As I mentioned earlier, we have the great privilege of having the Reverend Dr. Uriaso. Oh man, I tried. Was it right in Texan? Brito, Yuri, Yuri Brito with us this morning. He is the senior pastor of Providence Church in Pensacola, Florida, a sister church of ours in the CREC. Yuri was ordained to gospel ministry in 2009 and has received his Master of Divinity and Doctor of Ministry degrees from Reformed Theological Seminary. Yuri has been married to his wife, Melinda, for 19 years. Yes, okay. And is the father of Abigail, Ezekiel, Ephraim, Elijah, and Ezra. Like a good Brazilian, Yuri is a connoisseur of life and like a good churchman of liturgy. He advocates for biblical theocracy and affirms the centrality of Lord's Day worship as the supreme means to restore society. He affirms that the Psalter is a magnificent hymn book to be sung consistently. Dr. Brito is the editor of The Church Friendly Family and author of The Trinitarian Father. He is the co-author of a commentary on Ruth and the recently published commentary on Jonah, which is going to be the book we're going through at family camp. He also wrote a small booklet on pipe smoking. That's the one everyone's excited about. Yuri is the founder and contributor to the Kuyperian Commentary, a board member at Theopolis Institute, and the Senior Fellow of Pastoral Theology for the Center of Cultural Leadership. He believes feasting is good and right, technology should be stewarded faithfully, books are God's gifts to man, apostasy is real, baptism is the entrance to the covenant, Eucharist is God's food for hungry people, and the triune God is the pattern for all of life. And so how appropriate is it that we have him preaching on Trinity Sunday? So before I have you come up, we are going to have the Old Testament reading, and then Yuri will preach from John 8. Hear God's word. Does not wisdom call? Does not understanding raise her voice? On the heights, beside the way, at the crossroads, she takes her stand. Beside the gates, in front of the town, at the entrance of the portals, she cries aloud, to you, O men, I call, and my cry is to the children of man. The Lord possessed me at the beginning of his work, the first of his acts of old. Ages ago, I was set up at the first, before the beginning of the earth. When there were no depths, I was brought forth. When there were no springs abounding with water. Before the mountains had been shaped, before the hills, I was brought forth. Before He had made the earth with its fields or the first of the dust of the world, when He had established the heavens, I was there. When He drew a circle on the face of the deep, when He made firm the skies above, when He established the fountains of the deep, when He assigned to the sea its limit so that the waters might not transgress His command, when He marked out the foundations of the earth, there I was beside Him. like a master workman, and I was daily his delight, rejoicing before him always, rejoicing in his inhabited world and delighting in the children of man. Oh God, add your blessing to the reading and the hearing and the preaching of your word and grant us all the grace to trust and obey you and all the church said. Amen. our sermon text from the Gospel of Saint John. The Jews answered him, are we not right in saying that you are Samaritan and have a demon? Jesus answered, I do not have a demon, but I honor my father and you dishonor me. Yet I do not seek my own glory. There is one who seeks it and he is the judge. Truly, truly, I say to you, if anyone keeps my word, he will never see death. The Jews said to him, now we know that you have a demon. Abraham died, as did the prophets. Yet you say, if anyone keeps my word, he will never taste death. Are you greater than our father Abraham, who died? And the prophets died? Who do you make yourself out to be? Jesus answered, if I glorify myself, my glory is nothing. It is my father who glorifies me of whom you say he is our God, but you have not known him. I know him. If I were to say that I do not know him, I would be a liar like you, but I do know him and I keep his word. Your father Abraham rejoiced that he would see my day. He saw it and was glad. So the Jew said to him, you are not yet 50 years old and have you seen Abraham? Jesus said to them, truly, truly, I say to you, before Abraham was, I am. And so they picked up stones to throw at him, but Jesus hid himself and went out of the temple. This is the word of the Lord. Thanks be to God. May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O Lord, our rock and our nearest kinsman, Redeemer, Jesus Christ, our Lord. Amen. Grace, mercy, and peace be with you from God our Father and our Lord Jesus Christ. I am very delighted to be here with you on this Lord's Day, on Trinity Sunday. I have had the opportunity in the last 15 years to visit perhaps a quarter of all churches in the CREC. But I have truly been looking forward to visiting RCC for many years, because many of your names are very familiar, and it is a delight to be able to attach those names to faces. When people have asked me over the years, why has the CREC grown so much, especially in these last two years, part of the rationale for that is that we are able to speak the truth without apologizing. And I see the fruits of all that labor taking place here, as I know your church has also experienced the fruits of the gospel in numbers, and indeed, over the last couple of years. Today we celebrate the Holy Trinity. The Trinity is unity and diversity. God is three in one and one in three. But Christians, as you may