Latest / Topeka Bible Church Audio Archive / May 31, 2026 | The Trinity - The Triune God

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May 31, 2026 | The Trinity - The Triune God · Topeka Bible Church Audio Archive

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: Well, good morning.
• 0:01
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you for being here at Topeka Bible Church.
• 0:05
  SPEAKER_00: Name, as you uh heard before, is Malcolm Yarnell from Fort Worth, Texas.
• 0:09
  SPEAKER_00: Glad to have my wife, Karen, here.
• 0:11
  SPEAKER_00: Uh she's much nicer, kinder, uh prettier than I am.
• 0:16
  SPEAKER_00: I hope you'll get the opportunity to meet her.
• 0:19
  SPEAKER_00: The Triune God, who is he and what is he doing?
• 0:24
  SPEAKER_00: So the pastor has been taking you through God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit, and who uh each of the persons are, and what uh each of the persons do over the last three weeks, and he has asked me to bring all of that together into the unity of the Trinity.
• 0:45
  SPEAKER_00: And I thought I would do that by focusing on two texts, one that really uh gets us into who God is, and the other into what God does.
• 0:55
  SPEAKER_00: So, first of all, who is the triune God?
• 1:00
  SPEAKER_00: Now, the premier Trinitarian passage is known as the Great Commission.
• 1:05
  SPEAKER_00: Matthew 28 tells us who God is, and he is Trinity.
• 1:11
  SPEAKER_00: So the eleven disciples traveled to Galilee to the mountain where Jesus had directed them.
• 1:18
  SPEAKER_00: And when they saw him, they worshiped.
• 1:21
  SPEAKER_00: But some doubted.
• 1:24
  SPEAKER_00: Jesus came near and said to them, All authority has been given to me in heaven and on earth.
• 1:30
  SPEAKER_00: Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father.
• 1:37
  SPEAKER_00: Did you catch that?
• 1:38
  SPEAKER_00: The Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.
• 1:43
  SPEAKER_00: And did you notice that the name is singular, teaching them to observe everything I have commanded you, and remember, I am with you always to the end of the age.
• 1:58
  SPEAKER_00: Now this passage establishes the truth of Trinity through worship, through ontology, which is a fancy philosophical word, mean being or existence, and authority.
• 2:11
  SPEAKER_00: So, first of all, God is Trinity because we worship the Trinity, which we have already been doing if you paid attention.
• 2:21
  SPEAKER_00: As His creatures, we must worship only our Creator, the one true God.
• 2:28
  SPEAKER_00: The Ten Commandments make this clear.
• 2:31
  SPEAKER_00: The first commandment says, Do not have other gods besides me.
• 2:35
  SPEAKER_00: And the second says, Do not make an idol for yourself.
• 2:40
  SPEAKER_00: Do not bow and worship to them, and do not serve them, because I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God.
• 2:47
  SPEAKER_00: So we must worship God and only this one God.
• 2:52
  SPEAKER_00: You remember later, Jesus rebukes the serpent with this same law.
• 2:58
  SPEAKER_00: And Jesus told him, Go away, Satan, for it is written, worship the Lord your God and serve only Him.
• 3:08
  SPEAKER_00: So this is why we worship only the one God, who is the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit.
• 3:14
  SPEAKER_00: Now, worship is not limited to the Father.
• 3:18
  SPEAKER_00: Unbelievers and heretics like Arius are marked by their refusal to worship the one true God who is also the Son and the Spirit.
• 3:28
  SPEAKER_00: And true Christians are marked by their unqualified worship of the Father with the Son with the Spirit, and only of this one God.
• 3:38
  SPEAKER_00: Earlier in Matthew 28, the angel of the Lord revealed to Mary Magdalene and the other Mary as they came to the tomb of Jesus.
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_00: He told them, Jesus is risen from the dead.
• 3:51
  SPEAKER_00: And so heeding the Lord's command to proclaim the gospel to the disciples, on that first resurrection Sunday, the women then encountered the risen Lord himself.
• 4:02
  SPEAKER_00: And can you imagine their shock?
• 4:05
  SPEAKER_00: Verse 9 says, just then Jesus met them and said, Greetings.
• 4:10
  SPEAKER_00: And they came up, took hold of his feet, and worshiped him.
• 4:16
  SPEAKER_00: And Jesus received their worship and gave them instructions for the disciples.
• 4:22
  SPEAKER_00: Now, later, when the disciples themselves encountered Jesus in Galilee, they received from him the great commission.
• 4:31
  SPEAKER_00: But first, however, they worshiped him.
