What We Believe
As a congregation of the Associate Reformed Presbyterian Church, we believe that the Old and New Testaments alone are the only word from the only living and true God, who is truth itself, and therefore His Word ought to be believed and obeyed. And so, we believe, and seek to preach, teach and put into practice the content of the whole Bible. This also means we believe and seek to preach, teach and put into practice the content of the Westminster Confession of Faith (WCF) and its Larger and Shorter Catechisms (LC & SC). We seek to do this because we believe that the WCF is the best summary statement ever written by Christians regarding what the Bible teaches. We do not claim that in seeking to do this that we do so perfectly. After all, both the Bible and the WCF make very clear that “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Rom. 3:23; LC. Q. & A. 22; SC Q. A. 16).
We believe that as sinners—those who fail to be who God designed us to be as his image bearers, and therefore fail to do what God commands we do in His Ten Commandments—that we need the Lord Jesus Christ, the Second Person of the Trinity, who is both God and Man, to save us from our sins. We believe that God the Father sent Jesus, His Son, to be born of the virgin Mary, to perfectly obey the Ten Commandments, to pay the God-appointed penalty for sin through his death on the cross, was actually physically buried in a tomb, because he actually physically died on the cross, and then actually physically rose from the dead, triumphing over sin and death. We believe that after he rose from the dead, he ascended into heaven, and with the Father sent the Holy Spirit to continue his work of rescuing his physical creation and his covenant people from sin. Thus, we believe that Jesus has fulfilled, is fulfilling and will continue to fulfill all of the Old Covenant Scriptures.
We believe that it is Jesus, who is Truth, who established the authoritative interpretation of His life, death, resurrection and ascension through His chosen apostles, who then, and in conjunction with some of their co-laborers, wrote that interpretation in the books that comprise the New Testament. We believe that the New Testament teaches that a man had to have been an eyewitness of the life, death, resurrection and ascension of Jesus in order to be an apostle. Thus, with the book of Revelation, written by the apostle John, the only word from the only living and true God was finished. No one, other than Jesus’ chosen apostles had the authority to decide, by the power of the Holy Spirit, what is the written revelation from God which creates and perfects the Church, God’s covenant people. Thus, we believe that God’s Word is prior to all things, and that in no way has or does the Church determine what is in the Bible. Rather, God brought His Word through His Spirit to His covenant people, thereby creating them and causing them to recognize the Bible for what it actually is—God’s Word.
We believe that the Holy Spirit regenerates fallen sinners, resurrecting them from the spiritual dead, causing them to recognize their sin, giving them the ability to accurately understand who Jesus is, so that they turn from their sin and trust Jesus as their Lord and Savior. We believe that all those who are declared righteous (justified) by God through faith in Jesus are truly and progressively made to be righteous (sanctified) in this lifetime, yet never perfectly until they die and
go into the presence of the Lord, while waiting for the great and blessed day when God ushers in the final and fullest expression of His Kingdom, and gives all who he has saved from sin a new, glorified and eternal physical body. We believe that the creation is going to be rescued from sin and God will one day bring about a New Heavens and New Earth where God’s people, freed totally from sin will live and serve God eternally.
We believe that every individual Christian is actually part of the whole Church, the body of Christ, and is not only necessary to that body, but also dependent it on it for their salvation. Thus, we believe that God’s salvation comes through the Church and that God determined this, not the Church. We believe that the right (not perfect) preaching of the word of God, administration of the sacraments of baptism and the Lord’s Supper, and exercising of Church discipline, all of which include prayer and the corporate gathering together for worship, are the distinguishing marks of the Church. Congregations that are not doing these things rightly, that is, in accordance with what God’s written word requires, are not true churches of the Lord Jesus Christ. We believe that the entire history of God’s people revealed in the Old and New Testaments reveals that many, who professed faith in God and attached themselves to the visible covenant people of God, did not actually have salvation. Thus, we believe that we, who profess faith in Jesus for salvation, should always be examining ourselves as individuals, and that we as a congregation should examine ourselves corporately so that our individual lives and our corporate life together conforms to God’s Ten Commandments.
