What I Believe
What follows is the theological ground on which I stand. These convictions aren’t personal preference or denominational inheritance but the settled persuasion of a mind brought under the authority of Scripture over many years of study and prayer. I submit my thinking to the text rather than bending the text to my thinking, and I offer this confession as an open account of the faith I labor to defend.
What I Believe About Scripture
The sixty-six books of the Old and New Testaments are the verbally inspired, inerrant, and infallible Word of God. The Holy Spirit superintended the human writers so completely that what they produced in the original manuscripts is precisely what God intended them to write, and their personalities and historical circumstances were themselves the means God chose to give His Word to His people. The Bible, therefore, is the revelation of God and not a merely human record of it, carrying in its pages the authoritative voice of its Author. What Scripture says, God says. No authority on earth may sit in judgment over the Word of God, for no authority on earth occupies that ground. Scripture is likewise sufficient for every purpose God has given it to serve, equipping the saint for every good work and ordering the life of the church, and the soul that feeds upon it lacks nothing it requires for faith and practice.
2 Timothy 3:16–17; 2 Peter 1:20–21; Psalm 19:7–11; Matthew 5:18; Isaiah 55:10–11
What I Believe About the Triune God
There is one living and true God, eternal and unchanging in His being and sovereign over all that He has made. He exists eternally in three Persons — Father, Son, and Holy Spirit — each fully and equally God, distinct in Person and undivided in essence, so that the Christian does not worship three Gods but one God in three Persons. He called the universe into being out of nothing and sustains every atom of it by the word of His power, governing every event according to the counsel of His own will for the display of His own glory. The triune God cannot be comprehended fully by any creature, for the finite mind cannot contain the infinite. He has truly revealed Himself in His Word, however, and what He has shown His people there is enough for them to know Him truly and to worship Him forever.
Deuteronomy 6:4; Matthew 28:19; 2 Corinthians 13:14; Isaiah 46:9–10; Hebrews 1:3; Ephesians 1:11
What I Believe About God the Father
The Father is the first Person of the Godhead, from whom are all things and for whom His people exist. Before the foundation of the world He set His love on a people He chose for Himself, choosing them according to the good pleasure of His own will rather than on account of any foreseen merit in them, and He ordained every means by which that people would be brought at last to glory. He sent His Son into the world to accomplish their salvation and sends His Spirit into their hearts to apply it, so that all of redemption begins with the Father and returns to the Father in the praise of those He has saved. To those redeemed by the blood of Christ He grants the staggering dignity of adoption, receiving them into His household as sons and daughters and hearing their prayers in the name of His Son. His fatherly care does not cease until He has brought every one of His children home to the inheritance He prepared for them before the world was made.
1 Corinthians 8:6; Ephesians 1:3–6; John 3:16; 6:37–44; Galatians 4:4–7; Hebrews 12:5–11
What I Believe About God the Son
The eternal Son of God, of one essence with the Father and the Spirit, took to Himself a true human nature in the incarnation. He was conceived by the Holy Spirit and born of the virgin Mary, one Person in two natures — truly God and truly man — without confusion and without division. He lived a sinless life under the Law that He Himself had given, fulfilling every demand of righteousness on behalf of the people He came to save. At the cross, He offered Himself as a substitutionary sacrifice, bearing in His own body the full wrath of God against the sin of His people, so that divine justice was satisfied and divine mercy was poured out in the very same act. He was raised bodily on the third day, vindicated by the Father as the Son of God in power. From the tomb, He ascended to the right hand of the majesty on high, where He now intercedes as the great High Priest of His people until the day He returns to consummate all things.
John 1:1, 14; Philippians 2:5–11; Hebrews 4:14–16; 1 Peter 2:24; 1 Corinthians 15:3–8; Romans 1:4
What I Believe About God the Holy Spirit
The Holy Spirit is the third Person of the Trinity, fully and eternally God, proceeding from the Father and the Son. It is His office to take what belongs to Christ and apply it in time to the people Christ came to save. He convicts the world of its sin and opens the eyes of the elect to the glory of the Savior. At the moment of saving faith, He takes up permanent residence in the believer, having already worked within him the sovereign miracle of the new birth that made saving faith possible. He seals His people against the day of final redemption and incorporates them into the body of Christ. By the ministry of the Word, He then labors over the course of a lifetime to conform those He has indwelt to the image of the Son.
