LIFE IN THE TRINITY

We all want to hold a “correct” view of God, and may assume that the way we see God aligns with the great orthodox creeds. Yet, honest reflection may reveal that your image of God does not fully align with the God revealed in Jesus. Old assumptions can continue to shape our thinking. For many, this means living under a heavy burden of guilt, shaped by a harsh and punitive deity who feels menacing rather than merciful. With such a view of God, nowhere feels safe from the looming presence of a God created out of our own fear. What we need is a huge shift toward the God revealed in Jesus: the God who invites us into loving communion rather than dread.

The God we encounter in Jesus, through the Spirit, has already done everything necessary to restore that communion and continues to work so that it becomes a reality in our daily experience. We are invited to trust that it is God’s initiative, not our effort, that establishes our relationship with God. Our part is simply to turn toward God with openness, attentiveness, and a willingness to receive His love. This is not an obligation to be met, but an invitation into transforming encounters of love.

Such a journey begins with knowing, deeply and personally, the vastness of God’s love for you. All of us must return to this truth again and again; indeed, we can never receive too much of it. Our walk with God is shaped and strengthened when we rest confidently in His love. Everything else required of us in life is meant to flow from this lived experience of God’s extravagant affection.

Jesus gives us the Living Water of the Spirit to drink.  This Living Water becomes a spring of water that wells up within us to eternal life.  Jesus himself defined eternal life as knowing the Father and the Son; therefore, the Living Water is nothing less than a welling-up of divine communion within our hearts. Through this gift, we are drawn into the mutual love that flows eternally between the Father and the Son. Prayer, then, becomes the natural overflow of these living waters, a movement from the depths of our transformed hearts.

This Living Water is a pure gift freely given by Christ so that we may participate in his own loving relationship with the Father. Only within this communion of love can true prayer emerge, not as our effort alone, but as God’s own action alive within us. 

In prayer, we must bring our requests to God, but it’s far more than asking for things. Nor is prayer a mere religious duty or obligation. In its deepest essence, prayer is a personal meeting in love, a living communion with the God who is Love, who created us for love, and who desires to fill us with his own life. Through the Living Water of the Spirit, prayer becomes a participation in the divine communion which is life in fullness.  Paul prayed that we would grasp the breadth, length, height, and depth of God’s love so that we might be filled with all the fullness of God (Ephesians 3:14-18). This is the reality toward which the Living Water of the Spirit draws us.

God is love, and we come to know Him as we share in the communion of love that God is. Within this divine fellowship, our awareness of God’s love for us continually deepens. In the same way, our love for God grows as we are drawn into Jesus’ own love for the Father in the Spirit.

Prayer, then, is not merely something we do. Within this communion of love, prayer becomes a way of resting in the truth of who we are: God’s dearly loved children. This is our most fundamental identity. Only within this communion can we become who we most deeply are and know who we most deeply are. Only here can we grow into the full and authentic humans we are in Christ. Prayer is therefore not a task to accomplish but a way of being—a participation in the life of the God who is love.

And astonishingly, we really do dwell in this God. Paul writes, “you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God” (Colossians 3:3). Jesus died to the whole realm of sin that ruled over all in death. He did so to conquer it and liberate us from it.   Now, in him, we are no longer under that old dominion of sin; we have been set free. Even more, we have been raised with Christ, and our true lives are now hidden with Him in God. This means that, in a profoundly real way, we share in the Triune communion of love through the Spirit, living our lives from within God’s own life.

We may think of prayer as a conversation with God: He speaks to us and we speak back to Him.  Prayer as conversation has helped many people, including me.  However, the problem with understanding prayer as conversation is that prayer is so much more than communication.  Reducing prayer to conversation makes it simply a mental activity of words and thoughts rather than a transformative encounter.

I think we should rather view prayer as communion with God. Communion includes conversation, but it extends far beyond it. Communion involves closeness, connection, and a depth of intimacy that mere dialogue cannot capture. Paul reminds us that we are in Christ, just as Christ is in us. And as we indwell Jesus and he indwells us, we share in his communion with the Father by the Spirit. Only within the intimacy of this shared communal life can we enjoy true encounters with Abba as dearly loved children..

Our union with Christ is not only a future hope, but also a present reality. Even though our experience of this union may be lacking and intermittent, the union itself is real here and now. And the communion we enter into through this union possesses the unique power to transform us from within.

Because prayer is communion, we do not need to be talking to God every moment to be truly praying. We can simply be with God. Within communion, prayer remains a relationship of dialogue, but more fundamentally, it is a personal encounter. And since God is love, we can only encounter Him within the communion of love that He is as love and for the sake of love.

Many books seek to teach us how to pray, but should we see prayer as something we do, or as something we try to do better? True prayer is what God does within us. True prayer is not primarily our action; it is what God does within us. The indwelling Spirit of the Son prays in us, joining our hearts to the prayers of the Son before the Father. Our task is simple—to open ourselves to God as he prays in and through us.

Through prayer, God touches the world, but as we open ourselves to his movement within, he first touches and transforms us. We become the people he desires us to be as we learn to live in openness before him. This is very different from how most of us think about prayer.

In prayer, we are drawn into the triune communion of Father, Son, and Spirit. Within that shared life, the Spirit enables us to grasp “the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge” (Ephesians 3:20).  God’s love is always far beyond what we can fully grasp, and so prayer, too, is always greater than we can imagine. No method or formula can ever make us “masters” of prayer, because true prayer depends on God’s initiative, not ours.

Speaking words towards God isn’t necessarily prayer. God has opened himself to us, and his Spirit now prays within us, crying, “Abba, Father.” We join this movement as we turn toward God through Jesus in the Spirit. Anything else may resemble prayer, but genuine prayer always begins with an open heart responding to God’s own life within us.

