InPerspective

Harry Reeder: I want to take you to the Apostles' Creed. It has been used to defend truth, but its primary purpose was to teach essential truth. I honestly do not know of a better collection of essentials to develop a life that is framed and filled and founded upon the Word of God than the foundational doctrines that are collected in the Apostles' Creed that have been used in the church for 1,800 years.

Guest (Male): Putting life in biblical perspective with Dr. Harry L. Reeder. This is InPerspective, a radio and internet ministry of the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals. A high school graduate who wants to be a doctor cannot immediately begin a hospital residency. He or she first must go to college and start with the basics, like biology 101 and anatomy 101.

Christians who want to advance to the deeper, more complex doctrines of the faith must first start with Christianity 101, the basic, essential, foundational doctrines summarized in the Apostles' Creed. Stay with us now as Dr. Reeder takes us to selected verses from 1 Timothy chapters 3 and 4 and brings us today's teaching, part two of the message Confessions and Creeds.

Harry Reeder: There are multiple confessions in the history of the church. The majority were developed to ward off errors. In the early church, there were errors on the doctrine of God, the Trinitarian doctrine of God. In the early church, there were errors on the person of Christ, that He's fully God and fully man.

There were a number of different errors, so what would happen is the church would pull its elders together in order to establish a creed to refute the error. And so what would they do? You've got the Creed of Chalcedon, you've got the Athanasian Creed, you've got the Nicene Creed.

But where I want to take you is to the Apostles' Creed. It has been used to defend truth, but its primary purpose was to teach essential truth, as it was first collected in the second century. And that's why I want to go to it, because God uses creeds in the Bible to teach the Bible.

Now, the Apostles' Creed is an extra-biblical creed to teach biblical truth. Therefore, it has to be checked against the Bible, and I propose to do that for you in the coming weeks, doctrine by doctrine by doctrine that's contained in the Apostles' Creed. So that's where we would be heading and that's what we would be doing with that creed.

But I want to show you something else. Go to chapter 4 and verse 2. "Now the Spirit expressly says that in later times some will depart from the faith by devoting themselves to deceitful spirits and teachings of demons, through the insincerity of liars whose consciences are seared."

In other words, here's what the Holy Spirit tells all of us: Satan is going to bring false teachers who are going to undermine the truth in the church—the truth that you're built upon and the truth that you're supposed to uphold. Satan is going to produce, and let me tell you, this is so amazing.

They are actually going to step brazen-faced, occupying pulpits that historically have been used for the proclamation of God's Word, and purposefully distort, deter, and detour people from God's Word. It is so interesting for me that how many times in my Christian life I have read sermons from pastors in pulpits and I know the pastors who used to be in those pulpits and what they used to preach.

And I read what this person is saying, completely apostate, heretical, error-filled doctrine. I'm not talking about minor stuff. I'm talking about the serious issues of the faith. And they are able to do it brazen-faced. They're taking the money of God's tithe for their support, and they've abandoned the word. They've put their mind over the word instead of submitting to the word.

And they're teaching the doctrines of demons instead of the doctrines of the Word of God. And I've asked myself, how can they do that? And then I realize, Harry, if it weren't for the Spirit of God, you would do it. Consciences seared and hardened, teaching false doctrine.

Now make one more step with me. Here's the positive: The church, God's church, is built upon the truth and is built upon the truth to uphold the truth. And here you're warned by the Spirit of God, Satan is going to attack the truth. Here's the positive, here's the admonition and the warning, and in between is this creed that talks about the mystery of godliness that is found in Christ, the incarnate Christ who saved us, who ascended, and who is coming again.

And there is that creed in between the negative and the positive. In other words, the creed was given in the Word of God to show us that a creed can be used to teach truth to God's people and to ward off false truth to protect God's people. And there it stands with its right use.

So that brings me to our takeaway of how we would want to handle this as the people of God. The Apostles' Creed is a gift of God's providence to His church, containing essential foundations of the faith, once and for all delivered to the saints.

This gift of God's providence, like even the biblical creeds, this is an extra-biblical creed that contains biblical truth. And we learn by looking at biblical creeds that have biblical truth how to use this creed in discipleship, in confession, and in unity. That we learn how to use it, this Apostles' Creed, the gift of God's providence.

Now can I just make sure we all know something? The Apostles' Creed was not written by the apostles. How did we get its name? Glad you asked that question. How did we get that name, Apostles' Creed? Basically, what we're reciting was put together in the second century, about the mid-second century.

