I Believe... In God
The Essentials: Why Truth Matters • Sermon • Submitted • Presented
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· 1 viewBig Idea: Believing in God is essential to possessing truth. 1. Belief in God is how we draw near to Him (Heb 11:1, 6) 2. Belief in God is how we understand Him (2 Timothy 3:16; Deut 6:4; Matthew 28:19) 3. Belief in God is how we enjoy Him. (Heb 11:6)
Notes
Transcript
Introduction
Introduction
“What is Truth?”
Whether you recognize it or not, that is a profound and universally expressed question that has come to the mind of almost every human being over the ages.
Philosophers have asked it.
Politicians have questioned it.
Artists seek it.
Teachers ponder it.
It seems like everyone at one point or another asks, “what is truth?”
The answer is at the core of our existence.
But there’s some problems we have with truth these days.
On one hand, we live in a culture of extreme individualism. We’re told to be authentic to ourselves and what happens is that everyone creates their own version of what is true and what is false.
We celebrate that everyone has “your truth”
On the other hand, we live in an age of disinformation.
It’s not just that there are lies out there, but there are active attacks against truth itself.
Our wily enemy, Satan, loves to sow lies and disinformation against the truth of God in order to deceive the world and deceive the church.
With everyone having their own truth, and the world full of information, misinformation, and disinformation it can seem nearly impossible to tell fact from fiction.
We might think, well does it really matter?
Maybe it’s better to just pursue truth rather than to possess truth?
Shouldn’t we be content with sincerity over certainty?
Isn’t it more about the journey than the destination.
Ross Douthat, contributing editor in The Atlantic writes:
“The journey is only better than the destination if the destination turns out to be a disappointment, and not the place you hoped to arrive at after all.”
“Questing, hoping, searching, anticipating - all of these experiences have their virtues, but their virtues are dependent upon the thing that you're questing for turning out to be worthwhile, and if it does then only a fool would choose to keep it forever out of reach.”[1]
I believe it does matter - truth matters!
Because truth matters, it is important for us to seek, understand, know, and believe the truth.
What we believe, will shape how we live our lives!
Orient to Series
Orient to Series
So we are beginning a new series today.
We’re calling it The Essentials: Why Truth Matters
In this series of messages we are going to identify and lay down the essential truths, or basic doctrines of the Christian faith.
To do that we need some language to help us - and we need language that has been both affirmed by the church for centuries and language that is clearly informed and drawn from Scripture itself.
One statement that supplies this language is one of the oldest Christian “statements of faith” - it’s a creed, The Apostles’ Creed.
The Apostles’ Creed was probably not written by the Apostle’s themselves, but the early church developed a teaching curriculum called a catechism to help new converts to the Christian faith know what they were professing.
While many were illiterate and did not possess the wealth to own a personal copy of the Bible, the Creed provided in the church a “rule of faith” against false teaching and a faithful framework to unify churches and affirm new Christians in the faith.
In this series we’re going to take the statements of the Apostles’ Creed and show how the Scripture teaches these things in order to build our way of life off of what is true and not the lies of culture of the Devil.
So let’s start with the first thing the Apostles’ Creed calls us to believe.
“I Believe in God…”
Good! - I mean, that’s kind of an obvious thing, right?
We could almost assume that - 81% of Americans believe that.
But let me ask you a more penetrating question - do you really believe in God??
Does your life demonstrate a fundamental truth that God is real — that is he is there and that he has something to say about our lives?
Or is there a sort of “functional atheism” going on in your life that says, I don’t need God… he’s not relevant or necessary and really, he is unbelievable. And so you live forgetting, ignoring, and avoiding his existence.
Here’s the issue that we face if we either ignore or reject God… we can’t truly posses truth.
Big Idea: Believing in God is essential to possessing truth.
Everything in our lives will be distorted, misinformed, misunderstood, and askew if we do not believe in God.
In other words, God defines reality, and if we reject God, we reject true reality.
So why is it essential to believe in God?
What I want to get at today is this idea of belief, or faith.
We’ll talk more next week about who God is, and what we believe about him, but to start we must consider what it means to actually believe in Him.
What does that faith, or “believing in God” do? Why is faith necessary and essential?
3 answers to that question
First,
Belief in God is how we draw near to Him (Heb 11:1, 6)
Belief in God is how we draw near to Him (Heb 11:1, 6)
So faith is how we get closer to God.
How do you get closer, or draw near, to someone that you cannot see?
The Bible’s answer is faith, or belief in God.
Faith is the means by which we come to know and relate with God.
1 Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.
Faith is the banking of your life — look at the words here “assurance” and “conviction”
If you are assured of something you are firmly confident in it.
