Andrew Meher: you I wanna invite you, would you open up a Bible if you have one or Google or a Bible app, ⁓ Matthew chapter six. We're gonna read two verses, verses 31 and 32 in just a moment. ⁓ If you're new here or you weren't here with us last week, welcome, I'm so glad you're with us. We just started last week a series called We Believe. We are looking at the core truths, the core beliefs, the core practices of what it means to be a Christian, what it means to follow Jesus, and we're looking at this through the lens of something called the Apostle's Creed. The Apostle's Creed is ⁓ something that has existed in one form or another basically since Jesus said, baptize people in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. ⁓ before he returned to the Father. And basically, since the beginning of the church, people have been baptized into this basic statement of faith. And so that version that we read together and recited and prayed together a few moments ago is kind of the version we're teaching through here. And we're using the Apostles' Creed to just help orient ourselves a little bit to what it means to follow Jesus and what Christianity means. Remember, Last week I used this example of, imagine you turned on a TV show or a channel and it's like halfway through, or you're like, you know, you'd put on like a movie on TV on the weekends and you like came in on the end of it or halfway through on like a Saturday and you're like, who's that character? Where'd they come from? Is that an important line that they just said? Where are they trying to get to? Where'd they come from? Does anyone feel like that when they start following Jesus and learning about Christianity? Who's that? What's that name? Is that person important? Does that matter? And so what the apostles does for us is it just kind of helps orient us to help get our bearings to the big things that matter the most for all Christians in all places for the last 2000 years following Jesus. So when I say what's the Apostles Creed? That's what I'm referring to. By the way, I didn't mention this last week. The reason it's called the Apostles Creed is not because the original apostles wrote it, but because there's actually like 12 stanzas and so there's like one for each of the apostles. It's cute. There's your Jeopardy trivia for you. One other thing I want to mention about why we're using the Apostles' Creed as a framework to think about following Jesus is ⁓ three things I said. The Creed orients us around three things. First, it is instructional. It just teaches us about what we believe as Christians. Second, it is formational. That we actually need to be shaped and formed to actually be able to see the reality of this God, as we're going to talk about today, heaven and earth. We had to be kind of shaped into it. We need language for it. And also it's declarational. We need to be reminded of this good news of what we believe. The person sitting next to you needs to be reminded of good news. You could just turn to them real quick and say, you need to be reminded of good news. I'm just saying. But the creed just gives you easy language. You know when you're just like, don't know what to say? Some of you just know what to say all the time, I know. But when I don't know what to say, For me, it becomes a way of shaping my declaration, the truth that I believe in a given moment that I am going to stand on. And so we say that this, the creed, helps us live in the story of what God has been doing, is doing, and will do. And the last thing on that I'll say is this. Remember, when I say story, I don't mean fictitious, I don't mean made up. I mean the things that we believe that shape the way we make decisions about our If some of you believe it's a good idea to get good grades, then you're gonna do well, try and do your best in school, right? Or to do good at your job so you can get a promotion. There's these things that are stories that we believe and that's what we mean here. We believe, as we're gonna talk about today, in God the Father, creator of heaven and earth. And so these are beliefs that we have. And so last week we kind of just did a lot more overview. You can go back and listen to that sermon if you just need to get oriented about the creed. and we answered several questions about that, but today we're going to dive into the content proper. So I want to read these two verses from Matthew chapter 6, and I'm going to pray for us, and then we'll jump in, alright? This is Jesus speaking in Matthew chapter 6 verses 31 and 32, and he said this, For the pagans run after all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them. Let's pray. Lord, as we come before your word and we explore what it means that you are father. The words of that song are just in my head. All my life you have been faithful. Lord, when we have not been faithful, you have still been faithful and you have been good. And we thank you God for your faithfulness and I just pray that you would teach us about your faithfulness today. In Jesus' name we pray, amen. I want you to imagine, if you will, you can close your eyes if this is helpful, that you live in the ancient world. Two to three thousand years ago, you can even go further back. ⁓ This is a very uncertain world that you live in. Life expectancies typically were very short. There wasn't a lot of guarantees that women would make it through childbirth. There were a lot of guarantees that you'd