Senior Pastor, Robert Dennison, preached this message on September 21, 2025. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Audio Transcript
For Sundays, for many months now. It’ll take us a year. We’re going to be looking at our statement of faith in our bylaws. You should have a copy of the entire thing, not of our bylaws, but a statement of faith in your bulletin. We are not covering all of that today.
We are just looking at one part of the statement each week at a time. Now, every week in your bulletin, I’ll just point out again we have what’s called the New City Catechism. It’s just another way of regularly going over doctrine, which are things you’re supposed to know. A catechism is different because it involves a question and an answer. So we always encourage you as adults to think about this, to make sure you know it each week, but also to take it home and use it in the week with your kids.
We’ll just practice today. The question number two is, and if you don’t know the answer, look in your bulletin here. What is God? And your answer is, God is the Creator of everyone and everything. And we just so happen to be studying the doctrine and our statement of faith about God today, the Apostles Creed.
It’s another way just to succinctly remind ourselves of doctrine in the church. What are the parts of our doctrinal statement? They’re up here on the board. There are 13 of them. God, the Bible, the human condition, Jesus Christ, the work of Christ, the Holy Spirit, the Church, Christian living, Christ, return, response and eternal destiny, God the Father, marriage, gender and sexuality, and final authority for matters of belief and conduct.
The first 10 come from the EFCA Evangelical Free Church of America, of which we are a part of. And the last three are ones that our church has added. So you may have thought, why is God the Father away there at the end? Well, in the EFCA statement, they don’t have God the Father included, but as a church, we’ve decided that we should have a separate entry about him because we have a separate entity about Jesus Christ and also about the Holy Spirit. We’ve also added the section on marriage, gender and sexuality and final authority for matters of belief and conduct.
What is the definition and importance of doctrine? Why do we have it in the church? Well, the meaning of doctrine is that doctrine is a concise and limited synopsis of core beliefs that defines Christian faith and provides a guide for Christian living. If I were to circle two words there, the first one would be limited. Doctrine is not everything that we need to know about God.
Doctrine is not everything we need to know about Christian living. Because we have the Bible that provides us everything that we are supposed to know. The Bible is like an entire library, whereas the Gospel is just like a guide that you would take when you go on a vacation. When we go to another country, I don’t carry a whole library of books with me. So I know what to do there.
I just need a little guide that tells me how to say in their language, where’s the bathroom? How can I order a cup of coffee and give me something to eat? I mean, those are things that I need to know. Doctrine gives us just this very concise, limited synopsis to guide us in this life. What is the purpose of doctrine?
Well, doctrine provides a framework that alerts believers to false teaching. But again, it must never replace Scripture. It’s like a level. When you’re building something and you place a level on whatever it is you’re building, you can see by the level that something isn’t right. But the level does not help you to figure out what is causing the problem.
And the level certainly cannot help you fix the problem. It’s just there to alert you that something isn’t right and you need to look into it. And so it is that doctrine is like a level. When we put something up to it, some teaching we hear or a song that we’re listening to. If something doesn’t seem right, you’ve got to go to the full toolbox.
You have to go back to scripture to figure out why is there something not right about this. Thirdly, doctrine is a safeguard. It could be like the guardrails as you’re driving down a mountain road with a drop off on the side. It keeps you from going over the edge. Or it can be like a fence that keeps bad things from coming in that don’t belong within the church.
If we don’t have the guardrails, we might go off the edge. If our feet fence is damaged, things can get in that don’t belong there. If the boundaries are not kept in place, then false teaching and ungodly practices can sneak into the church. Let’s have a diagram up there. It has lwefc.
And this represents what we believe. This represents our doctrine. The green and the brown and the gray. And when we’re talking about dealing with other religious groups, we hold up our doctrine, we hold up our level to them. And if something doesn’t look right, we have to ascertain do we really need to be involved with that group.
And the first example here, group A, this would be another religious organization or a church like Graceway and Sauk that we just had a retreat with this weekend. They are in line with our doctrine and so we integrate with them at a deep level. But when you look at group B, this is someone or a religious organization or they might even call themselves a church and what they believe is so entirely different than us. We choose as a church not to integrate with them in any way. We have group C there and this is a group that’s very closely aligned with what we believe, but not completely.
So we will do some things with them. And then in group D, it would be another religious or organization or a church of some nature or even an individual or a radio speaker, a singer they just agree with us with a little bit. So we’re might do some things with them, but we’re not going to be heavily involved. But doctrine helps us to ascertain who are the groups that we associate with. And if someone comes knocking on your door and they’re Jehovah’s Witness or they’re Mormons and they start sharing something with you and they say Jesus and is not God in the flesh, that he is not the only son of God or something that doesn’t agree with our doctrine, your mind should go ding, ding, ding, there’s something wrong here.
