...He Came for Our Salvation | We Believe | Rick Atchley

We believe in one God, the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth, of all things visible and invisible. We believe in one Lord Jesus Christ, the only Son of God, begotten from the Father of all ages. God from God, light from light, true God from true God, begotten, not made, from the same day as the Father, who has all things made. And we believe for us and for our salvation. He came down from heaven, He became incarnate by the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary, and was made human. He was crucified for us under Pontius Pilate. He suffered and was buried. On the third day He rose again according to the Scriptures. We believe He ascended to heaven and is seated at the right hand of the Father. He will come again with glory to judge the living and the dead. His kingdom will never end. And we believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life. He proceeds from the Father and the Son, and with the Father and the Son is worshipped and glorified. He spoke through the prophets. We believe in one holy catholic and apostolic church. We affirm one baptism for the forgiveness of sin. We look forward to the resurrection of the dead and to life in the world to come. Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen. Welcome to the Hills, Preacher Rick here. I'm greeting our online family and all the people that are in person at our four campuses

in Dallas and Keller West Fort Worth and North Richland Hills. Before I begin my teaching this morning, I would like to lead a prayer. As you are all aware in the last 36 hours, our world has experienced a significant change. And while we can always debate the why of any war, what's not debatable is that war hurts innocent people, especially women and children. And I would remind you it affects the body of Christ. We have brothers and sisters in Iran. We are personally as a church doing work in that nation and our brothers and sisters there have a much harder life today than they did two days ago. Some of our workers have tried to get out of that country for the time. I can't mention their names. I can mention David and Lori Vanderpool. A lot of you know them. They live beyond ministry. A lot of us have been to Haiti to work in their work, and they also have work in Israel and in Gaza, especially with children on the margins. In fact, last year, they saw 45 people, Palestinian people, accept Christ and get baptized in Gaza. And we celebrate that, and I tell you that to just remind you, whether it's Gaza or Israel or Iran or any of the nations impacted by this conflict, we have brothers and sisters, and we need to keep them in our prayers. So we're going to do that now, and I ask you to bow with me. And so, God, we know war was not a part of your intention for this creation. We know that when creation is renewed, war will be gone forever. But today, we pray especially for innocent people caught up in a conflict they did not start. We pray for their safety and their well-being. We pray for members of our armed forces that are serving our nation in that part of the world, for their safety and for peace to reign in their families that I'm sure are quite anxious today. And we pray for the body of Christ and all of these nations most impacted by this war. We pray for the safety of our brothers and sisters. And we pray that their faith in this moment will give them more opportunities

to share the good news about the Prince of Peace. We pray all this in Jesus' name. Amen. So we're in week three of a six-week series on the Nicene Creed. It was composed 1,700 years ago. And it is, outside of Scripture, the most accepted and repeated Christian document in history. Today, all around the world, people are reciting this creed. Catholics, Orthodox, Protestants, Charismatics. non-charismatics, high church, low church, denom, non-denom. The body of Christ globally all agrees that these Christian truths are critical to our understanding of what it means to follow Jesus. And one reason I wanted to do this was to remind us that this faith that we preach, we did not invent. We received it. The apostles gave it to the next generation, to the next and to the next, and now they've given it to us. And this faith that we proclaim came to us at great cost. For about 300 years, it was as illegal to be a Christian and meet in public worship gatherings in the world as it is in Iran today, but Christians kept doing it. There was a part of the world, today it's called Turkey, then it was called Bithynia, where the persecution was particularly intense. We've read writings of a governor there named Pliny, who wrote to the emperor Trajan saying, I'm doing all I can to stamp out this superstition, but no matter how many Christians I kill, they keep on meeting and sharing their faith. And one of the major cities of that region called Bithynia

