At this time I will ask you to turn on the back page of your bulletin. We're going to make a little bit of a shift here. We as a church have more than one confession. We have the confession of the Heidelberg Catechism, but we also hold to the Belgic Confession and the Canons of Dort. And we have gone through, since I have been here, the Heidelberg Catechism, and according to my calculations, we should be able to, by the end of the year, go through the Belgic Confession, which, of course, is another of our confessions. So, let us read together our confession of faith, and I will read the heading and then we can read the article together. There is only one God. We believe with heart and confess with the mouth that there is one, only, simple, and spiritual being, which we call God, and that he is eternal, incomprehensible, invisible, immutable, infinite, almighty, perfectly wise, just, good, and the overflowing fountain of all good. So we believe with the heart and confess with the mouth, and I missed the all again, we all believe, the confession which we make is that we all believe with the mouth and confess with the mouth that there is one only simple and spiritual being which we call God. God is a spirit and God is simple. Now, what does that mean? for God to be simple. Notice the rest of the article. He is eternal, incomprehensible, invisible, immutable, infinite, almighty, perfectly wise, just, good, and the overflowing fountain of all good. Attributes of God. And so as we think of God, and as we think of his attributes, We often think of attributes as different things. But brothers and sisters, God is simple means that God is not just a pile of these things shoved together somehow, fit in somehow. That God is in all of these things one. One only simple. That God is the one God. He is not... People love to extract love. God is love. Well, how does love interact with all of these other things? No. God is certainly love. But he is also at the same time, in his essence, eternal, incomprehensible, invisible, immutable, infinite, almighty, perfectly wise, good, just, and the overflowing fountain of all good. God is one God. And so as we think about those things, people like to set the attributes of God against each other. And that's what's being confessed here is those attributes of God are not in opposition to one another. Those attributes of God are who God is. And those attributes are not parts. If you think of a diamond. Now, I don't know how many of you have ever looked at diamonds. You start thinking about getting married, they start teaching you tons of things about this is the diamond that you have to have. I remember back looking for Michelle's diamond for her ring. You've got to have this cut and it's got to have... If you think about the facets of a diamond, each facet is a part of that one stone. And without each facet of that stone, if one's cut a little bit off, it's not going to be nearly as bright as if it's perfectly cut. But what we have to understand is God is one God, and all of these different attributes arise from who he is in his centrality, in his simplicity. Perhaps you've heard of someone say, well, that's a complex person. He's got many different things, attributes to his life. Well, God is not complex in that manner. These are all central and emanating from who God is in his being. So his eternality, his incomprehensibleness, his spirituality, his invisibility, his immutability, his infinity, his power, his almightiness, his wisdom, his justice, his goodness, His overflowing fountain of all good, all emanate from the centrality of who God is. And so we dare not set one aspect of God over and against each other. We have to see that God is all of these things perfectly because they arise from the basic fact of who God is in His simplicity. And so we can go through all of these different aspects. We can look at biblical passages that speak to these things. But I actually want to spend more time just thinking about confessions. Because why do we have confessions as a church? There's a lot of churches out there that say to us, no creed but Christ. No book but the Bible, right? Why do we have the Belgic Confession? Why do we have the Canons of Dort? Why do we have the Heidelberg Catechism? Why are they so important to us as a church? Because we have written down in front of us what we believe, what we understand the Bible to teach. Churches which say no creed but Christ have an idea of what they believe the Bible teaches. and I want to be gracious to them. But sadly, the problem with that is if I don't have it written down in front of me, I can't look at it and examine it in light of Scripture. And someone else can't come in and say, why do you believe this? We have creeds because we believe this is what God's word says. This is the summary of what God teaches in His Word. The Heidelberg Catechism is, for us, a very good skeleton on which to hang our understanding when we read through the Bible. Can you understand every passage of Scripture? No. I'm sorry. No human being can easily do that. But brothers and sisters, we can have and memorize a skeleton on which to hang scripture, to see how these scriptures come together. Yes, of course, we want to come back just briefly there because what I said was a bit of a misspeak. When the confessions are to be in subjection to Scripture. If the Confession says something that is not Scriptural, we need to change the Confession. In fact, we as a denomination have done that with the Belgic Confession in one place from the normal Belgic Confession, because there are many churches who will confess it as originally written by Guido de Prey, But the problem is no one today or virtually no one believes that Paul wrote Hebrews. Well, the confession is originally and at the time perhaps it was understandable, but we as a denomination said, sorry, modern scholarship doesn't say that that's true. So we need to change the confessions if they do not represent what scripture says. But we have to have confessions. And we can stand up then and say, well, is this right or is this wrong according to scripture? And so we have the confessions and we confess them and we put them forward so that people can say, okay, that's what this church believes God's word says. And so we have the opportunity, we will, the Lord willing, continue to go through the Belgic Confession as we continue to go forward throughout this year, the Lord willing.