Michael Reeves Quotes

Chris[topher] Reeve wisely parsed the difference between optimism and hope. Unlike optimism, he said, 'Hope is the product of knowledge and the projection of where the knowledge can take us.

the center, the cornerstone, the jewel in the crown of Christianity is not an idea, a system or a thing; it is not even “the gospel” as such. It is Jesus Christ.

There is something gratuitous about creation, an unnecessary abundance of beauty, and through its blossoms and pleasures we can revel in the sheer largesse of the Father.

Indeed, in the triune God is the love behind all love, the life behind all life, the music behind all music, the beauty behind all beauty and the joy behind all joy.

The triunity of God is the secret of His beauty. If we deny this, we at once have a God without radiance and without joy (and without humour!); a God without beauty.

There was the Son of God being so himself that even a Gentile executioner sensed it. On the cross we see the Bridegroom, loving to death; the Lord of glory, giving out his life; the Lord of hosts, crushing Satan; the King, enthroned. 

Creation is built upon the promise of hope, that things will get better, that tomorrow will be better than the day before. But it's not true. Cities collapse. Populations expand. Environments decay. People get ruder. You can't go to a movie without getting in a fight with the guy in the third row who won't shut up. Filthy streets. Drive-by shootings. Irradiated corn. Permissible amounts of rat-droppings per hot dog. Bomb blasts, and body counts. Terror in the streets, on camera, in your living room. Aids and Ebola and Hepatitis B and you can't touch anyone because you're afraid you'll catch something besides love and nothing tastes as good anymore and Christopher Reeve is [dead] and love is statistically false. Pocket nukes and subway anthrax. You grow up frustrated, you live confused, you age frightened, you die alone. Safe terrain moves from your city to your block to your yard to your home to your living room to the bedroom and all you want is to be allowed to live without somebody breaking in to steal your tv and shove an ice-pick in your ear. That sound like a better world to you? That sound to you like a promise kept?

We shall never find happiness by looking at our prayers, our doings, or our feelings; it is what Jesus is, not what we are, that gives rest to the soul. If we would at once overcome Satan and have peace with God, it must be by “looking unto Jesus.

as the Father looks with pleasure and delight on this perfect Son of his, so he looks with pleasure and delight on all who are in him.

So next time you look up at the sun, moon and stars and wonder, remember: they are there because God loves, because the Father’s love for the Son burst out that it might be enjoyed by many. And they remain there only because God does not stop loving. He is an attentive Father who numbers every hair on our heads, for whom the fall of every sparrow matters; and out of love he upholds all things through his Son, and breathes out natural life on all through his Spirit.

God is love”: those three words could hardly be more bouncy. They seem lively, lovely and as warming as a crackling fire. But “God is a Trinity”? No, hardly the same effect: that just sounds cold and stodgy. All quite understandable, but the aim of this book is to stop the madness. Yes, the Trinity can be presented as a fusty and irrelevant dogma, but the truth is that God is love because God is a Trinity.

Sometimes we find ourselves tiring of Jesus, stupidly imagining that we have seen all there is to see and used up all the pleasure there is to be had in him. We get spiritually bored. But Jesus has satisfied the mind and heart of the infinite God for eternity. Our boredom is simple blindness. If the Father can be infinitely and eternally satisfied in him, then he must be overwhelmingly all-sufficient for us.

We cannot choose what we love, but always love what seems desirable to us. Thus we will only change what we love when something proves itself to be more desirable to us than what we already love. I will, then, always love sin and the world until I truly sense that Christ is better.

Archangel Michael, please sever and release any cords of fear. I am willing to let go of this unhealthy, unbalanced energy. I choose instead to align myself with love and light. I ask you to remove any negative energies from my body. Please release all effects of these cords now. Thank you.

I saw, during the midterm campaign of 2006, how difficult it was for opponents of stem cell research to run against hope. And so it was in the 2008 presidential contest. This was hope in the collective, a definition that should always apply to the expression of a people's political will. Christopher Reeve had believed in a formula: optimism + information = hope. In this case, the informing agent was us. Granted, it may all look different in six months to a year, but it is hard not to be buoyed by the desire for positive change as articulated and advanced by Barack Obama. It is okay to hope. This time the aspiration of many will not be derided as desperation by a few, as it was during the stem cell debate of '06. By the time you read this book, President Obama and the 111th Congress will have established federal funding for stem cell research. The dam has broken. Just as I'd hoped.

