I Believe

Mission and Vision

We romanticize

Imagine this…

Long time church goer… someone asks what do you believe?

Its easy to say some generic statement about belief… but is what you say you believe the same thing that This says?

Do you know how to share sound doctrine and Gospel truth with people based on historic and orthodox Christianity rooted in your life transformation… or do you just know how to give your opinion on how you feel

And our series is titled I Believe

Not taking away from personal experience with God. Or your emotional and spiritual development

In a world of competing truths, it is important to know what you believe

But if you are telling people about the god of your emotions or the god of your experience but that doesn’t line up with the God of the Bible… what are you really sharing?

Let’s flip the roles… how do you process someone telling you that they are Christian yet these are the foundations of their faith:

God wants you to be happy and healthy

Jesus was our example on how to live a good life

You don’t have to go to Church to be a Christian

How do you understand the Holy Spirit?

Well the holy spirit is really just gods force on earth. It isn’t really God but more like God’s hand

God doesn’t speak to us now days… we just have to try to be good

Can you spot false doctrine? Can you spot unorthodox teaching?

A struggle that a lot of our brothers and sisters have is they haven’t been given a foundation to start with to build on

I mean we have been given the foundation of Salvation in Christ on the cross… but to someone who is new to the faith… What do we truly believe?

Private vs Personal

You have to know what you believe

Today’s world is filled with false doctrine and flat out lies about the Christian faith

This isn’t anything new… check out Pauls word’s to Timothy

1 Timothy 1:1–7 ESV

Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus by command of God our Savior and of Christ Jesus our hope, To Timothy, my true child in the faith: Grace, mercy, and peace from God the Father and Christ Jesus our Lord. As I urged you when I was going to Macedonia, remain at Ephesus so that you may charge certain persons not to teach any different doctrine, nor to devote themselves to myths and endless genealogies, which promote speculations rather than the stewardship from God that is by faith. The aim of our charge is love that issues from a pure heart and a good conscience and a sincere faith. Certain persons, by swerving from these, have wandered away into vain discussion, desiring to be teachers of the law, without understanding either what they are saying or the things about which they make confident assertions.

There were people saying that they were believers in Christ… but didn’t know what Christians believed. And they were teaching it

There were false teachings and myths and endless genealogies that were sneaking into the church

People looking to gain some sort of brownie points for knowing what tribe they were a part of

People saying that their brand of church was the real one because they had some superior knowledge that no one else had (this is called gnosticism)

People caught up in zodiac signs and false teachings that ran contrary to scripture

So here’s what the early church did

They said… what if we could come up with a creed or a basic set of beliefs that cold combat these false teachings and help us unify over the things that truly matter (at that time)

So what developed in the first 200 years after Jesus death is what we now know as the Apostles creed

This wasn’t a new thing.

What they did was looked at what the church had held to be true

You will hear people say silly things like… christian doctrine was invented in 325ad at the council of Nicea

This is categorically false

The Old Roman Creed which was most of the Apostles creed was floating around 100-200 years after Christ’s death

Now what I want to clarify is something that is debated among many scholars to this day

The things in the AC were put there to clarify and combat false information regarding the faith

The things that are absent from the creed do not meet that they are not important… it simply means that there was no need to argue or clarify these things because there was common consensus.

There is little comment about Jesus’s actual life and ministry. That’s not because it doesn’t matter, but because it was taken for granted that if you are going to be a Christian, then the life and teachings of Christ need to be taken serousley

The AC started off as a foundation for Christians everywhere to know if they aligned with what all other Christians believed based on scripture

To make sure that people were standing in orthodoxy

Why is this important today?

We seem to have lost connection with the Old paths

tells us

Jeremiah 6:16 ESV

Thus says the Lord: “Stand by the roads, and look, and ask for the ancient paths, where the good way is; and walk in it, and find rest for your souls. But they said, ‘We will not walk in it.’

This was the Lord talking to pre-christian Jews. Telling them to stay connected to orthodox teaching

Now people believe that there is a new way to do things

What we truly need to do is reconnect to ancient paths. Looking at historical and orthodox christianity and seeing what they were solid on. What was it that wasn’t up for debate

Then you have to own it