We Believe In God Series

Series Overview

Today, I begin a series of messages entitled Creed: 9 Essentials to the Christian Faith. Why Is This Series Relevant? The reason for this series is that beliefs matter. Beliefs fundamentally alter the shape of our lives Beliefs in and around churches go by various names such as doctrine or articles of faith. No matter the name, beliefs fundamentally alter the shape of our lives.

Feng Hiannemi is a 22-year-old Chinese married woman. At seven months pregnant, she recently was dragged out of her relative’s home because of China’s one child policy. Because she was pregnant with a girl and she was too poor to pay the $6,400 fine that would give her the option to keep her child, Chinese officials aborted her baby in the seventh month of her pregnancy. According to her NBC phone interview: “She was blindfolded, thrown on a bed, and forced to sign a document that she couldn’t read with the blindfold still on her eyes. Then two shots were injected into her belly. Thirty hours later, on the morning June 4, she gave birth to a dead baby girl.” China’s long time Communist leader Chairman Mao Zedong originally encouraged women to have as many children as possible during the Cold War-era when human power was believed to be an important force if war broke out. But the country’s rulers soon found it too difficult to feed the huge population – so they adopted a harsh policy that allows urban citizens to have only one child, and rural couples to have two, if the first child is a girl.

Beliefs matter. Beliefs act as the currency for Christianity. Beliefs operate as the slab and the flooring in Christianity’s construction. There is no roof and walls until you have beliefs, the foundation.

This series, Creed, is an attempt to identify many of the basic elements of Christianity’s core beliefs. It’s an attempt to give more than a bumper sticker introduction to the Christian faith. You might think of it as identifying the basic elements on Christianity’s periodic table.

The word “creed” comes from the Latin and literally means, “to believe”. The word “creed” has come to us through the centuries as important tool in our history. As ancient Christians would adopt a creed at their baptism. That is, they adopted a concise statement of important points of belief that all Christians shared. You could think of a creed as an architectural drawing of the Christian faith. So, beliefs have always been important to the Christian faith. And what one believes is equally important in our day.

This Father’s Day, Americans continue to be quite religious despite the predictions of some that belief in God would die out as science and technology ascended. Yet, despite this prevalent religious inclination where approximately 95% of Americans believe in God, America is composed of Protestants who can’t name the four Gospels, Catholics who can’t name the seven sacraments, and Jews who can’t name the five books of Moses. Americans are ignorant of one another but we are also profoundly ignorant of rudiments of our faith. This growing religious illiteracy increases the chances of misunderstanding people of different faiths in the marketplace and for potential conflict.

And so we focus on a few of the essential beliefs of the Christian faith. So this series, Creed, is designed to answer those who wonder what really lies at the heart of Christianity. Creed is intended to identify the “bottom-line” of Christian’s central concerns for both believers and non-believer’s alike. My goal throughout this series is to take biblical ideas off the high shelf and put them to work in our everyday lives. If your idea of thinking of your beliefs is boring, if your idea of discussing your doctrine is something people fight over, then I want to convince you that your beliefs matter. And on this Father’s Day, I especially want to convince dads that beliefs matter.

Why Do Your Beliefs Matter? Let me quickly name four reasons why what you believe matters.

1. Beliefs Matter to God

2. Beliefs Matter to Your Church Family

3. Beliefs Matter to Your Family

4. Beliefs Matter to You

Beliefs Matter to Your Family

In light of Father’s Day, I want to simply focus on why Beliefs Matter to Your Family and each successive week we’ll see the relevance to the remaining three in the weeks to come. We all have a way of putting things together in our minds. We organize our perceptions into a pattern that makes sense to us. Your beliefs are organized and this is called theology. If someone says, “I’m no theologian, but…”but, everyone does theology. Only some do theology well and some are haphazard at it. For theology is thinking about God and making statements about God. You see, we don’t have a choice between believing and not believing. We will only have a choice between good beliefs and bad beliefs. We don’t have a choice between doing theology and not doing theology. We do have a choice between good theology and bad theology.