Welcome to Unveiled Faces, a Redeemer Presbyterian Church podcast. Please enjoy our feature presentation. Well, it is certainly a pleasure to be with the saints here at Redeemer Presbyterian Church, and our hope and prayer is that this can be the start of a very long and fruitful tradition of having some joint services each year. Our visit comes at the end of the celebration of three Sundays that we focus on at Church of the King each year, Ascension Sunday, Pentecost Sunday, and this morning, what is often considered Trinity Sunday. And we try to highlight these Sundays because they help us to focus on some very important truths about our faith, just as national holidays remind us about what it means to be an American. So you get to listen in a little bit on my thoughts about Trinity Sunday as we're reminded about the nature of our Triune God and how it gives purpose and understanding to all of His creation and helps us to rightly confess God before men. Now understanding God's nature is important. Our Triune God is the one true God that Jesus tells us that we should fear and confess before men in our morning text. Each week, we see as we come to worship the gracious work of our Triune God. As the Father calls us to worship, the Son assures us of forgiveness, and the Spirit lifts us up and instructs us. He is the great God that we serve, and the great God that we boldly proclaim each week with our Trinitarian worship. This is why we corporately confess our faith together in each of our congregations, using, as we did this morning, the Apostles' Creed or the Nicene Creed, Trinitarian creeds that all true Christians must affirm. It is important that we do such things in worship, and it is important that we not let them become routine. Real easy when we know the Apostles' Creed by heart to let your mind wander to other things as we're reciting it. Now, there are some, especially today, that would argue that reciting creeds or following some sort of church calendar or having a focus on something like Trinity Sunday is the very leaven of the Pharisees that Jesus warned his disciples about in the morning text. They were the religious leaders. They were the ones that had all the forms and things to do. They would tell us that the Christian faith should not be about formulas or doctrines or special days or laws. It's about having a personal relationship with Jesus. Now, of course, we and the Bible certainly agree. And if we have all of those things and even a lot of good works thrown in besides, but don't know Jesus, we're lost. To avoid this, the great cry in our generation from evangelical circles has been, we have no creed but Christ. Let's keep Jesus at the center of things. And I think that's good, except that we also have to then ask, well, who is this Christ? And they would be quick to say, as we should be as well, it's the Christ of the Bible. But how would they then contrast the Christ of the Bible with one that is presented by a Jehovah Witness or Mormon that comes by their door? You see, what we have forgotten in our age, sadly, is that these great creeds of the church were written to defend against such errors. And as such, they should not be forgotten. At Church of the King on Trinity Sunday and some other selected occasions, we even read the Athanasian Creed. That's a creed that's much longer, much more detailed, but it goes through the two awesome mysteries that God has revealed to us. His existence as the great triune God and the incarnation of Jesus, God becoming man. Now, as Jesus warned His disciples in our reading this morning, we must fear God rather than man, meaning that we must fear and confess the one true God. So if we are going to rightly fear and confess our one true God, we must have some grasp of these mysteries. As we get older, we understand them more and more, and we also realize that there's a whole lot of skeptics out there that have no use for the Christian faith, and this is usually a place where they'll try to say, oh, it's just a bunch of fairy tales, or you're just taking leaps of faith, or certainly you're being irrational. I mean, how can one God be three gods, or three persons? How can Jesus be fully God and fully man? as the confession proclaims. Now sadly, some have actually downplayed these grand truths in response to such attacks, but we should remember that such skeptics do not escape the problems that they have on their own. And we always want to have a couple of these handy for the people that say, oh, I don't go for that faith stuff. Just ask them how gravity works. That's always something to give them something to think about. Or the light that comes from those lamps acts like a particle and it also acts like a wave. And any good physicist would tell you that something has to be one or the other. It can't be both. And yet, here we are in the midst of light. You see, those are some physical examples, but we also need to be, as Christians, ready to challenge them with the more important philosophic dilemma of the one and the many, the universal and the particulars. Now, how we answer that question has some very real consequences, even if we've not given it much serious thought. In the 20th century, there were many humanist nations that slaughtered tens of millions of people for the good of the many. You see, to them, the universal was important. The particulars were