Delighting in the Trinity

Michael Reeves presents the Trinity as the ground of Christian joy, not a puzzle to be solved. This breakout session looks at the Creed's confession of one God in three persons, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and what follows for the Christian life.

Michael Reeves, “Delighting in the Trinity,” breakout session, Nicea Conference 2025, Istanbul.

Not embarrassed by the Trinity

In a non-Muslim majority country, I think the Trinity is seen as the sort of odd irrelevance of Christianity that can be left to the socially awkward theologians who like talking about things like how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, how can three be one, that sort of thing. But in a Muslim majority context, suddenly the issues of the Trinity get much tougher. And just speaking to Turkish believers here this week, I’m hearing how consistently they’re being asked, “Why is it you worship three gods?

How do we not be embarrassed about the doctrine of the Trinity?” And what I want to do with our time here today is try to convince you that the Trinity is not a doctrine for any believer in any context to be embarrassed about.

The triune living God is the very treasure of the gospel. The one we want to proclaim. The one who is distinguished in his beauty by his triune nature. It is what distinguishes him and raises him in beauty above all the idols. And what I want us to see is that the triune nature of God is the mold for the gospel. Everything that is beautiful about the gospel is so because God is triune.

The Trinity gives our gospel its character and its flavor. And what I want to do now with you is look through Paul’s letter to Romans to see how thoroughly consistently trinitarian it is and to see how the nature of Paul’s gospel there through and through depends on the triune nature of God.

Romans 1: a trinitarian gospel

So let’s start in Romans by looking at the very first four verses of the letter. If you turn with me please to Romans chapter 1:es 1 to4. Here’s how Paul introduces the gospel. And I want you to notice how trinitarian his language is.

Paul, a servant of Christ Jesus, called to be an apostle, set apart for the gospel of God, which he God, now this must be the Father being spoken of because look what’s to come. Which he God promised beforehand through his prophets in the holy Scriptures concerning his son.

is the gospel of God the Father concerning his Son, who is descended from David according to the flesh, and was declared to be the Son of God in power according to the spirit of holiness by his resurrection from the dead, Jesus Christ our Lord. So for Paul, the gospel, the good news is trinitarian. It is verse one the gospel of God that is the good news of the Father. Verse three concerning his Son who verse four was declared Son of God in power according to the Spirit.

Now straight away that is a very different way of starting to think about the Trinity. I wonder if you’ve been in a Bible study group and I think this is the sort of thing that Turkish believers are struggling with when laughed at about the Trinity. And a young believer in the Bible study group asks, “What about the Trinity?” Then how are we to explain this difficult doctrine?

And you know exactly what happens in a Bible study group. Someone’s going to perk up and say, “ yes. You see, I like to think I’ve heard this great illustration. God is like a shamrock leaf. There’s one leaf, but three bits sticking out. And then someone else will say, “No. I find it helpful to think of God like H2O.” That it’s one thing, but it could be ice, water, steam. So you warm up the Father and he becomes sunny and you warm him up some more and he becomes gassy and spiritual.

Or possibly my favorite is no the Trinity is like an egg is one thing. The shell, the white, the yolk, but it’s all one thing. And we wonder why people aren’t awestruck at the eggishness of God. Who is going to fall down in awe at such ridiculousness? And if that’s what the doctrine of the Trinity is, no wonder Christians avoid it. We’re laughing at it. It’s comical, not worshipful.

But Paul here in Romans 1 believes in the Trinity, not because of streaky bacon, H2O, three-headed giants, eggs, but because of the gospel. We’ll see throughout Romans the importance of look chapter 1 verse 7 knowing God our Father who sends his Son that we might have peace with him who sends his spirit of sonship that we might be sons of God crying Abba, Father and so what Paul sees in the gospel is exactly what was being fought for at the council of Nicea that God is as he reveals himself to be. That the Son truly reveals God. And because he truly and eternally is son, the one he reveals truly and eternally is father.

God is a father. He didn’t become a father at some point. That’s who he is most deeply all the way down. That’s his identity. And if that is his identity, if he didn’t just become father at some point, if that’s most truly who he is, the Son reveals the deepest identity of God, that he is father, then he must eternally be that. He can’t become that. Otherwise, that’s not who he is.

