Meeting Up With The Trinity

Meeting Up With the Trinity

June 3, 2007

Trinity Sunday

As has been said - today - this Sunday is Trinity Sunday. The Sunday set aside in the church year to highlight and recognize the Trinity.

The Trinity being

God the Father

Jesus Christ the Son

And the Holy Spirit

Back in the year 325, the first Christian emperor Constantine gathered a group of Christian leaders, to discuss and sort out the various views circulating about Christianity. This meeting was specifically trying to figure out and gain understanding on God. In their experience they worshipped God as they went to the Temple. From their ancestors they heard stories of a man named Jesus who claimed to be God’s son and in their experience they knew of God’s Spirit being within them. So the question surfaced,

How did all of these -Father, Son, and Holy Spirit fit together? Or did they fit together?

The result of this gathering was a creed called the Nicene Creed, that affirms the belief of a Trinitarian God - God having 3 persons - Father/Son/and Holy Spirit.

And just a hundred years later, a second gathering produced the Apostle’s Creed that affirms this same reality.

If you tuned out during that history lesson, come back now. Notice it wasn’t Jesus who taught his disciples about the Trinity. Jesus never sat down with the 12 and did a lesson explaining this. God, the Father never told Moses or anyone else "I am a God of 3 persons." The Holy Spirit didn’t say, "I’m 1/3 of God." This kind of bluntness isn’t in the Bible. In fact the word Trinity doesn’t even appear in the Bible.

This explanation of God came about as people - religious leaders tried to gain understanding and an explanation for what they had experienced as being true.

300 years of living had gone on since Jesus’ death and resurrection and 300 years of life had happened since Pentecost and they were trying to make sense of it. Their answer - God has given himself to us as the Father, Son and Spirit - the Trinity, 3 in 1.

And 2000 years later.

Generation upon generation of people have affirmed the fact that God has revealed himself to us as:

God the Father

Jesus Christ, the Son

And Holy Spirit

3 in One.

Though we might have a hard time explaining how this works out, if you look back over your Christian journey, no doubt you would be able to identify the work of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

There would be places

Circumstances

Feelings

Experiences

Teachings

Answered prayers

Convictions

that all point to distinct aspects of God the Father, Son and Holy Spirit and so today around the world Churches choose to remind ourselves that our God is a Trinity.

Before I go on, I need to state the obvious - this is a harder message to listen to. Last night Deb told me - you better warn them. So I’m warning you and if you are a visitor next week we’ll be back to normal. But for today I want us to dig in a bit, explore a bit. I’ve let this Sunday pass by the past few years but not this year.

So What I want to do is this.

1. Look at 4 texts that reveal and support - give evidence to God being 3 in 1.

2. Then I’d make 3 observations.

3. Tell a little about how I have experienced the Trinity in my own life.

Genesis 1:26, (page 3) is the 6th day of creation.

God has spoken into existence:

Light

Water

Land

Plants

Animals

And to cap it all off in verse 26, he says

Then the Lord said, "Let us make man in our image, in our likeness and let them rule . . ." Notice the pronouns.

"Let us make man in our image. In our likeness . . ."God doesn’t say "Let me make man in my image." God didn’t say, "Let there me man - mankind" as he did when he created everything else. No - when humanity was formed, God gave/deposited himself a plural himself in humanity. He formed the 1st humans out of who he was and is - a God with 3 natures.

In verse 2 of chapter 1, the author of Genesis tells us that the Holy Spirit was hovering over the waters of creation. God the Father wasn’t acting alone in creation. The Holy Spirit, the Spirit of god was present.

And in the book of John, verses 1 and 2, we read:

"In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning."

The writer John begins his book much like the book of Genesis, "In the beginning"