Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] No. As they used to say, don't adjust your TV sets.
[00:00:05] Yeah, it's me again.
[00:00:10] Benjamin and his family are not here today. They have gone to Arkansas to be with Benjamin's brother, who is increasingly getting sicker.
[00:00:20] So I want to take just a moment here and to pray for them, if you would join me. As we do that, Father, we proclaim together, holy, holy, holy is your name.
[00:00:38] And in this community where we join our voices together in worship to proclaim your holiness, Father, we also join our voices together to lift up some that we love.
[00:00:52] We pray this morning, Father, for Benjamin's brother Jonathan, that you would be present with him.
[00:01:03] I especially lift up Benjamin and his sister, his mom, so much that they have gone through over the last year. May your spirit, the comforting presence and powerful helper that you have given us, be especially present with them.
[00:01:21] Would you be with Clara and Macy and Nolan and with Rachel?
[00:01:28] Would you be present in the life of Jonathan's kids when there are questions, be especially present.
[00:01:38] And, Father, would you give all of us who are around that family the grace to know when to speak and when not to speak, when to love and when to go above and beyond in serving this sweet family?
[00:01:55] Bless us as we love them. Bless them as they are there with them together. Bless them as they travel. In Jesus name, we all say together, Amen.
[00:02:07] I believe in one God, the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, of all things visible and invisible. Howard, I'm humming a little bit. We may need to come down just a notch.
[00:02:23] I believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ, the only begotten Son of God, begotten of his Father before all worlds. God of God, light of light, very God of very God, Begotten, not made, being of one substance with the Father, by whom all things were made, who for us men and for our salvation came down from heaven and was incarnate by the Holy Spirit of the Virgin Mary. And was made man and was crucified also for us under Pontius Pilate.
[00:02:55] He suffered and was buried. And the third day he rose again according to the Scriptures, and ascended into heaven and sitteth at the right hand of the Father.
[00:03:06] And he shall come again with glory to judge both the quick and the dead, whose kingdom shall have no end.
[00:03:14] And I believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord and giver of life, who proceedeth from the Father and the Son, who with the Father and the Son together is worshiped and glorified.
[00:03:28] Glory be to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit, as it was in the beginning Is now and ever shall be World without end.
[00:03:39] Amen.
[00:03:42] If you've ever heard either of those creeds, chances are it's because you've worshiped in some place where those items were a recurring piece of worship. More than likely wasn't a church where the sign said Church of Christ.
[00:03:59] If you've experienced those, you can even take the hymn we've just sang, Holy, Holy, Holy, and hone on a bit. Hone in a bit on the why for why. We have never used or rarely have used the Gloria Pottery or the Nicene Creed in worship. You see, when it comes to the hymn Holy, Holy, Holy, you're in one of two camps.
[00:04:26] You're in the God Overall and Blessed Eternally camp, or you're in the God in Three Persons, Blessed Trinity camp. Why don't we go ahead and say overall? I'm not going to make you move.
[00:04:39] Thought about it now, why do we have these two camps?
[00:04:46] It used to be taboo to talk about it.
[00:04:50] We in Churches of Christ came out of a movement that placed and continues to place a very high value on Scripture and on being people of the book.
[00:05:00] Here's a problem with that. Being people of the Book meant there was an aversion, a resistance to creeds, statements of faith that were prescribed, both because they weren't authorized in Scripture and for the people who founded our movement.
[00:05:18] They had been part of the religious system that they were fleeing when they first came to America. The Campbells, who were the founding fathers of the Restoration movement, from whence Churches of Christ originate, fled these religious strictures to get away from a hierarchy that they didn't see in Scripture.
[00:05:38] Instead, they said, the Bible is the only creed we need. So what happened?
[00:05:45] Well, it was 1809, September, and Thomas Campbell, Alexander Campbell's father, was making a speech to a religious group that was trying to kick him out of their pulpit. They were looking for some sort of scriptural loophole where they could say, ha, ha, I gotcha. You're gone.
[00:06:04] Didn't have that kind of luck.
