Peace to you from God the Father, justification is yours through God the Son, and love is poured out on you through God the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Triune God, we cannot begin to comprehend the mystery and majesty of your being a three-in-one-God. Be with us today, though, so that we may again marvel in awe at what you have done to save us. God the Father, you have created us and you sustain us. God the Son, you have redeemed and saved us. God the Holy Spirit, you have brought us to faith and continue to sanctify us. To you be the glory, now and forever. Amen.

We have become a very advanced people now in the twentieth century. We have become so advanced that we can put fax machines in cars, send robots to Mars, climb the highest mountains, and clone sheep.

If there are things that remain confusing to us, we assume that with enough time, energy, and ingenuity, we will unravel all the mysteries of our universe. With enough time, energy, and ingenuity, we believe that we will find the cure for AIDS, live on the moon, clone human beings, and maybe even that the Minnesota Vikings or the Detroit Lions would win a Super Bowl.

The temptation for us as egotistical humans is to also assume that with enough time, energy, and ingenuity we should be able to comprehend the mystery of our Triune God. We are tempted to want one neat analogy that will make our three-in-one God clear to us. We desire one concise statement on the Trinity that will settle this perplexing problem for us once and for all.

Well, I hate to disappoint you so early in my sermon today, but it just is not that easy. There is no simple way to describe the Trinity in any meaningful way. We used two pages to confess the doctrine of the Trinity in the Athanasian Creed today, and now you may be more confused than before.

The Trinity is not one of those things that we can settle in short order. Women do not understand men. Men cannot possibly comprehend women. Neither can we understand nor comprehend the mystery that our God is three distinct persons, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, yet they are one God. Seeing as how the Christian Church has not been able to come up with a perfect definition or explanation of the Trinity in the past two thousand years, it is a safe bet that we will not unravel the mystery of the Trinity in the twenty minutes of my sermon.

This morning the apostle Paul gives us three assurances of our Triune God. First, we have the assurance of peace with God the Father. Next, we have the assurance of justification through God the Son. And finally, we have the assurance of love through God the Holy Spirit. By examining these three points, we will not explain the Trinity. We can only hope to be assured of what our Triune God has done for us.

First, we have the assurance of peace with God the Father. Peace is an important thing. We want peace in the Middle East; peace in marriage instead of fighting; peace from the inner demons of addictions.

Why don’t we have peace? Jews and Arabs are mortal enemies who throw rocks and shoot bullets at each other. Drugs, alcohol, and addictive behavior wage war on our bodies. Husband and wife can become enemies because they know what "buttons" to push to set their partner off. As sinful humans, we are enemies of God. God tells us, "Be holy because I, the Lord your God, am holy." (Leviticus 19:2) Jesus said, "Do this (love the Lord your God and your neighbor perfectly) and you will live." (Luke 10:28) God tells us to be perfect and holy, and yet how do we live? We do the opposite. We go against God. We throw rocks at his rules. We wage war against God with unholy, unchristian living. We push his buttons by disobeying his laws. We killed his Son with our sins.

Our sinful condition and our sinful actions cause turmoil in our relationship with God. We feel guilty. Ashamed. Frustrated. We avoid God. We don’t want to talk to him in prayer. We don’t want to listen to his advice in Bible study or devotions. We don’t feel like praising him in church. Our sins cause us to be at war with God. We have no peace.

When World War II ended in 1945 there were a handful of Japanese soldiers in the Philippines who didn’t believe the war was over. One of those soldiers was a guy named Hiroo Onoda, who had been the commander of an elite group of Japanese guerilla soldiers. When the war ended, American airplanes dropped leaflets through the Philippine jungles that said, "The war is over. Come down from the mountains." But Onoda thought it was a trick, a misinformation campaign, so he stayed in the jungles and caves … and for thirty years he didn’t come down. It wasn’t until 1975 that Onoda finally was convinced that peace had finally been established and the war was really over.

At times we can be like Hiroo Onoda. We may not listen to the good news of what Jesus Christ has accomplished for us. We may think it is too good to be true that all our sins, even the most disgusting and humiliating ones, can be forgiven, and so we decide to punish ourselves for our misdeeds. We stay huddled in our caves of sin, powerless to change ourselves, captive to our sins and failures. We exclude ourselves from the peace that God wants to give us.

We can come out of our cave of sin only if we allow Christ to take us to the hill of Calvary. The life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ mark the decisive victory in the human race’s rebellion against the Creator. True peace can only come from the forgiveness of sins and a right relationship with God. It is only through Jesus that this relationship can be restored. That is what you and I now enjoy.

