LIFE IN THE TRINITY

Saul of Tarsus was furious with Jesus’ followers. He couldn’t understand how they could call a man who had been crucified the Messiah. Indeed, he was outraged!. To him, Jesus’ death on a Roman cross proved he was not sent by God. Saul believed these people were wrong and dangerous, and their message needed to be destroyed—or God would be angry. That belief fueled Saul’s own anger.

But while Saul was carrying out his mission with great passion, something unexpected happened: the risen Jesus appeared to him. In that moment, God revealed to Saul—who would become Paul—who Jesus really was. He came to understand that Jesus, though crucified, had been sent by God as the true Messiah and had now been exalted as Lord.

From that point on, Paul saw Jesus in a new way—not as someone cursed and rejected, but as God’s chosen one who suffered and was raised in glory. Paul no longer viewed Jesus as just a man or a failed leader. Instead, he saw Jesus as both the suffering servant and the risen Lord. He was God’s Son, empowered by the Spirit and honoured by the Father. And as Paul continued following Jesus, the Holy Spirit helped him see Jesus this way more clearly each day.

Let’s keep asking the Holy Spirit to help us see Jesus the way Paul did. And may the Spirit transform us to become more like Jesus as we follow his cross-shaped path and share in his new, risen life.

God has revealed himself to us through Jesus by the Spirit. In this unveiling, we see that God is the one who loves.  Love is his way of being.  We see this in the story of Jesus’ self-giving love.  The Father gives his Son freely to us and for us.  The Son gives himself as the demonstration of God’s love, even while we were opposed to God as sinners.  We can say, with Timothy Keller, “We are more sinful and flawed in ourselves than we ever dared believe, yet at the very same time we are more loved and accepted in Jesus Christ than we ever dared hope.”

Truly, we can say the God who loves is for us (Romans 8:31-32). He freely gives himself to change and restore those who are unlovely, making them lovely. He turns enemies into family and gives worth to the unworthy. This God is for us.

Jesus called this loving God his Father, and invites us to do the same. That is our experience of God in the Spirit of God’s Son.  We know God as the Father of Jesus the Son, the Father who sent the Son into the world to accomplish what we humans could not accomplish, so that we could, in turn, know him as our Father. The act that made this possible was the Father sending the Son to die a reconciling and redeeming death on the cross.  The act that enables us to draw near to God as Father is the sending of the Spirit into our hearts, crying Abba Father.  That is now our lived experience as we keep in step with the Spirit in union with Jesus, the Son.

Saul of Tarsus was a devout Jew who was strongly opposed to Jesus’ followers. He believed he was serving God by trying to stop them. But everything changed after Jesus appeared to Saul. In that moment, Saul came to understand that Jesus is the Messiah, God’s Son, whom God sent to die and rise again.

After this experience, Saul (now called Paul) realised he had to change how he saw God.  He now understood that God loved the entire world so much that he sent his Son not just to live as a human, but to suffer, die, and rise again to save people from sin. Paul also came to see God as the Father of Jesus—and as his own Father too.

Paul explained this new relationship with God using the idea of adoption. Through Jesus, God adopts us as his dearly loved children. He also gives us the Spirit of his Son, who cries “Abba, Father” deep inside us (Galatians 4:6). Now in union with Jesus and by his Spirit, we can enjoy God’s nearness to us and our dearness to him. And this fuels trustful obedience towards God our Father.

As we live and move within this communion as dearly loved children, God transforms us in the likeness of his Son.  This is always his intention because he wants a large family who are like his unique Son.  It seems God says, I have such delight in my Son that I want many more who are just like him. And, with this in mind, God is always working within us to transform us into the likeness of his Son by his indwelling Spirit. 

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.