If you don’t know E. Stanley Jones, I hope you will get to know him. He is one of the great saints of God in the 20th Century—a marvelous, marvelous Christian man. Here is what he said, “Obviously, God must guide us in a way that will develop spontaneity in us. The development of character rather than direction in this, that, and the other matter must be the primary purpose of the Father. He will guide us, but he won’t override us. That fact should make us use caution with the method of sitting down with a pencil and a blank sheet of paper to write down the instructions dictated by God for the day. Suppose a parent would dictate to the child minutely everything he is to do during the day. The child would be stunted under that regime. The parent must guide in such a manner and to the degree that autonomous character capable of making right decisions for itself is produced. God does the same.” [1:20]
What we’ve been talking about now is precisely how God does that and one of the things that we’ve emphasized is the distance that God leaves in between him and between us, but we wanted to emphasize at the same time the nearness of God. So, the distance is a matter of how he leaves us room to decide, to feel, to experience the consequences of events and to learn how to look to God in everything without expecting to be told what to do. That is in the context of his constant teaching and our constant speaking because it’s not all about what we are to do. It’s about, of course, how things are and that’s a major part of our relationship to him.
Now today, I am going to talk about where it all begins and that is in the Trinity. The Trinity is the model of life with God. I want to read you a few words from Jesus’ great high priestly prayer in John, chapter 17. After telling in the discussion, if you wish, with his Father, after saying, “This is eternal life that they may know Thee, the only true God and Jesus Christ whom thou hast sent.” And I hope you may have thought about penciling in there, “this is eternal living” to make it active as it is supposed to be. Now Jesus says, “I have glorified you on the earth having accomplished the work which you have given me to do. Now, glorify Thou me together with Thyself with the glory which I had with you before the world was.” I would like you to think with me about that now.
What was the glory that Jesus had with the Father?—before the world was? It is so typical of people to ask, “What was God doing before he created the world?—as if somehow before the world was, there wasn’t anything to do. We need to really address that. There was plenty to do. Sometimes I reply to questions about that by saying, “Well, they were enjoying themselves.” But what was that? That was their fellowship with one another. They were enjoying one another in the dimensions of personal reality that makes the creative universe look like a pinpoint. The greatness of the persons that make up the Trinity is the ultimate and eternal reality. It is the Kingdom of God before there was an earth. It is a matter of the persons that make up the Trinity being in love with one another and adoring one another. I have been blessed with one granddaughter and she is a granddaughter. I cannot exhaust my joy and admiration in that child. Now, I can hardly say it but she’s not very big—you know, but it helps us realize in a small way what is truly of value. The only thing of great value in the universe is the experiences of a person—the experiences of a person. We see that in many ways; that’s why you treasure experiences. Some of you are going to go up to Estes Park. Why are you going to do that? To have experiences, okay? Now, persons are made up of experiences; that’s what people are made of. They are not made of material of any kind. They are made up of spiritual substance. Now, then if you go up to Estes Park, you will expand your substance and a bunch of you will want to take pictures. Why do you want pictures? Because they help you with your experiences, right? Now, experiences are what make up persons and persons are the only things of value in the universe. I just paused to let you think about that. Experiences are not physical realities; they are spiritual realities. That’s where you meet God is in your experiences. The Trinity consists of inexhaustible experiences and it’s very difficult to think well about this; partly, because we don’t try, but if you will imagine some person as you may have felt at some moment when you were in love with someone that there was no plumbing the depths of that other person—that there were simply endless stretches of possible experiences that they might have. Then, of course, you would share those experiences. Intimacy is a matter of shared experiences. That’s what intimacy is. To be intimate with God is to share his experiences and conversation that we have been talking about is the first level of shared experience. It doesn’t have to be verbalized in the way we might think of it. Ordinarily, if you watch a mother with her child, you see them sharing an experience and you watch the little child coming from the stage where it can hardly have an experience and then it begins to respond, and the richness of that relationship continues to grow as the possibilities of their experiences expand. So, the glory that Jesus had with the Father before the creation of the world. It was this marvelous company of persons sharing one another and the exploration, the thoughts, the feelings; perhaps, dimensions of experience that we can’t even identify or imagine. [10:13]
Now then, verse 22; well, let’s start with 21, “That they all may be one even as though Father art in me and I in Thee that they also may be in us; that the world may believe that Thou didst send me.” That’s the future. That’s where we are headed, and Jesus has prayed for us who are his apprentices in Kingdom living that we should know one another with the kind of intimacy that is present between him and his Father. Are you ready for that? Now, you see, for the most part, we are not about to go there because we are too scared. We know that intimacy makes us vulnerable and as a consequence—as we say: don’t we say, “we keep our distance.” [11:10] Isn’t that an interesting phrase? “We keep our distance.” We play our cards close to our chest. We know somehow that we better do that because it is not safe to do otherwise. Well, what might the fellowship of apprentices be other than progressively moving in the company of Jesus and the Trinity?—more and more into the open where we are able to trust one another.
