children’s curriculum where we’re teaching these things. And it’s incredible: the hunger in churches for children’s curriculum that is not moralistic — that is, curriculum that does not take the story of the feeding of the five thousand and does not say that the point is to share your lunch. That’s not the point of the story. The point of the story is that with one touch of the master’s hand, five thousand can be fed from five loaves and two fishes. “Praise our glorious, sovereign, creator God, child. Yes, you will share your lunch. But that’s quite subordinate.” I was not picking up the centrality of God in God’s mind and heart, and that he teaches us to share our lunch for his name’s sake.

Which brings to mind a text. Matthew 5:16: “Let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works [like sharing your lunch] and give glory to your Father who is in heaven.” Why should you do good deeds according to Matthew 5:16? So that God gets glory. “It’s all about God, five-year-old.” And you know what? They get it. They can get it. They can memorize these Scriptures.

Oh, I’ll tell you, the testimonies and the prayers of some of our children are wonderful. Next Sunday morning, we’ll have a 6:30 prayer meeting before the service. We just pray together for an hour and a half, starting at 6:30. And some of the parents courageously and wonderfully bring their whole families. And we sit in little circles of five or six or seven during a lot of that time, and I go and sit with families and listen to these kids pray. It boggles your mind what kids can learn, and how their hearts can be so shaped by these kinds of questions.

3. Is God an idolater? No, he has no other gods before him.

4. What is God’s chief jealousy? He’s a jealous God according to Exodus. Answer: his own rights over your affections, your passions, your trust, your love, your obedience. He is jealous that nobody gets it but him. He is jealous that he has all your heart.

5. What is the chief end of God? The chief end of God is to glorify God and enjoy himself forever.

6. Here’s my last question. This is the most recent one. And I ask it because I think it’s the hardest one to answer, and I think it gets at contemporary man-centeredness and the gospel of self-esteem better than any of these other questions. America is awash in alternatives to biblical gospel in the church and outside of the church. And self-esteem is the gospel, and psychology is the religion, and psychologists are the priests of America. And I believe there is a place for godly psychology; big time, I believe that. There is a kind of brokenness in our hearts, our minds, our lives, that is so deep for some, that I am thrilled that some people give their life to understanding the depth of the human psyche from a biblical worldview. But most of us aren’t there.

Here’s the question: Do you feel loved by God because he makes much of you, or do you feel loved by God because he grants you the privilege of enjoying making much of him? Test yourself now to find out if you’re mainly American or mainly biblical. Do you feel loved by God because he makes much of you? Are you God-centered because he’s man-centered? If you are, you’re not God-centered. Do you feel loved because he makes much of you, or do you feel loved because he has freed you to enjoy making much of him forever? And if you can’t answer yes to the second half of the question, you need to do some serious business with God.

So I discovered that I was standing on a wonderful platform, as I grew up in this home where I learned 1 Corinthians 10:31. And I built on that platform with the help of Jonathan Edwards and seminary faculty, and how they opened my eyes to the Bible and a structure that didn’t just call me to be God-centered, but showed me that God was God-centered, and thus put a foundation under my God-centeredness that has been so deep and so strong and so hot and full of flame that it gives rise to almost everything. And until you get that — the centrality of God in the heart of God — I don’t think he will probably be central in your heart like he could be or should be.

Something About Everything Changes

Now, as I moved through that for several years, being jostled and shaken, I remember going home some days from class, before I was married. I went to seminary September, I got married in December, and in those three months, there was a lot of upheaval going on theologically as well as other ways. And I would go home from classes, and I would put my elbows down and I would cry — I would just cry. My categories were being so blasted by so many insights that I would cry, wondering if I could ever sort this all out.

Theology is not a light thing for me. I never understand people that can treat ideas about God as a plaything. This never made any sense to me at all. Hell and heaven are in the balance here. A life of joy or despair and depression are in the balance here. How you do marriage is in the balance here. How you raise children is in the balance here. How you think about politics and entertainment and business is in the balance here. Because if there’s a God in heaven, and he didn’t come into being, and he is absolute, and everything else is contingent upon him, and he is absolute, ultimate truth and reality, and all things get their meaning and definition from him, then him being central has to do with everything. And how you can play with him, or thoughts about him, and do academic gamesmanship never made any sense to me. There were tears at every point of the way as I tried to understand him and get him right and not defame him or think wrong thoughts about him.

That was late sixties. Here I am in the seventies, and the question that kept pressing itself on me was: If that’s the way God is — everything done for his own glory, loving himself above all reality because he cannot love things that are less lovely than the most lovely or he’d be unrighteous — then how can he be loving to me? Because love, 1 Corinthians 13:5 says, “does not insist on its own way.” And everywhere I look in the Bible, God seeks his own glory. In fact, all over the Bible, we humans are told not to exalt ourselves. And if you exalt yourself, you’re going to be abased. It’s an abomination to God when a human being exalts himself. And yet, my great model, God, does everything to exalt himself. Those are the kinds of questions I was answering.