just cogs in the works, but they were people. And today, sadly in our country, we probably have gone the other way. We have individuals who can find no meaning at all in their lives and they strike out at others or commit suicide or both. You see, we as Christians proclaim ourselves to be Trinitarian because yes, it makes us Christians, but it also makes us more than just being different. It makes us those who actually have answers. You see, defying the law of gravity or lasers, to talk about light, could get you physically killed. You can't mess around with those. You know, if you walk off a six-floor building and say, I don't believe in gravity, you're still going to hit the concrete. But you see, not understanding our relationship to the one true God can land us in hellfire for eternity. So let's consider the importance of rightly fearing and confessing God today. And kids, as we do this, we're gonna pick a little bit out of some of the creeds, and you'll get to learn another one of those big words. Church of the King, we've been working on propitiation, and I hope most of our kids have got that one down. But this morning, I wanna read a phrase out of the Athanasian Creed. where it says in part that we have to confess the Father incomprehensible, the Son incomprehensible, the Holy Spirit incomprehensible, as also there are not three incomprehensibles, but one incomprehensible. So what does the Creed mean when it says that God is incomprehensible? Well, the easy answer is that God is God and we're not. But we need to be able to think that through and to be able to explain to people and to our own children why the creed would say something like that. Think about it this way. People often say that to comprehend something is to get one's hands around it, to understand it, to know about it, to understand it fully. If I'm told to comprehend a little teddy bear that one of the kids has brought to church this morning, I'm pretty sure I can handle that. I can pick it up. I can see what it's made of, how big it is. I put my arms around it. You know, I can take control of that teddy bear. But what if I'm asked to comprehend Half Dome down in Yosemite National Park? A little bigger struggle. I don't really know that I can explain how it was made. I certainly couldn't tell you how much it weighs, and I'm not even going to try to put my arms around it. So does that mean that I can comprehend one but not the other? No. You see, I can comprehend both of them as much as I am able. But in reality, I can't comprehend either fully. You see, there would be questions a good teddy bear maker would be able to ask me about the teddy bear that I probably wouldn't know either. But you see, God, when we think about Him and His nature, is certainly beyond our full comprehension because He is God. But we can still know Him. You see, if the creed were teaching that we can have no comprehension of God, What would be the point of even having a creed? You see, the wonder of the Bible is that God has revealed Himself to us. This is why we have Trinity Sunday in the church calendar. It's why we recite those great creeds of the church on a regular basis. So how do we comprehend the incomprehensible when it comes to understanding the nature of God? Well, I can tell you that there's been lots of suggestions made down through the years, and sadly, far too many of them have been wrong and led to heresy. So we need to be very careful what we teach our children. You see, when I was growing up in the church as a young Christian, they would say things like, well, the Trinity, you can think about it like an egg. If you have an egg, it's got a shell, and it's got a yolk, and it's got the white. So there's three parts in one egg, right? But you see, that's no different than paganism. Three gods working together or one great God with the Son and Spirit serving Him as the Jehovah Witnesses or Mormons would do. We're not serving three different gods that are somehow clumped together. Some say the Trinity is like water. That's a much better example, because now you've got one substance, and it's solid when it's frozen, it's liquid when it sits in the glass, and it's steam when you heat it up on the stove. One substance, three different forms. That's pretty close, isn't it? But again, what that is is modalism. It's another ancient heresy which teaches that God was the Father in the Old Testament as He appeared. He was Jesus when He came in the Gospels, and today we know Him as the Spirit. And sadly, such is taught in some churches today. And this is not rightly confessing God before men. You see, it is far better to stand on the shoulders of great saints who have gone before in these battles in the past and not start from scratch each generation. We forget that in some cases it took hundreds of years for men to work through how those creeds should be stated. But it comes down to the simple truth that God exists as a Trinity. Three persons who are each God existing as the one true God. In mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis has come as close as anyone that I've read in trying to give us even a glimmer of how to understand the proper basis and what we see in the creeds. He begins with where the creeds begin, that God in his totality is incomprehensible, but he has revealed himself. So C.S. Lewis would use this illustration. You guys know about