If you have never Dietrich Bonheoffer’s book, Life Together, I encourage you to read it. Bonheoffer was an incredibly gifted—I mean it in the spiritual sense—gifted man who came to understand what it was like for people to come together in Christ, and it is not safe to come together except in Christ because you have these conflicting Kingdoms that are not subordinated to God and the result of that is alienation and that’s the condition of human beings. All of the evils that you see in human life come from alienation that In turn comes from thinking wrongly about God. [12:58] And it’s only as you come to know the complete safety that you have in the Kingdom of God that you can begin to move towards other people in the kind of shared life that is found in the Trinity. It’s wonderful to think about the Trinity and brings some of these old doctrines to life. For example, we say there is no subordination in the Trinity. Well, guess what? There is no subordination in those who are living in the Trinity. See, many people confuse one-ness with identity and mess up the Trinity. That’s how you get groups, like down in Texas; there’s a “Jesus Only” group and because they don’t know the difference between oneness and identity, they are pushed by their mis-guided reasoning into thinking that Jesus is the Trinity—that Jesus is the Father—that Jesus is the Spirit—because they cannot distinguish unity and oneness from identity. Now, there’s no subordination in the Trinity. Why? Not because they are identical but because the members of the Trinity will not put up with it. That’s why there is no subordination in the Trinity because they love one another. Think the thought that they admire one another. And so, they are not worried about who’s ahead or who’s behind and there is no alienation in the Trinity. Actually, because there is no alienation, they don’t even have a conversation; they have a communion, and they have union. Conversation is where you start to overcome alienation and if there is only alienation, there is no conversation because there is no “con” in the “versation.” You watch people get in a mess in a family or a community and they don’t converse. Why not? There is no “con” so there is just verse. Right? We have trouble with marriage and so on and someone hears the phrase, “the two shall become one” and they say, “Which one?” Right? The answer is, “Neither one.” So, it’s so important for us to go back to what Jesus is praying for and when we see the beauty of it, then we can understand what he is saying when he says, verse 22, “The glory which thou hast given me I have given to them that they may be one just as we are one.” How’s that possible? Well, it’s possible because of the Trinity which is one and which invites us into its fellowship. The extension of the Trinity to human beings who have become disciples of Christ and been baptized in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Now, you probably know that when the Bible talks about the name, they are talking about the reality so that great statement of Jesus, “Make disciples of all nations baptizing them in the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit is not saying, “As you get ‘em wet in one way or another, say over them in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. Rather it is saying, “Pull the disciples into communitarian, Trinitarian Fellowship and they began to get a taste of real life is like. The union of his people is such that—now notice—“I, in them, Thou in me that they may be perfected in unity that the world may know that you sent me and did love them even as you loved me.” The next verse, “In order that they may behold my glory”—you see that glorious community stands for in earth and when people see it, there is no argument left. You see, that’s the true way to present Christ in embodied in his people.
