We worship a Triune God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The Trinity means that Love is the deepest reality.
We often focus our attention on Jesus by himself, sensing that God the Father is distant and that God the Spirit is mysterious. But we worship a Triune God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, one God in three persons. The Bible teaches that God the Father sent his Son by the Spirit, one God acting in perfect unity, that we might participate in the Trinitarian life of God.
To imitate the self-giving love revealed in the Trinity, receiving our identity as beloved children of God, so that we can love others as God the Father, God the Son, and God the Spirit love us.
I know the Trinity is central to Christianity. I've studied the creeds, read the systematic theologies, and grappled with the philosophical challenges. But when I sit in the carpool at school, eat dinner, or go for a run? I'm usually not thinking about the finer points of Trinitarian theology. Can you tell me how reflecting on 'homoousios' and 'perichoresis' helps me love God or my neighbor?
For many American evangelicals, we can check the box that "God is a Trinity" but surveys show that we don't really know what this means. For instance, we're more likely to say that the Holy Spirit is a force than a person. The Trinity can feel like a theological math problem, spiritual sounding words we say at church, or even an embarrassing confusion that we hope no one ever asks us to explain.
But at some moment I can no longer recall, thinking about our Triune God led me to a very simple but transformative insight that changes how I see everything: The Trinity means that Love is the deepest reality.
If love is fundamental, then I'm loved right now by the Father, the Son, and the Spirit. Not because I've earned it, mastered Trinitarian theology, or avoided particularly egregious sins. It's just that the God who is love currently loves me and will always love me because that is the very nature of our Trinitarian God.
As the beloved son of the Father, saved by the loving sacrifice of the Son, and filled with the loving presence of the Spirit, everything about my life is immersed in love. So, to the degree that I know the Triune God, it becomes increasingly obvious that I cannot do anything but wholeheartedly love God and others. To know and experience the Trinitarian love of God is to become fully human.
Think about creation itself. One theory suggests that matter is ultimate, and the current configuration of particles is exclusively explicable through complex, naturalistic explanations. Another kind of cosmology attributes the features of our world to a cosmic war between various gods and demigods. Yet another posits a solitary god who creates to escape his self-existent loneliness.
By contrast, Christianity reveals that from all eternity, the Father loved the Son with infinite delight, who returned that love in endless joy, united as one in the Spirit's everlasting happiness. So, when this Triune God of infinite love decided to create, the result was abundance, beauty, and splendor.
The Bible teaches us that "God created" (Genesis 1:1), "all things were made through" the Word, Jesus (John 1:3), and "the Spirit was hovering" (Genesis 1:2). It isn't that three gods divided up the work, but that one God (Father, Son, and Spirit) gifted creation in perfect unity and love.
This means creation wasn't God filling a void, or avoiding loneliness, but expressing his love by freely sharing friendship with us.
So, when we follow Jesus, we're not just placing ourselves under the authority of another human teacher. It's infinitely better: Jesus is both fully human and the eternally loving Creator. We can be confident that he knows how life works because he designed everything with perfect love.
There are many theories about how we change: educational interventions, political and economic reforms, technological innovation, and a wide range of self-help approaches. At Uncommon Pursuit, we highly value mentors and friends.
But as our name indicates, an uncommon pursuit is required: God's divine initiative. As Jesus taught us, "You can do nothing apart from me" (John 15:5). The Bible explains that the Holy Spirit convicts us of sin, Jesus saves us from our sin, and God the Father adopts us as his beloved children. We can also say that the Spirit dwells in us so that we love Jesus as our lives glorify God.
Because one, Triune God is always lovingly involved in our lives, our spiritual growth is never a self-sustained effort but ultimately a response to comprehensive, personal, divine grace.
Prayer is one of the most practical ways we experience the Trinity. In prayer, we are abiding with God the Father, through God the Son, by God the Spirit. We're not hoping our prayers reach heaven, navigating a bureaucratic committee of angels, or sanitizing our lives for God's approval. It isn't like a phone call that has a beginning and an end, but a shared life of love.
We know that God the Father loves us as much as he loves God the Son by God the Spirit! It was the Father who sent the Son, the Son who laid down his life for us, and the Spirit who applies this work to our lives (see John 3:16, 10:18, and Titus 3:4-7). So, we never have to question if God is paying attention. Understanding that God is Triune puts our hearts at rest because all three Persons of the Trinity are always united in love for us, all the time, in every circumstance.
Still, sometimes I wonder, what is God the Father like? I wish I could see him! It feels hard to know and love a God I cannot see. It's much easier to read the Gospels and get a glimpse of Jesus' wisdom, compassion, and holiness.
Yet even in his own ministry, Jesus faced this question from his disciples. In response, he explained, "The one who has seen me has seen the Father. How can you say, 'Show us the Father'? Don't you believe that I am in the Father and the Father is in me?" (John 14:9-10). That is, at the level of spiritual reality, to know Jesus is to know the Father and the Spirit, because God is one.
Let me be clear: God is one! We believe in a God with one divine nature, one divine will, and one divine authority. God is not a committee or a partnership. No, our confession is there is only one God. Yet, this one God has revealed himself through the unique persons of the Trinity. For instance, Jesus is neither the Father nor the Spirit, but as he explains, "The Father who lives in me does his works" (John 14:10). Wherever we look, we see God revealed as one God, the Father, Son, and Spirit, distinct yet united as one.
As the early church worked through this complexity, it confirmed a few fundamental points. First, there is always an absolute separation between God and everything and everyone else. The only reasonable conclusion is that the Creator is beyond the comprehension of anyone within his Creation.
