--As we talked about yesterday, the reason Christians take issues of marriage and family and gender and sexuality so seriously is because the very image of God is at stake in how we do these things.
--But this is only one implication of the Trinity as community concept. The interdependence and interconnectivity and mutual service and sacrifice of the Trinity shows up in at least one other massively significant place: the church.
--Just as family images God when functioning properly, the church with its mutual devotion and love does so as well. This is why Jesus says they shall know we are His disciples by our love one for another. It’s also why the notion of doing Christianity by yourself isn’t just a mistake or unbiblical. It’s blasphemous because you are denying the communal nature of the Trinity which we are meant to embody in our congregations.
--It’s not that they will know we aren’t His disciples by our hate, but rather by our indifference and disconnectedness to others who also truly love God. That’s another way in which the doctrine of the Trinity matters tremendously.
--And the most vivid place we see this imaging going on in the Bible is in the Book of Acts where everyone is devoting themselves to each other and sharing every aspect of their lives with each other eagerly, not out of obligation, but out of love.
--What we see there is that the early church looked very much like the Trinity in the way they all interacted with each other.
--And so the question for us when looking at that example is to ask whether we look like the Trinity or whether we just look like a loose affiliation of individuals.
--Are we connected tightly enough to really be a beautiful Bride for God or not?
--When Paul talks about us (plural) being the Temple of the Holy Spirit, this is what he’s talking about. He’s not saying (or at least not primarily saying) that each of us individually are, but that the community of believers all loving each other (just as the Father and Son love each other) become the indwelling place of the Holy Spirit.
--When Paul talks about us as being built together and joined, this is what he means.
--When he talks about the various parts of the body, this is what he means.
--These unions of diversity show by their loving function that they are pointing gloriously to the God who made them, a Trinity represented in our devoted community of believers.
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