13. What are the central, or chief, parts of Christian teaching and life?
These six parts of the catechism are the central teachings, or Six Chief Parts of Christian Doctrine:
1. God makes known His will through the Ten Commandments, which summarize how God wants us to love Him and love our neighbor and also reveal our sin and inability to keep God's Law.
2. The Creed summarizes who God is and what He has done for the world: creating and preserving all things out of fatherly love; redeeming the world in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, the Son of God; and calling and gathering believers into the Church by the Holy Spirit.
3. In the Lord's Prayer (or the Our Father), God the Son teaches Christians how to pray as God's own dear children, confident that what we are praying pleases Him and is for our good.
4. Scripture teaches us that in Holy Baptism, we are cleansed from our sins and belong to the one true God, Father, Son, and Spirit, whom we trust for life and salvation.
5. As God's believing, baptized children, we still battle against sins of thought, word, and deed. But God graciously has given special authority to His Church on earth to forgive the sins of the penitent and to withhold forgiveness from the unrepentant (Office of the Keys and Confession).
6. God welcomes His children to the Sacrament of the Altar (Lord's Supper), where Christ gives us His body to eat and His blood to drink with the bread and wine for the forgiveness of our sins and to strengthen our faith.
Eventual commentary
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