“I Believe in God…”
#1 Sermon in Series on the Apostle’s Creed:
Audio version is unavailable at this time.
Many years ago Charles Schultz, the author of Peanuts, did a cartoon for a church magazine and in that cartoon there was pictured a young teenager who had a witch doctor’s mask on. The caption of the cartoon read: My program tonight is entitled “It matters not what you believe only whether you are sincere or not.” Now, we laugh at that, maybe a little uncomfortably, because we know that sincerity has nothing to do with the truth; and yet often that is what we ask. As long as you are sincere, it is O.K. We laugh a little uncomfortably because we also know that deep down inside it matters tremendously what we believe; belief, what we think is true, informs everything that we do. Every decision we make is based on whether we think something is right or wrong, or whether it is true, whether it will benefit us, or something. We get married. We move. We do all kinds of things. Sometimes we do horrible things, sometimes we do great things, all because of truth that we believe in, or not. It forms a foundation of everything that we do.
Some people today have a strong belief that there should be no strong beliefs. I mean, how many times in recent years have we heard “More people have been killed in the name of religion than anything else.” Have you heard that? I have, many times. Well the answer is, get rid of religion. “Imagine there is no Heaven, it isn’t hard to do, nothing to kill and die for, and no religion too.” You know that was voted one of the greatest songs in rock and roll history. (gag) Oh, excuse me. It is just so, I’m sorry. … I had a hairball with that one… I shouldn’t do that in a sermon, should I? But you know what, it is patently false. Do a little research. You know, in Wikipedia, look up genocide in the twentieth century or something like that. You’ll find literally dozens of instances, I mean more than you could ever imagine, of not just a few people getting killed, but lots of people getting killed all at once, and you know what the reason were? 99% have nothing to do with religion; 99%, or more. I couldn’t really find one. Yeah, Hitler killed the Jews but it had nothing to do with religion, it was all racial. All kinds of things like that. It’s patently false. Patently false. The fact is everyone has beliefs, and we do everything we do because of beliefs. So it behooves us as Christians to review, if you will, what we believe. So this summer I am going to preach through the Apostles’ Creed. It is sort of the foundation of doctrinal preaching and I will try not to bore you. When you hear doctrine everyone wants to snooze. It’s like, oh my gosh! It really does apply of your life. It informs all of what we do, what we believe about God. So, I’m not giving up on John, by the way; just pausing with John a little bit; just this summer, eight to ten sermons probably, on the Apostles’ Creed.
This morning we are going to start with the first phrase, “I believe in God…” There is a lot in that, believe it or not. There is a whole lot in that. Well, let’s begin. The Scripture will be in the points that we look at. I have used several bits of Scripture. My first point is that the Creed, the Apostles’ Creed, is really about you. Now hang with me for a minute. What does that mean? Well the first word is “I” not “We”. When we recite a creed, when we recite the Apostles’ Creed, it is “I” believe. Now that is important. It is very important. We do live in a society right now that is very individualistic, so a lot of people believe that you can be a strong Christian, or strong believer, without church, without a group, without a community. I don’t agree with that. But in the end, it does start with you. It does start with you. And even in the Bible itself, there is this strong, strong idea that you need to confess what you believe as an individual. In fact, Paul links it to salvation. Romans 10:9-10: “If you confess with your mouth, ‘Jesus is Lord,’ and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.” That heart is not a beating heart. In the Bible the heart is everything about your being. So it says “and believe with everything you are that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.” So you confess with your mouth. So you believe and yet there is something about confessing. Faith is a personal journey. It is a personal thing. Each one speaks for his or herself.
You know I have had the privilege of serving several churches in my pastoral career and the first two were over two hundred years old. The first one was founded in 1756. The second one was founded in 1745. There is something really cool about that. This church is almost 125 years old. I think it is in three years. We are going to have a celebration. 125 years, that’s just great. I have met many, many people who are in there 90’s, very chronologically blessed, who said “I was baptized here in this place.” I just visited Albert Picha, who is in hospice, who is 99. He is probably not going to make one hundred. He told me, “I was baptized there.” Cool. It is so cool. There is something powerful about that, but we must remember something. Every generation is new. There are no second-generation Christians. Just because you are member of a church, just because your grandparents are members of a church, wherever you happen to be, doesn’t mean you are a Christian. Just because you were baptized in a place, doesn’t mean you are a Christian. Just because your parents are Christian, doesn’t mean you are a Christian. Every person comes to faith themselves. It is not transferable. It is influenced. Next week we get to have a baptism. We influence, we pray for. Every child that was born in my family, I prayed for them, that they would come to know the Lord. I pray the same thing for Jake and will continue to pray for my grandchildren. We all should be praying for all of our children that they may come to know the Lord. It is not transferable. We all come ourselves. “I” believe.
