Beliefs & Values

“And he said to him, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” —Matthew 22:37-39

The double command of Love flows directly from the source—God Himself, the creator of all things, both in Heaven and on Earth. Just as a child shares in the nature of his father, so to do we humans share in the Nature of our Father in whose Image we were made.

As He is Love (1 John 4: 8, 16b) so are we made for Love, to Love. In this sense, the double command of Love is freedom for us, as it is the fulfillment of our given meaning and purpose. Another way to put it is: to love God and our neighbors is to go with the river of life that flows from our Font.

At STP2 we are committed to The Great Commandment first and foremost because we love Jesus Christ, who is the Truth that has set us free (John 14:6 & 8:32); and, as He teaches us, to love Him is to observe His commandments (John 14:15). We express this Love firstly in our corporate worship together, which then spills out into the world as we love our neighbors. Indeed, in a certain sense, we love God by loving our neighbors.

And Jesus came and said to them, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age.” —Matthew 28:18-20

Our commitment to The Great Commission flows out of our commitment to The Great Commandment. We love the Triune God who is revealed in the God-Man, Jesus Christ, and by whom we are set free. Paradoxically, we only obtain this freedom as we obey His commandments, chief among them to love Him and our neighbors.

Because we know the freedom that can only be found in Christ, we know that it far surpasses the so-called “freedoms” offered by our culture. Indeed, the liberties of the self, buffered from all authorities or obligations outside of itself, are not freedom at all—they are slavery to Self that lead to the legion maladies of our day. We want to see our neighbors set free as we have been set free in Christ Jesus.

As such, we are committed to the work of The Great Commission: making disciples, baptizing them in the name of God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey all that He has commanded us, so that our neighbors, too, may find true freedom!

“Beloved, although I was very eager to write to you about our common salvation, I found it necessary to write appealing to you to contend for the faith that was once for all delivered to the saints.” —Jude 1:3

The fruit of our commitment to the Great Commandment and the Great Commission is a desire to see our family, friends, and neighbors set free from slavery to Self and the World and to be made new in Christ Jesus. But how can this happen in a culture set adrift, unmoored from reality, precisely because of its commitment to the “buffered self”? How can those who are taught from the first that they themselves are the arbiters of truth and reality come to see that this is slavery?

First and foremost they must encounter the Truth, the really real Jesus Christ, through His Body, the Church. And only a Church committed to the Great Commandment and the Great Commission can offer Christ to a broken and enslaved culture. A Church rooted in The Great Tradition will be able to remain true to the Truth that sets us free.

In the Great Tradition, we receive the faith once set down from Christ to the Apostles in Scripture, codified in the Creeds (especially the Apostles’, Nicene, and Athanasian Creeds), and taught in the Catechism. Through the Liturgy, our loves are reoriented through the Sacraments, the Word, and our rightful, corporate, public worship in Spirit and Truth.

By engaging other artifacts of the Great Tradition—for instance, the Spiritual Disciplines, hymnody, Doctrine, literature—we cultivate virtue and conform our imaginations to Reality/Truth. Not only are we continually made more free in the Tradition, we are made more like Christ Jesus Himself precisely so that we can obey the Great Commandment in Him and by His power fulfill the Great Commission, all for the sake of a world in need of True Freedom.