“He is the Sun of being and all creatures are His fleeting rays” by Herman Bavinck

“All that can be found in the whole world in the way of support and shelter and aid is originally and perfectly to be found in overflowing abundance in God.

Of Him the whole family in heaven and earth is named (Eph. 3:15).

He is the Sun of being and all creatures are His fleeting rays.”

–Herman Bavinck, The Wonderful Works of God (trans. Henry Zylstra; Glenside, PA: Westminster Seminary Press, 1909/2019), 116.

“The fountain of our salvation” by Herman Bavinck

“Once we have received the principle of eternal life in our hearts we cannot but long always to know more of Him who granted us that life.

More and more we come to look up to Him who is the fountain of our salvation.

From the comfort which we enjoy in our hearts, and from the benefit and fruit which the knowledge of God spells for our own selves and our lives, we always go back to the worship of the Eternal Being.

And then we always come more certainly to the sense that God does not exist for us but that we exist for Him.

We are not indifferent to our salvation, but this salvation is a means to His glory. The knowledge of God gave us life, but the life that was given leads us back to the knowledge of Him.

In God we find all our well-being and all our glory. He becomes the object of our worship, the theme of our song, the strength of our life.

From God, through God, and unto God are all things—that becomes the choice of our hearts and the watchword of our work.

We ourselves and all creatures round about us become means unto His glory.

The truth which at first we love especially because it gave us life thereupon becomes more and more dear to us because of itself, because of what it reveals to us concerning the Eternal Being.

The whole doctrine of faith, in its entirety and in its parts, becomes a proclamation of the praise of God an exhibit of His excellences, a glorification of His name.”

–Herman Bavinck, The Wonderful Works of God (trans. Henry Zylstra; Glenside, PA: Westminster Seminary Press, 1909/2019), 113-114.

“The sum of the blessings Christ sought” by Jonathan Edwards

“The sum of the blessings Christ sought, by what He did and suffered in the work of redemption, was the Holy Spirit. So is the affair of our redemption constituted.

The Father provides and gives the Redeemer, and the price of redemption is offered to Him, and He grants the benefit purchased.

The Son is the Redeemer that gives the price, and also is the price offered.

And the Holy Spirit is the grand blessing, obtained by the price offered, and bestowed on the redeemed.

The Holy Spirit, in His indwelling, His influences and fruits, is the sum of all grace, holiness, comfort and joy, or in one word, of all the spiritual good Christ purchased for men in this world: and is also the sum of all perfection, glory and eternal joy, that He purchased for them in another world.

The Holy Spirit is that great benefit, that is the subject matter of the promises, both of the eternal covenant of redemption, and also of the covenant of grace; the grand subject of the promises of the Old Testament, in the prophecies of the blessings of the Messiah’s kingdom; and the chief subject of the promises of the New Testament; and particularly of the covenant of grace delivered by Jesus Christ to His disciples, as His last will and testament, in John 14-16; the grand legacy, that He bequeathed to them in that His last and dying discourse with them.

Therefore the Holy Spirit is so often called “the Spirit of promise,” and emphatically “the promise, the promise of the Father,” etc. (Luke 24:49; Acts 1:4 and 2:33, 39; Gal. 3:14; Eph. 1:13 and 3:6).

This being the great blessing Christ purchased by His labors and sufferings on earth, it was the blessing He received of the Father, when He ascended into heaven, and entered into the Holy of Holies with His own blood, to communicate to those that He had redeemed.

John 16:7, “It is expedient for you, that I go away; for if I go not away, the Comforter will not come; but if I depart, I will send him unto you.”

Acts 2:33, “Being by the right hand of God exalted, and having received of the Father the promise of the Holy Ghost, he hath shed forth this which ye now see and hear.”

This is the sum of those gifts, which Christ received for men, even for the rebellious, at His ascension.

This is the sum of the benefits Christ obtains for men by His intercession (John 14:16–17): “I will pray the Father, and he shall give you another Comforter, that he may abide with you forever; even the Spirit of truth.”

Herein consists Christ’s communicative fullness, even in His being full of the Spirit, and so “full of grace and truth” [John 1:14], that we might of “this fullness receive, and grace for grace” [John 1:16].

He is “anointed with the Holy Ghost” [Acts 10:38]; and this is the ointment that goes down from the head to the members. “God gives the Spirit not by measure unto him” [John 3:34], that everyone that is His “might receive according to the measure of the gift of Christ” [Eph. 4:7].

