The following 30 quotes are from Daniel Hames and Michael Reeves’ new book God Shines Forth: How the Nature of God Shapes and Drives the Mission of the Church (Wheaton, Il: Crossway, 2022).
- “If God seems to us a demanding taskmaster, we will never be his eager ambassadors in the world. If we feel ourselves conned into having to perform evangelism, we will never warm to the calling he has set before us.”
- “This book is an invitation to start again at the beginning with your vision of God. Our aim is to set before your eyes God as he truly is: God who is so full of life and goodness that he loves to be known; not as a campaign to impose himself on us or on the world but to give himself and share his own life with the world.”
- “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.”
- “If we fear that God’s love for us is reluctant or that his approval rests on our performance, we won’t feel any real affection for him, our service will be grudging, and the world will likely see through us.”
- “Jesus is the Glory of God: the very outshining radiance of his being.”
- “If someone were to ask us, ‘What is God like?’ the answer must be ‘Jesus Christ.’”
- “The rise and fall of empires, all political intrigue and power plays, all fame and fortune, tragedy and triumph, all the trials and suffering of the people of God from Adam to the present day are all summed up and put in their proper place by the slain Lamb.”
- “The revelation of God at the cross torpedoes our expectations of him. Where we have imagined him to be distant and severe, the cross says, ‘God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son’ (John 3:16).”
- “If Jesus is not the definitive word on the nature of God, then some other god lurks behind him. But if Jesus truly is the radiance of the Father, then all the goodness we see demonstrated and enacted in Christ’s living, dying, and rising flows from God’s own eternal life and being.”
- “God alone is gloriously, completely, independently himself. This is God—Father, Son, and Spirit—before, beyond, and above all created things. Yet the triune life is not a fortress, shut up against the world. God’s satisfied self-existence does not mean grand isolation, vacuum-packed and hidden away. No, the very life of God—all that he is in himself—overflows.”
- “The glorious fullness of the living God revealed in Jesus sets him apart from all other gods. His innermost being is a sun of light, life, and warmth, always shining out: radiant and outgoing. Other gods, however, are always pits of grasping neediness.”
- “Gods that cannot speak will need us to find words. Gods that cannot carry us will need us to pick ourselves up. Gods that cannot freely love will need us to make ourselves loveable. Whether our god is reputation, possessions, or relationships, we will be let down.”
- “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.”
- “Far from adding to us or building us up, sin makes us far less human than we are meant to be, slowly eating us.”
- “Full of life, gloriously good, and overflowing with kindness, Jesus was everything a human being is meant to be—the definitive likeness of God, revealed in the original image himself. Here, at last, was a real man.”
- “While Adam plunged humanity into sin, multiplying death from his body, Christ burst through death as the firstfruits and the head of a new humanity, full of life.”
- “Our own attempts to be impressive, whole, and strong in mission will actually only betray our fallen emptiness and selfishness: they are the work of theologians of glory. But theologians of the cross are filled with the radiance of God, unearned, unexpected, and unquenchable.”
- “Happiness, beauty, and humility flow from the lives of those who are restored in the image of God.”
- “Pharisees cannot truly love God or other people, because they have not first enjoyed the love of God for themselves. When disciples of an empty, demanding God do mission, they will tend to be results-driven bullies.”
- “Christians can be cajoled into evangelism like a herd of animals, but this is not a foundation for healthy and effective mission.”
- “Duty and debt are cruel motivations for mission. Those who try to draw on them will end up unconvinced salespeople who peddle a product they do not finally believe in or enjoy for themselves.”
- “Happy mission is rooted not in our response to God, nor even in better understanding God’s plans and purposes, but in his own nature. The truest and highest motivation for mission is God himself.”
- “We may doggedly cling to the inerrancy of Scripture, the uniqueness of Christ, the doctrine of hell, and substitutionary atonement while—all the while—exposing the world to an undelightful God.”
- “If we ourselves do not constantly revel in his free justification of sinners, his self-giving love, and his Son poured out to death for us while we were still his enemies, then we will be ghostly, unhappy Christians holding out a black hole of a god to people already dying.”
- “We are not like medieval Crusaders who used violence and coercion to batter masses into submission, but with the message of the cross and the demonstration of the Spirit’s power (1 Cor. 2:1–5), we serve our captain, Christ, in a Christlike way.”
- “The same Son of God who gave himself for us on the cross is, even now, a sympathetic high priest who continues to intercede for us as we struggle with temptation.”
- “Adopted by a perfect Father, united to his glorious Son, and indwelt by the Comforter, Christians are able to take to the spiritual battlefield of mission with happy, humble selflessness.”
- “It is Christ who shows us God as he truly is: full, rich, and delightful. Those who satisfy themselves in Christ will be the best missionaries; and the best missionaries will be those most deeply delighted in his love for them.”
- “The treasure and glory of heaven is God himself.”
- “In the end of death, we see a God so generously full that he loves to give his life without measure such that death is blotted out forever.”
