Our Inability-to-Perfectly Love

by **pegasus202** Wed Apr 15, 2009 7:38 am

God spoke: “Let us make human beings in our image, make them reflecting our nature . . .” Genesis 1:26

God the Father, Son, and Spirit are the original small group.

That’s how Steve Pettit, jokes when he explains the Trinity’s never-beginning, never-ending community where there is intimacy, harmony, fellowship, and friendship.

In this Trinitarian community, we can see the blueprint for genuine, authentic community: all have equal value, each looks out for the other, one is ever ready to sacrifice for the sake of someone else, and everyone is absolutely safe. It’s a community of fearlessness, a fully free and uninhibited expression of godly love.

We are made in the image of this perfect love (Genesis 2:26), created as a race of beings to love and to be loved. We are designed to be at home in God’s perfect love and to be co-creators of a loving community on earth, where human lives are personally and purposefully shaped.

God’s love in us makes genuine community possible: “Since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another” (1 John 4:11 NIV). Through Christ, God enters into a very personal union with each of us; not conceptually, not theoretically, not metaphorically, but actually!

He makes the first move to bridge the huge gap between the holy and the sinful, between his perfect love and our inability-to-perfectly love. Through Jesus, God established forever the truth that genuine love is always personal, from a Person through a Person to a person.