All posts in category Blog

Deacons – Sermon Manuscript

-Sleeping bags have changed since I grew up! When my family went camping, or weren’t sleeping in our beds, we had this giant fabric sleeping bags that were always very neatly rolled back up and tied off so they’d be ready to go for the next camping trip. Today’s sleeping bags aren’t taken care of the same way. Today’s sleeping bags are all made of a synthetic material that makes you slide around everywhere, and they all come in this mummy style which is great for 1 person to stay warm, but not as enjoyable for a married couple.

-These new sleeping bags are meant to be packed a little differently (and much less carefully. You get 1 end in, and then just keep shoving until the sleeping bags all stuffed in!

-This sermon series is a little bit like packing these new sleeping bags. I’m trying to pack in so much information and history into 1 sermon, which means there’s only so far we can go with each part I’m talking about. So if you have questions about anything that’s brought up, please text this number on the screen.

-Today, we’re looking at the church office of Deacon, which was officially added to our bylaws as a church this past June. But that doesn’t mean we’ve answered all the questions about this office, or that we have specifics around what this office is and looks like for us as a church. And today’s sermon is my attempt to answer why it’s difficult to have specifics about this office. I’m also working on a position paper for our church to define why we have the offices we do, as well as what those offices focus on for our church family.

READ/PRAY (971, 1052)

I preached on both church offices in January ’25, so if you were here then, this will be some repetition, but that’s ok! I got a question about this particular office, and I’d forgotten what I preached about, which means it’s worth a repeat (at least for me!)

  1. Church Politics

-Most people I know either roll their eyes or gear up for a fight when I say something like “church politics,” but it doesn’t need to be that way! All we’re talking about when I say this is the way the church governs itself, because there needs to be some way to keep order and accountability across an organization. 

-What makes the church unique is 2 things: it inverts the typical power structures, and we rely on an ancient text called “the Bible” to serve as our guide. All church political structures appeal to the Bible to support their position. As for the inversion of the power structures, instead of viewing movement as “upward” in an organization, I think we need to view it as a move “downward,” because the call of Jesus is to grow in the service of others.

-I’ve shared this story before, but my first pastoral ministry was in Cheyenne, WY (which is in the part of the state that looks like Nebraska). Cheyenne is home to FE Warren AFB, and I learned quickly that military leadership is different than leadership modeled after Jesus. I was told from one military leader (who was also an elder) that Jesus’s leadership command to serve others was for a different time period, but not today. I disagreed then; I disagree now!

-There are 3 primary ways of organizing the church today:

-Episcopalian (Episcopal and RCC) argue more for a natural outgrowth from the Bible instead of explicit biblical texts. Make a big deal out of the “bishop” title and make it distinct from elder (I, and many other scholars, would argue they’re synonymous) 

-Presbyterian: church elects elders (called a session), those elders are part of a “Presbytery” (state, city) (taken from GRK), some of the elders from the Presbytery are a part of the General Assembly (nation)

-Congregational: congregation itself is the highest governing body of the church, from the doctrine of the priesthood of ALL believers (1 Pet. 2:9), corresponds to the way the early church functions (things are presented to the whole church), but among congregational there is a WIDE variety of thoughts and opinions, here’s the list of examples from Grudem’s Systematic Theology.

-I like to describe myself as an aspiring ecclesiologist, that is someone who studies the doctrine of the church. I love the church, I’m committed to the church, and I want to see the church flourish around us. So as I’ve studied and read over the years, I’ve landed on some language that I like to describe the way our church functions. If you’ve been coming for a while, you should have heard this before, but it is: Christ ruled, Elder led, Deacon served, Congregationally governed. I’m sure I stole all those pieces from somewhere, but I’ve lost track of where I found it! 

-I tried to make it look like Grudem’s chart here:

-First and foremost: Christ ruled. This cuts against much of the American ideal because we don’t like Kings! But for Christians it’s a different story, we serve under the reigning and ruling King Jesus. Friends, the church is a theocracy, not a democracy. That means our job isn’t to vote people in and out of office, or to try to find a constituency who represents us, our job is to submit to His will. 

-Story of person who voted no to everything because nothing should be unanimous. 

-If we’re working to submit all our decisions to the will of God, and we’re all keeping in step with the Spirit, there should be unanimous votes on a regular basis! And notice the arrows connecting God to each position below: since we’re a theocracy, God is the one who appoints, the church looks to affirm and follow where God has called.

-Congregationally Governed: this means the highest form of authority in the church is the congregation, but again, this is not a democracy. The congregation is charged with affirming leaders in the church, looking for ways to honor each other, working to keep the unity of the Spirit in our midst, but it’s not the congregation’s job to make every decision in the church. I like the way I’ve heard my dad summarize what this means in the EFCA: everyone gets their say, but not everyone gets their way. There will be times where you may not affirm the direction of the church, that doesn’t mean it’s time to find a new church, it might mean the Lord has you here to learn something new, or to demonstrate how you can willing submit to where it seems God is leading, or maybe that your thoughts were wrong on a topic! That’s happened to me before, where I thought something was a great idea, but I was missing some key information that made it not work out very well. That gets us to what I know is viewed as a 4-letter word today: submission. The Bible does command us to submit to the leaders of the church. Because of the baggage attached to that, let’s chat about it:

-I think Heb. 13 needs to be read in this conversation, the 2 verses that have 7s in them (makes it easy to remember!). Vs. 7 says part of the role of church leaders is to speak God’s Word to you, that comes up repeatedly in the qualifications lists for elders in the church. But it also tells us there’s supposed to be emulation, copying those leaders. So when we’re looking to vote on affirming elders, 1 of the questions you should be asking is: do I want to be like that person? Now, obviously they won’t be perfect, there’s only 1 Savior, but does spending time with them help you become more like Jesus, or as I like saying it, does time with them help you take 1 step closer to Jesus or not?

-Vs. 17 gets more explicit and uses that 4 letter word: submit. But friends, that’s not a negative thing! In God’s kingdom, the people you’re submitting to should have your best interests at heart, will love you deeply, and will work their hardest to faithfully point you to Jesus. But the author goes on, and this is where this text kind of scares me: they keep watch over your souls as those who will give an account. When I stand before Jesus, I will give an account for my leadership of this church family. Now, there’s different levels of account based on the closeness of the relationship (this is one of the many reasons I believe you should pursue membership in a local church, you can go back and listen to other sermons on that). But then for those who are submitting, it says to let them lead with joy. The question for you is do the leaders of the church look forward to your emails, notes, or conversations, or do they dread them because you’re making it difficult? That doesn’t mean you’re not allowed to share your thought or opinions, but HOW do you voice those things with leadership? As I’ve shared before, you can be right but be a jerk about being right! 

-Elder led: God raises up qualified men to serve in this office. That means we are complementarian in our convictions (look up the EFCA affirmations and denials if you want to see more about that). This group is intentionally on the bottom because in God’s kingdom those who are called to leadership roles are called to be servants, putting others interests above their own. The world views authority solely through the lens of exploitation and selfishness, but that’s not the way God’s kingdom works.

-Finally, what we’ll be looking more at today: Deacon served: God also gifts certain people in His body to help in various service-oriented roles to help the congregation operate well. I like the way pastor Matt Smethurst has summarized the distinction between elders and deacons:

-I don’t see these offices as optional in the church of Jesus Christ – if God has given us instructions for how best to operate and function as His bride, we should follow them! 

  • Who Are Deacons?

-Once again, we start with the name. Deacon is used all over the NT, but most of the time it’s translated as “servant,” and once Latin became the common language, it got translated into “minister” (do you see why I think everyone’s confused about terms today!) Here’s a couple verses that you may recognize where the word is used:

-So in one sense, every one of us is called to “deacon” each other, we’re all supposed to look for opportunities to serve each other. But there’s a difference between a general gift and being called to a church office, and this is also true of the elder/shepherd role. I know some women who are MUCH more gifted than I am pastorally (as shepherds), but that doesn’t mean they should be serving in the OFFICE of pastor/elder. Same here, just because all of us are called to serve each other doesn’t mean everyone is called to serve in the OFFICE of deacon, offices are recognized by the church to help serve in some specific way, we need to make a distinction between gifting and office.

-Let’s start with the primary Bible text, and there’s a lot less clarity around this office than the office of elder. One pastor argues that the primary use of the word “deacon” means they are assistants to the elders, based on the way this whole range of Greek words was used, and that’s an option! But here’s what Paul says in 1 Tim. 3, and it takes some work to get at Paul’s underlying argument (I think)

-First, he says Deacons LIKEWISE, which subordinates this section to a previous word he used, the word “must be” in vs. 2. So that verb is assumed here, deacons likewise MUST BE, that verb is carried over in our English translations to help us see it, but it’s not in the Greek, the Greek just says “Deacons, likewise, worthy of respect.” Now do you notice anything special about this list of qualifications for Deacons? First, it’s very similar to the expectations for Elders in the previous section, but they’re primarily character traits. The big difference is that Deacons don’t need to be able to teach. This tells us there’s a different purpose to this office than Elders, so we shouldn’t view the Deacons as future Elders, or view Deacons as the stepping stone to other leadership roles. Churches need both offices distinguished from each other to obey God’s Word!

-The other thing we need to talk about from this section is can women serve as Deacons? And I would argue yes, based on this text, another Bible passage, and church history, and you’re going to need to put on your thinking caps to trace this flow of thought, ok? Here’s what I think is the outline for what Paul is saying here, and in order to get this we need to trace Paul’s use of the word “likewise,” I also color coded this outline, and the text to try to help you understand Paul’s flow of thought. 1 other note: the word for “deaconess” didn’t exist yet. It didn’t come into use until much later, so Paul didn’t have a way of distinguishing male from female deacons. 

-Paul begins with the qualifications for this office of Deacon, then moves to some brief notes for women deacons, then goes back to men deacons, and finally wraps up this section with the reward for serving as a deacon. So in the text we begin with notes for everyone, vs. 11 begins a section on women, 12focuses on men, and 13 is back to all of them. Why do I think that? 

-First, the word Paul uses here that our translation puts “wives” in for is a more general use word that is often translated as “women.” If he’d meant the deacon’s wives he could have used a word that is more common to refer to wives instead of the general word for women.

-Second, I don’t think it makes sense for the qualifications to include wording for wives here if the section on elders doesn’t have anything about wives. It would make more sense to include something about elder’s wives instead of deacon’s wives.

-Third (and this is what clinched this position for me), this is carrying on a bigger argument Paul has made previously. In 1 Tim. 2, Paul similar compares the 2 genders in the church, he says men are to pray, and then he uses the exact same Grk word, translated here as “also,” to call out the women. 

-1 other reason I believe this office is open to women is found in Rom. 16. Our translation says “servant,” but it’s using the same word that we’ve been studying: Deacon. 

-Now, there are 2 other passages that I think help us flesh out how these 2 offices function together. First is Phil. 1:1, which tells us that churches quickly began adopting these 2 offices. The second is Titus 1:5, which tells us the necessity of Elders, but not Deacons. That means a church can function with only 1 of these offices, but as a church grows, in order to remain healthy, they should call Deacons.

-Some church history for us to be aware of:

-Church history: Didache (GRK Teaching) (“The Lord’s Teaching Through the Twelve Apostles to the Nations” late 1st century), limits it to men, but either that was a mistake or a typo, because just 2 decades later we have this account:

-And continuing further through church history.

  • What Should Deacons Do?

-Most people believe that the prototype for what eventually became the office of Deacon is found in Acts 6: 

-First, we see the focus of “the Twelve” and this isn’t meant to denigrate the serving of tables, remember the way the kingdom of God inverts the normal power structures of the world. What’s interesting is the names chosen of all these men are Hellenistic, not Hebraic, so in order to ensure the unity of the body, they chose men who were from that group of people. 

-Second, it’s not fair to limit this to only table ministry, because as we continue reading in Acts, Stephen becomes the first martyr who preaches the best sermon that summarizes the OT message I’ve ever read, and Philip performs miraculous signs in Samaria.

-Finally, look at the outcome of this work: the unity of the church is preserved, the word of God continues to go out, and the church continues growing.

-So I take this picture to mean that the deacons are responsible for various sorts of ministries that build up and unify the church. I like the way Gregg Allison summarizes this point:

-I think the lack of specificity around deacons is intentional in the Bible to allow for a wide level of flexibility for churches to determine which deacons they need for their church to remain unified. This means we can have deacons of music, facilities, kid’s ministry, youth ministry, men’s ministry, women’s ministry, kitchen, welcome team, safety team, IT. 

-One other note is that deacons don’t need to serve in perpetuity. That means there could be deacons called to serve for a set period of time, then be done. One recent example is during COVID. I wish we’d been able to put together a deacon of COVID response to help the elders read and understand all the reports that were coming out to help us know the best ways to meet together. That would have had an end date of when things got back to “normal.” Another example is we could create a deacon team to help with building remodeling that would help us collect bids, be involved in the planning process and communicating updates with the church, then when the remodeling is done, we no longer need those deacons to serve.

-We also could have deacons who are appointed and then build a team around them to accomplish the task they’ve been given! There are all sorts of different options for this office, none of which are prohibited in the Bible, which is why we need to spend some time talking about this.

-And I want to share my current thoughts on a way to talk about these 2 offices because churches should have them both, but what do we call them?

-Churches have people who serve in these roles both as paid and unpaid, so in order to help us clarify which office we’re referring to, I’m working on a position paper that lays out these titles.

-Where this gets confusing today, is people often use the word “Minister” to refer to pastors, but tracing the history of that word it’s actually used to refer to the Deacon office. So my proposal is that we have deacons who serve unpaid (similar to having elders who serve unpaid) and ministers who serve in a paid role (like we have pastors who serve in a paid role).

-I’m not sure if this is the best proposal in the world, but it’s what I’ve got now! It both brings clarity to the positions and also helps us to elevate the role that we call people to when they serve on staff at the church. I think it’s more than just a director role, there’s too much ministry expectations for to just use “director”.

-And as many of you know, I care greatly about the words we use! That’s why I don’t have an office, I have a study, that’s why this room isn’t called a sanctuary, it’s called an auditorium, it’s why we don’t have a worship team, we have a music team – if any of that sounds weird to you, text this number on the screen!

-I believe that God has designed the church to have 2 separate and distinct offices: Elders and Deacons. Elders serve by leading, overseeing, shepherding and teaching. Deacons lead by serving in a wide assortment of practical and ministerial ways under the authority and oversight of the Elders.

-I’m also excited for us to officially recognize both of these offices and would invite you to pray with the Elders as we work to solidify both our church’s needs and ask the Lord to bring the right people to our church to help fill these needs so that what we read in Acts 6:7 could be true at South Suburban:

Leave a comment
by mikethestrand on August 30, 2026  •  Permalink
Posted in Bible, Blog, Church, History, Sermon, Theology
Tagged , , , , , ,

Posted by mikethestrand on August 30, 2026

https://pastormikesmusings.com/2026/08/30/deacons-sermon-manuscript/

What it Means to Be Free – Sermon Manuscript

-We’re going to spend the next 4 weeks looking at some questions I’ve gotten over this calendar year, this week as you saw in that video, we’re looking at the denomination we’re a part of the EFCA. I’m also going to be trying something new with this series, so if you have questions during the sermon or as your processing throughout the week, text 651-252-4486 and I’ll answer those either in Sermon Scraps or in next week’s sermon. 

-So you know where we’ll be going: next week we’ll be looking at the order of the ordinances, then we’ll talk about the office of Deacon which was just added to our bylaws, and finally we’ll talk about how to disagree. But today, what it means to be free because there’s a lot of misunderstanding about the EFCA and what we’re about. And I think a lot of the questions parallel our current societies questions. 

-One of the primary issues in our world today is around your identity. Who are you, who do you want to be or become? I grew up in the era where you were told you could be whatever you wanted to be! So I decided (like most people my age) that I was going to play in the NBA. You may not be able to tell this from where you’re sitting, but I’m white. I’m also a solid 6 foot nothing. Which means my prospects for playing in the NBA were slim to none. But people wouldn’t tell kids that back then! Instead, I had to come to that realization myself through a lot of trial & error.

-There should have been signs though. Some of you have met my parents, they’re both the same height: 5’9” (probably shorter now as they’ve gotten older). Honestly, I’m just glad my first number got to 6 instead of staying in the 5’ range, thankfully my mom’s side has some height!

-Time has a way of tempering our expectations as we start to come to grips with the reality of ourselves and the world. Youth has a naivety about it that as you get older looks simultaneously cute and stupid! The message that you can be or do whatever you want is just not true! We’re all wired differently, we all have different strengths and weaknesses, we’re all products of a wide assortment of things, including the genetic makeup of your heritage, and the reality is we can’t escape those things – we are products of our histories. This somewhat runs contrary to so much of what we’re taught today. Our culture trains us to throw off all the shackles of tradition and chase our own desires. That’s basically the primary point of every Disney movie: “betcha on land they understand, bet they don’t reprimand their daughters sick of swimming.” Or “see the line where sky meets the sea, it calls me, no one know how far it goes.” Or even more explicit: “No rights, no wrongs, no rules for me, I’m FREE!” And there we are, back at freedom. And depending on what you mean by that, it may be true! But there’s a passage in the Bible that talks about being free that I want us to read together to get a sense of what the EFCA is about.

