The Creeds began to be used in worship as a means of expressing the faith of the Church. The earliest creed seems to have been simply “Jesus is Lord” (Romans 10:9; 1 Cor.12:3; 2 Cor.4:5; Phil.2:11). When believers were baptized they declared that Jesus was their Lord. They declared their loyalty and commitment to Jesus, and trust in his saving work. As time went on it became necessary for Christians to explain what that meant. What did Christians believe about God, and Jesus, and the Holy Spirit, and the Gospel. By the fourth century the Apostles’ Creed, as we now know it, was being used in the western church. It was the creed candidates for baptism were expected to profess before they were accepted into membership of the Church. Today it serves three main purposes:

1. It provides a brief summary of the Christian faith. It does not contain all that we believe, and there are parts of it we may not understand, but it does provide a map and context for the faith of the Church.
2. It allows us to recognize and avoid inadequate or unbalanced versions of Christianity. Some people may prefer to emphasize one part of Christianity rather than another. The Creed provides a balanced and biblical approach, tried and tested by believers throughout the centuries. There are many deficient views of Christianity around. The Creed helps us to think through areas of faith that we might otherwise avoid.
3. It reminds us that to believe is to belong. To become a Christian is to enter a community of faith, which stretches back to the Upper Room. By putting your faith in Jesus Christ, you have become a member of his body, the Church, which through the ages has used this creed to express its faith. It gives you a sense of  history and perspective. You share the faith with countless others throughout the world who pledge their allegiance to Jesus as Lord.

We begin with the words “I believe”, or credo in Latin, from which our English word creed is derived. What does it mean to believe, and what do Christian believe?

In Acts 16:22-34 we have the story of the baptism of the Philippian jailer and his family. A great earthquake had occurred, the foundations of the prison were shaken, the doors flew open, and every prisoner’s chains came loose. The jailer woke up, and when he saw what had happened, he drew his sword, and was about to kill himself, because he thought that the prisoners had escaped. The two apostles, Paul and Silas, saw what he was going to do and called upon him not to harm himself, by assuring him that everyone was still there. What then happens is simply extraordinary: the jailer is overcome with emotion and begs them to tell him what he must do to experience the salvation of new life that he had heard them singing about in the jail before the earthquake.

“They said, ‘Put your entire trust in the Master Jesus. Then you’ll live as you were meant to live – and everyone in your house included!’ They then went on to spell out in detail the story of the Master – the entire family got in on this part. They never did get to bed that night. The jailer made them feel at home, dressed their wounds, and then – he couldn’t wait till morning! – was baptized, he and everyone in his family. There in his home he had food set out for a festive meal. It was a night to remember. He and his entire family had put their trust in God; everyone in the house was in on the celebration.” (Acts 16:31-34, The Message)

Peterson translates “believe” as “put your entire trust in”. When John Gibson Paton (1824-1907), a Presbyterian missionary to the New Hebrides, began to translate the Gospel of John into the native language, he had a problem finding an equivalent word for ‘believe’. The natives were cannibals. There was no trust between them. They had no word for it. He asked one of his helpers to describe what he was doing. He told him that he was writing at his table. He then asked him what he was doing when he sat in his chair and lifted his feet off the floor. The native told him that he was resting his whole weight on the chair. That was the expression he utilized to describe what John calls ‘believe’. To believe is to put one’s whole weight on who Jesus is and what he has done. It is a relationship of complete trust with the person of Jesus Christ. To believe is to have a deep, personal relationship with Jesus Christ. It is to respond to an invitation by Jesus to become his disciple, his follower.

But what does that mean? Faith has to have content. You will notice that Paul and Silas spent the whole night telling the jailer and his family what it meant to believe in Jesus as Lord. They went on to spell out in detail the story of the Master. They probably covered the essentials of the faith just as they might be summarized in the Creed. To be baptized meant more than having a vague knowledge about an unknown God. He was introduced to God as Father, Son and Holy Spirit, the Holy Trinity, the birth of Jesus, the significance of his life         and teaching, his sufferings and death, his resurrection and ascension, his coming again in glory, the establishment of the Church, the forgiveness of sins, and the promise of eternal life. What a seminar it must have been. It was so exciting and new to them that they never did get to bed that night. A new world had opened up to them: a world in which they discovered a God who loved them and was searching for them, to invite them into his kingdom. This was not a God to be placated and humored, but a God who wanted to live with you, and within you, and through you to bless others. To believe meant to trust in someone who wanted to know and be known by you. The more you got to know him, the more you loved him. It was like a marriage between Christ and his Church, the bridegroom and the bride.

