If Christ Is our Treasure, What Do We Make of Food, Sex, and Seeing the Heat Lose in the NBA Playoffs (i.e. the good things of life)?

Nomista: But, sir, I pray you, would you not have our senses to be any longer exercised about any of their objects? would you have us no longer to take comfort in the good things of this life?

Evangelista: I pray you, do not mistake me; I do not speak as though I would have you stoically to refuse the lawful use of any of the Lord's good creatures, which he shall be pleased to afford you, neither do I prohibit you from all comfort therein.

But this is it which I do desire, namely, that you would endeavour to attain to such a peace, rest, and content in God, as he is in Christ, that the violent cry of your heart may be restrained, and that your appetites may not be so forcible, nor so unruly as they are naturally, but that the unruliness thereof may be brought into a very comely decorum and order: so that your sensual appetites may, with much more easiness and contentedness, be denied the objects of their desires, yea, and contented (if need be) with that which is most repugnant to them, as with hunger, cold, nakedness, yea, and with death itself.

For such is the wonderful working of the heart's quiet and rest in God, that although a man's senses be still exercised in and upon their proper objects, yet may it be truly said, that such a man's life is not sensual. For indeed his heart taketh little contentment in any such exercises, it being for the most part exercised in a more transcendent communion with God, as he is in Christ.

So that indeed the man who has this peace and rest in God may be truly said to 'use this world as though he used it not,' in that he receives no cordial contentment from any sensual exercise whatsoever, because his heart is withdrawn from them. Such a man is sleeping, looking, hearing, tasting, smelling, eating, drinking, feasting, and so on, but his heart is withdrawn from the creature, and rejoicing in God his Saviour, and his soul is magnifying the Lord: so that in the midst of all sensual delights, his heart secretly says, Aye, but my happiness is not here.

--Edward Fisher, The Marrow of Modern Divinity (Christian Focus, 2009), 258

Power

Lloyd-Jones:

What is the gospel? 

Well, you remember the answer of the Apostle Paul, 'It is the power of God unto salvation to every one that believeth' (Rom 1:16). 

How easy it is to forget that. How easy to preach it as a system, to preach it as a collection of ideas, or just to preach it as a truth. Ah, but you can do that without power. There are people, says the Apostle Paul, who 'have a form of godliness, but deny the power thereof' (2 Tim 3:5). 

Christianity is primarily a life. It is a power. It is a manifestation of energy.

--Martyn Lloyd-Jones, Revival (Crossway, 1987), 123

Psalm 42

What Must God Be Like?

'Is it by your understanding that the hawk soars,
and spreads his wings toward the south?'
--Job 39:26

Click to enlarge.

Source.

Vos on God's Love

Geerhardus Vos, in a 1902 address to Princeton Seminary as the school kicked off its 90th year, with words still relevant today:

No one will deny that in the Scriptural disclosure of truth the divine love is set forth as a most fundamental principle, nor that the embodiment of this principle in our human will and action forms a prime ingredient of that subjective religion which the Word of God requires of us.

But it is quite possible to overemphasize this one side of truth and duty as to bring into neglect other exceedingly important principles and demands of Christianity. The result will be that, while no positive error is taught, yet the equilibrium both in consciousness and life is disturbed and a condition created in which the power of resistance to the inroads of spiritual disease is greatly reduced. There can be little doubt that in this manner the one-sidedness and exclusiveness with which the love of God has been preached to the present generation is largely responsible for that universal weakening of the sense of sin, and the consequent decline of interest in the doctrines of atonement and justification, which even in orthodox and evangelical circles we all see and deplore.

--Geerhardus Vos, "The Scriptural Doctrine of the Love of God," in Redemptive History and Biblical Interpretation: The Shorter Writings of Geerhardus Vos (ed. Richard Gaffin; P&R, 1980), 426

Takeaway: To seek to exalt God's love without placing it against the full range of who God is and must be nets out as a diminishing, not exaltation, of that love.