A NOTE FROM PASTOR MARGE
None of us have all the answers to God figured out. If we did, we would quite literally be God Himself! God’s very nature is both knowable and incomprehensible. This is the mystery of God, who is far greater, bigger, powerful and awesome than anything or anyone we can imagine. While we have a true and personal knowledge of and relationship with God, this does not mean we can understand Him fully or comprehend His whole being. Not only is God’s whole being incomprehensible but each of His attributes, His goodness, faithfulness, patience, holiness, righteousness, kindness, wisdom, grace, and love, are well beyond our ability to fathom fully. While, as good Methodists, we continue down the path of sanctification and grow in Christ’s likeness, we can never know everything there is to know about God’s nature nor can we ever fully grasp even one of the aspects of His character or work. What’s required from us as Christians is not having all the answers to the tough questions about God and theology, but rather what’s required from us as Christians is our belief, trust, and following Christ with our whole being. It’s having faith in God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit despite our questions we may never have answers to until the other side of heaven.
One of these tough questions is this: “Is the Bible the only truth?” As Christians, we believe that the Bible is God’s written revelation of who He is and what He has done in redemptive history. We believe that the Bible is “God-breathed” and gets its true, authoritative, powerful, holy character from God Himself, who inspired human authors through the power of the Holy Spirit to write exactly what He wanted them to write. We believe that God did not simply just dictate words to the Biblical authors but rather He worked through the Biblical authors’ unique personalities and circumstances. Therefore, Scripture is both fully human and fully divine. It is both the testimony of men and women to God’s revelation, and it is also God’s divine revelation itself. In addition, the Bible is historically true, it is eternally trustworthy, and it is indeed good for preaching. We believe the Bible is good for reproof and correction. We believe it is good and the final authority in regards to all things pertaining to life. We believe the Bible is living and active, which means that it is very applicable to each one of our lives today in 2024. All-in-all, as Christians, we believe the Bible. We stand on it. We believe what the Bible says about itself is true. It is the primary source where we go to learn about God.
In this life, there are a million questions that we are going to answer. We must make decisions every day and the questions that we ask and answer in our lives are not equally weighted. Answering the questions, "What am I going to eat for lunch" and "Whom am I going to marry,” carry a different amount of weight, and they have a different amount of impact on the trajectory of our lives. Of all the questions that we will ask and answer in our lives, there's one question that weighs more than any other question. There's one question that has more significance and more impact on the trajectory of our lives than any other question that we will ever ask and answer. For most of us, the question is not, “Is the Bible historically true?” The world acknowledges that Christ did indeed live on and walked this earth. That is not really what we have to wrestle with. For most of us, the question that we have to wrestle with is this: “Who is Jesus Christ of Nazareth?” The Bible makes it very clear who Jesus was and is. The Bible, the Word of God, tells us this: Jesus Christ of Nazareth was God in flesh and stepped down from His Heavenly throne to rescue the world. Jesus Christ of Nazareth, because He is God, lived a perfect life, died the death humanity deserved, and conquered sin and death through His resurrection so that we could be forgiven and by grace through faith live forever with God. That’s what the Bible tells us.
Who do you say that He is?
— Pastor Marge
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