was a town called Nicaea. And the Christians there kept records of some of the saints that were martyred for the faith. There was a goose herder named Triphon, who cast a demon out of a daughter of a Roman official, but was beheaded. There was a devout widow named Theodota, and a Roman official wanted her to be his next wife, and she refused because she would not accept his gods. And so they burned her. There was a young teenage boy named Neophytos. He would not say Caesar is Lord. And so the Roman officials began to lash him and said, we're gonna keep lashing you until you say it. And the more they lashed, the more he said Jesus is Lord, until they had lashed him 500 times to the point of his death. And then they poured salt and vinegar in his wounds so his last moments would be even more excruciating. And the church took his dead body, and they buried it outside of town by a lake. Then somewhere around the early 300s, the Emperor Constantine declared that he had converted to Christianity. Now, it's debatable how sincere his conversion was. What's not debatable is that for the first time, it was not illegal to be a Christian or to go to church. And in Nicaea, they built a church on the spot where they had buried that teenage boy. And it's this church here.

And later in that church, bishops from all over the world came and they composed this creed. And here's why I tell you all that. I want you to hear this. These aren't a bunch of scholars coming together for a theological nerd fest. These are bishops and elders and pastors of churches where people have died because they believe this. They've seen people persecuted because they would rather die than deny. They believe unto death. So these bishops understood being a Christian meant being faithful to certain truths at all costs, that uncompromised believing was more important than compromised living. And so they did what they did. And the Christians died like they died because they were all convinced that God had done what he had done. And that brings us to, I think, the very heart of the creed. What has God done that we would rather die than deny? They wrote, we believe for us and for our salvation. He came down from heaven. He became incarnate by the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary and was made human. He was crucified for us under Pontius Pilate. He suffered and was buried. The third day he rose again, according to the scriptures.

Now, while this might be our favorite part of the creed, It is the most offensive part to unregenerate ears because it starts for our salvation. And the implication is obvious. We don't just need improving, we need saving. We don't just need repairing, we need redeeming. And this assertion repulses people who believe that man is basically good and he's evolving and becoming better. And the last thing he needs is forgiveness. And people who feel this way will embrace Jesus as an activist, but not as a savior. But his name defined his mission. Joseph has a dream. An angel comes to explain to Joseph why his fiance is pregnant while claiming to be a virgin. And the angel says, she'll give birth to a son and you're to give him the name Jesus because he will save his people from their sins. His name is his mission. You see, the biblical witness that consists of this says three things about the human condition. Number one, we're sinners. We really have violated God. Number two, we're sentenced. We deserve a penalty for our crime. We're sinners, we're sentenced. And number three, we're stuck. And by stuck, I mean, we cannot improve our standing with God

because the God of the Bible is unimpressed with self-produced righteousness. So did you notice in the creed, the only verb we get is believe. All the other verbs belong to God. He came, he became, he was crucified, he suffered, he was buried, he rose. Who is doing the work of salvation here? And this is the huge difference between religion and Christianity. That all other religions, they give you rules, they give you rituals, they give you disciplines, do these things and obligate God. Do these things and God owes you this. The gospel says, God is not in your debt. You are in God's debt. And he alone could pay the debt. And so to sum it up, here's the huge difference between the Christian faith handed down by our Christian forefathers and other religions. It is that salvation is not about man coming to God, but God coming to man. You don't get right with God by figuring out how to get back to him. He had to come to us. And this salvation plan that heaven conceived, it wasn't some last minute brainstorm of the Godhead. But as soon as we got in our mess, he announced it. And he prophesied to the serpent, through this woman, a seed will come

and he will crush your head. Here's what I want you to see. Salvation is not by us. Salvation is for us. The creed is not telling us what to do. It is reminding us of what God did. That our faith is not built on principles. It's built on events. God did something. And specifically, there were three moments in history where God made a strong statement, the birth, the death, and the resurrection. What the manger says is that God is man. And after the claim of the resurrection, this might be the most controversial claim of the Christian faith. But the fathers were clear. He came down from heaven. He became incarnate by the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary, and he was made human. And only the Christian faith teaches that the God who is above us came to live among us. John, at the start of his gospel, puts it this way. So the word became human and made his home among us. He was full of unfailing love and faithfulness. And we've seen his glory, the glory of the Father's one and only Son. No one's ever seen God, but the unique one who is himself God is near to the Father's heart.

