There's my hometown, their slogan for their town is a small town is like a big family. So we'll be a small family this morning during our Sunday school here. Congratulations. Thank you. This morning, we're talking about confessions and creeds. By confession, I don't mean standing in line to confess to a priest, and by creed, I don't mean the band. Creed is as awesome as creed is. But when we talk about confessions or creeds, we're talking about what we believe. Here I have our constitution of the Reformed Presbyterian Church of North America. So when you become a member, you'll get one of these and it goes through the Westminster Confession of Faith and then has a testimony on the side of it, which is basically a commentary from our denomination on the Westminster Confession. It also has our larger and shorter catechisms, our directory for church government, book of discipline, directory of worship, and a whole bunch of good stuff. So if you want to know what we believe, this is our subordinate standards, they're called. We hold the Bible first, and then the second is our standards that make sense of what we believe about. the Bible. You can see this on our website. So I pulled up our website here and you can see our beliefs and it will go through Yes, we adhere to the Westminster Confession and the parallel RP testimony, as I mentioned, as a faithful summary of the Bible's teachings. And it links to our Constitution and then goes through the basics about what we believe, the Bible, God, creation, man, the fall, grace, Christ, the Lord, the Holy Spirit, the gospel, good works, the church, the future. So, All of these things are statements or creeds or confessions about what we believe, what we adhere to. And it's increasingly important because nowadays, you see less and less creeds. So I have Apollo Creed there, the boxer knocked out, because people are anti-creedal these days. And this morning, rather than going through everything about creeds or maybe the content of creeds, we're going to really focus in and talk about why our culture is anti-confessional and anti-creedal, and then we'll look at the foundation for our creeds. In doing so, I'm really going to rely heavily on my teacher Carl Truman's book, The Credal Imperative, and also our pastor Nathan Eshelman's great book, I Have a Confession, The What and Why of the Westminster Confession of Faith. And I'll be really looking into one chapter in particular that's chapter 3, permission to write confessions. Where do we get a permission to have confessions? Before that, let's look at some confessionalism must-haves. In order to have a certain confession or a statement of faith, we have to understand that the past is important and has positive, relevant things to teach us today. That's an increasingly controversial view where you have atheists in the culture saying stuff like, well, that's just a silly, dusty, old 2,000-year-old book. which is not only stupid because it's not a singular book from 2,000 years ago, but it's stupid because the past is important. There's a quote from William Faulkner where a character says, the past is never dead, it's not even past. There's a certain sense that Our confessions are also a statement about the continuing applicability of the past to the present. And because they're always composed in the past, we need to claim that creeds and confessions still fulfill positive functions. So truth goes from one generation to another generation. And any cultural force that weakens or attenuates the belief that the past can be a source of knowledge and even wisdom is also a force that serves to undermine the relevance of creeds and confessions. Second, language has to be an appropriate vehicle for the stable transmission of the truth across time and geographical space. Increasingly, we see attacks on language as a capable medium of even transmuting or giving us the truth. And lastly, there must be a body or an institution that can authoritatively compose and enforce creeds and confessions. and that institution would be the church, right? There has to be such a thing as the church. Increasingly, you see people who, especially in America, there's this kind of strong individualism. Me and my Bible is all I need. Well, creeds also are against that kind of culture. Now, besides these kind of must-haves, I want to speak through some of the things that that really take away from our culture's adherence to creeds, why they might not be so keen on creeds. The first is, and this is all from Carl Truman, but the first is science, I'll probably comment a little extra, but the first is science where Science has this idea of progress. Everything is moving to an end and needing to be discovered. And in that way, there's a focus on the future, but very little appreciation for the past. Other than to say, those knuckleheads back then believed that we revolved around the Earth or the universe revolved around the Earth or, you know, the sun moved around the earth or these sorts of things where there's a kind of a distrust in the past. Likewise, technology that we continue to use gets better and better and there's a certain way that I'm sure when I get older my kids are going to be able to do things that I can't do with technology and it almost can give the sense that the future knows more than the past. This? Yes. Likewise, consumerism is this belief in the culture constantly buying things that if I have this new thing, shiny new thing, then I'll be happy. And it's always future focused on what I could have. So rarely is there a