LIFE IN THE TRINITY

I once read a book titled The Pursuit of God. It challenged me to “follow hard after God” The book also provided me with ways to channel my serious pursuit. I do think we should take our pursuit of God seriously.  Yet, as I have reflected more deeply on Scripture, I have come to see that the biblical story places even greater emphasis on God’s pursuit of us.

The whole drama of the Bible is the story of a God who moves toward humanity. The Father pursues us in his Son and by his Spirit, drawing us back home to himself. In this gracious movement, God reveals not only who he is toward us, but who he eternally is within himself—a God of love, communion, and self-giving.

Our journey of faith does not begin with our searching, but with God’s seeking. The Father encounters us through Jesus and in the Spirit. And our ongoing communion with God continues in the same way: the Father continually comes to us so that we might share in the Son’s own relationship with him in the Spirit.

By the Spirit, God personally encounters us, enabling us to participate in all that he has accomplished in Christ. As we share in the Son’s life, we come to know the love of God in the communion of the Spirit. 

So, when we speak of pursuing God, we must begin by recognising that God has first pursued us. Only in light of His constant pursuit of us can our own pursuit of Him be rightly understood. A serious pursuit of God is always born from an awareness of His prior and gracious pursuit of us.

In the garden, God walked with the first humans, seeking communion with them. Daily, they enjoyed the presence of God walking through the garden that was their home. God’s coming was not an interruption but the most natural rhythm of life in the garden. To speak with God was as effortless as breathing. He spoke to them, and they breathed in His word. They responded, breathing out their hearts to Him.  Nothing was more ordinary than these encounters with the communion-seeking God. Life was communing with God, and communing with God was life itself.

What was true in the garden is now truer still for us in Christ. The Father and the Son come to us by the Spirit, making their home with us. Attentive to our Father as dearly loved children in Jesus, we cry Abba Father with Jesus. God is not distant or waiting to be invited. He is present, indwelling us by His Spirit, for relationship. To commune with God is, once again, meant to be as natural as breathing.

However, this often does not feel like our daily experience. Instead of prayer being as simple and life-giving as breath, it becomes as complicated as living itself. Prayer becomes something we do rather than a way of being with the Father in the Son by the Spirit. We try to get God’s attention rather than resting in His nearness. What we need is not better techniques, but deeper awareness. God is, and always has been, a communion-seeking God. When we grasp this, prayer becomes less an effort and more a response, and everything else flows naturally from this living reality.

We come before God, both in our longing and our brokenness, our hope and our failure. We approach, not presenting an improved version of ourselves, but standing honestly before the One whose love for us never wavers. We trust that God already knows us, receives us, and desires our presence more than our performance. Communion, therefore, begins when we stop trying to control our relationship with God and entrust ourselves to the God who shapes the encounter. True communion is not something we manufacture; it is something we open ourselves to. As we entrust ourselves to the God who loves us beyond what we can measure or imagine, we are drawn into a depth of fellowship that surpasses anything we could create on our own. In the Spirit, we are drawn toward the Father through Jesus.  We get to share in Jesus’ communion with the Father.

Our anxious efforts to perfect our prayers often hinder the very communion we seek. Even with the best of intentions, we can become preoccupied with evaluating our prayers — wondering whether they are good enough, deep enough, or effective enough. In doing so, our focus turns inward, and we risk distracting ourselves from what God is already doing within us.

The heart of prayer is not self-evaluation but God-attention. When we fixate on what we are doing or what we are gaining out of it, we shift our gaze away from God and back onto ourselves. We must see that the form and fruit of communion belong to God, not to us.

Our task is both simple and demanding: to turn toward God in trustful openness and remain there. Even our prayers come from God’s Spirit praying within us through Jesus to the Father.

The Triune God is a living communion of love who has graciously moved toward us through Christ and by the Spirit. The purpose of this self-giving movement is to draw us into the joy of God’s own communal life. And we share in this communion as we are brought to the Father, through the Son, and by the Spirit. 

