Statement of Faith ~ Jeffrey D. Lang
God
The Christian affirmation is that God is one, the Creator of all that exists, and the source of life.
The New Testament identifies God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
I discover all I name God in Jesus Christ as He is presented in the New Testament.
Covenant
In the story of scripture, God establishes a covenant of grace with humanity’s first parents Adam and Eve following their fall into sin as a promise to redeem them and their posterity from sin and its consequent misery. The Old and New Testaments relate the unfolding of that singular covenant of grace.
Theological Anthropology
The aim of human life is love to God and neighbor.
Sin is ontological. Its root is selfishness that distorts love to God and neighbor.
Sin touches and taints every aspect of human personality in totality. Unable to save themselves from sin and its consequent misery, human beings require redemption from a source outside themselves.
Revelation
The New Testament presents Jesus as the Second Person of the Trinity, incarnate in human flesh. As the perfect and living Word of God, Jesus disclosed God to humanity
The scriptures are the word of God as they point and witness to the Word, Jesus Christ. The scriptures of the Old and New Testaments present an overarching story of creation, redemption, and consummation.
Jesus Christ
The New Testament presents Jesus Christ, born of the virgin Mary, as fully human and fully divine. Christ is presently prophet, priest, and king. I encounter Jesus in the gospels as ethical teacher, moral exemplar, savior, and Lord. The New Testament uniformly confesses that though crucified, Jesus was raised from death to life and reigns with God in the unity of the Holy Spirit.
Christ by means of His person and work; His life, death, resurrection, and ascension, is alone the means of salvation for human beings.
Salvation
Jesus Christ is the penal substitute who bore the penalty for sin on the cross for all who would believe in Him. God effectually calls persons by the Holy Spirit to faith in Christ. Faith is the gift of the Holy Spirit. Regeneration by the Holy Spirit precedes faith and repentance. Salvation is a gift of God’s free grace, rather than something earned or merited by the work or effort of human beings.
Trust in Christ, the great exemplar of God’s grace, issues out in obedience to the law of God and good works of mercy and compassion.
The Holy Spirit preserves in saving faith all who believe. No one redeemed by Christ can be finally lost. The savior perseveres with the believer from justification, through sanctification, to final glorification in heaven.
Common Grace
Common grace is the Spirit’s working among all people in all spheres of human thought and endeavor to restrain evil and advance the good. Human beings are capable, in spite of their fundamental bent toward sin, of relative and occasional altruism, reciprocity, virtue, and justice.
Special Grace
The scriptures affirm that which God wills, He accomplishes. God’s work to redeem, sanctify, and glorify His people is efficacious as He draws all whom He calls to Himself. This calling of God’s people is the special work of God’s grace.
General Revelation
Spirituality finds its sources, though partial and affected by sin, in reason and intuition, in a sense or feeling of existential dependence upon God. God is generally revealed in His works of creation.
Special Revelation
The scriptures attest to God’s special revelation, God’s unique self-revelation, in Jesus Christ. God disclosed Himself to Israel, in saving acts in history, in the law and prophets, and supremely in Jesus Christ, the fulfillment of Old Testament promise.
The Bible infallibly points toward Jesus Christ as the way, truth, and life for human beings and their salvation.
Church
The church was established by Christ. The visible church is a mixed assembly of true and false professors, gathered around word and sacrament. The invisible church is constituted by all who truly belong to God in Christ. The invisible church is known by God alone.
The Proclamation of the Word
Preaching aims at interpreting the scriptures as the preacher shares the promises of grace, and listens for the voice of the Spirit speaking through the scriptures, with and for a community in a particular time and place. The proclamation of the gospel is the word of God as it declares the promises of grace in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ.
The Sacraments
Scripture and the reformed confessions affirm two sacraments instituted by Jesus Christ: baptism and the Lord’s Supper. The sacraments, when connected to the proclamation of the gospel, accompany that proclamation as visible words, as means of grace, as signs and seals of the gospel.
Baptism is an unrepeatable act, by which the application of water in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit becomes a sign for an individual of spiritual rebirth, inclusion in the Church, seal of salvation, and identification with Christ.
The Lord’s Supper is a repeatable meal celebrating and enacting the values of Jesus. The ordinance of the supper looks back to the ministry of Jesus and His crucifixion, affirms the ongoing presence of Christ in His Church, and anticipates His coming again in final consummation.
The Church is composed of believers and their children. Not only adults, but the children and infants of believers, are the proper objects and recipients of the covenant promises and the sacramental signs.
Eschatology
The New Testament teaches that good and evil are mixed in both the world and the visible Church like wheat and weeds co-mingled in a field until the harvest of souls at the end of the age. Seated at the right hand of God at His ascension, Christ reigns until all enemies are placed under His feet.
The Church of Jesus Christ never ceases to exist between the first and second coming of Christ and is promised final victory in the triumph of God’s grace. The coming again of Jesus is coterminous with the general resurrection, general judgment, and eternal state. To reject God’s love in Christ is to choose alienation and separation from God. No one will be lost who can be saved.
Nothing in life or in death can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus the Lord. Amen.
Ministerial Reflections 