Christianity is not primarily about lifestyle change; it is about knowing God. To know and grow to enjoy him is what we are saved for... Nonetheless, getting to know God better does actually make for far more profound and practical change as well. Knowing the love of God is the very thing that makes us loving. Sensing the desirability of God alters our preferences and inclinations, the things that drive our behavior: We begin to want God more than anything else.

J. I. Packer once wrote: ‘If you want to judge how well a person understands Christianity, find out how much he makes of the thought of being God’s child, and having God as his Father. If this is not the thought that prompts and controls his worship and prayers and his whole outlook on life, it means he does not understand Christianity very well at all.

Prayer, then, is enjoying the care of a powerful Father, instead of being left to a frightening loneliness where everything is all down to you.

Knowing God as our Father not only wonderfully gladdens our view of him; it gives the deepest comfort and joy. The honour of it is stupefying.

What we love and enjoy is foundationally important. It is far more significant than our outward behaviour, for it is our desires that drive our behaviour. We do what we want.

Thus if your tendency is to think you’re rather wonderful, just remember your prayer life.

Clearly the salvation of this God is better even than forgiveness, and certainly more secure. Other gods might offer forgiveness, but this God welcomes and embraces us as his children, never to send us away.

if God is not a Father, if he has no Son and will have no children, then he must be lonely, distant and unapproachable; if he is not triune and so not essentially loving, then no God at all just looks better.

Such are the problems with nontriune gods and creation. Single-person gods, having spent eternity alone, are inevitably self-centered beings, and so it becomes hard to see why they would ever cause anything else to exist. Wouldn’t the existence of a universe be an irritating distraction for the god whose greatest pleasure is looking in a mirror? Creating just looks like a deeply unnatural thing for such a god to do. And if such gods do create, they always seem to do so out of an essential neediness or desire to use what they create merely for their own self-gratification. God’s Ecstasy Everything changes when it comes to the Father, Son and Spirit. Here is a God who is not essentially lonely, but who has been loving for all eternity as the Father has loved the Son in the Spirit. Loving others is not a strange or novel thing for this God at all; it is at the root of who he is.

Learn much of the Lord Jesus. For every look at yourself, take ten looks at Christ. He is altogether lovely. Such infinite majesty, and yet such meekness and grace, and all for sinners, even the chief. Live much in the smiles of God. Bask in His beams. Feel His all-seeing eye settled on you in love, and repose in His almighty arms. . . . Let your soul be filled with a heart-ravishing sense of the sweetness and excellency of Christ and all that is in Him.2 Yes!

It is not that he is all that will matter, as if the final conquest of evil and the resurrection of our bodies were trifling things; he is the center in that he is the fountainhead and source of all the blessings of the new creation.

Jesus Christ, God’s perfect Son, is the Beloved of the Father, the Song of the angels, the Logic of creation, the great Mystery of godliness, the bottomless Spring of life, comfort and joy. We were made to find our satisfaction, our heart’s rest, in him.

While these ‘five points of Calvinism’ reveal a growing interest in predestination among Calvinists, they were drawn up to protect what the Calvinists believed were important truths denied by the Arminians. They were never intended to be a summary of Calvinist belief or Calvin’s own thought.

What is your Christian life like? What is the shape of your gospel, your faith? In the end, it will all depend on what you think God is like. Who God is drives everything. So what is the human problem? Is it merely that we have strayed from a moral code? Or is it something worse: that we have strayed from him? What is salvation? Is it merely that we are brought back as law-abiding citizens? Or is it something better: that we are brought back as beloved children? What is the Christian life about? Mere behaviour? Or something deeper: enjoying God? And then there’s what our churches are like, our marriages, our relationships, our mission: all are moulded in the deepest way by what we think of God. In the early fourth century, Arius went for a pre-cooked God, ready-baked in his mind. Ignoring the way, the truth and life, he defined God without the Son, and the fallout was catastrophic: without the Son, God cannot truly be a Father; thus alone, he is not truly love. Thus he can have no fellowship to share with us, no Son to bring us close, no Spirit through whom we might know him. Arius was left with a very thin gruel: a life of self-dependent effort under the all-seeing eye of his distant and loveless God. The tragedy is that we all think like Arius every day. We think of God without the Son. We think of ‘God’, and not the Father of the Son. But from there it really doesn’t take long before you find that you are just a whole lot more interesting than this ‘God’. And could you but see yourself, you would notice that you are fast becoming like this ‘God’: all inward-looking and fruitless.

