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Episode Description:

This week on All of Life for God, Pastor Ryan McGraw reminds us that the doctrine of the Trinity is essential to the Christian life. Do you want to go deeper in your study of God’s triune nature?

Episode Transcript:

Remain standing just for a few moments, we're going to turn our attention just a page over from where we were this morning, still in the morning, but a little bit further forward in Ephesians. We're going pick up with Chapter 2, verses 14 down through the end of the chapter.

We started by asking in the conference, what do we already know about the triune God and what things can help us know Him better? Then we've looked at how the Trinity is the heart of the Gospel and spills forth into Paul's praise. Now we're going to ask the question, "Does it really matter?" And even as I ask the question, you realize I've answered it to a large extent. But what I'm trying to do is again, pick up a way of thinking, pick up a pattern, realize these are not isolated instances, but they come up a lot and teach us how to think about God in general.

So that being said, I'm going to focus on verse 18. So if you want to remember things, first text, John 5:26, "The Father is life in Himself. He's granted the Son to have life in Himself." This morning is a big text, but Father chose us, the Son purchased us, the Spirit applies the Gospel to us.

Next text, "For through Him, we both have access by one Spirit to the Father." And there's one more before the end of the chapter, so keep an ear for it.

Beginning in verse 14, "For He Himself is our peace, who has made both one and has broken down the middle wall of separation, having abolished in His flesh the enmity, that is the law of commandments contained in ordinances so as to create in Himself one new man from the two, thus making peace and that He might reconcile them both to God in one body through the cross, thereby putting to death the enmity. And He came and preached peace to you who are far off and those who were near, but through Him we both have access by one spirit to the Father. Now therefore, you are no longer strangers and foreigners, but fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God having been built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Jesus Christ Himself being the chief cornerstone in whom the whole building being fitted together grows into a holy temple in the Lord, in whom you also are being built together for a dwelling place of God in the Spirit."

Thus far our reading of scripture, let us pray. Father in heaven, we ask that as You have blessed us so many times before, that You would be with us now once again. Send forth Your spirit as we hear the voice of Your son in His Word. Help us to know You and walk with You, and bless us to live and to die for Your glory. And we ask it in Christ's name. Amen. You may be seated.

This text is often the one that I lead with in talking about the Trinity. I noticed some of you have the booklet, "Is the Trinity Practical?" And the topic that I'm giving you here, or the question I'm asking, is "Does the Trinity matter?" As I mentioned a moment ago, I think I've already answered that to a large extent, but what I'm trying to convey here and trying to get us to pick up is the way that the Trinity is the great assumption of the New Testament. Maybe later today or even in the Q&A time tomorrow, we can talk about what this does to how we read the Old Testament, because I think it does have enormous implications there, as well. But the Trinity is a basic... The Trinity is so woven into Paul's Gospel, it's as though he can't say anything without it. And yet for many of us, the Trinity, as I mentioned at the beginning of the conference, may be something that is difficult to explain and even more difficult to explain why it matters, why it's practical.

Most of you... Well, I should say I hope most of you, have read Pilgrim's Progress at some point and are familiar with it. I see some children nodding their heads, which is a good thing. I think our children have seven or eight different versions of it that people have given them over the years. But as Bunyan in Pilgrim's Progress is describing the journey of a Christian from earth to heaven, from the city of destruction where he was dying in sin to the Celestial City where he's with the Lord and everything that happens in between, there's something about the story that grips our hearts. Thankfully, Pilgrim's Progress has always stayed in print and has remained a bestseller. It's a wonderful book, but fewer people are familiar with Part Two than they are with Part One. And this is of course after Christian goes to heaven and goes to the Celestial City, and his wife and his children are only converted to Christ after he dies.

And the second part is instructive for so many reasons, partly because Bunyan wisely recognizes that maybe you could say a homeschool mom, who's now a single mom raising a bunch of kids, has a somewhat different Christian journey than her husband did. And in wisdom he shows even the diversity of Christian experience. But there's one episode in the second part of Pilgrim's Progress that always strikes me in relation to a text like Ephesians 2. And that is as Christians travels, I believe, to Interpreter's House, she meets three women and one of the women is named Prudence and she asks Christians, "Can I catechize your children?" And what she means is, "Can I ask them some questions about what they think and what they believe?" "Okay, sure." And if I remember correctly, I believe she starts with the five-year-old, at least I met someone here that's around five today. And the first three questions she asks the young child is, "How does the Father save you? How does the Son save you? How does the Spirit save you?"