• 4:34
  SPEAKER_00: And again, I want you to notice the word here.
• 4:38
  SPEAKER_00: They worshiped him.
• 4:43
  SPEAKER_00: The same word proscunine to worship is used in verse 16 as in verse 9.
• 4:48
  SPEAKER_00: And so the eleven disciples followed the lead of the women and offered worship to the Lord Jesus.
• 4:55
  SPEAKER_00: Now Matthew notes, however, that some doubted.
• 4:58
  SPEAKER_00: I imagine you caught that.
• 5:00
  SPEAKER_00: I think their skepticism is remarkable.
• 5:03
  SPEAKER_00: By the way, a neighboring state is known as the show-me state, right?
• 5:07
  SPEAKER_00: I lived in Missouri, but I'm not from Missouri, but I get it.
• 5:10
  SPEAKER_00: You know, as an academic, somebody says something, I'm like, yeah, right.
• 5:13
  SPEAKER_00: You know, so skepticism is just naturally part of who I am.
• 5:17
  SPEAKER_00: These disciples, some of them were skeptical.
• 5:19
  SPEAKER_00: That ought to tell you that they weren't gullible.
• 5:23
  SPEAKER_00: They were looking and they were overwhelmed by the truth that the God, man that they had encountered is truly God, and that death itself has no hold on Jesus Christ.
• 5:35
  SPEAKER_00: That to them was shocking.
• 5:38
  SPEAKER_00: They couldn't get their minds around it.
• 5:40
  SPEAKER_00: There are so many truths about God that transcended our ability to think properly about Him, and that's why we have doubts.
• 5:51
  SPEAKER_00: So some doubted, but we also know that in church history and in Scripture itself, these same disciples, some of whom doubted, went on to proclaim the gospel even in the faith of death itself, because they knew that the one who had conquered death would conquer death in them too.
• 6:14
  SPEAKER_00: Also, did you notice the act of baptism?
• 6:18
  SPEAKER_00: The act of water baptism is also an act of worship.
• 6:23
  SPEAKER_00: Jesus commanded his disciples to baptize those whom they had won to faith in him.
• 6:30
  SPEAKER_00: The early Cappadocian father Basil of Caesarea said this: For as we believe in the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, so are we also baptized in the name, again, the singular name, although there are three names given.
• 6:47
  SPEAKER_00: The name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.
• 6:51
  SPEAKER_00: First comes the confession, introducing us to salvation, and baptism follows, setting the seal upon our ascent.
• 6:59
  SPEAKER_00: Now, the first formal act of Christian worship, the first thing you do formally as a Christian is your baptism.
• 7:09
  SPEAKER_00: And in this water baptism, we identify ourselves with only one name.
• 7:15
  SPEAKER_00: Now, in the Old Testament, the divine name indicates both the identity and the authority of the one true God.
• 7:22
  SPEAKER_00: And by commanding baptism in the one name who has three names, Jesus requires every one of his disciples to begin the journey into Trinitarian confession, and that includes you and me.
• 7:36
  SPEAKER_00: You become a disciple of Jesus Christ, and it's always a pleasure for me to baptize one of our new church members.
• 7:42
  SPEAKER_00: I did it just this last uh Sunday.
• 7:44
  SPEAKER_00: I baptize you in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit.
• 7:49
  SPEAKER_00: We are buried with him in baptism.
• 7:51
  SPEAKER_00: We are raised to walk in newness of life.
• 7:53
  SPEAKER_00: You are identified with this God.
• 7:56
  SPEAKER_00: He is one God, one name, and yet he is the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit.
• 8:02
  SPEAKER_00: All true Christian theology is grounded in this foundational, original, and non-negotiable Christian dogma of the Trinity.
• 8:12
  SPEAKER_00: All the great creeds of the Christian church fold out from and develop the baptismal confession, the triune baptismal confessional formula of Jesus Christ in this text.
• 8:25
  SPEAKER_00: And that includes the Nicene Creed, the Apostles' Creed, the Athanasian Creed.
• 8:29
  SPEAKER_00: And I would argue that any confession that downplays the truth of the Trinity is insufficient.
• 8:35
  SPEAKER_00: This is a matter that in my own denomination, which is the Southern Baptist Convention, that I've been having to argue with them that we need to make sure that we are truly Trinitarian in our confession.
• 8:47
  SPEAKER_00: We who are Christians believe in the Trinity because we worship one God who is the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit.
• 8:58
  SPEAKER_00: Second, God is Trinity because Jesus and the Holy Spirit also unite divine ontology.