Now you may be so much smarter than I am, and that’s no problem for you at all, and you’ve got that in your back pocket. But I didn’t because I was slow. And now, I think I see, at least through a glass darkly, how this can be. And it strikes me as very simple now. It goes like this: If God were to love me, because the Bible says he does — “God so loved the world.” If he were to love me, then he would give to me what is best for me for my maximum eternal enjoyment. And what would that be? Answer: himself in all his glory.

Isn’t that what he’s doing in upholding and displaying and magnifying his glory in everything he does, so that I might see and have and enjoy the one thing for which I am designed, and which alone will satisfy my heart? God is the one being in the universe for whom self-exaltation is the most loving act towards humans. No other being can do this. God is in a class by himself. Anybody that presumes to imitate him in this is committing treason. God loves me precisely by preserving, upholding, displaying, and magnifying the one thing that I have to have, I long for, that will make me eternally, infinitely happy, and that is God in all his glory.

And suddenly — maybe it wasn’t suddenly, but oh, did it come. I saw that he’s after my joy in exalting himself. And my passion for joy and his passion to be glorified are one. That’s the biggest discovery I ever made. It’s absolutely life changing, theology changing, ministry changing, marriage changing, missions changing; everything changes when you get it.

Delight and Disdain

I saw it in part by noticing that God commands me to be happy in him all over the Bible:

• Psalm 37:4: “Delight yourself in the Lord.”
• Philippians 4:4: “Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, rejoice.”
• Psalm 100:2: “Serve the Lord with gladness! Come into his presence with singing!”
• Psalm 32:11: “Be glad in the Lord.”
• Psalm 43:4: “I will go to the altar of God, to God my exceeding joy,”

I saw it in texts like Jeremiah 2:13, where evil is defined as turning away from God as your joy:

My people have committed two evils:
they have forsaken me,
     the fountain of living waters,
and hewed out cisterns for themselves,
     broken cisterns that can hold no water.

What’s he saying? What’s evil? What’s evil in the world? Do you know what is evil in the world? Abandoning the pursuit of your joy in God is the essence of evil. “They have forsaken me, the fountain of living water, and have tried to get their satisfaction from broken cisterns that hold no water.” That’s the essence of evil: the failure to be a thoroughgoing Christian Hedonist is the essence of sin. That’s what I began to see.

Treasure Chest of Holy Joy

And then I saw that it was one with his pursuit of glory. And this phrase that’s all over our church presents my theology in a nutshell: God is most glorified in you when you are most satisfied in him. Ask yourself this question: How do you magnify the worth of a treasure? Now instead of giving my answer or your answer, let’s just let Jesus give us an answer. There’s a one-verse parable in Matthew 13:44 that goes like this:

The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field, which a man found and covered up. Then in his joy he goes and sells all that he has and buys that field.

My whole theology, almost, is in that verse. How do you magnify the treasure of King Jesus? Jesus is a treasure chest of holy joy, or you’re not a Christian. How do you magnify Jesus as your treasure, which is what God means to happen in the universe? That’s why the universe was created: to exalt the glory of Jesus.

No Ultimate Sacrifice

Why or how do you do that? First, you find him and discover him as a treasure. Yes, but nobody knows that you feel that way about him. Nobody can see an echo in your life that he has value to you. How do you display that? How do you magnify that? There are two answers in that little parable. One is that you sell everything you have to get him. That’s all the lifestyle stuff I was talking about yesterday. Make it look like he has value by the wartime austerity that you bring into your life for the sake of having him and spreading him.

But that’s not enough. There’s a little phrase that I haven’t mentioned yet that describes why selling everything you have to buy that field shows the supreme value of the treasure. And it’s the phrase: from joy over it. I got out my Greek New Testament this morning just to make sure it was really there: apo tes charas. From joy over the treasure — that’s why you sell everything. There’s no sacrifice in Christianity ultimately.

The great missionaries like David Livingstone and Hudson Taylor, both of them came to the end of their lives and stood up before thousands of students and said, “I never made a sacrifice.” Of course they had. They’d sold everything — but only for joy over an infinitely surpassing value. Is that a sacrifice? You fell off your lousy, no-good, dropping stock and bought blue-chip, never-failing, un-rusting, un-stealable stock in heaven? Is that a sacrifice?