statement about, oh, I'm satisfied with what comes from the past. The disappearance of human nature is another cultural, has a huge cultural impact on us. Humanity, not as a universal category, we don't all of humans have a shared human experience because we don't have a cultural, ethical, or philosophical, or metaphysical core that binds us all together. That's an increasingly popular view. Each person is kind of an island. So think about beliefs like you can be whatever you want to be. If you want to be a guy, if you want to be a girl, if you want to change this or change that. There's not a singular idea about what humanity is, so then how could a creed or a confession speak to me as an individual? Every person is gonna be different, so how can one thing have that effect on you when you have a sort of poetic form of existence? Whoa, excuse me. Now, words are one of the most important aspects of confessions, obviously. Confessions are, by definition, taking words to communicate what one person believes to another. I confess this, I believe this thing. But increasingly, words are seen as unreliable or incapable of really communicating. So you hear in Madonna's song, Bedtime Story, she says, words are useless, especially sentences. They don't stand for anything. How could they explain how I feel? This is not a new sentiment. I mean, it's been around since Hamlet, who said, words, words, words. But it is increasingly dominant in the universities of our culture that words are unreliable. So you have in literary theory approaches things like, maybe you guys have heard of deconstruction, or reader response theory, or lots of views that come out of a more post-modern or Marxist framework, like feminist theory or queer theory. I'm not just throwing all these out for nothing, but let me give you an example of how some of the more Marxist-influenced ideas might affect creeds. I'm going to bring it all together. There's a homeless crisis in all kinds of places in the United States. One increasingly popular way to refer to homeless people is not as homeless, but as unhoused. A lot of, you'll see on the political left, them introducing words all the time, new words. And that's not only to confuse and mystify and make you feel like you're behind the curve, but it's a way of actually changing people's ideas for power, for the sake of power. So in that case, about the unhoused, you think about If someone is unhoused, that means someone has done it to them, right? So then you have a victim mentality or a grievance culture baked into the word unhoused. It also brings in the idea of human rights. Oh, they deserve to be housed. Right? So all of these ideas are pushed into this word, not to make the word true, but to make it useful. I need to make this word useful in order to, you know, call him oppressed and then change society. So, words are so powerful because they can do these sorts of things, but when we talk about our confessions, we're not talking about words just merely as a mechanism of power and taking power, that's a Marxist view, but as genuinely communicating truth. Lastly, two cultural movements that really push against confessionalism as the anti-authoritarian kind of cultural mores around us that parents and priests are the bad ones in the movies. There's a distrust everywhere of people in authority. And lastly, in this list I have a fear of exclusion. People say stuff like doctrine divides. Well, no, and we'll get to this. Sin divides, but doctrine makes it evident and can draw barriers between people. And people don't like that all the time. They like to be inclusive. So the confessions are also against, you know, DEI initiatives, diversity, equity, inclusion kind of ideas. In that sense, they're very countercultural. Now, before responding to some of those cultural issues, I want to go through where is our confession founded? So our pastor Nathan in his book talks about this idea of, he mentions some fishing. I don't know if you guys have ever been spearfishing. He says when you fish you have to, so said a family member of his, look for the shadow sometimes and you can see the fish by the shadow in order to spear it. And in that way, we get the fish through seeing these things in scripture, or the shadows of them. But he comes to this point where he says, the church, as you will see, has through scripture, not only permission, but a warrant to make confessions. And that confessionalism is not to overthrow the teaching that's found in the Bible, but to summarize it, systemize it, arrange and organize it to show those willing to hear what the church believes and teaches. So in the early church there was kind of one arch heretic named Arius and Arius believe that Jesus was not God. And one of the first confessions of the church, the Nicene Creed, began because it was fighting against Arius. And they decided something, I think very common sense, to say, well, we should put down what we believe against Arius. And this is why these churches came together. formed a united understanding of what they believed in the form of a creed. They did as what one writer described as what common sense in the word of God taught the church to do. They wrote a confession. That's Samuel Miller. So we shouldn't be afraid of systematics, right? There is a certain sense that people don't like arranging and organizing and systematizing things. Some people will say, that's rationalism, you know, and you can't bend to rationalism. It's too simplistic. But this sort of systematizing is done by Scripture itself, right? And