Brothers, Preach the Nicene Creed to Magnify Your God

A. W. Tozer (1897–1963) said, “What comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us.” He went on, “Worship is pure or base as the worshiper entertains high or low thoughts of God.”^[1] It is concerning, then, that in a recent study, 43% of evangelicals agreed that “Jesus was a great teacher, but he was not God.”^[2] Sadly, this percentage of professing Christians that deny a cardinal doctrine of Christianity is on an upward trend. What is the the most vital doctrine in the Christian faith—even more vital than the gospel message itself? The Trinity. This is because before there can be a God who creates, judges, and redeems (which are all doctrines which pertain to us as creatures), there must be a God who is. Clearly, there is a major theological problem in our churches. If we asked the average Christian, “How often have you heard a sermon series, or a stand-alone sermon, on the Trinity?” The answer for many Christians would be seldom to none. Does this not demonstrate a deficiency in our preaching, our churches, and our lives as evangelicals? Those who deny the Trinity, according to the traditional and orthodox position, is that they are outside the bounds of biblical Christianity. Further, even if a believer mentally assents to doctrine, if the Triune nature of God does not affect his daily life, this too is concerning.

In this article, I will argue that one of the best ways to address this deficiency is to preach a sermon series on the Trinity using the Nicene Creed as a guide.^[3] Much of my argument is drawn from my own experience as I preached a series through the Nicene Creed at my own church. I’ll first demonstrate why we should preach through the creed before turning to how one might do this, and finally I’ll conclude with some personal reflections on our church’s journey through the Nicene Creed.

Rationale: Why Preach the Creed?

Many of us would not dispute that Trinitarian theology in our congregations is weaker than it ought to be. But is preaching through the Nicene Creed really the right way to address this problem? An obvious objection to preaching a series on the Creed is that it does not fit neatly into the normal pattern of consecutive exposition. At my church, our regular practice is preaching through books of the Bible on Sunday mornings. So, to preach a five-week series on an ancient creed undoubtedly feels out of the norm. But, at least in my context, we have occasionally preached topical sermons on things like technology, entertainment and leisure, and work. If our church can stomach addresses on those topics, which (while important) are far less important than the triune nature of God, then surely, we are justified in preaching an entire sermon series on the Trinity.

A weightier objection is that to preach on the Nicene Creed is to explain a man-made document and not the Scriptures. This is a fair contention, and given my Baptist context, it carries much weight.^[4] So, what then, is my rationale? Donald Fairbairn, an expert on the Nicene Creed, has remarked how almost every word in the Nicene Creed was derived from the Scriptures, except for one. In other words, the drafters of the creed were seeking to be immensely biblical in their articulation of theology. As for the one word that was extra-biblical, it was homoousios, which was employed to affirm the full deity of the Son and his co-eternality and co-substantiality with the Father. With these observations, the claim that the creed is extra-biblical, then, seems to carry less weight, even for a Baptist.

4. If, for example, I was a pastor in the Canadian Reformed Church, then it would be quite normal to have a separate service to teach, say, on the Heidelberg Catechism. This, however, is not our practice as a Baptist church with a non-liturgical, low-church, and non-confessional atmosphere.

Execution

In this next section, I will speak on the execution of preaching on the Nicene Creed. The goal here is to put forth what I did at my church and in my context; this is not intended to be an exemplary model. First, I divided up the Nicene Creed into five sermons: the Father, the Son’s deity, the Son’s incarnation, the Holy Spirit, and the church.^[5] Second, I made my arguments both from the Scripture and the creed. I endeavoured to show how the teaching of the creed accorded with the Scriptures; thus, I read an anchor text at the outset of each sermon, which captured a major idea which the respective article in the creed developed. Similarly, I did not replace the Scripture reading during the service with a reading of the creed. Third, there were weeks where I exposited more lines in the creed than others. In the sermon on the Father, I treated most of the lines in some fashion; however, in the sermon on the Church, I focused on the word, “catholic,” and did not comment on the rest. Fourth, while I weaved in some aspects of the history, I sought to not get bogged down with it. For my context, to provide extensive details about the background would not have been useful for my people. That being said, I provided some historical information to orient people to basic facts about church history—for example, that the Nicene Creed developed between the Council of Nicaea (325) and the First Council of Constantinople (381).

5. I preached all the sermons except the middle one (the Son’s incarnation), which was probably the most straightforward one for another elder to preach.

Fifth, I will say a word regarding the structure of the sermons. For most of the sermons, since they were topical, my headings were questions, which helped move the message along. The flow was usually heavier doctrine at the beginning, with pointed application towards the end. For instance, in the sermon on the Son’s deity, I spoke about bad Trinitarian analogies and the eternal generation of the Son, and ended with a section about how believers can be sons by grace because Jesus is a son by nature. Sixth—and this flows out of the previous reflection—in my preparation process, I kept asking the question, “Why does this matter?” As pastors, it is easy to presume that when we preach on theology and the people are tuned out, the fault is with them. But, as the great twentieth-century Welsh preacher, Martyn Lloyd-Jones said, “preaching is logic on fire.” If our sermons on the Trinity are boring, dull, and dry, then the fault, brother pastor, is with us, not our people. One way to make our sermons more relevant, and therefore interesting, is to persistently demand an answer to the question, “Why does this matter?”