This therefore was the great blessing He prayed for in that wonderful prayer, that he uttered for his disciples and all his future church, the evening before he died (John 17): the blessing He prayed for to the Father, in behalf of His disciples, was the same He had insisted on in His preceding discourse with them: and this doubtless was the blessing that He prayed for, when as our high priest, He “offered up strong crying and tears,” with his blood (Heb. 5:6–7).

The same that He shed His blood for, He also shed tears for, and poured out prayers for.”

–Jonathan Edwards, Apocalyptic Writings: “Notes on the Apocalypse” An Humble Attempt, ed. John E. Smith and Stephen J. Stein, vol. 5, The Works of Jonathan Edwards (New Haven; London: Yale University Press, 1977), 5: 341–342.

“Every atom in the universe” by Jonathan Edwards

“By virtue of the believer’s union with Christ, he does really possess all things (1 Cor. 3:21-23). But it may be asked, how does he possess all things? What is he the better for it? How is a true Christian so much richer than other men?

To answer this, I’ll tell you what I mean by “possessing all things.”

I mean that God three in one, all that He is, and all that He has, and all that He does, all that He has made or done— the whole universe, bodies and spirits, earth and heaven, angels, men and devils, sun, moon, and stars, land and sea, fish and fowls, all the silver and gold, kings and potentates as well as mean men— are as much the Christian’s as the money in his pocket, the clothes he wears, or the house he dwells in, or the meals he eats; yes, properly his, advantageously his, more his, by virtue of the union with Christ; because Christ, who certainly does possess all things, is entirely his: so that the Christian possesses it all, more than a wife the share of the best and dearest husband, more than the hand possesses what the head does; it is all his.

Every atom in the universe is managed by Christ so as to be most to the advantage of the Christian, every particle of air or every ray of the sun; so that he in the other world, when he comes to see it, shall sit and enjoy all this vast inheritance with surprising, amazing joy.”

–Jonathan Edwards, “Miscellany ff,” The “Miscellanies”: (Entry Nos. A–z, Aa–zz, 1–500), ed. Thomas A. Schafer and Harry S. Stout, Corrected Edition., vol. 13, The Works of Jonathan Edwards (New Haven; London: Yale University Press, 2002), 13: 183–184.

“Speak and think and live God’s praises” by Jonathan Edwards

“Let those who have been made partakers of the free and glorious grace of God, spend their lives much in praises and hallelujahs to God, for the wonders of His mercy in their redemption.

To you, O redeemed of the Lord, doth this doctrine most directly apply itself; you are those who have been made partakers of all this glorious grace of which you have now heard.

’Tis you that God entertained thoughts of restoring after your miserable fall into dreadful depravity and corruption, and into danger of the dreadful misery that unavoidably follows upon it.

’Tis for you in particular that God gave His Son, yea, His only Son, and sent Him into the world;

’Tis for you that the Son of God so freely gave Himself;

’Tis for you that He was born, died, rose again and ascended, and intercedes;

’Tis to you that there the free application of the fruit of these things is made: all this is done perfectly and altogether freely, without any of your desert, without any of your righteousness or strength.

Therefore, let your life be spent in praises to God.

When you praise Him in prayer, let it not be with coldness and indifferency; when you praise Him in your closet, let your whole soul be active therein; when you praise Him in singing, don’t barely make a noise, without any stirring of affection in the heart, without any internal melody.

Surely, you have reason to shout, cry, “Grace, grace, be the topstone of the temple!” (Zech. 4:7) Certainly, you don’t want mercy and bounty to praise God; you only want a heart and lively affections to praise him with.

Surely, if the angels are so astonished at God’s mercy to you, and do even shout with joy and admiration at the sight of God’s grace to you, you yourself, on whom this grace is bestowed, have much more reason to shout.

Consider that great part of your happiness in heaven, to all eternity, will consist in this: in praising of God, for His free and glorious grace in redeeming you; and if you would spend more time about it on earth, you would find this world would be much more of a heaven to you than it is.

Therefore, do nothing while you are alive, but speak and think and live God’s praises.”

–Jonathan Edwards, “Glorious Grace,” in Sermons and Discourses, 1720–1723 (ed. Wilson H. Kimnach and Harry S. Stout; vol. 10; The Works of Jonathan Edwards; New Haven; London: Yale University Press, 1992), 10: 399.

“Adoration in infinitesimals” by C.S. Lewis

“It’s comical that you, of all people, should ask my views about prayer as worship or adoration. On this subject you yourself taught me nearly all I know.

On a walk in the Forest of Dean. Can you have forgotten? You first taught me the great principle, ‘Begin where you are.’

I had thought one had to start by summoning up what we believe about the goodness and greatness of God, by thinking about creation and redemption and ‘all the blessings of this life’.