We have the peace that so many people are looking for. We have the peace that transcends all human understanding. (Philippians 4:7) It is a peace that is calming, soothing, relaxing. A peace that comes from knowing that no matter how badly we mess up, we are forgiven for Christ’s sake. God the Father loves us. He sent his Son to deliver the message of peace to us. The war is over. Come down from the mountain and caves of sin. It isn’t a trick. The war between us and God is really over, if you accept Christ’s sacrifice for your sins. Then you have the assurance of peace with God the Father.

Next, we have assurance of justification through God the Son. We really are not assured of many things in this world – job security, hail and rain in the weather, dating, or health. In our last presidential election, we weren’t even assured who our next president was going to be. On election day the networks first called Florida for Gore, then they said it was too close to call, then they called it for Bush, and then they said it was too close to call again. For over a month we learned more about chads than we ever cared to know – dimpled, pregnant, hanging chads. The process went through recounts, the Secretary of State, the Florida Supreme Court, and even to the U.S. Supreme Court. During that long, frustrating month, we had no assurance of who our next president was going to be. We couldn’t be sure of much of anything.

A lot of people think that our relationship with God is like that. They live under the constant uncertainty of whether they’ll make it or not. Well, imagine if getting into heaven was based on some sort of voting system – that our bad actions counted as "no" votes and our good deeds counted as "yes" votes. Imagine never knowing whether we’re going to make it or whether it’s too close to call. Imagine that when we die and the angels meet us at the gates of heaven, some of the angels demand a recount, so suddenly all of heaven is mobilized for a hand recount of our good and bad deeds. Will we make it? If this is the way heaven worked, then we would have no assurance, no eternal security.

I’m sure glad the Christian faith isn’t like our last election. Instead God offers people a sense of assurance about how they stand before him, and that assurance comes from God the Son, Jesus Christ. We have assurance because "we have been justified through faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ."

We need to be justified. We are rotten to the core. We were born that way. Sinful parents naturally give birth to sinful babies. We are born in the hopeless condition that we will die – die physically and die eternally. We compound our problem by sinning through envy, slander, gossip, hatred, arrogance, greed, deceit, and more. (Romans 1:29-31)

We need to be justified. "Justification" is a legal word that means to be acquitted of all charges, to be declared innocent and free to go. We are criminals who have broken God’s holy laws. We deserve to be punished. Yet God the Son has acquitted us of our crimes. He endured the punishment we deserved. Christ died for us, on behalf of us, in our place. The death that we deserved, he took. The separation that we caused, he healed. The war we waged, Christ reconciled. Through faith in Christ as our Savior, we are declared innocent of any wrongdoing. We are free from eternal punishment for our crimes. We are free to enter heaven. We have the assurance of justification through God the Son.

Our Triune God also gives us the assurance of love through God the Holy Spirit. Really, there is no reason to love us. We are unlovable creatures. We rebel, disobey, and hate. We are spiteful, envious, greedy creatures. We even had a hand in putting God the Son to death. Surely our Triune God cannot love people like us.

Oh, yes he can. And he does. "God has poured out his love into our hearts by the Holy Spirit, whom he has given us." Paul says that God actually floods our lives with his love by giving us the Holy Spirit. Like life-giving water is poured out on a parched desert during a storm, God drenches our hearts with his love when he sends his Holy Spirit to live in our hearts. This love flows through God’s Word and sacraments. It flows to us in the midst of our broken relationships, our depressing marriages, our frustrating jobs, our boring summers (for you kids who are eager for school to start again).

We have the assurance that our Triune God loves us no matter what. God the Father demonstrated his love by allowing his Son, Jesus, to die on the cross. We are amazed when a person gives up his or her life for a good person. We memorialize people who sacrifice their own lives for other people. We honor police officers and firefighters who die in the line of duty. But God went even further than that. Jesus died for us, and we are not good people. He demonstrated sacrificial love by dying for us. He lost his life in the line of his duty. So whenever we think that we are all alone and no one loves us, look at the cross, and know that your Triune God loves you.

An early church father, Augustine, while puzzling over the doctrine of the Trinity, was walking along the beach one day when he observed a young boy with a bucket, running back and forth to pour water into a little hole. Augustine asked, "What are you doing?" The boy replied, "I’m trying to put the ocean into this hole." Then Augustine realized that he had been trying to put an infinite God into his finite mind.

We cannot understand the mystery of the Trinity. We can only trust in his assurance of peace, justification, and love. And that should be enough for us to understand. Amen.

To the only wise God be glory forever through Jesus Christ. Amen. (Romans 16:27)