Mission and Commitments

Here at First Baptist Church, Travelers Rest, we like to say that we exist to worship

God and win glory for King Jesus. But what does that mean? Well, first of all, it means that we are committed to the primacy of worship.

We believe worship is first. First of all, we believe this because God deserves it. God is the greatest.

There is no one else like God. And so what we want to do is Psalm 96 says, and give God the glory that is due

His name. We also believe worship is first because we believe it's what we were made to do. It's our fundamental calling.

God has made us to be worshipers. Worship is inescapable. That is, God has made us in such a way that all people will worship something or someone.

The question is, whom or what will you worship? And so here at First Baptist, Travelers Rest, we worship the triune

God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. We also believe worship is first because worship is what shapes us.

It shapes us and conforms us into the image of Jesus and makes us into the type of people that He wants us to be, cultivating and shaping our loves and our desires.

And so worship shapes us. Also, worship has effect out in the world. We believe that what happens in the sanctuary flows out into the world.

This is a pattern that we see throughout Scripture, from Genesis, throughout the Old Testament into the New Testament, that what happens when

God's people come to worship, it has effect out into the world. And so, Ephesians 2 says that in Christ, we are seated with Christ in the heavenly places.

And then we pray, Our Father in heaven, hallowed be thy name. That's the worship there, may

God's name be praised. Your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.

And so, seated with Christ in the heavenly places, we worship God and ask Him to act on earth according to how it is in heaven.

So we believe that worship has real effect on the world that we live in. And so, we are committed to the primacy of worship.

And as part of being committed to the primacy of worship, we're committed to right worship. We believe that right worship is ordered according to the

Scriptures. We believe that right worship is Bible -saturated. When you come to First Baptist Church, we want you to hear a lot of Bible.

The Bible being read, the Bible being sung, the Bible being prayed, the Bible being preached. It's Bible -saturated.

We want worship to be participatory. We want you to participate and be active in your worship.

So give an amen and join in the prayers and hear the Word of God when it is read and when it is preached.

We sing loud and sing with gusto because passive worshipers make passive Christians, but active worshipers make active

Christians. And so we believe right worship is participatory. And we also believe that right worship is weighty, it's glorious, it's filled with what some call serious joy.

And that is the type of worship that we want to cultivate here at First Baptist Church Travelers Rest. So we want to worship

God, but we want to win glory for King Jesus. There are things that we want to accomplish out in the world.

And so, we are committed to the primacy of worship. We are also committed to preaching and teaching all the

Bible for all of life, understandably. What does that mean? That means we believe that the

Scriptures, the Word of God, all of it, from Genesis to Revelation and everything in between, that it is

God's authoritative Word for us. That it is sufficient for everything that we're going to face in life.

We have all of God's words that are necessary in order to address anything, because we believe the

Scriptures, in principle, address everything. And so we want to take all the Scripture, and then we want to press it out into the corners to address all of our lives.

And so, not just our spiritual lives, not just our church lives, though certainly that's included. But we want to teach and preach the

Bible in such a way that we apply all of the Bible to our home life, to our work life, to our school life, to our public life, to our private life, everything.

All the Bible for all of life, understandably. And when we say understandably, that means we want to preach and teach in such a way that the average person in travel address could come in, could hear our teaching and say, hmm, yeah,

I get that. That makes sense. So we're committed to the primacy of worship, and we're committed to preaching and teaching all the

Bible for all of life, understandably. We are also committed to table fellowship and joyful Christian hospitality.

We see in the book of Mark, for example, and other places, that Jesus came announcing

His kingdom, and He was eating and drinking with tax collectors and sinners. And the truth is,

Jesus Christ still eats with sinners. And so we want to open our tables as He has opened

His table to us. And so we, during worship, we partake of the Lord's Supper regularly, and that is where formally

Jesus Christ opens His table and shares fellowship with us. And then with that as the example, we go out into the world and we open our tables.

And so we want to be a community of followers of Jesus who open our homes, open our tables, share fellowship, share our lives with one another and with those in our community.

We want to be joyful about it. We want to bring people in, those who are hurting, those who are struggling.

We want to weep with those who weep, and we want to rejoice with those who rejoice. We want to be a fit community that comes around the table and comes around one another in joyful Christian hospitality to encourage one another, to speak the

Word of God to one another, to pray for one another, to bear one another's burdens, to love one another, to forgive one another.

We want to experience and offer table fellowship in joyful Christian hospitality.

We are also committed to equipping our people to be salt and light in the world.

So we live in a culture and a society that needs the

Gospel, that needs Jesus, that needs Christians giving their lives for the sake of others in service.

We need those who will go out into this world and bear witness to the truth of the Gospel. So we want to be that type of people, be that type of community that is salt and light, that preserves what is good and right and true and beautiful and glorious.

We want to be salt in that way and preserve that. We want to be light that shines the light of the Scriptures and shines the light of the

Gospels, shines the light of God's mercy to all who are around us. So we are committed to equipping the people of First Baptist Church Travelers Rest to live in that type of way, to love what

God loves, and to hate what God hates, and to have the courage to stand for what God stands for, and have the mercy to extend to those around us.

We want to be salt and light. And then lastly, we are committed to prayer. I've heard it said that you will never do anything greater than pray until you pray.

And so we want to saturate everything that we do here in prayer. We do this because we know that we work.

We plant, we water, but it's God who gives the increase. It's God who gives the growth.

And so we want to pray to Him. We want to pray to the Lord of the harvest, that He will send the harvest, that He will raise that up for us in our midst.

We know that every good gift comes down to us from the Father of light. And so we want to go to God and ask for those things.

We want to go to God who loves to give good gifts to His children and knows how to do so and delights to do so.

We want to go to God in thanksgiving. We want to go to God and ask for healing. We want to go to God and ask for help.

We want to go to God and ask for strength because it all comes down from Him to us.

And so we are committed to prayer because we know we can't do this by ourselves. We know we can't do this, any of what we're talking about, we can't do in our own strength.

It is all God's grace. It is all God's gift. And so we are committed to prayer. And so with these commitments, we seek to worship