You turned to the brook and once more splashed your burning face and hands in the little waterfall and said: ‘Why not begin with this?’ And it worked.

Apparently you have never guessed how much. That cushiony moss, that coldness and sound and dancing light were no doubt very minor blessings compared with ‘the means of grace and the hope of glory’. But then they were manifest.

So far as they were concerned, sight had replaced faith. They were not the hope of glory, they were an exposition of the glory itself. Yet you were not– or so it seemed to me– telling me that ‘Nature’, or ‘the beauties of Nature’, manifest the glory.

No such abstraction as ‘Nature’ comes into it. I was learning the far more secret doctrine that pleasures are shafts of the glory as it strikes our sensibility.

As it impinges on our will or our understanding, we give it different names– goodness or truth or the like. But its flash upon our senses and mood is pleasure.

But aren’t there bad, unlawful pleasures? Certainly there are. But in calling them ‘bad pleasures’ I take it we are using a kind of shorthand. We mean ‘pleasures snatched by unlawful acts’.

It is the stealing of the apple that is bad, not the sweetness. The sweetness is still a beam from the glory. That does not palliate the stealing. It makes it worse.

There is sacrilege in the theft. We have abused a holy thing. I have tried, since that moment, to make every pleasure into a channel of adoration.

I don’t mean simply by giving thanks for it. One must of course give thanks, but I mean something different. How shall I put it? We can’t– or I can’t– hear the song of a bird simply as a sound.

Its meaning or message (‘That’s a bird’) comes with it inevitably– just as one can’t see a familiar word in print as a merely visual pattern. The reading is as involuntary as the seeing.

When the wind roars I don’t just hear the roar; I ‘hear the wind’. In the same way it is possible to ‘read’ as well as to ‘have’ a pleasure. Or not even ‘as well as’.

The distinction ought to become, and sometimes is, impossible; to receive it and to recognise its divine source are a single experience. This heavenly fruit is instantly redolent of the orchard where it grew.

This sweet air whispers of the country from whence it blows. It is a message. We know we are being touched by a finger of that right hand at which there are pleasures for evermore.

There need be no question of thanks or praise as a separate event, something done afterwards. To experience the tiny theophany is itself to adore. Gratitude exclaims, very properly: ‘How good of God to give me this.’

Adoration says: ‘What must be the quality of that Being whose far-off and momentary coruscations are like this!’ One’s mind runs back up the sunbeam to the sun.

If I could always be what I aim at being, no pleasure would be too ordinary or too usual for such reception; from the first taste of the air when I look out of the window– one’s whole cheek becomes a sort of palate– down to one’s soft slippers at bed-time.

I don’t always achieve it. One obstacle is inattention. Another is the wrong kind of attention. One could, if one practised, hear simply a roar and not the roaring-of-the-wind.

In the same way, only far too easily, one can concentrate on the pleasure as an event in one’s own nervous system—subjectify it—and ignore the smell of Deity that hangs about it.

A third obstacle is greed. Instead of saying: ‘This also is Thou’, one may say the fatal word Encore.

There is also conceit: the dangerous reflection that not everyone can find God in a plain slice of bread and butter, or that others would condemn as simply ‘grey’ the sky in which I am delightedly observing such delicacies of pearl and dove and silver.

You notice that I am drawing no distinction between sensuous and aesthetic pleasures. But why should I? The line is almost impossible to draw and what use would it be if one succeeded in drawing it?

If this is Hedonism, it is also a somewhat arduous discipline. But it is worth some labour: for in so far as it succeeds, almost every day furnishes us with so to speak, ‘bearings’ on the Bright Blur.

It becomes brighter but less blurry. William Law remarks that people are merely ‘amusing themselves’ by asking for the patience which a famine or a persecution would call for if, in the meantime, the weather and every other inconvenience sets them grumbling.

One must learn to walk before one can run. So here. We– or at least I– shall not be able to adore God on the highest occasions if we have learned no habit of doing so on the lowest.

At best, our faith and reason will tell us that He is adorable, but we shall not have found Him so, not have ‘tasted and seen’. Any patch of sunlight in a wood will show you something about the sun which you could never get from reading books on astronomy.

These pure and spontaneous pleasures are ‘patches of Godlight’ in the woods of our experience. Of course one wants the books too.

One wants a great many things besides this ‘adoration in infinitesimals’ which I am preaching. And if I were preaching it in public, instead of feeding it back to the very man who taught it me (though he may by now find the lesson nearly unrecognisable?), I should have to pack it in ice, enclose it in barbed-wire reservations, and stick up warning notices in every direction.

Don’t imagine I am forgetting that the simplest act of mere obedience is worship of a far more important sort than what I’ve been describing.

