Welcome!

Our purpose is to honor the Lord Jesus Christ and to be His servants here in the Tampa Bay Area.

We welcome you to come and worship with us.  We come together to listen to God speak to us from the Bible.  We seek to respond by worshipping Him, living in obedience to His Word, loving one another, and reaching out to those who are yet unconverted.

 

Let us describe for you the central part of our worship, which is the preaching of God’s Word. 

  • We believe preaching should be: expository, doctrinal, experiential, evangelistic, worship-centered, and practical.

Let us explain that more fully: 

  • We believe the preaching of the Bible should be expository.  That means we seek to explain the meaning of a verse in relation to the verses around it.  This is necessary because the Bible’s content is written in sentences and paragraphs that are coherent and interrelated.  The Bible is God’s revelation, but it is still written in human language and must be understood in that manner.  We pray that God would then enliven His Word in our hearts, work faith in us, and stir us up to love and serve Him.
  • We believe preaching should be doctrinal: Themes of the Bible that are found in the passage we are studying are explained in reference to the way these themes are presented in the rest of the Bible.
  • We believe preaching should be experiential:  We seek a consciousness of the Living God’s presence and influence upon our souls as we listen to the Scriptures during the preaching of the Bible.
  • We believe preaching should be evangelistic: On the authority of God’s word we summon all hearers to repentance of sin and faith in the Lord Jesus Christ.  To every hearer, we proclaim Christ’s hearty welcome to come to Him and find forgiveness and a new life.
  • We believe preaching should be worship-centered: Preaching based on the Bible and full of Scriptural texts is a call to behold God, to adore Him, to believe Him, to be broken and contrite before Him, to rejoice in His forgiveness and acceptance, and to give ourselves afresh to Him to be His loyal followers.  This is worship!
  • We believe preaching should be practical: We seek to derive principles from the Bible that will teach us how to honor and obey God and fulfill our responsibilities in our marriages, with our children, in our work life, in our church life, and in all of our relationships and responsibilities of life.
  • Our preaching is in harmony with historic reformed Christianity: We are in agreement with historic reformed Christianity as it has been summarized throughout the centuries by such Bible summaries as the 1689 London Baptist Confession, the Westminster Confession,  The Synod of Dort, The Westminster Shorter Catechism, The Heidelberg Catechism, and many others.  To just mention one aspect, we believe both in God’s sovereignty to save and man’s responsibility to repent and believe and obey.

Let us describe for you the Biblical principles we seek to live by in our church life. 

  • We seek to be a church committed to a life of caring for one another, bearing each other’s burdens, and building one another up in Scripturally-oriented fellowship.

We seek to be:

  • Hungry worshippers thirsting after God’s word.
  • Prayerfully dependent upon the Spirit of God’s intervention.
  • Believers who focus on building up godly families.
  • We call the Sabbath Day a delight.
  • We are burdened for the necessity of holy living.
  • We rejoice  in a risen and glorious Lord.
  • We preach and delight in the doctrines of grace.
  • We glory in the free offer of the gospel to every sinner.
  • We proclaim Christ’s hearty welcome for every hearer to come unto Him for salvation. 

Come and see in person what we mean by these Biblical realities.

Pastor Gary Carter
Free Grace Church of Tampa Bay