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Acts 8 – Sermon Manuscript

Witnessing to the World

-One of the scandals of the church is who gets to be a part of it. Have you ever noticed the way we work to build ourselves up and tear others down? When we’re little we measure things like height or speed as those who are the best. As we get a little older it becomes intelligence or athletics. Then it’s your bank account and house. But all those pursuits end up leaving people wanting more, while Jesus comes and tears down all those markers that we use to divide. Which means the church has forever been filled by a group of people who don’t look like they should get along. Today we’re going to see the church break down numerous cultural and social divides, which is meant to continue being the call of the church today! I love pointing out that in this room there are 5 different generations of people, where else do they willingly give up their time to be together? Men and women, grandparents and babies, Millennials and Boomers, Gen X and Gen Alpha, all gathering together around the goal of taking 1 step closer to Jesus.

READ/PRAY (pg. 973)

  1. Dispersion of the Church (1-8)

-Last week we ended tracing the ministry of Stephen, one the 7 table ministers, and we were introduced to this new character: Saul. This week’s text picks up with him, which is a great time to remind us that verse numbers aren’t inspired! They were added hundreds of years after the fact to help with navigating it, but that’s why you’ll read in Heb. 2:6 “But someone somewhere has testified:” and then he goes on the quote from Psalm 8. They were compiled onto various scrolls! So vs. 1 should be seen as the conclusion of the killing of Stephen before going on to describe the rest of the persecution. But Saul brackets these 3 verses (1 & 3) so we’ll look at those together.

-Saul ravages: he’s learning where the Christians are meeting, takes men and women and throws them in prison. It was a unique thing for women to be included in this persecution at the time, and even more unique for Luke to specifically call out that persecution. This likely means that everyone viewed the women as vital to the spreading of this church. Instead of just attacking the leader, Saul systematically attacks them and throws them in prison. As I’ve said, I’m going to bring up membership as we see it throughout this book, it’s likely that Saul found some list of who was a part of this group (we today call it a membership list). He wasn’t just going door to door, he was careful and strategic.

-But the middle section tells us that this “severe persecution” doesn’t accomplish what Saul was hoping, instead it says the disciples “scattered” into some new places.

-Think back to Acts 1:8, where Jesus prophesied where the disciples would be His witnesses: in Jerusalem (which is where they’ve been up to this point), and where else? Judea and Samaria and the ends of the earth, look back at vs. 2, where did they scatter to? Exactly where Jesus said they would. God isn’t behind evil events, but even evil events accomplish God’s ultimate plans.

-What do those who were scattered do? They keep doing exactly what they were previously doing! But now they’re doing it in new places, they can’t help but continue preaching the Word everywhere they go. And I think this is something for us to consider too. Do you talk about the word wherever you go? Jesus tells a story about this in Matt. 13 where a farmer spread seed, and the ironic thing about the it is he’s a terrible farmer! Throwing his seed on the walking path next to the field, in a patch of rocks, with the thorns, he’s indiscriminately throwing the seed everywhere he goes. That’s what we’re supposed to be doing with the Word! What’s different about us and this farmer is we don’t know what the soil of someone’s heart is, but regardless of the person we’re talking to, we give the Word.

-The focus shifts to Philip in vs. 5 who was another one of the 7, and just like Stephen has an incredible preaching ministry.

-Our translation says that he went to a city, but some manuscripts (and some translations) describe this as THE city, referring to the capitol. That seems to make sense based on the significance of this story. We’ve seen the conversion of the Jews at their capitol city of Jerusalem, now we’re going to see the conversion of the Samaritans at their capitol city, but Philip just goes doing exactly what all the disciples were doing: spreading the Word about Jesus.

-We’re starting to get in a bit of a rut here because we’ve already seen all these exact same things happen before. Luke tells us that the Word ministry is once again connected to signs. We didn’t read what signs Stephen was doing, here we see what those sings were: exorcisms, healing of the paralyzed and lame. This is a manifestation of something I said last week: the Word ministry and the practical ministry are 2 sides of the same coin; you can’t separate them out. If you believe in the Word, it will be made visible through your actions.

-And the outcome of that ministry of Word and deed leads to great joy. What about when the ministry leads to oppression and persecution?

  • The Samaritan Pentecost (9-25)

-The outcome of Philip’s preaching is the faith of the Samaritans, but that means that there’s also going to be some kind of response from Satan to distract or deter the Word from doing its work, which leads to:

-meeting a new man named Simon, and the first thing Luke tells us is that he had practiced sorcery (magic) that had amazed the people. Today we would say he was dabbling in the occult or involved in dark spiritual practices. This battle between Jesus and the demons will come up again later because Jesus and other spiritual beings don’t get along, but Jesus is greater and stronger than any other being.

-Luke also tells us that Simon claimed to be “somebody great,” last week we saw the impulse of the human heart is always drawn back to Egypt, this week it’s the same idea with a different focus. Another way this sin is made visible in our lives is through trying to make your own name great, but that’s the opposite of how God has called us to live. And this is another thing that we can trace back to the beginning, in Gen. 11 we read the story of some people trying to build up their own names. Their goal is to build a giant tower that reaches the realm of the gods where they can build their own power & prestige, and then look at what the verse says their goal is: to build a name for themselves. Church, the human heart hasn’t changed in thousands of years!

-Today we call it platforming, building a brand, or influencing, and that has no place in following after Jesus. In fact, if what we’re doing leads to us getting the attention, what we’re doing might just be the wrong thing. Our job is to proclaim the Word, point people to the one the Word talks about (Jesus), and then get out of the way. And the unfortunate reality is the church is often just as guilty of this as the world! We chase after the latest fads, we appeal to Christian celebrities, missing how much of an oxymoron that is. In fact, one commentator I read said this story of Simon is the first “celebrity” conversion in the church! But that misses the reality that the point of being a Christian is Jesus, not us.

-And when Philip shows up in Samaria, he changes the dynamics and the focus of all the people! Suddenly Simon doesn’t have the corner on the market and this new gospel news about the kingdom of God is the latest fad in the area leading to some kind of mass conversion.

-Look at what Philip talks about here: the kingdom of God and Jesus Christ. What did Simon talk about? Himself! Since we’re in church, I think I’m allowed to confess this, but I love watching comedians, especially ones that do observational humor like Nate Bargatze and Brian Regan. Brian Regan has a bit about the “me monsters” at a get together (Google it later this afternoon if you haven’t seen it, Vikings are off this week and the Packers aren’t worth watching this year). We’ve all experienced that! Someone who can’t stop talking about themselves (and if you don’t know anyone like that, you’re probably that person). But what Jesus offers us is the ability to get over ourselves and begin to legitimately care for other people around us. In contrast to the “me monster,” CS Lewis said if you ever met a truly humble person, you wouldn’t walk away thinking about how humble they were, but about how kind they were in taking an interest in you. I need these kinds of reminders on a regular basis! It’s so easy for me to become overly fixated on my own comfort or desires instead of worrying about those around me, but that’s not the way of Jesus. Jesus frees me from fixating on myself and allows me to legitimately care about others.

-Apparently, even Simon the Sorcerer believed and was baptized, but that decision either only went skin deep or was a false conversion as we’ll see soon, but that’s getting a little bit ahead of the story.

-Word travels back to the apostles in Jerusalem about the effectiveness of the Word, so Peter and John are dispatched (remember, they’re still the leaders of this movement), but why do you think they’re both sent? Philip’s already there, why does there need to be 2 of the apostles. 2 primary reasons:

-First, according to the OT law, for something to be true, it requires 2 witnesses. Peter & John make 2!

-But the second reason is so they could pray for these new believers to receive the HS. This is one of those cases in this book where what’s described isn’t the normal course of events in the lives of Christians, because today there isn’t any gap between the faith and receiving the Holy Spirit, which means we need to ask the question, why is there this gap of time here? I found Australian commentator Dr. David Peterson helpful here:

-That’s why I titled this section “The Samaritan Pentecost” it’s a repeat of what happened in Jerusalem in Acts 2. And I also think the apostles were there to see that God wasn’t just working in the Jewish people anymore. The Samaritans and Jews were enemies for most of history, in fact, in Luke 9:54, John asks Jesus if he should call down fire on a city of Samaritans for not giving them a place to sleep! Suddenly that apostle is now praying for those same people that he wanted to kill! And in response, the Samaritans receive the HS.

