Cr: Creed

As we’re continuing our Elemental series, tonight we're going to talk about the importance of putting belief into action when we're trying to change the world.

This means that we must act on our beliefs, and it also means we need to believe the right things instead of the wrong things.

Believing the wrong things when it comes to our Christian doctrine is like trusting a do-it-yourself gastric bypass kit because it will only serve to get us into trouble.

(Aside depending on response) Yes, a DIY gastric bypass kit was actually up for sale, briefly, on Amazon in 2011. Someone reviewed the $264 product, claiming to be a customer, saying, "This is an awesome product. I have performed my first two bypasses using this kit (on myself of course), and I have lost over 200 pounds. There was some initial bleeding that occurred, and I needed to be rushed to the emergency room due to 'severe internal hemorrhaging,' but the three-week stay was well worth the cost I saved by doing my bypass.

We’re going to look at the essential element we’re going to call “creed,” and see how we can center our mission on the right things to believe.

Today, we're going to go back to the start of Paul's third missionary journey, when he wrote a letter that we know as 1 Corinthians.

Paul had spent more than a year in Corinth during his second missionary journey, and this letter was part of a series of correspondence he had with the church there after he left.

Paul wrote this letter because the Corinthians had asked Paul some questions, which Paul addressed starting in chapter 7. Questions about the practice of spiritual gifts in the church, the way Christians celebrated the Lord's supper, and more.

In chapter 15, Paul took a break from addressing specific issues and questions to address a key tenet of exactly what the Corinthians believed.

1 Cor. 15:1-11

The Corinthian church had questions but also some issues that were damaging the fabric and connectedness of the church. They had divisions:

between the rich and the poor that broke out at the Lord's table, because the rich people went ahead and ate all the food, leaving others hungry.

between Christians of Jewish background and Gentile background over whether it was OK to eat food that had been sacrificed to idols.

between those who had given up typical Corinthian sexual practices and those who said they could be Christians and still be as loose sexually as the rest of Corinth was.

These issues and more had polluted the Corinthian church and taken it off mission. But Paul diagnosed that the root problem was a theological one.

1 Corinthians 15:12 “Now if Christ is proclaimed as raised from the dead, how can some of you say that there is no resurrection of the dead?”

This question went to the root of the problem in Corinth: the Christians there had a hard time connecting what they did with their bodies to the state of their souls.

The ultimate demonstration of this belief came as they discounted the resurrection.

So Paul shared a creed, a statement of belief, that is one of the clearest statements of Christian doctrine in all of Scripture.

In 1 Cor. 15:3-8, Paul defended the resurrection and gave many witnesses to it. After this, there was no question that resurrection from the dead was real and that Jesus had risen Himself.

We see in this passage that what we believe is critically important.

If we get our Christian doctrine wrong, as the Corinthians had, we will find ourselves straying from our mission as Christians. As a result, if we change the world, it will be in the wrong ways.

When Paul began to unpack these questions, he started at the beginning. Laying a firm foundation of truth about who Jesus was and is, and about His resurrection was crucial before Paul could tackle these other issues.

This is because the foundation informs everything else. This is also true for us: we can do a lot of deeds, but our foundation must be locked in on Christ. Otherwise, it means nothing.

What you believe fuels what you do.

So if we want to take part in God's mission and change the world, we need to make sure that the essential element of creed is at work in our lives.

This doesn't mean that we have to have every answer before we get started on our mission. We will always be learning new things about God and about ourselves. We will have questions that will take a long time to answer–if we ever answer them at all.

But there are also parts of our creed that all Christians can agree on. Classic statements of the church, like the Apostles Creed or the Nicene Creed, have helped Christians over many centuries express what they believe.

As we continue to refine what we believe, we will find that it fuels what we will do.

Because we believe Christ is speaking, we can listen and obey what He leads us to do.

Because we believe God loves every person, we can show God's love to even the most unlikely people.

Because we believe we can do all things through Christ who strengthens us, we can take leaps of faith that look risky to everyone else.

What you believe fuels what you will do, so let creed fuel your mission with God.