Sunday May 12, 2013 | Greg Boyd
And over all these virtues put on love, which binds them all together in perfect unity.
God designed creation so that we would live in community with God and express God’s love towards each other and creation. However, sin disconnected us from God. In this sermon, Greg shows how we were created in the image of God to love others and creation and shows us how to reconnect with God.
God designed creation so that we would live in community with God and express God’s love towards each other and creation. God’s love is not just an action that God expresses but is rather who God is. God is the Father, Son, and Spirit and all three have an eternal nature of other-oriented, Calvary love. In the book of 1st John, the author writes that Love is defined on the Cross and that God is love. Love is all about the Cross.
We are triune beings. Many people that we only have a body and a soul. However, the Bible tells us that we have a body, soul, and Spirit. The Spirit is our innermost being. Our soul is our mind and personality. Our body is our physical nature. All three combine to make us who we are.
The love of the Trinity is replicated in our relationships with ourselves. We were always supposed to be defined by our image in God. And on the other spectrum, we have our ideas about who we are. We gain the truth of who we are from the Trinity, from the revelations that God has given to us. This is why, in Matthew 22, we are commanded to love God and others as we love ourselves. We have already been programmed to love ourselves as God loves.
When creation began, we were created to exhibit the perfect, other-oriented love of the Trinity to ourselves, others and creation. This is a God-defined society, where God overflows into us as we overflow into each other and creation. We were created to put on display God’s glory, which is God’s radiant love. Everything in creation would have been defined by God’s love and reflect God’s love.
But we were deceived. Because of Sin and Satan, the flow of God’s love to us was interrupted. We began to define our inner image by the things of this world. Instead of hearing and believing God’s image about ourselves, we began to believe the lies about ourselves. We began to believe the lies that others tell us; that we are no good, worthless, broken, ugly, and not loved by God. We then become fragmented within our own triune self. Our soul and body begin to decay and distorted from these lies. Our spirit suffered as a result.
And not only ourselves, but all of creation was deceived. Since God’s love no longer flowed to us, we began to exploit one another and tell each other lies about who we are. When we don’t love our neighbors as we love ourselves, we inevitably use our neighbors for ourselves. And it’s the same with God, animals, and all of creation. Society becomes fragmented into us and them.
God wants us to clothe ourselves not with the love of this world, but the love of Calvary.
Because God clothes himself in the love of Calvary. This begins by us clothing our mental picture of God in Calvary. The love that was given to us on the Cross is the ultimate definition of God’s love and God’s essence. Then, we need to clothe ourselves with Calvary. We were worth everything, and God showed that on Calvary. Finally, we need to live out God’s society here and now through our thoughts and actions towards all other people, animals, and creation. In this way, we live out our true identity in Christ. And all of it is defined by Calvary. Love, it’s all about the Cross.