Who We Are
We are a congregation of Christians with a God-given passion to prize and proclaim the excellencies of our crucified and risen Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ, the One through whom the God of all grace loved us, sought us, saved us, and called us out of darkness into His marvelous light (1 Pet. 2:9).
Who We Were
We were certainly not born with this passion. Nor did it arise from nowhere, or because we decided it was time to settle down and become religious, churchgoing people. Like every son and daughter of Adam, we were born in sin (Ps. 51:5; Rom. 5:12–19). Before being rescued by God’s grace, we loved the darkness of our sin and would have perferred to remain in our filth and rebellion (John 3:19). We hated the living God (Rom. 1:30). We loved and idolized His gifts, yet wanted nothing to do with Him (Rom. 1:25).
Our hatred for God was revealed in the way we lived in wicked avoidance of the light (John 3:20). Though we, with the rest of mankind, possessed an undeniable awareness of His existence, we refused to honor Him or give thanks to Him as the gracious Giver of life and breath and all things (Rom. 1:20–21; Acts 17:25). The glory of the immortal God, meant to be our joy and treasure, we exchanged for trivial and worthless substitutes. Instead of drinking from God, the fountain of living waters, to satisfy our thirsty souls, we drank down sin as though it were water. Instead of seeking the God from whom every blessing flows, we sought to satisfy ourselves with everything but Him, and proved by our own experience that what He declared long ago concerning the human race was and is still absolutely true:
None is righteous, no, not one;
no one understands; no one seeks for God.
All have turned aside;
together they have become worthless;
no one does good, not even one.
(Rom. 3:10-12)
Our attitude toward our Creator was the same as that of the citizens in Christ’s parable who said, “We do not want this man to reign over us!” (Luke 19:14). Wanting to be our own gods, we despised His glory, ignored His laws, disdained His sovereignty, and had no desire to submit to His will. Even when some of us were religious and churchgoing, we were like those of whom God said,
This people draw near with their mouth and honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from Me. (Isa. 29:13)
Like whitewashed tombs, some of us appeared beautiful and clean on the outside, but inside were filled with hypocrisy, death, and all uncleanness. Others of us could echo the words of Thomas Terry:
There was a time when we were fine living life with no particular religious bend, pretending to be our own gods, inventing our own systems of belief so as not to depend on anything other than our own self-governing consent.
Regardless of our different pasts, we had one thing in common: we were dead in the trespasses and sins in which we once walked (Eph. 2:1). We sheepishly followed the course of this godless world as blind captives of the devil. We lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the body and the mind, and like the rest of mankind, we stood under God’s wrath and curse for the countless ways we trivialized His majesty and belittled His glory. Our iniquities had truly risen higher than our heads, and our guilt had mounted up to the heavens (Ezra 9:6).
Blinded by sin (1 John 2:11),
polluted with sin (Job 14:4),
enslaved to sin (Rom. 6:17),
ruined in sin (Isa. 6:5),
dead in sin (Eph. 2:1),
and in love with sin (John 3:19),
we were hopelessly separated from Christ,
and without God in the world (Eph. 2:12).
But God...
It is only by God’s sovereign grace and magnanimous mercy that our story did not end here. It would have been perfectly just for Him to leave us wrecked and ruined, drowning in our sin, and to cast us into a hopeless, Christless eternity to face the endless outpouring of His righteous wrath that burns hot against sin.
What unspeakable glory that the Most High is also the Most Merciful! In our helpless and hostile state, the Judge of all the earth pitied us (Ezek. 16:5). Moved by a passion for His glory and a love for our souls, He opened our blind eyes to see the enormity of our sin and the wickedness of our ways. We saw that we were undeserving, ill-deserving, hell-deserving rebels who lived only for ourselves in the theater of a world that exists to display the breathtaking beauty of His glory. When the goodness and lovingkindness of God came to us through the gospel, His Spirit so moved in us that the message once ignored as irrelevant and dismissed as foolish became the greatest news we had ever heard (Tit. 3:4–7; 1 Thess. 1:4–5).
Our eyes were opened to behold the life-giving glory of Jesus Christ, the all-sufficient Savior who is able and willing to save to the uttermost all who draw near to God through Him (Heb. 7:25). Our ears were unstopped to hear the voice of the Good Shepherd calling us out of the sheepfold of sin into His green pastures of life and freedom (John 10:3). Our hearts were changed by the power of the Holy Spirit so that Christ became indescribably sweet to our souls and sin became disgustingly bitter (2 Cor. 5:17).
