Created for Community

In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth and everything in them. He saw that everything He had made was good.

But when He surveyed His creation, He said something He had not said before.

"It is not good that the man should be alone" (Genesis 2:18).

This is the first time in Scripture that something is declared not good. Not the creation itself. Not the structure of the world. Human solitude. God was saying that we are not made to be alone. We are made for relationship.

This is not incidental. It flows from what we are.

Genesis 1:27 tells us that God made humanity in His image. God Himself exists in eternal fellowship. The Trinity is a communion of three persons in perfect love and perfect unity. Father, Son, and Holy Spirit have always known and delighted in one another. When God created us in His image, He built into us the capacity for relationship, the need for community, the hunger to know and be known.

A solitary human being, however accomplished or resourced, is incomplete. We are made to receive and to give. To be vulnerable and to offer strength. To enter into the joys and sorrows of others.

The Psalms celebrate this. "Behold, how good and pleasant it is when brothers dwell in unity!" (Psalm 133:1). The image in that psalm is of oil flowing down Aaron's beard onto the collar of his robe, bringing refreshment and fragrance to the whole body. There is something healing and sanctifying about being bound together with others who love God.

Ecclesiastes, the preacher who had everything, observed: "Two are better than one... For if they fall, one will lift up his fellow. But woe to him who is alone when he falls and has not another to lift him up" (Ecclesiastes 4:9-10).

When sin entered the world, it fractured every relationship. Adam and Eve, who had dwelt in perfect communion with God and with each other, suddenly felt shame and hid. Their son Cain murdered his brother Abel. By the time God surveyed the earth again, it was filled with violence.

But God's intention to restore community was not abandoned. He began to call out a people for Himself. He chose Abraham to be the father of a nation. He delivered Israel from slavery and bound them together as His covenant community. Throughout the Old Testament, the pattern is clear. God saves people to be a people. He does not gather them as isolated individuals. He gathers them as a family, a body, a fellowship.

The New Testament unfolds what this gathered people actually is.

When Jesus prayed for all future believers on the night of His arrest, He prayed:

I do not ask for these only, but also for those who will believe in me through their word, that they may all be one, just as you, Father, are in me, and I in you, that they also may be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me. (John 17:20-21)

Our unity is not a human achievement. It is the gift of Christ Himself. We are one because we are all in Him. We are in the Father because we are in the Son.

The circle has no beginning and no end. It is centered on Christ. And it expands to include every person God has redeemed.

When you join a local church, you are not joining a service organization. You are entering a fellowship that connects you across space and time, to the apostles, to the saints of every age, to Christ Himself.

The people sitting around you next Sunday at Mayflower are not strangers with similar beliefs. They are your family in Christ. People as truly joined to you as you are joined to the Head of the body.