There is only good news when you consider Jesus, for what you see is that the most wonderful person loves you like a husband loves a wife. As great as your sin may be, it is swallowed up by the greatness of your husband’s love. He has committed himself to you, and he has sworn to be yours forever.

A Relationship with God
How do we carry out a relationship with God the Son? While John Owen argues that we live out our friendship with the Father with his love at the center, when it comes to the Son, it’s all about his grace. That isn’t something that Owen came up with on his own; we often see the grace of Jesus highlighted in Scripture as a particular gift to be experienced on a regular basis by his people (e.g., Rom. 16:20; Gal. 6:18; 1 Thess. 5:28; 2 Thess. 3:18). As believers we have communion with Jesus when we delight in the grace of his person (who he is) and when we live in light of the grace he has purchased for us (what he has done to save us and make us his own).
Owen continues his meditation on that first aspect of Jesus’s grace—the grace of his person—by unpacking the Bible’s use of marriage imagery to describe the way Jesus and his people relate to one another. The New Testament speaks of Jesus as a groom and his people, the church, as a bride (2 Cor. 11:2; Eph. 5:25–27).
You don’t have to work too hard to get the sense of what that word picture is meant to describe—marriage is supposed to be the most intimate and personal of all our relationships. Owen describes the way Jesus and his bride (that is, us!) relate to one another by saying, “There is a mutual resignation, or making over of their persons one to another. . . . Christ makes himself over to the soul, to be his, as to all the love, care, and tenderness of a husband; and the soul gives up itself wholly unto the Lord Christ, to be his, as to all loving, tender obedience.”1
We would never dare to think about Jesus this way if the Bible didn’t tell us that we should. It is hard to imagine that Jesus would love us this much, that he would give himself to us in the way that a perfectly loving husband would give himself to his wife. But just because it’s hard to imagine doesn’t mean that it isn’t true. Jesus is a husband to us. That means that our communion with the Son of God begins with him moving toward us in tender care and personal affection. He looks at us like a smitten man looks at the woman of his dreams.
Now, if a friendship (or marriage, in this case) is a two-way street, then what is expected of us? You can see why that is an important question. Jesus is always a perfect husband to us; his love and care never fail or diminish. That means that if we are not enjoying a happy relationship with him, we can be sure that the problem is on our end. But what are we to be looking for in our response to him? Owen lays out two ways that Jesus’s people should respond to his love: “the liking of Christ, for his excellency” and the “accepting of Christ by the will, as its only husband.”2 As we commune with him, we learn to see Jesus in all his beauty, and we begin to increasingly prefer Jesus over every other thing in the world. We turn our backs on everything that competes with Jesus for our affection, things like the promises of sin, the pleasures of the world, and the allure of self-salvation through religion and hard work.
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There are many great books for pastors, and I benefit from the work of numerous contemporary authors and thinkers. But there is also much gold to be mined from works that have stood the test of time and helped Christians for centuries. For that reason, I would urge pastors to read Communion with God.

Some years ago, I was preparing a reading list for an upcoming sabbatical. I didn’t have any pressing projects that required study, so I was at liberty to choose whatever books seemed like they would be most helpful and enjoyable. As I scanned the volumes in my office, my eyes fell upon an as-yet unread copy of John Owen’s Communion with God on a shelf. Contemplating the title, I thought that this book probably had something I needed. After all, being a pastor meant spending a lot of time in God’s Word and talking to people about the Lord, but it wasn’t always conducive to communion with God. And when it boiled down to it, I wasn’t 100 percent sure that I actually knew what “communion with God” meant.
So I read Owen’s book that summer, or more accurately—I devoured it. Owen can be a tough read; he never says something in ten words that can be explained in a hundred. And he definitely could have benefitted from an editor wrangling some order into the chaos of his syntax and outline (though the 2007 edition edited by Justin Taylor and Kelly Kapic has gone a long way towards giving the reader a fighting chance). But the juice was more than worth the squeeze. I don’t know of any book (except the Bible, obviously) that has impacted my daily life and thinking about God more. As a result, I’ve probably re-read Communion with God three or four times in the past few years. I’ve even written a book trying to make Owen’s insights accessible and available to the wider Christian community.
While I think that Communion with God is a book that will benefit any believer that reads it, it strikes me that there are a few ways it can particularly benefit pastors. Let me suggest four:
1. Communion with God  clarifies what it means to have a relationship with God.
Some evangelicals are fond of framing Christianity as “having a relationship with God,” and that is true (as far as it goes). But while we may have some idea how to carry on a relationship with a friend, a spouse, or a neighbor, it’s not always clear how we are supposed to relate to God. Owen’s book is a trusty field guide to the Bible’s practical teachings about having a relationship with God.
2. Communion with God  reminds us that our relationship with God is carried out with all three persons of the Trinity.
One of the distinctive features of Owen’s book is that it encourages believers to carry on distinct communion with the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. There is a fine line to be walked here, and Owen does it masterfully. He shows how we carry on a relationship with the Father in his love, the Son in his grace, and the Spirit in his comfort, while also insisting that to have a relationship with any one person is to have a relationship with the one God. As a preacher, I regularly find Owen’s thinking and vocabulary creeping into my sermon manuscripts.
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These four privileges (and the many more that we read about in Scripture) are meant to be a great source of joy in our daily lives. Our friendship with God isn’t just a vague concept filed away in heaven; it’s a permanent and stable reality that gives shape and structure to our lives. The things of the world come and go and the joy they provide is fleeting, but when we are “acquainted with our privileges,” we have a reason for joy that will never fade, tarnish, or leave us.

