In His “High Priestly Prayer” in John 17, Jesus said to the Father, “To know You is eternal life.” That tells us as adopted children of God that one of the most important and valuable things for us to do with the eternal life we already possess is to maintain a major on-going effort to learn as much as possible about our Heavenly Father and to do all that we can to cultivate a closer relationship with Him. God has directed us to “the ordinary means of grace” as the way we can pursue those goals. Those means of grace are the Word, prayer, and sacraments. These “ordinary” means are available and sufficient for us. We do not need any supernatural, miraculous, “extraordinary” resources.
As we grow in our understanding and appreciation of what God is like, certainly one of the most marvelous things we come to know and experience is that God is love, as we read in 1 John 4:8 and 16. There is virtually no end to the list of Bible verses and events that demonstrate the love of God, including the book of Hosea and the Parable of the Prodigal Son. And there is also a substantial list of books that have been written on the subject, from Bernard of Clairvaux, Jonathan Edwards, and Samuel Rutherford to John MacArthur, Ray Ortlund, R. C. Sproul, and D. A. Carson. The greatest statement of the love of God is, of course, Calvary’s cross where we see that “God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son” (John 3:16).