Book Club ~ God's Passion For His Glory

I've been drafting a post on my reading goals for this year, but I'm not ready to post it so I'll do this post in the meantime. Lily and I have been doing our Book Club via Skype lately. We have our weekly chat on the phone and then we go downstairs and fix our cups of tea and call each other on Skype. We drink tea and read to each other for a little while. It's almost like the coffee shop moments we wish we could have all year 'round. This afternoon we were reading and twice Lily and I stopped our reading and said, "we need to post that quote." So, I'm posting a couple of quotes from our reading in God's Passion For His Glory, this afternoon.

"It appears that all that is ever spoken of in the Scripture as an ultimate end of God's works is included in that one phrase, the glory of God....In the creature's knowing, esteeming, loving, rejoicing in, and praising God, the glory of God is both exhibited and acknowledged; his fullness is received and returned. Here is both an emanation and remanation. The refulgence shines upon and into the creature, and is reflected back to the luminary. The beams of glory come from God, are something of God, and are refunded back again to their original. So that the whole is of God, and in God, and to God; and he is the beginning, and middle, and the end." ~Jonathan Edwards in The End For Which God Created the World

"Edwards describes the person with truly gracious affections like this:

'As he has more holy boldness, so he has less of self-confidence...and more modesty. As he is more sure than others of deliverance from hell, so he has more of a sense of the desert of it. He is less apt than others to be shaken in faith, but more apt than others to be moved with solemn warnings, and with God's frowns, and with the calamities of others. He has the firmest comfort, but the softest heart: richer than others, but poorest of all in spirit; the tallest and strongest saint, but the least and tenderest child among them." ~Jonathan Edwards in Religions Affections