And so if God is father, to be who he is, he must have a son. To be father means to beget the Son. The Son who is eternally begotten of his father. Meaning this God would not be who he is if he did not love.

For eternity, the Father has been loving his son, pouring out his spirit upon him. It’s the classic old theologian’s joke. What was God doing before he created the world? He was making hell for those cheeky enough to ask such questions.

But John 17:24, Jesus tells us, “Father, you loved me before the creation of the world.” That is what this God eternally is like. And so we can say because our God is triune and only because our God is triune, therefore God is love.

And so you begin to see why the Trinity is such good news. God is love because God is triune. Because for eternity the Father has been begetting and loving his son. And if there is an illustration of the Trinity that you want to use, then what I would suggest is rather than going for shamrock leaves and H2O, go to Scripture.

And particularly a good place to go would be the baptism of Jesus. And at the baptism of Jesus, what do we see? We see the Father declaring his love for the Son. This is my beloved Son in whom I’m well pleased. And what have I missed out? He declares that as the Spirit rests on his son. For the Spirit is the one who makes the love of the Father known to the Son.

And that’s something you see in Luke 10 where we read that Jesus full of joy in the Holy Spirit cries,”I praise you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth.” So the Spirit makes the love of the Father known to the Son. And so the Son echoes love to the Father.

And so when you start with Scripture, you find that the triune God doesn’t come across as an irrelevant philosophical headache. You see, here is a God who is love, a father loving his son in the fellowship of the Spirit.

A God unlike all idols

There’s a God radically different to all idols. It means the nature of the triune God is at complete odds with the nature of all other gods. All the gods of human religions are needy essentially because eternally loveless. And the reason they create is because they either want friends or servants or slaves. In other words, they’re weak, needy. They need something to complete them.

Think of it like this. Just imagine a god, a single person. For eternity, he’s been alone on his throne. He can never have known love for others. That’s not part of his identity. He is lonely. So why would he create?

Such a God can only create us because he feels some need for us.

And so the glory of such a single person God is the glory of a black hole sucking in taking from us which is exactly why people dread the concept of God because God seems merely burdensome and all the gods of human imagination are merely taking merely being served.

But the triune God in contrast does not need us. He does not live as Paul says in temples made by human hands as if he needed anything. For the Father has never been lonely for eternity. He’s been perfectly satisfied just in knowing his son.

The most limitless mind in existence is eternally satisfied in the perfection and beauty of his son. And so his glory is not the glory of taking and sucking in. His glory is radiant, outgoing, self-giving. That’s what this God is like. Full and fruitful because eternally satisfied, eternally loving. And therefore, you see when Jesus is described as when the Son is described as the radiance of his father’s being. He shows who his father is in his very going out, in his giving out. The hour of his glorification is the hour when he lays down his life to give. That’s the nature of this God’s glory.

And that’s why this God can relate to us by pure grace. No other God can do that. And I think there’s a challenge for the church here. We need to be clear. More obvious than we are, we do not worship just any god.

The god of Scripture we worship is entirely different. All the gods of human imagination and religion. We believe in this God and the living God is so different to all the tiresome idols of human imagination. And in the gospel we see the only God who is completely sufficient, eternally satisfied, radiantly good.

And therefore only with this God is there the possibility of salvation by grace or salvation at all. I find it interesting having just been wandering around here this week. I always enjoy going into a Muslim cemetery and to see I don’t know if you’ve done this to see the tombs with the two stones, one at each end for judgment day for the two angels to land on and to weigh up your good deeds against your bad deeds.

And that’s so symbolic of where the religion is coming from because in Islam with a single person God, there is no word for salvation. The closest concept you could get to salvation is success. And that’s very revealing. The triune God offers salvation for the helpless who’ve achieved nothing because he’s so radiantly kind. Because he has all the resources and capacity for kindness and compassion in himself because he is eternally love.

