Three-in-One

‘“Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind” and, “Love your neighbour as yourself.”’

Luke 10:27, quoting Deuteronomy 6:5 and Leviticus 19:18

Because we in the West are so influenced by ancient Greek thought, by the impulse to classify everything into distinct categories, we have a tendency to hear these words as highlighting difference:

‘“Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind” and, “Love your neighbour as yourself.”’

and, indeed,

‘“Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind” and, “Love your neighbour as yourself.”’

But what if the spirit of these words – perhaps best understood as both an invitation and a challenge – was more concerned with unity?

‘“Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind” and, “Love your neighbour as yourself.”’

Differentiation is not entirely unhelpful. Indeed, it is a necessary stage, without which we are unable to navigate the world as we set out from home. Ancient Hebrew thought is also concerned with differentiation, such as that between ‘clean’ and ‘unclean.’ But while setting out from home – moving from Eden to fill the whole earth – is part of God’s intention for us, it is also God’s intention that we eventually return home – return to that place where we walk in harmony with one another and with God. And that movement requires first a stage of differentiation and then a stage of unification. This is why it is written that in Jesus, God is reconciling all things to him. God fills and bursts our containers.

The other evening I was with friends who are committed to living a life that attends to seeking to love God, the extended family of faith God has given us (self – the person only exists in community), and those who live alongside us (neighbour). That is a good thing. What I shared with them was what God had put on my heart, to ask the question: “How have you spent time with God today?”

I was not surprised that the first reaction was one of discomfort, of guilt. Why? Because of that tendency to separate things into different categories: the tendency to see loving God, self, and neighbour as ourselves as three different kinds of activity which we must seek to perform. Loving becomes defined by certain activities, which become tasks, which become squeezed out, which become opportunity for guilt. I gave God five minutes today...I haven’t told anyone about Jesus today...

One of the ways we remind ourselves that we are called to love God, self and neighbour is visually, through a triangle, a shape that has three sides, three angles. But a triangle only exists when there are three sides coming together at three angles: a triangle is a unity, at every point, in every moment.

We are never not with God, never not with our extended family of faith, never not with our neighbour. We are not alone in the world.

I love God when I acknowledge his presence, as I sit in the garden, as I acknowledge his presence in the person I am talking to. And I love that other person as I acknowledge God’s presence in them – for in so doing I am drawn to recognise them as made in God’s likeness, honoured, rather than focused on the particular ways in which that likeness is marred in them...and how that marring jars against the particular ways God’s likeness is marred in me. I love – or not – my extended family of faith and my neighbour as I make decisions that have an impact on them – including the simple, daily decisions, such as what I buy, and where.

Is the movement of your life focused on differentiation (remember, this is not entirely unhelpful, especially in the first half of our journey through life, but will become increasingly hard to juggle as we are drawn to start on the homeward journey), or becoming increasingly unified (not monochrome, but celebrating reconciliation between diversity)?

The Family Prayer

We spent the weekend at the (six-yearly) global gathering of The Order of Mission.  If the New Wine National Leaders Conference a couple of weeks back was an opportunity to get together with our closest friends, a gathering of TOM members is when we get together with our spiritual family.  I am deeply thankful for both friends and family; though it is a bitter-sweet thing that both are so dispersed, and when we get together there is never enough time to spend with everyone.  But it was a joy to be with brothers and sisters we have known for many years, and to meet other brothers and sisters for the first time.


Among other things, our Senior Guardian Mike Breen helped us look together at the Lord’s Prayer, through two familiar lenses, as a tool for attending to our personal and communal lives.  Here are my notes/reflections on Mike’s structure/connections.


Lens 1: The two strands that run through Scripture: Covenant and Kingdom: relationship and responsibility, being and doing, identity and activity, coming to Jesus and being sent out by him.


Lens 2: Jesus sums up how to live life well in this way: love God (UP, passionate spirituality), love one another within your household (IN, radical community), and love those beyond your household (OUT, missionary zeal).


The pattern Jesus gave for prayer addresses these three dimensions of life (the flow is from UP to IN to OUT), each expressed in both Covenant and Kingdom terms (again, there is a flow: we need both covenant and kingdom, but responsibility flows from relationship, doing from being, activity from identity – not the other way around).




UP: Covenant: Father
God is our loving Father, who longs for intimate relationship with us as his children.  He is not distant, absent, aloof, or abusive.  We are children, not slaves.


UP: Kingdom: King
God is also King of the Universe.  Never less than Daddy, but more than just Daddy: “our Dad has a very important job” and we need to recognise his kingship over our lives.


IN: Covenant: Provision
Jesus reveals to us that God our Father wants to give us good gifts, that he is generous, that all he has (and he owns everything) he shares with us; we do not earn access to his provision.


IN: Kingdom: Debt
We tend to think of forgiveness as coming to our father, but Jesus describes it as needing to deal with the king, to whom we are in debt.  The question is whether we are under the king’s judgement, or whether our debt has been cancelled.  Jesus is clear that unless we show mercy and cancel the debts of our debtors, a just king cannot cancel our greater debt to him.


OUT: Covenant: Protection
One of the roles of fatherhood is to offer protection – sometimes by physical presence, and controlled aggression (having learnt mastery over our physicality); sometimes by establishing boundaries within which freedom can be enjoyed.  As a personal example, on holiday recently I spent time climbing over rocks with my children, sometimes leading ahead of them to follow my example, sometimes telling them where it was not safe for them to venture.  In this way, my children grow in confidence (especially the less adventurous) and wisdom (especially the more adventurous).


