 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
 |
|
||||||||||||||
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
|
||||||||
 |
 |
 |
|
||||||||||||
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
|
||||||
|
This statement of faith is
derived from our understanding of the Holy Scriptures. The Triune God
We believe in one God,
eternally existing in three equally divine Persons: the Father,
the Son, and the Holy Spirit, who know, love, and glorify one
another. This one true and living God is infinitely perfect both
in His love and in His holiness. He is the Creator of all
things, visible and invisible, and is therefore worthy to
receive all glory and adoration. Immortal and eternal, He
perfectly and completely knows the end from the beginning,
sustains and sovereignly rules over all things, and
providentially brings about His eternal good purposes to redeem
a people for Himself and restore His fallen creation, to the
praise of His glorious grace. Revelation of the Word of God
God has graciously disclosed
His existence and power in the created order, and has supremely
revealed Himself to fallen human beings in the person of his
Son, the incarnate Word. Moreover, this God is a speaking God
who by His Spirit has graciously disclosed Himself in human
words: we believe that God has inspired the words preserved in
the Scriptures, the sixty-six books of the Old and New
Testaments, which are both record and means of His saving work
in the world. These writings alone constitute the verbally
inspired Word of God, which is utterly authoritative and without
error in the original writings, complete in its revelation of
His will for salvation, sufficient for all that God requires us
to believe and do, and final in its authority over every domain
of knowledge to which it speaks. We confess that both our finite
knowledge and our sinfulness preclude the possibility of knowing
God’s truth exhaustively, but we affirm that, enlightened by the
Spirit of God, we can know God’s revealed truth truly. The Bible
is to be believed, as God’s instruction, in all that it teaches;
obeyed, as God’s command, in all that it requires; and trusted,
as God’s pledge, in all that it promises. As God’s people hear,
believe, and do the Word, they are equipped as disciples of
Christ and witnesses to the gospel. Creation of Humanity
We believe that God created
human beings, male and female, in His own image. Adam and Eve
belonged to the created order that God Himself declared to be
very good, serving as God's agents to care for, manage, and
govern creation, living in holy and devoted fellowship with
their Maker. We believe that in God’s creation He has ordained
that life begins at conception. Men and women, equally made in
the image of God, enjoy equal access to God by faith in Christ
Jesus and are both called to move beyond passive self-indulgence
to significant private and public engagement in family, church,
and civic life. Adam, created male, and Eve, created female,
were made to complement each other in a one-flesh union, i.e.
marriage, that establishes the only biblical pattern of sexual
relations for born men and born women, such that marriage
ultimately serves as a type of the union between Christ and his
church. In God's wise purposes, men and women are not simply
interchangeable, but rather they complement each other in
mutually enriching ways. God ordains that they assume
distinctive roles which reflect the loving relationship between
Christ and the church, the husband exercising headship in a way
that displays the caring, sacrificial love of Christ, and the
wife submitting to her husband in a way that models the love of
the church for her Lord. Children are a gracious gift of the
Lord and parents are the principal educators of their children
in all areas of knowledge, educating them in the knowledge of
God as our Creator and Redeemer, thereby shaping their worldview
for all of life. The responsibility of the local church is to
equip and support the parents to raise their children in the
discipline and instruction of the Lord. In the ministry of the
church, both men and women are encouraged to serve Christ and to
be developed to their full potential in the manifold ministries
of the people of God. The distinctive leadership role within the
church given to qualified men is grounded in creation, the fall,
and redemption and must not be sidelined by appeals to cultural
developments. The Fall
We believe that Adam, made in
the image of God, forfeited his original sinless state by
disobeying God thereby falling under the curse of sin. As a
result, all human beings are alienated from God, corrupted in
every aspect of their being (e.g., physically, mentally,
volitionally, emotionally, spiritually) and condemned finally
and irrevocably to death—apart from God’s own gracious
intervention. The supreme need of all human beings is to be
reconciled to the God under whose just and holy wrath we stand;
the only hope of all human beings is the undeserved love of this
same God, who alone can rescue us and restore us to himself. The Plan of God
We believe that from eternity
God determined in grace to save a great multitude of guilty
sinners from every tribe and language and people and nation, and
to this end He foreknew (i.e. He set His love upon them) and
chose them. We believe that God justifies and sanctifies those
who by grace have faith in Jesus, and that He will one day
glorify them—all to the praise of his glorious grace. In love
God commands and implores all people to repent and believe,
having set his saving love on those He has chosen and having
ordained Christ to be their Redeemer. The Gospel
We believe that the gospel is
the good news of Jesus Christ—God’s perfect wisdom. This good
news is Christological, centering on His death on the cross and
His resurrection. The gospel is not proclaimed if the authentic
Christ is not proclaimed. Furthermore Christ has not been
proclaimed if His death and His resurrection are not central
(the message is “Christ died for our sins . . . [and] was
raised”). This good news is
The Redemption of Christ
We believe that, moved by
love and in obedience to His Father, the eternal Son became
human: the Word became flesh, fully God and fully human being,
one Person in two natures. The man Jesus, the promised Messiah
of Israel, was conceived through the miraculous agency of the
Holy Spirit, and was born of the virgin Mary. He perfectly
obeyed His heavenly Father, lived a sinless life, performed
miraculous signs, was crucified under Pontius Pilate, arose
bodily from the dead on the third day, and ascended into heaven.
