The devil passed catechism. He knows the Ten Commandments — all ten, in order. He knows the books of the Bible, the stories of Abraham and Noah and Mary Magdalene, the events of salvation history, the words of the creeds. He could probably outscore most of us on a confirmation quiz without breaking a sweat. And yet the devil is not saved. So if head knowledge alone were the goal of Christian catechesis, we'd have a serious problem on our hands — because the enemy of our souls has already cleared that bar, and he uses every bit of that knowledge to twist, tempt, and pull us away from the very hope that knowledge is supposed to point us toward. That's the uncomfortable fact I want you to sit with today as we talk about what Christian catechesis is really for.
There Is a Lot to Know
Let's start by being honest: there really is a substantial body of knowledge that belongs to the Christian faith, and it matters. When we do confirmation classes here at Gloria Dei, or when we walk adults through a membership class, we cover a lot of ground — and some of it involves straightforward memorization and recall. That's not a flaw in the system. It reflects the fact that our faith is rooted in real history, real people, real events, and real words that God has spoken into the world.
Think about what a thorough catechesis actually covers. The books of the Bible — all sixty-six of them, and in order. The Ten Commandments — and not just a vague sense that there are ten of them, but knowing what each one actually says and where it falls in the sequence. I'll be honest with you: I ask people to list the commandments in order more often than you might expect, and it surprises me every time how many folks who have been in the church for decades can get most of them but stumble on the order. That's not a criticism — it's just a reminder that this material requires real effort to internalize.
Then there are the Bible stories themselves. Do you know who Abraham is — not just the name, but the story? The call out of Ur, the covenant, the near-sacrifice of Isaac, and what all of it has to do with us? Do you know Ruth, and why her loyalty to Naomi matters to the larger story of salvation? Do you know what Peter did on the night Jesus was arrested, and what happened to him afterward on the shore of the Sea of Galilee? Do you know Mary Magdalene — not the cultural mythology that has grown up around her, but who she actually was and what she witnessed? These stories aren't decorative. They are the texture of salvation history, and knowing them gives you the ability to understand what God is doing and has done.
Beyond stories, there are the repeated words and practices of the worshipping community: the creeds, the Lord's Prayer, the hymns that the church has sung across centuries. These aren't just beautiful artifacts. They are the vocabulary of faith — the words that are supposed to be there when you need them, tucked away in memory, ready to surface in a moment of grief or fear or doubt or gratitude. All of that is good. All of that is worth pursuing. The knowledge itself is not the problem.
The Devil Knows, and It Doesn't Save Him
Here's where things get uncomfortable. The devil knows all of these things — and he knows them far better than you or I do. He has been paying attention longer than any of us have been alive. He knows scripture with a precision and depth that should genuinely unsettle us if we think that knowing scripture is, by itself, the finish line.
We see this most clearly in the account of Jesus being tempted in the wilderness. Satan doesn't approach Jesus with ignorance. He comes armed with scripture, quoting it accurately, applying it cleverly, using the words of God as instruments of temptation. He knows the text. He knows the promises. And he uses that knowledge not to worship, not to trust, not to rest in hope — but to twist, to leverage, to lead away from the path of faithful obedience. Knowledge in the devil's hands becomes a weapon against the very thing that knowledge is meant to serve.
Paul gets at something similar in Galatians when he reflects on his own experience with the law. He writes that he wouldn't have even known what coveting was except that God revealed it through the law — and then the law became the very thing the devil used to tempt him and lead him astray. The law does its work of revealing sin, and the enemy knows how to use that exposure to drive a person toward despair rather than toward repentance and grace. The knowledge of what sin is can, in the devil's hands, become a doorway to more sin rather than a doorway back to Jesus.
This is why I keep saying catechesis has to be more than head knowledge. Not because head knowledge is bad — it isn't. But because the devil has head knowledge in spades, and he is not saved by it. Something else is required. Something has to happen beyond the accumulation of facts, and that something is faith.
