Statement of Faith

What we believe

1. 1One God

   “Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one” (Deuteronomy 6:4). This one God has always existed as three persons: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Each is fully God, and each is His own person: the Father is not the Son, and the Spirit is neither the Father nor the Son. They are not three gods, and not one person taking three roles, but one God. Jesus sent His followers to baptize “in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit” (Matthew 28:19). God made everything that is, and He made it good (Genesis 1:1, 31).

2. 2God’s word

   The Bible is God’s word, true and trustworthy, and the final authority for what we believe and how we live (2 Timothy 3:16–17).

3. 3Captives

   We were made for God, but every one of us has sinned (Romans 3:23). Jesus said, “everyone who sins is a slave to sin” (John 8:34), and Paul wrote that “the wages of sin is death” (Romans 6:23). Behind sin and death stands a real enemy, the devil, “him who holds the power of death” (Hebrews 2:14). We could not free ourselves.

4. 4The Redeemer

   The eternal Son of God became a man: “The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us” (John 1:14). He was born of the virgin Mary, lived without sin, and is fully God and fully man (Colossians 2:9; Hebrews 4:15). He became one of our family so He could buy us back, as a close relative could redeem a family member under Israel’s law (Leviticus 25:48; Hebrews 2:14).

5. 5The ransom

   Jesus came “to give his life as a ransom for many” (Mark 10:45). He died in our place and for our sins (1 Corinthians 15:3). We were redeemed “not with perishable things such as silver or gold … but with the precious blood of Christ” (1 Peter 1:18–19). His blood bought us for God (Revelation 5:9). At the cross God canceled the charge against us and disarmed the powers that held it (Colossians 2:13–15).

6. 6The Victor

   By His death Jesus broke “the power of him who holds the power of death—that is, the devil” and freed “those who all their lives were held in slavery by their fear of death” (Hebrews 2:14–15). “The reason the Son of God appeared was to destroy the devil’s work” (1 John 3:8). Scripture tells us what our freedom cost and who we were bought for, but it never says anyone was paid, so we don’t either. Jesus didn’t pay the devil; He defeated him.

7. 7Risen

   Jesus was buried, and on the third day God raised Him bodily from the dead. He appeared to Peter, to the Twelve, to more than five hundred at once, to James, and to Paul (1 Corinthians 15:3–8). He says, “I was dead, and now look, I am alive for ever and ever! And I hold the keys of death and Hades” (Revelation 1:18). Paul said that if Christ has not been raised, our faith is futile (1 Corinthians 15:17).

8. 8The King

   The good news is that Jesus is the King. God raised Him and “made this Jesus, whom you crucified, both Lord and Messiah” (Acts 2:36). He reigns now at the Father’s right hand, and He will come again to judge.

9. 9Faith is allegiance

   The New Testament’s Greek word for faith, pistis, can mean trust, faithfulness, or loyalty. When the one we trust is a king, the closest English word is often allegiance, as Matthew Bates argues in Salvation by Allegiance Alone (2017). Saving faith holds three things together: believing the good news about the King, declaring loyalty to Him, and living that loyalty out. Jesus asked, “Why do you call me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ and do not do what I say?” (Luke 6:46), and He warned, “No one can serve two masters” (Matthew 6:24).

10. 10Set free by grace

    We are saved by grace, not by anything we earn: “it is by grace you have been saved, through faith … it is the gift of God—not by works, so that no one can boast” (Ephesians 2:8–9). We receive that grace by faith, and faith is not a way of paying for it. Jesus already gave His life as the ransom. God “wants all people to be saved and to come to a knowledge of the truth” (1 Timothy 2:4), and “whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life” (John 3:16). He hasn’t chosen some people for rescue and passed over the rest. Everyone is free to answer His call, and each of us is responsible for our answer. Jesus calls everyone to “Repent and believe the good news!” (Mark 1:15). “If you declare with your mouth, ‘Jesus is Lord,’ and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved” (Romans 10:9). “So if the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed” (John 8:36).

11. 11Bought, so we belong to Him

    “You are not your own; you were bought at a price. Therefore honor God with your bodies” (1 Corinthians 6:19–20). Jesus “gave himself for us to redeem us from all wickedness and to purify for himself a people that are his very own, eager to do what is good” (Titus 2:14). We used to be slaves to sin; now we “have been set free from sin and have become slaves to righteousness” (Romans 6:17–18). People who have been set free live as people who belong to Him: “Whoever claims to live in him must live as Jesus did” (1 John 2:6). Good works don’t buy our freedom, but they show whom we belong to, since we were “created in Christ Jesus to do good works” (Ephesians 2:10), and a life that really belongs to Him will look more and more like His. We are called to keep our faith to the end. A believer can turn away and be lost, and Scripture warns us about it: “See to it, brothers and sisters, that none of you has a sinful, unbelieving heart that turns away from the living God,” for “we have come to share in Christ, if indeed we hold our original conviction firmly to the very end” (Hebrews 3:12, 14). Christ will present us holy “if you continue in your faith, established and firm” (Colossians 1:23), and Jesus said, “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven” (Matthew 7:21).

12. 12The Spirit and the church

    The Holy Spirit lives in everyone who belongs to Jesus (1 Corinthians 6:19) and gathers us into one family, the church, from every tribe and language and people and nation (Revelation 5:9). We confess one baptism for the forgiveness of sins. There is “one Lord, one faith, one baptism” (Ephesians 4:5), and on the day the church began Peter said, “Repent and be baptized, every one of you, in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins. And you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit” (Acts 2:38).

