The closest thing you’ll find to a “statement of faith” on the website of preacher Jimmy Carter’s church in Plains, Ga. (www.maranathachurchplains.org), is a few paragraphs that inform:

“Because President Jimmy Carter teaches a Sunday School class, we are host to an average of ten thousand visitors per year.  This unique situation gives us an opportunity to share with many people who have never before had any close exposure to the gospel message.  This opportunity also represents a responsibility which we take very seriously. While we admire and respect President Carter, our focus is on Jesus Christ, the crucified Son of God who came to reveal to all humankind the love and grace of God.”

Notice it sounds like Christ is dead? This doesn’t surprise me at all since Carter, in his own writings, never overtly declares “the Son of God with power, according to the spirit of holiness, by the resurrection from the dead.” (Rom. 1:4)

Instead, as in his 1996 book, Living Faith, Carter tells the reader that while he was raised from a baby in church, and was only three when he began memorizing Bible verses in Sunday School, “By the time I was 12 or 13 years old, my anxiety about this (doubt in Christ’s resurrection) became so intense that at the end of every prayer, until after I was an adult, before ‘Amen’ I added the words ‘And, God, please help me believe in the resurrection.’ ”

Skimming through the book I couldn’t see evidence anywhere where Carter ever did get around to placing his faith in the resurrection—something that is absolutely essential to becoming a Christian.

The most basic gospel message says that in order to gain eternal life through Jesus Christ you must rest your faith in the facts of what God says He accomplished for us in the Crosswork of Christ. This means believing not only in His death at Calvary—

and the finality of the victory against sin won there—but His resurrection.

As the Apostle Paul himself defines this life-saving gospel in I Cor. 15, “Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures; And that he was buried, and that he rose again the third day according to the scriptures.”

Having said that, look at what preacher Carter gives as his own gospel presentation to a lost person in his 2002 book, The Personal Beliefs of Jimmy Carter:

“What does it mean when I say that I ‘decided to accept to accept Christ’? Jesus was the Messiah, the long-awaited savior (Editor’s Note: The letter ‘S’ is not capitalized!), who came both to reveal God to us and to heal the division between God and humankind. As Jesus told his disciples, ‘If you have seen me, you have seen God.’ (John 14:9)

“Furthermore, the Gospels recount how Jesus, having lived a perfect and blameless life, accepted a death of horrible suffering on the cross on our behalf, as an atonement for the sins we have committed.

“Accepting Christ as my savior means believing all those things and entering into a relationship with God through him, so that my past and future sins no longer alienate me from my Creator.

“Putting our faith in these concepts is what is meant by being ‘born again.’ It’s when there is an intimate melding of my life with that of Jesus: I become a brother with him, and God is our mutual parent.”

How incredible that the same man who put the phrase “born again” into the common vernacular back in the ’70s is possibly not even saved!

*****

As my pastor, Richard Jordan, pointed out in an Easter Sunday sermon once, “It’s interesting that there is no Easter in Islam. There’s no Easter in Buddhism, or Taoism, or Zorastarism, or any of the other religions of the world.

“They don’t even have anything to compare with it because resurrection is an issue that is peculiarly confined to the God of the Bible. To have a resurrection you have to have a God who’s alive. You have to have a living God.”

When Paul writes to Timothy, he even makes a special point of reminding him that the local grace assembly of Believers in Ephesus was “the house of God, which is the church of the living God,” distinguishing it from the pagan church in town dedicated to the world-renowned “Mother Goddess” Diana.

As Jordan explains, “You see, there was another religious system at Ephesus. You can go to Acts 19 and read the story about how they tried to kill the Apostle Paul and ran him out of town because he was hurting their business; he was hurting the business of their religion.

“Basically, Paul preached the Word of God and people got saved, abandoning all their pagan books and philosophies and rejoicing in the grace of God and the liberty it gave them from religion and the use of shrines, idols, statues, prayer beads, prayer wheels and all the rest of it.

“You see, the church of Diana had a great big temple with a steeple on top, and icons around it, and confession booths and priests that went around and did their thing and had all these silversmiths that made these beautiful icons.

“What Paul was saying to Tim was, ‘You don’t need any of this religion; you guys are the house of God!’ They had a life in Christ; they didn’t need the house to visit to find their God because their God lived inside of them!”

*****

In Philippians 3:10, Paul reveals his goal in life is, “That I may know him, and the power of his resurrection, and the fellowship of his sufferings, being made conformable unto his death.”

Obviously, belief in His resurrection is what it’s all about.

Jordan says of this famous line from Paul, “When I read that verse that’s not some tempestuous, enthusiastic outburst from a new convert, or some religious novice. After 35-plus years (Philippians was written at least 35 years after that revolutionizing collision Paul had with Christ on the road to Damascus) of vital, thrilling communion with his Saviour, Paul says, ‘My one goal in life is just to know Him.’

“The over-mastering passion of Paul’s Christ-intoxicated life was just to know Him. Get to know Him more and more personally, directly, intimately, experientially. To know Him; to have that intimate personal knowledge of the Lord Jesus Christ.

“It’s that ‘I may know Him directly,’ not just know about Him; not just increase data. Paul had that, but Paul wants a direct, immediate, heart-to-heart knowledge of Him.

“You realize you can’t know Buddha that way? You know why? Because he’s dead. Same with Mohammed and Confucius. It’s not to know about Him, but to know him. Christ died but He’s not dead. Christianity is not built on a coffin lid.

“Rather than it just being empty form, there is a reality of fellowship with the Lord Jesus Christ where you in your own self—in your own person—know Him.”