• 9:07
  SPEAKER_00: The doubts and difficulties some Christians have towards the truth of the Trinity derive from our natural difficulty with correlating the truth of the humanity of Jesus Christ with the truth of the deity of Jesus Christ.
• 9:22
  SPEAKER_00: You see, we frail creatures of dust find it barely comprehensible to wrap our limited minds around the revelation of what God is like, for he is limitless.
• 9:33
  SPEAKER_00: He is eternal, omnipresent, holy, love, just.
• 9:39
  SPEAKER_00: And we don't even know how to hold all of that truth about God together.
• 9:44
  SPEAKER_00: The apostles sometimes stumbled when they learned that this man standing before them in his flesh, proclaiming to them the word of God, his own word, with his human mouth, confronting them with his Jewish face, is indeed at the same time that he is man, he inhabits the eternal throne because he is God.
• 10:10
  SPEAKER_00: He is God, yet he is man.
• 10:13
  SPEAKER_00: He is man, yet he is God.
• 10:15
  SPEAKER_00: He's not two persons, but one person with two natures.
• 10:19
  SPEAKER_00: Our minds cannot really conceive of the truth of Jesus Christ well.
• 10:25
  SPEAKER_00: We do this, we hold this truth together as Christians, because this is what the biblical text teaches.
• 10:33
  SPEAKER_00: Once you'll remember the disciple Philip told Jesus, Show us the Father, and that's sufficient for us.
• 10:41
  SPEAKER_00: Jesus' response is stunning.
• 10:44
  SPEAKER_00: He said, Have I been with you so long, Philip, and you do not know me?
• 10:49
  SPEAKER_00: If you have seen me, you have seen the Father.
• 10:54
  SPEAKER_00: If you want to see God, you must look into the human face of Jesus Christ.
• 11:03
  SPEAKER_00: Our minds tremble before such truth.
• 11:07
  SPEAKER_00: So we find ourselves quickly passing over even key texts that display the truth of his personal union of the nature of God with the nature of humanity.
• 11:18
  SPEAKER_00: And we find the same truth here in the Great Commission.
• 11:22
  SPEAKER_00: Did you notice how at the end Jesus says, and remember, I am with you always, even to the end of the age.
• 11:33
  SPEAKER_00: So I am with you always.
• 11:37
  SPEAKER_00: That word always, and the idea that He is with us is very important.
• 11:48
  SPEAKER_00: The end of the age takes us, if you will, to the stage or the edge of history so we can peer over into eternity.
• 11:59
  SPEAKER_00: God exists in the eternal present, for he is above, beyond, before, after time itself.
• 12:08
  SPEAKER_00: As Paul said in Acts 17, in God we live and move and have our being.
• 12:16
  SPEAKER_00: God is the greater reality.
• 12:20
  SPEAKER_00: The world, as you can see around you, has existence.
• 12:24
  SPEAKER_00: You can pinch yourself.
• 12:25
  SPEAKER_00: You know you're real.
• 12:27
  SPEAKER_00: Understand this: God's reality is so much greater than the world that when you look at the ocean, God is greater.
• 12:35
  SPEAKER_00: When you see the planet from beyond, God is greater.
• 12:39
  SPEAKER_00: When you look at the universe and how magnificent and expansive it is, it is tiny in comparison to God.
• 12:47
  SPEAKER_00: For God is without limit whatsoever.
• 12:52
  SPEAKER_00: The world has existence because he has made space and time within himself for our world history, for our personal histories to exist.
• 13:02
  SPEAKER_00: God is not bound or limited by time.
• 13:07
  SPEAKER_00: Time is limited and bound by God.
• 13:11
  SPEAKER_00: If he is there before the beginning, he is also there at the end.
• 13:17
  SPEAKER_00: For we are creatures, he is the creator, and that includes time and space.
• 13:26
  SPEAKER_00: God in Christ brought creation toward an encounter with him.
• 13:34
  SPEAKER_00: So the age to come is rushing at us.
• 13:37
  SPEAKER_00: The end is coming towards us.
• 13:39
  SPEAKER_00: God is already there, and he takes us and tells us he's going to be with us to the very end.
• 13:50
  SPEAKER_00: Omnipresence.
• 13:51
  SPEAKER_00: That's what this is teaching.
• 13:53
  SPEAKER_00: I am with you always.
• 13:56
  SPEAKER_00: So the Son is always with the church.
• 14:03
  SPEAKER_00: That means his deity extends beyond even the church itself.
• 14:10
  SPEAKER_00: Psalm 139, verses 5 through 8 brings the Spirit with the Father into this trinity of divine omnipresence with the Son.
• 14:18
  SPEAKER_00: David writes this to the Lord.