-There are 3 points to today’s sermon, and we’re going to spend most of our time on point 2 because I think it needs the most work! First is what is “free”? Second, what is an evangelical (wait before jumping to conclusions on that word), and finally the reality of the EFCA is an unofficial motto: we’re better together.

READ/PRAY (pg. 1034)

  1. What is “Free”?

-We’re going to start with the biblical and theological point, and then we’re going to get to what the Free in EFCA stands for historically. We just read this text, but there are 3 things I want you to see in from this text that will help us understand this point. As Americans, this is one of the core things to the founding of our country! You can buy “freedom” t-shirts at Wal-Mart every summer! But is that the same thing as Christian freedom that Paul is talking about here?

-We need to understand 2 aspects to freedom: freedom from something vs. freedom to something. Our culture pushes freedom from everything! That’s Disney again, throw off all the shackles so we can be free and true to ourselves. But that’s a different form of slavery. Slavery to our individual wants and desires that change from moment to moment.

-There’s a great picture of this in the show Bluey (if you don’t have young kids right now, you’re missing out on some QUALITY TV, much better than the Barney I had growing up). It’s about a family of Australian blue-heeler dogs who go about their normal lives. In 1 episode, the family is going on a walk, and one of the kids is complaining about being “too tired” to walk, but then they start playing a game and the kid is running in circles as the walk continues. But as soon as the game is done, she’s suddenly “too tired” again. The best thing about this show is how much it parallels real life! We adults are the same way: our motivations and desires change from moment to moment, we are often slaves to our desires.

-But Jesus offers us freedom to live a flourishing life. However, that means there are boundaries to our freedom. If we’re following after Him, we’re not “free” to pursue sin, those things are antithetical to each other. Our tendency as Americans is to focus on vs. 1 and miss vs. 13-15, let me show you what I mean:

-We read vs. 1 and because of the climate that we live in, we jump to we are free from the yoke of slavery. But that misses the bigger context of Paul’s argument here. The freedom isn’t to go do whatever we want, the freedom is to go serve one another! But what’s the temptation? It’s to bite and devour, to fight and push for your own freedoms at the expense of others. Paul is telling us our freedom is a freedom to go serve others, giving higher priority to others because that’s what Christ did for us.

-The second piece I want you to take away from this is that the cross is offensive. Now I want to be careful, because that doesn’t mean you should be a jerk in your witnessing to others. The cross does and should offend people, but we shouldn’t be offensive to people, there is a difference! The last verse here is one of the funniest verses in the Bible – Paul is talking about circumcision, and the word he uses here means to completely cut off, so he’s saying why stop with circumcision? You should go all the way!

-The final piece from this is vs. 6. This is the reminder that we are saved by grace alone through faith alone in Christ alone, but that faith that saves us isn’t alone, it comes with strings attached. You can see the focus of our lives as Christians begins with faith, but then it has flesh on it: expressing itself outwardly through love.

-This is what we’re freed to do: to love others just like Jesus loved us. We aren’t saved by our good works, but we are saved (and freed) to do good works to others. Eph. 2 says it like this:

-So the idea of freedom is an idea that’s rooted in Scripture. We’re freed to live as God intended, not giving in to sin. There’s a song from Cityalight that says it this way: “Yes, He rose that we would be free indeed! Free from every plan of darkness, free to live and free to love” Apart from that freedom that has been won in Christ, we can’t truly live or love.

-But historically, the free in EFCA has meant that we are “free” from state-imposed rule. We are congregational in our polity. Let me explain all those words:

-In many European countries there is an official state church that oversees and manages the churches. That means taxes also go to support the pastor and church facilities. The EFCA intentionally didn’t want any higher oversight, so for us the highest governing body is the congregation. Our members are involved in most major decisions of our church (and that’s true of all EFCA churches), that’s what being congregational is.

-Polity is the same word for politics. How does a church govern itself? In the EFCA, the congregation is the highest governing body, where each church determines our leaders (elders/pastors), our annual budget, is involved in membership, taking on any debt, facility purchases, those kinds of major decisions. Here’s the way the EFCA states it:

-Autonomous doesn’t mean independent. We don’t get to make all our decisions on our own. By associating with the EFCA we are agreeing that we will support what the EFCA is doing (hence interdependent). We’re not DEpendent on the denomination, nor are we completely INdependent where we do whatever we want, as we’ll see at the end, we’re better together than apart, which is where INTERdependent is a helpful descriptor for us. 

  • What is an Evangelical?

-Now for the first word! And part of the reason we’re going to spend the bulk of our time on this word is because of the misunderstanding of this word in our culture today. For many people the word “Evangelical” has become a political marker and not a religious marker. Each election cycle we’re told what percentage of “evangelicals” voted for a candidate, but first I don’t think that’s accurate, and second what I’ve read about those polls is people self-identify out of a list of options, which means we have Buddhist evangelicals, Mormon evangelicals, and even Muslim evangelicals! When we use that word, we’re not talking about anything in American politics, we’re going back to a Greek word pronounced euongelion (which I put on the screen, because you can see how we can transliterate that into evangel, the base of evangelical) and all that word means is “good news.” 

-The early Reformers even described themselves as “evangelicals” so Luther described his movement as the (in German) evangelische kirche in English, evangelical church. So that term has more history to it than modern day American politics.

-And where this intersects with the EFCA is that the history of the day parallels the evangelical movement, so in order for us to understand our denomination, we need to understand what we mean when we say we’re “Evangelical,” and part of the difficulty is there’s no one to tell the world what it means! There’s general agreed upon ideas, but it includes Christians from a wide assortment of beliefs! 

-One of the most cited definitions of an Evangelical comes from a historian named David Bebbington who says Evangelicals are known by these 4 things (therefore this is often referred to as “Bebbington’s quadrilateral”)

-Another one is from the NAE (which the EFCA has been involved in since its founding), and they define it this way: 

-Finally, Thomas Kidd, a historian on evangelical religious history wrote a book titled ‘Who is an Evangelical?’ who defines it this way:

-I hope you can see some of the similarities! Evangelicals are Bible people, who emphasize the need for spiritual birth and then work to live and apply that belief to their lives, which is a good summary of the EFCA! Since it’s origination, the EFCA has been focused on the Bible, has sought to be faithful in evangelizing others about Jesus, and has looked for ways to care for the poor and marginalized. For example, in 1996, the EFCA passed a resolution titled, “A Stranger at Our Gates: A Christian Perspective  on Immigration.” This statement was explicitly stated to apply to all immigrants, whether legally documented, or not. I’m not saying that to make a political statement, we need some nuance on this conversation, if you want to talk more about that, email me and let’s grab coffee, but also keep in mind, this statement was written in 1996, 30 years ago! Friends, the more things change, the more things stay the same.

-With all that background to evangelicals, I want to share a brief history of the EFCA with you, which largely parallels the broader evangelical movement, and begins as a movement of immigrants from Sweden and Norway in the latter half of the 1800s. One of the descriptions I’ve heard from people trying to define the EFCA is we’re “like Baptists, but we’re not Baptists” and that’s not actually true. Our founding had a different focus and emphasis than the Baptists did, which you can see on this chart: the 3 primary streams of denominations that came out of the Reformation, and the EFCA is based out of the Lutheran stream, Baptists come out of the Anglican stream. 

-As for the history of the EFCA, we’re going to look at it tracing the mottos of the EFCA, which are:

-We’ll start with the first, and most important one: where stands it written.

-This gets to the primary focus of the Bible for us. The EFCA came out a pietistic movement in Scandinavia that was brought over to the US by immigrants from those countries (primarily Swedish and Norwegian). By piety, I don’t mean something negative, they took it from the Latin word pietaswhich means devotion. They were Lutherans who wanted to take their faith seriously and saw themselves in the lineage of the original Lutheran, Martin Luther. This pietistic impulse led to something known as the “Readers movement” where Christians would gather in homes to read the Bible and apply it to their lives (kind of like we do Life Groups today!) 

-The Bible has always been the focus of the EFCA, and that even impacted the founders of our movement. 2 names that comes up repeatedly when talking about the EFCA are Ellen Modin and Frederik Franson. Frederik was a Swedish traveling evangelist who wanted people to know about Jesus. He spent time in Chicago learning from and emulating DL Moody, and was referred to as “Moody’s Swedish disciple.” 

-Around the same time, Ellen Modin became the EFCA’s first supported missionary who was sent to the Mormons in Utah.

-As they started wanting to send more missionaries and continue expanding their reach and influence, they started realizing they couldn’t just operate by themselves, so they had their first conference in Boone, IA in 1884, which continued emphasizing the Bible, and from that conference this motto originated!

-The Swedes and the Norwegians both continued along parallel paths throughout the beginning of the 20th century, but a controversy was brewing that set the trajectory for the EFCA in the future. Today it’s referred to as the fundamentalist/modernist controversy. The question was centered on the work of God and the Bible being reliable. The “modernists” were influenced by the enlightenment and argued that miracles can’t happen, the “fundamentalists” argued for the “fundamentals” of the faith (wasn’t negative). The EFCA, being Bible people, landed on the side of the fundamentals, which eventually went 2 directions, the first was to become modern-day fundamentalist (arguing over every theological issue), and what are today called “Evangelicals.” 

-This leads us to the 2 motto: All believers, but believers only.

-This statement came out of the evangelical vs. fundamentalist divide and is an implication of theological triage: (EXPLAIN)

-The EFCA intentionally looks to focus on the essential tenants of the historic Christian faith without compromise, but to hold those convictions as graciously and charitably as possible. It’s possible speak the truth but be a jerk about it, this is the EFCA’s way of saying we’re not going to be a fighting fundamentalist. This is the way it’s historically been said in the EFCA: 

-Along with this movement, the 2 Free Churches (Norwegian & Swedish) starting having conversations about merging together, and another father of the EFCA, A.T. Olson, chaired a merger committee, which was finalized in 1950, dropping the European names and becoming the Free Church of America. One of the people involved in this process stated: “We’ll never stop being Norwegian, or Swedes, but tomorrow we will all be American.” Here’s Olson presenting a book celebrating the 75th anniversary (back to 1884) to President Eisenhower in 1959

-What started as a Scandinavian movement eventually realized we needed to reach beyond ourselves to truly represent the communities we lived in. This was FAR more than debating whether we should continue speaking Norwegian in our worship services (which was an early debate!) and it brought attention to the EFCA needing to reflect all peoples across the world, because all peoples in the world need the gospel. This has 2 implications, the first the missions of the EFCA, which includes 550 missionaries in 40 countries across the world, but closer to home it means looking beyond our Scandinavian heritage and reaching out to people from other tribes and tongues and nations who comprise what is today America! One of the big celebrations of the book is that our current acting president is an African American (being voted to officially become the president in June). Carlton Harris did his first internship out of seminary at First EFC in Wichita, KS in 1981, but several families left the church because he was African-American. Friends, that’s a part of our history, too. It’s not always the right things, and we need to be ok with acknowledging our past and working to grow more like Jesus over time.

-The last motto gets at the focus on discipleship (becoming more like Jesus), and I think this is where the history of the EFCA gets fun (in my mind) because our church has some strong connections to the EFCA! As I was reading the book, I came across this picture from 1984, 6 years after our church was planted, featuring our very own Ed Bender, who was receiving training on intentional discipleship. 

-A couple chapters later, I came across my dad, who still works in that role today, this also mentions Bill Hamel who was a member here at South Sub! And THEN, as it was discussing the rewrite of our SOF leading up to the 2008 vote, look who also got a shoutout! We hosted a conference here in 2006, the year after this room was built! And if you didn’t know, the headquarters for the EFCA are right off 494 & Cedar (so make sure you wave whenever you drive by)!

  • We’re Better Together

-As I mentioned at the beginning, there’s also a 4th motto that came up in the book, but I hadn’t heard other places, and that is the third point of the sermon: we’re better together. What started as a wide assortment of individuals coalesced into churches, which banded together to create a denomination that remains tethered to God’s Word, compassionate about reaching the lost, looking to love others in what we say and in how we live, and is committed to making disciples among all peoples. Last year, acting president Carlton Harris shared 4 words that he believes summarizes the EFCA from the past and into the future, and if you go the EFCA website you’ll see them on the front page: biblical and missional, united and free.

-The Bible is our highest source of authority, but we don’t exist to learn more Bible, the Bible compels us to look beyond ourselves and live missionally throughout the rest of our lives (loaded word that I don’t have time to explain now, text me if you want me to explain more about that)

-Similarly, we’re united together around our SOF, but we are free to love and serve the community that God has placed us in, but we don’t use that freedom to pursue selfishness, instead use it serve each other in love.

-Since I arrived 6 years ago, I’ve been working to more closely align us with the EFCA. In 2021 we hosted the same conference we had hosted in 2006, that same year we also hosted a national worship leader gathering. The EFCA has its’ problems and issues that need to be dealt with, but that’s true of any and every church and denomination until Jesus returns! I’m grateful for the EFCA, and am excited about what God continues to do in our little corner of the Evangelical world, and I hope this excites you to be a part of this denomination as well!

Leave a comment
by mikethestrand on August 16, 2026  •  Permalink
Posted in Bible, Blog, Church, History, Sermon
Tagged , ,

Posted by mikethestrand on August 16, 2026

https://pastormikesmusings.com/2026/08/16/what-it-means-to-be-free-sermon-manuscript/

Sermon Manuscript – Psalm 50

-There’s a movie that came out in 1992 that has become one of the top movies in history. It’s a story about a military investigation into the death of a Marine, and it featured a wide assortment of stars like Tom Cruise, Jack Nicholson, and Kevin Bacon. A quote from the movie has gone down in infamy and has been rated the 29th most impactful movie quote of all time (according to the American Film Institute). I’m sure many of you have heard the quote, if not seen the movie. The pivotal scene of the movie, and the iconic quote, is when Jack Nicholson’s character is on the stand being grilled by Tom Cruise. And it builds up getting more and more intense until Jack Nicholson exclaims: “you want the answers?!” Tom Cruise responds with: “I want the truth!” And then the line: “You can’t handle the truth!” And he continues his verbal tirade from there! 

-There is something exciting about courtroom scenes, getting a glimpse behind the curtain to the legal system. There’s book series devoted to it, movies devoted to it, TV shows that show real life courtrooms. We’re hardwired to want justice, it’s one of the ways God has created us. But what would happen if God were the one who was serving as the judge? Who would serve as the jury? How would humanity defend themselves, and what would God be indicting people for? Today’s Psalm shows us that exact situation. God delivers the opening statements, He lays out His case, and then He enacts a judgment. 

READ/PRAY (pg. 498)

-I found this quote from Derek Kidner’s commentary helpful in understanding exactly what’s going on in this Psalm, as well as a reminder that this text was also written to us! Even though this is addressed to God’s covenant people in the OT, the message applies to us today. We need these words just as much as the first hearers did, and there’s even some similar reminders for us in the NT, as we’ll see when we work our way through this chapter.

  1. Opening Comments (1-6)

-The first thing we need to look at is: Who is Asaph? This is the first Psalm we’ve come across that begins with his name, but he comes up later (mostly in the 70s). We learn more about him in other places in the OT. One example from 1 Chron. 16, tells us that Asaph was the chief musician who played the cymbals (just a reminder that drums are one of the most holy of all instruments!) 

-Whomever was final compiler of this book thought that this Psalm fit contextually here, which makes sense with what we’ve been learning all summer. 

-A brief summary of our study this summer, because all these Psalms build on each other, and I’d forgotten what all we’d seen in these Psalms (vacation brain is real)! We began in Pss. 41-43 with individual complaints and requests for protections from God. Ps. 44 expands the focus out to include the the entire community. Pss. 45 and 46 address the arrival of the King and establishing His reign. Pss. 47-48 celebrate the King and His glory filling the city, and last week we saw the foolishness of looking to worldly riches to fulfill you. This week we see the story of God coming in judgment. 

-The first verse begins with a running list of the names of God: Mighty One, God, the Lord, you should read this as God establishing His credentials. Just as a lawyer lists his various accomplishments and achievements, with God His credentials are connected to His various names because who else would be able to validate these credentials? We’ll see more of this in a few verses. 

-It goes on to say that He goes on to summon the earth, the whole earth. He’s inviting His creation to come and participate in this judgment.

-And where is God calling them to convene? It says from Zion – the place where God lives, the center of the world in Israelite thought. This also connects this Psalm thematically to Ps. 48, where God was establishing His rule and reign as centered in Zion, think of it like Washington DC, the primary city where God rules from.

-The further descriptions of God here allude to the first 5 books of the OT. Radiance could be referring back to Deut. 33 where God “shines forth” as He blesses the tribes of Israel, and then vs. 3 points back to Ex. 19, God’s appearance when He delivered the stipulations of His covenant to His people, the people are warned to stay away from the mountain when God met with Moses so that His glory wouldn’t destroy them

-(4) The same word that we saw previously comes up again here, God is calling the rest of His creation to come act as the jury in His case against His people. Last time it was just he earth; this time He expands His invitation to everything. And do you see why He’s gathering them? To serve as the jury in His indictment against His people.