dimensions, right? What do we live in? What kind of world do we live in? How many dimensions do we have? Three. There's a point, there's a line, and there's height, right? So it's three dimensions. But what Lewis would do is say, well, imagine that you lived on a two-dimensional world, like this piece of paper that wasn't even as thick as the piece of paper, just two dimensions. So now you could have points, right? You could have a line. You could make a circle. You could have a box. You could have a triangle, right? Could you have a cube? Could you have a block? No. Right? So if I drew six squares on my piece of paper, I'd have six squares, right? But now suppose that you got to visit this world, this little two-dimensional world, and you met some of the children there, and they showed you how they drew squares and triangles. And you said, oh, oh, I want to show you about a cube. I want to show you what a block is. And they go, what's a block? Well, it's something I play with. It's six squares. But it's just one block. And they go, wait a minute, I can draw six squares, but I can't make it one block. How would you do that? And then you would have to try to communicate to them, well, I come from a different world. We have another dimension. So when you have that other dimension, you can do that. So trying to think that way gives us just a little glimmer of how difficult it is for God, who is three persons in one God, to communicate to a world that knows nothing of anything but singular personalities. One person, one personality. Can't have three, well, I guess you can, but then you get put in a psych hospital, right? So it's not normal here, but with God, it is. And I could spend a whole sermon on God is love because he's existed that way from forever. He didn't have to create anything to love, you see. The bottom line, is that we believe what God has revealed about himself and not what we think he should be like or even what we think the scriptures teach about him. We should not neglect the wisdom of those who have gone before. You see, you could spend your entire lifetime studying what God has revealed, and you would still have more to learn. I think it'll go on into eternity that way. We will no more fully comprehend Him than I could put my arms around Half Dome. But that does not mean that we can't know Him, worship Him, love Him, just as I can admire half-dome, I can climb half-dome, and I can even fear half-dome as I think about that 3,000 foot sheer drop off its face. And that brings us to our text from Luke chapter 12. It begins with a warning from Jesus about the leaven of the Pharisees. Hypocrisy. You see, the Pharisees were, in many ways, what we would probably call today a know-it-all. They were not unlike the JWs or Mormons who might visit you at your door. When they come, boy, they've got all kinds of Bible verses, and they've studied things, and they're ready to talk and describe things just like the Pharisees were. But they would be insisting that God be brought down to their level. They don't like all this incomprehensible stuff. Let's explain it. Let me explain it to you simply. And the Pharisees, if you think about it, did that with Jesus. Don't talk about this forgiveness of sins and crosses and suffering. We just want a king. We just want to get rid of the Romans and move on. But Jesus then teaches his disciples the lesson that I want to leave us with here this morning on Trinity Sunday. He says to them, do not be afraid of those who kill the body. And after that, have no more that they can do. But I will show you whom you should fear. Fear Him who after He has killed has power to cast into hell. Yes, I say, fear Him. Now we should always try to be practical in our applications. So allow me to give just a few examples of where I think as modern Americans, we have our fears in all the wrong places. And I hope you will see that they are largely misplaced because we are not individually or collectively confessing the one true God. Now there's gonna be lots of discussions again, it's an election year, about the proper role of church and state. But you see, as we think about that, we should ponder the fact that all of the fear has shifted to the state. After all, they have the death penalty. If you commit a capital crime, they can kill your body and they can do it lawfully. just like Jesus said. But I think we've forgotten that they can do no more. You see, very few today have any fear of the church. What can they do? Oh yeah, they preach sermons, they try to scare people, they could even excommunicate somebody, but how serious is that? You see how backwards We have this? Jesus said that what is bound on earth by his disciples is bound in heaven. Which means a judgment from the church could put your soul in danger of hellfire. The state has no authority like that. No such power. It's reflected, I think, in the way that we train our children or give them priorities. You know, I don't think I have to tell you that we've got a pretty major focus on the evil of smoking today, which, by the way, is not even mentioned in the Bible. Now, don't get me wrong, I don't want to raise another generation of chain smokers, so health concerns are good things for your children to think about, but I want us to ponder for a second how obsessed our society has become on that issue. You can get an R rating in a