The Real Apostles' Creed

Can I ask you a question? If you were trapped today inside the elevator of a burning building, which would you prefer? A fellow victim to walk over to you and say, listen, I'm here with you. I understand what you're going through and I can feel your pain. Or a fireman to break down the door and lead you to safety. And what does the church become in the dilution of the gospel has become anything more or less than some organization that says we understand your pain. We're here with you. I don't want that gospel.

I want to be rescued. churches across the land have abandoned the truth of God's Word and cast aside the message of the gospel. In order to draw crowds, they say what people want to hear.

And in doing so they become nothing more than a club. They can't offer any real hope. There is a better way though. God's Word provides a clear roadmap to salvation.

It's also an exclusive roadmap, meaning that there's only one way. Today Stephen continues through a series entitled How to Get to Heaven from Earth. Stay with us as we open God's Word together in this message called The Real Apostles Creed. This past week I went to Smithfield's Barbecue, part of my spiritual devotion. I got a newspaper, which I typically do before heading to the non-smoking session.

That's where I know I'll be alone. It wasn't long before I was literally tearing newspaper articles out one after another. I don't remember a time when there was so much alarming news of tragedy and sorrow and suffering as these days. If I a year ago had walked up to somebody on the street and said, you know, Americans are in danger and they need to be saved. They would have looked at me like, what are you, a doomsday prophet or something? Say that now.

And they would say, you're right. We are in danger. We need to be saved. Now, what danger did you have in mind?

I believe the church, perhaps more than ever in our generation, could mount a search and rescue operation for the gospel sake like never before. Listen, I have read the end of this book of you. I know it's going to happen. Talk about tragedy. You talk about national disasters. You want to talk about danger unheard of.

I mean, can you imagine earthquakes so terrible that mountains and islands are literally displaced? All that in one chapter, in one chapter. Revelation Chapter six. The planet is groaning for the day of redemption. And those things we see in nature are part of its echoed groaning about those things that we see and fallen humanity groan and make us groan for justice. Many long to see the earth settle, don't they? They long to see the planet at peace, governed and led by some reasonable human being. Perhaps they long to see the earth improved.

I have read the rest of the story. I do not long to see earth restored to some kind of peaceful tranquility. I long to see earth recreated.

I long to see the king on the throne in the kingdom. This earth is on a collision course as God has designed it for great judgment. And we as a church did not hold out hope today for some skill that can teach you to avoid disaster or some secret that guarantees a comfortable life, some system that will somehow cause you to avoid all the troubles you know. We offer hope beyond the burning, collapsing universe we live in. We offer you hope beyond the transient nature of the things that we may think give us security. We offer you hope beyond the corruption and the terror filled world.

How? I know a judge. I know a divine judge who has eliminated my death sentence. I know a divine fireman that has extinguished for me the fires of hell. I know a rescuer who has taken me and placed me in the arms of the great physician, given me a blood transfusion and brought me from the dead into the living. We recommend him to you today.

Anything less would not be what you needed. Can I ask you a question? If you were trapped today inside the elevator of a burning building, which would you prefer? A fellow victim to walk over to you and say, listen, I'm here with you. I understand what you're going through and I can feel your pain.

Or a fireman to break down the door and lead you to safety. And what does the church become? In the dilution of the gospel has become anything more or less than some organization that says we understand your pain.

We're here with you. I don't want that gospel. I want to be rescued. I want to be taken out of here, right? And given meaning while I am here.

You wonder how you could be rescued, how you can be saved. The word, as David mentioned, is fallen into ill repute simply because it's been abused by those who really aren't saved. And yet it is a good word. It is a biblical word. And we discover the definition once again of salvation as Paul particularly emphasizes two things in Romans chapter 10. Our study today brings us to verse 9.

