A ridiculous story made the rounds years ago. Most of you have heard the story, but I wonder if you have caught its religious significance.
It is about a pilot and three passengers--a boy scout, a priest, and an atomic scientist--and a plane that develops engine trouble in mid-flight.
The pilot rushes back to the passenger compartment and exclaims, “The plane is going down! The plane is going down! We only have three parachutes, and there are four of us!” Then the pilot adds, “I have a family waiting for me at home. I must survive!” With that, he grabs one of the parachutes and jumps out of the plane.
At this point, the atomic scientist jumps to his feet and declares, “I am the smartest man in the world. It would be a great tragedy if my life was snuffed out!” With that, he also grabs a parachute and exits the plane.
With an alarmed look on his face, the priest says to the Boy Scout, “My son, I have no family. I am ready to meet my Maker. You are still young with much ahead of you. You take the last parachute.”
With this, the Boy Scout interrupts the priest, “Relax, Father. Don’t say any more. We’re all right.”
The priest asks, “How in the world can you say that we are all right?”
The Boy Scout replies, “The reason we’re all right is that the world’s smartest man just jumped out of the plane wearing my knapsack!”
Silly joke, but there is an important lesson to be derived from it. Metaphorically, there are many smart people today, successful people, affluent people who are jumping out of airplanes wearing knapsacks instead of parachutes. That is, they are reaching for ideas and philosophies that are very appealing, but those ideas and philosophies will not save them. They are knapsacks, not parachutes. In other words, people today need something they can believe in, and many are looking in the wrong places.
Buckminster Fuller once said: “The universe is a locked safe with the combination on the inside.”
Buckminster Fuller was an amazing man, but for once in his life, this brilliant Englishman was dead wrong. The universe is not a locked safe with the combination inside. There IS meaning and purpose to this world we live in and that meaning and purpose is available to all those who seek it. There is available to us and to everyone on this planet a body of truth that is knowable, understandable, and eternal.
The early church summed up this truth in the doctrine we know as the Trinity: God, the Father; God, the Son; God, the Holy Spirit.
Now it is sometimes difficult to get people excited about Christian doctrines--especially that of the Trinity. It sounds so deep and so mysterious. But bear with me, if you will. There is an important truth in this ancient doctrine that you and I need to see.
You won’t find the word “Trinity” in the Bible. In fact, you won’t find it in the writings of the early church fathers until the third century after Christ’s resurrection.
The concept of the Trinity is a product of the third century church, but it is based upon sound Biblical faith. This doctrine . . . God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit . . . properly understood . . . meets the deepest needs that we have in terms of understanding who God is and what our relationship to Him is all about. Let’s explore this great truth together.
You are familiar with the basic structure of the Trinity.
We begin with God as the creator and sustainer of life. God the Father: omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent, everlasting. This is the God who spoke and the world was created. This is the God who guides the stars, who rules the heavens, who orders the planets in their orbits. This is the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob--as well as Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. This is God in His transcendent authority, Lawgiver and Judge, the God whose ways are not our ways, the God whose glory is told by the heavens.
This is the God in whom all of us believe, as do most of the world’s people. For many of us, however, this God of transcendence seems far removed from us, out of touch with our needs, our concerns--unapproachable, and unyielding.
It is like a somewhat humorous true story that is told about Sir David Edgeworth, an Australian geologist and explorer. Edgeworth accompanied Ernest Shackleton on his expedition to the South Pole at the turn of the twentieth century, one of the most famous adventures ever made.
During this South Pole expedition, Edgeworth’s assistant, Douglas Mawson, was working in his tent one day. Suddenly the quietness was broken by a muffled cry from outside. “Are you very busy?” called this voice. Mawson recognized as the voice as that of Sir Edgeworth.
“Yes I am,” Mawson replied. “What’s the matter?”
“Are you really very busy?” asked the voice once again.
“Yes,” snapped Mawson, losing his patience. “What is it you want?”
After a moment’s silence, Sir David Edgeworth replied apologetically, “Well, I’m down a crevasse, and I don’t think I can hang on much longer.” (1)
Mawson found and rescued Edgeworth from near death in this crevasse in the South Pole ice.
Here is what interests me. Can you imagine a well-known geologist and explorer who had fallen into a large crack in the Antarctic ice and whose life was in peril being so shy that he was reluctant to let his colleagues know of his situation? “Are you really very busy?” he had asked as he dangled there in mortal danger. Sir David Edgeworth was obviously quite a timid man.
In the same way, if all we knew about God was this transcendent Lawgiver and Judge that we have described thus far we might also be timid about seeking Him out. How do you approach a Being who is omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent, everlasting? How can you even imagine a Being who is beyond space and time, the Creator of everything that exists? Our tiny brains cannot begin to cope with such a One. Such a God may seem far off, out of touch with our situation.
And this is why God the Father revealed His true nature in a gentle, compassionate man, Jesus of Nazareth. In Jesus we see God the Son cradling young children in his arms, and treating all persons with dignity and respect. In Jesus, the Son, we are exposed to the approachable side of God, the God who would lay down his own life in behalf of the creatures He had formed out of the clay of earth. Without Jesus we would never have known what God was really like. Jesus told us to call Him, “Daddy.” He taught us about God’s love and showed us His grace.
