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# Loving God for the Sake of God
- URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/loving-god-for-the-sake-of-god/
- Published: 2026-09-18T11:00:16.000Z
- Updated: 2026-09-18T11:00:15.000Z
- Description: If the church is to be a place of “joy that is inexpressible and filled with glory,” then her members, pastors, and leaders must learn the joy of being amazed by God and his glory in the created world.
- Author: Mere Orthodoxy
- Tags: Formation, Theology, Books, Drake Osborn

**Samuel G Parkison, *The Fountain of Life: Contemplating the Aseity of God*. Crossway, 2026\. 96 pp.**

The biggest questions that face every local church are not social, theoretical, practical, political, or even moral; they are theological. Because the church is the "dwelling place for God by the Spirit" (Eph 2:22), it is also the place on earth where God's glory is most evident, where communion with him is most tangible, and where contemplation of him should be most encouraged. Before every local church answers the important questions of how they might please the Father, follow the Son, and walk in the Spirit, they must answer that deeper question: who is God? 

Samuel Parkison's new book, *The Fountain of Life: Contemplating the Aseity of God*, gets the ordering right. His work is decidedly short, but its subject matter couldn’t be bigger: the life of God. In *The Fountain of Life,* Parkison places contemplation of the “Godness” of God on center stage. In doing so, he has written an accessible and eminently helpful book for both pastors and their congregations. This is not a critical review; I feel this book and more like it are needed. 

Central to the book are deep theological questions. Who is God, down to his core? How can we describe him, not just according to his actions or his attributes, but according to his very essence? The simple answer to these questions is that God is *a se*, as Parksion states simply, “God’s life is from himself.” To put it another way, God is “dependent on no one for existence.” But theological questions are not at odds with practical results. According to Parkison, the point of contemplating God is not to get answers, but to get God, since the glory and joy of God is the very thing we are created for! If that is true, then “there could be nothing more practical than contemplating God… to contemplate God is not to take a break from the real world; it is an exercise in reality.”

And yet, those with a knack for asking *too* many theological questions often have a track record for running headlong away from reality and into spiritual pride. In his polemical work *Against the Manicheans*, Augustine pokes all the necessary holes in the heretical questioning of Mani’s followers, who were dead set on their own dualistic cosmology. To their question of “why did God will to create heaven and earth?” Augustine replies that anyone asking that question is looking for “something greater than the will of God, though nothing greater can be found.” Augustine knew that our theology must never take us past God, or we’ve missed the point all together. 

*The Fountain of Life* understands that danger, and so is more than willing to press further in *to* God rather than *past* God. As Parkison rightly argues, if God is the independent source of everything, then “None of our questions, conversations, or experiences are *ever* really disconnected from the reality of God and his eternity.” Everything is contingent on him, since “all that is *not* God owes its existence *to* God.” For example, Parkison asks the reader to imagine a line in the text of Genesis 1:1, right in between “In the beginning God” and “created the heavens and the earth.” The grammatical proximity of these two clauses should not trick us into thinking they are ontologically close. There is nothing that is created that is even in the same atmosphere of God, much less greater than God. 

Parkison also handles the theological tendency to describe God only in negative (apophatic) terms, by what he is not or does not have. Unafraid of the leap into cataphatic theology (positive descriptions of God), he relays in detail the momentous shift in divine revelation that happens when God reveals himself to Moses as *I AM*. Seeing God as "infinite plentitude” and “fountain” may seem like squishy abstraction at first, but upon reflection we see that it is precisely *because* God is “the infinite source and giver of all life and being” that we need not go beyond him. We can encourage our flock towards deep contemplation of God without any fear or worry that it will lead to disappointment.

Instead, right contemplation of God should lead to unbounding joy. As Parkison urges his readers to “adopt the attitude of a child, asking a question for the sheer joy of getting its answer”, he reminds us that there are no theological questions that, when asked rightly, do not lead to delight. We live in a culture that is continually discouraging doing anything just for the love of it. Amateurism is at an all time-low, and side hustles are at an all time high. But as Parkison argues beautifully, if God is not contingent on anyone or anything, he creates everything we know and enjoy as sheer grace: just for the love of it.

Since the cosmos is fundamentally contingent and dependent on an independent creator—who made the world simply and freely as a result of his own pleasure... Since, then, creation itself is marvelously dispensable—since it does not have to exist at all, let alone in this way—we are invited to be amazed by all of it.

If the church is to be a place of “joy that is inexpressible and filled with glory” (1 Pt 1:8), then her members, pastors, and leaders must learn the joy of being amazed by God and his glory in the created world. We must become amateurs again, ministering for the sake of love and joy. Right contemplation of God’s aseity kills professionalism in the church, and opens up the people of God to the freedom of being entirely contingent on God. Only when we can lay down our need to be needed, then we can truly see how God’s love is, in Parkison’s words “pure, undiluted, gratuitous, unconstrained and noncompulsory.” That is the only kind of love that can be delighted in forever and ever.

Parkison also knows that joy in God has a clear focal point. If I may return to Augustine’s rebuke of the Manicheans, the ancient theologian goes on to describe the best way to get to know God: “If anyone desires to know the will of God, let him become a friend of God.” In order to ask theological questions rightly, there must be intimate trust. Intimacy of this kind requires real affection—that we would love God *for* God—and affection, stripped down, requires contemplation of something or someone beautiful enough to be worthy of affection.

In *Fountain of Life*, Parkison helps us to climb this ladder to an understanding of the will of God by first taking us to the first rung: the beauty of Christ. Drawing from the apostle John, “who Jesus loved”, we are led to see how Jesus Christ shares the same eternal life as the father. He is like Jacob’s ladder, drawing us up into the heart of God. Surprisingly, it is the doctrine of eternal generation that is the linchpin fastening the person of Jesus, and the Holy Spirit, to the life of God. As Parkison reminds us: "All that the Father is, is begotten as the Son; and all that the Father and Son are, is breathed out by the Spirit.” The gospel teaches that this begotten son was given for us, and his very life, the life of God, is available to us if we would only “find our ultimate satiation” in Jesus, the bread of Heaven. Parkison knows, and lets us know, that it is only in saving knowledge of Jesus Christ that we become, in Jesus’ words, “friends of God.” The doctrine of aseity is not theological abstraction—it is rocket fuel for the promises of the gospel.

I can go on record to say that the happiest pastor at our church is the one who reads the most theology. He attends well to his family and to the needs of the church, but we know he also meant it when recently he sent our fellow elders a picture of his new book on the doctrine of God and said “see y’all in a few months.” He is retired, and unpaid by the church budget, so there are no professional incentives for him to spend multiple hours a week (if not a day) contemplating God. He is not studying for any degrees or for the sake of an upcoming sermon series. He is not interested in impressing anyone or contributing to any academic journals. Instead, he is practicing for eternity: he contemplates the living God for the sake of love of the living God. In this way, he images God, the eternally triune one who contemplates everything that does not exist into existence simply for the love of it.

We need more godly pastors and Christians, and *Fountain of Life* is a step in the right direction towards helping all of us love God for the sake of God. For that reason, I commend it with eagerness.