Yet this perfectly loving God is Triune. In the precise formulation of orthodox theologians, this simply means that the Father is eternally unbegotten, the Son is eternally begotten, and the Spirit eternally proceeds from the Father and the Son. We know they are distinct because their relationships to one another are distinct. Yet when they act, whether in creation or salvation, all three act together in one unified and perfect divine initiative, as the activity of one God.
That is, God is one in essence (the what) but three in persons (the who). To know the Triune God is to feel awe, gratitude, and amazement at his overwhelming love.
But it's okay to be honest. Most days, I still don't feel immersed in Trinitarian reality. I pray without thinking about the Father, Son, and Spirit. I forget that love is the deepest reality and live for myself. This lesson is an invitation to remember that the Trinity isn't about what I feel, but about God's eternal, unchanging, perfectly loving identity. And what's true is that we are loved right now, whether we sense it or not.
C.S. Lewis, in Mere Christianity, explains the Trinity in a beautiful way:
God is love, and that love works through men—especially through the whole community of Christians. But this spirit of love is, from all eternity, a love going on between the Father and the Son. > > And now, what does it all matter? It matters more than anything else in the world. The whole dance, or drama, or pattern of this three-Personal life is to be played out in each one of us: or (putting it the other way round) each one of us has got to enter that pattern, take his place in that dance. There is no other way to the happiness for which we were made. > > Good things as well as bad, you know, are caught by a kind of infection. If you want to get warm you must stand near the fire: if you want to be wet you must get into the water. If you want joy, power, peace, eternal life, you must get close to, or even into, the thing that has them. They are not a sort of prize which God could, if He chose, just hand out to anyone. They are a great fountain of energy and beauty spurting up at the very centre of reality. If you are close to it, the spray will wet you: if you are not, you will remain dry. Once a man is united to God, how could he not live forever? Once a man is separated from God, what can he do but wither and die? > > But how is he to be united to God? How is it possible for us to be taken into the three-Personal life? > > You remember what I said in Chapter I about begetting and making. We are not begotten by God, we are only made by Him: in our natural state we are not sons of God, only (so to speak) statues. We have not got Zoe or spiritual life: only Bios or biological life which is presently going to run down and die. > > Now the whole offer which Christianity makes is this: that we can, if we let God have His way, come to share in the life of Christ. If we do, we shall then be sharing a life which was begotten, not made, which always has existed and always will exist. Christ is the Son of God. If we share in this kind of life we also shall be sons of God. We shall love the Father as He does and the Holy Ghost will arise in us. He came to this world and became a man in order to spread to other men the kind of life He has—by what I call 'good infection'. Every Christian is to become a little Christ. The whole purpose of becoming a Christian is simply nothing else (176-177).
Then Jesus came from Galilee to John at the Jordan, to be baptized by him. But John tried to stop him, saying, "I need to be baptized by you, and yet you come to me?" Jesus answered him, "Allow it for now, because this is the way for us to fulfill all righteousness." Then John allowed him to be baptized. When Jesus was baptized, he went up immediately from the water. The heavens suddenly opened for him, and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and coming down on him. And a voice from heaven said, "This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well-pleased." ... Jesus came near and said to them, "All authority has been given to me in heaven and on earth. Go, therefore, and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe everything I have commanded you. And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age."
Can you relate to finding the Trinity abstract or irrelevant? What makes the Trinity feel distant to you?
This lesson focuses on this key truth: "The Trinity means that Love is the deepest reality. If love is fundamental, then I'm loved right now." How does understanding the Trinity as eternal love change how you view God, yourself, your struggles, and everything about your life?
At Jesus's baptism, all three persons of the Trinity are present. The Father declares, "This is my beloved Son," the Spirit descends like a dove, and the Son is baptized. How does this passage help you understand the unity and distinction of the Trinity?
In this remarkable passage, Jesus accepts baptism from John to fulfill all righteousness. He humbles himself to fully identify with humanity, and his sacrificial love is honored by the Father and the Spirit, who are 'well-pleased' with a life of love. As you consider the eternal Son of God accepting baptism from a human he created, what do you notice about God's character?
Jesus commands us to baptize "in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit." When you were baptized, you were brought into this Trinitarian life. What does it mean that you are invited into the Trinitarian life of love between the Father, Son, and Spirit?
If you're struggling to "feel" the reality of God's love, how can you bring that experience to the God who loves you?
For nearly two thousand years, Christians have prayed this simple doxology, the Gloria Patri, together. Pray it slowly and attentively, thanking the Father, Son, and Spirit for their love, which deserves our worship:
Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit. As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end. Amen.
Check-in: Since our last discussion, what steps did you take to follow God?
Does the Trinity feel abstract or distant to you? In what ways?
What would be different from God if he wasn't triune but just one person?
How would your approach to life change if you were fully convinced of God's Trinitarian love for you?
When you don't feel God's abundant love, how do you make sense of that gap between his nature and our experience?
Duration: 2 minutes of silent reflection
What is the ONE thing the Holy Spirit is inviting me to do in response to our conversation today?
Consider your whole life:
- **Mind:** A truth about God's triune being to embrace or a false belief to reject. - **Heart:** An attitude to cultivate (trust in or gratitude for God's love) or an emotion to bring to God (fear, loneliness, dryness, doubt). - **Soul:** Practice Trinitarian prayer: Pray to the Father through Christ by the Spirit. - **Body:** What's one action you can take to be like the God of love who loves you? - **Relationships:** How can you be a loving friend to others in the way that God loves you? - **Life Plan:** How does your life plan reflect the deepest truths about reality?
Let's go around and share: "One thing I'm taking away is..." and "One way you can support me is..."
As you pray for one another, pray to the Father, by the Son, in the Spirit.
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