Tag Archives: Trinity

What I Believe: The Christian Church

Posted on by

The Christian Church, as were the Tabernacle and Temple, is intended to exist for a time to fulfill God’s purposes on earth. At the Second Coming, I believe, it will cease to exist, having served its purposes on earth and it will no longer be needed in heaven because believers will have direct access to the persons of the Trinity.

Jesus Christ is in charge of the Christian church as it is the extension of the work he came to do on earth. There is powerful symbolism in the New Testament portraying Christ as the bridegroom and the church as his bride. The meaning of this is, I think, that the Christian church must be prepared, eager, watchful, energetic, pure, and so forth to be ready to give itself to its Lord when he returns. This will not be as an organization or other human entity but as it will have birthed and been the mother of the people of the universal church.

The universal church is the totality of all believers, past, present and future that have been brought into the kingdom of God through the effectual work of Jesus Christ. There is, therefore, one church that is the body of Christ in the world. This is the holy catholic church of the Nicene Creed.

Advertisement

What I Believe: Person of the Holy Spirit

Posted on by

We might think of the Holy Spirit as the all-present person of the Trinity. He, using the traditional pronoun, exists in heaven communicating to the Father and Son the prayers of believers, sometimes even when the believers do not know what to say. He also continually passes over the earth to do what he has been given to do in our physical realm.

The person of the Holy Spirit is able to relate to our spirits so as to bring them to new life, make them stronger by maturing them in the knowledge and will of the Trinity, and produce in them the fruit and the gifts of the Holy Spirit. It is the Holy Spirit that brings God’s power and blessings to our Christian endeavors.

The Holy Spirit deserves the same respect as the other persons of the Trinity. Also, since the Holy Spirit is the person of the Trinity that brings awareness of sin to individuals. I believe a rejection of the Holy Spirit by an individual leaves no other path to faith in Jesus Christ and acceptance by God the Father.

What I Believe: Works of God

Posted on by

Since God’s original work of creation of the physical realm, which brought into being what had not previously existed, he has continued to work out his purposes in what he created. (This is contrary to some people’s idea that God wound up the universe like a clock and left it to run by itself.) This active working can be designated as continuing creation, providence, and miracles. Though this is more for our own thinking than something we are obliged to believe or necessarily as the Trinity thinks of it.

Continuing creation is God using things that do exist to create new things. For example, God uses two cells from our parents to create us who had no previous physical being, although we did receive the ancestry contained in our parent’s genetics.

In providence God uses what exists and shapes matter, energy and events in accordance with the way he has created them to accomplish his purposes.

Miracles involve actions we do not understand. Many people believe miracles are impossible as they seemingly require the violation of natural laws. However, we can think that if God intended miracles he would create a universe that could be used in ways that are beyond the usual. For instance, I do not believe that when Jesus started doing miracles he surprised anybody in heaven (only people on earth). It was just part of God’s original plan.

What I Believe: More About the Trinity

Posted on by

Let me put in here something more about the Trinity. This is not from my own thinking but from the Nicene Creed, a fifteen-hundred year old interpretation of Scripture accepted by most churches. The Trinity functions as three distinct persons though all share the full nature of God. Here is what the creed has to say about the character and roles of the three persons.

 

“We believe in one God, the Father, the Almighty, maker of heaven and earth of all that is, seen and unseen.

We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ, the only Son of God, eternally begotten of the Father, God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten, not made, of one Being with the Father. Through him all things were made.

We believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life, who proceeds from the Father and the Son. With the Father and the Son he is worshiped and glorified. He has spoken through the Prophets.”

What I Believe: The Trinity

Posted on by

The triune God of Christianity is absolutely unique. Except for offshoots of Christianity, other religions have no god, one god, many gods or everything as god. The Trinity is one God existing in the persons of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

The Bible adequately shows the truth of God in three persons and in one being. This mystery was revealed most fully in the person of Jesus and the writings of the New Testament. Jesus had authority to teach us about this because he was one of the persons. Thus, he was able to tell his disciples what they could understand about the Trinity and promised them another person, the Holy Spirit, would help them by providing further knowledge.

This knowledge of the Trinity has not given us the answer to “How can this be?” I believe it is meant to be this way so that we who believe can stand in awe and unbelievers will simply sound foolish when they claim the Trinity is a human invention. As written above, the only person once on earth who might lay claim to the invention of the reality of the Trinity was one of them.

Electronic Christianity Four

Posted on by

With the Olympics coming in August it brought to my mind that we eChristians are citizens of the nation of God. (I prefer using nation rather than kingdom to enhance the present reality of our spiritual affiliation.) This status will not get us into the Olympics regardless of our athletic abilities; still I think a duality is something we should remember as we live out our Christian lives. Various athletes hold dual citizenship just as we do but their nations are worldly. Some of them may have difficulty at times deciding where to place their higher loyalty. We should not have that problem. Still we will need to decide how much allegiance and respect we should show to our earthly nation. To put the question in somewhat biblical terms: Each of us will have to decide how much we will give to Caesar and how much to the Lord. However, since we love most the nation of God and its ruler, we can be sure of having a way to arrive at the right overall allegiance and this will be demonstrated by our love for other Christians.

One outworking of our love in eChristianity will be to provide support with “likes,” and comments, and also in other ways encourage each other. And, thus we can help each other to a better understanding and expression of what we are thinking and writing. We should also be aware that God did not intend for us to all think alike. If he had we would not have anything to say to each other. Instead he made us each to have our own way of thinking while making it possible for us to be united in the nation of God.

There is another area in which we are all different. This is in how much we focus on the outward expression of our Christianity—whether in small acts of kindness or seeking to perfect the world—compared to the time and effort we put into our inward experience of the persons of the Trinity. Each of us should seek to find the balance of our commitments that God expects of us. And none of us will be exactly in the same place in regard to these things.

Perhaps, we should, like Mary, ponder these things in our hearts and hope to come to a fuller understanding of all that is involved in our choices of what we emphasize in our lives.