survive to the next harvest season. Your life is sort of dictated by crop cycles. When do we need to plant? When do we need to harvest? ⁓ man, the rain's really late this year. Are we gonna survive? You didn't run down to the bodega on the corner if you were hungry. Imagine that you knew that, you know, this rain isn't coming because you were taught and the way you saw the world was because there was a deity that was in charge of the rainfall. We make them mad this year? It's late. What do we do? Or we did everything we were supposed to and it still didn't work. What's going on? Maybe your village or the city you're in was under threat from a neighboring village or a neighboring city and they attacked you and they overran you and you would have understood in that time and place and culture that that meant that their gods and deities were stronger than your gods and deities and you've been defeated. And what you're gonna need to do or maybe your god was just kind of mad at you and decided to spite you and just like, I'm not gonna help you. I'm gonna let them run you over. In fact, you were brought into a world that understood that all of the unpredictability that you experienced in life, all of the uncertainty, all of the worry you had over your crops, actually was just a reflection of the fact that there were all of these gods and all of these deities that were always struggling and fighting with each other. If you read Greek mythology, if you know any of those stories, you get a sense of this. They're struggling with each other, fighting with each other in the ancient Near East where especially the Old Testament of the Christian Bible was written. ⁓ There are gods that are fighting against these chaos monsters basically. And there's all this struggle and there's constant unpredictable tension. There's violence, there's male gods and there's female gods. They're fighting each other, they're forcing each other into different things. putting each other in bad situations, and they actually believed, and you would have believed if you lived in this time, that all that you see in the world was actually created through a big fight and a big war between some of these gods. You would believe that everything you saw was created out of violence, out of struggle, out of brutality, out of destruction, out of chaos. And now even humans are here to do the bidding of gods because gods can't work. That's beneath them. So we're going to make these people out of dirt and other things and we're going to make them bring us food and do everything we need. This was the worldview if you were an ancient person. Most people in the ancient world did not have a lot of personal agency. They couldn't just go do whatever they wanted to do. They were going to hopefully work the land and have enough to eat. How many of you are really thankful you don't live in a world like that anymore? Sometimes those who were in power in the ancient world would mirror the work that they believed the gods were doing and they would just treat other people as discardable objects or exploit them for their own purposes just as they imagined the gods were always doing. So either priests or kings of various gods thought it was their right to do these kinds of things. And this is the world that ⁓ Christianity emerged from. This is the world that the Hebrew people, the people of God of Israel emerged from. And they began to tell a very different story about who God was. Now, we are in some ways indebted to that in our modern Western civilization and world. There's a lot of influences, even though maybe people are not Christian today, there's a lot of cultural influences we get from that in our world. But we still live in a world with a lot of chaos and unpredictability and some uncertainty. Is that fair to say? Especially it feels like these days. ⁓ We live around war and rumors of wars after experiencing a global pandemic, that's like kind of realistic to us. It doesn't seem far-fetched that something could suddenly shut a lot of things down. There are possibilities of stock crashes and bubbles. bursting and investments tanking and sometimes actually it's not that different the way some of us turn to our investment portfolio might not be that different than how an ancient person would turn to their fertility god to make sure enough rain was falling. They're actually very similar believe it or not some of similar behaviors and rituals that are involved with that. Now we would say that's not a religious thing to do but it kind of is. And so we kind of still, I would like to suggest, live in a world where we're constantly worried about will I have enough? Is God mad at me? Is God punishing me? If we believe in God at all, if there is no God, if we don't believe there's a God, then it's like, well, it doesn't really matter. Just kind of figure out it, be as happy as you can. Because it doesn't really matter. None of this has a point. It's chaotic and unpredictable. And this today is still the world that I think Christianity is emerging from and experiencing. And it's the world in which that we need to think about the primary character of the Apostles' Creed, God. Who is God? A.W. Tozer, was a Christian and Missionary Alliance pastor and a theologian, he said this in one of his books, what you think about God is the most important thing about What you think about God or what you don't think about God is the most important thing about