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This last week

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Just to be more specific a young black male

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Lost their life in an encounter with a police officer in Rock Island and there's been reports about it. You can look up but

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Jake Van Damme and I were gonna have a Monday night meeting and we were gonna meet at a different place

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but then I saw Sheree who is one of the

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part of the family that owns roosters and

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Roosters is a black owned business here in town that I like to hang out with and so Sheree just said hey a lot going on

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She specifically was talking about that and so if anybody wants to talk come come down. I'll be behind the bar

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So I told Jake all right. We're going there like instead of going over here because let's go and listen to her

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let's go talk to her see how she is and

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There wasn't like a large group of people

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but

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It's the way it's like we're trying to learn how to be not just people who want to reconcile

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but actually be anti-racism

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which means you have to decide to put yourself in the position to have those conversations and

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To carry yourself with humility where you're listening, you know, just having an opinion right away

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But be listening to what is happening. And so I appreciate that Andy

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If we've never met my name is Greg. I'm one of the pastors here at the house

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I would love to have a coffee with you a drink of your choice with you

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Whatever that is and get to know you hear your story

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If you want to talk about Jesus, I love to talk about Jesus

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And so I would love to do that with you

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We are in the second week of a series that we are just calling Trinity

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Because it's just about the Trinity this this doctrinal idea that has existed in Christianity for really

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1600 solid years, but you know

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Shadows of it were floating around for a long time before them before they really kind of completely nailed it down now

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Advancements in technology. Did you know there was only 66 years between the first manned flight and

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a person setting foot on the moon

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66 years

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to go from

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flying for the first time on earth to

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traveling through space and

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Putting your feet on a floating hunk of rock

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That's out there in space. It's amazing how quickly technology

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Can advance the engine in that first plane

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Had 12 horsepower

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If you have a riding lawnmower, you have more horsepower in your riding lawnmower

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I'm not kidding riding lawnmowers have between 12 or 14 and 16

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Horsepower that first plane flew 120 glorious feet

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for 10 seconds

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Hmm for I think it was actually 12 seconds so in 10 feet per second 66 years later the Saturn 5

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That left Earth for the moon

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Had 160 million horsepower

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160 million horsepower for keeping track. That's a little bit more than a lawnmower

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The first stage of the Saturn 5 flight traveled 58 miles in 168 seconds

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58 miles and that is 1800 feet per second

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And it only took 66 years

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Humans are curious

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We are compelled to understand

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To improve to expand to explore

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Here's the thing after all the advancements after all the discoveries after all the equations

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Scratched out on boards the basic physics of flight are the same

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Learning more going further didn't and doesn't change or negate the initial truth that they began with

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What the Wright brothers did was not erased by Neil and Buzz yeah

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So if a fully formed concept of the Trinity is like reaching the moon

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Discovering or deciding on a doctrine of the Trinity didn't destroy the initial physics of faith

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That the first Christians began with

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Those basics were enough

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Those basics were enough for hundreds of years like pastor Jen said last week

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It was about 350 years after the resurrection of Jesus that the doctrine of the Trinity was cemented

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In the Nicene Creed

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350 years

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So why did it take so long?

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We have to keep in mind what kind of Messiah that the Israelites were waiting for back then

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They weren't assuming that a Messiah would claim divinity

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They weren't assuming that a Messiah would claim oneness with God

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They were waiting for someone sent from God, but not necessarily God from God

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Why?

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Well primarily because Judaism is famously monotheistic

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Meaning a religion of only one God

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Of all the central concepts of Judaism God being one is about as central as it gets

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One of their most important prayers is called the Shema

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They're told in Deuteronomy to teach this to their children all throughout their life to say it every day

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It says here oh Israel the Lord is our God the Lord is one

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They were surrounded by pantheistic pluralistic cultures that believed in many gods

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It was unique

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For them to believe there was only one so it wasn't immediately obvious how Jesus could be walking around on earth as a human

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And simultaneously be one with the Father without making that multiple gods

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Do you see that?

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Remember all the first Christians were Jewish

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All of them

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None of them were looking to leave Judaism

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Because they believed in Jesus

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None of them were trying to stop being Jewish

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And so for hundreds of years those early Christians into the next generations

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They held the mystery of Jesus's divinity in tension

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So for hundreds of years

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They moved

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From 120 to 120

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From 120 seconds of flight

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To the moon

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Beginning this was enough they believed that God was Father

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That Jesus was somehow divinely sent by the Father to forgive our sins to reconcile us to the Father

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Romans 10 9 if you declare with your mouth that Jesus is Lord

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And believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead you will be saved that was enough

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That is what made you a Christian

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You didn't have to understand the hypostatic union or the eternal interpersonal dwelling of the triune god

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But we're human

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We are compelled to understand

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To improve

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To expand

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To explore

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Trouble with that

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Said if we're not careful sometimes the more we learn the more divided we become

