of Matthew.
Kiddos, if you don't yet have one of these children's bulletins, be sure to grab one.
They're out in the North X just outside this room and I'd encourage you to follow along in the sermon this morning as we think together about the Holy Trinity.
As I mentioned to the children, the doctrine of the Trinity is completely encapsulated in the context of scripture, but the word Trinity Doesn't actually appear.
As you'll hear me talk of later in the Old Testament, you see echoes of it in the New Testament, you see it more fleshly filled out.
And in the early church, doctrines of the church became clarified and codified because of heresies that begin to emerge.
And by the fourth century, the doctrine of the Trinity became so important Not only was the very first council, the council of Niceia focused on the person of Jesus and him being fully God and fully man.
It was also focused on the nature of God as Trinity.
And by the fourth century, the church started a tradition.
Not all traditions are bad, of course.
It started a church education program whereby they said one day of the year we want to focus on the doctrine of the Trinity and they called that day Trinity Sunday.
And the Western church that is the church in Europe continued that tradition for many, many centuries, and even today some churches continue to dedicate one day of the 52 Sundays of the year thinking about the doctrine of the Trinity, and we had a gap between going through 2nd Peter and starting our summer in the Psalms next week and that gap fell on Trinity Sunday.
So, buckle up because here we go.
Doctrine of the Trinity, on fifth Sunday when all the kids are here, you're welcome mom and dad as you get to explain the Trinity to them.
Let's see how well you do.
Would you stand with me as we read a passage not often associated with the Trinity, but nevertheless central in its importance to our understanding.
This is the passage famously known as the Great Commission, Matthew chapter 28.
And I'll begin reading it verse 18.
And Jesus came and said to them, "All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me.
Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you.
And behold, I am with you always to the end of the age.
The grass withers and the flowers fade but God's word stands forever.
This is the word of the Lord.
Thanks be to God.
You may be seated.
Please.
Oh Father, would you be so gracious to turn down the distractions of our life for the next 18 minutes and would you focus our affections on the beauty of your son by the power of the Holy Spirit.
Would you, Lord, allow the joyful noises of these little children to remind us of the joy of being in Covenant Community together as those who are marked by your Triune name.
Would you minister to us now we pray this morning through your word as we prepare for your table, having sung your praise, confessed our sin, and now we hear and listen eagerly to how you intend to change us.
We pray these things in Jesus name.
Amen.
In 1799, when Napoleon's army was in Egypt, they were building a fort near a city called Rosetta.
And the soldiers stumbled upon this black granite piece of rock and they noticed that it was different than the other rocks around them.
They they saw that there was some kind of writing on it and as they began to more carefully examine the rock, they found that it wasn't just one language but it was three languages.
One of those languages they knew it was ancient Greek.
Another one was a language called demotic and another language was hieroglyphics language they had long lost ability to read.
And as they took this stone which you can go now to Britain and you can see it in the British Museum, it's been there since 1802.
This Rosetta stone as they called it.
They pulled up this rock out of this fort they were trying to build near Rosetta, Egypt.
And because scholars knew ancient Greek, they recognized that these three messages that were written thousands of years before to Ptolemy V.
These three messages were exactly the same message in three different dialects, written in the same script.
And so they triangulated the ancient Greek to reinterpret Egyptian hieroglyphics for the first time in a thousand years, then the language became known to humanity again.
And when the Rosetta Stone was discovered and scholars began to understand Egyptian hieroglyphics, an entire world burst open to explore about the ancient ways of the Egyptians.
And sometimes in the very similar way, the discovery of one truth or in our case one doctrine opens up to us an entire world that if we aren't aware of it, begin to just have implications for every area of our lives.
One scholar, his name is Scott Harrell.
He teaches even today at Dallas Seminary.
He calls the doctrine of the Trinity the Rosetta Stone of Christian theology.
It is the thing that shapes every other aspect of the Christian life.
You're longing to be loved and to be loved.
Where does that come from?
But from a God God who is love in and of himself.
Your desire to share your joys with others, where does that come from?
