This sermon was preached on Sunday 15th June 2025.

Bible Reading: John 16:12-15

During the season of Easter, we focused heavily on Jesus Christ, the Son of God, and also on his relationship to God the Father. But as we have come into Ascension Day and then Pentecost, we have focused more on God the Holy Spirit.

Last week, at Pentecost, we celebrated the coming of the Holy Spirit to the believers. With the coming of the Holy Spirit, God would dwell continually in the lives of his people. God was fully with us at all times. But hold on a second. Didn’t Jesus, the Son of God, go back to heaven? So, how can the coming of the Holy Spirit mean that God is fully with us at all times if Jesus is missing? Then what about God, our father, who art in heaven?

The reason we talk about God in this way, across God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit, is that this trinity of three persons makes up the one God. Today, on Trinity Sunday, we remember and celebrate that our one God consists of three persons: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. These three persons—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—make up what we call the Trinity.

Since last week we celebrated the coming of God the Holy Spirit, the next logical question to ask is: how do these three persons of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit work together? It may seem that we have three Gods, but throughout the Bible, God is consistent in being one God. 

Okay, so we have one God made up of three parts, three persons. I can get my head around that. The challenging part is that each person is not a third of God. It’s not a matter of the Father third, and the Son third, and the Spirit third, all adding up to a whole one God. Its not like the Trivial Pursuit wedges all adding up to a whole cheese. In fact, it is one God the Father, one God the Son, and one God the Spirit, adding up to be one whole God. One + One + One = One. God is three persons in one God.

I won’t pretend that I understand the full workings of who God was, is and always will be. But what I do know is that these three persons of God help show us more of the big picture of who God is. The biggest thing that I see about God the Trinity is that God exists in relationship and community.

God is a loving relationship, a loving community. Loving relationship is at the core of who God is. God shares love within himself within the Father, the Son and the Spirit. Then, from this overflow of love within the Trinity of God, God created humans so that we could exist in a loving relationship with God. We exist to be loved by God.

How incredible is that? When you ask the question, what is the meaning of life? Why do I exist? The answer is simply: to be loved by God. So often, as Christians, we can talk about how we need to say certain prayers, follow specific practices, abide by the rules, go to church etc., but all of that can miss what being a Christian is: it is to be loved by God. Let God love you.

There has been a significant increase in mental health illnesses in the West, particularly among young people. People are struggling with loneliness, isolation, anxiety, depression, and so many other illnesses. I know that there is a lot of stuff going on behind each individual’s situation, and it isn’t always an easy fix, but so often when I meet people who are going through these things, I think the first thing they need is to know that they are loved. They need to hear: God loves you. God created you and knows everything about you. He thinks you are brilliant, and incredible, and so so beautiful; you are the desire of his heart, and you fill God with heart-bursting joy.

Do you know that for yourself? Do you know that you mean everything to God? Did you know that everything about God yearned to bring you into existence? God exists in a loving relationship, in a community of love between the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, and we were created to join this loving relationship. Creating us for the purposes of love is an overflow of God’s very being.

You can see this in the creation story at the start of the Bible in the book of Genesis. In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. His Spirit was hovering over the waters. They made the Sun, the moon, and the stars. They made the earth and the sky. Then when it came to creating human beings, God said: “Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness.’[1]

Two things to note here. First, God said let ‘us’ make mankind. God is a plurality from the beginning. God has always been the Father, the Son and the Spirit, and it is from that relationship that God decides to extend that relationship by creating humankind to share love with God.

Second, as human beings, we are created in the image and likeness of God. This means that we are made to exist in loving relationship, just as our God exists in loving relationship between Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. We are made to be relational, just like God. As I mentioned earlier, so many of the issues we encounter in our modern day comes from a society that lacks meaningful and personal relationships with others. In the digital age, we are connected to more people than ever before, yet are more alone than ever before. We have lost our sense of the other and of community. We exist as individuals, but that is not how we were created. Even God does not exist solely as an individual. We are made to be in loving relationship, both with God and with one another. As God’s people, who bear God’s likeness, we are to live in loving relationship with others. 

As I said at the start, I don’t fully understand how God works or who he is, and quite frankly, no one does. We creatures cannot fathom the greatness of the creator. As humans, we cannot ever fully understand God because to understand God would be to limit him to our limited understanding. A God we could understand would not be God because God, by the greatness of his very nature, is beyond our understanding. I cannot understand the Trinity, how three persons fit into one God. But what I do know is that if God exists in loving relationship, and from that loving relationship made human beings to also exist in loving relationship, then all we can do is love. To be loved by God, love him and love others. This is what God as Trinity shows us: that we are created to be loved and love in return.

As Christians, our joy is that this love with God is not distant, but it has come near in the person of Jesus, who has given us God’s Spirit to dwell in us. Jesus says that the Spirit will reveal the truth about God and lead us into the truth. We may not always understand God and his love, but by God’s grace, his Spirit brings us deeper into God’s love. We are caught up more in God’s love, we know and experience more of his love, and in turn, our love for him and others grows.

Our Triune God demonstrates that the essence of both God and all creation is to love and be loved. If there is only one thing to take away for your life, let it be this: love and be loved. 

 

Amen.

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[1] Genesis 1.26 [NIV].