What Comes To Mind When You Think About The Trinity After Hours

Hello, this is Will Hardy with ManTalk Radio.

We are all about breaking down the walls of race and denomination. Your chosen Truth Network Podcast is starting in just a few minutes. Enjoy it, share it, but most of all, thank you for listening to the Truth Network Podcast.

This is the Truth Network. Coming to you from an entrenched barricade deep in the heart of central North Carolina, Masculine Journey After Hours. A time to go deeper and be more transparent on the topic covered on this week's broadcast. So sit back and join us on this adventure. The Masculine Journey After Hours starts here now.

Welcome to Masculine Journey After Hours. We're glad that you're with us today and we're talking about the topic. It came from a church service I was at a few weeks ago when my pastor was talking about a quote from A. W. Tozer that says, what comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us. And so he actually said, took it a little bit more than that and said, so what comes to your mind when you think of God the Father, Jesus and the Holy Spirit? Is it the same?

Is it different? But what comes to mind? And that's probably the most important thing about you is what you think about that relationship of them and that relationship with you. And so that was a question I threw out to the team and we've kind of been discussing it in the regular show. So if you missed that, you can go to any podcast outlet and get it. You can go to YouTube, Spotify, any of them.

It carries it. You can go pick up Masculine Journey Radio, or if you're listening to this, you already know that. And so you can just go listen to the one who was right before this show. But anyway, so where we pick up is with David. And David, you have the first clip and we already established out of the gate you really like it. So you don't have to tell us that. That was my whole set up. Take that away from me.

Because I saw you like my chest was pumping up. Here we go. Yeah. I like this clip.

No. So this clip comes from Bruce Almighty. It's where Bruce meets God. And it's a pretty funny clip. I do like it.

I think the guys like it as well. Do you like this clip? Bruce, I mean, if y'all haven't noticed, I've used a lot of clips from Bruce Almighty.

I mean, it's one of my favorite movies. I thought it's because they're already clipped already. Some of that has to do with it, but he likes clips. Here comes the embarrassing part we talked about, you know.

But no, when you ask that question and I got to thinking about it, you know, I was struggling actually finding the clip and got to think about it. And, you know, really how I look at all three of them, you know, is my friend friendships. So and with friendship comes humor. And this clip's funny, but it also comes with bad times through friendship and everything else. So really, I look at as friendship.

So we can play the clip and come back and talk about it. The gloves are off, God. God has taken my bird and my bush. God is a mean kid with a magnifying glass. Smite me, almighty smiter.

Now, I'm not much for blaspheming, but that last one made me laugh. Are you spying on me? Who are you? I'm the one. Creed of the heavens and the earth, Alpha and Omega. Bruce, I'm God. Bingo, Yahtzee. Is that your final answer? Our survey says God.

Bing, bing, bing, bing, bing, bing, bing, bing, bing. Well, it was nice to meet you, God. Thank you for the Grand Canyon and good luck with the apocalypse. You know what would have been a little bit more impressive, though? If you hadn't used the cheesy file cabinet illusion, anybody with a brain stem can tell that that drawer is being fed through the wall from the other side. All you have to do is find the crease right around here. There is a seam here. Or a hollow spot. Where?

Through the dry wall and concrete. Hey, that is a good one. That is a good one. Okay, how many fingers am I holding up? Now, Bruce, thou shalt not tempt the Lord. Hey, if you can't do it, man, that's cool.

Three, two, four, nine, six, eight, one. Okay. You've been doing a lot of complaining about me, Bruce. Quite frankly, I'm tired of it. Wait, wait, wait, wait. Don't come near me. Seriously, when I'm back into a corner, I'm like a wild animal.

I don't want to hurt you, but I will out of instinct. You haven't won a fight since grade five, and that was against a girl. Yeah, she was huge.

She'd been held back. And the sun was in your eyes. Oh, there you go. In a way, I brought you here to offer you a job. A job? What job?

My job. You think you can do it better, so here's your chance. When you leave this building, you will be endowed with all my powers. So yeah, I mean, it kind of goes back. If you didn't see the first show, go back and listen to it. Sam talked about how, you know, um, Prince can talk that way with love to it. And I can't tell you how many times, how many seasons I've gone through that talking with God or talking with Jesus that, you know, ultimately we had conversations similar to that where he could say whatever he wanted to say to me because I knew it was in love.

But then on the flip side, I could say whatever I wanted to say to him because he knew it was in love. So, I mean, that's really where, where I drilled down on it when Sam asked that question was really just friendship is what means to me. Thank you, David. You know, when I was listening to that clip, I thought about that. That's actually, I'll speak for me. That's my story.

You know, I charted off thinking I was God, you know, and I'd make my own decisions didn't involve him. And it ended about as well as Bruce's death. It didn't end well. And I think once we realized that, you know, the quote from the movie a couple of weeks ago, we talked about there, there's a God and I'm not him. What was that?

What was that movie? Rudy. Rudy. Yeah.

It's from Rudy. Yeah. That we played a couple of weeks ago that, you know, once we realized that the relationship changes, right. And we let him be God and we, and we submit, you know, and then things get better. But as long as we were out like Bruce trying to be God, it's not going to end well. It's going to crash and burn every single time. Right.

You may get some little successes and he did, but overall it's just tragedy as it keeps going on. Yep. They can't see you shaking your head. Yeah. Yeah. I like that movie. Thank you. I do.

You did. Thanks. So Rodney, that brings us to your clip now.

Now we're going from one extreme to the other as far as clips go. I would think so. It's pretty. Yeah. They're both about God, but they're in different spectrums here.

Yeah, they are. I ended up going to where my first thought went when you brought the subject up, which is normally when somebody brings up the Trinity or hear the Trinity, my thoughts go to this particular song and it's Holy, Holy, Holy, Lord God Almighty. This is by, who did this rendition that I found because I liked to get a manly voice in there, Robin Mark and they got a chorus in there. It's just men. But I always just think of holiness when I think of God. When I was like, how do I sum, sum, sum it up in just like one word? I just think of holiness and then the angel singing Holy, Holy, Holy just allows me to just be able to understand, okay, I am totally so separate from God because I would love to be God.

Right. That's how we are kind of wired to begin with. Hey, in all our lives, we want to be God until we actually meet Him. Then find out kind of like Bruce Almighty there a little bit where it's like, wow, would you really want to be God and have the control of all this stuff and what's going on?

How many things I would just mess up moment after moment. And to getting to know God is what I'm always trying to do. Trying to understand Him by who He tells me He is through His Word. It's just really, really easy to get stuck on a portion of God. Like you talked earlier, it's like over time you thought, well, I think the Father is this, I think the Son is something else and the Spirit is something different. It's like, well, they're the three in one. They're really all together on this. There are things that we learn that the Father knows the Son doesn't know yet, things of that nature. But really, as far as creation running the universe, they are one.

They are in unity. That's what they want in the body also of believers. That's one of the things that we're striving for.

We'll never get there in this lifetime. But that's kind of the beauty of it. It's like, he loves us anyway. It kind of helps me to know that, okay, even though I'm such a screw up, he still loves me because he's got the love from the Trinity that was there before the beginning of time.

So why don't we go ahead and play the clip. This is verse one and verse three. Verse one is specific because we've got Robby because it's about early in the morning.

There aren't too many people up earlier than Robby in the morning praying and worshiping God. And then you get the last part of that. It's like the purity of God, the love of God.

It's just beautiful. I Oh, cut short. Shitty. It's purity. Yeah, I know. I don't know. I guess I cut it short.

Yeah. But where I've been reading lately has been in Colossians, so I just was like, where would I go to even talk and kind of put – God, because you can go through the whole Bible and you're constantly like, okay, you can go from Genesis to Revelation and keep talking about the Trinity, but I love it here where the Father is the one who qualified us as the inheritance and the saints because he's the one that gave us to the Son, and all that the Father gives to him, he will keep and not let go out of his mighty hand. And then we've – right there, I love this because it's in conjunction with also the song, who rescued us from the authority of darkness and transferred us to the kingdom of his Son in love. And then as it goes through, it says Christ being the firstborn of all creation, that all things were created by him in the heavens and the earth, visible, invisible, again, back to all the things that we don't see going on around us.

We talk about spiritual warfare a lot. There's things going on there, the thrones and dominions, rulers and authorities, all this created through him and for him, and that's basically going through basically – let's see, Colossians 1 and 12 through 19 is kind of the range for a lot of that. And then for the Spirit, I jumped over to 1 Corinthians, and you know, because like we talked before, the Father sent the Son, the Son came to reveal the Father, so he's the one in the flesh.

If you have seen me, you've seen the Father. The Spirit came, the paraclete, the helper, to make sure that he indwells us so that we know Christ. He is the point to Christ. And I just love that beautiful relationship that there is this order and roles that they have that we are here to illuminate one greater than me. And that's the beautiful part that we're supposed to be doing is emulating that and glorifying Christ. But also in 1 Corinthians 2, 9, things which the eyes had not seen, ear is not heard, back to the things in the unseen world, and which have not entered the heart of man, all that God has prepared for those who love him. And that's what the Spirit's here to do. It's like we are being prepared day by day to love Christ and thus the Father. And you've got the three working towards that unity of goal rather than what a lot of Christians will point to your favorite pet peeve with the other Christian group and point fingers and stuff. He really wants unity, but he wants unity in truth and in love. It's not always easy for us to get there.

