- As you're new on your journey of following Jesus,
I wanna talk about just what are some
of the basic beliefs held by Christians around the world,
even over the centuries.
You may be wondering, "Okay, so I believe Jesus
"is God's son and I believe I'm supposed to follow him.
"What else do I need to know that would
"kind of create a foundation for me moving forward."
And the answer is you're gonna wanna learn a lot
in the weeks and the months to come.
In fact, I wanna just point you
to our website at the link below.
And this will take you to a page that has our basic beliefs.
There are a bunch of different basic beliefs
that we hold as followers of Jesus,
but just for simplicity, I wanna talk about three basic ones
that would kind of be a beginning point to get us going.
First of all, Christians throughout the world believe
in what's known as the Trinity.
The Trinity is the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.
Who is the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit?
Well, the Father is God,
the Son is Jesus,
and the Spirit is a spirit representation
of God the Father and God the Son.
Now what's amazing and a little bit difficult
for our finite minds to understand
is that God the Father, God the Son, and God the Spirit
are three in one.
These are three expressions of the same God.
God is God the Father.
God is God the Son, meaning God is now in human flesh
as Jesus who actually dwell on earth.
And God as Spirit.
Before Jesus left the earth, he said, "I'm going
"to go dwell with my father in heaven, but I'm sending
"the Holy Spirit to be with you."
We actually can connect to God through the Holy Spirit.
In other words, we don't have to just try to live
the Christian life on our own,
but as we pray to God, as we connect to God,
his spirit actually lives through us.
If you ever think, "Man, I kinda, like I feel like
"there's the presence of God."
That's the Holy Spirit revealing God to you.
The Holy Spirit has many different functions in the Bible
and you can read about them sometimes.
The Spirit is our counselor.
The Spirit is our guide.
The Spirit convicts us.
The Spirit leads us into all truth.
There is God the Father who rules and reigns in heaven.
There's God also the Son who walked on earth
showing us who God is and what he did.
And there is God the Spirit who empowers us
to live a godly life.
I also want to talk about the power of prayer.
As Jesus' followers we believe that we have access
to the very throne room of God
and that God hears our prayers.
In fact, there's a verse in the Bible that says
that we can come boldly before the throne
of grace in our time of need.
In other words we have access to God.
We can talk directly to him.
Your prayers are just as powerful as anybody else's prayers.
When you talk to God, not only do we believe
that God hears us, but we also believe
that we could hear from God.
That if we stop and we just listen, that he can speak to us
in so many different ways through his word, through people,
through circumstances, and by the power of his Spirit.
If there's something in your life,
you need help, pray about it.
If you got questions ask God about it.
If you need strength ask God for strength.
If you need a miracle, we go before God
and we ask and we believe that he hears our prayers.
The third thing I want to talk about is simply this,
that we believe in the Bible.
We believe that scripture is reliable.
That God's word is relevant.
We believe it's inspire by God.
And if I can tell you just a personal example,
it was the Bible that brought me to faith in Christ.
When I was in college, I didn't know
Jesus in a personal way.
I got into a lot of trouble.
And in my fraternity I actually started a Bible study
to gather kinda other guys around
that didn't know anything about God either
and we just started reading the Bible.
And the Bible started changing my life.
Now it's incredible that I was transformed by a free Bible
that was given to me by a gentleman.
And now our church is actually able
to give away free Bibles through the YouVersion Bible App
to people all over the world.
If you haven't yet downloaded the YouVersion Bible app,
I would invite you to do so.
There are reading plans like crazy.
You can even search new believers
and find reading plans just for you.
Some basics of what we believe about God.
We believe he is three persons in one:
Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
We believe he hears our prayers.
And we believe that he speaks to us through his word.
Therefore daily we go to his word.
We're strengthened by it.
We're conformed to become like him.
And as he renews our mind, changes the way we think
with his word, we can live a life
that would bring him glory.
What is our mission?
It's to lead people to become
fully devoted followers of Christ.
And I wanna thank you for taking another step
to fully following him.