Show Notes
In this episode of Peaceable and Kind, Derek Vreeland wraps up our series on the Nicene Creed with its powerful final lines—covering the Church, baptism, and what Christians hope for in the end:
“We believe in one holy catholic and apostolic Church. We acknowledge one baptism for the forgiveness of sins. We look for the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come. Amen.”
With honesty, warmth, and a deep love for the Church, Derek explores how these final affirmations hold hope and healing for Christians today—especially for those hurt by churches or struggling to find their place in Christian community.
Drawing from his own teenage years and spiritual formation in a nurturing Baptist church, Derek testifies to the beauty and brokenness of the Church. He offers grace to those wounded by toxic church leadership and reminds listeners why the Church—imperfect as she is—is still the beloved bride of Christ.
Whether you’ve loved the Church, been burned by it, or feel caught somewhere in between, this episode calls us back to what defines us: one Church, one baptism, one great hope in the resurrection and the life to come.
Key Takeaways
The Church is one—unity is central to Jesus’ prayer for his followers (John 17:21).
The Church is holy—we are set apart to live distinctively in the world.
The Church is catholic meaning “universal”, and includes all who affirm the essentials of Christian faith.
The Church is apostolic—rooted in the teaching of the apostles and the continuing work of the Spirit.
The Second Vatican Council (1962–1965) helped heal Protestant-Catholic division by affirming shared faith in Christ and calling Protestants “separated brothers and sisters.”
Lumen Gentium, a key document from Vatican II, reframed the Catholic Church’s identity and opened the door to meaningful Christian unity.
We are united in the essentials—even if we disagree on politics, denominations, or music styles.
🎧 Listen now and rediscover the hope of the Church and the life of the world to come.
Scriptures mentioned in this episode:
- John 17:21 John 17:14-19 Revelation 21:1-5
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.
Thank you for joining me for this episode as we are wrapping up our overview of the Nicene Creed.
But before we get there, let me encourage you to leave a rating and a review and follow me on social media.
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In this final section of the Nicene Creed, we’re going to wrap things up by talking about the church, talking about baptism, and what happens at the end of the world.
Sounds like fun to me, so let’s jump right in.
Here is how the Nicene Creed ends.
We believe in one holy Catholic and Apostolic Church.
We acknowledge one baptism for the forgiveness of sins.
We look for the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come.
Amen.
This final section of the Nicene Creed begins by talking about the church.
And I love the church
I love the idea of the church.
I love the global church.
I love the local church.
And that’s probably a good thing because I am a pastor.
And if you’re a pastor and you don’t love the church, you’re probably in the wrong vocation.
But even if I wasn’t a pastor, I would still love the local church.
And I know that people have had negative church experiences
And if that’s you, let me express my deepest apologies.
I grieve over the moral failures of church leadership, the growing number of
Stories I have heard about toxic churches, abusive churches, power-hungry churches.
The kind of churches that care more for money than their members, churches that care more about their brand than their people.
I I’m deeply grieved by that.
I I I pray about that.
I love the church so much, and when the church deforms into something ugly
and exploitative or abusive.
It breaks my heart because I know it breaks God’s heart.
So if you have been hurt by the church, by church people, church leaders,
Please know that I acknowledge your pain.
I know that it’s real.
I make no excuse.
I just pray, Lord have mercy.
Lord have mercy.
Christ have mercy.
Lord have mercy.
So I know that there are many people who have had negative church experiences, but that hasn’t been my personal experience.
Both as a church member and a church leader, I haven’t had these negative experiences.
I’ve been very fortunate to be in good, loving, nurturing, healthy churches.
Now, this doesn’t mean I haven’t experienced a level of pain in the church.
I have walked through conflicts and difficulties.
people getting mad at me, angry at me.
I’ve made plenty of mistakes.
But for me the church has been a nurturing place, particularly
when I was a teenager.
I was received and welcomed and nurtured by a church that loved me
in such a way that it set me on a trajectory that has put me where I am today.