As the mediatorial King, He is seated at the right hand of God
the Father, exercising in heaven and on earth all of God’s
sovereignty, and is our High Priest and righteous Advocate. We
believe that by His incarnation, life, death, resurrection, and
ascension, Jesus Christ acted as our representative and
substitute. He did this so that in him we might become the
righteousness of God: on the cross He atoned for sin,
propitiated God, and, by bearing the full penalty of our sins
(i.e. the wrath of God) reconciled to God the Father all those
who believe. By His resurrection Christ Jesus was vindicated by
His Father, broke the power of sin and death and defeated Satan
who once had power over it, and brought everlasting life to all
His people; by His ascension He has been forever exalted as Lord
and has prepared a place for us to be with Him. We believe that
salvation is found in no one else, for there is no other name
given under heaven by which we must be saved. Because God chose
the lowly things of this world, the despised things, the things
that are not, to nullify the things that are, no human being can
ever boast before him—Christ Jesus has become for us wisdom from
God—that is, our righteousness, holiness, and redemption. The Justification of Sinners
We believe that Christ, by
His obedience and death, completely paid the debt of all those
who are justified. By Christ’s perfect obedience He satisfied
the just demands of God on our behalf, since by faith alone that
perfect obedience, His righteousness, is credited to all who
trust in Christ alone for their acceptance with God. By His
sacrifice, He bore in our place the punishment due us for our
sins, making a proper, real, and full satisfaction to God’s
justice on our behalf, declaring the guilty to be righteous.
Christ was given by the Father for us, and His obedience and
punishment were accepted in our place, freely and not for
anything in us, this justification is solely of free grace, in
order that both the exact justice and the rich grace of God
might be glorified in the justification of sinners. The Power of the Holy Spirit
We believe that salvation,
attested in all Scripture and secured by Jesus Christ, is
applied to His people by the Holy Spirit. Sent by the Father and
the Son, the Holy Spirit glorifies the Lord Jesus Christ and is
present with and in believers. He convicts the world of sin,
righteousness, and judgment, and by His powerful and mysterious
work regenerates spiritually dead sinners, awakening them to
repentance and faith, baptizing them into union with the Lord
Jesus, such that they are justified before God by grace alone
through faith alone in Jesus Christ alone. By the Spirit’s
ministry, believers are renewed, sanctified, and adopted into
God’s family; they participate in the divine nature and receive
His sovereignly distributed gifts. The Holy Spirit is Himself
the down payment of the promised inheritance, and in this age
indwells, guides, instructs, equips, revives, and empowers
believers for Christ-like living and service. The Kingdom of God
We believe that those who
have been saved by the grace of God through union with Christ by
faith and through regeneration by the Holy Spirit enter the
kingdom of God and delight in the blessings of the new covenant:
the forgiveness of sins, the inward transformation that awakens
a desire to glorify, trust, and obey God, and the prospect of
the glory yet to be revealed. Good works, resulting from the
inward transformation, constitute indispensable evidence of
saving grace. Living as salt in a world that is decaying and
light in a world that is dark, believers should neither withdraw
into seclusion from the world, nor become indistinguishable from
it: rather, we are to do good works in our community, for all
the glory and honor of the nations is to be offered up to the
living God. Recognizing whose created order this is, and because
we are citizens of God’s kingdom, we are to love our neighbors
as ourselves, doing good to all, especially to those who belong
to the household of God. The kingdom of God, already present but
not fully realized, is the exercise of God’s sovereignty in the
world toward the eventual redemption of all creation. The
kingdom of God is an invasive power that plunders Satan’s dark
kingdom and regenerates and renovates through repentance and
faith the lives of individuals rescued from that kingdom. It
therefore inevitably establishes a new community of human life
together under God. God’s New People
We believe the Church is the
community of all true believers for all time. God’s new
covenant people are already seated with Christ in the heavenlies.
This universal church is manifest in local churches of which
Christ is the only Head; thus each “local church” is, in fact,
the church, the household of God, the assembly of the living
God, and the pillar and foundation of the truth. The church is
the body of Christ and He has pledged himself to her forever.
The church is distinguished by her gospel message, her sacred
ordinances, her discipline, her great mission, and, above all,
by her love for God, and by her members’ love for one another
and for the world. Crucially, this gospel we cherish has both
personal and corporate dimensions, neither of which may be
overlooked. Christ Jesus is our peace: He has not only brought
about peace with God, but also peace between alienated peoples.
His purpose was to create in Himself one new humanity, thus
making peace, and in one body to reconcile both Jew and Gentile
to God through the cross, by which He put to death their
hostility. The church serves as a sign of God’s future new world
when its members live for the service of one another and their
neighbors, rather than for self-focus. The church is the
corporate dwelling place of God’s Spirit, and the continuing
witness to God in the world. The Sacraments: Baptism and the Lord’s Supper
We believe that baptism and
the Lord’s Supper are ordained by the Lord Jesus himself as
physically visible expressions and proclamations of the Gospel.
Baptism is a picture of our life, death and resurrection with
Christ as members of the new covenant community, and the Lord’s
Supper is an ongoing covenant renewal celebration of our union
with Christ. Together they are simultaneously God’s pledge to
us, divinely ordained means of grace, our public vows of
submission to the once crucified and now resurrected Christ, and
anticipations of His return and of the consummation of all
things. The Restoration of All Things
We believe in the personal,
glorious, and bodily return of Christ Jesus our Lord, when He
will exercise His role as final Judge, and His kingdom will be
consummated. We believe in the bodily resurrection of both the
just and the unjust—the unjust to judgment and eternal conscious
punishment in hell, as our Lord Himself taught, and the just to
eternal blessedness in the presence of Him who sits on the
throne and of the Lamb, in the new heaven and the new earth, the
home of righteousness. On that day the Church will be presented
faultless before God by the obedience, suffering and triumph of
Christ, all sin purged and its wretched effects forever
banished. God will be all in all and His people will be filled
with wonder and delight by the immediacy of his inexpressible
holiness, and everything will be to the praise of His glorious
grace. |