CATM Sermon - The Holy Trinity & You
Who are you? What makes you tick? What are you about? Why is it that you think the way you think and behave the way you do? What leads you to live the life you live?
Important questions. Questions about identity, character. Questions that start to get at the heart of
what makes us go...what motivates us.
There is a thrill about getting to know a new person. And those are the kind of things we often want to learn about people who are new to us. It’s only normal to ask these kind of questions.
These very same questions are also ones we can ask of God...because God is a person.
For some that last statement may seem pretty odd. There are a lot of people who think of God as being impersonal...for many God is something very, very distant & very different from us - so different as to be unknowable, so beyond us that, many would ay, "The best we can know about God is that he represents the best in all of us”.
And that probably is the most we can say about God...when we rely on our ability to figure God out. That is why most religions come down to this. Be good. And if you’re good enough, you might get to go to heaven. God is out there somewhere, pretty much unreachable, or to some he’s angry, to some he’s a judge waiting to determine how much we will submit to him.
But we don’t have to rely on our ability to figure God out. God knows that the best we could ever come up with on our own is a very, very pale imitation of who he is. And that’s what you find in many expression of religious faith. Christians aren’t exempt from this. For reasons that should become clear in a little while, it is strange but true that a lot of Christians settle with a notion of God that is also distant, fearful, unknowable. But we really don’t have to rely on our ability to figure God out. There’s a better way.
We have the revelation from God about who He is. We have the Holy Bible, and if we read it, we can hear what God has to say about who He is. That is what the Holy Bible is-God’s gift of revelation.
And what does the Bible reveal about God? That’s a big question but there is something in particular that I really believe is worth knowing about God, and if we know it already, there’s something worth probing a little bit deeper into.
The Bible tells us, through the passages that were read earlier as well as in many other passages, that God is One. That is the most important revelation that came to the Israelites in the Old Testament. Most people back then thought that there were many gods. Ancient Roman and Greek people worshiped many different gods and lived in dread, trying to
appease the god.
But God revealed Himself to Israel as One. But the funny thing was, even though it was very, very clear that there was truly only one God, there were odd statements
Genesis 1:1 In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. 2 Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters. 26 Then God said, "Let us make man in our image, in our likeness, and let them rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the livestock, over all the earth, and over all the creatures that move along the ground." God talks about Himself, which is One, as somehow also more than one.
Proverbs 30
4 “Who has gone up to heaven and come down? Who has gathered up the wind in the hollow of his hands? Who has wrapped up the waters in his cloak? Who has established all the ends of the earth? What is his name, and the name of his son? Tell me if you know! “ Can you tell me?!?
There are many, many more such statements in the Old Testament, which was written, remember, long before Jesus Christ walked the earth.
And then we have the New Testament passages that clearly refer to Jesus and the Holy Spirit as God. Again, there are a ton of passages that speak about this [See “The Divinity of Jesus Christ” or more details]. But let’s just look again at two. The first is from Matthew 3:16-16 where we see, together at one special occasion at the same moment in history, the Son and the Spirit and the Father
“And Jesus, when he was baptized, went up straightway out of the water: and, lo, the heavens were opened unto him, and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove, and lighting upon him: And lo a voice from heaven, saying, This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased. Matthew 3:16-17
Now this is nothing fancy. It’s not any deep theology about the Trinity...it simply shows the Father and the Son and the Spirit, the Holy Spirit all together, all one, because there is only, of course, one God, and yet we see three distinct person.
Again, there are lots of passages I could point to here to show that the Holy Spirit and the Son and the Father are God. Let’s just look at one more passage.
John 1:1-3 "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through Him, and without Him nothing was made that was made." A little later in the same chapter it reads: 14The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the One and Only, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth”.
So it’s clear that Jesus is God. It’s clear that the Holy Spirit is God. It’s clear that the Father is
God. But there’s only one God. How can this be.
The church, needing to understand this revelation about God in the Bible said that this simply means that there is One God who is eternally existing in three person: The Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. Mathematics might help us a bit:1x1x1=1 Or, as my son Jared reminded me recently, Egg - shell, yolk, egg white.
That particular order of words for the Trinity comes directly from Jesus in Matthew 28:19: “Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit...”
That’s enough theology. That’s more detail than I normally go into, but it’s necessary to get to the next part of this message:
To sum it up, God is Three in One, or, God is a Community of Persons. There are three who dwell together in heaven, one in purpose, one in glory and majesty, one in power and divinity. This is what the Bible refers to as “the Godhead”. This is the identity of the God we worship. And this identity has a lot to do with what makes God tick, what makes Him think and act as hedoes.
Why does this matter? Firstly, because it’s normal to want to know as much about a person who we care for as possible. Christians have always been interested in WHO it is that they worship because, among other reasons, we are made in HIS image. We are like Him.