• 14:25
  SPEAKER_00: This wondrous knowledge is beyond me.
• 14:28
  SPEAKER_00: It is lofty.
• 14:29
  SPEAKER_00: I am unable to reach it.
• 14:31
  SPEAKER_00: Where can I go to escape your spirit?
• 14:34
  SPEAKER_00: Where can I flee from your presence?
• 14:36
  SPEAKER_00: If I go up to heaven, you are there.
• 14:39
  SPEAKER_00: And if I make my bed in shale, you're there too.
• 14:42
  SPEAKER_00: You can't escape God no matter where you go.
• 14:46
  SPEAKER_00: God is already there.
• 14:49
  SPEAKER_00: He is the omnipresent God, and Christ Himself is omnipresent.
• 14:55
  SPEAKER_00: Jesus comforted the disciples just before his bodily death, resurrection, and ascension in this way.
• 15:01
  SPEAKER_00: He said in John 14, I will ask the Father, and he will give you another counselor to be with you forever.
• 15:10
  SPEAKER_00: He is the Spirit of truth.
• 15:13
  SPEAKER_00: The world is unable to receive him because it doesn't see him or know him.
• 15:18
  SPEAKER_00: But you do know him because he remains with you and will be in you.
• 15:22
  SPEAKER_00: I will not leave you as orphans, I am coming to you.
• 15:26
  SPEAKER_00: So Jesus in his body at his ascension ascends to the eternal throne.
• 15:33
  SPEAKER_00: But he is also still with his people.
• 15:36
  SPEAKER_00: How?
• 15:36
  SPEAKER_00: By the presence of his Holy Spirit in their lives.
• 15:40
  SPEAKER_00: Because you cannot separate the Father and the Son from the Spirit, because this is one God.
• 15:48
  SPEAKER_00: The third point out of this passage I want you to see is that God is Trinity because the Son and the Spirit possess full authority.
• 15:58
  SPEAKER_00: To empower the ministry of all believers, all of whom together receive the Great Commission to make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the triune name and teaching them everything Christ has commanded, Jesus informed them.
• 16:12
  SPEAKER_00: He said, All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me.
• 16:18
  SPEAKER_00: Now, as a man, we see Jesus receiving all authority after his resurrection.
• 16:26
  SPEAKER_00: But as God, he also always and already possessed all authority.
• 16:33
  SPEAKER_00: So when the soldiers came to arrest him in the garden, do you remember what happened?
• 16:37
  SPEAKER_00: They asked whether he was Jesus.
• 16:39
  SPEAKER_00: And his response, according to John 18, was that he said his name, I am.
• 16:47
  SPEAKER_00: And that is the divine name.
• 16:49
  SPEAKER_00: We sang about this just a little bit ago.
• 16:51
  SPEAKER_00: That is the divine name.
• 16:52
  SPEAKER_00: And when Jesus pronounced his name, do you know what the soldiers and the guards did?
• 16:57
  SPEAKER_00: They fell back before the divine presence onto the ground.
• 17:03
  SPEAKER_00: And it's because hidden from their sight within the human body of Jesus Christ is the God of the universe who has always been the Lord.
• 17:15
  SPEAKER_00: And thus he says, I am.
• 17:18
  SPEAKER_00: The power of his deity was never suppressed, as the false doctrine of canonicism teaches.
• 17:26
  SPEAKER_00: The foundational Christian claim.
• 17:28
  SPEAKER_00: What does it take to become a believer?
• 17:30
  SPEAKER_00: It's to believe that Jesus is Lord and that God has risen him from the dead.
• 17:34
  SPEAKER_00: This is Romans 10, 9 and 10.
• 17:36
  SPEAKER_00: And you can't say it apart from the Holy Spirit, 1 Corinthians 12, 3.
• 17:40
  SPEAKER_00: What does it mean to say Jesus is Lord?
• 17:44
  SPEAKER_00: Jesus is a reference to his humanity, his human name.
• 17:50
  SPEAKER_00: It's like having your first name.
• 17:52
  SPEAKER_00: That's his human name, Jesus.
• 17:56
  SPEAKER_00: It's actually a Greek derivation of the Hebrew Joshua, and it means Yahweh saves.
• 18:03
  SPEAKER_00: So his name is Jesus.
• 18:06
  SPEAKER_00: But to confess Jesus properly, you must say, this man, this man, Jesus, is Lord.
• 18:14
  SPEAKER_00: Lord is another way of saying, I am, or Yahweh.
• 18:20
  SPEAKER_00: It's another way of saying God.