Yet if God is absolutely solitary in his supremacy, then surely evil must originate in God himself. Above and before all things, he is the source of all things, both good and evil. Clearly, it is not good for God to be alone. The triune God, however, is the sort of God who will make room for another to have real existence. The Father, who delights to have a Son, chooses to create many children who will have real lives of their own, to share the love and freedom he has always enjoyed. The creatures of the triune God are not mere extensions of him; he gives them life and personal being. Allowing them that, though, means allowing them to turn away from himself—and that is the origin of evil. By graciously giving his creatures the room to exist, the triune God allows them the freedom to turn away without himself being the author of evil.

Ongoingly in his creation, the Spirit vitalizes and refreshes. He delights to make his creation—and his creatures—fruitful. Isaiah writes of the time when “the Spirit is poured upon us from on high, and the desert becomes a fertile field, and the fertile field seems like a forest” (Is 32:15). The psalmist sings: “When you send your Spirit, they [the creatures] are created, and you renew the face of the earth” (Ps 104:30). Small wonder, then, that creativity, the ability to craft, adorn and make beautiful, is a gift of the Spirit: Then the LORD said to Moses, “See, I have chosen Bezalel son of Uri, the son of Hur, of the tribe of Judah, and I have filled him with the Spirit of God, with skill, ability and knowledge in all kinds of crafts—to make artistic designs for work in gold, silver and bronze, to cut and set stones, to work in wood, and to engage in all kinds of craftsmanship.” (Ex 31:1-5) The Spirit makes his creation alive with beauty.

Sibbes sought to draw his audience’s eyes from their own hearts to the Saviour, for ‘there are heights, and depths, and breadths of mercy in him above all the depths of our sin and misery’. How so? Because, since ‘God’s love resteth on Christ, as well pleased in him, we may gather that he is as well pleased with us, if we be in Christ!’ Thus Christian confidence in our spiritual state rests not on our strength of faith or performance, but upon ‘the joint agreement of all three persons of the Trinity’, that the Father loves the Son, and it is in the Son’s merits, and not our own, that Christians are loved. Because God is a loving community, Christians can be confident. Then, instead of simply laying moral burdens on young and struggling Christians, Sibbes showed them Christ’s attractiveness so that they might love him from the heart. From then, the Christian’s first task is ‘to warm ourselves at this fire of his love and mercy in giving himself for us’. Only when Christians do that do they truly stop sinning from the heart (whereas when they merely alter their behaviour it does nothing for the sin of the heart). In other words, Sibbes believed that the solution to sin is not the attempt to live without sin, but the gospel of God’s free grace.

Since God is, before all things, a Father, and not primarily Creator or Ruler, all his ways are beautifully fatherly. It is not that this God ‘does’ being Father as a day-job, only to kick back in the evenings as plain old ‘God’. It is not that he has a nice blob of fatherly icing on top. He is Father. All the way down. Thus all that he does he does as Father. That is who he is. He creates as a Father and he rules as a Father; and that means the way he rules over creation is most unlike the way any other God would rule over creation. The French Reformer, John Calvin, appreciating this deeply, once wrote: we ought in the very order of things [in creation] diligently to contemplate God’s fatherly love . . . [for as] a foreseeing and diligent father of the family he shows his wonderful goodness toward us . . . To conclude once for all, whenever we call God the Creator of heaven and earth, let us at the same time bear in mind that . . . we are indeed his children, whom he has received into his faithful protection to nourish and educate . . . So, invited by the great sweetness of his beneficence and goodness, let us study to love and serve him with all our heart.3 It was a profound observation, for it is only when we see that God rules his creation as a kind and loving Father that we will be moved to delight in his providence. We might acknowledge that the rule of some heavenly policeman was just, but we could never take delight in his regime as we can delight in the tender care of a father.

And false prophets—wolves in sheeps’ clothing that Jesus warned us would come—may still be with us. There are liberals who deny the Bible, and legalists and moralists who ignore its message, and prosperity teachers who twist it, but there are countless millions who’ve read the Word and understood and believed the gospel.

There are those like Peter James Lee, Episcopal Bishop of Virginia, who said in 2004, ‘If you must make a choice between heresy and schism, always choose heresy.

Such were most Christians on the eve of the Reformation: devoted, and devoted to the improvement, but not the overthrow, of their religion. This was not a society looking for radical change, only a clearing-up of acknowledged abuses.