-One of the fascinating things about this reality is that means the jury is always watching! Think back to Ps. 19 which tells us the the creation teaches and models God’s glory for us, they’re pointing us to God, witnessing to His glory and grandeur, so not only are they serving as a jury, they also serve as God’s witnesses. Let’s think about that for a minute. Can you escape the heat of the sun? You can maybe go to your basement, which stays the same temperature all the time, but even in my basement I have windows! And when it’s as hot as it has been the past month it’s a reminder of how much the sun affects things. Did anyone else appreciate the cloud cover on Tuesday? Just as we can’t escape the sun, we can’t escape God’s watchful eye over us

-But there’s another reason God calls out His creation here: they were the witnesses when the covenant was enacted between God and His people (see the beginning and end of Deut). By calling His witnesses, He’s reminding the people of their previous promises to remain faithful to Him. It’s a bit like pulling out the contract that both parties signed to remind everyone what they had previously agreed to. 

-God tells us who all is assembled in this courtroom. He’s acting as judge and defense attorney. The jury is the heaven and earth (the rest of His creation), and on trial are his “faithful ones” connected to the Hebrew word chesed God’s covenant keeping faithfulness, which signifies that this judgment is against His people.

-Last week’s Psalm was unique because it was meant for everyone, this one gets us back to the “normal” focus of the people of God. And once again we’re reminded that God is a righteous judge, His witnesses will speak to His faithfulness.

-We see a corollary to this in 1 Pet. 4:17. Friends, we will not escape God’s judgment, we’re actually more culpable than unbelievers because we’re supposed to know better! If we fail to live obediently even though we have His Word, what hope does the rest of the world have? This is why we need to ensure we’re faithfully obeying what we learn from God’s Word instead of either going through empty motions or ignoring the commands of how God has commanded us to live. 

–Selah

-“Lord, I praise you that, like a good father, you love your children far more than others, yet you hold them to far stricter standard. It is only when I grasp both of these truths that I change for the better, escaping both self-hate and self-indulgence. Infuse them deep into my heart by your Spirit. Amen.”

  • Judgment Against the Half-Hearted (7-15)

-After setting the stage, God moves to lay out His case, and the first issue he has is with the half-hearted (what Kidner called “unthinkingly religious”). And this group is a helpful warning for us to be aware of because the external appearance here is the same as those who are living in faithful obedience to God. 

-All the things God lists here are things that the people are supposed to offer: sacrifices, burnt offerings, offering up bulls and goats.

-But did you notice the pronouns here? God is building up to vs. 10 in the beginning of this section. Did you catch all the repeated use of “your.” 

-This group of people is faithful in obeying what God has commanded, but that’s where it stops. Those things aren’t wrong! But doing them as a way to “earn” God’s favor is wrong. He says every animal (wild) cattle (domesticated), but then he goes on to mention the birds and creatures of the field. If He’s the Creator of everything, is there anything that isn’t His? No! Why would the people need to “give” Him anything if it’s already His? They wouldn’t! All the offerings they could give are nothing compared the the reality that He already owns it all! 

-Vs. 12-13 we need to understand some historical context. There are some historical documents that list out that if a god isn’t given his sacrifices he dies from hunger (not sure what kind of a god that is that’s completely dependent on other people), but not this God. God doesn’t need anything. We’ve already established this, even if He did need something, it’s already His!

-This is teaching us something about God. Your fancy theological word for the day is “aseity” which means His complete self-existence. (from Latin a se which means “from himself.”) God is completely self-existent. He didn’t come from anyone, He doesn’t need anyone or anything else for Him to exist. Everything else comes from Him.

-There’s also another theological idea that’s coming up in this text, that is that God is also spiritual. He doesn’t need to eat like we do, He doesn’t eat bulls or drink their blood. That means the commands for the people to offer sacrifices to God aren’t just to expand His portfolio, there’s a different purpose to this: it’s meant to do something to us, which is what God talks about in the next verse:

-(14) Instead of just going through the motions, God invites His people to offer a thanksgiving sacrifice, to demonstrate gratitude for the gift of life that He has given.

-We see a parallel to this in Heb. 13:15. The author there tells us this is something that’s supposed to be going on continually, confessing and praising His name, giving Him thanks for the salvation that has been given to us because of His Son.

-When that becomes our way of life, then God invites us to not just go through the motions, but to pursue Him. He will meet us in our struggles and rescue and redeem us.

  • Judgment Against the Hypocrites (16-21)

-This next group has a different problem, Kidner called them the “hardened and hypocritical” This group is similarly going through the motions, but not all of them. These people say the right things, but then intentionally throw away God’s words, and even worse, God refers to this people as “wicked.”

-I’ve had this happen to me before! I had someone come up to me after a sermon onetime and tell me that they didn’t like one sentence of the sermon. When I asked which sentence it was, it was a Bible verse I quoted. This person said, “I don’t agree with that.” So I just said, “you’ll have to take that one up with God!”

-Jesus talks about this idea, too in Matt. 15, quoting from the prophet Isa. They speak the right things, they’ll recite the commands of God, but then live as if those words don’t exist.

-And the question we need to ask ourselves is: what do we do when we’re confronted by God’s Word? The goal of our study of the Bible isn’t to master it, the goal of our study of the Bible is to be mastered by it. Each week when I’m preparing these sermons I’m thinking of the Bible as a mirror: my goal is to hold this up to you and trust the Holy Spirit to reveal to you how closely your image reflects what we’re reading in the text. See, preaching isn’t just about me getting up here to pontificate each week about things I find interesting, God has designed the church to have leaders who weekly remind us of the truths of what God has done, and we’re supposed to respond with obedience. Preaching is meant to be a means of grace in the life of the Christian, a gift that helps us take 1 step closer to Jesus each week. 

-That’s the opposite of the description of the wicked: they see what it would take to grow closer to Jesus, and they run away from it. Instead of moving towards holiness they’re running in the opposite direction, which is the temptation of all our hearts. We think our way is better, we don’t always trust that God’s way is best or that He has our best interests at heart. That’s why the Bible is so incredible, it knows the way we’re all wired, which means it’s timeless. It knows the orientation of our heart, it isn’t bound to a specific cultural climate, it helps us correct our misplaced priorities 

-In this case, the Psalmist goes on to list some specific things they’re doing, ways they’re disregarding God’s Words:

-3 of the 10 commandments are listed here: thief, adulterer, speaking evil. Based on the description of these people, I’m guessing they could even list them out all 10 commandments if asked. But this text also tells us that they’re not always the ones committing the sins. 

-These people are guilty by association. It says they befriend the thief, they spend time with adulterers, and then they join in on speaking evil against others. This means it’s time to hold up the mirror of this text: church: who are you spending time with? We become like the people we spend time with. Now, this doesn’t mean that we never spend time with unbelievers (or the wicked), we’re still commanded to evangelize and tell others about what Jesus has done in our lives, but don’t put yourselves in places where you’ll be tempted to follow in their sinful ways. You need to know yourself well enough to know what faithful evangelism looks like for you without giving in to their sinful ways. You also need to have other Christians who know you well enough to be able to speak into your life and help you as you process and navigate life on this side of eternity.

-And it could even be that the Psalmist is trying to say that even though they didn’t participate in these things they were affirming them by not stopping them or telling their friends that this was wrong. This doesn’t mean you need to be a legalist or a party pooper, but it does mean evaluating what’s taking place around you and refusing to cross the line into sin.

-The last verse in this section tells us that they assumed that because they hadn’t yet been stopped or confronted that there was no problem with what they did. But it gets even worse. The 2nd line here could contain a reference to God’s name “I Am”, so it would be something like “you thought I AM was just like you.” This is connected to God’s aseity that we talked about earlier, God’s covenant name. Think of this like when your parents call you by your full name. The people were taking God’s silence as His permission to sin, but this verse is saying there’s a different reason for this:

-2 things: there is both a reason for His delay in returning and today is incredibly important. We see a warning like this in Heb. 3, where the author repeatedly says watch yourself today. On the day you hear God’s voice, don’t respond with a hardened heart! Obey now! Because tomorrow it could be too late.  

-Paul talks about this exact same idea in Rom. 2: God’s patience and long-suffering is intentional: so that we could have time to repent. And if you don’t repent then it’s going to be even worse for you when God returns, where we will face the consequences for everything we do on earth. Friends, your decisions today have implications for your life in eternity. God invites us into a way of flourishing as humans, but it comes through obedience to God’s way of living. One of the things that worries me is we tend to view Christianity as a 1-time decision and that’s it, instead of seeing that God expects a complete reorientation to our lives. God tells us that we need to pursue holiness with our whole lives, not just the bare minimum.

-So friends, are you pursuing God and living a holy life with all that you have, or are you wanting to continue holding on to your old ways of living?

  • Concluding Remarks (22-23) 

-The ending of this Psalm is a reminder about true wisdom. There are 2 ways to live: either obediently following God or refusing to obey and running away from Him. And we once again see that we’re not just supposed to go through the motions of sacrifices without a changed heart and life, we need to always give thanks to God for the salvation He has won on our behalf.

-Following Christ means that we live a thankful life. We give thanks to God for His good gifts, but there are also string attached: we need to order our conduct, we need to ensure that we obey God’s commands in our lives because those commands are how we live in wisdom, aligning ourselves with the reality of how God has designed this world to operate.

-The mirror of this text has a lot for us to reflect on! We see the reminder to not live a half-hearted life where we go through the motions but don’t allow that to affect our whole being, and the reminder to no be a hypocrite who can say all the right things but not be pursuing holiness and righteousness in our life. And with those reminders to pay careful attention to how we live, we have the promise that we will experience God’s salvation that comes through Jesus Christ.

-And the reality for us is that spiritual none of us can “handle the truth.” Rom. 3 tells us that we’ve all sinned, that we’ve all fallen short of what God has done, which means in God’s courtroom every single one of us has a “guilty” verdict. “But God,” we saw that reality last week! But God did what we couldn’t do, He paid the penalty that we couldn’t and gives us the freedom to live as new creations who have been called to live a holy life. We are the half-hearted, we are the hypocrites, but God’s mercy and grace are enough to deal with our sins.

Leave a comment
by mikethestrand on August 9, 2026  •  Permalink
Posted in Bible, Blog, Church, Life, Sermon
Tagged , , ,

Posted by mikethestrand on August 9, 2026

https://pastormikesmusings.com/2026/08/09/sermon-manuscript-psalm-50/

Psalm 49 – Sermon Manuscript

-One of the things you probably know about me if you’ve been coming here for any bit of time is that I LOVE history! I love reading history, I love studying history, I love visiting historical things. And 2 years ago, I got to go on the trip of a lifetime around Europe with some other pastors, which means you all will regularly be subjected to pictures and stories of my time from that trip! Partly because it was connected to church history. I got to visit London, Geneva, Rome, Edinburgh, Oxford and visit some places that had a profound influence on the direction of Western Christianity. But it wasn’t just Christianity that has been influenced by these areas, so I want to share some pictures that I took of significant things I saw. I’ll share a bit about each one, but I want you to see if you can figure out what they all have in common. Are you ready?

-This is a bust of the Roman emperor Claudius, who appears 3 times in the book of Acts, which we’re going to be working our way through this Fall, so it’s been on my mind. This bust lives in the British Museum in London.

-Up next is Isaac Newton and Stephen Hawking (who asked to be buried by Newton). Isaac’s comment is in Latin, Stephen’s is the English version, and this is at Westminster Abbey in London.

-In the same building, is the tomb of King Edward the 1 who it says was born in 1239 died in 1307

-Just to prove I was there, too, that’s the Metropolitan Tabernacle, where Charles Spurgeon preached, was dedicated as a building in 1861 (Spurgeon died in 1892)

-Next is a random building I walked by in Edinburgh, Scotland, which according to this sign is where Charles Darwin lived while studying medicine at the University of Edinburgh from 1825-1827.

-Also in Edinburgh is St. Giles Cathedral, where the Reformer John Knox (the statue, not the other guy, that’s my friend Brent) ministered during the Reformation. He had multiple run ins with “Bloody Mary” (Queen Mary I), as well as Mary, Queen of Scots during his life as pushed for Reformation beliefs, and that yellow square in the middle of that parking space marks where he was buried.

-Here is a memorial of where John Calvin used to live in Geneva. Not that building because that building was torn down, but it’s posted there in memory of where he lived while he was a pastor. 

-This is the Reformation wall (another evidence I was actually there) with statues of: John Calvin, John Knox (who you heard about earlier), William Farel (who coerced Calvin to serve in Geneva) and Theodore Beza (followed Calvin as the pastor in Geneva)

-Also, going even further back than the Reformation, here’s a sign in Geneva that says this road is the path Julius Caesar walked when he visited Geneva in 58 AD (which means the Apostles would have still been alive)

-Lastly, this is the stone marking the spot where Nero is buried in Rome. That’s it! Did you figure out what all these pictures have in common? They’re all markers of people who are dead. Today’s Psalm tells us that death is the great equalizer of everyone. The mortality rate has held steady throughout history at 100% (with the exception of Jesus), and in Ps. 49:11, we read, “Their graves are their permanent homes, their dwellings from generation to generation, though they have named estates after themselves.” Let’s read the rest of the Psalm together:

READ/PRAY (pg. 497-8)

  1. True Wisdom (1-4)

-The first 4 verses are an introduction that are saying what this Psalm is about, and there’s a couple things that make this Psalm unique. First comes in the first 2 verses. It says this Psalm is for ALL peoples, low and high, rich and poor. Generally, the Psalms are director to the people of God, this one is for every person who has ever lived, which is why it’s referred to as a wisdom Psalm, hence why it sounds more like the books of Proverbs or Ecc. than Psalms.

-And the entire purpose of those books is seeking to answer the question: what is wisdom? How do we get it? I would define wisdom as living in line with reality. That means aligning ourselves with God’s intent and design for us as humans. That also means sin is pushing against God’s design for us, which is what we see throughout the wisdom literature. Wisdom literature does all sorts of comparisons between the way of wisdom versus the way of foolishness. And the other thing about this Psalm is vs. 3-4 use basically every word the OT uses to talk about God’s wisdom: wisdom, understanding, proverb, and riddle. What’s slightly different about this is the last word: lyre. This is meant to be sung together. So, this wisdom Psalm is a song that contains wisdom for all people from all socio-economic backgrounds to learn a truth together. 

  • A Worldly Ransom (5-14)

-Remember what I said earlier about the comparison between wisdom and foolishness in the wisdom literature? That’s where the Psalmist jumps to next, he asks a question: why should I fear in times of trouble? And the implicit answer is: he shouldn’t! But what times of trouble is he talking about in this Psalm?

-The second half of vs. 5 tells us: the iniquity (that’s another word for sin) of his foes is all around him. Once again, that can be any number of things, right? Sin isn’t restricted to just 1 thing, so which sin? Look at vs. 6, that’s where we see the focus of the rest of this Psalm! It’s addressing the way of the foolish who look to their salvation and satisfaction in worldly wealth.

-He uses 2 interesting financial words in vs. 7 that we have use often when we talk about salvation: redemption and ransom. These are terms the wealthy would know because redemption is the price paid to free something (free an animal from another person, in this time you could free a slave with a financial payment), and a ransom is paid when something or someone in their household is captured by someone else (which the wealthy would have been more susceptible to). We see this even today, people are kidnapped and held hostage until a ransom is paid, but it isn’t generally the poor it happens to. And each of those things would have a price limit, but what would the price be when the ransom needs to be paid to God? Anyone have a way of measuring that price? It’s incalculable, at least in our minds.

-Jesus talks about this idea in Matt. 16: The last question Jesus asks is the same one we’re seeing in this Psalm: what ransom would someone pay to live longer? And isn’t that a temptation around us all the time? There’s a guy named Bryan Johnson (spelled differently), who’s described as a “biohacker” who supposedly spends $2 million each year to attempt to live forever. He’s claimed to have the “biological age” of a 17-year-old, despite actually being 48. It turns out, he has an autoimmune disease that is fatal. Friends, all the money in the world can’t save you from death, and for those of us in Christ, death isn’t something to fear. Yes, it’s an enemy, but death has been defeated! 

-And the Psalmist goes on to say exactly that point in vs. 10, who dies? Everyone. Just as we saw at the beginning of this Psalm, he uses a few words to describe everyone: wise, foolish, and stupid, and all of us are somewhere in that spectrum, right? 

-At some point, if Jesus doesn’t return, all of us will join the rest of humanity in the grave. Graveyards bear this out, don’t they? The checking account of everyone at a graveyard is exactly the same, they left every penny behind. This is one of the saddest things about the Egyptian Pharaohs that we’ve uncovered, they’re buried with all their treasure for the afterlife, but they didn’t take them to the afterlife, they’re sitting in museums all over the world.

-The last part of vs. 11 talks about this idea. Just like my visits to all those places in Europe with plaques and statues named after people, they’re just as dead as the person who died destitute and was buried in an unmarked grave. Even though they’ve worked their hardest to preserve their reputation in the world the only thing that is permanent is their living in the grave.

-Vs. 12 becomes a bit of a theme that serves as the markers of this Psalm, because it’s repeated almost verbatim in the last verse. One of the realities about humans is we have the same trajectory as every animal: death. We’re more than animals (one philosopher said we’re the only animals that think about being animals) in that we’re created as God’s image, but we end up in the same place: dead.

