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[00:00:00] Get. Good morning, St. Paul Lutheran Church. This is Sunday Drive to Church. I better get to it or else there's not going to be a Sunday Drive to Church podcast for this morning. Trinity Sunday, May 31, the year of our Lord 2026.
[00:00:14] It's the octave of Pentecost. So always the eighth day after Pentecost Sunday is Holy Trinity Sunday, where we confess the Trinity and unity and the Unity and Trinity, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, co equal, co eternal.
[00:00:32] Oh, God be praised. Let's pray.
[00:00:35] Almighty and everlasting God, you have given us grace to acknowledge the glory of the eternal Trinity by the confession of a true faith and to worship the unity in the power of the Divine Majesty.
[00:00:48] Keep us steadfast in this faith and defend us from all adversities.
[00:00:53] For you, O Father, Son and Holy Spirit, live and reign one God, now and forever.
[00:00:59] Amen.
[00:01:01] Amen. There is not a lot of times that we have prayers to the Holy Trinity, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, but it shows up a few times, and when it does, it's wonderful. This is one of them. Trinity Sunday.
[00:01:15] What is unique about today? We'll confess the Athanasian Creed. In fact, I was just digging into the Athanasian Creed, stalling my recording this Sunday morning.
[00:01:25] I said I got to record, but I think I was thinking about doing the whole Sunday drive home on the Athanasian Creed.
[00:01:32] Then I decided, no, I'm going to do Sunday school on the Athanasian Creed. So we're going to pause our Matthew study and we're going to dig into the Athanasian Creed a bit this morning because there's so many things there. So just real quick, by the way, it's in two parts.
[00:01:46] There are two great mysteries of the Christian faith.
[00:01:50] The mystery of the Holy Trinity, one God, three persons, one substance, one essence, three persons. And then the second great mystery of the Christian faith is the incarnation. One person, Jesus Christ, with two substances or two natures, divine and human, and the Athanasian Creed. Those 44 verses of the creed confess these two. 28 on the mystery of the Trinity, and then 44 -28 on the other on the mystery of the Incarnation. There's a couple of things that people get hung up on the Athanasian Creed, namely the word Catholic, which, remember, means according to the whole. That's no big deal. Everywhere, in every place taught. So this is not the unique doctrine. This is the Christian doctrine. The second thing that people get caught up on is the judgment of works at the end that will be judged based on what we did. But this is the constant teaching of the Scripture. So we let it stand. It turns out we say, well, aren't we saved by grace, through faith, not by works? Yes, but when God judges on the last day, it turns out that a judgment based on our works and a judgment based on our faith yields the same result. Because remember Hebrews 11, I think the key verse apart from faith, it's impossible to please God. The third thing that hangs people up on the Augsburg Confession. We'll talk about this more in Sunday school, but just to touch on it here, is that it says you have to believe this to be saved. And people say, I don't understand what's going on here. Can I be saved? Without understanding these subtleties of the Trinity? What it's saying there is that first of all, there is only one saving God, and that is Father, Son and Holy Spirit, the Holy Trinity no other God can save.
[00:03:29] That's why John says, or Jesus says in John, I'm the way, the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father but by me. And then John writes about Jesus, this is life, that they may know you, the only begotten Son and the Father who sent you, so that there is no salvation apart from this true God.
[00:03:49] Now, does that mean we have to understand all the different doctrines? No. But if we have any other doctrine, if God is not Holy Trinity, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, then there is no salvation. And if Jesus is not the God man, if the Incarnation is not true, then there is no salvation.
[00:04:08] So the only way to be saved is for these things to be true and for us to confess something different is to confess an unsaving faith.
[00:04:22] Now, does that immediately mean that you're damned?
[00:04:27] I think false doctrine is always working its way into our soul like cancer in the body.
[00:04:34] So any false doctrine is going to be eating away at saving faith.
[00:04:39] And if we have a false doctrine of the Holy Trinity, it's eating away at our salvation. If we have a false doctrine of the Incarnation, it's eating away at our salvation. Does it immediately destroy it?
[00:04:51] Probably not. There's this living, this kind of sick living, and we confess that this felicitous inconsistency. That's how Francis Pieper, the old Lutheran theologian, used to talk about, it's beautiful that it's possible, possible to be inconsistent.
