September 13

I believe in God, the Father: Psalm 33:6-9, Gen 1:1

1.1 Have you ever stopped to ask yourself: What actually makes the church the church? What is it that truly holds us together?

1.2 When we look around today, it is so easy to define the church by external things such as our budget, our committees, the programs we run, or even the building we gather in. But Scripture reminds us that none of these things makes the church what it is.

1.3 If we strip all of that away, what would remain? Think about why we do what we do here. Why do we give our tithes and offerings? Why do we volunteer our time and pour our energy into serving? We don't do it just to keep an organization running. And we certainly don't do it to show off how strong our faith is, or to prove something to God. No, we give and we serve simply because we believe.

1.4 We give because we know that God is our Creator, and that in Jesus Christ, He is our Father. We serve because the Holy Spirit has opened our eyes to see that Jesus is Lord, that this church is His living Body, and that we belong to one another as members of that body. Our giving and our serving are not human efforts to prop up a system—they are the natural, joyful response of people who believe.

1.5 The church was never built on human strategy or worldly resources. From the very beginning, the church has stood on one foundation alone: a shared confession of faith. And throughout history, whenever the church needed to remember who she was, she returned to the ancient words of that faith. Today, we begin right where the church has always begun:

'I believe in God the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth.

1.6 To open our hearts to this confession of faith: Creeds, let us turn to God’s Word. Let me read the Scriptures from Psalm 33:6–9 and Genesis 1:1–3.

Psalm 33:6–9

ESV

By the word of the Lord the heavens were made, and by the breath of his mouth all their host. He gathers the waters of the sea as a heap; he puts the deeps in storehouses. Let all the earth fear the Lord; let all the inhabitants of the world stand in awe of him! For he spoke, and it came to be; he commanded, and it stood firm.

Genesis 1:1–3

ESV

In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters. And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light.

2.1 When we hear these breathtaking words—"By the word of the Lord the heavens were made... For he spoke, and it came to be"—what picture of God rises in your mind? When we confess on Sunday morning, "I believe in God the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth," who are we actually picturing? Do we imagine an abstract, distant metaphysical force, or do we picture the living Sovereign who speaks reality into being and holds our very breath in His hands?

2.2 Before we can truly hear what Scripture and the Creed are saying, we have to pause and bracket out the subtle caricatures our modern culture constantly whispers to us. Too often, we reduce God to a distant cosmic clockmaker—someone who wound up the universe billions of years ago and stepped back to watch us figure it out on our own. Or perhaps we secretly imagine Him as a demanding taskmaster waiting for us to fail, or a celestial therapist whose only job is to validate our comfort. But the Scriptures do not allow for such small, domestic gods.

2.3 To truly grasp the weight of these verses, we have to read them not just through our 21st-century eyes, but through the eyes of the ancient world. In that ancient time, every nation and every culture had a creation story. Everyone believed the world was made by divine beings. But in all those ancient myths, creation came through bloody wars between deities, manual labor, and exhausting struggle—hacking through chaos, tearing apart defeated monsters, and fashioning human beings merely as slaves to carry the gods' heavy burdens. That was how everyone thought the universe worked.

2.4 Then comes Genesis. And it completely shatters the imagination of the ancient world. Here, there is no battle. There is no struggle, no sweat, no physical crafting, and no preexisting material that God has to wrestle into shape. The writer of Genesis declares something utterly unprecedented: God simply speaks. “And God said, 'Let there be light,' and there was light.” Do we see the staggering power of this? His word does not merely describe reality; His word creates reality. Without lifting a finger, without a single raw material, the moment His sovereign voice goes forth into the absolute void, existence itself responds and stands firm: "He spoke, and it came to be."

2.5 And here is the mystery: The God who commands reality out of absolute nothingness with a single breath is the very One Jesus bids us to call 'Father.' If our Father is the One whose voice calls whole galaxies into existence without needing any human effort or worldly material, why are we still so anxious? Why do we spend six days a week living as though everything in our lives will fall apart unless we control every little piece with our own hands?

3.1 The honest truth is, our anxiety is not just a psychological struggle; it is a theological one. Ever since Genesis 3, the deep temptation of the human heart has always been to step out of the creature’s place and seize the Creator’s throne. We secretly want to be our own sovereign makers. We want to define our own worth, secure our own future, and build our own kingdoms. But when we try to carry the weight of being God, it crushes us. The anxiety that keeps us awake at night is the exhaustion of trying to sustain a world we were never meant to govern.

3.2 And yet, look at what the Creator did when His masterpiece fell into the decay of sin and chaos. John takes us straight back to Genesis when he writes in John chapter 1:

John 1:1–4

GNT

In the beginning the Word already existed; the Word was with God, and the Word was God. From the very beginning the Word was with God. Through him God made all things; not one thing in all creation was made without him. The Word was the source of life, and this life brought light to people.

Paul echoes this in Colossians, proclaiming that in Christ, all things were created, and in Him, all things hold together. The sovereign Voice that spoke the stars into being did not abandon His craftsmanship. The very Creator stepped into His own creation. He cried out from a wooden manger, and later breathed His last on a Roman cross. Through the cross and the empty tomb, our Creator became our Redeemer. He descended into our brokenness not to condemn us, but to re-create us from within.

