80 tweets from Michael Reeves' Delighting in the Trinity

Here is another post that simply lists short quotes from a book I have recently read. Before the actual quotes, or tweetables as I like to cal them, I thought I might give a few reasons on why I would actually blog a post such as this.

There are two main reasons I think posts like these are worthwhile; one, they are helpful to me, and two, they are helpful to the reader.

I find this exercise of collecting short, significant quotes and organizing them in a list is beneficial for me in a couple of ways. First, it is a great way to review a book that I recently read. We all know how little we retain from what we read and how quickly we might even forget the main ideas and themes in a book. Compiling these quotes refreshes the memory and brings some of the key elements of the book back to the surface. Also, it is often helpful to have a resource which contains the memorable sentences from a book for future use. In the list below I can quickly find a quote I'm looking for without flipping the pages of the book. For me, those two reasons justify the work in creating this post even if nobody ever reads it. But, I also think these posts are helpful for the reader.

This type of post gives the reader a good sense and feel for what a book is like; a little taste-test as it were. This might be just the thing to encourage some one to get their hands on a book. The quotes are also usually encouraging and edifying in and of themselves. I marked these quotes as I was reading the book so they obviously had an impact on me and hopefully will do the same for someone visiting this post. Finally, this is a resource for others who might actually want to tweet some quotes from this book. The work of getting them digitalized is done; the reader can copy and paste away and share these with the Twitterverse if they like.

So, with that explanation, here are 80 tweetable quotes from Delighting in the Trinity:

• “…the truth is that God is love because God is a Trinity.” (9)

• “… it is only when you grasp what it means for God to be a Trinity that you really sense…beauty…kindness…loveliness…of God.”

• “… God is triune, and it is as triune that he is so good and desirable.”

• “Christianity is not primarily about lifestyle change; it is about knowing God.” (10)

• “Knowing the love of God is the very thing that makes us loving.”

• “No exaggeration; the knowledge of this God turns lives around.”

• “God is a mystery, but not in the alien abduction, things-that-go-bump-in-the-night sense.” (12)

• “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.”

• “Which God we worship; that is the article of faith that stands before all others.” (15)

• “… 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.”

• “So used are we to fashioning God according to our assumptions that our minds simply rebel at the thought of a God who is not as we would expect.” (17)

• “Neither a problem nor a technicality, the triune being of God is the vital oxygen of Christian life and joy.” (18)

• “That is who God has revealed himself to be: not first and foremost Creator or Ruler, but Father.” (21)

• “The most fundamental thing in God is not some abstract quality, but the fact that he is Father.” (23)

• “Since God is, before all things, a Father, and not primarily Creator or Ruler, all his ways are beautifully fatherly.”

• He is Father. All the way down. Thus all that he does he does as Father. That is who he is.”

• “For if, before all things, God was eternally a Father, then this God is an inherently outgoing, life-giving God.” (24)

• “This God, [John] says, is love in such a profound and potent way that you simply cannot know him without yourself becoming loving.” (26)

• “Before anything else, for all eternity, this God was loving, giving life to and delighting in his Son.”

• “The Father…is the Father of the eternal Son, and he finds his very identity…in loving and giving out his life and being to the Son.” (27)

• “…the Son is of the Father, and that the Father is never without the Son; for it is impossible that glory should be without radiance.” (Gregory of Nyssa)

• “…the Son also loves the Father-and so much so that to do his Father’s pleasure is as food to him.” (28)

• “…the shape of the Father-Son relationship begins a gracious cascade, like a waterfall of love…”

• On losing 3 distinct persons: “The trouble is, once you puree the persons, it becomes impossible to taste their gospel.” (32)

• “Single-person gods, having spent eternity alone, are inevitably self-centered beings, and so it becomes hard to see why they would ever cause anything to exist.” (41)

• Single-person gods create “out of an essential neediness or desire to use what they create merely for their own self-gratification.”

• “Loving others is not a strange or novel thing for this God at all; it is at the root of who he is.”

• “…the Father has always enjoyed loving another, and so the act of creation by which he creates others to love seems utterly appropriate for him.” (42)

• “The Father so delighted in his Son that his love for him overflowed, so that the Son might be the firstborn of many sons.” (43)

• “The God who loves to have an outgoing Image of himself in his Son loves to have many images of his love…”

• “That is why the Son goes out from the Father, in both creation and salvation: that the love of the Father for the Son might be shared.” (44)

• “It was his overflowing love for the Son that motivated the Father to create, and creation is his gift to his Son.” (50)

• “…because the Father’s love for the Son has burst out to be shared with us, the Son’s inheritance is also shared with us.”