To believe means to trust in Jesus as Lord, it means to know what that means – faith with content, not just a blind trust, but an informed trust. It also means to become committed to all that. Courtship leads to the wedding at which the vows are exchanged. To believe in Jesus as Lord leads to baptism. The jailer and all his family wanted to be baptized that very night, and they were. In baptism God commits himself to the candidate, and the candidate commits himself to God, as revealed in Jesus. It is a joyful and willing surrender to God. It is a throwing open of the doors of our lives and inviting God to enter as our Lord and Master, to live with us forever.

The jailer was filled with joy because he had come to believe in God – he and his whole family. They had acted upon their belief. To believe is an active verb not a passive one. It is to obey the call. It is an act of the will to put your whole weight upon what you have come to understand as God’s truth in Jesus.

To believe is more than knowledge. It is obedience to what you know to be true. I may believe that there is a plane flying to Atlanta. I may check out flight times and even make a reservation and purchase a ticket. I may travel to the airport and see people get on the plane. I may believe that the pilot can fly the plane and that the equipment is trustworthy. But unless I put my whole weight upon that plane, by committing myself to entering it, and sitting down, and allowing it to fly me to Atlanta, it is of no use to me. To believe in Jesus is to act on that belief, it is to obey what it is saying to me. It is allowing God to take hold of me and allowing him to take me where he wants me to go.

Faith is deficient when a member of a Church may give intellectual assent to what the Creed represents or is willing to be associated with those who believe, and yet holds back from wholehearted commitment. Their faith is passive. They do not act on their professed belief. They do not obey what it is saying to them. They avoid allowing God to take hold of them and allowing him to take them where he wants them to go. They don’t get on the plane. As a result their lives suffer from inadequate faith. They do not have the joy of faith represented by this Philippian jailer. They have a general, vague belief, but it does not have any specifics. Many of the words of the Creed are meaningless to them. They are stuck on the ground, and they never go any farther in their relationship with God. They are happy to have the benefits of church membership, but they don’t feel any excitement about it, and could take it or leave it. For them, it is not a matter of life or death. Belonging to the church is not that big a deal. The issue of faith is not that important to them.

The Rev. George Docherty preached a sermon in New York Avenue Presbyterian Church, Washington D.C. on Feb.7, 1954, in which he urged that the words, “under God” be added to the Pledge of Allegiance. At that time the United States was engaged in a bitter struggle with communism. He said that the pledge lacked, “the characteristic and definitive factor in the American way of life, the fundamental concept of the Founding Fathers that the country exists because of God and through God. Indeed, apart from the mention of the phrase, ‘the United States of America’, this could be a pledge of any republic. In fact, I could hear little Muscovites repeat a similar pledge to their hammer-and-sickle flag in Moscow with equal solemnity.”

Sitting in the congregation that morning was President Dwight Eisenhower, who had been baptized in that church and was serious about his faith. When he left the church that morning the President told the preacher that he agreed with him entirely and set the machinery into motion to get the words “under God” inserted into the pledge of Allegiance. Congress passed the bill and Eisenhower signed it into law on Flag Day, June 14, 1954.

The rationale Docherty used was that the nation was facing a theological war, not just a conflict between two political philosophies, or two economic systems. He claimed that it was a fight for the freedom of the human personality. To quote, “It is Armageddon, a battle of the gods. It is the view of man as comes down to us from Judeo-Christian civilization in mortal combat against modern, secularized, godless society.”

Docherty, helped to define and clarify, the nature of the ideological struggle that the nation was going through. The Apostles’ Creed is the Christian’s Pledge of Allegiance. It helps to define and clarify the nature of the identity of the Church. It challenges each person who says it with the choice of what he or she is willing to believe, trust in, commit his or her life to.