OUT: Kingdom: Deliverance
One of the roles of kingship is to deliver your people when they are in danger of being taken captive, or have been taken captive – as will be the case from time to time, given that another role of kingship is to deploy ambassadors who will represent him in the world and soldiers who will stand firm against his enemy.




As people (especially as people shaped by western society?), we tend to be creatures of division and over-reaction and demarcate our lives in ‘either/or’ polarities, but living life well generally requires of us that we see life in terms of ‘both/and’ continuums, not polarities.  Polarised categories tend to be our way of trying to create and maintain control over our lives; continuums – living with tension and paradox – bring us to the place of acknowledging our need for God, and allow the conditions needed for his creative new life to emerge.


Passionate spirituality is nurtured in the paradox of experiencing God as both Father and King; refusing to settle for impersonal legalism on the one hand, and cheap grace on the other.


Radical community is nurtured in the creative tension of experiencing the Father’s provision and the King’s cancellation of our debts; as we learn to be generous, and practice our responsibility to cancel debts.


Missionary zeal is nurtured in the continuum of experiencing the Father’s protection and the King’s deliverance; giving us confidence to go out into the world, and the backing we need to be ambassadors of heaven and soldiers in the spiritual battles we are engaged in.


If passionate spirituality, radical community, or missionary zeal is lacking in our lives, we have in the Lord’s Prayer a Jesus-given framework for conversation with God, a means of identifying together what we need to address...


As you create space to listen, what does the Spirit want to say to your spirit today?

Peace Be With You

John 20:19-31


Here John records for us two occasions on which the risen Jesus appears to his disciples.  Running through the account is Jesus’ phrase, spoken three times over, “Peace be with you!”


The word peace sums up reconciliation with God, one another and those around us.  This is what the resurrection has achieved: not only the possibility of peace, but the start of a new day, a new humanity, characterised by such peace.  Rowan Williams describes the church as God’s “pilot project” for this new humanity, as the peace Jesus speaks to us is worked out in our lives.  In this passage we see that there is both a flow to peace – from Jesus to his disciples, and through them to the world – and a purpose to peace – setting us free from our fear of the death of our self; sending us into the world; and enabling us to believe in Jesus as Lord and God.  Note also that the flow is continuous: i.e. that those who believe in Jesus as Lord and God are now themselves disciples who are sent into the world...

The Triangle : Balancing The Relationships Of Life

‘Lifeshapes’ are a series of tools for discipleship – for helping us to follow Jesus, and to help others to follow Jesus. Recognising that we live in an iconic culture, where brand logos both carry and unlock significant volumes of experience for us – try it: how much information and experience does the Disney logo, or the Apple logo, or the M&S logo recall to your mind? Choose a logo and write a list – they make use of simple iconic shapes to carry and unlock biblical teaching to live by, with a focus on the life and ministry of Jesus. The beauty of iconic symbols is this: that, just as with every new Disney (etc.) release, the reservoir of knowledge their logo carries and unlocks expands; so with every new thing we learn about living as disciples, the reservoir of knowledge the Lifeshapes carries and unlocks for us also expands.

According to Jesus, the greatest commandment is this: to love God with all of our heart (volitional, what we choose), and with all of our soul (emotional, what we feel), and with all of our mind (intellectual, what we think), and with all of our strength (physical, what we do). And the second greatest commandment is this: to love our neighbour (Jesus defined our neighbour as whoever does not share our beliefs about God) as much as we love ourselves (that is, those who share our beliefs, our own faith community). Indeed, Jesus goes so far as to say that everything else in the Bible hangs on these two commands: is, in effect, commentary, showing us who God is and how to love him; who we are and what loving one another looks like in practice; and who is our neighbour and how we are to relate to them.

And so life is all about attending to these three different relationships, and learning how to express love for God, self and neighbour in the choices we make, in what we feel about ourselves and others (emotions are important, but don’t overrule choice), in what we think about ourselves and others, and in what we do towards ourselves and others.

This is worked out in all kinds of ways. For example, in raising children to maturity, we need to give them three things: love, discipline, and freedom. They need the security of knowing that they are loved, of growing up in a loving environment – and love, whether we acknowledge it or not, comes from God. And they need discipline and freedom, which go hand-in-hand. For example, my children are currently under the discipline of learning to read and write and manipulate numbers – and the extent to which they can experience freedom in the world is determined, to a large degree, by the extent to which they can take on these disciplines. Likewise, they experience the discipline of having breakfast every morning, and a (more or less) regular bedtime at night. Again, the discipline of healthy nutition and sleep patterns – of a disciplined lifestyle – directly impact their capacity to explore the world in which they live, and how they relate to others.

This is simple – just three things to attend to – but hard (our mistake is to believe that parenting is complex, but somehow ought to be easy). It is interesting to observe the relationship between Millennials (those born after 1980) and their parents (the youngest of the Baby Boomer generation and oldest of Generation X). These parents have largely reacted to their own childhood experience of absent fathers – whether emotionally absent because they found their identity almost entirely through their career, rather than as husbands/fathers; or physically absent, through rapidly rising divorce. In reaction, as parents themselves, they have sought to always be there for their children, and to be friends with their children. They have seen discipline as punishment, rather than training – and raised a generation who see discipline as rejection. They have seen freedom as abandonment, rather than maturity – and raised a dependent generation who have a high view of entitlement and a low capacity for perseverance. As a result, Millennials struggle to leave home, or even contribute to the running of their parents’ home (in truth, their parents struggle to let them go, or even let them contribute); struggle to operate as adults in the workplace; struggle to enter into lasting relationships. But love hopes to see the one it loves grow to maturity, and compels us to attend to finding the balance between too much/too little discipline and too much/too little freedom.