The second part of the Apostles’ Creed says “I believe in Jesus Christ, His only-begotten Son, our Lord.” Whilst affirming belief in one God, the Creed quickly acknowledges something of the mystery of the Godhead, namely that One God exists in Three Persons, the doctrine of the Trinity.

I believe in Jesus Christ
Jesus is God’s Final Word, the final and definitive revelation of God. As Michael Card puts it,
“When the Father’s Wisdom wanted to communicate His love,
He spoke it in one final perfect Word.

He spoke the Incarnation and then so was born the Son.
His final word was Jesus, He needed no other one.
Spoke flesh and blood so He could bleed and make a way Divine.
And so was born the baby who would die to make it mine.” (Michael Card, ‘Final Word’)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_idg5Xxy6kE

Or, as the writer to the Hebrews tells us, “In the past God spoke to our ancestors through the prophets at many times and in various ways, but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son, whom he appointed heir of all things, and through whom also he made the universe. The Son is the radiance of God’s glory and the exact representation of his being, sustaining all things by his powerful word.” (Hebrews 1:1-3)

Even the names given to the Son are significant. Jesus – the name given by the angel to Joseph before the birth of Jesus (Matt 1:21) – means ‘Jehovah is Salvation.’ Christ or Messiah is the title meaning ‘Anointed One’. Both these names set out for us the purpose of Jesus, that He came into the world to save sinners. Matt 16 looks at the disciples’ confused understanding of who Jesus was, resulting in Peter’s confession ‘You are the Messiah, the Son of the Living God’ (Matt 16:16). We need spiritual or divine insight to understand who Jesus really is.

The only-begotten Son
This tells us something of that special relationship within the Godhead. The Creed echoes the language of John 1 which tells us how the one and only Son came to make his dwelling on earth and came to reveal the Father’s heart to us. Jesus was not a created being (see John 1 and Colossians 1), but one who lived in awareness of that relationship with His Father and who came to do the Father’s will. By belief in that name, we too can become children of God (John 1:12) and through believing, we can have life in that name (John 20:31)

Our Lord
Jesus is not just someone to be admired, someone to be respected. He is someone to be obeyed. Whilst we have that close, personal relationship with God, He is also someone to be feared (see Hebrews 12:22-29), for He is a consuming fire. When we stop and declare that Jesus Christ is our Lord, we are surrendering the control of our lives to God. This is scary and it’s frightening to see how often we take back that control and need, therefore, to surrender it again. That’s why it’s good to come back frequently to these core beliefs and examine who is really running our lives. Have we taken back the reins? Are we trying to manipulate circumstances and people to bend to our will? Or are we able to say, like Job, “The LORD gave and the LORD has taken away; may the name of the LORD be praised.” (Job1:21)?

1. Jesus Christ is the author of salvation – His name indicates His identity and purpose and He lived up to that name! Because of this we can be saved!
2. We strive to live in relationship with God and with others, for our God is a relational God.
3. We submit to God and surrender control of our lives, for He is our Lord. “Trust in the LORD with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding;6 in all your ways acknowledge him, and he will make your paths straight” (Prov 3:5-6)

Having spent eleven chapters giving us a firm theological footing so that we will understand the situation without God and all God has done for us in Christ, Paul moves on to the practical application of this in everyday living. The chapters are linked with that vital word ‘therefore’ (I hear a former pastor’s words echoing through the ages: “every time you see a ‘therefore’ in the Bible, you know it’s there for a reason!”) We really must not divorce the ‘theoretical’ from the ‘practical’.

There are many branches of mathematics, but these are often divided into ‘pure’ maths and ‘applied’ maths – this same idea of ‘theory’ and ‘practice’. Pure maths can, like theology, end up very abstract and philosophical. But life involves nitty-gritty as well as theory and Paul is keen to show us how the two strands fit together.