The Son’s very identity is found in this: that he is the beloved of the Father.

Preachers, therefore, must avoid vacuousness in their preaching, and they must avoid heartless intellectualism. The object of all true preaching, after all, is the heart, and preaching has failed “unless it makes men tremble, makes them sad, and then anon brings them to Christ, and causes them to rejoice. Sermons are to be heard in thousands, and yet how little comes of them all, because the heart is not aimed at, or else the archers miss the mark.

If the style of my programmes was to be inspired by anyone else, I thought it had to be, of course, the great Michael Palin.

A shared seat, shared music; and then the chap next to him nodding his head to Bruce Springsteen. Michael never let anyone’s situation define them. He started to break down barriers and helped a generation of viewers dismiss the stereotypes that had plagued our view of other cultures.

He takes what is Christ’s and makes it ours (Jn 16:14) so

the word grace is really just a shorthand way of speaking about the personal and loving kindness out of which, ultimately, God gives himself.

Over the following months he became increasingly clear that, if Rome held the pope to be an authority above Scripture, she could never be reformed by God’s word. The pope’s word would always trump God’s. In that case, the reign of the antichrist there was sealed, and it was no longer the church of God but the synagogue of Satan.

Calvin could never have been a celebrity Christian: a camera-shy intellectual, he always avoided the limelight. His portraits show a thin face, that often-throbbing head covered with a simple black cap, and strikingly intense eyes. In that, they are quite revealing, for while pitifully weak in body and naturally retiring by temperament, he was dauntingly strong in both mind and will. A lamb he was born, a lion he became for the Lord who saved him.

I will constrain no man by force, for faith must come freely without compulsion. Take myself as an example. I opposed indulgences and all the papists, but never with force. I simply taught, preached, and wrote God’s Word; otherwise I did nothing. And while I slept, or drank Wittenberg beer with my friends Philip and Amsdorf, the Word so greatly weakened the papacy that no prince or emperor ever inflicted such losses upon it. I did nothing; the Word did everything.

Anabaptism, on the whole, tended to be more interested in Christian living than theology. For the Magisterial Reformers2 like Luther, theology came first, informing how we then live; for the Anabaptists, holiness came first, and theology was then done to spur on Christian obedience.

Under his guidance, Anabaptism moved away from bloody revolutions and private revelations. The Mennonites were to be peaceful and biblical. Thus Menno sealed the victory of the Zurich Anabaptist martyr Felix Mantz’s nonaggressive, biblical radicalism.

However, there was a considerable danger for such a fight (one that threatened not only Puritanism, but also its sister-movement in Germany, Lutheran Pietism). That is, the desire to have people respond to the gospel could lead to a focus on the response, not the gospel. So, in looking for reformed lives (the sign that a person had responded rightly to the gospel), it was easy to let a concern for growth in personal holiness eclipse the original Reformation focus on justification. In other words, the danger for the Puritans was that they would be tempted to concentrate on holy living in response to the gospel at the expense of proclaiming the free, saving grace of God.

it is a striking feature of Sibbes’s preaching how strongly Christ-focused he is. And that is no accident: Sibbes sought to draw his audience’s eyes from their own hearts to the Saviour, for ‘there are heights, and depths, and breadths of mercy in him above all the depths of our sin and misery’.

Alas! can we think that the reformation is wrought, when we cast out a few ceremonies, and changed some vestures, and gestures, and forms! Oh no, sirs! it is the converting and saving of souls that is our business. That is the chiefest part of reformation.

Richard Sibbes said, ‘What a joyful spectacle is this to Satan and his faction, to see those that are separated from the world fall in pieces among themselves! Our discord is our enemy’s melody.

Pilgrim’s Progress is an allegory about every Christian (journeying from the City of Destruction to the Celestial City), but it is particularly reflective of Bunyan’s own experience. A tinker by trade, Bunyan was used to travelling from village to village with a 60-pound anvil and hefty toolkit on his back: it became a model for the great burden of sin his pilgrim carries on his back (until he comes to the cross and it is ‘loosed from off his shoulders’ to his enormous relief).

Puritanism, after all, had been a movement concerned with words (and the word of God), and so when Puritans were no longer educated, the muscle of the movement wasted away. Worse, without strong ties to biblical moorings, over the years that followed many found themselves drifting outside belief in such Christian basics as the Trinity.