The second word is “Believe”. My point here is, believing is not just about the facts. Now, we have all heard over the years the to-do, if you will, about the difference between scientific fact and faith fact. There is this idea that science is true and faith is just what you believe, whether it is true or not. Someone once said that faith is believing what you know isn’t so. But you know what? I have something to say to you. I believe that God exists. I believe in Jesus. I believe in His church in the same way that I believe in the multiplication table. I believe it the same way that I believe that water freezes at 32 degrees, in the same way I believe that gravity is real. We should all believe that. There is a tremendous amount of evidence for faith. There is… a tremendous amount of evidence for faith. There are people who have written books about the evidence for faith who actually started out not believing and came to faith because of the evidence for it. It is based on facts. Yeah, the facts run out after a while and you have to make a choice, but it is based on fact.
You know my wife is wonderful, and I am not going to try to embarrass her today; but she doesn’t say a whole lot about my sermons, especially after Sunday. She gives it a day or two. She knows I am not in the mood for that, but, bless her heart. But she did say something to me the other day. I came home after giving the illustration about jumping out of airplanes, as an illustration for faith, and I have done it so many times here, and she said, “You’ve got to leave that one alone for a while.” But it is a great illustration about how… Well that is why I brought this stick today, by the way. It is another illustration for faith. The word in the Bible is pistuo, which means to believe into something; not just believing a fact. So, biblical faith is all about putting your trust in someone or something. We don’t just believe God is there, we acknowledge God is there, that he is the boss, he is the Lord. When we believe in Jesus we are not saying, “Oh we just believe you are there.” We believe you are the Lord. We will talk more about that as we move along with the Apostles’ Creed. Believing is believing into. So those two first words are so important. It is about me, I; I have to believe it. The question for all of us is, do we? On a scale of one to ten, where is that faith that I have? Is it a two or a ten? Is it somewhere in between? Some times it goes up and down.
James’s point here is just this: (James 2:19) “You believe that God is one. Great. Even the demons have faith.” What is the difference between you and a demon? It means when you believe into, when you align yourself, when you confess that God is Lord, it is a very different thing.
Now what kind of God do we believe in? We say we believe in God, but what are we talking about? Who are we talking about? You know, it is interesting to me that the very first commandment, number 1—it’s number 1 for a reason— is this: “You shall have no other gods before me.” (Exodus 20:3) I have been interested, and it may be true, that it is procreating in other places in the country, but since I have lived in Minnesota I have been amazed at how many in your face bumper stickers there are. I don’t know if it’s because as Minnesotans we don’t like to say it out loud; but we have to say it somehow, so it is on the bumper sticker. Some of them are pretty good. Have you seen the one that says “coexist” in different religions? I want you to know, I don’t have any trouble with that. I really don’t. I think as Christians we are to be good citizens and we are to work with others whether they agree with us or not for the betterment of society. We should all get along; but at the same time, at the same time, we should never ever forget who we are worshipping. You know, it is interesting in our society right now, the enemy seems to be said to be atheism. You know, we all band together as people of faith against those who don’t. There are a lot of books out there right now that are just atheistic; there is whole society that is supposed to be atheistic, you know the communist, and all that kind of thing. But, lo and behold, there aren’t that many out there, are there? They don’t believe in a god of some kind. Now in biblical times there were no atheists. Everybody believed in something. The idea was the real God over against all the other gods. The same is true here. We must avoid syncretism, that is, we just all lump it together. I know that is not very politically correct, but we can believe what we believe without being nasty to anyone. We can be kind, we can persuade, that’s what it is about. I admit, the church, or the people who were purported to be Christians in history, have done a horrible job of that. We need to repent of it. Sometimes it has been supposedly forced conversions and people who have done who knows what. We need to put all that aside and we simply persuade.
When I first became a Christian that was what I wanted to do most of all. You know, it wasn’t as though, I’ve got God now and I am better than you. It was, I’ve got God now and I want you to have him too because he is pretty big and you can have him too. It is good stuff. That is what we need to be about. People need Jesus. People need God, the real God. It is not that we hate anyone else. It is that we have something that you know doesn’t really belong to us, and God has said, “Go tell.” “You shall have no other gods before me.” When we confess “I believe in God”, we are not only proclaiming the God in whom we believe into, we are proclaiming decisively that there are many other gods that we reject and we do not and cannot believe into. There is a sense in which we actually do take sides. And that is O.K.
What is God like? We will talk a little bit about that and next week we will talk about “God the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth.” What is this Father thing, anyway? Well, just come back next week and we will talk about it. What is this Almighty thing? What is it about God? Well, maybe that is a teaser, but come back and we will talk about it.
