There’s a little game I used to play with my daughter when she was small – the ‘I Love You This Much’ game. It always began the same way. “How much do you love me, Daddy?” she’d ask. “All the way to London and back”, I’d reply. “How much do you love me, Ariella?” She’d raise the stakes: “All the way to Australia and back”. I’d counter with the moon. She’d counter with Jupiter. And eventually, with a cheeky grin, she’d play her trump card: “I love you all the way to infinity”. That was it – game over. You can’t outdo infinity!
I often think about that little game because it reminds me of something simple but true: ‘infinity’ is the biggest word we have. Or at least, it feels that way. It's the furthest edge of our imagination. And yet even that word is too small for God. Only God is truly infinite, and that means more than immeasurably large. He is beyond all measure altogether.
One of the central things Christians confess about this infinite Creator is the mystery of the Trinity.
Today is Trinity Sunday, and the doctrine it celebrates says something remarkable about this infinite God: He has never been alone. He is the God who is love – love in His very being, rather than someone who is loving now and then. And that impacts every part of our lives.
The God Who Has Never Been Alone
Many people – and many religions – imagine God as a solitary figure, a single divine person sitting alone in eternity. But a solitary god cannot be eternally loving, because love needs someone to love.
The God of the Bible has never been alone. From all eternity, before creation and before time itself, the Father has loved the Son in the joy of the Holy Spirit.
So when God created, He wasn’t lonely or lacking anything. Creation came from abundance, the love that had always existed spilling outward into a world He delighted to make. That’s easy to forget when life feels random or chaotic, but it means you are not an accident. You were made on purpose by a God who has always lived in relationship, and you were made for relationship – with Him and with others.
How the Bible Tells This Story
Seen this way, the Trinity is simply the Bible’s own way of telling the truth about God. The Bible insists there is one God, and it keeps showing the Father, Son, and Spirit sharing His life and work. The Church’s doctrine of the Trinity gathered that witness into one confession. Christians confess that God is one in essence and three in person: one God who exists eternally as Father, Son, and Spirit, rather than three gods or one person wearing three masks.
We don’t need to force this mystery into a tidy analogy. Christians have spent centuries trying, but most analogies end up causing more problems than they solve. I once watched an evangelist attempting to explain the mystery of the Trinity to an atheist using an egg – shell, white, and yolk – but the atheist pointed out, quite reasonably, that he’d just described three parts of an egg.
Mystery means God is bigger than our categories, and that’s good news. A God small enough to fully explain would be too small to worship, but the God revealed in the Bible is never quite that manageable!
The Trinity on a Monday
I remember wrestling with the Trinity when I was younger. It often sounded like a mathematical equation or theological fine print – something for scholars to argue over. Yet everything we believe rests on it. In creation the Father speaks, the Spirit hovers over the waters, and the Son is the Word through whom it all comes into being. The same Son still sustains all things, while the Spirit gives life. And salvation has the same shape: the Father sends the Son to save us, and the Spirit brings that salvation home to our hearts. The gospel depends on it. A Saviour who wasn’t fully God couldn’t save us, and a Spirit who wasn’t couldn’t dwell in us.
The doctrine of the Trinity reaches into our ordinary places – into school runs, workplaces, hospital waiting rooms, dinner tables, and Monday mornings. It shapes how you pray, love, forgive, and belong; it impacts how you see yourself and other people, as well as what you understand it means to be human.
And each person of the Trinity meets you there a little differently.
The Father’s love steadies you
You don’t have to earn His affection or impress Him with your performance, and you needn’t fear being forgotten. The Father’s love is where your life starts, and it was there long before you’d done anything worth approving of. When Jesus teaches us to pray “Our Father”, He is inviting us, by grace, into His own relationship with God, where we can stop trying to win approval and learn to rest like children.
The Son’s grace carries you
Jesus shows you what God is like, and more than that, what God is like towards you. His life reveals the Father’s heart. On the cross we see the Father’s mercy, and in the resurrection, His power. And when you feel unworthy, or tired, or caught up in your own failures, the Son stands before the Father on your behalf.
The Spirit’s presence transforms you
Christians sometimes treat the Spirit as an optional extra for the especially keen, but He is the very life of God dwelling in you, drawing you into the love the Father has for the Son. He comforts and convicts, and now and then He unsettles you when you’ve grown comfortable – which is its own kind of kindness. He’s also the reason you can grow and change at all, and why you have any reason to hope. He also empowers you for daily living.
So How Do We Live This?
If God is Father, Son, and Spirit, then we were made by relationship and for it, which may be why loneliness hurts as much as it does. It’s also why the Church was never meant to function like a club. Jesus prayed that His people would be one as He and the Father are one, united in love while remaining distinct. Christian unity is a reflection of God’s own life.
None of this needs a programme. It might be as small as stopping long enough to remember you are already the Father’s, before you start striving again. It might mean letting Jesus’ grace shape your decisions, especially those moments when your first reaction isn’t your best one. And some days it’s simply asking the Spirit to fill whatever in you feels empty, weary, or afraid.
You can live in this love long before you understand the doctrine, which is just as well, because none of us ever gets to the bottom of it. If you’d like to go a little deeper into the mystery, though, you can listen to a sermon I preached recently on the God who is Three-in-One.
The God who holds the universe also holds you, so I’ll end as the apostle Paul did: “May the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all” (2 Corinthians 13:14).