Lesson video

Hi everyone and welcome to today's lesson on Christian beliefs.

I hope you've had a really good day so far.

My name is Mrs Day, and you have joined us for a lesson on the Trinity.

The Trinity is one of the main beliefs in Christianity.

And today, we're going to explore what exactly that means.

First thing that you need to do is to make sure that you have a pen or a pencil or something to write with, and that you have some paper to write on.

Would be really helpful if you also had a different coloured pen so that you can do some corrections to the work that you will do.

So what is our agenda for today? Well, first of all we need to define the Trinity.

So what actually is it? Secondly, we are going to look at the nature of the Trinity.

You all know what the word nature means from our last lesson.

I'm going to give you two seconds.

What do I mean when I say the nature of the Trinity? One, two.

I just mean what it is like.

Remember we said the nature of God, just means what is God Like.

And finally, we are going to look at the role of each part of the Trinity.

So what do they do that is different from the other parts of the Trinity? So that is where we are going in today's lesson.

As I said, the Trinity is a massive topic in Christianity.

It is a topic that people have spent lots of years studying, and it's really difficult to get your head around it.

But today we are going to try to understand what the Trinity is.

So if you look at the text on the slide, it says that Christianity is monotheistic.

What does that mean? Simply that it believes in one God.

Mono, you might've heard the word mono used for different things, such as a mono brow.

If I had a mono brow, it would be one eyebrow right across my head.

But that's a mono brow.

So monotheistic just means belief in one God.

However, this is where it gets slightly confusing because Christians believe that there's only one God, but that there are three persons in one.

Okay so one God, but there are three persons that make up God.

I see that you're thinking all this is hard.

Don't worry, you will understand this in a minute or two.

So let's look at how we could explain that.

And maybe slightly easier way.

What is the chocolate bar in this picture? Grip.

You got it.

You're right.

It is a Twix, the classic chocolate bar.

So why am I showing you a Twix? Good question.

If you look carefully at Twix, you will see that it has the layer of chocolate on the outside.

It has caramel and then it has biscuit.

But if I just gave you the caramel, it wouldn't be a Twix.

Okay? So if I just gave you the caramel, you might be a bit disappointed.

So what we find is that there are three parts that make up the Twix and we call it a Twix, but all three parts play a different role in the Twix.

The Carmel is never going to taste like the chocolate.

They play a different role.

And the Trinity is exactly the same with the Trinity, they all play different roles.

They all work together but they're all God.

There's still only one God but three persons.

There's only one Twix but three parts.

Hopefully that makes a bit more sense.

So then our definition of the Trinity.

God is one but made up of three distinct persons.

So remember God is one, but made up of three distinct persons.

So who are these persons? I will give you five seconds to try and write down who you think three persons are in the Trinity.

What is the Trinity made up of? Five, four, three, two and one.

So three parts of the Trinity are the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.

The Trinity is a key idea in Christianity and we can see the Trinity mentioned a few times in the Bible, also in real life today.

If you were to go to a baptismal service, and we will look at baptism later on, you would see someone being baptised in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.

So this idea of the Trinity is a core belief in Christianity.

So it's really important that we understand it before we look at the rest of Christianity.

So let's consider this in a slightly different way.

If you look at the image beside me, you can see how this works.

So notice that the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit are all separate, but they're all God you'll see the little strands going into the middle that says "is." So it says, the Father is God, Son is God and the Holy Spirit is God.

That's important.

It's not that the father is God and the other two are little assistants.

They are all God.

But it also says that the Father is not the Son.

Son is not the Holy Spirit and the Holy spirit is not the Father.

So we can see that they're all very different.

They're all different.

They all have their own roles.

It's also really important to notice, that all parts of the Trinity are equal.

A lot of people think that one part of the Trinity might be more important than the other.

Maybe the Father is more important than the Son, but actually the Bible teaches that all parts of the Trinity are equal.

So one part is not more important than other, they all have their own individual roles.

So now what we are going to do is to test what you've heard so far.

So you're going to see some true and false questions.

You can either write down true or false on a sheet of paper or you can point at the screen.

Let's try and remember all that we have heard so far about the Trinity.

Number one, Christians are polytheistic.

Christians are polytheistic.

Do you think that's true or false? Make your decision known.

Three, two, one.

It is false.

Well done if you got that.

Remember we said that Christians are monotheistic.

Which means what? Well done, they believe in one God.

Good work.

Okay, question number two.

Christians believe that God is made up of three persons.

Is that true or is it false? I'm going to give you three seconds.

Three, two, one.

It is true.

Well done if you got that.

Remember the Trinity is one God but made up of three persons.

Question number three.

The Trinity is made up of four parts.

Hopefully you all get this one.

Three, two, one.

That is false.

We know that the Trinity is made up of three parts.

And finally the three parts of the Trinity are the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.

Is that true or is that false? Three, two, one.

That is true.

Really good work, okay.

Hopefully you feel really confident with everything you've learned about the Trinity so far.

What I would like you to do now is to pause your video and complete these questions.

So we've been over a few little questions, to just jog your memory and see if you remember stuff, but now what I would like you to do is to try to write down everything you remember about the Trinity.

So you have three key questions there.

Three parts of the Trinity, three key questions and they are number one.

what is it? I want you to explain what it is in your own words.

So don't just look back and write down my definition.

I want you to try and explain it.

Number two.

Who is in it? So here are the three parts of the Trinity, And number three.

What does monotheistic mean? Okay, I think you could all do this.

So press pause and then press resume once you're ready to move on with out lesson.

Great.

Well done on that.

So what is the Trinity? Remember three persons that make up God.

If you get confused remember the Twix, three separate persons but they are still only one God.

Who is in it? You have the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.

And finally, what does monotheistic mean? Monotheistic means to believe in one God.