Through Jesus and by His Spirit, God has opened Himself to us so that we may have communion with Him.  In response, we are to open ourselves by the Spirit and through Jesus so that we actually enjoy communion with the Father. 

Such openness to God is truly life-transforming. Just think of how much this would transform your identity as you experience your belonging to the Father.  We come to understand ourselves as dearly loved children of the Father, and this changes how we relate to Him, to others, and to the world around us. 

A life lived in continual openness to God’s love becomes a living prayer. Not merely words spoken to Him, but a constant awareness and reception of His life and presence flowing through us. Though few of us can remain fully open to God at every moment, His grace enables us to grow in that direction. Distractions and obstacles often pull us away, but perhaps the greatest barrier is our distorted understanding of who God is. When we see God through Jesus and He is made real to us by His Spirit, we do see God as He truly is. Then those false images begin to fall away. 

The God we see through Jesus longs to remove whatever blocks our communion with Him and to fill us increasingly with His life, drawing us into ever deeper participation in His communion of joyful love.  Yes, God wants us to truly know Him, sharing in His life as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

The Old Testament reveals that God is present throughout the entire universe, yet it also shows that He dwelt in a special way in the temple. The temple was considered the house of God, the place where people went to meet Him (Psalm 27:4).

With the coming of the New Covenant, this understanding changes. God’s dwelling place is no longer a physical building but His people (1 Corinthians 3:16; 6:19). The God who fills the universe now lives within us. We are a people of His Presence. We can look at this in the context of our union with Christ. Through the Spirit, Christ is in us, and we are in Him. As Paul writes, “I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me” (Galatians 2:20).

When we consider God’s personal presence, we may want to sense his presence. And we feel disappointed if we don’t.  We say it has all come to nothing.  I wanted warm feelings of God with me all the time, but I don’t enjoy this. You may even become introspective, looking inside to see if you can feel anything at all of God in there. 

We must recognise that a genuine sense of God’s presence is a gift from God to us.  We cannot produce it.  What we can aim to do is simply live present to his presence in the whole of life, trusting God for a sense of his presence.  As we do so, we trust the God of grace to grant us a sense of his presence that will flood our lives with his joy.  

By the Spirit, the Father and Son make their home within and among us (John 14:23). Our sharing in the Triune communion could not be deeper. The Father and the Son come to us as their own dwelling place. Each divine person mutually indwells the others, and so, through the Spirit’s indwelling, both the Son and the Father make their home in us and among us.

Presence makes encounters possible. The sort of encounters that fill life with meaning. Only through presence can we truly meet anyone or anything. Others may be around us, yet we do not experience their presence until we are present ourselves. In the same way, though God is always with us, we may not recognise his presence until we become attentive and open.

Every human being longs for life to have meaning, but perhaps what we are really longing for is presence itself. Without presence, nothing carries meaning; but in the presence of our Father, through the Son and by the Spirit, all of life becomes saturated with significance.

God is always present to us and he invites us to be present to him.  Sadly, we are not always present to His presence. However, he persists, calling us to freely turn our hearts toward Him as the One who is already near. He really does want us to live awake and attentive to his presence. As we do, we trust the God who is with us and in us to meet us, granting us moments of real encounter in the midst of ordinary life. These encounters cannot be manufactured; they are pure gift. At the same time, we are called to be present to his presence, attentive to his attentiveness toward us.

Just before Jesus offered up his life for us, he said, “I will ask the Father, and he will give you another advocate to help you and be with you forever – the Spirit of truth.” Jesus, the Father’s Son, asks the Father for the Spirit of truth to guide us into all truth.  

The “truth” into which the Spirit guides us is not abstract concepts or a set of doctrines. Jesus declares, “I am the way, the truth, and the life.” Therefore, truth is not something but Someone — Jesus himself. He is the truth about God, showing us the Father’s heart, and he is the truth about humanity, revealing who we are called to be in communion with God. To know the truth, then, is to know Jesus personally and in knowing Jesus, we know the truth that sets us free.

But the truth of the Father through the Son comes to us by the Spirit of truth.  The Spirit of truth brings Jesus, the truth, to us so that we see him with the eyes of our hearts.  He is “the Spirit of truth” sent by the Father and Son to lead us into all truth.  
The Spirit comes within us, shining the light of the Son right into the depths of our hearts so that we see the glory of God in his face. He is “the Spirit of truth” sent by the Father and Son to lead us into all truth.  The Spirit of truth can do this in us because he is Himself God, true God of true God. And so, he alone can bring Jesus, the truth of God, to us

Paul writes, “… because you are sons, God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, Abba Father! Here, the Spirit is called the Spirit of God’s Son. Just as the Son was sent into the world to make us children of God, so the Spirit of that same Son is sent into our hearts, giving us the Son’s own Abba Father cry to God. Abba is the Aramaic word for Father. During his life on earth, Jesus addressed God this way (Mark 14:36). Since Jesus spoke Aramaic, not Greek, it is more likely that he often called God Abba.

This shows that the Father and the Son do not wish us to remain spectators of their relationship. Instead, they invite us to participate in that same love. The Spirit of God’s Son makes this possible. Through the Spirit, the Son’s own cry to the Father becomes our cry, uniting us with Jesus’ relationship to God. In heaven, Jesus still speaks his “Abba” before the Father, and that same cry is echoed within us through the Spirit living in our hearts.

This means that we share in the Son’s relationship with the Father through the Spirit. It is not only a personal experience, although each of us can individually know it. Paul’s language emphasises the plural: we are sons and daughters together. The Spirit binds us as a community, drawing us into the Son’s love for the Father. Therefore, as God’s family, we cry “Abba” together. Through the Spirit of the Son, we are caught up into this relationship of love, not only as individuals, but as one people united in Christ.