Our Beliefs, Our Convictions as Christians and as Nazarenes
Pastor Glenn Newton 3-5-00
Watch your life and doctrine closely. Persevere in them, because if you do,
you will save both yourself and your hearers. 1 Timothy 4:16
2 Preach the Word; be prepared in season and out of season; correct, rebuke
and encourage--with great patience and careful instruction. 3 For the time
will come when men will not put up with sound doctrine. Instead, to suit their
own desires, they will gather around them a great number of teachers to say
what their itching ears want to hear. 4 They will turn their ears away from
the truth and turn aside to myths. 2 Timothy 4:3
Tomorrow in the mail you are going to receive a cashiers check, make out to you
for the amount of $15,000.00, with only one stipulation, you must invest it for one year in
mutual funds - the Stock Market. You have received this check, it’s real, but the only way
you can use it for your own advantage, is you must invest it into a mutual fund of your
choice for at least 12 months before you can sell out for the cash.
What are you going to do? I don’t know if you know this or not, but you can lose
a lot of money in mutual funds............... of coarse the opposite is also true, you can make
a lot of money in mutual funds. So the Question is How are you going to invest your
Money?
If your like me, you may know a little about Mutual funds, but not enough to
know where to invest $15,000!!!! How do you know where to find the Sure thing? How
can you invest and feel confident that you have chosen a wise fund.
Somebody, tell me what would be the first thing you would do?
Call a broker? Try to learn more about investing? Call someone you could Trust to give
you Solid advice?
For most of us, who don’t keep up on Mutual Funds, what’s hot and what’s not in
the Stock Market, We would have to go through a process of filtering through all the
scams, all the companies that are fly by night who would gladly take your $15,000 for a
small fee. You see, there’s alot of crookedness out there today, and finding the truth
would take some effort on our part, but we could do it.
Let me ask you this. How many of you would just decide to pick a Mutual Fund
because the name sounded kind of flashy, so you would be willing to invest your 15,000
because of their name and just let it ride and hope for the best? Anyone?
Maybe you see a funny TV commercial and decide that that must be the right
mutual fund because they make great commercials, so you will trust them with your
15,000.? Anybody? You guys just aren’t very trusting are you?
You see the fact is we don’t want to take something of such great value and just risk it on
something that we don’t feel confident about. I don’t know about you, but before I
invested my money I would want to have some conviction in my heart that I have studied,
I have done some research, and I have made a wise choice based on what I truly believe is
the best. I imagine that would be the same process you would go through.
You see the All-Mighty Dollar has great value in our lives ............. most likely it has too
much value.
This morning I believe that we have in our possession something of great value, a
value so great that money is worthless in comparison, what we have is our Spiritual Life,
our Faith.
If you will agree with me that our Lives are of great value and our Faith is of great
value, then I ask you How are you Investing It?
This morning I believe that as a Christian, I should have strong Convictions about
what I believe, and why I believe it, and I can defend these things with Scripture and with
Experience and Reason.
This is not only True as a Christian in general, but this is True as a Nazarene. If
you are a member of our church, you have aligned yourself with our banner, you have
hopefully given yourself and your resources to it’s work, then without exception, you
should know What the Church of the Nazarene Believes, and You should Know Why we
believe it, and in a culture that disregards absolute truth, you Need to know how to defend
what The Church of the Nazarene Stands for. Can I hear a Amen?
The Church of the Nazarene was born because of Men and Women who had
compelling convictions about what they believed, and why they believed it. The Church of
the Nazarene exists because people from different social, educational, political, and even
denominational backgrounds were possessed by a vision of Christian Faith and life that
transcended their differences. These early Nazarenes, in their songs, in their sermons, in
their service to the lost and outcast people who would become Nazarenes they gave a
confident witness to convictions regarding the range and power of the gospel to transform
and empower all who would receive it. Their witness was driven by what they read in
their Bible, and by what happened in their own lives and the lives of those around them.
