Skip to main content

Enjoying God

I have enjoyed reading Tim Chester's Enjoying God.  It is helpful because it encourages to go beyond intellectual knowledge of God and love and enjoy Him. Tim wants us to like God. All true followers of Jesus would say they love God, but are we fond of God? Is your spiritual instinct to think well of God and His intentions for your life? Tim believes the key to enjoying God is give ourselves to dance to Him n a trinitarian fashion, Father, Son and Holy Spirit

I have read a number of Tim Chester books, so I must confess that I think what  he says in this book in individual chapters is better stated elsewhere in his other works. Also there is a part of me that feels that though most of our gifted modern writers like Tim are saying wonderful things, they are merely paraphrasing what old writers have said. It would be nice if many of us can read Owen and Bonhoeffer for ourselves. I believe that is much more beneficial in the long term than getting a few helpful quotes from Tim. Of course we often discover the existence of such older writers by reading about them in such books like Enjoying God. So I do appreciate Tim's effort in this regard. A good book, do read it if you can!

Here are some one liners that stood out for me:

"We are not only saved from sin, we are saved for God" 

"Faith looks beyond our circumstances to our relationship with God" 

"We pursue joy in God for God's sake, because He is the source of joy" 

"God is the loving Father you've always wished you had" 

"If you are in Christ, you always bring pleasure to the Father. He sees you and smiles with delight" 

"We don't need to worry because the world is full of signs of our Father's intimate involvement. We live in a fathered world" 

"Jesus asks everything of us, but he asks nothing of us that he himself has not first endured"

"The Spirit gives spiritual life in the present and physical life in the future"

"All the good we do is done in the power of the Spirit"

"If you want to to see the Spirit at work in your life, then attempt things that you feel you can't do without His help"

"For most people groaning is a backwards look....but for the Christians groaning is a forwards look"

"We go to the Bible to hear our Saviour speak to us"

"You can't enjoy God's love on your own"

"Brotherly love isn't a poor substitute for the real thing. For brotherly love is divine love. God loves us through the love of other Christians".

"You will never be happy while you are pursuing your own happiness"

"Our cities and towns are places in spiritual darkness. But every time a new church is started, it's as if God switches on a light. Light shines through Christian love".

Copyright © Chola Mukanga 2020
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Pornography as Occultism

There is a kind of helplessness that a man engaged in pornography exhibits. He often speaks of it in terms of a “struggle” or an “addiction.” Now both of those terms are accurate, I believe, but they distance a person from his sin in a soul-decaying manner. Pornography is not just an addiction; it is occultism. The man who sits upstairs viewing pornography while his wife chauffeurs the kids to soccer practice is not some unusual “pervert”; he is (like his forefather Adam) seeking the mystery of the universe apart from Christ. That’s the reason the one picture, stored in his memory, of that naked woman will never be enough for him. He will never be able to be satisfied because he will never be able to get an image naked enough. I say pornography is occultism because I believe the draw toward it is more than biological (though that is strong). The satanic powers understand that “the sexually immoral person sins against his own body” (1 Cor. 6:18). They understand that the pornographic ...
Post a Comment
KEEP READING →

The Wound of Sin

Bless the Lord, O my soul, that when you were playing with the bait, unaware of the hook like so many others, He opened your eyes—allowing you to see your folly and danger so that you might flee from it. And now, be careful that you do not grasp at any of the devil's temptations, lest he ensnare you with his hook. For though you may be restored by grace, it will not be without a wound—just as a fish sometimes escapes the hook but swims away injured. That wound may bring sorrow and take long to heal. And you have already known this to be true. THOMAS BOSTON  ( Source : The Art of Man-Fishing) A sobering truth from Thomas Boston. Sin always damages. God always restores His children when we fall but it is never without the wounds. We often carry the scars of our sins. This is another m reason for us to avoid sin altogether. Sometimes in our presumption of His grace, we tend to be antinomian. Boston is warning that such an attitude is foolish since sin always damages. It always leaves ...
Post a Comment
KEEP READING →

Pussy Riot as the Messenger

I have always thought there was something uneasy, or something not quite right about Pussy Riot and the western media reaction to it. It was not just the desecration of the Orthodox Church Cathedral. I could not placed my finger on it until I read this assessment by Vadim Nikitin : How many fans of Pussy Riot’s zany “punk prayer” in the Cathedral of Christ the Savior and Nadezhda Tolokonnikova’s erudite and moving closing statement were equally thrilled by her participation, naked and heavily pregnant, in a public orgy at a Moscow museum in 2008? That performance, by the radical art group Voina (Russian for “war”), was meant to illustrate how Russians were abused by their government. Voina had previously set fire to a police car and drew obscene images on a St. Petersburg drawbridge. Stunts like that would get you arrested just about anywhere, not just in authoritarian Russia. But Pussy Riot and its comrades at Voina come as a full package: You can’t have the fun, pro-democrac...
2 comments
KEEP READING →