And I don’t need to be involved with this. We’re going to go to item number 13 now that we added. And that’s the final authority for matters of belief and conduct. And that says that the statement of faith does not exhaust the extent of our beliefs. Again, it’s just one tool in the whole toolbox.
The Bible itself is the inspired and infallible word of God that speaks with final authority concerning truth. Morality and the proper conduct of humanity is the sole and final source of all that we believe. For purposes of LWEFC’s faith, doctrine, practice, policy and discipline, our elder team, under the direction of the Holy Spirit is our final interpretive authority on the Bible’s meaning and application on all theological and doctrinal matters beyond the Constitution and bylaws. Let me narrow this down to three things. The first thing is that Scripture is our primary source.
And make sure you heard that. Will you just say that with me? Scripture is our primary source. We have a statement of faith, but it’s just a concise summary of our core beliefs. It does not exhaust the extent of all our beliefs.
And when it comes to question about understanding what God’s word says, if there’s a decision that needs to be made in the church, we have decided as a congregation that Our elder team, under the direction of the Holy Spirit is our final interpretive authority. It means that you still have the right to decide who those elders are. If we ever have elders that are not in agreement with God’s Word, they no longer have the final interpretive authority. And it’s your responsibility as the body of Christ to study the Bible to know that we are all in agreement. But having an elder team that meets once a month is just a lot more convenient than all of you coming to an extra three hour meeting once a month with but all of you love doing that, so.
But still it resides with you to individually read your Bible and spend time there in Scripture Doctrine is a good thing to study, but it should never take the place of daily Bible reading in your life and understanding what God’s Word says. Let’s go now to our first doctrinal statement. It’s about God. Again, it’s not everything about God. It’s just the most basic concepts about him that we need to be certain that we understand.
Can you read the statement with me? We believe in one God, creator of all things, holy, infinitely perfect and eternally existing in a loving unity of three equally divine persons, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Having limitless knowledge and sovereign power, God has graciously purposed from eternity to redeem a people for Himself and to make all things new for his own glory. Let’s break that down into one phrase or even one word at a time. It starts off, we believe in one God, the Creator of all things, and there would be limitless scriptures on all of these.
I’m just going to give you one or two verses today and just give you at least one way that it should apply to our lives. Because everything about God affects everything in this world and in us. When we say that we believe in one God, creator of all things, that’s where God begins and what he lets us know about himself. In Genesis 1:1 it says, in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth before anything existed. That we know.
God existed before there were any other spiritual beings, angels, demons, Satan, anything in this world or anything in the spiritual world, in heaven. Throughout all of the universe, God was already present. In Deuteronomy 6 we read, Listen Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. And because of that you are to love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your strength. What this teaches us one thing is that we belong to God.
We are his possession, whether we acknowledge that or not. And because we belong to him, we owe him our worship, and we owe him our allegiance. That takes us up entirely. Our heart, our soul, and all our strength. And even people that don’t profess to believe in God, they’ve not accepted Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior.
They still belong to Him. And if God had not given us salvation, we still would owe him our worship and we would still owe him our allegiance because of who he is and that he created us. Scripture tells us that one day all those will bow their knee to the Lord and confess that he is the Lord, whether they are lost or whether they are one of his children. We believe in one God, the Creator of all things. Next thing is, we believe that God is holy.
And when we talk about God’s holiness, that means that he is just completely out of anything that we can comprehend or understand. We look at ourselves and we are created in his image. And because we can think and we can feel, we know that God thinks and feels. But the way he thinks and feels is completely holy. It’s completely outside of image.
Anything that we can understand or comprehend. Lord, who is like you. Among the lowercase G gods, the answer is there is none who is like you. You’re glorious and holiness, you’re revered with praises, and you’re performing wonders. What we draw from this is that he is completely out of our realm of understanding because there is nothing that compares to Him.
So when we think about God, our thoughts and our understanding should just be completely out there and unlimited. And that should amaze us. I just want to think of one thing. Talking about his omnipresence, that God is everywhere at once. What does that really mean?
Well, it’s not like I took a gallon of water and I poured it on the table and. And the water spread out, and part of it’s over there, and part of it’s over there. God is not a being that spread thinly everywhere, because God is completely everywhere in every single place. All of his power, all of his glory is everywhere at one time. He’s also not like Superman, who could travel at the speed of light and appear to be everywhere at once because he’s jumping around there.
