Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals

Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals, Inc: The Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals is pleased to bring you the following message from the Philadelphia Conference on Reformed Theology. Since its start in 1974, this conference has attracted audiences to its biblical expository approach to Christian doctrine. The Alliance is a listener-supported ministry. Our purpose is to promote a biblical understanding and worldview.

Guest (Male): The topic that I want to address here is using creeds and confessions in personal devotion. We can begin by saying personal devotion to our Triune God, according to some, may seem like it's not possible to mix personal devotion with creeds and confessions, and it may seem like trying to mix the proverbial oil and the water. What has doctrinal precision and drawing the boundaries of orthodoxy have to do with personal devotion and acts of prayer?

In fact, over the years, there have been theologians and people within the church that have described creeds and confessions as being an impediment to devotion. There was one 17th-century theologian in the Church of England by the name of William Chillingworth. He was a proponent of skepticism. He had his own difficulties in subscribing to the Thirty-Nine Articles, the doctrinal confession of the Church of England, and he wanted to push back beyond doctrines, denominations, creeds, and confessions.

He repeatedly said in a book of his, Judgment of the Religion of Protestants, "I do not understand the doctrine of Robert Bellarmine." Bellarmine was perhaps one of the most prominent Roman Catholic theologians of the 16th century. He says, "I do not understand the doctrine of the Sorbonne," which was at the University of Paris, one of the chief Roman Catholic learning centers for theology in Europe and it had been for a number of centuries. He says, "I don't understand the doctrine of the Jesuits."

He says when you hold the doctrine of the Council of Trent alongside of the doctrine of Luther or Melanchthon, "I don't understand what they're saying. I don't understand Luther, I don't understand Calvin, I don't understand Melanchthon, the Augsburg Confession, or Geneva, or the Heidelberg Catechism, or the articles of the Church of England." He says, "The only thing that we need is a perfect rule of faith and actions is the Bible. I say the Bible. I say the Bible is the only religion of Protestants."

Somebody like Chillingworth would say basically we don't need confessions or creeds. He would be positively opposed to the idea of combining creeds with piety; it's just too constraining. In our own day, there have been some who have said we need to return to, to borrow a line from the title of a C.S. Lewis book, we need to return to "mere Christianity."

Mind you, Lewis by the title of his book was not saying that we need to somehow go back to a period before creeds and confessions, but rather people misuse that title to say that creeds and confessions, whether of the 16th century, the 17th century, or the 4th or 5th centuries, are a straitjacket that limit our doctrinal and our emotional freedom.

So as popular as such sentiments might be for the sake of discussion, we can perhaps assume the validity for a moment of the desire and say, yes, all we need is the Bible. All we need is to worship and love Jesus. Perhaps you've even heard somebody say, "Don't give me all of this doctrine, just give me Jesus." Okay, so for the sake of discussion, let's start there. All I need is Jesus. And then somebody asks the question, well, who is Jesus?

Is he God in the flesh? Is he fully God? Is he fully man? Or is he one mixed divine and human nature? All of a sudden, we're right back in the middle of the creeds and the confessions. Or take another example. This happened literally to me a couple of weeks ago. I was at the rental car counter picking up my rental car when I was on a trip. I happened to be in Florida and the man started chatting me up. He's like, "Oh, are you here with NASA?"

No. Just as a little footnote, so far in life, I take great pride in these misidentifications. I've been mistaken for a fighter pilot, I've been mistaken for a Secret Service agent, and now a NASA scientist. So then he said, "So what are you here for?" and I was just like, this is going to be a big letdown, I'm here for a church meeting.

"What kind of church meeting?" For a meeting of Presbytery; it's where the ministers get together and we have our regional meeting. "Are you a pastor?" Well, I'm a professor. "What do you teach?" Come on, guy, just give me my rental car, I want to go. There's a lot of grouchy people in line behind me. I'm a professor, what do you teach? I teach systematic theology and church history.

He's like, "Oh, wow, so I've got this question. Let me ask you this: Some people say that Islam, Hinduism, and Christianity are all the same. What do you think?" This guy, when he hears this answer, he's going to downgrade me to a Tic-Tac with wheels and this is going to be terrible. But I thought, all right, Lord, I don't know what else to say, but here goes.

