LIFE IN THE TRINITY

John 17 records a prayer of Jesus to his Father.  He speaks much about the Father’s love for him.  In his Father’s presence, he talks about the Father loving him before the foundation of the world (John 17: 24).  And it is clear that Jesus still enjoys his Father’s love.  Furthermore, all through the prayer, he expresses his love for the Father as the Son.   

As Father and Son make their home with us, we share in this love.  Towards the end of his prayer, the Son says to his Father I want the love with which you have loved me to be in them and I in them (John 17: 26).  That happens when Father and Son make their home with us in the Spirit. We share in the Father’s love for his Son and the Son’s love for his Father.

As Father and Son make their home with us, we share in the Son’s joy (John 17.13).   Jesus speaks about my joy in them.  In love relationship with the Father, the Son has great joy.  It is the joy of the Father’s home. To be at home with the Father in a love relationship is to be full of joy in the Father’s love. A joy that surpasses all other joys.  As Father and Son make their home with us, we enter into the joy of their home. 

As Father and Son make their home with us, we share in Jesus’ peace.  Not just any peace, but my peace. Peace I leave with you; MY peace I give to you (John 14: 27). There is perfect peace in the Father and Son’s home.  As they make their home with us we experience this peace that surpasses all understanding.  Jesus’ peace at home with his Father is in us by the Spirit.  

Jesus tells us that he and his Father will come to us and make their home with us (John 14: 23).  I suppose we all have our ideas of what home is.  Even so, we can all agree that home means belonging. And belonging is one of the most important things in human life. We find our true identity in knowing we belong. This is not so strong in our individualistic culture. We find our identity in what we acquire, how we appear, or what we achieve.  But this kind of individual identity is always lacking and the human heart cries out for belonging.  Who we are and what our lives mean is found in belonging to someone or something.  True identity is communal and relational.

Father, Son and Spirit belong together.  The Son belongs to the Father as the one who lives in the Father by the Spirit.  And the Father belongs to the Son in the same way.  They belong to one another as they mutually indwell one another in self-giving love.  We might say the Triune Communion is the perfect home in which the three persons belong to one another.

Jesus tells us we belong because Father and Son have made their home with us in the Spirit.  In that belonging, we know who we are.  Or is it not better to say that we find who we are in this belonging by knowing whose we are?  We belong to Father and Son and they belong to us.  They make their home with us and we find our home in them.

I once read a book about the attentive life. The writer encouraged me to walk through all the moments of my life attentive to who God is with me for me. The book was helpful.

However, at one point, the writer says he wants to connect with the centre of his being to make a home for God. That sounds good, but should we aim to make a home for God?  Jesus tells us that he and his Father come and make their home with us,  We don’t make a home for Father and Son; they have made a home with us. 

Father, Son and Spirit mutually indwell one another as one communal being.  That means where the one is the others are too.  So the Spirit indwelling us is the Son indwelling us. And, the Son indwelling us by the Spirit is also the Father indwelling us. Because of this, Jesus tells us that both he and his Father make their home with us by the Spirit.  Our sharing in the Triune communion could not be deeper. All this anticipates our life together on the new earth: 

“See, the home of God is among the people.  He will dwell with them; they will be his people, and God himself will be with them; he will wipe every tear from their eyes.” (Rev. 21.3-4) 

By his Spirit, God makes his home with us here and now.  He does so in anticipation of making his home with us fully on the new earth. And as Father and Son make their home with us in the Spirit, we find our home in them. 

Jesus once said to his Father, You have loved them even as you have loved me John 17:23). How can God love us as he loves Jesus, his Son?  Is it because, like Jesus, we are full of love for God?  In another place John writes, This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us (1 John 4:10).  We don’t love God as we should, but still God loves us as he loves Jesus.  Why?  Simply because God IS love.  But we can say more.

First, We are in Christ.  Our lives are hidden with Christ in God.  And so, in union with Jesus, we are included in the divine circle of love. The Father loves the Son and loves us in the Son as he loves his Son.

Second, Christ is in us. The Father loves us and sends Jesus into our hearts to live within us by his Spirit.  Now, deep within us, the Father loves Jesus.  And now deep within us,  Jesus loves the Father so that we love the Father as Jesus loves the Father in and through us.  That means we really do participate in the divine circle of love.  

So, as Philip Yancy  has written: “There is nothing we can do to make God love us more and there is nothing we can do to make God love us less.”  In union with Jesus, the Father loves you as he loves his dearly loved Son. And yet, too many live before God less loved than they are. We need to see, really see, that we could not be more loved.

How can God love us as he loves Jesus, his Son?  Is it because, like Jesus, we are full of love for God?  In another place John writes, This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us (1 John 4:10).  We don’t love God as we should, but still God loves us as he loves Jesus.  Why?  Simply because God IS love.  But we can say more.

First, We are in Christ.  Our lives are hidden with Christ in God.  And so, in union with Jesus, we are included in the divine circle of love. The Father loves the Son and loves us in the Son as he loves his Son.

Second, Christ is in us. The Father loves us and sends Jesus into our hearts to live within us by his Spirit.  Now, deep within us, the Father loves Jesus.  And now deep within us,  Jesus loves the Father so that we love the Father as Jesus loves the Father in and through us.  That means we really do participate in the divine circle of love.  

So, as Philip Yancy  has written: “There is nothing we can do to make God love us more and there is nothing we can do to make God love us less.”  In union with Jesus, the Father loves you as he loves his dearly loved Son. And yet, too many live before God less loved than they are. We need to see, really see, that we could not be more loved.