More, for the first time in nearly four hundred years, Jews were allowed back into England (the idea was that they might be converted, the conversion of Israel precipitating the Second Coming, but they were allowed to worship freely).

Prayer with the heart is the heart of prayer: the cry of our soul is the soul of our cry.

In Cambridge, one group of dons was known to gather at the White Horse Inn, where all the Luther-talk and beer made it look so like Wittenberg that it was soon nicknamed ‘Little Germany’.

If anything, what that difference proves is how the Reformation, at its heart, was about doctrine. It was not a quest for political, social, or moral reform dressed up in theological clothes; deeper down than anything else was a set of theological questions: ‘What is the gospel?’ ‘How can we know?’ ‘What is salvation, and how can I be saved?’ ‘Who are God’s people, and what is the church?

In 1555, Ridley and Latimer were burned together, back to back, at the end of Broad Street in Oxford. Latimer, aged about eighty, was the first to die, shouting through the flames: ‘Be of good comfort, Master Ridley, and play the man; we shall this day light such a candle, by God’s grace, in England, as I trust shall never be put out.

Henry’s younger daughter Elizabeth was very much a chip off the old block. Imperious and relentlessly energetic, she had a quicksilver mind capable of lightning-fast repartee, and enough political cunning to survive Mary’s reign without slipping up. And, being who she was, everyone knew she would reintroduce Protestantism.

Nothing will so enlarge the intellect, nothing so magnify the whole soul of man, as a devout, earnest, continued investigation of the great subject of the Deity.

Christian life is communion with Christ.

The first main work, To the Christian Nobility of the German Nation, was Luther’s trumpet blast of reformation against the defensive walls Rome had built around herself. There were three such walls, he said: Rome’s first defence was the claim that the pope was the supreme power on earth; the second, that only the pope may interpret the Scriptures; the third, that no one but the pope may summon a council and thus reform the church.

Yet to the end he had a personality that could set the Rhine on fire. Some loved it, others wished he could be at least a little less rude and raw. Certainly he was no stained-glass ideal. Perhaps, though, such a red-blooded and blunt man was just what was needed for the momentous and seemingly impossible task of challenging all Christendom and turning it around. He was shock-therapy for the world. And, somehow, his personality seems fit for the gospel he uncovered: he inspires no moral self-improvement in would-be disciples; instead, his evident humanity testifies to a sinner’s absolute need for God’s grace.

Luther came out of hiding, returned to Wittenberg, and, instead of using force to reform, sought to persuade people with the Scriptures through simple, clear preaching. He believed that the word of God must first convince people, and then the rotten old structures would collapse. It was exactly what he had stood for before the emperor, that it is the Scriptures that must drive and dictate thought and practice. As a result, Luther never believed that he should devise any great programme for spreading the Reformation. He simply wanted to unleash the word of God, and let that do all the work.

His purpose, instead, he wrote, ‘was solely to transmit certain rudiments by which those who are touched with any zeal for religion might be shaped to true godliness’. It was designed as a simple introduction to the evangelical faith (‘Institutes’ means ‘basic instruction’).

Post tenebras lux

The closer one looks, the clearer it becomes: the Reformation was not, principally, a negative movement, about moving away from Rome; it was a positive movement, about moving towards the gospel.

A profoundly relevant, beautiful, and sweet message, a joy-giving message, a death-defying message: it is no wonder Richard Sibbes called the Reformation ‘that fire which all the world shall never be able to quench’.

For if, before all things, God was eternally a Father, then this God is an inherently outgoing, life-giving God. He did not give life for the first time when he decided to create; from eternity he has been life-giving.

As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you,” the Son says (Jn 15:9). And therein lies the very goodness of the gospel: as the Father is the lover and the Son the beloved, so Christ becomes the lover and the church the beloved. That means that Christ loves the church first and foremost: his love is not a response, given only when the church loves him; his love comes first, and we only love him because he first loved us (1 Jn 4:19).

For eternity, the Father so loves the Son that he excites the Son’s eternal love in response; Christ so loves the church that he excites our love in response; the husband so loves his wife that he excites her to love him back. Such is the spreading goodness that rolls out of the very being of this God.

Having such a God happily changes everything.

Luther discovered as ‘justification by God’s word’ instead of ‘justification by faith’, because it is God’s word that justifies here, not our faith. Faith, thought Luther, is not some inner resource we must summon up; if it were, it would by his definition be sin! For him, the question ‘Have I got enough faith?’ completely misunderstands what faith is, by looking to and so relying on itself, rather than Christ. Faith is a passive thing, simply accepting, receiving, believing Christ—taking God seriously in what he promises in the gospel.