13. 13Marriage

    God made marriage to join one man and one woman as “one flesh” for life (Mark 10:6–8): “what God has joined together, let no one separate” (Mark 10:9). Jesus said, “Anyone who divorces his wife and marries another woman commits adultery against her. And if she divorces her husband and marries another man, she commits adultery” (Mark 10:11–12). So we hold that marriage lasts until one spouse dies (Romans 7:2–3), and that remarriage while a former spouse is still living is adultery. We read the exception in Matthew 19:9 as allowing separation, not remarriage. When a marriage breaks down, Paul’s instruction is to “remain unmarried or else be reconciled” (1 Corinthians 7:10–11). Most early Christian writers taught the same, and marriage is meant to picture Christ and the church (Ephesians 5:31–32). Eternity In Our Heart sets out this view from Scripture and church history.

14. 14He is coming back

    Jesus will return. The dead will be raised, He will judge the world with justice, and God will make all things new, with no more death or mourning or crying or pain (Acts 1:11; Acts 17:31; Revelation 21:4–5).

What the early church said

These writers show how the early church generally spoke about the cross. We quote them as witnesses to what Christians believed, not as Scripture.

• The Epistle to Diognetus (2nd century): God “gave His own Son as a ransom for us, the holy One for transgressors.” (Epistle to Diognetus 9, tr. Roberts and Donaldson, ANF 1)
• Irenaeus of Lyon (around 180): “when Satan is bound, man is set free.” (Against Heresies 5.21.3, tr. Roberts and Rambaut)
• Gregory of Nyssa (4th century) pictured God hidden in our flesh, “that so, as with ravenous fish, the hook of the Deity might be gulped down along with the bait of flesh.” (The Great Catechism 24, tr. Moore and Wilson)
• The Easter hymn the Eastern churches still sing: “Christ is risen from the dead, trampling down death by death.” (The Paschal troparion, OCA)
• In 1931 Gustaf Aulén named this view Christus Victor, “Christ the Victor.”

Penal substitution

Many churches today explain the cross as penal substitution: our sin deserved God’s punishment, and at the cross the Father punished the Son in our place, so that His justice was satisfied and He could forgive us. Anselm of Canterbury taught in the 1090s that Christ’s death satisfied the honor owed to God, and the Reformers, John Calvin above all, gave that idea the penal form many churches teach today. We don’t teach it that way.

We agree that Jesus died in our place and for our sins (1 Corinthians 15:3), and that He carried what was ours. We teach the verses usually read as penal substitution as they stand: “the punishment that brought us peace was on him” (Isaiah 53:5), “Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us” (Galatians 3:13), and “God made him who had no sin to be sin for us” (2 Corinthians 5:21). He bore our sins without becoming a sinner, the way the goat on the Day of Atonement carried Israel’s sins away (Leviticus 16:22). Our video “Who Got Paid?” goes through each of these verses.

But Scripture never says the Father poured out His anger on the Son, and it never says God had to be paid before He could forgive. We are “saved from God’s wrath through him” (Romans 5:9), but no verse says in so many words that God’s wrath was spent on Jesus or satisfied by the cross. Those who teach it draw it from images like the cup Jesus prayed would pass from Him (Mark 14:36) and from the verses that call Him a “sacrifice of atonement” (Romans 3:25), which some Bibles translate “propitiation.” John says that sacrifice came from God’s love: “This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins” (1 John 4:10). The Father and the Son were not set against each other at the cross. Jesus “gave himself for our sins to rescue us from the present evil age, according to the will of our God and Father” (Galatians 1:4), and “God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ” (2 Corinthians 5:19). God also forgave freely before the cross: “Friend, your sins are forgiven” (Luke 5:20).

Christians who hold penal substitution are our brothers and sisters in Christ.

What we leave open

Faithful Christians disagree about these, and we don’t make any of them a test of faith: the age of the earth and how life developed, how a person is baptized and at what age (we all confess the one baptism), the order of events around Christ’s return, and which spiritual gifts continue today.

On the first, we lean toward a literal reading of Genesis and a young earth, as most early Christians did, though some early writers, such as Origen and Augustine, read the six days differently.

On Christ’s return, we lean toward a prewrath or posttribulation view: the church will go through the great tribulation, and Christ will gather His people when He comes, “immediately after the distress of those days” (Matthew 24:29–31; 2 Thessalonians 2:1–3).

Our lessons and videos don’t argue either question.

In our songs, scripts, and slides

• Say it the way Scripture says it. Use words like ransom, redeemed, bought back, set free, rescued, defeated, Victor, and belongs to Him. “Christ died for our sins” (1 Corinthians 15:3) is always right.
• Never name a payee. Don’t sing or say that the price was paid to the devil, or that the Father needed to be paid before He could forgive. Jesus forgave sins freely before the cross (Luke 5:20).
• Don’t make the cross the Father’s anger poured on the Son. Avoid lines like “the wrath of God was satisfied.” No verse says it; the line comes from the modern hymn “In Christ Alone” (2001). The cross is God’s rescue, which the Father and the Son undertook together: Jesus “gave himself for our sins to rescue us from the present evil age, according to the will of our God and Father” (Galatians 1:4).
• End with the resurrection and a response. Point to His rising, and invite people to turn to Him, believe, and live as His.
• Show what freedom is for. When a song or script says we are bought or set free, it can say what for: honoring God with our lives and living as Jesus did.