Preaching on the Trinity will deepen your people’s understanding of the nature of the God whom they worship and the shape of the gospel by which they have been saved. Additionally, the salvation of souls is at stake, since those who deny the Trinity outside the bounds of orthodox Christianity. That’s why, brother pastor, you should preach the Nicene Creed and the Triune God of whom it speaks.

A.W. Tozer (1897–1963) said, “What comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us.” He went on, “Worship is pure or base as the worshiper entertains high or low thoughts of God.”^[1] It is concerning, then, that in a recent study, 43% of evangelicals agreed that “Jesus was a great teacher, but he was not God.”^[2] Sadly, this percentage of professing Christians that deny a cardinal doctrine of Christianity is on an upward trend. What is the the most vital doctrine in the Christian faith—even more vital than the gospel message itself? The Trinity. This is because before there can be a God who creates, judges, and redeems (which are all doctrines which pertain to us as creatures), there must be a God who is. Clearly, there is a major theological problem in our churches. If we asked the average Christian, “How often have you heard a sermon series, or a stand-alone sermon, on the Trinity?” The answer for many Christians would be seldom to none. Does this not demonstrate a deficiency in our preaching, our churches, and our lives as evangelicals? Those who deny the Trinity, according to the traditional and orthodox position, is that they are outside the bounds of biblical Christianity. Further, even if a believer mentally assents to doctrine, if the Triune nature of God does not affect his daily life, this too is concerning.

In this article, I will argue that one of the best ways to address this deficiency is to preach a sermon series on the Trinity using the Nicene Creed as a guide.^[3] Much of my argument is drawn from my own experience as I preached a series through the Nicene Creed at my own church. I’ll first demonstrate why we should preach through the creed before turning to how one might do this, and finally I’ll conclude with some personal reflections on our church’s journey through the Nicene Creed.

Rationale: Why Preach the Creed?

Many of us would not dispute that Trinitarian theology in our congregations is weaker than it ought to be. But is preaching through the Nicene Creed really the right way to address this problem? An obvious objection to preaching a series on the Creed is that it does not fit neatly into the normal pattern of consecutive exposition. At my church, our regular practice is preaching through books of the Bible on Sunday mornings. So, to preach a five-week series on an ancient creed undoubtedly feels out of the norm. But, at least in my context, we have occasionally preached topical sermons on things like technology, entertainment and leisure, and work. If our church can stomach addresses on those topics, which (while important) are far less important than the triune nature of God, then surely, we are justified in preaching an entire sermon series on the Trinity.

A weightier objection is that to preach on the Nicene Creed is to explain a man-made document and not the Scriptures. This is a fair contention, and given my Baptist context, it carries much weight.^[4] So, what then, is my rationale? Donald Fairbairn, an expert on the Nicene Creed, has remarked how almost every word in the Nicene Creed was derived from the Scriptures, except for one. In other words, the drafters of the creed were seeking to be immensely biblical in their articulation of theology. As for the one word that was extra-biblical, it was homoousios, which was employed to affirm the full deity of the Son and his co-eternality and co-substantiality with the Father. With these observations, the claim that the creed is extra-biblical, then, seems to carry less weight, even for a Baptist.

Execution

In this next section, I will speak on the execution of preaching on the Nicene Creed. The goal here is to put forth what I did at my church and in my context; this is not intended to be an exemplary model. First, I divided up the Nicene Creed into five sermons: the Father, the Son’s deity, the Son’s incarnation, the Holy Spirit, and the church.^[5] Second, I made my arguments both from the Scripture and the creed. I endeavoured to show how the teaching of the creed accorded with the Scriptures; thus, I read an anchor text at the outset of each sermon, which captured a major idea which the respective article in the creed developed. Similarly, I did not replace the Scripture reading during the service with a reading of the creed. Third, there were weeks where I exposited more lines in the creed than others. In the sermon on the Father, I treated most of the lines in some fashion; however, in the sermon on the Church, I focused on the word, “catholic,” and did not comment on the rest. Fourth, while I weaved in some aspects of the history, I sought to not get bogged down with it. For my context, to provide extensive details about the background would not have been useful for my people. That being said, I provided some historical information to orient people to basic facts about church history—for example, that the Nicene Creed developed between the Council of Nicaea (325) and the First Council of Constantinople (381).

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