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The following message “God Shines Forth: How the Nature of God Shapes the Mission of the Church” by Michael Reeves was given at the 2025 Shepherds Conference.
Most of us have written something, torn it up, or pressed the delete key, and started afresh. We’ve stuck at it until the article, blog or chapter has polished up to a shine. Ernest Hemingway memorably said, “The only kind of writing is rewriting.”
For the Christian author, this involves prayer; it involves patience; it involves listening to critics. Maybe it means raising our boredom thresholds!
This is your Saviour. This is your King. For the Son of God has gone forth to war to fight for you, to win you back, and to spill his blood to redeem you forever from sin and death. This is the consolation of the world. The greatest comfort in life and death. And forever after.
We have an all-sufficient salvation because we have an all-sufficient Saviour. He brings us in. He keeps us in, and he carries us to the end.
Wonderfully, when we write from Christ, about Christ, and for Christ, marvelling at and sharing the glorious salvation he is working in such wretches as I surely am, then we are worshipping in Spirit and truth. It might even bless those who read it as well.
The taking of a blank page and filling it with alphabetic script that has meaning that can move heart and will is nothing short of marvellous.
The following three lectures by Donald Fairbairn were given at the 2025 EFCA Theology Preconference, “Nicaea and the Nicene Creed: 1700th Anniversary.”
“O storm-tossed and not comforted” your God comes. Suddenly, and all at once. Your God comes himself to comfort you. Again and again. He has not forgotten, nor has he forsaken. He has come to be your ever-present and everlasting comfort.
So, step out of the bitter winds, and into the fires of his love. Come, feel the glow. Come collapse in his strong, everlasting arms. For a bruised reed he will not break, and a smoldering wick, he will never snuff out.
We have heard someone tell us good new of joy and peace. We have come to know Jesus the Shepherd King. We tell others what we have seen and heard and know. We join with angels and all the redeemed in singing Glory to God.
Whether our darkness comes from relational breakdown, grief, loneliness, health challenges, the guilt of sins committed, the shame of sins experienced, global trends or deep personal struggle, we must know that our God is a God of hope.
Christ is a husband like no other—the husband all others point to. There is no length he is unwilling to go to care and provide for her. Christ spends himself on her. He sweats for her. He bleeds for her. He dies for her. He gives himself up for her. For he loves her.
Very small numbers are a reality for many. There is, however, a greater reality. Jesus says “there am I among them.” He promises that he will build his Church. He promises that he will be with his Church.
Dear friends, if you’re struggling and suffering this morning, if you feel you’re running out of options, there is somewhere left to turn. There is a hiding place and a safe refuge with Jesus as He gathers around him all of us who are in need. We’re not meant to be the assembly of the shiny, the sorted and the successful. And we’re not impressing God with our brilliance and our strength. No we are together. The bruised reeds, the smothering wicks huddled together around our King Jesus.
If the Old Testament were teaching a way of salvation based on our own merit, would it be useful reading when I want to grow in Christ—the one whose yoke is easy?
If the God I meet in the Old Testament were a different God from the one whom I meet in Christ, could I build others up in Christ by reading the two Testaments together?
If the God who saves me through the work of Jesus now “saved” quite differently back then, could I delight in the God I meet in the pages of the Old Covenant?
Friends, it’s not incidental to God that he is a kind and loving Father. That’s not a role he’s stepped into or an act that he tries to pull off while inwardly just being transcendent and disinterested in you.When you pray the Lord’s Prayer and call him “Our Father” or “Abba, Father,” you’re not asking him to pretend for a moment he’s less like God and more like Jesus than he actually is. You’re putting your finger on the very essence of God.
The following devotional by Clive Bowsher is for Friends of Union. To learn more about becoming a Friend of Union, visit www.uniontheology.org/friends-of-union
For the next five days, join Michael Reeves in uncovering the beauty of what it means to stand with integrity as people of the gospel.
We read four chapters later, this same Moabite woman is holding a baby. A baby not in the line of destruction but in the line of deliverance. Daring differently changed her destiny.
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