The teenage years are difficult, right?
Adolescence is difficult.
for anybody, right?
Like if I were to ask you, would you like to go back and relive middle school?
Most of you would say
Absolutely no.
Unless I could have my brain and put that in my middle school body if I had the wisdom and experience as an adult.
But no, no, no one really wants to relive their teenage years.
It’s just an awkward phase of transition and change.
But for me, my teenage years, I think, were
Exceedingly difficult.
It I was awkward, insecure, I was a very sensitive, introverted, nerdy kid.
I I really wanted to be an athlete
But I wasn’t built for that.
Like I have very little athletic ability.
I was fast when I was a teenager.
I could always run.
I could always do that.
Uh outside of that, I I really have have
very few athletic traits.
But for me, sports was a way of trying to find
my people trying to find acceptance.
I didn’t find it there because I wasn’t very good in the sports that I played.
I found the sense of belonging that I was looking for
in a very average, very run-of-the-mill Baptist church.
It wasn’t a perfect church
It was a time in the early 1990s when churches were in the midst of what we now call the worship wars.
So I was baptized in this church when I was 11, and then at 15, I began to really take my faith seriously and and that church just
welcomed me in and they were going through their own kind of debates about are we gonna worship with contemporary music?
Are we gonna sing out of the hymnal?
And as a teenager I saw some of the the fighting and arguing and
discussing about that with some disagreement.
I was invited to be a youth member of the Church Growth Committee.
Uh because a Baptist church, one thing you know about Baptist churches they love committees.
I got on this committee and I heard these people arguing back and forth, and I was just like, I’m just here for Jesus.
Like
Sing whatever music you want.
I mean I was a teenager and of course I liked pop music and rock music, so I was fine with contemporary music, but I loved singing out of the hymnals, so I really didn’t care.
But it was interesting that I came into this church at a time where I would call it a real youth revival.
It was a church of a couple hundred.
And at its height, we were having 120, 150 students coming.
We had outgrown the youth room.
We were meeting the fellowship hall.
We outgrew the fellowship hall, and we were meeting in the gymnasium.
of our local Christian school because so many students were coming.
And our youth pastor did all the, you know, youth pastor stuff, all the games and all the pizza and all the stuff, right?
But I remember at the end of every youth service, our youth pastor would have his Bible and usually open to the gospels, and he would just talk to us about Jesus.
And it caused me to fall in love with Jesus.
And there were just all sorts of students coming.
I mean, on Sunday morning, we would fill like sometimes four pews shoulder to shoulder with teenagers.
And me and my friends, we wanted to be at church on Sunday anytime the doors were open.
So I would go to early service, then I’d go to Sunday school, then I’d go back to the second service, which was a repeat of the early service.
I remember my mom asking me, why do you want to go to church two times when the sermon is exactly the same?
And I remember telling her, like, I I don’t want to miss anything.
We’re taking notes and we’re just so hungry for what was happening.
And this was not a perfect church in any sense.
I don’t want to paint the picture because of my nostalgia as if this is a perfect church.
Indeed, the church in the U.
S.
and the church globally is not perfect, but she is the bride of Christ.
And so I will always stand and defend.
Defend the church and I will always love the local church because they welcomed me in, because they loved me and nurtured me.
through worship, through Bible studies, through those church potlucks.
I remember going to the church potluck and I love sampling all that kind of food.
Food equals love, and I received all that in the church, so I will always love the bride of Christ.
And in the creed, we are given four markers.
That define the church.
These are the four classic markers of the church.
So the Nicene Creed in speaking of the church says that it is one
Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church.
So those are our four markers on what defines the church.
One
holy, Catholic, and Apostolic.
Let’s look at each of those markers.
So the first marker is that the church is one
Which might seem somewhat paradoxical today because our church is so divided and fractured.
There’s over twenty thousand denominations around the world.
And so people will often ask me, well, what’s the difference between Lutherans and Pentecostals?
