Life with a "Relational God"

There's a lady named Tanya, and she had a great Sunday. She came to church. She listened to a really great message. So maybe it's not this church. And then she sang some really uplifting songs.

It's definitely not our church. And she was really encouraged by her experience of church that particular Sunday. She had some incredible conversations at morning tea. She was prayed for.

And she left that place walking through the car park to her car as if she was walking on air. The rest of the day was just such a peaceful and happy time. God is so good, she thought to herself. But then came Monday.

The same alarm went off again with that same old shocking ringtone, and she had the same old breakfast and she started the same old work routine. Traffic was a nightmare. Some silly person had decided to look at their phone and rear ended someone on the M1. She got to work late because of it, had to rush into a meeting underprepared, and her coworker Susan was up to her old catty self again. Where had the joy of Sunday gone?

How quickly and how disappointingly did that peace of God disappear? Tanya felt guilty that she could so easily revert back to those old habits, back to that less than ideal spiritual vitality. She thought to herself, just hold on a few more days and then it'll be weekend again, and I can experience the incredible nearness of God once again. Does that sound familiar? Have you ever experienced something like this in your life?

That ebb and that flow of spiritual intimacy with God. Have you experienced that incredible joy of salvation only to let it slip through your hands? Have you been left disappointed in yourself at the swiftness of all that pleasure that just fizzles out and you're left feeling numb and empty once again? Well, the Bible says that life doesn't have to be lived this way. That we can experience God and His powerful presence in consistently deep ways.

The truth is, the Bible says that we can actually enjoy God all the time if we are willing to enjoy. Today, we're going to be starting a series called Enjoying Life with God: Experiencing God in All His Fullness. It's going to be a short series. It's only a four part series before we sort of head into the next look or the next series which prepares us for Christmas. And we're going to be looking over this month at the ways that we can relate to God in a deeper way, that more consistent way, that more intentional way as we seek to draw into the wonder of communion with God.

And as we do this, we're gonna try to be practical about it as well. It's no use saying we must be or we should be something for something that is voluntarily entered into, but we're going to try to give some easy to manage, easy to do habits as well about how we can think deeply about God and how we can know more about Him and experience Him at a deeper level. But as we do that, inherently, as we think about how we can be with God in a more intimate way, we have to think about and answer the question: who is God? Who is this God that we are trying to draw near to in the first place? And so as we explore this life with God, enjoying life with God, we're going to be looking at who God is, and we're going to be exploring Him in His fullness by looking at the theological concept of the Trinity.

Now there's a lot of people that are already sighing at that thought, at the complexity of a triune God. But trust me, as we do this, it's going to be amazing. This morning, we're going to be looking at this concept of the Trinity and we're going to start seeing why that is important, why God has revealed Himself to humanity in this way: Father, Son, and Spirit. And we're going to then next week start looking at who the Father is, and the week after who the Son is, and then finally who God the Spirit is as well. And so this morning, we're gonna get a little theological.

I hope you're okay with that. And as we do, we're gonna look at several passages as we work through this together. We're gonna jump through the Bible. So we're going to look at this morning: life with a relational God revealed in the Trinity. First point we'd look at is that the Trinity is a revelation of God about Himself.

God has revealed to us that He is a Trinity, that He is a triune God. Now the Bible explains that God is composed of three distinguishable persons, commonly referred to as the Father, the Son, and the Spirit. Technically, this is referred to as the Trinity, and that word Trinity is not mentioned in the Bible. So let's just put that out there. You won't find that word in Scripture.

It is an old word. It's an ancient word that theologians used to describe the biblical evidence, which seems to indicate this as a reality. We're gonna look at some of that evidence now. There is evidence both in the Old and in the New Testament where we find this concept that God is both one. We don't believe in a polytheistic faith, a faith of many gods.

There is one God. And so we hear in a very important Hebrew scripture of Deuteronomy 6:4, which is referred to even today in the Jewish faith as the Shema, which is the first word of this command: Hear. Hear, O Israel. Deuteronomy 6:4 says, The Lord your God, the Lord is one.

There is only one living God. Written in the context of Israel having just escaped the land of Egypt, a nation which worshipped many gods: the god of life, the god of death, the god of fertility. The nation that worshipped many gods, Israel is taught in the wilderness that there is just one God, one Creator God. And He reveals Himself to Israel personally with this name, Yahweh.

We translate it as Lord, capital letters like that. So in the Hebrew, it would say, Hear O Israel, the or Yahweh, your God. Hear O Israel, Yahweh, our God. Yahweh, our God. And yet, we also throughout the Bible, even in the first few books of the Bible, we hear that Yahweh, this one God, refers to Himself in plural terms. He speaks of Himself, this one God, in plural terms.

