One Plus One Plus One Equals One? - Part A

The subject today, the Trinity, the triune nature of God is foundational to our faith. It is essential to our faith, but I also know it is controversial. The doctrine of the Trinity is one of the most difficult spiritual truths to understand. And today on Connect with Skip Heiseck, Skip explores this foundational doctrine and why it's essential to your spiritual life. And at the end of today's program, Skip and his son Nate share some key insight to help you grasp this doctrine. It's okay to have mystery in your faith.

It's okay to go, I don't get it, but it's true. I think it's good to have mystery too. I think sometimes we try to use natural illustrations to describe supernatural things. We're doing it a disservice because we're trying to make it fit within the box of our understanding, but God is so beyond our understanding.

Thanks Skip and Nate. Be sure to stay tuned after today's message to hear the full conversation. Now we want to tell you about a resource that will help transform the way you pray and the way you live. Hudson Taylor, the great missionary to China said, it is possible to move men through God by prayer alone. E.M. Bounds who authored nine books on prayer said, God shapes the world by prayer. The more praying there is in the world, the better the world will be. And Billy Graham said, to get nations back on their feet, we must first get down on our knees.

Here's Skip Heitzig. You know, the Bible says that we will experience God's peace when we pray and it tells us to pray about everything. We want to help you know how and what to pray and what to expect. That's why we're offering Lord Teach Me to Pray in 28 Days by Kay Arthur. When you give to support this ministry, prayer is meant to up the game of peace and joy in our hearts. Lord Teach Me to Pray is our thanks when you give $25 or more today to help keep this ministry on the air, connecting you and others to God's word.

Call 800-922-1888 or give online securely at connectwithskip.com slash offer. Okay, we're in John Chapter 14 as Skip Heitzig starts today's study. Let not your heart be troubled. You believe in God, believe also in me. In my father's house are many mansions.

If it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you and if I go to prepare a place for you, I will come again and receive you to myself that where I am, there you may be also. And where I go, you know and the way you know. Thomas said to him, Lord, we do not know where you are going and how can we know the way? Jesus said to him, I am the way, the truth and the life. No one comes to the father except through me. If you had known me, you would have known my father also and from now on, you know him and have seen him. Philip said to him, Lord, show us the father and it is sufficient for us.

Jesus said to him, have I been with you so long and yet you have not known me, Philip? He who has seen me has seen the father. So how can you say, show us the father? Do you not believe that I am in the father and the father in me? The words that I speak to you, I do not speak on my own authority, but the father who dwells in me does the works. Believe me that I am in the father and the father in me or else believe me for the sake of the works themselves. Most assuredly, I say to you, he who believes in me, the works that I do, he will do also. And greater works than these he will do because I go to my father. And whatever you ask in my name, that I will do, that the father may be glorified in the son.

If you ask anything in my name, I will do it. If you love me, keep my commandments and I will pray the father and he will give you another helper, that he may abide with you forever. The spirit of truth whom the world cannot receive because it neither sees him nor knows him. But you know him, for he dwells with you and will be in you. I will not leave you orphans, I will come to you. And then down in verse 25, these things I have spoken to you while being present with you. But the helper, the holy spirit, whom the father will send in my name, he will teach you all things and bring to your remembrance the things that I said to you.

Have a seat, please. And thank you for that. Let's pray together. Father, thank you for this portion of your scripture, your word, spoken to us by the Lord Jesus himself. I pray, Lord, that even as you promised a helper, we ask for the Holy Spirit to help us, to grasp, to understand, to be inspired by the example we have here. Thank you, Lord, for the ability to meet together, to give friendly eyes or a smile, to give encouragement to one another, to meet, to enjoy that fellowship and the strength that comes from it. We humbly ask these things in Jesus' name.

Amen. I suppose if I were to try to use my sermon title in a math class, I would fail the class. One plus one plus one equals one. I understand that's bad math, but it's good theology. And I suppose if I wanted to be mathematically precise, I would state it differently.