We are like him in that we bear his image as individuals, but...more importantly, we bear his
image as a group, as a bunch of people who gather in His name, as a body.
Romans 12:4 Just as each of us has one body with many members, and these members do not all have the same function, 5so in Christ we who are many form one body, and each member belongs to all the others.
1 Corinthians10:16 “... Is not the bread that we break a participation in the body of Christ?
17Because there is one loaf, we, who are many, are one body, for we all partake of the one loaf.
What does this mean? How are we like God as a body? God is Three-in-one. The church is a plurality, or many-in-One. We best understand ourselves and our purpose and our nature when we get that we are a community of persons because we are made in God’s image, and we worship a god who is COMMUNAL in His very identity. That is why Jesus prayed, “Holy
Father, protect them by the power of your name--the name you gave me--so that they may be one as we are one. John 17:11b
John 17:20 "My prayer is not for them alone. I pray also for those who will believe in me through their message, 21that all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you. May they also be in us so that the world may believe that you have sent me. 22I have given them the glory that you gave me, that they may be one as we are one: 23I in them and you in me. May they be brought to complete unity to let the world know that you sent me and have loved
them even as you have loved me".
Why did Jesus pray this? Why didn’t he pray that we would just be good people living good lives and contributing good things to the world? Why didn’t he pray that each of us would hear the gospel and believe the gospel and then huddle away in our own little worlds, untouched by the trouble of other people, set apart from the bother of having to get along with other people who think differently and act differently and have all kinds off different gifts and ways of doing things.
The reason is that we’re not made for that. We’re not made to live as islands unto ourselves. One major reason that there is so much loneliness and sorrow in the world is that human beings try to live as though they can be isolated, or very often, loneliness just happens to people. Friends leave or friendships end, loved ones depart. And we’re left to lead lives of quiet desparation.
What happens, then, if we decide to act on what we’ve heard today? After every time of worship, after every message we hear, there is always an opportunity...an opportunity to sleep sometimes, yes, I admit. But there is also an opportunity to say, “If this is so, and it sure seems like it is so, how shall we then live?”
So, how shall we then live?
If in Christ we who are many form one body, and each member belongs to all the others, then I have a special connection to you.
There is a word in an African language - ‘‘ubuntu’’ - “ubuntu” says that I can only know myself as I see myself through your eyes - so the closer you stand to me, the better I can know myself. That is authentic New Testament community.
We are very much like family, in reality. If we are part of the same family, which in the local sense means the same church or mission, then we truly belong. What does belonging mean to you? When you belong to me and I belong to you and together we belong, in Christ Jesus, to one another, you are part of something bigger than yourself, and not just any old thing.
You are part of the living reality of the body of Christ on this earth. And you are here, right now, at just such a time as this, to give and receive.
If we really want to live as God intends us to live, which is the best kind ofl ife - belonging to Him and belonging to each other, caring about what we are together and each of us taking us seriously as a spiritual family we need:
1. To make sure that we make decisions that with the body of Christ in mind. Should I change jobs? What effect might that have on the body? That should be a consideration.
2. To know that we all belong and have a place here and a way to contribute. That’s why we have things like the Spiritual Gifts Discovery Course, that’s why there’s opportunities here to volunteer with the ushers, to use gifts that you have for God.
3. To think less about ourselves and Jesus...and more about yourself as being connected to
Christ’s body - the church; to see our lives as a blessing to the body, as accountable to the body; you are intended by God to be in relationships. So make sure you put a lot of hard work into establishing and strengthening your relationships.
That is how to live with purpose and meaning and belonging - that’s how to avoid the crippling
loneliness that sometimes happens - which, by the way, is never God’s intention for us.
Let me close with a few passages of Scripture:
1 John 3:11 This is the message you heard from the beginning: We should love one another.
1 John 3:14 We know that we have passed from death to life, because we love our brothers.
1 John 3:18 Dear children, let us not love with words or tongue but with actions and in truth.
1 John 4:7 Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves
has been born of God and knows God.
1 John 4:11 Dear friends, since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. 4:12 No one has ever seen God; but if we love one another, God lives in us and his love is made complete in us.
When people seeing us belonging to one another, caring for one another, they will ask: “Who goes to Church at the Mission? What are they about? What makes them tick? The answer, I pray, will be, “Church at the Mission is a place of belonging, a place to reach out and touch the living God. Church at the Mission is a place of love.
God is Three-in-one. That’s His identity. That’s who He is.
And He calls us to be one in Him. Amen?
Let’s pray.
God, thank you that you love each of us. Thank you that you reveal yourself to us as Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Yet you are, without a doubt, One. Cause us to be, without a doubt, One in You. Help to to realigned our priorities so that we might be the people you call us to be, in order that you would love and change the world through us. In Jesus name, amen.
