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May 21 - June 6, 2023
Christianity is not primarily about lifestyle change; it is about knowing God.
Knowing the love of God is the very thing that makes us loving.
God is a mystery in that who he is and what he is like are secrets, things we would never have worked out by ourselves.
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.
we are gazing upon the beauty of the Lord.
they were trying to express the truth of who God is as revealed in Scripture.
the Trinity is a scriptural truth—and
Which God we worship: that is the article of
faith that stands before all others.
I could believe in the death of a man called Jesus, I could believe in his bodily resurrection, I could even believe in a salvation by grace alone; but if I do not believe in this God, then, quite simply, I am not a Christian.
The Trinity is the cockpit of all Christian thinking.
We imagine God would be a simpler being—a single-person God. Perhaps, then, it is not so much the seemingly bad math of the Trinity that puts us off as the sheer imposition of an unexpected sort of God.
Neither a problem nor a technicality, the triune being of God is the vital oxygen of Christian life and joy.
He is the uncaused cause. That is who he is. God is, essentially, The Creator, The One in Charge.
mere might is not who God is.
if salvation simply means him letting me off and counting me as a law-abiding citizen, then gratitude (not love) is all I have.
I can never really love the God who is essentially just The Ruler.
I can never keep the greatest command: to love ...
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Being a Son means he has a Father. The God he reveals is, first and foremost, a Father.
That is who God has revealed himself to be: not first and foremost Creator or Ruler, but Father.
Before he ever created, before he ever ruled the world, before anything else, this God was a Father loving his Son.
if God is a Father, then he must be relational and life-giving, and that is the sort of God we could love.
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.
the Father is called Father because he is a Father. And a father is a person who gives life, who begets children.
the Son is of the Father, and that the Father is never without the Son;
“the world must learn that I love the Father and that I do exactly what my Father has commanded me”
the Son never sends or directs the Father.
a waterfall of love:
For eternity, the Father so loves the Son that he excites the Son’s eternal love in response; Christ so loves the church that he excites our love in response; the husband so loves his wife that he excites her to love him back.
In the very beginning, God creates by his Word (the Word that would later become flesh), and he does so by sending out his Word in the power of his Spirit or Breath.
The Father speaks, and on his Breath his Word is heard.
It is not, then, that God becomes sharing; being triune, God is a sharing God, a God who loves to include. Indeed, that is why God will go on to create. His love is not for keeping but for spreading.
As cows get together in herds and sheep in flocks, so divine persons congregate in the Trinity.
The Father is who he is by virtue of his relationship with the Son.
the Father would not be the Father without his Son (whom he loves through the Spirit).
And the Son would not be the Son without his Father.
They are who they are together. They always are together, and thus they always work together.
“God,” he said, “can never be anything but love, or anything but the Father: and He, Who loves, does not envy; He Who is Father, is wholly and entirely Father. This name admits of no compromise: no one can be partly father, and partly not.”
Eve is a person quite distinct from Adam, and yet she has all her life and being from Adam.
a personal God, a Son who is distinct from his Father, and yet who is of the very being of the Father, and who is eternally one with him in the Spirit.
If there is a God, why is there anything else? Why the universe? Why us? Why might God decide to have a creation?
if Allah needs his creation to be who he is in himself (“loving”),
then Allah is dependent on his own creation, and one of the cardinal beliefs of Islam is that Allah is dependent on nothing.
how can a solitary God be eternally and essentially loving when love in...
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how can God be eternally and essentially good when goodness involves being good to another? His answer was that God is, eternally, the uncaused cause.
God is eternally self-giving and good because he is eternally self-giving and
good to the universe.
However, once again it means that for God to be himself, he needs the world. He is, essentially, dep...
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Loving others is not a strange or novel thing for this God at all; it is at the root of who he is.
Think of God the Father: he is, by his very nature, life-giving. He is a father.
