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I believe we have to lot to learn from John Owen.
At first sight that’s an unlikely claim. For one thing Owen was born just over 500 years ago. So surely he’s past his sell-by date?! Plus he has some dubious connections. He was a chaplain to Oliver Cromwell during Cromwell’s notorious campaign in Ireland. Even though it’s unlikely Owen himself went any further than Dublin, that doesn’t look good an anyone’s CV. Owen was appointed by Parliament as the vice-chancellor of Oxford University. But when Charles II came to the throne in 1660, Owen was sacked, spending the remainder of his life on the margins of English society. Moreover, Owen’s prose is famous for being dense and hard to follow. It’s said he thought in Latin.
Nevertheless Owen was a great theologian with a strong pastoral heart. Here are three things I’ve learnt from his book, Communion with God, that have inspired my latest book Enjoying God.
What do you think of when you think about God? It’s actually a bit of trick question. That’s because the essence or nature of God is beyond our comprehension. We can’t think of anything when we think about God – the ‘God-ness’ of God is completely outside our experience.
Yet we can know God – genuinely and truly – through the three persons of God. The Father, Son and Spirit have lived in relationship with one another throughout eternity and now they invite us to share that relationship.
This insight has a big practical application. It will greatly help you to relate to the triune God if you think in terms of the three. Think about how the Father is relating to you and how you can respond. Think about how the Son and the Spirit relate to you, and how you can respond to each of them in a distinct way. Here’s how Owen himself put it: “The saints have distinct communion with the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit (that is, distinctly with the Father, and distinctly with the Son, and distinctly with the Holy Spirit).” We’re not trying to interact with an abstract idea. We’re engaging with persons.
Nothing can stop me being the son of my heavenly Father. But how much I enjoy that relationship depends in part on my involvement with the Father.
When we talk about God’s grace we often say something like, “There’s nothing you can do to improve your relationship with God.” And there’s a sense in which that’s gloriously true. God loved us when we were his enemies and he’s not going to stop loving us now that he’s made us his friends.
The complication is that our experience often suggests something different. The way we behave does affect our relationship with God. In practice we find that when we read the Bible regularly we feel closer to God. On the other hand, if we nurture temptation then we feel far from God.
Owen helps us make sense of this. He makes a distinction between union and communion. Communion is Owen’s way of referring to the two-way relationship we have with the triune God. There is, says Owen, giving and receiving. There is loving and being loved. There is delight and delighting.
But Owen also says our communion flows from our union with God through Christ and our union with God in Christ is one-way. It rests entirely on God’s grace. That’s the foundation and nothing we can do can shake that foundation. Owen says: “Our communion with God consists in his communication of himself to us, with our return to him of that which he requires and accepts, flowing from that union which in Jesus Christ we have with him.”
The greatest unkindness you can do to God the Father is not to believe that he loves you
We can’t strengthen or weaken our union with God, because that’s one way traffic – it all flows from God’s grace. But we can strengthen or weaken our communion with God. Our actions do affect the extent to which we enjoy the relationship. Think of it like this. Nothing can stop me being the son of my earthly father. But how much I enjoy that relationship depends on how much effort I put into it. In the same way, nothing can stop me being the son of my heavenly Father. I was adopted in Christ despite all my previous enmity towards God. But how much I enjoy that relationship depends in part on my involvement with the Father.
This perspective gives us both assurance (we can’t destroy our relationship with God) and motivation (the more we pursue God, the more we will enjoy him).
“God loves you.” We all know this. It’s Christianity 101. And yet so often we relate to God as if he doesn’t really love us. We keep our distance, especially when we feel our sin.
Owen is passionately concerned to impress on us the love of the Father. It matters, he says, because we’ll never really enjoy God until we embrace his love for us in Christ.
“How few of the saints,” he writes, “are acquainted in their experience with this privilege of holding direct communion with the Father in love! With what anxious, doubtful thoughts they look on him! What fears and questions they have about his goodwill and kindness! At the best, many think there is no sweetness at all in him towards us, except that which is purchased at a high price by the blood of Jesus.” As a result, “people are afraid to have good thoughts of God. They think it is presumptuous to view God as good, gracious, tender, and kind, loving.”
But Owen turns this fear on its head. He says the greatest unkindness you can do to God the Father is not to believe that he loves you. That’s because in love the Father sent his Son so you could be adopted as his child and in love he sends the Spirit so you can know yourself to be his child. “The more we see of the love of God, the more we will delight in him. Every other discovery of God, without this, will make the soul fly from him. But once the heart is taken up with the greatness of the Father’s love, it cannot but be overpowered, conquered and endeared to him.” What do we do if we want to see God’s love? We look to the cross. The cross is not Jesus trying to win a reluctant Father over. The plan of salvation starts with the Father’s love and ends with us enjoying that love.
Discover not only what it means to have a relationship with the living God—Father, Son and Spirit—but also how it can be infused with genuine joy in Tim Chester's new book Enjoying God. Available to buy now.
(All quotes from John Owen, “Communion with God” in The Works of John Owen, Vol. 2, ed. William Goold, Banner of Truth, 1965.)
Tim Chester is a senior faculty member of Crosslands Training and has written over 40 books. He has a PhD in theology and PgDip in history along with 25 years' experience of pastoral ministry. He is married with two grown-up daughters and lives in rural Derbyshire, where he is part of a church plant.
