Friends: Christianity is uniquely personal and also uniquely relational. Our faith life and communion are not so very different from the divine love within the Holy Trinity.  Blessings, Bob

BTW, there is a new Rich Jacobs "Finding Genius" podcast! Here is the link: Exploring The Culture Of Christianity With Bob Walters (recorded 7-31-24).

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Spirituality Column #926

August 13, 2024

Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary

Team Effort

By Bob Walters

“…I pray also for those who will believe in me through their message, that all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you. May they also be in us so that the world may believe that you have sent me.” – Jesus praying, John 17:20-21
One of the lessons of the Holy Trinity – Father, Son, Spirit – and of church gatherings and corporate Christian life in general is that Christianity is not an individual pursuit; it is a team sport. We are all in this together. Yes, with the triune God.

Do we – each one of us, singularly – have a personal and unique faith relationship with God through Jesus? Yes, we do. 

Does the Holy Spirit abide in our lives individually?  Yes, the Spirit does. 

But are we alone in our faith?  No, we are not.

The above cited prayer of Jesus is from the “Priestly Prayer” in John 17, the concluding prayerful words of Jesus to his disciples before His arrest in the Garden of Gethsemane. To refresh, Jesus and the disciples left the last supper (John 14:31), walked through Jerusalem toward the Garden listening to Jesus’s teaching (John 15-16), and in John 17 Jesus prays for himself (vv1-5), the disciples (vv6-19), and for “all who will believe in me through their message” (vv20-26). That includes us … today.

When Jesus directs us with the two greatest commandments, to love God and to love others (Matthew 22:37-39), and at the last supper reminds the disciples of this “new command … to “love one another” (John 13:35), Jesus is only telling the disciples – and by extension all believers – to do what Jesus himself does in the Holy Trinity … to love God and love others. 

God’s cosmic design is that He Himself is a community, and He created all of us – for His own glory – to be loved and loving, faithful participants in His Kingdom. Our faith in Jesus and reliance on the Holy Spirit bring us into that divine communion.

Perhaps the greatest mystery of our faith is the Holy Trinity – how something can be three in one, one in three, unique, yet together. But don’t get hung up on the math.

For all the different ways the Bible describes God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit, when the Bible says in the letters of John that “God is Love,” he is explaining the purpose of the Trinity, and that purpose is relationship, which is what gives communion its meaning.  Love cannot exist without relationship.

God is a community, as we, His faithful, are a community joined with Him and with each other. When we celebrate communion, we are celebrating our relationship not just with God through Jesus and among ourselves as Christians, but celebrating the Father-Son-Spirit relationship that is the abiding and loving truth of our faith. 

Our faith, my faith, your faith, can’t be something we simply “believe.”  Faith is the truth of all being, of how we live our lives.  I don’t merely believe I’m married to my wife Pam; I AM married to Pam.  That’s life and that’s truth … and that is what faith is. 

It is what God calls faith to be: real, the bedrock of our soul.  Faith is not a transient opinion, but life with love, purpose, and direction.  Our communion in faith is the communion into which Jesus invited his disciples, and all who would believe.

The communion we celebrate today as the faithful body of Christ is a communion in faith that is our strength, our hope, and our joy and our oneness in Christ.

To love God and to love each other is a divine team effort, and what Jesus does.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) adapted this from his Aug. 4 communion meditation at church. Regarding the “math” of the Trinity, 1+1+1=3, but 1x1x1=1. Multiply!