you. If the God that you imagine exists is chaotic, unpredictable, cruel, has a low view of humanity, doesn't really care about you, thinks you were an accident or unintentional, ⁓ then you are going to live in the world as if that's what matters and is true. If this God's angry at you or doesn't really care about you, then I'm not really gonna pay much attention. I'm gonna just do what I want. If there is a God who is random or doesn't exist, you might just decide that my life is sort of random and doesn't exist, so I think I just need to make the best of it and just try and be as happy as I can. But if the God that you believe exists is the Christian God, then there is actually some very specific things that this might lead us into living out in the world. When we talk about God in the Bible or in Christian circles, we're talking about God in a very, very specific way. This is not just, you know, on money in the United States, it says, in God we trust. But it's sort of kind of a vague idea. Well, which God? Who are we talking about when we say God? Right? And there might be a general sense that this is the God of the Judeo-Christian tradition, but we might not be as explicit as we need to be. And so here's what I want to say to help you understand who we are talking about when we say God and that we believe in God. We are talking about the God who is revealed in the Christian scriptures, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the God who led Israel out of Egypt, the God who has acted in history through this people and has begun to reveal who God is through these people, the God who is revealed in and through Jesus as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. This is the God that we're speaking of when we are saying we believe in God. God is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Now, this might seem very like philosophical. Does this even matter for my life? Here's why I want you to understand why this matters. ⁓ If we have a very vague idea about who God is, then we will have a very vague idea about what it means to follow that. If we have a specific idea of who this God is, then we will have a specific idea about how to follow this God. Does that make sense? And remember that the Apostles Creed has three sections. One is about God the Father. The second is about Jesus Christ, his only son, our Lord. And the third about the Holy Spirit. And so this is also what Jesus said when we're baptized. And this is, the Apostles Creed served as baptismal instruction. This is what Jesus said, do baptize them in the name of the Father, the Son. Holy Spirit. So what we are talking about here when we talk about God is trying to understand specifically who this God is because that God leads us to a specific way of living our lives. You all with me? So we see in the Creed, the first article says we believe in God the Father, Creator, Almighty, excuse me, Almighty, Creator of heaven and earth. We believe in God the Father, Almighty, Creator of heaven and earth. This is a God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit who we first hear spoken of in this Creed as Father. God is Father. So what I wanna do is I just wanna talk about each of these three phrases, God the Father, Almighty and creator of heaven and earth and what this means for us in our world. And here's what I want you to understand and have, this is like a big picture takeaway before we get into these three things. Here's the really good news is when we look at what Jesus said here, what'll I eat and what'll I drink, what'll I wear? Do you hear the worry and the uncertainty in that, in Matthew's writing here, right? He says this is what the pagans chase after. He's saying this is what people who don't understand who their God is and who the God is do. They're worried, they're uncertain, but you know that you have a God who is Father. And that's what Jesus wants us to see. So here's the big picture of good news I want you to understand. That today, what I want you to walk away with is that we come from a loving and intentional God who seeks our good. And the whole universe exists because of this good God. That's what we believe. It is intentional. It is not accidental. That means you are intentional and you are not accidental. It is not chaotic. It is good. And that is the good news of God the Father, Almighty, being creator of heaven and earth. Let's look at this first phrase, God the Father. We're invited to call God Father. Jesus tells us so. There are just in Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, the four gospel accounts of the life and ministry of Jesus. In those four accounts alone, there are 141 direct references to God as Father. If we add in the story in Luke about the prodigal son, when all of those references are to sort of about God as father, there's another 13. But we'll set those aside for right now. In Matthew's gospel, God has talked about his father 44 times. Most of those are Jesus referring to God as father. The gospel of Mark, there's four more. In Luke, there's 16. Again, an additional 13 if we include the father character in the parable of the prodigal. And then in John's gospel, there are 77 references to God as Father. Do you think that the writers of the gospels are trying to get our attention about how we should think about God? Jesus reveals God not just as His Father, Jesus reveals God as our Father. Look at John chapter 20 verse 17. says in