3.3 This is why early Christians were so bold when they confessed: "I believe in God the Father Almighty." In the original Greek of the Creeds, that word for "Almighty" is Pantokratōr. It does not simply mean raw, tyrannical force. It means the All-Sovereign Sustainer—the One who holds all the fragile threads of the cosmos together in providential care. And here is the heart of the Gospel: that sovereign Pantokratōr is not a distant dictator. As Paul reminds us in Romans 8, you did not receive a spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but the Spirit of adoption, by whom we cry, "Abba, Father!"

Romans 8:15

NIV

The Spirit you received does not make you slaves, so that you live in fear again; rather, the Spirit you received brought about your adoption to sonship. And by him we cry, “Abba, Father.”

His power is not capricious; it is paternal. His sovereignty is not a threat to our freedom; it is the only safe shelter for our fragility. Because He is our Father, His power is entirely committed to our good.

3.4 Do we see how the New Testament brings Genesis and the Cross together? Paul asks in Romans 8:

Romans 8:31–32

MSG

So, what do you think? With God on our side like this, how can we lose? If God didn’t hesitate to put everything on the line for us, embracing our condition and exposing himself to the worst by sending his own Son, is there anything else he wouldn’t gladly and freely do for us?

The God who effortlessly commands reality out of nothing with a single breath is the very same Father who gave His only Son for you. If He has already conquered your ultimate enemies such as sin, death, and decay, how can we doubt His ability to hold tomorrow together? To confess "I believe in God the Father Almighty" is not just reciting a Christian doctrine; it is exhaling our desperate need for control and resting, completely, in the hands of the Father who made us, redeemed us, and will never let us go.

4.1 So, what does this confession demand of us as we walk out of these doors and step into the coming week? It means that true faith does not grasp for control over an anxious world; it rests in the capable hands of the Father who spoke all things into being. When you face tomorrow’s uncertainties—the stack of unpaid bills, the medical diagnosis, the difficult relationship, or the fear of what the future holds—you do not face them as an orphan left to manage chaos. You face them as a beloved child of the Pantokratōr. In every anxious moment, our first response is not panic, but doxology. We breathe out our frantic control and whisper: "My Father is the All-Sovereign Maker, and I am safe in His hands."

4.2 And because our Father made heaven and earth, this faith is never an abstract idea that stays in our heads, nor is it an escape from this material world. The early Christians refused the lie that the physical world is bad and only the spiritual world matters. Because God created this world and called it good, our worship must be embodied.

4.3 We honor the Creator by how we care for the physical bodies He gave us—by treating sleep, food, and rest not as weaknesses to overcome, but as gifts from the hand that formed us out of dust and breathed life into us. A body that refuses to rest is still trying to be its own sustainer; a body that receives rest is confessing, quietly, that the Pantokratōr—not our own striving—holds the world together while we sleep.

4.4 We honor Him by stewarding the earth He fashioned—treating creation not as disposable trash to exploit, nor as raw material for our own kingdoms, but as our Father's sanctuary to cherish. The same anxious grasping that makes us hoard control over our own lives is what makes us hoard and exhaust the earth as though it, too, depended on us alone to hold it together. But the earth does not belong to us; it belongs to the One who spoke it into being and called it good before we ever arrived to manage it.

4.5 And we honor Him by looking into the faces of our neighbors—the broken, the lonely, and the marginalized—and seeing the sacred handiwork of our Maker. Every face we are tempted to walk past was spoken into existence by the same voice that said, "Let there be light." When we stop to see them, we are not performing charity; we are recognizing family—another creature held, like us, in the same Father's hands.

4.6 None of this is optional decoration on top of "real" faith. This is what it looks like when a person actually believes that God is Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth: rest instead of exhaustion, care instead of extraction, presence instead of avoidance. Embodied worship is simply doxology with hands and feet.

4.7 Now we can look back at where we began today.

1) Why do we give our tithes and offerings?

Not out of guilt, and not to keep an institution alive. We give because everything we possess belongs to the Maker of heaven and earth, and He has proven Himself faithful.

2) Why do we volunteer, teach, clean, serve, and love one another in this church?

Not to earn a spiritual trophy, but because the Holy Spirit has joined us to the living Body of Jesus Christ. Our service and our giving are simply the joyful, natural overflow of people who have been set free from having to be their own gods.

5.1 The church does not stand on the strength of our finances, the genius of our leadership, or the brilliance of our strategies. The church stands today, as she has for two thousand years, on this unshakable bedrock:

We belong to the God who speaks into the darkness and brings forth light.

We belong to the Father who gave His Son to make us His own.

5.2 So this week, lay down your heavy burden of control. Stand firm in the awe of His majestic voice.

Choose rest instead of exhaustion.

Choose care instead of extraction.

Choose presence instead of avoidance.

And let us live together as His church, boldly declaring with our lips and our lives:

"I believe in God the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth.