Growing Up, Heading Out (part 5) – Holy One, Holy Three

*Just so you know, this is probably the last post in this series for a while. I’ll come back to it but wanted to break out and write about a few other things also.I remember standing with my friend David and about 10 other pastors from the Central Illinois area (my place of residence prior to Parkview). We were meeting as the Lincoln-Area Ministerial Society, and David was leading us in a Taize worship service. Taize is a community in France and you can read all about it in the link but it was a fairly moving prayer.

We then started praying from the Lutheran prayer book – because David is Lutheran and we were in his church – and he began his prayer from the book with this line,

Almighty God, holy one – holy three…

I looked up and looked around and wondered if anyone else was thinking what I was.

Wow.

One of the most baffling things about God and the Bible is the discussion about the Trinity. If you’re not familiar, it goes something like this.

God is God.

Jesus is God.

Holy Spirit is God.

Easy enough, right? Yes, as long as you say you believe in three gods. But we don’t, we believe in one God with three different personalities – the Trinity. Holy ONE, and Holy THREE.

It doesn’t much matter how you think this happens or whether you ever understand it (here to tell you – still baffles me!) but the key thought is this: God was willing to confuse the stink out of us to show us a way of loving us.

God the Creator, the source of life loves us enough to rescue us even when everything in us wants to rebel against Him.

Jesus, the Son of God and the Savior of the world, shows God’s love for the world through showing the path to true life and then dying so we could walk it without the fear of death.

Holy Spirit, the stand-in for Jesus that lives within us, shows us the way of God’s love by teaching us what Jesus would have us do and giving us the courage to walk without the fear of death.

It may not make sense, but it changes the world.

I’d appreciate your prayers this weekend as I’ll be preaching the kick-off sermon for “What Would Jesus Hate, part 2”. I’ll be talking about “Religious Rip-offs” and it has been a tremendously challenging time of praying and preparing.

Would love to see you there this weekend!