“Holiness is consecrated closeness to God.”
– J.I Packer in Packer on the Christian Life by Sam Storms
The final entry in SEND’s doctrinal statement reads:
We believe that the presence of Jesus Christ by the Holy Spirit in the believer will result in a life of holiness and a walk of obedience to the will of God.
The church is important. In Christ and Culture Revisited, D.A. Carson writes,
We need to be reminded that the only human organization that continues into eternity is the church. (217).
This statement, made somewhat in passing, highlights the importance of the church.
The seventh part of SEND’s Statement of Faith is:
We believe that the church is the body of Jesus Christ, for which He will return, consisting of all who have accepted the redemption provided by Him.
Throughout this series of blog posts on our Statement of Faith we have been asking the basic question, “How does this statement hold us?” We continue with these thoughts on the church.
Sinful humanity naturally looks at life through the wrong end of the telescope. For them time is long and eternity is short; this life is large, the afterlife is small; this world is real, the world to come is unreal.
So writes Sinclair Ferguson in “Pastoral Theology: The Preacher and Hell,” chapter 10 in Hell Under Fire: Modern Scholarship Reinvents Eternal Punishment, ed. by Christopher W. Morgan and Robert A. Peterson . Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2007, kindle location 5762.
We have been working our way through the SEND International Statement of Faith asking how these statements hold our thoughts, affections, and actions. The fifth statement deals with sin and salvation:
We believe that all people are sinful and can be saved only by grace through faith in the shed blood of Christ.
John Owen begins his work on the Holy Spirit: “When God planned the great work of saving sinners, he provided two gifts. He gave his son and he gave his Spirit. In fact each Person of the Trinity was involved in this great work of salvation. The love, grace and wisdom of the Father planned it; the love, grace and humility of the Son purchased it; and the love, grace and power of the Holy Spirit enabled sinners to believe and receive it,” (The Holy Spirit, abridged by R.J.K. Law, Banner of Truth, 1998, p 1)
We continue to look at how our doctrinal statement holds our thinking, emotions and will, and our actions. SEND statement says that we believe “In God the Holy Spirit, who convicts the world of sin, regenerates, indwells, and empowers the believer.“
As we continue in our meditations on the SEND Doctrinal Statement we are taking our second look at the third section:“We believe in Jesus Christ, God the Son, the world’s only Savior; in His pre-incarnation, virgin birth, sinless life, vicarious death, burial, and bodily resurrection, and in His personal, visible return to earth;”
In a previous post we looked at the person of Christ, in this post we will meditate on the work of Christ. How does our belief in Christ’s “sinless life, vicarious death, burial, and bodily resurrection, and in His personal, visible return to earth” hold our thoughts, affections and will, and actions?
As we continue in our meditations on the SEND Doctrinal Statement we come to the third section:
“We believe in Jesus Christ, God the Son, the world’s only Savior; in His pre-incarnation, virgin birth, sinless life, vicarious death, burial, and bodily resurrection, and in His personal, visible return to earth;”
I am dividing this into two posts; this one focusing on the person of Christ and a second post on the work of Christ.
The person of Christ is described in our statement as God the Son, the world’s only savior, pre-existent before the incarnation, and virgin born.
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