What must we do to share in this communion of joyful love?   There is nothing special that we need to do other than turn up just as we are.  Not as we should be, could be, or hope one day to become, but simply as we are in this moment. Yet being truly ourselves before God proves far more difficult than it sounds.

In our relationships — including our relationship with God — we tend to present the version of ourselves we believe will be most acceptable. Fear of rejection often shapes how we relate to others, and even to God, leading us to hide behind subtle forms of pretence. Yet before God, such performances are unnecessary and ultimately harmful. God does not seek an edited version of us, but invites us into a relationship marked by vulnerability and honesty.

To stand before God in this open way requires deep trust in His love. Scripture assures us that God demonstrated this love in Christ while we were still sinners, still resistant, still far from Him. That same love remains unwavering now. We are invited to lean our whole weight upon the God who desires us as we are in the present moment. Only confidence in God’s love makes genuine openness possible.

This does not imply that God is content to leave us unchanged. On the contrary, He meets us to transform us from the inside out. But transformation is not a prerequisite for communion; it is its fruit. We come as we are, trusting His love, and longing to be renewed within the fellowship of Father, Son, and Spirit.

We all want to hold a “correct” view of God, and may assume that the way we see God aligns with the great orthodox creeds. Yet, honest reflection may reveal that your image of God does not fully align with the God revealed in Jesus. Old assumptions can continue to shape our thinking. For many, this means living under a heavy burden of guilt, shaped by a harsh and punitive deity who feels menacing rather than merciful. With such a view of God, nowhere feels safe from the looming presence of a God created out of our own fear. What we need is a huge shift toward the God revealed in Jesus: the God who invites us into loving communion rather than dread.

The God we encounter in Jesus, through the Spirit, has already done everything necessary to restore that communion and continues to work so that it becomes a reality in our daily experience. We are invited to trust that it is God’s initiative, not our effort, that establishes our relationship with God. Our part is simply to turn toward God with openness, attentiveness, and a willingness to receive His love. This is not an obligation to be met, but an invitation into transforming encounters of love.

Such a journey begins with knowing, deeply and personally, the vastness of God’s love for you. All of us must return to this truth again and again; indeed, we can never receive too much of it. Our walk with God is shaped and strengthened when we rest confidently in His love. Everything else required of us in life is meant to flow from this lived experience of God’s extravagant affection.

Jesus gives us the Living Water of the Spirit to drink.  This Living Water becomes a spring of water that wells up within us to eternal life.  Jesus himself defined eternal life as knowing the Father and the Son; therefore, the Living Water is nothing less than a welling-up of divine communion within our hearts. Through this gift, we are drawn into the mutual love that flows eternally between the Father and the Son. Prayer, then, becomes the natural overflow of these living waters, a movement from the depths of our transformed hearts.

This Living Water is a pure gift freely given by Christ so that we may participate in his own loving relationship with the Father. Only within this communion of love can true prayer emerge, not as our effort alone, but as God’s own action alive within us. 

In prayer, we must bring our requests to God, but it’s far more than asking for things. Nor is prayer a mere religious duty or obligation. In its deepest essence, prayer is a personal meeting in love, a living communion with the God who is Love, who created us for love, and who desires to fill us with his own life. Through the Living Water of the Spirit, prayer becomes a participation in the divine communion which is life in fullness.  Paul prayed that we would grasp the breadth, length, height, and depth of God’s love so that we might be filled with all the fullness of God (Ephesians 3:14-18). This is the reality toward which the Living Water of the Spirit draws us.

God is love, and we come to know Him as we share in the communion of love that God is. Within this divine fellowship, our awareness of God’s love for us continually deepens. In the same way, our love for God grows as we are drawn into Jesus’ own love for the Father in the Spirit.

Prayer, then, is not merely something we do. Within this communion of love, prayer becomes a way of resting in the truth of who we are: God’s dearly loved children. This is our most fundamental identity. Only within this communion can we become who we most deeply are and know who we most deeply are. Only here can we grow into the full and authentic humans we are in Christ. Prayer is therefore not a task to accomplish but a way of being—a participation in the life of the God who is love.

