This weekend, the one after Pentecost, it'll be Trinity
Sunday. So I thought I’d share something today about our immeasurable, mysterious,
unfathomable and incomprehensible God.
One God (not three) who exists eternally as three (not one) persons; Father,
Son, and Holy Spirit, each person being fully God, not partly.
I'm not going to attempt and explain the Trinity; that
would be like trying to set out the contents of the Encyclopaedia Britannica - on
the back of a matchbox. One of the greatest theologians ever, Augustine of Hippo,
wrote 15 volumes on the Trinity and then lamented that he had barely scratched the
surface.
Instead I'm going to leave you with a trinitarian
blessing. The Apostle Paul signs off 2 Corinthians with a brief farewell. It’s
a prayer for the church in Corinth, a Christian community that he founded. It is a prayer that the believers there will experience three things. The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ,
the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit. I want to say a little
about each of them.
Firstly, grace. We become Christians in the first place by
discovering and experiencing the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ. New York
church leader Tim Keller once said, “The more you see your own flaws and sins,
the more precious, electrifying, and amazing God’s grace appears to you.”
The sweetness of grace that saved an absolutely hopeless
wretch like me... Christianity is not so much about being nice (though that's no excuse for gratuitous offence)! Christianity is about being new. Grace is something sublimely wonderful - which is lavished on
you - and you just don’t deserve it at all because none of us contributed anything
to our salvation except the sin and filth and moral chaos that God had to forgive and cleanse.
May grace abound in you. May many, many more come to know
this saving grace as they encounter Jesus by faith at All Saints’.
Secondly, love. Once we come to faith and start a new life,
we begin to feel God's love for us as he pours it into our lives. It's love
that flows from a perfect Father's warm, beating heart. The Jewish
thinker Rabbi Aaron once sighed and said, “I wish I could love the greatest saint
like the Lord loves the greatest sinner.”
Knowing everything, everything, about you, God
was moved with compassion for you. He factored in and took into account all the mistakes you would make, then he chose you, he adopted you, he crowned you
with honour and dignity, and made you a prince or a princess. The Bible calls
us the apple of his eye.
I remember when our first child was born; I held Anna
in my arms, 7lb 4 oz. I looked into her blinking eyes as she adjusted to the light and I just loved her and
loved her. Just as well, actually, because she didn’t allow us any sleep for the next two
years!
But God’s love for us is far greater than the love of any human parent. And
the Bible says it endures forever. May the transformative experience of God’s
love abound and overflow at All Saints'.
Then thirdly, fellowship. New Christians quickly discover that this new,
marvellous experience of God is not a private thing. God puts the lonely in
families, as Psalm 68 says. He has designed Christian living to be enjoyed in community, so the
third experience in this blessing is discovering the fellowship, the intimate
friendship, of the Holy Spirit.
The fellowship of the Holy Spirit is about sharing deeply
with one another. Showing mercy - not criticism and judgement - to one another, bearing with
each other, forgiving each other, accepting one another, carrying one another’s
burdens.
I’ve never understood people who say they won’t go to
church “because of all the hypocrites.” Someone has said, quite rightly, “That’s
like someone refusing to the gym because of all the fat people.” It's not only offensive, it's misguided.
This trinitarian blessing is not a formula. It is not
just a snappy little motto we attach to an end of a meeting, like, “That's all folks”
or “God bless America” or “And on that bombshell, it's time to end.”
It’s not just something we say, it's something we
taste and know. This is our life; one in which we grow as our
experience of God as Father, Son and Holy Spirit evolves.
This is my last word of encouragement before we leave
All Saints'. And yes, we will pop back sometime to say a proper goodbye when the
world returns to normal, maybe in early September, because we can’t leave via video link!
It breaks our hearts to have to leave you. We are
managing our expectations; we never again expect to enjoy church as much as we have done
here. We have slowly come to terms with that reality over the last year. We have counted the cost. We will miss
you terribly and for a long time. Yours is a church in which grace, love and
fellowship are already rich and abundant.
But our prayer for you as we sign off is simply this –
and it’s a prayer from the heart, from two friends; may the grace of our Lord
Jesus Christ and the love of Father God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit
be with you all, evermore. Amen.
Brief online talk, 4 June 2020
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