Sam Storms Quotes

To say that worship is either about glorifying God or finding personal satisfaction is to put asunder what God has joined together. His glory and your gladness are not separate tracks moving in opposite directions. Rather His glory is in your gladness in Him.

Sin turns ugly and is subject to defeat only when seen in the light of Christ's beauty.

This is the glory and miracle of grace, that God, through the Holy Spirit, is able to transform a stubborn, rebellious, and unbelieving will into a passionate, obedient, believing will without violating the integrity of the individual or diminishing the voluntary nature of one's decision to trust Christ for salvation.

God created us so that the joy He has in Himself might be ours. God doesn't simply think about Himself or talk to Himself. He enjoys Himself! He celebrates with infinite and eternal intensity the beauty of who He is as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. And we've been created to join the party!

Integrity ... does not mean sinless, but it does describe a person who by God's grace "sin less."

Self-image, the concept we have of ourselves, must begin not by looking in the mirror but by looking into the face of God.

I simply define glory as the beauty of God unveiled. Glory is the resplendent radiance of His power and His personality. Glory is all of God that makes God God, and shows Him to be worthy of our praise and our boasting and our trust and our hope and our confidence and our joy.

Worship is first and foremost a feasting on all that God is for us in Jesus ... [One] in which God is the host, the cook, the waiter, and the meal itself.

...we must be careful to avoid the error of reductionism, as if the whole of the Spirit's ministry can be reduced to Christology, as if the Spirit does nothing but glorify Christ. It's the mistake of arguing that the primary purpose of the Spirit's coming is the sole purpose of his coming. The principal aim of the Spirit in what he does is to awaken us to the glory, splendor, and centrality of the work of Christ Jesus. But this does not mean that it is less than the Spirit at work when he awakens us also to his own glory and power and abiding presence.

The single most important principle I ever discovered is this: the goal or purpose of the Christian is precisely the pursuit of happiness - in God. The reason for this is that there is no greater way to glorify God than to find in Him the happiness that my soul so desperately craves.

If your reason for worshipping God is merely from a sense of moral duty, God would rather you not worship Him at all. To say that God is pleased with worship that lacks passion is to say God endorses hypocrisy.

God is able to cause all things people do to us, even the bad things, to work together for our good (Rom. 8:28). That isn't to say that all things are good, but that God can orchestrate the evil into a symphony of glory.

Everything without God is pathetically inferior to God without everything.

The ordinances do not impart eternal life to the believer, but they do confirm, strengthen, and heighten our awareness and enjoyment of that life. The bread and wine are means or instruments by which God quickens us to apprehend, understand, visualize, and experience the sanctifying influence of the Holy Spirit and his unique ministry of shining the light of illumination and glory on Jesus.

If you come to worship for any reason other that the joy and pleasure and satisfaction that are to be found in God, you dishonor Him ... God's greatest delight is your delight in Him.

God does not reveal information by communication: He reveals Himself by communion. Revelation is a personal meeting of God with man. It is a meeting of mind with mind or person with person.

There are no term limits on His reign. He has always been King and He always will be King. There is no death that threatens the perpetuity of His sovereign authority. There is no usurping of power by a lesser rival to His throne. There are no coups, no revolutions (at least, none that succeed). There is no threat of impeachment. He is a King who rules eternally.

The ultimate goal of theology isn't knowledge, but worship. If our learning and knowledge of God do not lead to the joyful praise of God, we have failed. We learn only that we might laud, which is to say that theology without doxology is idolatry. The only theology worth studying is a theology that can be sung!

Whatever and whenever God blesses, Satan curses. What God creates, Satan counterfeits.

Where there is no fruit, there may be no root.

God's creative design was that your ravenous appetite for pleasure find fulfillment in Him, for nothing more wonderfully reveals His glory than the joy the creature has in its Creator.

The essence of loving living as a follower of Jesus isn't in trying harder but in enjoying more. I'm not saying you can change without trying. I'm saying that enjoyment empowers effort. Pleasure in God is the power for purity.

...the Spirit comes to us as a fire, either to be fanned into full flame and given the freedom to accomplish his will or to be doused and extinguished by the water of human fear, control, and flawed theology.

Many Christians are either woefully deficient in their knowledge of Scripture or noticeably devoid of any experience of God's power. The Lord never intended this for His people. We have all seen firsthand the joyless intellectual arrogance the absence of spiritual power can produce, as well as the fanatical emotional excess that comes from the lack of theological integrity.

God limits the happiness and pleasure we have now precisely so we might not become attached to this world or dependent upon it or fearful of leaving it (dying), as well as to stir in our hearts a longing and yearning and holy anticipation for what is yet to come.

The Christian is not free to do what the Bible forbids. Christian freedom does not entail the right to fornicate or to steal or to lie or to persist in an unforgiving attitude or to do anything else the Scriptures explicitly prohibit. And a person who lovingly points this out to you is not a legalist for having done so!

Just as a husband cannot be indulgent of adultery in his wife, so also God cannot and will not endure infidelity in us. What would we think of a man or woman who does not experience jealous feelings when another person approaches his or her spouse and threatens to win his or her affection? We would regard such a person as deficient in moral character and lacking in true love.

Enjoy the joy of being enjoyed by God.

The focus of Satan's efforts is always the same: to deceive us into believing that the passing pleasures of sin are more satisfying than obedience.

God has sovereignly pulled back the curtain on His glory. He has disclosed Himself on the platform of both creation and redemption that we might stand awestruck in His presence, beholding the sweet symmetry of His attributes, pondering the unfathomable depths of His greatness, baffled by the wisdom of His deeds and the limitless extent of His goodness. This is His beauty.

A hypocrite [is the one who] wants to impress others with an external facade of religious piety that he knows is devoid of internal spiritual substance.

Grace ceases to be grace if God is compelled to bestow it in the presence of human merit.

The inspiration and authority of the Bible is the bedrock upon which our faith is built. Without it, we are doomed to uncertainty, doubt, and a hopeless groping in the darkness of human speculation.

Our giving is but a reflex of God's giving.