Tim Chester is a pastor of the Crowded House in Sheffield , England
Most of the other talks I have summarized and posted my thoughts, but for this one I’m just posting my notes (my blogging while listening skills are fading J). I tried to type as fast as possible, so it’s as close to “quotes” as I could do. After listening to Tim a few times this week (and reading You Can Change and using the Porterbook curriculum) I’ve decided that I’m going to read everything he’s written. This is good stuff people...read a taste of it below.
Tim Chester reminds us that the TRINITY is foundational to understanding why God adopted us.
Tim says if God wasn’t trinity then that would mean there was a time when God was not Father, not loving, not communicating…but for all eternity God was loving and communicating within the trinity.
God did not create us because he was deficient in himself. He did not need the world or need anything in the world. He created out of love because the very essence of God is LOVE.
Tim says, “God is not a ruler who becomes a father or who sometimes does fatherly-like things. No, first and foremost God is a God who loves us.”
God forgives us, but also does so much more. He loves you and adopts you and calls you his child.
Salvation is adoption because God is a Father. Before creation, God was not a frustrated ruler looking for someone to rule or a frustrated lover, looking for someone to love. No, God was a father who had been loving his son for all eternity.
--You cannot be claiming to be “god-like” if you are adopting out of need. That is not why God adopts us, so we should not adopt children to meet some human need for a child. If you adopt out of your emotional need to feel complete then you cannot love your child with the God-like love we have been loved with.
--What is true life? It is not having a child, but being a child of God.
God created us for his good out of the overflow of his love and glory. In eternity, the father and son share glory in the father’s presence.
God’s glory is God’s perfections pouring out of him, like the light radiating from the sun. Jesus reflects the glory of God. The light of God’s glory is perfectly reflected in the image or mirror of the Son.
On a sunny day, we never worry about the sun running out of light or heat. We know that light and heat will pour out of the sun without fail. In the same way, God’s love is like the sun, pouring forth his beams of love. Our job is to sit and enjoy the warmth and energy of the warm sun. We are to relax in Trinitarian love.
Your first job as a Christian is to do nothing except to soak in the light of God’s love.
We live in a cold, graceless world and our job is to step out into the warmth of God’s love and be filled from him.
It is for God’s great pleasure that he loves us, adopts us…THIS is true grace. He isn’t just being “nice” to us, but salvation comes out of the overflow of God’s love.
Jesus wants people to be where he is. Where is the son? At the Father’s side. And that is where he wants his people to live.
Jesus knows the father and makes him known to us.
The greatest unkindness you can do to God the Father is not to believe he loves you.
–John Owen
The WHOLE plan of salvation has as its goal your adoption by God.
Tim quoted from 1 John 4 and I thought it fitting to end this post with these great words from God our Father:
In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins. Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God abides in us and his love is perfected in us.
By this we know that we abide in him and he in us, because he has given us of his Spirit. And we have seen and testify that the Father has sent his Son to be the Savior of the world. Whoever confesses that Jesus is the Son of God, God abides in him, and he in God. So we have come to know and to believe the love that God has for us. God is love, and whoever abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him. By this is love perfected with us, so that we may have confidence for the day of judgment, because as he is so also are we in this world. There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear. For fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not been perfected in love. We love because he first loved us.
(1 John 4:10-19 ESV)
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