He has revealed God to us. God is man. It's controversial today. It was controversial then. A lot of people said there's no way God hung on a cross. That just appeared to be God. And these false prophets went around teaching that Jesus didn't really become a man. And so the one way the early church decided who false prophets were, where they asked the question, was Jesus God or not? John wrote, every spirit who confesses that Jesus Christ came to earth as a human is from God. And every spirit who refused to say this about Jesus is not from God. And so we said last time in our understanding of the Trinity, God, the Father, and God, the Son, and God, the Spirit, that Jesus, who is God, became man. And that's very comforting, because that means that God gets us. He understands our temptations, and our struggles, and our hurts. And it's very comforting to know that He suffers with us, but that's not why we're saved. We're saved because Jesus suffered for us. Remember, the incarnation is not the start of Jesus. Jesus has always existed. It is the birth of Jesus as a man. Why? I mean, if I'm okay, and you're okay,

and we're all basically improving, why did God become a man? Because the creed is not just affirming that He came, it is saying He had to come. Because only man should pay the debt that sin created, but only God could pay it. And so, heaven's solution was the God-man. Not half God, half man, fully God, and fully man. The Hebrew writer put it this way. When Christ came into the world, he said to God, you did not want animal sacrifices or sin offerings, but you've given me a body to offer. For God's will was for us to be made holy by the sacrifice of the body of Jesus Christ once for all time. The essence of sin is we put ourself where God belongs. And the essence of salvation is God putting Himself where we belonged. God's salvation plan was to love us to death. And that brings up the most offensive part of the gospel, the cross of Christ. Because the cross says God was sin. There are many ways to try to understand and explain what happened at the cross, and all of them are a bit inadequate because it's such a mystery. But at the core of the mystery is the claim, the mystery is the claim, he was crucified for us. And by for us, they meant instead of us. And the biblical witness is clear, Romans 5.8.

God demonstrates his own love for us in this, while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. 1 Corinthians 15.3, for what I received and passed on to you as of first importance, that Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures. In Galatians, Paul wrote, Christ took away the curse the law put on us. He changed places with us and put himself under that curse. All the scriptures point to this. Jesus said, they testify about me. He took those two guys on the road to Emmaus after his resurrection, and he took them to the scriptures and said, this has always been what God's pointing to. There's a neat story in Acts 8, an Ethiopian eunuch is reading from the scroll of Isaiah, the famous passage about the suffering servant, and Philip joins him and the eunuch says, I have no clue who this is talking about. What does this mean? Let me show you what he was reading. He was wounded for the wrong we did. He was crushed for the evil we did. The punishment which made us well was given to him, and we are healed because of his wounds. We all have wandered away like sheep. Each of us has gone his own way, but the Lord has put on him the punishment for all the evil we have done. This is sometimes called the doctrine of penal substitutionary atonement.

That someone took our place and took our penalty, and some people have trouble, especially with the first two words, because when we use the word substitute, we typically use it as someone who's not as good, right? Now, I know about this because I played a lot of sports as a boy, and I was always a substitute. That meant when the game started, I was on the bench. And if I got in the game, we were either way ahead or way behind Because I was not as good as the person whose place I was taking But that's not what we mean when we say Jesus is our substitute In fact, what we mean is that only he is good enough to take our place That only a sinless man could die for the sins of another and so Jesus came To sinners and he came for sinners, but he didn't become a sinner He became sin And I'm about to read a verse and If you ever hear me read this verse and you don't hear all in my voice You need to come and tell me it's time to quit Christ had no sin But God made him Become sin So that in Christ we could become right with God That verse explains why Jesus prayed before He was arrested father, is there another way Could you take this cup away Away What filled Jesus with dread wasn't the physical discomfort of the cross? Brave men have faced death and Jesus was as courageous as any man who ever lived What filled him with such dread he knew I? must become

