2025 Choir Tour - Devotions

I’m on this year’s Good News Choir Tour with my church. These students work really hard and are doing a great job. It’s cool being their youth minister and support them in the crowd each night! Laurin Hill, our worship minister, asked me to write devotions for the bus ride. I thought it would be fun to post them so people can follow along with us. And because they were a lot of fun to write!

Devo 1 June 3rd

God is

Before you start reading this devotion, pray to God, thanking Him for this day and the gift of life. Tell him about what you are experiencing. Thank Him for the gifts that He has given you. Then pray that God will help you be more aware of His presence in your life so you can be a better apprentice of Christ.

 How to begin? I’ve tried to write a book about a dozen times. This is what happens every time. I open a doc and I type,

 Umm……………………………………………………………………………………..

 Because I never know how to start it. Eventually, I get frustrated and eat pizza.

 Starting is hard. But starting matters. We have to start with something. There is a huge debate in psychology and education about what you know and how you know it. Are we blank slates as babies who slowly construct our reality through experience alone, or are we born with hardwiring that primes us to see things a certain way? Nature vs. Nurture. It’s a fun debate, but we don’t have time for that. And I already typed more than I understand about the topic.

 What I do know is that we all have a lens or framework that we use to see and interpret reality. I know I’m getting heady, but stay with me. You think what you think because of what others have told you, what you have experienced, and how God made you. I’m glad I don’t remember being a baby. It must have been terrifying absorbing all this information about reality, and you have no idea what any of it means. Sounds exhausting.

Maybe that’s why they sleep all the time.

 Starting is hard. But let’s make it harder. Go ahead and start to explain who/what/how God is? What is your frame of reference for him?

Who/What/How is God?  (if you see a bolded question, you are supposed to write your answer under it with a pen.)

Good effort! It’s difficult!

Christians should start with Scripture as it is God’s special revelation to us. We know God deeply through what he has revealed (told/shown) to us in the Bible. The next step is that we must take all the things we know about God and interpret them. Some things are easy…

1 John 4:8 - Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love.

I’m pretty sure it’s safe to assume that God is love. Seems straightforward to me. Got it!

 But then it gets hard when we naturally ask, “What does that mean?”

 Welcome to the exciting world of Theology--where we study God and make sense of all the things the Bible says about God! Theologians try to formulate all the information into nice categories so that it is easier to understand. The issue is that no one is perfect at this because interpretation is difficult. So it takes a lot of humility and a million different opinions. But don’t lose faith. It’s not happenstance. To be a Christian is to agree about the big things or the essentials of the faith. And the essentials are Orthodoxy (right beliefs).

 Let’s jump back 1700 years to the world of the 300s. The Bible as a library is coming together. The writings have been around and trusted, but what we consider the biblical library is being canonized. It seems like everyone agrees on the big essentials until a group of heretics (people who don’t believe in the Orthodox teachings of the church) started causing problems.

 They said crazy things like Jesus wasn’t really God, or that Jesus really was God, but He only appeared human, plus all sorts of other weird things.

 So, the Church had to get together and make a Council of smart people. They took all of the Scriptures and the essential beliefs of Christianity and wrote a Creed or a statement of faith to make sure that everyone would be on the same page about who/what/how God is.

This Creed is the Nicene Creed, and it was made by the Council of Nicaea in 325 AD. I know, I know nerdy stuff, but it’s extremely important. This is where the theologians put to paper and systematized the teachings of the Bible about God and God’s Nature in a concise way.

God is. God exists, and because God is, He interacted with the people He made. He revealed himself through the Bible so that we could know him in an intimate way. The Creed is the Church’s document to make sure we understand the God of the universe described in the Bible.

 Here is the Nicene Creed. Read it a couple of times. This is who God is.

We believe in one God,
the Father, the Almighty,
maker of heaven and earth,
of all that is,
seen and unseen.

We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ,
the only Son of God,
eternally begotten of the Father,
God from God, Light from Light,
true God from true God,
begotten, not made,
of one Being with the Father;
through him all things were made.
For us and for our salvation he came down from heaven,
was incarnate from the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary
and was made man.
For our sake he was crucified under Pontius Pilate;
he suffered death and was buried.
On the third day he rose again
in accordance with the Scriptures;
he ascended into heaven
and is seated at the right hand of the Father.
He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead,
and his kingdom will have no end.

We believe in the Holy Spirit,
the Lord, the giver of life,
who proceeds from the Father and the Son,
who with the Father and the Son is worshipped and glorified,
who has spoken through the prophets.
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.

 So if someone asked you who is God, what would you say?

What does this Creed teach you?

What is new or confusing?

What is a truth in the Creed that you need to remember today?