Father, Son, and Holy Spirit: Finding the Triune God

I have always been a major rule follower. As a child, I aimed to please and assumed excellent performance (in class, in extracurriculars, in life generally) would win me the love and applause of my parents. It was my goal in life to make my parents proud. So as a young adult beginning to explore Christianity and the Bible, it was easiest for me to understand God as the Father first, before the other members of the Trinity: Jesus and the Holy Spirit. 

God the Father

I understood the Father because I felt like I could understand Him. He had standards. He had expectations. He worked hard to create everything and expected you to be grateful for it. If you messed up, He would probably be angry. There would probably be consequences. But there were also things you could do to get back into His good graces. 

I saw God the Father the way I saw my own father: tough, loving but distant, larger than life.

All earthly fathers have the potential to reflect the Father’s love. Through that reflection, their children can glimpse who God says He is. Dad is the first man who’s given the duty to show you what it looks like to be kind, gentle, strong, peaceful, patient, just, merciful, compassionate, and humble. It’s a high calling to be a good father. If we had even a somewhat decent father experience as kids, that relationship is a relatively easy stepping stone to meeting God the Father.

But if your dad wasn’t a good dad or wasn’t even around, connecting to God the Father can be difficult. Where’s the entry point to meeting the Father if all you’ve experienced from fathers is desertion, disappointment, or worse? Because God refers to Himself as “Father,” it can be tough for those of us who didn’t have dads to relate to God the Father. That’s one reason I loved The Shack. Maybe if God the Father is a hard reality to connect with, we can see that part of the Trinity as the parent, guardian, provider, or father we wished we had.

Of course, most parents aren’t reflecting the glory of God all of the time. Even good parents lose their tempers. Our earthly parents can only show us so much of God’s character. There will always be a gap, whether a hairline fracture or yawning chasm, between who your parent was and what God the Father/Mother/Parent is like. 

God the Son

That’s where Jesus comes in. I had a hard time with Jesus before I became a Christian. He was always so compassionate. He was always so merciful. I had a long list of A’s on my report card and a resume of extracurriculars that proved just how good I was compared to everyone else, just how much love I thought I’d earned. Everyone should be as good as me, I thought to myself, staring down my judgmental nose at the rest of the world. What use did I have for the sacrificial love of Jesus and His forgiveness of sins, sins I didn’t think I had? 

I wish it weren’t so, but it took a few head-on collisions with just how short I fell from God’s glory Romans 3:23 NIV for me to see more of who God was through the person of Jesus. In the parable of the two debtors, Jesus asked Simon the Pharisee: “Two people owed money to a certain moneylender. One owed him five hundred denarii, and the other fifty. Neither of them had the money to pay him back, so he forgave the debts of both. Now which of them will love him more?” Simon admitted (reluctantly, I think) that probably the one who had the most debt loved the moneylender more. Jesus pointed to the “sinful woman” Simon was appalled by and listed off the ways she’d shown her love for Jesus ever since entering the house, concluding with, “Therefore, I tell you, her many sins have been forgiven—as her great love has shown. But whoever has been forgiven little loves little” Luke 7:40-47 NIV.

For a long while, I landed squarely in Simon the Pharisee’s camp, as a person who had been forgiven little, and therefore loved little—until I had those head-on collisions with my shortcomings. Once you’re aware of your sin, grace looks a whole lot more appealing.

Jesus, the Son of God, the second person of the Trinity, shows those of us who had fragmented pictures of God the Parent exactly what God’s love looks like in person form. Meeting Jesus is like adding color into the motion picture after Dorothy’s house crashed down in Oz. God hasn’t changed, but now He’s flesh and bone, walking incarnate among us. We can see Him in greater color and detail, and through Him we can see everything else more clearly. That’s the beauty of meeting Jesus.

The greatest gift Jesus the Son of God gives us is the color motion picture of God’s unconditional love and forgiveness.

Followers of Jesus recognize that they will fall short. As a result, they’re able to model the strength of humility, the necessity of confession (“what I did was wrong”) and the power of forgiveness. (“I’m sorry. Will you forgive me?” or “I forgive you.”) And mean it. As C. S. Lewis once said, “Every Christian is to become a little Christ. The whole purpose of becoming a Christian is simply nothing else.”

God the Holy Spirit

Thank God for the Holy Spirit, the Comforter, the Mighty Counselor, the Breath of the Almighty. I once heard poet and memoirist Mary Karr talk about how she came to faith. It wasn’t through God the Father. It wasn’t through Jesus. It was through prayer, through connecting with the Holy Spirit. She was trying to quit drinking and someone recommended praying, so she started praying every day, “Help me stay sober. Thanks.” 

I did not “meet” the Holy Spirit, or at least recognize Him, until after I had met the Jesus of the Gospels, and then I began seeing the Spirit’s presence everywhere. Long before I started questioning God the Father or studying God the Son, God the Holy Spirit was there. Love was there, grace was there, truth was there. I’d felt His heavy presence in a worship service. I’d heard His whisper of guidance and discernment throughout my childhood. I just didn’t know how to name Him.

In His mysterious filaments of grace and power, the Holy Spirit moves about, transcending what we thought we knew about Jesus and God to show us the way, the truth, and the life as He listens to our groans and prays on our behalf. The Holy Spirit knows the soul who cannot name Him. The Holy Spirit whispers love to the soul who has had a hard time seeing God’s true love in any of those who claim His name. If we can’t find God through the Father, if we’re unsure about God the Son in Jesus, there’s one whose name is comfort, breath, counsel, love, and He’s also God.

The God who wants all people to come to a saving knowledge of the truth gave us three glorious meet-and-greets as a means to know His great love: God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. By meeting one, you meet them all. Each Person of the Trinity breathes life into broken vessels and invites us deeper into relationship, so that one day perhaps we will know more fully, even as we are already known by God.

—Written by Sarah Wells. Used by permission from the author. Click here to connect with Sarah.