Welcome to another week of Things Unseen. This week I want to think with you about

the Trinity. I've sometimes said I suspect many Christians think that the doctrine of

the Trinity is the most obscure and probably the most speculative doctrine and therefore

the least practical of all the major Christian doctrines. I remember reading a comment

by the Roman Catholic theologian Carol Rannar about Roman Catholics actually and wondering

if the same was true of Protestants. He wrote that if God were not Trinity as far as most

Christians were concerned it wouldn't actually make any difference to their lives. Three

and one and one and three. That doesn't compute in the mathematics that most of us use and

we tend to operate I think on the theological principle that if we don't understand something

it can't be all that important. But most of us don't ever stop to think that if that

was our life principle we wouldn't be using our computers, our cell phones, we wouldn't

be flying in airplanes, most of us wouldn't use electricity or a hundred other things that

we do daily. The fact that we may not fully understand the Trinity doesn't mean that the Trinity

isn't essential to us. Perhaps it's worth pausing to ask this question. As the fact that

God is Trinity crossed your mind this last week or the week before. And if so has it made any

difference to the way you think and live? Many of us would almost die to defend the doctrine of

the Trinity. But the question here is does the doctrine of the Trinity really make any practical

difference to us? Well first of all what are we talking about when we speak about the Trinity?

We're not claiming we fully understand the Trinity. The Bible makes it clear that we would actually

need to be the Trinity to understand the Trinity. But here's what we mean. We mean there is only one

God. And this one God exists eternally in a unity of three persons, the Father, the Son and the

Holy Spirit, each of these persons having a distinct relationship to the other two.

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