Statement of Faith
WE BELIEVE:
The Bible is God’s infallible written revelation to man;
There is but one living and true God, an infinite, all-knowing Spirit, perfect in all His attributes, one in essence, eternally existing in three Persons–Father, Son, and Holy Spirit:
Father– God the Father, the first person of the Trinity, orders and disposes all things according to His own purpose and grace;
Son– Jesus Christ, the second person of the Trinity, possesses all the divine excellencies, and in these He is coequal, consubstantial, and coeternal with the Father; Jesus Christ was virgin born; that He was God incarnate; and that the purpose of the incarnation was to reveal God, redeem men, and rule over God’s kingdom; Jesus Christ accomplished our redemption through the shedding of His blood and sacrificial death on the cross and that His death was voluntary, vicarious, substitutionary, propitiatory, and redemptive; that on the basis of the efficacy of the death of our Lord Jesus Christ, the believing sinner is freed from the punishment, the penalty, the power, and one day the very presence of sin; and that he is declared righteous, given eternal life, and adopted into the family of God and that our justification is made sure by His literal, physical resurrection from the dead and that He is ascended to the right hand of the Father, where He now mediates as our Advocate and High-Priest;
Holy Spirit– The Holy Spirit is a divine person, eternal, underived, possessing all the attributes of personality and deity, and in all the divine attributes He is coequal and consubstantial with the Father and the Son;
Man was created by God in His image and likeness. Man was created free of sin with a rational nature, intelligence, volition, self-determination, and moral responsibility to God (Gen. 2:7, 15-25; James 3:9). God’s intention in the creation of man was that man should glorify God, enjoy God’s fellowship, live his life in the will of God, and by this accomplish God’s purpose for man in the world;
In Adam’s sin of disobedience to the revealed will and Word of God, man lost his innocence; incurred the penalty of spiritual and physical death; became subject to the wrath of God; and became inherently corrupt and utterly incapable of choosing or doing that which is acceptable to God apart from divine grace. With no recuperative powers to enable him to recover himself, man is hopelessly lost. Man’s salvation is thereby wholly of God’s grace through the redemptive work of our Lord Jesus Christ;
Because all men were in Adam, a nature corrupted by Adam’s sin has been transmitted to all men of all ages, Jesus Christ being the only exception. All men are thus sinners by nature;
Salvation is wholly of God by grace on the basis of the redemption of Jesus Christ, the merit of His shed blood, and not on the basis of human merit or works;
Believers should be separated unto our Lord Jesus and affirm that the Christian life is a life of obedient righteousness demonstrated by a crucified self attitude and a continual pursuit of holiness;
All who place their faith in Jesus Christ are immediately placed by the Holy Spirit into one united spiritual body, the church, the bride of Christ, of which Christ is the head;
Angels are created beings and are therefore not to be worshiped;
We teach that Satan is a created angel and the author of sin. He incurred the judgment of God by rebelling against his Creator, by taking numerous angels with him in his fall, and by introducing sin into the human race by his temptation of Eve;
Satan is the open and declared enemy of God and man, the prince of this world who has been defeated through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ and that he shall be eternally punished in the lake of fire;
We teach the bodily resurrection of all men, the saved to eternal life, and the unsaved to judgment and everlasting punishment.
