A Trinity-Sunday Sermon

“For through Him we both have access by one Spirit unto the Father.” — EPH. ii. 18.

TO-DAY is Trinity-Sunday. That truth from which our church takes its name; that truth which is the centre and circumference of our faith, this one day is specially set apart for its commemoration, and we are to talk of it with one another. But nothing could be worse for us than to think that the truth of the Trinity was one that could be separated from all others and laid aside by itself, to be specially taken up and discussed upon a given day. Why, we are preaching on the Trinity always. I should count any Sunday’s work unfitly done in which the Trinity was not the burden of our preaching. For when we preach the Fatherhood of God we preach His divinity; when we point to Christ the perfect Saviour, it is a Di vine Redeemer that we declare; and when we plead with men to hear the voice and yield to the persuasions of the Holy Spirit, the Comforter into whose comfort we invite them is Divine. The divinity of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, this is our Gospel. By this Gospel we look for sal vation. It is a Gospel to be used, to be believed in, and to be lived by; not merely to be kept and admired and discussed and explained. But, as a telescope which is valued for its precious uses may be sometimes taken down and its parts examined, its beautiful construction analyzed, so the truth of the Trinity may sometimes be made the subject of a special lecture. Only we are always to remember that the truth is given to us, not to be lectured on, but to be lived by; as the telescope is precious be cause it can sweep the sky and separate the star-dust into recognizable worlds; and not because its parts are beautifully adjusted and its whole construction is a miracle of mechanism. There is always a tendency to value doctrines for their symmetry and interior consistency, instead of for their uses; as if we built a new steam-engine and kept it under a glass-house, instead of setting it upon the road. Its efficiency upon the road is the only true test of whether it is really worthy of the homage that we would pay it in its crystal shrine. Let us remember this always as we talk and think about the doctrine of the Trinity.

The doctrine of the Trinity is the description of what we know of God. We have no right to say that it is the description of God; for what there may be in Deity of which we have no knowledge, how can we tell? We are only sure that the divine life is infinitely greater than our humanity can comprehend; and we are sure, too, that not even a revelation in the most perfect form, through the most perfect medium conceivable, could make known to the human intelligence anything in God save that which has relationship to human life. Man may reveal himself to the brutes, and the revelation may be clear and correct so far as it can go, but it must have its limit. Only that part of man can cross the line and show itself to the perception of that lower world which finds in b.rutedom some point which it can touch. Our strength may reveal itself to their fear; our kindness to their power of love; some part of our wisdom, even, to their dim capacity of education; but all the while there is a vast manhood of intellect, of taste, of spirituality, of which they never know. And so I am sure that the divine nature is three persons, but one God; but how much more than that I cannot know. That deep law which runs through all life, by which the higher any nature is, the more manifold and simple at once, the more full of complexity and unity at once, it grows, is easily accepted as applicable to the highest of all natures, — God. In the manifoldness of His being these three personal existences, Creator, Redeemer, Sanctifier, easily make themselves known to the human life. I tell the story of them, and that is my doctrine of the Trinity. But let me not say that that is all. To other worlds of other needs, and so of other understandings (for our needs are always the avenues for our intelligence), other sides of the personal force of the divine life must have issued. It is not for us to catalogue and inventory Deity; only in humble gratitude and reverence to bear our witness of the manifestation of God to us for our salvation. And so our doctrine of the Trinity is our account of what we know of God.

This idea seems to be borne out by our text. Hear it again: “Through Christ Jesus we all have access by one Spirit unto the Father.” St. Paul is not describing God. He is recounting the story that he loves to tell, — the story of man’s salvation. That story is always breaking from his eager lips. In his encouragements and his rebukes, in his consolations and his arguments, the history of man’s salvation to God, through Jesus, by the Spirit, is the burden of the whole. He is telling it always. That is what he lives for. He is telling it here. He does not define God. With no confident boldness does his sight try to sweep around the infinite circle of Deity and include it all; but only the God of man, the God of the human salvation, whom he knows with his whole heart, Him he announces with his ardent lips. This is the first thing we notice, — that Paul describes only the God whom man can know.

