STIL Chatting Evangelical Statement
We believe in:
1. The
one true God who lives eternally in three persons—the Father, the Son and the
Holy Spirit. As He is immutable (unchanging, and incapable of changing) in His essence, the God of the Old Testament is the same God as revealed in the New Testament.
2. The love, grace and sovereignty of God in creating,
sustaining, ruling, redeeming and judging the world.
3. The divine
inspiration and supreme authority of the Old and New Testament Scriptures, which
are the written Word of God—fully trustworthy for faith and conduct.
4. The dignity of all people, made male and female in God's image, yet spiritually dead in trespasses and sin, which incurs divine wrath and
judgment.
5. The incarnation of God's eternal Son, the Lord Jesus Christ, being the fulness
of deity in bodily form, truly divine and truly human, yet without sin.
6. The one-time atoning
sacrifice of Christ on the cross: the sinless Substitute for sinners, becoming
sin on behalf of His own, enduring His Father's wrath and judgment against us,
and thereby reconciling us to God.
7. The bodily resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ from the
dead, perfectly fulfilling Scripture in ascending to the Father, and reigning now at
His right hand in glory.
8.The justification of
sinners solely on the basis of the Lord Jesus' substitutionary sacrifice, imputed to their account by grace, without works, forever.
9. The ministry of God's Holy
Spirit, Who applies the salvation procured by Christ through regeneration,
taking up permanent residence in the life of the Christian; His baptizing us
into the body of Christ, His giving gifts, and sealing our inheritance for the
Day of Redemption.
10. The Church, the
body of Christ both local and universal, the priesthood of all believers, each having direct access to God through the one Mediator, the Lord Jesus Christ (I Timothy 2:5) —given
life by the Spirit and endowed with the Spirit's gifts to worship God and
proclaim the gospel.
11. The personal,
visible return of the Lord Jesus Christ for His own, having prepared a place for
them, He will come to receive them to Himself; His establishment of His kingdom,
and in His judging both lost and saved in justice and mercy, resulting in
condemnation for those who rejected Him and eternity in heaven for those clothed
in His righteousness.
12. God's absolute
knowledge of all things, potential and actual, transcending time and without
need of learning.
Jesus answered and said to him, "Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born again
he cannot see the kingdom of God." John 3:3
I bear witness before God that I have been inwardly changed by the Lord Jesus Christ, referred to in Scripture as having been "born again".