I said, "No, that's entirely false." In fact, Jesus says in John 14:6, "I'm the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes unto the Father but by me." Notice, somebody was basically saying, "Does it really matter? Jesus, Buddha, Muhammad?" And the confessional answer to it is absolutely yes, it does. We cannot just say for the sake of personal devotion, "Whatever makes you feel right, you do it. Whatever makes you happy, you believe it." That's just simply not the way that it works.

Right here and there, these two examples immediately return us to the relevance of creeds and confessions. But what we want to recognize is we want to ask the question, how can we use the creeds and the confessions in a positive manner to the benefit of our devotional lives? Well, let me say that this is the overall claim that I want to make: we must know whom we love in order to have a right relationship with God. We must know God in order to rightly love and worship God.

It is the creeds and confessions subordinate to the authority of Scripture that help us to know God so that we can love God. Keeping this in mind going forward, what I want to do is I want to defend this claim that the creeds and the confessions help us to know God so that we can rightly love him. We'll do it under three headings: first, the call of love; secondly, the age of distraction in which we live; and then third and finally, creeds, confession, and contemplation.

So let's first give thought to this idea here of the call of love. If we go back to the very first lecture for this morning and to the biblical foundation for creeds and confessions, we have to remember that God commands us, he commands us, mind you, both to know him and to love him. Deuteronomy 6:4: "Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one."

In other words, it's not the god of the Assyrians, it's not the god of the Canaanites, the Hittites; it's none of those other gods claiming to be god. The Lord our God is one. So first, here's the claim: this is the one God whom you are to know. And if you don't know this one God, you will potentially get drawn astray into worshipping other gods.

But then immediately on the heels of this is that God says, "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might." In other words, you cannot love what you do not know. A knowledge of who God is, our one God, fuels our love for him. So we can put it perhaps in these familiar terms: you've probably heard it said, to know someone is to love them.

When I was first getting to know my wife before we were married, I was asking her all sorts of questions. We were living apart, long distance, and so we would regularly send emails back and forth to one another just getting to know one another. We spent a lot of time on the telephone. And for you youngsters, we had to use a nickel line because long distance cost money back then. As my kids would say, it was almost back in the 1900s.

So I would get to know everything and I would ask her what were her likes and dislikes. So that for now, for example, I'm an expert in this as far as knowing my wife. I'm still learning, still much to learn, but I know that if I go to the store on February 13th to buy my wife a box of chocolates and roses, on February 14th my wife will kick me out of the house. Why? Because she says they triple the price of the flowers on that timeframe and I don't want you spending triple the price on the chocolate and the flowers. Buy me flowers any other day of the week, any other time during the year, but not on that day.

I know her, which helps me to love her in a way that is pleasing. In other words, I'm not going to do things, ideally, that will upset her. To know her is to love her. But notice moreover how a love of God leads to acts of instruction. "Teach these things to your children," Deuteronomy 6 says. Meditation: take the confession and it's a confession that should be in the heart as well as the mind. Notice that Deuteronomy 6 says that you should talk of these things when you sit, when you walk, and when you lie down.

Notice how this is something that spans the scope of the day: sitting down for a meal, sitting by the way, or even laying down at night. One of the things that I think that has been absolutely crucial for my family as we've been raising kids—right now I've got a sixth-grader, a 10th-grader, and a college freshman. The college freshman is away at college, though he's now back at home, so he's not there for the meals now. But when we sit down for a meal, we try to eat dinner together as a family as regularly as we can because it's at those meals that we're getting to know one another.

I'm talking to my kids, my wife is talking to them, they're asking them questions, we're spending time together. Not only are we spending time together, but we'll read a couple of chapters out of the Bible and then right now we're going through the Shorter Catechism where I'll fire off 10 questions and we'll go through the 10 questions and work our way through. You can get through the Shorter Catechism in about two weeks' time and then circle around and do it again. Notice that this is the lifestyle; notice that these are acts of devotion that the Scripture hands to us right there on a platter in Deuteronomy chapter six.

