Apostoles Creed | I believe in God the Father Almighty Creator of Heaven and Earth. | Gen 1:1

Intro

Hey y’all, how is everyone?

Break was cool?

Cool cool.

So let’s do something really quick,

everyone take out your phone, if you don’t have one take out some paper.

But do this, i want you to text me your answer.

And heres the question. What do you believe.

Here is my number on the screen. What do you believe?

Write your name and then What do you believe?

Text that to me, i’ll give you a couple mins to come up with what you believe.

As soon as you have it, send it.

I’ll start reading them.

I’ll go through them.

Okay so, how was that? Sounds easy, but the answers aren’t bad, but they’re vague, incomplete. That’s okay, that’s why we are here.

For the next few weeks we are going to live here basically.

What do we believe.

So tonight we are going to start going through the Apostels Creed.

I want to answer a lot of questions with this, so it may feel a little different tonight.

Why Creeds?

So why creeds? What is a creed and why?

A creed is a concise statement of belief. I sort of asked you a second ago, what is your creed? What do you believe? and you gave me something, and they weren’t bad, but they were incomplete, or vague.

A creed is clear and concise.

So why study them?

Creeds give us tools to remember and understand what we believe.

It is a part of spiritual formation. Through creeds and confessions, the church discipled it’s people. Think about it. Most couldn’t read, so how did they do it? Through learning the creed. Learning the confessions.

There was a base line of belief.

Why the Apostles Creed?

So why the Apostles Creed specifically?

Studying and internalizing the Apostles Creed does two things for us,

One it gives clarity and two it shows us community.

Basically answers the question,

What do we believe and who do we belong to?

It’ll take you about 1 min to say the whole creed but in that one min it gives you a basic, clear, and concise version of Christian belief.

and sure, there are things not in the creed that we hold dear to, but that isn’t the purpose of the creed.

The purpose is to say this is what the whole church believes, if you are in practicing orthodoxy, this is the most basic level.

This is what you have to believe if you are going to to be a christian in any level.

Al Mohler, a good baptist thinker says this about it.

“All Christians believe more than is contained in the Apostles Creed, but none can believe less.”

It’s the most basic beliefs held by the church through all time.

The Creed transcends time and place, it connects us to something bigger that just us right here right now.

We are connected to believers across time and place when we confess this creed.

I know this is not normal, and it may feel weird at first, thats okay, I want this to become a part of who we are.

So, let’s get in to it.

Let’s stand and say the whole thing together.

I believe in God, the Father almighty,       creator of heaven and earth.

I believe in Jesus Christ, his only Son, our Lord,       who was conceived by the Holy Spirit       and born of the virgin Mary.       He suffered under Pontius Pilate,       was crucified, died, and was buried;       he descended to hell.       The third day he rose again from the dead.       He ascended to heaven       and is seated at the right hand of God the Father almighty.       From there he will come to judge the living and the dead.

I believe in the Holy Spirit,       the holy catholic* church,       the communion of saints,       the forgiveness of sins,       the resurrection of the body,       and the life everlasting. Amen.

The first line of the apostles creed is this,

I believe in God the Father Almighty, Creator of Heaven and Earth.

let’s dive in to what that means

If you have your bible great, if you need a bible throw a hand up and we’ll get you one.

Cool, so we are going to be in Gen 1 tonight, exploring the first line of the creed.

So flip over there. it’s at the beginning.

Most of you probably know it but let’s read it together.

But before we do that, let’s pray for our time in the word.

Pay with me.

What is does it mean to say, “I believe in”

Okay cool, Gen 1:1

Genesis 1:1 ESV

1 In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.

Okay so, with that verse, and the first line of the AC let’s dive in.

What does the first line mean. I believe in God the Father Almighty, Creator of Heaven and Earth.

What does it mean to believe?

When we say the creed we are saying that I/We believe in something and so what does “I believe” mean.

When you say that, you are stating that you assent to something, that you say yes that is reality.

Belief always leads to action. Why?

because you if you truly believe something, you act on that belief.

Like, why do you brush your teeth? because you believe that it will give you a clean mouth. If you didn’t believe that, you probably wouldn’t do it.

So this is a true story, i used to work with this guy at Truetts a long time ago who was conspiracy theorist, and one of the many things that he believed to be true was that the toothpaste manufacturers were all in cahoots to get chemicals in our systems that would lower the birth rate or something, so he wouldn’t use toothpaste that you could buy, he made his own tooth paste.

He made it out of coco butter and charcoal. I’m not kidding. He would mix it up and brush his teeth with that. And you know what, that dudes smelled awful.

See belief leads to action, to confess something and then not follow through on it is a lie.

So when we say “I believe in”

We are saying this is something that defines my world view, something that shapes how we see reality.

We hold it to be ultimate reality.

“God the Father Almighty, Creator of Heaven and Earth”

SO what does this first line mean,

We are saying I believe in God the Father Almighty, Creator of Heaven and Earth.