-And just as we saw after Pentecost in Jerusalem, a couple wanted to appearance of holiness, the recognition and acclaim that came from being involved in this new community, an alternative option pops up here, and Simon the sorcerer re-enters the story. He wants whatever it is that the apostles have, and he thinks he can buy it. What’s interesting is he can tell that SOMETHING has happened. There are whole denominations that use this as evidence that we need to experience some kind of miraculous indwelling sometime after our conversion, but this isn’t something that’s true of the normal Christian experience, instead this is a unique event that shows the spread of the early church and connects this event to the Jerusalem church (leaders)

-Additionally, think about Simon’s request with a previous time Peter & John were asked for money back in Acts 3:6 “silver and gold I have NONE,” does it seem like money is something that could influence Peter & John? Nope! In fact, one of the requirements for elders later in the NT is “not a lover of money,” which means if you wouldn’t trust someone to help you with your finances, don’t trust them to be a leader in the church (but the inverse is also true: if you trust someone to be a leader in the church, you should also trust them to talk to you about finances without it affecting your relationship)

-And Peter won’t be affected by any money and condemns Simon. The words Peter uses here follow a number of OT curses God said He would give out to those who were disobedient: “part” or “share” alludes to Deut. 12:12, “poisoned by wickedness” from Deut. 29:16-21. Peter is saying this man isn’t truly a part of this new covenant community.

-It’s important for us to see that Simon doesn’t repent, he asks Peter to pray for him. If he’s truly saved, he would be able to pray on his own!

-And we’re left wondering: what happens to Simon after this! Does he repent? Does he continue looking for power from other places? Old stories would do this, leave them unresolved for us (parable of the prodigal: what happens to the older brother?). We’re forced to provide some kind of conclusion in our own mind, how would we respond if we were in this position? A modern-day example of this would be: how do you respond when someone confronts you about a sin issue in your life? Do you dismiss them? Make excuses? Blame someone or something else? On the one hand, at least Simon asked for prayer instead of trying to justify himself! But what we should do is cry out to Jesus! He has already paid the penalty for that sin, and He’s given us the Holy Spirit to combat those sins.

-But Simon isn’t the main character, this section ends with Peter and John going back to their primary focus: preaching the Word as they travel. Are you starting to catch the theme of this book? We’re tracing the expansion of God’s Word into the furthest corners of the world, beginning with Judea and Samaria. This also fulfills what Jesus said to the Samaritan woman in John 4 where He said a day was coming when Jews & Samaritans would all worship in spirit & truth, this story is that becoming a reality!

  • All Are Welcome (26-40)

-But Philip goes a different direction than the apostles, and this time the Word is going to expand even further out from the Samaritans. We looked at this map earlier, previously he driven out from persecution up to Samaria, now an angel tells him to go south towards Gaza, and Philip obeys! And who does he run into? Another person who wouldn’t have been allowed anywhere near the temple.

-4 descriptions of this person: Ethiopian, man, eunuch, high official. This is the kind of person Roman culture despised, referring to eunuch’s as the ultimate “non-man” but also not a woman, so the prevalent culture wouldn’t have a place for him, but notice what else Luke tells us: in Ethiopia, he was a high official, which tells us he was well connected highly thought of in that culture, even if the Jewish world didn’t have a place for him.

-Luke also tells us that he had come to worship in Jerusalem, making him a “God fearer,” someone who even though he wasn’t a Jew, was working to obey the 1 true God, and what’s incredible is this man likely wouldn’t have even been able to go into the court of the Gentiles because he was a eunuch! But even though he couldn’t “meet” God at the temple, God was coming to meet him on this desert road

-And he’s reading the scroll of Isaiah out loud! Contrast this with what we’ve seen of those opposed to the spread of the church so far in this book who won’t even consult the OT, much less work to obey it. So we’re seeing that God has been at work in other cultures too and has been subtly drawing the nations to himself. What this may be fulfilling is a prophecy from Isa. 56, which would have been just a few inches lower on the scroll this man was reading. Look at what God says about this man:

-Instead of being excluded from the temple worship, the eunuchs and the foreigners will be servants of the Most High God, they’ll be bringing their offerings to worship God together because God is the God of the world, not just 1 nation. But it all depends on their response to Jesus, which is who this eunuch “just happens” to be reading about!

-And Philip is commanded by the Spirit (how?) to run up to it, so he does. And he asks a simple question of the man: do you understand?

-Philip is starting with where this guy is at, taking advantage of the opportunity presented to him, being faithfully present where God has called him to be. We need to be on the lookout for similar situations around us! I remember a time I was working on a sermon in a Starbucks (again, I apologize to all you Minnesotans, Caribou’s aren’t as plentiful in CO), someone asked me what I was in school for because I had a few commentaries scattered around me. If you’ve never seen a commentary, they tend to be pretty large! But one of the baristas asked me where I was going to school, and I got to tell him I was working on a sermon which led to me talking about the church just down the road. Not every conversation goes like that, sometimes when people find out I’m a pastor they stop talking to me! But all of us should be taking advantage of opportunities like that to point people back to Jesus.

-This eunuch is reading from Isa. 53:7-8, which is a Messianic prophecy pointing forward to Jesus, and where the conversation began with Philip asking a question, now the eunuch asks Philip a question: who is Isaiah talking about? And that’s all Philip needs! He starts with that passage in Isa 53 and goes from there to talk about how Jesus is the ultimate fulfilment of what Isaiah was talking about. I think we see Paul telling us part of the significance of this story in Rom. 10: We need both the Word and teachers of the Word to help us understand what God’s saying. The Bible is both simple and complex: simple enough that children can read and benefit from it, but so complex that you can get advanced degrees in studying it because there’s SO MUCH to it! But don’t stop reading, studying, and digging in to it, when God’s Word gets into you, you won’t be able to stop talking about it and taking advantage of every opportunity to share about it with other people, you’ll always end up talking about the things you love, so if you love Jesus, He’s guaranteed to come up in every conversation, which is exactly what Philip has done, which apparently included the need to demonstrate your changed heart by being baptized, so chariot comes across some water and the eunuch asks another question:

-And I guess there’s nothing that would stop him from being baptized, because that’s exactly what Philip does. Once again, it’s important for us to take a minute and talk about this because there are some Christian groups that argue that you need to be baptized in order to be saved so they push for instantaneous baptisms when someone is saved. That’s not what this text is saying! We are saved by grace alone through faith alone in Jesus Christ alone, but since this man has demonstrated that he wants to be obedient to God, he wants to move forward with the sign & seal of that salvation through baptism.

-As soon as the baptism is finished, Philip is apparently carried away by the Spirit to a new place, which means this has to be the weirdest baptism in history! One of my kids has shared that they want to be baptized, but is scared I’ll leave them under the water too long (which probably says more about me than her fear), imagine getting baptized, coming out of the water, and the person baptizing you is just gone! But instead of freaking out (like I would do) the response of the eunuch is the same as the Samaritans: rejoicing, praising God, giving thanks for this salvation, and that’s the last we’ll read about this Eunuch, intentionally contrasted to Simon the Sorcerer, here we have a wonderful conclusion! Salvation leading to rejoicing, which is where we’re now supposed to ask: which one are you like? Jesus says something about what’s going on here in Luke 10:20 right after he sends his disciples out to begin preaching. They come back on cloud 9 because even the evil spirits listened to them!

-In this story, Simon was trying to hold on to power and influence, trying to build up his name and even called himself great, but he ends up with nothing. The eunuch, whose name we don’t even know is given a gift of infinite value, and he walks away rejoicing just like Jesus told His followers to do!

-Philip “appears” somehow in Azotus, then works his way up to Caesarea continually preaching the gospel. Once again, here’s the map showing Philip’s travels (with a skip from Gaza to Azotus), but everywhere he goes he’s continually preaching the gospel, taking advantage of any and every opportunity.

