Sermon Tone Analysis

It has been almost two years since Annette, Miss Lynn, and I moved into our condominium in Carrollton, and this week we got our first love letter from the condominium owners’ association.

I had been warned about this kind of thing by others who have lived in places where there are HOAs, but this has been my first experience with it, so I was a little surprised when Annette told me we’d received a notice of violation.

It turns out that we have been directed to have our driveway power-washed, and the notice included a quotation from the association’s bylaws that, frankly, requires some interpretation in order to conclude that we’ve somehow run afoul of the regulations.

Whatever.

We’ll get the work done.

Living under the sometimes arbitrary rules of this association was something we agreed to do when we signed the real estate closing documents.

Nearly every community and every organization one could ever be a part of includes some sort of statement of principles that one must agree to in order to be a part of it.

Some of you were probably Boy Scouts.

Do you remember the Scout Law?

A Scout is trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean, and reverent.

The Girl Scout Law is similar: “I will do my best to be honest and fair, friendly and helpful, considerate and caring, courageous and strong, and responsible for what I say and do, and to respect myself and others, respect authority, use resources wisely, make the world a better place, and be a sister to every Girl Scout.”

The Ruritan clubs have a pledge: “We are Ruritans dedicated to improving communities and building a better America.

Through fellowship, we are gaining friendships that last a lifetime.

By showing goodwill toward others, we are improving the attitudes of many.

Through community service, sharing and caring for those around us, we are striving to reach our common goals together.

May God Bless the Ruritans!”

Rotary clubs begin their meetings by reciting the Four-Way Test: “Of the things we think, say, or do: Is it the truth?

Is it fair to all concerned?

Will it build goodwill and better friendships?

Will it be beneficial to all concerned?”

These kinds of statements help members of these organizations remember the things that brought them together in the first place.

They help the organizations maintain their focus.

They help teach new members about the character of the organizations.

And they help to remind members of the history of their organizations.

And it may surprise some of you to hear this, but the Church — the big-C Church — seems always to have had statements of this sort that believers learned and recited, much as the Rotary Club recites the Four-Way Test at the beginning of every meeting.

These are creedal confessions — or, simply creeds, and it’s unfortunate that we have lost the tradition of learning and reciting them, because in losing the tradition, we’ve also lost the benefit of education and spiritual formation they represent.

Many biblical scholars believe Paul’s words in Eph 4:4-6 were an early creedal confession that would have been recited when a new convert was baptized.

Another passage scholars believe was a well-known creed in the first-generation church can be found in 1 Cor 15:3-4.

Another appears in 1 Tim 3:16.

Each of these passages describes something about the faith that the earliest converts to Christianity shared.

Each of them was used as a teaching tool within the young church.

And each of them helped to focus those believers on the mission of the church — to glorify God by making new disciples in Christ.

Creeds have fallen out of favor in much of the Protestant church.

“No creed but Christ” has often been the rallying cry of those who consider such statements of faith to be the stuff of popes and stuffy old churches with pipe organs and chancel choirs.

But you’ve heard me say many times before that WHAT we believe about Jesus is what’s important when it comes to saving faith.

We can believe that He was a great teacher and even a prophet, as many believed during His incarnation on earth, but those things do not constitute saving faith.

What we must believe about Jesus in order to be saved is that He is the unique and eternal Son of God; that He came to earth and lived a sinless life as a man; that He gave Himself as a sacrifice on the cross, taking upon Himself the sins of all mankind and the just punishment for those sins; that His sacrifice provides the only way for people to be reconciled to God; that He was raised back to life on the third day; that He will come again for those living and dead who have placed their faith in Him and His sacrifice on their behalf; and that He will rule in eternity over a recreated world.

These concepts are just the kinds of things we see covered in the creedal confessions of the churches in Ephesus and Corinth.

They’re also the kinds of things we see covered in the creedal confessions of the church as it grew and matured in the next few centuries after Jesus ascended back into heaven.

One of the earliest of those creedal confessions is known as the Apostles’ Creed.

Nobody is sure when it was written, but there are references to it that are almost as old as the New Testament church, probably dating back to about 150 A.D.

When the Apostles had died, and especially in the absence at the time of the canonical collection of books that we know as the Bible, the second generation of disciples needed to put together a declaration of faith that captured the Apostles’ teaching and that could be passed down to new generations.

You’ll find the text of this creed on the back of your song sheet this morning.