And I want you to look there. Romans chapter 10, verse 9. If you want to be rescued, here it is. If you want to be saved, here's how. That if you confess with your mouth, Jesus as Lord, and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you shall be saved. For with the heart man believes resulting or toward righteousness and with the mouth he confesses to or toward salvation. For the scripture says, whoever believes in him will not be disappointed or put to shame or brought to judgment.

So there's the promise. The end of verse 9. You shall be saved.

It's a future tense, by the way. It indicates salvation yet to come. Salvation from the wrath of God. There is salvation that deals with our past and our present and even this future which Paul references here. How do you get rescued from this wrath to come which would encompass an eternal hell?

How can you be saved from that? Well, you notice in these verses that Paul goes back and forth between the heart and the mouth, confessing with the mouth and believing in the heart, verse 9. Then he reverses the order and he talks about believing in the heart and confessing with the mouth in verse 10. Now, as Paul developing some faith plus works, system here, if you believe but you don't confess, then you're not saved. Well, who are you confessing to?

God or man? And Paul doesn't even say in this text. And what about verse 11 that says whoever just simply believes without any reference to confession, whoever believes will be saved from shame.

Well, a lot of confusion I believe could be avoided if we simply understand that these two phrases are not to be taken separately but together. One Greek scholar wrote this warning, to separate these two clauses, that is confessing with the mouth and believing with the heart, and look for a list of independent meanings in each of them is a grave mistake. A heart believing under righteousness and a mouth making confession under salvation are not two things but two sides of the same thing. See, Paul wrote with that same idea to the Corinthian believers when he wrote, I believed, therefore I have spoken with that same spirit of faith we also believe and therefore speak. In other words, Paul is not talking about salvation that is partial through believing in Christ and then completed in some public confession to Christ to teach that would add human works to salvation and thus transform salvation from a free gift into something that you must earn.

I believe that what Paul is actually attempting to do here is show that salvation comes to a person who believes certain things in their heart. Now the Jews, you need to understand, believe that the heart was the hub of existence. It was the core of the being. They believed in Paul's day that the soul, the spirit, the immaterial part of man that would live on resided in the heart. That's why the Bible talks about the heart believing and I've heard people today say, you know, we shouldn't ask people to ask Jesus into their heart. Well, that's actually very consistent with what Paul refers to as the heart believing. We simply are saying, Lord, we want you to dwell within the core, the hub of our existence represented by the heart. And what the heart believes is revealed, isn't it? By the mouth for out of the abundance of the heart, the mouth speaks. Matthew chapter 12 verse 34. Well, what does the inner core of your being believe? Which ultimately is confessed in a myriad of ways, but what do you believe that rescues you from the wrath and judgment of God? Two things. We read them.

Let me give them to you one at a time. Number one, that Jesus is Lord. You must believe that Jesus is Lord. Go back and read verse nine. If you confess with your mouth Jesus as Lord, the word as is supplied by the translator to try to make a little more sense of it.

And I fear it made it a little more confusing if anything. There's some who try to bolster their particular definition of what they call Lordship salvation by misunderstanding this verse to mean something like this. If I could expand it, if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is your total Lord and master, you will be saved. In other words, this becomes for them a verse that demands surrender to the mastery of Jesus Christ. And listen, there are a lot of verses that you can go to that challenge the true believer to surrender to the mastery of Christ, but this is not one of them. Don't mess up this verse.

Don't misuse it. In fact, that particular view trivializes the depth of the meaning of this text. Paul is actually saying something more like this. If you confess with your mouth, Jesus as Jehovah, Jesus as God, that's what he's saying.

You don't see the surrender of man here. You see the sovereignty of God there. In that phrase, the Greek word, which of course they know and we don't, that's why we take time to explain it, is kurios. It's a word that was used in the Septuagint over and over and over again to translate Yahweh, transliterated Jehovah. More than 6,000 times in the Hebrew scriptures, Yahweh was translated kurios or Lord.

