Core Convictions

You know the guidelines we laid out for you from the Master Jesus. God wants you to live a pure life. Keep yourselves from sexual promiscuity. Learn to appreciate and give dignity to your body, not abusing it, as is so common among those who know nothing of God. Holiness requires us to maintain a standard of salt-and-light leadership to those around us. It means we think through our words, actions, habits, and attitudes at all times. Holiness prevents us from conforming to cultural changes and moral relativism.

Anyone who does not provide for their relatives, and especially for their own household, has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever. One relationship that is central to the family is marriage. God considers marriage to be a lifelong sacred covenant between a man and a woman. He hates divorce, because marriage is designed to reflect the relationship between Christ and the church. According to Ephesians 5, husbands should love their wives as Christ loves the Church, leading through sacrificial service, and wives must love their husbands with respect, honoring them through sacrificial devotion Ephesians 5: Strong families grow out of strong marriages in which husbands and wives love and respect each other, serve and honor each other.

God knew each person even before he or she was conceived, so we must value each life as a gift from God. Life is precious, and only God has the right to control when we live and when we die — not human beings. God opposes the proud but shows favor to the humble. Humility serves as the remedy for prideful self-centeredness. My family and I keep our lives and our ministry simple so we can do more for God. Living simply lowers costs and frees up our time so resources can go to the work of the Lord.

We reach people for the glory of God, not for our own egos.

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Sincerity keeps us real and touchable, and it makes sure our words and thoughts match. Humility keeps our hearts tuned to God and not ourselves. What are your core convictions? What is it that you hold fast to no matter what the culture around you does? Come and share with us on our blog. We want to hear from you about living counter-culture!

Worship , or placing worth and value on who God is, tops my list.

1. a vivid awareness of the beauty, majesty, mystery, and holiness of the triune God

Salvationists come to the Bible for the purpose of hearing God address us in the 21st century. Thus we read the Bible with a view of understanding our world through its world. Convinced that words create worlds, we read the Bible slowly and prayerfully, paying attention to such words as grace, wilderness, atonement, covenant, holiness, hope and salvation.

We also pay attention to the story worlds of the Bible. Through these stories we envision what it means for us to meet with God as friend with friend, as did Moses See Ex. We imagine a world where Jesus washes our feet with basin and towel, just as he did the feet of his disciples, even over their protests See John These stories, and others, give us a glimpse into the character of God and what it means to relate to God today as disciple and friend. They are, however, not just examples; they are models for us to imitate.

For this reason we not only read the Bible personally, we read the Bible in community. This first doctrine points to the practice of reading the Bible as Scripture in order to be formed in biblical holiness. Second, we will learn to pray the Scriptures as we practice biblical spirituality. This is not to say that prayer is limited only to the texts of the Bible, but there are spiritual disciplines that draw on Scripture as we pray. While much of the Bible lends itself to prayer, this is especially true of the Psalms.

Praying the Psalms can help us in those moments. They utter lament with images that voice our own losses; they praise with resounding chords that take us out of our superficiality; they question God in ways we are reluctant to address him; they express trust in ways that we find difficult.

As we seek scriptural holiness we will attend to the practice of preaching biblically. The Salvation Army places an emphasis on preaching in its worship, given its roots in the Reformation. But preaching has come upon hard times in our culture. Because the Bible is read publicly in our worship, sermons play an important role. Biblical texts have a future as well as a past, and preaching seeks to fulfill that future by continuing the conversation of the text into the present.

There is a point to the Bible being organized from Genesis to Revelation. The spirituality that the Bible portrays has its twists and turns, but it moves toward a goal, as does our personal spirituality. We will learn much about spirituality from preaching Esther, Ecclesiastes and Ephesians. But we will also want to preach with the biblical plot in mind. Biblical holiness has a story, and we do well to keep its overall plot in mind as we prepare to preach it.

Finally, we will learn to practice holiness as biblical spirituality as we perform the Scriptures. But we also use the word to describe the way cars drive on the highway, or Olympic athletes compete during the Games. In other words, the notion of performance has to do with the way we take scripts and bring them to life. Jesus began his public ministry by reading from Isaiah, and then went about freeing the oppressed and embodying the Year of Jubilee. In other words, Jesus performed the Scriptures in his public ministry. Ancient words, ever true, changing me, and changing you; We have come with open hearts, O let the ancient words impart.

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