“Ultimate reality is a community of persons who know and love one another. That is what the universe, God, history, and life is all about. If you favor money, power, and accomplishment over human relationships, you will dash yourself on the rocks of reality […]
[it is] impossible […] to stay fully human if you refuse the cost of forgiveness, the substitutional exchange of love, and the confinements of community.
[…] We believe the world was made by a God who is a community of persons who have loved each other for all eternity. You were made for mutually self-giving, other directed love. Self-centeredness destroys the fabric of what God has made.”
A gospel which is only about the moment of conversion but does not extend to every moment of life in Christ is too small. A gospel that gets your sins forgiven but offers no power for transformation is too small. A gospel that isolates one of the benefits of union with Christ and ignores all the others is too small. A gospel that must be measured by your own moral conduct, social conscience, or religious experience is too small. A gospel that rearranges the components of your life but does not put you personally in the presence of God is too small.
Just think of the many unworthy ideas and attitudes about God that the doctrine of the Trinity can help us name, reject, and even deride. The doctrine of the Trinity expels unworthy ideas about the perfection of God’s life. It is unworthy to think that God without us is lonely or bored. God is not looking something to do in the happy land of the Trinity. God did not create the world in order to fill the drafty mansion of heaven with the pitter-patter of little feet. God is not pining away for companionship in a lonesome heaven.
Good theological reflection, taking its lead from the Bible, would always reject the idea of divine loneliness or boredom. But as soon as you entertain the truth of the doctrine of the ontological Trinity, the unworthiness of the idea of a lonely or bored God becomes patently obvious. The triune God is one, but not solitary. Nothing that God does in creation or redemption is done because God lacked employment and occupation. The incarnation of the Son of God was not undertaken as an excellent adventure to provide diversion from the dullness of being the eternal Son. All these ideas are unworthy of God, as the doctrine of the Trinity makes obvious.
….God is not lonely, bored, or selfish. But if we turned it around and said it in a positive way, we would simply say that God is lvoe. Not by conincidence, this is also how the Bible puts it. This is what the Bible helps us learn with greater precision: that God is love. The triune God is a love that is infinitely high above you, eternally preceding you, and welcoming you in.
Recently, Together for Adoption launched a house conference initiative to bring teaching on God’s story of adoption and its implications for the global orphan crisis to living rooms in select cities across the United States. Obviously, not everyone can fly across the country to attend a T4A conference. So, in part, the house conference initiative aims to “bring a T4A conference to a living room near you . . . for free.”
House Conference Format: 20-20-20
- 20 minutes of teaching: The Story Behind the Story of Adoption – Sparking the Conversation - 20 minutes of discussion: In-House Interviews – Continuing the Conversation - 20 minutes of questions: Q & A – Expanding the Conversation
Together for Adoption's hope is to use house conferences to spark continuing conversations about orphan care that move Christians/churches toward greater collaboration and implementation. Why are these conferences hosted in homes? Because the orphan crisis is something that Christians should grapple with in their living rooms. It should be that personal to us.
In the video above, I talk about the relationship between the Trinity and our adoption in Christ and its implications for global orphan care. I'll post a few more house conference videos the rest of this week.
For some years now I have been dipping into writings on the Trinity and the early church fathers. I have noted their influence on early Protestants too. I am one who, without reading them, used to think the fathers missed it. I now think, and Sanders confirms, that they got it better than I do. When they wrote the Trinitarian creeds, they had a grasp of the deep source of our salvation. God the Father Almighty, his only Son our Lord Jesus Christ, and the Spirit who proceeds from the Father and the Son are working symphonically to save, to redeem, and to exalt the bride of Christ into their presence. Chalcedon was profound.
Some may not have missed these rich resources of faith. Perhaps I have just been in the narrow confines of sectarian American evangelicalism. But the early church fathers had a grasp on God in Trinity and the Incarnation that is rooted in Scripture and life-shaping. I want to consider it more.
Fred is in that tradition, though he carefully confines his citations to the rich resources within Protestant evangelicalism. He is not calling us to become liturgical. He is calling us to bring out of the background what we know to be true. He is calling us to rediscover the resources of our our tributary of the Great Tradition.
I for one want to go back to learn from those men and the ones who went before them. I am grateful for this book which I hope sells out and is reprinted and circulated to as many people as possible. It is a gift to see the glory of the Triune God as the root and foundation of our redemption.
Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit. As it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be, world without end. Amen.
Fifth, Trinitarian life is unified and diverse. Greek Christian theolo- gians are fond of describing the Trinity with the term perichoresis. As the three persons of the Trinity are mutually indwelling, or permeating one another, we are deeply connected as part of the body, yet we retain our own identity. We are always persons in community.
Sixth, Trinitarian life is submissive. As we hear Jesus teaching us to pray, “Your will be done,” and himself praying, “Not my will, but yours, be done,” while he sweated drops of blood from anxiety caused by the looming horror of his crucifixion, we learn to submit ourselves to the will of the Father by the Spirit like the Son.
Seventh, Trinitarian life is joyful. Tim Keller explains:
To glorify something or someone is to praise, enjoy, and delight in them. When something is useful you are attracted to it for what it can bring you or do for you. But if it is beautiful, then you enjoy it simply for what it is. Just being in its presence is its own reward. To glorify someone is also to serve or defer to him or her. Instead of sacrificing their interests to make yourself happy, you sacrifice your interests to make them happy. Why? Your ultimate joy is to see them in joy.
What Keller is rightly saying is that the Trinity is the place of the greatest joy that has ever been or ever will be; each member delights in the others and pours himself out continuously for the good of the others in unparal- leled delight. Indeed, another synonym for the Trinity is Happy.
The God of the Bible is in himself eternally relational. Some religions teach that God made people to cure his loneliness; conversely, the fact is that God as a Trinitarian community was never without loving community. Rather, he is a relational God who welcomes us into relationship with himself.
In closing, the Trinity is not a doctrine to be philosophized beyond the teachings of Scripture but rather a humble, loving, worshipful, relational, diverse, submissive, and joyful life to be entered into by the Spirit through the Son to the Father.
Mark Lauterbach provides 
. His conclusion:
Fifth, Trinitarian life is unified and diverse. Greek Christian theolo- gians are fond of describing the Trinity with the term perichoresis. As the three persons of the Trinity are mutually indwelling, or permeating one another, we are deeply connected as part of the body, yet we retain our own identity. We are always persons in community.
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