God's Dream
I love these words from theologian, author, teacher and pastor, Gilbert Bilizekian. I’m not sure where I found this passage – perhaps from something I received from Willow Creek Community Church; perhaps from a magazine. These words so aptly explain the concept of community. Please read what Dr. Bilizekian has to teach us all.
Marty
If you had to answer in a single word what God’s dream for human beings is, what would you say? Consider the word community.Community is not a human invention. It is not a mere social phenomenon. Community is God’s dearest creation. It is only within community that there is the possibility of knowing and being known, loving and being loved, serving and being served, celebrating and being celebrated.
Because God is community - Father, Son, and Spirit in oneness of being - He creates community. It flows from who He is. When God created His first being, He astoundingly declared His creation to be “not good” because it was solitary; so He created a partner. God’s supreme achievement was not the creation of a solitary man but the creation of human community.
However, because of sin, God’s ideal of community often seemed to have been lost. Many times, it hung only by a thin thread of hope. If God were a quitter, it might have ended altogether. But over the rubble of failed human community stands the towering form of the cross.
Perfect community is to be found at the intersection of the two segments of the cross, where those who are reconciled with God are reconciled together - where we love God with all we have and we love our neighbor as ourselves. It is where we learn to care and share, to challenge and support, to confide and confess, to forgive and be forgiven, to laugh and weep, to be accountable to each other, to be servants together. It is the place of transformation.
Community. It alone will survive from this world into the next. Then God’s dream will be fulfilled when the Church is eternally united as a bride to her husband in the Savior’s embrace of redemptive love.
Will you be a part of building God’s dream?
- GILBERT BILEZIKIAN, 2000
God’s aim in history is the creation of an inclusive community of loving persons, with Himself as its primary sustainer and most glorious inhabitant.
DALLAS WILLARD
Comments
Thanks Pastor Marty,
This really says so much about QRCC, and that's why we love being there!
Laura and Bob Johnson