Show Notes
In this episode of Peaceable and Kind, host Derek Vreeland kicks off a brand-new mini-series exploring the Nicene Creed, beginning with its opening line: “We believe in one God, the Father, the Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, of all that is seen and unseen.”
With warmth, clarity, and wisdom, Derek reflects on what it means to believe in one God in a world of competing idols and spiritual confusion. Drawing from personal stories, ancient Christian belief, and contemporary relevance, this episode helps us reconnect with foundational truths: God is enough. God is Father. And God is our Creator.
Derek also addresses how the Church can lovingly disagree about how God created the world while staying united in the essential truth that God alone is the Creator of all things.
Key Takeaways
The Nicene Creed defines the essentials of the Christian faith and brings unity to believers across denominations.
Belief in “one God” affirms God’s sufficiency and stands against modern-day idols of money, power, and pleasure.
Jesus reveals that God is not distant or abstract, but personal—our Father.
God is the Maker of all that is seen and unseen—creation is not accidental, and every person bears the image of God.
Christians may disagree on the age of the earth or the timeline of creation—but all agree that God is Creator.
Whether you’re new to the Nicene Creed or seeking to deepen your faith, this episode offers a thoughtful starting point that centers your beliefs on the character and nature of God.
🎧 Listen now and be grounded in the faith that has united Christians for centuries.
Scriptures mentioned in this episode:
Genesis 1-2
John 14:9
Psalm 118:24
Psalm 139:13
Books mentioned in this podcast: What’s a Christian Anyway? by Glenn Packiam: https://amzn.to/4krON7Q Preorder Derek’s new book, Incarnation: 8 Lessons on How God Meets Us here: https://amzn.to/42jSZAs
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Transcript
Welcome back.
To another episode of Peaceable and Kind.
I am your host, Derek Vreeland, and I hope your summer is going well.
We’re into the summer months, it’s June.
And I recently had a birthday.
That’s right, I turned fifty-one years old.
And it’s interesting as the years go by, I’m less and less bothered by getting older.
Now turning 40, that was a big deal for me.
Like my 40th birthday was like, okay, now I’m becoming a real adult.
I need to act like a real adult.
And I thought a little bit about turning 50.
That was last year.
I did recognize I was getting older, but I don’t know, turning 50 wasn’t that big a deal and now
Turning fifty one, you know what?
It’s just a number.
And so I don’t get too tripped up on it.
I I have conversations with people though who are really struggling the older that they get.
And I just want to set you free from any kind of worry and anxiety.
I say be healthy, right?
Make healthy choices.
Yes, we’re all getting older, but be healthy, as healthy as you can be, and just live at whatever age you’re at.
I know as we get older some people want to look back, you know, to their twenties and and don’t get me wrong, I wish I had the energy that I did in my twenties.
I recognize I don’t have as much energy.
Uh now whenever I I sit too long um I start getting sleepy and if I’m sitting in my recliner, well I’m probably gonna fall asleep.
So I recognize those things, but I want to just live in the present moment.
And so yes, I
I’ve turned 51.
Um, I do have two grandkids and a gray beard, and you know what?
I just embrace it all.
I just want to live for today and be thankful for this day.
For this day that God has made, this day that God has given us.
And so I’m glad that you’ve joined me for this episode.
And if you appreciate the kind of Christian content
We are creating here.
I would love for you to subscribe wherever you’re listening to this podcast.
Leave a rating or a review.
That is always helpful.
and share this episode or a previous episode with someone that you think might enjoy this kind of Christian content.
On this episode, I’m beginning a new mini-series on the Nicene Creed based on Glenn Pacquia’s new book, What’s a Christian Anyway?
If you haven’t listened to my interview with Glenn, then go back and listen to episode 54.
Glenn is such a thoughtful and wise pastor, and he’s a great communicator, whether he’s preaching and teaching or writing.
I think as an author, he is
compelling and he writes with such clarity.
And his new book on the Nicene Creed, What’s a Christian Anyway, is such a helpful
readable book.
So I want to take six episodes, beginning with the episode we’re on right now, and walk through the Nicene Creed.
