Ron Frost in his doctoral dissertation quotes the following from Sibbes. I thought it was rather good:
Whence [how] is it that we are sons of God? Because he was the “Son of Man,” - “God in our Flesh.” There are three unions, the union of natures, God to become man, the union of grace, that we are one with Christ and the union of glory. The first is for the second and the second for the third, God became man that we might become one with God, God was “manifested in the flesh” that we might be united to him and being brought again to God the Father, we might come again to a glorious union.
Other quotable nuggets include:
The work of justification is, he [Sibbes] insisted, a gaze in which the believers are led “to turn aside from the contemplation of our own works and look solely upon God’s mercy and Christ’s perfection.”
Sin is characterised by two chief evils – a vain love of the world and an excessive self-love.
“…the only power by which humans can deal reciprocally with God is love, and that marital love is the highest form, the love that best expresses that union.
This approach displaced marriage from its presumed status in creation as an end in itself, with procreative, social and societal functions. Instead it gained a new status by illuminating, proleptically, the divine-human relationship that begins at conversion and continues into eternity. Thus, mystical marriage surpasses human marriage in the same way that an eternal reality is greater than a temporal reality.
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