I would say one times one times one equals one. That would be more precise, especially with the Trinity, since we are dealing with a compound unity. The subject today, the Trinity, the triune nature of God, is foundational to our faith.

It is essential to our faith, but I also know it is controversial. Winston Churchill once described Russian foreign policy, and he called it a riddle wrapped in a mystery, inside in a mystery, inside an enigma. It's a great description.

I feel the same about the Trinity. It's a riddle wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma. This is difficult territory for anybody. There was a family visiting from India, visiting friends in California. The friends in California on a Sunday went to church and took the family from India with them. They didn't have the background in India in American evangelical churches, obviously, didn't quite understand it. But after church, the host family asked their foreign visitors, what did you think? And the 11-year-old girl who is a part of that Indian family said, I don't understand why the West Coast is not included. And they looked like, what?

What do you mean? And she said, well, you know, when the minister stood up and said, in the name of the Father and the Son and the whole East Coast. Of course, she didn't understand that it was the Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost.

That was just a foreign expression to her. The Trinity poses a problem to us if we try to share our faith with a Jewish person, a Muslim, a Mormon, a Jehovah's Witness. None of those groups believe in the Trinity at all.

And apart from that, it's a problem for some of us. We wonder, should I pray to the Father? Should I pray to the Father? Is it okay to pray to Jesus?

Should I pray to the Holy Spirit? If I don't give attention to two of them, but I give attention to one of them, will the other two be offended? And aren't we just dealing with one person using different names?

There's confusion even among believers. And then even beyond that, how do I explain this mystery to my kids who ask questions and figure this out? Do I use an egg? That's how some people try to describe it to their kids. You know, you have one egg, but you have a shell and you have a white and you have a yolk. Or do I use water? Water can be one substance, but appear as a solid or a liquid or a vapor.

Or do I use three matches? And so you have three separate entities, but you put them together and it forms a name. There's all sorts of creative explanations and analogies. I don't know if any of them is perfect. I think it's always something we should be careful. We should be careful not to trivialize God and reduce Him to a formula. You know, what we are dealing with is the inability to take something infinite and comprehend it with a finite mind.

At the end of the day, it's not going to be possible. But that is not my aim. My goal here is not to explain to you the Trinity. I don't want necessarily you to understand the Trinity as much as enjoy the Trinity.

That is my aim. I don't want you to just know what the Trinity is or how the Trinity works. What I hope we get out of this, church today, is how all three members of the Trinity, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit help us.

How they sustain us and how they inspire us by their example. So we've read the text. I'm going to dip back into it for just a couple of things, but I want to show you five discoveries of the triune God out of this chapter. The first and most obvious is all three, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, are a reality.

You notice this when you read through chapter 14, chapter 15, and chapter 16. This whole section, Jesus will speak of the Father or my Father. He will speak of the Holy Spirit. He will speak of Himself.

He will call Himself the Son. And He does this freely throughout the entire section. And He gives personal pronouns to each of the three using terms like He, His, Him. So it's pretty evident and obvious as we read through the section that He is speaking about three distinct persons all working in concert together, a Trinity, a triune God.

It's pretty obvious. Now, not everybody agrees. Some will object and here is the objection. Well, the word Trinity isn't in the Bible. So what? The words second coming are not found in the Bible, but you read it, Jesus said, if I go, I will come again.

Guess what that is? A second coming. The word Bible isn't in the Bible. You don't have to have the word present for it to be a truth. Yes, I understand the word Trinity is not a biblical term. It's a theological term meant to express biblical truth. And so if you go through the scriptures, you get the obvious reality that not just the Lord Jesus, but the apostles, and you have in the Old and the New Testament, the evidence that there are three persons that we are dealing with. We find it at the baptism of Jesus in Matthew chapter 13, where it says, Jesus came up from the water, the heavens were opened, the Spirit of God descending on Him like a dove and a lighting upon Him. And suddenly a voice came from heaven.