That is not the way that God is. And in the Old Testament, he was in the Tabernacle and He was in the temple in the holy of Holies, but He wasn’t limiting himself to that space. It was just a special presence of Him. He was still everywhere, present and in his holiness. When we talk about presence, we think about the edges of the universe and we say, yeah, God fills up all the way to the edge of the universe.
God is so omnipresent that he goes beyond those edges. We can’t even fathom it. And in the same way, his goodness, his love, his mercy, his judge, his justice is just completely beyond, above everything and anything that we can comprehend or try to describe. You may think that your mom or your grandmother has ultimate love for you, but that’s nothing in comparison to what God has. And the wonderful thing about eternity is we are never going to get bored because there’s going to be more to learn about Him.
And just as our kids grow up, we love them more and more as we learn more and more about them. And when we have friends and when we’re married, as we learn more about our spouses and our friends at kids, causes us to love them more and more. So the pursuit of knowing God more throughout eternity, it’s just going to get more and more wonderful because he’s holy. He’s beyond all comprehension. The next thing we believe that God is infinitely perfect.
Let’s read Deuteronomy 32 where we read for I will proclaim the Lord’s name, declare the greatness of our God, the rock. His work is perfect. All his ways are just. A faithful God without bias. He is righteous and true.
One thing that we can gather from this is that there is nothing of greater value in life for us to desire and pursue.
He’s better than the most wonderful spouse. He’s better than grandkids. God isn’t just like a diamond. He’s better. He’s not like gold.
He’s better. He’s not like children. He is better. And because of that, we should be willing to give up everything that we have, everything that we are, everything that we do, just so that we can pursue this relationship with Him. Jesus gives two parables in the New Testament.
He talks about the man that found the pearl of great price and he went out and he sold everything for that pearl. Now imagine him going home to his wife and he’s saying, I found this pearl. We’re going to sell our house, we’re going to sell our property, and we’re going to sell all our kids just so that we can buy this pearl because it’s of such great value. Value. He was saying that’s how we should value God, because He is infinitely perfect.
There isn’t anything better that we should pursue in this life. Next, we believe that he is eternally existing. In Timothy we read now to the King. Eternal, immortal, invisible, the only God be Honor and glory forever and ever. Amen.
Ever. Just one takeaway from this is that our salvation is guaranteed for eternity. God has been planning it from eternity past. He’s taking care of it now, and he’s going to take care of our salvation forever into eternity. There isn’t going to be a day that comes and God says, okay, I’m checking out, I’m dying, I no longer exist.
You’re going to have to figure out some other way to maintain your eternal salvation. Because God is eternal. I take great comfort in knowing that it’s guaranteed forever that he’s going to take care of me. We believe in a loving unity. In First John 4, we read the one who does not love does not know God, because God is love.
God doesn’t just show us how to love. God doesn’t teach us how to love. God is love. And without him being love, there would be no love in this world. And in John 3 we read that the Father loves the Son and has given all things into his hands.
Now when we think about love, love has to have an object to love. In order for me to show love, I have to love someone or love something. So the question comes into mind, well, how could God be love if it was just God before everything existed? Well, that’s where we have the beauty and part of the understanding of why the Trinity existed. Because God, before He created anything, was in a loving relationship with Son and with the Holy Spirit.
That there was this ongoing relationship. And why is this special? What does it mean to me? Well, I read there God did not create me because he doesn’t need me. How many of you feel like God needs you?
Can you do anything for Him? Can you really give him anything that helps Him? No. He has everything. Everything is under his control.
And because he doesn’t need anything from us, the only reason we exist is because He. What are the words there? He wants to love us. Someone who has no needs at all, created us frail human beings that constantly sin and turn our back on him because he just wants to have relationship with us. God cannot be love in a vacuum by Himself.
Love necessitates there being object or a person that is loved by the One who loves. And God eternally has been in unity the Father, the Son and the Spirit, and a loving relationship. He doesn’t need us, but he wants us. The next statement we see is we believe in three equally divine persons, the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. And we go to Jesus baptism in Matthew chapter three, where we see all three of the Godhead.
It says, when Jesus was baptized, he went up immediately from the water. There’s the sun, the heavens suddenly opened for him, and he saw now the Spirit of God descending like a dove and coming down on him, the second Person in the Trinity. And then there’s this voice from heaven which is God the Father, saying, this is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased. And when it comes to how we are to baptize people, Jesus said, go, therefore, make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the singular name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Every member of the Trinity is important to us.
And one of the things about doctrine that should stand out, if you ever hear anyone say anything less about Jesus or anything less about the Holy Spirit than they should, there’s a problem. Because we worship all three. All three are necessary for our salvation. All three share all the character qualities of God.