And I like to talk about the origins of different denominations, but at the end of the day, every Protestant denomination is the product of a church fracture, a church split, disagreement over one thing or another.
But this classic marker of the oneness of the church is, I believe, deep within the heart of God.
The unity of the church is one of the primary themes of Paul’s letters.
So if you’re reading Paul’s letters, Romans and 1 and 2 Corinthians and Philippians and Colossians, all these
letters from Paul.
One of the primary themes is the unity of the church, particularly unity between Jews and Gentiles.
But Jesus himself prayed for the unity of the church, not just the unity of his disciples
but the unity of this community that would be known as the ecclesia in Greek, the church.
Jesus prayed for this in John seventeen, verse twenty one.
Jesus says
I pray that they will all be one, just as you and I are one, as you are in me, Father, and I am in you.
and may they be in us, so that the world will believe you sent me.
So Jesus before his death is praying, and it’s recorded in John’s Gospel
that one of the things on the heart of Jesus then, and I believe it’s still on the heart of Jesus today, is that we would experience
the same kind of oneness that is experienced in the heart of the Trinity between the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, even though the Spirit’s not mentioned here.
If you remember on an earlier episode when we were talking about Jesus and how Jesus is referenced in the Nicene Creed, one of the things the Creed tells us.
is that the Son, Jesus, is one being with the Father.
The Greek words homoousius is the same substance.
the eternal Son of God and the Eternal Father are of the same divine substance, and there is an unbroken
Relational unity between the Father, the Son, and the Spirit.
And so Jesus is praying to the Father that all of his disciples
Not just the present ones 2,000 years ago, but us too, we would experience the same kind of relational oneness and unity.
So if you believe the creed, you are my brother or you are my sister in Christ.
We might disagree on things like politics and social issues.
We might disagree on
How to interpret parts of the Bible, we’ll disagree on denominations and women preachers and speaking in tongues and predestination and
We’ll disagree maybe on the end times and the kind of music that you oughta have in church and the color of the daggum carpet in the sanctuary.
We might disagree on all those things, but
If you believe the essentials of the Christian faith, then we’re family.
And this is why I love the creeds, particularly the Nicene Creed.
The Nicene Creed gives us the essentials of the faith.
So, if you believe these things, you’re my brother or sister in Christ, and I will walk in fellowship with you.
I will extend a hand of friendship towards you, and hopefully you’ll reach out and grab my hand.
I have tried over the years to build relationships with pastors across denominational lines.
In particular, there was a church here in our community, and they had a discipleship pastor, which is an associate pastor role very similar to what I was doing.
And I had reached out to him, I said, let’s have coffee.
I have no agenda.
And so I met with him on two occasions.
And the first time I met with him, I had said, Well
You know what, we’re having coffee, we’re getting to know each other, so I’m gonna go ahead and confess my sins.
I have lied to you.
I told you that I do not have an agenda.
and that was a lie.
I do have one agenda, and that agenda is friendship.
And I was really hoping that as we would meet together and get to know each other, we could develop a friendship.
And we did meet a second time, and then it had been a while, and so I reached out.
Hey, you up for coffee?
Maybe we can talk theology and church life because we had an exchange on social media.
I think we were talking about hell or something like that.
And I love having these conversations.
And I don’t have to agree with you to enjoy a conversation with you.
And I said, let’s get together, have coffee and talk.
We could talk about
the thing we were discussing on social media.
And he responded, I don’t think that would benefit either of us very much.
You’re not going to change your view.
I’m not going to change my view.
So I’m not necessarily interested in doing that.
And I, of course, said, I understand, no problem.
So I responded quickly to him.
But on the inside, I was a little sad.
Because I I did want to build a friendship, and he wasn’t interested in that, and that’s okay.
Because I understand that friendship has a bit of chemistry that you just can’t force on people.
It happens or it doesn’t happen
But as much as it depends on me, I want to walk with other Christians in Christian unity because it’s the heart of Jesus.