know, are not the only ones who commemorate and celebrate or emphasize unity and diversity. Secular cultures also pursue unity. We see an example of this in the Psalter in Chapter 2, Song 2 of the Psalter, where the enemies of Yahweh gather in unity, in agreement to oppose the God of Israel. And we also see this pursuit of unity in our day between leftist religious leaders and secular political leaders. In fact, when the cause is biblical ethics and orthodoxy, strange alliances are formed. Wicked intentions are carried out successfully when others come together seeking to oppose Yahweh and His Anointed. So we should not be unfamiliar with the idea of oneness in secular culture, nor should we be unfamiliar with diversity in the world's catechism. You have undoubtedly heard of the expressions multiculturalism and inclusivism. These are ideas which accepts and promotes multiple ethnic cultures as all equally valid. We as Christians, we shouldn't dare, they would say, assert the superiority of one culture over another. If we declare that we have the authority of a theocratic ruler named Jesus the Christ, we are immediately in our culture deemed to be bigots and cultural Neanderthals. If you, should you dare, as a Christian, try to impose your views of morality in our present ethos, you're bound to receive the harshest accusations from the media and from all society's provocateurs and pugilists. Recently, we had a high-profile political figure equate pro-life advocates with racism. We are, he said, a pluralistic society. We need to accept all religions and all ethical behaviors. But isn't it interesting that for the secularists, you can be diverse in your sexuality, but when you attempt to legislate a unified morality or ethic, you are immediately ideologically hanged as a traitor. The conversation we have in our Gospel lesson on this Trinity Sunday between the Jews and our blessed Lord in John chapter 8 reflects in many ways this exact scenario. The Jews wanted to conform Jesus to their version of the Abrahamic line and the Abrahamic family, to their version of covenant theology. But Jesus, as we know quite well, was not interested in oneness for the sake of oneness. There is no merit in being united just for a meme or a hashtag movement. Jesus, as he said in the Gospel of John, he is the way, the truth, and the life. This is the only oneness that interests the kingdom of heaven. If there is oneness, if there is to be any kind of unity in our society, it must be grounded in what Francis Schaeffer referred to as true truth. an inescapable reality that is not bound or imprisoned by social constructs. The context of our passage here ends with this brilliant declaration from our Lord, this unmistakable declaration from Jesus, that whoever hears the Word of God is of God. Whoever hears, embodies, imbibes of the Word of God becomes himself united to God. And the Jews wanted Jesus to affirm that they too received that status, that they too were united to God, that they too were the seed, true seed of Abraham. But Jesus did not come to this conversation neutrally. Jesus brought to this interesting dialogue an entirely new script, which is why the religious leaders assumed that our Lord was a Samaritan-possessed man. Verse 48, and the Jews answered and said to him, do we not say rightly that you are a Samaritan and have a demon? Remember, the Samaritans, they were the enemies of true religion, according to the Jews. And the reality, of course, as the Gospel of John unfolds for us, is that Jesus is not some diabolically arrogant man, nor is our Lord Jesus trying to advance His own honor and glory. No. Jesus says that the Father is the one who will bestow upon Him. The Father is the one who will defend His honor and glory and grant all these things to His beloved Son. And that every time, Jesus implies, that every time the Jews disobey or fail to listen to the Lord of Glory, they are, at that very moment, disobeying and failing to listen to the words of the Father, God Himself. That is, the honor and glory of the Son are connected to the honor and glory of the Father. There is fundamental unity. They are one, but yet the Jews refuse to see this oneness. And in verse 51 of our passage, the dialogue now reaches a crescendo here in this great song of adoration. If anyone keeps my word, he will never, never taste or see death. And this is the type of modern sentiment that is going to excite a wave of fury from the Jews in our passage. Jesus has violated, according to their philosophical principle, their basic standard and definition of oneness. Jesus, in our passage, is not only claiming that these religious Jews are not of the seed of Abraham, But he also claims that he is the one himself who has the power of life and of death. And the enemies of Jesus are going to take these dogmatic declarations and they're going to treat it as proof of our Lord's boundless conceit. They say to themselves, this man, this congregation does not respect our established norms and cultural values. And now at this stage in our passage, the Jews are now convinced even more so as they are convinced of all of you fine people that you are demon possessed. And Jesus said, whoever hears the words of God is of God. And now he is saying that if anyone keeps his words, he will never see death. Our Lord is claiming a profound oneness of message between what he says and the words of the Father. Jesus is promising on the basis of this revelation. He is promising nothing more and nothing less than immortality. And it is precisely this statement, this promise of