Confessional

Few to read today. So starting off at Deuteronomy chapter 6, verses 1 to 12. Now these are the commandments, the statutes, and the rules that the Lord your God commanded me to teach you, that you may do them in the land to which you are going over to possess it, that you may fear the Lord your God, you and your son and your son's son, by keeping all His statutes and His commandments which I commanded you all the days of your life, and that your days may be long. Hear, therefore, O Israel, and be careful to do them, that it may go well with you, and that you may multiply greatly as the Lord, the God of your fathers has promised you in a land flowing with milk and honey. Hear, O Israel, the Lord your God is one.

The Lord is one. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your might. And these words that I command you today shall be on your heart. You shall teach them diligently to your children. You shall talk of them when you sit in your house, when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise.

You shall bind them as a sign on your hands, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes. You shall write them on the doorpost of your house and on your gates. And when the Lord your God brings you into the land that He swore to your fathers, to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob to give you with great and good cities that you did not build and houses full of good things that you did not fill and cisterns that you did not dig and vineyards and olive trees that you did not plant. And when you eat and are full, then take care lest you forget the Lord who brought you out of the land of Egypt out of the house of slavery. Second reading is from 2 Timothy chapter 1, verses 8 to 14.

Therefore, do not be ashamed of the testimony about our Lord, nor of me His prisoner, but share in suffering for the gospel by the power of God, who saved us and called us to a holy calling, not because of our works, but because of His own purpose and grace, which He gave us in Christ Jesus before the ages began, and which now has been manifested through the appearing of our saviour Christ Jesus, who has abolished death and brought life and immortality to light through the gospel, for which I was appointed a preacher and apostle and teacher, which is why I suffer as I do. But I'm not ashamed, for I know whom I have believed, and I'm convinced that He is able to guard until that day what has been entrusted to me. Follow the pattern of the sound words that you have heard from me in the faith and love that are in Christ Jesus. By the Holy Spirit who dwells within us, guard the good deposit entrusted to you. And the third reading from Romans 10 verses 1 to 10.

Brothers, my heart's desire and prayer to God for them is that they may be saved. For I bear them witness that they have a zeal for God but not according to knowledge. For being ignorant of the righteousness of God and seeking to establish their own, they did not submit to God's righteousness. For Christ is the end of the law for righteousness to everyone who believes. For Moses writes about the righteousness that is based on the law, that the person who does the commandments shall live by them.

But the righteousness based on faith says, do not say in your heart who will ascend into heaven, that is to bring Christ down, or who will descend into the abyss, that is to bring Christ up from the dead. But what does it say? The word is near you, in your mouth, and in your heart, that is the word of faith that we proclaim. Because if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, you will be saved. For with the heart, one believes and is justified, and with the mouth, one confesses and is saved.

You will notice there were two New Testament passages there, and the reason was I have two texts for this morning. And we're looking at, well, continuing in our study, what are the distinctives of the reformed faith? And we now come to the fifth one, that we are a confessional church. I remember if anybody remembers the other ones we looked at. I think we began with reformed worship, a worshipful church.

Then I think we looked at the doctrines of salvation, doctrines of grace. We looked at Christian worldview. We looked at the fact that we are a covenantal community. And now today, we look at the fact that we are a confessional church. And to help us understand that, I chose the two texts, one in Romans 10, the last two verses we are at there.

If you confess with your mouth Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, you will be saved. For it's with your heart that you believe and are justified, and it's with your mouth that you confess and are saved. Then we also take from 2 Timothy chapter 1 verses 13 and 14. What you heard from me, keep as the pattern of sound teaching with faith and love in Christ Jesus. Guard the good deposit that was entrusted to you.

Guard it with the help of the Holy Spirit who lives in us. So, friends, our reformed churches are confessional churches. This doesn't make us unique. Many churches are based on confessions, good confessions. It's a tradition that goes back a long way before the reformation.

I wonder how many people know which reformed confessions that we hold to in our church. Can we list them just to bring us up to speed? Westminster Confession. Yes? Belgic Confession.

