Outlined Transcript:
Hey everyone,
I wanted to pick up where I left off before, talking about discipleship, and give you a quick snapshot of something I did with my students recently.
The Grammar of the Gospel
There is a class I have been teaching throughout this semester, and if you remember, I previously talked through Romans 5 and the grammar of the Gospel. I mentioned the importance of paying attention to verbs and prepositions. One thing about English translations is that they are very diverse, but they are also very good and very accurate. For example, in Romans 5, I mentioned the preposition “to,” “for,” or “toward”: “God demonstrates His love for us” or “toward us.”
Some of the languages among my students do not have the same kind of grammar that we have in English. They do not have the same complexity or sophistication in their grammar. Sometimes they do not even have certain kinds of prepositions at all, so there are many things that can be lost. This is why, if a non-native English speaker wants to learn Greek or Hebrew, they often have to learn English first. They have to learn English grammatical categories in order to then learn Greek or Hebrew categories.
In God’s providence and wise sovereignty, He has used English as one of the great languages of the world to transmit and transfer biblical meaning in complex, sophisticated, and yet simple ways. So I have to slow down in my classes. Usually, my students are not native English speakers, and they do not always speak the same language either. Some speak Chinese, Korean, Thai, Khmer, Indonesian, Hindi, Burmese, and a variety of tribal languages. The grammar of the Gospel really is good news, and they know English well enough to think through these kinds of terms.
Memorizing the Apostles’ Creed
One thing I do in my classes is have my students memorize a psalm or a creed, typically the Apostles’ Creed, a couple of Psalms, and maybe something else short. I want to model for them the value of Bible memory and defending the faith by setting their minds on the written Word of God and on certain theological formulations.
Last week, my class had their oral exam. They all memorized the Apostles’ Creed. It was open Bible and open note, but they needed to memorize the Creed. Even if they did not do it perfectly, they were graded based on completion, not perfection. If they stumbled over a word, I helped them along. I simply wanted them to practice saying what the confessing church through the ages has said.
Something significant about the Apostles’ Creed is that it is really short, really simple, and one of the oldest standardized creeds. It collects the theology of the Trinity. It is based in three parts: I believe in the Father, I believe in the Son, and I believe in the Holy Spirit. It is broken up according to the three persons of the Trinity and the way the Bible unfolds their identities and works.
Then you have the Nicene Creed. The Nicene Creed does not simply collect the nature and identities of the three persons of the Trinity. It connects them. It shows how they are connected. Jesus is the only begotten Son of God, and the Nicene Creed fleshes that out. The Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son, and it fleshes that out as well.
So the Apostles’ Creed collects the doctrine of the Trinity. The Nicene Creed connects the doctrine of the Trinity. And the Athanasian Creed corrects errors, or possible errors, about the three persons of the Trinity. Basically, these creeds ground our faith in one God in three persons.
There are other creeds, of course, such as the Chalcedonian Creed, but I try not to get too granular with all the different creeds. I mainly focus on the Apostles’ Creed. I want to slow down and show my students the significance of the wording in the Creed. Then I help them find verses that attach to certain words or phrases so that they can disciple others and teach the basics of the faith.
A Simple Tool for Discipleship
In the early church, the Apostles’ Creed was often used as a discipleship tool before confessing believers were baptized into membership in the church. A person would memorize the Creed and defend it line by line with a disciple-maker, tutor, or what we might think of as the equivalent of a Sunday school teacher today.
When they could satisfactorily define certain parts of the Apostles’ Creed line by line and connect them to Scripture, that was their confession of faith. That was their testimony. Their testimony was not mainly how they met Jesus, how their life changed after conversion, or when they prayed a prayer. That is more of a recent development. A true testimony was more like giving a legal case of what you know to be true before a court or a jury. They were trained to know what they believed and why they believed it.
That is similar to the three things I use in my apologetics classes: source, authority, and definition. Where did you get that information? How do you know it is true? What do you mean? Define your terms.
So I will briefly walk through the first part of the Apostles’ Creed and explain how I quizzed my students. They were prepared for this. I had already told them how I was going to do it, but I wanted to give them a teaching example of how to do this with others.
Maybe they work in language groups that do not yet have a written Bible or a complete written Bible. Maybe the people they are discipling are not readers or do not yet have literacy development. Before you can even translate a Bible, you have to teach people to read. But if they do not even have an alphabet or a written language, that becomes very complicated. Sometimes a short outline like the Apostles’ Creed, teaching people to memorize it and defend it by memory, is a helpful step in discipling people in oral cultures.
So here is the very beginning:
I believe in God, the Father Almighty, creator of heaven and earth.