We believe that because God unites the individual sinner to himself through the work of the Holy Spirit that He unites Christians to one another. Thus, we believe that there is an accountability that all Christians have to one another as part of the Church. Thus, we believe that those congregations of the Lord Jesus that do not exercise and submit to being accountable to any other congregation other than themselves have a seriously defective understanding of salvation and the church, and very well may not be true churches of the Lord Jesus Christ. We believe that corporate worship is the chief practice of the Church, and that any other corporate practices of the Church are not essential to the Church, although they may be a good and proper extension of the Church’s corporate worship. Thus, we believe that any and all ministries of any congregation of the Lord Jesus that lead people to think that the power of God is equally accessed and displayed in those ministries just as much, if not more so, than corporate worship, are not genuine ministries of the Church, but man-made idols. Thus, we believe that the only necessary ministry of the Church is her corporate worship and that all faithful ministries of the Church must extend from the Church’s corporate worship and must reinforce its supremacy in the Church’s life.
We believe that faithfully true worship of the one Triune God is determined by God’s written word, empowered by God’s Holy Spirit and exalts the Triune God. We believe the Church’s corporate worship is to be done decently and in good order, and is to be saturated with 1) texts from God’s written word, 2) singing of hymns or songs that are either directly from God’s word (the Psalms), or give faithful expression of the truth of God’s Word, 3) praying to the Triune God, 4) making vows to God, 5) giving of offerings to God, and 6) receiving the sacrament of baptism and/the Lord’s Supper, the latter which ought be observed every time the Church meets for worship. We believe that this faithfully true worship is an experience that touches the entire person
in their thinking, choices and emotions, but cannot be reduced to merely our thoughts, choices and emotions. We believe that whether we have or have not engaged in faithfully true worship is not chiefly determined by the emotions we experience in worship or what we think we got out of the worship service. We believe that God, and God alone, determines what constitutes the true worship of himself, and he alone defines it by his Word and empowers it by His Word and Spirit.
We believe that all authority has been given to Jesus in heaven and on earth and therefore everything taking place on earth is ruled over by Jesus and is unavoidably related to his kingdom. We believe that any beliefs that relegate a person’s or congregation’s doctrine and practices to a private personal realm separated from the public realm of earthly life are not Christian beliefs or practices. We believe that while the Church’s doctrine and practices are primarily addressing her salvation in the Lord Jesus Christ, this salvation is not disconnected from, but inseparably united to, every aspect of earthly life. We believe that we are to pray that God’s kingdom should come and His will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Thus, we believe that we should pray and work toward the removal of all forms of evil that express rebellion to Jesus, who is king of the whole earth. Thus, we believe that there not a spiritual realm of reality disconnected from the physical realm of reality. We believe that the dominate and unbiblical way of thinking in American culture endorses the separation of the spiritual and physical realms of reality, and thus pushes the Church and individual Christians and their beliefs and practices out of the culture’s public life. We believe that the Triune God is Lord over all things—spiritual and physical—and we must honor Him in both realms always.
Why We Observe the Lord’s Supper Every Sunday
The Triune God, the only God, is a covenant making God. When God created, he entered into a covenant relationship with his creation. God’s covenant can be defined as his love-life bond which he sovereignly administers, setting forth commands to be obeyed, promising blessing upon obedience, curse upon disobedience, and sealed with his blood. Genesis 6-9 and Jeremiah 33:19-26 reveal that God’s covenant is with all creation. Before God gave his covenant sign of circumcision to Abraham in Genesis 17, he gave his covenant sign with creation, the rainbow, and announced it to Noah in Genesis 9. The whole story of salvation given in the Bible is about God establishing and keeping his covenant. Ultimately, God’s covenant with creation, though it began the moment God created, was administrated through Adam, the first man. Thus, God’s covenant with creation is united to what God is doing with his covenant people. Furthermore, in Genesis 17:10-14 God refers to circumcision as the covenant. So, what is the significance of these signs of God’s covenant?