A single person God requires success. Why would we not proclaim this God? Why would we not be proud, thrilled, delighted in the nature of this God? There is no salvation without the Trinity. And if we go on in Romans from Romans chapter 3 from verse 23, we see, for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and are justified by his grace as a gift through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as a propitiation by his blood. Now if God were not triune, if the Father had no son to die in our place, then God would have to make some third party suffer if there was to be any atonement.

In other words, humanity would have to provide one of us, some perfect man, which is impossible. And it’s not grace because God would be doing nothing for us. We’d be providing the substitute. We’d be having to produce the perfect one, which isn’t grace. And it’s not possible.

It’s only because the Father has his son, God can accomplish the entire work of salvation himself. He provides the sufficient sacrifice. And therefore, it is because God is triune that the cross works that it is an act of grace.

No salvation without the Trinity

So there is no salvation without the Trinity. But I think we can as Christians present a Trinity light gospel. And I wonder if this sounds familiar. Have you ever heard the gospel put like this? It’s like we’ve always all been naughty children in God’s schoolroom. And because we’ve been naughty, God, the school principal or headmaster is going to punish us. But along comes a nice classmate called Jesus who takes the punishment for us so we can go home with a clean school record. Does that sound familiar? And yes, I’ve echoed some lines of the gospel in there. But there’s something profoundly wrong with what I’ve just said. And it’s because I’ve started with a particular definition of God. Who is God? A heavenly headmaster.

That’s how I’ve just defined God for you. What if instead I started with the God who is father, whose very life for eternity has been about loving, delighting in his precious Son, who so enjoyed the perfection of his son that he sent his Son that his son might be the firstborn among many brothers.

Well, then you see a different gospel. The gospel of a God whose ultimate aim is not to send us home with a clean school report, but to embrace us with the very love with which he’s always loved his son.

See, the nature of God radically affects the sort of salvation he will offer. If God is just a heavenly school principal or headmaster, all he can offer is forgiveness. I’ll let you off the punishment. But you know, if God is a solitary individual who’s decided he wants a creation to rule over, that’s all you’re going to get. You’re going to get to be at best an accepted citizen under his kingship, forgiven.

But if God is a father loving his Son by his spirit, then the gospel is far sweeter. Salvation is about becoming the Spirit-anointed sons of God, more than forgiven, more even than righteous, adopted. And here is ultimately how the Trinity shapes the gospel. And we come to Romans 8 to see it. Particularly Romans 8 captures this trinitarian shape to our salvation so wonderfully. And I want to start with the surprise in Romans 8 from verse 14.

Sons in the Son

Your version possibly could look differently, but verse 14, ladies, pay particular attention to this. It says Romans 8:14, “All who are led by the Spirit of God are sons of God. All now you could of course jump on Paul and say this is classic misogynist sexist old language. You mean all who are led by the Spirit of God are children of God inclusive sons and daughters. And it’s okay to talk about sons and daughters, children of God generically. But what Paul’s doing here is not being careless.

He’s making it clear the status that all believers are given, men and women, all who believe in Jesus Christ are given the very status of the Son himself. That’s why it’s not children of God but sons of God. Because I think it’s very easy for us to imagine the Father has his beloved Son who he pleases who he loves and then there are the children of God. Yeah.

Right. And don’t we act like that the whole time? Of course the Father loves his son and then there’s us. But Paul is being as clear as he can. We share in precisely nothing less than the status the Son has. And men have got to make peace with the fact they’re part of the bride of Christ. We’ve all got issues here.

But the status we’re given in the gospel is not some exalted semiangelic status. The Son shares with us his own sonship. He goes on verse 15, “For you did not receive the Spirit of slavery to fall back into fear. You’ve received the spirit of adoption as sons by whom we cry Abba, Father.” The spirit of adoption that united to the Son, adopted in the Son, we receive the very spirit of the Son in us, making us cry the very cry of the Son, aba. And interestingly, the use of this Aramaic word, this one Aramaic word in a Greek epistle is done, of course, to evoke the time Jesus uses this one Aramaic word in Mark 14 when in private praying to his father, he says, “Aba, Father.”

