The Trinity

Today we celebrate Trinity Sunday in which we have an opportunity together to give some thought to the doctrine of the Trinity and its implications for our life and faith. We can perhaps better understand the Trinity in the ways in which we relate to God – the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit and what better place to begin than by looking at parts of the Nicene Creed which states:

We believe in one God, the Father, the almighty, maker of heaven and earth…

This describes God as a creator.  The image of God as Father has had a lasting significance to the Christian faith down the ages. We might consider God’s appearance to Moses in the form of a burning bush, on Mount Sinai when He gave Moses the Ten Commandments, or when He was in fellowship with and walked with Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden.

We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ, the only Son of God…

Christians assert that Jesus is both fully human and fully divine, God incarnate, God in the flesh.  We can reflect on Jesus’ birth, life, and ministry and the many miracles He did, and the sacrifice He made for each and every one of us.  Only Jesus as God could accomplish what He did on the cross – to conquer sin and death once and for all; this was the way in which God experienced what it was to be human.

We believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life…

For Christians, the Holy Spirit is the power of God, whom people experience in their daily lives.  He is ‘God in us’, God the helper, sustainer, and encourager. I think it is helpful to think about Pentecost, the birth of the early Church, and the empowering of the Apostles and the followers of Jesus. 

God is one ‘in essence’ and three ‘in person’. God’s essence is His very being. To be even more precise, essence is what you are. The “substance” of God is God, not a bunch of “ingredients” that taken together yield deity. What the Bible asks of us as disciples of Christ to do is to exhibit the love of God to others and to give ourselves in self-denying sacrificial service and self-subordination, as the Lord of glory did in becoming one with us in our humanity and dying on the cross. In other words, the incarnate Christ provides the perfect example of Godly living. And in this we must always hold before us the Great Commission in which we are commanded to “go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you.” Any healthy Church will not lose sight of the centrality of evangelism, an activity which is to be a hallmark or characteristic of the priesthood of all believers. In this place, we should intentionally journey deeper in our faith and grow as disciples through Christ and in the power of the Holy Spirit who may bring about that transformation in our life – all to the glory of God.

Mike Higton, Professor of Theology and Ministry at Durham, said in recent years:

“So there is God, the one to whom we pray, the one to whom we look, to whom we call out, the one who made the world and who loves all that has been made. And then there is God by our side, God once more the one with whom we pray; God in the life of this man who shares our life, this man who lives the life of God by our side, and who pours out his life in love for us. And then there is God in our hearts, God in our guts, God one more time, the stream in which we dip our toes, the stream in which we long to swim, the stream which filled the Son and can fill us too, and bear us in love back to our source.

The life of the one God meets us in all these three ways, and all that we meet in these three ways, has its roots deep, deep down in God’s life—all the way down in God’s life—in ways that our minds are not fit to grasp in ways that break our words to bits. One life, one love, one will, works through these three to meet us when we pray, to catch hold of us, to bear us up—and to take us home.

And that’s why our words for God need to stretch; one-bit words, it turns out, will not do on their own. We call the source, the one to whom we pray, God the Father. And we call the one by our side, the one with whom we pray, God once more, Jesus. And we call the one in our hearts, the one in whom we pray, God one more time, the Spirit. And that is why we call this God—the God we meet when we pray, the God we know when we pray—that is why we call this God ‘three in one’; that is why we call our God Trinity.”

In all of this be assured that God is in control. God knows exactly what he is doing. God is sovereign and the victory is already His.  And God who spoke the first word will also have the last word. And for us as disciples, let us be filled with hope and inspired because “those who hope in the Lord will renew their strength. They will soar on wings like eagles; they will run and not grow weary, they will walk and not be faint.” Amen