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.
So the creed tells us about the church, first that it’s one, second, that it’s holy.
It’s a holy community of people
Now, when the creed speaks of our holiness, it’s not saying necessarily that we are religious per se, though I think good religion is a good thing.
I know it’s not popular to say, it’s very popular these days to say, well, I’m spiritual but not religious.
The institutional church, I think, has done harm.
And it is not popular, and it is questioned.
And so I understand that, but just know that religion in and of itself is not a bad thing.
Bad religion is bad.
Hypocritical religion is bad.
Rule-based, fear-based, fundamentalist religion is bad.
So bad religion is bad, but good religion
James speaks of pure and undefiled religion.
Things like caring for orphans and widows are a good thing.
So bad religion is bad.
But there is a good form of religiosity, that is, rituals and habits and practices that form us in the ways of Jesus.
But holiness is not necessarily the same thing as religious.
Holy or holiness speaks of our separateness.
The word holy in the scriptures, it means set apart for a special purpose
So when the creed says that we are holy, it means that we are set apart for the purposes of God, that we are sacred, that we are indeed special.
That set apartness always makes me think of fine China.
Maybe you grew up in a home where your mom had a China cabinet.
and there would be pieces of China.
I don’t know if it’s as popular these days.
I grew up in a home like that.
My mom had a China cabinet.
and held this nice china and uh the rim of like the coffee cups and the saucers and the rim of the plates were all like overladen with silver beautiful
And my mom would always say, Well, this is fine China.
We’re saving this w for someone who really special will come to our house and we’ll have a special dinner.
And apparently we never had any special people over to our house because my mom never used that china.
But it’s set apart in a china cabinet because it’s special.
Well, this is what it means for the church to be holy
We are God’s peculiar, special people set apart for the purposes of God.
And so that’s what it means for us to be holy.
Now, before Jesus prayed for our unity, he also prayed for our holiness.
This is John 17, verses 14 through 19.
This is the prayer of Jesus to the Father.
He says, I have given them your word.
That’s the disciples.
And the world hates them because they do not belong to the world, just as I do not belong to the world.
I’m not asking for you to take them out of the world, but to keep them safe from the evil one.
They do not belong to this world any more than I do.
Make them holy by your truth.
teach them your word, which is truth.
Just as you sent me into the world, I am sending them into the world, and I give myself as a holy sacrifice for them
So they can be made holy by your truth.
Notice in the prayer of Jesus that this holiness is not to necessarily take us out of the world.
But that we would be insulated by God’s truth while in the world.
Our separateness doesn’t mean that we are to live apart from the world
Because Jesus talks about our holiness and then our being sent into the world.
We’re called to be salt and light in the world.
but to be distinct in the way that we live.
We’re going to be different people with different values because of Jesus
So the church, according to the creed, is one, it is holy, and it is Catholic.
This is the part of the Creed that tends to trip people up.
Particularly those who come from non-credal churches, non-denominational churches, evangelical, charismatic Pentecostal churches.
This word Catholic either trips people up or it triggers them.
Particularly I found people who are former Catholics, people who are raised Catholic, and then
made a decision to leave the Catholic Church because they disagree with Catholic doctrine and they join some evangelical church.
The word Catholic, I understand, becomes very triggering.
But understand that the word Catholic in the Nicene Creed, in the Apostles’ Creed, in the Athanasian Creed.
originally the word Catholic meant, and it still means today, universal.
When the Nicene Creed was ratified in the fourth century, there really was only one church.
There wasn’t a divide between Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox, or a divide between Roman Catholic and Protestant.
In the fourth century, there was only one institutional church.
So the Catholic nature or the Catholicity of the Church means that the Church is worldwide.
So when we say we believe in one holy Catholic and Apostolic Church,
We’re not pledging allegiance to the Roman Catholic Church.
We’re saying that the church is worldwide.