-And for those who live as if their riches make them better than others, that is the end of everything for them, as well as their followers. 

-Selah – Pray through whether or not you’re viewing life through this worldly view of material wealth determining your standing. Keller “Lord, I often catch myself imagining how much greater life would be if I had more. I also quietly ‘boast’ in my heart when I see myself able to afford certain goods and inhabit certain places. Save my heart from such shallowness and foolishness.” (Songs of Jesus)

-The Psalmist makes an interesting comparison in vs. 14 comparing death to a shepherd. What kind of a shepherd do you think death would be? Contrast that with the picture we see of God as a shepherd in Ps. 23

-Do you think death would lead you to green pastures and still waters or renew your life? Death is a horrible shepherd where the outcome is just destruction! That’s where wisdom is aligning yourself to God’s ways.

-The last sentence of vs. 14 says that while they used their money to advantage themselves on earth, the opposite will happen to them in eternity. 

-Jesus tells a parable with a similar focus in Luke 16 about a rich man and a poor man named Lazarus. From the beginning of the story it looks like 1 of these men is blessed and the other is cursed. But then we get a glimpse behind the curtain, after they’re both on the other side of life their situations are reversed. The rich man asks Father Abraham to send Lazarus to put a drop of water on his tongue, and here’s how Abraham responds: 

-And what’s amazing about this story is that the rich man is never even named, as if Jesus is using his as a stand in for everyone Psalm 49 is talking about. The man goes on to ask Abraham to send Lazarus to his brothers to warn them about death, and Abraham says they have Moses and the prophets, who they didn’t listen to, and the parable ends saying: 

-Guess what? Someone did rise from the dead and did tell us exactly how to ensure that we don’t go to the place of torment, which is where this Psalm goes next:

  • An Eternal Ransom (15-20; Heb. 9)

-I think the biggest and most significant 2 words in the Bible are the beginning of this verse: but God. In one of his many explanations of the gospel message, Paul in Eph. 2 says it this way: 

-Friends, this is the best news in the world! We’re all tempted to look with jealousy at those who make more than us, and not just that but we’re also tempted to look down on those who make less than us, aren’t we? How do you feel when you drive up next to someone begging for money at a stoplight? Do you pull over to the far lane to get away from them? Do you pretend they’re not there? Do you pray for them? Do you smile at them? There’s times where each of those responses may be appropriate, depending on the safety of the area you’re in! This isn’t meant to cast judgment on you, especially if you’ve been taken advantage of in the past, but I think it’s worth remembering that financial success doesn’t necessarily always come from God. And the human temptation is to look to worldly success instead of looking to God who is rich in mercy and will lavishly pour out that mercy on His children!

-The Psalmist says the exact same thing, even though he didn’t know the name “Jesus” millennia before He was born. Here he says the gospel message this way: But God will redeem me from the power of Sheol (death, the grave) because He will take me.

–Selah – take some time to pray and thank God for the 2 words at the beginning of this verse, “but God” who did rise from the dead and tell us exactly how to live a wise life

-Reiterating the question he asked at the beginning all the way back in vs. 5, we’re reminded to not be afraid when someone gets rich, or when his investments go up in value, because it has no bearing on their eternal soul. When he dies, he’ll have the same investments as everyone else who’s dead, you can’t take it to the other side with you.

-Vs. 18 is kind of weird, what seems to be taking place is the second half is what the rich person says to himself. He’s blessing himself, taking and spending his money on whatever he wants, then says to himself “you do well for yourself,” and finally the Psalmist interjects once again with wisdom in vs. 19

-This is the final reminder that even the wealthy end up in the same place as the poor: dead. By saying they will never see the light, the OT often picks up the idea of salvation coming with the morning, but for the rich who died without wisdom that morning salvation will never come.

-Vs. 20 is almost a repeat of vs. 12 but with 1 distinct difference, here, I’ll put them next to each other up on the screen so you can see it:

-In vs. 12 we see the reminder that humans are destined to be like the animals in that we’ll all die, what vs. 20 is doing is saying there is a difference among humans. Some humans die “without understanding” which means there’s the option of dying “with understanding,” and not ending up the same as the animals who are here one day and gone the next. 

-There’s a verse in the book of Hebrews that answers the unanswered questions of this whole Psalm. Vs. 7-8 said the wealth and abundant riches can’t redeem a person or pay back his ransom to God since the price of redeeming him is too costly. Which is why those two words that we looked at matter so much: but God. 

-Did you catch what the Psalmist is saying throughout this? The entire wealth of the world put together isn’t enough to pay God off for the consequences of 1 person’s sin. All the wealth in the world will someday pass away, but any 1 single sin has eternal consequences against the eternal God who created everything. But God paid what we couldn’t, He gave us Himself, which includes all the riches of His glory in the heavenly realm. Riches that we get to see little glimpses of here. I was struck this week that what we call “grace”, God’s undeserved and unearned favor poured out on us is nothing less than getting God Himself! Friends, when you’re saved, you are indwelled by the living God, you are united together to Him. Isn’t that incredible? Heb. 9:15

-This verse tells us that Jesus’s death paid that ransom. We were in bondage to sin, the only possible outcome for everyone was death, which is why Jesus had to die. But even death wasn’t strong enough to defeat God, so death spit Jesus back out. Friends, death no longer has power over anyone who is walking in the way of wisdom, another way of saying that is walking in the way of Jesus. If you follow Him, if you obey Him, everything changes, both here and then. 

-This is where the good news of the gospel is actually good news. Friends, Jesus told us that we have access to every spiritual blessing. Our spiritual bank account is LOADED. But we don’t have complete access to it right now. We get a stipend now, but the full inheritance is waiting for us. And it doesn’t come about by accumulating more stuff now, it comes by being faithful now. God brings people from all sorts of backgrounds here: wealthy and poor, young and old, and He invites us to use our gifts to be a blessing to each other. Are you demonstrating your faithfulness by using whatever resources God has given you to be a blessing to others? That’s what’s going to carry over into eternity, not building shrines to yourself, not naming buildings after yourself: using your resources as a way to be a blessing to others instead of building up more recognition for yourself is what shows that you’re living wisely, living in line with reality, and living as someone who is following in the way of Jesus.

Leave a comment
by mikethestrand on August 2, 2026  •  Permalink
Posted in Bible, Blog, Church, Life, Sermon
Tagged , , , ,

Posted by mikethestrand on August 2, 2026

https://pastormikesmusings.com/2026/08/02/psalm-49-sermon-manuscript/

Psalm 46 – Sermon Manuscript

-I got a text from Micah this morning who was sitting at the airport ready to fly to Mexico for the week with Elizabeth. I love flying, but not as much as my wife does. Every time we’re near the airport she gets the travel bug to go visit a new place. I know not all of you feel the same way she does! And if you stop and think about what you’re doing it makes sense to fear it! You’re strapping yourself in to an uncomfortable seat that’s connected to a metal tube that is about to take you 6 miles above the earth (which is where we were made to live), move at something like 500 mph, and you’re just stuck sitting there. You have zero control over where you’re going, and if you’re lucky every so often the pilot will get on and tell you what’s going on, otherwise you’re just at their mercy. For some of you, planes are a place of excitement and fun, for others planes are on object of pure terror! And that’s a glimpse of what we see in today’s Psalm. Psalm 46 focuses on God being our refuge and strength, but that same refuge can be a source of terror and dread to someone who isn’t following after God.

READ/PRAY (pg. 496)

God Is Our Refuge In: 

-This Psalm begins with this reminder that God is our refuge and strength, full stop. That means that whatever comes after this sentence is dependent on that reality. A few weeks ago, we looked at Psalm 42 and saw the need to preach to ourselves instead of just listening to yourself. This is the next step in that process, the preaching needs to begin with the reminder of who God is. And in this passage: if this is really true, that God is our refuge and strength, then we don’t need to be afraid of anything else, which is the point of this Psalm. This Psalm has 2 purposes: to call out those who aren’t following after God, and to encourage those who are following after God. And that’s at the heart of God’s message; it’s the same message for both people. This message that encourages those who are His condemns those who are against Him, there’s no 3rd way. 

-This God who is our refuge and strength is also a helper. Now that seems like a weird turn. How is God a helper? As it goes on to say an “ever-present help in times of trouble” is how I learned it growing up. It begins with the reality that He created us which means we are completely dependent on Him, so in that sense He helps our beginning. But the Bible also tells us that He didn’t create and then peace out, it goes on to tell us that He continues sustaining the world. The fact that we have oxygen in our lungs is his gift to us. Now, I know how the cycle works, we exhale CO2 which trees and plants need and then release oxygen into the air, but who’s the one who designed and continues perpetuating that cycle? God is! A professor I had in seminary onetime said we should never say that anything is “God-forsaken” because we couldn’t begin to imagine the terrors that would come if that were true. Not only does He sustain us, but He also relates to us and sympathizes with us. He is on our side and supports us in our daily lives.

-A clear place we see that is the verse that was the inspiration for Dane Ortlund’s book Gentle and Lowly that came out a few years ago. Dane points out in his book that the 1 place in the Bible where Jesus describes His deepest desire towards us is in Matt. 11. If you haven’t read the book yet, and you’re feeling a level of angst of struggle, grab it from the library or talk to me, I have extra copies! 

-Look at Jesus’s description of His heart toward those who are following after Him: lowly and humble is the deepest feeling towards us (different translations change it to lowly and gentle). And would you want His heart toward you to be any different? That’s the reason He is our refuge, that’s the reason He is our help, that’s the reason we can find our rest in Him! I was listening to a podcast this week about the need for us to just go outside because doing things like looking at birds and trees calms us, while staring at a phone literally makes us anxious! Kids – that’s one of the reasons your parents don’t let you play with phones all day every day! It’s not good for you as a person.

  1. Destruction (1-3)

-The rest of this section talks about the destruction of the world. And because verse 1 is true, We don’t need to be afraid when the earth collapses around us. This is more than just a localized thing, he’s using apocalyptic language, like a de-creation of the world, similar to what we read in Rev. or Ezek. He begins focusing on the things that feel immovable and steadfast: the earth and the mountains, those are hard things! Can any of you move the earth? Or even a mountain? Like I’ve got some yard projects I need to do at my house that involve moving some dirt, and I keep putting it off because I don’t want to move a little pile of dirt. That’s nothing compared to a mountain! 

-Then it shifts to the seas, which are roaring and foaming. When I think of the sea, I think peace and tranquility. I LOVE the beach! But waters often in the OT are a source of anxiety. Think of the huge waves, storms regularly coming through, the fact that it looks unending (Cara’s fear on the cruise)

-All these things are what we today call “natural events.” Storms roll through, tornado sirens go off in the summer, hail is inevitable, but all of us have something we’re afraid of. What “natural events” are you most afraid of? The weekend Cara and I started dating I found out my future SIL was terrified of tornadoes from growing up in Arkansas, I grew up with them being an inconvenience watching my grandpa go outside to look at them. Maybe you fear another virus, I keep reading about a new norovirus making its rounds on cruise ships (another reason for Cara to avoid them!) We all have areas in the world where we struggle to trust God, but His invitation here is to remember that He is our refuge and strength:

Selah

  • Wars (4-7)

-Contrast the water here with the water in the previous verse. And I hope by now you’re starting to catch the allusions to Psalm 1, where the blessed person is the one who is planted by streams of water. Water can either be lifegiving (like after you’ve mowed the lawn when it’s 100 outside with 100% humidity), or water can be unbelievably destructive like a hurricane. And God rules over them all. Here we see the way God uses water to bring life and flourishing to his people.

-City of God is a reference to Jerusalem, so here’s where this is kind of weird. There is not a river, nor has there ever been a river running through that city, but do you know what we see in Rev.? A river flowing through the New Jerusalem from God, giving life to the nations. So I think we’re actually seeing a glimpse here of the new heavenly realities because of what Jesus has done.

-But the most important fact about this city isn’t the river, it’s the third line: this is the place where God lives. That’s been the goal since creation, for God to live with His people. Since Gen. 3, that’s been impossible because holiness can’t co-exist with sin, but this has been God’s plan forever: to have a people living with Him.

–Heb. 12 picks up this idea, comparing our experience today to the Israelites who were so scared of the mountain when God met with Moses that they wouldn’t come near it. 

-Unlike them, we have come to a new mountain. And I think it’s worth asking for us today, where do we see the city of the living God? In the church. God lives and dwells among us through His Spirit today. And what that means is that because God lives and dwells in us today, we won’t be toppled, nothing can stand against the church, and that’s played itself out in history time and time again. Each time the church faces a threat in one place and begins to shrink, it flourishes somewhere else. I’ve been reading reports about the church growing like crazy in Iran, despite regular persecution and death. But that’s only true of the city of God

-While the city of God is stable, vs. 6 describes the city of man which can’t stop fighting. Nations rage, I think referring to Psalm 2 where the Psalmist asks why the nations rage against the Lord? In this case, it’s because God is reigning. All God has to do is speak and nations will fall. 

-And I think it’s appropriate for us to think about this today, as we clean up firework remnants from our yards and streets. I feel blessed to have been born here, I’m thankful for the freedoms we have, and the prosperity that allowed my great-grandparents to immigrate here over a century ago, but let’s not pretend or assume that this nation will last forever. Give thanks, appreciate, be the best citizen you can, not for the sake of the US, but for the sake of Jesus. But don’t put your hope on this nation! We see in this Psalm that all it takes is a word from the Lord and even this nation will crumble.

-I was listening to a podcast interview this week because one of the speakers just released a new book with reflections from Jer. 29 (not the verse everyone knows about God’s plan to prosper us, these are a few verses earlier). This is one of my favorite verses in the OT, so this really stuck out to me when someone else focuses on it. Now, this is in the old covenant, so we can’t do a 1 for 1 applying this to ourselves, but Peter calls us exiles and part of those who are dispersed around the world instead of gathered together in 1 place, and I think the call for us today is actually very similar. And do you see how ordinary this call is? It’s a normal life of working, of providing for your family, of taking care of your little plot of land, and helping your kids become adults. Friends, what if God’s call is simply faithful presence in the world? Jesus tells us that we will have suffering and difficulty in the world, but we’re supposed to be encouraged and take heart because He has overcome the world.

-I read a book earlier this summer that was talking about what we as Christians and the church should be pursuing, and the author took his whole argument and summarized it in the title: pilgrims and priests. Believe it or not, the entire world will never be Christians. We’re told that we’ll always have some dealings with “the world” which means maybe we’re not supposed to try to take over the whole world. Additionally, maybe we’re not supposed to try being culture warriors or try to become “famous,” maybe our job is to be faithful pilgrims who are working to sanctify (make holy) our little corner of the world. Maybe that’s how we shine as lights in the world, (which assumes there’s always going to be darkness!) Now, we don’t want or pray that people will remain alienated from God, in fact we regularly ask God to work and move in and through us, but we need to understand what our job is vs. God’s job. We live as faithful followers of Him, we take responsibility for our little “garden” (whether you actually grow food or not), and pursue the well-being of the place where God plants us.

-One of my concerns in the church in America is that we have whole “ministries” and “churches” who stoke fear and division in the church, who try to get people worked up about how the world is falling apart. That shouldn’t surprise us! That should never catch us off guard! We see here that the nations are going to rage and kingdoms are going to topple, so even when that happens, we don’t live in fear, we walk by faith and trust in the Lord who protects and preserves us. One of the most common commands throughout the Bible is “fear not,” so let’s not be afraid, that’s the main point this Psalm is giving us! 

-This idea that we’re supposed to shine as lights comes from Matt. 5. Here’s how Jesus describes His followers:

-That means we have to live holy lives. How are you doing at that? When people look at you, do they see God represented? What’s interesting about this light shining before others is just as we’ve seen, God’s Word can create or destroy. Our holy living is meant to either draw people in or condemn them for their unholy living. The last verse in Matt. 5 says they will give glory, but it doesn’t say that will be willingly, some will give glory because they’re forced to. So church, are you faithfully living and shining as a light in the darkness? That’s God’s invitation through this Psalm, and it’s only possible because of vs. 7

-Why can we live this way and not be afraid? The Lord of Armies is with us as a stronghold. Maybe a better word for you to get what is saying here is a “safe room,” a place where even if a tornado knocks down your house, you’ll be just fine. 

Selah – think about garden God has called you to cultivate.

  • Worship (8-11)

-This section begins with an invitation to come and see the work God does, the God who can bring devastation, but also brings life because the church is God’s chosen means of work today. Friends, coming in here is where people should be able to see God at work in you and in me! We should be looking for God at work here and inviting other people to join us and see God’s work being made visible. This means we’re supposed to be witnesses, sharing how we’re becoming more like Jesus, sharing the ways God continues providing for us, and living a happy (blessed) life that is faithfully ministering and serving the place God has called us.

-That’s the direction for the church, but we also get the negative side of it for those not in the church: devastation. We saw the description of that previously. At some point, the sin of this world will be destroyed. He will put an end to all wars and fighting, but it comes by one final act of devastation. Kidner: “Although the outcome is peace, the process is judgment.”

-The word translated “makes cease” is where we get the word “sabbath” from, which is much more than the absence of war or conflict, it’s everything being as God intended it to be (which does include no more fighting).

