What Do We Believe by True Faith?

● What Do We Believe by True Faith? Everything taught to us in the gospel. The Apostles’ Creed expresses what we believe in these words: We believe in God the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth; and in Jesus Christ his only Son our Lord, who was conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died, and was buried.
He descended into hell. The third day he rose again from the dead. He ascended into heaven, and is seated at the right hand of God the Father Almighty; from there he will come to judge the living and the dead. We believe in the Holy Spirit, the holy catholic church, the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body, and the life everlasting.

Recommended Resources

New City Catechism Commentary: “The only thing I can contribute to my salvation is my own sinful nature. It’s about coming to God with an awareness of our humble need—coming in faith, repenting of my sins, and laying out before God my sense that I need him. That’s the beginning of salvation.”
There is No Faith So Little That it Is Not Saving (The Gospel Coalition): “There is no faith so little that it can’t be saving. Faith does not have to be strong to be saving, it just has to be real. The smallest faith, if it is real, receives the same strength of Christ in salvation as the strongest faith.”
What Saving Faith Sees in Christ (DesiringGod): “Saving faith glorifies Christ by looking away from self to Christ alone — to his all-sufficiency, including his blood and righteousness, without which we could have no right standing with God. To which I say, with all my heart, Amen! Let us be willing to die for this. As many have.”

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:16

Sweet. Thank you all, worship team. Appreciate y'all serving us in this way. Once again, you probably noticed I'm not Austin. Lucky for you, this is a lesson Austin wrote. So, y'all bear with me. We'll make our way through this. First, just some general general background like we go over every week to set the stage here. This Messenger in Redeemer Youth, we have been going over Christ, redemption, grace, and the gospel. Essentially just all the nuts and bolts of the Christian faith and how Jesus saves us. And the way we've been walking through this is through the New City Catechism. The New City Catechism or Catechisms in general is just a series of questions, specific questions with specific answers that are meant to communicate truth. And also, all these lessons on Wednesday nights have been recorded. They are going up on the Redeemer Youth's podcast. So if you miss a week, you just want to review and go back, you have that available to you. And once again, we have our text line open. So throughout the lesson, if anything sparks in your brain, you have a question that you want to ask, go ahead and text that in. And we'll follow up with QA at the end. So, like we've done every week, the first thing we're going to do is we're going to start with the end. We're going to start with the destination that we're trying to get to tonight. So the catechism this week asks, What do we believe by true faith? The answer: everything taught to us in the gospel. The Apostles' Creed expresses what we believe in these words. We believe in God the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth, and in Jesus Christ, his only Son, our Lord, who was conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died, and was buried. He descended into hell. The third day he rose again from the dead, he ascended into heaven, and is seated at the right hand of God the Father Almighty. From there he will come to judge the living and the dead. We believe in the Holy Spirit, the Holy Catholic Church, the communion of the saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body, and the life everlasting. So that is our destination for the night. So let's start walking through how we got there. Before we start with the first question that arises, I do want to clarify one thing in that answer that where it says we believe in the Holy Spirit, the Holy Catholic Church, and the communion of the saints, uh, y'all may notice we are not in a Catholic church. The word Catholic here is not big C proper Catholic Church. This is little C. It is a term that's used to describe the universal church, the church as whole, the total body of all believers across the globe. So just to clarify that. So getting into the lesson, the first objection, the first question that arises when we look at what is true faith is who gets to say what true faith really is? And how do we know that Christians today aren't just making up rules and saying that's what we believe? Well, let's look into it. Uh, y'all go ahead and turn to our anchor text for this section in 2 Timothy chapter 3, verses 13 through 14. Someone shout out the page number whenever y'all find it. You got 2 Timothy chapter 3, verses 13 and 14.

unknown 3:54

936.