From Facts to Faith — What Formation Actually Means
What we are really after in catechesis — what we are always after — is faith. Not faith as a vague feeling of spiritual warmth, but faith as genuine trust: the conviction that Jesus, the Son of God, came into this world, died to atone for sin, rose from the dead, and lives and reigns to all eternity. And that all of that is true for you, personally — that your sins are forgiven on account of him, that you are held in God's hands, that the verdict over your life has already been spoken from the cross.
There used to be a phrase that was very popular in evangelical circles: having a personal relationship with Jesus. I understand why some people find that language a little squishy or imprecise. But if you put the best possible construction on it, what it's really trying to say is something exactly right: I actually trust and believe that Jesus died and rose for me, that my sins are forgiven for his sake, and that this changes everything about how I live. That's not a bad thing to want to communicate. That's the heart of it.
And notice that when faith is real — when it's not just intellectual assent but genuine trust — it does something. It shapes the way you live. It changes your relationship to God's word, to his commandments, to other people, to your own sin. A person who genuinely trusts that Jesus has won their forgiveness doesn't just know facts about Jesus; they have been changed by Jesus. They walk differently. They pray differently. They see the Ten Commandments differently — not as a list of accusations, but as the wisdom of God showing them what love actually looks like, what it looks like to love God and to love a neighbor from God's own perspective.
That is what catechesis is aiming at: the formation of a life of faith. Not just "what do you know" but "how do you live." And those two things are connected — what you know absolutely shapes how you live — but the knowledge is always in service of the life, never a destination in itself.
The Fear of the Lord — Where Wisdom Begins
The Old Testament has a phrase it comes back to repeatedly, most famously in the Psalms and in Proverbs: the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. That word "fear" can trip people up, because we tend to associate fear with terror or anxiety — a cowering, cringing response to a threatening power. But in the biblical sense, the fear of the Lord is something closer to what we might call awe-filled reverence grounded in right relationship. It is knowing who God is — fully, honestly, without softening the edges — and standing before him as what you actually are.
Here's what makes that both terrifying and wonderful: God has every right to judge you as a sinner. That is a serious fact, and the fear of the Lord doesn't let you look away from it. But the same God who has every right to condemn you gave his only-begotten Son to die for you, to redeem you — and gives you his Spirit so that you might live by faith. The fear of the Lord, rightly understood, is what you feel when you hold both of those things together at the same time: the gravity of your sin and the immensity of his grace.
Catechesis is meant to cultivate exactly that. It's meant to help you know who God is — not a vague, comfortable deity who exists to affirm your choices, but the living God who is holy and just and merciful and faithful — and to know what he has done, what he continues to do in your life, and how to live in right relationship with him. That right relationship, that fear-and-trust that flows from the cross, is what shapes the whole Christian life. It flows through us and, by the Spirit's work, through us into the world around us.
The Shape of the Christian Life
One of the things that sometimes gets lost when we talk about Christian freedom is that the Christian life actually has a shape. Because Christ has freed us, we can sometimes slide toward thinking that freedom means anything goes — that grace erases all structure, all pattern, all discipline. But that's not quite right.
There is a great deal of freedom and variety in how faith gets lived out across different people and different circumstances. But the Christian life is not shapeless. It has a form, and that form flows out of our baptism. Being baptized into Christ means being connected to his death and resurrection — and that connection means we walk in newness of life. The shape of that newness is what Jesus himself described when he said, Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near. Repent and believe the good news.
That ongoing pattern of repentance and faith — turning away from sin, turning toward the gospel, returning again and again to the promises of God — is not a one-time event at confirmation or at the baptismal font. It is the rhythm of the Christian life. And it is empowered by the Spirit, not manufactured by our willpower. As we take hold of God's promises, as we return to his word, as we live in the forgiveness he has won for us, the Spirit does the work of formation in us. We don't produce this change ourselves. But we do participate in it, and we participate in it by staying connected to the means through which God works.