part, Jesus is saying to his disciples, I'm ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God. This is how we are invited to talk about God because Jesus, used this language. So why do we call God father? Well because Jesus called God father. The basic idea, pretty simple. Now here's what I wanna help us do. ⁓ Father, I wanna be clear about this, father does not mean God is male. That's really important. Father does not mean God is male. God, as we'll see in a minute, is the creator of all things, but God is not part of what has been created. Does that make sense to you? God is outside time and space and the universe and all those crazy quantum physics things that those scientists tell us about that no one understands really. God is outside of all of that. So we are able to understand things in terms of things like male, female, like persons like that. That kind of works for us because we're creatures. God is just beyond any created category. God is so beyond all of that. So when we say Father, I want to be clear that we're not talking about God as male. That's not the way we're using the word here. One of the ancient theologians of the church, Gregory of Nazianzus, says this about the language of the father and the son. He says, father and son should be used without having any bodily ideas in our minds. These are not about bodies. This is about relationship. So we call God Father not because we're making a claim about biology, we're making a claim about God's relationship to us. We're making a claim, and Jesus is the one who makes this claim, that God is a caring, loving Father. This is very much in stark contrast to all of those pagan deities that we talked about earlier, right? They're chaotic. They don't necessarily care about you and I, and they're just doing their own thing. And if your interests and their interests align, that's great. But that's not what Jesus says about who God is. God says, is your father. Now, we gotta just kinda name one of the problems and challenges that some of us might experience. Some of us may have had earthly fathers who were amazing. They were so great and they were so helpful. And we love them, maybe they're still alive and we spend time with them and it's just a blessing. Some of us had complicated relationships with our fathers. And so to use language of God as Father, we don't first go to this, wonderful, benevolent relationship of God. The first thing that comes to mind is, don't want God to be my father. And even if we had kind of, yeah, my dad was generally a good guy, but it was complicated. A lot of us can say it was complicated. And there's a lot of pain that we have in our lives because of how our earthly fathers related to us or didn't relate to us. And so one thing that I wanna just help you see in this is that God is not trying to be like your earthly father. He's trying to be the father that everyone deserves to have. If I could put it that God is the father, caregiver, relational entity par excellence, if I can use fancy language. Like there's no one that does caring for someone better than God does. There's no one that you can trust to be there when it really matters more than God. There's no one who can be depended on and who consistently seeks our good more than God. This is why I love what it says in the end of Romans chapter eight, the apostle Paul says, there's no height or depth, there's no length or breadth, there's no angels or demons or anything else that can separate us from That's who we're talking about here when we say Father. So I wanna invite you to maybe pay attention to how your own view or idea of what a father is like that is not helpful or is negative or where you have some complicated emotions or experiences with. And I want you to recognize that God wants to meet you as a good father. and encounter you in a way that perhaps you have never known a father do before. That's really good news. You have a heavenly father who wants to change the game about how you relate in the family of God. So God is our Father. We believe in God the Father, Almighty. Not only is God our Father, but this God the Father is Almighty. Now what comes to mind when you hear Almighty? Go ahead, shout it out. You can talk to me. Powerful, what else? Can do anything. Supreme. Regal! Always there. Best. ⁓ vast. thought best. was like, best is good. Yeah, they're best. When we use almighty... in this words, you know, one of the things that goes off for me is I think maybe someone said powerful or something like that, or maybe I had that in my head. But sometimes I get a little uncomfortable with that word. Anyone else feel uncomfortable with talk about being really powerful these days? Like it feels like, don't know. Because in our minds, I think a lot of us have this spectrum about how almighty or all powerful works. And generally, it's fine until they meet really severe resistance and then that all-powerful gets violent and coercive and it will show you that it's in charge whatever that power is. anyone feel that? So I want to name that because God works so differently with power than humans do. because we have been corrupted and broken and sinful and coercion is kind of like the only solution we think we can go to sometimes to control things. But God is almighty. Let me give you a couple of scriptures to help frame a way of thinking about God is almighty. First, Genesis 1, the first two verses in the whole Bible talk about