Paul knew and he knew his audience would know exactly what he meant. To confess Jesus as kurios meant you confessed him as God incarnate. The Jews prayed that prayer every day and the Orthodox do to this day and they still miss the meaning because of their unbelief in the relationship of that verse with Romans 10.9, but they pray from Deuteronomy 6.45, that great Jewish prayer, Hear O Israel, the Lord, Yahweh, our God, Elohim is one Lord. The Lord, our God is one Lord. Our Jehovah, our Elohim is one Jehovah. Elohim is one kurios, one God, three persons, Father, Son and Spirit, each equally divine though the Spirit is not mentioned in Romans chapter 10, it isn't three but one. It isn't one God plus one plus one equals three gods, it's one times one times one equals one God. Isn't it ironic that the cult known as the Jehovah's Witnesses, Jehovah, Yahweh, kurios, Lord, it's interesting to me that they take as their name the one whose deity they deny. I was just visited this week by a group of them.

They came at the wrong time. Jehovah kurios is tantamount to saying Jesus Christ, our Messiah. He is our Jehovah. He is the expression of our Yahweh.

What he means? This is the stumbling block, of course, to the Jew. You go back in the context of this passage, back a few verses in chapter nine, verse 32, and Paul said they stumbled over the stumbling stone. They stumbled over the fact that this carpenter could possibly be Yahweh incarnate.

He couldn't say that. That's why Paul would say to the Corinthians, it is only by means of the Holy Spirit that a person can say Jesus is Lord. Jesus is kurios and truly believe it in the core of their being that he is in fact God incarnate. Well, is that what Jesus claimed? Is his claim that Paul mentions here indeed what people understood?

Oh, yeah, let me read you of one encounter from the Gospels. For this cause, therefore, the Jews were seeking all the more to kill him. They wanted to kill Jesus.

Why? Because he was not only breaking the Sabbath, that is, thumbing his nose at their traditions, but he was also calling God, his own father, note this, making himself equal with God. The Jews got it, even though they didn't believe it. The unbelieving Jew knows more than the liberal Protestant today who tries to say he isn't really one with a father. He's just a good man. He's a good teacher.

He's a moral example. That isn't what they were trying to kill Jesus for. They knew his claim was equation with God himself. By the way, Paul used the term Lord some 40 plus times in the Book of Romans and in eight verses. He uses that word to refer to God, the father.

He uses it interchangeably for God, the father and God, the son. And for the Jew to confess that Jesus was Jehovah meant their religious world would be turned upside down. This carpenter is in fact God. And they would say, I can't say that.

You want to be rescued? You have to believe that in the very core of your being that this carpenter is God in the flesh. Now, if I can just change a little bit and talk about the Gentile who would read this text, to use the name Kurios for Jesus would also be life changing for them.

In fact, they would eventually lose their lives because of it. While the Jew came out of the world of monotheism, just not understanding three persons in this one Godhead. The Gentile came out of a pluralistic society where there were many gods and everybody was happy as long as you allowed everybody to have whatever God they wanted to have. But if you said no, Jesus is God incarnate. He has exclusive claim to deity.

Oh, now you become hateful. You know, Nero wrote in their public records that they killed the Christians because they hated humanity. Claudius would be deified. This emperor who lived when Paul was a younger man, his images, his sculptures would show him as God, Jupiter incarnate. They accepted this title as their own, claiming to be sons of God. They are deity themselves. Caligula, another emperor from the first century living during the time of the apostles believed he could converse with the planet gods and he would often be seen around the palace talking to the planets. I would have loved to have seen a little bit of that, but he would have these conversations. We actually have the record of one occasion that I read this past week in a new book I got on the emperors of Rome.

It's really actually hard to put down. Caligula was supposedly conversing with the moon goddess talking to the moon. And he asked one of his servants standing nearby whether he could see the goddess for himself. Caligula said, could you see the goddess too? And this young servant kept his eyes fixed on the ground and replied in a whisper, only you, Lord, may behold another God. Only you, Kurios, may behold another Kurios. It would be the one that would say, now that I follow Jesus alone as God incarnate, I will no longer offer incense to Caesar and call him Lord.