Blessed with Spiritual Blessings
Christians are the most privileged people on earth. Every human being benefits from God’s daily mercy and kindness—every bite of food, every breath of air, every experience of love and happiness finds its origin in the benevolence of God (cf., Matt. 5:45, James 1:17). But those who have been united to Christ by faith receive gifts and privileges far beyond anyone else. We experience God’s common grace like the rest of mankind, but on top of that we are also “blessed . . . with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places.” (Eph.1:3)
If we are being honest, though, most Christians that I know (myself included) do not walk around every day giving off an “I am extremely blessed” vibe. The cares of the world often weigh on us, anxieties about the future sometimes will not stop nipping at our heels, and when we allow ourselves to think about it, we generally do not feel that we are doing a great job of following Jesus. We find ourselves easily excited—by a win in the big game, a promotion at work, a new relationship—but the happiness rarely lasts for very long. The Bible leads us to expect that Christians will have a source of joy and hope that should be evident to the world around them, but many of us do not consistently live like we do.
We might be tempted to think that this state of affairs is the result of life in the modern world, with all its difficulties, busyness, temptations, and distractions. But it might be helpful to know that Christians throughout history have testified to a similar struggle. Back in the 17th century, the English pastor and theologian John Owen wrote that many believers in his day “go heavily, when we might rejoice; and (are) weak, where we might be strong in the Lord.”1 For Owen, the cause of these struggles was clear. He wrote, “unacquaintedness with our mercies, our privileges, is our sin as well as our trouble.”2 That is to say, our problem is that we don’t really understand the many wonderful privileges we enjoy because we have a relationship with our heavenly Father.
Imagine a toddler who opens a gift on Christmas morning and only wants to play with the cardboard box that the gift came in. In that case, the child is presented with two objects—a gift and a box—and is unable to distinguish which is valuable and which is unworthy of his attention. To borrow from Owen’s language, we might say that he is unacquainted with what he has received. He doesn’t know the joys of zipping around on a tricycle or crafting a tower with building blocks, and so his attention is captured by the thing he does already understand—the box. We are just like that child when we find our hearts captured by the announcement of a new superhero movie or the prospect of an upcoming vacation but relatively unmoved by the thought of the blessings and privileges that we have as God’s people.
So, what do you do with the child who is playing with the box and ignoring the gift? You draw his attention to the present that he’s received. You show him what it can do and how he can play with it. You spark his little imagination with ways that this gift can bring him joy that the box never could. That’s what John Owen does for believers in his great work Communion with the Triune God. In that book, Owen unpacks the truth that when God gives a person new spiritual life, he doesn’t merely forgive her sins (though that alone would be far more than we could dare hope or imagine), but he brings her into a happy and pleasant relationship (Owen calls it “communion”; we might call it “fellowship” or even “friendship”) with him (I John 1:3, I Cor. 1:9, II Cor. 13:14). The warm and loving relationship that we have with God the Father, Son, and Spirit is a marvelous gift full of privileges that, when understood properly, have the power to capture our hearts and help us to live with joy.
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John Owen, Communion with the Triune God, p. 123.
ibid., 123.

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