So it means this,

I believe there is a God who is all powerful and always been there, I believe He is the creator of all things, and I believe He can be personally known.

Gen 1:1 let

And so with Gen 1, we see these things in there.

So let’s look at where we get this first line in the creed from scripture.

Genesis 1:1 ESV

1 In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.

We just read it a second ago, but in the beginning God.

Eternality of God

So the first thing that tells is well, in the beginning, God was there.

Really it tells us God was there before the beginning.

So this is one of the attributes of God, these tells us about who God is and what his essence is like.

God is Eternal.

Anyone want to take a shot a what eternal means? For something to be eternal?

Yeah, it means God has no beginning and no end,

God always was and is and is to come.

So this is the picture Gen 1 is creating for us.

At one point, there was only God. Was all there was.

There wasn’t even time or space, there was only God.

So, God is eternal. Without time, outside of time. No beginning, and no end.

So when we say I believe, we saying, I believe in God eternal, we believe in an ultimate reality, reality gets no more real than God. He is reality.

So when we say, i believe, we believe in God eternal and our lives are shaped by that fact.

The Power of God

But that is not all. We also See God as almighty in Gen 1 and also in the AC.

Look at creation.

In the Hebrew the word creation is the word bara, and what is cool about that word is that is only ever used to refer to God.

It is a Hebrew word of create, but it is a different kind of create.

It doesn’t translate well in to english, we see it as create.

Like this week i created a cool graphic on canva.

But this word Bara is designed to only be used to talk about God, Elohim, Yaweh, God the Father Almighty.

The reason is, they want you to know, that only God can create like God can.

So who likes to bake in here? Any bakers?

Cool, how do you do that? Mix your stuff, pour it in a pan or whatever, and throw it in the oven. You created the bread, you made the bread.

But what if you wanted the purest bread, you know farm to table, what if you went and bought wheat, ground it yourself in to flour, got farm raised local eggs, homemade butter, all that.

you make bread, its better.

Then let’s say you want to do it all, you don’t want to borrow our buy any materials for it, so you plant wheat, you raise chickens you get a cow for milk, whatever you need, you are growing it or raising it.

You get the stuff, you create the bread. it’s awesome.

but that is as far as you can go in making bread without buying or borrowing things right? You didn’t create the chickens, you didn’t create the rain, you didn’t create the sunlight.

We can’t create those things. When ever we are creating something, or making something, we have to borrow from God.

God doesn’t have to borrow.

God Creates. Because God is almighty.

By his very word He created all things.

Even in the Hebrew words for The Beginning, it implies nothing before on a deeper level.

That in in the beginning, was already an act of creation, because the first thing God created is time it’s self.

The heavens and the earth all spoken in to existence, in a breath.

that is the sort of power that God has.

That is the power that we believe God has when we say the first line of the Creed,

I believe in God the Father Almighty, Creator of Heaven and Earth.

God as Father

And then we see God as Father.

This may not come across as apparent, but when this was written the Fathers were the ones in control. Over the family, they were the the ones in control.

and so who has control in this? God.

From the very outset of creation we see that God is the sovereign one in control of all things.

We see him as creator and we see him as father, just a few verses down, we see him creating man in his image.

and one of the cool things we learned this weekend at the conference was this idea of why God did this.

One of the speakers said, when a king would take over an area, when he would conquer, when he would take control the first thing he would do is build statues of his likeness all over the region.

This showed people who is in charge.

This is what God is doing, but he is not creating lifeless statues, but is creating living beings because no one can create like God can.

And He is making them in his image, in his likeness, living breathing sons and daughters.

P2Christ

SO when we say we believe in God the Father, we are saying, we believe that we are sons and daughters of the sovereign one in control of all things, who created all things.

and so here is the things that I want you to think about.

Next week we are all going to say the creed together, it is going to become a part of who we are.

But for some of you, it may not be entirely true.

So what I want to you think about is, can you truthfully confess the creed?

Do you know God as Father, do you believe in God as Lord?

The apostles creed is the motto of the kingdom.

Is it true for you?

See in Genesis 1, creation is made, and God said it is good. That’s where we have lived tonight

But we all know what happens after that. just a couple chapters over we see sin enter the world through the fall. We see the relationship between God and humanity broken.

So then the whole rest of history is humanity rebelling against God, running from God, and the bible is the story of God drawing his people back to him.

all coming together on the cross.

Christ coming and dying and rising again makes away for us to have relationship as it was in the beginning.

Christ is calling us back to the good kingdom.

Christ is calling us to repent and believe the gospel. That Christ is on the throne.

That we can be with God again.

So ask yourself. Is this true for you? Or do you need to repent and believe the gospel?

So we are going to sing a song here in a second, and we are going to pray, and if you have any questions about what if means to follow Jesus, come talk to me. I want to invite you in to the kingdom.

Y’all pray with me.