7 June 09
Ephesians 4:1-6
One of the games people love to play is called, ‘Who’s the greatest’? It’s very easy to get caught up in it: ‘Who’s got the most to boast about’, ‘Who’s going to be the top dog’?
Remember Mohammed Alley ‘world champion boxer’ who as a young man was quite unashamed about making the claim, ‘to be the greatest’.
He was on an aeroplane at one time and the flight attendant asked him to do up his seat belt for take off.
And he replied, “no I’m not going to I don’t have to”.
She answered, ‘yes you do it’s the law this plane can’t take off until you do buckle up’.
But he said ‘I’m not going to because I’m superman and superman don’t need no seatbelt’.
To which the flight attendant replied, “And superman don’t need no aeroplane”.
Did you notice in our reading that there is a word that seems to dominate these verses that we read together?
It’s the word ‘one’ isn’t it?
I want to remind you of how important this word is to God. You could say one is God’s favourite number.
First because it defines God’s identity and also because it is central to our identities, at least it should be – it’s the way God created us to be; a fellowship of Christian believers of ‘one heart and one mind’.
God is three Persons in One; Father, Son and Spirit of which the confession says ‘each is God yet God is One’.
So God exists as three persons in a perfect unity or ‘oneness’.
Now this morning I want us to think about relationships within the Trinity?
How do you think God the Father, Son and Spirit relate to and experience each other?
Is there a hierarchy e.g. is the Father greater than the Son and the Son greater than the Spirit.
Is there any possibility of a power struggle within the Godhead?
‘Who’s the greatest’!
Let’s begin with the nature of God.
I. ‘Oneness’ is the Blueprint of God’s Nature.
Since we are focusing on the Holy Spirit, let’s begin with God the Spirit: How is oneness within the Trinity true of the Holy Spirit?
1. The Shyness of the Holy Spirit.
Some of the loveliest words that I have read about the Holy Spirit were written by a NT theologian named Dale Brunner in his book titled,
‘The Holy Spirit the Shy Member of the Trinity” and this is what he writes;
“One of the most surprising discoveries in my own study of the doctrine and experience of the Holy Spirit in the NT is what I can only call the shyness of the Holy Spirit.
What I mean here is not the shyness of timidity – Paul in 2 Tim 1:7 calls him the Spirit of Power – but the shyness of deference, the shyness of concentrated attention on another.
It is not the shyness, which we often experience from self centredness but the shyness of ‘other centredness’, in a word the shyness of love’.
This is not the attitude that says, “Look at me!”
Now we can read about the Holy Spirits deference to Jesus in John Gospel. Three statements from Jesus;
i. “The Holy Spirit will remind you of everything I have said to you.”
Jn. 14:26
ii. ‘The Spirit of truth who goes out from the Father, he will testify about me.’ Jn.15:26
iii. ‘He (Holy Spirit) will bring glory to me by taking from what is mine and making it known to you.” Jn. 16:14.
The Holy Spirit does not seek any attention for himself; His consistent ministry is to get people to focus on Jesus Christ.
He chooses to withdraw from sight and point people to the one he loves.
Dale Brunner writes;
‘It has often been said that the Holy Spirit is the Cinderella of the Trinity, the greatly neglected person of the Godhead.
But the Holy Spirit’s desire and work is that we be overcome again and thrilled again, excited and gripped again by the wonder, the majesty and relevance of Jesus.
The Holy Spirit does not mind being Cinderella outside the Ball Room if the Prince is honoured in his Kingdom.”
This shyness of the Holy Spirit is the shyness of love – what a lovely quality.
Q. What can we say about Jesus, does he ever exalt himself?
Again – far from it and the word that best describes Jesus character as revealed in the NT is – submission.
2. The Submission of Jesus.
We don’t ever hear Jesus saying ‘I’m the greatest’ in fact he affirms something very different.
Jesus said, ‘If I glorify myself my glory means nothing.’ Jn.8:54
Another time, ‘I didn’t come to be served but to serve’ (to be a servant)
Matt. 20:28
Jesus whole life was lived in submission to his Heavenly Father and
we see the best example of this in the garden of Gethsemane. When facing the prospect of an agonising death prayed;
‘Yet not my will (Father) but yours be done’. Lk. 22:42
We also see examples of Jesus submission to the HS – for example at beginning of his ministry Jesus submits to the baptism of the Spirit and then,
‘He (allows himself) to be led by the Spirit into the desert to be tempted by the devil.’ Mat. 4:1
So Jesus also has this same great quality of – the shyness of deference and submission to the other two members of the Trinity.