This is my beloved Son in whom I am well pleased. You have all three, Son being baptized, the Father speaking, the Holy Spirit coming in presence. At the end of Jesus' ministry in what is called the Great Commission, Matthew chapter 28, our Lord Jesus said, go therefore and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, in the name of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Again, there's that formula, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. It's something Paul the Apostle did in a benediction at the end of 2 Corinthians in the 13th chapter.

May the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all. Now again, we're dealing with three separate persons. After all, since the Father sent the Son into the world, right? John 3 16, for God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son. Since the Father sent the Son into the world, they can't be the same person.

They're separate they're separate and distinct. And as we read in our text this morning, since the Son and the Father both send the Holy Spirit, there is a distinction from one another. This has always been the understanding throughout church history. Church leaders in their generations carefully articulated the belief that the Bible sets forth of the triune nature of God.

Here's a sampling. In 96 AD, almost a century after Christ, Clement of Rome, a leader in Rome, was the first one to refer to all three members of the Godhead in an oath that he wrote. And he said, and I quote, as God lives and as the Lord Jesus lives and as the Holy Spirit lives, Father, Son, Holy Spirit. In the second century AD, leaders like Ignatius and Justin Martyr did the same thing. In the third century, Irenaeus and Tertullian did the same thing. In fact, it was Tertullian who came up and coined the term trinity as we know it using the Latin trinitas, the three in one. Fast forward a little bit to 325 AD when church leaders needed to come together to settle an issue. There was already a division over is Jesus God?

Are there three different separate persons in one Godhead? And so they had a meeting in Nicaea, ancient Asia Minor, modern day Turkey, and they formulated a creed called the Nicaean Creed or the Apostles' Creed. Some of you grew up in your churches saying it.

I believe in one God, the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth and in Jesus Christ, his only Son, our Lord. That's the language of a creed to distill the major beliefs of Christianity. I love what Spurgeon said. Charles Haddon Spurgeon said, to have a gospel without the trinity is like having a rope of sand that cannot hold together. Then Satan can overrun it, but give me a gospel with the trinity and the might of hell cannot prevail against it. No man can any more overthrow it than a bubble could split a rock or a feather break in half a mountain. Come on, so well put.

Spurgeon just had a knack. So these three, Father, Son and Holy Spirit are a reality. That's the first discovery. The second is that all three share in divinity. It's not just three separate persons, it's one God. One God.

This is where it gets tough for us to understand. All three are referred to in Scripture, Father, Son and Holy Spirit as being God and having the attributes or qualities of God. We see a sampling here, verse nine. Jesus said, if you have seen me, you have seen the Father.

It's a bold statement to say the Father and the Son share the same nature. In verse 16, speaking of the Holy Spirit, the Helper, listen to what he says, will abide with you forever. Now he is assigning an eternal nature to this third person, the Holy Spirit.

The Holy Spirit will abide with you forever. Now I've had conversations with folks who have said, well, Jesus never claimed to be God. And the New Testament never says overtly that Jesus is God. Whenever somebody says that to me, I say, could you tell me what version of the Bible you happen to be reading?

Because I have never found what you say you have found. And I've read a lot of different versions. First of all, Jesus said, before Abraham was, I am. And you know what the Jews did in response to that? Took up stones to kill him. And Jesus said, why do you want to kill me?

Think of all the good works I've done. He said, oh, we're not going to kill you for the good works you've done. We want to kill you because you being a man are constantly making yourself out to be God. So Jesus said it. His enemies understood what he said. Then he accepted worship from Thomas after the resurrection. When Thomas saw him alive, Thomas said, my Lord and my God. Don't you think if Jewish Jesus was just a man, he would have said to Thomas, oh, no, no, no.

Don't say that. That's blasphemy. Unless he was God.

And he was. He accepted Thomas' worship. Then he claimed to forgive sins. When he healed the paralytic, he said, son, your sins are forgiven. And the Jewish leader said, hey, wait a minute. Only God can forgive sins.

Yeah, that's why I said what I said. Then Jesus performed miracles that only God can perform. He demonstrated power over disease, power over demons, power over death. He claimed omnipotence, all power. He said in Matthew 28, all authority has been given to me in heaven and on earth. That's omnipotence. He claimed omnipresence in Matthew 18, wherever two or three are gathered in my name, I will be in their midst.