I will never bow my affections to Caesars. They are men. God-man I follow is God himself. Polycarp was one of those who got into trouble in the early part of the second century. He was discipled by John, the apostle.

Can you imagine that privilege? Polycarp had firm conviction about, of course, the person and deity of Jesus Christ. And he was being taken to the arena where he would be burned to death.

And the crowds had gathered by the tens of thousands. And as he was being carried along or taken there, the chief of police challenged him to renounce his beliefs and save himself. And Polycarp responded, how could I blaspheme my king and savior? Then he went on to say, hear my confession. I am a Christian. And if you are willing to learn what Christianity is, set a time at which you can hear me. Can you imagine being led to your death and you say to these officials, I'm a Christian.

And if you'd like to learn more about it, let's make an appointment. He was taken out as he said to them, why do you wait or hesitate? Bring on what you will. And as Polycarp was brought into the crowded arena where he would be executed, masses cried out. He is the father of the Christians. Note this, he is the destroyer of our gods.

He would dare destroy our gods. Romans chapter 10 verse 9 and 10 would become a creed. In fact, the medieval church began the myth of an apostles creed claiming that the apostles were somehow inspired. We have no record of that, of course, but we do have these little tidbits in the scriptures written by the apostles themselves.

And this would become the early first and second century creed. Anyone who would present themselves to be baptized would have to say that verse. I believe Jesus is curious or Lord. My friends, if you want to be rescued, you have to confess this creed for yourself, believing to the core of your being that Jesus Christ is Jehovah. Jesus Christ is God. Jesus Christ is Lord. But furthermore, you must confess that Jesus is not only Lord, but that Jesus Christ is living.

That's the next part of these phrases. The Christian then you see is not only one who believes that Jesus lived, he is one who believes that Jesus lives. A crucified Savior is only a dead man. It will take a crucified Savior who will be risen from the dead to give our faith its foundation. That is why the resurrection becomes so pivotal as Jesus Christ conquers the grave. Why is the resurrection so critical?

First, because it is the foundation of our faith. Paul writes to the Corinthian believers, Now I make known to you, brethren, the gospel which I preached to you, which also you received, in which also you stand, by which also you are saved. Same word, sozo, we find in Romans 10, 9, that he was buried and that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures. And if Christ has not been raised, verse 17, your faith is worthless and you are still in your sins. In other words, we haven't been rescued yet.

We're in this timed explosion waiting to go off. If the resurrection did not occur, not only is the foundation of our faith destroyed, but so is the validation of Christ. Jesus told the religious leaders in John 2, You destroy this temple and I'll rebuild it in three days.

And they thought he was referring to the literal physical temple where he was referring in fact to his body. When therefore he was raised from the dead, John 2, 19, his disciples remembered this and they believed the Scripture and the word which Jesus had spoken. The resurrection is the validation of the claim of our Lord Jesus Christ. Third, the resurrection is the inspiration of the apostles. Further, in 1 Corinthians, Paul writes that Jesus appeared to Peter then to the 12. After that, he appeared to more than 500 brethren at one time, most of whom remain until now. Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles. And last of all, as the one untimely born, he appeared to me also. I mean, how do you think that these cowards who ran in the face of the crucifixion will now on the day of Pentecost stand with great courage and bravery even though they're within a few hundred yards of the tomb?

They know it's empty. They have seen him. He's alive. And so Paul shouts with victory at the end of this chapter in 1 Corinthians 15, death is swallowed up in victory. So according to the Scriptures, five things in addition are true of Christ is still dead.

Let's sort of turn the coin around. Number one, without the resurrection, Jesus is a false prophet. Two, without the resurrection, the apostles are false witnesses. Three, without the resurrection, the church is promoting false promises. Four, without the resurrection, the believer is under false assurances. Five, without the resurrection, heaven is a false hope.

