1. True and saving knowledge of God has in view not only comprehension but decision and action. (Foreword, 5-6 [pages are from the Hodder & Stoughton, 1975 edition).
2. Ignorance of God lies at the root of much of the church’s weakness today. (Foreword, 6).
3. Two trends have contributed to the church’s current ignorance of God: (1) Christian minds have been conformed to the modern spirit: we have great thoughts of man and small thoughts of God. (2) Christian minds have been confused by modern skepticism. (Foreword, 6-7).
4. The proper study of God’s people is God. The study of Divinity is humbling, mind-expanding, and comforting. (citing Spurgeon, chapter 1, 13-14).
5. Five foundation truths for knowing God. 1. God has spoken to us and the Bible is His Word. 2. God is Lord and King over His world. 3. God is Savior. 4. God is Triune. 5. Godliness is responding to God’s revelation in trust and obedience, faith and worship, prayer and praise, submission and service. (Chapter 1, 16).
6. If we pursue theological knowledge for its own sake, it is bound to go bad on us. It will make us proud and conceited. Our aim in studying the Godhead must be to know God Himself the better. (Chapter 1, 18-19).
7. One can know a great deal about God without much knowledge of Him. (Chapter 2, 22-23)
8. One can know a great deal about godliness without much knowledge of God. (Chapter 2, 23)
9. Those who know God have great energy for God. (Chapter 2, 24)
10. Those who know God have great thoughts of God. (Chapter 2, 26)
11. Prayer is the best evidence for a man’s view of God. (Chapter 2, 27)
“The invariable fruit of true knowledge of God is energy to pray for God’s cause—energy, indeed, which can only find an outlet and a relief of inner tension when channelled into such prayer—and the more knowledge, the more energy!” (Chapter 2, 26)
12. Those who know God show great boldness for God. (Chapter 2, 28)
13. Those who know God have great contentment in God. (Chapter 2, 28)
14. “The comprehensiveness of our contentment is another measure whereby we may judge whether we really know God.” (Chapter 2, 30)
15. We were made to know God. Our purpose in life is to know God. The eternal life that Jesus gives is true knowledge of God. The best thing in life, which brings more joy, delight, and contentment, than anything else is the true and saving knowledge of God. God himself desires that we would know him. (Chapter 3, 31)
16. “Once you become aware that the main business that you are here for is to know God, most of life’s problems fall into place of their own accord.” (Chapter 3, 31)
17. “What makes life worthwhile is having a big enough objective, something which catches our imagination and lays hold of our allegiance; and this the Christian has, in a way that no other man has. For what higher, more exalted, and more compelling goal can there be than to know God? (Chapter 3, 32)
18. “Whether being a servant is matter for shame or for pride depends on whose servant one is. (Chapter 3, 35)
19. “Knowing God involves, first, listening to God’s word and receiving it as the Holy Spirit interprets it, in application to oneself; second, noting God’s nature and character, as his word and works reveal it; third, accepting his invitations, and doing what he commands; fourth, recognizing, and rejoicing in, the love that he has shown in thus approaching one and drawing one into this divine fellowship.” (Chapter 3, 35)
20. Four main biblical analogies for knowing God: (1) we know God in the manner of a son knowing his father, (2) a wife knowing her husband, (3) a subject knowing his King, and (4) a sheep knowing it shepherd. (Chapter 3, 35)
21. We know God in this way only three knowing Jesus Christ. (Chapter 3, 36)
22. Knowing God is a matter of (1) personal dealing, (2) personal involvement, in mind, will, and feeling; and (3) knowing God is a matter of grace. It is a relationship in which the initiative throughout is with God. (Chapter 3, 37-40)
23. “What matters supremely, therefore, is not, in the last analysis, the fact that I know God, but the larger fact which underlies it— the fact that he knows me.” (Chapter 3, 41)
24. “Idolatry consists not only in the worship of false gods, but also in the worship of the true God by images” (Charles Hodge). In its Christian application, this means that we are not to make use of visual or pictorial representations of the triune God, or of any person of the Trinity, for the purposes of Christian worship.” (Chapter 4, 44)
25. Images (1) dishonor God, for they obscure his glory, and (2) images mislead men, because they convey false ideas about God. (Chapter 4, 45-47)
26. Just as the second amendment forbids us to manufacture molten images of God, so it forbids us to dream up mental images of him. (Chapter 4, 47)
27. It needs to be said with the greatest possible emphasis that those who hold themselves free to think of God as they like our breaking the second commandment. (Chapter 4, 48)
28. To follow the imagination of one’s heart in the realm of theology is the way to remain ignorant of God, and to become an idolater, by speculation and imagination. (Chapter 4, 48)
29. The positive force of the second commandment is that it compels us to take our thoughts of God from his own holy word, and from no other source whatsoever. (Chapter 4, 49)
30. The mind that takes up with images is a mind that has not yet learned to love and attend to God’s word. (Chapter 4, 49)
31. To make an image of God is to take one’s thoughts of him from a human source, rather than from God himself; and this is precisely what is wrong with the image making. (Chapter 4, 50)
32. It is sad that so many make faith harder than it need be, by finding difficulties in the wrong places. (Chapter 5, 52)
33. The really staggering Christian claim is that Jesus of Nazareth was God made man—(1) that the second person of the Godhead became the ‘second man,’ the second representative of humanity, and (2) that he took humanity without loss of deity. (Chapter 5, 53)
34. “Here are two mysteries for the price of one— the plurality of persons within the unity of God, and the union of Godhead and manhood in the person of Jesus.” (Chapter 5, 53)
35. “The incarnation is in itself an unfathomable mystery, but it makes sense of everything else that the New Testament contains.” (Chapter 5, 54)
36. “The New Testament knows nothing of an incarnation which can be defined apart from its relation to atonement . . . Not Bethlehem, but Calvary, is the focus of revelation, and any construction of Christianity which ignores or denies this distorts Christianity by putting it out of focus.” (James Denney, The Death of Christ) (Chapter 5, 59)
37. “We see now what it meant for the Son of God to empty himself and become poor. It meant a laying aside of glory (the real kenosis); a voluntary restraint of power; an acceptance of hardship, isolation, ill–treatment, malice and misunderstanding; finally, a death that involved such agony—spiritual even more than physical—that his mind nearly broke under the prospect of it. (See Lk 12:50 and the Gethsemane story.) It meant love to the uttermost for unlovely human beings, that they through his poverty might become rich.” (Chapter 5, 65)
38. “The Christmas message is that there is hope for a ruined humanity—hope of pardon, hope of peace with God, hope of glory—because at the Father’s will Jesus Christ became poor and was born in a stable so that thirty years later he might hang on a cross. It is the most wonderful message that the world has ever heard, or will hear.” (Chapter 5, 65)
39. “It is our shame and disgrace today that so many Christians—I will be more specific: so many of the soundest and most orthodox Christians— go through this world in the spirit of the priest and the Levite in our Lord’s parable, seeing human needs all around them, but (after a pious wish, and perhaps a prayer, that God might meet those needs) averting their eyes and passing by on the other side. That is not the Christmas spirit. Nor is it the spirit of those Christians—alas, they are many— whose ambition in life seems limited to building a nice middle–class Christian home, and making nice middle–class Christian friends, and bringing up their children in nice middle–class Christian ways, and who leave the submiddle–class sections of the community, Christian and non–Christian, to get on by themselves.” (Chapter 5, 65-66)