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April 27 - May 12, 2020
Other gods might offer forgiveness, but this God welcomes and embraces us as his children, never to send us away.
“For although the whole world has most carefully sought to understand the nature, mind and activity of God, it has had no success in this whatever. But . . . God Himself has revealed and disclosed the deepest profundity of his fatherly heart, His sheer inexpressible love.”b
in revealing himself, not only does the Father send his Son in the power of his Spirit; together the Father and the Son send the Spirit to make the Son known. The Son makes the Father known; the Spirit makes the Son known. He does this first of all by breathing out the Scriptures (2 Tim 3:16; 1 Pet 1:11-12) so that in them, the “word of Christ,” Christ may be known (Rom 10:17; Col 3:16).
Knowing that the Bible is about him and not me means that, instead of reading the Bible obsessing about me, I can gaze on him.
hearing them as God’s very words that hold out Christ and draw us to want him. For the Spirit breathed out those words, not that we might merely alter our behavior, not that we might merely know about Christ, but that, as John Calvin wrote, we might have a “sincere affection” for him, that we might “cordially embrace him.”
For if the Spirit’s first work in salvation is to loose our hearts that we might have a lust or desire for the Lord, then the Christian life is about so much more than “getting heaven.”
When Christians talk of God giving us “grace,” for example, we can quickly imagine that “grace” is some kind of spiritual pocket money he doles out. Even the old explanation that “grace” is “God’s Riches At Christ’s Expense” can make it sound like stuff that God gives. But the word grace is really just a shorthand way of speaking about the personal and loving kindness out of which, ultimately, God gives himself.
It is not just the grief our sin might cause him; the Spirit’s personal presence in us means we are brought to enjoy the Spirit’s own intimate communion with the Father and the Son. If the Spirit were not God, he could not do that. It is all because God is three persons—Father, Son and Spirit—that we can have such communion. If God was in heaven and his Spirit a mere force, he would be more distant than the moon.
In giving us life he comes in to be with us and remain with us. Having once given life, then, he does not move on; he stays to make that life blossom and grow.
by opening our eyes to see the glory of Christ. That is how he comforts believers.
My new life began when the Spirit first opened my eyes (there’s the light) and won my heart (there’s the heat) to Christ.
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.
That means untwisting me. Naturally I am bent in on myself and I take a hellish delight in my own supposed independence. But if I am to be anything like the outgoing and outward-looking Father, Son and Spirit, the Spirit must take my eyes off myself (which he does by winning me to Christ).
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. My self-love need never be challenged.
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 giving of the Spirit, God shares with us—and catches us up into—the life that is his. The Father has eternally known and loved his great Son, and through the Spirit he opens our eyes that we too might know him, and so he wins our hearts that we too might love him. Our love for the Son, then, is an echo and an extension of the Father’s eternal love. In other words, through the Spirit the Father allows us to share in the enjoyment of what most delights him—his Son. It was his overwhelming love for the Son that inspired him to create us in the first place, and all so that we might
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the Spirit not only enables us to know and love Christ; he also gives us the mind of Christ, making us like him.
Like the oil flowing down onto the body of the high priest, he imparts the blessings of Christ the Head to his Body, the church.
unites us to the Son so that the Father’s love for the Son also encompasses us; he draws us to share the Father’s own enjoyment of the Son; and he causes us to share the Son’s delight in the Father.
It is by the Spirit that the Father has eternally loved his Son. And so, by sharing their Spirit with us, the Father and the Son share with us their own life, love and fellowship.
because the Christian life is one of being brought to share the delight the Father, Son and Spirit have for each other, desires matter.
It is far more significant than our outward behavior, for it is our desires that drive our behavior.
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.
If that were the case, evangelism would take a lot of self-motivation—and you can always tell when the church thinks like that, for that’s when evangelism gets left to the more adrenaline-stoked salespeople/professionals. But the reality is so different. The truth is that God is already on mission: in love, the Father has sent his Son and his Spirit. It is the outworking of his very nature.
Jesus is found out there, in the place of rejection. That is where the Father has sent him, that he might bring sinners back as children. The Christian life is one of being where he is, of joining in how he has been sent.
the Father sent the Son because of how he so loved him (and wanted that love to be shared and enjoyed), and the Son went because he so loved his Father (and wanted that love to be shared and enjoyed). The mission comes from the overflow of love, from the uncontainable enjoyment of the fellowship.
We become like what we worship.
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.
If I don’t enjoy Christ, I won’t speak of him. Or, perhaps worse, I will, but without love and enjoyment—and if my mouth does give away my heart, people will hear of an unwanted Christ.
the antitheist’s problem is not so much with the existence of God as with the character of God.
John Calvin said that the sinful human mind is like “a perpetual factory of idols,”[4] meaning that we are all constantly distorting the nature of God in our minds, making the Father of lights out to be less than he is, and devilish.
Khaled Anatolios comments: “Compassion for the lowly, rather than self-absorbed contemplation, is the proper characteristic of divine majesty in the Hebrew scriptures.”
And God is holy—“set apart” from me—precisely in that he is not like that. 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.
With this God, it is not as if sometimes he has love and sometimes he has wrath, as if those are different moods so that when he’s feeling one he’s not feeling the other. No, for all eternity the Father was loving his Son, but never once was he angry. Why? Because there was nothing to be angry with until Adam sinned in Genesis 3. So God’s anger at evil from Genesis 3 onward is a new thing: it is how the God who is love responds to evil.
God is angry at evil because he loves. Isaiah speaks of the pouring out of God’s wrath as his “strange work,” his “alien task” (Is 28:21), because it is not that God is naturally angry, but that evil provokes him: in his pure love, God cannot tolerate evil.
God isn’t wrathful in spite of being love. God is wrathful because God is love.[11]
In the Old Testament, the word for “glory” has to do with “heaviness” or “weight.” In 1 Samuel 4:18, for example, “Eli fell backwards off his chair by the side of the gate. His neck was broken and he died, for he was an old man and heavy.” So the glory of something is its mass, its bulk, its worth, what makes it up, what it is all about—indeed, what makes it itself.
So the glory of God is like radiant light, shining out, enlightening and giving life. And that is what the innermost being and weight of God is like: he is a sun of light, life and warmth, always shining out.
On the cross we see the glorification of the glory of God, the deepest revelation of the very heart of God—and it is all about laying down his own life to give life, to bear fruit.
Through the cross we see a God who is infinitely better. There we do not see a God who does not care about our plight; we see one who personally deals with the root of it all. The Babylonian god Marduk said he wanted humanity to exist as his slaves. Jesus said he “did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many” (Mk 10:45).
The tragedy is that we all think like Arius every day. We think of God without the Son. We think of “God,” and not the Father of the Son. But from there it really doesn’t take long before you find that you are just a whole lot more interesting than this “God.” And could you but see yourself, you would notice that you are fast becoming like this “God”: all inward-looking and fruitless.