And I remember reading that for the first time thinking, "17th-century Baptists think a lot differently than we do now." Are those the first questions coming out of your mouth to a five-year-old in a Christian Church, let alone to an adult? Can adult answer those questions? Hopefully you can to an extent, hopefully before now, but if not more clearly in light of what we've already seen. But then Prudence basically says, "Since your child was able to answer these three questions so well, I don't think I need to catechize the rest of the children. They're well instructed. They know the Gospel, they know who the Lord is and they know how they come to know Him."

And there's an assumption there isn't there, that the Trinity is not peripheral. The Trinity is not just a doctrinal foundation. The Trinity is at the core of what it means to be a Christian. The core of Christianity. If you look at the history of the Christian Church, the church has been through some weird times. And what I mean by that is I have an interest in church history and I read a lot of things that most times a reformed professor or pastor don't read. So I've read a lot of medieval allegories, I've read a lot of medieval sermons, as well as early church and modern things and all kinds of other things in between.

And the one thing that I see over and over and over again is that the church of Jesus Christ has always been obsessed with three things: the Trinity, Jesus Christ, and the Bible. Whatever faults we have, the way the Holy Spirit has always kept the church going, is our obsession with the Bible where we hear God's voice and we learn about Him; with Jesus Christ, the only way to God; and the Trinity itself.

And that brings us to this Ephesians 2 text. Does the Trinity matter? Yes, the Trinity matters because the Trinity is actually the foundation of everything we believe about God and of all of our experience of God, our interaction with God. There's a reason why the woman in Pilgrim's Progress Part Two asks the child questions about the Trinity. If you don't get this, then who cares about anything else? I often tell my wife, the older I grow in Christ, I really don't want to preach on anything else other than Jesus Christ and his Father and Spirit. But here we are in this text, and we see Paul again teaching the Trinity by what he assumes, not just by what he says.

So what we're going to look at is the Trinity again, in a sense at the heart and character of the Gospel, but specifically where I'm advancing this forward a little bit is the Trinity in the Christian life, the Trinity in Christian devotion. Let me state it a little bit differently and maybe shift the nature of the outline a little bit. What we're looking at is a foundation and a pattern; or a foundation and patterns, plural. And I've given you some patterns, I've given you some examples, but I want to press them home a little bit more fully with respect to the Father, Son and Spirit distinctly.

But then also since I'm not going to be here with you for more than tomorrow, unless something bad happens. Basically, I want to give you a foretaste of what to look for in other examples. Why does this permeate our thinking, in other words? So a foundation, some patterns, what's the foundation and what is Paul really getting at with regard to the Trinity?

You ever had a circumstance where perhaps you're dealing with a Jehovah's Witness, you're dealing with a Mormon or someone else who denies that Jesus Christ is God equal with the Father, and they might knock on your door? Usually, by the way, I've found the Mormons have changed their tactics in recent years. They used to get right into it. Who is Jesus Christ? What's the Trinity? Why do you guys believe this nonsense? Et cetera. Now usually their tactic is, "I'm a Christian just like you, and let's not talk about that stuff. Let's get away from it because we're all believers here. We're all Christians."

And we might be asking in light of what we've been saying so far, are we? Do we have the same God? Do we have the same Gospel? I think we know enough now to say no, but the issue is that people will come to you and act like the burden is on you. "You say God is one God and there are three persons in the Godhead, the Father, the Son, the Holy Spirit. Prove it." You realize that the Bible begins the other way around: because God is triune, this is what the Gospel is like. If you deny it, the burden's on you. You prove it. Because the issue is we can't talk about the Gospel unless we talk about God, and when we talk about God, we must talk about God as triune.

So I said I want to give you a foundation, I want to give you some patterns. What's the foundation that Paul lays here? We've already seen Chapter 1, and we've seen this great doxology to the Father for sending His Son on and His Spirit, two persons on mission, to bring us back to the Father who sent them. But now Paul is dealing with a fairly practical set of problems, and the great Trinitarian statement in verse 18 reveals the foundation of everything else that he says.

