Friday, October 24, 2008

Speaking Back to God

Quoting Pastor Peter Bender, pastor of Peace Lutheran Church in Sussex, Wisconsin, and Director of the Concordia Catechetical Academy. This quote is taken from part 2 of his Apostles’ Creed series, God the Son, on Issues, Etc.™:
...we are called to make confession as Christians. And the confession that we make is to speak back to God what it is that He has spoken to us. Which Word the Holy Spirit used to call us to faith in the first place. So the Word of the Gospel comes to us. We hear it, and by the Word of the Gospel we are called to faith and we speak back to God what He’s spoken to us. Like children who speak back to their parents the language that they have heard from their parents. And we are all called to speak the same language.

The Apostle’s Creed, we talked at the beginning of our time today about the objectivity of the language. It’s not only objective, but it’s objective language that is Scriptural language. It’s not language that is drawn from contemporary society and culture, because the contemporary societies and cultures change over time. Now this is God’s language. We take up God’s language, and we speak it back to Him. And what’s unique about the Apostle’s Creed is that every word, every phrase is Biblical. ...It speaks God’s language in God’s way. ...That’s the other thing that the Creed continues to do in that language we speak back to God, that’s faithful to the Scriptures, that speaks in God’s way. It’s always drawing us away from ourselves to God. In so many contemporary creeds that people concoct, end up being a kind of navel gazing, or speak more about the quality of my believing than they do about the objective reality of who God is and what He has done, which is how the Scriptures speak.

You can listen to the whole show here:

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