This season we are focusing on theological topics that are important foundations for the church. These will be theological topics that need to be deeply installed as bedrock truths for the followers of Jesus.
For the next few episodes, we are going to talk about the Trinity — the one true God eternally exists in three persons, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.
The Trinity has fallen on hard times for the average Christian. It just doesn’t seem that practical to everyday life, so we nod our heads as truth about God and then move on.
Fred Sanders writes, “Nothing we do as evangelicals make sense if it is divorced from a strong experiential and doctrinal grasp of the coordinated work of Jesus and his Spirit, worked out against the horizon of the Father’s love. Personal evangelism, conversational prayer, devotional Bible study, authoritative preaching, world missions, and assurance of salvation all presuppose that life in the gospel is life in communion with the Trinity. Forget the Trinity ,and you forget why we do what we do; you forget who we are as gospel Christians, you forget how we got to be like we are.” (Deeper Things of God, 9)
And yet — I would guess that for most Christians, what Sanders considers to be foundational “a strong experiential and doctrinal grasp of the coordinated work of Jesus Dan his Spirit, worked out against the horizon of the Father’s love.” — is something that we have given little thought to.
We have a tendency to bring all things of God down so that they revolve around us. Nowhere is this seen than in the intense tendency to make things “practical.”
But — our goal is not to bring God down to us, so that he can serve our daily lives, but to bring us up to God that we might behold his glory. To know God is the greatest reward. Of all the benefits that Jesus gives to us: the forgiveness of sins, the amazing power to experience change, the hope of the resurrection, adoption into the family of God, and the satisfying of God’s wrath — all of these are but servant benefits to the master benefit of beholding the glory of God. If we were to receive these things and not receive God himself, we would be deeply impoverished. Knowing God is the great benefit of Jesus.
For further study:
Credo Magazine’s Issue on the Trinity - https://credomag.com/magazine_issue/undivided-trinity/
Simply Trinity, by Matthew Barrett - https://amzn.to/3k0recz
Delighting in the Trinity, by Michael Reeves - https://amzn.to/3CvqTF8
Zion Presbyterian Church — www.zioncolumbia.org