But in a God who is consistently sharing Father, Son, and Holy Spirit within the intimate relationship of the Godhead of the Holy Trinity.
Your desire to give yourself in marriage or to give yourself in a dear friendship with somebody else, where does that come from?
But in the eternal generation of the Son of God who proceeds from the Father generated from the Father, eternally begotten from him.
The dynamic of the Trinity, the doctrine of the Trinity shapes even our life as a church.
Did you know that in 2011 when the core group of this church was beginning to meet, we were at one time not called Trinity, we were called anybody remember?
Redeemer of Washo.
We came from a mother church called Redeemer Tulsa, which has since changed her name to River Oaks Presbyterian Church.
And many of the people who first came to this church came from a church called Christ Presbyterian.
And because this core group wanted to honor both churches, we changed the name of the core group from Redeemer Owasco to Trinity Presbyterian Church.
And when I sent out a survey to the core group and said, "What do we want to call ourselves?" We had a whole bunch of options.
And it was the Trinity.
Trinity was the one that the core group chose.
And isn't it a mystery of mystery and mysteries?
The depth of the Trinity.
Francis Turkington said the Trinity is something to be believe to believe by faith and to cherish and adore with love.
And so we're going to look at the implications of what that means for us by looking at this famous passage message with which most of you are familiar, the Great Commission.
And we're going to look at it in three movements.
First, we're going to look, number one, look at your outline.
Jesus rules the mission.
Christ rules the mission, verse 18.
Secondly, the Trinity I defines the people.
The Trinity defines the people.
And lastly, Christ's presence sustains the community.
You cannot deeply enjoy the salvation of God if you do not know the God of your salvation, friends.
And Matthew chapter 28 invites us into that mystery.
First, look, Christ rules the mission.
Now, the context of Matthew chapter 28, of course, is right on the heels of his resurrection.
Remember Mary Magdalene and the other women come to the tomb and find that resurrected Jesus and he says to them, "Go and tell my brothers to meet me in Galilee." And so they show up in Galilee and here's what we read.
You see it in verse 16.
If you have a Bible open, you can look at the verses just above verse 18.
They meet him in Galilee.
And when they see Jesus, it says in Greek that some worshiped him and And, oh, isn't this an encouragement?
Some of the 11 doubted.
There's 11 because of course Judas wasn't there.
Some worshiped him and some doubted.
And even in their doubt, even in their doubt, even in their wavering, it's the same Greek word that Jesus says to Peter when he's walking on water and gets afraid and begins to sink and Jesus holds his hand and says, "Why are you a little faith?
Why do you doubt?" They wavered.
Is this really Jesus.
And it says, he comes to them.
He intentionally steps toward them in Greek.
And he says to them, number one, all authority has been given to me.
It's interesting that Jesus were God and there was only one God.
He wouldn't say has been given to me.
He would say, "I have all authority." But notice, even in Jesus's awareness of who he is, infinitely God, eternally Now, in the incarnation, man, fully God and fully man.
Jesus says, "I have an authority that's given to me." Hebrews chapter 1 says in the old times that God spoke to his forefathers and prophets in many ways, but in these last days he has spoken to us by his son, whom he has made heir of all things.
Hebrews 1:2 and through whom he has made the world.
Jesus has all authority.
Or Colossians chapter 1, where Jesus holds all things together by the power of his word.
Jesus has all authority.
He has all commanding authority to these disciples.
Jesus rules the mission.
If we were preaching just on the Great Commission at a missions conference, you might you might say the the the commanding authority the commanding charge and then the commanding presence.
Jesus rules with all authority he says and it is an authority that has been given to him by his father.
But notice Jesus is not just isolated from the father and the spirit.
His authority is exercised in the unfolding revelation of God as Father, Son and Holy Spirit because he then says go therefore And baptized, disciple all nations, baptizing them in the name singular of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, plural.
Now, if you're a math major, you know that 1 + 1 equals 2, but Jesus does some funny math here.
The name and then the name has three aspects, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
What is he doing?