And then the next thing we notice is the completeness with which this God, this part of God, is apprehended and depicted. See what he says. He is describing man’s salvation. It is one single thing, — the saving of a man. Here is the sinner in his sinfulness; there is the saint in his glory. It is the same man still, and the whole act, from the beginning to the end, — the act that took him in his sinfulness and lifted him thence, and set him in his glory, is one single act. It stands a unit among the works of God’s omnipotence. It is one throb of the all-loving heart; it is one movement of the Almighty arm. And yet this simple act, salvation, is clearly distinguished into its parts. See how clearly St. Paul discriminates them. Every act is made up of a purpose, a method, and a power. And so the purpose and the method and the power are here. What is the purpose or the end? “To the Father we all have access.” What is the method? “Through Christ Jesus.” What is the power? “By the Spirit.” Through. Christ Jesus we all have access, by one Spirit, unto the Father. In this one total act, the end, the method, and the power are distinguishable. Each stands out separate and clear. And what is more, each is distinctly personal. A personal name is given to the designation of each element. This salvation, which is all the work of God, first, last, and midmost, has its divine personalities distinct for its end and its method and its power. It is a salvation to the Father, through the Son, and by the Spirit. The salvation is all one; yet in it method, end, and poler are recognizable. It is a three in one.

Let us look into this a little more deeply. The perfection of any act consists in the elevation and the harmony of these three elements; its end, its method, and its power. Take, for instance, the act of a boy’s education. It may extend over twenty years, but it is capable of being considered as one act still from the time it begins in the nursery to the time it culminates in his profession. Now the perfection of that education will depend upon the perfection of its end, its method, and its power, and upon their being harmonious with and suitable to one another; each must be worthy of the rest. For instance, if the end be low, if no high ideal of scholarship and character is set up at the first, and kept clear all along, you may give him the best books and the best teachers, you may inspire him with the most eager enthusiasm; but you turn out only a halftaught scholar, a half-made man, as the result. The end was not worthy of the method and the power. Or, again, you set the highest standard up to be aimed at, and you put the purest ambitions into the boy’s nature; but you furnish only poor means, poor schools, poor teachers, and once more the education is imperfect. The, method is not worthy of the end and the power. Or, again, you make the ideal perfect, and you provide all the appliances of study at their very best; but you put only some low or mercenary impulse into the scholar’s heart, perhaps a mere servile submission to your authority, perhaps only a selfish idea of the money he is going to get out of his learning, and again a most imperfect product comes. This time the power has been unworthy of the method and the end. The ideal is the end to which, the school training is the method through which, the ambition is the power by which, the act of education is completed. Only when these three are one, only when each is perfect and so worthy of the others, only when in their perfect unity they entirely cooperate, while in their essential diversity they minister to one another, — only then, when the end is sacred, and the means are sacred, and the power is sacred, does the sacred result go forth into the world, and the boy’s education is complete.

This is an illustration. Instead of a boy’s education, put a man’s salvation. That is the perfect education, of which all others are but types. And there we look for and we find the same harmony of end, method, and power. Make either unworthy of the others and the salvation is not complete. If it be not to the Father, the Son’s redemption is in vain. If it be not through the Son, the Father waits and the Spirit moves for naught. If it be not by the Spirit, the Father’s heart stands cpen and the method of grace is perfect, but the unmoved soul stands inactive and unsaved. The Scripture revelation comes to tell us that end, method, and power, all are perfect, and each must thus be worthy of the rest. The three are one. Each is eternal, and yet as the old creed cries, “There are not three Eternals, but One Eternal.” Each is God, and yet “there are not three Gods, but one God,” — not three salvations, but one salvation, with its equal end and method and power, and so by the Trinity in Unity the soul is saved.

