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

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Incarnation and Modernity

[The Bible] resituate modernity's prejudices within a wider context from which they were originally wrenched, showing them to be reductive heresies of a more complex biblical reality. So whereas modernity privileges an unchanging a-historicity, in the incarnation God enters history at a particular moment to gather a people to be with him not in a Greck eternity of unchanging timelessness, but in a biblical eternity of never-ending and ever-renewed intimacy and relational richness. Whereas modernity subordinates the particular to the universal, the Bible perfectly marries the universal "image of the invisible God" together with a particular first-century Palestinian Jewish man. Whereas modernity seeks the abstract over the material and finds itself painfully akimbo between the twin idols of materialism and immaterialism, in the same gesture the incarnate Christ validates material reality and prevents his followers from ever worshipping it. Finally, whereas modernity secks ...

Do Not Be Anxious

Do not be troubled if you are poor - Christ Himself had no place to lay His head. Do not let the prospect of future hard times make you anxious about how you will endure, for "you will not be ashamed in evil days, and in times of famine you will be satisfied." God has said (Psalm 37:19) therefore, you must believe it. Do not be overly concerned with securing provisions for old age, for by all appearances, you may not live to see it. It is more than likely that you will reach your journey’s end sooner than expected. Your body is frail - it is already declining, greeting decay as its mother before it has even fully entered the hall of this world. The supports of your earthly tent are being loosened little by little. Take courage, O my soul, for soon the devil, the world, and the flesh will be crushed beneath your feet, and you will be welcomed into eternal mansions.   But even if the Lord prolongs your days to old age, He who brought you forth from your mother's womb will n...

You Are A Pilgrim

Remember the brevity and uncertainty of your time. You are a tenant in the world and you do not know how soon you may have to leave. You can take nothing with you. Therefore, having food and clothing (which the Lord does not allow you to lack), be content with them (1 Timothy 6:7-8). You are a stranger on this earth, going home to your Father's house, where the things of this world will no longer be needed. Why, then, O my soul, should you desire more than what will carry you to the end of your journey? Will you set up camp on this side of the Jordan and settle here? Are you saying, "It is good for me to stay here"? Are you so satisfied with what the world is offering that you no longer long for home? No, no! Well then, O my soul, gird up the loins of your mind! You are heading home, and your Father urges you to run and make haste. Go, then, and carry no burden that might slow you down, lest it hinder your journey, and the doors close before you reach home—leaving you out...