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.”