Canons of Dort. Heidelberg. The Apostles' Creed, the Athanasian Creed, and yeah. Nicene Creed. Thank you.

Yeah. So there are a few, in fact. And why do we have such creeds? Well, it's a tradition that goes back to before the time of Christ. The Old Testament people were based on a creed that they call the Shema.

Shema is a Hebrew word that says hear, and that's the first word of their creed, which says, hear, O Israel, the Lord your God is one. You must love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your mind, and with all your strength. This was the creed that the Israelites were commanded. They had His frontlets in front of their eyes. They put them on their doorposts, something to be constantly reminded of, something that they should teach to their children, something that all the people who belong to the covenant that God made with Israel should be aware of.

It was an expression of worship. And this Shema, this creed, is still being used by Jews in synagogues and in Israel till today. It's also a creed that counts for us, but what we want to look at in particular is how we as New Testament people must one, profess faith in Christ; secondly, process faith in Christ; and thirdly, protect our faith in Christ. So how must we profess our faith? Well, in the Apostles' Creed, we had the confession that Jesus is Lord.

It is a confession you find in all the early churches where archaeologists find bits and pieces in churches that sometimes come across this effect, that they confessed that Jesus was Lord. Now there's more to that than appears at first hearing because the word lord, kurios, is the translation of the Hebrew word Adonai, and Adonai was the name they used for Jehovah God. They were so scared of breaking the third commandment, that we should not use the name of our Lord God in vain, that they didn't use the name at all. That's why they thought they couldn't break the commandments. Of course, you can break it by pretending to be a believer and doing hypocrisy and so on.

But they thought by not mentioning that name, they would keep the commandments. And so everybody knew how it was written. It was J and an H and an A and a W and another H in Hebrew. And we think it might have been pronounced Yahweh, but we don't know for sure because nobody ever said it. And but in other words, when you said Jesus is Adonai, he's kurios, you're saying He is the Lord God. And, that, of course, is what the early church professed.

We read it clearly there in Romans 10:9. If you confess with your mouth Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, you will be saved. Now confessing Christ's deity was there from the very start, and I mention that because there's a lot of liberals who say, oh, that's something that slowly developed in the thinking of the church. It wasn't until the fifth century at Nicaea that they began to think of Jesus as God. Well, I was just listening to a program about biblical archaeology a couple of nights back, and they found a mosaic in an early worship centre connected to a Roman barracks for Roman soldiers.

There was a worship centre there. And there in the mosaic, it clearly states Jesus who is God. There's no doubt about it that the early church professed Jesus as God. And this confession of Christ as God was linked to His resurrection because the resurrection was proof that Jesus was God. Remember the Pharisees and other leaders kept challenging Jesus.

Who do you think you are? Who gave you this authority? Give us signs so we can believe in you. And Christ said, there's one sign that will be given to you, the sign of Jonah. Even as Jonah was in the belly of the whale for three days and three nights, so I will be in the earth for three days and three nights and come out alive.

And this was, of course, something that a man could not do. Only God could do that. And it's interesting that when Thomas, who we know as doubting Thomas, said, oh, I'm not going to believe that unless I can put my finger in the scars in His hands and my fist in His side where the big wound was and so on. And then when Christ appears to Thomas, what does He say? He said does He say, now I believe in the resurrection?

No. He says, my Lord and my God. You see, that was the proof. The sign of Jonah was the proof that Jesus was God. And so we see that when Peter preaches to that first congregation at Pentecost, he raises there Psalm 110 where it speaks of my Lord said unto my Lord, and Christ already asked people, who's that other Lord?

Who's that Lord who's spoken of? And, of course, it's the fact that God is speaking to God Himself, God the Father to God the Son. And so it's the risen Christ who was presented as a divine saviour, and you couldn't be baptised unless you were willing to make this confession. Now one of the most interesting texts in the Bible is one you won't find in your Bible. Well, maybe you will in the footnotes.

