Several months back my church worked through a Wednesday night study of the Apostles’ Creed. Those sermons can be found online at Spotify, Podbean, iTunes, or wherever you listen to podcasts. In this series, we divided the Apostles’ Creed into 14 sections. Each week we gave attention to a line or two from the Creed, and each week we started with one reason creeds and confessions of faith are important. We started each week in this way because most Baptists grow up with the idea that we need no creed but the Bible, that we don’t care about church history – only what the Bible says. This is a simplistic, naive, and foolish way of thinking. So, each week we discussed one reason creeds and confessions are not only helpful, but essential for the life of God’s people. Here’s the list.

All Christians have a creed. Some people do you the dignity of writing down their creed so that it can be studied and compared to the Bible. Others hold their creeds informally and secretly, so that you’re always wondering how they line up to the Bible … “Christians are not divided between those who have creeds and confessions and those who do not; rather, they are divided between those who have public creeds and confessions that are written down and exist as public documents, subject to public scrutiny, evaluation, and critique, and those who have private creeds and confessions that are often improvised, unwritten, and thus not open to public scrutiny, not susceptible to evaluation, and, crucially, not therefore subject to testing by Scripture to see whether they are true.” (Carl Trueman, Crisis of Confidence)Christians are believing people. The word “creed” comes from the Latin “credo,” which simply means “I believe.” A creed is simply a statement that summarizes what a person believes about the Bible, Christ, salvation, or some other point of theology … “Each stanza of the Apostles’ Creed begins with the Latin word, credo, ‘I believe.” … Christians are a believing people, and they place their belief in the objective truth claims of the Scriptures.” (Albert Mohler, The Apostles’ Creed)Christians are called to give a reason for our hope in Christ. The work of apologetics is defending what we believe, and the work of evangelism is proclaiming what we believe. Unless you’re going to only quote Scripture in apologetics and evangelism, you’re going to need a creed – a summary statement of what it is that you believe. It is better to have a thought out, well-written creed than to simply “fly by the seat of your pants” in the work of apologetics and evangelism … “The true Christian should be, indeed must be, a theologian. He must know at least something of the wealth of truth revealed in the Holy Scriptures. And he must know it with sufficient clarity to state it and defend his statement. And what can be stated and defended is a creed.” (AW Tozer, The Apostles’ Creed)Christians need guardrails and guidance. When you take a trip, you need a map or a GPS to guide you. Creeds and confessions offer this kind of guidance for the people of God. In addition to guidance, they also offer guardrails, protecting us from theological error and imbalance … “If you are going to travel cross-country on foot, you need a map … If life is a journey, then the million-word-long Holy Bible is the large-scale map with everything in it, and the hundred-word Apostles’ Creed … is the simplified road map, ignoring much but enabling you to see at a glance the main points of Christian belief.” (JI Packer, Affirming the Apostles’ Creed) … “The Apostles’ Creed functions as a guardrail for our teaching and instruction. Indeed, the creeds protect teachers from stumbling into error by providing a rule to follow and boundaries for healthy theological discussion and development.” (Albert Mohler, The Apostles’ Creed)Christians must seek unity in the truth. Many mindlessly repeat the mantra, “No creed but the Bible!” They do so not realizing that this statement in-and-of-itself is a creed, as it is not a direct quotation from the Bible itself. It’s also a pitifully short creed that doesn’t clarify what we believe about important issues. The only way for Christians to find unity is to first agree that the Bible is the inspired, inerrant Word of God, and second to agree about what the Bible says … “The slogan “No creed but the Bible” conceals the fact that in almost any group, crucial biblical statements will be properly understood by some and misunderstood by others. In such cases, it is naïve to say that the Bible unites us. It may not be uniting us at all. It may be a vague cloak for significant disunity. And that doesn’t honor the Scriptures.” (John Piper, Desiring God)Christians must beware of false teachers. Believe it or not, false teachers don’t show up in the church (or online) with a badge that says “Hello! I’m a false teacher.” Rather, they sneak in from the outside and they rise up from within the church. The vast majority of these false teachers don’t show up asking people to ditch the Bible. Instead, they show up with proof-verses for their ideas from the Bible. Therefore, the church needs creeds and confessions to help guard the sheep from the wolves … “The church, however, has understood since its founding that heresy and false teaching exist and that these are horrible dangers to the people of God … Heresy, the denial of a doctrine central to Christianity, departs from the truth and thus has eternal consequences. The church needs the creeds not only to teach the truth but to guard against error.” (Albert Mohler, The Apostles’ Creed)Christians do not believe in solus motus (emotions alone). Today, one’s feelings and emotions are often taken as undeniable and unassailable. We are a people ruled by our inner selves and our personal sense of reality. The objective nature of a written creed is a stark contrast to the “expressive individualism” of our post-modern culture … “In a world increasingly inclined to radical subjectivism, creeds and confessions represent a clear assertion of objective reality … Emotions do play a part in what it means to be a moral person. If I see someone being physically attacked on the street and feel no outrage, then it would be fair to say that there is something morally problematic about me. Yet feelings cannot be the sold guide to morality.” (Carl Trueman, Crisis of Confidence)Christians must disciple new believers. At Pentecost, the majority who were saved and added to