The God of Relationships

Just back yesterday from an awesome Church Student Ministries Conference (CSM) up at Quinta with around 100 students and leaders and apprentices from the UK. There is no other conference like it, with such intense and excellent bible teaching and digging for ourselves, such loving Chritsian community and honest sharing of the desire to lay down lives for our great God. We studied the topic of The Trinity this year, the One God in 3 persons, father, Son and Holy Spirit.

It was so striking that God is love because he has been love and has been loving for all eternity in the Godhead. And he invites us, sinners who have loved him not, to share in this intimate trinity relationship, to be not just citizens or servants but to be sons. Through the cross, we can be reconciled to the father, by the son's propiciation, made real to us by the Holy Spirit.

In John's gospel it is eye opening to see how Jesus prays to the father, who is in him and he in the father, that we might also be in him and know the same love that the father and son share for one another!!! And we saw though doing a huuuge new testament survey, all the one anothering stuff we are to do as church. Love and serve just keeps on coming out!! What amazing communities we could be for the light of the Gospel if we were to start loving each other, deeply from the heart. Why don't we?

The implication of us being Jesus' brothers, for His glory as the firstborn among many, is that we be what we are, that is, be holy because we are God's children. Prince Harry is a bit of a prat in the way he is a prince yet so often lives as if he is not, getting into drunken scarpes and the like. I guess he is behaving improperly for his status and so for us, the challenge of the trinity is also to be holy. I have a lot of work to do, but the trinity is changing me!