And Paul deliberately here in Galatians 4 shows us as personally as he can that to be a believer to have the Spirit of the Son is to come before the Father as Jesus himself does. The eternally beloved Son comes to us to share with us the love that the Father has always lavished on him. He comes to bring us into the life that is his. That’s what we’re brought into. The very life of God.

Not merely tolerated slaves, tolerated creatures, children, sons. So we’re brought not just as forgiven sinners even but as dearly beloved children sharing the Son’s own abba cry because the Father’s eternal love for the Son has spread to embrace even us in the Son. John Calvin put it like this. He said, “Christ’s aim in redemption was so to restore us to God’s grace as to make the children of men children of God, the heirs of Gehenna, the heirs of the heavenly kingdom.” Now, if God were not a father, he just couldn’t do that.

He couldn’t give us the right to be his children if the Father didn’t enjoy eternal fellowship with the Son. You’ve got to ask, does he even know what fellowship is? Does he have any fellowship he could share with us? So if the Son had always been a creature and never close to the Father, if the Son had always been distant from the Father, you’ve got to say, well, what kind of communion with God can he share with us? He’s never enjoyed closeness with the Father.

How can he bring us close? So if God was a single person, if God had no son, salvation would look entirely different. If God’s a single person, he might allow us to live under his rule and protection. Maybe he might even possibly be approached through intermediaries.

That’s very common. Single person God doesn’t want to get too close. Whether it’s angels or saints or depends on your system, there’ll usually be intermediaries to keep the distance. Such a God maybe would even offer some form of forgiveness, but he couldn’t offer closeness.

And since by definition he would not be eternally loving because he’s eternally solitary, is he going to offer forgiveness for free? Most unlikely. And so distant hirelings, we will remain. If God’s not triune, we’re never going to hear the Son’s golden words to his father. John 17:23, “Father, you have loved them even as you have loved me.”

No other system of thought can offer that. The gospel of this God gives intimate access to the most high. Beloved sons of God filled with the spirit of adoption. No other God could bring us so close. No other God could so win our hearts is so gracious, so good, so compassionate.

And so with this God with all sincerity we can say our Father knowing we pray as it were through Jesus approaching our Father secure in him and that is exactly what enables a heartfelt rather than a ritualistic prayer life. It is delight in this God that creates delight in prayer.

Delight yourself in the Lord and he will give you the desires of your heart. With this God, prayer becomes not mere duty but privilege of being able to access such a father knowing he listens in kindness. We can pour out our hearts to one whose ears are open to us.

And once again, it all means you’ve got a salvation that is of grace from beginning to end. Because if salvation is not about adoption, it’s not so clear that it has to be all of grace. See, I think often Christians talk like this. We talk of the gospel as our problem is God’s standards are very high and we haven’t quite met up somehow. Maybe we haven’t met up a lot, but somehow we haven’t met up. And the way we all work is, well, I’m a bit better than most. I can probably just cover the gap.

And so, even though we say salvation by grace, people are always thinking, I could add a bit. But if salvation is adoption as children of God, then you see performance can have nothing to do with it. Is just an irrelevant category for attaining salvation because you can’t earn your way into a family.

God’s blessing is sonship, becoming a child of God. And therefore effort can have nothing to do with it. And this is how Paul speaks particularly in Galatians that your efforts can make you a slave but no amount of effort can make you a son. All your efforts to win God’s blessing by your own strength will make you a slave.

and slaves don’t inherit. But sonship is free. And that is right at the heart of the Christian battle, knowing that the blessing God has is completely free. For he is a loving Father who adopts his children because of his kindness.

The Spirit in our hearts

And that Abba cry also tells us something else about how the Trinity shapes the gospel. Because that Abba cry isn’t just about a new status. Those who call on God as their father, Paul says, do so because they have been transformed.

So in Romans 8, he says verse 7 that the sinful natural mind is hostile to God. Naturally it’s not just that we’re unable to call God father. We wouldn’t want to. The natural mind is hostile to God. There is no love for him there. So it might try to buy him off but it doesn’t love him.