Mono means one and theism means God.

So one God.

Really well done on the first part of our lesson.

Now we're in the position to move on, to look at what the roles of each part of the Trinity are.

So what is a role? What does it mean if you have a role? I want you to imagine we are in a school play and you have a role you're playing the lead character.

Your role is your job.

If you have the lead character, you don't go and help the person who has another role.

You do your role.

And that's exactly the same with the Trinity.

Each part has its own role.

They have their own job or thing that they do.

So let's remind ourselves of the three parts of Trinity.

So we have the Father, we have the Son and we have the Holy Spirit.

And we're now going to look at the role of each person in the Trinity.

I want to introduce you to the Nicene Creed.

So the the Nicene Creed is a statement of belief that was written dine in 325AD.

That is a really long time ago.

And all that creed means is a statement of beliefs.

So why did they make this Nicene Creed? Because the first Christians in this Christian community decided actually, we need to write down all of our core beliefs.

So that people join the church, they know what we believe so that we can all make sure we believe the same thing.

In the same way that your school might have some values that everyone is meant to believe in, it's the same idea here.

They wrote down all these beliefs, so the all the Christians were on the same page.

So I'm going to give you this task to do, and to do it, you're going to read the Nicene Creed.

Remember that this document was written hundreds and hundreds of years ago.

But it still gives us lots of interesting information about the Trinity.

So what I would like you to do, is to go through and use a different highlighter to highlight parts of the creed that are about the Father, parts that are about the Son and parts that are about the Holy Spirit.

That is your first task.

The second thing that I would like you to do is to fill in the table that's just below my face.

And what I want you to do is to write down the information you learn about each part of the Trinity in that table.

So for example, under father, I might write down the Almighty.

I might explain what that means.

To say that He is omnipotent.

Great word.

We learned that last lesson.

So you can use things that we've learned in the past, but write down any point about these three persons in the Trinity in this table.

You can download this worksheet, you can print out or you can complete it online, I don't mind at all.

Okay, now it is over to you to have a go at this task.

So please pause the video take all the time you need, I think you'd need to spend at least 10 or 15 minutes on this.

Make sure you get every piece of information out of this Nicene Creed.

And when you come back, we are going to go through these answers together and see what you have learned.

Welcome back and well done on that task.

I hope you enjoyed reading through the Nicene Creed.

So if you look at the screen, you can see where I have highlighted.

Hopefully you all got this.

So you'll see the little section at the top is about the Father and then all of the blue section is about Son.

So there's a lot of information on the Son in the Nicene Creed.

And when we do more lessons on Christianity you will see some of these core beliefs about the Son in more detail.

And finally, the section at the bottom is on the Holy Spirit.

Well done if you've got that.

And if you look at the screen now, you can see the points that I wrote down about each person in the Trinity.

So if we look at the Father first, we can see that he is almighty or omnipotent.

What's omnipotent mean? All powerful, well done.

We can also say that he created the heavens and the earth that also sounds familiar.

Remember in the last lesson, we looked at the Genesis story where God created the whole world from nothing.

And secondly, we look at the Son.

So as we said there's quite a lot of information in the Nicene Creed about Son.

Firstly, we see that He came to earth as fully human.

So the Son or Jesus came to earth as a human being.

Secondly, we see that He came to earth for human salvation.

Salvation is quite a complicated word, but it just means to be saved.

So that means that the sun came to earth to save human beings.

We then see that He was crucified and rose again.

We are going to look at that in later lessons.

Then we see that He ascended or went up to heaven, and finally, the creed says that He will come again to judge the world.

And finally, let's look at the rule of the Holy Spirit.

So from the creed, we could read that the Holy Spirit is the giver of life.

We can also work out that the Holy Spirit is with Christians on earth today.

It also says that he is worshipped , and finally that he speaks through people today.

In the creed it said that he speaks through prophets, but we can also take that to mean people on earth in general.

So that should give you a bit of an idea, about what the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit do.

What are their roles? And hopefully you can see from looking at this that they don't have the same role.

They each support Christians or do something different in Christianity.

They're not the same.

So this is a big question, and this is a challenging question.

So I need you to feel up for the challenge.

Question is, how does the Trinity make Christianity different from other religions? You might have learned about some other religions in school already or you might be sitting there thinking, I don't know much about other religions.

Completely fine, but I want you to have a think about this question.

So how does the Trinity make Christianity different from other religions? What I would like you to do is just build up on your idea.

So you can pause the video and have a think about this for a second or two and write down any ideas that you can think of.

How does the Trinity make Christianity different from other religions? Great, so I hope you've had a really good, have think about that.

If your head hurts a little bit from thinking so hard that's a good sign.

So what makes Christianity different? So the Trinity is unique to Christianity.

We don't see the Trinity and other religions.

There are other monotheistic religions.

Remember what that means? There are other religions that believe in one God.

But the difference is they don't believe that that God is made up of three persons.

So Judaism and Islam are both monotheistic religions, but they both believe that you can't divide God.

You can't separate God into different parts.

There is one God, one person that's God, whereas Christianity believes that there's one God, but that God is made up of three separate persons.

So as we've said, that makes Christianity really unique.

And that is what makes it different from many other religions.

That's where Christians view of God is different to Jewish or Muslim view of God.

Really well done if you've got that.

I'm very, very impressed.

Okay, thanks for joining me today everyone, and I hope that you have learned about what the Trinity is, what the nature of the Trinity is like, and the different roles of the Trinity.

Please do go and complete the test that you take after the lessons.

And hopefully you will get five out of five in your knowledge and please join me again for our next lesson in Christianity.

If you would like to post a picture of your work that will be great, and you can see on the screen how you might do that.

Thank you for joining me today and have a lovely rest of your day.

See you soon.