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March 1 - March 22, 2020
that is how the new life goes on: by revealing the beauty, love, glory and kindness of Christ to me, the Spirit kindles in me an ever deeper and more sincere love for God. And as he stirs me to think ever more on Christ, he makes me more and more Godlike: less self-obsessed and more Christ-obsessed.
We become like what we worship.
If God only wanted me to live under his government, then the Spirit—if he could be bothered—would be more concerned simply to help me be a law-abiding citizen.
the Spirit comes with a far deeper purpose: that I might know the Son, and that I might be like him—meaning that the whole point is that my eyes look out to him. Knowing him is life, and looking to him is what enlivens.
We shall never find happiness by looking at our prayers, our doings, or our feelings; it is what Jesus is, not what we are, that gives rest to the soul.
through the Spirit the Father allows us to share in the enjoyment of what most delights him—his Son.
Nothing renders us so like unto God as our love unto Jesus Christ.”[8]
At the heart of our transformation into the likeness of the Son, then, is our sharing of his deep delight in the Father.
In our love and enjoyment of the Son we are like the Father; in our love and enjoyment of the Father we are like the Son. That is the happy life the Spirit calls us to.
By the Spirit I (slowly!) begin to love as God loves, with his own generous, overflowing, self-giving love for others.
the greatest unkindness you can do to him is to refuse to believe that he loves you:
Where our sin makes us prone to doubt, anxiety and cold-heartedness, where Satan buffets us with accusations, the Spirit brings assurance of the Father’s love and the Son’s perfect salvation.
since we have communion with all three persons, it is quite right that we should pray to all three: Jesus commends prayer to the Father (Jn 16:23); Stephen prayed to Jesus in Acts 7:59; and while it is harder to find clear instances in the Bible of prayer to the Spirit, Owen is adamant that we can: “The Holy Ghost, being God, is no less to be invocated, prayed to, and called on, than the Father and Son.”
the Spirit is not about bringing us to a mere external performance for Christ, but bringing us actually to love him and find our joy in him.
nobody can “dispossess the heart of an old affection, but by the expulsive power of a new one.”
we will only change what we love when something proves itself to be more desirable to us than what we already love. I will, then, always love sin and the world until I truly sense that Christ is better.
strip down God and make him lean and you must strip down his salvation and make it mean. Instead of a life bursting with love, joy and fellowship, all you will be left with is the watery gruel of religion.
Far, far from theological clutter, God’s being Father, Son and Spirit is just what makes the Christian life beautiful.
As the Father, Son and Spirit have always known fellowship with each other, so we in the image of God are made for fellowship.
When Adam and Eve turned in on themselves in self-love in Genesis 3, they not only turned away from the Lord God; they turned away from each other. Thus, not only did their relationship with the Lord break down, their relationship with each other broke down:
the Father sends the Son, not only to reconcile us to himself, but to reconcile us to each other in order that the world might be a place of harmony, reflecting their harmony.
So it is not just that the Father, Son and Spirit call us into fellowship with themselves; they share their heavenly harmony that there might be harmony on earth, that people of different genders, languages, hobbies and gifts might be one in peace and love; and that one day, with one heart and one voice, we might cry: “Salvation belongs to our God, who sits on the throne, and to the Lamb”
when we go out and share the knowledge of God’s great love we reflect something very profound about who God is. For when Jesus sends us, he is allowing us to share the missional, generous, outgoing shape of God’s own life.
a Christian singing God’s praises to the world is like a bird singing. Birds sing loudest, he said, when the sun rises and warms them; and so it is with Christians: when they are warmed by the Light of the world, by the love of God in Christ, that is when they sing loudest.
the antitheist’s problem is not so much with the existence of God as with the character of God.
The popular turn to various alternative spiritualities—from New Age and neopaganism to Wicca and plain old superstition—is routinely connected with a dislike for the idea of a personal God.
the only God inherently inclined to show mercy is the Father who has eternally loved his Son by the Spirit.
“Compassion for the lowly, rather than self-absorbed contemplation, is the proper characteristic of divine majesty in the Hebrew scriptures.”[5]
He is not set apart from us in priggishness, but by the fact that there are no such ugly traits in him as there are in us.
what we think God is like must shape our godliness, and what we think godliness is reveals what we think of God.
no wonder the two greatest commands are “Love the Lord your God” and “Love your neighbor as yourself.” For that is being like this God—sharing the love the Father and the Son have for each other, and then, like them, overflowing with that love to the world.
most essentially, to know and enjoy the God who is love means becoming, like him, loving.
God’s anger at evil from Genesis 3 onward is a new thing: it is how the God who is love responds to evil.
Though I used to complain about the indecency of the idea of God’s wrath, I came to think that I would have to rebel against a God who wasn’t wrathful at the sight of the world’s evil.
The wrath of the triune God is exactly the opposite of a character blip or a nasty side in him. It is the proof of the sincerity of his love, that he truly cares.
“glorifying” God cannot be about inflating, improving or expanding him. That is quite impossible with the God who is already superabundant and overflowing with life. Instead, when we give God the glory, we simply ascribe to him what is already his, declaring him to be as he truly is.
The glory of this God is radiant and outgoing. As the sun gives of its own light and heat, so this God glories in giving himself.
his glory is not about taking but giving.
One of the loveliest things about light is that it overcomes and banishes darkness.
when we see that Jesus is the radiance of God’s glory, it becomes impossible to think that God’s glory is something that is not about love.
Through Jesus we do not see a proud divine glory, but the glory of inexpressible humility and kindness.
the moment when Jesus finally reaches the deepest point of his humiliation, at the cross, is the moment when he is glorified and most clearly seen for who he is.
Other gods need worship and service and sustenance. But this God needs nothing. He has life in himself—and so much so that he is brimming over. His glory is inestimably good, overflowing, self-giving.
we all think like Arius every day. We think of God without the Son.
Without Jesus the Son, we cannot know that God is truly a loving Father. Without Jesus the Son, we cannot know him as our loving Father.