3. The Humility of the Father
On the occasion of Jesus baptism we hear God the Father saying of Jesus.
“This is my Son whom I love…listen to him.” Lk 3:22 see also 9:35.
“My Father, whom you claim as your God, is the one who glorifies me.” Jn 9:54.
And after Jesus death and resurrection Paul writes.
“Therefore God exalted him to the highest place and gave him a name that is above every other name…in heaven and on earth and under the earth.” Phil. 2:9.
So God the Father also never says, ‘look at me’.
Each member of the trinity graciously and selflessly points to the other in a gracious circle.
Dale Brunner concludes ‘The whole blessed Trinity is shy’.
So we have an answer to our question. ‘What are relationships like within the Trinity?
God the Father, Son and Spirit are certainly not into playing our game of, “Who’s the Greatest’ – as we would expect.
Rather their relationships are defined by the words deference and submission where;
1. The Father exalts the Son
2. The Son glorifies Father
3. The Holy Spirit bears witness only to Jesus the Son.
4. And Jesus submits to the ministry of the Spirit and
5. The Spirits intercedes for us with the Father and
6. The Father sends the Spirit to us to carry on the ministry of the Son.
Within the Trinity, God exists as a Father, Son and Holy Spirit in a community of humility, servant hood, mutual submission, delight and love such as you or I can not imagine.
It is vital that we understand this unity or Oneness that The Father, Son and Spirit have enjoyed through out eternity because it explains everything that God is and everything the God does.
Let’s look at two examples of how God goes about His work?
II ‘Oneness’ is the Blueprint of God’s Work.
1. God’s Creation.
From time to time in the Scriptures, God allows us to overhear the conversations of heaven.
And the first time this happens is in Genesis Chapter one where we overhear a conversation between God the Father, Son and Spirit.
“Then God said, Let ‘us make man in our image, in our likeness,..’ Gen. 1:26.
And what we see next is that each member of the Trinity has an essential part to play in creation.
i. God the Father was the Creator,
“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth” Gen. 1:1
ii. God the Son was the agent of creation, “Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made has been made.” John 1:3
iii. God the Spirit is the source of power and creative life imparted at Creation. Genesis 1:2
Then the climax of God’s creation, which came on the sixth day;
“So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them (each gender different from the other but capable of becoming one with each other).
Gen1: 26-27
In all of creation ‘oneness’ is the signature of God’s handiwork.
Albert Einstein the Father of astrophysics, was a Jew and he developed his law of relativity based on Israel’s great Confession –
‘The Lord your God O Israel is One’ and Einstein reasoned that there must be one integrated law of the universe and he was right.
But it’s also true to say that ‘oneness’ is the basis of all God’s moral and spiritual laws as well.
Now of course we know what happened to that perfect ‘oneness in creation’, with its ‘deference of love’, – it was lost when sin entered the world.
When Adam and Eve left the Garden of Eden they didn’t just lose Paradise they also lost community (oneness) and they went out into a world of enmity.
So that within a short time we have the first murder, recorded in Genesis 4:16, when Cain killed his brother Abel and it was all downhill from there.
The opening chapters of Genesis paint a very bleak picture of broken oneness, which haunts the world today.
A symptom of our loss of oneness is loneliness, which is epidemic in the world today.
Even though we see examples of closeness in the unity of a great family or the unity of a sports team after they’ve won a game, there are many people who do not have either of these.
Even if you are blessed with a loving family and good friends you will still not be fully satisfied until you experience God’s restoration of a paradise lost.
So ‘Oneness’ is the blueprint of God’s Creation and.
2. ‘Oneness’ is the Blueprint of God’s Redemption.
When Jesus died for us on the cross he removed the cause of all God’s hostility towards us because of our sin and all of our hostility towards others, also the result of sin.