SPEAKER_00 3:56

936. Thank you. Okay, y'all hang out there. We're gonna get to it in just a moment. So, in in response to this question of what true faith really is, and how do we know that people aren't just making stuff up about what it ought to be? Uh we're first gonna look into Jude verse 3. Jude verse 3 says, Beloved, although I was very eager to write to you about our common salvation, I found it necessary to write, appealing to you to contend for the faith that was once for all delivered to the saints. So, from this text we see that the basis of true faith was set during the time of the apostles, during the original foundation of the church that we now participate in. It was something that could be known, that could be taught, and that could be tested. Now, in our anchor text in 2 Timothy chapter 3, it says, Follow the pattern of sound words that you have heard from me in the faith and love that are in Christ Jesus, by the Holy Spirit who dwells within us, guard the deposit entrusted to you. Now, in this verse, you will notice that phrase that says the pattern of sound words. This this quote, the pattern of sound words, is a figure of speech. Alright, it's meant to describe the fundamentals. And the fundamentals are the basis for the what the verse describes as the good deposit entrusted to you. If what we describe as true faith wasn't really a thing by this point, Paul in this writing would be deceiving Timothy and also us about which things are truly important for our faith. Understanding the basics, the fundamentals, aren't just something that we now appeal to our own wisdom, our own interpretation. These are things that come from the ancient church in the writings and authority of Scripture. But there's also more objections, more questions that come up whenever we dig into what true faith is. And so at the beginning we went through the Apostles' Creed. So one question that may come up is why do we need things like the Apostles' Creed or any other creed for that matter? Isn't the Bible enough? How do we know it's not just a human tradition instead of what God actually wants us to believe? Let's dig in. Our anchor text for this section is gonna be Philippians chapter 2, verses 5 through 11. Somebody shout that page number out when you find it. You got Philippians chapter 2, verses 5 through 11. Ooh, 929. You got it. I got you. You got credit. Okay, so while y'all are finding that, again, the question that we're looking at is why do we need things like the Apostles' Creed or other creeds? Isn't the Bible just enough? And how do we know that we're not following just human tradition instead of what God actually wants us to believe? First text we're gonna dig into here is Deuteronomy chapter six, verse four. I'll actually read through verse five as well. This says, Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might. Now, this is probably a section of scripture that y'all are familiar with if you've grown up in Redeemer. Uh, this is one of the most important statements in the entire Bible. This uh this couple of verses here is something that's very well known and recognized and called the Shema. It functions as a very small creed, a very small, explicit statement of belief. And it the purpose of creeds like this that are very short is they're made to be easy and really able to be recited so that anyone can remember it. You just have to hear it a couple times and then you can remember it. And so, once again, that is hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your might. So now we also look here at 1 Corinthians chapter 15, verses 3 through 5, which says, For I deliver to you as first importance what I also received, that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised from the dead on the third day in accordance with the scriptures, so that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve. So what's taught in this verse or these verses uh is almost universally believed to actually be the first creed of the New Testament church. It's especially fascinating uh in the fact that Paul explicitly says that he's passing along what he describes as what I also received. Meaning he's not the one who came up with this. These words that Paul is writing to the Corinthian church are is doctrine that was given to him to then pass along. Now for our anchor text in Philippians chapter two, verses five through eleven, y'all read along. It says, Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men, and being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of God the Father. Again, here we are given another example of a creed in the New Testament. This one uh actually was believed to be a hymn meant for singing in church. These um hymns, these ancient hymns, are songs that that were meant to teach doctrines about the faith. In the same way that the songs that we sing should teach us about our faith. Our worship team does a phenomenal job of this at Redeemer. That whenever you pay attention to the worship that we sing on Sundays, these aren't songs that are just haphazardly chosen or just are meant to evoke a certain emotion or make make you feel a certain type of way, but they are rich with doctrine and theology and truths about God that are meant to point our hearts towards God as we receive his word, just like we did tonight. So, next uh for this question, we look at 2 Thessalonians chapter 2, verse 15, which says, So then, brothers, stand firm and hold to the traditions that you were taught by us, either by our spoken word or by our letter. So this verse references the traditions that were taught uh by the author of this letter. And so, what this leads us to understand is that tradition is not automatically a bad thing. Sometimes, whenever we we think of tradition, we tend to think of, well, these were things that mattered in a former time that were according to an older form of culture, and things don't really work like that anymore. But that is not universally true about traditions. Many traditions are good, and many of the traditions that we hold in the church are for our good and for God's glory. Paul commended the Thessalonians here to keep the traditions that were that were taught by him. All Christians have a category for you know what they think of tradition, whether they realize it or not. And this isn't a problem if the tradition does not usurp or undermine the authority of the Bible. Again, traditions are good in the right context, and whenever they are used for appropriate purposes. So, so as sorry, I keep running into this. But uh, as far as the tradition is meant to bolster your faith, to point you towards Christ, and it never attempts to overtake or undermine the authority of Scripture, it is there for your good and your edification. Now, the last main section we're gonna look at for an objection, um further questions regarding what true faith is, asks why does real faith have to believe really confusing things, like God being three and one or Jesus descending into hell? Can't I just believe in God and Jesus without all these complicated parts? This is a very common objection, and that's why we're about to dig into it. Our anchor text for this section is gonna be from Matthew chapter 28, verses 19 through 20. And once again, whoever finds it first, y'all shout it out. Matthew chapter 28, verses 19 through 20.