The Nicene Creed is broken up into three sections.
There’s the opening section about God the Father.
There’s this very long middle section about Jesus, God the Son.
And then the final section begins with a line about the Holy Spirit and then talks about the church and forgiveness and some other things.
So there are really three natural divisions in the Creed, and I would love to do three podcast episodes, but I don’t think we can cover everything.
So on this episode, we’re going to talk about God as Father, the Almighty, the Maker of heaven and earth, God as creator.
These are the opening lines of the Nicene Creed.
And then I’m going to take three episodes to talk about what the Creed says about Jesus.
And then one episode on the Holy Spirit.
And then a final episode, the last episode in this miniseries, we’ll talk about the church and the final lines of the Creed.
But I want to spend six episodes on the Nicene Creed because I think the Creed, all of the ancient creeds of the church, that would include the Apostles’ Creed.
the Athanasian Creed, but our focus is the Nicene Creed.
I think creeds are important, but I didn’t always think so.
I grew up as a Christian in a non-credal church.
So the church where I was baptized in and where I
grew up as a teenager, growing in my faith, where I sensed a call to be a pastor, was in a church that emphasized the Bible, which I so appreciate.
But we didn’t recite creeds, we didn’t talk about creeds, we were non-creedal.
And so when I was a freshman in college, I had left my hometown of St.
Joseph, Missouri
to attend Truman State University in Kirksville, Missouri.
And I was a philosophy religion major
One of the reasons I wanted to attend Truman State is they offered a philosophy degree.
And I thought if I’m going to go on into ministry, I thought philosophy would be a good foundation.
Uh side note, I ended up moving back to my hometown, transferring to our local university that didn’t have a philosophy degree.
So I ended up an English major.
But
My freshman year, I was a philosophy religion major, and my advisor at Truman State was an ordained Presbyterian minister who taught philosophy courses at our um state university.
And I was in a conversation with him one day in his office.
I was telling him, against his advice, that I was going to take a week off of school.
to drive down to Tulsa, Oklahoma with a friend of mine to attend a Bible conference.
Now he did try to talk me out of it.
He said you need to stay in class.
Which is really good advice.
If you’re in college, just go to class.
I know you can skip it.
It’s not like high school, but just go to class.
That will help you in college.
And I was talking to him about this Bible conference I was going to attend, which then led us into talking about our different churches.
I was at this point.
in more of a non-denominational church.
He was in a more traditional Presbyterian church.
And we started talking about the creeds.
And he talked about how valuable they are.
Every Sunday they recite the Apostles’ Creed in their church
And I said, in my 18 years of wisdom, well that’s dumb.
Why would I stand up and just recite some words?
That doesn’t help anybody.
That was definitely youthful ignorance because now at fifty-one years old, as a pastor and a father and a grandfather
I’ve just turned a 180.
I now see the value not only in reciting creeds, but in learning the content of them.
So in our church, we do recite the Apostles’ Creed every Sunday.
And to be honest, I recite the Apostles’ Creed every morning as a part of my morning prayer time.
Now, the Nicene Creed is an expanded version of the Apostles’ Creed.
And what I love about the Nicene Creed is that it gives us definition
on what it means to be a Christian.
It answers the question, what’s a Christian anyway?
I think that’s why Glenn used that title for his book.
The Nicene Creed sums up the essentials of what Christians believe, and the Nicene Creed binds us together in unity, because this is what all Christians believe.
Even the church of my childhood and teenage years.
They didn’t talk about the creed.
We didn’t recite the creed in our worship services, but we still believed the content of the creed
This is what all Catholic, Eastern Orthodox believers, all Protestants believe.
There are other religious groups that use Christian imagery and Christian language that we don’t consider Christians, like
Mormons and Jehovah Witnesses, and we don’t consider them Christians because they don’t believe the content of the Nicene Creed.
And so today I want to begin with the opening lines of this most important creed.
The Nicene Creed opens up this way
We believe in one God, the Father, the Almighty, maker of heaven and earth, of all that is, seen and unseen.
This is important, essential Christian understanding about who God is.
We believe that God is one, that God is unified in God’s essence and being, and that there is only one God.
