What help to us are Jesus' birth, life, suffering, and death; what help to us are His victory, His resurrection, ascension, and sitting at the right hand of the Father; what help to us are our knowledge and worship of God and Baptism and Communion, if the Holy Spirit does not come into our heart and create a living faith there? For Christianity is not a knowledge or teaching, not deeds and works, not going to church or prayer services, but heartfelt communion with the Lord, and that only the Holy Spirit can bring about.
-- Nils Jakob Laache

A while back, I wrote on the tension that exists for many of us between our good works (deeds) and our faith confession (creeds). Bishop Laache points out the reality that our Christianity must not be reduced simply to a mix of the two (let alone only one!) but is first and foremost about our Spirit-enabled communion with God.

Primarily, Christianity is about our relationship to the Triune God--Father, Son, and Spirit--which we confess in our creeds and labor to glorify in our actions. This relationship is by no means the stuff of sappy, sentimentalism or the Romanticism which detached faith from Scripture and tradition. On the contrary, our relationship with God is cultivated through the Word, nurtured by the Sacraments, and lived out in lives of prayer and service to others.