Have a look at Acts 8:37. You will remember when the Ethiopian was enlightened by Philip about what Isaiah meant, and he believed in Christ and said, yes, I want to be baptised. What's to stop me from being baptised? And then in Acts 8:37, you read that the eunuch confessed, I believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God.

Now why is that interesting? Because somebody pencilled it in after the book was written. This was the confession you had to make in order to be baptised. So it speaks in a strong way. We also find it in what we do have in scripture proper, like 1 Corinthians 12:3, where Paul says, no one can say Jesus is Lord except by the Spirit.

You can't have the Holy Spirit until you have confessed. Well, that's the proof when you confess that Jesus is God. And, of course, there is the baptismal formula, which was used from the beginning where people were baptised into the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. And, of course, it brings us to our doctrine of the Trinity. But now you might say, hey.

But doesn't this contradict the creed of the Jews? Because doesn't the Shema in Deuteronomy 6 tell us, hear, O Israel, the Lord your God is one? Are we now speaking of three gods? No. Because the word one there is an interesting word in Hebrew.

It's the word echad, and echad means a unity. There's another word in Hebrew for one, which means there's only one. But this word here is the same word that is used when Adam and Eve are married in paradise, and God says they will now be one. They will be a unity. And that is the way in which God has presented Himself from the very beginning.

Already in Genesis chapter 1, you hear that God the Father is there, that the word by which He created the world is there, and we know from John 1 and so that the word represents Christ. He is Christ, and there's the Spirit of God hovering over the waters. So it's nothing new. It's just something we came to understand better after Jesus came to Earth. So the Father, Son, and Spirit form a unity, one God.

And from the earliest times, therefore, Jesus is confessed as one person of the Trinity, as Lord, and because He was divine. And you see that in the gospels in many different ways. Think, for example, of the Magi who came to Bethlehem. What do they do when they meet baby Jesus? They worship Him.

That's very clear. There's only one you can worship, and that's God. Right? So they would have been doing something very wrong if Jesus had not been God. That's the time we read in Matthew 9 when the men lowered the lame man through the roof.

You remember that story and asked Jesus to heal him. And Jesus, instead of healing him, says, your sins are forgiven. And the Pharisees, standing by saying, oh, that's blasphemy. We can't forgive sin. Only God can forgive sin.

But Jesus, of course, knew what they were thinking in their heart, and He says, the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins. And to prove to you that I have that authority, stand up and walk. And here He showed His divine power in raising this man to walk, which showed He had that authority as God. And, again, you can go to Matthew 8 where you find the disciples caught in the storm, and they're thinking they're going to sink, and they wake Jesus up. Do something.

We're going to sink. And Jesus says, be still. You know? Totally calm. And the disciples said, wow.

What sort of man is this that even the winds obey Him? And then the answer comes in the next chapter, out of the mouth of a man possessed by demons. He was known as Legion, and he says, what have you to do with us, O Son of God? And it's amazing, whenever demoniacs beheld Jesus, they knew who He was. Without fail, they addressed Him by a divine title.

Even unbelievers like the centurion at the cross confessed Jesus as the Son of God. Now in the first three gospels, the ones we know as the synoptic gospels, it kind of works up to this, starting from Christ's birth, showing how He was God. But in John's gospel, John begins with that very fact. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He lays it out very clearly.

And so it's very clear from scripture that Jesus is God, not some later invention. No. From the very start. And in our text, Paul makes it clear that faith in Christ as being God, as being the Lord, is part of a pattern of sound teaching. And that brings us to our second point that we must process our faith in Christ.

And by that, I mean we have to do theology. We have to go to scripture and study it. Now there are some, and we usually refer to them as liberals, who say, no. You don't need all that theology. All you need to do is confess Christ.

No creed but Christ. But such a statement is nonsensical if you don't know who Christ is. Who is He? What does He do? And, of course, all kind of questions arose already in the early church.

