The Trinity and the Bride

I have recently be thinking about the church and it's success and failures over the past 24 years of my life. It is amazing to me the drastic dichotomy that can be displayed with so many positive and truly God honoring acts and selfless acts of worship as displayed by the global church body with so many sinful and blatant godless acts of that same global church body. I have always been perplexed by this. Now, I want to make one thing clear. I do not intend for this to turn into a church bashing session or a chance for denominational bombings, but rather a discussion about how we as the church can better satisfy the fulfillment of the image and purpose that we, being the global church, were created to be.

Over the past couple years I have generated my presuppositions of who the Bride of Christ was intended to be based solely on the person of Jesus Christ and the life he lived out on this earth, coupled with the commands He has given us in his Word. But recently I have began to think of it in a different light, correlating the interrelationship of the Godhead, and the way they fellowship with one another, to the intrinsic and purposed makeup of the church. Specifically I can think of three images that are displayed in the Trinity that should be better, or maybe i should say more completely, reflected in the church; Unity, Selflessness, and Missional.

As God is completely Unified so should his Church be unified. More and more do we here of church splits and dissension among church bodies. Bickering and slandering of other churches and other members of the church is readily available and prominent. It is through our inability to humbly embrace the diversity and difference among the body of Christ that we find the church in its current state. May we learn to better and more humbly fight to be a church defined by unity in the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

As God is selfless and completely self giving so should the Church be selfless and self giving. It is all to often that our churches are oriented and built to serve it's own church body. Though we are called to love each other I believe we must be careful not to absorb ourselves into self centeredness. As my professor put it, " so a local church when it becomes centered on its own well being will become a hollow shell of what it was intended to be." May be we a church that focused on being self giving in all aspects of our ministry, to one another in the body and outside of the body.

Finally, as God is Missional so should the Church be Missional. As God the Father has sent his Son and his Holy Spirit as the divine missionaries so should we model the sentness of the Godhead in our churches. May we as the church be intentionally pursuing the imperative command of our Lord in Matt. 28.19 to , " Go and make disciples of all nations.....". May we be missionaly pursuing all people, from our neighborhoods to the far off lands.

As we look to better resemble and display our God, let us look to unify the body of Christ both locally and globally through our selfgivingness and missional hearts, in order that God may receive the glory! Let us better reflect Trinity as the Bride of Christ, the one He seeks to return for!

-R