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One of the frustrations that Jesus had was how religion had stacked rules upon rules

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They learned things they discovered things they decided things and things got stacked on top of each other

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The development of Christian theology over the years is very similar

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We have systemized the divine

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We have turned the loving relationship of Jesus into a factory floor pushing packages from point A to point B

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What was the most personal act in history the birth life death and resurrection of Jesus

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Son of God has been depersonalized and fragmented into a system of beliefs

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That you have to believe a certain way

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Theology is good

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We need it but sometimes people that have been to the moon treat people in planes like they're not flying

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Paul one of the New Testament authors wants us to think about it differently

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In first Corinthians 8 he's talking about this divide between people that eat certain foods and those that did it

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He says the problem might not be the food guys

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It's about our knowledge

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Or what we think about this food that divides us he says

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Now about food sacrifice to idols we know that we all possess knowledge

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But knowledge puffs up

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Maybe you've heard that phrase you've heard that phrase knowledge puffs up

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He's talking about how spiritual insight causes us to be prideful towards one another

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Oh well I know this about God and you don't

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I know this about God and you don't oh I'm closer to the Lord now

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He continues

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But love builds up

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Where knowledge puffs up he says that love builds up

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Those who think they know something do not yet know as they ought to know

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And then he gets to the point he gives us the main point verse 3

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But whoever loves God is known by God

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He doesn't all the things that you think you understand all the things you're trying to know

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If you will just know love then you will be known by God

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I feel like it is more important to the writers of the scripture that we be known

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Than to be sure of all the things that we know does that make sense?

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Paul's warning that what we think we know gets in the way of the most basic things that we all need to understand

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Verse 6 and that is for us that there is but one God the Father from whom all things came and for whom we live

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And there is but one Lord Jesus Christ through whom all things came and through whom we live

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That is the base one God the Father one Lord Jesus Christ and that is what he wants us to agree about

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That is the base that is the first flight

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Because having the right information does not always get you closer to God

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Sometimes it pushes you further from each other

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And I think I would rather be flying barely off the surface of the earth with a community of faith

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Than to feel the chasm between the earth and the moon

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Some of us in this room have masters degrees in theological subjects

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Some of us have pastoral leadership degrees in education

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There are people in our church that actually have PhDs in Bible related subjects

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Some of us have never read the Bible from cover to cover

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Some of us have never read all four gospels

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But you do not need to know it all to be known by God

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Because knowledge puffs up

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Love builds up

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Now I could end my sermon right there like kind of in the name of avoiding puffing up by giving you more knowledge

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I should do that every week

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I would talk about Jesus for a few minutes and I would not want anyone to get prideful so we will end it there

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But we do happen to live on the other side of the Council of Nicaea

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And it may be helpful to have some idea of how they got there

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And how they landed on the doctrine of the Trinity

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So let's go

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Remember the roots of Christianity are in what?

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Judaism

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And Judaism was and had always been what?

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Monotheistic

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And the Christians in those first hundreds of years had to wrestle with the concept of how to understand Jesus as God

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If there was only one God

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What did it mean that Jesus said I and the Father are one?

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What did it mean that John said Jesus was at the beginning?

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That he was with God and was God

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What did it mean that Paul said all things were created through him and are held together by him?

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If there is only one God

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How did Jesus fit?

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Because I think that if I told you

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If you knew me

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And then someone else walked into the room and said oh I'm also Greg

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You would probably be like yeah you're not

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To reconcile the idea that they believed in God

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But then they could see God

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200 years into Christianity one of the first ideas that tried to sort it out was called subordination

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Subordination is where the Father is God

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And Jesus and the Holy Spirit are also distinct beings so there's a triune

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Nature to it but in subordination the Father is God and Jesus and the Holy Spirit are like servants

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There's a triune nature and there's only one God and these two are kind of like their vassals

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They would do different things that the Father was asking them to do so they weren't equal

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This preserved the concept of monotheism but it demoted Jesus and the Spirit

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And so eventually this was labeled a heresy because the scriptures seem to have a lot to say about Jesus being more than God's errand boy

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Another idea was called modalism

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This one's a little easier to understand because it's like water

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H2O

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It can be water, fluid, it can also be ice, a solid, it can also be steam, a vapor

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So people would try to describe how God is like water

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It can be any one of these three things

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The problem with that concept is that it can only be one of those things at a time

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It can't be all three at the same time

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So the concept of modalism would be the idea that maybe God is just putting on a mask and pretending to be a different personality

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Or that God is just extending his arm as Jesus to do certain things

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The trouble is that if Jesus is on the cross talking to the Father, who's he talking to?

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He's just the hand, he's talking to the other part

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And if a puppet dies on the cross, what does that really accomplish?

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If Jesus says, I'll send you the Holy Spirit, is he just saying, I'll be back?