In the mid-1950s, the Christian world was shocked when five missionaries were slaughtered in South America by a tribe of Auca Indians. Incredibly, sometime later this same Auca tribe welcomed the wife of one of the martyred missionaries and the sister of another missionary into their community. It was an amazing reversal of attitude on the part of the Aucas. It allowed missionaries to begin translating the New Testament into the language of the Aucas.
But there were difficulties. For example, the translators had difficulty putting the word “reconciled” into the Auca language. One of the most important verses in the New Testament is 2 Corinthians 5:18, “All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ.” Reconciliation is a critical word in understanding the Christian faith. The missionaries searched diligently for an equivalent word in the Auca language for the word “reconciled” but found none.
Then, one day a translator was traveling through the jungle with some of the Aucas. They came to a narrow, deep ravine, and the missionary thought they could go no farther. The Aucas, however, took out their machetes and cut down a large tree so that it fell over the ravine, permitting them all to cross safely.
The translator, listening intently to the Aucas, discovered that they had a word for “a tree across the ravine” and the translator decided this was the word for the meaning of reconciliation that he was looking for. Jesus was the tree laid across the chasm that separated humanity from God. (2)
Christ is our bridge to God and to salvation. We are grateful for God the Father in all His power and glory. But we are also grateful for God the Son in all his gentleness and grace, for he allows us to approach God with confidence. Because of Christ, we know that God is our Daddy, or, if you will, our Mommy. God the Father loves us more than our own parents love us. We know that because of Christ the Son.
But, of course, there is a third person in the Trinity just as important as the first two. That is the God the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is the presence of God in our daily lives. The Holy Spirit is the inner witness of the reality of God. It is the confirming testimony that He who created us is with us.
According to I John 4, our life in the world is actually Christ’s life lived within us. That is the work of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is that presence in our lives that allows us to get our lives together, to achieve spiritual discipline and direction, to take charge of our lives and channel them in ways that glorify God and enrich the world.
The word “organize” has a Latin root word that suggests something akin to playing an organ, especially a pipe organ. To play a pipe organ one must get all fifteen hundred pipes to sound in harmony. For many of us, it is all too apparent that we are restrained and restricted from being effective and successful in our living because of inner conflicts that are tearing us apart. A war is going on inside of us. We are being pushed and pulled from within. We desperately need the Spirit of God to come into our lives and take those warring thoughts and feelings and bring them together.
To achieve such a unity of mind and heart requires a surrender of all we are and all we hope to be to the presence and power of God. The sad truth is that many of us want only a partial experience of God’s Spirit without total surrender.
A letter was once mailed to General Electric from a little girl in the third grade who had chosen to investigate electricity for her class project.
“I’m trying to get all the information on electricity I can,” her letter said, “so please send me any booklets and papers you have. Also would it be asking too much for you to send me a little sample of electricity?”
In like fashion, many of us want just a little sample of the Spirit. We don’t want the Spirit to come in all its fullness. We tremble at the idea of God coming into our lives and taking total possession of our thoughts, our feelings, our dreams, our ambitions. Thus, because we want only a sample of God’s Spirit, we never achieve that oneness of mind and purpose so necessary for effective living.
The Holy Spirit is the inward evidence, the indwelling presence, that which allows us to organize and prioritize our lives. It is the Holy Spirit that gives us the peace and assurance to cope daily with life’s varied demands.
There is a story in the Old Testament that illustrates this truth. God had chosen King Saul to rule over Israel, but Saul was a disappointment to God. And so we read in 1 Samuel 16:25 that the Spirit of the Lord left King Saul. And when that happened, Saul was filled with depression and fear.
I know lots of people who are filled with depression and fear. Here is the reason. Somehow the Holy Spirit has slipped out of their lives. It is the Holy Spirit that gives a lift to our lives and helps us stand on higher ground. Without that Spirit our lives are like a barren desert.
A mother and child once stood looking at the beautiful picture of Christ standing at the door knocking. After a moment of thought, the mother said, “I wonder why they don’t let him in?”
The child considered this and then replied, “The reason they don’t let him in is that they are down in the cellar and they can’t hear him knocking.”
It is the Holy Spirit that lifts us out of the cellars of life by giving us inner evidence of the power and purpose of God.
Do you see now why this doctrine of the Trinity is so important to us? God the Father--our creator, sustainer, the Source of all that is or was or will ever be. God the Son--our Savior, Redeemer, the one who gave his life for us that we might know how much God loves us. And God the Holy Spirit--the evidence of the indwelling Christ and our enabler in life’s daily crises. This is the meaning of the Trinity. This is the truth that allows us to live our lives as a follower of the Christ. God has come down; Christ has died for us and on the third day was resurrected; the Holy Spirit is waiting to come into the lives of all who seek to follow Jesus, as evidence of God’s presence.
Why settle for a knapsack instead of a parachute? Indeed, why settle for a parachute when there is a Paraclete? A parachute gently lowers us to the ground; a Paraclete, which is the Biblical word for the Spirit, lifts us to the heavens. I pray that you will allow that same Spirit into your life today. In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.
1. Contributed. Source unknown.
2. Dennis Davidson, http://www.sermoncentral.com/sermons/god-demonstrates-his-love-dennis-davidson-sermon-on-gods-love-159565.asp.