But my friends, the convictions of our Forefathers are what birthed the Church of
the Nazarene, but for those convictions to sustain and guide our Church today is another
story. We face a time in the church where if we don’t make those convictions our our
forerunners our own, we will drift away from the distinctive calling upon our great church,
a Calling From God to Preach and Teach Holiness and Perfect Love. But you see
convictions can never be forced on someone. They must arise and be maintained from
deep within the soul.
I ask you today, Do you know what it is that Makes You a Nazarene? Have you
taken the Beliefs of the church and made them your own?
You see Convictions, those things you really feel strong about, must be celebrated,
refined, nourished, renewed, and transmitted. In the absence of defining and motivating
convictions, organizations and nations settle for cheap substitutes.
You don’t need to look any farther than our Great Nation. This Nation that
proclaims on it’s money, “In God We Trust” yet has lost it’s conviction, it’s lost it’s way
and has went astray from what we used to hold dear, from those Convictions, those
Beliefs.
My friends I will tell you this, This Nation was Birthed because of a people who
had strong Convictions about their God, about the Word of God, and about Absolute
Truth. This Nation was birthed with a spirit of Freedom, one where the Government was
not the sole focus, it was not the security blanket for the people, but it was a instrument
for the People’s good. My friends we have drifted along way from those Convictions, and
we are now a Nation that has lost it’s identity, and there’s alot of different groups out
their that would love to put their Stamp of ownership on our Nation. The only Stamp that
belongs there Is God’s Stamp, and until we realize that as a Nation no political party, no
special group, no organization will be able to fix the problem, there’s only one cure, we
call it Revival. And it will have to start with God’s people, who will have to care more
about Revival than their wallet, Christians who will care more about Revival than their
position in society, Christians who care more about Revival and Spiritual things than
what’s coming on Television tonight.
Pray for revival. Maybe as Christians around the nation today Fast and Pray for
our Belief in the Sanctity of Marriage, Maybe we will decide we have a lot more we need
to Pray and Fast for, and it will become a way of life, instead of a interruption in our
comfortable life.
Hear me this morning, there is Hope! We believe in a Big God who can and wants
to do more than we could ever wish for or imagine. Our Convictions can be renewed,
receiving fresh energy. Convictions can thrive from generation to generation. For this to
happen though, they must be intentionally renewed in a spirit of openness -- to the Holy
Spirit, to the Sciptures, and to our Brother’s and Sisters’ in Christ.
This morning I don’t want to discourage you, I want to Encourage you. I want to
share with you some of our most basic beliefs that we hold on to dearly as Christians, and
as Nazarenes. I could preach whole sermons on each of these, and have, but won’t this
morning aren’t you glad? But I want to remind you of what We hold Dear, and More
importantly than that, I want to challenge you to Make These Things Your Convictions,
Your Beliefs, not just in Theory, But in Practice.
My Friends if you don’t know what it is We believe in, You can be easily pulled
into thinking and believing something that is false, because you don’t know what is Truth.
As I list these Central Truths, have this Scripture in the back of your mind.
Watch your life and doctrine closely. Persevere in them, because if you do,
you will save both yourself and your hearers.
Your Doctrine is what you Belief about God. You need to know, not from some
TV preacher, but you need to study it for yourself and be convicted of it yourself, then
you will have the fire and the desire to stand up for Truth, because you will know What
God’s Word teaches. What we do on Sunday Night becomes that much more important,
We are Studying the Truth, We need to Know what it says so we can give an intelligent
answer, and a correct answer to anyone who would ask us what we believe.
I’m going to give you seven Crucial Beliefs, we have more than this, but I narrowed it
down to these.
1. The Church of the Nazarene believes that the Old and New Testament gives inspired
and unerring witness to the reality, character, deeds, and will of God, who is our Eternal
Creator and Redeemer. We believe that the Bible alone to be the defining source of
Christian Faith and practice. God’s Word is Foundational for us, it reveals to us the
Author of the World.