On the sign and revelatory gifts, I hold the cessationist position. The revelatory gifts that accompanied the apostolic era — tongues, prophecy, and miraculous healing among them — served a particular purpose in the history of redemption by authenticating the apostolic message and confirming the laying of the foundation on which the whole church would be built. With the completion of the canon of Scripture and the passing of the apostolic generation, those gifts ceased, their work done. The Spirit has not withdrawn, nor has His power diminished by a single degree. He continues to illumine the Word to the mind of the believer and to bring the saints to maturity through the ordinary means of grace by which God has always built His church.
John 14:16–17; 16:7–15; 1 Corinthians 12:13; Ephesians 1:13–14; 1 Corinthians 13:8–10; Hebrews 2:3–4; Ephesians 2:20
What I Believe About Creation
God created the heavens and the earth and all they contain in six days, speaking into being what had not existed before and declaring His finished work very good. The creation account in the opening chapters of Genesis records real history, not allegory and not the poetic veil for a slower process of development. The days Genesis describes are the days of a God who required no longer period than the one He took. Man is the direct and immediate handiwork of the Creator, formed from the dust of the ground and animated by the breath of God Himself. Male and female He made him, and in His own image, crowning the creature with a dignity no other creature shares. The world as God made it was unmarred by sin and untouched by death. What we now know of decay and futility entered creation through the fall, and the whole created order groans under that bondage as it waits for the consummation in which it will be set free.
Genesis 1:1–2:25; Exodus 20:11; Psalm 33:6–9; Romans 8:20–22; Colossians 1:16
What I Believe About Man
God created man in His own image, male and female, distinct from every other creature and set at the head of the creation as its steward. Adam was formed directly by the hand of God and stood as the federal head of the human race, so that his obedience or disobedience carried consequences for every son and daughter who would descend from him. Adam fell as the head of a race and not as a private man, and both his guilt and his corruption descend upon every human being who has ever drawn breath. Every human being, therefore, comes into the world already under God’s condemnation, inheriting from Adam a nature bent away from the Creator and incapable of any saving good. This is the sober testimony of Scripture, confirmed by every honest look into the human heart and every unvarnished page of history. Man’s condition apart from grace is death, not weakness, and his only hope lies in a rescue that must come from outside himself.
Genesis 1:26–27; 2:7; Romans 3:10–18; 5:12–21; Ephesians 2:1–3; Jeremiah 17:9
What I Believe About Salvation
Salvation is the work of the triune God from first to last, and no creature contributes to it the least degree of merit. The Father chose a people for Himself before the foundation of the world according to the good pleasure of His will, and the Son accomplished their redemption at Calvary by paying in full the debt their sin had incurred. The Spirit applies that redemption in time, raising sinners who were dead in trespasses to newness of life and working in them the repentance and faith by which they take hold of Christ. The sinner who comes to Christ is received into a salvation secured in full, not a probationary arrangement to be proved out by future performance. He is justified in that moment and adopted into the family of God, and the power of the Savior keeps him for an inheritance no earthly power can take from him.
Ephesians 1:3–14; 2:1–10; John 6:37–44; 10:27–30; Romans 3:21–26; 8:28–39; Titus 3:4–7
What I Believe About the Church
The church is the body of Christ, composed of every believer from the day of Pentecost to the day of His return, purchased by His blood and indwelt by His Spirit. This universal body finds its visible expression in the local church — a covenanted assembly of baptized believers gathered under the authority of Scripture, led by a plurality of qualified elders and served by deacons according to the pattern laid down in the Pastoral Epistles. Her common life is built on the preaching of the Word and sustained by the ordinances Christ gave her to keep, and she gathers as a redeemed people to worship the God who purchased her. The office of elder is given to men whose lives meet the biblical qualifications, and the authority those elders exercise is not their own but Christ’s, held always under the higher authority of His Word. The church is the household of God on earth and not an optional appendage to the Christian life, and no believer flourishes long apart from her fellowship and her means of grace.