Seventh, as for resources, I found the following helpful: Michael Reeves, Delighting in the Trinity, Donald Fairbairn’s three-part lecture series “Nicaea and the Nicene Creed: 1700th Anniversary,” his shorter and newer book, The Trinity. As for commentaries on the creed, there is Philip Cary’s The Nicene Creed: An Introduction, and a Catholic work by Jared Ortiz and Daniel A. Keating, The Nicene Creed: A Scriptural, Historical & Theological Commentary. The sections on the Trinity were superb; I would not say so, though, regarding the chapter on the church. Finally, Kevin DeYoung also has a short work, The Nicene Creed, that I found helpful.

Reflection

Finally, I want to provide some retrospective reflections, having preached a series on the Nicene Creed. First, if you are a pastor considering doing this, I would encourage you in that direction, with a few caveats. For one, you should probably check with your elders that they would be supportive of this idea. For two, depending on your current knowledge of Trinitarian doctrine, it would be wise for you to read relevant material on the Trinity before you plunge into a series on the subject. For instance, if you do not understand the eternal generation of the Son right now, it would not be advisable for you to preach a sermon on it next week. However, if your elders are on board and you feel that you have a working knowledge of Trinitarian theology, it would be a worthwhile consideration.

Second, as you might imagine, preaching the Nicene Creed grows you as a preacher. You must understand difficult and dense topics yourself and then seek to communicate them clearly to your people. Additionally, you must think of how those truths are going to impact the daily lives of your people.

Third, this series on the Nicene Creed was helpful to my Christian life in an unexpected way. Perhaps a summary from the sermon on the Son’s deity is apt here:

I started the sermon by talking about how the deity of Christ is taught in the New Testament, and how Christians worshiped Jesus as God during the first few centuries of the church before Nicaea. Then, I said, “The second misconception is this: the Trinity is like water or a milkshake.” I made the case that the Trinity should not be explained by analogies, but through the imagery of the Father and the Son. In other words, we can understand Jesus most clearly when we see him as the Son of the Father; he is the eternally begotten Son of the Father. The Son has always been a Son of the Father, therefore, the Father has always had a Son; the Father eternally communicates his divine essence to the Son. Therefore, Jesus is a son by nature.

Then, I said to the congregation, “That’s a lot of great information about the Trinity. But isn’t this stuff for theology nerds who like to geek out over this stuff? How does the eternal generation of the Son, or the co-equality of the Son and the Father, help me in my daily life? How does the doctrine of the Trinity make a difference in my life?” Here is a modified excerpt from my manuscript that gives a partial answer:

My parents split when I was ten, and they divorced when I was twelve. So, I basically grew up without a father from then on. When you are in that kind of situation, you desire with all your heart what you don’t have. For many years, I wished that I had an active and present father in my life. In fact, when I first encountered a godly family that loved one another, it was so hard for me to swallow the pill that I didn’t have that. So, it’s hard to have divorced parents. It’s hard to have a father who was absent when you needed him most.

But friends, I am going to be okay. The reason I am going to be okay is not because my parents miraculously got back together and lived happily ever after. It’s not because my dad entered back into the picture and went above and beyond to make up for lost time. It’s not because the Lord provided me with a stand-in father through a relative or family friend. No, I am going to be okay because Jesus is the Son of the Father.

My Savior is the Son of God who has been eternally loved by his Father. Then, my Savior came down into this world for me and my salvation. My Savior willingly went to the cross die for my sins as my substitute. My Savior sent the Holy Spirit to open my eyes so that I can see my need for the Savior. The Holy Spirit has entered my heart, and I can now cry, “Abba! Father!” (Rom 8:15). He is the eternal Son of God who assumed human flesh so that traitorous and rebellious sinners would be adopted as the children of God. Our sonship is possible, brothers and sisters, because Jesus is a son by nature, and therefore, we can be sons by grace.

All the Bible, all creation, all the universe, all history, all the unfolding of redemption, and all of your life is about him. He, and he alone, is worthy. Run to him. Trust in him. Worship him. Hallelujah! What a Savior! That’s why the doctrine of the Trinity is relevant to my life and to yours.

Preaching on the Trinity will deepen your people’s understanding of the nature of the God whom they worship and the shape of the gospel by which they have been saved. Additionally, the salvation of souls is at stake, since those who deny the Trinity outside the bounds of orthodox Christianity. That’s why, brother pastor, you should preach the Nicene Creed and the Triune God of whom it speaks. By doing so, you will gain a deeper understanding, and therefore more joyfully proclaim, the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ who came down for us and our salvation.^[6]

6. The Creed says, “Who, for us men and for our salvation, came down from heaven.” Chad Van Dixhoorn, ed., Creeds, Confessions, and Catechisms: A Reader’s Edition (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2022), 17.