And now, again, let* us look at this more carefully in its several parts. The end of the human salvation is “access to the Father.” That is the first truth of our religion — that the source of all is meant to be the end of all, that as we all came forth from a divine Creator, so it is into divinity that we are to return and to find our final rest and satisfaction, not in ourselves, nor in one another, but in the omnipotence, the omniscience, the perfectness, and the love of God. Now we are very apt to take it for granted, that however we may differ in our definitions and our belief of the deity of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, we are all at one, there can be and there is no hesitation, about the deity of the Father. God is di vine. God is God. And no doubt we do all assent in words to such a belief; but when we think what we mean by that word God; when we remember what we mean by “Father,” namely, the first source and the final satisfaction of a dependent nature; and then when we look around and see such multitudes of people living as if there were no higher source for their being than accident, and no higher satisfaction for their being than selfishness, do we not feel that there is need of a continual and most earnest preaching by word and act, from every pulpit of influence to which we can mount, of the divinity of the Father. Why, take a man who is utterly absorbed in the business of this world. How eager he is; his hands are knocking at every door; his voice is crying out for admittance into every secret place and treasure-house; he is all earnestness and restlessness. He is trying to come to something, trying to get access, and to what? To the best and richest of that earthly structure from which his life seems to himself to have issued. Counting himself the child of this world, he is giving himself up with a filial devotion to his father. He is the product in his tastes and his capacities of this social and commercial machinery which seems to be the mill out of which men’s characters are turned. It is the society and the business of the world that have made him what he is, and so he gives up all that he is to the society or the business that created him. The source of life and the satisfaction of life — think how many of us look for neither of them any farther back or any farther on than this routine in which we live. We devote ourselves to it; we deck it with all the graces we can bestow upon it, because there is no higher fatherhood present to our thoughts, because we know no loftier God. Now to such a man what is the first revelation that you want to make. Is it not the divinity of the Father. Remember that wonderful passage in the story of the Passover, where Jesus, with His agony before Him, is just rising to work His homely parable of washing the disciples’ feet. And the description of the act is this: “Jesus knowing that He was come from God and went to God, riseth from supper and laid aside His garments, and took a towel and girded Himself.” That was the key to all His life; the spring of every action. “Knowing that he came from God and went to God,” knowing, that is, that God was His Father, the source and the satisfaction of His life. And that same knowledge which Christ had, you would want your friend to have. Does it seem as if no man could escape it? Does it seem as if the Divine Fatherhood were the patent fact of all creation? As if Nature uttered it in all her voices, forever telling us how we came out from the centre of all life by the beauty and the majesty and the blessing with which she bears witness of Him to our hearts? Does it seem as if those hearts themselves, like lost children, claimed their own fathe* and would not be satisfied with any other? These voices are not fancies. They

are real. But the clear fact remains that multitudes of men do go through life and only in the dimmest tones hear either nature or their own hearts claiming God. To such the truth must be uttered from some teaching of experience or doctrine. They must be told; we must tell them, by any influence that we can bring to bear upon them, that the true end of their life is divine. Let us not think that it is only the divine Son and the divine Comforter that we have to preach. With these men all about us realizing St. Paul’s description, “Whose end is destruction, whose God is their belly,” surely we need to preach the divinity of the Father; the divinity of the end of life. The divinity of the Father needs assertion first of all. Let men once feel it, and then nature and their own hearts will come in with their sweet and solemn confirmations of it. But nature and the human heart do not teach it of them selves. The truest teaching of it must come from souls that are always going in and out before the divine Fatherhood themselves. By the sight of such souls others must come to seek the satisfaction that comes only from a divine end of life, — must come to crave access to the Father. So we believe and so we tempt other men to believe in God the Father.

