sermon-illustrations
Curated Sermon Illustrations on the Trinity
Explore powerful illustrations on the Trinity. Discover stories, analogies, humor and more as you bring your sermon to life.
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Signatures of the Trinity
Everything that is exists by and through and unto the relationship between God the Father and Jesus, his Son. One of the great teachers of the ancient church, St. Augustine, had a very helpful way of talking about this. In a massive treatise on the Trinity, he introduced the term vestigium trinitatis—“vestiges of the Trinity.” Augustine thought that God—being the God he is—left traces, “vestiges” of his nature in the created order.
We might think of them as “signatures” of his character and being. Since the nature of God is Father and Son (in the Holy Spirit), one of the central vestiges discernible in creation is the dynamic between the Father and the Son that I just described.
The created order taken as a whole is perhaps the most obvious example of this. The Father begets the Son from all eternity, and the Son yields his life obediently to the Father from all eternity. The life of the Trinity consists of that movement and flow. In an analogous way, creation comes into being by an act of the Father’s will and is sustained as long as he wills it and as long as it remains in proper relationship to him. If the relationship is severed, the creation spins, withers, and dies.
On the human level, the stakes are much higher. We also bear the “trace” of the relationship between the Father and the Son, but so much more than the creation does—for we have a choice. Will we yield our lives to the Father as the Son does?
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