The Holy Trinity, Father, Son, and Holy
Spirit, is social in nature. While the
three in one nature is a mystery, what is amazing is that God’s love seeks to
draw us into the social life of the Trinity.
Our life in Christ is social, that is to say dynamic, interactive, interpersonal, intimate, collective, and filled with loving fellowship.
That is because at the very heart of life is the holy, love of God. For
God so loved the world, loved us so much, that he took sacrificial action on our
behalf (John 1:14). Christ’s life and
death was a labor and offering of unreserved love for us. The gift of God’s very self at Pentecost, the
Holy Spirit, was a gift of perfect love, holy and pure. The entire story of God and man is a love
story, a social narrative of God’s grace and our response over millennia. It is a story of God’s great gift of our
restoration to holiness, his likeness and infilling.
It is a story of how God deploys human agency to make possible a full
salvation. Its a story of the way social
holiness works.
Here is a snapshot of how God’s love is
passed to us and then from us to others.
It is a snapshot of the social nature of holiness. I’ve known Dr. David Rightmire nearly all my
life. I first met him at his sister’s
birthday party in Waltham, Massachusetts when he was five years old and I was
eight. While we have traveled different
paths over the years, we now live in the same town (Wilmore, Kentucky) only a
block from each other and enjoy a renewed friendship. David is a professor at Asbury
University. He is a highly respected
teacher and scholar. He is the author of
Sanctified
Sanity: The Life and Theology of Samuel Logan Brengle. Brengle was a Salvation Army officer and a
renowned proponent of Wesleyan Holiness in the early twentieth century. David’s writing on Brengle is a labor of
love, a gift of knowledge to others. His
book is so well written, covering the life and theology of Brengle, that after
reading it I gave a copy to my daughter and son, and more recently to my
daughter-in-law.
My daughter read Sanctified Sanity thoroughly then took up reading Brengle’s Helps to Holiness and other books. She
began telling her husband about Brengle and gave him a copy of the book as a
gift. He then shared Brengle with four of
his friends: a pastor, and three seminary students. This led the five of them
to use Brengle’s writings on holiness as the focus of their weekly Bible study
on early Friday mornings. How
wonderful!
David’s labor of love, Sanctified Sanity, is now
available in a revised and
expanded edition. I expect it will be passed on to others
inspiring a renewed interest in the writings of Samuel Logan Brengle, God’s
remarkable soldier/saint. This is how
social holiness works. It moves from the love of the writer to the reader. In love the reader passes the Good News of a
full salvation exposited by Brengle to others so, they too may be “filled to the measure of
the fullness of God” (Ephesians 2:19), and then share the message of that
fullness with yet others. Thanks be to
God for his unimaginable gifts that keep on giving!
That we might be
partakers of the divine nature.
2 Peter 1:4