The question is how has such simple instruction failed to reach the hearts and minds of Christians so that they see creeds and confessions as being contradictory and anemical to personal devotion? Well, we could draw attention back to the last address and causes of de-confessionalism, but I think that another answer, another contributing factor, comes to the shift in the way that theologians have done theology. In the present, large swaths of the church, both in the pew as well as in the academy, look at theology as if it were a science, as if it were a discipline.

In other words, they simply look at the facts, they manipulate the data, they download the information, and they move on. Now such an attitude I think we could say brims with the confidence and the pride of rationalism: I just need to master the information. Moreover, these days because we have so many technological tools at our hand, we think that because we can master and manage the information that we're becoming proficient in it. But managing information is not the same thing as an act of devotion. It's an act of management. It's an act of collecting data.

But just because we can count, measure, classify, and master it doesn't mean that this is an act of worship. Think of the TV show—now I'm going way back, this is for some of you people, you're going to have to Google this one, it's going back to the 1900s—think of Star Trek. And for the record, brief footnote, I can't believe I'm referring to Star Trek because I myself am a Star Wars fan. I was seven years old in 1977 and I sat there for the release of this movie and I saw it and I was just blown away. I was there in a 70mm showing of Star Wars, the first installment. So you'll pardon me for referring to Star Trek.

But it's like the Star Trek TV show with Mr. Spock. The way that Mr. Spock would look at things is there would always be a logical, dispassionate, rational response and solution to every problem. And the show's writers, Gene Roddenberry and others, regularly liked to show that life requires more than logic and reason; there are other factors to be accounted for. Conversely, we can say that for those who are averse to knowledge, they instead have a recourse to feeling. In other words, if the road to the mind is blocked off, people will seek a detour to the heart through experience.

Now, this is what's going on in the contemporary period: you have these two extremes—either I'll manipulate the data or I'll feel the data, I'll experience it. But in prior centuries, especially prior to the Enlightenment, theologians did not look at doctrine primarily or chiefly as knowledge, but first and foremost as wisdom. Proverbs 9:10 says that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, and the knowledge of the Holy One is insight.

In other words, God does not disclose revelation or knowledge in a lecture hall, on a computer screen, in the science lab, or through a smartphone, but through his covenantal relationship with his people—a relationship that the Scriptures liken unto a marriage. In the covenant relationship, God reveals a knowledge of who he is—our covenant Lord, the maker of heavens and earth, our Redeemer, our Savior. And in covenant, God calls us to love him—we are his covenant servants. In covenant, God binds us to himself to live faithfully, which requires that we not only say all that is true about him, but that we also live it out.

And so thus I think we come full circle to Deuteronomy 6:4-9 where piety and devotion and confession go hand in hand and a passage such as Deuteronomy 6 beckons us to confess and worship our Triune God. Well, this brings us to a second point, which is what about the age of distraction in which we live? We presently live in a time that is filled with acids that corrode the metal of both our conviction and our devotion.

There have been many, many studies. One of the things that I did is when I became a dad and I saw all of this technology coming around, I thought, I need to be a better dad, I need to try to understand how and what the technologies that are arising are doing so that I can understand whether or not these things are beneficial or harmful to my children. Whether it's psychologists such as Jean Twenge and her book iGen, or Jonathan Haidt and the various books that he has written and the studies that he has conducted, we can observe that there are three large-scale trends that have come through technology that have had an adverse effect upon not only our lives of devotion but also we can say the use and the practice of using creeds and confessions.

And the three of these things are reading, contemplation, and patience. First of all in terms of reading: one of the ways that technology has eroded our abilities is, believe it or not, in our ability to read. Nicholas Carr in his book The Shallows on how the internet and technology centrally rewires our brains. In that, think about this—and maybe you do this, maybe not—in that when you read a screen, our tendency is, especially with the scroll, is that we will scroll through information. And so they've noted through studies that people read in a triangular pattern: at the top of the page, they start reading the whole sentence, but as they go down the page, their gaze ends up falling down to the corner of the screen so they don't actually read the entire page, they only read a portion of it as they scan the content.

This means that reading comprehension for adults has significantly been adversely affected simply because of the medium of the computer screen or the phone. This means that as adults because of our technologies, we are losing the capacity for deep reading. Think about it: if we're talking about social media such as a Twitter, or X, or Snapchat, or some of these other various social media mediums, you get 280 characters per tweet; that's roughly 40 to 60 words. If you consume a steady diet of short tweets, you train your brain to only pay attention to short bits of information.

