What do Christians believe?

Everyone inhabits a story. 

We all live our lives, consciously or not, according to a script, as though a certain set of answers to life’s deepest questions is true. So what is the Christian story, and what do Christians believe?

The Christian story begins with God, the eternal spring of love and life, bringing all things into existence. According to the Bible, our universe is no accident, it was designed for a purpose. And having brought order to his creation on a cosmic scale, before zooming in to cultivate a small corner of this wild planet, human beings were created for good to bear God’s image and inhabit his garden paradise, made for deep and meaningful relationships, to love God and love others, and for the role of cultivating the rest of the planet, serving as the gardeners and governors of God’s good world.

Our experience now, though, tells a different story. Our deepest intuitions about the world, that something is terribly wrong, bear witness that we have fallen from the paradise of God’s presence, and so the Christian story tells of how we became damaged by evil. Where rather than living the life of love for which we were created, and trusting God’s wisdom and good design, instead humanity sinned, doubting God’s character, rejecting God’s rule, and going against the moral fabric of God’s world. With our hearts becoming corrupted by evil, curving inwards in selfishness, our relationship to a holy God, and our harmony with our environment, they both changed, as now we became subject to judgment and susceptible to suffering, disease, and death.

Of course this raises the challenge: surely a loving God must deal with evil, but how can God bring evil to an end without also ending those he loves who are corrupted by it? And so God sets in motion His plan to rescue us and restore creation.

Having elected a tiny nation to light the way, Israel’s story prepares us to recognise God’s arrival on the stage of human history, as God the Son, incarnate in Jesus of Nazareth, descended into our darkness to save us, lighting the way back to God.

As the invisible God made visible, Jesus wept with those who were mourning, confronted the evil powers, and went about setting everything right, restoring beauty to the blind, music to the deaf, and dancing to the lame. Jesus’ whole life was one continual sermon, putting flesh on his words as he opened people’s eyes to the glory of what God is really like, and who we were created to be. And as the crescendo of the Christian story, at the heart of the biographies about Jesus, we find a blood-stained cross and empty tomb, totems of God’s reckoning with evil.

On the cross Jesus willingly embraced our sentence. Jesus died for our sins, offering his life as an act of atonement, securing forgiveness to all who believe. And defeating death through his resurrection, Jesus secured our destiny, promising eternal life to all who believe in a world free from suffering, disease, and death. That is the Christian story.

Christians believe that through Jesus we know who God is, and how He feels towards us. That through Jesus we know who we were created to be, our sacred purpose and destiny, which animate us now, with the help of the Holy Spirit, to live out Jesus’ teaching. Through Jesus our shadow side is both exposed and expunged, as we embrace God’s free gift of forgiveness for sin.

And Christians believe that there is hope for the world, as one day Jesus will return to deal with evil and set everything right, wiping away our tears, and ushering in the paradise of God’s presence, where we will forever serve alongside Jesus as the gardeners and governors of the new creation.