[00:05:08] If you were really consistent about your trinitarian error, then you would lose your faith in Christ. But you're inconsistent. You've got this heretical doctrine over here and saving faith over there, just like having a Great sickness and being alive. Anyhow, we got to get through those three things, because then we got to see what's in the Athanasian creed.
[00:05:31] It starts out, and if you want to think about it like this, I'll just kind of notice three things.
[00:05:37] One, two, three. Four things. I want to point out four things to you. The first is the language of substance and person.
[00:05:47] So this is already in verse four. We worship one God in Trinity and Trinity in unity, neither confusing the persons nor dividing the substance.
[00:05:59] So the persons refers to Father, Son and Holy Spirit, and these should not be confused, mingled with each other.
[00:06:06] But the substance refers to the divinity, to the divine nature, and this should not be divided.
[00:06:13] So it's going to go on to then list sort of four, and then two attributes that belong to the substance. Oh, sorry. But before we get to that, there's another set of vocab words that I want you to pay attention to.
[00:06:29] So it says, father's one person, the sons another. The Holy Spirit is another three persons. The Godhead of the Father and of the Son of the Holy Spirit is one. And then two technical terms that are used. The glory, equal. And that's going to be later on. Co equal, the majesty, co eternal.
[00:06:50] Those are the two words that we use to describe the shared substance of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, Co equal and co eternal. And then it's going to list four attributes that are under that co equal, co, eternal category, uncreated, infinite, eternal, and almighty.
[00:07:12] So there's one uncreated, one infinite, one eternal, one almighty, and then the. The two last ones. So remember, I said six. Those four and two. Those four. And then the two go, God and Lord.
[00:07:25] The Father is God, the Son is God, the Holy Spirit is God. But there's not three Gods. There's one God.
[00:07:30] God is co eternal, Co equal. Just as the Father's Lord, the Son is Lord, the Holy Spirit is Lord. They're not three Lords, but one Lord.
[00:07:38] So if you divide, if you put a line there, and on one side is eternal, infinite, uncreated, Almighty. That's where God is, That's where the Lord is. And there's only one there, one substance, but three persons.
[00:07:53] How then are those persons to be distinguished?
[00:07:58] Not confused, but nor are they to be divided.
[00:08:04] And that's the second part of the first article.
[00:08:07] And here it's going to talk about these inner workings of the Holy Trinity. The Father is not made or created or begotten.
[00:08:15] So what makes the Father different than the Son and the Spirit? Well, he's not begotten, he begets and creates. But we, the creature, are created. It's the Son that is begotten, which means to Father, to beget is to Father. So how is the Father distinguished? The Father is who fathers, and who is the Son?
[00:08:40] He's neither created, but begotten of the Father. In other words, he's sonned.
[00:08:46] So the Father fathers and the Son is sunned. And that's the distinction. I mean, the name itself is the distinction and the same for the Holy Spirit. Because what does it mean to be Spirit? It means to proceed, to be spirited.
[00:09:02] So the Holy Spirit is of the Father and of the Son. There's the filioque in the Athanasian creed. Neither made nor created nor begotten.
[00:09:11] So the Spirit is not, does not father and is not fathered, is not sunned.
[00:09:20] He proceeds from the Father and the Son.
[00:09:26] So the Father begets and spirits.
[00:09:29] The Son is begotten and spirits.
[00:09:32] The Spirit is spirited.
[00:09:38] So that their titles are their distinguishing characteristic in the Holy Trinity.
[00:09:49] And now we say, well, what does it mean to Father or to be fathered in the one divine essence? And the answer is, I don't know.
[00:09:57] That's why it's a mystery so great, so great a mystery. I don't even think, you know, sometimes there's these things that we talk about, how this will understand that once we get to heaven. I think that's true. I mean, history will make sense and so forth. But I think this mystery of the fathering of the Father and the sonning of the Son and the Spiriting of the Spirit is who we will marvel at that into the eternal life that will be given.
[00:10:26] Then it goes to the second great mystery, the Incarnation.
[00:10:30] And it says, whoever desires to be saved must think thus of the Trinity. That's conclusion of the first part. It's also necessary for everlasting salvation that one faith believe the Incarnation of our Lord Jesus Christ.