• “The very nature of the triune God is to be effusive, ebullient and bountiful…” (56)

• “Creation is about the spreading, the diffusion, the outward explosion of that love [the Father for the Son].”

• “The Father, Son and Spirit have always been in delicious harmony…” (59)

• “There is the deepest and most alluring beauty to be found in the heavenly harmony of the Trinity.” (61)

• “…but the fact that the God in whose image we are made is specifically the triune God of love has repercussions that echo all through Scripture.” (64-5)

• “Lovers [people who must love] we remain, but twisted, our love misdirected and perverted.” (65)

• “[Eve’s] act of sin was merely the manifestation of the turn in her heart: she now desired the fruit more than she desired God.”

• “Astonishingly, it was this very rejection of God [in Eden] that then drew forth the extreme depths of his love.” (68)

• “The God who is love definitively displays that love to the world by sending us his eternally beloved Son to atone for our sins.”

• “…through the sending of the Son for our salvation we see more clearly than ever how generous and self-giving the love of the triune God is.”

• “…the Father so delights in his eternal love for his Son that he desires to share it with all who will believe.” (69)

• “[God’s] love for the world is the overflow of the almighty love for his Son.” (70)

• “The Father so loves that he desires to catch us up in that loving fellowship he enjoys with the Son.” (71)

• “In fact, I can know the Father as my Father.”

• “Indeed, for when a person deliberately and confidently calls the Almighty “Father,” it shows they have grasped something beautiful…” (76)

• “Knowing God as our Father not only wonderfully gladdens our view of him, it gives the deepest comfort and joy.”

• “To be the child of some rich king would be nice; but to be the beloved of the emperor of the universe is beyond words.”

• “In short, if God had no word to say to us, we simply would not know him or dream of his deep benevolence.” (80)

• “…when the triune God gives us his Word, he gives us his very self…”

• “…we all come into the world spiritually stillborn, dead in our transgressions and sins.” (85)

• “Our problem is with our desires, that naturally we have no appetite for God, and we place all of our affections elsewhere.” (87)

• “…the Spirit’s work in giving us new life, then, is nothing less than bringing us to share in their [the Father and Son’s] mutual delight.”

• “… [the Spirit] enlightens us to know the love of God, and that light warms us, drawing us to love him and overflow with love to others.” (91)

• “The very beholding of Christ is a transforming sight.” (92)

• “My new life began when the Spirit first opened my eye (there’s the light) and won my heart (there’s the heat) to Christ.” (93)

• “By cultivating in us a deepening taste for Christ… the Spirit polishes a new humanity who begins to shine with his likeness.”

• “Our love for the Son, then, is an echo and an extension of the Father’s eternal love.” (94)

• “The Father’s very identity consists in his love for the Son, and so when we love the Son we reflect what is most characteristic about the Father.”

• “At the heart of our transformation into the likeness of the Son, then, is our sharing of his deep delight in the Father.” (95)

• “…the Spirit is not about bringing us to a mere external performance for Christ, but bringing us actually to love him and find our joy in him.” (99)

• “…the Spirit’s first work is to set our desires in order.” (100)

• “I will, then, always love sin and the world until I truly sense that Christ is better.” (101)

• “The Spirit shares the triune life of God by bringing God’s children into the mutual delight of the Father and Son…” (107)

• “…if God were just one person, then love of the other would not be central to his being.” (112)

• “[God’s] holiness is the lucidity and spotlessness of his overflowing love.”

• “The wrath of the triune God is exactly the opposite of a character blip… It is the proof of the sincerity of his love…” (120)

• “[God’s] love is not mild-mannered and limp; it is livid, potent and committed.”

• Glorifying “God cannot be about inflating, improving or expanding him. That is quite impossible…” (121)

• “…when we give God the glory, we simply ascribe to him what is already his, declaring him to be as he truly is.”

• “…the glory of God is like radiant light, shining out, enlightening and giving life.” (123)

• “…the very glory that is the fragrance of life to some is the smell of death to others.” (125)

• “[God] is all light-but that is terrible for those who love the darkness.”

• “Through Jesus, the Father shows us his innermost being-in the form of a servant, dying to give us life.” (126)

• “On the cross we see the glorification of the glory of God-and it is all about laying down life to give life, to bear fruit.” (127)

• “Who God is drives everything.” (129)

• “…our churches…our marriages, our relationships, our mission: all are molded in the deepest way by what we think of God.”