There were people who believed that Jesus wasn't a real man, but some kind of phantom, because they thought if he had a real, if he were a real man, how could God die on the cross and so on. And this was a teaching known as docetism, that he only looked like he was a man, although he was God. There was another view known as adoptionism that God adopted a human body for a while and then left him to die on the cross, because God couldn't die on the cross. There was a belief that he was a god but a lesser god than the great God, and this was the Arian heresy. And then there were all kinds of disputes about whether Jesus had a human nature or a divine nature, whether these were mixed or whether he had two personalities or whether he was fully man and fully God as we profess.

Later on at the time of the Reformation, there were again questions about Christ, this time about His work. What exactly does He do? Yeah. There were all those icons of Jesus hanging on the cross. But does that mean He paid for all our sin or only the sins we do before we're baptised?

Does it mean that He's there to help us to earn our salvation? And these questions already arose at apostolic times too. Paul deals with the question whether we are saved by faith or by works, by faith or the law. And, of course, the early church even had a synod on this point. We read in Acts 15.

Do Christians now have to follow all those Old Testament rules in order to earn their salvation? And they said, no. They don't, because we are saved by faith. And the physical resurrection was something that also came under attack. We see it in 1 Corinthians 15, where Paul has a whole chapter dealing with this.

How can some of you say there is no physical resurrection? Well, the reason why they said it is because they held to the Greek worldview, and the Greek worldview said anything spiritual is good, and everything physical is bad. Since physical is bad, why would we want to be resurrected into a physical body that would make us bad? And so they said, no. We will only be resurrected spiritually.

And in the same way, these were the people who said Christ didn't have a real human body. And John also has to deal with that. In 1 John 4 verses 2 and 3, he says, by this you know the Spirit of God. Every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ came in the flesh is from God, but those who deny it have the spirit of antichrist. And this was, in fact, the beginning of another heresy in the church known as Gnosticism.

So you see, throughout the history of Christianity, we have these attacks on the central beliefs of our Christian faith. The resurrection especially was at the centre of this. And these challenges can bring misunderstandings, and so it's important that we keep processing our faith, that we do our theology, that we try and understand what is happening here. And our confessions help us in this because here we have the pattern of sound teaching drawn up in a kind of, yeah, handy way for us to see what scripture teaches us. In 1 John 4 verses 2 and 3, we read, by this you know the Spirit of God.

Every spirit confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh. Notice the need to confess our faith, and these confessions then are central. They are that deposit that we must guard. And that brings us to our last point that we must protect faith in Christ. Paul writes to Timothy, keep the pattern of sound teaching, guard the good deposit.

In other words, our doctrine is important. We have to look after it. We have to hold to it and make sure that it isn't chiselled away from us. And Christ's affinity was a central part of that confession in all the churches. The largest part of the Apostles' Creed, of course, deals with who Christ was and what He did.

And this is something we need to guard and protect because it's under constant attack. We see that in the early church how people said, oh, yes. OK. He's God, but not fully God or maybe, well, He looks like God or something like that, but they weren't willing to accept His full deity. And so it's important that they hold onto that belief.

And that's, of course, Satan's strategy to try and lead us astray from the faith by attacking these doctrines. And that's why it's so important that we hold onto that deposit that we have in our confessions to help us and to guide us. Now, of course, this is an ongoing task because since the Reformation, we've had attacks, firstly, on the assurance of salvation, the whole Arminian controversy where they denied that God was the one who brought us to salvation. Then we had a whole battle for scripture, that scripture is truly the Word of God. Then evolutionism came to challenge the doctrine of creation.

And then we had all these so-called historians who said, oh, all this Old Testament stuff about Abraham and David, that's all myth. That's legends. Nothing true to it. And then there were the challenges to morality about marriage, about divorce, about what is it? Well, gender issues and so on.

And constantly, Satan finds new points on which to attack us. But if we stand on what the Bible teaches, if we stand on the confessions, they will help protect us against these attacks. And that's why as a confessional church, we take our confessions seriously. We know they are a gift God has given us to protect us in our faith, and that's why we teach them to our children, why we teach these confessions to new members. That's why we teach their truths over and over again.