No. No, it's not, because sometimes truth doesn't feel like love, and it all gets back to relationship. As we talked about before, if you have a friendship relationship and love's already the basis, a lot can be said in the midst of it, and so the relationship's the key part. Which we try to display on this humble little podcast. We've got a lot of picking and pecking and poking at each other, and we enjoy that. Yeah, we do. And we do it in love. Every once in a while, David gets his feelings hurt, but he's okay. Yeah, I truly like most of you. Yeah.

Understood. Sorry you feel that way, Sam. And just thinking of the application of that, because one of the things, it was just the other day again, I got angry over something, and I quickly was just thrust right back into the sovereignty of God, and knowing, okay, Lord, sorry, you got this. Why am I getting upset about something that's just so stupid in my life?

And it's knowing God that allows me to control those feelings and emotions and my thoughts and where they're at, because they'll get away from me, and it helps me just to get back to, okay, you're a holy God who's done everything for my good. Let me just drop that and get back to work. Yeah. Well, Danny, that brings us over to your clip, the final Shaq clip of the day. Yeah. We have as many Shaq clips as we have the outlaw Josie Wells. I think we use the same outlaw Josie Wells clip most of the time.

We just use them for multiple things. Quick little plug. It's been a neat night, because my son is in studio with us.

Absolutely. Cody's back here behind us. He's almost in studio. He's sitting in the door, because we have so many people in here. Yeah. And it's hot in here, too.

All this hot air that usually flows around. Sam, when you brought up the topic, my mind goes all over the place most of the time, but I'm always drawn to certain things. And I was, Bagger Vance corrected when I made this quote earlier in pre-show, in love by my buddy Jim here.

But my buddy Dr. J.L. Williams, who's passed on, he used to say that if you understood the Trinity, you'd be the fourth member. And Jim lovingly pointed out that if it was a fourth member, it wouldn't be a Trinity. I guess it would be a quartet. So anyway.

But I love that, because... It would be a gospel quartet. It would be a gospel quartet, yeah, that I graduated from Auburn. The concept... I don't think it was four people. Sorry. Yeah.

It wasn't a small school at one time. In a concept, God is simplifying himself so we can get hold of it. And we've talked about it a lot, about being relational. And you're taking a God who's uncontainable and unexplainable, and he's trying to relate it to our finite minds. And that's kind of the concept that I came away with, if you could understand him. Because he says his ways aren't our ways, his thoughts aren't our thoughts. So here we are trying to paint this box of who God is. And I think it's his way of giving us somewhat of a toehold into relational. And I've related it a lot to water. You got fluid, you got ice, and you got steam.

It's all water made out of fluid, and in different ways they do different things. And so to me, God relates to us wherever we're at, however he needs to, to get our attention. We talk about disruptions and dismantling and all that stuff, and that's to me is what it was. And I did go back to the shack.

I originally went for the cliff to Andy. And when I went to the folder to put it in, I was like, oh man, so I had to go back and go back to work a little bit. But this one is where he shows up as God the Father. And Mac, as we've talked about, has had a rough time. His daughter's been murdered, and he's been stuck. And he's been mad at God.

He's been all those things that Danny has been in his lifetime. And so God shows up as another character in the flesh, and we can play it from there, and we'll talk about it on the backside. You're going to need a father. What are we doing? Almost there. We're here to do something that's going to be very painful for you.

Please don't. Son, we're on a healing trail to bring closure to this part of your journey. You want me to forgive him? He killed my daughter. I want to hurt him. I want him to hurt like he hurt me. I want you to hurt him.

I know you do. But he, too, is my son. And I want to redeem him. Redeem him? You know, Mac's having a tough time with this, but God's really showing him his love for humanity.

And that, yeah, I want to redeem the guy who did this as well, which is almost a foreign concept wherever we're at. And I love, Robby uses this quote all the time, seeing life at 10,000 feet. And I adopted that because to back up and see a bigger picture, the larger story that we talk about, that life is bigger than what I can see.

And God sees it that way. And he shows up, and he's exactly what I need at that time. And a couple of things I jotted down was he was a shepherd to this lost sheep in the wilderness of addiction. He shepherded me in.

He left the 99, so to speak. He was an older brother guiding me through some growing up moments. He's been a motherly nurse helping to bandage up the wounds of my life. And he has and is fathering me through seasons of life filled with joy and pain. Because I need direction.

I need all those things. And we've talked a little bit about the mother aspect of God. In the beginning, he created man male and female in his image. But once again, we're trying to contain God in something that our minds can wrap around, which is impossible. But he shows up exactly where we need him, how we need him, and in most unconventional ways, when you hear people's testimonies and their stories, well, God showed up and done this. And you're like, no way. But yes way, because he's Yahweh.