This is not just a foundation, but what we're going to be doing through the text is as we're seeking to imitate how Paul thinks, we're also climbing a mountain. We're starting in the valley, we're at the foothills, and step by step, our goal is to get to the peak, the pinnacle on the top and see what we can see and stand from this vantage point and look down and see the glorious vista that stands before us.

That's exactly what Paul is doing as he's giving us a Trinitarian foundation of the Gospel. The Trinity is the pinnacle, the peak, and he as it were, is leading us one step at a time to hike up the hill until we can see it. And that pulls us back through the context of Ephesians Chapter 2. Sometimes we see in a text what we're looking for, what we expect, which is not always the same thing as what the author gives us.

What am I getting at? We'll go back to the beginning of Ephesians Chapter 2. We probably know a lot of these verses. "You who were dead in your trespasses and sins, God has made alive in Christ Jesus." What is Paul doing? First, he's reminding a group of Christians for whom he prays, and in whose presence he offers such a great doxology to their shared faith in the triune God, and he reminds them who they were. Whether you're born into the church, baptized as an infant, or come out of the world later on, whatever your experience may be, everything Paul lays before us in Ephesians 2 is true, isn't it? Who are we without Jesus Christ? We are not simply sick. We are not those who say God helps those who help themselves. We don't simply say, "I can generally make it okay in life, but when the going gets tough now I can't make it a day without Jesus."

What do we say? We are dead people. We can't lift a finger. We have no ears to hear. We have no spiritual breath in our lungs. We are dead in our trespasses. We are dead in our sins. We are dead because of our sins. We carry about in our thoughts, in our speech, in our behavior, a living death, as it were. And the problem is not what you do. Ultimately, the problem is who you are. There's something fundamentally wrong with our hearts, fundamentally wrong with our human nature.

Now, remember, Paul's writing this to a bunch of Gentile Christians, people who didn't grow up in church, at least not in the church in any meaningful sense of the term. He describes him later, and I'm jumping around and trying to pull you through the logic, because we're starting at the bottom of the hill in the depths walking up to the height to think about what Paul's actually doing. "You were outside of the church. You were dead in your trespasses and sins. You didn't know the God of Israel. You'd never heard the Gospel, you'd never heard any news. You as it were, were walking around in blindness and darkness with no hope, with no help with nothing." And notice how he describes them. If we go back a little bit to verse 11, he's told us, "You were dead. Now God has made you alive. You are presently where you sit, resurrected, you Ephesian Christians. But it was not always so. You were Gentiles in the flesh who are called uncircumcision by what is called the circumcision made in the flesh by hands. At that time you were without Christ, being aliens from the commonwealth of Israel, strangers from the covenants of promise, having no hope, without God in the world."

Now we need to grasp what Paul is actually saying in order to understand this glorious Trinitarian foundation of the Gospel even better and more richly, and then from it built some patterns. What is he doing? He's literally, think of it this way, getting up on Sunday morning telling a bunch of Christians who believe in Christ, who are gathered out of the world, perhaps a minority in the world they live in, marginalized by people around them, and he opens his Bible, as it were. In this case, he speaks his Bible because he's an apostle inspired by the Spirit, and he says, "First point, first lesson today, let me remind you how bad you are. Let me remind you where you would've been without Jesus Christ. You were strangers from the commonwealth of Israel. You didn't have Bibles in your home. You didn't grow up with family worship. You didn't grow up in the temple, the synagogue with all these visible pictures of what Jesus Christ would do for his people. You were without hope. You were without God in the world."

Now, I'm not one of those preachers that likes to quote Greek and Hebrew text to you all the time. I think it's better often just to say, "This is what it means. Here's the English," et cetera. But you'll recognize this. When Paul says "You are without God in the world," he actually says, "You were 'atheo'." And we have an English word that's like that. And what is it? You were atheist. But wait a minute, we worshiped Zeus, we worshiped Hermes, we brought our ritual sacrifices. We even had household gods. Let's make it a little bit more contemporary. We were spiritual people. We want to get in touch with our spiritual side, whatever that is. We believe that everybody needs a higher power, especially if you have an alcohol problem or you've got some other life-dominating issue that's ruining your relationship to other people. Everyone needs a little bit of help.

