We believe that all of life is worship. People worship something they are good at, something they want, something they fear, or something better than all of it. We believe that there is one God in three persons, a triune God revealed in the Old and New Testaments of the Christian Bible called the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.1 This Trinitarian God created and revealed Himself to people through His Word that they might know Him and worship Him.

But the people He made rejected Him as God and desired to be their own master. They disobeyed Him and brought death on their souls, their bodies and minds, their community and children, and the creation as a whole. This rebellion is called sin; sin is this mark of imperfection which leads mankind away from the creator and his revelation of truth. But this God had another plan, and so He descended to the earth in the form of a man, who was called Jesus.

Jesus lived a perfect life so that He might die and bring salvation to all those who place their faith, or hope and trust, in Him. Jesus suffered an unjust death at the hands of mankind, but this death He died for many, that their sins would be forgiven and that they themselves should not die in the life to come. Jesus rose from the dead three days later, conquering sin and death, and now reigns in heaven at the right hand of the Father. In His place, He has sent the Holy Spirit, who dwells in the heart of all those who believe, guiding and sanctifying 2 them until they should reach the after life. Jesus also established the church as the means by which He would accomplish His mission: spreading the news of His death and resurrection throughout the whole world.

Jesus has offered this salvation to those whom He has chosen, and those who respond receive eternal life. Those who would receive Him must repent and confess with their mouth that they have sinned against Him—God—and that Jesus died for their sins and rose from the dead that they would rise with Him and obtain eternal life. All of this is offered by Jesus’s grace—His undeserved kindness—and requires no work of the one who receives it.

The person who does receive this message can know they are one in Christ 3 Jesus’s disciples 4 based on what Jesus calls fruit of the Spirit. This fruit is grown by the inward working of the Holy Spirit through the sanctification of the believer. The one who is sanctified will have his desires changed from that of sin to that of righteousness, as described by God through His Word, the Bible. Jesus’s disciples seek to please God by obeying Him, learning from Him, behaving like Him, and telling others about Him.

None of this means that the Christian is perfect, but it does mean that they are constantly confessing their sins

This message is called the Gospel by Christians, and it is the means by which God expresses His power and love to unbelieving people. This message has changed my (T. H. Wright) life and has forever changed the course of the things I do. Redemption Studio remains an open place for discussion; most of all we hope you find room to discuss the Gospel and faith, that you might experience the power of God and see Him as He has revealed Himself, and that you might worship Him and be saved.

  1. As defined in the historic Nicene Creed, composed by the Council of Nicaea and the Council of Constantinople. ↩︎

  2. Sanctification could be summarized as the progressive process by which a person becomes more like Jesus. This is a work of the Holy Spirit in the life of the redeemed. ↩︎

  3. Christ is Jesus’s title, which translates Messiah in Hebrew, and means savior or anointed one. ↩︎

  4. A disciple is essentially a student who lives by his teacher/master/discipler’s example. ↩︎