From the beginning, the people of God, going all the way back to Abraham, have believed in what we talk about in academic circles as monotheism, one God.
And this was a strange belief in the ancient world because the ancient world was littered with many, many, many gods.
There were all sorts of tribal deities.
There was the sun gods and the moon gods and the gods of the river.
In Hinduism, which is still an active religion, in India and the Eastern world, they have 330 million gods.
But if we go back to the ancient world, the ancient Greek and Roman world, this is where Christianity began.
In the ancient Greek and Roman world, they had a pantheon of gods.
But for followers of Jesus, Christians, growing up out of the soil of the children of Abraham, we have always believed in one God.
And the funny thing is that Jesus and the early Christian movement put all of the other gods out of business
So that 2,000 years later, in our present time, at least here in the Western world, people don’t talk about God’s plural.
Even atheists who say they don’t believe in God, they don’t say, I don’t believe in the gods, but they’ll say, I don’t believe in God
Because Jesus and the early Christians brought to at least Western civilization the revelation that God is one.
That there is only one God.
And for Christians to say that God is one, what we’re saying is that God is enough.
We don’t need any other gods.
The ongoing temptation for us who are followers of Jesus is idolatry.
Idolatry is whenever we worship in the place of God something that is not God.
Idolatry is saying, God, you’re not enough.
I need to devote myself to something else.
And when we talk about worship
We’re not talking about just things that we bow down to, but worship is about what we give our lives to.
Worship is that which we are devoted to.
And so idolatry is saying, God, you’re not enough.
I need to devote myself to something else.
And typically, it is the old gods of money, sex, and power
These are the old gods that Jesus put out of business, but they have reorganized under different names.
Now, the ancient Greeks called these gods Mammon, Aphrodite, and Mars.
that is the gods of money, of sex and sexuality, and in Mars the god of war
So in the ancient world, they worshipped them and they called them gods.
We don’t call them gods today, but you know people who are fully devoted to the pursuit.
of money, of pleasure, or of power.
So these old gods are still around, although they don’t parade themselves as gods, but they are idols
They are temptations for us to devote ourselves to to find our identity and our sense of self in these idols: money, pleasure, and power.
But for Christians, in the words of the Nicene Creed, we believe in one God because we believe God is enough.
So we devote our energy, our time, our attention to the one true living God who then gives us life, who then gives us a sense of
Self-identity and self-understanding and fulfillment.
One God.
Hey friends, I wanted to pause for just a second to let you know that my next book
Incarnation, 8 lessons on how God meets us, is available for pre-order.
This Bible study is for individual devotional use or for small group discussion.
Link to pre-order is in the show notes.
And so the Nicene Creed continues to tell us that this one God is the Father, the Almighty.
Now it’s Jesus who reveals to us that God is our Father
And in doing so, Jesus is showing us that God is personable, that God is relatable.
I hear people sometimes saying, well, I’m not a religious person, but I’m a spiritual person.
And so if I say, oh, well, that’s great.
I think spirituality is a good thing.
Do you pray?
And sometimes people, if they’re really into spirituality, will say, Well, I pray to the universe.
And I understand that sentiment, but the universe as a concept
is very abstract.
And if you do a deep dive in this the universe spirituality, it’s the universe is pretty much a cold place.
And so Jesus reveals to us that God is not distant and that God is not cold and impersonal
But God is very personal that God indeed is father.
And so Glenn in his book, What’s a Christian Anyway, has this very helpful
bit of encouragement.
This is on page 50 and 51, where he’s reflecting on these opening lines of the Creed.
And Glenn writes
Even so, this kind of naming is tricky for many of us.
That is, naming God as our Father
He continues, we tend to start with our earthly fathers and then work our way upward to God.
But may I suggest, hard as it might be, we start instead with Jesus.
Who is the God revealed in Jesus?
Jesus said, Whoever has seen me has seen the Father.
This is such helpful encouragement because I know that some people did not grow up with a father present in their home.
Other people grew up with a harsh father, perhaps a violent, even abusive father
And so I know for some Christians to reflect on God as our Father can be tricky, as Glenn said.