So whatever God you find that's good for you, whatever God you find is true for you, that's good and you ought to pick that up. There's nothing wrong with it. The only thing that's possibly wrong is if you say that that's the only thing that's good. That's the only way that you can actually find a way to get along in life. Remember what I said before, the Gospel's not about you, it's about God? And what's this whole process? It's exactly what a sinner who's dead and sin thinks like. It's me. It's my convenience. If I'm a good person, it's because I look at the person next to me and we're about the same. We're about equal. I treat him well or her well. They treat me well and we compare ourselves among ourselves. We're in good shape. And by the way, if you need an idea of a God or a religion to add to that, to augment something in your life, then good for you.

But what are we really saying? Let's take all the masks off. What Paul doing here? That's total open atheism, no matter how religious you actually are. And there's a few reasons for that, because one, you're saying, "It's me first"; and then, "How do I compare to other people around me?" And then if there's space for God or need for God, then He comes at the end. That's what sin looks like. That's what it looks like to suppress the truth and unrighteousness. That's what it means to be dead and trespasses in sins. Here's the secret to the Christian life that Paul roots in a Trinitarian Gospel. Ready? God first, then others, then you come last.

Why is he telling these people, "No matter how religious you were, you were atheists?" "Well, that's insulting, Paul." "Yes, if you don't know the right God in the right way, you don't know any God at all. If you don't come to the Father through the Son by the Spirit, then whether you are theoretically an atheist or not, that's where you land. You think the same way." And Paul is basically saying, as you think about the Gospel of Jesus Christ, the entirety of your hope hinges on a single word in verse 13: "but". "But now in Christ Jesus, you who are once so far off have been brought near by the blood of Jesus Christ." He's about to tell us that everybody, whether you grew up in a Christian home or not, whether you grew up Jewish or Gentile, whether inside the church or outside the church, you're all on a level playing field. You all have exactly the same need, the same savior, the same Christ to draw you near. That's true for all of us.

But we need to recognize that the Gospel really does hinge on the word "but" here. You could do nothing, but God did everything. He came to you who are helpless, who are hopeless, moving down from the valley, the bottom of the mountain, the pit. Now we're moving up a step. God has done something. The Gospel is not about what I do. The Gospel is about what God has done, for me and in me.

And now he starts picking up pace, pulling us up to this great Trinitarian vista from which we look down and see everything a new light. Notice what he says beginning in verse 14, "For He Himself is our peace." Notice how he puts this. I've already said twice in two messages this morning, the Gospel is not about you, it's about God. I've also said, you could describe the Gospel in two words: "Jesus Christ." Do you see it again? Do you see this rhythm in scripture? This repetition, this constant pressing us to think along these lines. He doesn't just say, "Jesus gives peace." He is peace. He is our peace. Now, the question that's going to arise is, "Peace between whom?" And I'll answer that in just a moment, because there's actually more than one answer in the text.

"But Jesus, the Prince of Peace, is our peace." There's probably an illusion here to the promise in Micah Chapter 5, where the Christ would be born of Bethlehem, Judah. That's the part we really focus on. That's the part we know, because Jesus came, he was born in Bethlehem, the prophets predicted it, but you realize how the section ends. What happens when this great one, this Prince of Peace, is born in Bethlehem, Judah? The prophet concludes, "That one will be peace." Jesus is, as it were, the territory in which we make peace with God and others. I don't want to say "to neutral ground" because it's too weak. He is the ground of our peace. He is the substance of our peace. The Gospel is Jesus Christ. And when we receive Jesus Christ, we come out of darkness to light, we come to know God, where before we were atheists and we have peace.

Peace with whom? Well, there's a twofold reference here, and that is something like this. Remember, we got two groups. We got Jewish people. Let's say they grew up in the church, they always heard the scriptures. They were circumcised. Sounds a lot like, "I was baptized. I grew up in the church, I've always heard these things." And then you've got these gentiles that are doing anything and everything over here. These are, by the way, the homosexuals in the world. I don't think they had transgenderism in the way that we have it today. But things go full circle, the culture is not a whole lot different, and these people are brought out of that background.

And if you're a Jew, what do you learn your whole life? "We are God's chosen people. God's blessings belong with us and to us." And there's a real element of truth there. Isn't that exactly what Paul just said? "The covenants of promise, the commonwealth of Israel," they have hope. They're waiting for the Christ. They have all these great riches, these great things. Now, whether we use our riches well is a different question, isn't it? But we have them. They have them.