And so that's just kind of the cool deal in my mind. And I love this topic, because no matter where you are in life and no matter how far you think you've gone, God's coming for you. And he's relentless, and he won't stop at anything. We know that from the sacrifice on the cross.

He stops at nothing, because you're his son or his daughter, and he wants you in the fold too. Dr. Darrell Bock Thank you, Danny. As you were talking about our finite minds, I was thinking about – Dr. Darrell Bock Especially yours. Dr. Darrell Bock No, it's very finite.

It's uniquely finite. I was thinking about, I honestly believe I pray when I prayed to God. There are times my prayers are to God the Father. There are times there are prayers to Jesus, and there are times there are prayers to the Holy Spirit. I don't classify them that way, but when I really think about in my life and the roles I see them playing is that when I need advice, when I need counseling, when I need to know how to handle this situation, I'm praying to God the Father. God, I need you to father me in this.

I need you to walk me through it. You know, when it's a time that I just need someone beside me because I'm going into a difficult situation, I'm praying to Jesus the friend. You know, I don't say that.

I say God or Heavenly Father or whatever, but that's who I'm really in my mind kind of praying to, and when I need someone to prompt me, to guide me, to move me along the way or to help me see things that I don't normally see, it's to the Holy Spirit. You know, and I don't know why, but that's just how I do it. But I also think that that's okay because God knows how finite my mind is, but how finite all of our minds are, and that if that's how we can get our hands around it, and at least if we're still going to Him on all those things, I don't think He really cares.

Right? It's just a matter that we're going to Him and we're walking with Him, whether we see it segmented or combined together, really doesn't matter because there are times I do see it as a holy trinity, and there are times I see it segmented, but at the end of the day, I think He just cares that I'm doing it with Him, not as much how I'm doing it, if that makes sense. Darrell Bock That's, like I said to you guys earlier today, we don't have it to play on the air, but the song He Is that goes through each book of the Bible, who He is in that Bible, or in that story, so to speak, and when you tie into that, I believe you're right, and I couldn't help but think when you were talking, I'm praying to Jesus, or I'm praying to that, in Andy's clip, whether you hear them all together or once, they go, yes, Sam. Andy King Yeah. I don't really care if I'm praying to the Father, I need guidance, and the Holy Spirit shows up and does it.

I'm just glad it happened, and I won't ever notice the difference anyway. Darrell Bock Well, things that hit me with this, especially since you guys are picking on my unique definition, everybody listening to this is unique, and God made you that way, and as much as I admire Robby, God already has Robby, wants enough, and Sam, he wants me to be me, he wants you to be you, and that is part of the plan, and just figuring out who that is supposed to be is your job on the journey. Gary Barnes If you talk really quick, I think we have time to get your last little bump clip thingy in. Darrell Bock Sam was really generous in allowing the dueling clips to both be played, so let's play it, I think you'll recognize it. Gary Barnes Rich Mullins, right? Darrell Bock Rich Mullins. Gary Barnes And it's the Creed? Darrell Bock It is the Creed. Gary Barnes All right, here we go.

I believe in God the Father, Almighty maker of heaven and maker of earth, and then Jesus the Son. Darrell Bock Well, we'll come back to that, but Harold, take us home, tell us a little bit about this topic and what you think on it. Harold Jones Well, when the topic came up, I tried to find a clip, but it was not successful, so then I thought about, well, how do I typically think of the three? The Father I view as the CEO, he sets the objective to be accomplished. The Son is the chief engineer, he devises the plans to be used. The Spirit is the project manager that executes those plans to meet the objective.

That all came from a background of information systems in corporate America, so that doesn't limit the role of any one of the three, but at least for me, it kind of defines roles that they may play. Darrell Bock Yeah, and we get back to your song, Jim, and it gets down to what we believe. Jim Evans And that's what makes us what we are, and what you believe about God is the most important thing about you, and it doesn't need to be anything like anyone else. If you disagree with me, that's fine. You may be wrong, but I might be, too.

It's really a matter of what God puts in your heart, and how he has created you to be the unique person that you are. Darrell Bock So the question I have for you is a question that we all started with. What comes into your mind when you think about God, and Tozer will say that's the most important thing about us, so what is it that you think about when you think of God, when you think of Jesus, when you think of the Holy Spirit, and walk with Him this week. Spend some time digging into it with Him, saying, God, I'm going to let you lead me in this. I need you to help me see what I truly believe, and to walk with you into a deeper unity. Go to masculinejourney.org to register for the upcoming boot camp the weekend before Thanksgiving, and love somebody well this week. We'll talk with you next week. This is the Truth Network.