To learn Christian theology is to clear out the junk that has accumulated in our minds through years of listening to the world around us, and to replace it with truth. It is to put on the mind of Christ and so sift out the lies in our culture that otherwise would drive us. It is refusing to drift with the assumptions of our society.

Our delight in God is so essential because it 1) distinguishes us from demons, 2) is the heartbeat of the saints, 3) is part of entering the true life of God, and 4) is what we were made for.

We breathe in Scripture, and we breathe out prayer. Breathe in, breathe out: that’s the Christian life. Prayer is the breath of heavenly life: where that life is, there must be some prayer; where that life flourishes, there will be much prayer, and much pleasure in prayer. And friends, let us be clear: the life-breath of Christianity, of healthy churches, is not our talent, or even our hard work. It is prayer: active dependence upon God.

Let’s consider the leader who forgets that he is a sinner saved by grace and not his own efforts, the leader who finds his identity not in Christ but in his pastoring: how will his ministry play out? If he slips into thinking he is justified by his works—and the most orthodox Christian can make this error—he will be driven by his works. If he forgets he is a sinner saved by grace, he may try to fake his own perfection in front of his people. This is surprisingly common! If he forgets the cross and his justification before God and seeks to find his worth instead in the approval of others, he will never lead, but will merely pander to whatever makes him popular. In other words, for the leader to have strength of purpose, integrity, and the ability not to be driven (and burned out) by his ministry, he must maintain a solid grasp on the cross and so on his justification.

When your culture is hedonistic, your religion therapeutic, and your goal a feeling of personal well-being, fear will be the ever-present headache.

His desire (which is the desire of the Father and the Son) is to bring us to such a hearty enjoyment of God through Christ that we delight to know him, that we delight in all his ways, and that therefore we want to do as he wants and we hate the thought of ever grieving him.

we don’t need to try to ‘fit’ God into each day, that is to see our prayer life as something different from the rest of life. In fact the danger arises precisely when you do think your prayer life is something separate. No, for the Son everything flows from his communion with his Father, and so it should become for us. When you know that each day is already all God’s and that we have fellowship with him all the time, then prayer suffuses the whole day more naturally. Then you find yourself intuitively praying through the day more, and without feeling the need to be hyperspiritual and concentrated the whole time.

as you grow as a Christian, you should feel not more self-sufficient but ever more needy

To know you are a beloved child of God protects you from thinking of prayer as a ladder to God or an exercise by which you work your way into his favour.

John Calvin said that we pray, as it were, through Jesus’ mouth.

The Father loves his Son, and so hates sin, which ultimately is rejection of the Son; he loves his children, and so hates their being oppressed; he loves his world, and so hates all evil in it. Thus in his love he roots out sin in his people, even disciplining them that they might be freed from their captivity to it. In his love he is patient with us. And in his love he promises finally to destroy all evil as light destroys darkness.

Now if God were not triune, if there was no Son, no lamb of God to die in our place, then we would have to atone for our sin ourselves. We would have to provide, for God could not. But—hallelujah!—God has a Son, and in his infinite kindness he dies, paying the wages of sin, for us. It is because God is triune that the cross is such good news.

Here now was a God who does not want our goodness but our trust. All the struggles and all the anxiety could be replaced with massive confidence and simple faith, receiving the gift.

In the twenty-first century, we do not trust ‘mere’ words. They are the weapons of manipulation, the tools of spin used to coerce us. We have better things to do than pick over words. We are tolerant. The spirit of the Reformation that replaced the altar with the pulpit as the focal point of each church has long gone. A pulpit? The very thought strikes us as authoritarian and manipulative. How Erasmus has conquered! As we saw in chapter 4, it was he who said, ‘The sum of our religion is peace and unanimity, but these can scarcely stand unless we define as little as possible.’ Simply put, we do not like theological precision, for it causes division over issues that, we feel instinctively, are not the most relevant.

For as long as doctrine is ignored, we must remain captives of the ruling system or the spirit of the age, whatever that may be.

Sibbes seems to suggest that, even in reforming the Reformation, the real spirit of reformation could be lost, and all the doubts and anxieties of medieval Catholicism come streaming back in through the back door of a zealous Christian moralism that had lost sight of the grace of God. It was to maintain this essence of the Reformation that Sibbes and Puritans like him sought to teach and proclaim ‘the gracious nature and office of Christ; the right conceit of which is the spring of all service to Christ, and comfort from him’.