And then you've got these Gentiles. And in a sense, we could say that the Jews didn't want anything to do with the Gentiles, unless they became Jews. The Gentiles didn't want anything to do with the Jews. They found each other strange. But we find in our experience that the church often brings people together that maybe wouldn't even be friends otherwise. And so when the apostle is talking about Christ himself being our peace, notice what he says. "He has made both one and has broken down the middle wall of separation."

Now think about it this way. It's actually a pretty vivid illustration. Let's say as I'm looking at you on my left, so I guess your right, and then my right, your left over here. Let's put a wall right down the middle of the church so that you can't see each other anymore. And this side is the Jewish group, and this side is the Gentile group. And both sides are happy that there's a dividing line. They don't have to look at each other, they don't have to see each other, they don't have to do anything with each other.

And now here comes Jesus Christ, the one who is peace. And the first thing that the one who is peace does is it begins to break things. He breaks down the middle wall of separation and now makes them all one. Mingles up the congregation, switches the seats, mixes up the families. And it's more than that because all that's still external, isn't it? He turns the hearts of the people towards Christ, and He turns their hearts towards one another as well. So he breaks down the enmity, the animosity, the warfare. And notice how his reasoning goes. Now we're picking up steam. Now we're moving up to the top. Now we're going to see this great Trinitarian vista from which we stand. "Having abolished in his flesh the enmity that is the law of commandments contained in ordinances, so as to create in Himself one new man from the two, thus making peace."

Now, there's a lot of things he implies here. One is that those who are dead in their trespasses and sins are actually at war with God. And because human beings are at war with God, they're at war with one another. Think about the inverted steps that I gave you before: "Me first, then other people, if there's room for God, great." The Bible says the Lord first, then others, you come last. That's the pattern that the grace of God is bringing to us. And do you see it working out here in this text? There is no lasting peace among human beings unless we first have peace with God. Does that mean non-Christians can't be good neighbors and nice to each other, or non-Christian nations can have peace treaties and get along fair enough? No, but that's not because of the goodness of their hearts. It's because of the goodness of God. The world should be a whole lot worse than it is.

If the Lord left us to be consistent with our own principles. But we know the painful reality, don't we? That if we don't have the Lord first, then others, and putting ourselves last, there will always be war, there will always be strife, there will always be conflict in this world. I believe it was on this text in the 1940s that the late B. Martin Lloyd Jones, reflecting on World War II, basically said, "In the 20th century, everybody thought human beings are getting better. We're evolving. We're moving past all the strife and the wars and the division and all the problems we have, and we are reaching a new era of human greatness." There is what now people call a naive optimism. Everything's going to get better and better and better and better. And what happens? World War I, World War II. And Martin Lloyd Jones, who is preaching in London during the bombing of London during World War II and is hearing all the reports of concentration camps and all these people dying, says, "This is the Lord saying in a loud voice, no Christ, no peace."

Just as human beings think they're reaching their best, God lets them fall on their faces and shows them their worst. There will be no lasting peace between human beings without peace with God in Jesus Christ first, which means that our fundamental message as the church is not politics. It's the Gospel in Jesus Christ alone, who is our peace. He takes those who are enmity with God, who are at enmity with one another, and He makes one new man out of the two. He takes the Jews, He takes the Gentiles, He makes them brothers, sisters, dare I say friends? And he does it to us.

Some of you who I've been talking to, I've mentioned that my last pastoral call before moving to Greenville was in Silicon Valley. I mentioned here that the fact we have a church in Tennessee of all places, which the apostle Paul couldn't have even imagined or heard of, shows the greatness of the Gospel spreading to the ends of the earth, spreading the glory of Christ. And yet when I was in Silicon Valley, it was normal to have a minimum of at least 16 different nations in my church at any one time. People ate different food. They all look different, they dress different. They had different accents, they had different customs. You start picking up cultural stereotypes because they're there and you're living together and you're seeing each other's strengths and weaknesses all the time.

But we were united with a common love for Christ, our Savior. We were united in the spirit of God in one church with a common simple biblical worship, in one confession of faith. And we'd go to church on Sunday morning and my wife and I would just say to each other, "This is a foretaste of heaven. This is a great emblem of what Jesus is doing all over the world." He took the things that alienated us from God, the commandments standing against us, the commandments convicting us of our sins and he nailed them to the cross. He bore them in his own flesh. He bore a penalty we could not bear. And in light of Ephesians 1, he sent His Spirit to be sealed, to be down payment, to change us from the inside-out, not just from the outside-in. And it does something to our relationship to one another. Peace with God now can bring peace with other people.