-Verse 10 has been translated differently in many older Bible translations, you may have it memorized as “Be still, and know that I am God,” but this is a better translation in the context. It’s actually not meant to be a verse that is comforting, it’s meant to be a rebuke to those who are fighting. The “be still” that you’ve heard before could also be translated as “leave off!” or just “stop!” 

-God is going to be exalted whether people acknowledge Him or not! Even those who hated Him in this life will be forced to exalt Him in the next, so here we see that while war will someday come to an end, worship won’t. God will be worshipped, either willingly or by force.  

-The last verse in this Psalm repeats what we saw in vs. 7 with the focus being God living with us, which we see happening explicitly in Jesus when we turn to the first page of the NT, Matt. 1:23, quoting Isa. 7:14, God’s plan to bring an end to the wars and fighting of the world is by entering the world as a baby. One of the ways God has predominantly worked in history is by inverting the normal ordering of the world. There’s a reason Darwinian theory argued for “survival of the fittest,” if you look at the world that’s a pretty good description of what happens! The biggest, most aggressive, most powerful seems to be the one that always wins. 

-And in that world where that’s generally true, Jesus offers something completely different where He came into the world as a baby, completely reliant on His mother’s care. He is the God who takes the weak of the world to shame the strong. In God’s kingdom, you can’t get in by your intellect, your gifting, or your strength, in fact Jesus says in order to get in you need to become like a child. And children in the 1st century weren’t viewed the same way we look at them today. For us, kids are cute, they’re a gift, but that’s the opposite of the way the world at the time of Jesus viewed them. Here’s the way historian Tom Holland in his book Dominion says it: 

-Friends, Jesus’s arrival means that the entire world order has been flipped upside down, but that really means it’s been turned right-side up again, it’s back to the way God originally intended it to be, but it came with a cost. The destruction that God talked about here was laid on the back of Jesus. That act of love for us was an act of war in the spiritual realm where the pain, suffering, and sin of the world brought destruction to the Son of God so that we could stop fighting and know that He is God. This God who invites you and me to gather together each week to cease from our working and striving and chasing after the things of the world to see the works of the Lord. The Lord who brings us together who unites our hearts to His and to each other, and who works in our lives to make us more like Him. He invites us to live as faithful exiles who aren’t out to change the world but are living careful and intentional lives of love and service of God and others. And while it doesn’t look impressive to the world, it’s the way God has chosen to transform the entire world, taking the small and weak and destroying the big and strong.

Leave a comment
by mikethestrand on July 5, 2026  •  Permalink
Posted in Bible, Blog, Church, Life, Sermon
Tagged , , , ,

Posted by mikethestrand on July 5, 2026

https://pastormikesmusings.com/2026/07/05/psalm-46-sermon-manuscript/

Psalm 45 – Sermon Manuscript

-I’ve got some special pictures to share with you today of one of the best days of my life. 11 years ago, on June 5, 2015, Cara and I got married. Now, I know what you’re thinking, we haven’t aged a day! We had a wonderful time that day – our friends and family all joined us in Cheyenne, WY where we had met and where I was serving as a pastor. My dad did the ceremony, Cara’s dad was the first person to pray for us as a married couple, and yes, it was just as special as the pictures made it look. We had fun taking our pictures together, and believe it or not this is exactly what I wore on my wedding day! One of the funniest moments in my ministry was when someone was talking to me about the clothes I wore to church (which hasn’t really changed much since I got into ministry). At one moment in the conversation, the person said, “would you wear those clothes to your wedding?” And I said: absolutely! The last picture I’ll share with you for this morning is this one. We got married in custom Chuck Taylors with our name on it!  

-That was an incredibly fun day! But what these pictures don’t show is the fun dates we had leading up to it, the conversations, the laughs, even the fights. Honestly, the best part of the day was us getting up early, getting Starbucks, meeting at a park and going on a walk together. No one else was around, our friends were still sleeping, and we got to chat before all the busyness descended on us. And that day began the journey that you all have been a part of for over half our married lives now! But the marriage started on that day. We saved and planned and strategized for months for it! But if there hadn’t been the work leading up to it, it wouldn’t have been the enjoyable day it was.

-Today’s Psalm is a royal wedding Psalm, and I’ll warn you, at first glance you’re going to question what to do with it! But it’s in the Bible, it’s there for a reason, it’s God’s Word, and it has some incredible implications for us today.

READ/PRAY (pg. 496)

-This is a weird Psalm for us today, I’ll just be honest. I shared with a number of people as I was starting to dig into it that I wasn’t sure what in the world to do with it! And this is one of those places where our world today is SO different from the world 3,000 years ago. What this Psalm was used for was for a royal wedding, where the king was marrying his queen. 

-Now, we’re good Americans, so that’s part of where we struggle to understand this. Our general assumption is that the world is and should be a meritocracy instead of a monarchy. At least until there’s a royal wedding in England, and then it’s all over the news. My sisters were OBSESSED with the last royal wedding. They got up early to watch it, bought books about it, and I laughed at them (meanwhile, on my honeymoon, I made Cara adjust our entire schedule so I could watch the NBA Finals, we all have our priorities, right?)

-Intro labels this a love song, only Psalm that has that label with it! Now I don’t know about you, but when I think of a love song I don’t think about the Psalms, I start thinking about Michael Buble or Bruno Mars, but God is the one who authors every love story!

  1. The King (1-9)

-The first verse is an introduction or note from the person writing the Psalm. Think of it as the master of ceremonies, introducing this special day. His comments begin similarly to what we saw last week, he’s fixated on (lit.) a “good word.” And what do you think that good word is? God’s Word! He’s saying he’s spent time reading, reflecting, and meditating on God’s Word. This is the place all of us should start! We look to God’s Word as our authority, as our grounding, as our inspiration for how we live and interpret the world around us, including in a marriage relationship. 

-That means that the writer is reflecting on God’s Word as he writes these new words. This is where we see that the Bible authors so often are thinking back to and meditating on the Bible as their inspiration and encouragement even as they write new biblical words, which is why it’s so important for us to know the Bible! We need to be able to use the Bible to interpret events in our lives today, and so that we can faithfully interpret the text itself because it builds on itself.

-Not only is he reflecting on God’s Word as a whole, these are also his gifts, so he’s being faithful to what God had commissioned him to do (think back a few weeks to when we talked about the sons of Korah being gifted by God to lead the music at the tabernacle). Each one of us is given a gift from God to be used to be a blessing to others and to be obedient to Him: are you using that gift?

-The focus of the rest of this section is on the king himself, and there’s some wording that might mean this is referencing David. For example, this first line echoes the first description of David when he was anointed in 1 Sam. 16. Second line seems to allude to another description David uses of himself in his last address in 2 Sam. 23, and the third line seems to allude to God’s covenant with David in 2 Sam 7. So even if David didn’t write it, there are enough references or allusions that make it a fair bet that it’s referring to a wedding of David.

-Then it moves to some of David’s characteristics as a king:

-He’s supposed to ride triumphantly for a purpose: truth humility, and justice. These are meant to be descriptions of a faithful king, his rule and reign is marked by these attributes. Can you imagine living under a government where everywhere it touched these attributes became more prevalent? Instead, don’t we often see governments working to conceal, build pride, and enact injustice towards their enemies? And for us today, the place where we should look for these attributes is in the church. The church is the place where God is currently ruling, which means this should be reflective of His rule and reign and should expand the cause of truth, humility, and justice.

-Not only does his rule give life, it’s also effective in conquering his enemies. He’s faithful at both protecting those under his care and defending against those who would do harm to his people.

-Turns to God in vs. 6 because the king of God’s people is meant to serve as God’s representative on earth. You’ve heard me say before that as the leader goes, so goes the nation. The king is meant to serve as a model of God to the people, and at the same time represent the people before God, so as the people say “long live the king” it’s the same thing as giving praise and honor to God. 

-Once again, the theme of justice is attached to God’s kingdom, where God rules, true and lasting justice will take place. And just as a reminder, it’s not justice in the way it often gets thrown around on social media today, it’s justice as God defines it, living according to the ways God has called us to live. 

-Vs. 7 expands on the implication of God’s reign: loving righteousness and hating wickedness. That’s a great description of a good government, isn’t it? I think this idea is repeated in 1 Peter 2, even as Peter is writing in a completely different context, where the government at his time was the Romans, who didn’t follow God and didn’t always enact true justice. Nevertheless, Peter says we’re to submit to every human authority. And look at who he includes: emperor or governors. Our role today is faithful presence, working to support the government in areas where righteousness is being supported, and push back where wickedness is being supported.

-Because David’s reign is a faithful reflection of God, God has poured out His blessings on David. As a reminder of his wedding day, he’s cloaked in fragrant and expensive spices, like wearing his favorite and most expensive cologne. 

-He’s also coming from ivory palaces. If you don’t know what ivory is made of, it’s animal teeth or tusks, and it’s priceless! This is a way of signifying the immense wealth of King David.

-And everyone is there to celebrate: other king’s daughters, the queen is there is her finest jewelry, you can see how this wedding day is a day to remember!

  • The Queen (10-15)

-Up next, we have the future queen. The first picture of a marriage we see in the Bible is in Genesis, and there we see it from the man’s perspective, the leave and cleave part of marriage. In this Psalm, we see it from the women’s perspective, she’s to forget her family for the sake of this new relationship. Marriage requires both of you (as the vows say) “forsaking all others” for the sake of each other. 

-vs. 11 is interesting, look at how the KJV translated it. This is quite the exhortation, isn’t it? Now, the Bible is timeless in that it’s God’s Word for all peoples and all time, but it was also written in a specific cultural context, and this is a reminder for us that maybe all our cultural ideas aren’t the biblical ideal. We have a tendency to read the Bible through our cultural ideas instead of taking the time to dig into the culture this was written in. We have a more egalitarian culture today, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, it’s just something we need to be aware of when we approach the Bible. There’s only so much we can do to step outside of our cultural perspective, so just be aware of it as we approach this holy text. As each person approaches this marriage, there are different roles and responsibilities that they need to live out. The reality is men cannot bear or feed babies, I am physically incapable of that, that means there are distinct calls for men and women to live out to have a healthy marriage. Many of those are culturally conditioned, like there’s no verse that says women need to cook or men need to work outside the home, it takes both husbands and wives working hard for the sake of the other and their family for them to thrive. 

-Because of her new position and relationship with the King, she’ll get recognition and affirmation from the wealthy.

-And then we get another glimpse of the preparation for the wedding ceremony (yet another cultural difference, do you find it interesting that the men wear the spices, but the woman doesn’t?) Her clothing is crafted using the most expensive threads, her bridal court is coming with her in rejoicing and anticipation, and we assume that the wedding ceremony goes off without a hitch, otherwise the next section wouldn’t be in there!

  • The Children (16-17)

-One of the prayers for a new marriage is that they produce children. That’s been the means God has chosen for the expansion of humanity, and in this time period, children were viewed as a sign of God’s blessing on the family, so the prayer was that the king and queen would produce children which would continue to familial reign and blessing from God.

-This song is reminding the people that their prayer is for this family to continue. David’s lineage has been promised to remain on the throne forever as a sign of God’s blessing, which means David’s sons should serve as princes, so they’ll be ready to step into a kingly role.

-Because of the children serving in these roles, David’s name and lineage will be remembered forever, and as God’s representative on earth, the people will praise him. But the sad story of the Bible is that this doesn’t happen in a straight line, and only 2 generations after David’s rule, the nation splits into 2 until they were both defeated and taken into exile (which we studied this Spring when we looked at the minor prophets).

-Part of the reason we continue talking about David today is because of great King David’s greater son.

-As I mentioned at the beginning, I cringed when I first read through this Psalm this week! Not only is it focused on a wedding, it’s also family Sunday today! I also mentioned at the beginning of this series that we need to read the Psalms as focused on Jesus, but I was starting to question that when I read this! So how does this Psalm point us to Jesus? What does marriage have to do with Jesus’s work in the world?

  • The King of Kings (Heb. 1:8-9; Eph. 5:32)

-Just like many of the Psalms, this is quoted in the NT, specifically in Heb. 1. The focus of the whole book of Hebrews is to talk about how Jesus is better than any and everything else. 

-The book starts with the comparison of how God has spoken. He previously spoke by the prophets, but recently He’s spoken by His Son, and after His work He sat down next to the Father, which means Jesus is superior to the angels. 

-Then he compares Jesus to the angels through a wide variety of OT passages to demonstrate exactly how Jesus is better, he quotes from Psalm 104 to talk about angels, and then goes to quote from Psalm 45 in vs. 8-9 (just so you understand what you’re seeing in the Bible, it puts OT quotations in bold) which tells us that even in this royal wedding Psalm, it’s giving us a picture of Jesus. 

-Now, Jesus was never married. He died a single man, which should tell us that marriage doesn’t define a person, but we also know that Jesus is betrothed to a bride called the church, based on what Paul says about marriage in Eph. 5. This doesn’t take away from the original meaning of this text, but we see it today from a slightly different perspective than the first readers because there are 2 authors to each biblical text: human and divine (God), so while the human author can be thinking about 1 thing (in this case, king David and his marriage) God knows that it’s being set up for something even bigger and better than just David!

-Paul tells us the whole purpose of marriage is to be a picture to us of Jesus’s relationship to the church (the opposite isn’t true, we can’t project human marriage onto Jesus & the church). Just as Jesus loved the church and sacrificed Himself for His bride, husbands are commanded to lay down their lives for the sake of their wives. That’s how we live out Jesus’ reign today, His reign that brings about truth, humility, and justice, and it requires all of us individually and collectively living in that reality, married and single. Because even if you’re here and you’re not married, you are showing the reality of life in between Jesus’s 2 comings. You’re betrothed to a King who loves you and has been preparing for your eventual wedding. Rev. 19:7-8 tells us the story of that day: So here we get the full picture: Jesus is waiting for us as His bride, and our job is to ensure we’re dressing ourselves in the right clothes: our righteous acts.

Leave a comment
by mikethestrand on June 28, 2026  •  Permalink
Posted in Bible, Blog, Church, History, Life, Sermon
Tagged , , ,

Posted by mikethestrand on June 28, 2026

https://pastormikesmusings.com/2026/06/28/psalm-45-sermon-manuscript/

Psalm 41 – Sermon Manuscript

-I heard a great story of the implications of what God has done for us this week from Christian apologist John Lennox. Now, he’s an Irishman so he has a much more enjoyable accent than me, and he’s much smarter than me, so I won’t tell the story quite as well, but I believe you’ll get the point.

-Cara and I celebrated 11 years of marriage this week. What if our meeting story was me seeing her across the room, going out to buy a cookbook for her and handing it to her on our first date. She’d look at me like I was crazy and ask what she’s supposed to do with it. What if I said, “well, on page 126 there’s a recipe for my favorite kind of tacos, and I happen to really like those tacos, so as long as you follow all those instructions to a T, you and I are going to get along splendidly!”  Now, I happen to have bought Cara a few cookbooks over our 11 years of marriage, but I’ve never told her that! And I’ve DEFINITELY never told her that her food doesn’t tastes the same as my mom made it!

-But how often do we treat our Christian faith that way? These aren’t rules God has given in order to make his life easy, it’s the inverse of the way God has designed things. My love for Cara has nothing to do with how closely she follows the rules in the cookbook, just like God’s love for us has nothing to do with how closely we follow the rules. It’s in the context of a loving relationship that this book can begin to make sense!

-What we get in the Psalms is a picture of someone who is in that loving relationship with God, and what that means for us to live in that relationship.

READ/PRAY (pg. 494)

How to read the Psalms:

-Annual reminder: 1 is called a Psalm, 2 or more is plural PsalmS 

-The book of Psalms is at times difficult for us to figure out what to do with. It’s very different from the rest of the Bible, some of the things said in here almost feel like they’re heretical because they’re making some big accusations against God, there’s sections that ask God to kill someone, and as I’m sure many of you talk about with your kids, there’s a lot of “big feelings” throughout this book. Yet despite the differences, it is God’s inspired, inerrant, and authoritative Word (inspired is a theological term that is trying to capture what Paul says in 2 Tim. 3:16: “God breathed”, inerrant means there isn’t an error, and authoritative means we have to submit to it). 

-They’re also written in Hebrew poetry, which can be an acquired taste! I’m not sure about you, but the poetry section for me in English class was NOT my favorite section (bit of a snooze fest, sorry Bob). Even the questions my teachers asked about poetry were so different from the prose! I could not wrap my mind around it!