Then it goes on:
I believe in Jesus Christ, His only begotten Son, our Lord, conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died, and buried. He descended into hell.
And so on. I will not finish the rest of it here.
What Does It Mean to Believe?
After one student recited it, I asked one or two clarifying questions. I said, “I am putting on the hat of a young convert in your discipleship group. I am not wearing my professor hat. So answer my question as though I am just a curious young convert.”
Then I asked, “What is belief? What does it mean to believe in God or believe in Jesus?”
This is one of the greatest issues of the Protestant Reformation. What separates us from Roman Catholic works of righteousness, Roman Catholic mysticism, and all other varieties of unbiblical mysticism and hyper-authoritarian movements throughout church history is the word “faith,” or “faith alone.”
Faith is alone in that it receives all the benefits and blessings of Christ’s work for us, on our behalf, as our substitute. It receives the great exchange of our sin for His righteousness, accomplished on the cross and received through faith alone.
“I Believe” Is Personal
Faith has three identities.
First, it is important to point out that in the Latin, English, German, French, Spanish, and other languages the Apostles’ Creed has been translated into, it is always in the singular. It does not say, “We believe in God the Father.” It does not say, “We believe in Jesus Christ, the only begotten Son.” It says, “I believe.”
That is significant. A lot of times we talk about older cultures or Eastern cultures as being very communal, with everything in the “we” and everything in the plural. But not this creed. Why? Because we are justified as individuals by faith alone before Jesus Christ.
We are not born again and admitted into the family of Christ merely by association with others. We must receive the good news of the Gospel through faith alone and be born again as individuals, because we stand justified or condemned before God as individuals.
We are not saved through a collective. We are not saved through family association. We are not saved simply because we were baptized as infants into a certain church or covenant community. We must individually put our faith in Jesus Christ and receive the gift of regeneration from the Holy Spirit Himself. So the Creed is singular on purpose.
Knowledge, Assent, and Trust
What is belief? I will close with these three things: knowledge, assent, and trust.
First, faith includes knowledge. You have to know truth. You have to know the history of the Gospel. It is not a fable. It is not make-believe. It is not legend. It is verifiable history. So you have to know something.
Second, faith includes assent. You have to agree that these are not just facts, but that they are true. It is not merely that Jesus died historically. It is that what He accomplished on the cross has theological meaning and eternal consequence. It is not simply that a carpenter’s son from Nazareth died outside Jerusalem in a shameful death 2,000 years ago. It is that He is who He claimed to be, and He accomplished what He claimed to accomplish on the cross and in the resurrection.
But third, faith includes trust. Not only do I know that it is true, and not only do I agree that it is true and that it has theological consequence, but I receive it. I trust in it. It is good news for me.
The Good News for Those Who Believe
Maybe in a future video I will flesh this out even more. It is news that Jesus of Nazareth died. Even godless, agnostic, or atheistic professors in Ivy League schools know that, historically speaking. It is good news that what happened historically on the cross, in the resurrection, and in the empty tomb of Joseph of Arimathea has eternal theological consequence.
But even the demons believe that. It is not true for them in the sense that they are saved by it. They do not receive it. They know that Jesus is the Son of God, the Most High, but they do not trust in Him.
So it is good news theologically. But for those who are being saved, those who have received the seed of the Gospel through the preached Word of Christ, and who through hearing have faith, it is not just news, though it is. It is not just good news, though it is. It is the good news.
For those of us who receive it as the good news, it is not just history. It is not just theology. It is Gospel. It is redemption. It is deliverance.
Resting in Christ
This is what faith is. It is by faith alone that we receive all the blessings of Christ. We receive all that He accomplished for us in His active obedience in life, obeying the law of God, and in His passive obedience on the cross, soaking up the wrath of God and the penalty of the law.
Then in His resurrection, we see the verification and justification of sinners who, through faith, receive all the benefits and blessings of reconciliation with God, adoption by God, and all the rights and privileges of being adopted sons of God.
Faith is when we trust in that. It is when we rest in that. The old Reformers used to call it a hearty rest. It is a glad-hearted contentment, being at rest and at peace in God. That is faith: knowledge, assent, and trust.
We individually must lay hold of this Gospel. Or, to be more accurate, this Gospel must lay hold of us individually. We are not saved through associations, through a collective, or through a community. We are saved and justified as individuals before God.
And each of us individually confesses:
I believe in God, the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth.
I believe in Jesus Christ, His only begotten Son, our Lord, who was conceived of the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, dead, and buried, and was raised on the third day.
We confess these things as individuals, and that is important. This is what it means to become a disciple of Christ: to become a student of Christ who knows what he believes and why he believes it.
God bless you. Have a great week.
Thanks.