LIFE IN THE TRINITY

In the New Testament, we often hear about the Father and pray to hm. But what do we mean by “Father”? Many people define God as Father based on their experience with human fathers, good or bad. This can distort our understanding. God the Father is not just a better version of a human dad. To truly know the Father, we must look only to the Son.

1. The Son reveals the Father by who He is.
Jesus said, “If you have seen me, you have seen the Father.”  Everything Jesus says and does shows us the Father. His love, compassion, and lowly self-giving reveal what the Father is like.  So, we don’t project human fatherhood onto God.  We look at Jesus to understand the Father. The Father is Christ-like.

2. The Son reveals the Father through a relationship. Jesus relates to the Father in perfect love, and the Father to the Son in the same way. This loving relationship shows us that the Father is relational.  Even His holiness, justice, and sovereignty are lived out in relationship with the Son, through the Spirit.  And also with us.

The New Testament often speaks of “the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.” An we know the Father only through Jesus, the Son, who he is and how he relates to the Father. The Father sent the Son so that we could understand what He is like, and he also sends the Spirit of his Son into our hearts so that we can experience this relationship as our own. Through the Spirit, we share in Jesus’ “Abba,” cry deepening our personal connection with God as our loving Father.  

We were created in love, through love and for love by the triune God who is love.  Even though we rejected his love, God demonstrated his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. He has done so because he loves us and wants us with him.  God has also poured his love into our hearts through the Holy Spirit he gave us.  Truly, he has lavished his love upon us.  We can now say God enjoys overwhelming us with his kind of love. And we can also say that he continues to lavishly shower his love on us, enabling us to know who we are, his dearly loved children. As we live in God’s love, we are convinced that nothing in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.

Now, by his Spirit, God constantly invites us to live in the reality of his love. He has chosen to be God with us and for us.  He has chosen for us to be with him as his dearly loved children.   His love for us creates a response of love from us. So all our obedience towards God is not mere duty, but the expression of love.  Love is created in us by the Spirit in union with Jesus. For we no longer live, but Christ lives in us as the one who loved us and gave himself for us. He lives in us, enabling us to love God and one another with his love.  We can now say, I no longer love, but Christ loves in me.

Our minds must be constantly renewed to see God as he has revealed himself through Jesus.  As we keep our eyes fixed on Jesus, we see God making himself known as a three-person communal being. This personal God encounters us personally through Jesus and his Spirit.  In these encounters, God opens his heart to us as the One who loves us more than we can say.  That means we are to know God in person as personal. God came to us in person as Jesus; now he comes to us personally by his Spirit. 

God’s coming to us affirms the eternal decision of God to be with us and for us before we do anything. This is unconditional love. His relating to humanity in love is a pure gift. The gift is not separate from God’s self.  God gave himself, and he goes on giving himself again and again. And this giving of himself is the greatest gift God has for us. 

The life, death, and resurrection of Jesus demonstrate God’s love.  His love isn’t an abstract idea we might imagine in our best moments.  No!  His love can be seen in an actual self-giving person in human history.  And it is now poured into our hearts by the gift of the Spirit.  It is all God’s free action through Jesus in the Spirit. And it is this free action of God’s love that sets us free to respond in wonder, love and praise

How can we know who God is and what he is like?  Some “good” things promise to point us towards God, but eventually, they may divert our attention away from him.  If misused, human ideals, moral values, religious attitudes, practices of spirituality, and the quest for meaning may become central rather than God. 

God must make himself known to us.  And that is exactly what God has done and is doing through Jesus and the Spirit.  We remain in the dark when we try to find God through our own religious efforts.  He gives himself to us. Our part is to be attentive and responsive to him. We certainly should not rely on ideas arising from our imagination. That method takes human descriptions and casts God in that shape.

Through the Word who became flesh, God appeared in history. He became a human walking the earth in time and space. And now, through that same Jesus, God continually reveals himself to the eyes of our hearts by his Spirit.  All knowledge of God comes from God through Jesus and by his Spirit. “The God who said, ‘Light will shine out of darkness,’ has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ”  (2 Corinthians 4:6).  

We do not “possess” knowledge of God.  We only know God through God. There is a double movement of Grace. The Father makes himself known through Jesus by the Spirit.  And by the Spirit, through Jesus, we know the Father.

God always wants to be with us.  He desires to share himself with us through Jesus by his Spirit. However, we now live in a noisy world, and our lives may be very noisy.  This noise may be external through all that surrounds us, or the internal noise of our thoughts and feelings.  We may be full of noisy ideas about God, resulting in noisy and negative feelings about ourselves. By God’s grace, we must learn to listen to him amid all this noise. God always wants to tell us about himself, as the one who is always for us. 

God can break through all the noise. He does so as the Living Word speaks to us personally, opening the way for us to know who God really is. As we are attentive to the Living Word, God connects us with himself as the One who loves in freedom.  Too often, we miss God himself as he speaks to us.  We are not as attentive and responsive as we should be, Nevertheless, God always wants to meet with us by speaking personally to us in love.  We are often distracted away from him, but he is never distracted away from us.  We may not be attentive to him, but he is always fully attentive to us.  We may often fail to speak to him, but he never stops speaking to us. His speaking reveals his heart, telling us about his loving intentions for us and how he wants to be with us. His speaking is also an invitation to come home to himself.  We are to be attentive and responsive so that we do not miss God. 