Contrary to popular impression, the Puritan was no ascetic. If he continually warned against the vanity of the creatures as misused by fallen man, he never praised hair shirts or dry crusts. He liked good food, good drink and homely comforts; and while he laughed at mosquitoes, he found it a real hardship to drink water when the beer ran out.1

Learn much of the Lord Jesus. For every look at yourself, take ten looks at Christ. He is altogether lovely. Such infinite majesty, and yet such meekness and grace, and all for sinners, even the chief. Live much in the smiles of God. Bask in His beams. Feel His all-seeing eye settled on you in love, and repose in His almighty arms. . . . Let your soul be filled with a heart-ravishing sense of the sweetness and excellency of Christ and all that is in Him.

Reliance on ourselves is no option in light of the cross. However fantastically marvelous we may think we are, the cross is God’s verdict on us as sinners. It annihilates even the possibility of finally placing our trust in ourselves. Meaning we can know a far greater assurance, anchoring it in firm ground outside ourselves, in Christ. Christians are people who have given up all claims to both our badness and our goodness—and instead gotten him. 

I used to think that wrath was unworthy of God. Isn’t God love? Shouldn’t divine love be beyond wrath? God is love, and God loves every person and every creature. That’s exactly why God is wrathful against some of them. My last resistance to the idea of God’s wrath was a casualty of the war in the former Yugoslavia, the region from which I come. According to some estimates, 200,000 people were killed and over 3,000,000 were displaced. My villages and cities were destroyed, my people shelled day in and day out, some of them brutalized beyond imagination, and I could not imagine God not being angry. Or think of Rwanda in the last decade of the past century where 800,000 people were hacked to death in one hundred days! How did God react to the carnage? By doting on the perpetrators in a grandparently fashion? By refusing to condemn the bloodbath but instead affirming the perpetrators’ basic goodness? Wasn’t God fiercely angry with them? Though I used to complain about the indecency of the idea of God’s wrath, I came to think that I would have to rebel against a God who wasn’t wrathful at the sight of the world’s evil. God isn’t wrathful in spite of being love. God is wrathful because God is love.[11] Were

In Christ the Word, we exchange darkness for light as we think of God. For he perfectly shows us an unsurpassably desirable God, a kind God who is against all that is wrong, a God who thaws us. And only when we see that will we truly love him.

This is the highest honour of the Church, that, until he is united to us, the Son of God reckons himself in some measure imperfect. What consolation is it for us to learn, that, not until we are along with him, does he possess all his parts, or wish to be regarded as complete!109

Yet is all this fair to Erasmus? Was he not the one who made the Greek New Testament available, so providing the coals for the Reformation? Certainly he did, and yet his possession of the Scriptures (and his deep study of them) changed little for the man himself because of how he treated them. Burying them under convenient assertions of their vagueness, he accorded the Scriptures little practical, let alone governing, authority. The result was that, for Erasmus, the Bible was just one voice among many, and so its message could be tailored, squeezed, and adjusted to fit his own vision of what Christianity was. To break out of that suffocating scheme and achieve any substantial reformation, it took Luther’s attitude, that Scripture is the only sure foundation for belief (sola Scriptura). The Bible had to be acknowledged as the supreme authority and allowed to contradict and overrule all other claims, or else it would itself be overruled and its message hijacked. In other words, a simple reverence for the Bible and acknowledgment that it has some authority would never have been enough to bring about the Reformation. Sola Scriptura was the indispensable key for change.

If God is like Jesus, then, though I am sinful like the dying thief, I can dare to cry, “Remember me” (see Lk 23:42). I know how he will respond. Though I am so spiritually lame and leprous, I can call out to him. For I know just what he is like toward the weak and sick. In

in 1534 he completed his translation of the Old Testament into German and published it with prefaces, marginal notes, and illustrations. ‘Here you will find the swaddling cloths and the manger in which Christ lies’, announced the preface. Luther always emphasized that all the Scriptures are only ever about Christ, for it is only through faith in him that any could ever be saved.

Prayerlessness always goes hand in hand with a lack of Christian integrity. This is even more so for Christian leaders – to put it bluntly, if they are not enjoying communion with God, then they are selling a product they don’t really believe in.

What to do? “The only palliative,” said Lewis, “is to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds.