Doctrinal Statement

Biblical Help and Hope Ministries partners with the Biblical Counseling Coalition and is in full agreement with their doctrinal statement.

The Bible

The Bible is God’s inspired, infallible, and inerrant Word, given as His living revelation to humanity. We affirm its verbal, plenary inspiration and uphold its absolute trustworthiness and authority. Consisting of the 66 books of the Old and New Testaments, Scripture is the sufficient and definitive guide for Christian life, practice, and doctrine, calling us to glorify God by growing in Christlikeness. It fully reveals God’s character, promises, and will for salvation, as well as humanity’s identity—created in His image, fallen into sin, judged, yet redeemed through Christ and transformed by the Holy Spirit. The Bible provides meaning to every aspect of life, from blessings to suffering, spiritual warfare, and human influences. It also defines the Christian life and the Church’s mission, shaping our faith and purpose in alignment with Christ’s image.

Triune God

God the Father

We believe that God, as the Father, reigns over His entire universe with providential care, holy justice, and saving mercy, to His own glory. In His holy love, the Father is all-powerful, all-loving, all-knowing, and all-wise. He is fatherly in attitude toward all men, but Father, indeed, to those who have been made children of God through salvation in Christ.

Jesus Christ

We believe in the deity of our Lord Jesus Christ, the eternal Son of God, Who humbled Himself by taking on the form of a man by means of His virgin birth, becoming forever both fully human without ceasing to be fully God. We affirm that He lived a sinless life of active love and perfect wisdom. He died by crucifixion on the cross, by His shed blood and death making a vicarious, substitutionary atonement for our sins. After three days, He was resurrected bodily from the dead, unto an indestructible life. After appearing to His disciples and instructing them for forty days, He ascended to heaven. He is now seated at the right hand of the Father, interceding for believers, reigning as King over all creation, and working in and through His Church. He will personally return in power and glory to judge the living and the dead, and to raise to immortality those who eagerly await Him, perfecting them in His image.

Holy Spirit

We believe that God the Holy Spirit, sent by the Father and the Son, has come into the world to reveal and glorify Christ, and to convict and draw sinners to Christ. From the moment of spiritual birth, He indwells believers, individually and corporately, as their Helper. By the Spirit’s agency, believers are renewed, sanctified, and adopted into God’s family. He imparts new life to believers, placing them into the Body of Christ, transforming and empowering them for Christlike living, and sealing them until the day of redemption. He is the source of power for all acceptable worship and ministry as He imparts a diversity of enabling gifts that equip God’s people for service. He provides the power to understand and apply God’s truth in love.

Humanity / Creation

We believe that God created Adam and Eve in His image, male and female, and declared them “very good,” granting them all the capacities of image bearers. God created them to reflect and to enjoy His glory. They were created material and immaterial, physical body and spiritual soul, these qualities united and inseparably interdependent. They were created with a conscience able to discern good and evil; with the capacity to relate, think, choose, and feel in all the fruitfulness of wisdom. They were designed and commissioned to love God and one another, living in holy and devoted fellowship with God, and in loving, complementary relationship with each other. They were designed and commissioned to care for and govern His creation, working in and ruling over all creation as God’s faithful servants and stewards.

Humanity / Fall

We believe that because of voluntary sin against God, Adam and Eve fell from the actively good, sinless, and innocent state in which they were first created. They became self-willed, perverse, and transgressive against God and each other. Immediately they died spiritually and also began to die physically. Consequently, for them and all their progeny, the image of God was distorted and their nature depraved and corrupted in every aspect of their being (spiritually, socially, mentally, volitionally, and emotionally). While human beings are corrupted in every aspect of their being and functioning, because of God’s common grace the image of God has not been totally eradicated, and evil is not given full reign. God preserves and enables many common goods. All people have true dignity, a conscience in which clarity coexists with distortion, and many powers of mind, action, and feeling. All humanity is separated and alienated from God and thus spiritually dead – until God’s own gracious intervention. The supreme need of all human beings is to be reconciled to God; and the only hope of all human beings is to receive the undeserved grace of God in Christ. God alone can rescue us and restore sinners to Himself.

