Trinity Sunday

Remember!

[Jesus said] ‘Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you. And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age.’ Matthew 28.19-20

When things are tough

Remember – when things are tough, and despair threatens to paralyse our spirits and bodies – Jesus is with us. Lord, why don’t you do something to get me out of this mess? But he’s waiting for us to do something, to lift our burdens over on to him; for he’s here, ready and waiting to take them, as soon as we’ll let them go. But so often we cling to them for dear life, the sort of life that really is too dear, too expensive to afford. I am with you, always. This is a mega-helping of divine encouragement, designed to get us through to the completion of our worldwide commission, against all the odds.

GO – baptize – teach

It’s a threefold commission: to GO, to BAPTIZE and to TEACH the gospel. But the ‘going’ comes first. We are not to wait for folk to come to us, for they will probably never come. Don’t despair, Jesus is saying. Don’t sit around and let the world’s pressures get you down. Just get up and get out and do something to fight those ever-encroaching pressures: the media hype, the takeover of Sunday by business, the drive to have leisure and recreation at any cost; the obsession with wealth and insurance and long-range benefits. GO, and baptize, and teach. The kingdom of heaven is just as close to you in another house, another town, on another continent or island; because where I am, it is – and I am always with you.

And yet we cling to the familiar, and opt for praying for ‘someone else’ to go.

Go – BAPTIZE – teach

Anyone can legally baptize another in a life-threatening situation. One could argue that every second is such a situation. Jesus didn’t go a bundle on the legalities. He kept his great commission simple. And baptism, at its simplest, is anointing with, or immersing in, water, symbolically washing away the sins of the former life and entering a new life with Christ, washed clean visibly by the water and invisibly (spiritually) by his blood.

Yet there are other ways of understanding baptism. We say, after a person has had a traumatic experience or conversion, that they’ve had a ‘baptism by fire’, meaning that their introduction to a new phase of life or occupation has been dramatic to the point of cataclysmic. The disciples’ ‘baptism by fire’ could be said to have occurred at Pentecost, when the fiery tongues of the Spirit descended and alighted on everyone present. We may, indeed, have come to faith in a surprising, even startling way – or we may have had the privilege of seeing God deal in such a way with someone else.

Go – Baptize – TEACH

A teacher to be worthy of the name needs instruction. Unless we have studied the word of God, we are not going to have much success in sharing it with others. The Church in China today is an example of this; in some of the country areas, where communication is still difficult and distances great, many (often young) Christians, still fairly new to the faith, are struggling to pastor house churches before they have read much of the Bible themselves: not because of arrogance or over-confidence, but simply because they have no access to more than a few verses of Scripture. There are areas where one Bible may have to be shared between fifteen thousand or more people. Cults and pagan teachings can infiltrate, and heresies weaken, these struggling congregations. We need to pray for more Bibles, more training for pastors and Christian teachers. And on our home ground, may we recognize all the wealth of teaching on our bookshelves at home and at church, so that it’s not a case of the blind leading the blind.

Family service input

Encourage the young people to increase or implement an existing prayer/study programme of MISSION, MINISTRY and MENTORING, as part of the church’s Trinity schedule.

Suggested hymns

Holy, holy, holy, Lord God Almighty; Lead us, heavenly Father, lead us; May the grace of Christ our Saviour; Three in One, and One in Three.