I am often asked by people who find out that I am what I am—students and others—why are you a follower of Christ? And the answer is another question; Who else did you have in mind? [18:53] Where is the competition? There is none. So, the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit is the powerful reality of the Trinity and that gives us a chance to think more about what it is for people to be “one”—to be united. When do you have people who are united? How do we understand that? And together is not a simple notion. Let’s hold up before us the case of Paul when he says in Gal. 2:20, “I am crucified with Christ, nevertheless not I, but Christ lives in me.” Well, let’s start with the crucified bit, okay? Let’s say that Jesus was not crucified so that we would not have to be crucified but he was crucified so that we could be crucified with him. He invites us to join him on the cross and our union with him goes through that stage of being crucified. Now, what does that mean? Well, crucifixion means the end of a life. It means that what I am living for on my own no longer governs my existence. I am sharing the death of Christ so when he talks about taking up our cross ad following him, we saw the other day in Calvin’s little booklet about “cross bearing,” that’s the first step that we come to as we carry on our conversation with God. When you are crucified, you are not dead yet. You have a ways to go. But you have reached a point of finality. Now, you are sharing that as you and Christ—I and Christ, carry on our conversation—the conversation we live in is no longer about our old life in our own Kingdom; it’s now about God’s Kingdom and what he is doing. That now takes us all the way down to the ordinary affairs of ordinary life. This is where the Kingdom takes hold. The Kingdom is not in church, though I hope it is there but is not limited to that. In fact, that is not its primary place of action. The Kingdom of God is first of all the Trinity itself. If you hear someone saying, as is often said—especially in scholarly circles—that “Jesus brought the Kingdom of God to earth,” you should say to them, “He is a little late.” The Kingdom of God is from everlasting to everlasting. It takes the form of spiritual energy and life that we also call the “logos.” The logos is the organizing power of everything in the physical universe. That’s where the Kingdom of God is at work. Now, how do I know that, Kingdom? It is by finding it where I am and most of my time, I am at work. That’s true of everyone. Did you ever ask the question, ”Why do we have to spend so much time at work?” Well, that’s because of Genesis 1:26. But, then of course we were talking at lunch; our country is cursed with job hatred. I hate this job. Right? Well, of course, there are difficulties, and we could talk at length about them but the first stage in getting over that is to acknowledge the presence of God in your work. Now, there are many, many ways of presenting that in the scripture but when you find a vital movement of God in human history, you will find him in the work of ordinary human beings—not in special meetings. There may be special meetings—call them revivals or call them whatever you want to call them where people are enabled to see their life in a different way and teaching is important and the darkness and futility of lives is a function of ignorance. You are ignorant of God and so we act in our ignorance in futile ways and if we ever have a little glimmer of something good, thank God for whatever is good. That’s because the kingdom is breaking through and identification with that in our work is crucial to our entering the life of communion and union that lies beyond conversation. I hope I can convey this, but communion arises at a point where conversation can now stop and people will still be together and union, I think is best understood as action together where there isn’t even a though that that is what is happening. It just takes over. Perhaps all that is involved here is joy in what is being done. Joy is of course one of the marks of Jesus. We talked a little bit about that in other sessions and it characterizes the times that are hard even for the joy that was set before him, Jesus endured the cross despise the shame. What has he got now? Joy. [26:48] Where is that joy? Well, it is with the Glory that he had with the Father before the foundation of the world. It is the same. See, joy characterizes the Trinity, and that joy is largely the joy of union with others. Now, if you don’t have a kind of life in you that is resurrection life, Trinitarian life—then it is not possible to share in that life. There was a survey done recently where it was discovered that over 50% of people who own a dog consider it to be a member of the family. Now, you have to think a little bit about that. That might be good news for the dog but in all seriousness, you wonder about where it leaves the rest of the members of the family, don’t you? I can get in a fight over this because so many people are used to talking this way, but the dog can’t really share the life of a human being. They can be a part of it, but they can’t share it. They can’t enjoy a chess game. They can look at it, but they can’t understand it. The life that is in a kitten or a cat is a certain kind of