-Which is the primary focus of our witnessing, too. Church, we are the church whether we’re gathered here on Sunday or scattered across the south metro into the places we work, live, and play. And God has placed us there for a reason: to be His witnesses here, to preach the gospel here, to live the gospel here, and to share that gospel with everyone we can. But to do that, we need to be willing to die to ourselves, to be like John the Baptist who said, “He must increase, I must decrease.” Now if you don’t know how to do that, let me recommend a book to you, and then after you read it, anyone on staff would love to talk to you about it!

-And those of you who do feel comfortable talking about Jesus wherever you go: what does another step of faithfulness look like for you? Maybe it’s inviting someone to church, maybe it’s finding a book to read together, but everyone has room to grow in living as Jesus wants us to, so let’s take a step this week to grow in our desire to share the gospel with other, and pray for opportunities to come up where you can talk about what Jesus has done for you!

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by mikethestrand on October 18, 2026  •  Permalink
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Posted by mikethestrand on October 18, 2026

https://pastormikesmusings.com/2026/10/18/acts-8-sermon-manuscript/

Acts 1 – Sermon Manuscript

-New series in a new book. Going through it quickly this Fall, we’ll come back and dig into it a little more deeply someday in the future, but the purpose of this series is to help us trace the storyline of the book of Acts. Each year I pick a “word of the year” for our church, and this year’s word is “Witness” which is also one of our core values. My hope for us from this book is that our church grows in our witness to the world around us as we see the ways the early church witnessed to the implications of Jesus’s resurrection. And just so you hear it this week: God has a tendency to use normal people who are living normal lives do accomplish extraordinary things. You don’t need a million YT followers, you just need to be faithful to speaking what God has done in your life. Our job today is the same as the early disciples, we’re called the translate the gospel, which means becoming fluent in bringing Jesus into every situation we encounter.

-Hopefully you picked up a Scripture notebook on your way in, if you’re planning to stick around for the series. We buy those each time we go through a new book of the Bible for you to take notes in, and then keep, and then go back in the future and see what God taught you through our study of this book together. Also, a special welcome 4th graders who are here now: we’re thrilled you’re here, and I hope you take good notes in your new Bible!

-One of the biggest notes for us as we read narrative in the Bible is not everything is directly applicable to our lives. For example, in today’s text, we’re going to read about the disciples casting lots, and we’ll read about Judas committing suicide. Those aren’t stories that we’re supposed to copy in our lives today. The stories in the Bible reflect real events with real people and some of them serve as examples of what we shouldn’t do in our lives.

-Some key themes to look out for each week: Jesus is the main character, which is true of every book of the Bible. It all flows out from His fulfillment of the Father’s plan, as demonstrated through the power of the HS. If you didn’t hear that, each person of the Trinity is intimately involved in this story.

-God’s work going out is connected to the God’s Word going out. We looked at this a couple weeks ago in Acts 6 where another pivotal moment in the early church led to the Word of God spreading throughout His people.

-The last theme (and the title of this series) is Jesus’s witnesses spreading 3 ways: through HS indwelling, leading to salvation, establishment of churches.

READ/PRAY (pg. 966)

-Luke gives us an introduction to this book that sets us up for the rest of the book

-It also connects us back to his “first narrative” the Gospel of Luke, so let’s look back at that to see how Luke began that book:

-Original eyewitnesses (there we get that again), servants of the WORD

-Know the certainty: our faith isn’t on empty speculation, but verifiable facts and stories. And if you think about it, each time we read the Bible, we join the 2nd generation of Christians, we’re relying on the eyewitness testimony that we read and hold in our hands!

-Theophilus is likely Luke’s financial benefactor (name means loved by God, common 1st century name) 

-Focus on Jesus, Holy Spirit, convincing proofs (what do you think those were?)

  1. Witnesses Require Power (1-11)

-Focus on Jerusalem, central to God’s plans throughout history, also the place where He was killed. 

-Baptism with the HS, as I said earlier, the expansion of the HS is a theme we’ll trace throughout the book. Today, there’s an intimate connection between water baptism and baptism of the HS, we can’t separate those events out, but God is doing something different here in the early church.

-Vs. 6 the apostles tend to get a bad rap for this question, and there a sense where we look at them as ignorant or narrowly focused, but look back at vs. 3, what had Jesus been talking to them about? The Kingdom of God! The issue wasn’t that they were asking about the kingdom, the issue was the timing.

-But this bears some thinking about for us today. A theologian I enjoy has said the temptation is for us to be Acts 1:6 Christians, when Jesus says we need to be Acts 1:8 Christians. What does that mean? The temptation is always to look to worldly means for salvation, but what Jesus offers is something that is above and beyond this world. Chuck Colson used to say, “Salvation won’t arrive on Air Force One.” What Jesus offers is something that in the world’s eyes is as insignificant as a mustard seed, but over time grows and grows and impacts and influences every sphere of the world, that’s what the church is going to do.

-One of the realities about being a witness to Jesus is that you need to live like someone who has seen the resurrected Lord. It’s not enough to go through a mental checklist of beliefs, it requires a holistic life change that affects everything about you: what you say, how you work, how you spend your time and even your money. Jesus requires a complete reorientation of everything you do.

-And it starts with the indwelling power of the HS that spiritually raises us from death to life and allows us to follow after Jesus, then once the Holy Spirit lives in us, we get to be His witnesses, and this has both geographical and political implications. Geographical: it describes the spread of the church and gives a basic outline to the rest of the book (first chapters center on Jerusalem, expand to the surrounding nations, then ends in Rome), but politically it signifies that Jesus’s kingdom isn’t bound by the same national boundaries as the surrounding nations. Something different is taking place in Jesus’s kingdom that can’t and won’t be contained or restrained by other nations and civilizations.

-And one of the new things I learned about this call from God this week is that when Jesus is calling them witnesses, He’s pointing back to a Messianic prophecy from Isaiah (which also tells us something about this book, this new covenant people will re-enact some of the suffering servant ideas found in Isaiah).  

-Isaiah (through the guidance of the HS) is saying that when God’s salvation comes, His people will serve as the witnesses to this salvation, so when Jesus picks this up, He’s saying that what Isaiah spoke about is taking place among this new covenant people called the church. 

-This is the only account of the ascension in the Bible, which contains allusions to previous OT experiences (Elijah & Elisha), and the cloud covering connects to both the transfiguration and theophanies (encounters with God) in the OT (Luke 9:34 “While he was saying this, a cloud appeared and overshadowed them. They became afraid as they entered the cloud. 35 Then a voice came from the cloud, saying, “This is my Son, the Chosen One; listen to him!”) and theophanies like in Ex. 19:9 “The Lord said to Moses, “I am going to come to you in a dense cloud, so that the people will hear when I speak with you and will always believe you.”

-Another piece the cloud cover and Him the angels saying “Come back the same way” points us back to (Dan. 7) isn’t it incredible how the Bible connects together?

-2 angels question shakes the disciples out of their stupor, they’d already been giving their marching orders, the question was: were they going to pursue it?

  • Witnesses Require God’s Plans (12-26)

-They obey, at least initially! They go to Jerusalem to wait for the arrival of the HS. 

-One of the biggest issues throughout the Bible is the lack of obedience to God’s commands. It began in the garden, it continued to their kids, continued with Noah, continued even with the tower of Babel. In order to read and interpret the book of Acts properly, we need to know all these stories from the Bible! God often works in similar patterns and themes throughout the biblical storyline (as we’ve already seen a couple times in this story), and if we can bring those stories to mind, it will help us understand what’s taking place here. We see a similar idea here: God’s initial plan is to have Adam & Eve expand the garden so it covers the whole earth, the people are supposed to spread out. But their disobedience culminates in the tower of Babel where they are going to build a tower to get them to the realm of the gods and to ensure they never needed to scatter out, so God confuses their language and forces them to scatter! We see something similar happening here, Jesus tells them to wait, and then scatter, we’ll have to see if they do!

