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" Sibbes sought to draw his audience’s eyes from their own hearts to the Saviour, for ‘there are heights, and depths, and breadths of mercy in him above all the depths of our sin and misery’. How so? Because, since ‘God’s love resteth on Christ, as well pleased in him, we may gather that he is as well pleased with us, if we be in Christ!’ Thus Christian confidence in our spiritual state rests not on our strength of faith or performance, but upon ‘the joint agreement of all three persons of the Trinity’, that the Father loves the Son, and it is in the Son’s merits, and not our own, that Christians are loved. Because God is a loving community, Christians can be confident. Then, instead of simply laying moral burdens on young and struggling Christians, Sibbes showed them Christ’s attractiveness so that they might love him from the heart. From then, the Christian’s first task is ‘to warm ourselves at this fire of his love and mercy in giving himself for us’. Only when Christians do that do they truly stop sinning from the heart (whereas when they merely alter their behaviour it does nothing for the sin of the heart). In other words, Sibbes believed that the solution to sin is not the attempt to live without sin, but the gospel of God’s free grace. "
― Michael Reeves , The Unquenchable Flame: Discovering the Heart of the Reformation
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" Ongoingly in his creation, the Spirit vitalizes and refreshes. He delights to make his creation—and his creatures—fruitful. Isaiah writes of the time when “the Spirit is poured upon us from on high, and the desert becomes a fertile field, and the fertile field seems like a forest” (Is 32:15). The psalmist sings: “When you send your Spirit, they [the creatures] are created, and you renew the face of the earth” (Ps 104:30). Small wonder, then, that creativity, the ability to craft, adorn and make beautiful, is a gift of the Spirit: Then the LORD said to Moses, “See, I have chosen Bezalel son of Uri, the son of Hur, of the tribe of Judah, and I have filled him with the Spirit of God, with skill, ability and knowledge in all kinds of crafts—to make artistic designs for work in gold, silver and bronze, to cut and set stones, to work in wood, and to engage in all kinds of craftsmanship.” (Ex 31:1-5) The Spirit makes his creation alive with beauty. "
― Michael Reeves , Delighting in the Trinity: An Introduction to the Christian Faith
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" At the beginning of the fourth century, in Alexandria in the north of Egypt, a theologian named Arius began teaching that the Son was a created being, and not truly God. He did so because he believed that God is the origin and cause of everything, but is not caused to exist by anything else. ‘Uncaused’ or ‘Unoriginate’, he therefore held, was the best basic definition of what God is like. But since the Son, being a son, must have received his being from the Father, he could not, by Arius’ definition, be God. The argument persuaded many; it did not persuade Arius’ brilliant young contemporary, Athanasius. Believing that Arius had started in the wrong place with his basic definition of God, Athanasius dedicated the rest of his life to proving how catastrophic Arius’ thinking was for healthy Christian living. Actually, I’ve put it much too mildly: Athanasius simply boggled at Arius’ presumption. How could he possibly know what God is like other than as he has revealed himself? ‘It is,’ he said, ‘more pious and more accurate to signify God from the Son and call Him Father, than to name Him from His works only and call Him Unoriginate.’2 That is to say, the right way to think about God is to start with Jesus Christ, the Son of God, not some abstract definition we have made up like ‘Uncaused’ or ‘Unoriginate’. In fact, we should not even set out in our understanding of God by thinking of God primarily as Creator (naming him ‘from His works only’) – that, as we have seen, would make him dependent on his creation. 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.’ That different starting point and basic understanding of God would mean that the gospel Athanasius preached simply felt and tasted very different from the one preached by Arius. Arius would have to pray to ‘Unoriginate’. But would ‘Unoriginate’ listen? Athanasius could pray ‘Our Father’. With ‘The Unoriginate’ we are left scrambling for a dictionary in a philosophy lecture; with a Father things are familial. And if God is a Father, then he must be relational and life-giving, and that is the sort of God we could love. "
― Michael Reeves , Delighting in the Trinity: An Introduction to the Christian Faith