“Therefore, I urge you, brothers and sisters, in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God—this is your true and proper worship.” (Rom 12:1)

“So here’s what I want you to do, God helping you: Take your everyday, ordinary life—your sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life—and place it before God as an offering. Embracing what God does for you is the best thing you can do for him.” (Rom 12:1, The Message)

The first thing we considered was the word ‘urge’. Paul is not commanding the Romans to do this; God so often is looking for a heartfelt response, not a robot-like obedience that has no choices. In view of all that we have learned about God’s love, grace, mercy and provision, however, the logical, rational, reasonable and sensible response is to offer our whole lives to Him. As Jim Eliot, the missionary to Ecuador who lost his life there, is reputed to have said, “He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain that which he cannot lose.” Everything we have comes from God, even life itself. We have nothing really to cling on to, despite our illusions. All we have is the now of today to offer ourselves in service to Him.

God’s into the business of recycling! Long before this became fashionable (or expedient) to do, God has been taking ‘broken, shattered pieces’ and making them ‘more beautiful than I have ever known’ (Aaron Shust, ‘Long Live the King’). The old way of living, with its sin-tainted bias, is cleansed by God and our parts offered to Him (Rom 6:13). We are now set apart for God. The idea of ‘living sacrifices’ is memorable, for sacrifices in the Old Testament were always dead. But this is the very idea that Paul has explored earlier in Romans (notably chapter 6), that we are now dead to sin but alive to Christ. God does not waste anything!

‘True and proper worship’, ‘spiritual act of worship’, ‘reasonable worship’… all of these phrases convey the life-changing idea that worship means everything we do and are, offered to God. The rest of Romans will explore this in depth: what does this look like in the life of a believer? Is it just what we do in church? Emphatically not! It may be connected to ceremonies, songs, liturgy and celebration, but it is far more than these things. ‘Worship’ (also translated ‘service’) is our offering to God, and what we offer is our whole lives, our very beings.

As the Frances Havergal hymn goes,
“Take my life and let it be
Consecrated, Lord, to Thee.
Take my moments and my days,
Let them flow in endless praise.”

Or, as the Tim Hughes’ song reminds us, God is in everything:
“God in my living
There in my breathing
God in my waking
God in my sleeping
God in my resting
There in my working
God in my thinking
God in my speaking

God in my hoping
There in my dreaming
God in my watching
God in my waiting
God in my laughing
There in my weeping
God in my hurting
God in my healing”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SOY-eHUsHdM

There are a few special events coming up… Have you got your diaries ready?!

Sunday 6th November
This is the next family service at 6 p.m. and we have all been requested to bring items costing no more than £1 to ‘swap’ as part of the service. No further details available, so the theme is as yet unknown, but we’re sure this will be a fun service if we all join in!

Saturday 12th November
This is the baptismal service – times and details to be announced. It’s always great to celebrate new life in Christ and we are thrilled to be able to baptise new believers.

Saturday 17th December
The Christian singer Paul Poulton will be leading a ‘Christmas Extravaganza’ at church that evening. Paul is a skilled communicator and musician, so we are hoping for a great evening’s entertainment. Bring your friends along!

“The trouble with X is they only see things in black and white! They need to understand that there are shades of grey as well!”

I work with children and young people, and part of my job inevitably involves sorting out the (to me) petty squabbles associated with youth. “She’s not talking to me!” “He’s not my mate anymore!” “They looked at me funny!” Part of growing up has to include learning how to live alongside each other and get on with people who have different personalities, different upbringings, different values and different likes and dislikes. Small wonder that the intransigence and inflexibility of youth often adds to the tensions of everyday life (not that intransigence and inflexibility are only found in young people, either…)

The phrase ‘seeing things in black and white’ usually means being rigid in seeing one’s own point of view but failing to take anyone else’s opinions into consideration, black and white being thought of as opposites. Gradually, as we mature, we learn that life is more complex than perhaps we would like to acknowledge. Certainly there are things that are definitely right and definitely wrong, but relationships and friendships are rarely as clear-cut as we’d like to pretend.

Recently, however, I’ve begun to feel irritated by this idea that maturity involves seeing life in ‘shades of grey‘. I know what’s meant by that phrase: that life is indeed more complex than we often perceive. But the notion of grey being the only colour seems to me to belie the immense variety of God’s creation, and the blandness of this colour seems to continue to paint a picture of life that is dull and drab, rather than being rich and vibrant.