It can be troublesome
So when you hear in the words of the Creed that God is our Father, don’t start with whatever image you have of earthly fathers, but think about Jesus.
In fact, when you want to explore what God is like and who God is, don’t start in Genesis, but start with Jesus.
Jesus shows us what the Father is like.
And so Jesus says, if you’ve seen me, you’ve seen the Father.
Jesus comes to reveal to us the heart of God our Father.
I think that’s such a helpful way to begin.
Now, the oneness of God is in the very opening of our scriptures in Genesis
But this revelation of the fatherhood of God, that’s what we learn from Jesus.
So let’s start there.
The creed goes on to say that this one God, who is the Father, is the Almighty God.
He is the All-Sufficient One
He is bigger and greater than all other concepts of God, and this God is maker of heaven and earth.
Of all that is seen and unseen.
We believe that God is our creator
That God has created all of us.
Christians from the beginning have always believed that every human being
has dignity, worth, and value from the womb to the tomb
Every human being has value because no human beings are mistakes
Every human being, no matter the circumstances of their birth, were knit together in their mother’s womb by God.
So God is the creator of all things, of everything seen and unseen, but God is the creator of you.
and your neighbor, and every human being in the earth.
All human beings reflect the image of God
because all of us were created by God in God’s image.
That means every person of every nation, of every race, of every tribe and tongue and language
and ethnicity, everyone bears the beautiful image of God.
Now we are all born into sin
So our humanity can get corrupted.
We all need a savior.
We all need a rescuer.
But in our essence,
Humanity is beautiful because we were each created by God.
That’s why Christians from the very beginning have always valued the
holiness, the sanctity of life.
And so it doesn’t matter the family you grew up in.
Maybe you grew up in a very
warm, nurturing, loving family environment?
Maybe you didn’t.
Maybe you grew up in a hostile environment.
Maybe you grew up in an abusive environment.
Maybe you grew up in the foster system.
However, you grew up, we can set that aside.
And I understand that there can be trauma related to that.
So I don’t want to ignore it.
But I want you to know that you are beautiful and full of worth and dignity because God created you.
You are no accident.
You were created by this one Father Almighty God for a relationship with God
So we believe that God created us each individually, but we believe that God has created everything, the heavens and the earth.
So those who are praying to the universe, we would say, we believe the God we worship created the entire universe.
all of the stars and the galaxies.
And yes, God created this place, this earth that we call home.
He is the maker of heaven and earth
So all Christians believe that God is the creator of all things, but we may disagree with
how God created or when God created or how long it took for God to create
What all Christians believe, the value and the doctrine that we share in common is we believe in the central fact of who created all things.
And that’s the one true living God.
There has been much division in the last 10, 20, 30 years.
over our understanding of how God has created.
And different camps have been formed
There are those that believe that God created in six literal days, anywhere from six to ten thousand years ago.
There are other Christians that believe God created 13 billion years ago, and that the days of creation in Genesis 1 and 2 are not literal days
And I’m not here to rehash that old debate because I would rather find people who disagree on.
the age of the earth and how and when God created, I prefer to see those Christians walk together in love and unity.
When I was pastoring in Southwest Georgia, I had two of my elders who were very passionate.
About a view of creation that we would call young earth creationism, the idea that God created in six literal days six to ten thousand years ago.
I didn’t share that view then, and I don’t share that view today.
Scripture doesn’t tell us when
God created, and Genesis 1 and 2 itself doesn’t read necessarily like pure history.
It’s much more poetic
And Genesis 1 and 2 have two different creation accounts that are not necessarily the same.
So I believe in the inspiration of Genesis 1 and 2, but there’s nothing in Genesis 1 and 2
That caused me to believe that God created in six literal days six thousand years ago.
So we had these two elders at our church that were very passionate about another opinion.
And I loved these men and listened to them, and they wanted our church to host a conference with a very well-known
organization that teaches young earth creationism.
Initially I was hesitant, but I said, let’s give it some time.
Let’s talk and pray in our elder meetings and and and figure it out
So they were sending articles to me and the other elders.
