Michael Reeves > Quotes

“the center, the cornerstone, the jewel in the crown of Christianity is not an idea, a system or a thing; it is not even “the gospel” as such. It is Jesus Christ.”
― Michael Reeves, Rejoicing in Christ

“There is something gratuitous about creation, an unnecessary abundance of beauty, and through its blossoms and pleasures we can revel in the sheer largesse of the Father.”
― Michael Reeves, Delighting in the Trinity: An Introduction to the Christian Faith

“Indeed, in the triune God is the love behind all love, the life behind all life, the music behind all music, the beauty behind all beauty and the joy behind all joy.”
― Michael Reeves, Delighting in the Trinity: An Introduction to the Christian Faith

“So next time you look up at the sun, moon and stars and wonder, remember: they are there because God loves, because the Father’s love for the Son burst out that it might be enjoyed by many. And they remain there only because God does not stop loving. He is an attentive Father who numbers every hair on our heads, for whom the fall of every sparrow matters; and out of love he upholds all things through his Son, and breathes out natural life on all through his Spirit.”
― Michael Reeves, Delighting in the Trinity: An Introduction to the Christian Faith

“Such are the problems with nontriune gods and creation. 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 else to exist. Wouldn’t the existence of a universe be an irritating distraction for the god whose greatest pleasure is looking in a mirror? Creating just looks like a deeply unnatural thing for such a god to do. And if such gods do create, they always seem to do so out of an essential neediness or desire to use what they create merely for their own self-gratification. God’s Ecstasy Everything changes when it comes to the Father, Son and Spirit. Here is a God who is not essentially lonely, but who has been loving for all eternity as the Father has loved the Son in the Spirit. Loving others is not a strange or novel thing for this God at all; it is at the root of who he is.”
― Michael Reeves, Delighting in the Trinity: An Introduction to the Christian Faith

“The triunity of God is the secret of His beauty. If we deny this, we at once have a God without radiance and without joy (and without humour!); a God without beauty.”
― Michael Reeves, Delighting in the Trinity: An Introduction to the Christian Faith

“Christianity is not primarily about lifestyle change; it is about knowing God. To know and grow to enjoy him is what we are saved for... Nonetheless, getting to know God better does actually make for far more profound and practical change as well. Knowing the love of God is the very thing that makes us loving. Sensing the desirability of God alters our preferences and inclinations, the things that drive our behavior: We begin to want God more than anything else.”
― Michael Reeves, Delighting in the Trinity: An Introduction to the Christian Faith

“We shall never find happiness by looking at our prayers, our doings, or our feelings; it is what Jesus is, not what we are, that gives rest to the soul. If we would at once overcome Satan and have peace with God, it must be by “looking unto Jesus.”
― Michael Reeves, Delighting in the Trinity: An Introduction to the Christian Faith

“There was the Son of God being so himself that even a Gentile executioner sensed it. On the cross we see the Bridegroom, loving to death; the Lord of glory, giving out his life; the Lord of hosts, crushing Satan; the King, enthroned. ”
― Michael Reeves, Rejoicing in Christ

“Sometimes we find ourselves tiring of Jesus, stupidly imagining that we have seen all there is to see and used up all the pleasure there is to be had in him. We get spiritually bored. But Jesus has satisfied the mind and heart of the infinite God for eternity. Our boredom is simple blindness. If the Father can be infinitely and eternally satisfied in him, then he must be overwhelmingly all-sufficient for us.”
― Michael Reeves, Rejoicing in Christ

“God is love”: those three words could hardly be more bouncy. They seem lively, lovely and as warming as a crackling fire. But “God is a Trinity”? No, hardly the same effect: that just sounds cold and stodgy. All quite understandable, but the aim of this book is to stop the madness. Yes, the Trinity can be presented as a fusty and irrelevant dogma, but the truth is that God is love because God is a Trinity.”
― Michael Reeves, Delighting in the Trinity: An Introduction to the Christian Faith

“as the Father looks with pleasure and delight on this perfect Son of his, so he looks with pleasure and delight on all who are in him.”
― Michael Reeves, Rejoicing in Christ