[00:06:07] He was preaching about baptism, about congregational autonomy, about open communion, about important things so important that they continue to be studied today. In this speech that became a document known as the Declaration and Address.
[00:06:24] But it's something that Thomas Campbell said in a side conversation after the speech was over that I want us to kind of think about for a minute.
[00:06:32] After the speech was over and done and he was making his way out of this room, somebody asked him a question. I don't know what the question was. I've looked. I'VE looked. I've looked. I've asked. I've looked.
[00:06:47] But this question got attached to the speech that he had made as time passed and made into something far more important than Thomas Campbell ever intended. Here's what he his answer was to this mysterious question.
[00:07:02] Thomas Campbell said, where the Bible speaks, we speak.
[00:07:08] Where the Bible is silent, we are silent.
[00:07:15] The impact of this statement cannot be overstated, especially as it pertains to the Trinity.
[00:07:24] As a result of an innocent side comment, question and answer exchange, speak where the Bible speaks, Be silent. Where the Bible is silent became a creed.
[00:07:38] And because of the premise of that creed, the subject of the Trinity all but faded into the background of our movement not to really come out of hiding until the late 20th century.
[00:07:54] Okay, that's a great story, D.J. why does it matter?
[00:07:59] What's the Trinity? Why does it matter? You ask yourself those questions. Because even though that word Trinity is nowhere to be found in the pages of Scripture sidebar that was the beef for many people for many years. It's not there. Word's not in Scripture. We speak where the Bible speaks. It's not there. We're not going to speak about it.
[00:08:23] Even though that word is nowhere to be found in Scripture, it sits at the core of 2000 years of Christian belief and worship and practice. And it's even more important for us because in the Trinity, God the Father, Jesus the Son, and the Holy Spirit, we see the ideal picture of who God is and who we as followers of Christ are supposed to be and who the church is supposed to be.
[00:08:56] It's 100% accurate that the word Trinity is not in Scripture.
[00:09:01] Neither is the word doughnuts, neither is the word Bible class, neither is the word Welches, and neither is the Word a cappella.
[00:09:13] But the Godhead, the Trinity, the Father, the Son, the Spirit, God in three persons, sits at the background of the entire biblical story. As one preacher that I had in college said, it's there. From Genesis to maps, it's present in our worship, as it should be. Maybe you noticed that today. We're just going to talk about it for a few minutes. Look at it from a 30,000 foot perspective.
[00:09:42] If somebody was asking you, what is the Trinity?
[00:09:49] How might you respond?
[00:09:52] Any number of ways, right? Each boiling back to Father, Son, Holy Spirit. Sure.
[00:09:59] But I think we might be served by beginning with a different question.
[00:10:03] Who is God?
[00:10:07] There's a loaded question.
[00:10:11] There's any number of places we could go to find a suitable answer. The great creeds of the faith, like the two that I Started with would serve us well. But how would we distill it down even further if you had to write your own I believe statement?
[00:10:27] What makes the cut?
[00:10:31] What's of first importance? To use Pauline language, we believe in one living and true God who is the creator of heaven and earth, who is eternal, almighty, unchangeable, infinitely powerful, wise, just and holy. Not bad.
[00:10:53] We believe that the one God eternally exists in three persons, the Father, the Son, the Holy Spirit, and that these three are one God, Co, equal, Co eternal, having precisely the same nature and attributes, are worthy of precisely the same worship. Confidence and obedience.
[00:11:16] The early church really struggled with this idea.
[00:11:20] Three in one, one in three, God in three persons.
[00:11:26] They couldn't wrap their head around this. And it wasn't even into. I mean, there were councils convened in session throughout church history where this was the subject of discussion. Eventually the belief in the Trinity gets reduced to two short statements, one in essence, three in person.
[00:11:52] When we say these things, we mean there are three distinct persons who make up the one God of the Bible. We know that there's one God. We're not preaching three gods. I mean hero Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one.
[00:12:06] Jesus said I and the Father are.
[00:12:11] Jesus said I and the Father are. Okay, you're still awake.