That's why the shape of the Christian life includes gathering around God's word in worship — not as a social obligation or a cultural habit, but because this is where God shows up to give his gifts. It includes receiving the sacraments — the body and blood of Christ given and shed for the forgiveness of sins, as he himself commanded. It includes confessing the faith together: when you come to Gloria Dei on any given Sunday, we're going to confess the Apostles' Creed or the Nicene Creed, and occasionally the Athanasian Creed. Those creeds are not just historical recitations. They are acts of shared faith — the community standing together and declaring what we trust to be true about God and about ourselves.
And ultimately, the shape of the Christian life is the shape of trust. Trust that expresses itself in prayer — calling out to God, placing ourselves in his hands, believing that he hears and that he acts. This is not the trust of someone who has their theology perfectly systematized. It is the trust of a child who knows their Father and believes he is good.
Formation, Not Just Information
I want to be honest about a tendency I see — and see in myself, so I'm not pointing fingers here. When we think about catechesis, it is genuinely easier to measure information than it is to measure formation. I can give you a quiz. I can ask you to list the Ten Commandments in order, to name the books of the Bible, to identify the difference between Law and Gospel. I can grade that quiz and tell you whether you passed or failed. That is measurable. That is concrete. And because it's measurable, it's easy to treat it as the goal.
But formation is harder to measure, and that doesn't make it less important — it makes it more important, and more demanding. Formation is about habits. It's about the practices that keep bringing you back into God's word, week after week, year after year, so that the Spirit can keep doing his work in you. It's about the way your posture toward the commandments shifts over time — from seeing them as a threat to seeing them as a gift, as the wisdom of God about what love looks like in concrete human life. It's about the way your prayer life matures, not because you've learned more techniques but because you've learned to trust more deeply.
And formation has an outward dimension too. A life shaped by genuine faith in Jesus — by real trust in the gospel — is a life that testifies. Not necessarily with elaborate arguments or formal presentations, but with the kind of honest hope that other people notice and are drawn toward. The Spirit works through that testimony. He uses the witness of a person who genuinely trusts God's promises to build faith in others. Catechesis, at its best, is preparing people not just to know what Christians believe but to live in a way that makes other people want to ask why.
Going Back to Jesus, Again and Again
I want to be clear about one more thing before we close, because I don't want anyone to hear this and think the goal is moral perfection or some kind of spiritual achievement level that you eventually reach and maintain. You are going to continue to sin. I am going to continue to sin. The more deeply you know God's word, in fact, the more clearly you will see your own sin — not because you're getting worse, but because the light is getting brighter. Paul said he wouldn't have known what coveting was without the law. The deeper your catechesis goes, the more the law does its proper work of naming what is actually there.
And all of that — every conviction of sin, every failure, every moment of recognizing how far you fall short — is meant to drive you back to Jesus. Not to despair. Not to a performance of improvement that you hope will eventually satisfy God. But back to Jesus, who died and rose, whose forgiveness is real and full and already accomplished, who does not require you to earn your way back into his good graces because you were never in his good graces on the basis of your own merit to begin with. You are there because of him. You stay there because of him. And you go back to him, again and again, because of him.
That is the life catechesis is meant to form: a life of eternal life, lived in a temporal world, always returning to the One who won that eternal life for us. A life that knows what it believes and lives what it knows. A life shaped by the fear of the Lord — that honest, awestruck recognition of who God is and what he has done — and flowing from that fear, a life of genuine wisdom, genuine love, genuine trust.
So as you think about your own formation in the faith — whether you went through a confirmation class years ago or you're in the middle of one now, whether you feel like your knowledge is solid or you're aware of significant gaps — the question to sit with isn't only what do I know? It's how am I living it? And more than that: am I actually trusting Jesus, or am I trusting my knowledge about Jesus? Because those are not the same thing. The devil knows more about Jesus than most of us ever will. What he doesn't have — what the Spirit gives only to those who are brought to faith — is trust. That's what we're after. That's what all of this is for.
Transcript generated with A.I. Original by the author.
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