2. This is the divinity of the end. We come from

God and we go to God. And now pass to the divinity of the method. “Through Jesus Christ.” Man is separated from God. That fact, testified to by broken associations, by alienated affections, by conflicting wills, stands written in the whole history of our race. And equally clear is it to him who reads the Gospels and enters into sympathy with their wonderful Person, that in Him, in Jesus of Nazareth, appeared the Mediator by whom was to be the Atonement. His was the life and nature which, standing between the Godhood and the manhood, was to bridge the gulf and make the firm bright road, over which blessing and prayer might pass and repass with confident golden feet forever. And then the question is, — and when we ask it thus it becomes so much more than a dry problem of theology; it is a question for live anxious men to ask with faces full of eagerness, — out of which nature came that Mediator? Out of which side of the chasm sprang the bridge leaping forth towards the other? Evidently on both sides that bridge is bedded deep and clings with a tenacity which shows how it belongs there. He is both human and di vine. But from which side did the bridge spring? Who moved toward the reconciliation? Was it some towering man who, growing beyond his brothers, overlooked the battlements of heaven, and saw the place in the divine heart where man belonged, and then came back and bade his brethren follow him, and led them on with him into the home of a father who, reluctant or forgetful, sat without effort till his children found their way to him? It is the most precious part of our belief that it was with God that the activity began. It is the very soul of the Gospel, as I read it, that the Father’s heart, sitting above us in His holiness, yearned for us as we lay down here in our sin. And when there was no man to make an intercession, He sent His Son to tell us of His love, to liv* with us, to die for us, to lay His life like a strong bridge out from the divine side of existence, over which w« might walk, fearfully but safely, back into the divinity tvhere we belonged. Through Him we have access to the Father. As the end was divine so the method is di vine. As it is to God that we come, so it is God who brings us there. I can think nothing else without dishonoring the tireless, quenchless, love of God.

Analogies, I know, are very imperfect and often very deceptive, when they try to illustrate the highest things. But is it not as if a great strong nation, too strong to be jealous, strong enough to magnanimously pity and for give, had to deal with a colony of rebels whom it really desired to win back again to itself? They are of its own stock, but they have lost their allegiance and are suffering the sorrows and privations of being cut off from their fatherland and living in rebellion. That fatherland might send its embassy to tempt them home; and, if it did, whom would it choose to send? Would it not take of itself its messenger? The embassy that is sent is of the country that sends it. That is its value, that is its influence. The fatherland would choose its choicest son, taking him from nearest to its heart, and say, Go and show them what I am, how loving and how ready to for give, for you are I and you can show them. Such was the mission of the Messiah. Do you not remember Hia own parable? One day He told His hearers in the old temple how the master of the vineyard sent out his servants one after another to his rebellious husbandmen, but last of all he sent unto them his son. What was the difference? It was Himself that He sent then. The ambassador was of the very land that sent Him, “God of God, Light of Light, very God of very God, begotten, not made, being of one substance with the Father.” How full the words of the old creed* are of rich meaning. How the heat of the hot controversy in which they were born has passed out of them, and they are deep and clear and cool as wells that draw their water of refreshment from the unheated centre of the eternal rock. My friend says God sends Christ into the world and therefore Christ is not God. I cannot see it so. It seems to me just other wise. God sends Christ just because Christ is God. He sends Himself. His sending is a coming. The ambassador, the army is of the very most precious substance of the country that dispatches it. This is the meaning of that constant title of our Master. He is the Son of God. Think of it. Does not “Son” mean just this which the church’s faith, with the best words that it could find, has labored to express, “Two persons and one substance.” That is the Father and the Child. Separate personality but one nature. Unity and distinctness both, but the unity as true a fact as the distinctness. Nay, the unity the fact which made the essence of His mission, the fact which made Him the true, fit, only perfect messenger of God and Saviour of the world.