In the first chapter of the Bible, God thinks to Himself as He's creating everything that exists. He thinks to Himself in Genesis 1:26, Let us create man in Our image, in Our likeness. When Adam and Eve in Genesis 3 sin and plunge themselves into the chaos of sin, God says in Genesis 3:22, Behold, the man has become like one of us in knowing good and evil. In Genesis 11:7, at the Tower of Babel where humanity conspired to become like God, to ascend to God by building the Tower of Babel, God says, Come, let us go down there and confuse their language so that they may not understand one another's speech.

Many years later, as the story is unfolding of God's redemption and His desire to save humanity, we come to Isaiah 6:8 where God is saying, I need to bring a message to the people that there is forgiveness and reconciliation available to them. And God says to Himself and into the universe these words: I heard the voice of the Lord. This is Isaiah speaking, saying, Whom shall I send and who will go for us? And then Isaiah said, Here I am. Send me.

So even in the Old Testament, we're starting to see this dynamic nature of the God who is one speaking of Himself in these plural, pluralistic ways. At other occasions, we have this mysterious angel of the Lord that comes and he visits with people. He comes and he reveals God to people and he speaks on behalf of God as if he is speaking the word of God. This angel is therefore identified yet distinct from God. You can find that instance in Exodus 3 or Judges 13.

Exodus 3 or Judges 13 where this angel of the Lord comes and speaks to various individuals. But then we come to the New Testament and things start solidifying even a bit more. Jesus arrives on the scene. And through His life and through His character, the things He teaches, the hard to believe things He does, and then ultimately His death and His resurrection, all these things lead a group of Jewish believers to worship Him as God. That is pretty incredible.

Faithful Jews worship a man as God. Now you can say, well, okay, these are just heretics. They've gone crazy. But this man has said a lot of things about Himself that has caused these people to believe that He is God. Jesus Himself teaches some pretty paradigm shifting stuff.

He equates Himself to God personally. John 10:30, I and the Father are one, He says. John 14:9, He says, If you have seen me, you have seen the Father. Jesus is not just some great prophet, some great teacher that's come to say, This is the way, guys. Follow it.

Jesus comes to earth and says, I am the way. If you want the Father, you will come through me. He's claiming to be God. And then finally, His great resurrection from the dead, that victory over sin cements that, solidifies these claims and says, This man, he promised this and it's happened. So maybe some of the other stuff he said is also true.

And after this event, after this great resurrection, He takes His group of Jewish believers that are still coming to grips with all of this. He takes them to a mountain and He tells them that He must return to the Father to sit on the throne by which He will reign over what is going to happen across the next span of human history. He must go back to the kingdom, and His disciples will have to continue this work that He has begun as King. And as He farewells them, as He says goodbye to them, He gives them a final command and He says it in Matthew 28. Go, make disciples of all the nations, baptising them into the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.

See and notice that name is singular, not the names of the Father, the Son, and the Spirit, the one name: Father, Son, and Spirit. And it says that at this time, in this moment, the disciples worshipped Him. The disciples worshipped Christ. This is not just a prophet. This is not just a teacher.

It's not just another preacher like a KJ standing in front of people. And so from these sorts of evidences, Christians who get these scriptures have to wrestle with this and say, How does this work? How does this fit together? And hundreds of thousands of hours of debate and study have gone into this concept that there can be one God in three and three in one. And so after hundreds of thousands of debates and arguments, the great theological statements of the church started being written.

The great creeds: the Apostles Creed, the Nicene Creed, and then we find the Athanasian Creed, and you can read that in our book of forms here, which is on the back there that contains all the Christian creeds from the two thousand years of the church. And in that, this is what it proclaims: that we worship one God in Trinity and Trinity in unity, neither blending their persons nor dividing their essence. One God in three and three in one. The church father Tertullian, who lived about from the year 160 to 220, in his writing, once likened the Trinity to a flower. He said, God the Father is the unseen embedded power deep in the ground from which everything in the flower draws its strength.

He gives life and direction to that flower. God the Son is the seen green shoot that springs out from the soil, breaks into the world giving expression to the root system and giving shape and structure to the plant. And then God the Holy Spirit is the flower's fragrance and beauty. Seen, yet unseen. Noticed and sometimes disregarded, but always there magnifying the beauty of the flower in sometimes intangible ways.

And so having looked at, I guess, a brief overview, and again, you can read books this thick about the Trinity if you want. Having had a brief overview of the expression of the Trinity in the Bible, having seen that God has chosen to reveal Himself in these ways, we have to ask the question next: What are the implications for us of this God who has revealed Himself in this way? A God with three distinct persons. Well, firstly, it means that we can know God. God has existed, remember, in this eternal community, the Father, the Son, and the Spirit forever.