The way you show the value of a treasure — namely, the glory of King Jesus — is not just by what you lay down to have him, but by the joy with which you do it, and therefore, he is most glorified in you when you are most satisfied in him. And I’ll add the clincher. If you are indifferent to the pursuit of joy in God, you are treasonous, because he demands you to rejoice in him above all things. And to say, “Oh, you shouldn’t pursue that,” is to say you shouldn’t pursue obedience, which is treason.

Weight of Joy

Joy is not a light thing to me. The pursuit of joy in God is not a caboose at the end of the train; it’s right in the engine; it’s burning like a fire. There is no salvation without at least a mustard seed of joy in God that will carry you over all the other competing pleasures of the world that clamor for your soul.

God’s got a passion, and now I want to share in that passion so that I join God in God’s zeal for the glory of God. That’s the way I say it now. I don’t just say, “I want to have a zeal for the glory of God.” I say, “I want to get on his powerful, mighty, flaming, zeal for his glory. I want to join in him. I want his joy to flame in me.” That’s the way I understand the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is God burning for God, and when the Holy Spirit comes into you, that’s God’s flame for God coming into you. I mean, why is the Holy Spirit given according to John 16:14? To glorify Jesus. To magnify Jesus. The Holy Spirit is God’s passion for Jesus.

He is a person. Please, don’t hear me, in any way, undermining the full personhood of the Holy Spirit here. One of the unique things about this person is that his office in the economy of the Trinity is to be the energy transmitter of the Father to the Son and the Son to the Father of their inexhaustible zeal for each other’s glory. And that becomes my portion when he fills me. To be filled with the Holy Spirit is to be filled with God’s passion for the glory of God.

And then my passion for joy. I want to be happy. I can’t anymore not want to be happy than I can not get angry after a couple of days of no eating. I want to be happy, and God made me that way. It is neither good nor bad; it’s just there. And what you do with it is good or bad. And you are to glut your hunger on God. And in that, he gets glory. So they are not two passions; they’re one passion.

Why We Can’t Serve God

Now, on that foundation, I ask, So how do you do missions and how do you do ministry and how do you sustain a movement of prayer? What should life look like? And I come up with this title: “An Alternative to Serving God.” Why? Where’d you get that title? And I get it from two texts that are warnings in view of what we’ve just seen not to serve God.

Who Needs Serving?

The first one is Acts 17:25:

[God is not] served by human hands, as though he needed anything, since he himself gives to all mankind life and breath and everything.

That text is a warning not to serve God in the wrong way. There is a way to serve God that is treasonous. You can come into his courts and serve him blasphemously, because it says God is not served by human hands as though he needed anything. So watch out how you serve God. Contemplate how not to serve God. Think about how you should not serve God.

Here’s the second text: Mark 10:45, which says,

The Son of Man did not come to be served.

Now, before you read the rest of it, just let that sink in. Are you serving the Son of Man? High woe on you. The Son of Man did not come to be served. The gospel is not a help wanted sign; it’s a help available sign. I jog three or four mornings a week. I do a big tour around through Cedar-Riverside high rises, and there’s a machinist company over there, and they have a permanent sign on the wall: Help Wanted. It’s not put up or taken down. It’s constantly there. Only sometimes they have a big red No that they hang on it: No Help Wanted. And every time I jog by, and I see that big, red No Help Wanted sign, I say, “Yes, that’s the gospel! No help wanted.” I’m here to help you. I died to save you. You don’t help me; I help you .That’s what I mean by an alternative to serving God.

Now maybe there’s no problem in the Southern Baptist Church and everybody’s got this figured out, and nobody’s serving God wrongly, legalistically, trying to meet his needs and help him out and get his mission done. But I suspect there is a little bit of a problem with it, as there is in all human nature because we don’t like to be welfare cases. We want to be benefactors, not beneficiaries, and we will contribute to this so that we can get a little bit of the glory, because the giver gets the glories, which is why God will only be the giver.

Debtor’s Ethic

And the usual form that this way of serving God that I am so on a crusade against postures itself as what I would call, for one generation, the Tonto ethic. I also call it the debtor’s ethic. Forty years ago, there’s this TV show, and the Lone Ranger’s a cowboy. And Tonto, an Indian, is his sidekick. And the cowboy’s always doing great, good things for people, but he always got himself in a pickle, and Tonto would get him out of the pickle. One show explained culturally why that was the case. Way back when Tonto was little, the Lone Ranger rescued him from a deadly situation. And in that culture, you devote yourself for the rest of your life to serving the one who saved you. And that’s the way a lot of people think about it. They’d never articulate it like that. We’re getting God out of scrapes all the time. “Poor God — he can’t get his mission done and he can’t get people evangelized, and so we’ll help him.”