-The list of the apostles connect back to Luke 6, where Luke used the same list to talk about them, but back then it included Judas Isacariot who betrayed Jesus and then killed himself (as we read earlier), they’re down to 11, which becomes an issue in a bit.

-But do you notice what they’re spending their time doing: gathering to pray. Asking God to strengthen them and move in them, and prayer will come up again, so keep it in mind.

-And others were with them (next verse says there were about 120 of them – become a church member!), women who followed Jesus, including His mother and brothers. The last time the brothers were listed they were trying to stop Jesus. Apparently, they saw something that changed their mind. And I don’t know about you, but I have 2 sisters, I don’t think anyone could ever convince me they’re God in flesh (another reason to believe in Jesus) 

–16 Peter is the focus of these first chapters, we’ll trace his early ministry until we meet Paul “It was necessary” Peter begins by acknowledging God’s sovereign hand even in Judas’s betrayal. And you may be here facing your own betrayal: work, family, friends, even in the church! And this text reminds us that God sees you, knows the pain, and wants you to look to His Son. I was reminded this week of Heb. 12:2 “keeping our eyes on Jesus, the pioneer and perfecter of our faith. For the joy that lay before him, he endured the cross, despising the shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God.” Did you see that what Jesus was focused on in the midst of his death on the cross was the joy on the other side of it. The way Jesus could face betrayal was because He knew what was on the other side of it. And church, the reason we can face betrayals today is because we know what joy is coming someday. It might not be today or tomorrow, but someday it will all be worth it. 

-God is good, and His plans are good, even when they lead us through the darkest valley, even when it means His only begotten Son hanging on the cross and bearing the weight and penalty for the sins of the world that was in rebellion against Him. In the midst of that grief, He looked forward to the joy of His bride united back together to Him.

-This next section is a parenthetical note from Luke about what happened to Judas, pretty self-explanatory, so we’ll jump down to vs. 21

-What’s interesting is there are very strict qualifications for who is fit to serve in this role. It has to be someone who was an eyewitness to every event of Jesus’s ministry, which is why we believe that this church office of Apostle doesn’t exist today: no one else can give eyewitness testimony to all of Jesus’s earthly ministry. 

-Why do you think they needed to do this? We don’t see any place where Jesus says they needed to be 12, we’ve already seen there’s other that were also with them. AND Peter seems to be taking the immediate context of his Psalm quotes and stretching them a little bit beyond what they’re supposed to mean. So let’s talk about what Peter is doing.

-First, we need to stop claiming to read the Bible “literally.” The Bible isn’t intended to be read literally, one of my favorite hermeneutics professors says we’re supposed to read it “literarily” according to the genre that it’s in (the Bible is more like a library than a book). But by reading it literarily, we’re also supposed to read it as pointing us to Jesus. He is the main character of the whole story, the OT points to Him, the NT points back to Him, which means we constantly need to be asking the question: how does this text point us to Jesus? What Peter is doing is reading and interpreting David’s Psalms of complaint and lament through the lens of Jesus and saying what David experienced point to and are fulfilled in the experience Jesus had during His time on Earth. 

-Which gets us to the bigger biblical theology picture of what is taking place: Jesus is the true Israel who was faithful in every area that Israel failed (wilderness wanderings, temptations). After coming through the wilderness, Jesus chose 12 apostles as the new patriarchs of His movement (Luke 22:30“And you will sit on thrones judging the twelve tribes of Israel.”), and now that Christ’s work is done, the apostles realize they need to fill the vacancy of this new movement of God’s people called “the church” to be able to sit on those thrones when Jesus comes back. Because Jesus is the focus and direction of the whole Bible, His arrival literally changes everything! We need to read the Bible with our focus on Him. I love what Spurgeon said about preaching: preach the text and then make a beeline for Jesus! Our impulse as Christians today needs to be to be looking for Jesus throughout the whole Bible, and if the focus is on anything else, then it’s wrong. 

-One other thing this story is revealing is the delegated authority Jesus gave to these 12. The Gospel and beginning verses of this show us Jesus’s work in the church, now the focus is shifting to the new generation of leaders who have been tasked by Jesus with leading the church, His new people that will eventually comprise every tribe and tongue and nation, and that delegated authority is why we’re here today.

-Luke continues the story in vs. 23: either there were only 2 people who fit the criteria of seeing all of Jesus’s earthly ministry, or they decided together which 2 they wanted, but they were left with Joseph and Matthias. And then, importantly, they took more time to pray. Each time a new movement or direction of the church is brought up, the disciples take time to pray, which is a good reminder for us to spend time in prayer before we (individually and corporately) are making decisions. And don’t forget that the prayer listed here is communal: all of them gathering together to pray.

-And this is a specific prayer: God knows everything, including what the early church needs, so they ask Him to reveal which of these 2 should take the place of Judas, and the Greek is a play on words: Judas left his place as an apostle to go to his own place. This is similar to the Fall in Gen. 3, where Adam & Eve left their rightful place as images of God, and went to their own place of rebellion against God. This is another example in Scripture of the reminder that there are only 2 ways to live: either for God or against Him.

-After praying, they proceed to cast lots. Now there’s a whole bunch of discussion that we can have about this! Is this something we should do today, anytime we need to pick elders we should find 2 men, pray, then cast lots? Is this God endorsing gambling?

-First, there is actually biblical precedent for this move. Prov. 16:33 says: 

-So this isn’t outside of God’s control. But we also have examples from the OT where the people cast lots, one example is when the land is being portioned out to Israelites, they cast lots to determine which part of the land they entered (Josh. 18:6). This may be a connection back to that story as the new symbolic Israel is also chosen by lots, or it might just be that this was the way God worked at the time! 

-But the second and bigger issue is the timing of this, and it’s what makes us today different from the disciples then: we have the Holy Spirit, and one of the descriptions of the HS in the NT is a guide, He leads us towards holiness and righteousness. Now, little spoiler, the HS will come down in power on the disciples next week, but today’s text occurs before that indwelling.

-One last comment on this: this is the only time in the whole Bible Matthias is named. It doesn’t mean that he doesn’t matter, but it’s another reminder that the focus of this is Jesus, not the apostles! AND this is a bit of a spoiler, but one of my favorite phrases in this book comes after the indwelling of the HS in Acts 15: 

-Last week, I got a question come in that I saved for this week because it gets to this text. The question was: how do we determine the voice of God?

-And this text is working to answer that, even though it’s in a different era than we’re in today. So, for us today: how do we determine what God’s calling us to? There’s a little book that came out in 2009 that was so helpful for me that helped me answer this question, because so many times people I talked to referred to some mystical experience that I couldn’t duplicate! And the guidance Kevin says in this book is: live a holy life where you seek God above everything else, live in a church community, pray, and then trust that God will work in whatever you’re doing (as long as it’s not sin). 

-One way I’ve seen this in my life is with my dad when my family moved to MN. He was asked 3 separate times before he accepted the job, and each time he was asked, he brought it to the elders and submitted it to them. He told me that he needed to practice what he preached, and he was tired of people leaving the church without talking to anyone in leadership, and he refused to do that. The third time he was asked, the elders decided that “it seemed good to the HS and them.”

  • What Are You A Witness To?

-Over the next 3 months we’re going to be exploring together what it looks like for us to grow as witnesses in every area of our lives. We just started a 9AM class on parenting, and one of the realities is we’re supposed to be witnesses even in our parenting. Every single one of us witnesses to something in our lives, and Jesus’s invitation to us is for us to continually point people to Him. Now, when I hear that, it blows my mind, because I think that God had to have a better option for spreading His message! He willingly chooses broken, messed up people like you and me as His witnesses.