It’s not just our local church, but that we are connected
to all other churches and denominations that hold to the essentials of the Christian faith as expressed in the Creed
If by Christian, you mean those who believe in God, the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit
in all that’s spoken of in the Nicene Creed.
Then we can rightly say that Roman Catholics are Christian
Now, I think there’s confusion about this because I continue to talk to people who grew up with the idea that Catholics, Roman Catholics.
were not Christians.
So you’re either a Catholic or a Christian.
And I think that’s a mistake.
And it’s one of the reasons I appreciate using the word Catholic in the Creed
Because while it means universal, it is also a kind of tip of the hat towards the Roman Catholic Church to say, yeah, those Catholics.
Are also a part of this church, which is one holy Catholic and Apostolic.
Now, I didn’t always believe that.
There was a time in my life that I believed that Catholic and Christian meant two different things.
But if the Creed is our guide, then yes, Catholics are Christians.
Now, some churches, when they confess the Apostles’ Creed, for example, change the word Catholic to Christian
So as not to confuse or trigger people.
We we did that in our church for a time, but I was in favor of changing the word, because we started using the word Christian.
I wanted us to go back and use the word Catholic in part because it helps us get the word out
That the Church is universal, which includes Protestants and Roman Catholics as well as Eastern Orthodox Christians.
And I think using the word Catholic in our creeds is a step forward into recognizing our unity with Roman Catholic brothers and sisters.
Now the Protestant Catholic Wars of Western Europe are well documented.
Now the current
Hostility between evangelicals and Roman Catholics may not be as well documented, but I can testify that for my 30 plus years of being a Christian
It has existed and it continues to exist, and I believe there’s time, and this is the time, for us to reconcile.
for us to break down the wall of hostility between Protestants and Catholics.
The Second Vatican Council in the early nineteen sixties
Was a game-changing moment for the Roman Catholic Church.
So it was a council of bishops called by Pope John XXIII
And it brought bishops of the Roman Catholic world all together to have conversations about the renewal of the Roman Catholic Church.
Particularly in how to open up dialogue um with Protestants and to acknowledge the world has changed.
So they wanted to engage culture in this modern world and experience, I believe, by the Holy Spirit, a sense of renewal.
Now, one of its most powerful outcomes was there was a new spirit of openness towards other Christians.
So instead of seeing Protestants as enemies, Vatican II recognized us Protestants as separated brothers and sisters.
And that was language used in Vatican II, where in Western Europe there had been hundreds of years of fighting and violence and war between Catholics and Protestants.
Now in the 1960s at Vatican II, Roman Catholic bishops, the Pope himself, were acknowledging us Protestants as brothers and sisters.
And this shift laid the groundwork for real healing after years and years and years and a history of division
It reminded us that while we disagree on some things, we are united in Christ.
And documents like this didn’t necessarily
redefine Catholic doctrine, but it did clarify the mission of the church to be the light of the nations.
And there’s language in this document that speaks about the Roman Catholic Church’s desire
To take a step of unity towards Protestants.
So in Lumen Gentium, there’s lines like this
The Roman Catholic Church recognizes that in many ways she is linked with those who, being baptized, are honored with the name of Christian.
though they do not profess the faith in its entirety, or do not preserve unity of communion with the successor of Peter
So what they’re saying here is that we Protestants don’t profess the Roman Catholic faith in its entirety, nor do we give
any sort of authority to the Pope, the successor of Peter, but yet they call us Christian
The document goes on.
Likewise, we can say that in some real way they are joined with us in the Holy Spirit.
For to them too he gives his gifts and graces, whereby he is operative among them with his sanctifying power
Oh, I love that line because it acknowledges that it’s God, the Holy Spirit, who has joined us together.
So we’re not joined together in institution or even theology.
But we are drawn together by the Holy Spirit.
It is the Holy Spirit who is the Spirit of unity.
I love this.
And finally, one more line from this document: In all of Christ’s disciples, the Spirit arouses the desire to be peacefully united
in the manner determined by Christ as one flock under one shepherd, and he prompts them to pursue this end.