-The Psalms can be similar. They’re often very contextually based on situations that happened in the Psalmists life that he’s processing through singing which adds another level of complexity to us interpreting them. C.S. Lewis said about the Psalms: “the Psalms are poems, and poems intended to be sung: not doctrinal treatises, nor even sermons.” I think he’s slightly overstating his case because there is such rich truth in the Psalms, but the primary focus of these is to be beautiful works of art that stir our affections toward God. Here’s how some early historic church pastors described the Psalms. (compendium is a brief summary of a larger work). The Psalms teach us all sorts of things about God, things like God is infinitely creative. The Psalms give us language for both our prayers and songs that give us room to express ourselves, to feel comfortable crying out to God in the good and bad seasons. But I thought of 5 ways we should read through all the Psalms:

-Prayerfully: we’ve talked about using the Psalms as an inspiration for prayer before. If you don’t know what to pray, pick a Psalm! Read the first phrase and pray whatever comes to mind, when you run out of things to say read the next phrase, and continue down. And do you know how many Psalms there are? 150, know how many days there are in a month (usually) about 30, you’ve got 5 Psalms for each day of the month. A psalm a day keeps the devil away! Our very own Joe Taylor created an app you can download if you want help with this practice called “Pray the Psalms”

-Devotionally: one of my favorite things about the Psalms is the way they train my heart and mind to think God’s Words in my prayer. It gives me words when I don’t know what to say, it trains my mind to think the right things and it provides a framework for us to know how to cast our cares on God (1 Peter 5:7) because He cares about us.

-Emotionally: whatever emotion you’re experiencing you can find a Psalm to correlate to it. Jesus did this, when He was dying on the cross, He was thinking about Psalm 22, and we know this because He quoted it from the cross! The Psalms help us know what to do with our “big feelings” and learn how to turn those feelings into prayers and times with the Lord. Friends, feelings aren’t bad, but they’re also not necessarily true, the Psalms teach us how to feel properly, bringing all our feelings to God!

-Repeatedly: we’re going to be taking the hymnal of the Psalms into eternity, so get started memorizing and understanding it now. It has been a regular practice throughout church history to read through the book of Psalms on a regular basis and it’s worth continuing that practice for us today.

-Christo-centrically: Jesus is the main character and focus of the entire Bible, including the Psalms. Dietrich Bonhoeffer said this of the Psalms: meaning that Jesus is the focus of the Psalms. The Psalm aren’t prophetic in the same way passages from Isa. or even what we saw in the minor prophets, but we need to read the Psalms looking for how they point us to Jesus.

-Read it as a prayer to Jesus. The book of Hebrews begins sharing the history of God’s revelation which used to be through prophets but now is through His Son. He then runs through a list of OT quotations that are pointing to Jesus, and in these verses quoting from Pss. 102:25-2, and we’ll see another example of this later in Psalm 41.

-Read it as a prayer of Jesus (as I just shared of what Jesus did on the cross)

-Read it as a picture of Jesus. Think of how Jesus describes Himself in John 10:11. Can any of you think of a Psalm that talks about God being a shepherd? Yeah, Psalm 23! Probably the most well-known one! Jesus is telling us all those things that we read about in the Psalms are about Him!

-With all that background, now let’s work our way through this week’s Psalm:

  1. The Mercy of the Lord (1-3)

-Title or description is in the original text. Many times, it’s just an educated guess going into them because it’s mostly musical notes or something like that.

-Let’s start with the first word: happy, some translations will say blessed, the intent is similar (at least in English), it refers to someone who is faithfully following God, and it points us back to the beginning of this entire book, because this book is carefully arranged to build on itself, so when we read that word “happy” our minds should go back to the first 2 Psalms that set the stage for everything else coming after.

-Look at how the first Psalm begins: how is someone happy? By not following after sinners but delighting in God’s instructions and allowing that to be the focus of your life and attention.

–Psalms 1-2 are connected by this similar theme, and if you look at the last 2 verses of Psalm 2 it continues building on the way to be happy, here it’s in those who take refuge in Him, so we’re already starting to put a composite together of what it takes to be happy: someone who delights in God’s Word and takes refuge in Him.

-Let’s go back to Psalm 41 now and see how else we can be happy:

-Considerate of the poor. Our minds jump to financial, but that’s not the only thing meant by this word, think of it more like lowly or meek. Remember how we’re supposed to read this focused on Christ? Can you think of a time where Jesus gave a blessing to someone who was meek? His beatitudes. Grant Osborne (prof. at TEDS) in his commentary on Matthew says: 

-So maybe Jesus was thinking about and meditating on this Psalm when He preached His beatitudes. Both passages are getting to this same idea:

-As followers of the Lord, we are expected to represent Him, which means looking out for the poor, weak, and marginalized and using whatever resources we have to care for them. I’ve been thinking about this idea the past week in terms of people who try to live without the church, and maybe some of you, even though you’re here, don’t feel like this makes a whole lot of sense. The sun’s out, it’s lake season, the fish are biting, and you’re sitting in this large room with some people that you may not even know that well. Why? One basic reason is because woven into creation is rhythms, you see it in the creation account in Gen. 1 where God says we’re given the sun and moon to be able to mark the seasons and days out, and part of that rhythm is a 7 day week, where we gather on the 1st day of the week to celebrate the resurrection and to be encouraged to live as Christians throughout the rest of the week. But there’s another reason to engage in the church: you’re not made to do life alone. 

-How can someone be considered happy? By being considerate of the poor, which means you need to be around other people who are poor! Not just financial, but I was thinking about one of the early descriptions of how the church acted this past week in Acts 2

-This has unfortunately been twisted beyond what it says, and some people try to argue that this means the early church practiced communism or socialism, but that’s not at all what’s being said! It says people still owned possessions and property, and as needs came up the church would meet those needs. It’s actually very similar to what happens here! When a family has a new baby, people from church will drop off meals as a way to help. When someone has yardwork needs, it’s easy to recruit a group of people from church to come help. It’s the church living as the church is supposed to live, always looking for ways to help others as the opportunities come up. 

-And this idea isn’t restricted to Psalms, here’s a couple examples of how we’re supposed to treat the poor from Proverbs.

-What is the outcome of someone who is “happy” and considerate of the poor: protection and preservation from the Lord. And this is important for David to make this note, because things are going to shift in the next verse for him:

  • The Cruelty of the Enemy (4-9)

-David has done all this work previously to talk about what it takes to be blessed by God, but now David is saying he is the poor one who needs God’s protection and preservation.

-What is this sin? No one knows! But David asks God to still be gracious despite his sin, which is why he had previously said that God sustains and heals those who are sick. David is connecting his sin to some kind of sickness that his enemies are using against him and hoping that he dies from

-What’s the connection between sin and sickness? We (I) tend to look on miraculous healings with a level of skepticism, we’ve all been trained that science & technology can solve all our problems, but is that true? The Bible doesn’t say that all sickness is related to sin, but it does say some sickness is! And we also see that we’re supposed to pray for those who are sick. It’s wrong to say that there’s no correlation between sin and sickness, but it’s also wrong to say that every sickness is connected to some kind of sin in a person, and that’s about as far as we can go with it! We need to be comfortable with some ambiguity.

-Again, not sure what event this is referring to where David is incredibly sick, but his enemies are using it to begin planning his demise

-There’s an interesting connection to David’s complaints with Psalm 2 (besides just the happiness piece we saw before), in vs. 7 David says of these people conspiring against him that they whisper together and are planning to harm him. It’s the same word used in Psalm 2 for what the nations are trying to do against the Lord’s Anointed One. David is casting himself in that light, He is God’s anointed one who has been called to lead the nation at this point, but he’s not the ultimate anointed one, although the ultimate anointed one uses this Psalm during His time on earth too, which we see in vs. 9

-The last verse in this section takes a dark turn, it’s not just enemies who are against David, it’s even a friend.

-Ate my bread, David opened his home, they fellowshipped together, God has given food as a gift to join people together. Have you ever tried to be angry with someone over a meal? I know it happens, but it’s hard to be angry when you’re enjoying good food & drink together!

-And Jesus knew this, shortly after he washes His disciples’ feet in John 13, He warns them about what’s coming and says that this Scripture must be fulfilled. Just because it’s also fulfilled in Jesus doesn’t mean it’s not also true of David. David had a friend betray him, just like his eventual descendant Jesus had a friend betray Him. If you’ve ever felt the sting of a friend who betrayed you and went behind your back, Jesus knows that pain, too! But there’s another promise even further back in the Bible that this is also picking up. When you hear something about a heel in the Bible, you should hear the first gospel message God gives His people in Gen. 3, right after the fall:

-The rest of the story of Scripture is this continual fighting between the seed of the woman and the seed of the serpent. In David’s case, his enemies are carrying out the serpent’s plan: try to destroy the seed of the woman, but since God is on David’s side it’s not going to work, which is where David turns next:

  • The Grace of the Lord (10-13) 

-God isn’t like David’s enemies or friends! God is always faithful and steadfast and will preserve David. But David says something that seems to contradict other passage of Scripture, how can David claim to repay others? Isn’t that something God is supposed to do? What would repayment even look like for a follower of God?

-David here is acting like a righteous King is supposed to by bringing about shalom, lasting peace in his nation, similar to what Peter says about those in authority:

-Part of that authority means punishing those who are trying to do evil. Now, that isn’t something we get to use today, the church isn’t given the task of fighting and protecting land, David was! Today, we trust God’s repayment, as 2 Thess. 1 says: We wait patiently and trust that God has a plan for us that’s better than anything we experience on earth. When we meet God, we won’t consider any trials or difficulties we experience here as not worth it. God is in the redemption and restitution business; we’re in the trusting business.

-David ends by preaching truths to himself. God delights in him, God defeats his enemies, God supports David, and David gets to be in the Lord’s presence forever!

-Do you see the connection between living a life of integrity and being in God’s presence, where true and lasting happiness is found? It’s us working in sync with the Lord where living a life that’s obedient to Him leads to flourishing for us. God has told us what we need to live a peaceful and contented life, the question is: do you believe Him? As I shared at the beginning of this message, these rules aren’t in place to allow us to “earn” being in right standing with God, these rules are God telling us how much He loves us! Do you understand that God loves you enough to send His Son to take our sin on Himself? That His Son was betrayed by a friend who shared His table even though Jesus lived in complete integrity all so that we could live in God’s presence forever. The only adequate response to that reality is the last verse:

-Most likely, this last verse wasn’t in the Psalm that David wrote. This is the end of the first book of 5 that make up the bigger book of Psalms, and each one of the books ends with a doxological note giving praise to God. 

-The purpose of these Psalms is for us to praise, and as we saw last week with the end of the Nicene Creed, amen is the correct Christian response to talking to God.

-The biggest takeaway from this Psalm for us today is the reminder that we have an example of the person who was considerate of us who were poor. I preached a series themed on this verse last August if you want to go listen to it further, but this is a verse I’ve been meditating on for the last year:

Leave a comment
by mikethestrand on June 7, 2026  •  Permalink
Posted in Bible, Blog, Church, Life, Sermon
Tagged , , , , ,

Posted by mikethestrand on June 7, 2026

https://pastormikesmusings.com/2026/06/07/psalm-41-sermon-manuscript/

In the Church – Sermon Manuscript

-We’re in our last week looking at the Nicene Creed! We’ve broken it down into the 3 persons of the Godhead: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, this week we’ll be looking at the institution that represents that Trinity today: the church.

-And once again, I found another bad creed for us to look at, from an organization that claims to represent all “progressive Christians”

-“Inherently evolving and always progressing” how does that relate to Jude 3-4? A faith that was “once for all” delivered to the saints? Should Christianity always be evolving? No! That’s the amazing thing about it, it’s true forever. Now it can be applied differently depending on the context, but Christianity itself will never change!

-Is Jesus THE Way, truth, and life, or not? 

  1. One, Holy, Catholic, Apostolic

-These 4 words have often become referred to as the 4 characteristics of the church, and I think we need all of them together because each new generation needs different reminders. We also need to be careful not to project current issues onto what the early church meant here. When we read “one” today, we tend to kind of chuckle to ourselves because of the abundance of denominations we have today. I found 1 article online that said there are over 50,000 “Christian” denominations around the world, and we’ll look at that in a minute, but think of what these 4 words together mean: it distinguishes them all from the different heretical sects that were popping up all over (one of which was Arius). And each one of these are brought up throughout the Bible as something Christians should be pursuing together. So let’s take each one in turn!

-What does it mean that the church is one? This signifies the unity that’s supposed to be true of Christ’s church, and this is literally something that Jesus prayed for during His last night on earth. Look at what He prays in John 17:

-First of all, I’m going to point this out every time we read this text, but I think it’s just amazing that Jesus prays for us. He’s facing His death and He takes the time to pray for anyone who will believe in Him. Another way of saying that is He’s praying for the church throughout all history. But look at what He prays for: that they would be one. He says it 3 different times!

-And look at the outworking of this: so that the world would know that Jesus was sent and that we’re loved by Jesus. But how can we confess that the church is one when there’s so many different churches that look & act differently from each other? And I want to propose potentially a different way of thinking through the unity of the church. There are 2 things we need to think through in relation to this: first we need a way of defining what actually is a church because it’s more than just meeting together (JW and Mormons meet together, and as I shared in the 1 sermon in this series, they also claim to be Christians. We’ll look at that more when we get to baptism). But secondly, what if, instead of being inconsistent with the differences between church and denominations, those are actually markers of unity?

-One of the biggest questions philosophers wrestle with is the connection between groups and individuals. How can there be unity & diversity at the same time? And I think it’s getting us back to the Trinity! The creation is pointing to the Creator who is united as 1 God who exists as 3 persons. So what if the different true churches are representative of the eternal God who can’t be contained by any 1 church or denomination? A couple things that might help illustrate this for you: how many families do we have represented in this room? Quite a few! Does every family look and act exactly the same? Nope! Even though we spend time together, even though we worship the same God, there’s variety in these families, just like there’s variety in church families. If that doesn’t help, think of all the various sandwich shops we have, kids, I need your help to list some of them! Subway, Jimmy Johns, Jersey Mikes, Erberts & Gerbets, and because I’m from Northfield, Hogan Bros. Every one of those places is taking basically the same ingredients (some places have better ingredients than others), and putting them into a similar vehicle for calorie delivery to your mouth, right? So again, we have unity and diversity in the way these sandwiches are compiled. It’s similar in the church, where each local expression of the church will do some things better than others, but together we better represent the unity and diversity in the Godhead. With that in mind, I want to look at one more passage:

-Paul also talks about this in Eph. 4 where he has a running list of “ones.” He calls the church a body, and it’s hard for one body to be divided, isn’t it? So while I do believe that the various expressions of church help us represent God, there is still the call for us to pursue unity and work to break down some of the divides that we see between true churches around us (true is important there).

-What does it mean that the church is holy? This is a way of saying the church is set apart, sacred, unique, but this marker also signifies that we’re supposed to represent God. Peter talks about this in 1 Peter (quoting a few passages from Lev.)

-And notice how Peter begins this section: children. We’re operating under the assumption that we’re brought in as adopted children of God, which changes the focus of this holiness. It’s not pursuing holiness as a way to earn God’s recognition or to get Him to like you, it’s pursuing holiness because you know that He loves you and desires your flourishing. And because you know that God wants the best for you, it means obeying the things He’s told us to do.

-As I brought up earlier, we know that each family has “traits” that set them apart from other families, you all have told me how much my kids look alike, and there’s literally nothing they can do about it! But there’s also certain habits or patterns that my kids pick up that I can do something about. The foods we eat, the games we play, the inside jokes we have, and that’s also meant to be true in the church! When the world looks at the true church, they’re supposed to see God represented in us and through us, which means holiness should be a family trait they see!

-What does it mean that the church is catholic? This word “catholic” is taking from word that means “universal,” NOT referring to the Roman Catholic Church (notice that the word is lower case when I didn’t capitalize it, meaning it’s not a proper noun). And we see this in Jesus’s last words in Matt. The church is supposed to have disciples in all nations!

-Each church I’ve been at I’ve introduced reciting various historical creeds, confessions, or catechisms (like we do here) and each time I’ve had someone get upset with me when they’re first introduced because we’re Protestants and not Catholics! Unfortunately, there has been a tendency to conflate church history with Roman Catholic, and that’s not a helpful way to view church history. Gavin Ortlund has done some fantastic YT videos from a particularly Baptist perspective on church history, if you want to learn more about church history from a Protestant and baptistic perspective, watch him!

-All that to say, when we confess that we’re a part of the catholic church, we’re saying that we trace our heritage all the way back to Jesus! It’s confessing that we’re a part of the global church today, connected to the historic church of the past, and will remain a part of the church into eternity!

-What does it mean that the church is apostolic? Just as I said, we’re tracing our beliefs back to Jesus, and His first apostles. Look at what Jesus said to Peter in Matt. 16

-We’ve looked at this other times, the rock that the church is being built on is Peter’s confession that Jesus is the Christ, it’s not being built on Peter being the first Pope (which is why Jesus 3 verses later changes Peter’s nickname to Satan!)

-But do you see the authority that Jesus is giving to the church? The binding and loosing is in terms of recognizing and affirming the salvation of the future disciples. That’s an unbelievably weighty task! Now I want to be careful about this because I know your ears may have just pricked up: isn’t salvation by grace alone, through faith alone, in Jesus Christ alone? Yes, but the moment you’re saved you’re brought into a family that recognizes and affirms that you’re a part of this family.

-One of the early church fathers, writing in the 3rd century (so before the Nicene Creed) wrote an entire book titled “On the Unity of the Catholic Church” (again, catholic meaning universal). In that book, he stated the importance of the church this way: but then he went even further and also said: Once again, we need to caveat this a bit because Roman Catholics have taken this the wrong way to say that outside the church they’ve created there’s no salvation, what Cyprian is pointing to is the reality that God’s representatives on earth right now are found in the church. Think back to the great commission that we read earlier in Matt. 28, who is that charge given to? It’s not given to individuals, the command is given in the plural, saying YOU ALL TOGETHER go and make disciples.