-And I think this is a growth area for our church. One of the descriptions I was told about our church when I came was that most people that walk into our church came in with well-worn Bibles, which means we haven’t been good at inviting unbelievers in. So, my prayer this Fall is that we as a church grow in being faithful witnesses in every area of our lives. In his book The Rise of Christianity, Rodney Stark, a sociologist (who at the time of writing this book wasn’t a Christian) argues that Christianity’s growth followed typical human impulses without needing any spiritual influence. It’s a fascinating book that I think points to some of the normal ways God works. But one of the things he says in this book is: 

-What that means is we as Christians need to be inviting others into our relational sphere on a regular basis. Invite unbelievers to your LG, invite them over for a meal, have them rub shoulders with your friends at church. I still believe that relationships are the best way for us to be witnesses to others. Even coming up on October 24, we’ve got our annual Fall Fest, which is intentionally designed to be an outreach event! Invite your friends, neighbors, coworkers to join us! And then continue inviting them to join us until they start to see the realities of who Jesus is!

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by mikethestrand on September 13, 2026  •  Permalink
Posted in Bible, Blog, Church, History, Life, Sermon, Worship
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Posted by mikethestrand on September 13, 2026

https://pastormikesmusings.com/2026/09/13/acts-1-sermon-manuscript/

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:

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by mikethestrand on August 30, 2026  •  Permalink
Posted in Bible, Blog, Church, History, Sermon, Theology
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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!

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by mikethestrand on August 16, 2026  •  Permalink
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Posted by mikethestrand on August 16, 2026

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

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by mikethestrand on June 28, 2026  •  Permalink
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Posted by mikethestrand on June 28, 2026

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

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by mikethestrand on May 31, 2026  •  Permalink
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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. 