Matthew 16:18; Acts 2:41–47; 20:28; 1 Timothy 3:1–13; 5:17–25; Titus 1:5–9; 1 Peter 5:1–4; Hebrews 10:23–25
What I Believe About Justification
Justification is the gracious and judicial act of God by which He declares the believing sinner righteous in His sight. It is a verdict pronounced in the courtroom of heaven, effective in its fullness the moment faith is exercised, and no sanctifying progress in the believer adds to it or takes from it. The ground of justification is nothing within the sinner himself and nothing he can produce, but the righteousness of Jesus Christ, lived out in His sinless life and imputed to the believer’s account by the grace of God. Faith is the instrument by which the sinner lays hold of Christ’s righteousness, and faith is emphatically not the ground of God’s declaration. This is the doctrine on which the church stands or falls. The Reformers knew the gospel itself was at stake, and they risked their lives to hand this truth down to the generations that followed.
Romans 3:21–28; 4:1–8; 5:1; 2 Corinthians 5:21; Galatians 2:16; Philippians 3:9
What I Believe About Sanctification
Sanctification is the progressive work of the Spirit of God in conforming the believer to the image of His Son. It begins at the moment of the new birth and continues until the saint draws his last breath in this world. The Spirit does this work through the ordinary means of grace — the preaching of the Word, the administration of the ordinances, prayer, and the communion of the saints — and these means are sufficient for every spiritual need the believer will ever face. Sanctification is the work of God in the believer, and the believer is not for that reason passive in it. He is called to strive after holiness, putting sin to death by the Spirit and walking in the obedience of faith, and he does so knowing the Spirit Himself is at work within him to will and to do the good pleasure of God. No believer attains full sanctification in this life. The old nature remains and must be fought until the grave. The fight is not a losing one, however, for what the Spirit begins He finishes, and the saint is assured of seeing his Savior face to face and at last being made like Him in full.
John 17:17; Romans 6:1–14; 8:12–14; Philippians 2:12–13; 1 Thessalonians 4:3; Hebrews 12:14; 1 John 3:2
What I Believe About Perseverance
Those whom God has saved, He will keep. The believer’s perseverance to the end is the fruit of a salvation the triune God has secured from first to last, not the achievement of the saint’s own resolve. What the Father has chosen, the Son has redeemed; what the Son has redeemed, the Spirit keeps. The Good Shepherd does not lose a single sheep the Father has given Him, and no power in earth or in hell can pluck them from His hand. Perseverance operates through means. The warnings of Scripture are sharp and serious, and they are themselves among the means by which God keeps His people from apostasy. True faith proves itself genuine over time by its fruit, and a profession that never bears fruit was never true faith to begin with. Assurance is the birthright of every true believer, cultivated through steady attention to the promises of God in His Word and the evidences of grace at work in the heart that has been born again. The saint may stumble, and some saints stumble gravely, but no true believer will finally fall, for he is kept by the power of God through faith for a salvation ready to be revealed in the last time.
John 10:27–30; Romans 8:28–39; Philippians 1:6; 1 Peter 1:3–9; Hebrews 3:14; 1 John 2:19; Jude 24–25
What I Believe About Hermeneutics
Scripture is to be interpreted by the grammatical-historical method, which is the disciplined pursuit of the meaning the human author intended under the superintendence of the Spirit. That meaning is recovered through careful attention to the grammar of the text and the historical setting in which it was written, and through a literary sensibility that honors the genre of each passage and its place within the unfolding canon of revelation. The Bible was given in real time to real audiences, and the faithful interpreter hears first what those original hearers would have heard, then asks how the passage addresses the church in his own day. Scripture is its own best interpreter. The clearer passages illumine the more difficult, and no doctrine rests on an obscure verse wrenched from the pattern of the whole. Prophecy is read by the same rules that govern the rest of the Bible, its promises taken at face value rather than reshaped into meanings no original hearer could have recognized. Interpretation at its heart is an act of reverence before the God who has spoken, a submission to the text that refuses to impose on it what it does not say.
