Feeding on Jesus: Lent Week 1

This Lent season, we want to feed on Jesus. Historically, the church began celebrating Lent for two related reasons: (1) they wanted to imitate Christ's 40 days and 40 nights of fasting in the wilderness when He rebuffed the devil's temptation with "Humans won't live on bread alone but by every word that comes from God's mouth;" and (2) they wanted to partner with new converts who were being prepared to be baptized on Easter by their own period of fasting and studying the essentials of the faith.

Because of this, we want to take these 40 days (Lent is really more than 40 days, but that's because Sundays were celebration days, not fasting days, and therefore don't count) and intentionally press into God's life-delivering Word. We want to be like Jesus, we want to know Him, and we want to reorient our lives such that our primary sense of satisfaction and purpose is derived from doing what He wants.

We're doing this, trying to find life in God's Word, by working through our belief statement together.

We believe faith makes us alive, and our belief statement is our way of telling about the essentials of our faith. We've put it in a form that feels more like a story and less like a legal document with the hope that it might be more useful to you this way. Each Wednesday of Lent this year, we'll be posting a brief section from our beliefs for you to read through and discuss with the Christians you're living your life with. Please let us know if you're working through this with us; we'd love to talk about it with you.

Here are a few tips on how we might get the most out of this period of study:

• Pray. If we're going to live on God's words, we need to be focused and centered on Him. Let's approach our gracious Father by the power of His powerful Spirit based on the forgiveness that's only in His Son. Let's pray.
• Search the Scriptures. We think everything in our belief statement is deeply rooted in Scripture and accurately reflects the way the church has always understood Scripture. We should be able to ask ourselves Where does this come from in the Bible? about every part of the statement. 
• Consider fasting. Sometimes God's good gifts inadvertently distract us and keep us from seeking life in the only place we can truly find it. One of the benefits of fasting is that it can sometimes help us break out of this.
• Live differently. If we're not applying what we're learning, our learning is pointless. Theology that doesn't change our lives is never true, healthy theology.
• Discuss together. Where's this in the Bible? How does this have any effect on how we live? You'll find better answers in community than you will alone. If you need community, let us know.

For more information, see our entire belief statement here. Also, you can listen to one of our pastors' recent sermons (here) that discusses Jesus' temptation in the desert and more fully discusses why we are doing this. Finally, you can see all the posts in this series by clicking here.

Here's this week's portion of our belief statement:

We believe there is one God who created all things. All things that aren’t God were created by God. He created the laws of physics, physical matter, and all things, whether visible or invisible. He created the universe, the sun and the moon, the earth, and all the earth’s inhabitants, including humans.

Because we believe that this God created all things that aren’t God, we believe that He has every perfection imaginable. There is no power that is not sourced in the very being of God, so we believe that God is perfect in power—He is almighty, omnipotent, all-powerful. Likewise, He is perfectly good, which is convincingly demonstrated to us in that His steadfast, loyal love lasts forever and ever and in that He continues to feed and care for all of creation moment-by-moment. Likewise, He is perfect with respect to knowledge, such that there is nothing that He does not know. Likewise, He is not limited by space or time as if they existed before He did. He is able to do and know all things in all places and all times. He is God in the most robust sense—He is Creator of all things.