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

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

In One Lord – Sermon Manuscript

-We’re spending 4 weeks looking at the Nicene Creed because it helps provide a foundation for what we as Christians need to affirm. It’s the 1 extra-biblical document affirmed by all branches of the church and helps us learn how we should talk about the God of the Bible. Today we have a special treat, though, because there’s 1 word in here that’s not found in the Bible, which we’ll get to in a little bit.
-Also, remember that this wasn’t written to determine the books of the Bible (I don’t like that terminology anyway, humans didn’t determine the books that God inspired, they affirmed them, feel free to ask me about that sometime if you want)
READ Col. 1
-But just like we had a bad creed last week, I have another really bad creed that went viral a few years ago during a livestream from a “church” in Edina (I won’t even mention the name of it), called “The Sparkle Creed,” and it is as bad as that makes it sound. Are you ready to hear it? DO NOT recite this one with me because it is horrible: 
-non-binary doesn’t work to a being that isn’t gendered, God is spirit so that’s a category mistake. Also, He always reveals Himself in the singular and masculine throughout the Bible, so why aren’t they using God’s preferred pronouns?
-I have no clue what fabulous tunic Jesus wore, Joseph wore a fabulous tunic in Genesis, but not Jesus (maybe they confused the 2 people?). Jesus also didn’t have 2 dads, this completely ignores the mother of Jesus, you can’t create a baby with 2 dads!
-And on and on the nonsense goes (what does an AIDS quilt have to do with Jesus? love is love is love?) What are they actually confessing to believe in and where is their unbelief here? This whole thing is merely a humanistic statement that aligns with all our modern culture’s little-g gods. I shared last week that it’s significant that the Nicene Creed begins with WE believe (although some manuscripts said I in terms of one being baptized), but look how this one begins. Friends, this is one of the biggest problems in our world today: excessive focus on the individual. Even for Christians in the West, we view our faith as something we pick and choose. We jump from church to church whenever we want, we run from commitment and complain when things don’t perfectly align with what we want. And in that world, Jesus offers us something radically different: an invitation into a relationship with the triune God, who has eternally existed in a loving relationship of 3 equally divine persons, and our job as Christians is to invite others into that relationship that happens from the Father, through the Son, and in the Spirit.
-The question before us today is point one in my outline:
Is Jesus God?
-Think back to last week, I said the primary question the early church was working to determine was in this world, where there’s God, then a HARD line that separates Him from His creation, where do you put Jesus? Arius (4th century pastor) argued that the Son has to go below the line because God is one, so he used the phrase “There was a time when the Son was not” as his motto. But is that what the Bible actually reveals about God? I alluded to this last week, but Dan Brown (who just used an argument from Bart Ehrman) in The da Vinci Code spun a funny story about the Nicaean council meeting to “create” the Bible that ostracized people and didn’t represent “true” Christianity. That’s nothing close to what happened! In fact, this debate pushed people back to the Bible, and many of the early church fathers had the entire Bible memorized! Their writings are dripping with quotes from the Bible, which is why the Nicaean creed is similarly dripping with the Bible.
-One of my favorite professors in seminary said he wished instead of asking “what do you believe” when talking about this creed, pastors would ask “In whom do you trust,” because this creed is focused on the God of the Bible, not in what we do. So I’m going to ask you to recite it with me again this week, and following my professor, church, in whom do you trust?
-I want to look at 2 passages from the Bible before we work our way through the creed that will help us answer this question and will help us hear where some of the wording from the creed comes from! 
-First, John 1. John begins by alluding to the creation account of Gen. 1, and then goes on to tell us that the Word (who John later reveals is Jesus) was in the beginning. And this Word was with God and was God. With and was, separate and together. And then we see our preposition that we got from Fred Sanders last week: through. From the Father, through the Son, in the Spirit. He’s also described as the light (which is important for the creed)
-Second is what we read earlier, the Christ-hymn of Col. 1. Building up to this, Paul has been saying focusing on what we have in Jesus, then He bursts into this praise: the image of God, if you want to know what God looks like, look to Jesus. Firstborn (but not in terms of being created, this is priority) and we see that creation was THROUGH Him (visible and invisible). He is before and holding together everything, and He’s the head of the church. AND the Firstborn from the dead (pointing to another resurrection that we will experience). God has ALL his fullness dwell in him. How much is all? All! Nothing’s left out of God’s fullness dwelling in Him (that’s another way of saying He’s God). Jesus also provides the way to peace: through His blood. 
-I don’t know if you picked up on it from those passages, but those pretty clearly seem to be saying that Jesus is God, don’t they? And just in case we missed it, look at what Jesus says in John 10:30. And this is the point where the Jews know exactly what He’s saying and pick up rocks to kill Him! The question is: how do we talk about that? And that’s where the debate came from at Nicea:
-We’ll take this in 2 parts, the first is the divinity of Jesus, second is the work of the incarnate Jesus.
The Only-Begotten
-First thing to note is just as we confess one God, we also confess one Lord, but then it goes on to describe the HS as the Lord! That’s intentionally done so that we understand that Jesus and the Holy Spirit are also united. This word has a wide range of meanings throughout the Bible: used in the Greek translation of the OT to translate the divine name (Yahweh). In the NT it can refer to Jesus as God, and in other places it can be a sign of respect (such as calling a ruler my lord). In this case, it’s referring to Him as His divine name.
-Jesus Christ, transliteration of Joshua, the one who led his people into the promised land, and Christ is the anointed one, the long-awaited Messiah from the OT.
-Now we get to the good stuff! The only-begotten. Taking language from John 3:16, the creed states that Jesus is the only one who was begotten from the Father, and that this “begetting” is eternal.
-This is where Arius got off, because it’s a category error to assume that God is exactly like us, and this is also where this is good news for us. Begetting is a way of referring to the relationships within the Trinity, it’s not the same way that we “beget” today. So even though the Father “begets” the Son, there was never a time where the Son wasn’t “begotten” from the Father. What that means is we can’t apply the limit of time to this relationship; God has forever existed as Father and Son (and we can add Spirit to that list).
-And what makes this good news for us is it’s because of this relationship that we’re here today. One of the realities about God that we read in 1 John 4:8 is that He is love, but love assumes that there is someone else to love, otherwise that love turns inward and becomes self-love, which is gross! Love requires there to be someone else that the love is directed towards (which is, as the EFCA SOF says, why God eternally existing as a loving unity of 3 equally divine persons is so significant). Contrast this with Muslims who believe that Allah has 99 names that describe Him, one of which is “the most loving.” But who has Allah been loving? Muslims emphasize the unity of God and call those who believe in the Trinity heretics, strong words about Christians! But who has Allah been loving for eternity? And the word is specifically supposed to refer to love of someone else. If that someone else means that Allah loves his creation, then suddenly he’s not a completely independent god, he’s reliant on his creation to allow him to be loving, that’s not the case with the Christian God. That’s why we can say that God didn’t need to create us, He is completely independent in himself, but out of the overflow of God’s perfect trinitarian love, He created everything to be brought into that pre-existing relationship, which means our purpose in existing is to love God, and then represent that love to the rest of creation (doesn’t that almost sound like what Jesus said is the summary of the law? Love God, and love your neighbor) And once again, we see the importance of the prepositions from Fred Sanders: from the Father, through the Son, in the Spirit.
-God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God. Jesus is God, light, and the true God, and He’s also the Son who is sent from the Father: unity and diversity at the same time.
-They then clarify what they meant when they said begotten: not made, meaning that God’s begetting is different than a human begetting. This is another way of attacking Arius’s argument that Jesus was a created being.
-And now, finally, we’re at the one word that isn’t found in the Bible. One note: it’s not wrong to use extra-biblical words to attempt to describe things that are true about God, it helps us understand what we’re talking about! The Greek word they used is the word homoousios which is of the same essence (or Being as the translation we’ve been using says).
-And there’s a fantastic story that goes along with the choice of this word! The bishops kept attempting to use only words from the Bible, but Arius and his crew kept sitting in the corner chuckling to themselves as each word was proposed because they could use those same words with different dictionaries to stick with their perspective that Jesus was a created being. Here’s what Athanasius wrote about 20 years after the council:
-Dissimulation is a fancy word for hiding one’s internal thoughts and feelings to trick someone else. Arius and his followers (called Arians) were able to take the biblical words and twist them to mean what they wanted them to mean, which is why the council needed to come up with a word that couldn’t be twisted by them. And do you see how this discussion drove them back to the Bible to try to summarize what the Bible says in a way that can’t be debated?
-And the debate became which of these 2 words is the best description of the Bible’s definition of Jesus? And it’s been said that never has so much hinged on a single iota (the Greek letter i). The first word: homo (is a common word today, means “same”) the second word is ousia (“essence” or “being” or “substance”) some of the trick is in translation there isn’t always a 1 for 1 correlation, and words change meaning over time, so I like the way this translation has “Being” with the capital letter. The second proposed word changes the first word from “same” to “like”, which means Jesus is like the Father in essence, which Arius could have affirmed in his own way. And after much debate and discussion, the word homoousios became the orthodox way of referring to the Son, that is He is of the exact same essence or Being as the Father. Because of the unique relationship within the Trinity, people had to carefully determine how we would talk about it, which words adequately describe it, which words make it more difficult, and how can we all come to the same dictionary definition? You may remember this picture from last week, the 7 statements to describe God (which 1 book I read this week said is still not helpful because it looks like there are 4 instead of 3! Do you see why this is so difficult to discuss?) But what it’s trying to communicate is what we just talked about, which can be seen like this: The words they landed on to make sure that Arius couldn’t sneak by was “being” or “essence” which the three were referred to as “persons.” If you want to know about why they landed on persons, email me! 
-But that doesn’t get to everything that Jesus did, as we see in the next section:
Was Incarnate 
-What is the incarnation? We established from the first section that the Son is God, but then what about all the other stuff that He did, like taking on flesh and living as a human (like we saw in Colossians earlier). And it’s important for us to realize that even when the council that met at Nicaea was done, the debate wasn’t done. We heard from Athanasius earlier, who wasn’t even a bishop at the time, but spent his life defending the Nicene creed against misinterpretation. Then after Athanasius was another guy who continued refining what it was that the Bible revealed about Jesus, and here’s why we needed Jesus to become incarnate:
-Essentially, what he’s arguing is that if Jesus wasn’t completely human, then we can’t be completely saved. As an example, what if Jesus didn’t have a physical body (as some early cults tried to argue)? Then the only thing that could be saved is our immaterial parts, which is one of the things that this creed makes clear didn’t happen. Jesus was fully and completely human so that we could be fully and completely saved.
-It begins with the entire reason Jesus came: for our salvation. Did you notice that this is the first time it turns any attention to us? This is all focused on God and what He has done for us to bring us into relationship with Him. And then after mentioning us, it goes back to focusing on the second person of God:
-And I think it’s helpful for us to see the 10 verbs in this section that provide a summary of what Jesus did, and do you see how there’s what He did in the past, what He is currently doing, and what He will do in the future.
-First He came down from heaven, he humbled himself is the way Phil. 2 says it. Was incarnate comes from the Latin translation of this word, but the Greek word used is something like “was fleshified.” This is a unique term that describes something that only God could do. One author stated that this is different than embodied because “every living human being is embodied, but only Christ is God incarnate.” The Greek word emphasizes the fleshiness of this, the reality that Jesus entered into a fully human existence. This is a slight tangent, but I’m not a fan of people who say we as Christians are supposed to do “incarnational ministry.” I understand what people mean by that in that we’re supposed to represent Christ to the world, but I worry that it conflates what only Jesus could do with what we can do. We can witness and point to Him, only Jesus can be incarnate.
-And see how He became incarnate: from the HS and the Virgin Mary. We’ll look closer at the HS next week, but the first description of the HS in this creed is the life-giver. Just as the Spirit was hovering over the waters in the first creation, here He was involved in this special creation of the God-man, Jesus Christ, as Luke 1:35 tells us.
-And to make it explicit that Jesus was fully human, a literal translation of this next phrase is “in-humanized.” This is where Arius’s famous statement didn’t go far enough: there was a time when the Son was not human, but there was never a time when the Son was not existing. And friends, this is the craziest part of the whole story of Scripture. God eternal, who existed before time and space lowered himself down to our level by entering human history and being born as a baby. Again, I think Gregory of Nazianzus is helpful here: at no time during His earthly existence did He stop upholding the universe, but He also added humanity to what He was. Somehow and some way the eternal and invisible God added humanity to Himself, and with that said we’re at the mystery card again! Now, think of what the author of Hebrews says about Jesus: 
-I remember pondering this verse when I was in high school, and theologians love to debate: could Jesus have sinned? As if sin is inherent to being human. Unfortunately for the rest of us, it is. But that was not a part of God’s design of humans, sin actually is a marker that we’re not fully human, so Jesus was the most human person to ever walk the earth. 
-After ensuring that we understand Jesus’ humanity, we get to His work on the cross. He was crucified under Pilate, pointing to the historical reliability of this event as well as God’s sovereignty in guiding even a Roman governor! 
-Then it says he suffered death, but could the eternal and all-powerful God even suffer, much less die? One of the truths we confess about God is that he is immortal! I appreciated with Phillip Cary said about this: 
-And this creed goes even further in saying that He was buried. He died all the way, even facing the realm of the dead, which means when we die, we don’t need to be afraid, because Christ has already conquered that, too!
-And then we get to the reason to be a Christian: Jesus didn’t stay dead. On the third day He rose again! And this resurrection isn’t just for Jesus, this resurrection is the first fruits of death itself being undone! Jesus, in death, ensured that we never have to live apart from Him, so even when death comes for us (if the Jesus doesn’t come back before that day), we have nothing to fear! Jesus is with us here and there, and this was God’s plan “according to the Scriptures.”
-After 40 days, He ascended back into heaven, the place where He came down from. But now there’s something different about Him: He now has a body, forever. Jesus, the 1st century Jewish man, is now living in heaven as a fully incarnated human, which blows my mind! Now, heaven isn’t some place that we need to go into space to enter, it’s an invisible realm that we can’t see with our physical eyes right now, but somehow God can still see and interact with us here. And Jesus, the Son of God is currently sitting at the right hand of the Father, and a better way of thinking of sitting would be “is enthroned” as David describes in Psalm 110. While Jesus’ atoning work is done, the Bible tells us that He lives to constantly intercede on our behalf, to constantly lift us up before His Father.
-And lastly, this isn’t the end of the story. He has promised that He will return, the same way He left, in glory. This return won’t be humble, this return will be as the conquering King who will judge the living and the dead, which means no one is off the hook. And when He returns, that’s just the beginning of the end, because His kingdom will never end!
-And if we are in Christ, if we have been saved, if we have believed that Jesus is the Son of God, then we are brought up into this perfect trinitarian relationship because the of what Jesus has done for us.
-He came down, was incarnate, and was made man. He was crucified, he suffered, and was buried. Then he rose again, ascended into heaven, and is seated at His Father’s right hand, from where He will come again in glory, and all of this was: for us and for our salvation.
-This is the miracle of the Trinity, that God became a man to enable men and women to become children of God. I can’t think of any better news, of any better hope then trusting in this God of love.