Next, we read that we believe God has limitless knowledge. Psalm 147 says, Our Lord is great, vast in power, and his understanding is infinite and just one takeaway from that is that I can trust him to have all the answers and make all decisions perfectly. You know, even when we don’t understand why God does what he does, we can still trust him because his understanding is far beyond ours. In Isaiah 55, we read, for my thoughts are not your thoughts, and your ways are not my ways. This is the Lord’s declaration.
For as heaven is higher than earth, so my ways are higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts. There have been many times in my life I prayed, God, do this or do that. And he doesn’t answer my prayer the way I want him to. Sometimes he says yes, sometimes he says no, and sometimes he says, wait. But it’s always the hardest when he says no, and he doesn’t answer that prayer.
But sometimes a day later, a week later, a month later, a year later, it’s like, wow, if God had answered my prayer the way I wanted him to, there would be this disastrous thing that happened. And we can understand that just a little bit if we have children. Because all the time we’re telling our kids, don’t do such and such, and their answer is, but why can’t I? I want to do that. It makes me feel bad if you don’t let me do that.
And as parents, we can see that down the days ahead that if we let them do those things, it’s only going to lead to heartache and to problems and disaster. That’s just a very minuscule way of understanding how God works everything out. And we need to trust him that he has all the answers and makes decisions perfectly. We believe that he has sovereign power. And when we talk about sovereign power, there are mayors and there are judges and there are governors, there are presidents, there are kings, there have been emperors.
But when we talk about the sovereign one, that sovereignty means that they are over all of these man made entities. Jeremiah says, oh Lord God, you yourself made the heavens and by an earth, by your great power and with your outstretched arm. Nothing is too difficult for you. And because nothing is too difficult for the Lord in Ephesians we read now to him who is able to do above and beyond all that we ask or think there shouldn’t be anything that we can’t feel like. We can’t go to God and pray about and believe that he can take care of that or provide for our need.
We can ask him for anything. And we know for certain that he will make one day all things new. And we have no fear that evil is going to win in the end because God is sovereign above and beyond all things.
Next it says that we believe that God has graciously purposed from eternity to redeem a people for Himself. In second Timothy we read he has saved us and called us with a holy calling, not according to our works, but according to his own purpose and grace, which was given to us in Christ Jesus before time began. What that’s saying is that God planned to send His Son to die on the cross for our sins in eternity passed before anything was created. And if I were God and I looked at creating a race that I knew was going to turn against me, what would I do? I’d just say just forget it.
But God loves us so much, knowing that many would turn away from him still from eternity past, decided to create this world and all of us that live in it. Because he was purposing to redeem us, to send His Son to pay for our salvation one day. Since our salvation is from God, not ourselves, we know that it is eternal as he is. And we know that we should not fear losing it in any way and which should make us feel special and and love that on his mind, way before anything existed, he was thinking about each and every one of us individually wanting to redeem us to a relationship with Him. And lastly we believe that he will make all things new for his glory.
In Acts 3 we read heaven must receive him, that being Jesus until the time of restoration of all things which God spoke about through his holy prophets from the beginning. So going all the way back to Genesis, God was already sharing through his prophets that all of this sin, all of this evil is going to be restored to perfection one day. And then in Revelation, we read in the last chapter, then the one seated on the throne said, look, I am making everything new. And he also said, write, because these words are faithful and true. Write it down, John.
It’s going to happen. And because we believe that God will make all things new for his own glory, we can have this takeaway in our evil world. We can still live with certain hope of a perfect future with the Lord. Let’s end by reading that doctrinal statement again together that we’ve just briefly gone over today. You need to read Scripture to understand this more fully.
And I’ll just put in a plug in January with the Lake Wisconsin Bible Institute. The class there for 12 weeks will be on doctrine, and we’ll spend a lot more time going into these things and others, if you’re interested in that class. How many of y’ all have taken that doctrine class and enjoyed it? See, I threw the last part at the end, right, Bill, Was that an I enjoy it or great? Great.
Okay, let’s read it together. We believe in one God, creator of all things holy, infinitely perfect, and eternally existing in a loving unity of three equally divine persons, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Having limitless knowledge and sovereign power, God has graciously purposed from eternity to redeem a people for himself and to make all things new for his own glory. May we pray? Heavenly Father, we thank you that you have revealed enough to us that we can appreciate how awesome and wonderful you are.
And mostly, we appreciate the fact that you loved us, that you desire to have a relationship with us. And you sent your son, Jesus Christ to die, to be buried and be raised from the dead, to redeem us from the pit of sin and the slavery that Satan has over us in this world until we give our lives to you, Father. Thank you for making this provision. Help us to appreciate it more. Help us to desire to know you better and to study your word.