Chapter 4 of part 1 of Owen's On Communion with God provides exhortations unto communion with God along with directions in it and observations from it.
Owen exhorts: "It is a duty for Christians to hold immediate communion with the Father in love." After urging his readers to look to the Father as love, he exults in whose love this love is. It is the love of an all-sufficient and infinitely self-satisfied God whose triune life amidts of no defect or lack. God the Father infinitely delighted in his own glorious excellencies and perfections beheld in his Son from all eternity. In the fellowship of the Son through the Spirit of their love, he might have rested and delighted himself forever. So his love for creatures and requirement of love from them is not due to any need or deficiency in God.
Owen then describes the kind of love this is. It is eternal, free, unchangeable, distinguishing. The Father's love was fixed on his people before the foundation of the world. And nothing in us moved him to this love. It is wholly undeserved and has as its spring the Father's mere good pleasure and will. It is constant, for God is immutable. His love is a steadfast and comitted love. And, last, but certainly not least precious, God's love is distinguishing, discriminating. It is not promiscuous, at least not in one very important respect. It is a particular love for his holy people, not for all, a love that sends his Son to die for them to secure sharing in the truine life and love of God forever and ever.
So Owen urges all to look to the love of the Father so as to receive it. And, "let it have its proper fruit and efficacy upon your heart" in the return of love back to God again. He then gives considerations to help us in the duty and daily practice of receiving the Father's love and making suitable returns in love back to him.
"So much as we see of the love of God, so much shall we delight in him, and no more," says Owen. If this is so, and if we were created to glorify God by enjoying him forever, then this is no small matter. May the Father be pleased to grant to us a fuller enjoyment of his love as the blood-bought gift of the Son in the strength of the Spirit—to the praise of the glory of his grace, freely bestowed on us in the Beloved.
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