[00:10:45] So now we get to the language of the Incarnation, where we find the language of substance and person.
[00:10:53] And it says, he is God begotten from the substance of the Father before all ages. He is man born of the substance of his mother in this age. So two essences or substance or natures.
[00:11:06] Perfect God and perfect man.
[00:11:08] He is God a man. He's not two, but one Christ.
[00:11:12] And then how is he one? He won, however, not by the conversion of the divinity into flesh, but by the assumption of the humanity into God.
[00:11:24] So this personal union.
[00:11:26] Well, that's what it says next. One altogether, not by confusion of Substance, but by unity of person.
[00:11:34] So again, we're back to this.
[00:11:37] It's not a.
[00:11:38] When we talk about the Trinity, we don't divide the substance.
[00:11:42] When we talk about the Incarnation, we do. We don't confuse the substance.
[00:11:50] So the unity of Christ is a unity of person.
[00:11:53] In some ways, the Incarnation is the inverse mystery of the Trinity, where with the Trinity, it's one substance, three persons. With Christ, it's two substances, one person, that personal union.
[00:12:08] Wow.
[00:12:09] And it's not by changing God into man, like the old pagan myths, like the gods become a man.
[00:12:17] He. When He. When the Word becomes flesh, he tabernacles with us. So He. He. He remains the Word, and yet the flesh is brought into the divinity with Christ so that there's one Christ who is both God and man.
[00:12:36] In him, the divine nature dwells bodily. And it's. And it's not part of the divine nature. He's perfect God. That's what it says here.
[00:12:47] And it's not. He's not partially human like a human body, but God takes the soul part. No, he's. He's rational.
[00:12:57] How does it say it here?
[00:12:59] Rational soul and human flesh.
[00:13:03] So there's no partialism, either on the divine nature side or on the human nature side. He's. He's perfect God and perfect man.
[00:13:11] Wow. How can you understand that? You can't. We just have to confess it, because there is no other God who exists. It is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and there is no other God who can save. Okay, well, that's. We're going to talk about Sunday school. I've already talked about it too much. Okay, let me roll through the. The other parts of the liturgy. So. Oh, so that was my whole point. Don't. Don't miss the.
[00:13:35] All the great substance that's here in the Athanasian Creed. I mean, it's like a. It's like a theology book on two pages.
[00:13:43] It's so good. And it comes at you fast. Remember, that's why we do the Sunday drive to church, because in the liturgy, it comes at you fast, and then all of a sudden, we're. We're listening to the sermon, and I'm already.
[00:13:53] And. And it's one infinite, but.
[00:13:57] But Father's infinite, Son's infinite, the Holy Spirit's infinite. But there's only one infinite, not three.
[00:14:02] My mind is still rolling about that. And we're on to the next thing, so don't let it roll over you too fast. The psalm is Psalm 29. It's a beautiful hymn. Of praise.
[00:14:14] It starts out with a call to the angels to worship God. And I think that must be why it's Trinity Sunday appointed. Ascribe to the Lord, O heavenly beings. Ascribe to the Lord glory and strength. Ascribe to the Lord, Glory to his name. Worship the Lord in the splendor of holiness. It has this funny, because this is exalted picture.
[00:14:34] I'm surprised by Psalm 29 because it has this picture that the Lord is ruling over everything and then he gives baby deer.
[00:14:46] That seems a very specific thing, that the. Verse nine, the voice of the Lord. Oh, yeah, don't miss the voice of the Lord.
[00:14:59] Verse 3. The voice of the Lord is over the waters. Verse 4. The voice of the Lord is powerful. The voice of the Lord is full of majesty. Verse 5, the voice of the Lord breaks the cedars.
[00:15:09] Verse 7. The voice of the Lord flashes forth flames of fire. The voice. Verse 8, the verse of the Lord shakes the wilderness. And then verse nine, the voice of the Lord makes the deer give birth.
[00:15:24] And then strips the force bare. That seems like a very tender thing that the voice of the Lord does in the midst of all these very powerful things. Who is the voice of the Lord, by the way?
[00:15:33] The word Jesus.
[00:15:35] So he's making all these things happen.
[00:15:38] The Lord controls the cosmos by his voice.
[00:15:44] Beautiful.
[00:15:45] Old testament, Isaiah 6.
