The Trinity 1 - Where Do I Begin? Series

THE TRINITY I

Where Do I Begin…

09/23/12

How many of you are familiar with that old Andy Williams song, “Love Story”. The first line of the song goes, “Where do I begin, to tell the story of how great a love can be…” That my friends is my quandary, where do I begin to tell the story how great the greatest love ever, can be? But that is the task I will betaking on.

The task? Preaching a series of sermons on the doctrine of the Trinity. When I say Trinity what I mean is the Biblical teaching that God has revealed himself as, to quote James White, “Within the one being that is God, there exists eternally three coequal and coeternal persons, namely the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.” I do recognize that this is a monumental task. In fact it is in some respect an impossible task. In his work “Lectures in Systematic Theology” 19th century theologian R.L. Dabney stated this to his students regarding the Trinity, “We cannot disprove here, by our own reasoning, any more than we can prove: for the subject is beyond our cognition. I pray the student to bear in mind, that I am not here attempting to explain the Trinity, but just the contrary: I am endeavoring to convince him that it cannot be explained.”

Dabney’s point was that God is unfathomable, He cannot be comprehended, He will not fit inside our small brains. He is God! He will not fit inside whatever theological or humanistic box we would like to mold Him in. While we can not grasp God in all His glory, we can learn and may I say love, what He has revealed about Himself to us.

To quote another famous theologian Emil Brunner, “Even the revealed God remains a hidden God, and He wills to be worshipped as the one who is hidden and unfathomable”. Its is this hidden and unfathomable God that I want us to learn about throughout this series, because the WAY in which God has revealed Himself, is the WAY He desires to be worshipped and loved.

As we go through this series I first must begin with some basic truths before we get into the meat of the doctrine. The first basic truth we must see is that the doctrine of the Trinity is important. This is something we will flesh out even further in future sermons.

But let me begin with this, to me this is the most important series of sermons I have preached, because it is the most important topic I have preached upon. What could be more important then talking about Who and What God is? Because of its importance, we will be taking our time in covering this topic.

I will say this, I have spend more time studying the topic of the Trinity than any other topic since I have been a Christian. I have read several books on the Trinity, I have read papers, articles, outlines. I have listen to sermons by other preachers on this topic. All over the course of months. I did so because this is such an important topic to me and I want to get it right. As a side note, rather then list all of the research material that was used, if you want to know what it is, it is posted on our website. www.mccbchurch.org

My prayer is that I can communicate to each of you, how important this topic is, how important it is to your faith, to your worship, to your walk with Christ, because if you get this wrong, you may find yourself hearing the words of Jesus in Matthew 7:21-23 ““Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven. On that day many will say to me, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and cast out demons in your name, and do many mighty works in your name?’ And then will I declare to them, ‘I never knew you; depart from me, you workers of lawlessness.’” It is vitally important as we see in that passage, that we KNOW Jesus, and Jesus KNOWS us.

To do the will of Father, you MUST have an understanding of who the Father is, who the Son is, who the Holy Spirit is. This topic of the Triune nature of God, has eternal ramifications. I am fully aware that some of what we will be discussing, some of you may not follow, some of may simply not care. I will try to make things as simple as possible. But I would plea, in fact I am begging with you to seek to gain understanding, and again realize how important of a topic this is.