Our souls were granted the unspeakable privilege of seeing and savoring Jesus as the pearl of greatest value (Matt. 13:45–46), the One worth losing everything to gain. Our rock-hard hearts were melted by the reality of our Savior's dying love. Our pride was shattered as we realized that our sin led to His agony in Gethsemane and abandonment upon Calvary. Our minds were gripped by the truth that the sinless Son was pierced for our transgressions and crushed for our iniquities (Isa. 53:5). Our wonder was awakened that God laid our iniquities upon His righteous Son and crushed Him in our place (Isa. 53:10).
The ever-blessed Son became a curse for us so that we who stood under God’s curse might stand forever blessed in His presence. Our joy overflowed when we learned that Jesus not only bore our sin and died in our place, but was raised three days later by the glory of the Father for our justification (Rom. 4:25). Christ's resurrection gives us the greatest possible assurance that the sins of His people have been fully forgiven, paid for, and put away once for all. As far as the east is from the west, so far has He removed our transgressions from us!
By the sovereign freedom of the Holy Spirit, who like the wind blows where He wishes, beyond the control or manipulation of man, we were born again (John 3:8). We turned from our sin and our idols to serve the living God. Though we once wanted nothing to do with Jesus Christ, we came to place all our hope, trust, and confidence in Him, relying solely on His power to save us, cleanse us, and present us faultless before the throne of God (Col. 1:22).
Delivered by Grace, Destined for Glory
Upon trusting Jesus, God not only forgave our sins and purified our souls, but also declared us righteous in His sight, clothing us with the very righteousness of His Son (2 Cor. 5:21; Isa. 61:10). Now adopted into God's family and assured of eternal glory, we rejoice in the guarantee that He who began a good work in us will bring it to completion (Phil. 1:6). Our Savior has given us eternal life, and because of His priestly work of dying for us and interceding for us, we will never perish, and no one can snatch us from His hand (John 10:28). We press on, knowing that His infinite power will sustain us to the end. Though we will not attain perfection in this life, we press on toward the goal of the upward call of God in Christ (Phil. 3:14). Each of us can say with John Newton,
I am not what I ought to be,
I am not what I want to be,
I am not what I hope to be in another world;
but still I am not what I once used to be.
It took the Spirit of the Almighty to shatter our pride, silence our boasting, and bring us to the sobering realization that the only thing we contribute to our salvation is the sin that made our rescue necessary, nothing more.
Our New Identity
For reasons entirely outside of us—reasons that will fuel songs of praise for all eternity—we are a people who deserve hell, yet have been chosen by the free will and sovereign mercy of God the Father, redeemed by the precious blood of God the Son, and renewed by the life-giving power of God the Holy Spirit. We are no longer our own, but belong to Him who loved us and gave His life for us (Gal. 2:20). Once we were not a people, but now we are the people of God (1 Pet. 2:10). Our identity is wrapped up in who God is for us in Christ, and in the glorious gospel of His free grace.
The God who, in the very beginning, spoke His darkness-scattering light into the world has spoken His death-defying gospel into the dark dungeon of our damnation and despair to triumphantly lead our captive souls into the life, light, and liberty found only in His Son (John 1:4; 8:36). And this same voice, heard in the Scriptures and through the preaching of the gospel, will continue to sanctify, strengthen, and satisfy our ransomed souls as we journey toward the Celestial City.
Isaac Watts, the great hymn writer, captures the sweetness of God's saving grace that has become our story and song:
Plunged in a gulf of dark despair,
We wretched sinners lay,
Without one cheerful beam of hope,
Or spark of glimmering day.With pitying eyes the Prince of grace
Beheld our helpless grief;
He saw, and, O amazing love!
He ran to our relief.Down from the shining seats above,
With joyful haste He fled;
Entered the grave in mortal flesh,
And dwelt among the dead.O for this love, let rocks and hills
Their lasting silence break;
And all harmonious human tongues
The Saviour's praises speak.Angels, assist our mighty joys,
Strike all your harps of gold;
But when you raise your highest note,
His love can ne'er be told.
We Are Christians
Our aim in this article is not to highlight anything unique about who we are as Christians, but to gladly lock arms with our brothers and sisters around the world and throughout church history—those who were raised from the same ruins, rescued by the same grace, redeemed by the same blood, and regenerated by the same power—so that together we might lift our voices in the same eternal song:
Worthy is the Lamb who was slain, to receive power and wealth and wisdom and might and honor and glory and blessing! . . . To him who sits on the throne and to the Lamb be blessing and honor and glory and might forever and ever! (Rev. 5:12-13)
We are Christians, and for this reason we can join the apostle Paul in confessing:
…by the grace of God I am what I am, and His grace toward me was not in vain. (1 Cor. 15:10)