in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. And it says this, the spirit of God hovered over the darkness. or over the void, or over the water, depending on how. This is before God has said, let there be light. There's just nothing. It's just emptiness. And it says the spirit hovered over that. There's actually a bit of an implication of some kind of a maternal thing happening here. I think about ⁓ my wife or something, there's a thunderstorm, and she just comes around our girls. Almighty. There's this power, but it also has to do with this creative source, the spirits hovering over and everything's about to get created. We see the breath of the Spirit of God go into humanity when humanity's created. There's a sense of creation happening by this power that nothing existed and then suddenly everything existed. That's But also we see the same hovering kind of almighty power when the spirit comes upon Mary and she conceives and Jesus is suddenly growing in her womb. not coercively, see the pagan deities, we know stories of Greek mythology and how human women became impregnated by Greek deities and it was often violent and it was coercive. It was certainly very powerful but suddenly in the Christian story we see the spirit just rest upon Mary as she says yes. And there's actually the language there is explicitly the grammar. If you want to get really nerdy, it's not male language at all. So it's very much God is just coming upon Mary. There's this almighty creative force that the spirit rested upon. the womb of the world, if you will, before the first creation. And then when God, Jesus, the firstborn of the new creation is about to come into the world, the Spirit is there again. But then I wanna take this even further. I love Jesus in Matthew 23. He's coming to Jerusalem before he's crucified, and he comes over this ridge, and he's looking at Jerusalem. Remember, Jesus is fully human, but is also fully God. And he says, ⁓ Jerusalem, Jerusalem. you who kill the prophets and stone those who sent you. How often I have longed, hear this language, I have longed to gather your children together as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings. But you were not. So we can say no thank you to God's almighty power. longs to gather us into his almighty arms. Coercive, violent power would say, over here, I'm in charge. But that's not how God's almighty, all creating power works. It is, ⁓ as the early church, believe it or not, the early church would have said it, they often compared God to a breastfeeding mother, nurturing the church and nurturing the world. Ben Myers who wrote a book on the Apostles Creed he he he says this about the Apostles Creed know it's just danced away from me. He says, we relate to God, not like loyal subjects submitting to a powerful ruler, but like infants drawing nourishment from a mother. God's creative, ever-present power is certainly awe-inspiring, but it is not random, like the pagan gods of the ancient world or the random gods of today's economy. God is all caring, all knowing, consistently in charge, and always moving us towards God's purposes. If we think about it, to me, the person that comes to mind is Miss Frizzle from the Magic School Bus. You know Miss Frizzle from the match? These kids are worried like they just went down a volcano. What are we gonna do? And Miss Frizzle's like, ⁓ isn't this wonderful class? We get a great experience to go. They're like, we're gonna die. And Miss Frizzle's like, doesn't have a caret- she's not nervous. She's not worried. I think this is a picture of God as almighty. Like, ⁓ yeah, huh. Yeah, that's happening. It's not like God's surprised when something goes wrong in the world. It's not like God is surprised when anyone rebels as surely he's grieved. He wants to gather us into his arms, right? But surely not surprised and like Miss Frizzle, God's not nervous. God's not surprised or worried or in a hurry. God is almighty and his almighty power so not nervous that God just continues to move all things towards God's purposes. Come on, come on, you'll get there. And we're here panicking and God's like, isn't it wonderful class? Because God is almighty, God's taking care of us. Jesus said the pagans chase after these things, but your Father in heaven knows what you need because he is almighty. We don't have to be struck with fear when we come before God, but instead wonder, awe, and reverence. And we believe that God, we believe in God the Father. Almighty, in the heavens and the earth. Read through, we don't have time to read it today, Psalm 104 sometime. It's this meditation on God creating everything, and it's so beautiful and amazing. And there's a worldview difference. They thought about how the universe was structured differently, but read it. They're so in awe of this almighty God who made heaven and earth and made all things. It's so incredible. Now here's the thing that is so fascinating is in the ancient world, especially the ancient Greek world that Christianity came into, ⁓ they believed that the physical world was bad and evil and the spiritual world in heaven was good. But if we notice through Genesis chapter one, God makes something and then says this is good. And God makes trees and says this is And God makes plants and animals and all of the fish and the birds. This is good. And then God makes humans and he looks at everything that's been made and says, this is very good. Now a God who