life. Kittens and cats are very clever, and I think they are very smart and one of the things that they do is they fool people, but not really—they can’t be a friend. So, that’s where it’s so important to understand this matter of sharing a kind of life and now then comes the Gospel and comes the Spirit into those who are sharing a human life? Yes, that’s good but from the point of view of God and the life we are intended to have, we are dead in trespasses and sin just like the kitten is dead to a chess game. It’s a different form of life. So, it’s very important for us to understand that intimacy with God and life at a Trinitarian level comes from a kind of understanding and shared feeling and shared action and low and behold, we are right back at Genesis 1:26. We are given responsibilities to care for what is good and to produce it under God—sharing his life. Doing what is good, trusting Him, often putting ourselves in a position where what we might think should happen does not happen even to the point of martyrdom. It is interesting to hear people in this country talk about the possibility that the government would turn against Christians. They might even start taking their life. Well, or course, that’s standard fair for Christians, isn’t it? What greater thing could happen to you that you would be permitted to die for Jesus Christ? Actually, a lot of people could do that who can’t live for him. Right? On my campus and in most university campuses, there are actually a lot of Christians in the faculty, but they don’t know how to be Christians in that context. If you were to say, we are going to kill all the Christians—come to the center of the campus, they would come. They would know how to die but they don’t know how to live. [That’s right.] They haven’t been taught and after all, you are going to die anyway unless something more glorious—like that twinkle of the eye event—you know, unless that happens before you die. It isn’t as if you weren’t martyred, you’d just live forever, and actually there are worst ways to die. Just trying to make the point that if we live in this life, this Trinitarian life that is literally out of this world; if we live in that life, things may happen that we don’t want to happen, we don’t like, we don’t enjoy but that life is greater than anything that can happen to us in this world and it is not possible to take that away because it’s rooted in the Trinity. And the Trinity is forever. [33:00]
Now, as we learn that life, I wanted to make sure and take you to Revelation 22:5 and have you to look at it. I have mentioned it 2-3 times already, but this is where we are headed. You need to really take this in because I meet so many Christians who have grown older and they begin acting as if their life is at an end. It has hardly begun. If they don’t understand who they are and they don’t understand what kind of world they are in, then they’ll grow old and they’ll think this is the end and someone will retire them and give them a watch and just let them disappear into the sunset and they think that‘s it. No, no. One of the greatest ministries that is left undone in our culture by the church is ministry to older people in terms of the Kingdom of God and teaching them that it doesn’t matter if they are old, they are still in the Kingdom of God and in the Kingdom of God, they are active, and their life has hardly begun. Look at this verse—verse 5: “There shall no longer be any night, and they shall not have the need of the light of a lamp nor the light of the sun because the Lord God shall illumine them.” That’s what our lives are about and that is forever. [35:01]
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Well, you have some notes there. Just summarizing in the purpose of Gods redemptive work, conversation advances into communion and communion into union when the progression is complete, we say, “Truly, it is no longer I who live but Christ who lives in me.” And the mystery of Paul’s statement, which is coming out of his own experience with all of this, is expressed in that language. Also, “for me to live is Christ.” That, over and over, comes out of Paul.
Well, I wish I had time to carry on further with that. I’ll tell you. Let me just give you one more quotation from a man named Sam Shumaker, a wonderful Christian man of past generations who was one of the essential instruments in the creation of Alcoholics Anonymous and a great Christian teacher. Here’s what he said about how we come together with Christ, “Sometimes comes into our own energies and capacities and expands them. We are laid hold of by something greater than ourselves. We can face things, create things, accomplish things that in our own strength would have been impossible. The Holy Spirit seems to mix and mingle his powers with our own so that what happens is both heightening our own power and a gift to us from outside. This is so real and definite as attaching an appliance to an electric outlet, though of course, such a mechanical analogy is not altogether satisfactory but still you get the idea of an energy which is not of the machine or whatever—it doesn’t come from the machine, it comes from the outside—but when it seizes the machine, you can’t distinguish the machine from the action and the power that goes with it.
Alright, I must quit.