immortality to those who keep the Word of God, those who follow Messiah Jesus, this is the statement that takes the religious Jews, the experts of the day, into an altogether theological chaos. And the Jews are now persuaded that Jesus is possessed, and the appeal to Father Abraham Their standard bearer is the ultimate insult because the Jews of the day measure all things by Him. They measure every word written and spoken by Abraham himself. Abraham is the standard of all. Now, it is not that the Jews weren't familiar with the concept of death. They believed in death. They believed in life after death. They knew death existed because the greatest proof of death was their great hero, Abraham himself, and Abraham died. So, what is Jesus saying? Is Jesus saying that he is more than Abraham, that he is more than a prophet, that he is indeed greater than the greatest of Jewish history? The Jews know the implication of these questions, which is why they pose it to our Lord again and again throughout the gospel narratives. They fully understand that the only one who can safeguard a person from death is God himself. And Jesus gets to the heart of the matter, which is that the religious leaders are not interested in truth at all, but they are only interested in self-aggrandizement and self-preservation. In contrast, as Jesus has made it abundantly clear, Jesus is not interested in self-glorification. And he makes this abundantly clear when he says, if I glorify myself, my glory is nothing. It is my Father who bestows it upon me, who bestows glory upon me, of whom you say, He is our God. It is not self-glorification that impels Jesus to act on our behalf. It is obedience to the one who sent him. And Jesus is not implying, of course, that the Jews have no knowledge of God. They do have knowledge of God. There's an incredible tradition in history of their knowledge of God. They do have knowledge. But what Jesus is saying to this particular first century audience is that unless their Judaism, unless their understanding of who God is dies, unless they experience a theological death, They will never truly worship God himself, even God in the flesh. And that's why Jesus says, you think you know, you have knowledge of these things, but truly you do not know God. And the religious leaders of the day presume with an incredible air of superiority that they know the God of Israel, that they follow Him, but yet their very actions condemn that God. They claim to be a true people. They claim to be descendants of Abraham. They claim to be faithful to God. But Jesus says, you are liars. Jesus again and again accuses the Jews of bad hermeneutics, of poor understanding of the Bible. You, who are the ones who claim to know the Scriptures, fail to understand of whom the Scriptures points to. They claim to know the Word, but yet they deny the Word made flesh. Where does true knowledge of God come from? It comes from the word of God. As Calvin writes, all who boast of the name of God without the word of God are liars. And so Jesus makes these statements about himself, describes himself again and again throughout this gospel narrative. He builds on his divine resume, which baffles the religious leaders of the day. And he says, your father Abraham, he flips the ideological tables. Your father Abraham rejoiced that he would see my day. He saw it. And he was glad. Now, what Christ says here of Abraham in this passage, this applies, of course, to all Old Testament saints. All of them would have rejoiced to see him this day here. But there's a particular weight that is placed on Abraham, because this is their theological icon. And this weight placed on Abraham was given to Abraham, was placed on his shoulder, because Abraham was the one who received the promises to inherit the nations. But even Abraham, Jesus says, Even Father Abraham knew that there is a greater Father of all nations, and even Father Abraham knew that there is even a greater Son. In fact, the seed of Abraham himself is the Christ. In the beginning, I talked about those who do not tolerate the mission of Jesus because it conflicts with our so-called multicultural diversity claims. Well, verse 58, Jesus shatters all these societal niceties and claims that He is one with the Father. Here, the words of Christ, truly, truly, I say to you, before Abraham was, I am. That is to say, without a shadow of a doubt, before Abraham was, I am. And the I am statement that Jesus makes is undoubtedly a reference to the eternal nature of the Son. That is to say, He is the same yesterday, today, and forever. And there's also a unique little play on words in John chapter 8 here, a play on the past and present in our passage here. Abraham saw. Abraham rejoiced. But Jesus is the I am. He is the ever-present Lord of all creation. He is the Lord who gives meaning to all reality, the one who was in the beginning, who will be world without end. But for us today, at this very moment, He is. He is. He is with us this morning in this sacred assembly. He will be with us this week at camp. When these words were spoken, the Jews picked up stones to kill Him. Suddenly, the claims to sweet diversity turned into the mob. If Jesus is, what He claims to be, then it means that our Lord is declaring that He is the Lord of all creation, the Lord of Abraham, the one who demands allegiance from His people. It means that everything we do needs to be centered on this fundamental unity between Jesus and His Father who sent Him. It means, brothers and sisters, that religious and the political elites in our day must abandon their