In other words, do your math. The Apostles' Creed is apostolic doctrine faithful to God's Word, but it was written by disciples of disciples of disciples of the apostles. In other words, the apostles' disciples' disciples' disciples wrote the creed.

And it's called the Apostles' Creed because it's faithful to the apostolic doctrine that is found in the New Covenant. That's why it's called the Apostles' Creed. But did you know something? It wasn't even called that for hundreds of years. In fact, the gospel work will go up into Europe and the language of reverence and the language of knowledge was Latin.

And wherever this creed was uttered, it was uttered with a particular formula. What do I mean? Normally the way the creed was used in worship as a confession began with the leader of the worship service saying, "Christian, what do you believe concerning God the Father?" "I believe in God the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth."

"Christian, what do you believe concerning God the Son?" "I believe in Jesus Christ, His only Son, our Lord, who was conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, dead, and buried. He descended into hell. The third day He rose from the dead. He ascended into heaven, and He sits at the right hand of the Father. From there He shall come to judge the quick, the living, and the dead."

"Christian, what do you believe concerning God the Holy Spirit?" "I believe in the Holy Spirit," and then you go on to say the rest of the doctrines related to the work of the Holy Spirit in this world in light of what Christ has done by the authorship of a sovereign Father.

So how does that start? Latin. Credo, believe. We get the word credible. Credo in Deum, I believe in God. And so it would start each stanza. By the way, don't miss this. The great creeds, like the great hymns that stay with us, seem to all be Trinitarian. They revolve around the majesty of God in His three persons: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

And when you would recite these truths of this ancient creed, 109 words, recited for 1,800 years, modified for a couple of hundred years, and as it comes down to us, that's what they would say. Now watch. You are saved by faith. You can't be a Christian until you believe.

But the question is not "do you believe?" The question also is "what do you believe?" Satan believes. The question is "what do you believe?" Do you believe and what do you believe? And so they began to understand their statement of faith, the faith was the creed.

The act of believing is credo. "I believe, credo in what?" This statement of the faith, this distillation of the essentials. Now listen to me. Not all of the essentials of Christianity are in the Apostles' Creed.

But the statements that are in there are essentials. They are essentials. Not all of the essentials are in there, but those essentials that were collected to teach the believer at conversion and in discipleship were there. And so now this Apostles' Creed has been provided for us. Why are we going to try to understand it? Because we ought to be using it three ways.

Number one, in discipleship. Brothers and sisters, in days of challenge—viruses, pestilence, war, business failure, difficulty—days of challenge, days of victory, how do I not get carried away with myself? How do I not descend into self-pity in one? How do I not exalt myself in the other?

I have got to know who God is. To have a sound life in this world, you've got to have sound doctrine. Sound lives are built on sound doctrine. And when you build sound doctrine, don't build it at the secondary, the superstructure level. Go to the foundational level to make sure that you are building on sound doctrine.

When I was a kid growing up, I would come home from school, my elementary years. I would arrive at home, and as I got older, I liked to look at the newspaper when I got home. And so I would go find the paper, which had already been used by my daddy and my mama. I remember how it would be folded up and it would be separated into sections.

What section of the newspaper do you think I read first? Sports. It wasn't even close, with no shame at all. Sports. I went right to the sports section. Then when I finished that, what section do you think I went to? Comics. If one of you all says the astrology section, I'm going to shoot you, okay?

Where'd I go next? Comics. And when I went to the comics, where did I go first? No doubt, Mr. Schulz was my guide for life, actually. Peanuts was my guide for life. So I brought one of Peanuts' cartoons for you. Lucy and Linus, my favorite.

They're at a window. It's raining. Lucy's discouraged. She turns to Linus. "Linus, boy, look at it rain. Linus, if it doesn't stop raining, what if it floods the whole world?" "Linus, Lucy, it's not going to do that. In the ninth chapter of Genesis, God promised Noah that this would never happen again, and the sign of His promise is the rainbow."

"Lucy, oh Linus, you just took a great load off of my mind." "Linus, sound doctrine has a way of doing that." Sound doctrine has a way of doing that. It calms our fears, it bids our sorrows cease. Sound doctrine has a way of doing it. That's why we take essential doctrines.

In fact, you know how they used this usually? Its number one usage was when people were converted, they were first discipled with this and then brought to baptism. Maybe put it this way: This was the curriculum of the early church's pastor's inquirers class.

This is what they used to make sure you understood the faith once and for all foundationally with essentials. That's why ministers who say, "I am not going to build wood, hay, and stubble. I want to teach the Word of God, gold, silver, and precious jewels, so that in the day of trial, the wood, hay, and the stubble, it'll disappear, but the gold, silver, and precious jewels will only be polished."