And they have related to one another in this way forever. But when God then relates to us, He relates to us in the same way, in those three persons as Father, Son, and Spirit. But the practical implication of this means that our relationship with God can be deepened by understanding that we are relating to three persons in the Trinity. Personalities. When you pray, for example, think about addressing your words to the Father who gives, a Father who provides, a Father who protects.

He is a giver of all good gifts. But when you read the Bible, you can think about the Son who has revealed Himself in time and space, a Son who has, through His incarnation, shown what God is like and has given structure and shape to God. And then think about how this is being made real, how this is moving you to tears or joy or celebration through the work of the Spirit who is in you, making you feel these things. The fact that God has revealed Himself with the characteristics of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit teaches something of God's very nature, and that is that He is someone who can be related to.

Think about it. God could have chosen any metaphor. He could have chosen any word or concept or illustration to describe Himself as the infinite Creator. He could be whoever He wants to be, but He chooses to be known as Father and Son and Spirit. He doesn't choose to be something impersonal like wind and water and fire.

Although wind and water and fire, you can sort of almost match with the personalities of the Trinity. He doesn't reveal Himself as a hammer and an axe and a trumpet, useful tools that serve particular purposes. You can use a hammer to smash something and an axe to chop something and a trumpet to make a sound. He could have revealed Himself as animals or planetary bodies, stars and suns, but He reveals Himself as Father, Son, and Spirit. Why?

Because we can know who a Father is. We can know who a Son is. They are members of a family. They are individuals that we can relate to. We can know our fathers.

We can know our brothers. The Spirit of God doesn't exist outside of us, but He enters our very hearts and our minds. He mingles with us. And so the triune God is a personal God who reveals Himself as the God who can be known and related to, and that is very significant. We almost assume that God needs to be known.

We almost assume that we, our greatest goal in life is to know Him perhaps as Christians, but why? Why was that necessary? Why couldn't He just be, like some of our friends believe, a distant force that just exists and then he has withdrawn himself in his own satisfaction with who he is? This God reveals Himself as the relatable Father, Son, and Spirit because He needs and He wants us to be known.

But secondly, the implication for knowing God as three distinct persons means we must know God to experience wholeness in life. It's one thing to understand that God is someone we can know, but the Bible also makes us understand that God is revealed in His personhood so that we will receive all the benefits of His magnificent characteristics. Not simply can we know God, but in order to flourish in this life, we must know and experience Him as Father, Son, and Spirit. In other words, we must have communion and relationship with Him. And this is beautifully highlighted by an incident in the Bible involving Moses. It's a wonderful snapshot and I'm sure there are others we can point to as well.

Moses, the great spiritual leader of Israel. In a remarkable event, God has, in the context, revealed Himself to Israel. Like we said, drawing His people out of Egypt saying, I'm gonna choose this people to be My people and through this people to make known to the nations who I am. And God leads them into the wilderness. He reveals His will through the Ten Commandments. He makes a covenant with them saying, I will be your God if you will be My people.

And the ink is not yet dry on the tablets of stone. And they're making a golden calf and worshipping it as God. And in Exodus 33, God says this: Fine. You haven't chosen me. I've made a promise to you.

However, I'm taking you and I'm giving you the Promised Land. I'm giving you Canaan. I told you I would do it. I've brought you out. Now I will send you there, but when you cross that border, I'm not coming with you.

Now think about that for a second. So Exodus 33:3, I will not go up among you, He says, lest I consume you on the way for you are a stiff necked people. I'm not going with you. And think about this. The people will receive the blessing of God.

The thing that they wanted: freedom. Their own place, home. They will establish themselves without the demands of God's holy presence. They have a one way ticket to heaven. I wanna ask you, would you take that offer?

You get heaven without God, without the holiness expectation. But this is how Moses responds a few verses later. He intercedes for the people and pleads with God. He says, If Your presence, God, does not go with us, do not send us from here. How will anyone know that You are pleased with me and with Your people unless You go with us?

What else will distinguish me and Your people from all the other people on the face of the earth? It's a remarkable response. Moses' goals would have been achieved. He wanted to set his people free. He wanted to bring his people into prosperity and wealth and peace.

And he could have had heaven without God. But Moses doesn't want heaven without God. Moses doesn't want everything. He wants God. The blessings of the Promised Land are secondary to the true blessing, which is God Himself.

That is what it means to be a Christian. We don't receive simply a one way ticket to heaven. We aren't simply saved from hell, simply saved from an existence away from God. We are saved for God. When we enter into a relationship with God through faith, we enter into this two way dynamic.

A relationship with God is one of receiving yes, but it is one of giving as well. It is one of being loved and it is one of loving. Christianity isn't simple truths that must be believed. It's not just a lifestyle that must be lived. It is a real life relationship, a union with God.

