What We Believe
We believe the Bible is the Word of God written, the final and sufficient revelation of God to mankind. It is infallible and inerrant in all that it teaches and affirms.
We believe that it reveals one God who exists in three persons: God the Father, God the Son who is Jesus Christ, and God the Holy Spirit.
We believe that the Bible reveals what God is like; who mankind was created to be; what, sadly, all of mankind became through our first parents' fall in sin; what God's subsequent judgments were upon sinners in this world and the next; how Jesus Christ was promised, foreshadowed and prophesied in the Old Testament; and how He was then revealed and explained in the New Testament as the Lord and Savior of all who put their trust in Him.
To put it simply, we believe the Bible teaches "ruin by the Fall, ransom by the Son, and regeneration by the Holy Spirit". Our Evangelical, Reformed, and Baptist forefathers were not ashamed or embarrassed to spell out exactly what they believed the Word of God taught in the 1689 Baptist Confession of Faith. Charles Spurgeon called it the best theology in a small space that he knew and reprinted it for his church. Baptists in the South used to hold to the 1689 Confession. The Editor of the CHRISTIAN INDEX, the state paper of Georgia Baptists, wrote of it in an 1839 editorial as "our old confession" and urged all Baptist churches in Georgia to formally adopt it for the sake of uniformity, since most of them already used it or their own paraphrase of it as their own doctrinal statement. Just because something is old does not make it right. But it should give us pause before we throw it away. God has not changed; human nature has not changed; the Bible has not changed; God's sentence of eternal condemnation upon unrepentant sinners has not changed; the Gospel has not changed; God's appointed means of saving sinners by the preaching of the Gospel in the power of the Holy Spirit has not changed; God's appointed means of growing Christians in grace through the preaching of the Word, prayer, fellowship, the reading of the Word, and the sacraments have not changed. Thus Christians today stand on the shoulders of previous generations of believers who have studied, prayed over, meditated upon, and defended the Word of God. We want to "hold fast to this faith once and for all delivered to the saints". To deny what God has taught the church for almost 2,000 years would be a denial of our Savior's promise, "I will be with you even to the end of the age". We neglect what God has taught His Church in the past only at the peril of our present enjoyment of God and our future standing before Him on Judgment Day.
We believe that the greatest joy in all of life is to know God through Jesus Christ and we count it our highest privilege to live for His glory. We are not a great people; we are simply sinners saved by grace. We have, by God's grace, seen the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ and we are an eternally happy and blessed people for that!
