The Reality We Choose to Live Inside: Why the Church Still Needs Confessions

Sometimes the most honest prayers aren’t polished…they’re urgent.

Not because the world is “new,” exactly… but because it’s loud. Because it’s heavy. Because it keeps handing us headlines and arguments and fears and uncertainties, and if we’re not careful, those things start taking the throne in our minds.

So before anything else, we prayed:

God, in the midst of questions, division, and death…You are still on the throne.
Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.

That prayer matters because it names something we don’t always notice: our souls are always reaching for an authority. If we don’t choose one, we’ll drift into whatever is loudest.

And that’s why this Sunday felt different.

We weren’t just opening our Bibles, we were looking backward. Not to “nerd out” on history (though yes… if you hate history, this might’ve felt like a long walk through the museum). We looked back because believers before us wrestled with the same questions we’re wrestling with now:

• Who is Jesus—really?

• How do we know what’s true?

• What truths can’t be negotiated, even when it costs us?

We didn’t start with speeches. We started with three words.

In the earliest days of the Church, baptism didn’t come with a microphone and a testimony video. It came with three questions that were simple, public, and unskippable:

Do you believe in God the Father Almighty?
Do you believe in Jesus Christ, His only Son, our Lord?
Do you believe in the Holy Spirit?

And the answer, again and again, was the same:

I believe.

That’s where the Church learned something foundational: confession isn’t a churchy habit. It’s a human habit. We are always declaring what we believe about ourselves, about the world, about God. Over time, those repeated statements stop sounding like opinions and start feeling like reality.

We slowly begin to live inside the words we repeat.

So the Church did something intentional: it put truth on people’s lips, not just on parchment. Over time, those baptismal questions were preserved and expanded into what we now call the Apostles’ Creed. This was not written by the apostles, but summarizing the teaching handed down from the apostles.

Short. Clear. Trinitarian. Anchoring.

And then…pressure hit.

When “reasonable” becomes dangerous

A few centuries later, a teacher named Arius began saying things about Jesus that sounded believable, maybe even responsible. He wasn’t trying to “destroy Christianity.” In his mind, he was protecting God’s uniqueness.

His argument was simple:

If the Father is the source of everything, then the Son must come from the Father.
If the Son comes from the Father, then the Son must have a beginning.

In other words: There was a time when Jesus was not.

And here’s what made it so persuasive: it sounded reasonable. He even used Scripture to support his view (for example, arguments tied to Proverbs 8).

But the Church recognized what was at stake:

If Jesus is created, He is not eternal.
If He is not eternal, He is not fully God.
If He is not fully God, then the cross cannot truly reconcile humanity to God.

This wasn’t a side debate. It was salvation-level.

So in AD 325, church leaders gathered at Nicaea - not to invent a new faith, but to clarify what believers had always confessed.

They wrote what we now call the Nicene Creed, declaring Jesus is:

“Begotten, not made…of one substance with the Father.”

Meaning: Jesus is not merely like God. Jesus is God.

This is where the Church gave language to a kind of truth we don’t talk about every day, but we absolutely live by:

Ontology - the study of being; what something actually is in its nature.
The Church was making an ontological claim: who Jesus actually is.

And the wild part? Nicaea didn’t instantly end the controversy.

Truth doesn’t always silence lies. Sometimes it starts a longer fight.

One man against the world

As political winds shifted across the empire, pressures came down on the Church: Just blur the lines a little. Keep the peace. Make it less divisive.

But a young leader named Athanasius refused.

Because he believed something simple:

If the Church compromises on who Jesus is, the gospel loses all authority.

He was exiled five times…not for crimes, not for scandal, but for clarity.

A phrase circulated among those who stood with the Nicene confession:

Athanasius contra mundum
Athanasius against the world.

It’s a dramatic phrase because it describes a real temptation: when the cost of truth rises, we start negotiating. We start hiding. We start minimizing. We start reshaping Jesus into someone more “acceptable.”

But the moment the Church loses clarity about the Groom, the Bride loses her voice.

Fast-forward: when authority gets tangled

A thousand years later, the question wasn’t only Who is Jesus?
It was also: Who gets to define truth?

