Believing Orleans United Church

Trusting God, having confidence in God’s faithfulness, and relying on God’s goodness as we grow in faith.

For Christians, Jesus encourages us to “believe” in the transforming love he shares with God.  “What we believe” about Jesus is less influential than “how we believe” Jesus inspires us to live God’s love every day.  At OUC, we take believing seriously.

BELIEVING IN FAITHFUL RELATIONSHIPS

I’ve chosen this reading from the 1st Letter of John to help highlight the central place of believing in the lives of followers of Jesus, back in the 1st Century and with you and me here today.  As you will hear, believing and loving have a deep and abiding connection, which has the power to transform everyday living.  Notice how God’s loving animates our own, and inspires our faithfulness to God and to each other.  Like loving, believing makes a difference in how we approach every situation and circumstance we encounter.

From chapter 4 in 1st John:

410 In this is love, not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the atoning sacrifice for our sins. 11 Beloved, since God loved us so much, we also ought to love one another. 12 No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God lives in us, and his love is perfected in us.

13 By this we know that we abide in him and he in us, because he has given us of his Spirit. 14 And we have seen and do testify that the Father has sent his Son as the Savior of the world. 15 God abides in those who confess that Jesus is the Son of God, and they abide in God. 16 So we have known and believe the love that God has for us.

God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them.

This thought is continued later in the letter:

51 Everyone who believes that Jesus is the Christ has been born of God, and everyone who loves the parent loves the child. 2 By this we know that we love the children of God, when we love God and obey his commandments. 3 For the love of God is this, that we obey his commandments. And his commandments are not burdensome,

4 for whatever is born of God conquers the world. And this is the victory that conquers the world, our faith. 5 Who is it that conquers the world but the one who believes that Jesus is the Son of God?

Over the past five years here at Orleans United, we have embraced a simple message as a way of describing our faith community and encouraging each other in our faith journey:   Believe. Belong. Become.  Over the next three Sundays we’ll take a closer look at what’s at the heart of these words, beginning today with Believe.  So I invite you to turn with me to page 918 in Voices United and stand as we read together our best known United Church belief statement, A New Creed:

We are not alone, we live in God’s world.

We believe in God:

who has created and is creating,

who has come in Jesus, the Word made flesh, to reconcile and make new,

who works in us and others by the Spirit.

We trust in God.

We are called to be the Church:

to celebrate God’s presence,

to live with respect in Creation,

to love and serve others,

to seek justice and resist evil,

to proclaim Jesus, crucified and risen, our judge and our hope.

In life, in death, in life beyond death, God is with us.

We are not alone.

Thanks be to God.

This way of talking about BELIEVING has warmed my heart for many years, long before we moved to Ottawa and I became a United Church minister.  I first encountered A New Creed in 1974 while serving a Moravian congregation in Edmonton, and was humbled by its simple, inclusive, and relational way of claiming faith in God.  It’s been my main way to express Christian belief with others ever since.  And I’m deeply grateful to the United Church of Canada for that gift.