The University Church of Christ wants you to know that we care about your soul and want to do all we can to help you know God and understand His will for you. We would love to study His word with you and help you learn more about the Bible, Jesus Christ, His church, and salvation.
The Bible and Our Faith
We believe that the Bible is the word of the one, true, living God. The Bible provides us with all the information we need to know God’s will, to be saved, and to live a life that is pleasing to Him (2 Timothy 3:16-17, 2 Peter 1:3). It is our complete guide for all we believe and do.
Our Sin and God’s Son
The Bible tells us that God created us for fellowship with Him—to love us, and for us to love Him in return. Sadly, we have sinned against God, breaking fellowship with Him (Rom.3:23). Because God is perfectly just and holy, our sins bring His condemnation and wrath upon us. Our greatest need, therefore, is to have our sins forgiven and our fellowship with God restored.
The good news is that God has done for us what we could never do for ourselves. Because of His great love for us, God sent His only begotten son, Jesus Christ, who took upon Himself the penalty for our sins. “But God showed his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us” (Rom. 5:8). Salvation through Jesus Christ is the only way we can be saved from our sin and be right with God. Jesus Himself said, “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No man comes to the Father except through me” (John 14:6).
His Grace and Our Response
God offers salvation through Jesus as a gift of grace. We cannot earn that gift by our works; we receive it by faith, by believing in Him (Eph. 2:8-9). We must believe Jesus Christ is Lord, the One who died for our sins and was raised from the dead. “For God so loved the world he gave his only begotten Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life” (John 3:16; Rom. 10:9-10). But to be saved, our faith must move us to repent—to change our attitude toward sin and determine that we will turn away from sin and obey God. We must confess (openly acknowledge) Jesus as Lord and be baptized—immersed in water—for the remission of our sins. God’s word tells us that to be saved by faith we must “Repent and be baptized...in the name of Jesus Christ, for the remission of your sins” (Acts 2:38; see also Acts 22:16). That is how we receive salvation and become born again to begin new lives as children of God, members of His family, which is His church (1 Tim. 3:15). Set free from sin, we then strive to live as servants of Jesus Christ (Rom. 6:1-18).
The Lord and His Church
The church was made possible through Jesus Christ (Eph. 3:10-11), but there is a great deal of misunderstanding about the importance and identity of that church.
The church is the body of the saved, “the body of Christ” (Eph. 1:22-23; 5:23). God’s word tells us that there is but “one body...one Lord, one faith” (Eph. 4:4-6). There are no denominations in the Bible, yet when we look around today, we see so many different churches, different faiths, different teachings. All of this religious contradiction is confusing and contrary to God’s will (1 Cor. 1:10).
However, if we set aside the denominations, doctrines, and traditions of men and simply go back to the Bible, we can belong to the Lord’s church that is a part of God’s eternal plan to redeem us and bring us to Heaven through His Son. If we follow the New Testament and pattern our actions after its teachings and examples, we can be today what the early Christians were—simply Christians (Acts 11:26). Not members of any denomination; just members of Jesus’ church that we read about in the Bible.
This is what we are striving to do: To glorify God by following His Son, by loving others as He loves us, and by worshipping and serving Him together according to the pattern He has given us for His church (Acts 2:42). We seek to be Christians only, a part of the Lord’s family, the church which He died to save with His blood (Eph. 5:23-25).
We invite you to examine these beliefs in the light of God’s word (1 John 4:1). Please let us know if we can help you to learn more about the Bible, salvation through Christ, and His church.