• 18:22
  SPEAKER_00: So when you confess, if you're a true believer, when you confess that Jesus is Lord, you are saying this human being is God.
• 18:32
  SPEAKER_00: Our minds cannot hold that together, and we keep wanting to either make him human or divine.
• 18:39
  SPEAKER_00: He, however, is the one who is both human and divine.
• 18:43
  SPEAKER_00: He has always been the Lord.
• 18:46
  SPEAKER_00: He's always possessed the divine nature.
• 18:48
  SPEAKER_00: He's always possessed divine authority.
• 18:51
  SPEAKER_00: As I argue in my most recent book, Word, errant teachers throughout history have sought to diminish Christ in some way.
• 19:00
  SPEAKER_00: And the most egregious examples today are found among those who speak of Jesus but refuse to honor him as the one true God who alone possesses full divine authority with the Father and the Spirit.
• 19:12
  SPEAKER_00: You can talk to Muslims, Mormons, Hindus, Jehovah's Witnesses, they'll all talk to you about Jesus Christ.
• 19:20
  SPEAKER_00: Some of them will even try to tell you at first that they agree with Jesus.
• 19:24
  SPEAKER_00: I remember we had a group of Mormons coming through the neighborhood when I was a young pastor in North Carolina.
• 19:33
  SPEAKER_00: And I'd seen them going around, and I'd noticed all the neighbors were uh were uh you know telling them to leave, but they kept pointing to my house.
• 19:42
  SPEAKER_00: And so they they they came to my house and knocked on the door, and I was in a bit of shock because, you know, okay, why is everybody sending them there?
• 19:51
  SPEAKER_00: So, and the first thing they said, you know, uh because I said, Well, I, you know, welcome, let's let's talk.
• 19:57
  SPEAKER_00: And so we were on my porch and we started talking, and they they said, Well, you know, we believe in the same Jesus you do.
• 20:04
  SPEAKER_00: And I remember thinking to myself, no, you don't, and you know that.
• 20:07
  SPEAKER_00: And and I just, out of frustration, I said, You don't believe that.
• 20:13
  SPEAKER_00: You know you don't believe in the same Jesus I do.
• 20:16
  SPEAKER_00: And let me ask you a question.
• 20:17
  SPEAKER_00: Do you think that if you believed in the true God, he would have you lie to me about something?
• 20:23
  SPEAKER_00: And it was it was a surprise, especially for the younger one.
• 20:28
  SPEAKER_00: And as I began to share the truth of who Jesus Christ really is, you could tell that his heart was changing.
• 20:34
  SPEAKER_00: And I will never forget as the older one grabbed him physically when he realized that he was losing him and carried him away from my porch.
• 20:44
  SPEAKER_00: And I remember the look of terror in that young man's eyes because he had recognized that he was telling lies in the name of a God of lies, and that's not the true God.
• 20:57
  SPEAKER_00: Listen, there's one God who is the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, and the Son is truly God, and he has all divine authority.
• 21:10
  SPEAKER_00: This is what the Athanasian Creed summarizes the biblical text to say.
• 21:15
  SPEAKER_00: So the Father is God, the Son is God, and the Holy Ghost is God, and yet they are not three gods, but one God.
• 21:23
  SPEAKER_00: So likewise the Father is Lord, the Son Lord, and the Holy Ghost Lord, and yet not three lords, but one Lord.
• 21:31
  SPEAKER_00: Against every effort of false teachers to diminish Christ and his authority by making Jesus a lesser Lord, I want to stand with the great early church Bible teachers, including Gregory of Nazionzis, also known as the theologian, who proclaimed this.
• 21:49
  SPEAKER_00: He said this, and I agree with him fully in what he is saying.
• 21:53
  SPEAKER_00: This is my position regarding these things, and I hope it will always be.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_00: And of whoever is dear to me to worship God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit.
• 22:07
  SPEAKER_00: Three persons, one Godhead, undivided in honor and glory and substance and kingdom.
• 22:16
  SPEAKER_00: Now by honor and glory, Gregory is referring to worship, as we did.
• 22:22
  SPEAKER_00: By substance, Gregory is referring to divine ontology, the very being of God is Trinity, as we did.
• 22:29
  SPEAKER_00: And by kingdom, Gregory refers to the authority of God, which belongs to the three together without division.
• 22:40
  SPEAKER_00: From the Great Commission, we learn God is Trinity.
• 22:44
  SPEAKER_00: And this is supported by the divine ontology, the substance shared by the Son and the Spirit with the Father, by the divine authority possessed by the Spirit and the Son with the Father, and by the worship that it that we have to give to the Father with the Son and the Spirit.