Now, there are Catholics both in the 1960s and today that do not like this line, this document, or the entire Vatican Council.
Second Vatican Council.
There are Catholics who want to revert back to pre-Vatican II.
But that line right there, I agree with a hundred percent.
I believe the Holy Spirit is.
Stirring within us a desire to be peaceable and kind, to be peacefully united.
I think this is the heart of God.
I think the Holy Spirit is doing this now.
Okay, the fourth marker of the church is that we are apostolic.
That is, we are a part of the same church
That Peter, James, and John, Paul, all the apostles who walked and talked with Jesus, we are a part of the same church that they are.
This is why the New Testament is so important.
The writings, the letters of the apostles, including the Apostle Paul.
These have weight and authority over any other document ever written by Christians because they were inspired by the Holy Spirit, and it’s the apostles
Who bore witness to the living Jesus.
Now, Paul encountered the risen, ascended Jesus in visions and revelations, but James
John, Matthew, Mark, who we believe was the scribe of Peter, these men had direct encounter with the historic Jesus
And so we belong to a church that is shaped by the writing of the apostles.
Let’s finish up the creed with the two final lines, one about baptism, one about the end of the world.
The creed goes on to say we acknowledge one baptism for the forgiveness of sins.
I understand that baptism divides Christians.
Do we dunk people once, dunk them twice, dunk them three times?
I mean, I I tell parents, especially if they got rowdy kids, I say, hey, you know what we’re gonna do?
We’re just gonna hold them down under the water until they really repent.
Of course, I’m joking, we don’t do that, but I like to infuse a little humor in teaching about baptism with families
Uh other people do you sprinkle?
Do you pour with water?
Do you fully immerse in water?
And there is a big divide.
Over the issue of infant baptism, do we baptize babies or do we wait for them to grow up and make a profession of faith
This is the debate between Pedo-Baptism and Credo baptism.
And I’ll be honest, it’s a debate that I’m not really interested in engaging in.
Here’s where I come down on the issue.
The creed teaches us to acknowledge one baptism, and that this baptism is a sacramental experience of the forgiveness of sins.
Does this mean that a person never needs to confess their sins again?
Of course not.
Confession of sin is something that Christians do on an ongoing basis.
Does it mean that a person who is baptized as an infant needs to be rebaptized?
There are traditions that hold to that, the Anabaptists.
that became the foundation for the uh Baptist churches that we have all over.
They would say, yes, you gotta be re-baptized.
But for me,
Because of the creed teaching us that we acknowledge one baptism, I don’t think it’s necessary for people who were baptized as infants or babies to be rebaptized.
If faith was present in the heart of parents presenting a child for baptism, I say we accept that.
Now, it’s not my practice.
I have never baptized an infant or baby.
I’ve never been asked to.
In our church, our practice is to baptize people once they’ve made a confession of faith
But when people come to our church and they’re saying, hey, I was baptized as an infant, do I need to be rebaptized?
I say no.
Now, if they would like to be rebaptized, we’re happy to do that.
But this is simply an issue that I don’t want to debate and I don’t want to divide the church over.
What we believe in is baptism.
How that happens is up for debate.
And then finally we come to the end of the creed.
The end of the world.
This is what the creed says about the end.
We look for the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come.
Amen.
It’s interesting how a number of these final lines and statements in the creed can be divisive.
We divide over Catholic Protestant.
We divide over baptism, and we divide over what we think about the end of the world.
I really see this in the U.
S.
with the popularity of rapture theology and the seven-year tribulation and and the the war to end all wars, Armageddon, and
And, you know, for me, it’s not worth dividing over.
Are we living in the end times?
Well, I mean
R.
E.
M.
said it the best.
It’s the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine.
Are we in the end times?
Well, in one sense, yes, since the day of Pentecost.
We have been living in the last days.
These are the latest of the last days.
But is Jesus coming back today?