God has chosen to be for us and with us, overcoming our alienation and estrangement.  By choosing to be with and for us, God is choosing to be true to himself as the one who is love. We cannot make God love us, love is simply who God is.  He cannot stop loving.  If he stopped loving, he would cease to be himself. So God doesn’t first assess humans and then have a vote of confidence in us.  No! Simply because God loves us, he chooses to be with and for us.  

God has been for us from eternity, and his coming to be with us as Jesus fulfils his eternal choice.  The Father chose his Son to become human from eternity.  And, through Jesus, he acted for humanity in history. Jesus, the Father’s Servant/Son, took on himself the awful plight of humanity as a human.  He makes this move because this is what he decided to be from eternity.  

This loving decision for humanity creates space for a human response.  God’s decision to be for and with humanity does not exclude human response, but makes space for free and joyful responses. For the God who decided to be with us also chose to be within us by his Spirit, calling us out of our alienation. 

God’s intention in all this is that we might share in the life of God.  Not becoming God, but sharing in the Son’s relationship with his Father by the Spirit.  The triune God’s life is communal, and we share in his life as a gift. All this is made possible because of God’s decision fulfilled through Jesus and the Spirit. 

The Living Word who created all things came to us as a human in Jesus.  And the same living word comes to us today by the Spirit. So, the Word is not distant, but near.  We are encountered by a person so that we come to know God himself as personal.  He does not give us ideas about himself.  He comes to us personally through his Living Word by his Spirit. That means we do not project our own ideas upward trying to paint our own picture of God.  God has already made himself known personally and he wants to go on doing so. 

Through his Living Word, the self-giving of God gives himself to be present among us.  We might say that, in our experience, the Living Word seems mostly absent.  We are left simply going through the motions of worship and prayer with little or no personal encounter.  Nevertheless, we must affirm that God wants to meet with us through his Word and by his Spirit. We must simply be attentive and present to his presence. As God’s presence resonates in our presence, our thinking is reordered as Jesus displays what is real about God, ourselves, and the world. When God is known in this way, everything changes.

In God’s Presence, we are opened to apprehend the mystery of God simply by being attentive to his voice. We know that we can never comprehend, but in humility, we open ourselves to discover more and more of the Mystery.  In that way, we apprehend while never comprehending.   This opens the way for ever deeper relationships with God and one another.

God has rescued us from the dominion of darkness and brought us into the kingdom of the Son he loves.  We now live under the reign of this dearly loved Son as our only king.  He is not a remote king in a distant royal palace.  God exalted him to the highest place giving him the name above every name. Nevertheless, he draws near to be the king among us.  

Our king wants to meet us and we want to meet him.  This meeting happens as we fix our attention on Jesus, our king, in the Spirit.  Encountering the reality of our king, we know that we are deeply loved and that his love is unstoppable. Hearing how Jesus relentlessly loves us compels us to respond to him as the one who loves us.

Jesus comes among us and speaks to us so we know how to express allegiance to him as our king.  However, he not only comes among us to speak to us.  He also comes within us by the Spirit enabling us to do what he says.  The Spirit is the personal presence of Jesus in the individual and community. The Spirit gives life, makes known the love of our king, and makes possible obedience to him.  By the Spirit, we can now say together that it is no longer we who live, but it is our messianic king who lives in us. And the life we now live in the flesh we live by the faithfulness  of the Son of God, who loved us and gave himself for us.

God came into our world as a human.  He entered into a world that was under the reign of sin, death and Satan. He continually confronted this old order, showing the power of the new. Then, in his dying and rising, Jesus ended the old order and began the new. The old realm of sin reigning in death died in the death of Jesus. In the rising of Jesus, the new order was born. The new man rises as the new ruler in God’s new order.

Under the old domain of darkness, we saw all things with darkened minds in a natural human way, including God.  Now, with the eyes of our hearts enlightened by the Spirit, we see all things through the lens of Jesus.  Yes, we now find ourselves with entirely new ways of seeing God, ourselves, and all things in a new order with new ways of knowing. 

This new way of knowing is to be ever new as the living Lord encounters us repeatedly in the Spirit.  We do not take the new way of knowing God and make it our own possession to look at when we choose. To work on as we please.  In living encounters, the new way of knowing is new to us every new day so that it is ever fresh in the Spirit. And from our hearts we say Amen as we hear God saying, “See, I am making all things new.” (Revelation 21:5). 

God came into the world as a human, showing us the reality of God in a new way as Father, Son and Spirit.  Now, God encounters us personally through Jesus and by his Spirit, enabling us to know him in this new way. We now know him as the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ and our Father in union with Jesus, by the Spirit.  

We just did not see God this way before.  We always had vague notions of God. But as Jesus, the beloved Son, stands before us in the Spirit, we find ourselves standing before him and seeing in him the unveiling of God as Father, Son and Spirit. The new way of seeing God has been made new to us personally within our own hearts and minds. We see the new unveiling of God with new eyes, the eyes of our new hearts.  It is not going too far to speak of a seismic reconstruction in the way we see God and believe in him. It is altogether new!

This new way of knowing God in the fullness of his Triune love and light and life conflicts with our generally accepted beliefs. It brings new ways of seeing and believing. God himself encounters us in his Son by the Spirit. In this encounter, we see God as we have never seen him before. We do not add to what we believed before so that we now have an upgrade in our knowledge of God. God brings new ways of seeing, new ways of believing. Our knowing of God is altogether new. And we only break through into this new way of knowing of God as he encounters us through Jesus by his Spirit.