What We Believe
What We Believe
St. John’s is a member of the Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod
The foundation of everything we believe, teach and confess at St. John’s Lutheran Church is the Bible, the 66 canonical books of the Old and New Testaments. We believe these Holy Scriptures are the inspired and inerrant Word of God. By inspired, we mean that every word of the Bible written by the prophets, apostles and evangelists was given to them by God. By inerrant, we mean that the Bible is entirely free of error, that everything it teaches about the history of the world, the nature of man and our redemption through the Triune God is true.
The Lutheran faith is built around three basic Biblical principles – Sola Scriptura, Sola Fide, Sola Gratia.
These principles of Scripture Alone, Faith Alone, and Grace Alone are then articulated in what we call the sixchief parts of the Christian Faith. These six parts provide a summary of what we believe.
They are outlined in Martin Luther's Small Catechism and they provide a clear explanation of the most important teachings found in the Bible. If you would like to have a copy of the Catechism, give us a call in the church office or reach out via email. We would love to give you one.
The 10 commandments set out the requirements of God’s Law. They show us how God expects us to live our lives in a God-pleasing way. However, God reminds us through the 10 commandments that we all sin and fall short of God's standard. Thus we need a Savior who can forgive us from all our mistakes, failures, and shortcomings.
The Creed summarizes the Bible’s teachings about God as he has chosen to reveal himself. While the Creed has three parts to it (Father, Son, and Holy Spirit), it has a special emphasis on Jesus. It describes how he was born as a human being, suffered and died for our sins, and was raised to life again at the first Easter. In our worship services we use the Creed to confess together as a community of faith what we believe about God.
The disciples once asked Jesus, "How should we pray?" In response, Jesus taught them the simple prayer that we now call the Lord's Prayer.
This prayer is the model for our own prayer life and it teaches us what we should ask God for.
The Lord’s Prayer also teaches us a great deal about what God is like and His priorities for His creation and our own lives.
This prayer invites us to trust Jesus for all God things and for his help in times of distress and temptation.
We believe that Baptism is not an act of man’s obedience to God, but rather is an act of God’s mercy to man, where He gives to individuals the salvation that Jesus won for the world upon the cross. As Paul describes in Romans 6:4, baptism is an act where God drowns our sinful nature and raises us up to a new life where we can be called His very own children.
Here at St. John’s we believe that all nations are invited to the waters of Holy Baptism. The gifts of forgiveness and rebirth which God pours out in this blessed gift are for babies and seniors, men and women, rich and poor, black and white, and everyone in between.
As if that weren’t enough, in baptism God marks you as one of His beloved children and made a member of His eternal family. In Baptism God rescues you from death and the devil and gives you the promise of eternal salvation.
It is also the basis for our life as a Christian, which Martin Luther portrays as a daily return to the waters of Baptism to receive its blessings new every day!
Better known today as the Lord’s Supper or Holy Communion, this Sacrament lies at the heart of the Christian church’s weekly worship. The Lord’s Supper is not merely a symbolic meal, nor is it something that we offer back to God. Instead it is, as Luther puts it, "the true body and blood of our Lord Jesus Christ, under the bread and wine", in which "forgiveness of sins, life, and salvation are given us."
The Christian faith is not just about reading words on a page, but about hearing God’s message of forgiveness with our own ears. The essence of confession is not our confession, but the words of absolution we hear from our pastor. These are words spoken in love and grace to assure each of us of the forgiveness of sins that comes from Christ. It is as if Christ himself were saying them to us.
For a more extensive treatment of "What Lutherans Believe"
The complete collection of our confessions can be found in the Book of Concord of 1580