Shepherd Led Life believes:
In the mystery of the Trinity God: One Holy Perfect Loving Community of Three: Father – Son – Holy Spirit…yet One.
That God is knowable and has made knowing Him both desirable and possible. He has revealed Himself through creation, through His Word, and through His Incarnation.
That God created all, and rules over all. All of us are accountable to Him.
That God’s Word (The Bible) is true, and that God rules through His Word. The Bible is our final authority and we are to see ourselves as being under it.
Jesus was and is real. He came, He preached, He died, He conquered. He is now in heaven praying for His fellow brothers and sisters.
Jesus came to earth through a virgin named Mary, through the enabling power of the Holy Spirit. Jesus is truly God and truly man.
We are made in the image of God. We messed up through our deliberate rebellion (called sin) and that means death: physical and spiritual. Human death is not annihilation but separation (of the spirit from the body). Spiritual death is eternal separation from God.
Salvation is not earned, but a gift received. This is made possible by what Jesus accomplished on Calvary: a literal substitute for me. I am made right with God on the basis of His blood shed for me. I will never ever be able to impress God with good behaviour. I will however be able to bless Him through being holy.
Becoming a child of God happens through faith: the action of believing and placing your trust in what Christ did on your behalf. This is confirmed by God through the giving of the Holy Spirit. This is known as being born again. It does not stop there: you must grow up!
Heaven and hell are real. All people are going to one of those two places. It all depends on what they did with God’s grace through Christ whilst here on earth. There is no such thing as an innocent person in hell, although there are a lot of guilty (humanly speaking) people in heaven. They are only in heaven because they trusted in Christ and God declared them “Not Guilty” since He accepted on their behalf the death of Jesus, and gave to them the goodness and life of Jesus.
There is only one church, but multiple local expressions of it. The church represents all those who have been saved by Christ. The church is not called to glory in its existence, but to intentionally reveal the Gospel and Person of Christ, and to help those who believe to grow into conformity to Christ.
Jesus appointed two ordinances: baptism and the Lord’s Supper. These represent the core facts of the Christian faith. Baptism is the immersion into water as a confession of identifying with Jesus the Christ in His burial and resurrection. The Lord’s Supper reminds us of the sacrificial death of Christ enabling salvation, is a present reminder of His sustaining (‘keeping-us-going’) grace made available, and a reminder that He is coming again. I feel I must add that in terms of baptism, its not the amount of water that saves, but faith in Jesus Christ. I do however believe immersion is the biblical pattern as an outward expression and declaration of an inward reality.
Jesus is personally coming again, only this time not through a manger but in visible power and glory (If for some strange reason you don’t see this with your own eye, you’ll probably catch it on CNN – but nonetheless you’ll know something is happening!).
Marriage: God’s awesome idea between one natural man and one natural woman. This is the only context in which sex, from God’s point of view, is allowed – and for good reason!