Scripture is not kowtowing to rationalism. It's just, it is the truth. So the first place we can go to understand this is Ephesians 4.2, which says, with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love, eager to maintain the unity of the spirit and the bond of peace. There is one body and one spirit, just as you were called to the one hope that belongs to your call, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all. So here we have a very clear indication that the church is called to grow in our understanding of the teaching of the Bible, having certain topics systemized, right? Or organized. One church, one spirit, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father, right? That's a confession, isn't it? At least it's the outline for a confession. So you see the fish and tail, kind of the shadows thing that was brought up. There it is that we see this in the scripture itself. And you have to ask if there's one Lord or if there's one spirit or one baptism, what does that mean? And then you're doing systematics. You're looking into other parts of the scripture for what this all means. Now, you can see other foundations for confessionalism in the scripture. This is what the Westminster Confession says in chapter one, section six. God's whole counsel concerning all things vital for his own glory, man's faith in life, for his own glory, faith in life, it's all either expressly set down in the scripture and evidenced, or deduced from it by good and necessary consequence. So when we're thinking about confessions, we're talking about the deduced from the Bible by good and necessary consequence. If we're going to confess something, it has to be a necessary consequence of what the Bible says, but also a good one. And it is. So, we see these sorts of confessions in the Bible itself. So, we see, for example, the sound words. Paul says to Timothy, follow the pattern of sound words which you have heard from me in the faith and love that are in Christ Jesus. Here you have sound words being put up saying there is such a thing as a pattern or a system of sound words. And every generation kind of works on bringing new confessions or new creeds in some sense or another. Sometimes they're written, sometimes they're merely cultural, but as an example, maybe you've heard about the Nashville Statement on Human Sexuality, which was created to address sexual issues within the church. And in the PCA, they debated whether they should adopt it. These are important for us, too, to think about. Is that biblical? Should we be part of that? Is it founded on Scripture? And that's the main thing. These trustworthy sayings also from Paul are kind of mini-confessions. And were presented with the faithful sayings. Let me quote from Pastor Nathan's book here, page 55. Or some translations have trustworthy sayings that are worthy of all acceptance. This formula of this is a faithful saying and worthy of acceptance reminds us that there are New Testament statements that stand out as many confessions that all believers should be able to grab hold of and confess. Statements that are faithful to the overarching teaching of scripture. faithful sayings, and something that the believer holds true for him or herself, worthy of all acceptance. So if God didn't want the church to write confessions, why did Paul put in these statements as faithful sayings that you should know and believe? Here are some of the faithful statements from Timothy that I've put here. And you can see how the statements organize a certain thought about, let's say, the doctrine of salvation. Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners. And Paul adds, of whom I'm the first. Or the doctrine of the church. If anyone aspires to the office of an elder or overseer, he desires a noble task. Or the doctrine of God and Christ, that to this end we toil and strive because we have our hopes set on the living God. Or the doctrine of the last things. If we have died with Him, so we will also live with Him. And Paul says, again, this saying is trustworthy. or a doctrine of sanctification. I want you to insist on these things so that those who have believed in God may be careful to devote themselves to good works. So we have trustworthy sayings from Paul to systematize or bring together beliefs of the scripture or the Christian church. Now we also have tradition. And I don't know, tradition brings to mind a lot of different things for a lot of different people. In fact, some of them are, you know, cantankerous things that are brought up. I think a lot of people might think about the traditions of Rome. and they talk about the magisterium and trust in different human institutions there. Or maybe you think about, you know, Fiddler on the Roof, which is really an attack on all faith, if you've ever seen that story or that movie, suggesting that all beliefs are merely a result of tradition and not actually, you know, rooted in reality. Or maybe you think about family Thanksgivings and that I always bring the sweet potatoes. That's my tradition. But what we have in our confessions and what we're thinking about is tradition coming in two ways, mainly. A negative and a positive. So on the negative side, you have things where Jesus says to I believe the scribes and Pharisees, you leave the commandments of God and hold to the traditions of men. That's the negative tradition. Many traditions that have been brought into the church in that fashion. So I do think about especially the Roman Catholic tradition. So like the Immaculate conception, the idea that