He showed omniscience that he knew everything on many occasions. He was speaking to a woman at a well in Samaria. And she was getting all coy and curd and back and forth with Jesus.

And she said, you know, a few things. And finally, he just said, go call your husband. And she goes, I don't have a husband. Jesus said, you're right. You've had five husbands in the past.

And right now you're living with a guy who's not your husband. She didn't tell him that. How did he know that? Well, she said, sir, I perceive that you're a prophet. Then on other occasions, it says, and Jesus, knowing their thoughts, said to them, so he can read minds.

He knows people's past backgrounds. He showed omniscience. And not only that, but Paul the apostle, the rabbi from Tarsus, said Jesus was God very clearly and overtly in a few places.

Here's just a couple. Romans 9, verse 5. He said, Christ, who is over all the eternally blessed God. You can't get any clearer than that. Titus chapter 2, verse 13, looking for the blessed hope and glorious appearing of our great God and Savior, Jesus Christ.

Again, very clear. And then the Holy Spirit is also called God in scripture. Fifth chapter of the book of Acts, you remember the story of Ananias and Sapphira.

They took some land, sold it, pretended to give it all to the work of the Lord, kept back part for themselves. Not that that was a problem. The problem was they lied. And so Peter said, why has Satan filled your heart to lie to the Holy Spirit? And then he says immediately after, for you haven't lied to men, you lied to God. You see how we put that? You lied to the Holy Spirit, and when you did, you lied to God.

That's Skip Hytech with a message from the series 2020. Now let's go in the studio with Skip and Nate as they share some key insight to help you grasp this doctrine. The doctrine of the Trinity is one of the most challenging doctrines to understand, and we probably won't ever fully understand it this side of heaven. But Skip, is there any insight that's helped you to better grasp this doctrine so that you can embrace it and apply it to your life? That's a tough one. It's the hardest one. And I guess my gut level reaction to the question is no, there is not.

I couldn't give you one. But that's because no chapter in the Bible has an explanation of the Trinity. Rather, the Bible does have a formulation of the Trinity. So it's borne out by just viewing the whole story. Just keep reading the book, and the more you read the book, the Bible, you're going to discover that God manifests himself in three distinct persons.

Not three gods, but three distinct persons. Now, I think it's important when we teach children to—and yeah, we can go to eggs and we can go to water. There's all sorts of different explanations.

That may be helpful. But listen, your kids need to be taught the Trinity, whether you or they understand it. And if you don't understand it, guess what? They're not going to understand it now and when they grow up. So it's okay to have mystery in your faith.

It's okay to go, I don't get it, but it's true. I think it's good to have mystery too. I think sometimes we try to use natural illustrations to describe supernatural things. We're doing it a disservice because we're trying to make it fit within the box of our understanding. But God is so beyond our understanding. And that's what makes him magnificent. That's what makes him incredible, that we get to serve a God that's a lot bigger than our natural, you know, understanding of the world is. And when you're talking to your kids, you can use other illustrations that aren't trying to unlock the Trinity. For example, you know, son, I don't always understand electricity, but I know when I flip the switch, the lights come on.

I don't always understand, you know, combustion engines, but I know when I turn the key, the car works. So you can say, just like that, there's a lot of things about truth and God we don't understand, but I know this and you can underscore that. Thank you, Skip and Nate. We hope this conversation with Skip and Nate encouraged you in your faith.

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800-922-1888. Thank you for connecting more people to Jesus. And just a reminder, tune in to watch Connect with Skip Heitzig on the Hillsong Channel on Saturdays at 4.30 p.m. Mountain or catch it on TVN on Sundays at 5.30 a.m. Eastern. Check your local listings. Tune in tomorrow as Skip Heitzig shares how the Holy Trinity is active in your everyday life. Connect with Skip Heitzig is a presentation of Connection Communications, connecting you to God's never-changing truth in ever-changing times.