Is Jesus coming back in ten thousand years?
I dunno.
But since the day of Pentecost, Christians have lived with an expectation for the return of Christ, and I expect that.
But there’s no reason to walk in fear about the end of the world
Because the creed helps us get the end of our story right.
And there’s nothing to be afraid of.
The creed helps us see that the end of the world is not us escaping the world and going off and living in heaven forever, where God comes now and destroys the earth.
No, the end of the story as told in the Nicene Creed is an expectation for physical bodily resurrection.
That just as Jesus was raised into real human life in a glorified body, so too will we be resurrected
The Creed reminds us that the end is not a disembodied existence in heaven.
It’s not about going off to heaven so God can destroy the earth.
Rather, it’s about God recreating the earth, and a part of that recreation is that we get new physical bodies.
So those who have died in Christ will be raised
receive a new body and for those living at the return of Jesus in a moment in a twinkling of an eye we will change our
Our mortal bodies will become immortal.
Our perishable bodies will put on imperishable.
We’ll have physical bodies just like Jesus did.
And Jesus, after his resurrection, ate food, talked with people, hung out, broke bread.
People saw and experienced him.
So to me, there’s no reason to fear the end of the world.
Like we can all feel fine if we’re trusting in Jesus because it’s a hopeful ending given to us in the creed
We look for the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come.
The end of the Christian story is not doom.
Hellfire brimstone destruction.
The end of our story is life.
The life of the world that is to come.
And so let me end this mini-series on the Apostles’ Creed by taking you to the end of the Bible, Revelation 21, the second to last chapter.
This is one of my favorite passages of scripture.
I’ve talked about it on previous episodes, but here it is again because I love it so much.
Revelation 21, 1 through 5, I believe gives us a beautiful picture.
of what the creed is talking about when it says we look forward to the life of the world to come.
Revelation 21, starting with verse 1.
Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the old heaven and the old earth had disappeared, and the sea was also gone.
And I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down from God out of heaven, like a bride beautifully dressed for her husband.
I heard a loud shout from the throne, saying, Look, God’s home is now among his people.
He will live with them, and they will be his people.
God Himself will be with them.
He will wipe every tear from their eyes, and there will be no more death.
or sorrow, or crying, or pain.
All these things are gone forever.
And the one sitting on the throne said, Look, I am making everything new.
Do you hear the hope in this image?
It’s not an image of doom and destruction, but of new creation, recreation.
And there are many popular books and Christian teachers who teach
and write about all the fear and destruction and war and calamity and famine, and it has created panic among some Christians in fear
And I would like for you to release all of that fear and reflect on the life of the world to come
The New Jerusalem.
This is a picture of the world to come.
It comes from heaven to earth, and it’s this permanent
union and fellowship with the triune God.
God will be with God’s people forever.
And there’s no reason to fear this end and return of Christ.
No reason to fear this
world to come, because in the world to come God is going to remove from us death and sorrow and anxiety and panic and crying and pain.
Revelation 21 says, all those things are gone.
So as we reflect on the end, don’t be fearful.
And if you hear people trying to scare you about what’s going to happen at the end of the world, you just go back to the scriptures
Reread Revelation 21, 1 through 5.
Remember how hopeful the creed ends, and meditate on this word which will sanctify us.
Which will cause us to grow in holiness and will protect us from fear.
There is no fear for Christians about the end, because God is coming to make all things new
Well that’s gonna wrap up our discussion of the Nicene Creed, and this might be the longest episode.
Of peaceable and kind, so if you’ve made it to the end, congratulations.
But we had a lot of ground to cover about em
Important topics.
And so I hope that this helps you grow in your understanding of the essentials of the Christian faith.
And I hope that this causes you to grow in love for your brothers and sisters in Christ in different
churches and that you walk away feeling hope and renewed in that.
Well that’s all that we have for today.
Thank you again for joining me for this episode.
Go in peace and be kind.
This transcript was generated with AI and may contain errors.