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Doctrinal Statement
Doctrinal Statement
WE BELIEVE:
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There is One true and living God, who eternally exists in one essence and three persons: The Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, equal in power and glory, who created the universe and all that it is in it for His plans, will, and purposes, perfect in all His attributes and infinitely deserving of praise and worship
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The Old and New Testaments are the Word of God, Inspired and without blemish in the original manuscripts, written under inspiration of the Holy Spirit as the bounds of our faith and practice
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In the literal grammatical-historical method of interpretation to find the one and true meaning of each and every text regardless of the amounts of application that can be derived from said text
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We believe that Jesus Christ, the Word of God, the second person of the Holy Trinity, fully God and fully man, conceived of the Holy Spirit, came down in humiliation to put on flesh that He would live the perfectly obedient life that only God could but wholly as a man suffering and facing the consequences and temptations of the fall, yet perfectly sinless that He would meet all of the righteous requirements of the Law and substitute Himself as the perfect, holy, sacrificial atonement, bearing on the cross through His willing sacrifice all of the punishment for all of the sin, evil, and death for all mankind for all time, suffering for us what we rightly and justly deserved, that God's wrath and justice would be satisfied in Him
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Jesus was resurrected as a vindication of the Son and as a sign of the acceptance of the perfect sacrifice, the payment had been made and accepted, that Jesus Christ had won victory over death, sin, and evil and that we, humanity, might be set free from our sin and placed into right relationship with God the Father through the one and only mediator Christ our Lord and Savior
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That Salvation is by Grace through Faith in Christ alone, and occurs when we believe in the person and works of Jesus Christ, the life, death, resurrection, and right understanding of the full consequences of what Jesus did on the cross to save sinners, when one acknowledges their sin, their inability to change on their own, and has true repentance from their old ways and true desire to be fully and completely transformed into a new creature undergoing a spiritual death of the old creature and all of the ways associated with him, a true desire that one might be clothed in the righteousness of the savior and be capable through Christ who lives in us and through us to be conformed ever increasingly in every way into the image of Christ. When these things occur, we are promised that the Holy Spirit will indwell us, that our old hearts of stone will be replaced with new hearts of flesh, and the Christ will live in us and through conforming us into His image in every way, and we will bear fruit and works of the Spirit who works in us
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Those who are born again will find it necessary to display their newfound allegiance to Christ, and we are instructed to do so through a process known as a baptism, which is an essential dramatization of the spiritual reality that has taken place, where we are submerged into the water to represent the old man dying, and our identification with the suffering and death of Christ on the cross, and we are brought up out of the water representing the new man that has life in Christ freed from the shackles of sin and alive in the Spirit that sustains us with every breath we take, identifying with the resurrection and glorification of Jesus when He rose from the dead and ascended to the right hand of God
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That all people are sinners by nature and choice and under condemnation for the sins they have committed and deserve the due penalty for such crimes, yet God graciously and mercifully regenerates the hearts of those who choose to respond to the revelation of His son rightly, who repent of their sins and believe by faith that He and He alone saves.
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In the universal Church, the living spiritual body of Christ, who is the head, that all born again believers are members of
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In the personal and visible second coming of Christ where He will come and establish His Kingdom on earth and we will spend eternity in a transformed paradise under His rule, otherwise known as the New Heavens and New Earth, in the resurrection of the body, and the final judgment of eternal blessing for the righteous in Christ and eternal suffering for the wicked outside of Christ.
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In the continuation of the gifts as described by the Apostle Paul in the New Testament, that the Holy Spirit gives to each as He pleases for the edification and building up of the church and the encouragement of the believers, as well as a necessary tool for the furtherment of the kingdom and effective presentation of the Gospel in demonstration of the power of God.
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In the two ordinances established by Jesus Christ: water baptism and communion, both essential parts of the believer's life and obedience, and all born again believers should partake
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In the sovereignty of God, that the One who created, upholds, and governs all things, whose will and plan have been and will be carried out without fail by those with whom He has relationship with. In God's sovereignty He allowed man to freely choose Him or reject Him, He desires all to be saved but knows that many will choose to serve themselves instead of Him, and offers us, undeservedly so, eternal blessing, glory, intimacy, and friendship with Him if we would take our rightful place as His humbled, willing, and obedient servants seeking to know and do His will, that we might fulfill the purpose of our creation to be God's representatives on Earth and His co-laborers in the establishment of His kingdom and will. He offers graciously freedom form our slavery to sin, to serve a master who is perfectly loving, kind, gracious, merciful, wonderful, beautiful, and majestic in all His ways and workings. He offers all of this through the Son, by whom we can boldly enter before the throne of God and fellowship with the Father in the Holy of Holies now that the veil has been torn and free access to God restored through the atoning work on the cross
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All believers are to be known by their works and ultimately their love for one another. All true believers, those who are genuinely born again, will experience a true transformation of the heart and the will that leads to ever increasing holiness, righteousness, conformity to the person and character of Christ in the ways they think, act, and speak, that the old habits will be replaced with new, better ones, that we will strive for a ever deepening intimacy with Christ and our Brothers and Sisters, that all believers will inevitably continue to sin but less and less so because the gravity and weight of sin will bear down upon the conscience through the conviction of the Holy Spirit in immense and unbearable amounts of grief and sorrow. We will find our lives conforming to Christ slowly but surely and becoming more incompatible with the world and sin day by day. Our faith is demonstrated by our works, not perfect obedience nor legalistic works based salvation where we earn our way to God, but that our Faith in Christ is demonstrated in our ever increasingly transformed behaviors, attitudes toward both God and sin, and the light, transformed from the blindness of the old man, by which we see all of reality and life with God in His rightful place, as King. This is the process known as Sanctification and it is not an optional part of the Christian life, but the very thing that separates those who are genuinely Born-again and Spirit filled, from those who falsely profess faith in Christ but do not truly believe, love, nor obey the God they claim to