unknown 13:25

784.

SPEAKER_00 13:25

784. You are on top of it. I like it. All right. Before we get there, we're gonna check out a couple of other verses real quick. The first one is Matthew, sorry, not Matthew, Deuteronomy 29, chapter verse 29. Oh, there we go. This verse says, The secret things belong to the Lord our God, but the things that are revealed belong to us and to our children forever, that we may do all the words of his law. So, what this verse is is communicating to us is that simply there are some things about God that we cannot ever know. But everything that God has told us in his word, in scripture, is meant for us to know so that we can believe and obey him. Guys, we serve an unfathomable God who is good and loving and cares for us. And a God who is infinite and eternal is beyond our comprehension because we are not like that. And as this verse testifies, that the secret things belong to the Lord, but he has given us sufficient word about himself in the Bible, in Scripture, inspired by his Holy Spirit, so that we have all that we need to know him. Next, uh, we're gonna look at John chapter 16, verses 12 through 13. And this these verses say, I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now. When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth, for he will not speak on his own authority, but whatever he hears, he will speak, and he will declare to you the things that are to come. So here in this section of Scripture, Jesus promises that the Holy Spirit will help guide us into understanding of truth. Some things will make sense to us, and some things we believe to be true, even if it blows our minds. In both cases, it is the Spirit who guides us in understanding what we believe. Now, y'all read along in our anchor texts, uh and then we'll bring it home. So, Matthew 28, chapter 19 through 20, if y'all are still there, says, 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, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you, and behold, I am with you always, even to the end of the age. In this passage of Scripture, we're seeing some of the last words that Jesus spoke to his disciples before he ascended after the resurrection. And here we're given a command, and Jesus is commanding us to observe all the things that he has already commanded us. And some of some of these commands are things to do, they are actions. Go out, do this thing. But some of his commands are simply to believe what he said to be true. And both of these things we have to understand are impossible to faithfully accomplish by our own effort. We can't just grit our teeth and white knuckle our way into holiness, into obedience. And this is why Jesus, through the Spirit, promises to be with us always until the end of the age. So, to bring us home, uh, let's look back at our destination. The question, what do we believe by true faith? Answer everything taught to us in the gospel. The Apostles' Creed expresses what we believe in these words. We believe in God, the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth, and in Jesus Christ, his only Son, our Lord, who was conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died, and was buried. He descended into hell. The third day he rose again from the dead, he ascended into heaven, and is seated at the right hand of God the Father Almighty. From there he will come to judge the living and the dead. We believe in the Holy Spirit, the Holy Catholic Church, the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body, and the life everlasting.