Mary was sinless, or the assumption of Mary into heaven, didn't come until like the 14th century, but is considered to be a tradition from the beginning of the church. That is that Mary ascended into heaven just like Jesus, which is not obviously, it's not part of our belief. Those are the sort of traditions of men that are not the commandments of God. But then there is the positive where, yes, it is a commandment of God and a tradition. So we hear from Paul in 1 Corinthians 11 too. So, Nathan says here, tradition per se is neither good nor bad. It depends on what the tradition is rooted in. The scriptures must be the root of the tradition of the church if they are to be valuable for the Christian. So that's the litmus test. Is this from the scripture? So then brothers, we hear in 2 Thessalonians 2.15, stand firm and hold to the traditions that were taught by us, either by our spoken word or by our letter. Very clear indications that Paul also believed in tradition, and we should not have problems with tradition. Sometimes Roman Catholics will say to Protestants, or the Reformed, you believe in sola scriptura, which is like anti-tradition, you don't believe in that. And it's like, no, that's not true, right? We believe in sola scriptura, which is why we believe in tradition. which is why we can believe that tradition is necessary for us to have even, but that tradition must be rooted and grounded and shown from the scripture. Thomas Manton, member of the Westminster Assembly, who was also a clerk and military chaplain, said that divine traditions are either heavenly doctrines revealed by God or institutions and ordinances appointed by Him for the use of the church. Holding the traditions is nothing else but perseverance in the apostolic doctrine. And then he outlined six ways that tradition is maintained. He talked about scripture itself, the facts that a Christian believes in, like the virgin birth, for example, teachings drawn by consequence from the scripture, but are the more confirmed So think about infant baptism, for example. In the New Testament, it's not there explicitly, but it is there implicitly and it becomes a valid tradition of the church from the earliest days. The fourth is where words aren't used in scripture. So the word trinity, people like, sometimes I've heard in debates with Muslims, it's like, well, the word trinity isn't in the Bible, so it's not biblical. It's like, that's not true, right? Because the word trinity represents ideas that are from the Bible. that the Father is God, that the Son is God, that the Spirit is God, but the Father is not the Son, the Son is not the Holy Spirit, the Holy Spirit is not the Father, that this is clearly in the Bible, but not maybe systematized and explained like the word Trinity does in one spot. The fifth, he says, we do not reject the testimony of church history, which shows us that we believe in tradition. Which is great, because we didn't just come up with this Christian thing on our own. I have a, some of my family converted to Eastern, the so-called Eastern Orthodox Church. And they believe in all kinds of things like venerating images, right? And if you read John Calvin on images, he doesn't just say, well, that's wrong and show the scripture. He appeals to some of the ancient fathers and says, this is the way that we've believed down through history. So church history is something to be appealed to, and it's important in our tradition. We should not see ourselves as just coming up with Christianity on our own, but we stand on the shoulders of Christians who have come before us. So we don't believe in me and my Bible and that's it. I know numerous like kind of cultic groups who suggest that they can do such a thing. Like have you ever heard of the two by twos? They're these group that They go two by two and they have meetings, religious meetings in people's houses and the people who do it are called workers. And they just say, well, we have no tradition. We just go back to when Jesus sent them out two by two. We've still been doing it. It's like, if you actually look into their movement, you can actually see it was started by something like a Scottish minister. And they use a certain hymn book that's full of like Wesleyan sounding hymns. It's like, you can't say you have no tradition when you have picked one. You've picked the type of worship that you do, the type of sounds. This comes from a historical vein. Yeah, nobody just crops up out of nowhere. It's the same with, like, a lot of the Pentecostal and Charismatic movements suggest, oh, we're just the same group as in the Book of Acts that cropped up out of nowhere because we speak in tongues like they did. It's like, no, you actually come from a very specific branch of revivalistic thought that comes after the Reformation. So likewise, the Reformation is not the beginning of Christendom. And sometimes we can kind of think of it that way. But like I mentioned, Calvin quotes from ancient fathers, and we believe that these traditions are valuable. Lastly, Manton talks about innocent customs, which are like the circumstances, what time do you meet at church or something, and these can be swapped out and are not necessary for the church's faith in life. Some make the last thing to be the Word of God, and that's what faithful confessions and traditions protect us from, that they make themselves out to be the Word of God or make their own beliefs or their own circumstances. They make them out to be the Word of God, but we're protected by believing in proper traditions rooted