God’s Triple Team

I recently came across a very helpful interview with J. I. Packer about the necessity of preaching on the Trinity called “God’s Triple Team.” Packer is probably best known as the author of Knowing God, and is also a professor at Regent College in Vancouver, BC.

Now, I love Packer’s work because he calls us back to important truths about Christianity and the church. He makes a strong case for the Triune nature of the Gospel: the Father whose kingdom it is; the Son who died on the Cross; and the Spirit who brings new birth. He emphatically summarizes his point with this succinct statement: “You cannot preach the gospel without that Trinitarian frame of reference.”

Packer gently chastises pastors these days who ignore the Trinity. They:

assume the people in the pew are not interested in this sort of mental lumber for the mind and so they try to dodge it simply because they’re afraid people will be bored if the truth of the Trinity is focused on in any way at all.

I’m reminded of one of my mentors in college who said that he wouldn’t die for a lot of things in the Christian faith – styles of worship music, forms of church governance, or even certain theological points – but that if there was one thing he would undoubtedly die for it would be the Trinitarian understanding of God.

As Packer points out, we may be functionally giving up the Trinitarian understanding of God in our preaching today.