[00:15:49] You have the whole range of Isaiah's ministry noted there.
[00:15:53] Prophet Jeremiah.
[00:15:55] Sorry, prophet isaiah in Jerusalem, 730 to 680.
[00:16:00] This is talking about his call into ministry. The year that King Uzziah died is probably the year 740.
[00:16:11] That's the Steinman chronology.
[00:16:15] It's interesting that Isaiah has his calling so deep into his prophetic book. Most have it right up front, like Ezekiel, chapter one, two, three, all the others right away, like Amos, chapter one, verse one. But Isaiah, you got to get to chapter six to hear his call. And he's in the temple, he's a priest, and he's there ministering before the curtain. So he's in the holy place and doing the incense. And the. The curtain is there, protecting the holy of holies. And in a vision, it opens up and he sees the Lord seated on the throne.
[00:16:49] And he falls to the ground and says, I'm a man of unclean lips, and I live amongst a people of unclean lips. That's the picture that we have of Isaiah in our stained glass window. It's so beautiful. And then the Lord touches the lips of Isaiah.
[00:17:05] He sends the angel to grab the coal. Maybe it's the coal that Isaiah himself, lit from the incense altar, touches his lips. Your. Your guilt's taken away, your sins atoned for. Why is this Trinity Sunday? It's because it's. When Isaiah gets this glimpse of the heavenly throne. He hears the angels singing their. Their holy, holy, holy, holy to the Father, holy to the Son, holy to the Spirit, the trace hagion.
[00:17:32] And that's that Trinitarian praise.
[00:17:35] Beautiful.
[00:17:37] Whoo.
[00:17:40] The gradual between. We're back to the gradual now that we're past Easter season.
[00:17:45] Blessed are youe, O Lord, who beholds the deep, who dwells between the cherubim. Blessed are youe. In the firmament of heaven greatly we praise forever. It's given to us by the liturgy as a liturgical text, but I bet you you can find it in the Apocrypha. Ooh, boy. I wonder if someone.
[00:18:01] I think this. Oh, I should have looked this up before I started talking about it. I think this comes from apocryphal Daniel, the Song of the Three Children.
[00:18:10] I could be wrong about that, but there's a couple of times. Remember that these apocryphal texts show up in the.
[00:18:17] In the intervenant chants, either as the it, as the antiphon for the introit, or as the gradual or verse.
[00:18:26] I better look that up. And someone asked me in Sunday school. And so between now, whenever it is five in the morning on Sunday and Sunday school, 9:30, I'll see if I'm able to look that up. Romans 11 is this great kind of culmination of praise. So Paul has, In the first 11 chapters of Romans, really gone through all of doctrine. The power of the gospel, the danger of sin, the wrath of God, the gift of justification, the gift of holy baptism to live flesh and spirit, the conquering that we have in Christ, the comfort of the doctrine of election and how that applies to the Jewish people. And then he gets to the end of all of this, especially to the end of the discussion of the doctrine of election, the great mystery.
[00:19:15] And then he concludes with his doxology.
[00:19:18] And this will be the transition to his more slightly practical conclusion. The last four chapters of Romans.
[00:19:26] Oh, the depth of the riches and the wisdom and the knowledge of God. How unsearchable are his judgments and how inscrutable his ways.
[00:19:34] Who has known the mind of the Lord, who has been his counselor, who has given a gift to him that he might be repaid for from him and through him, and to him are all things.
[00:19:49] To him be glory forever. Amen.
[00:19:52] From him and through him and to Him.
[00:19:55] Wow. So all things come from the Lord. All things are. Are given through the mediation of the Lord, and all things are returned to the Lord.
[00:20:08] Such a beautiful text. Wow.
[00:20:12] John 3:1 17 is our gospel lesson. You know, if you look in the old TLH, this lesson was John 1 John 3:1 15.
[00:20:23] And I'll tell you, I did that for a few years.
[00:20:29] It was hard to stop at verse 15. Just as the Son of Man was lifted up in the wilderness, just as a serpent was lifted up in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up. That whoever believes in him should not perish, but have everlasting life. Stop right before the most precious of all verses. For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son that whosoever would believe in him would not perish, but have. Have not will have, but has everlasting life.
[00:21:01] Oh.
