The Trinity: God the Father

Romans 8.29-30

This morning, we will look at in the Trinity series, God the Father. I believe it was about 3 years ago that Kevin and Alyssa went to Italy and basically each and every day (because of Facebook), I was able to live out and enjoy all of their pictures. They took a tremendous amount of pictures that they shared and I was thankful that they did. Their pictures showed beautiful countryside, beautiful pictures of art that were found in churches, and stunning paintings out of chapels in churches. A good portion of the church’s history had art attached to it. It’s been a beautiful thing. Along the early 1900s (because art always teaches us something), there became a thing called abstract art. Abstract art means you could see a painting and it could just be whatever, and the interpretation of that painting was whatever you wanted it to be. That type of influence began to influence the church in areas of the gospels, and in particular in areas of the trinity. When we think of the trinity, you think of doctrinal truth that pertains to Jesus. You could probably sit there and recite a number of those things. You could think of the ministry of the Holy Spirit, but when you think of the ministry of God the Father, some of you might be drawing a blank. God the Father has often been pictured, almost shaped, over the last 100 years or so in our culture as some pathetic old man on a throne that has white hair and a white beard. He pathetically sits there and hopes people will pay attention to him. You wonder how the Father’s role plays out in redemption. When people think about God, they often think about God generally in one of two ways; they think about him as either personal or powerful. Certainly we know God is powerful, but oftentimes through the shaping of these perspectives we think of him as one over against the other. We either don’t think we can connect to him personally, or we make him so low and personal that we forget his power. I thought about that in a couple of different ways. God has named all the stars (reference to his powers). There are 400 billion stars in our galaxy. There are 200 billion galaxies. Our God is powerful, isn’t He? Oftentimes though the world we live in tries to gravitate towards God is love. Certainly, God is love, and that is something we should never doubt, but think about this. The Father created the very tree his son would die on. The Father nurtured in infancy those people (men) who would nail him to the cross. God loves. God is love. We should never doubt that. But the Bible is pretty clear to us that God is both - he is both powerful and personal. In all these things in the trinity that you see in the Bible, the trinity is always at work in scripture in creation and in redemption. Those are always being played out and are even going on now across the globe. The Father defines the plan, the Son executes the plan, and the Spirit applies the plan. Three in one (that we looked at last week) is the eternal godhead - the trinity that has been in existence from eternity past, and they have only ever worked in perfect love and unity with one another. Look at this text with me in Romans 8. In all of the trinity’s positions, we will not exhaust everything, but Romans 8 is a nice condensed spot to go to.

Romans 8. 28-30