claims to self-sufficiency and they must trust in the sufficiency of another, Jesus himself. Now, this is Trinity Sunday. When the church hears the word God, what we should automatically do at that moment, when we hear the word God, we should translate immediately in our minds to Trinity. We should think Trinitarianly. We don't want to fall prey to speaking about the Trinity in some kind of abstract and ethereal terms and philosophical jargon. Our liturgy itself, as you confessed this morning, began with those words, in the name of the Father, of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Those words, what they indicate for us is that the Trinity is the very foundation of the reality of the words and the actions and the rituals that you will exercise today. The Father, the Son, and Spirit, they are indeed for us concrete and relational terms. The triune God is not Aristotle, unmoved mover. The triune God moves. The Triune God is not Islam's unrelational God. The Triune God relates. The Triune God loves to be in relationship with his people. The Trinity is indeed an incomprehensible mystery, but it is a mystery of brightness, not a mystery of darkness. Tis only the splendor of light hideth thee. And today, in our religious pluralistic environment, which is the only air that this present age breathes, it is very important to stress that the Trinity alone is the true God, one God in three persons. As Leslie Newbigin once said, there is no way to preach Jesus without preaching the Trinity. The Trinity is not merely a doctrine to be believed, but the Trinity is the God to be adored. And this controversial, mind-stretching doctrine that we call the Trinity, didn't emerge, by the way, in some ivory tower think tank. It emerged out of the life and the mission of ordinary congregations. It was the comforting reality. It was a comforting and it was a living truth for the early church. And it is a comforting and must be a comforting and a true for us today. The Trinity is not to remain in some random and dusty 700-page systematic theology. It is intended to be related to and a part of your life and the life of this congregation. Thinking Trinitarianly has powerful consequences for us as a people on this Trinity Sunday. Everything we do is shaped by the Father, the Son, and the Spirit. The psalmist tells us that you are what you worship, which means that who we worship is going to shape the world around us. While the world today enters into dialogue with all sorts of political matters. The church does the most political thing when she gathers on a day like today and worships the political ruler of all creation, not of one nation, but of all nations of the earth. Don't be deceived, especially on a day like today. Don't be deceived by the world's cry that relationships are the kinds of things that ought to remain private or that sexual mutilation or sexual transformation are personal decisions with no consequences to society. We know that is a lie. And we know that is a lie because the Trinity, the source of all reality, is not private, nor should your relationship with ethics be. You don't need to find yourself in a TikTok video. You must find God, and you must find God and His people. Do you hear what I'm saying? If you ever hear a Christian come to you and very innocently say, You know, I just need to find myself. Well, your answer should be Christ has already found you. Who else are you seeking to find you? Christ has found you, brothers and sisters. Your identity is in Him. You are no longer lost. Or, very common today, if someone says, you know, I just need some time away from church to recover from some bad experiences in my life. Well, the answer at that moment is precisely not to stay away from church. In these circumstances, the church is the only place you should be. And we see this Trinitarian principle played out in the life of God's people in all sorts of structures. In the familial structures, we operate Trinitarianly, whether you know it or not. All members of a family carry a role, and if they don't, they should. One takes out the trash, right men? Another cleans dishes, other cooks, and so on and so forth. But because they all have different roles does not mean they are not part of this one family. In the Trinity, the same thing happens. The Father has a role, the Son has a role, and the Spirit has a role in redemptive history. In the Trinity, all these things cohere. In the Trinity, the Father has a role, the Son has a role, and the Spirit has a role that brings all of life into harmony, that makes all of our reality meaningful, that makes all our movements meaningful in society. This is how the family operates. The husband loves the wife. The wife submits to the husband. The children obey their parents. But they're all united in this one great mission. There is no lack of harmony. There is unity indeed, not only in believing the triune God, but seeing all of reality shaped by the Trinitarian faith. The Trinity, brothers and sisters, models for us what true love is. The Son loves the Father, the Father loves the Son, the Spirit loves the Son and the Father. The Trinity teaches us this morning to love and to bear each other's burdens. How do we know we are living and thinking Trinitarianly? It is indeed when we see the family of God acting and living as one. And I know that living like this is no easy task. But for Christians, this is the only way to live in this life, to live in honor, in submission, and in bold declaration that the Father is God, the Son is God, and that the Spirit is God. Amen.