We run our website the way we wished the whole internet worked: we provide high quality original content with no ads. We are funded solely by your direct support. Please consider supporting this project.
Why God Made You
The life God has for each one of us is a life of perfect love, one that eternally unites us with the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. This is why God made us. It’s what we long for, to love and be loved.
However, things like the love of the Trinity are not part of our normal language. So let’s unpack this a bit.
The great pastor and theologian Jonathan Edwards painted a portrait of the Trinity in which the love and joy of the three divine persons was so full and intense, it simply could not be contained. God’s fullness thus yearned to be expressed and replicated by sharing it with others. So this fullness overflowed as God brought forth a creation that mirrored his triune beauty.
The pinnacle of this creation is human beings, those who reflect, in a small way, the yearning to participate in the love of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
The God of overflowing love longs to pour his love into others, so he creates beings that long for his love to be poured into them. This is why you were created. However, because of our rebellion, living without the fullness of God is a reality that shapes our daily lives.
It’s a state that is completely unnatural, an emptiness that points to our true purpose.
Jesus reveals this purpose when he prays to the Father that his disciples and “those who will believe in me through their message” would be “one as we are one.” (The entire prayer can be read in John 17.) Then he prays that he would be in us in the same way that the Father is in him. God apparently wants the loving unity of his own triune being to be replicated in the way we relate to one another as well as in the way he relates to us and dwells in us.
Then Jesus proclaims to the Father that he “will continue to make you [the Father] known in order that the love you have for me may be in them and I myself may be in them.” And he essentially says the same thing when he says to the Father, “I have given them the glory that you gave me” for the “glory” that the Father gives the Son and that the Son shares with us is simply the weighty, brilliant radiance of the self-giving love of the three persons of the Trinity.
This means that God’s ultimate goal in creation is nothing less than for the very same perfect love that the Father has for his own Son to be given to us and to be placed within us.
We become the recipients of the Father’s eternal love for the Son because we are in the Son as he is perfectly loved, and the Son is in us, as he is perfectly loved.
This is the true life that we created to experience. It’s what we thirst for. And nothing else, no other purpose, can quench it. While some of us may be blessed with loving people in our lives, with worthwhile work, and with some measure of security, no one, and nothing, could come close to meeting this need.
Only God can satisfy your longing for perfect, unconditional love, unsurpassable worth, and absolute security.
—Adapted from Benefit of the Doubt, pages 58-60
Photo via Visual hunt
Related Reading
Tribalism
Sandra Unger spoke for Greg while he was on vacation the week after the 4th. In this clip, Sandra explains whats tribes are and how that creates unintended separation between people. In the full sermon, she speaks about what it means to be part of the Jesus Tribe. She discusses the reasons people are prone to…
Love and Free Will
God could have easily created a world in which nothing evil could ever happen. But this world would not have been capable of love. God could have preprogrammed agents to say loving things and to act in loving ways. He could even have preprogrammed these automatons to believe they were choosing to love. But these…
The Revelation of God in the Cross
The cross cannot be understood apart from the resurrection, just as the resurrection can never be understood apart from the cross. They are two sides of the same coin. If you consider the cross apart from the resurrection, then the crucified Christ becomes nothing more than one of the many thousands of people who were…
Sanctuary
. SantiMB . via Compfight Jamie Wright wrote this penetrating essay of encountering a woman in a moment of extremity and need. It’s a reminder of our great need for a sanctuary, a safe place to come when the world has gone mad and we have nowhere else to go. From her essay: Because,…
Repent! … From the Sin of Religion
People often think that being Christian is about “being religious,” but loving others in the way that Christ instructs us is about as far removed from religion as anything could be. Religion, as I use the term, is a system of beliefs and behaviors one embraces as a means of getting life—whether this be feeling…
The Cross and The Trinity
Out of love for humankind, Scripture tells us, Jesus emptied himself of his divine prerogatives, set aside the glory he had with the Father from before the foundation of the world, became a human being and bore our sin as he died a God-forsaken death on Calvary (Phil 2:5-7). Though Jesus remained fully God, he…