Did I go too slowly? Let me repeat it again. Without the resurrection, Jesus is a false prophet. That is, he's a liar. He's not a good man. He's not a good teacher. He's the worst of teachers. He deceives.

He's a liar. He claimed he would rise from the dead. All the Jews, by the way, had to do is produce a body and Christianity would be over.

But they found no body. Without the resurrection, secondly, the apostles are false witnesses. They're a bunch of liars too. Third, the church is promoting false promises. We're just an organized lie.

And all we're doing is promoting a lie now 2,000 years old. Without the resurrection, the believer is under false assurances. In other words, you're really not gonna be saved. You're not gonna get rescued.

You're gonna go down. You're gonna face the wrath of God. Without the resurrection, heaven is a false hope. Did not Jesus say that heaven would be given as a result of his ability to live and rise from the dead? He said, I'm going to prepare a place for you to his disciples. And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and receive you unto myself that where I am, there you may be.

Also John 14, two and three. If Jesus doesn't go, if he doesn't rise up, he's not gonna be able to prepare. If he doesn't prepare, he has nothing to come back to get us for and we have nowhere to go. This is all we get. This is it. This is all we have. Make the best of it. Make the most of it. A crumbling earth, a terror-filled world, a fearful existence, disaster upon disaster, injustice worldwide, a fleeting joy here and there, a momentary success here or there, but no future hope.

This is all you get. But there is more than this because Jesus did rise from the dead. Therefore, he did ascend.

Therefore, he did prepare. Therefore, he will come back and therefore, he will take us to this future place that awaits called heaven. You want to be rescued? You want to be saved from terror this world knows nothing of?

Believe in the core of your being that Jesus, in fact, is Jehovah, that he is Lord and believe that he has conquered death and is alive today. The old Moody, the great evangelist of the 1800s, I tell you about every once in a while, was surrounded by friends and family as he passed away. He was lying there on his bed, his eyes closed, and he began to talk. He said, earth is receding and heaven is at hand.

I can see the children. He and his wife had had children die. They thought he was dreaming and somebody at Moody's bed remarked, he's dreaming. Moody opened his eyes and said, I'm not dreaming.

Wouldn't that have been interesting? He went on to say, this is death. It is a sweet thing.

There's no valley here. And then his last words, God is calling me and I will go. Another dear saint of God, a famous pastor named Christmas Evans, pastored for years in Wales. He was dying and he had his family and friends around his bedside. We don't hear a lot of these stories now because we die in hospitals and we're hooked up to the tubes and we're typically drugged beyond the ability to communicate. Well, this one, Christmas Evans was dying and his family and friends were called to be around him.

He seemed to be sleeping, his breath now short and labored. But then this dear man opened his eyes and waved to his friends and his last words as his arms fell to the bedside were, drive on Elijah, drive on. By the way, for those here in this auditorium today who know in the core of their being that Jesus Christ is Lord and that Jesus Christ is living, maybe God will give us an opportunity to say something like that as we go from this crumbling earth to everlasting life, drive on Elijah, drive on. There's nothing quite like the feeling of being totally and completely assured of something. That's the powerful message of the gospel. Those who have placed their faith in Jesus Christ face eternity with 100% certainty, knowing that their salvation is safe and secure in Christ. Jesus Christ is Lord.

And because of that, we can trust him completely to keep every one of his promises to us. I'm glad you've joined us today. This is Wisdom for the Heart, the Bible teaching ministry of Stephen Davey.

Stephen pastors the Shepherd's Church in Cary, North Carolina. You can learn more about us at wisdomonline.org. While you're there, take advantage of the resource that we have that explains the gospel in detail. It's called God's Wisdom for Your Heart. It's also on the home screen of our smartphone app. We'll continue this series on our next broadcast. So please join us then here on Wisdom for the Heart. We'll continue this series on our next broadcast.