I'm going to mention patterns in a moment, and I'm almost at the end of this first point and then drive the patterns home. But you know when Paul addresses division in the church here, here he is doing it with unity, isn't he? He's made us both. One, he's brought us all together, people who had nothing in common into one church, one body, one Jesus Christ. But when Paul deals with division in the church, he has two favorite topics. And before I say what they are, I think you know this is Trinity conference. There's got to be in there somewhere, but there's two favorite topics. You got to ask yourself the question, if I wanted to deal with unity in the church, if I wanted to remedy division in the church and I only had an opportunity to pick two topics, and it's all I could talk about, what's going to be most helpful to the Christian Church? You know what Paul's two answers are? The Trinity and baptism.

Oh, that's interesting. Why? Because what he's really dealing with is he's saying, "You're so divided in the church, stop being so full of yourselves, stop being so concerned about your injured rights. Well, I'm right and he's wrong." And "She's the one. It's her problem." People do this in marriage, don't they? You come to marriage counseling as a pastor, and all you hear is what's wrong with the other person. And often I just tell people, "Okay, that's great. What's wrong with you?"

And what Paul is actually doing is he's saying, "Stop being so full of gazing at yourself, and start looking at the glory of the triune God." Here he's moving up to the finished work of Jesus Christ, to push us in this direction. But I'm hinting at some patterns here already in the foundation. Because in Chapter 4 when he addresses the church, he begins with the Trinity. And what he basically does is he says, "Endeavor to keep the unity of the spirit in the bond of peace." Why, Paul? "Because you have one God and Father who is above all through all in you all. You have one Lord, one Jesus Christ," that is. One faith, one baptism, which basically is screaming in your ears that your faith rests in a triune God and not in yourself.

1 Corinthians 12, where the church is really in trouble, he does the same thing. We're so concerned about our gifts: who has the best gifts? Who serves the best? And people miss the import... This is a slight tangent, I admit, but I hope it's worth it. People miss the import of 1 Corinthians 13 about love. 1 Corinthians 13 is Paul's way of saying, "what's wrong with you people? You are so concerned with gifts. What about your graces? You are so concerned with people recognizing you and whether you have the best gifts, whether you're better than someone else, you've missed the whole point."

And his first answer to that problem is the Trinity. And his second answer is baptism. You are unified in a diverse church because that's what your God is like. You are a dim reflection. And your baptism and the Lord's supper points you back to the fact... Well, that's my tangent. Now let's come crashing back to cap this off in Ephesians Chapter 2, what's he doing? He made peace. He brought you together. He took your gaze off yourself. He brought it back to Jesus Christ. He put your relationship to other people in the right light, on the right footing. And then he says in verse 17, if I can jump there, "He came, Jesus came, and preached to you who were a far off into those who were near." We're almost at the top, almost ready to look down and see what we've got before us. But do you notice something outright astonishing that Jesus Christ says here, or Paul says about Him rather? Jesus preached in Ephesus.

Have you read the Bible and you've read the New Testament? When did Jesus preach in Ephesus? It wasn't during his earthly ministry, was it? He died, he rose from the dead, and a church wasn't planted in Ephesus, if my math is right, until 20 to 30 years later, somewhere along there. But now what is Paul actually saying? Jesus preached in your church. Jesus preached among you. And He preached peace. He is peace. He proclaimed Himself and you heard Him. "When did we hear Jesus, Paul?" "When I came and preached the Gospel to you." And he realized that the Bible actually says in Romans 10, every one of you in this room, you need one thing to be saved. You must hear Jesus preaching. "But how do I do that? He's in heaven. I'm on earth. I'm 2000 years after the fact, and I need to hear the voice of Christ Himself in order to be saved?" You hear him in the same way the Ephesians did.