But the first thing we need to acknowledge, the first thing the Bible talks about that is very different from any other faith in the entire world, is God is absolutely personal. I may have told you about my last church. When I first arrived in Texas, my first year there, the first wedding I got was a couple who were, they were actually dwarves. He was about this tall, I think, and she was just a little taller. I asked them, I always do marriage counseling, and I said, “How did you meet?” “We met online.” Now this is 1999. I remember going, “Oh, that’s weird.” And ten years later, more people, they say, are meeting online than any other way. It is a big different world out there. And it is O.K. And you know what? I got an email from her just a little while ago. Ten year anniversary; two children; happy as they can be and doing well. They thought of me and said, “Thank you.” Wow! That’s cool.
Why do people… they always pair off, they are always looking for relationships. We all want, deep in our hearts, intimacy. It is because we are made in the image of God. It is because God is that way. It is because God is that way. God is personal. That may seems too obvious to us but it is so different. Again, it is instructive to do comparative religion. You know what I believe? I believe that it is really good to explain differences between all of us in any issue. If you are talking with someone and you have a difference with them, it is really good to take a piece of paper and say you believe this and I believe that. To clarify differences is a good thing. Sometimes it gets rid of misconceptions. At least we know where we stand. You can do it in a nice way. You know, its funny how we sort of don’t like to do that. We start clarifying differences and people start getting out the knives or something. I got a letter from someone a while back and I had said something in a sermon about clarifying a difference between Christianity and Islam and it was almost as though I had declared war. No, we have to know these things. The fact that God is personal is so different from say the Eastern religions who believe that God is totally impersonal. You are like a drop of water in a bucket— there is no personality. Even Islam, you know, Allah is very interesting. There is a connection between the biblical word Elohim and Allah, and there is a connection there. But we go further and acknowledge that God actually has a proper name: Yahweh. I AM WHO I AM. That is what it means in this culture. Moses said. “Who shall I say sent me?” And God said, “I AM”, Yahweh. That is my name. It will be my name forever and ever and ever”. (Exodus 3:14) To have a God to lower himself, if you will, to give us his proper name; amazing, because God is personal. The whole story of the Bible is about how God has a relationship with people. It is so different and we should be proud of that difference, not in a prideful way. But that is different. God is personal. God has a name. And God has entered history and loves through the person of Himself and the person of his Son and the power of his Spirit, and we will talk about it as we go along. God is personal.
And last but not least, we say that God is three in one. (Matthew 28:19) You know what? If I were an advertiser, and I was charged with creating a new product line, a new god, I would not start with the Trinity. The Trinity is hard. How is it that we have one being and that being is three persons? Yet that is part of the Apostles’ Creed; it is a part of Christianity; it is the bone of contention between ourselves and Islam and Jehovah’s Witnesses and all kinds of different groups. It is what we believe. Now, the first thing we really need to say is that there is a lot of things about God that we do not understand everything about: his infinity, his omniscience, his providential control of free actions, all those big questions out there. But at the same time, you know, we have entered relationships with people all the time without knowing everything about them. I mean, how many of you who are married knew everything about you spouse before you got married? After years later, do you still know everything about them? Men, do you know everything about your wives? Have you understood that manual for that yet? I’m sorry. I’m getting personal here. There are a lot of complex things in just individuals, right? God is way too big and complex to understand. So we affirm a truth we don’t totally understand and yet it has formed the foundation for what we believe.
And I will leave you with this. I will leave you with this. That God in his being is also relational. God didn’t really need us. He had fellowship within his self, through Father, Son and Holy Spirit. God is a person, is personal. I am not saying it is the total foundation of who God is. It is one of the major aspects of God, but God is personal and he didn’t need us. Yet, the marvelous thing is, he has made all of us, and one of the biggest reasons he made you and me and all of us is to have relationship with us. God is such a Big God and he can have a personal relationship with each person here and billions of others; and it still can be personal. I don’t know about you but I lose track after about ten. We all do. It is hard, but God can do it; and he loves you, and wants to know you, more and more and more. When I first became a Christian I said I wanted to share Christ, but I wanted people to know Christ. As a pastor, what I wanted most of all for people in the church is not only to know Christ but to know him better. I wanted to know him better. That is the motivation for my ministry. It is one of my biggest things, is I want you and me, all of us, because we are all growing, to know God better. And we do that by knowing about him, but most of all knowing him. And God at heart, and Trinity, is relational. There is love between the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit but there is love for you. Think about that during the week. Now we are going to talk about some big theology things next week but we will make it interesting, I hope. A little bit more about who God is. But let’s start with the idea, God is a person and loves you and wants to know you more. He wants you to know him.
Let’s pray together.
Lord God, thank you for who you are; that you are bigger than we can understand and that is good because you wouldn’t be God if we could understand you. And yet at the same time we can know you, we can know you. You have come to our level that we may know you. Help us to understand a little more about who you are and the commitment you ask from us and through faith, and the growing in our relationship with you. Now be with us Lord as we partake of the communion. May we experience your presence in a way that is very powerful. We pray in Jesus name. Amen.