“For he himself is our peace, who has made the two ‘one’ and has destroyed the barrier, the dividing walls of hostility, by abolishing in his flesh the law with its commandments and regulations. His purpose was to create in himself one new man out of two, thus making peace, and in this one body to reconcile both of them to God through the cross, by which he put to death their hostility.” Eph 2: 14-16.
What does this mean for us now?
It means that every one of us, who ever we were – with our religious and cultural differences, which may have important before we accepted Jesus – but are no longer relevant because God has made us a completely new person, such as never existed before.
Jesus was the first born of that ‘new creation’ and we are invited to follow him into a realm of existence – where in Christ we are no longer “Jew or Gentile, slave or free, male or female for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” Gal 3:28.
In Christ our ‘oneness’ is restored. Or at least it is potentially restored and this realisation of this potential is what Jesus prays for in John 17.
“My prayer is not for them alone (disciples). I pray also for those who will believe in me through their message, that all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you.
May they also be in us so the world may believe that you have sent me.” vs. 20-21.
This is a staggering prayer in which Jesus says, ‘Father may these followers of mine, such fallen and broken citizens of a sinful world, may they also be in us’.
You see the importance of understanding the Trinity is not that we get our theology right but that we live as if the Trinity is real.
But there was a price to pay but not by us and we must never forget what it cost God for us to be a part of this fellowship of oneness – community of faith.
Our second insight into a heavenly conversation concerns our redemption. God has not only created us He also had to redeem us. (Story of the little boy and his boat)
We can only imagine the conversation that took place heaven.
1. Christ the Son says “I will leave heaven and go earth and become like one of them.”
I will leave the perfect ‘oneness’, all that I have known throughout eternity and I will take on their brokenness and their loneliness.
‘I will die on their cross of shame and of infinitely greater pain than the physical torture of crucifixion, I will experience a Spiritual death and separation from the Godhead, I will experience a God forsakenness’.
And remember Jesus words from the cross:
“My God My God why have you forsaken me?”
An experience such as he has never known for a single moment in all eternity. And
2. The Father says, “I too am willing to pay the price – I will offer that which is most precious to me, my beloved son, to be despised and rejected and broken and murdered by his own people.
His pain will be my pain and there will be brokenness in the Godhead, which I too will bear. “I’m also willing to pay the price”. And
3. The Spirit said “and I too am willing to be poured out on all the earth and in mostly silent invisible ways I will lead and guide believers, never exalting myself always pointing only to Jesus.
Often being ignored quenched and denied” and we remember that the NT says He was grieved by their unbelief.
In all eternity, the Father and the Son had never quenched the Spirit but because of our sinfulness, even now we ignore him.
Father, Son and Spirit agree to take on the experience of pain and broken Community – broken Oneness, so that anyone who wants to may enter this fellowship of love; Paul calls it the fellowship of the HS.
You and I are invited to come into this new oneness through the gracious ministry of the Holy Spirit.
III. Conclusion.
Therefore let me say in conclusion and this is of the utmost importance for us to understand this.
For us to tolerate disunity in the Body of Christ and to do things that lead to disunity is utterly unthinkable and fundamentally at odds with the purposes of God for human history.
Paul says “Make every effort to keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace”. (Ephesians 4:3)
Paul does not say make every effort to create unity, we already have it if we have Christ.
It’s what Jesus death won for us, our job is simply to maintain it. And Paul uses a very rare form of the verb here, one of intense urgency, which someone has translated ‘make every effort. Spare no pain.’
This is why Paul says there is only one body (one Church) and Jesus will not allow his Church to be divided into any groupings that denies our ‘oneness’.
Isn’t it crazy that the Christian Church, which holds 90% of its beliefs in common and yet we allow ourselves to be divided by our 10% of differences! Whose work is that do you think?
Everything that the God the Father Son and Holy Spirit have ever done in relation to our creation and redemption have been inspired by a dream that the Oneness of their fellowship will one day be the oneness that they share with the human race.
Prayer
Heavenly Father we are humbled before you and despite our great diversity of culture, age and experience we are one in Christ Jesus.
Forgive us for the times when we have been cavalier about this precious new relationship you have created for us.
Forgive us when we have treated others with contempt or distance, or judgement or impatience or arrogance.
Make us one Father so the world might see and know that you have sent your Son.
We ask this in Jesus name, that through the love of the Father that the fellowship of the holy Spirit you will keep us one.