I’ve been thinking lately about what exactly causes us to serve. What is it about this Gospel that compels people to give their lives in abandonment and service? Service is such a testament to the power and greatness of Christianity. The Church has always been characterized by people giving the entirety of their lives in bold and reckless love. Surely Paul would not have considered a mere 9 months of service to be a terrific sacrifice, nor the desert Fathers and Mothers who committed their whole lives to prayer. Yet for me, the Race remains a huge, terrifying step.
Just what is it about this Gospel that causes people to abandon their comfort, to leave their homes and families, risk slander, torture, and even death, all for the sake of people they’ve never met?
For me, it all comes back to the Trinity.
If you are surprised the possibility of the Trinity being the motivation behind service, perhaps this is because we as a Church have done a pretty shabby job of approaching the Trinity in recent years. We usually begin by addressing the inherent confusion of the doctrine—pointing out that humans will never understand this numerical problem, will never wrap our heads around how God could be “three in one.” Maybe we then give some simplistic analogy about a clover or the states of water, and then move on, usually leaving people with a headache and frustration at being unable to understand. But I think there’s something incredibly crucial that’s lost when this is how we talk about the Trinity—something the Church before us has understood to a greater degree. We see the Trinity as central in the Church Fathers’ understanding of salvation, in the theology of the Reformers.
At the core of this problem, we have forgotten that the Trinity is the very heart of God’s identity. By approaching the most beautiful mystery of this entire world as merely a math equation to be solved, only a mental concept that will always remain incomprehensible, we have lost our sense of wonder at the beauty of God.
We have not only misunderstood the Trinity; we have slandered the very heart of God.
We have forgotten that the Trinity is the Gospel.
It is our duty as lovers of the Lord to set aside our confusion and instead accept the beautiful mystery of our God—the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The Gospel has to begin with God himself before we can ever understand how we fit into it. This is that Gospel, as best I know it.
Think for a moment about how love works. Love is fullest when it is given away. The very nature of love is to bestow itself upon another. Love held inside and given to nothing is inherently selfish. In many ways, love is in fact born, strengthened, and made powerful in the moment it is given away. How then, could God be love unless he were more than one person? If we served a single-person God, he could only be love by needing creation. God would thus depend on us, and probably hate us because of the ways we’ve betrayed and failed him time and time again.
Consider the alternative, however. If God is a Trinity, he has no need for anyone or anything except himself, for he is able to be love entirely on his own. The heart of all love and all beauty is the Trinity, our perfect model of giving love away. God is love precisely because he is a Trinity.
Throughout all of eternity, the Father has perfectly given his love to the Son. He pours endless love upon him, caring for him and building him up as a Father. Think of any beauty you’ve ever seen in a human father with his son, and now remember that this is merely a fraction of this perfect divine relationship.
In turn, the Son continually loves the Father through obedience; Christ repeatedly throws his love back to his Father by doing what he commands—a loving obedience carried out even to his gruesome death on the cross.
How do they choose to express their love for one another? The Spirit. The Father loves the Son by breathing out the Spirit, the master artist, who brings life and joy and creativity to all things. He is the means by which the Father and the Son show their love.
How are three Divine persons one God? They are one by their unity; no part of the Godhead could exist without all three. I find a lot of clarity in understanding the difference between a Trinitarian God and polytheistic religion when I compare our God to Greek Mythology. Think about the Greek gods; Zeus will always be Zeus, regardless of whether Poseidon lives or dies. The ocean could completely cease to exist, and Zeus would still remain unaffected.
However, this is not the case with our God. If any member of the Godhead ceased to exist, none of them could retain their identity. If the Son did not exist, how could the Father remain himself? What would he be the Father of? Whom would he love? If the Father did not exist, the Son would become the Orphan and everything about his identity would fundamentally change. And the Spirit, as the means by which their love is shown, is also vital in the unity of the Trinity, for without him their love would have no form of showing itself, and would have no home. They are one God precisely because of their dependent unity; they rely on each other for everything about their very identity.
With this framework in mind, I think we can form a much better understanding of our place in this world. If the Trinity is so perfect, such a beautiful example of love, why on earth are we here?
I am shocked to think about the fact that, somewhere in the reaches of eternity, there was a moment in which the Trinity looked around at one another and said something along the lines of “This…this is perfect. But you know what would make this even better? Mankind.”
We are only here because God’s love was so vast that it had to expand past himself. Love exploded, and we are the result. The Father’s love for the Son overflowed, and suddenly there was light, birds, nature, beauty—and you.
The only reason you exist is because God wanted to include you in his love.
He did this consciously knowing that we would break his love, that we would destroy his goodness and beauty to the extent that the eternal Son literally had to be torn away from the Father and Spirit to die. The love that is the fundamental reality of this universe literally died, because this love chose to create you—and yet, somehow, God still deemed that this choice would be better than never creating.
The Gospel is so much larger than just being forgiven, or redeemed. Jesus did not die so that you could just be forgiven. He did not die so that you could simply forget the sin of your past and one day go to Heaven after death.
He died so that you could become a part of him.
He died so that you, too, could die—and in that moment be joined to him and enter into the fullness of all love. “I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me” (Galatians 2:20).
For those who have died and been born again with and in Jesus, the Father no longer sees our sin. He no longer sees our brokenness, our failure, our insufficiency—he looks upon us and sees only Jesus, can only exclaim, “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased!”
Love himself died for you, that you could become a part of the beauty that holds every atom in this universe together.
This is why I’m going on the Race—there are people who die every day without hearing that they may be loved, that they may have hope and enter into the perfect, loving embrace of the Trinity. I’m asking you to be a part of this Gospel, to send and support me as I go, that they might have eternal life—“that they may know you the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent” (John 17:3).
Join me in proclaiming this love, the impossible Gospel of the Trinity.