in the Bible. Number three was teachings drawn by consequences from Scripture, but all the more confirmed by it. So I gave the example of infant baptism, that it's not immediately or directly in the scripture, but it's a teaching drawn out from the scripture. Like you don't have, I mean, you do have baptism of households in the New Testament, which likely included infants, or you have in 1 Corinthians 10, Paul says that they were all baptized, the fathers through the Red Sea, which included infants. So you do have infant baptism in the New Testament, but never does it say, oh, baptize infants, you know, directly. So it's drawn from the scripture by good and necessary consequence. Likewise, you don't have like men in the Old Testament partook in the sacrament of circumcision and the like. But in the New Testament, we have like or Old Testament Passover, but in the New Testament it never says, for example, that women can take the Lord's Supper, right? But just because it doesn't say that doesn't mean we can't deduce by good and necessary consequence that we ought to let women partake or women must partake in the Lord's Supper. They are to do so. So, Some of the foundations of confessionalism are, that were to, another foundation of the confessionalism in the scripture is this scripture from Jude chapter one, verse three. He says, Beloved, contend for the faith that was once for all delivered to the saints. The once for all delivered to the saints sometimes is called the deposit of faith. It's not as if our faith It just, we don't really know what it is. And some people call this like a living church. Just like, have you ever heard about the Constitution as a living document? Basically means we can change it to make it mean whatever we want for today. So likewise, some people approach the Bible like this. It's exactly the opposite of what Jude says when he says, contend for the faith once for all delivered. Meaning we have a fixed point of reference for what the faith is and what we're to believe about it. So I have this church here I found. I saw this video of Geisha. an asian woman dressed like a geisha in a christian church and she was a lesbian and was reading the liturgy and i'm like i just like one of those cringe videos like can't like a train wreck you just kind of have to see what's going on And it was at this church, so I found them, Metropolitan Community Church of Washington, D.C. And I looked at their statement of faith, which is usually where they have a creed or a confession, right? But you see these statements, we're people on a journey. learning to live into our spirituality while affirming our bodies, genders, and sexualities. We don't all believe exactly the same thing, and yet in the midst of our diversity, we build community grounded on God's radically inclusive love for all people. Yada, yada, yada. And it says, where does it say it? Oh, it says that we are part of an ongoing conversation on matters of belief and faith, shaped by scripture in the historic creeds, building on those who have come before us. So they're basically saying we repudiate the old creeds, but we take what we want and what we don't want, and we're in a conversation about it. We go back and forth and believe whatever we can. Now, to their credit, they actually say what they believe on their website. Most churches, you go to their website, or you go to understand, and you can't even figure out what they believe. They don't have it written down anywhere. And some denominations, like the Brethren, for example, don't believe in any kind of creed or confession, and so they don't have one, and you can't find it. Now, it's not that they don't have a creed, it's that it's a private one. You gotta spend years of chipping away, what do these people actually believe, instead of them telling it to you. So creeds are also... a way of being honest with who we are, where we come from, what do we believe. If you come into this church and someone says, I just want to know what you guys believe and I'll be on my way, we could say, oh well, you know, we believe in the Apostle Creed, we believe in the Nicene Creed, we accept the Westminster Confession and confess the Westminster Confession of Faith as our you know, as our creed, here you go. And they could walk away. But that is not the case in many, many churches. So we believe that we can have our confessions clear and rooted in the scripture, and that they are not only good and helpful to the church but necessary to make clear what we believe for the good of the church. So let me go ahead and close on that for now and see if there are any questions. Any thoughts? Yeah, I'll go ahead and give you the book here and you can check it out afterwards. Yep. Any other thoughts? Alright, well let me go ahead and close in a word of prayer. Our great God and Father, we thank you that you haven't left the church without a pattern of sound words, without tradition that we believe in and confess, and that keeps us secure and whole as a people. We know that it's easy to flounder around in the church or not be sure of what we believe in, but we thank you for the clarity of our confession and that we too can take it in hand and learn from it and grow to confess it continually. God, we pray that these things would be used by our church, that our confessions would be important to them, that history itself would be important as we see the way that the culture is going, help us to be counter-cultural in knowing and believing our creeds and confessions. We pray this in Christ's name. Amen.