Before any humans were created God was already loving.  The Father loved the Son in the Spirit and the Son loved the Father in the Spirit. I think we can say that God is a circle of joyful love. 

Because God is a circle of love he is content. He is not needy.  He is not lacking anything.  And yet, the love of the lovers cannot be contained.  They must expand the circle. The three persons had such joy in the circle of love they wanted to extend it to others.  So they created us to share in the love and to become loved and loving with them in the circle of love.   The God who is love created us in love, through love and for love within the circle of love. 

We did not want all this.  We wanted to live our own way.  We wanted to live in self-love.  So we rejected the circle of love.  But God didn’t give up on his purpose.  We did not love the God who is love, but in love, he loved us and came after us.  Through Jesus and the Spirit, he brings us back within the circle of love to be loved and loving within the circle of love that God is. 

As Father Son and Spirit move together in the world, we see that the divine persons are so tightly bound up together that we cannot think of one person apart from the others.  Indeed, their relationships with one another make them who they are as persons. 

It follows from this that human persons are also defined similarly by their relationships with one another. God created us to be relational to the point that being relational makes us persons.  However, our relationships with others are now seriously depersonalised. But through Jesus and the Spirit, God’s relations with us and our relations with God are deeply personalised.  And so, T. F Torrance speaks of Jesus as the personalising person, who restores us as persons in relation to other persons. 

As God personalises us in Jesus and the Spirit we come to know something of God as the communion of Father, Son and Spirit within their inner life.  We cannot begin to understand this by merely studying the doctrine of the Trinity.  Only as personalised persons sharing in the communion of love can we begin to see who the Triune God is.  

When Eugene Peterson began to see the Trinity as an emphatic statement that God is relational he moved into a new life of praying as relational and serving as relational.  I suppose that was because he was in the process of being personalised. He was personalised by the Person of the Son who lives as a dearly loved Son in a relationship with his Father in the communion of the Spirit.  And who also lives in us as a personalising person restoring all our relationships in the Spirit.

God is three-person relational.  But what do we mean by person?  To answer this question, we focus on the three-person relational God. God the Father is who he is in relation to his Son.  He is not who he is as Father without the Son.  God the Son is who he is in relation to his Father.  He is not who he is as Son without the Father.  Each Divine Person is other than and distinct from the other two.  And yet, they are so interrelated that they always intertwine with one another.

Likewise, each human person is only who he or she is as a person in relation to other persons.  We were created to be persons in relation to the personal God.  And also in relation to one another.  But we humans turn into ourselves to find who we are within ourselves.  So now we even define a person in terms of who we think we are as individuals. This is a departure from God’s intention for us.

The whole purpose of God through Jesus is to restore us to relationship.  Having reconciled us to God, Jesus sends the Spirit from the presence of the Father to restore our relation with the communal God.  That’s why TF Torrance speaks of Jesus as the “Personalising Person” and ourselves as “Personalised Persons.”  He restores our personal relationship with the personal God, and in doing so, he restores our personal relationship with one another.  We become God’s community in space and time restored in relationship with God and one another.  And so, we share in God’s communal life in union with the Son in the love of Spirit.  

During my early years as a Jesus follower, I received teaching about the Trinity fairly close to metaphysical philosophy. It was all about abstract formulations and precise definitions. It was also about heresy hunting. This was a big turnoff.  

However, I later received teaching about God as three-person relational.  He is three-person relational in the the drama of redemption, as all the action moves from the Father, through the Son and in the Spirit. This shows that God has always been three-person relational within his own communal life. He is essentially relational and calls us into relationship with him.  

This opened up to me a life of prayer as relational.  I saw for the first time that praying is sharing in Jesus’ relationship with his Father in the Spirit.  A conversation is already going on between Jesus and his Father in the Spirit and we get to share in that relational conversation in union with Jesus.

We easily slip into prayer as mere request.  We ask God to meet our own needs and the needs of our friends and family.  It is easily reduced to list-making and requests.  We must see that prayer is primarily a relationship. The request element is simply part of the relationship. We need to develop a new relational way of praying that arises from discovering who God is as a three-person relational being.  In the Spirit, the relational God draws near to us through Jesus for relationship; and in the Spirit, we draw near to the relational God through Jesus for relationship.  We share in the Son’s relationship with his Father as we cry abba Father in the Spirit of his Son.

The greatest sorrow and burden you can lay on the Father, the greatest unkindness you can do to him is not to believe that he loves you” (John Owen). We can add, that the greatest hurt and harm we can do to ourselves is not to believe that God loves us. We were created out of love, through love, and for love to live within God’s joyful communion of love.  But, tragically, too many miss that by failing to simply believe that he really does love them to the core.  

God has wonderfully demonstrated his own love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.  Christ gave himself for us, not while we were godly or righteous or worthy in some other way, but while we were God rejecting sinners.  God as human died for his enemies with no guarantees that we would ever turn to him.  Furthermore, God pours his love into our hearts by the Spirit that he has freely given us in Christ.  And by that same Spirit, we grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ.  By the Spirit, we come to know this love that surpasses knowledge. 

God has revealed through Jesus a limitless ocean of love between the Father, the Son, and the Spirit, an ocean that overflows towards humanity even when that humanity has turned against him.  And God takes us ever deeper into the revelation of himself as Love in his Spirit. Truly God loves us and wants us to know his love.