• 23:02
  SPEAKER_00: So let us stand with the great reformers of yesterday, including John Calvin, who said, indeed, it is impossible to praise God without also uttering the praises of the Father, of the Son, and of the Spirit.
• 23:19
  SPEAKER_00: I think we must confess together this truth which your pastor has led you to confess each week in this series on the Trinity.
• 23:28
  SPEAKER_00: So would you say this with me?
• 23:31
  SPEAKER_00: God is one being who eternally exists as three distinct persons, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
• 23:42
  SPEAKER_00: Each person is fully God, equal in glory and eternal in nature, yet there are not three gods, but one God.
• 23:52
  SPEAKER_00: So this brings us to our next major point.
• 23:57
  SPEAKER_00: While the Great Commission established for us the truth of the being of God as Trinity, Paul establishes the truth of the work of God as Trinity.
• 24:08
  SPEAKER_00: So what is God, the Trinity, doing?
• 24:13
  SPEAKER_00: Galatians 4 says this.
• 24:17
  SPEAKER_00: When the time came to completion, God, I want to stop there for a moment.
• 24:23
  SPEAKER_00: God sent his son, born of a woman, born under the law, to redeem those under the law, so that we might receive adoption as sons.
• 24:38
  SPEAKER_00: And because you are sons, God sent the Spirit of His Son into our hearts, crying, Abba Father.
• 24:50
  SPEAKER_00: So you are no longer a slave, but a son.
• 24:53
  SPEAKER_00: And if a son, then God has made you an heir.
• 24:58
  SPEAKER_00: When I was uh uh young, uh my family uh did not have wealth.
• 25:03
  SPEAKER_00: My father was uh enlisted man in the U.S.
• 25:06
  SPEAKER_00: military, quite low in rank, and so we often struggled.
• 25:10
  SPEAKER_00: And uh we had, I did not know this, but I had a a very rich um uh cousin of my father, and I used to think, well, maybe one day I'll inherit something.
• 25:20
  SPEAKER_00: Never got a thing out of it.
• 25:23
  SPEAKER_00: But I tell you what, if you're a believer in Jesus Christ, you have the inheritance of everything that he owns.
• 25:33
  SPEAKER_00: And that is something worth inheriting.
• 25:38
  SPEAKER_00: God has made you an heir.
• 25:41
  SPEAKER_00: Even as the Great Commission reminds us of the unity and the equality of the three as one, so the writings of Paul remind us of the distinctions and relations of the three as one through the work of God in redemption.
• 25:57
  SPEAKER_00: So let's look at the God who is love, the Trinitarian works of God and the Trinitarian grace of God.
• 26:03
  SPEAKER_00: First of all, notice this God, his son, the Spirit.
• 26:07
  SPEAKER_00: God as Trinity is perfect love.
• 26:12
  SPEAKER_00: The Apostle John tells us that God the Father is love.
• 26:17
  SPEAKER_00: He is pure love unto logical love, and he sends his son because of his love.
• 26:24
  SPEAKER_00: The apostle Matthew tells us the eternal Father always loves the one he calls my beloved son.
• 26:32
  SPEAKER_00: And the Apostle Paul tells us this perfect love, who is the Holy Spirit, is now shed abroad in the hearts of his people.
• 26:41
  SPEAKER_00: The Apostle John again reminds us that we know God loves us because he also gives us his spirit.
• 26:50
  SPEAKER_00: I like how Richard of St.
• 26:52
  SPEAKER_00: Victor summarized the biblical truth of the Trinitarian communion of love in this way.
• 26:58
  SPEAKER_00: Thus, charity is not only mutual love between two, that is, between the Father and the Son, it is fully shared love among the three.
• 27:09
  SPEAKER_00: God the Trinity is perfect love in and of himself.
• 27:15
  SPEAKER_00: He didn't have to create us to have somebody to love.
• 27:18
  SPEAKER_00: Why did God create us?
• 27:20
  SPEAKER_00: Because of his overflowing love.
• 27:24
  SPEAKER_00: God chose to create us, and he also chose to redeem us at the appropriate time by reason of his abundant overflowing love.
• 27:35
  SPEAKER_00: God, the God who is Trinitarian communion of love, loves you, my brother and sister.
• 27:43
  SPEAKER_00: So God the Father sent his son to perform your salvation and his spirit to complete your salvation.
• 27:52
  SPEAKER_00: And one day his son will return to make all things right in this broken world.
• 28:00
  SPEAKER_00: Before we get to our conclusion here, a quick word about the Trinitarian works of God.