[00:12:18] You ever seen the word Godhead?
[00:12:24] Theologians sometimes use that term when they want to refer to God the Father, God the Son and God the Spirit as three divine persons making up one God.
[00:12:36] We don't believe that there are three Gods. We don't believe that, you know, the Father, Son and Spirit are, you know, a third God here and a third God there and a third God there. We don't know. No, no.
[00:12:49] What's the take away from all this?
[00:12:53] We sang about it a little bit this morning. It was subtle and we said it in the call to worship. But there are some mysteries that our minds simply are incapable comprehending.
[00:13:06] There are some aspects of God that remain incomprehensible. That's a problem for us though, let's be honest.
[00:13:14] We don't like the unknown, we don't like mystery.
[00:13:23] Even just the silence around the Word makes them a disquiration. We want everything to be able to fit into our rational scientific method question and answer box, don't we?
[00:13:40] The first time I heard this passage was in a song at an event at ACU and it was just a one line song before I realized that it was even quoting another great 3:16 in the Bible. Beyond all questions, the mystery of Godliness is great.
[00:14:01] That Word beyond all question, it really means confessedly so we can confess and believe that it is true, that beyond all question the mystery of God is great.
[00:14:17] No doubt that God is much more than just one in essence, three in person. If you feel baffled by the Trinity, and maybe you do because you've never taught, talked about it, you've never heard sermons about it, maybe you have. I didn't have that experience.
[00:14:34] If you feel baffled by the Trinity, welcome to the club.
[00:14:40] The greatest minds of history have stood in amazement before a God so great that he can't be contained by our puny explanation.
[00:14:49] The great church, Father Augustine said, if you can fully understand it, it is not God.
[00:14:58] I like that.
[00:15:01] The Trinity has been called the most puzzling doctrine in the Christian faith and the central truth to the Christian faith. How can it be both?
[00:15:10] It is.
[00:15:13] Someone once asked Daniel Webster, the great late 17th century politician, Congressman, Secretary of State, how can a man of your intellect believe in the Trinity?
[00:15:28] And Webster said, I do not pretend fully to understand the arithmetic of heaven. Now I like that phrase.
[00:15:39] I don't like arithmetic, but I like the arithmetic of heaven.
[00:15:44] The Trinity sends us to a posture of worship before a God who is greater than our minds could ever comprehend.
[00:15:53] We rejoice that we have a triune God who, when we were lost in sin, acted in every person of his being to save us. You ever thought about that?
[00:16:04] The Father gave the Son, the Son offered Himself on the cross. The Holy Spirit brought us Jesus. We were so lost. I read one writer say that it took every part of the Godhead to save us.
[00:16:18] It was a hymn writer. It's a DJ sermon. There's going to be a hymn story.
[00:16:23] In 1774, who wrote a hymn, a Trinitarian hymn.
[00:16:31] This was his third stanza.
[00:16:35] Ignaz. Franz says, Holy Father, Holy Son, Holy Spirit, Three we name you, while in essence only one undivided God. We claim you.
[00:16:50] Then adoring, bend the knee and confess the mystery.
[00:16:58] It is a mystery. And with all the saints we assemble and worship before a God whose greatness we just proclaimed Father, Son and Spirit.
[00:17:08] But while the Trinity is about who God is and all that entails, the Trinity also reveals more about to what God is committed.
[00:17:20] Yes, God is God. Yes, Jesus is God. Yes, God is Spirit.
[00:17:25] But what do they show us together?
[00:17:30] They show us it's all about relationship. It's all about community. It's all about unity, it's love. God is a relational God. It's at the core of who God is. But also it's at the core of what God does and what God needs the church to be. So trinitarian sermon, three points and we're done.
[00:17:53] The Trinity matters because it models community and unity for us.
