If you have haven’t read Michael Reeves’ wonderful book Delighting in the Trinity you should. With joy and wit, he introduces us to the Trinity and what that means for our Christian faith. He inserts numerous quotes from other men along with illustrations and pictures. Tomorrow is Trinity Sunday so here are ten of my favorite quotes from the book.
Christianity is not primarily about lifestyle change; it is about knowing God.
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. And so, because the Christian God is triune, the Trinity is the governing center of all Christian belief, the truth that shapes and beautifies all others. The Trinity is the cockpit of all Christian thinking.
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.
Even the most basic all to believe in the Son of God is an invitation to the Trinitarian faith.
As it is, there is something gratuitous about creation, an unnecessary abundance of beauty, and through it blossoms and pleasures we can revel in the sheer largesse of the Father.
Martin Luther picked up Augustine’s line of thought to define the sinner as “the person curved back in on himself,” no longer loving like God, no longer looking to God, but inward-looking, self-obsessed, devilish. Such a person might well behave morally or religiously, but all they did would simply express their fundamental love for themselves.
Jesus’ self-giving love is entirely unconstrained and free. It comes, not from an necessity, but entirely out of who he is, the glory of his Father. Through the cross we see a God who delights to give himself.
A problem similar to Sadoleto’s happens when the Spirit is thought of as a force and not a person. Again it gives the impression of God up in heaven lobbing down tokens of his blessing (“the force”) while himself remaining all distant. And if that is how it is, then I can hardly have communion with this force (or with the Father or the Son):the Spirit must be a power I am to get a hold of and use as I get on with my life. Some do magic; others have money and the latest beauty products; I use the Spirit. And if I manage to use the Spirit more than other Christians, hurrah, for spiritual me.
As it is, because the Christian life is one of being brought to share the delight the Father, Son, and Spirit have for each other, desires matter…What we love and enjoy is foundationally important. It is far more significant than our outward behavior, for it is our desires that drive our behavior.
The anti-theist’s problem is not so much with the existence of God as with the character of God…In my own experience, talking with non-Christian students, again and again I find that when they describe the God they don’t believe in, he sound more like Satan than the loving Father of Jesus Christ: greedy, selfish, trigger-happy and entirely devoid of love. And if God is not Father, Son, and Spirit, aren’t they right?
And One
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…Like God’s holiness, then, his wrath is not something that sits awkwardly next to his love. Nor is it something unrelated to his love. God is angry at evil because he loves.
Fantastic quotes