This is the glory of the Incarnation. That embassy out of the fatherland comes to the rebel colony and lives there. It enters into the rude huts which the degenerate colonists have built, and makes itself a home in them. It is a stranger there, and yet the men of whom it is composed find in these half-savage huts memories of the common home from which these colonists as well as they came forth at first. They are not wholly strangers. Some thing about the shape of the huts reminds them of the palaces at home, and here and there an iron instrument with blunted edge, or a household utensil put to some unseemly use, makes them rejaernber that these rebels they have come to reconcile are originally brethren of theirs. And so the Mediator came to us, and every day of all the life in Palestine bore witness both to the strangeness and to the familiarness with which He lived among us. The evonts and habits of the Saviour’s career on earth seem like the huts of savagedom inhabited by the children of civilization. And so it is with the presence of Christ always, His unseen presence in the institutions of the world and in the hearts of men. He is always glorifying them and shaming them at once, showing at once their natural capacity and their degenerate condition. It does seem to me that the great beauty of the old belief in the divinity of Christ is the faith in the capacity of manhood which it implies. It believes that man is of so godlike a nature that he can hold God, that God can be incarnated in him. Our sense of man’s capacity is low. We do not think that God could dwell in the temple of a life like ours. But was not that just what He came to teach us that He could do? He teaches it to us by the rich experience of His Spirit dwelling in our spirits, but before that He taught it to us by the Word made flesh. A brute race could have seen no incarnation. God could care for them and feed them, but He could not come into them, live in them. But man is better. “Because we are sons, God has sent the spirit of His Son into our hearts.” Because we are sons, His Son Himself could take our nature upon Him. The more truly we believe in the Incarnate Deity, the more devoutly we must be lieve in the essential glory of humanity, the more earnestly we must struggle to keep the purity and integrity and largeness of our own human life, and to help our brethren to keep theirs. It is because the divine can dwell in us that we may have access to divinity. We and they must, through the divine method, come to the divine end where we belong, through God the Son to God the Father.

3. And now turn to the point that still remains. We have spoken of the end and of the method; but no true act is perfect unless the power by which it works is worthy of the method through which and the end to which it proceeds. The power of the act of man’s salvation is the Holy Spirit. “Through Christ Jesus we all have access by one Spirit unto the Father.” What do we mean by the Holy Spirit being the power of salvation? I think we are often deluded and misled by carrying out too far some of the figurative forms in which the Bible and the religious experience of men express the saving of the soul. For instance, salvation is described as the lifting of the soul out of a pit and putting it upon a pinnacle, or on a safe high platform of grace. The figure is strong and clear. Nothing can overstate the utter dependence of the soul on God for its deliverance; but if we let the figure leave in our minds an impression of the human soul as a dead, passive thing, to be lifted from one place to the other like a torpid log that makes no effort of its own either for cooperation or resistance, then the figure has misled us. The soul is a live thing. Everything that is done with it must be done in and through its own essential life. If a soul is saved, it must be by the salvation, the sanctification of its essential life; if a soul is lost, it must be by perdition of its life, by the degradation of its affections and desires and hopes. Let there be nothing merely mechanical in the conception of the way God treats these souls of ours. He works upon them in the vitality of thought, passion, and will that He put into them. And so when a soul comes to the Father through the Saviour, its whole essential vitality moves in the act. With those affections with which it has loved the world, it loves its Lord. With that same will with which it chose iniquity, it chooses now holiness and heaven. The whole capacity of life was there. Now the power of Life has entered in and is using it. And just this sometimes hides from us the essentially divine character of the new spiritual life. It seems as if the Christian had simply chosen to love God instead of loving his business; but as he goes on and finds what this new love of God really means, he finds what it is that has happened. He understands what is the nature cf the change, though its infiniteness enlarges to Him every day. The capacities of faith and love and holiness have been taken possession of and filled out to their completeness by the very Spirit of holiness and love and faith which they were made to hold, but which is greater than themselves. The divine power has taken possession of the soul’s capacities, and, although it may seem at first as if the soul itself had originated this new movement to God through Christ, just as it may seem to the child at first as if his body did all these spiritual acts which the spirit does within it, yet, by and by, the conviction clears itself, and grows clearer and clearer constantly, that it is not the soul’s simple ability to be religious that has made it religious; but that God by direct visitation has occupied that ability and is drawing the soul to Himself; just as the child comes to distinguish between the body’s mere ability to answer the mind’s requirements, and the mind itself which uses the body as the servant of its needs.