Read along with me.

I believe in God the Father, Almighty, maker of heaven and earth.

And in Jesus Christ, His only Son, our Lord; who was conceived of the Holy Ghost, born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, dead and buried.

He descended into Hell, on the third day he rose again from the dead; he ascended into Heaven and sitteth at that right hand of God the Father Almighty.

From thence he shall come to judge the quick and the dead.

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

Amen.

Now, we’re not going to spend time this morning going through all the doctrine within this creed.

I want to encourage you to read it again at home.

Spend some time investigating the Scriptural backing for each of the statements.

Creeds aren’t meant to replace the Bible, but to teach it.

I will not be surprised if you have questions about this creed after you’ve examined it.

If so, please don’t hesitate to come to me with them.

What I’ll tell you this morning is that the Apostles’ Creed, with some modifications that we’ll see in a few moments, represents the things that all Christians in all places from all times have always believed.

We may differ on the Rapture or millennialism or predestination or lots of other things, but these are the basic tenets of our faith.

But something began to happen after the Apostles’ Creed came into being in the mid-second century.

Gnosticism, which held that there was secret knowledge about Jesus that was available only to some, became fashionable, and false teachers associated with it came into the church.

And at the same time, biblical scholars began working to try to understand things like the divine nature of Jesus.

And in the process of all this scholarship, there were some priests and scholars in the church who began teaching things that were contrary to Scripture.

And so, an ecumenical council of churches was convened in Nicea in 325 A.D. And among the things that took place during that council was the writing of what’s known as the Nicene Creed, which dealt very directly with the heretical concepts of the deity of Christ.

Now, I’m not going to read the whole Nicene Creed today.

You’ll see it on the back of your song sheet, and again, I encourage you to take some time to look at it for yourself at home.

What I want to focus on this morning, as we continue our series of messages on “The Church — Revealed” is that last paragraph:

We believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life, who proceeds from the Father.

With the Father and the Son he is worshiped and glorified.

He has spoken through the Prophets.

We believe in one holy catholic and apostolic church.

We acknowledge one baptism for the forgiveness of sins.

We look for the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come.

Amen.

One of the great things the Nicene Creed accomplished was to set out the four marks of the church, the four characteristics that set this true New Covenant community of the Spirit apart from anything else that might claim to be the church.

First, notice that the Church is mentioned in the same paragraph that describes what we believe about the Holy Spirit.

Remember that the Church cannot exist without the Spirit, so this placement makes a lot of sense.

But look at that fourth sentence: “We believe in one holy catholic and apostolic church.”

Those are the four marks, and I want to spend the remainder of our time this morning examining them.

These are the things you should look for in a church, because these are the characteristics that speak to whether an assembly of people who call themselves Christians is truly part of the body of Christ.

The first mark is oneness.

We’ve talked a lot about this, and we’ll talk a lot more about it, because Jesus considered unity within the Church to be one of its most important characteristics.

Remember that He prayed in John, chapter 17, “that they may be one even as we are.”

From John 17:22-23:

Unity within the church is one of the ways the church shares the gospel.

Remember the church that formed in Acts, chapter 2? It included people who had come to Jerusalem from all over the known world at the time — slaves and free, women and men, rich and poor, Jews and Gentiles, prostitutes and Pharisees.

And the people of Jerusalem were amazed at what they saw taking place, because all of these people who might have had nothing to do with one another otherwise were eating together and spending time in one another’s homes, and they had all things in common.

You’ve heard me say it before, but it bears repeating: When the church looks just as divided as the world around it, the church has lost its distinctiveness and it no longer can be an effective witness for Jesus.

Unity within the church should create peace.

And since Jesus is the Lord of Peace, peace should be a characteristic that we greatly desire to show the world.

Now, unity doesn’t mean that we all have to agree on everything.

But what it does mean is that we have to disagree in love.

As the writer of Hebrews puts it:

So, the first mark of a true church is oneness, or unity.

And that verse from Hebrews is a nice transition to the second mark, holiness.

To be holy means to be set apart, dedicated or consecrated to the service of God.

And, in the sense that the church — in Greek, the ekklesia — has been called out from the world for service to God, we are already holy.

But there is more to holiness than this.

It’s helpful to remember that Scripture portrays holiness as the most foundational characteristic of God.

He is absolutely different than everything else in creation.

He is set apart from it all.