• 28:07
  SPEAKER_00: There are two things, and you could go back and uh look at the beginning of this PowerPoint, I think it has it on it.
• 28:17
  SPEAKER_00: Did you notice how your pastor's been preaching through, and you've got various symbols referring to each of the persons who are the Trinity?
• 28:26
  SPEAKER_00: Notice that only the Son becomes a human being and dies on the cross and rises from the dead.
• 28:36
  SPEAKER_00: So each person of the Trinity has a proper work, is what theologians call it.
• 28:43
  SPEAKER_00: But also every work of the Trinity is the work of each person.
• 28:48
  SPEAKER_00: Now, this kind of boggles our minds, but when you look at what Scripture has to say about each of the three persons and their works, uh each of the three persons are involved in every divine work.
• 29:02
  SPEAKER_00: You can find biblical texts about creation.
• 29:05
  SPEAKER_00: The Father creates, the Son creates, the Spirit creates as the one God.
• 29:10
  SPEAKER_00: You can find repeated affirmations, as we're going to see here in this text, about how it is the Father who saves us, the Son who saves us, the Spirit who saves us.
• 29:19
  SPEAKER_00: You can find repeated affirmations that in the end the judgment will be by the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit.
• 29:28
  SPEAKER_00: And so we refer to not only the proper works of the Trinity, the distinct working of the three, but the inseparable operations of the Trinity.
• 29:39
  SPEAKER_00: For God the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit is our creator, our redeemer, and our final judge.
• 29:47
  SPEAKER_00: The early Orthodox fathers examine Scripture and they noticed a paradigm of how God works as one.
• 29:54
  SPEAKER_00: First, the Father is the source or the origin of every divine work.
• 29:59
  SPEAKER_00: That's why he is the one who sent his Son.
• 30:03
  SPEAKER_00: He is the one who sent the Spirit.
• 30:08
  SPEAKER_00: Second, the Son or the Word speaks and performs every divine work.
• 30:14
  SPEAKER_00: And so the Son alone became the human being, Jesus Christ, who died on the cross and arose from the dead.
• 30:21
  SPEAKER_00: And third, the Spirit perfects or completes every divine work.
• 30:27
  SPEAKER_00: So it is the Son who is born of a woman, born under the law, to redeem those under the law, so we might receive adoption as sons.
• 30:36
  SPEAKER_00: And it is the Spirit of His Son who is sent into our hearts so that we can cry, Abba Father.
• 30:45
  SPEAKER_00: I like how Charles Haddon Spurgeon refers to such texts as these.
• 30:50
  SPEAKER_00: You know, one scholar found that over a thousand places in Scripture where you can find the members of the Trinity working together in creation, in redemption, in the final consummation of all things.
• 31:05
  SPEAKER_00: I think you can actually find many more.
• 31:07
  SPEAKER_00: But Charles Haddon's Vurgeon said it this way: we do not find the doctrine of the Trinity and unity set forth in Scripture in formal terms, such as those which are employed in the Athanasian Creed.
• 31:21
  SPEAKER_00: But the truth is continually taken for granted, as if it were a fact well known in the Church of God, if not laid down very often in so many words, it is everywhere held in solution.
• 31:35
  SPEAKER_00: And it is mentioned incidentally in connection with other truths in a way which renders it quite as distinct as if it were expressed in a set formula.
• 31:44
  SPEAKER_00: In many passages, it is brought before us so prominently that we must be willfully blind if we do not note it.
• 31:52
  SPEAKER_00: And he notes that Galatians 4 is one of those places.
• 31:57
  SPEAKER_00: In the present chapter, for instance, he says, we have distinct mention of the three divine persons.
• 32:05
  SPEAKER_00: God, that is the Father, sent forth the Spirit, that is the Holy Spirit.
• 32:11
  SPEAKER_00: And he is here called the Spirit of His Son.
• 32:15
  SPEAKER_00: Nor have we the names alone, for each sacred person is mentioned as acting in the work of our salvation.
• 32:24
  SPEAKER_00: Paul tells us, go back and look at the passage.
• 32:27
  SPEAKER_00: Paul tells us that when the time came to completion, what does this mean?
• 32:34
  SPEAKER_00: The Father, the Son, the Holy Spirit, the one God is eternal, and for some theologians, they note that the dispensations or the way God works in history has already been planned by God, the Trinity.
• 32:46
  SPEAKER_00: Some theologians call this the covenant of redemption, and it's outworking the covenant of grace.
• 32:53
  SPEAKER_00: Paul simply says, the time came to completion.
• 32:56
  SPEAKER_00: Who decided it was?