sin And he's on the cross and it gets real dark and you hear him scream my god my god Why have you forsaken me? And what's so interesting about his prayer? It is the only prayer Jesus ever prayed we have record of Where he didn't call God father He always calls God father even on the cross at the start father Forgive them at the end father into your hands I commit my spirit, but in this one moment as the sky is dark. He screams my god Why have you forsaken? me Because in that moment his relationship to God Was not paternal it was judicial. He had become sin And our little brains are too small to wrap around what I'm about to say but for the first Time in eternity in that moment Jesus experienced God as judge God can only deal with sin as his holiness allows if he doesn't punish it if he doesn't make adequate Satisfaction for it. He's not dealing with sin justly and he can't do that The cross is where holiness and love met It's where justice fell on our sins But it missed us It didn't miss Jesus and The angels are stunned as they realize God Has become sin And the Trinity is disjointed and Jesus is terribly alone has the embodiment of sin God is experiencing hell so that man does not have to and Certainly, there's more that happened at the cross, but not less Several years ago there was a break-in of a church in New York City that church had a huge 200 pound plaster figure of Jesus on the cross on a wall at a meditation corner and

Thieves broke in and took a lot of effort and time to unscrew the Jesus figure and still it but leave the cross on the wall and the church caretaker Probably didn't realize how prophetic he was being when he said I guess they just wanted to take Jesus, but they didn't want the cross And that speaks to men in our day I want the Jesus who speaks for people on the margins and I want the ethic and I want the love But I don't want Someone dying for my sins because I deserve God's wrath And can I confess there was a time some years ago When even in my own preaching I drifted away from talking about that It wasn't popular then it's not popular now, you know, it changed me Preaching in prison Because in prison people don't pose And they don't pretend and they get real with the fact I screwed up I've made a mess of things and I deserve punishment And when you stand in prison and you tell those men or women God loves you God came for you and God is willing to send his son to pay the penalty You couldn't pay and to forgive you of your sins. That is really really good news And if we think They need that news more than we do we still don't get the gospel When I was a boy The little church I was raised in had a regular song leader and if he was sick or gone We had no one else in the whole church that could start a song except brother Joe and the elders had no choice They didn't really like for brother Joe to lead singing because number one he was always gonna sing There's power in the blood and number two. He was gonna get all charismatic and start punching his fist. There's power power Wonder-working power way too much excitement for our church But I loved it Because brother Joe understood There is power in the blood of Jesus shed on the cross To make sinners right with God

But Everything he did on that cross would be powerless if he was just another dead religious founder and so The third day they wrote He rose again if the manger says God is man and the cross says God was sin the tomb says God is one and The Creed reminds us that we're not trusting our eternity to the wisdom and virtue of a dead guy Our hope tank is full because the tomb is empty. I Mentioned that Bithynia was a place where the persecution was especially severe Peter at the start of his first epistle mentions Bithynia. He's writing to the Christians there He knows how bad it is And he said this praise be to the God and father of a Lord Jesus Christ in his great mercy He's given us new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead our hope is real and one day it'll be fully realized because in the death and Resurrection of Jesus we have glimpsed the future We know how this story is going to end Paul writes We believe that Jesus died and that he rose again So because of him God will raise with Jesus those who have died This is why they would hold on This is why they wouldn't say Caesar is Lord. This is why they were willing to die for what they believed Because they had seen the future in the death and resurrection of Jesus and this is why they would go public and get baptized Baptism was the early church's way of saying to Rome. You don't own us and you never will Paul says When you were baptized you were buried with Christ and you were raised up with him through your faith in God's power That was shown when he raised Christ from the dead in Baptism, they were announcing the victory of God and declaring What is is not what's going to be So many years ago, I would watch NFL football almost every Sunday and For several years. There was a beer commercial that had the tagline. It just doesn't get any better than this And I remember one of the commercials. There's a bunch of dudes out in the wilderness or by a creek. It's cold It's wet and rainy. They're sitting around a fire and they're drinking brew and one of them says