When this experience is reached, then see what Godhood the soul has come to recognize in the world. First, there is the Creative Deity from which it sprang, and to which it is struggling to return — the divine End, God the Father. Then there is the Incarnate Deity, which makes that return possible by the exhibition of God’s love, — the divine method, God the Son; and then there is this Infused Deity, this divine energy in the soul itself, taking its capacities and setting them homeward to the Father — the divine Power of Salvation, God the Holy Spirit. To the Father, through the Son, by the Spirit. If we recur a moment to the figure which we used a while ago; God is the divine Fatherland of the human soul; Christ is like the embassy, part and parcel of that Fatherland, which comes out to win it back from its rebellion; and the Holy Spirit is the Fatherland wakened in the rebellious colony’s own soul. He is the newly-living loyalty. When the colony comes back, the power that brings it is the Fatherland in it seeking its own. So when the soul comes back to God, it is God in the soul that brings it. So we believe in the divine power, one with the divine method and the divine end, in God the Spirit one with the Father and the Son.

This appears to me the truth of the Deity as it relates to us. I say again, “as it relates to us.” What it may be in itself; how Father, Son, and Spirit meet in the perfect Godbood; what infini’.e truth more there may, there must, be in that Godhood, no man can dare to guess. But, to us, God is the end, the method, and the power of salvation; so He is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. It is in the perfect harmony of these sacred personalities that the precious unity of the Deity consists. I look at the theologies, and so often it seems as if the harmony of Father, Son, and Spirit had been lost, both by those that own and by those that disown the Trinity. One theology makes the Father hard and cruel, longing, as it were, for man’s punishment, extorting from the Son the last drop of life-blood which man’s -sin had incurred as penalty. Another theology makes the Son merely one of the multitude of sinning men, with somewhat bolder aspirations laying hold on a forgiveness which God might give but which no mortal might assume. Still another theology can find no God in the human heart at all; merely a fermentation of human nature is this desire after goodness, this reaching out towards Divinity. The end is not worthy of the method. I do not want to come to such a Father as some of the theologians have painted. Or the method is not worthy of the end. No man could come to the perfect God through such a Jesus as some men have described. Or the power is too weak for both; and all that Christ has done lies useless, and all the Father’s welcome waits in vain for the soul that has in it no Holy Ghost. But let each be real, and each be worthy of the others, and the salvation is complete. But each cannot be worthy of the others unless each is perfect. But each cannot be perfect, unless each is Divine; that is our faith in the Trinity, — three Per sons and one God.

We talk here to-day about the doctrine of the Trinity, our best conception and account of God. But does it not sometimes come over our minds, What shall we think of all this when we come into that world where we shall see God with unclouded vision, standing close to His mercy-seat and to His throne? Shall we still hold our doctrine of the Trinity? Will these formulas in which we have glibly argued to one another about God, as we talked in our churches and our parlors here, will they suffice to express that majesty and love which then shall pour in on the open soul conclusive witness of itself? Surely we must not hope it. Surely our formulas will burst, and prove too small and thin for that stupendous self-revelation of the Deity. We shall see, I believe, that our statements here were to the knowledge that will flood our eager apprehension there only what the child’s crude knowledge of his father is to the full-grown son’s comprehension of the generous and thoughtful nature under whose shadow and in whose light he lives. But just as the son, much as he learns about his father, never out grows, however he may refine and enlarge, his first conception of the essential qualities of the parental life, its truth and love and justice, so to the soul in heaven, learning more and more forever of the God of its salvation, this shall become clearer and clearer always: that it was saved by a divine power, through a divine method, to a divine end; into the heart of the Father, through the brotherhood of the Son, urged by the inspiring Spirit. That will be the everlasting salvation, real to the soul forever, whatever else may change. That will be the reality by which we shall know that the glory we have reached is the same for which we longed and prayed and struggled when we were on the earth, in these dear old days to which we shall look back with undying affection from eternity.

Let us keep the faith of the Trinity. I have spoken all in vain to-day, unless you know now that I do not mean by such an exhortation, “Let us cling to an idea, and die for the holding to a precious word.” Let us do that, if need be; but far above that, let us seek to come to the highest, through the highest, by the highest. Let the end and the method and the power of our life be all divine. If our hearts are set on that, Jesus will accept us for His disciples; all that He promised to do for those who trusted Him, He will do for us. He will show us the Father; He will send us the Comforter; nay, what can He do, or what can we ask that will outgo the strong and sweet assurance of the promise which we have been studying to-day: Through Him we shall have access by one Spirit unto the Father.