[00:18:03] The Trinity models community in unity. There's something modeled for us by our three in one God that we do well to pay close attention to and try to model how we live our lives and how we function as a church of God's people in a broken and divided world. There are stunning implications of this. That God has always existed in triune love and fellowship and eternal bliss. That this God has always been love, even when there wasn't yet a creation to love. God is not a lonely, solitary, needy figure. Yes, he's infinitely powerful, but it's not this raw, impersonal, behind the curtain, wizard of Oz type power.
[00:18:55] God is actually more personal than any person you've ever met. He's tri personal Father, Son and Spirit. And before he ever created, hated anything he loved.
[00:19:09] This is foundational to the good news. It's what makes good news good.
[00:19:16] Some of you know that when I finished my dissertation, my PhD program focused on the Trinity in worship. In the course of that, I read more books about things I didn't understand and still don't understand than I could count. But one of those writers was a guy named Fred Sanders. He wrote a book. He wrote a lot about the Trinity, but he wrote a book called the Deep Things of God. I just want to share a little quote from you. From him.
[00:19:46] There's something even better than the Good News.
[00:19:52] That's blasphemy. No, it's not. Hang on.
[00:19:55] There's something even better than the Good News. And that something is God.
[00:20:01] The good news of the Gospel is that God has opened up the dynamics of his triune life and given us a share in that perfect fellowship. But all of that Good News only makes sense against the background of something even better than the Good News. The goodness that is the perfection of God himself.
[00:20:23] The Trinity is first and foremost a teaching about who God is. And the God of the Trinity would have been God. The Trinity, whether He had revealed himself to us or not, whether he had redeemed us, whether he had created us or not, he said, there's something better than the Good News. And that something is God. And the Good news is good news. Because the Good News is what brings us into connection into relationship with this God. Father, Son and Spirit.
[00:20:57] Jesus says in John 17:24, Father, I desire that they also whom you have given me, may be with me where I am, to see my Glory that you have given me because you love me before the foundation of the world. The love of the Trinity is the fountain of all love and all grace. And it's the reason God can show love and grace to you and me is because God is love and he's always been love. That's number two. The Trinity models love for us.
[00:21:32] The Trinity models love for us.
[00:21:36] I find myself using the language of Scott McKnight pretty regularly. He wrote a really important book called the Jesus Creed.
[00:21:45] At the center of the Jesus Creed is the Shema. And at the center of the Shema, Deuteronomy, chapter 6, verses 4 through 6, is the God of love. And at the center of the God of love is the word one. And that word one, Scott McKnight says C.S. lewis says, is a divine dance.
[00:22:10] What Jesus said in John the 10th chapter, that he and the Father were one. Every Jew who heard him thought of that Statement from Deuteronomy 6. Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. Now, Jesus was claiming that he and the Father were one. So somehow there were two in one. And as the church gradually began to comprehend, they were actually three in one. This Jesus Creed that we believe, that we follow as followers of Jesus comes from this three in oneness of God. How are three one? Jesus own words the Father is in me and I am in the Father. The oneness of the Father and the Son is the oneness of, to use churchy language, mutual indwelling. I think that's the way the RSV even translates it at times, mutual indwelling with one another.
[00:23:06] Now, if we add the Father and the Son to the third person of the Trinity, the Spirit, we arrive at something that is distinct to our Christian faith.
[00:23:15] The Father and the Son and the Spirit are one because they indwell one another.
[00:23:20] They interrelate and love each other so deeply that they are one.
[00:23:28] The dance of the Trinity CS Lewis said, if you think me not irreverent, a kind of dance to change the image only slightly. It's the dance we see in the rope of a Celtic knot. Have you ever seen this?
[00:23:46] That picture in there, Matt?
[00:23:51] Yeah.
[00:23:54] Of all of the images that are there. If you just Google search image of the Trinity, a thousand things will come up.
[00:24:03] Where's the beginning? Where's the end of this knot?
[00:24:08] I don't know.
[00:24:11] But it's a great representation of the interrelatedness of the Trinity. But even that love is not fully understandable.
[00:24:21] I like the way the new living translation handles. Ephesians 3:19 May you experience the love of Christ. Though it is too great to comprehend fully.
[00:24:34] The Trinity teaches us that before the foundation of the world, God was having fellowship with his own being.
