“Be deeply Trinitarian” by Sinclair Ferguson
“At least in some of our churches, not a Lord’s Day passes without the congregation confessing one God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. But as is commonly recognized, Western Christianity has often had a special tendency to either an explicit or a pragmatic Unitarianism, be it of the Father (liberalism, for all practical purposes), the Son (evangelicalism, perhaps not least in its reactions against liberalism), or the Spirit (Charismaticism with its reaction to both of the previous).
This is, doubtless, a caricature. But my concern here arises from a sense that Bible-believing preachers (as well as others) continue to think of the Trinity as the most speculative and therefore the least practical of all doctrines. After all, what can you “do” as a result of hearing preaching that emphasizes God as Trinity? Well, at least inwardly if not outwardly, fall down in prostrate worship that the God whose being is so ineffable, so incomprehensible to my mental math, seeks fellowship with us!
I sometimes wonder if it is failure here that has led to churches actually to believe it when they are told by “church analysts” and the like that “the thing your church does best is worship . . . small groups, well you need to work on that . . . .” Doesn’t that verge on blasphemy? (Verge on it? There is surely only One who can assess the quality of our worship. This approach confuses aesthetics with adoration).
John’s Gospel suggests to us that one of the deepest burdens on our Lord’s heart during his last hours with his disciples was to help them understand that God’s being as Trinity is the heart of what makes the gospel both possible and actual, and that it is knowing him as such that forms the very lifeblood of the life of faith (cf. John 13–17). Read Paul with this in mind, and it becomes obvious how profoundly woven into the warp and woof of his gospel his understanding of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit is.
Our people need to know that, through the Spirit, their fellowship is with the Father and with His Son Jesus Christ. Would they know that from my preaching?”
–Sinclair Ferguson, “A Preacher’s Decalogue,” in Some Pastors and Teachers: Reflecting a Biblical Vision of What Every Minister is Called to Be (Carlisle, PA: Banner of Truth, 2017), 756-757.