When you think about it, the world is full of colours. Careful measurements of our visual system’s best performance have been made which show we can see about 1000 levels of light-dark, 100 levels of red-green, and 100 levels of yellow-blue for a single viewing condition in a laboratory. This means that the total number of colours we can see is about 10 million! (assuming we’re not colour-blind, that is…) We often use colours to describe emotions: we talk about red-hot anger or about the ‘green-eyed monster of jealousy’ or associate yellow with cowardice or purple with majesty.

Life is not all grey, any more than it is all black or white. It is full of colour, because God has made it that way. It is complex, many-layered, incorporating so many shades and tones that we have difficulty finding enough words to differentiate between them (think about all the synonyms of red: vermilion, crimson, scarlet, fuschia, maroon, burgundy etc.) If we associate the black-and-white simplicity of youth with a lack of emotional insight, I think we should also do away with mere shades of grey to represent the true depths of life. I can see a rainbow of colours, because life is vivid, spectacular, often difficult and complex, but ultimately varied and vibrant because God has made a world of wonderful colour for us to explore.

We had two birthdays to celebrate last night!

A creed (from the Latin ‘credo’, ‘I believe’) is a statement of belief and the Apostles’ Creed is one of the earliest statements of Christian belief. Last night, we looked at the opening statement from the Apostles’ Creed: “I believe in God the Father, Almighty, Maker of Heaven and earth.”

I believe in God the Father
The fact that God is our Father is affirmed in both the Old Testament (Deut 32:6, Is 9:6, Is 63:15, Jer 31:9, Mal 2:10, to name but a few examples) and the New Testament (looking especially at Jesus’s teaching in the Sermon on the Mount and John’s Gospel). The New Testament writers frequently began their letters with the phrase ‘grace and peace to you from God the Father and our Lord Jesus Christ’ (Romans 1:7, see also 2 Cor 1:2, Gal 1:3, Eph 1:3, 1 Tim 1:2 and 1 Thess 1:1, for example.) God is the perfect Father (James 1:17), giving good gifts. Even when He disciplines us, it is for our own good (Prov 3:12, Hebrews 12:8-10). Our own earthly fathers may have been good or bad, but God is a good Father, a God who is not impersonal but who is keen to enter into a close, personal relationship with us.

I believe in the Almighty
God is not only our Father (indicating the personal relationship we have with Him), He is the Almighty, the all-powerful one. His power is demonstrated throughout the Bible: in the way He chose Abraham and made a whole nation from a childless couple, in the way He coordinated the safety of that nation when threatened by famine or tyranny, in the miraculous defeat of the Egyptians in the Exodus (see Ex 15:4-6), and most especially in the death and resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ. The disciples’ hopes were dashed and lay in tatters at the crucifixion (see Luke 24:24), but not even death could thwart the power of God (Luke 24:5-7, 1 Cor 15:55).

I believe in the Maker of heaven and earth
Nowadays, the belief in God as maker of heaven and earth is under constant, daily attack. If you hold to the Biblical account of creation given in Genesis and affirm that you believe in God as maker of heaven and earth, you are likely to be ridiculed and scorned. But the Bible is unequivocal in its declaration that God is the Creator of the universe, of all we see and of mankind. For those who are interested in the creation vs evolution debate, there are many resources available to help us defend the Biblical viewpoint (see http://creation.com/, for example), but for now, it’s enough to look at the Biblical defence of this credal statement. Gen 1 affirms God’s activity in creation, a fact echoed in John 1 and Col 1. Job 9 and Job 38-42 affirm God’s power in creation and the actual phrase ‘Maker of heaven and earth’ is used in Ps 121:2, Ps 124:8, and Ps 146:6

Our God is the all-powerful Creator, the One who sustains everything by His powerful word, giving us confidence to face tomorrow and grace and strength for today. Our beliefs shape the way we live and help us to live with our heads held high!