It just doesn't get any better than this It just doesn't get any better than this and I remember thinking to myself you are cold you are wet You stink You're about to sleep on the ground Away from your loved ones and family If it doesn't get any better than this i'd get drunk, too But we preach the gospel We take people into the water and we baptize them in the death and the resurrection of jesus and we declare it gets a lot better than this Tolkien in his trilogy lord of the rings He put a lot of theology in there on purpose and one of my favorite scenes when gandalf reappears after people thought he was dead Samwise gamgee says to him Is everything sad going to come? untrue See, what God has done guarantees what God is going to do. And that's why those early Christians chose uncompromised believing over compromised living. Henry Nowen tells a story of a Lutheran pastor during World War II. He was in a concentration camp and he would not endorse the Nazi regime. So one day a guard begins to beat him rather savagely and he refuses to endorse the Nazi regime. And the guard says to him, don't you know I can kill you? And the pastor responds, I do know. But what you don't know is that I've already died. When we come to Christ and we are buried in his death and resurrection, that old us is gone and the new us is risen. And we've already experienced the only death that really matters. You see, people indoctrinated in the gospel are not intimidated by the world. And that's why today in parts of the world where believing what I just preached can put you in prison or worse, our brothers and sisters keep saying, I'm not letting it go. They remember what God has done for us.

Now we don't live in that context, but I don't care where you live, life is hard. And when life gets hard, you got to ask this question. What God do I believe in? And what the creed is reminding us and what the gospel is declaring, God is for us. God is for us. He came for us. He died for us. He rose for us, for our salvation. He did all of this. God is for us. God, the almighty has chosen you even if no one else ever has. God is, not maybe, not once was, right now at this moment, God is for. Not neutral, not unsure, not waiting on you to get your act together so we can make up his mind. God is for us. Not some of us, not the best of us, all of us, God is for us. Jesus came and he died and he was raised for our salvation. And the judge has ruled in our favor because he did and there is no higher court. And so the only way to experience the againstness of God is to reject the very gift that proves his for-ness. So in light of what he has done, what will you do with Jesus? For 2,000 years, the church has answered that question. I will declare him to be my Lord. I will publicly get baptized to say I believe in his death and his resurrection. And I will start following him as my leader and Lord. That's why we're going to have baptism Sunday in three weeks. That's why I want you to scan that QR code, ask your questions, learn more about it, call your family, call your friends, let them witness you go public for Jesus. I've seen thousands of people get baptized in the years I've been pastor at this church. But one of my top 10 all-time baptisms to witness was Dorothy Lewis.

You can see Dorothy in the baptistry with Evelyn, her friend. Evelyn's a member of our church. They met at a retirement center. At the time, Evelyn was 90 and Dorothy was 95. And they would watch sermons from our church and Dorothy noticed people getting baptized. And she said, why do they do that? And Evelyn explained. And Dorothy said, I got to do that. 95, we took two grown men to help her get into the water. But you can see, I don't think she regretted her decision. And what I'll never forget was her saying at 95 years old, why has no one ever told me about this? Well, you've been told. For 2,000 years, the Scriptures have been telling us, He came for our salvation. Do you believe this? If you do, I want you to join with billions of Christians throughout history and around the world and recite that part of the creed with me. Stand up, please. Every campus online, I'll say again. If you don't believe it, don't say it. If you do believe it, don't say it timidly. Say it with energy. Say it with passion. Say it like you believe this is worth dying for because it is. We believe for us and for our salvation. He came down from heaven. He became incarnate by the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary and was made human. He was crucified for us under Pontius Pilate. He suffered and was buried. The third day, He rose again according to the Scriptures.

This, this is what we believe. So God, we thank You for the words that we just spoke because they're true words. They describe what actually happened because God came for us. And we ask God for strength to hold on to these words, to pass these words on to the next generation. And like the millions of Christians before us, have the courage to pay whatever price is necessary to speak a true gospel to the world. You came for us. You were born for us. You died for us. You rose again for us. You're coming again for us. We believe this, we will hold on to this, and we will preach this until You come. In Jesus' name, amen.