And I want people to know the truth that anchors the soul and propels the Christian life to grow. The second thing is it's a confession. We use a creed to make three confessions. We confess these truths to God in worship. We confess these truths to one another in fellowship.

And we confess these truths to the world in witness and evangelism. "I believe." Now would you let me say this? Normally we do it about every fifth or sixth week. Folks, I believe in worship. You're confessing this to God. It's not mumbled.

"I believe in God the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth, and in Jesus Christ, His only Son, our Lord, who was conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was dead and buried, ascended into hell. The third day He rose again from the dead. He ascended into heaven and He's seated at the right hand of God the Father Almighty. From there He shall come to judge the quick 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. I believe in the life everlasting. Amen."

And we're ready to confess that to one another as we encourage one another in fellowship in days of challenge and victories. And we confess it before the world. "I believe." Yes, I'm guilty of being a Christian. I believe.

Thirdly and finally is unity. Unity. Amos 3:3, "How can two walk together unless they are agreed?" So I'm thankful for the Apostles' Creed. I'm thankful because my brothers and sisters who confess it, there are things we can do together and walk together.

Apostles' Creed Christians, we can get together and have Franklin Graham and go do a crusade together. Apostles' Creed Christians, we can get together and deal with this sanctity of life issue. We can do all of those things together because we can walk together. Now, we're not going to be able to walk where we disagree, but we can walk here.

Everything a true Christian believes is not in the Apostles' Creed. The doctrine on the inerrancy of the Word is assumed, but it's not in the Apostles' Creed. Everything a true Christian believes is not in the Apostles' Creed, but everything in the Apostles' Creed a true Christian believes when understood in its biblical context.

Not all the essentials are even in there, and there are things we believe at other places as well, but this is one thing we do surely believe together. One time I was with my dad and he said to me, "Son, today I want you to go with me to church. A friend of mine's joining a church. I want you to go with me, I want to go and support him."

I said, "Sure, Dad." I was 14 years old. We got in the car and went to this church. We went into this church, little did I know this church that I was visiting thinking it was one-off was a church six years later I'd come to with Cindy and I'd get converted there.

But I didn't know that then. I just went to that church. And it was a reformed Presbyterian church, and in the worship service they, that Sunday, affirmed and confessed the Apostles' Creed. Well, I never heard that. You see, I'd been raised in a church that didn't do the Apostles' Creed.

In fact, we were proud that we didn't do the Apostles' Creed. Here's what we said: "No creed but Christ. No confession but the Bible." Now, little did I know, that actually is a creed. Little did I know, that's actually a confession, but it's a very insufficient creed and confession because I can name five cults off the top of my head that would say that.

"No creed but Christ, no confession but the Bible." But they don't mean the Christ that I know from the Bible, nor do they mean the Bible, even the Bible I know. I can tell you denominations that'll say that within professed Christendom that we don't mean the same thing.

So it's a creed, that's a creed. It's just a very insufficient one. And so I'd been raised that way. So when we did this, I said, "Daddy, what in the world is this?" I said, "We don't do that, do we?" He said, "No, son, we don't. But you know, son, I think we ought to."

I said, "What?" He said, "Yeah." He said, "I want you to stop and think about it. You and I just walked into this church today to worship. We just heard from them what they believe, and they just told God what they believe from His Word. Son, I think that's a good thing. Make the good confession."

Use it to disciple, use it to confess to God in worship, to one another in fellowship, and to the world as a witness. And let's walk together because we can stand firm in it, like a Martin Luther. In the day of challenge, here I stand, I believe.

Today you might be here and you say, "You know, Pastor, I've never given my heart and my life by faith to Christ as defined as I heard of Him who loves me and gave Himself for me to save me from my sins and that I can't be saved without Him." And today, I believe.

And it would be our great desire. Today you say, "I do believe in Jesus, and I praise God for Father, Son, and Holy Spirit." Then would you ask the Lord to give us a great journey in these coming weeks through this that has come down to us from the Word of God through the people of God by the providence of God, that we will know what we're doing when we confess it in worship and witness and encouragement? We will know it, and we will know Him as we use it in discipleship, and we will know it so that these areas we believe and walk together.

Guest (Male): You're listening to InPerspective, featuring the teaching of Dr. Harry L. Reeder. Visit inperspective.org for additional biblical teaching by Dr. Reeder. Thanks for your prayers and your financial support. Make a single contribution or become a monthly supporter by contacting us at inperspective.org or call 1-800-488-1888.

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