movie now. for having scenes about smoking that are not needed. But on the other hand, we're not even allowed to mention the sin of fornication. You know, today it's love with violin music playing in the background, youthful passions running wild, raging hormones. Those are all seen as good things. Sexual purity is something the Bible does major on. There's a lot in there. And all we do today is make fun of it and then excuse all sorts of sexual sins. Selling cigarettes to someone under 18 today is a crime. You can't do it. But at the same time, America's largest provider of abortions, Planned Parenthood, is invited into our classrooms to teach young people that fornication is natural and how everyone is doing it. We fear smoking, which at its worst could kill you prematurely. But we encourage what the Bible says will actually keep people out of the kingdom of God, again, putting them at risk of hellfire. And that's really reflected, I think, in our society's priorities overall. We have, sadly, the age of the nanny state. We see thousands, literally thousands of laws passed every year to keep us Safe. I watched many past with that famous line, oh, if it saves just one life, especially if it's a child's life. You see, our fears are focused on physical death. So we allow more and more such laws to be passed. Just think about the ones that apply to our automobiles alone. We have car seats, airbags, seatbelts, where the dog can ride, when you can answer your phone, and on and on and on. Now many of these are certainly well and good, but contrast that with how our various courts have treated the biblical definition of marriage. all in the name of tolerance. If I demand that the state bless, or even a baker, my deviant sexual behavior, which is clearly an offense and attack on the very nature of our triune God, the court says that I have a constitutional right to do so. If I drive down the road with my seatbelt unbuckled, I get a ticket. I hope we can see the contrast. And I hope we can begin to understand that we live in such a society in large part because of our failure to confess the one true God, which has led to a state that is just what Jesus warned us about. You see, many would date if we were sitting around having a discussion, maybe we will at lunch, about what happened to America. A lot of people would say that it was when they took prayer out of school in the 60s and they launched the sexual revolution. But as Christians who take the Bible and the words of Jesus seriously, we must see that those were symptoms and not causes. You see, it was long ago that our nation moved away from confessing the one true God. And so such things should not surprise us. Sexual sins are taken very seriously in the Bible. And the Bible does so because they are an offense to the very nature of God, which is reflected in the proper marriage relationship you see from the very beginning God established marriage where two people become one flesh and you see the member of my little story about the lines and the cubes and that gives us a hint doesn't it Two people become one flesh in their loving relationship, and it does reflect the very nature of God. Remember that philosophic question of the one and the many? Marriage is where that really works itself out. What's more important when two people get married? The marriage or the people, the individuals? Chris, why both? And it's an example of what we see in the Trinity. If two people get married and their focus is only on their marriage, it won't be long before they're individually having problems. because there's no attention to the individuals. The husband won't pay attention to his wife because I'm worried about my marriage. The wife won't care for her husband because she's putting the marriage first. Now that sounds silly, but it happens. And the flip side, which is probably more true today, oh, it's the individuals that, you know, we don't need this submission stuff and the vows like they just didn't do in the royal wedding. And we don't need obedience. We don't need love. None of that. It's fulfillment. If you're getting married, young people, in order to fulfill yourselves, please don't. Because it won't do you any good, and it won't do your partner any good, and it won't do the world any good. You see, marriage is supposed to be like God's nature. What does the Father do? He gives Himself to the Son. The Son gives Himself to the Father. The Spirit rejoices in the love of the Son and the Father. They're always sacrificially loving each other. And they do it for the world. That's what our marriages should be. And when we begin to understand that, when we begin to see how central that is, we see that to treat sex casually or to violate marriage vows are sins that put us in danger of hellfire. They are an offense to our holy triune God. And as a result, we see the many problems that we have around us today. The attack on marriage today, or the push for so-called homosexual rights, are not merely political issues. And they require, they demand, a biblical response. You see, these battles go right to the heart of what we celebrate on Trinity Sunday. And we as Christians who rightly confess our God must be ready to give a biblical response if we are ever to see true repentance and reformation in our nation. You see, Jesus promised in our text that the Holy Spirit would give His