-Jesus founded the church as His earthly representation in this time between His comings and for us to follow after Jesus, we must be a part of the church, and since I talk about it so much, this is another one of the reasons I emphasize membership so much. Membership is a modern day response attempting to live out what Jesus has commanded because every human relationship requires a commitment on the part of both parties involved.

  • Markers of the Church

-This only talks about baptism, not the Lord’s Supper, but we believe those are the 2 markers that help us get at what a true church is (our denomination SOF says it this way). Before we look at those, though, one of the common critiques from Protestants to this creed is the forgiveness of sins (which I just mentioned comes only through faith in Jesus), so is this Creed saying that baptism is required for salvation? This is picking up on Peter’s words at Pentecost in Acts 2:

-Do you see the way repentance and baptism are intertwined? Baptism is meant to serve as a marker of the entry point of faith. Baptism is often the first step of obedience when the Lord has saved you, and the New Testament has no category for someone who is not baptized. Throughout the NT these 2 things are intimately connected together. You can also read Rom. 6 to see the picture Paul gives assuming that every Christian has been baptized.

-The other reality we confess about baptism is that there is “one” and we can see that in Eph. 4. This means that you shouldn’t be baptized more than once, that would be like asking to be born again (and I know that none of your mothers would sign up for that!) If you, any of you, have trusted in Jesus as your Savior, we would LOVE to baptize you here! We will fill up this tank anytime someone talks to us and expresses a desire to be baptized, so if that is any of you, please talk to me or anyone else on staff here and we’ll set up a time to talk about the significance of baptism and what it looks like.

-One other important thing to note about this creed is that it’s a summary of the bare minimum doctrines, but it isn’t a complete list of things that you need to practice or affirm to be a Christian. For example, baptism is only 1 of the ordinances Jesus gave to the church, the other is the Lord’s Supper. As I shared at the beginning of this series, creeds are written in response to questions or issues being raised, so at the time these statements were enough to articulate what the church is. 1200 years later, another confession was written that was working to distinguish the true church vs. false churches, and look at their summary: 3 things: correct preaching of the gospel, practicing of the sacraments (or ordinances) of baptism & communion, and church discipline (which I believe is a subset of the Lord’s Supper, email me if you want to know why).

-And I want to take some time to walk through the connection between those 2 things, because they are connected to each other, but most of the time we don’t think about their relationship. In fact, I’ve gotten into some debates with some pastors over this connection before! And that debate is: who should celebrate communion? And to answer that we need to think about what each sacrament is connected to. Baptism, as I shared earlier, is connected to repentance and the moment you’re saved. The Bible doesn’t have a category for an unbaptized Christian, which means anyone who is following Jesus should be baptized as a step of obedience to the Bible. Communion is connected to the ongoing sanctification (being made holy) of the believer, which I believe means you shouldn’t celebrate communion before you have been baptized, hence why I’ve shared before in various settings that I would discourage children from celebrating the Lord’s Supper until they have been baptized, because I don’t think it’s right to celebrate the ongoing practices until you have celebrated the beginning practice. There’s a logical connection to these 2 things that we need to keep in mind. This is also the historic practice of the church. The Didache (late 1st or early 2nd century document describing the practice of the church) says this:

-That being said, because I can’t point to a chapter and verse that makes this practice explicit I don’t believe it’s a sin if you get these out of order, and in my debates with people I’ve had people ask me: if someone got saved today would I bar them from the table? No! But the normal practice should be: saved, baptism, Lord’s Supper. And parents, you have a role to play in this: talk to your kids about what each of those ordinances mean! And if you don’t know how, talk to Erin because she’s a master at collecting books and resources to equip you to help your kids take 1 step closer to Jesus! Kids: talk to your parents about these things! And if you have put your trust in Jesus, talk to your parents about being baptized!

  • The Future Church

-This first phrase would have been viewed as ridiculous to most of the world at the time! What do you mean there’s a resurrection of the dead?! We need to squeeze as much pleasure out of this world as we possibly can, because once we’re gone that’s it! And I hate to break it to you, but that’s not Christianity. Christianity tells us that this world is broken, but redeemed, and that one day all the brokenness will be fixed, and the reason we can trust that is because someone told us that, and then He proved His words by rising from the dead.

-One of the most helpful passages for us to meditate on in relation to this is 1 Cor. 15. Paul tells us the necessity of the resurrection of the body because if there is no resurrection, then even Jesus is still dead, and if Jesus is still dead, then we have no reason to put our faith in Him. And it gets worse! Paul says if our only hope is in this world then everyone else should pity for us. But Jesus has been raised from the dead, which means the only people who should be pitied are those who don’t put their faith in Him!

-And Paul connects that reality to us for the rest of this section. Do you see how he refers to Jesus as the firstfruits here? That’s a way of saying Jesus is the picture of what we someday will be like. Those who belong to Christ will be resurrected just like Him, someday in the future when death itself is defeated and undone.

-And friends, the Bible also tells us about the life in the world to come, and the guy who told us what it will be like is the same one who rose from the dead, and since He’s the only guy who can claim that, I’m going to stick with His suggestions. Look at the picture we get of this new life in the last chapter of the Bible, Rev. 22

-In the new Jerusalem, after Jesus comes back, the city is divided by the river of the water of life. No more death exists there! And do you see the sources of this life? The throne of God and the Lamb. God is the source of all our life (remember last week we saw the Lifegiver?). And the tree of life produces fruit each month, the nations are healed, and the curse of sin is the only things that’s dead. And this life will never end! It says we will reign forever and ever.

-And the whole creed appropriately ends with a Hebrew word that means “this is true.” Which also happens to be the last word in the Bible, which is connected to another promise from Jesus. Jesus says that He is coming soon (which is a relative term when you compare it to eternity!)

-So John’s response: Amen, yes, this is true! And we respond inviting Jesus to return, but until that time we ask for the Lord’s grace to be with all of us, and just to reiterate that this is true, the Bible ends with this note of praise: amen. Yes, let it be true!

-We’ve made it all the way through this creed; how do we take this and begin applying it to our lives?

-First, we read and reflect on this as our pledge of allegiance to this Trinitarian God who exists as Father, Son, and Spirit, and we fall on our faces in worship of this mysterious reality that brings us into the loving relationship of this God.

-Second, we use this as a reminder of what is most important in our faith, this summary of God’s plan in salvation to rescue, reconcile, and redeem a people for Himself. This reminder of what the church throughout history and the world together believes and confesses as the mark of orthodoxy.

-Finally, because of the way this creed (and the Bible) ends, we use it as a reminder to hope! Jesus is coming soon, so we say: amen and amen, this is true, so come, Lord Jesus, come!

Leave a comment
by mikethestrand on May 31, 2026  •  Permalink
Posted in Bible, Blog, Church, History, Sermon, Worship
Tagged , , , , , , , , ,

Posted by mikethestrand on May 31, 2026

https://pastormikesmusings.com/2026/05/31/in-the-church-sermon-manuscript/

In the Holy Spirit

-Looking at the Nicene Creed in celebration of it’s 1,701st birthday. But each week, we’re also looking at a different creed to see why we need to have creeds. I’m guessing you’ve seen this one before, there’s a house in my neighborhood that has it up:

Let’s think about what this is saying:

-Black lives matters. I agree! As the nursery rhyme that I still sing to my kids says: Jesus loves the little children of the world, red and yellow, black and white. But, we have to differentiate between this statement the organization Black Lives Matter. BLM as an organization has some major disagreements with Christian faith, but we as Christians can affirm that black lives do indeed matter! 

-Science is real: science is merely observation, this is as helpful as saying “science says…” science doesn’t “say” anything, scienTISTS can say things as they interpret data and observations.

-Love is love: we talked about that one last week.

-Kindness is everything: have you looked at gas prices? I can’t use kindness to fill up my tank! It’s a ridiculous platitude that’s meant to give warm fuzzies but doesn’t mean anything!

-And Christians can be guilty of doing the same thing: I’m “pan” millennial, we’ll see how it all “pans” out, I’m as Calvinist as the Bible says and as Arminian as the Bible says. Study these issues! Those are an excuse to be lazy, and God doesn’t call people to laziness! Friends, this is why we need creeds in our lives to help protect us from laziness or theological drift. A friend sent me this yard sign that if anyone wants to buy for me I will gladly stick in my front yard:

-I’m going to ask you to stand for the reading of God’s Word, but we’re going to do something a little bit different, I’m just going to read them to you and ask you to listen and not follow along in your Bibles quite yet because I want to read the primary texts that get to what we’re studying today.

–Gen. 1:1-2; Luke 1:26-35, 4:1, 14-15, John 14:15-26, 16:12-15

  1. The Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed

-Technically, the creed we’ve been studying is referred to this way instead of just the Nicene Creed, because there are 2 editions of this. I shared at the beginning of this series that we’re celebrating 1700 years since this was written, but that’s only partially true. The conversation continued over the next decades, so in 381 they landed on the finalized version of the Nicene Creed that continues to be used through today.

-Now before we look at the biggest difference, I want to remind us where we’re starting and the reason this Creed even exists. God is the creator of everything, but there’s a hard line between God and creation, you’ve seen this each week. Arius worked hard to emphasize the one-ness of God and thus argued that Jesus has to go below the line. He argued that since Jesus was “begotten” then there had to have been a time when He was not. But the council, tracing what the Bible said, disagreed with that argument and said that Jesus Himself claimed to be one with the Father, therefore Jesus is above the line.

-The next question they had to work through gets us back to the beginning of last week’s section, where it said that Jesus’s work was “for us and for our salvation.” How do we bridge this divide? History traces humanity’s attempts at building a ladder to try to get up there, most specifically seen at Babel where humans did their best to reach the realm of the gods (in the heavens above), but despite humanity’s attempts, there is nothing that can bridge this gap. God exists completely outside of His creation, we can’t do anything to get up to Him, which means He has to come down to us, which just so happens to be the story we see in the Bible! Out of the overflow of God’s inner love comes the physical created world that is created to love God and love each other. But how can we be brought into that Trinitarian love? That’s where we need the Holy Spirit living in us, which the 325 edition of this creed didn’t articulate very much, here’s the comparison:

-The first edition made a basic statement that didn’t give much clarity, which meant guess which debate came next? Yeah, people trying to argue that the Holy Spirit was less than God. There was a group that called themselves the Pneumatomachi (side note, but if you’re going to create a heretical cult, this is a great name to use) which is Greek for “Spirit-fighters.” Just as Arius denied that Jesus was fully God, this group denied that the Holy Spirit was fully God, proposed by a guy name Macedonius. So how did the church respond? They convened another council to re-articulate and defend what the Bible says by fleshing out what they meant when they said “and in the Holy Spirit” previously.

-This takes place all the time, like you know how policies and laws always get created in response to something happening? That’s exactly what’s taking place here. At a previous church I was at, there was a policy in the wedding manual (but nowhere else) that banned Dungeons and Dragons, which means it could be played anytime EXCEPT when a wedding is going on! I would have LOVED to have known what happened that led to the banning of a board game because you know it was in response to some funny story!

-1 other big difference between these 2 editions is what is included after the section on the Holy Spirit: 

-This was removed in the 381 version because they wanted to use it as devotional and liturgical statement to be used in the church and by Christians.

-hypostasis and ousia are used as synonyms here (untranslated to be able to see what exactly is being said) and ensuring that Arius couldn’t use his preferred word and get away with it. Hypostatis refers to personhood or being, and ousia is the same thing (at this time). Eventually, hypostatis is the preferred term in referring to the persons of the Trinity, so what we looked at last week is what theologians call “the hypostatic union,” Jesus having 2 natures but 1 Being or essence. And if you’re already confused, then use that confusion to marvel at our God whose ways and thoughts are above anything we can ever imagine!

-So now let’s all recite the Niceno-Constantinopolitan creed together again (and I hope some of you are taking the time to memorize it throughout the week! There are papers at the tables on your way out if you haven’t gotten one yet!)

-This last phrase I’m breaking up into 2 weeks, this week we’ll just look at the Holy Spirit, next week we’ll look at where He’s at work: in the church. 

  • The Life-Giver

-I intentionally pulled this word out even though it’s not the first word used to describe him because I love this summary of the Spirit’s work, and the Greek is 1 compound word “life-giver.” Have you ever thought of the Sprit as the one who gives life? We read Gen. 1 earlier which explicitly mentions the Spirit being involved in creation. We know from other passages in the NT that the Son is also involved in creation, so we see from the beginning the Trinitarian nature of God.

-This is intentionally mean to contrast with the dead. Think of what Rom. 8:11 says: the Holy Spirit’s role in salvation is literally to bring us from death to life spiritually. 

-And we also see the role of the Spirit in the act of creation twice. First in the verses we read earlier where the Spirit is involved in bringing life to the primordial chaos, but then we see His work implied when the text focuses on the creation of humans in Gen. 2: notice that it’s not until the man is giving breath that he becomes a living being, so the Spirit’s role is to give life.

-We read these verses earlier, too, but that theme comes up again in the new creation of Jesus inside Mary’s womb. Look at how both Luke and Matthew describe what happened.

-Back to the creed: the Lord, the same as Jesus, pointing to unity between Son & Spirit

-The ordering is both biblical & logical. We started with the Father, then talked about the Son, and now we’re getting to the Holy Spirit, and that’s the reason we refer to them as the first, second, and third persons of the Godhead. It’s not significance, it’s the way God reveals Himself to us. 

-What is “proceeds”? Another word theologians will use in reference to the Spirit is the word “spiration” which just means breath.

-They’re trying to answer the question: how do we talk about the distinctions within the godhead? How do we determine the difference between the Son & the Spirit? Last week we looked at the word “begotten” in relation to Son seen from John 3:16, proceeds is the word chosen to refer to the Spirit’s relation because of John 15:26 (remember, they’re working to define how the Bible reveals God to us) so we see that the Spirit proceeds from the Father, while the Son is begotten from the Father.

-we’ll talk about the part in brackets as the third point, so hold onto that

-The theme in this next section is the Greek word syn being used repeatedly in this section, it means “with” or “together.”

-a literal way of trying to translate this idea would make zero sense in English in most cases, but it appears 3 times: “with”, “co-worshipped” and “co-glorified” attempting to signify that we worship God as Father, Son, and Spirit.

-Something I’ve been mulling over for a few years that comes out of this: do we pray to the Spirit? And I at times struggle to land on some of this discussion because there’s so many excesses of conversation that we need to avoid, but that doesn’t mean we should stop thinking, studying, or learning about the HS, but if the HS is God, then shouldn’t we also pray to Him? 

-I also think emphasis matters, because the primary focus throughout Scripture is on the Father (think of the Lord’s Prayer, how does it begin?), the second emphasis is on the Son, and the third emphasis is on the Spirit, which means if we’re following the Bible our addressing of God should follow a similar pattern where we direct our prayers to our Father, addressing him through the Son, and we do so in the indwelling power of the Holy Spirit. And even the work of the HS is meant to focus our minds in a specific direction: towards Jesus.

-I love what Charles Spurgeon said about this idea in one of his devotionals: Friends, part of the reason we struggle with sin is because we’re too busy looking at our sin or at ourselves instead of looking to Christ! Ask the Holy Spirit to focus your eyes on Jesus instead of yourself! 
-As always, because we’re in the realm of God, there’s more that could be said, but we don’t have time to dig into it today! I have plenty of books for you if you want to borrow them!

-The last phrase on the Holy Spirit gets to the realm of speaking. Have you ever considered the reality that our God speaks? And not just that God speaks, but sometimes God speaks through people! Where it says the prophets here, just replace it with “the Bible.” Anytime we see the Spirit speaking it’s going to drive us back to the Bible, and we see examples of that throughout Scripture:

-Look at what David says in 2 Sam. 23:2. Who is that spoke through David? The Spirit!

-Look how the author of Hebrews refers to the OT in 3:7. He’s quoting Psalm 95 there, but who does it say was speaking in Psalm 95? The HS!

-But it’s not just the OT the whole Bible is inspired by the same Spirit! 2 Tim. 3:16-17 tells us that ALL Scripture is “inspired by God” is trying to translate another compound Greek word made up of God + breath/Spirit, some translations have “God-breathed”, again inspired by the Spirit, and notice the goal of this inspiration: for us to be complete and ready for every good work (which comes about through the Spirit working in us)

-The last example of the Spirit speaking through Scripture: 2 Peter 1:21. I love the picture Peter paints here! “carried along” God working in them, but not leaving them off the hook, all this comes because the third person of the Trinity lives within us in some mysterious way through faith.

-Not let’s get into the most debated phrase of this whole thing: 

  • Filioque

-If you don’t know Latin, this word is Latin for “and the Son.”

-Let’s go back to the verse for the wording of this creed “proceeds” in John 15:26

-It sure looks like the Son is somehow involved in this process, right? And there’s other passages like John 14:16, once again Jesus is involved in the sending of the Spirit, even if the Spirit doesn’t “proceed” from the Son.