Nehemiah 8:8; Luke 24:27, 44–45; 2 Peter 1:20–21; 3:15–16; 1 Corinthians 2:12–13
What I Believe About Baptism
Baptism is the ordinance Christ gave His church as the outward sign of an inward reality already accomplished in the believer by the Spirit of God. It is rightly administered only to those who have professed saving faith in Christ, and it is administered by immersion in water, as both the meaning of the Greek word and the picture of the ordinance itself require. The believer going down into the water and rising again proclaims his identification with the death, burial, and resurrection of his Savior, testifying to the world that he has been joined to the Lord Jesus in His dying and in His rising to new life. The ordinance accomplishes nothing the Spirit has not already done. It regenerates no one and adds nothing to the finished work of Christ; it is a sign proclaiming what grace has already accomplished in the one who is baptized. The command to be baptized binds every believer, and no professing Christian is at liberty to neglect the ordinance without disobeying the Lord whose name he bears.
Matthew 28:18–20; Acts 2:38–41; 8:36–38; Romans 6:3–5; Colossians 2:12
What I Believe About the Lord’s Supper
The Lord’s Supper is the second ordinance Christ gave His church, instituted on the night He was betrayed as a perpetual memorial until He returns. At His table the gathered church takes the bread and the cup in remembrance of the body broken and the blood poured out for the sins of many. The bread does not become the body of Christ, and the cup does not become His blood; the elements remain signs of the Savior upon whom the believer feeds by faith. What happens at the table is the proclaiming of the Lord’s death until He comes. The sacrifice it remembers was offered once for all and requires no repetition. The ordinance is more than memory, however. The believer who comes in faith feeds spiritually on the Savior and finds his soul strengthened for the long walk home. The table is set only for those who belong to Christ, and every believer is called to examine himself before he comes, that he may not eat and drink judgment upon himself by failing to discern the Lord’s body.
Matthew 26:26–29; Luke 22:14–20; 1 Corinthians 10:16–17; 11:23–34
What I Believe About the Second Coming
Jesus Christ will return to this earth in person. His coming will be the literal arrival of the risen Savior in glory, visible to every eye and accompanied by His angels, and not a spiritual presence felt in the heart or a figurative event worked out through the course of history. He comes to gather His people to Himself and to render judgment upon a world that has refused His reign. No one knows the day or the hour, and speculation about the date is both useless and forbidden by the Lord who ascended with a promise on His lips. What Scripture demands of the believer is readiness, not calculation. The Christian lives in the sober hope that his Master may return at any moment, and he orders his days by that expectation. This is the blessed hope of the church — the consolation that has sustained the saints through every age of suffering and the fire that has animated the mission of the gospel to the ends of the earth.
Acts 1:9–11; Matthew 24:36–44; 1 Thessalonians 4:13–18; Titus 2:11–14; Revelation 1:7; 22:20
What I Believe About Last Things
Death is the consequence of sin and the last enemy Christ has destroyed. Every human being will die, and every human being will be raised — the righteous to everlasting life and the unrighteous to everlasting judgment. Christ will sit as Judge of all, and every person who has ever lived will give account to Him for the life he lived and the Savior he either received or refused. Those who have rejected the gospel will bear the just and eternal punishment their sin has earned, separated from the presence of God forever. Those who are in Christ will be received into a glory they have done nothing to earn. Their bodies will be raised and fitted like their Savior’s glorified body for the new heaven and new earth in which righteousness dwells. Between the world as it is and the world as God will one day remake it lies a span of history still unfolding, and the church labors in that span, proclaiming the gospel and enduring suffering as she longs for the day when faith will give way to sight.
John 5:28–29; 2 Corinthians 5:10; Revelation 20:11–15; 1 Corinthians 15:20–28, 50–57; Romans 8:18–25; 2 Peter 3:10–13
What I Believe About the Eternal State
Eternity is real, and the destinies it contains are not symbolic. Those who die outside of Christ will spend eternity consciously under the judgment of God, neither annihilated at death nor given a second chance beyond it, bearing forever the wrath their sin has earned and a holy God demands. The Scripture speaks of this reality in the sober language of fire and darkness and the gnashing of teeth, and it does so to urge sinners to flee to the only refuge that can shelter them. Those who are in Christ will dwell forever with God in the new heaven and the new earth, their bodies raised in glory and fitted for an inheritance that cannot fade or be taken away. In that country, death will be no more, neither sorrow, nor crying, nor pain, for the former things will have passed away. The Lamb who was slain will be at the center of all things, and His people will see His face, and the long ache of exile will be ended in the home for which they were made.
Matthew 25:46; Mark 9:43–48; 2 Thessalonians 1:5–10; Revelation 14:9–11; 21:1–22:5