When questions arise about what we believe, God calls us to confess Him. We do so as people known personally by God and who confess Him in a very personal way. When we confess Jesus and what he has done, we do so as a people who belong to Him. This forms not only how we confess Jesus but what we say about Him.
This blog is excerpted from Faithfully Formed: The Lutheran Confessions in Daily Life by Andy Wright.
Answering Questions about Confessing Christ
Christianity confesses. A popular opinion, however, is the idea that Christianity can be confession-less. Yet go back to that passage from Matthew 16. Jesus asks, “Who do you say that I am?” Peter’s response, “You are the Christ,” is a creedal statement [vv. 15–16]. He makes a confession of who Jesus is, which says something about Jesus’ person and work.
Think about when someone says, “I believe in Jesus.” This is an essential confession. Yet when we ask further questions like “What does this mean?”; “Who is Jesus?”; “Why do you need Jesus?”; “What does He save you from?”; and “How do you have salvation?” the answers to those questions confess something particular. The only way one can rightly know the answer to who Jesus is is to look at what the Bible teaches. The Father in heaven reveals to Peter that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of the living God, and when Peter speaks, he confesses this answer to Jesus. Peter confesses the faith, and even in these few words, he speaks a creed.
Another point to this confession of God is what He does. Just as we want to mold God into our image and likeness, we also want to turn Jesus into a false Christ. Maybe this false Christ exists just to be our moral teacher or to make us feel all warm and fuzzy. While there may be aspects of who Jesus is in those descriptions, the Scriptures reveal Him to be something so much greater.
To Know and Confess God
Thinking about all this can be confusing. Luther’s explanation of the Second Article of the Apostles’ Creed in the Small Catechism offers a wonderful, true confession of who Jesus is and what He has done for us:
I believe that Jesus Christ, true God, begotten of the Father from eternity, and also true man, born of the Virgin Mary, is my Lord. He has redeemed me, a lost and condemned creature, purchased and won me from all sins, from death, and from the power of the devil. He did this not with gold or silver, but with His holy, precious blood and with His innocent suffering and death, so that I may be His own, live under Him in His kingdom, and serve Him in everlasting righteousness, innocence, and blessedness, just as He is risen from the dead, lives and reigns to all eternity. This is most certainly true.
To know and confess who God is and that Jesus is “my Lord” who “has redeemed me” is to confess God, who has saved us by His own blood. In the explanation of the Second Article, Luther draws upon the language of Scripture, showing us how we are to think about and confess Jesus. This confession is more than in a god who is unknowable, whose ways and works are unclear, and it’s more than confessing a god who just came to be a good teacher or provide a nice sentiment in our lives. No, we confess that Jesus came to redeem us.
The Christian faith is personal, just as God is personal and not some nebulous spirit in the sky. We are set apart as the people of God not only in what we say but who we are in this world. The church is different, and Christians are different in our thinking, speaking, and living in this world.
Seeing God as He Is
God is not whoever I want Him to be. The Scriptures show us this, and the Lutheran Confessions help us confess it. To know this truth about God, in turn, forms our view of the world around us and how we interact with it. The Lutheran Confessions guide us to see that God, the true God, has created all things; He is the same one who commands us, “You shall have no other gods” (Exodus 20:3; Deuteronomy 5:7).
God calls us to examine our lives as we read and hear His Word and know who He is and who we are before Him. In some ways, this formation of our thinking as Christians begins with us dying to ourselves and to the world. It causes us to ask tough questions and, as Luther preaches in the Large Catechism, “Let everyone, then, see to it that he values this commandment great and high above all things. Do not regard it as a joke! Ask and examine your heart diligently [2 Corinthians 13:5], and you will find out whether it clings to God alone or not. …If, on the contrary, your heart clings to anything else from which it expects more good and help than from God, and if your heart does not take refuge in Him but flees from Him when in trouble, then you have an idol, another god” (Large Catechism, Part 1, paragraph 28).
Confessing God is something we can’t do on our own. The ability to confess God rightly is truly a gift from Him that He gives us through His Word. It forms our confession of what we say as we give answer to the question “Who do you say that I am?” We are clear in our confession as we speak the Scriptures, and we stand with the church throughout the ages in this same confession and faith that has been handed down to us. We treasure things like the Creeds and the Book of Concord as they shape and form our confession of who God is and what this means for us and the world both now and into eternity.
Blog post excerpted from Faithfully Formed: The Lutheran Confessions in Daily Life © 2024 Andy Wright, published by Concordia Publishing House. All rights reserved.
Scripture: ESV®.
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