A conviction is a deeply held and immovable persuasion.
So faith is this firmly confident, deeply-held conviction.
IN what?
Things hoped for… things not seen
Faith is the banking of your life on what is not possessed or realized at the moment.
It’s trusting in something that you don’t have fully in hand and yet are absolutely sure it will come through.
Every human being believes, or has faith in something!
We believe in SOMETHING to rescue us from the bad things that are going on and deliver to us the good things that we long to have.
Our lives are shaped by pursuing and acquiring what we might define as “the good life”
It’s why we feel restless and never contented or satisfied - As Augustine has said… “our hearts are restless”
But it’s not just that we believe about someone or something — faith is the requirement to actually please, or draw near to God.
6 And without faith it is impossible to please him, for whoever would draw near to God must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who seek him.
We can’t draw near to God (please him) without believing in him!
What does that look like… 2 things:
Whoever would draw near would need to 1) believe he exists and 2) that he rewards those who seek him.
You can’t draw near to God if you don’t believe fundamentally that he exists.
That is - you won’t throw your life on him and his promises if you don’t believe he’s there.
You won’t pursue God, or draw near to him if you don’t think he’s there to be found or close to.
Now I could spend some time giving reasonable logic, and use the discipline of apologetics to build a case for the existence of God.
But notice here what the text says is required first and foremost - you must believe (or have faith) that he exists.
Faith has to be the starting point:
If you have not understood, I say, believe. For understanding is the recompense of faith. Therefore, seek not to understand so that you may believe, but believe so that you may understand; for “unless you believe, you will not understand.”
Consider how fundamental this is - if you are going to pursue someone or possess something, you have to believe that it’s there to be had.
If you say, you know - I’d like to enjoy an amazing Hawaiian vacation with all the experiences of the islands, but you don’t believe Hawaii exists - you will not pursue that vacation experience.
If you say, I’d like to win 1 billion dollars in the lottery (not advocating gambling), but you don’t believe the 1 billion dollars are actually there - you won’t enter the lottery!
So faith comes first if you are to move towards the desire of your faith.
Here’s where this hits home:
May say they believe God exists - but they really don’t.
At least in how they live.
Many Christians are functional atheists.
Yes, God exists but there is no effort or desire to seek him or know him or experience God.
Here’s the invitation though - God invites and extends himself to us if we will pursue him by faith.
If we will believe he exists (that he is there) then we will be on the path towards truth.
He is there, and he can be known!
Wait, you’ll say… I’ll grant, God, or some highest power is there - but how can we know him? That’s the second answer to why faith is essential. It’s how we understand and know God.
Belief in God is how we understand Him (2 Timothy 3:16; Deut 6:4; Matthew 28:19)
Belief in God is how we understand Him (2 Timothy 3:16; Deut 6:4; Matthew 28:19)
If God exists, and we can know him then how do we know how to get close?
We don’t want to go about it the wrong way!
Suppose I told you that we were going on a trip to discover and tame the fearful and great batsquach creature, a distant cousin of the Sasquatch.
You might say you believe it exists, but to hunt it you’d need some information about it in order to capture and tame it. What does it like, what doesn’t it like, what kind of things are effective against it, does it have scales, fur? Where does it live? Is it nocturnal or a day-time animal? Is it a apex-predator or something harmless?
Your belief in its existence needs some revelation to inform your belief so that you can rightly relate to the batsquach.
If there was no information or documentation about it, then you’d struggle to believe it at all.
But I was able to provide some credible resources, perhaps some eyewitness testimonies, and some photos, and real information you’d know how to relate to the batsquach better.
The Christian faith is not a “blind faith” - it has reasonable, credible sources that are more than just eye-witness accounts and third-party testimonies.
We have the natural world that testifies to the existence of God:
1 The heavens declare the glory of God, and the sky above proclaims his handiwork.
20 For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse.
But we also have a greater testimony - God’s own Word to us - the Bible is God’s revelation of himself, it’s a primary source discourse of who he is.
16 All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness,
7 The law of the Lord is perfect, reviving the soul; the testimony of the Lord is sure, making wise the simple;
And it has been written so that we might believe God and understand him truly!
31 but these are written so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name.
So we can understand God and his nature by who he describes and reveals himself to be… but even that revelation of himself requires faith.
It requires faith because when God speaks about himself, he is disclosing the amazing mysteries of his incomprehensible nature to creatures that are not cognitively able to comprehend him
Let me illustrate: The Apostles’ Creed makes the profession, “I believe in God the Father…Jesus Christ his only Son…and the Holy Spirit.”