But in salvation, Romans 5:5, God pours his love into our hearts through the Holy Spirit he’s given us. And so he transforms our hearts, turning them from a love of sin and a hatred of God towards a love of God and a hatred of sin. So that those who were once hostile to God begin to cry, “Aba!”

out of hearts, not just a mere right to do so, but a desire to know a God who’s won their hearts. And so, think what’s going on there in that transformation. God the Father has eternally delighted in his son.

And we’ve been created that we might share that enjoyment of the Son. And so just as the Spirit moves on the firstborn Son, he moves on all the sons of God, the Spirit moves on the sons of God so that we cry as the Son himself cry cries. We cry, I praise you, father, lord of heaven and earth. A transformation has happened in our hearts. It’s not just we’re allowed to do so. For the first time, our eyes are open to see the glory of God and we love him and we long to praise him.

And this in fact is the heartbeat of what it means to be godly with the triune God. With all other gods, it’s quite different. With other gods, godliness is mere performance. Jesus said in John 8:42, “If God were your father, you would love me.”

The Father’s very identity consists in his love for his son. And when you love Jesus, that is when you reflect what is most characteristic about the Son. There is nothing so godly, nothing so godlike as love for Jesus because that is what the Father is like.

He loves his son. The Spirit not only enables us to know and love Christ, the Spirit also gives us the mind of Christ, making us like him. So that not only do we love the Son as the Father does, we find ourselves saying like Jesus, John 14:31, I love the Father.

At the heart of our transformation into the likeness of the Son is our delight in the Father. At the heart of our transformation into the likeness of the Son is our delight in the Father. In the heart of our transformation, our growth in godliness, our likeness to the Father is a love for the Son.

And so that is the work of the Spirit in us. Not merely giving us the strength to go through a duty or a ritual. He unites us to the Son so that the Father’s love for the Son encompasses us. He draws us to share the Father’s own enjoyment of his son.

He causes us to share the Son’s delight in his father. And that is why it is a delicious thing to keep in step with the Spirit. It means something wonderfully transformative. The Spirit is not about bringing us to mere external performance but bringing us to love him, glory in him. Find our enjoyment in him.

That is entering the life of this happy satisfied God. What we love and enjoy is foundationally important. For it is our desires that drive our behavior. And that’s the issue. We’re created in the image of the God who is love. We’re created as lovers. But what’s gone wrong is we’ve not stopped loving. It’s that our love has been perverted. And we’ve become, as Paul said, lovers of money, lovers of pleasure, lovers of self, lovers of anything but God.

But the Spirit’s first work is to set our desires in order. To open our eyes, give us the Father’s own relish for his son and his son’s ways, the Son’s own enjoyment of the Father. The H Heidelberg catechism puts it beautifully like this. It says, “What is the new birth, the coming to life of the new man?” And it answers, it is wholehearted joy in God through Christ and a delight to do every kind of good as God wants us to, not merely doing some good actions.

The Spirit’s deeper desire is to bring a hearty enjoyment of God through Christ so that we delight to know him. Delight in his ways and therefore want what he wants and hate the thought of grieving him. That is the life the Spirit gives us. He gives us himself opening us up to the lovely fellowship of the Father, the Son, and the Spirit winning our hearts to share their satisfaction and pleasure.

Sharing God’s harmony

And just one more thing to note from the last chapter of Romans in the gospel or the last few chapters really from we could go from chapter 12. In the gospel the Spirit not only reconciles us to God, he reconciles us to each other.

This is the heart of Romans 12 to the end. Really the Spirit leads us to Romans 12:10. Love one another with brotherly affection. For the God of peace and fellowship reconciles male and female, black and white, Jew and Gentile, all to the same uniting love of God, which spills over then into a heartfelt love of each other.

And so the Father, Son, and Spirit share their harmony that there might be harmony on earth that people of different tongues and ethnicities might cry together. Salvation belongs to our God who sits on the throne. How does the Trinity shape the gospel? The Trinity makes the gospel. The Trinity is the only God you would want to know.

You would want or be able to trust. The Trinity makes salvation possible and the Trinity makes salvation sweet. Only with this God are we welcomed in as brothers and sisters together. There to share the very joy of God and cry together, aba, father. So now the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all. Amen.