Identity Matters

Sunday, 25 June 2023 by

Bernard Gabbott - Sunday, 25 June 2023

Identity Matters

The LORD loves His people. The LORD’s people doubt His love. This affects their worship of Him – does He really deserve our best? And this affects their relationships with each other – if the LORD doesn’t really love us, why should we be faithful to each other? This is the scenario that Malachi confronts in Malachi 2:10-16. Three points are worth remembering. • First, this is a prophecy against God’s people, not a statement about the wider world. • Second, this is a reminder that how we live as God’s mob reflects what we think about God – our vertical life is expressed in our horizontal life. • And, third, God has given us daily images of His faithfulness towards us – daily covenants. Do we live in such a way here that we honour Him?

Scripture References: Malachi 2:10-16, Psalms 23:1-6, Deuteronomy 7:1-6

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We must keep remembering that The Apostles’ Creed speaks to the world we live in. And the world we live in is marked, defined, by restlessness. This is the absence of rest – and the dominance of searching for rest – in work, in leisure, in experience, in self-discovery. It is against this backdrop that we must understand the next part of The Apostles’ Creed – ‘I believe in Jesus Christ, God’s only Son, our Lord, who was conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the virgin Mary…’. The Incarnation – the birth of Jesus as THE God-man – is the only answer for the restlessness of our world. And this is because our restless lives are the expression of sin, and its judgement… and only someone who is both fully God and fully man can deal with our sin.
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Each week, we publicly state what we believe, as we gather as God’s mob. Each week, we publicly state that we believe certain truths about God – about His nature, about His actions, about His community, about His interactions with this world. In fact, as an Anglican Church, we are part of a denomination that states we hold to three ‘creeds’, three summary statements about what we believe about God – the Apostles’ Creed, the Nicaean Creed and the Athanasian Creed. Each creed emerged in response to certain questions – about the nature of God, about the nature of the Trinity. But the earliest was the Apostles’ Creed, a summary of the truth of the apostles, originally created for baptisms. In fact, to have such a creed – a summary – is following in the footsteps of God’s word – just look at Deuteronomy 6:4, or Romans 10:8-9, or Philippians 2:5-11.
Sunday, 29 December 2024
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