Everyone loves beautiful things. We hang beautiful things on our walls. We go to art museums and let the art carry us away to beautiful and extraordinary places. We wear beautiful jewelry around our necks and fingers and wrists and hang it from our ears. We gravitate toward beautiful landscapes and scenic locations.
Everyone loves beauty. We even love beautiful theology—truths that move us, words that grip us, concepts that free us and then carry us away.
The Nicene Creed is beautiful theology. It is present from start to finish as it flows through the magnificence of our faith. But three lines, in particular, stand out as being composed with beauty and grace. Here, we see the composers of the Creed take a complex and once-contested doctrine—who is Jesus?—and make it absolutely beautiful. These eleven words have always captured my heart and my imagination.
God from God,
Light from Light,
true God from true God. . . .
Three beautiful lines. One beautiful truth. A better and more beautiful answer there could not be.
The Westminster Shorter Catechism contains a few beautiful moments. In fact, it begins in beauty. It asks, “What is the chief end of humanity?” The answer is beautiful in simplicity and in power: “The chief end of humanity is to glorify God, and to enjoy him forever.” Everyone wants to know the meaning of life. Everyone wants to know how to have a beautiful life. Everyone wants to experience a life of significance and love and purpose. And here it is: We glorify God by enjoying him. And how do we enjoy him? We commit ourselves to glorifying him in all things. Our whole life’s purpose is set out in fourteen beautiful words. As theology goes, that is absolutely beautiful. Nothing short of absolute beauty.
And here is the best part. This is not only our theology, but these are confessions. We are a confessional church, and both the Nicene Creed and the Westminster Confession are part of our confessional heritage. They adorn our theological walls and bring beauty to our lives.
Recently, something beautiful happened. When we joined ECO, we inherited a whole new Confessional portfolio. To what was already ours (the Apostles’ Creed, the Nicene Creed, the Westminster Confession, and the Larger and Shorter Catechisms), we have now been given the Theological Declaration of Barmen and the Heidelberg Catechism. All of these creeds and confessions now hang on our theological walls and can properly be called ours. And you know what they say, “Everyone loves to have beauty things.”
And what is so beautiful about the Heidelberg Catechism? Almost the whole thing, but you don’t have to go too far to see that’s true. Like the Shorter Catechism, the Heidelberg Catechism comes flying out of the gate. It asks:
Q. 1. What is your only comfort, in life and in death?
A. That I belong—body and soul, in life and in death—not to myself but to my faithful Savior, Jesus Christ. At the cost of his own blood he has fully paid for all my sins and has completely freed me from the dominion of the devil. He protects me so well that without the will of my Father in heaven not a hair can fall from my head. Indeed, everything must fit his purpose for my salvation. Therefore, by his Holy Spirit, he also assures me of eternal life, and makes me wholeheartedly willing and ready from now on to live for him.
Now, the Catechism can proceed in several directions here. It can talk about obedience or duty or obligation. But the beauty of the Heidelberg Catechism is that it gets to the heart of our theology: grace and the beauty of gratitude.
We see that come to the foreground in the second question.
Q. 2. How many things must you know that you may live and die in the blessedness of this comfort?
A. Three. First, the greatness of my sin and wretchedness. Second, how I am freed from all my sins and their wretched consequences. Third, what gratitude I owe to God for such redemption.
And how beautiful is that? My comfort in life and in death is for me to see my sin, embrace my forgiveness and then live my life as an offering of gratitude. Forget the four spiritual laws. These three “laws” give us everything we need—our misery ends in our deliverance which then gives birth to a life of gratitude.
But here’s the great thing. The refrain of gratitude runs throughout the entire Catechism. We see it again and again and again (it is what makes this Catechism so beautiful). We see it here:
Q. 43. What further benefit do we receive from the sacrifice and death of Christ on the cross?
A. That by his power our old self is crucified, put to death, and buried with him, so that the evil passions of our physical bodies may reign in us no more, but that we may offer ourselves to him as a sacrifice of thanksgiving.
And we see it here:
Q. 32. But why are you called a Christian?
A. Because through faith I share in Christ and thus in his anointing, so that I may confess his name, offer myself a living sacrifice of gratitude to him, and fight against sin and the devil with a free and good conscience.
And here:
Q. 116. Why is prayer necessary for Christians?
A. Because it is the chief part of the gratitude which God requires of us, and because God will only give his grace and Holy Spirit to those who sincerely seek him in prayer without ceasing, and who thank him for these gifts.
But expressing gratitude makes little sense unless we know why we should burst forth in thanksgiving. Thankfully, the Catechism also makes the reasons for gratitude very clear. Two examples will serve our need for today. The first one should sound familiar. It is a passage we read at every communion service at River’s Edge. This is not just good news. This is the beautiful news of God’s grace. We read:
Q. 56. What do you believe concerning “the forgiveness of sins”?
A. For the sake of Christ’s reconciling work, God will remember my sins no more, nor the sinfulness with which I have to struggle all my life long. But he graciously imparts to me the righteousness of Christ so that I may never be condemned.
And here’s the second example:
Q. 60. How are you righteous before God?
A. Only by true faith in Jesus Christ. God grants me the benefits of the perfect expiation of Christ, imputing to me his righteousness and holiness as though I had never committed a single sin or had ever been sinful. I have fulfilled all the obedience which Christ has carried out for me, if I only accept such grace with a trusting heart. This is in spite of the fact that my conscience accuses me that I have grievously sinned against all the commandments of God and have not kept any one of them and that I am still ever prone to all that is evil.
And that leads us to this most beautiful statement of them all:
Q. 86. Since we are redeemed from our sin and its wretched consequences by grace through Christ without any merit of our own, why must we do good works?
A. Because just as Christ has redeemed us with his blood, he also renews us through his Holy Spirit according to his own image, so that with our whole life we may show ourselves grateful to God for his goodness and that he may be glorified through us.
If you would, underline that clause: “So that with our whole life we may show ourselves grateful to God for his goodness.” Why is that so beautiful? Because it changes everything. See, I grew up thinking the Christian life was all ought and obligation, duty and dread, but now we know that is not even close to the truth. We follow Jesus out of a profound sense of gratitude, out of the joy of thankfulness. And gratitude comes from the fact that God relates to us, not on the basis of law and behavior, but by grace (and grace from first to last). The most beautiful picture of theology is now hanging before us: God’s bestows grace out of love and we respond with love out of gratitude. And this gratitude is not something we do every now and again. It is who we are. All we have to offer to God is gratitude. And there we have it. Redemption is grace, and our response is gratitude. Or to say it another way, everything is grace and therefore everything must be gratitude. And that, my friends, is a beautiful and freeing and delightful way to live.
This thanksgiving, may your theological walls be filled with beautiful art, art that proclaims the beautiful news that the chief end of all humanity is to glorify God by living our lives as an outpouring of gratitude for his grace which is the express lane to enjoying him forever.
Happy Thanksgiving!