Every Lord's day when you come to this church, for most of you, to hear the preaching of the Gospel, you come to listen to Jesus. Now, I confess as a preacher, this is my consolation, when after preaching a sermon, I just want to go crawl at a hole because I feel like I've just watched a train wreck. I started teaching homiletics at Greenville Seminary years ago, and it just made it worse, because now I can hear the words coming out of my own mouth. I can see the train wreck happening, and people will walk away saying, the Lord blessed me through that sermon. I can argue objectively why it was bad, but there's something beautiful in the fact, isn't there? I'm not saying we should preach bad sermons, but I am saying that Christ is there, that people are listening to the Word of God. We are listening to the Word of God. We are there to hear the true preacher. We are there to hear the voice of Jesus Christ. And what is the result of all of that? This is now the vista for through him, through Jesus Christ, we both Jews, Gentiles, whoever we are, wherever we are, wherever we're from, have access by one spirit to the Father.

Well, does the Trinity matter? It sure does as a foundation, doesn't it? You see what I mean about why Paul can't really say anything without getting back to the Trinity? Because he's thinking of the Father who chose us, the Son who purchased us, the Spirit who lives in our hearts. And now what he's saying to these Christians, by this one spirit who is in all of your hearts, who may be one people in Jesus Christ, through Jesus Christ, your great destination is the Father. "God saved you from the Father through the Son by the Spirit." Chapter 1, praise His name. Now what is the fruit? What is the effect? What is the end result? Why does it matter? Because by the Spirit through the Son, you come to the Father. You see not just the vista from which we're looking at everything else, but this Trinitarian order, pattern, foundation of the Gospel.

I'm not looking at the end of chapter two, but I hope you picked it up in the reading. The same thing is there: a Trinitarian description of the church. Pull into Chapter 3, when Paul prays that we would know the love of Christ that passes knowledge. He prays for the spirit to strengthen us in the inner man, to see Christ's love that passes knowledge. And who's he addressing the prayer to? The Father. The Trinity, again. We've seen this in Ephesians 4. So what I'm doing now is transitioning, shifting from a foundation to a pattern, or patterns, and we're already beginning to see them.

Hopefully what you'll see here is that this Trinitarian pattern, from the Father, through the Son, by the Spirit, is not unique to a text like Ephesians 1 and Ephesians 2 and Ephesians 3 and Ephesians 4. Let me just give you some examples about some general patterns with all three persons, and then some particular emphases on each person as we stop.

General patterns, God creates from the Father through the Son by the spirit. God says, "Let there be light," and there is light through God's Word. The heavens come into being and the spirit of God hovers over the face of the deep. All things came to pass into being through the Word who was with God and who was God. And apart from him, nothing was made that was made. When God redeems us, the Father sends the Son, the Son is conceived by the Holy Spirit in the womb of the Virgin Mary, and he comes to save his people from their sins. And what are we seeing? The Father sends the Son. The Son becomes man. The Spirit perfects the work. Originates with the Father, is effected through the Son, is perfected by the Spirit. Jesus Christ is filled with all the gifts and all the graces of the Holy Spirit without measure.

As the Father sends the spirit to equip [inaudible 00:50:01] his work for us, we receive the spirit by measure. We imitate the gifts and graces of Jesus Christ and share in them partially and only entirely together, as the spirit of Christ makes us like Christ to bring us to the Father. Hebrews 9:14, "Christ offered himself by the eternal spirit to God," which by the way, people will debate there, "Does that mean Jesus's spirit in his heart, or does that mean the Holy Spirit?" I'm not going to go through all the exegeses. I'm just going to say, do you see the pattern? Sometimes, how do you pick one option or the other, because the one fits the whole Bible? Because this is a recurring theme because it keeps happening, and we'd expect it to be odd if it didn't appear in the same way at this point.

And you see the pattern. My greatest hope in looking at Ephesians 2:18 is you have one verse, that "Through him by one spirit, we both have access to God," becomes something resounding in your ears so that you can start seeing this pattern everywhere. If we see and understand the Trinitarian foundation of the Gospel in our lives, we can begin to take the pattern with us.

What about particular persons? I've given you general threefold patterns. What about the pattern of stressing particular persons? Well, everything God does originates with the Father, is effected through the Son, is perfected by the spirit. That means we start knowing what to do, where there might be reference to one person or to two persons. Notice here the spirit perfecting the work of God brings unity in the church, and is by the Spirit we both have access to one God through Jesus Christ.

