Modeling Our Ministry After the Trinity

Before God created, what was He doing? “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God” (John 1:1). Before God created; He related.

In the Greek, the little preposition with signifies “before, in the presence of, face-to-face with.” The Trinity always enjoys the sheer delight of eternal, unbroken communion, connection, and community.

When my children were young, we played a game called “Eye Contact.” I would bellow, “Josh! Marie! Let’s play ‘Eye Contact!’” They’d race to me, shove their eye sockets into my eye sockets, press their eyeballs into my eyeballs, and we would make eye contact.

For all eternity, Father and Son (and Spirit) engage not in “Eye Contact,” but in “Soul Contact.” Their love teaches us how to love in spirit and in truth.

That’s why we must build our life and ministry on the Trinity, not upon false gods and false views of our God. Consider one such false, blasphemous view of God. In the New York Times bestselling book God: A Biography, Jack Miles surmises that God had to learn how to love—from us! He stumbled upon loving relationships from the prophets at the end of the Old Testament.

Contrast that blasphemy with the truth of John 1:1. In using the Greek word for “was” in John 1:1, John could have chosen a tense that pictured a snapshot where we happened to travel back in time to a moment when the Son happened to be in the Father’s presence.

Instead, John selects the tense picturing an ongoing video. Whenever we might travel back in time, at whatever point we would arrive, we would always find Father and Son (and Spirit) together. We might translate John’s phrase the way his first-century readers would have heard it. “The Word was continually, without interruption, in intimate connection and communion with the Father always and forever.” Reality is relational because God is Trinitarian.

We must relate soul-to-soul because God is Trinitarian. The god of the Muslims is a monad—the Alone with the Alone. He exists in sterile oneness. Some ministry approaches fit Allah more than Jehovah: detached, aloof, distant, and non-relational.

Not so the Trinity. “No one has ever seen God, but God the One and Only, who is at the Father’s side, has made him known” (John 1:18). At the Father’s side literally is “in the bosom.” It’s the same word used later in John’s Gospel for John reclining on the bosom of Jesus while they ate and fellowshipped.

The Church Fathers called this perichoresis. Peri means around, and choresis is like a chorus—a dance chorus. It is a Greek term meaning to dance around and around in a beautiful symphony and harmony. The ancient Church used the term perichoresis to describe the eternal, endless, intimate, beautiful relationship of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

Do we minister at arm’s length, giving our spiritual friends a spiritual stiff arm? Do we relate as if our God is like Allah—are we aloof, hyper-professional, lacking empathy? Or do we engage our spiritual friends soul-to-soul and face-to-face in a symphony of sympathy—like the Trinity? Is our ministry “office hours only”? Or is it entering souls intimately?

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How can our lives and ministries follow the model of the Trinity?

Note: Today’s blog post is excerpted from chapter four of Soul Physicians.


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