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I'll be back but I'll have a different coat on

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And then there was a, this isn't in my notes, but anyone ever watch a series of unfortunate events on Netflix

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And how Count Olaf is always showing up as a different character

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But the kids are always like, that's Count Olaf and no one believes him

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That's what it made me think of, Jesus would be like, I'm going to send the Holy Spirit, ta-da!

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Sorry

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And then there was this concept called Arianism and it actually had started pretty early

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But it had kind of its heyday around 320 when an Alexandrian Christian named Arius was teaching

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That Jesus was a creation of the Father

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The concept was that the Father had created Jesus before the foundations of the Earth

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So that solved the problem of John saying that Jesus was there, was with God and was with God

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But he was still a creation of God which means that Jesus was not co-eternal

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That Jesus was not of the same substance

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Remember, all of these ideas, they're just trying their best to make sense of the relationship between the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit while maintaining monotheism

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And that's why we get the Nicene Creed

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Which says we believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ, the only Son of God, eternally begotten of the Father

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God from God, light from light, true God from true God, begotten, not made, of one being with the Father

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The first clause of the Nicene is about the Father, the second clause is about the Son

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The third is about the Holy Spirit

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The Creed defines a Trinitarian doctrine and maintains monotheism

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I could put it this way, the Nicene Creed gives the only answer that fits the question

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Because the reality is that there's too much scripture that points to all three while there is also no scripture that explains exactly how

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Some people aren't always comfortable when pastors talk about how the Bible doesn't explain something

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But the scriptures are very rarely like a recipe book, very rarely

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If you open up your Bibles to, not right now, but if you open your Bibles to Exodus 25-31

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You're going to get six solid chapters about how God wanted them to build a tabernacle

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Down to the length of every pole, the kind of wood that was meant to be used, the kind of silt or fine linen or gold

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Down to the amount, number of ounces, it is boom boom boom boom boom

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And a lot of us wishes we probably would like for there to be six chapters on exactly how the Trinity works

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Exactly how is it that there are three yet one?

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Why does the Bible talk so much about all three of them and yet leave us to be confused about how they're of one substance

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And there's still just one God but we experience all three

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But you will not find anything like that in the Bible

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Explaining exactly how God is three in one

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But you will find scripture throughout the Bible explaining that all three of the one exist

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We believe it to be true but we do not understand how

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Remember a friend of mine, Glenn Pacum, I loved that he pointed this out

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He said this is the reason that the Nicene Creed doesn't say I know

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Every line begins with we believe because it is a matter of faith

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And there's something about being a Christian, there's something about being a part of any religion that requires an element of faith

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Even if it's just a little bit, you may not be on the moon but that does not mean that you are not flying

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Personally, I believe the basics of the Nicene Creed

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I believe that Jesus is the Son of God

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He was born of a virgin Mary, begotten, not made

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That he is of one being with the Father

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That he was crucified, dead, buried, and resurrected

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That he forgives our sin

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I believe that God is Father, that Jesus is Son, and that Holy Spirit

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Is worshiping and glorified with the Father and the Son

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I believe in the mystery of the Trinity

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But I want you to hear me saying that if you do not believe that exactly that way, I want to dissuade your fear

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I want to dissuade your concern

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Because some of the most influential Christians of all time died knowing less doctrine about Jesus and the Trinity than you've heard in the last 20 minutes

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Let that sink in

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No Christian from the first multiple hundreds of years of Christianity had written down to read and understand the doctrine of the Trinity the way that we understand it right now

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But they believed that Jesus was Lord

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They believed that God was Father

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They believed that Holy Spirit acted on behalf of the Father and the Son

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They believed that Jesus forgave their sins

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They believed that Jesus reconciled them to the Father

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So if you're unsure exactly where you are in all of the systematic theology, and exactly why I believe this and this and this, am I right about this?

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I want to encourage you to not worry so much about whether you're right

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And ask yourself, do you love God?

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Because love builds up and if you love God then you are what? You are known by God

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I want you to know Jesus

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My hope is that the people that I come into contact with throughout my life are drawn to believing in Jesus on some level by the work of the Holy Spirit through me

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Because God the Father is good

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Wherever you are in that journey, wherever you are in that path, wherever you are between getting that plane off the ground and the moon

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You are flying

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You are flying

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And that's enough

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Amen?

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Let's pray

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Father we thank you for sending your son Jesus

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Only begotten

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Son of God

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Begotten not made of one being with the Father

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Thank you for the work he's done

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I pray that each of us as we think about where we're flying and how far we might be up off the ground, pray that you comfort us

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That you reassure us

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That you lead this flight wherever your spirit has for it to go

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Let us not be jealous or envious of those on the moon

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Let us be grateful and thankful for the wind that has lifted us

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In the name of Jesus we pray

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Amen