You're habituating yourself to paying attention to only short bursts. That is detrimental to deep reading. And this is what Nicholas Carr documents in terms of what's called the neuroplasticity of the mind. In other words, if you think of your mind as a field of tall grass, and if you do deep reading, you're taking one path through the tall grass and you habituate yourself to be able to pay attention to very long arguments and long readings. If on the other hand, you train your brain for just reading tweets, 40 to 60 words at a shot—or very intermittently, if you think of it as, if you will, popcorn—you're cutting another path through the tall grass, a new more dominant path, so that when you go to read a Bible, when you go to read a theology book, your mind is now conditioned for the shorter reading patterns and you cannot pay attention to the longer readings.

Case in point, I was watching an interview with two Hollywood stars and they were saying that when they were filming their movie, the producers told them that in the movie over the course of two hours, you have to restate the plot four to five times because people have lost their attention span so that you can't explain the plot of the movie at the outset, you have to regularly repeat it because otherwise you lose their attention. And this was a movie that was filmed and is presently in release.

This is something that has come home to me in that I recently submitted a book to a publisher and it was for a series—God willing it'll be out sometime in '27—and the editors told me, "You need to shorten your paragraphs because if you have long paragraphs, you will lose the attention of the reader, so make for short paragraphs." Okay, I was happy to make that adjustment. I would rather make the short paragraphs and have the person read the book than not read the book. But editors are telling writers you have to keep it short, otherwise you lose people's attention.

So our current cultural moment with its technology has adversely affected our reading, which this means that if our reading is affected, then our contemplation has been affected. In that, how often do we actually contemplate? How much deep thought do we give when we read a passage of Scripture or when we read a confession or creed or when we read a theology book? There was a movie that was released a number of years ago, but I remember watching this interview with the director where people complained about this director because of the style with which he shoots his movies where he does not leave any one scene on screen for more than about two seconds.

The entire movie is two seconds at a time: one-one-thousand, two-one-thousand, change the scene; one-one-thousand, two-one-thousand; one-one-thousand, two-one-thousand so that your brain is constantly and continually adjusting. Now one of the things that I've done sometimes with movies is I'll actually pause it and I start looking in-screen just to see what else is there because I'm curious what's in the background, what are the various people doing? Book nerd alert: if there's a bookshelf in the scene, I definitely pause it and I'm like, what books are on that shelf? Oh wait a minute, that looks like an interesting book, hang on, I'm going to go order that one. And I've ordered books from frozen movie screens before, honestly. I know, it's an illness. Pray for me.

So if you're constantly getting inundated with images and you're gearing your mind to read short bursts of information, how are we supposed to contemplate or think about deep truth? Agatha Christie once observed that many people think that necessity is the mother of invention, but she said instead, no, invention in my opinion arises directly from idleness. In other words, boredom is crucial to deep thinking.

And yet whether it's with our young people or whether it's with ourselves, we've always got our screens about. It always is very much on my mind when I go through the airport terminal and 75 percent of the people in the terminal, it seems like, have their faces buried in a screen. Whether they're walking or whether they're potted up or whether they're sitting there at the gate. Now, if this is you, I'm not criticizing you. Sometimes I've got my device out as well. But sometimes I tell myself, I'm going to set my phone down, put it in my pocket, do whatever, put it away, and I'm going to sit here and I'm going to be bored, and that's okay. I'm just going to sit here because the boredom allows me the chance to think.

Just a couple of days ago I was in the chair of my—I'm sad to admit it—my stylist. When you have less hair, you need a stylist, and it costs more money because when there's less to work with, they've got to do magic. So it used to be a haircut and it was a fast affair, now it takes a little bit more doing. Most of what you're looking at is hair product, it's not actual hair. That being said, I was just sitting there, I don't often talk when I'm getting a haircut. Talk about a terrible one time, somebody once told me she was cutting my hair and she's like, "Oh, you're a pastor? Really? Well, my boyfriend and I are living together and his mother says we're going to hell. What do you think?"

