God is love only because God is Trinity — love requires a beloved — and that one fact is the only reason engaging the world and its people is worth the trouble.
Central Image
Toby's dad stomping in from work, furious at "Everybody Wants to Rule the World" — ruling the world is all-day-every-day dealing with idiots and their idiot stuff, and why would anyone sign up for that? That frustration is the sermon's question, and amor vincit omnia is its answer.
The Turn
The assumption: world conquest is about power and authority, and power is exhausting. The flip: conquest doesn't happen by force at all — it happens through love, and love works because it is what the universe is actually made of, all the way down.
Outline
The Lord's Prayer, brought down to earth
Toby opened by revisiting the three petitions: hallowed be your name (more people honoring God for who He is), your kingdom come (more people saying Jesus is Lord and meaning it), your will be done (people consciously choosing to do what God wants). Together, those three are the church's entire assignment. The prayer asks for earth to become like heaven in the character of its people, not just its scenery. Toby's read going into a new year: Christianity is going to do exactly that, in time and in history. Which means there's a world to conquer — and that means dealing with people.
Dad and the song
His dad came home from a bad day at Weber Aircraft, caught a Tears for Fears song on the radio, and walked in the door already furious. His verdict: ruling the world is all-day-every-day dealing with idiots and their idiot stuff. Why would anyone want that? Toby had to leave the room. But the point lands: if the church is supposed to see the world transformed, then we're dealing with people — and people are crazy. Is any of this actually worth it? That's the sermon's load-bearing question.
The Alpha and Omega — three passages, one argument
Toby read Revelation 1:4–8, 21:5–8, and 22:12–13 — the three places that phrase appears. The first two times, it belongs to the Father. The third time, at the end of the book, Jesus claims it. That setup frames what follows: Revelation doesn't just tell a story about the end of the age, it lays out the Trinity as clearly as anywhere in the Bible.
The Trinity, explained without flinching
Toby walked through Revelation 1 as the clearest Trinitarian passage in Scripture. The Father gets three identifiers (who is, who was, who is to come). The Spirit is the seven spirits before the throne — seven meaning complete and everywhere, present in all seven churches. Jesus gets five identifiers including faithful witness, firstborn from the dead, and ruler of the kings of the earth — five being the number of covenant and relationship. Each person of the Trinity gets a number that fits what they do. The point wasn't numerology; it was that Revelation presents all three persons as fully God, fully distinct, and none of them reducible to the others. Brains should make a noise at this. That's the right response.
The reason God can say He is love
This is the sermon's main load-bearing move. Before God made anything — before heaven, before creation, before there was a place for God to be — there was only Father, Son, and Spirit. What did they have? Love. And that matters, because love requires a beloved. A solitary god cannot love — there's no one there to love. Toby took a direct shot at Allah: before creation, Allah was alone, and alone you don't love. Only the Trinitarian God can honestly make the claim that He is love, because in eternity there were already persons loving one another wildly and infinitely. No other worldview even tries to say that reality is grounded in love. Nobody else has even made the attempt. That's our claim, and it's the craziest true thing there is.
Why He made us
One sentence: God made us because Father, Son, and Spirit wanted more persons to share in what they had. That's the whole reason. Not to be glorified as some sort of exercise in divine self-expression — to extend what already existed in the Trinity to more persons. That's us. That's why we're here.
Is it worth it?
Toby got personal. As a teenager he genuinely believed nothing God could ever do would justify the suffering in the world — too much damage, too many people hurt. He still believed in God; he just argued with Him, because if you're going to be angry about it, God's the only one worth being angry at. But he's lived long enough and loved enough to know that love makes it worth it. He put it in terms everyone has felt: go through something hard, find love on the other end, and knowing that love got done makes the hardship make sense. That experience, stretched across all of reality, is the answer. The love of God will make every love we've ever known go invisible, the way a flashlight disappears when the sun comes out.
Amor vincit omnia
The Latin payoff: love conquers all — and that's the church's actual business. Toby circled back to the Revelation warning lists: the cowardly, the faithless, the liars, the sexually immoral — their portion is the lake of fire. That passage does two things. It says the villains eventually answer. But it also asks: is there anyone in your neighborhood, your family, your circle of people you see every week, that you'd be fine with ending up there? We're not supposed to be fine with that. And if there's something we can do about it, by the grace of God, we will. Love does its work in the world through the Holy Spirit in the people of God. That's the mechanism. That's us.
The Landing
The reason to get up on New Year's Day and do the hard things — church, people, the whole inconvenient project of engaging a broken world — is that love is the only thing that has always been true and always will be. Amor vincit omnia, and we're the ones it moves through.
Questions to Think About
- Toby's dad came home from work so fed up with people that a pop song about ruling the world set him off — ruling the world is just dealing with idiots all day, and why would anyone want that? When have you felt that way, where dealing with people seemed like more trouble than it could possibly be worth?
- Toby's argument was that the Trinity — God being one in three persons — is the only reason God can honestly say "God is love." Walk through that logic. What does love have to do with needing a beloved, and why does a solitary god change everything?
- "Alpha and Omega" shows up three times in Revelation. The first two times it's the Father. The third time, at the end of the book, it's Jesus. What was Toby saying about Jesus by doing it that way — and why does that matter for how we read the whole book?
- Toby said that as a teenager he genuinely thought nothing God could do would make the suffering in the world worth it — but he's changed his mind. Has yours changed? Or hasn't it?
- He said love is the only thing that has been there forever and will be there at the end — the only eternal thing. If that's actually true, how does it change what you spend your energy on?
- Toby claimed that no other worldview — not Islam, not secular humanism, nothing — even attempts to say that reality itself is grounded in love. Is that claim accurate? And if it is, why doesn't it hit us harder than it does?
- Toby ended with the Revelation list — the cowardly, the faithless, the liars heading for the lake of fire — and asked whether we'd be okay with anyone we know ending up there. He said we're not supposed to be. How does that land for us as a church, specifically?
- Name one specific person in your life you've quietly written off — someone you've stopped engaging because it costs too much — and decide this week whether "amor vincit omnia" actually applies to them.