The Three-in-One God Gives You Three Incredible Gifts
Maybe you’ve done this when you’ve been on an airplane. You look down as you’re taking off or landing, and you notice the movement of all the cars and trucks on the roads and highways. You see them streaming along the straightaways and curling around cloverleaf interchanges. From the sky you see a swirling mass of vehicles that doesn’t stop. It’s like a carefully choreographed dance. It’s fascinating how it all works. There’s even a certain beauty to it…from the air.
Once you land and you’re in one of those vehicles that someone else is watching from the sky, it may not look beautiful; it may be more frustrating than fascinating! It depends on your perspective, doesn’t it?
If you’re like most people, you may find that some things related to God can be quite fascinating and frustrating at the same time. There are lots of examples, but today we’re skipping all of them and going straight at the triune nature of God…the three-inone nature of God…one God yet three “persons”…the Trinity.
Fascinating that the triune God is something we can’t fully comprehend and understand!
Frustrating that the triune God is something we can’t fully comprehend and understand!
As we think about the Trinity today, this can go one of two ways. You can be so frustrated and say, “How can that be?! It doesn’t make sense! How can I believe something I can’t even understand?!”
Or, you can be a little humble and remember that this is God we are talking about, not another human being. You can choose to just listen and put yourself in the mind frame that what you are hearing today is true. It is what God says about himself and about the gifts that he says he gives to you. If you will do that, I think you’ll find God fascinating…and worthy of your love and your life.
The Father Gives Us Peace
Did you ever have that teacher who you swore just did not like you at all? They were out to get you. They looked at you funny. They cut you no slack on grading your work. Not a peaceful relationship with the one who holds all the authority in the classroom! Magnify that times a billion and you don’t even get close to the problem we had with the holy and almighty God, the authority over everything in heaven and on earth To be at odds with God is frightening.
And that’s the way things were. Peace with God is not something anyone is born with. Our congregation had a little boy born this week out at Vail. I assure you that he entered the world just like you did as an enemy of God. We all arrive the same way. We look cute and snuggle-worthy and everyone wants to hold us and touch our little toes and fingers. But not God. It sounds super harsh, but only because we’re looking at things from the way we think and feel. Try to think about it from the standpoint of the perfectly holy God. He cannot coexist with sin-contaminated people.
It would be great, wouldn’t it, if we could fix that problem. If you’re good at working on cars, you can buy an old junker, buy the right parts and get it working. If you’re a computer programmer, you can find the problem in the code and make it right. If you damage a relationship, you can work to repair that. But there’s nothing we can do about the problem of sin that we’re born with and the sinful way we live. That separates us from God, and we can’t make peace with God happen.
For sinful people to have peace with God, it had to come from God himself. He loved the world—the sinful world of people—so much that he put together a plan to make peace between sinful people and himself. The Father would send his Son to put an end to the hostility that existed between sinful mankind and God.
God created this peace, but many, many people reject it. They forfeit the peace that is there for them. But those who trust in God have this peace which the Father brings to them through his Son.
You look around the world right now and things are not peaceful not in our country, not between countries on the other side of the globe. Throw in the things that you’re forced to deal with personally or that you have shamefully brought on yourself, and peace seems like only a fantasy. But the peace the Father brings through his Son? That’s reality. How clearly we are told: Therefore, since we have been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.
You can probably tell that this is not simply an “I feel calm” kind of peace, the kind of thing that can come and go, as tenuous as a temporary cease-fire. It is actual, lasting peace between us and God. It has nothing to do with feelings; it has everything to do with God removing the hostility that existed between him and us because of sin.
The Son Gives us Grace
Imagine 5-year-old you preparing for your birthday party. You talk to your friends and say, “You bring me a new bike.” “And you bring me a new Diamondbacks hat.” “You bring me new books.” You bring me a new…” Can you imagine what our parents would say?! They would tell us in no uncertain terms that we are not to talk like that. They would teach us that gifts are not things we can demand or that we earn. A gift is something someone gives us because they want to, not because they have to.
If we understand that about a gift, then we can understand what the word grace is about. Grace tells us that the love of God is absolutely a gift from him. We hadn’t earned it, didn’t deserve it. Just like there is a price you pay for a gift that you give to someone for their birthday, there was a price paid for the gift of grace that you have. You have God’s grace, his love, because Jesus paid that price.
The idea of someone making the ultimate sacrifice so that others can live free is definitely not foreign to us, is it? In this country, we are thankful for those who have served in the military and given their lives for our peace and freedom.
How much more appreciative should we be that Jesus made the ultimate, ultimate sacrifice for all people so that they can live free from sin and at peace with God?!
His coming into this world to live sinlessly because we can’t… his willingness to die on a cross to pay for our sins and our sinfulness… his defeat of death so that we will also be victorious over it… incredible.
It’s heartbreaking that so many reject the peace the Father gives and the grace through Jesus that is there for them too. Paul was writing all this to people who already trusted in Jesus. They knew this gift of peace; they felt this gift of grace. We have these gifts too. And just like they did, you and I stand in this grace every day. We live in a peaceful and loving relationship with God every single day because he made it so!
Doesn’t that help you get through the day? We enjoy good things, to be sure, but we also experience suffering and things that test our patience and stretch our ability to carry on. Life in this world is hard and in some particular ways for Christians who live a little differently than others and sometimes find conflict because of it. But God says that we can rejoice while all this is going on because we know he’s working on us through all of that to ultimately bring us to hope.
The Spirit Gives Us Hope
The prognosis isn’t good. The doctor is super cautious and not promising anything. He talks about this potentially not being successful. He also mentions the good outcomes that are possible. Those are what you hold onto. Knowing that there is a possibility of success gives you hope.
When the Bible uses the word hope, it’s not a “maybe it will happen, maybe not” kind of thing. It comes from a Greek word that means “hope” in the sense of looking forward to. Maybe we would use the word anticipation or even expectation In other words, the result is not in doubt we just have to wait for it. What does God promise that there is no doubt about, but is also not here yet? The kids know that as well as the adults. What we’re waiting for, hoping for, is to see the glory of God and heaven itself.
And you know who’s behind that hope, pushing us forward through everything that threatens and hurts? Yeah, not too hard to guess since we’ve talked about the Father and the Son! The Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit was given to us, God says. He lives in us, God says. He works perseverance through our weakest moments. He forges character through our struggles He takes your pain and turns it into real, lasting hope.
We were born into this world as hopeless people in a hopeless world. But God really changed that! The Holy Spirit gave us faith to believe the promises of peace from the Father and grace in Christ. He sustains us while we’re sometimes slowly grinding through the difficulties of this world. We need him, and we have him. Like water being poured from a pitcher into a glass, the Holy Spirit pours love and hope into our hearts.
Are you frustrated because you can’t fully comprehend what it means that God is three-in-one and that the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are individually credited with certain gifts given to you, yet they are all one God? A little bit of frustration is maybe okay it just means that we hit the dead end of understanding. It keeps us humble.
Far greater than any frustration we might have is our faith-filled fascination that this incomprehensible, holy, almighty, eternal God decided to love us and to give us these incredible gifts: peace and grace and hope. What’s difficult to understand doesn’t have to be difficult to believe. Amen.
Now the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus. Amen.