thinks that the physical world isn't important or doesn't matter would say, you gotta deal with this until you can escape your bodies and be spiritual like me. Why does this matter? Sometimes us Christians can mistakenly think that our goal is to try and get to heaven. To escape all the drudgery of all of the things we gotta do and the schedules we have and the people we need to meet and I gotta wipe up a kid and like all this stuff. And God wants us to see that this world we live in is all of God's. it's good. And please don't try to escape it. As a matter of fact, as we'll talk about last week, or next week, God actually said, I'm gonna come in to that world. So, but here's the other thing I want you to understand about this, is that all of this stuff that God made is not random. You turn to the person next to you and say, you are not random. You are intent, tell them you are intentional. Now let me say that a human may not have had a lot of intention for you or purpose for you, but God did. This is what the prophet Jeremiah says, I knew you from the womb, right? I knew you. I have thoughts and plans for you, Jeremiah tells these people as they're having to leave their home and they're exiled into captivity and everything is chaotic and they don't know and everything's uncertain. He says, I've got plans for you, God says. I'm not done with you. How many of you came in here today and you're like, I think God's done with me. How many of you walked in and it's just been such a mundane, dull week and you just feel so unseen and like nothing you do counts for anything and you're wondering if it matters? Is there any point to this? You ever feel that? And God is saying, I have plans for you. Because I made you, I created absolutely everything, including you. It's not a mistake. I wanna just reflect on one more thing related to creation here that is so amazing to me. Just imagine God, Father, Son, Holy Spirit, right? Did you know God has a perfect loving community within God's self? The Father, the Son, the Holy Spirit, there's mutual ⁓ love and care and everything. One God. It's not three gods, it's one God fully united though. And there's perfect community in the Trinity is the theological term for that. God did not need anything else. God wasn't lonely out there in whatever is outside of time and space. God just was God. But God within the Father, Son and Spirit just loves so much that God goes, let's make some. And this is what you see all throughout Genesis, right? Let us make this, let us make this. And then God says, let us make people in our own image. Let's have a creature that sort of is able to relate to us on some level and is able to kind of represent us in this whole universe we've made. Guess who that is? No, that's you! I know the Sunday School answers always Jesus. But in this case, think about that and that led the psalmist in Psalm 8 to say, what is human that you're mindful of us? That kept coming, you guys know I'm a nerd about the Artemis II missions, it's so cool. And they're going around the moon at one point, and I just saw all these people posting these views of the earth from the backside of the moon going, and they were quoting Sameh, what is man that you're mindful of them? What are humans that you even consider us? This is the love that is God. This is the love and intention and purposefulness. When we say we believe in God, the Father Almighty, creator of heaven and earth, we are talking about beyond comprehension, the most generous and loving being anyone could possibly fathom, and then some. And says, let's make this created space. And let's. Enter in and let's have this community, this world, this creature, this set, this created order that we can just love. Does it change the way you go out on the lake later this summer? Does it change the way that you ⁓ mow your lawn? I don't know. Does it change the way that you interact with another human being you've never met before? Friends, the Christian story stands in stark contrast to a world that believes it's just all unpredictable, chaotic. We're struggling here where there's question over whether a person's life matters or not. What meaning is, identity is, all of these things based on maybe our performance or how good we can look to other people and appeal to some kind of idea about what we should be like. This is where the Christian story I think is so powerful and to say something like we believe in God the Father, Almighty, creator of heaven and earth, plants us in a story where we, as Jesus said, don't have to be worried about these things like the pagans do. We don't have to fear where our next meal will come from because God is generous and has made this generous world. Instead, we believe in this good news that God is our Father, that God is almighty, that God is loving. The God who seeks our good and the good of the whole universe. We believe in a God who is not created, but has made everything that is created and did so with great care and intentionality. This Father wants to nurture you in the life of God and is inviting you today into the triune love of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. So here is my question as we close today. Will you submit to this good news? Do you want to receive this good news? As Jesus said, do you want to get gathered in to his arms like a hen gathering its chicks? Will you receive this good news that we have a good father? Would you stand with me?