I was sending them articles, and monthly we would discuss it and talk about it.
And I recognize that our elder board didn’t all agree on this, but I couldn’t deny the passion of these two men.
So after a lengthy time of prayer and discussion in an elders meeting, I said, how about we do this?
How about we communicate to our congregation that while we have disagreements on the age of the earth and when and how God created,
that we are unified, that God is the creator, the maker of heaven and earth, and that it’s okay for us to have different opinions.
And if you will let me preach a sermon on Genesis 1 and 2 that represents a different point of view,
Then we can have our Young Earth Creationist Conference and allow this speaker from that organization to share a different point of view.
I told our elders, I said, I think this would be a beautiful act of unity.
That we as leaders can lovingly disagree, that we can listen to one another, learn from one another, even if we don’t agree on all the details, we can model that for our congregation.
And so we agreed.
So we made plans to have this conference and the Sunday before
The conference, I preached a sermon, and I talked about how there’s nothing in Genesis 1 and 2 that necessitates a literal interpretation.
But that some Christians who love Jesus do take some things in here literally.
What we agree on is that God is our one creator, maker of heaven and earth.
So I essentially shared my viewpoint, my interpretation of creation, which pulled out some of the poetic framing
of the language used in Genesis 1 and 2 and how Genesis 1 and 2 ultimately is revealing God as creator.
And then there’s room to disagree on a lot of the details.
Then we had our speaker in for multiple days for a conference.
I had dinner with him one night, a very uh intelligent, a very God-fearing man who loved Jesus, loved the church, loved the scriptures.
And um the more I listened to his lectures and even through our dinner conversation, the more I was convinced of my own interpretation.
So I wasn’t persuaded
to change my view, but I did grow somewhat in my respect, and I could see what they were trying to do.
I still felt that at the end of the day, a lot of their conclusions were wrong.
But I didn’t grow in any kind of animosity or hostility towards them.
And it’s funny because I was leading a small group in our church at that time on Wednesday nights.
And so the Wednesday night after the conference, uh, I asked our small group, hey, do we want to continue in our workbook or do you want to talk about the creation conference?
And they all said, let’s talk about creation.
Have you changed your view?
And I again reiterated what I had preached in that sermon Sunday before last.
And that is, no, my interpretation of things have not changed.
I’ve not been persuaded that God created in six literal days and that it happened six to ten thousand years ago.
In fact, I’m more convinced that that’s not true.
But that’s okay.
What I recognize is our speaker at the creation conference is my brother in Christ
And while we disagree on some things, here’s where we agree that the one God
The Creator God, who is Father and Almighty, He alone is the maker of heaven and earth, of all that is seen and unseen
And that is one of the moments that I begin to see the value of the Nicene Creed.
that we don’t need to identify with Christians necessarily based on second-tier ideas, like how many days did it take God to create?
That’s second tier.
What is top tier is given to us in the creed.
So I recognize as a brother and sister in Christ anyone
Who believes that God is one, Father Almighty, and the maker of heaven and earth?
We can disagree on the details as long as we agree on this one fact.
And I thought that was such a beautiful time in that church for us to show how brothers in Christ
Can love one another, listen to one another, and walk in unity, even if we have disagreements.
This is the value of the Nicene Creed
This creed gives us what the early Christians called the symbol of faith.
That is, it gave us this definition of a Christian.
Have you ever been to an amusement park and they have a line to uh queue up for a roller coaster and there will be a sign that says you must be this tall
in order to ride the roller coaster?
Well, that’s to keep, you know, kids who wouldn’t fit within the seat belt situation on the roller coaster from from riding and potentially being hurt, so they say you must be this tall to ride.
Well, the Nicene Creed is like that kind of sign for our faith.
It’s the symbol or sign or definition of our faith.
So that if you believe these things, then you can ride this kingdom of God roller coaster that we’re on
So if you grew up in a church background where this is new information for you, I invite you to explore the Nicene Creed.
And to continue listening to these episodes as I explore the creed line by line
Well, that’s all we have for today.
Thank you for listening to this episode.
Go in peace and be kind.
This transcript was generated with AI and may contain errors.