Yeah, she's got scissors and I'm thinking, I literally thought this: "Okay, Lord, the hair will grow back if she gets angry about what I'm going to say." And I said, "Well, your boyfriend's mom might have a point." And I just like, I mean literally, the sweat starts just pouring down my face and I was just like, whew, is it hot in here or is it just me? Oh my goodness. But I was just sitting there and my haircutter guy, he's like, "What are you thinking about?" And I thought, oh, I was thinking about a section in a book that I'm working on and I was thinking through the various arguments that I was doing. Whereas if I had been sitting there staring at my device as a lot of people do when they're in the chair, I wouldn't have had the mental space to be able to be bored to start thinking about something deeply.

So in other words, how can we think deeply upon the things of God in acts of devotion, worship, and prayer if it's always the videos, the flashing lights, the clicks, and the bursts of the tweets never stop to give us any time or empty space in the mind to contemplate? So reading, contemplation, third: patience. You perhaps heard the old aphorism "you are what you eat." Well, if we do not read deeply and if we do not think deeply, then that's going to affect the way that we have in terms of our patience or our lack thereof. To modify the aphorism "you are what you eat," "you are what you worship."

Or my grandmother used to say this to me—my grandmother was Mexican, she's now with the Lord, but she used to say, "Dime con quién andas y te diré quién eres," "Tell me who you spend your time with and I'll tell you who you are." And so if the internet is where we spend so much time, and it's a place of immediate gratification—instant purchases, same-day delivery, immediate news—should we be surprised when we find ourselves lacking the patience to contemplate the deep things of God? I mean, I live in a suburb of Jackson, Mississippi, and sometimes I've ordered theology books, pretty obscure ones at that, where it's like same-day delivery. And I'm like, whoa, really? This obscure medieval work from the 12th century I can get same-day delivery? Sign me up, let me order it.

But it's a place of immediate gratification. On average, the US teen receives over 237 app notifications per day and is on a screen between seven to nine hours per day and on a phone approximately five hours per day. What does this say about who we are and what we worship? And how is this eroding our sense of patience? And if we have to have the information immediately, what does it say when we think, if I don't have it immediately, then I don't want it, I need it now, instead of putting down the phone, letting boredom set in, and thinking deeply about the things of God?

So in our age of distraction, reading has been affected, contemplation has been affected, patience has been affected. So this brings us to our third and final point, which is what does all of this mean about creeds, confessions, and contemplation? If we have this call to love, as we've seen in Deuteronomy chapter six, but we live in an age of distraction, as we've seen in our second point, how can we instead push against the tide and use creeds and confessions and contemplation for acts of devotion? I think that we can break this down into three different areas: first is familiarity, secondly is worship, and then third and final is contemplation.

Familiarity: I think the first step we need to do is we need to become familiar with our creeds and our confessions. And this is where I would encourage you to do this: if you don't own a copy of the creeds and the confessions, get one. And when I say get one, I mean get a physical copy, okay? There are scientific studies that prove—I don't know all of the science of it, most of my science comes from Star Wars, so I don't understand the psychology of it, the psychiatry of it, the science of it—but what they tell me in the things that I've read say this is that there is a difference to a physical copy of a book versus a digital copy of a book and writing things down in that physical copy of the book.

Think about it, how many times have you ever said this, say in the generation or the period before the advent of the smartphone? That you would tell somebody, "I'm not sure exactly where it is in my Bible, but I know it's in the upper right-hand page." We've done that all the time. Nowadays, you can't do that because with one massive long scroll, there's no mental place for you to kind of put a mental note. Another thing that's important about obtaining the physical copy is not merely for the pagination, but rather as you read your physical copy of the book, you want to do so in a decidedly determinative manner. In other words, whether it's a highlighter, pencil, or pen, whatever method works best for you, mark it up.

You see a phrase, mark it up. You see a term you don't understand, go look it up. When I was in seminary, the first thing that I had to do was I literally sat down at my desk in my dorm room, I opened up the page, started reading, I didn't get one page in before I went, "I need a dictionary. I don't know what this book is saying. I know what the word 'Moses' means, but I don't think I know what any other word on this page means." So I stopped, went to the campus bookstore—you know, it's a building, four walls, has lots of books in it—I went to the campus bookstore, I bought a theological dictionary and I bought just a plain old dictionary.

Nowadays, you can sit there in front of your computer if you want and you can look it up, but I would say if you can, step away from the screen and mark up, write in the margins as to what's being discussed. Ask questions in the margin, interrogate the text. Not only ask questions, but even if you want, express concern or even disagreement. The more that you engage with the text, the deeper your reading is going to be. And if the document or the creed or the confession cites Scripture, then go and look up the various Scripture references and then read those in context. Get out your highlighter and your pencil or your pen, mark up the Scriptures and say, this is the relationship between these things.

So becoming familiar with the various creeds and confessions helps us to join hands with our theological forefathers to know who God is. And then hopefully once once we know who our Triune God is, this will motivate us to worship him all the more. As we become familiar with the creeds and the confessions, we need to then stop and I think and take inventory of what we read. Have you ever done this where you go out either for a sunrise or a sunset or out into the moonlit night and you just look and you gaze upon the beauty that you see? There have been times when I've been at the beach before—again, I don't understand the science of it—but where you see the moon out on the sea horizon, and it just looks absolutely massive. And you just gaze upon its beauty.

Well, gaze upon the beauty of the things that you read in your creeds and confessions. The Westminster Shorter Catechism says, "What is God?" "God is a spirit, infinite, eternal, unchangeable in his being, wisdom, power, holiness, justice, goodness, and truth." This is who the Triune God is in what we can say and what the confessional and catechetical language would be: this is describing the substance of who God is, the stuff as to what makes God God.

Then as you think about say the Nicene Creed, it says, "I believe in one Lord Jesus Christ, the only-begotten Son of God, born of the Father before all ages, God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten, not made, consubstantial with the Father; through him all things were made." Where the creed affirms the absolute full divinity of the Son of God. What does John say in John 1:1 and following? "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was God, and the Word was with God, and through him all things were made that were made." In the beginning, or Hebrews 1:1 and following where the Son of God is the exact imprint of his nature, by whom he created all things and sustains all things by the power of his word. That is who the Son is.

And then think of the words of the Apostles' Creed: Jesus Christ suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died, and buried. Meditate upon that truth. It's like Dorothy Sayers says, in that type of truth, the drama is the doctrine. Dorothy Sayers says that think of it, there is the tired old story where God is the tyrant over man. And yet what do we find in these creedal affirmations as they lead us back to the Scriptures? They tell us that there is drama in the doctrine where God is a better man than we are and instead suffers at the tyrannical hands of man so that we could be saved. Amazing love, how can it be that Thou, my God, shouldst die for me?

There is both drama there and rich truth for personal devotion. These are things that should fill our hearts with praise and give us, if you will, the doctrinal ground upon which we can stand to worship our Triune God. To this end, I would encourage you—and in fact when I saw it, I went and bought it, if I can get it out—I bought my pocket-sized copy of the confession. I have a pocket-sized copy of the Shorter Catechism and from time to time, I'll shove it in my pocket and I will pull it out when I'm bored and I'll just start reading through it.

Two of the things that I've tried to do to counter the damaging and destructive effects of the technologies that we use is that in the mornings, I will sometimes pick up my Shorter Catechism and just read a question or two of the catechism and think about it for a minute or two. I'll also read poetry. Now, I don't want to make you think that I sit around in my smoking jacket with my pipe and I read poetry all the time. I don't. But one of the things you should do with poetry is read it slowly and read it out loud. Now in all honesty, sometimes I'll read a poem by W.B. Yeats or Wendell Berry and I'll be like, yeah, I got no idea, I have no idea what this is talking about.

But it still forces me to slow down, to read carefully, and to read out loud. And this is what I do with the catechism: I read slowly and I read out loud and I slow down. So here we have these three ideas: familiarity, worship, and then third and final, contemplation. In that, worship I want to say is not merely for the moment, but should be an ongoing activity, one through which we can foster through contemplation and meditation. We can foster devotion to our Triune God through our creeds and confessions.

In other words, I want you to think about this: how often have we thought deeply, for example, about the very first question in the Westminster Shorter Catechism? "What is the chief end of man?" How often do we think deeply upon this? "Man's chief end is to glorify God and to enjoy him forever." Now I suspect that these words are familiar to many of us, but have we plumbed their depths? We may not realize it, but these words of enjoying God have roots all the way back in the patristic period in the theology of St. Augustine.

St. Augustine distinguished between use and enjoyment. Use and enjoyment. He said we use certain things in order that we can gain an enjoyment of them. On the other hand, when it comes to enjoying something, it's enjoying it, it's using it purely for the thing itself. Not for anything that it can do, but simply for the joy that it brings in and of itself. I suspect that in our lives there are many things that we just enjoy. The moonlight, for example, that as it beams down upon us from a full moon, that doesn't do anything particularly for us. But we look at it and it brings us joy simply because of its beauty for what it is.

Now when we use something, we do so to obtain something that we love. Or as when we enjoy something, we enjoy it purely for its own sake. So what the Westminster Shorter Catechism here is saying is that our chief end is to glorify God, to bring him praise and worship, and to worship him, to benefit from him purely for who he is. Purely for who he is. And so the catechism helps us to understand at this point that everything in our lives we should use to enjoy God. In this sense, we can begin to enjoy God, to worship him for who he is, to be devoted for who he is right now in this present life.

I can remember back in 1980 watching the Academy Award-winning movie Chariots of Fire, the true story of Scottish Olympic runner Eric Liddell. And there's a scene in the movie where he's talking to his sister about going to China because he was going to be a missionary. And later he did go to China and eventually died in China as a missionary and potentially, arguably, as a martyr. Nevertheless, his sister thought that he shouldn't waste his time running because she thought he should go straight to the mission field.

And in the line of this movie, it captures this very idea that we find in the Westminster Shorter Catechism. He says, "I believe God made me for a purpose—for China. But he also made me fast. And when I run, I feel his pleasure." And when I run, I feel his pleasure. You see, he was running not for the sake of running, but because his running helped him to give thanks to God for the gift that he had given him and his running, he used it to enjoy God.

Is that how we live the Christian life? I think it's more so the case—and I myself would be guilty of this as much as anybody else—that we use God and enjoy the things of this world, rather than using the things of this world to enjoy and to worship God. It's this one line that comes from the movie that has inspired me even in my own. I love running. And I usually run about four days a week, I do some other exercise. And there are times, there are times in all honesty, where I feel like I'm doing the survival shuffle, I'm just dragging a bag of bricks around the neighborhood as I go running and I just think, oh, this is work.

But every once in a while, I can feel like I'm running like a gazelle. I mean, I feel like I'm just hauling buggy, as they say. And I get excited. And there are times in those runs where tears will start flowing. Now mind you, I'm not running Olympic pace or anything like that. But the speed with which I'm running at that moment makes me feel so much joy. And I turn in that moment and I say, "Thank you, Lord, for my health. Thank you, Lord, for the ability to run. Thank you, Lord, for giving me this opportunity. Thank you, Lord, for my life. Thank you, Lord, for my existence."

So in that moment, as Eric Liddell says in the movie, "When I run, I feel his pleasure." But if I don't have the Shorter Catechism to point me in that direction, I think all it ends up potentially being is an experience without a doctrinal anchor. And this is what our creeds and confessions do, is they anchor us to the truths of Scripture and knowing who God is and what he has done for us. I think if we're dialed into the frequencies that our creeds and our confessions broadcast, then they can tune our hearts to enjoy God and we can wed personal devotion to the creeds and confessions.

So far from being anemical to our devotion, creeds and confessions I think are a wonderful gift that enables us to join the chorus sung throughout the ages in the praise of our Triune God—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. We must of course beware of the world in which we live and the dangers of misusing the gifts that God has given us, such as our technology. I'm not here to destroy our technology, I'm grateful for the inventions that we have. But we need to be aware of their limitations and their adverse side effects as if we were to dine with the devil. How do you dine with the devil? You sit very far away and use a very long spoon. In other words, keep these technologies at arm's length. Use them so that you can enjoy God; don't allow our technologies to use us and to embroil us in idolatry.

I think if we fail to keep these technologies at a distance, they can erode our capacity to read, to worship, and to contemplate and ultimately worship God. But if we're aware of the potential drawbacks, then armed with the truth, we can use our creeds and confessions to great benefit to foster, to inform, and to guide us in our devotion.

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