2. The Church of the Nazarene Believes that the God who, as we are studying in Genesis,
encountered and interacted with humanity in the Old Testament, choose to become God in
the form of Man in the form of Jesus Christ, whom we confess to be the Christ, the Son of
God. Through His Son, God DEFINITIVELY revealed himself. We fully belief that
Christ was fully man, and fully God. My friends you need to understand this, there are so
many churches out there, cults who say all the right things but they deny Christ as the Son
of God, you need to Know Why it’s So Important that He was fully Human and Fully
Divine, to be able to deal with these arguments.
One reason it’s so important is that if you take away either the humanness or the
divinity of Christ, the Cross becomes meaningless. The Bible says clearly that if you deny
Christ as the Son of God that you cannot make it heaven.
3. We Celebrate all that God accomplished in the Life, Death, resurrection, ascension, and
now the reign of Christ. We believe that God succeeded in all He set out to accomplish
and that the Holy Spirit now makes the Victorious Christ present to us. In other words,
We can experience Today Jesus Christ the Victor over Sin and Death, and He lavishes His
Gifts on the Church.
My Friends, we believe that God offers to all persons everywhere redemption
through His Son. We don’t believe that God has somehow Predestined some to heaven
and some to eternal Hell, we believe that the Father is “generous to all who call on him.”
Rom. 10:11-12. God desires that all come to repentance and reconciliation, in fact the
Holy Spirit goes to the person that is lost and draws that lost person towards Christ.
4. The Nazarene Church believes that we are born in a state of Sin, the sin of Adam has
infected us from the very beginning and apart from the redemption that comes through
Jesus Christ people from every station in life will be lost, without turning to Christ through
Faith. Christ and Christ alone can save us from our sin. My friends when we drift away
from this truth we are doomed, we must know the truth.
5. The Church of the Nazarene believes in the absolute Transforming power of the
Gospel. When we truly believe this we become “New Hope Messengers” taking this life
changing gospel to the dying world around us, we couldn’t in good conscience do
otherwise. We believe because of Christ, the old order of sin and despair has passed
away; all things have become new. We believe in the new Creation. God makes us all
new in our hearts, we are regenerated, or born again.
Along with this New Birth, because of this new birth, we also believe in Holy
Living. Loving God with all one’s heart, soul, mind, and strength, and one’s neighbor as
one’s self...... We believe that we can NOW Live a Christlike Life. We believe that
through the Holy Spirit, we possess the very Spirit of Christ, and because of that we can
be Sanctified through and through and be set free from the bondage of sin, we call this
Entire Sanctification. It’s a second work of Grace that God does in us as we give him
everything, not only what we possess, but everything we are, it’s a total surrender to Him.
For us Christian Holiness is Faith that works through love, it has nothing to do
with self-righteousness, exclusion, and arrogance.
6. We believe that in Jesus Christ, God brought to past and now cultivates the long
anticipated Kingdom of God on Earth. We believe that What God has initiated, he will
complete. So we live and serve in great hope of the glorious coming again of our Lord, to
deliver the completed Kingdom to the Father.
7. The Church of the Nazarene Believes that When Christ transforms a person, He graces
all of life. This conviction governs our understanding of Christian ethics, our life in the
home and in the world, it governs our philosophy of education at all levels. We believe
that the mind transformed by Gods Grace and given to God’s service can achieve their
moral, intellectual, and technological best. We believe that when Christians are obedient
to grace they will regularly experience religious growth and moral growth, being
continually renewed in Christ’s image.
These are some of the things that the Church of the Nazarene and it’s members hold true.
New Hope Church of the Nazarene, are these your Convictions, are these the things that
you believe in?
My friends your spiritual life is of such great value, don’t just toss it to the wind
and hope that it finds the right place to grow. But invest your time and energy finding out
truth, Let God’s Word convict you of these truths so that they will become yours and you
will Know that you Know, and you will know Why.
I’m challenging you to dig, go deeper, go to the next level. I’m committing myself
to do this in my own life, let’s take this journey together.