[00:24:41] That's why the Bible tells us that the Father loves the Son. In some sense, we can never understand that God, Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit have forever communicated and loved each other.
[00:24:56] Another writer that I came to love to read was Francis Schaeffer. He talks about this a lot in his books. He says this is where the human desire for intimacy and communication comes from. We were made to communicate and to love like God loves. Like the love, the unity, the community that exists eternally between God, Jesus and Spirit. That design is part of God's image within each of us.
[00:25:27] Perfect relational love that existed before the foundations of the world were laid.
[00:25:35] The Trinity grew out of this deep threefold pattern of relationship.
[00:25:40] The way we understand God's manner of loving and relating sets the model for how God's followers conduct their lives and carry out their mission to the world. And this is number three. The Trinity calls the church back to its mission, its vocation, its identity, its calling.
[00:26:01] The unity and community. The communion that exists between Father, Son and Spirit models what the church is supposed to look like and how to function as God's people in a divided world.
[00:26:19] Mission is an all encompassing term that relates to the church's witness in the world. Oftentimes we think of missions as something that's at a distance.
[00:26:28] Sometimes we think of evangelism and mission together. In any case, witnesses in Scripture empowered by and ultimately only effective because of the Holy Spirit. Mission in the Bible is appropriated to the Holy Spirit because the Church's mission is an extension of the Spirit's mission.
[00:26:49] Had to Memorize Acts, chapter 1, verse 8 for Carl Brackeen's freshman Bible class.
[00:26:55] But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you. And you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in Judea and Samaria, and to all the ends of the world.
[00:27:08] This mission is the outward extension of the Spirit's mission in our own lives. That is, the Spirit eternally proceeds from the Father and the Son. He is eternally the Spirit of the Father and the Son. He testifies to those from whom he proceeds. Because the Son is the image of the Father, the Spirit testifies to the Son in whom we see the Father. You see how that line is just a perpetual circle?
[00:27:42] So the mission of the church is ultimately empowered by and effective because of God, the Trinity, this triune God.
[00:27:52] Not only do we behold the Triune God and the missions of the Son and the mission of the Spirit. We enable others to behold the triune God in our proclamation of the Gospel to a lost and dying world.
[00:28:06] May our beholding of the triune God encourage and empower us to show him to others.
[00:28:13] Dawn, read the Great Commission passage from Matthew 28. When we accept that commission, Jesus has given us as his followers one that is the singular name of God in all of the background of the biblical language there. It's significant because it doesn't say in the names of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. It says in the name of the Father, Son and Spirit.
[00:28:45] When we accept that commission, we are committing to modeling the unity of the Trinity with each other as we stand arm in arm looking for every possible opportunity to love every human being in the world around us.
[00:29:01] The Trinity is supposed to change how we live our lives and how we recognize the presence of the kingdom of God in the world.
[00:29:09] The Trinity means that the church is fundamentally about relationship. Church is not a building, but it's a way being in the world. If the Trinity insists that relationships are what really matters, then that becomes. If you hear nothing else, hear this, that that becomes the litmus test for what people think faith looks like in the world.
[00:29:34] If the Trinity insists that relationships are what really matters, then that becomes the litmus test for what faith looks like in the world.
[00:29:48] Leonard Allen sums it up this way in his really important book Poured Out. He says, put in trinitarian terms, we can say that Christian discipleship means following the risen Christ in the power of the Holy Spirit, to the glory and praise of God the Father.
[00:30:07] Stand together. Please don't go ahead and come up.
[00:30:11] We're going to sing together as we sing. Our prayer team will be available at the back of the room to receive you, to pray with you, however we might be able to serve you. This is a time we have said is an important time of prayer and response.
[00:30:26] So, church, may we be committed to the unity, love and mission of the Trinity as we seek to bring about the mission of God in the world.
[00:30:40] May we be fully devoted to making disciples, loving others in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
[00:30:50] And as we do so, may the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with us all.
[00:31:02] Amen.
[00:31:05] Praise.