“Learn much of the Lord Jesus. For every look at yourself, take ten looks at Christ. He is altogether lovely. Such infinite majesty, and yet such meekness and grace, and all for sinners, even the chief. Live much in the smiles of God. Bask in His beams. Feel His all-seeing eye settled on you in love, and repose in His almighty arms. . . . Let your soul be filled with a heart-ravishing sense of the sweetness and excellency of Christ and all that is in Him.2 Yes!”
― Michael Reeves, Rejoicing in Christ

“What is your Christian life like? What is the shape of your gospel, your faith? In the end, it will all depend on what you think God is like. Who God is drives everything. So what is the human problem? Is it merely that we have strayed from a moral code? Or is it something worse: that we have strayed from him? What is salvation? Is it merely that we are brought back as law-abiding citizens? Or is it something better: that we are brought back as beloved children? What is the Christian life about? Mere behaviour? Or something deeper: enjoying God? And then there’s what our churches are like, our marriages, our relationships, our mission: all are moulded in the deepest way by what we think of God. In the early fourth century, Arius went for a pre-cooked God, ready-baked in his mind. Ignoring the way, the truth and life, he defined God without the Son, and the fallout was catastrophic: without the Son, God cannot truly be a Father; thus alone, he is not truly love. Thus he can have no fellowship to share with us, no Son to bring us close, no Spirit through whom we might know him. Arius was left with a very thin gruel: a life of self-dependent effort under the all-seeing eye of his distant and loveless God. The tragedy is that we all think like Arius every day. We think of God without the Son. We think of ‘God’, and not the Father of the Son. But from there it really doesn’t take long before you find that you are just a whole lot more interesting than this ‘God’. And could you but see yourself, you would notice that you are fast becoming like this ‘God’: all inward-looking and fruitless.”
― Michael Reeves, The Good God

“While these ‘five points of Calvinism’ reveal a growing interest in predestination among Calvinists, they were drawn up to protect what the Calvinists believed were important truths denied by the Arminians. They were never intended to be a summary of Calvinist belief or Calvin’s own thought.”
― Michael Reeves, The Unquenchable Flame: Discovering the Heart of the Reformation

“Prayer, then, is enjoying the care of a powerful Father, instead of being left to a frightening loneliness where everything is all down to you.”
― Michael Reeves, Enjoy Your Prayer Life

“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

“Yet if God is absolutely solitary in his supremacy, then surely evil must originate in God himself. Above and before all things, he is the source of all things, both good and evil. Clearly, it is not good for God to be alone. The triune God, however, is the sort of God who will make room for another to have real existence. The Father, who delights to have a Son, chooses to create many children who will have real lives of their own, to share the love and freedom he has always enjoyed. The creatures of the triune God are not mere extensions of him; he gives them life and personal being. Allowing them that, though, means allowing them to turn away from himself—and that is the origin of evil. By graciously giving his creatures the room to exist, the triune God allows them the freedom to turn away without himself being the author of evil.”
― Michael Reeves, Delighting in the Trinity: An Introduction to the Christian Faith

“It is not that he is all that will matter, as if the final conquest of evil and the resurrection of our bodies were trifling things; he is the center in that he is the fountainhead and source of all the blessings of the new creation.”
― Michael Reeves, Rejoicing in Christ

“Since God is, before all things, a Father, and not primarily Creator or Ruler, all his ways are beautifully fatherly. It is not that this God ‘does’ being Father as a day-job, only to kick back in the evenings as plain old ‘God’. It is not that he has a nice blob of fatherly icing on top. He is Father. All the way down. Thus all that he does he does as Father. That is who he is. He creates as a Father and he rules as a Father; and that means the way he rules over creation is most unlike the way any other God would rule over creation. The French Reformer, John Calvin, appreciating this deeply, once wrote: we ought in the very order of things [in creation] diligently to contemplate God’s fatherly love . . . [for as] a foreseeing and diligent father of the family he shows his wonderful goodness toward us . . . To conclude once for all, whenever we call God the Creator of heaven and earth, let us at the same time bear in mind that . . . we are indeed his children, whom he has received into his faithful protection to nourish and educate . . . So, invited by the great sweetness of his beneficence and goodness, let us study to love and serve him with all our heart.3 It was a profound observation, for it is only when we see that God rules his creation as a kind and loving Father that we will be moved to delight in his providence. We might acknowledge that the rule of some heavenly policeman was just, but we could never take delight in his regime as we can delight in the tender care of a father.”
― Michael Reeves, The Good God