• 32:58
  SPEAKER_00: Well, God did.
• 33:00
  SPEAKER_00: And God from eternity decides to send the Son, the Father, the Son, the Holy Spirit covenant, and they say, Son go.
• 33:10
  SPEAKER_00: And God sends the Son.
• 33:13
  SPEAKER_00: And the Son comes.
• 33:15
  SPEAKER_00: He's born of a woman.
• 33:17
  SPEAKER_00: Why is he born as a human being?
• 33:19
  SPEAKER_00: Because in order to be made right with God, we need a mediator, and that mediator must be truly God to mediate with God, and truly human to mediate with human beings.
• 33:32
  SPEAKER_00: And there's only one who can do that.
• 33:34
  SPEAKER_00: That is God come in the flesh.
• 33:36
  SPEAKER_00: And moreover, he must be perfect.
• 33:38
  SPEAKER_00: He must obey the law.
• 33:40
  SPEAKER_00: The problem with us is that every single one of us has disobeyed God's law.
• 33:45
  SPEAKER_00: And we deserve God's wrath, but God still loves us in spite of us.
• 33:50
  SPEAKER_00: So he sends a son to be born of a woman under the law to redeem us who are under the law.
• 33:57
  SPEAKER_00: In other words, to buy us back.
• 34:01
  SPEAKER_00: To take us who have sold ourselves into slavery, to sin and to death, and he buys us back by his perfect human obedience, where we were imperfect and we failed.
• 34:16
  SPEAKER_00: That's what the Son was doing.
• 34:19
  SPEAKER_00: And why did he do this?
• 34:20
  SPEAKER_00: So that you and I who are poor may become rich in him.
• 34:26
  SPEAKER_00: So that you and I who are owed nothing may inherit the world with Christ.
• 34:35
  SPEAKER_00: The Son of God is eternally begotten Son of God.
• 34:40
  SPEAKER_00: By nature, Jesus Christ is the Son of God.
• 34:44
  SPEAKER_00: You and I can become children of God.
• 34:47
  SPEAKER_00: How?
• 34:48
  SPEAKER_00: Not by nature, but by adoption.
• 34:52
  SPEAKER_00: And he adopts us, all of us who are willing to trust in Christ.
• 34:59
  SPEAKER_00: We who are such troubled children, he will invite us into his family and give us life.
• 35:07
  SPEAKER_00: And not only that, God sent the Spirit of His Son into our hearts crying, Abba, Father.
• 35:18
  SPEAKER_00: I grew up in a family that was not intimate with one another because of abusiveness.
• 35:25
  SPEAKER_00: And I did not have a father that I could be intimate with.
• 35:31
  SPEAKER_00: I did not even really call him daddy or papa because that affection just wasn't part of the relationship.
• 35:43
  SPEAKER_00: And yet what we're seeing in this text is that we have a perfect God the Father who loves us so much that he's willing to send his son to die on the cross for our sins and to rise from the dead so that whoever believes in him can have eternal life.
• 36:00
  SPEAKER_00: And he loves us so much that he is willing to send his Holy Spirit to convince our hearts that we can trust him, that we can be intimate with God, and that he loves us more than we love ourselves, that he knows us better than we know ourselves, and that he still cares for us even when we hate ourselves.
• 36:25
  SPEAKER_00: We have that kind of God.
• 36:27
  SPEAKER_00: A God who is a communion, a perfect love, reaching out for us by his son and by his spirit.
• 36:42
  SPEAKER_00: His spirit working and perfecting that salvation in our hearts so that we can finally turn to the one who is our creator and call out to him, Father, not as in a distant figure, but as in one that we can refer to as Abba, which is the Aramaic term that we can translate as daddy or papa.
• 37:05
  SPEAKER_00: You can know God intimately as love because he loves you and he sends his son and he sends his spirit.
• 37:25
  SPEAKER_00: And I know you're broken in some way.
• 37:29
  SPEAKER_00: We have a God who wants to heal us, who wants to perfect us, and in the end wants us to walk with him forever and know the one on the throne, the creator of the universe, the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit.
• 37:46
  SPEAKER_00: And so he sends his son and he sends his spirit.
• 37:52
  SPEAKER_00: Let me end with one statement and one question.
• 37:57
  SPEAKER_00: The statement is this God, the Trinity, loves you so much that he offers you an eternal inheritance as his adopted child.
• 38:12
  SPEAKER_00: And the question is this have you received God the Father's love by the grace of the Holy Spirit through faith in his only begotten Son, the crucified and resurrected God man, Jesus Christ?
• 38:32
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you.