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by mikethestrand on May 17, 2026  •  Permalink
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Posted by mikethestrand on May 17, 2026

https://pastormikesmusings.com/2026/05/17/in-one-lord-sermon-manuscript/

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.

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

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

Zephaniah – Sermon Manuscript

-I think that stories based on events that happened during WW2 have led to some of the best movies: Fury, Unbroken, Saving Private Ryan, Darkest Hour, Life is Beautiful, Midway, Dunkirk, Hacksaw Ridge, The Pianist all incredible movies of the resiliency of humans, and the destruction of war. But all those movies are from the perspective of the Allies. Where we celebrate the victories, how do all those movies portray the Germans? As the bad guys. We look at those various battles in triumph, but how would the other side view those events? As humiliation, right? Think of D-Day, when the Allies cross the English Channel and began their attack of the Western Front of the Nazis. Do you think the Germans were celebrating that day? Absolutely not! See, every war has 2 sides to it. Similarly, Zephaniah is going to give us 2 sides to the Day of the Lord. We talked about this back in Joel, but this is the book that talks about it the most.

READ/PRAY (pg. 835)

  1. The Message of Zephaniah

-The intro to this book gives us the opposite of what we’ve seen for a while: 4 previous generations of people! Why is this significant? 

-3 names: Cushi, Hezekiah, and Josiah, intending to give us a starting place for Hezekiah

-Cushi: refers to the land of Cush, significant because of what God promises and it would make Zephaniah bi-racial

-Hezekiah is described as the best king of Judah in 2 Kings 18, he destroyed the competing “worship” sites in Judah. One of the most fascinating things about him is in preparation for the Assyrian invasion, he dug a tunnel under Jerusalem to reroute a river and provide water for the city during the siege, and you can go visit “Hezekiah’s tunnel” today!

-The last significant name is Josiah, who led a major reform movement in Judah and became king when he was a child (2 Kings 22). When he was king, he began repairing the temple, and in the repair the book of the law was uncovered (Deuteronomy) which gave the stipulations the people were supposed to follow and obey. And Josiah took this seriously! He re-enacted the covenant ceremony with the people, who recommitted themselves to obeying God’s laws.

-These names are pointing out that Zephaniah is going to be in the same line as his great-great grandpa Hezekiah, one who is faithfully following God and encouraging the people toward obedience of God’s law. There’s debate about how far into Josiah’s reign this takes place, with most people I read saying it’s most likely shortly after he found the book of the law and began enacting it, but it hadn’t yet taken root in the people.

  1. The Day of the Lord in Judgment (1:1–3:8)

-Zechariah mentions “The Day of the Lord” 22 times throughout it, which tells me it’s his primary point in writing! One scholar said, “There is a compelling simplicity about Zephaniah’s message: he has only one topic, and he never digresses from it.” (Alec Motyer)

-We’ve talked about it before, because it’s a theme that’s been running across all these prophets, so just as a refresher, “The Day of the Lord” is a future moment where God would come in judgment to pay back the enemies of His people. Throughout this time period, the Israelites were excited for the day of the Lord because it was viewed in a completely positive light, where the other nations who had attacked God’s people would be judged. But the warning from the prophets is that the judgment would be negative, not positive!

-And that’s where Zephaniah begins his rebuke of the people. Look at this first description from God: He says He’s going to completely sweep away everything! And there’s intentionality in the way this destruction is described. If you think back to Gen. 1 when God created the world, this is the opposite of creation, it’s meant to make us think that the day of the Lord is going to be a de-creation. But it doesn’t take long for Him to remind the people that this isn’t just for people “out there” because right after this promised destruction of the world, look at vs. 4

-God is also angry with Judah, the 1 remaining people of God, and even worse He’ll destroy the promised city of Jerusalem. But notice how God describes the problem: the people are worshipping Baal, a fertility god who was thought to bring rain to them which they needed in order to live. And apparently there’s no difference between the pagan priests and the supposed priests of Yahweh. And if that’s the priests, the one who are supposed to be leading people in the worship of the one true God, what about the rest of the people?

-They’re worshipping the stars instead of the one who made the stars. On the one hand they’re worship God, but at the same time they hedge their bets and also worship Milcom (the false god of the Ammonites). This is called syncretism that is combining the worship of the true God with the worship of all these false gods, and we do the same thing today! We say we trust God completely, but we also make sure we don’t get too sold out to following after Him. Both Baal and Milcom are gods that the surrounding nations worshipped, and as I have read about the Israelites, you can take them out of Egypt, but the rest of their history is working to take the Egypt out of them. And that’s the same journey for all of us in our Christian life: God has taken us out of the world, but the rest of our earthly lives is working to take the world out of us. Unfortunately, the temptation is always there! Also unfortunately, it’s incredibly hard to find those areas that you’re still holding onto worldly ideas, we often don’t even realize them until either someone points them out or we react poorly to those areas being inconvenienced.

-I think I’ve shared this story before, but when one of the idols of my heart that I have to be conscientious of is when I feel dumb, and one of the precipitating reasons that has come to the surface in my life is because we drive older vehicles. Towards the end of me going to seminary, my car started having these weird issues where it would suddenly lose all power and acceleration, so the fastest I could go was like 15 mph. First time it happened, I pulled over, waited about 15 min, and suddenly it started and drove with no issues. But over the next week it KEPT happening and I just got ANGRY. And in one of my angry outbursts, I realized my reaction wasn’t the corresponding to the situation in front of me, and then it hit me: cars aren’t that complicated, I should be able to figure this out, and the fact that I couldn’t made me irate! Now I know you all already know this, but I needed to remind myself that I’m not God! I don’t, can’t, and won’t know everything, which means there’s going to be areas in my life that I am just ignorant about. This is an area where I know that I’m not God, but I don’t want to have to rely on Him, much to my shame and disgrace. And we all have areas like that in our lives, where we need to pray for the strength to fight those idols, those places where we struggle to trust God, where we still want to do our own things and live our own ways. The only consolation is we’re not alone in that! We see it in Zephaniah, which means it was true 3,000 years ago, so humans are still humans.

-Notice that in the very next verse, Zephaniah gives us the right response: be silent. Have you ever noticed that’s the response of people in the Bible who encounter God? Every time they realize that God is so much more holy than they are, so they fall on their faces and acknowledge their sin. Which is why it always make me chuckle to myself when so many songs that we sing in church are asking God to be present here, to reveal Himself to us, to show us His glory, because the Bible shows us that it’s a terrifying thing! With 1 caveat: if we’re covered by the blood of the sacrifice (Jesus) we don’t have to be afraid of approaching God. In fact, the book of Hebrews tells us we should have the opposite approach to God: we come before Him in confidence because of what Jesus has done, which is exactly what Zephaniah is talking about here.

-I think I mentioned him a few months ago, but I watched another interview with former Senator Ben Sasse yesterday where he was asked if he’s ready to die. He was diagnosed with stage 4 terminal pancreatic cancer in December, and you can tell if you watch this interview. But his response was fascinating, and it caused the interviewer to begin to cry, because he said, “I don’t feel ready, but to whom would I go? I have confidence that when Jesus said to the disciples, he didn’t want to be identified as the Messiah yet, keep these crowds away, don’t tell them about the water into wine miracle at the feast, but he says you can’t keep the children from me. And we’re told that we get to approach the Almighty, we get to approach the Divine and call him Daddy, Abba Father, that’s pretty glorious. And I know that that’s what I need.” 

-That’s someone who understands this reality here: we approach God in reverence and silence because He is so far above us, but that same God welcomes us in as His children, with open arms, for those are following Him, but for those who aren’t, it’s a completely different story.

