LIFE IN THE TRINITY

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. 

Jesus reveals the One God as Father, Son and Spirit.  This unveiling of the three in One is entirely new. There were hints in the Old Testament that we now see in retrospect. But when Jesus made the One God known as Father, Son and Spirit, he gave us a new vision of God. Through Jesus, God tells us something so new that we could never tell it to ourselves. 

This new unveiling of God comes to us from God himself.  He freely moved into human history in his Son, making himself known as he has never done before.  And now he freely moves into human lives, by his Spirit, making himself known to individuals as he has never done before. Leander Beck says that, following the resurrection of Jesus and the coming of the Spirit, Paul had not only to think new and different thoughts; he had also to think old thoughts differently.  So do we.

As God makes himself known in this new way, he calls into question what each person already claims to know. He shatters what we may already think about God.  Whatever way we saw God, his coming personally to us in his new way opens up an entirely new way of seeing him that we never even imagined.  Only God could make himself known to us in this way so that our knowing comes from God and through God.  As Jesus once said, “No one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son and those to whom the Son chooses to reveal him.”

In our daily lives, we ask questions.  What shall I wear today? What shall we eat tonight?  Where shall we go on holiday? Etc.  Occasionally, we may pause to ask deeper questions. Who am I?  Why am I here?  What is the ultimate purpose of my life?  Is the answer to these questions found within ourselves or outside ourselves?

Who I am is found in whose I am.    I belong to God.  In love, he has opened the Triune communion of love to include me.  So I now discover who I am as I discover WHOSE I am within this circle of love.  

Why I am here is also found in whose I am.  I am here because God wants me. And he wants me not because of anything in me but simply because he loves me and has always wanted me.  Even when I didn’t want him he always wanted me.  Even when I was against him he was always for me.  

What is the ultimate purpose of my life?  Again, the answer is found in whose I am.   My destiny is to be with the God who is for me within the circle of love. So when we awaken to the reality of God, we also become aware of the true goal of our own stories. We find ourselves saying yes to the God who is our future.  The God who is the end and ultimate purpose of our life-stories.  For we now see that our stories move from God’s circle of love, through his circle of love and to his circle of love.  All because Father, Son and Spirit are for us just as they are eternally for one another.