
Last Sunday (march 25, 2007) I preached about the person of the Holy Spirit at the eleven am service and I remember my friend Ellen’s comments a few years ago during our ENLI2 class, “If we have God the father, and we have Jesus as God the Son; then is the Holy Spirit the equivalent of God the mother? To which our senior pastor (Gilbert Foliente) replied, “NO Ellen, it’s the Holy Trinity not the holy family.” – Hilarious. (hi Elle, hope I remember the story right!)
But really, how do you explain this mystery?
Well to start with, I realized that the Holy Spirit, God the father and God the son’s being and relationship with each other or what we usually call in church as the Trinity is something that we cannot fully define and fully comprehend with our limited human minds. We can only attempt to describe it.
Here is one cool way my fiancée found out on the net how to describe the mystery:
Light three candles. Notice that there are three separate flames. Now, with help from another set of hands hold all three candles so that the flames come together as one flame. Together they are one flame, yet three separate flames.
God the Son (Jesus) is fully, completely God.
God the Father is fully, completely God. And
God the Holy Spirit is fully, completely God.
Yet there is only one God. Not three separate Gods. One God.
Simply put, they are one but they are also three. Three AND one, not three IN one.