Jesus lived a life of perfect obedience to God and suffered and died on a cross to create the way for people to be reconnected to God, as we were created to be. God brought Jesus to life again—defeating death—and Jesus returned to his Father in heaven.
Because Jesus died and rose again, we can live in hope for a better life in this world and in eternity with God.
To connect with this new life and hope, we need to recognize that we have big issues that we can’t fix ourselves, accept Christ’s claim that he is the Son of God and the way to new life, and allow God to lead us into a new relationship with him.
We believe that the Bible is our only rule for faith and life. We believe that “all Scripture is given by inspiration of God,” by which we understand the whole Bible is inspired in the sense that holy men of God “were moved by the Holy Spirit” to write the very words of Scripture. It is a perfect treasure of divine instruction. All Scripture is true and trustworthy. It reveals the principles by which God judges us, and therefore is, and will remain to the end of the world the true center of Christian union, and the supreme standard by which all human conduct, creeds, and religious opinions should be tried. All Scripture is a testimony to Christ, who is Himself the focus of divine revelation.
We believe that baptism and the Lord’s Supper are ordained by the Lord Jesus himself. The former is connected with entrance into the new covenant community, the latter with ongoing covenant renewal. 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.
