Trinity Sunday 2016 Sermon Notes

Trinity Sunday 2016 Sermon Notes

Primary Text

John 16:12-15


12 “I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now. 13 When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth, for he will not speak on his own authority, but whatever he hears he will speak, and he will declare to you the things that are to come. 14 He will glorify me, for he will take what is mine and declare it to you. 15 All that the Father has is mine; therefore I said that he will take what is mine and declare it to you.


1 John 4:7-9

7 Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God, and whoever loves has been born of God and knows God. 8 Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love.  (agape, divine, perfect love) 9 In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only Son into the world, so that we might live through him.


John 3:16

16 “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.


The Greatest Commandment

Matthew 22:35-40


35 And one of them, a lawyer, asked him a question to test him. 36 “Teacher, which is the great commandment in the Law?” 37 And he said to him, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. 38 This is the great and first commandment. 39 And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. 40 On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets.”



Here again, the word "Love" is a conjugation of the Greek word "Agape."


"Love" in the Bible

The New Testament uses two primary words for "love."


The word "Love" appears 286 times in the English Standard Version,


258 times, it uses a form of the Greek word "Agapeo," which means "to love, to show love, or to take pleasure in."  This is a selfless love, and this is how God loves us, but also how He commands us to love one another.


25 times, it uses a form of the Greek word "Phileo."  This is a kind of brotherly love, between people, and is used less than 10% of the time.


Likewise, the Old Testament uses two primary words for "love."
Love occurs 458 times in the ESV translation of the Old Testament:

247 times, the word "Love" translates the Hebrew word "Ahav." It means: "To like, to love, to endear, to flirt, lovable, love.


245 times, the word "Love translates the Hebrew word "Chessed."  It means "Loyalty, joint obligation, faithfulness, goodness, graciousness, Godly action."


Example: Agapeo

Luke 11:42


42 “But woe to you Pharisees! For you tithe mint and rue and every herb, and neglect justice and the love of God. These you ought to have done, without neglecting the others.


Example: Phileo

Matthew 6:5


5 “And when you pray, you must not be like the hypocrites. For they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and at the street corners, that they may be seen by others. Truly, I say to you, they have received their reward.


Example: Ahav

Exodus 20:5b-6




for I the LORD your God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children to the third and the fourth generation of those who hate me, 6 but showing steadfast love to thousands of those who love me and keep my commandments.


Example: Chessed

Genesis 24:12


12 And he said, “O LORD, God of my master Abraham, please grant me success today and show steadfast love to my master Abraham.


God is Love

So we said earlier, in 1 John 4:8, that "God is Love." And we mentioned that in that passage, John uses the word "Agapeo" to describe this essential nature of God.


This is a selfless love, and this is how God loves us, but also how He commands us to love one another.


But here is a question for us:  If this kind of selfless, giving love is an essential nature of God, that is, if God is defined by His ability to love selflessly, who did God love in this manner before He created us?


And while we ponder that...



The Atonement

Let us consider the Act of Atonement.


This question is often raised by those opposed to Christianity, and it goes something like this:

If God is Just, then that means that God is fair.  But God is presented with billions and billions of sinners.  If Jesus is truly going to pay for the sins of each one, wouldn't He have to live billions and billions of sinless lives, and then be sacrificed billions and billions of times?

How can one death, even the death of a perfect man, pay for more than one sinful life?

The Jews have adopted the position that each man's death pays for his own sins, but that is problematic as well.  In that instance, the lamb is spotted.  An imperfect lamb cannot be the sacrifice to cover sin, according to the Torah.


Yes, Jesus lived a perfect and sinless life, but is His one death enough to cover all sins?


A Third question

Since this is Trinity Sunday, and the message is about the nature of the Trinity, I'm going to stick with our theme here and ask a third question:


If, in the New Testament, Jesus does not speak directly to an issue, does that mean the issue is not important to us?

For instance, only once does Jesus come close to addressing the issue of homosexuality, when He says, in Matthew 19:3-6


3 And Pharisees came up to him and tested him by asking, “Is it lawful to divorce one’s wife for any cause?” 4 He answered, “Have you not read that he who created them from the beginning made them male and female, 5 and said, ‘Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh’? 6 So they are no longer two but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate.”


Since we follow Jesus, shouldn't we only listen to His words?  Should we ignore what came before, in the Old Testament, and only focus on what the Master specifically addresses?


Trinity

The answer to all three of these objections is the Trinity.


Unless we have some understanding of the idea of the Trinity, we cannot reasonably answer these objections.


Before the creation, who did God love?  The Father loved the Son and the Spirit, the Son loved the Spirit and the Father, and the Spirit loved the Father and the Son.  Three persons in one Godhead, selflessly loving and being loved in eternity past.


And the death of one man to pay for all men?  They're right, it's insufficient.  But they don't understand the Trinity.  You see, Jesus wasn't JUST a man.  He was God, made flesh.  He was the earthly representation of the infinite.  It wasn't just a man who died that day, it was God, who loved selflessly and gave Himself for us.  An infinite payment for a finite debt.


And what about the words of Jesus in the New Testament?  Should we only listen to those, at the exclusion of the Old Testament?  Not if we believe in the Trinity.  What the Father has spoken in the Old Testament, the Son and the Spirit do not disagree with.  Indeed, since the Three exist in Trinity, Jesus spoke everything in the Old Testament too.


The Trinity

The Trinity is an essential doctrine of the Christian faith.  Without an understanding of it, we cannot understand the atonement, the scriptures, or the very nature of God.


So how do we define the Trinity?


My favorite definition is this:


The Trinity is a mystery which cannot be comprehended by human reason but is understood only through faith and is best confessed in the words of the Athanasian creed, which states that we worship one God in Trinity and Trinity in Unity neither confusing the persons nor dividing the substance. That we are compelled by the Christian truth to confess that each distinct person is God and Lord, and that the deity of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit is One, Equal in Glory, co-equal in majesty.