If you walk into any Christian church in the world and ask someone, “What do Christians believe?” there is a good chance you will get all kinds of different answers. I want to distill all those different things down to the irreducible core beliefs. Other things can be discussed and debated, but what is the essence of what it means to be a Christian?
In 1st Corinthians 15:3 Paul says, “For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures…” This teaching of first importance remains at the core of everything we do. I believe it breaks down into three parts:
We’ve looked at Jesus and grace previously and I hope you will read them. If you have, you will notice that there are a lot of Bible verses throughout. All of these three weave together. If there is ever a sermon that I stand to preach that doesn’t feature these three then ask me to sit down so that someone else can open the scriptures and exult the grace of Jesus. We see all three in John 1:14, “And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth.”
The Bible is an amazing anthology of 66 unique works by 40 different authors who wrote independently over a span of 1500 years. The authors were army generals, priests, shepherds, kings, farmers, fishermen, tax collectors, and doctors. The Bible was written in three languages on three continents but it all contains a cohesive message of God’s gracious plan for salvation through Jesus Christ.
We take our view of the Bible from the Bible itself. 1st Timothy 3:16-17 says, “All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work.” In other words, God has inspired the Bible and intends it for the building up of the believer unto good works.
The Bible is inspired by God
I get that it is hard to imagine that words written by men thousands of years ago could have any impact on our daily lives. We are always looking for the newest and most trendy thing, but the Bible is probably the oldest and certainly the most timeless thing you will ever read. It was written by the hands of men, but as 2nd Peter 1:21 puts it, “no prophecy was ever produced by the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit.” These are not the mere words of men. The Bible contains the very words of God.
We can get into lots of debates about issues surrounding this point and I’m not saying that those discussions aren’t important. The heart of the matter, however, must come down to an admission of faith that the Bible, as we have the tools and resources to study it today, is the word of God and as such it should be the final judge for questions of faith and doctrine. There are numerous reasons that I believe we should hold scripture in such high regard including its historical record and textual integrity, not to mention the change that has been wrought in my own heart and life.
But the kicker for me, if I needed any convincing, was that it was good enough for Jesus. Jesus is God, and he believed the Bible was divinely inspired (Matthew 22:31-32), authoritative (John 10:34-36); powerful (Matthew 5:17-18); and about him (Luke 24:25-27). Furthermore, Jesus never questioned a single event, a single miracle, or a single historical claim of Scripture. He clearly believed in and treated scripture as the revealed word of God. It’s probably best to follow his lead.
The Bible is sufficient and understandable
The basic idea behind the sufficiency of Scripture is that in the Bible alone, God has given humankind all things that are necessary for the proper understanding of who God is, who we are, how God has acted in the past, and what God expects from us, and nothing else needs to be revealed to humanity about God or his plan for the human race. We believe that the Holy Spirit is still active today and he does use prophets to build up his people (1st Corinthians 14:3). However, any message received or delivered must come under and agree with the Bible. That is what John means in 1 John 4:1 when he admonishes the church to “test the spirits.”
Sometimes it is argued that the Bible is not clear in and of itself and that believers need some type of external authority to properly interpret and understand it. This may be some church, a creed, or a the teaching of some church leader. However, it is unreasonable to assert that God would give humanity a revelation of Himself that could not be understood by the masses. The Bible is written in such a way that people in every age are able to understand it. Every believer is commanded to study the Scriptures for themselves. Paul wrote in 2nd Timothy 2:15, “Do your best to present yourself to God as one approved, a worker who has no need to be ashamed, rightly handling the word of truth.”
While the Scriptures contain everything humanity needs to know about God, it does not reveal everything that we want to know about everything. The truth that God has revealed is sufficient but not exhaustive. For example, in the Proverbs we see a couple of verses that point to the behavior of the ant as exemplary, however there is no definition of what an ant is. If I was teaching a class in insect anatomy, I could not use the Bible as a textbook. However, if someone tried to teach that a believer should be lazy and let others do all the work for them, then the Bible has given clear teaching in opposition and we would disagree.
The Bible is profitable to teach and equip believers for godliness
So again, we look at 1st Timothy 3:16-17, “All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work.”
The profitable effect of Scripture, according to verse 17, is “that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work.” And the way it comes about is by the Scriptures. Scripture, in the hands of the Holy Spirit, has the power to make us the kind of people who can discern and do the good that needs to be done. The God-breathed Bible aims to make us doers of good in this world. The doctrines of the Bible are designed to produce good deeds. And they do it by teaching and that teaching has three sequential effects: reproof, correction, and training in righteousness.
When we are rightly taught by the Scriptures, we are first reproved, that is, our errors are pointed out and we are stopped in our tracks. Then we are corrected, that is, we are turned around from the harmful way we were going, and pointed in the right way. And third, we are trained in righteousness, that is, the Bible enables us to be trained, to grow, in righteousness. And as the teaching does these three things (reproof, correction, training) the Scripture equips us for every good deed.
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