He is saying not only does Jesus rule the mission but secondly, the Trinity defines the people.
When you are baptized in this church, you are baptized with water in the Triune name, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
That you in a sense are I ask the fathers the name of the child because they tell me they're given name and then they are baptized into the visible community of this church in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
They have now a new name.
They are called Christian.
And they are brought into the visible church through the mark of baptism, which is a sign and seal of God's covenant promise upon them to always be with them, to remind them of the truth.
to help them walk in light of them being set apart from the world as his very own people.
And if you grew up like I grew up, you might think back upon your own uh baptism where you were baptized in my church, it was at the front of the church.
And I was baptized in July of 1986 by Dr.
Morris Chapman.
It was I remember it like it was yesterday.
It was a Sunday night.
But after that baptism, quite frankly, I never really thought about it much after that.
But I had the name of the Triune God placed upon me just as many of you do and children just as many as you as you of you have had.
And do you know why we put our baptismal in the back of this church?
Doesn't it seem strange for some of you?
Why is it back there?
They have got a place to put it up here?
Do you know why it's in the back?
It's in the back because you enter into public worship.
You enter in to worship as God's people through the waters of your baptism.
And we put it in the back so that when you come into worship, into corporate worship, the first thing that you're thinking about is remembering your baptism that you've been set apart by the Tri you name, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
And that as you are humbled by God's work in your life as the Westminster Larger Catechism says, you are humbled by his work in your life.
You become incredibly grateful for the way that he has raised you to see the beauty of the gospel.
Are you with me?
He helps you to pray that others get to experience the beauty of what it means to be marked in the try you name.
He places his name upon And I wonder how many of you in this church really are Trinitarian.
Because most of us in the way that we pray, we pray to one God, the way that we live, we live as though there's one God and we grow frustrated and exhausted over time because we begin to believe that the Christian God is more like some other foreign God than the Christian God in the way that we seem to want to please him by our good works as though he measures us to say we're saved by our works rather than by his grace.
We find our prayers extremely thin instead of three-dimensional as the Trinity invites them to be.
We find our service lacking because, you know, quite frankly, we just don't really love others very well because sin is so deep in our heart and we're so self-consumed.
But if the Trinity really defined us as a people, what would it look like?
It would mean that there's nothing in your life that you're not willing to share.
I mean, there are relationships, of course, husband and wife that are intimate, you've made vows.
Of course, you you keep those.
That is a picture of the Trinity as well, the joy of being able to share in all that God has given you.
But you become incredibly generous people.
You give up your time, you give up your treasure, you give up your talents one to another.
You You exemplify this kind of Trinitarian life.
In church history in the early days, there were a lot of heresies which I'd be glad to talk with some of you more about if you're interested, but one of them was called modalism that that God is one God, but he he wears three different hats if you will.
He's the Father in the Old Testament, he's the Son in the Gospels, and he's the Holy Spirit and the the epistles.
It's as though one of you, you know, is a is a as a man, one of you as an engineer during the week, you're a baseball coach on the weekend, and you're you're also you happen to be married.
Three different aspects of one God.
That is a heresy.
God is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
The Holy Spirit is God.
The Son is God.
The Father is God.
But the Father is not the Son, nor the Spirit, nor the Son, the Father, or the Holy Spirit.
No.
Holy Spirit is not the Father or the Son.
Put that in your hat and try to think about that over the course of the week.
It is a beautiful mystery.
But the Trinity is it defines who we are as a people.
And in the early days of the church, they found there to be incredible onslaught that Jesus somehow in reading Proverbs 8:22 was the first created being of God.
And they said, "No, that's Arianism.
That is a heresy." Or that modalism gave rise to other forms later on throughout the fourth century and a man named Athanasius gave his entire life to defend the doctrine of the Trinity.
And you know why?
It's because the longing that you have to love and be loved is just an echo trace of who God is in his own nature.
He doesn't have parts.
God doesn't have pieces of him.
He is completely love.
He is totally good.
He is truth itself.
And yet, he is three persons, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
It defines who we are as a community.
