Our faith is all about Jesus:
His unparalleled life,
His saving death,
and His victorious resurrection.
All the rest is just details.
Our life is all about Jesus:
Who He really was,
Not the subjective product of our own idol-factory;
The whole Jesus, not just the parts we like;
Both the loving Jesus, and the no-nonsense Jesus;
The Jesus whose love and whose grace can never be equaled, earned, or deserved,
but not the sugar-sweet idol carved by Marcion;
Not the Jesus of the Quran, The Da Vinci Code, or the voice of the spirit within us,
but the Jesus to whom the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments bear unique, authoritative witness;
the Jesus who loved both the woman at the well and Zacchaeus too much to leave them in self-affirming sin.
He lived the life we should have lived;
He died the death we should have died.
Our faith is all about the Cross.
Anselm of Canterbury laid it out for us in Cur Deus Homo?
That is, Why did God have to become human?
Anselm spelled out what our entire Nicene-Chalcedonian Christology was predicated upon: the principle that only Someone who was fully God and fully human could satisfy the penalty of human sin for an entire world.
Every other belief about what Jesus did for us, depends on that belief for its meaning.
Our faith hangs on Jesus’ resurrection,
The truth that sets Jesus apart from every other claim on our hearts,
The reality without which the symbol loses its meaning.
When it comes to what we will stake our life on, fact trumps fiction every time.
Our faith is all about the mighty acts of God,
acts done not in some never-never land, but in our world of space and time.
If Jesus did not rise, we are all as hopeless as a hog in the stockyards.
Jesus’ resurrection validates the entire story of who He is and what He has done.
He has now ascended to the throne of the Universe
Taking human flesh where it has never gone before
Confirming that the Jesus of history and our heavenly Lord are the same Person.
He shall come again to earth “like the lightning that flashes across the sky”
To give us new, imperishable bodies like the one He was raised with
To create a new world where the fascinations of this life will seem like childish toys.
All the rest is just details.
Our Confessions help us fill in the details.
Here we learn much more about the incredible character and sovereign power of the triune God.
Here we learn what it means to be the Church, translated into action and accountability.
Here we learn that Christ is not only on the throne of heaven,
He also claims us as His covenant children in the waters of baptism,
and He is present with us whenever we eat the bread and drink the cup by which we proclaim His saving death.
Here we learn that the Scriptures are not “a witness among equals, but the witness without parallel.”
Here we learn that Jesus is Lord of all, not just of those who believe.
A statement of faith from the Chester (UK) Cathedral sums it all up.
“We believe:
That God has shown us what God is like through the life, the death, and the rising again of Jesus Christ;
That God loves each and every human being;
That through faith in God and trust in God’s promises, we can become the people God wants us to be: healed of what harms us, free of what imprisons us, and more fully alive.”
All the above, I most passionately believe.
