God

As God sends out Christ as the life and delight of the saints—the Bridegroom that the Bride is invited to enjoy—so we send him out in our preaching.

The following message by Michael Reeves was given at the 2022 Puritan Conference.

The Father is the lover, the Son is the beloved. The Bible is awash with talk of the Father’s love for the Son, but while the Son clearly does love the Father, hardly anything is said about it.

The Lord’s Prayer isn’t just a set liturgy or guide to prayer. It is an offering where Jesus extends to us the very keys of heaven that he himself possesses. He invites us to come to the Father as he does, to know the Father as he does—and on the very same terms. As he leads us to his Father, we discover that the goal of prayer is not that we get something from God, but that we get God himself.

Those who bask in the sunshine of this loving and generous God are the happiest Christians and the happiest missionaries. Seeing in Jesus what our God is really like causes us to shine like him.

The following 15 quotes are from Clive Bowsher’s new title Life in the Son: Exploring participation and union with Christ in John’s Gospel and letters.

God is our Shepherd. This truth is not for mere intellectual assent, nor a kind of badge to hang on our own board of orthodoxy. To know the one who is Shepherd is a precious reality from which the believer draws strength, comfort, and life.

When we see the radiance of the sun, we meet warmth, and light, and life. Jesus is the radiance of the glory of God. A God who does not need to take from us, but loves to give and give himself.

Dear ones, you are promised so much in this life, but freedom from suffering is not one (Phil. 1:29). Where will you turn when the high tide of illness, injustice, persecution, poverty, or any other kind of evil or unease brings you to an abrupt stop? Let this be an encouragement to warm your souls afresh at the white-hot flame of the Trinitarian love of God. Enough to turn your eyes from the pressures, performance, pain, and problems of this world, is he who wins us again and again by his heavenly kindness. It is this God who desires to be known in Christ and experienced within the deepest recesses of our souls. So it was for the Apostle Paul, and so it is for all of God’s dearly beloved children.

Go deep into who God is. Don’t fear the hard topics of theology but approach it as a worshipful son or daughter of the Father. If your eyes are open, what you see will only make your heart burst with the glory of who God is.