-On that day, there will be punishment from God on those who have been disobedient to Him, but the punishment from God ALWAYS fits the crime. He calls out those who take on the habits and practices of the nations (foreign clothing) instead of living as God has commanded them. He also promises to punish those who take on the superstitions of the nations (skip over the threshold, like “don’t step on a crack or you’ll break your mother’s back”) No one will be left out of this persecution, and the rest of this chapter describes all the ways God will bring about this punishment. And do you remember what I said earlier about the day of the Lord? Look at the warning about this day in vs. 14-15:

-It doesn’t sound like the greatest day in the world, does it? It sounds horrible! But it gets even worse: distress, their blood poured out.

-And this day will also reveal where people are putting their confidence. Look at the beginning of vs. 18: even in Zephaniah’s time people were thinking their riches would save them. Once again, we see that the human heart hasn’t changed, has it?

-The beginning of chapt. 2 is a shift in focus, because in the middle of this promised punishment is a change of tone. Here the call is to repent before all this punishment comes. One of the reasons we have these warnings in the Bible is to prevent people from continuing on in their sin and facing this punishment. 

-And do you see what repentance looks like? It looks like seeking the Lord, AND it looks like seeking righteousness and humility. Another way of saying this is if you seek after the Lord, you will start to look like the Lord (although imperfectly). And this section ends saying PERHAPS you’ll be saved, but we know from the message of the NT that this sparing is guaranteed because we know how to be on the right side of history (which doesn’t mean going along with whatever is trendy in our culture), it means we’re obedient to the Creator and Sustainer of everything. 

-The rest of chapter 2 is God continuing to talk about the punishment coming to the nations, but there’s a specific ordering to this following the 4 points of a compass around Judah: Philistines to the West, Ammonites and Moabites to the east, Cush in the south, and Assyria to the north. And who’s in the center of that compass? Judah, but remember, they’re assuming that the Day of the Lord is going to be the destruction of everyone else, so they would hear this expecting everything to be ok for them! But then God focuses His attention on 1 city, and contextually you would expect this to be something like Ninevah or another one of the Assyrian cities, and look at how terrible this city is: 

-Rebellious, not obeyed God, hasn’t responded to God’s discipline, hasn’t trusted the Lord, and hasn’t sought after God. Not only is the city running away from God, but her leaders are even worse! Princes and judges have become like wild beasts who are looking to exploit other people. The prophets and priests aren’t leading people to follow the Lord, they’re only looking to their own interests (which is a perennial problem in Israel, and as the leaders go, so goes the nation). So remember, I said contextually that it seems like it’s talking about the rest of the nations, but then look at the first line in vs. 5:

-This is talking about Jerusalem, the city where the Lord lives. God’s own people weren’t spared from the punishment, in fact theirs is even worse because they were supposed to be different from all the surrounding nations, but instead they’ve acted exactly like them. But in contradiction to the His own people, God is completely righteous and holy. Even when His people are running away from Him, God stays the same and continues being faithful to Himself and His promises. God never changes, that’s one of the greatest realities about God. 

-The last thing God says in this section is that in that day, there will be people from every tribe and tongue and nation who will stand condemned before Him because they refused to follow Him. This is the reality of life in the world God created, which is why He gives us all these warnings. Follow and obey Him now, because someday it will be too late.

  • The Day of the Lord in Salvation (3:9–20)

-The best news about this book is that while the ending is bad news for those who haven’t followed the one true God, for those who have listened and obeyed Him, the ending is joy and salvation.

-Do you see how great this day will be? The end goal is that everyone will be able to call on the name of the Lord and serve and obey Him perfectly. And it’s interesting that the Lord mentions Cush here, because that would include the family of Zephaniah, the people who were once spread out will come and worship the Lord together from all areas of the world. AND there’s a story in Acts that shows the fulfillment of this promise. 

–Acts 8 tells the story of Phillip who was told to go to a specific place and share the gospel message with an Ethiopian. Ethiopia is the same place that was called Cush during the time of Zechariah. God’s promises always come to pass, as we see here from Zechariah. 

-But that’s not all! Look what God goes on to say:

-The punishment has been changed. Those who trust in God are spared from this suffering because the king has come and lived with them, which changes everything for His people. Now that He is with them, they have nothing to fear. Then God doubles down on this promise, but look at the description He gives: 

-A warrior who saves. This helps us understand some of what the early disciples were expecting when Jesus came, a conquering warrior who would overthrow the shackles of oppression from the Romans. What they didn’t realize was the enemy they were thinking about was too small. The Romans were nothing compared to sin and death. God’s plans are so much bigger than anything we could come up with. And look at how God responds to His people: rejoicing,  quieting us, and delighting in us. Isn’t that amazing? God delights in spending time with His people.

-And the very last verse, God tells us what the last day will look like for those who have followed after Him: He will gather His people together to honor them, to encourage them, and to give them a place in His kingdom forever. And we know this is going to happen because of the last phrase in this verse: if God has spoken, it’s guaranteed to happen.

  • The Day of the Lord for You

-But now that we’ve looked at this book, we’re left with the question: which side are you on? For some, the Day of the Lord is something to get excited for because it means everything we’ve been hoping for will come true! But for others, it’s a day to fear. I heard a pastor onetime say that for those who are following Jesus, this world is the closest to hell we’ll ever live. And the reverse is also true: for those who aren’t following Jesus, this world is the closest to heaven they’ll ever live. 

-The Day of the Lord isn’t just a topic that’s seen in the prophets, we saw it when we looked at Revelation together last year. Look at how John describes that day in Rev. 6: 

-Notice that no ones left out, just like God promises in Zechariah that He’ll be looking EVERYWHERE for those who haven’t followed Him. These people are begging to be buried alive in an earthquake because God is that much more terrifying. When that day comes, if you aren’t walking with the Lord, it’s going to be the worst first day of the rest of your life. But you have a choice, right here and right now to not have that day be terrifying.

-For those of us who are walking with the Lord, we have a different reality, a completely different response to the Day of the Lord. For us, it’s going to be a day of celebrating, rejoicing, and giving thanks for because our faith is now sight. Everything we’ve hoped and prayed for has become real. But in this in between time, where we live between Jesus’ two comings, the book of Hebrews reminds us how we’re supposed to live with an eye on that day. 

-It begins with a reminder of how we’re supposed to follow God: through a confession that Jesus is that Warrior King who conquered Satan, sin, and death through his victorious resurrection, and now provides the way for us to come boldly before the Father. That confession is what saves us and makes us new people. And once we’re new people look what we’re supposed to do: consider one another. This is a way we imitate our God, by looking to other people above and beyond ourselves! But then it gets weird! Because we’re supposed to provoke each other. I don’t know about you, but I can’t think of a situation where it’s positive to “provoke” someone else (this may be a reminder that I have young kids at home because there’s a LOT of provoking that goes on!) but have you ever considered that provoking can be a good thing? According to this text, there’s a way of provoking each other that can lead to love and good works. Now I don’t know about you, but I feel like I could use more of that provoking in my life! Most of the provoking I have around me is to get angry about what’s taking place politically or socially. That doesn’t make me more holy, that doesn’t make me more like Jesus, and that doesn’t help me to represent the one true God to the watching world. And the author doesn’t stop there, do you see the way we provoke each other positively? By gathering together. Friends, this weekly meeting is more than just a social hour, this gathering around the throne of Jesus Christ is a spiritual battle where we provoke each other positively to grow in our love and our good works. This gathering is meant to be the place where we’re encouraged to continue following faithfully after Jesus. Out there, we’re going to be tempted to question, tempted to doubt, tempted to reflect the world instead of the Creator of the world. But in here, we get to encourage (provoke) each other to love and good works. 

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by mikethestrand on April 12, 2026  •  Permalink
Posted in Bible, Blog, Church, History, Life, Sermon, Worship
Tagged , , , , , ,

Posted by mikethestrand on April 12, 2026

https://pastormikesmusings.com/2026/04/12/zephaniah-sermon-manuscript/

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