Our Christian Faith

Since our faith is grounded in and grows out of God's revelation in Scripture, it only makes sense that Scripture would be our focus when sharing this faith. For this reason we offer a few of those things that have served to sharpen our understanding of that faith and strengthen our trust in the God revealed in Scripture.

First is Scripture itself. Without constant exposure to the Word it would be difficult to build up our faith that is supposed to be grounded in what God has told us. Thus a Bible reading plan for going through all of Scripture is useful. There are many plans out there. I offer one here that I modified from elsewhere years ago.

Second is bringing together its teachings in an orderly fashion. The Bible is not just a hodge-podge of stories and nuggets of wisdom. The creeds and confessions of the church help us to see how all the pieces of history, poetry and prophecy fit together. Some say we are to have no creed but the Bible. As an expression of the conviction that Scripture is our final authority in matters of Christian faith and practice, this is a noble sentiment. It leaves open though the question of what exactly it is that one believes. Baptists, Lutherans, Presbyterians and Catholics all claim to teach Scriptural doctrine, and thus to claim you believe what Scripture says is not very useful in identifying precisely what a church teaches. Believing that it is important to know what a church teaches, our church uses the London Baptist Confession of 1689 as a summary of those doctrines we find taught in Scripture.

Third, meditation is the saint's complement to reading larger sections of Scripture. It gives us the chance to linger over a few verses, a phrase or even a single word of Scripture to consider details and ideas we might miss when reading chapters at a time. I have found William Jay's Morning Exercises useful to this end, and you can find this work here.