Salvation / Redemption

Salvation is God’s gift of grace, received through faith alone in Jesus Christ. It is entirely conceived, accomplished, and applied by God’s sovereign will, not by human effort. Salvation delivers God’s people from sin’s penalty, power, and presence, imputing Christ’s righteousness and adopting believers into His family. It defeats darkness, bringing us into Christ’s Body of light and love. Jesus, fully God and fully man, lived sinlessly, obeyed the Law perfectly, and atoned for sin through His death. He rose bodily, reigns in heaven, and intercedes as our all-sufficient Savior. Salvation’s blessings—justification, new birth, adoption, and eternal life—are free gifts, given by the Spirit and received by faith. Through Christ’s work, sin is canceled, God’s wrath is satisfied, and believers are reconciled to Him. His resurrection conquered death, defeated Satan, and secured everlasting life. His ascension exalted Him as Lord, and He prepares a place for us. At His return, Christ will remove all sin and suffering, establish His kingdom, and perfect His Bride. Those regenerated by God are justified through faith, kept secure by His power, and will see Christ face to face, living with Him forever.

About Sanctification

We believe that sanctification is the process by which believers, each one and all together – as set apart from sin and united in Christ – are increasingly conformed to the image of Christ. Sanctification has past, present, and future aspects. First, believers are “chosen, holy and beloved” in Christ, set apart for God in union with Christ, and are actually made new by regeneration (positional or definitive sanctification). Second, believers begin to mature in their new life, set apart day-by-day through growth in grace into the likeness of Christ. This process (progressive sanctification) takes place by the power of the Holy Spirit, through the Word of God, in the communion of the saints, by the continual use of God’s appointed means of growth in grace, each member contributing to the growth of the whole unto maturity in Christ. Third, believers will be set apart from the very presence of sin when sanctification is completed (glorification) at the coming of Christ for the Church. Definitive sanctification in the past and glorification in the future provide anchors that sustain hope and bring encouragement amidst the failures and sufferings that make progressive sanctification a long and arduous pilgrimage.

The Church

We believe that the Church, the Body of Christ, is composed of all persons living and dead who have been joined to Christ and one another by the power of the Holy Spirit. Every true believer is baptized by the Holy Spirit into the Body of Christ and thus united in Christ to one another in unity and love across social, economic, and ethnic lines. We affirm that the local church is God’s primary instrument and context for His work today; that every believer should be an active member in a local assembly; and that the Christian community is the context where believers are mutually encouraged, equipped, and empowered to conform to the image of Christ through worship, fellowship, discipleship, stewardship, and ambassadorship (evangelism). The sanctification of an individual is not a personal self-improvement project, but is the formation of a constructive, fruitful member of the Body of Christ. We believe it is every believer’s privilege and obligation to be an instrument in the Redeemer’s hands. This requires an intentional involvement in the lives of others: learning to speak and to live the truth in love, learning humility, and learning to forgive and to give, so that we all grow in unity and maturity into Christ Who is the Head. The true mission of the Church is to bring God glory, as believers (individually and corporately) live consistent with the Great Commandment and the Great Commission. We believe that baptism and the Lord’s Supper are ordained by the Lord Jesus Himself. They are our public vows of submission to the once crucified and now resurrected Christ, and anticipations of His return and of the consummation of all things.

Eternity / Restoration

We believe in the personal, glorious, and bodily return of our Lord Jesus Christ when His kingdom will be consummated. We believe in the bodily resurrection of both the just and the unjust – the unjust to judgment and eternal conscious punishment in hell, and the just to eternal blessedness in the presence of Him Who sits on the throne and of the Lamb, in the new heaven and the new earth, the eternal home of righteousness. On that day, the Church will be presented faultless before God by the obedience, suffering, and triumph of Christ; all sin will be purged and its wretched effects forever banished. God will be all in all, His people will be enthralled with Him, and everything will be done to the praise of His glorious grace.