the church were Jews steeped in the Old Testament Scriptures. As Gentiles started flooding into the church, the early church found it necessary to develop tools for teaching and discipleship. New converts had to be “brought up to speed” on biblical and theological truth. The Apostles’ Creed was one such tool, and it was often associated with one’s baptism and public profession of faith … “One of the most important functions of the Apostles’ Creed, like all faithful creeds, is that it helps the church to teach and prepare new believers for faithfulness and maturity in the faith of the church. New believers in the early church were often asked to affirm the lines of the Apostles’ Creed, one by one affirming their belief and confession of the true Christian faith.” (Albert Mohler, The Apostles’ Creed) … “The Creed itself was born as an instrument of evangelism – first, as a summary syllabus for catechetical teaching of the faith to non-Jewish inquirers, and then as a declaration of personal faith for converts to use at the time of their baptism.” (JI Packer, Affirming the Apostles Creed)Christians must value Scripture first and tradition second. The Reformation idea of sola scriptura doesn’t mean that we reject all tradition or extra-biblical writing. It does mean, however, that we elevate Scripture to the highest place of authority, allowing the inspired, inerrant Word of God to rule over all of our doctrinal formulations. Thus, Scripture is our highest and final authority, but beneath Scripture we must maintain the faith once for all delivered to the saints through the use of creeds and confessions … “Most evangelicals, for example, will typically use Bible translations … And we can take this reflection a step further. All Protestant pastors, even the most fundamentalist, will, if they are remotely competent, prepare their sermons with the helps of lexicons, commentaries, and books of theology. As soon as they take down one of these books from their bookcases and start to read it, of course, they are drawing positively on church tradition.” (Carl Trueman, Crisis of Confidence)Christians are worshiping people. Jesus calls people to worship in spirit and truth – he wants his followers to worship from their hearts and with their minds. The minute we begin to think about the message of the Bible in words other than the actual words of Scripture, we are engaging in the theological work of creeds and confessions. This includes our prayers and songs, most of which are not verbatim quotations from the Bible even if they are drawn from the Bible … “The Apostles’ Creed delineates the most glorious and splendid truths of the Christian faith. It naturally ushers our souls into heartfelt worship and praise of God. The creeds, therefore, guide the church in worship and contain the most previous truths through which we can worship God and rightly praise his name.” (Albert Mohler, The Apostles’ Creed)Christians are people who believe in Jesus. This point may sound ridiculously obvious – Christians believe in Jesus Christ. That sounds simple enough, that is until one asks the obvious next question, “Which Jesus?” The Mormon Jesus? The Jehovah’s Witness Jesus? The Liberal Jesus? The Nazi Jesus? The atheist Jesus? Intellectual honesty demands that we recognize the fact that these various Jesuses are not the same even as they all claim to be “biblical.” Thus, we need a creed to clarify which Jesus we believe in … “The Holy Spirit does not call us to faith in general, but to faith in particular – to faith in the person and work of Jesus Christ.” (RC Sproul, What We Believe)Christians are connected to the past. Many modern people have no sense of history, no sense of the past and those who came before us. Evangelical Protestants tend to be especially guilty of ignorance when it comes to the story of church history. Sometimes reformed evangelicals talk as if church history started with Martin Luther and John Calvin. This is tragic, as there is a wealth of wisdom to be found in the pre-Reformation church. Creeds and confessions like the Apostles’ Creed, the Nicene Creed, the Chalcedonian Definition, and the Athanasian Creed help connect us to the rich history of the church … “This is why creeds and confessions are even more important now than before: they anchor us in history; they offer us reasonably comprehensive frameworks for thinking about the connections between God, anthropology, and ethics; and above all they point us to the transcendent God who rules over all things.” (Carl Trueman, Crisis of Confidence)Christians ought to think biblically. It’s certainly a good, biblical practice for believers to memorize the Word of God. However, thinking biblically involves more than simply being able to recite Bible verses and addresses. Christians are called to have minds transformed by the Word of God so that they are not conformed to the pattern of this world. Creeds and confessions can help us turn biblical truth into biblical thinking … “These documents do not seek to replace Scripture. Instead, they accurately seek to summarize its content into succinct statements in order to equip Christians with brief yet crucial distillations of the faith.” (Albert Mohler, The Apostles’ Creed) … “There are some who boast that they have no creed, but this is equivalent to saying that they have no faith, for our creed is simply the sum total of our beliefs about life.” (AW Tozer, The Apostles’ Creed)Christians ought to be integrated people. Increasingly, the western world opts for a cafeteria style approach to truth, one in which each person is free to pick-and-choose what they want to believe or not believe. Everyone is now entitled to a bespoke, personal, customized worldview. In this situation, most people don’t ever stop to wrestle with the inconsistencies inherent in their individual worldview. Creeds and confessions can help Christians to think in terms that correspond to the Bible and that cohere as a unified system of thought. Furthermore, creeds and confessions help take what we believe as Christians and transfer those beliefs into worship and action … “Christianity involves a creed, a code, and a cult. The creed sets out the beliefs of the church … The code presents the moral vision for life here on earth … And the cult is the way in which Christians are to worship the God described in the creed and whose character is reflected in the code.” (Carl Trueman, Crisis of Confidence)