disciples, and that's us, the words to say when they were persecuted. Now that can apply to someone like Stephen who was able to give, even as a deacon, one of the greatest sermons recorded in the scriptures after he was persecuted. And it can be true today as our courts and media attack the institution of marriage and promote all sorts of sexual perversions. And what might God give us to say? We should remind them of what Luke taught us today. Fear Him who, after He has killed you, can cast your body into hell. We need to remind them that it is not ultimately an argument with us, but with God Himself. I remember when one of the very first homosexual rights bills came through back in a much better day in the California legislature, one of the Christian senators, H.L. Richardson, stood up when the bill was presented, and he had his Bible with him, and he got it out, and he flipped through five or six passages on the sin of homosexuality and read them, and then looked at the rest of the senators and said, gentlemen, ladies, your argument's not with me, it's with God. and sat down. We don't have very many legislators like that anymore. We must not be ashamed or afraid to proclaim that marriage is a creation ordinance that cannot be changed and is used by God to demonstrate His own nature and His great love for His people. We should not be encouraged, now listen carefully, we should not be encouraged when a majority of people vote to uphold marriage. Because if we do, we will have no answer when another majority votes to support homosexual marriage. Our trust is not in people. Our trust is not in democracy. Our trust is in the Word of God. We cannot win the battle over abortion using just biological facts, as overwhelming as those can be. And sonograms are wonderful. But rather, this battle will not be won until we boldly present the unborn as those made in the image of God, so that their destruction is an affront to God Himself. And we should remember that God told the Old Testament saints in times where children were sacrificed right out in the open, that they were sacrificing God's children. He called them His own. And finally, we can't just be against such things, but we must affirm our belief in the one true God by the way that we live our lives. Jesus said the world will know Him by the way we love one another. We must see children as a blessing from God and not a burden. We must practice sexual purity, remembering how God has always been loyal to His people. And yes, our marriages must demonstrate the great love of God for His bride, the Church, and even His own nature. I give you a bit of homework. Ephesians chapter 5, again, it's like the Apostles' Creed. It's probably so familiar that you can read through it and not think about what you're reading. But read through that chapter this week and say, what's Paul talking about? Is he talking about marriage? No, no, no, wait, he's talking about the church. No, no, he's talking about creation. No, he's talking about God. He just intertwines things so closely that you can get lost. But it's an important place to meditate and to think about all that it means for God's nature to be reflected in the world, in our lives, our marriages, our churches, and our communication with the world. In that same chapter, the Apostle reminds us about the importance of our worship and church life, which is central. He says in verse 16, Therefore do not be unwise, but understand what the will of the Lord is. And do not be drunk with wine, which is dissipation, but be filled with the Spirit. speaking to one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody in your heart to the Lord, giving thanks always for the things to God the Father in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, submitting to one another in the fear of the Lord. Now, as always, there will be a lot of discussions about marriage and sexual practices in this election year, as I mentioned. And those are good opportunities for us. It's good opportunities for us to train our children. It's a good opportunity for us to strike up conversations and to be good witnesses. But we must understand, as we proclaim the wonder of our great triune God on this Trinity Sunday, that at bottom, these are attacks on Him and His church. We must pray that God enable us to show forth his character and his nature in our lives, in our churches, and in our marriages before a watching world. And we must fear the one true God and learn to believe the promise that Jesus gave to his disciples for such times as ours. The Holy Spirit will teach you in that very hour what you ought to say. Let's pray. Father, we do thank you for your word. We thank you, Lord, that you have revealed yourself to us. And Lord, we know that the more we learn about you, the more we know we need to learn. And may we be a people that are hungry for the word of God. May we hunger and thirst for your word. May we seek it out as we would gold and silver and treasure to know you and to know you better. We ask and pray this in Jesus' name. This has been a presentation of Redeemer Presbyterian Church. For more resources and information, please stop by our website at visitredeemer.org. All material herewithin, unless otherwise noted. Copyright Redeemer Presbyterian Church. Elk Grove, California. Music furnished by Nathan Clark George. Available at nathanclarkgeorge.com.