And lastly, And very briefly, notice what the text says next.
It says, "Behold, Jesus says, I am with you always until the end of the age.
I am with you always as you go and as you baptize and as you teach.
Making disciples here is the main verb or the great commission.
You go and make disciples.
How do you do that?
You make disciples by going.
It's a participle in Greek.
You make disciples by baptizing.
There's your evangelistic strategy.
You're bringing people into the church to be baptized to the sacraments.
You're teaching, there's your Christian education ministry.
You're teaching, you're helping them explain even doctrines of the Trinity like this over the course of your days, moms and dads, to your kiddos.
And it is Christ's very presence who sustains us.
Jesus says, "Lo, I'm with you always even to the end of the age." That's a strange thing to say because it wasn't long after that that Jesus ascended, didn't he?
40 days later.
So, why would Jesus say, "I'm with you always to the to the age when Jesus ascended to his father and they saw him go up into the clouds.
It's because he promised them another comforter, the Holy Spirit in John 14 and John 16.
Who if you believe in Christ and dwells you and reminds you and comforts you in the midst of the gospel.
And therefore, Jesus is with us by his spirit.
When you come to the Lord's supper in just a minute, Jesus is present here, really present by his spirit.
Long before the Pentecostal movement, John Calvin was called the theologian of the Holy Spirit because he worked out the nature of the Holy Spirit, extending Christ's presence into the local church when worship happened through the word preached as people are changed by the spirit.
Spirit and through the table as people come to taste and see that he indeed is good.
And so friends, as you come to the table this morning, I just want you to recognize and realize that sometimes one small truth can explode a whole new world of understanding and knowledge.
And God being triune is a mystery so deep that the greatest minds in all of human history have tried to plumb it depths.
St.
Augustine spent 15 years writing his book on the Trinity.
And his fanboys published his work before he was even ready for to go to print.
And it irritated him to no end.
And at the very end of that work where he spent 15 years trying to articulate the beauty of who God is, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
He writes Even amidst all of these words and it's 437 pages of it in the New City Press version.
"Oh my soul." he writes.
"Even as articulate as I've tried to be, I know it falls short of your beauty and grandeur and glory.
Would you have mercy on me as one who tries to attempt to plumb the depths of a mystery so beautiful and so great?
So, would you shape me?
Would you mold me?
Would you work in me that I might be shaped into your image even as I contemplate the beauty of you as Trinity?
So, friends, this morning as you come to the table and you hear the kiddos moving with you, Would you come knowing that we are a community that is shaped by this great doctrine, every Christian is.
It calls us to love because God is love.
It propels us to serve because God is ever giving, Father, Son, Holy Spirit.
The spirit who proceeds from the Father and the Son now and dwells you, shaping you and molding you more and more into this image.
And we indeed are people who are marked by his tri name, Father, Son, and Spirit.
Let's pray together.
Father, I pray that you would help us to listen lest out of our weariness, we should stop wanting to seek you, but let us seek your face always.
And with eagerness, would you, Lord, give us the strength having caused yourself to be found in your scriptures and give giving us the hope of finding you more and more, Lord, before you lies our strength and our weakness.
As your servant Augustine prayed many years ago, would you protect us from our own ignorance, but where you have open to us knowledge of yourself, would you receive us as we come in to plumb the depths?
Would you open to us the mystery of who you are as we knock?
Would you help us to remember you and let us understand you and let us love you and would you increase these things in us until you refashion us entirely.
And would you Father help us to see more and more how the Trinity is like the great Rosetta Stone that unlocks the mystery of your character and of your name sake.
Seeing you as one God and yet in three persons, Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
And would you help us to live in light, have your self-giving nature, all for your glory, and for the good of this body, we pray.
And as we give up our tides and offerings this morning, Father, would you help us to be generous, regular, and sacrificial, and our giving.
Would you equip us to use all that we have and all that we are?
And out of your try-new name, having been marked out from the world to lead lives wholly abandoned and devoted to you.
We pray these things in Jesus name.
Amen.
Sermon transcript is computer generated.