Communion Beyond Religious Activity

In the seventeenth century there lived a man whose mind could silence a room full of scholars, and yet whose deepest concern was a kind of warmth. His name was John Owen, and he was perhaps the most formidable theologian England has ever produced. He lived through civil war. He led a great university at Oxford. He advised the powerful and outlived their favour. He buried, in the end, all of his many children. And through every shaking of his world, he kept circling back to one extraordinary claim. That a Christian is not merely meant to work for God. A Christian is meant to walk with Him.

Now picture the world Owen wrote in. England torn open by war. Kings rising and falling. Pulpits seized and silenced. Owen himself, once a man of influence, pushed out into the cold of Nonconformity, watched and pressured for what he believed. In a season like that, men reach for control. They argue. They defend. They build machinery and call it religion. And it would have been easy, so easy, for faith to harden into something correct and lifeless. A God spoken of, defended, served, but never truly enjoyed.

Into that hardness Owen set down a book with a tender and almost daring title. Of Communion with God the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. Read the man and you sense what he is reaching for. He will not let you choose between truth and love. He will not let doctrine become cold. He will not let feeling become unmoored. He holds them together with both hands and says, in effect, the God you confess is the God with whom you walk.

Here is the heart of it. Owen believed that a believer comes to the Father, and is met not by a reluctant judge but by a Father whose love runs out to meet him. He comes through the Son, and finds not merely a mechanism of forgiveness but a Saviour to be treasured. He comes by the Spirit, and is not merely energised but comforted, helped, made holy. Three persons. One God. And the staggering thing Owen pressed upon a weary, frightened church was this. That God gives Himself to His people. Not His benefits only. Himself.

Think of how many believers Owen was speaking to across the centuries. The ones who serve and lead and teach, who attend every gathering and defend every doctrine, and whose hearts are quietly starving. The ones who relate to God only through duty, until duty grows brittle and cold. The ones who know how to talk about God all day long and yet live as if He were reluctant to come near them. To all of these Owen says the same hard and beautiful thing. Are you trying to serve a God you do not enjoy?

His own life pressed the question deeper. When institutions shook and controversies raged and grief came again and again to his door, Owen did not reach first for control. He reached for God Himself. He knew that the soul does not finally need efficiency. It needs the living God. And so his prose, heavy as old oak, kept opening onto something light. The privilege of an adopted child, coming to the Father, through the Son, by the Spirit, to confess, to receive mercy, to rest in love.

That is what John Owen left behind. Not merely a tower of learning, though the learning was real. He left a summons that outlived his age and ours. A summons away from religion as machinery, and toward fellowship as grace. The God Christians confess is not standing at a cold distance, tolerating their service. In Christ, by the Spirit, He throws the door open and invites them in. Owen spent a brilliant and sorrowful life saying one thing plainly. You were never meant to merely work near God. You were made to commune with Him.