Have you ever thought about... Sometimes Paul gives these offhand comments that stress one particular person and we might just glance over it and say, "Oh, that's interesting. You've got to make reference to God here and there somewhere. So that's a good thing to do, but why is it there?" One thing that strikes me here, looking at this Trinitarian pattern, pulling into Ephesians 2, is how it works elsewhere. So for instance, Colossians Chapter 1, Paul is thanking God for the church, the grace of God and Him in them just like he does often. And just in passing, "I'm thanking God for your faith, for your hope, but I'm also thanking God for your love in the spirit."

You see what's going on here? He can't think about Christian love without naming the Holy Spirit, because everything originates through the Father, is effected through the Son, is perfected by the Spirit. So when I look at you and I say, "These people who used to be at enmity with one another, who used to be at war, sure love each other. They're doing lots of hospitality. They're praying for one another, they meet each others'... They encourage one another in prayer and Christian fellowship." And when I see a church living like that, what do I think? Paul says, Holy Spirit, because the perfecting work of God is there. It's coming out.

Which by the way, I mentioned I might say something about the Old Testament. Let me just whet your appetite and get you to think through it. The Old Testament reveals the Trinity just like it does everything else: slowly and less clearly at the beginning, and more clearly as it moves on. But when you've read the end of the story, you can say the Spirit drives God's work home. So when I read Psalm 1 for example, and I say, "The man of God meditates on the law of God day and night," and the first thing I think of is, "That's convicting." Maybe I'm not meditating on the law of God day and night. Maybe I'm not doing this as I ought to. Maybe I should find a way to do it. We should think, Holy Spirit. Who's doing that convicting? Who is the one driving the work home? The one who always does it? That is his job, so to speak. That is his mission, to drive you to Jesus Christ.

And if I can just pull through the same example, the same pattern... When we think of a man who shuns the council of the ungodly and who meditates on the law of God day and night, who should we instinctively think of? That's Jesus Christ. Isn't it the most glorious man of all, really, in a sense, the only genuine human being that's ever lived since Adam?

And that's what the Spirit is making me like. He affects the work of God. He puts it on display. But as I hope to gather in the assembly, the congregation of the righteous, I look to my God and Father representing the majesty of the whole Trinity. You see what I'm trying to do here? Here's the pattern. How does Paul think? What is this Trinitarian foundation? Through him, we both have access by one Spirit to the Father because everything God does is from the Father, through the Son, by the Spirit. By the Spirit, through the Son, I come to the Father. And that doesn't mean that I go back to places like Psalm 1 and do something weird with the text. "Well, you see this verse over here is an allegorical representation of the Father and the Son, the Spirit." I'm not doing that, am I?

I'm saying since I'm a Christian, since I see what Paul sees in Ephesians 2, I can never be the same ever again. I just can't read the book the same way. I have to say, how would a Christian who has access to the Father through one Spirit with other Christians, read Psalm 1? What do I do with the convicting rebukes of God throughout the entirety of the scriptures? I embrace the work of the Spirit who drives me to Jesus for the forgiveness of those sins, but who also paints an image of Jesus in my heart as I call God, my God, my Father.

You see what I mean by patterns? Here is this foundation. I've used Ephesians 2 to illustrate it, to lift us up to the heights, to reach this point of coming to God by one Spirit, through Jesus Christ, to the Father, so that we are unalterably changed in everything we do, how we parent, how we live, how we conduct ourselves and our marriages. And can you imagine what marriage would be like, just universally, if people just learn one simple thing, chain of things? God first, then your spouse, and you're last, if you have time for you at all? It's revolutionary.

The reason for it is the Gospel is Trinitarian, and we are drawn into intimate fellowship with God through His Son, by His Spirit. We have a foundation, we have a pattern. Well, I intended to stop earlier than this and to see if you had questions, even though we do a Q&A tomorrow and I failed miserably. But I'm going to close this in prayer anyway, and we can enjoy fellowship together at the lunch and throughout the afternoon. And I'll start with a Q&A tomorrow, and then we'll have two messages for both services. Let's pray.

Father in heaven, we do bless You and praise Your name for these glorious truths you've given us in Your Word. Our hearts stand in awe of You, and our affections are raised to heaven, and we bless You for answering our prayers. Enable us to live godly lives in Christ Jesus. Enable us to proclaim the praises of Your glorious grace and bless our fellowship with one another the remainder of this day as we prepare for the Lord's day. We ask it in Jesus' name for His sake. Amen.