It’s the wrong way to conceive of missions, it’s the wrong way to conceive of evangelism, it’s the wrong way to conceive of counseling and everything else. Don’t be Tonto to God. That will defame him. No Help Wanted. I will serve you; you don’t serve me. The Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve and give his life a ransom for many. He will serve you; you don’t serve him. He will get you out of scrapes.

Charles Spurgeon preached a sermon called “Robinson Crusoe’s Text” one time, and in that novel, Robinson Crusoe, there was a text that he had, and it was Psalm 50:15. God says in that Psalm, “If I were hungry, I would not tell you” (Psalm 50:12). “Every beast of the forest is mine, the cattle on a thousand hills” (Psalm 50:10). And then verse 15: “Call upon me in the day of trouble; I will deliver you, and you shall glorify me.” And Spurgeon unpacked every phrase of that for 45 minutes. “You call on me in the day of trouble.” There’s a No Help Wanted sign. I’m up there to serve you. God serves us: “You call on me in the day of trouble. I will deliver you. Then you will glorify me because the giver gets the glory.” That’s why this is so crucial that you not serve God but find the lifestyle — I call it living by prayer — in which you’re constantly calling upon him to serve you.

We Can Never Repay God

Why is the debtor’s ethic, which says, “He saved me. Now I’ve got to work for him and try to repay the debt” — why is that so bad? I’ll give you three reasons.

1. Every effort you make to “repay” God for his grace to you puts you deeper in debt and doesn’t pay anything. Why? Because 1 Corinthians 15:10 says,

But by the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace toward me was not in vain. On the contrary, I worked harder than any of them, though it was not I, but the grace of God that is with me.

Okay, suppose you think of your life then as repaying God for his grace. So you say, “I’m going to work hard for God.” But then you bring that text in and it says, “I worked hard for God; nevertheless it was not I, but grace that was with me.” So every speck of energy you expended in this so-called service of God was a gift, a gift, a gift, a gift; and every second you were going deeper and deeper and deeper into debt to grace. You can’t pay it back. It’s impossible.

Everything that you could do that would please him, you would do in reliance upon more grace, and therefore you go deeper into debt every day. And God says, “Yes, you’ve got it, because I need to be the giver here every second of your life. Because the giver gets the glory. You get the joy, I get the glory. You get the help, I get the honor.” And that’s the key to the universe.

2. There’s a second reason why the attempt to live a debtor’s ethic and pay God back for all of his grace won’t work: it’s self-contradictory. If you could do it, grace would no longer be grace; it would be a business transaction. He gives this, you give that. The amortization payments might take an eternity, but it’s still a business transaction.

Oh, the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments and how inscrutable his ways!

“For who has known the mind of the Lord,
     or who has been his counselor?”
“Or who has given a gift to him
     that he might be repaid?”

For from him and through him and to him are all things. To him be glory forever. Amen. (Romans 11:33–36)

The giver gets the glory.

A Life of Prayerful Dependence

Which means, as we close, that an alternative to serving God is to live a life of prayer in which, moment by moment, you are expressing to God — not necessarily out loud, but at least in your heart demeanor — “I need you, I need you, I need you, I need you. Help me. Supply my need,” so that every moment of your life is a gifting, a gifting, a receiving from God, never of making a contribution to God, so that it relentlessly accomplishes the two great goals of my life and God’s two great goals: his glory, because the giver gets the glory, and my joy, because we get the joy.

And I’ll just give you the one last verse that I gave you yesterday: 1 Peter 4:11. Now, here we have service. Yes, we serve God. Paul calls himself a servant. But now it’s got to be completely rethought because of those warnings. So what’s the essence of it? What’s the essence of serving God in missions? And the answer is: receiving form him.

Whoever serves, [let him serve] as one who serves by the strength that God supplies — in order that in everything God may be glorified through Jesus Christ. To him belong glory and dominion forever and ever.

Amen — what a verse! What a freeing verse. Everything, absolutely everything you do, should be a receiving from God, never a giving to God as though he needed anything. You are always beneficiary. You are always bankrupt. You are always thirsty. You are always hungry. You are always receiver. You are always getter. You are always hedonist on a quest for joy in God, and nothing glorifies him more than when you stay in that lowly, receiving, getting, dependent, prayerful demeanor, and make him the fountain of living waters — so satisfying that you would never turn away to broken cisterns of sin, money, sex, power, prestige, success in all kinds of Christian endeavors and so on.

Well, I’ve got to stop, though there’s more to say. God’s glory is the ultimate value in the universe. The way he has seen to it to display, uphold, and magnify that glory is by creating human beings who find their delight in him, so that God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in him. And that satisfaction expresses itself moment by moment in living by prayerful reliance on the waterfall of grace that enable us to do the mission, do the ministry, love the wife, rear the children, break the powers of sin, and magnify him.