God’s desire from the beginning was to form a community of people who would live life in a way that images who God is for the purpose of glorifying Him and making His glory known. God exists as a perfect, loving, self-glorifying community within His triune nature. God’s call to Adam & Eve to “multiply, fill the earth and subdue it,” was a call to take what they had received from God (their knowledge and worship of Him) and reproduce it in their children and in their culture. God’s call to Noah and his family was an attempt at reclaiming the call to Adam and Eve, however within 3 generations the descendants of Noah go about building a tower to make a name for themselves, which is a direct contradiction to God’s desire for them to be a people who image God by glorifying Him and making His glory known. God then calls Abram to do what? To come out from among the idolatrous culture of Ur so that God can make him into a people, or nation as Genesis puts it, who will be a blessing to the rest of the world. And how will they be a blessing to the rest of the world? Well, if we fast forward to Moses’ time and the giving of the Law we see God’s plan is for Israel to be a “holy nation, a royal priesthood” (Exodus 19). In other words, they were to be a people who imaged God to the rest of the world by glorifying Him and making His glory known. This is the story of the entire Old Testament. From Genesis to Malachi God is continually calling, forming and shaping a people who will reflect who He is by living life in such a way that shows the rest of the world who He is and what He is about, a people who live centered on His glory for the purpose of making His glory known. He is a King looking for subjects who will represent His Kingdom.

God’s desire for humanity has not changed. God does not have a plan B. His desire today is still to have a people who reflect, or image, who He is by living life centered on His glory for the purpose of making His glory known. He is still calling a people to Himself.

A biblical understanding of the word <em>church</em> would be the community of people whom God has redeemed through the life, death and resurrection of His Son and has reconciled them back to the purpose of reflecting who He is by living life centered on His glory for the purpose of making His glory known. The whole purpose of the Gospel is not that we, as individual Christians, get to go to Heaven someday, it is that Heaven, God’s Kingdom, gets to return to us, His people, today. The church is not a building, though it does tend to gather in one. It is not a religious organization, though there are business aspects to it. The church is the community of people called by God the Father, through Jesus His Son, and empowered by God the Holy Spirit to be the representation of God’s Kingdom on the earth, a foreshadow of what is to come when Christ returns someday.

What we see in this passage is a community of people who are teaching and learning together, loving one another, sacrificing for one another, celebrating and partying together, having fun together, caring for one another, considering the needs of others as more important than their own, compassionate, worshipping together, discipling one another and living on mission together reaching out to those who are not yet part of this community.

To answer this question we must first hit the pause button and really think about who God is before we use words to describe Him. God exists as a perfect, loving, self-glorifying community within His triune nature. Within the relationship between God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit exists a self-perpetuating cycle of loving, giving, serving, sacrificing exaltation of Truth and Love. Therefore we can use words like omnipotent, omnipresent and omniscient to describe God, but we also can use words like righteous, holy, loving, merciful, compassionate, worshipful, fun, caring, sacrificial, missional…all of the same words we would likely use to describe the community we see in Acts 2. And, that is the point, after all. The communal life of the church ought to look like God, it ought to reflect His image to the world around us. The right question we should be asking ourselves when we gather in the context of our community groups, or on a Sunday morning, or when we go out to dinner together or have a cook out in our back yard and invite our neighbors, or when we go grocery shopping is this…If God were leading this gathering, or occurrence, what would it look like? Then, we simply follow suit.

The things that will keep us from becoming this kind of community are selfishness, pride, idolatry, self-preservation, misprioritized schedules, misprioritized spending, offenses, unforgiveness, etc.

It is so easy for these things to creep into our lives because we so easily get distracted from the main purpose of our existence. In our culture we are constantly bombarded with information that continually tells us that our identity lies in the opinions of others, our success lies within the amount of comfort we can achieve and our value comes from other’s perceptions of what we have to give. The is so because all of the kingdom of this world, all communities that exist apart from God’s purposes, will automatically default to the pursuit of “being like God” rather than reflecting the image of the One True God. And, if we make the purpose of like about our own glory then of course we will get angry when we feel other people are not putting our needs first. Of course we will be prideful and arrogant when we feel we are not being made much of. Of course we will spend our time and our money on things that make us feel more important or comfortable. Whatever has that place of glory in our lives will be the thing that steers our attitudes and behaviors.

When we focus on, and passionately pursue, the truth of Jesus in the Gospel then it absolutely destroys the idols of pride on one hand and rejection on the other. You see, the Gospel tells us that we are so messed up that Jesus <em>had</em> to die for us, but that we are so loved that he was <em>willing</em> to die for us. And, in understand those two realities, our eyes are opened to the transforming grace of God and we begin to see our identity, value and success come from Him alone. When we are secure in our relationship with Christ then we no longer need to look to others for these things and therefore we are free to unconditionally love, serve and celebrate alongside one another.

The most vital ingredient is keeping the Gospel at the center of all that we are and all that we do.