D.S.S. On "The Belief" or the Apostles' Creed

DSS ON THE APOSTLES CREED : PART OF SERMON : TEXT 2 CORINTHIANS 4:13

We having the same spirit of faith, according as it is written, I believed, and therefore have I spoken; we also believe, and therefore speak;
THE APOSTLES’ CREED
I believe in God the Father, Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth:
And in Jesus Christ, his only Son, our Lord:
Who was conceived by the Holy Ghost, born of the Virgin Mary:
Suffered under Pontius Pilate; was crucified, dead and buried:
He descended into hell:
The third day he rose again from the dead:
He ascended into heaven, and sitteth on the right hand of God the Father Almighty:
From thence He shall come to judge the quick and the dead:
I believe in the Holy Ghost:
I believe in the holy Catholic Church: the Communion of Saints:
The Forgiveness of sins:
The Resurrection of the body:
And the Life everlasting. Amen.

This creed, the Faith once delivered to the Saints and by which the Saints lived and died, that is your warrant that your hopes are no delusions but that they in God’s good time will be fulfilled.

Therefore my trust is in the Lord,
And not in mine own merit;
On Him my soul shall rest, His word
Upholds my fainting spirit;
His promised mercy is my fort,
My comfort and my sweet support;
I wait for it with patience
(From Psalm 130)

The Belief is not only a God-given ministry and a warrant for our hoping. It is also a safeguard. It preserves our minds from exaggerations and phantasies and eccentricities and holds us to the sweet simplicities of Christianity. I’d like you to remember this when you are studying the Belief. Its austerity is something which you need in your religious life, where emotion is sometimes ready to run away with you and rush you into all sorts of extravagancies. You have only to consider how in our day unbalanced Christians giving themselves over to queer and outlandish vagaries, and private interpretations of the Scripture, and heresies, can bring into the Church of Christ hatred and strife where the Love and Peace of Jesus should for ever abide, to realise the need for such a a heavenly shield and buckler.

We need not bid, for cloistered cell,
Our neighbor and our words farewell,
Nor strive to find ourselves too high
For sinful man beneath the sky.

The trivial round, the common task,
Will furnish all we ought to ask;
Room to deny ourselves, a road
To bring us daily nearer God.
John Keble 1792-1866

The belief puts us decisively in our proper place. In a little book which Erasmus wrote for the use of Anne Boleyn we find a pupil and his teacher considering about the Belief together.
The pupil says: “This troubled my mind for what cause it should be that whereas in all other disciplines and sciences they do begin with the most easy and light things such as are familiarly known to our senses, this heavenly philosophy doth forthwith at the beginning speak of God, which is the highest thing that can be and most furthest from all man’s senses.”
To which the teacher replies: “Verily! - Because this philosophy is a discipline of Belief and not of disquisition and reasoning; for disquisition and reasoning doth lead man’s mind far about by many compassing ways and oftentimes also doth beguile it and lead it out of the right way. But Faith compendiously and speedily doth carry and convey up to the highest and setteth our mind as it were on a high toting hill from which it may more certainly and perfectly discern and judge these inferior things, referring all things to God in whom is the beginning the increase and the perfect full end of all things.”

Let us stand and repeat the Belief together. Those of you who do not have it by heart may find it at Hymn 724.
Praise ye Jehovah! source of all our blessings:
Before His gifts earth’s richest boons wax dim;
Resting in Him, His peace and joy possessing,
All things are ours, for we have all in Him.