Later Christian Creeds stated that “the Father is God, the Son is God, and the Holy Spirit is God. Yet there are not three gods; but there is one God.”
Now where does it get that kind of language from? The Bible.
In the Bible we discover that God has disclosed himself as one God
4 “Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one.
God is not divided into parts, nor are there multiple gods - One God.
The apostle Paul taught the Corinthian church:
1 Corinthians 8:4 (ESV)
4 “there is no God but one.”
Yet the Bible also tells us that The Father is God, Jesus the Son is God, and the Holy Spirit is God.
Three distinct persons
19 Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit,
So we have one God in three persons, one name (or essence) three distinct persons
This is the doctrine of the Trinity.
Nothing that we know well is one essence and three persons - so this revelation of God blows our minds.
How do we make sense of it? We must believe - we believe God’s word!
This is what the Christian faith is built upon - the Word of God. If we don’t believe the Bible, or God’s revelation of himself, we will not believe the truth.
We may not fully comprehend every doctrine the Bible presents, we may not fully grasp all that God has revealed, but as we believe and seek understanding we can grow.
Otherwise how can we truly know who God is unless he has revealed himself to us!
If we believe God, and our faith is him, then we can further understand him, and further understand so that we can commune with him.
We can say to God, “I believe, help my unbelief!”
So faith is necessary to draw near to God, and faith is necessary to understand God.
But God is not just one that we want to know and understand… God is someone we want to enjoy.
Many have a view of God that he’s either apathetic towards humanity or absolutely angry.
Who would want to draw near to anyone like that? He either doesn’t exist, or doesn’t care, or is firmly against me!
But remember what Heb 11:6 said:
6 And without faith it is impossible to please him, for whoever would draw near to God must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who seek him.
That verse alone points out that God is up to doing something good… it’s enticing us to see that God is good and we can and should find good from him.
Which is the third answer to the question why faith is essential or necessary:
Because:
Belief in God is how we enjoy Him. (Heb 11:6)
Belief in God is how we enjoy Him. (Heb 11:6)
Without faith we cannot please God - it’s impossible.
And we must have two things happening in our faith:
That God exists - that he is there
That “he rewards those who seek him”
This is the posture of hope, confidence, assurance that God is good and that what he has for those who will “draw near” or “seek him” is our good; a reward!
If we hear these words, take them to heart, and believe that God is good and has a reward, we’ll want to seek him to enjoy him and that reward for us!
Again, it’s an invitation to seek the Lord
10 The young lions suffer want and hunger; but those who seek the Lord lack no good thing.
6 “Seek the Lord while he may be found; call upon him while he is near; 7 let the wicked forsake his way, and the unrighteous man his thoughts; let him return to the Lord, that he may have compassion on him, and to our God, for he will abundantly pardon.
What is that reward?
The reward the writer of Hebrews is pointing us to is the reward of God’s gracious and abundant love.
We’re rewarded with God actually giving us himself and all that he is: life, salvation, eternal joy!
If we fail to believe, we will not enjoy God, we will not receive his blessing and we will find ourselves facing doom, hell, and final and ultimate justice for our sins.
When I was a kid my parents had 4-wheel ATV’s that we would take up into the mountains and see some remote and amazing places in Colorado.
On one adventure we came to a very steep trail and I was sure we were going to die.
I began to scream and shout and demand we go back to the truck.
My dad asked me, “Jeremy do you trust me that I will take care of you, protect you, and that I have good things for you?”
I shook my head “yes” - I was saying I believed in my dad.
And my belief reinforced me to be able to stay calm as we ventured on and saw some of the most amazing and stunning scenery I’ve ever seen.
But it also brought me closer to my dad!
So here is encouragement for us when we face our own dark nights of the soul.
When our affliction and trial is great - we have to ask, do I believe? Do I trust that God is good, that he loves me, that he is going to protect and bring me forever into his eternal Kingdom?
God’s reward is the gift of adoption into his family through Jesus Christ’s death on our behalf.
We are freed from the bondage and slavery to sin by the finished work of Christ.
God provides freely his grace and mercy to all who will believe and trust in him.
Jesus has lived the perfect life we could not, died on our behalf as a substitute and sacrifice, and was vindicated in righteousness which was proved by his Resurrection on the third day.
All of these blessings are received only by faith!
So when we say “I believe in God...” we’re saying I believe that God is there, that he is knowable, that he is good and we can draw near to him through faith because of what Jesus has done for us.
We can seek and pursue him because he is good and loves us!
Let me ask again, “Do you believe in God?”
[1] - https://www.theatlantic.com/personal/archive/2007/05/what-is-truth/54318/