Thank you. Some of what we read in the Bible is open for dialogue and debate, but there are essential truths that are non-negotiable.

Today on Truth for Life, we'll review some of these core beliefs and learn why it's critical

to not only understand them for ourselves but instill them in the next generation.

Alistair Begg is teaching from Colossians chapter 1.

Well let me just outline, if you like, the content of our curriculum, reminding you

that the affirmations of the Christian faith all have to do with the being of God.

And the being of God, God as God, and these eternal truths, are not available to us

by our own unaided comprehension. In other words, there is no intellectual root to a knowledge of God.

We cannot evidentially simply get to God by thinking it out. God has given

signs and indications in our moral being, in the nature of creation, and so on. But in all

of that general revelation, there is only enough to convince us that we need a God. There is not

enough to convert us. and it is in the special

revelation that He gives in the person and work of the Lord Jesus that such a conversion

may take place.

Only when God is pleased to take the initiative and reveal himself, may we know just what it is and why it is, we believe it.

That happens, as we saw last time, as a result of God using his word, and as a result of God

working by his spirit. There's no point in running through a list of core Christian beliefs apart from our own discovery of Jesus

as Lord and Savior and King. You don't have to know all of these things to become a Christian,

but having become a Christian, you cannot, nor can I adequately

fulfill the responsibilities of Christian life without an experiential grasp of these essential doctrines.

Now, it's been well said that it takes a whole Bible to make a whole Christian. And one of the

great dangers that is represented

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