“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

“What we love and enjoy is foundationally important. It is far more significant than our outward behaviour, for it is our desires that drive our behaviour. We do what we want.”
― Michael Reeves, The Good God

“Jesus Christ, God’s perfect Son, is the Beloved of the Father, the Song of the angels, the Logic of creation, the great Mystery of godliness, the bottomless Spring of life, comfort and joy. We were made to find our satisfaction, our heart’s rest, in him.”
― Michael Reeves, Rejoicing in Christ

“if God is not a Father, if he has no Son and will have no children, then he must be lonely, distant and unapproachable; if he is not triune and so not essentially loving, then no God at all just looks better.”
― Michael Reeves, Delighting in the Trinity: An Introduction to the Christian Faith

“Thus if your tendency is to think you’re rather wonderful, just remember your prayer life.”
― Michael Reeves, Enjoy Your Prayer Life

“Preachers, therefore, must avoid vacuousness in their preaching, and they must avoid heartless intellectualism. The object of all true preaching, after all, is the heart, and preaching has failed “unless it makes men tremble, makes them sad, and then anon brings them to Christ, and causes them to rejoice. Sermons are to be heard in thousands, and yet how little comes of them all, because the heart is not aimed at, or else the archers miss the mark.”
― Michael Reeves, Spurgeon on the Christian Life: Alive in Christ

“We were made to enjoy the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ (2 Corinthians 4:6). That is the only light in which we can have life. It is the only light in which we can have full hearts. It is the only light in which we can minister to others. If you try to minister without constantly refilling your eyes and heart with this light then in the power of your own adrenaline and wisdom, you will go out and you will burn out.”
― Michael Reeves, Authentic Ministry: Serving from the Heart

“if God’s very identity is to be The Ruler, what kind of salvation can he offer me (if he’s even prepared to offer such a thing)? If God is The Ruler and the problem is that I have broken the rules, the only salvation he can offer is to forgive me and treat me as if I had kept the rules. But if that is how God is, my relationship with him can be little better than my relationship with any traffic cop (meaning no offence to any readers in the constabulary). Let me put it like this: if, as never happens, some fine copper were to catch me speeding and so breaking the rules, I would be punished; if, as never happens, he failed to spot me or I managed to shake him off after an exciting car chase, I would be relieved. But in neither case would I love him. And even if, like God, he chose to let me off the consequences of my law-breaking, I still would not love him. I might feel grateful, and that gratitude might be deep, but that is not at all the same thing as love. And so it is with the divine policeman: if salvation simply means him letting me off and counting me as a law-abiding citizen, then gratitude (not love) is all I have. In other words, I can never really love the God who is essentially just The Ruler. And that, ironically, means I can never keep the greatest command: to love the Lord my God.”
― Michael Reeves, The Good God

“Yet is all this fair to Erasmus? Was he not the one who made the Greek New Testament available, so providing the coals for the Reformation? Certainly he did, and yet his possession of the Scriptures (and his deep study of them) changed little for the man himself because of how he treated them. Burying them under convenient assertions of their vagueness, he accorded the Scriptures little practical, let alone governing, authority. The result was that, for Erasmus, the Bible was just one voice among many, and so its message could be tailored, squeezed, and adjusted to fit his own vision of what Christianity was. To break out of that suffocating scheme and achieve any substantial reformation, it took Luther’s attitude, that Scripture is the only sure foundation for belief (sola Scriptura). The Bible had to be acknowledged as the supreme authority and allowed to contradict and overrule all other claims, or else it would itself be overruled and its message hijacked. In other words, a simple reverence for the Bible and acknowledgment that it has some authority would never have been enough to bring about the Reformation. Sola Scriptura was the indispensable key for change.”
― Michael Reeves, The Unquenchable Flame: Discovering the Heart of the Reformation

“Our going out to the world with the gospel is not an endeavor that Christians have to hitch on to knowing God, bringing to the task a vigor and vim outsourced from elsewhere. Rather, the heart-gladdening, feet-quickening reality of God is itself at once all the motivation, the content, and the zest of our going. It is precisely because God, from his own glorious fullness, fills us with joy in him that we begin to bubble over with it to those around. This is the theological dynamic of mission. The wellspring of healthy, happy mission is God himself.”
― Michael Reeves, God Shines Forth: How the Nature of God Shapes and Drives the Mission of the Church