And astonishingly, we really do dwell in this God. Paul writes, “you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God” (Colossians 3:3). Jesus died to the whole realm of sin that ruled over all in death. He did so to conquer it and liberate us from it.   Now, in him, we are no longer under that old dominion of sin; we have been set free. Even more, we have been raised with Christ, and our true lives are now hidden with Him in God. This means that, in a profoundly real way, we share in the Triune communion of love through the Spirit, living our lives from within God’s own life.

We may think of prayer as a conversation with God: He speaks to us and we speak back to Him.  Prayer as conversation has helped many people, including me.  However, the problem with understanding prayer as conversation is that prayer is so much more than communication.  Reducing prayer to conversation makes it simply a mental activity of words and thoughts rather than a transformative encounter.

I think we should rather view prayer as communion with God. Communion includes conversation, but it extends far beyond it. Communion involves closeness, connection, and a depth of intimacy that mere dialogue cannot capture. Paul reminds us that we are in Christ, just as Christ is in us. And as we indwell Jesus and he indwells us, we share in his communion with the Father by the Spirit. Only within the intimacy of this shared communal life can we enjoy true encounters with Abba as dearly loved children..

Our union with Christ is not only a future hope, but also a present reality. Even though our experience of this union may be lacking and intermittent, the union itself is real here and now. And the communion we enter into through this union possesses the unique power to transform us from within.

Because prayer is communion, we do not need to be talking to God every moment to be truly praying. We can simply be with God. Within communion, prayer remains a relationship of dialogue, but more fundamentally, it is a personal encounter. And since God is love, we can only encounter Him within the communion of love that He is as love and for the sake of love.

Many books seek to teach us how to pray, but should we see prayer as something we do, or as something we try to do better? True prayer is what God does within us. True prayer is not primarily our action; it is what God does within us. The indwelling Spirit of the Son prays in us, joining our hearts to the prayers of the Son before the Father. Our task is simple—to open ourselves to God as he prays in and through us.

Through prayer, God touches the world, but as we open ourselves to his movement within, he first touches and transforms us. We become the people he desires us to be as we learn to live in openness before him. This is very different from how most of us think about prayer.

In prayer, we are drawn into the triune communion of Father, Son, and Spirit. Within that shared life, the Spirit enables us to grasp “the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge” (Ephesians 3:20).  God’s love is always far beyond what we can fully grasp, and so prayer, too, is always greater than we can imagine. No method or formula can ever make us “masters” of prayer, because true prayer depends on God’s initiative, not ours.

Speaking words towards God isn’t necessarily prayer. God has opened himself to us, and his Spirit now prays within us, crying, “Abba, Father.” We join this movement as we turn toward God through Jesus in the Spirit. Anything else may resemble prayer, but genuine prayer always begins with an open heart responding to God’s own life within us.

Through Jesus and by His Spirit, God has opened Himself to us so that we may have communion with Him.  In response, we are to open ourselves by the Spirit and through Jesus so that we actually enjoy communion with the Father. 

Such openness to God is truly life-transforming. Just think of how much this would transform your identity as you experience your belonging to the Father.  We come to understand ourselves as dearly loved children of the Father, and this changes how we relate to Him, to others, and to the world around us. 

A life lived in continual openness to God’s love becomes a living prayer. Not merely words spoken to Him, but a constant awareness and reception of His life and presence flowing through us. Though few of us can remain fully open to God at every moment, His grace enables us to grow in that direction. Distractions and obstacles often pull us away, but perhaps the greatest barrier is our distorted understanding of who God is. When we see God through Jesus and He is made real to us by His Spirit, we do see God as He truly is. Then those false images begin to fall away. 

The God we see through Jesus longs to remove whatever blocks our communion with Him and to fill us increasingly with His life, drawing us into ever deeper participation in His communion of joyful love.  Yes, God wants us to truly know Him, sharing in His life as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.