Now, of course, the wonderful thing about the gospel is that when we become children of God, we become so simply by believing in the finished work of Jesus. That is how easy it is to enter into this joy of knowing God. We simply believe that Jesus did die on the cross for my sin. And when that happens, we are regarded as children of God, irrespective of how close or how distant we feel to God at any time. But here is the important point to remember.

If we must know God to experience the wholeness of life that He wants to give us, of knowing God deeper and deeper, then it must mean that our life needs to be focused on knowing Him. And in doing so, our life will become more healed. In knowing Him, our life becomes more joyful, more in tune with that original design for us. It's like the story, remember two weeks ago of the prodigal son that we dealt with? The father had two sons, two boys.

One went walkabout, the other one stayed home. Both were the sons of the father. And both sons were at one point lost to the dad. What had they done, these two boys to deserve the father's love?

Nothing. They were born into his family. He loved them because they were his sons, but only the youngest son in his humble return to the father enjoyed being a son. The older brother didn't experience the joy of sonship, but both were sons.

And so praying and reading our Bibles won't make us more Christian. It won't make us more sons or more daughters of God, we are. Not doing our Bible readings or not doing our prayers won't make us less Christian either. But how much we enjoy God does depend on what we do. If we choose to regularly talk to Him, to reflect on Him, to recognise Him in our lives, the more we start doing that, the more we start enjoying life as sons and daughters.

And we start seeing and recognising and wholeheartedly enjoying the privileges and the rights of being sons and daughters. And so the key to finishing, the key to enjoying life with God as we begin this short series is seeing that God is inviting us into a wonderfully rich family. It's a family that has existed forever. Father, Son, and Spirit has existed for eternity, but we are being brought into that family to relate to that God. And as we explore this, looking at each member of the Trinity, we will start to see that we can be thankful for who God is.

This triune God has worked to save us. This triune God has worked to save us. All three persons redeeming us from the existence of hell in eternal existence apart from Him. And this is how it happened. In eternity past, God the Father, the root system, in His mercy said, I will save humanity.

The Son in eternity past said, Father, I will go for this mission. I will go for them. And the Spirit: I will make this true in their lives for them. I will apply this to them in love. God, the one triune God, not separately from one another, in perfect communion, in perfect agreement with one another said, We will bring these people to ourselves.

And so the Son entered our world in bodily form, standing in our place as our representative to bear the punishment on our behalf as sin destroyed His body, as sin waged war against His soul, and it was the Spirit that raised Him from the dead. The Spirit who entered not simply into time and space, but has entered our very hearts to confirm these truths and are speaking to us even now as we hear. It's the majestic God in all His fullness that has come into our lives. This is the God we may know. This is the God who we can grow to enjoy even more.

Let's pray. Father, we thank you for your mercy in having desired us from before we were close to being formed. That in your grace and in your great knowledge, you knew what would happen. You knew how our hearts would be towards you and yet you laughed and you pursued. Thank you, Lord Jesus, Son of God, that you said I will go for them.

That you did not consider equality with God the Father something to be grasped, but emptied yourself to take on the shape and the form of man. And then in that humility, did not consider your life something to be protected and guarded, but offered that life as a sacrifice for sin. Thank you, Holy Spirit, that you vindicated the Son by raising Him from the dead, pointing to the fact that He could not be brought down by sin and death, pointing to the fact that He has conquered over sin and death forever. And now, Holy Spirit, you are interceding for us, speaking to our hearts and our minds even as we reflect on these things and confirming that they are true. Our Spirit, will you continue to work in us?

Will you continue to remind us and teach us for the wrestles and the doubts that we may have? Lord, will you cover them as well with understanding and knowledge and peace? We thank you for these truths. We thank you that there is now an open door for us to enter through and to know our God who is there, the God who has shown Himself to us. We thank you for these truths, Lord.

Apply them to our hearts. We pray in Jesus' name. Amen. I want to be practical, and so we are going to reflect on what we can do. A lot of this is suggested by a really great book called Enjoying God by Tim Chester, which has been the inspiration for this little series.

And he has worked hard to make some very practical suggestions on how we can enjoy God more in our life with some good habits. And so one practical habit that has come from Tim Chester's book is to do this: Set a timer on your phone or set a reminder or whatever. And then just briefly for five minutes, attempt to pray to the Father, to the Son, and to the Spirit. Thinking about how the Father and His gifts and what He does for us has made you glad or what you would like Him to provide for you.

Thanking the Son for His work and what He can provide for you and praying to the Spirit in the same way. Now we are at the cusp of knowing more about the Trinity, but this is a great way to start. Whatever we know about the Trinity, do this: to pray specifically to the three persons. I can tell you, I've done it this week, it is quite challenging. It's quite hard.

But the more you do it, the more you think, How multidimensional can my prayer life be? How much is it stretching me to see the multicoloured spectrum of God as I enjoy Him?