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January 11 - January 21, 2019
God is love because God is a Trinity.
Yet Christianity is not primarily about lifestyle change; it is about knowing God. To know and grow to enjoy him is what we are saved for—and that is what we are going to press into here.
To know the Trinity is to know God, an eternal and personal God of infinite beauty, interest and fascination. The Trinity is a God we can know, and forever grow to know better.
For what makes Christianity absolutely distinct is the identity of our God. Which God we worship: that is the article of faith that stands before all others. The bedrock of our faith is nothing less than God himself, and every aspect of the gospel—creation, revelation, salvation—is only Christian insofar as it is the creation, revelation and salvation of this God, the triune God.
The Trinity is the cockpit of all Christian thinking.
if salvation simply means him letting me off and counting me as a law-abiding citizen, then gratitude (not love) is all I have.
That is who God has revealed himself to be: not first and foremost Creator or Ruler, but Father.
Jesus tells us explicitly in John 17:24. “Father,” he says, “you loved me before the creation of the world.” And that is the God revealed by Jesus Christ. Before he ever created, before he ever ruled the world, before anything else, this God was a Father loving his Son.
Our definition of God must be built on the Son who reveals him. And when we do that, starting with the Son, we find that the first thing to say about God is, as it says in the creed, “We believe in one God, the Father.”
The most foundational thing in God is not some abstract quality, but the fact that he is Father.
Since God is, before all things, a Father, and not primarily Creator or Ruler, all his ways are beautifully fatherly.
It was a profound observation, for it is only when we see that God rules his creation as a kind and loving Father that we will be moved to delight in his providence.
For if, before all things, God was eternally a Father, then this God is an inherently outgoing, life-giving God. He did not give life for the first time when he decided to create; from eternity he has been life-giving.
Rather, he is love. He could not not love. If he did not love, he would not be Father.
That is why it is important to note that the Son is the eternal Son. There was never a time when he didn’t exist.
The Father is never without the Son but, like a lamp, it is the very nature of the Father to shine out his Son.
Father-Son relationship (the headship) begins a gracious cascade, like a waterfall of love:
He is the lover, she is the beloved.
Being perfectly loving, from all eternity the Father and the Son have delighted to share their love and joy with and through the Spirit.
His love is not for keeping but for spreading.
Just so, the Father would not be the Father without his Son (whom he loves through the Spirit).
And so we see that the Father, Son and Spirit, while distinct persons, are absolutely inseparable from each other. Not confused, but undividable. They are who they are together. They always are together, and thus they always work together.
For the Son is the one Way to know God truly: only he reveals the Father.
It is that the Father has always enjoyed loving another, and so the act of creation by which he creates others to love seems utterly appropriate for him.
He delights to echo his Father’s love back to him, and that is what it is to be beside God, to image him, to be his child. We have been created that, knowing his love, we might love the Lord our God.
hypostasis.
Hypostasis describes the Father’s “being,” what is foundational to him.a
And thus the triune God can and does create. Grace, then, is not merely his kindness to those who have sinned; the very creation is a work of grace, flowing from God’s love.
he himself was adamant that it is our view of God that shapes us most deeply. We become like what we worship.a
Life is something that God has always had, and in creation it is something he now shares with us. By his Spirit he breathes out life on us. And not just in the beginning: that is always the Spirit’s work, to bring life.
To be coherent and meaningful, math requires the existence of ultimate plurality in unity.
In other words, in the triune God is a God we can heartily enjoy—and enjoy in and through his creation.
For in the Bible, sin is something that goes deeper than our behavior.
6). The problem is deeper than her actions, deeper than outward disobedience. Her act of sin was merely the manifestation of the turn in her heart: she now desired the fruit more than she desired God.
Love’s longings and the desires of their hearts shifted from the Lord to themselves. And thus, instead of running to him, they would now hide from him.
love, Augustine argued that we are always motivated by love—and that is why Adam and Eve disobeyed God. They sinned because they loved something else more than him. That also means that merely altering our behavior, as Pelagius suggested, will do no good. Something much more profound is needed: our hearts must be turned back.
Jesus’ self-giving love is entirely unconstrained and free. It comes, not from any necessity, but entirely out of who he is, the glory of his Father.
Knowing God as our Father not only wonderfully gladdens our view of him; it gives the deepest comfort and joy.
Allah is a single-person God who has an eternal word beside him in heaven, the Qur’an. At a glance, that seems to make Allah look less eternally lonely. But what is so significant is the fact that Allah’s word is a book, not a true companion for him. And it is a book that is only about him. Thus when Allah gives us his Qur’an, he gives us some thing, a deposit of information about himself and how he likes things.
What it does mean is that the point of all the Scriptures is to make Christ known.
Since our problem is with our hearts, the Spirit gives us new birth into a new life precisely by giving us new hearts (Ezek 36:26; Jn 3:3-8).
Even the old explanation that “grace” is “God’s Riches At Christ’s Expense”
This One dwells in our hearts, if we are really Christians, and He sees every act we do by day or under cover of the night; He hears every word we utter in public or in private; He sees every thought we entertain, He beholds every fancy and imagination that is permitted even a momentary lodging in our mind, and if there is anything unholy, impure, selfish, mean, petty, unkind, harsh, unjust, or any evil act or word or thought or fancy, He is grieved by
The new life the Spirit gives is a life of warmth, for it is his own life of delighting in the Father and the Son, and he rears us up precisely by warming our hearts to them.
But by cultivating in us a deepening taste for Christ, the epitome of beauty, the Spirit polishes a new humanity who begins to shine with his likeness.
the Spirit must take my eyes off myself (which he does by winning me to Christ).
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.
In other words, through the Spirit the Father allows us to share in the enjoyment of what most delights him—his Son.
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.
That said, normal Christian prayer is something richer and juicier: we join in with the fellowship as the Father, Son and Spirit are already enjoying it.
