God Shines Forth Quotes

“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

“Time and again, Scripture is clear that sinful humanity languishes in unknowing darkness, and, left to our imaginations, we dream up a miserable god, quite deserving of our dislike and mistrust. The unique and cheering work of Jesus is to be the light in the dark rooms of our hearts and minds, showing us the Father. As John Calvin put it, “We are blind as to the light of God, until in Christ it beams on us.”
― Michael Reeves, God Shines Forth: How the Nature of God Shapes and Drives the Mission of the Church

“The Lamb was coming. When the Lord visited the temple as a boy, it was not his first time there. On that same mountain, he had dwelt in the Most Holy Place, enthroned in his glory above the cherubim on the ark of the covenant. He had seen the generations of high priests entering behind the curtain on the Day of Atonement, watched the blood sprinkled on the mercy seat, and seen his people represented as precious stones over the heart of the Levite (Ex. 28:15–30). He had heard as the people outside celebrated when the high priest reemerged with atonement completed, and he had always known that his hour would soon come. And so, it was to Jerusalem, four days before his crucifixion, that the Lamb of God made his way (Luke 9:51).”
― Michael Reeves, God Shines Forth: How the Nature of God Shapes and Drives the Mission of the Church

“Make no mistake, the creation was not necessary: it was totally gratuitous. God doesn’t need there to be a creation, but all things exist because of his happy self-existence. Because of God’s aseity, we can know that all his works are gracious.”
― Michael Reeves, God Shines Forth: How the Nature of God Shapes and Drives the Mission of the Church

“Sibbes said that God “delights to spread his beams and his influence in inferior things, to make all things fruitful. Such a goodness is in God as is in a fountain, or in the breast that loves to ease itself of milk.”
― Michael Reeves, God Shines Forth: How the Nature of God Shapes and Drives the Mission of the Church

“What a comfort it is to have an eternally full and self-existent God. It means he is for us an anchor of unchanging faithfulness (James 1:17), perfectly free to do just as he chooses (Ps. 115:3), and unassailable by any evil or wickedness that would try to stand in his way (Job 42:2). Beyond this alone, though, what a joy to have a God whose glory is to share himself rather than hide himself. He presents himself to be known, his fatherly goodness to be enjoyed, and his life to be received.”
― Michael Reeves, God Shines Forth: How the Nature of God Shapes and Drives the Mission of the Church

“What a comfort it is to have an eternally full and self-existent God. It means he is for us an anchor of unchanging faithfulness (James 1:17), perfectly free to do just as he chooses (Ps. 115:3), and unassailable by any evil or wickedness that would try to stand in his way (Job 42:2). Beyond this alone, though, what a joy to have a God whose glory is to share himself rather than hide himself. He presents himself to be known, his fatherly goodness to be enjoyed, and his life to be received. And his aseity, simplicity, and immutability mean that these wonders never cease. John Howe, the Puritan preacher and chaplain to Oliver Cromwell, wrote that when delighting yourself in this God, “you will still find a continual spring, unexhausted fullness, a fountain never to be drawn dry.”8”
― Michael Reeves, God Shines Forth: How the Nature of God Shapes and Drives the Mission of the Church

“His happy fullness—and our derived enjoyment of him—is the heartbeat of mission, too. It is God’s own delighted, overflowing fullness that defines mission in the first place, for before it was ever a task given to the church, it was the disposition of God to communicate, give, and fill up. It is our knowledge of God and our enjoyment of him that fills us up and sends us out with his own life, love, and happiness into the world to communicate and bless as he does.”
― Michael Reeves, God Shines Forth: How the Nature of God Shapes and Drives the Mission of the Church

“Happiness, beauty, and humility flow from the lives of those who are restored in the image of God.”
― Michael Reeves, God Shines Forth: How the Nature of God Shapes and Drives the Mission of the Church

“This counterintuitive embrace of our own weakness and dependence is the way the glory of God will shine in and through us. Our own attempts to be impressive, whole, and strong in mission will actually only betray our fallen emptiness and selfishness:”
― Michael Reeves, God Shines Forth: How the Nature of God Shapes and Drives the Mission of the Church

“The glory of the Christian is always Jesus Christ and him crucified. “For what we proclaim is not ourselves, but Jesus Christ as Lord, with ourselves as your servants for Jesus’s sake,” says Paul in 2 Corinthians 4:5; and “far be it from me to boast except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ” (Gal. 6:14). Knowing that we are empty ones, now full of him, we always place Jesus himself at the foreground, rather than ourselves. It is Jesus we have to offer to the world, and not ourselves.”
― Michael Reeves, God Shines Forth: How the Nature of God Shapes and Drives the Mission of the Church