Carey Conference 2013 03

Mike Reeves spoke tonight on the church father Athanasius. His main point was that “Athansius shows us why we cannot be abstract in our God talk”. Athanasius says “Therefore it is more pious and more accurate to signify God from the Son and call Him Father, than to name Him from His works only and call Him Unoriginate.”
Mike also quoted others
Calvin

“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.”

Luther

"I did not love, yes, I hated the righteous God who punishes sinners. And secretly if not blasphemously, certainly murmuring greatly I was angry with God". Because not knowing God as a kind and loving Father, as a God who brings us close, he found he could not love God. This was an unlovely god. But do you know what he did? Who did he love instead? He had to love someone, we all do. Mary. The saints. He turned anywhere but God. He prayed to them, and actually felt real warm affection for St. Anne and Mary, those were the only ones he could be close to. They seemed kind, unlike God. That all changed when he began to see the fatherhood of God. And looking back later in life he said that as a monk he had not been worshipping the right God. For he said it is not enough to know God as the Creator and the Judge, only when God is known as a loving Father is he known aright.

"In these three articles God himself has revealed and opened to us the most profound depths of his fatherly heart, his sheer, unutterable love. He created us for this very purpose, to redeem and sanctify us. Moreover, having bestowed upon us everything in heaven and on earth, he has given us his Son and his Holy Spirit, through whom he brings us to himself. As we explained before, we could never come to recognise the Father’s favour and grace were it not for the Lord Christ, who is a mirror of the Father’s heart. Apart from him we see nothing but an angry and terrible Judge. But neither could we know anything of Christ, had it not been revealed by the Holy Spirit.”
Sibbes

If God had not a communicative, spreading goodness, he would never have created the world. The Father, Son, and Holy Ghost were happy in themselves, and enjoyed one another before the world was. But that God delights to communicate and spread his goodness, there had never boon a creation nor a redemption. God useth his creatures, not for defect of power, that he can do nothing without them, but for the spreading of his goodness; and thereupon comes all the subordination of one creature to another, and all to him.