To obey is better than sacrifice.”

–C.S. Lewis, Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer (San Diego, CA: Harvest, 1964), 88-91.

“God’s triune name” by Scott Swain

“We were baptized into God’s triune name so that we might learn to praise God’s triune name.”

–Scott R. Swain, The Trinity: An Introduction (ed. Graham A. Cole and Oren R. Martin; Short Studies in Systematic Theology; Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2020), 27.

“Our place is on our faces before Him in adoration” by John Stott

“It is of great importance to note from Romans 1–11 that theology (our belief about God) and doxology (our worship of God) should never be separated.

On the one hand, there can be no doxology without theology. It is not possible to worship an unknown god. All true worship is a response to the self-revelation of God in Christ and Scripture, and arises from our reflection on who He is and what He has done.

It was the tremendous truths of Romans 1–11 which provoked Paul’s outburst of praise. The worship of God is evoked, informed and inspired by the vision of God.

Worship without theology is bound to degenerate into idolatry. Hence the indispensable place of Scripture in both public worship and private devotion. It is the Word of God which calls forth the worship of God.

On the other hand, there should be no theology without doxology. There is something fundamentally flawed about a purely academic interest in God.

God is not an appropriate object for cool, critical, detached, scientific observation and evaluation. No, the true knowledge of God will always lead us to worship, as it did Paul. Our place is on our faces before Him in adoration.

As I believe Bishop Handley Moule said at the end of the last century, we must ‘beware equally of an undevotional theology and of an untheological devotion’.”

–John R. W. Stott, The Message of Romans: God’s Good News for the World (The Bible Speaks Today; Leicester, England; Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2001), 311–312.

“They that pray, and read, and sing do best of all” by Charles Spurgeon

“I agree with Matthew Henry when he says:

‘They that pray in the family do well.

They that pray and read the Scriptures do better.

But they that pray, and read, and sing do best of all.’

There is a completeness in that kind of family worship which is much to be desired.

Whether in the family or not, yet personally and privately, let us endeavour to be filled with God’s praise and with His honour all the day.

Be this our resolve— ‘I will extol Thee, my God, O King. And I will bless Thy name forever and ever. Every day will I bless Thee. And I will praise Thy name forever and ever‘ (Psalm 145:1-2).”

–Charles H. Spurgeon, “The Happy Duty of Daily Praise,” in The Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit Sermons, Volume 32 (London: Passmore & Alabaster, 1886), 32: 289.

“You have much more reason than angels to shout with joy” by Jonathan Edwards

“Let those who have been made partakers of this free and glorious grace of God, spend their lives much in praises and hallelujahs to God, for the wonders of His mercy in their redemption.

To you, O redeemed of the Lord, doth this doctrine most directly apply itself: you are those who have been made partakers of all this glorious grace of which you have now heard.

’Tis you that God entertained thoughts of restoring after your miserable fall into dreadful depravity and corruption, and into danger of the dreadful misery that unavoidably follows upon it.

’Tis for you in particular that God gave His Son, yea, His only Son, and sent Him into the world.

’Tis for you that the Son of God so freely gave Himself.

’Tis for you that He was born, died, rose again and ascended, and intercedes.

’Tis to you that there the free application of the fruit of these things is made: all this is done perfectly and altogether freely, without any of your desert, without any of your righteousness or strength.

Therefore, let your life be spent in praises to God.

When you praise Him in prayer, let it not be with coldness and indifferency.

When you praise Him in your closet, let your whole soul be active therein.

When you praise Him in singing, don’t barely make a noise, without any stirring of affection in the heart, without any internal melody. Surely, you have reason to shout and cry, ‘Grace, grace, be the topstone of the temple!’

Certainly, you don’t lack mercy and bounty to praise God; you only lack a heart and lively affections to praise Him with.

Surely, if the angels are so astonished at God’s mercy to you, and do even shout with joy and admiration at the sight of God’s grace to you, you yourself, on whom this grace is bestowed, have much more reason to shout.

Consider that great part of your happiness in heaven, to all eternity, will consist in this: in praising of God, for His free and glorious grace in redeeming you.

And if you would spend more time about it on earth, you would find this world would be much more of a heaven to you than it is. Wherefore, do nothing while you are alive, but speak and think and live God’s praises.”

–Jonathan Edwards, “Glorious Grace,” in Sermons and Discourses, 1720–1723 (ed. Wilson H. Kimnach and Harry S. Stout; vol. 10; The Works of Jonathan Edwards; New Haven; London: Yale University Press, 1992), 10: 399. Edwards preached this sermon on Zechariah 4:7 when he was 19 years old.