There's no one Like our God!

Sunday I had the privilege of introducing our new series on The Trinity at Gateway, Why Our God is Unique among the gods, and once again I was inspired, awed, and excited by the doctrine of the Trinity, or more particularly, knowing God as Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

One church member remarked beforehand that he couldn’t remember ever hearing any teaching on the Trinity, and he’s been around evangelical churches all his life. The sad fact is that we may acknowledge, confess in creeds and songs that we believe in the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, but in reality are practicing unitarians – the belief that God is solely and singularly One, with no dynamic of loving persons.

Such a belief impoverishes our worship, cripples our life and undermines our witness.

To make God known we need to know him as he is.

Yes the Trinity takes some thought, some hard brain work, but it’s worth every ounce of effort, as this big, vast, vision of God dawns on our souls.

The reality is that every true Christian already knows something of this Trinitarian God through his work in their lives, 1, as the Holy Spirit convicts of sin  and 2, points them to Jesus Christ as their Saviour and then having confessed their faith in him, 3, the awareness that they are now sons and daughters of the living God and able to call him Father.

Sadly for many that’s where it stalls.

What about you?

Yes, the word ‘trinity’ is not in the Bible, but the Reality is.

Yes, it doesn’t immediately step out at us, but there are hints and movements that indicate that God who is time and again confessed as One God is in fact a trinity of persons. In contrast to a world that was full of gods – gods to cover every sphere of life – Israel confessed that God was One and he sovereignly ruled over all, yet over and over in it’s story there are hints that the God they confessed and saw and encountered in action was somehow more.

When you get to the New Testament, suddenly it hits you, this Jesus, whom the gospels are all about, is none other than God’s Son living in flesh just like ours, yet he says ‘before Abraham was I am’! And John introducing his gospel reaches back beyond time and says, ‘The Word was with God and the word was God’- always.  God face to face with himself. The same but distinct from. He is God here, but he prays to God who is there! As John unpacks the gospel he recounts Jesus talking in very personal and intimate ways about his relationship to the Father, that people who have seen him have seen the Father, that the Father is in him and he is in the Father! He says, ‘Believe in God, believe also in me.’

There’s more.

It’s not Two, but Three! Jesus says that when he goes away he is going to send One just like Himself, the Comforter, the Holy Spirit with whom and through whom both he and the Father enjoy fellowship. Wow! Suddenly we are getting little insights into the interior relationship of God. God is One, but he’s Three. There are three distinct personalities in the One God.

Suddenly our picture of God dramatically changes, ‘there is’ as the previous pope said, ‘a ‘We’ in God.’

God was not and is not some solitary, self absorbed, power consumed individual doing his ‘own’ arbitrary thing, but rather a community of distinct loving Persons, delighting in and serving  one another from all eternity.

God was not and is not some benign policeman, protecting you on the one hand but looking out for your misdemeanours and penalising you on the other. Neither is he some Hitler, consumed with power and authority, making rash judgement calls all in the name of the advancement of his purposes.

No, in the Trinity we discover as the Godfrey Birthill song puts it, a “wonderful, wonderful God….”

Do you know Him?

God is for Us!

God is for us!

Staggering thought isn’t it? But know this the devil absolutely hates it, and is always seeking to undermine the truth, knowledge and experience of it – he comes to rob, kill and destroy.

In some circles you’d think God was against the world he created, but that is not the way the Bible portrays it.

From the beginning we find that God was still seeking out Adam and Eve for fellowship in the garden even though they had messed up. How many preacher’s have thundered ‘where are you?’ as if God were really angry with them, when in actual fact it was a loving appeal ‘Where are you? Why aren’t you here? What’s happened that you don’t want to come near?’

It was their sin that kept them away, the devil had lied, fooled them, and something had happened deep within, something that now caused them to hide from their loving Creator. Yes from there on in there is a deep alienation that causes them to know shame and pain – the consequences were unimaginable, having repercussions not only on them but every succeeding generation. Nevertheless as we journey through the story we find God on a mission, a mission to save, heal and restore humanity to that wonderful circle of Trinitarian fellowship for which they had originally been created.

The story wends it’s way through some amazing and frequently flawed characters, Noah, Abraham, a family, Moses, Joshua, a nation, as God pursues his dream, and the enemy though he constantly tries to undermine it through the character flaws and weaknesses of fallen humanity will not succeed.

Everything would ultimately lead to God himself taking on flesh in the coming of Jesus, weak, frail flesh – it’s impossible for us to dwell with God as we are, but not impossible for God to come and dwell with us.

John says the Word – Jesus, became flesh and dwelt among us. He lived in this stuff, real stuff. He lived a life in communion with the Father in the Spirit as we were intended to do. He went out and proclaimed the Good News of the Kingdom (reign and presence) of God, and notably in the Sermon on the Mount he opened wide the door of the Kingdom of God to the spiritually bankrupt, downtrodden, rejected, etc. and invited them in – all of them, much to the horror of the religious leaders of the day! He even ate and drank with them; even forgave people their sins. He healed the sick, delivered the bound, taught them all.

In everything he demonstrates God’s great heart for those whom he gives life to – an act of grace in itself; and ultimately as Paul the apostle says, God demonstrates his love for us in that while we were still sinners – self-willed rebels, misaligned, twisted, broken, no-hopers – Christ died for us.

Yes God is for us, and all along he has been intent on restoring what was lost.

This God being for us involves more than saving us and getting us to heaven when we die, but knowing his presence and power in our daily lives, in such a way as to save, heal, deliver, restore, guide, provide, reconcile, renew, etc..

This is not about religion, smells and bells, meetings, etc.. This is about the dynamic of this Tri-personal God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, sharing ‘themselves’ with us without reservation. To that end the incarnation and the cross were absolutely necessary.

And now…. Now the Holy Spirit sheds his love abundantly in our hearts, the same love the Father has for the Son and the Spirit, the same love the Son has for the Father and the Spirit, the same love the Spirit has for the Father and Son, a love that gave us life in the first place and is declared and demonstrated to us in Jesus, and now through believing in Him is poured into our lives by the Spirit, a love more abundant than we could ever imagine, because God is 100% for us, for you, in Jesus! And that will never change!

Do you believe it? Do you know it?