And I'm sorry that we no longer have a second service on Sunday where these confessions were particularly dealt with because, unfortunately, since we've gone to one service, the confessions have been largely ignored, and you don't find much teaching on confessions anymore. It's so important that we preach these truths over and over again, and something like the Heidelberg Catechism can help us in them. We still, thankfully, make them a condition for office bearers. You can't be an office bearer in our churches unless you hold to the confessions of our church. And when you call a pastor, he will have to do what we call a colloquium doctrinae to make sure he stands on the Word of God and its teachings as we find them in the confessions.

We guard against departure by, yeah, by upholding these confessions. And it's interesting that in many liberal churches, they've said, oh, if we do away with these confessions, we'll make it easier for people to come to church, and our churches will grow. How many liberal churches who've done that have grown? I couldn't tell you one. I can give you a whole lot who lost membership after that.

And, typically, where the gospel isn't preached, the churches begin to empty. And after a while, it's a few old people who sit there because they like to look at the glass inlaid windows that their family has presented or something, but it is a sad situation. If we dilute the doctrine, if we lose these central points of our faith, then we have no reason to come to church. A living faith is a faith that holds onto the doctrine as we have it in scripture and as we have it set out in the confessions. Now a living faith, of course, does not depend on some historical church document.

Ultimately, this living faith depends on the Holy Spirit. It's the Holy Spirit who will keep us centred on the truth of God's Word, and it's the Holy Spirit who will also help us to profess our faith. Now when did you last say the Apostles' Creed together in this church? We used to do it every Sunday, I think, in evening service, probably some people who wouldn't even remember it fully anymore. But I'm thankful to say that most of our professions are actually not done in creeds, but in song.

It's in song that we tell the world what we believe. It's in song that we bring glory to God for what He's done. It's in song that we profess our faith. And it's very clear that this was also the case in the early church, and we know that because many parts of their hymns are found in the epistles. Scholars agree that every now and then when Paul or Peter writes, the style suddenly changes.

You know how you all have a certain style of writing and all of a sudden it becomes poetic, and most scholars are agreed that what's happening here is that Paul and Peter quote one of the hymns that was being sung in their churches. And you find examples of that. You want to know it from Philippians 2:5 to 11, Colossians 1:15, 1 Timothy 3:16, Hebrews 1, the first three verses, 1 Peter 2:21 to 25. They're just some of these songs that we have from the early church. Now I'm almost tempted to say that you can test the health of the church by how lustily they sing.

I don't think it would be fully correct because there are other factors. Do people have good voices and so on? But on the whole, I, when I come to a church where people sing with enthusiasm and they sing of the wonderful things that God did, I know this is a good church, a church where the gospel is preached. And our songs should be a central part of our Christian life. It says in Ephesians 5:19, sing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs among yourselves, singing and making melody in your heart to the Lord.

And it's the Holy Spirit who prompts us to make this profession in song. It's the Holy Spirit who stirs us up, who fills us with this enthusiasm. Enthusiasm, of course, is a word meaning God in us, and it's Holy Spirit in us who brings out this feeling of adoration and just, yeah, wanting to worship God. And, therefore, we thank God that He's given us these wonderful hymns. We thank Him for our creeds and the confessions that help keep us on His path.

And with the Spirit's help, let us guard them against the attacks of the evil one. Let's guard these doctrines and uphold them because these creeds and confessions keep us centred on Jesus Christ. And that's what it's all about, isn't it? Because Christ is our saviour and our only comfort in life and death as we know from our creeds. Thank you.

Let's pray. Our Lord and Father, we thank you for the confessions that we have in this church, for the way they've led us and helped us to understand your wonderful work of salvation. Father, we pray that we may continue to uphold the truth that we find there as distilled from your Word. We thank you, Lord, that we have people to help us. We thank you for the work being done by scholars and ministers.

But, Father, we do pray that they may not go astray and follow the route of liberalism and by watering down what is so important. Father, we pray that our confessions will continue to stand us in good stead. And, Lord, above all, we thank you for the confession that Jesus Christ is Lord because it's in His name we pray. Amen.