One Lord Jesus Christ

You are listening to a message from Thrive Community Church, a church located in Southwest Florida. For more info, visit us at thrive-fl.org. When I grew up, sometimes it felt like faith was an intellectual exercise. And as long as you knew certain facts and memorized maybe a Bible verse or two, everything, you're good to go. Anybody ever feel that way? Sometimes that faith was just kind of a thing that you went through and you did it, you knew it. Okay, maybe it was just my church and the way I understood it as a child. But believing is about trusting, relying. Yes, there's knowledge involved, of course, but it goes well beyond that to a relationship. And that's what we're talking about today. And I know, you might go like, why are we using the Nicene Creed? It's 1,700 years old, yes, older than any of you here, 325 AD. This is the 1,700th anniversary, and you go like, wow, there's so many other relevant things you could be talking about today. We've got a lot of issues in our society. We've got a lot of issues in this world. Shouldn't you be doing something more relevant? I don't think there's anything more relevant than understanding who your God is and who your God is and what He is like. I don't care what's trending on TikTok, okay? That's not necessarily the way I'm going. We're going to find, I mean, it might be cool, I don't even use TikTok, but maybe I should, huh? No? Do you look at it at all? No, you don't, okay, not going to point to, but anyways. But I think we tend to just follow whatever fickle trend is happening, and we can just be moved around. It's kind of like a shiny new object in front of you, and then all of a sudden, we're paying attention to that, and then the next, and then the next, and then the next, and then the next, and then the next, and by then, it's the weekend already, and then we're just doing it again and again and again, and it keeps you going, but it doesn't, it can get you off center, it can actually, you lose a sense of your foundation, and what we're dealing with today in something like the creed is the foundation of our faith. When God's people stood together over the last 1700 years, and use these words, or even from the beginning after Jesus' resurrection, when they spoke just the simple, Jesus is Lord, they were saying two things at the same time. One is that no one else is Lord, and you might think that that's obvious, but in that day and age, Caesar was Lord for so many people. But no one else is Lord, no one else is defining reality for us. That's what we say when we speak the creed, and secondly, we are saying we believe the story and the truth and the reality of a God who created this world, and then loves this world enough to redeem this world through his own Son, and then fill us with his Spirit, and we are part of that story. We are, by the way, storytelling people. Later on in the potluck, I hope you all stay, we got a lot of good food, we're going to try to share a little of our story with each other, across the generations. We're going to ask a question like, what was the first concert you ever went to? I can't even recall, I'll have to think about that one. But what was the first time you used, whatever, drove a car? There's a story, and guess what happens when you hear that story from someone else? You start to know them. That's the way we actually get to know people. You don't know me because I'm 5'11", and weigh, I won't tell you how much, and I've got gray hair, and I have this degree and that degree. That doesn't tell you much about me. And the same is true, actually, about God. If all you knew is God is great, he's big, he's there, how much do you really know about God? We know him because he decides to relate to us from beginning to end, from Genesis through Revelation, and we know him because he has decided to get involved in the history of this world. In fact, he is the history of this world. And that's what we're confessing today. We're going to be looking at the most important part of the Creed, which starts out on the section on Jesus Christ. It says, we believe in one Lord Jesus Christ, the only Son of God, eternally begotten of the Father, God from God, light from light, true God from true God, begotten, not made, being of one substance with the Father, through whom all things were made. And you go like, wow, that's a lot. Yeah. In 325 AD, when this was being put together, they were trying to confess the entire Gospel words about who Jesus is, what he was about, and why. And you might go like, why do they have to get so technical about it? Because there are a lot of people who are questioning exactly what happened in Jesus Christ, who he was, and what he was doing. And so they had to get technical because it is important. Everything rises or falls on Jesus. There is no Christianity if there is no Christ. I don't care how I am, he's the important thing. All other religions center on a method, or a process, or a set of principles or rules....