The House that Jesus Built

A Welcome to the Church

Dale Ralph Davis

• Publisher: Christian Focus Publication
• eBook ISBN:
  9781781915943
• Year: 2015

What Our
Church Believes

1

Don’t swallow too hard. When we refer to what ‘our church’ believes you must realize that we are speaking loosely. It is hardly ‘our church’; it is, we trust, Christ’s church. When we call it ‘our’ church that is just a sloppy way of speaking about it among ourselves.

Sometimes people think churches like ours are ‘different’ because of what we believe. All depends on how you look at it. We are a confessional church, that is, we hold to a particular summary of biblical doctrine, namely the Westminster Confession of Faith plus the Larger and Shorter Catechisms. We do not put this confession of faith in place of the Bible. The Bible must hold supreme place for what the Christian believes; we only say that we believe the Westminster standards (as they are called) are a true and accurate summary of what the Bible teaches.

But I don’t want to take you through the Westminster Confession right now. Sometimes a succinct digest, a brief outline of a church’s doctrine, can give you a better flavor of the animal than a whole mass of details. So what follows is a sketch of our most distinctive beliefs. I support each of them from the life and teaching of Jesus, not because Jesus’ teaching is ‘better’ than the rest of the Bible and not because I don’t believe the rest of the Bible (for I do). But there’s method along with madness here. You see, some people sometimes hear our church doctrines and they say (or think), ‘Oh, that’s what that rascal Paul taught – you know, Paul, the guy who took the nice, simple teachings of Jesus and screwed them up.’ Now, I don’t share that attitude for a second. But, for the sake of argument, I want to show that if anyone doesn’t like the following teachings they have no one to blame but Jesus himself! And if someone doesn’t believe what Jesus says, he or she shouldn’t join his church.

Now, to the teaching.

The Bible is entirely true

Jesus’ scripture was the Old Testament. According to Jesus, ‘the Scripture cannot be broken’ (that is, it cannot be emptied of its force by being proven false; John 10:35). For him, whatever Scripture says, God says (Matt. 15:4). And what God says is truth (John 17:17). Jesus wasn’t simply saying nice things about the scriptures; he lived under their authority. He repelled Satan’s temptations because he remained obedient to God’s word – you may remember how three times he opposed Satan with ‘it is written’ (Matt. 4:4, 7, 10).

If we are faithful to Christ, our church must hold a very ‘high’ view of the Bible. He calls us to believe and obey what it says – even when it’s not to our liking. A number of us have been in churches that have abandoned their belief in the entire trustworthiness of the Bible. When that is done, the church’s foundations will crumble (eventually, if not sooner). If we can pick and choose what we will accept or reject from the Bible, then we have become the authority rather than holding the Bible as our authority. Then we have placed ourselves above God’s word rather than under it.

Sinners are perfectly sinful

Now by this we do not mean no one ever does anything decent, or just, or moral, or kind; we don’t mean every person is absolutely as evil in every way as he or she can possibly be (even society wouldn’t usually allow that). But we mean every person is a sinner at the core of his or her being and that, apart from Christ, sin rules his perspectives, motives, desires, purposes. We might think Jesus would think more positively. But he said in teaching his disciples, ‘If you, then, being evil, know how to give good gifts to your children…’ (Matt. 7:11). And that is all the more powerful because Jesus was not directly teaching about our nature there; he was teaching about another topic and he merely makes this aside; he simply reveals the assumption he makes about human nature, as though he takes it for granted and above argument. ‘If you, then, being evil…’

Maybe we prefer something more direct. Another time Jesus taught: ‘For from within, out of men’s hearts, come evil thoughts, sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, greed, malice, deceit, lewdness, envy, slander, arrogance and folly. All these evils come from inside and make a man unclean’ (Mark 7:21-3). If we take Jesus seriously, the ruck and muck that we feel, think, and do will never surprise us. If we have a high view of the Bible, we should have a low view of ourselves as sinners apart from God’s grace.

Many probably hold the view that ‘I sin, therefore I am a sinner.’ That is, my act of sinning makes me a sinner. But that is not what Jesus says in Mark 7. ‘From within, out of men’s hearts…’ That is, our corrupt nature gives rise to the whole array of sinful acts. In short, ‘I am a sinner, therefore I sin.’ I am perverse at the core of my being and that gives rise to all sorts of evil.

God is really big

We believe – would that we really believed it as we should – that God is really big. (We hold with all Christians that there is one God and that he has revealed himself as triune, that is, that the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit is each fully and eternally God.) When we say God is really big, we mean he is ‘sovereign,’ that all things are under his sway – even falling sparrows (Matt. 10:29). But more, we believe God is so big that we would never come to Jesus in faith unless he brought us and made us able to come. You’d think we were helpless, huh? True, says Jesus, for ‘no one is able to come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him’ (John 6:44). It is those whom the Father gives to Jesus who will come to Jesus (John 6:37). People do not come to Jesus because they think it’s a good idea. If any of us ever trusts in Jesus it is only because the Father gives us to Jesus and brings us to Jesus. That offends many people. They fight the idea that even our faith must be a gift of God (cf. Phil. 1:29). We can only say: Argue with Jesus – he’s the one who said it.

The cross is absolutely central

Here we are at the heart of the gospel. Jesus said that his death was the reason he came: ‘For even the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life a ransom for many’ (Mark 10:45). We are held as captives of sin, and Jesus’ death was the ransom-price that bought our release from that bondage.

You have a picture of what Jesu...

Table of contents

• Testimonials
• Title
• Indicia
• Table of Contents
• Note from the Author
• 1. What Our Church Believes
• 2. What Our Church Is
• 3. How Christians Live
• 4. The Matter that Matters
• Christian Focus