[00:21:02] So I think every preacher I know would Preach on John 3:16, even though it wasn't part of the reading. And so I think the. I think the hymnal committee must said, well, we better just.
[00:21:12] We better just add the last two verses to that section. For God did not come into the world to condemn the world.
[00:21:19] God did not send His Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through Jesus. Through Him.
[00:21:28] It's the story of Jesus talking to Nicodemus. It's early ministry. So it's just in John, the other gospel writers don't have this. And Jesus in that early part of his ministry was spending some time in Jerusalem. And Nicodemus, one of the Sanhedrin, a Pharisee, but the San, remember the Sanhedrin, that would be like the. The Supreme Court and the Senate all combined into one in Israel.
[00:21:49] And here's Nicodemus, who comes to visit Jesus.
[00:21:53] Later, we'll find Nicodemus helping Joseph of Arimathea, another council member who believed in him, but secretly for fear of the Jews being the ones to take care of Jesus at his burial.
[00:22:06] So Nicodemus, who comes to Jesus now with curiosity, but without faith, it seems like without faith that changes in the end. It seems like Nicodemus is a believer in the Lord Jesus. And Jesus gives them all this incredible, incredible theological insight. You have to be born from above.
[00:22:25] Your birth from below get you condemned. It's your birth from above that gets you saved.
[00:22:33] How can you do that? Says Nicodemus. We have to be born of water in the spirit. That's baptism.
[00:22:39] In other words, the Lord has to claim you, adopt you into his family. Nicodemus, how can I go into my mother's womb and be born a second time?
[00:22:46] Jesus says, I'm not going to talk. Come on.
[00:22:50] I'm teaching you earthly things and you can't get it. How can I teach you heavenly things?
[00:22:55] I'm not talking about the birth of the flesh. I'm talking about the birth of the spirit.
[00:23:00] So that baptism is that spiritual birth, so wonderful.
[00:23:06] And it's not by accident that we have this baptismal conversation with Nicodemus on Trinity Sunday, because those passages about baptism are where the Holy Trinity is most clearly revealed.
[00:23:19] For example, we have the baptism of Jesus where he's in the water and the Spirit descends like the dove. And the Father speaks, this is my beloved Son, in whom I'm well pleased. And the place where the doctrine of the Trinity is most clearly confessed is when Jesus gives instruction for baptism. Go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.
[00:23:42] We've taken that as the invocation, the calling upon the name of the Lord, the name, single name, because name belongs to essence or substance. And remember, there's only one substance. And what is that name? Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
[00:23:57] Amazing.
[00:24:01] So that we bless ourselves with that name when we wake up in the morning and we say, in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. And like Luther says in the small catechism, we bless ourselves with the sign of the Holy Cross.
[00:24:13] That's the name that was put on us in our baptism. That's the name by which we live and in which we die in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. And so it's not by accident that the doctrine of the Trinity and the gift of holy baptism are connected to one another.
[00:24:30] You guys are going to love the hymns. Holy, Holy, Holy is our entrance hymn. Father Most Holy. This beautiful.
[00:24:36] Look, it's 10th century medieval hymn for the hymn of the day, Triune God Be Thou Our Stay. That's that Luther hymn. It's very repetitive, but so it's worth trying to memorize. God the Father Be our stay. Oh, let us perish never. This is a good spiritual warfare hymn. Cleanse us from our sins we pray and grant us life forever and then keep us from the evil one. It's three times through, so try. You should try. First time, sing it out of the hymnal. Second time, try to not sing it out of the hymnal. Like, look only when you need to. And third time, look away. This would be good to do for the liturgy, too. We've been in the liturgy now, divine service setting three for a solid year and, well, solid half a year, almost every Sunday. So you should be able to get through the liturgy now without looking. It's fun.
[00:25:26] Immortal, Invisible, God only wise. Crown them with many crowns.
[00:25:30] And then our closing hymn, we praise you and acknowledge you. Oh, that Thaxton Ted Am. It's glorious. All right. I bet I'll. Oh, yeah, that'll do it for Trinity Sunday. Remember in Bible class, we're going to look at the Athanasian Creed?
[00:25:45] Someone remembered asked me about the thing that I mentioned and already forgot. I better.
[00:25:53] I'm sure I'll remember. God's Peace be with. See you soon.