As the medieval church became deeply institutionalized, spiritual authority became centralized. And without access to Scripture (because most people didn’t own Bibles and couldn’t read the language), many believers couldn’t consult the Word for themselves. They had to consult the institution.

That environment birthed practices like indulgences: the idea that financial payment could reduce punishment for sin, even for the dead.

It sounds absurd to us now. But it grew in a world where Scripture wasn’t accessible and authority was concentrated.

Then came Martin Luther.

In 1517, his objections began as a debate, but underneath it was a deeper question:

Is truth defined by church tradition-or revealed by God through Scripture?

At the imperial gathering known (unfortunately) as the Diet of Worms, Luther was commanded to recant.

His response still echoes:

“My conscience is captive to the Word of God.”

This wasn’t merely a protest about indulgences. It was a declaration about authority - what we might call an authoritative truth: where truth comes from and who has the right to define it.

The pattern keeps repeating - because the pressure keeps repeating

Here’s what history teaches us if we’re willing to listen:

• Clarity about truth has never been easy.

• Protecting clarity always costs something.

• Every generation faces the same choice: confess what is true, or reshape truth to survive.

And that’s not just “out there” in the culture. It’s personal.

Because confession isn’t only what we say in church, but it’s what we say in our minds:

“It’s always been this way.”
“I’ll never change.”
“This is just who I am.”
“God won’t come through.”
“This is how the world works.”

Those statements build a world. And then we live inside it.

So the people of God have always done something countercultural:

We confess what is actually true…together and out loud.

Not to win arguments.
Not to go viral.
Not to dominate conversations.

But to align ourselves with reality.

Three categories that help us stay clear

As a church, we’ve organized our confessions into three categories because not every truth functions the same way:

1) Essential Truths of Salvation

What must be true for the gospel to exist: who God is, who Jesus is, and what Christ accomplished through the cross. These are non-negotiable.

2) Essential Sources of Authority

How truth is made known: revealed through Scripture, illuminated by the Holy Spirit, guarded (not invented) by the Church. These are also non-negotiable, because if authority becomes fluid, every generation invents its own Christianity.

3) Essential Practices of Discipleship

How redeemed people live in response: worship, baptism, communion, holiness, generosity, unity, mission. These matter deeply, but this is where formation happens, where grace and truth walk together, and where believers are often at different stages of growth.

Without this distinction, churches tend to swing into one of two ditches:

• Everything becomes negotiable.

• Everything becomes rigid.

But the historic church has fought to hold both:
clarity about the gospel and grace in the process of formation.

Why this matters right now

When God begins stirring hearts - when there’s awakening - something always rises:

Hunger for truth.
Hunger for authenticity.
Fresh repentance.
Fresh surrender.

But awakenings aren’t sustained by less clarity.
They’re sustained by more clarity.

Because when hearts wake up, voices multiply. Ideas circulate. “Reasonable” starts sounding like “true.” And in those moments, the Church shouldn’t step back from truth.

We should become clearer—so we can protect what God is doing, anchor it, and pass it on.

A Simple Invitation

So here’s the invitation for this week.

Don’t let these ideas stay as a “church history lesson” or simply a Sunday message you heard and moved on from. Let them become something you return to when the world gets loud and your own thoughts start writing a different version of reality.

Because the truth is, every one of us is already confessing something. The question is simply whether what we are confessing is actually true.

That’s why throughout history the Church has written creeds and confessions. Not to replace Scripture, but to summarize what Scripture clearly teaches, and to help believers hold fast to those truths together.

At LEV Church we’ve done the same thing by organizing the confessions we stand on into clear Creeds / Statements of Belief. These statements are rooted in historic Christianity and supported by Scripture. They’re meant to do more than sit on a page…they’re meant to shape how we think, how we pray, how we worship, and how we live.

If you’d like to explore them further, you can read them here:

Take time to read through them slowly. Sit with the Scriptures behind them. Talk about them with your family or with friends. Ask questions.

Because as culture constantly tries to redefine reality, the Church continues doing what it has always done:

confessing the truth, again and again, and choosing to live inside the reality God defines.