-The biggest debate about this whole creed is whether or not to include “and the Son” of for the procession of the HS. This is pointed to as the reason for the split of the church between the east and the west. The phrase wasn’t added to the creed until 589 (200 years later), at a Western council in Toledo, Spain

-And this wasn’t a trivial matter! One of the eastern bishops named Photius wrote in 866 (pardon the French): do you see how strongly he’s condemning the phrase?

-And he has a point! Notice the word ecumenical, we tend to view that word with at least skepticism today, if not outright dismissal as someone who pursues just the lowest common denominator in theology instead of taking a stance, in this case view it positively as something the whole church together affirms.

-We’re Western Christians, we’re products of affirming that the Spirit proceeds from both the Father and the Son, but is that the best way to describe their relationship?

-Some terms theologians use to help us understand are in Latin: one refers to the mysterious inner workings of the Trinity that we can’t fully understand, the other refers to the external workings of the Trinity (and if you go digging into this further you’ll find that theologians will also refer to this distinction as the economic or the immanent Trinity, economic as the external workings, immanent as the internal)

-And if you just got more confused: we need a way of distinguishing between the work of God Himself versus the way we experience him in the history of salvation. For example, we can say that God lives in us from the moment we’re saved, but we can’t say the Son lives in us. Similarly we can say that Mary is the mother of God (another early church debate!), but we can’t say that Mary is the mother of the Father. Or one more example, we can say that God died, but we can’t say that the Father died.

-The phrase “and the Son” wasn’t in the original, so it shouldn’t be considered a marker of orthodoxy, but we do have to acknowledge some kind of relationship between the Son and the Spirit. Maximus the Confessor (another great name) said it should be proceeds from the Father through the Son.

-Words matter, definitions of words matter, and God’s revelation matters above all of them! And one of the joys of being a Protestant (that’s another church history issue for another time) is we can look at some of these debates as outside observers who continually go back to the Bible and try to defend what the Bible says. So a couple passages that I think help us get some more glimpses into the Trinity:

–John 16 shows the Spirit obeying Jesus, and says that everything the Father has is also Jesus’s, which you could argue that if the Spirit proceeds from the Father, then He must also proceed from the Son.

-In contrast to that, Mark 1 tells the account of Jesus’s baptism where all 3 persons of the Trinity are glimpsed together, Jesus in the water, the Spirit like a dove, and the Father affirming His Son. But then what happens to Jesus? He obeys the Spirit. And once again, we’re left with a mystery as to how the Godhead works “ad intra” or internally. We experience the Trinity “ad extra” and the Spirit (through the Son) brings us into this loving relationship within the Trinity, but we will never completely understand how this relationship works. And each time we bring up this mystery, we need to fall on our face in worship of this God. 

-I want to end our study on the HS today in John 20. Because of what God has done for us through His Son and in the Spirit living in us, we have peace with God. But the Spirit living in us is also the reason we’re still here in the world. The Spirit living in us is the reason Jesus sends us out into the world to both show the world the love God has for them, and to live holy lives in the world as a picture of what it means to follow Jesus.

-There’s also a note in here about sins, which leads us into the Lord’s Table. The church is the place where we gather each week to remember what’s truly true: that we have been adopted into this family of God that comes from the Father, through the Son, and in the Spirit. This family allows you to have your sins forgiven and together works towards ensuring the purity of Christ’s bride. 

Leave a comment
by mikethestrand on May 24, 2026  •  Permalink
Posted in Bible, Blog, Church, History, Sermon
Tagged , , , , , , , , , ,

Posted by mikethestrand on May 24, 2026

https://pastormikesmusings.com/2026/05/24/in-the-holy-spirit/

In One God – Sermon Manuscript

-My parents offered to watch the kids last night, so Cara and I got to go out for a date night, and we tried a new to us place called Crisp & Green in AV. Decent salads and smoothies if you’re looking for a salad! But they had something on the wall that serves as a perfect illustration of why we need to study something like the Nicene Creed: 

-I’m not sure about you, but I’m not looking to a salad place to tell me what to believe! Also, what does it mean to be 100% authentic? There’s all sort of different creeds that people hold to today (one of which is always be 100% authentic to yourself). But what is a Christian creed? What do we claim to believe in?

-We’re going to kick this series off reading from Deut. 6:4-8 (pg. 157)

-Our bread and butter here is picking a book of the Bible and walking through it. But how do we know how to interpret what’s in the Bible? Another way of asking this question is: how do we know which interpretation is the correct one? I share this regularly when I preach, but there are debates about all sorts of things in the Bible! The correct translation of specific words, the authors meaning behind the words, why some authors use words differently (if you want to wade into the waters look at the different ways Paul and James use the word “works”). One way the church (when I say that, I’m referring to the universal church) has tried to answer that question is by creating creeds, or statements of belief. Generally, these occur in response to specific questions or issues that are brought up as people start digging into Scripture, and the earliest debates in the church were focused on the question of how Jesus could be God. How could a first-century Jewish man who ate, walked, breathed, and slept be the Creator and sustainer of the universe? Especially when at the core of the Jewish faith is the confession that the Lord our God the Lord is one. I’ll mention this now as a teaser, but the big debate centers on this picture: where does Jesus fit in the understanding that God is unique when there’s a hard line between God and creation, does Jesus go above or below the line?

-One of the first things we have to admit is that in order for us to know God, He has to come down to our level. John Calvin, in his institutes, said, “God, in so speaking, lisps with us as nurses are wont to do with little children.” He’s saying that any talk God does to us is like baby talk, which is good for us, but it also means there are things that are said that we can’t fully understand, if we could completely understand God then He wouldn’t be God, we would! So then as we dig into what God has revealed, it takes some work and effort for us to figure out exactly what is meant in this “baby talk.”

-We also need to do some (what I have previously called) “Theological tune-up” from time to time! It’s worth trying to take some of what the Bible says and putting it together into a coherent system of belief (which is called systematic theology). I’ve shared this picture before, but it bears repeating as a reminder of how we grow in our knowledge and understanding of God. Exegesis is working to answer the question what does the text say? Biblical theology answers the question how has God revealed His word organically and historically, tracing various themes and ideas throughout the whole Bible. Historical theology answers the question how has the church historically understood this text? Systematic theology answers the question what does the Bible say about certain topics? And finally, pastoral theology answers how should humans respond to God’s revelation? We need all of these disciplines, but they’re often segmented off from each other, and in preaching the tendency is to do exegesis and then jump to pastoral theology without doing any further work. This series is intentionally taking some time to drill down into systematic theology, how do we put together what the Bible says about God? And all of these areas of study shape and inform each other in a feedback loop to help us grow in our understanding of what God has spoken to us. We need all of them working together to help us.

-I also like being late to the party, last year was the 1700th anniversary of the writing of the Nicene Creed, so I thought we should look at it, but I’d rather look at it after everyone else has already done it! My hope by the end of this series is that some of you have this creed memorized! So instead of doing a key verse in the sermon notes for this series, I’ve printed off some half sheets that have the whole thing on them, and the elders are also working to memorize it to recite at our meeting next month (so feel free to ask them how they’re memorization is coming). We’ll ALSO be singing a song after the sermon each week that helps us learn the words to this creed and move to a proper response. The words are also going to be on the screen each week, so would you please recite this creed with me (modern translation that I linked to in the sermon preview)

  1. What is a Creed?

-At the most basic level, a creed is an articulation of right belief, it’s where we get the word orthodoxy from 2 Greek words: orthos meaning straight or correct, and doxa meaning praise or belief. And that’s just 1 of the orthos, because for Christians the end goal isn’t just orthodoxy, the end goal of correct belief is orthopraxy (praxis Greek doing or practice) which is guided by orthocardia (right emotions), this is loving God correctly with all our heart, mind, soul, strength. This is meant to be a means of aligning what it is we believe with each other.

-Sometimes creeds were called symbols (from the Latin symbolum) which served as a sign or a token of being on the same side. For example, imagine a soldier is approaching a building at night, it’s dark outside, so the soldier standing guard says, “Halt! Who goes there?” and this army has a response that means they’re on the same side (open sesame). Another meaning of the symbolum is a pledge of allegiance giving from a solider when they were inducted into the army, they were given a creed something to recite that served as their confession in. Similarly for Christians, when they were baptized, they were pledging their allegiance to this God. 

-There are a number of what we could call “creeds” throughout the Bible (different than other creeds because these are all inspired), but there are numerous phrases that were used to identify God’s people throughout Scripture. One of the common phrases I’ve heard from Evangelicals is “No creed but the Bible.” And I understand and empathize with that impulse, but as soon as we say that we’re actually enacting a creed! And even more difficult: what do we do when heretical groups claim the same thing, as we’ll see with Mormons and Jehovah’s Witnesses? Really briefly, a few examples of what could be viewed as creeds throughout the Bible:

-We read this one earlier, Deut. 6, and do you see how this is God’s people pledging their allegiance to Him alone? God’s Words are to be at the forefront of everything they do.

-Another example is found in 1 Cor. 15, Paul quotes something that he says he received. That is he didn’t make it up or come up with it, it was passed down to him, and then he passes it down to the churches he plants and supports. 

-Another one is thought to be found in 1 Tim. 3, which again focuses on Jesus.

-Finally, there’s a few different places where we have a VERY short creedal statement, I’ll use Rom. 10:9, but it’s also found in 1 Cor. 12:3, Phil. 2:11, and that is the proclamation that Jesus is Lord. It’s a confession of truth, of aligning ourselves to this specific God who took on flesh as the God-man Jesus.

  • Why Study a Creed?

-The first and most important reason is because creeds provide guardrails that serve as protection from heresy. One brief caveat here before I continue, that word is used far too loosely today by so many online organizations that become “heresy hunters” who are trying to condemn as many people as they can! It’s not a Christian virtue to constantly be looking for problems in others. I have a pastor friend who likes to say that Christians are called to operate with the perspective of love, which means we assume the best about others, we don’t operate with the perspective of skepticism, that’s not a Christian virtue. That being said, heresy is still a real thing that we need to be aware of! So a few examples of groups today who deny the Nicene Creed, and why we need to understand what this creed is saying:

-We’ll start with Jehovah’s Witnesses (of which Michal Jackson was a part of, and so was Prince). On their website under what they believe they say: 

-Do you notice that they’re quoting the Bible to back up what they believe? Does that mean that they’re orthodox in those beliefs? Absolutely not! In fact, I often see JWs at the library when we take our kids there, with their displays to try to convince others to join this heretical cult! 

-What about the group formerly known as Mormons (LDS)? Here’s a quote from their website from an article titled “Becoming Like God.” Distinct beings, unity of the divine. What is divine, and what are beings? But Joseph Smith said some pretty crazy things too, like: Does any of that sound like what we read in the Bible, or like what we read about in the Nicene Creed?

-One more modern-day example: United Pentecostal Church International (oneness penecostalism) again deny the Trinity. There aren’t 3 persons of the Godhead, they are 3 “modes” or perceptions of God. They even explicitly state that they baptize only in the name of Jesus.

-Do you see how they’re taking the Bible and twisting and distorting it to fit their ideas? They even reference various verses but then ignore or gloss over any verses that don’t fit within their ideas. This is why we need creeds to correct the areas where we may be tempted to twist the Bible. As an example, my kids will often ask the question “Does ____ believe in God?” So YouTube stars, actors, basketball players, etc. And that’s fine for their age, but as you get older you know it’s not enough to ask that question, you need to go to the second question of WHICH God someone believes in. The Nicene Creed tells us which God is the God of the Bible that we should worship.

-Secondly, it allows us to avoid what CS Lewis called “chronological snobbery.” Friends, we are not the first Christians to live! God has been at work among His people for millennia, and it helps us to know and love God by learning from the examples of those who have wrestled through various issues in the past.

-A secondary question to the above is why study of THIS creed (besides it being the 1701st anniversary of it). Because it’s the most important creed in church history. It’s the only creed that has been affirmed by every branch of orthodox Christianity (not the eastern orthodox church), thus serves as a good foundation for “theological triage.” If you haven’t heard that before, you haven’t been coming here very long! We need a way of ranking specific doctrines, because denying some of them would land put you in heresy, but other doctrines have a wide margin of belief to them and you’re not in doubt of worshipping the wrong God. 

-If you noticed when we recited it, it’s broken down nicely into 3 sections that all begin with “We believe” and each section refers to 1 person of the Godhead: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The trinity is what separates Christianity from every other religion that has ever been created, and whatever language we use for it is going to fall short in some area. We’re entering into the realm of the divine when we talk about theology, which means there’s going to be things that our human minds can’t completely comprehend. There’s also no analogy that accurately describes the Trinity (egg and clover they’re all separate, water can’t be all 3 at the same time, human as father, son, and husband only gets to the relational aspect of the trinity but breaks down into modalism). 

-In an attempt to simplify some of this conversation, there are 7 statements that are true about God, which are all found in this picture. So if you can start to understand this picture, you’re starting to grasp the one true God who has revealed Himself to His creation. 1. The Father is God. 2. The Son is God. 3. The Holy Spirit is God. 4. The Father is not the Son. 5. The Son is not the Holy Spirit. 6. The Holy Spirit is not the Father. 7. There is only one God.

-I’ve shared this story a couple times before, but it bears repeating as we begin this series. In seminary, you’re required to take some theology classes, which means we got to read a few books about theology. In talking about the Trinity, my professor said because we’re in the realm of God, we have a “mystery” card to play, but that doesn’t mean as soon as we enter into that realm we jump to waving the “mystery” white flag, we need to put in the work before we jump to the mystery. Our focus over the next 4 weeks is going to be exploring the beautiful doctrine of the Trinity, what theologian Fred Sanders calls “the happy land of the Trinity.” Even the word “trinity” isn’t in the Bible, it’s a word that humans came up with to describe this picture: tri (3) unity.

-Why was this creed written? In response to an early church debate that was taking place. There was a bishop (elder/pastor) named Arius who was trying to uphold the unity (oneness) and uniqueness of God. If God is one, then that means that even the Son had to be created by God. He was picking up the terminology from one of the most well-known Bible verses: John 3:16 (in the old NKJV that I memorized it in), begotten means there was a beginning time, right? That’s how it works with humans, I begot my kids, there was a time before they existed. Unfortunately, we can’t project the way humans work unto God. So when Arius was reading this, he equated begotten with created, but that’s not what is meant by this statement. God’s begetting is connecting to the way they relate to each other, not the way ordering of the Godhead (we’ll get there, don’t worry!). But Arius began teaching this, and apparently even created catchy songs that were spread across the Mediterranean by sailors (Athanasius said the songs weren’t even very good).

-Recently converted emperor Constantine, in order to protect the unity of his kingdom convened this council that met in Nicea to determine who was right: Arius or Alexander (bishop of Alexandria). Over 300 bishops convened, and there wasn’t a clear winner at the beginning. But it’s important for us to know that they didn’t set to determine ALL orthodoxy (inerrancy and the books of the Bible wasn’t even a discussion topic, contrary to Dan Brown’s presentation) primarily focused on the deity of Jesus, and worked to clarify the relationship God had between Himself and how that impacts us today.

-I mentioned Fred Sanders earlier, but I love the way he summarizes the way we respond to God: 

-We’ll be discussing more about the council each week as we work our way through the creed, but with all that background, let’s look at the first section:

  • God is One

-We believe: instead of a mere intellectual ascent, this is a way of ascribing allegiance to the one true God, who has declared from the beginning that He is one. He has no parts, He cannot be divided, He is completely united in being. This begins in the same place that shema began as a way to acknowledge the past history of God’s work. One note on this creed, the authors worked their hardest to use only biblical language, and they were successful with all except 1 word. But you’ll need to come back next week to find out what that 1 word is! There’s also some debate over how to translate this opening phrase, some manuscripts have the plural (we), others have the individual (I). One purpose in having this creed is to give something for those who were getting baptized to agree to! So in that case, it’s I believe, but WE all affirm along with those getting baptized.

-Second, the first things He’s called is Father, and this gets to His relation to His Son, Jesus, and because of what Jesus has done it also describes His relation to us. He’s not just the father though, He’s also the almighty. The words used by this creed were used to refer to some other gods too, in this case it’s a way of saying that God is the ruler over everything.

-He’s also the maker (or creator) of heaven and earth. This is a way of saying everything (like when someone says I’ve been working day and night, you don’t take it to mean there was no breaks), it also echoes the language of Gen. 1

-Lastly, it alludes to Col. 1:16 when it says that God created the visible sphere and the invisible sphere. But this also is a way of denying the Gnostic heresy that said Jesus was just 1 of a plethora of gods in the supernatural realm.

-This is the shortest section of the creed because this wasn’t really up for debate. Even the heretics believed in the unity of God, but what do we do with it today? We believe. Belief is more than just a mental check box (like saying you read the terms and conditions of every app you download), this is confessing our allegiance in this God who is completely united and can’t be divided. This God created everyone, including you and me, and what’s the most amazing about this God is He doesn’t leave us alone. He comes down in flesh to bear the penalty for our sins and then comes down to indwell those who confess that they believe in His name.

3 Comments
by mikethestrand on May 10, 2026  •  Permalink
Posted in Bible, Blog, Church, History, Sermon, Worship
Tagged , , , , , , ,

Posted by mikethestrand on May 10, 2026

https://pastormikesmusings.com/2026/05/10/in-one-god-sermon-manuscript/

« Older Posts