Briefly, the covenant signs are signifiers and seals of God’s grace to those with whom he establishes his covenant. Put another way, they “represent Christ, and his benefits” (Westminster Confession of Faith 23.1). Of course, the Lord Jesus Christ is the Word of God made flesh. It is only appropriate that Jesus should be described this way—the Word made flesh—because with God, word and deed always go together. When God spoke his word, he accomplished something in his speaking, as Genesis 1 reveals. God’s word is powerful and effective, and it is so because God’s word is never separated from God’s Spirit. All of this is to say that God has always confirmed his word with an action or deed that follows upon his speaking or delivering his word. This is seen supremely in the Lord Jesus Christ, the Word of God made flesh. So, a central feature of the church’s covenant relationship with God is His confirming his word to us by way of our senses. This is what the Lord’s Supper and baptism are: covenant acts by which God confirms His word to us by way of our senses. They are not first and foremost us confirming something to or with God, but the reverse. At the very heart of the Christian faith and life is that God’s people receive from God, they do not take from God.
Precisely because God never delivered his word without confirming his word with some kind of act or deed, that people either heard, saw, touched, smelled or tasted, we believe, along with the majority testimony of the Church down through the ages, that Christian worship is most faithfully Christian when after the word of God is delivered in corporate worship through the Church’s reading, praying, praising and preaching of it, that it should be confirmed by the administration of the Lord’s Supper. Part of what it means that God confirms his word is that he actually applies his word; he makes his word have the effect he intends for it to have. And God is always doing one of two things with his word—blessing or cursing.
On the night before he was crucified Jesus instituted his Supper. When he did, he referred to the cup of wine of the New Covenant as his blood and the bread as his body. Of course, Jesus was speaking representatively. Jesus was not engaging in metaphysical confusion thinking and teaching that the bread he held was his very flesh and the wine his actual blood. No, he spoke in the same way we would if we pointed to a place on a map that identified our hometown and we said, “This is my hometown.” The spot on the map represents our hometown, it is not literally our hometown. Yet, while the communion bread and the cup of wine represent Jesus’ body and blood, we also need to understand that because they do, they are actually used by God the Holy Spirit to confirm God’s word in us. This is another way of saying that God’s people are spiritually strengthened by receiving the bread and the cup. Just as people are nourished physically through bread and wine, so too God’s people are fed spiritually through the bread and the wine of the Lord’s Supper, when they eat and drink in a manner consistent with the purpose for which God gave the Supper and its elements.
It is precisely because we believe that God is actually active in our eating and drinking of the bread and cup of the Lord’s Supper that we observe it every Sunday. We believe that as sinners saved only by God applying his grace to us that we need the nourishment given to us in the bread and cup. Because the Lord’s Supper requires us to examine ourselves in relation to God and His Church and repent of our sin before receiving the elements, we believe that weekly reception of the Lord’s Supper forces the issues of faith in God and repentance to God upon us, and this is a most excellent thing. Finally, we believe that God’s Word is never able to be fully understood by us, and as such, we are not saved, in the end, only because of our understanding of God’s word but by our reception of it through the Spirit of God acting upon our soul and applying God’s Word to us. The Lord’s Supper is a vivid reminder to us that our relationship to Jesus by which he saves us from our sins is not under our control, and we can never fully understand this relationship.
Is it possible for weekly observance of the Lord’s Supper to become routine so that we do it without soberly thinking about what we are doing? Yes. But this is true of every aspect of weekly worship. Some will say that the Supper doesn’t have the same meaning for them if they do it weekly as opposed to doing it monthly or even less frequently. But this is to think that we assign the meaning of the Supper based on how often we do it and how we feel about it. Both are unbiblical thoughts. We don’t give either baptism or the Lord’s Supper their meaning; God does. And God has revealed in his Scriptures that the meaning of the Lord’s Supper is tied to our need to receive from the Lord what he alone can give us to save us from our sin. So, we receive the Lord’s Supper every Sunday.
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